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Title: Pride and Prejudice

Author: Jane Austen

Posting Date: August 26, 2008 [EBook #1342]
Release Date: June, 1998
Last Updated: March 10, 2018

Language: English

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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

By Jane Austen



Chapter 1


It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his
first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds
of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property
of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that
Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she
told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

“_You_ want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken
by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came
down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much
delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he
is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to
be in the house by the end of next week.”

“What is his name?”

“Bingley.”

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or
five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? How can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You
must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

“Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he
_may_ fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as
soon as he comes.”

“I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send
them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better, for as you are
as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley may like you the best of the
party.”

“My dear, you flatter me. I certainly _have_ had my share of beauty, but
I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five
grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”

“In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”

“But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into
the neighbourhood.”

“It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”

“But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would
be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to
go, merely on that account, for in general, you know, they visit no
newcomers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for _us_ to
visit him if you do not.”

“You are over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very
glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my
hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls; though
I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.”

“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the
others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so
good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving _her_ the preference.”

“They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied he; “they are
all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of
quickness than her sisters.”

“Mr. Bennet, how _can_ you abuse your own children in such a way? You
take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They
are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration
these last twenty years at least.”

“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four
thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”

“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not
visit them.”

“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them
all.”

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had
been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. _Her_ mind
was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding,
little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented,
she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her
daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.



Chapter 2


Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He
had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring
his wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was
paid she had no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following
manner. Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he
suddenly addressed her with:

“I hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy.”

“We are not in a way to know _what_ Mr. Bingley likes,” said her mother
resentfully, “since we are not to visit.”

“But you forget, mamma,” said Elizabeth, “that we shall meet him at the
assemblies, and that Mrs. Long promised to introduce him.”

“I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces
of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion
of her.”

“No more have I,” said Mr. Bennet; “and I am glad to find that you do
not depend on her serving you.”

Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply, but, unable to contain
herself, began scolding one of her daughters.

“Don't keep coughing so, Kitty, for Heaven's sake! Have a little
compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.”

“Kitty has no discretion in her coughs,” said her father; “she times
them ill.”

“I do not cough for my own amusement,” replied Kitty fretfully. “When is
your next ball to be, Lizzy?”

“To-morrow fortnight.”

“Aye, so it is,” cried her mother, “and Mrs. Long does not come back
till the day before; so it will be impossible for her to introduce him,
for she will not know him herself.”

“Then, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and introduce
Mr. Bingley to _her_.”

“Impossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted with him
myself; how can you be so teasing?”

“I honour your circumspection. A fortnight's acquaintance is certainly
very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a
fortnight. But if _we_ do not venture somebody else will; and after all,
Mrs. Long and her neices must stand their chance; and, therefore, as
she will think it an act of kindness, if you decline the office, I will
take it on myself.”

The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only, “Nonsense,
nonsense!”

“What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?” cried he. “Do
you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on
them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you _there_. What say you,
Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read
great books and make extracts.”

Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.

“While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr.
Bingley.”

“I am sick of Mr. Bingley,” cried his wife.

“I am sorry to hear _that_; but why did not you tell me that before? If
I had known as much this morning I certainly would not have called
on him. It is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we
cannot escape the acquaintance now.”

The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished; that of Mrs.
Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest; though, when the first tumult of joy
was over, she began to declare that it was what she had expected all the
while.

“How good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet! But I knew I should
persuade you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well to
neglect such an acquaintance. Well, how pleased I am! and it is such a
good joke, too, that you should have gone this morning and never said a
word about it till now.”

“Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose,” said Mr. Bennet; and,
as he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the raptures of his wife.

“What an excellent father you have, girls!” said she, when the door was
shut. “I do not know how you will ever make him amends for his kindness;
or me, either, for that matter. At our time of life it is not so
pleasant, I can tell you, to be making new acquaintances every day; but
for your sakes, we would do anything. Lydia, my love, though you _are_
the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next
ball.”

“Oh!” said Lydia stoutly, “I am not afraid; for though I _am_ the
youngest, I'm the tallest.”

The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would
return Mr. Bennet's visit, and determining when they should ask him to
dinner.



Chapter 3


Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five
daughters, could ask on the subject, was sufficient to draw from her
husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley. They attacked him
in various ways--with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions, and
distant surmises; but he eluded the skill of them all, and they were at
last obliged to accept the second-hand intelligence of their neighbour,
Lady Lucas. Her report was highly favourable. Sir William had been
delighted with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely
agreeable, and, to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next assembly
with a large party. Nothing could be more delightful! To be fond of
dancing was a certain step towards falling in love; and very lively
hopes of Mr. Bingley's heart were entertained.

“If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at Netherfield,”
 said Mrs. Bennet to her husband, “and all the others equally well
married, I shall have nothing to wish for.”

In a few days Mr. Bingley returned Mr. Bennet's visit, and sat about
ten minutes with him in his library. He had entertained hopes of being
admitted to a sight of the young ladies, of whose beauty he had
heard much; but he saw only the father. The ladies were somewhat more
fortunate, for they had the advantage of ascertaining from an upper
window that he wore a blue coat, and rode a black horse.

An invitation to dinner was soon afterwards dispatched; and already
had Mrs. Bennet planned the courses that were to do credit to her
housekeeping, when an answer arrived which deferred it all. Mr. Bingley
was obliged to be in town the following day, and, consequently, unable
to accept the honour of their invitation, etc. Mrs. Bennet was quite
disconcerted. She could not imagine what business he could have in town
so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that
he might be always flying about from one place to another, and never
settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas quieted her fears
a little by starting the idea of his being gone to London only to get
a large party for the ball; and a report soon followed that Mr. Bingley
was to bring twelve ladies and seven gentlemen with him to the assembly.
The girls grieved over such a number of ladies, but were comforted the
day before the ball by hearing, that instead of twelve he brought only
six with him from London--his five sisters and a cousin. And when
the party entered the assembly room it consisted of only five
altogether--Mr. Bingley, his two sisters, the husband of the eldest, and
another young man.

Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant
countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women,
with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely
looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention
of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and
the report which was in general circulation within five minutes
after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen
pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he
was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great
admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust
which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be
proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all
his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most
forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared
with his friend.

Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal
people in the room; he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance,
was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving
one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for
themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced
only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being
introduced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in
walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party.
His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man
in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again.
Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs. Bennet, whose dislike of
his general behaviour was sharpened into particular resentment by his
having slighted one of her daughters.

Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit
down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr. Darcy had been
standing near enough for her to hear a conversation between him and Mr.
Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes, to press his friend
to join it.

“Come, Darcy,” said he, “I must have you dance. I hate to see you
standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better
dance.”

“I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am
particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this
it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not
another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to
stand up with.”

“I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Mr. Bingley, “for a
kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in
my life as I have this evening; and there are several of them you see
uncommonly pretty.”

“_You_ are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr.
Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

“Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one
of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I
dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”

“Which do you mean?” and turning round he looked for a moment at
Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said:
“She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt _me_; I am in no
humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted
by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her
smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”

Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth
remained with no very cordial feelings toward him. She told the story,
however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively,
playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.

The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole family. Mrs.
Bennet had seen her eldest daughter much admired by the Netherfield
party. Mr. Bingley had danced with her twice, and she had been
distinguished by his sisters. Jane was as much gratified by this as
her mother could be, though in a quieter way. Elizabeth felt Jane's
pleasure. Mary had heard herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most
accomplished girl in the neighbourhood; and Catherine and Lydia had been
fortunate enough never to be without partners, which was all that they
had yet learnt to care for at a ball. They returned, therefore, in good
spirits to Longbourn, the village where they lived, and of which they
were the principal inhabitants. They found Mr. Bennet still up. With
a book he was regardless of time; and on the present occasion he had a
good deal of curiosity as to the event of an evening which had raised
such splendid expectations. He had rather hoped that his wife's views on
the stranger would be disappointed; but he soon found out that he had a
different story to hear.

“Oh! my dear Mr. Bennet,” as she entered the room, “we have had a most
delightful evening, a most excellent ball. I wish you had been there.
Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it. Everybody said how well
she looked; and Mr. Bingley thought her quite beautiful, and danced with
her twice! Only think of _that_, my dear; he actually danced with her
twice! and she was the only creature in the room that he asked a second
time. First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand
up with her! But, however, he did not admire her at all; indeed, nobody
can, you know; and he seemed quite struck with Jane as she was going
down the dance. So he inquired who she was, and got introduced, and
asked her for the two next. Then the two third he danced with Miss King,
and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again,
and the two sixth with Lizzy, and the _Boulanger_--”

“If he had had any compassion for _me_,” cried her husband impatiently,
“he would not have danced half so much! For God's sake, say no more of
his partners. Oh that he had sprained his ankle in the first dance!”

“Oh! my dear, I am quite delighted with him. He is so excessively
handsome! And his sisters are charming women. I never in my life saw
anything more elegant than their dresses. I dare say the lace upon Mrs.
Hurst's gown--”

Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against any
description of finery. She was therefore obliged to seek another branch
of the subject, and related, with much bitterness of spirit and some
exaggeration, the shocking rudeness of Mr. Darcy.

“But I can assure you,” she added, “that Lizzy does not lose much by not
suiting _his_ fancy; for he is a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at
all worth pleasing. So high and so conceited that there was no enduring
him! He walked here, and he walked there, fancying himself so very
great! Not handsome enough to dance with! I wish you had been there, my
dear, to have given him one of your set-downs. I quite detest the man.”



Chapter 4


When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in
her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her sister just how very
much she admired him.

“He is just what a young man ought to be,” said she, “sensible,
good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners!--so much
ease, with such perfect good breeding!”

“He is also handsome,” replied Elizabeth, “which a young man ought
likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.”

“I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I
did not expect such a compliment.”

“Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between
us. Compliments always take _you_ by surprise, and _me_ never. What
could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help
seeing that you were about five times as pretty as every other woman
in the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that. Well, he certainly is
very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a
stupider person.”

“Dear Lizzy!”

“Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general.
You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable
in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in your
life.”

“I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak
what I think.”

“I know you do; and it is _that_ which makes the wonder. With _your_
good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of
others! Affectation of candour is common enough--one meets with it
everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design--to take the
good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing
of the bad--belongs to you alone. And so you like this man's sisters,
too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his.”

“Certainly not--at first. But they are very pleasing women when you
converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her brother, and keep
his house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming
neighbour in her.”

Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced; their behaviour at
the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more
quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister,
and with a judgement too unassailed by any attention to herself, she
was very little disposed to approve them. They were in fact very fine
ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the
power of making themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and
conceited. They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the
first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand
pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of
associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect
entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of
a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply
impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their
own had been acquired by trade.

Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred
thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an
estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and
sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a
good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those
who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the
remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to
purchase.

His sisters were anxious for his having an estate of his own; but,
though he was now only established as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no
means unwilling to preside at his table--nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had
married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider
his house as her home when it suited her. Mr. Bingley had not been of
age two years, when he was tempted by an accidental recommendation
to look at Netherfield House. He did look at it, and into it for
half-an-hour--was pleased with the situation and the principal
rooms, satisfied with what the owner said in its praise, and took it
immediately.

Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of
great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the
easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition
could offer a greater contrast to his own, and though with his own he
never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy's regard, Bingley
had the firmest reliance, and of his judgement the highest opinion.
In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means
deficient, but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty,
reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not
inviting. In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley
was sure of being liked wherever he appeared, Darcy was continually
giving offense.

The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently
characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or
prettier girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive
to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt
acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could not
conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a
collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for
none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received
either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty,
but she smiled too much.

Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so--but still they admired
her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one
whom they would not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore
established as a sweet girl, and their brother felt authorized by such
commendation to think of her as he chose.



Chapter 5


Within a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom the Bennets
were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade
in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the
honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty.
The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a
disgust to his business, and to his residence in a small market town;
and, in quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house
about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge,
where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and,
unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all
the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him
supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By
nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St.
James's had made him courteous.

Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a
valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several children. The eldest
of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was
Elizabeth's intimate friend.

That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to talk over
a ball was absolutely necessary; and the morning after the assembly
brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to communicate.

“_You_ began the evening well, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Bennet with civil
self-command to Miss Lucas. “_You_ were Mr. Bingley's first choice.”

“Yes; but he seemed to like his second better.”

“Oh! you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be
sure that _did_ seem as if he admired her--indeed I rather believe he
_did_--I heard something about it--but I hardly know what--something
about Mr. Robinson.”

“Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson; did not
I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson's asking him how he liked our Meryton
assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many
pretty women in the room, and _which_ he thought the prettiest? and his
answering immediately to the last question: 'Oh! the eldest Miss Bennet,
beyond a doubt; there cannot be two opinions on that point.'”

“Upon my word! Well, that is very decided indeed--that does seem as
if--but, however, it may all come to nothing, you know.”

“_My_ overhearings were more to the purpose than _yours_, Eliza,” said
Charlotte. “Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend,
is he?--poor Eliza!--to be only just _tolerable_.”

“I beg you would not put it into Lizzy's head to be vexed by his
ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man, that it would be quite
a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long told me last night that he
sat close to her for half-an-hour without once opening his lips.”

“Are you quite sure, ma'am?--is not there a little mistake?” said Jane.
“I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her.”

“Aye--because she asked him at last how he liked Netherfield, and he
could not help answering her; but she said he seemed quite angry at
being spoke to.”

“Miss Bingley told me,” said Jane, “that he never speaks much,
unless among his intimate acquaintances. With _them_ he is remarkably
agreeable.”

“I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very
agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it
was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had
heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had come to
the ball in a hack chaise.”

“I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long,” said Miss Lucas, “but I
wish he had danced with Eliza.”

“Another time, Lizzy,” said her mother, “I would not dance with _him_,
if I were you.”

“I believe, ma'am, I may safely promise you _never_ to dance with him.”

“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend _me_ so much as pride
often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so
very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour,
should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a _right_
to be proud.”

“That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive
_his_ pride, if he had not mortified _mine_.”

“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her
reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have
ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human
nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us
who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some
quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different
things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may
be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of
ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

“If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy,” cried a young Lucas, who came with
his sisters, “I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of
foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a day.”

“Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought,” said Mrs.
Bennet; “and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle
directly.”

The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she
would, and the argument ended only with the visit.



Chapter 6


The ladies of Longbourn soon waited on those of Netherfield. The visit
was soon returned in due form. Miss Bennet's pleasing manners grew on
the goodwill of Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and though the mother was
found to be intolerable, and the younger sisters not worth speaking to,
a wish of being better acquainted with _them_ was expressed towards
the two eldest. By Jane, this attention was received with the greatest
pleasure, but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment
of everybody, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them;
though their kindness to Jane, such as it was, had a value as arising in
all probability from the influence of their brother's admiration. It
was generally evident whenever they met, that he _did_ admire her and
to _her_ it was equally evident that Jane was yielding to the preference
which she had begun to entertain for him from the first, and was in a
way to be very much in love; but she considered with pleasure that it
was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane
united, with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and a
uniform cheerfulness of manner which would guard her from the suspicions
of the impertinent. She mentioned this to her friend Miss Lucas.

“It may perhaps be pleasant,” replied Charlotte, “to be able to impose
on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be
so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill
from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and
it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in
the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every
attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all
_begin_ freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are
very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without
encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show _more_
affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he
may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.”

“But she does help him on, as much as her nature will allow. If I can
perceive her regard for him, he must be a simpleton, indeed, not to
discover it too.”

“Remember, Eliza, that he does not know Jane's disposition as you do.”

“But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal
it, he must find it out.”

“Perhaps he must, if he sees enough of her. But, though Bingley and Jane
meet tolerably often, it is never for many hours together; and, as they
always see each other in large mixed parties, it is impossible that
every moment should be employed in conversing together. Jane should
therefore make the most of every half-hour in which she can command his
attention. When she is secure of him, there will be more leisure for
falling in love as much as she chooses.”

“Your plan is a good one,” replied Elizabeth, “where nothing is in
question but the desire of being well married, and if I were determined
to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I should adopt it. But
these are not Jane's feelings; she is not acting by design. As yet,
she cannot even be certain of the degree of her own regard nor of its
reasonableness. She has known him only a fortnight. She danced four
dances with him at Meryton; she saw him one morning at his own house,
and has since dined with him in company four times. This is not quite
enough to make her understand his character.”

“Not as you represent it. Had she merely _dined_ with him, she might
only have discovered whether he had a good appetite; but you must
remember that four evenings have also been spent together--and four
evenings may do a great deal.”

“Yes; these four evenings have enabled them to ascertain that they
both like Vingt-un better than Commerce; but with respect to any other
leading characteristic, I do not imagine that much has been unfolded.”

“Well,” said Charlotte, “I wish Jane success with all my heart; and
if she were married to him to-morrow, I should think she had as good a
chance of happiness as if she were to be studying his character for a
twelvemonth. Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If
the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or
ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the
least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to
have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as
possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your
life.”

“You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is not sound. You know it is not
sound, and that you would never act in this way yourself.”

Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley's attentions to her sister, Elizabeth
was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some
interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely
allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the
ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no
sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly
had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered
uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To
this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had
detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry
in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and
pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those
of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of
this she was perfectly unaware; to her he was only the man who made
himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough
to dance with.

He began to wish to know more of her, and as a step towards conversing
with her himself, attended to her conversation with others. His doing so
drew her notice. It was at Sir William Lucas's, where a large party were
assembled.

“What does Mr. Darcy mean,” said she to Charlotte, “by listening to my
conversation with Colonel Forster?”

“That is a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer.”

“But if he does it any more I shall certainly let him know that I see
what he is about. He has a very satirical eye, and if I do not begin by
being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him.”

On his approaching them soon afterwards, though without seeming to have
any intention of speaking, Miss Lucas defied her friend to mention such
a subject to him; which immediately provoking Elizabeth to do it, she
turned to him and said:

“Did you not think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself uncommonly
well just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at
Meryton?”

“With great energy; but it is always a subject which makes a lady
energetic.”

“You are severe on us.”

“It will be _her_ turn soon to be teased,” said Miss Lucas. “I am going
to open the instrument, Eliza, and you know what follows.”

“You are a very strange creature by way of a friend!--always wanting me
to play and sing before anybody and everybody! If my vanity had taken
a musical turn, you would have been invaluable; but as it is, I would
really rather not sit down before those who must be in the habit of
hearing the very best performers.” On Miss Lucas's persevering, however,
she added, “Very well, if it must be so, it must.” And gravely glancing
at Mr. Darcy, “There is a fine old saying, which everybody here is of
course familiar with: 'Keep your breath to cool your porridge'; and I
shall keep mine to swell my song.”

Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital. After a song
or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties of several that
she would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her
sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in
the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always
impatient for display.

Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her
application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited
manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she
had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with
much more pleasure, though not playing half so well; and Mary, at the
end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by
Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger sisters, who,
with some of the Lucases, and two or three officers, joined eagerly in
dancing at one end of the room.

Mr. Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode of
passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation, and was too
much engrossed by his thoughts to perceive that Sir William Lucas was
his neighbour, till Sir William thus began:

“What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There
is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the first
refinements of polished society.”

“Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst
the less polished societies of the world. Every savage can dance.”

Sir William only smiled. “Your friend performs delightfully,” he
continued after a pause, on seeing Bingley join the group; “and I doubt
not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr. Darcy.”

“You saw me dance at Meryton, I believe, sir.”

“Yes, indeed, and received no inconsiderable pleasure from the sight. Do
you often dance at St. James's?”

“Never, sir.”

“Do you not think it would be a proper compliment to the place?”

“It is a compliment which I never pay to any place if I can avoid it.”

“You have a house in town, I conclude?”

Mr. Darcy bowed.

“I had once had some thought of fixing in town myself--for I am fond
of superior society; but I did not feel quite certain that the air of
London would agree with Lady Lucas.”

He paused in hopes of an answer; but his companion was not disposed
to make any; and Elizabeth at that instant moving towards them, he was
struck with the action of doing a very gallant thing, and called out to
her:

“My dear Miss Eliza, why are you not dancing? Mr. Darcy, you must allow
me to present this young lady to you as a very desirable partner. You
cannot refuse to dance, I am sure when so much beauty is before you.”
 And, taking her hand, he would have given it to Mr. Darcy who, though
extremely surprised, was not unwilling to receive it, when she instantly
drew back, and said with some discomposure to Sir William:

“Indeed, sir, I have not the least intention of dancing. I entreat you
not to suppose that I moved this way in order to beg for a partner.”

Mr. Darcy, with grave propriety, requested to be allowed the honour of
her hand, but in vain. Elizabeth was determined; nor did Sir William at
all shake her purpose by his attempt at persuasion.

“You excel so much in the dance, Miss Eliza, that it is cruel to deny
me the happiness of seeing you; and though this gentleman dislikes the
amusement in general, he can have no objection, I am sure, to oblige us
for one half-hour.”

“Mr. Darcy is all politeness,” said Elizabeth, smiling.

“He is, indeed; but, considering the inducement, my dear Miss Eliza,
we cannot wonder at his complaisance--for who would object to such a
partner?”

Elizabeth looked archly, and turned away. Her resistance had not
injured her with the gentleman, and he was thinking of her with some
complacency, when thus accosted by Miss Bingley:

“I can guess the subject of your reverie.”

“I should imagine not.”

“You are considering how insupportable it would be to pass many evenings
in this manner--in such society; and indeed I am quite of your opinion.
I was never more annoyed! The insipidity, and yet the noise--the
nothingness, and yet the self-importance of all those people! What would
I give to hear your strictures on them!”

“Your conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was more
agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure
which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”

Miss Bingley immediately fixed her eyes on his face, and desired he
would tell her what lady had the credit of inspiring such reflections.
Mr. Darcy replied with great intrepidity:

“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”

“Miss Elizabeth Bennet!” repeated Miss Bingley. “I am all astonishment.
How long has she been such a favourite?--and pray, when am I to wish you
joy?”

“That is exactly the question which I expected you to ask. A lady's
imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love
to matrimony, in a moment. I knew you would be wishing me joy.”

“Nay, if you are serious about it, I shall consider the matter is
absolutely settled. You will be having a charming mother-in-law, indeed;
and, of course, she will always be at Pemberley with you.”

He listened to her with perfect indifference while she chose to
entertain herself in this manner; and as his composure convinced her
that all was safe, her wit flowed long.



Chapter 7


Mr. Bennet's property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two
thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed,
in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother's
fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply
the deficiency of his. Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and
had left her four thousand pounds.

She had a sister married to a Mr. Phillips, who had been a clerk to
their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in
London in a respectable line of trade.

The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most
convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually tempted
thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to their aunt and
to a milliner's shop just over the way. The two youngest of the family,
Catherine and Lydia, were particularly frequent in these attentions;
their minds were more vacant than their sisters', and when nothing
better offered, a walk to Meryton was necessary to amuse their morning
hours and furnish conversation for the evening; and however bare of news
the country in general might be, they always contrived to learn some
from their aunt. At present, indeed, they were well supplied both with
news and happiness by the recent arrival of a militia regiment in the
neighbourhood; it was to remain the whole winter, and Meryton was the
headquarters.

Their visits to Mrs. Phillips were now productive of the most
interesting intelligence. Every day added something to their knowledge
of the officers' names and connections. Their lodgings were not long a
secret, and at length they began to know the officers themselves. Mr.
Phillips visited them all, and this opened to his nieces a store of
felicity unknown before. They could talk of nothing but officers; and
Mr. Bingley's large fortune, the mention of which gave animation
to their mother, was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the
regimentals of an ensign.

After listening one morning to their effusions on this subject, Mr.
Bennet coolly observed:

“From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two
of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but
I am now convinced.”

Catherine was disconcerted, and made no answer; but Lydia, with perfect
indifference, continued to express her admiration of Captain Carter,
and her hope of seeing him in the course of the day, as he was going the
next morning to London.

“I am astonished, my dear,” said Mrs. Bennet, “that you should be so
ready to think your own children silly. If I wished to think slightingly
of anybody's children, it should not be of my own, however.”

“If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it.”

“Yes--but as it happens, they are all of them very clever.”

“This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree. I
had hoped that our sentiments coincided in every particular, but I must
so far differ from you as to think our two youngest daughters uncommonly
foolish.”

“My dear Mr. Bennet, you must not expect such girls to have the sense of
their father and mother. When they get to our age, I dare say they will
not think about officers any more than we do. I remember the time when
I liked a red coat myself very well--and, indeed, so I do still at my
heart; and if a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year,
should want one of my girls I shall not say nay to him; and I thought
Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William's in
his regimentals.”

“Mamma,” cried Lydia, “my aunt says that Colonel Forster and Captain
Carter do not go so often to Miss Watson's as they did when they first
came; she sees them now very often standing in Clarke's library.”

Mrs. Bennet was prevented replying by the entrance of the footman with
a note for Miss Bennet; it came from Netherfield, and the servant waited
for an answer. Mrs. Bennet's eyes sparkled with pleasure, and she was
eagerly calling out, while her daughter read,

“Well, Jane, who is it from? What is it about? What does he say? Well,
Jane, make haste and tell us; make haste, my love.”

“It is from Miss Bingley,” said Jane, and then read it aloud.

“MY DEAR FRIEND,--

“If you are not so compassionate as to dine to-day with Louisa and me,
we shall be in danger of hating each other for the rest of our lives,
for a whole day's tete-a-tete between two women can never end without a
quarrel. Come as soon as you can on receipt of this. My brother and the
gentlemen are to dine with the officers.--Yours ever,

“CAROLINE BINGLEY”

“With the officers!” cried Lydia. “I wonder my aunt did not tell us of
_that_.”

“Dining out,” said Mrs. Bennet, “that is very unlucky.”

“Can I have the carriage?” said Jane.

“No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to
rain; and then you must stay all night.”

“That would be a good scheme,” said Elizabeth, “if you were sure that
they would not offer to send her home.”

“Oh! but the gentlemen will have Mr. Bingley's chaise to go to Meryton,
and the Hursts have no horses to theirs.”

“I had much rather go in the coach.”

“But, my dear, your father cannot spare the horses, I am sure. They are
wanted in the farm, Mr. Bennet, are they not?”

“They are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them.”

“But if you have got them to-day,” said Elizabeth, “my mother's purpose
will be answered.”

She did at last extort from her father an acknowledgment that the horses
were engaged. Jane was therefore obliged to go on horseback, and her
mother attended her to the door with many cheerful prognostics of a
bad day. Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before
it rained hard. Her sisters were uneasy for her, but her mother was
delighted. The rain continued the whole evening without intermission;
Jane certainly could not come back.

“This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed!” said Mrs. Bennet more than
once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own. Till the
next morning, however, she was not aware of all the felicity of her
contrivance. Breakfast was scarcely over when a servant from Netherfield
brought the following note for Elizabeth:

“MY DEAREST LIZZY,--

“I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be
imputed to my getting wet through yesterday. My kind friends will not
hear of my returning till I am better. They insist also on my seeing Mr.
Jones--therefore do not be alarmed if you should hear of his having been
to me--and, excepting a sore throat and headache, there is not much the
matter with me.--Yours, etc.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note
aloud, “if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness--if she
should die, it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of
Mr. Bingley, and under your orders.”

“Oh! I am not afraid of her dying. People do not die of little trifling
colds. She will be taken good care of. As long as she stays there, it is
all very well. I would go and see her if I could have the carriage.”

Elizabeth, feeling really anxious, was determined to go to her, though
the carriage was not to be had; and as she was no horsewoman, walking
was her only alternative. She declared her resolution.

“How can you be so silly,” cried her mother, “as to think of such a
thing, in all this dirt! You will not be fit to be seen when you get
there.”

“I shall be very fit to see Jane--which is all I want.”

“Is this a hint to me, Lizzy,” said her father, “to send for the
horses?”

“No, indeed, I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is nothing
when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.”

“I admire the activity of your benevolence,” observed Mary, “but every
impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion,
exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”

“We will go as far as Meryton with you,” said Catherine and Lydia.
Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young ladies set off
together.

“If we make haste,” said Lydia, as they walked along, “perhaps we may
see something of Captain Carter before he goes.”

In Meryton they parted; the two youngest repaired to the lodgings of one
of the officers' wives, and Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing
field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing
over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last
within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face
glowing with the warmth of exercise.

She was shown into the breakfast-parlour, where all but Jane were
assembled, and where her appearance created a great deal of surprise.
That she should have walked three miles so early in the day, in such
dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and
Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt
for it. She was received, however, very politely by them; and in their
brother's manners there was something better than politeness; there
was good humour and kindness. Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr.
Hurst nothing at all. The former was divided between admiration of the
brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion, and doubt as
to the occasion's justifying her coming so far alone. The latter was
thinking only of his breakfast.

Her inquiries after her sister were not very favourably answered. Miss
Bennet had slept ill, and though up, was very feverish, and not
well enough to leave her room. Elizabeth was glad to be taken to her
immediately; and Jane, who had only been withheld by the fear of giving
alarm or inconvenience from expressing in her note how much she longed
for such a visit, was delighted at her entrance. She was not equal,
however, to much conversation, and when Miss Bingley left them
together, could attempt little besides expressions of gratitude for the
extraordinary kindness she was treated with. Elizabeth silently attended
her.

When breakfast was over they were joined by the sisters; and Elizabeth
began to like them herself, when she saw how much affection and
solicitude they showed for Jane. The apothecary came, and having
examined his patient, said, as might be supposed, that she had caught
a violent cold, and that they must endeavour to get the better of it;
advised her to return to bed, and promised her some draughts. The advice
was followed readily, for the feverish symptoms increased, and her head
ached acutely. Elizabeth did not quit her room for a moment; nor were
the other ladies often absent; the gentlemen being out, they had, in
fact, nothing to do elsewhere.

When the clock struck three, Elizabeth felt that she must go, and very
unwillingly said so. Miss Bingley offered her the carriage, and she only
wanted a little pressing to accept it, when Jane testified such concern
in parting with her, that Miss Bingley was obliged to convert the offer
of the chaise to an invitation to remain at Netherfield for the present.
Elizabeth most thankfully consented, and a servant was dispatched to
Longbourn to acquaint the family with her stay and bring back a supply
of clothes.



Chapter 8


At five o'clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at half-past six
Elizabeth was summoned to dinner. To the civil inquiries which then
poured in, and amongst which she had the pleasure of distinguishing the
much superior solicitude of Mr. Bingley's, she could not make a very
favourable answer. Jane was by no means better. The sisters, on hearing
this, repeated three or four times how much they were grieved, how
shocking it was to have a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked
being ill themselves; and then thought no more of the matter: and their
indifference towards Jane when not immediately before them restored
Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her former dislike.

Their brother, indeed, was the only one of the party whom she could
regard with any complacency. His anxiety for Jane was evident, and his
attentions to herself most pleasing, and they prevented her feeling
herself so much an intruder as she believed she was considered by the
others. She had very little notice from any but him. Miss Bingley was
engrossed by Mr. Darcy, her sister scarcely less so; and as for Mr.
Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to
eat, drink, and play at cards; who, when he found her to prefer a plain
dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.

When dinner was over, she returned directly to Jane, and Miss Bingley
began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room. Her manners were
pronounced to be very bad indeed, a mixture of pride and impertinence;
she had no conversation, no style, no beauty. Mrs. Hurst thought the
same, and added:

“She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent
walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really
looked almost wild.”

“She did, indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very
nonsensical to come at all! Why must _she_ be scampering about the
country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair, so untidy, so blowsy!”

“Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep
in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to
hide it not doing its office.”

“Your picture may be very exact, Louisa,” said Bingley; “but this was
all lost upon me. I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably
well when she came into the room this morning. Her dirty petticoat quite
escaped my notice.”

“_You_ observed it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley; “and I am
inclined to think that you would not wish to see _your_ sister make such
an exhibition.”

“Certainly not.”

“To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is,
above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! What could she mean by
it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence,
a most country-town indifference to decorum.”

“It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing,” said
Bingley.

“I am afraid, Mr. Darcy,” observed Miss Bingley in a half whisper, “that
this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine eyes.”

“Not at all,” he replied; “they were brightened by the exercise.” A
short pause followed this speech, and Mrs. Hurst began again:

“I have an excessive regard for Miss Jane Bennet, she is really a very
sweet girl, and I wish with all my heart she were well settled. But with
such a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is
no chance of it.”

“I think I have heard you say that their uncle is an attorney in
Meryton.”

“Yes; and they have another, who lives somewhere near Cheapside.”

“That is capital,” added her sister, and they both laughed heartily.

“If they had uncles enough to fill _all_ Cheapside,” cried Bingley, “it
would not make them one jot less agreeable.”

“But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any
consideration in the world,” replied Darcy.

To this speech Bingley made no answer; but his sisters gave it their
hearty assent, and indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of
their dear friend's vulgar relations.

With a renewal of tenderness, however, they returned to her room on
leaving the dining-parlour, and sat with her till summoned to coffee.
She was still very poorly, and Elizabeth would not quit her at all, till
late in the evening, when she had the comfort of seeing her sleep, and
when it seemed to her rather right than pleasant that she should go
downstairs herself. On entering the drawing-room she found the whole
party at loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting
them to be playing high she declined it, and making her sister the
excuse, said she would amuse herself for the short time she could stay
below, with a book. Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.

“Do you prefer reading to cards?” said he; “that is rather singular.”

“Miss Eliza Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, “despises cards. She is a great
reader, and has no pleasure in anything else.”

“I deserve neither such praise nor such censure,” cried Elizabeth; “I am
_not_ a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things.”

“In nursing your sister I am sure you have pleasure,” said Bingley; “and
I hope it will be soon increased by seeing her quite well.”

Elizabeth thanked him from her heart, and then walked towards the
table where a few books were lying. He immediately offered to fetch her
others--all that his library afforded.

“And I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my own
credit; but I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many, I have more
than I ever looked into.”

Elizabeth assured him that she could suit herself perfectly with those
in the room.

“I am astonished,” said Miss Bingley, “that my father should have left
so small a collection of books. What a delightful library you have at
Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!”

“It ought to be good,” he replied, “it has been the work of many
generations.”

“And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying
books.”

“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as
these.”

“Neglect! I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the beauties of
that noble place. Charles, when you build _your_ house, I wish it may be
half as delightful as Pemberley.”

“I wish it may.”

“But I would really advise you to make your purchase in that
neighbourhood, and take Pemberley for a kind of model. There is not a
finer county in England than Derbyshire.”

“With all my heart; I will buy Pemberley itself if Darcy will sell it.”

“I am talking of possibilities, Charles.”

“Upon my word, Caroline, I should think it more possible to get
Pemberley by purchase than by imitation.”

Elizabeth was so much caught with what passed, as to leave her very
little attention for her book; and soon laying it wholly aside, she drew
near the card-table, and stationed herself between Mr. Bingley and his
eldest sister, to observe the game.

“Is Miss Darcy much grown since the spring?” said Miss Bingley; “will
she be as tall as I am?”

“I think she will. She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet's height, or
rather taller.”

“How I long to see her again! I never met with anybody who delighted me
so much. Such a countenance, such manners! And so extremely accomplished
for her age! Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite.”

“It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies can have patience
to be so very accomplished as they all are.”

“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”

“Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and
net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this, and I am sure
I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being
informed that she was very accomplished.”

“Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has
too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no
otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very
far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I
cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen, in the whole range of my
acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”

“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.

“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your
idea of an accomplished woman.”

“Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it.”

“Oh! certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really
esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met
with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing,
dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides
all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of
walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word
will be but half-deserved.”

“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must
yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by
extensive reading.”

“I am no longer surprised at your knowing _only_ six accomplished women.
I rather wonder now at your knowing _any_.”

“Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all
this?”

“I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and
application, and elegance, as you describe united.”

Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley both cried out against the injustice of her
implied doubt, and were both protesting that they knew many women who
answered this description, when Mr. Hurst called them to order, with
bitter complaints of their inattention to what was going forward. As all
conversation was thereby at an end, Elizabeth soon afterwards left the
room.

“Elizabeth Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her,
“is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the
other sex by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it
succeeds. But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.”

“Undoubtedly,” replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly addressed,
“there is a meanness in _all_ the arts which ladies sometimes condescend
to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is
despicable.”

Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to
continue the subject.

Elizabeth joined them again only to say that her sister was worse, and
that she could not leave her. Bingley urged Mr. Jones being sent for
immediately; while his sisters, convinced that no country advice could
be of any service, recommended an express to town for one of the most
eminent physicians. This she would not hear of; but she was not so
unwilling to comply with their brother's proposal; and it was settled
that Mr. Jones should be sent for early in the morning, if Miss Bennet
were not decidedly better. Bingley was quite uncomfortable; his sisters
declared that they were miserable. They solaced their wretchedness,
however, by duets after supper, while he could find no better relief
to his feelings than by giving his housekeeper directions that every
attention might be paid to the sick lady and her sister.



Chapter 9


Elizabeth passed the chief of the night in her sister's room, and in the
morning had the pleasure of being able to send a tolerable answer to the
inquiries which she very early received from Mr. Bingley by a housemaid,
and some time afterwards from the two elegant ladies who waited on his
sisters. In spite of this amendment, however, she requested to have a
note sent to Longbourn, desiring her mother to visit Jane, and form her
own judgement of her situation. The note was immediately dispatched, and
its contents as quickly complied with. Mrs. Bennet, accompanied by her
two youngest girls, reached Netherfield soon after the family breakfast.

Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would have been
very miserable; but being satisfied on seeing her that her illness was
not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering immediately, as her
restoration to health would probably remove her from Netherfield. She
would not listen, therefore, to her daughter's proposal of being carried
home; neither did the apothecary, who arrived about the same time, think
it at all advisable. After sitting a little while with Jane, on Miss
Bingley's appearance and invitation, the mother and three daughters all
attended her into the breakfast parlour. Bingley met them with hopes
that Mrs. Bennet had not found Miss Bennet worse than she expected.

“Indeed I have, sir,” was her answer. “She is a great deal too ill to be
moved. Mr. Jones says we must not think of moving her. We must trespass
a little longer on your kindness.”

“Removed!” cried Bingley. “It must not be thought of. My sister, I am
sure, will not hear of her removal.”

“You may depend upon it, Madam,” said Miss Bingley, with cold civility,
“that Miss Bennet will receive every possible attention while she
remains with us.”

Mrs. Bennet was profuse in her acknowledgments.

“I am sure,” she added, “if it was not for such good friends I do not
know what would become of her, for she is very ill indeed, and suffers
a vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the world, which is
always the way with her, for she has, without exception, the sweetest
temper I have ever met with. I often tell my other girls they are
nothing to _her_. You have a sweet room here, Mr. Bingley, and a
charming prospect over the gravel walk. I do not know a place in the
country that is equal to Netherfield. You will not think of quitting it
in a hurry, I hope, though you have but a short lease.”

“Whatever I do is done in a hurry,” replied he; “and therefore if I
should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in five
minutes. At present, however, I consider myself as quite fixed here.”

“That is exactly what I should have supposed of you,” said Elizabeth.

“You begin to comprehend me, do you?” cried he, turning towards her.

“Oh! yes--I understand you perfectly.”

“I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen
through I am afraid is pitiful.”

“That is as it happens. It does not follow that a deep, intricate
character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours.”

“Lizzy,” cried her mother, “remember where you are, and do not run on in
the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home.”

“I did not know before,” continued Bingley immediately, “that you were a
studier of character. It must be an amusing study.”

“Yes, but intricate characters are the _most_ amusing. They have at
least that advantage.”

“The country,” said Darcy, “can in general supply but a few subjects for
such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and
unvarying society.”

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be
observed in them for ever.”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning
a country neighbourhood. “I assure you there is quite as much of _that_
going on in the country as in town.”

Everybody was surprised, and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment,
turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete
victory over him, continued her triumph.

“I cannot see that London has any great advantage over the country, for
my part, except the shops and public places. The country is a vast deal
pleasanter, is it not, Mr. Bingley?”

“When I am in the country,” he replied, “I never wish to leave it;
and when I am in town it is pretty much the same. They have each their
advantages, and I can be equally happy in either.”

“Aye--that is because you have the right disposition. But that
gentleman,” looking at Darcy, “seemed to think the country was nothing
at all.”

“Indeed, Mamma, you are mistaken,” said Elizabeth, blushing for her
mother. “You quite mistook Mr. Darcy. He only meant that there was not
such a variety of people to be met with in the country as in the town,
which you must acknowledge to be true.”

“Certainly, my dear, nobody said there were; but as to not meeting
with many people in this neighbourhood, I believe there are few
neighbourhoods larger. I know we dine with four-and-twenty families.”

Nothing but concern for Elizabeth could enable Bingley to keep his
countenance. His sister was less delicate, and directed her eyes towards
Mr. Darcy with a very expressive smile. Elizabeth, for the sake of
saying something that might turn her mother's thoughts, now asked her if
Charlotte Lucas had been at Longbourn since _her_ coming away.

“Yes, she called yesterday with her father. What an agreeable man Sir
William is, Mr. Bingley, is not he? So much the man of fashion! So
genteel and easy! He has always something to say to everybody. _That_
is my idea of good breeding; and those persons who fancy themselves very
important, and never open their mouths, quite mistake the matter.”

“Did Charlotte dine with you?”

“No, she would go home. I fancy she was wanted about the mince-pies. For
my part, Mr. Bingley, I always keep servants that can do their own work;
_my_ daughters are brought up very differently. But everybody is to
judge for themselves, and the Lucases are a very good sort of girls,
I assure you. It is a pity they are not handsome! Not that I think
Charlotte so _very_ plain--but then she is our particular friend.”

“She seems a very pleasant young woman.”

“Oh! dear, yes; but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas herself
has often said so, and envied me Jane's beauty. I do not like to boast
of my own child, but to be sure, Jane--one does not often see anybody
better looking. It is what everybody says. I do not trust my own
partiality. When she was only fifteen, there was a man at my brother
Gardiner's in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was
sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But, however, he
did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses
on her, and very pretty they were.”

“And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has
been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first
discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”

“I have been used to consider poetry as the _food_ of love,” said Darcy.

“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I
am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”

Darcy only smiled; and the general pause which ensued made Elizabeth
tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself again. She longed to
speak, but could think of nothing to say; and after a short silence Mrs.
Bennet began repeating her thanks to Mr. Bingley for his kindness to
Jane, with an apology for troubling him also with Lizzy. Mr. Bingley was
unaffectedly civil in his answer, and forced his younger sister to be
civil also, and say what the occasion required. She performed her part
indeed without much graciousness, but Mrs. Bennet was satisfied, and
soon afterwards ordered her carriage. Upon this signal, the youngest of
her daughters put herself forward. The two girls had been whispering to
each other during the whole visit, and the result of it was, that the
youngest should tax Mr. Bingley with having promised on his first coming
into the country to give a ball at Netherfield.

Lydia was a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen, with a fine complexion
and good-humoured countenance; a favourite with her mother, whose
affection had brought her into public at an early age. She had high
animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence, which the
attention of the officers, to whom her uncle's good dinners, and her own
easy manners recommended her, had increased into assurance. She was very
equal, therefore, to address Mr. Bingley on the subject of the ball, and
abruptly reminded him of his promise; adding, that it would be the most
shameful thing in the world if he did not keep it. His answer to this
sudden attack was delightful to their mother's ear:

“I am perfectly ready, I assure you, to keep my engagement; and when
your sister is recovered, you shall, if you please, name the very day of
the ball. But you would not wish to be dancing when she is ill.”

Lydia declared herself satisfied. “Oh! yes--it would be much better to
wait till Jane was well, and by that time most likely Captain Carter
would be at Meryton again. And when you have given _your_ ball,” she
added, “I shall insist on their giving one also. I shall tell Colonel
Forster it will be quite a shame if he does not.”

Mrs. Bennet and her daughters then departed, and Elizabeth returned
instantly to Jane, leaving her own and her relations' behaviour to the
remarks of the two ladies and Mr. Darcy; the latter of whom, however,
could not be prevailed on to join in their censure of _her_, in spite of
all Miss Bingley's witticisms on _fine eyes_.



Chapter 10


The day passed much as the day before had done. Mrs. Hurst and Miss
Bingley had spent some hours of the morning with the invalid, who
continued, though slowly, to mend; and in the evening Elizabeth joined
their party in the drawing-room. The loo-table, however, did not appear.
Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching
the progress of his letter and repeatedly calling off his attention by
messages to his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and
Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.

Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in
attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion. The perpetual
commendations of the lady, either on his handwriting, or on the evenness
of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern
with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was
exactly in union with her opinion of each.

“How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!”

He made no answer.

“You write uncommonly fast.”

“You are mistaken. I write rather slowly.”

“How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of a
year! Letters of business, too! How odious I should think them!”

“It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of yours.”

“Pray tell your sister that I long to see her.”

“I have already told her so once, by your desire.”

“I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend
pens remarkably well.”

“Thank you--but I always mend my own.”

“How can you contrive to write so even?”

He was silent.

“Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on the harp;
and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful
little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss
Grantley's.”

“Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again? At
present I have not room to do them justice.”

“Oh! it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you
always write such charming long letters to her, Mr. Darcy?”

“They are generally long; but whether always charming it is not for me
to determine.”

“It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with
ease, cannot write ill.”

“That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline,” cried her
brother, “because he does _not_ write with ease. He studies too much for
words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?”

“My style of writing is very different from yours.”

“Oh!” cried Miss Bingley, “Charles writes in the most careless way
imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest.”

“My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them--by which
means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.”

“Your humility, Mr. Bingley,” said Elizabeth, “must disarm reproof.”

“Nothing is more deceitful,” said Darcy, “than the appearance of
humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an
indirect boast.”

“And which of the two do you call _my_ little recent piece of modesty?”

“The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in
writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of
thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you
think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with
quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any
attention to the imperfection of the performance. When you told Mrs.
Bennet this morning that if you ever resolved upon quitting Netherfield
you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of
panegyric, of compliment to yourself--and yet what is there so very
laudable in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business
undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or anyone else?”

“Nay,” cried Bingley, “this is too much, to remember at night all the
foolish things that were said in the morning. And yet, upon my honour,
I believe what I said of myself to be true, and I believe it at this
moment. At least, therefore, I did not assume the character of needless
precipitance merely to show off before the ladies.”

“I dare say you believed it; but I am by no means convinced that
you would be gone with such celerity. Your conduct would be quite as
dependent on chance as that of any man I know; and if, as you were
mounting your horse, a friend were to say, 'Bingley, you had better
stay till next week,' you would probably do it, you would probably not
go--and at another word, might stay a month.”

“You have only proved by this,” cried Elizabeth, “that Mr. Bingley did
not do justice to his own disposition. You have shown him off now much
more than he did himself.”

“I am exceedingly gratified,” said Bingley, “by your converting what my
friend says into a compliment on the sweetness of my temper. But I am
afraid you are giving it a turn which that gentleman did by no means
intend; for he would certainly think better of me, if under such a
circumstance I were to give a flat denial, and ride off as fast as I
could.”

“Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intentions
as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?”

“Upon my word, I cannot exactly explain the matter; Darcy must speak for
himself.”

“You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine,
but which I have never acknowledged. Allowing the case, however, to
stand according to your representation, you must remember, Miss Bennet,
that the friend who is supposed to desire his return to the house, and
the delay of his plan, has merely desired it, asked it without offering
one argument in favour of its propriety.”

“To yield readily--easily--to the _persuasion_ of a friend is no merit
with you.”

“To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of
either.”

“You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of
friendship and affection. A regard for the requester would often make
one readily yield to a request, without waiting for arguments to reason
one into it. I am not particularly speaking of such a case as you have
supposed about Mr. Bingley. We may as well wait, perhaps, till the
circumstance occurs before we discuss the discretion of his behaviour
thereupon. But in general and ordinary cases between friend and friend,
where one of them is desired by the other to change a resolution of no
very great moment, should you think ill of that person for complying
with the desire, without waiting to be argued into it?”

“Will it not be advisable, before we proceed on this subject, to
arrange with rather more precision the degree of importance which is to
appertain to this request, as well as the degree of intimacy subsisting
between the parties?”

“By all means,” cried Bingley; “let us hear all the particulars, not
forgetting their comparative height and size; for that will have more
weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be aware of. I assure
you, that if Darcy were not such a great tall fellow, in comparison with
myself, I should not pay him half so much deference. I declare I do not
know a more awful object than Darcy, on particular occasions, and in
particular places; at his own house especially, and of a Sunday evening,
when he has nothing to do.”

Mr. Darcy smiled; but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that he was
rather offended, and therefore checked her laugh. Miss Bingley warmly
resented the indignity he had received, in an expostulation with her
brother for talking such nonsense.

“I see your design, Bingley,” said his friend. “You dislike an argument,
and want to silence this.”

“Perhaps I do. Arguments are too much like disputes. If you and Miss
Bennet will defer yours till I am out of the room, I shall be very
thankful; and then you may say whatever you like of me.”

“What you ask,” said Elizabeth, “is no sacrifice on my side; and Mr.
Darcy had much better finish his letter.”

Mr. Darcy took her advice, and did finish his letter.

When that business was over, he applied to Miss Bingley and Elizabeth
for an indulgence of some music. Miss Bingley moved with some alacrity
to the pianoforte; and, after a polite request that Elizabeth would lead
the way which the other as politely and more earnestly negatived, she
seated herself.

Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister, and while they were thus employed,
Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music-books
that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed
on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of
admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her
because he disliked her, was still more strange. She could only imagine,
however, at last that she drew his notice because there was something
more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in
any other person present. The supposition did not pain her. She liked
him too little to care for his approbation.

After playing some Italian songs, Miss Bingley varied the charm by
a lively Scotch air; and soon afterwards Mr. Darcy, drawing near
Elizabeth, said to her:

“Do not you feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such an
opportunity of dancing a reel?”

She smiled, but made no answer. He repeated the question, with some
surprise at her silence.

“Oh!” said she, “I heard you before, but I could not immediately
determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say 'Yes,'
that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always
delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of
their premeditated contempt. I have, therefore, made up my mind to tell
you, that I do not want to dance a reel at all--and now despise me if
you dare.”

“Indeed I do not dare.”

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his
gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her
manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy
had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really
believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he
should be in some danger.

Miss Bingley saw, or suspected enough to be jealous; and her great
anxiety for the recovery of her dear friend Jane received some
assistance from her desire of getting rid of Elizabeth.

She often tried to provoke Darcy into disliking her guest, by talking of
their supposed marriage, and planning his happiness in such an alliance.

“I hope,” said she, as they were walking together in the shrubbery
the next day, “you will give your mother-in-law a few hints, when this
desirable event takes place, as to the advantage of holding her tongue;
and if you can compass it, do cure the younger girls of running after
officers. And, if I may mention so delicate a subject, endeavour to
check that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence,
which your lady possesses.”

“Have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity?”

“Oh! yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Phillips be placed
in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them next to your great-uncle the
judge. They are in the same profession, you know, only in different
lines. As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not have it taken, for
what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?”

“It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their
colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be
copied.”

At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst and
Elizabeth herself.

“I did not know that you intended to walk,” said Miss Bingley, in some
confusion, lest they had been overheard.

“You used us abominably ill,” answered Mrs. Hurst, “running away without
telling us that you were coming out.”

Then taking the disengaged arm of Mr. Darcy, she left Elizabeth to walk
by herself. The path just admitted three. Mr. Darcy felt their rudeness,
and immediately said:

“This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the
avenue.”

But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them,
laughingly answered:

“No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear
to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a
fourth. Good-bye.”

She then ran gaily off, rejoicing as she rambled about, in the hope of
being at home again in a day or two. Jane was already so much recovered
as to intend leaving her room for a couple of hours that evening.



Chapter 11


When the ladies removed after dinner, Elizabeth ran up to her
sister, and seeing her well guarded from cold, attended her into the
drawing-room, where she was welcomed by her two friends with many
professions of pleasure; and Elizabeth had never seen them so agreeable
as they were during the hour which passed before the gentlemen appeared.
Their powers of conversation were considerable. They could describe an
entertainment with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh
at their acquaintance with spirit.

But when the gentlemen entered, Jane was no longer the first object;
Miss Bingley's eyes were instantly turned toward Darcy, and she had
something to say to him before he had advanced many steps. He addressed
himself to Miss Bennet, with a polite congratulation; Mr. Hurst also
made her a slight bow, and said he was “very glad;” but diffuseness
and warmth remained for Bingley's salutation. He was full of joy and
attention. The first half-hour was spent in piling up the fire, lest she
should suffer from the change of room; and she removed at his desire
to the other side of the fireplace, that she might be further from
the door. He then sat down by her, and talked scarcely to anyone
else. Elizabeth, at work in the opposite corner, saw it all with great
delight.

When tea was over, Mr. Hurst reminded his sister-in-law of the
card-table--but in vain. She had obtained private intelligence that Mr.
Darcy did not wish for cards; and Mr. Hurst soon found even his open
petition rejected. She assured him that no one intended to play, and
the silence of the whole party on the subject seemed to justify her. Mr.
Hurst had therefore nothing to do, but to stretch himself on one of the
sofas and go to sleep. Darcy took up a book; Miss Bingley did the same;
and Mrs. Hurst, principally occupied in playing with her bracelets
and rings, joined now and then in her brother's conversation with Miss
Bennet.

Miss Bingley's attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr.
Darcy's progress through _his_ book, as in reading her own; and she
was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She
could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her
question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be
amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the
second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant
it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no
enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a
book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not
an excellent library.”

No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and
cast her eyes round the room in quest for some amusement; when hearing
her brother mentioning a ball to Miss Bennet, she turned suddenly
towards him and said:

“By the bye, Charles, are you really serious in meditating a dance at
Netherfield? I would advise you, before you determine on it, to consult
the wishes of the present party; I am much mistaken if there are
not some among us to whom a ball would be rather a punishment than a
pleasure.”

“If you mean Darcy,” cried her brother, “he may go to bed, if he
chooses, before it begins--but as for the ball, it is quite a settled
thing; and as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough, I shall send
round my cards.”

“I should like balls infinitely better,” she replied, “if they were
carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably
tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much
more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of
the day.”

“Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be
near so much like a ball.”

Miss Bingley made no answer, and soon afterwards she got up and walked
about the room. Her figure was elegant, and she walked well; but
Darcy, at whom it was all aimed, was still inflexibly studious. In
the desperation of her feelings, she resolved on one effort more, and,
turning to Elizabeth, said:

“Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a
turn about the room. I assure you it is very refreshing after sitting so
long in one attitude.”

Elizabeth was surprised, but agreed to it immediately. Miss Bingley
succeeded no less in the real object of her civility; Mr. Darcy looked
up. He was as much awake to the novelty of attention in that quarter as
Elizabeth herself could be, and unconsciously closed his book. He was
directly invited to join their party, but he declined it, observing that
he could imagine but two motives for their choosing to walk up and down
the room together, with either of which motives his joining them would
interfere. “What could he mean? She was dying to know what could be his
meaning?”--and asked Elizabeth whether she could at all understand him?

“Not at all,” was her answer; “but depend upon it, he means to be severe
on us, and our surest way of disappointing him will be to ask nothing
about it.”

Miss Bingley, however, was incapable of disappointing Mr. Darcy in
anything, and persevered therefore in requiring an explanation of his
two motives.

“I have not the smallest objection to explaining them,” said he, as soon
as she allowed him to speak. “You either choose this method of passing
the evening because you are in each other's confidence, and have secret
affairs to discuss, or because you are conscious that your figures
appear to the greatest advantage in walking; if the first, I would be
completely in your way, and if the second, I can admire you much better
as I sit by the fire.”

“Oh! shocking!” cried Miss Bingley. “I never heard anything so
abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?”

“Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination,” said Elizabeth. “We
can all plague and punish one another. Tease him--laugh at him. Intimate
as you are, you must know how it is to be done.”

“But upon my honour, I do _not_. I do assure you that my intimacy has
not yet taught me _that_. Tease calmness of manner and presence of
mind! No, no; I feel he may defy us there. And as to laughter, we will
not expose ourselves, if you please, by attempting to laugh without a
subject. Mr. Darcy may hug himself.”

“Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!” cried Elizabeth. “That is an
uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would
be a great loss to _me_ to have many such acquaintances. I dearly love a
laugh.”

“Miss Bingley,” said he, “has given me more credit than can be.
The wisest and the best of men--nay, the wisest and best of their
actions--may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in
life is a joke.”

“Certainly,” replied Elizabeth--“there are such people, but I hope I
am not one of _them_. I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good.
Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, _do_ divert me, I own,
and I laugh at them whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely
what you are without.”

“Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has been the study
of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong
understanding to ridicule.”

“Such as vanity and pride.”

“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride--where there is a real
superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.”

Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.

“Your examination of Mr. Darcy is over, I presume,” said Miss Bingley;
“and pray what is the result?”

“I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it
himself without disguise.”

“No,” said Darcy, “I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough,
but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch
for. It is, I believe, too little yielding--certainly too little for the
convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others
so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings
are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper
would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost
forever.”

“_That_ is a failing indeed!” cried Elizabeth. “Implacable resentment
_is_ a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I
really cannot _laugh_ at it. You are safe from me.”

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular
evil--a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”

“And _your_ defect is to hate everybody.”

“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to misunderstand
them.”

“Do let us have a little music,” cried Miss Bingley, tired of a
conversation in which she had no share. “Louisa, you will not mind my
waking Mr. Hurst?”

Her sister had not the smallest objection, and the pianoforte was
opened; and Darcy, after a few moments' recollection, was not sorry for
it. He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.



Chapter 12


In consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth wrote the
next morning to their mother, to beg that the carriage might be sent for
them in the course of the day. But Mrs. Bennet, who had calculated on
her daughters remaining at Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which
would exactly finish Jane's week, could not bring herself to receive
them with pleasure before. Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at
least not to Elizabeth's wishes, for she was impatient to get home. Mrs.
Bennet sent them word that they could not possibly have the carriage
before Tuesday; and in her postscript it was added, that if Mr. Bingley
and his sister pressed them to stay longer, she could spare them
very well. Against staying longer, however, Elizabeth was positively
resolved--nor did she much expect it would be asked; and fearful, on the
contrary, as being considered as intruding themselves needlessly long,
she urged Jane to borrow Mr. Bingley's carriage immediately, and at
length it was settled that their original design of leaving Netherfield
that morning should be mentioned, and the request made.

The communication excited many professions of concern; and enough was
said of wishing them to stay at least till the following day to work
on Jane; and till the morrow their going was deferred. Miss Bingley was
then sorry that she had proposed the delay, for her jealousy and dislike
of one sister much exceeded her affection for the other.

The master of the house heard with real sorrow that they were to go so
soon, and repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Bennet that it would not be
safe for her--that she was not enough recovered; but Jane was firm where
she felt herself to be right.

To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligence--Elizabeth had been at
Netherfield long enough. She attracted him more than he liked--and Miss
Bingley was uncivil to _her_, and more teasing than usual to himself.
He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration
should _now_ escape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope
of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been
suggested, his behaviour during the last day must have material weight
in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke
ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were
at one time left by themselves for half-an-hour, he adhered most
conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her.

On Sunday, after morning service, the separation, so agreeable to almost
all, took place. Miss Bingley's civility to Elizabeth increased at last
very rapidly, as well as her affection for Jane; and when they parted,
after assuring the latter of the pleasure it would always give her
to see her either at Longbourn or Netherfield, and embracing her most
tenderly, she even shook hands with the former. Elizabeth took leave of
the whole party in the liveliest of spirits.

They were not welcomed home very cordially by their mother. Mrs. Bennet
wondered at their coming, and thought them very wrong to give so much
trouble, and was sure Jane would have caught cold again. But their
father, though very laconic in his expressions of pleasure, was really
glad to see them; he had felt their importance in the family circle. The
evening conversation, when they were all assembled, had lost much of
its animation, and almost all its sense by the absence of Jane and
Elizabeth.

They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough-bass and human
nature; and had some extracts to admire, and some new observations of
threadbare morality to listen to. Catherine and Lydia had information
for them of a different sort. Much had been done and much had been said
in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers
had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it
had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.



Chapter 13


“I hope, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet to his wife, as they were at
breakfast the next morning, “that you have ordered a good dinner to-day,
because I have reason to expect an addition to our family party.”

“Who do you mean, my dear? I know of nobody that is coming, I am sure,
unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call in--and I hope _my_ dinners
are good enough for her. I do not believe she often sees such at home.”

“The person of whom I speak is a gentleman, and a stranger.”

Mrs. Bennet's eyes sparkled. “A gentleman and a stranger! It is Mr.
Bingley, I am sure! Well, I am sure I shall be extremely glad to see Mr.
Bingley. But--good Lord! how unlucky! There is not a bit of fish to be
got to-day. Lydia, my love, ring the bell--I must speak to Hill this
moment.”

“It is _not_ Mr. Bingley,” said her husband; “it is a person whom I
never saw in the whole course of my life.”

This roused a general astonishment; and he had the pleasure of being
eagerly questioned by his wife and his five daughters at once.

After amusing himself some time with their curiosity, he thus explained:

“About a month ago I received this letter; and about a fortnight ago
I answered it, for I thought it a case of some delicacy, and requiring
early attention. It is from my cousin, Mr. Collins, who, when I am dead,
may turn you all out of this house as soon as he pleases.”

“Oh! my dear,” cried his wife, “I cannot bear to hear that mentioned.
Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing
in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own
children; and I am sure, if I had been you, I should have tried long ago
to do something or other about it.”

Jane and Elizabeth tried to explain to her the nature of an entail. They
had often attempted to do it before, but it was a subject on which
Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason, and she continued to rail
bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of
five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.

“It certainly is a most iniquitous affair,” said Mr. Bennet, “and
nothing can clear Mr. Collins from the guilt of inheriting Longbourn.
But if you will listen to his letter, you may perhaps be a little
softened by his manner of expressing himself.”

“No, that I am sure I shall not; and I think it is very impertinent of
him to write to you at all, and very hypocritical. I hate such false
friends. Why could he not keep on quarreling with you, as his father did
before him?”

“Why, indeed; he does seem to have had some filial scruples on that
head, as you will hear.”

“Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent, 15th October.

“Dear Sir,--

“The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured
father always gave me much uneasiness, and since I have had the
misfortune to lose him, I have frequently wished to heal the breach; but
for some time I was kept back by my own doubts, fearing lest it might
seem disrespectful to his memory for me to be on good terms with anyone
with whom it had always pleased him to be at variance.--'There, Mrs.
Bennet.'--My mind, however, is now made up on the subject, for having
received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be
distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de
Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has
preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be
my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her
ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which
are instituted by the Church of England. As a clergyman, moreover, I
feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in
all families within the reach of my influence; and on these grounds I
flatter myself that my present overtures are highly commendable, and
that the circumstance of my being next in the entail of Longbourn estate
will be kindly overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject the
offered olive-branch. I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the
means of injuring your amiable daughters, and beg leave to apologise for
it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to make them every possible
amends--but of this hereafter. If you should have no objection to
receive me into your house, I propose myself the satisfaction of waiting
on you and your family, Monday, November 18th, by four o'clock, and
shall probably trespass on your hospitality till the Saturday se'ennight
following, which I can do without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine
is far from objecting to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided
that some other clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day.--I
remain, dear sir, with respectful compliments to your lady and
daughters, your well-wisher and friend,

“WILLIAM COLLINS”

“At four o'clock, therefore, we may expect this peace-making gentleman,”
 said Mr. Bennet, as he folded up the letter. “He seems to be a most
conscientious and polite young man, upon my word, and I doubt not will
prove a valuable acquaintance, especially if Lady Catherine should be so
indulgent as to let him come to us again.”

“There is some sense in what he says about the girls, however, and if
he is disposed to make them any amends, I shall not be the person to
discourage him.”

“Though it is difficult,” said Jane, “to guess in what way he can mean
to make us the atonement he thinks our due, the wish is certainly to his
credit.”

Elizabeth was chiefly struck by his extraordinary deference for Lady
Catherine, and his kind intention of christening, marrying, and burying
his parishioners whenever it were required.

“He must be an oddity, I think,” said she. “I cannot make him
out.--There is something very pompous in his style.--And what can he
mean by apologising for being next in the entail?--We cannot suppose he
would help it if he could.--Could he be a sensible man, sir?”

“No, my dear, I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the
reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his
letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him.”

“In point of composition,” said Mary, “the letter does not seem
defective. The idea of the olive-branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I
think it is well expressed.”

To Catherine and Lydia, neither the letter nor its writer were in any
degree interesting. It was next to impossible that their cousin should
come in a scarlet coat, and it was now some weeks since they had
received pleasure from the society of a man in any other colour. As for
their mother, Mr. Collins's letter had done away much of her ill-will,
and she was preparing to see him with a degree of composure which
astonished her husband and daughters.

Mr. Collins was punctual to his time, and was received with great
politeness by the whole family. Mr. Bennet indeed said little; but the
ladies were ready enough to talk, and Mr. Collins seemed neither in
need of encouragement, nor inclined to be silent himself. He was a
tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and
stately, and his manners were very formal. He had not been long seated
before he complimented Mrs. Bennet on having so fine a family of
daughters; said he had heard much of their beauty, but that in this
instance fame had fallen short of the truth; and added, that he did
not doubt her seeing them all in due time disposed of in marriage. This
gallantry was not much to the taste of some of his hearers; but Mrs.
Bennet, who quarreled with no compliments, answered most readily.

“You are very kind, I am sure; and I wish with all my heart it may
prove so, for else they will be destitute enough. Things are settled so
oddly.”

“You allude, perhaps, to the entail of this estate.”

“Ah! sir, I do indeed. It is a grievous affair to my poor girls, you
must confess. Not that I mean to find fault with _you_, for such things
I know are all chance in this world. There is no knowing how estates
will go when once they come to be entailed.”

“I am very sensible, madam, of the hardship to my fair cousins, and
could say much on the subject, but that I am cautious of appearing
forward and precipitate. But I can assure the young ladies that I come
prepared to admire them. At present I will not say more; but, perhaps,
when we are better acquainted--”

He was interrupted by a summons to dinner; and the girls smiled on each
other. They were not the only objects of Mr. Collins's admiration. The
hall, the dining-room, and all its furniture, were examined and praised;
and his commendation of everything would have touched Mrs. Bennet's
heart, but for the mortifying supposition of his viewing it all as his
own future property. The dinner too in its turn was highly admired; and
he begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellency of its
cooking was owing. But he was set right there by Mrs. Bennet, who
assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to keep a
good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen. He
begged pardon for having displeased her. In a softened tone she declared
herself not at all offended; but he continued to apologise for about a
quarter of an hour.



Chapter 14


During dinner, Mr. Bennet scarcely spoke at all; but when the servants
were withdrawn, he thought it time to have some conversation with his
guest, and therefore started a subject in which he expected him to
shine, by observing that he seemed very fortunate in his patroness. Lady
Catherine de Bourgh's attention to his wishes, and consideration for
his comfort, appeared very remarkable. Mr. Bennet could not have chosen
better. Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject elevated him
to more than usual solemnity of manner, and with a most important aspect
he protested that “he had never in his life witnessed such behaviour in
a person of rank--such affability and condescension, as he had himself
experienced from Lady Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to
approve of both of the discourses which he had already had the honour of
preaching before her. She had also asked him twice to dine at Rosings,
and had sent for him only the Saturday before, to make up her pool of
quadrille in the evening. Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many
people he knew, but _he_ had never seen anything but affability in her.
She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gentleman; she
made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the
neighbourhood nor to his leaving the parish occasionally for a week or
two, to visit his relations. She had even condescended to advise him to
marry as soon as he could, provided he chose with discretion; and had
once paid him a visit in his humble parsonage, where she had perfectly
approved all the alterations he had been making, and had even vouchsafed
to suggest some herself--some shelves in the closet up stairs.”

“That is all very proper and civil, I am sure,” said Mrs. Bennet, “and
I dare say she is a very agreeable woman. It is a pity that great ladies
in general are not more like her. Does she live near you, sir?”

“The garden in which stands my humble abode is separated only by a lane
from Rosings Park, her ladyship's residence.”

“I think you said she was a widow, sir? Has she any family?”

“She has only one daughter, the heiress of Rosings, and of very
extensive property.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Bennet, shaking her head, “then she is better off than
many girls. And what sort of young lady is she? Is she handsome?”

“She is a most charming young lady indeed. Lady Catherine herself says
that, in point of true beauty, Miss de Bourgh is far superior to the
handsomest of her sex, because there is that in her features which marks
the young lady of distinguished birth. She is unfortunately of a sickly
constitution, which has prevented her from making that progress in many
accomplishments which she could not have otherwise failed of, as I am
informed by the lady who superintended her education, and who still
resides with them. But she is perfectly amiable, and often condescends
to drive by my humble abode in her little phaeton and ponies.”

“Has she been presented? I do not remember her name among the ladies at
court.”

“Her indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her being in town;
and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine one day, has deprived the
British court of its brightest ornament. Her ladyship seemed pleased
with the idea; and you may imagine that I am happy on every occasion to
offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable
to ladies. I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine, that
her charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess, and that the most
elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by
her. These are the kind of little things which please her ladyship, and
it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to
pay.”

“You judge very properly,” said Mr. Bennet, “and it is happy for you
that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask
whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the
moment, or are the result of previous study?”

“They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I
sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant
compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to
give them as unstudied an air as possible.”

Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd
as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment,
maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance,
and, except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner
in his pleasure.

By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr. Bennet was glad
to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and, when tea was over,
glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily
assented, and a book was produced; but, on beholding it (for everything
announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and
begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at
him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some
deliberation he chose Fordyce's Sermons. Lydia gaped as he opened the
volume, and before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three
pages, she interrupted him with:

“Do you know, mamma, that my uncle Phillips talks of turning away
Richard; and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him. My aunt told me
so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more
about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.”

Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but Mr.
Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said:

“I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books
of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes
me, I confess; for, certainly, there can be nothing so advantageous to
them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.”

Then turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at
backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted
very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements.
Mrs. Bennet and her daughters apologised most civilly for Lydia's
interruption, and promised that it should not occur again, if he would
resume his book; but Mr. Collins, after assuring them that he bore his
young cousin no ill-will, and should never resent her behaviour as any
affront, seated himself at another table with Mr. Bennet, and prepared
for backgammon.



Chapter 15


Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had
been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part
of his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and
miserly father; and though he belonged to one of the universities, he
had merely kept the necessary terms, without forming at it any useful
acquaintance. The subjection in which his father had brought him up had
given him originally great humility of manner; but it was now a
good deal counteracted by the self-conceit of a weak head, living in
retirement, and the consequential feelings of early and unexpected
prosperity. A fortunate chance had recommended him to Lady Catherine de
Bourgh when the living of Hunsford was vacant; and the respect which
he felt for her high rank, and his veneration for her as his patroness,
mingling with a very good opinion of himself, of his authority as a
clergyman, and his right as a rector, made him altogether a mixture of
pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility.

Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he intended to
marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had
a wife in view, as he meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found
them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report.
This was his plan of amends--of atonement--for inheriting their father's
estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and
suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own
part.

His plan did not vary on seeing them. Miss Bennet's lovely face
confirmed his views, and established all his strictest notions of what
was due to seniority; and for the first evening _she_ was his settled
choice. The next morning, however, made an alteration; for in a
quarter of an hour's tete-a-tete with Mrs. Bennet before breakfast, a
conversation beginning with his parsonage-house, and leading naturally
to the avowal of his hopes, that a mistress might be found for it at
Longbourn, produced from her, amid very complaisant smiles and general
encouragement, a caution against the very Jane he had fixed on. “As to
her _younger_ daughters, she could not take upon her to say--she could
not positively answer--but she did not _know_ of any prepossession; her
_eldest_ daughter, she must just mention--she felt it incumbent on her
to hint, was likely to be very soon engaged.”

Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabeth--and it was soon
done--done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire. Elizabeth, equally
next to Jane in birth and beauty, succeeded her of course.

Mrs. Bennet treasured up the hint, and trusted that she might soon have
two daughters married; and the man whom she could not bear to speak of
the day before was now high in her good graces.

Lydia's intention of walking to Meryton was not forgotten; every sister
except Mary agreed to go with her; and Mr. Collins was to attend them,
at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him,
and have his library to himself; for thither Mr. Collins had followed
him after breakfast; and there he would continue, nominally engaged with
one of the largest folios in the collection, but really talking to Mr.
Bennet, with little cessation, of his house and garden at Hunsford. Such
doings discomposed Mr. Bennet exceedingly. In his library he had been
always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told
Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room of the
house, he was used to be free from them there; his civility, therefore,
was most prompt in inviting Mr. Collins to join his daughters in their
walk; and Mr. Collins, being in fact much better fitted for a walker
than a reader, was extremely pleased to close his large book, and go.

In pompous nothings on his side, and civil assents on that of his
cousins, their time passed till they entered Meryton. The attention of
the younger ones was then no longer to be gained by him. Their eyes were
immediately wandering up in the street in quest of the officers, and
nothing less than a very smart bonnet indeed, or a really new muslin in
a shop window, could recall them.

But the attention of every lady was soon caught by a young man, whom
they had never seen before, of most gentlemanlike appearance, walking
with another officer on the other side of the way. The officer was
the very Mr. Denny concerning whose return from London Lydia came
to inquire, and he bowed as they passed. All were struck with the
stranger's air, all wondered who he could be; and Kitty and Lydia,
determined if possible to find out, led the way across the street, under
pretense of wanting something in an opposite shop, and fortunately
had just gained the pavement when the two gentlemen, turning back, had
reached the same spot. Mr. Denny addressed them directly, and entreated
permission to introduce his friend, Mr. Wickham, who had returned with
him the day before from town, and he was happy to say had accepted a
commission in their corps. This was exactly as it should be; for the
young man wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming.
His appearance was greatly in his favour; he had all the best part of
beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address.
The introduction was followed up on his side by a happy readiness
of conversation--a readiness at the same time perfectly correct and
unassuming; and the whole party were still standing and talking together
very agreeably, when the sound of horses drew their notice, and Darcy
and Bingley were seen riding down the street. On distinguishing the
ladies of the group, the two gentlemen came directly towards them, and
began the usual civilities. Bingley was the principal spokesman, and
Miss Bennet the principal object. He was then, he said, on his way to
Longbourn on purpose to inquire after her. Mr. Darcy corroborated
it with a bow, and was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes
on Elizabeth, when they were suddenly arrested by the sight of the
stranger, and Elizabeth happening to see the countenance of both as they
looked at each other, was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting.
Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham,
after a few moments, touched his hat--a salutation which Mr. Darcy just
deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to
imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.

In another minute, Mr. Bingley, but without seeming to have noticed what
passed, took leave and rode on with his friend.

Mr. Denny and Mr. Wickham walked with the young ladies to the door of
Mr. Phillip's house, and then made their bows, in spite of Miss Lydia's
pressing entreaties that they should come in, and even in spite of
Mrs. Phillips's throwing up the parlour window and loudly seconding the
invitation.

Mrs. Phillips was always glad to see her nieces; and the two eldest,
from their recent absence, were particularly welcome, and she was
eagerly expressing her surprise at their sudden return home, which, as
their own carriage had not fetched them, she should have known nothing
about, if she had not happened to see Mr. Jones's shop-boy in the
street, who had told her that they were not to send any more draughts to
Netherfield because the Miss Bennets were come away, when her civility
was claimed towards Mr. Collins by Jane's introduction of him. She
received him with her very best politeness, which he returned with
as much more, apologising for his intrusion, without any previous
acquaintance with her, which he could not help flattering himself,
however, might be justified by his relationship to the young ladies who
introduced him to her notice. Mrs. Phillips was quite awed by such an
excess of good breeding; but her contemplation of one stranger was soon
put to an end by exclamations and inquiries about the other; of whom,
however, she could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that
Mr. Denny had brought him from London, and that he was to have a
lieutenant's commission in the ----shire. She had been watching him the
last hour, she said, as he walked up and down the street, and had Mr.
Wickham appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly have continued the
occupation, but unluckily no one passed windows now except a few of the
officers, who, in comparison with the stranger, were become “stupid,
disagreeable fellows.” Some of them were to dine with the Phillipses
the next day, and their aunt promised to make her husband call on Mr.
Wickham, and give him an invitation also, if the family from Longbourn
would come in the evening. This was agreed to, and Mrs. Phillips
protested that they would have a nice comfortable noisy game of lottery
tickets, and a little bit of hot supper afterwards. The prospect of such
delights was very cheering, and they parted in mutual good spirits. Mr.
Collins repeated his apologies in quitting the room, and was assured
with unwearying civility that they were perfectly needless.

As they walked home, Elizabeth related to Jane what she had seen pass
between the two gentlemen; but though Jane would have defended either
or both, had they appeared to be in the wrong, she could no more explain
such behaviour than her sister.

Mr. Collins on his return highly gratified Mrs. Bennet by admiring
Mrs. Phillips's manners and politeness. He protested that, except Lady
Catherine and her daughter, he had never seen a more elegant woman;
for she had not only received him with the utmost civility, but even
pointedly included him in her invitation for the next evening, although
utterly unknown to her before. Something, he supposed, might be
attributed to his connection with them, but yet he had never met with so
much attention in the whole course of his life.



Chapter 16


As no objection was made to the young people's engagement with their
aunt, and all Mr. Collins's scruples of leaving Mr. and Mrs. Bennet for
a single evening during his visit were most steadily resisted, the coach
conveyed him and his five cousins at a suitable hour to Meryton; and
the girls had the pleasure of hearing, as they entered the drawing-room,
that Mr. Wickham had accepted their uncle's invitation, and was then in
the house.

When this information was given, and they had all taken their seats, Mr.
Collins was at leisure to look around him and admire, and he was so much
struck with the size and furniture of the apartment, that he declared he
might almost have supposed himself in the small summer breakfast
parlour at Rosings; a comparison that did not at first convey much
gratification; but when Mrs. Phillips understood from him what
Rosings was, and who was its proprietor--when she had listened to the
description of only one of Lady Catherine's drawing-rooms, and found
that the chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds, she felt all
the force of the compliment, and would hardly have resented a comparison
with the housekeeper's room.

In describing to her all the grandeur of Lady Catherine and her mansion,
with occasional digressions in praise of his own humble abode, and
the improvements it was receiving, he was happily employed until the
gentlemen joined them; and he found in Mrs. Phillips a very attentive
listener, whose opinion of his consequence increased with what she
heard, and who was resolving to retail it all among her neighbours as
soon as she could. To the girls, who could not listen to their cousin,
and who had nothing to do but to wish for an instrument, and examine
their own indifferent imitations of china on the mantelpiece, the
interval of waiting appeared very long. It was over at last, however.
The gentlemen did approach, and when Mr. Wickham walked into the room,
Elizabeth felt that she had neither been seeing him before, nor thinking
of him since, with the smallest degree of unreasonable admiration.
The officers of the ----shire were in general a very creditable,
gentlemanlike set, and the best of them were of the present party; but
Mr. Wickham was as far beyond them all in person, countenance, air, and
walk, as _they_ were superior to the broad-faced, stuffy uncle Phillips,
breathing port wine, who followed them into the room.

Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was
turned, and Elizabeth was the happy woman by whom he finally seated
himself; and the agreeable manner in which he immediately fell into
conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, made her feel
that the commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered
interesting by the skill of the speaker.

With such rivals for the notice of the fair as Mr. Wickham and the
officers, Mr. Collins seemed to sink into insignificance; to the young
ladies he certainly was nothing; but he had still at intervals a kind
listener in Mrs. Phillips, and was by her watchfulness, most abundantly
supplied with coffee and muffin. When the card-tables were placed, he
had the opportunity of obliging her in turn, by sitting down to whist.

“I know little of the game at present,” said he, “but I shall be glad
to improve myself, for in my situation in life--” Mrs. Phillips was very
glad for his compliance, but could not wait for his reason.

Mr. Wickham did not play at whist, and with ready delight was he
received at the other table between Elizabeth and Lydia. At first there
seemed danger of Lydia's engrossing him entirely, for she was a most
determined talker; but being likewise extremely fond of lottery tickets,
she soon grew too much interested in the game, too eager in making bets
and exclaiming after prizes to have attention for anyone in particular.
Allowing for the common demands of the game, Mr. Wickham was therefore
at leisure to talk to Elizabeth, and she was very willing to hear
him, though what she chiefly wished to hear she could not hope to be
told--the history of his acquaintance with Mr. Darcy. She dared not
even mention that gentleman. Her curiosity, however, was unexpectedly
relieved. Mr. Wickham began the subject himself. He inquired how far
Netherfield was from Meryton; and, after receiving her answer, asked in
a hesitating manner how long Mr. Darcy had been staying there.

“About a month,” said Elizabeth; and then, unwilling to let the subject
drop, added, “He is a man of very large property in Derbyshire, I
understand.”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Wickham; “his estate there is a noble one. A clear
ten thousand per annum. You could not have met with a person more
capable of giving you certain information on that head than myself, for
I have been connected with his family in a particular manner from my
infancy.”

Elizabeth could not but look surprised.

“You may well be surprised, Miss Bennet, at such an assertion, after
seeing, as you probably might, the very cold manner of our meeting
yesterday. Are you much acquainted with Mr. Darcy?”

“As much as I ever wish to be,” cried Elizabeth very warmly. “I have
spent four days in the same house with him, and I think him very
disagreeable.”

“I have no right to give _my_ opinion,” said Wickham, “as to his being
agreeable or otherwise. I am not qualified to form one. I have known him
too long and too well to be a fair judge. It is impossible for _me_
to be impartial. But I believe your opinion of him would in general
astonish--and perhaps you would not express it quite so strongly
anywhere else. Here you are in your own family.”

“Upon my word, I say no more _here_ than I might say in any house in
the neighbourhood, except Netherfield. He is not at all liked in
Hertfordshire. Everybody is disgusted with his pride. You will not find
him more favourably spoken of by anyone.”

“I cannot pretend to be sorry,” said Wickham, after a short
interruption, “that he or that any man should not be estimated beyond
their deserts; but with _him_ I believe it does not often happen. The
world is blinded by his fortune and consequence, or frightened by his
high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chooses to be seen.”

“I should take him, even on _my_ slight acquaintance, to be an
ill-tempered man.” Wickham only shook his head.

“I wonder,” said he, at the next opportunity of speaking, “whether he is
likely to be in this country much longer.”

“I do not at all know; but I _heard_ nothing of his going away when I
was at Netherfield. I hope your plans in favour of the ----shire will
not be affected by his being in the neighbourhood.”

“Oh! no--it is not for _me_ to be driven away by Mr. Darcy. If _he_
wishes to avoid seeing _me_, he must go. We are not on friendly terms,
and it always gives me pain to meet him, but I have no reason for
avoiding _him_ but what I might proclaim before all the world, a sense
of very great ill-usage, and most painful regrets at his being what he
is. His father, Miss Bennet, the late Mr. Darcy, was one of the best men
that ever breathed, and the truest friend I ever had; and I can never
be in company with this Mr. Darcy without being grieved to the soul by
a thousand tender recollections. His behaviour to myself has been
scandalous; but I verily believe I could forgive him anything and
everything, rather than his disappointing the hopes and disgracing the
memory of his father.”

Elizabeth found the interest of the subject increase, and listened with
all her heart; but the delicacy of it prevented further inquiry.

Mr. Wickham began to speak on more general topics, Meryton, the
neighbourhood, the society, appearing highly pleased with all that
he had yet seen, and speaking of the latter with gentle but very
intelligible gallantry.

“It was the prospect of constant society, and good society,” he added,
“which was my chief inducement to enter the ----shire. I knew it to be
a most respectable, agreeable corps, and my friend Denny tempted me
further by his account of their present quarters, and the very great
attentions and excellent acquaintances Meryton had procured them.
Society, I own, is necessary to me. I have been a disappointed man, and
my spirits will not bear solitude. I _must_ have employment and society.
A military life is not what I was intended for, but circumstances have
now made it eligible. The church _ought_ to have been my profession--I
was brought up for the church, and I should at this time have been in
possession of a most valuable living, had it pleased the gentleman we
were speaking of just now.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes--the late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation of the best
living in his gift. He was my godfather, and excessively attached to me.
I cannot do justice to his kindness. He meant to provide for me amply,
and thought he had done it; but when the living fell, it was given
elsewhere.”

“Good heavens!” cried Elizabeth; “but how could _that_ be? How could his
will be disregarded? Why did you not seek legal redress?”

“There was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest as to
give me no hope from law. A man of honour could not have doubted the
intention, but Mr. Darcy chose to doubt it--or to treat it as a merely
conditional recommendation, and to assert that I had forfeited all claim
to it by extravagance, imprudence--in short anything or nothing. Certain
it is, that the living became vacant two years ago, exactly as I was
of an age to hold it, and that it was given to another man; and no
less certain is it, that I cannot accuse myself of having really done
anything to deserve to lose it. I have a warm, unguarded temper, and
I may have spoken my opinion _of_ him, and _to_ him, too freely. I can
recall nothing worse. But the fact is, that we are very different sort
of men, and that he hates me.”

“This is quite shocking! He deserves to be publicly disgraced.”

“Some time or other he _will_ be--but it shall not be by _me_. Till I
can forget his father, I can never defy or expose _him_.”

Elizabeth honoured him for such feelings, and thought him handsomer than
ever as he expressed them.

“But what,” said she, after a pause, “can have been his motive? What can
have induced him to behave so cruelly?”

“A thorough, determined dislike of me--a dislike which I cannot but
attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me
less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father's uncommon
attachment to me irritated him, I believe, very early in life. He had
not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood--the sort
of preference which was often given me.”

“I had not thought Mr. Darcy so bad as this--though I have never liked
him. I had not thought so very ill of him. I had supposed him to be
despising his fellow-creatures in general, but did not suspect him of
descending to such malicious revenge, such injustice, such inhumanity as
this.”

After a few minutes' reflection, however, she continued, “I _do_
remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of
his resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper. His disposition
must be dreadful.”

“I will not trust myself on the subject,” replied Wickham; “I can hardly
be just to him.”

Elizabeth was again deep in thought, and after a time exclaimed, “To
treat in such a manner the godson, the friend, the favourite of his
father!” She could have added, “A young man, too, like _you_, whose very
countenance may vouch for your being amiable”--but she contented herself
with, “and one, too, who had probably been his companion from childhood,
connected together, as I think you said, in the closest manner!”

“We were born in the same parish, within the same park; the greatest
part of our youth was passed together; inmates of the same house,
sharing the same amusements, objects of the same parental care. _My_
father began life in the profession which your uncle, Mr. Phillips,
appears to do so much credit to--but he gave up everything to be of
use to the late Mr. Darcy and devoted all his time to the care of the
Pemberley property. He was most highly esteemed by Mr. Darcy, a most
intimate, confidential friend. Mr. Darcy often acknowledged himself to
be under the greatest obligations to my father's active superintendence,
and when, immediately before my father's death, Mr. Darcy gave him a
voluntary promise of providing for me, I am convinced that he felt it to
be as much a debt of gratitude to _him_, as of his affection to myself.”

“How strange!” cried Elizabeth. “How abominable! I wonder that the very
pride of this Mr. Darcy has not made him just to you! If from no better
motive, that he should not have been too proud to be dishonest--for
dishonesty I must call it.”

“It _is_ wonderful,” replied Wickham, “for almost all his actions may
be traced to pride; and pride had often been his best friend. It has
connected him nearer with virtue than with any other feeling. But we are
none of us consistent, and in his behaviour to me there were stronger
impulses even than pride.”

“Can such abominable pride as his have ever done him good?”

“Yes. It has often led him to be liberal and generous, to give his money
freely, to display hospitality, to assist his tenants, and relieve the
poor. Family pride, and _filial_ pride--for he is very proud of what
his father was--have done this. Not to appear to disgrace his family,
to degenerate from the popular qualities, or lose the influence of the
Pemberley House, is a powerful motive. He has also _brotherly_ pride,
which, with _some_ brotherly affection, makes him a very kind and
careful guardian of his sister, and you will hear him generally cried up
as the most attentive and best of brothers.”

“What sort of girl is Miss Darcy?”

He shook his head. “I wish I could call her amiable. It gives me pain to
speak ill of a Darcy. But she is too much like her brother--very, very
proud. As a child, she was affectionate and pleasing, and extremely fond
of me; and I have devoted hours and hours to her amusement. But she is
nothing to me now. She is a handsome girl, about fifteen or sixteen,
and, I understand, highly accomplished. Since her father's death, her
home has been London, where a lady lives with her, and superintends her
education.”

After many pauses and many trials of other subjects, Elizabeth could not
help reverting once more to the first, and saying:

“I am astonished at his intimacy with Mr. Bingley! How can Mr. Bingley,
who seems good humour itself, and is, I really believe, truly amiable,
be in friendship with such a man? How can they suit each other? Do you
know Mr. Bingley?”

“Not at all.”

“He is a sweet-tempered, amiable, charming man. He cannot know what Mr.
Darcy is.”

“Probably not; but Mr. Darcy can please where he chooses. He does not
want abilities. He can be a conversible companion if he thinks it worth
his while. Among those who are at all his equals in consequence, he is
a very different man from what he is to the less prosperous. His
pride never deserts him; but with the rich he is liberal-minded, just,
sincere, rational, honourable, and perhaps agreeable--allowing something
for fortune and figure.”

The whist party soon afterwards breaking up, the players gathered round
the other table and Mr. Collins took his station between his cousin
Elizabeth and Mrs. Phillips. The usual inquiries as to his success were
made by the latter. It had not been very great; he had lost every
point; but when Mrs. Phillips began to express her concern thereupon,
he assured her with much earnest gravity that it was not of the least
importance, that he considered the money as a mere trifle, and begged
that she would not make herself uneasy.

“I know very well, madam,” said he, “that when persons sit down to a
card-table, they must take their chances of these things, and happily I
am not in such circumstances as to make five shillings any object. There
are undoubtedly many who could not say the same, but thanks to Lady
Catherine de Bourgh, I am removed far beyond the necessity of regarding
little matters.”

Mr. Wickham's attention was caught; and after observing Mr. Collins for
a few moments, he asked Elizabeth in a low voice whether her relation
was very intimately acquainted with the family of de Bourgh.

“Lady Catherine de Bourgh,” she replied, “has very lately given him
a living. I hardly know how Mr. Collins was first introduced to her
notice, but he certainly has not known her long.”

“You know of course that Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Anne Darcy
were sisters; consequently that she is aunt to the present Mr. Darcy.”

“No, indeed, I did not. I knew nothing at all of Lady Catherine's
connections. I never heard of her existence till the day before
yesterday.”

“Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, will have a very large fortune, and it is
believed that she and her cousin will unite the two estates.”

This information made Elizabeth smile, as she thought of poor Miss
Bingley. Vain indeed must be all her attentions, vain and useless her
affection for his sister and her praise of himself, if he were already
self-destined for another.

“Mr. Collins,” said she, “speaks highly both of Lady Catherine and her
daughter; but from some particulars that he has related of her ladyship,
I suspect his gratitude misleads him, and that in spite of her being his
patroness, she is an arrogant, conceited woman.”

“I believe her to be both in a great degree,” replied Wickham; “I have
not seen her for many years, but I very well remember that I never liked
her, and that her manners were dictatorial and insolent. She has the
reputation of being remarkably sensible and clever; but I rather believe
she derives part of her abilities from her rank and fortune, part from
her authoritative manner, and the rest from the pride for her
nephew, who chooses that everyone connected with him should have an
understanding of the first class.”

Elizabeth allowed that he had given a very rational account of it, and
they continued talking together, with mutual satisfaction till supper
put an end to cards, and gave the rest of the ladies their share of Mr.
Wickham's attentions. There could be no conversation in the noise
of Mrs. Phillips's supper party, but his manners recommended him to
everybody. Whatever he said, was said well; and whatever he did, done
gracefully. Elizabeth went away with her head full of him. She could
think of nothing but of Mr. Wickham, and of what he had told her, all
the way home; but there was not time for her even to mention his name
as they went, for neither Lydia nor Mr. Collins were once silent. Lydia
talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the
fish she had won; and Mr. Collins in describing the civility of Mr. and
Mrs. Phillips, protesting that he did not in the least regard his losses
at whist, enumerating all the dishes at supper, and repeatedly fearing
that he crowded his cousins, had more to say than he could well manage
before the carriage stopped at Longbourn House.



Chapter 17


Elizabeth related to Jane the next day what had passed between Mr.
Wickham and herself. Jane listened with astonishment and concern; she
knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be so unworthy of Mr.
Bingley's regard; and yet, it was not in her nature to question the
veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham. The
possibility of his having endured such unkindness, was enough to
interest all her tender feelings; and nothing remained therefore to be
done, but to think well of them both, to defend the conduct of each,
and throw into the account of accident or mistake whatever could not be
otherwise explained.

“They have both,” said she, “been deceived, I dare say, in some way
or other, of which we can form no idea. Interested people have perhaps
misrepresented each to the other. It is, in short, impossible for us to
conjecture the causes or circumstances which may have alienated them,
without actual blame on either side.”

“Very true, indeed; and now, my dear Jane, what have you got to say on
behalf of the interested people who have probably been concerned in the
business? Do clear _them_ too, or we shall be obliged to think ill of
somebody.”

“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my
opinion. My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a disgraceful light
it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father's favourite in such
a manner, one whom his father had promised to provide for. It is
impossible. No man of common humanity, no man who had any value for his
character, could be capable of it. Can his most intimate friends be so
excessively deceived in him? Oh! no.”

“I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley's being imposed on, than
that Mr. Wickham should invent such a history of himself as he gave me
last night; names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. If it
be not so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was truth in his
looks.”

“It is difficult indeed--it is distressing. One does not know what to
think.”

“I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.”

But Jane could think with certainty on only one point--that Mr. Bingley,
if he _had_ been imposed on, would have much to suffer when the affair
became public.

The two young ladies were summoned from the shrubbery, where this
conversation passed, by the arrival of the very persons of whom they had
been speaking; Mr. Bingley and his sisters came to give their personal
invitation for the long-expected ball at Netherfield, which was fixed
for the following Tuesday. The two ladies were delighted to see their
dear friend again, called it an age since they had met, and repeatedly
asked what she had been doing with herself since their separation. To
the rest of the family they paid little attention; avoiding Mrs. Bennet
as much as possible, saying not much to Elizabeth, and nothing at all to
the others. They were soon gone again, rising from their seats with an
activity which took their brother by surprise, and hurrying off as if
eager to escape from Mrs. Bennet's civilities.

The prospect of the Netherfield ball was extremely agreeable to every
female of the family. Mrs. Bennet chose to consider it as given in
compliment to her eldest daughter, and was particularly flattered
by receiving the invitation from Mr. Bingley himself, instead of a
ceremonious card. Jane pictured to herself a happy evening in the
society of her two friends, and the attentions of their brother; and
Elizabeth thought with pleasure of dancing a great deal with Mr.
Wickham, and of seeing a confirmation of everything in Mr. Darcy's look
and behaviour. The happiness anticipated by Catherine and Lydia depended
less on any single event, or any particular person, for though they
each, like Elizabeth, meant to dance half the evening with Mr. Wickham,
he was by no means the only partner who could satisfy them, and a ball
was, at any rate, a ball. And even Mary could assure her family that she
had no disinclination for it.

“While I can have my mornings to myself,” said she, “it is enough--I
think it is no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening engagements.
Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those
who consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for
everybody.”

Elizabeth's spirits were so high on this occasion, that though she did
not often speak unnecessarily to Mr. Collins, she could not help asking
him whether he intended to accept Mr. Bingley's invitation, and if
he did, whether he would think it proper to join in the evening's
amusement; and she was rather surprised to find that he entertained no
scruple whatever on that head, and was very far from dreading a rebuke
either from the Archbishop, or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, by venturing to
dance.

“I am by no means of the opinion, I assure you,” said he, “that a ball
of this kind, given by a young man of character, to respectable people,
can have any evil tendency; and I am so far from objecting to dancing
myself, that I shall hope to be honoured with the hands of all my fair
cousins in the course of the evening; and I take this opportunity of
soliciting yours, Miss Elizabeth, for the two first dances especially,
a preference which I trust my cousin Jane will attribute to the right
cause, and not to any disrespect for her.”

Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. She had fully proposed being
engaged by Mr. Wickham for those very dances; and to have Mr. Collins
instead! her liveliness had never been worse timed. There was no help
for it, however. Mr. Wickham's happiness and her own were perforce
delayed a little longer, and Mr. Collins's proposal accepted with as
good a grace as she could. She was not the better pleased with his
gallantry from the idea it suggested of something more. It now first
struck her, that _she_ was selected from among her sisters as worthy
of being mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a
quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.
The idea soon reached to conviction, as she observed his increasing
civilities toward herself, and heard his frequent attempt at a
compliment on her wit and vivacity; and though more astonished than
gratified herself by this effect of her charms, it was not long before
her mother gave her to understand that the probability of their marriage
was extremely agreeable to _her_. Elizabeth, however, did not choose
to take the hint, being well aware that a serious dispute must be the
consequence of any reply. Mr. Collins might never make the offer, and
till he did, it was useless to quarrel about him.

If there had not been a Netherfield ball to prepare for and talk of, the
younger Miss Bennets would have been in a very pitiable state at this
time, for from the day of the invitation, to the day of the ball, there
was such a succession of rain as prevented their walking to Meryton
once. No aunt, no officers, no news could be sought after--the very
shoe-roses for Netherfield were got by proxy. Even Elizabeth might have
found some trial of her patience in weather which totally suspended the
improvement of her acquaintance with Mr. Wickham; and nothing less than
a dance on Tuesday, could have made such a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and
Monday endurable to Kitty and Lydia.



Chapter 18


Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and looked in
vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a
doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. The certainty
of meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that
might not unreasonably have alarmed her. She had dressed with more than
usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all
that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than
might be won in the course of the evening. But in an instant arose
the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted for Mr. Darcy's
pleasure in the Bingleys' invitation to the officers; and though
this was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was
pronounced by his friend Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and who
told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business the
day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant smile,
“I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if
he had not wanted to avoid a certain gentleman here.”

This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was caught by
Elizabeth, and, as it assured her that Darcy was not less answerable for
Wickham's absence than if her first surmise had been just, every
feeling of displeasure against the former was so sharpened by immediate
disappointment, that she could hardly reply with tolerable civility to
the polite inquiries which he directly afterwards approached to make.
Attendance, forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham. She
was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and turned away
with a degree of ill-humour which she could not wholly surmount even in
speaking to Mr. Bingley, whose blind partiality provoked her.

But Elizabeth was not formed for ill-humour; and though every prospect
of her own was destroyed for the evening, it could not dwell long on her
spirits; and having told all her griefs to Charlotte Lucas, whom she had
not seen for a week, she was soon able to make a voluntary transition
to the oddities of her cousin, and to point him out to her particular
notice. The first two dances, however, brought a return of distress;
they were dances of mortification. Mr. Collins, awkward and solemn,
apologising instead of attending, and often moving wrong without being
aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery which a disagreeable
partner for a couple of dances can give. The moment of her release from
him was ecstasy.

She danced next with an officer, and had the refreshment of talking of
Wickham, and of hearing that he was universally liked. When those dances
were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with
her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy who took
her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that,
without knowing what she did, she accepted him. He walked away again
immediately, and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of
mind; Charlotte tried to console her:

“I dare say you will find him very agreeable.”

“Heaven forbid! _That_ would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find
a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an
evil.”

When the dancing recommenced, however, and Darcy approached to claim her
hand, Charlotte could not help cautioning her in a whisper, not to be a
simpleton, and allow her fancy for Wickham to make her appear unpleasant
in the eyes of a man ten times his consequence. Elizabeth made no
answer, and took her place in the set, amazed at the dignity to which
she was arrived in being allowed to stand opposite to Mr. Darcy, and
reading in her neighbours' looks, their equal amazement in beholding
it. They stood for some time without speaking a word; and she began to
imagine that their silence was to last through the two dances, and at
first was resolved not to break it; till suddenly fancying that it would
be the greater punishment to her partner to oblige him to talk, she made
some slight observation on the dance. He replied, and was again
silent. After a pause of some minutes, she addressed him a second time
with:--“It is _your_ turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I talked
about the dance, and _you_ ought to make some sort of remark on the size
of the room, or the number of couples.”

He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be
said.

“Very well. That reply will do for the present. Perhaps by and by I may
observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones. But
_now_ we may be silent.”

“Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?”

“Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be
entirely silent for half an hour together; and yet for the advantage of
_some_, conversation ought to be so arranged, as that they may have the
trouble of saying as little as possible.”

“Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you
imagine that you are gratifying mine?”

“Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great
similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial,
taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say
something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to
posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.”

“This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,”
 said he. “How near it may be to _mine_, I cannot pretend to say. _You_
think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly.”

“I must not decide on my own performance.”

He made no answer, and they were again silent till they had gone down
the dance, when he asked her if she and her sisters did not very often
walk to Meryton. She answered in the affirmative, and, unable to resist
the temptation, added, “When you met us there the other day, we had just
been forming a new acquaintance.”

The effect was immediate. A deeper shade of _hauteur_ overspread his
features, but he said not a word, and Elizabeth, though blaming herself
for her own weakness, could not go on. At length Darcy spoke, and in a
constrained manner said, “Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners
as may ensure his _making_ friends--whether he may be equally capable of
_retaining_ them, is less certain.”

“He has been so unlucky as to lose _your_ friendship,” replied Elizabeth
with emphasis, “and in a manner which he is likely to suffer from all
his life.”

Darcy made no answer, and seemed desirous of changing the subject. At
that moment, Sir William Lucas appeared close to them, meaning to pass
through the set to the other side of the room; but on perceiving Mr.
Darcy, he stopped with a bow of superior courtesy to compliment him on
his dancing and his partner.

“I have been most highly gratified indeed, my dear sir. Such very
superior dancing is not often seen. It is evident that you belong to the
first circles. Allow me to say, however, that your fair partner does not
disgrace you, and that I must hope to have this pleasure often repeated,
especially when a certain desirable event, my dear Eliza (glancing at
her sister and Bingley) shall take place. What congratulations will then
flow in! I appeal to Mr. Darcy:--but let me not interrupt you, sir. You
will not thank me for detaining you from the bewitching converse of that
young lady, whose bright eyes are also upbraiding me.”

The latter part of this address was scarcely heard by Darcy; but Sir
William's allusion to his friend seemed to strike him forcibly, and his
eyes were directed with a very serious expression towards Bingley and
Jane, who were dancing together. Recovering himself, however, shortly,
he turned to his partner, and said, “Sir William's interruption has made
me forget what we were talking of.”

“I do not think we were speaking at all. Sir William could not have
interrupted two people in the room who had less to say for themselves.
We have tried two or three subjects already without success, and what we
are to talk of next I cannot imagine.”

“What think you of books?” said he, smiling.

“Books--oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same
feelings.”

“I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be
no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”

“No--I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of
something else.”

“The _present_ always occupies you in such scenes--does it?” said he,
with a look of doubt.

“Yes, always,” she replied, without knowing what she said, for her
thoughts had wandered far from the subject, as soon afterwards appeared
by her suddenly exclaiming, “I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy,
that you hardly ever forgave, that your resentment once created was
unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its _being
created_.”

“I am,” said he, with a firm voice.

“And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?”

“I hope not.”

“It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion,
to be secure of judging properly at first.”

“May I ask to what these questions tend?”

“Merely to the illustration of _your_ character,” said she, endeavouring
to shake off her gravity. “I am trying to make it out.”

“And what is your success?”

She shook her head. “I do not get on at all. I hear such different
accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.”

“I can readily believe,” answered he gravely, “that reports may vary
greatly with respect to me; and I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were
not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to
fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either.”

“But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have another
opportunity.”

“I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours,” he coldly replied.
She said no more, and they went down the other dance and parted in
silence; and on each side dissatisfied, though not to an equal degree,
for in Darcy's breast there was a tolerably powerful feeling towards
her, which soon procured her pardon, and directed all his anger against
another.

They had not long separated, when Miss Bingley came towards her, and
with an expression of civil disdain accosted her:

“So, Miss Eliza, I hear you are quite delighted with George Wickham!
Your sister has been talking to me about him, and asking me a thousand
questions; and I find that the young man quite forgot to tell you, among
his other communication, that he was the son of old Wickham, the late
Mr. Darcy's steward. Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to
give implicit confidence to all his assertions; for as to Mr. Darcy's
using him ill, it is perfectly false; for, on the contrary, he has
always been remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has treated
Mr. Darcy in a most infamous manner. I do not know the particulars, but
I know very well that Mr. Darcy is not in the least to blame, that he
cannot bear to hear George Wickham mentioned, and that though my brother
thought that he could not well avoid including him in his invitation to
the officers, he was excessively glad to find that he had taken himself
out of the way. His coming into the country at all is a most insolent
thing, indeed, and I wonder how he could presume to do it. I pity you,
Miss Eliza, for this discovery of your favourite's guilt; but really,
considering his descent, one could not expect much better.”

“His guilt and his descent appear by your account to be the same,” said
Elizabeth angrily; “for I have heard you accuse him of nothing worse
than of being the son of Mr. Darcy's steward, and of _that_, I can
assure you, he informed me himself.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied Miss Bingley, turning away with a sneer.
“Excuse my interference--it was kindly meant.”

“Insolent girl!” said Elizabeth to herself. “You are much mistaken
if you expect to influence me by such a paltry attack as this. I see
nothing in it but your own wilful ignorance and the malice of Mr.
Darcy.” She then sought her eldest sister, who had undertaken to make
inquiries on the same subject of Bingley. Jane met her with a smile of
such sweet complacency, a glow of such happy expression, as sufficiently
marked how well she was satisfied with the occurrences of the evening.
Elizabeth instantly read her feelings, and at that moment solicitude for
Wickham, resentment against his enemies, and everything else, gave way
before the hope of Jane's being in the fairest way for happiness.

“I want to know,” said she, with a countenance no less smiling than her
sister's, “what you have learnt about Mr. Wickham. But perhaps you have
been too pleasantly engaged to think of any third person; in which case
you may be sure of my pardon.”

“No,” replied Jane, “I have not forgotten him; but I have nothing
satisfactory to tell you. Mr. Bingley does not know the whole of
his history, and is quite ignorant of the circumstances which have
principally offended Mr. Darcy; but he will vouch for the good conduct,
the probity, and honour of his friend, and is perfectly convinced that
Mr. Wickham has deserved much less attention from Mr. Darcy than he has
received; and I am sorry to say by his account as well as his sister's,
Mr. Wickham is by no means a respectable young man. I am afraid he has
been very imprudent, and has deserved to lose Mr. Darcy's regard.”

“Mr. Bingley does not know Mr. Wickham himself?”

“No; he never saw him till the other morning at Meryton.”

“This account then is what he has received from Mr. Darcy. I am
satisfied. But what does he say of the living?”

“He does not exactly recollect the circumstances, though he has heard
them from Mr. Darcy more than once, but he believes that it was left to
him _conditionally_ only.”

“I have not a doubt of Mr. Bingley's sincerity,” said Elizabeth warmly;
“but you must excuse my not being convinced by assurances only. Mr.
Bingley's defense of his friend was a very able one, I dare say; but
since he is unacquainted with several parts of the story, and has learnt
the rest from that friend himself, I shall venture to still think of
both gentlemen as I did before.”

She then changed the discourse to one more gratifying to each, and on
which there could be no difference of sentiment. Elizabeth listened with
delight to the happy, though modest hopes which Jane entertained of Mr.
Bingley's regard, and said all in her power to heighten her confidence
in it. On their being joined by Mr. Bingley himself, Elizabeth withdrew
to Miss Lucas; to whose inquiry after the pleasantness of her last
partner she had scarcely replied, before Mr. Collins came up to them,
and told her with great exultation that he had just been so fortunate as
to make a most important discovery.

“I have found out,” said he, “by a singular accident, that there is now
in the room a near relation of my patroness. I happened to overhear the
gentleman himself mentioning to the young lady who does the honours of
the house the names of his cousin Miss de Bourgh, and of her mother Lady
Catherine. How wonderfully these sort of things occur! Who would have
thought of my meeting with, perhaps, a nephew of Lady Catherine de
Bourgh in this assembly! I am most thankful that the discovery is made
in time for me to pay my respects to him, which I am now going to
do, and trust he will excuse my not having done it before. My total
ignorance of the connection must plead my apology.”

“You are not going to introduce yourself to Mr. Darcy!”

“Indeed I am. I shall entreat his pardon for not having done it earlier.
I believe him to be Lady Catherine's _nephew_. It will be in my power to
assure him that her ladyship was quite well yesterday se'nnight.”

Elizabeth tried hard to dissuade him from such a scheme, assuring him
that Mr. Darcy would consider his addressing him without introduction
as an impertinent freedom, rather than a compliment to his aunt; that
it was not in the least necessary there should be any notice on either
side; and that if it were, it must belong to Mr. Darcy, the superior in
consequence, to begin the acquaintance. Mr. Collins listened to her
with the determined air of following his own inclination, and, when she
ceased speaking, replied thus:

“My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world in
your excellent judgement in all matters within the scope of your
understanding; but permit me to say, that there must be a wide
difference between the established forms of ceremony amongst the laity,
and those which regulate the clergy; for, give me leave to observe that
I consider the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with
the highest rank in the kingdom--provided that a proper humility of
behaviour is at the same time maintained. You must therefore allow me to
follow the dictates of my conscience on this occasion, which leads me to
perform what I look on as a point of duty. Pardon me for neglecting to
profit by your advice, which on every other subject shall be my constant
guide, though in the case before us I consider myself more fitted by
education and habitual study to decide on what is right than a young
lady like yourself.” And with a low bow he left her to attack Mr.
Darcy, whose reception of his advances she eagerly watched, and whose
astonishment at being so addressed was very evident. Her cousin prefaced
his speech with a solemn bow and though she could not hear a word of
it, she felt as if hearing it all, and saw in the motion of his lips the
words “apology,” “Hunsford,” and “Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” It vexed
her to see him expose himself to such a man. Mr. Darcy was eyeing him
with unrestrained wonder, and when at last Mr. Collins allowed him time
to speak, replied with an air of distant civility. Mr. Collins, however,
was not discouraged from speaking again, and Mr. Darcy's contempt seemed
abundantly increasing with the length of his second speech, and at the
end of it he only made him a slight bow, and moved another way. Mr.
Collins then returned to Elizabeth.

“I have no reason, I assure you,” said he, “to be dissatisfied with my
reception. Mr. Darcy seemed much pleased with the attention. He answered
me with the utmost civility, and even paid me the compliment of saying
that he was so well convinced of Lady Catherine's discernment as to be
certain she could never bestow a favour unworthily. It was really a very
handsome thought. Upon the whole, I am much pleased with him.”

As Elizabeth had no longer any interest of her own to pursue, she turned
her attention almost entirely on her sister and Mr. Bingley; and the
train of agreeable reflections which her observations gave birth to,
made her perhaps almost as happy as Jane. She saw her in idea settled in
that very house, in all the felicity which a marriage of true affection
could bestow; and she felt capable, under such circumstances, of
endeavouring even to like Bingley's two sisters. Her mother's thoughts
she plainly saw were bent the same way, and she determined not to
venture near her, lest she might hear too much. When they sat down to
supper, therefore, she considered it a most unlucky perverseness which
placed them within one of each other; and deeply was she vexed to find
that her mother was talking to that one person (Lady Lucas) freely,
openly, and of nothing else but her expectation that Jane would soon
be married to Mr. Bingley. It was an animating subject, and Mrs. Bennet
seemed incapable of fatigue while enumerating the advantages of the
match. His being such a charming young man, and so rich, and living but
three miles from them, were the first points of self-gratulation; and
then it was such a comfort to think how fond the two sisters were of
Jane, and to be certain that they must desire the connection as much as
she could do. It was, moreover, such a promising thing for her younger
daughters, as Jane's marrying so greatly must throw them in the way of
other rich men; and lastly, it was so pleasant at her time of life to be
able to consign her single daughters to the care of their sister, that
she might not be obliged to go into company more than she liked. It was
necessary to make this circumstance a matter of pleasure, because on
such occasions it is the etiquette; but no one was less likely than Mrs.
Bennet to find comfort in staying home at any period of her life. She
concluded with many good wishes that Lady Lucas might soon be equally
fortunate, though evidently and triumphantly believing there was no
chance of it.

In vain did Elizabeth endeavour to check the rapidity of her mother's
words, or persuade her to describe her felicity in a less audible
whisper; for, to her inexpressible vexation, she could perceive that the
chief of it was overheard by Mr. Darcy, who sat opposite to them. Her
mother only scolded her for being nonsensical.

“What is Mr. Darcy to me, pray, that I should be afraid of him? I am
sure we owe him no such particular civility as to be obliged to say
nothing _he_ may not like to hear.”

“For heaven's sake, madam, speak lower. What advantage can it be for you
to offend Mr. Darcy? You will never recommend yourself to his friend by
so doing!”

Nothing that she could say, however, had any influence. Her mother would
talk of her views in the same intelligible tone. Elizabeth blushed and
blushed again with shame and vexation. She could not help frequently
glancing her eye at Mr. Darcy, though every glance convinced her of what
she dreaded; for though he was not always looking at her mother, she was
convinced that his attention was invariably fixed by her. The expression
of his face changed gradually from indignant contempt to a composed and
steady gravity.

At length, however, Mrs. Bennet had no more to say; and Lady Lucas, who
had been long yawning at the repetition of delights which she saw no
likelihood of sharing, was left to the comforts of cold ham and
chicken. Elizabeth now began to revive. But not long was the interval of
tranquillity; for, when supper was over, singing was talked of, and
she had the mortification of seeing Mary, after very little entreaty,
preparing to oblige the company. By many significant looks and silent
entreaties, did she endeavour to prevent such a proof of complaisance,
but in vain; Mary would not understand them; such an opportunity of
exhibiting was delightful to her, and she began her song. Elizabeth's
eyes were fixed on her with most painful sensations, and she watched her
progress through the several stanzas with an impatience which was very
ill rewarded at their close; for Mary, on receiving, amongst the thanks
of the table, the hint of a hope that she might be prevailed on to
favour them again, after the pause of half a minute began another.
Mary's powers were by no means fitted for such a display; her voice was
weak, and her manner affected. Elizabeth was in agonies. She looked at
Jane, to see how she bore it; but Jane was very composedly talking to
Bingley. She looked at his two sisters, and saw them making signs
of derision at each other, and at Darcy, who continued, however,
imperturbably grave. She looked at her father to entreat his
interference, lest Mary should be singing all night. He took the hint,
and when Mary had finished her second song, said aloud, “That will do
extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other
young ladies have time to exhibit.”

Mary, though pretending not to hear, was somewhat disconcerted; and
Elizabeth, sorry for her, and sorry for her father's speech, was afraid
her anxiety had done no good. Others of the party were now applied to.

“If I,” said Mr. Collins, “were so fortunate as to be able to sing, I
should have great pleasure, I am sure, in obliging the company with an
air; for I consider music as a very innocent diversion, and perfectly
compatible with the profession of a clergyman. I do not mean, however,
to assert that we can be justified in devoting too much of our time
to music, for there are certainly other things to be attended to. The
rector of a parish has much to do. In the first place, he must make
such an agreement for tithes as may be beneficial to himself and not
offensive to his patron. He must write his own sermons; and the time
that remains will not be too much for his parish duties, and the care
and improvement of his dwelling, which he cannot be excused from making
as comfortable as possible. And I do not think it of light importance
that he should have attentive and conciliatory manners towards everybody,
especially towards those to whom he owes his preferment. I cannot acquit
him of that duty; nor could I think well of the man who should omit an
occasion of testifying his respect towards anybody connected with the
family.” And with a bow to Mr. Darcy, he concluded his speech, which had
been spoken so loud as to be heard by half the room. Many stared--many
smiled; but no one looked more amused than Mr. Bennet himself, while his
wife seriously commended Mr. Collins for having spoken so sensibly,
and observed in a half-whisper to Lady Lucas, that he was a remarkably
clever, good kind of young man.

To Elizabeth it appeared that, had her family made an agreement to
expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would
have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or
finer success; and happy did she think it for Bingley and her sister
that some of the exhibition had escaped his notice, and that his
feelings were not of a sort to be much distressed by the folly which he
must have witnessed. That his two sisters and Mr. Darcy, however, should
have such an opportunity of ridiculing her relations, was bad enough,
and she could not determine whether the silent contempt of the
gentleman, or the insolent smiles of the ladies, were more intolerable.

The rest of the evening brought her little amusement. She was teased by
Mr. Collins, who continued most perseveringly by her side, and though
he could not prevail on her to dance with him again, put it out of her
power to dance with others. In vain did she entreat him to stand up with
somebody else, and offer to introduce him to any young lady in the room.
He assured her, that as to dancing, he was perfectly indifferent to it;
that his chief object was by delicate attentions to recommend himself to
her and that he should therefore make a point of remaining close to her
the whole evening. There was no arguing upon such a project. She owed
her greatest relief to her friend Miss Lucas, who often joined them, and
good-naturedly engaged Mr. Collins's conversation to herself.

She was at least free from the offense of Mr. Darcy's further notice;
though often standing within a very short distance of her, quite
disengaged, he never came near enough to speak. She felt it to be the
probable consequence of her allusions to Mr. Wickham, and rejoiced in
it.

The Longbourn party were the last of all the company to depart, and, by
a manoeuvre of Mrs. Bennet, had to wait for their carriage a quarter of
an hour after everybody else was gone, which gave them time to see how
heartily they were wished away by some of the family. Mrs. Hurst and her
sister scarcely opened their mouths, except to complain of fatigue, and
were evidently impatient to have the house to themselves. They repulsed
every attempt of Mrs. Bennet at conversation, and by so doing threw a
languor over the whole party, which was very little relieved by the
long speeches of Mr. Collins, who was complimenting Mr. Bingley and his
sisters on the elegance of their entertainment, and the hospitality and
politeness which had marked their behaviour to their guests. Darcy said
nothing at all. Mr. Bennet, in equal silence, was enjoying the scene.
Mr. Bingley and Jane were standing together, a little detached from the
rest, and talked only to each other. Elizabeth preserved as steady a
silence as either Mrs. Hurst or Miss Bingley; and even Lydia was too
much fatigued to utter more than the occasional exclamation of “Lord,
how tired I am!” accompanied by a violent yawn.

When at length they arose to take leave, Mrs. Bennet was most pressingly
civil in her hope of seeing the whole family soon at Longbourn, and
addressed herself especially to Mr. Bingley, to assure him how happy he
would make them by eating a family dinner with them at any time, without
the ceremony of a formal invitation. Bingley was all grateful pleasure,
and he readily engaged for taking the earliest opportunity of waiting on
her, after his return from London, whither he was obliged to go the next
day for a short time.

Mrs. Bennet was perfectly satisfied, and quitted the house under the
delightful persuasion that, allowing for the necessary preparations of
settlements, new carriages, and wedding clothes, she should undoubtedly
see her daughter settled at Netherfield in the course of three or four
months. Of having another daughter married to Mr. Collins, she thought
with equal certainty, and with considerable, though not equal, pleasure.
Elizabeth was the least dear to her of all her children; and though the
man and the match were quite good enough for _her_, the worth of each
was eclipsed by Mr. Bingley and Netherfield.



Chapter 19


The next day opened a new scene at Longbourn. Mr. Collins made his
declaration in form. Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as
his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having
no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at
the moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the
observances, which he supposed a regular part of the business. On
finding Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth, and one of the younger girls together,
soon after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words:

“May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth,
when I solicit for the honour of a private audience with her in the
course of this morning?”

Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise, Mrs.
Bennet answered instantly, “Oh dear!--yes--certainly. I am sure Lizzy
will be very happy--I am sure she can have no objection. Come, Kitty, I
want you up stairs.” And, gathering her work together, she was hastening
away, when Elizabeth called out:

“Dear madam, do not go. I beg you will not go. Mr. Collins must excuse
me. He can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear. I am
going away myself.”

“No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. I desire you to stay where you are.” And upon
Elizabeth's seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed looks, about to
escape, she added: “Lizzy, I _insist_ upon your staying and hearing Mr.
Collins.”

Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction--and a moment's
consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it
over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again and tried to
conceal, by incessant employment the feelings which were divided between
distress and diversion. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as soon as
they were gone, Mr. Collins began.

“Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from
doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections. You
would have been less amiable in my eyes had there _not_ been this little
unwillingness; but allow me to assure you, that I have your respected
mother's permission for this address. You can hardly doubt the
purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to
dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken. Almost as
soon as I entered the house, I singled you out as the companion of
my future life. But before I am run away with by my feelings on this
subject, perhaps it would be advisable for me to state my reasons for
marrying--and, moreover, for coming into Hertfordshire with the design
of selecting a wife, as I certainly did.”

The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away
with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing, that she could
not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him further,
and he continued:

“My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for
every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example
of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced that it will
add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly--which perhaps I ought
to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and
recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling
patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked
too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I
left Hunsford--between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was
arranging Miss de Bourgh's footstool, that she said, 'Mr. Collins, you
must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose
a gentlewoman for _my_ sake; and for your _own_, let her be an active,
useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small
income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as
you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me, by the
way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice
and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the
advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond
anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be
acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and
respect which her rank will inevitably excite. Thus much for my general
intention in favour of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views
were directed towards Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I
can assure you there are many amiable young women. But the fact is, that
being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured
father (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy
myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters, that
the loss to them might be as little as possible, when the melancholy
event takes place--which, however, as I have already said, may not
be for several years. This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and
I flatter myself it will not sink me in your esteem. And now nothing
remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the
violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and
shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well
aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds
in the four per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother's
decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head,
therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that
no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married.”

It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.

“You are too hasty, sir,” she cried. “You forget that I have made no
answer. Let me do it without further loss of time. Accept my thanks for
the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of
your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than to
decline them.”

“I am not now to learn,” replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the
hand, “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the
man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their
favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a
third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just
said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.”

“Upon my word, sir,” cried Elizabeth, “your hope is a rather
extraordinary one after my declaration. I do assure you that I am not
one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so
daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second
time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make _me_
happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who
could make you so. Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I
am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the
situation.”

“Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so,” said Mr. Collins
very gravely--“but I cannot imagine that her ladyship would at all
disapprove of you. And you may be certain when I have the honour of
seeing her again, I shall speak in the very highest terms of your
modesty, economy, and other amiable qualification.”

“Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary. You
must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the compliment
of believing what I say. I wish you very happy and very rich, and by
refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise.
In making me the offer, you must have satisfied the delicacy of your
feelings with regard to my family, and may take possession of Longbourn
estate whenever it falls, without any self-reproach. This matter may
be considered, therefore, as finally settled.” And rising as she
thus spoke, she would have quitted the room, had Mr. Collins not thus
addressed her:

“When I do myself the honour of speaking to you next on the subject, I
shall hope to receive a more favourable answer than you have now given
me; though I am far from accusing you of cruelty at present, because I
know it to be the established custom of your sex to reject a man on
the first application, and perhaps you have even now said as much to
encourage my suit as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the
female character.”

“Really, Mr. Collins,” cried Elizabeth with some warmth, “you puzzle me
exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form
of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as
to convince you of its being one.”

“You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your
refusal of my addresses is merely words of course. My reasons for
believing it are briefly these: It does not appear to me that my hand is
unworthy of your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would
be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections
with the family of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are
circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take it into further
consideration, that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no
means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your
portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo
the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must
therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me,
I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by
suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”

“I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind
of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would
rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you
again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but
to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect
forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant
female, intending to plague you, but as a rational creature, speaking
the truth from her heart.”

“You are uniformly charming!” cried he, with an air of awkward
gallantry; “and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express
authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of
being acceptable.”

To such perseverance in wilful self-deception Elizabeth would make
no reply, and immediately and in silence withdrew; determined, if
he persisted in considering her repeated refusals as flattering
encouragement, to apply to her father, whose negative might be uttered
in such a manner as to be decisive, and whose behaviour at least could
not be mistaken for the affectation and coquetry of an elegant female.



Chapter 20


Mr. Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of his
successful love; for Mrs. Bennet, having dawdled about in the vestibule
to watch for the end of the conference, no sooner saw Elizabeth open
the door and with quick step pass her towards the staircase, than she
entered the breakfast-room, and congratulated both him and herself in
warm terms on the happy prospect of their nearer connection. Mr. Collins
received and returned these felicitations with equal pleasure, and then
proceeded to relate the particulars of their interview, with the result
of which he trusted he had every reason to be satisfied, since the
refusal which his cousin had steadfastly given him would naturally flow
from her bashful modesty and the genuine delicacy of her character.

This information, however, startled Mrs. Bennet; she would have been
glad to be equally satisfied that her daughter had meant to encourage
him by protesting against his proposals, but she dared not believe it,
and could not help saying so.

“But, depend upon it, Mr. Collins,” she added, “that Lizzy shall be
brought to reason. I will speak to her about it directly. She is a very
headstrong, foolish girl, and does not know her own interest but I will
_make_ her know it.”

“Pardon me for interrupting you, madam,” cried Mr. Collins; “but if
she is really headstrong and foolish, I know not whether she would
altogether be a very desirable wife to a man in my situation, who
naturally looks for happiness in the marriage state. If therefore she
actually persists in rejecting my suit, perhaps it were better not
to force her into accepting me, because if liable to such defects of
temper, she could not contribute much to my felicity.”

“Sir, you quite misunderstand me,” said Mrs. Bennet, alarmed. “Lizzy is
only headstrong in such matters as these. In everything else she is as
good-natured a girl as ever lived. I will go directly to Mr. Bennet, and
we shall very soon settle it with her, I am sure.”

She would not give him time to reply, but hurrying instantly to her
husband, called out as she entered the library, “Oh! Mr. Bennet, you
are wanted immediately; we are all in an uproar. You must come and make
Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will not have him, and if you
do not make haste he will change his mind and not have _her_.”

Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them
on her face with a calm unconcern which was not in the least altered by
her communication.

“I have not the pleasure of understanding you,” said he, when she had
finished her speech. “Of what are you talking?”

“Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins,
and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.”

“And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems an hopeless business.”

“Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her
marrying him.”

“Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.”

Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the
library.

“Come here, child,” cried her father as she appeared. “I have sent for
you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made
you an offer of marriage. Is it true?” Elizabeth replied that it was.
“Very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?”

“I have, sir.”

“Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your
accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?”

“Yes, or I will never see her again.”

“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must
be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you
again if you do _not_ marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again
if you _do_.”

Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning,
but Mrs. Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the
affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.

“What do you mean, Mr. Bennet, in talking this way? You promised me to
_insist_ upon her marrying him.”

“My dear,” replied her husband, “I have two small favours to request.
First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the
present occasion; and secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the
library to myself as soon as may be.”

Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband, did
Mrs. Bennet give up the point. She talked to Elizabeth again and again;
coaxed and threatened her by turns. She endeavoured to secure Jane
in her interest; but Jane, with all possible mildness, declined
interfering; and Elizabeth, sometimes with real earnestness, and
sometimes with playful gaiety, replied to her attacks. Though her manner
varied, however, her determination never did.

Mr. Collins, meanwhile, was meditating in solitude on what had passed.
He thought too well of himself to comprehend on what motives his cousin
could refuse him; and though his pride was hurt, he suffered in no other
way. His regard for her was quite imaginary; and the possibility of her
deserving her mother's reproach prevented his feeling any regret.

While the family were in this confusion, Charlotte Lucas came to spend
the day with them. She was met in the vestibule by Lydia, who, flying to
her, cried in a half whisper, “I am glad you are come, for there is such
fun here! What do you think has happened this morning? Mr. Collins has
made an offer to Lizzy, and she will not have him.”

Charlotte hardly had time to answer, before they were joined by Kitty,
who came to tell the same news; and no sooner had they entered the
breakfast-room, where Mrs. Bennet was alone, than she likewise began on
the subject, calling on Miss Lucas for her compassion, and entreating
her to persuade her friend Lizzy to comply with the wishes of all her
family. “Pray do, my dear Miss Lucas,” she added in a melancholy tone,
“for nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me. I am cruelly used,
nobody feels for my poor nerves.”

Charlotte's reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and Elizabeth.

“Aye, there she comes,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “looking as unconcerned
as may be, and caring no more for us than if we were at York, provided
she can have her own way. But I tell you, Miss Lizzy--if you take it
into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way,
you will never get a husband at all--and I am sure I do not know who is
to maintain you when your father is dead. I shall not be able to keep
you--and so I warn you. I have done with you from this very day. I told
you in the library, you know, that I should never speak to you again,
and you will find me as good as my word. I have no pleasure in talking
to undutiful children. Not that I have much pleasure, indeed, in talking
to anybody. People who suffer as I do from nervous complaints can have
no great inclination for talking. Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it
is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.”

Her daughters listened in silence to this effusion, sensible that
any attempt to reason with her or soothe her would only increase the
irritation. She talked on, therefore, without interruption from any of
them, till they were joined by Mr. Collins, who entered the room with
an air more stately than usual, and on perceiving whom, she said to
the girls, “Now, I do insist upon it, that you, all of you, hold
your tongues, and let me and Mr. Collins have a little conversation
together.”

Elizabeth passed quietly out of the room, Jane and Kitty followed, but
Lydia stood her ground, determined to hear all she could; and Charlotte,
detained first by the civility of Mr. Collins, whose inquiries after
herself and all her family were very minute, and then by a little
curiosity, satisfied herself with walking to the window and pretending
not to hear. In a doleful voice Mrs. Bennet began the projected
conversation: “Oh! Mr. Collins!”

“My dear madam,” replied he, “let us be for ever silent on this point.
Far be it from me,” he presently continued, in a voice that marked his
displeasure, “to resent the behaviour of your daughter. Resignation
to inevitable evils is the duty of us all; the peculiar duty of a
young man who has been so fortunate as I have been in early preferment;
and I trust I am resigned. Perhaps not the less so from feeling a doubt
of my positive happiness had my fair cousin honoured me with her hand;
for I have often observed that resignation is never so perfect as
when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our
estimation. You will not, I hope, consider me as showing any disrespect
to your family, my dear madam, by thus withdrawing my pretensions to
your daughter's favour, without having paid yourself and Mr. Bennet the
compliment of requesting you to interpose your authority in my
behalf. My conduct may, I fear, be objectionable in having accepted my
dismission from your daughter's lips instead of your own. But we are all
liable to error. I have certainly meant well through the whole affair.
My object has been to secure an amiable companion for myself, with due
consideration for the advantage of all your family, and if my _manner_
has been at all reprehensible, I here beg leave to apologise.”



Chapter 21


The discussion of Mr. Collins's offer was now nearly at an end, and
Elizabeth had only to suffer from the uncomfortable feelings necessarily
attending it, and occasionally from some peevish allusions of her
mother. As for the gentleman himself, _his_ feelings were chiefly
expressed, not by embarrassment or dejection, or by trying to avoid her,
but by stiffness of manner and resentful silence. He scarcely ever spoke
to her, and the assiduous attentions which he had been so sensible of
himself were transferred for the rest of the day to Miss Lucas, whose
civility in listening to him was a seasonable relief to them all, and
especially to her friend.

The morrow produced no abatement of Mrs. Bennet's ill-humour or ill
health. Mr. Collins was also in the same state of angry pride. Elizabeth
had hoped that his resentment might shorten his visit, but his plan did
not appear in the least affected by it. He was always to have gone on
Saturday, and to Saturday he meant to stay.

After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton to inquire if Mr. Wickham
were returned, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball.
He joined them on their entering the town, and attended them to their
aunt's where his regret and vexation, and the concern of everybody, was
well talked over. To Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged
that the necessity of his absence _had_ been self-imposed.

“I found,” said he, “as the time drew near that I had better not meet
Mr. Darcy; that to be in the same room, the same party with him for so
many hours together, might be more than I could bear, and that scenes
might arise unpleasant to more than myself.”

She highly approved his forbearance, and they had leisure for a full
discussion of it, and for all the commendation which they civilly
bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer walked back with
them to Longbourn, and during the walk he particularly attended to
her. His accompanying them was a double advantage; she felt all the
compliment it offered to herself, and it was most acceptable as an
occasion of introducing him to her father and mother.

Soon after their return, a letter was delivered to Miss Bennet; it came
from Netherfield. The envelope contained a sheet of elegant, little,
hot-pressed paper, well covered with a lady's fair, flowing hand; and
Elizabeth saw her sister's countenance change as she read it, and saw
her dwelling intently on some particular passages. Jane recollected
herself soon, and putting the letter away, tried to join with her usual
cheerfulness in the general conversation; but Elizabeth felt an anxiety
on the subject which drew off her attention even from Wickham; and no
sooner had he and his companion taken leave, than a glance from Jane
invited her to follow her up stairs. When they had gained their own room,
Jane, taking out the letter, said:

“This is from Caroline Bingley; what it contains has surprised me a good
deal. The whole party have left Netherfield by this time, and are on
their way to town--and without any intention of coming back again. You
shall hear what she says.”

She then read the first sentence aloud, which comprised the information
of their having just resolved to follow their brother to town directly,
and of their meaning to dine in Grosvenor Street, where Mr. Hurst had a
house. The next was in these words: “I do not pretend to regret anything
I shall leave in Hertfordshire, except your society, my dearest friend;
but we will hope, at some future period, to enjoy many returns of that
delightful intercourse we have known, and in the meanwhile may
lessen the pain of separation by a very frequent and most unreserved
correspondence. I depend on you for that.” To these highflown
expressions Elizabeth listened with all the insensibility of distrust;
and though the suddenness of their removal surprised her, she saw
nothing in it really to lament; it was not to be supposed that their
absence from Netherfield would prevent Mr. Bingley's being there; and as
to the loss of their society, she was persuaded that Jane must cease to
regard it, in the enjoyment of his.

“It is unlucky,” said she, after a short pause, “that you should not be
able to see your friends before they leave the country. But may we not
hope that the period of future happiness to which Miss Bingley looks
forward may arrive earlier than she is aware, and that the delightful
intercourse you have known as friends will be renewed with yet greater
satisfaction as sisters? Mr. Bingley will not be detained in London by
them.”

“Caroline decidedly says that none of the party will return into
Hertfordshire this winter. I will read it to you:”

“When my brother left us yesterday, he imagined that the business which
took him to London might be concluded in three or four days; but as we
are certain it cannot be so, and at the same time convinced that when
Charles gets to town he will be in no hurry to leave it again, we have
determined on following him thither, that he may not be obliged to spend
his vacant hours in a comfortless hotel. Many of my acquaintances are
already there for the winter; I wish that I could hear that you, my
dearest friend, had any intention of making one of the crowd--but of
that I despair. I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may
abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings, and that your
beaux will be so numerous as to prevent your feeling the loss of the
three of whom we shall deprive you.”

“It is evident by this,” added Jane, “that he comes back no more this
winter.”

“It is only evident that Miss Bingley does not mean that he _should_.”

“Why will you think so? It must be his own doing. He is his own
master. But you do not know _all_. I _will_ read you the passage which
particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves from _you_.”

“Mr. Darcy is impatient to see his sister; and, to confess the truth,
_we_ are scarcely less eager to meet her again. I really do not think
Georgiana Darcy has her equal for beauty, elegance, and accomplishments;
and the affection she inspires in Louisa and myself is heightened into
something still more interesting, from the hope we dare entertain of
her being hereafter our sister. I do not know whether I ever before
mentioned to you my feelings on this subject; but I will not leave the
country without confiding them, and I trust you will not esteem them
unreasonable. My brother admires her greatly already; he will have
frequent opportunity now of seeing her on the most intimate footing;
her relations all wish the connection as much as his own; and a sister's
partiality is not misleading me, I think, when I call Charles most
capable of engaging any woman's heart. With all these circumstances to
favour an attachment, and nothing to prevent it, am I wrong, my dearest
Jane, in indulging the hope of an event which will secure the happiness
of so many?”

“What do you think of _this_ sentence, my dear Lizzy?” said Jane as she
finished it. “Is it not clear enough? Does it not expressly declare that
Caroline neither expects nor wishes me to be her sister; that she is
perfectly convinced of her brother's indifference; and that if she
suspects the nature of my feelings for him, she means (most kindly!) to
put me on my guard? Can there be any other opinion on the subject?”

“Yes, there can; for mine is totally different. Will you hear it?”

“Most willingly.”

“You shall have it in a few words. Miss Bingley sees that her brother is
in love with you, and wants him to marry Miss Darcy. She follows him
to town in hope of keeping him there, and tries to persuade you that he
does not care about you.”

Jane shook her head.

“Indeed, Jane, you ought to believe me. No one who has ever seen you
together can doubt his affection. Miss Bingley, I am sure, cannot. She
is not such a simpleton. Could she have seen half as much love in Mr.
Darcy for herself, she would have ordered her wedding clothes. But the
case is this: We are not rich enough or grand enough for them; and she
is the more anxious to get Miss Darcy for her brother, from the notion
that when there has been _one_ intermarriage, she may have less trouble
in achieving a second; in which there is certainly some ingenuity, and
I dare say it would succeed, if Miss de Bourgh were out of the way. But,
my dearest Jane, you cannot seriously imagine that because Miss Bingley
tells you her brother greatly admires Miss Darcy, he is in the smallest
degree less sensible of _your_ merit than when he took leave of you on
Tuesday, or that it will be in her power to persuade him that, instead
of being in love with you, he is very much in love with her friend.”

“If we thought alike of Miss Bingley,” replied Jane, “your
representation of all this might make me quite easy. But I know the
foundation is unjust. Caroline is incapable of wilfully deceiving
anyone; and all that I can hope in this case is that she is deceiving
herself.”

“That is right. You could not have started a more happy idea, since you
will not take comfort in mine. Believe her to be deceived, by all means.
You have now done your duty by her, and must fret no longer.”

“But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in
accepting a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to marry
elsewhere?”

“You must decide for yourself,” said Elizabeth; “and if, upon mature
deliberation, you find that the misery of disobliging his two sisters is
more than equivalent to the happiness of being his wife, I advise you by
all means to refuse him.”

“How can you talk so?” said Jane, faintly smiling. “You must know that
though I should be exceedingly grieved at their disapprobation, I could
not hesitate.”

“I did not think you would; and that being the case, I cannot consider
your situation with much compassion.”

“But if he returns no more this winter, my choice will never be
required. A thousand things may arise in six months!”

The idea of his returning no more Elizabeth treated with the utmost
contempt. It appeared to her merely the suggestion of Caroline's
interested wishes, and she could not for a moment suppose that those
wishes, however openly or artfully spoken, could influence a young man
so totally independent of everyone.

She represented to her sister as forcibly as possible what she felt
on the subject, and had soon the pleasure of seeing its happy effect.
Jane's temper was not desponding, and she was gradually led to hope,
though the diffidence of affection sometimes overcame the hope, that
Bingley would return to Netherfield and answer every wish of her heart.

They agreed that Mrs. Bennet should only hear of the departure of the
family, without being alarmed on the score of the gentleman's conduct;
but even this partial communication gave her a great deal of concern,
and she bewailed it as exceedingly unlucky that the ladies should happen
to go away just as they were all getting so intimate together. After
lamenting it, however, at some length, she had the consolation that Mr.
Bingley would be soon down again and soon dining at Longbourn, and the
conclusion of all was the comfortable declaration, that though he had
been invited only to a family dinner, she would take care to have two
full courses.



Chapter 22


The Bennets were engaged to dine with the Lucases and again during the
chief of the day was Miss Lucas so kind as to listen to Mr. Collins.
Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her. “It keeps him in good
humour,” said she, “and I am more obliged to you than I can express.”
 Charlotte assured her friend of her satisfaction in being useful, and
that it amply repaid her for the little sacrifice of her time. This was
very amiable, but Charlotte's kindness extended farther than Elizabeth
had any conception of; its object was nothing else than to secure her
from any return of Mr. Collins's addresses, by engaging them towards
herself. Such was Miss Lucas's scheme; and appearances were so
favourable, that when they parted at night, she would have felt almost
secure of success if he had not been to leave Hertfordshire so very
soon. But here she did injustice to the fire and independence of his
character, for it led him to escape out of Longbourn House the next
morning with admirable slyness, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw
himself at her feet. He was anxious to avoid the notice of his cousins,
from a conviction that if they saw him depart, they could not fail to
conjecture his design, and he was not willing to have the attempt known
till its success might be known likewise; for though feeling almost
secure, and with reason, for Charlotte had been tolerably encouraging,
he was comparatively diffident since the adventure of Wednesday.
His reception, however, was of the most flattering kind. Miss Lucas
perceived him from an upper window as he walked towards the house, and
instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had
she dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.

In as short a time as Mr. Collins's long speeches would allow,
everything was settled between them to the satisfaction of both; and as
they entered the house he earnestly entreated her to name the day that
was to make him the happiest of men; and though such a solicitation must
be waived for the present, the lady felt no inclination to trifle with
his happiness. The stupidity with which he was favoured by nature must
guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its
continuance; and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure
and disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that
establishment were gained.

Sir William and Lady Lucas were speedily applied to for their consent;
and it was bestowed with a most joyful alacrity. Mr. Collins's present
circumstances made it a most eligible match for their daughter, to whom
they could give little fortune; and his prospects of future wealth were
exceedingly fair. Lady Lucas began directly to calculate, with more
interest than the matter had ever excited before, how many years longer
Mr. Bennet was likely to live; and Sir William gave it as his decided
opinion, that whenever Mr. Collins should be in possession of the
Longbourn estate, it would be highly expedient that both he and his wife
should make their appearance at St. James's. The whole family, in short,
were properly overjoyed on the occasion. The younger girls formed hopes
of _coming out_ a year or two sooner than they might otherwise have
done; and the boys were relieved from their apprehension of Charlotte's
dying an old maid. Charlotte herself was tolerably composed. She had
gained her point, and had time to consider of it. Her reflections were
in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible
nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must
be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly
either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was
the only provision for well-educated young women of small fortune,
and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest
preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at
the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all
the good luck of it. The least agreeable circumstance in the business
was the surprise it must occasion to Elizabeth Bennet, whose friendship
she valued beyond that of any other person. Elizabeth would wonder,
and probably would blame her; and though her resolution was not to be
shaken, her feelings must be hurt by such a disapprobation. She resolved
to give her the information herself, and therefore charged Mr. Collins,
when he returned to Longbourn to dinner, to drop no hint of what had
passed before any of the family. A promise of secrecy was of course very
dutifully given, but it could not be kept without difficulty; for the
curiosity excited by his long absence burst forth in such very direct
questions on his return as required some ingenuity to evade, and he was
at the same time exercising great self-denial, for he was longing to
publish his prosperous love.

As he was to begin his journey too early on the morrow to see any of the
family, the ceremony of leave-taking was performed when the ladies moved
for the night; and Mrs. Bennet, with great politeness and cordiality,
said how happy they should be to see him at Longbourn again, whenever
his engagements might allow him to visit them.

“My dear madam,” he replied, “this invitation is particularly
gratifying, because it is what I have been hoping to receive; and
you may be very certain that I shall avail myself of it as soon as
possible.”

They were all astonished; and Mr. Bennet, who could by no means wish for
so speedy a return, immediately said:

“But is there not danger of Lady Catherine's disapprobation here, my
good sir? You had better neglect your relations than run the risk of
offending your patroness.”

“My dear sir,” replied Mr. Collins, “I am particularly obliged to you
for this friendly caution, and you may depend upon my not taking so
material a step without her ladyship's concurrence.”

“You cannot be too much upon your guard. Risk anything rather than her
displeasure; and if you find it likely to be raised by your coming to us
again, which I should think exceedingly probable, stay quietly at home,
and be satisfied that _we_ shall take no offence.”

“Believe me, my dear sir, my gratitude is warmly excited by such
affectionate attention; and depend upon it, you will speedily receive
from me a letter of thanks for this, and for every other mark of your
regard during my stay in Hertfordshire. As for my fair cousins, though
my absence may not be long enough to render it necessary, I shall now
take the liberty of wishing them health and happiness, not excepting my
cousin Elizabeth.”

With proper civilities the ladies then withdrew; all of them equally
surprised that he meditated a quick return. Mrs. Bennet wished to
understand by it that he thought of paying his addresses to one of her
younger girls, and Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him.
She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others; there was
a solidity in his reflections which often struck her, and though by no
means so clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read
and improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very
agreeable companion. But on the following morning, every hope of this
kind was done away. Miss Lucas called soon after breakfast, and in a
private conference with Elizabeth related the event of the day before.

The possibility of Mr. Collins's fancying himself in love with her
friend had once occurred to Elizabeth within the last day or two; but
that Charlotte could encourage him seemed almost as far from
possibility as she could encourage him herself, and her astonishment was
consequently so great as to overcome at first the bounds of decorum, and
she could not help crying out:

“Engaged to Mr. Collins! My dear Charlotte--impossible!”

The steady countenance which Miss Lucas had commanded in telling her
story, gave way to a momentary confusion here on receiving so direct a
reproach; though, as it was no more than she expected, she soon regained
her composure, and calmly replied:

“Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it incredible
that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman's good opinion,
because he was not so happy as to succeed with you?”

But Elizabeth had now recollected herself, and making a strong effort
for it, was able to assure with tolerable firmness that the prospect of
their relationship was highly grateful to her, and that she wished her
all imaginable happiness.

“I see what you are feeling,” replied Charlotte. “You must be surprised,
very much surprised--so lately as Mr. Collins was wishing to marry
you. But when you have had time to think it over, I hope you will be
satisfied with what I have done. I am not romantic, you know; I never
was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins's
character, connection, and situation in life, I am convinced that my
chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on
entering the marriage state.”

Elizabeth quietly answered “Undoubtedly;” and after an awkward pause,
they returned to the rest of the family. Charlotte did not stay much
longer, and Elizabeth was then left to reflect on what she had heard.
It was a long time before she became at all reconciled to the idea of so
unsuitable a match. The strangeness of Mr. Collins's making two offers
of marriage within three days was nothing in comparison of his being now
accepted. She had always felt that Charlotte's opinion of matrimony was
not exactly like her own, but she had not supposed it to be possible
that, when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better
feeling to worldly advantage. Charlotte the wife of Mr. Collins was a
most humiliating picture! And to the pang of a friend disgracing herself
and sunk in her esteem, was added the distressing conviction that it
was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had
chosen.



Chapter 23


Elizabeth was sitting with her mother and sisters, reflecting on what
she had heard, and doubting whether she was authorised to mention
it, when Sir William Lucas himself appeared, sent by his daughter, to
announce her engagement to the family. With many compliments to them,
and much self-gratulation on the prospect of a connection between the
houses, he unfolded the matter--to an audience not merely wondering, but
incredulous; for Mrs. Bennet, with more perseverance than politeness,
protested he must be entirely mistaken; and Lydia, always unguarded and
often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed:

“Good Lord! Sir William, how can you tell such a story? Do not you know
that Mr. Collins wants to marry Lizzy?”

Nothing less than the complaisance of a courtier could have borne
without anger such treatment; but Sir William's good breeding carried
him through it all; and though he begged leave to be positive as to the
truth of his information, he listened to all their impertinence with the
most forbearing courtesy.

Elizabeth, feeling it incumbent on her to relieve him from so unpleasant
a situation, now put herself forward to confirm his account, by
mentioning her prior knowledge of it from Charlotte herself; and
endeavoured to put a stop to the exclamations of her mother and sisters
by the earnestness of her congratulations to Sir William, in which she
was readily joined by Jane, and by making a variety of remarks on the
happiness that might be expected from the match, the excellent character
of Mr. Collins, and the convenient distance of Hunsford from London.

Mrs. Bennet was in fact too much overpowered to say a great deal while
Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings
found a rapid vent. In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving
the whole of the matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins
had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be
happy together; and fourthly, that the match might be broken off. Two
inferences, however, were plainly deduced from the whole: one, that
Elizabeth was the real cause of the mischief; and the other that she
herself had been barbarously misused by them all; and on these two
points she principally dwelt during the rest of the day. Nothing could
console and nothing could appease her. Nor did that day wear out her
resentment. A week elapsed before she could see Elizabeth without
scolding her, a month passed away before she could speak to Sir William
or Lady Lucas without being rude, and many months were gone before she
could at all forgive their daughter.

Mr. Bennet's emotions were much more tranquil on the occasion, and such
as he did experience he pronounced to be of a most agreeable sort; for
it gratified him, he said, to discover that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had
been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and
more foolish than his daughter!

Jane confessed herself a little surprised at the match; but she said
less of her astonishment than of her earnest desire for their happiness;
nor could Elizabeth persuade her to consider it as improbable. Kitty
and Lydia were far from envying Miss Lucas, for Mr. Collins was only a
clergyman; and it affected them in no other way than as a piece of news
to spread at Meryton.

Lady Lucas could not be insensible of triumph on being able to retort
on Mrs. Bennet the comfort of having a daughter well married; and she
called at Longbourn rather oftener than usual to say how happy she was,
though Mrs. Bennet's sour looks and ill-natured remarks might have been
enough to drive happiness away.

Between Elizabeth and Charlotte there was a restraint which kept them
mutually silent on the subject; and Elizabeth felt persuaded that
no real confidence could ever subsist between them again. Her
disappointment in Charlotte made her turn with fonder regard to her
sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could
never be shaken, and for whose happiness she grew daily more anxious,
as Bingley had now been gone a week and nothing more was heard of his
return.

Jane had sent Caroline an early answer to her letter, and was counting
the days till she might reasonably hope to hear again. The promised
letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on Tuesday, addressed to
their father, and written with all the solemnity of gratitude which a
twelvemonth's abode in the family might have prompted. After discharging
his conscience on that head, he proceeded to inform them, with many
rapturous expressions, of his happiness in having obtained the affection
of their amiable neighbour, Miss Lucas, and then explained that it was
merely with the view of enjoying her society that he had been so ready
to close with their kind wish of seeing him again at Longbourn, whither
he hoped to be able to return on Monday fortnight; for Lady Catherine,
he added, so heartily approved his marriage, that she wished it to take
place as soon as possible, which he trusted would be an unanswerable
argument with his amiable Charlotte to name an early day for making him
the happiest of men.

Mr. Collins's return into Hertfordshire was no longer a matter of
pleasure to Mrs. Bennet. On the contrary, she was as much disposed to
complain of it as her husband. It was very strange that he should come
to Longbourn instead of to Lucas Lodge; it was also very inconvenient
and exceedingly troublesome. She hated having visitors in the house
while her health was so indifferent, and lovers were of all people the
most disagreeable. Such were the gentle murmurs of Mrs. Bennet, and
they gave way only to the greater distress of Mr. Bingley's continued
absence.

Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject. Day after
day passed away without bringing any other tidings of him than the
report which shortly prevailed in Meryton of his coming no more to
Netherfield the whole winter; a report which highly incensed Mrs.
Bennet, and which she never failed to contradict as a most scandalous
falsehood.

Even Elizabeth began to fear--not that Bingley was indifferent--but that
his sisters would be successful in keeping him away. Unwilling as
she was to admit an idea so destructive of Jane's happiness, and so
dishonorable to the stability of her lover, she could not prevent its
frequently occurring. The united efforts of his two unfeeling sisters
and of his overpowering friend, assisted by the attractions of Miss
Darcy and the amusements of London might be too much, she feared, for
the strength of his attachment.

As for Jane, _her_ anxiety under this suspense was, of course, more
painful than Elizabeth's, but whatever she felt she was desirous of
concealing, and between herself and Elizabeth, therefore, the subject
was never alluded to. But as no such delicacy restrained her mother,
an hour seldom passed in which she did not talk of Bingley, express her
impatience for his arrival, or even require Jane to confess that if he
did not come back she would think herself very ill used. It needed
all Jane's steady mildness to bear these attacks with tolerable
tranquillity.

Mr. Collins returned most punctually on Monday fortnight, but his
reception at Longbourn was not quite so gracious as it had been on his
first introduction. He was too happy, however, to need much attention;
and luckily for the others, the business of love-making relieved them
from a great deal of his company. The chief of every day was spent by
him at Lucas Lodge, and he sometimes returned to Longbourn only in time
to make an apology for his absence before the family went to bed.

Mrs. Bennet was really in a most pitiable state. The very mention of
anything concerning the match threw her into an agony of ill-humour,
and wherever she went she was sure of hearing it talked of. The sight
of Miss Lucas was odious to her. As her successor in that house, she
regarded her with jealous abhorrence. Whenever Charlotte came to see
them, she concluded her to be anticipating the hour of possession; and
whenever she spoke in a low voice to Mr. Collins, was convinced that
they were talking of the Longbourn estate, and resolving to turn herself
and her daughters out of the house, as soon as Mr. Bennet were dead. She
complained bitterly of all this to her husband.

“Indeed, Mr. Bennet,” said she, “it is very hard to think that Charlotte
Lucas should ever be mistress of this house, that I should be forced to
make way for _her_, and live to see her take her place in it!”

“My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for
better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.”

This was not very consoling to Mrs. Bennet, and therefore, instead of
making any answer, she went on as before.

“I cannot bear to think that they should have all this estate. If it was
not for the entail, I should not mind it.”

“What should not you mind?”

“I should not mind anything at all.”

“Let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such
insensibility.”

“I never can be thankful, Mr. Bennet, for anything about the entail. How
anyone could have the conscience to entail away an estate from one's own
daughters, I cannot understand; and all for the sake of Mr. Collins too!
Why should _he_ have it more than anybody else?”

“I leave it to yourself to determine,” said Mr. Bennet.



Chapter 24


Miss Bingley's letter arrived, and put an end to doubt. The very first
sentence conveyed the assurance of their being all settled in London for
the winter, and concluded with her brother's regret at not having had
time to pay his respects to his friends in Hertfordshire before he left
the country.

Hope was over, entirely over; and when Jane could attend to the rest
of the letter, she found little, except the professed affection of the
writer, that could give her any comfort. Miss Darcy's praise occupied
the chief of it. Her many attractions were again dwelt on, and Caroline
boasted joyfully of their increasing intimacy, and ventured to predict
the accomplishment of the wishes which had been unfolded in her former
letter. She wrote also with great pleasure of her brother's being an
inmate of Mr. Darcy's house, and mentioned with raptures some plans of
the latter with regard to new furniture.

Elizabeth, to whom Jane very soon communicated the chief of all this,
heard it in silent indignation. Her heart was divided between concern
for her sister, and resentment against all others. To Caroline's
assertion of her brother's being partial to Miss Darcy she paid no
credit. That he was really fond of Jane, she doubted no more than she
had ever done; and much as she had always been disposed to like him, she
could not think without anger, hardly without contempt, on that easiness
of temper, that want of proper resolution, which now made him the slave
of his designing friends, and led him to sacrifice of his own happiness
to the caprice of their inclination. Had his own happiness, however,
been the only sacrifice, he might have been allowed to sport with it in
whatever manner he thought best, but her sister's was involved in it, as
she thought he must be sensible himself. It was a subject, in short,
on which reflection would be long indulged, and must be unavailing. She
could think of nothing else; and yet whether Bingley's regard had really
died away, or were suppressed by his friends' interference; whether
he had been aware of Jane's attachment, or whether it had escaped his
observation; whatever were the case, though her opinion of him must be
materially affected by the difference, her sister's situation remained
the same, her peace equally wounded.

A day or two passed before Jane had courage to speak of her feelings to
Elizabeth; but at last, on Mrs. Bennet's leaving them together, after a
longer irritation than usual about Netherfield and its master, she could
not help saying:

“Oh, that my dear mother had more command over herself! She can have no
idea of the pain she gives me by her continual reflections on him. But
I will not repine. It cannot last long. He will be forgot, and we shall
all be as we were before.”

Elizabeth looked at her sister with incredulous solicitude, but said
nothing.

“You doubt me,” cried Jane, slightly colouring; “indeed, you have
no reason. He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my
acquaintance, but that is all. I have nothing either to hope or fear,
and nothing to reproach him with. Thank God! I have not _that_ pain. A
little time, therefore--I shall certainly try to get the better.”

With a stronger voice she soon added, “I have this comfort immediately,
that it has not been more than an error of fancy on my side, and that it
has done no harm to anyone but myself.”

“My dear Jane!” exclaimed Elizabeth, “you are too good. Your sweetness
and disinterestedness are really angelic; I do not know what to say
to you. I feel as if I had never done you justice, or loved you as you
deserve.”

Miss Bennet eagerly disclaimed all extraordinary merit, and threw back
the praise on her sister's warm affection.

“Nay,” said Elizabeth, “this is not fair. _You_ wish to think all the
world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of anybody. I only want
to think _you_ perfect, and you set yourself against it. Do not
be afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching on your
privilege of universal good-will. You need not. There are few people
whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see
of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms
my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the
little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or
sense. I have met with two instances lately, one I will not mention; the
other is Charlotte's marriage. It is unaccountable! In every view it is
unaccountable!”

“My dear Lizzy, do not give way to such feelings as these. They will
ruin your happiness. You do not make allowance enough for difference
of situation and temper. Consider Mr. Collins's respectability, and
Charlotte's steady, prudent character. Remember that she is one of a
large family; that as to fortune, it is a most eligible match; and be
ready to believe, for everybody's sake, that she may feel something like
regard and esteem for our cousin.”

“To oblige you, I would try to believe almost anything, but no one else
could be benefited by such a belief as this; for were I persuaded that
Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her
understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a
conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as
I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who married him
cannot have a proper way of thinking. You shall not defend her, though
it is Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual,
change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade
yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of
danger security for happiness.”

“I must think your language too strong in speaking of both,” replied
Jane; “and I hope you will be convinced of it by seeing them happy
together. But enough of this. You alluded to something else. You
mentioned _two_ instances. I cannot misunderstand you, but I entreat
you, dear Lizzy, not to pain me by thinking _that person_ to blame, and
saying your opinion of him is sunk. We must not be so ready to fancy
ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man
to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but
our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than
it does.”

“And men take care that they should.”

“If it is designedly done, they cannot be justified; but I have no idea
of there being so much design in the world as some persons imagine.”

“I am far from attributing any part of Mr. Bingley's conduct to design,”
 said Elizabeth; “but without scheming to do wrong, or to make others
unhappy, there may be error, and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness,
want of attention to other people's feelings, and want of resolution,
will do the business.”

“And do you impute it to either of those?”

“Yes; to the last. But if I go on, I shall displease you by saying what
I think of persons you esteem. Stop me whilst you can.”

“You persist, then, in supposing his sisters influence him?”

“Yes, in conjunction with his friend.”

“I cannot believe it. Why should they try to influence him? They can
only wish his happiness; and if he is attached to me, no other woman can
secure it.”

“Your first position is false. They may wish many things besides his
happiness; they may wish his increase of wealth and consequence; they
may wish him to marry a girl who has all the importance of money, great
connections, and pride.”

“Beyond a doubt, they _do_ wish him to choose Miss Darcy,” replied Jane;
“but this may be from better feelings than you are supposing. They have
known her much longer than they have known me; no wonder if they love
her better. But, whatever may be their own wishes, it is very unlikely
they should have opposed their brother's. What sister would think
herself at liberty to do it, unless there were something very
objectionable? If they believed him attached to me, they would not try
to part us; if he were so, they could not succeed. By supposing such an
affection, you make everybody acting unnaturally and wrong, and me most
unhappy. Do not distress me by the idea. I am not ashamed of having been
mistaken--or, at least, it is light, it is nothing in comparison of what
I should feel in thinking ill of him or his sisters. Let me take it in
the best light, in the light in which it may be understood.”

Elizabeth could not oppose such a wish; and from this time Mr. Bingley's
name was scarcely ever mentioned between them.

Mrs. Bennet still continued to wonder and repine at his returning no
more, and though a day seldom passed in which Elizabeth did not account
for it clearly, there was little chance of her ever considering it with
less perplexity. Her daughter endeavoured to convince her of what she
did not believe herself, that his attentions to Jane had been merely the
effect of a common and transient liking, which ceased when he saw her
no more; but though the probability of the statement was admitted at
the time, she had the same story to repeat every day. Mrs. Bennet's best
comfort was that Mr. Bingley must be down again in the summer.

Mr. Bennet treated the matter differently. “So, Lizzy,” said he one day,
“your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to
being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.
It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction
among her companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to
be long outdone by Jane. Now is your time. Here are officers enough in
Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham
be _your_ man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.”

“Thank you, sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me. We must not
all expect Jane's good fortune.”

“True,” said Mr. Bennet, “but it is a comfort to think that whatever of
that kind may befall you, you have an affectionate mother who will make
the most of it.”

Mr. Wickham's society was of material service in dispelling the gloom
which the late perverse occurrences had thrown on many of the Longbourn
family. They saw him often, and to his other recommendations was now
added that of general unreserve. The whole of what Elizabeth had already
heard, his claims on Mr. Darcy, and all that he had suffered from him,
was now openly acknowledged and publicly canvassed; and everybody was
pleased to know how much they had always disliked Mr. Darcy before they
had known anything of the matter.

Miss Bennet was the only creature who could suppose there might be
any extenuating circumstances in the case, unknown to the society
of Hertfordshire; her mild and steady candour always pleaded for
allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakes--but by everybody else
Mr. Darcy was condemned as the worst of men.



Chapter 25


After a week spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity,
Mr. Collins was called from his amiable Charlotte by the arrival of
Saturday. The pain of separation, however, might be alleviated on his
side, by preparations for the reception of his bride; as he had reason
to hope, that shortly after his return into Hertfordshire, the day would
be fixed that was to make him the happiest of men. He took leave of his
relations at Longbourn with as much solemnity as before; wished his fair
cousins health and happiness again, and promised their father another
letter of thanks.

On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of receiving
her brother and his wife, who came as usual to spend the Christmas
at Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly
superior to his sister, as well by nature as education. The Netherfield
ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived
by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so
well-bred and agreeable. Mrs. Gardiner, who was several years younger
than Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Phillips, was an amiable, intelligent, elegant
woman, and a great favourite with all her Longbourn nieces. Between the
two eldest and herself especially, there subsisted a particular regard.
They had frequently been staying with her in town.

The first part of Mrs. Gardiner's business on her arrival was to
distribute her presents and describe the newest fashions. When this was
done she had a less active part to play. It became her turn to listen.
Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and much to complain of. They
had all been very ill-used since she last saw her sister. Two of her
girls had been upon the point of marriage, and after all there was
nothing in it.

“I do not blame Jane,” she continued, “for Jane would have got Mr.
Bingley if she could. But Lizzy! Oh, sister! It is very hard to think
that she might have been Mr. Collins's wife by this time, had it not
been for her own perverseness. He made her an offer in this very room,
and she refused him. The consequence of it is, that Lady Lucas will have
a daughter married before I have, and that the Longbourn estate is just
as much entailed as ever. The Lucases are very artful people indeed,
sister. They are all for what they can get. I am sorry to say it of
them, but so it is. It makes me very nervous and poorly, to be thwarted
so in my own family, and to have neighbours who think of themselves
before anybody else. However, your coming just at this time is the
greatest of comforts, and I am very glad to hear what you tell us, of
long sleeves.”

Mrs. Gardiner, to whom the chief of this news had been given before,
in the course of Jane and Elizabeth's correspondence with her, made her
sister a slight answer, and, in compassion to her nieces, turned the
conversation.

When alone with Elizabeth afterwards, she spoke more on the subject. “It
seems likely to have been a desirable match for Jane,” said she. “I am
sorry it went off. But these things happen so often! A young man, such
as you describe Mr. Bingley, so easily falls in love with a pretty girl
for a few weeks, and when accident separates them, so easily forgets
her, that these sort of inconsistencies are very frequent.”

“An excellent consolation in its way,” said Elizabeth, “but it will not
do for _us_. We do not suffer by _accident_. It does not often
happen that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of
independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he was violently in
love with only a few days before.”

“But that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so
doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as
often applied to feelings which arise from a half-hour's acquaintance,
as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how _violent was_ Mr. Bingley's
love?”

“I never saw a more promising inclination; he was growing quite
inattentive to other people, and wholly engrossed by her. Every time
they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own ball he
offended two or three young ladies, by not asking them to dance; and I
spoke to him twice myself, without receiving an answer. Could there be
finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”

“Oh, yes!--of that kind of love which I suppose him to have felt. Poor
Jane! I am sorry for her, because, with her disposition, she may not get
over it immediately. It had better have happened to _you_, Lizzy; you
would have laughed yourself out of it sooner. But do you think she
would be prevailed upon to go back with us? Change of scene might be
of service--and perhaps a little relief from home may be as useful as
anything.”

Elizabeth was exceedingly pleased with this proposal, and felt persuaded
of her sister's ready acquiescence.

“I hope,” added Mrs. Gardiner, “that no consideration with regard to
this young man will influence her. We live in so different a part of
town, all our connections are so different, and, as you well know, we go
out so little, that it is very improbable that they should meet at all,
unless he really comes to see her.”

“And _that_ is quite impossible; for he is now in the custody of his
friend, and Mr. Darcy would no more suffer him to call on Jane in such
a part of London! My dear aunt, how could you think of it? Mr. Darcy may
perhaps have _heard_ of such a place as Gracechurch Street, but he
would hardly think a month's ablution enough to cleanse him from its
impurities, were he once to enter it; and depend upon it, Mr. Bingley
never stirs without him.”

“So much the better. I hope they will not meet at all. But does not Jane
correspond with his sister? _She_ will not be able to help calling.”

“She will drop the acquaintance entirely.”

But in spite of the certainty in which Elizabeth affected to place this
point, as well as the still more interesting one of Bingley's being
withheld from seeing Jane, she felt a solicitude on the subject which
convinced her, on examination, that she did not consider it entirely
hopeless. It was possible, and sometimes she thought it probable, that
his affection might be reanimated, and the influence of his friends
successfully combated by the more natural influence of Jane's
attractions.

Miss Bennet accepted her aunt's invitation with pleasure; and the
Bingleys were no otherwise in her thoughts at the same time, than as she
hoped by Caroline's not living in the same house with her brother,
she might occasionally spend a morning with her, without any danger of
seeing him.

The Gardiners stayed a week at Longbourn; and what with the Phillipses,
the Lucases, and the officers, there was not a day without its
engagement. Mrs. Bennet had so carefully provided for the entertainment
of her brother and sister, that they did not once sit down to a family
dinner. When the engagement was for home, some of the officers always
made part of it--of which officers Mr. Wickham was sure to be one; and
on these occasions, Mrs. Gardiner, rendered suspicious by Elizabeth's
warm commendation, narrowly observed them both. Without supposing them,
from what she saw, to be very seriously in love, their preference
of each other was plain enough to make her a little uneasy; and
she resolved to speak to Elizabeth on the subject before she left
Hertfordshire, and represent to her the imprudence of encouraging such
an attachment.

To Mrs. Gardiner, Wickham had one means of affording pleasure,
unconnected with his general powers. About ten or a dozen years ago,
before her marriage, she had spent a considerable time in that very
part of Derbyshire to which he belonged. They had, therefore, many
acquaintances in common; and though Wickham had been little there since
the death of Darcy's father, it was yet in his power to give her fresher
intelligence of her former friends than she had been in the way of
procuring.

Mrs. Gardiner had seen Pemberley, and known the late Mr. Darcy by
character perfectly well. Here consequently was an inexhaustible subject
of discourse. In comparing her recollection of Pemberley with the minute
description which Wickham could give, and in bestowing her tribute of
praise on the character of its late possessor, she was delighting both
him and herself. On being made acquainted with the present Mr. Darcy's
treatment of him, she tried to remember some of that gentleman's
reputed disposition when quite a lad which might agree with it, and
was confident at last that she recollected having heard Mr. Fitzwilliam
Darcy formerly spoken of as a very proud, ill-natured boy.



Chapter 26


Mrs. Gardiner's caution to Elizabeth was punctually and kindly given
on the first favourable opportunity of speaking to her alone; after
honestly telling her what she thought, she thus went on:

“You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because
you are warned against it; and, therefore, I am not afraid of speaking
openly. Seriously, I would have you be on your guard. Do not involve
yourself or endeavour to involve him in an affection which the want
of fortune would make so very imprudent. I have nothing to say against
_him_; he is a most interesting young man; and if he had the fortune he
ought to have, I should think you could not do better. But as it is, you
must not let your fancy run away with you. You have sense, and we all
expect you to use it. Your father would depend on _your_ resolution and
good conduct, I am sure. You must not disappoint your father.”

“My dear aunt, this is being serious indeed.”

“Yes, and I hope to engage you to be serious likewise.”

“Well, then, you need not be under any alarm. I will take care of
myself, and of Mr. Wickham too. He shall not be in love with me, if I
can prevent it.”

“Elizabeth, you are not serious now.”

“I beg your pardon, I will try again. At present I am not in love with
Mr. Wickham; no, I certainly am not. But he is, beyond all comparison,
the most agreeable man I ever saw--and if he becomes really attached to
me--I believe it will be better that he should not. I see the imprudence
of it. Oh! _that_ abominable Mr. Darcy! My father's opinion of me does
me the greatest honour, and I should be miserable to forfeit it. My
father, however, is partial to Mr. Wickham. In short, my dear aunt, I
should be very sorry to be the means of making any of you unhappy; but
since we see every day that where there is affection, young people
are seldom withheld by immediate want of fortune from entering into
engagements with each other, how can I promise to be wiser than so many
of my fellow-creatures if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that it
would be wisdom to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is not
to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his first
object. When I am in company with him, I will not be wishing. In short,
I will do my best.”

“Perhaps it will be as well if you discourage his coming here so very
often. At least, you should not _remind_ your mother of inviting him.”

“As I did the other day,” said Elizabeth with a conscious smile: “very
true, it will be wise in me to refrain from _that_. But do not imagine
that he is always here so often. It is on your account that he has been
so frequently invited this week. You know my mother's ideas as to the
necessity of constant company for her friends. But really, and upon my
honour, I will try to do what I think to be the wisest; and now I hope
you are satisfied.”

Her aunt assured her that she was, and Elizabeth having thanked her for
the kindness of her hints, they parted; a wonderful instance of advice
being given on such a point, without being resented.

Mr. Collins returned into Hertfordshire soon after it had been quitted
by the Gardiners and Jane; but as he took up his abode with the Lucases,
his arrival was no great inconvenience to Mrs. Bennet. His marriage was
now fast approaching, and she was at length so far resigned as to think
it inevitable, and even repeatedly to say, in an ill-natured tone, that
she “_wished_ they might be happy.” Thursday was to be the wedding day,
and on Wednesday Miss Lucas paid her farewell visit; and when she
rose to take leave, Elizabeth, ashamed of her mother's ungracious and
reluctant good wishes, and sincerely affected herself, accompanied her
out of the room. As they went downstairs together, Charlotte said:

“I shall depend on hearing from you very often, Eliza.”

“_That_ you certainly shall.”

“And I have another favour to ask you. Will you come and see me?”

“We shall often meet, I hope, in Hertfordshire.”

“I am not likely to leave Kent for some time. Promise me, therefore, to
come to Hunsford.”

Elizabeth could not refuse, though she foresaw little pleasure in the
visit.

“My father and Maria are coming to me in March,” added Charlotte, “and I
hope you will consent to be of the party. Indeed, Eliza, you will be as
welcome as either of them.”

The wedding took place; the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from
the church door, and everybody had as much to say, or to hear, on
the subject as usual. Elizabeth soon heard from her friend; and their
correspondence was as regular and frequent as it had ever been; that
it should be equally unreserved was impossible. Elizabeth could never
address her without feeling that all the comfort of intimacy was over,
and though determined not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the
sake of what had been, rather than what was. Charlotte's first letters
were received with a good deal of eagerness; there could not but be
curiosity to know how she would speak of her new home, how she would
like Lady Catherine, and how happy she would dare pronounce herself to
be; though, when the letters were read, Elizabeth felt that Charlotte
expressed herself on every point exactly as she might have foreseen. She
wrote cheerfully, seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing
which she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighbourhood, and
roads, were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine's behaviour was most
friendly and obliging. It was Mr. Collins's picture of Hunsford and
Rosings rationally softened; and Elizabeth perceived that she must wait
for her own visit there to know the rest.

Jane had already written a few lines to her sister to announce their
safe arrival in London; and when she wrote again, Elizabeth hoped it
would be in her power to say something of the Bingleys.

Her impatience for this second letter was as well rewarded as impatience
generally is. Jane had been a week in town without either seeing or
hearing from Caroline. She accounted for it, however, by supposing that
her last letter to her friend from Longbourn had by some accident been
lost.

“My aunt,” she continued, “is going to-morrow into that part of the
town, and I shall take the opportunity of calling in Grosvenor Street.”

She wrote again when the visit was paid, and she had seen Miss Bingley.
“I did not think Caroline in spirits,” were her words, “but she was very
glad to see me, and reproached me for giving her no notice of my coming
to London. I was right, therefore, my last letter had never reached
her. I inquired after their brother, of course. He was well, but so much
engaged with Mr. Darcy that they scarcely ever saw him. I found that
Miss Darcy was expected to dinner. I wish I could see her. My visit was
not long, as Caroline and Mrs. Hurst were going out. I dare say I shall
see them soon here.”

Elizabeth shook her head over this letter. It convinced her that
accident only could discover to Mr. Bingley her sister's being in town.

Four weeks passed away, and Jane saw nothing of him. She endeavoured to
persuade herself that she did not regret it; but she could no longer be
blind to Miss Bingley's inattention. After waiting at home every morning
for a fortnight, and inventing every evening a fresh excuse for her, the
visitor did at last appear; but the shortness of her stay, and yet more,
the alteration of her manner would allow Jane to deceive herself no
longer. The letter which she wrote on this occasion to her sister will
prove what she felt.

“My dearest Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in her
better judgement, at my expense, when I confess myself to have been
entirely deceived in Miss Bingley's regard for me. But, my dear sister,
though the event has proved you right, do not think me obstinate if I
still assert that, considering what her behaviour was, my confidence was
as natural as your suspicion. I do not at all comprehend her reason for
wishing to be intimate with me; but if the same circumstances were to
happen again, I am sure I should be deceived again. Caroline did not
return my visit till yesterday; and not a note, not a line, did I
receive in the meantime. When she did come, it was very evident that
she had no pleasure in it; she made a slight, formal apology, for not
calling before, said not a word of wishing to see me again, and was
in every respect so altered a creature, that when she went away I was
perfectly resolved to continue the acquaintance no longer. I pity,
though I cannot help blaming her. She was very wrong in singling me out
as she did; I can safely say that every advance to intimacy began on
her side. But I pity her, because she must feel that she has been acting
wrong, and because I am very sure that anxiety for her brother is the
cause of it. I need not explain myself farther; and though _we_ know
this anxiety to be quite needless, yet if she feels it, it will easily
account for her behaviour to me; and so deservedly dear as he is to
his sister, whatever anxiety she must feel on his behalf is natural and
amiable. I cannot but wonder, however, at her having any such fears now,
because, if he had at all cared about me, we must have met, long ago.
He knows of my being in town, I am certain, from something she said
herself; and yet it would seem, by her manner of talking, as if she
wanted to persuade herself that he is really partial to Miss Darcy. I
cannot understand it. If I were not afraid of judging harshly, I should
be almost tempted to say that there is a strong appearance of duplicity
in all this. But I will endeavour to banish every painful thought,
and think only of what will make me happy--your affection, and the
invariable kindness of my dear uncle and aunt. Let me hear from you very
soon. Miss Bingley said something of his never returning to Netherfield
again, of giving up the house, but not with any certainty. We had better
not mention it. I am extremely glad that you have such pleasant accounts
from our friends at Hunsford. Pray go to see them, with Sir William and
Maria. I am sure you will be very comfortable there.--Yours, etc.”

This letter gave Elizabeth some pain; but her spirits returned as she
considered that Jane would no longer be duped, by the sister at least.
All expectation from the brother was now absolutely over. She would not
even wish for a renewal of his attentions. His character sunk on
every review of it; and as a punishment for him, as well as a possible
advantage to Jane, she seriously hoped he might really soon marry Mr.
Darcy's sister, as by Wickham's account, she would make him abundantly
regret what he had thrown away.

Mrs. Gardiner about this time reminded Elizabeth of her promise
concerning that gentleman, and required information; and Elizabeth
had such to send as might rather give contentment to her aunt than to
herself. His apparent partiality had subsided, his attentions were over,
he was the admirer of some one else. Elizabeth was watchful enough to
see it all, but she could see it and write of it without material pain.
Her heart had been but slightly touched, and her vanity was satisfied
with believing that _she_ would have been his only choice, had fortune
permitted it. The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most
remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering himself
agreeable; but Elizabeth, less clear-sighted perhaps in this case than
in Charlotte's, did not quarrel with him for his wish of independence.
Nothing, on the contrary, could be more natural; and while able to
suppose that it cost him a few struggles to relinquish her, she was
ready to allow it a wise and desirable measure for both, and could very
sincerely wish him happy.

All this was acknowledged to Mrs. Gardiner; and after relating the
circumstances, she thus went on: “I am now convinced, my dear aunt, that
I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that pure
and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name, and
wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial
towards _him_; they are even impartial towards Miss King. I cannot find
out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to
think her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this. My
watchfulness has been effectual; and though I certainly should be a more
interesting object to all my acquaintances were I distractedly in love
with him, I cannot say that I regret my comparative insignificance.
Importance may sometimes be purchased too dearly. Kitty and Lydia take
his defection much more to heart than I do. They are young in the
ways of the world, and not yet open to the mortifying conviction that
handsome young men must have something to live on as well as the plain.”



Chapter 27


With no greater events than these in the Longbourn family, and otherwise
diversified by little beyond the walks to Meryton, sometimes dirty and
sometimes cold, did January and February pass away. March was to take
Elizabeth to Hunsford. She had not at first thought very seriously of
going thither; but Charlotte, she soon found, was depending on the plan
and she gradually learned to consider it herself with greater pleasure
as well as greater certainty. Absence had increased her desire of seeing
Charlotte again, and weakened her disgust of Mr. Collins. There
was novelty in the scheme, and as, with such a mother and such
uncompanionable sisters, home could not be faultless, a little change
was not unwelcome for its own sake. The journey would moreover give her
a peep at Jane; and, in short, as the time drew near, she would have
been very sorry for any delay. Everything, however, went on smoothly,
and was finally settled according to Charlotte's first sketch. She was
to accompany Sir William and his second daughter. The improvement
of spending a night in London was added in time, and the plan became
perfect as plan could be.

The only pain was in leaving her father, who would certainly miss her,
and who, when it came to the point, so little liked her going, that he
told her to write to him, and almost promised to answer her letter.

The farewell between herself and Mr. Wickham was perfectly friendly; on
his side even more. His present pursuit could not make him forget that
Elizabeth had been the first to excite and to deserve his attention, the
first to listen and to pity, the first to be admired; and in his manner
of bidding her adieu, wishing her every enjoyment, reminding her of
what she was to expect in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and trusting their
opinion of her--their opinion of everybody--would always coincide, there
was a solicitude, an interest which she felt must ever attach her to
him with a most sincere regard; and she parted from him convinced that,
whether married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable
and pleasing.

Her fellow-travellers the next day were not of a kind to make her
think him less agreeable. Sir William Lucas, and his daughter Maria, a
good-humoured girl, but as empty-headed as himself, had nothing to say
that could be worth hearing, and were listened to with about as much
delight as the rattle of the chaise. Elizabeth loved absurdities, but
she had known Sir William's too long. He could tell her nothing new of
the wonders of his presentation and knighthood; and his civilities were
worn out, like his information.

It was a journey of only twenty-four miles, and they began it so early
as to be in Gracechurch Street by noon. As they drove to Mr. Gardiner's
door, Jane was at a drawing-room window watching their arrival; when
they entered the passage she was there to welcome them, and Elizabeth,
looking earnestly in her face, was pleased to see it healthful and
lovely as ever. On the stairs were a troop of little boys and girls,
whose eagerness for their cousin's appearance would not allow them to
wait in the drawing-room, and whose shyness, as they had not seen
her for a twelvemonth, prevented their coming lower. All was joy and
kindness. The day passed most pleasantly away; the morning in bustle and
shopping, and the evening at one of the theatres.

Elizabeth then contrived to sit by her aunt. Their first object was her
sister; and she was more grieved than astonished to hear, in reply to
her minute inquiries, that though Jane always struggled to support her
spirits, there were periods of dejection. It was reasonable, however,
to hope that they would not continue long. Mrs. Gardiner gave her the
particulars also of Miss Bingley's visit in Gracechurch Street, and
repeated conversations occurring at different times between Jane and
herself, which proved that the former had, from her heart, given up the
acquaintance.

Mrs. Gardiner then rallied her niece on Wickham's desertion, and
complimented her on bearing it so well.

“But my dear Elizabeth,” she added, “what sort of girl is Miss King? I
should be sorry to think our friend mercenary.”

“Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial affairs,
between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end,
and avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me,
because it would be imprudent; and now, because he is trying to get
a girl with only ten thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is
mercenary.”

“If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall know
what to think.”

“She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of her.”

“But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather's death
made her mistress of this fortune.”

“No--why should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain _my_
affections because I had no money, what occasion could there be for
making love to a girl whom he did not care about, and who was equally
poor?”

“But there seems an indelicacy in directing his attentions towards her
so soon after this event.”

“A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those elegant
decorums which other people may observe. If _she_ does not object to it,
why should _we_?”

“_Her_ not objecting does not justify _him_. It only shows her being
deficient in something herself--sense or feeling.”

“Well,” cried Elizabeth, “have it as you choose. _He_ shall be
mercenary, and _she_ shall be foolish.”

“No, Lizzy, that is what I do _not_ choose. I should be sorry, you know,
to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in Derbyshire.”

“Oh! if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in
Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not
much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow
where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has
neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones
worth knowing, after all.”

“Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment.”

Before they were separated by the conclusion of the play, she had the
unexpected happiness of an invitation to accompany her uncle and aunt in
a tour of pleasure which they proposed taking in the summer.

“We have not determined how far it shall carry us,” said Mrs. Gardiner,
“but, perhaps, to the Lakes.”

No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her
acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. “Oh, my dear,
dear aunt,” she rapturously cried, “what delight! what felicity! You
give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What
are young men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport
we shall spend! And when we _do_ return, it shall not be like other
travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We
_will_ know where we have gone--we _will_ recollect what we have seen.
Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our
imaginations; nor when we attempt to describe any particular scene,
will we begin quarreling about its relative situation. Let _our_
first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of
travellers.”



Chapter 28


Every object in the next day's journey was new and interesting to
Elizabeth; and her spirits were in a state of enjoyment; for she had
seen her sister looking so well as to banish all fear for her health,
and the prospect of her northern tour was a constant source of delight.

When they left the high road for the lane to Hunsford, every eye was in
search of the Parsonage, and every turning expected to bring it in view.
The palings of Rosings Park was their boundary on one side. Elizabeth
smiled at the recollection of all that she had heard of its inhabitants.

At length the Parsonage was discernible. The garden sloping to the
road, the house standing in it, the green pales, and the laurel hedge,
everything declared they were arriving. Mr. Collins and Charlotte
appeared at the door, and the carriage stopped at the small gate which
led by a short gravel walk to the house, amidst the nods and smiles of
the whole party. In a moment they were all out of the chaise, rejoicing
at the sight of each other. Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend with the
liveliest pleasure, and Elizabeth was more and more satisfied with
coming when she found herself so affectionately received. She saw
instantly that her cousin's manners were not altered by his marriage;
his formal civility was just what it had been, and he detained her some
minutes at the gate to hear and satisfy his inquiries after all her
family. They were then, with no other delay than his pointing out the
neatness of the entrance, taken into the house; and as soon as they
were in the parlour, he welcomed them a second time, with ostentatious
formality to his humble abode, and punctually repeated all his wife's
offers of refreshment.

Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory; and she could not help
in fancying that in displaying the good proportion of the room, its
aspect and its furniture, he addressed himself particularly to her,
as if wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him. But
though everything seemed neat and comfortable, she was not able to
gratify him by any sigh of repentance, and rather looked with wonder at
her friend that she could have so cheerful an air with such a companion.
When Mr. Collins said anything of which his wife might reasonably be
ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she involuntarily turned her
eye on Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but
in general Charlotte wisely did not hear. After sitting long enough to
admire every article of furniture in the room, from the sideboard to
the fender, to give an account of their journey, and of all that had
happened in London, Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in the
garden, which was large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of
which he attended himself. To work in this garden was one of his most
respectable pleasures; and Elizabeth admired the command of countenance
with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercise, and
owned she encouraged it as much as possible. Here, leading the way
through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an
interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out
with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind. He could number the
fields in every direction, and could tell how many trees there were in
the most distant clump. But of all the views which his garden, or which
the country or kingdom could boast, none were to be compared with the
prospect of Rosings, afforded by an opening in the trees that bordered
the park nearly opposite the front of his house. It was a handsome
modern building, well situated on rising ground.

From his garden, Mr. Collins would have led them round his two meadows;
but the ladies, not having shoes to encounter the remains of a white
frost, turned back; and while Sir William accompanied him, Charlotte
took her sister and friend over the house, extremely well pleased,
probably, to have the opportunity of showing it without her husband's
help. It was rather small, but well built and convenient; and everything
was fitted up and arranged with a neatness and consistency of which
Elizabeth gave Charlotte all the credit. When Mr. Collins could be
forgotten, there was really an air of great comfort throughout, and by
Charlotte's evident enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed he must be often
forgotten.

She had already learnt that Lady Catherine was still in the country. It
was spoken of again while they were at dinner, when Mr. Collins joining
in, observed:

“Yes, Miss Elizabeth, you will have the honour of seeing Lady Catherine
de Bourgh on the ensuing Sunday at church, and I need not say you will
be delighted with her. She is all affability and condescension, and I
doubt not but you will be honoured with some portion of her notice
when service is over. I have scarcely any hesitation in saying she
will include you and my sister Maria in every invitation with which she
honours us during your stay here. Her behaviour to my dear Charlotte is
charming. We dine at Rosings twice every week, and are never allowed
to walk home. Her ladyship's carriage is regularly ordered for us. I
_should_ say, one of her ladyship's carriages, for she has several.”

“Lady Catherine is a very respectable, sensible woman indeed,” added
Charlotte, “and a most attentive neighbour.”

“Very true, my dear, that is exactly what I say. She is the sort of
woman whom one cannot regard with too much deference.”

The evening was spent chiefly in talking over Hertfordshire news,
and telling again what had already been written; and when it closed,
Elizabeth, in the solitude of her chamber, had to meditate upon
Charlotte's degree of contentment, to understand her address in guiding,
and composure in bearing with, her husband, and to acknowledge that it
was all done very well. She had also to anticipate how her visit
would pass, the quiet tenor of their usual employments, the vexatious
interruptions of Mr. Collins, and the gaieties of their intercourse with
Rosings. A lively imagination soon settled it all.

About the middle of the next day, as she was in her room getting ready
for a walk, a sudden noise below seemed to speak the whole house in
confusion; and, after listening a moment, she heard somebody running
up stairs in a violent hurry, and calling loudly after her. She opened
the door and met Maria in the landing place, who, breathless with
agitation, cried out--

“Oh, my dear Eliza! pray make haste and come into the dining-room, for
there is such a sight to be seen! I will not tell you what it is. Make
haste, and come down this moment.”

Elizabeth asked questions in vain; Maria would tell her nothing more,
and down they ran into the dining-room, which fronted the lane, in
quest of this wonder; It was two ladies stopping in a low phaeton at the
garden gate.

“And is this all?” cried Elizabeth. “I expected at least that the pigs
were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and her
daughter.”

“La! my dear,” said Maria, quite shocked at the mistake, “it is not
Lady Catherine. The old lady is Mrs. Jenkinson, who lives with them;
the other is Miss de Bourgh. Only look at her. She is quite a little
creature. Who would have thought that she could be so thin and small?”

“She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind.
Why does she not come in?”

“Oh, Charlotte says she hardly ever does. It is the greatest of favours
when Miss de Bourgh comes in.”

“I like her appearance,” said Elizabeth, struck with other ideas. “She
looks sickly and cross. Yes, she will do for him very well. She will
make him a very proper wife.”

Mr. Collins and Charlotte were both standing at the gate in conversation
with the ladies; and Sir William, to Elizabeth's high diversion, was
stationed in the doorway, in earnest contemplation of the greatness
before him, and constantly bowing whenever Miss de Bourgh looked that
way.

At length there was nothing more to be said; the ladies drove on, and
the others returned into the house. Mr. Collins no sooner saw the two
girls than he began to congratulate them on their good fortune, which
Charlotte explained by letting them know that the whole party was asked
to dine at Rosings the next day.



Chapter 29


Mr. Collins's triumph, in consequence of this invitation, was complete.
The power of displaying the grandeur of his patroness to his wondering
visitors, and of letting them see her civility towards himself and his
wife, was exactly what he had wished for; and that an opportunity
of doing it should be given so soon, was such an instance of Lady
Catherine's condescension, as he knew not how to admire enough.

“I confess,” said he, “that I should not have been at all surprised by
her ladyship's asking us on Sunday to drink tea and spend the evening at
Rosings. I rather expected, from my knowledge of her affability, that it
would happen. But who could have foreseen such an attention as this? Who
could have imagined that we should receive an invitation to dine there
(an invitation, moreover, including the whole party) so immediately
after your arrival!”

“I am the less surprised at what has happened,” replied Sir William,
“from that knowledge of what the manners of the great really are, which
my situation in life has allowed me to acquire. About the court, such
instances of elegant breeding are not uncommon.”

Scarcely anything was talked of the whole day or next morning but their
visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully instructing them in what
they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, and
so splendid a dinner, might not wholly overpower them.

When the ladies were separating for the toilette, he said to Elizabeth--

“Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your apparel. Lady
Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of dress in us which
becomes herself and her daughter. I would advise you merely to put on
whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest--there is no occasion
for anything more. Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you
for being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank
preserved.”

While they were dressing, he came two or three times to their different
doors, to recommend their being quick, as Lady Catherine very much
objected to be kept waiting for her dinner. Such formidable accounts of
her ladyship, and her manner of living, quite frightened Maria Lucas
who had been little used to company, and she looked forward to her
introduction at Rosings with as much apprehension as her father had done
to his presentation at St. James's.

As the weather was fine, they had a pleasant walk of about half a
mile across the park. Every park has its beauty and its prospects; and
Elizabeth saw much to be pleased with, though she could not be in such
raptures as Mr. Collins expected the scene to inspire, and was but
slightly affected by his enumeration of the windows in front of the
house, and his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally
cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.

When they ascended the steps to the hall, Maria's alarm was every
moment increasing, and even Sir William did not look perfectly calm.
Elizabeth's courage did not fail her. She had heard nothing of Lady
Catherine that spoke her awful from any extraordinary talents or
miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money or rank she thought
she could witness without trepidation.

From the entrance-hall, of which Mr. Collins pointed out, with a
rapturous air, the fine proportion and the finished ornaments, they
followed the servants through an ante-chamber, to the room where Lady
Catherine, her daughter, and Mrs. Jenkinson were sitting. Her ladyship,
with great condescension, arose to receive them; and as Mrs. Collins had
settled it with her husband that the office of introduction should
be hers, it was performed in a proper manner, without any of those
apologies and thanks which he would have thought necessary.

In spite of having been at St. James's, Sir William was so completely
awed by the grandeur surrounding him, that he had but just courage
enough to make a very low bow, and take his seat without saying a word;
and his daughter, frightened almost out of her senses, sat on the edge
of her chair, not knowing which way to look. Elizabeth found herself
quite equal to the scene, and could observe the three ladies before her
composedly. Lady Catherine was a tall, large woman, with strongly-marked
features, which might once have been handsome. Her air was not
conciliating, nor was her manner of receiving them such as to make her
visitors forget their inferior rank. She was not rendered formidable by
silence; but whatever she said was spoken in so authoritative a tone,
as marked her self-importance, and brought Mr. Wickham immediately to
Elizabeth's mind; and from the observation of the day altogether, she
believed Lady Catherine to be exactly what he represented.

When, after examining the mother, in whose countenance and deportment
she soon found some resemblance of Mr. Darcy, she turned her eyes on the
daughter, she could almost have joined in Maria's astonishment at her
being so thin and so small. There was neither in figure nor face any
likeness between the ladies. Miss de Bourgh was pale and sickly; her
features, though not plain, were insignificant; and she spoke very
little, except in a low voice, to Mrs. Jenkinson, in whose appearance
there was nothing remarkable, and who was entirely engaged in listening
to what she said, and placing a screen in the proper direction before
her eyes.

After sitting a few minutes, they were all sent to one of the windows to
admire the view, Mr. Collins attending them to point out its beauties,
and Lady Catherine kindly informing them that it was much better worth
looking at in the summer.

The dinner was exceedingly handsome, and there were all the servants and
all the articles of plate which Mr. Collins had promised; and, as he had
likewise foretold, he took his seat at the bottom of the table, by her
ladyship's desire, and looked as if he felt that life could furnish
nothing greater. He carved, and ate, and praised with delighted
alacrity; and every dish was commended, first by him and then by Sir
William, who was now enough recovered to echo whatever his son-in-law
said, in a manner which Elizabeth wondered Lady Catherine could bear.
But Lady Catherine seemed gratified by their excessive admiration, and
gave most gracious smiles, especially when any dish on the table proved
a novelty to them. The party did not supply much conversation. Elizabeth
was ready to speak whenever there was an opening, but she was seated
between Charlotte and Miss de Bourgh--the former of whom was engaged in
listening to Lady Catherine, and the latter said not a word to her all
dinner-time. Mrs. Jenkinson was chiefly employed in watching how little
Miss de Bourgh ate, pressing her to try some other dish, and fearing
she was indisposed. Maria thought speaking out of the question, and the
gentlemen did nothing but eat and admire.

When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to
be done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any
intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every
subject in so decisive a manner, as proved that she was not used to
have her judgement controverted. She inquired into Charlotte's domestic
concerns familiarly and minutely, gave her a great deal of advice as
to the management of them all; told her how everything ought to be
regulated in so small a family as hers, and instructed her as to the
care of her cows and her poultry. Elizabeth found that nothing was
beneath this great lady's attention, which could furnish her with an
occasion of dictating to others. In the intervals of her discourse
with Mrs. Collins, she addressed a variety of questions to Maria and
Elizabeth, but especially to the latter, of whose connections she knew
the least, and who she observed to Mrs. Collins was a very genteel,
pretty kind of girl. She asked her, at different times, how many sisters
she had, whether they were older or younger than herself, whether any of
them were likely to be married, whether they were handsome, where they
had been educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been
her mother's maiden name? Elizabeth felt all the impertinence of
her questions but answered them very composedly. Lady Catherine then
observed,

“Your father's estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think. For your
sake,” turning to Charlotte, “I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no
occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought
necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh's family. Do you play and sing, Miss
Bennet?”

“A little.”

“Oh! then--some time or other we shall be happy to hear you. Our
instrument is a capital one, probably superior to----You shall try it
some day. Do your sisters play and sing?”

“One of them does.”

“Why did not you all learn? You ought all to have learned. The Miss
Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income as yours. Do
you draw?”

“No, not at all.”

“What, none of you?”

“Not one.”

“That is very strange. But I suppose you had no opportunity. Your mother
should have taken you to town every spring for the benefit of masters.”

“My mother would have had no objection, but my father hates London.”

“Has your governess left you?”

“We never had any governess.”

“No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home
without a governess! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must
have been quite a slave to your education.”

Elizabeth could hardly help smiling as she assured her that had not been
the case.

“Then, who taught you? who attended to you? Without a governess, you
must have been neglected.”

“Compared with some families, I believe we were; but such of us as
wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to
read, and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be
idle, certainly might.”

“Aye, no doubt; but that is what a governess will prevent, and if I had
known your mother, I should have advised her most strenuously to engage
one. I always say that nothing is to be done in education without steady
and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it. It is
wonderful how many families I have been the means of supplying in that
way. I am always glad to get a young person well placed out. Four nieces
of Mrs. Jenkinson are most delightfully situated through my means; and
it was but the other day that I recommended another young person,
who was merely accidentally mentioned to me, and the family are quite
delighted with her. Mrs. Collins, did I tell you of Lady Metcalf's
calling yesterday to thank me? She finds Miss Pope a treasure. 'Lady
Catherine,' said she, 'you have given me a treasure.' Are any of your
younger sisters out, Miss Bennet?”

“Yes, ma'am, all.”

“All! What, all five out at once? Very odd! And you only the second. The
younger ones out before the elder ones are married! Your younger sisters
must be very young?”

“Yes, my youngest is not sixteen. Perhaps _she_ is full young to be
much in company. But really, ma'am, I think it would be very hard upon
younger sisters, that they should not have their share of society and
amusement, because the elder may not have the means or inclination to
marry early. The last-born has as good a right to the pleasures of youth
as the first. And to be kept back on _such_ a motive! I think it would
not be very likely to promote sisterly affection or delicacy of mind.”

“Upon my word,” said her ladyship, “you give your opinion very decidedly
for so young a person. Pray, what is your age?”

“With three younger sisters grown up,” replied Elizabeth, smiling, “your
ladyship can hardly expect me to own it.”

Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer;
and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever
dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.

“You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure, therefore you need not
conceal your age.”

“I am not one-and-twenty.”

When the gentlemen had joined them, and tea was over, the card-tables
were placed. Lady Catherine, Sir William, and Mr. and Mrs. Collins sat
down to quadrille; and as Miss de Bourgh chose to play at cassino, the
two girls had the honour of assisting Mrs. Jenkinson to make up her
party. Their table was superlatively stupid. Scarcely a syllable was
uttered that did not relate to the game, except when Mrs. Jenkinson
expressed her fears of Miss de Bourgh's being too hot or too cold, or
having too much or too little light. A great deal more passed at the
other table. Lady Catherine was generally speaking--stating the mistakes
of the three others, or relating some anecdote of herself. Mr. Collins
was employed in agreeing to everything her ladyship said, thanking her
for every fish he won, and apologising if he thought he won too many.
Sir William did not say much. He was storing his memory with anecdotes
and noble names.

When Lady Catherine and her daughter had played as long as they chose,
the tables were broken up, the carriage was offered to Mrs. Collins,
gratefully accepted and immediately ordered. The party then gathered
round the fire to hear Lady Catherine determine what weather they were
to have on the morrow. From these instructions they were summoned by
the arrival of the coach; and with many speeches of thankfulness on Mr.
Collins's side and as many bows on Sir William's they departed. As soon
as they had driven from the door, Elizabeth was called on by her cousin
to give her opinion of all that she had seen at Rosings, which, for
Charlotte's sake, she made more favourable than it really was. But her
commendation, though costing her some trouble, could by no means satisfy
Mr. Collins, and he was very soon obliged to take her ladyship's praise
into his own hands.



Chapter 30


Sir William stayed only a week at Hunsford, but his visit was long
enough to convince him of his daughter's being most comfortably settled,
and of her possessing such a husband and such a neighbour as were not
often met with. While Sir William was with them, Mr. Collins devoted his
morning to driving him out in his gig, and showing him the country; but
when he went away, the whole family returned to their usual employments,
and Elizabeth was thankful to find that they did not see more of her
cousin by the alteration, for the chief of the time between breakfast
and dinner was now passed by him either at work in the garden or in
reading and writing, and looking out of the window in his own book-room,
which fronted the road. The room in which the ladies sat was backwards.
Elizabeth had at first rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer
the dining-parlour for common use; it was a better sized room, and had a
more pleasant aspect; but she soon saw that her friend had an excellent
reason for what she did, for Mr. Collins would undoubtedly have been
much less in his own apartment, had they sat in one equally lively; and
she gave Charlotte credit for the arrangement.

From the drawing-room they could distinguish nothing in the lane, and
were indebted to Mr. Collins for the knowledge of what carriages went
along, and how often especially Miss de Bourgh drove by in her phaeton,
which he never failed coming to inform them of, though it happened
almost every day. She not unfrequently stopped at the Parsonage, and
had a few minutes' conversation with Charlotte, but was scarcely ever
prevailed upon to get out.

Very few days passed in which Mr. Collins did not walk to Rosings, and
not many in which his wife did not think it necessary to go likewise;
and till Elizabeth recollected that there might be other family livings
to be disposed of, she could not understand the sacrifice of so many
hours. Now and then they were honoured with a call from her ladyship,
and nothing escaped her observation that was passing in the room during
these visits. She examined into their employments, looked at their work,
and advised them to do it differently; found fault with the arrangement
of the furniture; or detected the housemaid in negligence; and if she
accepted any refreshment, seemed to do it only for the sake of finding
out that Mrs. Collins's joints of meat were too large for her family.

Elizabeth soon perceived, that though this great lady was not in
commission of the peace of the county, she was a most active magistrate
in her own parish, the minutest concerns of which were carried to her
by Mr. Collins; and whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to
be quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor, she sallied forth into the
village to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold
them into harmony and plenty.

The entertainment of dining at Rosings was repeated about twice a week;
and, allowing for the loss of Sir William, and there being only one
card-table in the evening, every such entertainment was the counterpart
of the first. Their other engagements were few, as the style of living
in the neighbourhood in general was beyond Mr. Collins's reach. This,
however, was no evil to Elizabeth, and upon the whole she spent her time
comfortably enough; there were half-hours of pleasant conversation with
Charlotte, and the weather was so fine for the time of year that she had
often great enjoyment out of doors. Her favourite walk, and where she
frequently went while the others were calling on Lady Catherine, was
along the open grove which edged that side of the park, where there was
a nice sheltered path, which no one seemed to value but herself, and
where she felt beyond the reach of Lady Catherine's curiosity.

In this quiet way, the first fortnight of her visit soon passed away.
Easter was approaching, and the week preceding it was to bring an
addition to the family at Rosings, which in so small a circle must be
important. Elizabeth had heard soon after her arrival that Mr. Darcy was
expected there in the course of a few weeks, and though there were not
many of her acquaintances whom she did not prefer, his coming would
furnish one comparatively new to look at in their Rosings parties, and
she might be amused in seeing how hopeless Miss Bingley's designs on him
were, by his behaviour to his cousin, for whom he was evidently
destined by Lady Catherine, who talked of his coming with the greatest
satisfaction, spoke of him in terms of the highest admiration, and
seemed almost angry to find that he had already been frequently seen by
Miss Lucas and herself.

His arrival was soon known at the Parsonage; for Mr. Collins was walking
the whole morning within view of the lodges opening into Hunsford Lane,
in order to have the earliest assurance of it, and after making his
bow as the carriage turned into the Park, hurried home with the great
intelligence. On the following morning he hastened to Rosings to pay his
respects. There were two nephews of Lady Catherine to require them, for
Mr. Darcy had brought with him a Colonel Fitzwilliam, the younger son of
his uncle Lord ----, and, to the great surprise of all the party, when
Mr. Collins returned, the gentlemen accompanied him. Charlotte had seen
them from her husband's room, crossing the road, and immediately running
into the other, told the girls what an honour they might expect, adding:

“I may thank you, Eliza, for this piece of civility. Mr. Darcy would
never have come so soon to wait upon me.”

Elizabeth had scarcely time to disclaim all right to the compliment,
before their approach was announced by the door-bell, and shortly
afterwards the three gentlemen entered the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam,
who led the way, was about thirty, not handsome, but in person and
address most truly the gentleman. Mr. Darcy looked just as he had been
used to look in Hertfordshire--paid his compliments, with his usual
reserve, to Mrs. Collins, and whatever might be his feelings toward her
friend, met her with every appearance of composure. Elizabeth merely
curtseyed to him without saying a word.

Colonel Fitzwilliam entered into conversation directly with the
readiness and ease of a well-bred man, and talked very pleasantly; but
his cousin, after having addressed a slight observation on the house and
garden to Mrs. Collins, sat for some time without speaking to anybody.
At length, however, his civility was so far awakened as to inquire of
Elizabeth after the health of her family. She answered him in the usual
way, and after a moment's pause, added:

“My eldest sister has been in town these three months. Have you never
happened to see her there?”

She was perfectly sensible that he never had; but she wished to see
whether he would betray any consciousness of what had passed between
the Bingleys and Jane, and she thought he looked a little confused as he
answered that he had never been so fortunate as to meet Miss Bennet. The
subject was pursued no farther, and the gentlemen soon afterwards went
away.



Chapter 31


Colonel Fitzwilliam's manners were very much admired at the Parsonage,
and the ladies all felt that he must add considerably to the pleasures
of their engagements at Rosings. It was some days, however, before they
received any invitation thither--for while there were visitors in the
house, they could not be necessary; and it was not till Easter-day,
almost a week after the gentlemen's arrival, that they were honoured by
such an attention, and then they were merely asked on leaving church to
come there in the evening. For the last week they had seen very little
of Lady Catherine or her daughter. Colonel Fitzwilliam had called at the
Parsonage more than once during the time, but Mr. Darcy they had seen
only at church.

The invitation was accepted of course, and at a proper hour they joined
the party in Lady Catherine's drawing-room. Her ladyship received
them civilly, but it was plain that their company was by no means so
acceptable as when she could get nobody else; and she was, in fact,
almost engrossed by her nephews, speaking to them, especially to Darcy,
much more than to any other person in the room.

Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed really glad to see them; anything was a
welcome relief to him at Rosings; and Mrs. Collins's pretty friend had
moreover caught his fancy very much. He now seated himself by her, and
talked so agreeably of Kent and Hertfordshire, of travelling and staying
at home, of new books and music, that Elizabeth had never been half so
well entertained in that room before; and they conversed with so much
spirit and flow, as to draw the attention of Lady Catherine herself,
as well as of Mr. Darcy. _His_ eyes had been soon and repeatedly turned
towards them with a look of curiosity; and that her ladyship, after a
while, shared the feeling, was more openly acknowledged, for she did not
scruple to call out:

“What is that you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is it you are talking
of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is.”

“We are speaking of music, madam,” said he, when no longer able to avoid
a reply.

“Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I
must have my share in the conversation if you are speaking of music.
There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment
of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt,
I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her health
had allowed her to apply. I am confident that she would have performed
delightfully. How does Georgiana get on, Darcy?”

Mr. Darcy spoke with affectionate praise of his sister's proficiency.

“I am very glad to hear such a good account of her,” said Lady
Catherine; “and pray tell her from me, that she cannot expect to excel
if she does not practice a good deal.”

“I assure you, madam,” he replied, “that she does not need such advice.
She practises very constantly.”

“So much the better. It cannot be done too much; and when I next write
to her, I shall charge her not to neglect it on any account. I often
tell young ladies that no excellence in music is to be acquired without
constant practice. I have told Miss Bennet several times, that she
will never play really well unless she practises more; and though Mrs.
Collins has no instrument, she is very welcome, as I have often told
her, to come to Rosings every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs.
Jenkinson's room. She would be in nobody's way, you know, in that part
of the house.”

Mr. Darcy looked a little ashamed of his aunt's ill-breeding, and made
no answer.

When coffee was over, Colonel Fitzwilliam reminded Elizabeth of having
promised to play to him; and she sat down directly to the instrument. He
drew a chair near her. Lady Catherine listened to half a song, and then
talked, as before, to her other nephew; till the latter walked away
from her, and making with his usual deliberation towards the pianoforte
stationed himself so as to command a full view of the fair performer's
countenance. Elizabeth saw what he was doing, and at the first
convenient pause, turned to him with an arch smile, and said:

“You mean to frighten me, Mr. Darcy, by coming in all this state to hear
me? I will not be alarmed though your sister _does_ play so well. There
is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the
will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate
me.”

“I shall not say you are mistaken,” he replied, “because you could not
really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I have
had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know that you find
great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are
not your own.”

Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself, and said to
Colonel Fitzwilliam, “Your cousin will give you a very pretty notion of
me, and teach you not to believe a word I say. I am particularly unlucky
in meeting with a person so able to expose my real character, in a part
of the world where I had hoped to pass myself off with some degree of
credit. Indeed, Mr. Darcy, it is very ungenerous in you to mention all
that you knew to my disadvantage in Hertfordshire--and, give me leave to
say, very impolitic too--for it is provoking me to retaliate, and such
things may come out as will shock your relations to hear.”

“I am not afraid of you,” said he, smilingly.

“Pray let me hear what you have to accuse him of,” cried Colonel
Fitzwilliam. “I should like to know how he behaves among strangers.”

“You shall hear then--but prepare yourself for something very dreadful.
The first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire, you must know,
was at a ball--and at this ball, what do you think he did? He danced
only four dances, though gentlemen were scarce; and, to my certain
knowledge, more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a
partner. Mr. Darcy, you cannot deny the fact.”

“I had not at that time the honour of knowing any lady in the assembly
beyond my own party.”

“True; and nobody can ever be introduced in a ball-room. Well, Colonel
Fitzwilliam, what do I play next? My fingers wait your orders.”

“Perhaps,” said Darcy, “I should have judged better, had I sought an
introduction; but I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers.”

“Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?” said Elizabeth, still
addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. “Shall we ask him why a man of sense and
education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend
himself to strangers?”

“I can answer your question,” said Fitzwilliam, “without applying to
him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.”

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,” said Darcy,
“of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot
catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their
concerns, as I often see done.”

“My fingers,” said Elizabeth, “do not move over this instrument in the
masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same
force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I
have always supposed it to be my own fault--because I will not take the
trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe _my_ fingers as
capable as any other woman's of superior execution.”

Darcy smiled and said, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your
time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can
think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.”

Here they were interrupted by Lady Catherine, who called out to know
what they were talking of. Elizabeth immediately began playing again.
Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening for a few minutes, said
to Darcy:

“Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss if she practised more, and
could have the advantage of a London master. She has a very good notion
of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne's. Anne would have
been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn.”

Elizabeth looked at Darcy to see how cordially he assented to his
cousin's praise; but neither at that moment nor at any other could she
discern any symptom of love; and from the whole of his behaviour to Miss
de Bourgh she derived this comfort for Miss Bingley, that he might have
been just as likely to marry _her_, had she been his relation.

Lady Catherine continued her remarks on Elizabeth's performance, mixing
with them many instructions on execution and taste. Elizabeth received
them with all the forbearance of civility, and, at the request of the
gentlemen, remained at the instrument till her ladyship's carriage was
ready to take them all home.



Chapter 32


Elizabeth was sitting by herself the next morning, and writing to Jane
while Mrs. Collins and Maria were gone on business into the village,
when she was startled by a ring at the door, the certain signal of a
visitor. As she had heard no carriage, she thought it not unlikely to
be Lady Catherine, and under that apprehension was putting away her
half-finished letter that she might escape all impertinent questions,
when the door opened, and, to her very great surprise, Mr. Darcy, and
Mr. Darcy only, entered the room.

He seemed astonished too on finding her alone, and apologised for his
intrusion by letting her know that he had understood all the ladies were
to be within.

They then sat down, and when her inquiries after Rosings were made,
seemed in danger of sinking into total silence. It was absolutely
necessary, therefore, to think of something, and in this emergence
recollecting _when_ she had seen him last in Hertfordshire, and
feeling curious to know what he would say on the subject of their hasty
departure, she observed:

“How very suddenly you all quitted Netherfield last November, Mr. Darcy!
It must have been a most agreeable surprise to Mr. Bingley to see you
all after him so soon; for, if I recollect right, he went but the day
before. He and his sisters were well, I hope, when you left London?”

“Perfectly so, I thank you.”

She found that she was to receive no other answer, and, after a short
pause added:

“I think I have understood that Mr. Bingley has not much idea of ever
returning to Netherfield again?”

“I have never heard him say so; but it is probable that he may spend
very little of his time there in the future. He has many friends, and
is at a time of life when friends and engagements are continually
increasing.”

“If he means to be but little at Netherfield, it would be better for
the neighbourhood that he should give up the place entirely, for then we
might possibly get a settled family there. But, perhaps, Mr. Bingley did
not take the house so much for the convenience of the neighbourhood as
for his own, and we must expect him to keep it or quit it on the same
principle.”

“I should not be surprised,” said Darcy, “if he were to give it up as
soon as any eligible purchase offers.”

Elizabeth made no answer. She was afraid of talking longer of his
friend; and, having nothing else to say, was now determined to leave the
trouble of finding a subject to him.

He took the hint, and soon began with, “This seems a very comfortable
house. Lady Catherine, I believe, did a great deal to it when Mr.
Collins first came to Hunsford.”

“I believe she did--and I am sure she could not have bestowed her
kindness on a more grateful object.”

“Mr. Collins appears to be very fortunate in his choice of a wife.”

“Yes, indeed, his friends may well rejoice in his having met with one
of the very few sensible women who would have accepted him, or have made
him happy if they had. My friend has an excellent understanding--though
I am not certain that I consider her marrying Mr. Collins as the
wisest thing she ever did. She seems perfectly happy, however, and in a
prudential light it is certainly a very good match for her.”

“It must be very agreeable for her to be settled within so easy a
distance of her own family and friends.”

“An easy distance, do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles.”

“And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's
journey. Yes, I call it a _very_ easy distance.”

“I should never have considered the distance as one of the _advantages_
of the match,” cried Elizabeth. “I should never have said Mrs. Collins
was settled _near_ her family.”

“It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Anything beyond
the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.”

As he spoke there was a sort of smile which Elizabeth fancied she
understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and
Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered:

“I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her
family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many
varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expenses of
travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the
case _here_. Mr. and Mrs. Collins have a comfortable income, but not
such a one as will allow of frequent journeys--and I am persuaded my
friend would not call herself _near_ her family under less than _half_
the present distance.”

Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “_You_ cannot
have a right to such very strong local attachment. _You_ cannot have
been always at Longbourn.”

Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of
feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and
glancing over it, said, in a colder voice:

“Are you pleased with Kent?”

A short dialogue on the subject of the country ensued, on either side
calm and concise--and soon put an end to by the entrance of Charlotte
and her sister, just returned from her walk. The tete-a-tete surprised
them. Mr. Darcy related the mistake which had occasioned his intruding
on Miss Bennet, and after sitting a few minutes longer without saying
much to anybody, went away.

“What can be the meaning of this?” said Charlotte, as soon as he was
gone. “My dear, Eliza, he must be in love with you, or he would never
have called us in this familiar way.”

But when Elizabeth told of his silence, it did not seem very likely,
even to Charlotte's wishes, to be the case; and after various
conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to proceed from
the difficulty of finding anything to do, which was the more probable
from the time of year. All field sports were over. Within doors there
was Lady Catherine, books, and a billiard-table, but gentlemen cannot
always be within doors; and in the nearness of the Parsonage, or the
pleasantness of the walk to it, or of the people who lived in it, the
two cousins found a temptation from this period of walking thither
almost every day. They called at various times of the morning, sometimes
separately, sometimes together, and now and then accompanied by their
aunt. It was plain to them all that Colonel Fitzwilliam came because he
had pleasure in their society, a persuasion which of course recommended
him still more; and Elizabeth was reminded by her own satisfaction in
being with him, as well as by his evident admiration of her, of her
former favourite George Wickham; and though, in comparing them, she saw
there was less captivating softness in Colonel Fitzwilliam's manners,
she believed he might have the best informed mind.

But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the Parsonage, it was more difficult
to understand. It could not be for society, as he frequently sat there
ten minutes together without opening his lips; and when he did speak,
it seemed the effect of necessity rather than of choice--a sacrifice
to propriety, not a pleasure to himself. He seldom appeared really
animated. Mrs. Collins knew not what to make of him. Colonel
Fitzwilliam's occasionally laughing at his stupidity, proved that he was
generally different, which her own knowledge of him could not have told
her; and as she would liked to have believed this change the effect
of love, and the object of that love her friend Eliza, she set herself
seriously to work to find it out. She watched him whenever they were at
Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He
certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that
look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often
doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it
seemed nothing but absence of mind.

She had once or twice suggested to Elizabeth the possibility of his
being partial to her, but Elizabeth always laughed at the idea; and Mrs.
Collins did not think it right to press the subject, from the danger of
raising expectations which might only end in disappointment; for in her
opinion it admitted not of a doubt, that all her friend's dislike would
vanish, if she could suppose him to be in her power.


In her kind schemes for Elizabeth, she sometimes planned her marrying
Colonel Fitzwilliam. He was beyond comparison the most pleasant man; he
certainly admired her, and his situation in life was most eligible; but,
to counterbalance these advantages, Mr. Darcy had considerable patronage
in the church, and his cousin could have none at all.



Chapter 33


More than once did Elizabeth, in her ramble within the park,
unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy. She felt all the perverseness of the
mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought, and, to
prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him at first that
it was a favourite haunt of hers. How it could occur a second time,
therefore, was very odd! Yet it did, and even a third. It seemed like
wilful ill-nature, or a voluntary penance, for on these occasions it was
not merely a few formal inquiries and an awkward pause and then away,
but he actually thought it necessary to turn back and walk with her. He
never said a great deal, nor did she give herself the trouble of talking
or of listening much; but it struck her in the course of their third
rencontre that he was asking some odd unconnected questions--about
her pleasure in being at Hunsford, her love of solitary walks, and her
opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Collins's happiness; and that in speaking of
Rosings and her not perfectly understanding the house, he seemed to
expect that whenever she came into Kent again she would be staying
_there_ too. His words seemed to imply it. Could he have Colonel
Fitzwilliam in his thoughts? She supposed, if he meant anything, he must
mean an allusion to what might arise in that quarter. It distressed
her a little, and she was quite glad to find herself at the gate in the
pales opposite the Parsonage.

She was engaged one day as she walked, in perusing Jane's last letter,
and dwelling on some passages which proved that Jane had not written in
spirits, when, instead of being again surprised by Mr. Darcy, she saw
on looking up that Colonel Fitzwilliam was meeting her. Putting away the
letter immediately and forcing a smile, she said:

“I did not know before that you ever walked this way.”

“I have been making the tour of the park,” he replied, “as I generally
do every year, and intend to close it with a call at the Parsonage. Are
you going much farther?”

“No, I should have turned in a moment.”

And accordingly she did turn, and they walked towards the Parsonage
together.

“Do you certainly leave Kent on Saturday?” said she.

“Yes--if Darcy does not put it off again. But I am at his disposal. He
arranges the business just as he pleases.”

“And if not able to please himself in the arrangement, he has at least
pleasure in the great power of choice. I do not know anybody who seems
more to enjoy the power of doing what he likes than Mr. Darcy.”

“He likes to have his own way very well,” replied Colonel Fitzwilliam.
“But so we all do. It is only that he has better means of having it
than many others, because he is rich, and many others are poor. I speak
feelingly. A younger son, you know, must be inured to self-denial and
dependence.”

“In my opinion, the younger son of an earl can know very little of
either. Now seriously, what have you ever known of self-denial and
dependence? When have you been prevented by want of money from going
wherever you chose, or procuring anything you had a fancy for?”

“These are home questions--and perhaps I cannot say that I have
experienced many hardships of that nature. But in matters of greater
weight, I may suffer from want of money. Younger sons cannot marry where
they like.”

“Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they very often
do.”

“Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not many
in my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to
money.”

“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” and she coloured at the
idea; but, recovering herself, said in a lively tone, “And pray, what
is the usual price of an earl's younger son? Unless the elder brother is
very sickly, I suppose you would not ask above fifty thousand pounds.”

He answered her in the same style, and the subject dropped. To interrupt
a silence which might make him fancy her affected with what had passed,
she soon afterwards said:

“I imagine your cousin brought you down with him chiefly for the sake of
having someone at his disposal. I wonder he does not marry, to secure a
lasting convenience of that kind. But, perhaps, his sister does as well
for the present, and, as she is under his sole care, he may do what he
likes with her.”

“No,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, “that is an advantage which he must
divide with me. I am joined with him in the guardianship of Miss Darcy.”

“Are you indeed? And pray what sort of guardians do you make? Does your
charge give you much trouble? Young ladies of her age are sometimes a
little difficult to manage, and if she has the true Darcy spirit, she
may like to have her own way.”

As she spoke she observed him looking at her earnestly; and the manner
in which he immediately asked her why she supposed Miss Darcy likely to
give them any uneasiness, convinced her that she had somehow or other
got pretty near the truth. She directly replied:

“You need not be frightened. I never heard any harm of her; and I dare
say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world. She is a
very great favourite with some ladies of my acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and
Miss Bingley. I think I have heard you say that you know them.”

“I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike man--he
is a great friend of Darcy's.”

“Oh! yes,” said Elizabeth drily; “Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind to Mr.
Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him.”

“Care of him! Yes, I really believe Darcy _does_ take care of him in
those points where he most wants care. From something that he told me in
our journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted to
him. But I ought to beg his pardon, for I have no right to suppose that
Bingley was the person meant. It was all conjecture.”

“What is it you mean?”

“It is a circumstance which Darcy could not wish to be generally known,
because if it were to get round to the lady's family, it would be an
unpleasant thing.”

“You may depend upon my not mentioning it.”

“And remember that I have not much reason for supposing it to be
Bingley. What he told me was merely this: that he congratulated himself
on having lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most
imprudent marriage, but without mentioning names or any other
particulars, and I only suspected it to be Bingley from believing
him the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and from
knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer.”

“Did Mr. Darcy give you reasons for this interference?”

“I understood that there were some very strong objections against the
lady.”

“And what arts did he use to separate them?”

“He did not talk to me of his own arts,” said Fitzwilliam, smiling. “He
only told me what I have now told you.”

Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with
indignation. After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she
was so thoughtful.

“I am thinking of what you have been telling me,” said she. “Your
cousin's conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the judge?”

“You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?”

“I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his
friend's inclination, or why, upon his own judgement alone, he was to
determine and direct in what manner his friend was to be happy.
But,” she continued, recollecting herself, “as we know none of the
particulars, it is not fair to condemn him. It is not to be supposed
that there was much affection in the case.”

“That is not an unnatural surmise,” said Fitzwilliam, “but it is a
lessening of the honour of my cousin's triumph very sadly.”

This was spoken jestingly; but it appeared to her so just a picture
of Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer, and
therefore, abruptly changing the conversation talked on indifferent
matters until they reached the Parsonage. There, shut into her own room,
as soon as their visitor left them, she could think without interruption
of all that she had heard. It was not to be supposed that any other
people could be meant than those with whom she was connected. There
could not exist in the world _two_ men over whom Mr. Darcy could have
such boundless influence. That he had been concerned in the measures
taken to separate Bingley and Jane she had never doubted; but she had
always attributed to Miss Bingley the principal design and arrangement
of them. If his own vanity, however, did not mislead him, _he_ was
the cause, his pride and caprice were the cause, of all that Jane had
suffered, and still continued to suffer. He had ruined for a while
every hope of happiness for the most affectionate, generous heart in the
world; and no one could say how lasting an evil he might have inflicted.

“There were some very strong objections against the lady,” were Colonel
Fitzwilliam's words; and those strong objections probably were, her
having one uncle who was a country attorney, and another who was in
business in London.

“To Jane herself,” she exclaimed, “there could be no possibility of
objection; all loveliness and goodness as she is!--her understanding
excellent, her mind improved, and her manners captivating. Neither
could anything be urged against my father, who, though with some
peculiarities, has abilities Mr. Darcy himself need not disdain, and
respectability which he will probably never reach.” When she thought of
her mother, her confidence gave way a little; but she would not allow
that any objections _there_ had material weight with Mr. Darcy, whose
pride, she was convinced, would receive a deeper wound from the want of
importance in his friend's connections, than from their want of sense;
and she was quite decided, at last, that he had been partly governed
by this worst kind of pride, and partly by the wish of retaining Mr.
Bingley for his sister.

The agitation and tears which the subject occasioned, brought on a
headache; and it grew so much worse towards the evening, that, added to
her unwillingness to see Mr. Darcy, it determined her not to attend her
cousins to Rosings, where they were engaged to drink tea. Mrs. Collins,
seeing that she was really unwell, did not press her to go and as much
as possible prevented her husband from pressing her; but Mr. Collins
could not conceal his apprehension of Lady Catherine's being rather
displeased by her staying at home.



Chapter 34


When they were gone, Elizabeth, as if intending to exasperate herself
as much as possible against Mr. Darcy, chose for her employment the
examination of all the letters which Jane had written to her since her
being in Kent. They contained no actual complaint, nor was there any
revival of past occurrences, or any communication of present suffering.
But in all, and in almost every line of each, there was a want of that
cheerfulness which had been used to characterise her style, and which,
proceeding from the serenity of a mind at ease with itself and kindly
disposed towards everyone, had been scarcely ever clouded. Elizabeth
noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an
attention which it had hardly received on the first perusal. Mr. Darcy's
shameful boast of what misery he had been able to inflict, gave her
a keener sense of her sister's sufferings. It was some consolation
to think that his visit to Rosings was to end on the day after the
next--and, a still greater, that in less than a fortnight she should
herself be with Jane again, and enabled to contribute to the recovery of
her spirits, by all that affection could do.

She could not think of Darcy's leaving Kent without remembering that
his cousin was to go with him; but Colonel Fitzwilliam had made it clear
that he had no intentions at all, and agreeable as he was, she did not
mean to be unhappy about him.

While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound of the
door-bell, and her spirits were a little fluttered by the idea of its
being Colonel Fitzwilliam himself, who had once before called late in
the evening, and might now come to inquire particularly after her.
But this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were very differently
affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw Mr. Darcy walk into the
room. In an hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her
health, imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better.
She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few moments, and
then getting up, walked about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but
said not a word. After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her
in an agitated manner, and thus began:

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be
repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love
you.”

Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured,
doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement;
and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long felt for her,
immediately followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides
those of the heart to be detailed; and he was not more eloquent on the
subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority--of
its being a degradation--of the family obstacles which had always
opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to
the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his
suit.

In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to
the compliment of such a man's affection, and though her intentions did
not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to
receive; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she
lost all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to compose herself to
answer him with patience, when he should have done. He concluded with
representing to her the strength of that attachment which, in spite
of all his endeavours, he had found impossible to conquer; and with
expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her acceptance of
his hand. As he said this, she could easily see that he had no doubt
of a favourable answer. He _spoke_ of apprehension and anxiety, but
his countenance expressed real security. Such a circumstance could
only exasperate farther, and, when he ceased, the colour rose into her
cheeks, and she said:

“In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to
express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however
unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation should
be felt, and if I could _feel_ gratitude, I would now thank you. But I
cannot--I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly
bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occasioned pain to
anyone. It has been most unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be
of short duration. The feelings which, you tell me, have long prevented
the acknowledgment of your regard, can have little difficulty in
overcoming it after this explanation.”

Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his eyes fixed
on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less resentment than
surprise. His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance
of his mind was visible in every feature. He was struggling for the
appearance of composure, and would not open his lips till he believed
himself to have attained it. The pause was to Elizabeth's feelings
dreadful. At length, with a voice of forced calmness, he said:

“And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting!
I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little _endeavour_ at
civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.”

“I might as well inquire,” replied she, “why with so evident a desire
of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me
against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?
Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I _was_ uncivil? But I have
other provocations. You know I have. Had not my feelings decided against
you--had they been indifferent, or had they even been favourable, do you
think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has
been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most
beloved sister?”

As she pronounced these words, Mr. Darcy changed colour; but the emotion
was short, and he listened without attempting to interrupt her while she
continued:

“I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive can
excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted _there_. You dare not,
you cannot deny, that you have been the principal, if not the only means
of dividing them from each other--of exposing one to the censure of the
world for caprice and instability, and the other to its derision for
disappointed hopes, and involving them both in misery of the acutest
kind.”

She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was listening
with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any feeling of remorse.
He even looked at her with a smile of affected incredulity.

“Can you deny that you have done it?” she repeated.

With assumed tranquillity he then replied: “I have no wish of denying
that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your
sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards _him_ I have been
kinder than towards myself.”

Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil reflection,
but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to conciliate her.

“But it is not merely this affair,” she continued, “on which my dislike
is founded. Long before it had taken place my opinion of you was
decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received
many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to
say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself?
or under what misrepresentation can you here impose upon others?”

“You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns,” said Darcy,
in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.

“Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help feeling an
interest in him?”

“His misfortunes!” repeated Darcy contemptuously; “yes, his misfortunes
have been great indeed.”

“And of your infliction,” cried Elizabeth with energy. “You have reduced
him to his present state of poverty--comparative poverty. You have
withheld the advantages which you must know to have been designed for
him. You have deprived the best years of his life of that independence
which was no less his due than his desert. You have done all this!
and yet you can treat the mention of his misfortune with contempt and
ridicule.”

“And this,” cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room,
“is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me!
I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this
calculation, are heavy indeed! But perhaps,” added he, stopping in
his walk, and turning towards her, “these offenses might have been
overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the
scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These
bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater
policy, concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of
my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by
reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.
Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and
just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your
connections?--to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose
condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”

Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to
the utmost to speak with composure when she said:

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your
declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern
which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more
gentlemanlike manner.”

She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued:

“You could not have made the offer of your hand in any possible way that
would have tempted me to accept it.”

Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an
expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on:

“From the very beginning--from the first moment, I may almost say--of
my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest
belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of
the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of
disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a
dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the
last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

“You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your
feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been.
Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best
wishes for your health and happiness.”

And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth heard him
the next moment open the front door and quit the house.

The tumult of her mind, was now painfully great. She knew not how
to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for
half-an-hour. Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed,
was increased by every review of it. That she should receive an offer of
marriage from Mr. Darcy! That he should have been in love with her for
so many months! So much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of
all the objections which had made him prevent his friend's marrying
her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his
own case--was almost incredible! It was gratifying to have inspired
unconsciously so strong an affection. But his pride, his abominable
pride--his shameless avowal of what he had done with respect to
Jane--his unpardonable assurance in acknowledging, though he could
not justify it, and the unfeeling manner in which he had mentioned Mr.
Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not attempted to deny, soon
overcame the pity which the consideration of his attachment had for
a moment excited. She continued in very agitated reflections till the
sound of Lady Catherine's carriage made her feel how unequal she was to
encounter Charlotte's observation, and hurried her away to her room.



Chapter 35


Elizabeth awoke the next morning to the same thoughts and meditations
which had at length closed her eyes. She could not yet recover from the
surprise of what had happened; it was impossible to think of anything
else; and, totally indisposed for employment, she resolved, soon after
breakfast, to indulge herself in air and exercise. She was proceeding
directly to her favourite walk, when the recollection of Mr. Darcy's
sometimes coming there stopped her, and instead of entering the park,
she turned up the lane, which led farther from the turnpike-road. The
park paling was still the boundary on one side, and she soon passed one
of the gates into the ground.

After walking two or three times along that part of the lane, she was
tempted, by the pleasantness of the morning, to stop at the gates and
look into the park. The five weeks which she had now passed in Kent had
made a great difference in the country, and every day was adding to the
verdure of the early trees. She was on the point of continuing her walk,
when she caught a glimpse of a gentleman within the sort of grove which
edged the park; he was moving that way; and, fearful of its being Mr.
Darcy, she was directly retreating. But the person who advanced was now
near enough to see her, and stepping forward with eagerness, pronounced
her name. She had turned away; but on hearing herself called, though
in a voice which proved it to be Mr. Darcy, she moved again towards the
gate. He had by that time reached it also, and, holding out a letter,
which she instinctively took, said, with a look of haughty composure,
“I have been walking in the grove some time in the hope of meeting you.
Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?” And then, with a
slight bow, turned again into the plantation, and was soon out of sight.

With no expectation of pleasure, but with the strongest curiosity,
Elizabeth opened the letter, and, to her still increasing wonder,
perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letter-paper, written
quite through, in a very close hand. The envelope itself was likewise
full. Pursuing her way along the lane, she then began it. It was dated
from Rosings, at eight o'clock in the morning, and was as follows:--

“Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension
of its containing any repetition of those sentiments or renewal of those
offers which were last night so disgusting to you. I write without any
intention of paining you, or humbling myself, by dwelling on wishes
which, for the happiness of both, cannot be too soon forgotten; and the
effort which the formation and the perusal of this letter must occasion,
should have been spared, had not my character required it to be written
and read. You must, therefore, pardon the freedom with which I demand
your attention; your feelings, I know, will bestow it unwillingly, but I
demand it of your justice.

“Two offenses of a very different nature, and by no means of equal
magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first mentioned was,
that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had detached Mr. Bingley
from your sister, and the other, that I had, in defiance of various
claims, in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate
prosperity and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham. Wilfully and
wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged
favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other
dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect
its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the separation of two young
persons, whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could
bear no comparison. But from the severity of that blame which was last
night so liberally bestowed, respecting each circumstance, I shall hope
to be in the future secured, when the following account of my actions
and their motives has been read. If, in the explanation of them, which
is due to myself, I am under the necessity of relating feelings which
may be offensive to yours, I can only say that I am sorry. The necessity
must be obeyed, and further apology would be absurd.

“I had not been long in Hertfordshire, before I saw, in common with
others, that Bingley preferred your elder sister to any other young
woman in the country. But it was not till the evening of the dance
at Netherfield that I had any apprehension of his feeling a serious
attachment. I had often seen him in love before. At that ball, while I
had the honour of dancing with you, I was first made acquainted, by Sir
William Lucas's accidental information, that Bingley's attentions to
your sister had given rise to a general expectation of their marriage.
He spoke of it as a certain event, of which the time alone could
be undecided. From that moment I observed my friend's behaviour
attentively; and I could then perceive that his partiality for Miss
Bennet was beyond what I had ever witnessed in him. Your sister I also
watched. Her look and manners were open, cheerful, and engaging as ever,
but without any symptom of peculiar regard, and I remained convinced
from the evening's scrutiny, that though she received his attentions
with pleasure, she did not invite them by any participation of
sentiment. If _you_ have not been mistaken here, _I_ must have been
in error. Your superior knowledge of your sister must make the latter
probable. If it be so, if I have been misled by such error to inflict
pain on her, your resentment has not been unreasonable. But I shall not
scruple to assert, that the serenity of your sister's countenance and
air was such as might have given the most acute observer a conviction
that, however amiable her temper, her heart was not likely to be
easily touched. That I was desirous of believing her indifferent is
certain--but I will venture to say that my investigation and decisions
are not usually influenced by my hopes or fears. I did not believe
her to be indifferent because I wished it; I believed it on impartial
conviction, as truly as I wished it in reason. My objections to the
marriage were not merely those which I last night acknowledged to have
the utmost force of passion to put aside, in my own case; the want of
connection could not be so great an evil to my friend as to me. But
there were other causes of repugnance; causes which, though still
existing, and existing to an equal degree in both instances, I had
myself endeavoured to forget, because they were not immediately before
me. These causes must be stated, though briefly. The situation of your
mother's family, though objectionable, was nothing in comparison to that
total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by
herself, by your three younger sisters, and occasionally even by your
father. Pardon me. It pains me to offend you. But amidst your concern
for the defects of your nearest relations, and your displeasure at this
representation of them, let it give you consolation to consider that, to
have conducted yourselves so as to avoid any share of the like censure,
is praise no less generally bestowed on you and your elder sister, than
it is honourable to the sense and disposition of both. I will only say
farther that from what passed that evening, my opinion of all parties
was confirmed, and every inducement heightened which could have led
me before, to preserve my friend from what I esteemed a most unhappy
connection. He left Netherfield for London, on the day following, as
you, I am certain, remember, with the design of soon returning.

“The part which I acted is now to be explained. His sisters' uneasiness
had been equally excited with my own; our coincidence of feeling was
soon discovered, and, alike sensible that no time was to be lost in
detaching their brother, we shortly resolved on joining him directly in
London. We accordingly went--and there I readily engaged in the office
of pointing out to my friend the certain evils of such a choice. I
described, and enforced them earnestly. But, however this remonstrance
might have staggered or delayed his determination, I do not suppose
that it would ultimately have prevented the marriage, had it not been
seconded by the assurance that I hesitated not in giving, of your
sister's indifference. He had before believed her to return his
affection with sincere, if not with equal regard. But Bingley has great
natural modesty, with a stronger dependence on my judgement than on his
own. To convince him, therefore, that he had deceived himself, was
no very difficult point. To persuade him against returning into
Hertfordshire, when that conviction had been given, was scarcely the
work of a moment. I cannot blame myself for having done thus much. There
is but one part of my conduct in the whole affair on which I do not
reflect with satisfaction; it is that I condescended to adopt the
measures of art so far as to conceal from him your sister's being in
town. I knew it myself, as it was known to Miss Bingley; but her
brother is even yet ignorant of it. That they might have met without
ill consequence is perhaps probable; but his regard did not appear to me
enough extinguished for him to see her without some danger. Perhaps this
concealment, this disguise was beneath me; it is done, however, and it
was done for the best. On this subject I have nothing more to say, no
other apology to offer. If I have wounded your sister's feelings, it
was unknowingly done and though the motives which governed me may to
you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not yet learnt to condemn
them.

“With respect to that other, more weighty accusation, of having injured
Mr. Wickham, I can only refute it by laying before you the whole of his
connection with my family. Of what he has _particularly_ accused me I
am ignorant; but of the truth of what I shall relate, I can summon more
than one witness of undoubted veracity.

“Mr. Wickham is the son of a very respectable man, who had for many
years the management of all the Pemberley estates, and whose good
conduct in the discharge of his trust naturally inclined my father to
be of service to him; and on George Wickham, who was his godson, his
kindness was therefore liberally bestowed. My father supported him at
school, and afterwards at Cambridge--most important assistance, as his
own father, always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would have
been unable to give him a gentleman's education. My father was not only
fond of this young man's society, whose manners were always engaging; he
had also the highest opinion of him, and hoping the church would be
his profession, intended to provide for him in it. As for myself, it is
many, many years since I first began to think of him in a very different
manner. The vicious propensities--the want of principle, which he was
careful to guard from the knowledge of his best friend, could not escape
the observation of a young man of nearly the same age with himself,
and who had opportunities of seeing him in unguarded moments, which Mr.
Darcy could not have. Here again I shall give you pain--to what degree
you only can tell. But whatever may be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham
has created, a suspicion of their nature shall not prevent me from
unfolding his real character--it adds even another motive.

“My excellent father died about five years ago; and his attachment to
Mr. Wickham was to the last so steady, that in his will he particularly
recommended it to me, to promote his advancement in the best manner
that his profession might allow--and if he took orders, desired that a
valuable family living might be his as soon as it became vacant. There
was also a legacy of one thousand pounds. His own father did not long
survive mine, and within half a year from these events, Mr. Wickham
wrote to inform me that, having finally resolved against taking orders,
he hoped I should not think it unreasonable for him to expect some more
immediate pecuniary advantage, in lieu of the preferment, by which he
could not be benefited. He had some intention, he added, of studying
law, and I must be aware that the interest of one thousand pounds would
be a very insufficient support therein. I rather wished, than believed
him to be sincere; but, at any rate, was perfectly ready to accede to
his proposal. I knew that Mr. Wickham ought not to be a clergyman; the
business was therefore soon settled--he resigned all claim to assistance
in the church, were it possible that he could ever be in a situation to
receive it, and accepted in return three thousand pounds. All connection
between us seemed now dissolved. I thought too ill of him to invite him
to Pemberley, or admit his society in town. In town I believe he chiefly
lived, but his studying the law was a mere pretence, and being now free
from all restraint, his life was a life of idleness and dissipation.
For about three years I heard little of him; but on the decease of the
incumbent of the living which had been designed for him, he applied to
me again by letter for the presentation. His circumstances, he assured
me, and I had no difficulty in believing it, were exceedingly bad. He
had found the law a most unprofitable study, and was now absolutely
resolved on being ordained, if I would present him to the living in
question--of which he trusted there could be little doubt, as he was
well assured that I had no other person to provide for, and I could not
have forgotten my revered father's intentions. You will hardly blame
me for refusing to comply with this entreaty, or for resisting every
repetition to it. His resentment was in proportion to the distress of
his circumstances--and he was doubtless as violent in his abuse of me
to others as in his reproaches to myself. After this period every
appearance of acquaintance was dropped. How he lived I know not. But
last summer he was again most painfully obtruded on my notice.

“I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget myself,
and which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold
to any human being. Having said thus much, I feel no doubt of your
secrecy. My sister, who is more than ten years my junior, was left to
the guardianship of my mother's nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and myself.
About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an establishment formed
for her in London; and last summer she went with the lady who presided
over it, to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by
design; for there proved to have been a prior acquaintance between him
and Mrs. Younge, in whose character we were most unhappily deceived; and
by her connivance and aid, he so far recommended himself to Georgiana,
whose affectionate heart retained a strong impression of his kindness to
her as a child, that she was persuaded to believe herself in love, and
to consent to an elopement. She was then but fifteen, which must be her
excuse; and after stating her imprudence, I am happy to add, that I owed
the knowledge of it to herself. I joined them unexpectedly a day or two
before the intended elopement, and then Georgiana, unable to support the
idea of grieving and offending a brother whom she almost looked up to as
a father, acknowledged the whole to me. You may imagine what I felt and
how I acted. Regard for my sister's credit and feelings prevented
any public exposure; but I wrote to Mr. Wickham, who left the place
immediately, and Mrs. Younge was of course removed from her charge. Mr.
Wickham's chief object was unquestionably my sister's fortune, which
is thirty thousand pounds; but I cannot help supposing that the hope of
revenging himself on me was a strong inducement. His revenge would have
been complete indeed.

“This, madam, is a faithful narrative of every event in which we have
been concerned together; and if you do not absolutely reject it as
false, you will, I hope, acquit me henceforth of cruelty towards Mr.
Wickham. I know not in what manner, under what form of falsehood he
had imposed on you; but his success is not perhaps to be wondered
at. Ignorant as you previously were of everything concerning either,
detection could not be in your power, and suspicion certainly not in
your inclination.

“You may possibly wonder why all this was not told you last night; but
I was not then master enough of myself to know what could or ought to
be revealed. For the truth of everything here related, I can appeal more
particularly to the testimony of Colonel Fitzwilliam, who, from our
near relationship and constant intimacy, and, still more, as one of
the executors of my father's will, has been unavoidably acquainted
with every particular of these transactions. If your abhorrence of _me_
should make _my_ assertions valueless, you cannot be prevented by
the same cause from confiding in my cousin; and that there may be
the possibility of consulting him, I shall endeavour to find some
opportunity of putting this letter in your hands in the course of the
morning. I will only add, God bless you.

“FITZWILLIAM DARCY”



Chapter 36


If Elizabeth, when Mr. Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect it to
contain a renewal of his offers, she had formed no expectation at all of
its contents. But such as they were, it may well be supposed how eagerly
she went through them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited.
Her feelings as she read were scarcely to be defined. With amazement did
she first understand that he believed any apology to be in his power;
and steadfastly was she persuaded, that he could have no explanation
to give, which a just sense of shame would not conceal. With a strong
prejudice against everything he might say, she began his account of what
had happened at Netherfield. She read with an eagerness which hardly
left her power of comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the
next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of
the one before her eyes. His belief of her sister's insensibility she
instantly resolved to be false; and his account of the real, the worst
objections to the match, made her too angry to have any wish of doing
him justice. He expressed no regret for what he had done which satisfied
her; his style was not penitent, but haughty. It was all pride and
insolence.

But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr. Wickham--when
she read with somewhat clearer attention a relation of events which,
if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which
bore so alarming an affinity to his own history of himself--her
feelings were yet more acutely painful and more difficult of definition.
Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished
to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, “This must be false!
This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!”--and when she had
gone through the whole letter, though scarcely knowing anything of the
last page or two, put it hastily away, protesting that she would not
regard it, that she would never look in it again.

In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on
nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the letter
was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she could, she
again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and
commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence.
The account of his connection with the Pemberley family was exactly what
he had related himself; and the kindness of the late Mr. Darcy, though
she had not before known its extent, agreed equally well with his own
words. So far each recital confirmed the other; but when she came to the
will, the difference was great. What Wickham had said of the living
was fresh in her memory, and as she recalled his very words, it was
impossible not to feel that there was gross duplicity on one side or the
other; and, for a few moments, she flattered herself that her wishes did
not err. But when she read and re-read with the closest attention, the
particulars immediately following of Wickham's resigning all pretensions
to the living, of his receiving in lieu so considerable a sum as three
thousand pounds, again was she forced to hesitate. She put down
the letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be
impartiality--deliberated on the probability of each statement--but with
little success. On both sides it was only assertion. Again she read
on; but every line proved more clearly that the affair, which she had
believed it impossible that any contrivance could so represent as to
render Mr. Darcy's conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a
turn which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole.

The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not to lay at
Mr. Wickham's charge, exceedingly shocked her; the more so, as she could
bring no proof of its injustice. She had never heard of him before his
entrance into the ----shire Militia, in which he had engaged at the
persuasion of the young man who, on meeting him accidentally in town,
had there renewed a slight acquaintance. Of his former way of life
nothing had been known in Hertfordshire but what he told himself. As
to his real character, had information been in her power, she had
never felt a wish of inquiring. His countenance, voice, and manner had
established him at once in the possession of every virtue. She tried
to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished trait of
integrity or benevolence, that might rescue him from the attacks of
Mr. Darcy; or at least, by the predominance of virtue, atone for those
casual errors under which she would endeavour to class what Mr. Darcy
had described as the idleness and vice of many years' continuance. But
no such recollection befriended her. She could see him instantly before
her, in every charm of air and address; but she could remember no more
substantial good than the general approbation of the neighbourhood, and
the regard which his social powers had gained him in the mess. After
pausing on this point a considerable while, she once more continued to
read. But, alas! the story which followed, of his designs on Miss
Darcy, received some confirmation from what had passed between Colonel
Fitzwilliam and herself only the morning before; and at last she was
referred for the truth of every particular to Colonel Fitzwilliam
himself--from whom she had previously received the information of his
near concern in all his cousin's affairs, and whose character she had no
reason to question. At one time she had almost resolved on applying to
him, but the idea was checked by the awkwardness of the application, and
at length wholly banished by the conviction that Mr. Darcy would never
have hazarded such a proposal, if he had not been well assured of his
cousin's corroboration.

She perfectly remembered everything that had passed in conversation
between Wickham and herself, in their first evening at Mr. Phillips's.
Many of his expressions were still fresh in her memory. She was _now_
struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and
wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting
himself forward as he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions
with his conduct. She remembered that he had boasted of having no fear
of seeing Mr. Darcy--that Mr. Darcy might leave the country, but that
_he_ should stand his ground; yet he had avoided the Netherfield ball
the very next week. She remembered also that, till the Netherfield
family had quitted the country, he had told his story to no one but
herself; but that after their removal it had been everywhere discussed;
that he had then no reserves, no scruples in sinking Mr. Darcy's
character, though he had assured her that respect for the father would
always prevent his exposing the son.

How differently did everything now appear in which he was concerned!
His attentions to Miss King were now the consequence of views solely and
hatefully mercenary; and the mediocrity of her fortune proved no longer
the moderation of his wishes, but his eagerness to grasp at anything.
His behaviour to herself could now have had no tolerable motive; he had
either been deceived with regard to her fortune, or had been gratifying
his vanity by encouraging the preference which she believed she had most
incautiously shown. Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter
and fainter; and in farther justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not
but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago
asserted his blamelessness in the affair; that proud and repulsive as
were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their
acquaintance--an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much
together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways--seen anything
that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust--anything that spoke him
of irreligious or immoral habits; that among his own connections he was
esteemed and valued--that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a
brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his
sister as to prove him capable of _some_ amiable feeling; that had his
actions been what Mr. Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of
everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and
that friendship between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man
as Mr. Bingley, was incomprehensible.

She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham
could she think without feeling she had been blind, partial, prejudiced,
absurd.

“How despicably I have acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself
on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have
often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified
my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this
discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could
not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my
folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect
of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted
prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were
concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.”

From herself to Jane--from Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were in a line
which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy's explanation
_there_ had appeared very insufficient, and she read it again. Widely
different was the effect of a second perusal. How could she deny that
credit to his assertions in one instance, which she had been obliged to
give in the other? He declared himself to be totally unsuspicious of her
sister's attachment; and she could not help remembering what Charlotte's
opinion had always been. Neither could she deny the justice of his
description of Jane. She felt that Jane's feelings, though fervent, were
little displayed, and that there was a constant complacency in her air
and manner not often united with great sensibility.

When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were
mentioned in terms of such mortifying, yet merited reproach, her sense
of shame was severe. The justice of the charge struck her too forcibly
for denial, and the circumstances to which he particularly alluded as
having passed at the Netherfield ball, and as confirming all his first
disapprobation, could not have made a stronger impression on his mind
than on hers.

The compliment to herself and her sister was not unfelt. It soothed,
but it could not console her for the contempt which had thus been
self-attracted by the rest of her family; and as she considered
that Jane's disappointment had in fact been the work of her nearest
relations, and reflected how materially the credit of both must be hurt
by such impropriety of conduct, she felt depressed beyond anything she
had ever known before.

After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to every
variety of thought--re-considering events, determining probabilities,
and reconciling herself, as well as she could, to a change so sudden and
so important, fatigue, and a recollection of her long absence, made
her at length return home; and she entered the house with the wish
of appearing cheerful as usual, and the resolution of repressing such
reflections as must make her unfit for conversation.

She was immediately told that the two gentlemen from Rosings had each
called during her absence; Mr. Darcy, only for a few minutes, to take
leave--but that Colonel Fitzwilliam had been sitting with them at least
an hour, hoping for her return, and almost resolving to walk after her
till she could be found. Elizabeth could but just _affect_ concern
in missing him; she really rejoiced at it. Colonel Fitzwilliam was no
longer an object; she could think only of her letter.



Chapter 37


The two gentlemen left Rosings the next morning, and Mr. Collins having
been in waiting near the lodges, to make them his parting obeisance, was
able to bring home the pleasing intelligence, of their appearing in very
good health, and in as tolerable spirits as could be expected, after the
melancholy scene so lately gone through at Rosings. To Rosings he then
hastened, to console Lady Catherine and her daughter; and on his return
brought back, with great satisfaction, a message from her ladyship,
importing that she felt herself so dull as to make her very desirous of
having them all to dine with her.

Elizabeth could not see Lady Catherine without recollecting that, had
she chosen it, she might by this time have been presented to her as
her future niece; nor could she think, without a smile, of what her
ladyship's indignation would have been. “What would she have said? how
would she have behaved?” were questions with which she amused herself.

Their first subject was the diminution of the Rosings party. “I assure
you, I feel it exceedingly,” said Lady Catherine; “I believe no one
feels the loss of friends so much as I do. But I am particularly
attached to these young men, and know them to be so much attached to
me! They were excessively sorry to go! But so they always are. The
dear Colonel rallied his spirits tolerably till just at last; but Darcy
seemed to feel it most acutely, more, I think, than last year. His
attachment to Rosings certainly increases.”

Mr. Collins had a compliment, and an allusion to throw in here, which
were kindly smiled on by the mother and daughter.

Lady Catherine observed, after dinner, that Miss Bennet seemed out of
spirits, and immediately accounting for it by herself, by supposing that
she did not like to go home again so soon, she added:

“But if that is the case, you must write to your mother and beg that
you may stay a little longer. Mrs. Collins will be very glad of your
company, I am sure.”

“I am much obliged to your ladyship for your kind invitation,” replied
Elizabeth, “but it is not in my power to accept it. I must be in town
next Saturday.”

“Why, at that rate, you will have been here only six weeks. I expected
you to stay two months. I told Mrs. Collins so before you came. There
can be no occasion for your going so soon. Mrs. Bennet could certainly
spare you for another fortnight.”

“But my father cannot. He wrote last week to hurry my return.”

“Oh! your father of course may spare you, if your mother can. Daughters
are never of so much consequence to a father. And if you will stay
another _month_ complete, it will be in my power to take one of you as
far as London, for I am going there early in June, for a week; and as
Dawson does not object to the barouche-box, there will be very good room
for one of you--and indeed, if the weather should happen to be cool, I
should not object to taking you both, as you are neither of you large.”

“You are all kindness, madam; but I believe we must abide by our
original plan.”

Lady Catherine seemed resigned. “Mrs. Collins, you must send a servant
with them. You know I always speak my mind, and I cannot bear the idea
of two young women travelling post by themselves. It is highly improper.
You must contrive to send somebody. I have the greatest dislike in
the world to that sort of thing. Young women should always be properly
guarded and attended, according to their situation in life. When my
niece Georgiana went to Ramsgate last summer, I made a point of her
having two men-servants go with her. Miss Darcy, the daughter of
Mr. Darcy, of Pemberley, and Lady Anne, could not have appeared with
propriety in a different manner. I am excessively attentive to all those
things. You must send John with the young ladies, Mrs. Collins. I
am glad it occurred to me to mention it; for it would really be
discreditable to _you_ to let them go alone.”

“My uncle is to send a servant for us.”

“Oh! Your uncle! He keeps a man-servant, does he? I am very glad you
have somebody who thinks of these things. Where shall you change horses?
Oh! Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the Bell, you will be
attended to.”

Lady Catherine had many other questions to ask respecting their journey,
and as she did not answer them all herself, attention was necessary,
which Elizabeth believed to be lucky for her; or, with a mind so
occupied, she might have forgotten where she was. Reflection must be
reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it
as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary
walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant
recollections.

Mr. Darcy's letter she was in a fair way of soon knowing by heart. She
studied every sentence; and her feelings towards its writer were at
times widely different. When she remembered the style of his address,
she was still full of indignation; but when she considered how unjustly
she had condemned and upbraided him, her anger was turned against
herself; and his disappointed feelings became the object of compassion.
His attachment excited gratitude, his general character respect; but she
could not approve him; nor could she for a moment repent her refusal,
or feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again. In her own past
behaviour, there was a constant source of vexation and regret; and in
the unhappy defects of her family, a subject of yet heavier chagrin.
They were hopeless of remedy. Her father, contented with laughing at
them, would never exert himself to restrain the wild giddiness of his
youngest daughters; and her mother, with manners so far from right
herself, was entirely insensible of the evil. Elizabeth had frequently
united with Jane in an endeavour to check the imprudence of Catherine
and Lydia; but while they were supported by their mother's indulgence,
what chance could there be of improvement? Catherine, weak-spirited,
irritable, and completely under Lydia's guidance, had been always
affronted by their advice; and Lydia, self-willed and careless, would
scarcely give them a hearing. They were ignorant, idle, and vain. While
there was an officer in Meryton, they would flirt with him; and while
Meryton was within a walk of Longbourn, they would be going there
forever.

Anxiety on Jane's behalf was another prevailing concern; and Mr. Darcy's
explanation, by restoring Bingley to all her former good opinion,
heightened the sense of what Jane had lost. His affection was proved
to have been sincere, and his conduct cleared of all blame, unless any
could attach to the implicitness of his confidence in his friend. How
grievous then was the thought that, of a situation so desirable in every
respect, so replete with advantage, so promising for happiness, Jane had
been deprived, by the folly and indecorum of her own family!

When to these recollections was added the development of Wickham's
character, it may be easily believed that the happy spirits which had
seldom been depressed before, were now so much affected as to make it
almost impossible for her to appear tolerably cheerful.

Their engagements at Rosings were as frequent during the last week of
her stay as they had been at first. The very last evening was spent
there; and her ladyship again inquired minutely into the particulars of
their journey, gave them directions as to the best method of packing,
and was so urgent on the necessity of placing gowns in the only right
way, that Maria thought herself obliged, on her return, to undo all the
work of the morning, and pack her trunk afresh.

When they parted, Lady Catherine, with great condescension, wished them
a good journey, and invited them to come to Hunsford again next year;
and Miss de Bourgh exerted herself so far as to curtsey and hold out her
hand to both.



Chapter 38


On Saturday morning Elizabeth and Mr. Collins met for breakfast a few
minutes before the others appeared; and he took the opportunity of
paying the parting civilities which he deemed indispensably necessary.

“I know not, Miss Elizabeth,” said he, “whether Mrs. Collins has yet
expressed her sense of your kindness in coming to us; but I am very
certain you will not leave the house without receiving her thanks for
it. The favour of your company has been much felt, I assure you. We
know how little there is to tempt anyone to our humble abode. Our plain
manner of living, our small rooms and few domestics, and the little we
see of the world, must make Hunsford extremely dull to a young lady like
yourself; but I hope you will believe us grateful for the condescension,
and that we have done everything in our power to prevent your spending
your time unpleasantly.”

Elizabeth was eager with her thanks and assurances of happiness. She
had spent six weeks with great enjoyment; and the pleasure of being with
Charlotte, and the kind attentions she had received, must make _her_
feel the obliged. Mr. Collins was gratified, and with a more smiling
solemnity replied:

“It gives me great pleasure to hear that you have passed your time not
disagreeably. We have certainly done our best; and most fortunately
having it in our power to introduce you to very superior society, and,
from our connection with Rosings, the frequent means of varying the
humble home scene, I think we may flatter ourselves that your Hunsford
visit cannot have been entirely irksome. Our situation with regard to
Lady Catherine's family is indeed the sort of extraordinary advantage
and blessing which few can boast. You see on what a footing we are. You
see how continually we are engaged there. In truth I must acknowledge
that, with all the disadvantages of this humble parsonage, I should
not think anyone abiding in it an object of compassion, while they are
sharers of our intimacy at Rosings.”

Words were insufficient for the elevation of his feelings; and he was
obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility
and truth in a few short sentences.

“You may, in fact, carry a very favourable report of us into
Hertfordshire, my dear cousin. I flatter myself at least that you will
be able to do so. Lady Catherine's great attentions to Mrs. Collins you
have been a daily witness of; and altogether I trust it does not appear
that your friend has drawn an unfortunate--but on this point it will be
as well to be silent. Only let me assure you, my dear Miss Elizabeth,
that I can from my heart most cordially wish you equal felicity in
marriage. My dear Charlotte and I have but one mind and one way of
thinking. There is in everything a most remarkable resemblance of
character and ideas between us. We seem to have been designed for each
other.”

Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was
the case, and with equal sincerity could add, that she firmly believed
and rejoiced in his domestic comforts. She was not sorry, however, to
have the recital of them interrupted by the lady from whom they sprang.
Poor Charlotte! it was melancholy to leave her to such society! But she
had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently regretting that
her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion. Her
home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their
dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.

At length the chaise arrived, the trunks were fastened on, the parcels
placed within, and it was pronounced to be ready. After an affectionate
parting between the friends, Elizabeth was attended to the carriage by
Mr. Collins, and as they walked down the garden he was commissioning her
with his best respects to all her family, not forgetting his thanks
for the kindness he had received at Longbourn in the winter, and his
compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, though unknown. He then handed her
in, Maria followed, and the door was on the point of being closed,
when he suddenly reminded them, with some consternation, that they had
hitherto forgotten to leave any message for the ladies at Rosings.

“But,” he added, “you will of course wish to have your humble respects
delivered to them, with your grateful thanks for their kindness to you
while you have been here.”

Elizabeth made no objection; the door was then allowed to be shut, and
the carriage drove off.

“Good gracious!” cried Maria, after a few minutes' silence, “it seems
but a day or two since we first came! and yet how many things have
happened!”

“A great many indeed,” said her companion with a sigh.

“We have dined nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there twice!
How much I shall have to tell!”

Elizabeth added privately, “And how much I shall have to conceal!”

Their journey was performed without much conversation, or any alarm; and
within four hours of their leaving Hunsford they reached Mr. Gardiner's
house, where they were to remain a few days.

Jane looked well, and Elizabeth had little opportunity of studying her
spirits, amidst the various engagements which the kindness of her
aunt had reserved for them. But Jane was to go home with her, and at
Longbourn there would be leisure enough for observation.

It was not without an effort, meanwhile, that she could wait even for
Longbourn, before she told her sister of Mr. Darcy's proposals. To know
that she had the power of revealing what would so exceedingly astonish
Jane, and must, at the same time, so highly gratify whatever of her own
vanity she had not yet been able to reason away, was such a temptation
to openness as nothing could have conquered but the state of indecision
in which she remained as to the extent of what she should communicate;
and her fear, if she once entered on the subject, of being hurried
into repeating something of Bingley which might only grieve her sister
further.



Chapter 39


It was the second week in May, in which the three young ladies set out
together from Gracechurch Street for the town of ----, in Hertfordshire;
and, as they drew near the appointed inn where Mr. Bennet's carriage
was to meet them, they quickly perceived, in token of the coachman's
punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia looking out of a dining-room up stairs.
These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed
in visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and
dressing a salad and cucumber.

After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table set
out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords, exclaiming,
“Is not this nice? Is not this an agreeable surprise?”

“And we mean to treat you all,” added Lydia, “but you must lend us the
money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there.” Then, showing
her purchases--“Look here, I have bought this bonnet. I do not think
it is very pretty; but I thought I might as well buy it as not. I shall
pull it to pieces as soon as I get home, and see if I can make it up any
better.”

And when her sisters abused it as ugly, she added, with perfect
unconcern, “Oh! but there were two or three much uglier in the shop; and
when I have bought some prettier-coloured satin to trim it with fresh, I
think it will be very tolerable. Besides, it will not much signify what
one wears this summer, after the ----shire have left Meryton, and they
are going in a fortnight.”

“Are they indeed!” cried Elizabeth, with the greatest satisfaction.

“They are going to be encamped near Brighton; and I do so want papa to
take us all there for the summer! It would be such a delicious scheme;
and I dare say would hardly cost anything at all. Mamma would like to
go too of all things! Only think what a miserable summer else we shall
have!”

“Yes,” thought Elizabeth, “_that_ would be a delightful scheme indeed,
and completely do for us at once. Good Heaven! Brighton, and a whole
campful of soldiers, to us, who have been overset already by one poor
regiment of militia, and the monthly balls of Meryton!”

“Now I have got some news for you,” said Lydia, as they sat down at
table. “What do you think? It is excellent news--capital news--and about
a certain person we all like!”

Jane and Elizabeth looked at each other, and the waiter was told he need
not stay. Lydia laughed, and said:

“Aye, that is just like your formality and discretion. You thought the
waiter must not hear, as if he cared! I dare say he often hears worse
things said than I am going to say. But he is an ugly fellow! I am glad
he is gone. I never saw such a long chin in my life. Well, but now for
my news; it is about dear Wickham; too good for the waiter, is it not?
There is no danger of Wickham's marrying Mary King. There's for you! She
is gone down to her uncle at Liverpool: gone to stay. Wickham is safe.”

“And Mary King is safe!” added Elizabeth; “safe from a connection
imprudent as to fortune.”

“She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him.”

“But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side,” said Jane.

“I am sure there is not on _his_. I will answer for it, he never cared
three straws about her--who could about such a nasty little freckled
thing?”

Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of such
coarseness of _expression_ herself, the coarseness of the _sentiment_
was little other than her own breast had harboured and fancied liberal!

As soon as all had ate, and the elder ones paid, the carriage was
ordered; and after some contrivance, the whole party, with all their
boxes, work-bags, and parcels, and the unwelcome addition of Kitty's and
Lydia's purchases, were seated in it.

“How nicely we are all crammed in,” cried Lydia. “I am glad I bought my
bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another bandbox! Well, now
let us be quite comfortable and snug, and talk and laugh all the way
home. And in the first place, let us hear what has happened to you all
since you went away. Have you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any
flirting? I was in great hopes that one of you would have got a husband
before you came back. Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare.
She is almost three-and-twenty! Lord, how ashamed I should be of not
being married before three-and-twenty! My aunt Phillips wants you so to
get husbands, you can't think. She says Lizzy had better have taken Mr.
Collins; but _I_ do not think there would have been any fun in it. Lord!
how I should like to be married before any of you; and then I would
chaperon you about to all the balls. Dear me! we had such a good piece
of fun the other day at Colonel Forster's. Kitty and me were to spend
the day there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have a little dance in the
evening; (by the bye, Mrs. Forster and me are _such_ friends!) and so
she asked the two Harringtons to come, but Harriet was ill, and so Pen
was forced to come by herself; and then, what do you think we did? We
dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes on purpose to pass for a
lady, only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs.
Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow
one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny,
and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they
did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs.
Forster. I thought I should have died. And _that_ made the men suspect
something, and then they soon found out what was the matter.”

With such kinds of histories of their parties and good jokes, did
Lydia, assisted by Kitty's hints and additions, endeavour to amuse her
companions all the way to Longbourn. Elizabeth listened as little as she
could, but there was no escaping the frequent mention of Wickham's name.

Their reception at home was most kind. Mrs. Bennet rejoiced to see Jane
in undiminished beauty; and more than once during dinner did Mr. Bennet
say voluntarily to Elizabeth:

“I am glad you are come back, Lizzy.”

Their party in the dining-room was large, for almost all the Lucases
came to meet Maria and hear the news; and various were the subjects that
occupied them: Lady Lucas was inquiring of Maria, after the welfare and
poultry of her eldest daughter; Mrs. Bennet was doubly engaged, on one
hand collecting an account of the present fashions from Jane, who sat
some way below her, and, on the other, retailing them all to the younger
Lucases; and Lydia, in a voice rather louder than any other person's,
was enumerating the various pleasures of the morning to anybody who
would hear her.

“Oh! Mary,” said she, “I wish you had gone with us, for we had such fun!
As we went along, Kitty and I drew up the blinds, and pretended there
was nobody in the coach; and I should have gone so all the way, if Kitty
had not been sick; and when we got to the George, I do think we behaved
very handsomely, for we treated the other three with the nicest cold
luncheon in the world, and if you would have gone, we would have treated
you too. And then when we came away it was such fun! I thought we never
should have got into the coach. I was ready to die of laughter. And then
we were so merry all the way home! we talked and laughed so loud, that
anybody might have heard us ten miles off!”

To this Mary very gravely replied, “Far be it from me, my dear sister,
to depreciate such pleasures! They would doubtless be congenial with the
generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for
_me_--I should infinitely prefer a book.”

But of this answer Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened to
anybody for more than half a minute, and never attended to Mary at all.

In the afternoon Lydia was urgent with the rest of the girls to walk
to Meryton, and to see how everybody went on; but Elizabeth steadily
opposed the scheme. It should not be said that the Miss Bennets could
not be at home half a day before they were in pursuit of the officers.
There was another reason too for her opposition. She dreaded seeing Mr.
Wickham again, and was resolved to avoid it as long as possible. The
comfort to _her_ of the regiment's approaching removal was indeed beyond
expression. In a fortnight they were to go--and once gone, she hoped
there could be nothing more to plague her on his account.

She had not been many hours at home before she found that the Brighton
scheme, of which Lydia had given them a hint at the inn, was under
frequent discussion between her parents. Elizabeth saw directly that her
father had not the smallest intention of yielding; but his answers were
at the same time so vague and equivocal, that her mother, though often
disheartened, had never yet despaired of succeeding at last.



Chapter 40


Elizabeth's impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could
no longer be overcome; and at length, resolving to suppress every
particular in which her sister was concerned, and preparing her to be
surprised, she related to her the next morning the chief of the scene
between Mr. Darcy and herself.

Miss Bennet's astonishment was soon lessened by the strong sisterly
partiality which made any admiration of Elizabeth appear perfectly
natural; and all surprise was shortly lost in other feelings. She was
sorry that Mr. Darcy should have delivered his sentiments in a manner so
little suited to recommend them; but still more was she grieved for the
unhappiness which her sister's refusal must have given him.

“His being so sure of succeeding was wrong,” said she, “and certainly
ought not to have appeared; but consider how much it must increase his
disappointment!”

“Indeed,” replied Elizabeth, “I am heartily sorry for him; but he has
other feelings, which will probably soon drive away his regard for me.
You do not blame me, however, for refusing him?”

“Blame you! Oh, no.”

“But you blame me for having spoken so warmly of Wickham?”

“No--I do not know that you were wrong in saying what you did.”

“But you _will_ know it, when I tell you what happened the very next
day.”

She then spoke of the letter, repeating the whole of its contents as far
as they concerned George Wickham. What a stroke was this for poor Jane!
who would willingly have gone through the world without believing that
so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind, as was here
collected in one individual. Nor was Darcy's vindication, though
grateful to her feelings, capable of consoling her for such discovery.
Most earnestly did she labour to prove the probability of error, and
seek to clear the one without involving the other.

“This will not do,” said Elizabeth; “you never will be able to make both
of them good for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied
with only one. There is but such a quantity of merit between them; just
enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting
about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Darcy's;
but you shall do as you choose.”

It was some time, however, before a smile could be extorted from Jane.

“I do not know when I have been more shocked,” said she. “Wickham so
very bad! It is almost past belief. And poor Mr. Darcy! Dear Lizzy, only
consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and with the
knowledge of your ill opinion, too! and having to relate such a thing
of his sister! It is really too distressing. I am sure you must feel it
so.”

“Oh! no, my regret and compassion are all done away by seeing you so
full of both. I know you will do him such ample justice, that I am
growing every moment more unconcerned and indifferent. Your profusion
makes me saving; and if you lament over him much longer, my heart will
be as light as a feather.”

“Poor Wickham! there is such an expression of goodness in his
countenance! such an openness and gentleness in his manner!”

“There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those
two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the
appearance of it.”

“I never thought Mr. Darcy so deficient in the _appearance_ of it as you
used to do.”

“And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike
to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one's genius, such an
opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually
abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot always be laughing
at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”

“Lizzy, when you first read that letter, I am sure you could not treat
the matter as you do now.”

“Indeed, I could not. I was uncomfortable enough, I may say unhappy. And
with no one to speak to about what I felt, no Jane to comfort me and say
that I had not been so very weak and vain and nonsensical as I knew I
had! Oh! how I wanted you!”

“How unfortunate that you should have used such very strong expressions
in speaking of Wickham to Mr. Darcy, for now they _do_ appear wholly
undeserved.”

“Certainly. But the misfortune of speaking with bitterness is a most
natural consequence of the prejudices I had been encouraging. There
is one point on which I want your advice. I want to be told whether I
ought, or ought not, to make our acquaintances in general understand
Wickham's character.”

Miss Bennet paused a little, and then replied, “Surely there can be no
occasion for exposing him so dreadfully. What is your opinion?”

“That it ought not to be attempted. Mr. Darcy has not authorised me
to make his communication public. On the contrary, every particular
relative to his sister was meant to be kept as much as possible to
myself; and if I endeavour to undeceive people as to the rest of his
conduct, who will believe me? The general prejudice against Mr. Darcy
is so violent, that it would be the death of half the good people in
Meryton to attempt to place him in an amiable light. I am not equal
to it. Wickham will soon be gone; and therefore it will not signify to
anyone here what he really is. Some time hence it will be all found out,
and then we may laugh at their stupidity in not knowing it before. At
present I will say nothing about it.”

“You are quite right. To have his errors made public might ruin him for
ever. He is now, perhaps, sorry for what he has done, and anxious to
re-establish a character. We must not make him desperate.”

The tumult of Elizabeth's mind was allayed by this conversation. She had
got rid of two of the secrets which had weighed on her for a fortnight,
and was certain of a willing listener in Jane, whenever she might wish
to talk again of either. But there was still something lurking behind,
of which prudence forbade the disclosure. She dared not relate the other
half of Mr. Darcy's letter, nor explain to her sister how sincerely she
had been valued by her friend. Here was knowledge in which no one
could partake; and she was sensible that nothing less than a perfect
understanding between the parties could justify her in throwing off
this last encumbrance of mystery. “And then,” said she, “if that very
improbable event should ever take place, I shall merely be able to
tell what Bingley may tell in a much more agreeable manner himself. The
liberty of communication cannot be mine till it has lost all its value!”

She was now, on being settled at home, at leisure to observe the real
state of her sister's spirits. Jane was not happy. She still cherished a
very tender affection for Bingley. Having never even fancied herself
in love before, her regard had all the warmth of first attachment,
and, from her age and disposition, greater steadiness than most first
attachments often boast; and so fervently did she value his remembrance,
and prefer him to every other man, that all her good sense, and all her
attention to the feelings of her friends, were requisite to check the
indulgence of those regrets which must have been injurious to her own
health and their tranquillity.

“Well, Lizzy,” said Mrs. Bennet one day, “what is your opinion _now_ of
this sad business of Jane's? For my part, I am determined never to speak
of it again to anybody. I told my sister Phillips so the other day. But
I cannot find out that Jane saw anything of him in London. Well, he is
a very undeserving young man--and I do not suppose there's the least
chance in the world of her ever getting him now. There is no talk of
his coming to Netherfield again in the summer; and I have inquired of
everybody, too, who is likely to know.”

“I do not believe he will ever live at Netherfield any more.”

“Oh well! it is just as he chooses. Nobody wants him to come. Though I
shall always say he used my daughter extremely ill; and if I was her, I
would not have put up with it. Well, my comfort is, I am sure Jane will
die of a broken heart; and then he will be sorry for what he has done.”

But as Elizabeth could not receive comfort from any such expectation,
she made no answer.

“Well, Lizzy,” continued her mother, soon afterwards, “and so the
Collinses live very comfortable, do they? Well, well, I only hope
it will last. And what sort of table do they keep? Charlotte is an
excellent manager, I dare say. If she is half as sharp as her
mother, she is saving enough. There is nothing extravagant in _their_
housekeeping, I dare say.”

“No, nothing at all.”

“A great deal of good management, depend upon it. Yes, yes, _they_ will
take care not to outrun their income. _They_ will never be distressed
for money. Well, much good may it do them! And so, I suppose, they often
talk of having Longbourn when your father is dead. They look upon it as
quite their own, I dare say, whenever that happens.”

“It was a subject which they could not mention before me.”

“No; it would have been strange if they had; but I make no doubt they
often talk of it between themselves. Well, if they can be easy with an
estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. I should be
ashamed of having one that was only entailed on me.”



Chapter 41


The first week of their return was soon gone. The second began. It was
the last of the regiment's stay in Meryton, and all the young ladies
in the neighbourhood were drooping apace. The dejection was almost
universal. The elder Miss Bennets alone were still able to eat, drink,
and sleep, and pursue the usual course of their employments. Very
frequently were they reproached for this insensibility by Kitty and
Lydia, whose own misery was extreme, and who could not comprehend such
hard-heartedness in any of the family.

“Good Heaven! what is to become of us? What are we to do?” would they
often exclaim in the bitterness of woe. “How can you be smiling so,
Lizzy?”

Their affectionate mother shared all their grief; she remembered what
she had herself endured on a similar occasion, five-and-twenty years
ago.

“I am sure,” said she, “I cried for two days together when Colonel
Miller's regiment went away. I thought I should have broken my heart.”

“I am sure I shall break _mine_,” said Lydia.

“If one could but go to Brighton!” observed Mrs. Bennet.

“Oh, yes!--if one could but go to Brighton! But papa is so
disagreeable.”

“A little sea-bathing would set me up forever.”

“And my aunt Phillips is sure it would do _me_ a great deal of good,”
 added Kitty.

Such were the kind of lamentations resounding perpetually through
Longbourn House. Elizabeth tried to be diverted by them; but all sense
of pleasure was lost in shame. She felt anew the justice of Mr. Darcy's
objections; and never had she been so much disposed to pardon his
interference in the views of his friend.

But the gloom of Lydia's prospect was shortly cleared away; for she
received an invitation from Mrs. Forster, the wife of the colonel of
the regiment, to accompany her to Brighton. This invaluable friend was a
very young woman, and very lately married. A resemblance in good humour
and good spirits had recommended her and Lydia to each other, and out of
their _three_ months' acquaintance they had been intimate _two_.

The rapture of Lydia on this occasion, her adoration of Mrs. Forster,
the delight of Mrs. Bennet, and the mortification of Kitty, are scarcely
to be described. Wholly inattentive to her sister's feelings, Lydia
flew about the house in restless ecstasy, calling for everyone's
congratulations, and laughing and talking with more violence than ever;
whilst the luckless Kitty continued in the parlour repined at her fate
in terms as unreasonable as her accent was peevish.

“I cannot see why Mrs. Forster should not ask _me_ as well as Lydia,”
 said she, “Though I am _not_ her particular friend. I have just as much
right to be asked as she has, and more too, for I am two years older.”

In vain did Elizabeth attempt to make her reasonable, and Jane to make
her resigned. As for Elizabeth herself, this invitation was so far from
exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother and Lydia, that she
considered it as the death warrant of all possibility of common sense
for the latter; and detestable as such a step must make her were it
known, she could not help secretly advising her father not to let her
go. She represented to him all the improprieties of Lydia's general
behaviour, the little advantage she could derive from the friendship of
such a woman as Mrs. Forster, and the probability of her being yet more
imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where the temptations must
be greater than at home. He heard her attentively, and then said:

“Lydia will never be easy until she has exposed herself in some public
place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so
little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present
circumstances.”

“If you were aware,” said Elizabeth, “of the very great disadvantage to
us all which must arise from the public notice of Lydia's unguarded and
imprudent manner--nay, which has already arisen from it, I am sure you
would judge differently in the affair.”

“Already arisen?” repeated Mr. Bennet. “What, has she frightened away
some of your lovers? Poor little Lizzy! But do not be cast down. Such
squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity
are not worth a regret. Come, let me see the list of pitiful fellows who
have been kept aloof by Lydia's folly.”

“Indeed you are mistaken. I have no such injuries to resent. It is not
of particular, but of general evils, which I am now complaining. Our
importance, our respectability in the world must be affected by the
wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint which mark
Lydia's character. Excuse me, for I must speak plainly. If you, my dear
father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and
of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of
her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character
will be fixed, and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt
that ever made herself or her family ridiculous; a flirt, too, in the
worst and meanest degree of flirtation; without any attraction beyond
youth and a tolerable person; and, from the ignorance and emptiness
of her mind, wholly unable to ward off any portion of that universal
contempt which her rage for admiration will excite. In this danger
Kitty also is comprehended. She will follow wherever Lydia leads. Vain,
ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled! Oh! my dear father, can you
suppose it possible that they will not be censured and despised wherever
they are known, and that their sisters will not be often involved in the
disgrace?”

Mr. Bennet saw that her whole heart was in the subject, and
affectionately taking her hand said in reply:

“Do not make yourself uneasy, my love. Wherever you and Jane are known
you must be respected and valued; and you will not appear to less
advantage for having a couple of--or I may say, three--very silly
sisters. We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to
Brighton. Let her go, then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will
keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an
object of prey to anybody. At Brighton she will be of less importance
even as a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find
women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being
there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow
many degrees worse, without authorising us to lock her up for the rest
of her life.”

With this answer Elizabeth was forced to be content; but her own opinion
continued the same, and she left him disappointed and sorry. It was not
in her nature, however, to increase her vexations by dwelling on
them. She was confident of having performed her duty, and to fret
over unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was no part of her
disposition.

Had Lydia and her mother known the substance of her conference with her
father, their indignation would hardly have found expression in their
united volubility. In Lydia's imagination, a visit to Brighton comprised
every possibility of earthly happiness. She saw, with the creative eye
of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing-place covered with officers.
She saw herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them
at present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp--its tents
stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young
and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and, to complete the view, she
saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six
officers at once.

Had she known her sister sought to tear her from such prospects and such
realities as these, what would have been her sensations? They could have
been understood only by her mother, who might have felt nearly the same.
Lydia's going to Brighton was all that consoled her for her melancholy
conviction of her husband's never intending to go there himself.

But they were entirely ignorant of what had passed; and their raptures
continued, with little intermission, to the very day of Lydia's leaving
home.

Elizabeth was now to see Mr. Wickham for the last time. Having been
frequently in company with him since her return, agitation was pretty
well over; the agitations of former partiality entirely so. She had even
learnt to detect, in the very gentleness which had first delighted
her, an affectation and a sameness to disgust and weary. In his present
behaviour to herself, moreover, she had a fresh source of displeasure,
for the inclination he soon testified of renewing those intentions which
had marked the early part of their acquaintance could only serve, after
what had since passed, to provoke her. She lost all concern for him in
finding herself thus selected as the object of such idle and frivolous
gallantry; and while she steadily repressed it, could not but feel the
reproof contained in his believing, that however long, and for whatever
cause, his attentions had been withdrawn, her vanity would be gratified,
and her preference secured at any time by their renewal.

On the very last day of the regiment's remaining at Meryton, he dined,
with other of the officers, at Longbourn; and so little was Elizabeth
disposed to part from him in good humour, that on his making some
inquiry as to the manner in which her time had passed at Hunsford, she
mentioned Colonel Fitzwilliam's and Mr. Darcy's having both spent three
weeks at Rosings, and asked him, if he was acquainted with the former.

He looked surprised, displeased, alarmed; but with a moment's
recollection and a returning smile, replied, that he had formerly seen
him often; and, after observing that he was a very gentlemanlike man,
asked her how she had liked him. Her answer was warmly in his favour.
With an air of indifference he soon afterwards added:

“How long did you say he was at Rosings?”

“Nearly three weeks.”

“And you saw him frequently?”

“Yes, almost every day.”

“His manners are very different from his cousin's.”

“Yes, very different. But I think Mr. Darcy improves upon acquaintance.”

“Indeed!” cried Mr. Wickham with a look which did not escape her. “And
pray, may I ask?--” But checking himself, he added, in a gayer tone, “Is
it in address that he improves? Has he deigned to add aught of civility
to his ordinary style?--for I dare not hope,” he continued in a lower
and more serious tone, “that he is improved in essentials.”

“Oh, no!” said Elizabeth. “In essentials, I believe, he is very much
what he ever was.”

While she spoke, Wickham looked as if scarcely knowing whether to
rejoice over her words, or to distrust their meaning. There was a
something in her countenance which made him listen with an apprehensive
and anxious attention, while she added:

“When I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean that
his mind or his manners were in a state of improvement, but that, from
knowing him better, his disposition was better understood.”

Wickham's alarm now appeared in a heightened complexion and agitated
look; for a few minutes he was silent, till, shaking off his
embarrassment, he turned to her again, and said in the gentlest of
accents:

“You, who so well know my feeling towards Mr. Darcy, will readily
comprehend how sincerely I must rejoice that he is wise enough to assume
even the _appearance_ of what is right. His pride, in that direction,
may be of service, if not to himself, to many others, for it must only
deter him from such foul misconduct as I have suffered by. I only
fear that the sort of cautiousness to which you, I imagine, have been
alluding, is merely adopted on his visits to his aunt, of whose good
opinion and judgement he stands much in awe. His fear of her has always
operated, I know, when they were together; and a good deal is to be
imputed to his wish of forwarding the match with Miss de Bourgh, which I
am certain he has very much at heart.”

Elizabeth could not repress a smile at this, but she answered only by a
slight inclination of the head. She saw that he wanted to engage her on
the old subject of his grievances, and she was in no humour to indulge
him. The rest of the evening passed with the _appearance_, on his
side, of usual cheerfulness, but with no further attempt to distinguish
Elizabeth; and they parted at last with mutual civility, and possibly a
mutual desire of never meeting again.

When the party broke up, Lydia returned with Mrs. Forster to Meryton,
from whence they were to set out early the next morning. The separation
between her and her family was rather noisy than pathetic. Kitty was the
only one who shed tears; but she did weep from vexation and envy. Mrs.
Bennet was diffuse in her good wishes for the felicity of her daughter,
and impressive in her injunctions that she should not miss the
opportunity of enjoying herself as much as possible--advice which
there was every reason to believe would be well attended to; and in
the clamorous happiness of Lydia herself in bidding farewell, the more
gentle adieus of her sisters were uttered without being heard.



Chapter 42


Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could
not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal felicity or domestic
comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance
of good humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a
woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in
their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect,
esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views
of domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of
a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own
imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often
console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of
the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal
enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as
her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not
the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his
wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true
philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her
father's behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but
respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of
herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to
banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation
and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own
children, was so highly reprehensible. But she had never felt so
strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so
unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising
from so ill-judged a direction of talents; talents, which, rightly used,
might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even
if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife.

When Elizabeth had rejoiced over Wickham's departure she found little
other cause for satisfaction in the loss of the regiment. Their parties
abroad were less varied than before, and at home she had a mother and
sister whose constant repinings at the dullness of everything around
them threw a real gloom over their domestic circle; and, though Kitty
might in time regain her natural degree of sense, since the disturbers
of her brain were removed, her other sister, from whose disposition
greater evil might be apprehended, was likely to be hardened in all
her folly and assurance by a situation of such double danger as a
watering-place and a camp. Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what
has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had been
looking with impatient desire did not, in taking place, bring all the
satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to
name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity--to have
some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by
again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the
present, and prepare for another disappointment. Her tour to the Lakes
was now the object of her happiest thoughts; it was her best consolation
for all the uncomfortable hours which the discontentedness of her mother
and Kitty made inevitable; and could she have included Jane in the
scheme, every part of it would have been perfect.

“But it is fortunate,” thought she, “that I have something to wish for.
Were the whole arrangement complete, my disappointment would be certain.
But here, by carrying with me one ceaseless source of regret in my
sister's absence, I may reasonably hope to have all my expectations of
pleasure realised. A scheme of which every part promises delight can
never be successful; and general disappointment is only warded off by
the defence of some little peculiar vexation.”

When Lydia went away she promised to write very often and very minutely
to her mother and Kitty; but her letters were always long expected, and
always very short. Those to her mother contained little else than that
they were just returned from the library, where such and such officers
had attended them, and where she had seen such beautiful ornaments as
made her quite wild; that she had a new gown, or a new parasol, which
she would have described more fully, but was obliged to leave off in a
violent hurry, as Mrs. Forster called her, and they were going off to
the camp; and from her correspondence with her sister, there was still
less to be learnt--for her letters to Kitty, though rather longer, were
much too full of lines under the words to be made public.

After the first fortnight or three weeks of her absence, health, good
humour, and cheerfulness began to reappear at Longbourn. Everything wore
a happier aspect. The families who had been in town for the winter came
back again, and summer finery and summer engagements arose. Mrs. Bennet
was restored to her usual querulous serenity; and, by the middle of
June, Kitty was so much recovered as to be able to enter Meryton without
tears; an event of such happy promise as to make Elizabeth hope that by
the following Christmas she might be so tolerably reasonable as not to
mention an officer above once a day, unless, by some cruel and malicious
arrangement at the War Office, another regiment should be quartered in
Meryton.

The time fixed for the beginning of their northern tour was now fast
approaching, and a fortnight only was wanting of it, when a letter
arrived from Mrs. Gardiner, which at once delayed its commencement and
curtailed its extent. Mr. Gardiner would be prevented by business from
setting out till a fortnight later in July, and must be in London again
within a month, and as that left too short a period for them to go so
far, and see so much as they had proposed, or at least to see it with
the leisure and comfort they had built on, they were obliged to give up
the Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour, and, according to the
present plan, were to go no farther northwards than Derbyshire. In that
county there was enough to be seen to occupy the chief of their three
weeks; and to Mrs. Gardiner it had a peculiarly strong attraction. The
town where she had formerly passed some years of her life, and where
they were now to spend a few days, was probably as great an object of
her curiosity as all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth,
Dovedale, or the Peak.

Elizabeth was excessively disappointed; she had set her heart on seeing
the Lakes, and still thought there might have been time enough. But it
was her business to be satisfied--and certainly her temper to be happy;
and all was soon right again.

With the mention of Derbyshire there were many ideas connected. It was
impossible for her to see the word without thinking of Pemberley and its
owner. “But surely,” said she, “I may enter his county with impunity,
and rob it of a few petrified spars without his perceiving me.”

The period of expectation was now doubled. Four weeks were to pass away
before her uncle and aunt's arrival. But they did pass away, and Mr.
and Mrs. Gardiner, with their four children, did at length appear at
Longbourn. The children, two girls of six and eight years old, and two
younger boys, were to be left under the particular care of their
cousin Jane, who was the general favourite, and whose steady sense and
sweetness of temper exactly adapted her for attending to them in every
way--teaching them, playing with them, and loving them.

The Gardiners stayed only one night at Longbourn, and set off the
next morning with Elizabeth in pursuit of novelty and amusement.
One enjoyment was certain--that of suitableness of companions;
a suitableness which comprehended health and temper to bear
inconveniences--cheerfulness to enhance every pleasure--and affection
and intelligence, which might supply it among themselves if there were
disappointments abroad.

It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire,
nor of any of the remarkable places through which their route thither
lay; Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham, etc. are
sufficiently known. A small part of Derbyshire is all the present
concern. To the little town of Lambton, the scene of Mrs. Gardiner's
former residence, and where she had lately learned some acquaintance
still remained, they bent their steps, after having seen all the
principal wonders of the country; and within five miles of Lambton,
Elizabeth found from her aunt that Pemberley was situated. It was not
in their direct road, nor more than a mile or two out of it. In
talking over their route the evening before, Mrs. Gardiner expressed
an inclination to see the place again. Mr. Gardiner declared his
willingness, and Elizabeth was applied to for her approbation.

“My love, should not you like to see a place of which you have heard
so much?” said her aunt; “a place, too, with which so many of your
acquaintances are connected. Wickham passed all his youth there, you
know.”

Elizabeth was distressed. She felt that she had no business at
Pemberley, and was obliged to assume a disinclination for seeing it. She
must own that she was tired of seeing great houses; after going over so
many, she really had no pleasure in fine carpets or satin curtains.

Mrs. Gardiner abused her stupidity. “If it were merely a fine house
richly furnished,” said she, “I should not care about it myself; but
the grounds are delightful. They have some of the finest woods in the
country.”

Elizabeth said no more--but her mind could not acquiesce. The
possibility of meeting Mr. Darcy, while viewing the place, instantly
occurred. It would be dreadful! She blushed at the very idea, and
thought it would be better to speak openly to her aunt than to run such
a risk. But against this there were objections; and she finally resolved
that it could be the last resource, if her private inquiries to the
absence of the family were unfavourably answered.

Accordingly, when she retired at night, she asked the chambermaid
whether Pemberley were not a very fine place? what was the name of its
proprietor? and, with no little alarm, whether the family were down for
the summer? A most welcome negative followed the last question--and her
alarms now being removed, she was at leisure to feel a great deal of
curiosity to see the house herself; and when the subject was revived the
next morning, and she was again applied to, could readily answer, and
with a proper air of indifference, that she had not really any dislike
to the scheme. To Pemberley, therefore, they were to go.



Chapter 43


Elizabeth, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of
Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned
in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter.

The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground. They
entered it in one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through
a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.

Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired
every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for
half-a-mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable
eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by
Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which
the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone
building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of
high woody hills; and in front, a stream of some natural importance was
swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks
were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She
had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural
beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were
all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that
to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!

They descended the hill, crossed the bridge, and drove to the door; and,
while examining the nearer aspect of the house, all her apprehension of
meeting its owner returned. She dreaded lest the chambermaid had been
mistaken. On applying to see the place, they were admitted into the
hall; and Elizabeth, as they waited for the housekeeper, had leisure to
wonder at her being where she was.

The housekeeper came; a respectable-looking elderly woman, much less
fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her. They
followed her into the dining-parlour. It was a large, well proportioned
room, handsomely fitted up. Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went
to a window to enjoy its prospect. The hill, crowned with wood, which
they had descended, receiving increased abruptness from the distance,
was a beautiful object. Every disposition of the ground was good; and
she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its
banks and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace it,
with delight. As they passed into other rooms these objects were taking
different positions; but from every window there were beauties to be
seen. The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to
the fortune of its proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of
his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of
splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings.

“And of this place,” thought she, “I might have been mistress! With
these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of
viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and
welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But no,”--recollecting
herself--“that could never be; my uncle and aunt would have been lost to
me; I should not have been allowed to invite them.”

This was a lucky recollection--it saved her from something very like
regret.

She longed to inquire of the housekeeper whether her master was really
absent, but had not the courage for it. At length however, the question
was asked by her uncle; and she turned away with alarm, while Mrs.
Reynolds replied that he was, adding, “But we expect him to-morrow, with
a large party of friends.” How rejoiced was Elizabeth that their own
journey had not by any circumstance been delayed a day!

Her aunt now called her to look at a picture. She approached and saw the
likeness of Mr. Wickham, suspended, amongst several other miniatures,
over the mantelpiece. Her aunt asked her, smilingly, how she liked it.
The housekeeper came forward, and told them it was a picture of a young
gentleman, the son of her late master's steward, who had been brought
up by him at his own expense. “He is now gone into the army,” she added;
“but I am afraid he has turned out very wild.”

Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece with a smile, but Elizabeth could not
return it.

“And that,” said Mrs. Reynolds, pointing to another of the miniatures,
“is my master--and very like him. It was drawn at the same time as the
other--about eight years ago.”

“I have heard much of your master's fine person,” said Mrs. Gardiner,
looking at the picture; “it is a handsome face. But, Lizzy, you can tell
us whether it is like or not.”

Mrs. Reynolds respect for Elizabeth seemed to increase on this
intimation of her knowing her master.

“Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?”

Elizabeth coloured, and said: “A little.”

“And do not you think him a very handsome gentleman, ma'am?”

“Yes, very handsome.”

“I am sure I know none so handsome; but in the gallery up stairs you
will see a finer, larger picture of him than this. This room was my late
master's favourite room, and these miniatures are just as they used to
be then. He was very fond of them.”

This accounted to Elizabeth for Mr. Wickham's being among them.

Mrs. Reynolds then directed their attention to one of Miss Darcy, drawn
when she was only eight years old.

“And is Miss Darcy as handsome as her brother?” said Mrs. Gardiner.

“Oh! yes--the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so
accomplished!--She plays and sings all day long. In the next room is
a new instrument just come down for her--a present from my master; she
comes here to-morrow with him.”

Mr. Gardiner, whose manners were very easy and pleasant, encouraged her
communicativeness by his questions and remarks; Mrs. Reynolds, either
by pride or attachment, had evidently great pleasure in talking of her
master and his sister.

“Is your master much at Pemberley in the course of the year?”

“Not so much as I could wish, sir; but I dare say he may spend half his
time here; and Miss Darcy is always down for the summer months.”

“Except,” thought Elizabeth, “when she goes to Ramsgate.”

“If your master would marry, you might see more of him.”

“Yes, sir; but I do not know when _that_ will be. I do not know who is
good enough for him.”

Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying, “It is
very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so.”

“I say no more than the truth, and everybody will say that knows him,”
 replied the other. Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far; and she
listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added, “I have
never known a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever
since he was four years old.”

This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her
ideas. That he was not a good-tempered man had been her firmest opinion.
Her keenest attention was awakened; she longed to hear more, and was
grateful to her uncle for saying:

“There are very few people of whom so much can be said. You are lucky in
having such a master.”

“Yes, sir, I know I am. If I were to go through the world, I could
not meet with a better. But I have always observed, that they who are
good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and
he was always the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted boy in the
world.”

Elizabeth almost stared at her. “Can this be Mr. Darcy?” thought she.

“His father was an excellent man,” said Mrs. Gardiner.

“Yes, ma'am, that he was indeed; and his son will be just like him--just
as affable to the poor.”

Elizabeth listened, wondered, doubted, and was impatient for more. Mrs.
Reynolds could interest her on no other point. She related the subjects
of the pictures, the dimensions of the rooms, and the price of the
furniture, in vain. Mr. Gardiner, highly amused by the kind of family
prejudice to which he attributed her excessive commendation of her
master, soon led again to the subject; and she dwelt with energy on his
many merits as they proceeded together up the great staircase.

“He is the best landlord, and the best master,” said she, “that ever
lived; not like the wild young men nowadays, who think of nothing but
themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but will give
him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw
anything of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle away
like other young men.”

“In what an amiable light does this place him!” thought Elizabeth.

“This fine account of him,” whispered her aunt as they walked, “is not
quite consistent with his behaviour to our poor friend.”

“Perhaps we might be deceived.”

“That is not very likely; our authority was too good.”

On reaching the spacious lobby above they were shown into a very pretty
sitting-room, lately fitted up with greater elegance and lightness than
the apartments below; and were informed that it was but just done to
give pleasure to Miss Darcy, who had taken a liking to the room when
last at Pemberley.

“He is certainly a good brother,” said Elizabeth, as she walked towards
one of the windows.

Mrs. Reynolds anticipated Miss Darcy's delight, when she should enter
the room. “And this is always the way with him,” she added. “Whatever
can give his sister any pleasure is sure to be done in a moment. There
is nothing he would not do for her.”

The picture-gallery, and two or three of the principal bedrooms, were
all that remained to be shown. In the former were many good paintings;
but Elizabeth knew nothing of the art; and from such as had been already
visible below, she had willingly turned to look at some drawings of Miss
Darcy's, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and
also more intelligible.

In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have
little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked in quest of
the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested
her--and she beheld a striking resemblance to Mr. Darcy, with such a
smile over the face as she remembered to have sometimes seen when he
looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest
contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery.
Mrs. Reynolds informed them that it had been taken in his father's
lifetime.

There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle
sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at the height of
their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds
was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise
of an intelligent servant? As a brother, a landlord, a master, she
considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship!--how
much of pleasure or pain was it in his power to bestow!--how much of
good or evil must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought
forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she
stood before the canvas on which he was represented, and fixed his
eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of
gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and
softened its impropriety of expression.

When all of the house that was open to general inspection had been seen,
they returned downstairs, and, taking leave of the housekeeper, were
consigned over to the gardener, who met them at the hall-door.

As they walked across the hall towards the river, Elizabeth turned back
to look again; her uncle and aunt stopped also, and while the former
was conjecturing as to the date of the building, the owner of it himself
suddenly came forward from the road, which led behind it to the stables.

They were within twenty yards of each other, and so abrupt was his
appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes
instantly met, and the cheeks of both were overspread with the deepest
blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immovable from
surprise; but shortly recovering himself, advanced towards the party,
and spoke to Elizabeth, if not in terms of perfect composure, at least
of perfect civility.

She had instinctively turned away; but stopping on his approach,
received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to be
overcome. Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to the picture
they had just been examining, been insufficient to assure the other two
that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the gardener's expression of surprise, on
beholding his master, must immediately have told it. They stood a little
aloof while he was talking to their niece, who, astonished and confused,
scarcely dared lift her eyes to his face, and knew not what answer
she returned to his civil inquiries after her family. Amazed at the
alteration of his manner since they last parted, every sentence that
he uttered was increasing her embarrassment; and every idea of the
impropriety of her being found there recurring to her mind, the few
minutes in which they continued were some of the most uncomfortable in
her life. Nor did he seem much more at ease; when he spoke, his accent
had none of its usual sedateness; and he repeated his inquiries as
to the time of her having left Longbourn, and of her having stayed in
Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke the
distraction of his thoughts.

At length every idea seemed to fail him; and, after standing a few
moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected himself, and took
leave.

The others then joined her, and expressed admiration of his figure; but
Elizabeth heard not a word, and wholly engrossed by her own feelings,
followed them in silence. She was overpowered by shame and vexation. Her
coming there was the most unfortunate, the most ill-judged thing in the
world! How strange it must appear to him! In what a disgraceful light
might it not strike so vain a man! It might seem as if she had purposely
thrown herself in his way again! Oh! why did she come? Or, why did he
thus come a day before he was expected? Had they been only ten minutes
sooner, they should have been beyond the reach of his discrimination;
for it was plain that he was that moment arrived--that moment alighted
from his horse or his carriage. She blushed again and again over
the perverseness of the meeting. And his behaviour, so strikingly
altered--what could it mean? That he should even speak to her was
amazing!--but to speak with such civility, to inquire after her family!
Never in her life had she seen his manners so little dignified, never
had he spoken with such gentleness as on this unexpected meeting. What
a contrast did it offer to his last address in Rosings Park, when he put
his letter into her hand! She knew not what to think, or how to account
for it.

They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water, and
every step was bringing forward a nobler fall of ground, or a finer
reach of the woods to which they were approaching; but it was some time
before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it; and, though she answered
mechanically to the repeated appeals of her uncle and aunt, and
seemed to direct her eyes to such objects as they pointed out, she
distinguished no part of the scene. Her thoughts were all fixed on that
one spot of Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then
was. She longed to know what at the moment was passing in his mind--in
what manner he thought of her, and whether, in defiance of everything,
she was still dear to him. Perhaps he had been civil only because he
felt himself at ease; yet there had been _that_ in his voice which was
not like ease. Whether he had felt more of pain or of pleasure in
seeing her she could not tell, but he certainly had not seen her with
composure.

At length, however, the remarks of her companions on her absence of mind
aroused her, and she felt the necessity of appearing more like herself.

They entered the woods, and bidding adieu to the river for a while,
ascended some of the higher grounds; when, in spots where the opening of
the trees gave the eye power to wander, were many charming views of the
valley, the opposite hills, with the long range of woods overspreading
many, and occasionally part of the stream. Mr. Gardiner expressed a wish
of going round the whole park, but feared it might be beyond a walk.
With a triumphant smile they were told that it was ten miles round.
It settled the matter; and they pursued the accustomed circuit; which
brought them again, after some time, in a descent among hanging woods,
to the edge of the water, and one of its narrowest parts. They crossed
it by a simple bridge, in character with the general air of the scene;
it was a spot less adorned than any they had yet visited; and the
valley, here contracted into a glen, allowed room only for the stream,
and a narrow walk amidst the rough coppice-wood which bordered it.
Elizabeth longed to explore its windings; but when they had crossed the
bridge, and perceived their distance from the house, Mrs. Gardiner,
who was not a great walker, could go no farther, and thought only
of returning to the carriage as quickly as possible. Her niece was,
therefore, obliged to submit, and they took their way towards the house
on the opposite side of the river, in the nearest direction; but their
progress was slow, for Mr. Gardiner, though seldom able to indulge the
taste, was very fond of fishing, and was so much engaged in watching the
occasional appearance of some trout in the water, and talking to the
man about them, that he advanced but little. Whilst wandering on in this
slow manner, they were again surprised, and Elizabeth's astonishment
was quite equal to what it had been at first, by the sight of Mr. Darcy
approaching them, and at no great distance. The walk being here
less sheltered than on the other side, allowed them to see him before
they met. Elizabeth, however astonished, was at least more prepared
for an interview than before, and resolved to appear and to speak with
calmness, if he really intended to meet them. For a few moments, indeed,
she felt that he would probably strike into some other path. The idea
lasted while a turning in the walk concealed him from their view; the
turning past, he was immediately before them. With a glance, she saw
that he had lost none of his recent civility; and, to imitate his
politeness, she began, as they met, to admire the beauty of the place;
but she had not got beyond the words “delightful,” and “charming,” when
some unlucky recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise of
Pemberley from her might be mischievously construed. Her colour changed,
and she said no more.

Mrs. Gardiner was standing a little behind; and on her pausing, he asked
her if she would do him the honour of introducing him to her friends.
This was a stroke of civility for which she was quite unprepared;
and she could hardly suppress a smile at his being now seeking the
acquaintance of some of those very people against whom his pride had
revolted in his offer to herself. “What will be his surprise,” thought
she, “when he knows who they are? He takes them now for people of
fashion.”

The introduction, however, was immediately made; and as she named their
relationship to herself, she stole a sly look at him, to see how he bore
it, and was not without the expectation of his decamping as fast as he
could from such disgraceful companions. That he was _surprised_ by the
connection was evident; he sustained it, however, with fortitude, and
so far from going away, turned back with them, and entered into
conversation with Mr. Gardiner. Elizabeth could not but be pleased,
could not but triumph. It was consoling that he should know she had
some relations for whom there was no need to blush. She listened most
attentively to all that passed between them, and gloried in every
expression, every sentence of her uncle, which marked his intelligence,
his taste, or his good manners.

The conversation soon turned upon fishing; and she heard Mr. Darcy
invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often as he
chose while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering at the same time
to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of
the stream where there was usually most sport. Mrs. Gardiner, who was
walking arm-in-arm with Elizabeth, gave her a look expressive of wonder.
Elizabeth said nothing, but it gratified her exceedingly; the compliment
must be all for herself. Her astonishment, however, was extreme, and
continually was she repeating, “Why is he so altered? From what can
it proceed? It cannot be for _me_--it cannot be for _my_ sake that his
manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a
change as this. It is impossible that he should still love me.”

After walking some time in this way, the two ladies in front, the two
gentlemen behind, on resuming their places, after descending to
the brink of the river for the better inspection of some curious
water-plant, there chanced to be a little alteration. It originated
in Mrs. Gardiner, who, fatigued by the exercise of the morning, found
Elizabeth's arm inadequate to her support, and consequently preferred
her husband's. Mr. Darcy took her place by her niece, and they walked on
together. After a short silence, the lady first spoke. She wished him
to know that she had been assured of his absence before she came to the
place, and accordingly began by observing, that his arrival had been
very unexpected--“for your housekeeper,” she added, “informed us that
you would certainly not be here till to-morrow; and indeed, before we
left Bakewell, we understood that you were not immediately expected
in the country.” He acknowledged the truth of it all, and said that
business with his steward had occasioned his coming forward a few hours
before the rest of the party with whom he had been travelling. “They
will join me early to-morrow,” he continued, “and among them are some
who will claim an acquaintance with you--Mr. Bingley and his sisters.”

Elizabeth answered only by a slight bow. Her thoughts were instantly
driven back to the time when Mr. Bingley's name had been the last
mentioned between them; and, if she might judge by his complexion, _his_
mind was not very differently engaged.

“There is also one other person in the party,” he continued after a
pause, “who more particularly wishes to be known to you. Will you allow
me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister to your acquaintance
during your stay at Lambton?”

The surprise of such an application was great indeed; it was too great
for her to know in what manner she acceded to it. She immediately felt
that whatever desire Miss Darcy might have of being acquainted with her
must be the work of her brother, and, without looking farther, it was
satisfactory; it was gratifying to know that his resentment had not made
him think really ill of her.

They now walked on in silence, each of them deep in thought. Elizabeth
was not comfortable; that was impossible; but she was flattered and
pleased. His wish of introducing his sister to her was a compliment of
the highest kind. They soon outstripped the others, and when they had
reached the carriage, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were half a quarter of a
mile behind.

He then asked her to walk into the house--but she declared herself not
tired, and they stood together on the lawn. At such a time much might
have been said, and silence was very awkward. She wanted to talk, but
there seemed to be an embargo on every subject. At last she recollected
that she had been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dove Dale
with great perseverance. Yet time and her aunt moved slowly--and her
patience and her ideas were nearly worn out before the tete-a-tete was
over. On Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner's coming up they were all pressed to go
into the house and take some refreshment; but this was declined, and
they parted on each side with utmost politeness. Mr. Darcy handed the
ladies into the carriage; and when it drove off, Elizabeth saw him
walking slowly towards the house.

The observations of her uncle and aunt now began; and each of them
pronounced him to be infinitely superior to anything they had expected.
“He is perfectly well behaved, polite, and unassuming,” said her uncle.

“There _is_ something a little stately in him, to be sure,” replied her
aunt, “but it is confined to his air, and is not unbecoming. I can now
say with the housekeeper, that though some people may call him proud, I
have seen nothing of it.”

“I was never more surprised than by his behaviour to us. It was more
than civil; it was really attentive; and there was no necessity for such
attention. His acquaintance with Elizabeth was very trifling.”

“To be sure, Lizzy,” said her aunt, “he is not so handsome as Wickham;
or, rather, he has not Wickham's countenance, for his features
are perfectly good. But how came you to tell me that he was so
disagreeable?”

Elizabeth excused herself as well as she could; said that she had liked
him better when they had met in Kent than before, and that she had never
seen him so pleasant as this morning.

“But perhaps he may be a little whimsical in his civilities,” replied
her uncle. “Your great men often are; and therefore I shall not take him
at his word, as he might change his mind another day, and warn me off
his grounds.”

Elizabeth felt that they had entirely misunderstood his character, but
said nothing.

“From what we have seen of him,” continued Mrs. Gardiner, “I really
should not have thought that he could have behaved in so cruel a way by
anybody as he has done by poor Wickham. He has not an ill-natured look.
On the contrary, there is something pleasing about his mouth when he
speaks. And there is something of dignity in his countenance that would
not give one an unfavourable idea of his heart. But, to be sure, the
good lady who showed us his house did give him a most flaming character!
I could hardly help laughing aloud sometimes. But he is a liberal
master, I suppose, and _that_ in the eye of a servant comprehends every
virtue.”

Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in vindication of
his behaviour to Wickham; and therefore gave them to understand, in
as guarded a manner as she could, that by what she had heard from
his relations in Kent, his actions were capable of a very different
construction; and that his character was by no means so faulty, nor
Wickham's so amiable, as they had been considered in Hertfordshire. In
confirmation of this, she related the particulars of all the pecuniary
transactions in which they had been connected, without actually naming
her authority, but stating it to be such as might be relied on.

Mrs. Gardiner was surprised and concerned; but as they were now
approaching the scene of her former pleasures, every idea gave way to
the charm of recollection; and she was too much engaged in pointing out
to her husband all the interesting spots in its environs to think of
anything else. Fatigued as she had been by the morning's walk they
had no sooner dined than she set off again in quest of her former
acquaintance, and the evening was spent in the satisfactions of a
intercourse renewed after many years' discontinuance.

The occurrences of the day were too full of interest to leave Elizabeth
much attention for any of these new friends; and she could do nothing
but think, and think with wonder, of Mr. Darcy's civility, and, above
all, of his wishing her to be acquainted with his sister.



Chapter 44


Elizabeth had settled it that Mr. Darcy would bring his sister to visit
her the very day after her reaching Pemberley; and was consequently
resolved not to be out of sight of the inn the whole of that morning.
But her conclusion was false; for on the very morning after their
arrival at Lambton, these visitors came. They had been walking about the
place with some of their new friends, and were just returning to the inn
to dress themselves for dining with the same family, when the sound of a
carriage drew them to a window, and they saw a gentleman and a lady in
a curricle driving up the street. Elizabeth immediately recognizing
the livery, guessed what it meant, and imparted no small degree of her
surprise to her relations by acquainting them with the honour which she
expected. Her uncle and aunt were all amazement; and the embarrassment
of her manner as she spoke, joined to the circumstance itself, and many
of the circumstances of the preceding day, opened to them a new idea on
the business. Nothing had ever suggested it before, but they felt that
there was no other way of accounting for such attentions from such a
quarter than by supposing a partiality for their niece. While these
newly-born notions were passing in their heads, the perturbation of
Elizabeth's feelings was at every moment increasing. She was quite
amazed at her own discomposure; but amongst other causes of disquiet,
she dreaded lest the partiality of the brother should have said too much
in her favour; and, more than commonly anxious to please, she naturally
suspected that every power of pleasing would fail her.

She retreated from the window, fearful of being seen; and as she walked
up and down the room, endeavouring to compose herself, saw such looks of
inquiring surprise in her uncle and aunt as made everything worse.

Miss Darcy and her brother appeared, and this formidable introduction
took place. With astonishment did Elizabeth see that her new
acquaintance was at least as much embarrassed as herself. Since her
being at Lambton, she had heard that Miss Darcy was exceedingly proud;
but the observation of a very few minutes convinced her that she was
only exceedingly shy. She found it difficult to obtain even a word from
her beyond a monosyllable.

Miss Darcy was tall, and on a larger scale than Elizabeth; and, though
little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance
womanly and graceful. She was less handsome than her brother; but there
was sense and good humour in her face, and her manners were perfectly
unassuming and gentle. Elizabeth, who had expected to find in her as
acute and unembarrassed an observer as ever Mr. Darcy had been, was much
relieved by discerning such different feelings.

They had not long been together before Mr. Darcy told her that Bingley
was also coming to wait on her; and she had barely time to express her
satisfaction, and prepare for such a visitor, when Bingley's quick
step was heard on the stairs, and in a moment he entered the room. All
Elizabeth's anger against him had been long done away; but had she still
felt any, it could hardly have stood its ground against the unaffected
cordiality with which he expressed himself on seeing her again. He
inquired in a friendly, though general way, after her family, and looked
and spoke with the same good-humoured ease that he had ever done.

To Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner he was scarcely a less interesting personage
than to herself. They had long wished to see him. The whole party before
them, indeed, excited a lively attention. The suspicions which had just
arisen of Mr. Darcy and their niece directed their observation towards
each with an earnest though guarded inquiry; and they soon drew from
those inquiries the full conviction that one of them at least knew
what it was to love. Of the lady's sensations they remained a little
in doubt; but that the gentleman was overflowing with admiration was
evident enough.

Elizabeth, on her side, had much to do. She wanted to ascertain the
feelings of each of her visitors; she wanted to compose her own, and
to make herself agreeable to all; and in the latter object, where she
feared most to fail, she was most sure of success, for those to whom she
endeavoured to give pleasure were prepossessed in her favour. Bingley
was ready, Georgiana was eager, and Darcy determined, to be pleased.

In seeing Bingley, her thoughts naturally flew to her sister; and, oh!
how ardently did she long to know whether any of his were directed in
a like manner. Sometimes she could fancy that he talked less than on
former occasions, and once or twice pleased herself with the notion
that, as he looked at her, he was trying to trace a resemblance. But,
though this might be imaginary, she could not be deceived as to his
behaviour to Miss Darcy, who had been set up as a rival to Jane. No look
appeared on either side that spoke particular regard. Nothing occurred
between them that could justify the hopes of his sister. On this point
she was soon satisfied; and two or three little circumstances occurred
ere they parted, which, in her anxious interpretation, denoted a
recollection of Jane not untinctured by tenderness, and a wish of saying
more that might lead to the mention of her, had he dared. He observed
to her, at a moment when the others were talking together, and in a tone
which had something of real regret, that it “was a very long time since
he had had the pleasure of seeing her;” and, before she could reply,
he added, “It is above eight months. We have not met since the 26th of
November, when we were all dancing together at Netherfield.”

Elizabeth was pleased to find his memory so exact; and he afterwards
took occasion to ask her, when unattended to by any of the rest, whether
_all_ her sisters were at Longbourn. There was not much in the question,
nor in the preceding remark; but there was a look and a manner which
gave them meaning.

It was not often that she could turn her eyes on Mr. Darcy himself;
but, whenever she did catch a glimpse, she saw an expression of general
complaisance, and in all that he said she heard an accent so removed
from _hauteur_ or disdain of his companions, as convinced her that
the improvement of manners which she had yesterday witnessed however
temporary its existence might prove, had at least outlived one day. When
she saw him thus seeking the acquaintance and courting the good opinion
of people with whom any intercourse a few months ago would have been a
disgrace--when she saw him thus civil, not only to herself, but to the
very relations whom he had openly disdained, and recollected their last
lively scene in Hunsford Parsonage--the difference, the change was
so great, and struck so forcibly on her mind, that she could hardly
restrain her astonishment from being visible. Never, even in the company
of his dear friends at Netherfield, or his dignified relations
at Rosings, had she seen him so desirous to please, so free from
self-consequence or unbending reserve, as now, when no importance
could result from the success of his endeavours, and when even the
acquaintance of those to whom his attentions were addressed would draw
down the ridicule and censure of the ladies both of Netherfield and
Rosings.

Their visitors stayed with them above half-an-hour; and when they arose
to depart, Mr. Darcy called on his sister to join him in expressing
their wish of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, and Miss Bennet, to dinner
at Pemberley, before they left the country. Miss Darcy, though with a
diffidence which marked her little in the habit of giving invitations,
readily obeyed. Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece, desirous of knowing
how _she_, whom the invitation most concerned, felt disposed as to its
acceptance, but Elizabeth had turned away her head. Presuming however,
that this studied avoidance spoke rather a momentary embarrassment than
any dislike of the proposal, and seeing in her husband, who was fond of
society, a perfect willingness to accept it, she ventured to engage for
her attendance, and the day after the next was fixed on.

Bingley expressed great pleasure in the certainty of seeing Elizabeth
again, having still a great deal to say to her, and many inquiries to
make after all their Hertfordshire friends. Elizabeth, construing all
this into a wish of hearing her speak of her sister, was pleased, and on
this account, as well as some others, found herself, when their
visitors left them, capable of considering the last half-hour with some
satisfaction, though while it was passing, the enjoyment of it had been
little. Eager to be alone, and fearful of inquiries or hints from her
uncle and aunt, she stayed with them only long enough to hear their
favourable opinion of Bingley, and then hurried away to dress.

But she had no reason to fear Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner's curiosity; it was
not their wish to force her communication. It was evident that she was
much better acquainted with Mr. Darcy than they had before any idea of;
it was evident that he was very much in love with her. They saw much to
interest, but nothing to justify inquiry.

Of Mr. Darcy it was now a matter of anxiety to think well; and, as far
as their acquaintance reached, there was no fault to find. They could
not be untouched by his politeness; and had they drawn his character
from their own feelings and his servant's report, without any reference
to any other account, the circle in Hertfordshire to which he was known
would not have recognized it for Mr. Darcy. There was now an interest,
however, in believing the housekeeper; and they soon became sensible
that the authority of a servant who had known him since he was four
years old, and whose own manners indicated respectability, was not to be
hastily rejected. Neither had anything occurred in the intelligence of
their Lambton friends that could materially lessen its weight. They had
nothing to accuse him of but pride; pride he probably had, and if not,
it would certainly be imputed by the inhabitants of a small market-town
where the family did not visit. It was acknowledged, however, that he
was a liberal man, and did much good among the poor.

With respect to Wickham, the travellers soon found that he was not held
there in much estimation; for though the chief of his concerns with the
son of his patron were imperfectly understood, it was yet a well-known
fact that, on his quitting Derbyshire, he had left many debts behind
him, which Mr. Darcy afterwards discharged.

As for Elizabeth, her thoughts were at Pemberley this evening more than
the last; and the evening, though as it passed it seemed long, was not
long enough to determine her feelings towards _one_ in that mansion;
and she lay awake two whole hours endeavouring to make them out. She
certainly did not hate him. No; hatred had vanished long ago, and she
had almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against him,
that could be so called. The respect created by the conviction of his
valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly admitted, had for some
time ceased to be repugnant to her feeling; and it was now heightened
into somewhat of a friendlier nature, by the testimony so highly in
his favour, and bringing forward his disposition in so amiable a light,
which yesterday had produced. But above all, above respect and esteem,
there was a motive within her of goodwill which could not be overlooked.
It was gratitude; gratitude, not merely for having once loved her,
but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and
acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations
accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid
her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most
eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display
of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only
were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent
on making her known to his sister. Such a change in a man of so much
pride exciting not only astonishment but gratitude--for to love, ardent
love, it must be attributed; and as such its impression on her was of a
sort to be encouraged, as by no means unpleasing, though it could not be
exactly defined. She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him,
she felt a real interest in his welfare; and she only wanted to know how
far she wished that welfare to depend upon herself, and how far it would
be for the happiness of both that she should employ the power, which her
fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing on her the renewal of
his addresses.

It had been settled in the evening between the aunt and the niece, that
such a striking civility as Miss Darcy's in coming to see them on the
very day of her arrival at Pemberley, for she had reached it only to a
late breakfast, ought to be imitated, though it could not be equalled,
by some exertion of politeness on their side; and, consequently, that
it would be highly expedient to wait on her at Pemberley the following
morning. They were, therefore, to go. Elizabeth was pleased; though when
she asked herself the reason, she had very little to say in reply.

Mr. Gardiner left them soon after breakfast. The fishing scheme had been
renewed the day before, and a positive engagement made of his meeting
some of the gentlemen at Pemberley before noon.



Chapter 45


Convinced as Elizabeth now was that Miss Bingley's dislike of her had
originated in jealousy, she could not help feeling how unwelcome her
appearance at Pemberley must be to her, and was curious to know with how
much civility on that lady's side the acquaintance would now be renewed.

On reaching the house, they were shown through the hall into the saloon,
whose northern aspect rendered it delightful for summer. Its windows
opening to the ground, admitted a most refreshing view of the high woody
hills behind the house, and of the beautiful oaks and Spanish chestnuts
which were scattered over the intermediate lawn.

In this house they were received by Miss Darcy, who was sitting there
with Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, and the lady with whom she lived in
London. Georgiana's reception of them was very civil, but attended with
all the embarrassment which, though proceeding from shyness and the fear
of doing wrong, would easily give to those who felt themselves inferior
the belief of her being proud and reserved. Mrs. Gardiner and her niece,
however, did her justice, and pitied her.

By Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley they were noticed only by a curtsey; and,
on their being seated, a pause, awkward as such pauses must always be,
succeeded for a few moments. It was first broken by Mrs. Annesley, a
genteel, agreeable-looking woman, whose endeavour to introduce some kind
of discourse proved her to be more truly well-bred than either of the
others; and between her and Mrs. Gardiner, with occasional help from
Elizabeth, the conversation was carried on. Miss Darcy looked as if she
wished for courage enough to join in it; and sometimes did venture a
short sentence when there was least danger of its being heard.

Elizabeth soon saw that she was herself closely watched by Miss Bingley,
and that she could not speak a word, especially to Miss Darcy, without
calling her attention. This observation would not have prevented her
from trying to talk to the latter, had they not been seated at an
inconvenient distance; but she was not sorry to be spared the necessity
of saying much. Her own thoughts were employing her. She expected every
moment that some of the gentlemen would enter the room. She wished, she
feared that the master of the house might be amongst them; and whether
she wished or feared it most, she could scarcely determine. After
sitting in this manner a quarter of an hour without hearing Miss
Bingley's voice, Elizabeth was roused by receiving from her a cold
inquiry after the health of her family. She answered with equal
indifference and brevity, and the other said no more.

The next variation which their visit afforded was produced by the
entrance of servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the
finest fruits in season; but this did not take place till after many
a significant look and smile from Mrs. Annesley to Miss Darcy had been
given, to remind her of her post. There was now employment for the whole
party--for though they could not all talk, they could all eat; and the
beautiful pyramids of grapes, nectarines, and peaches soon collected
them round the table.

While thus engaged, Elizabeth had a fair opportunity of deciding whether
she most feared or wished for the appearance of Mr. Darcy, by the
feelings which prevailed on his entering the room; and then, though but
a moment before she had believed her wishes to predominate, she began to
regret that he came.

He had been some time with Mr. Gardiner, who, with two or three other
gentlemen from the house, was engaged by the river, and had left him
only on learning that the ladies of the family intended a visit to
Georgiana that morning. No sooner did he appear than Elizabeth wisely
resolved to be perfectly easy and unembarrassed; a resolution the more
necessary to be made, but perhaps not the more easily kept, because she
saw that the suspicions of the whole party were awakened against them,
and that there was scarcely an eye which did not watch his behaviour
when he first came into the room. In no countenance was attentive
curiosity so strongly marked as in Miss Bingley's, in spite of the
smiles which overspread her face whenever she spoke to one of its
objects; for jealousy had not yet made her desperate, and her attentions
to Mr. Darcy were by no means over. Miss Darcy, on her brother's
entrance, exerted herself much more to talk, and Elizabeth saw that he
was anxious for his sister and herself to get acquainted, and forwarded
as much as possible, every attempt at conversation on either side. Miss
Bingley saw all this likewise; and, in the imprudence of anger, took the
first opportunity of saying, with sneering civility:

“Pray, Miss Eliza, are not the ----shire Militia removed from Meryton?
They must be a great loss to _your_ family.”

In Darcy's presence she dared not mention Wickham's name; but Elizabeth
instantly comprehended that he was uppermost in her thoughts; and the
various recollections connected with him gave her a moment's distress;
but exerting herself vigorously to repel the ill-natured attack, she
presently answered the question in a tolerably detached tone. While
she spoke, an involuntary glance showed her Darcy, with a heightened
complexion, earnestly looking at her, and his sister overcome with
confusion, and unable to lift up her eyes. Had Miss Bingley known what
pain she was then giving her beloved friend, she undoubtedly would
have refrained from the hint; but she had merely intended to discompose
Elizabeth by bringing forward the idea of a man to whom she believed
her partial, to make her betray a sensibility which might injure her in
Darcy's opinion, and, perhaps, to remind the latter of all the follies
and absurdities by which some part of her family were connected
with that corps. Not a syllable had ever reached her of Miss Darcy's
meditated elopement. To no creature had it been revealed, where secrecy
was possible, except to Elizabeth; and from all Bingley's connections
her brother was particularly anxious to conceal it, from the very
wish which Elizabeth had long ago attributed to him, of their becoming
hereafter her own. He had certainly formed such a plan, and without
meaning that it should affect his endeavour to separate him from Miss
Bennet, it is probable that it might add something to his lively concern
for the welfare of his friend.

Elizabeth's collected behaviour, however, soon quieted his emotion; and
as Miss Bingley, vexed and disappointed, dared not approach nearer to
Wickham, Georgiana also recovered in time, though not enough to be able
to speak any more. Her brother, whose eye she feared to meet, scarcely
recollected her interest in the affair, and the very circumstance which
had been designed to turn his thoughts from Elizabeth seemed to have
fixed them on her more and more cheerfully.

Their visit did not continue long after the question and answer above
mentioned; and while Mr. Darcy was attending them to their carriage Miss
Bingley was venting her feelings in criticisms on Elizabeth's person,
behaviour, and dress. But Georgiana would not join her. Her brother's
recommendation was enough to ensure her favour; his judgement could not
err. And he had spoken in such terms of Elizabeth as to leave Georgiana
without the power of finding her otherwise than lovely and amiable. When
Darcy returned to the saloon, Miss Bingley could not help repeating to
him some part of what she had been saying to his sister.

“How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy,” she
cried; “I never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since
the winter. She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing
that we should not have known her again.”

However little Mr. Darcy might have liked such an address, he contented
himself with coolly replying that he perceived no other alteration than
her being rather tanned, no miraculous consequence of travelling in the
summer.

“For my own part,” she rejoined, “I must confess that I never could
see any beauty in her. Her face is too thin; her complexion has no
brilliancy; and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose
wants character--there is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are
tolerable, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes,
which have sometimes been called so fine, I could never see anything
extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do
not like at all; and in her air altogether there is a self-sufficiency
without fashion, which is intolerable.”

Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth, this was not
the best method of recommending herself; but angry people are not always
wise; and in seeing him at last look somewhat nettled, she had all the
success she expected. He was resolutely silent, however, and, from a
determination of making him speak, she continued:

“I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all
were to find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect
your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, '_She_
a beauty!--I should as soon call her mother a wit.' But afterwards she
seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at
one time.”

“Yes,” replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, “but _that_
was only when I first saw her, for it is many months since I have
considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.”

He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of
having forced him to say what gave no one any pain but herself.

Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth talked of all that had occurred during their
visit, as they returned, except what had particularly interested them
both. The look and behaviour of everybody they had seen were discussed,
except of the person who had mostly engaged their attention. They talked
of his sister, his friends, his house, his fruit--of everything but
himself; yet Elizabeth was longing to know what Mrs. Gardiner thought of
him, and Mrs. Gardiner would have been highly gratified by her niece's
beginning the subject.



Chapter 46


Elizabeth had been a good deal disappointed in not finding a letter from
Jane on their first arrival at Lambton; and this disappointment had been
renewed on each of the mornings that had now been spent there; but
on the third her repining was over, and her sister justified, by the
receipt of two letters from her at once, on one of which was marked that
it had been missent elsewhere. Elizabeth was not surprised at it, as
Jane had written the direction remarkably ill.

They had just been preparing to walk as the letters came in; and
her uncle and aunt, leaving her to enjoy them in quiet, set off by
themselves. The one missent must first be attended to; it had been
written five days ago. The beginning contained an account of all their
little parties and engagements, with such news as the country afforded;
but the latter half, which was dated a day later, and written in evident
agitation, gave more important intelligence. It was to this effect:

“Since writing the above, dearest Lizzy, something has occurred of a
most unexpected and serious nature; but I am afraid of alarming you--be
assured that we are all well. What I have to say relates to poor Lydia.
An express came at twelve last night, just as we were all gone to bed,
from Colonel Forster, to inform us that she was gone off to Scotland
with one of his officers; to own the truth, with Wickham! Imagine our
surprise. To Kitty, however, it does not seem so wholly unexpected. I am
very, very sorry. So imprudent a match on both sides! But I am willing
to hope the best, and that his character has been misunderstood.
Thoughtless and indiscreet I can easily believe him, but this step
(and let us rejoice over it) marks nothing bad at heart. His choice is
disinterested at least, for he must know my father can give her nothing.
Our poor mother is sadly grieved. My father bears it better. How
thankful am I that we never let them know what has been said against
him; we must forget it ourselves. They were off Saturday night about
twelve, as is conjectured, but were not missed till yesterday morning at
eight. The express was sent off directly. My dear Lizzy, they must have
passed within ten miles of us. Colonel Forster gives us reason to expect
him here soon. Lydia left a few lines for his wife, informing her of
their intention. I must conclude, for I cannot be long from my poor
mother. I am afraid you will not be able to make it out, but I hardly
know what I have written.”

Without allowing herself time for consideration, and scarcely knowing
what she felt, Elizabeth on finishing this letter instantly seized the
other, and opening it with the utmost impatience, read as follows: it
had been written a day later than the conclusion of the first.

“By this time, my dearest sister, you have received my hurried letter; I
wish this may be more intelligible, but though not confined for time, my
head is so bewildered that I cannot answer for being coherent. Dearest
Lizzy, I hardly know what I would write, but I have bad news for you,
and it cannot be delayed. Imprudent as the marriage between Mr. Wickham
and our poor Lydia would be, we are now anxious to be assured it has
taken place, for there is but too much reason to fear they are not gone
to Scotland. Colonel Forster came yesterday, having left Brighton the
day before, not many hours after the express. Though Lydia's short
letter to Mrs. F. gave them to understand that they were going to Gretna
Green, something was dropped by Denny expressing his belief that W.
never intended to go there, or to marry Lydia at all, which was
repeated to Colonel F., who, instantly taking the alarm, set off from B.
intending to trace their route. He did trace them easily to Clapham,
but no further; for on entering that place, they removed into a hackney
coach, and dismissed the chaise that brought them from Epsom. All that
is known after this is, that they were seen to continue the London road.
I know not what to think. After making every possible inquiry on that
side London, Colonel F. came on into Hertfordshire, anxiously renewing
them at all the turnpikes, and at the inns in Barnet and Hatfield, but
without any success--no such people had been seen to pass through. With
the kindest concern he came on to Longbourn, and broke his apprehensions
to us in a manner most creditable to his heart. I am sincerely grieved
for him and Mrs. F., but no one can throw any blame on them. Our
distress, my dear Lizzy, is very great. My father and mother believe the
worst, but I cannot think so ill of him. Many circumstances might make
it more eligible for them to be married privately in town than to pursue
their first plan; and even if _he_ could form such a design against a
young woman of Lydia's connections, which is not likely, can I suppose
her so lost to everything? Impossible! I grieve to find, however, that
Colonel F. is not disposed to depend upon their marriage; he shook his
head when I expressed my hopes, and said he feared W. was not a man to
be trusted. My poor mother is really ill, and keeps her room. Could she
exert herself, it would be better; but this is not to be expected. And
as to my father, I never in my life saw him so affected. Poor Kitty has
anger for having concealed their attachment; but as it was a matter of
confidence, one cannot wonder. I am truly glad, dearest Lizzy, that you
have been spared something of these distressing scenes; but now, as the
first shock is over, shall I own that I long for your return? I am not
so selfish, however, as to press for it, if inconvenient. Adieu! I
take up my pen again to do what I have just told you I would not; but
circumstances are such that I cannot help earnestly begging you all to
come here as soon as possible. I know my dear uncle and aunt so well,
that I am not afraid of requesting it, though I have still something
more to ask of the former. My father is going to London with Colonel
Forster instantly, to try to discover her. What he means to do I am sure
I know not; but his excessive distress will not allow him to pursue any
measure in the best and safest way, and Colonel Forster is obliged to
be at Brighton again to-morrow evening. In such an exigence, my
uncle's advice and assistance would be everything in the world; he will
immediately comprehend what I must feel, and I rely upon his goodness.”

“Oh! where, where is my uncle?” cried Elizabeth, darting from her seat
as she finished the letter, in eagerness to follow him, without losing
a moment of the time so precious; but as she reached the door it was
opened by a servant, and Mr. Darcy appeared. Her pale face and impetuous
manner made him start, and before he could recover himself to speak,
she, in whose mind every idea was superseded by Lydia's situation,
hastily exclaimed, “I beg your pardon, but I must leave you. I must find
Mr. Gardiner this moment, on business that cannot be delayed; I have not
an instant to lose.”

“Good God! what is the matter?” cried he, with more feeling than
politeness; then recollecting himself, “I will not detain you a minute;
but let me, or let the servant go after Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. You are
not well enough; you cannot go yourself.”

Elizabeth hesitated, but her knees trembled under her and she felt how
little would be gained by her attempting to pursue them. Calling back
the servant, therefore, she commissioned him, though in so breathless
an accent as made her almost unintelligible, to fetch his master and
mistress home instantly.

On his quitting the room she sat down, unable to support herself, and
looking so miserably ill, that it was impossible for Darcy to leave her,
or to refrain from saying, in a tone of gentleness and commiseration,
“Let me call your maid. Is there nothing you could take to give you
present relief? A glass of wine; shall I get you one? You are very ill.”

“No, I thank you,” she replied, endeavouring to recover herself. “There
is nothing the matter with me. I am quite well; I am only distressed by
some dreadful news which I have just received from Longbourn.”

She burst into tears as she alluded to it, and for a few minutes could
not speak another word. Darcy, in wretched suspense, could only say
something indistinctly of his concern, and observe her in compassionate
silence. At length she spoke again. “I have just had a letter from Jane,
with such dreadful news. It cannot be concealed from anyone. My younger
sister has left all her friends--has eloped; has thrown herself into
the power of--of Mr. Wickham. They are gone off together from Brighton.
_You_ know him too well to doubt the rest. She has no money, no
connections, nothing that can tempt him to--she is lost for ever.”

Darcy was fixed in astonishment. “When I consider,” she added in a yet
more agitated voice, “that I might have prevented it! I, who knew what
he was. Had I but explained some part of it only--some part of what I
learnt, to my own family! Had his character been known, this could not
have happened. But it is all--all too late now.”

“I am grieved indeed,” cried Darcy; “grieved--shocked. But is it
certain--absolutely certain?”

“Oh, yes! They left Brighton together on Sunday night, and were traced
almost to London, but not beyond; they are certainly not gone to
Scotland.”

“And what has been done, what has been attempted, to recover her?”

“My father is gone to London, and Jane has written to beg my uncle's
immediate assistance; and we shall be off, I hope, in half-an-hour. But
nothing can be done--I know very well that nothing can be done. How is
such a man to be worked on? How are they even to be discovered? I have
not the smallest hope. It is every way horrible!”

Darcy shook his head in silent acquiescence.

“When _my_ eyes were opened to his real character--Oh! had I known what
I ought, what I dared to do! But I knew not--I was afraid of doing too
much. Wretched, wretched mistake!”

Darcy made no answer. He seemed scarcely to hear her, and was walking
up and down the room in earnest meditation, his brow contracted, his air
gloomy. Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. Her
power was sinking; everything _must_ sink under such a proof of family
weakness, such an assurance of the deepest disgrace. She could neither
wonder nor condemn, but the belief of his self-conquest brought nothing
consolatory to her bosom, afforded no palliation of her distress. It
was, on the contrary, exactly calculated to make her understand her own
wishes; and never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved
him, as now, when all love must be vain.

But self, though it would intrude, could not engross her. Lydia--the
humiliation, the misery she was bringing on them all, soon swallowed
up every private care; and covering her face with her handkerchief,
Elizabeth was soon lost to everything else; and, after a pause of
several minutes, was only recalled to a sense of her situation by
the voice of her companion, who, in a manner which, though it spoke
compassion, spoke likewise restraint, said, “I am afraid you have been
long desiring my absence, nor have I anything to plead in excuse of my
stay, but real, though unavailing concern. Would to Heaven that anything
could be either said or done on my part that might offer consolation to
such distress! But I will not torment you with vain wishes, which may
seem purposely to ask for your thanks. This unfortunate affair will, I
fear, prevent my sister's having the pleasure of seeing you at Pemberley
to-day.”

“Oh, yes. Be so kind as to apologise for us to Miss Darcy. Say that
urgent business calls us home immediately. Conceal the unhappy truth as
long as it is possible, I know it cannot be long.”

He readily assured her of his secrecy; again expressed his sorrow for
her distress, wished it a happier conclusion than there was at present
reason to hope, and leaving his compliments for her relations, with only
one serious, parting look, went away.

As he quitted the room, Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they
should ever see each other again on such terms of cordiality as
had marked their several meetings in Derbyshire; and as she threw a
retrospective glance over the whole of their acquaintance, so full
of contradictions and varieties, sighed at the perverseness of those
feelings which would now have promoted its continuance, and would
formerly have rejoiced in its termination.

If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's
change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if
otherwise--if regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or
unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on
a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been
exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given
somewhat of a trial to the latter method in her partiality for Wickham,
and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other
less interesting mode of attachment. Be that as it may, she saw him
go with regret; and in this early example of what Lydia's infamy must
produce, found additional anguish as she reflected on that wretched
business. Never, since reading Jane's second letter, had she entertained
a hope of Wickham's meaning to marry her. No one but Jane, she thought,
could flatter herself with such an expectation. Surprise was the least
of her feelings on this development. While the contents of the first
letter remained in her mind, she was all surprise--all astonishment that
Wickham should marry a girl whom it was impossible he could marry
for money; and how Lydia could ever have attached him had appeared
incomprehensible. But now it was all too natural. For such an attachment
as this she might have sufficient charms; and though she did not suppose
Lydia to be deliberately engaging in an elopement without the intention
of marriage, she had no difficulty in believing that neither her virtue
nor her understanding would preserve her from falling an easy prey.

She had never perceived, while the regiment was in Hertfordshire, that
Lydia had any partiality for him; but she was convinced that Lydia
wanted only encouragement to attach herself to anybody. Sometimes one
officer, sometimes another, had been her favourite, as their attentions
raised them in her opinion. Her affections had continually been
fluctuating but never without an object. The mischief of neglect and
mistaken indulgence towards such a girl--oh! how acutely did she now
feel it!

She was wild to be at home--to hear, to see, to be upon the spot to
share with Jane in the cares that must now fall wholly upon her, in a
family so deranged, a father absent, a mother incapable of exertion, and
requiring constant attendance; and though almost persuaded that nothing
could be done for Lydia, her uncle's interference seemed of the utmost
importance, and till he entered the room her impatience was severe. Mr.
and Mrs. Gardiner had hurried back in alarm, supposing by the servant's
account that their niece was taken suddenly ill; but satisfying them
instantly on that head, she eagerly communicated the cause of their
summons, reading the two letters aloud, and dwelling on the postscript
of the last with trembling energy.--Though Lydia had never been a
favourite with them, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner could not but be deeply
afflicted. Not Lydia only, but all were concerned in it; and after the
first exclamations of surprise and horror, Mr. Gardiner promised every
assistance in his power. Elizabeth, though expecting no less, thanked
him with tears of gratitude; and all three being actuated by one spirit,
everything relating to their journey was speedily settled. They were to
be off as soon as possible. “But what is to be done about Pemberley?”
 cried Mrs. Gardiner. “John told us Mr. Darcy was here when you sent for
us; was it so?”

“Yes; and I told him we should not be able to keep our engagement.
_That_ is all settled.”

“What is all settled?” repeated the other, as she ran into her room to
prepare. “And are they upon such terms as for her to disclose the real
truth? Oh, that I knew how it was!”

But wishes were vain, or at least could only serve to amuse her in the
hurry and confusion of the following hour. Had Elizabeth been at leisure
to be idle, she would have remained certain that all employment was
impossible to one so wretched as herself; but she had her share of
business as well as her aunt, and amongst the rest there were notes to
be written to all their friends at Lambton, with false excuses for their
sudden departure. An hour, however, saw the whole completed; and Mr.
Gardiner meanwhile having settled his account at the inn, nothing
remained to be done but to go; and Elizabeth, after all the misery of
the morning, found herself, in a shorter space of time than she could
have supposed, seated in the carriage, and on the road to Longbourn.



Chapter 47


“I have been thinking it over again, Elizabeth,” said her uncle, as they
drove from the town; “and really, upon serious consideration, I am much
more inclined than I was to judge as your eldest sister does on the
matter. It appears to me so very unlikely that any young man should
form such a design against a girl who is by no means unprotected or
friendless, and who was actually staying in his colonel's family, that I
am strongly inclined to hope the best. Could he expect that her friends
would not step forward? Could he expect to be noticed again by the
regiment, after such an affront to Colonel Forster? His temptation is
not adequate to the risk!”

“Do you really think so?” cried Elizabeth, brightening up for a moment.

“Upon my word,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “I begin to be of your uncle's
opinion. It is really too great a violation of decency, honour, and
interest, for him to be guilty of. I cannot think so very ill of
Wickham. Can you yourself, Lizzy, so wholly give him up, as to believe
him capable of it?”

“Not, perhaps, of neglecting his own interest; but of every other
neglect I can believe him capable. If, indeed, it should be so! But I
dare not hope it. Why should they not go on to Scotland if that had been
the case?”

“In the first place,” replied Mr. Gardiner, “there is no absolute proof
that they are not gone to Scotland.”

“Oh! but their removing from the chaise into a hackney coach is such
a presumption! And, besides, no traces of them were to be found on the
Barnet road.”

“Well, then--supposing them to be in London. They may be there, though
for the purpose of concealment, for no more exceptional purpose. It is
not likely that money should be very abundant on either side; and it
might strike them that they could be more economically, though less
expeditiously, married in London than in Scotland.”

“But why all this secrecy? Why any fear of detection? Why must their
marriage be private? Oh, no, no--this is not likely. His most particular
friend, you see by Jane's account, was persuaded of his never intending
to marry her. Wickham will never marry a woman without some money. He
cannot afford it. And what claims has Lydia--what attraction has she
beyond youth, health, and good humour that could make him, for her sake,
forego every chance of benefiting himself by marrying well? As to what
restraint the apprehensions of disgrace in the corps might throw on a
dishonourable elopement with her, I am not able to judge; for I know
nothing of the effects that such a step might produce. But as to your
other objection, I am afraid it will hardly hold good. Lydia has
no brothers to step forward; and he might imagine, from my father's
behaviour, from his indolence and the little attention he has ever
seemed to give to what was going forward in his family, that _he_ would
do as little, and think as little about it, as any father could do, in
such a matter.”

“But can you think that Lydia is so lost to everything but love of him
as to consent to live with him on any terms other than marriage?”

“It does seem, and it is most shocking indeed,” replied Elizabeth, with
tears in her eyes, “that a sister's sense of decency and virtue in such
a point should admit of doubt. But, really, I know not what to say.
Perhaps I am not doing her justice. But she is very young; she has never
been taught to think on serious subjects; and for the last half-year,
nay, for a twelvemonth--she has been given up to nothing but amusement
and vanity. She has been allowed to dispose of her time in the most idle
and frivolous manner, and to adopt any opinions that came in her way.
Since the ----shire were first quartered in Meryton, nothing but love,
flirtation, and officers have been in her head. She has been doing
everything in her power by thinking and talking on the subject, to give
greater--what shall I call it? susceptibility to her feelings; which are
naturally lively enough. And we all know that Wickham has every charm of
person and address that can captivate a woman.”

“But you see that Jane,” said her aunt, “does not think so very ill of
Wickham as to believe him capable of the attempt.”

“Of whom does Jane ever think ill? And who is there, whatever might be
their former conduct, that she would think capable of such an attempt,
till it were proved against them? But Jane knows, as well as I do, what
Wickham really is. We both know that he has been profligate in every
sense of the word; that he has neither integrity nor honour; that he is
as false and deceitful as he is insinuating.”

“And do you really know all this?” cried Mrs. Gardiner, whose curiosity
as to the mode of her intelligence was all alive.

“I do indeed,” replied Elizabeth, colouring. “I told you, the other day,
of his infamous behaviour to Mr. Darcy; and you yourself, when last at
Longbourn, heard in what manner he spoke of the man who had behaved
with such forbearance and liberality towards him. And there are other
circumstances which I am not at liberty--which it is not worth while to
relate; but his lies about the whole Pemberley family are endless. From
what he said of Miss Darcy I was thoroughly prepared to see a proud,
reserved, disagreeable girl. Yet he knew to the contrary himself. He
must know that she was as amiable and unpretending as we have found
her.”

“But does Lydia know nothing of this? can she be ignorant of what you
and Jane seem so well to understand?”

“Oh, yes!--that, that is the worst of all. Till I was in Kent, and saw
so much both of Mr. Darcy and his relation Colonel Fitzwilliam, I was
ignorant of the truth myself. And when I returned home, the ----shire
was to leave Meryton in a week or fortnight's time. As that was the
case, neither Jane, to whom I related the whole, nor I, thought it
necessary to make our knowledge public; for of what use could
it apparently be to any one, that the good opinion which all the
neighbourhood had of him should then be overthrown? And even when it was
settled that Lydia should go with Mrs. Forster, the necessity of opening
her eyes to his character never occurred to me. That _she_ could be
in any danger from the deception never entered my head. That such a
consequence as _this_ could ensue, you may easily believe, was far
enough from my thoughts.”

“When they all removed to Brighton, therefore, you had no reason, I
suppose, to believe them fond of each other?”

“Not the slightest. I can remember no symptom of affection on either
side; and had anything of the kind been perceptible, you must be aware
that ours is not a family on which it could be thrown away. When first
he entered the corps, she was ready enough to admire him; but so we all
were. Every girl in or near Meryton was out of her senses about him for
the first two months; but he never distinguished _her_ by any particular
attention; and, consequently, after a moderate period of extravagant and
wild admiration, her fancy for him gave way, and others of the regiment,
who treated her with more distinction, again became her favourites.”

                          * * * * *

It may be easily believed, that however little of novelty could be added
to their fears, hopes, and conjectures, on this interesting subject, by
its repeated discussion, no other could detain them from it long, during
the whole of the journey. From Elizabeth's thoughts it was never absent.
Fixed there by the keenest of all anguish, self-reproach, she could find
no interval of ease or forgetfulness.

They travelled as expeditiously as possible, and, sleeping one night
on the road, reached Longbourn by dinner time the next day. It was a
comfort to Elizabeth to consider that Jane could not have been wearied
by long expectations.

The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were standing
on the steps of the house as they entered the paddock; and, when the
carriage drove up to the door, the joyful surprise that lighted up their
faces, and displayed itself over their whole bodies, in a variety of
capers and frisks, was the first pleasing earnest of their welcome.

Elizabeth jumped out; and, after giving each of them a hasty kiss,
hurried into the vestibule, where Jane, who came running down from her
mother's apartment, immediately met her.

Elizabeth, as she affectionately embraced her, whilst tears filled the
eyes of both, lost not a moment in asking whether anything had been
heard of the fugitives.

“Not yet,” replied Jane. “But now that my dear uncle is come, I hope
everything will be well.”

“Is my father in town?”

“Yes, he went on Tuesday, as I wrote you word.”

“And have you heard from him often?”

“We have heard only twice. He wrote me a few lines on Wednesday to say
that he had arrived in safety, and to give me his directions, which I
particularly begged him to do. He merely added that he should not write
again till he had something of importance to mention.”

“And my mother--how is she? How are you all?”

“My mother is tolerably well, I trust; though her spirits are greatly
shaken. She is up stairs and will have great satisfaction in seeing you
all. She does not yet leave her dressing-room. Mary and Kitty, thank
Heaven, are quite well.”

“But you--how are you?” cried Elizabeth. “You look pale. How much you
must have gone through!”

Her sister, however, assured her of her being perfectly well; and their
conversation, which had been passing while Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were
engaged with their children, was now put an end to by the approach
of the whole party. Jane ran to her uncle and aunt, and welcomed and
thanked them both, with alternate smiles and tears.

When they were all in the drawing-room, the questions which Elizabeth
had already asked were of course repeated by the others, and they soon
found that Jane had no intelligence to give. The sanguine hope of
good, however, which the benevolence of her heart suggested had not yet
deserted her; she still expected that it would all end well, and that
every morning would bring some letter, either from Lydia or her father,
to explain their proceedings, and, perhaps, announce their marriage.

Mrs. Bennet, to whose apartment they all repaired, after a few minutes'
conversation together, received them exactly as might be expected; with
tears and lamentations of regret, invectives against the villainous
conduct of Wickham, and complaints of her own sufferings and ill-usage;
blaming everybody but the person to whose ill-judging indulgence the
errors of her daughter must principally be owing.

“If I had been able,” said she, “to carry my point in going to Brighton,
with all my family, _this_ would not have happened; but poor dear Lydia
had nobody to take care of her. Why did the Forsters ever let her go out
of their sight? I am sure there was some great neglect or other on their
side, for she is not the kind of girl to do such a thing if she had been
well looked after. I always thought they were very unfit to have the
charge of her; but I was overruled, as I always am. Poor dear child!
And now here's Mr. Bennet gone away, and I know he will fight Wickham,
wherever he meets him and then he will be killed, and what is to become
of us all? The Collinses will turn us out before he is cold in his
grave, and if you are not kind to us, brother, I do not know what we
shall do.”

They all exclaimed against such terrific ideas; and Mr. Gardiner, after
general assurances of his affection for her and all her family, told her
that he meant to be in London the very next day, and would assist Mr.
Bennet in every endeavour for recovering Lydia.

“Do not give way to useless alarm,” added he; “though it is right to be
prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
It is not quite a week since they left Brighton. In a few days more we
may gain some news of them; and till we know that they are not married,
and have no design of marrying, do not let us give the matter over as
lost. As soon as I get to town I shall go to my brother, and make
him come home with me to Gracechurch Street; and then we may consult
together as to what is to be done.”

“Oh! my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Bennet, “that is exactly what I
could most wish for. And now do, when you get to town, find them out,
wherever they may be; and if they are not married already, _make_ them
marry. And as for wedding clothes, do not let them wait for that, but
tell Lydia she shall have as much money as she chooses to buy them,
after they are married. And, above all, keep Mr. Bennet from fighting.
Tell him what a dreadful state I am in, that I am frighted out of my
wits--and have such tremblings, such flutterings, all over me--such
spasms in my side and pains in my head, and such beatings at heart, that
I can get no rest by night nor by day. And tell my dear Lydia not to
give any directions about her clothes till she has seen me, for she does
not know which are the best warehouses. Oh, brother, how kind you are! I
know you will contrive it all.”

But Mr. Gardiner, though he assured her again of his earnest endeavours
in the cause, could not avoid recommending moderation to her, as well
in her hopes as her fear; and after talking with her in this manner till
dinner was on the table, they all left her to vent all her feelings on
the housekeeper, who attended in the absence of her daughters.

Though her brother and sister were persuaded that there was no real
occasion for such a seclusion from the family, they did not attempt to
oppose it, for they knew that she had not prudence enough to hold her
tongue before the servants, while they waited at table, and judged it
better that _one_ only of the household, and the one whom they could
most trust should comprehend all her fears and solicitude on the
subject.

In the dining-room they were soon joined by Mary and Kitty, who had been
too busily engaged in their separate apartments to make their appearance
before. One came from her books, and the other from her toilette. The
faces of both, however, were tolerably calm; and no change was visible
in either, except that the loss of her favourite sister, or the anger
which she had herself incurred in this business, had given more of
fretfulness than usual to the accents of Kitty. As for Mary, she was
mistress enough of herself to whisper to Elizabeth, with a countenance
of grave reflection, soon after they were seated at table:

“This is a most unfortunate affair, and will probably be much talked of.
But we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into the wounded bosoms of
each other the balm of sisterly consolation.”

Then, perceiving in Elizabeth no inclination of replying, she added,
“Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful
lesson: that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one
false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less
brittle than it is beautiful; and that she cannot be too much guarded in
her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.”

Elizabeth lifted up her eyes in amazement, but was too much oppressed
to make any reply. Mary, however, continued to console herself with such
kind of moral extractions from the evil before them.

In the afternoon, the two elder Miss Bennets were able to be for
half-an-hour by themselves; and Elizabeth instantly availed herself of
the opportunity of making any inquiries, which Jane was equally eager to
satisfy. After joining in general lamentations over the dreadful sequel
of this event, which Elizabeth considered as all but certain, and Miss
Bennet could not assert to be wholly impossible, the former continued
the subject, by saying, “But tell me all and everything about it which
I have not already heard. Give me further particulars. What did Colonel
Forster say? Had they no apprehension of anything before the elopement
took place? They must have seen them together for ever.”

“Colonel Forster did own that he had often suspected some partiality,
especially on Lydia's side, but nothing to give him any alarm. I am so
grieved for him! His behaviour was attentive and kind to the utmost. He
_was_ coming to us, in order to assure us of his concern, before he had
any idea of their not being gone to Scotland: when that apprehension
first got abroad, it hastened his journey.”

“And was Denny convinced that Wickham would not marry? Did he know of
their intending to go off? Had Colonel Forster seen Denny himself?”

“Yes; but, when questioned by _him_, Denny denied knowing anything of
their plans, and would not give his real opinion about it. He did not
repeat his persuasion of their not marrying--and from _that_, I am
inclined to hope, he might have been misunderstood before.”

“And till Colonel Forster came himself, not one of you entertained a
doubt, I suppose, of their being really married?”

“How was it possible that such an idea should enter our brains? I felt
a little uneasy--a little fearful of my sister's happiness with him
in marriage, because I knew that his conduct had not been always quite
right. My father and mother knew nothing of that; they only felt how
imprudent a match it must be. Kitty then owned, with a very natural
triumph on knowing more than the rest of us, that in Lydia's last letter
she had prepared her for such a step. She had known, it seems, of their
being in love with each other, many weeks.”

“But not before they went to Brighton?”

“No, I believe not.”

“And did Colonel Forster appear to think well of Wickham himself? Does
he know his real character?”

“I must confess that he did not speak so well of Wickham as he formerly
did. He believed him to be imprudent and extravagant. And since this sad
affair has taken place, it is said that he left Meryton greatly in debt;
but I hope this may be false.”

“Oh, Jane, had we been less secret, had we told what we knew of him,
this could not have happened!”

“Perhaps it would have been better,” replied her sister. “But to expose
the former faults of any person without knowing what their present
feelings were, seemed unjustifiable. We acted with the best intentions.”

“Could Colonel Forster repeat the particulars of Lydia's note to his
wife?”

“He brought it with him for us to see.”

Jane then took it from her pocket-book, and gave it to Elizabeth. These
were the contents:

“MY DEAR HARRIET,

“You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help
laughing myself at your surprise to-morrow morning, as soon as I am
missed. I am going to Gretna Green, and if you cannot guess with who,
I shall think you a simpleton, for there is but one man in the world I
love, and he is an angel. I should never be happy without him, so think
it no harm to be off. You need not send them word at Longbourn of my
going, if you do not like it, for it will make the surprise the greater,
when I write to them and sign my name 'Lydia Wickham.' What a good joke
it will be! I can hardly write for laughing. Pray make my excuses to
Pratt for not keeping my engagement, and dancing with him to-night.
Tell him I hope he will excuse me when he knows all; and tell him I will
dance with him at the next ball we meet, with great pleasure. I shall
send for my clothes when I get to Longbourn; but I wish you would tell
Sally to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown before they are
packed up. Good-bye. Give my love to Colonel Forster. I hope you will
drink to our good journey.

“Your affectionate friend,

“LYDIA BENNET.”

“Oh! thoughtless, thoughtless Lydia!” cried Elizabeth when she had
finished it. “What a letter is this, to be written at such a moment!
But at least it shows that _she_ was serious on the subject of their
journey. Whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her
side a _scheme_ of infamy. My poor father! how he must have felt it!”

“I never saw anyone so shocked. He could not speak a word for full ten
minutes. My mother was taken ill immediately, and the whole house in
such confusion!”

“Oh! Jane,” cried Elizabeth, “was there a servant belonging to it who
did not know the whole story before the end of the day?”

“I do not know. I hope there was. But to be guarded at such a time is
very difficult. My mother was in hysterics, and though I endeavoured to
give her every assistance in my power, I am afraid I did not do so
much as I might have done! But the horror of what might possibly happen
almost took from me my faculties.”

“Your attendance upon her has been too much for you. You do not look
well. Oh that I had been with you! you have had every care and anxiety
upon yourself alone.”

“Mary and Kitty have been very kind, and would have shared in every
fatigue, I am sure; but I did not think it right for either of them.
Kitty is slight and delicate; and Mary studies so much, that her hours
of repose should not be broken in on. My aunt Phillips came to Longbourn
on Tuesday, after my father went away; and was so good as to stay till
Thursday with me. She was of great use and comfort to us all. And
Lady Lucas has been very kind; she walked here on Wednesday morning to
condole with us, and offered her services, or any of her daughters', if
they should be of use to us.”

“She had better have stayed at home,” cried Elizabeth; “perhaps she
_meant_ well, but, under such a misfortune as this, one cannot see
too little of one's neighbours. Assistance is impossible; condolence
insufferable. Let them triumph over us at a distance, and be satisfied.”

She then proceeded to inquire into the measures which her father had
intended to pursue, while in town, for the recovery of his daughter.

“He meant I believe,” replied Jane, “to go to Epsom, the place where
they last changed horses, see the postilions and try if anything could
be made out from them. His principal object must be to discover the
number of the hackney coach which took them from Clapham. It had come
with a fare from London; and as he thought that the circumstance of a
gentleman and lady's removing from one carriage into another might
be remarked he meant to make inquiries at Clapham. If he could anyhow
discover at what house the coachman had before set down his fare, he
determined to make inquiries there, and hoped it might not be impossible
to find out the stand and number of the coach. I do not know of any
other designs that he had formed; but he was in such a hurry to be gone,
and his spirits so greatly discomposed, that I had difficulty in finding
out even so much as this.”



Chapter 48


The whole party were in hopes of a letter from Mr. Bennet the next
morning, but the post came in without bringing a single line from him.
His family knew him to be, on all common occasions, a most negligent and
dilatory correspondent; but at such a time they had hoped for exertion.
They were forced to conclude that he had no pleasing intelligence to
send; but even of _that_ they would have been glad to be certain. Mr.
Gardiner had waited only for the letters before he set off.

When he was gone, they were certain at least of receiving constant
information of what was going on, and their uncle promised, at parting,
to prevail on Mr. Bennet to return to Longbourn, as soon as he could,
to the great consolation of his sister, who considered it as the only
security for her husband's not being killed in a duel.

Mrs. Gardiner and the children were to remain in Hertfordshire a few
days longer, as the former thought her presence might be serviceable
to her nieces. She shared in their attendance on Mrs. Bennet, and was a
great comfort to them in their hours of freedom. Their other aunt also
visited them frequently, and always, as she said, with the design of
cheering and heartening them up--though, as she never came without
reporting some fresh instance of Wickham's extravagance or irregularity,
she seldom went away without leaving them more dispirited than she found
them.

All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months
before, had been almost an angel of light. He was declared to be in debt
to every tradesman in the place, and his intrigues, all honoured with
the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman's family.
Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world;
and everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the
appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above
half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of
her sister's ruin more certain; and even Jane, who believed still less
of it, became almost hopeless, more especially as the time was now come
when, if they had gone to Scotland, which she had never before entirely
despaired of, they must in all probability have gained some news of
them.

Mr. Gardiner left Longbourn on Sunday; on Tuesday his wife received a
letter from him; it told them that, on his arrival, he had immediately
found out his brother, and persuaded him to come to Gracechurch Street;
that Mr. Bennet had been to Epsom and Clapham, before his arrival,
but without gaining any satisfactory information; and that he was now
determined to inquire at all the principal hotels in town, as Mr. Bennet
thought it possible they might have gone to one of them, on their first
coming to London, before they procured lodgings. Mr. Gardiner himself
did not expect any success from this measure, but as his brother was
eager in it, he meant to assist him in pursuing it. He added that Mr.
Bennet seemed wholly disinclined at present to leave London and promised
to write again very soon. There was also a postscript to this effect:

“I have written to Colonel Forster to desire him to find out, if
possible, from some of the young man's intimates in the regiment,
whether Wickham has any relations or connections who would be likely to
know in what part of town he has now concealed himself. If there were
anyone that one could apply to with a probability of gaining such a
clue as that, it might be of essential consequence. At present we have
nothing to guide us. Colonel Forster will, I dare say, do everything in
his power to satisfy us on this head. But, on second thoughts, perhaps,
Lizzy could tell us what relations he has now living, better than any
other person.”

Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this deference to her
authority proceeded; but it was not in her power to give any information
of so satisfactory a nature as the compliment deserved. She had never
heard of his having had any relations, except a father and mother, both
of whom had been dead many years. It was possible, however, that some of
his companions in the ----shire might be able to give more information;
and though she was not very sanguine in expecting it, the application
was a something to look forward to.

Every day at Longbourn was now a day of anxiety; but the most anxious
part of each was when the post was expected. The arrival of letters
was the grand object of every morning's impatience. Through letters,
whatever of good or bad was to be told would be communicated, and every
succeeding day was expected to bring some news of importance.

But before they heard again from Mr. Gardiner, a letter arrived for
their father, from a different quarter, from Mr. Collins; which, as Jane
had received directions to open all that came for him in his absence,
she accordingly read; and Elizabeth, who knew what curiosities his
letters always were, looked over her, and read it likewise. It was as
follows:

“MY DEAR SIR,

“I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation
in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now
suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter from
Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir, that Mrs. Collins and myself
sincerely sympathise with you and all your respectable family, in
your present distress, which must be of the bitterest kind, because
proceeding from a cause which no time can remove. No arguments shall be
wanting on my part that can alleviate so severe a misfortune--or that
may comfort you, under a circumstance that must be of all others the
most afflicting to a parent's mind. The death of your daughter would
have been a blessing in comparison of this. And it is the more to
be lamented, because there is reason to suppose as my dear Charlotte
informs me, that this licentiousness of behaviour in your daughter has
proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though, at the same time,
for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think
that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be
guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age. Howsoever that may be,
you are grievously to be pitied; in which opinion I am not only joined
by Mrs. Collins, but likewise by Lady Catherine and her daughter, to
whom I have related the affair. They agree with me in apprehending that
this false step in one daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of
all the others; for who, as Lady Catherine herself condescendingly says,
will connect themselves with such a family? And this consideration leads
me moreover to reflect, with augmented satisfaction, on a certain event
of last November; for had it been otherwise, I must have been involved
in all your sorrow and disgrace. Let me then advise you, dear sir, to
console yourself as much as possible, to throw off your unworthy child
from your affection for ever, and leave her to reap the fruits of her
own heinous offense.

“I am, dear sir, etc., etc.”

Mr. Gardiner did not write again till he had received an answer from
Colonel Forster; and then he had nothing of a pleasant nature to send.
It was not known that Wickham had a single relationship with whom he
kept up any connection, and it was certain that he had no near one
living. His former acquaintances had been numerous; but since he
had been in the militia, it did not appear that he was on terms of
particular friendship with any of them. There was no one, therefore,
who could be pointed out as likely to give any news of him. And in the
wretched state of his own finances, there was a very powerful motive for
secrecy, in addition to his fear of discovery by Lydia's relations, for
it had just transpired that he had left gaming debts behind him to a
very considerable amount. Colonel Forster believed that more than a
thousand pounds would be necessary to clear his expenses at Brighton.
He owed a good deal in town, but his debts of honour were still more
formidable. Mr. Gardiner did not attempt to conceal these particulars
from the Longbourn family. Jane heard them with horror. “A gamester!”
 she cried. “This is wholly unexpected. I had not an idea of it.”

Mr. Gardiner added in his letter, that they might expect to see their
father at home on the following day, which was Saturday. Rendered
spiritless by the ill-success of all their endeavours, he had yielded
to his brother-in-law's entreaty that he would return to his family, and
leave it to him to do whatever occasion might suggest to be advisable
for continuing their pursuit. When Mrs. Bennet was told of this, she did
not express so much satisfaction as her children expected, considering
what her anxiety for his life had been before.

“What, is he coming home, and without poor Lydia?” she cried. “Sure he
will not leave London before he has found them. Who is to fight Wickham,
and make him marry her, if he comes away?”

As Mrs. Gardiner began to wish to be at home, it was settled that she
and the children should go to London, at the same time that Mr. Bennet
came from it. The coach, therefore, took them the first stage of their
journey, and brought its master back to Longbourn.

Mrs. Gardiner went away in all the perplexity about Elizabeth and her
Derbyshire friend that had attended her from that part of the world. His
name had never been voluntarily mentioned before them by her niece; and
the kind of half-expectation which Mrs. Gardiner had formed, of their
being followed by a letter from him, had ended in nothing. Elizabeth had
received none since her return that could come from Pemberley.

The present unhappy state of the family rendered any other excuse for
the lowness of her spirits unnecessary; nothing, therefore, could be
fairly conjectured from _that_, though Elizabeth, who was by this time
tolerably well acquainted with her own feelings, was perfectly aware
that, had she known nothing of Darcy, she could have borne the dread of
Lydia's infamy somewhat better. It would have spared her, she thought,
one sleepless night out of two.

When Mr. Bennet arrived, he had all the appearance of his usual
philosophic composure. He said as little as he had ever been in the
habit of saying; made no mention of the business that had taken him
away, and it was some time before his daughters had courage to speak of
it.

It was not till the afternoon, when he had joined them at tea, that
Elizabeth ventured to introduce the subject; and then, on her briefly
expressing her sorrow for what he must have endured, he replied, “Say
nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing,
and I ought to feel it.”

“You must not be too severe upon yourself,” replied Elizabeth.

“You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone
to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have
been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression.
It will pass away soon enough.”

“Do you suppose them to be in London?”

“Yes; where else can they be so well concealed?”

“And Lydia used to want to go to London,” added Kitty.

“She is happy then,” said her father drily; “and her residence there
will probably be of some duration.”

Then after a short silence he continued:

“Lizzy, I bear you no ill-will for being justified in your advice to me
last May, which, considering the event, shows some greatness of mind.”

They were interrupted by Miss Bennet, who came to fetch her mother's
tea.

“This is a parade,” he cried, “which does one good; it gives such an
elegance to misfortune! Another day I will do the same; I will sit in my
library, in my nightcap and powdering gown, and give as much trouble as
I can; or, perhaps, I may defer it till Kitty runs away.”

“I am not going to run away, papa,” said Kitty fretfully. “If I should
ever go to Brighton, I would behave better than Lydia.”

“_You_ go to Brighton. I would not trust you so near it as Eastbourne
for fifty pounds! No, Kitty, I have at last learnt to be cautious, and
you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever to enter into
my house again, nor even to pass through the village. Balls will be
absolutely prohibited, unless you stand up with one of your sisters.
And you are never to stir out of doors till you can prove that you have
spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner.”

Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.

“Well, well,” said he, “do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good
girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of
them.”



Chapter 49


Two days after Mr. Bennet's return, as Jane and Elizabeth were walking
together in the shrubbery behind the house, they saw the housekeeper
coming towards them, and, concluding that she came to call them to their
mother, went forward to meet her; but, instead of the expected summons,
when they approached her, she said to Miss Bennet, “I beg your pardon,
madam, for interrupting you, but I was in hopes you might have got some
good news from town, so I took the liberty of coming to ask.”

“What do you mean, Hill? We have heard nothing from town.”

“Dear madam,” cried Mrs. Hill, in great astonishment, “don't you know
there is an express come for master from Mr. Gardiner? He has been here
this half-hour, and master has had a letter.”

Away ran the girls, too eager to get in to have time for speech. They
ran through the vestibule into the breakfast-room; from thence to the
library; their father was in neither; and they were on the point of
seeking him up stairs with their mother, when they were met by the
butler, who said:

“If you are looking for my master, ma'am, he is walking towards the
little copse.”

Upon this information, they instantly passed through the hall once
more, and ran across the lawn after their father, who was deliberately
pursuing his way towards a small wood on one side of the paddock.

Jane, who was not so light nor so much in the habit of running as
Elizabeth, soon lagged behind, while her sister, panting for breath,
came up with him, and eagerly cried out:

“Oh, papa, what news--what news? Have you heard from my uncle?”

“Yes I have had a letter from him by express.”

“Well, and what news does it bring--good or bad?”

“What is there of good to be expected?” said he, taking the letter from
his pocket. “But perhaps you would like to read it.”

Elizabeth impatiently caught it from his hand. Jane now came up.

“Read it aloud,” said their father, “for I hardly know myself what it is
about.”

“Gracechurch Street, Monday, August 2.

“MY DEAR BROTHER,

“At last I am able to send you some tidings of my niece, and such as,
upon the whole, I hope it will give you satisfaction. Soon after you
left me on Saturday, I was fortunate enough to find out in what part of
London they were. The particulars I reserve till we meet; it is enough
to know they are discovered. I have seen them both--”

“Then it is as I always hoped,” cried Jane; “they are married!”

Elizabeth read on:

“I have seen them both. They are not married, nor can I find there
was any intention of being so; but if you are willing to perform the
engagements which I have ventured to make on your side, I hope it will
not be long before they are. All that is required of you is, to assure
to your daughter, by settlement, her equal share of the five thousand
pounds secured among your children after the decease of yourself and
my sister; and, moreover, to enter into an engagement of allowing her,
during your life, one hundred pounds per annum. These are conditions
which, considering everything, I had no hesitation in complying with,
as far as I thought myself privileged, for you. I shall send this by
express, that no time may be lost in bringing me your answer. You
will easily comprehend, from these particulars, that Mr. Wickham's
circumstances are not so hopeless as they are generally believed to be.
The world has been deceived in that respect; and I am happy to say there
will be some little money, even when all his debts are discharged, to
settle on my niece, in addition to her own fortune. If, as I conclude
will be the case, you send me full powers to act in your name throughout
the whole of this business, I will immediately give directions to
Haggerston for preparing a proper settlement. There will not be the
smallest occasion for your coming to town again; therefore stay quiet at
Longbourn, and depend on my diligence and care. Send back your answer as
fast as you can, and be careful to write explicitly. We have judged it
best that my niece should be married from this house, of which I hope
you will approve. She comes to us to-day. I shall write again as soon as
anything more is determined on. Yours, etc.,

“EDW. GARDINER.”

“Is it possible?” cried Elizabeth, when she had finished. “Can it be
possible that he will marry her?”

“Wickham is not so undeserving, then, as we thought him,” said her
sister. “My dear father, I congratulate you.”

“And have you answered the letter?” cried Elizabeth.

“No; but it must be done soon.”

Most earnestly did she then entreat him to lose no more time before he
wrote.

“Oh! my dear father,” she cried, “come back and write immediately.
Consider how important every moment is in such a case.”

“Let me write for you,” said Jane, “if you dislike the trouble
yourself.”

“I dislike it very much,” he replied; “but it must be done.”

And so saying, he turned back with them, and walked towards the house.

“And may I ask--” said Elizabeth; “but the terms, I suppose, must be
complied with.”

“Complied with! I am only ashamed of his asking so little.”

“And they _must_ marry! Yet he is _such_ a man!”

“Yes, yes, they must marry. There is nothing else to be done. But there
are two things that I want very much to know; one is, how much money
your uncle has laid down to bring it about; and the other, how am I ever
to pay him.”

“Money! My uncle!” cried Jane, “what do you mean, sir?”

“I mean, that no man in his senses would marry Lydia on so slight a
temptation as one hundred a year during my life, and fifty after I am
gone.”

“That is very true,” said Elizabeth; “though it had not occurred to me
before. His debts to be discharged, and something still to remain! Oh!
it must be my uncle's doings! Generous, good man, I am afraid he has
distressed himself. A small sum could not do all this.”

“No,” said her father; “Wickham's a fool if he takes her with a farthing
less than ten thousand pounds. I should be sorry to think so ill of him,
in the very beginning of our relationship.”

“Ten thousand pounds! Heaven forbid! How is half such a sum to be
repaid?”

Mr. Bennet made no answer, and each of them, deep in thought, continued
silent till they reached the house. Their father then went on to the
library to write, and the girls walked into the breakfast-room.

“And they are really to be married!” cried Elizabeth, as soon as they
were by themselves. “How strange this is! And for _this_ we are to be
thankful. That they should marry, small as is their chance of happiness,
and wretched as is his character, we are forced to rejoice. Oh, Lydia!”

“I comfort myself with thinking,” replied Jane, “that he certainly would
not marry Lydia if he had not a real regard for her. Though our kind
uncle has done something towards clearing him, I cannot believe that ten
thousand pounds, or anything like it, has been advanced. He has children
of his own, and may have more. How could he spare half ten thousand
pounds?”

“If he were ever able to learn what Wickham's debts have been,” said
Elizabeth, “and how much is settled on his side on our sister, we shall
exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for them, because Wickham has
not sixpence of his own. The kindness of my uncle and aunt can never
be requited. Their taking her home, and affording her their personal
protection and countenance, is such a sacrifice to her advantage as
years of gratitude cannot enough acknowledge. By this time she is
actually with them! If such goodness does not make her miserable now,
she will never deserve to be happy! What a meeting for her, when she
first sees my aunt!”

“We must endeavour to forget all that has passed on either side,” said
Jane: “I hope and trust they will yet be happy. His consenting to
marry her is a proof, I will believe, that he is come to a right way of
thinking. Their mutual affection will steady them; and I flatter myself
they will settle so quietly, and live in so rational a manner, as may in
time make their past imprudence forgotten.”

“Their conduct has been such,” replied Elizabeth, “as neither you, nor
I, nor anybody can ever forget. It is useless to talk of it.”

It now occurred to the girls that their mother was in all likelihood
perfectly ignorant of what had happened. They went to the library,
therefore, and asked their father whether he would not wish them to make
it known to her. He was writing and, without raising his head, coolly
replied:

“Just as you please.”

“May we take my uncle's letter to read to her?”

“Take whatever you like, and get away.”

Elizabeth took the letter from his writing-table, and they went up stairs
together. Mary and Kitty were both with Mrs. Bennet: one communication
would, therefore, do for all. After a slight preparation for good news,
the letter was read aloud. Mrs. Bennet could hardly contain herself. As
soon as Jane had read Mr. Gardiner's hope of Lydia's being soon
married, her joy burst forth, and every following sentence added to its
exuberance. She was now in an irritation as violent from delight, as she
had ever been fidgety from alarm and vexation. To know that her daughter
would be married was enough. She was disturbed by no fear for her
felicity, nor humbled by any remembrance of her misconduct.

“My dear, dear Lydia!” she cried. “This is delightful indeed! She will
be married! I shall see her again! She will be married at sixteen!
My good, kind brother! I knew how it would be. I knew he would manage
everything! How I long to see her! and to see dear Wickham too! But the
clothes, the wedding clothes! I will write to my sister Gardiner about
them directly. Lizzy, my dear, run down to your father, and ask him
how much he will give her. Stay, stay, I will go myself. Ring the bell,
Kitty, for Hill. I will put on my things in a moment. My dear, dear
Lydia! How merry we shall be together when we meet!”

Her eldest daughter endeavoured to give some relief to the violence of
these transports, by leading her thoughts to the obligations which Mr.
Gardiner's behaviour laid them all under.

“For we must attribute this happy conclusion,” she added, “in a great
measure to his kindness. We are persuaded that he has pledged himself to
assist Mr. Wickham with money.”

“Well,” cried her mother, “it is all very right; who should do it but
her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his own, I and my children
must have had all his money, you know; and it is the first time we have
ever had anything from him, except a few presents. Well! I am so happy!
In a short time I shall have a daughter married. Mrs. Wickham! How well
it sounds! And she was only sixteen last June. My dear Jane, I am in
such a flutter, that I am sure I can't write; so I will dictate, and
you write for me. We will settle with your father about the money
afterwards; but the things should be ordered immediately.”

She was then proceeding to all the particulars of calico, muslin, and
cambric, and would shortly have dictated some very plentiful orders, had
not Jane, though with some difficulty, persuaded her to wait till her
father was at leisure to be consulted. One day's delay, she observed,
would be of small importance; and her mother was too happy to be quite
so obstinate as usual. Other schemes, too, came into her head.

“I will go to Meryton,” said she, “as soon as I am dressed, and tell the
good, good news to my sister Philips. And as I come back, I can call
on Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long. Kitty, run down and order the carriage.
An airing would do me a great deal of good, I am sure. Girls, can I do
anything for you in Meryton? Oh! Here comes Hill! My dear Hill, have you
heard the good news? Miss Lydia is going to be married; and you shall
all have a bowl of punch to make merry at her wedding.”

Mrs. Hill began instantly to express her joy. Elizabeth received her
congratulations amongst the rest, and then, sick of this folly, took
refuge in her own room, that she might think with freedom.

Poor Lydia's situation must, at best, be bad enough; but that it was
no worse, she had need to be thankful. She felt it so; and though, in
looking forward, neither rational happiness nor worldly prosperity could
be justly expected for her sister, in looking back to what they had
feared, only two hours ago, she felt all the advantages of what they had
gained.



Chapter 50


Mr. Bennet had very often wished before this period of his life that,
instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for
the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived
him. He now wished it more than ever. Had he done his duty in that
respect, Lydia need not have been indebted to her uncle for whatever
of honour or credit could now be purchased for her. The satisfaction of
prevailing on one of the most worthless young men in Great Britain to be
her husband might then have rested in its proper place.

He was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone
should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother-in-law, and he
was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance,
and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could.

When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly
useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The son was to join
in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow
and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters
successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs.
Bennet, for many years after Lydia's birth, had been certain that he
would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then
too late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy, and her
husband's love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their
income.

Five thousand pounds was settled by marriage articles on Mrs. Bennet and
the children. But in what proportions it should be divided amongst the
latter depended on the will of the parents. This was one point, with
regard to Lydia, at least, which was now to be settled, and Mr. Bennet
could have no hesitation in acceding to the proposal before him. In
terms of grateful acknowledgment for the kindness of his brother,
though expressed most concisely, he then delivered on paper his perfect
approbation of all that was done, and his willingness to fulfil the
engagements that had been made for him. He had never before supposed
that, could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his daughter, it would
be done with so little inconvenience to himself as by the present
arrangement. He would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser by the
hundred that was to be paid them; for, what with her board and pocket
allowance, and the continual presents in money which passed to her
through her mother's hands, Lydia's expenses had been very little within
that sum.

That it would be done with such trifling exertion on his side, too, was
another very welcome surprise; for his wish at present was to have as
little trouble in the business as possible. When the first transports
of rage which had produced his activity in seeking her were over, he
naturally returned to all his former indolence. His letter was soon
dispatched; for, though dilatory in undertaking business, he was quick
in its execution. He begged to know further particulars of what he
was indebted to his brother, but was too angry with Lydia to send any
message to her.

The good news spread quickly through the house, and with proportionate
speed through the neighbourhood. It was borne in the latter with decent
philosophy. To be sure, it would have been more for the advantage
of conversation had Miss Lydia Bennet come upon the town; or, as the
happiest alternative, been secluded from the world, in some distant
farmhouse. But there was much to be talked of in marrying her; and the
good-natured wishes for her well-doing which had proceeded before from
all the spiteful old ladies in Meryton lost but a little of their spirit
in this change of circumstances, because with such an husband her misery
was considered certain.

It was a fortnight since Mrs. Bennet had been downstairs; but on this
happy day she again took her seat at the head of her table, and in
spirits oppressively high. No sentiment of shame gave a damp to her
triumph. The marriage of a daughter, which had been the first object
of her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was now on the point of
accomplishment, and her thoughts and her words ran wholly on those
attendants of elegant nuptials, fine muslins, new carriages, and
servants. She was busily searching through the neighbourhood for a
proper situation for her daughter, and, without knowing or considering
what their income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and
importance.

“Haye Park might do,” said she, “if the Gouldings could quit it--or the
great house at Stoke, if the drawing-room were larger; but Ashworth is
too far off! I could not bear to have her ten miles from me; and as for
Pulvis Lodge, the attics are dreadful.”

Her husband allowed her to talk on without interruption while the
servants remained. But when they had withdrawn, he said to her: “Mrs.
Bennet, before you take any or all of these houses for your son and
daughter, let us come to a right understanding. Into _one_ house in this
neighbourhood they shall never have admittance. I will not encourage the
impudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn.”

A long dispute followed this declaration; but Mr. Bennet was firm. It
soon led to another; and Mrs. Bennet found, with amazement and horror,
that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his
daughter. He protested that she should receive from him no mark of
affection whatever on the occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend
it. That his anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable
resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege without which her
marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all she could believe
possible. She was more alive to the disgrace which her want of new
clothes must reflect on her daughter's nuptials, than to any sense of
shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they
took place.

Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry that she had, from the distress of
the moment, been led to make Mr. Darcy acquainted with their fears for
her sister; for since her marriage would so shortly give the
proper termination to the elopement, they might hope to conceal its
unfavourable beginning from all those who were not immediately on the
spot.

She had no fear of its spreading farther through his means. There were
few people on whose secrecy she would have more confidently depended;
but, at the same time, there was no one whose knowledge of a sister's
frailty would have mortified her so much--not, however, from any fear
of disadvantage from it individually to herself, for, at any rate,
there seemed a gulf impassable between them. Had Lydia's marriage been
concluded on the most honourable terms, it was not to be supposed that
Mr. Darcy would connect himself with a family where, to every other
objection, would now be added an alliance and relationship of the
nearest kind with a man whom he so justly scorned.

From such a connection she could not wonder that he would shrink. The
wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself of his
feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation survive such a
blow as this. She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented, though she
hardly knew of what. She became jealous of his esteem, when she could no
longer hope to be benefited by it. She wanted to hear of him, when there
seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. She was convinced that
she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they
should meet.

What a triumph for him, as she often thought, could he know that the
proposals which she had proudly spurned only four months ago, would now
have been most gladly and gratefully received! He was as generous, she
doubted not, as the most generous of his sex; but while he was mortal,
there must be a triumph.

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in
disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and
temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It
was an union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease
and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved;
and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she
must have received benefit of greater importance.

But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what
connubial felicity really was. An union of a different tendency, and
precluding the possibility of the other, was soon to be formed in their
family.

How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence,
she could not imagine. But how little of permanent happiness could
belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions
were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.

                          * * * * *

Mr. Gardiner soon wrote again to his brother. To Mr. Bennet's
acknowledgments he briefly replied, with assurance of his eagerness to
promote the welfare of any of his family; and concluded with entreaties
that the subject might never be mentioned to him again. The principal
purport of his letter was to inform them that Mr. Wickham had resolved
on quitting the militia.

“It was greatly my wish that he should do so,” he added, “as soon as
his marriage was fixed on. And I think you will agree with me, in
considering the removal from that corps as highly advisable, both on
his account and my niece's. It is Mr. Wickham's intention to go into
the regulars; and among his former friends, there are still some who
are able and willing to assist him in the army. He has the promise of an
ensigncy in General ----'s regiment, now quartered in the North. It
is an advantage to have it so far from this part of the kingdom. He
promises fairly; and I hope among different people, where they may each
have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent. I have
written to Colonel Forster, to inform him of our present arrangements,
and to request that he will satisfy the various creditors of Mr. Wickham
in and near Brighton, with assurances of speedy payment, for which I
have pledged myself. And will you give yourself the trouble of carrying
similar assurances to his creditors in Meryton, of whom I shall subjoin
a list according to his information? He has given in all his debts; I
hope at least he has not deceived us. Haggerston has our directions,
and all will be completed in a week. They will then join his regiment,
unless they are first invited to Longbourn; and I understand from Mrs.
Gardiner, that my niece is very desirous of seeing you all before she
leaves the South. She is well, and begs to be dutifully remembered to
you and her mother.--Yours, etc.,

“E. GARDINER.”

Mr. Bennet and his daughters saw all the advantages of Wickham's removal
from the ----shire as clearly as Mr. Gardiner could do. But Mrs. Bennet
was not so well pleased with it. Lydia's being settled in the North,
just when she had expected most pleasure and pride in her company,
for she had by no means given up her plan of their residing in
Hertfordshire, was a severe disappointment; and, besides, it was such a
pity that Lydia should be taken from a regiment where she was acquainted
with everybody, and had so many favourites.

“She is so fond of Mrs. Forster,” said she, “it will be quite shocking
to send her away! And there are several of the young men, too, that she
likes very much. The officers may not be so pleasant in General ----'s
regiment.”

His daughter's request, for such it might be considered, of being
admitted into her family again before she set off for the North,
received at first an absolute negative. But Jane and Elizabeth,
who agreed in wishing, for the sake of their sister's feelings and
consequence, that she should be noticed on her marriage by her parents,
urged him so earnestly yet so rationally and so mildly, to receive her
and her husband at Longbourn, as soon as they were married, that he was
prevailed on to think as they thought, and act as they wished. And their
mother had the satisfaction of knowing that she would be able to show
her married daughter in the neighbourhood before she was banished to the
North. When Mr. Bennet wrote again to his brother, therefore, he sent
his permission for them to come; and it was settled, that as soon as
the ceremony was over, they should proceed to Longbourn. Elizabeth was
surprised, however, that Wickham should consent to such a scheme, and
had she consulted only her own inclination, any meeting with him would
have been the last object of her wishes.



Chapter 51


Their sister's wedding day arrived; and Jane and Elizabeth felt for her
probably more than she felt for herself. The carriage was sent to
meet them at ----, and they were to return in it by dinner-time. Their
arrival was dreaded by the elder Miss Bennets, and Jane more especially,
who gave Lydia the feelings which would have attended herself, had she
been the culprit, and was wretched in the thought of what her sister
must endure.

They came. The family were assembled in the breakfast room to receive
them. Smiles decked the face of Mrs. Bennet as the carriage drove up to
the door; her husband looked impenetrably grave; her daughters, alarmed,
anxious, uneasy.

Lydia's voice was heard in the vestibule; the door was thrown open, and
she ran into the room. Her mother stepped forwards, embraced her, and
welcomed her with rapture; gave her hand, with an affectionate smile,
to Wickham, who followed his lady; and wished them both joy with an
alacrity which shewed no doubt of their happiness.

Their reception from Mr. Bennet, to whom they then turned, was not quite
so cordial. His countenance rather gained in austerity; and he scarcely
opened his lips. The easy assurance of the young couple, indeed, was
enough to provoke him. Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet
was shocked. Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy,
and fearless. She turned from sister to sister, demanding their
congratulations; and when at length they all sat down, looked eagerly
round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and
observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been
there.

Wickham was not at all more distressed than herself, but his manners
were always so pleasing, that had his character and his marriage been
exactly what they ought, his smiles and his easy address, while he
claimed their relationship, would have delighted them all. Elizabeth had
not before believed him quite equal to such assurance; but she sat down,
resolving within herself to draw no limits in future to the impudence
of an impudent man. She blushed, and Jane blushed; but the cheeks of the
two who caused their confusion suffered no variation of colour.

There was no want of discourse. The bride and her mother could neither
of them talk fast enough; and Wickham, who happened to sit near
Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in that neighbourhood,
with a good humoured ease which she felt very unable to equal in her
replies. They seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the
world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain; and Lydia led
voluntarily to subjects which her sisters would not have alluded to for
the world.

“Only think of its being three months,” she cried, “since I went away;
it seems but a fortnight I declare; and yet there have been things
enough happened in the time. Good gracious! when I went away, I am sure
I had no more idea of being married till I came back again! though I
thought it would be very good fun if I was.”

Her father lifted up his eyes. Jane was distressed. Elizabeth looked
expressively at Lydia; but she, who never heard nor saw anything of
which she chose to be insensible, gaily continued, “Oh! mamma, do the
people hereabouts know I am married to-day? I was afraid they might not;
and we overtook William Goulding in his curricle, so I was determined he
should know it, and so I let down the side-glass next to him, and took
off my glove, and let my hand just rest upon the window frame, so that
he might see the ring, and then I bowed and smiled like anything.”

Elizabeth could bear it no longer. She got up, and ran out of the room;
and returned no more, till she heard them passing through the hall to
the dining parlour. She then joined them soon enough to see Lydia, with
anxious parade, walk up to her mother's right hand, and hear her say
to her eldest sister, “Ah! Jane, I take your place now, and you must go
lower, because I am a married woman.”

It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment
from which she had been so wholly free at first. Her ease and good
spirits increased. She longed to see Mrs. Phillips, the Lucases, and
all their other neighbours, and to hear herself called “Mrs. Wickham”
 by each of them; and in the mean time, she went after dinner to show her
ring, and boast of being married, to Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids.

“Well, mamma,” said she, when they were all returned to the breakfast
room, “and what do you think of my husband? Is not he a charming man? I
am sure my sisters must all envy me. I only hope they may have half
my good luck. They must all go to Brighton. That is the place to get
husbands. What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go.”

“Very true; and if I had my will, we should. But my dear Lydia, I don't
at all like your going such a way off. Must it be so?”

“Oh, lord! yes;--there is nothing in that. I shall like it of all
things. You and papa, and my sisters, must come down and see us. We
shall be at Newcastle all the winter, and I dare say there will be some
balls, and I will take care to get good partners for them all.”

“I should like it beyond anything!” said her mother.

“And then when you go away, you may leave one or two of my sisters
behind you; and I dare say I shall get husbands for them before the
winter is over.”

“I thank you for my share of the favour,” said Elizabeth; “but I do not
particularly like your way of getting husbands.”

Their visitors were not to remain above ten days with them. Mr. Wickham
had received his commission before he left London, and he was to join
his regiment at the end of a fortnight.

No one but Mrs. Bennet regretted that their stay would be so short; and
she made the most of the time by visiting about with her daughter, and
having very frequent parties at home. These parties were acceptable to
all; to avoid a family circle was even more desirable to such as did
think, than such as did not.

Wickham's affection for Lydia was just what Elizabeth had expected
to find it; not equal to Lydia's for him. She had scarcely needed her
present observation to be satisfied, from the reason of things, that
their elopement had been brought on by the strength of her love, rather
than by his; and she would have wondered why, without violently caring
for her, he chose to elope with her at all, had she not felt certain
that his flight was rendered necessary by distress of circumstances; and
if that were the case, he was not the young man to resist an opportunity
of having a companion.

Lydia was exceedingly fond of him. He was her dear Wickham on every
occasion; no one was to be put in competition with him. He did every
thing best in the world; and she was sure he would kill more birds on
the first of September, than any body else in the country.

One morning, soon after their arrival, as she was sitting with her two
elder sisters, she said to Elizabeth:

“Lizzy, I never gave _you_ an account of my wedding, I believe. You
were not by, when I told mamma and the others all about it. Are not you
curious to hear how it was managed?”

“No really,” replied Elizabeth; “I think there cannot be too little said
on the subject.”

“La! You are so strange! But I must tell you how it went off. We were
married, you know, at St. Clement's, because Wickham's lodgings were in
that parish. And it was settled that we should all be there by eleven
o'clock. My uncle and aunt and I were to go together; and the others
were to meet us at the church. Well, Monday morning came, and I was in
such a fuss! I was so afraid, you know, that something would happen to
put it off, and then I should have gone quite distracted. And there was
my aunt, all the time I was dressing, preaching and talking away just as
if she was reading a sermon. However, I did not hear above one word in
ten, for I was thinking, you may suppose, of my dear Wickham. I longed
to know whether he would be married in his blue coat.”

“Well, and so we breakfasted at ten as usual; I thought it would never
be over; for, by the bye, you are to understand, that my uncle and aunt
were horrid unpleasant all the time I was with them. If you'll believe
me, I did not once put my foot out of doors, though I was there a
fortnight. Not one party, or scheme, or anything. To be sure London was
rather thin, but, however, the Little Theatre was open. Well, and so
just as the carriage came to the door, my uncle was called away upon
business to that horrid man Mr. Stone. And then, you know, when once
they get together, there is no end of it. Well, I was so frightened I
did not know what to do, for my uncle was to give me away; and if we
were beyond the hour, we could not be married all day. But, luckily, he
came back again in ten minutes' time, and then we all set out. However,
I recollected afterwards that if he had been prevented going, the
wedding need not be put off, for Mr. Darcy might have done as well.”

“Mr. Darcy!” repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.

“Oh, yes!--he was to come there with Wickham, you know. But gracious
me! I quite forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised
them so faithfully! What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret!”

“If it was to be secret,” said Jane, “say not another word on the
subject. You may depend upon my seeking no further.”

“Oh! certainly,” said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; “we will
ask you no questions.”

“Thank you,” said Lydia, “for if you did, I should certainly tell you
all, and then Wickham would be angry.”

On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her
power, by running away.

But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible; or at least
it was impossible not to try for information. Mr. Darcy had been at
her sister's wedding. It was exactly a scene, and exactly among people,
where he had apparently least to do, and least temptation to go.
Conjectures as to the meaning of it, rapid and wild, hurried into her
brain; but she was satisfied with none. Those that best pleased her, as
placing his conduct in the noblest light, seemed most improbable. She
could not bear such suspense; and hastily seizing a sheet of paper,
wrote a short letter to her aunt, to request an explanation of what
Lydia had dropt, if it were compatible with the secrecy which had been
intended.

“You may readily comprehend,” she added, “what my curiosity must be
to know how a person unconnected with any of us, and (comparatively
speaking) a stranger to our family, should have been amongst you at such
a time. Pray write instantly, and let me understand it--unless it is,
for very cogent reasons, to remain in the secrecy which Lydia seems
to think necessary; and then I must endeavour to be satisfied with
ignorance.”

“Not that I _shall_, though,” she added to herself, as she finished
the letter; “and my dear aunt, if you do not tell me in an honourable
manner, I shall certainly be reduced to tricks and stratagems to find it
out.”

Jane's delicate sense of honour would not allow her to speak to
Elizabeth privately of what Lydia had let fall; Elizabeth was glad
of it;--till it appeared whether her inquiries would receive any
satisfaction, she had rather be without a confidante.



Chapter 52


Elizabeth had the satisfaction of receiving an answer to her letter as
soon as she possibly could. She was no sooner in possession of it
than, hurrying into the little copse, where she was least likely to
be interrupted, she sat down on one of the benches and prepared to
be happy; for the length of the letter convinced her that it did not
contain a denial.

“Gracechurch street, Sept. 6.

“MY DEAR NIECE,

“I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole morning
to answering it, as I foresee that a _little_ writing will not comprise
what I have to tell you. I must confess myself surprised by your
application; I did not expect it from _you_. Don't think me angry,
however, for I only mean to let you know that I had not imagined such
inquiries to be necessary on _your_ side. If you do not choose to
understand me, forgive my impertinence. Your uncle is as much surprised
as I am--and nothing but the belief of your being a party concerned
would have allowed him to act as he has done. But if you are really
innocent and ignorant, I must be more explicit.

“On the very day of my coming home from Longbourn, your uncle had a most
unexpected visitor. Mr. Darcy called, and was shut up with him several
hours. It was all over before I arrived; so my curiosity was not so
dreadfully racked as _yours_ seems to have been. He came to tell Mr.
Gardiner that he had found out where your sister and Mr. Wickham were,
and that he had seen and talked with them both; Wickham repeatedly,
Lydia once. From what I can collect, he left Derbyshire only one day
after ourselves, and came to town with the resolution of hunting for
them. The motive professed was his conviction of its being owing to
himself that Wickham's worthlessness had not been so well known as to
make it impossible for any young woman of character to love or confide
in him. He generously imputed the whole to his mistaken pride, and
confessed that he had before thought it beneath him to lay his private
actions open to the world. His character was to speak for itself. He
called it, therefore, his duty to step forward, and endeavour to remedy
an evil which had been brought on by himself. If he _had another_
motive, I am sure it would never disgrace him. He had been some days
in town, before he was able to discover them; but he had something to
direct his search, which was more than _we_ had; and the consciousness
of this was another reason for his resolving to follow us.

“There is a lady, it seems, a Mrs. Younge, who was some time ago
governess to Miss Darcy, and was dismissed from her charge on some cause
of disapprobation, though he did not say what. She then took a large
house in Edward-street, and has since maintained herself by letting
lodgings. This Mrs. Younge was, he knew, intimately acquainted with
Wickham; and he went to her for intelligence of him as soon as he got to
town. But it was two or three days before he could get from her what he
wanted. She would not betray her trust, I suppose, without bribery and
corruption, for she really did know where her friend was to be found.
Wickham indeed had gone to her on their first arrival in London, and had
she been able to receive them into her house, they would have taken up
their abode with her. At length, however, our kind friend procured the
wished-for direction. They were in ---- street. He saw Wickham, and
afterwards insisted on seeing Lydia. His first object with her, he
acknowledged, had been to persuade her to quit her present disgraceful
situation, and return to her friends as soon as they could be prevailed
on to receive her, offering his assistance, as far as it would go. But
he found Lydia absolutely resolved on remaining where she was. She cared
for none of her friends; she wanted no help of his; she would not hear
of leaving Wickham. She was sure they should be married some time or
other, and it did not much signify when. Since such were her feelings,
it only remained, he thought, to secure and expedite a marriage, which,
in his very first conversation with Wickham, he easily learnt had never
been _his_ design. He confessed himself obliged to leave the regiment,
on account of some debts of honour, which were very pressing; and
scrupled not to lay all the ill-consequences of Lydia's flight on her
own folly alone. He meant to resign his commission immediately; and as
to his future situation, he could conjecture very little about it. He
must go somewhere, but he did not know where, and he knew he should have
nothing to live on.

“Mr. Darcy asked him why he had not married your sister at once. Though
Mr. Bennet was not imagined to be very rich, he would have been able
to do something for him, and his situation must have been benefited by
marriage. But he found, in reply to this question, that Wickham still
cherished the hope of more effectually making his fortune by marriage in
some other country. Under such circumstances, however, he was not likely
to be proof against the temptation of immediate relief.

“They met several times, for there was much to be discussed. Wickham of
course wanted more than he could get; but at length was reduced to be
reasonable.

“Every thing being settled between _them_, Mr. Darcy's next step was to
make your uncle acquainted with it, and he first called in Gracechurch
street the evening before I came home. But Mr. Gardiner could not be
seen, and Mr. Darcy found, on further inquiry, that your father was
still with him, but would quit town the next morning. He did not judge
your father to be a person whom he could so properly consult as your
uncle, and therefore readily postponed seeing him till after the
departure of the former. He did not leave his name, and till the next
day it was only known that a gentleman had called on business.

“On Saturday he came again. Your father was gone, your uncle at home,
and, as I said before, they had a great deal of talk together.

“They met again on Sunday, and then _I_ saw him too. It was not all
settled before Monday: as soon as it was, the express was sent off to
Longbourn. But our visitor was very obstinate. I fancy, Lizzy, that
obstinacy is the real defect of his character, after all. He has been
accused of many faults at different times, but _this_ is the true one.
Nothing was to be done that he did not do himself; though I am sure (and
I do not speak it to be thanked, therefore say nothing about it), your
uncle would most readily have settled the whole.

“They battled it together for a long time, which was more than either
the gentleman or lady concerned in it deserved. But at last your uncle
was forced to yield, and instead of being allowed to be of use to his
niece, was forced to put up with only having the probable credit of it,
which went sorely against the grain; and I really believe your letter
this morning gave him great pleasure, because it required an explanation
that would rob him of his borrowed feathers, and give the praise where
it was due. But, Lizzy, this must go no farther than yourself, or Jane
at most.

“You know pretty well, I suppose, what has been done for the young
people. His debts are to be paid, amounting, I believe, to considerably
more than a thousand pounds, another thousand in addition to her own
settled upon _her_, and his commission purchased. The reason why all
this was to be done by him alone, was such as I have given above. It
was owing to him, to his reserve and want of proper consideration, that
Wickham's character had been so misunderstood, and consequently that he
had been received and noticed as he was. Perhaps there was some truth
in _this_; though I doubt whether _his_ reserve, or _anybody's_ reserve,
can be answerable for the event. But in spite of all this fine talking,
my dear Lizzy, you may rest perfectly assured that your uncle would
never have yielded, if we had not given him credit for _another
interest_ in the affair.

“When all this was resolved on, he returned again to his friends, who
were still staying at Pemberley; but it was agreed that he should be in
London once more when the wedding took place, and all money matters were
then to receive the last finish.

“I believe I have now told you every thing. It is a relation which
you tell me is to give you great surprise; I hope at least it will not
afford you any displeasure. Lydia came to us; and Wickham had constant
admission to the house. _He_ was exactly what he had been, when I
knew him in Hertfordshire; but I would not tell you how little I was
satisfied with her behaviour while she staid with us, if I had not
perceived, by Jane's letter last Wednesday, that her conduct on coming
home was exactly of a piece with it, and therefore what I now tell
you can give you no fresh pain. I talked to her repeatedly in the most
serious manner, representing to her all the wickedness of what she had
done, and all the unhappiness she had brought on her family. If she
heard me, it was by good luck, for I am sure she did not listen. I was
sometimes quite provoked, but then I recollected my dear Elizabeth and
Jane, and for their sakes had patience with her.

“Mr. Darcy was punctual in his return, and as Lydia informed you,
attended the wedding. He dined with us the next day, and was to leave
town again on Wednesday or Thursday. Will you be very angry with me, my
dear Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying (what I was never bold
enough to say before) how much I like him. His behaviour to us has,
in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire. His
understanding and opinions all please me; he wants nothing but a little
more liveliness, and _that_, if he marry _prudently_, his wife may teach
him. I thought him very sly;--he hardly ever mentioned your name. But
slyness seems the fashion.

“Pray forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not
punish me so far as to exclude me from P. I shall never be quite happy
till I have been all round the park. A low phaeton, with a nice little
pair of ponies, would be the very thing.

“But I must write no more. The children have been wanting me this half
hour.

“Yours, very sincerely,

“M. GARDINER.”

The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits,
in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the
greatest share. The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had
produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister's
match, which she had feared to encourage as an exertion of goodness too
great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be just, from the
pain of obligation, were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true!
He had followed them purposely to town, he had taken on himself all
the trouble and mortification attendant on such a research; in which
supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he must abominate and
despise, and where he was reduced to meet, frequently meet, reason
with, persuade, and finally bribe, the man whom he always most wished to
avoid, and whose very name it was punishment to him to pronounce. He had
done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard nor esteem. Her
heart did whisper that he had done it for her. But it was a hope shortly
checked by other considerations, and she soon felt that even her vanity
was insufficient, when required to depend on his affection for her--for
a woman who had already refused him--as able to overcome a sentiment so
natural as abhorrence against relationship with Wickham. Brother-in-law
of Wickham! Every kind of pride must revolt from the connection. He had,
to be sure, done much. She was ashamed to think how much. But he had
given a reason for his interference, which asked no extraordinary
stretch of belief. It was reasonable that he should feel he had been
wrong; he had liberality, and he had the means of exercising it; and
though she would not place herself as his principal inducement, she
could, perhaps, believe that remaining partiality for her might assist
his endeavours in a cause where her peace of mind must be materially
concerned. It was painful, exceedingly painful, to know that they were
under obligations to a person who could never receive a return. They
owed the restoration of Lydia, her character, every thing, to him. Oh!
how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she had ever
encouraged, every saucy speech she had ever directed towards him. For
herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him. Proud that in a cause
of compassion and honour, he had been able to get the better of himself.
She read over her aunt's commendation of him again and again. It
was hardly enough; but it pleased her. She was even sensible of some
pleasure, though mixed with regret, on finding how steadfastly both she
and her uncle had been persuaded that affection and confidence subsisted
between Mr. Darcy and herself.

She was roused from her seat, and her reflections, by some one's
approach; and before she could strike into another path, she was
overtaken by Wickham.

“I am afraid I interrupt your solitary ramble, my dear sister?” said he,
as he joined her.

“You certainly do,” she replied with a smile; “but it does not follow
that the interruption must be unwelcome.”

“I should be sorry indeed, if it were. We were always good friends; and
now we are better.”

“True. Are the others coming out?”

“I do not know. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia are going in the carriage to
Meryton. And so, my dear sister, I find, from our uncle and aunt, that
you have actually seen Pemberley.”

She replied in the affirmative.

“I almost envy you the pleasure, and yet I believe it would be too much
for me, or else I could take it in my way to Newcastle. And you saw the
old housekeeper, I suppose? Poor Reynolds, she was always very fond of
me. But of course she did not mention my name to you.”

“Yes, she did.”

“And what did she say?”

“That you were gone into the army, and she was afraid had--not turned
out well. At such a distance as _that_, you know, things are strangely
misrepresented.”

“Certainly,” he replied, biting his lips. Elizabeth hoped she had
silenced him; but he soon afterwards said:

“I was surprised to see Darcy in town last month. We passed each other
several times. I wonder what he can be doing there.”

“Perhaps preparing for his marriage with Miss de Bourgh,” said
Elizabeth. “It must be something particular, to take him there at this
time of year.”

“Undoubtedly. Did you see him while you were at Lambton? I thought I
understood from the Gardiners that you had.”

“Yes; he introduced us to his sister.”

“And do you like her?”

“Very much.”

“I have heard, indeed, that she is uncommonly improved within this year
or two. When I last saw her, she was not very promising. I am very glad
you liked her. I hope she will turn out well.”

“I dare say she will; she has got over the most trying age.”

“Did you go by the village of Kympton?”

“I do not recollect that we did.”

“I mention it, because it is the living which I ought to have had. A
most delightful place!--Excellent Parsonage House! It would have suited
me in every respect.”

“How should you have liked making sermons?”

“Exceedingly well. I should have considered it as part of my duty,
and the exertion would soon have been nothing. One ought not to
repine;--but, to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me! The
quiet, the retirement of such a life would have answered all my ideas
of happiness! But it was not to be. Did you ever hear Darcy mention the
circumstance, when you were in Kent?”

“I have heard from authority, which I thought _as good_, that it was
left you conditionally only, and at the will of the present patron.”

“You have. Yes, there was something in _that_; I told you so from the
first, you may remember.”

“I _did_ hear, too, that there was a time, when sermon-making was not
so palatable to you as it seems to be at present; that you actually
declared your resolution of never taking orders, and that the business
had been compromised accordingly.”

“You did! and it was not wholly without foundation. You may remember
what I told you on that point, when first we talked of it.”

They were now almost at the door of the house, for she had walked fast
to get rid of him; and unwilling, for her sister's sake, to provoke him,
she only said in reply, with a good-humoured smile:

“Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let
us quarrel about the past. In future, I hope we shall be always of one
mind.”

She held out her hand; he kissed it with affectionate gallantry, though
he hardly knew how to look, and they entered the house.



Chapter 53


Mr. Wickham was so perfectly satisfied with this conversation that he
never again distressed himself, or provoked his dear sister Elizabeth,
by introducing the subject of it; and she was pleased to find that she
had said enough to keep him quiet.

The day of his and Lydia's departure soon came, and Mrs. Bennet was
forced to submit to a separation, which, as her husband by no means
entered into her scheme of their all going to Newcastle, was likely to
continue at least a twelvemonth.

“Oh! my dear Lydia,” she cried, “when shall we meet again?”

“Oh, lord! I don't know. Not these two or three years, perhaps.”

“Write to me very often, my dear.”

“As often as I can. But you know married women have never much time for
writing. My sisters may write to _me_. They will have nothing else to
do.”

Mr. Wickham's adieus were much more affectionate than his wife's. He
smiled, looked handsome, and said many pretty things.

“He is as fine a fellow,” said Mr. Bennet, as soon as they were out of
the house, “as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks, and makes love to
us all. I am prodigiously proud of him. I defy even Sir William Lucas
himself to produce a more valuable son-in-law.”

The loss of her daughter made Mrs. Bennet very dull for several days.

“I often think,” said she, “that there is nothing so bad as parting with
one's friends. One seems so forlorn without them.”

“This is the consequence, you see, Madam, of marrying a daughter,” said
Elizabeth. “It must make you better satisfied that your other four are
single.”

“It is no such thing. Lydia does not leave me because she is married,
but only because her husband's regiment happens to be so far off. If
that had been nearer, she would not have gone so soon.”

But the spiritless condition which this event threw her into was shortly
relieved, and her mind opened again to the agitation of hope, by an
article of news which then began to be in circulation. The housekeeper
at Netherfield had received orders to prepare for the arrival of her
master, who was coming down in a day or two, to shoot there for several
weeks. Mrs. Bennet was quite in the fidgets. She looked at Jane, and
smiled and shook her head by turns.

“Well, well, and so Mr. Bingley is coming down, sister,” (for Mrs.
Phillips first brought her the news). “Well, so much the better. Not
that I care about it, though. He is nothing to us, you know, and I am
sure _I_ never want to see him again. But, however, he is very welcome
to come to Netherfield, if he likes it. And who knows what _may_ happen?
But that is nothing to us. You know, sister, we agreed long ago never to
mention a word about it. And so, is it quite certain he is coming?”

“You may depend on it,” replied the other, “for Mrs. Nicholls was in
Meryton last night; I saw her passing by, and went out myself on purpose
to know the truth of it; and she told me that it was certain true. He
comes down on Thursday at the latest, very likely on Wednesday. She was
going to the butcher's, she told me, on purpose to order in some meat on
Wednesday, and she has got three couple of ducks just fit to be killed.”

Miss Bennet had not been able to hear of his coming without changing
colour. It was many months since she had mentioned his name to
Elizabeth; but now, as soon as they were alone together, she said:

“I saw you look at me to-day, Lizzy, when my aunt told us of the present
report; and I know I appeared distressed. But don't imagine it was from
any silly cause. I was only confused for the moment, because I felt that
I _should_ be looked at. I do assure you that the news does not affect
me either with pleasure or pain. I am glad of one thing, that he comes
alone; because we shall see the less of him. Not that I am afraid of
_myself_, but I dread other people's remarks.”

Elizabeth did not know what to make of it. Had she not seen him in
Derbyshire, she might have supposed him capable of coming there with no
other view than what was acknowledged; but she still thought him partial
to Jane, and she wavered as to the greater probability of his coming
there _with_ his friend's permission, or being bold enough to come
without it.

“Yet it is hard,” she sometimes thought, “that this poor man cannot
come to a house which he has legally hired, without raising all this
speculation! I _will_ leave him to himself.”

In spite of what her sister declared, and really believed to be her
feelings in the expectation of his arrival, Elizabeth could easily
perceive that her spirits were affected by it. They were more disturbed,
more unequal, than she had often seen them.

The subject which had been so warmly canvassed between their parents,
about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought forward again.

“As soon as ever Mr. Bingley comes, my dear,” said Mrs. Bennet, “you
will wait on him of course.”

“No, no. You forced me into visiting him last year, and promised, if I
went to see him, he should marry one of my daughters. But it ended in
nothing, and I will not be sent on a fool's errand again.”

His wife represented to him how absolutely necessary such an attention
would be from all the neighbouring gentlemen, on his returning to
Netherfield.

“'Tis an etiquette I despise,” said he. “If he wants our society,
let him seek it. He knows where we live. I will not spend my hours
in running after my neighbours every time they go away and come back
again.”

“Well, all I know is, that it will be abominably rude if you do not wait
on him. But, however, that shan't prevent my asking him to dine here, I
am determined. We must have Mrs. Long and the Gouldings soon. That will
make thirteen with ourselves, so there will be just room at table for
him.”

Consoled by this resolution, she was the better able to bear her
husband's incivility; though it was very mortifying to know that her
neighbours might all see Mr. Bingley, in consequence of it, before
_they_ did. As the day of his arrival drew near,--

“I begin to be sorry that he comes at all,” said Jane to her sister. “It
would be nothing; I could see him with perfect indifference, but I can
hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well;
but she does not know, no one can know, how much I suffer from what she
says. Happy shall I be, when his stay at Netherfield is over!”

“I wish I could say anything to comfort you,” replied Elizabeth; “but it
is wholly out of my power. You must feel it; and the usual satisfaction
of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied me, because you have
always so much.”

Mr. Bingley arrived. Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of servants,
contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that the period of anxiety
and fretfulness on her side might be as long as it could. She counted
the days that must intervene before their invitation could be sent;
hopeless of seeing him before. But on the third morning after his
arrival in Hertfordshire, she saw him, from her dressing-room window,
enter the paddock and ride towards the house.

Her daughters were eagerly called to partake of her joy. Jane resolutely
kept her place at the table; but Elizabeth, to satisfy her mother, went
to the window--she looked,--she saw Mr. Darcy with him, and sat down
again by her sister.

“There is a gentleman with him, mamma,” said Kitty; “who can it be?”

“Some acquaintance or other, my dear, I suppose; I am sure I do not
know.”

“La!” replied Kitty, “it looks just like that man that used to be with
him before. Mr. what's-his-name. That tall, proud man.”

“Good gracious! Mr. Darcy!--and so it does, I vow. Well, any friend of
Mr. Bingley's will always be welcome here, to be sure; but else I must
say that I hate the very sight of him.”

Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. She knew but little
of their meeting in Derbyshire, and therefore felt for the awkwardness
which must attend her sister, in seeing him almost for the first time
after receiving his explanatory letter. Both sisters were uncomfortable
enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves; and their
mother talked on, of her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and her resolution to be
civil to him only as Mr. Bingley's friend, without being heard by either
of them. But Elizabeth had sources of uneasiness which could not be
suspected by Jane, to whom she had never yet had courage to shew Mrs.
Gardiner's letter, or to relate her own change of sentiment towards him.
To Jane, he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused,
and whose merit she had undervalued; but to her own more extensive
information, he was the person to whom the whole family were indebted
for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded herself with an
interest, if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just as
what Jane felt for Bingley. Her astonishment at his coming--at his
coming to Netherfield, to Longbourn, and voluntarily seeking her again,
was almost equal to what she had known on first witnessing his altered
behaviour in Derbyshire.

The colour which had been driven from her face, returned for half a
minute with an additional glow, and a smile of delight added lustre to
her eyes, as she thought for that space of time that his affection and
wishes must still be unshaken. But she would not be secure.

“Let me first see how he behaves,” said she; “it will then be early
enough for expectation.”

She sat intently at work, striving to be composed, and without daring to
lift up her eyes, till anxious curiosity carried them to the face of
her sister as the servant was approaching the door. Jane looked a little
paler than usual, but more sedate than Elizabeth had expected. On the
gentlemen's appearing, her colour increased; yet she received them with
tolerable ease, and with a propriety of behaviour equally free from any
symptom of resentment or any unnecessary complaisance.

Elizabeth said as little to either as civility would allow, and sat down
again to her work, with an eagerness which it did not often command. She
had ventured only one glance at Darcy. He looked serious, as usual; and,
she thought, more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as
she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps he could not in her mother's
presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt. It was a painful, but
not an improbable, conjecture.

Bingley, she had likewise seen for an instant, and in that short period
saw him looking both pleased and embarrassed. He was received by Mrs.
Bennet with a degree of civility which made her two daughters ashamed,
especially when contrasted with the cold and ceremonious politeness of
her curtsey and address to his friend.

Elizabeth, particularly, who knew that her mother owed to the latter
the preservation of her favourite daughter from irremediable infamy,
was hurt and distressed to a most painful degree by a distinction so ill
applied.

Darcy, after inquiring of her how Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner did, a question
which she could not answer without confusion, said scarcely anything. He
was not seated by her; perhaps that was the reason of his silence; but
it had not been so in Derbyshire. There he had talked to her friends,
when he could not to herself. But now several minutes elapsed without
bringing the sound of his voice; and when occasionally, unable to resist
the impulse of curiosity, she raised her eyes to his face, she as often
found him looking at Jane as at herself, and frequently on no object but
the ground. More thoughtfulness and less anxiety to please, than when
they last met, were plainly expressed. She was disappointed, and angry
with herself for being so.

“Could I expect it to be otherwise!” said she. “Yet why did he come?”

She was in no humour for conversation with anyone but himself; and to
him she had hardly courage to speak.

She inquired after his sister, but could do no more.

“It is a long time, Mr. Bingley, since you went away,” said Mrs. Bennet.

He readily agreed to it.

“I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People _did_ say
you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas; but, however, I hope
it is not true. A great many changes have happened in the neighbourhood,
since you went away. Miss Lucas is married and settled. And one of my
own daughters. I suppose you have heard of it; indeed, you must have
seen it in the papers. It was in The Times and The Courier, I know;
though it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, 'Lately,
George Wickham, Esq. to Miss Lydia Bennet,' without there being a
syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or anything.
It was my brother Gardiner's drawing up too, and I wonder how he came to
make such an awkward business of it. Did you see it?”

Bingley replied that he did, and made his congratulations. Elizabeth
dared not lift up her eyes. How Mr. Darcy looked, therefore, she could
not tell.

“It is a delightful thing, to be sure, to have a daughter well married,”
 continued her mother, “but at the same time, Mr. Bingley, it is very
hard to have her taken such a way from me. They are gone down to
Newcastle, a place quite northward, it seems, and there they are to stay
I do not know how long. His regiment is there; for I suppose you have
heard of his leaving the ----shire, and of his being gone into the
regulars. Thank Heaven! he has _some_ friends, though perhaps not so
many as he deserves.”

Elizabeth, who knew this to be levelled at Mr. Darcy, was in such
misery of shame, that she could hardly keep her seat. It drew from her,
however, the exertion of speaking, which nothing else had so effectually
done before; and she asked Bingley whether he meant to make any stay in
the country at present. A few weeks, he believed.

“When you have killed all your own birds, Mr. Bingley,” said her mother,
“I beg you will come here, and shoot as many as you please on Mr.
Bennet's manor. I am sure he will be vastly happy to oblige you, and
will save all the best of the covies for you.”

Elizabeth's misery increased, at such unnecessary, such officious
attention! Were the same fair prospect to arise at present as had
flattered them a year ago, every thing, she was persuaded, would be
hastening to the same vexatious conclusion. At that instant, she felt
that years of happiness could not make Jane or herself amends for
moments of such painful confusion.

“The first wish of my heart,” said she to herself, “is never more to
be in company with either of them. Their society can afford no pleasure
that will atone for such wretchedness as this! Let me never see either
one or the other again!”

Yet the misery, for which years of happiness were to offer no
compensation, received soon afterwards material relief, from observing
how much the beauty of her sister re-kindled the admiration of her
former lover. When first he came in, he had spoken to her but little;
but every five minutes seemed to be giving her more of his attention. He
found her as handsome as she had been last year; as good natured, and
as unaffected, though not quite so chatty. Jane was anxious that no
difference should be perceived in her at all, and was really persuaded
that she talked as much as ever. But her mind was so busily engaged,
that she did not always know when she was silent.

When the gentlemen rose to go away, Mrs. Bennet was mindful of her
intended civility, and they were invited and engaged to dine at
Longbourn in a few days time.

“You are quite a visit in my debt, Mr. Bingley,” she added, “for when
you went to town last winter, you promised to take a family dinner with
us, as soon as you returned. I have not forgot, you see; and I assure
you, I was very much disappointed that you did not come back and keep
your engagement.”

Bingley looked a little silly at this reflection, and said something of
his concern at having been prevented by business. They then went away.

Mrs. Bennet had been strongly inclined to ask them to stay and dine
there that day; but, though she always kept a very good table, she did
not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a man
on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride
of one who had ten thousand a year.



Chapter 54


As soon as they were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover her spirits;
or in other words, to dwell without interruption on those subjects that
must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy's behaviour astonished and vexed her.

“Why, if he came only to be silent, grave, and indifferent,” said she,
“did he come at all?”

She could settle it in no way that gave her pleasure.

“He could be still amiable, still pleasing, to my uncle and aunt, when
he was in town; and why not to me? If he fears me, why come hither? If
he no longer cares for me, why silent? Teasing, teasing, man! I will
think no more about him.”

Her resolution was for a short time involuntarily kept by the approach
of her sister, who joined her with a cheerful look, which showed her
better satisfied with their visitors, than Elizabeth.

“Now,” said she, “that this first meeting is over, I feel perfectly
easy. I know my own strength, and I shall never be embarrassed again by
his coming. I am glad he dines here on Tuesday. It will then be publicly
seen that, on both sides, we meet only as common and indifferent
acquaintance.”

“Yes, very indifferent indeed,” said Elizabeth, laughingly. “Oh, Jane,
take care.”

“My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak, as to be in danger now?”

“I think you are in very great danger of making him as much in love with
you as ever.”

                          * * * * *

They did not see the gentlemen again till Tuesday; and Mrs. Bennet, in
the meanwhile, was giving way to all the happy schemes, which the good
humour and common politeness of Bingley, in half an hour's visit, had
revived.

On Tuesday there was a large party assembled at Longbourn; and the two
who were most anxiously expected, to the credit of their punctuality
as sportsmen, were in very good time. When they repaired to the
dining-room, Elizabeth eagerly watched to see whether Bingley would take
the place, which, in all their former parties, had belonged to him, by
her sister. Her prudent mother, occupied by the same ideas, forbore
to invite him to sit by herself. On entering the room, he seemed to
hesitate; but Jane happened to look round, and happened to smile: it was
decided. He placed himself by her.

Elizabeth, with a triumphant sensation, looked towards his friend.
He bore it with noble indifference, and she would have imagined that
Bingley had received his sanction to be happy, had she not seen his eyes
likewise turned towards Mr. Darcy, with an expression of half-laughing
alarm.

His behaviour to her sister was such, during dinner time, as showed an
admiration of her, which, though more guarded than formerly, persuaded
Elizabeth, that if left wholly to himself, Jane's happiness, and his
own, would be speedily secured. Though she dared not depend upon the
consequence, she yet received pleasure from observing his behaviour. It
gave her all the animation that her spirits could boast; for she was in
no cheerful humour. Mr. Darcy was almost as far from her as the table
could divide them. He was on one side of her mother. She knew how little
such a situation would give pleasure to either, or make either appear to
advantage. She was not near enough to hear any of their discourse, but
she could see how seldom they spoke to each other, and how formal and
cold was their manner whenever they did. Her mother's ungraciousness,
made the sense of what they owed him more painful to Elizabeth's mind;
and she would, at times, have given anything to be privileged to tell
him that his kindness was neither unknown nor unfelt by the whole of the
family.

She was in hopes that the evening would afford some opportunity of
bringing them together; that the whole of the visit would not pass away
without enabling them to enter into something more of conversation than
the mere ceremonious salutation attending his entrance. Anxious
and uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room, before the
gentlemen came, was wearisome and dull to a degree that almost made her
uncivil. She looked forward to their entrance as the point on which all
her chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.

“If he does not come to me, _then_,” said she, “I shall give him up for
ever.”

The gentlemen came; and she thought he looked as if he would have
answered her hopes; but, alas! the ladies had crowded round the table,
where Miss Bennet was making tea, and Elizabeth pouring out the coffee,
in so close a confederacy that there was not a single vacancy near her
which would admit of a chair. And on the gentlemen's approaching, one of
the girls moved closer to her than ever, and said, in a whisper:

“The men shan't come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them;
do we?”

Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She followed him with
her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke, had scarcely patience enough
to help anybody to coffee; and then was enraged against herself for
being so silly!

“A man who has once been refused! How could I ever be foolish enough to
expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the sex, who would not
protest against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman?
There is no indignity so abhorrent to their feelings!”

She was a little revived, however, by his bringing back his coffee cup
himself; and she seized the opportunity of saying:

“Is your sister at Pemberley still?”

“Yes, she will remain there till Christmas.”

“And quite alone? Have all her friends left her?”

“Mrs. Annesley is with her. The others have been gone on to Scarborough,
these three weeks.”

She could think of nothing more to say; but if he wished to converse
with her, he might have better success. He stood by her, however, for
some minutes, in silence; and, at last, on the young lady's whispering
to Elizabeth again, he walked away.

When the tea-things were removed, and the card-tables placed, the ladies
all rose, and Elizabeth was then hoping to be soon joined by him,
when all her views were overthrown by seeing him fall a victim to her
mother's rapacity for whist players, and in a few moments after seated
with the rest of the party. She now lost every expectation of pleasure.
They were confined for the evening at different tables, and she had
nothing to hope, but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side
of the room, as to make him play as unsuccessfully as herself.

Mrs. Bennet had designed to keep the two Netherfield gentlemen to
supper; but their carriage was unluckily ordered before any of the
others, and she had no opportunity of detaining them.

“Well girls,” said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, “What
say you to the day? I think every thing has passed off uncommonly well,
I assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. The
venison was roasted to a turn--and everybody said they never saw so
fat a haunch. The soup was fifty times better than what we had at the
Lucases' last week; and even Mr. Darcy acknowledged, that the partridges
were remarkably well done; and I suppose he has two or three French
cooks at least. And, my dear Jane, I never saw you look in greater
beauty. Mrs. Long said so too, for I asked her whether you did not. And
what do you think she said besides? 'Ah! Mrs. Bennet, we shall have her
at Netherfield at last.' She did indeed. I do think Mrs. Long is as good
a creature as ever lived--and her nieces are very pretty behaved girls,
and not at all handsome: I like them prodigiously.”

Mrs. Bennet, in short, was in very great spirits; she had seen enough of
Bingley's behaviour to Jane, to be convinced that she would get him at
last; and her expectations of advantage to her family, when in a happy
humour, were so far beyond reason, that she was quite disappointed at
not seeing him there again the next day, to make his proposals.

“It has been a very agreeable day,” said Miss Bennet to Elizabeth. “The
party seemed so well selected, so suitable one with the other. I hope we
may often meet again.”

Elizabeth smiled.

“Lizzy, you must not do so. You must not suspect me. It mortifies me.
I assure you that I have now learnt to enjoy his conversation as an
agreeable and sensible young man, without having a wish beyond it. I am
perfectly satisfied, from what his manners now are, that he never had
any design of engaging my affection. It is only that he is blessed
with greater sweetness of address, and a stronger desire of generally
pleasing, than any other man.”

“You are very cruel,” said her sister, “you will not let me smile, and
are provoking me to it every moment.”

“How hard it is in some cases to be believed!”

“And how impossible in others!”

“But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I
acknowledge?”

“That is a question which I hardly know how to answer. We all love to
instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing. Forgive
me; and if you persist in indifference, do not make me your confidante.”



Chapter 55


A few days after this visit, Mr. Bingley called again, and alone. His
friend had left him that morning for London, but was to return home in
ten days time. He sat with them above an hour, and was in remarkably
good spirits. Mrs. Bennet invited him to dine with them; but, with many
expressions of concern, he confessed himself engaged elsewhere.

“Next time you call,” said she, “I hope we shall be more lucky.”

He should be particularly happy at any time, etc. etc.; and if she would
give him leave, would take an early opportunity of waiting on them.

“Can you come to-morrow?”

Yes, he had no engagement at all for to-morrow; and her invitation was
accepted with alacrity.

He came, and in such very good time that the ladies were none of them
dressed. In ran Mrs. Bennet to her daughter's room, in her dressing
gown, and with her hair half finished, crying out:

“My dear Jane, make haste and hurry down. He is come--Mr. Bingley is
come. He is, indeed. Make haste, make haste. Here, Sarah, come to Miss
Bennet this moment, and help her on with her gown. Never mind Miss
Lizzy's hair.”

“We will be down as soon as we can,” said Jane; “but I dare say Kitty is
forwarder than either of us, for she went up stairs half an hour ago.”

“Oh! hang Kitty! what has she to do with it? Come be quick, be quick!
Where is your sash, my dear?”

But when her mother was gone, Jane would not be prevailed on to go down
without one of her sisters.

The same anxiety to get them by themselves was visible again in the
evening. After tea, Mr. Bennet retired to the library, as was his
custom, and Mary went up stairs to her instrument. Two obstacles of
the five being thus removed, Mrs. Bennet sat looking and winking at
Elizabeth and Catherine for a considerable time, without making any
impression on them. Elizabeth would not observe her; and when at last
Kitty did, she very innocently said, “What is the matter mamma? What do
you keep winking at me for? What am I to do?”

“Nothing child, nothing. I did not wink at you.” She then sat still
five minutes longer; but unable to waste such a precious occasion, she
suddenly got up, and saying to Kitty, “Come here, my love, I want to
speak to you,” took her out of the room. Jane instantly gave a look
at Elizabeth which spoke her distress at such premeditation, and her
entreaty that _she_ would not give in to it. In a few minutes, Mrs.
Bennet half-opened the door and called out:

“Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak with you.”

Elizabeth was forced to go.

“We may as well leave them by themselves you know;” said her mother, as
soon as she was in the hall. “Kitty and I are going up stairs to sit in
my dressing-room.”

Elizabeth made no attempt to reason with her mother, but remained
quietly in the hall, till she and Kitty were out of sight, then returned
into the drawing-room.

Mrs. Bennet's schemes for this day were ineffectual. Bingley was every
thing that was charming, except the professed lover of her daughter. His
ease and cheerfulness rendered him a most agreeable addition to their
evening party; and he bore with the ill-judged officiousness of the
mother, and heard all her silly remarks with a forbearance and command
of countenance particularly grateful to the daughter.

He scarcely needed an invitation to stay supper; and before he went
away, an engagement was formed, chiefly through his own and Mrs.
Bennet's means, for his coming next morning to shoot with her husband.

After this day, Jane said no more of her indifference. Not a word passed
between the sisters concerning Bingley; but Elizabeth went to bed in
the happy belief that all must speedily be concluded, unless Mr. Darcy
returned within the stated time. Seriously, however, she felt tolerably
persuaded that all this must have taken place with that gentleman's
concurrence.

Bingley was punctual to his appointment; and he and Mr. Bennet spent
the morning together, as had been agreed on. The latter was much more
agreeable than his companion expected. There was nothing of presumption
or folly in Bingley that could provoke his ridicule, or disgust him into
silence; and he was more communicative, and less eccentric, than the
other had ever seen him. Bingley of course returned with him to dinner;
and in the evening Mrs. Bennet's invention was again at work to get
every body away from him and her daughter. Elizabeth, who had a letter
to write, went into the breakfast room for that purpose soon after tea;
for as the others were all going to sit down to cards, she could not be
wanted to counteract her mother's schemes.

But on returning to the drawing-room, when her letter was finished, she
saw, to her infinite surprise, there was reason to fear that her mother
had been too ingenious for her. On opening the door, she perceived her
sister and Bingley standing together over the hearth, as if engaged in
earnest conversation; and had this led to no suspicion, the faces of
both, as they hastily turned round and moved away from each other, would
have told it all. Their situation was awkward enough; but _hers_ she
thought was still worse. Not a syllable was uttered by either; and
Elizabeth was on the point of going away again, when Bingley, who as
well as the other had sat down, suddenly rose, and whispering a few
words to her sister, ran out of the room.

Jane could have no reserves from Elizabeth, where confidence would give
pleasure; and instantly embracing her, acknowledged, with the liveliest
emotion, that she was the happiest creature in the world.

“'Tis too much!” she added, “by far too much. I do not deserve it. Oh!
why is not everybody as happy?”

Elizabeth's congratulations were given with a sincerity, a warmth,
a delight, which words could but poorly express. Every sentence of
kindness was a fresh source of happiness to Jane. But she would not
allow herself to stay with her sister, or say half that remained to be
said for the present.

“I must go instantly to my mother;” she cried. “I would not on any
account trifle with her affectionate solicitude; or allow her to hear it
from anyone but myself. He is gone to my father already. Oh! Lizzy, to
know that what I have to relate will give such pleasure to all my dear
family! how shall I bear so much happiness!”

She then hastened away to her mother, who had purposely broken up the
card party, and was sitting up stairs with Kitty.

Elizabeth, who was left by herself, now smiled at the rapidity and ease
with which an affair was finally settled, that had given them so many
previous months of suspense and vexation.

“And this,” said she, “is the end of all his friend's anxious
circumspection! of all his sister's falsehood and contrivance! the
happiest, wisest, most reasonable end!”

In a few minutes she was joined by Bingley, whose conference with her
father had been short and to the purpose.

“Where is your sister?” said he hastily, as he opened the door.

“With my mother up stairs. She will be down in a moment, I dare say.”

He then shut the door, and, coming up to her, claimed the good wishes
and affection of a sister. Elizabeth honestly and heartily expressed
her delight in the prospect of their relationship. They shook hands with
great cordiality; and then, till her sister came down, she had to listen
to all he had to say of his own happiness, and of Jane's perfections;
and in spite of his being a lover, Elizabeth really believed all his
expectations of felicity to be rationally founded, because they had for
basis the excellent understanding, and super-excellent disposition of
Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and
himself.

It was an evening of no common delight to them all; the satisfaction of
Miss Bennet's mind gave a glow of such sweet animation to her face, as
made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped
her turn was coming soon. Mrs. Bennet could not give her consent or
speak her approbation in terms warm enough to satisfy her feelings,
though she talked to Bingley of nothing else for half an hour; and when
Mr. Bennet joined them at supper, his voice and manner plainly showed
how really happy he was.

Not a word, however, passed his lips in allusion to it, till their
visitor took his leave for the night; but as soon as he was gone, he
turned to his daughter, and said:

“Jane, I congratulate you. You will be a very happy woman.”

Jane went to him instantly, kissed him, and thanked him for his
goodness.

“You are a good girl;” he replied, “and I have great pleasure in
thinking you will be so happily settled. I have not a doubt of your
doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are
each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so
easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will
always exceed your income.”

“I hope not so. Imprudence or thoughtlessness in money matters would be
unpardonable in me.”

“Exceed their income! My dear Mr. Bennet,” cried his wife, “what are you
talking of? Why, he has four or five thousand a year, and very likely
more.” Then addressing her daughter, “Oh! my dear, dear Jane, I am so
happy! I am sure I shan't get a wink of sleep all night. I knew how it
would be. I always said it must be so, at last. I was sure you could not
be so beautiful for nothing! I remember, as soon as ever I saw him, when
he first came into Hertfordshire last year, I thought how likely it was
that you should come together. Oh! he is the handsomest young man that
ever was seen!”

Wickham, Lydia, were all forgotten. Jane was beyond competition her
favourite child. At that moment, she cared for no other. Her younger
sisters soon began to make interest with her for objects of happiness
which she might in future be able to dispense.

Mary petitioned for the use of the library at Netherfield; and Kitty
begged very hard for a few balls there every winter.

Bingley, from this time, was of course a daily visitor at Longbourn;
coming frequently before breakfast, and always remaining till after
supper; unless when some barbarous neighbour, who could not be enough
detested, had given him an invitation to dinner which he thought himself
obliged to accept.

Elizabeth had now but little time for conversation with her sister; for
while he was present, Jane had no attention to bestow on anyone else;
but she found herself considerably useful to both of them in those hours
of separation that must sometimes occur. In the absence of Jane, he
always attached himself to Elizabeth, for the pleasure of talking of
her; and when Bingley was gone, Jane constantly sought the same means of
relief.

“He has made me so happy,” said she, one evening, “by telling me that he
was totally ignorant of my being in town last spring! I had not believed
it possible.”

“I suspected as much,” replied Elizabeth. “But how did he account for
it?”

“It must have been his sister's doing. They were certainly no friends to
his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at, since he might have
chosen so much more advantageously in many respects. But when they see,
as I trust they will, that their brother is happy with me, they will
learn to be contented, and we shall be on good terms again; though we
can never be what we once were to each other.”

“That is the most unforgiving speech,” said Elizabeth, “that I ever
heard you utter. Good girl! It would vex me, indeed, to see you again
the dupe of Miss Bingley's pretended regard.”

“Would you believe it, Lizzy, that when he went to town last November,
he really loved me, and nothing but a persuasion of _my_ being
indifferent would have prevented his coming down again!”

“He made a little mistake to be sure; but it is to the credit of his
modesty.”

This naturally introduced a panegyric from Jane on his diffidence, and
the little value he put on his own good qualities. Elizabeth was pleased
to find that he had not betrayed the interference of his friend; for,
though Jane had the most generous and forgiving heart in the world, she
knew it was a circumstance which must prejudice her against him.

“I am certainly the most fortunate creature that ever existed!” cried
Jane. “Oh! Lizzy, why am I thus singled from my family, and blessed
above them all! If I could but see _you_ as happy! If there _were_ but
such another man for you!”

“If you were to give me forty such men, I never could be so happy as
you. Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your
happiness. No, no, let me shift for myself; and, perhaps, if I have very
good luck, I may meet with another Mr. Collins in time.”

The situation of affairs in the Longbourn family could not be long a
secret. Mrs. Bennet was privileged to whisper it to Mrs. Phillips,
and she ventured, without any permission, to do the same by all her
neighbours in Meryton.

The Bennets were speedily pronounced to be the luckiest family in the
world, though only a few weeks before, when Lydia had first run away,
they had been generally proved to be marked out for misfortune.



Chapter 56


One morning, about a week after Bingley's engagement with Jane had been
formed, as he and the females of the family were sitting together in the
dining-room, their attention was suddenly drawn to the window, by the
sound of a carriage; and they perceived a chaise and four driving up
the lawn. It was too early in the morning for visitors, and besides, the
equipage did not answer to that of any of their neighbours. The horses
were post; and neither the carriage, nor the livery of the servant who
preceded it, were familiar to them. As it was certain, however, that
somebody was coming, Bingley instantly prevailed on Miss Bennet to avoid
the confinement of such an intrusion, and walk away with him into the
shrubbery. They both set off, and the conjectures of the remaining three
continued, though with little satisfaction, till the door was thrown
open and their visitor entered. It was Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

They were of course all intending to be surprised; but their
astonishment was beyond their expectation; and on the part of Mrs.
Bennet and Kitty, though she was perfectly unknown to them, even
inferior to what Elizabeth felt.

She entered the room with an air more than usually ungracious, made no
other reply to Elizabeth's salutation than a slight inclination of the
head, and sat down without saying a word. Elizabeth had mentioned her
name to her mother on her ladyship's entrance, though no request of
introduction had been made.

Mrs. Bennet, all amazement, though flattered by having a guest of such
high importance, received her with the utmost politeness. After sitting
for a moment in silence, she said very stiffly to Elizabeth,

“I hope you are well, Miss Bennet. That lady, I suppose, is your
mother.”

Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.

“And _that_ I suppose is one of your sisters.”

“Yes, madam,” said Mrs. Bennet, delighted to speak to Lady Catherine.
“She is my youngest girl but one. My youngest of all is lately married,
and my eldest is somewhere about the grounds, walking with a young man
who, I believe, will soon become a part of the family.”

“You have a very small park here,” returned Lady Catherine after a short
silence.

“It is nothing in comparison of Rosings, my lady, I dare say; but I
assure you it is much larger than Sir William Lucas's.”

“This must be a most inconvenient sitting room for the evening, in
summer; the windows are full west.”

Mrs. Bennet assured her that they never sat there after dinner, and then
added:

“May I take the liberty of asking your ladyship whether you left Mr. and
Mrs. Collins well.”

“Yes, very well. I saw them the night before last.”

Elizabeth now expected that she would produce a letter for her from
Charlotte, as it seemed the only probable motive for her calling. But no
letter appeared, and she was completely puzzled.

Mrs. Bennet, with great civility, begged her ladyship to take some
refreshment; but Lady Catherine very resolutely, and not very politely,
declined eating anything; and then, rising up, said to Elizabeth,

“Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness
on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you
will favour me with your company.”

“Go, my dear,” cried her mother, “and show her ladyship about the
different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.”

Elizabeth obeyed, and running into her own room for her parasol,
attended her noble guest downstairs. As they passed through the
hall, Lady Catherine opened the doors into the dining-parlour and
drawing-room, and pronouncing them, after a short survey, to be decent
looking rooms, walked on.

Her carriage remained at the door, and Elizabeth saw that her
waiting-woman was in it. They proceeded in silence along the gravel walk
that led to the copse; Elizabeth was determined to make no effort for
conversation with a woman who was now more than usually insolent and
disagreeable.

“How could I ever think her like her nephew?” said she, as she looked in
her face.

As soon as they entered the copse, Lady Catherine began in the following
manner:--

“You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my
journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I
come.”

Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.

“Indeed, you are mistaken, Madam. I have not been at all able to account
for the honour of seeing you here.”

“Miss Bennet,” replied her ladyship, in an angry tone, “you ought to
know, that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere _you_ may
choose to be, you shall not find _me_ so. My character has ever been
celebrated for its sincerity and frankness, and in a cause of such
moment as this, I shall certainly not depart from it. A report of a most
alarming nature reached me two days ago. I was told that not only your
sister was on the point of being most advantageously married, but that
you, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet, would, in all likelihood, be soon
afterwards united to my nephew, my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I
_know_ it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him
so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved
on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to
you.”

“If you believed it impossible to be true,” said Elizabeth, colouring
with astonishment and disdain, “I wonder you took the trouble of coming
so far. What could your ladyship propose by it?”

“At once to insist upon having such a report universally contradicted.”

“Your coming to Longbourn, to see me and my family,” said Elizabeth
coolly, “will be rather a confirmation of it; if, indeed, such a report
is in existence.”

“If! Do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not been
industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know that such a
report is spread abroad?”

“I never heard that it was.”

“And can you likewise declare, that there is no foundation for it?”

“I do not pretend to possess equal frankness with your ladyship. You may
ask questions which I shall not choose to answer.”

“This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has
he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?”

“Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible.”

“It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his
reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation,
have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You
may have drawn him in.”

“If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it.”

“Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such
language as this. I am almost the nearest relation he has in the world,
and am entitled to know all his dearest concerns.”

“But you are not entitled to know mine; nor will such behaviour as this,
ever induce me to be explicit.”

“Let me be rightly understood. This match, to which you have the
presumption to aspire, can never take place. No, never. Mr. Darcy is
engaged to my daughter. Now what have you to say?”

“Only this; that if he is so, you can have no reason to suppose he will
make an offer to me.”

Lady Catherine hesitated for a moment, and then replied:

“The engagement between them is of a peculiar kind. From their infancy,
they have been intended for each other. It was the favourite wish of
_his_ mother, as well as of hers. While in their cradles, we planned
the union: and now, at the moment when the wishes of both sisters would
be accomplished in their marriage, to be prevented by a young woman of
inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to
the family! Do you pay no regard to the wishes of his friends? To his
tacit engagement with Miss de Bourgh? Are you lost to every feeling of
propriety and delicacy? Have you not heard me say that from his earliest
hours he was destined for his cousin?”

“Yes, and I had heard it before. But what is that to me? If there is
no other objection to my marrying your nephew, I shall certainly not
be kept from it by knowing that his mother and aunt wished him to
marry Miss de Bourgh. You both did as much as you could in planning the
marriage. Its completion depended on others. If Mr. Darcy is neither
by honour nor inclination confined to his cousin, why is not he to make
another choice? And if I am that choice, why may not I accept him?”

“Because honour, decorum, prudence, nay, interest, forbid it. Yes,
Miss Bennet, interest; for do not expect to be noticed by his family or
friends, if you wilfully act against the inclinations of all. You will
be censured, slighted, and despised, by everyone connected with him.
Your alliance will be a disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned
by any of us.”

“These are heavy misfortunes,” replied Elizabeth. “But the wife of Mr.
Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily
attached to her situation, that she could, upon the whole, have no cause
to repine.”

“Obstinate, headstrong girl! I am ashamed of you! Is this your gratitude
for my attentions to you last spring? Is nothing due to me on that
score? Let us sit down. You are to understand, Miss Bennet, that I came
here with the determined resolution of carrying my purpose; nor will
I be dissuaded from it. I have not been used to submit to any person's
whims. I have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment.”

“_That_ will make your ladyship's situation at present more pitiable;
but it will have no effect on me.”

“I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my
nephew are formed for each other. They are descended, on the maternal
side, from the same noble line; and, on the father's, from respectable,
honourable, and ancient--though untitled--families. Their fortune on
both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of
every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide them?
The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections,
or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be. If you
were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in
which you have been brought up.”

“In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that
sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are
equal.”

“True. You _are_ a gentleman's daughter. But who was your mother?
Who are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their
condition.”

“Whatever my connections may be,” said Elizabeth, “if your nephew does
not object to them, they can be nothing to _you_.”

“Tell me once for all, are you engaged to him?”

Though Elizabeth would not, for the mere purpose of obliging Lady
Catherine, have answered this question, she could not but say, after a
moment's deliberation:

“I am not.”

Lady Catherine seemed pleased.

“And will you promise me, never to enter into such an engagement?”

“I will make no promise of the kind.”

“Miss Bennet I am shocked and astonished. I expected to find a more
reasonable young woman. But do not deceive yourself into a belief that
I will ever recede. I shall not go away till you have given me the
assurance I require.”

“And I certainly _never_ shall give it. I am not to be intimidated into
anything so wholly unreasonable. Your ladyship wants Mr. Darcy to marry
your daughter; but would my giving you the wished-for promise make their
marriage at all more probable? Supposing him to be attached to me, would
my refusing to accept his hand make him wish to bestow it on his cousin?
Allow me to say, Lady Catherine, that the arguments with which you have
supported this extraordinary application have been as frivolous as the
application was ill-judged. You have widely mistaken my character, if
you think I can be worked on by such persuasions as these. How far your
nephew might approve of your interference in his affairs, I cannot tell;
but you have certainly no right to concern yourself in mine. I must beg,
therefore, to be importuned no farther on the subject.”

“Not so hasty, if you please. I have by no means done. To all the
objections I have already urged, I have still another to add. I am
no stranger to the particulars of your youngest sister's infamous
elopement. I know it all; that the young man's marrying her was a
patched-up business, at the expence of your father and uncles. And is
such a girl to be my nephew's sister? Is her husband, is the son of his
late father's steward, to be his brother? Heaven and earth!--of what are
you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”

“You can now have nothing further to say,” she resentfully answered.
“You have insulted me in every possible method. I must beg to return to
the house.”

And she rose as she spoke. Lady Catherine rose also, and they turned
back. Her ladyship was highly incensed.

“You have no regard, then, for the honour and credit of my nephew!
Unfeeling, selfish girl! Do you not consider that a connection with you
must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?”

“Lady Catherine, I have nothing further to say. You know my sentiments.”

“You are then resolved to have him?”

“I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that manner,
which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without
reference to _you_, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”

“It is well. You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse to obey the
claims of duty, honour, and gratitude. You are determined to ruin him in
the opinion of all his friends, and make him the contempt of the world.”

“Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude,” replied Elizabeth, “have any
possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either
would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the
resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former
_were_ excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment's
concern--and the world in general would have too much sense to join in
the scorn.”

“And this is your real opinion! This is your final resolve! Very well.
I shall now know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss Bennet, that your
ambition will ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped to find you
reasonable; but, depend upon it, I will carry my point.”

In this manner Lady Catherine talked on, till they were at the door of
the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added, “I take no leave
of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve
no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.”

Elizabeth made no answer; and without attempting to persuade her
ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself. She
heard the carriage drive away as she proceeded up stairs. Her mother
impatiently met her at the door of the dressing-room, to ask why Lady
Catherine would not come in again and rest herself.

“She did not choose it,” said her daughter, “she would go.”

“She is a very fine-looking woman! and her calling here was prodigiously
civil! for she only came, I suppose, to tell us the Collinses were
well. She is on her road somewhere, I dare say, and so, passing through
Meryton, thought she might as well call on you. I suppose she had
nothing particular to say to you, Lizzy?”

Elizabeth was forced to give into a little falsehood here; for to
acknowledge the substance of their conversation was impossible.



Chapter 57


The discomposure of spirits which this extraordinary visit threw
Elizabeth into, could not be easily overcome; nor could she, for many
hours, learn to think of it less than incessantly. Lady Catherine, it
appeared, had actually taken the trouble of this journey from Rosings,
for the sole purpose of breaking off her supposed engagement with Mr.
Darcy. It was a rational scheme, to be sure! but from what the report
of their engagement could originate, Elizabeth was at a loss to imagine;
till she recollected that _his_ being the intimate friend of Bingley,
and _her_ being the sister of Jane, was enough, at a time when the
expectation of one wedding made everybody eager for another, to supply
the idea. She had not herself forgotten to feel that the marriage of her
sister must bring them more frequently together. And her neighbours
at Lucas Lodge, therefore (for through their communication with the
Collinses, the report, she concluded, had reached Lady Catherine), had
only set that down as almost certain and immediate, which she had looked
forward to as possible at some future time.

In revolving Lady Catherine's expressions, however, she could not help
feeling some uneasiness as to the possible consequence of her persisting
in this interference. From what she had said of her resolution to
prevent their marriage, it occurred to Elizabeth that she must meditate
an application to her nephew; and how _he_ might take a similar
representation of the evils attached to a connection with her, she dared
not pronounce. She knew not the exact degree of his affection for his
aunt, or his dependence on her judgment, but it was natural to suppose
that he thought much higher of her ladyship than _she_ could do; and it
was certain that, in enumerating the miseries of a marriage with _one_,
whose immediate connections were so unequal to his own, his aunt would
address him on his weakest side. With his notions of dignity, he would
probably feel that the arguments, which to Elizabeth had appeared weak
and ridiculous, contained much good sense and solid reasoning.

If he had been wavering before as to what he should do, which had often
seemed likely, the advice and entreaty of so near a relation might
settle every doubt, and determine him at once to be as happy as dignity
unblemished could make him. In that case he would return no more. Lady
Catherine might see him in her way through town; and his engagement to
Bingley of coming again to Netherfield must give way.

“If, therefore, an excuse for not keeping his promise should come to his
friend within a few days,” she added, “I shall know how to understand
it. I shall then give over every expectation, every wish of his
constancy. If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might
have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him
at all.”

                          * * * * *

The surprise of the rest of the family, on hearing who their visitor had
been, was very great; but they obligingly satisfied it, with the same
kind of supposition which had appeased Mrs. Bennet's curiosity; and
Elizabeth was spared from much teasing on the subject.

The next morning, as she was going downstairs, she was met by her
father, who came out of his library with a letter in his hand.

“Lizzy,” said he, “I was going to look for you; come into my room.”

She followed him thither; and her curiosity to know what he had to
tell her was heightened by the supposition of its being in some manner
connected with the letter he held. It suddenly struck her that it
might be from Lady Catherine; and she anticipated with dismay all the
consequent explanations.

She followed her father to the fire place, and they both sat down. He
then said,

“I have received a letter this morning that has astonished me
exceedingly. As it principally concerns yourself, you ought to know its
contents. I did not know before, that I had two daughters on the brink
of matrimony. Let me congratulate you on a very important conquest.”

The colour now rushed into Elizabeth's cheeks in the instantaneous
conviction of its being a letter from the nephew, instead of the aunt;
and she was undetermined whether most to be pleased that he explained
himself at all, or offended that his letter was not rather addressed to
herself; when her father continued:

“You look conscious. Young ladies have great penetration in such matters
as these; but I think I may defy even _your_ sagacity, to discover the
name of your admirer. This letter is from Mr. Collins.”

“From Mr. Collins! and what can _he_ have to say?”

“Something very much to the purpose of course. He begins with
congratulations on the approaching nuptials of my eldest daughter, of
which, it seems, he has been told by some of the good-natured, gossiping
Lucases. I shall not sport with your impatience, by reading what he says
on that point. What relates to yourself, is as follows: 'Having thus
offered you the sincere congratulations of Mrs. Collins and myself on
this happy event, let me now add a short hint on the subject of another;
of which we have been advertised by the same authority. Your daughter
Elizabeth, it is presumed, will not long bear the name of Bennet, after
her elder sister has resigned it, and the chosen partner of her fate may
be reasonably looked up to as one of the most illustrious personages in
this land.'

“Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this? 'This young
gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with every thing the heart of
mortal can most desire,--splendid property, noble kindred, and extensive
patronage. Yet in spite of all these temptations, let me warn my cousin
Elizabeth, and yourself, of what evils you may incur by a precipitate
closure with this gentleman's proposals, which, of course, you will be
inclined to take immediate advantage of.'

“Have you any idea, Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it comes out:

“'My motive for cautioning you is as follows. We have reason to imagine
that his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look on the match with
a friendly eye.'

“_Mr. Darcy_, you see, is the man! Now, Lizzy, I think I _have_
surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched on any man within
the circle of our acquaintance, whose name would have given the lie
more effectually to what they related? Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any
woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in his
life! It is admirable!”

Elizabeth tried to join in her father's pleasantry, but could only force
one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been directed in a manner so
little agreeable to her.

“Are you not diverted?”

“Oh! yes. Pray read on.”

“'After mentioning the likelihood of this marriage to her ladyship last
night, she immediately, with her usual condescension, expressed what she
felt on the occasion; when it became apparent, that on the score of some
family objections on the part of my cousin, she would never give her
consent to what she termed so disgraceful a match. I thought it my duty
to give the speediest intelligence of this to my cousin, that she and
her noble admirer may be aware of what they are about, and not run
hastily into a marriage which has not been properly sanctioned.' Mr.
Collins moreover adds, 'I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia's sad
business has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that their
living together before the marriage took place should be so generally
known. I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain
from declaring my amazement at hearing that you received the young
couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an
encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should
very strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them,
as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their
names to be mentioned in your hearing.' That is his notion of Christian
forgiveness! The rest of his letter is only about his dear Charlotte's
situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. But, Lizzy, you
look as if you did not enjoy it. You are not going to be _missish_,
I hope, and pretend to be affronted at an idle report. For what do we
live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our
turn?”

“Oh!” cried Elizabeth, “I am excessively diverted. But it is so
strange!”

“Yes--_that_ is what makes it amusing. Had they fixed on any other man
it would have been nothing; but _his_ perfect indifference, and _your_
pointed dislike, make it so delightfully absurd! Much as I abominate
writing, I would not give up Mr. Collins's correspondence for any
consideration. Nay, when I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving
him the preference even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence and
hypocrisy of my son-in-law. And pray, Lizzy, what said Lady Catherine
about this report? Did she call to refuse her consent?”

To this question his daughter replied only with a laugh; and as it had
been asked without the least suspicion, she was not distressed by
his repeating it. Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her
feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she
would rather have cried. Her father had most cruelly mortified her, by
what he said of Mr. Darcy's indifference, and she could do nothing but
wonder at such a want of penetration, or fear that perhaps, instead of
his seeing too little, she might have fancied too much.



Chapter 58


Instead of receiving any such letter of excuse from his friend, as
Elizabeth half expected Mr. Bingley to do, he was able to bring Darcy
with him to Longbourn before many days had passed after Lady Catherine's
visit. The gentlemen arrived early; and, before Mrs. Bennet had time
to tell him of their having seen his aunt, of which her daughter sat
in momentary dread, Bingley, who wanted to be alone with Jane, proposed
their all walking out. It was agreed to. Mrs. Bennet was not in the
habit of walking; Mary could never spare time; but the remaining five
set off together. Bingley and Jane, however, soon allowed the others
to outstrip them. They lagged behind, while Elizabeth, Kitty, and Darcy
were to entertain each other. Very little was said by either; Kitty
was too much afraid of him to talk; Elizabeth was secretly forming a
desperate resolution; and perhaps he might be doing the same.

They walked towards the Lucases, because Kitty wished to call upon
Maria; and as Elizabeth saw no occasion for making it a general concern,
when Kitty left them she went boldly on with him alone. Now was the
moment for her resolution to be executed, and, while her courage was
high, she immediately said:

“Mr. Darcy, I am a very selfish creature; and, for the sake of giving
relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding yours. I
can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my
poor sister. Ever since I have known it, I have been most anxious to
acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it. Were it known to the rest
of my family, I should not have merely my own gratitude to express.”

“I am sorry, exceedingly sorry,” replied Darcy, in a tone of surprise
and emotion, “that you have ever been informed of what may, in a
mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. I did not think Mrs. Gardiner
was so little to be trusted.”

“You must not blame my aunt. Lydia's thoughtlessness first betrayed to
me that you had been concerned in the matter; and, of course, I could
not rest till I knew the particulars. Let me thank you again and again,
in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced
you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the
sake of discovering them.”

“If you _will_ thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone.
That the wish of giving happiness to you might add force to the other
inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your
_family_ owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe I thought
only of _you_.”

Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause,
her companion added, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your
feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. _My_
affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence
me on this subject for ever.”

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of
his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not
very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone
so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make
her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The
happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never
felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as
warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth
been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the
expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him;
but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of
feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his
affection every moment more valuable.

They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to
be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects. She
soon learnt that they were indebted for their present good understanding
to the efforts of his aunt, who did call on him in her return through
London, and there relate her journey to Longbourn, its motive, and the
substance of her conversation with Elizabeth; dwelling emphatically on
every expression of the latter which, in her ladyship's apprehension,
peculiarly denoted her perverseness and assurance; in the belief that
such a relation must assist her endeavours to obtain that promise
from her nephew which she had refused to give. But, unluckily for her
ladyship, its effect had been exactly contrariwise.

“It taught me to hope,” said he, “as I had scarcely ever allowed myself
to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to be certain that,
had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have
acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly.”

Elizabeth coloured and laughed as she replied, “Yes, you know enough
of my frankness to believe me capable of _that_. After abusing you so
abominably to your face, I could have no scruple in abusing you to all
your relations.”

“What did you say of me, that I did not deserve? For, though your
accusations were ill-founded, formed on mistaken premises, my
behaviour to you at the time had merited the severest reproof. It was
unpardonable. I cannot think of it without abhorrence.”

“We will not quarrel for the greater share of blame annexed to that
evening,” said Elizabeth. “The conduct of neither, if strictly examined,
will be irreproachable; but since then, we have both, I hope, improved
in civility.”

“I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself. The recollection of what I
then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of
it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your
reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: 'had you behaved in a
more gentlemanlike manner.' Those were your words. You know not, you can
scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;--though it was some time,
I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”

“I was certainly very far from expecting them to make so strong an
impression. I had not the smallest idea of their being ever felt in such
a way.”

“I can easily believe it. You thought me then devoid of every proper
feeling, I am sure you did. The turn of your countenance I shall never
forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any possible
way that would induce you to accept me.”

“Oh! do not repeat what I then said. These recollections will not do at
all. I assure you that I have long been most heartily ashamed of it.”

Darcy mentioned his letter. “Did it,” said he, “did it soon make you
think better of me? Did you, on reading it, give any credit to its
contents?”

She explained what its effect on her had been, and how gradually all her
former prejudices had been removed.

“I knew,” said he, “that what I wrote must give you pain, but it was
necessary. I hope you have destroyed the letter. There was one part
especially, the opening of it, which I should dread your having the
power of reading again. I can remember some expressions which might
justly make you hate me.”

“The letter shall certainly be burnt, if you believe it essential to the
preservation of my regard; but, though we have both reason to think my
opinions not entirely unalterable, they are not, I hope, quite so easily
changed as that implies.”

“When I wrote that letter,” replied Darcy, “I believed myself perfectly
calm and cool, but I am since convinced that it was written in a
dreadful bitterness of spirit.”

“The letter, perhaps, began in bitterness, but it did not end so. The
adieu is charity itself. But think no more of the letter. The feelings
of the person who wrote, and the person who received it, are now
so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant
circumstance attending it ought to be forgotten. You must learn some
of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you
pleasure.”

“I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind. Your
retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment
arising from them is not of philosophy, but, what is much better, of
innocence. But with me, it is not so. Painful recollections will intrude
which cannot, which ought not, to be repelled. I have been a selfish
being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I
was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I
was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit.
Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt
by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all
that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught
me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family
circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least
to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I
was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been
but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You
taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you,
I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception.
You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman
worthy of being pleased.”

“Had you then persuaded yourself that I should?”

“Indeed I had. What will you think of my vanity? I believed you to be
wishing, expecting my addresses.”

“My manners must have been in fault, but not intentionally, I assure
you. I never meant to deceive you, but my spirits might often lead me
wrong. How you must have hated me after _that_ evening?”

“Hate you! I was angry perhaps at first, but my anger soon began to take
a proper direction.”

“I am almost afraid of asking what you thought of me, when we met at
Pemberley. You blamed me for coming?”

“No indeed; I felt nothing but surprise.”

“Your surprise could not be greater than _mine_ in being noticed by you.
My conscience told me that I deserved no extraordinary politeness, and I
confess that I did not expect to receive _more_ than my due.”

“My object then,” replied Darcy, “was to show you, by every civility in
my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to
obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you
see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes
introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an
hour after I had seen you.”

He then told her of Georgiana's delight in her acquaintance, and of her
disappointment at its sudden interruption; which naturally leading to
the cause of that interruption, she soon learnt that his resolution of
following her from Derbyshire in quest of her sister had been formed
before he quitted the inn, and that his gravity and thoughtfulness
there had arisen from no other struggles than what such a purpose must
comprehend.

She expressed her gratitude again, but it was too painful a subject to
each, to be dwelt on farther.

After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy to know
anything about it, they found at last, on examining their watches, that
it was time to be at home.

“What could become of Mr. Bingley and Jane!” was a wonder which
introduced the discussion of their affairs. Darcy was delighted with
their engagement; his friend had given him the earliest information of
it.

“I must ask whether you were surprised?” said Elizabeth.

“Not at all. When I went away, I felt that it would soon happen.”

“That is to say, you had given your permission. I guessed as much.” And
though he exclaimed at the term, she found that it had been pretty much
the case.

“On the evening before my going to London,” said he, “I made a
confession to him, which I believe I ought to have made long ago. I
told him of all that had occurred to make my former interference in his
affairs absurd and impertinent. His surprise was great. He had never had
the slightest suspicion. I told him, moreover, that I believed myself
mistaken in supposing, as I had done, that your sister was indifferent
to him; and as I could easily perceive that his attachment to her was
unabated, I felt no doubt of their happiness together.”

Elizabeth could not help smiling at his easy manner of directing his
friend.

“Did you speak from your own observation,” said she, “when you told him
that my sister loved him, or merely from my information last spring?”

“From the former. I had narrowly observed her during the two visits
which I had lately made here; and I was convinced of her affection.”

“And your assurance of it, I suppose, carried immediate conviction to
him.”

“It did. Bingley is most unaffectedly modest. His diffidence had
prevented his depending on his own judgment in so anxious a case, but
his reliance on mine made every thing easy. I was obliged to confess
one thing, which for a time, and not unjustly, offended him. I could not
allow myself to conceal that your sister had been in town three months
last winter, that I had known it, and purposely kept it from him. He was
angry. But his anger, I am persuaded, lasted no longer than he remained
in any doubt of your sister's sentiments. He has heartily forgiven me
now.”

Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful
friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked
herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at,
and it was rather too early to begin. In anticipating the happiness
of Bingley, which of course was to be inferior only to his own, he
continued the conversation till they reached the house. In the hall they
parted.



Chapter 59


“My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?” was a question
which Elizabeth received from Jane as soon as she entered their room,
and from all the others when they sat down to table. She had only to
say in reply, that they had wandered about, till she was beyond her own
knowledge. She coloured as she spoke; but neither that, nor anything
else, awakened a suspicion of the truth.

The evening passed quietly, unmarked by anything extraordinary. The
acknowledged lovers talked and laughed, the unacknowledged were silent.
Darcy was not of a disposition in which happiness overflows in mirth;
and Elizabeth, agitated and confused, rather _knew_ that she was happy
than _felt_ herself to be so; for, besides the immediate embarrassment,
there were other evils before her. She anticipated what would be felt
in the family when her situation became known; she was aware that no
one liked him but Jane; and even feared that with the others it was a
dislike which not all his fortune and consequence might do away.

At night she opened her heart to Jane. Though suspicion was very far
from Miss Bennet's general habits, she was absolutely incredulous here.

“You are joking, Lizzy. This cannot be!--engaged to Mr. Darcy! No, no,
you shall not deceive me. I know it to be impossible.”

“This is a wretched beginning indeed! My sole dependence was on you; and
I am sure nobody else will believe me, if you do not. Yet, indeed, I am
in earnest. I speak nothing but the truth. He still loves me, and we are
engaged.”

Jane looked at her doubtingly. “Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be. I know how much
you dislike him.”

“You know nothing of the matter. _That_ is all to be forgot. Perhaps I
did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as
these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever
remember it myself.”

Miss Bennet still looked all amazement. Elizabeth again, and more
seriously assured her of its truth.

“Good Heaven! can it be really so! Yet now I must believe you,” cried
Jane. “My dear, dear Lizzy, I would--I do congratulate you--but are you
certain? forgive the question--are you quite certain that you can be
happy with him?”

“There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already, that
we are to be the happiest couple in the world. But are you pleased,
Jane? Shall you like to have such a brother?”

“Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or myself more
delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as impossible. And do you
really love him quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than
marry without affection. Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought
to do?”

“Oh, yes! You will only think I feel _more_ than I ought to do, when I
tell you all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, I must confess that I love him better than I do Bingley. I am
afraid you will be angry.”

“My dearest sister, now _be_ serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let
me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me
how long you have loved him?”

“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began.
But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds
at Pemberley.”

Another entreaty that she would be serious, however, produced the
desired effect; and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn assurances
of attachment. When convinced on that article, Miss Bennet had nothing
further to wish.

“Now I am quite happy,” said she, “for you will be as happy as myself.
I always had a value for him. Were it for nothing but his love of you,
I must always have esteemed him; but now, as Bingley's friend and your
husband, there can be only Bingley and yourself more dear to me. But
Lizzy, you have been very sly, very reserved with me. How little did you
tell me of what passed at Pemberley and Lambton! I owe all that I know
of it to another, not to you.”

Elizabeth told her the motives of her secrecy. She had been unwilling
to mention Bingley; and the unsettled state of her own feelings had made
her equally avoid the name of his friend. But now she would no longer
conceal from her his share in Lydia's marriage. All was acknowledged,
and half the night spent in conversation.

                          * * * * *

“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Bennet, as she stood at a window the next
morning, “if that disagreeable Mr. Darcy is not coming here again with
our dear Bingley! What can he mean by being so tiresome as to be always
coming here? I had no notion but he would go a-shooting, or something or
other, and not disturb us with his company. What shall we do with him?
Lizzy, you must walk out with him again, that he may not be in Bingley's
way.”

Elizabeth could hardly help laughing at so convenient a proposal; yet
was really vexed that her mother should be always giving him such an
epithet.

As soon as they entered, Bingley looked at her so expressively, and
shook hands with such warmth, as left no doubt of his good information;
and he soon afterwards said aloud, “Mrs. Bennet, have you no more lanes
hereabouts in which Lizzy may lose her way again to-day?”

“I advise Mr. Darcy, and Lizzy, and Kitty,” said Mrs. Bennet, “to walk
to Oakham Mount this morning. It is a nice long walk, and Mr. Darcy has
never seen the view.”

“It may do very well for the others,” replied Mr. Bingley; “but I am
sure it will be too much for Kitty. Won't it, Kitty?” Kitty owned that
she had rather stay at home. Darcy professed a great curiosity to see
the view from the Mount, and Elizabeth silently consented. As she went
up stairs to get ready, Mrs. Bennet followed her, saying:

“I am quite sorry, Lizzy, that you should be forced to have that
disagreeable man all to yourself. But I hope you will not mind it: it is
all for Jane's sake, you know; and there is no occasion for talking
to him, except just now and then. So, do not put yourself to
inconvenience.”

During their walk, it was resolved that Mr. Bennet's consent should be
asked in the course of the evening. Elizabeth reserved to herself the
application for her mother's. She could not determine how her mother
would take it; sometimes doubting whether all his wealth and grandeur
would be enough to overcome her abhorrence of the man. But whether she
were violently set against the match, or violently delighted with it, it
was certain that her manner would be equally ill adapted to do credit
to her sense; and she could no more bear that Mr. Darcy should hear
the first raptures of her joy, than the first vehemence of her
disapprobation.

                          * * * * *

In the evening, soon after Mr. Bennet withdrew to the library, she saw
Mr. Darcy rise also and follow him, and her agitation on seeing it was
extreme. She did not fear her father's opposition, but he was going to
be made unhappy; and that it should be through her means--that _she_,
his favourite child, should be distressing him by her choice, should be
filling him with fears and regrets in disposing of her--was a wretched
reflection, and she sat in misery till Mr. Darcy appeared again, when,
looking at him, she was a little relieved by his smile. In a few minutes
he approached the table where she was sitting with Kitty; and, while
pretending to admire her work said in a whisper, “Go to your father, he
wants you in the library.” She was gone directly.

Her father was walking about the room, looking grave and anxious.
“Lizzy,” said he, “what are you doing? Are you out of your senses, to be
accepting this man? Have not you always hated him?”

How earnestly did she then wish that her former opinions had been more
reasonable, her expressions more moderate! It would have spared her from
explanations and professions which it was exceedingly awkward to give;
but they were now necessary, and she assured him, with some confusion,
of her attachment to Mr. Darcy.

“Or, in other words, you are determined to have him. He is rich, to be
sure, and you may have more fine clothes and fine carriages than Jane.
But will they make you happy?”

“Have you any other objection,” said Elizabeth, “than your belief of my
indifference?”

“None at all. We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but
this would be nothing if you really liked him.”

“I do, I do like him,” she replied, with tears in her eyes, “I love him.
Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable. You do not
know what he really is; then pray do not pain me by speaking of him in
such terms.”

“Lizzy,” said her father, “I have given him my consent. He is the kind
of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare refuse anything, which he
condescended to ask. I now give it to _you_, if you are resolved on
having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know
your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor
respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked
up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the
greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape
discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the grief of seeing
_you_ unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are
about.”

Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply; and
at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object
of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of
him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection
was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months'
suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did
conquer her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.

“Well, my dear,” said he, when she ceased speaking, “I have no more to
say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with
you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.”

To complete the favourable impression, she then told him what Mr. Darcy
had voluntarily done for Lydia. He heard her with astonishment.

“This is an evening of wonders, indeed! And so, Darcy did every thing;
made up the match, gave the money, paid the fellow's debts, and got him
his commission! So much the better. It will save me a world of trouble
and economy. Had it been your uncle's doing, I must and _would_ have
paid him; but these violent young lovers carry every thing their own
way. I shall offer to pay him to-morrow; he will rant and storm about
his love for you, and there will be an end of the matter.”

He then recollected her embarrassment a few days before, on his reading
Mr. Collins's letter; and after laughing at her some time, allowed her
at last to go--saying, as she quitted the room, “If any young men come
for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure.”

Elizabeth's mind was now relieved from a very heavy weight; and, after
half an hour's quiet reflection in her own room, she was able to join
the others with tolerable composure. Every thing was too recent for
gaiety, but the evening passed tranquilly away; there was no longer
anything material to be dreaded, and the comfort of ease and familiarity
would come in time.

When her mother went up to her dressing-room at night, she followed her,
and made the important communication. Its effect was most extraordinary;
for on first hearing it, Mrs. Bennet sat quite still, and unable to
utter a syllable. Nor was it under many, many minutes that she could
comprehend what she heard; though not in general backward to credit
what was for the advantage of her family, or that came in the shape of a
lover to any of them. She began at length to recover, to fidget about in
her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself.

“Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would
have thought it! And is it really true? Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich
and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages
you will have! Jane's is nothing to it--nothing at all. I am so
pleased--so happy. Such a charming man!--so handsome! so tall!--Oh, my
dear Lizzy! pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before. I
hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Every thing
that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh,
Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted.”

This was enough to prove that her approbation need not be doubted: and
Elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was heard only by herself,
soon went away. But before she had been three minutes in her own room,
her mother followed her.

“My dearest child,” she cried, “I can think of nothing else! Ten
thousand a year, and very likely more! 'Tis as good as a Lord! And a
special licence. You must and shall be married by a special licence. But
my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond of,
that I may have it to-morrow.”

This was a sad omen of what her mother's behaviour to the gentleman
himself might be; and Elizabeth found that, though in the certain
possession of his warmest affection, and secure of her relations'
consent, there was still something to be wished for. But the morrow
passed off much better than she expected; for Mrs. Bennet luckily stood
in such awe of her intended son-in-law that she ventured not to speak to
him, unless it was in her power to offer him any attention, or mark her
deference for his opinion.

Elizabeth had the satisfaction of seeing her father taking pains to get
acquainted with him; and Mr. Bennet soon assured her that he was rising
every hour in his esteem.

“I admire all my three sons-in-law highly,” said he. “Wickham, perhaps,
is my favourite; but I think I shall like _your_ husband quite as well
as Jane's.”



Chapter 60


Elizabeth's spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr.
Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. “How could
you begin?” said she. “I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when
you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first
place?”

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which
laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I
knew that I _had_ begun.”

“My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners--my behaviour
to _you_ was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke
to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now be sincere;
did you admire me for my impertinence?”

“For the liveliness of your mind, I did.”

“You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less.
The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious
attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking,
and looking, and thinking for _your_ approbation alone. I roused, and
interested you, because I was so unlike _them_. Had you not been really
amiable, you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you
took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and
in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously
courted you. There--I have saved you the trouble of accounting for
it; and really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly
reasonable. To be sure, you knew no actual good of me--but nobody thinks
of _that_ when they fall in love.”

“Was there no good in your affectionate behaviour to Jane while she was
ill at Netherfield?”

“Dearest Jane! who could have done less for her? But make a virtue of it
by all means. My good qualities are under your protection, and you are
to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me
to find occasions for teasing and quarrelling with you as often as may
be; and I shall begin directly by asking you what made you so unwilling
to come to the point at last. What made you so shy of me, when you first
called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you called, did
you look as if you did not care about me?”

“Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement.”

“But I was embarrassed.”

“And so was I.”

“You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.”

“A man who had felt less, might.”

“How unlucky that you should have a reasonable answer to give, and that
I should be so reasonable as to admit it! But I wonder how long you
_would_ have gone on, if you had been left to yourself. I wonder when
you _would_ have spoken, if I had not asked you! My resolution of
thanking you for your kindness to Lydia had certainly great effect.
_Too much_, I am afraid; for what becomes of the moral, if our comfort
springs from a breach of promise? for I ought not to have mentioned the
subject. This will never do.”

“You need not distress yourself. The moral will be perfectly fair. Lady
Catherine's unjustifiable endeavours to separate us were the means of
removing all my doubts. I am not indebted for my present happiness to
your eager desire of expressing your gratitude. I was not in a humour
to wait for any opening of yours. My aunt's intelligence had given me
hope, and I was determined at once to know every thing.”

“Lady Catherine has been of infinite use, which ought to make her happy,
for she loves to be of use. But tell me, what did you come down to
Netherfield for? Was it merely to ride to Longbourn and be embarrassed?
or had you intended any more serious consequence?”

“My real purpose was to see _you_, and to judge, if I could, whether I
might ever hope to make you love me. My avowed one, or what I avowed to
myself, was to see whether your sister were still partial to Bingley,
and if she were, to make the confession to him which I have since made.”

“Shall you ever have courage to announce to Lady Catherine what is to
befall her?”

“I am more likely to want more time than courage, Elizabeth. But it
ought to be done, and if you will give me a sheet of paper, it shall be
done directly.”

“And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and
admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But
I have an aunt, too, who must not be longer neglected.”

From an unwillingness to confess how much her intimacy with Mr. Darcy
had been over-rated, Elizabeth had never yet answered Mrs. Gardiner's
long letter; but now, having _that_ to communicate which she knew would
be most welcome, she was almost ashamed to find that her uncle and
aunt had already lost three days of happiness, and immediately wrote as
follows:

“I would have thanked you before, my dear aunt, as I ought to have done,
for your long, kind, satisfactory, detail of particulars; but to say the
truth, I was too cross to write. You supposed more than really existed.
But _now_ suppose as much as you choose; give a loose rein to your
fancy, indulge your imagination in every possible flight which the
subject will afford, and unless you believe me actually married, you
cannot greatly err. You must write again very soon, and praise him a
great deal more than you did in your last. I thank you, again and again,
for not going to the Lakes. How could I be so silly as to wish it! Your
idea of the ponies is delightful. We will go round the Park every day. I
am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so
before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she
only smiles, I laugh. Mr. Darcy sends you all the love in the world that
he can spare from me. You are all to come to Pemberley at Christmas.
Yours, etc.”

Mr. Darcy's letter to Lady Catherine was in a different style; and still
different from either was what Mr. Bennet sent to Mr. Collins, in reply
to his last.

“DEAR SIR,

“I must trouble you once more for congratulations. Elizabeth will soon
be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console Lady Catherine as well as you can.
But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has more to give.

“Yours sincerely, etc.”

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching
marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere. She wrote even
to Jane on the occasion, to express her delight, and repeat all her
former professions of regard. Jane was not deceived, but she was
affected; and though feeling no reliance on her, could not help writing
her a much kinder answer than she knew was deserved.

The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar information,
was as sincere as her brother's in sending it. Four sides of paper were
insufficient to contain all her delight, and all her earnest desire of
being loved by her sister.

Before any answer could arrive from Mr. Collins, or any congratulations
to Elizabeth from his wife, the Longbourn family heard that the
Collinses were come themselves to Lucas Lodge. The reason of this
sudden removal was soon evident. Lady Catherine had been rendered
so exceedingly angry by the contents of her nephew's letter, that
Charlotte, really rejoicing in the match, was anxious to get away till
the storm was blown over. At such a moment, the arrival of her friend
was a sincere pleasure to Elizabeth, though in the course of their
meetings she must sometimes think the pleasure dearly bought, when she
saw Mr. Darcy exposed to all the parading and obsequious civility of
her husband. He bore it, however, with admirable calmness. He could even
listen to Sir William Lucas, when he complimented him on carrying away
the brightest jewel of the country, and expressed his hopes of their all
meeting frequently at St. James's, with very decent composure. If he did
shrug his shoulders, it was not till Sir William was out of sight.

Mrs. Phillips's vulgarity was another, and perhaps a greater, tax on his
forbearance; and though Mrs. Phillips, as well as her sister, stood in
too much awe of him to speak with the familiarity which Bingley's good
humour encouraged, yet, whenever she _did_ speak, she must be vulgar.
Nor was her respect for him, though it made her more quiet, at all
likely to make her more elegant. Elizabeth did all she could to shield
him from the frequent notice of either, and was ever anxious to keep
him to herself, and to those of her family with whom he might converse
without mortification; and though the uncomfortable feelings arising
from all this took from the season of courtship much of its pleasure, it
added to the hope of the future; and she looked forward with delight to
the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing
to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at
Pemberley.



Chapter 61


Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got
rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride
she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may
be guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the
accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many
of her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible,
amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it
was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity
in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and
invariably silly.

Mr. Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly; his affection for her
drew him oftener from home than anything else could do. He delighted in
going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected.

Mr. Bingley and Jane remained at Netherfield only a twelvemonth. So near
a vicinity to her mother and Meryton relations was not desirable even to
_his_ easy temper, or _her_ affectionate heart. The darling wish of his
sisters was then gratified; he bought an estate in a neighbouring county
to Derbyshire, and Jane and Elizabeth, in addition to every other source
of happiness, were within thirty miles of each other.

Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her time with
her two elder sisters. In society so superior to what she had generally
known, her improvement was great. She was not of so ungovernable a
temper as Lydia; and, removed from the influence of Lydia's example,
she became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less
ignorant, and less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia's
society she was of course carefully kept, and though Mrs. Wickham
frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the promise of
balls and young men, her father would never consent to her going.

Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was necessarily
drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet's being quite
unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, but
she could still moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no
longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters' beauty and her own,
it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without
much reluctance.

As for Wickham and Lydia, their characters suffered no revolution from
the marriage of her sisters. He bore with philosophy the conviction that
Elizabeth must now become acquainted with whatever of his ingratitude
and falsehood had before been unknown to her; and in spite of every
thing, was not wholly without hope that Darcy might yet be prevailed on
to make his fortune. The congratulatory letter which Elizabeth received
from Lydia on her marriage, explained to her that, by his wife at least,
if not by himself, such a hope was cherished. The letter was to this
effect:

“MY DEAR LIZZY,

“I wish you joy. If you love Mr. Darcy half as well as I do my dear
Wickham, you must be very happy. It is a great comfort to have you so
rich, and when you have nothing else to do, I hope you will think of us.
I am sure Wickham would like a place at court very much, and I do not
think we shall have quite money enough to live upon without some help.
Any place would do, of about three or four hundred a year; but however,
do not speak to Mr. Darcy about it, if you had rather not.

“Yours, etc.”

As it happened that Elizabeth had _much_ rather not, she endeavoured in
her answer to put an end to every entreaty and expectation of the kind.
Such relief, however, as it was in her power to afford, by the practice
of what might be called economy in her own private expences, she
frequently sent them. It had always been evident to her that such an
income as theirs, under the direction of two persons so extravagant in
their wants, and heedless of the future, must be very insufficient to
their support; and whenever they changed their quarters, either Jane or
herself were sure of being applied to for some little assistance
towards discharging their bills. Their manner of living, even when the
restoration of peace dismissed them to a home, was unsettled in the
extreme. They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap
situation, and always spending more than they ought. His affection for
her soon sunk into indifference; hers lasted a little longer; and
in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all the claims to
reputation which her marriage had given her.

Though Darcy could never receive _him_ at Pemberley, yet, for
Elizabeth's sake, he assisted him further in his profession. Lydia was
occasionally a visitor there, when her husband was gone to enjoy himself
in London or Bath; and with the Bingleys they both of them frequently
staid so long, that even Bingley's good humour was overcome, and he
proceeded so far as to talk of giving them a hint to be gone.

Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy's marriage; but as she
thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at Pemberley, she
dropt all her resentment; was fonder than ever of Georgiana, almost as
attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and paid off every arrear of civility
to Elizabeth.

Pemberley was now Georgiana's home; and the attachment of the sisters
was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each
other even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion
in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with
an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive, manner of
talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect
which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open
pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen
in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions, she began to comprehend that
a woman may take liberties with her husband which a brother will not
always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.

Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew;
and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character in
her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him
language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time
all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth's persuasion,
he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation;
and, after a little further resistance on the part of his aunt, her
resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity
to see how his wife conducted herself; and she condescended to wait
on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had
received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the
visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.

With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms.
Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever
sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing
her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

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Title: Heart of Darkness

Author: Joseph Conrad

Release Date: February 1995 [EBook #219]
Last Updated: March 2, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEART OF DARKNESS ***




Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger





HEART OF DARKNESS

By Joseph Conrad




I


The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of
the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly
calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come
to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of
an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded
together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails
of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red
clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A
haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.
The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed
condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest,
and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four
affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to
seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so
nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness
personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in
the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of
the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of
separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's
yarns--and even convictions. The Lawyer--the best of old fellows--had,
because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck,
and was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a
box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow
sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had
sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect,
and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an
idol. The director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way
aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards
there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did
not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing
but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and
exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a
speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the
Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded
rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the
gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre
every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.

And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and
from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat,
as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that
gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less
brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested
unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the
race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a
waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the
venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and
departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And
indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes,
“followed the sea” with reverence and affection, than to evoke the
great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal
current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories
of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles
of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is
proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled
and untitled--the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the
ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from
the _Golden Hind_ returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be
visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale,
to the _Erebus_ and _Terror_, bound on other conquests--and that never
returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from
Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith--the adventurers and the settlers;
kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the
dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals”
 of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all
had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch,
messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the
sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river
into the mystery of an unknown earth!... The dreams of men, the seed
of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear
along the shore. The Chapman light-house, a three-legged thing erect
on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a
great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the
upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously
on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places
of the earth.”

He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst that
could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a
seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may
so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home
order, and their home is always with them--the ship; and so is their
country--the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is
always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign
shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance;
for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself,
which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree
on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent,
and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen
have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the
shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity
to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not
inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination
of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow.
It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and
presently he said, very slow--“I was thinking of very old times, when
the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other day
.... Light came out of this river since--you say Knights? Yes; but
it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the
clouds. We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth
keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings
of a commander of a fine--what d'ye call 'em?--trireme in the
Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the
Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries--a
wonderful lot of handy men they must have been, too--used to build,
apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we
read. Imagine him here--the very end of the world, a sea the colour
of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a
concertina--and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you
like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat
fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian
wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in
a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests,
disease, exile, and death--death skulking in the air, in the water, in
the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes--he did
it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about
it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his
time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he
was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at
Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful
climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too
much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or
tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp,
march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the
utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the
wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of
wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to
live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And
it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination
of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing
to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

He paused.

“Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the
hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the
pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a
lotus-flower--“Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves
us is efficiency--the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not
much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was
merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and
for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have
it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of
others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to
be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great
scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle
a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter
noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too
much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not
a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the
idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a
sacrifice to....”

He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red
flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each
other--then separating slowly or hastily. The traffic of the great city
went on in the deepening night upon the sleepless river. We looked on,
waiting patiently--there was nothing else to do till the end of
the flood; but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in
a hesitating voice, “I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn
fresh-water sailor for a bit,” that we knew we were fated, before
the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive
experiences.

“I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,”
 he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales
who seem so often unaware of what their audience would like best to
hear; “yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I
got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I
first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the
culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind
of light on everything about me--and into my thoughts. It was sombre
enough, too--and pitiful--not extraordinary in any way--not very clear
either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.

“I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of
Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas--a regular dose of the East--six years
or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and
invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to
civilize you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get
tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship--I should think the
hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn't even look at me. And I got
tired of that game, too.

“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for
hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all
the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on
the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map
(but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When
I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I
remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The
glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the hemispheres. I
have been in some of them, and... well, we won't talk about that. But
there was one yet--the biggest, the most blank, so to speak--that I had
a hankering after.

“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled
since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be
a blank space of delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream
gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it
one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map,
resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its
body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the
depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window,
it fascinated me as a snake would a bird--a silly little bird. Then I
remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river.
Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can't trade without using some
kind of craft on that lot of fresh water--steamboats! Why shouldn't I
try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not
shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.

“You understand it was a Continental concern, that Trading society; but
I have a lot of relations living on the Continent, because it's cheap
and not so nasty as it looks, they say.

“I am sorry to own I began to worry them. This was already a fresh
departure for me. I was not used to get things that way, you know. I
always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I
wouldn't have believed it of myself; but, then--you see--I felt somehow
I must get there by hook or by crook. So I worried them. The men said
'My dear fellow,' and did nothing. Then--would you believe it?--I tried
the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work--to get a job.
Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear
enthusiastic soul. She wrote: 'It will be delightful. I am ready to do
anything, anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a
very high personage in the Administration, and also a man who has lots
of influence with,' etc. She was determined to make no end of fuss to
get me appointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.

“I got my appointment--of course; and I got it very quick. It appears
the Company had received news that one of their captains had been killed
in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the
more anxious to go. It was only months and months afterwards, when I
made the attempt to recover what was left of the body, that I heard the
original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yes,
two black hens. Fresleven--that was the fellow's name, a Dane--thought
himself wronged somehow in the bargain, so he went ashore and started to
hammer the chief of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn't surprise
me in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told that
Fresleven was the gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two
legs. No doubt he was; but he had been a couple of years already out
there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the
need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way. Therefore he
whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his people
watched him, thunderstruck, till some man--I was told the chief's
son--in desperation at hearing the old chap yell, made a tentative jab
with a spear at the white man--and of course it went quite easy between
the shoulder-blades. Then the whole population cleared into the forest,
expecting all kinds of calamities to happen, while, on the other hand,
the steamer Fresleven commanded left also in a bad panic, in charge of
the engineer, I believe. Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much
about Fresleven's remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I
couldn't let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to
meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough
to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not
been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped
black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity
had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. Mad terror had
scattered them, men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had
never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should
think the cause of progress got them, anyhow. However, through this
glorious affair I got my appointment, before I had fairly begun to hope
for it.

“I flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I
was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the
contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me
think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt. I had no difficulty in
finding the Company's offices. It was the biggest thing in the town,
and everybody I met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea
empire, and make no end of coin by trade.

“A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable
windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting right and
left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through
one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid
as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and
the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The
slim one got up and walked straight at me--still knitting with downcast
eyes--and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as
you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was
as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and
preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal
table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a
large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a
vast amount of red--good to see at any time, because one knows that some
real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green,
smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where
the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I
wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in
the centre. And the river was there--fascinating--deadly--like a snake.
Ough! A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a
compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me
into the sanctuary. Its light was dim, and a heavy writing-desk squatted
in the middle. From behind that structure came out an impression of pale
plumpness in a frock-coat. The great man himself. He was five feet
six, I should judge, and had his grip on the handle-end of ever so many
millions. He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely, was satisfied with
my French. _Bon Voyage_.

“In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in the waiting-room
with the compassionate secretary, who, full of desolation and sympathy,
made me sign some document. I believe I undertook amongst other things
not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I am not going to.

“I began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am not used to such
ceremonies, and there was something ominous in the atmosphere. It
was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy--I don't
know--something not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer
room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. People were arriving,
and the younger one was walking back and forth introducing them. The
old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on
a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on her lap. She wore a starched
white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed
spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the
glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me.
Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over,
and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She
seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feeling came
over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought
of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for
a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown,
the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old
eyes. _Ave!_ Old knitter of black wool. _Morituri te salutant_. Not
many of those she looked at ever saw her again--not half, by a long way.

“There was yet a visit to the doctor. 'A simple formality,' assured me
the secretary, with an air of taking an immense part in all my sorrows.
Accordingly a young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some
clerk I suppose--there must have been clerks in the business, though
the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead--came from
somewhere up-stairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with
inkstains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and
billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a
little too early for the doctor, so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he
developed a vein of joviality. As we sat over our vermouths he glorified
the Company's business, and by and by I expressed casually my surprise
at him not going out there. He became very cool and collected all at
once. 'I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,'
he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we
rose.

“The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else
the while. 'Good, good for there,' he mumbled, and then with a certain
eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather
surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got
the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He
was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with
his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. 'I always ask
leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going
out there,' he said. 'And when they come back, too?' I asked. 'Oh, I
never see them,' he remarked; 'and, moreover, the changes take place
inside, you know.' He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. 'So you are
going out there. Famous. Interesting, too.' He gave me a searching
glance, and made another note. 'Ever any madness in your family?' he
asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. 'Is that question
in the interests of science, too?' 'It would be,' he said, without
taking notice of my irritation, 'interesting for science to watch the
mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but...' 'Are you an
alienist?' I interrupted. 'Every doctor should be--a little,' answered
that original, imperturbably. 'I have a little theory which you
messieurs who go out there must help me to prove. This is my share
in the advantages my country shall reap from the possession of such a
magnificent dependency. The mere wealth I leave to others. Pardon my
questions, but you are the first Englishman coming under my
observation...' I hastened to assure him I was not in the least typical.
'If I were,' said I, 'I wouldn't be talking like this with you.' 'What
you say is rather profound, and probably erroneous,' he said, with a
laugh. 'Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. _Adieu_. How do
you English say, eh? Good-bye. Ah! Good-bye. _Adieu_. In the tropics one
must before everything keep calm.'... He lifted a warning forefinger....
'_Du calme, du calme_.'

“One thing more remained to do--say good-bye to my excellent aunt. I
found her triumphant. I had a cup of tea--the last decent cup of tea for
many days--and in a room that most soothingly looked just as you would
expect a lady's drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the
fireside. In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me
I had been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness
knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted
creature--a piece of good fortune for the Company--a man you don't get
hold of every day. Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a
two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It
appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital--you
know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort
of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk
just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush
of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning
those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she
made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run
for profit.

“'You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his hire,'
she said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are.
They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything
like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they
were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some
confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the
day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

“After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write
often, and so on--and I left. In the street--I don't know why--a queer
feeling came to me that I was an imposter. Odd thing that I, who used to
clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with
less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a
moment--I won't say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this
commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying
that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the
centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the
earth.

“I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they
have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing
soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a
coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There
it is before you--smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or
savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.'
This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with
an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so
dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight,
like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was
blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to
glisten and drip with steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks
showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above
them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along,
stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy
toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed
and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers--to take care of the
custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf;
but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They
were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast
looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various
places--trading places--with names like Gran' Bassam, Little Popo; names
that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister
back-cloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these
men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the
uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth
of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The
voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the
speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that
had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary
contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see
from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang;
their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque
masks--these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an
intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf
along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a
great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to
a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long.
Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon
a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and
she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars
going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles
of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy,
slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin
masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was,
incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the
six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke
would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech--and
nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in
the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was
not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was
a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--hidden out of sight
somewhere.

“We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying
of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more
places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade
goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb;
all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature
herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams
of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters,
thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to
writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we
stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general
sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary
pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.

“It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river.
We anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin
till some two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a
start for a place thirty miles higher up.

“I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a
Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a
young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait.
As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously
at the shore. 'Been living there?' he asked. I said, 'Yes.' 'Fine lot
these government chaps--are they not?' he went on, speaking English
with great precision and considerable bitterness. 'It is funny what some
people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that
kind when it goes upcountry?' I said to him I expected to see that
soon. 'So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead
vigilantly. 'Don't be too sure,' he continued. 'The other day I took
up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.'
'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking
out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country
perhaps.'

“At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up
earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a
waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of
the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A
lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty
projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times
in a sudden recrudescence of glare. 'There's your Company's station,'
said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on the
rocky slope. 'I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So.
Farewell.'

“I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path
leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an
undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in
the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some
animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty
rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things
seemed to stir feebly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted to
the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation
shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was
all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a
railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless
blasting was all the work going on.

“A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men
advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow,
balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept
time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and
the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every
rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an
iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain
whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report
from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen
firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but
these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They
were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells,
had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meagre
breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the
eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a
glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages.
Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of the new
forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle.
He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white man on
the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was
simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he
could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a
large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take
me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part
of the great cause of these high and just proceedings.

“Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left. My idea was to
let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know
I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off.
I've had to resist and to attack sometimes--that's only one way of
resisting--without counting the exact cost, according to the demands
of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of
violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by
all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed
and drove men--men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I
foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become
acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and
pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out
several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I
stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill,
obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.

“I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the
slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't
a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have
been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals
something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow
ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that
a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in
there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up.
At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade
for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped
into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an
uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful
stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved,
with a mysterious sound--as though the tearing pace of the launched
earth had suddenly become audible.

“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the
trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within
the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.
Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the
soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the
place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

“They were dying slowly--it was very clear. They were not enemies, they
were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now--nothing but black
shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish
gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality
of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar
food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl
away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air--and nearly as
thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees.
Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined
at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the
eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant,
a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out
slowly. The man seemed young--almost a boy--but you know with them it's
hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good
Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly
on it and held--there was no other movement and no other glance. He had
tied a bit of white worsted round his neck--Why? Where did he get it?
Was it a badge--an ornament--a charm--a propitiatory act? Was there any
idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck,
this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

“Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs
drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing,
in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its
forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others
were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture
of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these
creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards
the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the
sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his
woolly head fall on his breastbone.

“I didn't want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste towards
the station. When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an
unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for
a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light
alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No
hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a
big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

“I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was the Company's
chief accountant, and that all the book-keeping was done at this
station. He had come out for a moment, he said, 'to get a breath of
fresh air. The expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion
of sedentary desk-life. I wouldn't have mentioned the fellow to you at
all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the
man who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time.
Moreover, I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his
vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a
hairdresser's dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he
kept up his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up
shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out nearly
three years; and, later, I could not help asking him how he managed to
sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said modestly,
'I've been teaching one of the native women about the station. It was
difficult. She had a distaste for the work.' Thus this man had verily
accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in
apple-pie order.

“Everything else in the station was in a muddle--heads, things,
buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and
departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads,
and brass-wire sent into the depths of darkness, and in return came a
precious trickle of ivory.

“I had to wait in the station for ten days--an eternity. I lived in a
hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into
the accountant's office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly
put together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from
neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need to
open the big shutter to see. It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed
fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed. I sat generally on the
floor, while, of faultless appearance (and even slightly scented),
perching on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he stood up for
exercise. When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalid agent from
upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. 'The
groans of this sick person,' he said, 'distract my attention. And
without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors
in this climate.'

“One day he remarked, without lifting his head, 'In the interior you
will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.' On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he
said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at
this information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, 'He is a very
remarkable person.' Further questions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz
was at present in charge of a trading-post, a very important one, in the
true ivory-country, at 'the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory
as all the others put together...' He began to write again. The sick
man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace.

“Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and a great tramping of
feet. A caravan had come in. A violent babble of uncouth sounds burst
out on the other side of the planks. All the carriers were speaking
together, and in the midst of the uproar the lamentable voice of the
chief agent was heard 'giving it up' tearfully for the twentieth time
that day.... He rose slowly. 'What a frightful row,' he said. He
crossed the room gently to look at the sick man, and returning, said to
me, 'He does not hear.' 'What! Dead?' I asked, startled. 'No, not yet,'
he answered, with great composure. Then, alluding with a toss of the
head to the tumult in the station-yard, 'When one has got to make
correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the
death.' He remained thoughtful for a moment. 'When you see Mr. Kurtz'
he went on, 'tell him from me that everything here'--he glanced at the
deck--' is very satisfactory. I don't like to write to him--with those
messengers of ours you never know who may get hold of your letter--at
that Central Station.' He stared at me for a moment with his mild,
bulging eyes. 'Oh, he will go far, very far,' he began again. 'He
will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above--the
Council in Europe, you know--mean him to be.'

“He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently
in going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the
homeward-bound agent was lying finished and insensible; the other,
bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct
transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still
tree-tops of the grove of death.

“Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for
a two-hundred-mile tramp.

“No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a
stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the
long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly
ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a
solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long
time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of
fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and
Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for
them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very
soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too. Still I passed through
several abandoned villages. There's something pathetically childish in
the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of
sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load. Camp,
cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in harness,
at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd and
his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above.
Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking,
swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive,
and wild--and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells
in a Christian country. Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform,
camping on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very
hospitable and festive--not to say drunk. Was looking after the upkeep
of the road, he declared. Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless
the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead,
upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be
considered as a permanent improvement. I had a white companion, too,
not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy and with the exasperating habit
of fainting on the hot hillsides, miles away from the least bit of shade
and water. Annoying, you know, to hold your own coat like a parasol over
a man's head while he is coming to. I couldn't help asking him once what
he meant by coming there at all. 'To make money, of course. What do you
think?' he said, scornfully. Then he got fever, and had to be carried in
a hammock slung under a pole. As he weighed sixteen stone I had no end
of rows with the carriers. They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their
loads in the night--quite a mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in
English with gestures, not one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of
eyes before me, and the next morning I started the hammock off in front
all right. An hour afterwards I came upon the whole concern wrecked in
a bush--man, hammock, groans, blankets, horrors. The heavy pole had
skinned his poor nose. He was very anxious for me to kill somebody,
but there wasn't the shadow of a carrier near. I remembered the old
doctor--'It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes
of individuals, on the spot.' I felt I was becoming scientifically
interesting. However, all that is to no purpose. On the fifteenth day
I came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into the Central
Station. It was on a back water surrounded by scrub and forest, with
a pretty border of smelly mud on one side, and on the three others
enclosed by a crazy fence of rushes. A neglected gap was all the gate
it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the
flabby devil was running that show. White men with long staves in their
hands appeared languidly from amongst the buildings, strolling up to
take a look at me, and then retired out of sight somewhere. One of them,
a stout, excitable chap with black moustaches, informed me with great
volubility and many digressions, as soon as I told him who I was, that
my steamer was at the bottom of the river. I was thunderstruck. What,
how, why? Oh, it was 'all right.' The 'manager himself' was there. All
quite correct. 'Everybody had behaved splendidly! splendidly!'--'you
must,' he said in agitation, 'go and see the general manager at once. He
is waiting!'

“I did not see the real significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I
see it now, but I am not sure--not at all. Certainly the affair was too
stupid--when I think of it--to be altogether natural. Still... But
at the moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nuisance. The
steamer was sunk. They had started two days before in a sudden hurry
up the river with the manager on board, in charge of some volunteer
skipper, and before they had been out three hours they tore the bottom
out of her on stones, and she sank near the south bank. I asked myself
what I was to do there, now my boat was lost. As a matter of fact, I had
plenty to do in fishing my command out of the river. I had to set about
it the very next day. That, and the repairs when I brought the pieces to
the station, took some months.

“My first interview with the manager was curious. He did not ask me to
sit down after my twenty-mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in
complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle
size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps
remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as
trenchant and heavy as an axe. But even at these times the rest of his
person seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was
only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something
stealthy--a smile--not a smile--I remember it, but I can't explain. It
was unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had said something
it got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches
like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest
phrase appear absolutely inscrutable. He was a common trader, from his
youth up employed in these parts--nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he
inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired
uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust--just
uneasiness--nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a...
a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative,
or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable
state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His
position had come to him--why? Perhaps because he was never ill... He
had served three terms of three years out there... Because triumphant
health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power
in itself. When he went home on leave he rioted on a large
scale--pompously. Jack ashore--with a difference--in externals only.
This one could gather from his casual talk. He originated nothing, he
could keep the routine going--that's all. But he was great. He was great
by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control
such a man. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing
within him. Such a suspicion made one pause--for out there there were no
external checks. Once when various tropical diseases had laid low almost
every 'agent' in the station, he was heard to say, 'Men who come out
here should have no entrails.' He sealed the utterance with that smile
of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in
his keeping. You fancied you had seen things--but the seal was on. When
annoyed at meal-times by the constant quarrels of the white men about
precedence, he ordered an immense round table to be made, for which a
special house had to be built. This was the station's mess-room. Where
he sat was the first place--the rest were nowhere. One felt this to be
his unalterable conviction. He was neither civil nor uncivil. He was
quiet. He allowed his 'boy'--an overfed young negro from the coast--to
treat the white men, under his very eyes, with provoking insolence.

“He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I had been very long on the
road. He could not wait. Had to start without me. The up-river stations
had to be relieved. There had been so many delays already that he did
not know who was dead and who was alive, and how they got on--and so on,
and so on. He paid no attention to my explanations, and, playing with
a stick of sealing-wax, repeated several times that the situation was
'very grave, very grave.' There were rumours that a very important
station was in jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it was
not true. Mr. Kurtz was... I felt weary and irritable. Hang Kurtz,
I thought. I interrupted him by saying I had heard of Mr. Kurtz on the
coast. 'Ah! So they talk of him down there,' he murmured to himself.
Then he began again, assuring me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, an
exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company; therefore
I could understand his anxiety. He was, he said, 'very, very uneasy.'
Certainly he fidgeted on his chair a good deal, exclaimed, 'Ah, Mr.
Kurtz!' broke the stick of sealing-wax and seemed dumfounded by the
accident. Next thing he wanted to know 'how long it would take to'...
I interrupted him again. Being hungry, you know, and kept on my feet
too. I was getting savage. 'How can I tell?' I said. 'I haven't even
seen the wreck yet--some months, no doubt.' All this talk seemed to me
so futile. 'Some months,' he said. 'Well, let us say three months before
we can make a start. Yes. That ought to do the affair.' I flung out
of his hut (he lived all alone in a clay hut with a sort of verandah)
muttering to myself my opinion of him. He was a chattering idiot.
Afterwards I took it back when it was borne in upon me startlingly
with what extreme nicety he had estimated the time requisite for the
'affair.'

“I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that
station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the
redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then
I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine
of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered
here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot
of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory'
rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were
praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a
whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in
my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared
speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like
evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic
invasion.

“Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Various things happened. One
evening a grass shed full of calico, cotton prints, beads, and I don't
know what else, burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have
thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that
trash. I was smoking my pipe quietly by my dismantled steamer, and saw
them all cutting capers in the light, with their arms lifted high, when
the stout man with moustaches came tearing down to the river, a tin
pail in his hand, assured me that everybody was 'behaving splendidly,
splendidly,' dipped about a quart of water and tore back again. I
noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail.

“I strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the thing had gone off like
a box of matches. It had been hopeless from the very first. The flame
had leaped high, driven everybody back, lighted up everything--and
collapsed. The shed was already a heap of embers glowing fiercely. A
nigger was being beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in
some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly. I saw him,
later, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking very sick and
trying to recover himself; afterwards he arose and went out--and
the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again. As I
approached the glow from the dark I found myself at the back of two men,
talking. I heard the name of Kurtz pronounced, then the words, 'take
advantage of this unfortunate accident.' One of the men was the manager.
I wished him a good evening. 'Did you ever see anything like it--eh? it
is incredible,' he said, and walked off. The other man remained. He was
a first-class agent, young, gentlemanly, a bit reserved, with a forked
little beard and a hooked nose. He was stand-offish with the other
agents, and they on their side said he was the manager's spy upon them.
As to me, I had hardly ever spoken to him before. We got into talk, and
by and by we strolled away from the hissing ruins. Then he asked me to
his room, which was in the main building of the station. He struck
a match, and I perceived that this young aristocrat had not only a
silver-mounted dressing-case but also a whole candle all to himself.
Just at that time the manager was the only man supposed to have any
right to candles. Native mats covered the clay walls; a collection of
spears, assegais, shields, knives was hung up in trophies. The business
intrusted to this fellow was the making of bricks--so I had been
informed; but there wasn't a fragment of a brick anywhere in the
station, and he had been there more than a year--waiting. It seems he
could not make bricks without something, I don't know what--straw maybe.
Anyway, it could not be found there and as it was not likely to be sent
from Europe, it did not appear clear to me what he was waiting for. An
act of special creation perhaps. However, they were all waiting--all
the sixteen or twenty pilgrims of them--for something; and upon my word
it did not seem an uncongenial occupation, from the way they took it,
though the only thing that ever came to them was disease--as far as I
could see. They beguiled the time by back-biting and intriguing against
each other in a foolish kind of way. There was an air of plotting about
that station, but nothing came of it, of course. It was as unreal as
everything else--as the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern, as
their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real
feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory
was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued
and slandered and hated each other only on that account--but as to
effectually lifting a little finger--oh, no. By heavens! there is
something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while
another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very
well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking
at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a
kick.

“I had no idea why he wanted to be sociable, but as we chatted in
there it suddenly occurred to me the fellow was trying to get at
something--in fact, pumping me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the
people I was supposed to know there--putting leading questions as to my
acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes
glittered like mica discs--with curiosity--though he tried to keep up a
bit of superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I
became awfully curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn't
possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was
very pretty to see how he baffled himself, for in truth my body was full
only of chills, and my head had nothing in it but that wretched
steamboat business. It was evident he took me for a perfectly shameless
prevaricator. At last he got angry, and, to conceal a movement of
furious annoyance, he yawned. I rose. Then I noticed a small sketch in
oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying
a lighted torch. The background was sombre--almost black. The movement
of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face
was sinister.

“It arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding an empty half-pint
champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my
question he said Mr. Kurtz had painted this--in this very station more
than a year ago--while waiting for means to go to his trading post.
'Tell me, pray,' said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz?'

“'The chief of the Inner Station,' he answered in a short tone, looking
away. 'Much obliged,' I said, laughing. 'And you are the brickmaker of
the Central Station. Every one knows that.' He was silent for a while.
'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary of pity and
science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,' he began
to declaim suddenly, 'for the guidance of the cause intrusted to us by
Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness
of purpose.' 'Who says that?' I asked. 'Lots of them,' he replied. 'Some
even write that; and so _he_ comes here, a special being, as you ought to
know.' 'Why ought I to know?' I interrupted, really surprised. He paid
no attention. 'Yes. Today he is chief of the best station, next year he
will be assistant-manager, two years more and... but I dare-say you
know what he will be in two years' time. You are of the new gang--the
gang of virtue. The same people who sent him specially also recommended
you. Oh, don't say no. I've my own eyes to trust.' Light dawned upon me.
My dear aunt's influential acquaintances were producing an unexpected
effect upon that young man. I nearly burst into a laugh. 'Do you read
the Company's confidential correspondence?' I asked. He hadn't a word
to say. It was great fun. 'When Mr. Kurtz,' I continued, severely, 'is
General Manager, you won't have the opportunity.'

“He blew the candle out suddenly, and we went outside. The moon had
risen. Black figures strolled about listlessly, pouring water on
the glow, whence proceeded a sound of hissing; steam ascended in the
moonlight, the beaten nigger groaned somewhere. 'What a row the brute
makes!' said the indefatigable man with the moustaches, appearing
near us. 'Serve him right. Transgression--punishment--bang! Pitiless,
pitiless. That's the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations
for the future. I was just telling the manager...' He noticed my
companion, and became crestfallen all at once. 'Not in bed yet,'
he said, with a kind of servile heartiness; 'it's so natural. Ha!
Danger--agitation.' He vanished. I went on to the riverside, and
the other followed me. I heard a scathing murmur at my ear, 'Heap
of muffs--go to.' The pilgrims could be seen in knots gesticulating,
discussing. Several had still their staves in their hands. I verily
believe they took these sticks to bed with them. Beyond the fence the
forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through that dim stir,
through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of
the land went home to one's very heart--its mystery, its greatness, the
amazing reality of its concealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly
somewhere near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my
pace away from there. I felt a hand introducing itself under my arm.
'My dear sir,' said the fellow, 'I don't want to be misunderstood, and
especially by you, who will see Mr. Kurtz long before I can have
that pleasure. I wouldn't like him to get a false idea of my
disposition....'

“I let him run on, this _papier-mache_ Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me
that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find
nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don't you see, had
been planning to be assistant-manager by and by under the present man,
and I could see that the coming of that Kurtz had upset them both not a
little. He talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my
shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a
carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud,
by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was
before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon
had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass,
over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than
the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre
gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.
All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about
himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity
looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we
who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it
handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that
couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? I could
see a little ivory coming out from there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was
in there. I had heard enough about it, too--God knows! Yet somehow
it didn't bring any image with it--no more than if I had been told an
angel or a fiend was in there. I believed it in the same way one of you
might believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a
Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars.
If you asked him for some idea how they looked and behaved, he would get
shy and mutter something about 'walking on all-fours.' If you as much
as smiled, he would--though a man of sixty--offer to fight you. I would
not have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near
enough to a lie. You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not
because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it
appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in
lies--which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world--what I want
to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten
would do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by
letting the young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to
my influence in Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretence as
the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion
it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not
see--you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in
the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do
you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a
dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey
the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and
bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being
captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams....”

He was silent for a while.

“... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the
life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes
its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is
impossible. We live, as we dream--alone....”

He paused again as if reflecting, then added:

“Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me,
whom you know....”

It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one
another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more
to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might
have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch
for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the
faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself
without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.

“... Yes--I let him run on,” Marlow began again, “and think what
he pleased about the powers that were behind me. I did! And there was
nothing behind me! There was nothing but that wretched, old, mangled
steamboat I was leaning against, while he talked fluently about 'the
necessity for every man to get on.' 'And when one comes out here, you
conceive, it is not to gaze at the moon.' Mr. Kurtz was a 'universal
genius,' but even a genius would find it easier to work with 'adequate
tools--intelligent men.' He did not make bricks--why, there was a
physical impossibility in the way--as I was well aware; and if he
did secretarial work for the manager, it was because 'no sensible man
rejects wantonly the confidence of his superiors.' Did I see it? I saw
it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven!
Rivets. To get on with the work--to stop the hole. Rivets I
wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast--cases--piled
up--burst--split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that
station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death.
You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping
down--and there wasn't one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We
had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And every
week the messenger, a long negro, letter-bag on shoulder and staff in
hand, left our station for the coast. And several times a week a coast
caravan came in with trade goods--ghastly glazed calico that made you
shudder only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart,
confounded spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers
could have brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.

“He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude
must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform
me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I
could see that very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of
rivets--and rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only
known it. Now letters went to the coast every week.... 'My dear
sir,' he cried, 'I write from dictation.' I demanded rivets. There was
a way--for an intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very
cold, and suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered whether
sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and day)
I wasn't disturbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of
getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds.
The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they could
lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o' nights for him. All this
energy was wasted, though. 'That animal has a charmed life,' he said;
'but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man--you
apprehend me?--no man here bears a charmed life.' He stood there for
a moment in the moonlight with his delicate hooked nose set a little
askew, and his mica eyes glittering without a wink, then, with a curt
Good-night, he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and considerably
puzzled, which made me feel more hopeful than I had been for days. It
was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the
battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She
rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked
along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty
in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love
her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given
me a chance to come out a bit--to find out what I could do. No, I don't
like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that
can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the
work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not
for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere
show, and never can tell what it really means.

“I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with
his legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few
mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally
despised--on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the
foreman--a boiler-maker by trade--a good worker. He was a lank, bony,
yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his
head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed
to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality,
for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a widower with six young
children (he had left them in charge of a sister of his to come out
there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an
enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After work
hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about his
children and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud under
the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind
of white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had loops to go over
his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted on the bank rinsing
that wrapper in the creek with great care, then spreading it solemnly on
a bush to dry.

“I slapped him on the back and shouted, 'We shall have rivets!' He
scrambled to his feet exclaiming, 'No! Rivets!' as though he couldn't
believe his ears. Then in a low voice, 'You... eh?' I don't know why
we behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and
nodded mysteriously. 'Good for you!' he cried, snapped his fingers above
his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck.
A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest on
the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering roll upon the
sleeping station. It must have made some of the pilgrims sit up in their
hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the manager's hut,
vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished, too.
We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet
flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of
vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves,
boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting
invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested,
ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out
of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty
splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an icthyosaurus had
been taking a bath of glitter in the great river. 'After all,' said the
boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, 'why shouldn't we get the rivets?'
Why not, indeed! I did not know of any reason why we shouldn't. 'They'll
come in three weeks,' I said confidently.

“But they didn't. Instead of rivets there came an invasion, an
infliction, a visitation. It came in sections during the next three
weeks, each section headed by a donkey carrying a white man in new
clothes and tan shoes, bowing from that elevation right and left to the
impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod on
the heels of the donkey; a lot of tents, camp-stools, tin boxes, white
cases, brown bales would be shot down in the courtyard, and the air of
mystery would deepen a little over the muddle of the station. Five such
instalments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight with the
loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision stores, that, one
would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness for
equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent in
themselves but that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving.

“This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and
I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk
of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without
audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight
or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not
seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into
a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know; but
the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.

“In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighbourhood, and his
eyes had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with
ostentation on his short legs, and during the time his gang infested the
station spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two roaming
about all day long with their heads close together in an everlasting
confab.

“I had given up worrying myself about the rivets. One's capacity for
that kind of folly is more limited than you would suppose. I said
Hang!--and let things slide. I had plenty of time for meditation,
and now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn't very
interested in him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who
had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the
top after all and how he would set about his work when there.”




II



“One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard
voices approaching--and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling
along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost
myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: 'I am as
harmless as a little child, but I don't like to be dictated to. Am I the
manager--or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It's incredible.'
... I became aware that the two were standing on the shore alongside
the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not move; it
did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. 'It _is_ unpleasant,' grunted
the uncle. 'He has asked the Administration to be sent there,' said the
other, 'with the idea of showing what he could do; and I was instructed
accordingly. Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not
frightful?' They both agreed it was frightful, then made several bizarre
remarks: 'Make rain and fine weather--one man--the Council--by the
nose'--bits of absurd sentences that got the better of my drowsiness,
so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits about me when the uncle
said, 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he alone
there?' 'Yes,' answered the manager; 'he sent his assistant down the
river with a note to me in these terms: “Clear this poor devil out of
the country, and don't bother sending more of that sort. I had rather be
alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of with me.” It was more
than a year ago. Can you imagine such impudence!' 'Anything since then?'
asked the other hoarsely. 'Ivory,' jerked the nephew; 'lots of it--prime
sort--lots--most annoying, from him.' 'And with that?' questioned the
heavy rumble. 'Invoice,' was the reply fired out, so to speak. Then
silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.

“I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained
still, having no inducement to change my position. 'How did that ivory
come all this way?' growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The
other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an
English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently
intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods
and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided
to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dugout with four
paddlers, leaving the half-caste to continue down the river with the
ivory. The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody attempting such
a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate motive. As to me, I seemed
to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the dugout,
four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly
on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home--perhaps; setting
his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his empty and
desolate station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply
a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His name, you
understand, had not been pronounced once. He was 'that man.' The
half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult
trip with great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as 'that
scoundrel.' The 'scoundrel' had reported that the 'man' had been very
ill--had recovered imperfectly.... The two below me moved away then a
few paces, and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I heard:
'Military post--doctor--two hundred miles--quite alone now--unavoidable
delays--nine months--no news--strange rumours.' They approached again,
just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I know, unless a
species of wandering trader--a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory
from the natives.' Who was it they were talking about now? I gathered in
snatches that this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz's district, and
of whom the manager did not approve. 'We will not be free from unfair
competition till one of these fellows is hanged for an example,'
he said. 'Certainly,' grunted the other; 'get him hanged! Why not?
Anything--anything can be done in this country. That's what I say;
nobody here, you understand, _here_, can endanger your position. And why?
You stand the climate--you outlast them all. The danger is in Europe;
but there before I left I took care to--' They moved off and whispered,
then their voices rose again. 'The extraordinary series of delays is
not my fault. I did my best.' The fat man sighed. 'Very sad.' 'And the
pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other; 'he bothered
me enough when he was here. “Each station should be like a beacon on the
road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for
humanizing, improving, instructing.” Conceive you--that ass! And
he wants to be manager! No, it's--' Here he got choked by excessive
indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was surprised to see
how near they were--right under me. I could have spat upon their hats.
They were looking on the ground, absorbed in thought. The manager was
switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious relative lifted his
head. 'You have been well since you came out this time?' he asked. The
other gave a start. 'Who? I? Oh! Like a charm--like a charm. But the
rest--oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick, too, that I haven't
the time to send them out of the country--it's incredible!' 'Hm'm.
Just so,' grunted the uncle. 'Ah! my boy, trust to this--I say, trust to
this.' I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that
took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river--seemed to beckon
with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a
treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the
profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling that I leaped to my
feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as though I had expected
an answer of some sort to that black display of confidence. You know
the foolish notions that come to one sometimes. The high stillness
confronted these two figures with its ominous patience, waiting for the
passing away of a fantastic invasion.

“They swore aloud together--out of sheer fright, I believe--then
pretending not to know anything of my existence, turned back to the
station. The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed
to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal
length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without
bending a single blade.

“In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness,
that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the
news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate
of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found
what they deserved. I did not inquire. I was then rather excited at
the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean
it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek
when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station.

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were
kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air
was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into
the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and
alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed
through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you
would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to
find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for
ever from everything you had known once--somewhere--far away--in another
existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one,
as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered
with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of
plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in
the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful
aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no
time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by
inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I
shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the
life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night
for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,
to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality--the reality, I tell
you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it
all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at
my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your
respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--”

“Try to be civil, Marlow,” growled a voice, and I knew there was at
least one listener awake besides myself.

“I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of
the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well
done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since
I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to
me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road.
I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell
you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's
supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.
No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump--eh? A blow on the
very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and
think of it--years after--and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend
to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to
wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.
We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine
fellows--cannibals--in their place. They were men one could work with,
and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other
before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat
which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my
nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three
or four pilgrims with their staves--all complete. Sometimes we came
upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown,
and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great
gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange--had the
appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would
ring in the air for a while--and on we went again into the silence,
along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of
our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running
up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept
the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the
floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and
yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you
were small, the grimy beetle crawled on--which was just what you wanted
it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know.
To some place where they expected to get something. I bet! For me it
crawled towards Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started
leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed
behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar
the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart
of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of
drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain
sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till
the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could
not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness;
the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig
would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an
earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied
ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance,
to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But
suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush
walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs,
a mass of hands clapping of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes
rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer
toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who
could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings;
we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane
men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could
not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we
were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled
form of a conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were
not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion
of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and
leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just
the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly
enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that
there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it
which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.
And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything
is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after
all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage--who can tell?--but
truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and
shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at
least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth
with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles won't
do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the
first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in
this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have
a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be
silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments,
is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for
a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say?
Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with
white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on
those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and
circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.
There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And
between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was
an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there
below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a
dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.
A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted
at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of
intrepidity--and he had filed teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool
of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars
on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and
stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a
thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful
because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this--that should
the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside
the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take
a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass
fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and
a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his
lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short
noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence--and we crept
on, towards Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous
and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and
thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy
thoughts.

“Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds,
an inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of
what had been a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked
wood-pile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of
firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing
on it. When deciphered it said: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach
cautiously.' There was a signature, but it was illegible--not
Kurtz--a much longer word. 'Hurry up.' Where? Up the river? 'Approach
cautiously.' We had not done so. But the warning could not have been
meant for the place where it could be only found after approach.
Something was wrong above. But what--and how much? That was the
question. We commented adversely upon the imbecility of that telegraphic
style. The bush around said nothing, and would not let us look very far,
either. A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the hut, and
flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was dismantled; but we could
see a white man had lived there not very long ago. There remained a rude
table--a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish reposed in a dark corner,
and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its covers, and the
pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the
back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which
looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, _An
Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship_, by a man Towser, Towson--some
such name--Master in his Majesty's Navy. The matter looked dreary
reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of
figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing
antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve
in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the
breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not
a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a
singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going
to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago,
luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor,
with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and
the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something
unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but
still more astounding were the notes pencilled in the margin, and
plainly referring to the text. I couldn't believe my eyes! They were in
cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a
book of that description into this nowhere and studying it--and making
notes--in cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery.

“I had been dimly aware for some time of a worrying noise, and when I
lifted my eyes I saw the wood-pile was gone, and the manager, aided by
all the pilgrims, was shouting at me from the riverside. I slipped the
book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing
myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.

“I started the lame engine ahead. 'It must be this miserable trader--this
intruder,' exclaimed the manager, looking back malevolently at the place
we had left. 'He must be English,' I said. 'It will not save him from
getting into trouble if he is not careful,' muttered the manager darkly.
I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in
this world.

“The current was more rapid now, the steamer seemed at her last gasp,
the stern-wheel flopped languidly, and I caught myself listening on
tiptoe for the next beat of the boat, for in sober truth I expected the
wretched thing to give up every moment. It was like watching the last
flickers of a life. But still we crawled. Sometimes I would pick out a
tree a little way ahead to measure our progress towards Kurtz by, but
I lost it invariably before we got abreast. To keep the eyes so long
on one thing was too much for human patience. The manager displayed
a beautiful resignation. I fretted and fumed and took to arguing with
myself whether or no I would talk openly with Kurtz; but before I could
come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence,
indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter
what any one knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One
gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair
lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of
meddling.

“Towards the evening of the second day we judged ourselves about eight
miles from Kurtz's station. I wanted to push on; but the manager looked
grave, and told me the navigation up there was so dangerous that it
would be advisable, the sun being very low already, to wait where we
were till next morning. Moreover, he pointed out that if the warning
to approach cautiously were to be followed, we must approach in
daylight--not at dusk or in the dark. This was sensible enough. Eight
miles meant nearly three hours' steaming for us, and I could also see
suspicious ripples at the upper end of the reach. Nevertheless, I was
annoyed beyond expression at the delay, and most unreasonably, too,
since one night more could not matter much after so many months. As we
had plenty of wood, and caution was the word, I brought up in the middle
of the stream. The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a
railway cutting. The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had
set. The current ran smooth and swift, but a dumb immobility sat on the
banks. The living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every
living bush of the undergrowth, might have been changed into stone, even
to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep--it
seemed unnatural, like a state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any
kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself
of being deaf--then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as
well. About three in the morning some large fish leaped, and the loud
splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When the sun rose
there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the
night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round
you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a
shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of
the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun
hanging over it--all perfectly still--and then the white shutter came
down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the
chain, which we had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it
stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of
infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A
complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The
sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don't know
how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had
screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this
tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried
outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short,
leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately
listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. 'Good God!
What is the meaning--' stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims--a
little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore sidespring
boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained
open-mouthed a while minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush
out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
'ready' in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we were
on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of
dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around
her--and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our
eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off
without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.

“I went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled in short, so as to
be ready to trip the anchor and move the steamboat at once if necessary.
'Will they attack?' whispered an awed voice. 'We will be all butchered
in this fog,' murmured another. The faces twitched with the strain, the
hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to wink. It was very curious
to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black
fellows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the
river as we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away. The
whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of
being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an
alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were essentially
quiet, even those of the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the
chain. Several exchanged short, grunting phrases, which seemed to settle
the matter to their satisfaction. Their headman, a young, broad-chested
black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils
and his hair all done up artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me.
'Aha!' I said, just for good fellowship's sake. 'Catch 'im,' he snapped,
with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth--'catch
'im. Give 'im to us.' 'To you, eh?' I asked; 'what would you do with
them?' 'Eat 'im!' he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail,
looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude.
I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to
me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been
growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been
engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any
clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still
belonged to the beginnings of time--had no inherited experience to teach
them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper
written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the
river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live.
Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which
couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn't, in
the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it
overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really
a case of legitimate self-defence. You can't breathe dead hippo waking,
sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on
existence. Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of
brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to
buy their provisions with that currency in riverside villages. You can
see how _that_ worked. There were either no villages, or the people were
hostile, or the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with
an occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn't want to stop the steamer for
some more or less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire
itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don't see what
good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid
with a regularity worthy of a large and honourable trading company. For
the rest, the only thing to eat--though it didn't look eatable in the
least--I saw in their possession was a few lumps of some stuff like
half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender colour, they kept wrapped in
leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it
seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any serious purpose
of sustenance. Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they
didn't go for us--they were thirty to five--and have a good tuck-in for
once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men,
with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with
strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their
muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of
those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there.
I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest--not because it
occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own
to you that just then I perceived--in a new light, as it were--how
unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped,
that my aspect was not so--what shall I say?--so--unappetizing: a touch
of fantastic vanity which fitted well with the dream-sensation that
pervaded all my days at that time. Perhaps I had a little fever, too.
One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse. I had
often 'a little fever,' or a little touch of other things--the playful
paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more
serious onslaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at them as you
would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives,
capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable
physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it
superstition, disgust, patience, fear--or some kind of primitive honour?
No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust
simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs,
and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.
Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating
torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well,
I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly.
It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of
one's soul--than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these
chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I
would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst
the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me--the fact
dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a
ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater--when I thought
of it--than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in this
savage clamour that had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind
whiteness of the fog.

“Two pilgrims were quarrelling in hurried whispers as to which bank.
'Left.' 'no, no; how can you? Right, right, of course.' 'It is very
serious,' said the manager's voice behind me; 'I would be desolated if
anything should happen to Mr. Kurtz before we came up.' I looked at him,
and had not the slightest doubt he was sincere. He was just the kind of
man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint. But
when he muttered something about going on at once, I did not even take
the trouble to answer him. I knew, and he knew, that it was impossible.
Were we to let go our hold of the bottom, we would be absolutely in
the air--in space. We wouldn't be able to tell where we were going
to--whether up or down stream, or across--till we fetched against one
bank or the other--and then we wouldn't know at first which it was.
Of course I made no move. I had no mind for a smash-up. You couldn't
imagine a more deadly place for a shipwreck. Whether we drowned at
once or not, we were sure to perish speedily in one way or another. 'I
authorize you to take all the risks,' he said, after a short silence.
'I refuse to take any,' I said shortly; which was just the answer he
expected, though its tone might have surprised him. 'Well, I must defer
to your judgment. You are captain,' he said with marked civility. I
turned my shoulder to him in sign of my appreciation, and looked into
the fog. How long would it last? It was the most hopeless lookout. The
approach to this Kurtz grubbing for ivory in the wretched bush was beset
by as many dangers as though he had been an enchanted princess sleeping
in a fabulous castle. 'Will they attack, do you think?' asked the
manager, in a confidential tone.

“I did not think they would attack, for several obvious reasons. The
thick fog was one. If they left the bank in their canoes they would get
lost in it, as we would be if we attempted to move. Still, I had also
judged the jungle of both banks quite impenetrable--and yet eyes were
in it, eyes that had seen us. The riverside bushes were certainly very
thick; but the undergrowth behind was evidently penetrable.
However, during the short lift I had seen no canoes anywhere in the
reach--certainly not abreast of the steamer. But what made the idea of
attack inconceivable to me was the nature of the noise--of the cries we
had heard. They had not the fierce character boding immediate hostile
intention. Unexpected, wild, and violent as they had been, they had
given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. The glimpse of the
steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained
grief. The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a
great human passion let loose. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy....

“You should have seen the pilgrims stare! They had no heart to grin, or
even to revile me: but I believe they thought me gone mad--with fright,
maybe. I delivered a regular lecture. My dear boys, it was no good
bothering. Keep a lookout? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for
the signs of lifting as a cat watches a mouse; but for anything else our
eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in
a heap of cotton-wool. It felt like it, too--choking, warm, stifling.
Besides, all I said, though it sounded extravagant, was absolutely
true to fact. What we afterwards alluded to as an attack was really an
attempt at repulse. The action was very far from being aggressive--it
was not even defensive, in the usual sense: it was undertaken under the
stress of desperation, and in its essence was purely protective.

“It developed itself, I should say, two hours after the fog lifted, and
its commencement was at a spot, roughly speaking, about a mile and a
half below Kurtz's station. We had just floundered and flopped round a
bend, when I saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock of bright green, in the
middle of the stream. It was the only thing of the kind; but as we opened
the reach more, I perceived it was the head of a long sand-bank, or
rather of a chain of shallow patches stretching down the middle of the
river. They were discoloured, just awash, and the whole lot was seen
just under the water, exactly as a man's backbone is seen running down
the middle of his back under the skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could
go to the right or to the left of this. I didn't know either channel, of
course. The banks looked pretty well alike, the depth appeared the same;
but as I had been informed the station was on the west side, I naturally
headed for the western passage.

“No sooner had we fairly entered it than I became aware it was much
narrower than I had supposed. To the left of us there was the long
uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high, steep bank heavily
overgrown with bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in serried ranks.
The twigs overhung the current thickly, and from distance to distance a
large limb of some tree projected rigidly over the stream. It was then
well on in the afternoon, the face of the forest was gloomy, and a
broad strip of shadow had already fallen on the water. In this shadow
we steamed up--very slowly, as you may imagine. I sheered her well
inshore--the water being deepest near the bank, as the sounding-pole
informed me.

“One of my hungry and forbearing friends was sounding in the bows just
below me. This steamboat was exactly like a decked scow. On the deck,
there were two little teakwood houses, with doors and windows. The
boiler was in the fore-end, and the machinery right astern. Over
the whole there was a light roof, supported on stanchions. The funnel
projected through that roof, and in front of the funnel a small cabin
built of light planks served for a pilot-house. It contained a couch,
two camp-stools, a loaded Martini-Henry leaning in one corner, a tiny
table, and the steering-wheel. It had a wide door in front and a broad
shutter at each side. All these were always thrown open, of course. I
spent my days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that roof,
before the door. At night I slept, or tried to, on the couch. An
athletic black belonging to some coast tribe and educated by my poor
predecessor, was the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore
a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the
world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen.
He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would
let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute.

“I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feeling much annoyed to
see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river, when I saw
my poleman give up on the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on
the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in. He kept
hold on it though, and it trailed in the water. At the same time the
fireman, whom I could also see below me, sat down abruptly before his
furnace and ducked his head. I was amazed. Then I had to look at the
river mighty quick, because there was a snag in the fairway. Sticks,
little sticks, were flying about--thick: they were whizzing before my
nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-house. All
this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet--perfectly
quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel
and the patter of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by
Jove! We were being shot at! I stepped in quickly to close the shutter
on the landside. That fool-helmsman, his hands on the spokes, was
lifting his knees high, stamping his feet, champing his mouth, like a
reined-in horse. Confound him! And we were staggering within ten feet of
the bank. I had to lean right out to swing the heavy shutter, and I saw
a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me very
fierce and steady; and then suddenly, as though a veil had been removed
from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom, naked breasts,
arms, legs, glaring eyes--the bush was swarming with human limbs in
movement, glistening of bronze colour. The twigs shook, swayed, and
rustled, the arrows flew out of them, and then the shutter came to.
'Steer her straight,' I said to the helmsman. He held his head rigid,
face forward; but his eyes rolled, he kept on lifting and setting down
his feet gently, his mouth foamed a little. 'Keep quiet!' I said in a
fury. I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.
I darted out. Below me there was a great scuffle of feet on the iron
deck; confused exclamations; a voice screamed, 'Can you turn back?'
I caught sight of a V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? Another
snag! A fusillade burst out under my feet. The pilgrims had opened with
their Winchesters, and were simply squirting lead into that bush. A
deuce of a lot of smoke came up and drove slowly forward. I swore at
it. Now I couldn't see the ripple or the snag either. I stood in the
doorway, peering, and the arrows came in swarms. They might have been
poisoned, but they looked as though they wouldn't kill a cat. The bush
began to howl. Our wood-cutters raised a warlike whoop; the report of a
rifle just at my back deafened me. I glanced over my shoulder, and the
pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a dash at the
wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped everything, to throw the shutter
open and let off that Martini-Henry. He stood before the wide opening,
glaring, and I yelled at him to come back, while I straightened the
sudden twist out of that steamboat. There was no room to turn even if I
had wanted to, the snag was somewhere very near ahead in that confounded
smoke, there was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the
bank--right into the bank, where I knew the water was deep.

“We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a whirl of broken twigs
and flying leaves. The fusillade below stopped short, as I had foreseen
it would when the squirts got empty. I threw my head back to a glinting
whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at one shutter-hole and out
at the other. Looking past that mad helmsman, who was shaking the empty
rifle and yelling at the shore, I saw vague forms of men running bent
double, leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent. Something
big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard,
and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an
extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. The
side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what appeared
a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp-stool. It
looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody ashore he had
lost his balance in the effort. The thin smoke had blown away, we were
clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred
yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank; but my
feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had
rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched
that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged
through the opening, had caught him in the side, just below the ribs;
the blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my
shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under
the wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing lustre. The fusillade burst
out again. He looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like something
precious, with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from
him. I had to make an effort to free my eyes from his gaze and attend
to the steering. With one hand I felt above my head for the line of
the steam whistle, and jerked out screech after screech hurriedly. The
tumult of angry and warlike yells was checked instantly, and then from
the depths of the woods went out such a tremulous and prolonged wail of
mournful fear and utter despair as may be imagined to follow the flight
of the last hope from the earth. There was a great commotion in the
bush; the shower of arrows stopped, a few dropping shots rang out
sharply--then silence, in which the languid beat of the stern-wheel came
plainly to my ears. I put the helm hard a-starboard at the moment when
the pilgrim in pink pyjamas, very hot and agitated, appeared in the
doorway. 'The manager sends me--' he began in an official tone, and
stopped short. 'Good God!' he said, glaring at the wounded man.

“We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquiring glance
enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would presently put
to us some questions in an understandable language; but he died without
uttering a sound, without moving a limb, without twitching a muscle.
Only in the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we
could not see, to some whisper we could not hear, he frowned heavily,
and that frown gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably sombre,
brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre of inquiring glance faded
swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent
eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he
understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you
the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is
dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,'
said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. 'And by the way, I suppose
Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by this time.'

“For the moment that was the dominant thought. There was a sense of
extreme disappointment, as though I had found out I had been striving
after something altogether without a substance. I couldn't have been
more disgusted if I had travelled all this way for the sole purpose of
talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking with... I flung one shoe overboard,
and became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking forward
to--a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had never
imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn't say to
myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by
the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself
as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of
action. Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration
that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all
the other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his
being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood
out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his
ability to talk, his words--the gift of expression, the bewildering,
the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the
pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an
impenetrable darkness.

“The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought,
'By Jove! it's all over. We are too late; he has vanished--the gift has
vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that
chap speak after all'--and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of
emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these
savages in the bush. I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation
somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in
life.... Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well,
absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever--Here, give me some tobacco.”...

There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and
Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and
dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he
took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of
the night in the regular flicker of tiny flame. The match went out.

“Absurd!” he cried. “This is the worst of trying to tell.... Here
you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with
two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another,
excellent appetites, and temperature normal--you hear--normal from
year's end to year's end. And you say, Absurd! Absurd be--exploded!
Absurd! My dear boys, what can you expect from a man who out of sheer
nervousness had just flung overboard a pair of new shoes! Now I think of
it, it is amazing I did not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud
of my fortitude. I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the
inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I
was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh, yes, I heard more than
enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a
voice. And I heard--him--it--this voice--other voices--all of them were
so little more than voices--and the memory of that time itself lingers
around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber,
silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of
sense. Voices, voices--even the girl herself--now--”

He was silent for a long time.

“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he began, suddenly.
“Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely.
They--the women, I mean--are out of it--should be out of it. We must
help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours
gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the
disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.' You would have
perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty
frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes,
but this--ah--specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had
patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball--an ivory ball;
it had caressed him, and--lo!--he had withered; it had taken him, loved
him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed
his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish
initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should
think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting
with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above
or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager
had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they
call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the
tusks sometimes--but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep
enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the
steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could
see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this
favour had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say,
'My ivory.' Oh, yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station,
my river, my--' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath
in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal
of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything
belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he
belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That
was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible--it
was not good for one either--trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat
amongst the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand.
How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind
neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately
between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and
gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region
of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the
way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of
silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can
be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the
great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own
innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you
may be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull even to know you are
being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made
a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool,
or the devil too much of a devil--I don't know which. Or you may be such
a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to
anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only
a standing place--and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain
I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with
sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo,
so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see?
Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of
unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in--your power of devotion,
not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's
difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain--I am
trying to account to myself for--for--Mr. Kurtz--for the shade of Mr.
Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with
its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because
it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated
partly in England, and--as he was good enough to say himself--his
sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his
father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz;
and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the
making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too.
I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence,
but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had
found time for! But this must have been before his--let us say--nerves,
went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending
with unspeakable rites, which--as far as I reluctantly gathered
from what I heard at various times--were offered up to him--do you
understand?--to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece
of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later
information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument
that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must
necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural
beings--we approach them with the might of a deity,' and so on, and so
on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good
practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me
with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember,
you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an
august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the
unbounded power of eloquence--of words--of burning noble words. There
were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,
unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently
much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of
a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to
every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'
The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that
valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to
himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of 'my pamphlet'
(he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence
upon his career. I had full information about all these things, and,
besides, as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory. I've
done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it, if I
choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst
all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of
civilization. But then, you see, I can't choose. He won't be forgotten.
Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or
frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his
honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter
misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered
one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with
self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm
the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I
missed my late helmsman awfully--I missed him even while his body
was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing
strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of
sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he
had steered; for months I had him at my back--a help--an instrument. It
was a kind of partnership. He steered for me--I had to look after him, I
worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created,
of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the
intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt
remains to this day in my memory--like a claim of distant kinship
affirmed in a supreme moment.

“Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone. He had no restraint,
no restraint--just like Kurtz--a tree swayed by the wind. As soon as
I had put on a dry pair of slippers, I dragged him out, after first
jerking the spear out of his side, which operation I confess I performed
with my eyes shut tight. His heels leaped together over the little
doorstep; his shoulders were pressed to my breast; I hugged him from
behind desperately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any man on
earth, I should imagine. Then without more ado I tipped him overboard.
The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I
saw the body roll over twice before I lost sight of it for ever. All the
pilgrims and the manager were then congregated on the awning-deck
about the pilot-house, chattering at each other like a flock of excited
magpies, and there was a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude.
What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for I can't guess.
Embalm it, maybe. But I had also heard another, and a very ominous,
murmur on the deck below. My friends the wood-cutters were likewise
scandalized, and with a better show of reason--though I admit that the
reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind
that if my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have
him. He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was
dead he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause
some startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the
man in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at the business.

“This I did directly the simple funeral was over. We were going
half-speed, keeping right in the middle of the stream, and I listened
to the talk about me. They had given up Kurtz, they had given up the
station; Kurtz was dead, and the station had been burnt--and so on--and
so on. The red-haired pilgrim was beside himself with the thought that
at least this poor Kurtz had been properly avenged. 'Say! We must have
made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think?
Say?' He positively danced, the bloodthirsty little gingery beggar.
And he had nearly fainted when he saw the wounded man! I could not help
saying, 'You made a glorious lot of smoke, anyhow.' I had seen, from the
way the tops of the bushes rustled and flew, that almost all the shots
had gone too high. You can't hit anything unless you take aim and fire
from the shoulder; but these chaps fired from the hip with their eyes
shut. The retreat, I maintained--and I was right--was caused by the
screeching of the steam whistle. Upon this they forgot Kurtz, and began
to howl at me with indignant protests.

“The manager stood by the wheel murmuring confidentially about the
necessity of getting well away down the river before dark at all events,
when I saw in the distance a clearing on the riverside and the outlines
of some sort of building. 'What's this?' I asked. He clapped his hands
in wonder. 'The station!' he cried. I edged in at once, still going
half-speed.

“Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare
trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on
the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the
peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a
background. There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had
been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained
in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with
round carved balls. The rails, or whatever there had been between, had
disappeared. Of course the forest surrounded all that. The river-bank
was clear, and on the waterside I saw a white man under a hat like a
cart-wheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm. Examining the
edge of the forest above and below, I was almost certain I could see
movements--human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past prudently,
then stopped the engines and let her drift down. The man on the shore
began to shout, urging us to land. 'We have been attacked,' screamed
the manager. 'I know--I know. It's all right,' yelled back the other, as
cheerful as you please. 'Come along. It's all right. I am glad.'

“His aspect reminded me of something I had seen--something funny I had
seen somewhere. As I manoeuvred to get alongside, I was asking myself,
'What does this fellow look like?' Suddenly I got it. He looked like
a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown
holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright
patches, blue, red, and yellow--patches on the back, patches on the
front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket,
scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him
look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see
how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish
face, very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue
eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance
like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain. 'Look out, captain!' he
cried; 'there's a snag lodged in here last night.' What! Another snag? I
confess I swore shamefully. I had nearly holed my cripple, to finish off
that charming trip. The harlequin on the bank turned his little pug-nose
up to me. 'You English?' he asked, all smiles. 'Are you?' I shouted from
the wheel. The smiles vanished, and he shook his head as if sorry for
my disappointment. Then he brightened up. 'Never mind!' he cried
encouragingly. 'Are we in time?' I asked. 'He is up there,' he replied,
with a toss of the head up the hill, and becoming gloomy all of a
sudden. His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright
the next.

“When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the
teeth, had gone to the house this chap came on board. 'I say, I don't
like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said. He assured me
earnestly it was all right. 'They are simple people,' he added; 'well,
I am glad you came. It took me all my time to keep them off.' 'But you
said it was all right,' I cried. 'Oh, they meant no harm,' he said; and
as I stared he corrected himself, 'Not exactly.' Then vivaciously, 'My
faith, your pilot-house wants a clean-up!' In the next breath he advised
me to keep enough steam on the boiler to blow the whistle in case of any
trouble. 'One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles.
They are simple people,' he repeated. He rattled away at such a rate
he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to be trying to make up for lots of
silence, and actually hinted, laughing, that such was the case. 'Don't
you talk with Mr. Kurtz?' I said. 'You don't talk with that man--you
listen to him,' he exclaimed with severe exaltation. 'But now--' He
waved his arm, and in the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost
depths of despondency. In a moment he came up again with a jump,
possessed himself of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he
gabbled: 'Brother sailor... honour... pleasure... delight...
introduce myself... Russian... son of an arch-priest...
Government of Tambov... What? Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent
English tobacco! Now, that's brotherly. Smoke? Where's a sailor that
does not smoke?”

“The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he had run away from
school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship; ran away again; served some
time in English ships; was now reconciled with the arch-priest. He made
a point of that. 'But when one is young one must see things, gather
experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.' 'Here!' I interrupted. 'You
can never tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz,' he said, youthfully solemn and
reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a
Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods,
and had started for the interior with a light heart and no more idea of
what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that
river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything.
'I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,' he said. 'At first old
Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,' he narrated with keen
enjoyment; 'but I stuck to him, and talked and talked, till at last he
got afraid I would talk the hind-leg off his favourite dog, so he gave
me some cheap things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would never
see my face again. Good old Dutchman, Van Shuyten. I've sent him one
small lot of ivory a year ago, so that he can't call me a little thief
when I get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don't care. I had
some wood stacked for you. That was my old house. Did you see?'

“I gave him Towson's book. He made as though he would kiss me, but
restrained himself. 'The only book I had left, and I thought I had lost
it,' he said, looking at it ecstatically. 'So many accidents happen to
a man going about alone, you know. Canoes get upset sometimes--and
sometimes you've got to clear out so quick when the people get angry.'
He thumbed the pages. 'You made notes in Russian?' I asked. He nodded.
'I thought they were written in cipher,' I said. He laughed, then became
serious. 'I had lots of trouble to keep these people off,' he said.
'Did they want to kill you?' I asked. 'Oh, no!' he cried, and checked
himself. 'Why did they attack us?' I pursued. He hesitated, then
said shamefacedly, 'They don't want him to go.' 'Don't they?' I said
curiously. He nodded a nod full of mystery and wisdom. 'I tell you,' he
cried, 'this man has enlarged my mind.' He opened his arms wide, staring
at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round.”




III



“I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in
motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic,
fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and
altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was
inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so
far, how he had managed to remain--why he did not instantly disappear.
'I went a little farther,' he said, 'then still a little farther--till
I had gone so far that I don't know how I'll ever get back. Never mind.
Plenty time. I can manage. You take Kurtz away quick--quick--I tell
you.' The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags, his
destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile
wanderings. For months--for years--his life hadn't been worth a day's
purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all
appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and
of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like
admiration--like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him
unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to
breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move
onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation.
If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure
had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth. I almost
envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to
have consumed all thought of self so completely, that even while he
was talking to you, you forgot that it was he--the man before your
eyes--who had gone through these things. I did not envy him his devotion
to Kurtz, though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and
he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it
appeared about the most dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so
far.

“They had come together unavoidably, like two ships becalmed near
each other, and lay rubbing sides at last. I suppose Kurtz wanted an
audience, because on a certain occasion, when encamped in the forest,
they had talked all night, or more probably Kurtz had talked. 'We talked
of everything,' he said, quite transported at the recollection. 'I
forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last
an hour. Everything! Everything!... Of love, too.' 'Ah, he talked to
you of love!' I said, much amused. 'It isn't what you think,' he cried,
almost passionately. 'It was in general. He made me see things--things.'

“He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time, and the headman
of my wood-cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him his heavy and
glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you
that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the
very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so
impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness. 'And, ever
since, you have been with him, of course?' I said.

“On the contrary. It appears their intercourse had been very much broken
by various causes. He had, as he informed me proudly, managed to nurse
Kurtz through two illnesses (he alluded to it as you would to some risky
feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone, far in the depths of the
forest. 'Very often coming to this station, I had to wait days and
days before he would turn up,' he said. 'Ah, it was worth waiting
for!--sometimes.' 'What was he doing? exploring or what?' I asked. 'Oh,
yes, of course'; he had discovered lots of villages, a lake, too--he
did not know exactly in what direction; it was dangerous to inquire
too much--but mostly his expeditions had been for ivory. 'But he had no
goods to trade with by that time,' I objected. 'There's a good lot of
cartridges left even yet,' he answered, looking away. 'To speak plainly,
he raided the country,' I said. He nodded. 'Not alone, surely!' He
muttered something about the villages round that lake. 'Kurtz got the
tribe to follow him, did he?' I suggested. He fidgeted a little. 'They
adored him,' he said. The tone of these words was so extraordinary that
I looked at him searchingly. It was curious to see his mingled eagerness
and reluctance to speak of Kurtz. The man filled his life, occupied his
thoughts, swayed his emotions. 'What can you expect?' he burst out; 'he
came to them with thunder and lightning, you know--and they had never
seen anything like it--and very terrible. He could be very terrible.
You can't judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man. No, no, no!
Now--just to give you an idea--I don't mind telling you, he wanted to
shoot me, too, one day--but I don't judge him.' 'Shoot you!' I cried
'What for?' 'Well, I had a small lot of ivory the chief of that village
near my house gave me. You see I used to shoot game for them. Well,
he wanted it, and wouldn't hear reason. He declared he would shoot me
unless I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country, because
he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth
to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased. And it was true, too.
I gave him the ivory. What did I care! But I didn't clear out. No, no. I
couldn't leave him. I had to be careful, of course, till we got friendly
again for a time. He had his second illness then. Afterwards I had to
keep out of the way; but I didn't mind. He was living for the most part
in those villages on the lake. When he came down to the river, sometimes
he would take to me, and sometimes it was better for me to be careful.
This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't
get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there
was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then
he would remain; go off on another ivory hunt; disappear for weeks;
forget himself amongst these people--forget himself--you know.' 'Why!
he's mad,' I said. He protested indignantly. Mr. Kurtz couldn't be mad.
If I had heard him talk, only two days ago, I wouldn't dare hint at such
a thing.... I had taken up my binoculars while we talked, and was
looking at the shore, sweeping the limit of the forest at each side and
at the back of the house. The consciousness of there being people in
that bush, so silent, so quiet--as silent and quiet as the ruined house
on the hill--made me uneasy. There was no sign on the face of nature
of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in
desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in
hints ending in deep sighs. The woods were unmoved, like a mask--heavy,
like the closed door of a prison--they looked with their air of hidden
knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence. The
Russian was explaining to me that it was only lately that Mr. Kurtz had
come down to the river, bringing along with him all the fighting men of
that lake tribe. He had been absent for several months--getting himself
adored, I suppose--and had come down unexpectedly, with the intention
to all appearance of making a raid either across the river or down
stream. Evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of
the--what shall I say?--less material aspirations. However he had
got much worse suddenly. 'I heard he was lying helpless, and so I came
up--took my chance,' said the Russian. 'Oh, he is bad, very bad.' I
directed my glass to the house. There were no signs of life, but there
was the ruined roof, the long mud wall peeping above the grass, with
three little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all this
brought within reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque
movement, and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped
up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck
at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable
in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view,
and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a
blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw
my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they
were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing--food for thought
and also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky;
but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend
the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the
stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the
first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may
think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement
of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I
returned deliberately to the first I had seen--and there it was, black,
dried, sunken, with closed eyelids--a head that seemed to sleep at the
top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow
white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some
endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.

“I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact, the manager said
afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's methods had ruined the district. I have no
opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand that there
was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only
showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his
various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small
matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under
his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I
can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very
last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a
terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered
to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he
had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the
whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him
because he was hollow at the core.... I put down the glass, and the
head that had appeared near enough to be spoken to seemed at once to
have leaped away from me into inaccessible distance.

“The admirer of Mr. Kurtz was a bit crestfallen. In a hurried,
indistinct voice he began to assure me he had not dared to take
these--say, symbols--down. He was not afraid of the natives; they would
not stir till Mr. Kurtz gave the word. His ascendancy was extraordinary.
The camps of these people surrounded the place, and the chiefs came
every day to see him. They would crawl.... 'I don't want to know
anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz,' I shouted.
Curious, this feeling that came over me that such details would be more
intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz's
windows. After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at
one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle
horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being
something that had a right to exist--obviously--in the sunshine. The
young man looked at me with surprise. I suppose it did not occur to
him that Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine. He forgot I hadn't heard any of
these splendid monologues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct
of life--or what not. If it had come to crawling before Mr. Kurtz, he
crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all. I had no idea of the
conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him
excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I
was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers--and these
were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their
sticks. 'You don't know how such a life tries a man like Kurtz,' cried
Kurtz's last disciple. 'Well, and you?' I said. 'I! I! I am a simple
man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody. How can
you compare me to...?' His feelings were too much for speech, and
suddenly he broke down. 'I don't understand,' he groaned. 'I've been
doing my best to keep him alive, and that's enough. I had no hand in
all this. I have no abilities. There hasn't been a drop of medicine or a
mouthful of invalid food for months here. He was shamefully abandoned.
A man like this, with such ideas. Shamefully! Shamefully! I--I--haven't
slept for the last ten nights...'

“His voice lost itself in the calm of the evening. The long shadows of
the forest had slipped downhill while we talked, had gone far beyond
the ruined hovel, beyond the symbolic row of stakes. All this was in the
gloom, while we down there were yet in the sunshine, and the stretch
of the river abreast of the clearing glittered in a still and dazzling
splendour, with a murky and overshadowed bend above and below. Not a
living soul was seen on the shore. The bushes did not rustle.

“Suddenly round the corner of the house a group of men appeared, as
though they had come up from the ground. They waded waist-deep in the
grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their
midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose
shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying straight to
the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human
beings--of naked human beings--with spears in their hands, with bows,
with shields, with wild glances and savage movements, were poured into
the clearing by the dark-faced and pensive forest. The bushes shook, the
grass swayed for a time, and then everything stood still in attentive
immobility.

“'Now, if he does not say the right thing to them we are all done for,'
said the Russian at my elbow. The knot of men with the stretcher had
stopped, too, halfway to the steamer, as if petrified. I saw the man on
the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders
of the bearers. 'Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love
in general will find some particular reason to spare us this time,' I
said. I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if
to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonouring
necessity. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the
thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of
that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with
grotesque jerks. Kurtz--Kurtz--that means short in German--don't it?
Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life--and death.
He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his
body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I
could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving.
It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had
been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of
dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide--it gave him
a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the
air, all the earth, all the men before him. A deep voice reached
me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. The
stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again, and almost at
the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages was vanishing without
any perceptible movement of retreat, as if the forest that had ejected
these beings so suddenly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn
in a long aspiration.

“Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his
arms--two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-carbine--the
thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. The manager bent over him
murmuring as he walked beside his head. They laid him down in one of the
little cabins--just a room for a bed place and a camp-stool or two,
you know. We had brought his belated correspondence, and a lot of torn
envelopes and open letters littered his bed. His hand roamed feebly
amongst these papers. I was struck by the fire of his eyes and the
composed languor of his expression. It was not so much the exhaustion of
disease. He did not seem in pain. This shadow looked satiated and calm,
as though for the moment it had had its fill of all the emotions.

“He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight in my face said,
'I am glad.' Somebody had been writing to him about me. These special
recommendations were turning up again. The volume of tone he emitted
without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed
me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man
did not seem capable of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in
him--factitious no doubt--to very nearly make an end of us, as you
shall hear directly.

“The manager appeared silently in the doorway; I stepped out at once
and he drew the curtain after me. The Russian, eyed curiously by the
pilgrims, was staring at the shore. I followed the direction of his
glance.

“Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting
indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river
two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under
fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque
repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and
gorgeous apparition of a woman.

“She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths,
treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous
ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of
a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to
the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of
glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men,
that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have
had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and
superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and
stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen
suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the
colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her,
pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous
and passionate soul.

“She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long
shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce
aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some
struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a
stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an
inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step
forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of
fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The
young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back.
She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving
steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw
them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to
touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the
earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy
embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.

“She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into
the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the
dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.

“'If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried to
shoot her,' said the man of patches, nervously. 'I have been risking my
life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house. She
got in one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked
up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn't decent. At least
it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour,
pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect of this
tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or
there would have been mischief. I don't understand.... No--it's too
much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now.'

“At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice behind the curtain: 'Save
me!--save the ivory, you mean. Don't tell me. Save _me!_ Why, I've had to
save you. You are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as
you would like to believe. Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out yet--I
will return. I'll show you what can be done. You with your little
peddling notions--you are interfering with me. I will return. I....'

“The manager came out. He did me the honour to take me under the arm
and lead me aside. 'He is very low, very low,' he said. He considered it
necessary to sigh, but neglected to be consistently sorrowful. 'We have
done all we could for him--haven't we? But there is no disguising the
fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did
not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously,
cautiously--that's my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district
is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will
suffer. I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory--mostly
fossil. We must save it, at all events--but look how precarious the
position is--and why? Because the method is unsound.' 'Do you,' said I,
looking at the shore, 'call it “unsound method?”' 'Without doubt,' he
exclaimed hotly. 'Don't you?'... 'No method at all,' I murmured after
a while. 'Exactly,' he exulted. 'I anticipated this. Shows a complete
want of judgment. It is my duty to point it out in the proper quarter.'
'Oh,' said I, 'that fellow--what's his name?--the brickmaker, will make
a readable report for you.' He appeared confounded for a moment. It
seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned
mentally to Kurtz for relief--positively for relief. 'Nevertheless I
think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,' I said with emphasis. He started,
dropped on me a heavy glance, said very quietly, 'he _was_,' and turned
his back on me. My hour of favour was over; I found myself lumped along
with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe:
I was unsound! Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of
nightmares.

“I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was
ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me
as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I
felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp
earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an
impenetrable night.... The Russian tapped me on the shoulder. I heard
him mumbling and stammering something about 'brother seaman--couldn't
conceal--knowledge of matters that would affect Mr. Kurtz's
reputation.' I waited. For him evidently Mr. Kurtz was not in his grave;
I suspect that for him Mr. Kurtz was one of the immortals. 'Well!' said
I at last, 'speak out. As it happens, I am Mr. Kurtz's friend--in a
way.'

“He stated with a good deal of formality that had we not been 'of the
same profession,' he would have kept the matter to himself without
regard to consequences. 'He suspected there was an active ill-will
towards him on the part of these white men that--' 'You are right,' I
said, remembering a certain conversation I had overheard. 'The manager
thinks you ought to be hanged.' He showed a concern at this intelligence
which amused me at first. 'I had better get out of the way quietly,'
he said earnestly. 'I can do no more for Kurtz now, and they would soon
find some excuse. What's to stop them? There's a military post three
hundred miles from here.' 'Well, upon my word,' said I, 'perhaps you
had better go if you have any friends amongst the savages near by.'
'Plenty,' he said. 'They are simple people--and I want nothing, you
know.' He stood biting his lip, then: 'I don't want any harm to happen
to these whites here, but of course I was thinking of Mr. Kurtz's
reputation--but you are a brother seaman and--' 'All right,' said I,
after a time. 'Mr. Kurtz's reputation is safe with me.' I did not know
how truly I spoke.

“He informed me, lowering his voice, that it was Kurtz who had ordered
the attack to be made on the steamer. 'He hated sometimes the idea of
being taken away--and then again.... But I don't understand these
matters. I am a simple man. He thought it would scare you away--that you
would give it up, thinking him dead. I could not stop him. Oh, I had an
awful time of it this last month.' 'Very well,' I said. 'He is all right
now.' 'Ye-e-es,' he muttered, not very convinced apparently. 'Thanks,'
said I; 'I shall keep my eyes open.' 'But quiet-eh?' he urged anxiously.
'It would be awful for his reputation if anybody here--' I promised a
complete discretion with great gravity. 'I have a canoe and three
black fellows waiting not very far. I am off. Could you give me a few
Martini-Henry cartridges?' I could, and did, with proper secrecy. He
helped himself, with a wink at me, to a handful of my tobacco. 'Between
sailors--you know--good English tobacco.' At the door of the pilot-house
he turned round--'I say, haven't you a pair of shoes you could spare?'
He raised one leg. 'Look.' The soles were tied with knotted strings
sandalwise under his bare feet. I rooted out an old pair, at which he
looked with admiration before tucking it under his left arm. One of his
pockets (bright red) was bulging with cartridges, from the other (dark
blue) peeped 'Towson's Inquiry,' etc., etc. He seemed to think himself
excellently well equipped for a renewed encounter with the wilderness.
'Ah! I'll never, never meet such a man again. You ought to have heard
him recite poetry--his own, too, it was, he told me. Poetry!' He rolled
his eyes at the recollection of these delights. 'Oh, he enlarged my
mind!' 'Good-bye,' said I. He shook hands and vanished in the night.
Sometimes I ask myself whether I had ever really seen him--whether it
was possible to meet such a phenomenon!...

“When I woke up shortly after midnight his warning came to my mind with
its hint of danger that seemed, in the starred darkness, real enough to
make me get up for the purpose of having a look round. On the hill a
big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked corner of the
station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks,
armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within
the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise from
the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed
the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping
their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air
with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of
many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation came out from
the black, flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of
a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses.
I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an abrupt burst of
yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up and mysterious frenzy, woke
me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut short all at once, and the
low droning went on with an effect of audible and soothing silence. I
glanced casually into the little cabin. A light was burning within, but
Mr. Kurtz was not there.

“I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I
didn't believe them at first--the thing seemed so impossible. The fact
is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract
terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What
made this emotion so overpowering was--how shall I define it?--the
moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous,
intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me
unexpectedly. This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and
then the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of
a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw
impending, was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in
fact, so much that I did not raise an alarm.

“There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster and sleeping on a chair
on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him; he
snored very slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore.
I did not betray Mr. Kurtz--it was ordered I should never betray him--it
was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was
anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone--and to this day I
don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar
blackness of that experience.

“As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail--a broad trail through the
grass. I remember the exultation with which I said to myself, 'He can't
walk--he is crawling on all-fours--I've got him.' The grass was wet
with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague
notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don't know. I
had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded
herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the
other end of such an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in
the air out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would never get
back to the steamer, and imagined myself living alone and unarmed in the
woods to an advanced age. Such silly things--you know. And I remember
I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of my heart, and was
pleased at its calm regularity.

“I kept to the track though--then stopped to listen. The night was very
clear; a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, in which
black things stood very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion
ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that night. I
actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle (I verily believe
chuckling to myself) so as to get in front of that stir, of that motion
I had seen--if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing Kurtz as
though it had been a boyish game.

“I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me coming, I would have
fallen over him, too, but he got up in time. He rose, unsteady, long,
pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed
slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed
between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the forest.
I had cut him off cleverly; but when actually confronting him I seemed
to come to my senses, I saw the danger in its right proportion. It was
by no means over yet. Suppose he began to shout? Though he could hardly
stand, there was still plenty of vigour in his voice. 'Go away--hide
yourself,' he said, in that profound tone. It was very awful. I glanced
back. We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire. A black figure
stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms, across the
glow. It had horns--antelope horns, I think--on its head. Some sorcerer,
some witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiendlike enough. 'Do you know what
you are doing?' I whispered. 'Perfectly,' he answered, raising his voice
for that single word: it sounded to me far off and yet loud, like a hail
through a speaking-trumpet. 'If he makes a row we are lost,' I thought
to myself. This clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even apart from
the very natural aversion I had to beat that Shadow--this wandering and
tormented thing. 'You will be lost,' I said--'utterly lost.' One gets
sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did say the right
thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than
he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were
being laid--to endure--to endure--even to the end--even beyond.

“'I had immense plans,' he muttered irresolutely. 'Yes,' said I; 'but if
you try to shout I'll smash your head with--' There was not a stick or
a stone near. 'I will throttle you for good,' I corrected myself. 'I was
on the threshold of great things,' he pleaded, in a voice of longing,
with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold. 'And now for
this stupid scoundrel--' 'Your success in Europe is assured in any
case,' I affirmed steadily. I did not want to have the throttling of
him, you understand--and indeed it would have been very little use for
any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell--the heavy, mute spell
of the wilderness--that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast
by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of
gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had
driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam
of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this
alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspirations. And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in
being knocked on the head--though I had a very lively sense of that
danger, too--but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I
could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like
the niggers, to invoke him--himself--his own exalted and incredible
degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew
it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had
kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did
not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air. I've been
telling you what we said--repeating the phrases we pronounced--but
what's the good? They were common everyday words--the familiar, vague
sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But what of that? They had
behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in
dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody ever struggled
with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either.
Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear--concentrated,
it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein
was my only chance--barring, of course, the killing him there and then,
which wasn't so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was
mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by
heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to
go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could
have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of
sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw
the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith,
and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. I kept my head pretty
well; but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I wiped my
forehead, while my legs shook under me as though I had carried half a
ton on my back down that hill. And yet I had only supported him, his
bony arm clasped round my neck--and he was not much heavier than a
child.

“When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose presence behind the
curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out
of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass
of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I steamed up a bit, then
swung down stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of
the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its
terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of the
first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright red earth
from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast
again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned
heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce
river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent
tail--something that looked a dried gourd; they shouted periodically
together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human
language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were
like the responses of some satanic litany.

“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there.
Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an
eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and
tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her
hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a
roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.

“'Do you understand this?' I asked.

“He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a mingled
expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I saw a
smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colourless lips
that a moment after twitched convulsively. 'Do I not?' he said slowly,
gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a supernatural
power.

“I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the
pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air of anticipating a
jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror
through that wedged mass of bodies. 'Don't! don't you frighten them
away,' cried some one on deck disconsolately. I pulled the string
time after time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they
swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three red chaps
had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot
dead. Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch,
and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and
glittering river.

“And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun,
and I could see nothing more for smoke.

“The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us
down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and
Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart
into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had
no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and
satisfied glance: the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished.
I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of
'unsound method.' The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavour. I was,
so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this
unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the
tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.

“Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It
survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the
barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes
of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth
and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble
and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my
ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated
sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of
the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould
of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of
the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that
soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham
distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

“Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet
him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where
he intended to accomplish great things. 'You show them you have in you
something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to
the recognition of your ability,' he would say. 'Of course you must take
care of the motives--right motives--always.' The long reaches that were
like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike,
slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees looking
patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner
of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings. I looked
ahead--piloting. 'Close the shutter,' said Kurtz suddenly one day; 'I
can't bear to look at this.' I did so. There was a silence. 'Oh, but I
will wring your heart yet!' he cried at the invisible wilderness.

“We broke down--as I had expected--and had to lie up for repairs at the
head of an island. This delay was the first thing that shook Kurtz's
confidence. One morning he gave me a packet of papers and a
photograph--the lot tied together with a shoe-string. 'Keep this for
me,' he said. 'This noxious fool' (meaning the manager) 'is capable of
prying into my boxes when I am not looking.' In the afternoon I saw him.
He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly, but I
heard him mutter, 'Live rightly, die, die...' I listened. There was
nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a
fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He had been writing
for the papers and meant to do so again, 'for the furthering of my
ideas. It's a duty.'

“His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at
a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never
shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the
engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a
bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an
infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers,
ratchet-drills--things I abominate, because I don't get on with them. I
tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a
wretched scrap-heap--unless I had the shakes too bad to stand.

“One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a
little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.'
The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh,
nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have
never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched.
I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that
ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven
terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again
in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme
moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at
some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

“'The horror! The horror!'

“I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in
the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his
eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.
He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the
unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies
streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces.
Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway,
and said in a tone of scathing contempt:

“'Mistah Kurtz--he dead.'

“All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my
dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not
eat much. There was a lamp in there--light, don't you know--and outside
it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man
who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this
earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course
aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.

“And then they very nearly buried me.

“However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did
not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my
loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life
is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes
too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with
death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place
in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around,
without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great
desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly
atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right,
and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of
ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it
to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for
pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have
nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped
over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that
could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace
the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that
beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged. 'The horror!' He
was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of
belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of
revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed
truth--the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own
extremity I remember best--a vision of greyness without form filled
with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all
things--even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to
have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped
over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating
foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the
wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that
inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the
invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a
word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better. It was an
affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by
abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!
That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond,
when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the
echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as
translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.

“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I
remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some
inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself
back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying
through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour
their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their
insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They
were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence,
because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals
going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was
offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of
a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to
enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from
laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was
not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets--there were
various affairs to settle--grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable
persons. I admit my behaviour was inexcusable, but then my temperature
was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavours to 'nurse up
my strength' seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength
that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing. I kept
the bundle of papers given me by Kurtz, not knowing exactly what to do
with it. His mother had died lately, watched over, as I was told, by
his Intended. A clean-shaved man, with an official manner and wearing
gold-rimmed spectacles, called on me one day and made inquiries, at
first circuitous, afterwards suavely pressing, about what he was pleased
to denominate certain 'documents.' I was not surprised, because I had
had two rows with the manager on the subject out there. I had refused
to give up the smallest scrap out of that package, and I took the same
attitude with the spectacled man. He became darkly menacing at last,
and with much heat argued that the Company had the right to every bit of
information about its 'territories.' And said he, 'Mr. Kurtz's
knowledge of unexplored regions must have been necessarily extensive
and peculiar--owing to his great abilities and to the deplorable
circumstances in which he had been placed: therefore--' I assured him
Mr. Kurtz's knowledge, however extensive, did not bear upon the problems
of commerce or administration. He invoked then the name of science. 'It
would be an incalculable loss if,' etc., etc. I offered him the report
on the 'Suppression of Savage Customs,' with the postscriptum torn
off. He took it up eagerly, but ended by sniffing at it with an air
of contempt. 'This is not what we had a right to expect,' he remarked.
'Expect nothing else,' I said. 'There are only private letters.' He
withdrew upon some threat of legal proceedings, and I saw him no more;
but another fellow, calling himself Kurtz's cousin, appeared two days
later, and was anxious to hear all the details about his dear relative's
last moments. Incidentally he gave me to understand that Kurtz had
been essentially a great musician. 'There was the making of an immense
success,' said the man, who was an organist, I believe, with lank grey
hair flowing over a greasy coat-collar. I had no reason to doubt
his statement; and to this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz's
profession, whether he ever had any--which was the greatest of his
talents. I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else
for a journalist who could paint--but even the cousin (who took snuff
during the interview) could not tell me what he had been--exactly. He
was a universal genius--on that point I agreed with the old chap, who
thereupon blew his nose noisily into a large cotton handkerchief and
withdrew in senile agitation, bearing off some family letters and
memoranda without importance. Ultimately a journalist anxious to know
something of the fate of his 'dear colleague' turned up. This visitor
informed me Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics 'on the
popular side.' He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped
short, an eyeglass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive, confessed
his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit--'but heavens! how
that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had faith--don't
you see?--he had the faith. He could get himself to believe
anything--anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme
party.' 'What party?' I asked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He
was an--an--extremist.' Did I not think so? I assented. Did I know, he
asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity, 'what it was that had induced
him to go out there?' 'Yes,' said I, and forthwith handed him the
famous Report for publication, if he thought fit. He glanced through it
hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged 'it would do,' and took himself
off with this plunder.

“Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters and the girl's
portrait. She struck me as beautiful--I mean she had a beautiful
expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie, too, yet one
felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the
delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features. She seemed ready to
listen without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought
for herself. I concluded I would go and give her back her portrait
and those letters myself. Curiosity? Yes; and also some other feeling
perhaps. All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul,
his body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained
only his memory and his Intended--and I wanted to give that up, too,
to the past, in a way--to surrender personally all that remained of him
with me to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate. I
don't defend myself. I had no clear perception of what it was I really
wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty, or the
fulfilment of one of those ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of
human existence. I don't know. I can't tell. But I went.

“I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that
accumulate in every man's life--a vague impress on the brain of shadows
that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the
high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still
and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him
on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the
earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much
as he had ever lived--a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of
frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and
draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to
enter the house with me--the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild
crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter
of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and
muffled like the beating of a heart--the heart of a conquering darkness.
It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful
rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the
salvation of another soul. And the memory of what I had heard him say
afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of
fires, within the patient woods, those broken phrases came back to
me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity. I
remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale
of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish
of his soul. And later on I seemed to see his collected languid manner,
when he said one day, 'This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company
did not pay for it. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk.
I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though. H'm. It is a
difficult case. What do you think I ought to do--resist? Eh? I want no
more than justice.'... He wanted no more than justice--no more than
justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor, and
while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel--stare
with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the
universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!”

“The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three
long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and
bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in
indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental
whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams
on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door
opened--closed. I rose.

“She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards
me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his
death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she
would remember and mourn forever. She took both my hands in hers and
murmured, 'I had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very
young--I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for
belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all
the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by
an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful
head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say,
'I--I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were
still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her
face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the
playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove!
the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died
only yesterday--nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same
instant of time--his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the very
moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard
them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have
survived' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with
her tone of despairing regret, the summing up whisper of his eternal
condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation
of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and
absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She motioned me to
a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and
she put her hand over it.... 'You knew him well,' she murmured, after
a moment of mourning silence.

“'Intimacy grows quickly out there,' I said. 'I knew him as well as it
is possible for one man to know another.'

“'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know him and not
to admire him. Was it?'

“'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the
appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my
lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to--'

“'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled
dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him
so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.'

“'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every
word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth
and white, remained illumined by the inextinguishable light of belief
and love.

“'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,' she repeated, a
little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent
you to me. I feel I can speak to you--and oh! I must speak. I want
you--you who have heard his last words--to know I have been worthy of
him.... It is not pride.... Yes! I am proud to know I understood
him better than any one on earth--he told me so himself. And since his
mother died I have had no one--no one--to--to--'

“I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had
given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care
of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager
examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the
certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard
that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He
wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had
not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer
that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out
there.

“'... Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?' she was
saying. 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them.' She looked
at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and
the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all
the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever
heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by
the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible
words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the
threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know!'
she cried.

“'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but
bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and
saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in
the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her--from
which I could not even defend myself.

“'What a loss to me--to us!'--she corrected herself with beautiful
generosity; then added in a murmur, 'To the world.' By the last gleams
of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears--of tears
that would not fall.

“'I have been very happy--very fortunate--very proud,' she went on. 'Too
fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for--for
life.'

“She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in
a glimmer of gold. I rose, too.

“'And of all this,' she went on mournfully, 'of all his promise, and
of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing
remains--nothing but a memory. You and I--'

“'We shall always remember him,' I said hastily.

“'No!' she cried. 'It is impossible that all this should be lost--that
such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing--but sorrow. You
know what vast plans he had. I knew of them, too--I could not perhaps
understand--but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words,
at least, have not died.'

“'His words will remain,' I said.

“'And his example,' she whispered to herself. 'Men looked up to
him--his goodness shone in every act. His example--'

“'True,' I said; 'his example, too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.'

“'But I do not. I cannot--I cannot believe--not yet. I cannot believe
that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never,
never, never.'

“She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them
back and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of
the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see
this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too,
a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one,
tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown
arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness.
She said suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived.'

“'His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me, 'was in every way
worthy of his life.'

“'And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger subsided before a
feeling of infinite pity.

“'Everything that could be done--' I mumbled.

“'Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth--more than his
own mother, more than--himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured
every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.'

“I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said, in a muffled
voice.

“'Forgive me. I--I have mourned so long in silence--in silence....
You were with him--to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near
to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to
hear....'

“'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words....'
I stopped in a fright.

“'Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. 'I want--I
want--something--something--to--to live with.'

“I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk
was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper
that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind.
'The horror! The horror!'

“'His last word--to live with,' she insisted. 'Don't you understand I
loved him--I loved him--I loved him!'

“I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

“'The last word he pronounced was--your name.'

“I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short
by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and
of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!'... She knew. She was
sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It
seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that
the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens
do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I
had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he
wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have
been too dark--too dark altogether....”

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a
meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of
the ebb,” said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was
barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to
the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast
sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.





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Title: Dracula

Author: Bram Stoker

Release Date: August 16, 2013 [EBook #345]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRACULA ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)







                                DRACULA





                                DRACULA

                                  _by_

                              Bram Stoker

                        [Illustration: colophon]

                                NEW YORK

                            GROSSET & DUNLAP

                              _Publishers_

      Copyright, 1897, in the United States of America, according
                   to Act of Congress, by Bram Stoker

                        [_All rights reserved._]

                      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
                                   AT
               THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.




                                   TO

                             MY DEAR FRIEND

                               HOMMY-BEG




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I
                                                                    Page

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                              1

CHAPTER II

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                             14

CHAPTER III

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                             26

CHAPTER IV

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                             38

CHAPTER V

Letters--Lucy and Mina                                                51

CHAPTER VI

Mina Murray's Journal                                                 59

CHAPTER VII

Cutting from "The Dailygraph," 8 August                               71

CHAPTER VIII

Mina Murray's Journal                                                 84

CHAPTER IX

Mina Murray's Journal                                                 98

CHAPTER X

Mina Murray's Journal                                                111

CHAPTER XI

Lucy Westenra's Diary                                                124

CHAPTER XII

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   136

CHAPTER XIII

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   152

CHAPTER XIV

Mina Harker's Journal                                                167

CHAPTER XV

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   181

CHAPTER XVI

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   194

CHAPTER XVII

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   204

CHAPTER XVIII

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   216

CHAPTER XIX

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                            231

CHAPTER XX

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                            243

CHAPTER XXI

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   256

CHAPTER XXII

Jonathan Harker's Journal                                            269

CHAPTER XXIII

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   281

CHAPTER XXIV

Dr. Seward's Phonograph Diary, spoken by Van Helsing                 294

CHAPTER XXV

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   308

CHAPTER XXVI

Dr. Seward's Diary                                                   322

CHAPTER XXVII

Mina Harker's Journal                                                338




DRACULA




CHAPTER I

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL

(_Kept in shorthand._)


_3 May. Bistritz._--Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at
Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an
hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I
got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the
streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived
late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The
impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the
East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is
here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish
rule.

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh.
Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or
rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was
very good but thirsty. (_Mem._, get recipe for Mina.) I asked the
waiter, and he said it was called "paprika hendl," and that, as it was a
national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the
Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I
don't know how I should be able to get on without it.

Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the
British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library
regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the
country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a
nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the
extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states,
Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian
mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was
not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the
Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare
with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post
town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter
here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my
travels with Mina.

In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities:
Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the
descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the
East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended
from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered
the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I
read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the
horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of
imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (_Mem._, I
must ask the Count all about them.)

I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had
all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my
window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been
the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was
still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous
knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.
I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour
which they said was "mamaliga," and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a
very excellent dish, which they call "impletata." (_Mem._, get recipe
for this also.) I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little
before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to
the station at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour
before we began to move. It seems to me that the further east you go the
more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of
beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the
top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by
rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side
of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and
running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every
station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts
of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I
saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats
and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women
looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy
about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other,
and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something
fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there
were petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the
Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy
hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous
heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass
nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and
had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very
picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be
set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are,
however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural
self-assertion.

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a
very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier--for the
Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--it has had a very stormy
existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series
of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate
occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent
a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war
proper being assisted by famine and disease.

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I
found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of
course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was
evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a
cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress--white
undergarment with long double apron, front, and back, of coloured stuff
fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed and
said, "The Herr Englishman?" "Yes," I said, "Jonathan Harker." She
smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirt-sleeves,
who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with
a letter:--

     "My Friend.--Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting
     you. Sleep well to-night. At three to-morrow the diligence will
     start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo
     Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust
     that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you
     will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.

"Your friend,

"DRACULA."


_4 May._--I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count,
directing him to secure the best place on the coach for me; but on
making inquiries as to details he seemed somewhat reticent, and
pretended that he could not understand my German. This could not be
true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly; at least, he
answered my questions exactly as if he did. He and his wife, the old
lady who had received me, looked at each other in a frightened sort of
way. He mumbled out that the money had been sent in a letter, and that
was all he knew. When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could
tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves,
and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak
further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask
any one else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means
comforting.

Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a
very hysterical way:

"Must you go? Oh! young Herr, must you go?" She was in such an excited
state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and
mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I
was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her
that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business,
she asked again:

"Do you know what day it is?" I answered that it was the fourth of May.
She shook her head as she said again:

"Oh, yes! I know that! I know that, but do you know what day it is?" On
my saying that I did not understand, she went on:

"It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that to-night, when
the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have
full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?"
She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but
without effect. Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not
to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very
ridiculous but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business
to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I therefore
tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked
her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and
dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I
did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been
taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it
seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a
state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the
rosary round my neck, and said, "For your mother's sake," and went out
of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting
for the coach, which is, of course, late; and the crucifix is still
round my neck. Whether it is the old lady's fear, or the many ghostly
traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I
am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. If this book should
ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my good-bye. Here comes the
coach!

       *       *       *       *       *

_5 May. The Castle._--The grey of the morning has passed, and the sun is
high over the distant horizon, which seems jagged, whether with trees or
hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and little are
mixed. I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake,
naturally I write till sleep comes. There are many odd things to put
down, and, lest who reads them may fancy that I dined too well before I
left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they
called "robber steak"--bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red
pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple
style of the London cat's meat! The wine was Golden Mediasch, which
produces a queer sting on the tongue, which is, however, not
disagreeable. I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else.

When I got on the coach the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw him
talking with the landlady. They were evidently talking of me, for every
now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting
on the bench outside the door--which they call by a name meaning
"word-bearer"--came and listened, and then looked at me, most of them
pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for
there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot
dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not
cheering to me, for amongst them were "Ordog"--Satan, "pokol"--hell,
"stregoica"--witch, "vrolok" and "vlkoslak"--both of which mean the same
thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is
either were-wolf or vampire. (_Mem._, I must ask the Count about these
superstitions)

When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time
swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and
pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a
fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at
first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a
charm or guard against the evil eye. This was not very pleasant for me,
just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man; but every one
seemed so kind-hearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I
could not but be touched. I shall never forget the last glimpse which I
had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing
themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of
rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the
centre of the yard. Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered
the whole front of the box-seat--"gotza" they call them--cracked his big
whip over his four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on
our journey.

I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the
scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather
languages, which my fellow-passengers were speaking, I might not have
been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping
land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned
with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the
road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom--apple,
plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under
the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these
green hills of what they call here the "Mittel Land" ran the road,
losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the
straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the
hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we
seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then
what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no
time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime
excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter
snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in
the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept
in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the
Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops,
and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point.

Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes
of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right
and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon
them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range,
deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where
grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and
pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where
the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the
mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again
the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as
we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered
peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to
be right before us:--

"Look! Isten szek!"--"God's seat!"--and he crossed himself reverently.

As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind
us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was
emphasised by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the
sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there
we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed
that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses,
and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there
was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even
turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of
devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were
many things new to me: for instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here
and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems
shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves. Now and
again we passed a leiter-wagon--the ordinary peasant's cart--with its
long, snake-like vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the
road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group of home-coming
peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the Slovaks with their
coloured, sheepskins, the latter carrying lance-fashion their long
staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell it began to get very cold,
and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the
gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which
ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the
Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of
late-lying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods
that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of
greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a
peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and
grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset
threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the
Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the
hills were so steep that, despite our driver's haste, the horses could
only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home,
but the driver would not hear of it. "No, no," he said; "you must not
walk here; the dogs are too fierce"; and then he added, with what he
evidently meant for grim pleasantry--for he looked round to catch the
approving smile of the rest--"and you may have enough of such matters
before you go to sleep." The only stop he would make was a moment's
pause to light his lamps.

When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the
passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as
though urging him to further speed. He lashed the horses unmercifully
with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on
to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of
patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the
hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater; the crazy coach
rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a
stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level, and we appeared
to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come nearer to us on each
side and to frown down upon us; we were entering on the Borgo Pass. One
by one several of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed
upon me with an earnestness which would take no denial; these were
certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good
faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that strange mixture of
fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at
Bistritz--the sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye.
Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned forward, and on each side the
passengers, craning over the edge of the coach, peered eagerly into the
darkness. It was evident that something very exciting was either
happening or expected, but though I asked each passenger, no one would
give me the slightest explanation. This state of excitement kept on for
some little time; and at last we saw before us the Pass opening out on
the eastern side. There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the
air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the
mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got
into the thunderous one. I was now myself looking out for the conveyance
which was to take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the
glare of lamps through the blackness; but all was dark. The only light
was the flickering rays of our own lamps, in which the steam from our
hard-driven horses rose in a white cloud. We could see now the sandy
road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle.
The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock
my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do, when
the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something which I
could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a tone; I
thought it was "An hour less than the time." Then turning to me, he said
in German worse than my own:--

"There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected after all. He will
now come on to Bukovina, and return to-morrow or the next day; better
the next day." Whilst he was speaking the horses began to neigh and
snort and plunge wildly, so that the driver had to hold them up. Then,
amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a universal crossing
of themselves, a calèche, with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook
us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our
lamps, as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coal-black and
splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown
beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I
could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red
in the lamplight, as he turned to us. He said to the driver:--

"You are early to-night, my friend." The man stammered in reply:--

"The English Herr was in a hurry," to which the stranger replied:--

"That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot
deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift." As he
spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with
very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my
companions whispered to another the line from Burger's "Lenore":--

    "Denn die Todten reiten schnell"--
    ("For the dead travel fast.")

The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a
gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time
putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. "Give me the Herr's
luggage," said the driver; and with exceeding alacrity my bags were
handed out and put in the calèche. Then I descended from the side of the
coach, as the calèche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a
hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been
prodigious. Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we
swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam
from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected
against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves. Then
the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept
on their way to Bukovina. As they sank into the darkness I felt a
strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me; but a cloak was thrown
over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the driver said in
excellent German:--

"The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the Count bade me take all
care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz (the plum brandy of the
country) underneath the seat, if you should require it." I did not take
any, but it was a comfort to know it was there all the same. I felt a
little strangely, and not a little frightened. I think had there been
any alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that
unknown night journey. The carriage went at a hard pace straight along,
then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It
seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground
again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was
so. I would have liked to have asked the driver what this all meant, but
I really feared to do so, for I thought that, placed as I was, any
protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to
delay. By-and-by, however, as I was curious to know how time was
passing, I struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch; it was
within a few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I
suppose the general superstition about midnight was increased by my
recent experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense.

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road--a
long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by
another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which
now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed
to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp
it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to
strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they
quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from
sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each
side of us began a louder and a sharper howling--that of wolves--which
affected both the horses and myself in the same way--for I was minded to
jump from the calèche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged
madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them
from bolting. In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to
the sound, and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able
to descend and to stand before them. He petted and soothed them, and
whispered something in their ears, as I have heard of horse-tamers
doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under his caresses they became
quite manageable again, though they still trembled. The driver again
took his seat, and shaking his reins, started off at a great pace. This
time, after going to the far side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a
narrow roadway which ran sharply to the right.

Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the
roadway till we passed as through a tunnel; and again great frowning
rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we
could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the
rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along.
It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall,
so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The
keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew
fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer
and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I
grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver,
however, was not in the least disturbed; he kept turning his head to
left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.

Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The
driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses, and,
jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know
what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while
I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took
his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep
and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated
endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare.
Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness
around us I could watch the driver's motions. He went rapidly to where
the blue flame arose--it must have been very faint, for it did not seem
to illumine the place around it at all--and gathering a few stones,
formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical
effect: when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it,
for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but
as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me
straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue
flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the
wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle.

At last there came a time when the driver went further afield than he
had yet gone, and during his absence, the horses began to tremble worse
than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I could not see any cause
for it, for the howling of the wolves had ceased altogether; but just
then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the
jagged crest of a beetling, pine-clad rock, and by its light I saw
around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues,
with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were a hundred times more
terrible in the grim silence which held them than even when they howled.
For myself, I felt a sort of paralysis of fear. It is only when a man
feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand
their true import.

All at once the wolves began to howl as though the moonlight had had
some peculiar effect on them. The horses jumped about and reared, and
looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in a way painful to see;
but the living ring of terror encompassed them on every side; and they
had perforce to remain within it. I called to the coachman to come, for
it seemed to me that our only chance was to try to break out through the
ring and to aid his approach. I shouted and beat the side of the
calèche, hoping by the noise to scare the wolves from that side, so as
to give him a chance of reaching the trap. How he came there, I know
not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and
looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his
long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves
fell back and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud passed across
the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness.

When I could see again the driver was climbing into the calèche, and the
wolves had disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a
dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The time
seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete
darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on
ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main
always ascending. Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the
driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a
vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light,
and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit
sky.




CHAPTER II

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL--_continued_


_5 May._--I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully
awake I must have noticed the approach of such a remarkable place. In
the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several dark
ways led from it under great round arches, it perhaps seemed bigger than
it really is. I have not yet been able to see it by daylight.

When the calèche stopped, the driver jumped down and held out his hand
to assist me to alight. Again I could not but notice his prodigious
strength. His hand actually seemed like a steel vice that could have
crushed mine if he had chosen. Then he took out my traps, and placed
them on the ground beside me as I stood close to a great door, old and
studded with large iron nails, and set in a projecting doorway of
massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was
massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and
weather. As I stood, the driver jumped again into his seat and shook the
reins; the horses started forward, and trap and all disappeared down one
of the dark openings.

I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell
or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark
window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate. The
time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon
me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people?
What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a
customary incident in the life of a solicitor's clerk sent out to
explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor's
clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor--for just before leaving
London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am now a
full-blown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if
I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I
expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home, with
the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt
in the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the
pinching test, and my eyes were not to be deceived. I was indeed awake
and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to
wait the coming of the morning.

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching
behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming
light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of
massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise
of long disuse, and the great door swung back.

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white
moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck
of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver
lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind,
throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the
open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly
gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:--

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!" He made no
motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his
gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that
I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and
holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince,
an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as
ice--more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said:--

"Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the
happiness you bring!" The strength of the handshake was so much akin to
that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I had not seen, that
for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was
speaking; so to make sure, I said interrogatively:--

"Count Dracula?" He bowed in a courtly way as he replied:--

"I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in;
the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest." As he was
speaking, he put the lamp on a bracket on the wall, and stepping out,
took my luggage; he had carried it in before I could forestall him. I
protested but he insisted:--

"Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late, and my people are not
available. Let me see to your comfort myself." He insisted on carrying
my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding stair, and
along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang
heavily. At the end of this he threw open a heavy door, and I rejoiced
to see within a well-lit room in which a table was spread for supper,
and on whose mighty hearth a great fire of logs, freshly replenished,
flamed and flared.

The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing
the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit
by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort. Passing
through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter. It was a
welcome sight; for here was a great bedroom well lighted and warmed with
another log fire,--also added to but lately, for the top logs were
fresh--which sent a hollow roar up the wide chimney. The Count himself
left my luggage inside and withdrew, saying, before he closed the
door:--

"You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your
toilet. I trust you will find all you wish. When you are ready, come
into the other room, where you will find your supper prepared."

The light and warmth and the Count's courteous welcome seemed to have
dissipated all my doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal state,
I discovered that I was half famished with hunger; so making a hasty
toilet, I went into the other room.

I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of the
great fireplace, leaning against the stonework, made a graceful wave of
his hand to the table, and said:--

"I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse
me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup."

I handed to him the sealed letter which Mr. Hawkins had entrusted to me.
He opened it and read it gravely; then, with a charming smile, he handed
it to me to read. One passage of it, at least, gave me a thrill of
pleasure.

"I must regret that an attack of gout, from which malady I am a constant
sufferer, forbids absolutely any travelling on my part for some time to
come; but I am happy to say I can send a sufficient substitute, one in
whom I have every possible confidence. He is a young man, full of energy
and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition. He is
discreet and silent, and has grown into manhood in my service. He shall
be ready to attend on you when you will during his stay, and shall take
your instructions in all matters."

The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I
fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese
and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was
my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many
questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had
experienced.

By this time I had finished my supper, and by my host's desire had drawn
up a chair by the fire and begun to smoke a cigar which he offered me,
at the same time excusing himself that he did not smoke. I had now an
opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked
physiognomy.

His face was a strong--a very strong--aquiline, with high bridge of the
thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and
hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His
eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy
hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I
could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather
cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over
the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a
man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops
extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm
though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees
in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing
them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather
coarse--broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in
the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp
point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not
repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a
horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could
not conceal. The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a
grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his
protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the
fireplace. We were both silent for a while; and as I looked towards the
window I saw the first dim streak of the coming dawn. There seemed a
strange stillness over everything; but as I listened I heard as if from
down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count's eyes
gleamed, and he said:--

"Listen to them--the children of the night. What music they make!"
Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he
added:--

"Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the
hunter." Then he rose and said:--

"But you must be tired. Your bedroom is all ready, and to-morrow you
shall sleep as late as you will. I have to be away till the afternoon;
so sleep well and dream well!" With a courteous bow, he opened for me
himself the door to the octagonal room, and I entered my bedroom....

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things,
which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the
sake of those dear to me!

       *       *       *       *       *

_7 May._--It is again early morning, but I have rested and enjoyed the
last twenty-four hours. I slept till late in the day, and awoke of my
own accord. When I had dressed myself I went into the room where we had
supped, and found a cold breakfast laid out, with coffee kept hot by the
pot being placed on the hearth. There was a card on the table, on which
was written:--

"I have to be absent for a while. Do not wait for me.--D." I set to and
enjoyed a hearty meal. When I had done, I looked for a bell, so that I
might let the servants know I had finished; but I could not find one.
There are certainly odd deficiencies in the house, considering the
extraordinary evidences of wealth which are round me. The table service
is of gold, and so beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value.
The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of
my bed are of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and must have
been of fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old,
though in excellent order. I saw something like them in Hampton Court,
but there they were worn and frayed and moth-eaten. But still in none of
the rooms is there a mirror. There is not even a toilet glass on my
table, and I had to get the little shaving glass from my bag before I
could either shave or brush my hair. I have not yet seen a servant
anywhere, or heard a sound near the castle except the howling of wolves.
Some time after I had finished my meal--I do not know whether to call it
breakfast or dinner, for it was between five and six o'clock when I had
it--I looked about for something to read, for I did not like to go about
the castle until I had asked the Count's permission. There was
absolutely nothing in the room, book, newspaper, or even writing
materials; so I opened another door in the room and found a sort of
library. The door opposite mine I tried, but found it locked.

In the library I found, to my great delight, a vast number of English
books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and
newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines
and newspapers, though none of them were of very recent date. The books
were of the most varied kind--history, geography, politics, political
economy, botany, geology, law--all relating to England and English life
and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the
London Directory, the "Red" and "Blue" books, Whitaker's Almanac, the
Army and Navy Lists, and--it somehow gladdened my heart to see it--the
Law List.

Whilst I was looking at the books, the door opened, and the Count
entered. He saluted me in a hearty way, and hoped that I had had a good
night's rest. Then he went on:--

"I am glad you found your way in here, for I am sure there is much that
will interest you. These companions"--and he laid his hand on some of
the books--"have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever
since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours
of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to
know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of
your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of
humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes
it what it is. But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books.
To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak."

"But, Count," I said, "you know and speak English thoroughly!" He bowed
gravely.

"I thank you, my friend, for your all too-flattering estimate, but yet I
fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know
the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them."

"Indeed," I said, "you speak excellently."

"Not so," he answered. "Well, I know that, did I move and speak in your
London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not
enough for me. Here I am noble; I am _boyar_; the common people know me,
and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men
know him not--and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am
like the rest, so that no man stops if he see me, or pause in his
speaking if he hear my words, 'Ha, ha! a stranger!' I have been so long
master that I would be master still--or at least that none other should
be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter
Hawkins, of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You
shall, I trust, rest here with me awhile, so that by our talking I may
learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make
error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be
away so long to-day; but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many
important affairs in hand."

Of course I said all I could about being willing, and asked if I might
come into that room when I chose. He answered: "Yes, certainly," and
added:--

"You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are
locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that
all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with
my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand." I said I was sure of
this, and then he went on:--

"We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are
not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from
what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of
what strange things there may be."

This led to much conversation; and as it was evident that he wanted to
talk, if only for talking's sake, I asked him many questions regarding
things that had already happened to me or come within my notice.
Sometimes he sheered off the subject, or turned the conversation by
pretending not to understand; but generally he answered all I asked most
frankly. Then as time went on, and I had got somewhat bolder, I asked
him of some of the strange things of the preceding night, as, for
instance, why the coachman went to the places where he had seen the blue
flames. He then explained to me that it was commonly believed that on a
certain night of the year--last night, in fact, when all evil spirits
are supposed to have unchecked sway--a blue flame is seen over any place
where treasure has been concealed. "That treasure has been hidden," he
went on, "in the region through which you came last night, there can be
but little doubt; for it was the ground fought over for centuries by the
Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil
in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men,
patriots or invaders. In old days there were stirring times, when the
Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out
to meet them--men and women, the aged and the children too--and waited
their coming on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep
destruction on them with their artificial avalanches. When the invader
was triumphant he found but little, for whatever there was had been
sheltered in the friendly soil."

"But how," said I, "can it have remained so long undiscovered, when
there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look?"
The Count smiled, and as his lips ran back over his gums, the long,
sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely; he answered:--

"Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool! Those flames only
appear on one night; and on that night no man of this land will, if he
can help it, stir without his doors. And, dear sir, even if he did he
would not know what to do. Why, even the peasant that you tell me of who
marked the place of the flame would not know where to look in daylight
even for his own work. Even you would not, I dare be sworn, be able to
find these places again?"

"There you are right," I said. "I know no more than the dead where even
to look for them." Then we drifted into other matters.

"Come," he said at last, "tell me of London and of the house which you
have procured for me." With an apology for my remissness, I went into my
own room to get the papers from my bag. Whilst I was placing them in
order I heard a rattling of china and silver in the next room, and as I
passed through, noticed that the table had been cleared and the lamp
lit, for it was by this time deep into the dark. The lamps were also lit
in the study or library, and I found the Count lying on the sofa,
reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw's Guide. When I
came in he cleared the books and papers from the table; and with him I
went into plans and deeds and figures of all sorts. He was interested in
everything, and asked me a myriad questions about the place and its
surroundings. He clearly had studied beforehand all he could get on the
subject of the neighbourhood, for he evidently at the end knew very much
more than I did. When I remarked this, he answered:--

"Well, but, my friend, is it not needful that I should? When I go there
I shall be all alone, and my friend Harker Jonathan--nay, pardon me, I
fall into my country's habit of putting your patronymic first--my friend
Jonathan Harker will not be by my side to correct and aid me. He will be
in Exeter, miles away, probably working at papers of the law with my
other friend, Peter Hawkins. So!"

We went thoroughly into the business of the purchase of the estate at
Purfleet. When I had told him the facts and got his signature to the
necessary papers, and had written a letter with them ready to post to
Mr. Hawkins, he began to ask me how I had come across so suitable a
place. I read to him the notes which I had made at the time, and which I
inscribe here:--

"At Purfleet, on a by-road, I came across just such a place as seemed to
be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place
was for sale. It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure,
built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of
years. The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with
rust.

"The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old _Quatre
Face_, as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of
the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by
the solid stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it, which
make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, dark-looking pond or
small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear and
flows away in a fair-sized stream. The house is very large and of all
periods back, I should say, to mediæval times, for one part is of stone
immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with
iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or
church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading
to it from the house, but I have taken with my kodak views of it from
various points. The house has been added to, but in a very straggling
way, and I can only guess at the amount of ground it covers, which must
be very great. There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very
large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic
asylum. It is not, however, visible from the grounds."

When I had finished, he said:--

"I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to
live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a
day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice
also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love
not to think that our bones may lie amongst the common dead. I seek not
gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and
sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young;
and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not
attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the
shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken
battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would
be alone with my thoughts when I may." Somehow his words and his look
did not seem to accord, or else it was that his cast of face made his
smile look malignant and saturnine.

Presently, with an excuse, he left me, asking me to put all my papers
together. He was some little time away, and I began to look at some of
the books around me. One was an atlas, which I found opened naturally at
England, as if that map had been much used. On looking at it I found in
certain places little rings marked, and on examining these I noticed
that one was near London on the east side, manifestly where his new
estate was situated; the other two were Exeter, and Whitby on the
Yorkshire coast.

It was the better part of an hour when the Count returned. "Aha!" he
said; "still at your books? Good! But you must not work always. Come; I
am informed that your supper is ready." He took my arm, and we went into
the next room, where I found an excellent supper ready on the table. The
Count again excused himself, as he had dined out on his being away from
home. But he sat as on the previous night, and chatted whilst I ate.
After supper I smoked, as on the last evening, and the Count stayed with
me, chatting and asking questions on every conceivable subject, hour
after hour. I felt that it was getting very late indeed, but I did not
say anything, for I felt under obligation to meet my host's wishes in
every way. I was not sleepy, as the long sleep yesterday had fortified
me; but I could not help experiencing that chill which comes over one at
the coming of the dawn, which is like, in its way, the turn of the tide.
They say that people who are near death die generally at the change to
the dawn or at the turn of the tide; any one who has when tired, and
tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere
can well believe it. All at once we heard the crow of a cock coming up
with preternatural shrillness through the clear morning air; Count
Dracula, jumping to his feet, said:--

"Why, there is the morning again! How remiss I am to let you stay up so
long. You must make your conversation regarding my dear new country of
England less interesting, so that I may not forget how time flies by
us," and, with a courtly bow, he quickly left me.

I went into my own room and drew the curtains, but there was little to
notice; my window opened into the courtyard, all I could see was the
warm grey of quickening sky. So I pulled the curtains again, and have
written of this day.

       *       *       *       *       *

_8 May._--I began to fear as I wrote in this book that I was getting too
diffuse; but now I am glad that I went into detail from the first, for
there is something so strange about this place and all in it that I
cannot but feel uneasy. I wish I were safe out of it, or that I had
never come. It may be that this strange night-existence is telling on
me; but would that that were all! If there were any one to talk to I
could bear it, but there is no one. I have only the Count to speak with,
and he!--I fear I am myself the only living soul within the place. Let
me be prosaic so far as facts can be; it will help me to bear up, and
imagination must not run riot with me. If it does I am lost. Let me say
at once how I stand--or seem to.

I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could
not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the window,
and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder,
and heard the Count's voice saying to me, "Good-morning." I started, for
it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass
covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly,
but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count's
salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken.
This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I
could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in
the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no
sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and, coming on
the top of so many strange things, was beginning to increase that vague
feeling of uneasiness which I always have when the Count is near; but at
the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was
trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half
round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his
eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at
my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which
held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed
so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.

"Take care," he said, "take care how you cut yourself. It is more
dangerous than you think in this country." Then seizing the shaving
glass, he went on: "And this is the wretched thing that has done the
mischief. It is a foul bauble of man's vanity. Away with it!" and
opening the heavy window with one wrench of his terrible hand, he flung
out the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones
of the courtyard far below. Then he withdrew without a word. It is very
annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watch-case or
the bottom of the shaving-pot, which is fortunately of metal.

When I went into the dining-room, breakfast was prepared; but I could
not find the Count anywhere. So I breakfasted alone. It is strange that
as yet I have not seen the Count eat or drink. He must be a very
peculiar man! After breakfast I did a little exploring in the castle. I
went out on the stairs, and found a room looking towards the South. The
view was magnificent, and from where I stood there was every opportunity
of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A
stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without
touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree
tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and
there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through
the forests.

But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I
explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and
bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there
an available exit.

The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!




CHAPTER III

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL--_continued_


When I found that I was a prisoner a sort of wild feeling came over me.
I rushed up and down the stairs, trying every door and peering out of
every window I could find; but after a little the conviction of my
helplessness overpowered all other feelings. When I look back after a
few hours I think I must have been mad for the time, for I behaved much
as a rat does in a trap. When, however, the conviction had come to me
that I was helpless I sat down quietly--as quietly as I have ever done
anything in my life--and began to think over what was best to be done. I
am thinking still, and as yet have come to no definite conclusion. Of
one thing only am I certain; that it is no use making my ideas known to
the Count. He knows well that I am imprisoned; and as he has done it
himself, and has doubtless his own motives for it, he would only deceive
me if I trusted him fully with the facts. So far as I can see, my only
plan will be to keep my knowledge and my fears to myself, and my eyes
open. I am, I know, either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears,
or else I am in desperate straits; and if the latter be so, I need, and
shall need, all my brains to get through.

I had hardly come to this conclusion when I heard the great door below
shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once into
the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him making
the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along
thought--that there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him
through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the
dining-room, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these
menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them.
This gave me a fright, for if there is no one else in the castle, it
must have been the Count himself who was the driver of the coach that
brought me here. This is a terrible thought; for if so, what does it
mean that he could control the wolves, as he did, by only holding up his
hand in silence. How was it that all the people at Bistritz and on the
coach had some terrible fear for me? What meant the giving of the
crucifix, of the garlic, of the wild rose, of the mountain ash? Bless
that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a
comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing
which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous
should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there
is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium,
a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some
time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my
mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I can about Count
Dracula, as it may help me to understand. To-night he may talk of
himself, if I turn the conversation that way. I must be very careful,
however, not to awake his suspicion.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Midnight._--I have had a long talk with the Count. I asked him a few
questions on Transylvania history, and he warmed up to the subject
wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of
battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he
afterwards explained by saying that to a _boyar_ the pride of his house
and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their
fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said "we,"
and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. I wish I could put
down all he said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most
fascinating. It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country. He
grew excited as he spoke, and walked about the room pulling his great
white moustache and grasping anything on which he laid his hands as
though he would crush it by main strength. One thing he said which I
shall put down as nearly as I can; for it tells in its way the story of
his race:--

"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood
of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here,
in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from
Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their
Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay,
and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the
were-wolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found
the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame,
till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those
old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the
desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as
Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" He held up his arms. "Is it a
wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the
Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his
thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when
Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us
here when he reached the frontier; that the Honfoglalas was completed
there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were
claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries
was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkey-land; ay, and more
than that, endless duty of the frontier guard, for, as the Turks say,
'water sleeps, and enemy is sleepless.' Who more gladly than we
throughout the Four Nations received the 'bloody sword,' or at its
warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King? When was
redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the
flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? Who
was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat
the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that
his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the
Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula,
indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and
again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who,
when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had
to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being
slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They
said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants
without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to
conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the
Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for
our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the
Szekelys--and the Dracula as their heart's blood, their brains, and
their swords--can boast a record that mushroom growths like the
Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over.
Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and
the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told."

It was by this time close on morning, and we went to bed. (_Mem._, this
diary seems horribly like the beginning of the "Arabian Nights," for
everything has to break off at cockcrow--or like the ghost of Hamlet's
father.)

       *       *       *       *       *

_12 May._--Let me begin with facts--bare, meagre facts, verified by
books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not
confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own
observation, or my memory of them. Last evening when the Count came from
his room he began by asking me questions on legal matters and on the
doing of certain kinds of business. I had spent the day wearily over
books, and, simply to keep my mind occupied, went over some of the
matters I had been examined in at Lincoln's Inn. There was a certain
method in the Count's inquiries, so I shall try to put them down in
sequence; the knowledge may somehow or some time be useful to me.

First, he asked if a man in England might have two solicitors or more. I
told him he might have a dozen if he wished, but that it would not be
wise to have more than one solicitor engaged in one transaction, as only
one could act at a time, and that to change would be certain to militate
against his interest. He seemed thoroughly to understand, and went on to
ask if there would be any practical difficulty in having one man to
attend, say, to banking, and another to look after shipping, in case
local help were needed in a place far from the home of the banking
solicitor. I asked him to explain more fully, so that I might not by any
chance mislead him, so he said:--

"I shall illustrate. Your friend and mine, Mr. Peter Hawkins, from under
the shadow of your beautiful cathedral at Exeter, which is far from
London, buys for me through your good self my place at London. Good! Now
here let me say frankly, lest you should think it strange that I have
sought the services of one so far off from London instead of some one
resident there, that my motive was that no local interest might be
served save my wish only; and as one of London residence might, perhaps,
have some purpose of himself or friend to serve, I went thus afield to
seek my agent, whose labours should be only to my interest. Now, suppose
I, who have much of affairs, wish to ship goods, say, to Newcastle, or
Durham, or Harwich, or Dover, might it not be that it could with more
ease be done by consigning to one in these ports?" I answered that
certainly it would be most easy, but that we solicitors had a system of
agency one for the other, so that local work could be done locally on
instruction from any solicitor, so that the client, simply placing
himself in the hands of one man, could have his wishes carried out by
him without further trouble.

"But," said he, "I could be at liberty to direct myself. Is it not so?"

"Of course," I replied; and "such is often done by men of business, who
do not like the whole of their affairs to be known by any one person."

"Good!" he said, and then went on to ask about the means of making
consignments and the forms to be gone through, and of all sorts of
difficulties which might arise, but by forethought could be guarded
against. I explained all these things to him to the best of my ability,
and he certainly left me under the impression that he would have made a
wonderful solicitor, for there was nothing that he did not think of or
foresee. For a man who was never in the country, and who did not
evidently do much in the way of business, his knowledge and acumen were
wonderful. When he had satisfied himself on these points of which he had
spoken, and I had verified all as well as I could by the books
available, he suddenly stood up and said:--

"Have you written since your first letter to our friend Mr. Peter
Hawkins, or to any other?" It was with some bitterness in my heart that
I answered that I had not, that as yet I had not seen any opportunity of
sending letters to anybody.

"Then write now, my young friend," he said, laying a heavy hand on my
shoulder: "write to our friend and to any other; and say, if it will
please you, that you shall stay with me until a month from now."

"Do you wish me to stay so long?" I asked, for my heart grew cold at the
thought.

"I desire it much; nay, I will take no refusal. When your master,
employer, what you will, engaged that someone should come on his behalf,
it was understood that my needs only were to be consulted. I have not
stinted. Is it not so?"

What could I do but bow acceptance? It was Mr. Hawkins's interest, not
mine, and I had to think of him, not myself; and besides, while Count
Dracula was speaking, there was that in his eyes and in his bearing
which made me remember that I was a prisoner, and that if I wished it I
could have no choice. The Count saw his victory in my bow, and his
mastery in the trouble of my face, for he began at once to use them, but
in his own smooth, resistless way:--

"I pray you, my good young friend, that you will not discourse of things
other than business in your letters. It will doubtless please your
friends to know that you are well, and that you look forward to getting
home to them. Is it not so?" As he spoke he handed me three sheets of
note-paper and three envelopes. They were all of the thinnest foreign
post, and looking at them, then at him, and noticing his quiet smile,
with the sharp, canine teeth lying over the red underlip, I understood
as well as if he had spoken that I should be careful what I wrote, for
he would be able to read it. So I determined to write only formal notes
now, but to write fully to Mr. Hawkins in secret, and also to Mina, for
to her I could write in shorthand, which would puzzle the Count, if he
did see it. When I had written my two letters I sat quiet, reading a
book whilst the Count wrote several notes, referring as he wrote them to
some books on his table. Then he took up my two and placed them with his
own, and put by his writing materials, after which, the instant the door
had closed behind him, I leaned over and looked at the letters, which
were face down on the table. I felt no compunction in doing so, for
under the circumstances I felt that I should protect myself in every way
I could.

One of the letters was directed to Samuel F. Billington, No. 7, The
Crescent, Whitby, another to Herr Leutner, Varna; the third was to
Coutts & Co., London, and the fourth to Herren Klopstock & Billreuth,
bankers, Buda-Pesth. The second and fourth were unsealed. I was just
about to look at them when I saw the door-handle move. I sank back in my
seat, having just had time to replace the letters as they had been and
to resume my book before the Count, holding still another letter in his
hand, entered the room. He took up the letters on the table and stamped
them carefully, and then turning to me, said:--

"I trust you will forgive me, but I have much work to do in private this
evening. You will, I hope, find all things as you wish." At the door he
turned, and after a moment's pause said:--

"Let me advise you, my dear young friend--nay, let me warn you with all
seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any
chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has
many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be
warned! Should sleep now or ever overcome you, or be like to do, then
haste to your own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be
safe. But if you be not careful in this respect, then"--He finished his
speech in a gruesome way, for he motioned with his hands as if he were
washing them. I quite understood; my only doubt was as to whether any
dream could be more terrible than the unnatural, horrible net of gloom
and mystery which seemed closing around me.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--I endorse the last words written, but this time there is no
doubt in question. I shall not fear to sleep in any place where he is
not. I have placed the crucifix over the head of my bed--I imagine that
my rest is thus freer from dreams; and there it shall remain.

When he left me I went to my room. After a little while, not hearing any
sound, I came out and went up the stone stair to where I could look out
towards the South. There was some sense of freedom in the vast expanse,
inaccessible though it was to me, as compared with the narrow darkness
of the courtyard. Looking out on this, I felt that I was indeed in
prison, and I seemed to want a breath of fresh air, though it were of
the night. I am beginning to feel this nocturnal existence tell on me.
It is destroying my nerve. I start at my own shadow, and am full of all
sorts of horrible imaginings. God knows that there is ground for my
terrible fear in this accursed place! I looked out over the beautiful
expanse, bathed in soft yellow moonlight till it was almost as light as
day. In the soft light the distant hills became melted, and the shadows
in the valleys and gorges of velvety blackness. The mere beauty seemed
to cheer me; there was peace and comfort in every breath I drew. As I
leaned from the window my eye was caught by something moving a storey
below me, and somewhat to my left, where I imagined, from the order of
the rooms, that the windows of the Count's own room would look out. The
window at which I stood was tall and deep, stone-mullioned, and though
weatherworn, was still complete; but it was evidently many a day since
the case had been there. I drew back behind the stonework, and looked
carefully out.

What I saw was the Count's head coming out from the window. I did not
see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his
back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had had
so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and
somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest
and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to
repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the
window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss,
_face down_ with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At
first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the
moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could
be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the
stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus
using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable
speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.

What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the
semblance of man? I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering
me; I am in fear--in awful fear--and there is no escape for me; I am
encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of....

       *       *       *       *       *

_15 May._--Once more have I seen the Count go out in his lizard fashion.
He moved downwards in a sidelong way, some hundred feet down, and a good
deal to the left. He vanished into some hole or window. When his head
had disappeared, I leaned out to try and see more, but without
avail--the distance was too great to allow a proper angle of sight. I
knew he had left the castle now, and thought to use the opportunity to
explore more than I had dared to do as yet. I went back to the room, and
taking a lamp, tried all the doors. They were all locked, as I had
expected, and the locks were comparatively new; but I went down the
stone stairs to the hall where I had entered originally. I found I could
pull back the bolts easily enough and unhook the great chains; but the
door was locked, and the key was gone! That key must be in the Count's
room; I must watch should his door be unlocked, so that I may get it and
escape. I went on to make a thorough examination of the various stairs
and passages, and to try the doors that opened from them. One or two
small rooms near the hall were open, but there was nothing to see in
them except old furniture, dusty with age and moth-eaten. At last,
however, I found one door at the top of the stairway which, though it
seemed to be locked, gave a little under pressure. I tried it harder,
and found that it was not really locked, but that the resistance came
from the fact that the hinges had fallen somewhat, and the heavy door
rested on the floor. Here was an opportunity which I might not have
again, so I exerted myself, and with many efforts forced it back so that
I could enter. I was now in a wing of the castle further to the right
than the rooms I knew and a storey lower down. From the windows I could
see that the suite of rooms lay along to the south of the castle, the
windows of the end room looking out both west and south. On the latter
side, as well as to the former, there was a great precipice. The castle
was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was
quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or
bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort,
impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the
west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged
mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with
mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and
crannies of the stone. This was evidently the portion of the castle
occupied by the ladies in bygone days, for the furniture had more air of
comfort than any I had seen. The windows were curtainless, and the
yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled one to
see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over
all and disguised in some measure the ravages of time and the moth. My
lamp seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was
glad to have it with me, for there was a dread loneliness in the place
which chilled my heart and made my nerves tremble. Still, it was better
than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the
presence of the Count, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I
found a soft quietude come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak
table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much
thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my
diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is
nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my
senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own
which mere "modernity" cannot kill.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later: the Morning of 16 May._--God preserve my sanity, for to this I
am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past.
Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not
go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it
is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this
hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone I
can look for safety, even though this be only whilst I can serve his
purpose. Great God! merciful God! Let me be calm, for out of that way
lies madness indeed. I begin to get new lights on certain things which
have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant
when he made Hamlet say:--

    "My tablets! quick, my tablets!
    'Tis meet that I put it down," etc.,

for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock
had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose.
The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.

The Count's mysterious warning frightened me at the time; it frightens
me more now when I think of it, for in future he has a fearful hold upon
me. I shall fear to doubt what he may say!

When I had written in my diary and had fortunately replaced the book and
pen in my pocket I felt sleepy. The Count's warning came into my mind,
but I took a pleasure in disobeying it. The sense of sleep was upon me,
and with it the obstinacy which sleep brings as outrider. The soft
moonlight soothed, and the wide expanse without gave a sense of freedom
which refreshed me. I determined not to return to-night to the
gloom-haunted rooms, but to sleep here, where, of old, ladies had sat
and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for
their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars. I drew a great
couch out of its place near the corner, so that as I lay, I could look
at the lovely view to east and south, and unthinking of and uncaring for
the dust, composed myself for sleep. I suppose I must have fallen
asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly
real--so real that now sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the
morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep.

I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I
came into it; I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight,
my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of
dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by
their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming
when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw
no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some
time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline
noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes that seemed to be
almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was
fair, as fair as can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes
like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it
in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the
moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like
pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something
about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some
deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would
kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some
day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.
They whispered together, and then they all three laughed--such a
silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have
come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable,
tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand.
The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her
on. One said:--

"Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to
begin." The other added:--

"He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all." I lay quiet,
looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation.
The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement
of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent
the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter
underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under
the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply
gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling
and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips
like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining
on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp
teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of
my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she
paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked
her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the
skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that
is to tickle it approaches nearer--nearer. I could feel the soft,
shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat,
and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there.
I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited--waited with beating
heart.

But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as
lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his
being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I
saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with
giant's power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the
white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with
passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to
the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light
in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. His
face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires;
the thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar
of white-hot metal. With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman
from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating
them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the
wolves. In a voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to
cut through the air and then ring round the room he said:--

"How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when
I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware
how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me." The fair girl,
with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him:--

"You yourself never loved; you never love!" On this the other women
joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the
room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure
of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively,
and said in a soft whisper:--

"Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it
not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall
kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work
to be done."

"Are we to have nothing to-night?" said one of them, with a low laugh,
as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which
moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he
nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my
ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a
half-smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with
horror; but as I looked they disappeared, and with them the dreadful
bag. There was no door near them, and they could not have passed me
without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into the rays of the
moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the
dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely faded away.

Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.




CHAPTER IV

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL--_continued_


I awoke in my own bed. If it be that I had not dreamt, the Count must
have carried me here. I tried to satisfy myself on the subject, but
could not arrive at any unquestionable result. To be sure, there were
certain small evidences, such as that my clothes were folded and laid by
in a manner which was not my habit. My watch was still unwound, and I am
rigorously accustomed to wind it the last thing before going to bed, and
many such details. But these things are no proof, for they may have been
evidences that my mind was not as usual, and, from some cause or
another, I had certainly been much upset. I must watch for proof. Of one
thing I am glad: if it was that the Count carried me here and undressed
me, he must have been hurried in his task, for my pockets are intact. I
am sure this diary would have been a mystery to him which he would not
have brooked. He would have taken or destroyed it. As I look round this
room, although it has been to me so full of fear, it is now a sort of
sanctuary, for nothing can be more dreadful than those awful women, who
were--who _are_--waiting to suck my blood.

       *       *       *       *       *

_18 May._--I have been down to look at that room again in daylight, for
I _must_ know the truth. When I got to the doorway at the top of the
stairs I found it closed. It had been so forcibly driven against the
jamb that part of the woodwork was splintered. I could see that the bolt
of the lock had not been shot, but the door is fastened from the inside.
I fear it was no dream, and must act on this surmise.

       *       *       *       *       *

_19 May._--I am surely in the toils. Last night the Count asked me in
the suavest tones to write three letters, one saying that my work here
was nearly done, and that I should start for home within a few days,
another that I was starting on the next morning from the time of the
letter, and the third that I had left the castle and arrived at
Bistritz. I would fain have rebelled, but felt that in the present state
of things it would be madness to quarrel openly with the Count whilst I
am so absolutely in his power; and to refuse would be to excite his
suspicion and to arouse his anger. He knows that I know too much, and
that I must not live, lest I be dangerous to him; my only chance is to
prolong my opportunities. Something may occur which will give me a
chance to escape. I saw in his eyes something of that gathering wrath
which was manifest when he hurled that fair woman from him. He explained
to me that posts were few and uncertain, and that my writing now would
ensure ease of mind to my friends; and he assured me with so much
impressiveness that he would countermand the later letters, which would
be held over at Bistritz until due time in case chance would admit of my
prolonging my stay, that to oppose him would have been to create new
suspicion. I therefore pretended to fall in with his views, and asked
him what dates I should put on the letters. He calculated a minute, and
then said:--

"The first should be June 12, the second June 19, and the third June
29."

I know now the span of my life. God help me!

       *       *       *       *       *

_28 May._--There is a chance of escape, or at any rate of being able to
send word home. A band of Szgany have come to the castle, and are
encamped in the courtyard. These Szgany are gipsies; I have notes of
them in my book. They are peculiar to this part of the world, though
allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over. There are thousands
of them in Hungary and Transylvania, who are almost outside all law.
They attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or _boyar_, and
call themselves by his name. They are fearless and without religion,
save superstition, and they talk only their own varieties of the Romany
tongue.

I shall write some letters home, and shall try to get them to have them
posted. I have already spoken them through my window to begin
acquaintanceship. They took their hats off and made obeisance and many
signs, which, however, I could not understand any more than I could
their spoken language....

       *       *       *       *       *

I have written the letters. Mina's is in shorthand, and I simply ask Mr.
Hawkins to communicate with her. To her I have explained my situation,
but without the horrors which I may only surmise. It would shock and
frighten her to death were I to expose my heart to her. Should the
letters not carry, then the Count shall not yet know my secret or the
extent of my knowledge....

       *       *       *       *       *

I have given the letters; I threw them through the bars of my window
with a gold piece, and made what signs I could to have them posted. The
man who took them pressed them to his heart and bowed, and then put them
in his cap. I could do no more. I stole back to the study, and began to
read. As the Count did not come in, I have written here....

       *       *       *       *       *

The Count has come. He sat down beside me, and said in his smoothest
voice as he opened two letters:--

"The Szgany has given me these, of which, though I know not whence they
come, I shall, of course, take care. See!"--he must have looked at
it--"one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other"--here
he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and
the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly--"the
other is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is
not signed. Well! so it cannot matter to us." And he calmly held letter
and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were consumed. Then he
went on:--

"The letter to Hawkins--that I shall, of course, send on, since it is
yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that
unknowingly I did break the seal. Will you not cover it again?" He held
out the letter to me, and with a courteous bow handed me a clean
envelope. I could only redirect it and hand it to him in silence. When
he went out of the room I could hear the key turn softly. A minute later
I went over and tried it, and the door was locked.

When, an hour or two after, the Count came quietly into the room, his
coming awakened me, for I had gone to sleep on the sofa. He was very
courteous and very cheery in his manner, and seeing that I had been
sleeping, he said:--

"So, my friend, you are tired? Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I
may not have the pleasure to talk to-night, since there are many labours
to me; but you will sleep, I pray." I passed to my room and went to bed,
and, strange to say, slept without dreaming. Despair has its own calms.

       *       *       *       *       *

_31 May._--This morning when I woke I thought I would provide myself
with some paper and envelopes from my bag and keep them in my pocket, so
that I might write in case I should get an opportunity, but again a
surprise, again a shock!

Every scrap of paper was gone, and with it all my notes, my memoranda,
relating to railways and travel, my letter of credit, in fact all that
might be useful to me were I once outside the castle. I sat and pondered
awhile, and then some thought occurred to me, and I made search of my
portmanteau and in the wardrobe where I had placed my clothes.

The suit in which I had travelled was gone, and also my overcoat and
rug; I could find no trace of them anywhere. This looked like some new
scheme of villainy....

       *       *       *       *       *

_17 June._--This morning, as I was sitting on the edge of my bed
cudgelling my brains, I heard without a cracking of whips and pounding
and scraping of horses' feet up the rocky path beyond the courtyard.
With joy I hurried to the window, and saw drive into the yard two great
leiter-wagons, each drawn by eight sturdy horses, and at the head of
each pair a Slovak, with his wide hat, great nail-studded belt, dirty
sheepskin, and high boots. They had also their long staves in hand. I
ran to the door, intending to descend and try and join them through the
main hall, as I thought that way might be opened for them. Again a
shock: my door was fastened on the outside.

Then I ran to the window and cried to them. They looked up at me
stupidly and pointed, but just then the "hetman" of the Szgany came out,
and seeing them pointing to my window, said something, at which they
laughed. Henceforth no effort of mine, no piteous cry or agonised
entreaty, would make them even look at me. They resolutely turned away.
The leiter-wagons contained great, square boxes, with handles of thick
rope; these were evidently empty by the ease with which the Slovaks
handled them, and by their resonance as they were roughly moved. When
they were all unloaded and packed in a great heap in one corner of the
yard, the Slovaks were given some money by the Szgany, and spitting on
it for luck, lazily went each to his horse's head. Shortly afterwards, I
heard the cracking of their whips die away in the distance.

       *       *       *       *       *

_24 June, before morning._--Last night the Count left me early, and
locked himself into his own room. As soon as I dared I ran up the
winding stair, and looked out of the window, which opened south. I
thought I would watch for the Count, for there is something going on.
The Szgany are quartered somewhere in the castle and are doing work of
some kind. I know it, for now and then I hear a far-away muffled sound
as of mattock and spade, and, whatever it is, it must be the end of some
ruthless villainy.

I had been at the window somewhat less than half an hour, when I saw
something coming out of the Count's window. I drew back and watched
carefully, and saw the whole man emerge. It was a new shock to me to
find that he had on the suit of clothes which I had worn whilst
travelling here, and slung over his shoulder the terrible bag which I
had seen the women take away. There could be no doubt as to his quest,
and in my garb, too! This, then, is his new scheme of evil: that he will
allow others to see me, as they think, so that he may both leave
evidence that I have been seen in the towns or villages posting my own
letters, and that any wickedness which he may do shall by the local
people be attributed to me.

It makes me rage to think that this can go on, and whilst I am shut up
here, a veritable prisoner, but without that protection of the law which
is even a criminal's right and consolation.

I thought I would watch for the Count's return, and for a long time sat
doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were some
quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They were
like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in
clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a sense of
soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in the
embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy more
fully the aërial gambolling.

Something made me start up, a low, piteous howling of dogs somewhere far
below in the valley, which was hidden from my sight. Louder it seemed to
ring in my ears, and the floating motes of dust to take new shapes to
the sound as they danced in the moonlight. I felt myself struggling to
awake to some call of my instincts; nay, my very soul was struggling,
and my half-remembered sensibilities were striving to answer the call. I
was becoming hypnotised! Quicker and quicker danced the dust; the
moonbeams seemed to quiver as they went by me into the mass of gloom
beyond. More and more they gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom
shapes. And then I started, broad awake and in full possession of my
senses, and ran screaming from the place. The phantom shapes, which were
becoming gradually materialised from the moonbeams, were those of the
three ghostly women to whom I was doomed. I fled, and felt somewhat
safer in my own room, where there was no moonlight and where the lamp
was burning brightly.

When a couple of hours had passed I heard something stirring in the
Count's room, something like a sharp wail quickly suppressed; and then
there was silence, deep, awful silence, which chilled me. With a
beating heart, I tried the door; but I was locked in my prison, and
could do nothing. I sat down and simply cried.

As I sat I heard a sound in the courtyard without--the agonised cry of a
woman. I rushed to the window, and throwing it up, peered out between
the bars. There, indeed, was a woman with dishevelled hair, holding her
hands over her heart as one distressed with running. She was leaning
against a corner of the gateway. When she saw my face at the window she
threw herself forward, and shouted in a voice laden with menace:--

"Monster, give me my child!"

She threw herself on her knees, and raising up her hands, cried the same
words in tones which wrung my heart. Then she tore her hair and beat her
breast, and abandoned herself to all the violences of extravagant
emotion. Finally, she threw herself forward, and, though I could not see
her, I could hear the beating of her naked hands against the door.

Somewhere high overhead, probably on the tower, I heard the voice of the
Count calling in his harsh, metallic whisper. His call seemed to be
answered from far and wide by the howling of wolves. Before many minutes
had passed a pack of them poured, like a pent-up dam when liberated,
through the wide entrance into the courtyard.

There was no cry from the woman, and the howling of the wolves was but
short. Before long they streamed away singly, licking their lips.

I could not pity her, for I knew now what had become of her child, and
she was better dead.

What shall I do? what can I do? How can I escape from this dreadful
thing of night and gloom and fear?

       *       *       *       *       *

_25 June, morning._--No man knows till he has suffered from the night
how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. When the
sun grew so high this morning that it struck the top of the great
gateway opposite my window, the high spot which it touched seemed to me
as if the dove from the ark had lighted there. My fear fell from me as
if it had been a vaporous garment which dissolved in the warmth. I must
take action of some sort whilst the courage of the day is upon me. Last
night one of my post-dated letters went to post, the first of that fatal
series which is to blot out the very traces of my existence from the
earth.

Let me not think of it. Action!

It has always been at night-time that I have been molested or
threatened, or in some way in danger or in fear. I have not yet seen the
Count in the daylight. Can it be that he sleeps when others wake, that
he may be awake whilst they sleep? If I could only get into his room!
But there is no possible way. The door is always locked, no way for me.

Yes, there is a way, if one dares to take it. Where his body has gone
why may not another body go? I have seen him myself crawl from his
window. Why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window? The
chances are desperate, but my need is more desperate still. I shall risk
it. At the worst it can only be death; and a man's death is not a
calf's, and the dreaded Hereafter may still be open to me. God help me
in my task! Good-bye, Mina, if I fail; good-bye, my faithful friend and
second father; good-bye, all, and last of all Mina!

       *       *       *       *       *

_Same day, later._--I have made the effort, and God, helping me, have
come safely back to this room. I must put down every detail in order. I
went whilst my courage was fresh straight to the window on the south
side, and at once got outside on the narrow ledge of stone which runs
around the building on this side. The stones are big and roughly cut,
and the mortar has by process of time been washed away between them. I
took off my boots, and ventured out on the desperate way. I looked down
once, so as to make sure that a sudden glimpse of the awful depth would
not overcome me, but after that kept my eyes away from it. I knew pretty
well the direction and distance of the Count's window, and made for it
as well as I could, having regard to the opportunities available. I did
not feel dizzy--I suppose I was too excited--and the time seemed
ridiculously short till I found myself standing on the window-sill and
trying to raise up the sash. I was filled with agitation, however, when
I bent down and slid feet foremost in through the window. Then I looked
around for the Count, but, with surprise and gladness, made a discovery.
The room was empty! It was barely furnished with odd things, which
seemed to have never been used; the furniture was something the same
style as that in the south rooms, and was covered with dust. I looked
for the key, but it was not in the lock, and I could not find it
anywhere. The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one
corner--gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and
Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as
though it had lain long in the ground. None of it that I noticed was
less than three hundred years old. There were also chains and ornaments,
some jewelled, but all of them old and stained.

At one corner of the room was a heavy door. I tried it, for, since I
could not find the key of the room or the key of the outer door, which
was the main object of my search, I must make further examination, or
all my efforts would be in vain. It was open, and led through a stone
passage to a circular stairway, which went steeply down. I descended,
minding carefully where I went, for the stairs were dark, being only lit
by loopholes in the heavy masonry. At the bottom there was a dark,
tunnel-like passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour, the
odour of old earth newly turned. As I went through the passage the smell
grew closer and heavier. At last I pulled open a heavy door which stood
ajar, and found myself in an old, ruined chapel, which had evidently
been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken, and in two places were
steps leading to vaults, but the ground had recently been dug over, and
the earth placed in great wooden boxes, manifestly those which had been
brought by the Slovaks. There was nobody about, and I made search for
any further outlet, but there was none. Then I went over every inch of
the ground, so as not to lose a chance. I went down even into the
vaults, where the dim light struggled, although to do so was a dread to
my very soul. Into two of these I went, but saw nothing except fragments
of old coffins and piles of dust; in the third, however, I made a
discovery.

There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on a
pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count! He was either dead or asleep, I
could not say which--for the eyes were open and stony, but without the
glassiness of death--and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all
their pallor; the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of
movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart. I bent over him,
and tried to find any sign of life, but in vain. He could not have lain
there long, for the earthy smell would have passed away in a few hours.
By the side of the box was its cover, pierced with holes here and there.
I thought he might have the keys on him, but when I went to search I saw
the dead eyes, and in them, dead though they were, such a look of hate,
though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled from the place, and
leaving the Count's room by the window, crawled again up the castle
wall. Regaining my room, I threw myself panting upon the bed and tried
to think....

       *       *       *       *       *

_29 June._--To-day is the date of my last letter, and the Count has
taken steps to prove that it was genuine, for again I saw him leave the
castle by the same window, and in my clothes. As he went down the wall,
lizard fashion, I wished I had a gun or some lethal weapon, that I might
destroy him; but I fear that no weapon wrought alone by man's hand would
have any effect on him. I dared not wait to see him return, for I feared
to see those weird sisters. I came back to the library, and read there
till I fell asleep.

I was awakened by the Count, who looked at me as grimly as a man can
look as he said:--

"To-morrow, my friend, we must part. You return to your beautiful
England, I to some work which may have such an end that we may never
meet. Your letter home has been despatched; to-morrow I shall not be
here, but all shall be ready for your journey. In the morning come the
Szgany, who have some labours of their own here, and also come some
Slovaks. When they have gone, my carriage shall come for you, and shall
bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence from Bukovina to
Bistritz. But I am in hopes that I shall see more of you at Castle
Dracula." I suspected him, and determined to test his sincerity.
Sincerity! It seems like a profanation of the word to write it in
connection with such a monster, so asked him point-blank:--

"Why may I not go to-night?"

"Because, dear sir, my coachman and horses are away on a mission."

"But I would walk with pleasure. I want to get away at once." He smiled,
such a soft, smooth, diabolical smile that I knew there was some trick
behind his smoothness. He said:--

"And your baggage?"

"I do not care about it. I can send for it some other time."

The Count stood up, and said, with a sweet courtesy which made me rub my
eyes, it seemed so real:--

"You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is
that which rules our _boyars_: 'Welcome the coming; speed the parting
guest.' Come with me, my dear young friend. Not an hour shall you wait
in my house against your will, though sad am I at your going, and that
you so suddenly desire it. Come!" With a stately gravity, he, with the
lamp, preceded me down the stairs and along the hall. Suddenly he
stopped.

"Hark!"

Close at hand came the howling of many wolves. It was almost as if the
sound sprang up at the rising of his hand, just as the music of a great
orchestra seems to leap under the bâton of the conductor. After a pause
of a moment, he proceeded, in his stately way, to the door, drew back
the ponderous bolts, unhooked the heavy chains, and began to draw it
open.

To my intense astonishment I saw that it was unlocked. Suspiciously, I
looked all round, but could see no key of any kind.

As the door began to open, the howling of the wolves without grew louder
and angrier; their red jaws, with champing teeth, and their blunt-clawed
feet as they leaped, came in through the opening door. I knew then that
to struggle at the moment against the Count was useless. With such
allies as these at his command, I could do nothing. But still the door
continued slowly to open, and only the Count's body stood in the gap.
Suddenly it struck me that this might be the moment and means of my
doom; I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own instigation. There
was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough for the Count, and
as a last chance I cried out:--

"Shut the door; I shall wait till morning!" and covered my face with my
hands to hide my tears of bitter disappointment. With one sweep of his
powerful arm, the Count threw the door shut, and the great bolts clanged
and echoed through the hall as they shot back into their places.

In silence we returned to the library, and after a minute or two I went
to my own room. The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand
to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that
Judas in hell might be proud of.

When I was in my room and about to lie down, I thought I heard a
whispering at my door. I went to it softly and listened. Unless my ears
deceived me, I heard the voice of the Count:--

"Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have
patience! To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!" There was a low,
sweet ripple of laughter, and in a rage I threw open the door, and saw
without the three terrible women licking their lips. As I appeared they
all joined in a horrible laugh, and ran away.

I came back to my room and threw myself on my knees. It is then so near
the end? To-morrow! to-morrow! Lord, help me, and those to whom I am
dear!

       *       *       *       *       *

_30 June, morning._--These may be the last words I ever write in this
diary. I slept till just before the dawn, and when I woke threw myself
on my knees, for I determined that if Death came he should find me
ready.

At last I felt that subtle change in the air, and knew that the morning
had come. Then came the welcome cock-crow, and I felt that I was safe.
With a glad heart, I opened my door and ran down to the hall. I had seen
that the door was unlocked, and now escape was before me. With hands
that trembled with eagerness, I unhooked the chains and drew back the
massive bolts.

But the door would not move. Despair seized me. I pulled, and pulled, at
the door, and shook it till, massive as it was, it rattled in its
casement. I could see the bolt shot. It had been locked after I left the
Count.

Then a wild desire took me to obtain that key at any risk, and I
determined then and there to scale the wall again and gain the Count's
room. He might kill me, but death now seemed the happier choice of
evils. Without a pause I rushed up to the east window, and scrambled
down the wall, as before, into the Count's room. It was empty, but that
was as I expected. I could not see a key anywhere, but the heap of gold
remained. I went through the door in the corner and down the winding
stair and along the dark passage to the old chapel. I knew now well
enough where to find the monster I sought.

The great box was in the same place, close against the wall, but the lid
was laid on it, not fastened down, but with the nails ready in their
places to be hammered home. I knew I must reach the body for the key, so
I raised the lid, and laid it back against the wall; and then I saw
something which filled my very soul with horror. There lay the Count,
but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair
and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller,
and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than
ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the
corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep,
burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches
underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were
simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his
repletion. I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in
me revolted at the contact; but I had to search, or I was lost. The
coming night might see my own body a banquet in a similar way to those
horrid three. I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of the
key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile
on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I
was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come
he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and
create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the
helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me
to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand,
but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the
cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the
hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full
upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to
paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face,
merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my
hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade
caught the edge of the lid which fell over again, and hid the horrid
thing from my sight. The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face,
blood-stained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its
own in the nethermost hell.

I thought and thought what should be my next move, but my brain seemed
on fire, and I waited with a despairing feeling growing over me. As I
waited I heard in the distance a gipsy song sung by merry voices coming
closer, and through their song the rolling of heavy wheels and the
cracking of whips; the Szgany and the Slovaks of whom the Count had
spoken were coming. With a last look around and at the box which
contained the vile body, I ran from the place and gained the Count's
room, determined to rush out at the moment the door should be opened.
With strained ears, I listened, and heard downstairs the grinding of the
key in the great lock and the falling back of the heavy door. There must
have been some other means of entry, or some one had a key for one of
the locked doors. Then there came the sound of many feet tramping and
dying away in some passage which sent up a clanging echo. I turned to
run down again towards the vault, where I might find the new entrance;
but at the moment there seemed to come a violent puff of wind, and the
door to the winding stair blew to with a shock that set the dust from
the lintels flying. When I ran to push it open, I found that it was
hopelessly fast. I was again a prisoner, and the net of doom was closing
round me more closely.

As I write there is in the passage below a sound of many tramping feet
and the crash of weights being set down heavily, doubtless the boxes,
with their freight of earth. There is a sound of hammering; it is the
box being nailed down. Now I can hear the heavy feet tramping again
along the hall, with many other idle feet coming behind them.

The door is shut, and the chains rattle; there is a grinding of the key
in the lock; I can hear the key withdraw: then another door opens and
shuts; I hear the creaking of lock and bolt.

Hark! in the courtyard and down the rocky way the roll of heavy wheels,
the crack of whips, and the chorus of the Szgany as they pass into the
distance.

I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman,
and there is nought in common. They are devils of the Pit!

I shall not remain alone with them; I shall try to scale the castle wall
farther than I have yet attempted. I shall take some of the gold with
me, lest I want it later. I may find a way from this dreadful place.

And then away for home! away to the quickest and nearest train! away
from this cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his
children still walk with earthly feet!

At least God's mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the
precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep--as a man.
Good-bye, all! Mina!




CHAPTER V

_Letter from Miss Mina Murray to Miss Lucy Westenra._


"_9 May._

"My dearest Lucy,--

"Forgive my long delay in writing, but I have been simply overwhelmed
with work. The life of an assistant schoolmistress is sometimes trying.
I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together
freely and build our castles in the air. I have been working very hard
lately, because I want to keep up with Jonathan's studies, and I have
been practising shorthand very assiduously. When we are married I shall
be able to be useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I
can take down what he wants to say in this way and write it out for
him on the typewriter, at which also I am practising very hard. He
and I sometimes write letters in shorthand, and he is keeping a
stenographic journal of his travels abroad. When I am with you I
shall keep a diary in the same way. I don't mean one of those
two-pages-to-the-week-with-Sunday-squeezed-in-a-corner diaries, but a
sort of journal which I can write in whenever I feel inclined. I do not
suppose there will be much of interest to other people; but it is not
intended for them. I may show it to Jonathan some day if there is in it
anything worth sharing, but it is really an exercise book. I shall try
to do what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing
descriptions and trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with
a little practice, one can remember all that goes on or that one hears
said during a day. However, we shall see. I will tell you of my little
plans when we meet. I have just had a few hurried lines from Jonathan
from Transylvania. He is well, and will be returning in about a week. I
am longing to hear all his news. It must be so nice to see strange
countries. I wonder if we--I mean Jonathan and I--shall ever see them
together. There is the ten o'clock bell ringing. Good-bye.

"Your loving

"MINA.

"Tell me all the news when you write. You have not told me anything for
a long time. I hear rumours, and especially of a tall, handsome,
curly-haired man???"


_Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray_.

"_17, Chatham Street_,

"_Wednesday_.

"My dearest Mina,--

"I must say you tax me _very_ unfairly with being a bad correspondent. I
wrote to you _twice_ since we parted, and your last letter was only your
_second_. Besides, I have nothing to tell you. There is really nothing
to interest you. Town is very pleasant just now, and we go a good deal
to picture-galleries and for walks and rides in the park. As to the
tall, curly-haired man, I suppose it was the one who was with me at the
last Pop. Some one has evidently been telling tales. That was Mr.
Holmwood. He often comes to see us, and he and mamma get on very well
together; they have so many things to talk about in common. We met some
time ago a man that would just _do for you_, if you were not already
engaged to Jonathan. He is an excellent _parti_, being handsome, well
off, and of good birth. He is a doctor and really clever. Just fancy! He
is only nine-and-twenty, and he has an immense lunatic asylum all under
his own care. Mr. Holmwood introduced him to me, and he called here to
see us, and often comes now. I think he is one of the most resolute men
I ever saw, and yet the most calm. He seems absolutely imperturbable. I
can fancy what a wonderful power he must have over his patients. He has
a curious habit of looking one straight in the face, as if trying to
read one's thoughts. He tries this on very much with me, but I flatter
myself he has got a tough nut to crack. I know that from my glass. Do
you ever try to read your own face? _I do_, and I can tell you it is not
a bad study, and gives you more trouble than you can well fancy if you
have never tried it. He says that I afford him a curious psychological
study, and I humbly think I do. I do not, as you know, take sufficient
interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions. Dress is a
bore. That is slang again, but never mind; Arthur says that every day.
There, it is all out. Mina, we have told all our secrets to each other
since we were _children_; we have slept together and eaten together, and
laughed and cried together; and now, though I have spoken, I would like
to speak more. Oh, Mina, couldn't you guess? I love him. I am blushing
as I write, for although I _think_ he loves me, he has not told me so in
words. But oh, Mina, I love him; I love him; I love him! There, that
does me good. I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire
undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you what I feel.
I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop,
or I should tear up the letter, and I don't want to stop, for I _do_ so
want to tell you all. Let me hear from you _at once_, and tell me all
that you think about it. Mina, I must stop. Good-night. Bless me in your
prayers; and, Mina, pray for my happiness.

"LUCY.

"P.S.--I need not tell you this is a secret. Good-night again.

"L."

_Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray_.

"_24 May_.

"My dearest Mina,--

"Thanks, and thanks, and thanks again for your sweet letter. It was so
nice to be able to tell you and to have your sympathy.

"My dear, it never rains but it pours. How true the old proverbs are.
Here am I, who shall be twenty in September, and yet I never had a
proposal till to-day, not a real proposal, and to-day I have had three.
Just fancy! THREE proposals in one day! Isn't it awful! I feel sorry,
really and truly sorry, for two of the poor fellows. Oh, Mina, I am so
happy that I don't know what to do with myself. And three proposals!
But, for goodness' sake, don't tell any of the girls, or they would be
getting all sorts of extravagant ideas and imagining themselves injured
and slighted if in their very first day at home they did not get six at
least. Some girls are so vain! You and I, Mina dear, who are engaged and
are going to settle down soon soberly into old married women, can
despise vanity. Well, I must tell you about the three, but you must keep
it a secret, dear, from _every one_, except, of course, Jonathan. You
will tell him, because I would, if I were in your place, certainly tell
Arthur. A woman ought to tell her husband everything--don't you think
so, dear?--and I must be fair. Men like women, certainly their wives, to
be quite as fair as they are; and women, I am afraid, are not always
quite as fair as they should be. Well, my dear, number One came just
before lunch. I told you of him, Dr. John Seward, the lunatic-asylum
man, with the strong jaw and the good forehead. He was very cool
outwardly, but was nervous all the same. He had evidently been schooling
himself as to all sorts of little things, and remembered them; but he
almost managed to sit down on his silk hat, which men don't generally do
when they are cool, and then when he wanted to appear at ease he kept
playing with a lancet in a way that made me nearly scream. He spoke to
me, Mina, very straightforwardly. He told me how dear I was to him,
though he had known me so little, and what his life would be with me to
help and cheer him. He was going to tell me how unhappy he would be if I
did not care for him, but when he saw me cry he said that he was a brute
and would not add to my present trouble. Then he broke off and asked if
I could love him in time; and when I shook my head his hands trembled,
and then with some hesitation he asked me if I cared already for any one
else. He put it very nicely, saying that he did not want to wring my
confidence from me, but only to know, because if a woman's heart was
free a man might have hope. And then, Mina, I felt a sort of duty to
tell him that there was some one. I only told him that much, and then he
stood up, and he looked very strong and very grave as he took both my
hands in his and said he hoped I would be happy, and that if I ever
wanted a friend I must count him one of my best. Oh, Mina dear, I can't
help crying: and you must excuse this letter being all blotted. Being
proposed to is all very nice and all that sort of thing, but it isn't at
all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know
loves you honestly, going away and looking all broken-hearted, and to
know that, no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing
quite out of his life. My dear, I must stop here at present, I feel so
miserable, though I am so happy.

"_Evening._

"Arthur has just gone, and I feel in better spirits than when I left
off, so I can go on telling you about the day. Well, my dear, number Two
came after lunch. He is such a nice fellow, an American from Texas, and
he looks so young and so fresh that it seems almost impossible that he
has been to so many places and has had such adventures. I sympathise
with poor Desdemona when she had such a dangerous stream poured in her
ear, even by a black man. I suppose that we women are such cowards that
we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him. I know now
what I would do if I were a man and wanted to make a girl love me. No, I
don't, for there was Mr. Morris telling us his stories, and Arthur never
told any, and yet---- My dear, I am somewhat previous. Mr. Quincey P.
Morris found me alone. It seems that a man always does find a girl
alone. No, he doesn't, for Arthur tried twice to _make_ a chance, and I
helping him all I could; I am not ashamed to say it now. I must tell you
beforehand that Mr. Morris doesn't always speak slang--that is to say,
he never does so to strangers or before them, for he is really well
educated and has exquisite manners--but he found out that it amused me
to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, and there
was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things. I am afraid, my
dear, he has to invent it all, for it fits exactly into whatever else he
has to say. But this is a way slang has. I do not know myself if I shall
ever speak slang; I do not know if Arthur likes it, as I have never
heard him use any as yet. Well, Mr. Morris sat down beside me and looked
as happy and jolly as he could, but I could see all the same that he was
very nervous. He took my hand in his, and said ever so sweetly:--

"'Miss Lucy, I know I ain't good enough to regulate the fixin's of your
little shoes, but I guess if you wait till you find a man that is you
will go join them seven young women with the lamps when you quit. Won't
you just hitch up alongside of me and let us go down the long road
together, driving in double harness?'

"Well, he did look so good-humoured and so jolly that it didn't seem
half so hard to refuse him as it did poor Dr. Seward; so I said, as
lightly as I could, that I did not know anything of hitching, and that I
wasn't broken to harness at all yet. Then he said that he had spoken in
a light manner, and he hoped that if he had made a mistake in doing so
on so grave, so momentous, an occasion for him, I would forgive him. He
really did look serious when he was saying it, and I couldn't help
feeling a bit serious too--I know, Mina, you will think me a horrid
flirt--though I couldn't help feeling a sort of exultation that he was
number two in one day. And then, my dear, before I could say a word he
began pouring out a perfect torrent of love-making, laying his very
heart and soul at my feet. He looked so earnest over it that I shall
never again think that a man must be playful always, and never earnest,
because he is merry at times. I suppose he saw something in my face
which checked him, for he suddenly stopped, and said with a sort of
manly fervour that I could have loved him for if I had been free:--

"'Lucy, you are an honest-hearted girl, I know. I should not be here
speaking to you as I am now if I did not believe you clean grit, right
through to the very depths of your soul. Tell me, like one good fellow
to another, is there any one else that you care for? And if there is
I'll never trouble you a hair's breadth again, but will be, if you will
let me, a very faithful friend.'

"My dear Mina, why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy
of them? Here was I almost making fun of this great-hearted, true
gentleman. I burst into tears--I am afraid, my dear, you will think
this a very sloppy letter in more ways than one--and I really felt very
badly. Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want
her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say
it. I am glad to say that, though I was crying, I was able to look into
Mr. Morris's brave eyes, and I told him out straight:--

"'Yes, there is some one I love, though he has not told me yet that he
even loves me.' I was right to speak to him so frankly, for quite a
light came into his face, and he put out both his hands and took mine--I
think I put them into his--and said in a hearty way:--

"'That's my brave girl. It's better worth being late for a chance of
winning you than being in time for any other girl in the world. Don't
cry, my dear. If it's for me, I'm a hard nut to crack; and I take it
standing up. If that other fellow doesn't know his happiness, well, he'd
better look for it soon, or he'll have to deal with me. Little girl,
your honesty and pluck have made me a friend, and that's rarer than a
lover; it's more unselfish anyhow. My dear, I'm going to have a pretty
lonely walk between this and Kingdom Come. Won't you give me one kiss?
It'll be something to keep off the darkness now and then. You can, you
know, if you like, for that other good fellow--he must be a good fellow,
my dear, and a fine fellow, or you could not love him--hasn't spoken
yet.' That quite won me, Mina, for it _was_ brave and sweet of him, and
noble, too, to a rival--wasn't it?--and he so sad; so I leant over and
kissed him. He stood up with my two hands in his, and as he looked down
into my face--I am afraid I was blushing very much--he said:--

"'Little girl, I hold your hand, and you've kissed me, and if these
things don't make us friends nothing ever will. Thank you for your sweet
honesty to me, and good-bye.' He wrung my hand, and taking up his hat,
went straight out of the room without looking back, without a tear or a
quiver or a pause; and I am crying like a baby. Oh, why must a man like
that be made unhappy when there are lots of girls about who would
worship the very ground he trod on? I know I would if I were free--only
I don't want to be free. My dear, this quite upset me, and I feel I
cannot write of happiness just at once, after telling you of it; and I
don't wish to tell of the number three until it can be all happy.

"Ever your loving

"LUCY.

"P.S.--Oh, about number Three--I needn't tell you of number Three, need
I? Besides, it was all so confused; it seemed only a moment from his
coming into the room till both his arms were round me, and he was
kissing me. I am very, very happy, and I don't know what I have done to
deserve it. I must only try in the future to show that I am not
ungrateful to God for all His goodness to me in sending to me such a
lover, such a husband, and such a friend.

"Good-bye."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

(Kept in phonograph)

_25 May._--Ebb tide in appetite to-day. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so
diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty
feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth
the doing.... As I knew that the only cure for this sort of thing was
work, I went down amongst the patients. I picked out one who has
afforded me a study of much interest. He is so quaint that I am
determined to understand him as well as I can. To-day I seemed to get
nearer than ever before to the heart of his mystery.

I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making
myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing
it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep
him to the point of his madness--a thing which I avoid with the patients
as I would the mouth of hell.

(_Mem._, under what circumstances would I _not_ avoid the pit of hell?)
_Omnia Romæ venalia sunt._ Hell has its price! _verb. sap._ If there be
anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards
_accurately_, so I had better commence to do so, therefore--

R. M. Renfield, ætat 59.--Sanguine temperament; great physical strength;
morbidly excitable; periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which I
cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the
disturbing influence end in a mentally-accomplished finish; a possibly
dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution
is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves. What I think of
on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is
balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed
point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of
accidents can balance it.


_Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Hon. Arthur Holmwood._

"_25 May._

"My dear Art,--

"We've told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies; and dressed one
another's wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas; and drunk
healths on the shore of Titicaca. There are more yarns to be told, and
other wounds to be healed, and another health to be drunk. Won't you let
this be at my camp-fire to-morrow night? I have no hesitation in asking
you, as I know a certain lady is engaged to a certain dinner-party, and
that you are free. There will only be one other, our old pal at the
Korea, Jack Seward. He's coming, too, and we both want to mingle our
weeps over the wine-cup, and to drink a health with all our hearts to
the happiest man in all the wide world, who has won the noblest heart
that God has made and the best worth winning. We promise you a hearty
welcome, and a loving greeting, and a health as true as your own right
hand. We shall both swear to leave you at home if you drink too deep to
a certain pair of eyes. Come!

"Yours, as ever and always,

"QUINCEY P. MORRIS."


_Telegram from Arthur Holmwood to Quincey P. Morris._

"_26 May._

"Count me in every time. I bear messages which will make both your ears
tingle.

"ART."




CHAPTER VI

MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL


_24 July. Whitby._--Lucy met me at the station, looking sweeter and
lovelier than ever, and we drove up to the house at the Crescent in
which they have rooms. This is a lovely place. The little river, the
Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near the
harbour. A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through which the
view seems somehow further away than it really is. The valley is
beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on the high land
on either side you look right across it, unless you are near enough to
see down. The houses of the old town--the side away from us--are all
red-roofed, and seem piled up one over the other anyhow, like the
pictures we see of Nuremberg. Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby
Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of
"Marmion," where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble
ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is
a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and
the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big
graveyard, all full of tombstones. This is to my mind the nicest spot in
Whitby, for it lies right over the town, and has a full view of the
harbour and all up the bay to where the headland called Kettleness
stretches out into the sea. It descends so steeply over the harbour that
part of the bank has fallen away, and some of the graves have been
destroyed. In one place part of the stonework of the graves stretches
out over the sandy pathway far below. There are walks, with seats beside
them, through the churchyard; and people go and sit there all day long
looking at the beautiful view and enjoying the breeze. I shall come and
sit here very often myself and work. Indeed, I am writing now, with my
book on my knee, and listening to the talk of three old men who are
sitting beside me. They seem to do nothing all day but sit up here and
talk.

The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long granite wall
stretching out into the sea, with a curve outwards at the end of it, in
the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy sea-wall runs along outside
of it. On the near side, the sea-wall makes an elbow crooked inversely,
and its end too has a lighthouse. Between the two piers there is a
narrow opening into the harbour, which then suddenly widens.

It is nice at high water; but when the tide is out it shoals away to
nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running between
banks of sand, with rocks here and there. Outside the harbour on this
side there rises for about half a mile a great reef, the sharp edge of
which runs straight out from behind the south lighthouse. At the end of
it is a buoy with a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in a
mournful sound on the wind. They have a legend here that when a ship is
lost bells are heard out at sea. I must ask the old man about this; he
is coming this way....

He is a funny old man. He must be awfully old, for his face is all
gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree. He tells me that he is
nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland fishing
fleet when Waterloo was fought. He is, I am afraid, a very sceptical
person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and the White Lady
at the abbey he said very brusquely:--

"I wouldn't fash masel' about them, miss. Them things be all wore out.
Mind, I don't say that they never was, but I do say that they wasn't in
my time. They be all very well for comers and trippers, an' the like,
but not for a nice young lady like you. Them feet-folks from York and
Leeds that be always eatin' cured herrin's an' drinkin' tea an' lookin'
out to buy cheap jet would creed aught. I wonder masel' who'd be
bothered tellin' lies to them--even the newspapers, which is full of
fool-talk." I thought he would be a good person to learn interesting
things from, so I asked him if he would mind telling me something about
the whale-fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to begin
when the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured to get up, and said:--

"I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My grand-daughter doesn't like
to be kept waitin' when the tea is ready, for it takes me time to
crammle aboon the grees, for there be a many of 'em; an', miss, I lack
belly-timber sairly by the clock."

He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well as he could, down
the steps. The steps are a great feature on the place. They lead from
the town up to the church, there are hundreds of them--I do not know how
many--and they wind up in a delicate curve; the slope is so gentle that
a horse could easily walk up and down them. I think they must originally
have had something to do with the abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went
out visiting with her mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did
not go. They will be home by this.

       *       *       *       *       *

_1 August._--I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had a most
interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who always come
and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them, and I should think
must have been in his time a most dictatorial person. He will not admit
anything, and downfaces everybody. If he can't out-argue them he bullies
them, and then takes their silence for agreement with his views. Lucy
was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a
beautiful colour since she has been here. I noticed that the old men did
not lose any time in coming up and sitting near her when we sat down.
She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love with her
on the spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not contradict her, but
gave me double share instead. I got him on the subject of the legends,
and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it
and put it down:--

"It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel; that's what it be, an'
nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' barguests an' bogles
an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women
a-belderin'. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an' all grims an' signs
an' warnin's, be all invented by parsons an' illsome beuk-bodies an'
railway touters to skeer an' scunner hafflin's, an' to get folks to do
somethin' that they don't other incline to. It makes me ireful to think
o' them. Why, it's them that, not content with printin' lies on paper
an' preachin' them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin' them on the
tombstones. Look here all around you in what airt ye will; all them
steans, holdin' up their heads as well as they can out of their pride,
is acant--simply tumblin' down with the weight o' the lies wrote on
them, 'Here lies the body' or 'Sacred to the memory' wrote on all of
them, an' yet in nigh half of them there bean't no bodies at all; an'
the memories of them bean't cared a pinch of snuff about, much less
sacred. Lies all of them, nothin' but lies of one kind or another! My
gog, but it'll be a quare scowderment at the Day of Judgment when they
come tumblin' up in their death-sarks, all jouped together an' tryin' to
drag their tombsteans with them to prove how good they was; some of them
trimmlin' and ditherin', with their hands that dozzened an' slippy from
lyin' in the sea that they can't even keep their grup o' them."

I could see from the old fellow's self-satisfied air and the way in
which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was
"showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going:--

"Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are not
all wrong?"

"Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they make
out the people too good; for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be
like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now
look you here; you come here a stranger, an' you see this kirk-garth." I
nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite
understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church.
He went on: "And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk that be
happed here, snod an' snog?" I assented again. "Then that be just where
the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these lay-beds that be toom as
old Dun's 'bacca-box on Friday night." He nudged one of his companions,
and they all laughed. "And my gog! how could they be otherwise? Look at
that one, the aftest abaft the bier-bank: read it!" I went over and
read:--

"Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of
Andres, April, 1854, æt. 30." When I came back Mr. Swales went on:--

"Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the coast
of Andres! an' you consated his body lay under! Why, I could name ye a
dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above"--he pointed
northwards--"or where the currents may have drifted them. There be the
steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the small-print of
the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowrey--I knew his father, lost in
the _Lively_ off Greenland in '20; or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the
same seas in 1777; or John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year
later; or old John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned
in the Gulf of Finland in '50. Do ye think that all these men will have
to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet sounds? I have me antherums
aboot it! I tell ye that when they got here they'd be jommlin' an'
jostlin' one another that way that it 'ud be like a fight up on the ice
in the old days, when we'd be at one another from daylight to dark, an'
tryin' to tie up our cuts by the light of the aurora borealis." This was
evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his
cronies joined in with gusto.

"But," I said, "surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the
assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to
take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judgment. Do you think
that will be really necessary?"

"Well, what else be they tombstones for? Answer me that, miss!"

"To please their relatives, I suppose."

"To please their relatives, you suppose!" This he said with intense
scorn. "How will it pleasure their relatives to know that lies is wrote
over them, and that everybody in the place knows that they be lies?" He
pointed to a stone at our feet which had been laid down as a slab, on
which the seat was rested, close to the edge of the cliff. "Read the
lies on that thruff-stean," he said. The letters were upside down to me
from where I sat, but Lucy was more opposite to them, so she leant over
and read:--

"Sacred to the memory of George Canon, who died, in the hope of a
glorious resurrection, on July, 29, 1873, falling from the rocks at
Kettleness. This tomb was erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly
beloved son. 'He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.'
Really, Mr. Swales, I don't see anything very funny in that!" She spoke
her comment very gravely and somewhat severely.

"Ye don't see aught funny! Ha! ha! But that's because ye don't gawm the
sorrowin' mother was a hell-cat that hated him because he was
acrewk'd--a regular lamiter he was--an' he hated her so that he
committed suicide in order that she mightn't get an insurance she put on
his life. He blew nigh the top of his head off with an old musket that
they had for scarin' the crows with. 'Twarn't for crows then, for it
brought the clegs and the dowps to him. That's the way he fell off the
rocks. And, as to hopes of a glorious resurrection, I've often heard him
say masel' that he hoped he'd go to hell, for his mother was so pious
that she'd be sure to go to heaven, an' he didn't want to addle where
she was. Now isn't that stean at any rate"--he hammered it with his
stick as he spoke--"a pack of lies? and won't it make Gabriel keckle
when Geordie comes pantin' up the grees with the tombstean balanced on
his hump, and asks it to be took as evidence!"

I did not know what to say, but Lucy turned the conversation as she
said, rising up:--

"Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and I cannot
leave it; and now I find I must go on sitting over the grave of a
suicide."

"That won't harm ye, my pretty; an' it may make poor Geordie gladsome to
have so trim a lass sittin' on his lap. That won't hurt ye. Why, I've
sat here off an' on for nigh twenty years past, an' it hasn't done me
no harm. Don't ye fash about them as lies under ye, or that doesn' lie
there either! It'll be time for ye to be getting scart when ye see the
tombsteans all run away with, and the place as bare as a stubble-field.
There's the clock, an' I must gang. My service to ye, ladies!" And off
he hobbled.

Lucy and I sat awhile, and it was all so beautiful before us that we
took hands as we sat; and she told me all over again about Arthur and
their coming marriage. That made me just a little heart-sick, for I
haven't heard from Jonathan for a whole month.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The same day._ I came up here alone, for I am very sad. There was no
letter for me. I hope there cannot be anything the matter with Jonathan.
The clock has just struck nine. I see the lights scattered all over the
town, sometimes in rows where the streets are, and sometimes singly;
they run right up the Esk and die away in the curve of the valley. To my
left the view is cut off by a black line of roof of the old house next
the abbey. The sheep and lambs are bleating in the fields away behind
me, and there is a clatter of a donkey's hoofs up the paved road below.
The band on the pier is playing a harsh waltz in good time, and further
along the quay there is a Salvation Army meeting in a back street.
Neither of the bands hears the other, but up here I hear and see them
both. I wonder where Jonathan is and if he is thinking of me! I wish he
were here.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_5 June._--The case of Renfield grows more interesting the more I get to
understand the man. He has certain qualities very largely developed;
selfishness, secrecy, and purpose. I wish I could get at what is the
object of the latter. He seems to have some settled scheme of his own,
but what it is I do not yet know. His redeeming quality is a love of
animals, though, indeed, he has such curious turns in it that I
sometimes imagine he is only abnormally cruel. His pets are of odd
sorts. Just now his hobby is catching flies. He has at present such a
quantity that I have had myself to expostulate. To my astonishment, he
did not break out into a fury, as I expected, but took the matter in
simple seriousness. He thought for a moment, and then said: "May I have
three days? I shall clear them away." Of course, I said that would do. I
must watch him.

       *       *       *       *       *

_18 June._--He has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got several
very big fellows in a box. He keeps feeding them with his flies, and
the number of the latter is becoming sensibly diminished, although he
has used half his food in attracting more flies from outside to his
room.

       *       *       *       *       *

_1 July._--His spiders are now becoming as great a nuisance as his
flies, and to-day I told him that he must get rid of them. He looked
very sad at this, so I said that he must clear out some of them, at all
events. He cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave him the same time
as before for reduction. He disgusted me much while with him, for when a
horrid blow-fly, bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room,
he caught it, held it exultantly for a few moments between his finger
and thumb, and, before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his
mouth and ate it. I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it
was very good and very wholesome; that it was life, strong life, and
gave life to him. This gave me an idea, or the rudiment of one. I must
watch how he gets rid of his spiders. He has evidently some deep problem
in his mind, for he keeps a little note-book in which he is always
jotting down something. Whole pages of it are filled with masses of
figures, generally single numbers added up in batches, and then the
totals added in batches again, as though he were "focussing" some
account, as the auditors put it.

       *       *       *       *       *

_8 July._--There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in
my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and then, oh,
unconscious cerebration! you will have to give the wall to your
conscious brother. I kept away from my friend for a few days, so that I
might notice if there were any change. Things remain as they were except
that he has parted with some of his pets and got a new one. He has
managed to get a sparrow, and has already partially tamed it. His means
of taming is simple, for already the spiders have diminished. Those that
do remain, however, are well fed, for he still brings in the flies by
tempting them with his food.

       *       *       *       *       *

_19 July._--We are progressing. My friend has now a whole colony of
sparrows, and his flies and spiders are almost obliterated. When I came
in he ran to me and said he wanted to ask me a great favour--a very,
very great favour; and as he spoke he fawned on me like a dog. I asked
him what it was, and he said, with a sort of rapture in his voice and
bearing:--

"A kitten, a nice little, sleek playful kitten, that I can play with,
and teach, and feed--and feed--and feed!" I was not unprepared for this
request, for I had noticed how his pets went on increasing in size and
vivacity, but I did not care that his pretty family of tame sparrows
should be wiped out in the same manner as the flies and the spiders; so
I said I would see about it, and asked him if he would not rather have a
cat than a kitten. His eagerness betrayed him as he answered:--

"Oh, yes, I would like a cat! I only asked for a kitten lest you should
refuse me a cat. No one would refuse me a kitten, would they?" I shook
my head, and said that at present I feared it would not be possible, but
that I would see about it. His face fell, and I could see a warning of
danger in it, for there was a sudden fierce, sidelong look which meant
killing. The man is an undeveloped homicidal maniac. I shall test him
with his present craving and see how it will work out; then I shall know
more.

       *       *       *       *       *

_10 p. m._--I have visited him again and found him sitting in a corner
brooding. When I came in he threw himself on his knees before me and
implored me to let him have a cat; that his salvation depended upon it.
I was firm, however, and told him that he could not have it, whereupon
he went without a word, and sat down, gnawing his fingers, in the corner
where I had found him. I shall see him in the morning early.

       *       *       *       *       *

_20 July._--Visited Renfield very early, before the attendant went his
rounds. Found him up and humming a tune. He was spreading out his sugar,
which he had saved, in the window, and was manifestly beginning his
fly-catching again; and beginning it cheerfully and with a good grace. I
looked around for his birds, and not seeing them, asked him where they
were. He replied, without turning round, that they had all flown away.
There were a few feathers about the room and on his pillow a drop of
blood. I said nothing, but went and told the keeper to report to me if
there were anything odd about him during the day.

       *       *       *       *       *

_11 a. m._--The attendant has just been to me to say that Renfield has
been very sick and has disgorged a whole lot of feathers. "My belief is,
doctor," he said, "that he has eaten his birds, and that he just took
and ate them raw!"

       *       *       *       *       *

_11 p. m._--I gave Renfield a strong opiate to-night, enough to make
even him sleep, and took away his pocket-book to look at it. The thought
that has been buzzing about my brain lately is complete, and the theory
proved. My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to
invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous
(life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he
can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He
gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then
wanted a cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later
steps? It would almost be worth while to complete the experiment. It
might be done if there were only a sufficient cause. Men sneered at
vivisection, and yet look at its results to-day! Why not advance science
in its most difficult and vital aspect--the knowledge of the brain? Had
I even the secret of one such mind--did I hold the key to the fancy of
even one lunatic--I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch
compared with which Burdon-Sanderson's physiology or Ferrier's
brain-knowledge would be as nothing. If only there were a sufficient
cause! I must not think too much of this, or I may be tempted; a good
cause might turn the scale with me, for may not I too be of an
exceptional brain, congenitally?

How well the man reasoned; lunatics always do within their own scope. I
wonder at how many lives he values a man, or if at only one. He has
closed the account most accurately, and to-day begun a new record. How
many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives?

To me it seems only yesterday that my whole life ended with my new hope,
and that truly I began a new record. So it will be until the Great
Recorder sums me up and closes my ledger account with a balance to
profit or loss. Oh, Lucy, Lucy, I cannot be angry with you, nor can I be
angry with my friend whose happiness is yours; but I must only wait on
hopeless and work. Work! work!

If I only could have as strong a cause as my poor mad friend there--a
good, unselfish cause to make me work--that would be indeed happiness.


_Mina Murray's Journal._

_26 July._--I am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here; it
is like whispering to one's self and listening at the same time. And
there is also something about the shorthand symbols that makes it
different from writing. I am unhappy about Lucy and about Jonathan. I
had not heard from Jonathan for some time, and was very concerned; but
yesterday dear Mr. Hawkins, who is always so kind, sent me a letter from
him. I had written asking him if he had heard, and he said the enclosed
had just been received. It is only a line dated from Castle Dracula,
and says that he is just starting for home. That is not like Jonathan;
I do not understand it, and it makes me uneasy. Then, too, Lucy,
although she is so well, has lately taken to her old habit of walking in
her sleep. Her mother has spoken to me about it, and we have decided
that I am to lock the door of our room every night. Mrs. Westenra has
got an idea that sleep-walkers always go out on roofs of houses and
along the edges of cliffs and then get suddenly wakened and fall over
with a despairing cry that echoes all over the place. Poor dear, she is
naturally anxious about Lucy, and she tells me that her husband, Lucy's
father, had the same habit; that he would get up in the night and dress
himself and go out, if he were not stopped. Lucy is to be married in the
autumn, and she is already planning out her dresses and how her house is
to be arranged. I sympathise with her, for I do the same, only Jonathan
and I will start in life in a very simple way, and shall have to try to
make both ends meet. Mr. Holmwood--he is the Hon. Arthur Holmwood, only
son of Lord Godalming--is coming up here very shortly--as soon as he can
leave town, for his father is not very well, and I think dear Lucy is
counting the moments till he comes. She wants to take him up to the seat
on the churchyard cliff and show him the beauty of Whitby. I daresay it
is the waiting which disturbs her; she will be all right when he
arrives.

       *       *       *       *       *

_27 July._--No news from Jonathan. I am getting quite uneasy about him,
though why I should I do not know; but I do wish that he would write, if
it were only a single line. Lucy walks more than ever, and each night I
am awakened by her moving about the room. Fortunately, the weather is so
hot that she cannot get cold; but still the anxiety and the perpetually
being wakened is beginning to tell on me, and I am getting nervous and
wakeful myself. Thank God, Lucy's health keeps up. Mr. Holmwood has been
suddenly called to Ring to see his father, who has been taken seriously
ill. Lucy frets at the postponement of seeing him, but it does not touch
her looks; she is a trifle stouter, and her cheeks are a lovely
rose-pink. She has lost that anæmic look which she had. I pray it will
all last.

       *       *       *       *       *

_3 August._--Another week gone, and no news from Jonathan, not even to
Mr. Hawkins, from whom I have heard. Oh, I do hope he is not ill. He
surely would have written. I look at that last letter of his, but
somehow it does not satisfy me. It does not read like him, and yet it is
his writing. There is no mistake of that. Lucy has not walked much in
her sleep the last week, but there is an odd concentration about her
which I do not understand; even in her sleep she seems to be watching
me. She tries the door, and finding it locked, goes about the room
searching for the key.

_6 August._--Another three days, and no news. This suspense is getting
dreadful. If I only knew where to write to or where to go to, I should
feel easier; but no one has heard a word of Jonathan since that last
letter. I must only pray to God for patience. Lucy is more excitable
than ever, but is otherwise well. Last night was very threatening, and
the fishermen say that we are in for a storm. I must try to watch it and
learn the weather signs. To-day is a grey day, and the sun as I write is
hidden in thick clouds, high over Kettleness. Everything is grey--except
the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock;
grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the
grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea
is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar,
muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey
mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and
there is a "brool" over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom.
Dark figures are on the beach here and there, sometimes half shrouded in
the mist, and seem "men like trees walking." The fishing-boats are
racing for home, and rise and dip in the ground swell as they sweep into
the harbour, bending to the scuppers. Here comes old Mr. Swales. He is
making straight for me, and I can see, by the way he lifts his hat, that
he wants to talk....

I have been quite touched by the change in the poor old man. When he sat
down beside me, he said in a very gentle way:--

"I want to say something to you, miss." I could see he was not at ease,
so I took his poor old wrinkled hand in mine and asked him to speak
fully; so he said, leaving his hand in mine:--

"I'm afraid, my deary, that I must have shocked you by all the wicked
things I've been sayin' about the dead, and such like, for weeks past;
but I didn't mean them, and I want ye to remember that when I'm gone. We
aud folks that be daffled, and with one foot abaft the krok-hooal, don't
altogether like to think of it, and we don't want to feel scart of it;
an' that's why I've took to makin' light of it, so that I'd cheer up my
own heart a bit. But, Lord love ye, miss, I ain't afraid of dyin', not a
bit; only I don't want to die if I can help it. My time must be nigh at
hand now, for I be aud, and a hundred years is too much for any man to
expect; and I'm so nigh it that the Aud Man is already whettin' his
scythe. Ye see, I can't get out o' the habit of caffin' about it all at
once; the chafts will wag as they be used to. Some day soon the Angel of
Death will sound his trumpet for me. But don't ye dooal an' greet, my
deary!"--for he saw that I was crying--"if he should come this very
night I'd not refuse to answer his call. For life be, after all, only a
waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that
we can rightly depend on. But I'm content, for it's comin' to me, my
deary, and comin' quick. It may be comin' while we be lookin' and
wonderin'. Maybe it's in that wind out over the sea that's bringin' with
it loss and wreck, and sore distress, and sad hearts. Look! look!" he
cried suddenly. "There's something in that wind and in the hoast beyont
that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells like death. It's in the
air; I feel it comin'. Lord, make me answer cheerful when my call
comes!" He held up his arms devoutly, and raised his hat. His mouth
moved as though he were praying. After a few minutes' silence, he got
up, shook hands with me, and blessed me, and said good-bye, and hobbled
off. It all touched me, and upset me very much.

I was glad when the coastguard came along, with his spy-glass under his
arm. He stopped to talk with me, as he always does, but all the time
kept looking at a strange ship.

"I can't make her out," he said; "she's a Russian, by the look of her;
but she's knocking about in the queerest way. She doesn't know her mind
a bit; she seems to see the storm coming, but can't decide whether to
run up north in the open, or to put in here. Look there again! She is
steered mighty strangely, for she doesn't mind the hand on the wheel;
changes about with every puff of wind. We'll hear more of her before
this time to-morrow."




CHAPTER VII

CUTTING FROM "THE DAILYGRAPH," 8 AUGUST


(_Pasted in Mina Murray's Journal._)

From a Correspondent.

_Whitby_.

One of the greatest and suddenest storms on record has just been
experienced here, with results both strange and unique. The weather had
been somewhat sultry, but not to any degree uncommon in the month of
August. Saturday evening was as fine as was ever known, and the great
body of holiday-makers laid out yesterday for visits to Mulgrave Woods,
Robin Hood's Bay, Rig Mill, Runswick, Staithes, and the various trips in
the neighbourhood of Whitby. The steamers _Emma_ and _Scarborough_ made
trips up and down the coast, and there was an unusual amount of
"tripping" both to and from Whitby. The day was unusually fine till the
afternoon, when some of the gossips who frequent the East Cliff
churchyard, and from that commanding eminence watch the wide sweep of
sea visible to the north and east, called attention to a sudden show of
"mares'-tails" high in the sky to the north-west. The wind was then
blowing from the south-west in the mild degree which in barometrical
language is ranked "No. 2: light breeze." The coastguard on duty at once
made report, and one old fisherman, who for more than half a century has
kept watch on weather signs from the East Cliff, foretold in an emphatic
manner the coming of a sudden storm. The approach of sunset was so very
beautiful, so grand in its masses of splendidly-coloured clouds, that
there was quite an assemblage on the walk along the cliff in the old
churchyard to enjoy the beauty. Before the sun dipped below the black
mass of Kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky, its
downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset-colour--flame,
purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold; with here and
there masses not large, but of seemingly absolute blackness, in all
sorts of shapes, as well outlined as colossal silhouettes. The
experience was not lost on the painters, and doubtless some of the
sketches of the "Prelude to the Great Storm" will grace the R. A. and R.
I. walls in May next. More than one captain made up his mind then and
there that his "cobble" or his "mule," as they term the different
classes of boats, would remain in the harbour till the storm had passed.
The wind fell away entirely during the evening, and at midnight there
was a dead calm, a sultry heat, and that prevailing intensity which, on
the approach of thunder, affects persons of a sensitive nature. There
were but few lights in sight at sea, for even the coasting steamers,
which usually "hug" the shore so closely, kept well to seaward, and but
few fishing-boats were in sight. The only sail noticeable was a foreign
schooner with all sails set, which was seemingly going westwards. The
foolhardiness or ignorance of her officers was a prolific theme for
comment whilst she remained in sight, and efforts were made to signal
her to reduce sail in face of her danger. Before the night shut down she
was seen with sails idly flapping as she gently rolled on the undulating
swell of the sea,

    "As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean."

Shortly before ten o'clock the stillness of the air grew quite
oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a sheep
inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly heard, and the
band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a discord in the
great harmony of nature's silence. A little after midnight came a
strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to
carry a strange, faint, hollow booming.

Then without warning the tempest broke. With a rapidity which, at the
time, seemed incredible, and even afterwards is impossible to realize,
the whole aspect of nature at once became convulsed. The waves rose in
growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, till in a very few minutes
the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and devouring monster.
White-crested waves beat madly on the level sands and rushed up the
shelving cliffs; others broke over the piers, and with their spume swept
the lanthorns of the lighthouses which rise from the end of either pier
of Whitby Harbour. The wind roared like thunder, and blew with such
force that it was with difficulty that even strong men kept their feet,
or clung with grim clasp to the iron stanchions. It was found necessary
to clear the entire piers from the mass of onlookers, or else the
fatalities of the night would have been increased manifold. To add to
the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came
drifting inland--white, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion,
so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of
imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were
touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many
a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by. At times the mist
cleared, and the sea for some distance could be seen in the glare of the
lightning, which now came thick and fast, followed by such sudden peals
of thunder that the whole sky overhead seemed trembling under the shock
of the footsteps of the storm.

Some of the scenes thus revealed were of immeasurable grandeur and of
absorbing interest--the sea, running mountains high, threw skywards with
each wave mighty masses of white foam, which the tempest seemed to
snatch at and whirl away into space; here and there a fishing-boat, with
a rag of sail, running madly for shelter before the blast; now and again
the white wings of a storm-tossed sea-bird. On the summit of the East
Cliff the new searchlight was ready for experiment, but had not yet been
tried. The officers in charge of it got it into working order, and in
the pauses of the inrushing mist swept with it the surface of the sea.
Once or twice its service was most effective, as when a fishing-boat,
with gunwale under water, rushed into the harbour, able, by the guidance
of the sheltering light, to avoid the danger of dashing against the
piers. As each boat achieved the safety of the port there was a shout of
joy from the mass of people on shore, a shout which for a moment seemed
to cleave the gale and was then swept away in its rush.

Before long the searchlight discovered some distance away a schooner
with all sails set, apparently the same vessel which had been noticed
earlier in the evening. The wind had by this time backed to the east,
and there was a shudder amongst the watchers on the cliff as they
realized the terrible danger in which she now was. Between her and the
port lay the great flat reef on which so many good ships have from time
to time suffered, and, with the wind blowing from its present quarter,
it would be quite impossible that she should fetch the entrance of the
harbour. It was now nearly the hour of high tide, but the waves were so
great that in their troughs the shallows of the shore were almost
visible, and the schooner, with all sails set, was rushing with such
speed that, in the words of one old salt, "she must fetch up somewhere,
if it was only in hell." Then came another rush of sea-fog, greater than
any hitherto--a mass of dank mist, which seemed to close on all things
like a grey pall, and left available to men only the organ of hearing,
for the roar of the tempest, and the crash of the thunder, and the
booming of the mighty billows came through the damp oblivion even louder
than before. The rays of the searchlight were kept fixed on the harbour
mouth across the East Pier, where the shock was expected, and men waited
breathless. The wind suddenly shifted to the north-east, and the remnant
of the sea-fog melted in the blast; and then, _mirabile dictu_, between
the piers, leaping from wave to wave as it rushed at headlong speed,
swept the strange schooner before the blast, with all sail set, and
gained the safety of the harbour. The searchlight followed her, and a
shudder ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a
corpse, with drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each
motion of the ship. No other form could be seen on deck at all. A great
awe came on all as they realised that the ship, as if by a miracle, had
found the harbour, unsteered save by the hand of a dead man! However,
all took place more quickly than it takes to write these words. The
schooner paused not, but rushing across the harbour, pitched herself on
that accumulation of sand and gravel washed by many tides and many
storms into the south-east corner of the pier jutting under the East
Cliff, known locally as Tate Hill Pier.

There was of course a considerable concussion as the vessel drove up on
the sand heap. Every spar, rope, and stay was strained, and some of the
"top-hammer" came crashing down. But, strangest of all, the very instant
the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as
if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow
on the sand. Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard
hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat
tombstones--"thruff-steans" or "through-stones," as they call them in
the Whitby vernacular--actually project over where the sustaining cliff
has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed
intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.

It so happened that there was no one at the moment on Tate Hill Pier, as
all those whose houses are in close proximity were either in bed or were
out on the heights above. Thus the coastguard on duty on the eastern
side of the harbour, who at once ran down to the little pier, was the
first to climb on board. The men working the searchlight, after scouring
the entrance of the harbour without seeing anything, then turned the
light on the derelict and kept it there. The coastguard ran aft, and
when he came beside the wheel, bent over to examine it, and recoiled at
once as though under some sudden emotion. This seemed to pique general
curiosity, and quite a number of people began to run. It is a good way
round from the West Cliff by the Drawbridge to Tate Hill Pier, but your
correspondent is a fairly good runner, and came well ahead of the crowd.
When I arrived, however, I found already assembled on the pier a crowd,
whom the coastguard and police refused to allow to come on board. By the
courtesy of the chief boatman, I was, as your correspondent, permitted
to climb on deck, and was one of a small group who saw the dead seaman
whilst actually lashed to the wheel.

It was no wonder that the coastguard was surprised, or even awed, for
not often can such a sight have been seen. The man was simply fastened
by his hands, tied one over the other, to a spoke of the wheel. Between
the inner hand and the wood was a crucifix, the set of beads on which it
was fastened being around both wrists and wheel, and all kept fast by
the binding cords. The poor fellow may have been seated at one time, but
the flapping and buffeting of the sails had worked through the rudder of
the wheel and dragged him to and fro, so that the cords with which he
was tied had cut the flesh to the bone. Accurate note was made of the
state of things, and a doctor--Surgeon J. M. Caffyn, of 33, East Elliot
Place--who came immediately after me, declared, after making
examination, that the man must have been dead for quite two days. In his
pocket was a bottle, carefully corked, empty save for a little roll of
paper, which proved to be the addendum to the log. The coastguard said
the man must have tied up his own hands, fastening the knots with his
teeth. The fact that a coastguard was the first on board may save some
complications, later on, in the Admiralty Court; for coastguards cannot
claim the salvage which is the right of the first civilian entering on a
derelict. Already, however, the legal tongues are wagging, and one young
law student is loudly asserting that the rights of the owner are already
completely sacrificed, his property being held in contravention of the
statutes of mortmain, since the tiller, as emblemship, if not proof, of
delegated possession, is held in a _dead hand_. It is needless to say
that the dead steersman has been reverently removed from the place where
he held his honourable watch and ward till death--a steadfastness as
noble as that of the young Casabianca--and placed in the mortuary to
await inquest.

Already the sudden storm is passing, and its fierceness is abating;
crowds are scattering homeward, and the sky is beginning to redden over
the Yorkshire wolds. I shall send, in time for your next issue, further
details of the derelict ship which found her way so miraculously into
harbour in the storm.

_Whitby_

_9 August._--The sequel to the strange arrival of the derelict in the
storm last night is almost more startling than the thing itself. It
turns out that the schooner is a Russian from Varna, and is called the
_Demeter_. She is almost entirely in ballast of silver sand, with only a
small amount of cargo--a number of great wooden boxes filled with mould.
This cargo was consigned to a Whitby solicitor, Mr. S. F. Billington, of
7, The Crescent, who this morning went aboard and formally took
possession of the goods consigned to him. The Russian consul, too,
acting for the charter-party, took formal possession of the ship, and
paid all harbour dues, etc. Nothing is talked about here to-day except
the strange coincidence; the officials of the Board of Trade have been
most exacting in seeing that every compliance has been made with
existing regulations. As the matter is to be a "nine days' wonder," they
are evidently determined that there shall be no cause of after
complaint. A good deal of interest was abroad concerning the dog which
landed when the ship struck, and more than a few of the members of the
S. P. C. A., which is very strong in Whitby, have tried to befriend the
animal. To the general disappointment, however, it was not to be found;
it seems to have disappeared entirely from the town. It may be that it
was frightened and made its way on to the moors, where it is still
hiding in terror. There are some who look with dread on such a
possibility, lest later on it should in itself become a danger, for it
is evidently a fierce brute. Early this morning a large dog, a half-bred
mastiff belonging to a coal merchant close to Tate Hill Pier, was found
dead in the roadway opposite to its master's yard. It had been fighting,
and manifestly had had a savage opponent, for its throat was torn away,
and its belly was slit open as if with a savage claw.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--By the kindness of the Board of Trade inspector, I have been
permitted to look over the log-book of the _Demeter_, which was in order
up to within three days, but contained nothing of special interest
except as to facts of missing men. The greatest interest, however, is
with regard to the paper found in the bottle, which was to-day produced
at the inquest; and a more strange narrative than the two between them
unfold it has not been my lot to come across. As there is no motive for
concealment, I am permitted to use them, and accordingly send you a
rescript, simply omitting technical details of seamanship and
supercargo. It almost seems as though the captain had been seized with
some kind of mania before he had got well into blue water, and that
this had developed persistently throughout the voyage. Of course my
statement must be taken _cum grano_, since I am writing from the
dictation of a clerk of the Russian consul, who kindly translated for
me, time being short.

                         LOG OF THE "DEMETER."


_Varna to Whitby._

_Written 18 July, things so strange happening, that I shall keep
accurate note henceforth till we land._

       *       *       *       *       *

On 6 July we finished taking in cargo, silver sand and boxes of earth.
At noon set sail. East wind, fresh. Crew, five hands ... two mates,
cook, and myself (captain).

       *       *       *       *       *

On 11 July at dawn entered Bosphorus. Boarded by Turkish Customs
officers. Backsheesh. All correct. Under way at 4 p. m.

       *       *       *       *       *

On 12 July through Dardanelles. More Customs officers and flagboat of
guarding squadron. Backsheesh again. Work of officers thorough, but
quick. Want us off soon. At dark passed into Archipelago.

       *       *       *       *       *

On 13 July passed Cape Matapan. Crew dissatisfied about something.
Seemed scared, but would not speak out.

       *       *       *       *       *

On 14 July was somewhat anxious about crew. Men all steady fellows, who
sailed with me before. Mate could not make out what was wrong; they only
told him there was _something_, and crossed themselves. Mate lost temper
with one of them that day and struck him. Expected fierce quarrel, but
all was quiet.

       *       *       *       *       *

On 16 July mate reported in the morning that one of crew, Petrofsky, was
missing. Could not account for it. Took larboard watch eight bells last
night; was relieved by Abramoff, but did not go to bunk. Men more
downcast than ever. All said they expected something of the kind, but
would not say more than there was _something_ aboard. Mate getting very
impatient with them; feared some trouble ahead.

       *       *       *       *       *

On 17 July, yesterday, one of the men, Olgaren, came to my cabin, and in
an awestruck way confided to me that he thought there was a strange man
aboard the ship. He said that in his watch he had been sheltering
behind the deck-house, as there was a rain-storm, when he saw a tall,
thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companion-way,
and go along the deck forward, and disappear. He followed cautiously,
but when he got to bows found no one, and the hatchways were all closed.
He was in a panic of superstitious fear, and I am afraid the panic may
spread. To allay it, I shall to-day search entire ship carefully from
stem to stern.

       *       *       *       *       *

Later in the day I got together the whole crew, and told them, as they
evidently thought there was some one in the ship, we would search from
stem to stern. First mate angry; said it was folly, and to yield to such
foolish ideas would demoralise the men; said he would engage to keep
them out of trouble with a handspike. I let him take the helm, while the
rest began thorough search, all keeping abreast, with lanterns: we left
no corner unsearched. As there were only the big wooden boxes, there
were no odd corners where a man could hide. Men much relieved when
search over, and went back to work cheerfully. First mate scowled, but
said nothing.

       *       *       *       *       *

_22 July_.--Rough weather last three days, and all hands busy with
sails--no time to be frightened. Men seem to have forgotten their dread.
Mate cheerful again, and all on good terms. Praised men for work in bad
weather. Passed Gibralter and out through Straits. All well.

       *       *       *       *       *

_24 July_.--There seems some doom over this ship. Already a hand short,
and entering on the Bay of Biscay with wild weather ahead, and yet last
night another man lost--disappeared. Like the first, he came off his
watch and was not seen again. Men all in a panic of fear; sent a round
robin, asking to have double watch, as they fear to be alone. Mate
angry. Fear there will be some trouble, as either he or the men will do
some violence.

       *       *       *       *       *

_28 July_.--Four days in hell, knocking about in a sort of maelstrom,
and the wind a tempest. No sleep for any one. Men all worn out. Hardly
know how to set a watch, since no one fit to go on. Second mate
volunteered to steer and watch, and let men snatch a few hours' sleep.
Wind abating; seas still terrific, but feel them less, as ship is
steadier.

       *       *       *       *       *

_29 July_.--Another tragedy. Had single watch to-night, as crew too
tired to double. When morning watch came on deck could find no one
except steersman. Raised outcry, and all came on deck. Thorough search,
but no one found. Are now without second mate, and crew in a panic. Mate
and I agreed to go armed henceforth and wait for any sign of cause.

       *       *       *       *       *

_30 July_.--Last night. Rejoiced we are nearing England. Weather fine,
all sails set. Retired worn out; slept soundly; awaked by mate telling
me that both man of watch and steersman missing. Only self and mate and
two hands left to work ship.

       *       *       *       *       *

_1 August_.--Two days of fog, and not a sail sighted. Had hoped when in
the English Channel to be able to signal for help or get in somewhere.
Not having power to work sails, have to run before wind. Dare not lower,
as could not raise them again. We seem to be drifting to some terrible
doom. Mate now more demoralised than either of men. His stronger nature
seems to have worked inwardly against himself. Men are beyond fear,
working stolidly and patiently, with minds made up to worst. They are
Russian, he Roumanian.

       *       *       *       *       *

_2 August, midnight_.--Woke up from few minutes' sleep by hearing a cry,
seemingly outside my port. Could see nothing in fog. Rushed on deck, and
ran against mate. Tells me heard cry and ran, but no sign of man on
watch. One more gone. Lord, help us! Mate says we must be past Straits
of Dover, as in a moment of fog lifting he saw North Foreland, just as
he heard the man cry out. If so we are now off in the North Sea, and
only God can guide us in the fog, which seems to move with us; and God
seems to have deserted us.

       *       *       *       *       *

_3 August_.--At midnight I went to relieve the man at the wheel, and
when I got to it found no one there. The wind was steady, and as we ran
before it there was no yawing. I dared not leave it, so shouted for the
mate. After a few seconds he rushed up on deck in his flannels. He
looked wild-eyed and haggard, and I greatly fear his reason has given
way. He came close to me and whispered hoarsely, with his mouth to my
ear, as though fearing the very air might hear: "_It_ is here; I know
it, now. On the watch last night I saw It, like a man, tall and thin,
and ghastly pale. It was in the bows, and looking out. I crept behind
It, and gave It my knife; but the knife went through It, empty as the
air." And as he spoke he took his knife and drove it savagely into
space. Then he went on: "But It is here, and I'll find It. It is in the
hold, perhaps in one of those boxes. I'll unscrew them one by one and
see. You work the helm." And, with a warning look and his finger on his
lip, he went below. There was springing up a choppy wind, and I could
not leave the helm. I saw him come out on deck again with a tool-chest
and a lantern, and go down the forward hatchway. He is mad, stark,
raving mad, and it's no use my trying to stop him. He can't hurt those
big boxes: they are invoiced as "clay," and to pull them about is as
harmless a thing as he can do. So here I stay, and mind the helm, and
write these notes. I can only trust in God and wait till the fog clears.
Then, if I can't steer to any harbour with the wind that is, I shall cut
down sails and lie by, and signal for help....

       *       *       *       *       *

It is nearly all over now. Just as I was beginning to hope that the mate
would come out calmer--for I heard him knocking away at something in the
hold, and work is good for him--there came up the hatchway a sudden,
startled scream, which made my blood run cold, and up on the deck he
came as if shot from a gun--a raging madman, with his eyes rolling and
his face convulsed with fear. "Save me! save me!" he cried, and then
looked round on the blanket of fog. His horror turned to despair, and in
a steady voice he said: "You had better come too, captain, before it is
too late. _He_ is there. I know the secret now. The sea will save me
from Him, and it is all that is left!" Before I could say a word, or
move forward to seize him, he sprang on the bulwark and deliberately
threw himself into the sea. I suppose I know the secret too, now. It was
this madman who had got rid of the men one by one, and now he has
followed them himself. God help me! How am I to account for all these
horrors when I get to port? _When_ I get to port! Will that ever be?

       *       *       *       *       *

_4 August._--Still fog, which the sunrise cannot pierce. I know there is
sunrise because I am a sailor, why else I know not. I dared not go
below, I dared not leave the helm; so here all night I stayed, and in
the dimness of the night I saw It--Him! God forgive me, but the mate was
right to jump overboard. It was better to die like a man; to die like a
sailor in blue water no man can object. But I am captain, and I must not
leave my ship. But I shall baffle this fiend or monster, for I shall tie
my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with
them I shall tie that which He--It!--dare not touch; and then, come good
wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain. I am
growing weaker, and the night is coming on. If He can look me in the
face again, I may not have time to act.... If we are wrecked, mayhap
this bottle may be found, and those who find it may understand; if not,
... well, then all men shall know that I have been true to my trust. God
and the Blessed Virgin and the saints help a poor ignorant soul trying
to do his duty....

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course the verdict was an open one. There is no evidence to adduce;
and whether or not the man himself committed the murders there is now
none to say. The folk here hold almost universally that the captain is
simply a hero, and he is to be given a public funeral. Already it is
arranged that his body is to be taken with a train of boats up the Esk
for a piece and then brought back to Tate Hill Pier and up the abbey
steps; for he is to be buried in the churchyard on the cliff. The owners
of more than a hundred boats have already given in their names as
wishing to follow him to the grave.

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much
mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I
believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so
will end this one more "mystery of the sea."


_Mina Murray's Journal._

_8 August._--Lucy was very restless all night, and I, too, could not
sleep. The storm was fearful, and as it boomed loudly among the
chimney-pots, it made me shudder. When a sharp puff came it seemed to be
like a distant gun. Strangely enough, Lucy did not wake; but she got up
twice and dressed herself. Fortunately, each time I awoke in time and
managed to undress her without waking her, and got her back to bed. It
is a very strange thing, this sleep-walking, for as soon as her will is
thwarted in any physical way, her intention, if there be any,
disappears, and she yields herself almost exactly to the routine of her
life.

Early in the morning we both got up and went down to the harbour to see
if anything had happened in the night. There were very few people about,
and though the sun was bright, and the air clear and fresh, the big,
grim-looking waves, that seemed dark themselves because the foam that
topped them was like snow, forced themselves in through the narrow mouth
of the harbour--like a bullying man going through a crowd. Somehow I
felt glad that Jonathan was not on the sea last night, but on land. But,
oh, is he on land or sea? Where is he, and how? I am getting fearfully
anxious about him. If I only knew what to do, and could do anything!

       *       *       *       *       *

_10 August._--The funeral of the poor sea-captain to-day was most
touching. Every boat in the harbour seemed to be there, and the coffin
was carried by captains all the way from Tate Hill Pier up to the
churchyard. Lucy came with me, and we went early to our old seat, whilst
the cortège of boats went up the river to the Viaduct and came down
again. We had a lovely view, and saw the procession nearly all the way.
The poor fellow was laid to rest quite near our seat so that we stood on
it when the time came and saw everything. Poor Lucy seemed much upset.
She was restless and uneasy all the time, and I cannot but think that
her dreaming at night is telling on her. She is quite odd in one thing:
she will not admit to me that there is any cause for restlessness; or if
there be, she does not understand it herself. There is an additional
cause in that poor old Mr. Swales was found dead this morning on our
seat, his neck being broken. He had evidently, as the doctor said,
fallen back in the seat in some sort of fright, for there was a look of
fear and horror on his face that the men said made them shudder. Poor
dear old man! Perhaps he had seen Death with his dying eyes! Lucy is so
sweet and sensitive that she feels influences more acutely than other
people do. Just now she was quite upset by a little thing which I did
not much heed, though I am myself very fond of animals. One of the men
who came up here often to look for the boats was followed by his dog.
The dog is always with him. They are both quiet persons, and I never saw
the man angry, nor heard the dog bark. During the service the dog would
not come to its master, who was on the seat with us, but kept a few
yards off, barking and howling. Its master spoke to it gently, and then
harshly, and then angrily; but it would neither come nor cease to make a
noise. It was in a sort of fury, with its eyes savage, and all its hairs
bristling out like a cat's tail when puss is on the war-path. Finally
the man, too, got angry, and jumped down and kicked the dog, and then
took it by the scruff of the neck and half dragged and half threw it on
the tombstone on which the seat is fixed. The moment it touched the
stone the poor thing became quiet and fell all into a tremble. It did
not try to get away, but crouched down, quivering and cowering, and was
in such a pitiable state of terror that I tried, though without effect,
to comfort it. Lucy was full of pity, too, but she did not attempt to
touch the dog, but looked at it in an agonised sort of way. I greatly
fear that she is of too super-sensitive a nature to go through the world
without trouble. She will be dreaming of this to-night, I am sure. The
whole agglomeration of things--the ship steered into port by a dead
man; his attitude, tied to the wheel with a crucifix and beads; the
touching funeral; the dog, now furious and now in terror--will all
afford material for her dreams.

I think it will be best for her to go to bed tired out physically, so I
shall take her for a long walk by the cliffs to Robin Hood's Bay and
back. She ought not to have much inclination for sleep-walking then.




CHAPTER VIII

MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL


_Same day, 11 o'clock p. m._--Oh, but I am tired! If it were not that I
had made my diary a duty I should not open it to-night. We had a lovely
walk. Lucy, after a while, was in gay spirits, owing, I think, to some
dear cows who came nosing towards us in a field close to the lighthouse,
and frightened the wits out of us. I believe we forgot everything
except, of course, personal fear, and it seemed to wipe the slate clean
and give us a fresh start. We had a capital "severe tea" at Robin Hood's
Bay in a sweet little old-fashioned inn, with a bow-window right over
the seaweed-covered rocks of the strand. I believe we should have
shocked the "New Woman" with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless
them! Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest,
and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls. Lucy was
really tired, and we intended to creep off to bed as soon as we could.
The young curate came in, however, and Mrs. Westenra asked him to stay
for supper. Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the dusty miller; I
know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic. I think that
some day the bishops must get together and see about breeding up a new
class of curates, who don't take supper, no matter how they may be
pressed to, and who will know when girls are tired. Lucy is asleep and
breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and
looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her
only in the drawing-room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now.
Some of the "New Women" writers will some day start an idea that men and
women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or
accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to
accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make
of it, too! There's some consolation in that. I am so happy to-night,
because dear Lucy seems better. I really believe she has turned the
corner, and that we are over her troubles with dreaming. I should be
quite happy if I only knew if Jonathan.... God bless and keep him.

       *       *       *       *       *

_11 August, 3 a. m._--Diary again. No sleep now, so I may as well write.
I am too agitated to sleep. We have had such an adventure, such an
agonising experience. I fell asleep as soon as I had closed my diary....
Suddenly I became broad awake, and sat up, with a horrible sense of fear
upon me, and of some feeling of emptiness around me. The room was dark,
so I could not see Lucy's bed; I stole across and felt for her. The bed
was empty. I lit a match and found that she was not in the room. The
door was shut, but not locked, as I had left it. I feared to wake her
mother, who has been more than usually ill lately, so threw on some
clothes and got ready to look for her. As I was leaving the room it
struck me that the clothes she wore might give me some clue to her
dreaming intention. Dressing-gown would mean house; dress, outside.
Dressing-gown and dress were both in their places. "Thank God," I said
to myself, "she cannot be far, as she is only in her nightdress." I ran
downstairs and looked in the sitting-room. Not there! Then I looked in
all the other open rooms of the house, with an ever-growing fear
chilling my heart. Finally I came to the hall door and found it open. It
was not wide open, but the catch of the lock had not caught. The people
of the house are careful to lock the door every night, so I feared that
Lucy must have gone out as she was. There was no time to think of what
might happen; a vague, overmastering fear obscured all details. I took a
big, heavy shawl and ran out. The clock was striking one as I was in the
Crescent, and there was not a soul in sight. I ran along the North
Terrace, but could see no sign of the white figure which I expected. At
the edge of the West Cliff above the pier I looked across the harbour to
the East Cliff, in the hope or fear--I don't know which--of seeing Lucy
in our favourite seat. There was a bright full moon, with heavy black,
driving clouds, which threw the whole scene into a fleeting diorama of
light and shade as they sailed across. For a moment or two I could see
nothing, as the shadow of a cloud obscured St. Mary's Church and all
around it. Then as the cloud passed I could see the ruins of the abbey
coming into view; and as the edge of a narrow band of light as sharp as
a sword-cut moved along, the church and the churchyard became gradually
visible. Whatever my expectation was, it was not disappointed, for
there, on our favourite seat, the silver light of the moon struck a
half-reclining figure, snowy white. The coming of the cloud was too
quick for me to see much, for shadow shut down on light almost
immediately; but it seemed to me as though something dark stood behind
the seat where the white figure shone, and bent over it. What it was,
whether man or beast, I could not tell; I did not wait to catch another
glance, but flew down the steep steps to the pier and along by the
fish-market to the bridge, which was the only way to reach the East
Cliff. The town seemed as dead, for not a soul did I see; I rejoiced
that it was so, for I wanted no witness of poor Lucy's condition. The
time and distance seemed endless, and my knees trembled and my breath
came laboured as I toiled up the endless steps to the abbey. I must have
gone fast, and yet it seemed to me as if my feet were weighted with
lead, and as though every joint in my body were rusty. When I got almost
to the top I could see the seat and the white figure, for I was now
close enough to distinguish it even through the spells of shadow. There
was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the
half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, "Lucy! Lucy!" and
something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face
and red, gleaming eyes. Lucy did not answer, and I ran on to the
entrance of the churchyard. As I entered, the church was between me and
the seat, and for a minute or so I lost sight of her. When I came in
view again the cloud had passed, and the moonlight struck so brilliantly
that I could see Lucy half reclining with her head lying over the back
of the seat. She was quite alone, and there was not a sign of any living
thing about.

When I bent over her I could see that she was still asleep. Her lips
were parted, and she was breathing--not softly as usual with her, but in
long, heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every
breath. As I came close, she put up her hand in her sleep and pulled the
collar of her nightdress close around her throat. Whilst she did so
there came a little shudder through her, as though she felt the cold. I
flung the warm shawl over her, and drew the edges tight round her neck,
for I dreaded lest she should get some deadly chill from the night air,
unclad as she was. I feared to wake her all at once, so, in order to
have my hands free that I might help her, I fastened the shawl at her
throat with a big safety-pin; but I must have been clumsy in my anxiety
and pinched or pricked her with it, for by-and-by, when her breathing
became quieter, she put her hand to her throat again and moaned. When I
had her carefully wrapped up I put my shoes on her feet and then began
very gently to wake her. At first she did not respond; but gradually she
became more and more uneasy in her sleep, moaning and sighing
occasionally. At last, as time was passing fast, and, for many other
reasons, I wished to get her home at once, I shook her more forcibly,
till finally she opened her eyes and awoke. She did not seem surprised
to see me, as, of course, she did not realise all at once where she was.
Lucy always wakes prettily, and even at such a time, when her body must
have been chilled with cold, and her mind somewhat appalled at waking
unclad in a churchyard at night, she did not lose her grace. She
trembled a little, and clung to me; when I told her to come at once with
me home she rose without a word, with the obedience of a child. As we
passed along, the gravel hurt my feet, and Lucy noticed me wince. She
stopped and wanted to insist upon my taking my shoes; but I would not.
However, when we got to the pathway outside the churchyard, where there
was a puddle of water, remaining from the storm, I daubed my feet with
mud, using each foot in turn on the other, so that as we went home, no
one, in case we should meet any one, should notice my bare feet.

Fortune favoured us, and we got home without meeting a soul. Once we saw
a man, who seemed not quite sober, passing along a street in front of
us; but we hid in a door till he had disappeared up an opening such as
there are here, steep little closes, or "wynds," as they call them in
Scotland. My heart beat so loud all the time that sometimes I thought I
should faint. I was filled with anxiety about Lucy, not only for her
health, lest she should suffer from the exposure, but for her reputation
in case the story should get wind. When we got in, and had washed our
feet, and had said a prayer of thankfulness together, I tucked her into
bed. Before falling asleep she asked--even implored--me not to say a
word to any one, even her mother, about her sleep-walking adventure. I
hesitated at first to promise; but on thinking of the state of her
mother's health, and how the knowledge of such a thing would fret her,
and thinking, too, of how such a story might become distorted--nay,
infallibly would--in case it should leak out, I thought it wiser to do
so. I hope I did right. I have locked the door, and the key is tied to
my wrist, so perhaps I shall not be again disturbed. Lucy is sleeping
soundly; the reflex of the dawn is high and far over the sea....

       *       *       *       *       *

_Same day, noon._--All goes well. Lucy slept till I woke her and seemed
not to have even changed her side. The adventure of the night does not
seem to have harmed her; on the contrary, it has benefited her, for she
looks better this morning than she has done for weeks. I was sorry to
notice that my clumsiness with the safety-pin hurt her. Indeed, it might
have been serious, for the skin of her throat was pierced. I must have
pinched up a piece of loose skin and have transfixed it, for there are
two little red points like pin-pricks, and on the band of her nightdress
was a drop of blood. When I apologised and was concerned about it, she
laughed and petted me, and said she did not even feel it. Fortunately it
cannot leave a scar, as it is so tiny.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Same day, night._--We passed a happy day. The air was clear, and the
sun bright, and there was a cool breeze. We took our lunch to Mulgrave
Woods, Mrs. Westenra driving by the road and Lucy and I walking by the
cliff-path and joining her at the gate. I felt a little sad myself, for
I could not but feel how _absolutely_ happy it would have been had
Jonathan been with me. But there! I must only be patient. In the evening
we strolled in the Casino Terrace, and heard some good music by Spohr
and Mackenzie, and went to bed early. Lucy seems more restful than she
has been for some time, and fell asleep at once. I shall lock the door
and secure the key the same as before, though I do not expect any
trouble to-night.

       *       *       *       *       *

_12 August._--My expectations were wrong, for twice during the night I
was wakened by Lucy trying to get out. She seemed, even in her sleep, to
be a little impatient at finding the door shut, and went back to bed
under a sort of protest. I woke with the dawn, and heard the birds
chirping outside of the window. Lucy woke, too, and, I was glad to see,
was even better than on the previous morning. All her old gaiety of
manner seemed to have come back, and she came and snuggled in beside me
and told me all about Arthur. I told her how anxious I was about
Jonathan, and then she tried to comfort me. Well, she succeeded
somewhat, for, though sympathy can't alter facts, it can help to make
them more bearable.

       *       *       *       *       *

_13 August._--Another quiet day, and to bed with the key on my wrist as
before. Again I awoke in the night, and found Lucy sitting up in bed,
still asleep, pointing to the window. I got up quietly, and pulling
aside the blind, looked out. It was brilliant moonlight, and the soft
effect of the light over the sea and sky--merged together in one great,
silent mystery--was beautiful beyond words. Between me and the moonlight
flitted a great bat, coming and going in great whirling circles. Once or
twice it came quite close, but was, I suppose, frightened at seeing me,
and flitted away across the harbour towards the abbey. When I came back
from the window Lucy had lain down again, and was sleeping peacefully.
She did not stir again all night.

       *       *       *       *       *

_14 August._--On the East Cliff, reading and writing all day. Lucy seems
to have become as much in love with the spot as I am, and it is hard to
get her away from it when it is time to come home for lunch or tea or
dinner. This afternoon she made a funny remark. We were coming home for
dinner, and had come to the top of the steps up from the West Pier and
stopped to look at the view, as we generally do. The setting sun, low
down in the sky, was just dropping behind Kettleness; the red light was
thrown over on the East Cliff and the old abbey, and seemed to bathe
everything in a beautiful rosy glow. We were silent for a while, and
suddenly Lucy murmured as if to herself:--

"His red eyes again! They are just the same." It was such an odd
expression, coming _apropos_ of nothing, that it quite startled me. I
slewed round a little, so as to see Lucy well without seeming to stare
at her, and saw that she was in a half-dreamy state, with an odd look on
her face that I could not quite make out; so I said nothing, but
followed her eyes. She appeared to be looking over at our own seat,
whereon was a dark figure seated alone. I was a little startled myself,
for it seemed for an instant as if the stranger had great eyes like
burning flames; but a second look dispelled the illusion. The red
sunlight was shining on the windows of St. Mary's Church behind our
seat, and as the sun dipped there was just sufficient change in the
refraction and reflection to make it appear as if the light moved. I
called Lucy's attention to the peculiar effect, and she became herself
with a start, but she looked sad all the same; it may have been that she
was thinking of that terrible night up there. We never refer to it; so I
said nothing, and we went home to dinner. Lucy had a headache and went
early to bed. I saw her asleep, and went out for a little stroll myself;
I walked along the cliffs to the westward, and was full of sweet
sadness, for I was thinking of Jonathan. When coming home--it was then
bright moonlight, so bright that, though the front of our part of the
Crescent was in shadow, everything could be well seen--I threw a glance
up at our window, and saw Lucy's head leaning out. I thought that
perhaps she was looking out for me, so I opened my handkerchief and
waved it. She did not notice or make any movement whatever. Just then,
the moonlight crept round an angle of the building, and the light fell
on the window. There distinctly was Lucy with her head lying up against
the side of the window-sill and her eyes shut. She was fast asleep, and
by her, seated on the window-sill, was something that looked like a
good-sized bird. I was afraid she might get a chill, so I ran upstairs,
but as I came into the room she was moving back to her bed, fast
asleep, and breathing heavily; she was holding her hand to her throat,
as though to protect it from cold.

I did not wake her, but tucked her up warmly; I have taken care that the
door is locked and the window securely fastened.

She looks so sweet as she sleeps; but she is paler than is her wont, and
there is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which I do not like. I
fear she is fretting about something. I wish I could find out what it
is.

       *       *       *       *       *

_15 August._--Rose later than usual. Lucy was languid and tired, and
slept on after we had been called. We had a happy surprise at breakfast.
Arthur's father is better, and wants the marriage to come off soon. Lucy
is full of quiet joy, and her mother is glad and sorry at once. Later on
in the day she told me the cause. She is grieved to lose Lucy as her
very own, but she is rejoiced that she is soon to have some one to
protect her. Poor dear, sweet lady! She confided to me that she has got
her death-warrant. She has not told Lucy, and made me promise secrecy;
her doctor told her that within a few months, at most, she must die, for
her heart is weakening. At any time, even now, a sudden shock would be
almost sure to kill her. Ah, we were wise to keep from her the affair of
the dreadful night of Lucy's sleep-walking.

       *       *       *       *       *

_17 August._--No diary for two whole days. I have not had the heart to
write. Some sort of shadowy pall seems to be coming over our happiness.
No news from Jonathan, and Lucy seems to be growing weaker, whilst her
mother's hours are numbering to a close. I do not understand Lucy's
fading away as she is doing. She eats well and sleeps well, and enjoys
the fresh air; but all the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and
she gets weaker and more languid day by day; at night I hear her gasping
as if for air. I keep the key of our door always fastened to my wrist at
night, but she gets up and walks about the room, and sits at the open
window. Last night I found her leaning out when I woke up, and when I
tried to wake her I could not; she was in a faint. When I managed to
restore her she was as weak as water, and cried silently between long,
painful struggles for breath. When I asked her how she came to be at the
window she shook her head and turned away. I trust her feeling ill may
not be from that unlucky prick of the safety-pin. I looked at her throat
just now as she lay asleep, and the tiny wounds seem not to have healed.
They are still open, and, if anything, larger than before, and the
edges of them are faintly white. They are like little white dots with
red centres. Unless they heal within a day or two, I shall insist on the
doctor seeing about them.


_Letter, Samuel F. Billington & Son, Solicitors, Whitby, to Messrs.
Carter, Paterson & Co., London._

"_17 August._

"Dear Sirs,--

"Herewith please receive invoice of goods sent by Great Northern
Railway. Same are to be delivered at Carfax, near Purfleet, immediately
on receipt at goods station King's Cross. The house is at present empty,
but enclosed please find keys, all of which are labelled.

"You will please deposit the boxes, fifty in number, which form the
consignment, in the partially ruined building forming part of the house
and marked 'A' on rough diagram enclosed. Your agent will easily
recognise the locality, as it is the ancient chapel of the mansion. The
goods leave by the train at 9:30 to-night, and will be due at King's
Cross at 4:30 to-morrow afternoon. As our client wishes the delivery
made as soon as possible, we shall be obliged by your having teams ready
at King's Cross at the time named and forthwith conveying the goods to
destination. In order to obviate any delays possible through any routine
requirements as to payment in your departments, we enclose cheque
herewith for ten pounds (£10), receipt of which please acknowledge.
Should the charge be less than this amount, you can return balance; if
greater, we shall at once send cheque for difference on hearing from
you. You are to leave the keys on coming away in the main hall of the
house, where the proprietor may get them on his entering the house by
means of his duplicate key.

"Pray do not take us as exceeding the bounds of business courtesy in
pressing you in all ways to use the utmost expedition.

_"We are, dear Sirs,

"Faithfully yours,

"SAMUEL F. BILLINGTON & SON."_


_Letter, Messrs. Carter, Paterson & Co., London, to Messrs. Billington &
Son, Whitby._

"_21 August._

"Dear Sirs,--

"We beg to acknowledge £10 received and to return cheque £1 17s. 9d,
amount of overplus, as shown in receipted account herewith. Goods are
delivered in exact accordance with instructions, and keys left in parcel
in main hall, as directed.

"We are, dear Sirs,

"Yours respectfully.

"_Pro_ CARTER, PATERSON & CO."


_Mina Murray's Journal._

_18 August._--I am happy to-day, and write sitting on the seat in the
churchyard. Lucy is ever so much better. Last night she slept well all
night, and did not disturb me once. The roses seem coming back already
to her cheeks, though she is still sadly pale and wan-looking. If she
were in any way anæmic I could understand it, but she is not. She is in
gay spirits and full of life and cheerfulness. All the morbid reticence
seems to have passed from her, and she has just reminded me, as if I
needed any reminding, of _that_ night, and that it was here, on this
very seat, I found her asleep. As she told me she tapped playfully with
the heel of her boot on the stone slab and said:--

"My poor little feet didn't make much noise then! I daresay poor old Mr.
Swales would have told me that it was because I didn't want to wake up
Geordie." As she was in such a communicative humour, I asked her if she
had dreamed at all that night. Before she answered, that sweet, puckered
look came into her forehead, which Arthur--I call him Arthur from her
habit--says he loves; and, indeed, I don't wonder that he does. Then she
went on in a half-dreaming kind of way, as if trying to recall it to
herself:--

"I didn't quite dream; but it all seemed to be real. I only wanted to be
here in this spot--I don't know why, for I was afraid of something--I
don't know what. I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing
through the streets and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by, and
I leaned over to look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling--the
whole town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howling at once--as
I went up the steps. Then I had a vague memory of something long and
dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the sunset, and something very
sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking
into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have
heard there is to drowning men; and then everything seemed passing away
from me; my soul seemed to go out from my body and float about the air.
I seem to remember that once the West Lighthouse was right under me,
and then there was a sort of agonising feeling, as if I were in an
earthquake, and I came back and found you shaking my body. I saw you do
it before I felt you."

Then she began to laugh. It seemed a little uncanny to me, and I
listened to her breathlessly. I did not quite like it, and thought it
better not to keep her mind on the subject, so we drifted on to other
subjects, and Lucy was like her old self again. When we got home the
fresh breeze had braced her up, and her pale cheeks were really more
rosy. Her mother rejoiced when she saw her, and we all spent a very
happy evening together.

       *       *       *       *       *

_19 August._--Joy, joy, joy! although not all joy. At last, news of
Jonathan. The dear fellow has been ill; that is why he did not write. I
am not afraid to think it or say it, now that I know. Mr. Hawkins sent
me on the letter, and wrote himself, oh, so kindly. I am to leave in the
morning and go over to Jonathan, and to help to nurse him if necessary,
and to bring him home. Mr. Hawkins says it would not be a bad thing if
we were to be married out there. I have cried over the good Sister's
letter till I can feel it wet against my bosom, where it lies. It is of
Jonathan, and must be next my heart, for he is _in_ my heart. My journey
is all mapped out, and my luggage ready. I am only taking one change of
dress; Lucy will bring my trunk to London and keep it till I send for
it, for it may be that ... I must write no more; I must keep it to say
to Jonathan, my husband. The letter that he has seen and touched must
comfort me till we meet.


_Letter, Sister Agatha, Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary,
Buda-Pesth, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray._

"_12 August._

"Dear Madam,--

"I write by desire of Mr. Jonathan Harker, who is himself not strong
enough to write, though progressing well, thanks to God and St. Joseph
and Ste. Mary. He has been under our care for nearly six weeks,
suffering from a violent brain fever. He wishes me to convey his love,
and to say that by this post I write for him to Mr. Peter Hawkins,
Exeter, to say, with his dutiful respects, that he is sorry for his
delay, and that all of his work is completed. He will require some few
weeks' rest in our sanatorium in the hills, but will then return. He
wishes me to say that he has not sufficient money with him, and that he
would like to pay for his staying here, so that others who need shall
not be wanting for help.

"Believe me,

"Yours, with sympathy and all blessings,

"SISTER AGATHA.

"P. S.--My patient being asleep, I open this to let you know something
more. He has told me all about you, and that you are shortly to be his
wife. All blessings to you both! He has had some fearful shock--so says
our doctor--and in his delirium his ravings have been dreadful; of
wolves and poison and blood; of ghosts and demons; and I fear to say of
what. Be careful with him always that there may be nothing to excite him
of this kind for a long time to come; the traces of such an illness as
his do not lightly die away. We should have written long ago, but we
knew nothing of his friends, and there was on him nothing that any one
could understand. He came in the train from Klausenburg, and the guard
was told by the station-master there that he rushed into the station
shouting for a ticket for home. Seeing from his violent demeanour that
he was English, they gave him a ticket for the furthest station on the
way thither that the train reached.

"Be assured that he is well cared for. He has won all hearts by his
sweetness and gentleness. He is truly getting on well, and I have no
doubt will in a few weeks be all himself. But be careful of him for
safety's sake. There are, I pray God and St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, many,
many, happy years for you both."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_19 August._--Strange and sudden change in Renfield last night. About
eight o'clock he began to get excited and sniff about as a dog does when
setting. The attendant was struck by his manner, and knowing my interest
in him, encouraged him to talk. He is usually respectful to the
attendant and at times servile; but to-night, the man tells me, he was
quite haughty. Would not condescend to talk with him at all. All he
would say was:--

     "I don't want to talk to you: you don't count now; the Master is at
     hand."

The attendant thinks it is some sudden form of religious mania which has
seized him. If so, we must look out for squalls, for a strong man with
homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The
combination is a dreadful one. At nine o'clock I visited him myself. His
attitude to me was the same as that to the attendant; in his sublime
self-feeling the difference between myself and attendant seemed to him
as nothing. It looks like religious mania, and he will soon think that
he himself is God. These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man
are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen give themselves
away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the God created
from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow. Oh,
if men only knew!

For half an hour or more Renfield kept getting excited in greater and
greater degree. I did not pretend to be watching him, but I kept strict
observation all the same. All at once that shifty look came into his
eyes which we always see when a madman has seized an idea, and with it
the shifty movement of the head and back which asylum attendants come to
know so well. He became quite quiet, and went and sat on the edge of his
bed resignedly, and looked into space with lack-lustre eyes. I thought I
would find out if his apathy were real or only assumed, and tried to
lead him to talk of his pets, a theme which had never failed to excite
his attention. At first he made no reply, but at length said testily:--

"Bother them all! I don't care a pin about them."

"What?" I said. "You don't mean to tell me you don't care about
spiders?" (Spiders at present are his hobby and the note-book is filling
up with columns of small figures.) To this he answered enigmatically:--

"The bride-maidens rejoice the eyes that wait the coming of the bride;
but when the bride draweth nigh, then the maidens shine not to the eyes
that are filled."

He would not explain himself, but remained obstinately seated on his bed
all the time I remained with him.

I am weary to-night and low in spirits. I cannot but think of Lucy, and
how different things might have been. If I don't sleep at once, chloral,
the modern Morpheus--C_{2}HCl_{3}O. H_{2}O! I must be careful not to let
it grow into a habit. No, I shall take none to-night! I have thought of
Lucy, and I shall not dishonour her by mixing the two. If need be,
to-night shall be sleepless....

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Glad I made the resolution; gladder that I kept to it. I had
lain tossing about, and had heard the clock strike only twice, when the
night-watchman came to me, sent up from the ward, to say that Renfield
had escaped. I threw on my clothes and ran down at once; my patient is
too dangerous a person to be roaming about. Those ideas of his might
work out dangerously with strangers. The attendant was waiting for me.
He said he had seen him not ten minutes before, seemingly asleep in his
bed, when he had looked through the observation-trap in the door. His
attention was called by the sound of the window being wrenched out. He
ran back and saw his feet disappear through the window, and had at once
sent up for me. He was only in his night-gear, and cannot be far off.
The attendant thought it would be more useful to watch where he should
go than to follow him, as he might lose sight of him whilst getting out
of the building by the door. He is a bulky man, and couldn't get through
the window. I am thin, so, with his aid, I got out, but feet foremost,
and, as we were only a few feet above ground, landed unhurt. The
attendant told me the patient had gone to the left, and had taken a
straight line, so I ran as quickly as I could. As I got through the belt
of trees I saw a white figure scale the high wall which separates our
grounds from those of the deserted house.

I ran back at once, told the watchman to get three or four men
immediately and follow me into the grounds of Carfax, in case our friend
might be dangerous. I got a ladder myself, and crossing the wall,
dropped down on the other side. I could see Renfield's figure just
disappearing behind the angle of the house, so I ran after him. On the
far side of the house I found him pressed close against the old
ironbound oak door of the chapel. He was talking, apparently to some
one, but I was afraid to go near enough to hear what he was saying, lest
I might frighten him, and he should run off. Chasing an errant swarm of
bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic, when the fit of escaping
is upon him! After a few minutes, however, I could see that he did not
take note of anything around him, and so ventured to draw nearer to
him--the more so as my men had now crossed the wall and were closing him
in. I heard him say:--

"I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will
reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar
off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass
me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?"

He _is_ a selfish old beggar anyhow. He thinks of the loaves and fishes
even when he believes he is in a Real Presence. His manias make a
startling combination. When we closed in on him he fought like a tiger.
He is immensely strong, for he was more like a wild beast than a man. I
never saw a lunatic in such a paroxysm of rage before; and I hope I
shall not again. It is a mercy that we have found out his strength and
his danger in good time. With strength and determination like his, he
might have done wild work before he was caged. He is safe now at any
rate. Jack Sheppard himself couldn't get free from the strait-waistcoat
that keeps him restrained, and he's chained to the wall in the padded
room. His cries are at times awful, but the silences that follow are
more deadly still, for he means murder in every turn and movement.

Just now he spoke coherent words for the first time:--

"I shall be patient, Master. It is coming--coming--coming!"

So I took the hint, and came too. I was too excited to sleep, but this
diary has quieted me, and I feel I shall get some sleep to-night.




CHAPTER IX


_Letter, Mina Harker to Lucy Westenra._

"_Buda-Pesth, 24 August._

"My dearest Lucy,--

"I know you will be anxious to hear all that has happened since we
parted at the railway station at Whitby. Well, my dear, I got to Hull
all right, and caught the boat to Hamburg, and then the train on here. I
feel that I can hardly recall anything of the journey, except that I
knew I was coming to Jonathan, and, that as I should have to do some
nursing, I had better get all the sleep I could.... I found my dear one,
oh, so thin and pale and weak-looking. All the resolution has gone out
of his dear eyes, and that quiet dignity which I told you was in his
face has vanished. He is only a wreck of himself, and he does not
remember anything that has happened to him for a long time past. At
least, he wants me to believe so, and I shall never ask. He has had some
terrible shock, and I fear it might tax his poor brain if he were to try
to recall it. Sister Agatha, who is a good creature and a born nurse,
tells me that he raved of dreadful things whilst he was off his head. I
wanted her to tell me what they were; but she would only cross herself,
and say she would never tell; that the ravings of the sick were the
secrets of God, and that if a nurse through her vocation should hear
them, she should respect her trust. She is a sweet, good soul, and the
next day, when she saw I was troubled, she opened up the subject again,
and after saying that she could never mention what my poor dear raved
about, added: 'I can tell you this much, my dear: that it was not about
anything which he has done wrong himself; and you, as his wife to be,
have no cause to be concerned. He has not forgotten you or what he owes
to you. His fear was of great and terrible things, which no mortal can
treat of.' I do believe the dear soul thought I might be jealous lest my
poor dear should have fallen in love with any other girl. The idea of
_my_ being jealous about Jonathan! And yet, my dear, let me whisper, I
felt a thrill of joy through me when I _knew_ that no other woman was a
cause of trouble. I am now sitting by his bedside, where I can see his
face while he sleeps. He is waking!...

"When he woke he asked me for his coat, as he wanted to get something
from the pocket; I asked Sister Agatha, and she brought all his things.
I saw that amongst them was his note-book, and was going to ask him to
let me look at it--for I knew then that I might find some clue to his
trouble--but I suppose he must have seen my wish in my eyes, for he sent
me over to the window, saying he wanted to be quite alone for a moment.
Then he called me back, and when I came he had his hand over the
note-book, and he said to me very solemnly:--

"'Wilhelmina'--I knew then that he was in deadly earnest, for he has
never called me by that name since he asked me to marry him--'you know,
dear, my ideas of the trust between husband and wife: there should be no
secret, no concealment. I have had a great shock, and when I try to
think of what it is I feel my head spin round, and I do not know if it
was all real or the dreaming of a madman. You know I have had brain
fever, and that is to be mad. The secret is here, and I do not want to
know it. I want to take up my life here, with our marriage.' For, my
dear, we had decided to be married as soon as the formalities are
complete. 'Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to share my ignorance? Here is
the book. Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me
know; unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to
the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here.' He fell
back exhausted, and I put the book under his pillow, and kissed him. I
have asked Sister Agatha to beg the Superior to let our wedding be this
afternoon, and am waiting her reply....

       *       *       *       *       *

"She has come and told me that the chaplain of the English mission
church has been sent for. We are to be married in an hour, or as soon
after as Jonathan awakes....

       *       *       *       *       *

"Lucy, the time has come and gone. I feel very solemn, but very, very
happy. Jonathan woke a little after the hour, and all was ready, and he
sat up in bed, propped up with pillows. He answered his 'I will' firmly
and strongly. I could hardly speak; my heart was so full that even those
words seemed to choke me. The dear sisters were so kind. Please God, I
shall never, never forget them, nor the grave and sweet responsibilities
I have taken upon me. I must tell you of my wedding present. When the
chaplain and the sisters had left me alone with my husband--oh, Lucy, it
is the first time I have written the words 'my husband'--left me alone
with my husband, I took the book from under his pillow, and wrapped it
up in white paper, and tied it with a little bit of pale blue ribbon
which was round my neck, and sealed it over the knot with sealing-wax,
and for my seal I used my wedding ring. Then I kissed it and showed it
to my husband, and told him that I would keep it so, and then it would
be an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each
other; that I would never open it unless it were for his own dear sake
or for the sake of some stern duty. Then he took my hand in his, and oh,
Lucy, it was the first time he took _his wife's_ hand, and said that it
was the dearest thing in all the wide world, and that he would go
through all the past again to win it, if need be. The poor dear meant to
have said a part of the past, but he cannot think of time yet, and I
shall not wonder if at first he mixes up not only the month, but the
year.

"Well, my dear, what could I say? I could only tell him that I was the
happiest woman in all the wide world, and that I had nothing to give him
except myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these went my love
and duty for all the days of my life. And, my dear, when he kissed me,
and drew me to him with his poor weak hands, it was like a very solemn
pledge between us....

"Lucy dear, do you know why I tell you all this? It is not only because
it is all sweet to me, but because you have been, and are, very dear to
me. It was my privilege to be your friend and guide when you came from
the schoolroom to prepare for the world of life. I want you to see now,
and with the eyes of a very happy wife, whither duty has led me; so that
in your own married life you too may be all happy as I am. My dear,
please Almighty God, your life may be all it promises: a long day of
sunshine, with no harsh wind, no forgetting duty, no distrust. I must
not wish you no pain, for that can never be; but I do hope you will be
_always_ as happy as I am _now_. Good-bye, my dear. I shall post this at
once, and, perhaps, write you very soon again. I must stop, for Jonathan
is waking--I must attend to my husband!

"Your ever-loving

"MINA HARKER."


_Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Harker._

"_Whitby, 30 August._

"My dearest Mina,--

"Oceans of love and millions of kisses, and may you soon be in your own
home with your husband. I wish you could be coming home soon enough to
stay with us here. The strong air would soon restore Jonathan; it has
quite restored me. I have an appetite like a cormorant, am full of
life, and sleep well. You will be glad to know that I have quite given
up walking in my sleep. I think I have not stirred out of my bed for a
week, that is when I once got into it at night. Arthur says I am getting
fat. By the way, I forgot to tell you that Arthur is here. We have such
walks and drives, and rides, and rowing, and tennis, and fishing
together; and I love him more than ever. He _tells_ me that he loves me
more, but I doubt that, for at first he told me that he couldn't love me
more than he did then. But this is nonsense. There he is, calling to me.
So no more just at present from your loving

"LUCY.

"P. S.--Mother sends her love. She seems better, poor dear. "P. P.
S.--We are to be married on 28 September."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_20 August._--The case of Renfield grows even more interesting. He has
now so far quieted that there are spells of cessation from his passion.
For the first week after his attack he was perpetually violent. Then one
night, just as the moon rose, he grew quiet, and kept murmuring to
himself: "Now I can wait; now I can wait." The attendant came to tell
me, so I ran down at once to have a look at him. He was still in the
strait-waistcoat and in the padded room, but the suffused look had gone
from his face, and his eyes had something of their old pleading--I might
almost say, "cringing"--softness. I was satisfied with his present
condition, and directed him to be relieved. The attendants hesitated,
but finally carried out my wishes without protest. It was a strange
thing that the patient had humour enough to see their distrust, for,
coming close to me, he said in a whisper, all the while looking
furtively at them:--

"They think I could hurt you! Fancy _me_ hurting _you_! The fools!"

It was soothing, somehow, to the feelings to find myself dissociated
even in the mind of this poor madman from the others; but all the same I
do not follow his thought. Am I to take it that I have anything in
common with him, so that we are, as it were, to stand together; or has
he to gain from me some good so stupendous that my well-being is needful
to him? I must find out later on. To-night he will not speak. Even the
offer of a kitten or even a full-grown cat will not tempt him. He will
only say: "I don't take any stock in cats. I have more to think of now,
and I can wait; I can wait."

After a while I left him. The attendant tells me that he was quiet
until just before dawn, and that then he began to get uneasy, and at
length violent, until at last he fell into a paroxysm which exhausted
him so that he swooned into a sort of coma.

       *       *       *       *       *

... Three nights has the same thing happened--violent all day then quiet
from moonrise to sunrise. I wish I could get some clue to the cause. It
would almost seem as if there was some influence which came and went.
Happy thought! We shall to-night play sane wits against mad ones. He
escaped before without our help; to-night he shall escape with it. We
shall give him a chance, and have the men ready to follow in case they
are required....

       *       *       *       *       *

_23 August._--"The unexpected always happens." How well Disraeli knew
life. Our bird when he found the cage open would not fly, so all our
subtle arrangements were for nought. At any rate, we have proved one
thing; that the spells of quietness last a reasonable time. We shall in
future be able to ease his bonds for a few hours each day. I have given
orders to the night attendant merely to shut him in the padded room,
when once he is quiet, until an hour before sunrise. The poor soul's
body will enjoy the relief even if his mind cannot appreciate it. Hark!
The unexpected again! I am called; the patient has once more escaped.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Another night adventure. Renfield artfully waited until the
attendant was entering the room to inspect. Then he dashed out past him
and flew down the passage. I sent word for the attendants to follow.
Again he went into the grounds of the deserted house, and we found him
in the same place, pressed against the old chapel door. When he saw me
he became furious, and had not the attendants seized him in time, he
would have tried to kill me. As we were holding him a strange thing
happened. He suddenly redoubled his efforts, and then as suddenly grew
calm. I looked round instinctively, but could see nothing. Then I caught
the patient's eye and followed it, but could trace nothing as it looked
into the moonlit sky except a big bat, which was flapping its silent and
ghostly way to the west. Bats usually wheel and flit about, but this one
seemed to go straight on, as if it knew where it was bound for or had
some intention of its own. The patient grew calmer every instant, and
presently said:--

"You needn't tie me; I shall go quietly!" Without trouble we came back
to the house. I feel there is something ominous in his calm, and shall
not forget this night....


_Lucy Westenra's Diary_

_Hillingham, 24 August._--I must imitate Mina, and keep writing things
down. Then we can have long talks when we do meet. I wonder when it will
be. I wish she were with me again, for I feel so unhappy. Last night I
seemed to be dreaming again just as I was at Whitby. Perhaps it is the
change of air, or getting home again. It is all dark and horrid to me,
for I can remember nothing; but I am full of vague fear, and I feel so
weak and worn out. When Arthur came to lunch he looked quite grieved
when he saw me, and I hadn't the spirit to try to be cheerful. I wonder
if I could sleep in mother's room to-night. I shall make an excuse and
try.

       *       *       *       *       *

_25 August._--Another bad night. Mother did not seem to take to my
proposal. She seems not too well herself, and doubtless she fears to
worry me. I tried to keep awake, and succeeded for a while; but when the
clock struck twelve it waked me from a doze, so I must have been falling
asleep. There was a sort of scratching or flapping at the window, but I
did not mind it, and as I remember no more, I suppose I must then have
fallen asleep. More bad dreams. I wish I could remember them. This
morning I am horribly weak. My face is ghastly pale, and my throat pains
me. It must be something wrong with my lungs, for I don't seem ever to
get air enough. I shall try to cheer up when Arthur comes, or else I
know he will be miserable to see me so.


_Letter, Arthur Holmwood to Dr. Seward._

"_Albemarle Hotel, 31 August._

"My dear Jack,--

"I want you to do me a favour. Lucy is ill; that is, she has no special
disease, but she looks awful, and is getting worse every day. I have
asked her if there is any cause; I do not dare to ask her mother, for to
disturb the poor lady's mind about her daughter in her present state of
health would be fatal. Mrs. Westenra has confided to me that her doom is
spoken--disease of the heart--though poor Lucy does not know it yet. I
am sure that there is something preying on my dear girl's mind. I am
almost distracted when I think of her; to look at her gives me a pang. I
told her I should ask you to see her, and though she demurred at
first--I know why, old fellow--she finally consented. It will be a
painful task for you, I know, old friend, but it is for _her_ sake, and
I must not hesitate to ask, or you to act. You are to come to lunch at
Hillingham to-morrow, two o'clock, so as not to arouse any suspicion in
Mrs. Westenra, and after lunch Lucy will take an opportunity of being
alone with you. I shall come in for tea, and we can go away together; I
am filled with anxiety, and want to consult with you alone as soon as I
can after you have seen her. Do not fail!

"ARTHUR."


_Telegram, Arthur Holmwood to Seward._

"_1 September._

"Am summoned to see my father, who is worse. Am writing. Write me fully
by to-night's post to Ring. Wire me if necessary."


_Letter from Dr. Seward to Arthur Holmwood._

"_2 September._

"My dear old fellow,--

"With regard to Miss Westenra's health I hasten to let you know at once
that in my opinion there is not any functional disturbance or any malady
that I know of. At the same time, I am not by any means satisfied with
her appearance; she is woefully different from what she was when I saw
her last. Of course you must bear in mind that I did not have full
opportunity of examination such as I should wish; our very friendship
makes a little difficulty which not even medical science or custom can
bridge over. I had better tell you exactly what happened, leaving you to
draw, in a measure, your own conclusions. I shall then say what I have
done and propose doing.

"I found Miss Westenra in seemingly gay spirits. Her mother was present,
and in a few seconds I made up my mind that she was trying all she knew
to mislead her mother and prevent her from being anxious. I have no
doubt she guesses, if she does not know, what need of caution there is.
We lunched alone, and as we all exerted ourselves to be cheerful, we
got, as some kind of reward for our labours, some real cheerfulness
amongst us. Then Mrs. Westenra went to lie down, and Lucy was left with
me. We went into her boudoir, and till we got there her gaiety remained,
for the servants were coming and going. As soon as the door was closed,
however, the mask fell from her face, and she sank down into a chair
with a great sigh, and hid her eyes with her hand. When I saw that her
high spirits had failed, I at once took advantage of her reaction to
make a diagnosis. She said to me very sweetly:--

"'I cannot tell you how I loathe talking about myself.' I reminded her
that a doctor's confidence was sacred, but that you were grievously
anxious about her. She caught on to my meaning at once, and settled that
matter in a word. 'Tell Arthur everything you choose. I do not care for
myself, but all for him!' So I am quite free.

"I could easily see that she is somewhat bloodless, but I could not see
the usual anæmic signs, and by a chance I was actually able to test the
quality of her blood, for in opening a window which was stiff a cord
gave way, and she cut her hand slightly with broken glass. It was a
slight matter in itself, but it gave me an evident chance, and I secured
a few drops of the blood and have analysed them. The qualitative
analysis gives a quite normal condition, and shows, I should infer, in
itself a vigorous state of health. In other physical matters I was quite
satisfied that there is no need for anxiety; but as there must be a
cause somewhere, I have come to the conclusion that it must be something
mental. She complains of difficulty in breathing satisfactorily at
times, and of heavy, lethargic sleep, with dreams that frighten her, but
regarding which she can remember nothing. She says that as a child she
used to walk in her sleep, and that when in Whitby the habit came back,
and that once she walked out in the night and went to East Cliff, where
Miss Murray found her; but she assures me that of late the habit has not
returned. I am in doubt, and so have done the best thing I know of; I
have written to my old friend and master, Professor Van Helsing, of
Amsterdam, who knows as much about obscure diseases as any one in the
world. I have asked him to come over, and as you told me that all things
were to be at your charge, I have mentioned to him who you are and your
relations to Miss Westenra. This, my dear fellow, is in obedience to
your wishes, for I am only too proud and happy to do anything I can for
her. Van Helsing would, I know, do anything for me for a personal
reason, so, no matter on what ground he comes, we must accept his
wishes. He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows
what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher
and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day;
and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron
nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution,
self-command, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the
kindliest and truest heart that beats--these form his equipment for the
noble work that he is doing for mankind--work both in theory and
practice, for his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy. I
tell you these facts that you may know why I have such confidence in
him. I have asked him to come at once. I shall see Miss Westenra
to-morrow again. She is to meet me at the Stores, so that I may not
alarm her mother by too early a repetition of my call.

"Yours always,

"JOHN SEWARD."


_Letter, Abraham Van Helsing, M. D., D. Ph., D. Lit., etc., etc., to Dr.
Seward._

"_2 September._

"My good Friend,--

"When I have received your letter I am already coming to you. By good
fortune I can leave just at once, without wrong to any of those who have
trusted me. Were fortune other, then it were bad for those who have
trusted, for I come to my friend when he call me to aid those he holds
dear. Tell your friend that when that time you suck from my wound so
swiftly the poison of the gangrene from that knife that our other
friend, too nervous, let slip, you did more for him when he wants my
aids and you call for them than all his great fortune could do. But it
is pleasure added to do for him, your friend; it is to you that I come.
Have then rooms for me at the Great Eastern Hotel, so that I may be near
to hand, and please it so arrange that we may see the young lady not too
late on to-morrow, for it is likely that I may have to return here that
night. But if need be I shall come again in three days, and stay longer
if it must. Till then good-bye, my friend John.

 "VAN HELSING."


_Letter, Dr. Seward to Hon. Arthur Holmwood._

"_3 September._

"My dear Art,--

"Van Helsing has come and gone. He came on with me to Hillingham, and
found that, by Lucy's discretion, her mother was lunching out, so that
we were alone with her. Van Helsing made a very careful examination of
the patient. He is to report to me, and I shall advise you, for of
course I was not present all the time. He is, I fear, much concerned,
but says he must think. When I told him of our friendship and how you
trust to me in the matter, he said: 'You must tell him all you think.
Tell him what I think, if you can guess it, if you will. Nay, I am not
jesting. This is no jest, but life and death, perhaps more.' I asked
what he meant by that, for he was very serious. This was when we had
come back to town, and he was having a cup of tea before starting on his
return to Amsterdam. He would not give me any further clue. You must not
be angry with me, Art, because his very reticence means that all his
brains are working for her good. He will speak plainly enough when the
time comes, be sure. So I told him I would simply write an account of
our visit, just as if I were doing a descriptive special article for
_The Daily Telegraph_. He seemed not to notice, but remarked that the
smuts in London were not quite so bad as they used to be when he was a
student here. I am to get his report to-morrow if he can possibly make
it. In any case I am to have a letter.

"Well, as to the visit. Lucy was more cheerful than on the day I first
saw her, and certainly looked better. She had lost something of the
ghastly look that so upset you, and her breathing was normal. She was
very sweet to the professor (as she always is), and tried to make him
feel at ease; though I could see that the poor girl was making a hard
struggle for it. I believe Van Helsing saw it, too, for I saw the quick
look under his bushy brows that I knew of old. Then he began to chat of
all things except ourselves and diseases and with such an infinite
geniality that I could see poor Lucy's pretense of animation merge into
reality. Then, without any seeming change, he brought the conversation
gently round to his visit, and suavely said:--

"'My dear young miss, I have the so great pleasure because you are so
much beloved. That is much, my dear, ever were there that which I do not
see. They told me you were down in the spirit, and that you were of a
ghastly pale. To them I say: "Pouf!"' And he snapped his fingers at me
and went on: 'But you and I shall show them how wrong they are. How can
he'--and he pointed at me with the same look and gesture as that with
which once he pointed me out to his class, on, or rather after, a
particular occasion which he never fails to remind me of--'know anything
of a young ladies? He has his madams to play with, and to bring them
back to happiness, and to those that love them. It is much to do, and,
oh, but there are rewards, in that we can bestow such happiness. But the
young ladies! He has no wife nor daughter, and the young do not tell
themselves to the young, but to the old, like me, who have known so many
sorrows and the causes of them. So, my dear, we will send him away to
smoke the cigarette in the garden, whiles you and I have little talk all
to ourselves.' I took the hint, and strolled about, and presently the
professor came to the window and called me in. He looked grave, but
said: 'I have made careful examination, but there is no functional
cause. With you I agree that there has been much blood lost; it has
been, but is not. But the conditions of her are in no way anæmic. I have
asked her to send me her maid, that I may ask just one or two question,
that so I may not chance to miss nothing. I know well what she will say.
And yet there is cause; there is always cause for everything. I must go
back home and think. You must send to me the telegram every day; and if
there be cause I shall come again. The disease--for not to be all well
is a disease--interest me, and the sweet young dear, she interest me
too. She charm me, and for her, if not for you or disease, I come.'

"As I tell you, he would not say a word more, even when we were alone.
And so now, Art, you know all I know. I shall keep stern watch. I trust
your poor father is rallying. It must be a terrible thing to you, my
dear old fellow, to be placed in such a position between two people who
are both so dear to you. I know your idea of duty to your father, and
you are right to stick to it; but, if need be, I shall send you word to
come at once to Lucy; so do not be over-anxious unless you hear from
me."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_4 September._--Zoöphagous patient still keeps up our interest in him.
He had only one outburst and that was yesterday at an unusual time. Just
before the stroke of noon he began to grow restless. The attendant knew
the symptoms, and at once summoned aid. Fortunately the men came at a
run, and were just in time, for at the stroke of noon he became so
violent that it took all their strength to hold him. In about five
minutes, however, he began to get more and more quiet, and finally sank
into a sort of melancholy, in which state he has remained up to now. The
attendant tells me that his screams whilst in the paroxysm were really
appalling; I found my hands full when I got in, attending to some of the
other patients who were frightened by him. Indeed, I can quite
understand the effect, for the sounds disturbed even me, though I was
some distance away. It is now after the dinner-hour of the asylum, and
as yet my patient sits in a corner brooding, with a dull, sullen,
woe-begone look in his face, which seems rather to indicate than to show
something directly. I cannot quite understand it.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Another change in my patient. At five o'clock I looked in on
him, and found him seemingly as happy and contented as he used to be. He
was catching flies and eating them, and was keeping note of his capture
by making nail-marks on the edge of the door between the ridges of
padding. When he saw me, he came over and apologised for his bad
conduct, and asked me in a very humble, cringing way to be led back to
his own room and to have his note-book again. I thought it well to
humour him: so he is back in his room with the window open. He has the
sugar of his tea spread out on the window-sill, and is reaping quite a
harvest of flies. He is not now eating them, but putting them into a
box, as of old, and is already examining the corners of his room to find
a spider. I tried to get him to talk about the past few days, for any
clue to his thoughts would be of immense help to me; but he would not
rise. For a moment or two he looked very sad, and said in a sort of
far-away voice, as though saying it rather to himself than to me:--

"All over! all over! He has deserted me. No hope for me now unless I do
it for myself!" Then suddenly turning to me in a resolute way, he said:
"Doctor, won't you be very good to me and let me have a little more
sugar? I think it would be good for me."

"And the flies?" I said.

"Yes! The flies like it, too, and I like the flies; therefore I like
it." And there are people who know so little as to think that madmen do
not argue. I procured him a double supply, and left him as happy a man
as, I suppose, any in the world. I wish I could fathom his mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Midnight._--Another change in him. I had been to see Miss Westenra,
whom I found much better, and had just returned, and was standing at our
own gate looking at the sunset, when once more I heard him yelling. As
his room is on this side of the house, I could hear it better than in
the morning. It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky
beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows
and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul
water, and to realise all the grim sternness of my own cold stone
building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart
to endure it all. I reached him just as the sun was going down, and from
his window saw the red disc sink. As it sank he became less and less
frenzied; and just as it dipped he slid from the hands that held him, an
inert mass, on the floor. It is wonderful, however, what intellectual
recuperative power lunatics have, for within a few minutes he stood up
quite calmly and looked around him. I signalled to the attendants not to
hold him, for I was anxious to see what he would do. He went straight
over to the window and brushed out the crumbs of sugar; then he took his
fly-box, and emptied it outside, and threw away the box; then he shut
the window, and crossing over, sat down on his bed. All this surprised
me, so I asked him: "Are you not going to keep flies any more?"

"No," said he; "I am sick of all that rubbish!" He certainly is a
wonderfully interesting study. I wish I could get some glimpse of his
mind or of the cause of his sudden passion. Stop; there may be a clue
after all, if we can find why to-day his paroxysms came on at high noon
and at sunset. Can it be that there is a malign influence of the sun at
periods which affects certain natures--as at times the moon does others?
We shall see.


_Telegram, Seward, London, to Van Helsing, Amsterdam._

"_4 September._--Patient still better to-day."


_Telegram, Seward, London, to Van Helsing, Amsterdam._

"_5 September._--Patient greatly improved. Good appetite; sleeps
naturally; good spirits; colour coming back."


_Telegram, Seward, London, to Van Helsing, Amsterdam._

"_6 September._--Terrible change for the worse. Come at once; do not
lose an hour. I hold over telegram to Holmwood till have seen you."




CHAPTER X


_Letter, Dr. Seward to Hon. Arthur Holmwood._

"_6 September._

"My dear Art,--

"My news to-day is not so good. Lucy this morning had gone back a bit.
There is, however, one good thing which has arisen from it; Mrs.
Westenra was naturally anxious concerning Lucy, and has consulted me
professionally about her. I took advantage of the opportunity, and told
her that my old master, Van Helsing, the great specialist, was coming to
stay with me, and that I would put her in his charge conjointly with
myself; so now we can come and go without alarming her unduly, for a
shock to her would mean sudden death, and this, in Lucy's weak
condition, might be disastrous to her. We are hedged in with
difficulties, all of us, my poor old fellow; but, please God, we shall
come through them all right. If any need I shall write, so that, if you
do not hear from me, take it for granted that I am simply waiting for
news. In haste

Yours ever,

"JOHN SEWARD."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_7 September._--The first thing Van Helsing said to me when we met at
Liverpool Street was:--

"Have you said anything to our young friend the lover of her?"

"No," I said. "I waited till I had seen you, as I said in my telegram. I
wrote him a letter simply telling him that you were coming, as Miss
Westenra was not so well, and that I should let him know if need be."

"Right, my friend," he said, "quite right! Better he not know as yet;
perhaps he shall never know. I pray so; but if it be needed, then he
shall know all. And, my good friend John, let me caution you. You deal
with the madmen. All men are mad in some way or the other; and inasmuch
as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen,
too--the rest of the world. You tell not your madmen what you do nor why
you do it; you tell them not what you think. So you shall keep knowledge
in its place, where it may rest--where it may gather its kind around it
and breed. You and I shall keep as yet what we know here, and here." He
touched me on the heart and on the forehead, and then touched himself
the same way. "I have for myself thoughts at the present. Later I shall
unfold to you."

"Why not now?" I asked. "It may do some good; we may arrive at some
decision." He stopped and looked at me, and said:--

"My friend John, when the corn is grown, even before it has
ripened--while the milk of its mother-earth is in him, and the sunshine
has not yet begun to paint him with his gold, the husbandman he pull the
ear and rub him between his rough hands, and blow away the green chaff,
and say to you: 'Look! he's good corn; he will make good crop when the
time comes.'" I did not see the application, and told him so. For reply
he reached over and took my ear in his hand and pulled it playfully, as
he used long ago to do at lectures, and said: "The good husbandman tell
you so then because he knows, but not till then. But you do not find the
good husbandman dig up his planted corn to see if he grow; that is for
the children who play at husbandry, and not for those who take it as of
the work of their life. See you now, friend John? I have sown my corn,
and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout; if he sprout at all,
there's some promise; and I wait till the ear begins to swell." He broke
off, for he evidently saw that I understood. Then he went on, and very
gravely:--

"You were always a careful student, and your case-book was ever more
full than the rest. You were only student then; now you are master, and
I trust that good habit have not fail. Remember, my friend, that
knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker.
Even if you have not kept the good practise, let me tell you that this
case of our dear miss is one that may be--mind, I say _may be_--of such
interest to us and others that all the rest may not make him kick the
beam, as your peoples say. Take then good note of it. Nothing is too
small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises.
Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We
learn from failure, not from success!"

When I described Lucy's symptoms--the same as before, but infinitely
more marked--he looked very grave, but said nothing. He took with him a
bag in which were many instruments and drugs, "the ghastly paraphernalia
of our beneficial trade," as he once called, in one of his lectures, the
equipment of a professor of the healing craft. When we were shown in,
Mrs. Westenra met us. She was alarmed, but not nearly so much as I
expected to find her. Nature in one of her beneficent moods has ordained
that even death has some antidote to its own terrors. Here, in a case
where any shock may prove fatal, matters are so ordered that, from some
cause or other, the things not personal--even the terrible change in her
daughter to whom she is so attached--do not seem to reach her. It is
something like the way Dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an
envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that
which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered
selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice
of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have
knowledge of.

I used my knowledge of this phase of spiritual pathology, and laid down
a rule that she should not be present with Lucy or think of her illness
more than was absolutely required. She assented readily, so readily that
I saw again the hand of Nature fighting for life. Van Helsing and I were
shown up to Lucy's room. If I was shocked when I saw her yesterday, I
was horrified when I saw her to-day. She was ghastly, chalkily pale; the
red seemed to have gone even from her lips and gums, and the bones of
her face stood out prominently; her breathing was painful to see or
hear. Van Helsing's face grew set as marble, and his eyebrows converged
till they almost touched over his nose. Lucy lay motionless, and did not
seem to have strength to speak, so for a while we were all silent. Then
Van Helsing beckoned to me, and we went gently out of the room. The
instant we had closed the door he stepped quickly along the passage to
the next door, which was open. Then he pulled me quickly in with him and
closed the door. "My God!" he said; "this is dreadful. There is no time
to be lost. She will die for sheer want of blood to keep the heart's
action as it should be. There must be transfusion of blood at once. Is
it you or me?"

"I am younger and stronger, Professor. It must be me."

"Then get ready at once. I will bring up my bag. I am prepared."

I went downstairs with him, and as we were going there was a knock at
the hall-door. When we reached the hall the maid had just opened the
door, and Arthur was stepping quickly in. He rushed up to me, saying in
an eager whisper:--

"Jack, I was so anxious. I read between the lines of your letter, and
have been in an agony. The dad was better, so I ran down here to see for
myself. Is not that gentleman Dr. Van Helsing? I am so thankful to you,
sir, for coming." When first the Professor's eye had lit upon him he had
been angry at his interruption at such a time; but now, as he took in
his stalwart proportions and recognised the strong young manhood which
seemed to emanate from him, his eyes gleamed. Without a pause he said to
him gravely as he held out his hand:--

"Sir, you have come in time. You are the lover of our dear miss. She is
bad, very, very bad. Nay, my child, do not go like that." For he
suddenly grew pale and sat down in a chair almost fainting. "You are to
help her. You can do more than any that live, and your courage is your
best help."

"What can I do?" asked Arthur hoarsely. "Tell me, and I shall do it. My
life is hers, and I would give the last drop of blood in my body for
her." The Professor has a strongly humorous side, and I could from old
knowledge detect a trace of its origin in his answer:--

"My young sir, I do not ask so much as that--not the last!"

"What shall I do?" There was fire in his eyes, and his open nostril
quivered with intent. Van Helsing slapped him on the shoulder. "Come!"
he said. "You are a man, and it is a man we want. You are better than
me, better than my friend John." Arthur looked bewildered, and the
Professor went on by explaining in a kindly way:--

"Young miss is bad, very bad. She wants blood, and blood she must have
or die. My friend John and I have consulted; and we are about to perform
what we call transfusion of blood--to transfer from full veins of one to
the empty veins which pine for him. John was to give his blood, as he is
the more young and strong than me"--here Arthur took my hand and wrung
it hard in silence--"but, now you are here, you are more good than us,
old or young, who toil much in the world of thought. Our nerves are not
so calm and our blood not so bright than yours!" Arthur turned to him
and said:--

"If you only knew how gladly I would die for her you would
understand----"

He stopped, with a sort of choke in his voice.

"Good boy!" said Van Helsing. "In the not-so-far-off you will be happy
that you have done all for her you love. Come now and be silent. You
shall kiss her once before it is done, but then you must go; and you
must leave at my sign. Say no word to Madame; you know how it is with
her! There must be no shock; any knowledge of this would be one. Come!"

We all went up to Lucy's room. Arthur by direction remained outside.
Lucy turned her head and looked at us, but said nothing. She was not
asleep, but she was simply too weak to make the effort. Her eyes spoke
to us; that was all. Van Helsing took some things from his bag and laid
them on a little table out of sight. Then he mixed a narcotic, and
coming over to the bed, said cheerily:--

"Now, little miss, here is your medicine. Drink it off, like a good
child. See, I lift you so that to swallow is easy. Yes." She had made
the effort with success.

It astonished me how long the drug took to act. This, in fact, marked
the extent of her weakness. The time seemed endless until sleep began to
flicker in her eyelids. At last, however, the narcotic began to manifest
its potency; and she fell into a deep sleep. When the Professor was
satisfied he called Arthur into the room, and bade him strip off his
coat. Then he added: "You may take that one little kiss whiles I bring
over the table. Friend John, help to me!" So neither of us looked whilst
he bent over her.

Van Helsing turning to me, said:

"He is so young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not
defibrinate it."

Then with swiftness, but with absolute method, Van Helsing performed the
operation. As the transfusion went on something like life seemed to come
back to poor Lucy's cheeks, and through Arthur's growing pallor the joy
of his face seemed absolutely to shine. After a bit I began to grow
anxious, for the loss of blood was telling on Arthur, strong man as he
was. It gave me an idea of what a terrible strain Lucy's system must
have undergone that what weakened Arthur only partially restored her.
But the Professor's face was set, and he stood watch in hand and with
his eyes fixed now on the patient and now on Arthur. I could hear my own
heart beat. Presently he said in a soft voice: "Do not stir an instant.
It is enough. You attend him; I will look to her." When all was over I
could see how much Arthur was weakened. I dressed the wound and took his
arm to bring him away, when Van Helsing spoke without turning round--the
man seems to have eyes in the back of his head:--

"The brave lover, I think, deserve another kiss, which he shall have
presently." And as he had now finished his operation, he adjusted the
pillow to the patient's head. As he did so the narrow black velvet band
which she seems always to wear round her throat, buckled with an old
diamond buckle which her lover had given her, was dragged a little up,
and showed a red mark on her throat. Arthur did not notice it, but I
could hear the deep hiss of indrawn breath which is one of Van Helsing's
ways of betraying emotion. He said nothing at the moment, but turned to
me, saying: "Now take down our brave young lover, give him of the port
wine, and let him lie down a while. He must then go home and rest, sleep
much and eat much, that he may be recruited of what he has so given to
his love. He must not stay here. Hold! a moment. I may take it, sir,
that you are anxious of result. Then bring it with you that in all ways
the operation is successful. You have saved her life this time, and you
can go home and rest easy in mind that all that can be is. I shall tell
her all when she is well; she shall love you none the less for what you
have done. Good-bye."

When Arthur had gone I went back to the room. Lucy was sleeping gently,
but her breathing was stronger; I could see the counterpane move as her
breast heaved. By the bedside sat Van Helsing, looking at her intently.
The velvet band again covered the red mark. I asked the Professor in a
whisper:--

"What do you make of that mark on her throat?"

"What do you make of it?"

"I have not examined it yet," I answered, and then and there proceeded
to loose the band. Just over the external jugular vein there were two
punctures, not large, but not wholesome-looking. There was no sign of
disease, but the edges were white and worn-looking, as if by some
trituration. It at once occurred to me that this wound, or whatever it
was, might be the means of that manifest loss of blood; but I abandoned
the idea as soon as formed, for such a thing could not be. The whole bed
would have been drenched to a scarlet with the blood which the girl must
have lost to leave such a pallor as she had before the transfusion.

"Well?" said Van Helsing.

"Well," said I, "I can make nothing of it." The Professor stood up. "I
must go back to Amsterdam to-night," he said. "There are books and
things there which I want. You must remain here all the night, and you
must not let your sight pass from her."

"Shall I have a nurse?" I asked.

"We are the best nurses, you and I. You keep watch all night; see that
she is well fed, and that nothing disturbs her. You must not sleep all
the night. Later on we can sleep, you and I. I shall be back as soon as
possible. And then we may begin."

"May begin?" I said. "What on earth do you mean?"

"We shall see!" he answered, as he hurried out. He came back a moment
later and put his head inside the door and said with warning finger held
up:--

"Remember, she is your charge. If you leave her, and harm befall, you
shall not sleep easy hereafter!"


_Dr. Seward's Diary--continued._

_8 September._--I sat up all night with Lucy. The opiate worked itself
off towards dusk, and she waked naturally; she looked a different being
from what she had been before the operation. Her spirits even were good,
and she was full of a happy vivacity, but I could see evidences of the
absolute prostration which she had undergone. When I told Mrs. Westenra
that Dr. Van Helsing had directed that I should sit up with her she
almost pooh-poohed the idea, pointing out her daughter's renewed
strength and excellent spirits. I was firm, however, and made
preparations for my long vigil. When her maid had prepared her for the
night I came in, having in the meantime had supper, and took a seat by
the bedside. She did not in any way make objection, but looked at me
gratefully whenever I caught her eye. After a long spell she seemed
sinking off to sleep, but with an effort seemed to pull herself together
and shook it off. This was repeated several times, with greater effort
and with shorter pauses as the time moved on. It was apparent that she
did not want to sleep, so I tackled the subject at once:--

"You do not want to go to sleep?"

"No; I am afraid."

"Afraid to go to sleep! Why so? It is the boon we all crave for."

"Ah, not if you were like me--if sleep was to you a presage of horror!"

"A presage of horror! What on earth do you mean?"

"I don't know; oh, I don't know. And that is what is so terrible. All
this weakness comes to me in sleep; until I dread the very thought."

"But, my dear girl, you may sleep to-night. I am here watching you, and
I can promise that nothing will happen."

"Ah, I can trust you!" I seized the opportunity, and said: "I promise
you that if I see any evidence of bad dreams I will wake you at once."

"You will? Oh, will you really? How good you are to me. Then I will
sleep!" And almost at the word she gave a deep sigh of relief, and sank
back, asleep.

All night long I watched by her. She never stirred, but slept on and on
in a deep, tranquil, life-giving, health-giving sleep. Her lips were
slightly parted, and her breast rose and fell with the regularity of a
pendulum. There was a smile on her face, and it was evident that no bad
dreams had come to disturb her peace of mind.

In the early morning her maid came, and I left her in her care and took
myself back home, for I was anxious about many things. I sent a short
wire to Van Helsing and to Arthur, telling them of the excellent result
of the operation. My own work, with its manifold arrears, took me all
day to clear off; it was dark when I was able to inquire about my
zoöphagous patient. The report was good; he had been quite quiet for the
past day and night. A telegram came from Van Helsing at Amsterdam whilst
I was at dinner, suggesting that I should be at Hillingham to-night, as
it might be well to be at hand, and stating that he was leaving by the
night mail and would join me early in the morning.

       *       *       *       *       *

_9 September_.--I was pretty tired and worn out when I got to
Hillingham. For two nights I had hardly had a wink of sleep, and my
brain was beginning to feel that numbness which marks cerebral
exhaustion. Lucy was up and in cheerful spirits. When she shook hands
with me she looked sharply in my face and said:--

"No sitting up to-night for you. You are worn out. I am quite well
again; indeed, I am; and if there is to be any sitting up, it is I who
will sit up with you." I would not argue the point, but went and had my
supper. Lucy came with me, and, enlivened by her charming presence, I
made an excellent meal, and had a couple of glasses of the more than
excellent port. Then Lucy took me upstairs, and showed me a room next
her own, where a cozy fire was burning. "Now," she said, "you must stay
here. I shall leave this door open and my door too. You can lie on the
sofa for I know that nothing would induce any of you doctors to go to
bed whilst there is a patient above the horizon. If I want anything I
shall call out, and you can come to me at once." I could not but
acquiesce, for I was "dog-tired," and could not have sat up had I tried.
So, on her renewing her promise to call me if she should want anything,
I lay on the sofa, and forgot all about everything.


_Lucy Westenra's Diary._

_9 September._--I feel so happy to-night. I have been so miserably weak,
that to be able to think and move about is like feeling sunshine after
a long spell of east wind out of a steel sky. Somehow Arthur feels very,
very close to me. I seem to feel his presence warm about me. I suppose
it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner
eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give Love
rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills. I know
where my thoughts are. If Arthur only knew! My dear, my dear, your ears
must tingle as you sleep, as mine do waking. Oh, the blissful rest of
last night! How I slept, with that dear, good Dr. Seward watching me.
And to-night I shall not fear to sleep, since he is close at hand and
within call. Thank everybody for being so good to me! Thank God!
Good-night, Arthur.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_10 September._--I was conscious of the Professor's hand on my head, and
started awake all in a second. That is one of the things that we learn
in an asylum, at any rate.

"And how is our patient?"

"Well, when I left her, or rather when she left me," I answered.

"Come, let us see," he said. And together we went into the room.

The blind was down, and I went over to raise it gently, whilst Van
Helsing stepped, with his soft, cat-like tread, over to the bed.

As I raised the blind, and the morning sunlight flooded the room, I
heard the Professor's low hiss of inspiration, and knowing its rarity, a
deadly fear shot through my heart. As I passed over he moved back, and
his exclamation of horror, "Gott in Himmel!" needed no enforcement from
his agonised face. He raised his hand and pointed to the bed, and his
iron face was drawn and ashen white. I felt my knees begin to tremble.

There on the bed, seemingly in a swoon, lay poor Lucy, more horribly
white and wan-looking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the gums
seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a
corpse after a prolonged illness. Van Helsing raised his foot to stamp
in anger, but the instinct of his life and all the long years of habit
stood to him, and he put it down again softly. "Quick!" he said. "Bring
the brandy." I flew to the dining-room, and returned with the decanter.
He wetted the poor white lips with it, and together we rubbed palm and
wrist and heart. He felt her heart, and after a few moments of agonising
suspense said:--

"It is not too late. It beats, though but feebly. All our work is
undone; we must begin again. There is no young Arthur here now; I have
to call on you yourself this time, friend John." As he spoke, he was
dipping into his bag and producing the instruments for transfusion; I
had taken off my coat and rolled up my shirt-sleeve. There was no
possibility of an opiate just at present, and no need of one; and so,
without a moment's delay, we began the operation. After a time--it did
not seem a short time either, for the draining away of one's blood, no
matter how willingly it be given, is a terrible feeling--Van Helsing
held up a warning finger. "Do not stir," he said, "but I fear that with
growing strength she may wake; and that would make danger, oh, so much
danger. But I shall precaution take. I shall give hypodermic injection
of morphia." He proceeded then, swiftly and deftly, to carry out his
intent. The effect on Lucy was not bad, for the faint seemed to merge
subtly into the narcotic sleep. It was with a feeling of personal pride
that I could see a faint tinge of colour steal back into the pallid
cheeks and lips. No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to
feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.

The Professor watched me critically. "That will do," he said. "Already?"
I remonstrated. "You took a great deal more from Art." To which he
smiled a sad sort of smile as he replied:--

"He is her lover, her _fiancé_. You have work, much work, to do for her
and for others; and the present will suffice."

When we stopped the operation, he attended to Lucy, whilst I applied
digital pressure to my own incision. I laid down, whilst I waited his
leisure to attend to me, for I felt faint and a little sick. By-and-by
he bound up my wound, and sent me downstairs to get a glass of wine for
myself. As I was leaving the room, he came after me, and half
whispered:--

"Mind, nothing must be said of this. If our young lover should turn up
unexpected, as before, no word to him. It would at once frighten him and
enjealous him, too. There must be none. So!"

When I came back he looked at me carefully, and then said:--

"You are not much the worse. Go into the room, and lie on your sofa, and
rest awhile; then have much breakfast, and come here to me."

I followed out his orders, for I knew how right and wise they were. I
had done my part, and now my next duty was to keep up my strength. I
felt very weak, and in the weakness lost something of the amazement at
what had occurred. I fell asleep on the sofa, however, wondering over
and over again how Lucy had made such a retrograde movement, and how
she could have been drained of so much blood with no sign anywhere to
show for it. I think I must have continued my wonder in my dreams, for,
sleeping and waking, my thoughts always came back to the little
punctures in her throat and the ragged, exhausted appearance of their
edges--tiny though they were.

Lucy slept well into the day, and when she woke she was fairly well and
strong, though not nearly so much so as the day before. When Van Helsing
had seen her, he went out for a walk, leaving me in charge, with strict
injunctions that I was not to leave her for a moment. I could hear his
voice in the hall, asking the way to the nearest telegraph office.

Lucy chatted with me freely, and seemed quite unconscious that anything
had happened. I tried to keep her amused and interested. When her mother
came up to see her, she did not seem to notice any change whatever, but
said to me gratefully:--

"We owe you so much, Dr. Seward, for all you have done, but you really
must now take care not to overwork yourself. You are looking pale
yourself. You want a wife to nurse and look after you a bit; that you
do!" As she spoke, Lucy turned crimson, though it was only momentarily,
for her poor wasted veins could not stand for long such an unwonted
drain to the head. The reaction came in excessive pallor as she turned
imploring eyes on me. I smiled and nodded, and laid my finger on my
lips; with a sigh, she sank back amid her pillows.

Van Helsing returned in a couple of hours, and presently said to me:
"Now you go home, and eat much and drink enough. Make yourself strong. I
stay here to-night, and I shall sit up with little miss myself. You and
I must watch the case, and we must have none other to know. I have grave
reasons. No, do not ask them; think what you will. Do not fear to think
even the most not-probable. Good-night."

In the hall two of the maids came to me, and asked if they or either of
them might not sit up with Miss Lucy. They implored me to let them; and
when I said it was Dr. Van Helsing's wish that either he or I should sit
up, they asked me quite piteously to intercede with the "foreign
gentleman." I was much touched by their kindness. Perhaps it is because
I am weak at present, and perhaps because it was on Lucy's account, that
their devotion was manifested; for over and over again have I seen
similar instances of woman's kindness. I got back here in time for a
late dinner; went my rounds--all well; and set this down whilst waiting
for sleep. It is coming.

       *       *       *       *       *

_11 September._--This afternoon I went over to Hillingham. Found Van
Helsing in excellent spirits, and Lucy much better. Shortly after I had
arrived, a big parcel from abroad came for the Professor. He opened it
with much impressment--assumed, of course--and showed a great bundle of
white flowers.

"These are for you, Miss Lucy," he said.

"For me? Oh, Dr. Van Helsing!"

"Yes, my dear, but not for you to play with. These are medicines." Here
Lucy made a wry face. "Nay, but they are not to take in a decoction or
in nauseous form, so you need not snub that so charming nose, or I shall
point out to my friend Arthur what woes he may have to endure in seeing
so much beauty that he so loves so much distort. Aha, my pretty miss,
that bring the so nice nose all straight again. This is medicinal, but
you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and
hang him round your neck, so that you sleep well. Oh yes! they, like the
lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten. It smell so like the waters
of Lethe, and of that fountain of youth that the Conquistadores sought
for in the Floridas, and find him all too late."

Whilst he was speaking, Lucy had been examining the flowers and smelling
them. Now she threw them down, saying, with half-laughter, and
half-disgust:--

"Oh, Professor, I believe you are only putting up a joke on me. Why,
these flowers are only common garlic."

To my surprise, Van Helsing rose up and said with all his sternness, his
iron jaw set and his bushy eyebrows meeting:--

"No trifling with me! I never jest! There is grim purpose in all I do;
and I warn you that you do not thwart me. Take care, for the sake of
others if not for your own." Then seeing poor Lucy scared, as she might
well be, he went on more gently: "Oh, little miss, my dear, do not fear
me. I only do for your good; but there is much virtue to you in those so
common flowers. See, I place them myself in your room. I make myself the
wreath that you are to wear. But hush! no telling to others that make so
inquisitive questions. We must obey, and silence is a part of obedience;
and obedience is to bring you strong and well into loving arms that wait
for you. Now sit still awhile. Come with me, friend John, and you shall
help me deck the room with my garlic, which is all the way from Haarlem,
where my friend Vanderpool raise herb in his glass-houses all the year.
I had to telegraph yesterday, or they would not have been here."

We went into the room, taking the flowers with us. The Professor's
actions were certainly odd and not to be found in any pharmacopoeia
that I ever heard of. First he fastened up the windows and latched them
securely; next, taking a handful of the flowers, he rubbed them all over
the sashes, as though to ensure that every whiff of air that might get
in would be laden with the garlic smell. Then with the wisp he rubbed
all over the jamb of the door, above, below, and at each side, and round
the fireplace in the same way. It all seemed grotesque to me, and
presently I said:--

"Well, Professor, I know you always have a reason for what you do, but
this certainly puzzles me. It is well we have no sceptic here, or he
would say that you were working some spell to keep out an evil spirit."

"Perhaps I am!" he answered quietly as he began to make the wreath which
Lucy was to wear round her neck.

We then waited whilst Lucy made her toilet for the night, and when she
was in bed he came and himself fixed the wreath of garlic round her
neck. The last words he said to her were:--

"Take care you do not disturb it; and even if the room feel close, do
not to-night open the window or the door."

"I promise," said Lucy, "and thank you both a thousand times for all
your kindness to me! Oh, what have I done to be blessed with such
friends?"

As we left the house in my fly, which was waiting, Van Helsing said:--

"To-night I can sleep in peace, and sleep I want--two nights of travel,
much reading in the day between, and much anxiety on the day to follow,
and a night to sit up, without to wink. To-morrow in the morning early
you call for me, and we come together to see our pretty miss, so much
more strong for my 'spell' which I have work. Ho! ho!"

He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two nights
before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror. It must
have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but
I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.




CHAPTER XI

_Lucy Westenra's Diary._


_12 September._--How good they all are to me. I quite love that dear Dr.
Van Helsing. I wonder why he was so anxious about these flowers. He
positively frightened me, he was so fierce. And yet he must have been
right, for I feel comfort from them already. Somehow, I do not dread
being alone to-night, and I can go to sleep without fear. I shall not
mind any flapping outside the window. Oh, the terrible struggle that I
have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness,
or the pain of the fear of sleep, with such unknown horrors as it has
for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no
dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings
nothing but sweet dreams. Well, here I am to-night, hoping for sleep,
and lying like Ophelia in the play, with "virgin crants and maiden
strewments." I never liked garlic before, but to-night it is delightful!
There is peace in its smell; I feel sleep coming already. Good-night,
everybody.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_13 September._--Called at the Berkeley and found Van Helsing, as usual,
up to time. The carriage ordered from the hotel was waiting. The
Professor took his bag, which he always brings with him now.

Let all be put down exactly. Van Helsing and I arrived at Hillingham at
eight o'clock. It was a lovely morning; the bright sunshine and all the
fresh feeling of early autumn seemed like the completion of nature's
annual work. The leaves were turning to all kinds of beautiful colours,
but had not yet begun to drop from the trees. When we entered we met
Mrs. Westenra coming out of the morning room. She is always an early
riser. She greeted us warmly and said:--

"You will be glad to know that Lucy is better. The dear child is still
asleep. I looked into her room and saw her, but did not go in, lest I
should disturb her." The Professor smiled, and looked quite jubilant. He
rubbed his hands together, and said:--

"Aha! I thought I had diagnosed the case. My treatment is working," to
which she answered:--

"You must not take all the credit to yourself, doctor. Lucy's state this
morning is due in part to me."

"How you do mean, ma'am?" asked the Professor.

"Well, I was anxious about the dear child in the night, and went into
her room. She was sleeping soundly--so soundly that even my coming did
not wake her. But the room was awfully stuffy. There were a lot of those
horrible, strong-smelling flowers about everywhere, and she had actually
a bunch of them round her neck. I feared that the heavy odour would be
too much for the dear child in her weak state, so I took them all away
and opened a bit of the window to let in a little fresh air. You will be
pleased with her, I am sure."

She moved off into her boudoir, where she usually breakfasted early. As
she had spoken, I watched the Professor's face, and saw it turn ashen
grey. He had been able to retain his self-command whilst the poor lady
was present, for he knew her state and how mischievous a shock would be;
he actually smiled on her as he held open the door for her to pass into
her room. But the instant she had disappeared he pulled me, suddenly and
forcibly, into the dining-room and closed the door.

Then, for the first time in my life, I saw Van Helsing break down. He
raised his hands over his head in a sort of mute despair, and then beat
his palms together in a helpless way; finally he sat down on a chair,
and putting his hands before his face, began to sob, with loud, dry sobs
that seemed to come from the very racking of his heart. Then he raised
his arms again, as though appealing to the whole universe. "God! God!
God!" he said. "What have we done, what has this poor thing done, that
we are so sore beset? Is there fate amongst us still, sent down from the
pagan world of old, that such things must be, and in such way? This poor
mother, all unknowing, and all for the best as she think, does such
thing as lose her daughter body and soul; and we must not tell her, we
must not even warn her, or she die, and then both die. Oh, how we are
beset! How are all the powers of the devils against us!" Suddenly he
jumped to his feet. "Come," he said, "come, we must see and act. Devils
or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him
all the same." He went to the hall-door for his bag; and together we
went up to Lucy's room.

Once again I drew up the blind, whilst Van Helsing went towards the bed.
This time he did not start as he looked on the poor face with the same
awful, waxen pallor as before. He wore a look of stern sadness and
infinite pity.

"As I expected," he murmured, with that hissing inspiration of his which
meant so much. Without a word he went and locked the door, and then
began to set out on the little table the instruments for yet another
operation of transfusion of blood. I had long ago recognised the
necessity, and begun to take off my coat, but he stopped me with a
warning hand. "No!" he said. "To-day you must operate. I shall provide.
You are weakened already." As he spoke he took off his coat and rolled
up his shirt-sleeve.

Again the operation; again the narcotic; again some return of colour to
the ashy cheeks, and the regular breathing of healthy sleep. This time I
watched whilst Van Helsing recruited himself and rested.

Presently he took an opportunity of telling Mrs. Westenra that she must
not remove anything from Lucy's room without consulting him; that the
flowers were of medicinal value, and that the breathing of their odour
was a part of the system of cure. Then he took over the care of the case
himself, saying that he would watch this night and the next and would
send me word when to come.

After another hour Lucy waked from her sleep, fresh and bright and
seemingly not much the worse for her terrible ordeal.

What does it all mean? I am beginning to wonder if my long habit of life
amongst the insane is beginning to tell upon my own brain.


_Lucy Westenra's Diary._

_17 September._--Four days and nights of peace. I am getting so strong
again that I hardly know myself. It is as if I had passed through some
long nightmare, and had just awakened to see the beautiful sunshine and
feel the fresh air of the morning around me. I have a dim
half-remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing; darkness
in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present distress
more poignant: and then long spells of oblivion, and the rising back to
life as a diver coming up through a great press of water. Since,
however, Dr. Van Helsing has been with me, all this bad dreaming seems
to have passed away; the noises that used to frighten me out of my
wits--the flapping against the windows, the distant voices which seemed
so close to me, the harsh sounds that came from I know not where and
commanded me to do I know not what--have all ceased. I go to bed now
without any fear of sleep. I do not even try to keep awake. I have grown
quite fond of the garlic, and a boxful arrives for me every day from
Haarlem. To-night Dr. Van Helsing is going away, as he has to be for a
day in Amsterdam. But I need not be watched; I am well enough to be left
alone. Thank God for mother's sake, and dear Arthur's, and for all our
friends who have been so kind! I shall not even feel the change, for
last night Dr. Van Helsing slept in his chair a lot of the time. I found
him asleep twice when I awoke; but I did not fear to go to sleep again,
although the boughs or bats or something napped almost angrily against
the window-panes.


_"The Pall Mall Gazette," 18 September._

                           THE ESCAPED WOLF.

         PERILOUS ADVENTURE OF OUR INTERVIEWER.

         _Interview with the Keeper in the Zoölogical Gardens._

After many inquiries and almost as many refusals, and perpetually using
the words "Pall Mall Gazette" as a sort of talisman, I managed to find
the keeper of the section of the Zoölogical Gardens in which the wolf
department is included. Thomas Bilder lives in one of the cottages in
the enclosure behind the elephant-house, and was just sitting down to
his tea when I found him. Thomas and his wife are hospitable folk,
elderly, and without children, and if the specimen I enjoyed of their
hospitality be of the average kind, their lives must be pretty
comfortable. The keeper would not enter on what he called "business"
until the supper was over, and we were all satisfied. Then when the
table was cleared, and he had lit his pipe, he said:--

"Now, sir, you can go on and arsk me what you want. You'll excoose me
refoosin' to talk of perfeshunal subjects afore meals. I gives the
wolves and the jackals and the hyenas in all our section their tea afore
I begins to arsk them questions."

"How do you mean, ask them questions?" I queried, wishful to get him
into a talkative humour.

"'Ittin' of them over the 'ead with a pole is one way; scratchin' of
their hears is another, when gents as is flush wants a bit of a show-orf
to their gals. I don't so much mind the fust--the 'ittin' with a pole
afore I chucks in their dinner; but I waits till they've 'ad their
sherry and kawffee, so to speak, afore I tries on with the
ear-scratchin'. Mind you," he added philosophically, "there's a deal of
the same nature in us as in them theer animiles. Here's you a-comin' and
arskin' of me questions about my business, and I that grumpy-like that
only for your bloomin' 'arf-quid I'd 'a' seen you blowed fust 'fore I'd
answer. Not even when you arsked me sarcastic-like if I'd like you to
arsk the Superintendent if you might arsk me questions. Without offence
did I tell yer to go to 'ell?"

"You did."

"An' when you said you'd report me for usin' of obscene language that
was 'ittin' me over the 'ead; but the 'arf-quid made that all right. I
weren't a-goin' to fight, so I waited for the food, and did with my 'owl
as the wolves, and lions, and tigers does. But, Lor' love yer 'art, now
that the old 'ooman has stuck a chunk of her tea-cake in me, an' rinsed
me out with her bloomin' old teapot, and I've lit hup, you may scratch
my ears for all you're worth, and won't git even a growl out of me.
Drive along with your questions. I know what yer a-comin' at, that 'ere
escaped wolf."

"Exactly. I want you to give me your view of it. Just tell me how it
happened; and when I know the facts I'll get you to say what you
consider was the cause of it, and how you think the whole affair will
end."

"All right, guv'nor. This 'ere is about the 'ole story. That 'ere wolf
what we called Bersicker was one of three grey ones that came from
Norway to Jamrach's, which we bought off him four years ago. He was a
nice well-behaved wolf, that never gave no trouble to talk of. I'm more
surprised at 'im for wantin' to get out nor any other animile in the
place. But, there, you can't trust wolves no more nor women."

"Don't you mind him, sir!" broke in Mrs. Tom, with a cheery laugh. "'E's
got mindin' the animiles so long that blest if he ain't like a old wolf
'isself! But there ain't no 'arm in 'im."

"Well, sir, it was about two hours after feedin' yesterday when I first
hear my disturbance. I was makin' up a litter in the monkey-house for a
young puma which is ill; but when I heard the yelpin' and 'owlin' I kem
away straight. There was Bersicker a-tearin' like a mad thing at the
bars as if he wanted to get out. There wasn't much people about that
day, and close at hand was only one man, a tall, thin chap, with a 'ook
nose and a pointed beard, with a few white hairs runnin' through it. He
had a 'ard, cold look and red eyes, and I took a sort of mislike to him,
for it seemed as if it was 'im as they was hirritated at. He 'ad white
kid gloves on 'is 'ands, and he pointed out the animiles to me and says:
'Keeper, these wolves seem upset at something.'

"'Maybe it's you,' says I, for I did not like the airs as he give
'isself. He didn't git angry, as I 'oped he would, but he smiled a kind
of insolent smile, with a mouth full of white, sharp teeth. 'Oh no, they
wouldn't like me,' 'e says.

"'Ow yes, they would,' says I, a-imitatin' of him. 'They always likes a
bone or two to clean their teeth on about tea-time, which you 'as a
bagful.'

"Well, it was a odd thing, but when the animiles see us a-talkin' they
lay down, and when I went over to Bersicker he let me stroke his ears
same as ever. That there man kem over, and blessed but if he didn't put
in his hand and stroke the old wolf's ears too!

"'Tyke care,' says I. 'Bersicker is quick.'

"'Never mind,' he says. 'I'm used to 'em!'

"'Are you in the business yourself?' I says, tyking off my 'at, for a
man what trades in wolves, anceterer, is a good friend to keepers.

"'No' says he, 'not exactly in the business, but I 'ave made pets of
several.' And with that he lifts his 'at as perlite as a lord, and walks
away. Old Bersicker kep' a-lookin' arter 'im till 'e was out of sight,
and then went and lay down in a corner and wouldn't come hout the 'ole
hevening. Well, larst night, so soon as the moon was hup, the wolves
here all began a-'owling. There warn't nothing for them to 'owl at.
There warn't no one near, except some one that was evidently a-callin' a
dog somewheres out back of the gardings in the Park road. Once or twice
I went out to see that all was right, and it was, and then the 'owling
stopped. Just before twelve o'clock I just took a look round afore
turnin' in, an', bust me, but when I kem opposite to old Bersicker's
cage I see the rails broken and twisted about and the cage empty. And
that's all I know for certing."

"Did any one else see anything?"

"One of our gard'ners was a-comin' 'ome about that time from a 'armony,
when he sees a big grey dog comin' out through the garding 'edges. At
least, so he says, but I don't give much for it myself, for if he did 'e
never said a word about it to his missis when 'e got 'ome, and it was
only after the escape of the wolf was made known, and we had been up all
night-a-huntin' of the Park for Bersicker, that he remembered seein'
anything. My own belief was that the 'armony 'ad got into his 'ead."

"Now, Mr. Bilder, can you account in any way for the escape of the
wolf?"

"Well, sir," he said, with a suspicious sort of modesty, "I think I can;
but I don't know as 'ow you'd be satisfied with the theory."

"Certainly I shall. If a man like you, who knows the animals from
experience, can't hazard a good guess at any rate, who is even to try?"

"Well then, sir, I accounts for it this way; it seems to me that 'ere
wolf escaped--simply because he wanted to get out."

From the hearty way that both Thomas and his wife laughed at the joke I
could see that it had done service before, and that the whole
explanation was simply an elaborate sell. I couldn't cope in badinage
with the worthy Thomas, but I thought I knew a surer way to his heart,
so I said:--

"Now, Mr. Bilder, we'll consider that first half-sovereign worked off,
and this brother of his is waiting to be claimed when you've told me
what you think will happen."

"Right y'are, sir," he said briskly. "Ye'll excoose me, I know, for
a-chaffin' of ye, but the old woman here winked at me, which was as much
as telling me to go on."

"Well, I never!" said the old lady.

"My opinion is this: that 'ere wolf is a-'idin' of, somewheres. The
gard'ner wot didn't remember said he was a-gallopin' northward faster
than a horse could go; but I don't believe him, for, yer see, sir,
wolves don't gallop no more nor dogs does, they not bein' built that
way. Wolves is fine things in a storybook, and I dessay when they gets
in packs and does be chivyin' somethin' that's more afeared than they is
they can make a devil of a noise and chop it up, whatever it is. But,
Lor' bless you, in real life a wolf is only a low creature, not half so
clever or bold as a good dog; and not half a quarter so much fight in
'im. This one ain't been used to fightin' or even to providin' for
hisself, and more like he's somewhere round the Park a-'idin' an'
a-shiverin' of, and, if he thinks at all, wonderin' where he is to get
his breakfast from; or maybe he's got down some area and is in a
coal-cellar. My eye, won't some cook get a rum start when she sees his
green eyes a-shining at her out of the dark! If he can't get food he's
bound to look for it, and mayhap he may chance to light on a butcher's
shop in time. If he doesn't, and some nursemaid goes a-walkin' orf with
a soldier, leavin' of the hinfant in the perambulator--well, then I
shouldn't be surprised if the census is one babby the less. That's
all."

I was handing him the half-sovereign, when something came bobbing up
against the window, and Mr. Bilder's face doubled its natural length
with surprise.

"God bless me!" he said. "If there ain't old Bersicker come back by
'isself!"

He went to the door and opened it; a most unnecessary proceeding it
seemed to me. I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so
well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us; a
personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.

After all, however, there is nothing like custom, for neither Bilder nor
his wife thought any more of the wolf than I should of a dog. The animal
itself was as peaceful and well-behaved as that father of all
picture-wolves--Red Riding Hood's quondam friend, whilst moving her
confidence in masquerade.

The whole scene was an unutterable mixture of comedy and pathos. The
wicked wolf that for half a day had paralysed London and set all the
children in the town shivering in their shoes, was there in a sort of
penitent mood, and was received and petted like a sort of vulpine
prodigal son. Old Bilder examined him all over with most tender
solicitude, and when he had finished with his penitent said:--

"There, I knew the poor old chap would get into some kind of trouble;
didn't I say it all along? Here's his head all cut and full of broken
glass. 'E's been a-gettin' over some bloomin' wall or other. It's a
shyme that people are allowed to top their walls with broken bottles.
This 'ere's what comes of it. Come along, Bersicker."

He took the wolf and locked him up in a cage, with a piece of meat that
satisfied, in quantity at any rate, the elementary conditions of the
fatted calf, and went off to report.

I came off, too, to report the only exclusive information that is given
to-day regarding the strange escapade at the Zoo.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_17 September._--I was engaged after dinner in my study posting up my
books, which, through press of other work and the many visits to Lucy,
had fallen sadly into arrear. Suddenly the door was burst open, and in
rushed my patient, with his face distorted with passion. I was
thunderstruck, for such a thing as a patient getting of his own accord
into the Superintendent's study is almost unknown. Without an instant's
pause he made straight at me. He had a dinner-knife in his hand, and,
as I saw he was dangerous, I tried to keep the table between us. He was
too quick and too strong for me, however; for before I could get my
balance he had struck at me and cut my left wrist rather severely.
Before he could strike again, however, I got in my right and he was
sprawling on his back on the floor. My wrist bled freely, and quite a
little pool trickled on to the carpet. I saw that my friend was not
intent on further effort, and occupied myself binding up my wrist,
keeping a wary eye on the prostrate figure all the time. When the
attendants rushed in, and we turned our attention to him, his employment
positively sickened me. He was lying on his belly on the floor licking
up, like a dog, the blood which had fallen from my wounded wrist. He was
easily secured, and, to my surprise, went with the attendants quite
placidly, simply repeating over and over again: "The blood is the life!
The blood is the life!"

I cannot afford to lose blood just at present; I have lost too much of
late for my physical good, and then the prolonged strain of Lucy's
illness and its horrible phases is telling on me. I am over-excited and
weary, and I need rest, rest, rest. Happily Van Helsing has not summoned
me, so I need not forego my sleep; to-night I could not well do without
it.


_Telegram, Van Helsing, Antwerp, to Seward, Carfax._

(Sent to Carfax, Sussex, as no county given; delivered late by
twenty-two hours.)

"_17 September._--Do not fail to be at Hillingham to-night. If not
watching all the time frequently, visit and see that flowers are as
placed; very important; do not fail. Shall be with you as soon as
possible after arrival."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_18 September._--Just off for train to London. The arrival of Van
Helsing's telegram filled me with dismay. A whole night lost, and I know
by bitter experience what may happen in a night. Of course it is
possible that all may be well, but what _may_ have happened? Surely
there is some horrible doom hanging over us that every possible accident
should thwart us in all we try to do. I shall take this cylinder with
me, and then I can complete my entry on Lucy's phonograph.


_Memorandum left by Lucy Westenra._

_17 September. Night._--I write this and leave it to be seen, so that no
one may by any chance get into trouble through me. This is an exact
record of what took place to-night. I feel I am dying of weakness, and
have barely strength to write, but it must be done if I die in the
doing.

I went to bed as usual, taking care that the flowers were placed as Dr.
Van Helsing directed, and soon fell asleep.

I was waked by the flapping at the window, which had begun after that
sleep-walking on the cliff at Whitby when Mina saved me, and which now I
know so well. I was not afraid, but I did wish that Dr. Seward was in
the next room--as Dr. Van Helsing said he would be--so that I might have
called him. I tried to go to sleep, but could not. Then there came to me
the old fear of sleep, and I determined to keep awake. Perversely sleep
would try to come then when I did not want it; so, as I feared to be
alone, I opened my door and called out: "Is there anybody there?" There
was no answer. I was afraid to wake mother, and so closed my door again.
Then outside in the shrubbery I heard a sort of howl like a dog's, but
more fierce and deeper. I went to the window and looked out, but could
see nothing, except a big bat, which had evidently been buffeting its
wings against the window. So I went back to bed again, but determined
not to go to sleep. Presently the door opened, and mother looked in;
seeing by my moving that I was not asleep, came in, and sat by me. She
said to me even more sweetly and softly than her wont:--

"I was uneasy about you, darling, and came in to see that you were all
right."

I feared she might catch cold sitting there, and asked her to come in
and sleep with me, so she came into bed, and lay down beside me; she did
not take off her dressing gown, for she said she would only stay a while
and then go back to her own bed. As she lay there in my arms, and I in
hers, the flapping and buffeting came to the window again. She was
startled and a little frightened, and cried out: "What is that?" I tried
to pacify her, and at last succeeded, and she lay quiet; but I could
hear her poor dear heart still beating terribly. After a while there was
the low howl again out in the shrubbery, and shortly after there was a
crash at the window, and a lot of broken glass was hurled on the floor.
The window blind blew back with the wind that rushed in, and in the
aperture of the broken panes there was the head of a great, gaunt grey
wolf. Mother cried out in a fright, and struggled up into a sitting
posture, and clutched wildly at anything that would help her. Amongst
other things, she clutched the wreath of flowers that Dr. Van Helsing
insisted on my wearing round my neck, and tore it away from me. For a
second or two she sat up, pointing at the wolf, and there was a strange
and horrible gurgling in her throat; then she fell over--as if struck
with lightning, and her head hit my forehead and made me dizzy for a
moment or two. The room and all round seemed to spin round. I kept my
eyes fixed on the window, but the wolf drew his head back, and a whole
myriad of little specks seemed to come blowing in through the broken
window, and wheeling and circling round like the pillar of dust that
travellers describe when there is a simoon in the desert. I tried to
stir, but there was some spell upon me, and dear mother's poor body,
which seemed to grow cold already--for her dear heart had ceased to
beat--weighed me down; and I remembered no more for a while.

The time did not seem long, but very, very awful, till I recovered
consciousness again. Somewhere near, a passing bell was tolling; the
dogs all round the neighbourhood were howling; and in our shrubbery,
seemingly just outside, a nightingale was singing. I was dazed and
stupid with pain and terror and weakness, but the sound of the
nightingale seemed like the voice of my dead mother come back to comfort
me. The sounds seemed to have awakened the maids, too, for I could hear
their bare feet pattering outside my door. I called to them, and they
came in, and when they saw what had happened, and what it was that lay
over me on the bed, they screamed out. The wind rushed in through the
broken window, and the door slammed to. They lifted off the body of my
dear mother, and laid her, covered up with a sheet, on the bed after I
had got up. They were all so frightened and nervous that I directed them
to go to the dining-room and have each a glass of wine. The door flew
open for an instant and closed again. The maids shrieked, and then went
in a body to the dining-room; and I laid what flowers I had on my dear
mother's breast. When they were there I remembered what Dr. Van Helsing
had told me, but I didn't like to remove them, and, besides, I would
have some of the servants to sit up with me now. I was surprised that
the maids did not come back. I called them, but got no answer, so I went
to the dining-room to look for them.

My heart sank when I saw what had happened. They all four lay helpless
on the floor, breathing heavily. The decanter of sherry was on the table
half full, but there was a queer, acrid smell about. I was suspicious,
and examined the decanter. It smelt of laudanum, and looking on the
sideboard, I found that the bottle which mother's doctor uses for
her--oh! did use--was empty. What am I to do? what am I to do? I am back
in the room with mother. I cannot leave her, and I am alone, save for
the sleeping servants, whom some one has drugged. Alone with the dead! I
dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf through the
broken window.

The air seems full of specks, floating and circling in the draught from
the window, and the lights burn blue and dim. What am I to do? God
shield me from harm this night! I shall hide this paper in my breast,
where they shall find it when they come to lay me out. My dear mother
gone! It is time that I go too. Good-bye, dear Arthur, if I should not
survive this night. God keep you, dear, and God help me!




CHAPTER XII

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY


_18 September._--I drove at once to Hillingham and arrived early.
Keeping my cab at the gate, I went up the avenue alone. I knocked gently
and rang as quietly as possible, for I feared to disturb Lucy or her
mother, and hoped to only bring a servant to the door. After a while,
finding no response, I knocked and rang again; still no answer. I cursed
the laziness of the servants that they should lie abed at such an
hour--for it was now ten o'clock--and so rang and knocked again, but
more impatiently, but still without response. Hitherto I had blamed only
the servants, but now a terrible fear began to assail me. Was this
desolation but another link in the chain of doom which seemed drawing
tight around us? Was it indeed a house of death to which I had come, too
late? I knew that minutes, even seconds of delay, might mean hours of
danger to Lucy, if she had had again one of those frightful relapses;
and I went round the house to try if I could find by chance an entry
anywhere.

I could find no means of ingress. Every window and door was fastened and
locked, and I returned baffled to the porch. As I did so, I heard the
rapid pit-pat of a swiftly driven horse's feet. They stopped at the
gate, and a few seconds later I met Van Helsing running up the avenue.
When he saw me, he gasped out:--

"Then it was you, and just arrived. How is she? Are we too late? Did you
not get my telegram?"

I answered as quickly and coherently as I could that I had only got his
telegram early in the morning, and had not lost a minute in coming here,
and that I could not make any one in the house hear me. He paused and
raised his hat as he said solemnly:--

"Then I fear we are too late. God's will be done!" With his usual
recuperative energy, he went on: "Come. If there be no way open to get
in, we must make one. Time is all in all to us now."

We went round to the back of the house, where there was a kitchen
window. The Professor took a small surgical saw from his case, and
handing it to me, pointed to the iron bars which guarded the window. I
attacked them at once and had very soon cut through three of them. Then
with a long, thin knife we pushed back the fastening of the sashes and
opened the window. I helped the Professor in, and followed him. There
was no one in the kitchen or in the servants' rooms, which were close at
hand. We tried all the rooms as we went along, and in the dining-room,
dimly lit by rays of light through the shutters, found four
servant-women lying on the floor. There was no need to think them dead,
for their stertorous breathing and the acrid smell of laudanum in the
room left no doubt as to their condition. Van Helsing and I looked at
each other, and as we moved away he said: "We can attend to them later."
Then we ascended to Lucy's room. For an instant or two we paused at the
door to listen, but there was no sound that we could hear. With white
faces and trembling hands, we opened the door gently, and entered the
room.

How shall I describe what we saw? On the bed lay two women, Lucy and her
mother. The latter lay farthest in, and she was covered with a white
sheet, the edge of which had been blown back by the draught through the
broken window, showing the drawn, white face, with a look of terror
fixed upon it. By her side lay Lucy, with face white and still more
drawn. The flowers which had been round her neck we found upon her
mother's bosom, and her throat was bare, showing the two little wounds
which we had noticed before, but looking horribly white and mangled.
Without a word the Professor bent over the bed, his head almost touching
poor Lucy's breast; then he gave a quick turn of his head, as of one who
listens, and leaping to his feet, he cried out to me:--

"It is not yet too late! Quick! quick! Bring the brandy!"

I flew downstairs and returned with it, taking care to smell and taste
it, lest it, too, were drugged like the decanter of sherry which I found
on the table. The maids were still breathing, but more restlessly, and I
fancied that the narcotic was wearing off. I did not stay to make sure,
but returned to Van Helsing. He rubbed the brandy, as on another
occasion, on her lips and gums and on her wrists and the palms of her
hands. He said to me:--

"I can do this, all that can be at the present. You go wake those maids.
Flick them in the face with a wet towel, and flick them hard. Make them
get heat and fire and a warm bath. This poor soul is nearly as cold as
that beside her. She will need be heated before we can do anything
more."

I went at once, and found little difficulty in waking three of the
women. The fourth was only a young girl, and the drug had evidently
affected her more strongly, so I lifted her on the sofa and let her
sleep. The others were dazed at first, but as remembrance came back to
them they cried and sobbed in a hysterical manner. I was stern with
them, however, and would not let them talk. I told them that one life
was bad enough to lose, and that if they delayed they would sacrifice
Miss Lucy. So, sobbing and crying, they went about their way, half clad
as they were, and prepared fire and water. Fortunately, the kitchen and
boiler fires were still alive, and there was no lack of hot water. We
got a bath and carried Lucy out as she was and placed her in it. Whilst
we were busy chafing her limbs there was a knock at the hall door. One
of the maids ran off, hurried on some more clothes, and opened it. Then
she returned and whispered to us that there was a gentleman who had come
with a message from Mr. Holmwood. I bade her simply tell him that he
must wait, for we could see no one now. She went away with the message,
and, engrossed with our work, I clean forgot all about him.

I never saw in all my experience the Professor work in such deadly
earnest. I knew--as he knew--that it was a stand-up fight with death,
and in a pause told him so. He answered me in a way that I did not
understand, but with the sternest look that his face could wear:--

"If that were all, I would stop here where we are now, and let her fade
away into peace, for I see no light in life over her horizon." He went
on with his work with, if possible, renewed and more frenzied vigour.

Presently we both began to be conscious that the heat was beginning to
be of some effect. Lucy's heart beat a trifle more audibly to the
stethoscope, and her lungs had a perceptible movement. Van Helsing's
face almost beamed, and as we lifted her from the bath and rolled her in
a hot sheet to dry her he said to me:--

"The first gain is ours! Check to the King!"

We took Lucy into another room, which had by now been prepared, and laid
her in bed and forced a few drops of brandy down her throat. I noticed
that Van Helsing tied a soft silk handkerchief round her throat. She was
still unconscious, and was quite as bad as, if not worse than, we had
ever seen her.

Van Helsing called in one of the women, and told her to stay with her
and not to take her eyes off her till we returned, and then beckoned me
out of the room.

"We must consult as to what is to be done," he said as we descended the
stairs. In the hall he opened the dining-room door, and we passed in, he
closing the door carefully behind him. The shutters had been opened, but
the blinds were already down, with that obedience to the etiquette of
death which the British woman of the lower classes always rigidly
observes. The room was, therefore, dimly dark. It was, however, light
enough for our purposes. Van Helsing's sternness was somewhat relieved
by a look of perplexity. He was evidently torturing his mind about
something, so I waited for an instant, and he spoke:--

"What are we to do now? Where are we to turn for help? We must have
another transfusion of blood, and that soon, or that poor girl's life
won't be worth an hour's purchase. You are exhausted already; I am
exhausted too. I fear to trust those women, even if they would have
courage to submit. What are we to do for some one who will open his
veins for her?"

"What's the matter with me, anyhow?"

The voice came from the sofa across the room, and its tones brought
relief and joy to my heart, for they were those of Quincey Morris. Van
Helsing started angrily at the first sound, but his face softened and a
glad look came into his eyes as I cried out: "Quincey Morris!" and
rushed towards him with outstretched hands.

"What brought you here?" I cried as our hands met.

"I guess Art is the cause."

He handed me a telegram:--

"Have not heard from Seward for three days, and am terribly anxious.
Cannot leave. Father still in same condition. Send me word how Lucy is.
Do not delay.--HOLMWOOD."

"I think I came just in the nick of time. You know you have only to tell
me what to do."

Van Helsing strode forward, and took his hand, looking him straight in
the eyes as he said:--

"A brave man's blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in
trouble. You're a man and no mistake. Well, the devil may work against
us for all he's worth, but God sends us men when we want them."

Once again we went through that ghastly operation. I have not the heart
to go through with the details. Lucy had got a terrible shock and it
told on her more than before, for though plenty of blood went into her
veins, her body did not respond to the treatment as well as on the other
occasions. Her struggle back into life was something frightful to see
and hear. However, the action of both heart and lungs improved, and Van
Helsing made a subcutaneous injection of morphia, as before, and with
good effect. Her faint became a profound slumber. The Professor watched
whilst I went downstairs with Quincey Morris, and sent one of the maids
to pay off one of the cabmen who were waiting. I left Quincey lying down
after having a glass of wine, and told the cook to get ready a good
breakfast. Then a thought struck me, and I went back to the room where
Lucy now was. When I came softly in, I found Van Helsing with a sheet or
two of note-paper in his hand. He had evidently read it, and was
thinking it over as he sat with his hand to his brow. There was a look
of grim satisfaction in his face, as of one who has had a doubt solved.
He handed me the paper saying only: "It dropped from Lucy's breast when
we carried her to the bath."

When I had read it, I stood looking at the Professor, and after a pause
asked him: "In God's name, what does it all mean? Was she, or is she,
mad; or what sort of horrible danger is it?" I was so bewildered that I
did not know what to say more. Van Helsing put out his hand and took the
paper, saying:--

"Do not trouble about it now. Forget it for the present. You shall know
and understand it all in good time; but it will be later. And now what
is it that you came to me to say?" This brought me back to fact, and I
was all myself again.

"I came to speak about the certificate of death. If we do not act
properly and wisely, there may be an inquest, and that paper would have
to be produced. I am in hopes that we need have no inquest, for if we
had it would surely kill poor Lucy, if nothing else did. I know, and you
know, and the other doctor who attended her knows, that Mrs. Westenra
had disease of the heart, and we can certify that she died of it. Let us
fill up the certificate at once, and I shall take it myself to the
registrar and go on to the undertaker."

"Good, oh my friend John! Well thought of! Truly Miss Lucy, if she be
sad in the foes that beset her, is at least happy in the friends that
love her. One, two, three, all open their veins for her, besides one old
man. Ah yes, I know, friend John; I am not blind! I love you all the
more for it! Now go."

In the hall I met Quincey Morris, with a telegram for Arthur telling him
that Mrs. Westenra was dead; that Lucy also had been ill, but was now
going on better; and that Van Helsing and I were with her. I told him
where I was going, and he hurried me out, but as I was going said:--

"When you come back, Jack, may I have two words with you all to
ourselves?" I nodded in reply and went out. I found no difficulty about
the registration, and arranged with the local undertaker to come up in
the evening to measure for the coffin and to make arrangements.

When I got back Quincey was waiting for me. I told him I would see him
as soon as I knew about Lucy, and went up to her room. She was still
sleeping, and the Professor seemingly had not moved from his seat at her
side. From his putting his finger to his lips, I gathered that he
expected her to wake before long and was afraid of forestalling nature.
So I went down to Quincey and took him into the breakfast-room, where
the blinds were not drawn down, and which was a little more cheerful, or
rather less cheerless, than the other rooms. When we were alone, he said
to me:--

"Jack Seward, I don't want to shove myself in anywhere where I've no
right to be; but this is no ordinary case. You know I loved that girl
and wanted to marry her; but, although that's all past and gone, I can't
help feeling anxious about her all the same. What is it that's wrong
with her? The Dutchman--and a fine old fellow he is; I can see
that--said, that time you two came into the room, that you must have
_another_ transfusion of blood, and that both you and he were exhausted.
Now I know well that you medical men speak _in camera_, and that a man
must not expect to know what they consult about in private. But this is
no common matter, and, whatever it is, I have done my part. Is not that
so?"

"That's so," I said, and he went on:--

"I take it that both you and Van Helsing had done already what I did
to-day. Is not that so?"

"That's so."

"And I guess Art was in it too. When I saw him four days ago down at his
own place he looked queer. I have not seen anything pulled down so quick
since I was on the Pampas and had a mare that I was fond of go to grass
all in a night. One of those big bats that they call vampires had got at
her in the night, and what with his gorge and the vein left open, there
wasn't enough blood in her to let her stand up, and I had to put a
bullet through her as she lay. Jack, if you may tell me without
betraying confidence, Arthur was the first, is not that so?" As he spoke
the poor fellow looked terribly anxious. He was in a torture of suspense
regarding the woman he loved, and his utter ignorance of the terrible
mystery which seemed to surround her intensified his pain. His very
heart was bleeding, and it took all the manhood of him--and there was a
royal lot of it, too--to keep him from breaking down. I paused before
answering, for I felt that I must not betray anything which the
Professor wished kept secret; but already he knew so much, and guessed
so much, that there could be no reason for not answering, so I answered
in the same phrase: "That's so."

"And how long has this been going on?"

"About ten days."

"Ten days! Then I guess, Jack Seward, that that poor pretty creature
that we all love has had put into her veins within that time the blood
of four strong men. Man alive, her whole body wouldn't hold it." Then,
coming close to me, he spoke in a fierce half-whisper: "What took it
out?"

I shook my head. "That," I said, "is the crux. Van Helsing is simply
frantic about it, and I am at my wits' end. I can't even hazard a guess.
There has been a series of little circumstances which have thrown out
all our calculations as to Lucy being properly watched. But these shall
not occur again. Here we stay until all be well--or ill." Quincey held
out his hand. "Count me in," he said. "You and the Dutchman will tell me
what to do, and I'll do it."

When she woke late in the afternoon, Lucy's first movement was to feel
in her breast, and, to my surprise, produced the paper which Van Helsing
had given me to read. The careful Professor had replaced it where it had
come from, lest on waking she should be alarmed. Her eye then lit on Van
Helsing and on me too, and gladdened. Then she looked around the room,
and seeing where she was, shuddered; she gave a loud cry, and put her
poor thin hands before her pale face. We both understood what that
meant--that she had realised to the full her mother's death; so we tried
what we could to comfort her. Doubtless sympathy eased her somewhat, but
she was very low in thought and spirit, and wept silently and weakly for
a long time. We told her that either or both of us would now remain with
her all the time, and that seemed to comfort her. Towards dusk she fell
into a doze. Here a very odd thing occurred. Whilst still asleep she
took the paper from her breast and tore it in two. Van Helsing stepped
over and took the pieces from her. All the same, however, she went on
with the action of tearing, as though the material were still in her
hands; finally she lifted her hands and opened them as though scattering
the fragments. Van Helsing seemed surprised, and his brows gathered as
if in thought, but he said nothing.

       *       *       *       *       *

_19 September._--All last night she slept fitfully, being always afraid
to sleep, and something weaker when she woke from it. The Professor and
I took it in turns to watch, and we never left her for a moment
unattended. Quincey Morris said nothing about his intention, but I knew
that all night long he patrolled round and round the house.

When the day came, its searching light showed the ravages in poor Lucy's
strength. She was hardly able to turn her head, and the little
nourishment which she could take seemed to do her no good. At times she
slept, and both Van Helsing and I noticed the difference in her, between
sleeping and waking. Whilst asleep she looked stronger, although more
haggard, and her breathing was softer; her open mouth showed the pale
gums drawn back from the teeth, which thus looked positively longer and
sharper than usual; when she woke the softness of her eyes evidently
changed the expression, for she looked her own self, although a dying
one. In the afternoon she asked for Arthur, and we telegraphed for him.
Quincey went off to meet him at the station.

When he arrived it was nearly six o'clock, and the sun was setting full
and warm, and the red light streamed in through the window and gave more
colour to the pale cheeks. When he saw her, Arthur was simply choking
with emotion, and none of us could speak. In the hours that had passed,
the fits of sleep, or the comatose condition that passed for it, had
grown more frequent, so that the pauses when conversation was possible
were shortened. Arthur's presence, however, seemed to act as a
stimulant; she rallied a little, and spoke to him more brightly than she
had done since we arrived. He too pulled himself together, and spoke as
cheerily as he could, so that the best was made of everything.

It was now nearly one o'clock, and he and Van Helsing are sitting with
her. I am to relieve them in a quarter of an hour, and I am entering
this on Lucy's phonograph. Until six o'clock they are to try to rest. I
fear that to-morrow will end our watching, for the shock has been too
great; the poor child cannot rally. God help us all.


_Letter, Mina Harker to Lucy Westenra._

(Unopened by her.)

"_17 September._

"My dearest Lucy,--

"It seems _an age_ since I heard from you, or indeed since I wrote. You
will pardon me, I know, for all my faults when you have read all my
budget of news. Well, I got my husband back all right; when we arrived
at Exeter there was a carriage waiting for us, and in it, though he had
an attack of gout, Mr. Hawkins. He took us to his house, where there
were rooms for us all nice and comfortable, and we dined together. After
dinner Mr. Hawkins said:--

"'My dears, I want to drink your health and prosperity; and may every
blessing attend you both. I know you both from children, and have, with
love and pride, seen you grow up. Now I want you to make your home here
with me. I have left to me neither chick nor child; all are gone, and in
my will I have left you everything.' I cried, Lucy dear, as Jonathan and
the old man clasped hands. Our evening was a very, very happy one.

"So here we are, installed in this beautiful old house, and from both my
bedroom and the drawing-room I can see the great elms of the cathedral
close, with their great black stems standing out against the old yellow
stone of the cathedral and I can hear the rooks overhead cawing and
cawing and chattering and gossiping all day, after the manner of
rooks--and humans. I am busy, I need not tell you, arranging things and
housekeeping. Jonathan and Mr. Hawkins are busy all day; for, now that
Jonathan is a partner, Mr. Hawkins wants to tell him all about the
clients.

"How is your dear mother getting on? I wish I could run up to town for a
day or two to see you, dear, but I dare not go yet, with so much on my
shoulders; and Jonathan wants looking after still. He is beginning to
put some flesh on his bones again, but he was terribly weakened by the
long illness; even now he sometimes starts out of his sleep in a sudden
way and awakes all trembling until I can coax him back to his usual
placidity. However, thank God, these occasions grow less frequent as the
days go on, and they will in time pass away altogether, I trust. And now
I have told you my news, let me ask yours. When are you to be married,
and where, and who is to perform the ceremony, and what are you to wear,
and is it to be a public or a private wedding? Tell me all about it,
dear; tell me all about everything, for there is nothing which interests
you which will not be dear to me. Jonathan asks me to send his
'respectful duty,' but I do not think that is good enough from the
junior partner of the important firm Hawkins & Harker; and so, as you
love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses
of the verb, I send you simply his 'love' instead. Good-bye, my dearest
Lucy, and all blessings on you.

"Yours,

"MINA HARKER."


_Report from Patrick Hennessey, M. D., M. R. C. S. L. K. Q. C. P. I.,
etc., etc., to John Seward, M. D._

"_20 September._

"My dear Sir,--

"In accordance with your wishes, I enclose report of the conditions of
everything left in my charge.... With regard to patient, Renfield, there
is more to say. He has had another outbreak, which might have had a
dreadful ending, but which, as it fortunately happened, was unattended
with any unhappy results. This afternoon a carrier's cart with two men
made a call at the empty house whose grounds abut on ours--the house to
which, you will remember, the patient twice ran away. The men stopped at
our gate to ask the porter their way, as they were strangers. I was
myself looking out of the study window, having a smoke after dinner, and
saw one of them come up to the house. As he passed the window of
Renfield's room, the patient began to rate him from within, and called
him all the foul names he could lay his tongue to. The man, who seemed a
decent fellow enough, contented himself by telling him to "shut up for a
foul-mouthed beggar," whereon our man accused him of robbing him and
wanting to murder him and said that he would hinder him if he were to
swing for it. I opened the window and signed to the man not to notice,
so he contented himself after looking the place over and making up his
mind as to what kind of a place he had got to by saying: 'Lor' bless
yer, sir, I wouldn't mind what was said to me in a bloomin' madhouse. I
pity ye and the guv'nor for havin' to live in the house with a wild
beast like that.' Then he asked his way civilly enough, and I told him
where the gate of the empty house was; he went away, followed by threats
and curses and revilings from our man. I went down to see if I could
make out any cause for his anger, since he is usually such a
well-behaved man, and except his violent fits nothing of the kind had
ever occurred. I found him, to my astonishment, quite composed and most
genial in his manner. I tried to get him to talk of the incident, but he
blandly asked me questions as to what I meant, and led me to believe
that he was completely oblivious of the affair. It was, I am sorry to
say, however, only another instance of his cunning, for within half an
hour I heard of him again. This time he had broken out through the
window of his room, and was running down the avenue. I called to the
attendants to follow me, and ran after him, for I feared he was intent
on some mischief. My fear was justified when I saw the same cart which
had passed before coming down the road, having on it some great wooden
boxes. The men were wiping their foreheads, and were flushed in the
face, as if with violent exercise. Before I could get up to him the
patient rushed at them, and pulling one of them off the cart, began to
knock his head against the ground. If I had not seized him just at the
moment I believe he would have killed the man there and then. The other
fellow jumped down and struck him over the head with the butt-end of his
heavy whip. It was a terrible blow; but he did not seem to mind it, but
seized him also, and struggled with the three of us, pulling us to and
fro as if we were kittens. You know I am no light weight, and the others
were both burly men. At first he was silent in his fighting; but as we
began to master him, and the attendants were putting a strait-waistcoat
on him, he began to shout: 'I'll frustrate them! They shan't rob me!
they shan't murder me by inches! I'll fight for my Lord and Master!' and
all sorts of similar incoherent ravings. It was with very considerable
difficulty that they got him back to the house and put him in the padded
room. One of the attendants, Hardy, had a finger broken. However, I set
it all right; and he is going on well.

"The two carriers were at first loud in their threats of actions for
damages, and promised to rain all the penalties of the law on us. Their
threats were, however, mingled with some sort of indirect apology for
the defeat of the two of them by a feeble madman. They said that if it
had not been for the way their strength had been spent in carrying and
raising the heavy boxes to the cart they would have made short work of
him. They gave as another reason for their defeat the extraordinary
state of drouth to which they had been reduced by the dusty nature of
their occupation and the reprehensible distance from the scene of their
labours of any place of public entertainment. I quite understood their
drift, and after a stiff glass of grog, or rather more of the same, and
with each a sovereign in hand, they made light of the attack, and swore
that they would encounter a worse madman any day for the pleasure of
meeting so 'bloomin' good a bloke' as your correspondent. I took their
names and addresses, in case they might be needed. They are as
follows:--Jack Smollet, of Dudding's Rents, King George's Road, Great
Walworth, and Thomas Snelling, Peter Farley's Row, Guide Court, Bethnal
Green. They are both in the employment of Harris & Sons, Moving and
Shipment Company, Orange Master's Yard, Soho.

"I shall report to you any matter of interest occurring here, and shall
wire you at once if there is anything of importance.

"Believe me, dear Sir,

"Yours faithfully,

"PATRICK HENNESSEY."


_Letter, Mina Harker to Lucy Westenra_.

(Unopened by her.)

"_18 September._

"My dearest Lucy,--

"Such a sad blow has befallen us. Mr. Hawkins has died very suddenly.
Some may not think it so sad for us, but we had both come to so love him
that it really seems as though we had lost a father. I never knew either
father or mother, so that the dear old man's death is a real blow to me.
Jonathan is greatly distressed. It is not only that he feels sorrow,
deep sorrow, for the dear, good man who has befriended him all his life,
and now at the end has treated him like his own son and left him a
fortune which to people of our modest bringing up is wealth beyond the
dream of avarice, but Jonathan feels it on another account. He says the
amount of responsibility which it puts upon him makes him nervous. He
begins to doubt himself. I try to cheer him up, and _my_ belief in _him_
helps him to have a belief in himself. But it is here that the grave
shock that he experienced tells upon him the most. Oh, it is too hard
that a sweet, simple, noble, strong nature such as his--a nature which
enabled him by our dear, good friend's aid to rise from clerk to master
in a few years--should be so injured that the very essence of its
strength is gone. Forgive me, dear, if I worry you with my troubles in
the midst of your own happiness; but, Lucy dear, I must tell some one,
for the strain of keeping up a brave and cheerful appearance to Jonathan
tries me, and I have no one here that I can confide in. I dread coming
up to London, as we must do the day after to-morrow; for poor Mr.
Hawkins left in his will that he was to be buried in the grave with his
father. As there are no relations at all, Jonathan will have to be chief
mourner. I shall try to run over to see you, dearest, if only for a few
minutes. Forgive me for troubling you. With all blessings,

"Your loving

"MINA HARKER."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_20 September._--Only resolution and habit can let me make an entry
to-night. I am too miserable, too low-spirited, too sick of the world
and all in it, including life itself, that I would not care if I heard
this moment the flapping of the wings of the angel of death. And he has
been flapping those grim wings to some purpose of late--Lucy's mother
and Arthur's father, and now.... Let me get on with my work.

I duly relieved Van Helsing in his watch over Lucy. We wanted Arthur to
go to rest also, but he refused at first. It was only when I told him
that we should want him to help us during the day, and that we must not
all break down for want of rest, lest Lucy should suffer, that he agreed
to go. Van Helsing was very kind to him. "Come, my child," he said;
"come with me. You are sick and weak, and have had much sorrow and much
mental pain, as well as that tax on your strength that we know of. You
must not be alone; for to be alone is to be full of fears and alarms.
Come to the drawing-room, where there is a big fire, and there are two
sofas. You shall lie on one, and I on the other, and our sympathy will
be comfort to each other, even though we do not speak, and even if we
sleep." Arthur went off with him, casting back a longing look on Lucy's
face, which lay in her pillow, almost whiter than the lawn. She lay
quite still, and I looked round the room to see that all was as it
should be. I could see that the Professor had carried out in this room,
as in the other, his purpose of using the garlic; the whole of the
window-sashes reeked with it, and round Lucy's neck, over the silk
handkerchief which Van Helsing made her keep on, was a rough chaplet of
the same odorous flowers. Lucy was breathing somewhat stertorously, and
her face was at its worst, for the open mouth showed the pale gums. Her
teeth, in the dim, uncertain light, seemed longer and sharper than they
had been in the morning. In particular, by some trick of the light, the
canine teeth looked longer and sharper than the rest. I sat down by her,
and presently she moved uneasily. At the same moment there came a sort
of dull flapping or buffeting at the window. I went over to it softly,
and peeped out by the corner of the blind. There was a full moonlight,
and I could see that the noise was made by a great bat, which wheeled
round--doubtless attracted by the light, although so dim--and every now
and again struck the window with its wings. When I came back to my seat,
I found that Lucy had moved slightly, and had torn away the garlic
flowers from her throat. I replaced them as well as I could, and sat
watching her.

Presently she woke, and I gave her food, as Van Helsing had prescribed.
She took but a little, and that languidly. There did not seem to be with
her now the unconscious struggle for life and strength that had hitherto
so marked her illness. It struck me as curious that the moment she
became conscious she pressed the garlic flowers close to her. It was
certainly odd that whenever she got into that lethargic state, with the
stertorous breathing, she put the flowers from her; but that when she
waked she clutched them close. There was no possibility of making any
mistake about this, for in the long hours that followed, she had many
spells of sleeping and waking and repeated both actions many times.

At six o'clock Van Helsing came to relieve me. Arthur had then fallen
into a doze, and he mercifully let him sleep on. When he saw Lucy's face
I could hear the sissing indraw of his breath, and he said to me in a
sharp whisper: "Draw up the blind; I want light!" Then he bent down,
and, with his face almost touching Lucy's, examined her carefully. He
removed the flowers and lifted the silk handkerchief from her throat. As
he did so he started back, and I could hear his ejaculation, "Mein
Gott!" as it was smothered in his throat. I bent over and looked, too,
and as I noticed some queer chill came over me.

The wounds on the throat had absolutely disappeared.

For fully five minutes Van Helsing stood looking at her, with his face
at its sternest. Then he turned to me and said calmly:--

"She is dying. It will not be long now. It will be much difference, mark
me, whether she dies conscious or in her sleep. Wake that poor boy, and
let him come and see the last; he trusts us, and we have promised him."

I went to the dining-room and waked him. He was dazed for a moment, but
when he saw the sunlight streaming in through the edges of the shutters
he thought he was late, and expressed his fear. I assured him that Lucy
was still asleep, but told him as gently as I could that both Van
Helsing and I feared that the end was near. He covered his face with his
hands, and slid down on his knees by the sofa, where he remained,
perhaps a minute, with his head buried, praying, whilst his shoulders
shook with grief. I took him by the hand and raised him up. "Come," I
said, "my dear old fellow, summon all your fortitude: it will be best
and easiest for her."

When we came into Lucy's room I could see that Van Helsing had, with
his usual forethought, been putting matters straight and making
everything look as pleasing as possible. He had even brushed Lucy's
hair, so that it lay on the pillow in its usual sunny ripples. When we
came into the room she opened her eyes, and seeing him, whispered
softly:--

"Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come!" He was stooping to
kiss her, when Van Helsing motioned him back. "No," he whispered, "not
yet! Hold her hand; it will comfort her more."

So Arthur took her hand and knelt beside her, and she looked her best,
with all the soft lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes. Then
gradually her eyes closed, and she sank to sleep. For a little bit her
breast heaved softly, and her breath came and went like a tired child's.

And then insensibly there came the strange change which I had noticed in
the night. Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale
gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a
sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which
were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice,
such as I had never heard from her lips:--

"Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!" Arthur bent
eagerly over to kiss her; but at that instant Van Helsing, who, like me,
had been startled by her voice, swooped upon him, and catching him by
the neck with both hands, dragged him back with a fury of strength which
I never thought he could have possessed, and actually hurled him almost
across the room.

"Not for your life!" he said; "not for your living soul and hers!" And
he stood between them like a lion at bay.

Arthur was so taken aback that he did not for a moment know what to do
or say; and before any impulse of violence could seize him he realised
the place and the occasion, and stood silent, waiting.

I kept my eyes fixed on Lucy, as did Van Helsing, and we saw a spasm as
of rage flit like a shadow over her face; the sharp teeth champed
together. Then her eyes closed, and she breathed heavily.

Very shortly after she opened her eyes in all their softness, and
putting out her poor, pale, thin hand, took Van Helsing's great brown
one; drawing it to her, she kissed it. "My true friend," she said, in a
faint voice, but with untellable pathos, "My true friend, and his! Oh,
guard him, and give me peace!"

"I swear it!" he said solemnly, kneeling beside her and holding up his
hand, as one who registers an oath. Then he turned to Arthur, and said
to him: "Come, my child, take her hand in yours, and kiss her on the
forehead, and only once."

Their eyes met instead of their lips; and so they parted.

Lucy's eyes closed; and Van Helsing, who had been watching closely, took
Arthur's arm, and drew him away.

And then Lucy's breathing became stertorous again, and all at once it
ceased.

"It is all over," said Van Helsing. "She is dead!"

I took Arthur by the arm, and led him away to the drawing-room, where he
sat down, and covered his face with his hands, sobbing in a way that
nearly broke me down to see.

I went back to the room, and found Van Helsing looking at poor Lucy, and
his face was sterner than ever. Some change had come over her body.
Death had given back part of her beauty, for her brow and cheeks had
recovered some of their flowing lines; even the lips had lost their
deadly pallor. It was as if the blood, no longer needed for the working
of the heart, had gone to make the harshness of death as little rude as
might be.

    "We thought her dying whilst she slept,
        And sleeping when she died."

I stood beside Van Helsing, and said:--

"Ah, well, poor girl, there is peace for her at last. It is the end!"

He turned to me, and said with grave solemnity:--

"Not so; alas! not so. It is only the beginning!"

When I asked him what he meant, he only shook his head and answered:--

"We can do nothing as yet. Wait and see."




CHAPTER XIII

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY--_continued_.


The funeral was arranged for the next succeeding day, so that Lucy and
her mother might be buried together. I attended to all the ghastly
formalities, and the urbane undertaker proved that his staff were
afflicted--or blessed--with something of his own obsequious suavity.
Even the woman who performed the last offices for the dead remarked to
me, in a confidential, brother-professional way, when she had come out
from the death-chamber:--

"She makes a very beautiful corpse, sir. It's quite a privilege to
attend on her. It's not too much to say that she will do credit to our
establishment!"

I noticed that Van Helsing never kept far away. This was possible from
the disordered state of things in the household. There were no relatives
at hand; and as Arthur had to be back the next day to attend at his
father's funeral, we were unable to notify any one who should have been
bidden. Under the circumstances, Van Helsing and I took it upon
ourselves to examine papers, etc. He insisted upon looking over Lucy's
papers himself. I asked him why, for I feared that he, being a
foreigner, might not be quite aware of English legal requirements, and
so might in ignorance make some unnecessary trouble. He answered me:--

"I know; I know. You forget that I am a lawyer as well as a doctor. But
this is not altogether for the law. You knew that, when you avoided the
coroner. I have more than him to avoid. There may be papers more--such
as this."

As he spoke he took from his pocket-book the memorandum which had been
in Lucy's breast, and which she had torn in her sleep.

"When you find anything of the solicitor who is for the late Mrs.
Westenra, seal all her papers, and write him to-night. For me, I watch
here in the room and in Miss Lucy's old room all night, and I myself
search for what may be. It is not well that her very thoughts go into
the hands of strangers."

I went on with my part of the work, and in another half hour had found
the name and address of Mrs. Westenra's solicitor and had written to
him. All the poor lady's papers were in order; explicit directions
regarding the place of burial were given. I had hardly sealed the
letter, when, to my surprise, Van Helsing walked into the room,
saying:--

"Can I help you, friend John? I am free, and if I may, my service is to
you."

"Have you got what you looked for?" I asked, to which he replied:--

"I did not look for any specific thing. I only hoped to find, and find I
have, all that there was--only some letters and a few memoranda, and a
diary new begun. But I have them here, and we shall for the present say
nothing of them. I shall see that poor lad to-morrow evening, and, with
his sanction, I shall use some."

When we had finished the work in hand, he said to me:--

"And now, friend John, I think we may to bed. We want sleep, both you
and I, and rest to recuperate. To-morrow we shall have much to do, but
for the to-night there is no need of us. Alas!"

Before turning in we went to look at poor Lucy. The undertaker had
certainly done his work well, for the room was turned into a small
_chapelle ardente_. There was a wilderness of beautiful white flowers,
and death was made as little repulsive as might be. The end of the
winding-sheet was laid over the face; when the Professor bent over and
turned it gently back, we both started at the beauty before us, the tall
wax candles showing a sufficient light to note it well. All Lucy's
loveliness had come back to her in death, and the hours that had passed,
instead of leaving traces of "decay's effacing fingers," had but
restored the beauty of life, till positively I could not believe my eyes
that I was looking at a corpse.

The Professor looked sternly grave. He had not loved her as I had, and
there was no need for tears in his eyes. He said to me: "Remain till I
return," and left the room. He came back with a handful of wild garlic
from the box waiting in the hall, but which had not been opened, and
placed the flowers amongst the others on and around the bed. Then he
took from his neck, inside his collar, a little gold crucifix, and
placed it over the mouth. He restored the sheet to its place, and we
came away.

I was undressing in my own room, when, with a premonitory tap at the
door, he entered, and at once began to speak:--

"To-morrow I want you to bring me, before night, a set of post-mortem
knives."

"Must we make an autopsy?" I asked.

"Yes and no. I want to operate, but not as you think. Let me tell you
now, but not a word to another. I want to cut off her head and take out
her heart. Ah! you a surgeon, and so shocked! You, whom I have seen with
no tremble of hand or heart, do operations of life and death that make
the rest shudder. Oh, but I must not forget, my dear friend John, that
you loved her; and I have not forgotten it, for it is I that shall
operate, and you must only help. I would like to do it to-night, but for
Arthur I must not; he will be free after his father's funeral to-morrow,
and he will want to see her--to see _it_. Then, when she is coffined
ready for the next day, you and I shall come when all sleep. We shall
unscrew the coffin-lid, and shall do our operation: and then replace
all, so that none know, save we alone."

"But why do it at all? The girl is dead. Why mutilate her poor body
without need? And if there is no necessity for a post-mortem and nothing
to gain by it--no good to her, to us, to science, to human
knowledge--why do it? Without such it is monstrous."

For answer he put his hand on my shoulder, and said, with infinite
tenderness:--

"Friend John, I pity your poor bleeding heart; and I love you the more
because it does so bleed. If I could, I would take on myself the burden
that you do bear. But there are things that you know not, but that you
shall know, and bless me for knowing, though they are not pleasant
things. John, my child, you have been my friend now many years, and yet
did you ever know me to do any without good cause? I may err--I am but
man; but I believe in all I do. Was it not for these causes that you
send for me when the great trouble came? Yes! Were you not amazed, nay
horrified, when I would not let Arthur kiss his love--though she was
dying--and snatched him away by all my strength? Yes! And yet you saw
how she thanked me, with her so beautiful dying eyes, her voice, too, so
weak, and she kiss my rough old hand and bless me? Yes! And did you not
hear me swear promise to her, that so she closed her eyes grateful? Yes!

"Well, I have good reason now for all I want to do. You have for many
years trust me; you have believe me weeks past, when there be things so
strange that you might have well doubt. Believe me yet a little, friend
John. If you trust me not, then I must tell what I think; and that is
not perhaps well. And if I work--as work I shall, no matter trust or no
trust--without my friend trust in me, I work with heavy heart and feel,
oh! so lonely when I want all help and courage that may be!" He paused a
moment and went on solemnly: "Friend John, there are strange and
terrible days before us. Let us not be two, but one, that so we work to
a good end. Will you not have faith in me?"

I took his hand, and promised him. I held my door open as he went away,
and watched him go into his room and close the door. As I stood without
moving, I saw one of the maids pass silently along the passage--she had
her back towards me, so did not see me--and go into the room where Lucy
lay. The sight touched me. Devotion is so rare, and we are so grateful
to those who show it unasked to those we love. Here was a poor girl
putting aside the terrors which she naturally had of death to go watch
alone by the bier of the mistress whom she loved, so that the poor clay
might not be lonely till laid to eternal rest....

       *       *       *       *       *

I must have slept long and soundly, for it was broad daylight when Van
Helsing waked me by coming into my room. He came over to my bedside and
said:--

"You need not trouble about the knives; we shall not do it."

"Why not?" I asked. For his solemnity of the night before had greatly
impressed me.

"Because," he said sternly, "it is too late--or too early. See!" Here he
held up the little golden crucifix. "This was stolen in the night."

"How, stolen," I asked in wonder, "since you have it now?"

"Because I get it back from the worthless wretch who stole it, from the
woman who robbed the dead and the living. Her punishment will surely
come, but not through me; she knew not altogether what she did and thus
unknowing, she only stole. Now we must wait."

He went away on the word, leaving me with a new mystery to think of, a
new puzzle to grapple with.

The forenoon was a dreary time, but at noon the solicitor came: Mr.
Marquand, of Wholeman, Sons, Marquand & Lidderdale. He was very genial
and very appreciative of what we had done, and took off our hands all
cares as to details. During lunch he told us that Mrs. Westenra had for
some time expected sudden death from her heart, and had put her affairs
in absolute order; he informed us that, with the exception of a certain
entailed property of Lucy's father's which now, in default of direct
issue, went back to a distant branch of the family, the whole estate,
real and personal, was left absolutely to Arthur Holmwood. When he had
told us so much he went on:--

"Frankly we did our best to prevent such a testamentary disposition, and
pointed out certain contingencies that might leave her daughter either
penniless or not so free as she should be to act regarding a matrimonial
alliance. Indeed, we pressed the matter so far that we almost came into
collision, for she asked us if we were or were not prepared to carry out
her wishes. Of course, we had then no alternative but to accept. We were
right in principle, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred we should
have proved, by the logic of events, the accuracy of our judgment.
Frankly, however, I must admit that in this case any other form of
disposition would have rendered impossible the carrying out of her
wishes. For by her predeceasing her daughter the latter would have come
into possession of the property, and, even had she only survived her
mother by five minutes, her property would, in case there were no
will--and a will was a practical impossibility in such a case--have been
treated at her decease as under intestacy. In which case Lord Godalming,
though so dear a friend, would have had no claim in the world; and the
inheritors, being remote, would not be likely to abandon their just
rights, for sentimental reasons regarding an entire stranger. I assure
you, my dear sirs, I am rejoiced at the result, perfectly rejoiced."

He was a good fellow, but his rejoicing at the one little part--in which
he was officially interested--of so great a tragedy, was an
object-lesson in the limitations of sympathetic understanding.

He did not remain long, but said he would look in later in the day and
see Lord Godalming. His coming, however, had been a certain comfort to
us, since it assured us that we should not have to dread hostile
criticism as to any of our acts. Arthur was expected at five o'clock, so
a little before that time we visited the death-chamber. It was so in
very truth, for now both mother and daughter lay in it. The undertaker,
true to his craft, had made the best display he could of his goods, and
there was a mortuary air about the place that lowered our spirits at
once. Van Helsing ordered the former arrangement to be adhered to,
explaining that, as Lord Godalming was coming very soon, it would be
less harrowing to his feelings to see all that was left of his _fiancée_
quite alone. The undertaker seemed shocked at his own stupidity and
exerted himself to restore things to the condition in which we left them
the night before, so that when Arthur came such shocks to his feelings
as we could avoid were saved.

Poor fellow! He looked desperately sad and broken; even his stalwart
manhood seemed to have shrunk somewhat under the strain of his
much-tried emotions. He had, I knew, been very genuinely and devotedly
attached to his father; and to lose him, and at such a time, was a
bitter blow to him. With me he was warm as ever, and to Van Helsing he
was sweetly courteous; but I could not help seeing that there was some
constraint with him. The Professor noticed it, too, and motioned me to
bring him upstairs. I did so, and left him at the door of the room, as I
felt he would like to be quite alone with her, but he took my arm and
led me in, saying huskily:--

"You loved her too, old fellow; she told me all about it, and there was
no friend had a closer place in her heart than you. I don't know how to
thank you for all you have done for her. I can't think yet...."

Here he suddenly broke down, and threw his arms round my shoulders and
laid his head on my breast, crying:--

"Oh, Jack! Jack! What shall I do! The whole of life seems gone from me
all at once, and there is nothing in the wide world for me to live for."

I comforted him as well as I could. In such cases men do not need much
expression. A grip of the hand, the tightening of an arm over the
shoulder, a sob in unison, are expressions of sympathy dear to a man's
heart. I stood still and silent till his sobs died away, and then I said
softly to him:--

"Come and look at her."

Together we moved over to the bed, and I lifted the lawn from her face.
God! how beautiful she was. Every hour seemed to be enhancing her
loveliness. It frightened and amazed me somewhat; and as for Arthur, he
fell a-trembling, and finally was shaken with doubt as with an ague. At
last, after a long pause, he said to me in a faint whisper:--

"Jack, is she really dead?"

I assured him sadly that it was so, and went on to suggest--for I felt
that such a horrible doubt should not have life for a moment longer than
I could help--that it often happened that after death faces became
softened and even resolved into their youthful beauty; that this was
especially so when death had been preceded by any acute or prolonged
suffering. It seemed to quite do away with any doubt, and, after
kneeling beside the couch for a while and looking at her lovingly and
long, he turned aside. I told him that that must be good-bye, as the
coffin had to be prepared; so he went back and took her dead hand in his
and kissed it, and bent over and kissed her forehead. He came away,
fondly looking back over his shoulder at her as he came.

I left him in the drawing-room, and told Van Helsing that he had said
good-bye; so the latter went to the kitchen to tell the undertaker's men
to proceed with the preparations and to screw up the coffin. When he
came out of the room again I told him of Arthur's question, and he
replied:--

"I am not surprised. Just now I doubted for a moment myself!"

We all dined together, and I could see that poor Art was trying to make
the best of things. Van Helsing had been silent all dinner-time; but
when we had lit our cigars he said--

"Lord----"; but Arthur interrupted him:--

"No, no, not that, for God's sake! not yet at any rate. Forgive me, sir:
I did not mean to speak offensively; it is only because my loss is so
recent."

The Professor answered very sweetly:--

"I only used that name because I was in doubt. I must not call you
'Mr.,' and I have grown to love you--yes, my dear boy, to love you--as
Arthur."

Arthur held out his hand, and took the old man's warmly.

"Call me what you will," he said. "I hope I may always have the title of
a friend. And let me say that I am at a loss for words to thank you for
your goodness to my poor dear." He paused a moment, and went on: "I know
that she understood your goodness even better than I do; and if I was
rude or in any way wanting at that time you acted so--you remember"--the
Professor nodded--"you must forgive me."

He answered with a grave kindness:--

"I know it was hard for you to quite trust me then, for to trust such
violence needs to understand; and I take it that you do not--that you
cannot--trust me now, for you do not yet understand. And there may be
more times when I shall want you to trust when you cannot--and may
not--and must not yet understand. But the time will come when your trust
shall be whole and complete in me, and when you shall understand as
though the sunlight himself shone through. Then you shall bless me from
first to last for your own sake, and for the sake of others and for her
dear sake to whom I swore to protect."

"And, indeed, indeed, sir," said Arthur warmly, "I shall in all ways
trust you. I know and believe you have a very noble heart, and you are
Jack's friend, and you were hers. You shall do what you like."

The Professor cleared his throat a couple of times, as though about to
speak, and finally said:--

"May I ask you something now?"

"Certainly."

"You know that Mrs. Westenra left you all her property?"

"No, poor dear; I never thought of it."

"And as it is all yours, you have a right to deal with it as you will. I
want you to give me permission to read all Miss Lucy's papers and
letters. Believe me, it is no idle curiosity. I have a motive of which,
be sure, she would have approved. I have them all here. I took them
before we knew that all was yours, so that no strange hand might touch
them--no strange eye look through words into her soul. I shall keep
them, if I may; even you may not see them yet, but I shall keep them
safe. No word shall be lost; and in the good time I shall give them back
to you. It's a hard thing I ask, but you will do it, will you not, for
Lucy's sake?"

Arthur spoke out heartily, like his old self:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, you may do what you will. I feel that in saying this I
am doing what my dear one would have approved. I shall not trouble you
with questions till the time comes."

The old Professor stood up as he said solemnly:--

"And you are right. There will be pain for us all; but it will not be
all pain, nor will this pain be the last. We and you too--you most of
all, my dear boy--will have to pass through the bitter water before we
reach the sweet. But we must be brave of heart and unselfish, and do our
duty, and all will be well!"

I slept on a sofa in Arthur's room that night. Van Helsing did not go to
bed at all. He went to and fro, as if patrolling the house, and was
never out of sight of the room where Lucy lay in her coffin, strewn with
the wild garlic flowers, which sent, through the odour of lily and rose,
a heavy, overpowering smell into the night.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_22 September._--In the train to Exeter. Jonathan sleeping.

It seems only yesterday that the last entry was made, and yet how much
between then, in Whitby and all the world before me, Jonathan away and
no news of him; and now, married to Jonathan, Jonathan a solicitor, a
partner, rich, master of his business, Mr. Hawkins dead and buried, and
Jonathan with another attack that may harm him. Some day he may ask me
about it. Down it all goes. I am rusty in my shorthand--see what
unexpected prosperity does for us--so it may be as well to freshen it up
again with an exercise anyhow....

The service was very simple and very solemn. There were only ourselves
and the servants there, one or two old friends of his from Exeter, his
London agent, and a gentleman representing Sir John Paxton, the
President of the Incorporated Law Society. Jonathan and I stood hand in
hand, and we felt that our best and dearest friend was gone from us....

We came back to town quietly, taking a 'bus to Hyde Park Corner.
Jonathan thought it would interest me to go into the Row for a while, so
we sat down; but there were very few people there, and it was
sad-looking and desolate to see so many empty chairs. It made us think
of the empty chair at home; so we got up and walked down Piccadilly.
Jonathan was holding me by the arm, the way he used to in old days
before I went to school. I felt it very improper, for you can't go on
for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the
pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit; but it was Jonathan, and he
was my husband, and we didn't know anybody who saw us--and we didn't
care if they did--so on we walked. I was looking at a very beautiful
girl, in a big cart-wheel hat, sitting in a victoria outside Guiliano's,
when I felt Jonathan clutch my arm so tight that he hurt me, and he said
under his breath: "My God!" I am always anxious about Jonathan, for I
fear that some nervous fit may upset him again; so I turned to him
quickly, and asked him what it was that disturbed him.

He was very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror and
half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and
black moustache and pointed beard, who was also observing the pretty
girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either of us,
and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good face; it was
hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all
the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal's.
Jonathan kept staring at him, till I was afraid he would notice. I
feared he might take it ill, he looked so fierce and nasty. I asked
Jonathan why he was disturbed, and he answered, evidently thinking that
I knew as much about it as he did: "Do you see who it is?"

"No, dear," I said; "I don't know him; who is it?" His answer seemed to
shock and thrill me, for it was said as if he did not know that it was
to me, Mina, to whom he was speaking:--

"It is the man himself!"

The poor dear was evidently terrified at something--very greatly
terrified; I do believe that if he had not had me to lean on and to
support him he would have sunk down. He kept staring; a man came out of
the shop with a small parcel, and gave it to the lady, who then drove
off. The dark man kept his eyes fixed on her, and when the carriage
moved up Piccadilly he followed in the same direction, and hailed a
hansom. Jonathan kept looking after him, and said, as if to himself:--

"I believe it is the Count, but he has grown young. My God, if this be
so! Oh, my God! my God! If I only knew! if I only knew!" He was
distressing himself so much that I feared to keep his mind on the
subject by asking him any questions, so I remained silent. I drew him
away quietly, and he, holding my arm, came easily. We walked a little
further, and then went in and sat for a while in the Green Park. It was
a hot day for autumn, and there was a comfortable seat in a shady place.
After a few minutes' staring at nothing, Jonathan's eyes closed, and he
went quietly into a sleep, with his head on my shoulder. I thought it
was the best thing for him, so did not disturb him. In about twenty
minutes he woke up, and said to me quite cheerfully:--

"Why, Mina, have I been asleep! Oh, do forgive me for being so rude.
Come, and we'll have a cup of tea somewhere." He had evidently forgotten
all about the dark stranger, as in his illness he had forgotten all that
this episode had reminded him of. I don't like this lapsing into
forgetfulness; it may make or continue some injury to the brain. I must
not ask him, for fear I shall do more harm than good; but I must somehow
learn the facts of his journey abroad. The time is come, I fear, when I
must open that parcel, and know what is written. Oh, Jonathan, you will,
I know, forgive me if I do wrong, but it is for your own dear sake.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--A sad home-coming in every way--the house empty of the dear
soul who was so good to us; Jonathan still pale and dizzy under a slight
relapse of his malady; and now a telegram from Van Helsing, whoever he
may be:--

"You will be grieved to hear that Mrs. Westenra died five days ago, and
that Lucy died the day before yesterday. They were both buried to-day."

Oh, what a wealth of sorrow in a few words! Poor Mrs. Westenra! poor
Lucy! Gone, gone, never to return to us! And poor, poor Arthur, to have
lost such sweetness out of his life! God help us all to bear our
troubles.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_22 September._--It is all over. Arthur has gone back to Ring, and has
taken Quincey Morris with him. What a fine fellow is Quincey! I believe
in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy's death as any
of us; but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking. If America
can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world
indeed. Van Helsing is lying down, having a rest preparatory to his
journey. He goes over to Amsterdam to-night, but says he returns
to-morrow night; that he only wants to make some arrangements which can
only be made personally. He is to stop with me then, if he can; he says
he has work to do in London which may take him some time. Poor old
fellow! I fear that the strain of the past week has broken down even his
iron strength. All the time of the burial he was, I could see, putting
some terrible restraint on himself. When it was all over, we were
standing beside Arthur, who, poor fellow, was speaking of his part in
the operation where his blood had been transfused to his Lucy's veins; I
could see Van Helsing's face grow white and purple by turns. Arthur was
saying that he felt since then as if they two had been really married
and that she was his wife in the sight of God. None of us said a word of
the other operations, and none of us ever shall. Arthur and Quincey went
away together to the station, and Van Helsing and I came on here. The
moment we were alone in the carriage he gave way to a regular fit of
hysterics. He has denied to me since that it was hysterics, and insisted
that it was only his sense of humour asserting itself under very
terrible conditions. He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down
the blinds lest any one should see us and misjudge; and then he cried,
till he laughed again; and laughed and cried together, just as a woman
does. I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the
circumstances; but it had no effect. Men and women are so different in
manifestations of nervous strength or weakness! Then when his face grew
grave and stern again I asked him why his mirth, and why at such a time.
His reply was in a way characteristic of him, for it was logical and
forceful and mysterious. He said:--

"Ah, you don't comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad,
though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But
no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come
just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your
door and say, 'May I come in?' is not the true laughter. No! he is a
king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no
time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.' Behold, in example I grieve my
heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her, though
I am old and worn; I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other
sufferers want that so she may have all. And yet I can laugh at her very
grave--laugh when the clay from the spade of the sexton drop upon her
coffin and say 'Thud! thud!' to my heart, till it send back the blood
from my cheek. My heart bleed for that poor boy--that dear boy, so of
the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his
hair and eyes the same. There, you know now why I love him so. And yet
when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my
father-heart yearn to him as to no other man--not even to you, friend
John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son--yet even
at such moment King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear,
'Here I am! here I am!' till the blood come dance back and bring some of
the sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek. Oh, friend John, it is
a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and
troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the
tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and
tears that burn as they fall--all dance together to the music that he
make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that
he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn
tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and,
like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain
become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the
sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with
our labour, what it may be."

I did not like to wound him by pretending not to see his idea; but, as I
did not yet understand the cause of his laughter, I asked him. As he
answered me his face grew stern, and he said in quite a different
tone:--

"Oh, it was the grim irony of it all--this so lovely lady garlanded with
flowers, that looked so fair as life, till one by one we wondered if she
were truly dead; she laid in that so fine marble house in that lonely
churchyard, where rest so many of her kin, laid there with the mother
who loved her, and whom she loved; and that sacred bell going 'Toll!
toll! toll!' so sad and slow; and those holy men, with the white
garments of the angel, pretending to read books, and yet all the time
their eyes never on the page; and all of us with the bowed head. And all
for what? She is dead; so! Is it not?"

"Well, for the life of me, Professor," I said, "I can't see anything to
laugh at in all that. Why, your explanation makes it a harder puzzle
than before. But even if the burial service was comic, what about poor
Art and his trouble? Why, his heart was simply breaking."

"Just so. Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had
made her truly his bride?"

"Yes, and it was a sweet and comforting idea for him."

"Quite so. But there was a difficulty, friend John. If so that, then
what about the others? Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist,
and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church's law, though
no wits, all gone--even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife,
am bigamist."

"I don't see where the joke comes in there either!" I said; and I did
not feel particularly pleased with him for saying such things. He laid
his hand on my arm, and said:--

"Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others
when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust.
If you could have looked into my very heart then when I want to laugh;
if you could have done so when the laugh arrived; if you could do so
now, when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him--for
he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time--maybe you would
perhaps pity me the most of all."

I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.

"Because I know!"

And now we are all scattered; and for many a long day loneliness will
sit over our roofs with brooding wings. Lucy lies in the tomb of her
kin, a lordly death-house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming
London; where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill,
and where wild flowers grow of their own accord.

So I can finish this diary; and God only knows if I shall ever begin
another. If I do, or if I even open this again, it will be to deal with
different people and different themes; for here at the end, where the
romance of my life is told, ere I go back to take up the thread of my
life-work, I say sadly and without hope,

                        "FINIS."


_"The Westminster Gazette," 25 September._

                          A HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY.


The neighbourhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a
series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what
was known to the writers of headlines as "The Kensington Horror," or
"The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or
three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from
home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all
these cases the children were too young to give any properly
intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses
is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in
the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the
children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is
generally supposed in the neighbourhood that, as the first child missed
gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to
come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as
occasion served. This is the more natural as the favourite game of the
little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A
correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to
be the "bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists
might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the
reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general
principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular
rôle at these _al fresco_ performances. Our correspondent naïvely says
that even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of
these grubby-faced little children pretend--and even imagine
themselves--to be.

There is, however, possibly a serious side to the question, for some of
the children, indeed all who have been missed at night, have been
slightly torn or wounded in the throat. The wounds seem such as might be
made by a rat or a small dog, and although of not much importance
individually, would tend to show that whatever animal inflicts them has
a system or method of its own. The police of the division have been
instructed to keep a sharp look-out for straying children, especially
when very young, in and around Hampstead Heath, and for any stray dog
which may be about.


               _"The Westminster Gazette," 25 September._

                            _Extra Special._

                         THE HAMPSTEAD HORROR.

                         ANOTHER CHILD INJURED.

                         _The "Bloofer Lady."_

We have just received intelligence that another child, missed last
night, was only discovered late in the morning under a furze bush at the
Shooter's Hill side of Hampstead Heath, which is, perhaps, less
frequented than the other parts. It has the same tiny wound in the
throat as has been noticed in other cases. It was terribly weak, and
looked quite emaciated. It too, when partially restored, had the common
story to tell of being lured away by the "bloofer lady."




CHAPTER XIV

MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL


_23 September_.--Jonathan is better after a bad night. I am so glad that
he has plenty of work to do, for that keeps his mind off the terrible
things; and oh, I am rejoiced that he is not now weighed down with the
responsibility of his new position. I knew he would be true to himself,
and now how proud I am to see my Jonathan rising to the height of his
advancement and keeping pace in all ways with the duties that come upon
him. He will be away all day till late, for he said he could not lunch
at home. My household work is done, so I shall take his foreign journal,
and lock myself up in my room and read it....


_24 September_.--I hadn't the heart to write last night; that terrible
record of Jonathan's upset me so. Poor dear! How he must have suffered,
whether it be true or only imagination. I wonder if there is any truth
in it at all. Did he get his brain fever, and then write all those
terrible things, or had he some cause for it all? I suppose I shall
never know, for I dare not open the subject to him.... And yet that man
we saw yesterday! He seemed quite certain of him.... Poor fellow! I
suppose it was the funeral upset him and sent his mind back on some
train of thought.... He believes it all himself. I remember how on our
wedding-day he said: "Unless some solemn duty come upon me to go back to
the bitter hours, asleep or awake, mad or sane." There seems to be
through it all some thread of continuity.... That fearful Count was
coming to London.... If it should be, and he came to London, with his
teeming millions.... There may be a solemn duty; and if it come we must
not shrink from it.... I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter
this very hour and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other
eyes if required. And if it be wanted; then, perhaps, if I am ready,
poor Jonathan may not be upset, for I can speak for him and never let
him be troubled or worried with it at all. If ever Jonathan quite gets
over the nervousness he may want to tell me of it all, and I can ask him
questions and find out things, and see how I may comfort him.


_Letter, Van Helsing to Mrs. Harker._

"_24 September._

(_Confidence_)

"Dear Madam,--

"I pray you to pardon my writing, in that I am so far friend as that I
sent to you sad news of Miss Lucy Westenra's death. By the kindness of
Lord Godalming, I am empowered to read her letters and papers, for I am
deeply concerned about certain matters vitally important. In them I find
some letters from you, which show how great friends you were and how you
love her. Oh, Madam Mina, by that love, I implore you, help me. It is
for others' good that I ask--to redress great wrong, and to lift much
and terrible troubles--that may be more great than you can know. May it
be that I see you? You can trust me. I am friend of Dr. John Seward and
of Lord Godalming (that was Arthur of Miss Lucy). I must keep it private
for the present from all. I should come to Exeter to see you at once if
you tell me I am privilege to come, and where and when. I implore your
pardon, madam. I have read your letters to poor Lucy, and know how good
you are and how your husband suffer; so I pray you, if it may be,
enlighten him not, lest it may harm. Again your pardon, and forgive me.

"VAN HELSING."


_Telegram, Mrs. Harker to Van Helsing._

"_25 September._--Come to-day by quarter-past ten train if you can catch
it. Can see you any time you call.

"WILHELMINA HARKER."

MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL.

_25 September._--I cannot help feeling terribly excited as the time
draws near for the visit of Dr. Van Helsing, for somehow I expect that
it will throw some light upon Jonathan's sad experience; and as he
attended poor dear Lucy in her last illness, he can tell me all about
her. That is the reason of his coming; it is concerning Lucy and her
sleep-walking, and not about Jonathan. Then I shall never know the real
truth now! How silly I am. That awful journal gets hold of my
imagination and tinges everything with something of its own colour. Of
course it is about Lucy. That habit came back to the poor dear, and that
awful night on the cliff must have made her ill. I had almost forgotten
in my own affairs how ill she was afterwards. She must have told him
of her sleep-walking adventure on the cliff, and that I knew all about
it; and now he wants me to tell him what she knows, so that he may
understand. I hope I did right in not saying anything of it to Mrs.
Westenra; I should never forgive myself if any act of mine, were it even
a negative one, brought harm on poor dear Lucy. I hope, too, Dr. Van
Helsing will not blame me; I have had so much trouble and anxiety of
late that I feel I cannot bear more just at present.

I suppose a cry does us all good at times--clears the air as other rain
does. Perhaps it was reading the journal yesterday that upset me, and
then Jonathan went away this morning to stay away from me a whole day
and night, the first time we have been parted since our marriage. I do
hope the dear fellow will take care of himself, and that nothing will
occur to upset him. It is two o'clock, and the doctor will be here soon
now. I shall say nothing of Jonathan's journal unless he asks me. I am
so glad I have type-written out my own journal, so that, in case he asks
about Lucy, I can hand it to him; it will save much questioning.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--He has come and gone. Oh, what a strange meeting, and how it
all makes my head whirl round! I feel like one in a dream. Can it be all
possible, or even a part of it? If I had not read Jonathan's journal
first, I should never have accepted even a possibility. Poor, poor, dear
Jonathan! How he must have suffered. Please the good God, all this may
not upset him again. I shall try to save him from it; but it may be even
a consolation and a help to him--terrible though it be and awful in its
consequences--to know for certain that his eyes and ears and brain did
not deceive him, and that it is all true. It may be that it is the doubt
which haunts him; that when the doubt is removed, no matter
which--waking or dreaming--may prove the truth, he will be more
satisfied and better able to bear the shock. Dr. Van Helsing must be a
good man as well as a clever one if he is Arthur's friend and Dr.
Seward's, and if they brought him all the way from Holland to look after
Lucy. I feel from having seen him that he _is_ good and kind and of a
noble nature. When he comes to-morrow I shall ask him about Jonathan;
and then, please God, all this sorrow and anxiety may lead to a good
end. I used to think I would like to practise interviewing; Jonathan's
friend on "The Exeter News" told him that memory was everything in such
work--that you must be able to put down exactly almost every word
spoken, even if you had to refine some of it afterwards. Here was a rare
interview; I shall try to record it _verbatim_.

It was half-past two o'clock when the knock came. I took my courage _à
deux mains_ and waited. In a few minutes Mary opened the door, and
announced "Dr. Van Helsing."

I rose and bowed, and he came towards me; a man of medium weight,
strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and
a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise
of the head strikes one at once as indicative of thought and power; the
head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face,
clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large, resolute, mobile
mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but with quick, sensitive
nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big, bushy brows come down and the
mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine, rising at first almost
straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart;
such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it,
but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big, dark blue eyes are set
widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man's moods. He
said to me:--

"Mrs. Harker, is it not?" I bowed assent.

"That was Miss Mina Murray?" Again I assented.

"It is Mina Murray that I came to see that was friend of that poor dear
child Lucy Westenra. Madam Mina, it is on account of the dead I come."

"Sir," I said, "you could have no better claim on me than that you were
a friend and helper of Lucy Westenra." And I held out my hand. He took
it and said tenderly:--

"Oh, Madam Mina, I knew that the friend of that poor lily girl must be
good, but I had yet to learn----" He finished his speech with a courtly
bow. I asked him what it was that he wanted to see me about, so he at
once began:--

"I have read your letters to Miss Lucy. Forgive me, but I had to begin
to inquire somewhere, and there was none to ask. I know that you were
with her at Whitby. She sometimes kept a diary--you need not look
surprised, Madam Mina; it was begun after you had left, and was in
imitation of you--and in that diary she traces by inference certain
things to a sleep-walking in which she puts down that you saved her. In
great perplexity then I come to you, and ask you out of your so much
kindness to tell me all of it that you can remember."

"I can tell you, I think, Dr. Van Helsing, all about it."

"Ah, then you have good memory for facts, for details? It is not always
so with young ladies."

"No, doctor, but I wrote it all down at the time. I can show it to you
if you like."

"Oh, Madam Mina, I will be grateful; you will do me much favour." I
could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit--I suppose it is
some of the taste of the original apple that remains still in our
mouths--so I handed him the shorthand diary. He took it with a grateful
bow, and said:--

"May I read it?"

"If you wish," I answered as demurely as I could. He opened it, and for
an instant his face fell. Then he stood up and bowed.

"Oh, you so clever woman!" he said. "I knew long that Mr. Jonathan was a
man of much thankfulness; but see, his wife have all the good things.
And will you not so much honour me and so help me as to read it for me?
Alas! I know not the shorthand." By this time my little joke was over,
and I was almost ashamed; so I took the typewritten copy from my
workbasket and handed it to him.

"Forgive me," I said: "I could not help it; but I had been thinking that
it was of dear Lucy that you wished to ask, and so that you might not
have time to wait--not on my account, but because I know your time must
be precious--I have written it out on the typewriter for you."

He took it and his eyes glistened. "You are so good," he said. "And may
I read it now? I may want to ask you some things when I have read."

"By all means," I said, "read it over whilst I order lunch; and then you
can ask me questions whilst we eat." He bowed and settled himself in a
chair with his back to the light, and became absorbed in the papers,
whilst I went to see after lunch chiefly in order that he might not be
disturbed. When I came back, I found him walking hurriedly up and down
the room, his face all ablaze with excitement. He rushed up to me and
took me by both hands.

"Oh, Madam Mina," he said, "how can I say what I owe to you? This paper
is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am daze, I am dazzle, with so
much light, and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time. But that
you do not, cannot, comprehend. Oh, but I am grateful to you, you so
clever woman. Madam"--he said this very solemnly--"if ever Abraham Van
Helsing can do anything for you or yours, I trust you will let me know.
It will be pleasure and delight if I may serve you as a friend; as a
friend, but all I have ever learned, all I can ever do, shall be for you
and those you love. There are darknesses in life, and there are lights;
you are one of the lights. You will have happy life and good life, and
your husband will be blessed in you."

"But, doctor, you praise me too much, and--and you do not know me."

"Not know you--I, who am old, and who have studied all my life men and
women; I, who have made my specialty the brain and all that belongs to
him and all that follow from him! And I have read your diary that you
have so goodly written for me, and which breathes out truth in every
line. I, who have read your so sweet letter to poor Lucy of your
marriage and your trust, not know you! Oh, Madam Mina, good women tell
all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that
angels can read; and we men who wish to know have in us something of
angels' eyes. Your husband is noble nature, and you are noble too, for
you trust, and trust cannot be where there is mean nature. And your
husband--tell me of him. Is he quite well? Is all that fever gone, and
is he strong and hearty?" I saw here an opening to ask him about
Jonathan, so I said:--

"He was almost recovered, but he has been greatly upset by Mr. Hawkins's
death." He interrupted:--

"Oh, yes, I know, I know. I have read your last two letters." I went
on:--

"I suppose this upset him, for when we were in town on Thursday last he
had a sort of shock."

"A shock, and after brain fever so soon! That was not good. What kind of
a shock was it?"

"He thought he saw some one who recalled something terrible, something
which led to his brain fever." And here the whole thing seemed to
overwhelm me in a rush. The pity for Jonathan, the horror which he
experienced, the whole fearful mystery of his diary, and the fear that
has been brooding over me ever since, all came in a tumult. I suppose I
was hysterical, for I threw myself on my knees and held up my hands to
him, and implored him to make my husband well again. He took my hands
and raised me up, and made me sit on the sofa, and sat by me; he held my
hand in his, and said to me with, oh, such infinite sweetness:--

"My life is a barren and lonely one, and so full of work that I have not
had much time for friendships; but since I have been summoned to here by
my friend John Seward I have known so many good people and seen such
nobility that I feel more than ever--and it has grown with my advancing
years--the loneliness of my life. Believe, me, then, that I come here
full of respect for you, and you have given me hope--hope, not in what I
am seeking of, but that there are good women still left to make life
happy--good women, whose lives and whose truths may make good lesson for
the children that are to be. I am glad, glad, that I may here be of some
use to you; for if your husband suffer, he suffer within the range of my
study and experience. I promise you that I will gladly do _all_ for him
that I can--all to make his life strong and manly, and your life a happy
one. Now you must eat. You are overwrought and perhaps over-anxious.
Husband Jonathan would not like to see you so pale; and what he like not
where he love, is not to his good. Therefore for his sake you must eat
and smile. You have told me all about Lucy, and so now we shall not
speak of it, lest it distress. I shall stay in Exeter to-night, for I
want to think much over what you have told me, and when I have thought I
will ask you questions, if I may. And then, too, you will tell me of
husband Jonathan's trouble so far as you can, but not yet. You must eat
now; afterwards you shall tell me all."

After lunch, when we went back to the drawing-room, he said to me:--

"And now tell me all about him." When it came to speaking to this great
learned man, I began to fear that he would think me a weak fool, and
Jonathan a madman--that journal is all so strange--and I hesitated to go
on. But he was so sweet and kind, and he had promised to help, and I
trusted him, so I said:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, what I have to tell you is so queer that you must not
laugh at me or at my husband. I have been since yesterday in a sort of
fever of doubt; you must be kind to me, and not think me foolish that I
have even half believed some very strange things." He reassured me by
his manner as well as his words when he said:--

"Oh, my dear, if you only know how strange is the matter regarding which
I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little
of any one's belief, no matter how strange it be. I have tried to keep
an open mind; and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close
it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that
make one doubt if they be mad or sane."

"Thank you, thank you, a thousand times! You have taken a weight off my
mind. If you will let me, I shall give you a paper to read. It is long,
but I have typewritten it out. It will tell you my trouble and
Jonathan's. It is the copy of his journal when abroad, and all that
happened. I dare not say anything of it; you will read for yourself and
judge. And then when I see you, perhaps, you will be very kind and tell
me what you think."

"I promise," he said as I gave him the papers; "I shall in the morning,
so soon as I can, come to see you and your husband, if I may."

"Jonathan will be here at half-past eleven, and you must come to lunch
with us and see him then; you could catch the quick 3:34 train, which
will leave you at Paddington before eight." He was surprised at my
knowledge of the trains off-hand, but he does not know that I have made
up all the trains to and from Exeter, so that I may help Jonathan in
case he is in a hurry.

So he took the papers with him and went away, and I sit here
thinking--thinking I don't know what.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Letter (by hand), Van Helsing to Mrs. Harker._

"_25 September, 6 o'clock._

"Dear Madam Mina,--

"I have read your husband's so wonderful diary. You may sleep without
doubt. Strange and terrible as it is, it is _true_! I will pledge my
life on it. It may be worse for others; but for him and you there is no
dread. He is a noble fellow; and let me tell you from experience of men,
that one who would do as he did in going down that wall and to that
room--ay, and going a second time--is not one to be injured in
permanence by a shock. His brain and his heart are all right; this I
swear, before I have even seen him; so be at rest. I shall have much to
ask him of other things. I am blessed that to-day I come to see you, for
I have learn all at once so much that again I am dazzle--dazzle more
than ever, and I must think.

"Yours the most faithful,

"ABRAHAM VAN HELSING."


_Letter, Mrs. Harker to Van Helsing._

"_25 September, 6:30 p. m._

"My dear Dr. Van Helsing,--

"A thousand thanks for your kind letter, which has taken a great weight
off my mind. And yet, if it be true, what terrible things there are in
the world, and what an awful thing if that man, that monster, be really
in London! I fear to think. I have this moment, whilst writing, had a
wire from Jonathan, saying that he leaves by the 6:25 to-night from
Launceston and will be here at 10:18, so that I shall have no fear
to-night. Will you, therefore, instead of lunching with us, please come
to breakfast at eight o'clock, if this be not too early for you? You can
get away, if you are in a hurry, by the 10:30 train, which will bring
you to Paddington by 2:35. Do not answer this, as I shall take it that,
if I do not hear, you will come to breakfast.

"Believe me,

"Your faithful and grateful friend,

"MINA HARKER."


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_26 September._--I thought never to write in this diary again, but the
time has come. When I got home last night Mina had supper ready, and
when we had supped she told me of Van Helsing's visit, and of her having
given him the two diaries copied out, and of how anxious she has been
about me. She showed me in the doctor's letter that all I wrote down was
true. It seems to have made a new man of me. It was the doubt as to the
reality of the whole thing that knocked me over. I felt impotent, and in
the dark, and distrustful. But, now that I _know_, I am not afraid, even
of the Count. He has succeeded after all, then, in his design in getting
to London, and it was he I saw. He has got younger, and how? Van Helsing
is the man to unmask him and hunt him out, if he is anything like what
Mina says. We sat late, and talked it all over. Mina is dressing, and I
shall call at the hotel in a few minutes and bring him over....

He was, I think, surprised to see me. When I came into the room where he
was, and introduced myself, he took me by the shoulder, and turned my
face round to the light, and said, after a sharp scrutiny:--

"But Madam Mina told me you were ill, that you had had a shock." It was
so funny to hear my wife called "Madam Mina" by this kindly,
strong-faced old man. I smiled, and said:--

"I _was_ ill, I _have_ had a shock; but you have cured me already."

"And how?"

"By your letter to Mina last night. I was in doubt, and then everything
took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the
evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know
what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been
the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted
myself. Doctor, you don't know what it is to doubt everything, even
yourself. No, you don't; you couldn't with eyebrows like yours." He
seemed pleased, and laughed as he said:--

"So! You are physiognomist. I learn more here with each hour. I am with
so much pleasure coming to you to breakfast; and, oh, sir, you will
pardon praise from an old man, but you are blessed in your wife." I
would listen to him go on praising Mina for a day, so I simply nodded
and stood silent.

"She is one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and
other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its
light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an
egoist--and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so sceptical and
selfish. And you, sir--I have read all the letters to poor Miss Lucy,
and some of them speak of you, so I know you since some days from the
knowing of others; but I have seen your true self since last night. You
will give me your hand, will you not? And let us be friends for all our
lives."

We shook hands, and he was so earnest and so kind that it made me quite
choky.

"And now," he said, "may I ask you for some more help? I have a great
task to do, and at the beginning it is to know. You can help me here.
Can you tell me what went before your going to Transylvania? Later on I
may ask more help, and of a different kind; but at first this will do."

"Look here, sir," I said, "does what you have to do concern the Count?"

"It does," he said solemnly.

"Then I am with you heart and soul. As you go by the 10:30 train, you
will not have time to read them; but I shall get the bundle of papers.
You can take them with you and read them in the train."

After breakfast I saw him to the station. When we were parting he
said:--

"Perhaps you will come to town if I send to you, and take Madam Mina
too."

"We shall both come when you will," I said.

I had got him the morning papers and the London papers of the previous
night, and while we were talking at the carriage window, waiting for the
train to start, he was turning them over. His eyes suddenly seemed to
catch something in one of them, "The Westminster Gazette"--I knew it by
the colour--and he grew quite white. He read something intently,
groaning to himself: "Mein Gott! Mein Gott! So soon! so soon!" I do not
think he remembered me at the moment. Just then the whistle blew, and
the train moved off. This recalled him to himself, and he leaned out of
the window and waved his hand, calling out: "Love to Madam Mina; I shall
write so soon as ever I can."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_26 September._--Truly there is no such thing as finality. Not a week
since I said "Finis," and yet here I am starting fresh again, or rather
going on with the same record. Until this afternoon I had no cause to
think of what is done. Renfield had become, to all intents, as sane as
he ever was. He was already well ahead with his fly business; and he had
just started in the spider line also; so he had not been of any trouble
to me. I had a letter from Arthur, written on Sunday, and from it I
gather that he is bearing up wonderfully well. Quincey Morris is with
him, and that is much of a help, for he himself is a bubbling well of
good spirits. Quincey wrote me a line too, and from him I hear that
Arthur is beginning to recover something of his old buoyancy; so as to
them all my mind is at rest. As for myself, I was settling down to my
work with the enthusiasm which I used to have for it, so that I might
fairly have said that the wound which poor Lucy left on me was becoming
cicatrised. Everything is, however, now reopened; and what is to be the
end God only knows. I have an idea that Van Helsing thinks he knows,
too, but he will only let out enough at a time to whet curiosity. He
went to Exeter yesterday, and stayed there all night. To-day he came
back, and almost bounded into the room at about half-past five o'clock,
and thrust last night's "Westminster Gazette" into my hand.

"What do you think of that?" he asked as he stood back and folded his
arms.

I looked over the paper, for I really did not know what he meant; but he
took it from me and pointed out a paragraph about children being decoyed
away at Hampstead. It did not convey much to me, until I reached a
passage where it described small punctured wounds on their throats. An
idea struck me, and I looked up. "Well?" he said.

"It is like poor Lucy's."

"And what do you make of it?"

"Simply that there is some cause in common. Whatever it was that injured
her has injured them." I did not quite understand his answer:--

"That is true indirectly, but not directly."

"How do you mean, Professor?" I asked. I was a little inclined to take
his seriousness lightly--for, after all, four days of rest and freedom
from burning, harrowing anxiety does help to restore one's spirits--but
when I saw his face, it sobered me. Never, even in the midst of our
despair about poor Lucy, had he looked more stern.

"Tell me!" I said. "I can hazard no opinion. I do not know what to
think, and I have no data on which to found a conjecture."

"Do you mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion as to
what poor Lucy died of; not after all the hints given, not only by
events, but by me?"

"Of nervous prostration following on great loss or waste of blood."

"And how the blood lost or waste?" I shook my head. He stepped over and
sat down beside me, and went on:--

"You are clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold;
but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears
hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to
you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand,
and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But
there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men's
eyes, because they know--or think they know--some things which other men
have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to
explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to
explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,
which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend
to be young--like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not
believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialisation. No? Nor
in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in
hypnotism----"

"Yes," I said. "Charcot has proved that pretty well." He smiled as he
went on: "Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And of course then you
understand how it act, and can follow the mind of the great
Charcot--alas that he is no more!--into the very soul of the patient
that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it that you
simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to conclusion
be a blank? No? Then tell me--for I am student of the brain--how you
accept the hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let me tell you, my
friend, that there are things done to-day in electrical science which
would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered
electricity--who would themselves not so long before have been burned
as wizards. There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that
Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and 'Old Parr' one hundred and
sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her poor
veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we
could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do
you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the
qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me
why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived
for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew,
till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can
you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that
come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their
veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang
on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant
nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that
it is hot, flit down on them, and then--and then in the morning are
found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?"

"Good God, Professor!" I said, starting up. "Do you mean to tell me that
Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London
in the nineteenth century?" He waved his hand for silence, and went
on:--

"Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of
men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and
why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint?
Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are
some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and
women who cannot die? We all know--because science has vouched for the
fact--that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of
years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of
the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die
and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the
corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men
come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian
fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?" Here
I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered; he so crowded on my mind
his list of nature's eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my
imagination was getting fired. I had a dim idea that he was teaching me
some lesson, as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam; but
he used then to tell me the thing, so that I could have the object of
thought in mind all the time. But now I was without this help, yet I
wanted to follow him, so I said:--

"Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so
that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in
my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an
idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping
from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without
knowing where I am going."

"That is good image," he said. "Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is
this: I want you to believe."

"To believe what?"

"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once
of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to
believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man.
He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of
truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway
truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value
him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in
the universe."

"Then you want me not to let some previous conviction injure the
receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read
your lesson aright?"

"Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now
that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to
understand. You think then that those so small holes in the children's
throats were made by the same that made the hole in Miss Lucy?"

"I suppose so." He stood up and said solemnly:--

"Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were so! but alas! no. It is worse,
far, far worse."

"In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?" I cried.

He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair, and placed his
elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands as he spoke:--

"They were made by Miss Lucy!"




CHAPTER XV

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY--_continued_.


For a while sheer anger mastered me; it was as if he had during her life
struck Lucy on the face. I smote the table hard and rose up as I said to
him:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad?" He raised his head and looked at me, and
somehow the tenderness of his face calmed me at once. "Would I were!" he
said. "Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my
friend, why, think you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell
you so simple a thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all
my life? Was it because I wished to give you pain? Was it that I wanted,
now so late, revenge for that time when you saved my life, and from a
fearful death? Ah no!"

"Forgive me," said I. He went on:--

"My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the breaking to you,
for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But even yet I do not
expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract
truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always
believed the 'no' of it; it is more hard still to accept so sad a
concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. To-night I go to prove
it. Dare you come with me?"

This staggered me. A man does not like to prove such a truth; Byron
excepted from the category, jealousy.

    "And prove the very truth he most abhorred."

He saw my hesitation, and spoke:--

"The logic is simple, no madman's logic this time, jumping from tussock
to tussock in a misty bog. If it be not true, then proof will be relief;
at worst it will not harm. If it be true! Ah, there is the dread; yet
very dread should help my cause, for in it is some need of belief. Come,
I tell you what I propose: first, that we go off now and see that child
in the hospital. Dr. Vincent, of the North Hospital, where the papers
say the child is, is friend of mine, and I think of yours since you were
in class at Amsterdam. He will let two scientists see his case, if he
will not let two friends. We shall tell him nothing, but only that we
wish to learn. And then----"

"And then?" He took a key from his pocket and held it up. "And then we
spend the night, you and I, in the churchyard where Lucy lies. This is
the key that lock the tomb. I had it from the coffin-man to give to
Arthur." My heart sank within me, for I felt that there was some fearful
ordeal before us. I could do nothing, however, so I plucked up what
heart I could and said that we had better hasten, as the afternoon was
passing....

We found the child awake. It had had a sleep and taken some food, and
altogether was going on well. Dr. Vincent took the bandage from its
throat, and showed us the punctures. There was no mistaking the
similarity to those which had been on Lucy's throat. They were smaller,
and the edges looked fresher; that was all. We asked Vincent to what he
attributed them, and he replied that it must have been a bite of some
animal, perhaps a rat; but, for his own part, he was inclined to think
that it was one of the bats which are so numerous on the northern
heights of London. "Out of so many harmless ones," he said, "there may
be some wild specimen from the South of a more malignant species. Some
sailor may have brought one home, and it managed to escape; or even from
the Zoölogical Gardens a young one may have got loose, or one be bred
there from a vampire. These things do occur, you know. Only ten days ago
a wolf got out, and was, I believe, traced up in this direction. For a
week after, the children were playing nothing but Red Riding Hood on the
Heath and in every alley in the place until this 'bloofer lady' scare
came along, since when it has been quite a gala-time with them. Even
this poor little mite, when he woke up to-day, asked the nurse if he
might go away. When she asked him why he wanted to go, he said he wanted
to play with the 'bloofer lady.'"

"I hope," said Van Helsing, "that when you are sending the child home
you will caution its parents to keep strict watch over it. These fancies
to stray are most dangerous; and if the child were to remain out another
night, it would probably be fatal. But in any case I suppose you will
not let it away for some days?"

"Certainly not, not for a week at least; longer if the wound is not
healed."

Our visit to the hospital took more time than we had reckoned on, and
the sun had dipped before we came out. When Van Helsing saw how dark it
was, he said:--

"There is no hurry. It is more late than I thought. Come, let us seek
somewhere that we may eat, and then we shall go on our way."

We dined at "Jack Straw's Castle" along with a little crowd of
bicyclists and others who were genially noisy. About ten o'clock we
started from the inn. It was then very dark, and the scattered lamps
made the darkness greater when we were once outside their individual
radius. The Professor had evidently noted the road we were to go, for he
went on unhesitatingly; but, as for me, I was in quite a mixup as to
locality. As we went further, we met fewer and fewer people, till at
last we were somewhat surprised when we met even the patrol of horse
police going their usual suburban round. At last we reached the wall of
the churchyard, which we climbed over. With some little difficulty--for
it was very dark, and the whole place seemed so strange to us--we found
the Westenra tomb. The Professor took the key, opened the creaky door,
and standing back, politely, but quite unconsciously, motioned me to
precede him. There was a delicious irony in the offer, in the
courtliness of giving preference on such a ghastly occasion. My
companion followed me quickly, and cautiously drew the door to, after
carefully ascertaining that the lock was a falling, and not a spring,
one. In the latter case we should have been in a bad plight. Then he
fumbled in his bag, and taking out a matchbox and a piece of candle,
proceeded to make a light. The tomb in the day-time, and when wreathed
with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now, some
days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites
turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the
beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured
stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished
brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a
candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been
imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life--animal life--was
not the only thing which could pass away.

Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Holding his candle so
that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm
dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he
made assurance of Lucy's coffin. Another search in his bag, and he took
out a turnscrew.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"To open the coffin. You shall yet be convinced." Straightway he began
taking out the screws, and finally lifted off the lid, showing the
casing of lead beneath. The sight was almost too much for me. It seemed
to be as much an affront to the dead as it would have been to have
stripped off her clothing in her sleep whilst living; I actually took
hold of his hand to stop him. He only said: "You shall see," and again
fumbling in his bag, took out a tiny fret-saw. Striking the turnscrew
through the lead with a swift downward stab, which made me wince, he
made a small hole, which was, however, big enough to admit the point of
the saw. I had expected a rush of gas from the week-old corpse. We
doctors, who have had to study our dangers, have to become accustomed to
such things, and I drew back towards the door. But the Professor never
stopped for a moment; he sawed down a couple of feet along one side of
the lead coffin, and then across, and down the other side. Taking the
edge of the loose flange, he bent it back towards the foot of the
coffin, and holding up the candle into the aperture, motioned to me to
look.

I drew near and looked. The coffin was empty.

It was certainly a surprise to me, and gave me a considerable shock, but
Van Helsing was unmoved. He was now more sure than ever of his ground,
and so emboldened to proceed in his task. "Are you satisfied now, friend
John?" he asked.

I felt all the dogged argumentativeness of my nature awake within me as
I answered him:--

"I am satisfied that Lucy's body is not in that coffin; but that only
proves one thing."

"And what is that, friend John?"

"That it is not there."

"That is good logic," he said, "so far as it goes. But how do you--how
can you--account for it not being there?"

"Perhaps a body-snatcher," I suggested. "Some of the undertaker's people
may have stolen it." I felt that I was speaking folly, and yet it was
the only real cause which I could suggest. The Professor sighed. "Ah
well!" he said, "we must have more proof. Come with me."

He put on the coffin-lid again, gathered up all his things and placed
them in the bag, blew out the light, and placed the candle also in the
bag. We opened the door, and went out. Behind us he closed the door and
locked it. He handed me the key, saying: "Will you keep it? You had
better be assured." I laughed--it was not a very cheerful laugh, I am
bound to say--as I motioned him to keep it. "A key is nothing," I said;
"there may be duplicates; and anyhow it is not difficult to pick a lock
of that kind." He said nothing, but put the key in his pocket. Then he
told me to watch at one side of the churchyard whilst he would watch at
the other. I took up my place behind a yew-tree, and I saw his dark
figure move until the intervening headstones and trees hid it from my
sight.

It was a lonely vigil. Just after I had taken my place I heard a distant
clock strike twelve, and in time came one and two. I was chilled and
unnerved, and angry with the Professor for taking me on such an errand
and with myself for coming. I was too cold and too sleepy to be keenly
observant, and not sleepy enough to betray my trust so altogether I had
a dreary, miserable time.

Suddenly, as I turned round, I thought I saw something like a white
streak, moving between two dark yew-trees at the side of the churchyard
farthest from the tomb; at the same time a dark mass moved from the
Professor's side of the ground, and hurriedly went towards it. Then I
too moved; but I had to go round headstones and railed-off tombs, and I
stumbled over graves. The sky was overcast, and somewhere far off an
early cock crew. A little way off, beyond a line of scattered
juniper-trees, which marked the pathway to the church, a white, dim
figure flitted in the direction of the tomb. The tomb itself was hidden
by trees, and I could not see where the figure disappeared. I heard the
rustle of actual movement where I had first seen the white figure, and
coming over, found the Professor holding in his arms a tiny child. When
he saw me he held it out to me, and said:--

"Are you satisfied now?"

"No," I said, in a way that I felt was aggressive.

"Do you not see the child?"

"Yes, it is a child, but who brought it here? And is it wounded?" I
asked.

"We shall see," said the Professor, and with one impulse we took our way
out of the churchyard, he carrying the sleeping child.

When we had got some little distance away, we went into a clump of
trees, and struck a match, and looked at the child's throat. It was
without a scratch or scar of any kind.

"Was I right?" I asked triumphantly.

"We were just in time," said the Professor thankfully.

We had now to decide what we were to do with the child, and so consulted
about it. If we were to take it to a police-station we should have to
give some account of our movements during the night; at least, we should
have had to make some statement as to how we had come to find the child.
So finally we decided that we would take it to the Heath, and when we
heard a policeman coming, would leave it where he could not fail to find
it; we would then seek our way home as quickly as we could. All fell out
well. At the edge of Hampstead Heath we heard a policeman's heavy
tramp, and laying the child on the pathway, we waited and watched until
he saw it as he flashed his lantern to and fro. We heard his exclamation
of astonishment, and then we went away silently. By good chance we got a
cab near the "Spaniards," and drove to town.

I cannot sleep, so I make this entry. But I must try to get a few hours'
sleep, as Van Helsing is to call for me at noon. He insists that I shall
go with him on another expedition.

       *       *       *       *       *

_27 September._--It was two o'clock before we found a suitable
opportunity for our attempt. The funeral held at noon was all completed,
and the last stragglers of the mourners had taken themselves lazily
away, when, looking carefully from behind a clump of alder-trees, we saw
the sexton lock the gate after him. We knew then that we were safe till
morning did we desire it; but the Professor told me that we should not
want more than an hour at most. Again I felt that horrid sense of the
reality of things, in which any effort of imagination seemed out of
place; and I realised distinctly the perils of the law which we were
incurring in our unhallowed work. Besides, I felt it was all so useless.
Outrageous as it was to open a leaden coffin, to see if a woman dead
nearly a week were really dead, it now seemed the height of folly to
open the tomb again, when we knew, from the evidence of our own
eyesight, that the coffin was empty. I shrugged my shoulders, however,
and rested silent, for Van Helsing had a way of going on his own road,
no matter who remonstrated. He took the key, opened the vault, and again
courteously motioned me to precede. The place was not so gruesome as
last night, but oh, how unutterably mean-looking when the sunshine
streamed in. Van Helsing walked over to Lucy's coffin, and I followed.
He bent over and again forced back the leaden flange; and then a shock
of surprise and dismay shot through me.

There lay Lucy, seemingly just as we had seen her the night before her
funeral. She was, if possible, more radiantly beautiful than ever; and I
could not believe that she was dead. The lips were red, nay redder than
before; and on the cheeks was a delicate bloom.

"Is this a juggle?" I said to him.

"Are you convinced now?" said the Professor in response, and as he spoke
he put over his hand, and in a way that made me shudder, pulled back the
dead lips and showed the white teeth.

"See," he went on, "see, they are even sharper than before. With this
and this"--and he touched one of the canine teeth and that below
it--"the little children can be bitten. Are you of belief now, friend
John?" Once more, argumentative hostility woke within me. I _could_ not
accept such an overwhelming idea as he suggested; so, with an attempt to
argue of which I was even at the moment ashamed, I said:--

"She may have been placed here since last night."

"Indeed? That is so, and by whom?"

"I do not know. Some one has done it."

"And yet she has been dead one week. Most peoples in that time would not
look so." I had no answer for this, so was silent. Van Helsing did not
seem to notice my silence; at any rate, he showed neither chagrin nor
triumph. He was looking intently at the face of the dead woman, raising
the eyelids and looking at the eyes, and once more opening the lips and
examining the teeth. Then he turned to me and said:--

"Here, there is one thing which is different from all recorded; here is
some dual life that is not as the common. She was bitten by the vampire
when she was in a trance, sleep-walking--oh, you start; you do not know
that, friend John, but you shall know it all later--and in trance could
he best come to take more blood. In trance she died, and in trance she
is Un-Dead, too. So it is that she differ from all other. Usually when
the Un-Dead sleep at home"--as he spoke he made a comprehensive sweep of
his arm to designate what to a vampire was "home"--"their face show what
they are, but this so sweet that was when she not Un-Dead she go back to
the nothings of the common dead. There is no malign there, see, and so
it make hard that I must kill her in her sleep." This turned my blood
cold, and it began to dawn upon me that I was accepting Van Helsing's
theories; but if she were really dead, what was there of terror in the
idea of killing her? He looked up at me, and evidently saw the change in
my face, for he said almost joyously:--

"Ah, you believe now?"

I answered: "Do not press me too hard all at once. I am willing to
accept. How will you do this bloody work?"

"I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall
drive a stake through her body." It made me shudder to think of so
mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling
was not so strong as I had expected. I was, in fact, beginning to
shudder at the presence of this being, this Un-Dead, as Van Helsing
called it, and to loathe it. Is it possible that love is all subjective,
or all objective?

I waited a considerable time for Van Helsing to begin, but he stood as
if wrapped in thought. Presently he closed the catch of his bag with a
snap, and said:--

"I have been thinking, and have made up my mind as to what is best. If I
did simply follow my inclining I would do now, at this moment, what is
to be done; but there are other things to follow, and things that are
thousand times more difficult in that them we do not know. This is
simple. She have yet no life taken, though that is of time; and to act
now would be to take danger from her for ever. But then we may have to
want Arthur, and how shall we tell him of this? If you, who saw the
wounds on Lucy's throat, and saw the wounds so similar on the child's at
the hospital; if you, who saw the coffin empty last night and full
to-day with a woman who have not change only to be more rose and more
beautiful in a whole week, after she die--if you know of this and know
of the white figure last night that brought the child to the churchyard,
and yet of your own senses you did not believe, how, then, can I expect
Arthur, who know none of those things, to believe? He doubted me when I
took him from her kiss when she was dying. I know he has forgiven me
because in some mistaken idea I have done things that prevent him say
good-bye as he ought; and he may think that in some more mistaken idea
this woman was buried alive; and that in most mistake of all we have
killed her. He will then argue back that it is we, mistaken ones, that
have killed her by our ideas; and so he will be much unhappy always. Yet
he never can be sure; and that is the worst of all. And he will
sometimes think that she he loved was buried alive, and that will paint
his dreams with horrors of what she must have suffered; and again, he
will think that we may be right, and that his so beloved was, after all,
an Un-Dead. No! I told him once, and since then I learn much. Now, since
I know it is all true, a hundred thousand times more do I know that he
must pass through the bitter waters to reach the sweet. He, poor fellow,
must have one hour that will make the very face of heaven grow black to
him; then we can act for good all round and send him peace. My mind is
made up. Let us go. You return home for to-night to your asylum, and see
that all be well. As for me, I shall spend the night here in this
churchyard in my own way. To-morrow night you will come to me to the
Berkeley Hotel at ten of the clock. I shall send for Arthur to come too,
and also that so fine young man of America that gave his blood. Later we
shall all have work to do. I come with you so far as Piccadilly and
there dine, for I must be back here before the sun set."

So we locked the tomb and came away, and got over the wall of the
churchyard, which was not much of a task, and drove back to Piccadilly.


_Note left by Van Helsing in his portmanteau, Berkeley Hotel directed to
John Seward, M. D._

(Not delivered.)

"_27 September._

"Friend John,--

"I write this in case anything should happen. I go alone to watch in
that churchyard. It pleases me that the Un-Dead, Miss Lucy, shall not
leave to-night, that so on the morrow night she may be more eager.
Therefore I shall fix some things she like not--garlic and a
crucifix--and so seal up the door of the tomb. She is young as Un-Dead,
and will heed. Moreover, these are only to prevent her coming out; they
may not prevail on her wanting to get in; for then the Un-Dead is
desperate, and must find the line of least resistance, whatsoever it may
be. I shall be at hand all the night from sunset till after the sunrise,
and if there be aught that may be learned I shall learn it. For Miss
Lucy or from her, I have no fear; but that other to whom is there that
she is Un-Dead, he have now the power to seek her tomb and find shelter.
He is cunning, as I know from Mr. Jonathan and from the way that all
along he have fooled us when he played with us for Miss Lucy's life, and
we lost; and in many ways the Un-Dead are strong. He have always the
strength in his hand of twenty men; even we four who gave our strength
to Miss Lucy it also is all to him. Besides, he can summon his wolf and
I know not what. So if it be that he come thither on this night he shall
find me; but none other shall--until it be too late. But it may be that
he will not attempt the place. There is no reason why he should; his
hunting ground is more full of game than the churchyard where the
Un-Dead woman sleep, and the one old man watch.

"Therefore I write this in case.... Take the papers that are with this,
the diaries of Harker and the rest, and read them, and then find this
great Un-Dead, and cut off his head and burn his heart or drive a stake
through it, so that the world may rest from him.

"If it be so, farewell.

"VAN HELSING."



_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_28 September._--It is wonderful what a good night's sleep will do for
one. Yesterday I was almost willing to accept Van Helsing's monstrous
ideas; but now they seem to start out lurid before me as outrages on
common sense. I have no doubt that he believes it all. I wonder if his
mind can have become in any way unhinged. Surely there must be _some_
rational explanation of all these mysterious things. Is it possible that
the Professor can have done it himself? He is so abnormally clever that
if he went off his head he would carry out his intent with regard to
some fixed idea in a wonderful way. I am loath to think it, and indeed
it would be almost as great a marvel as the other to find that Van
Helsing was mad; but anyhow I shall watch him carefully. I may get some
light on the mystery.

       *       *       *       *       *

_29 September, morning._.... Last night, at a little before ten o'clock,
Arthur and Quincey came into Van Helsing's room; he told us all that he
wanted us to do, but especially addressing himself to Arthur, as if all
our wills were centred in his. He began by saying that he hoped we would
all come with him too, "for," he said, "there is a grave duty to be done
there. You were doubtless surprised at my letter?" This query was
directly addressed to Lord Godalming.

"I was. It rather upset me for a bit. There has been so much trouble
around my house of late that I could do without any more. I have been
curious, too, as to what you mean. Quincey and I talked it over; but the
more we talked, the more puzzled we got, till now I can say for myself
that I'm about up a tree as to any meaning about anything."

"Me too," said Quincey Morris laconically.

"Oh," said the Professor, "then you are nearer the beginning, both of
you, than friend John here, who has to go a long way back before he can
even get so far as to begin."

It was evident that he recognised my return to my old doubting frame of
mind without my saying a word. Then, turning to the other two, he said
with intense gravity:--

"I want your permission to do what I think good this night. It is, I
know, much to ask; and when you know what it is I propose to do you will
know, and only then, how much. Therefore may I ask that you promise me
in the dark, so that afterwards, though you may be angry with me for a
time--I must not disguise from myself the possibility that such may
be--you shall not blame yourselves for anything."

"That's frank anyhow," broke in Quincey. "I'll answer for the Professor.
I don't quite see his drift, but I swear he's honest; and that's good
enough for me."

"I thank you, sir," said Van Helsing proudly. "I have done myself the
honour of counting you one trusting friend, and such endorsement is dear
to me." He held out a hand, which Quincey took.

Then Arthur spoke out:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, I don't quite like to 'buy a pig in a poke,' as they
say in Scotland, and if it be anything in which my honour as a gentleman
or my faith as a Christian is concerned, I cannot make such a promise.
If you can assure me that what you intend does not violate either of
these two, then I give my consent at once; though for the life of me, I
cannot understand what you are driving at."

"I accept your limitation," said Van Helsing, "and all I ask of you is
that if you feel it necessary to condemn any act of mine, you will first
consider it well and be satisfied that it does not violate your
reservations."

"Agreed!" said Arthur; "that is only fair. And now that the
_pourparlers_ are over, may I ask what it is we are to do?"

"I want you to come with me, and to come in secret, to the churchyard at
Kingstead."

Arthur's face fell as he said in an amazed sort of way:--

"Where poor Lucy is buried?" The Professor bowed. Arthur went on: "And
when there?"

"To enter the tomb!" Arthur stood up.

"Professor, are you in earnest; or it is some monstrous joke? Pardon me,
I see that you are in earnest." He sat down again, but I could see that
he sat firmly and proudly, as one who is on his dignity. There was
silence until he asked again:--

"And when in the tomb?"

"To open the coffin."

"This is too much!" he said, angrily rising again. "I am willing to be
patient in all things that are reasonable; but in this--this desecration
of the grave--of one who----" He fairly choked with indignation. The
Professor looked pityingly at him.

"If I could spare you one pang, my poor friend," he said, "God knows I
would. But this night our feet must tread in thorny paths; or later, and
for ever, the feet you love must walk in paths of flame!"

Arthur looked up with set white face and said:--

"Take care, sir, take care!"

"Would it not be well to hear what I have to say?" said Van Helsing.
"And then you will at least know the limit of my purpose. Shall I go
on?"

"That's fair enough," broke in Morris.

After a pause Van Helsing went on, evidently with an effort:--

"Miss Lucy is dead; is it not so? Yes! Then there can be no wrong to
her. But if she be not dead----"

Arthur jumped to his feet.

"Good God!" he cried. "What do you mean? Has there been any mistake; has
she been buried alive?" He groaned in anguish that not even hope could
soften.

"I did not say she was alive, my child; I did not think it. I go no
further than to say that she might be Un-Dead."

"Un-Dead! Not alive! What do you mean? Is this all a nightmare, or what
is it?"

"There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they
may solve only in part. Believe me, we are now on the verge of one. But
I have not done. May I cut off the head of dead Miss Lucy?"

"Heavens and earth, no!" cried Arthur in a storm of passion. "Not for
the wide world will I consent to any mutilation of her dead body. Dr.
Van Helsing, you try me too far. What have I done to you that you should
torture me so? What did that poor, sweet girl do that you should want to
cast such dishonour on her grave? Are you mad that speak such things, or
am I mad to listen to them? Don't dare to think more of such a
desecration; I shall not give my consent to anything you do. I have a
duty to do in protecting her grave from outrage; and, by God, I shall do
it!"

Van Helsing rose up from where he had all the time been seated, and
said, gravely and sternly:--

"My Lord Godalming, I, too, have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty
to you, a duty to the dead; and, by God, I shall do it! All I ask you
now is that you come with me, that you look and listen; and if when
later I make the same request you do not be more eager for its
fulfilment even than I am, then--then I shall do my duty, whatever it
may seem to me. And then, to follow of your Lordship's wishes I shall
hold myself at your disposal to render an account to you, when and where
you will." His voice broke a little, and he went on with a voice full of
pity:--

"But, I beseech you, do not go forth in anger with me. In a long life of
acts which were often not pleasant to do, and which sometimes did wring
my heart, I have never had so heavy a task as now. Believe me that if
the time comes for you to change your mind towards me, one look from
you will wipe away all this so sad hour, for I would do what a man can
to save you from sorrow. Just think. For why should I give myself so
much of labour and so much of sorrow? I have come here from my own land
to do what I can of good; at the first to please my friend John, and
then to help a sweet young lady, whom, too, I came to love. For her--I
am ashamed to say so much, but I say it in kindness--I gave what you
gave; the blood of my veins; I gave it, I, who was not, like you, her
lover, but only her physician and her friend. I gave to her my nights
and days--before death, after death; and if my death can do her good
even now, when she is the dead Un-Dead, she shall have it freely." He
said this with a very grave, sweet pride, and Arthur was much affected
by it. He took the old man's hand and said in a broken voice:--

"Oh, it is hard to think of it, and I cannot understand; but at least I
shall go with you and wait."




CHAPTER XVI

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY--_continued_


It was just a quarter before twelve o'clock when we got into the
churchyard over the low wall. The night was dark with occasional gleams
of moonlight between the rents of the heavy clouds that scudded across
the sky. We all kept somehow close together, with Van Helsing slightly
in front as he led the way. When we had come close to the tomb I looked
well at Arthur, for I feared that the proximity to a place laden with so
sorrowful a memory would upset him; but he bore himself well. I took it
that the very mystery of the proceeding was in some way a counteractant
to his grief. The Professor unlocked the door, and seeing a natural
hesitation amongst us for various reasons, solved the difficulty by
entering first himself. The rest of us followed, and he closed the door.
He then lit a dark lantern and pointed to the coffin. Arthur stepped
forward hesitatingly; Van Helsing said to me:--

"You were with me here yesterday. Was the body of Miss Lucy in that
coffin?"

"It was." The Professor turned to the rest saying:--

"You hear; and yet there is no one who does not believe with me." He
took his screwdriver and again took off the lid of the coffin. Arthur
looked on, very pale but silent; when the lid was removed he stepped
forward. He evidently did not know that there was a leaden coffin, or,
at any rate, had not thought of it. When he saw the rent in the lead,
the blood rushed to his face for an instant, but as quickly fell away
again, so that he remained of a ghastly whiteness; he was still silent.
Van Helsing forced back the leaden flange, and we all looked in and
recoiled.

The coffin was empty!

For several minutes no one spoke a word. The silence was broken by
Quincey Morris:--

"Professor, I answered for you. Your word is all I want. I wouldn't ask
such a thing ordinarily--I wouldn't so dishonour you as to imply a
doubt; but this is a mystery that goes beyond any honour or dishonour.
Is this your doing?"

"I swear to you by all that I hold sacred that I have not removed nor
touched her. What happened was this: Two nights ago my friend Seward and
I came here--with good purpose, believe me. I opened that coffin, which
was then sealed up, and we found it, as now, empty. We then waited, and
saw something white come through the trees. The next day we came here in
day-time, and she lay there. Did she not, friend John?"

"Yes."

"That night we were just in time. One more so small child was missing,
and we find it, thank God, unharmed amongst the graves. Yesterday I came
here before sundown, for at sundown the Un-Dead can move. I waited here
all the night till the sun rose, but I saw nothing. It was most probable
that it was because I had laid over the clamps of those doors garlic,
which the Un-Dead cannot bear, and other things which they shun. Last
night there was no exodus, so to-night before the sundown I took away my
garlic and other things. And so it is we find this coffin empty. But
bear with me. So far there is much that is strange. Wait you with me
outside, unseen and unheard, and things much stranger are yet to be.
So"--here he shut the dark slide of his lantern--"now to the outside."
He opened the door, and we filed out, he coming last and locking the
door behind him.

Oh! but it seemed fresh and pure in the night air after the terror of
that vault. How sweet it was to see the clouds race by, and the passing
gleams of the moonlight between the scudding clouds crossing and
passing--like the gladness and sorrow of a man's life; how sweet it was
to breathe the fresh air, that had no taint of death and decay; how
humanising to see the red lighting of the sky beyond the hill, and to
hear far away the muffled roar that marks the life of a great city. Each
in his own way was solemn and overcome. Arthur was silent, and was, I
could see, striving to grasp the purpose and the inner meaning of the
mystery. I was myself tolerably patient, and half inclined again to
throw aside doubt and to accept Van Helsing's conclusions. Quincey
Morris was phlegmatic in the way of a man who accepts all things, and
accepts them in the spirit of cool bravery, with hazard of all he has to
stake. Not being able to smoke, he cut himself a good-sized plug of
tobacco and began to chew. As to Van Helsing, he was employed in a
definite way. First he took from his bag a mass of what looked like
thin, wafer-like biscuit, which was carefully rolled up in a white
napkin; next he took out a double-handful of some whitish stuff, like
dough or putty. He crumbled the wafer up fine and worked it into the
mass between his hands. This he then took, and rolling it into thin
strips, began to lay them into the crevices between the door and its
setting in the tomb. I was somewhat puzzled at this, and being close,
asked him what it was that he was doing. Arthur and Quincey drew near
also, as they too were curious. He answered:--

"I am closing the tomb, so that the Un-Dead may not enter."

"And is that stuff you have put there going to do it?" asked Quincey.
"Great Scott! Is this a game?"

"It is."

"What is that which you are using?" This time the question was by
Arthur. Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered:--

"The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence." It was an
answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and we felt individually
that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the Professor's, a
purpose which could thus use the to him most sacred of things, it was
impossible to distrust. In respectful silence we took the places
assigned to us close round the tomb, but hidden from the sight of any
one approaching. I pitied the others, especially Arthur. I had myself
been apprenticed by my former visits to this watching horror; and yet I,
who had up to an hour ago repudiated the proofs, felt my heart sink
within me. Never did tombs look so ghastly white; never did cypress, or
yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funereal gloom; never did tree
or grass wave or rustle so ominously; never did bough creak so
mysteriously; and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a
woeful presage through the night.

There was a long spell of silence, a big, aching void, and then from the
Professor a keen "S-s-s-s!" He pointed; and far down the avenue of yews
we saw a white figure advance--a dim white figure, which held something
dark at its breast. The figure stopped, and at the moment a ray of
moonlight fell upon the masses of driving clouds and showed in startling
prominence a dark-haired woman, dressed in the cerements of the grave.
We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a
fair-haired child. There was a pause and a sharp little cry, such as a
child gives in sleep, or a dog as it lies before the fire and dreams. We
were starting forward, but the Professor's warning hand, seen by us as
he stood behind a yew-tree, kept us back; and then as we looked the
white figure moved forwards again. It was now near enough for us to see
clearly, and the moonlight still held. My own heart grew cold as ice,
and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognised the features of
Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was
turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous
wantonness. Van Helsing stepped out, and, obedient to his gesture, we
all advanced too; the four of us ranged in a line before the door of the
tomb. Van Helsing raised his lantern and drew the slide; by the
concentrated light that fell on Lucy's face we could see that the lips
were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her
chin and stained the purity of her lawn death-robe.

We shuddered with horror. I could see by the tremulous light that even
Van Helsing's iron nerve had failed. Arthur was next to me, and if I had
not seized his arm and held him up, he would have fallen.

When Lucy--I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her
shape--saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives
when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy's eyes in form
and colour; but Lucy's eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of
the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love
passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have
done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy
light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God,
how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to
the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had
clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls
over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There
was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when
she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell
back and hid his face in his hands.

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace,
said:--

"Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are
hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!"

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones--something of the
tingling of glass when struck--which rang through the brains even of us
who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under
a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She
was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between
them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a
suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter
the tomb.

When within a foot or two of the door, however, she stopped, as if
arrested by some irresistible force. Then she turned, and her face was
shown in the clear burst of moonlight and by the lamp, which had now no
quiver from Van Helsing's iron nerves. Never did I see such baffled
malice on a face; and never, I trust, shall such ever be seen again by
mortal eyes. The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw
out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of
the flesh were the coils of Medusa's snakes, and the lovely,
blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of
the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death--if looks could
kill--we saw it at that moment.

And so for full half a minute, which seemed an eternity, she remained
between the lifted crucifix and the sacred closing of her means of
entry. Van Helsing broke the silence by asking Arthur:--

"Answer me, oh my friend! Am I to proceed in my work?"

Arthur threw himself on his knees, and hid his face in his hands, as he
answered:--

"Do as you will, friend; do as you will. There can be no horror like
this ever any more;" and he groaned in spirit. Quincey and I
simultaneously moved towards him, and took his arms. We could hear the
click of the closing lantern as Van Helsing held it down; coming close
to the tomb, he began to remove from the chinks some of the sacred
emblem which he had placed there. We all looked on in horrified
amazement as we saw, when he stood back, the woman, with a corporeal
body as real at that moment as our own, pass in through the interstice
where scarce a knife-blade could have gone. We all felt a glad sense of
relief when we saw the Professor calmly restoring the strings of putty
to the edges of the door.

When this was done, he lifted the child and said:

"Come now, my friends; we can do no more till to-morrow. There is a
funeral at noon, so here we shall all come before long after that. The
friends of the dead will all be gone by two, and when the sexton lock
the gate we shall remain. Then there is more to do; but not like this of
to-night. As for this little one, he is not much harm, and by to-morrow
night he shall be well. We shall leave him where the police will find
him, as on the other night; and then to home." Coming close to Arthur,
he said:--

"My friend Arthur, you have had a sore trial; but after, when you look
back, you will see how it was necessary. You are now in the bitter
waters, my child. By this time to-morrow you will, please God, have
passed them, and have drunk of the sweet waters; so do not mourn
overmuch. Till then I shall not ask you to forgive me."

Arthur and Quincey came home with me, and we tried to cheer each other
on the way. We had left the child in safety, and were tired; so we all
slept with more or less reality of sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

_29 September, night._--A little before twelve o'clock we three--Arthur,
Quincey Morris, and myself--called for the Professor. It was odd to
notice that by common consent we had all put on black clothes. Of
course, Arthur wore black, for he was in deep mourning, but the rest of
us wore it by instinct. We got to the churchyard by half-past one, and
strolled about, keeping out of official observation, so that when the
gravediggers had completed their task and the sexton under the belief
that every one had gone, had locked the gate, we had the place all to
ourselves. Van Helsing, instead of his little black bag, had with him a
long leather one, something like a cricketing bag; it was manifestly of
fair weight.

When we were alone and had heard the last of the footsteps die out up
the road, we silently, and as if by ordered intention, followed the
Professor to the tomb. He unlocked the door, and we entered, closing it
behind us. Then he took from his bag the lantern, which he lit, and also
two wax candles, which, when lighted, he stuck, by melting their own
ends, on other coffins, so that they might give light sufficient to work
by. When he again lifted the lid off Lucy's coffin we all looked--Arthur
trembling like an aspen--and saw that the body lay there in all its
death-beauty. But there was no love in my own heart, nothing but
loathing for the foul Thing which had taken Lucy's shape without her
soul. I could see even Arthur's face grow hard as he looked. Presently
he said to Van Helsing:--

"Is this really Lucy's body, or only a demon in her shape?"

"It is her body, and yet not it. But wait a while, and you all see her
as she was, and is."

She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth,
the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth--which it made one shudder to
see--the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a
devilish mockery of Lucy's sweet purity. Van Helsing, with his usual
methodicalness, began taking the various contents from his bag and
placing them ready for use. First he took out a soldering iron and some
plumbing solder, and then a small oil-lamp, which gave out, when lit in
a corner of the tomb, gas which burned at fierce heat with a blue
flame; then his operating knives, which he placed to hand; and last a
round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about
three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in the fire, and
was sharpened to a fine point. With this stake came a heavy hammer, such
as in households is used in the coal-cellar for breaking the lumps. To
me, a doctor's preparations for work of any kind are stimulating and
bracing, but the effect of these things on both Arthur and Quincey was
to cause them a sort of consternation. They both, however, kept their
courage, and remained silent and quiet.

When all was ready, Van Helsing said:--

"Before we do anything, let me tell you this; it is out of the lore and
experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers
of the Un-Dead. When they become such, there comes with the change the
curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age
adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that
die from the preying of the Un-Dead becomes themselves Un-Dead, and prey
on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the
ripples from a stone thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met
that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die; or again, last night
when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died,
have become _nosferatu_, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would
all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have fill us with horror.
The career of this so unhappy dear lady is but just begun. Those
children whose blood she suck are not as yet so much the worse; but if
she live on, Un-Dead, more and more they lose their blood and by her
power over them they come to her; and so she draw their blood with that
so wicked mouth. But if she die in truth, then all cease; the tiny
wounds of the throats disappear, and they go back to their plays
unknowing ever of what has been. But of the most blessed of all, when
this now Un-Dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor
lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working wickedness by
night and growing more debased in the assimilating of it by day, she
shall take her place with the other Angels. So that, my friend, it will
be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free.
To this I am willing; but is there none amongst us who has a better
right? Will it be no joy to think of hereafter in the silence of the
night when sleep is not: 'It was my hand that sent her to the stars; it
was the hand of him that loved her best; the hand that of all she would
herself have chosen, had it been to her to choose?' Tell me if there be
such a one amongst us?"

We all looked at Arthur. He saw, too, what we all did, the infinite
kindness which suggested that his should be the hand which would restore
Lucy to us as a holy, and not an unholy, memory; he stepped forward and
said bravely, though his hand trembled, and his face was as pale as
snow:--

"My true friend, from the bottom of my broken heart I thank you. Tell me
what I am to do, and I shall not falter!" Van Helsing laid a hand on his
shoulder, and said:--

"Brave lad! A moment's courage, and it is done. This stake must be
driven through her. It will be a fearful ordeal--be not deceived in
that--but it will be only a short time, and you will then rejoice more
than your pain was great; from this grim tomb you will emerge as though
you tread on air. But you must not falter when once you have begun. Only
think that we, your true friends, are round you, and that we pray for
you all the time."

"Go on," said Arthur hoarsely. "Tell me what I am to do."

"Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place the point over the
heart, and the hammer in your right. Then when we begin our prayer for
the dead--I shall read him, I have here the book, and the others shall
follow--strike in God's name, that so all may be well with the dead that
we love and that the Un-Dead pass away."

Arthur took the stake and the hammer, and when once his mind was set on
action his hands never trembled nor even quivered. Van Helsing opened
his missal and began to read, and Quincey and I followed as well as we
could. Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could
see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might.

The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech
came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted
in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the
lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur
never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm
rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst
the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His
face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it
gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little
vault.

And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the
teeth seemed to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The
terrible task was over.

The hammer fell from Arthur's hand. He reeled and would have fallen had
we not caught him. The great drops of sweat sprang from his forehead,
and his breath came in broken gasps. It had indeed been an awful strain
on him; and had he not been forced to his task by more than human
considerations he could never have gone through with it. For a few
minutes we were so taken up with him that we did not look towards the
coffin. When we did, however, a murmur of startled surprise ran from one
to the other of us. We gazed so eagerly that Arthur rose, for he had
been seated on the ground, and came and looked too; and then a glad,
strange light broke over his face and dispelled altogether the gloom of
horror that lay upon it.

There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded
and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a
privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in
her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. True that
there were there, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care and
pain and waste; but these were all dear to us, for they marked her truth
to what we knew. One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like
sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and
symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever.

Van Helsing came and laid his hand on Arthur's shoulder, and said to
him:--

"And now, Arthur my friend, dear lad, am I not forgiven?"

The reaction of the terrible strain came as he took the old man's hand
in his, and raising it to his lips, pressed it, and said:--

"Forgiven! God bless you that you have given my dear one her soul again,
and me peace." He put his hands on the Professor's shoulder, and laying
his head on his breast, cried for a while silently, whilst we stood
unmoving. When he raised his head Van Helsing said to him:--

"And now, my child, you may kiss her. Kiss her dead lips if you will, as
she would have you to, if for her to choose. For she is not a grinning
devil now--not any more a foul Thing for all eternity. No longer she is
the devil's Un-Dead. She is God's true dead, whose soul is with Him!"

Arthur bent and kissed her, and then we sent him and Quincey out of the
tomb; the Professor and I sawed the top off the stake, leaving the point
of it in the body. Then we cut off the head and filled the mouth with
garlic. We soldered up the leaden coffin, screwed on the coffin-lid,
and gathering up our belongings, came away. When the Professor locked
the door he gave the key to Arthur.

Outside the air was sweet, the sun shone, and the birds sang, and it
seemed as if all nature were tuned to a different pitch. There was
gladness and mirth and peace everywhere, for we were at rest ourselves
on one account, and we were glad, though it was with a tempered joy.

Before we moved away Van Helsing said:--

"Now, my friends, one step of our work is done, one the most harrowing
to ourselves. But there remains a greater task: to find out the author
of all this our sorrow and to stamp him out. I have clues which we can
follow; but it is a long task, and a difficult, and there is danger in
it, and pain. Shall you not all help me? We have learned to believe, all
of us--is it not so? And since so, do we not see our duty? Yes! And do
we not promise to go on to the bitter end?"

Each in turn, we took his hand, and the promise was made. Then said the
Professor as we moved off:--

"Two nights hence you shall meet with me and dine together at seven of
the clock with friend John. I shall entreat two others, two that you
know not as yet; and I shall be ready to all our work show and our plans
unfold. Friend John, you come with me home, for I have much to consult
about, and you can help me. To-night I leave for Amsterdam, but shall
return to-morrow night. And then begins our great quest. But first I
shall have much to say, so that you may know what is to do and to dread.
Then our promise shall be made to each other anew; for there is a
terrible task before us, and once our feet are on the ploughshare we
must not draw back."




CHAPTER XVII

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY--_continued_


When we arrived at the Berkeley Hotel, Van Helsing found a telegram
waiting for him:--

     "Am coming up by train. Jonathan at Whitby. Important news.--MINA
     HARKER."

The Professor was delighted. "Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina," he said,
"pearl among women! She arrive, but I cannot stay. She must go to your
house, friend John. You must meet her at the station. Telegraph her _en
route_, so that she may be prepared."

When the wire was despatched he had a cup of tea; over it he told me of
a diary kept by Jonathan Harker when abroad, and gave me a typewritten
copy of it, as also of Mrs. Harker's diary at Whitby. "Take these," he
said, "and study them well. When I have returned you will be master of
all the facts, and we can then better enter on our inquisition. Keep
them safe, for there is in them much of treasure. You will need all your
faith, even you who have had such an experience as that of to-day. What
is here told," he laid his hand heavily and gravely on the packet of
papers as he spoke, "may be the beginning of the end to you and me and
many another; or it may sound the knell of the Un-Dead who walk the
earth. Read all, I pray you, with the open mind; and if you can add in
any way to the story here told do so, for it is all-important. You have
kept diary of all these so strange things; is it not so? Yes! Then we
shall go through all these together when we meet." He then made ready
for his departure, and shortly after drove off to Liverpool Street. I
took my way to Paddington, where I arrived about fifteen minutes before
the train came in.

The crowd melted away, after the bustling fashion common to arrival
platforms; and I was beginning to feel uneasy, lest I might miss my
guest, when a sweet-faced, dainty-looking girl stepped up to me, and,
after a quick glance, said: "Dr. Seward, is it not?"

"And you are Mrs. Harker!" I answered at once; whereupon she held out
her hand.

"I knew you from the description of poor dear Lucy; but----" She stopped
suddenly, and a quick blush overspread her face.

The blush that rose to my own cheeks somehow set us both at ease, for it
was a tacit answer to her own. I got her luggage, which included a
typewriter, and we took the Underground to Fenchurch Street, after I had
sent a wire to my housekeeper to have a sitting-room and bedroom
prepared at once for Mrs. Harker.

In due time we arrived. She knew, of course, that the place was a
lunatic asylum, but I could see that she was unable to repress a shudder
when we entered.

She told me that, if she might, she would come presently to my study, as
she had much to say. So here I am finishing my entry in my phonograph
diary whilst I await her. As yet I have not had the chance of looking at
the papers which Van Helsing left with me, though they lie open before
me. I must get her interested in something, so that I may have an
opportunity of reading them. She does not know how precious time is, or
what a task we have in hand. I must be careful not to frighten her. Here
she is!


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_29 September._--After I had tidied myself, I went down to Dr. Seward's
study. At the door I paused a moment, for I thought I heard him talking
with some one. As, however, he had pressed me to be quick, I knocked at
the door, and on his calling out, "Come in," I entered.

To my intense surprise, there was no one with him. He was quite alone,
and on the table opposite him was what I knew at once from the
description to be a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much
interested.

"I hope I did not keep you waiting," I said; "but I stayed at the door
as I heard you talking, and thought there was some one with you."

"Oh," he replied with a smile, "I was only entering my diary."

"Your diary?" I asked him in surprise.

"Yes," he answered. "I keep it in this." As he spoke he laid his hand on
the phonograph. I felt quite excited over it, and blurted out:--

"Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?"

"Certainly," he replied with alacrity, and stood up to put it in train
for speaking. Then he paused, and a troubled look overspread his face.

"The fact is," he began awkwardly, "I only keep my diary in it; and as
it is entirely--almost entirely--about my cases, it may be awkward--that
is, I mean----" He stopped, and I tried to help him out of his
embarrassment:--

"You helped to attend dear Lucy at the end. Let me hear how she died;
for all that I know of her, I shall be very grateful. She was very, very
dear to me."

To my surprise, he answered, with a horrorstruck look in his face:--

"Tell you of her death? Not for the wide world!"

"Why not?" I asked, for some grave, terrible feeling was coming over me.
Again he paused, and I could see that he was trying to invent an excuse.
At length he stammered out:--

"You see, I do not know how to pick out any particular part of the
diary." Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said
with unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naïveté
of a child: "That's quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!" I could
not but smile, at which he grimaced. "I gave myself away that time!" he
said. "But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months
past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular
part of it in case I wanted to look it up?" By this time my mind was
made up that the diary of a doctor who attended Lucy might have
something to add to the sum of our knowledge of that terrible Being, and
I said boldly:--

"Then, Dr. Seward, you had better let me copy it out for you on my
typewriter." He grew to a positively deathly pallor as he said:--

"No! no! no! For all the world, I wouldn't let you know that terrible
story!"

Then it was terrible; my intuition was right! For a moment I thought,
and as my eyes ranged the room, unconsciously looking for something or
some opportunity to aid me, they lit on a great batch of typewriting on
the table. His eyes caught the look in mine, and, without his thinking,
followed their direction. As they saw the parcel he realised my meaning.

"You do not know me," I said. "When you have read those papers--my own
diary and my husband's also, which I have typed--you will know me
better. I have not faltered in giving every thought of my own heart in
this cause; but, of course, you do not know me--yet; and I must not
expect you to trust me so far."

He is certainly a man of noble nature; poor dear Lucy was right about
him. He stood up and opened a large drawer, in which were arranged in
order a number of hollow cylinders of metal covered with dark wax, and
said:--

"You are quite right. I did not trust you because I did not know you.
But I know you now; and let me say that I should have known you long
ago. I know that Lucy told you of me; she told me of you too. May I make
the only atonement in my power? Take the cylinders and hear them--the
first half-dozen of them are personal to me, and they will not horrify
you; then you will know me better. Dinner will by then be ready. In the
meantime I shall read over some of these documents, and shall be better
able to understand certain things." He carried the phonograph himself up
to my sitting-room and adjusted it for me. Now I shall learn something
pleasant, I am sure; for it will tell me the other side of a true love
episode of which I know one side already....


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_29 September._--I was so absorbed in that wonderful diary of Jonathan
Harker and that other of his wife that I let the time run on without
thinking. Mrs. Harker was not down when the maid came to announce
dinner, so I said: "She is possibly tired; let dinner wait an hour," and
I went on with my work. I had just finished Mrs. Harker's diary, when
she came in. She looked sweetly pretty, but very sad, and her eyes were
flushed with crying. This somehow moved me much. Of late I have had
cause for tears, God knows! but the relief of them was denied me; and
now the sight of those sweet eyes, brightened with recent tears, went
straight to my heart. So I said as gently as I could:--

"I greatly fear I have distressed you."

"Oh, no, not distressed me," she replied, "but I have been more touched
than I can say by your grief. That is a wonderful machine, but it is
cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart.
It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one must hear them
spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the
words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as
I did."

"No one need ever know, shall ever know," I said in a low voice. She
laid her hand on mine and said very gravely:--

"Ah, but they must!"

"Must! But why?" I asked.

"Because it is a part of the terrible story, a part of poor dear Lucy's
death and all that led to it; because in the struggle which we have
before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all
the knowledge and all the help which we can get. I think that the
cylinders which you gave me contained more than you intended me to know;
but I can see that there are in your record many lights to this dark
mystery. You will let me help, will you not? I know all up to a certain
point; and I see already, though your diary only took me to 7 September,
how poor Lucy was beset, and how her terrible doom was being wrought
out. Jonathan and I have been working day and night since Professor Van
Helsing saw us. He is gone to Whitby to get more information, and he
will be here to-morrow to help us. We need have no secrets amongst us;
working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than
if some of us were in the dark." She looked at me so appealingly, and at
the same time manifested such courage and resolution in her bearing,
that I gave in at once to her wishes. "You shall," I said, "do as you
like in the matter. God forgive me if I do wrong! There are terrible
things yet to learn of; but if you have so far travelled on the road to
poor Lucy's death, you will not be content, I know, to remain in the
dark. Nay, the end--the very end--may give you a gleam of peace. Come,
there is dinner. We must keep one another strong for what is before us;
we have a cruel and dreadful task. When you have eaten you shall learn
the rest, and I shall answer any questions you ask--if there be anything
which you do not understand, though it was apparent to us who were
present."


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_29 September._--After dinner I came with Dr. Seward to his study. He
brought back the phonograph from my room, and I took my typewriter. He
placed me in a comfortable chair, and arranged the phonograph so that I
could touch it without getting up, and showed me how to stop it in case
I should want to pause. Then he very thoughtfully took a chair, with his
back to me, so that I might be as free as possible, and began to read. I
put the forked metal to my ears and listened.

When the terrible story of Lucy's death, and--and all that followed, was
done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a
fainting disposition. When Dr. Seward saw me he jumped up with a
horrified exclamation, and hurriedly taking a case-bottle from a
cupboard, gave me some brandy, which in a few minutes somewhat restored
me. My brain was all in a whirl, and only that there came through all
the multitude of horrors, the holy ray of light that my dear, dear Lucy
was at last at peace, I do not think I could have borne it without
making a scene. It is all so wild, and mysterious, and strange that if I
had not known Jonathan's experience in Transylvania I could not have
believed. As it was, I didn't know what to believe, and so got out of my
difficulty by attending to something else. I took the cover off my
typewriter, and said to Dr. Seward:--

"Let me write this all out now. We must be ready for Dr. Van Helsing
when he comes. I have sent a telegram to Jonathan to come on here when
he arrives in London from Whitby. In this matter dates are everything,
and I think that if we get all our material ready, and have every item
put in chronological order, we shall have done much. You tell me that
Lord Godalming and Mr. Morris are coming too. Let us be able to tell him
when they come." He accordingly set the phonograph at a slow pace, and I
began to typewrite from the beginning of the seventh cylinder. I used
manifold, and so took three copies of the diary, just as I had done with
all the rest. It was late when I got through, but Dr. Seward went about
his work of going his round of the patients; when he had finished he
came back and sat near me, reading, so that I did not feel too lonely
whilst I worked. How good and thoughtful he is; the world seems full of
good men--even if there _are_ monsters in it. Before I left him I
remembered what Jonathan put in his diary of the Professor's
perturbation at reading something in an evening paper at the station at
Exeter; so, seeing that Dr. Seward keeps his newspapers, I borrowed the
files of "The Westminster Gazette" and "The Pall Mall Gazette," and took
them to my room. I remember how much "The Dailygraph" and "The Whitby
Gazette," of which I had made cuttings, helped us to understand the
terrible events at Whitby when Count Dracula landed, so I shall look
through the evening papers since then, and perhaps I shall get some new
light. I am not sleepy, and the work will help to keep me quiet.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_30 September._--Mr. Harker arrived at nine o'clock. He had got his
wife's wire just before starting. He is uncommonly clever, if one can
judge from his face, and full of energy. If this journal be true--and
judging by one's own wonderful experiences, it must be--he is also a man
of great nerve. That going down to the vault a second time was a
remarkable piece of daring. After reading his account of it I was
prepared to meet a good specimen of manhood, but hardly the quiet,
business-like gentleman who came here to-day.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--After lunch Harker and his wife went back to their own room,
and as I passed a while ago I heard the click of the typewriter. They
are hard at it. Mrs. Harker says that they are knitting together in
chronological order every scrap of evidence they have. Harker has got
the letters between the consignee of the boxes at Whitby and the
carriers in London who took charge of them. He is now reading his wife's
typescript of my diary. I wonder what they make out of it. Here it
is....

     Strange that it never struck me that the very next house might be
     the Count's hiding-place! Goodness knows that we had enough clues
     from the conduct of the patient Renfield! The bundle of letters
     relating to the purchase of the house were with the typescript. Oh,
     if we had only had them earlier we might have saved poor Lucy!
     Stop; that way madness lies! Harker has gone back, and is again
     collating his material. He says that by dinner-time they will be
     able to show a whole connected narrative. He thinks that in the
     meantime I should see Renfield, as hitherto he has been a sort of
     index to the coming and going of the Count. I hardly see this yet,
     but when I get at the dates I suppose I shall. What a good thing
     that Mrs. Harker put my cylinders into type! We never could have
     found the dates otherwise....

     I found Renfield sitting placidly in his room with his hands
     folded, smiling benignly. At the moment he seemed as sane as any
     one I ever saw. I sat down and talked with him on a lot of
     subjects, all of which he treated naturally. He then, of his own
     accord, spoke of going home, a subject he has never mentioned to my
     knowledge during his sojourn here. In fact, he spoke quite
     confidently of getting his discharge at once. I believe that, had I
     not had the chat with Harker and read the letters and the dates of
     his outbursts, I should have been prepared to sign for him after a
     brief time of observation. As it is, I am darkly suspicious. All
     those outbreaks were in some way linked with the proximity of the
     Count. What then does this absolute content mean? Can it be that
     his instinct is satisfied as to the vampire's ultimate triumph?
     Stay; he is himself zoöphagous, and in his wild ravings outside the
     chapel door of the deserted house he always spoke of "master." This
     all seems confirmation of our idea. However, after a while I came
     away; my friend is just a little too sane at present to make it
     safe to probe him too deep with questions. He might begin to think,
     and then--! So I came away. I mistrust these quiet moods of his; so
     I have given the attendant a hint to look closely after him, and to
     have a strait-waistcoat ready in case of need.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_29 September, in train to London._--When I received Mr. Billington's
courteous message that he would give me any information in his power I
thought it best to go down to Whitby and make, on the spot, such
inquiries as I wanted. It was now my object to trace that horrid cargo
of the Count's to its place in London. Later, we may be able to deal
with it. Billington junior, a nice lad, met me at the station, and
brought me to his father's house, where they had decided that I must
stay the night. They are hospitable, with true Yorkshire hospitality:
give a guest everything, and leave him free to do as he likes. They all
knew that I was busy, and that my stay was short, and Mr. Billington had
ready in his office all the papers concerning the consignment of boxes.
It gave me almost a turn to see again one of the letters which I had
seen on the Count's table before I knew of his diabolical plans.
Everything had been carefully thought out, and done systematically and
with precision. He seemed to have been prepared for every obstacle which
might be placed by accident in the way of his intentions being carried
out. To use an Americanism, he had "taken no chances," and the absolute
accuracy with which his instructions were fulfilled, was simply the
logical result of his care. I saw the invoice, and took note of it:
"Fifty cases of common earth, to be used for experimental purposes."
Also the copy of letter to Carter Paterson, and their reply; of both of
these I got copies. This was all the information Mr. Billington could
give me, so I went down to the port and saw the coastguards, the Customs
officers and the harbour-master. They had all something to say of the
strange entry of the ship, which is already taking its place in local
tradition; but no one could add to the simple description "Fifty cases
of common earth." I then saw the station-master, who kindly put me in
communication with the men who had actually received the boxes. Their
tally was exact with the list, and they had nothing to add except that
the boxes were "main and mortal heavy," and that shifting them was dry
work. One of them added that it was hard lines that there wasn't any
gentleman "such-like as yourself, squire," to show some sort of
appreciation of their efforts in a liquid form; another put in a rider
that the thirst then generated was such that even the time which had
elapsed had not completely allayed it. Needless to add, I took care
before leaving to lift, for ever and adequately, this source of
reproach.

       *       *       *       *       *

_30 September._--The station-master was good enough to give me a line to
his old companion the station-master at King's Cross, so that when I
arrived there in the morning I was able to ask him about the arrival of
the boxes. He, too, put me at once in communication with the proper
officials, and I saw that their tally was correct with the original
invoice. The opportunities of acquiring an abnormal thirst had been here
limited; a noble use of them had, however, been made, and again I was
compelled to deal with the result in an _ex post facto_ manner.

From thence I went on to Carter Paterson's central office, where I met
with the utmost courtesy. They looked up the transaction in their
day-book and letter-book, and at once telephoned to their King's Cross
office for more details. By good fortune, the men who did the teaming
were waiting for work, and the official at once sent them over, sending
also by one of them the way-bill and all the papers connected with the
delivery of the boxes at Carfax. Here again I found the tally agreeing
exactly; the carriers' men were able to supplement the paucity of the
written words with a few details. These were, I shortly found, connected
almost solely with the dusty nature of the job, and of the consequent
thirst engendered in the operators. On my affording an opportunity,
through the medium of the currency of the realm, of the allaying, at a
later period, this beneficial evil, one of the men remarked:--

"That 'ere 'ouse, guv'nor, is the rummiest I ever was in. Blyme! but it
ain't been touched sence a hundred years. There was dust that thick in
the place that you might have slep' on it without 'urtin' of yer bones;
an' the place was that neglected that yer might 'ave smelled ole
Jerusalem in it. But the ole chapel--that took the cike, that did! Me
and my mate, we thort we wouldn't never git out quick enough. Lor', I
wouldn't take less nor a quid a moment to stay there arter dark."

Having been in the house, I could well believe him; but if he knew what
I know, he would, I think, have raised his terms.

Of one thing I am now satisfied: that _all_ the boxes which arrived at
Whitby from Varna in the _Demeter_ were safely deposited in the old
chapel at Carfax. There should be fifty of them there, unless any have
since been removed--as from Dr. Seward's diary I fear.

I shall try to see the carter who took away the boxes from Carfax when
Renfield attacked them. By following up this clue we may learn a good
deal.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Mina and I have worked all day, and we have put all the papers
into order.


_Mina Harker's Journal_

_30 September._--I am so glad that I hardly know how to contain myself.
It is, I suppose, the reaction from the haunting fear which I have had:
that this terrible affair and the reopening of his old wound might act
detrimentally on Jonathan. I saw him leave for Whitby with as brave a
face as I could, but I was sick with apprehension. The effort has,
however, done him good. He was never so resolute, never so strong, never
so full of volcanic energy, as at present. It is just as that dear, good
Professor Van Helsing said: he is true grit, and he improves under
strain that would kill a weaker nature. He came back full of life and
hope and determination; we have got everything in order for to-night. I
feel myself quite wild with excitement. I suppose one ought to pity any
thing so hunted as is the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not
human--not even beast. To read Dr. Seward's account of poor Lucy's
death, and what followed, is enough to dry up the springs of pity in
one's heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Lord Godalming and Mr. Morris arrived earlier than we
expected. Dr. Seward was out on business, and had taken Jonathan with
him, so I had to see them. It was to me a painful meeting, for it
brought back all poor dear Lucy's hopes of only a few months ago. Of
course they had heard Lucy speak of me, and it seemed that Dr. Van
Helsing, too, has been quite "blowing my trumpet," as Mr. Morris
expressed it. Poor fellows, neither of them is aware that I know all
about the proposals they made to Lucy. They did not quite know what to
say or do, as they were ignorant of the amount of my knowledge; so they
had to keep on neutral subjects. However, I thought the matter over, and
came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do would be to post
them in affairs right up to date. I knew from Dr. Seward's diary that
they had been at Lucy's death--her real death--and that I need not fear
to betray any secret before the time. So I told them, as well as I
could, that I had read all the papers and diaries, and that my husband
and I, having typewritten them, had just finished putting them in order.
I gave them each a copy to read in the library. When Lord Godalming got
his and turned it over--it does make a pretty good pile--he said:--

"Did you write all this, Mrs. Harker?"

I nodded, and he went on:--

"I don't quite see the drift of it; but you people are all so good and
kind, and have been working so earnestly and so energetically, that all
I can do is to accept your ideas blindfold and try to help you. I have
had one lesson already in accepting facts that should make a man humble
to the last hour of his life. Besides, I know you loved my poor Lucy--"
Here he turned away and covered his face with his hands. I could hear
the tears in his voice. Mr. Morris, with instinctive delicacy, just laid
a hand for a moment on his shoulder, and then walked quietly out of the
room. I suppose there is something in woman's nature that makes a man
free to break down before her and express his feelings on the tender or
emotional side without feeling it derogatory to his manhood; for when
Lord Godalming found himself alone with me he sat down on the sofa and
gave way utterly and openly. I sat down beside him and took his hand. I
hope he didn't think it forward of me, and that if he ever thinks of it
afterwards he never will have such a thought. There I wrong him; I
_know_ he never will--he is too true a gentleman. I said to him, for I
could see that his heart was breaking:--

"I loved dear Lucy, and I know what she was to you, and what you were to
her. She and I were like sisters; and now she is gone, will you not let
me be like a sister to you in your trouble? I know what sorrows you have
had, though I cannot measure the depth of them. If sympathy and pity can
help in your affliction, won't you let me be of some little service--for
Lucy's sake?"

In an instant the poor dear fellow was overwhelmed with grief. It seemed
to me that all that he had of late been suffering in silence found a
vent at once. He grew quite hysterical, and raising his open hands, beat
his palms together in a perfect agony of grief. He stood up and then sat
down again, and the tears rained down his cheeks. I felt an infinite
pity for him, and opened my arms unthinkingly. With a sob he laid his
head on my shoulder and cried like a wearied child, whilst he shook with
emotion.

We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above
smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked; I felt this big
sorrowing man's head resting on me, as though it were that of the baby
that some day may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he
were my own child. I never thought at the time how strange it all was.

After a little bit his sobs ceased, and he raised himself with an
apology, though he made no disguise of his emotion. He told me that for
days and nights past--weary days and sleepless nights--he had been
unable to speak with any one, as a man must speak in his time of
sorrow. There was no woman whose sympathy could be given to him, or with
whom, owing to the terrible circumstance with which his sorrow was
surrounded, he could speak freely. "I know now how I suffered," he said,
as he dried his eyes, "but I do not know even yet--and none other can
ever know--how much your sweet sympathy has been to me to-day. I shall
know better in time; and believe me that, though I am not ungrateful
now, my gratitude will grow with my understanding. You will let me be
like a brother, will you not, for all our lives--for dear Lucy's sake?"

"For dear Lucy's sake," I said as we clasped hands. "Ay, and for your
own sake," he added, "for if a man's esteem and gratitude are ever worth
the winning, you have won mine to-day. If ever the future should bring
to you a time when you need a man's help, believe me, you will not call
in vain. God grant that no such time may ever come to you to break the
sunshine of your life; but if it should ever come, promise me that you
will let me know." He was so earnest, and his sorrow was so fresh, that
I felt it would comfort him, so I said:--

"I promise."

As I came along the corridor I saw Mr. Morris looking out of a window.
He turned as he heard my footsteps. "How is Art?" he said. Then noticing
my red eyes, he went on: "Ah, I see you have been comforting him. Poor
old fellow! he needs it. No one but a woman can help a man when he is in
trouble of the heart; and he had no one to comfort him."

He bore his own trouble so bravely that my heart bled for him. I saw the
manuscript in his hand, and I knew that when he read it he would realise
how much I knew; so I said to him:--

"I wish I could comfort all who suffer from the heart. Will you let me
be your friend, and will you come to me for comfort if you need it? You
will know, later on, why I speak." He saw that I was in earnest, and
stooping, took my hand, and raising it to his lips, kissed it. It seemed
but poor comfort to so brave and unselfish a soul, and impulsively I
bent over and kissed him. The tears rose in his eyes, and there was a
momentary choking in his throat; he said quite calmly:--

"Little girl, you will never regret that true-hearted kindness, so long
as ever you live!" Then he went into the study to his friend.

"Little girl!"--the very words he had used to Lucy, and oh, but he
proved himself a friend!




CHAPTER XVIII

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY


_30 September._--I got home at five o'clock, and found that Godalming
and Morris had not only arrived, but had already studied the transcript
of the various diaries and letters which Harker and his wonderful wife
had made and arranged. Harker had not yet returned from his visit to the
carriers' men, of whom Dr. Hennessey had written to me. Mrs. Harker gave
us a cup of tea, and I can honestly say that, for the first time since I
have lived in it, this old house seemed like _home_. When we had
finished, Mrs. Harker said:--

"Dr. Seward, may I ask a favour? I want to see your patient, Mr.
Renfield. Do let me see him. What you have said of him in your diary
interests me so much!" She looked so appealing and so pretty that I
could not refuse her, and there was no possible reason why I should; so
I took her with me. When I went into the room, I told the man that a
lady would like to see him; to which he simply answered: "Why?"

"She is going through the house, and wants to see every one in it," I
answered. "Oh, very well," he said; "let her come in, by all means; but
just wait a minute till I tidy up the place." His method of tidying was
peculiar: he simply swallowed all the flies and spiders in the boxes
before I could stop him. It was quite evident that he feared, or was
jealous of, some interference. When he had got through his disgusting
task, he said cheerfully: "Let the lady come in," and sat down on the
edge of his bed with his head down, but with his eyelids raised so that
he could see her as she entered. For a moment I thought that he might
have some homicidal intent; I remembered how quiet he had been just
before he attacked me in my own study, and I took care to stand where I
could seize him at once if he attempted to make a spring at her. She
came into the room with an easy gracefulness which would at once command
the respect of any lunatic--for easiness is one of the qualities mad
people most respect. She walked over to him, smiling pleasantly, and
held out her hand.

"Good-evening, Mr. Renfield," said she. "You see, I know you, for Dr.
Seward has told me of you." He made no immediate reply, but eyed her all
over intently with a set frown on his face. This look gave way to one
of wonder, which merged in doubt; then, to my intense astonishment, he
said:--

"You're not the girl the doctor wanted to marry, are you? You can't be,
you know, for she's dead." Mrs. Harker smiled sweetly as she replied:--

"Oh no! I have a husband of my own, to whom I was married before I ever
saw Dr. Seward, or he me. I am Mrs. Harker."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"My husband and I are staying on a visit with Dr. Seward."

"Then don't stay."

"But why not?" I thought that this style of conversation might not be
pleasant to Mrs. Harker, any more than it was to me, so I joined in:--

"How did you know I wanted to marry any one?" His reply was simply
contemptuous, given in a pause in which he turned his eyes from Mrs.
Harker to me, instantly turning them back again:--

"What an asinine question!"

"I don't see that at all, Mr. Renfield," said Mrs. Harker, at once
championing me. He replied to her with as much courtesy and respect as
he had shown contempt to me:--

"You will, of course, understand, Mrs. Harker, that when a man is so
loved and honoured as our host is, everything regarding him is of
interest in our little community. Dr. Seward is loved not only by his
household and his friends, but even by his patients, who, being some of
them hardly in mental equilibrium, are apt to distort causes and
effects. Since I myself have been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, I
cannot but notice that the sophistic tendencies of some of its inmates
lean towards the errors of _non causa_ and _ignoratio elenchi_." I
positively opened my eyes at this new development. Here was my own pet
lunatic--the most pronounced of his type that I had ever met
with--talking elemental philosophy, and with the manner of a polished
gentleman. I wonder if it was Mrs. Harker's presence which had touched
some chord in his memory. If this new phase was spontaneous, or in any
way due to her unconscious influence, she must have some rare gift or
power.

We continued to talk for some time; and, seeing that he was seemingly
quite reasonable, she ventured, looking at me questioningly as she
began, to lead him to his favourite topic. I was again astonished, for
he addressed himself to the question with the impartiality of the
completest sanity; he even took himself as an example when he mentioned
certain things.

"Why, I myself am an instance of a man who had a strange belief. Indeed,
it was no wonder that my friends were alarmed, and insisted on my being
put under control. I used to fancy that life was a positive and
perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things, no
matter how low in the scale of creation, one might indefinitely prolong
life. At times I held the belief so strongly that I actually tried to
take human life. The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I
tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by
the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his
blood--relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, 'For the blood is
the life.' Though, indeed, the vendor of a certain nostrum has
vulgarised the truism to the very point of contempt. Isn't that true,
doctor?" I nodded assent, for I was so amazed that I hardly knew what to
either think or say; it was hard to imagine that I had seen him eat up
his spiders and flies not five minutes before. Looking at my watch, I
saw that I should go to the station to meet Van Helsing, so I told Mrs.
Harker that it was time to leave. She came at once, after saying
pleasantly to Mr. Renfield: "Good-bye, and I hope I may see you often,
under auspices pleasanter to yourself," to which, to my astonishment, he
replied:--

"Good-bye, my dear. I pray God I may never see your sweet face again.
May He bless and keep you!"

When I went to the station to meet Van Helsing I left the boys behind
me. Poor Art seemed more cheerful than he has been since Lucy first took
ill, and Quincey is more like his own bright self than he has been for
many a long day.

Van Helsing stepped from the carriage with the eager nimbleness of a
boy. He saw me at once, and rushed up to me, saying:--

"Ah, friend John, how goes all? Well? So! I have been busy, for I come
here to stay if need be. All affairs are settled with me, and I have
much to tell. Madam Mina is with you? Yes. And her so fine husband? And
Arthur and my friend Quincey, they are with you, too? Good!"

As I drove to the house I told him of what had passed, and of how my own
diary had come to be of some use through Mrs. Harker's suggestion; at
which the Professor interrupted me:--

"Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man's brain--a brain that a man
should have were he much gifted--and a woman's heart. The good God
fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good
combination. Friend John, up to now fortune has made that woman of help
to us; after to-night she must not have to do with this so terrible
affair. It is not good that she run a risk so great. We men are
determined--nay, are we not pledged?--to destroy this monster; but it is
no part for a woman. Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her
in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in
waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams. And, besides,
she is young woman and not so long married; there may be other things to
think of some time, if not now. You tell me she has wrote all, then she
must consult with us; but to-morrow she say good-bye to this work, and
we go alone." I agreed heartily with him, and then I told him what we
had found in his absence: that the house which Dracula had bought was
the very next one to my own. He was amazed, and a great concern seemed
to come on him. "Oh that we had known it before!" he said, "for then we
might have reached him in time to save poor Lucy. However, 'the milk
that is spilt cries not out afterwards,' as you say. We shall not think
of that, but go on our way to the end." Then he fell into a silence that
lasted till we entered my own gateway. Before we went to prepare for
dinner he said to Mrs. Harker:--

"I am told, Madam Mina, by my friend John that you and your husband have
put up in exact order all things that have been, up to this moment."

"Not up to this moment, Professor," she said impulsively, "but up to
this morning."

"But why not up to now? We have seen hitherto how good light all the
little things have made. We have told our secrets, and yet no one who
has told is the worse for it."

Mrs. Harker began to blush, and taking a paper from her pockets, she
said:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, will you read this, and tell me if it must go in. It
is my record of to-day. I too have seen the need of putting down at
present everything, however trivial; but there is little in this except
what is personal. Must it go in?" The Professor read it over gravely,
and handed it back, saying:--

"It need not go in if you do not wish it; but I pray that it may. It can
but make your husband love you the more, and all us, your friends, more
honour you--as well as more esteem and love." She took it back with
another blush and a bright smile.

And so now, up to this very hour, all the records we have are complete
and in order. The Professor took away one copy to study after dinner,
and before our meeting, which is fixed for nine o'clock. The rest of us
have already read everything; so when we meet in the study we shall all
be informed as to facts, and can arrange our plan of battle with this
terrible and mysterious enemy.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_30 September._--When we met in Dr. Seward's study two hours after
dinner, which had been at six o'clock, we unconsciously formed a sort of
board or committee. Professor Van Helsing took the head of the table, to
which Dr. Seward motioned him as he came into the room. He made me sit
next to him on his right, and asked me to act as secretary; Jonathan sat
next to me. Opposite us were Lord Godalming, Dr. Seward, and Mr.
Morris--Lord Godalming being next the Professor, and Dr. Seward in the
centre. The Professor said:--

"I may, I suppose, take it that we are all acquainted with the facts
that are in these papers." We all expressed assent, and he went on:--

"Then it were, I think good that I tell you something of the kind of
enemy with which we have to deal. I shall then make known to you
something of the history of this man, which has been ascertained for me.
So we then can discuss how we shall act, and can take our measure
according.

"There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they
exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the
teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane
peoples. I admit that at the first I was sceptic. Were it not that
through long years I have train myself to keep an open mind, I could not
have believe until such time as that fact thunder on my ear. 'See! see!
I prove; I prove.' Alas! Had I known at the first what now I know--nay,
had I even guess at him--one so precious life had been spared to many of
us who did love her. But that is gone; and we must so work, that other
poor souls perish not, whilst we can save. The _nosferatu_ do not die
like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger; and being
stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampire which is
amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of
cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have
still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the
divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are
for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in
callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear
at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he
can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the
thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and
the bat--the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become
small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown. How then are we to
begin our strike to destroy him? How shall we find his where; and having
found it, how can we destroy? My friends, this is much; it is a terrible
task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave
shudder. For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win; and then
where end we? Life is nothings; I heed him not. But to fail here, is not
mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforward
become foul things of the night like him--without heart or conscience,
preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us for
ever are the gates of heaven shut; for who shall open them to us again?
We go on for all time abhorred by all; a blot on the face of God's
sunshine; an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we are face
to face with duty; and in such case must we shrink? For me, I say, no;
but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his
song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are
young. Some have seen sorrow; but there are fair days yet in store. What
say you?"

Whilst he was speaking, Jonathan had taken my hand. I feared, oh so
much, that the appalling nature of our danger was overcoming him when I
saw his hand stretch out; but it was life to me to feel its touch--so
strong, so self-reliant, so resolute. A brave man's hand can speak for
itself; it does not even need a woman's love to hear its music.

When the Professor had done speaking my husband looked in my eyes, and I
in his; there was no need for speaking between us.

"I answer for Mina and myself," he said.

"Count me in, Professor," said Mr. Quincey Morris, laconically as usual.

"I am with you," said Lord Godalming, "for Lucy's sake, if for no other
reason."

Dr. Seward simply nodded. The Professor stood up and, after laying his
golden crucifix on the table, held out his hand on either side. I took
his right hand, and Lord Godalming his left; Jonathan held my right with
his left and stretched across to Mr. Morris. So as we all took hands our
solemn compact was made. I felt my heart icy cold, but it did not even
occur to me to draw back. We resumed our places, and Dr. Van Helsing
went on with a sort of cheerfulness which showed that the serious work
had begun. It was to be taken as gravely, and in as businesslike a way,
as any other transaction of life:--

"Well, you know what we have to contend against; but we, too, are not
without strength. We have on our side power of combination--a power
denied to the vampire kind; we have sources of science; we are free to
act and think; and the hours of the day and the night are ours equally.
In fact, so far as our powers extend, they are unfettered, and we are
free to use them. We have self-devotion in a cause, and an end to
achieve which is not a selfish one. These things are much.

"Now let us see how far the general powers arrayed against us are
restrict, and how the individual cannot. In fine, let us consider the
limitations of the vampire in general, and of this one in particular.

"All we have to go upon are traditions and superstitions. These do not
at the first appear much, when the matter is one of life and death--nay
of more than either life or death. Yet must we be satisfied; in the
first place because we have to be--no other means is at our control--and
secondly, because, after all, these things--tradition and
superstition--are everything. Does not the belief in vampires rest for
others--though not, alas! for us--on them? A year ago which of us would
have received such a possibility, in the midst of our scientific,
sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century? We even scouted a belief
that we saw justified under our very eyes. Take it, then, that the
vampire, and the belief in his limitations and his cure, rest for the
moment on the same base. For, let me tell you, he is known everywhere
that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany
all over, in France, in India, even in the Chernosese; and in China, so
far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at
this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the
devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar. So far, then, we
have all we may act upon; and let me tell you that very much of the
beliefs are justified by what we have seen in our own so unhappy
experience. The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the
time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the
living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow
younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though
they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. But he
cannot flourish without this diet; he eat not as others. Even friend
Jonathan, who lived with him for weeks, did never see him to eat, never!
He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect, as again
Jonathan observe. He has the strength of many of his hand--witness again
Jonathan when he shut the door against the wolfs, and when he help him
from the diligence too. He can transform himself to wolf, as we gather
from the ship arrival in Whitby, when he tear open the dog; he can be as
bat, as Madam Mina saw him on the window at Whitby, and as friend John
saw him fly from this so near house, and as my friend Quincey saw him at
the window of Miss Lucy. He can come in mist which he create--that noble
ship's captain proved him of this; but, from what we know, the distance
he can make this mist is limited, and it can only be round himself. He
come on moonlight rays as elemental dust--as again Jonathan saw those
sisters in the castle of Dracula. He become so small--we ourselves saw
Miss Lucy, ere she was at peace, slip through a hairbreadth space at the
tomb door. He can, when once he find his way, come out from anything or
into anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with
fire--solder you call it. He can see in the dark--no small power this,
in a world which is one half shut from the light. Ah, but hear me
through. He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay; he is even
more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell.
He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey
some of nature's laws--why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the
first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come;
though afterwards he can come as he please. His power ceases, as does
that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times
can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is
bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset.
These things are we told, and in this record of ours we have proof by
inference. Thus, whereas he can do as he will within his limit, when he
have his earth-home, his coffin-home, his hell-home, the place
unhallowed, as we saw when he went to the grave of the suicide at
Whitby; still at other time he can only change when the time come. It is
said, too, that he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood
of the tide. Then there are things which so afflict him that he has no
power, as the garlic that we know of; and as for things sacred, as this
symbol, my crucifix, that was amongst us even now when we resolve, to
them he is nothing, but in their presence he take his place far off and
silent with respect. There are others, too, which I shall tell you of,
lest in our seeking we may need them. The branch of wild rose on his
coffin keep him that he move not from it; a sacred bullet fired into the
coffin kill him so that he be true dead; and as for the stake through
him, we know already of its peace; or the cut-off head that giveth rest.
We have seen it with our eyes.

"Thus when we find the habitation of this man-that-was, we can confine
him to his coffin and destroy him, if we obey what we know. But he is
clever. I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to
make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what he
has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his
name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of
Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time,
and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most
cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the 'land beyond the
forest.' That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his
grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The Draculas were, says
Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who
were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They
learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake
Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. In the
records are such words as 'stregoica'--witch, 'ordog,' and
'pokol'--Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is
spoken of as 'wampyr,' which we all understand too well. There have been
from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their
graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it
is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in
all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest."

Whilst they were talking Mr. Morris was looking steadily at the window,
and he now got up quietly, and went out of the room. There was a little
pause, and then the Professor went on:--

"And now we must settle what we do. We have here much data, and we must
proceed to lay out our campaign. We know from the inquiry of Jonathan
that from the castle to Whitby came fifty boxes of earth, all of which
were delivered at Carfax; we also know that at least some of these boxes
have been removed. It seems to me, that our first step should be to
ascertain whether all the rest remain in the house beyond that wall
where we look to-day; or whether any more have been removed. If the
latter, we must trace----"

Here we were interrupted in a very startling way. Outside the house came
the sound of a pistol-shot; the glass of the window was shattered with a
bullet, which, ricochetting from the top of the embrasure, struck the
far wall of the room. I am afraid I am at heart a coward, for I shrieked
out. The men all jumped to their feet; Lord Godalming flew over to the
window and threw up the sash. As he did so we heard Mr. Morris's voice
without:--

"Sorry! I fear I have alarmed you. I shall come in and tell you about
it." A minute later he came in and said:--

"It was an idiotic thing of me to do, and I ask your pardon, Mrs.
Harker, most sincerely; I fear I must have frightened you terribly. But
the fact is that whilst the Professor was talking there came a big bat
and sat on the window-sill. I have got such a horror of the damned
brutes from recent events that I cannot stand them, and I went out to
have a shot, as I have been doing of late of evenings, whenever I have
seen one. You used to laugh at me for it then, Art."

"Did you hit it?" asked Dr. Van Helsing.

"I don't know; I fancy not, for it flew away into the wood." Without
saying any more he took his seat, and the Professor began to resume his
statement:--

"We must trace each of these boxes; and when we are ready, we must
either capture or kill this monster in his lair; or we must, so to
speak, sterilise the earth, so that no more he can seek safety in it.
Thus in the end we may find him in his form of man between the hours of
noon and sunset, and so engage with him when he is at his most weak.

"And now for you, Madam Mina, this night is the end until all be well.
You are too precious to us to have such risk. When we part to-night, you
no more must question. We shall tell you all in good time. We are men
and are able to bear; but you must be our star and our hope, and we
shall act all the more free that you are not in the danger, such as we
are."

All the men, even Jonathan, seemed relieved; but it did not seem to me
good that they should brave danger and, perhaps, lessen their
safety--strength being the best safety--through care of me; but their
minds were made up, and, though it was a bitter pill for me to swallow,
I could say nothing, save to accept their chivalrous care of me.

Mr. Morris resumed the discussion:--

"As there is no time to lose, I vote we have a look at his house right
now. Time is everything with him; and swift action on our part may save
another victim."

I own that my heart began to fail me when the time for action came so
close, but I did not say anything, for I had a greater fear that if I
appeared as a drag or a hindrance to their work, they might even leave
me out of their counsels altogether. They have now gone off to Carfax,
with means to get into the house.

Manlike, they had told me to go to bed and sleep; as if a woman can
sleep when those she loves are in danger! I shall lie down and pretend
to sleep, lest Jonathan have added anxiety about me when he returns.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_1 October, 4 a. m._--Just as we were about to leave the house, an
urgent message was brought to me from Renfield to know if I would see
him at once, as he had something of the utmost importance to say to me.
I told the messenger to say that I would attend to his wishes in the
morning; I was busy just at the moment. The attendant added:--

"He seems very importunate, sir. I have never seen him so eager. I don't
know but what, if you don't see him soon, he will have one of his
violent fits." I knew the man would not have said this without some
cause, so I said: "All right; I'll go now"; and I asked the others to
wait a few minutes for me, as I had to go and see my "patient."

"Take me with you, friend John," said the Professor. "His case in your
diary interest me much, and it had bearing, too, now and again on _our_
case. I should much like to see him, and especial when his mind is
disturbed."

"May I come also?" asked Lord Godalming.

"Me too?" said Quincey Morris. "May I come?" said Harker. I nodded, and
we all went down the passage together.

We found him in a state of considerable excitement, but far more
rational in his speech and manner than I had ever seen him. There was an
unusual understanding of himself, which was unlike anything I had ever
met with in a lunatic; and he took it for granted that his reasons would
prevail with others entirely sane. We all four went into the room, but
none of the others at first said anything. His request was that I would
at once release him from the asylum and send him home. This he backed up
with arguments regarding his complete recovery, and adduced his own
existing sanity. "I appeal to your friends," he said, "they will,
perhaps, not mind sitting in judgment on my case. By the way, you have
not introduced me." I was so much astonished, that the oddness of
introducing a madman in an asylum did not strike me at the moment; and,
besides, there was a certain dignity in the man's manner, so much of
the habit of equality, that I at once made the introduction: "Lord
Godalming; Professor Van Helsing; Mr. Quincey Morris, of Texas; Mr.
Renfield." He shook hands with each of them, saying in turn:--

"Lord Godalming, I had the honour of seconding your father at the
Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the title, that he is no
more. He was a man loved and honoured by all who knew him; and in his
youth was, I have heard, the inventor of a burnt rum punch, much
patronised on Derby night. Mr. Morris, you should be proud of your great
state. Its reception into the Union was a precedent which may have
far-reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold
alliance to the Stars and Stripes. The power of Treaty may yet prove a
vast engine of enlargement, when the Monroe doctrine takes its true
place as a political fable. What shall any man say of his pleasure at
meeting Van Helsing? Sir, I make no apology for dropping all forms of
conventional prefix. When an individual has revolutionised therapeutics
by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain-matter,
conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him to
one of a class. You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by heredity, or by
the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective
places in the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at
least the majority of men who are in full possession of their liberties.
And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian and medico-jurist as
well as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to
be considered as under exceptional circumstances." He made this last
appeal with a courtly air of conviction which was not without its own
charm.

I think we were all staggered. For my own part, I was under the
conviction, despite my knowledge of the man's character and history,
that his reason had been restored; and I felt under a strong impulse to
tell him that I was satisfied as to his sanity, and would see about the
necessary formalities for his release in the morning. I thought it
better to wait, however, before making so grave a statement, for of old
I knew the sudden changes to which this particular patient was liable.
So I contented myself with making a general statement that he appeared
to be improving very rapidly; that I would have a longer chat with him
in the morning, and would then see what I could do in the direction of
meeting his wishes. This did not at all satisfy him, for he said
quickly:--

"But I fear, Dr. Seward, that you hardly apprehend my wish. I desire to
go at once--here--now--this very hour--this very moment, if I may. Time
presses, and in our implied agreement with the old scytheman it is of
the essence of the contract. I am sure it is only necessary to put
before so admirable a practitioner as Dr. Seward so simple, yet so
momentous a wish, to ensure its fulfilment." He looked at me keenly, and
seeing the negative in my face, turned to the others, and scrutinised
them closely. Not meeting any sufficient response, he went on:--

"Is it possible that I have erred in my supposition?"

"You have," I said frankly, but at the same time, as I felt, brutally.
There was a considerable pause, and then he said slowly:--

"Then I suppose I must only shift my ground of request. Let me ask for
this concession--boon, privilege, what you will. I am content to implore
in such a case, not on personal grounds, but for the sake of others. I
am not at liberty to give you the whole of my reasons; but you may, I
assure you, take it from me that they are good ones, sound and
unselfish, and spring from the highest sense of duty. Could you look,
sir, into my heart, you would approve to the full the sentiments which
animate me. Nay, more, you would count me amongst the best and truest of
your friends." Again he looked at us all keenly. I had a growing
conviction that this sudden change of his entire intellectual method was
but yet another form or phase of his madness, and so determined to let
him go on a little longer, knowing from experience that he would, like
all lunatics, give himself away in the end. Van Helsing was gazing at
him with a look of utmost intensity, his bushy eyebrows almost meeting
with the fixed concentration of his look. He said to Renfield in a tone
which did not surprise me at the time, but only when I thought of it
afterwards--for it was as of one addressing an equal:--

"Can you not tell frankly your real reason for wishing to be free
to-night? I will undertake that if you will satisfy even me--a stranger,
without prejudice, and with the habit of keeping an open mind--Dr.
Seward will give you, at his own risk and on his own responsibility, the
privilege you seek." He shook his head sadly, and with a look of
poignant regret on his face. The Professor went on:--

"Come, sir, bethink yourself. You claim the privilege of reason in the
highest degree, since you seek to impress us with your complete
reasonableness. You do this, whose sanity we have reason to doubt, since
you are not yet released from medical treatment for this very defect. If
you will not help us in our effort to choose the wisest course, how can
we perform the duty which you yourself put upon us? Be wise, and help
us; and if we can we shall aid you to achieve your wish." He still shook
his head as he said:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, I have nothing to say. Your argument is complete, and
if I were free to speak I should not hesitate a moment; but I am not my
own master in the matter. I can only ask you to trust me. If I am
refused, the responsibility does not rest with me." I thought it was now
time to end the scene, which was becoming too comically grave, so I went
towards the door, simply saying:--

"Come, my friends, we have work to do. Good-night."

As, however, I got near the door, a new change came over the patient. He
moved towards me so quickly that for the moment I feared that he was
about to make another homicidal attack. My fears, however, were
groundless, for he held up his two hands imploringly, and made his
petition in a moving manner. As he saw that the very excess of his
emotion was militating against him, by restoring us more to our old
relations, he became still more demonstrative. I glanced at Van Helsing,
and saw my conviction reflected in his eyes; so I became a little more
fixed in my manner, if not more stern, and motioned to him that his
efforts were unavailing. I had previously seen something of the same
constantly growing excitement in him when he had to make some request of
which at the time he had thought much, such, for instance, as when he
wanted a cat; and I was prepared to see the collapse into the same
sullen acquiescence on this occasion. My expectation was not realised,
for, when he found that his appeal would not be successful, he got into
quite a frantic condition. He threw himself on his knees, and held up
his hands, wringing them in plaintive supplication, and poured forth a
torrent of entreaty, with the tears rolling down his cheeks, and his
whole face and form expressive of the deepest emotion:--

"Let me entreat you, Dr. Seward, oh, let me implore you, to let me out
of this house at once. Send me away how you will and where you will;
send keepers with me with whips and chains; let them take me in a
strait-waistcoat, manacled and leg-ironed, even to a gaol; but let me go
out of this. You don't know what you do by keeping me here. I am
speaking from the depths of my heart--of my very soul. You don't know
whom you wrong, or how; and I may not tell. Woe is me! I may not tell.
By all you hold sacred--by all you hold dear--by your love that is
lost--by your hope that lives--for the sake of the Almighty, take me out
of this and save my soul from guilt! Can't you hear me, man? Can't you
understand? Will you never learn? Don't you know that I am sane and
earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting
for his soul? Oh, hear me! hear me! Let me go! let me go! let me go!"

I thought that the longer this went on the wilder he would get, and so
would bring on a fit; so I took him by the hand and raised him up.

"Come," I said sternly, "no more of this; we have had quite enough
already. Get to your bed and try to behave more discreetly."

He suddenly stopped and looked at me intently for several moments. Then,
without a word, he rose and moving over, sat down on the side of the
bed. The collapse had come, as on former occasion, just as I had
expected.

When I was leaving the room, last of our party, he said to me in a
quiet, well-bred voice:--

"You will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the justice to bear in mind, later
on, that I did what I could to convince you to-night."




CHAPTER XIX

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL


_1 October, 5 a. m._--I went with the party to the search with an easy
mind, for I think I never saw Mina so absolutely strong and well. I am
so glad that she consented to hold back and let us men do the work.
Somehow, it was a dread to me that she was in this fearful business at
all; but now that her work is done, and that it is due to her energy and
brains and foresight that the whole story is put together in such a way
that every point tells, she may well feel that her part is finished, and
that she can henceforth leave the rest to us. We were, I think, all a
little upset by the scene with Mr. Renfield. When we came away from his
room we were silent till we got back to the study. Then Mr. Morris said
to Dr. Seward:--

"Say, Jack, if that man wasn't attempting a bluff, he is about the
sanest lunatic I ever saw. I'm not sure, but I believe that he had some
serious purpose, and if he had, it was pretty rough on him not to get a
chance." Lord Godalming and I were silent, but Dr. Van Helsing added:--

"Friend John, you know more of lunatics than I do, and I'm glad of it,
for I fear that if it had been to me to decide I would before that last
hysterical outburst have given him free. But we live and learn, and in
our present task we must take no chance, as my friend Quincey would say.
All is best as they are." Dr. Seward seemed to answer them both in a
dreamy kind of way:--

"I don't know but that I agree with you. If that man had been an
ordinary lunatic I would have taken my chance of trusting him; but he
seems so mixed up with the Count in an indexy kind of way that I am
afraid of doing anything wrong by helping his fads. I can't forget how
he prayed with almost equal fervour for a cat, and then tried to tear my
throat out with his teeth. Besides, he called the Count 'lord and
master,' and he may want to get out to help him in some diabolical way.
That horrid thing has the wolves and the rats and his own kind to help
him, so I suppose he isn't above trying to use a respectable lunatic. He
certainly did seem earnest, though. I only hope we have done what is
best. These things, in conjunction with the wild work we have in hand,
help to unnerve a man." The Professor stepped over, and laying his hand
on his shoulder, said in his grave, kindly way:--

"Friend John, have no fear. We are trying to do our duty in a very sad
and terrible case; we can only do as we deem best. What else have we to
hope for, except the pity of the good God?" Lord Godalming had slipped
away for a few minutes, but now he returned. He held up a little silver
whistle, as he remarked:--

"That old place may be full of rats, and if so, I've got an antidote on
call." Having passed the wall, we took our way to the house, taking care
to keep in the shadows of the trees on the lawn when the moonlight shone
out. When we got to the porch the Professor opened his bag and took out
a lot of things, which he laid on the step, sorting them into four
little groups, evidently one for each. Then he spoke:--

"My friends, we are going into a terrible danger, and we need arms of
many kinds. Our enemy is not merely spiritual. Remember that he has the
strength of twenty men, and that, though our necks or our windpipes are
of the common kind--and therefore breakable or crushable--his are not
amenable to mere strength. A stronger man, or a body of men more strong
in all than him, can at certain times hold him; but they cannot hurt him
as we can be hurt by him. We must, therefore, guard ourselves from his
touch. Keep this near your heart"--as he spoke he lifted a little silver
crucifix and held it out to me, I being nearest to him--"put these
flowers round your neck"--here he handed to me a wreath of withered
garlic blossoms--"for other enemies more mundane, this revolver and this
knife; and for aid in all, these so small electric lamps, which you can
fasten to your breast; and for all, and above all at the last, this,
which we must not desecrate needless." This was a portion of Sacred
Wafer, which he put in an envelope and handed to me. Each of the others
was similarly equipped. "Now," he said, "friend John, where are the
skeleton keys? If so that we can open the door, we need not break house
by the window, as before at Miss Lucy's."

Dr. Seward tried one or two skeleton keys, his mechanical dexterity as a
surgeon standing him in good stead. Presently he got one to suit; after
a little play back and forward the bolt yielded, and, with a rusty
clang, shot back. We pressed on the door, the rusty hinges creaked, and
it slowly opened. It was startlingly like the image conveyed to me in
Dr. Seward's diary of the opening of Miss Westenra's tomb; I fancy that
the same idea seemed to strike the others, for with one accord they
shrank back. The Professor was the first to move forward, and stepped
into the open door.

"_In manus tuas, Domine!_" he said, crossing himself as he passed over
the threshold. We closed the door behind us, lest when we should have
lit our lamps we should possibly attract attention from the road. The
Professor carefully tried the lock, lest we might not be able to open it
from within should we be in a hurry making our exit. Then we all lit our
lamps and proceeded on our search.

The light from the tiny lamps fell in all sorts of odd forms, as the
rays crossed each other, or the opacity of our bodies threw great
shadows. I could not for my life get away from the feeling that there
was some one else amongst us. I suppose it was the recollection, so
powerfully brought home to me by the grim surroundings, of that terrible
experience in Transylvania. I think the feeling was common to us all,
for I noticed that the others kept looking over their shoulders at every
sound and every new shadow, just as I felt myself doing.

The whole place was thick with dust. The floor was seemingly inches
deep, except where there were recent footsteps, in which on holding down
my lamp I could see marks of hobnails where the dust was cracked. The
walls were fluffy and heavy with dust, and in the corners were masses of
spider's webs, whereon the dust had gathered till they looked like old
tattered rags as the weight had torn them partly down. On a table in the
hall was a great bunch of keys, with a time-yellowed label on each. They
had been used several times, for on the table were several similar rents
in the blanket of dust, similar to that exposed when the Professor
lifted them. He turned to me and said:--

"You know this place, Jonathan. You have copied maps of it, and you know
it at least more than we do. Which is the way to the chapel?" I had an
idea of its direction, though on my former visit I had not been able to
get admission to it; so I led the way, and after a few wrong turnings
found myself opposite a low, arched oaken door, ribbed with iron bands.
"This is the spot," said the Professor as he turned his lamp on a small
map of the house, copied from the file of my original correspondence
regarding the purchase. With a little trouble we found the key on the
bunch and opened the door. We were prepared for some unpleasantness, for
as we were opening the door a faint, malodorous air seemed to exhale
through the gaps, but none of us ever expected such an odour as we
encountered. None of the others had met the Count at all at close
quarters, and when I had seen him he was either in the fasting stage of
his existence in his rooms or, when he was gloated with fresh blood, in
a ruined building open to the air; but here the place was small and
close, and the long disuse had made the air stagnant and foul. There was
an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler
air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not
alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the
pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had
become itself corrupt. Faugh! it sickens me to think of it. Every breath
exhaled by that monster seemed to have clung to the place and
intensified its loathsomeness.

Under ordinary circumstances such a stench would have brought our
enterprise to an end; but this was no ordinary case, and the high and
terrible purpose in which we were involved gave us a strength which rose
above merely physical considerations. After the involuntary shrinking
consequent on the first nauseous whiff, we one and all set about our
work as though that loathsome place were a garden of roses.

We made an accurate examination of the place, the Professor saying as we
began:--

"The first thing is to see how many of the boxes are left; we must then
examine every hole and corner and cranny and see if we cannot get some
clue as to what has become of the rest." A glance was sufficient to show
how many remained, for the great earth chests were bulky, and there was
no mistaking them.

There were only twenty-nine left out of the fifty! Once I got a fright,
for, seeing Lord Godalming suddenly turn and look out of the vaulted
door into the dark passage beyond, I looked too, and for an instant my
heart stood still. Somewhere, looking out from the shadow, I seemed to
see the high lights of the Count's evil face, the ridge of the nose, the
red eyes, the red lips, the awful pallor. It was only for a moment, for,
as Lord Godalming said, "I thought I saw a face, but it was only the
shadows," and resumed his inquiry, I turned my lamp in the direction,
and stepped into the passage. There was no sign of any one; and as there
were no corners, no doors, no aperture of any kind, but only the solid
walls of the passage, there could be no hiding-place even for _him_. I
took it that fear had helped imagination, and said nothing.

A few minutes later I saw Morris step suddenly back from a corner, which
he was examining. We all followed his movements with our eyes, for
undoubtedly some nervousness was growing on us, and we saw a whole mass
of phosphorescence, which twinkled like stars. We all instinctively drew
back. The whole place was becoming alive with rats.

For a moment or two we stood appalled, all save Lord Godalming, who was
seemingly prepared for such an emergency. Rushing over to the great
iron-bound oaken door, which Dr. Seward had described from the outside,
and which I had seen myself, he turned the key in the lock, drew the
huge bolts, and swung the door open. Then, taking his little silver
whistle from his pocket, he blew a low, shrill call. It was answered
from behind Dr. Seward's house by the yelping of dogs, and after about a
minute three terriers came dashing round the corner of the house.
Unconsciously we had all moved towards the door, and as we moved I
noticed that the dust had been much disturbed: the boxes which had been
taken out had been brought this way. But even in the minute that had
elapsed the number of the rats had vastly increased. They seemed to
swarm over the place all at once, till the lamplight, shining on their
moving dark bodies and glittering, baleful eyes, made the place look
like a bank of earth set with fireflies. The dogs dashed on, but at the
threshold suddenly stopped and snarled, and then, simultaneously lifting
their noses, began to howl in most lugubrious fashion. The rats were
multiplying in thousands, and we moved out.

Lord Godalming lifted one of the dogs, and carrying him in, placed him
on the floor. The instant his feet touched the ground he seemed to
recover his courage, and rushed at his natural enemies. They fled before
him so fast that before he had shaken the life out of a score, the other
dogs, who had by now been lifted in the same manner, had but small prey
ere the whole mass had vanished.

With their going it seemed as if some evil presence had departed, for
the dogs frisked about and barked merrily as they made sudden darts at
their prostrate foes, and turned them over and over and tossed them in
the air with vicious shakes. We all seemed to find our spirits rise.
Whether it was the purifying of the deadly atmosphere by the opening of
the chapel door, or the relief which we experienced by finding ourselves
in the open I know not; but most certainly the shadow of dread seemed to
slip from us like a robe, and the occasion of our coming lost something
of its grim significance, though we did not slacken a whit in our
resolution. We closed the outer door and barred and locked it, and
bringing the dogs with us, began our search of the house. We found
nothing throughout except dust in extraordinary proportions, and all
untouched save for my own footsteps when I had made my first visit.
Never once did the dogs exhibit any symptom of uneasiness, and even when
we returned to the chapel they frisked about as though they had been
rabbit-hunting in a summer wood.

The morning was quickening in the east when we emerged from the front.
Dr. Van Helsing had taken the key of the hall-door from the bunch, and
locked the door in orthodox fashion, putting the key into his pocket
when he had done.

"So far," he said, "our night has been eminently successful. No harm has
come to us such as I feared might be and yet we have ascertained how
many boxes are missing. More than all do I rejoice that this, our
first--and perhaps our most difficult and dangerous--step has been
accomplished without the bringing thereinto our most sweet Madam Mina or
troubling her waking or sleeping thoughts with sights and sounds and
smells of horror which she might never forget. One lesson, too, we have
learned, if it be allowable to argue _a particulari_: that the brute
beasts which are to the Count's command are yet themselves not amenable
to his spiritual power; for look, these rats that would come to his
call, just as from his castle top he summon the wolves to your going and
to that poor mother's cry, though they come to him, they run pell-mell
from the so little dogs of my friend Arthur. We have other matters
before us, other dangers, other fears; and that monster--he has not used
his power over the brute world for the only or the last time to-night.
So be it that he has gone elsewhere. Good! It has given us opportunity
to cry 'check' in some ways in this chess game, which we play for the
stake of human souls. And now let us go home. The dawn is close at hand,
and we have reason to be content with our first night's work. It may be
ordained that we have many nights and days to follow, if full of peril;
but we must go on, and from no danger shall we shrink."

The house was silent when we got back, save for some poor creature who
was screaming away in one of the distant wards, and a low, moaning sound
from Renfield's room. The poor wretch was doubtless torturing himself,
after the manner of the insane, with needless thoughts of pain.

I came tiptoe into our own room, and found Mina asleep, breathing so
softly that I had to put my ear down to hear it. She looks paler than
usual. I hope the meeting to-night has not upset her. I am truly
thankful that she is to be left out of our future work, and even of our
deliberations. It is too great a strain for a woman to bear. I did not
think so at first, but I know better now. Therefore I am glad that it is
settled. There may be things which would frighten her to hear; and yet
to conceal them from her might be worse than to tell her if once she
suspected that there was any concealment. Henceforth our work is to be a
sealed book to her, till at least such time as we can tell her that all
is finished, and the earth free from a monster of the nether world. I
daresay it will be difficult to begin to keep silence after such
confidence as ours; but I must be resolute, and to-morrow I shall keep
dark over to-night's doings, and shall refuse to speak of anything that
has happened. I rest on the sofa, so as not to disturb her.

       *       *       *       *       *

_1 October, later._--I suppose it was natural that we should have all
overslept ourselves, for the day was a busy one, and the night had no
rest at all. Even Mina must have felt its exhaustion, for though I slept
till the sun was high, I was awake before her, and had to call two or
three times before she awoke. Indeed, she was so sound asleep that for a
few seconds she did not recognize me, but looked at me with a sort of
blank terror, as one looks who has been waked out of a bad dream. She
complained a little of being tired, and I let her rest till later in the
day. We now know of twenty-one boxes having been removed, and if it be
that several were taken in any of these removals we may be able to trace
them all. Such will, of course, immensely simplify our labour, and the
sooner the matter is attended to the better. I shall look up Thomas
Snelling to-day.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_1 October._--It was towards noon when I was awakened by the Professor
walking into my room. He was more jolly and cheerful than usual, and it
is quite evident that last night's work has helped to take some of the
brooding weight off his mind. After going over the adventure of the
night he suddenly said:--

"Your patient interests me much. May it be that with you I visit him
this morning? Or if that you are too occupy, I can go alone if it may
be. It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy,
and reason so sound." I had some work to do which pressed, so I told him
that if he would go alone I would be glad, as then I should not have to
keep him waiting; so I called an attendant and gave him the necessary
instructions. Before the Professor left the room I cautioned him against
getting any false impression from my patient. "But," he answered, "I
want him to talk of himself and of his delusion as to consuming live
things. He said to Madam Mina, as I see in your diary of yesterday, that
he had once had such a belief. Why do you smile, friend John?"

"Excuse me," I said, "but the answer is here." I laid my hand on the
type-written matter. "When our sane and learned lunatic made that very
statement of how he _used_ to consume life, his mouth was actually
nauseous with the flies and spiders which he had eaten just before Mrs.
Harker entered the room." Van Helsing smiled in turn. "Good!" he said.
"Your memory is true, friend John. I should have remembered. And yet it
is this very obliquity of thought and memory which makes mental disease
such a fascinating study. Perhaps I may gain more knowledge out of the
folly of this madman than I shall from the teaching of the most wise.
Who knows?" I went on with my work, and before long was through that in
hand. It seemed that the time had been very short indeed, but there was
Van Helsing back in the study. "Do I interrupt?" he asked politely as he
stood at the door.

"Not at all," I answered. "Come in. My work is finished, and I am free.
I can go with you now, if you like.

"It is needless; I have seen him!"

"Well?"

"I fear that he does not appraise me at much. Our interview was short.
When I entered his room he was sitting on a stool in the centre, with
his elbows on his knees, and his face was the picture of sullen
discontent. I spoke to him as cheerfully as I could, and with such a
measure of respect as I could assume. He made no reply whatever. "Don't
you know me?" I asked. His answer was not reassuring: "I know you well
enough; you are the old fool Van Helsing. I wish you would take yourself
and your idiotic brain theories somewhere else. Damn all thick-headed
Dutchmen!" Not a word more would he say, but sat in his implacable
sullenness as indifferent to me as though I had not been in the room at
all. Thus departed for this time my chance of much learning from this so
clever lunatic; so I shall go, if I may, and cheer myself with a few
happy words with that sweet soul Madam Mina. Friend John, it does
rejoice me unspeakable that she is no more to be pained, no more to be
worried with our terrible things. Though we shall much miss her help, it
is better so."

"I agree with you with all my heart," I answered earnestly, for I did
not want him to weaken in this matter. "Mrs. Harker is better out of it.
Things are quite bad enough for us, all men of the world, and who have
been in many tight places in our time; but it is no place for a woman,
and if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in time
infallibly have wrecked her."

So Van Helsing has gone to confer with Mrs. Harker and Harker; Quincey
and Art are all out following up the clues as to the earth-boxes. I
shall finish my round of work and we shall meet to-night.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_1 October._--It is strange to me to be kept in the dark as I am to-day;
after Jonathan's full confidence for so many years, to see him
manifestly avoid certain matters, and those the most vital of all. This
morning I slept late after the fatigues of yesterday, and though
Jonathan was late too, he was the earlier. He spoke to me before he went
out, never more sweetly or tenderly, but he never mentioned a word of
what had happened in the visit to the Count's house. And yet he must
have known how terribly anxious I was. Poor dear fellow! I suppose it
must have distressed him even more than it did me. They all agreed that
it was best that I should not be drawn further into this awful work, and
I acquiesced. But to think that he keeps anything from me! And now I am
crying like a silly fool, when I _know_ it comes from my husband's great
love and from the good, good wishes of those other strong men.

That has done me good. Well, some day Jonathan will tell me all; and
lest it should ever be that he should think for a moment that I kept
anything from him, I still keep my journal as usual. Then if he has
feared of my trust I shall show it to him, with every thought of my
heart put down for his dear eyes to read. I feel strangely sad and
low-spirited to-day. I suppose it is the reaction from the terrible
excitement.

Last night I went to bed when the men had gone, simply because they told
me to. I didn't feel sleepy, and I did feel full of devouring anxiety. I
kept thinking over everything that has been ever since Jonathan came to
see me in London, and it all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate
pressing on relentlessly to some destined end. Everything that one does
seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which
is most to be deplored. If I hadn't gone to Whitby, perhaps poor dear
Lucy would be with us now. She hadn't taken to visiting the churchyard
till I came, and if she hadn't come there in the day-time with me she
wouldn't have walked there in her sleep; and if she hadn't gone there at
night and asleep, that monster couldn't have destroyed her as he did.
Oh, why did I ever go to Whitby? There now, crying again! I wonder what
has come over me to-day. I must hide it from Jonathan, for if he knew
that I had been crying twice in one morning--I, who never cried on my
own account, and whom he has never caused to shed a tear--the dear
fellow would fret his heart out. I shall put a bold face on, and if I do
feel weepy, he shall never see it. I suppose it is one of the lessons
that we poor women have to learn....

I can't quite remember how I fell asleep last night. I remember hearing
the sudden barking of the dogs and a lot of queer sounds, like praying
on a very tumultuous scale, from Mr. Renfield's room, which is somewhere
under this. And then there was silence over everything, silence so
profound that it startled me, and I got up and looked out of the window.
All was dark and silent, the black shadows thrown by the moonlight
seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not a thing seemed to be
stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin
streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness
across the grass towards the house, seemed to have a sentience and a
vitality of its own. I think that the digression of my thoughts must
have done me good, for when I got back to bed I found a lethargy
creeping over me. I lay a while, but could not quite sleep, so I got out
and looked out of the window again. The mist was spreading, and was now
close up to the house, so that I could see it lying thick against the
wall, as though it were stealing up to the windows. The poor man was
more loud than ever, and though I could not distinguish a word he said,
I could in some way recognise in his tones some passionate entreaty on
his part. Then there was the sound of a struggle, and I knew that the
attendants were dealing with him. I was so frightened that I crept into
bed, and pulled the clothes over my head, putting my fingers in my ears.
I was not then a bit sleepy, at least so I thought; but I must have
fallen asleep, for, except dreams, I do not remember anything until the
morning, when Jonathan woke me. I think that it took me an effort and a
little time to realise where I was, and that it was Jonathan who was
bending over me. My dream was very peculiar, and was almost typical of
the way that waking thoughts become merged in, or continued in, dreams.

I thought that I was asleep, and waiting for Jonathan to come back. I
was very anxious about him, and I was powerless to act; my feet, and my
hands, and my brain were weighted, so that nothing could proceed at the
usual pace. And so I slept uneasily and thought. Then it began to dawn
upon me that the air was heavy, and dank, and cold. I put back the
clothes from my face, and found, to my surprise, that all was dim
around. The gaslight which I had left lit for Jonathan, but turned down,
came only like a tiny red spark through the fog, which had evidently
grown thicker and poured into the room. Then it occurred to me that I
had shut the window before I had come to bed. I would have got out to
make certain on the point, but some leaden lethargy seemed to chain my
limbs and even my will. I lay still and endured; that was all. I closed
my eyes, but could still see through my eyelids. (It is wonderful what
tricks our dreams play us, and how conveniently we can imagine.) The
mist grew thicker and thicker and I could see now how it came in, for I
could see it like smoke--or with the white energy of boiling
water--pouring in, not through the window, but through the joinings of
the door. It got thicker and thicker, till it seemed as if it became
concentrated into a sort of pillar of cloud in the room, through the top
of which I could see the light of the gas shining like a red eye. Things
began to whirl through my brain just as the cloudy column was now
whirling in the room, and through it all came the scriptural words "a
pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night." Was it indeed some such
spiritual guidance that was coming to me in my sleep? But the pillar was
composed of both the day and the night-guiding, for the fire was in the
red eye, which at the thought got a new fascination for me; till, as I
looked, the fire divided, and seemed to shine on me through the fog like
two red eyes, such as Lucy told me of in her momentary mental wandering
when, on the cliff, the dying sunlight struck the windows of St. Mary's
Church. Suddenly the horror burst upon me that it was thus that Jonathan
had seen those awful women growing into reality through the whirling mist
in the moonlight, and in my dream I must have fainted, for all became
black darkness. The last conscious effort which imagination made was to
show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. I must be
careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one's reason if there were
too much of them. I would get Dr. Van Helsing or Dr. Seward to prescribe
something for me which would make me sleep, only that I fear to alarm
them. Such a dream at the present time would become woven into their
fears for me. To-night I shall strive hard to sleep naturally. If I do
not, I shall to-morrow night get them to give me a dose of chloral; that
cannot hurt me for once, and it will give me a good night's sleep. Last
night tired me more than if I had not slept at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

_2 October 10 p. m._--Last night I slept, but did not dream. I must have
slept soundly, for I was not waked by Jonathan coming to bed; but the
sleep has not refreshed me, for to-day I feel terribly weak and
spiritless. I spent all yesterday trying to read, or lying down dozing.
In the afternoon Mr. Renfield asked if he might see me. Poor man, he was
very gentle, and when I came away he kissed my hand and bade God bless
me. Some way it affected me much; I am crying when I think of him. This
is a new weakness, of which I must be careful. Jonathan would be
miserable if he knew I had been crying. He and the others were out till
dinner-time, and they all came in tired. I did what I could to brighten
them up, and I suppose that the effort did me good, for I forgot how
tired I was. After dinner they sent me to bed, and all went off to smoke
together, as they said, but I knew that they wanted to tell each other
of what had occurred to each during the day; I could see from Jonathan's
manner that he had something important to communicate. I was not so
sleepy as I should have been; so before they went I asked Dr. Seward to
give me a little opiate of some kind, as I had not slept well the night
before. He very kindly made me up a sleeping draught, which he gave to
me, telling me that it would do me no harm, as it was very mild.... I
have taken it, and am waiting for sleep, which still keeps aloof. I hope
I have not done wrong, for as sleep begins to flirt with me, a new fear
comes: that I may have been foolish in thus depriving myself of the
power of waking. I might want it. Here comes sleep. Good-night.




CHAPTER XX

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL


_1 October, evening._--I found Thomas Snelling in his house at Bethnal
Green, but unhappily he was not in a condition to remember anything. The
very prospect of beer which my expected coming had opened to him had
proved too much, and he had begun too early on his expected debauch. I
learned, however, from his wife, who seemed a decent, poor soul, that he
was only the assistant to Smollet, who of the two mates was the
responsible person. So off I drove to Walworth, and found Mr. Joseph
Smollet at home and in his shirtsleeves, taking a late tea out of a
saucer. He is a decent, intelligent fellow, distinctly a good, reliable
type of workman, and with a headpiece of his own. He remembered all
about the incident of the boxes, and from a wonderful dog's-eared
notebook, which he produced from some mysterious receptacle about the
seat of his trousers, and which had hieroglyphical entries in thick,
half-obliterated pencil, he gave me the destinations of the boxes. There
were, he said, six in the cartload which he took from Carfax and left at
197, Chicksand Street, Mile End New Town, and another six which he
deposited at Jamaica Lane, Bermondsey. If then the Count meant to
scatter these ghastly refuges of his over London, these places were
chosen as the first of delivery, so that later he might distribute more
fully. The systematic manner in which this was done made me think that
he could not mean to confine himself to two sides of London. He was now
fixed on the far east of the northern shore, on the east of the southern
shore, and on the south. The north and west were surely never meant to
be left out of his diabolical scheme--let alone the City itself and the
very heart of fashionable London in the south-west and west. I went back
to Smollet, and asked him if he could tell us if any other boxes had
been taken from Carfax.

He replied:--

"Well, guv'nor, you've treated me wery 'an'some"--I had given him half a
sovereign--"an' I'll tell yer all I know. I heard a man by the name of
Bloxam say four nights ago in the 'Are an' 'Ounds, in Pincher's Alley,
as 'ow he an' his mate 'ad 'ad a rare dusty job in a old 'ouse at
Purfect. There ain't a-many such jobs as this 'ere, an' I'm thinkin'
that maybe Sam Bloxam could tell ye summut." I asked if he could tell me
where to find him. I told him that if he could get me the address it
would be worth another half-sovereign to him. So he gulped down the rest
of his tea and stood up, saying that he was going to begin the search
then and there. At the door he stopped, and said:--

"Look 'ere, guv'nor, there ain't no sense in me a-keepin' you 'ere. I
may find Sam soon, or I mayn't; but anyhow he ain't like to be in a way
to tell ye much to-night. Sam is a rare one when he starts on the booze.
If you can give me a envelope with a stamp on it, and put yer address on
it, I'll find out where Sam is to be found and post it ye to-night. But
ye'd better be up arter 'im soon in the mornin', or maybe ye won't ketch
'im; for Sam gets off main early, never mind the booze the night afore."

This was all practical, so one of the children went off with a penny to
buy an envelope and a sheet of paper, and to keep the change. When she
came back, I addressed the envelope and stamped it, and when Smollet had
again faithfully promised to post the address when found, I took my way
to home. We're on the track anyhow. I am tired to-night, and want sleep.
Mina is fast asleep, and looks a little too pale; her eyes look as
though she had been crying. Poor dear, I've no doubt it frets her to be
kept in the dark, and it may make her doubly anxious about me and the
others. But it is best as it is. It is better to be disappointed and
worried in such a way now than to have her nerve broken. The doctors
were quite right to insist on her being kept out of this dreadful
business. I must be firm, for on me this particular burden of silence
must rest. I shall not ever enter on the subject with her under any
circumstances. Indeed, it may not be a hard task, after all, for she
herself has become reticent on the subject, and has not spoken of the
Count or his doings ever since we told her of our decision.

       *       *       *       *       *

_2 October, evening._--A long and trying and exciting day. By the first
post I got my directed envelope with a dirty scrap of paper enclosed, on
which was written with a carpenter's pencil in a sprawling hand:--

"Sam Bloxam, Korkrans, 4, Poters Cort, Bartel Street, Walworth. Arsk for
the depite."

I got the letter in bed, and rose without waking Mina. She looked heavy
and sleepy and pale, and far from well. I determined not to wake her,
but that, when I should return from this new search, I would arrange for
her going back to Exeter. I think she would be happier in our own home,
with her daily tasks to interest her, than in being here amongst us and
in ignorance. I only saw Dr. Seward for a moment, and told him where I
was off to, promising to come back and tell the rest so soon as I should
have found out anything. I drove to Walworth and found, with some
difficulty, Potter's Court. Mr. Smollet's spelling misled me, as I asked
for Poter's Court instead of Potter's Court. However, when I had found
the court, I had no difficulty in discovering Corcoran's lodging-house.
When I asked the man who came to the door for the "depite," he shook his
head, and said: "I dunno 'im. There ain't no such a person 'ere; I never
'eard of 'im in all my bloomin' days. Don't believe there ain't nobody
of that kind livin' ere or anywheres." I took out Smollet's letter, and
as I read it it seemed to me that the lesson of the spelling of the name
of the court might guide me. "What are you?" I asked.

"I'm the depity," he answered. I saw at once that I was on the right
track; phonetic spelling had again misled me. A half-crown tip put the
deputy's knowledge at my disposal, and I learned that Mr. Bloxam, who
had slept off the remains of his beer on the previous night at
Corcoran's, had left for his work at Poplar at five o'clock that
morning. He could not tell me where the place of work was situated, but
he had a vague idea that it was some kind of a "new-fangled ware'us";
and with this slender clue I had to start for Poplar. It was twelve
o'clock before I got any satisfactory hint of such a building, and this
I got at a coffee-shop, where some workmen were having their dinner. One
of these suggested that there was being erected at Cross Angel Street a
new "cold storage" building; and as this suited the condition of a
"new-fangled ware'us," I at once drove to it. An interview with a surly
gatekeeper and a surlier foreman, both of whom were appeased with the
coin of the realm, put me on the track of Bloxam; he was sent for on my
suggesting that I was willing to pay his day's wages to his foreman for
the privilege of asking him a few questions on a private matter. He was
a smart enough fellow, though rough of speech and bearing. When I had
promised to pay for his information and given him an earnest, he told me
that he had made two journeys between Carfax and a house in Piccadilly,
and had taken from this house to the latter nine great boxes--"main
heavy ones"--with a horse and cart hired by him for this purpose. I
asked him if he could tell me the number of the house in Piccadilly, to
which he replied:--

"Well, guv'nor, I forgits the number, but it was only a few doors from a
big white church or somethink of the kind, not long built. It was a
dusty old 'ouse, too, though nothin' to the dustiness of the 'ouse we
tooked the bloomin' boxes from."

"How did you get into the houses if they were both empty?"

"There was the old party what engaged me a-waitin' in the 'ouse at
Purfleet. He 'elped me to lift the boxes and put them in the dray. Curse
me, but he was the strongest chap I ever struck, an' him a old feller,
with a white moustache, one that thin you would think he couldn't throw
a shadder."

How this phrase thrilled through me!

"Why, 'e took up 'is end o' the boxes like they was pounds of tea, and
me a-puffin' an' a-blowin' afore I could up-end mine anyhow--an' I'm no
chicken, neither."

"How did you get into the house in Piccadilly?" I asked.

"He was there too. He must 'a' started off and got there afore me, for
when I rung of the bell he kem an' opened the door 'isself an' 'elped me
to carry the boxes into the 'all."

"The whole nine?" I asked.

"Yus; there was five in the first load an' four in the second. It was
main dry work, an' I don't so well remember 'ow I got 'ome." I
interrupted him:--

"Were the boxes left in the hall?"

"Yus; it was a big 'all, an' there was nothin' else in it." I made one
more attempt to further matters:--

"You didn't have any key?"

"Never used no key nor nothink. The old gent, he opened the door 'isself
an' shut it again when I druv off. I don't remember the last time--but
that was the beer."

"And you can't remember the number of the house?"

"No, sir. But ye needn't have no difficulty about that. It's a 'igh 'un
with a stone front with a bow on it, an' 'igh steps up to the door. I
know them steps, 'avin' 'ad to carry the boxes up with three loafers
what come round to earn a copper. The old gent give them shillin's, an'
they seein' they got so much, they wanted more; but 'e took one of them
by the shoulder and was like to throw 'im down the steps, till the lot
of them went away cussin'." I thought that with this description I could
find the house, so, having paid my friend for his information, I started
off for Piccadilly. I had gained a new painful experience; the Count
could, it was evident, handle the earth-boxes himself. If so, time was
precious; for, now that he had achieved a certain amount of
distribution, he could, by choosing his own time, complete the task
unobserved. At Piccadilly Circus I discharged my cab, and walked
westward; beyond the Junior Constitutional I came across the house
described, and was satisfied that this was the next of the lairs
arranged by Dracula. The house looked as though it had been long
untenanted. The windows were encrusted with dust, and the shutters were
up. All the framework was black with time, and from the iron the paint
had mostly scaled away. It was evident that up to lately there had been
a large notice-board in front of the balcony; it had, however, been
roughly torn away, the uprights which had supported it still remaining.
Behind the rails of the balcony I saw there were some loose boards,
whose raw edges looked white. I would have given a good deal to have
been able to see the notice-board intact, as it would, perhaps, have
given some clue to the ownership of the house. I remembered my
experience of the investigation and purchase of Carfax, and I could not
but feel that if I could find the former owner there might be some means
discovered of gaining access to the house.

There was at present nothing to be learned from the Piccadilly side, and
nothing could be done; so I went round to the back to see if anything
could be gathered from this quarter. The mews were active, the
Piccadilly houses being mostly in occupation. I asked one or two of the
grooms and helpers whom I saw around if they could tell me anything
about the empty house. One of them said that he heard it had lately been
taken, but he couldn't say from whom. He told me, however, that up to
very lately there had been a notice-board of "For Sale" up, and that
perhaps Mitchell, Sons, & Candy, the house agents, could tell me
something, as he thought he remembered seeing the name of that firm on
the board. I did not wish to seem too eager, or to let my informant know
or guess too much, so, thanking him in the usual manner, I strolled
away. It was now growing dusk, and the autumn night was closing in, so I
did not lose any time. Having learned the address of Mitchell, Sons, &
Candy from a directory at the Berkeley, I was soon at their office in
Sackville Street.

The gentleman who saw me was particularly suave in manner, but
uncommunicative in equal proportion. Having once told me that the
Piccadilly house--which throughout our interview he called a
"mansion"--was sold, he considered my business as concluded. When I
asked who had purchased it, he opened his eyes a thought wider, and
paused a few seconds before replying:--

"It is sold, sir."

"Pardon me," I said, with equal politeness, "but I have a special reason
for wishing to know who purchased it."

Again he paused longer, and raised his eyebrows still more. "It is sold,
sir," was again his laconic reply.

"Surely," I said, "you do not mind letting me know so much."

"But I do mind," he answered. "The affairs of their clients are
absolutely safe in the hands of Mitchell, Sons, & Candy." This was
manifestly a prig of the first water, and there was no use arguing with
him. I thought I had best meet him on his own ground, so I said:--

"Your clients, sir, are happy in having so resolute a guardian of their
confidence. I am myself a professional man." Here I handed him my card.
"In this instance I am not prompted by curiosity; I act on the part of
Lord Godalming, who wishes to know something of the property which was,
he understood, lately for sale." These words put a different complexion
on affairs. He said:--

"I would like to oblige you if I could, Mr. Harker, and especially would
I like to oblige his lordship. We once carried out a small matter of
renting some chambers for him when he was the Honourable Arthur
Holmwood. If you will let me have his lordship's address I will consult
the House on the subject, and will, in any case, communicate with his
lordship by to-night's post. It will be a pleasure if we can so far
deviate from our rules as to give the required information to his
lordship."

I wanted to secure a friend, and not to make an enemy, so I thanked him,
gave the address at Dr. Seward's and came away. It was now dark, and I
was tired and hungry. I got a cup of tea at the Aërated Bread Company
and came down to Purfleet by the next train.

I found all the others at home. Mina was looking tired and pale, but she
made a gallant effort to be bright and cheerful, it wrung my heart to
think that I had had to keep anything from her and so caused her
inquietude. Thank God, this will be the last night of her looking on at
our conferences, and feeling the sting of our not showing our
confidence. It took all my courage to hold to the wise resolution of
keeping her out of our grim task. She seems somehow more reconciled; or
else the very subject seems to have become repugnant to her, for when
any accidental allusion is made she actually shudders. I am glad we
made our resolution in time, as with such a feeling as this, our growing
knowledge would be torture to her.

I could not tell the others of the day's discovery till we were alone;
so after dinner--followed by a little music to save appearances even
amongst ourselves--I took Mina to her room and left her to go to bed.
The dear girl was more affectionate with me than ever, and clung to me
as though she would detain me; but there was much to be talked of and I
came away. Thank God, the ceasing of telling things has made no
difference between us.

When I came down again I found the others all gathered round the fire in
the study. In the train I had written my diary so far, and simply read
it off to them as the best means of letting them get abreast of my own
information; when I had finished Van Helsing said:--

"This has been a great day's work, friend Jonathan. Doubtless we are on
the track of the missing boxes. If we find them all in that house, then
our work is near the end. But if there be some missing, we must search
until we find them. Then shall we make our final _coup_, and hunt the
wretch to his real death." We all sat silent awhile and all at once Mr.
Morris spoke:--

"Say! how are we going to get into that house?"

"We got into the other," answered Lord Godalming quickly.

"But, Art, this is different. We broke house at Carfax, but we had night
and a walled park to protect us. It will be a mighty different thing to
commit burglary in Piccadilly, either by day or night. I confess I don't
see how we are going to get in unless that agency duck can find us a key
of some sort; perhaps we shall know when you get his letter in the
morning." Lord Godalming's brows contracted, and he stood up and walked
about the room. By-and-by he stopped and said, turning from one to
another of us:--

"Quincey's head is level. This burglary business is getting serious; we
got off once all right; but we have now a rare job on hand--unless we
can find the Count's key basket."

As nothing could well be done before morning, and as it would be at
least advisable to wait till Lord Godalming should hear from Mitchell's,
we decided not to take any active step before breakfast time. For a good
while we sat and smoked, discussing the matter in its various lights and
bearings; I took the opportunity of bringing this diary right up to the
moment. I am very sleepy and shall go to bed....

Just a line. Mina sleeps soundly and her breathing is regular. Her
forehead is puckered up into little wrinkles, as though she thinks even
in her sleep. She is still too pale, but does not look so haggard as she
did this morning. To-morrow will, I hope, mend all this; she will be
herself at home in Exeter. Oh, but I am sleepy!


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_1 October._--I am puzzled afresh about Renfield. His moods change so
rapidly that I find it difficult to keep touch of them, and as they
always mean something more than his own well-being, they form a more
than interesting study. This morning, when I went to see him after his
repulse of Van Helsing, his manner was that of a man commanding destiny.
He was, in fact, commanding destiny--subjectively. He did not really
care for any of the things of mere earth; he was in the clouds and
looked down on all the weaknesses and wants of us poor mortals. I
thought I would improve the occasion and learn something, so I asked
him:--

"What about the flies these times?" He smiled on me in quite a superior
sort of way--such a smile as would have become the face of Malvolio--as
he answered me:--

"The fly, my dear sir, has one striking feature; its wings are typical
of the aërial powers of the psychic faculties. The ancients did well
when they typified the soul as a butterfly!"

I thought I would push his analogy to its utmost logically, so I said
quickly:--

"Oh, it is a soul you are after now, is it?" His madness foiled his
reason, and a puzzled look spread over his face as, shaking his head
with a decision which I had but seldom seen in him, he said:--

"Oh, no, oh no! I want no souls. Life is all I want." Here he brightened
up; "I am pretty indifferent about it at present. Life is all right; I
have all I want. You must get a new patient, doctor, if you wish to
study zoöphagy!"

This puzzled me a little, so I drew him on:--

"Then you command life; you are a god, I suppose?" He smiled with an
ineffably benign superiority.

"Oh no! Far be it from me to arrogate to myself the attributes of the
Deity. I am not even concerned in His especially spiritual doings. If I
may state my intellectual position I am, so far as concerns things
purely terrestrial, somewhat in the position which Enoch occupied
spiritually!" This was a poser to me. I could not at the moment recall
Enoch's appositeness; so I had to ask a simple question, though I felt
that by so doing I was lowering myself in the eyes of the lunatic:--

"And why with Enoch?"

"Because he walked with God." I could not see the analogy, but did not
like to admit it; so I harked back to what he had denied:--

"So you don't care about life and you don't want souls. Why not?" I put
my question quickly and somewhat sternly, on purpose to disconcert him.
The effort succeeded; for an instant he unconsciously relapsed into his
old servile manner, bent low before me, and actually fawned upon me as
he replied:--

"I don't want any souls, indeed, indeed! I don't. I couldn't use them if
I had them; they would be no manner of use to me. I couldn't eat them
or----" He suddenly stopped and the old cunning look spread over his
face, like a wind-sweep on the surface of the water. "And doctor, as to
life, what is it after all? When you've got all you require, and you
know that you will never want, that is all. I have friends--good
friends--like you, Dr. Seward"; this was said with a leer of
inexpressible cunning. "I know that I shall never lack the means of
life!"

I think that through the cloudiness of his insanity he saw some
antagonism in me, for he at once fell back on the last refuge of such as
he--a dogged silence. After a short time I saw that for the present it
was useless to speak to him. He was sulky, and so I came away.

Later in the day he sent for me. Ordinarily I would not have come
without special reason, but just at present I am so interested in him
that I would gladly make an effort. Besides, I am glad to have anything
to help to pass the time. Harker is out, following up clues; and so are
Lord Godalming and Quincey. Van Helsing sits in my study poring over the
record prepared by the Harkers; he seems to think that by accurate
knowledge of all details he will light upon some clue. He does not wish
to be disturbed in the work, without cause. I would have taken him with
me to see the patient, only I thought that after his last repulse he
might not care to go again. There was also another reason: Renfield
might not speak so freely before a third person as when he and I were
alone.

I found him sitting out in the middle of the floor on his stool, a pose
which is generally indicative of some mental energy on his part. When I
came in, he said at once, as though the question had been waiting on his
lips:--

"What about souls?" It was evident then that my surmise had been
correct. Unconscious cerebration was doing its work, even with the
lunatic. I determined to have the matter out. "What about them
yourself?" I asked. He did not reply for a moment but looked all round
him, and up and down, as though he expected to find some inspiration for
an answer.

"I don't want any souls!" he said in a feeble, apologetic way. The
matter seemed preying on his mind, and so I determined to use it--to "be
cruel only to be kind." So I said:--

"You like life, and you want life?"

"Oh yes! but that is all right; you needn't worry about that!"

"But," I asked, "how are we to get the life without getting the soul
also?" This seemed to puzzle him, so I followed it up:--

"A nice time you'll have some time when you're flying out there, with
the souls of thousands of flies and spiders and birds and cats buzzing
and twittering and miauing all round you. You've got their lives, you
know, and you must put up with their souls!" Something seemed to affect
his imagination, for he put his fingers to his ears and shut his eyes,
screwing them up tightly just as a small boy does when his face is being
soaped. There was something pathetic in it that touched me; it also gave
me a lesson, for it seemed that before me was a child--only a child,
though the features were worn, and the stubble on the jaws was white. It
was evident that he was undergoing some process of mental disturbance,
and, knowing how his past moods had interpreted things seemingly foreign
to himself, I thought I would enter into his mind as well as I could and
go with him. The first step was to restore confidence, so I asked him,
speaking pretty loud so that he would hear me through his closed ears:--

"Would you like some sugar to get your flies round again?" He seemed to
wake up all at once, and shook his head. With a laugh he replied:--

"Not much! flies are poor things, after all!" After a pause he added,
"But I don't want their souls buzzing round me, all the same."

"Or spiders?" I went on.

"Blow spiders! What's the use of spiders? There isn't anything in them
to eat or"--he stopped suddenly, as though reminded of a forbidden
topic.

"So, so!" I thought to myself, "this is the second time he has suddenly
stopped at the word 'drink'; what does it mean?" Renfield seemed himself
aware of having made a lapse, for he hurried on, as though to distract
my attention from it:--

"I don't take any stock at all in such matters. 'Rats and mice and such
small deer,' as Shakespeare has it, 'chicken-feed of the larder' they
might be called. I'm past all that sort of nonsense. You might as well
ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of chop-sticks, as to try to
interest me about the lesser carnivora, when I know of what is before
me."

"I see," I said. "You want big things that you can make your teeth meet
in? How would you like to breakfast on elephant?"

"What ridiculous nonsense you are talking!" He was getting too wide
awake, so I thought I would press him hard. "I wonder," I said
reflectively, "what an elephant's soul is like!"

The effect I desired was obtained, for he at once fell from his
high-horse and became a child again.

"I don't want an elephant's soul, or any soul at all!" he said. For a
few moments he sat despondently. Suddenly he jumped to his feet, with
his eyes blazing and all the signs of intense cerebral excitement. "To
hell with you and your souls!" he shouted. "Why do you plague me about
souls? Haven't I got enough to worry, and pain, and distract me already,
without thinking of souls!" He looked so hostile that I thought he was
in for another homicidal fit, so I blew my whistle. The instant,
however, that I did so he became calm, and said apologetically:--

"Forgive me, Doctor; I forgot myself. You do not need any help. I am so
worried in my mind that I am apt to be irritable. If you only knew the
problem I have to face, and that I am working out, you would pity, and
tolerate, and pardon me. Pray do not put me in a strait-waistcoat. I
want to think and I cannot think freely when my body is confined. I am
sure you will understand!" He had evidently self-control; so when the
attendants came I told them not to mind, and they withdrew. Renfield
watched them go; when the door was closed he said, with considerable
dignity and sweetness:--

"Dr. Seward, you have been very considerate towards me. Believe me that
I am very, very grateful to you!" I thought it well to leave him in this
mood, and so I came away. There is certainly something to ponder over in
this man's state. Several points seem to make what the American
interviewer calls "a story," if one could only get them in proper order.
Here they are:--

Will not mention "drinking."

Fears the thought of being burdened with the "soul" of anything.

Has no dread of wanting "life" in the future.

Despises the meaner forms of life altogether, though he dreads being
haunted by their souls.

Logically all these things point one way! he has assurance of some kind
that he will acquire some higher life. He dreads the consequence--the
burden of a soul. Then it is a human life he looks to!

And the assurance--?

Merciful God! the Count has been to him, and there is some new scheme of
terror afoot!

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--I went after my round to Van Helsing and told him my
suspicion. He grew very grave; and, after thinking the matter over for a
while asked me to take him to Renfield. I did so. As we came to the door
we heard the lunatic within singing gaily, as he used to do in the time
which now seems so long ago. When we entered we saw with amazement that
he had spread out his sugar as of old; the flies, lethargic with the
autumn, were beginning to buzz into the room. We tried to make him talk
of the subject of our previous conversation, but he would not attend. He
went on with his singing, just as though we had not been present. He had
got a scrap of paper and was folding it into a note-book. We had to come
away as ignorant as we went in.

His is a curious case indeed; we must watch him to-night.


_Letter, Mitchell, Sons and Candy to Lord Godalming._

_"1 October._

"My Lord,

"We are at all times only too happy to meet your wishes. We beg, with
regard to the desire of your Lordship, expressed by Mr. Harker on your
behalf, to supply the following information concerning the sale and
purchase of No. 347, Piccadilly. The original vendors are the executors
of the late Mr. Archibald Winter-Suffield. The purchaser is a foreign
nobleman, Count de Ville, who effected the purchase himself paying the
purchase money in notes 'over the counter,' if your Lordship will pardon
us using so vulgar an expression. Beyond this we know nothing whatever
of him.

"We are, my Lord,

"Your Lordship's humble servants,

"MITCHELL, SONS & CANDY."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_2 October._--I placed a man in the corridor last night, and told him to
make an accurate note of any sound he might hear from Renfield's room,
and gave him instructions that if there should be anything strange he
was to call me. After dinner, when we had all gathered round the fire
in the study--Mrs. Harker having gone to bed--we discussed the attempts
and discoveries of the day. Harker was the only one who had any result,
and we are in great hopes that his clue may be an important one.

Before going to bed I went round to the patient's room and looked in
through the observation trap. He was sleeping soundly, and his heart
rose and fell with regular respiration.

This morning the man on duty reported to me that a little after midnight
he was restless and kept saying his prayers somewhat loudly. I asked him
if that was all; he replied that it was all he heard. There was
something about his manner so suspicious that I asked him point blank if
he had been asleep. He denied sleep, but admitted to having "dozed" for
a while. It is too bad that men cannot be trusted unless they are
watched.

To-day Harker is out following up his clue, and Art and Quincey are
looking after horses. Godalming thinks that it will be well to have
horses always in readiness, for when we get the information which we
seek there will be no time to lose. We must sterilise all the imported
earth between sunrise and sunset; we shall thus catch the Count at his
weakest, and without a refuge to fly to. Van Helsing is off to the
British Museum looking up some authorities on ancient medicine. The old
physicians took account of things which their followers do not accept,
and the Professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be
useful to us later.

I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in
strait-waistcoats.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--We have met again. We seem at last to be on the track, and our
work of to-morrow may be the beginning of the end. I wonder if
Renfield's quiet has anything to do with this. His moods have so
followed the doings of the Count, that the coming destruction of the
monster may be carried to him in some subtle way. If we could only get
some hint as to what passed in his mind, between the time of my argument
with him to-day and his resumption of fly-catching, it might afford us a
valuable clue. He is now seemingly quiet for a spell.... Is he?---- That
wild yell seemed to come from his room....

       *       *       *       *       *

The attendant came bursting into my room and told me that Renfield had
somehow met with some accident. He had heard him yell; and when he went
to him found him lying on his face on the floor, all covered with blood.
I must go at once....




CHAPTER XXI

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY


_3 October._--Let me put down with exactness all that happened, as well
as I can remember it, since last I made an entry. Not a detail that I
can recall must be forgotten; in all calmness I must proceed.

When I came to Renfield's room I found him lying on the floor on his
left side in a glittering pool of blood. When I went to move him, it
became at once apparent that he had received some terrible injuries;
there seemed none of that unity of purpose between the parts of the body
which marks even lethargic sanity. As the face was exposed I could see
that it was horribly bruised, as though it had been beaten against the
floor--indeed it was from the face wounds that the pool of blood
originated. The attendant who was kneeling beside the body said to me as
we turned him over:--

"I think, sir, his back is broken. See, both his right arm and leg and
the whole side of his face are paralysed." How such a thing could have
happened puzzled the attendant beyond measure. He seemed quite
bewildered, and his brows were gathered in as he said:--

"I can't understand the two things. He could mark his face like that by
beating his own head on the floor. I saw a young woman do it once at the
Eversfield Asylum before anyone could lay hands on her. And I suppose he
might have broke his neck by falling out of bed, if he got in an awkward
kink. But for the life of me I can't imagine how the two things
occurred. If his back was broke, he couldn't beat his head; and if his
face was like that before the fall out of bed, there would be marks of
it." I said to him:--

"Go to Dr. Van Helsing, and ask him to kindly come here at once. I want
him without an instant's delay." The man ran off, and within a few
minutes the Professor, in his dressing gown and slippers, appeared. When
he saw Renfield on the ground, he looked keenly at him a moment, and
then turned to me. I think he recognised my thought in my eyes, for he
said very quietly, manifestly for the ears of the attendant:--

"Ah, a sad accident! He will need very careful watching, and much
attention. I shall stay with you myself; but I shall first dress myself.
If you will remain I shall in a few minutes join you."

The patient was now breathing stertorously and it was easy to see that
he had suffered some terrible injury. Van Helsing returned with
extraordinary celerity, bearing with him a surgical case. He had
evidently been thinking and had his mind made up; for, almost before he
looked at the patient, he whispered to me:--

"Send the attendant away. We must be alone with him when he becomes
conscious, after the operation." So I said:--

"I think that will do now, Simmons. We have done all that we can at
present. You had better go your round, and Dr. Van Helsing will operate.
Let me know instantly if there be anything unusual anywhere."

The man withdrew, and we went into a strict examination of the patient.
The wounds of the face was superficial; the real injury was a depressed
fracture of the skull, extending right up through the motor area. The
Professor thought a moment and said:--

"We must reduce the pressure and get back to normal conditions, as far
as can be; the rapidity of the suffusion shows the terrible nature of
his injury. The whole motor area seems affected. The suffusion of the
brain will increase quickly, so we must trephine at once or it may be
too late." As he was speaking there was a soft tapping at the door. I
went over and opened it and found in the corridor without, Arthur and
Quincey in pajamas and slippers: the former spoke:--

"I heard your man call up Dr. Van Helsing and tell him of an accident.
So I woke Quincey or rather called for him as he was not asleep. Things
are moving too quickly and too strangely for sound sleep for any of us
these times. I've been thinking that to-morrow night will not see things
as they have been. We'll have to look back--and forward a little more
than we have done. May we come in?" I nodded, and held the door open
till they had entered; then I closed it again. When Quincey saw the
attitude and state of the patient, and noted the horrible pool on the
floor, he said softly:--

"My God! what has happened to him? Poor, poor devil!" I told him
briefly, and added that we expected he would recover consciousness after
the operation--for a short time, at all events. He went at once and sat
down on the edge of the bed, with Godalming beside him; we all watched
in patience.

"We shall wait," said Van Helsing, "just long enough to fix the best
spot for trephining, so that we may most quickly and perfectly remove
the blood clot; for it is evident that the hæmorrhage is increasing."

The minutes during which we waited passed with fearful slowness. I had a
horrible sinking in my heart, and from Van Helsing's face I gathered
that he felt some fear or apprehension as to what was to come. I dreaded
the words that Renfield might speak. I was positively afraid to think;
but the conviction of what was coming was on me, as I have read of men
who have heard the death-watch. The poor man's breathing came in
uncertain gasps. Each instant he seemed as though he would open his eyes
and speak; but then would follow a prolonged stertorous breath, and he
would relapse into a more fixed insensibility. Inured as I was to sick
beds and death, this suspense grew, and grew upon me. I could almost
hear the beating of my own heart; and the blood surging through my
temples sounded like blows from a hammer. The silence finally became
agonising. I looked at my companions, one after another, and saw from
their flushed faces and damp brows that they were enduring equal
torture. There was a nervous suspense over us all, as though overhead
some dread bell would peal out powerfully when we should least expect
it.

At last there came a time when it was evident that the patient was
sinking fast; he might die at any moment. I looked up at the Professor
and caught his eyes fixed on mine. His face was sternly set as he
spoke:--

"There is no time to lose. His words may be worth many lives; I have
been thinking so, as I stood here. It may be there is a soul at stake!
We shall operate just above the ear."

Without another word he made the operation. For a few moments the
breathing continued to be stertorous. Then there came a breath so
prolonged that it seemed as though it would tear open his chest.
Suddenly his eyes opened, and became fixed in a wild, helpless stare.
This was continued for a few moments; then it softened into a glad
surprise, and from the lips came a sigh of relief. He moved
convulsively, and as he did so, said:--

"I'll be quiet, Doctor. Tell them to take off the strait-waistcoat. I
have had a terrible dream, and it has left me so weak that I cannot
move. What's wrong with my face? it feels all swollen, and it smarts
dreadfully." He tried to turn his head; but even with the effort his
eyes seemed to grow glassy again so I gently put it back. Then Van
Helsing said in a quiet grave tone:--

"Tell us your dream, Mr. Renfield." As he heard the voice his face
brightened, through its mutilation, and he said:--

"That is Dr. Van Helsing. How good it is of you to be here. Give me some
water, my lips are dry; and I shall try to tell you. I dreamed"--he
stopped and seemed fainting, I called quietly to Quincey--"The
brandy--it is in my study--quick!" He flew and returned with a glass,
the decanter of brandy and a carafe of water. We moistened the parched
lips, and the patient quickly revived. It seemed, however, that his poor
injured brain had been working in the interval, for, when he was quite
conscious, he looked at me piercingly with an agonised confusion which I
shall never forget, and said:--

"I must not deceive myself; it was no dream, but all a grim reality."
Then his eyes roved round the room; as they caught sight of the two
figures sitting patiently on the edge of the bed he went on:--

"If I were not sure already, I would know from them." For an instant his
eyes closed--not with pain or sleep but voluntarily, as though he were
bringing all his faculties to bear; when he opened them he said,
hurriedly, and with more energy than he had yet displayed:--

"Quick, Doctor, quick. I am dying! I feel that I have but a few minutes;
and then I must go back to death--or worse! Wet my lips with brandy
again. I have something that I must say before I die; or before my poor
crushed brain dies anyhow. Thank you! It was that night after you left
me, when I implored you to let me go away. I couldn't speak then, for I
felt my tongue was tied; but I was as sane then, except in that way, as
I am now. I was in an agony of despair for a long time after you left
me; it seemed hours. Then there came a sudden peace to me. My brain
seemed to become cool again, and I realised where I was. I heard the
dogs bark behind our house, but not where He was!" As he spoke, Van
Helsing's eyes never blinked, but his hand came out and met mine and
gripped it hard. He did not, however, betray himself; he nodded slightly
and said: "Go on," in a low voice. Renfield proceeded:--

"He came up to the window in the mist, as I had seen him often before;
but he was solid then--not a ghost, and his eyes were fierce like a
man's when angry. He was laughing with his red mouth; the sharp white
teeth glinted in the moonlight when he turned to look back over the belt
of trees, to where the dogs were barking. I wouldn't ask him to come in
at first, though I knew he wanted to--just as he had wanted all along.
Then he began promising me things--not in words but by doing them." He
was interrupted by a word from the Professor:--

"How?"

"By making them happen; just as he used to send in the flies when the
sun was shining. Great big fat ones with steel and sapphire on their
wings; and big moths, in the night, with skull and cross-bones on their
backs." Van Helsing nodded to him as he whispered to me unconsciously:--

"The _Acherontia Aitetropos of the Sphinges_--what you call the
'Death's-head Moth'?" The patient went on without stopping.

"Then he began to whisper: 'Rats, rats, rats! Hundreds, thousands,
millions of them, and every one a life; and dogs to eat them, and cats
too. All lives! all red blood, with years of life in it; and not merely
buzzing flies!' I laughed at him, for I wanted to see what he could do.
Then the dogs howled, away beyond the dark trees in His house. He
beckoned me to the window. I got up and looked out, and He raised his
hands, and seemed to call out without using any words. A dark mass
spread over the grass, coming on like the shape of a flame of fire; and
then He moved the mist to the right and left, and I could see that there
were thousands of rats with their eyes blazing red--like His, only
smaller. He held up his hand, and they all stopped; and I thought he
seemed to be saying: 'All these lives will I give you, ay, and many more
and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship
me!' And then a red cloud, like the colour of blood, seemed to close
over my eyes; and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself opening
the sash and saying to Him: 'Come in, Lord and Master!' The rats were
all gone, but He slid into the room through the sash, though it was only
open an inch wide--just as the Moon herself has often come in through
the tiniest crack and has stood before me in all her size and
splendour."

His voice was weaker, so I moistened his lips with the brandy again, and
he continued; but it seemed as though his memory had gone on working in
the interval for his story was further advanced. I was about to call him
back to the point, but Van Helsing whispered to me: "Let him go on. Do
not interrupt him; he cannot go back, and maybe could not proceed at all
if once he lost the thread of his thought." He proceeded:--

"All day I waited to hear from him, but he did not send me anything, not
even a blow-fly, and when the moon got up I was pretty angry with him.
When he slid in through the window, though it was shut, and did not even
knock, I got mad with him. He sneered at me, and his white face looked
out of the mist with his red eyes gleaming, and he went on as though he
owned the whole place, and I was no one. He didn't even smell the same
as he went by me. I couldn't hold him. I thought that, somehow, Mrs.
Harker had come into the room."

The two men sitting on the bed stood up and came over, standing behind
him so that he could not see them, but where they could hear better.
They were both silent, but the Professor started and quivered; his face,
however, grew grimmer and sterner still. Renfield went on without
noticing:--

"When Mrs. Harker came in to see me this afternoon she wasn't the same;
it was like tea after the teapot had been watered." Here we all moved,
but no one said a word; he went on:--

"I didn't know that she was here till she spoke; and she didn't look the
same. I don't care for the pale people; I like them with lots of blood
in them, and hers had all seemed to have run out. I didn't think of it
at the time; but when she went away I began to think, and it made me mad
to know that He had been taking the life out of her." I could feel that
the rest quivered, as I did, but we remained otherwise still. "So when
He came to-night I was ready for Him. I saw the mist stealing in, and I
grabbed it tight. I had heard that madmen have unnatural strength; and
as I knew I was a madman--at times anyhow--I resolved to use my power.
Ay, and He felt it too, for He had to come out of the mist to struggle
with me. I held tight; and I thought I was going to win, for I didn't
mean Him to take any more of her life, till I saw His eyes. They burned
into me, and my strength became like water. He slipped through it, and
when I tried to cling to Him, He raised me up and flung me down. There
was a red cloud before me, and a noise like thunder, and the mist seemed
to steal away under the door." His voice was becoming fainter and his
breath more stertorous. Van Helsing stood up instinctively.

"We know the worst now," he said. "He is here, and we know his purpose.
It may not be too late. Let us be armed--the same as we were the other
night, but lose no time; there is not an instant to spare." There was no
need to put our fear, nay our conviction, into words--we shared them in
common. We all hurried and took from our rooms the same things that we
had when we entered the Count's house. The Professor had his ready, and
as we met in the corridor he pointed to them significantly as he said:--

"They never leave me; and they shall not till this unhappy business is
over. Be wise also, my friends. It is no common enemy that we deal with.
Alas! alas! that that dear Madam Mina should suffer!" He stopped; his
voice was breaking, and I do not know if rage or terror predominated in
my own heart.

Outside the Harkers' door we paused. Art and Quincey held back, and the
latter said:--

"Should we disturb her?"

"We must," said Van Helsing grimly. "If the door be locked, I shall
break it in."

"May it not frighten her terribly? It is unusual to break into a lady's
room!"

Van Helsing said solemnly, "You are always right; but this is life and
death. All chambers are alike to the doctor; and even were they not they
are all as one to me to-night. Friend John, when I turn the handle, if
the door does not open, do you put your shoulder down and shove; and you
too, my friends. Now!"

He turned the handle as he spoke, but the door did not yield. We threw
ourselves against it; with a crash it burst open, and we almost fell
headlong into the room. The Professor did actually fall, and I saw
across him as he gathered himself up from hands and knees. What I saw
appalled me. I felt my hair rise like bristles on the back of my neck,
and my heart seemed to stand still.

The moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind the room
was light enough to see. On the bed beside the window lay Jonathan
Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor.
Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad
figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black.
His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we all recognised
the Count--in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left
hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms
at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck,
forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared
with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which
was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible
resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to
compel it to drink. As we burst into the room, the Count turned his
face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap
into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils
of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge; and the
white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth,
champed together like those of a wild beast. With a wrench, which threw
his victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height, he turned
and sprang at us. But by this time the Professor had gained his feet,
and was holding towards him the envelope which contained the Sacred
Wafer. The Count suddenly stopped, just as poor Lucy had done outside
the tomb, and cowered back. Further and further back he cowered, as we,
lifting our crucifixes, advanced. The moonlight suddenly failed, as a
great black cloud sailed across the sky; and when the gaslight sprang up
under Quincey's match, we saw nothing but a faint vapour. This, as we
looked, trailed under the door, which with the recoil from its bursting
open, had swung back to its old position. Van Helsing, Art, and I moved
forward to Mrs. Harker, who by this time had drawn her breath and with
it had given a scream so wild, so ear-piercing, so despairing that it
seems to me now that it will ring in my ears till my dying day. For a
few seconds she lay in her helpless attitude and disarray. Her face was
ghastly, with a pallor which was accentuated by the blood which smeared
her lips and cheeks and chin; from her throat trickled a thin stream of
blood; her eyes were mad with terror. Then she put before her face her
poor crushed hands, which bore on their whiteness the red mark of the
Count's terrible grip, and from behind them came a low desolate wail
which made the terrible scream seem only the quick expression of an
endless grief. Van Helsing stepped forward and drew the coverlet gently
over her body, whilst Art, after looking at her face for an instant
despairingly, ran out of the room. Van Helsing whispered to me:--

"Jonathan is in a stupor such as we know the Vampire can produce. We can
do nothing with poor Madam Mina for a few moments till she recovers
herself; I must wake him!" He dipped the end of a towel in cold water
and with it began to flick him on the face, his wife all the while
holding her face between her hands and sobbing in a way that was
heart-breaking to hear. I raised the blind, and looked out of the
window. There was much moonshine; and as I looked I could see Quincey
Morris run across the lawn and hide himself in the shadow of a great
yew-tree. It puzzled me to think why he was doing this; but at the
instant I heard Harker's quick exclamation as he woke to partial
consciousness, and turned to the bed. On his face, as there might well
be, was a look of wild amazement. He seemed dazed for a few seconds, and
then full consciousness seemed to burst upon him all at once, and he
started up. His wife was aroused by the quick movement, and turned to
him with her arms stretched out, as though to embrace him; instantly,
however, she drew them in again, and putting her elbows together, held
her hands before her face, and shuddered till the bed beneath her shook.

"In God's name what does this mean?" Harker cried out. "Dr. Seward, Dr.
Van Helsing, what is it? What has happened? What is wrong? Mina, dear,
what is it? What does that blood mean? My God, my God! has it come to
this!" and, raising himself to his knees, he beat his hands wildly
together. "Good God help us! help her! oh, help her!" With a quick
movement he jumped from bed, and began to pull on his clothes,--all the
man in him awake at the need for instant exertion. "What has happened?
Tell me all about it!" he cried without pausing. "Dr. Van Helsing, you
love Mina, I know. Oh, do something to save her. It cannot have gone too
far yet. Guard her while I look for _him_!" His wife, through her terror
and horror and distress, saw some sure danger to him: instantly
forgetting her own grief, she seized hold of him and cried out:--

"No! no! Jonathan, you must not leave me. I have suffered enough
to-night, God knows, without the dread of his harming you. You must stay
with me. Stay with these friends who will watch over you!" Her
expression became frantic as she spoke; and, he yielding to her, she
pulled him down sitting on the bed side, and clung to him fiercely.

Van Helsing and I tried to calm them both. The Professor held up his
little golden crucifix, and said with wonderful calmness:--

"Do not fear, my dear. We are here; and whilst this is close to you no
foul thing can approach. You are safe for to-night; and we must be calm
and take counsel together." She shuddered and was silent, holding down
her head on her husband's breast. When she raised it, his white
night-robe was stained with blood where her lips had touched, and where
the thin open wound in her neck had sent forth drops. The instant she
saw it she drew back, with a low wail, and whispered, amidst choking
sobs:--

"Unclean, unclean! I must touch him or kiss him no more. Oh, that it
should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have
most cause to fear." To this he spoke out resolutely:--

"Nonsense, Mina. It is a shame to me to hear such a word. I would not
hear it of you; and I shall not hear it from you. May God judge me by my
deserts, and punish me with more bitter suffering than even this hour,
if by any act or will of mine anything ever come between us!" He put out
his arms and folded her to his breast; and for a while she lay there
sobbing. He looked at us over her bowed head, with eyes that blinked
damply above his quivering nostrils; his mouth was set as steel. After a
while her sobs became less frequent and more faint, and then he said to
me, speaking with a studied calmness which I felt tried his nervous
power to the utmost:--

"And now, Dr. Seward, tell me all about it. Too well I know the broad
fact; tell me all that has been." I told him exactly what had happened,
and he listened with seeming impassiveness; but his nostrils twitched
and his eyes blazed as I told how the ruthless hands of the Count had
held his wife in that terrible and horrid position, with her mouth to
the open wound in his breast. It interested me, even at that moment, to
see, that, whilst the face of white set passion worked convulsively over
the bowed head, the hands tenderly and lovingly stroked the ruffled
hair. Just as I had finished, Quincey and Godalming knocked at the door.
They entered in obedience to our summons. Van Helsing looked at me
questioningly. I understood him to mean if we were to take advantage of
their coming to divert if possible the thoughts of the unhappy husband
and wife from each other and from themselves; so on nodding acquiescence
to him he asked them what they had seen or done. To which Lord Godalming
answered:--

"I could not see him anywhere in the passage, or in any of our rooms. I
looked in the study but, though he had been there, he had gone. He had,
however----" He stopped suddenly, looking at the poor drooping figure on
the bed. Van Helsing said gravely:--

"Go on, friend Arthur. We want here no more concealments. Our hope now
is in knowing all. Tell freely!" So Art went on:--

"He had been there, and though it could only have been for a few
seconds, he made rare hay of the place. All the manuscript had been
burned, and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white ashes; the
cylinders of your phonograph too were thrown on the fire, and the wax
had helped the flames." Here I interrupted. "Thank God there is the
other copy in the safe!" His face lit for a moment, but fell again as he
went on: "I ran downstairs then, but could see no sign of him. I looked
into Renfield's room; but there was no trace there except----!" Again he
paused. "Go on," said Harker hoarsely; so he bowed his head and
moistening his lips with his tongue, added: "except that the poor fellow
is dead." Mrs. Harker raised her head, looking from one to the other of
us she said solemnly:--

"God's will be done!" I could not but feel that Art was keeping back
something; but, as I took it that it was with a purpose, I said nothing.
Van Helsing turned to Morris and asked:--

"And you, friend Quincey, have you any to tell?"

"A little," he answered. "It may be much eventually, but at present I
can't say. I thought it well to know if possible where the Count would
go when he left the house. I did not see him; but I saw a bat rise from
Renfield's window, and flap westward. I expected to see him in some
shape go back to Carfax; but he evidently sought some other lair. He
will not be back to-night; for the sky is reddening in the east, and the
dawn is close. We must work to-morrow!"

He said the latter words through his shut teeth. For a space of perhaps
a couple of minutes there was silence, and I could fancy that I could
hear the sound of our hearts beating; then Van Helsing said, placing his
hand very tenderly on Mrs. Harker's head:--

"And now, Madam Mina--poor, dear, dear Madam Mina--tell us exactly what
happened. God knows that I do not want that you be pained; but it is
need that we know all. For now more than ever has all work to be done
quick and sharp, and in deadly earnest. The day is close to us that must
end all, if it may be so; and now is the chance that we may live and
learn."

The poor, dear lady shivered, and I could see the tension of her nerves
as she clasped her husband closer to her and bent her head lower and
lower still on his breast. Then she raised her head proudly, and held
out one hand to Van Helsing who took it in his, and, after stooping and
kissing it reverently, held it fast. The other hand was locked in that
of her husband, who held his other arm thrown round her protectingly.
After a pause in which she was evidently ordering her thoughts, she
began:--

"I took the sleeping draught which you had so kindly given me, but for a
long time it did not act. I seemed to become more wakeful, and myriads
of horrible fancies began to crowd in upon my mind--all of them
connected with death, and vampires; with blood, and pain, and trouble."
Her husband involuntarily groaned as she turned to him and said
lovingly: "Do not fret, dear. You must be brave and strong, and help me
through the horrible task. If you only knew what an effort it is to me
to tell of this fearful thing at all, you would understand how much I
need your help. Well, I saw I must try to help the medicine to its work
with my will, if it was to do me any good, so I resolutely set myself to
sleep. Sure enough sleep must soon have come to me, for I remember no
more. Jonathan coming in had not waked me, for he lay by my side when
next I remember. There was in the room the same thin white mist that I
had before noticed. But I forget now if you know of this; you will find
it in my diary which I shall show you later. I felt the same vague
terror which had come to me before and the same sense of some presence.
I turned to wake Jonathan, but found that he slept so soundly that it
seemed as if it was he who had taken the sleeping draught, and not I. I
tried, but I could not wake him. This caused me a great fear, and I
looked around terrified. Then indeed, my heart sank within me: beside
the bed, as if he had stepped out of the mist--or rather as if the mist
had turned into his figure, for it had entirely disappeared--stood a
tall, thin man, all in black. I knew him at once from the description of
the others. The waxen face; the high aquiline nose, on which the light
fell in a thin white line; the parted red lips, with the sharp white
teeth showing between; and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the
sunset on the windows of St. Mary's Church at Whitby. I knew, too, the
red scar on his forehead where Jonathan had struck him. For an instant
my heart stood still, and I would have screamed out, only that I was
paralysed. In the pause he spoke in a sort of keen, cutting whisper,
pointing as he spoke to Jonathan:--

"'Silence! If you make a sound I shall take him and dash his brains out
before your very eyes.' I was appalled and was too bewildered to do or
say anything. With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder
and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did
so, 'First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well
be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have
appeased my thirst!' I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not
want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that
such is, when his touch is on his victim. And oh, my God, my God, pity
me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!" Her husband groaned
again. She clasped his hand harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if
he were the injured one, and went on:--

"I felt my strength fading away, and I was in a half swoon. How long
this horrible thing lasted I know not; but it seemed that a long time
must have passed before he took his foul, awful, sneering mouth away. I
saw it drip with the fresh blood!" The remembrance seemed for a while to
overpower her, and she drooped and would have sunk down but for her
husband's sustaining arm. With a great effort she recovered herself and
went on:--

"Then he spoke to me mockingly, 'And so you, like the others, would play
your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and
frustrate me in my designs! You know now, and they know in part already,
and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They
should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they
played wits against me--against me who commanded nations, and intrigued
for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were
born--I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now
to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful
wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my
helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall
minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you
have done. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my
call. When my brain says "Come!" to you, you shall cross land or sea to
do my bidding; and to that end this!' With that he pulled open his
shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When
the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding
them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to
the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the---- Oh
my God! my God! what have I done? What have I done to deserve such a
fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my
days. God pity me! Look down on a poor soul in worse than mortal peril;
and in mercy pity those to whom she is dear!" Then she began to rub her
lips as though to cleanse them from pollution.

As she was telling her terrible story, the eastern sky began to quicken,
and everything became more and more clear. Harker was still and quiet;
but over his face, as the awful narrative went on, came a grey look
which deepened and deepened in the morning light, till when the first
red streak of the coming dawn shot up, the flesh stood darkly out
against the whitening hair.

We have arranged that one of us is to stay within call of the unhappy
pair till we can meet together and arrange about taking action.

Of this I am sure: the sun rises to-day on no more miserable house in
all the great round of its daily course.




CHAPTER XXII

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL


_3 October._--As I must do something or go mad, I write this diary. It
is now six o'clock, and we are to meet in the study in half an hour and
take something to eat; for Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward are agreed
that if we do not eat we cannot work our best. Our best will be, God
knows, required to-day. I must keep writing at every chance, for I dare
not stop to think. All, big and little, must go down; perhaps at the end
the little things may teach us most. The teaching, big or little, could
not have landed Mina or me anywhere worse than we are to-day. However,
we must trust and hope. Poor Mina told me just now, with the tears
running down her dear cheeks, that it is in trouble and trial that our
faith is tested--that we must keep on trusting; and that God will aid us
up to the end. The end! oh my God! what end?... To work! To work!

When Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward had come back from seeing poor
Renfield, we went gravely into what was to be done. First, Dr. Seward
told us that when he and Dr. Van Helsing had gone down to the room below
they had found Renfield lying on the floor, all in a heap. His face was
all bruised and crushed in, and the bones of the neck were broken.

Dr. Seward asked the attendant who was on duty in the passage if he had
heard anything. He said that he had been sitting down--he confessed to
half dozing--when he heard loud voices in the room, and then Renfield
had called out loudly several times, "God! God! God!" after that there
was a sound of falling, and when he entered the room he found him lying
on the floor, face down, just as the doctors had seen him. Van Helsing
asked if he had heard "voices" or "a voice," and he said he could not
say; that at first it had seemed to him as if there were two, but as
there was no one in the room it could have been only one. He could swear
to it, if required, that the word "God" was spoken by the patient. Dr.
Seward said to us, when we were alone, that he did not wish to go into
the matter; the question of an inquest had to be considered, and it
would never do to put forward the truth, as no one would believe it. As
it was, he thought that on the attendant's evidence he could give a
certificate of death by misadventure in falling from bed. In case the
coroner should demand it, there would be a formal inquest, necessarily
to the same result.

When the question began to be discussed as to what should be our next
step, the very first thing we decided was that Mina should be in full
confidence; that nothing of any sort--no matter how painful--should be
kept from her. She herself agreed as to its wisdom, and it was pitiful
to see her so brave and yet so sorrowful, and in such a depth of
despair. "There must be no concealment," she said, "Alas! we have had
too much already. And besides there is nothing in all the world that can
give me more pain than I have already endured--than I suffer now!
Whatever may happen, it must be of new hope or of new courage to me!"
Van Helsing was looking at her fixedly as she spoke, and said, suddenly
but quietly:--

"But dear Madam Mina, are you not afraid; not for yourself, but for
others from yourself, after what has happened?" Her face grew set in its
lines, but her eyes shone with the devotion of a martyr as she
answered:--

"Ah no! for my mind is made up!"

"To what?" he asked gently, whilst we were all very still; for each in
our own way we had a sort of vague idea of what she meant. Her answer
came with direct simplicity, as though she were simply stating a fact:--

"Because if I find in myself--and I shall watch keenly for it--a sign of
harm to any that I love, I shall die!"

"You would not kill yourself?" he asked, hoarsely.

"I would; if there were no friend who loved me, who would save me such a
pain, and so desperate an effort!" She looked at him meaningly as she
spoke. He was sitting down; but now he rose and came close to her and
put his hand on her head as he said solemnly:

"My child, there is such an one if it were for your good. For myself I
could hold it in my account with God to find such an euthanasia for you,
even at this moment if it were best. Nay, were it safe! But my
child----" For a moment he seemed choked, and a great sob rose in his
throat; he gulped it down and went on:--

"There are here some who would stand between you and death. You must not
die. You must not die by any hand; but least of all by your own. Until
the other, who has fouled your sweet life, is true dead you must not
die; for if he is still with the quick Un-Dead, your death would make
you even as he is. No, you must live! You must struggle and strive to
live, though death would seem a boon unspeakable. You must fight Death
himself, though he come to you in pain or in joy; by the day, or the
night; in safety or in peril! On your living soul I charge you that you
do not die--nay, nor think of death--till this great evil be past." The
poor dear grew white as death, and shock and shivered, as I have seen a
quicksand shake and shiver at the incoming of the tide. We were all
silent; we could do nothing. At length she grew more calm and turning to
him said, sweetly, but oh! so sorrowfully, as she held out her hand:--

"I promise you, my dear friend, that if God will let me live, I shall
strive to do so; till, if it may be in His good time, this horror may
have passed away from me." She was so good and brave that we all felt
that our hearts were strengthened to work and endure for her, and we
began to discuss what we were to do. I told her that she was to have all
the papers in the safe, and all the papers or diaries and phonographs we
might hereafter use; and was to keep the record as she had done before.
She was pleased with the prospect of anything to do--if "pleased" could
be used in connection with so grim an interest.

As usual Van Helsing had thought ahead of everyone else, and was
prepared with an exact ordering of our work.

"It is perhaps well," he said, "that at our meeting after our visit to
Carfax we decided not to do anything with the earth-boxes that lay
there. Had we done so, the Count must have guessed our purpose, and
would doubtless have taken measures in advance to frustrate such an
effort with regard to the others; but now he does not know our
intentions. Nay, more, in all probability, he does not know that such a
power exists to us as can sterilise his lairs, so that he cannot use
them as of old. We are now so much further advanced in our knowledge as
to their disposition that, when we have examined the house in
Piccadilly, we may track the very last of them. To-day, then, is ours;
and in it rests our hope. The sun that rose on our sorrow this morning
guards us in its course. Until it sets to-night, that monster must
retain whatever form he now has. He is confined within the limitations
of his earthly envelope. He cannot melt into thin air nor disappear
through cracks or chinks or crannies. If he go through a doorway, he
must open the door like a mortal. And so we have this day to hunt out
all his lairs and sterilise them. So we shall, if we have not yet catch
him and destroy him, drive him to bay in some place where the catching
and the destroying shall be, in time, sure." Here I started up for I
could not contain myself at the thought that the minutes and seconds so
preciously laden with Mina's life and happiness were flying from us,
since whilst we talked action was impossible. But Van Helsing held up
his hand warningly. "Nay, friend Jonathan," he said, "in this, the
quickest way home is the longest way, so your proverb say. We shall all
act and act with desperate quick, when the time has come. But think, in
all probable the key of the situation is in that house in Piccadilly.
The Count may have many houses which he has bought. Of them he will have
deeds of purchase, keys and other things. He will have paper that he
write on; he will have his book of cheques. There are many belongings
that he must have somewhere; why not in this place so central, so quiet,
where he come and go by the front or the back at all hour, when in the
very vast of the traffic there is none to notice. We shall go there and
search that house; and when we learn what it holds, then we do what our
friend Arthur call, in his phrases of hunt 'stop the earths' and so we
run down our old fox--so? is it not?"

"Then let us come at once," I cried, "we are wasting the precious,
precious time!" The Professor did not move, but simply said:--

"And how are we to get into that house in Piccadilly?"

"Any way!" I cried. "We shall break in if need be."

"And your police; where will they be, and what will they say?"

I was staggered; but I knew that if he wished to delay he had a good
reason for it. So I said, as quietly as I could:--

"Don't wait more than need be; you know, I am sure, what torture I am
in."

"Ah, my child, that I do; and indeed there is no wish of me to add to
your anguish. But just think, what can we do, until all the world be at
movement. Then will come our time. I have thought and thought, and it
seems to me that the simplest way is the best of all. Now we wish to get
into the house, but we have no key; is it not so?" I nodded.

"Now suppose that you were, in truth, the owner of that house, and could
not still get it; and think there was to you no conscience of the
housebreaker, what would you do?"

"I should get a respectable locksmith, and set him to work to pick the
lock for me."

"And your police, they would interfere, would they not?"

"Oh, no! not if they knew the man was properly employed."

"Then," he looked at me as keenly as he spoke, "all that is in doubt is
the conscience of the employer, and the belief of your policemen as to
whether or no that employer has a good conscience or a bad one. Your
police must indeed be zealous men and clever--oh, so clever!--in reading
the heart, that they trouble themselves in such matter. No, no, my
friend Jonathan, you go take the lock off a hundred empty house in this
your London, or of any city in the world; and if you do it as such
things are rightly done, and at the time such things are rightly done,
no one will interfere. I have read of a gentleman who owned a so fine
house in London, and when he went for months of summer to Switzerland
and lock up his house, some burglar came and broke window at back and
got in. Then he went and made open the shutters in front and walk out
and in through the door, before the very eyes of the police. Then he
have an auction in that house, and advertise it, and put up big notice;
and when the day come he sell off by a great auctioneer all the goods of
that other man who own them. Then he go to a builder, and he sell him
that house, making an agreement that he pull it down and take all away
within a certain time. And your police and other authority help him all
they can. And when that owner come back from his holiday in Switzerland
he find only an empty hole where his house had been. This was all done
_en règle_; and in our work we shall be _en règle_ too. We shall not go
so early that the policemen who have then little to think of, shall deem
it strange; but we shall go after ten o'clock, when there are many
about, and such things would be done were we indeed owners of the
house."

I could not but see how right he was and the terrible despair of Mina's
face became relaxed a thought; there was hope in such good counsel. Van
Helsing went on:--

"When once within that house we may find more clues; at any rate some of
us can remain there whilst the rest find the other places where there be
more earth-boxes--at Bermondsey and Mile End."

Lord Godalming stood up. "I can be of some use here," he said. "I shall
wire to my people to have horses and carriages where they will be most
convenient."

"Look here, old fellow," said Morris, "it is a capital idea to have all
ready in case we want to go horsebacking; but don't you think that one
of your snappy carriages with its heraldic adornments in a byway of
Walworth or Mile End would attract too much attention for our purposes?
It seems to me that we ought to take cabs when we go south or east; and
even leave them somewhere near the neighbourhood we are going to."

"Friend Quincey is right!" said the Professor. "His head is what you
call in plane with the horizon. It is a difficult thing that we go to
do, and we do not want no peoples to watch us if so it may."

Mina took a growing interest in everything and I was rejoiced to see
that the exigency of affairs was helping her to forget for a time the
terrible experience of the night. She was very, very pale--almost
ghastly, and so thin that her lips were drawn away, showing her teeth in
somewhat of prominence. I did not mention this last, lest it should give
her needless pain; but it made my blood run cold in my veins to think of
what had occurred with poor Lucy when the Count had sucked her blood. As
yet there was no sign of the teeth growing sharper; but the time as yet
was short, and there was time for fear.

When we came to the discussion of the sequence of our efforts and of the
disposition of our forces, there were new sources of doubt. It was
finally agreed that before starting for Piccadilly we should destroy the
Count's lair close at hand. In case he should find it out too soon, we
should thus be still ahead of him in our work of destruction; and his
presence in his purely material shape, and at his weakest, might give us
some new clue.

As to the disposal of forces, it was suggested by the Professor that,
after our visit to Carfax, we should all enter the house in Piccadilly;
that the two doctors and I should remain there, whilst Lord Godalming
and Quincey found the lairs at Walworth and Mile End and destroyed them.
It was possible, if not likely, the Professor urged, that the Count
might appear in Piccadilly during the day, and that if so we might be
able to cope with him then and there. At any rate, we might be able to
follow him in force. To this plan I strenuously objected, and so far as
my going was concerned, for I said that I intended to stay and protect
Mina, I thought that my mind was made up on the subject; but Mina would
not listen to my objection. She said that there might be some law matter
in which I could be useful; that amongst the Count's papers might be
some clue which I could understand out of my experience in Transylvania;
and that, as it was, all the strength we could muster was required to
cope with the Count's extraordinary power. I had to give in, for Mina's
resolution was fixed; she said that it was the last hope for _her_ that
we should all work together. "As for me," she said, "I have no fear.
Things have been as bad as they can be; and whatever may happen must
have in it some element of hope or comfort. Go, my husband! God can, if
He wishes it, guard me as well alone as with any one present." So I
started up crying out: "Then in God's name let us come at once, for we
are losing time. The Count may come to Piccadilly earlier than we
think."

"Not so!" said Van Helsing, holding up his hand.

"But why?" I asked.

"Do you forget," he said, with actually a smile, "that last night he
banqueted heavily, and will sleep late?"

Did I forget! shall I ever--can I ever! Can any of us ever forget that
terrible scene! Mina struggled hard to keep her brave countenance; but
the pain overmastered her and she put her hands before her face, and
shuddered whilst she moaned. Van Helsing had not intended to recall her
frightful experience. He had simply lost sight of her and her part in
the affair in his intellectual effort. When it struck him what he said,
he was horrified at his thoughtlessness and tried to comfort her. "Oh,
Madam Mina," he said, "dear, dear Madam Mina, alas! that I of all who so
reverence you should have said anything so forgetful. These stupid old
lips of mine and this stupid old head do not deserve so; but you will
forget it, will you not?" He bent low beside her as he spoke; she took
his hand, and looking at him through her tears, said hoarsely:--

"No, I shall not forget, for it is well that I remember; and with it I
have so much in memory of you that is sweet, that I take it all
together. Now, you must all be going soon. Breakfast is ready, and we
must all eat that we may be strong."

Breakfast was a strange meal to us all. We tried to be cheerful and
encourage each other, and Mina was the brightest and most cheerful of
us. When it was over, Van Helsing stood up and said:--

"Now, my dear friends, we go forth to our terrible enterprise. Are we
all armed, as we were on that night when first we visited our enemy's
lair; armed against ghostly as well as carnal attack?" We all assured
him. "Then it is well. Now, Madam Mina, you are in any case _quite_ safe
here until the sunset; and before then we shall return--if---- We shall
return! But before we go let me see you armed against personal attack. I
have myself, since you came down, prepared your chamber by the placing
of things of which we know, so that He may not enter. Now let me guard
yourself. On your forehead I touch this piece of Sacred Wafer in the
name of the Father, the Son, and----"

There was a fearful scream which almost froze our hearts to hear. As he
had placed the Wafer on Mina's forehead, it had seared it--had burned
into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal. My poor
darling's brain had told her the significance of the fact as quickly as
her nerves received the pain of it; and the two so overwhelmed her that
her overwrought nature had its voice in that dreadful scream. But the
words to her thought came quickly; the echo of the scream had not ceased
to ring on the air when there came the reaction, and she sank on her
knees on the floor in an agony of abasement. Pulling her beautiful hair
over her face, as the leper of old his mantle, she wailed out:--

"Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must
bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day." They
all paused. I had thrown myself beside her in an agony of helpless
grief, and putting my arms around held her tight. For a few minutes our
sorrowful hearts beat together, whilst the friends around us turned away
their eyes that ran tears silently. Then Van Helsing turned and said
gravely; so gravely that I could not help feeling that he was in some
way inspired, and was stating things outside himself:--

"It may be that you may have to bear that mark till God himself see fit,
as He most surely shall, on the Judgment Day, to redress all wrongs of
the earth and of His children that He has placed thereon. And oh, Madam
Mina, my dear, my dear, may we who love you be there to see, when that
red scar, the sign of God's knowledge of what has been, shall pass away,
and leave your forehead as pure as the heart we know. For so surely as
we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the
burden that is hard upon us. Till then we bear our Cross, as His Son did
in obedience to His Will. It may be that we are chosen instruments of
His good pleasure, and that we ascend to His bidding as that other
through stripes and shame; through tears and blood; through doubts and
fears, and all that makes the difference between God and man."

There was hope in his words, and comfort; and they made for resignation.
Mina and I both felt so, and simultaneously we each took one of the old
man's hands and bent over and kissed it. Then without a word we all
knelt down together, and, all holding hands, swore to be true to each
other. We men pledged ourselves to raise the veil of sorrow from the
head of her whom, each in his own way, we loved; and we prayed for help
and guidance in the terrible task which lay before us.

It was then time to start. So I said farewell to Mina, a parting which
neither of us shall forget to our dying day; and we set out.

To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a
vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible
land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant
many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so
the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.

We entered Carfax without trouble and found all things the same as on
the first occasion. It was hard to believe that amongst so prosaic
surroundings of neglect and dust and decay there was any ground for such
fear as already we knew. Had not our minds been made up, and had there
not been terrible memories to spur us on, we could hardly have proceeded
with our task. We found no papers, or any sign of use in the house; and
in the old chapel the great boxes looked just as we had seen them last.
Dr. Van Helsing said to us solemnly as we stood before them:--

"And now, my friends, we have a duty here to do. We must sterilise this
earth, so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far
distant land for such fell use. He has chosen this earth because it has
been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more
holy still. It was sanctified to such use of man, now we sanctify it to
God." As he spoke he took from his bag a screwdriver and a wrench, and
very soon the top of one of the cases was thrown open. The earth smelled
musty and close; but we did not somehow seem to mind, for our attention
was concentrated on the Professor. Taking from his box a piece of the
Sacred Wafer he laid it reverently on the earth, and then shutting down
the lid began to screw it home, we aiding him as he worked.

One by one we treated in the same way each of the great boxes, and left
them as we had found them to all appearance; but in each was a portion
of the Host.

When we closed the door behind us, the Professor said solemnly:--

"So much is already done. If it may be that with all the others we can
be so successful, then the sunset of this evening may shine on Madam
Mina's forehead all white as ivory and with no stain!"

As we passed across the lawn on our way to the station to catch our
train we could see the front of the asylum. I looked eagerly, and in the
window of my own room saw Mina. I waved my hand to her, and nodded to
tell that our work there was successfully accomplished. She nodded in
reply to show that she understood. The last I saw, she was waving her
hand in farewell. It was with a heavy heart that we sought the station
and just caught the train, which was steaming in as we reached the
platform.

I have written this in the train.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Piccadilly, 12:30 o'clock._--Just before we reached Fenchurch Street
Lord Godalming said to me:--

"Quincey and I will find a locksmith. You had better not come with us in
case there should be any difficulty; for under the circumstances it
wouldn't seem so bad for us to break into an empty house. But you are a
solicitor and the Incorporated Law Society might tell you that you
should have known better." I demurred as to my not sharing any danger
even of odium, but he went on: "Besides, it will attract less attention
if there are not too many of us. My title will make it all right with
the locksmith, and with any policeman that may come along. You had
better go with Jack and the Professor and stay in the Green Park,
somewhere in sight of the house; and when you see the door opened and
the smith has gone away, do you all come across. We shall be on the
lookout for you, and shall let you in."

"The advice is good!" said Van Helsing, so we said no more. Godalming
and Morris hurried off in a cab, we following in another. At the corner
of Arlington Street our contingent got out and strolled into the Green
Park. My heart beat as I saw the house on which so much of our hope was
centred, looming up grim and silent in its deserted condition amongst
its more lively and spruce-looking neighbours. We sat down on a bench
within good view, and began to smoke cigars so as to attract as little
attention as possible. The minutes seemed to pass with leaden feet as we
waited for the coming of the others.

At length we saw a four-wheeler drive up. Out of it, in leisurely
fashion, got Lord Godalming and Morris; and down from the box descended
a thick-set working man with his rush-woven basket of tools. Morris paid
the cabman, who touched his hat and drove away. Together the two
ascended the steps, and Lord Godalming pointed out what he wanted done.
The workman took off his coat leisurely and hung it on one of the spikes
of the rail, saying something to a policeman who just then sauntered
along. The policeman nodded acquiescence, and the man kneeling down
placed his bag beside him. After searching through it, he took out a
selection of tools which he produced to lay beside him in orderly
fashion. Then he stood up, looked into the keyhole, blew into it, and
turning to his employers, made some remark. Lord Godalming smiled, and
the man lifted a good-sized bunch of keys; selecting one of them, he
began to probe the lock, as if feeling his way with it. After fumbling
about for a bit he tried a second, and then a third. All at once the
door opened under a slight push from him, and he and the two others
entered the hall. We sat still; my own cigar burnt furiously, but Van
Helsing's went cold altogether. We waited patiently as we saw the
workman come out and bring in his bag. Then he held the door partly
open, steadying it with his knees, whilst he fitted a key to the lock.
This he finally handed to Lord Godalming, who took out his purse and
gave him something. The man touched his hat, took his bag, put on his
coat and departed; not a soul took the slightest notice of the whole
transaction.

When the man had fairly gone, we three crossed the street and knocked at
the door. It was immediately opened by Quincey Morris, beside whom stood
Lord Godalming lighting a cigar.

"The place smells so vilely," said the latter as we came in. It did
indeed smell vilely--like the old chapel at Carfax--and with our
previous experience it was plain to us that the Count had been using the
place pretty freely. We moved to explore the house, all keeping together
in case of attack; for we knew we had a strong and wily enemy to deal
with, and as yet we did not know whether the Count might not be in the
house. In the dining-room, which lay at the back of the hall, we found
eight boxes of earth. Eight boxes only out of the nine, which we sought!
Our work was not over, and would never be until we should have found the
missing box. First we opened the shutters of the window which looked out
across a narrow stone-flagged yard at the blank face of a stable,
pointed to look like the front of a miniature house. There were no
windows in it, so we were not afraid of being over-looked. We did not
lose any time in examining the chests. With the tools which we had
brought with us we opened them, one by one, and treated them as we had
treated those others in the old chapel. It was evident to us that the
Count was not at present in the house, and we proceeded to search for
any of his effects.

After a cursory glance at the rest of the rooms, from basement to attic,
we came to the conclusion that the dining-room contained any effects
which might belong to the Count; and so we proceeded to minutely examine
them. They lay in a sort of orderly disorder on the great dining-room
table. There were title deeds of the Piccadilly house in a great bundle;
deeds of the purchase of the houses at Mile End and Bermondsey;
note-paper, envelopes, and pens and ink. All were covered up in thin
wrapping paper to keep them from the dust. There were also a clothes
brush, a brush and comb, and a jug and basin--the latter containing
dirty water which was reddened as if with blood. Last of all was a
little heap of keys of all sorts and sizes, probably those belonging to
the other houses. When we had examined this last find, Lord Godalming
and Quincey Morris taking accurate notes of the various addresses of the
houses in the East and the South, took with them the keys in a great
bunch, and set out to destroy the boxes in these places. The rest of us
are, with what patience we can, waiting their return--or the coming of
the Count.




CHAPTER XXIII

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY


_3 October._--The time seemed terrible long whilst we were waiting for
the coming of Godalming and Quincey Morris. The Professor tried to keep
our minds active by using them all the time. I could see his beneficent
purpose, by the side glances which he threw from time to time at Harker.
The poor fellow is overwhelmed in a misery that is appalling to see.
Last night he was a frank, happy-looking man, with strong, youthful
face, full of energy, and with dark brown hair. To-day he is a drawn,
haggard old man, whose white hair matches well with the hollow burning
eyes and grief-written lines of his face. His energy is still intact; in
fact, he is like a living flame. This may yet be his salvation, for, if
all go well, it will tide him over the despairing period; he will then,
in a kind of way, wake again to the realities of life. Poor fellow, I
thought my own trouble was bad enough, but his----! The Professor knows
this well enough, and is doing his best to keep his mind active. What he
has been saying was, under the circumstances, of absorbing interest. So
well as I can remember, here it is:--

"I have studied, over and over again since they came into my hands, all
the papers relating to this monster; and the more I have studied, the
greater seems the necessity to utterly stamp him out. All through there
are signs of his advance; not only of his power, but of his knowledge of
it. As I learned from the researches of my friend Arminus of Buda-Pesth,
he was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and
alchemist--which latter was the highest development of the
science-knowledge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond
compare, and a heart that knew no fear and no remorse. He dared even to
attend the Scholomance, and there was no branch of knowledge of his time
that he did not essay. Well, in him the brain powers survived the
physical death; though it would seem that memory was not all complete.
In some faculties of mind he has been, and is, only a child; but he is
growing, and some things that were childish at the first are now of
man's stature. He is experimenting, and doing it well; and if it had not
been that we have crossed his path he would be yet--he may be yet if we
fail--the father or furtherer of a new order of beings, whose road must
lead through Death, not Life."

Harker groaned and said, "And this is all arrayed against my darling!
But how is he experimenting? The knowledge may help us to defeat him!"

"He has all along, since his coming, been trying his power, slowly but
surely; that big child-brain of his is working. Well for us, it is, as
yet, a child-brain; for had he dared, at the first, to attempt certain
things he would long ago have been beyond our power. However, he means
to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait
and to go slow. _Festina lente_ may well be his motto."

"I fail to understand," said Harker wearily. "Oh, do be more plain to
me! Perhaps grief and trouble are dulling my brain."

The Professor laid his hand tenderly on his shoulder as he spoke:--

"Ah, my child, I will be plain. Do you not see how, of late, this
monster has been creeping into knowledge experimentally. How he has been
making use of the zoöphagous patient to effect his entry into friend
John's home; for your Vampire, though in all afterwards he can come when
and how he will, must at the first make entry only when asked thereto by
an inmate. But these are not his most important experiments. Do we not
see how at the first all these so great boxes were moved by others. He
knew not then but that must be so. But all the time that so great
child-brain of his was growing, and he began to consider whether he
might not himself move the box. So he began to help; and then, when he
found that this be all-right, he try to move them all alone. And so he
progress, and he scatter these graves of him; and none but he know where
they are hidden. He may have intend to bury them deep in the ground. So
that he only use them in the night, or at such time as he can change his
form, they do him equal well; and none may know these are his
hiding-place! But, my child, do not despair; this knowledge come to him
just too late! Already all of his lairs but one be sterilise as for him;
and before the sunset this shall be so. Then he have no place where he
can move and hide. I delayed this morning that so we might be sure. Is
there not more at stake for us than for him? Then why we not be even
more careful than him? By my clock it is one hour and already, if all be
well, friend Arthur and Quincey are on their way to us. To-day is our
day, and we must go sure, if slow, and lose no chance. See! there are
five of us when those absent ones return."

Whilst he was speaking we were startled by a knock at the hall door, the
double postman's knock of the telegraph boy. We all moved out to the
hall with one impulse, and Van Helsing, holding up his hand to us to
keep silence, stepped to the door and opened it. The boy handed in a
despatch. The Professor closed the door again, and, after looking at the
direction, opened it and read aloud.

"Look out for D. He has just now, 12:45, come from Carfax hurriedly and
hastened towards the South. He seems to be going the round and may want
to see you: Mina."

There was a pause, broken by Jonathan Harker's voice:--

"Now, God be thanked, we shall soon meet!" Van Helsing turned to him
quickly and said:--

"God will act in His own way and time. Do not fear, and do not rejoice
as yet; for what we wish for at the moment may be our undoings."

"I care for nothing now," he answered hotly, "except to wipe out this
brute from the face of creation. I would sell my soul to do it!"

"Oh, hush, hush, my child!" said Van Helsing. "God does not purchase
souls in this wise; and the Devil, though he may purchase, does not keep
faith. But God is merciful and just, and knows your pain and your
devotion to that dear Madam Mina. Think you, how her pain would be
doubled, did she but hear your wild words. Do not fear any of us, we are
all devoted to this cause, and to-day shall see the end. The time is
coming for action; to-day this Vampire is limit to the powers of man,
and till sunset he may not change. It will take him time to arrive
here--see, it is twenty minutes past one--and there are yet some times
before he can hither come, be he never so quick. What we must hope for
is that my Lord Arthur and Quincey arrive first."

About half an hour after we had received Mrs. Harker's telegram, there
came a quiet, resolute knock at the hall door. It was just an ordinary
knock, such as is given hourly by thousands of gentlemen, but it made
the Professor's heart and mine beat loudly. We looked at each other, and
together moved out into the hall; we each held ready to use our various
armaments--the spiritual in the left hand, the mortal in the right. Van
Helsing pulled back the latch, and, holding the door half open, stood
back, having both hands ready for action. The gladness of our hearts
must have shown upon our faces when on the step, close to the door, we
saw Lord Godalming and Quincey Morris. They came quickly in and closed
the door behind them, the former saying, as they moved along the
hall:--

"It is all right. We found both places; six boxes in each and we
destroyed them all!"

"Destroyed?" asked the Professor.

"For him!" We were silent for a minute, and then Quincey said:--

"There's nothing to do but to wait here. If, however, he doesn't turn up
by five o'clock, we must start off; for it won't do to leave Mrs. Harker
alone after sunset."

"He will be here before long now," said Van Helsing, who had been
consulting his pocket-book. "_Nota bene_, in Madam's telegram he went
south from Carfax, that means he went to cross the river, and he could
only do so at slack of tide, which should be something before one
o'clock. That he went south has a meaning for us. He is as yet only
suspicious; and he went from Carfax first to the place where he would
suspect interference least. You must have been at Bermondsey only a
short time before him. That he is not here already shows that he went to
Mile End next. This took him some time; for he would then have to be
carried over the river in some way. Believe me, my friends, we shall not
have long to wait now. We should have ready some plan of attack, so that
we may throw away no chance. Hush, there is no time now. Have all your
arms! Be ready!" He held up a warning hand as he spoke, for we all could
hear a key softly inserted in the lock of the hall door.

I could not but admire, even at such a moment, the way in which a
dominant spirit asserted itself. In all our hunting parties and
adventures in different parts of the world, Quincey Morris had always
been the one to arrange the plan of action, and Arthur and I had been
accustomed to obey him implicitly. Now, the old habit seemed to be
renewed instinctively. With a swift glance around the room, he at once
laid out our plan of attack, and, without speaking a word, with a
gesture, placed us each in position. Van Helsing, Harker, and I were
just behind the door, so that when it was opened the Professor could
guard it whilst we two stepped between the incomer and the door.
Godalming behind and Quincey in front stood just out of sight ready to
move in front of the window. We waited in a suspense that made the
seconds pass with nightmare slowness. The slow, careful steps came along
the hall; the Count was evidently prepared for some surprise--at least
he feared it.

Suddenly with a single bound he leaped into the room, winning a way past
us before any of us could raise a hand to stay him. There was something
so panther-like in the movement--something so unhuman, that it seemed
to sober us all from the shock of his coming. The first to act was
Harker, who, with a quick movement, threw himself before the door
leading into the room in the front of the house. As the Count saw us, a
horrible sort of snarl passed over his face, showing the eye-teeth long
and pointed; but the evil smile as quickly passed into a cold stare of
lion-like disdain. His expression again changed as, with a single
impulse, we all advanced upon him. It was a pity that we had not some
better organised plan of attack, for even at the moment I wondered what
we were to do. I did not myself know whether our lethal weapons would
avail us anything. Harker evidently meant to try the matter, for he had
ready his great Kukri knife and made a fierce and sudden cut at him. The
blow was a powerful one; only the diabolical quickness of the Count's
leap back saved him. A second less and the trenchant blade had shorne
through his heart. As it was, the point just cut the cloth of his coat,
making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold
fell out. The expression of the Count's face was so hellish, that for a
moment I feared for Harker, though I saw him throw the terrible knife
aloft again for another stroke. Instinctively I moved forward with a
protective impulse, holding the Crucifix and Wafer in my left hand. I
felt a mighty power fly along my arm; and it was without surprise that I
saw the monster cower back before a similar movement made spontaneously
by each one of us. It would be impossible to describe the expression of
hate and baffled malignity--of anger and hellish rage--which came over
the Count's face. His waxen hue became greenish-yellow by the contrast
of his burning eyes, and the red scar on the forehead showed on the
pallid skin like a palpitating wound. The next instant, with a sinuous
dive he swept under Harker's arm, ere his blow could fall, and, grasping
a handful of the money from the floor, dashed across the room, threw
himself at the window. Amid the crash and glitter of the falling glass,
he tumbled into the flagged area below. Through the sound of the
shivering glass I could hear the "ting" of the gold, as some of the
sovereigns fell on the flagging.

We ran over and saw him spring unhurt from the ground. He, rushing up
the steps, crossed the flagged yard, and pushed open the stable door.
There he turned and spoke to us:--

"You think to baffle me, you--with your pale faces all in a row, like
sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think
you have left me without a place to rest; but I have more. My revenge is
just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your
girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and
others shall yet be mine--my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my
jackals when I want to feed. Bah!" With a contemptuous sneer, he passed
quickly through the door, and we heard the rusty bolt creak as he
fastened it behind him. A door beyond opened and shut. The first of us
to speak was the Professor, as, realising the difficulty of following
him through the stable, we moved toward the hall.

"We have learnt something--much! Notwithstanding his brave words, he
fears us; he fear time, he fear want! For if not, why he hurry so? His
very tone betray him, or my ears deceive. Why take that money? You
follow quick. You are hunters of wild beast, and understand it so. For
me, I make sure that nothing here may be of use to him, if so that he
return." As he spoke he put the money remaining into his pocket; took
the title-deeds in the bundle as Harker had left them, and swept the
remaining things into the open fireplace, where he set fire to them with
a match.

Godalming and Morris had rushed out into the yard, and Harker had
lowered himself from the window to follow the Count. He had, however,
bolted the stable door; and by the time they had forced it open there
was no sign of him. Van Helsing and I tried to make inquiry at the back
of the house; but the mews was deserted and no one had seen him depart.

It was now late in the afternoon, and sunset was not far off. We had to
recognise that our game was up; with heavy hearts we agreed with the
Professor when he said:--

"Let us go back to Madam Mina--poor, poor dear Madam Mina. All we can do
just now is done; and we can there, at least, protect her. But we need
not despair. There is but one more earth-box, and we must try to find
it; when that is done all may yet be well." I could see that he spoke as
bravely as he could to comfort Harker. The poor fellow was quite broken
down; now and again he gave a low groan which he could not suppress--he
was thinking of his wife.

With sad hearts we came back to my house, where we found Mrs. Harker
waiting us, with an appearance of cheerfulness which did honour to her
bravery and unselfishness. When she saw our faces, her own became as
pale as death: for a second or two her eyes were closed as if she were
in secret prayer; and then she said cheerfully:--

"I can never thank you all enough. Oh, my poor darling!" As she spoke,
she took her husband's grey head in her hands and kissed it--"Lay your
poor head here and rest it. All will yet be well, dear! God will protect
us if He so will it in His good intent." The poor fellow groaned. There
was no place for words in his sublime misery.

We had a sort of perfunctory supper together, and I think it cheered us
all up somewhat. It was, perhaps, the mere animal heat of food to hungry
people--for none of us had eaten anything since breakfast--or the sense
of companionship may have helped us; but anyhow we were all less
miserable, and saw the morrow as not altogether without hope. True to
our promise, we told Mrs. Harker everything which had passed; and
although she grew snowy white at times when danger had seemed to
threaten her husband, and red at others when his devotion to her was
manifested, she listened bravely and with calmness. When we came to the
part where Harker had rushed at the Count so recklessly, she clung to
her husband's arm, and held it tight as though her clinging could
protect him from any harm that might come. She said nothing, however,
till the narration was all done, and matters had been brought right up
to the present time. Then without letting go her husband's hand she
stood up amongst us and spoke. Oh, that I could give any idea of the
scene; of that sweet, sweet, good, good woman in all the radiant beauty
of her youth and animation, with the red scar on her forehead, of which
she was conscious, and which we saw with grinding of our
teeth--remembering whence and how it came; her loving kindness against
our grim hate; her tender faith against all our fears and doubting; and
we, knowing that so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and
purity and faith, was outcast from God.

"Jonathan," she said, and the word sounded like music on her lips it was
so full of love and tenderness, "Jonathan dear, and you all my true,
true friends, I want you to bear something in mind through all this
dreadful time. I know that you must fight--that you must destroy even as
you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter;
but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this
misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when
he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have
spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him, too, though it may
not hold your hands from his destruction."

As she spoke I could see her husband's face darken and draw together, as
though the passion in him were shrivelling his being to its core.
Instinctively the clasp on his wife's hand grew closer, till his
knuckles looked white. She did not flinch from the pain which I knew she
must have suffered, but looked at him with eyes that were more appealing
than ever. As she stopped speaking he leaped to his feet, almost tearing
his hand from hers as he spoke:--

"May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that
earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond it I could send
his soul for ever and ever to burning hell I would do it!"

"Oh, hush! oh, hush! in the name of the good God. Don't say such things,
Jonathan, my husband; or you will crush me with fear and horror. Just
think, my dear--I have been thinking all this long, long day of it--that
... perhaps ... some day ... I, too, may need such pity; and that some
other like you--and with equal cause for anger--may deny it to me! Oh,
my husband! my husband, indeed I would have spared you such a thought
had there been another way; but I pray that God may not have treasured
your wild words, except as the heart-broken wail of a very loving and
sorely stricken man. Oh, God, let these poor white hairs go in evidence
of what he has suffered, who all his life has done no wrong, and on whom
so many sorrows have come."

We men were all in tears now. There was no resisting them, and we wept
openly. She wept, too, to see that her sweeter counsels had prevailed.
Her husband flung himself on his knees beside her, and putting his arms
round her, hid his face in the folds of her dress. Van Helsing beckoned
to us and we stole out of the room, leaving the two loving hearts alone
with their God.

Before they retired the Professor fixed up the room against any coming
of the Vampire, and assured Mrs. Harker that she might rest in peace.
She tried to school herself to the belief, and, manifestly for her
husband's sake, tried to seem content. It was a brave struggle; and was,
I think and believe, not without its reward. Van Helsing had placed at
hand a bell which either of them was to sound in case of any emergency.
When they had retired, Quincey, Godalming, and I arranged that we should
sit up, dividing the night between us, and watch over the safety of the
poor stricken lady. The first watch falls to Quincey, so the rest of us
shall be off to bed as soon as we can. Godalming has already turned in,
for his is the second watch. Now that my work is done I, too, shall go
to bed.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_3-4 October, close to midnight._--I thought yesterday would never end.
There was over me a yearning for sleep, in some sort of blind belief
that to wake would be to find things changed, and that any change must
now be for the better. Before we parted, we discussed what our next step
was to be, but we could arrive at no result. All we knew was that one
earth-box remained, and that the Count alone knew where it was. If he
chooses to lie hidden, he may baffle us for years; and in the
meantime!--the thought is too horrible, I dare not think of it even now.
This I know: that if ever there was a woman who was all perfection, that
one is my poor wronged darling. I love her a thousand times more for her
sweet pity of last night, a pity that made my own hate of the monster
seem despicable. Surely God will not permit the world to be the poorer
by the loss of such a creature. This is hope to me. We are all drifting
reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor. Thank God! Mina is
sleeping, and sleeping without dreams. I fear what her dreams might be
like, with such terrible memories to ground them in. She has not been so
calm, within my seeing, since the sunset. Then, for a while, there came
over her face a repose which was like spring after the blasts of March.
I thought at the time that it was the softness of the red sunset on her
face, but somehow now I think it has a deeper meaning. I am not sleepy
myself, though I am weary--weary to death. However, I must try to sleep;
for there is to-morrow to think of, and there is no rest for me
until....

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--I must have fallen asleep, for I was awaked by Mina, who was
sitting up in bed, with a startled look on her face. I could see easily,
for we did not leave the room in darkness; she had placed a warning hand
over my mouth, and now she whispered in my ear:--

"Hush! there is someone in the corridor!" I got up softly, and crossing
the room, gently opened the door.

Just outside, stretched on a mattress, lay Mr. Morris, wide awake. He
raised a warning hand for silence as he whispered to me:--

"Hush! go back to bed; it is all right. One of us will be here all
night. We don't mean to take any chances!"

His look and gesture forbade discussion, so I came back and told Mina.
She sighed and positively a shadow of a smile stole over her poor, pale
face as she put her arms round me and said softly:--

"Oh, thank God for good brave men!" With a sigh she sank back again to
sleep. I write this now as I am not sleepy, though I must try again.

       *       *       *       *       *

_4 October, morning._--Once again during the night I was wakened by
Mina. This time we had all had a good sleep, for the grey of the coming
dawn was making the windows into sharp oblongs, and the gas flame was
like a speck rather than a disc of light. She said to me hurriedly:--

"Go, call the Professor. I want to see him at once."

"Why?" I asked.

"I have an idea. I suppose it must have come in the night, and matured
without my knowing it. He must hypnotise me before the dawn, and then I
shall be able to speak. Go quick, dearest; the time is getting close." I
went to the door. Dr. Seward was resting on the mattress, and, seeing
me, he sprang to his feet.

"Is anything wrong?" he asked, in alarm.

"No," I replied; "but Mina wants to see Dr. Van Helsing at once."

"I will go," he said, and hurried into the Professor's room.

In two or three minutes later Van Helsing was in the room in his
dressing-gown, and Mr. Morris and Lord Godalming were with Dr. Seward at
the door asking questions. When the Professor saw Mina a smile--a
positive smile ousted the anxiety of his face; he rubbed his hands as he
said:--

"Oh, my dear Madam Mina, this is indeed a change. See! friend Jonathan,
we have got our dear Madam Mina, as of old, back to us to-day!" Then
turning to her, he said, cheerfully: "And what am I do for you? For at
this hour you do not want me for nothings."

"I want you to hypnotise me!" she said. "Do it before the dawn, for I
feel that then I can speak, and speak freely. Be quick, for the time is
short!" Without a word he motioned her to sit up in bed.

Looking fixedly at her, he commenced to make passes in front of her,
from over the top of her head downward, with each hand in turn. Mina
gazed at him fixedly for a few minutes, during which my own heart beat
like a trip hammer, for I felt that some crisis was at hand. Gradually
her eyes closed, and she sat, stock still; only by the gentle heaving of
her bosom could one know that she was alive. The Professor made a few
more passes and then stopped, and I could see that his forehead was
covered with great beads of perspiration. Mina opened her eyes; but she
did not seem the same woman. There was a far-away look in her eyes, and
her voice had a sad dreaminess which was new to me. Raising his hand to
impose silence, the Professor motioned to me to bring the others in.
They came on tip-toe, closing the door behind them, and stood at the
foot of the bed, looking on. Mina appeared not to see them. The
stillness was broken by Van Helsing's voice speaking in a low level tone
which would not break the current of her thoughts:--

"Where are you?" The answer came in a neutral way:--

"I do not know. Sleep has no place it can call its own." For several
minutes there was silence. Mina sat rigid, and the Professor stood
staring at her fixedly; the rest of us hardly dared to breathe. The room
was growing lighter; without taking his eyes from Mina's face, Dr. Van
Helsing motioned me to pull up the blind. I did so, and the day seemed
just upon us. A red streak shot up, and a rosy light seemed to diffuse
itself through the room. On the instant the Professor spoke again:--

"Where are you now?" The answer came dreamily, but with intention; it
were as though she were interpreting something. I have heard her use the
same tone when reading her shorthand notes.

"I do not know. It is all strange to me!"

"What do you see?"

"I can see nothing; it is all dark."

"What do you hear?" I could detect the strain in the Professor's patient
voice.

"The lapping of water. It is gurgling by, and little waves leap. I can
hear them on the outside."

"Then you are on a ship?" We all looked at each other, trying to glean
something each from the other. We were afraid to think. The answer came
quick:--

"Oh, yes!"

"What else do you hear?"

"The sound of men stamping overhead as they run about. There is the
creaking of a chain, and the loud tinkle as the check of the capstan
falls into the rachet."

"What are you doing?"

"I am still--oh, so still. It is like death!" The voice faded away into
a deep breath as of one sleeping, and the open eyes closed again.

By this time the sun had risen, and we were all in the full light of
day. Dr. Van Helsing placed his hands on Mina's shoulders, and laid her
head down softly on her pillow. She lay like a sleeping child for a few
moments, and then, with a long sigh, awoke and stared in wonder to see
us all around her. "Have I been talking in my sleep?" was all she said.
She seemed, however, to know the situation without telling, though she
was eager to know what she had told. The Professor repeated the
conversation, and she said:--

"Then there is not a moment to lose: it may not be yet too late!" Mr.
Morris and Lord Godalming started for the door but the Professor's calm
voice called them back:--

"Stay, my friends. That ship, wherever it was, was weighing anchor
whilst she spoke. There are many ships weighing anchor at the moment in
your so great Port of London. Which of them is it that you seek? God be
thanked that we have once again a clue, though whither it may lead us we
know not. We have been blind somewhat; blind after the manner of men,
since when we can look back we see what we might have seen looking
forward if we had been able to see what we might have seen! Alas, but
that sentence is a puddle; is it not? We can know now what was in the
Count's mind, when he seize that money, though Jonathan's so fierce
knife put him in the danger that even he dread. He meant escape. Hear
me, ESCAPE! He saw that with but one earth-box left, and a pack of men
following like dogs after a fox, this London was no place for him. He
have take his last earth-box on board a ship, and he leave the land. He
think to escape, but no! we follow him. Tally Ho! as friend Arthur would
say when he put on his red frock! Our old fox is wily; oh! so wily, and
we must follow with wile. I, too, am wily and I think his mind in a
little while. In meantime we may rest and in peace, for there are waters
between us which he do not want to pass, and which he could not if he
would--unless the ship were to touch the land, and then only at full or
slack tide. See, and the sun is just rose, and all day to sunset is to
us. Let us take bath, and dress, and have breakfast which we all need,
and which we can eat comfortably since he be not in the same land with
us." Mina looked at him appealingly as she asked:--

"But why need we seek him further, when he is gone away from us?" He
took her hand and patted it as he replied:--

"Ask me nothings as yet. When we have breakfast, then I answer all
questions." He would say no more, and we separated to dress.

After breakfast Mina repeated her question. He looked at her gravely for
a minute and then said sorrowfully:--

"Because my dear, dear Madam Mina, now more than ever must we find him
even if we have to follow him to the jaws of Hell!" She grew paler as
she asked faintly:--

"Why?"

"Because," he answered solemnly, "he can live for centuries, and you are
but mortal woman. Time is now to be dreaded--since once he put that mark
upon your throat."

I was just in time to catch her as she fell forward in a faint.




CHAPTER XXIV

DR. SEWARD'S PHONOGRAPH DIARY, SPOKEN BY VAN HELSING


This to Jonathan Harker.

You are to stay with your dear Madam Mina. We shall go to make our
search--if I can call it so, for it is not search but knowing, and we
seek confirmation only. But do you stay and take care of her to-day.
This is your best and most holiest office. This day nothing can find him
here. Let me tell you that so you will know what we four know already,
for I have tell them. He, our enemy, have gone away; he have gone back
to his Castle in Transylvania. I know it so well, as if a great hand of
fire wrote it on the wall. He have prepare for this in some way, and
that last earth-box was ready to ship somewheres. For this he took the
money; for this he hurry at the last, lest we catch him before the sun
go down. It was his last hope, save that he might hide in the tomb that
he think poor Miss Lucy, being as he thought like him, keep open to him.
But there was not of time. When that fail he make straight for his last
resource--his last earth-work I might say did I wish _double entente_.
He is clever, oh, so clever! he know that his game here was finish; and
so he decide he go back home. He find ship going by the route he came,
and he go in it. We go off now to find what ship, and whither bound;
when we have discover that, we come back and tell you all. Then we will
comfort you and poor dear Madam Mina with new hope. For it will be hope
when you think it over: that all is not lost. This very creature that we
pursue, he take hundreds of years to get so far as London; and yet in
one day, when we know of the disposal of him we drive him out. He is
finite, though he is powerful to do much harm and suffers not as we do.
But we are strong, each in our purpose; and we are all more strong
together. Take heart afresh, dear husband of Madam Mina. This battle is
but begun, and in the end we shall win--so sure as that God sits on high
to watch over His children. Therefore be of much comfort till we return.

VAN HELSING.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_4 October._--When I read to Mina, Van Helsing's message in the
phonograph, the poor girl brightened up considerably. Already the
certainty that the Count is out of the country has given her comfort;
and comfort is strength to her. For my own part, now that his horrible
danger is not face to face with us, it seems almost impossible to
believe in it. Even my own terrible experiences in Castle Dracula seem
like a long-forgotten dream. Here in the crisp autumn air in the bright
sunlight----

Alas! how can I disbelieve! In the midst of my thought my eye fell on
the red scar on my poor darling's white forehead. Whilst that lasts,
there can be no disbelief. And afterwards the very memory of it will
keep faith crystal clear. Mina and I fear to be idle, so we have been
over all the diaries again and again. Somehow, although the reality
seems greater each time, the pain and the fear seem less. There is
something of a guiding purpose manifest throughout, which is comforting.
Mina says that perhaps we are the instruments of ultimate good. It may
be! I shall try to think as she does. We have never spoken to each other
yet of the future. It is better to wait till we see the Professor and
the others after their investigations.

The day is running by more quickly than I ever thought a day could run
for me again. It is now three o'clock.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_5 October, 5 p. m._--Our meeting for report. Present: Professor Van
Helsing, Lord Godalming, Dr. Seward, Mr. Quincey Morris, Jonathan
Harker, Mina Harker.

Dr. Van Helsing described what steps were taken during the day to
discover on what boat and whither bound Count Dracula made his escape:--

"As I knew that he wanted to get back to Transylvania, I felt sure that
he must go by the Danube mouth; or by somewhere in the Black Sea, since
by that way he come. It was a dreary blank that was before us. _Omne
ignotum pro magnifico_; and so with heavy hearts we start to find what
ships leave for the Black Sea last night. He was in sailing ship, since
Madam Mina tell of sails being set. These not so important as to go in
your list of the shipping in the _Times_, and so we go, by suggestion of
Lord Godalming, to your Lloyd's, where are note of all ships that sail,
however so small. There we find that only one Black-Sea-bound ship go
out with the tide. She is the _Czarina Catherine_, and she sail from
Doolittle's Wharf for Varna, and thence on to other parts and up the
Danube. 'Soh!' said I, 'this is the ship whereon is the Count.' So off
we go to Doolittle's Wharf, and there we find a man in an office of wood
so small that the man look bigger than the office. From him we inquire
of the goings of the _Czarina Catherine_. He swear much, and he red face
and loud of voice, but he good fellow all the same; and when Quincey
give him something from his pocket which crackle as he roll it up, and
put it in a so small bag which he have hid deep in his clothing, he
still better fellow and humble servant to us. He come with us, and ask
many men who are rough and hot; these be better fellows too when they
have been no more thirsty. They say much of blood and bloom, and of
others which I comprehend not, though I guess what they mean; but
nevertheless they tell us all things which we want to know.

"They make known to us among them, how last afternoon at about five
o'clock comes a man so hurry. A tall man, thin and pale, with high nose
and teeth so white, and eyes that seem to be burning. That he be all in
black, except that he have a hat of straw which suit not him or the
time. That he scatter his money in making quick inquiry as to what ship
sails for the Black Sea and for where. Some took him to the office and
then to the ship, where he will not go aboard but halt at shore end of
gang-plank, and ask that the captain come to him. The captain come, when
told that he will be pay well; and though he swear much at the first he
agree to term. Then the thin man go and some one tell him where horse
and cart can be hired. He go there and soon he come again, himself
driving cart on which a great box; this he himself lift down, though it
take several to put it on truck for the ship. He give much talk to
captain as to how and where his box is to be place; but the captain like
it not and swear at him in many tongues, and tell him that if he like he
can come and see where it shall be. But he say 'no'; that he come not
yet, for that he have much to do. Whereupon the captain tell him that he
had better be quick--with blood--for that his ship will leave the
place--of blood--before the turn of the tide--with blood. Then the thin
man smile and say that of course he must go when he think fit; but he
will be surprise if he go quite so soon. The captain swear again,
polyglot, and the thin man make him bow, and thank him, and say that he
will so far intrude on his kindness as to come aboard before the
sailing. Final the captain, more red than ever, and in more tongues tell
him that he doesn't want no Frenchmen--with bloom upon them and also
with blood--in his ship--with blood on her also. And so, after asking
where there might be close at hand a ship where he might purchase ship
forms, he departed.

"No one knew where he went 'or bloomin' well cared,' as they said, for
they had something else to think of--well with blood again; for it soon
became apparent to all that the _Czarina Catherine_ would not sail as
was expected. A thin mist began to creep up from the river, and it grew,
and grew; till soon a dense fog enveloped the ship and all around her.
The captain swore polyglot--very polyglot--polyglot with bloom and
blood; but he could do nothing. The water rose and rose; and he began to
fear that he would lose the tide altogether. He was in no friendly mood,
when just at full tide, the thin man came up the gang-plank again and
asked to see where his box had been stowed. Then the captain replied
that he wished that he and his box--old and with much bloom and
blood--were in hell. But the thin man did not be offend, and went down
with the mate and saw where it was place, and came up and stood awhile
on deck in fog. He must have come off by himself, for none notice him.
Indeed they thought not of him; for soon the fog begin to melt away, and
all was clear again. My friends of the thirst and the language that was
of bloom and blood laughed, as they told how the captain's swears
exceeded even his usual polyglot, and was more than ever full of
picturesque, when on questioning other mariners who were on movement up
and down on the river that hour, he found that few of them had seen any
of fog at all, except where it lay round the wharf. However, the ship
went out on the ebb tide; and was doubtless by morning far down the
river mouth. She was by then, when they told us, well out to sea.

"And so, my dear Madam Mina, it is that we have to rest for a time, for
our enemy is on the sea, with the fog at his command, on his way to the
Danube mouth. To sail a ship takes time, go she never so quick; and when
we start we go on land more quick, and we meet him there. Our best hope
is to come on him when in the box between sunrise and sunset; for then
he can make no struggle, and we may deal with him as we should. There
are days for us, in which we can make ready our plan. We know all about
where he go; for we have seen the owner of the ship, who have shown us
invoices and all papers that can be. The box we seek is to be landed in
Varna, and to be given to an agent, one Ristics who will there present
his credentials; and so our merchant friend will have done his part.
When he ask if there be any wrong, for that so, he can telegraph and
have inquiry made at Varna, we say 'no'; for what is to be done is not
for police or of the customs. It must be done by us alone and in our own
way."

When Dr. Van Helsing had done speaking, I asked him if he were certain
that the Count had remained on board the ship. He replied: "We have the
best proof of that: your own evidence, when in the hypnotic trance this
morning." I asked him again if it were really necessary that they should
pursue the Count, for oh! I dread Jonathan leaving me, and I know that
he would surely go if the others went. He answered in growing passion,
at first quietly. As he went on, however, he grew more angry and more
forceful, till in the end we could not but see wherein was at least some
of that personal dominance which made him so long a master amongst
men:--

"Yes, it is necessary--necessary--necessary! For your sake in the first,
and then for the sake of humanity. This monster has done much harm
already, in the narrow scope where he find himself, and in the short
time when as yet he was only as a body groping his so small measure in
darkness and not knowing. All this have I told these others; you, my
dear Madam Mina, will learn it in the phonograph of my friend John, or
in that of your husband. I have told them how the measure of leaving his
own barren land--barren of peoples--and coming to a new land where life
of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn, was the
work of centuries. Were another of the Un-Dead, like him, to try to do
what he has done, perhaps not all the centuries of the world that have
been, or that will be, could aid him. With this one, all the forces of
nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in
some wondrous way. The very place, where he have been alive, Un-Dead for
all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical
world. There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither.
There have been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters
of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify. Doubtless,
there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of
occult forces which work for physical life in strange way; and in
himself were from the first some great qualities. In a hard and warlike
time he was celebrate that he have more iron nerve, more subtle brain,
more braver heart, than any man. In him some vital principle have in
strange way found their utmost; and as his body keep strong and grow and
thrive, so his brain grow too. All this without that diabolic aid which
is surely to him; for it have to yield to the powers that come from,
and are, symbolic of good. And now this is what he is to us. He have
infect you--oh, forgive me, my dear, that I must say such; but it is for
good of you that I speak. He infect you in such wise, that even if he do
no more, you have only to live--to live in your own old, sweet way; and
so in time, death, which is of man's common lot and with God's sanction,
shall make you like to him. This must not be! We have sworn together
that it must not. Thus are we ministers of God's own wish: that the
world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters,
whose very existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one
soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem
more. Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise; and like them, if
we fall, we fall in good cause." He paused and I said:--

"But will not the Count take his rebuff wisely? Since he has been driven
from England, will he not avoid it, as a tiger does the village from
which he has been hunted?"

"Aha!" he said, "your simile of the tiger good, for me, and I shall
adopt him. Your man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once
tasted blood of the human, care no more for the other prey, but prowl
unceasing till he get him. This that we hunt from our village is a
tiger, too, a man-eater, and he never cease to prowl. Nay, in himself he
is not one to retire and stay afar. In his life, his living life, he go
over the Turkey frontier and attack his enemy on his own ground; he be
beaten back, but did he stay? No! He come again, and again, and again.
Look at his persistence and endurance. With the child-brain that was to
him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city. What
does he do? He find out the place of all the world most of promise for
him. Then he deliberately set himself down to prepare for the task. He
find in patience just how is his strength, and what are his powers. He
study new tongues. He learn new social life; new environment of old
ways, the politic, the law, the finance, the science, the habit of a new
land and a new people who have come to be since he was. His glimpse that
he have had, whet his appetite only and enkeen his desire. Nay, it help
him to grow as to his brain; for it all prove to him how right he was at
the first in his surmises. He have done this alone; all alone! from a
ruin tomb in a forgotten land. What more may he not do when the greater
world of thought is open to him. He that can smile at death, as we know
him; who can flourish in the midst of diseases that kill off whole
peoples. Oh, if such an one was to come from God, and not the Devil,
what a force for good might he not be in this old world of ours. But we
are pledged to set the world free. Our toil must be in silence, and our
efforts all in secret; for in this enlightened age, when men believe not
even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest
strength. It would be at once his sheath and his armour, and his weapons
to destroy us, his enemies, who are willing to peril even our own souls
for the safety of one we love--for the good of mankind, and for the
honour and glory of God."

After a general discussion it was determined that for to-night nothing
be definitely settled; that we should all sleep on the facts, and try to
think out the proper conclusions. To-morrow, at breakfast, we are to
meet again, and, after making our conclusions known to one another, we
shall decide on some definite cause of action.

       *       *       *       *       *

I feel a wonderful peace and rest to-night. It is as if some haunting
presence were removed from me. Perhaps ...

My surmise was not finished, could not be; for I caught sight in the
mirror of the red mark upon my forehead; and I knew that I was still
unclean.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_5 October._--We all rose early, and I think that sleep did much for
each and all of us. When we met at early breakfast there was more
general cheerfulness than any of us had ever expected to experience
again.

It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let
any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way--even by
death--and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment. More
than once as we sat around the table, my eyes opened in wonder whether
the whole of the past days had not been a dream. It was only when I
caught sight of the red blotch on Mrs. Harker's forehead that I was
brought back to reality. Even now, when I am gravely revolving the
matter, it is almost impossible to realise that the cause of all our
trouble is still existent. Even Mrs. Harker seems to lose sight of her
trouble for whole spells; it is only now and again, when something
recalls it to her mind, that she thinks of her terrible scar. We are to
meet here in my study in half an hour and decide on our course of
action. I see only one immediate difficulty, I know it by instinct
rather than reason: we shall all have to speak frankly; and yet I fear
that in some mysterious way poor Mrs. Harker's tongue is tied. I _know_
that she forms conclusions of her own, and from all that has been I can
guess how brilliant and how true they must be; but she will not, or
cannot, give them utterance. I have mentioned this to Van Helsing, and
he and I are to talk it over when we are alone. I suppose it is some of
that horrid poison which has got into her veins beginning to work. The
Count had his own purposes when he gave her what Van Helsing called "the
Vampire's baptism of blood." Well, there may be a poison that distils
itself out of good things; in an age when the existence of ptomaines is
a mystery we should not wonder at anything! One thing I know: that if my
instinct be true regarding poor Mrs. Harker's silences, then there is a
terrible difficulty--an unknown danger--in the work before us. The same
power that compels her silence may compel her speech. I dare not think
further; for so I should in my thoughts dishonour a noble woman!

Van Helsing is coming to my study a little before the others. I shall
try to open the subject with him.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--When the Professor came in, we talked over the state of
things. I could see that he had something on his mind which he wanted to
say, but felt some hesitancy about broaching the subject. After beating
about the bush a little, he said suddenly:--

"Friend John, there is something that you and I must talk of alone, just
at the first at any rate. Later, we may have to take the others into our
confidence"; then he stopped, so I waited; he went on:--

"Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina is changing." A cold shiver ran
through me to find my worst fears thus endorsed. Van Helsing
continued:--

"With the sad experience of Miss Lucy, we must this time be warned
before things go too far. Our task is now in reality more difficult than
ever, and this new trouble makes every hour of the direst importance. I
can see the characteristics of the vampire coming in her face. It is now
but very, very slight; but it is to be seen if we have eyes to notice
without to prejudge. Her teeth are some sharper, and at times her eyes
are more hard. But these are not all, there is to her the silence now
often; as so it was with Miss Lucy. She did not speak, even when she
wrote that which she wished to be known later. Now my fear is this. If
it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance, tell what the Count see and
hear, is it not more true that he who have hypnotise her first, and who
have drink of her very blood and make her drink of his, should, if he
will, compel her mind to disclose to him that which she know?" I nodded
acquiescence; he went on:--

"Then, what we must do is to prevent this; we must keep her ignorant of
our intent, and so she cannot tell what she know not. This is a painful
task! Oh, so painful that it heart-break me to think of; but it must be.
When to-day we meet, I must tell her that for reason which we will not
to speak she must not more be of our council, but be simply guarded by
us." He wiped his forehead, which had broken out in profuse perspiration
at the thought of the pain which he might have to inflict upon the poor
soul already so tortured. I knew that it would be some sort of comfort
to him if I told him that I also had come to the same conclusion; for at
any rate it would take away the pain of doubt. I told him, and the
effect was as I expected.

It is now close to the time of our general gathering. Van Helsing has
gone away to prepare for the meeting, and his painful part of it. I
really believe his purpose is to be able to pray alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--At the very outset of our meeting a great personal relief was
experienced by both Van Helsing and myself. Mrs. Harker had sent a
message by her husband to say that she would not join us at present, as
she thought it better that we should be free to discuss our movements
without her presence to embarrass us. The Professor and I looked at each
other for an instant, and somehow we both seemed relieved. For my own
part, I thought that if Mrs. Harker realised the danger herself, it was
much pain as well as much danger averted. Under the circumstances we
agreed, by a questioning look and answer, with finger on lip, to
preserve silence in our suspicions, until we should have been able to
confer alone again. We went at once into our Plan of Campaign. Van
Helsing roughly put the facts before us first:--

"The _Czarina Catherine_ left the Thames yesterday morning. It will take
her at the quickest speed she has ever made at least three weeks to
reach Varna; but we can travel overland to the same place in three days.
Now, if we allow for two days less for the ship's voyage, owing to such
weather influences as we know that the Count can bring to bear; and if
we allow a whole day and night for any delays which may occur to us,
then we have a margin of nearly two weeks. Thus, in order to be quite
safe, we must leave here on 17th at latest. Then we shall at any rate
be in Varna a day before the ship arrives, and able to make such
preparations as may be necessary. Of course we shall all go armed--armed
against evil things, spiritual as well as physical." Here Quincey Morris
added:--

"I understand that the Count comes from a wolf country, and it may be
that he shall get there before us. I propose that we add Winchesters to
our armament. I have a kind of belief in a Winchester when there is any
trouble of that sort around. Do you remember, Art, when we had the pack
after us at Tobolsk? What wouldn't we have given then for a repeater
apiece!"

"Good!" said Van Helsing, "Winchesters it shall be. Quincey's head is
level at all times, but most so when there is to hunt, metaphor be more
dishonour to science than wolves be of danger to man. In the meantime we
can do nothing here; and as I think that Varna is not familiar to any of
us, why not go there more soon? It is as long to wait here as there.
To-night and to-morrow we can get ready, and then, if all be well, we
four can set out on our journey."

"We four?" said Harker interrogatively, looking from one to another of
us.

"Of course!" answered the Professor quickly, "you must remain to take
care of your so sweet wife!" Harker was silent for awhile and then said
in a hollow voice:--

"Let us talk of that part of it in the morning. I want to consult with
Mina." I thought that now was the time for Van Helsing to warn him not
to disclose our plans to her; but he took no notice. I looked at him
significantly and coughed. For answer he put his finger on his lips and
turned away.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_5 October, afternoon._--For some time after our meeting this morning I
could not think. The new phases of things leave my mind in a state of
wonder which allows no room for active thought. Mina's determination not
to take any part in the discussion set me thinking; and as I could not
argue the matter with her, I could only guess. I am as far as ever from
a solution now. The way the others received it, too, puzzled me; the
last time we talked of the subject we agreed that there was to be no
more concealment of anything amongst us. Mina is sleeping now, calmly
and sweetly like a little child. Her lips are curved and her face beams
with happiness. Thank God, there are such moments still for her.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--How strange it all is. I sat watching Mina's happy sleep, and
came as near to being happy myself as I suppose I shall ever be. As the
evening drew on, and the earth took its shadows from the sun sinking
lower, the silence of the room grew more and more solemn to me. All at
once Mina opened her eyes, and looking at me tenderly, said:--

"Jonathan, I want you to promise me something on your word of honour. A
promise made to me, but made holily in God's hearing, and not to be
broken though I should go down on my knees and implore you with bitter
tears. Quick, you must make it to me at once."

"Mina," I said, "a promise like that, I cannot make at once. I may have
no right to make it."

"But, dear one," she said, with such spiritual intensity that her eyes
were like pole stars, "it is I who wish it; and it is not for myself.
You can ask Dr. Van Helsing if I am not right; if he disagrees you may
do as you will. Nay, more, if you all agree, later, you are absolved
from the promise."

"I promise!" I said, and for a moment she looked supremely happy; though
to me all happiness for her was denied by the red scar on her forehead.
She said:--

"Promise me that you will not tell me anything of the plans formed for
the campaign against the Count. Not by word, or inference, or
implication; not at any time whilst this remains to me!" and she
solemnly pointed to the scar. I saw that she was in earnest, and said
solemnly:--

"I promise!" and as I said it I felt that from that instant a door had
been shut between us.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later, midnight._--Mina has been bright and cheerful all the evening.
So much so that all the rest seemed to take courage, as if infected
somewhat with her gaiety; as a result even I myself felt as if the pall
of gloom which weighs us down were somewhat lifted. We all retired
early. Mina is now sleeping like a little child; it is a wonderful thing
that her faculty of sleep remains to her in the midst of her terrible
trouble. Thank God for it, for then at least she can forget her care.
Perhaps her example may affect me as her gaiety did to-night. I shall
try it. Oh! for a dreamless sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

_6 October, morning._--Another surprise. Mina woke me early, about the
same time as yesterday, and asked me to bring Dr. Van Helsing. I thought
that it was another occasion for hypnotism, and without question went
for the Professor. He had evidently expected some such call, for I found
him dressed in his room. His door was ajar, so that he could hear the
opening of the door of our room. He came at once; as he passed into the
room, he asked Mina if the others might come, too.

"No," she said quite simply, "it will not be necessary. You can tell
them just as well. I must go with you on your journey."

Dr. Van Helsing was as startled as I was. After a moment's pause he
asked:--

"But why?"

"You must take me with you. I am safer with you, and you shall be safer,
too."

"But why, dear Madam Mina? You know that your safety is our solemnest
duty. We go into danger, to which you are, or may be, more liable than
any of us from--from circumstances--things that have been." He paused,
embarrassed.

As she replied, she raised her finger and pointed to her forehead:--

"I know. That is why I must go. I can tell you now, whilst the sun is
coming up; I may not be able again. I know that when the Count wills me
I must go. I know that if he tells me to come in secret, I must come by
wile; by any device to hoodwink--even Jonathan." God saw the look that
she turned on me as she spoke, and if there be indeed a Recording Angel
that look is noted to her everlasting honour. I could only clasp her
hand. I could not speak; my emotion was too great for even the relief of
tears. She went on:--

"You men are brave and strong. You are strong in your numbers, for you
can defy that which would break down the human endurance of one who had
to guard alone. Besides, I may be of service, since you can hypnotise me
and so learn that which even I myself do not know." Dr. Van Helsing said
very gravely:--

"Madam Mina, you are, as always, most wise. You shall with us come; and
together we shall do that which we go forth to achieve." When he had
spoken, Mina's long spell of silence made me look at her. She had fallen
back on her pillow asleep; she did not even wake when I had pulled up
the blind and let in the sunlight which flooded the room. Van Helsing
motioned to me to come with him quietly. We went to his room, and within
a minute Lord Godalming, Dr. Seward, and Mr. Morris were with us also.
He told them what Mina had said, and went on:--

"In the morning we shall leave for Varna. We have now to deal with a
new factor: Madam Mina. Oh, but her soul is true. It is to her an agony
to tell us so much as she has done; but it is most right, and we are
warned in time. There must be no chance lost, and in Varna we must be
ready to act the instant when that ship arrives."

"What shall we do exactly?" asked Mr. Morris laconically. The Professor
paused before replying:--

"We shall at the first board that ship; then, when we have identified
the box, we shall place a branch of the wild rose on it. This we shall
fasten, for when it is there none can emerge; so at least says the
superstition. And to superstition must we trust at the first; it was
man's faith in the early, and it have its root in faith still. Then,
when we get the opportunity that we seek, when none are near to see, we
shall open the box, and--and all will be well."

"I shall not wait for any opportunity," said Morris. "When I see the box
I shall open it and destroy the monster, though there were a thousand
men looking on, and if I am to be wiped out for it the next moment!" I
grasped his hand instinctively and found it as firm as a piece of steel.
I think he understood my look; I hope he did.

"Good boy," said Dr. Van Helsing. "Brave boy. Quincey is all man. God
bless him for it. My child, believe me none of us shall lag behind or
pause from any fear. I do but say what we may do--what we must do. But,
indeed, indeed we cannot say what we shall do. There are so many things
which may happen, and their ways and their ends are so various that
until the moment we may not say. We shall all be armed, in all ways; and
when the time for the end has come, our effort shall not be lack. Now
let us to-day put all our affairs in order. Let all things which touch
on others dear to us, and who on us depend, be complete; for none of us
can tell what, or when, or how, the end may be. As for me, my own
affairs are regulate; and as I have nothing else to do, I shall go make
arrangements for the travel. I shall have all tickets and so forth for
our journey."

There was nothing further to be said, and we parted. I shall now settle
up all my affairs of earth, and be ready for whatever may come....

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--It is all done; my will is made, and all complete. Mina if she
survive is my sole heir. If it should not be so, then the others who
have been so good to us shall have remainder.

It is now drawing towards the sunset; Mina's uneasiness calls my
attention to it. I am sure that there is something on her mind which the
time of exact sunset will reveal. These occasions are becoming harrowing
times for us all, for each sunrise and sunset opens up some new
danger--some new pain, which, however, may in God's will be means to a
good end. I write all these things in the diary since my darling must
not hear them now; but if it may be that she can see them again, they
shall be ready.

She is calling to me.




CHAPTER XXV

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY


_11 October, Evening._--Jonathan Harker has asked me to note this, as he
says he is hardly equal to the task, and he wants an exact record kept.

I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs.
Harker a little before the time of sunset. We have of late come to
understand that sunrise and sunset are to her times of peculiar freedom;
when her old self can be manifest without any controlling force subduing
or restraining her, or inciting her to action. This mood or condition
begins some half hour or more before actual sunrise or sunset, and lasts
till either the sun is high, or whilst the clouds are still aglow with
the rays streaming above the horizon. At first there is a sort of
negative condition, as if some tie were loosened, and then the absolute
freedom quickly follows; when, however, the freedom ceases the
change-back or relapse comes quickly, preceded only by a spell of
warning silence.

To-night, when we met, she was somewhat constrained, and bore all the
signs of an internal struggle. I put it down myself to her making a
violent effort at the earliest instant she could do so. A very few
minutes, however, gave her complete control of herself; then, motioning
her husband to sit beside her on the sofa where she was half reclining,
she made the rest of us bring chairs up close. Taking her husband's hand
in hers began:--

"We are all here together in freedom, for perhaps the last time! I know,
dear; I know that you will always be with me to the end." This was to
her husband whose hand had, as we could see, tightened upon hers. "In
the morning we go out upon our task, and God alone knows what may be in
store for any of us. You are going to be so good to me as to take me
with you. I know that all that brave earnest men can do for a poor weak
woman, whose soul perhaps is lost--no, no, not yet, but is at any rate
at stake--you will do. But you must remember that I am not as you are.
There is a poison in my blood, in my soul, which may destroy me; which
must destroy me, unless some relief comes to us. Oh, my friends, you
know as well as I do, that my soul is at stake; and though I know there
is one way out for me, you must not and I must not take it!" She looked
appealingly to us all in turn, beginning and ending with her husband.

"What is that way?" asked Van Helsing in a hoarse voice. "What is that
way, which we must not--may not--take?"

"That I may die now, either by my own hand or that of another, before
the greater evil is entirely wrought. I know, and you know, that were I
once dead you could and would set free my immortal spirit, even as you
did my poor Lucy's. Were death, or the fear of death, the only thing
that stood in the way I would not shrink to die here, now, amidst the
friends who love me. But death is not all. I cannot believe that to die
in such a case, when there is hope before us and a bitter task to be
done, is God's will. Therefore, I, on my part, give up here the
certainty of eternal rest, and go out into the dark where may be the
blackest things that the world or the nether world holds!" We were all
silent, for we knew instinctively that this was only a prelude. The
faces of the others were set and Harker's grew ashen grey; perhaps he
guessed better than any of us what was coming. She continued:--

"This is what I can give into the hotch-pot." I could not but note the
quaint legal phrase which she used in such a place, and with all
seriousness. "What will each of you give? Your lives I know," she went
on quickly, "that is easy for brave men. Your lives are God's, and you
can give them back to Him; but what will you give to me?" She looked
again questioningly, but this time avoided her husband's face. Quincey
seemed to understand; he nodded, and her face lit up. "Then I shall tell
you plainly what I want, for there must be no doubtful matter in this
connection between us now. You must promise me, one and all--even you,
my beloved husband--that, should the time come, you will kill me."

"What is that time?" The voice was Quincey's, but it was low and
strained.

"When you shall be convinced that I am so changed that it is better that
I die that I may live. When I am thus dead in the flesh, then you will,
without a moment's delay, drive a stake through me and cut off my head;
or do whatever else may be wanting to give me rest!"

Quincey was the first to rise after the pause. He knelt down before her
and taking her hand in his said solemnly:--

"I'm only a rough fellow, who hasn't, perhaps, lived as a man should to
win such a distinction, but I swear to you by all that I hold sacred and
dear that, should the time ever come, I shall not flinch from the duty
that you have set us. And I promise you, too, that I shall make all
certain, for if I am only doubtful I shall take it that the time has
come!"

"My true friend!" was all she could say amid her fast-falling tears, as,
bending over, she kissed his hand.

"I swear the same, my dear Madam Mina!" said Van Helsing.

"And I!" said Lord Godalming, each of them in turn kneeling to her to
take the oath. I followed, myself. Then her husband turned to her
wan-eyed and with a greenish pallor which subdued the snowy whiteness of
his hair, and asked:--

"And must I, too, make such a promise, oh, my wife?"

"You too, my dearest," she said, with infinite yearning of pity in her
voice and eyes. "You must not shrink. You are nearest and dearest and
all the world to me; our souls are knit into one, for all life and all
time. Think, dear, that there have been times when brave men have killed
their wives and their womenkind, to keep them from falling into the
hands of the enemy. Their hands did not falter any the more because
those that they loved implored them to slay them. It is men's duty
towards those whom they love, in such times of sore trial! And oh, my
dear, if it is to be that I must meet death at any hand, let it be at
the hand of him that loves me best. Dr. Van Helsing, I have not
forgotten your mercy in poor Lucy's case to him who loved"--she stopped
with a flying blush, and changed her phrase--"to him who had best right
to give her peace. If that time shall come again, I look to you to make
it a happy memory of my husband's life that it was his loving hand which
set me free from the awful thrall upon me."

"Again I swear!" came the Professor's resonant voice. Mrs. Harker
smiled, positively smiled, as with a sigh of relief she leaned back and
said:--

"And now one word of warning, a warning which you must never forget:
this time, if it ever come, may come quickly and unexpectedly, and in
such case you must lose no time in using your opportunity. At such a
time I myself might be--nay! if the time ever comes, _shall be_--leagued
with your enemy against you."

"One more request;" she became very solemn as she said this, "it is not
vital and necessary like the other, but I want you to do one thing for
me, if you will." We all acquiesced, but no one spoke; there was no need
to speak:--

"I want you to read the Burial Service." She was interrupted by a deep
groan from her husband; taking his hand in hers, she held it over her
heart, and continued: "You must read it over me some day. Whatever may
be the issue of all this fearful state of things, it will be a sweet
thought to all or some of us. You, my dearest, will I hope read it, for
then it will be in your voice in my memory for ever--come what may!"

"But oh, my dear one," he pleaded, "death is afar off from you."

"Nay," she said, holding up a warning hand. "I am deeper in death at
this moment than if the weight of an earthly grave lay heavy upon me!"

"Oh, my wife, must I read it?" he said, before he began.

"It would comfort me, my husband!" was all she said; and he began to
read when she had got the book ready.

"How can I--how could any one--tell of that strange scene, its
solemnity, its gloom, its sadness, its horror; and, withal, its
sweetness. Even a sceptic, who can see nothing but a travesty of bitter
truth in anything holy or emotional, would have been melted to the heart
had he seen that little group of loving and devoted friends kneeling
round that stricken and sorrowing lady; or heard the tender passion of
her husband's voice, as in tones so broken with emotion that often he
had to pause, he read the simple and beautiful service from the Burial
of the Dead. I--I cannot go on--words--and--v-voice--f-fail m-me!"

       *       *       *       *       *

She was right in her instinct. Strange as it all was, bizarre as it may
hereafter seem even to us who felt its potent influence at the time, it
comforted us much; and the silence, which showed Mrs. Harker's coming
relapse from her freedom of soul, did not seem so full of despair to any
of us as we had dreaded.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_15 October, Varna._--We left Charing Cross on the morning of the 12th,
got to Paris the same night, and took the places secured for us in the
Orient Express. We travelled night and day, arriving here at about five
o'clock. Lord Godalming went to the Consulate to see if any telegram had
arrived for him, whilst the rest of us came on to this hotel--"the
Odessus." The journey may have had incidents; I was, however, too eager
to get on, to care for them. Until the _Czarina Catherine_ comes into
port there will be no interest for me in anything in the wide world.
Thank God! Mina is well, and looks to be getting stronger; her colour is
coming back. She sleeps a great deal; throughout the journey she slept
nearly all the time. Before sunrise and sunset, however, she is very
wakeful and alert; and it has become a habit for Van Helsing to
hypnotise her at such times. At first, some effort was needed, and he
had to make many passes; but now, she seems to yield at once, as if by
habit, and scarcely any action is needed. He seems to have power at
these particular moments to simply will, and her thoughts obey him. He
always asks her what she can see and hear. She answers to the first:--

"Nothing; all is dark." And to the second:--

"I can hear the waves lapping against the ship, and the water rushing
by. Canvas and cordage strain and masts and yards creak. The wind is
high--I can hear it in the shrouds, and the bow throws back the foam."
It is evident that the _Czarina Catherine_ is still at sea, hastening on
her way to Varna. Lord Godalming has just returned. He had four
telegrams, one each day since we started, and all to the same effect:
that the _Czarina Catherine_ had not been reported to Lloyd's from
anywhere. He had arranged before leaving London that his agent should
send him every day a telegram saying if the ship had been reported. He
was to have a message even if she were not reported, so that he might be
sure that there was a watch being kept at the other end of the wire.

We had dinner and went to bed early. To-morrow we are to see the
Vice-Consul, and to arrange, if we can, about getting on board the ship
as soon as she arrives. Van Helsing says that our chance will be to get
on the boat between sunrise and sunset. The Count, even if he takes the
form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition, and
so cannot leave the ship. As he dare not change to man's form without
suspicion--which he evidently wishes to avoid--he must remain in the
box. If, then, we can come on board after sunrise, he is at our mercy;
for we can open the box and make sure of him, as we did of poor Lucy,
before he wakes. What mercy he shall get from us will not count for
much. We think that we shall not have much trouble with officials or the
seamen. Thank God! this is the country where bribery can do anything,
and we are well supplied with money. We have only to make sure that the
ship cannot come into port between sunset and sunrise without our being
warned, and we shall be safe. Judge Moneybag will settle this case, I
think!

       *       *       *       *       *

_16 October._--Mina's report still the same: lapping waves and rushing
water, darkness and favouring winds. We are evidently in good time, and
when we hear of the _Czarina Catherine_ we shall be ready. As she must
pass the Dardanelles we are sure to have some report.

       *       *       *       *       *

_17 October._--Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome
the Count on his return from his tour. Godalming told the shippers that
he fancied that the box sent aboard might contain something stolen from
a friend of his, and got a half consent that he might open it at his own
risk. The owner gave him a paper telling the Captain to give him every
facility in doing whatever he chose on board the ship, and also a
similar authorisation to his agent at Varna. We have seen the agent, who
was much impressed with Godalming's kindly manner to him, and we are all
satisfied that whatever he can do to aid our wishes will be done. We
have already arranged what to do in case we get the box open. If the
Count is there, Van Helsing and Seward will cut off his head at once and
drive a stake through his heart. Morris and Godalming and I shall
prevent interference, even if we have to use the arms which we shall
have ready. The Professor says that if we can so treat the Count's body,
it will soon after fall into dust. In such case there would be no
evidence against us, in case any suspicion of murder were aroused. But
even if it were not, we should stand or fall by our act, and perhaps
some day this very script may be evidence to come between some of us and
a rope. For myself, I should take the chance only too thankfully if it
were to come. We mean to leave no stone unturned to carry out our
intent. We have arranged with certain officials that the instant the
_Czarina Catherine_ is seen, we are to be informed by a special
messenger.

       *       *       *       *       *

_24 October._--A whole week of waiting. Daily telegrams to Godalming,
but only the same story: "Not yet reported." Mina's morning and evening
hypnotic answer is unvaried: lapping waves, rushing water, and creaking
masts.

_Telegram, October 24th._

_Rufus Smith, Lloyd's, London, to Lord Godalming, care of H. B. M.
Vice-Consul, Varna._

"_Czarina Catherine_ reported this morning from Dardanelles."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_25 October._--How I miss my phonograph! To write diary with a pen is
irksome to me; but Van Helsing says I must. We were all wild with
excitement yesterday when Godalming got his telegram from Lloyd's. I
know now what men feel in battle when the call to action is heard. Mrs.
Harker, alone of our party, did not show any signs of emotion. After
all, it is not strange that she did not; for we took special care not to
let her know anything about it, and we all tried not to show any
excitement when we were in her presence. In old days she would, I am
sure, have noticed, no matter how we might have tried to conceal it; but
in this way she is greatly changed during the past three weeks. The
lethargy grows upon her, and though she seems strong and well, and is
getting back some of her colour, Van Helsing and I are not satisfied. We
talk of her often; we have not, however, said a word to the others. It
would break poor Harker's heart--certainly his nerve--if he knew that we
had even a suspicion on the subject. Van Helsing examines, he tells me,
her teeth very carefully, whilst she is in the hypnotic condition, for
he says that so long as they do not begin to sharpen there is no active
danger of a change in her. If this change should come, it would be
necessary to take steps!... We both know what those steps would have to
be, though we do not mention our thoughts to each other. We should
neither of us shrink from the task--awful though it be to contemplate.
"Euthanasia" is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to
whoever invented it.

It is only about 24 hours' sail from the Dardanelles to here, at the
rate the _Czarina Catherine_ has come from London. She should therefore
arrive some time in the morning; but as she cannot possibly get in
before then, we are all about to retire early. We shall get up at one
o'clock, so as to be ready.

       *       *       *       *       *

_25 October, Noon_.--No news yet of the ship's arrival. Mrs. Harker's
hypnotic report this morning was the same as usual, so it is possible
that we may get news at any moment. We men are all in a fever of
excitement, except Harker, who is calm; his hands are cold as ice, and
an hour ago I found him whetting the edge of the great Ghoorka knife
which he now always carries with him. It will be a bad lookout for the
Count if the edge of that "Kukri" ever touches his throat, driven by
that stern, ice-cold hand!

Van Helsing and I were a little alarmed about Mrs. Harker to-day. About
noon she got into a sort of lethargy which we did not like; although we
kept silence to the others, we were neither of us happy about it. She
had been restless all the morning, so that we were at first glad to know
that she was sleeping. When, however, her husband mentioned casually
that she was sleeping so soundly that he could not wake her, we went to
her room to see for ourselves. She was breathing naturally and looked so
well and peaceful that we agreed that the sleep was better for her than
anything else. Poor girl, she has so much to forget that it is no wonder
that sleep, if it brings oblivion to her, does her good.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Our opinion was justified, for when after a refreshing sleep
of some hours she woke up, she seemed brighter and better than she had
been for days. At sunset she made the usual hypnotic report. Wherever he
may be in the Black Sea, the Count is hurrying to his destination. To
his doom, I trust!

       *       *       *       *       *

_26 October._--Another day and no tidings of the _Czarina Catherine_.
She ought to be here by now. That she is still journeying _somewhere_ is
apparent, for Mrs. Harker's hypnotic report at sunrise was still the
same. It is possible that the vessel may be lying by, at times, for fog;
some of the steamers which came in last evening reported patches of fog
both to north and south of the port. We must continue our watching, as
the ship may now be signalled any moment.

       *       *       *       *       *

_27 October, Noon._--Most strange; no news yet of the ship we wait for.
Mrs. Harker reported last night and this morning as usual: "lapping
waves and rushing water," though she added that "the waves were very
faint." The telegrams from London have been the same: "no further
report." Van Helsing is terribly anxious, and told me just now that he
fears the Count is escaping us. He added significantly:--

"I did not like that lethargy of Madam Mina's. Souls and memories can do
strange things during trance." I was about to ask him more, but Harker
just then came in, and he held up a warning hand. We must try to-night
at sunset to make her speak more fully when in her hypnotic state.

       *       *       *       *       *

     _28 October._--Telegram. _Rufus Smith, London, to Lord Godalming,
     care H. B. M. Vice Consul, Varna._

     "_Czarina Catherine_ reported entering Galatz at one o'clock
     to-day."


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_28 October._--When the telegram came announcing the arrival in Galatz I
do not think it was such a shock to any of us as might have been
expected. True, we did not know whence, or how, or when, the bolt would
come; but I think we all expected that something strange would happen.
The delay of arrival at Varna made us individually satisfied that things
would not be just as we had expected; we only waited to learn where the
change would occur. None the less, however, was it a surprise. I suppose
that nature works on such a hopeful basis that we believe against
ourselves that things will be as they ought to be, not as we should know
that they will be. Transcendentalism is a beacon to the angels, even if
it be a will-o'-the-wisp to man. It was an odd experience and we all
took it differently. Van Helsing raised his hand over his head for a
moment, as though in remonstrance with the Almighty; but he said not a
word, and in a few seconds stood up with his face sternly set. Lord
Godalming grew very pale, and sat breathing heavily. I was myself half
stunned and looked in wonder at one after another. Quincey Morris
tightened his belt with that quick movement which I knew so well; in our
old wandering days it meant "action." Mrs. Harker grew ghastly white, so
that the scar on her forehead seemed to burn, but she folded her hands
meekly and looked up in prayer. Harker smiled--actually smiled--the
dark, bitter smile of one who is without hope; but at the same time his
action belied his words, for his hands instinctively sought the hilt of
the great Kukri knife and rested there. "When does the next train start
for Galatz?" said Van Helsing to us generally.

"At 6:30 to-morrow morning!" We all started, for the answer came from
Mrs. Harker.

"How on earth do you know?" said Art.

"You forget--or perhaps you do not know, though Jonathan does and so
does Dr. Van Helsing--that I am the train fiend. At home in Exeter I
always used to make up the time-tables, so as to be helpful to my
husband. I found it so useful sometimes, that I always make a study of
the time-tables now. I knew that if anything were to take us to Castle
Dracula we should go by Galatz, or at any rate through Bucharest, so I
learned the times very carefully. Unhappily there are not many to learn,
as the only train to-morrow leaves as I say."

"Wonderful woman!" murmured the Professor.

"Can't we get a special?" asked Lord Godalming. Van Helsing shook his
head: "I fear not. This land is very different from yours or mine; even
if we did have a special, it would probably not arrive as soon as our
regular train. Moreover, we have something to prepare. We must think.
Now let us organize. You, friend Arthur, go to the train and get the
tickets and arrange that all be ready for us to go in the morning. Do
you, friend Jonathan, go to the agent of the ship and get from him
letters to the agent in Galatz, with authority to make search the ship
just as it was here. Morris Quincey, you see the Vice-Consul, and get
his aid with his fellow in Galatz and all he can do to make our way
smooth, so that no times be lost when over the Danube. John will stay
with Madam Mina and me, and we shall consult. For so if time be long you
may be delayed; and it will not matter when the sun set, since I am here
with Madam to make report."

"And I," said Mrs. Harker brightly, and more like her old self than she
had been for many a long day, "shall try to be of use in all ways, and
shall think and write for you as I used to do. Something is shifting
from me in some strange way, and I feel freer than I have been of late!"
The three younger men looked happier at the moment as they seemed to
realise the significance of her words; but Van Helsing and I, turning to
each other, met each a grave and troubled glance. We said nothing at the
time, however.

When the three men had gone out to their tasks Van Helsing asked Mrs.
Harker to look up the copy of the diaries and find him the part of
Harker's journal at the Castle. She went away to get it; when the door
was shut upon her he said to me:--

"We mean the same! speak out!"

"There is some change. It is a hope that makes me sick, for it may
deceive us."

"Quite so. Do you know why I asked her to get the manuscript?"

"No!" said I, "unless it was to get an opportunity of seeing me alone."

"You are in part right, friend John, but only in part. I want to tell
you something. And oh, my friend, I am taking a great--a terrible--risk;
but I believe it is right. In the moment when Madam Mina said those
words that arrest both our understanding, an inspiration came to me. In
the trance of three days ago the Count sent her his spirit to read her
mind; or more like he took her to see him in his earth-box in the ship
with water rushing, just as it go free at rise and set of sun. He learn
then that we are here; for she have more to tell in her open life with
eyes to see and ears to hear than he, shut, as he is, in his coffin-box.
Now he make his most effort to escape us. At present he want her not.

"He is sure with his so great knowledge that she will come at his call;
but he cut her off--take her, as he can do, out of his own power, that
so she come not to him. Ah! there I have hope that our man-brains that
have been of man so long and that have not lost the grace of God, will
come higher than his child-brain that lie in his tomb for centuries,
that grow not yet to our stature, and that do only work selfish and
therefore small. Here comes Madam Mina; not a word to her of her trance!
She know it not; and it would overwhelm her and make despair just when
we want all her hope, all her courage; when most we want all her great
brain which is trained like man's brain, but is of sweet woman and have
a special power which the Count give her, and which he may not take away
altogether--though he think not so. Hush! let me speak, and you shall
learn. Oh, John, my friend, we are in awful straits. I fear, as I never
feared before. We can only trust the good God. Silence! here she comes!"

I thought that the Professor was going to break down and have hysterics,
just as he had when Lucy died, but with a great effort he controlled
himself and was at perfect nervous poise when Mrs. Harker tripped into
the room, bright and happy-looking and, in the doing of work, seemingly
forgetful of her misery. As she came in, she handed a number of sheets
of typewriting to Van Helsing. He looked over them gravely, his face
brightening up as he read. Then holding the pages between his finger and
thumb he said:--

"Friend John, to you with so much of experience already--and you, too,
dear Madam Mina, that are young--here is a lesson: do not fear ever to
think. A half-thought has been buzzing often in my brain, but I fear to
let him loose his wings. Here now, with more knowledge, I go back to
where that half-thought come from and I find that he be no half-thought
at all; that be a whole thought, though so young that he is not yet
strong to use his little wings. Nay, like the "Ugly Duck" of my friend
Hans Andersen, he be no duck-thought at all, but a big swan-thought that
sail nobly on big wings, when the time come for him to try them. See I
read here what Jonathan have written:--

"That other of his race who, in a later age, again and again, brought
his forces over The Great River into Turkey Land; who, when he was
beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come
alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered,
since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph."

"What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see
nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my
man-thought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word
from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what
it mean--what it _might_ mean. Just as there are elements which rest,
yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch--then
pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill
and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and
leagues. Is it not so? Well, I shall explain. To begin, have you ever
study the philosophy of crime? 'Yes' and 'No.' You, John, yes; for it is
a study of insanity. You, no, Madam Mina; for crime touch you not--not
but once. Still, your mind works true, and argues not _a particulari ad
universale_. There is this peculiarity in criminals. It is so constant,
in all countries and at all times, that even police, who know not much
from philosophy, come to know it empirically, that _it is_. That is to
be empiric. The criminal always work at one crime--that is the true
criminal who seems predestinate to crime, and who will of none other.
This criminal has not full man-brain. He is clever and cunning and
resourceful; but he be not of man-stature as to brain. He be of
child-brain in much. Now this criminal of ours is predestinate to crime
also; he, too, have child-brain, and it is of the child to do what he
have done. The little bird, the little fish, the little animal learn not
by principle, but empirically; and when he learn to do, then there is to
him the ground to start from to do more. '_Dos pou sto_,' said
Archimedes. 'Give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world!' To do once,
is the fulcrum whereby child-brain become man-brain; and until he have
the purpose to do more, he continue to do the same again every time,
just as he have done before! Oh, my dear, I see that your eyes are
opened, and that to you the lightning flash show all the leagues," for
Mrs. Harker began to clap her hands and her eyes sparkled. He went on:--

"Now you shall speak. Tell us two dry men of science what you see with
those so bright eyes." He took her hand and held it whilst she spoke.
His finger and thumb closed on her pulse, as I thought instinctively and
unconsciously, as she spoke:--

"The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would
so classify him, and _quâ_ criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.
Thus, in a difficulty he has to seek resource in habit. His past is a
clue, and the one page of it that we know--and that from his own
lips--tells that once before, when in what Mr. Morris would call a
'tight place,' he went back to his own country from the land he had
tried to invade, and thence, without losing purpose, prepared himself
for a new effort. He came again better equipped for his work; and won.
So he came to London to invade a new land. He was beaten, and when all
hope of success was lost, and his existence in danger, he fled back over
the sea to his home; just as formerly he had fled back over the Danube
from Turkey Land."

"Good, good! oh, you so clever lady!" said Van Helsing,
enthusiastically, as he stooped and kissed her hand. A moment later he
said to me, as calmly as though we had been having a sick-room
consultation:--

"Seventy-two only; and in all this excitement. I have hope." Turning to
her again, he said with keen expectation:--

"But go on. Go on! there is more to tell if you will. Be not afraid;
John and I know. I do in any case, and shall tell you if you are right.
Speak, without fear!"

"I will try to; but you will forgive me if I seem egotistical."

"Nay! fear not, you must be egotist, for it is of you that we think."

"Then, as he is criminal he is selfish; and as his intellect is small
and his action is based on selfishness, he confines himself to one
purpose. That purpose is remorseless. As he fled back over the Danube,
leaving his forces to be cut to pieces, so now he is intent on being
safe, careless of all. So his own selfishness frees my soul somewhat
from the terrible power which he acquired over me on that dreadful
night. I felt it! Oh, I felt it! Thank God, for His great mercy! My soul
is freer than it has been since that awful hour; and all that haunts me
is a fear lest in some trance or dream he may have used my knowledge for
his ends." The Professor stood up:--

"He has so used your mind; and by it he has left us here in Varna,
whilst the ship that carried him rushed through enveloping fog up to
Galatz, where, doubtless, he had made preparation for escaping from us.
But his child-mind only saw so far; and it may be that, as ever is in
God's Providence, the very thing that the evil-doer most reckoned on for
his selfish good, turns out to be his chiefest harm. The hunter is taken
in his own snare, as the great Psalmist says. For now that he think he
is free from every trace of us all, and that he has escaped us with so
many hours to him, then his selfish child-brain will whisper him to
sleep. He think, too, that as he cut himself off from knowing your mind,
there can be no knowledge of him to you; there is where he fail! That
terrible baptism of blood which he give you makes you free to go to him
in spirit, as you have as yet done in your times of freedom, when the
sun rise and set. At such times you go by my volition and not by his;
and this power to good of you and others, as you have won from your
suffering at his hands. This is now all the more precious that he know
it not, and to guard himself have even cut himself off from his
knowledge of our where. We, however, are not selfish, and we believe
that God is with us through all this blackness, and these many dark
hours. We shall follow him; and we shall not flinch; even if we peril
ourselves that we become like him. Friend John, this has been a great
hour; and it have done much to advance us on our way. You must be scribe
and write him all down, so that when the others return from their work
you can give it to them; then they shall know as we do."

And so I have written it whilst we wait their return, and Mrs. Harker
has written with her typewriter all since she brought the MS. to us.




CHAPTER XXVI

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY


_29 October._--This is written in the train from Varna to Galatz. Last
night we all assembled a little before the time of sunset. Each of us
had done his work as well as he could; so far as thought, and endeavour,
and opportunity go, we are prepared for the whole of our journey, and
for our work when we get to Galatz. When the usual time came round Mrs.
Harker prepared herself for her hypnotic effort; and after a longer and
more serious effort on the part of Van Helsing than has been usually
necessary, she sank into the trance. Usually she speaks on a hint; but
this time the Professor had to ask her questions, and to ask them pretty
resolutely, before we could learn anything; at last her answer came:--

"I can see nothing; we are still; there are no waves lapping, but only a
steady swirl of water softly running against the hawser. I can hear
men's voices calling, near and far, and the roll and creak of oars in
the rowlocks. A gun is fired somewhere; the echo of it seems far away.
There is tramping of feet overhead, and ropes and chains are dragged
along. What is this? There is a gleam of light; I can feel the air
blowing upon me."

Here she stopped. She had risen, as if impulsively, from where she lay
on the sofa, and raised both her hands, palms upwards, as if lifting a
weight. Van Helsing and I looked at each other with understanding.
Quincey raised his eyebrows slightly and looked at her intently, whilst
Harker's hand instinctively closed round the hilt of his Kukri. There
was a long pause. We all knew that the time when she could speak was
passing; but we felt that it was useless to say anything. Suddenly she
sat up, and, as she opened her eyes, said sweetly:--

"Would none of you like a cup of tea? You must all be so tired!" We
could only make her happy, and so acquiesced. She bustled off to get
tea; when she had gone Van Helsing said:--

"You see, my friends. _He_ is close to land: he has left his
earth-chest. But he has yet to get on shore. In the night he may lie
hidden somewhere; but if he be not carried on shore, or if the ship do
not touch it, he cannot achieve the land. In such case he can, if it be
in the night, change his form and can jump or fly on shore, as he did
at Whitby. But if the day come before he get on shore, then, unless he
be carried he cannot escape. And if he be carried, then the customs men
may discover what the box contain. Thus, in fine, if he escape not on
shore to-night, or before dawn, there will be the whole day lost to him.
We may then arrive in time; for if he escape not at night we shall come
on him in daytime, boxed up and at our mercy; for he dare not be his
true self, awake and visible, lest he be discovered."

There was no more to be said, so we waited in patience until the dawn;
at which time we might learn more from Mrs. Harker.

Early this morning we listened, with breathless anxiety, for her
response in her trance. The hypnotic stage was even longer in coming
than before; and when it came the time remaining until full sunrise was
so short that we began to despair. Van Helsing seemed to throw his whole
soul into the effort; at last, in obedience to his will she made
reply:--

"All is dark. I hear lapping water, level with me, and some creaking as
of wood on wood." She paused, and the red sun shot up. We must wait till
to-night.

And so it is that we are travelling towards Galatz in an agony of
expectation. We are due to arrive between two and three in the morning;
but already, at Bucharest, we are three hours late, so we cannot
possibly get in till well after sun-up. Thus we shall have two more
hypnotic messages from Mrs. Harker; either or both may possibly throw
more light on what is happening.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Sunset has come and gone. Fortunately it came at a time when
there was no distraction; for had it occurred whilst we were at a
station, we might not have secured the necessary calm and isolation.
Mrs. Harker yielded to the hypnotic influence even less readily than
this morning. I am in fear that her power of reading the Count's
sensations may die away, just when we want it most. It seems to me that
her imagination is beginning to work. Whilst she has been in the trance
hitherto she has confined herself to the simplest of facts. If this goes
on it may ultimately mislead us. If I thought that the Count's power
over her would die away equally with her power of knowledge it would be
a happy thought; but I am afraid that it may not be so. When she did
speak, her words were enigmatical:--

"Something is going out; I can feel it pass me like a cold wind. I can
hear, far off, confused sounds--as of men talking in strange tongues,
fierce-falling water, and the howling of wolves." She stopped and a
shudder ran through her, increasing in intensity for a few seconds,
till, at the end, she shook as though in a palsy. She said no more, even
in answer to the Professor's imperative questioning. When she woke from
the trance, she was cold, and exhausted, and languid; but her mind was
all alert. She could not remember anything, but asked what she had said;
when she was told, she pondered over it deeply for a long time and in
silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

_30 October, 7 a. m._--We are near Galatz now, and I may not have time
to write later. Sunrise this morning was anxiously looked for by us all.
Knowing of the increasing difficulty of procuring the hypnotic trance,
Van Helsing began his passes earlier than usual. They produced no
effect, however, until the regular time, when she yielded with a still
greater difficulty, only a minute before the sun rose. The Professor
lost no time in his questioning; her answer came with equal quickness:--

"All is dark. I hear water swirling by, level with my ears, and the
creaking of wood on wood. Cattle low far off. There is another sound, a
queer one like----" She stopped and grew white, and whiter still.

"Go on; go on! Speak, I command you!" said Van Helsing in an agonised
voice. At the same time there was despair in his eyes, for the risen sun
was reddening even Mrs. Harker's pale face. She opened her eyes, and we
all started as she said, sweetly and seemingly with the utmost
unconcern:--

"Oh, Professor, why ask me to do what you know I can't? I don't remember
anything." Then, seeing the look of amazement on our faces, she said,
turning from one to the other with a troubled look:--

"What have I said? What have I done? I know nothing, only that I was
lying here, half asleep, and heard you say go on! speak, I command you!'
It seemed so funny to hear you order me about, as if I were a bad
child!"

"Oh, Madam Mina," he said, sadly, "it is proof, if proof be needed, of
how I love and honour you, when a word for your good, spoken more
earnest than ever, can seem so strange because it is to order her whom I
am proud to obey!"

The whistles are sounding; we are nearing Galatz. We are on fire with
anxiety and eagerness.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_30 October._--Mr. Morris took me to the hotel where our rooms had been
ordered by telegraph, he being the one who could best be spared, since
he does not speak any foreign language. The forces were distributed
much as they had been at Varna, except that Lord Godalming went to the
Vice-Consul, as his rank might serve as an immediate guarantee of some
sort to the official, we being in extreme hurry. Jonathan and the two
doctors went to the shipping agent to learn particulars of the arrival
of the _Czarina Catherine_.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Lord Godalming has returned. The Consul is away, and the
Vice-Consul sick; so the routine work has been attended to by a clerk.
He was very obliging, and offered to do anything in his power.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_30 October._--At nine o'clock Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and I called
on Messrs. Mackenzie & Steinkoff, the agents of the London firm of
Hapgood. They had received a wire from London, in answer to Lord
Godalming's telegraphed request, asking us to show them any civility in
their power. They were more than kind and courteous, and took us at once
on board the _Czarina Catherine_, which lay at anchor out in the river
harbour. There we saw the Captain, Donelson by name, who told us of his
voyage. He said that in all his life he had never had so favourable a
run.

"Man!" he said, "but it made us afeard, for we expeckit that we should
have to pay for it wi' some rare piece o' ill luck, so as to keep up the
average. It's no canny to run frae London to the Black Sea wi' a wind
ahint ye, as though the Deil himself were blawin' on yer sail for his
ain purpose. An' a' the time we could no speer a thing. Gin we were nigh
a ship, or a port, or a headland, a fog fell on us and travelled wi' us,
till when after it had lifted and we looked out, the deil a thing could
we see. We ran by Gibraltar wi'oot bein' able to signal; an' till we
came to the Dardanelles and had to wait to get our permit to pass, we
never were within hail o' aught. At first I inclined to slack off sail
and beat about till the fog was lifted; but whiles, I thocht that if the
Deil was minded to get us into the Black Sea quick, he was like to do it
whether we would or no. If we had a quick voyage it would be no to our
miscredit wi' the owners, or no hurt to our traffic; an' the Old Mon who
had served his ain purpose wad be decently grateful to us for no
hinderin' him." This mixture of simplicity and cunning, of superstition
and commercial reasoning, aroused Van Helsing, who said:--

"Mine friend, that Devil is more clever than he is thought by some; and
he know when he meet his match!" The skipper was not displeased with the
compliment, and went on:--

"When we got past the Bosphorus the men began to grumble; some o' them,
the Roumanians, came and asked me to heave overboard a big box which had
been put on board by a queer lookin' old man just before we had started
frae London. I had seen them speer at the fellow, and put out their twa
fingers when they saw him, to guard against the evil eye. Man! but the
supersteetion of foreigners is pairfectly rideeculous! I sent them aboot
their business pretty quick; but as just after a fog closed in on us I
felt a wee bit as they did anent something, though I wouldn't say it was
agin the big box. Well, on we went, and as the fog didn't let up for
five days I joost let the wind carry us; for if the Deil wanted to get
somewheres--well, he would fetch it up a'reet. An' if he didn't, well,
we'd keep a sharp lookout anyhow. Sure eneuch, we had a fair way and
deep water all the time; and two days ago, when the mornin' sun came
through the fog, we found ourselves just in the river opposite Galatz.
The Roumanians were wild, and wanted me right or wrong to take out the
box and fling it in the river. I had to argy wi' them aboot it wi' a
handspike; an' when the last o' them rose off the deck wi' his head in
his hand, I had convinced them that, evil eye or no evil eye, the
property and the trust of my owners were better in my hands than in the
river Danube. They had, mind ye, taken the box on the deck ready to
fling in, and as it was marked Galatz _via_ Varna, I thocht I'd let it
lie till we discharged in the port an' get rid o't althegither. We
didn't do much clearin' that day, an' had to remain the nicht at anchor;
but in the mornin', braw an' airly, an hour before sun-up, a man came
aboard wi' an order, written to him from England, to receive a box
marked for one Count Dracula. Sure eneuch the matter was one ready to
his hand. He had his papers a' reet, an' glad I was to be rid o' the
dam' thing, for I was beginnin' masel' to feel uneasy at it. If the Deil
did have any luggage aboord the ship, I'm thinkin' it was nane ither
than that same!"

"What was the name of the man who took it?" asked Dr. Van Helsing with
restrained eagerness.

"I'll be tellin' ye quick!" he answered, and, stepping down to his
cabin, produced a receipt signed "Immanuel Hildesheim." Burgen-strasse
16 was the address. We found out that this was all the Captain knew; so
with thanks we came away.

We found Hildesheim in his office, a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi
Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez. His arguments were
pointed with specie--we doing the punctuation--and with a little
bargaining he told us what he knew. This turned out to be simple but
important. He had received a letter from Mr. de Ville of London, telling
him to receive, if possible before sunrise so as to avoid customs, a box
which would arrive at Galatz in the _Czarina Catherine_. This he was to
give in charge to a certain Petrof Skinsky, who dealt with the Slovaks
who traded down the river to the port. He had been paid for his work by
an English bank note, which had been duly cashed for gold at the Danube
International Bank. When Skinsky had come to him, he had taken him to
the ship and handed over the box, so as to save porterage. That was all
he knew.

We then sought for Skinsky, but were unable to find him. One of his
neighbours, who did not seem to bear him any affection, said that he had
gone away two days before, no one knew whither. This was corroborated by
his landlord, who had received by messenger the key of the house
together with the rent due, in English money. This had been between ten
and eleven o'clock last night. We were at a standstill again.

Whilst we were talking one came running and breathlessly gasped out that
the body of Skinsky had been found inside the wall of the churchyard of
St. Peter, and that the throat had been torn open as if by some wild
animal. Those we had been speaking with ran off to see the horror, the
women crying out "This is the work of a Slovak!" We hurried away lest we
should have been in some way drawn into the affair, and so detained.

As we came home we could arrive at no definite conclusion. We were all
convinced that the box was on its way, by water, to somewhere; but where
that might be we would have to discover. With heavy hearts we came home
to the hotel to Mina.

When we met together, the first thing was to consult as to taking Mina
again into our confidence. Things are getting desperate, and it is at
least a chance, though a hazardous one. As a preliminary step, I was
released from my promise to her.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_30 October, evening._--They were so tired and worn out and dispirited
that there was nothing to be done till they had some rest; so I asked
them all to lie down for half an hour whilst I should enter everything
up to the moment. I feel so grateful to the man who invented the
"Traveller's" typewriter, and to Mr. Morris for getting this one for
me. I should have felt quite; astray doing the work if I had to write
with a pen....

It is all done; poor dear, dear Jonathan, what he must have suffered,
what must he be suffering now. He lies on the sofa hardly seeming to
breathe, and his whole body appears in collapse. His brows are knit; his
face is drawn with pain. Poor fellow, maybe he is thinking, and I can
see his face all wrinkled up with the concentration of his thoughts. Oh!
if I could only help at all.... I shall do what I can.

I have asked Dr. Van Helsing, and he has got me all the papers that I
have not yet seen.... Whilst they are resting, I shall go over all
carefully, and perhaps I may arrive at some conclusion. I shall try to
follow the Professor's example, and think without prejudice on the facts
before me....

       *       *       *       *       *

I do believe that under God's providence I have made a discovery. I
shall get the maps and look over them....

       *       *       *       *       *

I am more than ever sure that I am right. My new conclusion is ready, so
I shall get our party together and read it. They can judge it; it is
well to be accurate, and every minute is precious.


_Mina Harker's Memorandum._

(Entered in her Journal.)

_Ground of inquiry._--Count Dracula's problem is to get back to his own
place.

(_a_) He must be _brought back_ by some one. This is evident; for had he
power to move himself as he wished he could go either as man, or wolf,
or bat, or in some other way. He evidently fears discovery or
interference, in the state of helplessness in which he must be--confined
as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box.

(_b_) _How is he to be taken?_--Here a process of exclusions may help
us. By road, by rail, by water?

1. _By Road._--There are endless difficulties, especially in leaving the
city.

(_x_) There are people; and people are curious, and investigate. A hint,
a surmise, a doubt as to what might be in the box, would destroy him.

(_y_) There are, or there may be, customs and octroi officers to pass.

(_z_) His pursuers might follow. This is his highest fear; and in order
to prevent his being betrayed he has repelled, so far as he can, even
his victim--me!

2. _By Rail._--There is no one in charge of the box. It would have to
take its chance of being delayed; and delay would be fatal, with enemies
on the track. True, he might escape at night; but what would he be, if
left in a strange place with no refuge that he could fly to? This is not
what he intends; and he does not mean to risk it.

3. _By Water._--Here is the safest way, in one respect, but with most
danger in another. On the water he is powerless except at night; even
then he can only summon fog and storm and snow and his wolves. But were
he wrecked, the living water would engulf him, helpless; and he would
indeed be lost. He could have the vessel drive to land; but if it were
unfriendly land, wherein he was not free to move, his position would
still be desperate.

We know from the record that he was on the water; so what we have to do
is to ascertain _what_ water.

The first thing is to realise exactly what he has done as yet; we may,
then, get a light on what his later task is to be.

_Firstly._--We must differentiate between what he did in London as part
of his general plan of action, when he was pressed for moments and had
to arrange as best he could.

_Secondly_ we must see, as well as we can surmise it from the facts we
know of, what he has done here.

As to the first, he evidently intended to arrive at Galatz, and sent
invoice to Varna to deceive us lest we should ascertain his means of
exit from England; his immediate and sole purpose then was to escape.
The proof of this, is the letter of instructions sent to Immanuel
Hildesheim to clear and take away the box _before sunrise_. There is
also the instruction to Petrof Skinsky. These we must only guess at; but
there must have been some letter or message, since Skinsky came to
Hildesheim.

That, so far, his plans were successful we know. The _Czarina Catherine_
made a phenomenally quick journey--so much so that Captain Donelson's
suspicions were aroused; but his superstition united with his canniness
played the Count's game for him, and he ran with his favouring wind
through fogs and all till he brought up blindfold at Galatz. That the
Count's arrangements were well made, has been proved. Hildesheim cleared
the box, took it off, and gave it to Skinsky. Skinsky took it--and here
we lose the trail. We only know that the box is somewhere on the water,
moving along. The customs and the octroi, if there be any, have been
avoided.

Now we come to what the Count must have done after his arrival--_on
land_, at Galatz.

The box was given to Skinsky before sunrise. At sunrise the Count could
appear in his own form. Here, we ask why Skinsky was chosen at all to
aid in the work? In my husband's diary, Skinsky is mentioned as dealing
with the Slovaks who trade down the river to the port; and the man's
remark, that the murder was the work of a Slovak, showed the general
feeling against his class. The Count wanted isolation.

My surmise is, this: that in London the Count decided to get back to his
castle by water, as the most safe and secret way. He was brought from
the castle by Szgany, and probably they delivered their cargo to Slovaks
who took the boxes to Varna, for there they were shipped for London.
Thus the Count had knowledge of the persons who could arrange this
service. When the box was on land, before sunrise or after sunset, he
came out from his box, met Skinsky and instructed him what to do as to
arranging the carriage of the box up some river. When this was done, and
he knew that all was in train, he blotted out his traces, as he thought,
by murdering his agent.

I have examined the map and find that the river most suitable for the
Slovaks to have ascended is either the Pruth or the Sereth. I read in
the typescript that in my trance I heard cows low and water swirling
level with my ears and the creaking of wood. The Count in his box, then,
was on a river in an open boat--propelled probably either by oars or
poles, for the banks are near and it is working against stream. There
would be no such sound if floating down stream.

Of course it may not be either the Sereth or the Pruth, but we may
possibly investigate further. Now of these two, the Pruth is the more
easily navigated, but the Sereth is, at Fundu, joined by the Bistritza
which runs up round the Borgo Pass. The loop it makes is manifestly as
close to Dracula's castle as can be got by water.


_Mina Harker's Journal--continued._

When I had done reading, Jonathan took me in his arms and kissed me. The
others kept shaking me by both hands, and Dr. Van Helsing said:--

"Our dear Madam Mina is once more our teacher. Her eyes have been where
we were blinded. Now we are on the track once again, and this time we
may succeed. Our enemy is at his most helpless; and if we can come on
him by day, on the water, our task will be over. He has a start, but he
is powerless to hasten, as he may not leave his box lest those who carry
him may suspect; for them to suspect would be to prompt them to throw
him in the stream where he perish. This he knows, and will not. Now men,
to our Council of War; for, here and now, we must plan what each and all
shall do."

"I shall get a steam launch and follow him," said Lord Godalming.

"And I, horses to follow on the bank lest by chance he land," said Mr.
Morris.

"Good!" said the Professor, "both good. But neither must go alone. There
must be force to overcome force if need be; the Slovak is strong and
rough, and he carries rude arms." All the men smiled, for amongst them
they carried a small arsenal. Said Mr. Morris:--

"I have brought some Winchesters; they are pretty handy in a crowd, and
there may be wolves. The Count, if you remember, took some other
precautions; he made some requisitions on others that Mrs. Harker could
not quite hear or understand. We must be ready at all points." Dr.
Seward said:--

"I think I had better go with Quincey. We have been accustomed to hunt
together, and we two, well armed, will be a match for whatever may come
along. You must not be alone, Art. It may be necessary to fight the
Slovaks, and a chance thrust--for I don't suppose these fellows carry
guns--would undo all our plans. There must be no chances, this time; we
shall, not rest until the Count's head and body have been separated, and
we are sure that he cannot re-incarnate." He looked at Jonathan as he
spoke, and Jonathan looked at me. I could see that the poor dear was
torn about in his mind. Of course he wanted to be with me; but then the
boat service would, most likely, be the one which would destroy the ...
the ... the ... Vampire. (Why did I hesitate to write the word?) He was
silent awhile, and during his silence Dr. Van Helsing spoke:--

"Friend Jonathan, this is to you for twice reasons. First, because you
are young and brave and can fight, and all energies may be needed at the
last; and again that it is your right to destroy him--that--which has
wrought such woe to you and yours. Be not afraid for Madam Mina; she
will be my care, if I may. I am old. My legs are not so quick to run as
once; and I am not used to ride so long or to pursue as need be, or to
fight with lethal weapons. But I can be of other service; I can fight in
other way. And I can die, if need be, as well as younger men. Now let
me say that what I would is this: while you, my Lord Godalming and
friend Jonathan go in your so swift little steamboat up the river, and
whilst John and Quincey guard the bank where perchance he might be
landed, I will take Madam Mina right into the heart of the enemy's
country. Whilst the old fox is tied in his box, floating on the running
stream whence he cannot escape to land--where he dares not raise the lid
of his coffin-box lest his Slovak carriers should in fear leave him to
perish--we shall go in the track where Jonathan went,--from Bistritz
over the Borgo, and find our way to the Castle of Dracula. Here, Madam
Mina's hypnotic power will surely help, and we shall find our way--all
dark and unknown otherwise--after the first sunrise when we are near
that fateful place. There is much to be done, and other places to be
made sanctify, so that that nest of vipers be obliterated." Here
Jonathan interrupted him hotly:--

"Do you mean to say, Professor Van Helsing, that you would bring Mina,
in her sad case and tainted as she is with that devil's illness, right
into the jaws of his death-trap? Not for the world! Not for Heaven or
Hell!" He became almost speechless for a minute, and then went on:--

"Do you know what the place is? Have you seen that awful den of hellish
infamy--with the very moonlight alive with grisly shapes, and every
speck of dust that whirls in the wind a devouring monster in embryo?
Have you felt the Vampire's lips upon your throat?" Here he turned to
me, and as his eyes lit on my forehead he threw up his arms with a cry:
"Oh, my God, what have we done to have this terror upon us!" and he sank
down on the sofa in a collapse of misery. The Professor's voice, as he
spoke in clear, sweet tones, which seemed to vibrate in the air, calmed
us all:--

"Oh, my friend, it is because I would save Madam Mina from that awful
place that I would go. God forbid that I should take her into that
place. There is work--wild work--to be done there, that her eyes may not
see. We men here, all save Jonathan, have seen with their own eyes what
is to be done before that place can be purify. Remember that we are in
terrible straits. If the Count escape us this time--and he is strong and
subtle and cunning--he may choose to sleep him for a century, and then
in time our dear one"--he took my hand--"would come to him to keep him
company, and would be as those others that you, Jonathan, saw. You have
told us of their gloating lips; you heard their ribald laugh as they
clutched the moving bag that the Count threw to them. You shudder; and
well may it be. Forgive me that I make you so much pain, but it is
necessary. My friend, is it not a dire need for the which I am giving,
possibly my life? If it were that any one went into that place to stay,
it is I who would have to go to keep them company."

"Do as you will," said Jonathan, with a sob that shook him all over, "we
are in the hands of God!"

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Oh, it did me good to see the way that these brave men worked.
How can women help loving men when they are so earnest, and so true, and
so brave! And, too, it made me think of the wonderful power of money!
What can it not do when it is properly applied; and what might it do
when basely used. I felt so thankful that Lord Godalming is rich, and
that both he and Mr. Morris, who also has plenty of money, are willing
to spend it so freely. For if they did not, our little expedition could
not start, either so promptly or so well equipped, as it will within
another hour. It is not three hours since it was arranged what part each
of us was to do; and now Lord Godalming and Jonathan have a lovely steam
launch, with steam up ready to start at a moment's notice. Dr. Seward
and Mr. Morris have half a dozen good horses, well appointed. We have
all the maps and appliances of various kinds that can be had. Professor
Van Helsing and I are to leave by the 11:40 train to-night for Veresti,
where we are to get a carriage to drive to the Borgo Pass. We are
bringing a good deal of ready money, as we are to buy a carriage and
horses. We shall drive ourselves, for we have no one whom we can trust
in the matter. The Professor knows something of a great many languages,
so we shall get on all right. We have all got arms, even for me a
large-bore revolver; Jonathan would not be happy unless I was armed like
the rest. Alas! I cannot carry one arm that the rest do; the scar on my
forehead forbids that. Dear Dr. Van Helsing comforts me by telling me
that I am fully armed as there may be wolves; the weather is getting
colder every hour, and there are snow-flurries which come and go as
warnings.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--It took all my courage to say good-bye to my darling. We may
never meet again. Courage, Mina! the Professor is looking at you keenly;
his look is a warning. There must be no tears now--unless it may be that
God will let them fall in gladness.


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_October 30. Night._--I am writing this in the light from the furnace
door of the steam launch: Lord Godalming is firing up. He is an
experienced hand at the work, as he has had for years a launch of his
own on the Thames, and another on the Norfolk Broads. Regarding our
plans, we finally decided that Mina's guess was correct, and that if any
waterway was chosen for the Count's escape back to his Castle, the
Sereth and then the Bistritza at its junction, would be the one. We took
it, that somewhere about the 47th degree, north latitude, would be the
place chosen for the crossing the country between the river and the
Carpathians. We have no fear in running at good speed up the river at
night; there is plenty of water, and the banks are wide enough apart to
make steaming, even in the dark, easy enough. Lord Godalming tells me to
sleep for a while, as it is enough for the present for one to be on
watch. But I cannot sleep--how can I with the terrible danger hanging
over my darling, and her going out into that awful place.... My only
comfort is that we are in the hands of God. Only for that faith it would
be easier to die than to live, and so be quit of all the trouble. Mr.
Morris and Dr. Seward were off on their long ride before we started;
they are to keep up the right bank, far enough off to get on higher
lands where they can see a good stretch of river and avoid the following
of its curves. They have, for the first stages, two men to ride and lead
their spare horses--four in all, so as not to excite curiosity. When
they dismiss the men, which shall be shortly, they shall themselves look
after the horses. It may be necessary for us to join forces; if so they
can mount our whole party. One of the saddles has a movable horn, and
can be easily adapted for Mina, if required.

It is a wild adventure we are on. Here, as we are rushing along through
the darkness, with the cold from the river seeming to rise up and strike
us; with all the mysterious voices of the night around us, it all comes
home. We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into
a whole world of dark and dreadful things. Godalming is shutting the
furnace door....

       *       *       *       *       *

_31 October._--Still hurrying along. The day has come, and Godalming is
sleeping. I am on watch. The morning is bitterly cold; the furnace heat
is grateful, though we have heavy fur coats. As yet we have passed only
a few open boats, but none of them had on board any box or package of
anything like the size of the one we seek. The men were scared every
time we turned our electric lamp on them, and fell on their knees and
prayed.

       *       *       *       *       *

_1 November, evening._--No news all day; we have found nothing of the
kind we seek. We have now passed into the Bistritza; and if we are wrong
in our surmise our chance is gone. We have over-hauled every boat, big
and little. Early this morning, one crew took us for a Government boat,
and treated us accordingly. We saw in this a way of smoothing matters,
so at Fundu, where the Bistritza runs into the Sereth, we got a
Roumanian flag which we now fly conspicuously. With every boat which we
have over-hauled since then this trick has succeeded; we have had every
deference shown to us, and not once any objection to whatever we chose
to ask or do. Some of the Slovaks tell us that a big boat passed them,
going at more than usual speed as she had a double crew on board. This
was before they came to Fundu, so they could not tell us whether the
boat turned into the Bistritza or continued on up the Sereth. At Fundu
we could not hear of any such boat, so she must have passed there in the
night. I am feeling very sleepy; the cold is perhaps beginning to tell
upon me, and nature must have rest some time. Godalming insists that he
shall keep the first watch. God bless him for all his goodness to poor
dear Mina and me.

       *       *       *       *       *

_2 November, morning._--It is broad daylight. That good fellow would not
wake me. He says it would have been a sin to, for I slept peacefully and
was forgetting my trouble. It seems brutally selfish to me to have slept
so long, and let him watch all night; but he was quite right. I am a new
man this morning; and, as I sit here and watch him sleeping, I can do
all that is necessary both as to minding the engine, steering, and
keeping watch. I can feel that my strength and energy are coming back to
me. I wonder where Mina is now, and Van Helsing. They should have got to
Veresti about noon on Wednesday. It would take them some time to get the
carriage and horses; so if they had started and travelled hard, they
would be about now at the Borgo Pass. God guide and help them! I am
afraid to think what may happen. If we could only go faster! but we
cannot; the engines are throbbing and doing their utmost. I wonder how
Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris are getting on. There seem to be endless
streams running down the mountains into this river, but as none of them
are very large--at present, at all events, though they are terrible
doubtless in winter and when the snow melts--the horsemen may not have
met much obstruction. I hope that before we get to Strasba we may see
them; for if by that time we have not overtaken the Count, it may be
necessary to take counsel together what to do next.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_2 November._--Three days on the road. No news, and no time to write it
if there had been, for every moment is precious. We have had only the
rest needful for the horses; but we are both bearing it wonderfully.
Those adventurous days of ours are turning up useful. We must push on;
we shall never feel happy till we get the launch in sight again.

       *       *       *       *       *

_3 November._--We heard at Fundu that the launch had gone up the
Bistritza. I wish it wasn't so cold. There are signs of snow coming; and
if it falls heavy it will stop us. In such case we must get a sledge and
go on, Russian fashion.

       *       *       *       *       *

_4 November._--To-day we heard of the launch having been detained by an
accident when trying to force a way up the rapids. The Slovak boats get
up all right, by aid of a rope and steering with knowledge. Some went up
only a few hours before. Godalming is an amateur fitter himself, and
evidently it was he who put the launch in trim again. Finally, they got
up the rapids all right, with local help, and are off on the chase
afresh. I fear that the boat is not any better for the accident; the
peasantry tell us that after she got upon smooth water again, she kept
stopping every now and again so long as she was in sight. We must push
on harder than ever; our help may be wanted soon.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_31 October._--Arrived at Veresti at noon. The Professor tells me that
this morning at dawn he could hardly hypnotise me at all, and that all I
could say was: "dark and quiet." He is off now buying a carriage and
horses. He says that he will later on try to buy additional horses, so
that we may be able to change them on the way. We have something more
than 70 miles before us. The country is lovely, and most interesting; if
only we were under different conditions, how delightful it would be to
see it all. If Jonathan and I were driving through it alone what a
pleasure it would be. To stop and see people, and learn something of
their life, and to fill our minds and memories with all the colour and
picturesqueness of the whole wild, beautiful country and the quaint
people! But, alas!--

       *       *       *       *       *

_Later._--Dr. Van Helsing has returned. He has got the carriage and
horses; we are to have some dinner, and to start in an hour. The
landlady is putting us up a huge basket of provisions; it seems enough
for a company of soldiers. The Professor encourages her, and whispers to
me that it may be a week before we can get any good food again. He has
been shopping too, and has sent home such a wonderful lot of fur coats
and wraps, and all sorts of warm things. There will not be any chance of
our being cold.

       *       *       *       *       *

We shall soon be off. I am afraid to think what may happen to us. We are
truly in the hands of God. He alone knows what may be, and I pray Him,
with all the strength of my sad and humble soul, that He will watch over
my beloved husband; that whatever may happen, Jonathan may know that I
loved him and honoured him more than I can say, and that my latest and
truest thought will be always for him.




CHAPTER XXVII

MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL


_1 November._--All day long we have travelled, and at a good speed. The
horses seem to know that they are being kindly treated, for they go
willingly their full stage at best speed. We have now had so many
changes and find the same thing so constantly that we are encouraged to
think that the journey will be an easy one. Dr. Van Helsing is laconic;
he tells the farmers that he is hurrying to Bistritz, and pays them well
to make the exchange of horses. We get hot soup, or coffee, or tea; and
off we go. It is a lovely country; full of beauties of all imaginable
kinds, and the people are brave, and strong, and simple, and seem full
of nice qualities. They are _very, very_ superstitious. In the first
house where we stopped, when the woman who served us saw the scar on my
forehead, she crossed herself and put out two fingers towards me, to
keep off the evil eye. I believe they went to the trouble of putting an
extra amount of garlic into our food; and I can't abide garlic. Ever
since then I have taken care not to take off my hat or veil, and so have
escaped their suspicions. We are travelling fast, and as we have no
driver with us to carry tales, we go ahead of scandal; but I daresay
that fear of the evil eye will follow hard behind us all the way. The
Professor seems tireless; all day he would not take any rest, though he
made me sleep for a long spell. At sunset time he hypnotised me, and he
says that I answered as usual "darkness, lapping water and creaking
wood"; so our enemy is still on the river. I am afraid to think of
Jonathan, but somehow I have now no fear for him, or for myself. I write
this whilst we wait in a farmhouse for the horses to be got ready. Dr.
Van Helsing is sleeping, Poor dear, he looks very tired and old and
grey, but his mouth is set as firmly as a conqueror's; even in his sleep
he is instinct with resolution. When we have well started I must make
him rest whilst I drive. I shall tell him that we have days before us,
and we must not break down when most of all his strength will be
needed.... All is ready; we are off shortly.

       *       *       *       *       *

_2 November, morning._--I was successful, and we took turns driving all
night; now the day is on us, bright though cold. There is a strange
heaviness in the air--I say heaviness for want of a better word; I mean
that it oppresses us both. It is very cold, and only our warm furs keep
us comfortable. At dawn Van Helsing hypnotised me; he says I answered
"darkness, creaking wood and roaring water," so the river is changing as
they ascend. I do hope that my darling will not run any chance of
danger--more than need be; but we are in God's hands.

       *       *       *       *       *

_2 November, night._--All day long driving. The country gets wilder as
we go, and the great spurs of the Carpathians, which at Veresti seemed
so far from us and so low on the horizon, now seem to gather round us
and tower in front. We both seem in good spirits; I think we make an
effort each to cheer the other; in the doing so we cheer ourselves. Dr.
Van Helsing says that by morning we shall reach the Borgo Pass. The
houses are very few here now, and the Professor says that the last horse
we got will have to go on with us, as we may not be able to change. He
got two in addition to the two we changed, so that now we have a rude
four-in-hand. The dear horses are patient and good, and they give us no
trouble. We are not worried with other travellers, and so even I can
drive. We shall get to the Pass in daylight; we do not want to arrive
before. So we take it easy, and have each a long rest in turn. Oh, what
will to-morrow bring to us? We go to seek the place where my poor
darling suffered so much. God grant that we may be guided aright, and
that He will deign to watch over my husband and those dear to us both,
and who are in such deadly peril. As for me, I am not worthy in His
sight. Alas! I am unclean to His eyes, and shall be until He may deign
to let me stand forth in His sight as one of those who have not incurred
His wrath.


_Memorandum by Abraham Van Helsing._

_4 November._--This to my old and true friend John Seward, M.D., of
Purfleet, London, in case I may not see him. It may explain. It is
morning, and I write by a fire which all the night I have kept
alive--Madam Mina aiding me. It is cold, cold; so cold that the grey
heavy sky is full of snow, which when it falls will settle for all
winter as the ground is hardening to receive it. It seems to have
affected Madam Mina; she has been so heavy of head all day that she was
not like herself. She sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps! She who is usual
so alert, have done literally nothing all the day; she even have lost
her appetite. She make no entry into her little diary, she who write so
faithful at every pause. Something whisper to me that all is not well.
However, to-night she is more _vif_. Her long sleep all day have refresh
and restore her, for now she is all sweet and bright as ever. At sunset
I try to hypnotise her, but alas! with no effect; the power has grown
less and less with each day, and to-night it fail me altogether. Well,
God's will be done--whatever it may be, and whithersoever it may lead!

Now to the historical, for as Madam Mina write not in her stenography, I
must, in my cumbrous old fashion, that so each day of us may not go
unrecorded.

We got to the Borgo Pass just after sunrise yesterday morning. When I
saw the signs of the dawn I got ready for the hypnotism. We stopped our
carriage, and got down so that there might be no disturbance. I made a
couch with furs, and Madam Mina, lying down, yield herself as usual, but
more slow and more short time than ever, to the hypnotic sleep. As
before, came the answer: "darkness and the swirling of water." Then she
woke, bright and radiant and we go on our way and soon reach the Pass.
At this time and place, she become all on fire with zeal; some new
guiding power be in her manifested, for she point to a road and say:--

"This is the way."

"How know you it?" I ask.

"Of course I know it," she answer, and with a pause, add: "Have not my
Jonathan travelled it and wrote of his travel?"

At first I think somewhat strange, but soon I see that there be only one
such by-road. It is used but little, and very different from the coach
road from the Bukovina to Bistritz, which is more wide and hard, and
more of use.

So we came down this road; when we meet other ways--not always were we
sure that they were roads at all, for they be neglect and light snow
have fallen--the horses know and they only. I give rein to them, and
they go on so patient. By-and-by we find all the things which Jonathan
have note in that wonderful diary of him. Then we go on for long, long
hours and hours. At the first, I tell Madam Mina to sleep; she try, and
she succeed. She sleep all the time; till at the last, I feel myself to
suspicious grow, and attempt to wake her. But she sleep on, and I may
not wake her though I try. I do not wish to try too hard lest I harm
her; for I know that she have suffer much, and sleep at times be
all-in-all to her. I think I drowse myself, for all of sudden I feel
guilt, as though I have done something; I find myself bolt up, with the
reins in my hand, and the good horses go along jog, jog, just as ever. I
look down and find Madam Mina still sleep. It is now not far off sunset
time, and over the snow the light of the sun flow in big yellow flood,
so that we throw great long shadow on where the mountain rise so steep.
For we are going up, and up; and all is oh! so wild and rocky, as though
it were the end of the world.

Then I arouse Madam Mina. This time she wake with not much trouble, and
then I try to put her to hypnotic sleep. But she sleep not, being as
though I were not. Still I try and try, till all at once I find her and
myself in dark; so I look round, and find that the sun have gone down.
Madam Mina laugh, and I turn and look at her. She is now quite awake,
and look so well as I never saw her since that night at Carfax when we
first enter the Count's house. I am amaze, and not at ease then; but she
is so bright and tender and thoughtful for me that I forget all fear. I
light a fire, for we have brought supply of wood with us, and she
prepare food while I undo the horses and set them, tethered in shelter,
to feed. Then when I return to the fire she have my supper ready. I go
to help her; but she smile, and tell me that she have eat already--that
she was so hungry that she would not wait. I like it not, and I have
grave doubts; but I fear to affright her, and so I am silent of it. She
help me and I eat alone; and then we wrap in fur and lie beside the
fire, and I tell her to sleep while I watch. But presently I forget all
of watching; and when I sudden remember that I watch, I find her lying
quiet, but awake, and looking at me with so bright eyes. Once, twice
more the same occur, and I get much sleep till before morning. When I
wake I try to hypnotise her; but alas! though she shut her eyes
obedient, she may not sleep. The sun rise up, and up, and up; and then
sleep come to her too late, but so heavy that she will not wake. I have
to lift her up, and place her sleeping in the carriage when I have
harnessed the horses and made all ready. Madam still sleep, and she look
in her sleep more healthy and more redder than before. And I like it
not. And I am afraid, afraid, afraid!--I am afraid of all things--even
to think but I must go on my way. The stake we play for is life and
death, or more than these, and we must not flinch.

       *       *       *       *       *

_5 November, morning._--Let me be accurate in everything, for though you
and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think
that I, Van Helsing, am mad--that the many horrors and the so long
strain on nerves has at the last turn my brain.

All yesterday we travel, ever getting closer to the mountains, and
moving into a more and more wild and desert land. There are great,
frowning precipices and much falling water, and Nature seem to have held
sometime her carnival. Madam Mina still sleep and sleep; and though I
did have hunger and appeased it, I could not waken her--even for food. I
began to fear that the fatal spell of the place was upon her, tainted as
she is with that Vampire baptism. "Well," said I to myself, "if it be
that she sleep all the day, it shall also be that I do not sleep at
night." As we travel on the rough road, for a road of an ancient and
imperfect kind there was, I held down my head and slept. Again I waked
with a sense of guilt and of time passed, and found Madam Mina still
sleeping, and the sun low down. But all was indeed changed; the frowning
mountains seemed further away, and we were near the top of a
steep-rising hill, on summit of which was such a castle as Jonathan tell
of in his diary. At once I exulted and feared; for now, for good or ill,
the end was near.

I woke Madam Mina, and again tried to hypnotise her; but alas!
unavailing till too late. Then, ere the great dark came upon us--for
even after down-sun the heavens reflected the gone sun on the snow, and
all was for a time in a great twilight--I took out the horses and fed
them in what shelter I could. Then I make a fire; and near it I make
Madam Mina, now awake and more charming than ever, sit comfortable amid
her rugs. I got ready food: but she would not eat, simply saying that
she had not hunger. I did not press her, knowing her unavailingness. But
I myself eat, for I must needs now be strong for all. Then, with the
fear on me of what might be, I drew a ring so big for her comfort, round
where Madam Mina sat; and over the ring I passed some of the wafer, and
I broke it fine so that all was well guarded. She sat still all the
time--so still as one dead; and she grew whiter and ever whiter till the
snow was not more pale; and no word she said. But when I drew near, she
clung to me, and I could know that the poor soul shook her from head to
feet with a tremor that was pain to feel. I said to her presently, when
she had grown more quiet:--

"Will you not come over to the fire?" for I wished to make a test of
what she could. She rose obedient, but when she have made a step she
stopped, and stood as one stricken.

"Why not go on?" I asked. She shook her head, and, coming back, sat
down in her place. Then, looking at me with open eyes, as of one waked
from sleep, she said simply:--

"I cannot!" and remained silent. I rejoiced, for I knew that what she
could not, none of those that we dreaded could. Though there might be
danger to her body, yet her soul was safe!

Presently the horses began to scream, and tore at their tethers till I
came to them and quieted them. When they did feel my hands on them, they
whinnied low as in joy, and licked at my hands and were quiet for a
time. Many times through the night did I come to them, till it arrive to
the cold hour when all nature is at lowest; and every time my coming was
with quiet of them. In the cold hour the fire began to die, and I was
about stepping forth to replenish it, for now the snow came in flying
sweeps and with it a chill mist. Even in the dark there was a light of
some kind, as there ever is over snow; and it seemed as though the
snow-flurries and the wreaths of mist took shape as of women with
trailing garments. All was in dead, grim silence only that the horses
whinnied and cowered, as if in terror of the worst. I began to
fear--horrible fears; but then came to me the sense of safety in that
ring wherein I stood. I began, too, to think that my imaginings were of
the night, and the gloom, and the unrest that I have gone through, and
all the terrible anxiety. It was as though my memories of all Jonathan's
horrid experience were befooling me; for the snow flakes and the mist
began to wheel and circle round, till I could get as though a shadowy
glimpse of those women that would have kissed him. And then the horses
cowered lower and lower, and moaned in terror as men do in pain. Even
the madness of fright was not to them, so that they could break away. I
feared for my dear Madam Mina when these weird figures drew near and
circled round. I looked at her, but she sat calm, and smiled at me; when
I would have stepped to the fire to replenish it, she caught me and held
me back, and whispered, like a voice that one hears in a dream, so low
it was:--

"No! No! Do not go without. Here you are safe!" I turned to her, and
looking in her eyes, said:--

"But you? It is for you that I fear!" whereat she laughed--a laugh, low
and unreal, and said:--

"Fear for _me_! Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from them
than I am," and as I wondered at the meaning of her words, a puff of
wind made the flame leap up, and I see the red scar on her forehead.
Then, alas! I knew. Did I not, I would soon have learned, for the
wheeling figures of mist and snow came closer, but keeping ever without
the Holy circle. Then they began to materialise till--if God have not
take away my reason, for I saw it through my eyes--there were before me
in actual flesh the same three women that Jonathan saw in the room, when
they would have kissed his throat. I knew the swaying round forms, the
bright hard eyes, the white teeth, the ruddy colour, the voluptuous
lips. They smiled ever at poor dear Madam Mina; and as their laugh came
through the silence of the night, they twined their arms and pointed to
her, and said in those so sweet tingling tones that Jonathan said were
of the intolerable sweetness of the water-glasses:--

"Come, sister. Come to us. Come! Come!" In fear I turned to my poor
Madam Mina, and my heart with gladness leapt like flame; for oh! the
terror in her sweet eyes, the repulsion, the horror, told a story to my
heart that was all of hope. God be thanked she was not, yet, of them. I
seized some of the firewood which was by me, and holding out some of the
Wafer, advanced on them towards the fire. They drew back before me, and
laughed their low horrid laugh. I fed the fire, and feared them not; for
I knew that we were safe within our protections. They could not
approach, me, whilst so armed, nor Madam Mina whilst she remained within
the ring, which she could not leave no more than they could enter. The
horses had ceased to moan, and lay still on the ground; the snow fell on
them softly, and they grew whiter. I knew that there was for the poor
beasts no more of terror.

And so we remained till the red of the dawn to fall through the
snow-gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror; but
when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again.
At the first coming of the dawn the horrid figures melted in the
whirling mist and snow; the wreaths of transparent gloom moved away
towards the castle, and were lost.

Instinctively, with the dawn coming, I turned to Madam Mina, intending
to hypnotise her; but she lay in a deep and sudden sleep, from which I
could not wake her. I tried to hypnotise through her sleep, but she made
no response, none at all; and the day broke. I fear yet to stir. I have
made my fire and have seen the horses, they are all dead. To-day I have
much to do here, and I keep waiting till the sun is up high; for there
may be places where I must go, where that sunlight, though snow and mist
obscure it, will be to me a safety.

I will strengthen me with breakfast, and then I will to my terrible
work. Madam Mina still sleeps; and, God be thanked! she is calm in her
sleep....


_Jonathan Harker's Journal._

_4 November, evening._--The accident to the launch has been a terrible
thing for us. Only for it we should have overtaken the boat long ago;
and by now my dear Mina would have been free. I fear to think of her,
off on the wolds near that horrid place. We have got horses, and we
follow on the track. I note this whilst Godalming is getting ready. We
have our arms. The Szgany must look out if they mean fight. Oh, if only
Morris and Seward were with us. We must only hope! If I write no more
Good-bye, Mina! God bless and keep you.


_Dr. Seward's Diary._

_5 November._--With the dawn we saw the body of Szgany before us dashing
away from the river with their leiter-wagon. They surrounded it in a
cluster, and hurried along as though beset. The snow is falling lightly
and there is a strange excitement in the air. It may be our own
feelings, but the depression is strange. Far off I hear the howling of
wolves; the snow brings them down from the mountains, and there are
dangers to all of us, and from all sides. The horses are nearly ready,
and we are soon off. We ride to death of some one. God alone knows who,
or where, or what, or when, or how it may be....


_Dr. Van Helsing's Memorandum._

_5 November, afternoon._--I am at least sane. Thank God for that mercy
at all events, though the proving it has been dreadful. When I left
Madam Mina sleeping within the Holy circle, I took my way to the castle.
The blacksmith hammer which I took in the carriage from Veresti was
useful; though the doors were all open I broke them off the rusty
hinges, lest some ill-intent or ill-chance should close them, so that
being entered I might not get out. Jonathan's bitter experience served
me here. By memory of his diary I found my way to the old chapel, for I
knew that here my work lay. The air was oppressive; it seemed as if
there was some sulphurous fume, which at times made me dizzy. Either
there was a roaring in my ears or I heard afar off the howl of wolves.
Then I bethought me of my dear Madam Mina, and I was in terrible plight.
The dilemma had me between his horns.

Her, I had not dare to take into this place, but left safe from the
Vampire in that Holy circle; and yet even there would be the wolf! I
resolve me that my work lay here, and that as to the wolves we must
submit, if it were God's will. At any rate it was only death and
freedom beyond. So did I choose for her. Had it but been for myself the
choice had been easy, the maw of the wolf were better to rest in than
the grave of the Vampire! So I make my choice to go on with my work.

I knew that there were at least three graves to find--graves that are
inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her
Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as
though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when
such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine,
found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay,
and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the
wanton Un-Dead have hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, till sunset
come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair
woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a
kiss--and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire
fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead!...

There is some fascination, surely, when I am moved by the mere presence
of such an one, even lying as she lay in a tomb fretted with age and
heavy with the dust of centuries, though there be that horrid odour such
as the lairs of the Count have had. Yes, I was moved--I, Van Helsing,
with all my purpose and with my motive for hate--I was moved to a
yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my faculties and to clog my
very soul. It may have been that the need of natural sleep, and the
strange oppression of the air were beginning to overcome me. Certain it
was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields
to a sweet fascination, when there came through the snow-stilled air a
long, low wail, so full of woe and pity that it woke me like the sound
of a clarion. For it was the voice of my dear Madam Mina that I heard.

Then I braced myself again to my horrid task, and found by wrenching
away tomb-tops one other of the sisters, the other dark one. I dared not
pause to look on her as I had on her sister, lest once more I should
begin to be enthrall; but I go on searching until, presently, I find in
a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister
which, like Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of
the mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so
exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls
some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl
with new emotion. But God be thanked, that soul-wail of my dear Madam
Mina had not died out of my ears; and, before the spell could be wrought
further upon me, I had nerved myself to my wild work. By this time I had
searched all the tombs in the chapel, so far as I could tell; and as
there had been only three of these Un-Dead phantoms around us in the
night, I took it that there were no more of active Un-Dead existent.
There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and
nobly proportioned. On it was but one word

                                DRACULA.

This then was the Un-Dead home of the King-Vampire, to whom so many more
were due. Its emptiness spoke eloquent to make certain what I knew.
Before I began to restore these women to their dead selves through my
awful work, I laid in Dracula's tomb some of the Wafer, and so banished
him from it, Un-Dead, for ever.

Then began my terrible task, and I dreaded it. Had it been but one, it
had been easy, comparative. But three! To begin twice more after I had
been through a deed of horror; for if it was terrible with the sweet
Miss Lucy, what would it not be with these strange ones who had survived
through centuries, and who had been strengthened by the passing of the
years; who would, if they could, have fought for their foul lives....

Oh, my friend John, but it was butcher work; had I not been nerved by
thoughts of other dead, and of the living over whom hung such a pall of
fear, I could not have gone on. I tremble and tremble even yet, though
till all was over, God be thanked, my nerve did stand. Had I not seen
the repose in the first place, and the gladness that stole over it just
ere the final dissolution came, as realisation that the soul had been
won, I could not have gone further with my butchery. I could not have
endured the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of
writhing form, and lips of bloody foam. I should have fled in terror and
left my work undone. But it is over! And the poor souls, I can pity them
now and weep, as I think of them placid each in her full sleep of death
for a short moment ere fading. For, friend John, hardly had my knife
severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and
crumble in to its native dust, as though the death that should have come
centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud "I
am here!"

Before I left the castle I so fixed its entrances that never more can
the Count enter there Un-Dead.

When I stepped into the circle where Madam Mina slept, she woke from her
sleep, and, seeing, me, cried out in pain that I had endured too much.

"Come!" she said, "come away from this awful place! Let us go to meet my
husband who is, I know, coming towards us." She was looking thin and
pale and weak; but her eyes were pure and glowed with fervour. I was
glad to see her paleness and her illness, for my mind was full of the
fresh horror of that ruddy vampire sleep.

And so with trust and hope, and yet full of fear, we go eastward to meet
our friends--and _him_--whom Madam Mina tell me that she _know_ are
coming to meet us.


_Mina Harker's Journal._

_6 November._--It was late in the afternoon when the Professor and I
took our way towards the east whence I knew Jonathan was coming. We did
not go fast, though the way was steeply downhill, for we had to take
heavy rugs and wraps with us; we dared not face the possibility of being
left without warmth in the cold and the snow. We had to take some of our
provisions, too, for we were in a perfect desolation, and, so far as we
could see through the snowfall, there was not even the sign of
habitation. When we had gone about a mile, I was tired with the heavy
walking and sat down to rest. Then we looked back and saw where the
clear line of Dracula's castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under
the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the
Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur,
perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with
seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain
on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We
could hear the distant howling of wolves. They were far off, but the
sound, even though coming muffled through the deadening snowfall, was
full of terror. I knew from the way Dr. Van Helsing was searching about
that he was trying to seek some strategic point, where we would be less
exposed in case of attack. The rough roadway still led downwards; we
could trace it through the drifted snow.

In a little while the Professor signalled to me, so I got up and joined
him. He had found a wonderful spot, a sort of natural hollow in a rock,
with an entrance like a doorway between two boulders. He took me by the
hand and drew me in: "See!" he said, "here you will be in shelter; and
if the wolves do come I can meet them one by one." He brought in our
furs, and made a snug nest for me, and got out some provisions and
forced them upon me. But I could not eat; to even try to do so was
repulsive to me, and, much as I would have liked to please him, I could
not bring myself to the attempt. He looked very sad, but did not
reproach me. Taking his field-glasses from the case, he stood on the top
of the rock, and began to search the horizon. Suddenly he called out:--

"Look! Madam Mina, look! look!" I sprang up and stood beside him on the
rock; he handed me his glasses and pointed. The snow was now falling
more heavily, and swirled about fiercely, for a high wind was beginning
to blow. However, there were times when there were pauses between the
snow flurries and I could see a long way round. From the height where we
were it was possible to see a great distance; and far off, beyond the
white waste of snow, I could see the river lying like a black ribbon in
kinks and curls as it wound its way. Straight in front of us and not far
off--in fact, so near that I wondered we had not noticed before--came a
group of mounted men hurrying along. In the midst of them was a cart, a
long leiter-wagon which swept from side to side, like a dog's tail
wagging, with each stern inequality of the road. Outlined against the
snow as they were, I could see from the men's clothes that they were
peasants or gypsies of some kind.

On the cart was a great square chest. My heart leaped as I saw it, for I
felt that the end was coming. The evening was now drawing close, and
well I knew that at sunset the Thing, which was till then imprisoned
there, would take new freedom and could in any of many forms elude all
pursuit. In fear I turned to the Professor; to my consternation,
however, he was not there. An instant later, I saw him below me. Round
the rock he had drawn a circle, such as we had found shelter in last
night. When he had completed it he stood beside me again, saying:--

"At least you shall be safe here from _him_!" He took the glasses from
me, and at the next lull of the snow swept the whole space below us.
"See," he said, "they come quickly; they are flogging the horses, and
galloping as hard as they can." He paused and went on in a hollow
voice:--

"They are racing for the sunset. We may be too late. God's will be
done!" Down came another blinding rush of driving snow, and the whole
landscape was blotted out. It soon passed, however, and once more his
glasses were fixed on the plain. Then came a sudden cry:--

"Look! Look! Look! See, two horsemen follow fast, coming up from the
south. It must be Quincey and John. Take the glass. Look before the snow
blots it all out!" I took it and looked. The two men might be Dr. Seward
and Mr. Morris. I knew at all events that neither of them was Jonathan.
At the same time I _knew_ that Jonathan was not far off; looking around
I saw on the north side of the coming party two other men, riding at
break-neck speed. One of them I knew was Jonathan, and the other I took,
of course, to be Lord Godalming. They, too, were pursuing the party with
the cart. When I told the Professor he shouted in glee like a schoolboy,
and, after looking intently till a snow fall made sight impossible, he
laid his Winchester rifle ready for use against the boulder at the
opening of our shelter. "They are all converging," he said. "When the
time comes we shall have gypsies on all sides." I got out my revolver
ready to hand, for whilst we were speaking the howling of wolves came
louder and closer. When the snow storm abated a moment we looked again.
It was strange to see the snow falling in such heavy flakes close to us,
and beyond, the sun shining more and more brightly as it sank down
towards the far mountain tops. Sweeping the glass all around us I could
see here and there dots moving singly and in twos and threes and larger
numbers--the wolves were gathering for their prey.

Every instant seemed an age whilst we waited. The wind came now in
fierce bursts, and the snow was driven with fury as it swept upon us in
circling eddies. At times we could not see an arm's length before us;
but at others, as the hollow-sounding wind swept by us, it seemed to
clear the air-space around us so that we could see afar off. We had of
late been so accustomed to watch for sunrise and sunset, that we knew
with fair accuracy when it would be; and we knew that before long the
sun would set. It was hard to believe that by our watches it was less
than an hour that we waited in that rocky shelter before the various
bodies began to converge close upon us. The wind came now with fiercer
and more bitter sweeps, and more steadily from the north. It seemingly
had driven the snow clouds from us, for, with only occasional bursts,
the snow fell. We could distinguish clearly the individuals of each
party, the pursued and the pursuers. Strangely enough those pursued did
not seem to realise, or at least to care, that they were pursued; they
seemed, however, to hasten with redoubled speed as the sun dropped lower
and lower on the mountain tops.

Closer and closer they drew. The Professor and I crouched down behind
our rock, and held our weapons ready; I could see that he was determined
that they should not pass. One and all were quite unaware of our
presence.

All at once two voices shouted out to: "Halt!" One was my Jonathan's,
raised in a high key of passion; the other Mr. Morris' strong resolute
tone of quiet command. The gypsies may not have known the language, but
there was no mistaking the tone, in whatever tongue the words were
spoken. Instinctively they reined in, and at the instant Lord Godalming
and Jonathan dashed up at one side and Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris on the
other. The leader of the gypsies, a splendid-looking fellow who sat his
horse like a centaur, waved them back, and in a fierce voice gave to his
companions some word to proceed. They lashed the horses which sprang
forward; but the four men raised their Winchester rifles, and in an
unmistakable way commanded them to stop. At the same moment Dr. Van
Helsing and I rose behind the rock and pointed our weapons at them.
Seeing that they were surrounded the men tightened their reins and drew
up. The leader turned to them and gave a word at which every man of the
gypsy party drew what weapon he carried, knife or pistol, and held
himself in readiness to attack. Issue was joined in an instant.

The leader, with a quick movement of his rein, threw his horse out in
front, and pointing first to the sun--now close down on the hill
tops--and then to the castle, said something which I did not understand.
For answer, all four men of our party threw themselves from their horses
and dashed towards the cart. I should have felt terrible fear at seeing
Jonathan in such danger, but that the ardour of battle must have been
upon me as well as the rest of them; I felt no fear, but only a wild,
surging desire to do something. Seeing the quick movement of our
parties, the leader of the gypsies gave a command; his men instantly
formed round the cart in a sort of undisciplined endeavour, each one
shouldering and pushing the other in his eagerness to carry out the
order.

In the midst of this I could see that Jonathan on one side of the ring
of men, and Quincey on the other, were forcing a way to the cart; it was
evident that they were bent on finishing their task before the sun
should set. Nothing seemed to stop or even to hinder them. Neither the
levelled weapons nor the flashing knives of the gypsies in front, nor
the howling of the wolves behind, appeared to even attract their
attention. Jonathan's impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his
purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they
cowered, aside and let him pass. In an instant he had jumped upon the
cart, and, with a strength which seemed incredible, raised the great
box, and flung it over the wheel to the ground. In the meantime, Mr.
Morris had had to use force to pass through his side of the ring of
Szgany. All the time I had been breathlessly watching Jonathan I had,
with the tail of my eye, seen him pressing desperately forward, and had
seen the knives of the gypsies flash as he won a way through them, and
they cut at him. He had parried with his great bowie knife, and at first
I thought that he too had come through in safety; but as he sprang
beside Jonathan, who had by now jumped from the cart, I could see that
with his left hand he was clutching at his side, and that the blood was
spurting through his fingers. He did not delay notwithstanding this, for
as Jonathan, with desperate energy, attacked one end of the chest,
attempting to prize off the lid with his great Kukri knife, he attacked
the other frantically with his bowie. Under the efforts of both men the
lid began to yield; the nails drew with a quick screeching sound, and
the top of the box was thrown back.

By this time the gypsies, seeing themselves covered by the Winchesters,
and at the mercy of Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward, had given in and made
no resistance. The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the
shadows of the whole group fell long upon the snow. I saw the Count
lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from
the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen
image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I
knew too well.

As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them
turned to triumph.

But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife.
I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same
moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.

It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the
drawing of a breath, the whole body crumble into dust and passed from
our sight.

I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final
dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never
could have imagined might have rested there.

The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone
of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the
setting sun.

The gypsies, taking us as in some way the cause of the extraordinary
disappearance of the dead man, turned, without a word, and rode away as
if for their lives. Those who were unmounted jumped upon the
leiter-wagon and shouted to the horsemen not to desert them. The wolves,
which had withdrawn to a safe distance, followed in their wake, leaving
us alone.

Mr. Morris, who had sunk to the ground, leaned on his elbow, holding his
hand pressed to his side; the blood still gushed through his fingers. I
flew to him, for the Holy circle did not now keep me back; so did the
two doctors. Jonathan knelt behind him and the wounded man laid back his
head on his shoulder. With a sigh he took, with a feeble effort, my hand
in that of his own which was unstained. He must have seen the anguish of
my heart in my face, for he smiled at me and said:--

"I am only too happy to have been of any service! Oh, God!" he cried
suddenly, struggling up to a sitting posture and pointing to me, "It was
worth for this to die! Look! look!"

The sun was now right down upon the mountain top, and the red gleams
fell upon my face, so that it was bathed in rosy light. With one impulse
the men sank on their knees and a deep and earnest "Amen" broke from all
as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. The dying man
spoke:--

"Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not
more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!"

And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a
gallant gentleman.




                                  NOTE


Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of
some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It
is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the same
day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the
secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed into
him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but
we call him Quincey.

In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went
over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and
terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things
which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were
living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The
castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.

When we got home we were talking of the old time--which we could all
look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily
married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since
our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the
mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one
authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later
note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum.
We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as
proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with
our boy on his knee:--

"We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day
know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her
sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so
loved her, that they did dare much for her sake."

JONATHAN HARKER.

                                THE END

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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

in a very simply way=> in a very simple way {pg 68}

"The Westminister Gazette," 25 September.=> "The Westminster Gazette,"
25 September. {pg 165}

It have told him=> She must have told him {pg 169}

from md sight=> from my sight {pg}184

Goldaming=> Godalming {pg 226}

I I did not want to hinder him=> I did not want to hinder him {pg 267}

They lay in a sort of or-orderly=> They lay in a sort of orderly {pg
279}

Translyvania=> Transylvania {pg 294}

this mrrning from Dardanelles=> this morning from Dardanelles {pg 313}







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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume
XLVIII, 1751-1765, by Various

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Title: The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XLVIII, 1751-1765
       Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the
       islands and their peoples, their history and records of
       the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books
       and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial
       and religious conditions of those islands from their
       earliest relations with European nations to the close of
       the nineteenth century,

Author: Various

Contributor: Edward Gaylord Bourne

Editor: Emma Helen Blair
        James Alexander Robertson

Release Date: May 17, 2017 [EBook #54740]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, VOL XLVIII ***




Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net/ for Project
Gutenberg.








                   The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898

   Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and
   their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions,
    as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the
   political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those
   islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the
                    close of the nineteenth century,

                        Volume XLVIII, 1751-1765



 Edited and annotated by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson
  with historical introduction and additional notes by Edward Gaylord
                                Bourne.



                      The Arthur H. Clark Company
                            Cleveland, Ohio
                                 MCMVII








CONTENTS OF VOLUME XLVIII


    Preface                                                         13

    Documents of 1751-1762:

        Usurpation of Indian lands by friars. Fernando VI;
        San Lorenzo, November 7, 1751                               27
        Moro raids repulsed by Visayans. [Unsigned];
        Manila, [1755]                                              37
        Augustinian parishes and missions, 1760. Pedro Velasco,
        O.S.A.; Tondo, April 16, 1760                               52
        Later Augustinian and Dominican missions. Antonio
        Mozo, O.S.A.; Madrid, 1763. Bernardo Ustáriz, O.P.;
        Manila, 1745                                                59
        Events in Filipinas, 1739-1762. [Compiled from Martinez
        de Zúñiga and other writers.]                              137

    Memorial of 1765. Francisco Leandro de Viana; Manila,
    February 10, 1765                                              197

    Bibliographical Data                                           339








ILLUSTRATIONS


    Map of the Philippine Islands; photographic facsimile from
    original map in Murillo Velarde's Historia de la provincia
    de Philipinas (Manila, 1749); from copy in possession of
    Edward E. Ayer, Chicago                               Frontispiece
    Map of Leyte, from original MS. of P. Pagteel, in
    collection of Charts by Alexander Dalrymple ([London],
    1788), ii, p. 76; photographic facsimile from copy in
    Library of Congress                                             39
    Plan of the new Alcaicería of San Fernando, 1756;
    photographic facsimile from original manuscript in
    Archivo general de Indias, Sevilla                             181
    View of Spanish city and fort of Gammalamma, Terrenate;
    photographic facsimile from Recueil des voiages Comp.
    Indes orientales (Amsterdam, 1725); iii, p. 348; from
    copy in library of Wisconsin Historical Society                213
    Plan of the citadel of Santiago at Manila; photographic
    facsimile from original manuscript in Archivo general de
    Indias, Sevilla                                                219
    Map of Mindanao, 1757; by Nicolás Norton Nicols;
    photographic facsimile from original manuscript in Archivo
    general de Indias, Sevilla                                     281








PREFACE


The contents of the present volume (dated 1751-65) include accounts
of the missionary efforts of the Augustinian and Dominican orders, and
events in Filipinas from 1739 to the beginning of the English invasion;
and the survey of the condition and needs of the islands which is
presented in the memorial by the royal fiscal Viana. A valuable
feature in the missionary reports is the ethnological information
furnished therein regarding the savage tribes of Central Luzón;
and the self-sacrifice and devotion of the missionaries themselves
appear in striking contrast with the unscrupulous greed displayed,
as one of the short documents shows, in the management of the friar
estates near Manila. The times are troublous for the colony: several
insurrections occur among the natives, the Acapulco galleon of 1743
is captured by the English, the Moro pirates ravage the archipelago
with enormous destruction of life and property, and the Spaniards
are defeated by them. Governor Arandia attempts to establish reforms,
and thus incurs much odium; he is engaged in numerous controversies,
and finally dies. Viana's memorial presents a vivid picture of the
distressed condition of the Philippine colony after the English
invasion, its urgent need of relief, and the ways in which this may
be accomplished.

A letter by Fernando VI to the Manila Audiencia (November 7, 1751)
expresses his approval of the proceedings of Auditor Enriquez in
pacifying the insurgent Indians of certain villages near Manila and
in Bulacan--a revolt caused by the usurpation of Indian lands by
the managers of the friar estates, and the fraudulent proceedings of
government officials who aided such usurpation. Enriquez had pacified
the natives, deprived the friars of such lands as they held illegally,
and distributed these among those natives who were aggrieved; he also
investigated the titles by which the orders held their estates, and
regulated the proper boundaries of their lands. The king also commands
the Manila government to exercise vigilant care for the welfare of
the Indians, and to notify them that in their difficulties they must
have recourse to the royal fiscal for redress or aid.

In a rare pamphlet published at Manila in 1755, apparently written
by one of the Jesuit missionaries in Leyte, are enumerated various
instances when the raids of Moro pirates against the Visayan villages
in 1754 are repulsed by the natives, under the direction of their
spiritual guides; and one of these, the defense of Palompong, is
related at length. An official report (in MS.) made by the Augustinian
provincial (1760) shows the parishes and missions then in charge of
his order in the Philippines, with the population (classified as to
sex, age, etc.) of each one.

In the eighteenth century several important missions were conducted
by the Augustinians and Dominicans among the savage and untamed
head-hunting tribes of Central Luzón. Those of the former order are
recorded by Fray Antonio Mozo in his Noticia histórico natural (Madrid,
1763); he presents  much valuable information regarding those people,
whose first contact with European civilization was mainly found in
their intercourse with those missionaries. This begins, for the Italons
(now called Ibilao) and Abacas in 1702, when the Augustinians attempt
to christianize them--with fair success, considering the wildness and
ferocity of those people. They also carry the gospel among the Isinay,
a work which the Dominicans had been compelled to abandon as hopeless;
and within a quarter of a century the entire tribe have been baptized
and civilized by Fray Alejandro Cacho. In 1740 these Isinay missions
are ceded to the Dominican order. Among all these wild peoples, the
missionaries have introduced not only the gospel, but instruction
in farming and irrigation, and supplies of cattle and plows; and,
wherever possible, they have formed "reductions" or settlements of
their converts, usually in localities best adapted to the cultivation
of the soil.

The Augustinians carry on their missions among the Ilocans, the
Tinguians, the Igorots, the Zambals, and the Negritos--this last
having stations throughout the islands; also in Cebú and Panay,
and in China. Mozo narrates the progress of these missions, but
devotes much of his space to accounts of the wild tribes and their
peculiar customs and beliefs; this is especially fortunate for our
purpose in regard to the Negritos, about whom less has been known than
about the other Philippine peoples, Mozo's residence of three years
among them rendering his observations extremely valuable. He also
gave particular attention to the practices and medicines used by the
natives in sickness, and to the plants which are useful therein. Among
these missions the most arduous, according to our writer, was that
to the "apostates" and infidels who had taken refuge in a certain
mountainous and densely-wooded district; these renegades and heathen
dwelt together, each making the other worse. Among these people were
preserved many of the ancient pagan customs which the missionaries
had in most places been able to extirpate; and these are described by
Mozo. Even in this hard field, "multitudes of infidels were baptized
and hundreds of apostates reclaimed." The Augustinians also conduct
missions in the interior of Cebú and Panay, where not only are the
mountains rugged and the forests dense, but there are wizards among
the natives who "by conversing with the demon do things which cause
terror;" some account of their practices is given, as also of the
converts gained by missionaries among those people. He then describes
some of the medicines that are used by the natives. Among these are the
gall and fat of the python; a stone which, when applied to a woman's
thigh, would facilitate childbirth; and a plant which intoxicates
and infuriates those who go into battle. Another plant temporarily
paralyzes the muscular system. Mozo concludes with an account of the
Augustinian missions in China, which does not concern our work.

Some account of the Dominican missions in Central Luzón is
given by Bernardo Ustáriz (Manila, 1745) and Manuel del Río
(Mexico? ca. 1740). In Paniqui the missionaries have formed within
six years seven native churches, with nearly a thousand converts;
they are erecting substantial wooden buildings for religious purposes,
and have opened new roads and repaired old ones in order to facilitate
intercourse between the provinces. A neighboring tribe of head-hunters
have harassed the Christian districts, but a government expedition is
sent against them and checks their insolence; this success greatly
increases that of the missions, to which hundreds of natives flock
for instruction and baptism. Río gives a more detailed account of
the Paniqui mission, and of its early beginnings. Some of the first
missionaries were poisoned by heathen savages. The most interesting
feature of the Dominicans' labor in this region is their opening a
high-road from Asingan, Pangasinan, to Buhay in Ituy.

A brief résumé of events during the period 1739-62 is compiled from the
histories of the time; we have used for most of it Zúñiga's narrative,
copiously annotated from Concepción's and others. The royal fiscal
Arroyo is imprisoned by Governor Torre, in accordance with an order
issued by his predecessor; finally, the king orders restitution of
the fiscal's office, salary, and confiscated goods, but this finds
the unfortunate prisoner dead (1743). In the same year the English
commander Anson captures the Acapulco galleon "Covadonga," which causes
heavy loss to Manila. Two years later, Governor Torre dies, after a
troublous administration in which he incurs general odium. A revolt of
the natives in Balayan and Taal is promptly quelled. Torre is succeeded
by the bishop of Nueva Caceres, Juan de Arrechedera, a Dominican; his
administration is vigorous, and he does much for the defense of Manila
against possible enemies. In 1747 the new archbishop of Manila arrives
in the islands, but Arrechedera retains the office of governor. An
insurrection of the natives in Bohol is easily quelled. The king of
Spain writes conciliatory letters to the sultans of Mindanao and Joló,
who profess friendship, but prove to be scheming and unreliable;
they permit Jesuit missionaries to enter their countries, but these
are soon obliged to take refuge in Zamboanga. A rebellion in Joló
obliges its ruler to flee to Manila. In 1750 a new governor arrives
there, Francisco de Ovando; he finds much to do in making the little
navy of the islands effective and in equipping a squadron against
the Moros. He sends Alimudin back to his kingdom; but at Zamboanga
the sultan's actions are so indicative of treachery that he and all
his household are arrested and sent to Manila. War is then declared
against the Joloans, and another expedition is sent to attack them, but
the Spaniards are obliged to fall back on Zamboanga. This is followed
by piratical ravages throughout Filipinas, causing enormous losses of
property, and of persons taken captive by the Moros. Ovando sends the
captive Alimudin with a fleet to restore him to the throne of Joló; but
at Zamboanga he is suspected of disloyalty and treachery, and is sent
back to Manila as a prisoner. The Spaniards attack the town of Joló,
but are repulsed; this encourages the pirates to renew their raids,
and the Visayan Islands (and even Luzón) are cruelly harried. Ovando
is succeeded (1754) by Arandia as governor; he institutes reforms
in all directions, thus drawing upon himself much animosity, in both
secular and ecclesiastical quarters; and he makes treaties with the
Joloans. The Dominican missions are reestablished in the Batanes
Islands; and that order takes charge of the Isinay missions in Luzón,
which are conferred on it by the Augustinians. Zúñiga records his
opinions regarding the character of the Filipino natives and the
proper methods of conducting missions among them. In 1757 certain
ecclesiastical controversies in Tungquin are ended by decrees issued
at Rome. Arandia expels the heathen Chinese from the islands, and
builds for their trade the market of San Fernando. He becomes involved
in numerous controversies with the religious orders, and draws upon
himself much popular hatred--largely due to the acts of his favorite
Orendain. He makes the utmost exertions for the service of his king
and the islands, and finally, worn out by these fatigues, dies (May
31, 1759), an event probably hastened by poison. The government is
assumed by Bishop Espeleta, who even usurps it from Archbishop Rojo
for a time; but the latter becomes governor (1761) by royal decree. He
releases Orendain, who had been imprisoned for his official acts,
and provides comfortable quarters for the captive sultan of Joló. In
the following year occurs the siege and capture of Manila, which will
be related in VOL. XLIX.

Nearly half of this volume is occupied by the valuable memorial written
in 1765 by Francisco Leandro de Viana, then royal fiscal at Manila,
"Demonstration of the deplorably wretched state of the Philipinas
Islands." We are told that the Council of Indias refused to print this
document, a fact which indicates both the apathy and the corruption
existing in the Spanish court. Viana was a man of keen and logical
mind, clear and far vision, and great enthusiasm and energy; and he
evidently felt a deep sense of official responsibility and ardent zeal
as a Spanish patriot. In this memorial he describes the weakness,
danger, and almost destitution of the Philippine colony, and shows
the necessity of either abandoning it entirely or providing for it
suitable means of support; demonstrates that the latter course should
be adopted, and that it can be pursued if the natural resources of the
islands are developed. Viana sets forth the advantageous location of
the islands from both the commercial and strategic points of view,
and asserts that the English covet the islands as a vantage-point
for themselves, especially as a basis for their explorations on the
western coast of North America--of which, and of certain Spanish
explorations made in 1640, he gives some account--and for attacks on
the Spanish possessions in America. If Spain keeps the Philippines,
they must be put into a condition of defense, for which Viana makes
various suggestions, some as less costly alternatives for others. The
military forces of the islands should be enlarged, and the pay of
both officers and men increased, so that they may have the means to
support themselves decently. After this is accomplished, "the reduction
of all the Indian villages ought to be resolutely undertaken, as a
matter that is absolutely essential." This would result in a great
increase of the tribute-money, and in many benefits to both the
government and the Indian natives. Viana proposes an increase in the
rate of the tribute exacted from the natives, and various economies
in the administration of the islands; and urges that the Moros be
thoroughly punished. He devotes a long chapter to "arguments which
justify the increase of tributes." The expenses of administration in
the islands have steadily increased since their conquest, as also
have the needs of the Spanish crown; yet the Indians have not been
further taxed to meet these demands, as have the people of Spain;
they should now pay their share of the burden, and, moreover, they are
taxed very moderately. They are idle, improvident, and extravagant;
they might be rich, if they would labor even moderately; and an
increase in their tributes would require but little additional work
from them, which would also help to correct their slothfulness. This
vice, however, is also the bane of their Spanish masters, whom Viana
bitterly rebukes; but he urges that the Indians be compelled to do a
certain amount of work, especially in agricultural production. The
various rebellions of the natives of Filipinas constitute another
valid reason for increasing their tributes. Viana declares that, in
proposing this measure, he must at the same time protest against the
misuse or theft of its proceeds; and he rebukes, in scathing terms, the
recklessness, extravagance, and dishonesty of the Spanish officials,
and the unpunished corruption and misgovernment that prevail in Spain's
colonial administration. The increase of tributes can be secured only
by maintaining in the islands a military force sufficient to punish
and prevent the Moro raids, and to keep the Indians in wholesome awe;
and the alcaldes-mayor of the provinces should be more carefully chosen
and better paid. All military supplies should be kept at Cavite instead
of (as now) Manila. As an alternative for increasing the tributes,
Viana suggests the establishment of church tithes, by which the royal
treasury would be relieved of the heavy burden of supporting the
ecclesiastical estate; or the imposition on the Indians and mestizos
of a tax for the support of the military posts in the provinces.

Part ii of Viana's memorial is devoted to "navigation and commerce;
the method for establishing them in these islands, and their great
benefits." He begins by showing the necessity of navigation and
commerce for the maintenance of every nation, which he illustrates from
the history of the several European nations, deploring the neglect
of these industries by the Spaniards. The latter, notwithstanding
the contrary claim made by the Dutch, are free to navigate by way of
Cape of Good Hope; and all powers have an equal right to sail the
high seas. Viana enumerates the advantages of the Cape Good Hope
route for commerce--convenience, promptness, saving of expense, a
wider market for the commodities of both Spain and the Philippines,
better administration of the colony and stricter enforcement of the
laws. Moreover, the commerce of other European nations, especially that
with Mexico, could be greatly diminished, in favor of Spanish trade;
and the proceeds of the latter would remain among the Spaniards,
instead of being carried away to foreign lands and benefiting the
enemies of Spain. Viana here, as in many other passages, laments the
fatal indolence, negligence, and pride of his fellow-countrymen,
which have prevented them from securing, as they might have done,
the power and wealth which other nations have attained. He enumerates
the valuable products of the islands, which ought to be developed
and made available; chief among these are cinnamon and iron. Viana
sets forth his project for retrieving the condition of the islands
by establishing a Spanish trading company. He relates the great
success, power, and wealth gained by the trading companies of the
other nations; and urges that Spain follow their example, and thus
obtain a share of those benefits and gains. Not least of these will
be the awakening of the Spaniards, especially the upper classes,
to a more active and useful mode of life, banishing the ignorance,
idleness, and vice which are so prevalent among them. For this purpose,
appeal is made to the king to encourage and favor the formation of a
trading company. Viana advocates the establishment of shipyards in the
islands, and enumerates the resources of Filipinas for supporting this
industry. By establishing a Spanish company, many benefits could be
enjoyed by the provinces of Filipinas, especially in developing their
resources and furnishing employment to the natives; and many valuable
products of the islands are enumerated which ought to be included in
their commerce. An important advantage for Viana's proposed company
is the friendly attitude of the peoples throughout India toward the
Spaniards. He finds Manila's Asiatic commerce now reduced to that
with the Chinese ports; but it should be reestablished with India,
Siam, and other countries. Moreover, the proposed company can give
new life to the Acapulco trade, and compel the Mexican traders
to give fairer treatment and more advantageous sales to those of
Manila. Viana remonstrates against the restrictions imposed on the
commerce of the Spanish colonies, which really serve only to increase
the gains of foreigners. These restrictions are caused largely by
influences emanating from Cadiz and Acapulco; the arguments alleged
in favor of them are vigorously refuted by Viana. In his opinion,
it is the foreign merchants at Cadiz who are at the bottom of the
opposition to Manila's commerce; and they are obtaining control of
Spain's wealth, and causing much more injury to her industries than can
the little competition of Manila. Far greater is the damage caused by
the fraudulent dealings of foreign merchants who sell in Spain goods
from China as if they were made in European countries; and by the
commercial restrictions which prevent Spaniards from competing with
those foreigners. These injuries could largely be prevented by the
proposed Spanish trading company, which would also assure to Spain
various positive advantages; and Viana suggests for that company free
trade with Nueva España. No slight benefit resulting therefrom would
be the great diminution of the illicit trade which the foreign nations
are conducting in the Spanish-American dominions. Viana mentions the
difficulties which that company will encounter, and proposes some
measures to remedy these. One hindrance may be the jealousy of other
nations; but they will not unite against Spain, and, in case of war,
Holland and France would be inclined to side with her against the
English. The greatest difficulty, however, will be the opposition
of the Philippine officials of the crown to the company, which may
be a check to its activities; Viana cleverly proposes to forestall
this by entrusting to the company the government and management of
the islands, the crown making over to it the tributes and customs
duties. In the final chapter, he proposes to conduct the commerce
of Manila with Nueva España via the Panama route, in case that by
Cape Good Hope prove impracticable, and sets forth its advantages;
he suggests that for this purpose that route be improved, and perhaps
a canal be made between the two oceans; and closes with an appeal to
the Spanish government for aid to this project.


The Editors

January, 1907.








DOCUMENTS OF 1751-1762


Usurpation of Indian lands by friars. Fernando VI; November 7, 1751.
Moro raids repulsed by Visayans. [Unsigned; 1755]
Augustinian parishes and missions, 1760. Pedro Velasco, O.S.A.;
April 16, 1760.
Later Augustinian and Dominican missions. Antonio Mozo, O.S.A.;
1763. Bernardo Ustáriz, O.P.; 1745.
Events in Filipinas, 1739-1762. [Compiled from Martinez de Zúñiga
and other writers.]


    Sources: The first of these documents is obtained from La
    Democracia (Manila), November 25, 1901; the second, from a rare
    pamphlet published at Manila (1755), in the possession of Edward
    E. Ayer, Chicago; the third, from an original MS. in possession
    of Mr. Ayer; the fourth, from Mozo's Noticia histórico natural
    (Madrid, 1763), and a rare pamphlet by the Dominican Ustáriz, both
    from copies in the Library of Congress; the fifth, compiled from
    Zúñiga's Historia (Sampaloc, 1803), pp. 546-601, and Concepción's
    Hist. de Philipinas, xi, pp. 89-237, fully annotated from other
    writers.

    Translations: That of the third document is made by James Alexander
    Robertson; all the rest, by Emma Helen Blair.








USURPATION OF INDIAN LANDS BY FRIARS


To the president and auditors of my royal Audiencia of the Filipinas
Islands, resident in the city of Manila: [1] Don Pedro Enriquez, an
auditor of that same Audiencia, made a report, with sworn statements
of his proceedings; of what he had done under the commission which
was conferred on him by the government there for the pacification of
the villages of Taguig, Hagonoy, Parañaque, Bacoor, Cavite el Viejo,
and other places attached to them which lie near that capital, all
which had revolted. [He reported that] they were pacified by merely
the proclamation of a general pardon (except to the chief instigators
of the revolt) which he published, and by the promise that their
complaints should be heard and justice done to them; but the village
of San Mateo also revolted, and he proceeded to its punishment and
left it in ruins, because the people had not surrendered their arms;
it was, however, already [re]peopled, with inhabitants who were more
numerous and of more peaceable disposition. A similar insurrection or
revolt occurred in most of the villages of the province of Bulacan,
and these, like the former, by an agreement which they had formed
by a public writing with the village of Silang protested, as they
afterward made evident in their petitions, against the injuries which
the Indians received from the managers of the estates which are owned
by the religious of St. Dominic and those of St. Augustine, both calced
and discalced--usurping the lands of the Indians, without leaving them
the freedom of the rivers for their fishing, or allowing them to cut
wood for their necessary use, or even to collect the wild fruits;
nor did they allow the natives to pasture on the hills near their
villages the carabaos which they used for agriculture. [2] Accordingly
[the said auditor] determined to free them from these oppressions, [3]
and decided that they should not pay various unjust taxes which the
managers exacted from them. Having proved to be capable in the other
task assigned him, he received a commission as subdelegate judge of
the adjustment of land-titles, in consequence of which he demanded
from the aforesaid religious orders the titles of ownership for the
lands which they possessed; and, notwithstanding the resistance that
they made to him, repeatedly refusing [to obey], he distributed to
the villages the lands which the orders had usurped, and all which
they held without legitimate cause [4] he declared to be crown lands
[realengas]--as occurred with the convent of San Pablo, belonging
to the calced religious of St. Augustine, assigning to it [i.e.,
the crown] a farm for horned cattle and two caballerías of land
which were supposed to belong to it, according to the testimony of
the village of San Mateo. He also took other measures which seemed
to him proper for the investigation of the fraudulent proceedings
in the measurement of the lands in the estate of Biñan, which is
owned by the religious of St. Dominic--fraud which was committed in
the year 1743 by the court clerk of that Audiencia [of Manila] with
notable fraud and trickery, in which participated the two surveyors
(appointed through ignorance or evil intent), to the grave injury of
the village of Silang. This had caused the disturbances, revolts, and
losses which had been experienced in the above-mentioned villages. The
aforesaid proceedings [by the auditor] were considered and examined
with the closest attention in my Council of the Indias, with the
decrees that were also sent by the Audiencia there in the course
of the proceedings in a second appeal interposed by the village of
Silang--decrees obtained in that suit by the natives of that village
against the college of Santo Tomas de Aquino, in regard to lands
usurped [from them] and annexed to the estate of Biñan, which the
religious own. On the subject of the disturbance among the aforesaid
Indians, Governor Don Gaspar de la Torre, his successor the bishop
of Nueva Segovia, and the provincials of the aforesaid religious
orders set forth the allegations made in the name of the orders by
father Fray Miguel Vivas as their procurator-general at this court,
and by Father Pedro Altamirano, who acts in that capacity for the
Society of Jesus for its provinces of the Indias (on the point that
the province of San Ignacio in those islands had no share in the
commotions in those villages, as was shown by various testimonies),
and the explanations made by my fiscal, who was cognizant of the
whole matter. It has therefore appeared expedient to me to advise
you of the receipt of your letters of July 30, 1745, and July 17,
1746, and of the acts which accompany them; and to notify you that
by a despatch of this date I approve, and regard as just and proper,
all that was performed by the aforesaid  Don Pedro Calderon Enriquez
in virtue of the commission and appointment which was conferred
upon him by Governor Don Gaspar de la Torre by the advice of the
Audiencia there, in order that he might proceed to the pacification
of the insurgent villages in the jurisdictions of Silang, Imus and
San Nicolas, Cavite el Viejo, and the other districts which united on
account of the controversy over the ownership of the lands which the
religious--Dominicans, and both calced and discalced Augustinians--are
endeavoring to keep. I also give him thanks for the judicious conduct
and measures which he employed for the aforesaid pacification; and
I likewise approve what he accomplished as subdelegate judge of the
settlement of land-titles, in regard to the survey and boundaries
of the estates which, in accordance with their legitimate titles,
belong to each of those orders, in view of the more accurate and
reliable information [obtained] from the interpretations of the four
surveyors whom he appointed--the latter bearing in mind, to this end,
the measures put into execution by the auditor Ozaeta in the year 1699,
in accordance with the chart printed by the pilot Bueno, in his book
entitled Navegación especulativa y practica [5] [i.e., "Navigation,
theoretical and practical"] (which chart serves in those islands as
the standard for the surveys)--assigning to the aforesaid religious
that which belongs to them by their [legal] titles, which is the
same that was ordained in the executory decree despatched by the
Audiencia there. I also approve what he did in adjudging to my royal
crown the lands which the aforesaid religious orders had usurped, and
in allotting lands to the Indians for the sum of two thousand pesos,
at times and terms stipulated with them.

From the aforesaid investigations charges resulted against Don Juan
Monroy, court clerk of that Audiencia, who was engaged in the survey
and adjustment of boundaries made in those same lands of Biñan in
the year 1743--in which, by the declaration of the two surveyors
who took part in it, is evident their ignorance of such work, and
of the rules and measures [to be used]. Although [sc., after?] the
lands had been measured and a chart of the estates had been drawn, the
computations were made by the said Monroy, and the surveyors signed it,
supposing that it was correct; but it was acknowledged that in that
same year, later, another survey and adjustment of boundaries was
made by the aforesaid court clerk and one of the said surveyors on
some lands over which there were lawsuits--some, in particular, with
the religious of St. Augustine--in which survey there was assigned to
each cattle-farm 3,024,574 square brazas of land, this being different
from the previous survey, which was computed at 8,695,652 brazas. In
this was proved the fraud with which the said Monroy acted, in giving
to the said religious more than half of the land which belonged to
Silang. Accordingly, it has appeared to me proper to condemn him to
two years' suspension from his office, and to lay upon him a fine
of two thousand pesos, applied to the fund of fines paid into the
royal treasury; and for this exaction there is issued, on this same
date, the proper despatch to the Marqués de Regalía, a minister of
the said my Council and tribunal of the Indias, and exclusive judge
of rents, settlement of land-titles, and collection of fines and
condemnations. By another despatch of the same date, the government of
those islands is commanded to exercise hereafter the utmost vigilance
in order that the Indians of the said villages may not be molested
by the religious, and that the latter shall be kept in check in the
unjust acts which they may in future attempt against not only those
Indians but other natives of those islands. In this, the government
must always bear in mind the reiterated commands given in the laws
[of the empire], and the frequent royal decrees that have been issued,
to the end that the Indians shall be well treated and shall not suffer
oppression or extortion; and shall direct that my fiscal there shall
appear as their representative and in their defense on every occasion
which shall present itself in this regard. Considering how important
it is that the Indians shall know of the recourse which they can have
when they are oppressed or ill-treated, and in their controversies,
it would be very expedient that the government give them information
of this, so that they may not be ignorant thereof, and that they may
use these [peaceable] means without going to the extreme, as they
did on this occasion, by employing armed force. For this time, my
royal charity and clemency overlooks their proceedings, considering
their heedless disposition; but when they shall have been advised of
what they ought to do in such cases, and in others of a different
nature, if they fail to use those means they shall be chastised
with the utmost severity. I have resolved to notify you of this,
in order that you may be acquainted with this my royal decision,
and in order that, so far as you are concerned, you may make known
my decree; and I command the most prompt and effective measures,
to the end that it may be fully and duly carried into effect; for
such is my will. Dated at San Lorenzo, on November 7, 1751.


I the King

By command of the king our sovereign:

Doctor Josef Ignacio de Goyenechea

[Farther down on this decree were three rubricas of the lords of the
royal and supreme Council of the Indias.]

In the regular official session of the Audiencia of Manila,
in September, 1753. The honorable president and auditors of the
Audiencia, being in session in the royal halls of the said court,
having officially considered a royal decree dated at San Lorenzo on
November 7, 1751, by which his Majesty (whom may God preserve) was
pleased to approve what was done by the auditor Don Pedro Calderon
Enriquez in the pacification of the villages which had revolted,
and to command him to execute what is expressed therein, with the
other provisions of the said royal despatch and the claims of the
fiscal, the said president and auditors declare: That they must
command and did command that the orders given by his Majesty in
his royal despatch be observed, fulfilled, and executed; and, in
order that it may have due effect, the contents of the said royal
decree shall be communicated to the reverend provincials of the holy
orders of St. Dominic, St. Augustine, the Recollects, the Society
of Jesus, and to the prior of the convent of St. John of God, in
these islands. Attested copies of it shall be made, and sent to the
alcaldes-mayor of the provinces of these islands, in order that,
translating the decree into the language of the country, they may
print it [6] and make known its contents to the natives of the said
provinces, so that the Indians may be informed of what is provided and
ordered by his Majesty in the said royal decree--the alcaldes sending
to the [proper] official of the court a sworn statement that they have
thus executed the decree; and likewise notifying the clerk of court,
in order that, in virtue thereof, he may fulfil what is herein ordered
and forbear in the exercise of his office, and may appoint a notary
approved to his satisfaction so that he may be responsible for the
deposit of those papers and the record of these proceedings. Such
were the orders and commands of the said honorable members, and they
signed their names. [7]

Obando Licentiate Arzadun Calderon Enriquez



Before me:

Manuel de Antiquia, notary and secretary.

[This is a copy.]








MORO RAIDS REPULSED BY VISAYANS

Relation of the valorous defense of the Bisayan natives of the village
of Palompong, in the island of Leyte, of the province of Catbalogan,
in the Philipinas Islands, which they made against the Mahometan
forces of Ylanos and Malanaos, in the month of June, 1754.


On the ninth day of the above month, about five o'clock in the
afternoon, twenty-five Moro joangas came into this port of Palompong,
with another small vessel, and entered the harbor with so little
fear of being attacked by any armada that during the entire siege
they left their vessels [sacayanes], high and dry, as if they were in
their own land and enjoying an Octavian peace. At their arrival their
vessels displayed a great number of banners, streamers and pennons,
all of red silk; but they did not land until the following day,
at seven o'clock in the morning. So many of them landed that they
numbered more than a thousand, and so boldly that they immediately
surrounded and encompassed the church; and at the first attack they
succeeded in burning the sacristy (over which was the dwelling of the
father minister), notwithstanding it was defended with two bulwarks,
and fortified by two rows of palma brava and two other rows of wooden
palisades with a rampart. In this conflagration were destroyed all
the furniture of the church and the house there, as also the goods
of the people who had gone into the church; and the fire was so
fierce that it gave no opportunity to save two lantacas, two versos,
and the supplies that were stored there--gunpowder and balls, and
rice for the food of the people. These took refuge in the church in
great confusion and fear, at seeing themselves surrounded by so many
enemies, and trying to prevent the fire--which, notwithstanding that
the church was unroofed, had already caught on the ridgepole and
other timbers--from going further.

At the time when they burned the sacristy, the Moros made five trenches
very near the church, and immediately began to fire their artillery;
this consisted in lantacas of various sizes, and other pieces up to
the caliber of three-libra balls, as far as we could judge by the
balls which were picked up. Besides this, there were among them many
musketeers that were very skilful, and the rest occupied themselves
in hurling sumbilins and stones; and others threw a sort of wooden
bar, sharp at one end, and with fire on the other; this caused much
annoyance to the people, who, on account of the danger of fire,
were manifestly without any protection by day or by night.

On this first day there were three killed and five wounded on our
side, and all by balls, for there was no special harm done by the
rest of their missiles. Since the Moros were so numerous that they
could renew their forces, they fought so continuously that they gave
us no opportunity to rest night or day, so that some of our dead
could not be buried until after several days. At last the women,
besides providing some little food for the men, were continually
occupied in drawing water to extinguish the fire, and even putting
it out themselves, and in making wadding, cartouches, etc.

On the second day, which was Tuesday, we had two killed and five
wounded; for the balls rained on us, so that in some planks which
were placed on the parapet I counted as many as ten holes in each
one. Besides the continual fire from their trenches, the Moros made
two covers resembling tortoises, with two rows of planks, and under
these they steadily approached the two gates which communicate with
the sacristy. From the mouths of these they continually hurled fire,
pieces of wood, etc., in order to burn the repairs which were made
by those within, so that they could burn down the doors, in order to
fire afterward a cannon from under the said tortoises, and carry away
with it the entire church; but those inside frustrated the intention
of the enemy by continually throwing water and dirt [on the fire].

The Moros also made a bulwark, or cavalier, which overtopped the walls
of the church, and through Wednesday night and Thursday morning they
were pushing this close up to the church; but those inside, who by this
time had recovered from their fear and consternation, in the midst of
their total lack [of defenses], contrived to make a shelter of planks
on top of the church, from which to fire a lantaca. When this was seen
by the Moros, they desisted from pushing their machine close to the
church, but they began another piece of work which was worse; for,
as the side of the church was undefended after the burning of the two
bulwarks, and no one could put his head out of the window on account of
the furious rain of balls and bullets, the Moros stationed themselves
at the foot of the wall and began to place against it a great quantity
of wood, and whatever [fuel] the houses of the Indians supplied them,
and set fire to this at a time when a very brisk wind was blowing;
this carried the flames even within the church, and, notwithstanding
they incessantly threw water on the fire, many timbers were burned,
and the stone sills of the church were reduced to lime and ashes.

About this time they tried to scale the church on both sides, and a
Moro ascended up to a window; but he was thrown down by a blow in
the face which was given him, and his companions who were beneath
were put to flight by throwing at them pieces of stone. At this the
Moros were somewhat checked; and, seeing that on the side where they
had made their greatest efforts to possess themselves of the church,
repairs in proportion had been made within, they erected on the other
side of the church two more bulwarks or cavaliers, which were higher
than the first one. As fast as this was done, those within topped their
walls with a parapet of molave planks; when they saw this the courage
of the Moros fell somewhat, and the Christians were so much encouraged
that on the following day (the fifteenth of the month and the fifth of
the blockade) they made a sally, scorning the firearms of the enemies,
especially the guns, of which those within were entirely destitute.

In this sally the captain of the village killed a Moro with a
lance-thrust, and the rest took to flight. A drum and three shields
were captured from them, but the Christians did not dare to go very
far for fear of some ambush. On retreating, and trying to enter by
a very narrow gate, the Moros charged upon them with a shower of
sumbilins, and a shot from a lantaca at a distance of four brazas,
when the unconquerable St. Xavier so well defended his children that
not even one of them was wounded. On another day those within again
made a sally, and the Moros did not dare to face them; consequently
the Christians were able to destroy their machines. They again made
a sally on Monday, but not only did the Moros refuse to fight, but
even in haste dragged out their boats, which were still on dry land;
and vigorously rowing, with some of their boats flying a black flag,
they quietly left the harbor, directing their course toward Carigara.

As for the Moros, it is known with certainty that those slain in this
siege are forty-six who were shot, and three killed with sumbilins;
and one from a lance-thrust. The number wounded is not known, nor is
that of those who were killed at night, but certainly it would be
a great number, because their fiercest attacks were always made at
night; and as there were so many of them, and on our side a continual
fire of lantacas with almost marvelous success in their shots, we
do not doubt that a much greater number would be killed by night
than by day. It is certain that after the Moros had gone all these
shores were full of corpses; and it is known by captives who made
their escape that the Moros, after they had gone away, proceeded to
throw many of the wounded into the waters of the bay. It is also known
through the captives that the Moros, astonished at such destruction,
asked not only each other but the captives how it could be that
in Hilongos, which is a large village, they had lost so few men,
and in Palompong, so small a village, they had lost so many. Besides
those who were killed and wounded by the gunshots, it is known that
many were wounded by certain poisoned darts which they call borot,
[8] and doubtless many were rendered useless by their wounds.

Throughout this siege has been manifestly visible the power and
protection of St. Francis Xavier, the patron of the village; it is not
the least argument for this with me that this people in the absence
of the father minister--who everywhere is usually the soul of the
community, and whose presence is more necessary here on account of the
disunited condition of the natives, who, as forming a new village,
are of various factions, with continual jealousies--nevertheless
could be encouraged to enter the church, when it is a fact that,
left to themselves, they have a sort of aversion and horror of being
shut in. Another evidence is, that in the burning of the sacristy God
in His lofty judgments permitted that the fire, although so fierce,
was not communicated to the church; nor did it cause in those people
the horror which usually impels them irresistibly to flee even from
less dangerous fires. The third, that inside the church water was
obtained with such facility that throughout the blockade it was not
lacking, although they were continually drawing it in order to put
out the fire; while in the deepest old wells, on an occasion when
they were making repairs, I have noticed that the water failed many
times. And for stronger evidence that it did not fail in the time
of the siege (although it was a time of drought), after the siege,
although it rained heavily, I did not see any water in the five wells
which they made inside the church. Fourth, that although in the fire
there were hardly saved, in the judgment of all, some twenty cavans
of rice, that scanty provision was sufficient for one hundred and
thirty-five men, and some two hundred women and children, during
the nine days of the siege. Fifth, that although in the said fire
hardly four gantas, or zelemins, of gunpowder were saved, and the
fire of the lantacas was continual by day and night, that supply was
enough for the same number of days; for several persons have assured
me that on three successive days there was not in their opinion more
powder than enough for one day, and on the next day the amount that
had been used was not missed. The sixth, that the Bisayans, who when
left to themselves are so given to sleep, did not sleep an instant
throughout the time of the siege. Seventh, that although they saw the
wounded and dead beside them it made no greater impression on them
than if it were a representation in a comedy. Eighth, when many of
those who talked most valiantly had decided, in view of the lack of
provisions and gunpowder, to leave the place and flee to the woods,
on three successive nights, when they tried after prayers to open a
door, they could never succeed in opening it before daylight. In this
determination to go away many of the women were ready to die rather
than surrender themselves to such a rabble, and on this account they
had been armed in order that, by defending themselves, they might
more easily meet death; and there was a man who had determined to kill
his wife and children rather than see them in the power of enemies so
cruel to soul and body. Notwithstanding all this, they never failed
in the strong hope that their illustrious patron, St. Francis Xavier,
would not abandon them. He was continually invoked, and his image was
carried in procession by those who were not occupied with the defense;
and this confidence increased on Friday (a day which so belonged to
that saint), because on that day the face of St. Xavier's image was
seen to be very smiling and joyous, a certain omen of victory. Greater
than ever was their confidence in the saint's protection on Sunday,
when, although their provisions were so short and the enemy was seen
in every direction, all believed that on the next day before noon
they would find themselves free from the siege, for the very reason
that it seemed impossible for them to maintain their position any
longer. They asked this from their glorious patron with a promise
of a novenary; and the saint made full response to their confidence,
delivering his children from the siege on Monday morning.

With the departure of the Moros, the people were left in great
anxiety whether they would come back, as they were wont to do; for
there was absolutely nothing to eat, and no place in which to find
food, because the Moros had gone about ravaging and destroying all
the grain-fields that they found. The people therefore are entirely
destitute, suffering terribly from hunger, and without having any
means with which to find food. For neither cotton, nor abaca, nor
woven cloth were left for the women; and the men, besides seeing
their grain-fields and boats destroyed, had no implements with which
to cultivate the earth, or to fish in the sea.

Of those who fled to the hills there were seventeen captured and nine
slain, and there was one Moro killed. The Moros were on the march and
went as far as the vicinity of Ogmuc, following the Christians who
were retreating. Finally, it is known by the captives who escaped that
the chief dato went away from here wounded in the face with a ball,
and their chief pandita was dying from a wound in his bowels.

Particular relation should be made of this valorous defense for being
distinguished and aided, as is evident from its occurrences, by the
powerful arm of the Highest; and therefore the glorious defenses of
other villages which, with warning to the Moros, are celebrating
the triumph of their bravery, I will reduce to a brief summary,
which will thus make the memory of these eternal, without wearying
the public with a diffuse account of their circumstances.

In the month of February of this year, the Moros, elated at the
destruction of some little villages on that coast of the island
[of Leyte] opposite Carigara, attacked the important village of
Hilongos. There were some two thousand of them, and they besieged the
place for eleven days; but the natives of the village, encouraged by
the presence and advice of their father minister, who was with them,
made various sallies to hinder the formation of the enemy's trenches;
and they repulsed his assaults with the death of many Mahometans,
without losing even one of our men in so frequent encounters.

In the month of May of the same year, four joangas made port at the
island of Marinduque, with more than two thousand Moros, and for a
week they besieged the little fort of the village of Gazang, which was
defended by its natives from repeated assaults, under the judicious
management of their courageous father minister; and the Mahometans,
not carrying out their depraved intentions, smothered their fury,
ravaging and sacking whatever they found outside the precincts of the
said fort. During the continual fighting of those days, the Moros
had more than ninety killed, and many more were wounded; while on
our side there was no more than one killed, and another one wounded.

The Moros who went away unsuccessful from Marinduque sent eight joangas
to the island of Luban, where they landed thinking that they would find
very little resistance; but the father cura and the alcalde-mayor, with
a few people who hastily gathered about them, defended themselves from
behind a palisade which they had formed, with so notable intrepidity
that with only the firearms of the alcalde-mayor they killed seven
Moros; and, sallying from the trenches, they fell upon the enemies
until they compelled them to a shameful flight.

A squadron of more than twenty joangas of the Mahometans almost at
the same time attacked the village of Antiqui in the island of Panay;
but they experienced a vigorous resistance from its inhabitants,
which originated from the fiery spirit and persuasions of their
father prior. The same thing happened to another squadron of the
same or greater number in the island of Cuyo, the natives of which,
with their father prior, not only defended themselves in their fort,
but in a glorious sortie on the Moros--who were terrified, as was
proved by the weapons and armor which the Indians secured as spoil.

Twice was the village of Ylog, the chief town on the island of Negros,
attacked by thirty joangas of Moros, but on both occasions their
designs were frustrated, with notable loss to their hosts; this was
attained through the noble intrepidity of the natives, urged on by
the fiery courage and direction of their father minister; and the
Moros, seeing themselves attacked by the besieged, left several of
their companions lying on the ground in the haste and confusion with
which they embarked in their joangas, the moorings of which they cut
in order to hasten their flight.

On the twenty-fifth of July, the day of the illustrious patron of the
Spains, St. James the apostle, fifty boat-loads of Moros arrived at
the important village of Catbalogan, and, divided into two bands,
attacked the village on both sides. One of these parties gained
possession of a high hill from which their lantacas dominated the
fort, in which was enclosed the house and church of the [Jesuit]
college; the other party attacked on the side of the village, and
for a week the rest of the Moros hurled on it continual attacks; but
all these were repelled with singular courage. The Moros therefore,
many of them having perished with their dato, the chief in command
of the squadron, withdrew the rest of their forces, making the boast
that they would return with a stronger force to avenge their injuries.

The Moros then proceeded to the village of Calviga, which is situated
on the same coast up the river, about half a legua from the shore,
where some three hundred of them landed. These, on leaving their
vessels, marched toward the village, regarding themselves as certain
of taking it; but the natives, by the instruction of their father
minister, waited for the enemy until they came within range of a
cannon-shot. Thus they secured the effective fire of their lantacas,
with which they killed fifteen Moros; and this alone was enough to
make the enemy turn in precipitate flight. From here they went to
the village of Boad, which was on an island near by called Palasan;
and although they besieged it for three days, with redoubled efforts
in their assaults, when they saw the vigorous resistance that was
made by the natives and their father minister they retreated, balked
in their intentions.

About the month of September, in the province of Albay the Moros
found their arrogance defeated by the union which was formed among the
natives in three villages, under the conduct of an ardent Franciscan;
and by main force the natives compelled the enemy to go away from the
province, rebuffed. Last of all, the two villages Ynitao and Lubungan,
on the northern coast of the island Mindanao, especially experienced
the fierce attacks of the Mahometans on four occasions, when they
sustained continuous assaults, repulsing them with vigorous sallies,
and inflicting heavy punishment, with evident losses, on the Moros. [9]

By this brief narration it is clearly proved that, although these
favorable results have not preserved the villages from the ravaging
of their fields and other injuries, at least their inhabitants were
delivered from slavery; [10] while, on the contrary, those who through
cowardice did not make valorous resistance to the Mahometan enemy have
not only lost their goods, but they groan in captivity, unless they
have been delivered by the victorious arms of his Majesty. And thus
the natives of this archipelago, arousing their own courage by the
fortunate successes of their countrymen, can take example therefrom
in order to avoid misfortunes in the future. [11]








AUGUSTINIAN PARISHES AND MISSIONS, 1760

Report of the villages, tributes, those exempted by age and sickness,
unmarried men and girls, schools for boys and girls, infants, missions,
catechumens, and those newly baptized, of the provinces and ministries
of the Order of our father St. Augustine, in these Philipinas Islands,
this present year of 1760.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Provinces | Villages  | Tributes of men and women
           |           |      | Exempt
           |           |      |     | Young men
           |           |      |     |     | Young women
           |           |      |     |     |     | Escolapios [12]
           |           |      |     |     |     |      | Young children
           |           |      |     |     |     |      |      |
           Spaniards,
           |           |      |     |     |     |      |      | men and
           |           |      |     |     |     |      |      | women
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Tondo      |Tondo      |1,810 |  500|  450|  868| 1,400| 1,904|   35
           |Passig     |1,520 |  490|  400|  600| 1,310| 1,450|    0
           |Taguiig    |  700 |  308|  204|  310|   600|   702|    3
           |Parañaque  |1,025 |  330|  300|  400|   820| 1,090|    6
           |Malate     |  512 |  162|  135|  200|   416|   640|    2
           |Tambobong  |1,650 |  500|  510|  650| 1,130| 1,710|   12
           |-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
           |  Total    |7,217 |2,290|1,999|3,028| 5,676| 7,496|   58
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Bulacan    |Bulacan    |1,250 |  380|  450|  580| 1,000| 1,150|   12
           |Guiguintô  |  300 |   52|   80|  100|   125|   280|    0
           |Bigaa      |  450 |  146|  162|  200|   350|   600|    0
           |Angat      |  622 |  160|  220|  316|   502|   916|    2
           |Baliuag    |1,000 |  317|  372|  500|   910| 1,320|    0
           |Quingua    |  800 |  290|  310|  346|   614| 1,192|    1
           |Calumpit   |  550 |  140|  150|  210|   300|   718|    0
           |Hagonoy    |  750 |  240|  300|  390|   630| 1,030|    0
           |Paombong   |  250 |   70|   60|   90|   110|   250|    0
           |Malolos    |1,300 |  425|  520|  625| 1,000| 1,154|    0
           |-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
           |  Total    |7,272 |2,220|2,624|3,357| 5,541| 8,610|   15
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Balayan    |Taal       |  800 |  106|  250|  410|   612| 1,025|    0
           |Bauang     |1,225 |  150|  310|  600| 1,010| 1,212|    0
           |Batangas   |1,200 |  150|  350|  600| 1,100| 1,210|    6
           |Lipa       |  650 |  150|  200|  300|   525|   680|    0
           |Tiyauong   |  350 |  134|  120|  118|   200|   230|    0
           |San Pablo  |  850 |  140|  200|  420|   750|   892|    0
           |Tanauan    |  420 |   70|  100|  190|   300|   512|    6
           |-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
           |  Total    |5,495 |  900|1,630|2,638| 4,497| 5,761|   12
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Pampanga   |Macabebe   |  855 |  322|  150|  200|   550|   810|    4
           |Minalin    |  760 |  300|  200|  351|   563|   850|    0
           |Sesmoan    |  254 |   62|   70|   85|    80|   270|    0
           |Lubao      |  520 |  160|  130|  210|   400|   525|    9
           |Uauâ       |  680 |  250|  160|  302|   550|   560|   18
           |Betis      |  260 |   61|   80|   88|    90|   270|    0
           |Santa Rita |      |     |     |     |      |      |
           |  y Porac  |  420 |   80|   91|  102|   150|   370|    0
           |Bacolor    |1,150 |  400|  504|  510|   220| 1,300|   40
           |San        |      |     |     |     |      |      |
           |  Fernando |  525 |  150|  128|  200|   350|   625|    2
           |Mexico     |1,100 |  315|  230|  504| 1,006| 1,500|    4
           |Pinpin     |  500 |  140|  120|  200|   312|   532|    0
           |Arayat     |  800 |  309|  200|  290|   525|   850|    0
           |Magalang   |  300 |   70|   90|  100|   105|   312|    1
           |Tarlac     |  410 |   60|  116|  134|   220|   513|    1
           |San Joseph |  150 |   20|   32|   44|    80|   200|    0
           |Tayug      |   62 |   16|   20|   25|    30|    64|    0
           |Santor     |  555 |  106|  100|  130|   258|   340|    0
           |Gapang     |  660 |  202|  140|  180|   465|   684|    0
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------------
Ylocos     |Namacpacan | 1,020|  230|  211|  358|   590| 1,114|    0
           |Bangar     |   700|  212|  130|  254|   307|   595|    0
           |Candong    |   600|  162|  124|  214|   368|   585|    0
           |Narbacan   | 1,150|  260|  110|  326|   515| 1,119|    0
           |Santa      |      |     |     |     |      |      |
             Catharina |   818|  210|  162|  228|   480|   910|    0
           |Bantay     |   830|  208|  162|  300|   500|   930|    0
           |Magsingal  |   855|  183|  154|  257|   483|   663|    4
           |Cabugao    | 1,125|  332|  246|  359|   754| 1,140|    0
           |Sinait     |   495|  110|  115|  200|   398|   612|    0
           |Badoc      |   558|  120|  140|  204|   390|   589|    0
           |Pauay      | 1,560|  418|  500|  690| 1,004| 1,515|    0
           |Batac      | 1,780|  506|  512|  790| 1,102| 1,655|   35
           |San        |      |     |     |     |      |      |
           |  Nicolas  |   825|  208|  180|  400|   610|   920|    0
           |Ylauag     | 2,250|  400|  710|1,125| 1,550| 2,310|    0
           |Sarrat     |   480|   75|  102|  224|   237|   508|    0
           |Dingras    |   800|  240|  196|  248|    25|   801|    0
           |Bacarra    | 1,125|  251|  203|  401|   892| 1,151|    2
           |Bangui     |   312|   36|   46|   74|   102|   347|    0
           |-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------------
           |  Total    |17,283|4,151|4,001|6,652| 7,707|17,464|   41
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Zebu       |San Nicolas|   700|   56|  103|  154|   392|   726|    0
           |Argao      |   225|  300|  325|  506|   925| 1,136|    0
           |Bolohon    |   650|   90|  170|  214|   354|   630|    0
           |Opon       |   790|  104|  164|  259|   448|   770|    0
           |Cabcar     |   500|   75|  100|  190|   301|   532|    0
           +-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
           |    Total  | 2,865|  625|  862|1,323| 2,420| 3,794|    0
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Yloylo     |Oton       | 1,000|  164|  203|  298|   998| 1,000|    0
           |Alimodian  | 1,490|  125|  656|  780| 1,309| 1,050|    0
           |Maasin     | 1,390|  380|  268|  340| 1,100| 1,200|    0
           |Matagub    |   825|  108|  203|  260|   752|   834|    0
           |Tigbauan   | 1,260|  398|  360|  594|   916| 1,300|    0
           |Guimbal    | 1,280|  209|  230|  386|   910| 1,050|    0
           |Miagao     | 1,325|  309|  400|  602|   932| 1,125|    0
           |Antique    |   990|  180|  295|  358|   510|   890|    0
           |Sibalon    |   930|  260|  239|  420|   519|   990|    0
           |Bugason    | 1,200|  302|  410|  660|   925| 1,150|    0
           |Xaro       | 1,271|  320|  410|  625| 1,004| 1,261|   14
           |Dumangas   |   724|  142|  157|  209|   604|   767|    4
           |Anilao     |   430|   75|   90|  130|   140|   344|    0
           |Camando    | 1,230|  465|  274|  446|   750|   922|    0
           |Cabatuan   | 1,780|  502|  750|1,050| 1,213| 1,942|    0
           |Pototan    | 1,050|  280|  310|  518|   861| 1,200|    0
           |Laglag     |   800|  200|  284|  391|   500|   709|    0
           |Lambunao   |   772|  182|  204|  310|   435|   719|    0
           |Passi      |   622|  128|  193|  248|   301|   583|    0
           |Ygbaras    |   550|  103|  155|  243|   258|   495|    0
           +-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
           |Total[13]  |20,889|5,132|5,991|8,868|14,937|19,976|   18
-----------+-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
Panay      |Panay      | 1,019|  350|  375|  496|   784|   847|    3
           |Capis      |   730|  182|  200|  343|   402|   654|   16
           |Dumalag    | 1,080|  223|  350|  589|   703|   994|    3
           |Dumarao    |   750|  220|  266|  422|   451|   730|    0
           |-----------+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----------
           |    Total  | 3,579|  975|1,191|1,850| 2,340| 3,225|   22
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


General summary of all the classes contained in this table


-----------------------------------------------------------------
The above provinces
           |Tributes of men and women
           |      |Exempted, by age and infirmity
           |      |      |Young men
           |      |      |      |Young women
           |      |      |      |      |Escolapios
           |      |      |      |      |      |Young children
           |      |      |      |      |      |      |Spaniards,
           |      |      |      |      |      |      |  men and
           |      |      |      |      |      |      |  women
-----------+-------------+------+------+------+------+-----------
Tondo      | 7,217| 2,290| 1,999| 3,028| 5,676| 7,296|     58
Bulacan    | 7,272| 2,220| 2,624| 3,357| 4,541| 8,610|     15
Balayan    | 5,495|   900| 1,630| 2,638| 4,497| 5,761|     12
Pampanga   |10,451| 7,615| 3,087| 4,399| 8,361|13,297|    100
Pangasinan | 3,064|   725|   541|   843| 1,568| 3,001|      0
Ylocos     |17,283| 4,151| 4,001| 6,652| 7,707|17,464|     41
Zebu       | 2,865|   625|   862| 1,323| 2,420| 3,794|      0
Yloylo     |20,889| 5,132| 5,991| 8,868|14,937|19,976|     18
Panay      | 3,579|   975| 1,191| 1,850| 2,340| 3,225|     22
           |------+------+------+------+------+------+-----------
    Total  |78,115|24,633|21,926|32,958|52,047|82,424|    266
-----------------------------------------------------------------


Missions of various nations belonging to the province of Pampanga


-------------------------------------------------------------------
         Villages           | Tribes | New Christians|Catechumens
                            |        | of both sexes |
----------------------------+--------+---------------+-------------
Mission of Magalang y Tarlac|Zambals |       85      |      82
Mission of Tayug            |Igorrots|      343      |      60
Visita of Lupao             |Balugas |       62      |      20
Mission of Santor           |Balugas |       24      |      40
                            +--------+---------------+-------------
                            |  Total |      514      |     202
-------------------------------------------------------------------


Missions of Igorrots and Tingyans belonging to the province of Ylocos


----------------------------------------------------------------------
          Villages             | Tribes | New Christians|Catechumens
                               |        | of both sexes |
-------------------------------+--------+---------------+-------------
Village of Santiago            |Tingyans|      352      |     200
Village of San Augustin de Bana|Tingyans|       85      |      50
Territory of Batac             |Tingyans|       11      |      20
Territory of Narbacan          |Igorrots|        5      |      12
Territory of Candon            |Igorrots|       35      |      39
Territory of Bangar            |Igorrots|       79      |      33
Territory of Namacpacan        |Igorrots|       12      |      30
Territory of Agoo              |Igorrots|       12      |       9
Territory of Iringay           |Igorrots|        0      |      20
Territory of Bauan             |Igorrots|        3      |       5
Territory of Magsingal         |Tingyans|        6      |       4
Territory of Bacarra           |Apayos  |        5      |       4
                               +--------+---------------+-------------
                               |  Total |      605      |     426
----------------------------------------------------------------------


[Missions in] China


----------------------------------------------------------------------
                                        | New Christians| Catechumens
                                        | of both sexes |
----------------------------------------+---------------+-------------
Missions of China in various villages of|               |
that extensive empire                   |      680      |     800
----------------------------------------------------------------------


Total summary of the classes included in this table reduced to persons

[Notice is given that in the total of tributes it must be understood
that each single whole tribute means two persons; and thus it will
be noted in the figures. The total is as set forth below.]


                  Tributes                    156,230
                  Exempt                       24,633
                  Young men                    21,926
                  Young women                  32,958
                  Escolapios                   52,047
                  Young children               82,424
                  Spaniards, men and women        266
                  Missions of these islands     1,693
                  Missions of China             1,480
                                              -------
                      Total                   373,663


I, Master Fray Pedro Velasco, provincial of this province of Santísimo
Nombre de Jesus of Philipinas of the Order of the Hermits of our
father St. Augustine, certify that the lists of villages and souls
contained in this table and which are administered by the religious
of this said province, are set forth truly; and in order that this
may be suitably evident, I have affixed my signature in this convent
of Tondo, on April sixteenth, one thousand seven hundred and sixty.


Fray Pedro Velasco, provincial of St. Augustine.








LATER AUGUSTINIAN AND DOMINICAN MISSIONS


AUGUSTINIAN MISSIONS

[The following account of Augustinian missions in the first half
of the eighteenth century is translated from Antonio Mozo's Noticia
histórico natural (Madrid, 1763). [14] It is presented partly in full,
and partly in synopsis, preferring for the former such parts as are
of ethnological interest.]





CHAPTER I

In which account is given of the progress of the mission to the
Italons, from the year 1700 to the present time.


After we had been able to reduce to our holy faith two tribes who
dwelt at the summits of the most rugged mountains in the province of
Pampanga, the Caraclans and Buquids, and from them had been formed
three villages--Santor and Bongabon, quite populous; and Pantabangan,
of smaller numbers, and lying more within the mountains [15]--this
gate being now opened so that we could proceed further, it only needed
that we should have the courage to do so. For at the first step were
encountered two contiguous tribes: the Italons, a people fierce, brave,
and bold; and the Abacas, who are somewhat less so. The religious
therefore feared that those people, to judge from their ferocious
natures, would without doubt tear them to pieces at the very outset,
without even listening to them; and for this very reason they greatly
dreaded to set foot within the territory of those tribes. While we
were in these straits, our provincial then being our father reader
Fray Francisco Zamora, about the year 1702 he selected for this purpose
father Fray Antolin de Arzaga, [16] whose virtue and ardor he knew well
from experience, and entrusted to him this enterprise, as dangerous
as difficult. [This gospel pioneer went out, equipped with what was
necessary for administering the sacraments and with some trinkets to
give the natives, "and with no other arms than his confidence in God."]

[On August 16, 1702, a letter from Father Arzaga to his superior gave
account of his progress thus far; it was written from Pantabangan,
which is "distant from Santor eight leguas by a very difficult
road." From the latter village he sent a message, by the hands of four
chiefs, to the chief of Lublub, who came out to meet him with forty
infidels; but the father finally persuaded them to let him enter
their village, where he exhorted and instructed them, receiving an
attentive hearing. "This village [i.e., Lublub] has about one hundred
and fifty persons; it is distant from this one [of Pantabangan] four
leguas to the east, by an uneven road. This Italon tribe consists of
fifty-six villages (so far as I have yet ascertained), which lie on
the shores of two deep rivers, toward the north. They have a general
language which is entirely separate from those of Tagalos and Pampanga;
they have well-kept villages, with high houses. They take great care
of their fields, and keep their grain in tambobos, or granaries, thus
anticipating times of sterility and sickness. The fishing, as also the
hunting, is abundant and good; the climate is temperate; and there are
many open plains, beautiful to see. The people are kindly, but very
warlike and of courageous dispositions; they are quite ingenious, and
are hospitable. They understand that there is a God, and that He is in
heaven, caring for all whom He creates--to whom they offer sacrifices,
only when they make agreements of peace--and that there is no other
God than He. They say that He rewards the good and punishes the bad,
but they do not know in what manner; and they admit that they have
immortal souls. They make a contract of marriage with one wife only,
which lasts until death; they do not allow concubinage; and they do not
marry their relatives. They observe the truth well; and, what is more,
they desire to be Christians." [17] Certain "bad Christians" have told
these Italons that the Spaniards are trying to load them with tributes
and take away their liberty; therefore they are waiting to make their
decision, and fifteen of them, accompanied by an Augustinian religious,
are carrying Arzaga's letter to Manila. He continues:]

"The Abaca tribe consists of ten villages, divided into two
jurisdictions, one of which belongs to this village and contains six
villages toward the north, extending, as they have told me, to the
boundaries of the Igorrots. Twenty-two persons in the first village,
called Diama, came to visit me as soon as I arrived here; having
explained to them some mysteries of our holy faith, they returned to
their own village. I visited them there, and they received me thus:
They had placed a tall cross at the entrance of their jurisdiction,
and from that place to the village they had cleared the roads, which
are very bad, adorning them with arches up to the front of the house
in which they lodged me; and there they had built another cross, even
taller. This village is distant a legua and a half [from Pantabangan],
and from it the gate is open for the entire Italon and Abaca tribes;
it has wars with the Italons in regard to certain murders. I conferred
with them about their making peace [with those villages], and their
learning the truth which our holy faith teaches. They listened
attentively to what I said to them; and, in conclusion, we made an
agreement that they will at once become Christians and make peace. They
ask that I catechize them, build a church, and baptize them. They are
almost of the same type as the Italons; but some of them have several
wives, and this is not so liberal a people as the former one. This
village [of Diama] contains over a hundred persons; they speak a
different language, for which reason it is necessary that there be a
minister who can learn it, and devote himself to their instruction,
for I am studying the Italon tongue. What I state to your Reverence
is, that a minister is needed whom we can consult about some cases
which are presenting themselves here; for it is very discouraging
to act in the midst of scruples, in matters of conscience. What your
Reverence shall ordain will be in every way most just.

"The second jurisdiction of this people pertains to Caranglan, to which
I went with the determination to visit the four remaining villages;
for father Fray Francisco de la Maza wrote to me from Itui that two of
those villages desired to be converted, and were asking for a minister
of our order, on account of being in our jurisdiction. I asked about
this in Caranglan, and they said that it was true as regards one of
them, which is an important village and is already Christian; and in
the other village there are many persons who are Christians, although
for lack of a minister they are going without administration. These
two villages are a half-day's journey from Caranglan, by a bad road,
and one is contiguous to Itui, on the western side. There are many
rivers to be crossed; and, as these were filled by a storm which
caught me at Caranglan, I could not cross them, although I waited a
week. One Abaca has continued forty years in apostasy; he asks that
I will reconcile him with the church, and baptize his wife and three
children, and I am instructing them in order to do this. I am sending
away the Italons [with this letter], and tomorrow the Indian who went
to Manila will come, to go with me to the Abaca villages; we will do
what is possible there, until the coming of another minister. When
he shall come, I will go on to the Italons who are further up [the
river]; they tell me that it will require two months, only to go to
the villages. I have information that they desire to see a father, and
to be Christians; this was furnished to me by Nicolàs de los Santos,
who has been among these people; and he has done and is doing much
good to their souls. He is my constant companion in my journeys, and
serves me in everything; I earnestly commend him to your Reverence."

[The Italons who carried this letter to Manila were received with
great kindness by Governor Zabalburu; and on their return they were
accompanied by the minister for whom Arzaga had asked, for which post
was selected his uncle, Fray Balthasar de Santa Maria Isisigana, [18]
who went as superior of that mission. The two entered upon its labors
with indefatigable zeal and energy, and on December 28, 1702, Isisigana
sent in an encouraging report of what they had accomplished. Arzaga
had already built a church at a place four leguas from Pantabangan,
which he dedicated to St. Thomas de Villanueva; and Isisigana writes
that they have just erected another at San Agustin, and built a
house for the minister, while at Santo Christo de Burgos, about six
leguas distant from this, the timber is already being cut for another
church and convent. Most of the people, whether adults or children,
desire to embrace the Catholic faith; and the missionaries go about,
surrounded by the children, who sing and dance with joy. In building
the church of San Agustin, the fathers were aided by thirty infidels
from another village, one and one-half leguas distant, who came
of their own accord, simply because they had heard that a church
was being erected there. Fray Arzaga went to the upper Italons,
by wretched roads; he went on foot from Pantabangan to Tablayàn,
the first Italon village, about eighteen leguas. Many natives
visited him there; he desired to go farther, but was attacked with
an illness which almost proved mortal, and was obliged to return to
Pantabangan. The chief of Tablayan, with his family, accompanied him
thither; and they were ready to build him a church and house at once,
if he could have remained with them. The missionaries asked for cattle
from Manila, and the provincial sent them two hundred and twenty. As
they grew skilled in the native dialects, they were able to extend
their labors further, and they baptized many people from the tribes
in that region, Abaca, Italon, and Irapi; and by 1704 they had formed
several villages and erected five churches. The fruits of their zeal,
and those gathered by other Augustinian missionaries in the islands,
are shown by a certificate given to the governor in that year by the
provincial of the order, which reads as follows:]

"I, Fray Juan Bautista de Olarte, pensioned lecturer in sacred
theology, provincial of the province of Santissimo Nombre de Jesus
of the hermits of our father St. Augustine, do certify that, from
the eighth day of October, 1702, until the twentieth of May in this
present year, the two missionary religious of the said my order
who were employed in the conversion of the natives in the Italon and
Abaca tribes, who dwell in the mountains of Pantabangàn and Caranglàn,
[19]  have founded five villages, to wit: Santo Tomàs de Villanueva,
which is composed of eighty families; Santo Christo de Burgos, one
hundred families; San Agustin, one hundred and sixty; San Pablo,
one hundred and forty; San Joseph, seventy families. They all have
accepted the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the holy sacrament of
baptism has been administered to four hundred and seventy-nine persons,
all adults, who are instructed and taught in the Christian doctrine
and the mysteries of our holy faith; and those who at present are
being catechized and instructed for baptism number more than eight
hundred persons.

"I also certify that in the said mountains of Pantabangàn and Caranglàn
dwell the tribes called Igorrots, Irapis, and Sinay, and others,
which contain a great number of natives who live in their pagan
state; and that the Italon tribe alone contains fifty-six villages,
all infidels, who have offered to become Christians when they shall
have ministers who can teach them and preach the religion of our Lord
Jesus Christ; and that the said missionaries of my order are employed
in this ministry.

"I also certify that the minister of my order who serves in the
villages of Tarlac, Magalan, and Bucsi, Zambal villages in the province
of Pampanga, has catechized and baptized, from the year 1702 up to
May 20 of this present year, fifty-eight adults, all of whom have
come down from the mountains of the said villages.

"I also certify that the minister who serves in the village of Pórac
in the said province of Pampanga has catechized, instructed, and
baptized, in the missions which he has carried on in the mountains
of the said village during the said two years, twenty-six natives
among the blacks who dwell in that neighborhood.

"I also certify that the religious of the said my order who serve
in the villages of Agoò, Bavang, and Bacnotan in the province of
Pangasinan have converted to our holy faith, and instructed and
baptized, in the period of two years twenty-six natives from the
tribe called Igorrots, who dwell in the said mountains.

"I also certify that the ministers who serve in the province of
Ilocos have in the period of two years converted to our holy faith and
baptized one hundred and fifty-six natives from the infidel Tinguians
who are in and belong to the said province, and live in its mountains
and hills.

"I also certify that the minister for the village of Antique in
the province of Octong has in his charge and care the islets which
are called Cagayàn, and has labored for seven years to convert the
natives inhabiting them to our holy faith. Having gone thither to
visit the Christians, in the past year of 1703, he gave instruction
in the Christian doctrine and the mysteries of our holy faith to
forty-four adults, and baptized them, with others, who were the
children of Christian parents; and he heard the confessions of all the
old Christians, for he remained in that mission four months. In the
said province of Ogtòn, the religious who are ministers at Guimbal,
Tigbavan, and Xaro have converted to our holy faith and baptized
thirty-six adults, on various occasions when they have gone into the
mountains in their respective jurisdictions. That there has not been
a greater increase [in the number of conversions] not only in this
province, but in those of Pampanga, Pangasinan, and Ilocos, is [due
to] the lack of religious ministers; for those in my province are not
enough for even the maintenance of the villages and Christians who
are in their charge. And in order that these things may be evident
in the proper place, I give the present at the demand and order of
the captain-general of these islands, and president of the royal
Audiencia, Don Domingo Zabalburu; it is dated at this royal convent
of San Pablo at Manila, on the twenty-sixth day of May, in the year
one thousand seven hundred and four.


    Fray Juan Bautista Olarte, provincial."


[So great was the zeal of Arzaga and Isisigana that they devoted
themselves to seeking out the heathen among those wild mountains,
enduring privations, exposure, and sufferings, until the health of
both was broken down. Arzaga was again attacked by a sickness which
prostrated him, and died in 1707; his uncle held out three years
longer, and was then called in from the field, in order to recruit
his strength, but he was never able to return to his labors, and died
in 1716, in the convent of Vava. [20] In their place was sent to this
mission field Fray Alexandro Cacho, [21] in zeal and courage a worthy
successor to them. He succeeded in converting a chief named Dinalavang,
dreaded as well as renowned for his fierce and warlike disposition and
for his skill in all military exercises; also a sister of this man,
as valiant and dextrous as he, baptized as Doña Maria. Mozo gives an
interesting account of the fierce and cruel practices of these savage
tribes (whom he compares to the Huns), "which more than once I have
rebuked, when I have been among those people." "If they succeed in
killing a person they try to drink his blood; and, cutting off pieces
of his lungs, together with the testicles [22] and other parts, they
also draw out the entrails, and then divide these among themselves and
eat them raw--not only to make themselves terrible, but also because
they say it is a powerful medicine for exciting courage, fierceness,
and fortitude in their battles. They also cut off the head, and carry
it away in order to celebrate their festivals, with great gluttony and
carousing, [filling the skull] with a sort of wine which they make from
sugarcane and call ilang. Afterward, they take the grinders and teeth
and set these in the hilts of their cutlasses; and, as a consequence,
there is hardly any one in this tribe or in the Ibilaos whose cutlass
is not adorned with many teeth of those whom he has killed, or who
has not in his hut a collection of the skulls from human heads--this
very thing inspiring them with greater courage when they fight, in the
same way as it happened, as Virgil sings, to Æneas when he saw on his
antagonist Turnus the scarf of his beloved Pallas. So these people,
when they see the teeth of their own tribesmen on the sword-hilts
of their opponents, fling themselves upon the latter like mad dogs;
and from this may be readily inferred what degree of ferocity and
barbarism theirs must be, and what sort of hardships and labors it
will cost to free them from the power of the demon.... They greatly
dislike arrogance in their neighbors; and they likewise abhor every
sorcerer and wizard, a motive which makes them treat without mercy
any one of these whom they seize, cutting him to pieces with their
knives; and even at their feasts, and in the superstitious rites
which they practice, they utter a thousand execrations against such
persons, hurling at them a thousand curses, and swearing that they
will not spare any one of them who may fall into their hands, [an
oath] which they fulfil exactly." Mozo describes the secret raids
made by these people against their enemies, marching at night and
attacking a defenseless village at daybreak; and he accuses them
of aiding their ordinary weapons with a diabolical practice--"they
throw into a hole in some creek a root and herbs which they carry,
provided [for this purpose], and, by their using various magic spells
which the demon has taught to them, so violent a wind is raised,
and a tempest of rain, that with the noise thus caused they are not
observed, and likewise are better protected from the villages against
which they march." He adds, "I do not relate fables;" and states that
he has several times endeavored to restrain them from this devilish
proceeding. Sometimes, he says, the proceedings are reversed, and
the aggressors are, in their turn, surprised by those whom they
have attacked, who then take revenge upon them. Mozo relates how,
on one occasion, a hostile band of heathen attacked some Christians,
and captured a loaded musket, its match still lighted; they examined
it carefully, and, while handling it, incautiously let the match fall
on the priming. The gun was discharged, killing some and crippling
others of the group crowded around it; the survivors fled in terror,
but afterward returned to the spot, and with a cord dragged the gun
to their village and buried it in the ground. Learning that its owner
lived in Bongabon, they immediately rated the people of that village
as sorcerers, who had placed a powerful magic in the gun; and for more
than fifty years they taught their children, as soon as the latter
could speak, to avoid the dwellers in Bongabon as dangerous sorcerers.]





CHAPTER II

The glorious triumphs among the Isinay and adjoining tribes are related


In the wild and impenetrable mountain ranges which extend to the
northeast and north, and separate the provinces of Pampanga and Nueva
Segovia, there are various tribes who have almost the same customs
as those of the Abaca and Ibilaos; one of these is the one called
Isinay. [23] To them, and to the adjacent tribes, the fervent zeal
of the fathers belonging to the illustrious Order of St. Dominic [24]
had been directed, years before; but they found so much stubbornness,
violence, and cruelty that--after immense labors, and having been
in danger of losing their lives--they were not able to secure the
conversion of one of those people to our holy faith. For this reason
the fathers were obliged to withdraw from them, seeing that they were
wasting time without having any result, or even the hope of it. [The
Augustinian Cacho took up this task, and went on foot among those wild
mountains and wilder savages; at first they repulsed him, and even
tried to kill him, but finally his perseverance and patience softened
their hard hearts, and they were willing to listen to him.] From the
year 1715 until 1723, he was able to found four new villages of the
Isinay people, not to mention many others besides, from other tribes,
whom he baptized, and who united themselves with the other villages
previously mentioned. Finally, continuing unweariedly in his holy
task, and enduring the hardships which may be guessed, by the year
1738 he had come to the end of baptizing and converting the entire
Isinay tribe, with a large part of other tribes, whom he settled
in different villages. All these, thoroughly subdued and tamed,
baptized, and established in a well civilized mode of life, the
[Augustinian] province surrendered to the holy Order of St. Dominic,
with churches, dwellings for the religious, the sacred vessels,
and the other ornaments of the sacristy, because that of our father
St. Augustine found that it had many missions for which to care, and
not religious enough for all. This surrender was made in the year 1740
[25] preceding the permission of the governor and examination by the
judge whom he appointed for that task. The latter recorded a judicial
inventory of everything that was surrendered, and even copied from
the baptismal registers the numbers of the persons baptized, that
these matters might be evident for all time; and at the same time
he made a judicial investigation, showing who those were who began
to evangelize the said tribes--from which it appeared that when our
religious began their labors there, there was not any Christian in
those places. This surrender being accomplished, then, our religious
withdrew to their other missions, in which there are fifteen villages
which have been formed since the year 1702, at which time that mission
was commenced for the aforesaid places. In these glorious triumphs,
those who attained greatest eminence and were most fortunate in
winning souls, next to the three religious [already named], sons of
this province of Castilla, were: our father Fray Vicente Ibarra,
[26] who afterward was provincial; the father definitor Fray Juan
Velloxin, a most guileless man, full of virtue, and unwearied in
labors; the father Fray Diego Nogueròl, who is still living, and has
been definitor--all these three from this province of Castilla--and
the father commissary Fray Joseph Gonzalez, a son of the province of
Philipinas; also others, whom, in order not to be tedious, I omit.

[News of this change reached Spain in 1742, and the general public
impression was that the aforesaid conversions had been accomplished
by the Dominican fathers. At the representations of the Augustinian
procurator at Madrid, the king issued a decree (dated December 19,
1742), approving and confirming the transfer made to the Dominicans,
setting forth the facts in the case and giving the credit for these
labors to the Augustinians. In the rehearsal of their achievements
various interesting facts are stated. The people of Ituy were formerly
called Isinay, a name given to them by the Italons. The first three
Augustinian missionaries baptized, from the year 1715 to 1723, six
hundred and ninety-five persons of all ages among these Ituis, not
counting many others who were being prepared for baptism. Of these
converts they formed four villages with their churches: Bujay (the
chief village), Pigpig, Marian, and Canan. In this and the Italon
mission they baptized in that period three thousand, four hundred
and thirteen persons. In 1723 the order applied to the governor
for further aid; he sent Auditor Pabón to inspect the missions,
whose report led to the appointment of three more missionaries
there, their stipends paid from the royal treasury. The eighteen
Isinay villages had been reduced to nine [27] by the missionaries;
all of these contained church buildings, and most of them convents;
and the people were considerably civilized. The missionaries had
provided them with beasts of burden, and with "all the rest that was
necessary for the cultivation of their grain-fields." Through the
efforts of these missionaries, in conjunction with the Dominicans,
a road was constructed from Pampanga to Cagayan; [28] and another,
from Pangasinan to Paniqui, was opened by the Dominicans, in which they
were aided greatly by the Augustinians. The eighteen Italon villages,
with two others, were reduced to fifteen: within the mountains, Puncàn,
Caranglan, San Miguèl, Santa Rita, Bolo, Pantabangan, San Juan, and
Santo Thomàs; in the valleys, Tayog, Umingan, Lupào, San Joseph,
Palosapes (or Urorin), San Agustin, and Santa Monica. Perhaps the
greatest among the Augustinian missionaries was Alexandro Cacho,
who died in 1745. After him came Fray Agustin Barriocanal, [29]
a man of great zeal, who formed a village called Ambayavan; in the
flower of his youth he was drowned while trying to ford a swollen
stream (June 5, 1747). Another noted missionary was Pedro Freyre;
he converted eighty families in the Jumangi tribe, and gathered
them into a village, with their own church; and he converted great
numbers from the Italon, Abaca, Ibilao, Irapi, and Ilongot tribes,
and even some of the blacks (Negritos). Mozo cites their labors in
order to show that the missionary spirit was then even more active
and aspiring than in the early days of the conquest; and confirms
it by describing the mode of life of these mountain tribes, and the
consequent difficulties in missionary labor among them, saying:]

The tribes converted by the early missionaries were more civilized,
dwelt on the plains, and had a more orderly mode of life, sowing grain
and gathering enough for their support; but these of whom we speak,
besides being rough in their behavior, hardly know any tillage of
the soil, living generally by hunting. Their mode of cultivating what
little they plant is as follows: They first clear some little piece
of ground from the brush and weeds on it, with their knives (which
resemble those which the butchers use); then with the point of the
knife they make holes in the ground, in rows, and throw into each
a few grains of seed; they know no other plow, or any other thing
which might serve as one, for which reason the harvest that they
gather is always very small. They do the same for any planting of
sugarcane which they make--from which, when the cane is mature, they
press out the juice and make wine for drinking at their feasts; after
cutting out of the soil the grass to the roots, they make little holes
in it, and then thrust into these the shoots from the mature canes
which they had cut. For this reason, and because it is necessary to
provide means by which those who are converted may obtain a suitable
support, so that for lack of this they may not go wandering about,
as soon as we begin to confer baptism we endeavor to find animals
and other necessaries for the cultivation of the land--the religious
being often the first one who begins to plow and sow, directing them
in this way, so that they may learn how to do it. The same thing
occurs with reaping. They do not use sickles, but go on picking the
grain spike by spike; and, as there is so little of it, they soon
end their task. But, now that they are taught to plow, it is also
necessary to teach them to cut and winnow the grain; and this is done,
the religious being the ones who commence it, in order that the people
may imitate them--in which the work alone is for them, as they give
up all the fruit of it for the benefit of the said barbarians. [The
missionaries also had to contend with the attachment of the savages
to their mountains, for they abhorred the life on the plains. One
reason was, their dread of the smallpox, which never entered the
mountains, because these savage dwellers there instituted a strict
quarantine--closing up the roads and paths with logs and brushwood,
and sending out the declaration that they would immediately kill any
one who dared to enter their territory. Another reason was, that the
hotter climate of the plains did not agree with them. Accordingly,
in order not to exasperate them, no further effort was made to change
their dwellings, and the religious continued to labor among them in
the midst of a thousand trials and hardships.]





CHAPTER III

Missions of the provinces of Ilocos and Pangasinan in general


[Mozo states that the two provinces of Pampanga and Pangasinan were so
populous that, "of those whom our forefathers converted in these two
provinces alone are counted more than one hundred and fifty thousand
souls--who, settled in villages, and maintained in a very civilized
and Christian society, hold their own on the frontier of the infidels;
for their territory allows them no alternative, shut in on one side
by the sea, and on the other by very rugged mountains."]

Four very noted tribes, three of them very extensive and populous,
the fourth of more restricted territory and containing fewer souls--in
which last the enemy [of souls], strongly fortified, has resisted
for long ages--have been the aim to which the zeal and fervor of the
evangelical ministers have been directed. The said tribes dwell among
mountain ranges that are very extensive, lofty, and rugged--which,
stretching from the province of Pampanga and bordering that of
Pangasinan, run throughout Ilocos, through a space, with bends and
turns, of about a hundred leguas. [30] The first of these tribes is
called Igolot, and, corrupting the letters, they are wont to call
it Igorrot; their territory occupies about thirty leguas, from the
confines of Pampanga to those of the province of Ilocos. Contiguous
to this tribe is another which is called Tinggian, not less numerous;
and it extends for a distance of about forty leguas along the same
mountains, even trenching upon the province of Ilocos. Then comes
another, called Apayao, [31] extending about thirty leguas, which
consists of many thousands of souls; and at one side dwell another
tribe, called Adang, which has fewer people, but, for the very reason
that they find themselves less powerful, they have their dwellings
in places almost inaccessible--maintaining (as do the three others)
their own different dialect. Of the said four tribes, the first
and third are to a great degree cruel and barbarous; but the second
and third, although sufficiently obstinate, are more tractable. It
is said that the Igolot tribe are a caste of those Chinese who
had come over with the pirate Limahon to conquer those islands;
and, being conquered, he escaped with those whom he could gather,
those who could taking refuge in these mountains, in which they have
multiplied exceedingly. Besides the reasons which favor this opinion,
it is apparently confirmed by their appearance; for, although they go
about naked, and are subjected to every inclemency of the weather,
they nevertheless greatly resemble the Chinese in the light color
and gracefulness of their bodies, especially in the eyes, in which
there is a close likeness between them. Their fierceness and cruelty
is unequaled; their only desire is to take captives, in order to
have slaves for their service, and, when they have enough of these,
to kill whomever they encounter. For this reason, without a strong
escort one cannot pass, except with great danger, through the upper
part of those mountains; and even the villages are so infested with
them that as a precaution they always keep some men armed to resist
these marauders--at night stationing a sentinel with his drum, who
is changed during the daytime--throughout that mountain range. And
because in every place our natives (especially if they are away from
the village) are so harassed by the Igolots, therefore when they go to
sow their grain or gather their crops they erect high sentry-posts,
from which they can see if the enemy are coming; and those who work
keep the sickle in one hand and a weapon in the other--as we are told
of the Israelites when in the time of Esdras they were building the
walls of Jerusalem.... And even when they do this, they are not safe
from the fury of these savages. Such was the ferocity of this tribe,
in which they continued until the past year of 1755, and in such
manner did they try the patience of all those villages.

The tribe adjoining this one, called Tingguian, are more gentle and
more industrious, and maintain a much more civilized condition,
because they have much intercourse with the Christians in whose
vicinity they live; and for the same reason they are more open to
the teachings of the religious. And although so far as concerns the
acceptance of baptism they have continued very obstinate, for many
years refusing to allow a religious to live among them, yet always
it has been a very satisfactory harvest [of souls] which annually
has been gathered and united with the Christians, as may be seen by
the certificate of the reverend father provincial which is presented
above; speaking of the Tingguians, he states that in only two years one
hundred and fifty-six infidels had been converted to our holy faith
by the religious of the villages near by--which has always been the
fact, sometimes more and sometimes fewer. With such a drop of comfort
as this, the ministers were consoled--who, not finding any hindrance
in going from time to time to visit those savages, went in and out,
carried away by their holy zeal. And although, when the fathers talked
to them about our holy law, they would reply that the time for it had
not yet come for them, nor was it possible to overcome their caprices
by any arguments, nevertheless there was always one person here, or
another there, who was made ready to receive the heavenly influences.

The third tribe, which is the one called Apayao, not only does
not remain behind the Igolot in cruelty, bloodthirstiness, and
barbarism, but in a great degree surpasses it. For not only are
its men continually going about, placing a thousand ambushes in the
roads, in order to exercise their rage on the wretches who have the
misfortune to fall into their hands, without sparing any person, no
matter of what rank or condition he may be; but they have, besides,
a specially barbaric custom and cruel superstition at the funerals
and obsequies of their chiefs and other persons whom they respect,
in every way very similar to that which for many centuries the Greeks
practiced at the death of their heroes, and other persons of rank,
before and after the so celebrated destruction of Troya. [Here Mozo
makes a long digression regarding the customs of the ancient Greeks and
Romans in killing slaves or other people at the death of a prominent
person.] These [Apayao] barbarians, then, are wont to celebrate the
funerals and obsequies of their dead, although not promiscuously of
all, but only those of their chiefs and other persons to whom they
pay respect; and because they believe that the shades [manes] of the
deceased take delight in human blood, they endeavor to give them this
pleasure by killing people--a greater or less number, according to
the station of the dead man. To do so, they avail themselves only
of those whom they capture for this purpose, and these they go out
to seek with great diligence, as soon as the dying man has ceased
to breathe. In order that they may not lack these captives, they
assemble a considerable number of men, and, some taking one road and
some another, they go down from the mountains well armed, and, hiding
in the brushwood near the roads, they wait very silently for some
passers-by; and, as soon as they discover such persons, they attack
them with great fury, and kill them with their javelins on the very
spot. This done, the assailants cut off their heads, and laden with
these (leaving the bodies there) they carry them to their own dead,
and place the heads about him. After this they celebrate their sort
of banquet, at which they eat and drink like beasts; and when this is
finished they complete the burial. Placing in the tomb some portion of
food and drink, they bury the corpse with those heads, being greatly
pleased and satisfied at having pleased the shades of their dead,
and believing that through this whatever they may undertake will have
a prosperous issue.

[Mozo recalls the scanty results of missionary work among these savage
tribes in the early days. "In the year 1660, when Don Diego de Salcedo
was governor of these islands, two religious escorted by some soldiers
entered the territory of the Igorrots, and in a place called Cayam
[32] they established a small military post with a church, which
they dedicated to the archangel St. Michael; and from this place
they began with apostolic zeal to preach to those tribes the holy
name of God, but the harvest of souls which they could obtain was
exceedingly small...." A little while after the said religious had
made this entrance, the soldiers became sick through the insalubrity
of the region, and the barbarians threatened to cut them into pieces
if they did not immediately go away from that place. Accordingly, not
having sufficient force to resist, the fathers were obliged to yield to
this opposition, and retired with much sadness, taking with them such
persons as they had baptized. From that time until recent years, none
of the various attempts to found a mission there had been successful,
although occasional converts were made among those tribes. Among the
Apayaos and Tingguians also this experience was repeated; only within
recent years had they allowed the religious to labor among them,
a few, however, being converted by missionaries in villages near them.]





CHAPTER IV

The missions of Ilocos, in especial


[The missionaries who most zealously and successfully labored in this
field were: Fray Joseph Herice, Fray Jacinto Rivera, Fray Nicolàs
Fabro, and Fray Manuel Madariaga. [33] The first-named established
this mission in 1720; he formed a village of his converts, the first
thus established among the Adang tribe, another having been made among
the Apayaos, which was called Vera [i.e., Vira?]. The infidels named
Father Herice "the hunter of souls." He labored among them twenty-two
years, dying in 1742; and three years later Father Rivera followed him,
after gaining considerable extension for this mission.]





CHAPTER V

The mission to the Tingguians


[Father Fabro labored in this mission also, and formed a village of
converts which he called San Juan; by the year 1750, it contained
more than a thousand souls. This missionary labored indefatigably,
and much exposure and hardship finally crippled him; Fray Madariaga
came to his aid, and, although his health was not good, he accomplished
wonders. In 1736 he formed a village at Dingras, naming it Santiago;
his death occurred in 1744. In 1753 two other Tingguian villages
were newly formed--one three leguas from Santiago, further within
the mountains; and another, four leguas from this. In that same year,
Father Juan Solorzano was sent to this mission; he was most zealous
and useful, and forgetful of self, so much so that within the first
year he contracted a fever, as the result of exposure, which ended
his life in four days.]





CHAPTER VI

The mission to the Igolot tribe in especial


[Mozo refers to what he has already mentioned, that these barbarians
would not allow the missionaries to settle in their country, but
that some of them became converted through the labors of outside
missionaries. They were not disturbed by this, however, but rather
were pleased, because their relatives or friends who had removed to
Christian villages were thus able to supply them with articles of
comfort or luxury which they themselves had not--"blankets, which
they wrap around them when there is some cold weather, in the time of
north winds; wine; hogs and cattle, of whose flesh they are very fond,
and use it continually in their feasts and banquets." Through this
commerce, also, the missionaries find opportunity to reach some of
the heathen, and thus secure occasional conversions. Mozo describes
a barbarous custom of theirs: "It is a usage among these people not
to give burial to any of their dead, especially if he was a chief,
until whatever he may have left has been consumed in gluttony and
carousing among his relatives and others belonging to him; with some
chiefs this is commonly no small amount, because in the rivers there
some gold is found, and all the people endeavor to obtain it for their
chiefs. For, expending for cattle, hogs, rice, and wine whatever the
dead man possessed of this sort, they make enormous bonfires about the
corpse, which they lay in the ground; and having killed the animals,
they thrust them just as they are--with hair, hides, and entrails--into
the said bonfires, and thus prepare barbecues [34] which are savory to
their taste. Afterward, beginning to dance around the corpse, they keep
this up night and day, one set giving place to another. [35] They eat
and drink frequently; and if any one is inclined to sleep he squats on
his haunches, with his head resting on his knees, and needs no other
bed. Thus they remain, ten, fifteen, or twenty days with the corpse,
without interring it; and, even when it emits a stench and swarms with
maggots, it does not drive them away. They reserve some gold and some
food, which afterward they inter with the deceased, so that he may
have it, as they say, for his journey." In 1747 the Augustinian Fray
Francisco Cordova (who had been the associate of Cacho) was sent to
Agoo, on the frontier of the Igolots, and soon secured their good-will,
although they long refused to allow him to live among them. Finally,
after seven years of this apparently unfruitful labor, a miraculous
change occurred. During the visitation of the provincial--then Fray
Manuel Carrillo, accompanied by Mozo as his secretary--while he was
conferring with Cordova at Aringay, five chiefs came down from the
mountains, and asked Carrillo to send missionaries among them. He sent
a deputation of them to Manila to ask this favor from the governor;
who received them most graciously, and granted whatever they asked;
they were instructed in the faith and baptized while in Manila, and
returned to their tribe, who eagerly sought baptism also. Cordova
[36] was made superior of the new mission, with Fray Francisco Romero
and Fray Pedro Vivar as his assistants; they built two churches,
and baptized many hundreds of the people. In other Igolot villages,
missions were also conducted by Fray Carlos de Horta, Fray Joseph
Torres, and Fray Juan Sanchez.]





CHAPTER VII

Missions to the Zambals


Along the provinces of Pangasinan and Pampanga, fronting their
western side, there dwells another tribe, which they call Zambal,
no less fierce than those already mentioned, and exceeding them in
boldness. They are continually assaulting travelers, and they take
their greatest pleasure in killing. So continual are their descents
from the mountains to infest the said roads that it is only with great
peril that one can cross from one province to the other without an
escort; and even then many mishaps occur frequently; for these bandits
lie hidden in the thickets and ravines at the sides of the road, and,
when one of them gives a yell, all discharge their arrows, in the
management of which they are very skilful; and, felling to the ground
those whom they can reach, they cut off the heads of these, and carry
them away in order to celebrate their feasts. They are also wont to
approach the villages by night, and in hiding to wait for any person
who strays from the rest and leaves the village early; then they do the
same with him, be his rank what it may; afterward they take the skull
of the slain man's head and use it for a drinking-vessel, in the same
manner as did the Scythians, as Ravisius Textor and Plinius relate.

This tribe obtain their living generally from the hunting of deer, wild
swine and buffaloes, and from the honey produced by the innumerable
bees which are in those extensive forests and shut-in mountains. They
are accustomed also to plant certain potatoes, which here we call
Malagan potatoes, and there are named camote, the seed of which,
with the name, was carried [thither] from Nueva España; but they
care little for the said planting, because without any work of their
own the Author of Nature provides them with a kind of wild palm,
so useful and profitable that this tree alone admirably displays the
wisdom of its Creator--for what it spontaneously yields is a thing to
cause astonishment, and would even be incredible to one who did not
see it. [Mozo here cites several authors regarding the uses of the
palm in other countries, but says, "all this is nothing compared to
the palms which we are going to describe; accordingly, for the praise
of the Creator, I am going to give a full account of the said tree,"
which he accordingly does. The palm referred to is the buri, [37] or
sago-palm; its farinaceous product is called yoro in Pampangan, and
in Tagálog sagu. He describes the native method of fire-making among
these people, as follows: "They take two splinters of a kind of bamboo,
very thick and tall, which grows in abundance throughout the forests
there, and along the creeks; and, scraping the outer surface of one of
these a little with a knife, they make tinder of the shavings. Then
they make a notch in the splinter with which they must rub the other
one; and, placing on its outside that which serves for tinder, they
make the other splinter firm, placing it on edge against some tree,
first paring its upper edge thin, like a knife-blade. This done, with
the other and notched splinter (and the tinder filling the notch)
they begin, holding it flat, to rub the lower one very hard. In
less than two minutes it begins to smoke, and is fully kindled;
they breathe upon it to raise a flame, and, feeding this with dry
leaves, grass, and little sticks, in a very short time they make
a fierce blaze." [38] Mozo also describes some vegetable medicines
used by the natives. Among these wild people were sent missionaries,
Fray Gonzalo de Salazar and others; these form villages with their
converts--"Magalang, Tarlac, Bucsic, and Panlinlan, in which there
are more than seven hundred families, as appears from the original
register, made in the past year of 1759, of which I have a legal
copy." In 1728, Fray Juan Velloxin formed the village of Tunàs;
and in 1755 Fray Sebastian Morono established those of Pandolan,
Garlit, San Miguèl, and another one. Besides these, many converts
removed their residence to other Christian villages. Mozo notices,
as a curious phenomenon, that among these Zambals are certain persons
who are immune to the bites of poisonous animals and insects--as
he thinks, because of some quality of their "humors," or of their
physical conditions; he cites therefor Pliny and other writers, and
various instances of which he has known personally. He also describes
the cure of these poisonous bites by sucking out the poison, which
act (as also the person who does it) is called, in Pampangan, tavac;
but the ability to accomplish this he ascribes to some peculiarity
of temperament or physique on the part of the healer.]





CHAPTER VIII

Missions to the Balugas, [39] or Aetas


Besides the aforesaid missions, the province maintains another,
scattered through all the islands, to a class of people who, it is
believed (and with no small reason), were in olden times the masters
of the entire land. One of the grounds for this belief is, that in all
the islands (which are very many) these people maintain an identical
language, and different from those of all the other peoples among
whom they live; while the other natives of each island have a language
different [from those spoken in other islands], and even in some places
(as is evident throughout all this treatise) are encountered at every
turn different dialects in the same island. Another argument is drawn
from the similarity which there is between the peoples of those islands
and the Malayos, and even in their respective languages--these Malayos
are natives of Maluco, and are quite energetic and warlike--excepting
the people of whom we now speak. From this it has been inferred that
these blacks ruled that country; and that the said Malayos, coming to
it and subduing its former masters, compelled them to retire to the
bush and the mountain heights, abandoning the rest of the country to
the conquerors.

These people of whom we speak are very dark in color, not black
like those of Angola; neither have they thick lips, or curly and
short hair, like them. But their color is a brownish or pallid
[descolorido] black, their hair like that of a mulatto; their lips
are not thick; many of them are very corpulent, and all have large
abdomens, and generally both men and women appear feeble. All go
naked, with no other covering than a long strip like a narrow sash,
with which, tied round the waist and drawn between the legs, the
men cover their private parts; while the women wear a sort of apron,
which covers them behind and before as far as the knees. Both sexes
make these coverings from the bark of a tree which they call balete;
stripping off its bark, which is very smooth and flexible, they place
it in water, afterward beating it in order to loosen the outer layer;
then washing and drying it, it remains of the color and softness of a
chamois-skin, although it is thin. They keep this on until it wears
out, and when they can no longer use it they repair to the shop in
the grove, to look for another in their storehouse.

The nature and peculiarities of these Balugas are described by the
reverend father, former provincial of the Philipinas, our father Fray
Vicente Ibarra, in the report of the missions which he made to the
governor of those islands, Don Fernando Valdés Tamon, in the year
1738. He says, then, speaking of these people: "The third mission
which is in these mountains is very arduous, not so much on account
of the toilsome roads as because the people have less intellect than
[any other that] is known in these islands; for this reason it has
not been possible to introduce them into any civilization, although
those who are baptized are numerous. Their maintenance in the faith
is so difficult that it cannot easily be explained after the no small
expenses that are incurred; for all the time while the ministers are
devoting themselves to their instruction it is necessary to support
the fathers, furnishing to them rice, meat, wine, and tobacco, along
with some trinkets for the women and children. For those people have
neither house nor fields, nor any furniture save the bow and arrow
and some heavy knives [machetes], with which they are continually
seeking their food, without reserving anything for another day."

[Mozo adds other information, acquired during his residence of three
years among the Negritos; but precedes it by various citations from
learned authors. Returning to his subject, he says:]

They have their own territory, within which they go about in bands
and from which they never go out; but they do not have any fixed
dwelling-place in it, for they remain a short time in one place
hunting, and afterward they remove therefrom four or five leguas
away. In whatever place they arrive, they make their hut in an
instant with four rough sticks, and with a sort of grass, very long
and flexible, with which the country abounds, which they call ilib,
[40] or with the leaves of palms--with which and with the stakes
they form their huts (which resemble those of the vineyard-keepers),
in which with a piece of wood and some dry grass, [41] which they are
sure to find about the entrance, they forthwith have bed and pillows,
and all that they need for sleep. They live entirely in common,
and therefore when they capture any deer or wild swine (by hunting
which they live) they immediately share it equally--except the head
and neck, which parts they set aside for the dogs that they have,
who start the said game.

Each band, usually containing twenty-five to thirty persons, goes by
itself, with one man to whom the rest pay respect, generally the one
who is most daring and valiant. In the summer they go down to live
on the banks of the streams, seeking the fresh air; but in times of
rain, or when the north winds blow hard, they huddle together in the
thickets, so dense that the wind hardly enters them. If one of them
dies, as soon as he expires they bury him in a very shallow grave;
and then they take to flight, in order that death may not seize
another person and carry him away, as they say. When the time for
[gathering] honeycombs arrives--and the stores of honey which the bees
[42] gather in those dense forests are without limit--they are busy in
searching for these; and if they come across a honey-tree the person
who finds it immediately makes a mark on the trunk of the tree, and
possesses it as securely as if he had it in his own house. For, even if
another person goes there and finds it, when he sees the mark he says:
"This tree already has an owner," and therefore he goes on. Afterward,
they go at a convenient time, and, waiting until there is no wind,
so that the smoke may not be prevented from rising perpendicularly,
they make a fire [under the tree]; and, the bees being scared away,
men climb the tree, carrying a sort of sling, strongly made from a
palm-leaf, very broad, [from the tree] which they call anao. [43]
They take out the comb entire, with wax and all, placing it in this
receptacle; and then tie it together and carry it down. They eat
the honey, and sell the wax in order to buy tobacco for smoking,
without which they cannot pass the time. So long as such people have
their tobacco, their bows and arrows, their half-cutlass, and their
outfit for striking fire, they do not desire anything else--money, or
clothing, or lands--neither do they envy any person for anything. They
shoot arrows with the greatest dexterity, and will pierce a deer with
one from side to side in his most rapid flight. When they have food
they eat it in a barbarous manner; but if on account of bad weather
they have not been able to obtain any game, they boil water and drink
it, and compress their bellies with cords. They are also accustomed to
dig in the ground and search for a root called sucbao, [44] with which,
when it is roasted, they can subsist, although in summer they never
lack fruits in the woods. They are always happy, and keep themselves
plump and contented; and among them are persons who are quite old.

I frankly confess that, in the midst of the sorrow that was occasioned
in me by the extreme barbarism and mental stupidity of this people
when I knew by experience their mode of life, at the same time not
only were presented before me those golden ages, so celebrated,
of which Ovid treats at length in his Metamorphoses, Cicero in his
Aratus, Lactantius Firmianus in his Institutiones, and Seneca in his
Epistolæ, but I also saw how true is that Epicurean maxim, which,
distinguishing human necessities, says, Naturales necessitates satiari
pene nihilo. To which Pythocles adds, Si vis hominem divitem facere,
non pecuniæ adjice, sed cupiditatibus detrahe. [45] It is worth while
to see the said people going about naked, without house or shelter,
without land, and even without desire for it, yet living contented,
happy, plump, and satisfied; without having any anxieties beyond
that of searching for enough to get through the day with--which, as
it is but little, they soon provide from what is yielded by nature
in those mountains.... Again I say that their mode of life arouses
my admiration, and that if they were enlightened by our holy faith,
and were enduring for God's sake the sufferings that they experience, I
believe that not even the most austere monk of the Thebaid could equal
them. It is, however, true that they avail themselves of the "bill
of divorce," although before marriage a false step is hardly heard
of among them; and that in some districts they are cruel and murderous.

[Mozo here makes observations on various medicinal plants,
which he found by actual experience or observation to be highly
efficacious. Among these are two roots which these natives used
in cases of parturition--one to facilitate the birth, the other to
cleanse and strengthen the mother's system; the woman was able to
go out from her hut, carrying her infant, within one day, or even a
few hours. Seeing the great virtue of this treatment, Mozo obtained
a quantity of these remedies and prescribed them successfully in many
similar cases, after he left the Negritos. They poisoned their arrows
with a decoction of the bark of the camandag, [46] and of some other
plants, in order to kill large game--so powerful a poison that even a
buffalo would die within two minutes if one of these arrows hit even
its hoof.]

It is a fact, however, that they do not use the said poisoned arrows
against any save animals, considering it an inexpiable crime to shoot
rational beings with them; but for hunting those animals--"the great
game," as they call them--they use these arrows continually, and
with them kill innumerable beasts. When one of these falls to the
ground, they immediately cut off its head; and, having thoroughly
washed the flesh, they eat it without any misgivings. I baptized
the man who chiefly made this poison, who was already past the age
of ninety years, who never was willing to leave me until he died;
and on various occasions he explained to me the method of making the
said poison, naming to me the separate ingredients, although I never
was acquainted with them. These same people have other plants, the
use of which I tried, in my religious instructions, to banish among
them--not only because some persons make use of them for evil purposes,
but also because they lead one to suspect some diabolical aid, for
those people accomplish with them things which are truly amazing. But
since information of this may be of great assistance in explaining some
things which, written by the ancients, give the moderns material for
many and various curious inquiries, I will briefly describe what those
barbarians are accustomed to do with the said plants. They use, then,
I was told, certain herbs that are amatory, or adapted for philters,
if thus they should be called (which I do not dispute), in order to
captivate the love of those whom they desire to win. For instance,
do they desire to marry some woman who does not love them? Then,
obtaining their herbs (which they know very well), they carry these
with them, endeavoring at the same time to carry them in the mouth
when they talk with the woman; and the attraction is usually such
that in a short time they succeed in gaining the affection of women
who before were very averse to loving them. They do the same when they
enter the presence of some person whom they have offended and whom they
fear. They take the said herbs in their mouths, and, armed with this
antidote, they are not afraid to be seen by him and to talk with him;
and such are the results that they experience that, even when that
person is greatly offended, he feels for that time so changed that,
far from showing his anger, he receives them with great kindness, and
with indications of special affection. They are also wont to use the
aforesaid herbs in order to succeed in committing their lewd acts with
women; and the women do the same in order to make themselves beloved
by the men, very often, but not always, succeeding in this. [Mozo
relates an instance of this: a convert of his own, a most virtuous,
modest, and exemplary widow, at first refused to marry another man, an
infidel; but with the odor of these plants he overcame her opposition
and carried her away with him. "Never since then have I been able to
see them again, although I tried to do so that I might convert that
barbarian, and marry them afterward." He also relates how sometimes
the natives would try this spell on him, if they feared that he was
offended with them; after careful examination, he was satisfied that
it caused not the slightest change in his feelings. He argues that
any effect produced by the use of these herbs must, after all, be a
natural one, and not caused by diabolical influences--a conclusion
which he enforces by quoting various learned doctors. He and other
missionaries made vigorous efforts to prevent the natives from such
use of these herbs, on account of their bad results--as also in
another custom, thus described:]

In order to enable them to kill some deer quickly, they take some herbs
which they call in their own language panarongusa, which signifies
the same as to say in Spanish, aliciente para venados [i.e., "a lure
for deer"]. They distinguish the said herb into male and female, and
therefore they make two small bundles of them, the male plants in
one and the female in another. This done, they stick an arrow into
the ground, and, placing at the top of it the herbs tied together,
they begin to call the deer, imitating its voice, which they do to
perfection. If in that vicinity there is any deer that hears the
said sound, it infallibly sets out at once, and, beginning to scent,
steadily approaches the fixed arrow, without taking fright at the men
who are stationed near it. They allow the deer to approach, and, when
it is in the place which suits them, they shoot an arrow at whichever
part of its body they wish, and bring it down without difficulty. When
I heard these things, I endeavored with those very persons, after
they were baptized, to make a more than minute investigation, to
ascertain whether the devil was giving them any instruction in it,
whether they used any superstitious words, or performed [like] acts,
so that I could form some opinion regarding these; but the unanimous
reply of all was, that there was nothing of this sort, but that
their ancestors had known that the said herbs possessed this virtue,
and that they simply made use of them. There was, consequently,
nothing more for me to do, except to declare that these were among
the frauds of which the enemy [of souls] avails himself, in order
by these baits to ruin their souls, and so much the more as he more
secretly endeavored to introduce such things [as these among them];
and that on this account they ought to abstain from this mode of
hunting, using only the common one, and trusting in the Lord who
gives food to all living creatures, without despising the raven's
nestlings who cry unto Him, that He would furnish what they might
need for their support. I think that I succeeded, and that other
religious will succeed in gradually banishing much of this abuse.

[In Ilocos Fray Alexandra Cacho formed a village of converts, under
the name of San Juan de Sahagun; and Fray Velloxin greatly enlarged
the village of Santa Monica, "although in past years there came a
pest of smallpox, which in a short time swept away a great number of
the inhabitants." Fray Francisco Alvarez, a son of the province of
Philipinas, in 1740 formed two other small villages in the mountains of
Santor; this was removed to another site by Mozo himself in 1747, and
in the period of three years he secured more than a hundred and fifty
conversions, and even the attendance of their children at school. The
harvest among those people, Mozo says, is great, and many more might
be saved if there were more missionaries; those who are among them are
overworked, and in a few years are worn out or killed by their labors.]





CHAPTER IX

Missions to the apostates and infidels intermixed


Another mission, in my judgment more arduous than any of those I have
mentioned, according to what I myself have experienced--and this is the
general opinion of all those who are engaged in its cultivation--is
the mission which the province maintains in a place which is called
the Marangley. This is composed of some very extensive and close
forests, with various mountains, so covered with thickets and lofty
trees that the sunlight can hardly enter there--although at intervals
the natives have their clearings, of land which is so fertile that
it seems incredible; and for this very reason, thinking that it would
be considered fabulous, I omit an account of the abundance with which
the land responds to whatever handful of seed they are accustomed to
cast into it.

In the said forests and hills dwell many people of various tribes,
mingled together, Christians and infidels. Some are there, attracted by
the hills from which they went out [in former times]; others, in flight
from the officers of justice, who are seeking them. Many also go there
in order to live in idleness, and to free themselves from the payment
of tribute and the fulfilment of other obligations; and many, because
it is the region in which they were born, and where they have lived as
infidels. There they dwell intermingled, infidels and Christians being
married together, and mingling a thousand superstitions with the law of
Jesus Christ. From this results a hydra more fierce and more difficult
to conquer than the celebrated one with which Hercules fought; for the
apostates, as being entirely corrupt, are most difficult to reclaim,
and they with their corruption, persuasions, and evil customs, to
a great degree pervert the simple nature of the infidels, just as
St. Paul tells us. Their sustenance is like that which I related of the
Zambals, that is, [obtained] from the chase and from the innumerable
wild palms which I have already mentioned; but they also sow their
scanty bit of rice, the land responding to them with an incredible
harvest, although they cultivate it wretchedly and take very little
care of their fields. As many of them are Christians and had learned
the mysteries of our holy faith, while the infidels among whom they
live have a thousand superstitions, omens, and foolish observances,
they make a medley of Jesus Christ and Baal, which is not even that of
those Samaritans of whom it is related that they desired at the same
time to serve the God of Israel and not to cast out their [false]
gods. And because among these peoples are generally encountered not
only the superstitions which those infidel communities maintain, but
also the frivolous beliefs in which the peoples of Philipinas were
living before they could receive our holy faith, I have thought it
well to reserve this information for this place--observing, moreover,
that among the Christian communities hardly a trace of these things is
now encountered. This is the result of the labors, past and present,
of the religious in extirpating them, and even in so short a time they
have been able to banish them; while in our Europa, and even in our
España, after so many centuries remnants of the ancient paganism are
still frequently encountered.... Those of whom we are speaking believe
that every forest, every mountain, every river, and every grove has a
powerful spirit who rules in those places; they call him Nono, which
signifies "grandfather"--by which name I understand they call him,
partly because they think that the said spirit is that of some one of
the powerful ones who once lived there, and also partly on account of
the extreme veneration which those people have for their old men. It
is also very credible that this foolish belief among them comes from
their neighbors the Chinese, who likewise attribute to every river,
forest, field, and grove these Penates and fauns, giving them a name
which signifies the ruler and master of those places. They believe,
then, that this spirit which they say rules there has his dwelling
in some one of those trees which are most distinguished for size and
for abundance of leaves, as likewise in some great heaps of earth,
shaped like a sugar-loaf, which are made by a kind of ants, very
destructive, which they call anay, [47] of which many are found in
the open country there. Accordingly, not only do they regard it as
a religious duty not to pick fruit or take anything from the said
hills without first asking permission from the nono, with words of
great reverence, but likewise, whenever they pass before the said
tree or hillock, they pay their respects, saying in their language,
Tabipo, which means, "By your permission," and then they go on
their way. They are so fearful that, if they fail in doing this,
they imagine that the said spirit will send upon them some sickness
which will deprive them of life; this notion they confirm with some
irrelevant casualties--some persons having failed to perform this
ceremony, and afterward by accident having fallen ill--from which
they conclude that this was a punishment from the nono; and therefore
they try afterward to appease his anger by various gifts, which they
offer to him after their fashion. Moreover, in the said trees there
is often heard some loud noise, which, although it is frequently made
by some great serpent which has its abode in some hole that may be
in the tree, they attribute to its nono--although it is true that
the demon, in order to blind them more and thus to inspire them with
greater terror, is wont to appear to them often in the said trees. The
sacrifices which they are wont to offer to him in case of sickness,
as likewise several times in the year, are reduced to burning certain
herbs in front of the said tree, and placing there some little portion
of food, drink, leaf tobacco, and an herb which they are accustomed
to chew when combined with the small fruit of a palm, which they
call luyos in the Pampanga tongue, and bonga in the Tagal (and that
fruit and the herb all together they call in the former language mama,
and in the latter buyo), all which things, after having thus offered
them, they themselves eat, having made their prayers, such as they
are. [Mozo here stops to recall how like superstitions and heathen
sacrifices lingered for a long time in Africa and even in Europe,
and the efforts made by the Christian fathers to extirpate them. He
says that in Filipinas the heathen do not "adore the trees as gods;
but the aforesaid tree they regard as the dwelling in which the spirit
who rules that grove or forest has his abode, and therefore they
offer before it what we have described, and perform the said acts
of prayer and veneration; but these are not directed to the tree,
but to the spirit or nono who resides in it."]

Besides this, they have another and exceedingly foolish superstition
and belief, which is also found among the Chinese (and the Romans
had it, as we read in our father St. Augustine and others); this is
the belief that there is an evil spirit who is hostile to the birth
of children, and who, they say, in the form of a bird approaches
the house where the woman lies in childbirth, and kills the child
by tearing out its bowels. This spirit they call in their language
usuang (and it is the same that the Romans call Silvanus), which, they
say, shines by night. In order to free themselves from this spirit,
they do a ridiculous thing. As soon as the woman begins her travail,
the husband, attended by other persons, strips off his clothes, and,
taking his naked cutlass, climbs to the ridge-pole of the house, his
companions remaining below with their lances; and he does not cease
making cuts at the air until the infant is born. They believe that
the said usuang is frightened away by this, and dares not return. At
other times they do the same thing, [except that] they are stationed
below the house. They also fear greatly two other genii or spirits,
of whom they tell a thousand stories. One they call tigbalang, which
they say has the body of a giant and the legs of a horse; and the
other, which they say resembles a pigmy they call patianac. [48]
It is certain that the demon thus appears to them, to terrify them
with threats if they fail to serve him.

They also use auguries, which they obtain from a bird that they
call batala, in the manner of which Virgilius sings, and which his
commentator Servius explains; upon this Gellius, Pompeius, Cicero,
Tiraquellus, and other humanists expatiate at length. And it is
not surprising that they should be prepossessed by this error; for,
if we believe Luis Vives, it passed from Assia to Grecia, and thence
to Italia and Roma. Their belief is of that sort in this particular,
that, if they set out on any expedition against another people, and
on encountering them this bird should appear, singing in what they
think is a melancholy tone, they immediately turn back and abandon
their purpose, fearing to be entirely destroyed. On the other hand,
if the bird sings to them agreeably, they at once regard their success
as certain.

When they make peace with their opponents, they use a thousand
execrations and imprecations with which they sign their treaties; and
in order to divine whether there is any insecurity in the decision
they catch a hog, and having stretched it on the ground, with its
feet fastened thereto, they thrust into the midst of its body a
knife, very broad and sharply pointed, and, quickly drawing this
out, they carefully look for the blood on both sides. If on the side
which faces either of the two parties there is no blood, or if it is
there but not running, they conclude that the people on that side are
deceiving them; but if the blood runs on both sides they shake hands,
together they feast on the hog, and they swallow powerful draughts
[of palm-wine?]--forming the same opinion from the blood as did the
ancients from the entrails of the animals which they sacrificed,
Cicero's statement being verified that there is hardly a nation which
does not find auguries in these things.

In the eclipses they display great sadness, believing that some dragon
will carry away the sun or the moon, and therefore they call upon it
in terms which express that idea. Accordingly, in order to succor those
heavenly bodies they raise loud yells, and shooting arrows upward, they
make a thousand demonstrations of grief, as did the Romans, according
to Tacitus and Livius.... To this the Chinese add still more; for,
besides the said shouting, they bring out some copper instruments,
a sort of timbrel, having a very loud and disagreeable sound;
and striking these all at the same time, they make a frightful and
horrible sound. This, they say, is to aid the sun not to be carried
away by the dragon, which they think is frightened by this noise,
and thus lets the sun go free.

These and other superstitions and idle beliefs are generally held by
the infidels of these islands, and among the peoples of whom we are
speaking not only are these ideas found complete, but also, since among
those people dwell apostates, who have some knowledge of the mysteries
of our holy faith and of Christian observances, they introduce among
the multitude of such notions others from Christianity--with the
mixture which they make of these, bending one knee to Christ and the
other to the demon, and believing all these things equally. But it is
not surprising that they do this, when even over here after six hundred
years there still were left relics of the ancient heathenism, like to
these, as appears from the Councils, and from the saints above cited,
who rebuke in terminis these very things--to which may be added the
Council of Agde, [49] and other writings of the saints. [Mozo here
relates some incidents to show how the devil holds these poor people
in bondage, and terrifies them with threats and horrible sights.]

[In these missions, from the year 1718, multitudes of infidels were
baptized and hundreds of apostates reclaimed. Prominent among the
laborers therein were Fray Juan Velloxin, Fray Antonio Leon and a
brother of his (who died worn out by the fatigues of his work), Fray
Manuel Calvo, and Fray Francisco Alvarez. [50] During that time four
villages of converts were formed--Ururin, Lupao, Umingan, and Tayog,
in which the natives lived in very Christian fashion, their numbers
increasing with new conversions. Mozo relates several instances of
the opposition made by the devil to this work.]





CHAPTERS X, XI

Missions to Visayas


Having now made known the triumphs secured in this present century
in the great island of Luzon, it is right that we say something of
the missions which the province maintains in the various islands
which are called Visayas; and, in order that the reader may better
understand the pious labors which are being endured in the conversion
of the infidels therein to our holy faith, it will be very proper
to say something about the customs of the said peoples, and of the
places where they dwell, even though it be without enlarging much
thereon. Commencing with the latter point, I relate how in two
islands, called Zebu and Panay, there are some exceedingly dense
woodlands, and mountain districts more rugged than can be described;
for they are so impenetrable, and so thick with undergrowth, that
it is impossible to make a step forward without the utmost toil,
and even danger, especially for those who are ignorant of the path,
such as it is--which the natives know, and by which they go down,
when it suits them, to look for some things which they need. In
the said mountains dwell a people who are called Mundos; [51] they
have the same characteristics of fierceness and barbarism as those
of whom we have spoken in preceding missions, but they have besides
this a peculiarity which renders them intractable, for they have among
them some fearful wizards, who by conversing with the demon do things
which cause terror, and who are able to render credible much of what
is regarded as fabulous. [Here our author cites various writers to
show how prevalent was witchcraft in the ancient times.]

In this manner, then, instructed and misled by the demon, those
barbarians do fearful things, especially to revenge themselves, to
the continual terror of those about them. The natives say that these
wizards, changed into crocodiles, follow them when in their canoes,
and do not stop until they seize some person whom they hate; also
that they change themselves into other animals, in order to commit
other wicked acts--as likewise that, availing themselves of various
enchantments, they commit horrible murders, with a thousand other
diabolical acts which are attributed to them. For this reason, if any
one having this reputation enters any village to settle there, or,
when already resident there, some rumor arises that he may be such
a person, they immediately summon him peremptorily to depart from
the village within three days; and if he does not obey they burn his
house, and even himself and his family, nor is it once only that they
have killed such persons with their lances. I do not doubt that the
vulgar herd invent much, but as little is it doubtful that there are
many wizards, who do a thousand evil things.

Among them a malady is apt to prevail which they call bungsol (which
signifies "a sudden swoon"), which is apt to attack them as a result
of swellings, as hard as a stone, which originate in their stomachs;
this trouble is often caused by chills, which they experience from
going barefoot in the water and in wet places, and is wont to cause
them such pains that on occasion they will suddenly appear as if
dead. At other times, this sickness is also caused by some magic of a
sorcerer, which they call gavay, by which word they are accustomed to
denote the witchcraft and the act of practicing it--in which they do
not often make a mistake; for through their mouths, as well as through
other conduits of the body, these sorcerers on occasion eject rice
in the hull, and other things, which could not be done if they were
not aided by something of the said magic. In order to cure the person
bewitched in this manner, they endeavor to summon some other person who
has the reputation of a sorcerer; and this person, performing various
exercises of his powers, calls to the one who caused that sickness. If
the sufferer does not improve, the sorcerer at once pretends that the
first one must be very far away, and for this reason cannot hear him,
but will return the next day; and by this means he keeps the people
deceived, and eats and drinks at the cost of the poor sick man. It
also sometimes happens that they are quickly cured, and therefore
when they see these things they feel such fear that, when the sorcerer
goes so far as to ask for anything, they immediately give it to him,
fearing lest he may bewitch them--in the same way as occurs over here
[in España] in some little villages, when those persons go through
them whom they call loberos, [52] and others of that stripe.

If on a journey they lose their way in some desert plain, they
attribute this to the patianac of whom we spoke before; and in order
that they may be able to find the road they strip off their clothing,
and with this they say that they succeed in doing so because this
proceeding frightens the patianac, and he takes flight and does not
mislead them. In order to discover and know who it is that has taken
from them any missing article, they employ a diabolical device, which
they practice with a sort of sieve, which they call bilao--an act in
which one plainly recognizes that it proceeds from the demon; for by
simply shaking the said sieve while they name various persons the
[name of the] thief comes into their minds. They also summon their
manes, or [spirits of the] dead, when they are assembled in the house
where some person has died; and in order to see whether or not those
spirits come they lay down a sort of fine mat, and, scattering over
it ashes in order that the marks of feet may be printed thereon,
often there may be seen the traces of footsteps, and with this they
remain well content. It is true, however, that even over here [in
Europa] such things were wont to be seen in olden times, as we read in
various writings which describe the sacrifices which were offered to
such departed spirits; and our father St. Augustine points out this,
citing Marcus Varro, while it is individually explained by Tiraquellus
and others....

As for the missions which the [Augustinian] province has in the Visayas
Islands, the toil with which they have been and are being cultivated
is inexpressible, and very little, if anything, has been published
or known about them--partly because, as this work is carried on more
remote from sight, it has been less likely to attract applause;
and likewise because the religious, content that God, for love of
whom they are employed therein, should be cognizant of their labors,
care little for the rest, thus avoiding the subtle vainglory which,
under pretext of the glory of God and the honor of the religious order,
often deceitfully seeks praise for oneself....

Let the first mission, then, to become known to the public be that
of Bugasson, in the mountains of the province of Panay, in order
that it may be known how great has been the labor in the conversion
of those infidels. In the year 1704, father Fray Thomás Sanchez,
a son of this province of Castilla, when he had finished baptizing
the Indians who lived on the plains in that region, was assigned
by his obedience to the said mountains, with two other fathers,
as his associates. They obeyed the orders of their superior, and,
after having conquered various difficulties, with a thousand risks
of their lives, and having endured a thousand hardships of hunger,
want, the fatigues of the wretched roads, and other inclemencies of
the weather, amid the terrors of death they were able to secure the
baptism of a number of barbarians, enough to establish a foothold in
that region and erect a church. They continued in their task, reaping
considerable fruit, although in a short time, worn out by fatigues,
the said father and one of his companions died. Others were sent in
their places by the province, who were able to imitate the zeal of the
first missionaries so closely that in the year 1733 they were able to
form a village of the recent converts alone, on a most favorable site,
of more than two thousand five hundred souls; and, our Lord continuing
His favors, so great a number have been added to the flock of Christ,
by means of the continual preaching and industry of the missionary
religious, that in the original chart of the said village which was
sent to his Majesty in the past year of 1760, it is shown to have,
counting women, men, and children, six thousand and eighty-nine souls,
who are now baptized and reclaimed to civilization.

At the western side of the province of Panay, about twenty-five or
thirty leguas out at sea, there are some little islets called the
Cagayans; they are so low that they can hardly be seen, except when
one is very near, and therefore when the Indians sailed thither they
followed a star, by which they had marked the location of these
islets. In them were many infidels, and even therein took refuge
all the outlaws, and men who committed murders. There is no water
in the said islands, but they contain so great an abundance of the
palms called "cocoa" that, with the water of the said fruit, they
do not feel the need of any other. [To go among these people was
exceedingly dangerous, on account of their fierce natures; but it
was accomplished (in 1703) by Fray Hypolito Casiano, who succeeded in
winning their friendship and converting them to the Christian faith,
so that in two years (as stated by the provincial Olarte, ante) he had
"baptized all the infidels there, and induced all the criminals who had
resorted thither to repent of their deeds and reform their lives." He
continued these labors and these triumphs until his death, in 1726.]

The third mission of the Visayas Islands is that of which the reverend
father provincial Fray Vicente Ibarra gave a particular and exact
account to the governor of the islands in the year 1738, when he had
finished his visitation of the missions, having received an urgent
request that he should make report of their condition and progress
(for with all this strictness are affairs examined in Philipinas,
since such is the command of his Majesty, whom may God preserve);
and because the said father provincial, as being an eyewitness
and well acquainted with the religious who began that mission, can
speak with more accuracy, I will set down his very words, as follows:
"The third mission which my province maintains is in the mountains of
Bosoc in the province of Ogtong, on the further coast of the province
of Panay. This mission was established in the year 1728, an entrance
being made in the rugged region of those mountains by father Fray
Felix de Zuñiga [53]--a religious of the most religious habits and the
gentlest demeanor; and so zealous for souls that, without heeding the
inclemencies of those wild mountains, he went about on foot, unshod, in
sun and in rain, crossing almost by a miracle swollen and rapid rivers,
and, despising danger, made his way into the most secluded places, in
which there are many apostates and Carib [54] blacks, of which sort
are all those who are in the mountains of these islands. Such power
had his zeal and constancy that he gained no small number of souls,
since from those who were converted he was able to form three small
villages; but, while he was praying one day in the little house which
he had made for his dwelling, some apostates killed him with their
lances. At present the said mission is cared for, on account of the
great deficiency of men that we experience, by two religious who are
in the village of Bugasson."

[All these missions were still conducted, when Mozo wrote, and were
saving many souls; but their work was greatly limited and hindered by
the scarcity of workers. These missionaries displayed the same spirit
of devotion, zeal for souls, and self-sacrifice as did the earlier
ones, but "with this difference [in results], that our predecessors
dealt with peoples who were gentler and more civilized, while those of
the present time are handling people who are more fierce and barbarous;
and for this reason their triumphs must be the more glorious, and their
virtue and constancy most firmly grounded. Many other souls are caught
for Heaven in these islands by those religious who serve in villages
near the districts where there are infidels, of which there are many
in the said islands. They penetrate further into the country when
they are permitted to do so, and they lose no opportunity when those
[infidels] go down to their villages to procure articles that they
need, which occurs often; those [thus converted] amount to several
hundred persons annually."]

[Mozo here describes certain remedies for sickness which are used
by the natives. Among these are the gall and fat of the python
(called saua and biting, in various dialects) and another similar
species of serpent, which reach an enormous size in the forests of
the interior. The gall is used both internally and externally by
the natives, to cure chills and pains in the stomach--to which they
are especially liable from going barefooted, and more or less naked,
through mud and rain at all times; also for malignant fevers and any
inflammation which causes them. Mozo relates how he had cured himself
of a high fever, when the physicians had "sentenced him to death,"
by the use of this remedy, and had on other occasions been relieved or
cured by it; "consequently, I guard what I have of it like a precious
jewel." The fat of these serpents is equally efficient for swellings
or pains in the muscles and sinews, especially those caused by chills
and exposure to weather; also it relieves the pains of gout.]

[Those Indians used a small stone, resembling a nut, in order to
facilitate childbirth; they said that it was found, although only in
small quantities, in a mine somewhere; this stone, applied to the left
thigh, would quickly relieve the most difficult case of parturition,
[55] and afterward, applied again, would bring away the placenta;
but in both cases it must be removed as soon as the desired effect
was accomplished, or else it would "cause even the bowels to be drawn
out." They also made use of a certain root, called in the Pampanga
tongue sugapa, [56] to inflame their courage in battle; "he who eats
it is made beside himself, and rendered so furious that while its
effect lasts he cares not for dangers, nor even hesitates to rush
into the midst of pikes and swords. On many occasions, therefore,
when they go out to fight with any who are hostile to them they are
wont to carry this root with them, and, by eating it at the time of
the attack, they enter the battle like furious wild beasts, without
turning back even when their force is cut to pieces; on the other hand,
even when one of them is pierced from side to side with a lance, he
will raise himself by that very lance in order to strike at him who
had pierced him. Sometimes, also, when they wish to revenge themselves
on some more powerful man, it occurs to them to eat the said root;
and, with the fury which it arouses in them, they fling themselves
upon him like rabid wolves, being carried away by that rage in the
presence of the person whom they meet, whoever he may be. Therefore,
on account of the pernicious effects which the said root causes,
the Dutch have given peremptory orders in Batavia that any person
who sees another, whoever he may be, in the said fury shall without
fail shoot him or [otherwise] put him to death, in order that an end
may be put to the fatal accidents which are daily seen in that city,
on account of the natives there being very prone to this barbarous
proceeding. The Malanao and Joloan Moros are accustomed to use this
plant much. They are also acquainted with other herbs the use of
which is no less pernicious, although in another way than is the
root above referred to. I have forgotten their names, but in those
regions there are many who know them, and are even acquainted with
those plants (would that it were not so!). It is true, indeed, that
among those who are now living in a civilized manner and are grounded
in the faith, hardly any abuse is found in this respect; and even,
except very seldom, any one who is acquainted with those plants;
but among some infidel tribes there is often much of this, as I
could confirm by cases which occurred to me while I was among those
people." [Mozo here mentions certain herbs (unnamed) which produce a
complete physical torpor in the person to whom they are administered,
so that he can use neither voice nor limbs; [57] the natives are apt
to avail themselves of this for purposes of robbery, but "they do not
use it in order to abuse women, which is an especial providence of our
Lord." He relates an "amusing trick" played by the natives on another
religious: this father had baptized some infants, on condition that
they be surrendered to his care to be brought up as Christians; after
a time, the parents came one night, and burned the above-mentioned
herb under the house, thus producing its effect upon the inmates;
"and in the sight of all, without any one having the power to move,
they seized the infants and went away with them," nor was the father
ever able to find either the children or their parents.]

[The rest of Mozo's work (pp. 152-234) is occupied with the relation
of the Augustinian missions in China; at the end is a list of the
baptisms solemnized by one missionary during the year 1760-61,
giving the name, age, and residence of each; most of these persons
are children, and one had been a priest of an idol.]





DOMINICAN MISSIONS IN PANIQUI AND ITUY

[In a rare pamphlet printed at Manila and dated 1745--of which the
Library of Congress possesses a copy--Bernardo Ustáriz, [58] then
provincial of the Dominican order in Filipinas, wrote a sketch of
the above missions, from which we make the following summary:]

[The missions of the order had reaped a rich harvest in central Luzón,
but the fathers were not satisfied because the gospel had secured no
stable footing "in Paniqui, [59] which was hiding among the provinces
of Cagayan, Pangasinan, and Pampanga." They succeeded in making an
entrance therein in 1739, at the cost of the lives of four of their
missionaries; but six years later they were maintaining four laborers
in that region and making encouraging progress. In this enterprise
they were liberally aided by Governor Gaspar de la Torre. In those
remote and wild regions the missionaries suffered greatly from lack
of suitable shelter and food, the inclemencies of the weather, and
the hardships of traveling. As an illustration: "On one occasion,
a missionary having set out from the village of Appiàt for the place
called Cauayan, night came upon him when he reached a village named
Làcab; he expected that he could find a lodging there, and thus
pass the night less uncomfortably, under some roof. He uttered loud
cries, calling to its inhabitants, but his only reply was a confused
yelling from the women, who in anger cried out that the religious
should not enter the village. At the time they were offering a
public supplication, in order to obtain from their idols rain for
making their fields fruitful; and, as they formed the opinion that
the devil would not speak to them through fear of the religious,
they would not consent that the father should lodge in any of their
houses. Accordingly, he found himself obliged to sleep on the ground
that night, exposed to any disagreeable change of weather that might
arise." For some time the missionaries were derided, repelled, and
threatened, and the natives endeavored to prevent them from entering
the houses; but they persevered undauntedly, and the devil was
often thwarted by their courageous resistance. Many persons desired
baptism, but some were lured away by the devil, speaking through
the priestesses (or aniteras), and others were intimidated by the
opposition of their friends and relatives, who would even threaten
a convert with death. Some fancied that to become a Christian would
render one "a perpetual slave to the Spaniards." In 1743, a chief at
Appiat came with his family to the missionaries to be baptized. In
the aforesaid space of six years, they had "succeeded in erecting
six churches, in the villages of Cauayàn, Appiàt, Bagabag, Lappàu,
Darùyag, and Carìg. To these should be added that of Bayombong; for,
although some Christians were there when it was received from the
reverend Augustinian fathers, there were still many infidels, of whom
some lived with the said Christians, and others had fled to a forest
called Vàcal--from which they have gradually come out by dint of the
visits which the missionaries have frequently made them, and with the
baptisms among them an increase has been made in the number of the
Christians who were in Bayombong when the Order of St. Dominic began
its ministrations there. Thus, in the said seven churches there is
the number of nine hundred and seventy souls, baptized in the said
time--besides ten apostates, who after many years have returned to
the Christian faith. The number of Christians would be greater, if the
missionaries did not use especial care in administering baptism, and if
they were willing to comply with the desires of many persons." Many
of the requests for baptism were caused by the desire to escape
from tyrannical lords, or from creditors, or from the penalty due to
their crimes; and not a few imagined that they could thus gain some
more influential position among their people. In those seven churches
there were eight hundred and fifty-eight catechumens; and these would
have been more numerous if there were missionaries. At the time of
Ustáriz's writing, there has been a gratifying change in the feelings
of those people, even among the infidels; they are more docile, and
more friendly to the missionaries, and they even live more peaceably
among themselves, committing fewer murders. Governor Torre granted
to these fathers "extraordinary Indian guards, who even yet have not
been able to complete the works in all the villages. In Cauayàn and
Lappàu, they have built substantial houses and churches of planks;
in Bagabag and Daruyag they have constructed houses of the same sort,
and although [in those places] there are pavilions suitable for saying
mass, they will proceed to build there substantial churches when
they finish the wooden house and church in Appiàt (or Gàpat); they
will also build a house in Carig, where a large church of planks has
already been completed. In the village of Bayombong it has likewise
been necessary to build a new house and church of planks, because
the buildings which were there for both these were little more than
hovels." These same Indian guards had been obliged to spend much time
in opening and repairing roads, which had delayed their work on the
church buildings; but those new roads had enabled the missionaries
to secure an easy communication with the surrounding provinces, and
to discover the lurking-places of the heathen natives. The work and
maintenance of these Indian laborers are paid for by the government;
but the fathers had to spend no small sum in other ways, to secure
the spiritual conquest of the heathen about them. "It is necessary to
influence them not only by fear but by love," and thus the missionary
must give them gratuities and presents; he must also support some
of them, even for several months, who came from a great distance to
receive instruction and, being in a strange land, had no means of
support. The fathers had furnished plows to all who asked for them,
that the natives might better cultivate their lands.]

[In the villages of Bujay and Dupag, and still more in the district
of Ytuy, they met many obstacles and afflictions, as those natives
were not so docile as those of Paniqui. "Nevertheless, much fruit
has been gathered, in baptizing many infidels of the neighboring
tribes, Ygolot, Ylongot, and others; and in reclaiming some apostates
who were hiding in the mountains." The missionaries were troubled
not only with the obstinacy of those in Ytuy (or Ysinay), and the
persistent efforts of the devil to render their labors vain, but
with the hostilities committed on their converts by a tribe close
by Ytuy, called Panoypuyes, who made head-hunting raids on their
Christian neighbors. The Ysinays were a timid people, and these fierce
marauders kept them in abject submission to their tyranny--killing
them when found alone or unprotected on the road, killing or snaring
their cattle, demanding from them contributions of produce, and even
human beings whom the tyrants slew and then "offered in sacrifice
to their false gods." The missionaries feared that they must abandon
this mission; but, hearing that Auditor Arzadun was then making his
official visitation in the province of Pangasinan, they appealed to
him for aid. He sent a body of armed men from that province against
the Panoypuyes, but they could not administer sufficient punishment;
he then ordered troops from Cagayan, two hundred and eighty-two
in number. To these were added fifty of the Indian guards from the
mission of Santa Cruz of Paniqui, and some of the native converts
there; and this expedition was able to check the insolence of those
dreaded marauders. Ustáriz presents an extract from the report of
this enterprise which was furnished to him by Fray Antonio del Campo,
the vicar-provincial of the said missions. The expedition captured
and burned the villages of Ajanàs (the principal village of the
Panoypuyes), Masi, Taveng, Bangao, and others; and slew Sapàc--the
chief who ruled that tribe, and had been most tyrannical toward "the
poor Ysinay Christians"--with many of his followers. In Ajanàs was a
large building, on higher ground than the rest, and surrounded by a
wall of stones, which was their sole fortress; "it was destined only
for the residence of the unmarried men, who, according to the custom of
that tribe, are not allowed to cover the more shameful part of their
bodies, nor sleep where the married people live; the said pavilion
also served as a watch-tower the duty of sentinel service belonging to
the unmarried men." Since this castigation, the missions and Christian
Indians had enjoyed peace; and the natives, relieved from their terror
of the enemy, had flocked to the missionaries for baptism. In Bujày
there were baptized about two hundred persons of the Ygolots alone,
and at this writing there were "more than seven hundred souls newly
added to this mission; for, the report of the valor of the Cagayan
Christians in this undertaking having spread abroad, it has penetrated
into even the most remote part of the mountains, attracting even
the most secluded of the Ylongots, a tribe who rival the Panoypuyes
in valor and fierceness. The mission of Paniqui likewise felt these
benign effects; for at the report of such an achievement more than
six hundred persons came to enroll themselves for the [instruction in]
catechism, from the Yogad and Gaddàng tribes--besides forty souls from
the village of Ybana in the Ygolot tribe, who united themselves to
the village of Bayombong. Nor was this blessing monopolized by these
two missions, but, crossing the mountains, it went on to Pungcan--to
which place many families, influenced by the rumor of this influx
of people [to the missions], have come down from the Gumangi tribe,
in whose instruction the reverend Augustinian fathers are occupied."]



[A pamphlet (Mexico? ca. 1740) by Fray Manuel del Rio, then provincial
of the Dominicans in Filipinas, relates the "events in the mission of
Santa Cruz in Ituy, in the province of Paniqui: in the year 1739;" it
is reprinted by Retana in his Archivo, ii, pp. 175-205. The following
information is gleaned therefrom, space not permitting us to present
more than the leading facts contained therein.] [60]

[The Dominican province of Filipinas had within the islands the following active missions: San Miguel 
de Oriong, in the mountains of Batan; Pantol and Asingan, in those of Pangasinan; in the islands [61] 
which extend toward Hermosa Island, those of the Batanes and Calayàn; and in the mountains and hills 
of Cagayan, the missions of Santa Rosa of Cifun, Tumavini, Orag, Mavanan, Santa Cruz, Vangan, and 
Capitanan. The missionaries in the provinces of Pangasinan and Cagayan had long desired to extend 
their work into the inland region lying between those provinces; and this was begun in the year 1632, 
in the district of Ituy, or Isinay. This mission was founded by Fray Thomàs Gutierrez, who afterward 
died therein. The district of Paniqui was afterward chosen for missionary labors, but up to 1736 with 
only indifferent and occasional success; it "was founded in Zifun by Fray Pedro Ximenez, and afterward 
was transferred to the location which it now has, with the title of Santa Rosa." In 1735, the 
Augustinian fathers (who at the time of Río's writing were administering the Ituy mission) observed 
some indications that those hearts were becoming softened; of this they informed the Dominicans, who 
in the following year made the eighth attempt to establish a mission in that heathen district. On May 
25, 1736, Fray Diego de la Torre went from his village of Ilagan (in Cagayan) to make a reconnaissance 
among the heathen people of Cagayan; at first they rebuffed him, but by dint of kind treatment and 
presents he won the confidence of some among them. These told him that the only obstacle in the way of 
his efforts was, the impassableness of the high-road from Cagayan to Pangasinan; if this were made 
passable, they would have no longer a barrier between themselves and Spanish influence. Fray Torre's 
report of his dealings with these heathen induced the Dominican provincial, Fray Geronymo Sanz Ortiz, 
to ask Valdés Tamón for government aid to their new enterprise; the governor granted the establishment 
of a mission in Paniqui, composed of four religious and the guard necessary for their protection, at 
the expense of the king; and the following religious were sent thither: Fray Manuel Molinér, Fray 
Joseph Thomás Marin, Fray Romualdo Molina, and Fray Pedro de Sierra. They began their labors in July, 
1737, and encountered determined opposition from the natives, who, advised by the demon, would not 
admit them into the villages. The chiefs demanded, as the price of even allowing the missionaries to 
remain near the villages, gifts of beads, cattle and horses, and gold; and, finally, two men to slay 
as offerings to their demons. Fray Molinér died suddenly, it was suspected from poison given to him by 
some heathen; and in his stead Fray Torre was sent. About this time (1738) the fathers received 
protection and hospitality from an Indian woman of rank in that tribe; and this aid, with the presents 
given by the fathers and their persistent charity and gentleness, softened the hearts of the 
unbelievers until they consented to make a treaty of peace, some of the chiefs even going to Nueva 
Segovia to ratify it. Nevertheless, the fathers still experienced much opposition, especially from the 
people of Bayongbong, the most southern and the chief village of that heathen district; and often 
their lives were in danger, especially when their Indian guards became frightened and began to retreat 
to their homes. Indeed, Fathers Torre and Molina died suddenly, probably from poison, like Molinér. 
The Dominican provincial again appealed to the government for aid, asking that more guards be assigned 
to the missionaries, and that one or two military posts be established in that province--partly for 
the protection of the missionaries, partly to ensure the safety of the road which was to be built from 
Pangasinan to Cagayan; [62] this was granted by the governor, and the necessary provisions made 
therefor. By the time when news of this came to Cagayan, Marin had so far advanced matters that 
"almost nothing remained to overcome;" he had secured the support of a powerful chief named Danao, and 
toleration from another named Ansimo; and Marin went to Pangasinan, taking with him Pyrán, Danao's 
grandson--who was so caressed and honored by the Spaniards that he returned home a firm friend to the 
missionaries, and did much to open his countrymen's hearts toward them. The Dominican father 
provincial determined to open a direct road from Paniqui to Pangasinan, at the expense of the 
province--a most arduous and difficult undertaking, on account of the rugged surface of the country 
and the hostility of the Igorrots, "a bloodthirsty and very treacherous people." Father Manuel del Río 
was sent out to make the necessary explorations for this road, in which he suffered great hardship. 
The Igorrots were greatly opposed to the intended road-making; but they were finally induced, by the 
father's arguments, but still more by his liberal distribution of presents,
to give their consent. The treaty made with them was thus solemnized:
"In the presence of all, a hog was killed, and, as soon as the knife
was thrust into it, profound silence reigned--all watching the dying
struggles of the animal, and the flowing of its blood, which seemed
like a fountain gushing upward. After a long time, a Christian
Indian who was experienced in their ceremonies came forward, and,
collecting in his hand some of the animal's blood, went, with loud
cries and a swaggering step, and smeared with the blood the feet
of the Igorrot chiefs; at this they were well pleased, and began
to talk vigorously in their own language, and with bold gestures,
as a sign that they would fulfil their agreement. This done, they
were given something to drink, and the cattle, carajays, [63] salt,
and other things at which the bargain had been settled were placed
before them; and they returned to their villages contented, having
remained from that time friends with the Christians. This road is two
days' journey in length, from the most eastern village of Pangasinan,
called Asingan, to the village of Buxay among the Isinay people, which
is a mission of the Augustinian fathers. For the greater comfort of
travelers, road-houses were built at regular distances, in the places
called Colong, Malalapang, and Malionlion; and in the last-named,
which is the last town on the border of Pangasinan, a religious was
stationed--on account of some Igorrot Christians being there, with
some others who, it was hoped, would become Christians--with the title
of missionary to the infidels there; he was separate from the other
four who were in the province of Paniqui, who were destined to the
reduction and conversion of the infidels in that province. This was
a great achievement to open this road for communication between the
provinces; for this has been an undertaking often attempted but never
carried out, and often the royal exchequer has incurred great costs
in it, and always without any benefit--especially twenty years ago,
when the unfortunate mariscal Don Fernando Bustillo, governor and
captain-general of these islands, attempted t open this road. Many
thousands of pesos were spent, many unlucky events occurred, and
no result was attained; and now, without any expense to the royal
exchequer, at the cost of the religious order, it was readily cut
through and opened. It is hoped that this road will be of great
utility, not only for the said communication and trade between the
provinces, but also for the easier conversion of the infidels--who,
through trade and communication with the Christians, will learn their
civilization and excellent customs, and will after a time abandon the
barbarous condition in which they lived before." In April of 1739,
Father Río was accompanied to Manila by Danao and the other chiefs
already mentioned; they were feasted and laden with presents, and the
governor "granted freely whatever they asked." In this road-building
and other matters pertaining to this mission, the Dominican province
spent "almost three thousand eight-real pieces; although it is the
poorest province in the Indias, it can liberally spend its treasure,
as now it has done, in the service of God and for the good of souls,
for which chiefly it was founded."] [64]








EVENTS IN FILIPINAS, 1739-1762


[A brief summary of events during the above period is here presented;
it is taken, like similar abstracts in previous volumes, mainly from
the histories of Zúñiga, Concepción, and Montero y Vidal.]

[The government of the islands by Valdés y Tamón ended in the summer
of 1739, when he was succeeded by Gaspar de la Torre. Just before this
time, the former ordered the royal fiscal, Christoval Perez de Arroyo,
[65] to be sent to prison for refusing to give up certain documents in
his possession; the fiscal then took refuge in the Recollect convent,
and his property was seized. After Torre's coming, the archbishop
(Fray Juan Angel Rodriguez), at the instance of the Recollects,
made arrangements with him for Arroyo's restitution to office;
but the governor, instead, imprisoned the fiscal. The suit against
him could not be decided at Manila, and was therefore referred to
the court at Madrid, Arroyo meanwhile remaining a prisoner, and
harshly treated. The archbishop was so grieved at this, and at his
having been the cause (although innocent) of Arroyo's imprisonment,
by inducing him to leave his asylum in the convent, that he became
seriously ill; and the heroic remedies prescribed by the physicians
so reduced his strength that he soon died. Among the accusations
made against Arroyo was that he had married (in 1738) Doña Maria
Luisa Josepha de Morales y Santistevan without the knowledge and
consent of her guardian; but this was apparently settled by the
proof afterward adduced that the marriage took place on August 12,
1742, and was performed by the guardian himself, Juan de la Fuente y
Yepes, dean of the cathedral. In the following December Arroyo died;
his widow was summoned to take his place in the legal proceedings
then pending against him, but asked the authorities to release her
from this requirement; nevertheless, her property was seized, and
the case was referred to Madrid for settlement. The court censured
both Valdés y Tamón and Torre for their proceedings in the matter,
and ordered that Arroyo be restored to his office, with pay for the
time which he had spent in prison; but this decision reached Manila
(April, 1743) only after his death. (Concepción, Hist. de Philipinas,
xi, pp. 89-121.)]

[In January of 1743 the bishop-elect of Nueva Caceres, the master
Don Isidoro de Arevalo, asked from the Manila government permission
to go to Macao to receive his consecration, there being no bishop in
the islands to confer it. But the governor had received letters from
China which told of the expedition of the English commander Anson (see
VOL. XLVII, p. 231, note 48), his depredations on the South American
coast, and his presence in the harbor of Canton for the purpose of
repairing his vessel; and he therefore asked the bishop to defer his
voyage for a time, in order to avert the danger of his capture by
the English "pirate." In the following May, news came to Manila that
Anson had sailed from Canton, and gone toward the Embocadero to lie
in wait for the Acapulco galleon "Cobadonga;" the ship "Pilar," which
Anson had been previously foiled in capturing, was despatched (June
3) to aid the galleon, but its commander seems to have been timorous,
and took refuge in the port of Ticao at the news of a strange warship
being seen (June 22) in those waters. Finally, his ship began to leak,
and he returned to Manila without accomplishing anything. On June
30 the "Cobadonga" was captured by Anson, after a brave resistance
by the Spaniards. The residencia of the officers of the "Pilar"
was delayed for two years, and, although the charges of delay and
negligence brought against them were serious, they were finally
exonerated from blame; those of the expedition which endeavored,
but unsuccessfully, to find and punish Anson after his capture of the
"Cobadonga" were also justified. As for the commander (Don Geronimo
Montero) and officers of the latter vessel, severe charges were
brought against them by the royal fiscal for surrendering the ship;
they were arrested, and a special investigation of the matter was made
by the royal Audiencia. The fiscal demanded that they be punished;
but after examination of the testimony, the governor decided that
they were not to blame for the surrender; but they were condemned to
pay the costs of their trial. In this voyage the "Cobadonga" had not
brought from Mexico the returns on the investments made for that year
by the Misericordia [66] and other administrators of obras pías; these
returns, amounting to 1,200,000 pesos, were left behind at Acapulco,
either through fear of the English cruisers or for more profitable
investment in Mexico. Hence arose a controversy as to the restitution
of these funds, and the Misericordia brought suit for their recovery
from the agents who had withheld them; but it was decided by the
Council of Indias that the latter were not bound and could not be
compelled to repay the money. "In the outer court of justice this
went very well, but in the inner court it was quite otherwise; for we
have knowledge of actual restitutions of the property thus withheld
being made to the obras pías, by those persons who had more healthy
consciences." (Concepción, Hist. de Philipinas, xi, pp. 121-237.)]





[The remainder of this summary is taken from Zúñiga's Historia de
Philipinas, pp. 546-601.]

Señor Don Gaspar de la Torre made a bad beginning of his government;
the violent proceedings which he instituted against the fiscal
Arroyo began to make him odious to the community, the misfortunes
which occurred during his term of office exasperated the minds of the
citizens, and all his conduct was directed more toward pacifying this
hatred than to gaining the esteem of the subjects whom he ruled. Seeing
that he was disliked in the city, he began to be affected with
melancholy, from which resulted a dysentery, a disease from which
one seldom recovers in Philipinas. His illness was aggravated by the
news which reached him that the village of Balayan in the province
of Batangas had revolted; [67] and finally a supposed revolt of the
Sangleys ended his life. There was a rumor that the Chinese were
going to come into the city, and, notwithstanding his illness, he
tried to go out against them; his friends would not permit this, and
soon ascertained that it was all a fabrication; [68] but he became so
feverish from the shock that he died a few days afterward, September
21, 1745.... In his place began to rule, conformably to the directions
given by his Majesty, Señor Arrechedera of the Order of St. Dominic,
the bishop-elect of Ylocos. He made investigations in regard to the
uprising of the Chinese, and found that they had no such intention,
nor had they given any cause for suspecting them of rebellion; it was
therefore believed that this report had been circulated in order to
vex the governor. No long time was spent in quelling the uprising
in Balayan; for the sargento-mayor went out with a hundred men of
the regular troops and many Indians, encountered the insurgents, and,
although he could not conquer them, because the Indians who accompanied
him all fled immediately, checked the onset of the enemy, without his
having suffered any mishap, save that he received a musket-shot from
one of his own men, a raw recruit. He asked for aid from Manila, and
they sent him two hundred men, with whom he conquered the enemies and
punished them as they deserved--shooting some, and banishing others,
according to the influence that they had exercised in the sedition,
which vanished like smoke. He left behind a small detachment in that
province, in order to inspire some respect [for the Spanish power]
in the seditious who might remain in hiding; and the rest of the
troops were sent to Cavite, because, besides the information which he
received that the English were at Batavia with a squadron, the alcalde
of Ilocos gave warning that two ships had been seen from that coast,
with two smaller vessels, which were believed to be enemies. The
most illustrious governor put the town in a condition for defense,
erected various works, purchased arms through the agency of foreigners,
and cast some cannons. All these preparations were not necessary,
for the English did not come, although they resented our having taken
from them a brigantine and a balandra.... In Philipinas, Manila found
some consolation in the arrival of two ships, [69] which had returned
from Acapulco and brought some funds to relieve the necessities of
the commonwealth. In one of them came Don Fray Pedro de la Santisima
Trinidad, [70] who, while a member of the Council of Indias, had
taken the Franciscan habit in the Recollect convent of Pomasque;
and his Majesty presented him for the archbishopric of Manila,
asking the pope to compel him to accept that dignity. Fray Pedro,
not being able to oppose the mandate of his Holiness, was consecrated
in España; he came to Philipinas, and took possession of his office
[mitra] on August 27, 1747. It appeared that he ought to have begun
at the same time to rule as governor [of the islands]; for the king's
decree appointed for the vacancies [in that office] the archbishop
of Manila, and in default of him the nearest bishop--through which
arrangement the office had been assumed by Señor Arrechedera, who
ought to have surrendered the authority to the archbishop as soon as
the latter took possession of his see. His most illustrious Lordship
did not choose to stir up this question, and contented himself with
reporting the matter to the court; answer was made to him that orders
had already been previously despatched that he should take charge
of the government ad interim, but this royal order did not arrive
[at Manila] until after the arrival of the proprietary governor. [His
most illustrious Lordship] also brought a decree in which his Majesty
committed to him the expulsion of the Chinese--which had not yet
been effected, on account of the personal interests of the governors,
although it had been repeatedly commanded; but he thought it well not
to make the decree known until a better opportunity, because he found
Señor Arrechedera greatly devoted to the Chinese." [71] This was the
only defect that was observed in this most illustrious prelate and
governor; in other matters his most illustrious Lordship carried
himself with much honor in his government. He quelled the revolt
in the island of Bohol, sending Commander Lechuga with a suitable
force; this officer punished some of the rebels, and reduced all the
fishermen's villages of that island to obedience to the king of España;
but in the hill-country the insurgents remain until this day. [72]

The Jesuits had been urging our Catholic monarch Phelipe V, and
constrained him to the inglorious act of writing to the kings of Joló
and Mindanao; the governor sent ambassadors to deliver his letters
and make an alliance with the Moros. [73] Those petty kings were
greatly delighted at the honor thus done them by a king so great
as that of España, and, in order to gratify him by complying with
his requests to them, consented to receive missionaries into their
countries. A Jesuit father went to Mindanao, but, seeing that the
chiefs were restless and the king had little power to restrain them,
he feared that they would take his life, and abandoned his mission;
and he fled for refuge to the fort of Zamboanga. In Joló two Jesuits
began to sow the seed of the gospel, [74] but gathered little fruit
because the panditas of the Moro religion raised a fierce opposition
to them, and the leading men of the kingdom were not willing that
the missionaries should preach a different faith from that which they
had inherited from their ancestors. In these circumstances the king
of Joló, Mahomad Alimudin, desired to go to visit the governor of
Manila; but the Jesuit fathers were displeased at this resolution,
because they feared that the king's brother Bantilan, an enemy to the
Christians, would be left in command. From this resulted jealousies
and disturbances in the court, and the minds of men became so inflamed
that some one gave the sultan, or king, a lance-thrust. [75] Affairs
were thrown into so bad condition that the fathers of the Society,
not considering themselves safe in Joló, precipitately retreated
to Zamboanga. The sultan Alimudin likewise fled from his kingdom
in order to go to Manila, to seek aid from the governor in order to
punish the rebels who had given him the lance-thrust and conspired
against his person. [76] He reached Zamboanga, [77] and there the
Spaniards furnished him with means to proceed to Manila; he entered
that city with a retinue of seventy persons, with whom he was lodged
in a house in the suburb of Binondo, which was kept at his disposal
at the cost of the royal treasury. Afterward he made his public entry
[into Manila], and was received with great ostentation; the leading
persons in Manila visited him, and presented to him gold chains,
robes, diamond rings, sashes, and gold-headed canes--so that he was
astonished at so much magnificence, and at the generosity of the
Spaniards, for whatever he needed for the support of his household
was supplied to him from the royal treasury. [78]

The governor desired that the sultan should become a Christian,
and spoke to him about it; and the latter did not delay to pretend
to embrace our religion. He was entrusted to two Jesuit fathers
for instruction in the faith, and very soon he was instructed in
the Christian doctrine, and gave signs of being truly converted,
by the urgent requests which he made to the archbishop to baptize
him. Nevertheless, his conversion was somewhat uncertain. Some said
that he became a Christian only that the Spaniards might place him on
the throne from which he saw himself ousted, and that we ought not to
trust in his conversion; others were of opinion that in his conforming
to the usage of the church we ought to believe that his intention
was sincere, and that he should be baptized, so long as he did not in
his outward actions give cause for thinking otherwise. In view of this
diversity of opinions, his illustrious Lordship thought it expedient to
delay the baptism, and to wait until the sultan should give stronger
proofs of his resolution. This delay vexed the bishop-governor, who
desired to see him a Christian as soon as possible; and, as he could
not change the archbishop's mind, he sent Alimudin to the village of
Panique, [79] which is the nearest one [to Manila] in his bishopric
of Ylocos, in order that he might be baptized there; and he sent a
Spaniard to appear in his name as sponsor. Besides the guard of his
own people, the sultan was accompanied by another guard of Spaniards;
and in all places through which he passed a ceremonious reception was
given to him. In Panique he was baptized by a Dominican religious,
on April 29, 1750, with great solemnity and the assistance of other
religious of the same order. On his return to Manila, the governor
received him with a general salvo from the plaza, and ordered that
festivities should be celebrated with comedies, dances, fireworks,
and bull-fights, in sign of rejoicing.

In Joló the brother of the sultan, named Bantilan, had continued
in the government of the kingdom; it was he who had ordered that
his brother be assaulted, and had stirred up the rebellion among
the chiefs which compelled his brother to take refuge among the
Spaniards. Bantilan was the greatest enemy that the Spaniards and
Christians had, and gave orders that many boats should go out to
infest our seas. The Joloans--who were rebels against their own king,
and pirates by office--equipped many pancos, joined with them other
Moros, whom they call Tirones, and began plundering raids through
all the islands. The most illustrious governor gave his commands
against them, and commanded some small fleets to set sail; this did
not fail to cause in the Moros some respect [for our power], and to
restrain them; but no injury was inflicted on them, nor were their
insolent acts punished, because there were in Manila few troops. For
this reason it was impossible to restore the throne to the king of
Joló, who was now, since becoming a Christian, named Don Fernando de
Alimudin; the proprietary governor, who arrived in the same year when
he was baptized, met him in Manila with the greatest ostentation.





CHAPTER XXXI


Don Francisco Joseph de Obando, a native of Caceres in Extramadura,
went with a squadron to the Southern Sea, and was in Lima at
the time when that great earthquake occurred in which Callao was
submerged. [80] There the favor of the king was extended to him, in
appointing him governor of Manila; he went to Mexico, and in that
kingdom married Doña Barbara Ribadeneyra; and, accompanied by his
wife, he embarked for Philipinas to render service in the government,
of which he took possession in July, 1750. As soon as he arrived,
the archbishop presented to him the royal decree in which his Majesty
charged him with the expulsion of the Sangleys. The governor held a
council for the discussion of this subject, and in it was stirred up
a controversy over a seat, which frustrated the excellent intention
of his Majesty to expel the Chinese, who are so injurious to these
his dominions. The archbishop attempted to seat himself on a chair at
the left of the governor, at the head of the table [en la testera];
the latter would not allow this, nor that the guards should form in
ranks when the archbishop entered the palace or passed through the
gates of the city; and these points of etiquette were sufficient
to prevent the execution of the order to expel the Sangleys from
Philipinas. Information of this controversy was sent to the court,
and on both points came decisions in favor of the archbishop. The royal
Audiencia had a dispute with the governor on another point, because he
had by his own authority appointed Don Domingo Nebra temporary warden
of Cavite, when he should have conferred this post after consulting
the royal Audiencia, as his Majesty had commanded. The governor did
not gainsay this royal order, but he said that there was no person
competent for the building of the vessels which it was necessary to
construct for the commerce of Acapulco and the defense of the islands
against the Moros, except Nebra; that the latter was seventy years
old, and could not be compelled to take charge of the construction
of boats unless he wished; and that in no case would he accept the
post under consultation of the royal Audiencia, because in that case
he would be subject to residencia. The governor concluded that, in
an extraordinary case like this, he ought not to adhere to the usual
rules, but decide what was most expedient for the royal service. [81]
The royal Audiencia made their remonstrances and protests, but, seeing
that the governor was the stronger, they yielded, and appealed to
his Majesty. In spite of the knowledge which the governor so highly
extolled in Nebra, the fragata "Pilar," which he careened and which
was despatched to Acapulco, perished at sea, without any news about
her having come here.

Another and very noisy controversy occurred in Manila about this
time. A lady who had made profession in the beaterio of Santa
Cathalina, where she was called Mother Cecilia, became enamored of Don
Francisco Figueroa; [82] and presented herself before [the ordinary,
during] the vacant see (Señor Arrechedera being then the governor),
alleging that her profession was null. The provisor, who did not desire
controversies with the Dominican fathers (to which order the governor
belonged), pacified her, [arguing] that she should be silent for the
time, and wait for a better opportunity to press her claim. As soon
as Señor Obando arrived, seeing that the difficulties had ceased which
until then had made her keep silent, she presented herself before the
archbishop, asking, as she had done before with the provisor, that
he would annul her profession. His illustrious Lordship commanded
that the beata should be placed [for the time] in Santa Potenciana,
but this was vigorously opposed by the Dominican fathers. They had
recourse to the superior government, but, not finding support in that
tribunal, they gave way and surrendered the lady to the provisor,
to whom was entrusted this sequestration. The lawsuit followed, and
the archbishop decided that, in view of the fact that his Majesty
had forbidden that the beaterio of Santa Cathalina should be erected
into a convent, Mother Cecilia, who had made profession in it, could
not be truly a religious, and therefore her profession was null. [83]
The Dominican fathers lodged an appeal before the [papal] delegate,
who was the bishop of Zebú; [84] and the appeal was admitted to allow
another trial in the former court, but not to suspend its decrees [en
lo devolutivo, y no en lo suspensivo]. In order to follow up their
appeal with vigor they sent a religious who might carry on active
judicial proceedings against the beata, because they thought that to do
otherwise was a disgrace to the beaterio; but that bishop declined to
hear so vexatious a lawsuit, under pretext of his poor health. There
was no other bishop in Philipinas to whom they could have recourse,
for which reason they carried the suit to the archbishop of Mexico;
and he summoned Mother Cecilia before his tribunal, demanding that
she be sent to Mexico in order that he might hear and decide the case
there. As the appeal had not been admitted for the suspension [of the
first sentence], the beata contracted matrimony, and with her husband
embarked for Mexico, where the marriage was considered valid and her
profession as null. [85] The documents in the case [el espediente]
having been carried to the Council of Indias, orders were given that
the beaterio of Santa Cathalina should be extinguished with the death
of the beatas who [then] were its inmates--which has not been done,
because the Dominican fathers have obtained the revocation of this
order. [86]

The governor, being informed of the ravages which the Moros were
committing in the provinces of Bisayas, determined to attack them
with a powerful squadron, which could at the same time reëstablish
Don Fernando Alimudin (whom, now become a Christian, Señor Obando had
found in Manila) on the throne of Joló, of which he had unjustly been
despoiled. There was a diversity of opinions on this latter point,
because many persons believed that no confidence could be placed in
his fidelity, and suspected that on the first occasion that might
arise he would practice some treachery, as his fathers had done. But
the decision was made in favor of the exiled king, and he was carried
to Joló in the almiranta of the armada, which sailed from Cavite
under command of the master-of-camp of the royal regiment, who bore
commissions for both these offices. The armada reached Zamboanga, but
the almiranta did not make its appearance; and, in order not to lose
the monsoon, and not to give the Moros time to fortify themselves,
the fleet, without waiting for the almiranta, sailed from that port
on June 13, 1751, and on the twenty-sixth anchored in the cove of
Joló, at a mile distant from the forts of the enemy. They began to
fire the cannons at these, and those who were in command were so
intimidated that they began negotiations for peace; and they signed a
letter in which they bound themselves to obey their king and receive
him as faithful vassals, and to surrender to the Spaniards all the
captive Christians who might be in the island. With this compact the
master-of-camp returned, much elated, to Zamboanga in nine days;
and carried with him two champans of Chinese [87] whom he found
trading there, seizing them under the pretext that they had sold a
cannon to our enemies the Joloans, with whom treaties of peace had
just been made.

The almiranta had been delayed because it had met some damage, and
had remained at Calapan repairing its rudder, for which reason it did
not arrive at Zamboanga until July 25; but the king of Joló, impatient
at waiting so long, had embarked with two caracoas and arrived there
twelve days before. In spite of his activity, the governor of Zamboanga
was very doubtful of his fidelity; and, having found two letters which
Alimudin wrote to the king of Mindanao--one in the vulgar tongue,
[written] by order of the governor of Manila, and the other in the
Arabic language, which he had learned in Batavia, where he had spent
some time--the commandant became curious to know what he was saying in
this language, [now] obsolete in our islands. He sought for someone
to translate the letter, and found that Alimudin said that what he
wrote in the other was in obedience to the governor of Manila and to
his commands; and he could not avoid obeying him, or excuse himself,
because he was in a foreign dominion. To this suspicion was added the
fact that a brother of his named Asin, and the chiefs of Joló who had
made the compact with the master-of-camp to receive their king and
surrender the captive Christians, came to Zamboanga to visit him;
and they not only brought no captive, but it was said that, under
pretext of this visit, they were bringing in arms, in order to gain
possession of the fort. The governor, influenced by these reports,
arrested the sultan with all his following, [88] and searched the
house in which they lived, but he found only a few arms, which gave
no indication of an uprising; but other faults were discovered,
which gave plausible ground for their arrest. Various despatches and
presents which he had sent to the Moros were considered as suspicious;
and the commander and two passengers of the almiranta declared that
he was on very bad terms with the people in Manila, from whom he
had received many kindnesses, to whom on all occasions he showed
himself ungrateful; that he said the new governor had kept him like
a prisoner; that he gave no sign of being a Christian, since he went
every night to sleep with his concubines, did not hear mass, and had
taken away the crosses from the rosaries belonging to the people of
his household; and, finally, that he had apostatized from the faith
by offering a Mahometan sacrifice at Calapan, where he killed a goat,
divided it into twelve parts, with many superstitious ceremonies,
and gave them to his followers to eat, in order to celebrate Easter.

The governor of Zamboanga made report to Manila regarding these
charges and his arrest of the sultan and his household; and answer
was made to him that he should send Alimudin and all his people to
Manila as prisoners, and that war should be declared on the Joloans
[89]--giving authority to every one who wished to equip his vessel
as a privateer, and allowing him to keep for himself whatever he
should seize as plunder; and any persons who should thus be seized
should remain captives, [90] since the Moros of Joló had been declared
not only enemies to the Spaniards, but pirates, who ought to suffer
captivity, just as they imposed this lot on the Christians whom they
seized. The extermination of the Moros was undertaken with so much
ardor that pardon [indulto] for their crimes was granted to those who
should present themselves to serve against the enemy. The armada which
the master-of-camp had at Zamboanga was reënforced, [91] and a second
expedition was made to Joló, more unfortunate than the first--for the
Spaniards attempted to land in that island, and the Moros received them
with such valor that they compelled our people to retreat, with heavy
loss and great disgrace to the Spanish arms, to the fort of Zamboanga.

The haughty Bantilan, who ruled the kingdom of Joló in the absence of
his brother, undertook to induce, by the victory which he had gained
over the Spaniards, the men of Mindanao to break the peace which
they were observing with us, and to harry us as much as they could;
and he urged all the pirates who were in those islands to take up
arms against the Spaniards, whom he represented as conquered, and in
fear of their arms. Then the seas of Bisayas were seen covered with
little fleets of Moros, who carried desolation everywhere. Nothing
was heard of save plundering, the burning of villages, the seizing of
vessels, captivities, and [other] acts of violence, which the Moros
committed in our territories [92]--so that Señor Obando wished to go
forth in person to restrain them, and to repair the many injuries
which they were inflicting on us. His Majesty had commanded that a
fortified post should be established in the island of Paragua, in
order to shut off the pirates from entrance [into Bisayan waters]
on that side, just as it was closed on the other side by the post
of Zamboanga. In order to proceed in all respects with moderation,
the governor sent an ambassador to the king of Borney, in order that
the latter should cede to us the territory that he possessed in that
island; and when it was ceded he made ready a squadron to build the
fortified post, and from that place to follow up the Moros who were
plundering our islands. He intended to go out in person at the head
of this armada, and consulted the royal Audiencia on this point; but
the auditors were of opinion that it was not expedient to hazard his
person, and that he could entrust this expedition to another person,
who by carrying an engineer to draw plans for the fort which it was
necessary to build on the island of Paragua could accomplish all that
was expected from the expedition. In accordance with this advice, the
governor appointed, as its commander, Don Antonio Fabea, [sc. Faveau]
who sailed from Cavite with eleven vessels; he took with him Don Manuel
Aguirre, who went with an appointment as commandant of the military
post which was to be established, and bore orders to go to Igolote,
in the same island [of Paragua], to dislodge the Moros, who usually
took refuge in that place. Here his men fell sick, to such an extent
that, without doing more than to take possession of that district,
they went back to Manila, leaving behind two hundred and seventy dead,
and carrying home many sick men in the squadron. [93]

The king of Joló had already reached Manila, and was imprisoned in the
fort of Santiago, [94] to the great satisfaction of those who had been
opposed to his baptism and had always doubted his fidelity; but he
obtained from the governor permission that his daughter the princess
Faatima, who was imprisoned with him, might go to Joló with letters
from him for his brother and other chiefs, in order [to urge them]
to make a stable peace with the Spaniards; and for this permission he
bound himself to surrender fifty Christian captives. [95] The princess
accomplished the return of the captives, and obtained from her uncle
Bantilan the despatch of an ambassador to Manila, to attend to her
father's affairs. The envoy carried authority to conduct, jointly with
Bantilan's brother the king, negotiations for peace with the governor,
and to solemnize the treaties which they should regard as expedient,
[the chiefs] binding themselves to obey whatever the two should
sign. It was stipulated with the king and the ambassador that the
Moros of Joló should surrender all the Christian captives who were in
their island, and send back all the arms which they had taken from
the Spaniards, and the ornaments which they had plundered from the
churches; and, in order to make these treaties effective, permission
was granted to one of the chiefs who were prisoners with the king to
go to Joló in company with the ambassador whom Bantilan had sent.

The governor had very little confidence in the promises of the Moros
or in their treaties, because they had always broken them with the
same facility with which they had made them; and he prepared a strong
squadron [to go] against them, in order to compel them by force to
observe the treaties which he did not expect they would keep of
their own accord. Nor did his suspicions prove to be groundless,
for in that year (which was 1754) occurred the worst inroad which
those islanders had made into Philipinas. In all districts they made
raids with blood and fire, killing religious, Indians, and Spaniards,
burning and plundering villages; and taking captive thousands of
Christians, not only in the islands near Joló, but throughout our
territories, even in the provinces nearest to the capital Manila. [96]
The fleet which the governor had made ready went out against them,
but, before they could do anything, his successor came, at the end of
his four years' term of office; for this reason, he left the islands
in the most deplorable condition that had ever been known, the cause
of these evils being either his own misconduct or the unfitness of
those to whom he gave appointments, or perhaps his misfortune. What is
certain is, that he experienced a very grievous residencia, and many
charges against him resulted; and in the following year he embarked
in the galleon "Santisima Trinidad" for Acapulco, and died on the way,
without reaching España.





CHAPTER XXXII


Don Pedro Manuel de Arandia, [97] a native of Ceuta and of Vizcayan
ancestry, took possession of his government in July, 1754. As soon
as he arrived in Manila, he undertook to organize the troops, and to
place the military force on a regular footing and in conformity with
the ordinances which are observed in España. From the royal troops that
were in the islands he formed the "king's regiment" of two battalions;
he reorganized the body of artillerists, placing it in the condition
in which we now see it; and he assigned to both the soldiers and the
officers pay with which they could decently support themselves and meet
their obligations, without being harassed to seek in some other way
what was necessary for life. He was very diligent to put in order the
arsenal at Cavite, and whatever depended upon the royal officials--in
which he did not fail to suffer annoyances, and to incur the dislike of
many persons who did not enjoy so much reform and so great zeal. [98]
At the beginning of his government, in the month of December, occurred
the terrible eruption of the volcano of Taal, which lies in the middle
of Lake Bombon, in the province of Batangas. So heavy was the shower
of ashes that it destroyed four villages which were on the shore of
the lake, and it was necessary to remove them a legua inland. There
were many and severe earthquake shocks, and a noise as of squadrons
engaged in battle; and the atmosphere was darkened with the quantities
of sand and ashes which issued from the volcano--so that in Manila,
which is distant twenty leguas, but little could be seen at noonday;
and in Cavite, which is somewhat nearer, that time of day seemed
like a dark night. [99] I have ascended with Señor Alava [100] to
the summit of this volcano, and only a lake was seen, about half a
legua in diameter; it was very deep, and its waters were dark green.

The armada which Señor Obando had sent against the Moros met so poor
success that the governor was obliged to take away its command from
Don Miguel Valdés, who had been sent as its chief officer; and it
was conferred on Father Ducos, a Jesuit, from whom he expected better
results. In fact, that father was fitted for the post, and acted with
such valor and discretion that he took from the enemies more than a
hundred and fifty vessels, destroyed three of their villages, killed
their inhabitants, and made captive innumerable people; and he checked
the onset of those barbarians, who were devastating everything. [101]
These happy tidings arrived at Manila in January, 1755; Señor Arandia
gave orders that the Te Deum should be sung by way of thanksgiving,
and confirmed Father Ducos in his command of the naval squadron;
he had great esteem for the father because the latter was the son
of a colonel who was the governor's intimate friend, and because he
seemed to have inherited his father's valor.

Señor Arandia treated the king of Joló with much kindness, and allowed
him his liberty, although the king voluntarily continued to live in
the fort of Santiago; the governor gave him a monthly allowance of
fifty pesos and six cavans of rice for his support, and prevailed upon
the archbishop to grant him permission to hear mass and receive the
sacraments, of which he had been deprived. The king desired to marry
as his second wife a woman who had been his concubine but was now
a Christian; [102] the archbishop would not permit this, and Señor
Arandia not only smoothed away all the difficulties, but gave the
king the use of his palace in order that in it he might celebrate
the marriage with more pomp and solemnity. He did not gain these
dispensations without some dispute with his most illustrious Lordship,
to which was added another, which, although of less importance, was
sufficient to alienate feeling and cause resentment in Philipinas. The
governor complained of the archbishop because the bells were not rung
for the former when he entered or left any church, as ought to be done
on account of his being vice-patron, especially when he went [thither]
as president of the [ecclesiastical] tribunals. His most illustrious
Lordship declared that he had no order from the king for doing so;
but these formalities, together with the attacks of illness which
the most illustrious Señor Trinidad suffered, caused his death; this
occurred on May 29, 1755. Señor Arandia continued to favor the king of
Joló, for he thought that by this means he could end the war with the
Moros. He sent to Joló all the princes and princesses, the datos, and
all the women, who were detained in Manila, leaving the king alone--who
acknowledged his vassalage [hizo pleito homenaje] and took the oath
of fidelity, until a decision [of his case] should arrive from the
court of España, which had been informed of his detention. The princes
and princesses arrived at Joló on October 5 of this year; they were
graciously received by Bantilan, who, grateful for the generosity of
the governor, promised to observe faithfully the treaty of peace which
his ambassador and his brother had signed at Manila. It was necessary,
in order to extricate ourselves entirely from the war, to make an
agreement with the men of Mindanao; the governor undertook this, and
sent ambassadors to them; but the petty rulers who are in that island
are so numerous and so treacherous that it is impossible to establish
a permanent peace with them. Even assuming that all the petty kings
of the Moros may desire to observe the peace with the Spaniards, they
will never succeed in it, because they possess so little authority
over their vassals that they have never been able to restrain them,
[103] and they never will prevent them from going out to plunder and to
seize captives throughout our islands, for they have given themselves
up to this kind of life; and only the spiritual conquest of their
provinces is adequate to deliver us from these troublesome enemies.

During this government was undertaken the reëstablishment of the
missions in the islands of Batanes, which lie to the north of
Cagayan. From early times the Dominican fathers maintained in the
islands of Babuyanes religious ministers, who gave instruction to
their inhabitants; but in the year 1690 they removed these people to
Cagayan. The king having decreed that they should go back to their
own land, the religious who directed them established a mission in
the islands of the Batanes, [104] distant some thirty leguas from
Cagayan; and after his death his companion withdrew, leaving the
mission abandoned until the year 1718. It was then reëstablished
by another Dominican religious, who fixed his headquarters in the
island of Calayan, in which place he attempted to make the Indians
in the other islands settle, in order that, brought together there,
they might be instructed in the Christian religion. Great as was the
desire of the Batanes to enter the bosom of the church, only a hundred
and fifty persons took the resolution to change their place of abode;
and half of these died in a short time. That island offered few means
of comfort, for which reason the father missionary became sick; and,
although he had a successor, the mission was entirely abandoned. [105]

In the year 1754, two religious were sent, of whom one died and
the other retired to Cagayan, seriously ill; but he returned in the
following year with another companion. In order to ameliorate the
destitution which they had suffered in the preceding year, they
determined to take with them a carpenter, a lay brother of their
order, in order that he might, as soon as they reached the place,
put together a house, which was to go in the vessel, in pieces. Their
zeal did not permit them to wait until the work was finished; and,
fearing that the monsoon would pass away, they embarked without their
little house. Hardly had they reached Calayan when the two fell sick;
other fathers went to succor them, and all became sick; accordingly,
they returned [to the mainland] one after another, and it was necessary
to abandon the mission after the Dominican fathers had incurred large
expenses for it. Afterward, this conquest was again undertaken,
by Señor Basco in 1783; and this effort has been successful in
maintaining there the Dominican fathers, converting those islanders
to the faith. A commandant was stationed there with his garrison,
which caused much expense, because it was necessary to send them
all their supplies from Philipinas; for in all those islands the only
produce is camotes and such other eatable things as grow in the country
itself. There is no doubt that other articles would be produced, but so
numerous are the rats, which consume everything, and so frequent the
baguios or hurricanes, that one may rest assured that these plagues
would devastate the fields before the crops could mature. Every year
a bark was sent to carry succor to the islands, but, as the baguios
are so frequent in those seas, many of these vessels were wrecked;
it has therefore been recognized that the maintenance of that post is
impossible, and the result is, that only the Dominican fathers remain
there with a small guard, who must be succored from Cagayan. For this
enterprise Señor Basco was granted the title of Conde de la Conquista;
but I assert that if half of what he spent in Batanes had been expended
in placing missionaries in Ylocos, Pangasinan, and Cagayan, he would
have gained more vassals for the king of España, and with less risk.

I am astonished that we should have left the beaten track of the
conquest or pacification of the Indians, and taken up another which
is more dangerous and more costly, only because it makes more noise
and a more showy appearance, that is, [the conquest] by arms, which
always has produced bad effects--as occurred at this time, in the
hill-country of the Igorrots. In the year of 1740, the Augustinian
fathers handed over to the Dominicans the missions of Ytuy, or Ysinay,
in order that, these being joined to the missions of Panique which they
had established in the preceding year, the provinces of Pangasinan and
Cagayan might be united on their southern borders. [106] The Indians,
both Christians and unbelievers, resented this change of missionaries,
from which resulted a species of civil wars among them; and it was
necessary for the auditor Don Ygnacio Arzadun y Rebolledo, who was
then making official visitation of the province of Pangasinan, to send
troops [to Ytuy] to silence the malcontents. Our men fought a battle
with them, in which the natives were defeated and pacified; but a few
years later they again became restless, and finally, in the year 1756,
many Christians apostatized; and these, united with the unbelievers,
raised a furious tempest. They burned some churches, slew many of the
people who remained faithful, and, losing reverence for the missionary
fathers, searched for them to take their lives. On account of this,
Señor Arandia despatched an expedition to this mission and to the
hill-country of the Ygorrots, which had very little effect; for it
accomplished nothing save to frighten the Indians and make them flee to
the hills, to come down again as soon as the soldiers should go away.

In order to know how to pacify the Indians, it is necessary to
understand their character. Whether because of their naturally
superstitious disposition, or because God has thus ordained it,
they are very affectionate to the missionary fathers, and have much
reverence for them; but there are not lacking some who dare to plan
some perfidy against the fathers, and for this reason they need
escorts to protect them from audacious attempts of that sort. At
times the natives become heated and rise against authority, and the
multitude come out against the fathers, unless there is some check to
restrain them; such a check, is in the military posts, which ought to
be near the missions, so that the Indians may have respect for these,
and fear lest they will be immediately punished if they commit any
insolent act. With these measures of precaution the islands were
conquered, and the same are observed at the present time; but the
missionaries are very few, from which it results that they are so
widely separated that they have to make a day's journey to visit one
another, when they need to be confessed or on other occasions, and
they are very poorly paid. For what is a hundred pesos and two hundred
cavans of rice for a Spaniard to maintain himself with decency in
the missions? [Even] this small stipend they sometimes cannot collect
without a thousand annoyances and vexations which are occasioned to
them by the alcaldes-mayor, who seek various pretexts for not paying
them, and compel them to go from the mission to the [provincial]
capital to collect it, as I have seen. So wretchedly do these poor
religious live that there are occasions in which they find themselves
obliged to use for their own support what was given to them for their
guards; and they live without these, preferring to remain exposed
to the affronts of the heathens rather than perish with hunger. The
military posts are also few in number, and the Indians in them are
unable to impose respect on their countrymen. If the money that has
been spent in useless expeditions could have been employed in these
sure means of pacification, that undertaking would have made much
greater progress. It is true, we shall never see the rapid advances
made by our ancestors in the conquest [of the islands], because the
Indians have their eyes more open; the Christians themselves persuade
the others not to be baptized, in order that the tribute and other
taxes may not be imposed on them. Moreover, they themselves have a
custom which greatly hinders their civilization, and consequently their
conversion. If any one commits a murder in another village, its people
do not rest until they have avenged the crime; the consequence is,
that the weaker villages are obliged to remove from the district,
or to league themselves with other villages. In either case, the
Christian church suffers much, because those who are baptized must
follow the infidels of their own village and separate themselves
from the [missionary] fathers, or else must enter into the general
hostilities. Nevertheless, gradually they would all be converted;
for if in the neighboring villages many unbelievers are continually
being baptized, who leave their own lands and are held in less regard
than are the oldtime Christians, how many more would not be baptized
if they could remain in their own homes, honored and courted by their
old acquaintances? Christian morality is very holy, and attracts all
hearts in which vice has not become deeply rooted.

On May 15, 1757, the holy Congregation [i.e., of Propaganda] at Rome
issued the decree which put an end to the controversies which the
discalced Augustinians (or Recollects) sent out by the Propaganda
had in the kingdom of Tungquin with the Dominican missionary fathers
from Philipinas over the administration of certain districts, and
in regard to the [association called the] "Lovers of the Cross"
[Amatrices de la Cruz]. [107] The Dominicans had received into their
missions various priests sent out by the Propaganda, who--for lack of
ministers, or on account of the persecutions--had ministered to some
villages in the Dominican territory. On this account  his Lordship
Fray Hilario de Jesus, bishop of Coriza, asked from the Dominicans a
residence for a Recollect (as the latter belonged to his own order);
and soon after that he asked for the entire district, which was granted
to him during the lifetime of that religious. When the bishop saw
the Dominicans so compliant, he did not delay in demanding another
district for his discalced fathers. The Dominicans did not accede
to this demand, and his illustrious Lordship, availing himself
of various pretexts, introduced  into that district a Recollect
religious; from this resulted a sort of schism, in which papers
were written on both sides, insulting remarks were made, and neither
party would yield. Like altercations occurred  in other districts,
because the Recollects tried to thrust themselves into the missions
of the Dominicans.  The "Lovers of the Cross" were a sort of beatas,
who lived in a community, and, although they did not take the vow
of chastity, observed the [rules of the] religious life; some of
them belonged to the Tertiary Order of St. Dominic, and others to
the discalced religious women of St. Augustine. It was made evident
that these beaterios ought to be subject to the parish priests; but,
bringing forward various pretexts, the Dominicans and Recollects
disputed  over the direction of these beatas.

In order to stop the scandals which resulted from these disputes,
the bishop of Coriza assembled a [diocesan] synod in the village of
Luctuy; it was the second synod held in Tungquin, and held its first
session on June 24, 1753. Among the other points that were settled,
action was taken on the "Lovers of the Cross," and on the distribution
of districts. As the bishop was a Recollect, and the rest of those
who attended the council were his confederates, everything was decided
against the Dominicans; Father Hernandez, therefore, who was the only
member of his order who attended the synod, protested against all its
decrees, appealed to the Apostolic See, and went out of the meeting
before it was ended. After the synod closed, the Dominicans, seeing
that a Recollect was going to Rome to secure approbation for the acts
of the council, sent another envoy, a Dominican, to prevent this. When
the whole matter was examined in the holy Congregation, two districts
were set aside for the Recollect fathers, and the rest were continued
in charge of the Dominicans, the beaterios of the "Lovers of the Cross"
were left subject to their respective parish priests. In regard to the
[acts of the] second council of Tungquin, it was ordained that they
should not be carried into effect until the holy Congregation should,
after a thorough examination, agree to confirm them.

Returning to Manila, one of the good things which Señor Arandia
did in his term of office was the expulsion of the Chinese. He
sent away all the heathen to their own country, and, in order that
hereafter they might not remain in Philipinas, he founded the market
[alcayseria] of San Fernando, [108] in which all the Sangleys who
come here to trade must dwell until the time for the departure of
their champans arrives; and then all must embark in their vessels
except the Christians, who have permission to live in the islands,
provided they devote themselves to the cultivation of the soil. The
Spaniards who were interested in the residence of the Sangleys in
Manila persuaded him that, if he expelled them, there would not
be people enough to carry on the internal trade; and, in order to
counteract this frivolous pretext, he established a [commercial]
company of Spaniards and mestizos. This lasted only one year, [109]
because there was little need of it in some islands where there
are more than enough to carry on this sort of traffic. The Asiatics
are naturally slothful, and consequently enjoy greatly the kind of
life--since it gives them food without labor--which they secure by
buying and selling the commodities which are consumed in the country;
and, even if some are unsuccessful, every one has a very moderate
[amount of] trade; but there is hardly any one among them who does not
carry it on very steadily. This abundance of petty traders makes their
wares much dearer, since they pass through many hands before they reach
the last buyer; and each trader, since he operates with little capital,
must make large gains in order to support himself. From this it must be
inferred that the Sangleys, far from being necessary to this commerce,
greatly injure it; and it should have been considered desirable to
lessen, in place of increasing, the number of these traders or dealers.

Notwithstanding the wisdom of this measure, Señor Arandia lost much
in popular esteem by it; and this, added to others of his actions,
brought upon him the hatred of the community. In virtue of the ample
powers which he brought from the court, he drew up instructions for
the alcaldes-mayor and the government of the provinces, in which
he openly declared himself against the regulars. At the beginning,
he had treated these religious bodies with respect; but, resenting
some acts of disrespect manifested toward him by certain individuals,
in these instructions he deprived the orders of the kitchen-boys who
had been furnished to them by the king since the conquest, and the
servants granted them by the crown for sacristans. Not content with
causing them these losses, [110] he made various remonstrances against
them to his Majesty, in which he spoke of them with little civility;
and in the instructions he spared no means of injuring them, seeking
opportunity to speak ill of them even in those sections of that
document which have no connection with the religious. The blame for
all this was laid on his favorite, Don Santiago Orendain, [111] who
was the declared enemy of the ecclesiastics; but this could not excuse
Señor Arandia for issuing directions which the king had the goodness to
censure as soon as he saw them, for depriving the ecclesiastics of the
groves of nipa palms which they held in La Hermita and Bagunbayan, for
stirring up several groundless controversies with them, for imposing
taxes on the goods which the religious in the provinces were sending
to their convents, [112] and for expressing his [unfavorable] opinion
of them in public. He had a dispute with the royal Audiencia because
he was not willing to render military honors to them when they went
in a formal body, on occasions when he did not preside over their
sessions. He imprisoned the treasurer and auditor of accounts of the
royal exchequer, and caused them great suffering, because they had
sent information to the court of some things that was contrary to the
explanations given by him in his reports. Unwearied in the government,
he conceived many projects which he considered necessary for the
proper government of the islands. He talked of removing the arsenal
from Cavite to the port of Lampon; and he ordered a ship to be built
in the kingdom of Siam, which had such ill-fortune that in bringing it
over to Manila it was driven to port in China three times, and once to
Batavia, causing enormous expenses to the royal treasury. [113] The
governor made reports to the king, and proposed to him various plans
for the promotion of [operations in] the mines of iron and gold. He
abolished the corregidorship of Mariveles, annexing Marigondon and
the other little villages of that shore to the district of Cavite,
and forming from the villages on the opposite shore and from others
which belonged to Pampanga the alcaldía which we call Batan. [114]
He made regulations for the soldiery, the royal exchequer, and the
Acapulco ship [115]--on all occasions giving many proofs of his
zeal for the royal service, by which he was aroused to enthusiasm;
but this disposition, ill directed by Orendain, was the cause for
his being abhorred by every one. It was so wearing upon him that he
reached the point of feeling a distaste for every kind of business,
and experienced so great a failure of his vital powers that in the
night of May 31, 1759, it was known that he was dying; and, after
receiving all the sacraments, he expired at two o'clock in the morning
of the following day. [116] He left by his will two hundred and fifty
thousand pesoty and one cannot guess how he gained them in the less
than five years during which his term of office lasted; but at the
hour of death he distributed them in a pious and Christian manner.

Through the death of Señor Arandia, the bishop of Zebu, Señor Espeleta,
assumed the government. Soon afterward, the new archbishop of Manila
arrived here, Don Manuel Roxo, [117] a native of Tala [sc. Tula] in
the kingdom of Nueva España; his Majesty had taken him from the post
of canon and provisor at Mexico, for this see, giving him permission
to be consecrated in Nueva España. He took possession of his church
on July 22, 1759, and immediately claimed that he should be put in
possession of the military government, which it seems belonged to him
by the royal orders. The four auditors were divided in opinion, Señors
Calderón and Davila deciding that the archbishop should assume the
governorship, and Señors Villacorta and Galban that no change ought
to be made. While they were in session in their hall, discussing
this question, his illustrious Lordship Espeleta entered; he spoke
with decision, and, in order to intimidate them more, made ready the
artillery and placed the troops under arms; at these preparations
the auditors and the archbishop gave way, and the bishop of Zebu
remained in peaceable possession [of the government]. The first
thing that he did was to revoke the ordinances of Señor Arandia,
and to make some preparations against the Moros, who since the year
fifty-four had been ravaging our provinces; but the event which made
most noise in his time was the lawsuit against Doctor Orendain. Every
one placed on him the blame for the actions of Señor Arandia; and
the fiscal of the king, Señor Viana, believed that he had been placed
under arrest in his own house by the favorite's suggestion. Orendain,
either because his conscience stung him, or because reports had been
spread that some design was formed against his person, took refuge
in the Augustinian convent at Tondo. The fiscal made it a pretext for
claiming Orendain from this asylum, that he should be arrested because
he was treasurer for the Crusade, and, by his voluntary withdrawal
[to asylum], indicated that he might prove to be a debtor to the royal
treasury. He then left his refuge, and was imprisoned in the fort
of Santiago, the authorities commissioning Señor Villacorta to bring
legal proceedings against Orendain. It was found that he had hidden
various jewels in the convents, and, while these investigations were
being pursued, he made his escape from the fortress in the dress of
a woman, going away in a coach, without the guard recognizing him,
and took refuge in the convent of the Recollects. The auditor thus
commissioned had recourse to the provisor, in order that the latter
might give orders for Orendain's removal thence; but, as the provisor
did not accede to this after three demands, the auditor sent a notary
with soldiers, and removed Orendain by force from the sanctuary. The
provisor declared Señor Villacorta publicly excommunicated, and his
name was placed on the list. That gentleman had recourse to the royal
Audiencia, which ordered the provisor to absolve the auditor; this was
done through the cura of the cathedral, but ad reincidentiam, and for
the period of thirty days--that is, if the accused did not return to
the church within the thirty days, he would incur excommunication the
second time. Señor Villacorta challenged the provisor, and this lawsuit
became so tangled that various judges were challenged by one side and
the other, and even Señors Calderon and Davila were challenged by the
king's fiscal, who had taken part in the dispute; and there was no one
who could give judgment in the suit, because some refused to take the
responsibility, and others were challenged by one or the other party.

In such condition was the Orendain affair, when a decree arrived from
his Majesty in which he appointed the archbishop as governor ad interim
on account of the death of Señor Arandia. He assumed the authority in
the year 1761, and put an end to this clamorous lawsuit by commanding
that Orendain should leave the fort, and all his property be returned
to him, with [his giving] security for all that he owed to the Holy
Crusade; he also imposed on all persons perpetual silence during the
time until his Majesty (whom he informed of his proceedings) should
make some other decision. His most illustrious Lordship continued
to rule the islands in much peace, fulfilling rather the office of
father than that of governor, conciliating those who were turbulent,
and extending his charity to the king of Joló, who was living in the
fort with much lack of comfort. The governor quartered him in a house
in Manila, decently furnished, with a coach and with menials enough for
his service. He wished, besides this, to restore him to his kingdom,
and after listening to the opinions of the leading persons in Manila,
it was decided that the king Don Fernando and his son Israel should
be sent back to Joló, and that they should take with them a guard of
Spaniards, in order that the chiefs in that island should not compel
him to abjure the Catholic religion which he had embraced. When
they were ready to carry out this undertaking the English arrived
[at Manila], the war with whom it is necessary to relate in separate
chapters. [118]








MEMORIAL OF 1765

By Francisco Leandro de Viana. MS. dated February 10, 1765.


    Source: This document is translated from a MS.--apparently
    a duplicate copy of the first original, and bearing Viana's
    autograph signature--in the possession of Edward E. Ayer, Chicago.

    Translation: This is made by Emma Helen Blair.








VIANA'S MEMORIAL OF 1765


Part I

In which is shown the deplorable condition of the Philipinas Islands;
the necessity of preserving them, with respectable forces; and the
method for attaining this, without the costs which hitherto [have
been incurred], and with increase to the royal exchequer.




Chapter First: Of the present unhappy condition of these islands [119]

1. There is no greater misfortune in the world than poverty; all have a
contempt for it, and all regard it with displeasure. No one honors the
poor man, however heroic and eminent he may be; his subordinates serve
him unwillingly, and readily show him insolence. He has no success,
for lack of money; and, in fine, every undertaking costs him immense
labors, fatigues, vigilance, and sorrow.

2. It is literally this which is occurring in these islands. The Moros
deride us, and display their superiority compared to our weakness,
which certainly is ignominious to the Catholic arms, and to the
reputation of the [Spanish] nation. When we had forces for punishing
them, they were curbed and humiliated; since they have seen us poor
and weak they have displayed their perfidy and boldness, and are
treating us with the greatest insolence ever seen--for they invade
even the villages along this bay, without there being, on our side,
any means to prevent this.

3. The vassals of his Majesty, both Spaniards and natives, live in
the sorrow which is aroused in them by their melancholy reflections
on our poor and miserable condition. The Indians, who are civil only
when they fear some punishment, regard their sovereign with little
respect, and the Spanish nation with disgust at seeing it humiliated
by the English, the Dutch, the French, and even the Moros; and they
judge that the Spaniards are somewhat more than the Indians, but
much less than the other nations. And, although they are confounded
at the glorious successes which our armies have gained against the
English since the capture of this military post, and at the heroic
valor with which the unfaithful provinces have been punished, when
they become aware of our actual poverty that will be enough to destroy
their reverence and respect for the acts of the superior government,
and to make them bold to commit any insolence, for our lack of means
to restrain them from it.

4. For this same reason, nothing can be undertaken that will avail
against the Moros who harass us, [120] or against the Indians who
refuse obedience to the commands laid on them. The consequence of this
is, that the scanty funds in the royal treasury are being consumed;
that it is deprived of the receipts which it could have if we were
in a respectable condition; and that a zealous governor of these
islands labors and watches, in weariness and grief, to procure the
remedy for so many evils, under the impossibility of finding it.

5. If we look at the condition of this fort and of that at Cavite,
we shall lament, as is natural, the necessity of repairing their
fortifications and building some new ones, of clearing out the ditches,
of tearing down buildings, and of other works which will be deemed
indispensable. If we turn our view to the artillery, we shall find
it so defective, and part of it so useless, that for the defense of
these forts it will be necessary to spend many thousands of pesos. If
the gun-carriages which are needed and are actually lacking are built;
if the forts are supplied with the gunpowder, balls, grapeshot, bombs,
grenades, and other implements of war, and with iron, nails, mantelets,
cordage, and oil, and, in short, with everything which ought to abound
in the [royal] storehouses: the cost of all these things, which are
necessary, will be enormous. If attention is given to the need of ships
for transporting [hither] the situado, and of other smaller vessels
for sending aid to the military posts, providing them with supplies,
driving away the Moros, and transporting property from the provinces,
one will be astounded at the contemplation of these expenses. And,
after all, he will draw the conclusion that nothing of what I have
mentioned can be undertaken, for lack of money; that the Moros will
keep us in a state of continual fear; and the Indians will act as
caprice leads them; that at the first outbreak of war the forts will
be found entirely defenseless; that the military posts will be exposed
to destruction; and, in one word, that the lack of troops and money
places these islands in imminent risk of their total destruction, by
various paths, and our sovereign and the Spanish nation in grievous
danger of losing their honor, reputation, and influence--which must
be averted by such means as are possible; and one of these is, the
abandonment of these domains.

6. If, then, they produce nothing; if to maintain them must cost so
much that it weakens the royal exchequer, to the injury of other
and more important domains; if for lack of money the honor of the
Catholic arms cannot be maintained in these distant regions; if we
are exposed to being the plaything of all the nations; if we cannot
resist or confront the feeblest enemy who may attack us; and finally,
if we must endure the ignominy of being discreditably deprived of
these faithful vassals, with the loss of all that they have: it is
better to anticipate these losses in good time, to abandon or sell
these regions, and allow to all [their inhabitants] free opportunity
to make their property secure and take refuge in other dominions, where
the power of our beloved kings and lords may shield and defend them.

7. This is the method of saving expenses, and employing those funds
for other and more useful purposes, and averting the ignominies to
which we are exposed--with danger not only to our property but to
our lives. For we are surrounded by ferocious and inhuman enemies,
such as are the English--who, warned by the events of the late war,
will give no quarter if they return to these islands, on account of
not exposing themselves to remain as prisoners within the walls of
Manila and Cavite--the Moros, who will come to the aid of the said
English, or alone by themselves if they see us very weak (and in every
way those people are terrible, for they know not what humanity is);
the Sangleys or Chinese, who are equally barbarous and bloodthirsty;
and even the Indians, who also are cruel and ferocious.

8. The recent example of Pangasinan is the most melancholy
warning. What obstinacy and blindness! what insolence and aversion
toward the Spaniards! What treasons and apostasies! What murders, so
inhuman and cruel! It is certain that the Indians desire to throw off
the mild yoke of the Spaniards; that they are Christians, and vassals
of our king, simply through fear, and fail to be either Christians
or vassals when they consider us weak; and that they neither respect
nor obey any one, when they find an opportunity for resistance.

9. The revolted Indians in the island of Bohol solemnize weddings
among themselves, confer baptism, and perform other functions of the
Catholics, for which purpose they have some persons who perform the
duties of the father ministers in the villages; and this mockery,
this scorn, this contumely they display for what is most sacred in
our religion. They have fled from the villages, and live in their
freedom in the hills; yet for this conduct they have experienced
only kind treatment and promises of pardon, to which they do not,
and never will, pay any attention. If we had troops and money, those
insurgents would be reduced; they would be good Christians and vassals,
and the royal treasury would possess the receipts from their tributes;
for only the fear of punishment is adequate to subject the Indians,
and draw them toward what is right.

10. More recent is the case of Pangasinan, whose natives had just
been making the same mockery of our Catholic religion, and showing
the same contempt for it; but chastisement has reduced them to being
Christians and vassals to our king. It is argued from this that, so
long as we have not the forces for coercing the Indians, they will
be our greatest and most terrible enemies--from whom we cannot free
ourselves, save by the measure of abandoning the islands, in case we
do not maintain them with respectable forces.




Chapter Second: Of the difficulties which will result from abandoning
these islands

1. Not many years had passed after their conquest when it was
recognized in España that, in order to support them, it was necessary
to expend much money; and the question arose whether it was more
expedient to maintain these new domains, or to abandon them. Opinions
were expressed on both sides: some urged that but little advantage
had resulted to the crown from spending immense sums of money in this
country, so distant from its sovereign--who, besides the fact that
it did not promise him much profit, could not render it assistance
with the promptness which was necessary. Others, on the contrary,
urged that under no circumstances ought these islands to be abandoned,
which were conferring such glory on our arms, victorious in the four
quarters of the world, in which resounded the power of our sovereign,
and his royal and Catholic zeal for the salvation of so many souls.

2. Our king and sovereign Don Phelipe the Second, of glorious
memory, embraced this latter opinion, with that apostolic and heroic
resolution, so celebrated in our histories, that "for the sake of one
single soul that might be saved, he would consider well employed the
moneys that were being spent in these islands."

3. I believe that to this religious motive others were added, of
policy and state, for maintaining these islands, which, although at
the beginning they would consume much money--as occurs in every new
colonizing enterprise, which [sort of work] is not done for nothing--at
the same time promised great advantages, on account of the valuable
products which they yielded, and the great number of people who were
conquered. Efforts in this enterprise were made for several years,
with the greatest ardor; the chimerical projects of Terrenate and
the Molucas were begun, which cost us infinite expense; and, on the
other hand, we were harassed by the Moros, with the Dutch, who were
aiding them as enemies to this conquest, which they feared would be
their ruin--an indication that we had a better opportunity than they
to aggrandize ourselves with the commerce of all India, which would
have yielded to us the very profits which they feared to lose. And
we, occupied in defending ourselves from so many enemies, have not
thought of making any progress, but only of leaving everything as the
famous Legaspi established it--and yet continually with new burdens,
on account of the creation of new offices, the increase of missions,
and other expenses, which exceeded the income of this royal treasury,
and were made up from that of Mexico.

4. Freed at last from the aforesaid enemies, [a time of] serenity and
calm began in these islands, and much progress might have been made,
to the benefit of the royal exchequer; with its forlorn condition,
and the interested motives of those who were managing it, the zealous
and disinterested governor Don Fausto Cruzat promptly made himself
acquainted. He collected much money which had been regarded as lost;
he erected or rebuilt very costly works, as the galleon "San Joseph,"
the palace, the halls of the royal Audiencia and the accountancy,
with prisons, storehouses, etc.; he left much money in the royal
treasury; he prevented the remittance of large sums which were
due from the Mexican treasury; and he practiced economies which
were very considerable, and suited to his own example of interest,
zeal, application, and ability. But the reduction which he made in
the military force, in pay, and in the royal situado, was not the
best idea for the security of these islands, and for supplying their
urgent necessities--especially as no increase of the royal revenue was
established in place of the said reduction. For as a consequence--and
the receipts of the royal treasury having been diminished, when they
might have been increased--and with the necessity of holding the Moros
in check, with costly expeditions and the construction and equipment
of some military posts, our expenses were increased; and since these
were greater than the incomes, the islands have not retrieved their
condition since that time. They have had but few troops, and this
government has not been able to make itself respected, or to restrain
the invasions of the Moros. Nor is it able to undertake enterprises
that would be useful in the provinces, in order that these might
produce for the royal revenues the great increase which they bid
fair to yield, and for which plans would be made, [if the support
of the government could be given], by those who were of opinion that
these islands should be preserved. As is admitted by [those of] all
nations, these islands are the most fertile, abundant, and rich, and
the country the most delightful, in all India; and no other region is
so well suited for [the center of] a flourishing commerce, on account
of their situation. [For they lie midway] between the empire of China,
the kingdoms of Siam and Cochinchina, the islands of Celebes and
Molucas, the kingdom of Borney, Vengala, the coasts of Coromandel and
Malavar, Goa, Persia, and other populous regions which have made the
[mercantile] companies of Olanda and Inglaterra rich. With greater
reason would they be able to increase the wealth of España, if in these
islands were cultivated their many valuable products, which are greatly
esteemed in the aforesaid colonies, and if these products found there
the market which foreign goods now enjoy. The whole matter consists
in restoring our commerce with the same courage and perseverance
which the foreigners display, for which design the abandonment of
these islands would be very pernicious--even laying aside religious
motives, which are powerful to the Catholic zeal of the Spaniards.

5. I find another and greater objection to the abandonment of these
islands; that is, that the English would securely establish themselves
therein, for they have shown themselves eager and greedy for the
advantages which the islands present. In that case, they would
easily carry on, by way of the Southern Sea, an illicit commerce
with Nueva España--where they could land wherever they might please,
and without difficulty make themselves masters of the Californias,
in order to continue, with this advantage, the discoveries by which
they have sought to find a passage to the Eastern Indias by the
[route] northwest from Hudson's Bay (called thus from the name of an
English captain). With this object there was formed, at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, a company of English merchants, who, as
a result of their latest enterprises (in the years 1746 and 1747),
[121] have reasonable expectations of finding a way of communication
between the Northern and the Southern Seas, according to the critical
account of a modern geographer.

6. West of Canada and of the Misisipi River is the great gulf of the
Western Sea, [122] which falls [into the ocean] above [i.e., north of]
Cape Mendocino; it was discovered by the Spaniard Martin de Aguilar,
and it is judiciously conjectured that it extends a considerable
distance toward the lands of the northern region in which is situated
the strait of Anian, according to the discoveries of the Russians in
1728, 1731, and 1741--which have a certain agreement with those of
the aforesaid Aguilar, and especially with those which our admiral Don
Bartholome Fuente and his captain Pedro Bernarda made in the year 1640,
[123] north of California and northwest from Canada.

7. The former navigated along the coast of California four hundred
and ninety-six leguas to the north-northwest, as far as the lake
which is called Lake de los Reyes [i.e., "of the Kings"], and reached
Canoset; he crossed a lake, and by a river--to which he gave the name
Parmentier, which was that of his Spanish interpreter--he arrived
at another lake, which he named Fuente; it is one hundred and sixty
leguas long and sixty wide. From this point he passed to another lake,
called Ronquillo (from the name of a captain in that squadron), and in
one of the villages there he learned that at a little distance toward
the east there was a ship, in which it was supposed that there were
Spaniards; they found an English ship, which had reached that place
by the current from Bafin's Bay, or else that of Hudson's Bay.

8. Captain Bernarda, who had directed his course to the north, arrived
at Minhaset, a village of America; he entered a lake four hundred
and thirty-six leguas long (which he named Velasco), the extremity of
which extends northeastward, as far as 77 degrees of latitude, and by
a river which flows from the said lake to the southwest he came out
at the sea. Again going to the north, he continued his navigation
to the northeast in the sea of Tartaria, as far as 79 degrees of
latitude, always following the coasts. He sent ashore a Spaniard,
and he assured him that he had seen the extremity of the gulf of
Davis's Strait, or of Bafin's Bay; and that in that place there was
a freshwater lake at the latitude of 80 degrees, and mountains of ice
toward the north and northwest. From this the said captain concluded
that there was no passage or communication between the said strait
and the Southern Sea; but the English regard these relations as the
effect of the Spanish policy, which hides the actual discoveries of
Admiral Fuente. As if there were not a similar refutation of error in
the voyage which the merchants of Zelandia undertook in the year 1592,
as Samuel Ricard [124] relates, with the idea of passing over to China
by way of the coasts of Tartaria! On the contrary, the English suspect
that there is a passage to the Southern Sea by way of Hudson's Bay;
and they are continually searching for it, with the greatest ardor and
perseverance--for which enterprise they will have, without any doubt,
motives which encourage their expectations. It is enough for my purpose
to show how substantial is the advantage that would result to the said
English from being masters of these islands, in order that they may
establish themselves in the coasts of the Californias, and thus render
easy the illicit commerce and the discoveries that I have mentioned.

9. Even without these suspicions, it cannot be doubted that in case
of war breaking out the English could attack our domains in the
two Americas from these islands, by the coast of the South [Sea];
and from Europe, by the opposite coast--diverting our forces in one
direction, in order to strike a blow in security, where it may be
most to their advantage; and to this risk we expose ourselves by
abandoning these islands. But, notwithstanding this, I conclude
that if we must ignominiously lose them, by not maintaining them
with respectable forces, it would be better for us to abandon them
rather than to encounter such a calamity. This, in my opinion, would
be accomplished in the first hostilities [that might break out],
since the English, who are arrogantly establishing their factory
in Joló to secure the profits of their commerce in that kingdom,
will much more willingly establish themselves in Manila, whenever an
opportunity is afforded them; and they will profit by whatever now
benefits the Spaniards--and much more, on account of their greater
application and industry, which regards the entire circuit of the
world as narrow for the extension of their commerce.

10. The dominions ceded to the English by España and Francia in North
America, as far as the Misisipi River, furnish to that nation the
means for continuing the discoveries which I point out; and it cannot
be doubted that, at the same time, they are seeking for a connection
between the two seas--to which the inquisitive disposition of the
English will devote itself, with the energy which hitherto [they
have displayed]. They can open a route, by land if not by water,
to the Californias, where any settlement [by them] would be very
injurious to us, but very advantageous to them if they possess
these islands. But without them the English could not maintain
such a settlement, except at great cost in sending to it supplies
in ships, which would have to navigate either by way of Cape Horn,
[125] in order to go along the coast of the South--without fear of
encountering resistance from the Spaniards, since a dozen Englishmen,
and half as many Indians to guide them, will make the crossing,
and fortify themselves in any part of the southern [i.e., Pacific]
coast of America--or by the Cape of Good Hope [Buena Esperanza], the
Gulf of India, and the Straits of Malacca, in order to cross over from
there, by way of these islands, and afterward make the same voyage as
do the ships of this [Acapulco] line. These voyages, so protracted,
will hold back the English from any settlement on the southern coast
of America. However, if these islands belonged to them, they would
immediately execute that project, in order to secure the advantages of
this great commerce and of the illicit traffic which they would carry
on in Nueva España--just as now they are conducting it from Jamayca
and Honduras among all the Windward Islands [Islas de Barlovento]
and in part of the Americas, with notable injury to the commerce
of España and to the royal duties, of which they are depriving his
Majesty with so many illicit importations [of foreign goods].

11. Many other difficulties which would ensue from the abandonment
of these islands can be seen in the Extracto historial [126] of the
commerce of Philipinas, to which I refer--contenting myself, lastly,
with calling attention to what we have lost by the Dutch having
made themselves masters of the Molucas, the commerce of which has
compensated them for the enormous expenses which they incurred. This
subject also is treated by the said Extracto historial, and by the
chronicles or histories of these islands. It is sufficient to say
that the Dutch have enriched themselves with the cloves and spices
of the Molucas, from which the Spaniards obtained nothing but great
expenses, with no mercantile advantage; that with the said products
they have drained the silver from our dominions; and that with this
money they have waged most cruel war against us.

12. Let a computation be made of the expense which the Molucas caused
us, and of the loss which we have experienced from abandoning them;
and even he who is least versed [in such matters] will concede
that the latter is vastly greater than the former. For ten years'
expenditures for preserving the Molucas are not equal to the increase
of strength which we have given every year to our enemies since they
gained possession of those islands. I assert that we would not have
abandoned that valuable piece of territory if our Spaniards had been as
industrious and assiduous in trading as are the Dutch; or if they had
realized what they lost, which has been the immense treasures which
the Dutch have gained. But ours is the singular misfortune that we
regard the land as useless that does not abound in silver; nor will
we consent to be convinced that commerce is the most safe of mines,
if the products which our provinces yield are promoted, cultivated,
and worked up.

13. The importance of the Molucas was not thoroughly understood until
we lost them; nor will the loss resulting from the abandonment of
the Philipinas be realized until they are in the power of some other
nation, less indolent and negligent than ours. Then their exceedingly
rich products--cinnamon, cloves, pepper, nutmegs, cotton, gold, iron,
and the others which are yielded in great abundance (as will be said
in its place)--will be cultivated and gathered up; those foreigners
will sell us these very fruits, which now we cannot appreciate, and
with them will take away our money; and in any war we shall be ruined
by the gains which our abandonment [of the islands] will produce to
those [who possess them].

14. I believe that in view of these reflections, and of what I am going
to explain, every good Spaniard will be convinced of the necessity of
preserving these islands--even though it shall be at greater expense,
and without the powerful incentive of religion--on account of the
great benefit which can result to the monarchy if we open our eyes to
avail ourselves of the advantages which these dominions offer to us,
as I attempt to demonstrate in this writing.




Chapter Third: Upon maintaining the islands with respectable forces

1. Assuming the difficulties which would follow from abandoning them,
which is the first measure proposed, the second seems indispensable--to
place these forts not only in a condition of ordinary defense, but in
one of entire security, in order to avert the ignominy and discredit
of our arms, and to render worthy of respect the name of our king
and sovereign, and that of the Spanish nation, which certainly have
lost much of their honor in this part of the world, at seeing the
derision which the Moros have repeatedly cast at us. And it has been a
special providence of God that since the shameful loss of Manila our
arms should regain the reputation which they had lost in the siege
of this fort, by some glorious successes--so complete that they were
extolled by the enemies themselves, and caused admiration throughout
India--in order to show that the loyalty of the Spaniards, even when
their forces were most feeble, could conquer the strongest enemy and
avenge their injuries. But this glorious and heroic example of fidelity
and valor--by which all the people distinguished themselves, under the
orders cf their commander, Don Simon de Anda y Salazar--ought not to
lull us into living in excessive confidence that, in another invasion
(which may God not permit), we shall be able to accomplish the same
results; for the hand of God is not always ready to work miracles,
and He desires that men shall aid themselves, in order that He may
aid them.

2. I say, then, that it is very easy to make these fortified places so
worthy of respect that there will be no forces in this part of India
able to capture them. With the same ease any person can begin to form,
in his imagination, a basis of brave soldiers, of fortifications, etc.;
but he will strike on a reef from not knowing how the increased expense
which must necessarily burden this undertaking can be supported. For
this end, I will propose some measures, after showing the way by
which to make ourselves respected.

3. The towns of Manila and Cavite ought to be placed [in a condition
of defense] with the plan of fortifications in the modern style which
shall be furnished by the engineers who may be consulted, or may come
from España, for this purpose. This expense will be very great, as is
naturally obvious; and perhaps with the same expenditure the entrance
of the bay could be fortified to prevent the entrance of ships and
leave this place in a condition conformable thereto--devoting all
attention to the said entrance and to the port of Cavite (in which
the courts, the [royal] offices, the storehouses, etc, ought to
be), because its situation, aided by art, will make the said port
impregnable, and its maintenance less costly and more secure.

4. The town of Manila is of no use without the port of Cavite; and
the latter, without the former, is more useful and less costly. Any
enemy who attempts to capture this town [of Manila] can secure
the same advantages by seizing other lands on the shores of the
bay, because all is alike, but useless, without the said port;
and the expedient of abandoning this town (which, on account of
its uselessness, does not merit the expenditure of so much money),
and employing the same expense in fortifying, if that can be done,
the entrance of Mariveles, is more advantageous and safe, and less
costly. It is more advantageous, because then no vessel can enter
the bay, to invade the villages along its shore, as the Moros now do;
more safe, because while any [hostile] squadron would be wasting time
in opening a passage by which to find entrance into the bay and lay
siege to Cavite, opportunity would thus be given for various military
measures which would render difficult the capture of the said port;
and less costly, because not so many soldiers are necessary to guard
the fortifications of the said entrance and port as to man the great
extent of the walls of Manila--which, according to intelligent persons,
needs a garrison of at least three thousand men. [127]

5. There is a sort of flat boats which are called "floating bastions"
[baluartes en el agua]; they are of shallow keel, but of a strength
which can support artillery of large caliber. This is a most admirable
invention for defending the entrances of ports; those who understand
the subject will give more minute information regarding these vessels,
which, added to the fortification of the aforesaid entrance [of
Mariveles], will make it impossible for hostile ships to enter the bay.

6. There is no doubt that Manila, as I have said, is unnecessary if
Cavite is well fortified; but it is also certain that at Manila it is
easier to bring in supplies, and for all the troops and the citizens
to remove, with their property, to the provinces, where the enemy
cannot attack them. These reflections, and the difficulties which
there may be in fortifying the entrance to the bay, will be better
foreseen by those who understand the subject.

7. Besides the two ships, which are necessary for the trade with
Nueva España, there ought to be at Cavite two others in reserve,
which could serve in any outbreak of war for the guard and defense
of our fortifications, and even could be sent out for capturing
the ships of our enemies which might come from Europa and from the
coasts [of India] to trade at Canton, for the latter pass in sight
of the coasts of Ilocos and Cagayan, and visit without fail Pulaor,
Pulicondor, and Pulizapato. These ships [at Cavite] ought to have
competent naval officers; and even in time of peace they will be very
useful for keeping the coasts clear [of enemies], for transporting
troops to the military posts, for any expedition against the Moros,
and for reconnoitering and surveying the lands, and the shoals
and dangerous places of our islands and seas, and discovering new
routes. The navy, shipyard, and arsenal of Cavite should be placed
under such regulations as shall be considered most suitable; and as
warden of the said port there should be appointed a competent naval
officer, or some one of the builders of ships, with the title of
superintendent of the arsenal and shipyard, in order that affairs
may progress in proportion to his ability.

8. The expense of the two ships which must sail to Acapulco is paid
for by the same royal duties which have been hitherto paid, for there
have always been at least two galleons for this purpose. As for the
additional two ships, and some fragatas besides, it can be estimated
that they will cost one hundred thousand pesos a year, besides their
construction; this can be carried on in various parts of these islands,
with evident saving of expense on account of the exceeding abundance
of timber and the low wages of the workmen.

9. The principal defense and security of these islands consists in
the troops. In every province there ought to be fifty soldiers, with
their officers, at the disposal of the alcaldes-mayor. In this way
the reduction of the villages would be made easier, without which all
the rest is absolutely idle and useless. As fast as the villages are
reduced, they offer greater advantages for both spiritual and temporal
things; and thus could be established what would be very beneficial
to the Indians and to the royal exchequer, as will be explained later.

10. With a thousand soldiers distributed in the provinces--and these
in time of war could retreat to the forts--and with three thousand
who may be permanently stationed in the forts, the port of Cavite
and the forts which may be erected at the entrance of the bay will be
impregnable. Or, [if it be a question] of not undertaking this work
but of maintaining the fortified post of Manila, the said number of
troops will likewise be sufficient; for the Dutch, the English, and
the French, who are the powers that we can fear in India, have not
the facilities for coming to conquer our towns with so many marines
as there would be soldiers in our garrisons aforesaid; and, on the
other hand, they may fear lest we invade them with part of the said
military force and of the militia (which, disciplined on the plan that
I propose in my memorandum of suggestions, will exceed six thousand
men, besides the veterans). With that force, and with the enormous
number of men who could be obtained from these islands for [making]
earthworks [para faginas] and for other construction, the name of our
sovereign and of the Spanish nation would command so much respect in
this part of the world that no one would dare to invade us.

11. The permanent garrison of Manila and Cavite, according to the
regulation by Señor Arandia, contains two thousand men, divided into
twenty companies; and the plan which I propose for the security of
the said towns and of the provinces calls for another two thousand
men. From these can be formed another twenty companies, of a hundred
men each; and, since usually these companies are at no time complete,
it will be necessary, in order to keep them full, to increase the
said plan by another thousand men, in order that the [regular]
footing of four thousand men may always be maintained. They can
easily be recruited in Nueva España, and [sent over] by every ship
to replace those who may die; for we have learned by experience
that the Americans, if they are well disciplined, are remarkably
well fitted for soldiers. They are barbarians in courage, and are
daring and resolute; they fling themselves into the greatest danger
as joyously as into a dance; and whether on the march or in guard
duty, in heat or in rain, and in the most distressing fatigues, they
are always gay, contented, and good-humored. With the same aspect
they endure poor food, a scanty supper, a hard bed; and, finally,
they are very obedient, and their virile powers are quite spent
[son de potencias mui despejadas] usually--so much so that on this
account they usually have all the vices which are natural to man. But
strict discipline and punishment are a great restraint on them; and,
with the example of four or five hundred veteran soldiers who might
come from España, a very respectable military force could be trained
here--with the additional consideration that they are better able
than are the Europeans to endure heat and rain, and other hardships,
which ruin the latter and make no impression on the former. But it
is indispensable that some officers of rank should come from España,
to lay good foundations for this edifice, for in no other way can it
be permanent.

12. In order that this force may serve willingly, and be reliable,
it is necessary to increase their pay. It is impossible to have
good officers unless they have sufficient pay to support themselves
decently, and it is certain that they do not have it; the same thing
is true of the soldiers, relatively; and on this account it is found
that both officers and men serve by compulsion, for, by leaving the
service, they make a better living, and are more highly esteemed. A
captain with [a salary of] twenty-five pesos, a lieutenant with
eighteen, and an alférez with fourteen, cannot feed, clothe, and house
themselves; and in order to appear on the streets neat and clean,
they are forced to practice a thousand stratagems and deceits, which
cast discredit on the body of officers and injure their reputation
among the citizens. The honorable officer who does not conform to this
[sort of] life, or who has means to support himself in some other way,
or who adds to his income by trading, escapes by leaving the service;
and the soldier deserts, and takes refuge in one of the provinces,
where he lives better and has more comforts. Therefore, in order
that they may serve the king with affection, willingness, and honor,
both officers and men should receive a corresponding rate of pay.

13. This, it seems to me, ought to be fixed at the rate of fifty
pesos for the captain's pay, forty for the lieutenant, thirty for the
alférez, ten for the sergeant, eight for the corporal, and five for
the private soldier; and in this proportion for the sargentos-mayor,
the adjutants, and others. With these salaries all the military could
support themselves decently, and the service would be desirable;
young men of good standing would devote themselves to it; there
would be emulation among the officers, and, if these were competent,
among the soldiers also--who, with such pay, would not be so eager
to desert the service.

14. Computing the annual expense of the aforesaid  forty companies,
according to the proposed schedule of pay, it would amount to very
nearly the sum of three hundred and twenty thousand pesos; and adding
thirty thousand pesos more, for the pay of the corps of artillerists
whom we ought to have, the annual expense would be about three
hundred and fifty thousand pesos. [With that force,] there would be
men for the detachments which we may need to send on special service,
for the expeditions that may be necessary, for proceeding wherever
necessity may call for aid, and for the ships and the galleys; and,
above all, for rendering ourselves respected and feared, in times of
either peace or war.

15. This increase of troops and pay, compared with the pay and troops
stated in Señor Arandia's regulations, amounts to the half more;
and I reckon it, with that of the artillery, at two hundred thousand
pesos more of expense; this, with the hundred thousand applied for
the navy alone, will make three hundred thousand pesos of increase
to be charged to this royal treasury. Computing the cost not by the
said regulations, but by the plan which I have just proposed, the
entire cost of army, navy, and corps of artillery amounts to four
hundred and fifty thousand pesos annually.




Chapter Fourth: On the facility with which these islands can produce
for the royal exchequer more than what it needs for the said expenses.

1. Having constituted the aforesaid military force--or half of it, in
order that the expense may be less at first--the reduction of all the
Indian villages ought to be resolutely undertaken, as a matter that is
absolutely essential, without which all the rest will be useless. This
reduction made (which can be accomplished in less than a year),
enumeration will be made of the tribute-payers in all the provinces;
after the reduction their numbers will be greatly increased, because
the heads of barangay will not be able to hide the tributes as easily
as they now do, or to commit thefts and dishonorable acts, as they have
hitherto done. The ordinances will be made duly effective, especially
in regard to plantations, and other measures will be adopted that are
beneficial for the better government, both economic and civil, of the
villages; government buildings will be erected in the chief towns,
at least, that may serve to shelter the alcalde-mayor and the troops
that he will have; also a storehouse,  in which to keep the property
of the royal exchequer. Good schoolmasters will be employed for the
instruction of the Indians, and for teaching them our language; and
the matters in which the father ministers should have the right to
intervene, and those in which they ought to forbear, will be strictly
regulated, without any dispensation. The cultivation of the land will
be conducted with the utmost care; and, finally, the tribute will be
increased, to the rate of two pesos a head each year. Although this
is a very moderate impost, and is profitable not only to the king but
to the Indians, in order to draw them out from their continual and
pernicious slothfulness, this branch of revenue will produce annually
one million, six hundred thousand pesos. This addition to the royal
treasury, even when some deduction is made, as is ordinary, will not
only support the expenses of my plan for army, artillery, and navy, but
a considerable amount of silver will be left for other allotments from
the royal exchequer, and for indemnifying the expenses with which the
islands have been burdened, from the time of their conquest until now.

2. The other increases and savings which the royal exchequer can make
in its various branches I have set forth to his Majesty and to the
superior government, and I will furnish a still more detailed account
whenever it shall be deemed necessary. It is sufficient [here] to
know that these can amount to some four hundred thousand pesos, and
that, when added to the income from the tributes, the two items will
amount to two millions of pesos annually; and even if half a million
be deducted for contingencies and losses, and another half-million be
spent in making payments, a million still remains as savings. Even
considering the matter as gloomily and distrustfully as possible,
there cannot fail to be an annual saving of half a million of pesos,
as any one will understand who is moderately acquainted with the
affairs of these islands.

3. With such receipts in the royal treasury, and with the aforesaid
soldiery and their pay, and with navy, artillerists, and military
supplies, what enterprises cannot be undertaken in these islands? Will
this not be the most considerable establishment in all India? Will
there be forces that can overcome us? Will the English, who have their
forts and factories, with the necessary garrisons, venture again to
invade this place? On the contrary, will they not fear, and with just
cause, that we, superior then in forces, will attack them in their own
colonies? I think that no one will doubt that the advantage is ours,
assuming that my plan for savings and increases in the royal revenues
is practicable; and I believe that, however numerous the difficulties
which may accumulate in carrying it out, all will admit the suitability
of these islands for attaining it, if only it be undertaken in earnest
and followed up persistently by all the governors; for if the military
forces be placed on the footing that I propose, all the rest will be
overcome without special difficulty; and I dare stake my head on it.

4. In order that the islands may enjoy the peace, tranquillity,
and comfort which they should have, with evident benefit to the royal
revenues, it is absolutely necessary to inflict exemplary punishment on
the Moros of Jolo and Mindanao, whose insolence, perfidy, cruelties,
piracies, seizing of captives, and deceitfulness have ruined these
wretched provinces, and will entirely annihilate them unless the
remedy be applied--and there is no other, than to attack them in their
own territories, and give them no quarter; to destroy them, or else
intimidate them so that they will never forget [their punishment]; and
to put a stop to their raids, by some small forts, which can keep them
in subjection--imposing on them a heavy tribute, which will indemnify
the expenses of the expedition and the costs of the said forts and
soldiers. The enterprise is easy and safe, when we have the men and
the money; and the advantage and even necessity is the greatest one
of these islands. Upon this I could expatiate at length, since this
is a matter upon which I have worked with considerable application;
but this point is sufficient, as being one of those most essential to
the prosperity of these islands, and to make it evident that at the
same time we can succeed in depriving the English of their factory in
Jolo. [128] This is another of the more important matters, since in
either peace or war they will entirely ruin these islands: in peace,
by frauds and commercial intrigues; and in war, with small forces.

5. For the execution of all the aforesaid, and in order that
the [military] establishment proposed may suffer no delay or
procrastination, it would be expedient for his Majesty to give
commission for this to the governors, and to the ministers of the
Audiencia, with the insistence which is merited by this project,
so assured and so beneficial; and the amplest powers should be
given them to proceed in such manner as they shall judge, by the
majority of votes [in councils of war], to be most expedient. For in
consulting his Majesty in regard to some uncertainties, and waiting
for his royal decisions, the delay of at least three years will be
experienced; and in so long a time the postponement of action cannot
fail to be injurious to the enterprise, and to cool interest in its
continuation, when it ought to be pursued with the greatest ardor,
zeal, and efficiency, deferring for this all other affairs, as being
less important.

6. The first thing which should be attempted is, that his Majesty
issue commands--provided he approve the project for making these
domains respected, and the plan for economies and increases in
the royal revenues--to the viceroy of Nueva España to send over
here money and soldiers, in order to serve as a foundation for the
work that is to be undertaken. For this is necessary to be done,
even if there were no such project; for in its present condition
the place is without defense, and the government without forces to
make itself obeyed; and there is no medium between the two extremes
above stated--to abandon this country, or to maintain it with honor;
and the latter cannot be secured without spending money, and without
having sufficient troops to garrison the forts.

7. If to these succors from Nueva España were added two ships and
five hundred soldiers from Europa, a corresponding force of officers,
and abundance of military supplies--which could come to these islands
by way of the Cape of Good Hope--great advantages would ensue. First,
all the vassals in these islands would rejoice at seeing such succor as
never before had been seen in them; second, the Indians would have some
idea of the power of our sovereign, since, as a people of material
ideas and little penetration, they do not consider or understand
more than what enters through their eyes; third, they would feel more
respect, fear, and dread, which is that which holds them in check, and
obliges them to be Christians and vassals of our king. Fourth, such aid
would serve as a terror to the Moros, and would allow the provinces,
overwhelmed by their invasions, to take breath; fifth, all the soldiery
would be disciplined and organized after the example of the said five
hundred veteran soldiers, and with the sergeants and corporals of the
latter a good corps of officers could be formed, filling vacant posts
with them in place of the untrained and inexperienced (to whom can be
given other appointments in the posts of alcalde-mayor, corregidor,
etc.). Sixth, in these neighboring provinces the reduction [of the
villages] and the increase of tribute could be immediately undertaken,
without risk of resistance on their part; and when the undertaking
was concluded in this region, where it is easier to carry out such
a measure, it would be continued in the other provinces, one after
another. Thus in a short time the benefits set down in this project
would be obtained, and with them the troops and their pay could be
increased, fortifications and ships built, supplies provided (which
could be done here), and the Moros who harass us destroyed.




Chapter Fifth: Of the arguments which justify the increase of tributes

1. As this matter is discussed with the greatest scruples by all
the authors, it has seemed to me desirable to explain, as briefly
as possible, the reasons which I consider just for the increase of
tributes which I mention in the preceding chapter. I see therein from
the start the obstacles and difficulties which this delicate question
will occasion; but I will bring together the considerations which
no author denies in this discussion; I will adapt their doctrines to
the Indians of these islands, in order that the justification of my
design may be evident; and I will conclude with touching upon some
objections which have been raised by the most learned persons whom
I have consulted on this point.

2. From the confusion and disorders of ancient times originated the
selection of kings, to whom and to their successors the respective
kingdoms entrusted the power of establishing laws; of forming towns,
and of maintaining them in peace, justice, and social order; of
appointing persons for government, civil, economic, and military; of
establishing tribunals; and, in fine, of providing their vassals with
all the means conducive to their greatest comfort and security. The
people bound themselves to contribute means for meeting these expenses,
with the tributes and regular charges which might be necessary. By
this mutual obligation between the kings and the vassals, the latter
must be protected, defended from enemies, and maintained in peace
and justice; and in return and acknowledgment they must also pay the
tributes, since these are employed for the common benefit, and secure
the stability and solidity of the state. If St. Paul counseled that
tributes be paid to the heathen princes, with how much more reason
ought they to be paid to our Catholic monarchs!

3. The payment of tributes is binding in the tribunal of conscience,
under [penalty of] mortal sin, and with the obligation to make
restitution when they are fraudulently withheld; and this opinion
no author questions. But, as it is not possible to determine the
quantity, opinions are divided, and many persons expand this matter,
urging that the excessive imposition of tribute exonerates from
the obligation to pay it, and establishing [the fact of] the said
excess on various arguments, although I know not whether these are
solid as is necessary. For, in order to speak with assurance on
this matter, neither theology nor jurisprudence is sufficient; but
it is necessary to know also the science of government and that of
administration--which are little understood by some who clamor against
excess in the tributes, without knowing whether or not there is any.

4. In matters of government, a statesman who is adorned with
superior talents will distinguish the expenditures which are
necessary from those which are needlessly incurred; he will know
whether the tributes are sufficient to meet the obligations of the
crown; and he will make a calculation of the incomes and expenses
of the royal exchequer. This neither the jurist nor the theologian
can do, without knowledge of these matters, which are remote from
their professions, and consequently they cannot be sure whether
the tributes are sufficient, or are extravagantly spent, in order
that they may establish the [charge of] excess in them, or the
[right of] relief from paying them, or the [justice of] scruples
at imposing them. But the theologian and the jurist who may have
the said information will doubtless declare with most correctness,
whether the tributes are excessive or moderate, and whether there
is obligation to diminish them or necessity for increasing them,
in order that sovereigns may not experience the aforesaid scruples,
or the vassals have cause for not paying the tributes.

5. It cannot be denied that in all the nations of Europe the tributes
have been increased in this century, as the Mercuries publish it;
and this is right, because continually new things are discovered
which render the old ones useless--for instance, a fortification
which formerly was considered impregnable is [now] regarded as very
frail and weak. On the other hand, the exertions which a power makes
oblige it to incur greater expenses, and all of the powers strive
to place themselves in a state of equilibrium which can render
their respective domains secure. The abundance of silver has raised
the prices of commodities, and, as everything costs much more than
formerly, and the necessity for expenditures is infinitely greater,
the increase of tributes cannot be avoided, nor can the vassals be
excused from the clear obligation to pay them, in proportion to the
[demands of the] times, which cannot be the same.

6. The pious feeling with which the Indians have been regarded has
rendered still more delicate the question of the tributes which
have been imposed upon them; nevertheless, all our authors agree in
justifying not only those which at first were laid upon them, but
those which for just reasons were afterward increased. Moreover, it
was decided by a council of very learned men whom the emperor Carlos
Fifth consulted that the Indians ought to pay the same tributes which
the other vassals were paying in España, appraising their value,
and moderating the tax according to the resources of the tributaries
and to what each province could carry and endure; [129] and from this
proceed to the laws which have been established, and the royal decrees
that have been issued, for this purpose. These ordinances are even
more benign than the aforesaid decision; for really the poverty of
the Indians has been exaggerated more than is just, and it has been
believed that by these moderate measures the conquest of the Indias,
both spiritual and temporal, would be more easily effected--which I do
not attribute to that, but to the great reverence which the reputation
and glorious achievements of the Spaniards occasioned in the Indians.

7. Taking for granted then, the moderation (as all admit) of the
tributes paid by the Indians, especially in these islands--where
they paid only at the rate of four reals for each tributary, and of
one real a head which was afterward imposed in addition, one entire
tribute finally paying ten reals, in accordance with ley 65, tit. 5,
lib. 6, of the Recopilación de Indias, without there being, from the
year 1602 until now, any further burden upon them--and assuming,
as an unquestioned fact, that there has been a continual increase
of new offices, new military posts, and many expenses in these
very islands; as also that the urgent needs of the crown are now
incomparably far greater than in the past century, it seems that by
an undeniable conclusion the increase of tributes ought to be lawful,
in proportion to the increase in the said expenses. For without the
tributes the king cannot fulfil his obligations as such, in regard
to his vassals; nor can the latter omit to contribute the means for
their own preservation and security, which is what the sovereign must
endeavor to obtain for them.

8. What reason will there be for the vassals in the peninsula of España
being the only ones to be laden with an increase in the tributes,
and for the vassals in the Indias not bearing the same increase? One
class is under the same obligation as the other to pay their share to
their king, for the necessary expenses of the monarchy. Let, then,
a survey be made of the taxes and imposts which have been increased
in España since the conquest of the Indias, and it will be seen what
increase of tributes has been imposed upon the Spaniards in order
to defray the expenses of the crown, while in the Indias hardly any
increase has been made--although it accords with equitable justice
that all should bear these burdens which conduce to the common welfare,
and assure the stability and permanence of all the dominions.

9. Even when the expenses of these islands were less, the tributes
were not sufficient; and every year the generosity of our sovereign
has sent and is sending the situado [130] from Nueva España--which,
[even] with the product of the tributes and of other royal taxes, is
not enough to satisfy all the obligations of this royal treasury. This
is an argument which demonstrates that these vassals do not contribute
to their king the amount which, in the opinion of all, they are
under obligation to pay; for they ought to pay that which his Majesty
spends for their comfort, for their spiritual and temporal government,
for the administration of justice, and in defense of their persons
and property. Besides all this, they ought to contribute to the
royal revenues for the expenses of the wars, and the maintenance of
troops and forts, of the navy, of state officials, and of the royal
household--which, as indispensable and general expenses, ought to be
exacted from all the vassals. But not only are these expenses never
exacted from the vassals here, but these islands have been supported
at the cost of the labors and fatigues of the other vassals, without
any reason being found why one class should enjoy more privileges
than the other while they receive equal benefits.

10. There are probably in all the world no vassals who are less
burdened than are the Indians of these islands. They eat and drink
without paying alcabala or any impost; the fabrics with which they
clothe themselves, if made in the islands, pay nothing, and if they
are of foreign make they bear no heavier burden than the light one of
the customs duties; in the polos and personal services to which the
king assigns them, he furnishes them with rations and pay according
to the tariffs and ordinances of the provinces; and, finally, each
Indian pays, at the end of the year, only five reals, from the age of
eighteen years to that of sixty. I agree that at the beginning it was
proper to proceed with this moderation, because the said tribute was
then considered sufficient for the expenses, and those of the monarchy
were also less in those times, on account of the scarcity of silver,
which caused all commodities to be cheaper than they are now; and,
finally, because they had not been conquered by wars occasioned by
their own perverse conduct, in order to impose on them heavy tributes
at the discretion of the conqueror, as is just in such cases. For they
submitted of their own accord, and our conquest was made not because
they had previously furnished us with causes for war, but for the
sake of their greater good, both spiritual and temporal; for this
reason their tribute ought to be more moderate, but not so much so
that, in order to relieve these vassals, it should be charged back
to the others (as it has been, unjustly), in order to support these
islands. For it does not accord with justice that exemption should
be granted to these Indians from their obligations, as vassals, to
pay their share toward the expenses of these dominions and of the
entire monarchy, in [due] proportion; and that this favor [to them]
should prove injurious to the rest of the vassals, who certainly are
more worthy of consideration [than these], since they are more useful.

11. "In the time of their heathendom, they ought to be considered as
slaves rather than as vassals of their tyrannical petty kings, to whom
they paid service as vassals. These tyrants employed them in their
grain-fields, and in gathering pearls, shells, gold, dyewood, amber,
and civet; in timber-cutting, and in the construction of vessels;
in a word, the people had nothing more than the labor appointed to
them by their tyrant masters" (thus I explained the matter to his
Majesty in a report of June 5, 1760, and [here] will copy exactly
the rest of its contents regarding the increase of tributes). "Your
Majesty conquered these dominions and these peoples, making rational
beings from brutes, Christians from heathens, and rich people from
poor ones. Your Majesty gave them the freedom of the sea, the rivers,
the lands, and the forests; established a governor, an Audiencia, and
other courts, in order that they might be defended from their enemies
and maintained in justice; formed bishoprics, with bishops and curas;
and, in fine, you completed these benefits with the many privileges
which are contained in the laws of the Indias, without further burden
to them than the payment by each Indian of five reals. At the same
time, they were able to pay much more, as it is just they should,
considering that every vassal ought to contribute to his king and
natural lord whatever is necessary to maintain the vassals in peace,
justice, and social order; but in these islands not only does your
Majesty not obtain what is needed to pay these expenses, but your
Majesty supplies, and has supplied, an immense amount of money. If
the rest of your vassals contributed in this proportion, your Majesty
could not maintain your dominions, for you spend vastly more than what
they yield to you; nor could the Indians of these islands, moreover,
be instructed and governed if your Majesty spent upon them no more
than you obtain from the fund of the tributes. Therefore, in order
that these obligations may be reciprocal--that of your Majesty to
maintain the Indians in social order, and theirs to contribute for
the same--it is necessary that the tribute be proportioned to the
expenses, and larger than what they are at present paying."

12. Let these reflections be prudently considered, for, even without
the constraint of the foregoing ones, they show the lawfulness of
increasing the tribute; and at greater length I have stated the
disposition of the Indians, as I also explained to his Majesty in
the said report: "They are a people who are given up to sloth; they
work one day for the food for the entire week, and the rest of the
time they are without occupation, and most often [spend that time] in
gambling or drinking. That is a very unusual Indian who takes pains
to have a comfortable house, and to accumulate some little property
for the comfort of his children; for he [usually] only works for
his food and for wretched clothing, for paying his tribute, and for
gambling. This is more usually the case; as also is it certain that
there are no vassals who have better opportunities for being rich,
or can do so more easily. Those who were exempted from going to cut
timber paid the overseer five pesos, three reals each, in order not to
be obliged to do this work for the period of one month; and in this
is evident the facility with which they make money when they choose,
and when necessity urges them."

13. Here comes in well what the governor has set forth in a memorandum
of suggestions regarding the increase of the tributes, and I will
extract from it what answers my purpose: "Among the numerous vices
which are occasioned by the incredible laziness of the Indians, one
is that of gambling. When they gamble on a cockfight, a multitude
of people assemble, and all of them carry ready money for this
purpose. The Indian women adorn themselves with many chains of gold,
with pendants, and with rosaries ornamented with gold; with rings
and bracelets of tumbac, and with many buttons of the said metals
on their chemises. The Indians are accustomed to use much silver,
and some gold and tumbac, on the said buttons and those on their
jackets; in rings and clasps; on their knife-belts [131] and weapons
ornamented with silver. For a burial they pay out twenty, forty,
or sixty pesos; they spend enormous amounts in the banquets at their
weddings, in the functions of gobernadorcillos, and in other things,
which prove that the Indian, notwithstanding his great slothfulness,
has money for everything except for the tribute."

14. There is no province which does not yield many and excellent
products, and, if the Indians were willing to apply themselves to
a very moderate [amount of] labor, they could pay a larger tribute,
and [yet] live with more comforts; for there are probably no vassals
in all the world who have such facilities and opportunities for
becoming rich as have the Indians of Filipinas. But this condition
is not attained when there is slothfulness; and what means have the
Spaniards used to banish this vice? None; for we are as languid and
negligent as the Indians, and have left them in their freedom without
seeking either their advancement or our own. The Spaniards do not go
out of Manila, where all are gentlemen; they regard it as unworthy
to devote themselves to any other pursuit than commerce; they employ
themselves in swindling and begging alms, rather than seek a living in
the provinces; and, more than all, they live in utter idleness. They
loiter about, divert themselves with gambling and other vices, and
become insolent in their licentious mode of speech, even that which
they do not understand. For this reason Manila is the commonwealth
most abominable for malicious tales, slanders, and factions, [132]
for sloth and licentiousness; for even the citizen of most wealth
and he who is most occupied will have at least ten months which he
does not know how to employ.

15. Such is the example that we set to the Indians, and they imitate
us so perfectly that they all desire to live as the Spaniard does,
to wear the same costly ornaments, and to be rich--but without labor,
and without ceasing to be idle or to divert themselves with all the
other vices. If the many Spanish vagabonds who wander about Manila
and its environs were distributed in the provinces, they would trade
therein; they would marry Indian women of rank, would become rich with
some application and labor, and would thus furnish a good example to
the Indians. In this way the foreigners (and especially the French)
have established their colonies, free from the error of our pernicious
vanity, inaction, and sloth; and we, although better warned than they,
are unwilling to change our ideas, but prefer to maintain the Indians
in the same state of idleness.

16. The means for their not being idle is, that the Spaniards should
work, and encourage and aid the Indians to cultivate their lands and
utilize their products. An ordinance should be published that no Indian
may be a gobernadorcillo or official of his village unless he cultivate
and gather in a certain portion of rice, wheat, sugar, cacao, cotton,
wax, or other product, regulated by what each province produces;
that if they do not cultivate their lands they must lose them, the
lands being adjudicated to other persons, in order that these may
cultivate them; and that exemption from tributes, polos, and personal
services be granted to those who shall most distinguish themselves
in tillage and harvesting. The idea is, to stimulate them in this
manner to the tillage and cultivation of the lands which his Majesty
grants to all the villages and the Indians who dwell in them; and
these measures are very gentle compared to others which were decreed
by the municipal law of the Indias. For in one of the ordinances of
Mexico it is decreed that "the Indians must not be allowed to be idle,
or to wander about as idlers and vagabonds; but they must work on
their farms." The authorities could compel them by force to obey this,
as Señor Solorzano proves by various arguments in book 2, chapter 7
of his Política Indiana, demonstrating that no Indian would work if
allowed his liberty, "through his natural inclination to an idle and
easy life," as is definitely stated in ley 1, tit. 13, lib. 6 ("Of
the Indians"), and many others of the same Recopilación; and that the
Indians resist work "because they are exceedingly slothful and fond
of idleness, and are inclined to abandon themselves to intemperance,
licentiousness, and other vices which idolatry occasions among them;
and as they are so little covetous, and are content with so little for
food and clothing, many passing their lives in the manner of beasts,
some force and compulsion is necessary to make them give up this
mode of life; for the devil prompts and persuades them not to serve
or aid the Spaniards.

17. "On this account it has always been regarded as best to keep them
occupied and at work, and in their heathen condition the same was done
by their Ingas [i.e., Incas] and Montesumas--to such an extent that,
when they lacked profitable and necessary occupation, their rulers
set them to work at others that were only for pleasure, and of no
use or benefit; they were even made to collect little bags of lice,
and to cut and carry to the mountains stones of enormous size."

18. All this description seems written for the Indians of these
islands, and he who may have any experience with them will decide
that, in order to remove them from their sloth and their vices the
increase of their tributes is indispensable, as is the necessity of
compelling them by the said measure to perform work that is useful to
the king, and likewise to themselves, in both spiritual and temporal
interests--so much so that one can and ought to form the gravest
scruples at allowing the Indians to remain in their present condition,
since it is the origin of numberless evils (from which I shall pray God
to deliver his Majesty and his ministers), through consenting to this
so pernicious sloth, and not applying some remedy to it. At the same
time with the increase of the tribute, the abundance of products and
the wealth of the islands will be greater; for if the Indians now do a
certain amount of work in order to pay five reals, they will be under
necessity of working three times as much in order to pay two pesos.

19. In Nueva España, Señor Solorzano regards as lawful and very just
the tribute of eight tostons (which are four pesos, each of eight
silver reals), for each Indian, one-half more [133] than what I rated
in the increase which is here proposed. He who has any knowledge of
the said kingdom and of these islands will admit that the said rate
is very moderate; for the Indians of America do not enjoy so great an
abundance of products or so wide a market as do the natives of these
islands. Also, there they have not, in proportion [to the extent
of the country], as many troops and as many military posts as here;
and these natives have fewer burdens of polos and personal services,
and much less hardship, than those of Nueva España. Notwithstanding
these advantages, which furnish just reason for imposing on these
islands the same tribute which is regarded as just in Nueva España,
I am fixing the rate at one-half less--for with the two pesos for each
Indian I think that there will be more than enough to place the troops,
the fortifications, and the navy, on a more respectable footing; to
defend these vassals from the invasions of Moros and other enemies;
and, by saving to his Majesty the royal situado and making amends for
the enormous expenses which have burdened these islands, to furnish
to the royal revenues some increase, and have means with which to
meet the needs and obligations of the crown.

20. The difference which there may be between the Indians who were
conquered by arms and those who voluntarily subjected themselves to
our sway (as were those of these islands) is also found in the said
regulation of rates, by which the latter will pay but one-half as much
as the former; for this circumstance that I have mentioned does not
relieve them from the obligations and burdens of vassals--although on
account of it they have the right to be treated with more clemency, as
they have been treated hitherto, and will be in the future--paying the
two pesos as tribute, in order that his Majesty and the other vassals
need not defray the expenses to which the people of these islands ought
to contribute, since these conduce to their spiritual and temporal
welfare, and to the preservation and security of these dominions.

21. Besides this, it ought to be borne in mind that, from the first
years of this conquest until the one in which we now are, nearly
all the provinces have at various times rebelled and risen in arms;
and not one of our authors doubts that for this kind of offense the
Indians ought to be punished by an increase of their tributes, that
this may serve them as a warning and example; for they [thus] lost
the right to be treated with the mildness which their first voluntary
submission deserved. If the Spaniards had proceeded after this fashion
in these islands, it would have been an easy matter to increase the
tributes, in order to save the situados. Moreover, with the examples
in this war [i.e., with the English] we have most rightful cause for
punishing, by some such means, the traitorous and revolted provinces,
by [imposing] not only the two pesos of tribute, but much more, in
order to make some distinction between the Indians who have continued
faithful to our king and those who have rebelled and acted disloyally.

22. With these brief reflections the minds of those who have
entertained some doubts or scruples in regard to the increase of
tributes which I proposed in the preceding chapter would be convinced;
but there would be other difficulties to overcome in this exceedingly
delicate matter. People will tell me (as I have sometimes heard it
said) that any person who proposes the increase of tributes commits
mortal sin, and incurs the excommunication of the bull of the Cena. But
I will reply with the upright and pious intention which has influenced
me to write on this subject--on which, in my opinion, depends the
preservation of these islands and their Christian churches; for they
will certainly be lost in a few years unless they produce [means]
for the expenses which they occasion, or unless his Majesty increase
the royal situado; this is a difficult matter, and he is under no
obligation to do so. And it is sufficient for me, in order not to incur
the said excommunication, that the bull of the Cena is not received
in España in regard to matters of temporal government (in which our
sovereigns are absolute), but only in what concerns ecclesiastical
discipline, and the purity of the faith and the Catholic religion,
in which the Spaniards have always affirmed the blindest obedience
to the supreme pontiff and vicar of Christ on earth.

23. Nevertheless, I regard with the most profound veneration and
respect all that is contained in the aforesaid bull, and its provisions
regarding government taxes and tributes make me hesitate; for, assuming
(as a good Catholic) some influence of the Holy Ghost for the said
pontifical declaration, [134] my mind would be full of remorse if
at the same time when I defend the increase of tributes I did not
oppose the malversation of their proceeds, the superfluous expenses,
the lack of economy in those who administer them, and the numberless
thefts from the royal revenues, which are the strongest objections
that can be raised against my proposal.

24. It is certain that the vassals are under obligation to pay tribute
to their kings, but it is likewise certain that they have the right,
in equity, that what they pay as tribute be well employed, and that
punishment be administered to those who steal, extravagantly spend,
or misapply those funds; for in the honest administration of the
royal revenues consists the greatest comfort of the vassals and
the prosperity of the [respective] monarchies. The remark made by a
celebrated French writer is [worthy] of note: that if the ministers
of the king of España in the Indias were not so dishonest the
royal incomes would amount to more than those of all the powers of
Europa. The vassal complies with the obligation which rests on him,
but the kings do not fulfil theirs; for they let go without punishment
all the theft, all the robbery, all the iniquity committed by their
ministers. I am well aware that there cannot be government among men
without these defects and vices, which without exception are utterly
incurable, and all the nations of the world have committed them from
the time of Adam; but he who knows our general misgovernment of the
Indias and the numberless robberies which are committed [therein] will
be astounded to see that the criminals are not punished. [At the same
time] he is certain that the royal revenues are in great part consumed
by those who manage them, while if some exemplary punishments were
inflicted the thefts would be greatly checked; that, by not curbing
these, heavier burdens are laid upon the vassals; and that these
protest against the tributes which are imposed upon them, [levied]
not strictly for the maintenance of the dominions, but in order to
enrich the officials, who (especially in the Indias) make enormous
fortunes with what they obtain by defrauding the royal exchequer--or,
to speak more correctly, by plundering those who pay tribute.

25. If in the collection, administration, and allotment of the royal
revenues there were application, zeal, disinterestedness, and economy,
it is evident that the vassals would not be compelled to contribute
with so many imposts and taxes; for with what is plundered and
misapplied in one year the expenses could be met for the half of
the following year, and perhaps, instead of increasing the taxes,
it would be possible to make some reductions of these to the vassals
who should be considered most burdened.

26. I have not the slightest doubt that the tributes which have been
hitherto paid in these islands are not sufficient for maintaining them
in a condition so respectable as that which I have already proposed;
and if for this chiefest reason I have defended the increase of
tributes, I likewise retract this opinion in case our court do not
apply the most effective remedies, in order to check the robberies and
malversations which during my time I have seen, and that they may not
be responsible before the stern tribunal of God for such hardships
to the Indians, and for the robberies, which will be committed in
greater number in proportion to the increase in the funds which
will be handled. For, strict as is the obligation of the vassals to
contribute to the expenses, or pay tribute, equally so is that of the
sovereigns to make proper distribution of what is contributed, and to
endeavor that it be not misapplied; and so long as kings do not fulfil
this obligation, by appointing zealous and disinterested officials,
and punishing with the greatest severity those who are not such,
there will be few persons who will venture to express opinions in
favor of increasing the tributes. But [when such measures are taken]
I will be the first to withdraw from this statement of my opinion;
for I have always believed that the aforesaid condition [of honest
administration] was inseparable from such increase.

27. I will note other objections which have been made to me against
increasing the tributes; but, before mentioning them, I protest
my veneration and blind obedience to the royal decrees of my king
and sovereign, whose upright conscience will consider what is most
in accordance with its internal peace, the rectitude of his royal
intentions and the comfort of his vassals, by mercilessly punishing
those who defraud the royal treasury, and issuing such other commands
as are expedient.

28. There are many who restrict the powers of the sovereign which I
mentioned in section 2 of this chapter, and who say that the [various]
countries, when they instituted kings, did not dispossess themselves of
all the authority which the people of the nation possessed; but that
the latter reserved something, especially in the matter of taxes,
which were proposed and demanded by the kings, while the vassals
granted or denied them--[the objectors] drawing conclusions from this
ancient method, and (especially in our España) from the convocation of
parliament [cortes]; that the power of the king to grind his vassals
is not absolute, and that these do not depend in such matters on the
will of their kings alone. I frankly state these objections, which,
even though they be paltry (on account of the positive opinion of the
sovereign, supreme, and absolute power of our kings, who recognize no
superior on earth), it is expedient for those who ought to anticipate
them not to overlook; for, in order to render a question clear, and
to foresee all the difficulties in its decision and practical result,
a knowledge of the replies and objections which may be made is always
helpful. I content myself with pointing these out, and repeating my
[assertion of] invariable obedience to the royal commands of my king
and sovereign, as I stated in the preceding section.

29. [Some] persons will also raise objections against what I have
stated in the fifth section, that in all nations imposts and taxes are
increased, according to their necessities and exigencies, and that,
when this time [of urgency] is ended, the vassals are set free from
such burdens; but that in España there is no impost which may not be
perpetual, as has generally been the case with all--and the "Man of
San Quintin" demonstrates it in his memorial, attributing the ruin of
the monarchy to [the imposts,] the millones and sisas especially. [135]

30. These and other objections I will answer briefly, by saying that
the presumption of the law by which it is believed of all public
officials that they conduct themselves conformably to justice,
so long as quite the opposite is not evident, is stronger and more
effective in favor of kings and their wise prime ministers--who,
with more enlightenment, a profounder knowledge of the [affairs of]
state, well-known zeal for the welfare of the monarchy, and the proper
maintenance of their lofty honor and character, have decided and will
decide these matters, in which we who are inferior and of more limited
abilities ought to render subordinate our own opinions, and honor
with the utmost respect their wise decisions, persuading ourselves,
as is just, that in their councils they have borne in mind all the
considerations which can produce the most advantageous judgment,
before it is made known to the public. For however satisfied one
may be with their reasoning, he would admit that he was convinced
if it were possible for him to hear the substantial arguments which
influence the royal proceedings of our sovereign--on account of which
I, more than any other person, submit these productions of my dull
intellect to the superior comprehension of his Majesty and his zealous
ministers, protesting that I do not presume to furnish enlightenment
on these subjects because I might think that they do not possess it,
but in order to manifest my intense desire that what is understood
to be beneficial to the state, to the glory of the nation, and to
the welfare of all the vassals, may be carried into execution.

31. It will be necessary to assume that the increase of tributes in
these islands will be resented in the greater part of them, and that,
in order to obtain it, the precaution of stationing fifty or sixty
soldiers in each province will be necessary; in view of this, the
Indians will not cause the least trouble, while if they see us without
military forces the aforesaid increase will be entirely impracticable.

32. Equally it must be assumed that so long as the Moros invade
the provinces the Indians will resist paying tribute; for they will
represent that for the defense of their villages they are employed
during most of the year in making bulwarks, stockades, and little
strongholds, and with weapons in their hands, on account of having no
aid from the king which will secure them from the said invasions; and
in truth they ought to be heeded in this point. To this end I repeat
that in these islands some respectable forces are necessary, and with
them must be punished the haughtiness and insolence of the Moros;
for at the sight of this example the Indians will be encouraged,
they will attend to their labors, they will regard with respect
the affairs of his Majesty, and they will assuredly pay the tribute
which may be imposed upon them, without danger of their revolting. To
this end, a circular edict or decree should be drawn up, in which,
suiting the mode of expression to the disposition of the Indians,
should be fully explained to them the motives which constrain us
to the said increase, and the obligation under which they lie to
pay their share of the expenses for their spiritual and temporal
maintenance under the mild sway of our Catholic king and sovereign,
and for freeing them from the tyranny and servitude to which they
would see themselves reduced if these islands should, for lack of
military forces, pass over to another sovereign.

33. This edict or order, carefully prepared, and translated into
the idiom of each province, can produce many good results if we
proceed with an understanding of the character of the Indians, and
[in accordance] with the ideas that are necessary, which ought to
be communicated, by instructions, to all the alcaldes-mayor and
corregidors of the provinces, according to the circumstances of each
one--imposing the most severe penalties on those who do not exactly
fulfil the orders which the government may entrust to their management
and conduct, and offering corresponding rewards to those who shall
distinguish themselves in the execution and success of the new order
of things, which ought to be established in each province. [136]

34. In order to [secure] the observance of the said ordinance, it will
be expedient that when the tribute is increased the salaries likewise
should be made larger. An alcalde-mayor has twenty-five pesos of salary
a month, which makes three hundred pesos a year; but before he leaves
Manila for the province to which he is assigned he spends a larger sum
[than that] in the fees for his documents and in the notary's office,
and for the securities [that he must give]. In three years his term
as alcalde comes to an end, and the expenses of his residencia cost
him four hundred to five hundred pesos; and it needs but little less
for the settlement, presentation, and despatch of the accounts of the
royal revenue. Thus all the salary which he receives on account of
being alcalde, which amounts to nine hundred pesos in the three years,
is not sufficient for the aforesaid expenses; for the rest of their
maintenance have been invented the thefts from the royal revenue which
they handle, and from the Indians within their jurisdiction. For this
reason, and likewise because these offices have usually been sold,
as a rule they are filled by men who are not very trustworthy. But
if suitable pay were assigned to them, there would be many persons
of known probity who would seek them, transgressions could be more
severely punished, plundering would be decreased, the appointees
would furnish better bondsmen for the security of the royal exchequer,
and the Indians would not experience oppression.

35. The poverty of the alcaldes-mayor, their being loaded with debts
when they go from Manila, and the ambition to become rich in a short
time, draw them into trading with the product of the tributes in each
province; they buy vessels, lade them with goods, and convey these to
Manila, or send them to other provinces. If the vessel sink, if the
Moros seize it, or if it run aground on some shoal and the goods are
damaged, or if any other disaster occur, the alcalde loses nothing,
for he possesses nothing; and the damage is suffered by the king alone.

36. All this would be remedied by paying them more; for there would
be more reliable alcaldes, and they could be compelled to deposit in
the royal treasury every year, by means of their agents, the royal
revenue of their respective provinces, in order to avoid the aforesaid
contingencies, which here are common.

37. With better alcaldes, all the provinces would be well governed. For
what is more melancholy than to surrender authority over them to
persons who are incompetent, nobodies, in distressed circumstances,
vicious, and thieves? How is a man of this sort to govern fifteen,
twenty, or forty thousand Indians? If he cares for nothing except
for conducting his own business, how is he to attend to the
affairs which concern the king and the Indians? If the alcalde is
inefficient, or coarse, or ill-bred, or of little capacity, how is
he to govern well? how is he to administer justice, and how civilize
his subjects? How is he to furnish reports on subjects which his
limited intellect does not comprehend or fathom? How is he to look
after the cultivation of the soil, the collection of its products,
making plantations, and other things for which the ordinances provide?

38. This disappointment, this disorder, this misgovernment, and the
thefts from the royal revenue can only be avoided or remedied, for
the most part, by increasing the tribute and giving larger salaries
to the alcaldes-mayor, the corregidors, and the other officers of
justice in the provinces. There is occasion for the same increase of
pay in the posts of public and royal officials, and the subordinates
in the accountancy of the royal exchequer, in order to stimulate
them to better work and greater zeal and application in the affairs
of the royal finances.

39. In the royal storehouses there would be an end to the incredible
infractions of law and the thefts by the storekeepers, by giving this
position to honorable Spaniards, with suitable pay; and abolishing
the mischievous abuses in the waste and consumption of supplies--with
unchangeable regulations for the incomes and expenditures; for the
respective account-books of the storehouses and the appointment of an
auditor for verifying them; for the credits and debits of the accounts,
with vouchers for them; for the obligation and responsibility of the
storekeeper; for the weekly inspection which ought to be made by the
royal officials, in order to acquaint themselves with the condition
of all these matters, and ascertain whether or not they are properly
attended to; and for many other things, which contribute to greater
economy in the royal revenues. [137]

40. In order that there shall not be such confusion, it would be
expedient to separate the storehouses, or divide what belongs to the
artillery and military supplies from all the rest; and to abolish the
dependence of the storehouses at Cavite on those of Manila, making
the regulation that in the said port be entered and unladen whatever
is necessary for the equipment of ships, galleys, and other vessels
of the king, without its being necessary that the vessels from the
provinces which come with property belonging to the royal account
should unlade their cargoes in these storehouses [at Manila], from
which various goods are sent back to the said port. This causes greater
expense, on account of the detention of the seamen, and because of
the vessels and men that afterward are employed in conveying to the
said port what [supplies] it needs, in which also they are exposed
to the uncertainties of the sea. This is avoided and spared by the
direct discharge of cargo in the said port, where, in fact, the main
storehouse ought to stand, because there three-fourths of the goods
belonging to the royal account are consumed.

41. The superior government gives orders for the hasty equipment of
some vessels to cruise against the Moros, and for other purposes. The
cordage, the sails, and all the rest, are sent from the Manila
storehouse; the said vessels set sail, and come to supply themselves
with provisions at these storehouses. Who does not see the loss of time
and the increase of expenses which are uselessly incurred, and which
could be saved if the storehouses at Cavite contained what they need?

42. Although what I have touched on in these last sections may seem
a digression from the object of this chapter, they will be excused
by those who remember what I had already stated in section 26, and
by those who think that the increase of tributes will facilitate the
increase of salaries. This measure will give the superior judges more
discretionary power for punishing the thefts and illegal acts which
are diminishing the royal patrimony, to the injury of the vassals--who
have no right to complain that those who render them faithful and
disinterested service should be well paid; but their right in justice
calls for punishment to those who, receiving suitable pay, satiate
their covetousness with the blood and sweat of those who are wretched.

43. With the increase of tribute, numberless other matters could
be regulated, for the settlement of which it is needful to begin
spending money. All my plan and project is based on this chapter,
for in no other way--although these islands can be supported with the
economies which I set forth to his Majesty in my advices of the year
sixty, without the necessity of the royal situado--will it be possible
to place the country in the respectable condition of strength which
can oppose the nations who are established in this part of India, or
to produce so great advantages to the royal exchequer. I therefore
desire that these reflections of mine be carefully considered, in
order that, with other opinions that carry more authority than mine,
the royal and upright conscience of my beloved king and sovereign
may make such decision as he shall hold most expedient; and I shall
content myself with having brought forward what is dictated to me by
fidelity and affection, the zeal of a good Spaniard, desire for the
glory and increase of the monarchy, and the general welfare of these
islands and of the entire [Spanish] nation.

44. And if, notwithstanding the cogent reasons which justify the
increase of the tributes, it be preferred to employ with these vassals
an extraordinary degree of mercy, without a resulting deficiency in
the means for supporting the islands with respectable forces this
could be made practicable by establishing the tithes [138] for the
maintenance of the ministers of religious instruction, that of the
cabildo of this holy metropolitan church, with its archbishop, and
the suffragan bishops with their churches; for the wine for masses,
and the oil for the lamps; and even for the missionaries--all with
the saving, for the royal exchequer, of these great expenses.

45. Nearly all the provinces have their military posts, with the
garrisons corresponding to the greater or less danger of enemies;
and this expense is another of the heaviest incurred by the royal
exchequer, which would be able to save it (in default of the increase
of tributes) by laying upon the Indians and mestizos the burden of
such contribution as shall be deemed necessary for maintaining the
said military posts. [This would include] the pay of the troops
in garrison, the cost of transporting them and of the shipment of
provisions, clothing for the men, and the purchase of necessary arms;
for all this would contribute to the benefit of the provinces and of
their inhabitants.

46. And if, for the same reason which I have stated for the military
posts, there be exacted from the natives of the provinces the cost
of the thousand soldiers distributed among them who are mentioned
in sections 9 and 10 of chapter third, the total saving to the
royal exchequer will exceed 260,000 pesos, or will come near to
300,000. With this, and the product from the tributes (if these are
paid as hitherto), and from the other sources of income, there will
be in the royal treasury funds sufficient for the maintenance of the
islands according to my plan, provided that the rules be observed
which I set forth in my memorandum of suggestions and in my advices
to his Majesty. Thus will be secured these objects: to make our power
respected throughout India, to avoid the expense of the royal situado
which comes from Nueva España, and to gain the many advantages which
have been mentioned. I shall speak of these in the second part of
this work, in which I am going to treat of navigation and commerce,
the gains from which will be more than enough for maintaining these
dominions, even if the tributes are not increased.





Part II

Of navigation and commerce: the method for establishing them in these
islands, and their great benefits.


Chapter First: In which it is demonstrated, with examples, that
no power can make itself respected in the world without navigation
and commerce.

1. I do not presume to utter new things, but to arouse the minds
of Spaniards to follow the examples of the other nations, to which
end I have drawn from the works on history, both ancient and modern,
what confirms this idea. [This chapter is interesting, but the limits
of our space make it preferable to omit most of it, as having but
slight connection with our main subject; the following sections are
worth retaining.]

17. In the fifteenth century was begun the manufacture of woolen stuffs
[paños] in Inglaterra; for before that they sold (as we are now doing)
their woolens to other nations, especially to the Flemings and the
people of Brabant--from whom some seditious persons went over to
the said kingdom, about the year 1420, and taught manufactures to the
English. Monsieur de Thou, [139] however, attributes this establishment
[of a new industry] to Queen Isabel [i.e., Elizabeth], and to the
disturbances, on account of religion, in which the great Duke de Alva
and the Inquisition of España were insulted--without having borne in
mind, when he allowed his pen to move with the envious and bitter
temper that swayed him, that, many years before the revolution of
some of the seventeen [Netherlands] provinces which threw off the
mild yoke of the Spaniards, the artisans of Lovaina [i.e., Louvain]
had already introduced the manufacture of woolen stuffs in Londres.

18. The French, who in the opinion of Cardinal Richelieu were totally
unfitted for commerce, have made with it and navigation the most
felicitous progress, especially since the reign of Louis Fourteenth.

19. Nor must I omit the height of glory and power to which the empire
of the Muscovites has been raised since the reign of the great Czar
Peter. That nation was ferocious, barbarous, and slothful, and had
no intercourse with other and foreign nations. That glorious monarch
formed the design of civilizing the vassals of his Russian empire,
and of turning their inclinations toward political affairs, the
sciences, the fine arts, and the great advantages which result from so
praiseworthy occupations; but [even] his uncommon intellect found no
other means [for this] than that of navigation and commerce. But he
went incognito to Inglaterra and Holanda, under pretext of renewing
certain treaties, but in reality with the idea of gaining instruction
in those two sciences, which were his only aim. In this he actually
succeeded, by dint of immense labor and mechanical occupations,
which, if apparently they were unworthy of a prince, were afterward
(as they still are) those which most enhanced his glory. Not to linger
over what is well known, I conclude with what is to my purpose: that
the great Czar Peter established commerce in his empire, overcoming
insuperable difficulties; and from the year 1697 (which is the real
date of that enterprise) to the present time so marvelous has been the
progress of that empire that its forces by sea and land, its wealth and
products, its manufactures, its vassals transformed from barbarians
into civilized beings, learned men, and politicians, yield to [those
of] no other power--all being due to commerce, which in the short time
of sixty-seven years has wrought these apparently incredible prodigies.

20. The Swedes and Danes [140] also have made much progress through
this means; and the Portuguese, glorious in their conquests and
discoveries, have constantly declined ever since they neglected
navigation and commerce, regarding these as occupations unworthy of
their nobility. [141]

21. Almost the same has happened to our España; what fear, what
respect, what terror, did not our armadas inspire in the four
quarters of the world? There was no power that could resist them;
but, not to linger on the glories of our nation, I leave that to
the histories which relate them--especially those of the reigns
of the pious king Don Fernando, the Catholic monarchs, the emperor
Don Carlos Fifth, Don Phelipe Second, and Don Phelipe Fourth, who
certainly protected navigation and commerce. I will assert [here]
only what answers my purpose: that our navy declined, our great
manufactures in Sevilla, Segovia, and other places retrograded,
and our commerce deteriorated, with the continual wars; and, as we
did not repair this damage, we were at the same time promoting the
commerce of the other nations. These have made themselves rich through
our negligence and inactivity--selling to us all the more commodities
the more we abandoned manufactures, and with their gains increasing
their shipping the more that we gave up shipbuilding--until in these
latest reigns our shipping and commerce were reëstablished. But it is
necessary to extend our commerce further, in proportion to our vast
domains; otherwise, we keep them greatly exposed [to danger]. For
it has been now thoroughly proved that navigation and commerce have
rendered formidable and terrible the forces and power of the nations
who have practiced them, as also that from the decay or neglect of
these activities has proceeded the ruin of kingdoms.




Chapter Second: Of the liberty of the Spaniards to navigate by way
of the Cape of Good Hope

1. Some may think that this navigation is prohibited to the Spaniards
by the treaties of peace, and that on this account we have not
established a commerce like that of the Dutch, English, French,
Swedes, Danes, and other nations. But it is certain that there is no
such prohibition, and that our natural inactivity, laziness, and lack
of application to commerce, has been the cause of our not undertaking
the aforesaid navigation, which is equally free to us as to all the
other powers. For the prohibition that the Englishman, the Dutchman,
and the rest can lay upon us is, that our ships may not enter their
ports, just as they have been forbidden to enter our ports; but
they cannot hinder us from navigating in all the seas of the world,
in accordance with natural right and the law of nations. That law
does not allow the dominion of the sea to any power, according to
Grotius, Heinsius, and others--contrary to the Mare clausum [i.e.,
"closed sea"], of the Englishman Selden, [142] who in regard to
the dispute of the year 1653 defended the [English] dominion of the
White Sea, and the right of forbidding this navigation to the Dutch;
but they maintained their freedom with powerful fleets, and with the
same arguments which justify the freedom which the Spaniards possess
for navigating by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

2. As the Dutch have always regarded these islands with suspicion,
fearing some injury to their own commerce, they likewise have striven
in every way to make amends for the damages which they fear. One of
these is the extension of our commerce, because it diminishes their
own; and, in order to hinder it, they have sometimes chosen to avail
themselves of article 5 in the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and of
article 10 in that of Utrecht in 1714--in which is confirmed the said
article 5, wherein it is provided that "the Spaniards shall retain
their navigation to the Eastern Indias, in the same manner as they
enjoy it at present, without being authorized to extend it further; as
likewise the inhabitants of this Low Country [i.e., Netherlands] shall
abstain from frequenting the places which the Castilians possess in
the Eastern Indias." From these expressions, and from the demarcation
[made] by the supreme pontiff Alexander Sixth, the Dutch--who claim,
by right of conquest, to enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of
the Portuguese--try to argue that our ships have no right to navigate
by way of the Cape of Good Hope, nor along the regions of Asia--the
Coromandel Coast, Vengala, the Red Sea, etc.--intending that these
Philipinas Islands shall be the limits of our navigation to the west.

3-8. [In section 3, it is shown that the demarcation of Alexander VI
was made only to check possible disputes between the great Catholic
nations of Spain and Portugal, and its provisions referred only to
their discoveries of lands and isles, and not at all to the navigation
of the sea, which no power can claim, "since it is not fitted for other
dominion than that of God." Section 4 shows that the Portuguese and
Spaniards have frequented each other's ports, without any difficulties
arising between them over the navigation of those seas, which has not
been and could not be forbidden to the Spaniards; and that even if the
Portuguese had had any such exclusive right it could not pass over to
the Dutch when they conquered the former nation in India, especially
as privileges granted by the Holy See to its Catholic followers
could not be claimed by Protestants. In section 5 it is asserted that
the previously-cited article 5 of the treaty of Westphalia does not
forbid navigation past the Cape of Good Hope, but only the entrance
of Spaniards or Dutch into ports belonging to the other power; that
navigation on the high seas is, "by natural right, free to all the
world," and the object of the treaty was to protect both powers in
their respective possessions and commerce. As further proof of this,
Viana cites (in his section 6) the Hague treaty of 1650, and comments
on it in section 7. In the following section he shows how the Dutch
are claiming what was never granted by Alexander VI, who separated
only the conquests of Spain and Portugal, and not their navigations in
the high seas, a distinction which has been observed in the practice
of both countries, "who have freely navigated and traded through all
the seas of the East and the West." He claims that Japan and China
"are, without doubt, included in the demarcation of Castilla."]

9. Equally within the demarcation of España are included the kingdoms
of Siam, Camboja, Cochinchina, and, in the other direction, Borney, the
Molucas, and the other islands of the Malays--as was declared in the
year 1524, by the geographers appointed for this purpose by the crowns
of Castilla and Portugal, to whose decision the respective sovereigns
agreed. As for the prohibition of navigation, if the demarcation of
Alexander VI were to have been observed, it was clear that the Dutch
must admit the right of the Spaniards to prevent their navigation
through the seas of the kingdoms and provinces here enumerated, as also
through those of Japan and China, to which the Dutch ships go every
year; or else that they have not any right to forbid to the Spaniards
the navigation by way of the Cape of Good Hope. For by the admission of
those very Dutchmen, in a letter which the governor of Batavia wrote
to the governor here [at Manila], in regard to a balandra seized by
the Spaniards in the island of Mindanao (which belongs to the crown
of España, and is within the limits of the aforesaid demarcation),
they say that the Spaniards could not enjoy dominion over the rivers
and ports of Mindanao, and that only the authority of the petty king
there ought to be acknowledged; and they add that it is lawful for any
power to navigate there, and make observations on the situation of
those lands and towns, and to trade therein with the vassals of the
princes who possess them. This carries conviction [of the principle]
that as little ought the Spaniards to recognize in Eastern India any
other authority than that of the princes of the ports and towns where
their ships make port; and that it is lawful to navigate through those
seas, to reconnoiter those lands, and to trade with their vassals,
as has been done hitherto. For our ships have gone to their ports,
where they have been well received, as happened recently with the ship
named "Guadalupe," in the past year of 760; and those who have come
to this city, under various flags--Moro, Armenian, Malabar, Chinese,
Siamese, and others--have met the same friendly reception.

10-11. [Viana asserts that, although "long use and immemorial
possession may be a certain title to dominion over the sea," in such
instances as that of the Venetians over the Adriatic, and the Greeks
over the Ionian, this cannot be true of the claim made by the Dutch
(as having conquered the Portuguese settlements) to the dominion of
the great seas that lave India and Africa. These waters are too vast
to be possessed by any one power, and have always been freely used by
all nations. Moreover, the influence of Alexander VI and his successors
had always been in favor of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, and of the
preservation of the law of nations--"which presumption is taken for
granted whenever for just cause temporal dominions are changed by the
paramount power of the supreme pontiff." [143] He also cites Solorzano
to support his contention. The final section repeats the statement that
the Dutch cannot forbid the Spaniards to navigate through the seas
of India, and past the Cape of Good Hope; and adds, "Would to heaven
that we had the eyes to perceive the advantages of this navigation,
which are the following." Thus he prepares for chapter iii.]




Chapter Third: Of the advantages of the commerce carried on by way
of the Cape of Good Hope

1. The distance of these islands [from España] deprives our court often
of news; occasions delays in the correction of so many infractions
of law; retards all governmental measures; gives opportunity for the
commission of many iniquities; discourages those who are zealous for
the royal service; causes incredible expenses to the royal exchequer,
and to the inhabitants of these islands; and detains the citizens here,
as if in a place of banishment, [144] since they are not at liberty
to return to España, nor have they means to pay the expenses of the
long and grievous journey over land and sea, by way of Acapulco. All
this would be in great part remedied by carrying on navigation and
commerce by the Cape of Good Hope.

2. The clothing for the troops is brought from Mexico; it costs much,
and serves only to kill the soldiers. If it came directly from España,
it would be of better quality, cheaper, and more suitable for garments;
and our [Spanish] manufactures would have this market.

3. The wine for masses comes by way of Vera Cruz; it crosses the
entire kingdom of Mexico, and is shipped at Acapulco; and it arrives
here with so many leakages, damages, and costs for transportation
that it costs very dear--and sometimes it is mixed with water, to
replace what the muleteers drink on the route [across Mexico]. If it
came by way of the Cape, there would not be this uncertainty about
celebrating mass and the wine would cost much less.

4. The iron which has been purchased here from the Dutch, English, and
others at very high prices would cost much less if it came directly
from España, and foreigners would not carry away our silver. I say
the same of the lead, copper, gunpowder, balls, bombs, grenades, and
cannons, which have always been bought from foreigners, on account of
the negligence of the Spaniards--who, although they have [material for]
all the said [supplies] within the islands, go outside to find it,
for lack of application in working the mines.

5. The many thousands of pesos which the king has expended in the
transportation of missions by way of Nueva España, the detention
of the religious in the said kingdom in order to await the galleon
(for which delay the king pays), and the amount that is contributed
for clothing to the religious orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis,
would have been largely saved, and can be thus saved in the future,
if the said route be established. Among the ships of that navigation
will come to these islands many belonging to the commerce of Cadiz, and
on the other hand other ships will go to Cadiz from here, among which
there will be many who will undertake [to convey], some one article
and others another of the numberless commodities which can yield some
profit. With this trade it will be known what the Philipinas are;
our court will have more light [about them]; the infractions of law
and the iniquitous acts, of which it will have accurate information,
will be punished; and the measures of redress will not be delayed
for four or five years, as is now the usual case.

6-7. [Viana (in section 6) reminds the government of the great
advantage which the proposed route would give in sending news of an
outbreak of war with any power, enforcing this by the ignorance of the
Philippine colony, in the late war with England, of any hostilities
with that country, of which Manila learned by the coming of the
English squadron to attack that city. He urges (section 7) the lack of
available shipping along the South American coast, and "the incredible
amount of money which the equipment at Acapulco of the fragata 'Santa
Rosa' (which by accident arrived at the said port from Perù) cost; and
the injuries which would have followed to these islands if the divine
Providence had not made ready the said fragata for our succor. Thus
will be seen the advantage of the aforesaid navigation and commerce,
for, without its costing the king any money, he will have in Cadiz
vessels for carrying out the orders and despatching the succors and
provisions which his royal compassion shall regard as expedient."]

8. Conducting our commerce from these islands to España by way of the
Cape of Good Hope, the commerce of the foreigners must necessarily
be diminished, and they will not obtain so much silver from us. In
most years there come to the port of Canton, in the empire of China,
twenty-four, twenty-eight, or thirty ships--English, French, Dutch,
Swedish, and Danish; they carry our pesos fuertes (which is the
money most valued in China and throughout India), and some European
commodities, as fine woolen stuffs, and Brussels camlets [carros
de oro] (which the Chinese use for their outer garments [145] in
the winter-time), some pearls, and clocks, and much wine; cochineal
[grana] from our own America, and the opium of India, are also two
main lines of this commerce.

9. Such is the lading of the said ships, which return to Europa with
chà or tea, and with some porcelain, some articles of furniture in
lacquered or varnished wood, rosewood escritoires, and candlesticks
and other articles of white copper; [146] and, finally, they carry a
great amount of silk, both raw and in fabrics, which is their principal
lading. The raw silk is used for the European manufactures, and with
the fabrics they transact most of their trading. Each of the aforesaid
nations has its agent in Canton, who during the year disposes of such
goods as his ships could not sell; he furnishes to the Chinese the
designs [for fabrics] which are every year invented, and they weave the
stuffs of the same width as those of Europa. Afterward they sell these,
as coming from Francia, Inglaterra, and other European countries,
without any one being able to detect the fraud except those who have
been in these islands--where it is notorious to all that this is true;
and he who may doubt it will find this statement confirmed in the
"Universal Dictionary" of Sabary. [147] A large portion of the said
fabrics or stuffs come to Nueva España in our trading-fleets, and,
although they are of the same quality as those which the galleons carry
from here to Acapulco--with only the difference that the latter are
wider and somewhat more lustrous than the former--there is a very
great difference in the prices; for the mere name of "French" or
"English" confers value and estimation on the said fabrics throughout
the kingdom of Mexico, and the mere name of their being "Chinese"
renders those which go by way of Acapulco of little value.

10. This fraud only the traders of Manila thoroughly understand,
because they see it every year; the traders of Cadiz would be
equally aware of it if they carried on commerce in the empire of
China, as the foreigners do. They would also discover in the same
way numberless small wares of Canton make which are sold in España
as made in Londres and Paris, as is the case with the snuff-boxes
of all kinds, whether gold or silver, or of tortoise-shell or other
material; with lace-bobbins [palillos] of mother-of-pearl, ornamented
with gold, and those of finely lacquered or varnished work, painted;
and with various other curious articles of mother-of-pearl, ivory, etc.

11. All of these desirable articles, and many more, could be obtained
by our ships, if they came via the Cape of Good Hope to these islands,
which are on the route to Canton. At Cadiz they could take on cargoes
of woolen stuffs, which here are used for riding caps and coats,
[148] liveries, and in China for outer garments, as I have said;
Brussels camlets, which both here and in that country are greatly
used; wines (and thus the Swedes, who carry it from Cadiz to Canton,
and the Dutch and the English--all of whom carry away our money,
and make us pay sometimes a peso fuerte for a single bottle of red
wine, and for that of Xeres--would be deprived of this [source of]
profit); hats, which the foreigners sell to us at high prices;
silk hose and thread under-stockings; mirrors; crystal chandeliers;
branched candlesticks, and lanterns; vases, cups, and other kinds of
glassware; European paper; thread for sewing; britannia linens, fabrics
from Cambray, etc. (which are brought at much cost from Batavia);
silver and gold galloons and laces, which also the Dutch sell (and
would to Heaven that the great extravagance of Manila in this respect
might be prohibited!); and numerous other articles, which persons who
have a practical acquaintance with commerce can name better than I,
and which, if used, would be recognized as highly beneficial.

12. Of course the said lines are of recognized utility and large
profits, both for the Spaniards who may ship them by the said route
of the Cape, and for those who will buy the goods in these islands,
at more moderate prices. Above all, the profit would remain among
Spaniards; our Spanish manufactures would have this additional market;
we would succeed in stopping the foreigners from draining away all
our silver. For it is an intolerable grief to good Spaniards that,
when more than two hundred millions of pesos have come to these
islands since they were conquered, there are not now found in them
eight hundred thousand pesos in ready money. [This is] because our own
inactivity and lack of application causes us to buy from foreigners
the very articles with which these dominions abound, or which they
bring from our own España--as is the case with the iron, the copper,
the lead, the saltpetre; with the cinnamon, cloves, and pepper; with
the wines; with the woolen stuffs; with the mirrors; with the hats,
hose, galloons, and other articles, of which some are manufactured
in our España, and others are produced in these islands.

13. The Spanish ships which make their navigation by way of the Cape
could supply, as I have said, these islands with what they need, and
carry from them to Canton many excellent products which the foreign
ships cannot include in their cargoes. Such are birds'-nests, nacre
or mother-of-pearl, carey or black tortoise-shell, indigo and dyes
from Pampanga, balate, tapa, deer's sinews, hides, sybucao, ebony,
lumber, and other things, which have a great consumption in China;
on this account every year cargoes of these commodities are carried
thither by the champans which come here to trade, and by the barks
which depart from here for Emui and Macao. With these products,
and with the commodities from España, the said vessels would ship
at Canton the same goods that the foreigners are taking on; the
royal duties at Cadiz would be the same; our manufactures would be
greatly promoted; the profits would be as great [to the Spaniards]
as the losses to the said foreigners; the products of these islands
would be cultivated according to the market for them; and, finally,
in time many other advantages and benefits would be made evident.

14. The said ships returning from Canton by way of this city, in order
to pursue their voyage to Cadiz, could carry some products of the
islands--such as very fine petates or mats, hats of the same kind,
and cotton; tortoise-shell, palomaria; tamarinds, dragon's blood;
manungal, [149] and jars of the same wood, which is very medicinal;
various especial roots; gold; sibucao, which resembles brazil-wood, for
dyeing; pepper, which yields very abundantly wherever it is cultivated;
sugar, which does not cost here two cuartos a libra; dried candied
fruits; and, finally, they would have the benefit of the cinnamon,
with which our mountains abound from Samboanga to Caraga in the island
of Mindanao; it would be the most valuable line of commerce. These
mountains are in the same degree of north latitude as those of Ceylan,
where the Dutch obtain all the cinnamon; and it is judged, on account
of their location, that the quality of the cinnamon also is the very
same. For in Ceylan likewise cinnamon grows that is thick and gummy,
like that of Samboangan, and if the latter were cultivated like the
former, it would be equally good. [150] The cinnamon of Mindanao will
be as good as that of Ceylan if the king prohibits the latter in his
dominions, and facilitates the consumption of the former; and if the
Spaniards had begun to sell their cinnamon before the Dutch did so,
ours would now be of better quality than theirs.

15. As soon as I arrived in these islands and had made myself
somewhat acquainted with this subject, the inactivity and indolence
of our people caused me much sorrow; for although we possessed this
exceedingly rich treasure, there had been no one who devoted himself
to its development. This I explained, among other things, to his
Majesty in my report of June 5, 1760, showing what these islands
could produce, the valuable products with which they abound, and the
possibility of maintaining them without the situado which annually
comes from Mexico. In the following year came Don Nicolas Norton
Nicols, [151] who, it seems, proposed at the court the project for
[developing] the cinnamon, and brought a royal order from his Majesty
that he should be aided therein. I did so, with the utmost energy
and readiness, and this famous and skilful Englishman began to make
plantations in Caraga; people assure me that he would have carried
this work to completion if God had not taken away his life, through
the grief which he experienced at the attack on us by the English,
from whom he expected no favor. It was necessary that a foreigner
should accomplish what no Spaniard had done in some two hundred
years; [152] he died on account of our misfortunes, and now there
will be no one who will devote himself to the same enterprise; for
these citizens have no thought of any further occupation than their
everlasting laziness, nor have they the spirit to risk four reals,
or any zeal for the nation.

16. Even without its cultivation, there is a wide market for all the
cinnamon which comes from Samboangan. The greater part of it is used in
these islands, for chocolate, and brings a very good price; for ragouts
and for liquors, it is stronger than that of Ceylan; and it is being
shipped, as for several years past, to Nueva España. In Samboangan no
cinnamon is procured besides what the natives gather in order to better
their wretched condition, but this produces a sufficient quantity. This
is enough to prove that if the Spaniards would apply themselves to
the cultivation of the cinnamon of the said mountains; to making new
plantations, the bark of which, as being more delicate, would yield
better cinnamon than that of Ceylan; and to gather what Nature herself
produces, without any [human] labor: this commodity alone would be
capable of enriching the islands and the Spanish commerce, and of
annihilating that of the Dutch. The Dutch company supports existence,
notwithstanding its many losses and obligations, on the cinnamon and
[other] spices, fixing the prices of these at its pleasure, as being
masters of this commerce--which indemnifies them for their losses on
other things, and for the incredible costs of fortresses, troops,
and [commercial] establishments in the aforesaid island of Ceylan
(which would not be incurred in our cinnamon mountains).

17. The iron is another valuable product of these islands; there are
mountains of this metal, the ores of which yield seventy-five per cent,
only twenty-five per cent being lost in the fire. To judge from the
abundance of ores in the said mountains, iron to supply the world
can be obtained from them. Before the English came to attack us, the
working of these mines was vigorously pushed; it was in charge of Don
Juan Solano and Don Francisco Casañas. In less than eight months they
established furnaces, coalpits, barracks, forges, and other facilities,
and they mined a large quantity of iron; but everything was destroyed,
as a result of the loss of Manila, because some malevolent persons went
to plunder and destroy all the works. But it is absolutely certain that
all the iron can be obtained [here] which the islands need for nails,
plows, bolts, cannon-balls, bombs, grenades, cannons, and carajayes,
and for other uses, which amount to more than one hundred thousand
pesos every year, without the iron costing three pesos a pico. [It
is also certain] that if this money remains within the islands--an
amount of which hitherto the Dutch, English, and Chinese have drained
us--they will become rich, and diminish the commerce of the foreigners.

18. The commerce in the iron that is necessary for these islands will
alone produce, in fifteen or twenty years, more money than what they
now have; and if the Indians were compelled to clothe themselves with
the fabrics of the land, even with the little commerce that we have the
islands would abound with silver. The trade with Nueva España in iron
would be extremely advantageous to his Majesty; for the mines of Sonora
and other provinces further inland cannot be worked, on account of the
transportation from Mexico of the great amount of iron and quicksilver
that is necessary; and this, and the expenses which are added for the
conveyance of silver to Mexico, leave very little profit to the miners.

19. In carrying the iron from these islands and the quicksilver from
Peru to Acapulco or to La Navidad, these effects can be transported in
small vessels, and with little expense, to the coast of Guadalajara;
they will cost less than if purchased in Mexico; at least thirty or
forty pesos will be saved on the transportation of every arroba; and,
if on the return trip by the same route the silver is embarked for
Acapulco, there will be a great saving of freight in the transportation
of this metal.

20. Let a computation be made of the money which must have gone out
from the islands since their conquest, in order to purchase the very
products in which they abound, and the amount will be incalculable for
the items of cinnamon, iron, saltpetre, and other products. Let also
computation be made of what the outlays must have been for purchasing
wines, mirrors, and the other things which, as I have stated above,
could be brought directly from España; and it will be seen that by
our own fault we have enriched our enemies, and that we could have
annihilated their commerce and increased our own with only the sources
of gain which are pointed out in the present exposition. Then let us,
even though it be late, have the discernment to avert our total ruin,
by striving, with glorious emulation, to secure the greatest prosperity
for the Spanish nation.




Chapter Fourth: Of the necessity for forming a company in these islands

1. By a royal decree dated at Sevilla on March 23, 1733 (in which the
project was carried out which was approved by his Majesty on April 26,
1732), there was established by our lord Don Phelipe Fifth, of undying
memory, a company with the name of "Royal Company of Philipinas,"
[153] under fifty-eight articles and stipulations. These were full
of the most unusual privileges and liberties that can be granted,
and were even more advantageous to the Spaniards than those which
Louis Fourteenth granted to the French for their Oriental Company;
but I do not know exactly for what reason--some attribute it to
the loss of Torres's trading-fleet--the paternal affection did not
prove effectual with which our beloved king and sovereign took an
interest in making the Spanish monarchy prosperous by the extension
and promotion of commerce (the only means for securing wealth),
imitating the examples of almost all the nations of Europa, who, in
order to become rich, have established their companies in the Orient.

2-12. [In these sections Viana expands this last statement, enumerating
the nations who have enriched themselves by the Oriental trade,
and the companies formed in each for this purpose. First were the
Genovese and Venetians, who traded with India by way of the Red Sea;
they were afterward driven out of this trade by the Portuguese, in
consequence of the discovery by the latter of the route via Cape of
Good Hope. (Section 3.) "Portuguese trading-fleets of thirty ships
came to the commerce of India every year, and for Brasil alone sailed
fifteen to twenty ships laden with merchandise from India--besides
others which carried on trade in China, Japon, Persia, Arabía,
Mosambique, Melinda, Sofala, and other regions. But now that commerce
is so reduced that only one or, at most, two ships sail from Lisboa
yearly, which would not be the case if they had established a company
with adequate capital, which is the only way of making commerce
lasting." The Dutch at first bought spices from the Portuguese,
and then resold them at a huge profit to the other European nations;
but Phelipe II prohibited the spice trade to Portugal, and the Dutch
therefore formed a company to operate in the Orient, and trade directly
with its peoples. As finally constituted in 1602, this company had
(section 6) a capital of 6,600,000 florins ("according to Savary"); and
"in less than four years the members received the principal of their
shares with the great profits which they obtained." At the time of
Viana's writing, the Dutch company were maintaining "twelve thousand
men, regular troops, in their twenty-five fortresses in India, and
were able to equip 30,000 militia in their colonies, especially that
of Batavia" (Savary). Viana cites another authority, Samuel Ricard,
who places this militia force at 100,000, and states that the company
employed in the Eastern trade more than 160 ships, each carrying thirty
to sixty cannon, besides forty ships of the line (which number was
increased in time of war). This enterprise ruined the commerce of the
Portuguese (who had been the first to open the sea-route to India);
"from that time until now it has steadily diminished, and is the
poorest in all India; this has been the result of their not having
formed a company with capital, and with respectable forces to oppose
the conquests which the Dutch made. For they had a better opportunity
than the latter, and it would have cost them less to maintain a
flourishing commerce, as was that which they already possessed,
than it cost the Dutch to establish a new commerce by dint of money,
conquests, fortifications, and enormous expenses." The English company
(section 8) sent out its first fleet (of four ships) in the year 1600;
its capital was 369,891 pounds sterling. After various fluctuations of
fortune, it was reëstablished in 1698, and attained great prosperity,
so that its capital had increased to 1,703,422 pounds. In Viana's time,
"the ships from Madrast for London (more than fifty in number) carry
annual cargoes of five to six million pounds, according to the estimate
of Sabary; and, taking into consideration the increase which this
commerce has had since he published his famous work, the 'Universal
Dictionary,' it must by this time be worth some ten millions. This
does not include the operations of the private English traders who
traffic among the colonies of India; this may be inferred from the
duties which they pay in Madrast, which, at the rate of five per cent,
produce for the company 80,000 pagodas. This sum amounts to 120,000
or 130,000 pesos, estimating the pagoda at twelve and sometimes
thirteen silver reals." The English company were maintaining in
constant operation 150 ships and fragatas, and more than fifty smaller
vessels, employed in their commerce between India and London alone; to
the great expenses of this navy must be added those of the company's
forts and garrisons in India, which indicate how enormous were their
profits. An Englishman told Viana that the king of England was owing to
the company more than 36,000,000 pesos, the amount of loans which they
had made to the crown in various emergencies. The Oriental commerce
of the Dutch was further encroached upon (section 11) by the trading
companies formed later in France, Sweden, and Denmark, and proposed in
Prussia; [154] these were protected and fostered by their respective
governments. The commerce of the Dutch "would have been ruined if it
were not for their being exclusive owners of the spice trade--of which
only the Spaniards are able to deprive them, since we have in these
islands cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg." As all those nations
maintained forts, garrisons, and war-ships, the necessity of opposing
these armaments with like forces has imposed on the Dutch enormous
additional expenses. Viana says (section 12): "I know not what reason
there can be why that which is so beneficial to all the powers should
not, with even greater cause, be an advantage to España, which holds
her conquests in peaceable possession, and has valuable products
in her dominions; moreover, she has forts and ports which at little
cost can be rendered impregnable, and better opportunities than any
other nation for a very flourishing commerce. Yet she labors only to
enrich her enemies, abandoning to them the commerce which our people
are unwilling to carry on, and surrendering to them our treasures
and wealth, in exchange for the greater part of the commodities and
products which our own lands produce."]

13. If the Spaniards would form a company in the islands, similar
to the foreign companies, and according to the pious anxiety with
which the magnanimous heart of our beloved king and sovereign Don
Phelipe Fifth, of undying memory, was concerned in this matter,
all the nations who trade in India would have the same experience as
the Portuguese and Dutch. Our commerce would annihilate or [at least]
diminish that of all the India companies, who cannot find a market for
their goods if they do not trade these in our dominions--and this they
could not do if the Spanish company had large capital, and ships for
navigation and trade in España and the Americas. If we could fortify
the towns and garrison them, as has already been explained, the other
nations would find themselves under the necessity of spending much
more than they now do, in order to defend themselves against our
power, if war should break out. This increase of expenses on the
one hand, and diminution of their commerce on the other, are two
excellent principles, which promise many advantages to the Spanish
company--which, as it is not, like the others, compelled to incur
these expenses, will be able to sell its commodities at lower prices,
and the gains will be more certain.

14. In order to facilitate the establishment of this most beneficial
company, the royal protection of our sovereign is absolutely necessary,
and with it must be banished the contemptuous notion that the Spaniards
form of the commercial career; for that notion usually leads them to
keep their chests full of silver, for which they sell the products
of their family estates. As a rule, the Spaniards spend with great
economy what is necessary for their maintenance, especially those
in the little hamlets throughout the kingdom; and, as they enjoy
no commerce, they deprive themselves of the benefits arising from
commercial activities, with detriment to their families and to the
public welfare. On the other hand, they imagine that there is too
great a risk in the remittance of their silver by sea, because they
are so little (or not at all) acquainted with nautical science and
mercantile affairs; and, as timidity prevails in their minds over
ambition, they consider themselves fortunate to keep their riches
under their own eyes, without thinking of investing them. But they
would take hazards on their money, if they were touched by that eager
desire for gain which is inseparable from all commerce, and which is
stimulated by the lure of profits.

15. There are, of course, many persons whose ability enables them
to understand thoroughly the benefits of commerce; but they live
remote from the marine ports, they have not trustworthy acquaintances
to whom they can confide the management of their capital, and they
sorrowfully deprive themselves of the benefits which they would derive
from its employment, the result of which is that they lead idle lives,
or sometimes yield to an extravagance which is excessive and impairs
their fortunes. Even more melancholy than all that I have related
is the sight of the Spanish nobility, without any occupation, and,
as a rule, reared in extreme ignorance and idleness. This is the
source of many excesses, the beginning of ruin to the most robust
constitutions, a hindrance to the generation of children, and a
cause of the lessening of population which is continually growing
more worthy of consideration.

16. Let there be formed, then, an Oriental company, and let the nobles
of the kingdom contribute its funds; the profits [on these] will
awaken in them a liking for commerce, and they will become acquainted
with this most useful branch of knowledge. They will maintain their
[business] relations, they will have some occupation, and will not
use up their fortunes with vicious habits; their children will be
brought up with a liking for commerce, and the fathers will have the
satisfaction of employing some of their sons in appointments under
the same company. This is the most certain means for securing the
happiness of families and the prosperity of the entire monarchy; for,
if commerce and the naval service (which follows the other closely)
are promoted, there will be no vagabonds or idlers. Rather, idleness
will come to an end, and with it many vices, on account of the enormous
number of men whom a company with large capital needs to employ by land
and sea--not only for its business positions, but for manufactures and
navigation, in which persons from all spheres of life find an opening.

17. What a number of people must be employed by the English and Dutch
companies in the more than one hundred and fifty ships which each
company maintains for its commerce, and in the various colonies in
which they have established that commerce! And what advantages result
to these two powers from keeping so many people busy, maintaining
them at the company's expense, and freeing them from the idleness
in which they would [otherwise] live! If those countries had not so
great a commerce, vagabonds and idlers would abound in them; but this
class of people is not seen there. On the contrary, there is great
application to all the arts and sciences; for all have employment,
and all are useful--some in manufactures, others in the military or
the naval service, and others in commerce, etc.

18. The attainment of these fortunate advantages depends on whether
our beloved king and sovereign will assure to his vassals all his royal
protection for the promotion of the said company, following the example
of his glorious father, Don Phelipe Fifth, ever to be remembered; for
the money of the royal treasury is the main foundation for this great
and most useful enterprise. For it cannot be doubted that, animated
by the same spirit, there will be many contributors to the capital of
the said company--all the nobility of España, from the highest rank
down; the guilds of Madrid, which now form a body of considerable
importance; all the merchants of España, the two Americas, and these
islands; some foreigners; and many religious communities, who have set
aside the proceeds of their funds for pious contributions--convinced
of the benefits of this commerce, and of the prosperity which will
ensue to the Spanish nation; and regarding it as certain that (as
will be mentioned hereafter) our Spanish merchants, if assured of
their gains by way of these seas, and the method of supplying the
Americas, in great part, with the materials for clothing which they
need, without the burden of the royal imposts, will not long for the
illegal purchase of foreign commodities.

19. There are also other advantages, worthy of being known, which
render the above-mentioned project more feasible. One of these is
the abundance of timber for the construction of ships; at least
ten ships can be built every year in these islands; and, by taking
care of their many forests, even if a hundred ships were built now
there would be enough timber left to construct every year the ten
that I have mentioned. The Viscount del Puerto greatly praises (in
book 9, chapter 10, article 2 of his Reflecciones militares [155])
the project of a friend of his (whose name he conceals) for forming
a company in these islands; and among the products which it yields he
mentions the timber called tiga (it is not known here by this name),
extolling its strength, and setting forth the advantages of carrying
this wood to España as ballast for the ships.

20. This wood (of which, according to the said author, the strong
ships of Philipinas are built) is in my opinion the teca [i.e., teak],
which comes from the Coast; or that which is known here (and I am
inclined to think that this is meant) by the name of molave. This
abounds in all the islands, and is so compact that it petrifies in
the water, which I myself have seen; of it are made the ribs of
the ship's frame, the knees, and all the principal timbers that
strengthen the ship. The keels are made of another wood, equally
strong, which is called guijo; it never rots in the water, nor does
the boring worm, which is bred on the ships in the port of Cavite,
penetrate it. There are other woods as useful as the guijo, and among
them is the dongon, which is better. As a rule, the lower masts are
made from the mangachapui, which is another timber of especial value;
for, although it is somewhat heavy, it never splinters, and is very
elastic. The yards and topmasts are of palo maria; and for whatever
is made of boards the lavan, the banaba, and the tangili [156] are
also used, from which kinds of wood very long and broad planks are
obtained. There are pines here, and various other kinds of trees,
which can be put to the same use; and plantations could be made of
the teca tree (the wood of which lasts more than a hundred years in
the water), for there is more than enough land for this purpose in
the vicinity of Manila and Cavite. Likewise, sawmills could be built,
in order to save the expense of [hiring] sawyers; also dry-docks,
for careening the ships and preserving them under cover.

21. In Ilocos are manufactured the blankets which serve as sails
for our ships; and canvas can be made (as it has been) of excellent
quality and in enormous quantities, for there is no end to the cotton
which is and can be gathered, with the greatest facility, and of
the finest quality. Moreover, on the many tracts of land which the
sloth of the Indians leaves untilled hemp could be cultivated--which,
even if it should not yield well on the lands of one province, would
without doubt succeed on those of another; for there is nothing among
all the products of the earth which is not afforded by these islands,
by searching for the climate--whether hot, cool, or temperate--which
is suited to the needs of the crop. Flax would be produced with the
same ease as hemp, without any other cultivation than that which rice
receives on irrigated soil [en tubigan]; and the seed of both these
plants has been sown, and is yielding very well, in the province
of Cagayan.

22. There is much pitch, and cordage is so abundant that it can be
supplied to all the ships of España, with what is made here; and, in
order that it may be evident whether it is suited for this purpose,
I will explain in detail how on this may depend the question of saving
the expense of purchasing cordage in foreign kingdoms, by availing
ourselves of that produced in our own dominions. [The fiber used for]
cordage is both white and black; the former is known by the name
of abaca, which is obtained from the bark of a tree resembling the
plantain, the trunk of which is heckled like [the stems of] hemp. The
fiber is very harsh; tar scorches it, and for this reason no tar
is used in these ships; it is stronger than hemp, as experience
has shown. It is usually of service no longer than for one voyage;
the threads shrink much, and on this account all the cordage here
is heavier than that of Europa. On twisting it, it is apt to break,
and in order to avoid this it is cured by placing it for some time in
salt water, and drying it in the sunshine, then storing it until it is
needed; for if this precaution be not taken, and it becomes spattered
or moistened with fresh water, it will soon become rotten. With
some additional expense the cordage could be made finer and smaller,
without changing its quality; it would then be more easily handled,
and the manoeuvers of the ships would be more expeditious.

23. The [fiber for] black cordage (known as cabo negro) [157] is
obtained from a plant which they call gamù, very similar to the coco,
and it is a veil which covers the entire tree, from the top down;
it grows out between each pair of leaves [entre òja y òja] of the
gamù, like long hair, or tufts of hair. It is exceedingly harsh,
and for this reason it is used only for cables, of all sizes, and to
some extent for tackle and rigging; and there is nothing with which
to compare its strength. It lasts many years, but it is necessary
to keep it either under water, or uncovered, where the dew and the
rains bathe it; and in dry weather water is thrown over it, either
salt or fresh, for its better preservation; for if it stands in the
sun and wind, without these precautions, the threads break, and it
loses its extraordinary strength. It is also preserved by keeping
it in a shady place, where the wind strikes it but little. These two
kinds of cordage are exceedingly abundant in these islands.

24. There is another sort of cordage, [made] from the husks of the
coco, which is superior to the other two; for with the said fiber
the ships can be calked, and [even] after many years the bonote
(thus they call it) comes out as fresh, strong, and sound as on the
day when it was thrust between the planks. Of this species also there
is a great abundance.

25. The anchors can be cast here, by putting into operation the iron
mines of which mention has been made; and I can say the same of the
cannons, the balls, the grape-shot, the bombs, and the grenades. For, I
repeat, there is iron in these islands for supplying all the world, and
there are men enough to mine and manufacture it, if there be brought
from España some skilled directors (who are not found here). If it be
desired to work the copper, there are mines of this also, although I
cannot speak with the same certainty of these as of the iron mines; for
I have not come across any records to show whether the said metal has
been worked at any time, and what the product was. The same thing is
true in regard to the lead mines, but I have seen ores from Paracale,
which were smelted at Bacolor, by order of Don Simon de Anda; and I
do not doubt that, if we had skilled master-workmen in this and other
industries, many useful discoveries would be made through the agency
of the aforesaid company, whose funds would allow the expenses that
a private person is unable to incur.

26. To this concourse of advantages ought to be added the most
important one that our Indians are exceedingly ingenious in
the construction of ships. They do not understand arithmetic, or
proportions and measures, or the computation of the weights of the
various parts, or anything which requires knowledge; but if they have
masters who will furnish to them models of the works, they imitate
everything with the greatest accuracy, for they have exceedingly
keen eyesight, and indescribable facility in making whatever they
see. For this reason we have here excellent carpenters, calkers,
and the other artisans necessary for the construction of ships,
and in whatever number may be desired.

27. There is not an Indian in these islands who has not a remarkable
inclination for the sea; nor is there at present in all the world a
people more agile in manoeuvers on shipboard, or who learn so quickly
nautical terms and whatever a good mariner ought to know. Their
disposition is most humble in the presence of a Spaniard, and they
show him great respect; but they can teach many of the Spanish
mariners who sail in these seas. In the ships of España there are
sure to be some Indians from these islands, and investigation can be
made to ascertain what they are. The little that I understand about
them makes me think that these are a people most suited for the sea;
and that, if the ships are manned with crews one-third Spaniards and
the other two-thirds Indians, the best mariners of these islands can
be obtained, and many of them be employed in our warships. There is
hardly an Indian who has sailed the seas who does not understand the
mariner's compass, and therefore on this [Acapulco] trade-route there
are some very skilful and dexterous helmsmen. Their disposition is
cowardly, but, when placed on a ship, from which they cannot escape,
they fight with spirit and courage.

28. Let it be considered, then, whether these circumstances are
worthy of regard, and highly advantageous for the company of which I
am speaking--which likewise can save much money in the difference of
wages; and any one will reason that not one of the foreign companies
has had the opportunities which these islands possess for the
establishment of a company, since all these things which are easy
and of little expense for the Spaniards were almost insuperable
difficulties for the Dutch, the English, and the French--who
succeeded in overcoming them by dint of silver, of conquests, and of
fortifications; and by bringing from Europa supplies which we do not
have to bring, because they abound in these islands.

29. In order not to be prolix in relating other advantages which the
companies in general possess, as compared with the commerce of private
persons, I refer to those which are set forth by the distinguished
Don Miguel Zavala (in his celebrated memorial [158] to Phelipe V of
blessed memory), whose authority alone would be sufficient in order
that no means should be neglected for establishing the aforesaid
company in these islands; and I pass to other advantages which the
said author explains. But first I will point out what relates to the
fortunes in the Indias, which do not pass to the grandsons; this is
accounted for by the vicious way in which the creoles, as a rule,
are reared--the indolence and vices in which they are brought up,
and the luxury and prodigality to which they are accustomed from
childhood. If these fortunes, or the greater part of them, were
[invested] in the company, they would not be so easily wasted; and,
even if the sons should save nothing from the profits, they would
keep the principal which their fathers might bequeath to them in the
aforesaid company. Or, in case there were some persons so reckless
as to sell their shares, others would buy these, and the commerce
and its gains would always remain for the benefit of the Spaniards.

30. With the funds of a company, enterprises could be undertaken that
would be both extensive and easy. The province of Pampanga alone is
capable of producing more sugar than can be consumed in China (to which
the Sangleys carry it when it is cheap), in the coasts of Coromandel,
Malabar, and Vengala (where it is scarce, and is sold at a high price),
and in all the ports of India; having a market, all that is required
of this product will be supplied in abundance, especially if the said
company encourages the Indians to cultivate their lands. It would be
the same with the dyes; and with deer's hides, sinews, and tapa (or
dried meat) which all come from the same province, and are sold to the
Chinese who come here to trade. By establishing a mart in the capital
[of Pampanga], on the company's account, it will gather in all the
said products, in exchange for cloth, especially if credit be given
to some persons until the time of the harvest; and the gains will be
enormous, since profits will be made on the sale of the cloth, on the
purchase of the products, and on the export of these to other colonies.

31. The same method ought to be observed in the other provinces
for promoting the cultivation of the lands and the abundance of so
highly valuable products as they yield; by this means there would
be obtained in Pangasinan all the gold which the infidels bring
down from the mountains there, which exceeds three hundred thousand
pesos each year, and with that which is brought from other provinces
reaches five hundred thousand pesos. This commodity is very useful
in all the commerce of India, and can also be carried to Europa, as
is done by the English and Dutch, to whom regularly comes the gold
from Philipinas; its current price is at the rate of sixteen pesos
for the tae of 22-carat metal (each tae has the weight of ten reals),
and in this ratio is purchased that of 21, 20, 19, and 18 carats.

32. In the provinces of Ilocos and Cagayan there might be excellent
factories, to work up the great amount of fine cotton which they
produce; and, by bringing skilled workmen from the Coast, the figured
cottons which are brought thence could be made [here]. In all the
Visayan Islands, in the province of Camarines, and in that of Albay,
are made the choicest and finest webs, which they call nipis; and
others, of commoner quality, which they call guinaras, and use for
shirts. In Cagayan and Ilocos are woven very fine handkerchiefs,
towels, coverlets, table-linen (which is of as good quality as that
made in Flandes), terlingas, etc.; and if only these provinces are
stimulated, and factories established with good master-workmen,
the company can easily manufacture at least all the cloth which the
Indians consume. As these number a million of souls, if we allow to
each one an average consumption of no more than one peso, this would
amount to a million of pesos; and the greater part of this amount,
which now the Chinese, the Dutch, and the English carry away, would
remain in the islands, and would increase the profits of the Spaniards
and the losses of the said foreigners.

33. The cacao is very abundant and cheap, and if it could find a market
in other colonies and kingdoms the crop of it would be still greater,
because the Indians would devote themselves to its cultivation. [159]
Entire groves of the coffee-tree could be planted, since it yields
fruit everywhere; it is milder than that of Mage [i.e., Mocha?] and
its fruit is gathered in the year when it is [first] planted, on
account of the richness of the soil. Rice and wheat, if the natives
applied themselves [to cultivating these], as they would do if they
had a market for them, would be sold at good prices throughout China
(where these grains are scarce), in Cochinchina, in Siam, in Camboja,
in Pegu, and sometimes in the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. Wax--of
which these mountains are full, and which is sold by the infidel
Indians who inhabit them--has a great consumption here, and much of it
is shipped to Nueva España; and if it were bartered for cloth, as was
said above, it could be procured in greater quantity. Tobacco, oil,
and sulphur are very abundant. Horses are valued in the said coasts,
and, although there are many of them in these islands, there would be
more if the ranchmen had a better sale for them; for at times they
are accustomed to kill the horses, in order to dry their flesh and
sell it. Carabaos and deer, whose flesh is likewise dried, yield some
pesos. In fine, the following are recognized articles of merchandise
in different places in China, Cochinchina, Camboja, and Siam: sugar,
rice, cotton; indigo, dyes, sibucao (a sort of Brasil-wood), deer's
sinews, pepper, black tortoise-shell (called carey), nacre shells (or
mother-of-pearl), [160] birds'-nests, ebony; tapa (or dried meat),
balate and camaron (both which are shellfish), and bonga; cables
of cabo negro--all of which commodities these islands produce. [To
these must be added] cochineal from Nueva España, fine cloths and
camlets from España; lead (which also is produced by these islands,
although it is not mined), and other articles, as stated above,
of which better information will be given by practical merchants.

34. For Vengala, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, Persia, Zurrate,
and other parts of India, are found useful indigo, sugar, sibucao,
sulphur, siguey, birds'-nests, cotton, rice, gold, and horses;
and, in one word, all that has been said in the preceding chapter
(speaking of the private commerce which could be carried on via the
Cape of Good Hope) ought to be understood, with greater reason,
of the commerce which can be carried on by the company of which
this chapter treats. For this reason I omit what I said there of the
cinnamon and other products which the company could develop, with its
funds and systematic arrangements, better than an individual could;
for the latter may die, and the former continues perpetually to carry
on the enterprises of manufactures, mining operations, the cultivation
and promotion of crops, and the exportation of all these to foreign
kingdoms and colonies. For all will be successful in these islands with
the Indians, who, if well paid, will do what they are ordered to. [161]

35. I have already mentioned the indescribable readiness with which
our Indians learn perfectly whatever they see, even without the
necessity of a master to instruct them. There are some who write well,
without knowing how to read, as they have had no teacher; for by their
natural inclination they devote themselves to imitation of the letters,
and easily succeed in doing so, without being able to read what they
write. This is one proof of their readiness, above mentioned, but they
have still more of it in embroidery. It is a marvelous thing to see,
that there is hardly an Indian who cannot embroider, and that they
learn this art without any teacher save their own attention and their
extraordinary patience. The hands of the Indian women are the most
delicate, for every kind of sewing and needlework; and the company,
by availing itself of this skill of our Indian men and women, could
employ an innumerable number of people in embroidery, needlework,
and the making of hose--they make them of fine quality, in Zebu of
cotton, and in La Laguna of silk--and obtain much profit through
these industries, in finding a market for them.

36. Near Paracali in the province of Camarines there is abundance
of rock crystal, very transparent and choice. In the province of
Cagayan are some stones that are very singular and rare; one of these
is emerald-green veined with gold or golden-brown, and when well
polished it looks like a mirror, or like the finest jasper. Another
is a stone as white as marble, similar to that which abounds in the
mountains of San Matheo near Manila (from which has been made the
paved floor of the Society's church in this city); and who knows what
Nature is keeping concealed, for our enlightenment, in the provinces
and mountains of these islands? Assiduity, good taste, and the desire
for knowledge would discover many things if there were Spaniards here
who would devote themselves to the investigation and examination of
the many rarities in the plan of Nature.

37. If there were any chemist and herbalist here, this likewise would
be an immense aid for making further discoveries and experimenting
with many trees, roots, herbs, and medicinal stones. For instance,
the narra; [162] in cups made from the wood of this tree water
becomes, in a very short time, of a most beautiful blue color,
and people say that it is useful for curing obstructions; the wood
called manunga, which is extolled for its remarkable virtues; the
seeds of the catbalonga, or St. Ignatius's kernels, which are already
known and esteemed in Europa; the shell in which the cocoanut grows,
in which water soon becomes exceedingly bitter; bezoar stones; and
innumerable other articles from which homely remedies are made here,
among the Spaniards as well as among the Indians. The latter make
much use of the remedies produced in the islands, and know some,
both herbs and woods, which cure the most hideous and bloody wound
in twenty-four hours. The rhubarb [163] may be smelled [sehuele]
in many woodlands, and no one is acquainted with it; the herb of
Calamba is especially good for preventing, by [the application of]
its juice, the bad results of a blow or fall. More than all, in
the mountains of Mindoro there is a tree called calinga, the bark
of which has a delicious odor, which smells like cinnamon, cloves,
and pepper all combined; I made a small quantity of chocolate, using
the said bark powdered instead of cinnamon, and it was very pleasing
to the taste. In the ship "Santissima Trinidad," which the English
captured, I was sending to Madrid some lozenges and many pieces of
the said bark, which is a delicious flavor for seasoning ragouts;
and I have used it in my household. Señor Anda also sent to Madrid
the aforesaid bark, and, I think, chocolate made with it powdered. So
great is the abundance of these trees that there are mountains,
many leguas in extent, which produce them.

38. If the foreigners had these trees, they would have already
introduced in the world the use of this commodity, with enormous
profits; and we, if we possessed industry, and zeal for the
interests of the nation, would have been able with this tree, to
lessen the consumption of the cinnamon and cloves of the Dutch. Let
these points be considered, and the advantages will be recognized
which can assuredly be expected by the company which may be formed
in these islands--regarding it as certain that nothing will make
progress, except by this means; rather, this colony will in a little
while go wretchedly to destruction, without the least hope for its
reëstablishment.

39. By way of conclusion to this chapter, I will note as the last (and
an important) advantage of the aforesaid company the conspicuously
fair treatment and friendly reception which the Spaniards have
experienced, and may expect, throughout India. Our silver [money]
is in good repute in all regions, and those peoples, especially the
Chinese and the princes of India, show the greatest eagerness and
make great efforts to obtain it, as being the most valuable for them;
and, although the Dutch, English, French and other powers trade in
this part of the world with our pesos, the Spanish ships are always
better received in those ports, because they carry more silver and
more products of these islands, which are held in very evident esteem.

40. Since I have been in Manila, I have seen only the traders from
Canton and Emui in China visit this port, [164] except the ship
"Guadalupe," which went to the [Malabar?] Coast; and through its
captain and officers I have heard of the friendly reception which
they met in all the ports of India. But in other days the commerce
of this colony was more extensive. In China it was established in the
year 1598, and has been maintained without interruption; the king of
Camboja asked this government for aid, and it was sent to him in the
year 1594, leaving commerce with that country established. In the
same year the king of Siam sent an embassy to open commerce with
these islands, and in 1599 the said commerce was actually begun,
by vessels which went from these islands, and which came from Siam,
with which country the Spaniards have maintained the most friendly
relations. This was recently experienced in the case of the ship which
was built there in the year 53, by order of our governor the Marques
de Ovando, who sent thither letters for the said king of Siam; and
the latter, in virtue of these, furnished a sufficient sum of money,
and gave all the other assistance which they asked from him. In the
year 718, the same king of Siam granted a piece of land, in order
that the Spaniards might establish a trading-post there.

41. In the year 1596, commerce with these islands was established in
Cochinchina, and the Spaniards declined to establish a trading-post
[on the land] which this king afterward bestowed upon them. In Tunquin
also the Spaniards undertook their commerce; and in Zurrate, Vengala,
and other kingdoms of India, both Moorish and heathen, they have been
equally well received. Although, on account of the reverses of this
commonwealth and the lack of courage in its merchants, the Spaniards
have given up this commerce for several years past, it cannot be
doubted that the aforesaid company has the opportunity to establish
itself advantageously, furnishing a market for the products of these
islands, bringing hither those of the said kingdoms, and establishing
(if that shall be expedient) some trading-posts--with which their
purchases will be at more reasonable prices, and their gains in España
and Nueva España more assured.

42. Here at the same time another advantage presents itself. The
commerce which now is carried on with Acapulco by private persons
suffers many losses, occasioned by the unsuccessful fairs there. These
losses originate in the necessity of selling the goods in order to
send back [to Manila] the money that they produce; for even if the
merchants lose in the sale something on the principal which they
shipped, it is necessary to sell their goods in order to repay what
they obtained from the obras pias for their investments. If the goods
are left in Nueva España, in order to take advantage of an opportunity
for better sale, they cannot meet the cost of the expenses, and here
find themselves tormented by their creditors. The company cannot be
placed in such straits, but will always sell their wares to advantage
and profit; for when in Acapulco they do not obtain good returns on
the merchandise, they can transfer it to the storehouse which they will
have to establish in Mexico. This expedient alone will be sufficient to
induce the Mexicans to make strenuous endeavors to be preferred in the
sale at the said port, because they will not deceive the said company
as they now do private persons, acting aggressively against them,
in order to fix arbitrarily the prices of their goods--constrained
as our merchants are to sell them, on account of the limitation of
the time [of the fair], since the galleons ought to sail from the
said port by the twenty-fifth of March.

43. I will conclude this chapter with the authority of the celebrated
Don Geronimo Ustariz, [165] who, although he disapproves the commerce
[managed] by companies in España and the Americas, considers it
expedient in these islands; and indeed, when his arguments against
the establishment of the said companies are examined, it will be seen
that they do not apply to this commerce--where, on the contrary,
it will be seen that not even the least progress can be secured,
unless the company of which I am speaking be formed.

44. The same author, speaking of the commerce in spices, is inclined
to think that it ought to be carried on directly by the Spaniards,
by the same route which other nations adopt for it, arranging the
purchases in these islands in order to supply the Americas and all
España by the ports of Acapulco, Panama, and Portovelo. This exhibits
the utility of what I have herein set forth, for it is confirmed by
the three most earnest and distinguished Spaniards of this century,
to wit, the Visconde del Puerto, Don Miguel de Zabala, and Don Geronimo
Ustariz. But I am surprised that this last-named writer, who treats the
subject of commerce so extensively and so acutely, with the greatest
erudition and knowledge of whatever there is to be known of foreign
nations and countries, should be ignorant that these islands produce in
abundance cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg, which, without the necessity
of buying it from the Dutch, we can use for our benefit, in order to
supply all our own dominions. This is a proof that the Spaniards of
Philipinas do not apply themselves to becoming acquainted with this
country, in order to make known its products; and that they would not
be [thus] ignorant if the alcaldes-mayor would make reports--one to
their successors, and another to the government--of the condition of
each province, as I advised his Majesty in the past year of 1760.




Chapter Fifth: Of the extension which the commerce of the aforesaid
company can enjoy

1-3. [Viana makes remonstrance against "the limitations
and restrictions with which the commerce of the Spaniards is
established." These only enable foreigners to compete with them to
greater advantage, and increase the gains of foreign traders. He
adduces the examples of other nations in support of his position
that commerce ought to be extended and freed from restrictions, as
far as possible; and complains that Spaniards only are forbidden to
trade with each other, in the colonies of that monarchy. (Section
3.) "The argument for this is apparently founded on the exportation
of silver, and on the opposition made by the merchants of Cadiz,
who are misled by foreigners, and that of the officials at Acapulco,
who find their advantage in the said limitation. Those merchants are
always inveighing against the injuries that result to their trade,
and the check to our [Spanish] manufactures, with which arguments
they have always tried to bring about the ruin of this [Philippine]
commerce; but I will see if I cannot overthrow these arguments."]

4. All the silver that is coined in the dominions of España comes to a
halt in foreign kingdoms, among our greatest enemies. The treasures of
the Indias pass through the aqueduct of Cadiz, without leaving even a
trace on the conduits of the Spanish merchants, as can be demonstrated
by [comparing] the riches that the Indias have produced, and the
poverty of the Spaniards. Upon this point I refer to what Don Miguel
de Zavala says in his memorial; and that which the celebrated Macanaz
has written on the same subject ought to be printed on plates of gold,
or, better, in the hearts of our sovereigns and their ministers of
state, in order to cure the wounds of their vassals with the remedies
which he proposes. For if all the silver is carried away from the
dominions of España, what more will she have, whether it go by way
of Acapulco or by way of Cadiz? I assert that in Cadiz the commerce
of the foreigners is greater than that of the Spaniards: the latter
(with the exception of some strong business houses, which have been
built up in this century) support themselves by being figureheads [166]
for the former, who cannot possess the commerce in their own behalf or
in their own persons. This is disclosed by the "Universal dictionary
of commerce," in praising the good Catholic Spaniards in this illicit
mode of carrying on business--which is the same as regarding them as
being, even if not traitors, at least disobedient to their king. Here
is seen the interested motive for [the claim] that the silver should
not be exported by way of Acapulco, but that all should go to Cadiz,
into the power of the foreigners--who are the ones who, in reality
and with hidden hand, have always made opposition to this commerce
of Manila.

5. Those who carry away the silver from Acapulco are all Spaniards,
and the greater part of it accumulates in the empire of China, which
has not waged war against us, nor will she do so, with the gains that
we allow her; but those who carry away the silver which reaches Cadiz
are the foreigners, and it is going to remain with the powers who
are harassing and ruining us with our own wealth. Let these points of
difference be compared, and decide whether it is not a weak argument,
that of the export [of silver from Nueva España], against which so
much clamor has been made by the commerce of Cadiz--or, to speak more
correctly, the convenience of the foreigners--and I believe that it
will be outweighed, not only by the loss of the royal duties which are
yielded to the royal treasury by the silver which goes to Cadiz, but by
the injury that is caused to us by the profits which we furnish to the
foreigners. Moreover, the silver carried away from Acapulco can yield
the same [amount in] duties, in order to avoid the aforesaid loss,
if it be considered of much importance--which it is not; for even
if two millions of pesos were carried away each year, and the royal
treasury deprived of the duties thereon (for which privation there is
no necessity), that is not a sum which merits the great opposition,
if not bitter hatred, of the commerce of Cadiz for this poor commerce
[of Manila].

6. The other argument, that of the retardment which our manufactures
of España would suffer [in competition] with those of China, is as
easily overthrown. It is certain that our factories cannot furnish
all the goods which are consumed in our dominions, and that on this
account the silks, fabrics, hose, ribbons, etc., of other powers
are allowed entrance therein; and what more need is there, in the
case of these wares than of those of China, for declaiming against
the injury which the latter, but not the former, occasion? There
is no further difference except that the Spaniards trade with one
class of the goods, and the foreigners with the other. Against the
foreigners there is no one to raise objections, as some of them do
against our own people; and as in these clamors there is no mention
of the name of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, Irishmen,
etc., but [only] of the commerce of Cadiz and of its Spanish traders,
the motive for this opposition is better hidden, the injury which
they exaggerate is more readily believed, the minds of people are
preoccupied with impressions of this sort; and the commerce of Manila,
which has neither capital nor fame nor authority, and not so much
influence as that of Cadiz, is the one which always suffers, which
is permitted [only] with restrictions, and which cannot repair the
damages experienced by the merchants of Cadiz without knowing them.

7. Before this, I had already mentioned the great amount of silk,
both raw and woven, which foreigners bring from China, and that with
this they supply their own manufactures, and [likewise] obtain money
from us by selling in España the fabrics from Canton as if they
came from Paris, Londres, Amsterdam, etc. Is this, or is it not,
detrimental to our manufactures? and, if it is, why is not an outcry
made against it by the merchants of Cadiz? They will say that it is
impossible to prohibit this commerce, while our own manufactures are
in so backward a condition; but why will this argument not avail the
Spanish merchants of Manila? They will say also that the foreigners
introduce into España not fabrics from China, but those of their own
manufacture; that, whether it be from one country or from another,
the injury to our manufactures is the same. But what cannot be denied
is, that the foreigners who obtain so great an amount of silk from
China trade it in our dominions, and that we cannot do the same in
order to deprive them of those enormous gains. If, then, the company
of Spaniards were formed in these islands, they could convey from
China a great deal of raw silk for our factories, and many special
fabrics which would be of as good quality as those of Europa; they
could furnish them more cheaply than the foreigners do; and, above
all, the profits would remain among the Spaniards. Our commerce would
steadily flourish; we would have more ships, to make our dominions
safe; the marine service would be increased; and necessarily there
would be diminution in the commerce of the foreigners, for which our
deluded Spaniards are pleading.

8. The royal duties will be the same, if the silk and fabrics of China
are carried by our ships of the company, as if they were carried by
the foreigners; and even if the kindness of our sovereign makes some
reduction [in the duties], in order to favor the said company and
subvert those that are hostile to it, other advantages, of greater
importance than the aforesaid duties, will result to the crown, in
the certain knowledge that, in the present state of things, that is
prohibited to the Spaniards which is allowed to foreigners--that is,
the introduction of goods from China which are difficult to recognize
in España, on account of the facility with which European fabrics
are imitated in Canton.

9. By allowing to the aforesaid company the importation of Chinese
goods into España, while the prohibition to foreigners remains in
force, the trading-fleets and galleons will be supplied; and these
commodities will be purchased less from foreigners, in order that
our own manufactures and commerce may gain some growth.

10. All the silk which our company will put on the market will
diminish the amount sold by the foreigners; and if they have not a
market for this commodity they will take on smaller cargoes of it
in China, Cochinchina, Canton, Tonquin, Tripara, Bengala, and Achem,
and the said company will find it easier to purchase the silk. Before
the nations of Europe carried away the silk from Canton, it could
be bought at very low prices; but since they began to carry on this
commerce--which was in the year 1685, in which the emperor of China
opened his ports to all nations--up to the present time, the prices
have risen more than three hundred per cent, as some merchants of
this city have informed me.

11. In the six years that I have spent in Manila, the [price of]
silk has risen every time; and because so much was being sent out of
the country [of China], the emperor forbade, under the most rigorous
penalties, the exportation of this product--of which an enormous amount
is consumed in his empire, where it was already becoming scarce in
the year 759--that it might be used by his vassals, whom he regards
with the most extraordinary affection.

12. Finally, when the merchants of Cadiz become shareholders in
the said company there will be no more talk of the export of silver
by way of Acapulco, or of the injury to our manufactures from the
fabrics of China; or the only ones who will cry out against it will
be the foreigners connected with the said commerce [of Cadiz], when
their names are made known, for they will not [then] have Spaniards
to talk, as the saying is, "through a goose's mouth." If it shall
be considered expedient (as it seems to me it is) that the aforesaid
company may ship freely, and without any restriction, such wares as it
shall think best to the kingdom of Nueva España, the royal duties can
be so adjusted that the royal treasury will not suffer a great loss,
under the certainty that the goods of the said commercial company will
all be duly registered, as also the silver which they bring in return;
for its directors will possess no authority for anything except what is
according to the rules in the like method of commerce. This legality
in the declarations [of goods shipped] will result in great benefit
to the aforesaid royal duties, even though these be more moderate than
the duties which are exacted from private persons whose greed for gain
urges them to convey, and to bring [here], many contraband articles.

13. For greater security on this point, it could be so regulated
that there would not be the slightest uncertainty, by causing the
agents or directors whom it will be necessary to have in this city,
to write out the invoices of what they ship, according to the entries
in their cash-books, and the same with the silver and the goods that
are brought back in return--information of all this being sent from
here to the officials at Acapulco, and reciprocally from that port
to the officials at this capital, in order that on each side any
possible infraction of the law may be known, and those engaged in
the commerce be restrained from committing such. This exhibition of
invoices and the returns in silver can be compared with the statements
which the directors of the company will furnish, in order to ascertain
whether the former agree with those which will be contained in the said
statements. I take for granted that in the presentation, examination,
and approval of these accounts there will be the supervision of some
person appointed for that purpose by our sovereign--whose royal and
benevolent disposition will, it is to be believed, place some capital
in the company that I have mentioned, as a foundation for this great
work; and in this case it is hardly possible that the least crevice
will be found by which the royal duties might suffer loss.

14. The nobility of España, from the highest rank down; the guilds
of Madrid, who now form a commercial body of much importance; all
the merchants of España, the kingdom of Mexico, Peru, and these
islands; some foreigners; and many religious communities which have
set aside the produce of their funds for pious purposes--all these
will, without doubt, become shareholders in the aforesaid company,
if they are convinced of the benefit of this commerce, and of the
prosperity which will ensue to the Spanish nation; and when the
said merchants have their gains by means of these seas assured, and
a means of supplying the kingdom of Mexico with a great part of the
goods which its people need, without the burden of the royal duties,
it is certain that they will not desire to purchase foreign goods,
except at such advantage as will prove detrimental to the foreigners.

15. It is also evident that the aforesaid company will be able to
furnish its commodities at lower prices than the foreign companies
do; for it does not have to incur so many expenses in maintaining
troops, fortresses, etc., as do the Dutch, English, and French; nor
will the costs of the navigation be so great, because the voyage
is shorter. Moreover, the purchases will be [made] in China, at
the same prices as those of the said foreigners; and consequently,
the company transporting its merchandise to España, and being able
to furnish goods at more reasonable prices than the foreigners do,
for these reasons the profits will be greater and the losses of the
foreigners more certain. By carrying the goods from these islands
to Nueva España, the company will hinder the illicit commerce of the
said foreigners, who in sailing from India to Europa, and from Europa
to their colonies in America, must incur more expense than the said
Spaniards, and will not be able to furnish commodities at the same
prices as the latter can.

16. The English who come to trade in China carry these goods to the
ports of Inglaterra, pay there the duties on them, and afterward
ship them to various regions--among these to Jamayca, from which
island they carry on a very extensive illicit commerce with the
Windward Islands; with Nueva España, through Honduras, and by way
of the coasts of Campeche and Vera Cruz; and with Peru, through
the colony of Sacramento, and various other places. The number of
laden vessels which enter Jamaica every year exceeds five hundred;
and by this can be estimated the value of the goods which are [thus]
disposed of (for all of these are carried into our dominions), and
the great amount of silver which they carry away from us, thus causing
loss to the royal duties of his Majesty--which, in proportion to the
said goods and the money which they produce, would be very large.

17. Sabary, whom I have cited, estimates at eight millions of pesos
the illicit commerce which the English carry on, from Jamayca alone,
with the Spaniards of America; and he states, to the discredit of
our nation, that all the ministers and officials, from the highest
to the lowest, proceed by agreement to defraud the royal duties, and
to become rich at the cost of what they seize from the royal revenues.

18. Probably no less is the amount of the fraudulent commerce
carried on by the Dutch from Curazao; and much greater is that
which is conducted by the two nations (and even by the French) in
Puerto Rico, Cartagena, Buenos Ayres, Campeche, Honduras, Portovelo,
Caracas, Guayaquil, and the Canarias Islands, and the other ports of
the Windward Islands and the two Americas--as also is made known by
the same author whom I have already cited, besides what we all know.

19. The new and very extensive territory which the aforesaid English
now possess in North America, and on the Mexican Gulf as far as
the Misisipi, renders this illicit commerce much easier for them
by means of that coast, especially by way of the new Santender,
[167] which has a good harbor for vessels of moderate size, and many
rivers; it is not far distant by land from Cretaro [i.e., Queretaro]
and other rich cities of Nueva España, and by sea it is not far from
Vera Cruz. With these great opportunities, the illicit commerce can
be pushed to the utmost; for the ambition and covetousness of the
trader despises no means which may bring him profit.

20. The commodities which the English illegally introduce [into our
colonies] must necessarily be cheaper than those which go in our
trading-fleets by way of Vera Cruz, for the latter pay many duties,
and the former none; and the very English who sell in Cadiz to the
Spaniards, paying their duties, sell the same commodities in Nueva
España at a lower price than in Cadiz. Therefore, if some efficacious
remedy be not applied to these illicit importations, I think that
our commerce will be ruined; that our trading-fleets will experience
great losses; that the royal duties will be diminished; and that in
Nueva España the illicit commerce will reach an even greater extent
than in Perù. But it also seems to me that if the commerce from these
islands to Acapulco is free to our company the aforesaid losses can
be in great part averted, for the following reasons.

21. When the foreigners (and especially the English) obtain so much
silk, both raw and woven, from China we must believe that they find
this commerce profitable, and that the said commodity is very cheap
in the said empire, compared with the prices of silks in Europa. The
profit is more obvious in the woven goods, because the infinite number
of people who inhabit China, and the abundance of workmen in every kind
of occupation, cause their manufactures to be exceedingly cheap--as
all of us who live in this part of the world know by experience, who
every year send to Canton commissions for many articles, because they
cost us less than to make the purchases in this city. For instance: The
Chinese and the Spaniards carry silver from here to Canton, where it
is worth three per cent more; and nevertheless a snuff-box, a salver,
and other small articles of silver cost less there than when made here
to order--which shows the great saving of [cost in the] manufacture
which results from the great abundance of workmen, as I have said.

22. This advantage which the English have through the commerce of
Canton--to which port usually come every year thirteen or fourteen
ships--can also be enjoyed by our company; and, buying at the same
prices [as the English]; it can sell its goods at lower prices in
Nueva España, even after paying the royal duties. For the English
are obliged to make longer and more costly voyages, as is that from
Canton to Inglaterra, and from there to España and Nueva España; while
the Spaniards will sail from here to Acapulco. The former pay royal
duties in Inglaterra, and the latter will pay these in Acapulco,
saving the expenses of the second voyage which the English make,
to their colonies in America. Finally, the Spaniards are not obliged
to maintain, at so great expense as do the English, fortified posts
and many troops, which are supported by their profits; for these
reasons, the latter will not be able to sell their goods at the same
price as that of the Spanish company. Consequently, they will not
make illicit importations [into the Spanish colonies] of silks and
[woolen] fabrics; and even those of their linen goads (which are most
to be dreaded) can be diminished with [our importations of] the light
linen goods of China [liencesillo] (which are used in Nueva España),
with "elephants" and other goods from the coast, and, in due time,
with the cotton cloths which will be woven in these islands. Here
there is abundance of cotton, and of people for its cultivation and
manufacture--especially if some masters in this art come from España,
or, in case that fail, from the Coromandel or the Malabar coast;
and if among the Indians be introduced the spinning-wheels which are
already in use in the manufactures of España.

23. From all these arguments it will be possible to conclude whether
they are as well adapted to free commerce [of these islands] with the
kingdom of Peru, and to that which the two Americas can mutually and
reciprocally conduct between each other, in order that all the vassals
may have a share in the extension of the commerce which hitherto has
been prohibited to them; that the products of all the provinces may
be increased, by the market which will be provided for them; that
the Southern [i.e., Pacific] coasts of the said Americas may have
an abundance of vessels; that they may mutually aid and defend each
other from enemies; that by this means all our dominions remote from
España may be more securely preserved; that our silver may have wide
circulation among the Spaniards, who, occupied in this lawful traffic,
will not expose their money to the risks of the illicit commerce;
that the commerce of the foreigners may be diminished, without the
least loss to the royal exchequer in the duties from them; and, in
fine, that with the gains [from this commerce], and with the decreased
exportation of silver to the foreign kingdoms of Europa, the prosperity
of our monarchy may begin, and it may come to be the most worthy of
respect in all the world, with the extension of its commerce--which
is the sole and only means of attaining success; for no other means
has been found more effectual, by either ancient or modern geniuses.




Chapter Sixth: Of the difficulties which the aforesaid company will
encounter, in order to establish and continue its commerce; and of
the method for preventing these.

1. The difficulties and inconveniences which the celebrated Don Miguel
de Zabala mentions, and the manner in which he entirely removes them,
ought to be borne in mind in this chapter (like all the rest that
that great man wrote), in regard to the establishment of our commerce
through companies, in order that by the said work, and by what I have
set forth, even the dullest person may be convinced of the usefulness
of the Spanish company in these islands. Notwithstanding that the
principal difficulty, and the only one to be feared, is the efforts
of the foreign powers, I will copy exactly the remarks of the said
author, for perhaps not all those who see this document will have
[opportunity to see] them; and I cannot dispel these fears with
arguments more weighty, or persuasion more effective.

2-18. [Zabala admits the danger that other powers, angered at the
loss of their gains through the success of a Spanish company, would
endeavor to destroy it; but he regrets the timidity of the Spanish
merchants, who allow themselves to remain at the mercy and dictation of
foreigners. The Spaniards would readily take measures to end this, if
entire secrecy were possible, but they fear failure if their intentions
are known by the foreigners. They should remember that not only are
the Spanish colonies in the Indias strictly forbidden to trade in
any way with the other powers, but that the latter themselves had
consented to these arrangements, which España had a right to make
for her own colonies. Those powers will not seek by force the ruin
of Spanish commerce, as that would be too costly an enterprise, but
will endeavor to gain this end by craft and intrigue. If a Spanish
commercial company were formed, its larger capital and more extensive
business would enable it to withstand losses which would ruin private
persons. All of these considerations should relieve the fears which
check the free and wide operation of Spanish commerce and thus keep
it within the clutches of foreign traders. Zabala urges the formation
of Spanish companies for commerce, on which must depend the security
of gains therein and the prosperity of España.]

19. It is hardly possible that the nations of Europa will unite
to hinder the company of these islands. The Dutch will not fail to
appear with their pretended right of authority to prohibit to us the
navigation by way of Cape Good Hope; but with the arguments which are
presented in chapter 2, part ii [of this memorial], and those which our
wise ministers of state can bring forward in favor of our well-known
right in justice, the said Dutch will find themselves obliged to admit
it, or they will fear the injury which we can inflict upon them by
hindering their commerce in China, Japon, and other regions which
are included in the arbitrary division and imaginary limit made by
Pope Alexander Sixth.

20. On the other hand, likewise, the Dutch recognize and fear
the superiority of the English, who are doing them much damage
in India--as recently they experienced, in the past year of 760,
in their establishments in Vengala, and even in those of the island
of Ceylan, to judge by some shrewd suspicions that the English were
encouraging the king of the said island in his revolt against the
Dutch. If the Spaniards establish their company, the British forces
will be further diverted, in case war should break out, by those
of España and Francia; the Dutch will then consider themselves more
secure, and will expect some aid in case they guide those nations to
appropriate some [English] establishments; for the aforesaid powers
will not, for their own advantage, consent that the English attain
further superiority by unjust means.

21. The French also have a like interest in the formation of the
Spanish company, and they will promote it, in order to have its aid,
which may be to them very important; for if they had had it in the
late war they would not have lost all their establishments in India;
nor would we have lost the fortified posts of Manila and Cavite,
if we had had the said company.

22. The lack of a port on the coast of Africa as a landing-place for
our ships is another of the difficulties which our navigation by way
of Cape Good Hope may encounter; but our friendly relations with the
court of Francia will open to us, without doubt, free entrance to the
port of Mauritius. With a knowledge, too, of the ports on the said
coast of Africa, we can establish ourselves where we think it best
to, as the Dutch have done; or we can find some island, like that of
Santa Elena, [168] which the English occupy, or those of San Matheo
and Acension, which serve the Portuguese for a way-station.

23. The last difficulty may be the greatest of all, and it consists
in the probable opposition of the ministers and officials of his
Majesty to the ministers and officials of the company. For I assume,
in the pursuance of my plan, that there will be here ships of war,
a suitable force for the safety of these towns, a governor and
captain-general, a royal Audiencia, royal officials, etc.; and that
the company will have likewise its own ships, the construction of
them, cloth manufactures in the provinces, the working of mines, the
cultivation of cinnamon, and other enterprises, which without the aid
of the government are difficult, but with it very easy. The aforesaid
opposition to those of the company, and the unpleasant relations which
follow (or are very probable) between the directors and the government,
may be a very great impediment to all the said activities. But this,
it seems to me, can be corrected by making suitable regulations, and
his Majesty issuing very strict orders for their punctual observance,
with heavy penalties against the transgressors; also by the company
having so many protectors in the court as its shareholders, especially
if the shares be taken by the highest nobility, as an example to the
rest. These will be so many more public prosecutors, who will raise
an outcry against those who, in whatever way, oppose the interests
of the company; and who will demand punishment for him who deserves
it, in order that this may serve as a warning to others--under the
well-founded assumption that the growth of the aforesaid company can
interest no one so much as it does our sovereign, in order that the
crown and the nation may be maintained with dignity and splendor, and
gain credit by our commerce, and by the riches which it will draw to
us if that commerce be undertaken and continued with the ardor which
is demanded by love for our country.

24. I do not dwell so much as I might on this last difficulty, because
it seems to me that what I have said is alone sufficient for taking
the necessary precautions. As little will I take time to enumerate
the advantages which would result to his Majesty from committing to
the aforesaid company the government, management, and social order of
these islands, with the obligation to maintain them with sufficient
forces--for this purpose, [the crown] making over to it the tributes
and the royal duties, and the company furnishing some amount to the
royal revenues in acknowledgment of the [royal] authority, during
the time while this sort of treaty or contract should last; on this
subject, I could divulge something, if I did not realize the great
difficulties therein.

25. Besides this, I consider that if his Majesty place these towns and
islands under the plan that I have proposed, they can bring together
their considerable military forces for the furtherance of the said
company, and for such assistance as it may find necessary--so that
the king may increase his royal revenues and the company save much
expense, which will redound in material gains to its commerce, and
to obvious damage to that of the foreigners.

26. By granting to the company the privilege of proposing [the names
of] persons whom it considers trustworthy, to serve in the office of
alcalde-mayor for the provinces where it will have its manufactures,
cultivation of crops, or operation of mines, all possible advancement
will be rendered easy, and the royal exchequer will preserve the
royal revenues, by means of the said persons, for whom security will
be given by the said company or its directors; and even the tributes
of various provinces could be arranged, by agreement, with evident
advantage and benefit to the royal exchequer.

27. Finally, all matters must be regulated on a very substantial
basis--questions of government, the cases in which preventive measures
must be taken, the protection of the company, and the powers which
must be granted to it, as will be unavoidable in order to obviate
uncertainties and injurious dissensions, in regard to which suitable
advices will be given on the proper occasion.




Chapter Seventh: Of the suitability of Panama and Portovelo, in case
the navigation via Cape Good Hope be impracticable.

1-2. [Viana briefly restates some of the conclusions reached in
foregoing chapters, and proceeds to consider the possibility of the
route via the Cape of Good Hope proving impracticable, in which case
he proposes as an alternative the route via Panama.]

3. God has placed an isthmus midway between the two Americas, with the
port and bay of Panama on the coast of the Southern Sea, and that of
Portovelo on the opposite coast; although the former is of use only
for vessels of medium size, there is another, called Perico, which
admits ships of the line, their lading being conveyed in small vessels
to Panama, which is two leguas distant. The second, which is that of
Portovelo, is one of the most beautiful and well-defended ports in
America; there are disembarked the goods of the ships from España,
and they are conveyed to Panama; and the gold and silver and some
products of Peru, which arrive at the latter port at the time of the
[Spanish] trading-fleets, are transported to that of Portovelo by land,
and by the Chagre River, for the return of the ships to España.

4. The Spanish company, when established in these islands, can have
its storehouses and factors at the said ports; the ships which sail
from here for Panama will leave there their cargoes, and bring back
the goods which the ships of Cadiz will have carried to Portovelo;
and these latter will in their turn do the same, leaving their cargoes
at the said port, and, for their return voyage, taking aboard whatever
might be sent to them from Panama.

5. This route would, without doubt, occasion greater expenses to
the Spanish company than would the navigation via Cape Good Hope,
but always many advantages to its commerce would result. If war
should break out, the said route will be more secure from enemies,
and our coasts will be better defended by the frequent visits of our
ships to the said ports on the Southern coast; in that spacious sea
they are not in danger of encountering enemies, as in the straits of
Sunda, Malaca, and others of the Malayan Islands, through which it
is necessary to pass in order to navigate through the seas of India
and of the African coast, with risk from the nations of Europa who
are established in both regions.

6. If the prosperity of the said company will be as great as the
circumstances here set forth promise, we ought to expect that, in order
to facilitate its commerce and save transportation, some part of its
gains will be employed in the improvement of the Panama route--in
making the Chagre River more navigable, and perhaps in seeking the
easiest mode of joining the two seas, or in finding other means for
conveying the goods by water from one port to the other. [169]

7. The idea of facilitating the commerce of España with these islands
by the said route is not a new one, nor do I claim that it should
be attributed to me; for it was brought forward in the year 1621,
after the dangers of the navigation via Cape Horn [Cabo de Hornos]
had been recognized, and it was realized what difficulties there were
in conducting the commerce through those stormy seas. Information
regarding it having been asked from the president and ministers of [the
Audiencia of] Panama, "they brought forward so effectual arguments
why it should not be permitted" (so Don Joseph de Veytia says, in
his Norte de la contratacion) "that navigation by this route ceased."

8. Before undertaking any enterprise people's minds are usually
dismayed at the multitude of hindrances which present themselves to
the imagination; but all these are overcome, as a rule, by assiduous
application, for the success of the enterprises which always are
as difficult in their first stages as they are easy and simple in
the middle and end of their course. The subject of commerce has
encountered in our España apparently insuperable difficulties, which
have intimidated the leading ministers in its promotion; and, while it
cannot be denied that our nation has devoted very little attention to
that most useful study, the science of commerce, our people ought to
distrust the reality of the disadvantages which have been exaggerated
in other times, and investigate them in these happier days. Therein
the same difficulties will not be found, or it will be possible to
obviate the injury which may be feared, by effectual measures for
the greater stability of the commerce, the security of our dominions,
and the welfare of all the vassals.

9. In Francia there was so much distrust on the subject of commerce
that, its promotion and extension being deemed impossible, every
project of this kind was rejected. Cardinal Richelieu, in his political
testament, regards the French as incapable of commerce, as I have
said; and, before this famous minister, his predecessors discussed
the matter in no other fashion. But the great Louis Fourteenth and
his most zealous and able [minister], Monsieur Colvert, overcoming
dangers, scorning inconveniences, and trampling on difficulties,
resolutely undertook, with magnanimous souls, to render that easy
which for so many centuries had been deemed difficult, and finally
they succeeded. Then why will it not be possible also to render the
transaction of our commerce successful and easy by way of Panama,
conquering the difficulties which will be alleged against it?

10. I am not ignorant of these hindrances; but I believe that, however
strong they may be, they will not prevail over the welfare of the
monarchy, and that the elevated and magnanimous royal soul of our
beloved king and sovereign Don Carlos Third (whom may God preserve)
and his zealous ministers will overcome the difficulties which have
been hitherto considered insurmountable, and will hasten with suitable
remedies to check the ruin of our dominions, which had its origin in
the great amount of illicit commerce of the foreign nations. Perhaps
they will form an entirely opposite idea from that of other times,
regarding the conduct of our commerce by way of Panama, in order
to provide from these islands the commodities which are needed for
España and the Americas, to assure the royal duties, and to overthrow
the foreigners--who, as I have said, will not be able to sell their
merchandise at so moderate prices as the Spanish company can; and
it will be the only effectual means of preventing the aforesaid
illicit commerce.

11. I have set forth, sincerely and candidly, what my limited ability
comprehends, and the knowledge that I have acquired of these islands;
I have touched on these subjects as concisely as possible, in order
not to render this document diffuse and too wearisome. I doubt not
that in it will be found many defects, since the practical knowledge
of commerce is remote from my profession; on these points, others who
are more intelligent will be able to bring forward their arguments. I
will be content if all will be convinced of my love for the nation,
of my desire for its greater prosperity, of my ardent zeal, and
of my loyalty to my king and sovereign; these are the only motives
which have constrained me to offer the reflections which I have here
stated--availing myself, for this little work, of the small amount of
leisure which the arduous occupations of my office leave free for me.

May God grant that the effects and results correspond to my good
intentions; and for the sake of their best success, the preservation
of these islands, the extension of Spanish commerce, and the happy
advancement of the monarchy, may He render prosperous for many years
the life of our beloved king and sovereign Don Carlos Third (whom
may God preserve) Manila, February 10, 1765.


Francisco Leandro de Viana








BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA


The documents in the present volume are obtained from the following
sources:

1. Usurpation of Indian lands.--From La Democracia (Manila), November
25, 1901; from a copy in the possession of James A. LeRoy, Durango,
Mexico.

2. Moro raids.--From a rare pamphlet published at Manila (1755),
from a copy in the possession of Edward E. Ayer, Chicago.

3. Augustinian parishes, 1760.--From an original MS. in possession
of Edward E. Ayer.

4. Later missions.--From Mozo's Noticia histórico natural (Madrid,
1763), and a rare pamphlet by Ustáriz (1745), both from copies in
the Library of Congress.

5. Events in Filipinas, 1739-62.--This is compiled from Zúñiga's
Historia (Sampaloc, 1803), pp. 546-601, and Concepcion's Hist. de
Philipinas, xi, pp. 89-237; and fully annotated from other writers.

6. Viana's Memorial of 1765.--From a MS.--apparently a duplicate copy
of the first original, and bearing Viana's autograph signature--in
the possession of Edward E. Ayer.








NOTES


[1] This document was printed in the Manila newspaper La Democracia
(the organ of the Federal party), on November 25, 1901; it was
furnished to that paper by Hugo Salazar, a young Filipino--a native of
Luzón, educated as a pharmacist, prominent in the Federal party during
1901-04, and in 1903-04 governor of Surigao province, Mindanao--under
the pen-name of "Ambut." It was printed with accompanying comments
written by him, which here appear as foot-notes, signed "Ambut." We are
indebted to the courtesy of James A. LeRoy (now [1906] U. S. consul
at Durango, Mexico) for a copy of the above issue of La Democracia,
and for the above information.

[2] Cf. pp. 141-143, post, note 63.

[3] In view of these abuses which occurred in the middle of the
eighteenth century, which have been repeated in our own time (up to the
year '97) with an outcome favorable to the friars because the latter
found support in the venality or the pliancy of the authorities,
will it be possible still to deny the justice and good reason with
which the Filipinos reject the friars, demanding the suppression
of the religious corporations, which always and everywhere have
had pernicious consequences? Libertas, in its No. 686, shows bad
faith and shamelessness in addressing to a co-religionist of ours
these questions in its editorial columns: "Can Don Leocadio inform
us whether these popular tumults which keep him so preoccupied were
known in Filipinas before the year '96? Is it not public and notorious
that certain conspicuous attorneys, resident in Manila, are the ones
who are deceiving the people, promising them impossible things, and
obtaining from them beforehand enormous sums of money?" Don Leocadio
does not answer, in order not to waste his time; but he recommends
the reading of this royal decree, in which all the friar-lovers will
find a complete answer if they will reason with their brains. As the
organ of the friars, it is natural that Libertas should speak thus,
displaying the blessing of his Holiness Leo XIII as a banner for
concealing error and falsehood; it is likewise natural that those
who reason with the stomach should form a chorus for that sort of
scribbling; but it is truly regrettable that our women and other
persons should aid, through their lack of instruction, through the
influence of the confessional, and through religious fanaticism,
in falsifying historical truth.--"Ambut."

[4] It results, then, that the friars usurped not only the lands of
individuals, but those of the State; this is called "filling both
sides of the mouth with food" [comer á dos carrillos]--which they
were doing, receiving salaries from the State and collecting dues
from their parishioners.--"Ambut."

[5] This work was composed by Joseph González Cabrera Bueno, a native
of Teneriffe, and at the time of its publication (Manila, 1734) the
chief pilot for the Manila-Acapulco line of galleons. He was a sailor
of great ability and long experience, which, with this book, gave him a
very high rank among the mariners of his day. He dedicated the book to
Governor Valdés y Tamón; its censura (or examination by the censor)
was made by Murillo Velarde; and its illustrations were engraved
by the native Filipino artist Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay. (Vindel,
Catálogo biblioteca filipina, no. 819.)

[6] This direction to the alcaldes-mayor naturally suggests the query,
"How many of the provinces were supplied with printing-offices in
1753?" and reminds one of Dickens's "Circumlocution Office," and its
efforts "how not to do it."

[7] The pernicious character of the religious corporations, as an
evil to society, is sufficiently proved; for even Catholic France
is expelling them from her bosom. It only remains, then, to decide
whether the prohibition of their existence is opposed to the principle
of the separation of Church and State. To conform to the principle
that the welfare of the people is a supreme law, and in virtue of
that to deny legal existence to such associations as are hostile to
the said principle, is not to fail in [loyalty to] the separation of
the Church and the State, inasmuch as the prohibition has nothing
to do with religious dogmas or ecclesiastical discipline; and, in
order to be just and thoroughly impartial, it does not oppose itself
to any specified community or sect, for it entirely sets aside the
religious character of the corporations, considering them simply as
groups of human beings in their relation to the general good. The
State, in this case, legislates without passing beyond the bounds
of its proper and exclusive jurisdiction, and does not invade the
attributes of the ecclesiastical power.

Some will say that by prohibiting the existence of religious
corporations liberties are restricted. To this I answer, that that
liberty which causes harm to society ought not to be understood as
liberty; and, [using the term] in this sense, the United States would
not be disloyal to their Constitution in adopting restrictive measures
in regard to the "trust," Chinese immigration, and the association
of persons dangerous to peace, order, and the sanctity of the home.

As for the estates of the friars, Señor Sumulong was quite right, to
judge from the facts in this royal decree, in asking for an ample and
complete investigation of the legality of the titles to property which
the friars could bring forward. It is to be observed that there was no
opportunity here for [ascertaining] the real right of prescription, for
it was impossible to protest against usurpations if one did not wish
to be deported or shot as an anti-Spaniard or a filibuster.--"Ambut."

An interesting commentary on the above opinions is found in the recent
action (December, 1906) of the French government in regard to the Roman
Catholic church in France, the separation of Church and State there,
and foreign interference with the proceedings of that government.--Eds.

[8] Bolot (borot): an arrow with a hook or barb (Noceda and Sanlucar's
Vocab. Tagal).

[9] The year 1754 was especially disastrous to the Philippines on
account of the Moro raids; thousands of people were slain, and other
thousands carried away captive; even the coasts of Luzón were ravaged,
and the population of the Visayas suffered a notable diminution. See
account of these losses in Concepción's Hist. de Philipinas,
xiii, pp. 190-250; and Montero y Vidal's Hist. de pirateria, i,
pp. 309-317. In July of that year, Ovando was succeeded in the
government of the islands by Arandía, who at once instituted reforms
in the military service, and did what he could to defend the islands
from their enemies; he died on May 31, 1759, worn out with the cares
and fatigues of government.

[10] Forrest says (Voyage to New Guinea, p. 302) in describing the
pirate raids by the Moros: "The Spaniards not allowing the Bisayans
fire-arms, the latter prove less able to defend themselves." Also
(p. 303): "On Celebes, they take, if in Dutch territory, even those
of their own religion: a decent musselman, with his wife and four
children were brought to Mindanao, by this very prow." "The Sooloos
have in their families many Bisayan, some Spanish slaves, whom
they purchase from the Illanon and Magindano cruisers. Sometimes
they purchase whole cargoes, which they carry to Passir, on Borneo;
where, if the females are handsome, they are bought up for the Batavia
market. The masters sometimes use their slaves cruelly, assuming the
power of life and death over them. Many are put to death for trifling
offences, and their bodies left above ground." (Ut supra, p. 330.)

[11] The archbishop of Manila, Don Miguel Garcia Serrano, wrote to
his Majesty that in the period of thirty years during which there
was no fortified post in Mindanao, twenty thousand Christians had
been made captive by the Moros. (Torrubia, Dissertacion, p. 49.)

This relation was evidently written by some one of the Jesuit
missionaries in Leyte, and perhaps even an eyewitness to the events
related. The villages which he names as having repulsed the enemy seem
to have been largely those in charge of the Jesuits. Some mention
of the raids made in 1752-53 against the Recollect missions may be
found on pp. 163, 164, post, note 88.

[12] Escolapios: regular clergy of the Order of Escuelas Pías (or
"religious schools"), founded early in the seventeenth century by
St. Joseph of Calasanz (1556-1648), an Aragonese priest. (See
VOL. XLVI, pp. 114, 115, note 49.) Besides the usual three
vows, they took another one, to consecrate themselves to the
instruction of children. They soon attained great reputation,
and their order extended to many countries. So highly were their
educational services appreciated in Spain that when the religious
orders there were secularized (1835) that of Escuelas Pías was
exempted therefrom by special grant, which was extended also to the
Philippines. "Nevertheless, it is argued that they do not accept any
salutary innovation or judicious reform, even when it is guaranteed
by the experience of accredited instructors; and it is said that they
walk on leaden feet, as if tied down to a stale routine." (Dominguez.)

Echegaray also gives to the word Escolapios the meaning of "students
attending the Escuelas Pías," in which sense the word is evidently
used here--except that the schools are simply the parish schools
conducted by the friars among the Filipino natives.

[13] totals given in these tables are in some cases incorrect, but
have been left as in original.

[14] The title-page of this work reads thus in English: "A plain
historical account of the glorious triumphs and fortunate progress
gained during the present century by the religious of the order of
our father St. Augustine, in the missions which are in their charge in
the Philipinas Islands, and in the great empire of China. Information
is given regarding each of those peoples, their usages, customs,
superstitions, mode of life, and medicines which they use in their
diseases, with other curious information. Composed by the reverend
father Fray Antonio Mozo, of the same order, formerly secretary
and definitor of the province of Philipinas, and now commissary and
general definitor for the same, who dedicates it to this province of
Castilla of the same order. With the necessary licenses. At Madrid,
by Andrès Ortega, Las Infantas Street. The year 1763."

This book contains much information regarding the customs and
superstitions of the natives, especially of the Negritos, which is
valuable not only as being furnished by an educated man who lived
among them, but on account of his kindly nature, comparative freedom
from bigotry and prejudice, and his inclination to take an impartial
and philosophical view of his subject. For this reason, a very full
synopsis has been made of his work, and his observations on the natives
have been mostly translated in full. He left the islands in 1759,
as he states on p. 76 of his book.

[15] This mission field was located in the eastern part of what
is now the province of Nueva Ecija (formed at the beginning of the
nineteenth century), on the Rio Grande of Pampanga and its tributary
the Santor, nearly half-way from the source of the former to its mouth;
the peoples here mentioned evidently dwelt at first on the heights of
the Caraballo de Baler--part of the Caraballo Sur range, from which
flow northward the waters of the Magat and the Rio Grande of Cagayan;
and southward the Rio Grande and the Rio Chico (respectively "great
river" and "little river" of Pampanga). The name "Buquid" apparently
simply designates them as dwellers in the mountain forests. The
Italons--a name of the same signification, applied by the Gaddans to
the Ilongots dwelling in the Caraballo mountains of Nueva Ecija and
Príncipe (who are called Ibilao by their Isinay neighbors north of
that range)--and Abacas lived on the headwaters of the Rio Grande
and Rio Chico. Barrows says (Census of Philippines, i, p. 437):
"The Ibilao who inhabit the mountains of Nueva Ecija are among the
most persistent head hunters of northern Luzón. Their raids upon the
Christian settlements of Nueva Ecija are incessant, and they have
repeatedly taken lives in the vicinity of Carranglán and Pantabangán
within the last two or three years." (See also ut supra, pp. 470, 471.)

[16] In another place this name appears as Alzaga; but Pérez (Catálogo,
p. 179) spells it Arziaga. This missionary was a native of Valladolid,
and came to the islands in 1699; he died in 1707.

[17] For a modern description of the Ilongots (or Italons), see
that given in Census of the Philippines, i, pp. 545-547; the writer
(L. E. Bennett, governor of Nueva Vizcaya) says: "The chiefs of all
these settlements stated to me positively that adultery was unknown
among these people, and that their family relations were very closely
drawn. They further stated that they never knew of a case of a young
woman giving birth before she had been married." "Fighting is never
carried on in the open, but they depend entirely upon assassination
and ambush. They set pointed bamboos and spring guns for each other
in places known to be traveled, and use spears and bows and arrows
with poisoned tips when they fight."

[18] This name is spelled Isasigana by Pérez. He was born in Durango,
Vizcaya, in 1665, and came to the islands in 1699. Three years later
he was sent to Carranglán, where he remained until he was worn out
with missionary labors. Recalled to Manila for his health's sake,
he afterward held various offices in his order (1706-10), and was
minister at Guagua and Apalit (1712, 1713). He died at Guagua (Vava,
in Mozo), in 1717.

[19] "The missions of Pantabangan were administered by the Augustinians
until they surrendered them to the Franciscans in order that the
latter might unite these to their missions of Baler, which lies on
the further coast that is called by that name. They maintain in these
missions two or three religious, who minister to Pantabangan, where
there are 60 houses; Puncán, which has 56 houses; and Carranglán,
82. Very little progress is made in these missions, on account of
the misgovernment among the Indians and the lack of policy on the
part of the Spaniards." (Zúñiga's Estadismo, Retana's ed., i, p. 473.)

Vindel describes in his Catálogo, t. ii, no. 328, a rare pamphlet
(apparently not mentioned elsewhere): Relación del descubrimiento
y entrada de los religiosos de N. S. P. S. Francisco ... en los
pueblos ó rancherías de los montes altos de Baler; it is undated,
but was probably published at Manila, about 1755. In it, "Fathers
Manuel de San Agustín and Manuel de Jesús María Fermoselle report to
their provincial, Fray Alejandro Ferrer [who held that office during
1753-56], the condition in which they found those villages." San
Agustín labored in Baler and neighboring villages during 1747-60. The
mission of Baler was founded in 1609 by Franciscan missionaries,
but half a century later was ceded, through scarcity of laborers, to
the Recollects; the latter order abandoned that district in 1703, for
the same reason, and the Franciscans resumed the charge of it. Baler
was formerly situated on the right bank of the San José River, near
the sea; but on December 27, 1735, it was utterly destroyed by a tidal
wave, and the surviving inhabitants removed the village farther inland,
to higher ground. (Huerta, Estado, pp. 280, 477.)

[20] Pérez states that he died at Guagua, a town in southern Pampanga;
for this name Vava is apparently a phonetic Spanish corruption.

[21] Alejandro Cacho was a native of León, and came from a noble
family; he arrived at Manila in the mission of 1690. He was a
missionary to various tribes in upper Pampanga (now Nueva Écija),
among whom he labored indefatigably for more than forty years. "He
formed villages, opened roads, established schools, built churches,
and felled groves; and what was but a little while before a gloomy
and impenetrable forest afterward burst upon the sight of the
astonished traveler as a broad plain, which the directing hand of the
indefatigable Augustinian converted into a fertile field and beautiful
province, the pride and hope of the new converts. And he accomplished
even more; assigned to the missions of Carranglán and Pantabangan
(1707) he eagerly devoted himself to the study of the flora in those
unknown regions, examining the medicinal virtues of each plant; and
as a fruit of his laborious task, besides practicing successfully the
art of the physician among his beloved parishioners he left us the
works which we mention below." "He is one of the figures which most
clearly illustrate what the religious in Filipinas was, in the double
conception of priest and maintainer of the Spanish sovereignty in
this archipelago." (Pérez.) He died in Carranglán in 1748. The works
alluded to are: "A treatise on the medicinal herbs of the mountains
of Buhay;" "Origin and customs of those barbarous peoples;" "History
of the Augustinian missions among the Italon Ilongots, the Isinais,
the Irulis, and the Igolots," during 1704-33; and three maps drawn
by Cacho, giving valuable information regarding the habitat of those
peoples in central Luzón. Besides these, he wrote catechisms in the
languages of those tribes, directions for their government, etc.

[22] Spanish, al testud; this word does not appear in the lexicons,
and it is impossible to determine its meaning accurately from the
text. Testud may be possibly a misprint for testuz, meaning "the
hind part of the head;" but it is more probably the mistake of an
amanuensis for testiculos, these glands being regarded as the source
of virile power.

[23] "Isinay is the language spoken by the Igorot of the hills
in western Nueva Vizcaya, and by a part of the population of the
towns of Aritao, Dupax, and Bambang, who are of Igorot origin, but
whose ancestors were converted in the latter half of the eighteenth
century." "The name Igorot (in Spanish form, Igorrote) means in several
Malayan languages, 'people of the mountains.'... I have adopted it as
a general designation for the whole body of primitive Malayan tribes
of northern Luzón who are of the same physical type, speak closely
allied languages, and present the same grade of culture." (Barrows,
in Census of Philippines, i, pp. 471, 472.) See also VOL. XX of this
series, pp. 269-279.

[24] See account of Dominican missions, following this of
Mozo's. Interesting accounts of the Dominican missions in Luzón and
its dependent islands, in recent times, may be found in the Correo
Sino-Annamita (a missionary publication issued from the college of
Santo Tomás, Manila, during the period 1866-97), vols. i, iv, xiii-xv,
xx, xxi, xxiii-xxx.

[25] A royal decree (given in full by Mozo, pp. 48-51) states that
the Augustinians informed the Dominicans, by a letter of September 8,
1739, of their decision to surrender the Ituy missions, contingent on
the permission of the governor; and the actual formal surrender took
place on April 8, 1740. This transfer was liberal and disinterested,
the Augustinians asking no compensation for their property, which
was of considerable value. The number of baptized persons included
in these missions was 2,755; and the Augustinians had taught them to
irrigate their lands, and had furnished them with animals and plows.

[26] Fray Vicente Ibarra was born in Durango in 1694, and made his
religious profession at the age of sixteen; he came to the islands
in 1712. He was minister at Santor and other places (1720-28), and
afterward held several offices in his order. In 1737 he was prior
provincial, and made a visitation of all the Augustinian religious
ministers there. The latter part of his life was spent mainly at
Manila, where he died on December 24, 1760. He left various writings
in the Pampanga dialect. (Pérez's Catálogo.)

Juan Belloxin was born in the province of Logroño in 1695, and made
his profession at Salamanca when seventeen years old. He came to the
islands in 1718, and spent ten years as missionary to the heathen
Isinays, on whose dialect he left some MS. volumes. He was minister
in various villages in other districts, and died at Manila in 1742.

Diego Noguerol was a native of the province of Coruña (1699), and
professed at Compostela in 1716. Two years later he arrived at Manila,
and went to the upper Pampanga mission; he was the first minister
at Buhay (1728), where he remained seven years. He labored in other
ministries and held offices in the order, dying at Manila in 1785.

[27] These were Bujay (the mission center), Dupag, Meuba, Mayon,
Diangan, Limanab, Batù, Paitan, and Bayongbong (this last located
in Paniqui).

[28] See description of trails in Igorot country, in Census of
Philippines, i, p. 542.

[29] Agustín Barrio Canal was born in the province of Burgos, and made
profession in the Augustinian convent of Salamanca in 1733, at the age
of nineteen. He came to the islands in 1737, and became a missionary
in western and central Luzón, where he died as related in Mozo's text.

Pedro Freyre was born in the province of Lugo, and entered the
Augustinian order at Burgos. He came to the Philippines in 1737, and
labored among the tribes of central Luzón until 1753; he then became
a minister in Pampanga, where he spent nearly twenty years. In 1771
he was removed by force from his post there, for refusing to accept
the diocesan visit; the rest of his life was spent at Manila, where
he died in 1790. (Pérez's Catálogo.)

[30] Reference is here made to the great western mountain range of
Luzón, the Caraballos Occidentales; it is nearly 200 miles long, and,
including its subordinate ranges, one-third as broad. It is really a
system of mountains, its central range forming the divide between the
waters flowing to Cagayán River on the east and those flowing to the
China Sea on the west. Its southern portion is called Cordillera Sur,
which, bending eastward, under the name of Caraballos Sur joins the
Sierra Madre or eastern coast range. This last range stretches along
the eastern side of Luzón, from the northeastern point of the island to
Laguna de Bay, a distance of 350 miles, and divides the waters of the
Cagayán valley (which is about 50 miles wide, and 160 in length) from
those of the Pacific slope. See Census of Philippines, i, pp. 60, 61.

[31] Barrows classes the Apayaos as an Igorot division, located
in the district of Ayangan; (cf. VOL. XLIII, p. 72, note 11). The
Tinguians also are Igorot, and are the pagan people of Abra; "they
have developed toward civilized life, being about on the same plane of
culture as the Ilocano." "This word is derived from tingues, meaning
'mountain,' a Malayan word, archaic, and almost unused now in Tagálog,
and the suffix an." Adang evidently  means the Gaddans, or Gaddang,
another Igorot branch in western Isabela; some of them, christianized
in early days, occupy the northern towns of Nueva Vizcaya. (Census
of Philippines, i, pp. 469, 471, 477.)

[32] Cayán was formerly the capital of Lepanto; and is three miles
from the present capital, Cervantes.

[33] José Herice was born in 1691, in a town in Navarra, and made
his religious profession at Pamplona at the age of twenty. He came
to the islands in 1718, and was sent to the Ilocos missions. He was
the pioneer evangelist among the Adang (or Gaddans), and consumed so
much of his strength in that field that he was transferred to easier
charges in Ilocos, from 1725 on. He died at Batác in 1742. (Pérez's
Catálogo.) Rivera came to the islands in 1713, and was sent to the
Tinguians, but for like cause was also transferred to the plains
villages in 1719. Madariaga came over with Herice, whose associate
he was among the Gaddans and Apayaos, until 1729, when he too went
down to the plains; he died in 1744.

[34] Spanish, barbacoas: a word adopted from the Indians of Guiana,
their name for the frames on which they roasted or smoke-dried any
kind of meat or fish; it is also applied (in English, corrupted to
"barbecue") to a hog or other large animal roasted whole, and to the
open-air entertainment at which such roasts (now usually made in a
pit dug in the earth) form part of the food.

[35] See account of Igorot canaos (or feasts), and their dances at
these, in Census of Philippines, i, pp. 535-537.

[36] Francisco Javier Córdoba was born in Mexico in 1712, and entered
the Augustinian order at the age of seventeen. He came to the islands
in 1732, and spent the rest of his life in the missions of Pampanga
and Ilocos; his death occurred there, about 1764.

Romero was a native of Cadiz, born in 1729, and entered the order
in Mechoacán, Nueva España, in 1750. Two years later he came to the
islands, and joined the Igorot mission, afterward being cura in Indian
villages; finally he returned to America (soon after 1774).

Pedro Vivar was born at Logroño in 1737, and made his profession at
Valladolid, at the age of fourteen; he came to Manila with the mission
of 1752, and two years later was sent to the Igorot mission. After
three years labor there, he took charge of the ministries in various
native villages of Ilocos, where he died in 1771. In the revolt which
occurred in that province during the British occupation, he and other
missionaries were imprisoned by the insurgents, and narrowly escaped
being slain by them. Vivar left several MSS., among them a history
of the above rebellion, which was recently published (Manila, 1893),
in vol. iv of Biblioteca historica Filipina. (Pérez's Catálogo.)

[37] The Tagálog name of the sago-palm (in Pampanga called ebos,
according to Mozo), or Corypha umbraculifera. C. minor is commonly
called palma brava (Tagálog, anáhao or anáo); see VOL. XLVII, p. 181,
note 27.

[38] This is the fire-saw, a variant on the fire-drill so generally
used by the North American Indians and other savage peoples. See
description and illustration of the fire-saw used in Borneo,
(similar to that of the Zambals), in Ling Roth's Natives of Sarawak,
i, pp. 377, 378.

[39] "'Baluga,' in the Pampango language, means half-breed or mixed
blood. It has quite a wide use to indicate Negrito-Malayan roving
savages." (Barrows, in Census of Philippines, i, p. 469.)

[40] Ilib: a Pampango name of the cogon grass (Imperata arundinacea);
see VOL. XXIX, p. 233, note 74.

[41] Spanish, lumbre, meaning "fire," thence "light;" and by extension
"tinder," used to produce fire. Evidently the allusion in the text is
to material used for tinder--in such a region and for use as a bed,
obviously meaning dry grass.

[42] See Delgado's description of the bees in Filipinas (Historia,
pp. 848, 849). He states that there are several different kinds of
bees, which produce great quantities of wax and honey--especially in
the Visayas, where two crops are gathered in the year.

[43] See note on sago-palm, p. 91, ante.

[44] Evidently the same as súcao, an Ilocan name for a kind of
pond-lily, Nelumbium speciosum; its tubers (and Blanco says, its
flowers) are edible--as is the case with those of other species of
the same genus, in America and other regions, which are used for food
to some extent by the savages.

[45] That is, "Natural necessities are satisfied with almost
nothing." The other saying is: "If you wish to make a man rich do
not add to his wealth, but take away his desires."

[46] The Visayan name for the shrub (Croton tiglium) which yields
the croton oil of commerce; it belongs to the order Euphorbiaceæ.

[47] "Termes monocerus (Koen), the common name for which is anay. The
anay, or white ant, is a very remarkable insect, with a large head,
on the upper part of which it has three small eyes; and it is armed
with two hard teeth, shaped like a forceps, with which this creature
destroys in a very short time the woodwork of a house, the best
depository of papers, the largest library, or the finest wardrobe
of clothing. The only wood that it does not attack is the molave, on
account of its bitter taste and excessive hardness. The anay lives in
families; it is found in all wet localities, and erects dwellings of
clay which are two or three meters in height, and so solid that the
passage of buffaloes over them is not sufficient to destroy them. The
interior of these ant-hills contains a multitude of little cells,
divided by thin partitions; and in these they deposit thousands of
eggs (some 80,000 to each female) that are infinitely small. One
[in each hill?] of these terrible insects is distinguished by its
enormous proportions, and this one the Indian calls 'queen of the
ants.' In the rainy season, wings grow on them, and they fly in
fabulous numbers at sunset. The damage which these insects cause is
incalculable." (Montero y Vidal, Archipiélago Filipino, p. 114.)

The same writer mentions, in the preface to the same work, as an
instance of the prevalent ignorance in Spain of the nature and needs
of that country's colonies in the East, that some member of the royal
Council undertook to despatch a decree that the army in Filipinas
should go in pursuit of the anay, believing it to be some terrible
criminal.

Salazar makes an interesting reference (Hist. Sant. Rosario, p. 567)
to some unnamed species of ant: "In that country [of the Mandayas]
are certain ants which are called 'Dutchmen,' whose sting is so sharp
that it becomes unendurable;" and he relates that this creature was
used by a Dominican missionary as a new penance.

[48] Cf. account of these superstitions as still believed in Batangas,
in Census of Philippines, i, pp. 520, 521.

[49] Agde (Latin, "Agatha") a city in southeastern France, was
anciently the seat of a bishopric suffragan to Narbonne; it was
suppressed in 1790. The council here referred to was held in the year
506, "in the time and with the authorization of Alaric, king of the
Visigoths in Spain, although he was an Arian." (Chevin's Dictionnaire
de noms de lieux, p. 5.)

[50] Antonio Léon was born in 1702, in the province of Alicante, and
made profession in the Augustinian convent at Salamanca at the age
of sixteen. He came in the mission of 1724, and spent the rest of his
life mainly in the missions of Pampanga, in which he died (1766). His
younger brother Pablo came (being then a novice) to the islands at
the same time; he was missionary in Puncán (1731) and Santor (1732)
and died in 1733.

Manuel Calvo was born in Almagro in 1704, and when sixteen years
old entered the Augustinian order at Toledo. He came to Manila with
the foregoing brothers, and labored in Pampanga missions; he died at
Ayárat in 1758.

Francisco Alvárez was a native of Oviedo province in Spain, and made
profession at Madrid in 1727, at the age of twenty-two; he came to
the islands in the mission of 1732. He also labored in the Pampanga
missions, and died at Manila in 1769. (Pérez's Catálogo.)

[51] "In the mountains [of Iloilo] there are many Indians whom
they call Mundos; they should be called vagamundos [English,
"vagabonds"], but the Indians bite off half from Castilian words
when they are somewhat long. These Mundos are descendants of the
Christians who, not being able to remain in the villages on account
of their delinquencies, have fled to the mountains. They are not
unwilling to become Christians, provided the fathers will go to
their hamlets to live; but as this is impossible, on account of those
places being inaccessible to civilized people, they continue in their
infidelity. Some come down to the villages, and in their places others
escape [to them] who commit new crimes; and [thus] this caste of people
is continually  maintained, notwithstanding the efforts that have
been made to reduce them. The Indians trade with them, and give them
rice and cloth in exchange for the wax and pitch which they bring down
from the hills; and, in order not to lose this advantage, the Indians
have been opposed to the reduction of the Mundos to a civilized and
Christian mode of life." (Zuñiga, Estadismo, ii, pp. 93-94.)

[52] Loberos (from lobo, "wolf"): Dominguez calls it a synonym of
espantanublados ("scare clouds"), an epithet of "the vagabond who,
wearing long garments, goes through the hamlets begging from door to
door; and the country folk believe that he has power over the clouds"
(Diccionario of the Academy).

[53] Félix de Rioja y Zúñiga was born at Cadiz in 1691, of a noble
family, and made his profession there at the age of seventeen,
renouncing an inherited title. He came to the islands in 1712,
and seven years later was sent to the Bataan mission. He was sent
to Guimbal (1722) and Bugason in 1728; in the latter place he was
murdered in June, 1734.

[54] Carib: the name of the Indian race who inhabited the Antilles
and adjacent coasts when the New World was discovered; also applied
in general to fierce (and especially to cannibal) savages.

[55] Cf. Matilda C. Stevenson's account of a ceremony employed at
childbirth by the Sia Indians of New Mexico, in which an ear of corn
(which among them is the emblem of life) is passed up and down the body
of the mother, accompanied with prayers to one of their divinities, to
secure a safe and easy delivery. (Report of U. S. Bureau of Ethnology,
1889-90, pp. 134-141.)

[56] This plant is evidently Datura alba (or perhaps in some places
D. fastuosa, which has the same properties), commonly called "jimson
weed" in the United States; it is called catchúbong or tachibong by
the Visayans, and in Tagálog talamponay. (See Official Handbook of
the Philippines, part i, pp. 377, 401; also Merrill's Dictionary of
Plant Names, p. 142.)

[57] It is possible that this plant is Euphorbia pilufera, a soporific;
it is used, as are many other plants found in the islands, for
poisoning fish.

[58] Fray Bernardo Ustáriz was born in the archbishopric of Zaragoza,
and entered the Dominican order at Calatayud; he came to the
Philippines with the mission of 1730. In the following year he was
minister at Binondo, and in 1739 at Abucay; with these exceptions he
was engaged in high offices of his order--being the head, at various
times, of the college of Letran and of the university of Santo
Tomás; and twice (1743 and 1755) the provincial of the order. He
was afterward appointed bishop of Nueva Segovia, taking possession
of that see in 1761. In the following year the capture of Manila by
the English occasioned a revolt in Ilocos; the efforts of Ustáriz
to oppose the insurgents were unsuccessful, and drew upon him their
resentment. They kept him a prisoner for six months, and were on
the point of killing him; but his life was saved by the opportune
arrival of a Spanish force. He then accompanied the troops through
their campaign for the pacification of Pangasinan, and the hardships
which he underwent therein and in his previous captivity shortened his
life; he died at the hospital of San Gabriel, near Manila, August 2,
1764. (Ferrando's Hist. PP. dominicos, v, pp. 6-9.)

[59] Father Manuel del Río thus describes the district of Paniqui and
its people (Retana's Archivo, ii, pp. 185-187): "This province of
Paniqui extends from north to south; and its length, from the last
Christian village of Cagayan, which is Itugug, to the last infidel
village (but close to the mission of Isinay), called Bayongbong, is
probably two and one-half or three days' journey. Its breadth thus
far has not been ascertained; but I think that it includes more than
fifteen leguas of plains, or level ground, from the mountains of the
Igorrots to those of the Ilongots. These are two ranges of lofty
peaks, which intersect this province in the middle, and likewise
others in the center of this island; and in these mountains dwell
these two and other barbarous tribes, whom hitherto it has been
impossible to conquer, on account of the inaccessible character of
the mountains. The land of this province of Paniqui is quite level,
and good for cultivation. The villages are numerous, although not very
large; for on the shores of the Maga River alone, which flows through
the length of that province from south to north, are counted eighteen
villages, including both large and small ones. The people of that
tribe are distinct from those adjacent to them, and have a different
language from the others. The men are accustomed from childhood to
file their upper teeth into points, which often causes them to decay;
and the teeth, after being dyed a sort of dark blue, are adorned (when
the person is a chief) with small golden pegs. For persons of rank,
it is considered very unsightly to have white teeth. They also pierce
their ears, as women do; and some cleave them through. These people
are barbarians in their customs, without any kind of civilization
or government; and they pay respect only to some chiefs, who have
acquired a reputation as such by their valorous deeds. They are not
idolaters, nor are they given to religion or to worship; they have
only some superstitions regarding the songs of birds, and similar
things, founded on oracles which are given to them by the demon,
through the agency of their aniteras, or priestesses. These women,
through a compact which they have with the demon, after taking a
certain potion are possessed by that same demon; and through their
mouths this enemy is able to declare his will to those wretched
people. At other times, the demon speaks to them in his own person,
in an aerial body; but never, or very seldom, does he allow himself
to be seen by those who hear him. Through the counsel of this chief
enemy of the human race, those heathen are wont to buy Indians from
other provinces, in order to offer them in sacrifice, by killing
them, to the demon. Of this class must have been a little boy four
years old, apparently an Igorrot, who was seen by the said father
commissary, Fray Diego de la Torre. Those infidels were buying the
child, to kill him; and the father, not having with him any forces
for preventing this, could only obtain from them that they should
bring the child to him for baptism before the sacrifice. God chose
that the bargain should not be settled, and that the father should
buy the child for some trinkets and beads, which those people value;
and accordingly he brought the lad to Cagayan, snatching him from the
teeth and claws of the infernal wolf. The said father encountered among
those infidels, another boy, about seven years old, who was white and
ruddy, like a European--a very singular thing among people so swarthy
as they. His mother had had other children, but dark, like herself;
and she says that when she was pregnant with this boy she dreamed
that they commanded her to give him the name of Adàn [i.e., Adam],
and therefore did so, calling the boy Adàn. They regarded him as a
little idol; and therefore, although the father urged them several
times to give him the child, he was unable to obtain it."

[60] See earlier accounts of these Dominican missions in Central
Luzón, in VOL. XXXVII, pp. 98-101; and in VOL. XLIII, Salazar's
history, book i, chap. xxxiii, and book ii, chaps. ii, xi, xxii,
xxxv, xlix. Cf. Ferrando's Hist. PP. dominicos, passim, for detailed
accounts from the beginnings of those missions down to 1830.

[61] In Retana's printed text this word appears, by some error,
as montes, when the context plainly indicates islas.

[62] See account of this project, the explorations made for it, and
its successful accomplishment, in Ferrando's Hist. PP. dominicos,
iv, pp. 367-382.

[63] Carajay is, according to Vidal y Soler (Viajes de Jagor, p. 138),
an earthenware jar, used for cooking by the Bicol natives in Camarines.

[64] According to an official report sent to the king in July, 1752,
the Dominican province of Santisimo Rosario had then only 83 religious,
who were in charge of 219,459 souls. Besides the missions of China and
Tun-kin, the province conducted in the Filipinas Islands seven missions
in Cagayan, two in Pangasinan, six in Ituy, one in Cauayan, and eight
in Paniqui; and one in the mountains of Oriong, in Bataan. "In all
these missions, or villages of new converts, there were reckoned 8,917
Christians, with many catechumens who were being prepared to receive
the holy sacrament of baptism. This number is not included in the
general administration of the province previously mentioned. Some of
these villages or missions were committed to religious appointed as
vicars in other and older villages, to which the former were added,
and considered as visitas or annexes--especially in Cagayan, where
there has not been any religious with only the title of missionary. The
number of souls who are today in charge of the province in the islands
of Luzon and Batanes, according to the general report of 1870, is
560,911." (Ferrando, Hist. PP. dominicos, iv, pp. 560, 561.)

[65] The fiscal Arroyo declared that he had been imprisoned in order
that he might not prosecute claims against the following persons in
their approaching residencias: Governor Valdés Tamón, for the enormous
sums which the royal treasury had lost during his government, which
amounted to a million and a half pesos; the Marqués de las Salinas and
the Marqués de Monte-Castro, confederates of the same Señor Valdés,
for having appropriated from the royal treasury and from the public
two and one-half million pesos; and Don Domingo de Otero Vermudez,
[who had taken] more than two hundred thousand. (Concepción, Hist. de
Philipinas, xi, p. 95.)

[66] See enumeration of these funds in the historical sketch of the
Misericordia, in VOL. XLVII.

[67] It is thus stated by Concepción (Hist. de Philipinas, xi,
p. 280): "With the pretext that the fathers of the Society [of Jesus]
had usurped from them cultivated lands, and the untilled lands on
the hills, on which they kept enormous herds of horned cattle--for
which reason, and because the Jesuits said that these were their
own property, they would not allow the natives to supply themselves
with wood, rattans, and bamboos, unless they paid fixed prices--the
Indians committed shocking acts of hostility on the ranches of Lian and
Nasugbu, killing and plundering the tenants of those lands, with many
other ravages. Nor did they respect the houses of the [Jesuit] fathers,
but attacked and plundered them, and partly burned them, as well as
many other buildings independent of these." All was plundering, rapine,
destruction, and debauchery; the natives also rebelled against the
exactions from them of tribute and personal services. "The contagion
spread to the village of Taal, and more than sparks were discovered
in other places, although efforts were made to conceal the fire." The
alcalde-mayor and the Jesuits tried at first to pacify the Indians,
urging them to wait for the official visit of Auditor Calderon; but
they could do nothing, the natives being rendered only more daring
by this attempt. Troops were then sent from Manila against them;
in the battle mentioned in our text several were wounded, among them
the commanding officer, Sargento-mayor Juan Gonzalez de el Pulgar;
but he succeeded in routing the enemy. The chief of the insurgents,
one Matienza, took refuge in a church, but was captured and disarmed
therein. Reënforcements were sent from Manila, and the rebellion was
soon quelled. The leaders of the rebellion were punished in various
ways, according to their prominence or influence; some were shot,
others sent into exile or to the galleys; and amnesty was granted
to the insurgents who would lay down their arms and renew their
acknowledgment of vassalage.

To this may be added the following statements by Calderon himself:
"By commission of this royal Audiencia, I went to a village outside
the walls of this capital, to take measures for the completion of a
small bridge, which was being hindered by some dispute, and to pay
to Master Alarífe 250 pesos which had been offered to him for its
construction. I proceeded to make inquiries regarding the lands and
revenues belonging to the village; and I found that all the surrounding
estates (on which the people were working) belonged to a certain
[F., for Fulano] ecclesiastic, the Indians and mestizos paying him
rent not only for these, but for the land occupied by their cabins,
at the rate of three pesos a year for the married man, and one and
one-half pesos for the widow or the unmarried man. And as it seemed
to me that the person who, according to what was evident to my own
eyes, was collecting about 30 pesos of land-rent, independently of
the estates and houses belonging to him, was the one who rightfully
ought to bear the cost of the little bridge, I announced that this
cost should be collected from the persons who were owing rents for the
lands. Receipts therefor were to be given to them, and orders were
issued to the royal judges before whom such cases come first, that
they must, if the laymen who make these payments should be accused
before them, give the latter credit for these receipts; nor in all
this brief summary, and in the measures that I took, would I notice
the ecclesiastic who called himself the owner of all." "In regard to
the representations of the convenience for the Indian who has built
his hut in the grain-field, I believe that it is quite the contrary,
and that it would be more expedient for him and for the commonwealth
that he should not be allowed to build it there, or that he be
obliged to change his dwelling, for those huts generally serve as
refuge for persons bent on mischief; besides, as the Indian thus has
no watchful neighbor to inform the religious minister of his doings,
and no alcalde, he lives in too much freedom. But, granted that all
this comes to an end, what right has the owner of the land to more
than the rent from him who occupies it? And if with his pilapis,
or pathway, and his house he occupies no more than 50 brazas--for
which he has to pay the same as if he had rented a cabalita, which
is a thousand brazas--and if he must pay the same rent, then lease
to him the cabalita, including therein the house and pilapis; and
with this the Indian will have land for planting his young trees,
and for making some planting of grain."

These items are cited from a pamphlet issued (Manila, 1739) by the
auditor Pedro Calderón Henríquez, entitled: Discvrso ivridico, en
qve se defiende la real iurisdiccion, y se hace demonstracion de la
injusticia, que contiene el contrato de arrendamiento de solares en
estas islas; in it he "laments the great amount that the Filipinos
were paying to the ecclesiastical power." This seems to have brought
out a reply defending the ecclesiastics, Apología por la immvnidad
ecclesiastica, y por la licitvd de terrazgos,  o alqvileres de
tierras segvn la forma, estilo de algvnas estancias de estas islas
Philipinas (Manila, 1739); it is significant that this was published
from the Jesuit printing-house, and the auditor's pamphlet from the
college of Santo Tomás. Regarding both these, see Vindel's Catálogo
bibl. filipina, nos. 1807, 1808; therein is cited the following
paragraph from the Apología:

"48. In the cultivated estates or farms which the Society of Jesus
possesses in these islands, the tenants pay nothing for the house-lot
which they occupy, with the little garden which their houses are
wont to have in addition; but they pay only for the other land which
they cultivate. There is, moreover, an order from the superiors that
no person shall be allowed on those farms unless he has the charge
of some grain-field--and rightly so, since this is the purpose for
which admission to the estates is granted to any one; although this
does not prevent entire justice being shown to the old men, widows,
and other people who are legitimately disabled, by allowing them
to remain, as they do, in their houses without paying anything for
these and without cultivating a field. Therefore, there is evident
falsehood in what is said by a certain [N., used when name is not to
be mentioned] author, at the beginning of no. 3, art. 2, in speaking
of these estates of the Society--that is, that the tenants pay for
the land which they cultivate and for the ground under the houses
which they occupy. In Santa Cruz the same observance was in use at
the beginning, and it still is followed among the tenants who work
on the lands of Mayhaligue adjoining the said village of Santa Cruz,
and have their houses in the grain-fields. But as in course of time
the Sangley mestizos increased in numbers, and devoted themselves
to other occupations--painters, gilders, and silver-smiths, etc.,
which trades they now exercise with dexterity--and many households
were formed, up to the number of about three hundred and eighty, which
they now reach, it became necessary to yield to their importunities;
and for this college of San Ignacio at Manila to condemn the splendid
orchards which it possessed there, and permit the said mestizos
to establish therein their dwellings. And, as it is not right that
the said college should suffer the heavy damage of losing the said
orchards, which had cost it many thousands of pesos, ..."

[68] Concepción says (Hist. de Philipinas, xi, pp. 278-280) that some
investigation of this report was made before Torre's death, and seven
of the wealthiest Chinese were arrested, "as being those most liable to
suspicion in the proposed disturbance." These men were kept in prison
for six months, the investigations being continued by Arrechedera and
indicating that the "plot" was but a malicious fabrication, intended
to harass Torre and thus cause his death. Finally, the governor, in
view of their long imprisonment and the failure to prove any charges
against them, released the Chinese prisoners, "under precautions and
securities." One of the prisoners proved, by a note from the warden
of the court prison, that the latter "had received the Chinaman as a
prisoner, without being told from whom or by whose order." The further
precaution was taken of sending back to China, in the champans that
went that year, "no small number of Chinese, of those who were known to
be strollers and without employment." Concepción states that Torre's
government was rendered odious largely by a certain man in Manila,
"who, on account of his rank and wealth, ambitiously lorded it over
the community, causing its government to be subject to his pleasure,
and did all that he could to cast infamy on the governor."

[69] In these ships came the royal situado for the current year
(1747), and 30,000 pesos on account of the arrearages due; moreover,
the returns from the cargo of the previous year were unusually large,
owing to successful sales at Acapulco. The vessels halted at the port
of Sisiran, where the silver was disembarked, being sent overland
to Manila; this was done through fear lest they might be attacked
by enemies at the Embocadero. The galleon "Rosario" was sent with a
cargo for Acapulco, but was driven back by contrary winds, because
it was poorly constructed and difficult to manage. This placed the
royal treasury again in great straits, because the situados were in
arrears for six remittances; Arrechedera appealed to the citizens and
the clergy, who responded liberally--especially the archbishop and his
chapter; "the Society of Jesus alone furnished 11,000 pesos--the royal
promise being pledged for payment; and the obras pías also contributed
to the common cause with their reserve funds." (Concepción, Hist. de
Philipinas, xii, pp. 36-38.)

[70] His family name was Martinez de Arizala; at this time he was
fifty-two years of age. He was a member of the Audiencia of Quito
in Peru (now in Ecuador) for seventeen years, and had been entrusted
with various important commissions by the king.

[71] Probably on account of his being a Dominican, the Chinese in
and near Manila being mostly in charge of that order in matters
of religion.

[72] A full account of this revolt and its cause and progress may be
found in Concepción's Hist. de Philipinas, xiv, pp. 79-107; and of
its punishment by Lechuga, in xi, pp. 40-43. In writing the latter
volume, he had not any adequate information regarding the causes
of the rebellion; but later he obtained a detailed account of this
from the Recollect fathers in Bohol who took charge of the natives
after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. According to them, the
immediate occasion of the revolt was the arbitrary conduct of the
Jesuit, Father Morales, who was, in 1744, in charge of the district
of Inabangan. He sent out a native constable to arrest a renegade
Indian, but the latter slew the constable, whose brother, Francisco
Dagóhoy, obtained the corpse, and carried it into his village. Morales
refused to bury it in consecrated ground, and it lay for three days
unburied and rotting. Angered at this arbitrary and harsh treatment,
especially as Morales had been the cause of the constable's death,
Dagóhoy swore vengeance on the Jesuit, and persuaded the natives
of his district to join him therein; 3,000 of them followed him,
abandoning their homes and fortifying an inaccessible retreat in the
mountains. On their way they plundered a large and valuable estate
in that vicinity, named San Xavier, belonging to the Jesuits, which
was well stocked with cows, carabaos, horses, and other animals. Soon
afterward, Dagóhoy bribed an Indian to kill the Jesuit minister of
Hagna, Father Lamberti; and afterward Morales was also assassinated
by natives. The insurgents were numerously recruited through various
acts of injustice and tyranny by the Spaniards, and the rebellion was
assuming dangerous proportions. Bishop Espeleta of Cebú endeavored to
persuade the insurgents to return to their allegiance, and offered them
secular priests instead of the Jesuits; but they took this for timidity
on the part of the government, and became only more emboldened. Twenty
years later, Recollect missionaries were sent to Bohol in place of the
expelled Jesuits, and in the district of Baclayon was stationed Fray
Pedro de Santa Barbara; he laid plans for reclaiming and reconciling
the insurgents, and was partially successful; Dagóhoy and several other
datos "returned to God and to the church" with their followers, several
hundred being baptized and making then confessions. Nevertheless,
they did not go much further, and although Bishop Espeleta endeavored
in person to secure their Christian administration, "he could not
secure from Dagóhoy any more than that he would build a church,
in order to comply with his Christian obligations; but, as he
was attracted by the lawless life which he had led during so many
years, and by the gratification of being obeyed, the undertaking was
delayed until the present time. Nothing was done save to erect the
foundation posts, which had to serve for the present church." This
last volume of Concepción's was published in 1792, and his later
information was obtained probably in 1789, in which year he wrote
this account. (Espeleta's last remonstrance with Dagóhoy was made,
as stated by our writer, "in the year sixty-two;" but the context
would indicate that it occurred after the labors of the Recollects
began, and therefore the date is more probably "seventy-two," the
word sesenta being printed for setenta, by one of the typographical
errors so frequent in Conception's pages.) Fray Pedro de Santa Barbara
was so delighted at his first success that he persuaded the civil
authorities to withdraw the troops from most of the Bohol stations,
and to publish a general amnesty (this was not later than 1770);
but the result was, that the insurgent chiefs would not allow any
of their followers to leave their strongholds under pain of death,
and continued their habits of raids on their neighbors, plundering,
and murder. Concepción expresses indignant surprise that this rebellion
had been allowed to go long unpunished, with so great loss and injury
to the peaceable part of the population.

[73] These ambassadors were: for Mindanao, Father Francisco Isasi,
rector of the Jesuit college at Zamboanga, and the sargento-mayor
there, Don Thomas de Arrevillaga. For Joló, Isasi was also designated;
but on his return from Tamontaca his health was so broken that in his
place was appointed Father Sebastian Ignacio de Arcada, then in charge
of the district of Siocon; he went thither accompanied by Arrevillaga,
having been sent by Juan Gonzalez de el Pulgar, then governor of
Zamboanga. (Concepción, Hist. de Philipinas, xii, pp. 75-106.)

[74] The missionaries appointed to the Mindanao mission were the
Jesuits Juan Moreno and Sebastian Arcada; but the latter was ill
at the time, and died soon afterward; in his place was substituted
Ignacio Malaga. See account of their mission in Concepción, xii,
pp. 110-112, 138-141.

Those who went to Joló were Juan Ang[e]les and Patricio de el Barrio;
they left Zamboanga on June 3, 1748, in company with Alimudin. For
account of their mission, see Concepción, xii, pp. 114-138;
he cites a diary and letters written by Father Angeles, and the
report of Commandant Pulgar. He blames the Jesuits (pp. 146, 147)
for misrepresenting the Moro sultans to the governor, and Pulgar (as
being under their influence) for an unnecessarily hostile attitude
toward the Moros.

[75] Concepción states (xii, p. 134) that Alimudin was so infatuated
for one of his concubines that he neglected his duties of government;
and that his brother Bantilan bribed a man to assassinate the sultan,
giving him six slaves and a thousand pesos.

[76] Ferrando speaks (Hist. PP. dominicos, iv, p. 535) of "this
sedition, actual or feigned (but on this point history has not made
its final utterance)."

[77] Forrest says (Voyage, p. 334) of Alimudin's visit to Samboangan:
"He bought goods from Don Zacharias the governor, giving the Don his
own price, made presents to the officers of the garrison, and lost
his money to them, as if accidentally, by gaming with dice. Still
resolved to ingratiate himself with the governor, the Sultan wanted
to make him a present of forty male slaves, whom he had drest in rich
liveries on the occasion. Many of them were natives of Papua or New
Guinea. Zacharias refused the presents, suspecting the Sultan of some
design. The Sultan then asked leave to go to Manila. He went thither,
and said to the archbishop, 'I will turn Christian, let the Spaniards
take Sooloo, send the stubborn Datoos to Samboangan; make me king
there, I then will oblige every one to embrace your religion.' The
Spaniards listened to him, and he returned to Samboangan with an
armada."

[78] See letter of the Jesuit Masvesi regarding this visit of the
Joloan ruler, in VOL. XLVII, pp. 243-250; also account of it (1750),
ascribed to Arrechedera, in Retana's Archivo, i, no. v.

[79] Ferrando says (iv, pp. 538, 539) that Arrechedera sent the sultan
to Binalatongan (in Pangasinan) for baptism; but that Alimudin was
taken ill at Paniqui, on his journey, and it was therefore decided
to baptize him there.

[80] This catastrophe, one of the most ruinous of its kind ever known,
occurred on October 28, 1746; Lima was wrecked by the earthquake,
and Callao destroyed by a tidal wave--in Lima, over 1,100 persons
perished, and in Callao 4,600. A detailed account of this event was
published at Lima by order of the viceroy, Marqués de Villa Garcia,
an English translation of which appeared in London (the second edition
in 1748); and other accounts were published in Lima and Mexico.

[81] See account of this controversy, the wretched condition in which
the royal ships and galleys were found to be, and the loss of the
"Pilar," in Concepción's Historia, xii, pp. 183-211; cf. Montero y
Vidal, Hist. de piratería, i, p. 291, note. The vessel known by the
names of "Rosarito" and "Philipino," which "had cost the royal treasury
60,666 pesos, had remained more than four years abandoned to the sun
and rain, without any care;" and it was now valued at 18,000 pesos,
a sum which, after more thorough examination of the rotting timbers,
was reduced to 7,500. The Spanish government had ordered that six
ships be at once constructed to proceed against the Moro pirates;
and it was therefore necessary to hasten this work, without waiting
for "red tape," hence Nebra's informal appointment. The "Pilar"
was not a fragata,  but a large ship; it sailed in June or July,
1750; its repairing and cleaning was so hastily done that the vessel
began to leak before it left the Luzón coast. The commander, Ignacio
Martinez de Faura, was notified of this, and that it was unsafe for
the vessel to proceed into the open sea; he answered, "To Purgatory,
or to Acapulco!" In the following October, pieces of wreckage were
picked up on the eastern coasts of Luzón, which were identified as
belonging to the "Pilar."

[82] "The secretary of the government, who, protected in that quarter
by the person who ought to have condemned his acts, pushed forward
his designs and finally effected his purpose" (Ferrando, iv, p. 548).

[83] "This [Dominican] province had already (in 1745) reported to
his Majesty that the beaterio of Santa Cathalina was maintained in
the form of observance provided by the royal decrees of February 17,
1716 and September 10, 1732; that it contained the fifteen religious
which it ought to have according to the arrangements of its founder;
that they observed the three vows of religious, according to the
enactment of St. Pius V, issued on 28 [sic] in 1566; and that, although
there had never been the slightest question raised on this point,
some uncertainties were beginning to present themselves regarding the
nature of their vows, and even whether dispensation from these could
be granted by the archbishop of Manila." Accordingly, the Dominicans
requested the royal decision on these matters; the king therefore
decreed (June 20, 1747) that a committee formed of the governor, the
archbishop, and the Dominican provincial, should carefully examine
into the best method of carrying out the previous decrees. They did
so, and, when their deliberations were laid before the royal fiscal,
he demanded that the vows taken by these beatas be declared opposed
to his Majesty's will. Sister Cecilia, as soon as she was placed in
Santa Potenciana, divested herself of the religious habit, claiming
that her profession was null--a claim which was irregular, "because
the five years had already passed which the laws and justice allow
for proceedings of this sort." When the papal delegate disallowed
the appeal of the Dominicans from the archbishop's attempted control
of this case, they appealed to the Audiencia for protection from the
fuerza exerted by the latter; but that court declined to interfere,
saying that there was no fuerza committed. The archbishop then
pronounced a definitive sentence in favor of Cecilia, and set her at
liberty; she then married Figueroa, and they went to Nueva España. The
Spanish government took no further notice of her case, save to refuse
to the Dominicans permission to lay it before the Holy See. (Ferrando,
iv, pp. 548-551)

[84] This was Don Protasio Cavezas.

[85] A minute account of this episode is found in Concepción's
Historia, xii, pp. 212-230. The lady's name was Cecilia Ita y
Salazar. She had been educated in the beaterio from childhood, and
had been a professed religious for sixteen years.

[86] "The royal decree issued in 1762 in consequence of the notorious
litigation of Mother Cecilia did not decide that the beaterio should
be extinguished, but only that new religious should not be admitted
until those then living, who numbered nearly thirty, should be reduced
to fifteen religious of the choir, in conformity with the provisions
of its foundation," "and that the number of the fifteen beatas should
be kept up, according to vacancies that might occur." (Ferrando, v,
p. 151).

[87] "The seizure of these champans was afterward the cause
of a clamorous lawsuit incited by various officers against the
master-of-camp Abad, accusing him of having kept for himself the best
part [of the goods seized]. It was also proved that he employed the
vessels of the royal navy in his mercantile speculations; this evil
was very general in that period, and to it must be attributed, in
large part, the scanty results of most of the expeditions against the
Mahometan Malays of southern Filipinas." (Montero y Vidal, Hist. de
piratería, i, p. 294.)

Another Chinese champan was seized by the Spaniards, apparently not
long afterward, near Malandi; it was laden with goods for trade
in Mindanao, which included a number of guns and other weapons,
with ammunition. These were confiscated by the Spaniards, an act
which was greatly resented by Jampsa, the sultan of Tamontaca, who
therefore abandoned the Spanish alliance and sided with the hostile
Moros. (Concepción, xiii, pp. 1-5.)

[88] This proceeding took place at midnight on August 3, and the
number arrested was 217 persons: these included Alimudin's four sons,
his brother and sister, four of his daughters, five brothers-in-law,
a son-in-law; a Mahometan jaddí ("the second rank in that sect,
equivalent to a bishop") and five panditas; also two prominent
chiefs, one hundred and sixty of the sultan's vassals, and thirty-two
concubines and female servants. (Montero y Vidal, Hist. de piratería,
i, p. 298.) Cf. Concepción, xii, pp. 288, 289.

[89] Alimudin and his household arrived as prisoners at Manila in
September, 1751. Soon afterward the Manila government declared war,
with fire and sword, against the Joloans and all those Moro peoples who
aided them; permitting the enslavement of all who should be captured,
whether men, women or children; and giving all their property and
possessions to their captors, free from all royal dues or imposts. See
copy of this proclamation in Montero y Vidal's Hist. de piratería,
appendix, pp. 29-31. Concepción (xii, p. 344) regards this declaration
of war as unjust; he adds that the Joloan captive princes, whose
arrest was incited by ambition and greed, were so unfortunate as
to lose their protector, Bishop Arrechedera, by death (November 12,
1751). In the same month died also Bishop Arevalo, of Nueva Caceres.

[90] Here, as most often elsewhere, "captives" are synonymous with
"slaves." Montero y Vidal (Hist. de piratería, i, p. 299) protests
against this permission to enslave the Moros, as being contrary
to the provisions of the laws of the Indias, which forbid slavery
in Philipinas.

[91] Concepción says (xii, pp. 345-352) that the master-of-camp in
command of the fleet (who was Antonio Ramón de Abad y Monterde) was
undecided whether to attack Joló, but was persuaded to do so by the
Jesuits, who told him that the very sight of the Spanish squadron
would ensure the surrender of the Joloans. The attack was made at
the beginning of June, 1752, and was unsuccessful; Abad was angry
at the Jesuits, who had led him into this difficulty, and quarreled
with them. They retorted by accusing him to the governor, of conduct
(in modern phrase) "unworthy of an officer and a gentleman"--that
is, of neglect of official duty, mismanagement of the campaign,
unnecessary sacrifice of his men's lives, and licentious behavior
at Zamboanga. This was believed, until Abad was reported much more
favorably by other officers of his fleet. See full account of his
residencia (ut supra, xiii, pp. 36-85), in which he was acquitted
from the charges made against him, but sentenced to pay the costs of
the residencia.

[92] These hostilities broke out in 1752, and for several years
scourged the unfortunate Visayans. Concepción records many of these
attacks in considerable detail (Hist. de Philipinas, xiii, pp. 5-36);
the missions of the Recollects, as also those of the Jesuits in
Mindanao (except those under the shelter of the fort at Zamboanga)
were the frontier outposts most exposed to the pirates, and it is
these missions that Concepción chiefly mentions. The fort at Iligan,
Mindanao, was besieged by two thousand Moros for two months; but a
Spanish fleet was sent from Cebú, which obliged the enemy to raise the
siege, after a great loss of men. This defense was conducted by the
Jesuit in charge there, Father José Ducós, whose father had been an
officer in the Spanish army; and this same priest rendered valiant
service in other Moro raids in that region. Tagoloan and Yponan,
in the province of Cagayan, Mindanao were besieged by the Moros;
but the mountain Indians were called down to their aid by the Jesuit
missionaries, and compelled the enemy to retreat. In Caraga, Surigao
was attacked, and the Christian inhabitants, with their two Recollect
missionaries, were compelled to take flight and seek refuge in the
mountains; they were hunted there for weeks by the enemy--one of
the priests being finally captured and taken to Lanao--all this time,
enduring terrible hardships and suffering, which caused the other (Fray
Roque de Santa Monica) to become hopelessly insane; he was afterward
brought to Manila, but died there in a demented condition. "The
district of Surigao, rich through its famous gold-mines, and now in
most wretched condition," was devastated and ruined. The enemy did the
same in the island of Siargao, where the Recollect missionary, Fray
Joseph de la Virgen de el Niño Perdido, was slain while endeavoring to
lead his followers against the pirates. Nearly all the population--of
Surigao, more than 2,000 souls; of Siargao, more than 1,600--were
either slain or carried away captive. The district of Butuan was laid
waste and some two hundred captives seized; the little military post
at Linao, up the river, alone escaped, mainly through the difficulty
of ascending the stream. The Moros attacked the island of Camiguin,
which was so bravely defended by its natives that the pirates were
repulsed--especially by "one of the villages, which consisted of people
of Moro origin from the Lake of Malanao, from which they had withdrawn
on account of domestic dissensions, and settled in this island. They
are of excellent disposition, very good Christians, courageous,
and have an irreconcilable hatred for those enemies." Here they were
led by their Recollect priest, Fray Marcelinc de el Espiritu Santo,
"a robust native of La Mancha," who with them fought so valiantly that
the enemy could not make a landing. Romblon had so good a fort that
it could repel the foe; Ticao was so poorly defended that the people,
with their missionary, Fray Manuel de Santa Cathalina, could only take
to flight--the priest being afterward captured, and finally ransomed
for eight hundred pesos. In several places the missionaries were
either slain or captured by the pirates; and these raids were extended,
the boldness of the enemy increasing, even to the coasts of Luzón, in
Batangas and Zambales. The government took what precautions it could,
but these amounted to little save in the vicinity of Manila, Cebú,
and Zamboanga; military and naval forces, and supplies of all sorts,
were deficient, and there was much official apathy and corruption.

[93] "This unfortunate attempt cost the treasury 36,976 pesos, and
a galley that was seized by the Moros" (Montero y Vidal, Hist. de
piratería, i, p. 301).

[94] "In Manila the indignation against the disloyal Ali-Mudin knew
no bounds. All clamored for the punishment of so ignoble a race,
sorrowfully recalling the fact that the amount expended in courting
him and in the expenses of his sojourn there was more than 20,000
pesos, without counting the 6,000 pesos and the military supplies
sent to establish the Jesuits in Joló" (ut supra, p. 299). Later,
the authorities at Manila hardly knew what to do with Alimudin; he
would probably have been put to death, but it was feared that the
Moros would retaliate by slaughtering their Christian captives, who
numbered some 10,000. Fatima procured the return (in the summer of
1753) of fifty-one Christian captives, and negotiations were made for
peace between Manila and Joló; and in June, 1754, Bantilan surrendered
sixty-eight more captives, and a Spanish galley and champan. Faveau,
who had carried on a brilliant campaign against the pirates with his
little squadron, made a favorable report to the governor of the good
intentions of both Bantilan and Alimudin; and stated that the return
of the latter to Joló was desired by his subjects, and that Bantilan
was willing to resign in his favor. Arandía sent most of the Joloan
prisoners back to that island, retaining the sultan and his eldest
son as hostages until the full accomplishment of the treaty; they
remained there until the capture of the city by the English (1762),
who afterward restored them to Joló (see VOL. XLIX). Ferrando (iv,
pp. 541-543) considers that Alimudin was unjustly suspected and
ill-treated, and defends him from accusations of disloyalty to the
Spaniards and to the Christian religion.

[95] "The Sultanship in Sooloo is hereditary, but the government
mixed. About fifteen Datoos, who may be called the nobility, make
the greater part of the legislature. Their title is hereditary
to the eldest son, and they sit in council with the Sultan. The
Sultan has two votes in this assembly, and each Datoo has one. The
heir-apparent (who, when I was there, was Datoo Alamoodine) if he
sides with the Sultan, has two votes; but, if against him, only
one. There are two representatives of the people, called Manteries,
like the military tribunes of the Romans. The common people of Sooloo,
called Tellimanhood, enjoy much real freedom, owing to the above
representation; but the Tellimanhood, or vassals of the adjacent
islands named Tappool, Seassee, Tawee-tawee, and others, being the
estates of particular Datoos, are often used in a tyrannical manner
by their chiefs. I have been told that their haughty lords visiting
their estates, will sometimes with impunity demand and carry off young
women, whom they happen to fancy, to swell the number of their Sandles
(Concubines) at Sooloo." (Forrest, Voyage, p. 326.)

[96] For detailed accounts of the events here briefly mentioned, the
Moro wars, the imprisonment of Alimudin, the ravages committed in the
islands by those pirates, etc., to the end of Ovando's government,
see Concepción's Hist. de Philipinas, xii, pp. 230-419, and xiii,
pp. 1-250. See also the account of the "Moro raids repulsed by Visayan
natives," ante; it is inserted mainly to represent more vividly, in
the words of a probable eyewitness, a typical raid by Moro pirates
on the peaceable Christian natives.

[97] To this name should be added, "Santisteban, Echeveria, y Alvero"
(Concepción, xiii, p. 250); he was a knight of the Order of Calatrava.

[98] See Concepción, Hist. de Philipinas, xiii, pp. 250-287, for
details of these reforms.

[99] See Concepción's account of this eruption (xiii, pp. 345-350);
it lasted from September to December, 1754 and was accompanied by
severe earthquakes, one of which lasted half an hour.

[100] Ignacio María de Alava, "Commander-in-chief of the naval forces
in Asiatic waters," was a personal friend of Zúñiga, to whom the latter
dedicated his Historia. In a preliminary notice to his Estadismo (p. 3
of Retana's ed.) he says that Alava desired to become acquainted with
the Philippines from various points of view, and invited the priest to
accompany him therein. Alava arrived at Manila on December 25, 1796,
and remained in the islands until January 7, 1803; he reorganized the
naval forces and the arsenal at Cavite, with much energy and ability,
but had various controversies with Governor Aguilar. Afterward he held
important posts in the Spanish naval administration, and died on May
26, 1815. See Retana's note concerning him (ut supra, ii, p. *562),
and Montero y Vidal's Hist. de Philipinas, ii, pp. 345-359.

[101] The exploits of this militant Jesuit are described by Concepción,
in Hist. de Philipinas, xiii, pp. 148-168, 178-188, 296-319.

[102] The name given her in baptism was Rita Calderón; the marriage
occurred on April 27, 1755. See Concepción, xiii, pp. 333, 334.

[103] "The people of Magindano, and their neighbours, known commonly
by the name of Oran Illanon, as living near the great Lano, are very
piratically inclined. Neither can the Sultan of Magindano restrain his
subjects from fitting out vessels, which go among the Philippines,
to Mangaio, that is, cruise against the Spaniards: much less can be
restrained the Illanos, being under a government more aristocratic;
for, on the banks of the Lano, are no fewer than seventeen, stiled
Rajahs, and sixteen who take the title of Sultan, besides those on the
coast. When the Spanish envoy sailed from Magindano for Samboangan,
Rajah Moodo sent a vessel, as has been said, to convoy him across
the Illano bay. This is a proof the Spaniards are not on good terms
with the Illanos. These, within ten years before 1775, have done
much mischief to the Spaniards, among the islands called Babuyan,
at the north extremity of the Philippines; and, at this time, they
possess an island in the very heart of the Philippines, called Burias,
where has been a colony of Illanos, for many years, men, women,
and children. The Spaniards have often attempted to dislodge them;
but in vain: the island, which is not very large, being environed
with rocks and shoals to a considerable distance." (Forrest, Voyage
to New Guinea, pp. 301, 302.)

[104] Fray Mateo González founded this mission to the Batanes. He made
his profession in 1667, and came to Manila four years later, being
then twenty-seven years old. He was sent to the Cagayán missions,
and was stationed in the Babuyanes Islands during 1673-84 (save in
1677-80, at Lallo-c). In 1686 he made a visit to the Batanes, where
he was well received; they contained over 3,000 souls. Leaving his
companion there to study the language, he went to Manila to secure
support for his new mission, to which he returned with Fray Juan Rois;
but hardly two months passed before the unhealthful climate and many
privations brought mortal illness on them. González died on July 25,
1688, and Rois on August 10, following. With this the Batanes mission
came to an end until (in 1718) it was revived by Fray Juan Bel. (Reseña
biográfica, ii, pp. 155-157.)

[105] "Action was taken in a session of the royal treasury officials
on the execution of the orders in a royal despatch which notified
this government to establish on the mainland of Cagayan the people
who were dwelling in the islands of the Babuyanes; for this purpose
the sum of five thousand, three hundred and ninety-eight pesos was
sent from the royal treasury of Mexico, definitely allotted to this
transportation. The migration was agreed upon, the money was spent,
but the only result was the transfer of some families, the greater part
of them remaining in their own islands--where, as they were accustomed
to that mode of life, they desired no further privileges than their
own liberty, even though it be with necessary inconveniences, which
they felt little or not at all, being free from the yoke since their
youth." (Concepción, Hist. de Philipinas, xi, p.304.)

Cf. Salazar's sketch of the history of these missions, in chapter
xxiii of Hist. Sant. Rosario (in our VOL. XLIII). See also, for both
early and later events therein, Ferrando's Hist. PP. dominicos, iii,
pp. 550-588, and iv, pp. 254-258, 330, 582-585.

Concepción (ut supra) does not mention the date of the royal decree;
but Ferrando states (iv, p. 423) that it was dated March 14, 1728,
and that it granted for this purpose the sum of 3,398 pesos; the "3"
may be a typographical error for "5," the amount as given (but spelled
out) by Concepción. Ferrando says that some three hundred families
removed to the mainland, but that many more remained in their islands.

[106] This is more fully described in the previous document, "Later
Augustinian and Dominican missions."

[107] See Ferrando's Hist. PP. dominicos, iv, pp. 576-582.

[108] Arandia made a census of the Christian Sangleys in the islands,
and found that they numbered 3,413. He established the market here
mentioned, that of San Fernando, at first intended to be simply a
pavilion in which trade might be carried on; the heathen merchants to
return immediately to their own country, without going inland from
Manila or having any dealings with the natives. But, as it was soon
apparent that the exigencies of weather and trade required larger and
more permanent quarters, Arandía had a plan made for the necessary
dwellings and storehouses, by a Recollect lay brother who was an
excellent architect (whom the governor had appointed superintendent
of royal works); and a contract for building it was made, at a cost
of 48,000 pesos. Half of this amount was contributed by a citizen of
Manila, Fernando de Mier y Noriega, the other half being supplied
from the royal treasury; as a reward for this service, he was made
warden of the new market, an office carrying a salary of fifty pesos
a month, and passing to his children and descendants. (Concepción,
xiii, pp. 357-360.) The king, however, restricted this privilege to
Mier's life.

[109] See Concepción's account of this enterprise (xiv,
pp. 167-171). The amount of capital raised was 76,500 pesos, in
shares of 500 each; with this, the company began to buy goods (ropas)
to supply the public necessities, and sold these in their own shops,
in each of which were two Spanish agents, no Sangley having anything
to do with these shops. It was planned that the company, having bought
goods at wholesale--they found that they could purchase thus at sixteen
per cent less than they paid for the same goods at retail--should
sell at only thirty per cent above the first cost; "of this [gain]
eight per cent must be paid to his Majesty to make up to the royal
treasury the deficiency arising from the loss of the licenses that
the infidels had paid; ten per cent went to the shareholders; and
the remaining twelve per cent was kept for the payment of salaries,
and for a public fund for the promotion of the industries and products
of the country." Their capital was found insufficient to make their
purchases; indeed, this lack had always been felt when the Sangleys
conducted the trade, but their industry had supplied it; the directors
therefore applied to the Misericordia and other administrators for
the loan of the reserve funds held in the obras pías. The latter were
at first disposed to aid the company, but later declined to do so,
following the advice of certain theologians whom they consulted. The
auditor Pedro Calderon Henriquez gave an opinion contrary to this,
saying that the obras pías had gained great profits through the
voluntary concession and tolerance of the citizens, who ought not
to be the only ones to make sacrifices for the public good; and that
"in these islands they had winked at the business transactions of the
confraternities, which are not carried on in other regions, on account
of the convenience which the merchants found in having money ready
for investment in their commerce." The governor therefore demanded
from the Misericordia 100,000 pesos of their reserve funds, and from
the Third Order (of St. Francis) 30,000; and with these funds the
company was for the time floated. (Among the advantages expected from
this enterprise were: lower prices than the Chinese asked for goods,
the same price the year round, the retention of all profits within the
country, and the certain support of the twenty-one families belonging
to the company's employ.) Another great hindrance was found in the
general practice of using clipped money in this trade, which caused
great losses. This and other difficulties caused the dissolution of
the company within the year, and it was unable to do more than save
the capital invested therein.

[110] Ferrando says (iv, pp. 587-591) that Arandía cut off from
the hospital of San Gabriel 800 pesos, out of the 2,000 which it
received from the communal fund of the Sangleys, for whose benefit
the hospital was founded; and this amount the Dominican province
was obliged, through motives of humanity, to make good from its own
treasury. Moreover, he insisted that the Augustinian provincial, Fray
Juan Facundo Meseguer, should reveal to him the private reasons which
he had for removing two of his friars from their charges in Indian
villages. This was in reality an attack on all the religious bodies,
who all resolved to make common cause on the governor, and forthwith
sent to the king a remonstrance against the governor's proceedings;
this checked Arandía, who desisted from his demands against Meseguer.

[111] Vindel's Catálogo, tomo i (Madrid, 1896), p. 94, cites from
Rezabal y Ugarte's Escritores de los seis colegios universitarios
(Madrid, 1805) mention of works left by Viana, existing in the archives
of the Council of Indias, among them "Ordinances for the government
of the Indian provinces of Filipinas." This, with the hostility which
his letters and other writings exhibit toward the religious orders,
indicates the possibility that Viana had some responsibility for the
instructions here mentioned by Zúñiga.

[112] According to Concepción (xiii, pp. 360-366), the tax here
referred to was a general one, called "the royal impost," an ad
valorem duty levied on all the products of the provinces, brought
in the coasting trade to Manila; it was established, in view of the
depleted condition of the royal treasury, for the maintenance of
the royal fleets against the pirates and the defense of the internal
commerce of the islands, and was exacted from all persons concerned,
without exempting any one, whatever his rank or estate. The Dominicans
were unwilling to pay this tax on certain commodities which they
were sending to their convents in Cagayan, alleging that these were
not commercial articles, and that they were exempt as a religious
body. This was of no avail, and their vessel was seized; but, either
through their representations at court or because Arandía had not
first asked the royal permission for this measure, it was censured
by the government and the duty removed.

[113] See Concepción's full account of this venture (xiv,
pp. 208-275). It will be remembered that Bustamante had attempted
in 1718 to open up commerce with Siam (VOL. XLIV, p. 152); but this
was a failure, through the apathy of the Spaniards. In the year
1747 a Siamese ship came to Manila with merchandise, and another
four years later; these were well received there, and allowed to
sell their goods free from duties. On the second ship came a Jesuit,
Father Juan Regis Aroche, as envoy from the king of Siam to establish
friendly relations with the Manila government; he proposed to Ovando
to send an expedition to Siam to build there a galleon, then needed
at Manila for the Acapulco trade. As the royal treasury had not the
funds for this, Ovando formed a stock company, with a hundred shares,
each of 300 pesos; 30,000 pesos were thus raised (said by the Jesuit
to be enough to build the ship)--"with the idea that afterward the
king [of España] would vouchsafe to buy it, and the gains would
be divided pro rata among the shareholders, whose profits would be
considerable even if the ship were sold at the usual and reasonable
price." Accordingly Captain Joseph Pasarin was sent to Siam (March 18,
1752), and made arrangements for the construction of the ship, which
was facilitated and aided by the king of that country; labor was there
abundant and cheap, yet the cost of the ship was much more than had
been planned, and not only was a second remittance made from Manila,
but the king furnished nearly 13,000 pesos besides. Pasarin set out on
his voyage to Manila with the new ship, but, when in sight of Bolinao,
a fierce storm drove the Spaniards back, and finally compelled them
to land in China. They went to Macao, refitted their damaged ship
(for which a wealthy Portuguese lent them, without interest, 20,516
pesos), and set sail for Manila on April 28, 1755; storms again
drove them from Bolinao, and they were compelled to put back to
Macao, and to remain there five months until the north winds should
subside; Simon Vicente de la Rosa again generously aided them with
5,000 pesos. Returning their voyage on December 12 of that year,
unfavorable winds again attacked them, and they were obliged to
make port in Batavia. (January 12, 1756). Here Pasarin fell sick,
and on his recovery found that the shipbuilder whom the Dutch had
detailed to repair the galleon had fled with certain goods which he
plundered from it, and twenty-eight of his seamen had deserted; at
last he secured a new crew, and reached Cavite on July 6, 1756. This
galleon was named "Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe," or "La Mexicana;" its
keel was 120 English feet long, and its capacity was 1,032 toneladas;
it was built entirely of teak; the entire cost of vessel, equipment,
and construction was 53,370 pesos. The king of Spain disapproved
the enterprise; and when the accounts of the company were settled,
it was found that they were still indebted to the extent of 9,520
pesos. The galleon was sold at public auction for 10,000 pesos.

[114] Concepción furnishes an interesting account (xiv, pp. 76-79) of
the abolition by Arandía of the "rotten borough" of Cebú. During the
term of Governor Arrechedera, he received a request from Juan Baraona
Velazquez, governor and chief magistrate of Cebú province, that in view
of the lack not only of regidors there but of citizens who could fill
that office, the governor should confer it on certain persons named
by him, among them two who were the only permanent (Spanish) settlers
there. Nevertheless, affairs soon returned to their former condition:
of the five persons thus appointed, one was long detained in Manila,
and one died; another was deprived of office for harsh treatment of the
headman of the Sangleys, and still another for failure to perform his
duties. "Thus, only the regidor Espina was left, and in him much was
deficient, if he were not actually incapable; for he could not read
or write, and his judgment was not very sound." Velazquez therefore
proposed that these offices be extinguished, and some suitable person
be appointed from Manila to assist him in ruling the province. Nothing
came of this, and his successor, Joseph Romo, applied to Arandía for
relief, saying that for two years no election of alcalde-in-ordinary
had been held, and the office was exercised by the regidor Pedro
Muñoz--the same who had ill-treated the Sangley--"of whom alone
that municipality was composed;" that the latter had obtained his
post only ad interim, and now refused to surrender it to Romo. "In
view of this report, Señor Arandía decided that these remnants of
the city should be abolished, leaving it with only the name of city,
and that it should be ruled by its chief magistrate, as alcalde-mayor
of the province; and in this wretched condition was left the first
city of this sphere, endowed with privileges by our Catholic kings,
and worthy of other and greater consideration. Its lack of citizens
transformed it into so dry a skeleton; and, although this measure was
provisional, necessity has made it perpetual." Buzeta and Bravo say
(Diccionario, i, p. 555) that since then Cebú had been governed by
a gobernadorcillo, like any native village; and at the end of that
same volume they give a table of the population of Cebú province in
1818, which shows that the ancient city of Santisimo Nombre de Jésus
contained no pure Spaniards, its population of 2,070 souls being all
native or Chinese except 233 Spanish mestizos. Its present population,
according to the late U. S. census, is 31,079--of whom 793 are natives
of China, 131 of America, and 168 of Europe.

[115] He had witnessed personally at Acapulco the careless, disorderly,
and even fraudulent manner in which this trade was carried on by the
Mexican merchants, who contrived to secure the advantage in every way
over those of Manila. He therefore imposed severe penalties on all who
on either side should practice frauds. He also appointed four of the
most distinguished of the citizens of Manila to register, apportion,
and appraise the goods sent thence; but the only result was that these
men took the best for themselves, and consulted their own profit; he
therefore revoked their commissions and sharply rebuked them. Arandía
also made many reforms in the management of the Acapulco ship, its
supplies, and its men, both on the sea and in port. (Concepción, xiv,
pp. 171-183.)

[116] Le Gentil and Marquina are cited by Montero y Vidal (Hist. de
Filipinas, ii, p. 14) to show that Arandia died by poison or other
violent means.

[117] His full name was Manuel Antonio Rojo del Río y Vieyra.

[118] At this point properly should come the documents which relate the
invasion of the islands by the English, their capture of Manila, the
consequent disturbances in the provinces, etc.; but the great length
of this episode, and the desirability of bringing all this material
together in one volume, induce us to place it all in VOL. XLIX,
completing this present volume with the noted memorial by the royal
fiscal Viana, written nearly a year after the evacuation of Manila
by the English.

[119] The title-page of this valuable MS. reads as follows:
"Demonstration of the deplorably wretched state of the Philipinas
Islands; the necessity of [either] abandoning them or maintaining
them with respectable forces, with the disadvantages of the first
and the advantages of the second; what the islands can produce for
the royal exchequer; the navigation practiced in their commerce,
and the extension and profits of the latter. With reflections,
which demonstrate the benefit of forming a company, under the royal
protection, in order to render the Spanish monarchy prosperous and
glorious, and to deprive its enemies of the gains by which they
are ruining it in both peace and war. By Don Francisco Leandro
de Viana, a student in the old college of San Bartholome el Maior
of the university of Salamanca; former rector of the same college;
graduated by the chapter of Santa Barbara in the aforesaid university;
a member of the Council of his Majesty; and his fiscal in this
royal Audiencia of Manila." It is followed by a letter addressed to
the governor of the islands, Francisco de la Torre, with the date
of March 20, 1765; this occupies eleven closely-written pages, and
serves the double purpose of an introduction to Viana's memorial and
of the official delivery of the document to the governor-general,
as the representative of his Majesty. This preface rehearses the
needy condition of the islands since the English invasion, entreats
the royal aid for these unfortunate vassals of Spain, and briefly
outlines the matter and arguments of the memorial. Vindel states
(Catálogo of 1896, p. 94) that the printing of this memorial was
forbidden by the Council of the Indias. It is of much importance,
not only as showing the condition and needs of the islands after the
English invasion, but for the light it throws on the condition of
Spain, her relations with the rest of Europe, and with her colonies,
and the national characteristics of her people. The memorial is here
presented in full, except a few passages which are briefly synopsized,
as they have but minor and indirect importance. Viana writes with
authority, as being royal fiscal of the islands, a man equipped with
the best learning of his day, and an ardent patriot.

The university of Salamanca originated in the cathedral school, before
the twelfth century; and in 1243 it was made a university under the
royal protection of Ferdinand the Saint, his son Alfonso X continuing
this aid, enlarging its scope, and granting it many privileges. Later
kings and several popes did much to aid and strengthen Salamanca, and
it became the greatest educational institution in Spain, and one of
the four greatest in the world; in 1584, it had 6,778 students. In
1401 Bishop Diego de Anaya Maldonado founded the first college
for poor students, which was called the college of San Bartolomé,
and later "the Old College." In 1845 Salamanca and all other like
institutions were secularized, and placed under the control of the
government. (Ramon Ruiz Amado, in the new and monumental Catholic
Encyclopedia, now in process of preparation.)

[120] "Since our entrance into this land, the Moorish [i.e., Mahometan]
following has been greatly increased--not only through the ordinary
traffic which the people of Macazar carry on in it; but because the
santons of Meca, proceeding by way of the strait of Moca, come to
Sumatra, and from there pass, by the strait of that island, to our
islanders, with a diabolical inclination; they bring Alcorans in
Arabic, and by means of these instruct our natives. A great number of
these books were seized in La Sabanilla, and I saw them in the hands
of Sargento-mayor Ponce, in the year 1724." (Torrubia, Dissertacion,
pp. 2, 3.)

[121] Probably referring to the Hudson's Bay Company, although that
was actually organized in 1670; and the explorations of 1746-47 here
mentioned evidently allude to the expedition of William Moor and
Henry Ellis in those years, "for discovering a Northwest Passage"--a
discovery for which the English parliament had offered a reward of
20,000 pounds. This expedition, however, was not under the auspices
of the company, whose officials, on the contrary, treated Moor and
Ellis with much harshness and even inhumanity.

[122] On maps of North America made in the first half of the eighteenth
century may be seen the great Mer d'Ouest, or "Western Sea," evidently
an exaggeration of Puget Sound, to which only the entrance had then
been discovered. The explorations of Martin Aguilar were made in
January, 1603, in partial conjunction with Sebastian Vizcaino, who
went along the California coast with two Spanish vessels, Aguilar
being in command of one of the ships. Bancroft (Northeast Coast, i,
p. 140-148) thinks that Aguilar went no farther than latitude 42°. The
Russians (under the lead of Vitus Bering) made various discoveries on
the Alaskan coasts before 1741, and afterward regularly hunted for
furs in Alaska, sending this commodity directly, and by a shorter
route, to China, where they carried on a highly profitable trade,
although they undersold the English merchants there (Bancroft, ut
supra, pp. 345, 346).

[123] This exploration by Fuente and Bernarda is regarded by most of
the authorities on this subject as being spurious. The account of
it first appeared in a London periodical (the Monthly Miscellany),
in 1708, and it is now supposed that it was simply a clever hoax. For
more circumstantial description of it, see Bancroft's Northeast Coast,
i, pp. 116-119; and Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America,
ii, pp. 462, 463.

[124] Probably referring to Ricard's Traité general du commerce,
of which a second edition was published at Amsterdam in 1705.

[125] In Spanish text, Cabo de Hornos, but there is no information
available to show whether this is simply a corruption of the Dutch
explorer's name (as seems more probable), or whether the Spaniards used
the name Hornos (meaning "ovens") through some accidental circumstance
or association. The first discovery of Cape Horn was made by Francisco
de Hoces, one of the ship-captains in Loaisa's expedition of 1525,
who was driven thither by contrary winds; but the cape was first
doubled from the east by the Dutch commander William Cornelisz
Schouten van Hoorn in 1616--accounts of this voyage being written
by both Van Hoorn and his companion Lemaire. (Winsor, Narrative and
Critical History of America, viii, pp. 384, 409-412.)

[126] For the text of Extracto historial, see VOLS. XXX, XLIV, and
XLV of this series.

[127] Marginal note by Viana.--"Don Miguel Gomes, who plays the
engineer in this town, calls for four thousand men in his new plan of
fortification. He regards the entire wall and its bastions as useless,
and, just as if there were no defenses, he plans for a fortification
[that would be] exceedingly costly, and of greater circuit or extent
than the present one. One does not need to be very skilful to adapt
to the site of Manila one of the many plans of fortification that
are contained in Belidor and other noted authors. The skill of an
engineer consists in being able to avail himself as far as possible
of a wall, correcting its irregular shape, and putting the place in
a condition of defense, with an obvious saving of expense, yet not
failing to observe the rules of fortification. One of these rules is,
to consider the number of men who can be maintained for its garrison,
and to proportion the bastions to the number of soldiers who are there
to defend them; but the said Don Miguel does not order his scheme by
this rule. On the contrary, he occupies much ground, and consequently
increases the number of bastions; these would remain undefended,
for lack of troops, a consideration which ought to induce him to
diminish the extent of the fort rather than extend it.

"On the other hand, it appears that all the bastions and the
curtain on the land side could be maintained as they are, without
more construction than that of the esplanades, ditch, covert-ways,
glacis, ravelins, etc.; for besides the wall, which is a good one,
and the bastions, which are apparently well flanked, it is easy to
inundate the entire locality, or reduce it to a mangrove thicket, so
that it will be impenetrable to the strongest enemy--who will not be
able to set up a battery, or to endure the fire from the fort while
they are clearing the field from obstructions.

"The curtain along the shore of the great Pasig River is a weak one,
but there is sufficient soil for strengthening it; and by inundating
the ground on the opposite shore of the said river the fortress will
be impregnable on that side. This inundation can be made in various
ways, but the safest one, in my opinion (although most expensive, on
account of the greater strength which must be given to the pillars)
would be to set flood-gates in all the arches of the great bridge,
and in the estuaries or rivers of Binondoc and Santa Cruz, in order
that the water might overflow (as it would without difficulty) the
entire locality; nor would the said inundation prevent the ingress of
provisions, which always come by water and not by land. The artillery
of the redoubt [fortin; it defended the bridge] and the fortress would
defend the said flood-gates, even though the inundation might permit
the enemy to approach in order to destroy them.

"The curtain on the seashore, which is exceedingly weak, and the
fortress or citadel of Santiago, which is in ruins, could be repaired
without so much cost as the new scheme presents; for we have already
seen that ships cannot demolish the fort. If to that advantage be
added the other of cutting a good ditch between the bay shore and
the wall, with its covert-way and some outpost battery, in order to
harass the said ships and hinder them from landing men, the town
could be made equally impregnable on that side--especially if the
fort be repaired and the corresponding bastions be constructed, in
order to flank well the said seashore curtain, as seems necessary. In
this manner the town could be well defended, with a great saving of
expense, and without the incredible cost which would be incurred by
carrying out the new plan of fortification which has been presented
by the aforesaid Gomes--regarding which I set forth what common sense
[la luz natural] dictated to me, in the expediente which was referred
to me by this superior government, proposing the measures of economy
which could be employed in any work whatever, with evident advantage
to the royal exchequer; since with five or six thousand pesos, which
will be the cost of forty thousand cavans of rice, six thousand
workmen can be maintained for a whole year."

[128] Forrest cites (pp. 307, 308) Valentyn to the effect that the
Mindanaos refused in 1689 to allow the Dutch to build a fort on
their land, although the latter offered a large sum of money for the
privilege; and that the sultan told other Dutchmen in 1694 that the
same request from the English had been likewise refused, although they
offered even more money. Valentyn therefore thought that Dampier had
been misled in his idea that the Mindanaos would make a treaty with
the English and allow them to settle.

[129] A phrase which recalls the well-known order by an American
railroad magnate, "charge all that the traffic will bear."

[130] The term situado was also applied, among other things, to the
increase (1590) of two reals on each tribute (see VOL. XIV, p. 247,
and XVI, p. 160). Torrubia explains this clearly in his Dissertacion,
pp. 95-98; and he makes the following statement about the fund of
"the fourths:" "The said father ministers are paid from the 'fourths'
of the eight reals which remain (and these are distinct from the
situado), and from the former the ministers were paid before the
increase of the tributes. The present method is, to collect the ten
reals, as the Ordinances provide, from each entire tribute; from
this two reals are taken for paying the soldiers, etc., and this is
called situado. After that, the fourth part of the eight reals (that
it, two reals) is taken out, and this it to pay the ministers--to
whom for every hundred tributes that are under their ministry are
paid twenty or twenty-five pesos (according to various customs of
provinces and tributaries, which it would be difficult to explain
at this time), with which sum the support assigned to the ministers
is completed. For this purpose was instituted the royal fund of
'fourths,' which is explained in the Recopilacion by ley 14, tit. 3,
lib. 1; for this fund the encomenderos of tributes who, on account
of being unbelievers, have no parish priest contribute (after having
paid the two reals of the situado, which amount is set apart and
separately administered) another two reals for every infidel tribute,
which is called the 'fourth' of the eight remaining reals; thus six
reals remain, which is the amount that has always been estimated
for the tribute. The destination of the money from the 'fourths'
was the support of hospitals and charitable funds; but such is not
now its use, because, thanks to God, all the tributes in encomiendas
are Christians. Accordingly, with those two reals of the 'fourths'
the encomiendas pay the ministers, and hand over the two reals of
the situado to the royal treasury for its fund allotted to troops,
etc. This is the usual arrangement, although in some villages and
encomiendas the procedure is somewhat different."

[131] Verecus (for biricús): meaning "sword-belts."

[132] Spanish, pandillas: one of its meanings is, "a party of persons
joined together for recreation in the country, or for mischief,"
which is quite equivalent to the Americanism "gang."

[133] Thus in the text (y vna mitad mas deloque yo regulo), but
evidently thus written by some oversight; for Viana certainly meant
to say here, as in other places (see allusion to the increase of the
tributes, in this and subsequent paragraphs), that the Mexican impost
was twice that which he was proposing to establish in Filipinas.

[134] On the margin of the MS. is the following note, written in a
different hand, probably by some official of the India Council, or
some friend of Viana's: "It was necessary to speak thus in a country
of ignorant ecclesiastics."

[135] Millones: "the voluntary impost which the kingdoms had granted
to the king, on the consumption of the six commodities of wine,
vinegar, oil, meat, soap, and tallow candles (see VOL. XLIV,
p. 299, note 91); it was renewed every six years." Sisas: "the
impost on food-stuffs, reducing the measure; a tribute reputed as
a nuisance--which, notwithstanding that, still exists under another
appellation." (Dominguez.)

[136] Marginal note by Viana.--"In the Royal Audiencia is pending the
expediente of the provincial ordinances, in which I have asked for
various things which are beneficial, and proper for good government."

[137] Marginal note by Viana.--"In the expediente for the regulation
of storehouses I explain what would be proper for checking the abuses
that are detrimental to the royal treasury, and present a plan for
the orderly management and accounts of all the towns and military
posts of these islands, and [records of] information about them."

[138] On the matter of ecclesiastical tithes in the Spanish colonies,
see Recopilación de leyes de Indias, lib. i, tit. xvi; laws xi and
xii declare that the Indians shall not be responsible for tithes,
but that the encomenderos shall pay these on what they receive from
the Indians as tribute. In the Philippines, the crown had from the
first made special provision for the support of the ecclesiastical
estate; and tithes were not exacted there.

[139] Presumably citing the Historia of Jacques Auguste de Thou
(the Elder), originally published in Latin at Paris, 1604-08, but
afterward appearing in many editions and translations. This book was
"the history of his own time," covering the period 1543-1607.

[140] An East India company formed in Denmark sent an expedition
in 1618, which formed a settlement in the state of Tanjour, India,
where the Danes built Tranquebar and Fort Dannebourg; for a time they
carried on a thriving trade, but the influence of the Dutch crowded
them aside in India, and the company finally surrendered its charter
and made over its settlements to the government. In 1670 a new company
was formed; but it was even more unfortunate than the first one, and,
having become bankrupt, was extinguished in 1730. Two years later,
another company was organized, which obtained a charter for forty
years, with many privileges, and this was extended (1772) for twenty
years. See Raynal's Établissemens et commerce des Européens dans les
Indes, i, pp. 548-566.

[141] For full account of the discoveries, wars and conquests
of the Portuguese in the East Indies, with accounts of India,
China, Japan, and of the people of those countries, see Raynal's
Établissemens et commerce des Européens dans les Indes (Genève, 1780),
i, pp. 1-150. At the end, he states "the causes which brought on the
ruin of the Portuguese in India." "This little nation, finding itself
the entire mistress of the richest and most extensive commerce in the
world, was soon composed of merchants, traders, and sailors, who were
consumed in long navigations. She lost also the foundation of all real
power--agriculture, national industry, and population; there was no
proportion between her commerce and the means of continuing it. Still
worse, she aimed at being a conquering power, and embraced an extent of
territory which no nation in Europe could preserve without weakening
itself. This little country, but moderately populous, was constantly
wasting its inhabitants as soldiers, as sailors, and as colonists." "As
the government soon changed its projects for commerce into schemes
for conquest, the nation, which had never possessed the spirit of
commerce, assumed that of brigandage. Clocks and watches, firearms,
fine cloths, and some other kinds of merchandise which since have
been carried to the Indias were not then at the degree of perfection
which they have since attained, and the Portuguese could only carry
money there. Soon they grew tired of this, and forcibly took away from
the Indians what they had at first purchased from those peoples." "Of
all the conquests which the Portuguese had made in the seas of Asia,
there now remain to them only Macao, part of the island of Timor,
Daman, Diu, and Goa. At present, Macao sends to Timor, to Siam, and
to Cochinchina a few small vessels of little value. It sends five or
six to Goa, laden with goods that were rejected at Canton, and most of
which belong to the Chinese traders. These latter ships carry return
cargoes of sandalwood, India saffron, ginger, pepper, linen goods,
and all the articles for which Goa can trade on the coast of Malabar or
at Surat with its sixty-gun ship, its two frigates, and its six armed
shallops. As a result of this inaction, the colony cannot furnish more
than three or four cargoes a year for Europe; and the value of these
does not exceed 3,175,000 livres, even since 1752, when this commerce
ceased to be under the yoke of monopoly,--excepting its sugar, snuff,
pepper, saltpeter, pearls, sandalwood, and eaglewood, the exclusive
purchase and sale of which is carried on by the crown." "Such is
the degraded state into which the Portuguese have fallen in India,
[that people who furnished] the hardy navigators who discovered it,
the intrepid warriors who subjugated it. The theater of their glory
and opulence, it has become that of their ruin and disgrace. Formerly a
viceroy, and since 1774 a governor-general, both despotic and cruel; a
military force turbulent and undisciplined, composed of 6,276 soldiers,
black or white; magistrates whose venality is notorious; an unjust
and rapacious administration: can all these kinds of oppression,
which would ruin even the most virtuous people, regenerate a nation
that is idle, degraded, and corrupt?"

[142] The English jurist John Selden published (London, 1635) a work
that attracted great attention, entitled Mare clausum seu de dominio
maris libri duo. A later edition (1636) added to this a considerable
amount of matter relating to the navigation rights of the Dutch.

The Macanaz mentioned by Viana in several places was probably Melchor
Rafael de Macanaz, a fiscal of Castilla early in the eighteenth century
(Revue Hispanique, vi, p. 455).

[143] At the foot of the MS. page is written the following comment,
in the same hand as that mentioned ante, p. 249, note 130: "The author
agrees to this opinion, which is contrary to his own, through fear
of ignorant and angry ecclesiastics."

[144] Spanish, como en un Presidio, alluding to the custom of banishing
a political offender to some remote military post, from which escape
was, of course, practically impossible.

[145] In the text, vicias, a word which does not appear (save as
a botanical term) in the Spanish dictionaries; its translation,
therefore, is necessarily conjectural.

[146] An alloy of copper and nickel, known as "white copper" and
"German silver," and to the Chinese as Packfong and petong.

[147] The Dictionnaire universel de commerce of Jacques Savary des
Bruslons was published at Paris, 1723-30; it had numerous editions,
and was translated into English (London, 1751-55).

[148] In text, capingotes; this word is not in the dictionaries,
and suggests the blunder of some amanuensis in confusing capirotes
and redingotes.

[149] Manungal (Samadera indica): "the wood is used in making cups
which turn liquid placed in them bitter; the bitter substance has
certain medicinal properties." (Official Handbook of the Philippines,
p. 353.) Blanco (who named this tree Manungala, but later Niota) says
that this bitter principle is successfully used in cholera morbus;
and Montero y Vidal (Archipiélago filipino, p. 77), that "it was as
efficacious as Peruvian bark in fevers." In the same work (pp. 389,
391) manungal is, apparently by some oversight, identified with the
macabuhay (Tinospora), which latter name is also applied, according
to Merrill's Dictionary of Plant Names (p. 76) to Lunasia amara.

[150] In this connection should be cited the account of the Ceylon
cinnamon published by Forrest in his Voyage to New Guinea, pp. 338-349;
it was "communicated by the chief inspector of the Cinnamon Trade,
and Manufacturer in that Island, to Albertus Seba, a noted Druggist at
Amsterdam. Translated by the late Dr. Scheucher; F. R. S." Some notes
on the medicinal uses of the leaves are added by Seba, and there is
an engraving illustrating the appearance of the leaves, of which nine
are represented, presumably those of the nine different varieties of
cinnamon which are enumerated in the inspector's description. Of these
but one is mentioned as having a glutinous character, and that seems
to be one of the sorts inferior in quality. Some of these varieties
are said to yield "camphire" [i.e., camphor].

[151] The map of Mindanao made by Norton Nicols, here reproduced, is
accompanied by the following inscription: "The island of Mindanao,
whose inhabitants are the fatal enemies of our holy Catholic faith
and who, together with the islanders of Jolo, cause the horrible ruin,
martyrdoms, and thefts in the other islands belonging to his Catholic
Majesty, which have cost him so huge a sum of money, and so much blood
of his faithful vassals, the Indians, although as yet fruitlessly. Said
island is about 150 leguas away from Manila, and about 23 from Jolo. It
lies between six degrees nine minutes and nine degrees one minute,
north latitude, a distance of 44 leguas from north to south. East
and west it extends 128 1/3 leguas. Its most western point is 127
degrees 17 minutes east of Cadiz, which counting 20 leguas per degree,
amounts to 2,555 2/3 leguas. Reckoning 15 degrees of longitude, for
each hour of time, there is a time difference of 8 hours, 31 minutes,
8 seconds, so that 12 o'clock in the day here is 8 seconds 31 minutes
past 8 at night there.

[This map is drawn on a scale of 20 Spanish leguas to 6 cm., and the
size of the original MS. map is 41 × 27 cm.]

[152] A parallel case: "Before 1744, the Philippines had not beheld on
their fertile soil the growth of any of our [European] vegetables. At
that time, Mahé de Villebague carried thither seeds of them, and
all these useful plants had prospered, when, eight months later,
the cultivator, whom the interests of his business called to go
elsewhere, left his garden to another Frenchman, who was settled in
these islands. The Spaniards, who could not see without jealousy that
a foreigner should point out to them the path which they ought to have
entered two centuries ago, rose against the inheritor of his cares,
with so much violence that, in order to restore peace, the authorities
felt constrained to order that these wholesome plants be torn up by the
roots. Fortunately the Chinese, who are continually occupied with what
can contribute to their own success, secretly preserved the plants. By
degrees the people became accustomed to an innovation so beneficial;
and this [sort of] cultivation is now one of the chief resources of
the colony." (Raynal, Établissemens et commerce des Européens, i,
pp. 607, 608.)

[153] Regarding this company, see VOL. XLV, pp. 45-50.

[154] In this series the only mention of German trade in the Orient
has been contained in one or two slight allusions. The following
note on this subject is kindly furnished us by Asa Currier Tilton,
late of the historical department of the University of Wisconsin,
and now one of the staff of the Wisconsin State Historical Library.

Germany and the search for the sea-route to India.--Germany was
concerned in the explorations of the Portuguese and Spaniards because
of her close commercial relations with those nations. The Fuggers,
Welsers, and other great mercantile houses had important trade and
financial relations with Spain and Portugal, and were thus able
to secure the right to participate in the India trade. The first
occasion when they took part in an expedition was in 1505-06, when
Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy, was sent out. The following
works furnish general information on this phase of the discoveries,
and also contain bibliographical material which indicates the sources
for more detailed information:

General works: Heyd, Geschichte des Levantehandels in Mittelalter
(Stuttgart, 1879), 2 vols.; this has also been translated into
French, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-âge (Leipzig,
1885-86), 2 vols. Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen
(Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1858). Sachse, Pennsylvania: the German
influence in its settlement and development; part 1, "The Fatherland,
1450-1700"--published in Proceedings and Addresses of the Pennsylvania
German Society, vol. viii (1897).

On the Fuggers and Welsers: Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger
(Jena, 1896), 2 vols. Häbler, Die Geschichte der Fuggerschen Handlung
in Spanien (Weimar, 1897); and Die überseeischen Unternehmungen
der Welser und ihrer Gesellschafter (Leipzig, 1903). Hautzsch, Die
überseeischen Unternehmungen der Augsburger Welser (Leipzig, 1895),
a dissertation. Tagebuch des Lucas Rem aus den Jahren 1494-1541:
Beitrag zur Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Augsburg; "mitgetheilt mit
erläuternden Bemerkungen, und einem Anhange von noch ungedruckten
Briefen und Berichten über die Entdeckungen des neuen Seewegs nach
Amerika und Ostindien versehen, von B. Greiff"--published  (Augsburg,
1861) in Jahresberichte 26 of the "Historische Kreisverein" in the
jurisdiction of Schwaben and Neuburg; (the appendix contains documents
from the collection of Dr. Conrad Peutinger); Rem was an agent of
the Welsers, and represented them at Lisbon and in Spain.

On the expedition of Francisco d'Almeida: Kunstmann, Die Fahrt
der ersten Deutschen nach dem Portugiesischen Indien (München,
1861). Balthasar Springers Indienfahrt, 1505-06, "wissenschaftliche
Würdigung der Reiseberichte Springers zur Einführung in den Neudruck
seiner Meerfahrt vom Jahre 1509, von Franz Schulze" (Strassburg,
1902); Springer went on the expedition as one of the agents of
the German merchants. The Voyage from Lisbon to India, 1505-06,
"being an account and journal by Albericus Vespuccius; translated
from the contemporary Flemish, and edited" by C. H. Coote (London,
1894); this is shown by Harrisse to be nothing but a corrupt Flemish
version of Springer's account; and Vespuccius had nothing to do with
this voyage. Harrisse, Americus Vespuccius (London, 1895); besides
showing the true character of Coote's book, this work contains valuable
notes on the German connection with the discoveries.

[155] This work (Turin, 1724-30) was written by Alvaro J. A. I. de
Navia Osorio y Vigil Argüelles de la Rua, Marqués de Santa Cruz de
Marcenado and Visconde del Puerto. He also wrote Comercio suelto,
y en compañias, general y particular en Mexico, Perú y Filipinas,
etc. (Madrid, 1732).

[156] For identifications of these various woods, see VOLS. XII,
p. 245 (molave), and XVIII, pp. 169-173. Tangili is the Tagálog
name for various trees of the genera Dipterocarpus and Shorea,
(of the same natural order). "Teak" is a corruption of the Malabar
name for the tree known to botanists as Tectona grandis. According to
Official Handbook (p. 356), it "exists in Mindanao, and said to exist
in Negros." Blanco gives (Flora, p. 93), the following interesting
account of its habitat: "The only teak tree of which I have first-hand
knowledge is the one which exists in the village of Tanay, in Laguna
de Bahi [i.e., Bay]. Formerly there were two, and they were planted by
a Franciscan priest; it is not known whence the seed came. The Tanay
people call it ticla.... It is common in some provinces of Visayas,
in Negros Island, Zambales, Mindanao, and Butuan, as has recently
been ascertained. The tree whose flowers I have seen is in Tanay,
and has waited twenty-three years to bloom."

[157] See VOL. XVIII, p. 177. The term is applied (Official Handbook,
p. 332) to the sheaths, or fibers surrounding the leaf-stems, of a
species of palm, Caryota urens.

[158] Representación al Rey ... dirigida al mas seguro aumento del real
erario (Madrid?, 1732), by Miguel de Zavala y Auñon. It is of interest
to note that Viana must have been related to Zavala, since his name, in
full, was Francisco Leandro de Viana Zavala Vehena Saenz de Villaverde;
he was afterward made Conde de Tepa and Marqués de Prado Alegre.

[159] Cacao is found throughout the archipelago; large quantities
of cacao of excellent quality are produced in southern Mindanao and
the district of Davao. The native product commands a better price
than that imported from Singapore. Coffee is found throughout the
islands; the best quality is grown in Batangas. (Official Handbook,
p. 303.) Montero y Vidal says (Archipiélago Filipino, p. 61) that
the islands produce cacao equal in quality to that of Caracas, and
coffee that is superior in some respects to that of Mocha.

See Jagor's account of cacao in the Philippines, its history, culture,
and preparation, in his Reisen, pp. 76-81.

[160] Marginal note by Viana.--"At this very time, men are obtaining
in this bay many of the said shells, and some pearls of good luster."

[161] Marginal note by Viana.--"The mulberry trees yield wonderfully
in these islands, and, by making suitable plantations of them, and
bringing silkworms from China, [the production of] this valuable
article of commerce can be promoted."

[162] Narra is the native name of the valuable timber trees in the
genus Pterocarpus, especially P. indicas; it is sometimes called
"the mahogany of the Philippines." The species alluded to by Viana is
probably P. Blancoi, called apálit by the Pampangos; "the decoction
of the wood is nephritic" (Official Handbook).

Catbalonga (pepitas de San Ignacio) is one of the native names tor
Strychnos Ignatii, one of the species from which the drug strychnine
is obtained. See Jagor's interesting note on this plant (Ignatia
amara, L., or Strychnos Ignatii, Berg.) in his Reisen, pp. 213, 214;
he says that it is used (under the name pepita de Catbalonga) as a
household remedy in many families in Filipinas, and is regarded by
the superstitious as a charm against poisons of all kinds.

[163] Neither Blanco nor Merrill mentions the rhubarb (Rheum) as a
product of the Philippines, although the former describes a tree the
soft wood of which, when chewed, has purgative properties similar
to those of rhubarb; but he did not see the tree itself, which grew
in the province of Laguna. Calinga is the native name of Cinnamomum
pauciflorum.

[164] "On account of the English invasion, it was positively prohibited
that foreign vessels should land at Filipino ports. This prohibition,
and that imposed in the royal decree of 1593--which provided that no
merchant of Manila should send his vessels to China, or go there to
purchase his goods directly--were superlatively absurd, mischievous,
and impolitic; for this constituted a [special] privilege in favor
of the Chinese, who, when they appeared in the port of Manila once
a year in their clumsy champans, secured for lack of competition
a considerable increase in the prices for their merchandise, the
valuation placed on the goods not being sufficient to diminish the
monopoly which they enjoyed on those articles." This stupid procedure
not only kept the Spaniards from competing with foreigners in the
markets of India and China, thus surrendering all that commerce and
its advantages to the latter; but these, especially the English and
French, took advantage of the Chinese monopoly of trade with Manila by
sending thither cargoes of their goods under the flag of some Asiatic
country; some Armenian or Moor would act as owner of the vessel,
the real captain or agent being ostensibly an interpreter. (Montero
y Vidal, Hist, de Filipinas, ii, pp. 120, 121.)

On one occasion Viana tried to stop this by demanding that the
Audiencia punish severely the Frenchmen who were selling their cargoes
in Manila, in open and reckless violation of the royal decrees; but
that tribunal declined to do more than notify the Frenchmen that a
repetition of the offense would be severely punished--on the ground
that a lawsuit brought against them and the buyers of the goods would
involve nearly all the citizens of Manila, the religious corporations,
and various dignitaries. (Azcarraga y Palmero, Libertad de comercio,
pp. 115, 116.) Azcarraga was a Filipino.

[165] Referring to the book by this author entitled Theorica y
practica de comercio y de marina (Madrid, 1724), an important work,
which was translated into English (1751) and French (1753). Two of
the chapters have the following titles: "Of the commerce which can
be carried on in the Eastern Indias, by availing ourselves of the
shelter and assistance of Filipinas;" and "Of the commerce with
Filipinas." (Vindel's Catálogo, 1903, p. 276.)

[166] Spanish, testas de fierro (in modern form, testaferros); meaning
"those who lend their names to a contract, claim, or other business
when it belongs to another person" (Dominguez).

[167] Referring to the town of Nuevo Santander, near the eastern coast
of Mexico; it was founded in 1749 by José de Escandon, a Spanish
officer, who in that year conquered and colonized the province of
Tamaulipas. This town is on the Santander River, about 120 miles
north of Tampico, and is now the capital of the province.

[168] St. Helena Island, famous as the place of Napoleon's last
exile. The British government has withdrawn (October 27-29, 1906)
the military forces there.

[169] Bancroft states (Hist. Central America, ii, pp. 246-250) that
the first project for an interoceanic canal across the Isthmus of
Panama was broached probably by Charles V, who ordered that a survey
be made of the ground and estimates of the cost of such route be made;
this was done in 1534, and the scheme appeared so costly that it could
not be undertaken. The first road across the isthmus was made about
1520. By the middle of the century Panama had become the most important
city of America, and was the seat and channel of untold wealth; it was
the object of attack, more than once by the enemies of Spain and by
pirates, and before 1671 (when Old Panama was burned) it was four times
sacked and partially destroyed. By the end of the sixteenth century
the importance and population of this city had greatly declined,
for various reasons: the depredations of buccaneers; the diminishing
receipts of treasure from the mines of both North and South America,
and the consequent decline of commerce; the unhealthful climate; and,
most important of all, the unwise and short-sighted restrictions
imposed on commerce by the Spanish government. Portobello also
became a rival of Panama in 1597, when it was made a port of entry
in place of Nombre de Dios. Destroyed by buccaneers in 1671, Panama
was immediately rebuilt in a more salubrious location, and fortified
so that it was regarded as impregnable. Until 1718 the provinces
of the isthmus were subject to the viceroy of Peru, and then were
incorporated with the kingdom of Nueva Granada. After 1748 Spain had
but little intercourse with her South American colonies except via
Cape Horn, the despatch of fleets to the isthmus was discontinued;
its commerce became insignificant; and Panama became of but slight
importance. (Ut supra, pp. 390-403, 464-481, 517-542, 570-594.)






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Robert Louis Stevenson

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Title: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Posting Date: June 25, 2008 [EBook #43]
Release Date: October 31, 1992
Last Updated: September 14, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE ***










THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

by Robert Louis Stevenson




STORY OF THE DOOR


Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never
lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward
in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.
At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something
eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never
found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent
symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts
of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone,
to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had
not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved
tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high
pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity
inclined to help rather than to reprove. “I incline to Cain’s heresy,”
 he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own
way.” In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last
reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of
downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his
chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.

No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative
at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar
catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his
friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was
the lawyer’s way. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom
he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of
time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt the
bond that united him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the
well-known man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these
two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common.
It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks,
that they said nothing, looked singularly dull and would hail with
obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put
the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel
of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but
even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them
uninterrupted.

It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a
by-street in a busy quarter of London. The street was small and what
is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the weekdays. The
inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed and all emulously hoping to
do better still, and laying out the surplus of their grains in coquetry;
so that the shop fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of
invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it
veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage,
the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a
fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished
brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught
and pleased the eye of the passenger.

Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east the line was
broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point a certain
sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It
was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower
storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore
in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The
door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered
and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the
panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried
his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one had
appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages.

Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the by-street; but
when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and
pointed.

“Did you ever remark that door?” he asked; and when his companion had
replied in the affirmative. “It is connected in my mind,” added he,
“with a very odd story.”

“Indeed?” said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of voice, “and what
was that?”

“Well, it was this way,” returned Mr. Enfield: “I was coming home from
some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black
winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was
literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street and all the
folks asleep--street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession
and all as empty as a church--till at last I got into that state of mind
when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a
policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was
stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe
eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross
street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at
the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man
trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the
ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t
like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a few halloa,
took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where
there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was
perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly
that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had
turned out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for
whom she had been sent put in his appearance. Well, the child was not
much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones; and there
you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious
circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So
had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case
was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no
particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as
emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every
time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white
with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew
what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next
best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this
as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If
he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them.
And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the
women off him as best we could for they were as wild as harpies. I never
saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle,
with a kind of black sneering coolness--frightened too, I could see
that--but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. `If you choose to
make capital out of this accident,’ said he, `I am naturally helpless.
No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he. `Name your figure.’
Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family; he
would have clearly liked to stick out; but there was something about the
lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. The next thing was
to get the money; and where do you think he carried us but to that place
with the door?--whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back
with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on
Coutts’s, drawn payable to bearer and signed with a name that I can’t
mention, though it’s one of the points of my story, but it was a name at
least very well known and often printed. The figure was stiff; but the
signature was good for more than that if it was only genuine. I took the
liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the whole business looked
apocryphal, and that a man does not, in real life, walk into a cellar
door at four in the morning and come out with another man’s cheque for
close upon a hundred pounds. But he was quite easy and sneering. `Set
your mind at rest,’ says he, `I will stay with you till the banks open
and cash the cheque myself.’ So we all set off, the doctor, and the
child’s father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of the
night in my chambers; and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in
a body to the bank. I gave in the cheque myself, and said I had every
reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was
genuine.”

“Tut-tut,” said Mr. Utterson.

“I see you feel as I do,” said Mr. Enfield. “Yes, it’s a bad story. For
my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable
man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the
proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your
fellows who do what they call good. Black mail I suppose; an honest man
paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail
House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence. Though
even that, you know, is far from explaining all,” he added, and with the
words fell into a vein of musing.

From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather suddenly: “And
you don’t know if the drawer of the cheque lives there?”

“A likely place, isn’t it?” returned Mr. Enfield. “But I happen to have
noticed his address; he lives in some square or other.”

“And you never asked about the--place with the door?” said Mr. Utterson.

“No, sir: I had a delicacy,” was the reply. “I feel very strongly about
putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of
judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit
quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others;
and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of)
is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to
change their name. No sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks
like Queer Street, the less I ask.”

“A very good rule, too,” said the lawyer.

“But I have studied the place for myself,” continued Mr. Enfield. “It
seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in
or out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my
adventure. There are three windows looking on the court on the first
floor; none below; the windows are always shut but they’re clean. And
then there is a chimney which is generally smoking; so somebody must
live there. And yet it’s not so sure; for the buildings are so packed
together about the court, that it’s hard to say where one ends and
another begins.”

The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then “Enfield,”
 said Mr. Utterson, “that’s a good rule of yours.”

“Yes, I think it is,” returned Enfield.

“But for all that,” continued the lawyer, “there’s one point I want to
ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child.”

“Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do. It was a
man of the name of Hyde.”

“Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What sort of a man is he to see?”

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his
appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I
never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be
deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I
couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet
I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of
it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I
can see him this moment.”

Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and obviously under a
weight of consideration. “You are sure he used a key?” he inquired at
last.

“My dear sir...” began Enfield, surprised out of himself.

“Yes, I know,” said Utterson; “I know it must seem strange. The fact is,
if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is because I know
it already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been
inexact in any point you had better correct it.”

“I think you might have warned me,” returned the other with a touch of
sullenness. “But I have been pedantically exact, as you call it. The
fellow had a key; and what’s more, he has it still. I saw him use it not
a week ago.”

Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the young man
presently resumed. “Here is another lesson to say nothing,” said he. “I
am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to
this again.”

“With all my heart,” said the lawyer. “I shake hands on that, Richard.”




SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE


That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre
spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a
Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume
of some dry divinity on his reading desk, until the clock of the
neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go
soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night however, as soon as the
cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his business
room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a
document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll’s Will and sat down with
a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr.
Utterson though he took charge of it now that it was made, had refused
to lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided not only
that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D.,
F.R.S., etc., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his
“friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,” but that in case of Dr. Jekyll’s
“disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three
calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry
Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or
obligation beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the
doctor’s household. This document had long been the lawyer’s eyesore. It
offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary
sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest. And hitherto it
was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by
a sudden turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the
name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when
it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the
shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there
leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.

“I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper
in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.”

With that he blew out his candle, put on a greatcoat, and set forth in
the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine, where his
friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding
patients. “If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon,” he had thought.

The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was subjected to no stage
of delay, but ushered direct from the door to the dining-room where
Dr. Lanyon sat alone over his wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper,
red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a
boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up
from his chair and welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was
the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed
on genuine feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at
school and college, both thorough respectors of themselves and of each
other, and what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each
other’s company.

After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject which so
disagreeably preoccupied his mind.

“I suppose, Lanyon,” said he, “you and I must be the two oldest friends
that Henry Jekyll has?”

“I wish the friends were younger,” chuckled Dr. Lanyon. “But I suppose
we are. And what of that? I see little of him now.”

“Indeed?” said Utterson. “I thought you had a bond of common interest.”

“We had,” was the reply. “But it is more than ten years since Henry
Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in mind;
and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for old
sake’s sake, as they say, I see and I have seen devilish little of the
man. Such unscientific balderdash,” added the doctor, flushing suddenly
purple, “would have estranged Damon and Pythias.”

This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to Mr. Utterson.
“They have only differed on some point of science,” he thought;
and being a man of no scientific passions (except in the matter of
conveyancing), he even added: “It is nothing worse than that!” He gave
his friend a few seconds to recover his composure, and then approached
the question he had come to put. “Did you ever come across a protege of
his--one Hyde?” he asked.

“Hyde?” repeated Lanyon. “No. Never heard of him. Since my time.”

That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried back with him
to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro, until the small
hours of the morning began to grow large. It was a night of little ease
to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and beseiged by questions.

Six o’clock struck on the bells of the church that was so conveniently
near to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was digging at the
problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but
now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay
and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room,
Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted
pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal
city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child
running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut
trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he
would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming
and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be
opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and
lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and
even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in
these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he
dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping
houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to
dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every
street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the
figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had
no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus
it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer’s mind a
singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the
features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once set eyes on him, he
thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as
was the habit of mysterious things when well examined. He might see a
reason for his friend’s strange preference or bondage (call it which you
please) and even for the startling clause of the will. At least it would
be a face worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of
mercy: a face which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of
the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.

From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the
by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon when
business was plenty, and time scarce, at night under the face of
the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or
concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post.

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry night; frost in
the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor; the lamps, unshaken
by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light and shadow. By ten
o’clock, when the shops were closed the by-street was very solitary and,
in spite of the low growl of London from all round, very silent. Small
sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly
audible on either side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach
of any passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some
minutes at his post, when he was aware of an odd light footstep drawing
near. In the course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed
to the quaint effect with which the footfalls of a single person, while
he is still a great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast
hum and clatter of the city. Yet his attention had never before been so
sharply and decisively arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious
prevision of success that he withdrew into the entry of the court.

The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as they
turned the end of the street. The lawyer, looking forth from the entry,
could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with. He was small and
very plainly dressed and the look of him, even at that distance, went
somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination. But he made straight
for the door, crossing the roadway to save time; and as he came, he drew
a key from his pocket like one approaching home.

Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the shoulder as he passed.
“Mr. Hyde, I think?”

Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But his fear
was only momentary; and though he did not look the lawyer in the face,
he answered coolly enough: “That is my name. What do you want?”

“I see you are going in,” returned the lawyer. “I am an old friend of
Dr. Jekyll’s--Mr. Utterson of Gaunt Street--you must have heard of my
name; and meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might admit me.”

“You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home,” replied Mr. Hyde,
blowing in the key. And then suddenly, but still without looking up,
“How did you know me?” he asked.

“On your side,” said Mr. Utterson “will you do me a favour?”

“With pleasure,” replied the other. “What shall it be?”

“Will you let me see your face?” asked the lawyer.

Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some sudden
reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair stared
at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. “Now I shall know you
again,” said Mr. Utterson. “It may be useful.”

“Yes,” returned Mr. Hyde, “It is as well we have met; and apropos, you
should have my address.” And he gave a number of a street in Soho.

“Good God!” thought Mr. Utterson, “can he, too, have been thinking
of the will?” But he kept his feelings to himself and only grunted in
acknowledgment of the address.

“And now,” said the other, “how did you know me?”

“By description,” was the reply.

“Whose description?”

“We have common friends,” said Mr. Utterson.

“Common friends,” echoed Mr. Hyde, a little hoarsely. “Who are they?”

“Jekyll, for instance,” said the lawyer.

“He never told you,” cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of anger. “I did not
think you would have lied.”

“Come,” said Mr. Utterson, “that is not fitting language.”

The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment, with
extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and disappeared into
the house.

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of
disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every
step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental
perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a
class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave
an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had
a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of
murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky,
whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against
him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown
disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.
“There must be something else,” said the perplexed gentleman. “There
is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man
seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be
the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul
that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The
last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s
signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

Round the corner from the by-street, there was a square of ancient,
handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate
and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men;
map-engravers, architects, shady lawyers and the agents of obscure
enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still
occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of
wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for
the fanlight, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A well-dressed, elderly
servant opened the door.

“Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?” asked the lawyer.

“I will see, Mr. Utterson,” said Poole, admitting the visitor, as he
spoke, into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall paved with flags,
warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by a bright, open fire,
and furnished with costly cabinets of oak. “Will you wait here by the
fire, sir? or shall I give you a light in the dining-room?”

“Here, thank you,” said the lawyer, and he drew near and leaned on the
tall fender. This hall, in which he was now left alone, was a pet fancy
of his friend the doctor’s; and Utterson himself was wont to speak of
it as the pleasantest room in London. But tonight there was a shudder in
his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his memory; he felt (what was
rare with him) a nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his
spirits, he seemed to read a menace in the flickering of the firelight
on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the
roof. He was ashamed of his relief, when Poole presently returned to
announce that Dr. Jekyll was gone out.

“I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting room, Poole,” he said. “Is
that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home?”

“Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir,” replied the servant. “Mr. Hyde has a
key.”

“Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man,
Poole,” resumed the other musingly.

“Yes, sir, he does indeed,” said Poole. “We have all orders to obey
him.”

“I do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde?” asked Utterson.

“O, dear no, sir. He never dines here,” replied the butler. “Indeed we
see very little of him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and
goes by the laboratory.”

“Well, good-night, Poole.”

“Good-night, Mr. Utterson.”

And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Harry
Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was
wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of
God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost
of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment
coming, PEDE CLAUDO, years after memory has forgotten and self-love
condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded
awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, least
by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light
there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of
their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by
the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and
fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided.
And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of
hope. “This Master Hyde, if he were studied,” thought he, “must have
secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared
to which poor Jekyll’s worst would be like sunshine. Things cannot
continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of this creature
stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside; poor Harry, what a wakening!
And the danger of it; for if this Hyde suspects the existence of the
will, he may grow impatient to inherit. Ay, I must put my shoulders to
the wheel--if Jekyll will but let me,” he added, “if Jekyll will
only let me.” For once more he saw before his mind’s eye, as clear as
transparency, the strange clauses of the will.





DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE


A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one of
his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all intelligent,
reputable men and all judges of good wine; and Mr. Utterson so contrived
that he remained behind after the others had departed. This was no new
arrangement, but a thing that had befallen many scores of times. Where
Utterson was liked, he was liked well. Hosts loved to detain the dry
lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot
on the threshold; they liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company,
practising for solitude, sobering their minds in the man’s rich silence
after the expense and strain of gaiety. To this rule, Dr. Jekyll was no
exception; and as he now sat on the opposite side of the fire--a large,
well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a stylish cast
perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness--you could see by his
looks that he cherished for Mr. Utterson a sincere and warm affection.

“I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll,” began the latter. “You
know that will of yours?”

A close observer might have gathered that the topic was distasteful; but
the doctor carried it off gaily. “My poor Utterson,” said he, “you are
unfortunate in such a client. I never saw a man so distressed as you
were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what
he called my scientific heresies. O, I know he’s a good fellow--you
needn’t frown--an excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of
him; but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant.
I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon.”

“You know I never approved of it,” pursued Utterson, ruthlessly
disregarding the fresh topic.

“My will? Yes, certainly, I know that,” said the doctor, a trifle
sharply. “You have told me so.”

“Well, I tell you so again,” continued the lawyer. “I have been learning
something of young Hyde.”

The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to the very lips, and
there came a blackness about his eyes. “I do not care to hear more,”
 said he. “This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop.”

“What I heard was abominable,” said Utterson.

“It can make no change. You do not understand my position,” returned the
doctor, with a certain incoherency of manner. “I am painfully situated,
Utterson; my position is a very strange--a very strange one. It is one
of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.”

“Jekyll,” said Utterson, “you know me: I am a man to be trusted. Make
a clean breast of this in confidence; and I make no doubt I can get you
out of it.”

“My good Utterson,” said the doctor, “this is very good of you, this
is downright good of you, and I cannot find words to thank you in. I
believe you fully; I would trust you before any man alive, ay, before
myself, if I could make the choice; but indeed it isn’t what you fancy;
it is not as bad as that; and just to put your good heart at rest, I
will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde.
I give you my hand upon that; and I thank you again and again; and I
will just add one little word, Utterson, that I’m sure you’ll take in
good part: this is a private matter, and I beg of you to let it sleep.”

Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire.

“I have no doubt you are perfectly right,” he said at last, getting to
his feet.

“Well, but since we have touched upon this business, and for the last
time I hope,” continued the doctor, “there is one point I should like
you to understand. I have really a very great interest in poor Hyde. I
know you have seen him; he told me so; and I fear he was rude. But I do
sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man; and if
I am taken away, Utterson, I wish you to promise me that you will bear
with him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if you knew all;
and it would be a weight off my mind if you would promise.”

“I can’t pretend that I shall ever like him,” said the lawyer.

“I don’t ask that,” pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand upon the other’s
arm; “I only ask for justice; I only ask you to help him for my sake,
when I am no longer here.”

Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. “Well,” said he, “I promise.”





THE CAREW MURDER CASE


Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18--, London was startled
by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all the more notable by the
high position of the victim. The details were few and startling. A
maid servant living alone in a house not far from the river, had gone
upstairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the
small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane,
which the maid’s window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full
moon. It seems she was romantically given, for she sat down upon her
box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of
musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated
that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or
thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat she became aware
of an aged beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the
lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to
whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech
(which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed and accosted
the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as
if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his
pointing, it some times appeared as if he were only inquiring his way;
but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to
watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness
of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded
self-content. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was
surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited
her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand
a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word,
and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of
a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot,
brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like
a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very
much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of
all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like
fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of
blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped
upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid
fainted.

It was two o’clock when she came to herself and called for the police.
The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle
of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been
done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had
broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and
one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter--the other,
without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and gold
watch were found upon the victim: but no cards or papers, except a
sealed and stamped envelope, which he had been probably carrying to the
post, and which bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson.

This was brought to the lawyer the next morning, before he was out of
bed; and he had no sooner seen it and been told the circumstances, than
he shot out a solemn lip. “I shall say nothing till I have seen the
body,” said he; “this may be very serious. Have the kindness to wait
while I dress.” And with the same grave countenance he hurried through
his breakfast and drove to the police station, whither the body had been
carried. As soon as he came into the cell, he nodded.

“Yes,” said he, “I recognise him. I am sorry to say that this is Sir
Danvers Carew.”

“Good God, sir,” exclaimed the officer, “is it possible?” And the next
moment his eye lighted up with professional ambition. “This will make a
deal of noise,” he said. “And perhaps you can help us to the man.” And
he briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken stick.

Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick
was laid before him, he could doubt no longer; broken and battered as it
was, he recognized it for one that he had himself presented many years
before to Henry Jekyll.

“Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?” he inquired.

“Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking, is what the maid
calls him,” said the officer.

Mr. Utterson reflected; and then, raising his head, “If you will come
with me in my cab,” he said, “I think I can take you to his house.”

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the
season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the
wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so
that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a
marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be
dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich,
lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here,
for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft
of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal
quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy
ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never
been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful
reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of
some city in a nightmare. The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the
gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he
was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s
officers, which may at times assail the most honest.

As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little
and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house,
a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged
children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different
nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and
the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as
umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the
home of Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of
a million sterling.

An ivory-faced and silvery-haired old woman opened the door. She had an
evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy: but her manners were excellent. Yes,
she said, this was Mr. Hyde’s, but he was not at home; he had been in
that night very late, but he had gone away again in less than an hour;
there was nothing strange in that; his habits were very irregular, and
he was often absent; for instance, it was nearly two months since she
had seen him till yesterday.

“Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms,” said the lawyer; and when
the woman began to declare it was impossible, “I had better tell you
who this person is,” he added. “This is Inspector Newcomen of Scotland
Yard.”

A flash of odious joy appeared upon the woman’s face. “Ah!” said she,
“he is in trouble! What has he done?”

Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances. “He don’t seem a very
popular character,” observed the latter. “And now, my good woman, just
let me and this gentleman have a look about us.”

In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old woman remained
otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms; but these
were furnished with luxury and good taste. A closet was filled with
wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a good picture hung
upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who was
much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of many plies and agreeable
in colour. At this moment, however, the rooms bore every mark of having
been recently and hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor,
with their pockets inside out; lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the
hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been
burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt end of a
green cheque book, which had resisted the action of the fire; the other
half of the stick was found behind the door; and as this clinched his
suspicions, the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank,
where several thousand pounds were found to be lying to the murderer’s
credit, completed his gratification.

“You may depend upon it, sir,” he told Mr. Utterson: “I have him in my
hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left the stick
or, above all, burned the cheque book. Why, money’s life to the man.
We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the
handbills.”

This last, however, was not so easy of accomplishment; for Mr. Hyde had
numbered few familiars--even the master of the servant maid had only
seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been
photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as
common observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that
was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive
impressed his beholders.




INCIDENT OF THE LETTER


It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way to Dr.
Jekyll’s door, where he was at once admitted by Poole, and carried down
by the kitchen offices and across a yard which had once been a garden,
to the building which was indifferently known as the laboratory or
dissecting rooms. The doctor had bought the house from the heirs of
a celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes being rather chemical than
anatomical, had changed the destination of the block at the bottom of
the garden. It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in
that part of his friend’s quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless
structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of
strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager
students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical
apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw,
and the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further
end, a flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize;
and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into the doctor’s
cabinet. It was a large room fitted round with glass presses, furnished,
among other things, with a cheval-glass and a business table, and
looking out upon the court by three dusty windows barred with iron. The
fire burned in the grate; a lamp was set lighted on the chimney shelf,
for even in the houses the fog began to lie thickly; and there, close up
to the warmth, sat Dr. Jekyll, looking deathly sick. He did not rise
to meet his visitor, but held out a cold hand and bade him welcome in a
changed voice.

“And now,” said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had left them, “you have
heard the news?”

The doctor shuddered. “They were crying it in the square,” he said. “I
heard them in my dining-room.”

“One word,” said the lawyer. “Carew was my client, but so are you, and I
want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad enough to hide this
fellow?”

“Utterson, I swear to God,” cried the doctor, “I swear to God I will
never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with
him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my
help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my
words, he will never more be heard of.”

The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his friend’s feverish
manner. “You seem pretty sure of him,” said he; “and for your sake, I
hope you may be right. If it came to a trial, your name might appear.”

“I am quite sure of him,” replied Jekyll; “I have grounds for certainty
that I cannot share with any one. But there is one thing on which you
may advise me. I have--I have received a letter; and I am at a loss
whether I should show it to the police. I should like to leave it in
your hands, Utterson; you would judge wisely, I am sure; I have so great
a trust in you.”

“You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection?” asked the
lawyer.

“No,” said the other. “I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I
am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character, which this
hateful business has rather exposed.”

Utterson ruminated awhile; he was surprised at his friend’s selfishness,
and yet relieved by it. “Well,” said he, at last, “let me see the
letter.”

The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed “Edward Hyde”:
and it signified, briefly enough, that the writer’s benefactor,
Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a thousand
generosities, need labour under no alarm for his safety, as he had means
of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked this
letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had
looked for; and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions.

“Have you the envelope?” he asked.

“I burned it,” replied Jekyll, “before I thought what I was about. But
it bore no postmark. The note was handed in.”

“Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?” asked Utterson.

“I wish you to judge for me entirely,” was the reply. “I have lost
confidence in myself.”

“Well, I shall consider,” returned the lawyer. “And now one word
more: it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that
disappearance?”

The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness; he shut his mouth
tight and nodded.

“I knew it,” said Utterson. “He meant to murder you. You had a fine
escape.”

“I have had what is far more to the purpose,” returned the doctor
solemnly: “I have had a lesson--O God, Utterson, what a lesson I have
had!” And he covered his face for a moment with his hands.

On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or two with Poole. “By
the bye,” said he, “there was a letter handed in to-day: what was the
messenger like?” But Poole was positive nothing had come except by post;
“and only circulars by that,” he added.

This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed. Plainly the
letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly, indeed, it had been
written in the cabinet; and if that were so, it must be differently
judged, and handled with the more caution. The newsboys, as he went,
were crying themselves hoarse along the footways: “Special edition.
Shocking murder of an M.P.” That was the funeral oration of one friend
and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest the good
name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal. It
was, at least, a ticklish decision that he had to make; and self-reliant
as he was by habit, he began to cherish a longing for advice. It was not
to be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for.

Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr.
Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely
calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine
that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The
fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps
glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these
fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in
through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the
room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago
resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows
richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on
hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of
London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. There was no man from whom he kept
fewer secrets than Mr. Guest; and he was not always sure that he kept as
many as he meant. Guest had often been on business to the doctor’s;
he knew Poole; he could scarce have failed to hear of Mr. Hyde’s
familiarity about the house; he might draw conclusions: was it not as
well, then, that he should see a letter which put that mystery to
right? and above all since Guest, being a great student and critic of
handwriting, would consider the step natural and obliging? The clerk,
besides, was a man of counsel; he could scarce read so strange a
document without dropping a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utterson
might shape his future course.

“This is a sad business about Sir Danvers,” he said.

“Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of public feeling,”
 returned Guest. “The man, of course, was mad.”

“I should like to hear your views on that,” replied Utterson. “I have a
document here in his handwriting; it is between ourselves, for I scarce
know what to do about it; it is an ugly business at the best. But there
it is; quite in your way: a murderer’s autograph.”

Guest’s eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and studied it with
passion. “No sir,” he said: “not mad; but it is an odd hand.”

“And by all accounts a very odd writer,” added the lawyer.

Just then the servant entered with a note.

“Is that from Dr. Jekyll, sir?” inquired the clerk. “I thought I knew
the writing. Anything private, Mr. Utterson?”

“Only an invitation to dinner. Why? Do you want to see it?”

“One moment. I thank you, sir;” and the clerk laid the two sheets of
paper alongside and sedulously compared their contents. “Thank you,
sir,” he said at last, returning both; “it’s a very interesting
autograph.”

There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson struggled with himself.
“Why did you compare them, Guest?” he inquired suddenly.

“Well, sir,” returned the clerk, “there’s a rather singular resemblance;
the two hands are in many points identical: only differently sloped.”

“Rather quaint,” said Utterson.

“It is, as you say, rather quaint,” returned Guest.

“I wouldn’t speak of this note, you know,” said the master.

“No, sir,” said the clerk. “I understand.”

But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night, than he locked the
note into his safe, where it reposed from that time forward. “What!” he
thought. “Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!” And his blood ran cold in
his veins.




INCIDENT OF DR. LANYON


Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for the
death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde had
disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed.
Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came
out of the man’s cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile
life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have
surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts, not a whisper.
From the time he had left the house in Soho on the morning of the
murder, he was simply blotted out; and gradually, as time drew on, Mr.
Utterson began to recover from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow
more at quiet with himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of
thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that
that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll.
He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became
once more their familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always
been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion.
He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed
to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service; and
for more than two months, the doctor was at peace.

On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the doctor’s with a small
party; Lanyon had been there; and the face of the host had looked from
one to the other as in the old days when the trio were inseparable
friends. On the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door was shut against
the lawyer. “The doctor was confined to the house,” Poole said, “and saw
no one.” On the 15th, he tried again, and was again refused; and having
now been used for the last two months to see his friend almost daily, he
found this return of solitude to weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night
he had in Guest to dine with him; and the sixth he betook himself to Dr.
Lanyon’s.

There at least he was not denied admittance; but when he came in, he was
shocked at the change which had taken place in the doctor’s appearance.
He had his death-warrant written legibly upon his face. The rosy man had
grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older;
and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical decay that
arrested the lawyer’s notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner
that seemed to testify to some deep-seated terror of the mind. It
was unlikely that the doctor should fear death; and yet that was what
Utterson was tempted to suspect. “Yes,” he thought; “he is a doctor, he
must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge
is more than he can bear.” And yet when Utterson remarked on his
ill-looks, it was with an air of great firmness that Lanyon declared
himself a doomed man.

“I have had a shock,” he said, “and I shall never recover. It is a
question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir,
I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more
glad to get away.”

“Jekyll is ill, too,” observed Utterson. “Have you seen him?”

But Lanyon’s face changed, and he held up a trembling hand. “I wish to
see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll,” he said in a loud, unsteady voice.
“I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you will spare me any
allusion to one whom I regard as dead.”

“Tut-tut,” said Mr. Utterson; and then after a considerable pause,
“Can’t I do anything?” he inquired. “We are three very old friends,
Lanyon; we shall not live to make others.”

“Nothing can be done,” returned Lanyon; “ask himself.”

“He will not see me,” said the lawyer.

“I am not surprised at that,” was the reply. “Some day, Utterson, after
I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I
cannot tell you. And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me
of other things, for God’s sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep
clear of this accursed topic, then in God’s name, go, for I cannot bear
it.”

As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote to Jekyll,
complaining of his exclusion from the house, and asking the cause of
this unhappy break with Lanyon; and the next day brought him a long
answer, often very pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious
in drift. The quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. “I do not blame our old
friend,” Jekyll wrote, “but I share his view that we must never meet. I
mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not
be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut
even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on
myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief
of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that
this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning;
and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and
that is to respect my silence.” Utterson was amazed; the dark influence
of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor had returned to his old tasks
and amities; a week ago, the prospect had smiled with every promise of a
cheerful and an honoured age; and now in a moment, friendship, and peace
of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked. So great and
unprepared a change pointed to madness; but in view of Lanyon’s manner
and words, there must lie for it some deeper ground.

A week afterwards Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in something less than
a fortnight he was dead. The night after the funeral, at which he had
been sadly affected, Utterson locked the door of his business room,
and sitting there by the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set
before him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of
his dead friend. “PRIVATE: for the hands of G. J. Utterson ALONE, and in
case of his predecease to be destroyed unread,” so it was emphatically
superscribed; and the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. “I have
buried one friend to-day,” he thought: “what if this should cost me
another?” And then he condemned the fear as a disloyalty, and broke the
seal. Within there was another enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked
upon the cover as “not to be opened till the death or disappearance
of Dr. Henry Jekyll.” Utterson could not trust his eyes. Yes, it was
disappearance; here again, as in the mad will which he had long ago
restored to its author, here again were the idea of a disappearance
and the name of Henry Jekyll bracketted. But in the will, that idea had
sprung from the sinister suggestion of the man Hyde; it was set there
with a purpose all too plain and horrible. Written by the hand of
Lanyon, what should it mean? A great curiosity came on the trustee,
to disregard the prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these
mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his dead friend were
stringent obligations; and the packet slept in the inmost corner of his
private safe.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it; and it may
be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson desired the society of his
surviving friend with the same eagerness. He thought of him kindly; but
his thoughts were disquieted and fearful. He went to call indeed; but he
was perhaps relieved to be denied admittance; perhaps, in his heart, he
preferred to speak with Poole upon the doorstep and surrounded by the
air and sounds of the open city, rather than to be admitted into that
house of voluntary bondage, and to sit and speak with its inscrutable
recluse. Poole had, indeed, no very pleasant news to communicate. The
doctor, it appeared, now more than ever confined himself to the cabinet
over the laboratory, where he would sometimes even sleep; he was out of
spirits, he had grown very silent, he did not read; it seemed as if
he had something on his mind. Utterson became so used to the unvarying
character of these reports, that he fell off little by little in the
frequency of his visits.




INCIDENT AT THE WINDOW


It chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his usual walk with Mr.
Enfield, that their way lay once again through the by-street; and that
when they came in front of the door, both stopped to gaze on it.

“Well,” said Enfield, “that story’s at an end at least. We shall never
see more of Mr. Hyde.”

“I hope not,” said Utterson. “Did I ever tell you that I once saw him,
and shared your feeling of repulsion?”

“It was impossible to do the one without the other,” returned Enfield.
“And by the way, what an ass you must have thought me, not to know that
this was a back way to Dr. Jekyll’s! It was partly your own fault that I
found it out, even when I did.”

“So you found it out, did you?” said Utterson. “But if that be so, we
may step into the court and take a look at the windows. To tell you the
truth, I am uneasy about poor Jekyll; and even outside, I feel as if the
presence of a friend might do him good.”

The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of premature
twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright with
sunset. The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and
sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of
mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll.

“What! Jekyll!” he cried. “I trust you are better.”

“I am very low, Utterson,” replied the doctor drearily, “very low. It
will not last long, thank God.”

“You stay too much indoors,” said the lawyer. “You should be out,
whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my
cousin--Mr. Enfield--Dr. Jekyll.) Come now; get your hat and take a
quick turn with us.”

“You are very good,” sighed the other. “I should like to very much; but
no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not. But indeed, Utterson,
I am very glad to see you; this is really a great pleasure; I would ask
you and Mr. Enfield up, but the place is really not fit.”

“Why, then,” said the lawyer, good-naturedly, “the best thing we can do
is to stay down here and speak with you from where we are.”

“That is just what I was about to venture to propose,” returned the
doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile
was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject
terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below.
They saw it but for a glimpse for the window was instantly thrust down;
but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court
without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the by-street; and it
was not until they had come into a neighbouring thoroughfare, where even
upon a Sunday there were still some stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson
at last turned and looked at his companion. They were both pale; and
there was an answering horror in their eyes.

“God forgive us, God forgive us,” said Mr. Utterson.

But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and walked on once
more in silence.




THE LAST NIGHT


Mr. Utterson was sitting by his fireside one evening after dinner, when
he was surprised to receive a visit from Poole.

“Bless me, Poole, what brings you here?” he cried; and then taking a
second look at him, “What ails you?” he added; “is the doctor ill?”

“Mr. Utterson,” said the man, “there is something wrong.”

“Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine for you,” said the lawyer.
“Now, take your time, and tell me plainly what you want.”

“You know the doctor’s ways, sir,” replied Poole, “and how he shuts
himself up. Well, he’s shut up again in the cabinet; and I don’t like
it, sir--I wish I may die if I like it. Mr. Utterson, sir, I’m afraid.”

“Now, my good man,” said the lawyer, “be explicit. What are you afraid
of?”

“I’ve been afraid for about a week,” returned Poole, doggedly
disregarding the question, “and I can bear it no more.”

The man’s appearance amply bore out his words; his manner was altered
for the worse; and except for the moment when he had first announced his
terror, he had not once looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he sat
with the glass of wine untasted on his knee, and his eyes directed to a
corner of the floor. “I can bear it no more,” he repeated.

“Come,” said the lawyer, “I see you have some good reason, Poole; I see
there is something seriously amiss. Try to tell me what it is.”

“I think there’s been foul play,” said Poole, hoarsely.

“Foul play!” cried the lawyer, a good deal frightened and rather
inclined to be irritated in consequence. “What foul play! What does the
man mean?”

“I daren’t say, sir,” was the answer; “but will you come along with me
and see for yourself?”

Mr. Utterson’s only answer was to rise and get his hat and greatcoat;
but he observed with wonder the greatness of the relief that appeared
upon the butler’s face, and perhaps with no less, that the wine was
still untasted when he set it down to follow.

It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying
on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and flying wrack of the
most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and
flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets
unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had
never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have wished it
otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious of so sharp a wish to
see and touch his fellow-creatures; for struggle as he might, there was
borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The square,
when they got there, was full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in
the garden were lashing themselves along the railing. Poole, who had
kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now pulled up in the middle of
the pavement, and in spite of the biting weather, took off his hat and
mopped his brow with a red pocket-handkerchief. But for all the hurry of
his coming, these were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but
the moisture of some strangling anguish; for his face was white and his
voice, when he spoke, harsh and broken.

“Well, sir,” he said, “here we are, and God grant there be nothing
wrong.”

“Amen, Poole,” said the lawyer.

Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded manner; the door was
opened on the chain; and a voice asked from within, “Is that you,
Poole?”

“It’s all right,” said Poole. “Open the door.”

The hall, when they entered it, was brightly lighted up; the fire was
built high; and about the hearth the whole of the servants, men and
women, stood huddled together like a flock of sheep. At the sight of Mr.
Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysterical whimpering; and the cook,
crying out “Bless God! it’s Mr. Utterson,” ran forward as if to take him
in her arms.

“What, what? Are you all here?” said the lawyer peevishly. “Very
irregular, very unseemly; your master would be far from pleased.”

“They’re all afraid,” said Poole.

Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the maid lifted her
voice and now wept loudly.

“Hold your tongue!” Poole said to her, with a ferocity of accent that
testified to his own jangled nerves; and indeed, when the girl had so
suddenly raised the note of her lamentation, they had all started and
turned towards the inner door with faces of dreadful expectation.
“And now,” continued the butler, addressing the knife-boy, “reach me a
candle, and we’ll get this through hands at once.” And then he begged
Mr. Utterson to follow him, and led the way to the back garden.

“Now, sir,” said he, “you come as gently as you can. I want you to hear,
and I don’t want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if by any chance he
was to ask you in, don’t go.”

Mr. Utterson’s nerves, at this unlooked-for termination, gave a jerk
that nearly threw him from his balance; but he recollected his courage
and followed the butler into the laboratory building through the
surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to the foot
of the stair. Here Poole motioned him to stand on one side and listen;
while he himself, setting down the candle and making a great and obvious
call on his resolution, mounted the steps and knocked with a somewhat
uncertain hand on the red baize of the cabinet door.

“Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you,” he called; and even as he did
so, once more violently signed to the lawyer to give ear.

A voice answered from within: “Tell him I cannot see anyone,” it said
complainingly.

“Thank you, sir,” said Poole, with a note of something like triumph in
his voice; and taking up his candle, he led Mr. Utterson back across the
yard and into the great kitchen, where the fire was out and the beetles
were leaping on the floor.

“Sir,” he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, “Was that my master’s
voice?”

“It seems much changed,” replied the lawyer, very pale, but giving look
for look.

“Changed? Well, yes, I think so,” said the butler. “Have I been twenty
years in this man’s house, to be deceived about his voice? No, sir;
master’s made away with; he was made away with eight days ago, when we
heard him cry out upon the name of God; and who’s in there instead
of him, and why it stays there, is a thing that cries to Heaven, Mr.
Utterson!”

“This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale my man,”
 said Mr. Utterson, biting his finger. “Suppose it were as you suppose,
supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been--well, murdered what could induce the
murderer to stay? That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend itself to
reason.”

“Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, but I’ll do it yet,”
 said Poole. “All this last week (you must know) him, or it, whatever it
is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some
sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind. It was sometimes his
way--the master’s, that is--to write his orders on a sheet of paper and
throw it on the stair. We’ve had nothing else this week back; nothing
but papers, and a closed door, and the very meals left there to be
smuggled in when nobody was looking. Well, sir, every day, ay, and twice
and thrice in the same day, there have been orders and complaints, and I
have been sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in town. Every time
I brought the stuff back, there would be another paper telling me to
return it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different
firm. This drug is wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for.”

“Have you any of these papers?” asked Mr. Utterson.

Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note, which the
lawyer, bending nearer to the candle, carefully examined. Its contents
ran thus: “Dr. Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw. He
assures them that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his
present purpose. In the year 18--, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large
quantity from Messrs. M. He now begs them to search with most sedulous
care, and should any of the same quality be left, forward it to him at
once. Expense is no consideration. The importance of this to Dr. J. can
hardly be exaggerated.” So far the letter had run composedly enough, but
here with a sudden splutter of the pen, the writer’s emotion had broken
loose. “For God’s sake,” he added, “find me some of the old.”

“This is a strange note,” said Mr. Utterson; and then sharply, “How do
you come to have it open?”

“The man at Maw’s was main angry, sir, and he threw it back to me like
so much dirt,” returned Poole.

“This is unquestionably the doctor’s hand, do you know?” resumed the
lawyer.

“I thought it looked like it,” said the servant rather sulkily; and
then, with another voice, “But what matters hand of write?” he said.
“I’ve seen him!”

“Seen him?” repeated Mr. Utterson. “Well?”

“That’s it!” said Poole. “It was this way. I came suddenly into the
theatre from the garden. It seems he had slipped out to look for this
drug or whatever it is; for the cabinet door was open, and there he was
at the far end of the room digging among the crates. He looked up when
I came in, gave a kind of cry, and whipped upstairs into the cabinet. It
was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head
like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his
face? If it was my master, why did he cry out like a rat, and run from
me? I have served him long enough. And then...” The man paused and
passed his hand over his face.

“These are all very strange circumstances,” said Mr. Utterson, “but I
think I begin to see daylight. Your master, Poole, is plainly seized
with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer;
hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask and
the avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to find this drug, by
means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery--God
grant that he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad
enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and
natural, hangs well together, and delivers us from all exorbitant
alarms.”

“Sir,” said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled pallor, “that thing
was not my master, and there’s the truth. My master”--here he looked
round him and began to whisper--“is a tall, fine build of a man, and
this was more of a dwarf.” Utterson attempted to protest. “O, sir,”
 cried Poole, “do you think I do not know my master after twenty years?
Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door,
where I saw him every morning of my life? No, sir, that thing in the
mask was never Dr. Jekyll--God knows what it was, but it was never Dr.
Jekyll; and it is the belief of my heart that there was murder done.”

“Poole,” replied the lawyer, “if you say that, it will become my duty to
make certain. Much as I desire to spare your master’s feelings, much as
I am puzzled by this note which seems to prove him to be still alive, I
shall consider it my duty to break in that door.”

“Ah, Mr. Utterson, that’s talking!” cried the butler.

“And now comes the second question,” resumed Utterson: “Who is going to
do it?”

“Why, you and me, sir,” was the undaunted reply.

“That’s very well said,” returned the lawyer; “and whatever comes of it,
I shall make it my business to see you are no loser.”

“There is an axe in the theatre,” continued Poole; “and you might take
the kitchen poker for yourself.”

The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrument into his hand, and
balanced it. “Do you know, Poole,” he said, looking up, “that you and I
are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?”

“You may say so, sir, indeed,” returned the butler.

“It is well, then that we should be frank,” said the other. “We both
think more than we have said; let us make a clean breast. This masked
figure that you saw, did you recognise it?”

“Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so doubled up, that
I could hardly swear to that,” was the answer. “But if you mean, was it
Mr. Hyde?--why, yes, I think it was! You see, it was much of the same
bigness; and it had the same quick, light way with it; and then who else
could have got in by the laboratory door? You have not forgot, sir, that
at the time of the murder he had still the key with him? But that’s not
all. I don’t know, Mr. Utterson, if you ever met this Mr. Hyde?”

“Yes,” said the lawyer, “I once spoke with him.”

“Then you must know as well as the rest of us that there was something
queer about that gentleman--something that gave a man a turn--I don’t
know rightly how to say it, sir, beyond this: that you felt in your
marrow kind of cold and thin.”

“I own I felt something of what you describe,” said Mr. Utterson.

“Quite so, sir,” returned Poole. “Well, when that masked thing like a
monkey jumped from among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it
went down my spine like ice. O, I know it’s not evidence, Mr. Utterson;
I’m book-learned enough for that; but a man has his feelings, and I give
you my bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!”

“Ay, ay,” said the lawyer. “My fears incline to the same point. Evil,
I fear, founded--evil was sure to come--of that connection. Ay truly, I
believe you; I believe poor Harry is killed; and I believe his murderer
(for what purpose, God alone can tell) is still lurking in his victim’s
room. Well, let our name be vengeance. Call Bradshaw.”

The footman came at the summons, very white and nervous.

“Put yourself together, Bradshaw,” said the lawyer. “This suspense, I
know, is telling upon all of you; but it is now our intention to make
an end of it. Poole, here, and I are going to force our way into the
cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear
the blame. Meanwhile, lest anything should really be amiss, or any
malefactor seek to escape by the back, you and the boy must go round the
corner with a pair of good sticks and take your post at the laboratory
door. We give you ten minutes, to get to your stations.”

As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch. “And now, Poole, let
us get to ours,” he said; and taking the poker under his arm, led the
way into the yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now
quite dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that
deep well of building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about
their steps, until they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they
sat down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all around; but nearer
at hand, the stillness was only broken by the sounds of a footfall
moving to and fro along the cabinet floor.

“So it will walk all day, sir,” whispered Poole; “ay, and the better
part of the night. Only when a new sample comes from the chemist,
there’s a bit of a break. Ah, it’s an ill conscience that’s such an
enemy to rest! Ah, sir, there’s blood foully shed in every step of
it! But hark again, a little closer--put your heart in your ears, Mr.
Utterson, and tell me, is that the doctor’s foot?”

The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for all they
went so slowly; it was different indeed from the heavy creaking tread of
Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. “Is there never anything else?” he asked.

Poole nodded. “Once,” he said. “Once I heard it weeping!”

“Weeping? how that?” said the lawyer, conscious of a sudden chill of
horror.

“Weeping like a woman or a lost soul,” said the butler. “I came away
with that upon my heart, that I could have wept too.”

But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole disinterred the axe from
under a stack of packing straw; the candle was set upon the nearest
table to light them to the attack; and they drew near with bated breath
to where that patient foot was still going up and down, up and down, in
the quiet of the night. “Jekyll,” cried Utterson, with a loud voice, “I
demand to see you.” He paused a moment, but there came no reply. “I give
you fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see
you,” he resumed; “if not by fair means, then by foul--if not of your
consent, then by brute force!”

“Utterson,” said the voice, “for God’s sake, have mercy!”

“Ah, that’s not Jekyll’s voice--it’s Hyde’s!” cried Utterson. “Down with
the door, Poole!”

Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow shook the building, and
the red baize door leaped against the lock and hinges. A dismal screech,
as of mere animal terror, rang from the cabinet. Up went the axe again,
and again the panels crashed and the frame bounded; four times the
blow fell; but the wood was tough and the fittings were of excellent
workmanship; and it was not until the fifth, that the lock burst and the
wreck of the door fell inwards on the carpet.

The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness that had
succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the cabinet
before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and
chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer
or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business table, and nearer
the fire, the things laid out for tea; the quietest room, you would
have said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most
commonplace that night in London.

Right in the middle there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and
still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and
beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large
for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still
moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone: and by the
crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung
upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a
self-destroyer.

“We have come too late,” he said sternly, “whether to save or punish.
Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains for us to find the body
of your master.”

The far greater proportion of the building was occupied by the theatre,
which filled almost the whole ground storey and was lighted from above,
and by the cabinet, which formed an upper story at one end and looked
upon the court. A corridor joined the theatre to the door on the
by-street; and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second
flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a spacious
cellar. All these they now thoroughly examined. Each closet needed but
a glance, for all were empty, and all, by the dust that fell from their
doors, had stood long unopened. The cellar, indeed, was filled with
crazy lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was
Jekyll’s predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were
advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a
perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. No
where was there any trace of Henry Jekyll dead or alive.

Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. “He must be buried here,” he
said, hearkening to the sound.

“Or he may have fled,” said Utterson, and he turned to examine the door
in the by-street. It was locked; and lying near by on the flags, they
found the key, already stained with rust.

“This does not look like use,” observed the lawyer.

“Use!” echoed Poole. “Do you not see, sir, it is broken? much as if a
man had stamped on it.”

“Ay,” continued Utterson, “and the fractures, too, are rusty.” The two
men looked at each other with a scare. “This is beyond me, Poole,” said
the lawyer. “Let us go back to the cabinet.”

They mounted the stair in silence, and still with an occasional
awestruck glance at the dead body, proceeded more thoroughly to examine
the contents of the cabinet. At one table, there were traces of chemical
work, various measured heaps of some white salt being laid on glass
saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy man had been
prevented.

“That is the same drug that I was always bringing him,” said Poole; and
even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling noise boiled over.

This brought them to the fireside, where the easy-chair was drawn cosily
up, and the tea things stood ready to the sitter’s elbow, the very sugar
in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea
things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work,
for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated,
in his own hand with startling blasphemies.

Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the searchers came
to the cheval-glass, into whose depths they looked with an involuntary
horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow
playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions
along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful
countenances stooping to look in.

“This glass has seen some strange things, sir,” whispered Poole.

“And surely none stranger than itself,” echoed the lawyer in the same
tones. “For what did Jekyll”--he caught himself up at the word with a
start, and then conquering the weakness--“what could Jekyll want with
it?” he said.

“You may say that!” said Poole.

Next they turned to the business table. On the desk, among the neat
array of papers, a large envelope was uppermost, and bore, in the
doctor’s hand, the name of Mr. Utterson. The lawyer unsealed it, and
several enclosures fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the
same eccentric terms as the one which he had returned six months before,
to serve as a testament in case of death and as a deed of gift in case
of disappearance; but in place of the name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer,
with indescribable amazement read the name of Gabriel John Utterson. He
looked at Poole, and then back at the paper, and last of all at the dead
malefactor stretched upon the carpet.

“My head goes round,” he said. “He has been all these days in
possession; he had no cause to like me; he must have raged to see
himself displaced; and he has not destroyed this document.”

He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in the doctor’s hand
and dated at the top. “O Poole!” the lawyer cried, “he was alive and
here this day. He cannot have been disposed of in so short a space; he
must be still alive, he must have fled! And then, why fled? and how?
and in that case, can we venture to declare this suicide? O, we must
be careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in some dire
catastrophe.”

“Why don’t you read it, sir?” asked Poole.

“Because I fear,” replied the lawyer solemnly. “God grant I have no
cause for it!” And with that he brought the paper to his eyes and read
as follows:

“My dear Utterson,--When this shall fall into your hands, I shall have
disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to
foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances of my nameless
situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early. Go then, and
first read the narrative which Lanyon warned me he was to place in your
hands; and if you care to hear more, turn to the confession of

“Your unworthy and unhappy friend,

“HENRY JEKYLL.”

“There was a third enclosure?” asked Utterson.

“Here, sir,” said Poole, and gave into his hands a considerable packet
sealed in several places.

The lawyer put it in his pocket. “I would say nothing of this paper. If
your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit. It is
now ten; I must go home and read these documents in quiet; but I shall
be back before midnight, when we shall send for the police.”

They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them; and
Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the fire in the
hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which
this mystery was now to be explained.




DR. LANYON’S NARRATIVE


On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the evening
delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague
and old school companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised by
this; for we were by no means in the habit of correspondence; I had seen
the man, dined with him, indeed, the night before; and I could
imagine nothing in our intercourse that should justify formality of
registration. The contents increased my wonder; for this is how the
letter ran:

“10th December, 18--.

“Dear Lanyon,--You are one of my oldest friends; and although we may
have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at
least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day
when, if you had said to me, `Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason,
depend upon you,’ I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you.
Lanyon my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail
me to-night, I am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I
am going to ask you for something dishonourable to grant. Judge for
yourself.

“I want you to postpone all other engagements for to-night--ay, even if
you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a cab, unless
your carriage should be actually at the door; and with this letter in
your hand for consultation, to drive straight to my house. Poole, my
butler, has his orders; you will find him waiting your arrival with a
locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be forced: and you are
to go in alone; to open the glazed press (letter E) on the left hand,
breaking the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, with all its contents
as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same
thing) the third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of mind, I have
a morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you may
know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial and a
paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Cavendish
Square exactly as it stands.

“That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You should
be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before
midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in
the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor
foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be
preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to
ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand
into the house a man who will present himself in my name, and to place
in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with you from my
cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude
completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation,
you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital
importance; and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they
must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the
shipwreck of my reason.

“Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart
sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility.
Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a
blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware
that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away
like a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save

“Your friend,

“H.J.

“P.S.--I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my
soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this letter
not come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case, dear
Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the
course of the day; and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may
then already be too late; and if that night passes without event, you
will know that you have seen the last of Henry Jekyll.”

Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane;
but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound
to do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less
I was in a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so
worded could not be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose
accordingly from table, got into a hansom, and drove straight to
Jekyll’s house. The butler was awaiting my arrival; he had received by
the same post as mine a registered letter of instruction, and had sent
at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The tradesmen came while we
were yet speaking; and we moved in a body to old Dr. Denman’s surgical
theatre, from which (as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll’s private
cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was very strong, the lock
excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble and have
to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the locksmith was near
despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and after two hour’s work,
the door stood open. The press marked E was unlocked; and I took out the
drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and returned
with it to Cavendish Square.

Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough
made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that it
was plain they were of Jekyll’s private manufacture: and when I opened
one of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt
of a white colour. The phial, to which I next turned my attention,
might have been about half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly
pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and
some volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The
book was an ordinary version book and contained little but a series of
dates. These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the
entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. Here and there a
brief remark was appended to a date, usually no more than a single
word: “double” occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hundred
entries; and once very early in the list and followed by several marks
of exclamation, “total failure!!!” All this, though it whetted my
curiosity, told me little that was definite. Here were a phial of some
salt, and the record of a series of experiments that had led (like too
many of Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of practical usefulness.
How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either
the honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his
messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? And
even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be received by
me in secret? The more I reflected the more convinced I grew that I
was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and though I dismissed my
servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might be found in some
posture of self-defence.

Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded
very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small
man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.

He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him
enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the
darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing
with his bull’s eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started
and made greater haste.

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed
him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand ready
on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had
never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as
I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his
face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and
great apparent debility of constitution, and--last but not least--with
the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore
some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked
sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic,
personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms;
but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in
the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle
of hatred.

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck
in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed
in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his
clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric,
were enormously too large for him in every measurement--the trousers
hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the
waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon
his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far
from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal
and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced
me--something seizing, surprising and revolting--this fresh disparity
seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest
in the man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his
origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set
down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on
fire with sombre excitement.

“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so lively was his
impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake
me.

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my
blood. “Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have not yet the pleasure
of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please.” And I showed him an
example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an
imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the
hour, the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my
visitor, would suffer me to muster.

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough. “What you
say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my
politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry
Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood...” He
paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his
collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the
hysteria--“I understood, a drawer...”

But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and some perhaps on my
own growing curiosity.

“There it is, sir,” said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on the
floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart: I
could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and
his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and
reason.

“Compose yourself,” said I.

He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of
despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he uttered
one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next
moment, in a voice that was already fairly well under control, “Have you
a graduated glass?” he asked.

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he
asked.

He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red
tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first
of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to
brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes
of vapour. Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and
the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to
a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a
keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and
looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.

“And now,” said he, “to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will you
be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to
go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of
curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall
be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were
before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service
rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches
of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of
knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you,
here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by
a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.”

“Sir,” said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
possessing, “you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I
hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too
far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end.”

“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you remember your vows: what
follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so
long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have
denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your
superiors--behold!”

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed;
he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with
injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I
thought, a change--he seemed to swell--his face became suddenly black
and the features seemed to melt and alter--and the next moment, I had
sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to
shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there before my
eyes--pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with
his hands, like a man restored from death--there stood Henry Jekyll!

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on
paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at
it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if
I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep
has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and
night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die;
and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man
unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in
memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing,
Utterson, and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be
more than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was,
on Jekyll’s own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in
every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.

HASTIE LANYON




HENRY JEKYLL’S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE


I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect
of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been
supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished
future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety
of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I
found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head
high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.
Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I
reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock
of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to
a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such
irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had
set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of
shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any
particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with
even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those
provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.
In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that
hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the
most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer,
I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest;
I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame,
than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge
or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction
of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of
the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides
of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily
nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to
such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I
say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that
point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines;
and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere
polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my
part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction
and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own
person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality
of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my
consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only
because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the
course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as
a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.
If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life
would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his
way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright
twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward
path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no
longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous
evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were
thus bound together--that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these
polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they
dissociated?

I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light began
to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to
perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling
immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body
in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to
shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss
the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter
deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I
have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound
for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast
it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful
pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident,
my discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognised
my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the
powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which
these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form
and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they
were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I
knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled
and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of
an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,
utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to
change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at
last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my
tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a
large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments,
to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I
compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the
glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of
courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly
nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour
of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and
I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something
strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very
novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body;
within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered
sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the
bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.
I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked,
tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought,
in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my
hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I
was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.

There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands beside
me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very purpose
of these transformations. The night however, was far gone into
the morning--the morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the
conception of the day--the inmates of my house were locked in the most
rigorous hours of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with
hope and triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom.
I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I
could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that
their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through
the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw
for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but
that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to
which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and
less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the
course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of
effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much
less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde
was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as
good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly
and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still
believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint
of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the
glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome.
This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore
a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than
the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed
to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that
when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at
first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was
because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good
and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive
experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had
lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a
house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I
once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs
of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the
stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.

That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my
discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while
under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been
otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth
an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action;
it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the
prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that
which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil,
kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and
the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now
two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the
other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of
whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The
movement was thus wholly toward the worse.

Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of
a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my
pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well
known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this
incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this
side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to
drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to
assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion;
it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my preparations
with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho,
to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a housekeeper
a creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other
side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described)
was to have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to
parry mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in
my second character. I next drew up that will to which you so much
objected; so that if anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll,
I could enter on that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus
fortified, as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by the
strange immunities of my position.

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own
person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did
so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye
with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy,
strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty.
But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think
of it--I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door,
give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had
always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass
away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead,
quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who
could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.

The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have
said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of
Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would
come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of
wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of
my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being
inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on
self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture
to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times
aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from
ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was
Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse;
he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even
make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And
thus his conscience slumbered.

Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now
I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I
mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which
my chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought
on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a
child aroused against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised
the other day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child’s
family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at
last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to
bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of
Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by
opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself;
and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with
a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.

Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one
of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in
bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in
vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the
square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and
the design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I
was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in
the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body
of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological way, began
lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even
as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still
so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon
my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was
professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely.
But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a
mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder,
knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of
hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the
mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden
and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed I rushed
to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into
something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll,
I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked
myself; and then, with another bound of terror--how was it to be
remedied? It was well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my
drugs were in the cabinet--a long journey down two pairs of stairs,
through the back passage, across the open court and through the
anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horror-struck. It
might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that,
when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? And then with
an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon my mind that the
servants were already used to the coming and going of my second self. I
had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in clothes of my own size: had
soon passed through the house, where Bradshaw stared and drew back at
seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten
minutes later, Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was sitting
down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of breakfasting.

Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this reversal
of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on the
wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to
reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities
of my double existence. That part of me which I had the power of
projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed
to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as
though (when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide
of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged,
the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of
voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become
irrevocably mine. The power of the drug had not been always equally
displayed. Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed me;
since then I had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, and
once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount; and these rare
uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole shadow on my contentment.
Now, however, and in the light of that morning’s accident, I was led to
remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to
throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly
transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore seemed to
point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better
self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory
in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared
between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive
apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the
pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or
but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in
which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father’s
interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference. To cast in my lot
with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly
indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was
to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow
and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal;
but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while
Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be
not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances
were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man;
much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and
trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast
a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found
wanting in the strength to keep to it.

Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by
friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to
the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses
and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made
this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither
gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde,
which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true
to my determination; for two months, I led a life of such severity as
I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an
approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the freshness
of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of
course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde
struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I
once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.

I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that
he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long
as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete
moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the
leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was
punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was
conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more
furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that
stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to
the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God, no
man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a
provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in
which a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped
myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us
continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and
in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of
glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow;
and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly,
in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill
of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from
the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost
peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure)
destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in
the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly
devising others in the future, and yet still hastening and still
hearkening in my wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon
his lips as he compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the
dead man. The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before
Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had
fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of
self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole:
I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had walked with my
father’s hand, and through the self-denying toils of my professional
life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at
the damned horrors of the evening. I could have screamed aloud; I sought
with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and
sounds with which my memory swarmed against me; and still, between the
petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the
acuteness of this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a
sense of joy. The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth
impossible; whether I would or not, I was now confined to the better
part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced to think of it! with what
willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions of natural life! with
what sincere renunciation I locked the door by which I had so often gone
and come, and ground the key under my heel!

The next day, came the news that the murder had not been overlooked,
that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim was
a man high in public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a
tragic folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have
my better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the
scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an
instant, and the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with
honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how
earnestly, in the last months of the last year, I laboured to relieve
suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days
passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I
wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I
daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality
of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower
side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl
for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of
that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I
was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as
an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of
temptation.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled
at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the
balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural,
like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It was a
fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but
cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter chirrupings
and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal
within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little
drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.
After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled,
comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with
the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that
vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most
deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as
in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in
the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger,
a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung
formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded
and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe
of all men’s respect, wealthy, beloved--the cloth laying for me in the
dining-room at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted,
houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows.

My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once
observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to
a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that,
where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance
of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how
was I to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in
my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If
I sought to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the
gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How
was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in
the streets, how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should
I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician
to rifle the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that
of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own
hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must
follow became lighted up from end to end.

Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a
passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name of
which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical
enough, however tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could
not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust of
devilish fury; and the smile withered from his face--happily for
him--yet more happily for myself, for in another instant I had certainly
dragged him from his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me
with so black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look
did they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders,
led me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde
in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate
anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the
creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will;
composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and
that he might receive actual evidence of their being posted, sent them
out with directions that they should be registered. Thenceforward, he
sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there
he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing
before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth
in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the
streets of the city. He, I say--I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had
nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when at
last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged
the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an
object marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal
passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a tempest.
He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, skulking
through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes that
still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I
think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.

When I came to myself at Lanyon’s, the horror of my old friend perhaps
affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in
the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A
change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows,
it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon’s
condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came
home to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration
of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the
nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning
shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought
of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the
appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my
own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so
strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.

I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking
the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those
indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the
time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging
and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a
double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat
looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be
re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great
effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of
the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above
all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always
as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending
doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even
beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a
creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and
mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.
But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would
leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew
daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images
of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed
not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of
Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly
the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it
was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity
of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links
of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of
his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing;
that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the
amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had
no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that
insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye;
lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle
to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of
slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred
of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows
drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his
subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the
necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen,
and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence
the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand
blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying
the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of
death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in
the ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken
and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and
passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut
him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice;
and yet even to these, habit brought--no, not alleviation--but a
certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my
punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which
has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and
nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the
date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh
supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first
change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without
efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked;
it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure,
and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the
draught.

About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the
influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time,
short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see
his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay
too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto
escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence
and great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of
writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall
have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and
circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the
action of his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us
both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when
I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I
shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most
strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this
room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace.
Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release
himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true
hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here
then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I
bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Author: The Brothers Grimm

Translator: Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes

Posting Date: December 14, 2008 [EBook #2591]
Release Date: April, 2001
Last Updated: November 7, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GRIMMS’ FAIRY TALES ***




Produced by Emma Dudding, John Bickers, and Dagny





FAIRY TALES

By The Brothers Grimm



PREPARER’S NOTE

     The text is based on translations from
     the Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmarchen by
     Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes.




CONTENTS:

     THE GOLDEN BIRD
     HANS IN LUCK
     JORINDA AND JORINDEL
     THE TRAVELLING MUSICIANS
     OLD SULTAN
     THE STRAW, THE COAL, AND THE BEAN
     BRIAR ROSE
     THE DOG AND THE SPARROW
     THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES
     THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE
     THE WILLOW-WREN AND THE BEAR
     THE FROG-PRINCE
     CAT AND MOUSE IN PARTNERSHIP
     THE GOOSE-GIRL
     THE ADVENTURES OF CHANTICLEER AND PARTLET
       1. HOW THEY WENT TO THE MOUNTAINS TO EAT NUTS
       2. HOW CHANTICLEER AND PARTLET WENT TO VISIT MR KORBES
     RAPUNZEL
     FUNDEVOGEL
     THE VALIANT LITTLE TAILOR
     HANSEL AND GRETEL
     THE MOUSE, THE BIRD, AND THE SAUSAGE
     MOTHER HOLLE
     LITTLE RED-CAP [LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD]
     THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM
     TOM THUMB
     RUMPELSTILTSKIN
     CLEVER GRETEL
     THE OLD MAN AND HIS GRANDSON
     THE LITTLE PEASANT
     FREDERICK AND CATHERINE
     SWEETHEART ROLAND
     SNOWDROP
     THE PINK
     CLEVER ELSIE
     THE MISER IN THE BUSH
     ASHPUTTEL
     THE WHITE SNAKE
     THE WOLF AND THE SEVEN LITTLE KIDS
     THE QUEEN BEE
     THE ELVES AND THE SHOEMAKER
     THE JUNIPER-TREE
     the juniper-tree.
     THE TURNIP
     CLEVER HANS
     THE THREE LANGUAGES
     THE FOX AND THE CAT
     THE FOUR CLEVER BROTHERS
     LILY AND THE LION
     THE FOX AND THE HORSE
     THE BLUE LIGHT
     THE RAVEN
     THE GOLDEN GOOSE
     THE WATER OF LIFE
     THE TWELVE HUNTSMEN
     THE KING OF THE GOLDEN MOUNTAIN
     DOCTOR KNOWALL
     THE SEVEN RAVENS
     THE WEDDING OF MRS FOX
     FIRST STORY
     SECOND STORY
     THE SALAD
     THE STORY OF THE YOUTH WHO WENT FORTH TO LEARN WHAT FEAR WAS
     KING GRISLY-BEARD
     IRON HANS
     CAT-SKIN
     SNOW-WHITE AND ROSE-RED




THE BROTHERS GRIMM FAIRY TALES




THE GOLDEN BIRD

A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree
which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about
the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night one
of them was gone. The king became very angry at this, and ordered the
gardener to keep watch all night under the tree. The gardener set his
eldest son to watch; but about twelve o’clock he fell asleep, and in
the morning another of the apples was missing. Then the second son was
ordered to watch; and at midnight he too fell asleep, and in the morning
another apple was gone. Then the third son offered to keep watch; but
the gardener at first would not let him, for fear some harm should come
to him: however, at last he consented, and the young man laid himself
under the tree to watch. As the clock struck twelve he heard a rustling
noise in the air, and a bird came flying that was of pure gold; and as
it was snapping at one of the apples with its beak, the gardener’s son
jumped up and shot an arrow at it. But the arrow did the bird no harm;
only it dropped a golden feather from its tail, and then flew away.
The golden feather was brought to the king in the morning, and all the
council was called together. Everyone agreed that it was worth more than
all the wealth of the kingdom: but the king said, ‘One feather is of no
use to me, I must have the whole bird.’

Then the gardener’s eldest son set out and thought to find the golden
bird very easily; and when he had gone but a little way, he came to a
wood, and by the side of the wood he saw a fox sitting; so he took his
bow and made ready to shoot at it. Then the fox said, ‘Do not shoot me,
for I will give you good counsel; I know what your business is, and
that you want to find the golden bird. You will reach a village in the
evening; and when you get there, you will see two inns opposite to each
other, one of which is very pleasant and beautiful to look at: go not in
there, but rest for the night in the other, though it may appear to you
to be very poor and mean.’ But the son thought to himself, ‘What can
such a beast as this know about the matter?’ So he shot his arrow at
the fox; but he missed it, and it set up its tail above its back and
ran into the wood. Then he went his way, and in the evening came to
the village where the two inns were; and in one of these were people
singing, and dancing, and feasting; but the other looked very dirty,
and poor. ‘I should be very silly,’ said he, ‘if I went to that shabby
house, and left this charming place’; so he went into the smart house,
and ate and drank at his ease, and forgot the bird, and his country too.

Time passed on; and as the eldest son did not come back, and no tidings
were heard of him, the second son set out, and the same thing happened
to him. He met the fox, who gave him the good advice: but when he came
to the two inns, his eldest brother was standing at the window where
the merrymaking was, and called to him to come in; and he could not
withstand the temptation, but went in, and forgot the golden bird and
his country in the same manner.

Time passed on again, and the youngest son too wished to set out into
the wide world to seek for the golden bird; but his father would not
listen to it for a long while, for he was very fond of his son, and
was afraid that some ill luck might happen to him also, and prevent his
coming back. However, at last it was agreed he should go, for he would
not rest at home; and as he came to the wood, he met the fox, and heard
the same good counsel. But he was thankful to the fox, and did not
attempt his life as his brothers had done; so the fox said, ‘Sit upon my
tail, and you will travel faster.’ So he sat down, and the fox began to
run, and away they went over stock and stone so quick that their hair
whistled in the wind.

When they came to the village, the son followed the fox’s counsel, and
without looking about him went to the shabby inn and rested there all
night at his ease. In the morning came the fox again and met him as he
was beginning his journey, and said, ‘Go straight forward, till you come
to a castle, before which lie a whole troop of soldiers fast asleep and
snoring: take no notice of them, but go into the castle and pass on and
on till you come to a room, where the golden bird sits in a wooden cage;
close by it stands a beautiful golden cage; but do not try to take the
bird out of the shabby cage and put it into the handsome one, otherwise
you will repent it.’ Then the fox stretched out his tail again, and the
young man sat himself down, and away they went over stock and stone till
their hair whistled in the wind.

Before the castle gate all was as the fox had said: so the son went in
and found the chamber where the golden bird hung in a wooden cage, and
below stood the golden cage, and the three golden apples that had been
lost were lying close by it. Then thought he to himself, ‘It will be a
very droll thing to bring away such a fine bird in this shabby cage’; so
he opened the door and took hold of it and put it into the golden cage.
But the bird set up such a loud scream that all the soldiers awoke, and
they took him prisoner and carried him before the king. The next morning
the court sat to judge him; and when all was heard, it sentenced him to
die, unless he should bring the king the golden horse which could run as
swiftly as the wind; and if he did this, he was to have the golden bird
given him for his own.

So he set out once more on his journey, sighing, and in great despair,
when on a sudden his friend the fox met him, and said, ‘You see now
what has happened on account of your not listening to my counsel. I will
still, however, tell you how to find the golden horse, if you will do as
I bid you. You must go straight on till you come to the castle where the
horse stands in his stall: by his side will lie the groom fast asleep
and snoring: take away the horse quietly, but be sure to put the old
leathern saddle upon him, and not the golden one that is close by it.’
Then the son sat down on the fox’s tail, and away they went over stock
and stone till their hair whistled in the wind.

All went right, and the groom lay snoring with his hand upon the golden
saddle. But when the son looked at the horse, he thought it a great pity
to put the leathern saddle upon it. ‘I will give him the good one,’
said he; ‘I am sure he deserves it.’ As he took up the golden saddle the
groom awoke and cried out so loud, that all the guards ran in and took
him prisoner, and in the morning he was again brought before the court
to be judged, and was sentenced to die. But it was agreed, that, if he
could bring thither the beautiful princess, he should live, and have the
bird and the horse given him for his own.

Then he went his way very sorrowful; but the old fox came and said, ‘Why
did not you listen to me? If you had, you would have carried away
both the bird and the horse; yet will I once more give you counsel. Go
straight on, and in the evening you will arrive at a castle. At twelve
o’clock at night the princess goes to the bathing-house: go up to her
and give her a kiss, and she will let you lead her away; but take care
you do not suffer her to go and take leave of her father and mother.’
Then the fox stretched out his tail, and so away they went over stock
and stone till their hair whistled again.

As they came to the castle, all was as the fox had said, and at twelve
o’clock the young man met the princess going to the bath and gave her the
kiss, and she agreed to run away with him, but begged with many tears
that he would let her take leave of her father. At first he refused,
but she wept still more and more, and fell at his feet, till at last
he consented; but the moment she came to her father’s house the guards
awoke and he was taken prisoner again.

Then he was brought before the king, and the king said, ‘You shall never
have my daughter unless in eight days you dig away the hill that stops
the view from my window.’ Now this hill was so big that the whole world
could not take it away: and when he had worked for seven days, and had
done very little, the fox came and said. ‘Lie down and go to sleep; I
will work for you.’ And in the morning he awoke and the hill was gone;
so he went merrily to the king, and told him that now that it was
removed he must give him the princess.

Then the king was obliged to keep his word, and away went the young man
and the princess; and the fox came and said to him, ‘We will have all
three, the princess, the horse, and the bird.’ ‘Ah!’ said the young man,
‘that would be a great thing, but how can you contrive it?’

‘If you will only listen,’ said the fox, ‘it can be done. When you come
to the king, and he asks for the beautiful princess, you must say, “Here
she is!” Then he will be very joyful; and you will mount the golden
horse that they are to give you, and put out your hand to take leave of
them; but shake hands with the princess last. Then lift her quickly on
to the horse behind you; clap your spurs to his side, and gallop away as
fast as you can.’

All went right: then the fox said, ‘When you come to the castle where
the bird is, I will stay with the princess at the door, and you will
ride in and speak to the king; and when he sees that it is the right
horse, he will bring out the bird; but you must sit still, and say that
you want to look at it, to see whether it is the true golden bird; and
when you get it into your hand, ride away.’

This, too, happened as the fox said; they carried off the bird, the
princess mounted again, and they rode on to a great wood. Then the fox
came, and said, ‘Pray kill me, and cut off my head and my feet.’ But the
young man refused to do it: so the fox said, ‘I will at any rate give
you good counsel: beware of two things; ransom no one from the gallows,
and sit down by the side of no river.’ Then away he went. ‘Well,’
thought the young man, ‘it is no hard matter to keep that advice.’

He rode on with the princess, till at last he came to the village where
he had left his two brothers. And there he heard a great noise and
uproar; and when he asked what was the matter, the people said, ‘Two men
are going to be hanged.’ As he came nearer, he saw that the two men were
his brothers, who had turned robbers; so he said, ‘Cannot they in any
way be saved?’ But the people said ‘No,’ unless he would bestow all his
money upon the rascals and buy their liberty. Then he did not stay to
think about the matter, but paid what was asked, and his brothers were
given up, and went on with him towards their home.

And as they came to the wood where the fox first met them, it was so
cool and pleasant that the two brothers said, ‘Let us sit down by the
side of the river, and rest a while, to eat and drink.’ So he said,
‘Yes,’ and forgot the fox’s counsel, and sat down on the side of the
river; and while he suspected nothing, they came behind, and threw him
down the bank, and took the princess, the horse, and the bird, and went
home to the king their master, and said. ‘All this have we won by our
labour.’ Then there was great rejoicing made; but the horse would not
eat, the bird would not sing, and the princess wept.

The youngest son fell to the bottom of the river’s bed: luckily it was
nearly dry, but his bones were almost broken, and the bank was so steep
that he could find no way to get out. Then the old fox came once more,
and scolded him for not following his advice; otherwise no evil would
have befallen him: ‘Yet,’ said he, ‘I cannot leave you here, so lay hold
of my tail and hold fast.’ Then he pulled him out of the river, and said
to him, as he got upon the bank, ‘Your brothers have set watch to kill
you, if they find you in the kingdom.’ So he dressed himself as a poor
man, and came secretly to the king’s court, and was scarcely within the
doors when the horse began to eat, and the bird to sing, and the princess
left off weeping. Then he went to the king, and told him all his
brothers’ roguery; and they were seized and punished, and he had the
princess given to him again; and after the king’s death he was heir to
his kingdom.

A long while after, he went to walk one day in the wood, and the old fox
met him, and besought him with tears in his eyes to kill him, and cut
off his head and feet. And at last he did so, and in a moment the
fox was changed into a man, and turned out to be the brother of the
princess, who had been lost a great many many years.




HANS IN LUCK

Some men are born to good luck: all they do or try to do comes
right--all that falls to them is so much gain--all their geese are
swans--all their cards are trumps--toss them which way you will, they
will always, like poor puss, alight upon their legs, and only move on so
much the faster. The world may very likely not always think of them as
they think of themselves, but what care they for the world? what can it
know about the matter?

One of these lucky beings was neighbour Hans. Seven long years he had
worked hard for his master. At last he said, ‘Master, my time is up; I
must go home and see my poor mother once more: so pray pay me my wages
and let me go.’ And the master said, ‘You have been a faithful and good
servant, Hans, so your pay shall be handsome.’ Then he gave him a lump
of silver as big as his head.

Hans took out his pocket-handkerchief, put the piece of silver into it,
threw it over his shoulder, and jogged off on his road homewards. As he
went lazily on, dragging one foot after another, a man came in sight,
trotting gaily along on a capital horse. ‘Ah!’ said Hans aloud, ‘what a
fine thing it is to ride on horseback! There he sits as easy and happy
as if he was at home, in the chair by his fireside; he trips against no
stones, saves shoe-leather, and gets on he hardly knows how.’ Hans did
not speak so softly but the horseman heard it all, and said, ‘Well,
friend, why do you go on foot then?’ ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘I have this load to
carry: to be sure it is silver, but it is so heavy that I can’t hold up
my head, and you must know it hurts my shoulder sadly.’ ‘What do you say
of making an exchange?’ said the horseman. ‘I will give you my horse,
and you shall give me the silver; which will save you a great deal of
trouble in carrying such a heavy load about with you.’ ‘With all my
heart,’ said Hans: ‘but as you are so kind to me, I must tell you one
thing--you will have a weary task to draw that silver about with you.’
However, the horseman got off, took the silver, helped Hans up, gave him
the bridle into one hand and the whip into the other, and said, ‘When
you want to go very fast, smack your lips loudly together, and cry
“Jip!”’

Hans was delighted as he sat on the horse, drew himself up, squared his
elbows, turned out his toes, cracked his whip, and rode merrily off, one
minute whistling a merry tune, and another singing,

 ‘No care and no sorrow,
  A fig for the morrow!
  We’ll laugh and be merry,
  Sing neigh down derry!’

After a time he thought he should like to go a little faster, so he
smacked his lips and cried ‘Jip!’ Away went the horse full gallop; and
before Hans knew what he was about, he was thrown off, and lay on his
back by the road-side. His horse would have ran off, if a shepherd who
was coming by, driving a cow, had not stopped it. Hans soon came to
himself, and got upon his legs again, sadly vexed, and said to the
shepherd, ‘This riding is no joke, when a man has the luck to get upon
a beast like this that stumbles and flings him off as if it would break
his neck. However, I’m off now once for all: I like your cow now a great
deal better than this smart beast that played me this trick, and has
spoiled my best coat, you see, in this puddle; which, by the by, smells
not very like a nosegay. One can walk along at one’s leisure behind that
cow--keep good company, and have milk, butter, and cheese, every day,
into the bargain. What would I give to have such a prize!’ ‘Well,’ said
the shepherd, ‘if you are so fond of her, I will change my cow for your
horse; I like to do good to my neighbours, even though I lose by it
myself.’ ‘Done!’ said Hans, merrily. ‘What a noble heart that good man
has!’ thought he. Then the shepherd jumped upon the horse, wished Hans
and the cow good morning, and away he rode.

Hans brushed his coat, wiped his face and hands, rested a while, and
then drove off his cow quietly, and thought his bargain a very lucky
one. ‘If I have only a piece of bread (and I certainly shall always be
able to get that), I can, whenever I like, eat my butter and cheese with
it; and when I am thirsty I can milk my cow and drink the milk: and what
can I wish for more?’ When he came to an inn, he halted, ate up all his
bread, and gave away his last penny for a glass of beer. When he had
rested himself he set off again, driving his cow towards his mother’s
village. But the heat grew greater as soon as noon came on, till at
last, as he found himself on a wide heath that would take him more than
an hour to cross, he began to be so hot and parched that his tongue
clave to the roof of his mouth. ‘I can find a cure for this,’ thought
he; ‘now I will milk my cow and quench my thirst’: so he tied her to the
stump of a tree, and held his leathern cap to milk into; but not a drop
was to be had. Who would have thought that this cow, which was to bring
him milk and butter and cheese, was all that time utterly dry? Hans had
not thought of looking to that.

While he was trying his luck in milking, and managing the matter very
clumsily, the uneasy beast began to think him very troublesome; and at
last gave him such a kick on the head as knocked him down; and there he
lay a long while senseless. Luckily a butcher soon came by, driving a
pig in a wheelbarrow. ‘What is the matter with you, my man?’ said the
butcher, as he helped him up. Hans told him what had happened, how he
was dry, and wanted to milk his cow, but found the cow was dry too. Then
the butcher gave him a flask of ale, saying, ‘There, drink and refresh
yourself; your cow will give you no milk: don’t you see she is an old
beast, good for nothing but the slaughter-house?’ ‘Alas, alas!’ said
Hans, ‘who would have thought it? What a shame to take my horse, and
give me only a dry cow! If I kill her, what will she be good for? I hate
cow-beef; it is not tender enough for me. If it were a pig now--like
that fat gentleman you are driving along at his ease--one could do
something with it; it would at any rate make sausages.’ ‘Well,’ said
the butcher, ‘I don’t like to say no, when one is asked to do a kind,
neighbourly thing. To please you I will change, and give you my fine fat
pig for the cow.’ ‘Heaven reward you for your kindness and self-denial!’
said Hans, as he gave the butcher the cow; and taking the pig off the
wheel-barrow, drove it away, holding it by the string that was tied to
its leg.

So on he jogged, and all seemed now to go right with him: he had met
with some misfortunes, to be sure; but he was now well repaid for all.
How could it be otherwise with such a travelling companion as he had at
last got?

The next man he met was a countryman carrying a fine white goose. The
countryman stopped to ask what was o’clock; this led to further chat;
and Hans told him all his luck, how he had so many good bargains, and
how all the world went gay and smiling with him. The countryman then
began to tell his tale, and said he was going to take the goose to a
christening. ‘Feel,’ said he, ‘how heavy it is, and yet it is only eight
weeks old. Whoever roasts and eats it will find plenty of fat upon it,
it has lived so well!’ ‘You’re right,’ said Hans, as he weighed it in
his hand; ‘but if you talk of fat, my pig is no trifle.’ Meantime the
countryman began to look grave, and shook his head. ‘Hark ye!’ said he,
‘my worthy friend, you seem a good sort of fellow, so I can’t help doing
you a kind turn. Your pig may get you into a scrape. In the village I
just came from, the squire has had a pig stolen out of his sty. I was
dreadfully afraid when I saw you that you had got the squire’s pig. If
you have, and they catch you, it will be a bad job for you. The least
they will do will be to throw you into the horse-pond. Can you swim?’

Poor Hans was sadly frightened. ‘Good man,’ cried he, ‘pray get me out
of this scrape. I know nothing of where the pig was either bred or born;
but he may have been the squire’s for aught I can tell: you know this
country better than I do, take my pig and give me the goose.’ ‘I ought
to have something into the bargain,’ said the countryman; ‘give a fat
goose for a pig, indeed! ‘Tis not everyone would do so much for you as
that. However, I will not be hard upon you, as you are in trouble.’ Then
he took the string in his hand, and drove off the pig by a side path;
while Hans went on the way homewards free from care. ‘After all,’
thought he, ‘that chap is pretty well taken in. I don’t care whose pig
it is, but wherever it came from it has been a very good friend to me. I
have much the best of the bargain. First there will be a capital roast;
then the fat will find me in goose-grease for six months; and then there
are all the beautiful white feathers. I will put them into my pillow,
and then I am sure I shall sleep soundly without rocking. How happy my
mother will be! Talk of a pig, indeed! Give me a fine fat goose.’

As he came to the next village, he saw a scissor-grinder with his wheel,
working and singing,

 ‘O’er hill and o’er dale
  So happy I roam,
  Work light and live well,
  All the world is my home;
  Then who so blythe, so merry as I?’

Hans stood looking on for a while, and at last said, ‘You must be well
off, master grinder! you seem so happy at your work.’ ‘Yes,’ said the
other, ‘mine is a golden trade; a good grinder never puts his hand
into his pocket without finding money in it--but where did you get that
beautiful goose?’ ‘I did not buy it, I gave a pig for it.’ ‘And where
did you get the pig?’ ‘I gave a cow for it.’ ‘And the cow?’ ‘I gave a
horse for it.’ ‘And the horse?’ ‘I gave a lump of silver as big as my
head for it.’ ‘And the silver?’ ‘Oh! I worked hard for that seven long
years.’ ‘You have thriven well in the world hitherto,’ said the grinder,
‘now if you could find money in your pocket whenever you put your hand
in it, your fortune would be made.’ ‘Very true: but how is that to be
managed?’ ‘How? Why, you must turn grinder like myself,’ said the other;
‘you only want a grindstone; the rest will come of itself. Here is one
that is but little the worse for wear: I would not ask more than the
value of your goose for it--will you buy?’ ‘How can you ask?’ said
Hans; ‘I should be the happiest man in the world, if I could have money
whenever I put my hand in my pocket: what could I want more? there’s
the goose.’ ‘Now,’ said the grinder, as he gave him a common rough stone
that lay by his side, ‘this is a most capital stone; do but work it well
enough, and you can make an old nail cut with it.’

Hans took the stone, and went his way with a light heart: his eyes
sparkled for joy, and he said to himself, ‘Surely I must have been born
in a lucky hour; everything I could want or wish for comes of itself.
People are so kind; they seem really to think I do them a favour in
letting them make me rich, and giving me good bargains.’

Meantime he began to be tired, and hungry too, for he had given away his
last penny in his joy at getting the cow.

At last he could go no farther, for the stone tired him sadly: and he
dragged himself to the side of a river, that he might take a drink of
water, and rest a while. So he laid the stone carefully by his side on
the bank: but, as he stooped down to drink, he forgot it, pushed it a
little, and down it rolled, plump into the stream.

For a while he watched it sinking in the deep clear water; then sprang
up and danced for joy, and again fell upon his knees and thanked Heaven,
with tears in his eyes, for its kindness in taking away his only plague,
the ugly heavy stone.

‘How happy am I!’ cried he; ‘nobody was ever so lucky as I.’ Then up he
got with a light heart, free from all his troubles, and walked on till
he reached his mother’s house, and told her how very easy the road to
good luck was.




JORINDA AND JORINDEL

There was once an old castle, that stood in the middle of a deep gloomy
wood, and in the castle lived an old fairy. Now this fairy could take
any shape she pleased. All the day long she flew about in the form of
an owl, or crept about the country like a cat; but at night she always
became an old woman again. When any young man came within a hundred
paces of her castle, he became quite fixed, and could not move a step
till she came and set him free; which she would not do till he had given
her his word never to come there again: but when any pretty maiden came
within that space she was changed into a bird, and the fairy put her
into a cage, and hung her up in a chamber in the castle. There were
seven hundred of these cages hanging in the castle, and all with
beautiful birds in them.

Now there was once a maiden whose name was Jorinda. She was prettier
than all the pretty girls that ever were seen before, and a shepherd
lad, whose name was Jorindel, was very fond of her, and they were soon
to be married. One day they went to walk in the wood, that they might be
alone; and Jorindel said, ‘We must take care that we don’t go too near
to the fairy’s castle.’ It was a beautiful evening; the last rays of the
setting sun shone bright through the long stems of the trees upon
the green underwood beneath, and the turtle-doves sang from the tall
birches.

Jorinda sat down to gaze upon the sun; Jorindel sat by her side; and
both felt sad, they knew not why; but it seemed as if they were to be
parted from one another for ever. They had wandered a long way; and when
they looked to see which way they should go home, they found themselves
at a loss to know what path to take.

The sun was setting fast, and already half of its circle had sunk behind
the hill: Jorindel on a sudden looked behind him, and saw through the
bushes that they had, without knowing it, sat down close under the old
walls of the castle. Then he shrank for fear, turned pale, and trembled.
Jorinda was just singing,

 ‘The ring-dove sang from the willow spray,
  Well-a-day! Well-a-day!
  He mourn’d for the fate of his darling mate,
  Well-a-day!’

when her song stopped suddenly. Jorindel turned to see the reason, and
beheld his Jorinda changed into a nightingale, so that her song ended
with a mournful _jug, jug_. An owl with fiery eyes flew three times
round them, and three times screamed:

 ‘Tu whu! Tu whu! Tu whu!’

Jorindel could not move; he stood fixed as a stone, and could neither
weep, nor speak, nor stir hand or foot. And now the sun went quite down;
the gloomy night came; the owl flew into a bush; and a moment after the
old fairy came forth pale and meagre, with staring eyes, and a nose and
chin that almost met one another.

She mumbled something to herself, seized the nightingale, and went away
with it in her hand. Poor Jorindel saw the nightingale was gone--but
what could he do? He could not speak, he could not move from the spot
where he stood. At last the fairy came back and sang with a hoarse
voice:

 ‘Till the prisoner is fast,
  And her doom is cast,
  There stay! Oh, stay!
  When the charm is around her,
  And the spell has bound her,
  Hie away! away!’

On a sudden Jorindel found himself free. Then he fell on his knees
before the fairy, and prayed her to give him back his dear Jorinda: but
she laughed at him, and said he should never see her again; then she
went her way.

He prayed, he wept, he sorrowed, but all in vain. ‘Alas!’ he said, ‘what
will become of me?’ He could not go back to his own home, so he went to
a strange village, and employed himself in keeping sheep. Many a time
did he walk round and round as near to the hated castle as he dared go,
but all in vain; he heard or saw nothing of Jorinda.

At last he dreamt one night that he found a beautiful purple flower,
and that in the middle of it lay a costly pearl; and he dreamt that he
plucked the flower, and went with it in his hand into the castle, and
that everything he touched with it was disenchanted, and that there he
found his Jorinda again.

In the morning when he awoke, he began to search over hill and dale for
this pretty flower; and eight long days he sought for it in vain: but
on the ninth day, early in the morning, he found the beautiful purple
flower; and in the middle of it was a large dewdrop, as big as a costly
pearl. Then he plucked the flower, and set out and travelled day and
night, till he came again to the castle.

He walked nearer than a hundred paces to it, and yet he did not become
fixed as before, but found that he could go quite close up to the door.
Jorindel was very glad indeed to see this. Then he touched the door with
the flower, and it sprang open; so that he went in through the court,
and listened when he heard so many birds singing. At last he came to the
chamber where the fairy sat, with the seven hundred birds singing in
the seven hundred cages. When she saw Jorindel she was very angry, and
screamed with rage; but she could not come within two yards of him, for
the flower he held in his hand was his safeguard. He looked around at
the birds, but alas! there were many, many nightingales, and how then
should he find out which was his Jorinda? While he was thinking what to
do, he saw the fairy had taken down one of the cages, and was making the
best of her way off through the door. He ran or flew after her, touched
the cage with the flower, and Jorinda stood before him, and threw her
arms round his neck looking as beautiful as ever, as beautiful as when
they walked together in the wood.

Then he touched all the other birds with the flower, so that they all
took their old forms again; and he took Jorinda home, where they were
married, and lived happily together many years: and so did a good many
other lads, whose maidens had been forced to sing in the old fairy’s
cages by themselves, much longer than they liked.




THE TRAVELLING MUSICIANS

An honest farmer had once an ass that had been a faithful servant to him
a great many years, but was now growing old and every day more and more
unfit for work. His master therefore was tired of keeping him and
began to think of putting an end to him; but the ass, who saw that some
mischief was in the wind, took himself slyly off, and began his journey
towards the great city, ‘For there,’ thought he, ‘I may turn musician.’

After he had travelled a little way, he spied a dog lying by the
roadside and panting as if he were tired. ‘What makes you pant so, my
friend?’ said the ass. ‘Alas!’ said the dog, ‘my master was going to
knock me on the head, because I am old and weak, and can no longer make
myself useful to him in hunting; so I ran away; but what can I do to
earn my livelihood?’ ‘Hark ye!’ said the ass, ‘I am going to the great
city to turn musician: suppose you go with me, and try what you can
do in the same way?’ The dog said he was willing, and they jogged on
together.

They had not gone far before they saw a cat sitting in the middle of the
road and making a most rueful face. ‘Pray, my good lady,’ said the ass,
‘what’s the matter with you? You look quite out of spirits!’ ‘Ah, me!’
said the cat, ‘how can one be in good spirits when one’s life is in
danger? Because I am beginning to grow old, and had rather lie at my
ease by the fire than run about the house after the mice, my mistress
laid hold of me, and was going to drown me; and though I have been lucky
enough to get away from her, I do not know what I am to live upon.’
‘Oh,’ said the ass, ‘by all means go with us to the great city; you are
a good night singer, and may make your fortune as a musician.’ The cat
was pleased with the thought, and joined the party.

Soon afterwards, as they were passing by a farmyard, they saw a cock
perched upon a gate, and screaming out with all his might and main.
‘Bravo!’ said the ass; ‘upon my word, you make a famous noise; pray what
is all this about?’ ‘Why,’ said the cock, ‘I was just now saying that
we should have fine weather for our washing-day, and yet my mistress and
the cook don’t thank me for my pains, but threaten to cut off my
head tomorrow, and make broth of me for the guests that are coming
on Sunday!’ ‘Heaven forbid!’ said the ass, ‘come with us Master
Chanticleer; it will be better, at any rate, than staying here to have
your head cut off! Besides, who knows? If we care to sing in tune, we
may get up some kind of a concert; so come along with us.’ ‘With all my
heart,’ said the cock: so they all four went on jollily together.

They could not, however, reach the great city the first day; so when
night came on, they went into a wood to sleep. The ass and the dog laid
themselves down under a great tree, and the cat climbed up into the
branches; while the cock, thinking that the higher he sat the safer he
should be, flew up to the very top of the tree, and then, according to
his custom, before he went to sleep, looked out on all sides of him to
see that everything was well. In doing this, he saw afar off something
bright and shining and calling to his companions said, ‘There must be a
house no great way off, for I see a light.’ ‘If that be the case,’ said
the ass, ‘we had better change our quarters, for our lodging is not the
best in the world!’ ‘Besides,’ added the dog, ‘I should not be the
worse for a bone or two, or a bit of meat.’ So they walked off together
towards the spot where Chanticleer had seen the light, and as they drew
near it became larger and brighter, till they at last came close to a
house in which a gang of robbers lived.

The ass, being the tallest of the company, marched up to the window and
peeped in. ‘Well, Donkey,’ said Chanticleer, ‘what do you see?’ ‘What
do I see?’ replied the ass. ‘Why, I see a table spread with all kinds of
good things, and robbers sitting round it making merry.’ ‘That would
be a noble lodging for us,’ said the cock. ‘Yes,’ said the ass, ‘if we
could only get in’; so they consulted together how they should contrive
to get the robbers out; and at last they hit upon a plan. The ass placed
himself upright on his hind legs, with his forefeet resting against the
window; the dog got upon his back; the cat scrambled up to the dog’s
shoulders, and the cock flew up and sat upon the cat’s head. When
all was ready a signal was given, and they began their music. The ass
brayed, the dog barked, the cat mewed, and the cock screamed; and then
they all broke through the window at once, and came tumbling into
the room, amongst the broken glass, with a most hideous clatter! The
robbers, who had been not a little frightened by the opening concert,
had now no doubt that some frightful hobgoblin had broken in upon them,
and scampered away as fast as they could.

The coast once clear, our travellers soon sat down and dispatched what
the robbers had left, with as much eagerness as if they had not expected
to eat again for a month. As soon as they had satisfied themselves, they
put out the lights, and each once more sought out a resting-place to
his own liking. The donkey laid himself down upon a heap of straw in
the yard, the dog stretched himself upon a mat behind the door, the
cat rolled herself up on the hearth before the warm ashes, and the
cock perched upon a beam on the top of the house; and, as they were all
rather tired with their journey, they soon fell asleep.

But about midnight, when the robbers saw from afar that the lights were
out and that all seemed quiet, they began to think that they had been in
too great a hurry to run away; and one of them, who was bolder than
the rest, went to see what was going on. Finding everything still, he
marched into the kitchen, and groped about till he found a match in
order to light a candle; and then, espying the glittering fiery eyes of
the cat, he mistook them for live coals, and held the match to them to
light it. But the cat, not understanding this joke, sprang at his face,
and spat, and scratched at him. This frightened him dreadfully, and away
he ran to the back door; but there the dog jumped up and bit him in the
leg; and as he was crossing over the yard the ass kicked him; and the
cock, who had been awakened by the noise, crowed with all his might. At
this the robber ran back as fast as he could to his comrades, and told
the captain how a horrid witch had got into the house, and had spat at
him and scratched his face with her long bony fingers; how a man with a
knife in his hand had hidden himself behind the door, and stabbed him
in the leg; how a black monster stood in the yard and struck him with a
club, and how the devil had sat upon the top of the house and cried out,
‘Throw the rascal up here!’ After this the robbers never dared to go
back to the house; but the musicians were so pleased with their quarters
that they took up their abode there; and there they are, I dare say, at
this very day.




OLD SULTAN

A shepherd had a faithful dog, called Sultan, who was grown very old,
and had lost all his teeth. And one day when the shepherd and his wife
were standing together before the house the shepherd said, ‘I will shoot
old Sultan tomorrow morning, for he is of no use now.’ But his wife
said, ‘Pray let the poor faithful creature live; he has served us well a
great many years, and we ought to give him a livelihood for the rest of
his days.’ ‘But what can we do with him?’ said the shepherd, ‘he has not
a tooth in his head, and the thieves don’t care for him at all; to
be sure he has served us, but then he did it to earn his livelihood;
tomorrow shall be his last day, depend upon it.’

Poor Sultan, who was lying close by them, heard all that the shepherd
and his wife said to one another, and was very much frightened to think
tomorrow would be his last day; so in the evening he went to his good
friend the wolf, who lived in the wood, and told him all his sorrows,
and how his master meant to kill him in the morning. ‘Make yourself
easy,’ said the wolf, ‘I will give you some good advice. Your master,
you know, goes out every morning very early with his wife into the
field; and they take their little child with them, and lay it down
behind the hedge in the shade while they are at work. Now do you lie
down close by the child, and pretend to be watching it, and I will come
out of the wood and run away with it; you must run after me as fast as
you can, and I will let it drop; then you may carry it back, and they
will think you have saved their child, and will be so thankful to you
that they will take care of you as long as you live.’ The dog liked this
plan very well; and accordingly so it was managed. The wolf ran with the
child a little way; the shepherd and his wife screamed out; but Sultan
soon overtook him, and carried the poor little thing back to his master
and mistress. Then the shepherd patted him on the head, and said, ‘Old
Sultan has saved our child from the wolf, and therefore he shall live
and be well taken care of, and have plenty to eat. Wife, go home, and
give him a good dinner, and let him have my old cushion to sleep on
as long as he lives.’ So from this time forward Sultan had all that he
could wish for.

Soon afterwards the wolf came and wished him joy, and said, ‘Now, my
good fellow, you must tell no tales, but turn your head the other way
when I want to taste one of the old shepherd’s fine fat sheep.’ ‘No,’
said the Sultan; ‘I will be true to my master.’ However, the wolf
thought he was in joke, and came one night to get a dainty morsel. But
Sultan had told his master what the wolf meant to do; so he laid wait
for him behind the barn door, and when the wolf was busy looking out for
a good fat sheep, he had a stout cudgel laid about his back, that combed
his locks for him finely.

Then the wolf was very angry, and called Sultan ‘an old rogue,’ and
swore he would have his revenge. So the next morning the wolf sent the
boar to challenge Sultan to come into the wood to fight the matter. Now
Sultan had nobody he could ask to be his second but the shepherd’s old
three-legged cat; so he took her with him, and as the poor thing limped
along with some trouble, she stuck up her tail straight in the air.

The wolf and the wild boar were first on the ground; and when they
espied their enemies coming, and saw the cat’s long tail standing
straight in the air, they thought she was carrying a sword for Sultan to
fight with; and every time she limped, they thought she was picking up
a stone to throw at them; so they said they should not like this way of
fighting, and the boar lay down behind a bush, and the wolf jumped
up into a tree. Sultan and the cat soon came up, and looked about and
wondered that no one was there. The boar, however, had not quite hidden
himself, for his ears stuck out of the bush; and when he shook one of
them a little, the cat, seeing something move, and thinking it was a
mouse, sprang upon it, and bit and scratched it, so that the boar jumped
up and grunted, and ran away, roaring out, ‘Look up in the tree, there
sits the one who is to blame.’ So they looked up, and espied the wolf
sitting amongst the branches; and they called him a cowardly rascal,
and would not suffer him to come down till he was heartily ashamed of
himself, and had promised to be good friends again with old Sultan.




THE STRAW, THE COAL, AND THE BEAN

In a village dwelt a poor old woman, who had gathered together a dish
of beans and wanted to cook them. So she made a fire on her hearth, and
that it might burn the quicker, she lighted it with a handful of straw.
When she was emptying the beans into the pan, one dropped without her
observing it, and lay on the ground beside a straw, and soon afterwards
a burning coal from the fire leapt down to the two. Then the straw
began and said: ‘Dear friends, from whence do you come here?’ The coal
replied: ‘I fortunately sprang out of the fire, and if I had not escaped
by sheer force, my death would have been certain,--I should have been
burnt to ashes.’ The bean said: ‘I too have escaped with a whole skin,
but if the old woman had got me into the pan, I should have been made
into broth without any mercy, like my comrades.’ ‘And would a better
fate have fallen to my lot?’ said the straw. ‘The old woman has
destroyed all my brethren in fire and smoke; she seized sixty of them at
once, and took their lives. I luckily slipped through her fingers.’

‘But what are we to do now?’ said the coal.

‘I think,’ answered the bean, ‘that as we have so fortunately escaped
death, we should keep together like good companions, and lest a new
mischance should overtake us here, we should go away together, and
repair to a foreign country.’

The proposition pleased the two others, and they set out on their way
together. Soon, however, they came to a little brook, and as there was
no bridge or foot-plank, they did not know how they were to get over
it. The straw hit on a good idea, and said: ‘I will lay myself straight
across, and then you can walk over on me as on a bridge.’ The straw
therefore stretched itself from one bank to the other, and the coal,
who was of an impetuous disposition, tripped quite boldly on to the
newly-built bridge. But when she had reached the middle, and heard the
water rushing beneath her, she was after all, afraid, and stood still,
and ventured no farther. The straw, however, began to burn, broke in
two pieces, and fell into the stream. The coal slipped after her, hissed
when she got into the water, and breathed her last. The bean, who had
prudently stayed behind on the shore, could not but laugh at the event,
was unable to stop, and laughed so heartily that she burst. It would
have been all over with her, likewise, if, by good fortune, a tailor who
was travelling in search of work, had not sat down to rest by the brook.
As he had a compassionate heart he pulled out his needle and thread,
and sewed her together. The bean thanked him most prettily, but as the
tailor used black thread, all beans since then have a black seam.




BRIAR ROSE

A king and queen once upon a time reigned in a country a great way off,
where there were in those days fairies. Now this king and queen had
plenty of money, and plenty of fine clothes to wear, and plenty of
good things to eat and drink, and a coach to ride out in every day: but
though they had been married many years they had no children, and this
grieved them very much indeed. But one day as the queen was walking
by the side of the river, at the bottom of the garden, she saw a poor
little fish, that had thrown itself out of the water, and lay gasping
and nearly dead on the bank. Then the queen took pity on the little
fish, and threw it back again into the river; and before it swam away
it lifted its head out of the water and said, ‘I know what your wish is,
and it shall be fulfilled, in return for your kindness to me--you will
soon have a daughter.’ What the little fish had foretold soon came to
pass; and the queen had a little girl, so very beautiful that the king
could not cease looking on it for joy, and said he would hold a great
feast and make merry, and show the child to all the land. So he asked
his kinsmen, and nobles, and friends, and neighbours. But the queen
said, ‘I will have the fairies also, that they might be kind and good
to our little daughter.’ Now there were thirteen fairies in the kingdom;
but as the king and queen had only twelve golden dishes for them to eat
out of, they were forced to leave one of the fairies without asking her.
So twelve fairies came, each with a high red cap on her head, and red
shoes with high heels on her feet, and a long white wand in her hand:
and after the feast was over they gathered round in a ring and gave all
their best gifts to the little princess. One gave her goodness, another
beauty, another riches, and so on till she had all that was good in the
world.

Just as eleven of them had done blessing her, a great noise was heard in
the courtyard, and word was brought that the thirteenth fairy was
come, with a black cap on her head, and black shoes on her feet, and a
broomstick in her hand: and presently up she came into the dining-hall.
Now, as she had not been asked to the feast she was very angry, and
scolded the king and queen very much, and set to work to take her
revenge. So she cried out, ‘The king’s daughter shall, in her fifteenth
year, be wounded by a spindle, and fall down dead.’ Then the twelfth of
the friendly fairies, who had not yet given her gift, came forward, and
said that the evil wish must be fulfilled, but that she could soften its
mischief; so her gift was, that the king’s daughter, when the spindle
wounded her, should not really die, but should only fall asleep for a
hundred years.

However, the king hoped still to save his dear child altogether from
the threatened evil; so he ordered that all the spindles in the kingdom
should be bought up and burnt. But all the gifts of the first eleven
fairies were in the meantime fulfilled; for the princess was so
beautiful, and well behaved, and good, and wise, that everyone who knew
her loved her.

It happened that, on the very day she was fifteen years old, the king
and queen were not at home, and she was left alone in the palace. So she
roved about by herself, and looked at all the rooms and chambers, till
at last she came to an old tower, to which there was a narrow staircase
ending with a little door. In the door there was a golden key, and when
she turned it the door sprang open, and there sat an old lady spinning
away very busily. ‘Why, how now, good mother,’ said the princess; ‘what
are you doing there?’ ‘Spinning,’ said the old lady, and nodded her
head, humming a tune, while buzz! went the wheel. ‘How prettily that
little thing turns round!’ said the princess, and took the spindle
and began to try and spin. But scarcely had she touched it, before the
fairy’s prophecy was fulfilled; the spindle wounded her, and she fell
down lifeless on the ground.

However, she was not dead, but had only fallen into a deep sleep; and
the king and the queen, who had just come home, and all their court,
fell asleep too; and the horses slept in the stables, and the dogs in
the court, the pigeons on the house-top, and the very flies slept upon
the walls. Even the fire on the hearth left off blazing, and went to
sleep; the jack stopped, and the spit that was turning about with a
goose upon it for the king’s dinner stood still; and the cook, who was
at that moment pulling the kitchen-boy by the hair to give him a box
on the ear for something he had done amiss, let him go, and both fell
asleep; the butler, who was slyly tasting the ale, fell asleep with the
jug at his lips: and thus everything stood still, and slept soundly.

A large hedge of thorns soon grew round the palace, and every year it
became higher and thicker; till at last the old palace was surrounded
and hidden, so that not even the roof or the chimneys could be seen. But
there went a report through all the land of the beautiful sleeping Briar
Rose (for so the king’s daughter was called): so that, from time to
time, several kings’ sons came, and tried to break through the thicket
into the palace. This, however, none of them could ever do; for the
thorns and bushes laid hold of them, as it were with hands; and there
they stuck fast, and died wretchedly.

After many, many years there came a king’s son into that land: and an
old man told him the story of the thicket of thorns; and how a beautiful
palace stood behind it, and how a wonderful princess, called Briar Rose,
lay in it asleep, with all her court. He told, too, how he had heard
from his grandfather that many, many princes had come, and had tried to
break through the thicket, but that they had all stuck fast in it, and
died. Then the young prince said, ‘All this shall not frighten me; I
will go and see this Briar Rose.’ The old man tried to hinder him, but
he was bent upon going.

Now that very day the hundred years were ended; and as the prince came
to the thicket he saw nothing but beautiful flowering shrubs, through
which he went with ease, and they shut in after him as thick as ever.
Then he came at last to the palace, and there in the court lay the dogs
asleep; and the horses were standing in the stables; and on the roof sat
the pigeons fast asleep, with their heads under their wings. And when he
came into the palace, the flies were sleeping on the walls; the spit
was standing still; the butler had the jug of ale at his lips, going
to drink a draught; the maid sat with a fowl in her lap ready to be
plucked; and the cook in the kitchen was still holding up her hand, as
if she was going to beat the boy.

Then he went on still farther, and all was so still that he could hear
every breath he drew; till at last he came to the old tower, and opened
the door of the little room in which Briar Rose was; and there she lay,
fast asleep on a couch by the window. She looked so beautiful that he
could not take his eyes off her, so he stooped down and gave her a kiss.
But the moment he kissed her she opened her eyes and awoke, and smiled
upon him; and they went out together; and soon the king and queen also
awoke, and all the court, and gazed on each other with great wonder.
And the horses shook themselves, and the dogs jumped up and barked; the
pigeons took their heads from under their wings, and looked about and
flew into the fields; the flies on the walls buzzed again; the fire in
the kitchen blazed up; round went the jack, and round went the spit,
with the goose for the king’s dinner upon it; the butler finished his
draught of ale; the maid went on plucking the fowl; and the cook gave
the boy the box on his ear.

And then the prince and Briar Rose were married, and the wedding feast
was given; and they lived happily together all their lives long.




THE DOG AND THE SPARROW

A shepherd’s dog had a master who took no care of him, but often let him
suffer the greatest hunger. At last he could bear it no longer; so he
took to his heels, and off he ran in a very sad and sorrowful mood.
On the road he met a sparrow that said to him, ‘Why are you so sad,
my friend?’ ‘Because,’ said the dog, ‘I am very very hungry, and have
nothing to eat.’ ‘If that be all,’ answered the sparrow, ‘come with me
into the next town, and I will soon find you plenty of food.’ So on they
went together into the town: and as they passed by a butcher’s shop,
the sparrow said to the dog, ‘Stand there a little while till I peck you
down a piece of meat.’ So the sparrow perched upon the shelf: and having
first looked carefully about her to see if anyone was watching her, she
pecked and scratched at a steak that lay upon the edge of the shelf,
till at last down it fell. Then the dog snapped it up, and scrambled
away with it into a corner, where he soon ate it all up. ‘Well,’ said
the sparrow, ‘you shall have some more if you will; so come with me to
the next shop, and I will peck you down another steak.’ When the dog had
eaten this too, the sparrow said to him, ‘Well, my good friend, have you
had enough now?’ ‘I have had plenty of meat,’ answered he, ‘but I should
like to have a piece of bread to eat after it.’ ‘Come with me then,’
said the sparrow, ‘and you shall soon have that too.’ So she took him
to a baker’s shop, and pecked at two rolls that lay in the window, till
they fell down: and as the dog still wished for more, she took him to
another shop and pecked down some more for him. When that was eaten, the
sparrow asked him whether he had had enough now. ‘Yes,’ said he; ‘and
now let us take a walk a little way out of the town.’ So they both went
out upon the high road; but as the weather was warm, they had not gone
far before the dog said, ‘I am very much tired--I should like to take a
nap.’ ‘Very well,’ answered the sparrow, ‘do so, and in the meantime
I will perch upon that bush.’ So the dog stretched himself out on the
road, and fell fast asleep. Whilst he slept, there came by a carter with
a cart drawn by three horses, and loaded with two casks of wine. The
sparrow, seeing that the carter did not turn out of the way, but would
go on in the track in which the dog lay, so as to drive over him, called
out, ‘Stop! stop! Mr Carter, or it shall be the worse for you.’ But the
carter, grumbling to himself, ‘You make it the worse for me, indeed!
what can you do?’ cracked his whip, and drove his cart over the poor
dog, so that the wheels crushed him to death. ‘There,’ cried the
sparrow, ‘thou cruel villain, thou hast killed my friend the dog. Now
mind what I say. This deed of thine shall cost thee all thou art worth.’
‘Do your worst, and welcome,’ said the brute, ‘what harm can you do me?’
and passed on. But the sparrow crept under the tilt of the cart, and
pecked at the bung of one of the casks till she loosened it; and then
all the wine ran out, without the carter seeing it. At last he looked
round, and saw that the cart was dripping, and the cask quite empty.
‘What an unlucky wretch I am!’ cried he. ‘Not wretch enough yet!’ said
the sparrow, as she alighted upon the head of one of the horses, and
pecked at him till he reared up and kicked. When the carter saw this,
he drew out his hatchet and aimed a blow at the sparrow, meaning to kill
her; but she flew away, and the blow fell upon the poor horse’s head
with such force, that he fell down dead. ‘Unlucky wretch that I am!’
cried he. ‘Not wretch enough yet!’ said the sparrow. And as the carter
went on with the other two horses, she again crept under the tilt of the
cart, and pecked out the bung of the second cask, so that all the wine
ran out. When the carter saw this, he again cried out, ‘Miserable wretch
that I am!’ But the sparrow answered, ‘Not wretch enough yet!’ and
perched on the head of the second horse, and pecked at him too. The
carter ran up and struck at her again with his hatchet; but away she
flew, and the blow fell upon the second horse and killed him on the
spot. ‘Unlucky wretch that I am!’ said he. ‘Not wretch enough yet!’ said
the sparrow; and perching upon the third horse, she began to peck him
too. The carter was mad with fury; and without looking about him, or
caring what he was about, struck again at the sparrow; but killed his
third horse as he done the other two. ‘Alas! miserable wretch that I
am!’ cried he. ‘Not wretch enough yet!’ answered the sparrow as she flew
away; ‘now will I plague and punish thee at thy own house.’ The
carter was forced at last to leave his cart behind him, and to go home
overflowing with rage and vexation. ‘Alas!’ said he to his wife, ‘what
ill luck has befallen me!--my wine is all spilt, and my horses all three
dead.’ ‘Alas! husband,’ replied she, ‘and a wicked bird has come into
the house, and has brought with her all the birds in the world, I am
sure, and they have fallen upon our corn in the loft, and are eating it
up at such a rate!’ Away ran the husband upstairs, and saw thousands of
birds sitting upon the floor eating up his corn, with the sparrow in the
midst of them. ‘Unlucky wretch that I am!’ cried the carter; for he saw
that the corn was almost all gone. ‘Not wretch enough yet!’ said the
sparrow; ‘thy cruelty shall cost thee thy life yet!’ and away she flew.

The carter seeing that he had thus lost all that he had, went down
into his kitchen; and was still not sorry for what he had done, but sat
himself angrily and sulkily in the chimney corner. But the sparrow sat
on the outside of the window, and cried ‘Carter! thy cruelty shall cost
thee thy life!’ With that he jumped up in a rage, seized his hatchet,
and threw it at the sparrow; but it missed her, and only broke the
window. The sparrow now hopped in, perched upon the window-seat, and
cried, ‘Carter! it shall cost thee thy life!’ Then he became mad and
blind with rage, and struck the window-seat with such force that he
cleft it in two: and as the sparrow flew from place to place, the carter
and his wife were so furious, that they broke all their furniture,
glasses, chairs, benches, the table, and at last the walls, without
touching the bird at all. In the end, however, they caught her: and the
wife said, ‘Shall I kill her at once?’ ‘No,’ cried he, ‘that is letting
her off too easily: she shall die a much more cruel death; I will eat
her.’ But the sparrow began to flutter about, and stretch out her neck
and cried, ‘Carter! it shall cost thee thy life yet!’ With that he
could wait no longer: so he gave his wife the hatchet, and cried, ‘Wife,
strike at the bird and kill her in my hand.’ And the wife struck; but
she missed her aim, and hit her husband on the head so that he fell down
dead, and the sparrow flew quietly home to her nest.




THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES

There was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters. They slept in
twelve beds all in one room; and when they went to bed, the doors were
shut and locked up; but every morning their shoes were found to be quite
worn through as if they had been danced in all night; and yet nobody
could find out how it happened, or where they had been.

Then the king made it known to all the land, that if any person could
discover the secret, and find out where it was that the princesses
danced in the night, he should have the one he liked best for his
wife, and should be king after his death; but whoever tried and did not
succeed, after three days and nights, should be put to death.

A king’s son soon came. He was well entertained, and in the evening was
taken to the chamber next to the one where the princesses lay in their
twelve beds. There he was to sit and watch where they went to dance;
and, in order that nothing might pass without his hearing it, the door
of his chamber was left open. But the king’s son soon fell asleep; and
when he awoke in the morning he found that the princesses had all been
dancing, for the soles of their shoes were full of holes. The same thing
happened the second and third night: so the king ordered his head to be
cut off. After him came several others; but they had all the same luck,
and all lost their lives in the same manner.

Now it chanced that an old soldier, who had been wounded in battle
and could fight no longer, passed through the country where this king
reigned: and as he was travelling through a wood, he met an old woman,
who asked him where he was going. ‘I hardly know where I am going, or
what I had better do,’ said the soldier; ‘but I think I should like very
well to find out where it is that the princesses dance, and then in time
I might be a king.’ ‘Well,’ said the old dame, ‘that is no very hard
task: only take care not to drink any of the wine which one of the
princesses will bring to you in the evening; and as soon as she leaves
you pretend to be fast asleep.’

Then she gave him a cloak, and said, ‘As soon as you put that on
you will become invisible, and you will then be able to follow the
princesses wherever they go.’ When the soldier heard all this good
counsel, he determined to try his luck: so he went to the king, and said
he was willing to undertake the task.

He was as well received as the others had been, and the king ordered
fine royal robes to be given him; and when the evening came he was led
to the outer chamber. Just as he was going to lie down, the eldest of
the princesses brought him a cup of wine; but the soldier threw it all
away secretly, taking care not to drink a drop. Then he laid himself
down on his bed, and in a little while began to snore very loud as if
he was fast asleep. When the twelve princesses heard this they laughed
heartily; and the eldest said, ‘This fellow too might have done a wiser
thing than lose his life in this way!’ Then they rose up and opened
their drawers and boxes, and took out all their fine clothes, and
dressed themselves at the glass, and skipped about as if they were eager
to begin dancing. But the youngest said, ‘I don’t know how it is, while
you are so happy I feel very uneasy; I am sure some mischance will
befall us.’ ‘You simpleton,’ said the eldest, ‘you are always afraid;
have you forgotten how many kings’ sons have already watched in vain?
And as for this soldier, even if I had not given him his sleeping
draught, he would have slept soundly enough.’

When they were all ready, they went and looked at the soldier; but he
snored on, and did not stir hand or foot: so they thought they were
quite safe; and the eldest went up to her own bed and clapped her hands,
and the bed sank into the floor and a trap-door flew open. The soldier
saw them going down through the trap-door one after another, the eldest
leading the way; and thinking he had no time to lose, he jumped up, put
on the cloak which the old woman had given him, and followed them;
but in the middle of the stairs he trod on the gown of the youngest
princess, and she cried out to her sisters, ‘All is not right; someone
took hold of my gown.’ ‘You silly creature!’ said the eldest, ‘it is
nothing but a nail in the wall.’ Then down they all went, and at the
bottom they found themselves in a most delightful grove of trees; and
the leaves were all of silver, and glittered and sparkled beautifully.
The soldier wished to take away some token of the place; so he broke
off a little branch, and there came a loud noise from the tree. Then the
youngest daughter said again, ‘I am sure all is not right--did not you
hear that noise? That never happened before.’ But the eldest said, ‘It
is only our princes, who are shouting for joy at our approach.’

Then they came to another grove of trees, where all the leaves were of
gold; and afterwards to a third, where the leaves were all glittering
diamonds. And the soldier broke a branch from each; and every time there
was a loud noise, which made the youngest sister tremble with fear; but
the eldest still said, it was only the princes, who were crying for joy.
So they went on till they came to a great lake; and at the side of the
lake there lay twelve little boats with twelve handsome princes in them,
who seemed to be waiting there for the princesses.

One of the princesses went into each boat, and the soldier stepped into
the same boat with the youngest. As they were rowing over the lake, the
prince who was in the boat with the youngest princess and the soldier
said, ‘I do not know why it is, but though I am rowing with all my might
we do not get on so fast as usual, and I am quite tired: the boat
seems very heavy today.’ ‘It is only the heat of the weather,’ said the
princess: ‘I feel it very warm too.’

On the other side of the lake stood a fine illuminated castle, from
which came the merry music of horns and trumpets. There they all landed,
and went into the castle, and each prince danced with his princess; and
the soldier, who was all the time invisible, danced with them too; and
when any of the princesses had a cup of wine set by her, he drank it
all up, so that when she put the cup to her mouth it was empty. At this,
too, the youngest sister was terribly frightened, but the eldest always
silenced her. They danced on till three o’clock in the morning, and then
all their shoes were worn out, so that they were obliged to leave off.
The princes rowed them back again over the lake (but this time the
soldier placed himself in the boat with the eldest princess); and on the
opposite shore they took leave of each other, the princesses promising
to come again the next night.

When they came to the stairs, the soldier ran on before the princesses,
and laid himself down; and as the twelve sisters slowly came up very
much tired, they heard him snoring in his bed; so they said, ‘Now all
is quite safe’; then they undressed themselves, put away their fine
clothes, pulled off their shoes, and went to bed. In the morning the
soldier said nothing about what had happened, but determined to see more
of this strange adventure, and went again the second and third night;
and every thing happened just as before; the princesses danced each time
till their shoes were worn to pieces, and then returned home. However,
on the third night the soldier carried away one of the golden cups as a
token of where he had been.

As soon as the time came when he was to declare the secret, he was taken
before the king with the three branches and the golden cup; and the
twelve princesses stood listening behind the door to hear what he would
say. And when the king asked him. ‘Where do my twelve daughters dance at
night?’ he answered, ‘With twelve princes in a castle under ground.’ And
then he told the king all that had happened, and showed him the three
branches and the golden cup which he had brought with him. Then the king
called for the princesses, and asked them whether what the soldier said
was true: and when they saw that they were discovered, and that it was
of no use to deny what had happened, they confessed it all. And the king
asked the soldier which of them he would choose for his wife; and he
answered, ‘I am not very young, so I will have the eldest.’--And they
were married that very day, and the soldier was chosen to be the king’s
heir.




THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE

There was once a fisherman who lived with his wife in a pigsty, close
by the seaside. The fisherman used to go out all day long a-fishing; and
one day, as he sat on the shore with his rod, looking at the sparkling
waves and watching his line, all on a sudden his float was dragged away
deep into the water: and in drawing it up he pulled out a great fish.
But the fish said, ‘Pray let me live! I am not a real fish; I am an
enchanted prince: put me in the water again, and let me go!’ ‘Oh, ho!’
said the man, ‘you need not make so many words about the matter; I will
have nothing to do with a fish that can talk: so swim away, sir, as soon
as you please!’ Then he put him back into the water, and the fish darted
straight down to the bottom, and left a long streak of blood behind him
on the wave.

When the fisherman went home to his wife in the pigsty, he told her how
he had caught a great fish, and how it had told him it was an enchanted
prince, and how, on hearing it speak, he had let it go again. ‘Did not
you ask it for anything?’ said the wife, ‘we live very wretchedly here,
in this nasty dirty pigsty; do go back and tell the fish we want a snug
little cottage.’

The fisherman did not much like the business: however, he went to the
seashore; and when he came back there the water looked all yellow and
green. And he stood at the water’s edge, and said:

 ‘O man of the sea!
  Hearken to me!
  My wife Ilsabill
  Will have her own will,
  And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

Then the fish came swimming to him, and said, ‘Well, what is her will?
What does your wife want?’ ‘Ah!’ said the fisherman, ‘she says that when
I had caught you, I ought to have asked you for something before I let
you go; she does not like living any longer in the pigsty, and wants
a snug little cottage.’ ‘Go home, then,’ said the fish; ‘she is in the
cottage already!’ So the man went home, and saw his wife standing at the
door of a nice trim little cottage. ‘Come in, come in!’ said she; ‘is
not this much better than the filthy pigsty we had?’ And there was a
parlour, and a bedchamber, and a kitchen; and behind the cottage there
was a little garden, planted with all sorts of flowers and fruits; and
there was a courtyard behind, full of ducks and chickens. ‘Ah!’ said the
fisherman, ‘how happily we shall live now!’ ‘We will try to do so, at
least,’ said his wife.

Everything went right for a week or two, and then Dame Ilsabill said,
‘Husband, there is not near room enough for us in this cottage; the
courtyard and the garden are a great deal too small; I should like to
have a large stone castle to live in: go to the fish again and tell him
to give us a castle.’ ‘Wife,’ said the fisherman, ‘I don’t like to go to
him again, for perhaps he will be angry; we ought to be easy with this
pretty cottage to live in.’ ‘Nonsense!’ said the wife; ‘he will do it
very willingly, I know; go along and try!’

The fisherman went, but his heart was very heavy: and when he came to
the sea, it looked blue and gloomy, though it was very calm; and he went
close to the edge of the waves, and said:

 ‘O man of the sea!
  Hearken to me!
  My wife Ilsabill
  Will have her own will,
  And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

‘Well, what does she want now?’ said the fish. ‘Ah!’ said the man,
dolefully, ‘my wife wants to live in a stone castle.’ ‘Go home, then,’
said the fish; ‘she is standing at the gate of it already.’ So away went
the fisherman, and found his wife standing before the gate of a great
castle. ‘See,’ said she, ‘is not this grand?’ With that they went into
the castle together, and found a great many servants there, and the
rooms all richly furnished, and full of golden chairs and tables; and
behind the castle was a garden, and around it was a park half a
mile long, full of sheep, and goats, and hares, and deer; and in the
courtyard were stables and cow-houses. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘now we
will live cheerful and happy in this beautiful castle for the rest of
our lives.’ ‘Perhaps we may,’ said the wife; ‘but let us sleep upon it,
before we make up our minds to that.’ So they went to bed.

The next morning when Dame Ilsabill awoke it was broad daylight, and
she jogged the fisherman with her elbow, and said, ‘Get up, husband,
and bestir yourself, for we must be king of all the land.’ ‘Wife, wife,’
said the man, ‘why should we wish to be the king? I will not be king.’
‘Then I will,’ said she. ‘But, wife,’ said the fisherman, ‘how can you
be king--the fish cannot make you a king?’ ‘Husband,’ said she, ‘say
no more about it, but go and try! I will be king.’ So the man went away
quite sorrowful to think that his wife should want to be king. This time
the sea looked a dark grey colour, and was overspread with curling waves
and the ridges of foam as he cried out:

 ‘O man of the sea!
  Hearken to me!
  My wife Ilsabill
  Will have her own will,
  And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

‘Well, what would she have now?’ said the fish. ‘Alas!’ said the poor
man, ‘my wife wants to be king.’ ‘Go home,’ said the fish; ‘she is king
already.’

Then the fisherman went home; and as he came close to the palace he saw
a troop of soldiers, and heard the sound of drums and trumpets. And when
he went in he saw his wife sitting on a throne of gold and diamonds,
with a golden crown upon her head; and on each side of her stood six
fair maidens, each a head taller than the other. ‘Well, wife,’ said the
fisherman, ‘are you king?’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I am king.’ And when he had
looked at her for a long time, he said, ‘Ah, wife! what a fine thing it
is to be king! Now we shall never have anything more to wish for as long
as we live.’ ‘I don’t know how that may be,’ said she; ‘never is a long
time. I am king, it is true; but I begin to be tired of that, and I
think I should like to be emperor.’ ‘Alas, wife! why should you wish to
be emperor?’ said the fisherman. ‘Husband,’ said she, ‘go to the fish!
I say I will be emperor.’ ‘Ah, wife!’ replied the fisherman, ‘the fish
cannot make an emperor, I am sure, and I should not like to ask him for
such a thing.’ ‘I am king,’ said Ilsabill, ‘and you are my slave; so go
at once!’

So the fisherman was forced to go; and he muttered as he went along,
‘This will come to no good, it is too much to ask; the fish will be
tired at last, and then we shall be sorry for what we have done.’ He
soon came to the seashore; and the water was quite black and muddy, and
a mighty whirlwind blew over the waves and rolled them about, but he
went as near as he could to the water’s brink, and said:

 ‘O man of the sea!
  Hearken to me!
  My wife Ilsabill
  Will have her own will,
  And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

‘What would she have now?’ said the fish. ‘Ah!’ said the fisherman,
‘she wants to be emperor.’ ‘Go home,’ said the fish; ‘she is emperor
already.’

So he went home again; and as he came near he saw his wife Ilsabill
sitting on a very lofty throne made of solid gold, with a great crown on
her head full two yards high; and on each side of her stood her guards
and attendants in a row, each one smaller than the other, from the
tallest giant down to a little dwarf no bigger than my finger. And
before her stood princes, and dukes, and earls: and the fisherman went
up to her and said, ‘Wife, are you emperor?’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I am
emperor.’ ‘Ah!’ said the man, as he gazed upon her, ‘what a fine thing
it is to be emperor!’ ‘Husband,’ said she, ‘why should we stop at being
emperor? I will be pope next.’ ‘O wife, wife!’ said he, ‘how can you be
pope? there is but one pope at a time in Christendom.’ ‘Husband,’ said
she, ‘I will be pope this very day.’ ‘But,’ replied the husband, ‘the
fish cannot make you pope.’ ‘What nonsense!’ said she; ‘if he can make
an emperor, he can make a pope: go and try him.’

So the fisherman went. But when he came to the shore the wind was raging
and the sea was tossed up and down in boiling waves, and the ships were
in trouble, and rolled fearfully upon the tops of the billows. In the
middle of the heavens there was a little piece of blue sky, but towards
the south all was red, as if a dreadful storm was rising. At this sight
the fisherman was dreadfully frightened, and he trembled so that his
knees knocked together: but still he went down near to the shore, and
said:

 ‘O man of the sea!
  Hearken to me!
  My wife Ilsabill
  Will have her own will,
  And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

‘What does she want now?’ said the fish. ‘Ah!’ said the fisherman, ‘my
wife wants to be pope.’ ‘Go home,’ said the fish; ‘she is pope already.’

Then the fisherman went home, and found Ilsabill sitting on a throne
that was two miles high. And she had three great crowns on her head, and
around her stood all the pomp and power of the Church. And on each side
of her were two rows of burning lights, of all sizes, the greatest as
large as the highest and biggest tower in the world, and the least no
larger than a small rushlight. ‘Wife,’ said the fisherman, as he looked
at all this greatness, ‘are you pope?’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I am pope.’
‘Well, wife,’ replied he, ‘it is a grand thing to be pope; and now
you must be easy, for you can be nothing greater.’ ‘I will think about
that,’ said the wife. Then they went to bed: but Dame Ilsabill could not
sleep all night for thinking what she should be next. At last, as she
was dropping asleep, morning broke, and the sun rose. ‘Ha!’ thought she,
as she woke up and looked at it through the window, ‘after all I cannot
prevent the sun rising.’ At this thought she was very angry, and wakened
her husband, and said, ‘Husband, go to the fish and tell him I must
be lord of the sun and moon.’ The fisherman was half asleep, but the
thought frightened him so much that he started and fell out of bed.
‘Alas, wife!’ said he, ‘cannot you be easy with being pope?’ ‘No,’
said she, ‘I am very uneasy as long as the sun and moon rise without my
leave. Go to the fish at once!’

Then the man went shivering with fear; and as he was going down to
the shore a dreadful storm arose, so that the trees and the very rocks
shook. And all the heavens became black with stormy clouds, and the
lightnings played, and the thunders rolled; and you might have seen in
the sea great black waves, swelling up like mountains with crowns of
white foam upon their heads. And the fisherman crept towards the sea,
and cried out, as well as he could:

 ‘O man of the sea!
  Hearken to me!
  My wife Ilsabill
  Will have her own will,
  And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’

‘What does she want now?’ said the fish. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘she wants to
be lord of the sun and moon.’ ‘Go home,’ said the fish, ‘to your pigsty
again.’

And there they live to this very day.




THE WILLOW-WREN AND THE BEAR

Once in summer-time the bear and the wolf were walking in the forest,
and the bear heard a bird singing so beautifully that he said: ‘Brother
wolf, what bird is it that sings so well?’ ‘That is the King of birds,’
said the wolf, ‘before whom we must bow down.’ In reality the bird was
the willow-wren. ‘IF that’s the case,’ said the bear, ‘I should very
much like to see his royal palace; come, take me thither.’ ‘That is not
done quite as you seem to think,’ said the wolf; ‘you must wait until
the Queen comes,’ Soon afterwards, the Queen arrived with some food in
her beak, and the lord King came too, and they began to feed their young
ones. The bear would have liked to go at once, but the wolf held him
back by the sleeve, and said: ‘No, you must wait until the lord and lady
Queen have gone away again.’ So they took stock of the hole where the
nest lay, and trotted away. The bear, however, could not rest until he
had seen the royal palace, and when a short time had passed, went to it
again. The King and Queen had just flown out, so he peeped in and saw
five or six young ones lying there. ‘Is that the royal palace?’ cried
the bear; ‘it is a wretched palace, and you are not King’s children, you
are disreputable children!’ When the young wrens heard that, they were
frightfully angry, and screamed: ‘No, that we are not! Our parents are
honest people! Bear, you will have to pay for that!’

The bear and the wolf grew uneasy, and turned back and went into their
holes. The young willow-wrens, however, continued to cry and scream, and
when their parents again brought food they said: ‘We will not so much as
touch one fly’s leg, no, not if we were dying of hunger, until you have
settled whether we are respectable children or not; the bear has been
here and has insulted us!’ Then the old King said: ‘Be easy, he shall
be punished,’ and he at once flew with the Queen to the bear’s cave, and
called in: ‘Old Growler, why have you insulted my children? You shall
suffer for it--we will punish you by a bloody war.’ Thus war was
announced to the Bear, and all four-footed animals were summoned to take
part in it, oxen, asses, cows, deer, and every other animal the earth
contained. And the willow-wren summoned everything which flew in the
air, not only birds, large and small, but midges, and hornets, bees and
flies had to come.

When the time came for the war to begin, the willow-wren sent out spies
to discover who was the enemy’s commander-in-chief. The gnat, who was
the most crafty, flew into the forest where the enemy was assembled,
and hid herself beneath a leaf of the tree where the password was to be
announced. There stood the bear, and he called the fox before him
and said: ‘Fox, you are the most cunning of all animals, you shall be
general and lead us.’ ‘Good,’ said the fox, ‘but what signal shall we
agree upon?’ No one knew that, so the fox said: ‘I have a fine long
bushy tail, which almost looks like a plume of red feathers. When I lift
my tail up quite high, all is going well, and you must charge; but if I
let it hang down, run away as fast as you can.’ When the gnat had heard
that, she flew away again, and revealed everything, down to the minutest
detail, to the willow-wren. When day broke, and the battle was to begin,
all the four-footed animals came running up with such a noise that the
earth trembled. The willow-wren with his army also came flying through
the air with such a humming, and whirring, and swarming that every one
was uneasy and afraid, and on both sides they advanced against each
other. But the willow-wren sent down the hornet, with orders to settle
beneath the fox’s tail, and sting with all his might. When the fox felt
the first string, he started so that he lifted one leg, from pain, but
he bore it, and still kept his tail high in the air; at the second
sting, he was forced to put it down for a moment; at the third, he could
hold out no longer, screamed, and put his tail between his legs. When
the animals saw that, they thought all was lost, and began to flee, each
into his hole, and the birds had won the battle.

Then the King and Queen flew home to their children and cried:
‘Children, rejoice, eat and drink to your heart’s content, we have won
the battle!’ But the young wrens said: ‘We will not eat yet, the bear
must come to the nest, and beg for pardon and say that we are honourable
children, before we will do that.’ Then the willow-wren flew to the
bear’s hole and cried: ‘Growler, you are to come to the nest to my
children, and beg their pardon, or else every rib of your body shall
be broken.’ So the bear crept thither in the greatest fear, and begged
their pardon. And now at last the young wrens were satisfied, and sat
down together and ate and drank, and made merry till quite late into the
night.




THE FROG-PRINCE

One fine evening a young princess put on her bonnet and clogs, and went
out to take a walk by herself in a wood; and when she came to a cool
spring of water, that rose in the midst of it, she sat herself down
to rest a while. Now she had a golden ball in her hand, which was her
favourite plaything; and she was always tossing it up into the air, and
catching it again as it fell. After a time she threw it up so high that
she missed catching it as it fell; and the ball bounded away, and rolled
along upon the ground, till at last it fell down into the spring. The
princess looked into the spring after her ball, but it was very deep, so
deep that she could not see the bottom of it. Then she began to bewail
her loss, and said, ‘Alas! if I could only get my ball again, I would
give all my fine clothes and jewels, and everything that I have in the
world.’

Whilst she was speaking, a frog put its head out of the water, and said,
‘Princess, why do you weep so bitterly?’ ‘Alas!’ said she, ‘what can you
do for me, you nasty frog? My golden ball has fallen into the spring.’
The frog said, ‘I want not your pearls, and jewels, and fine clothes;
but if you will love me, and let me live with you and eat from off
your golden plate, and sleep upon your bed, I will bring you your ball
again.’ ‘What nonsense,’ thought the princess, ‘this silly frog is
talking! He can never even get out of the spring to visit me, though
he may be able to get my ball for me, and therefore I will tell him he
shall have what he asks.’ So she said to the frog, ‘Well, if you will
bring me my ball, I will do all you ask.’ Then the frog put his head
down, and dived deep under the water; and after a little while he came
up again, with the ball in his mouth, and threw it on the edge of the
spring. As soon as the young princess saw her ball, she ran to pick
it up; and she was so overjoyed to have it in her hand again, that she
never thought of the frog, but ran home with it as fast as she could.
The frog called after her, ‘Stay, princess, and take me with you as you
said,’ But she did not stop to hear a word.

The next day, just as the princess had sat down to dinner, she heard a
strange noise--tap, tap--plash, plash--as if something was coming up the
marble staircase: and soon afterwards there was a gentle knock at the
door, and a little voice cried out and said:

 ‘Open the door, my princess dear,
  Open the door to thy true love here!
  And mind the words that thou and I said
  By the fountain cool, in the greenwood shade.’

Then the princess ran to the door and opened it, and there she saw
the frog, whom she had quite forgotten. At this sight she was sadly
frightened, and shutting the door as fast as she could came back to her
seat. The king, her father, seeing that something had frightened her,
asked her what was the matter. ‘There is a nasty frog,’ said she, ‘at
the door, that lifted my ball for me out of the spring this morning: I
told him that he should live with me here, thinking that he could never
get out of the spring; but there he is at the door, and he wants to come
in.’

While she was speaking the frog knocked again at the door, and said:

 ‘Open the door, my princess dear,
  Open the door to thy true love here!
  And mind the words that thou and I said
  By the fountain cool, in the greenwood shade.’

Then the king said to the young princess, ‘As you have given your word
you must keep it; so go and let him in.’ She did so, and the frog hopped
into the room, and then straight on--tap, tap--plash, plash--from the
bottom of the room to the top, till he came up close to the table where
the princess sat. ‘Pray lift me upon chair,’ said he to the princess,
‘and let me sit next to you.’ As soon as she had done this, the frog
said, ‘Put your plate nearer to me, that I may eat out of it.’ This
she did, and when he had eaten as much as he could, he said, ‘Now I am
tired; carry me upstairs, and put me into your bed.’ And the princess,
though very unwilling, took him up in her hand, and put him upon the
pillow of her own bed, where he slept all night long. As soon as it was
light he jumped up, hopped downstairs, and went out of the house.
‘Now, then,’ thought the princess, ‘at last he is gone, and I shall be
troubled with him no more.’

But she was mistaken; for when night came again she heard the same
tapping at the door; and the frog came once more, and said:

 ‘Open the door, my princess dear,
  Open the door to thy true love here!
  And mind the words that thou and I said
  By the fountain cool, in the greenwood shade.’

And when the princess opened the door the frog came in, and slept upon
her pillow as before, till the morning broke. And the third night he did
the same. But when the princess awoke on the following morning she was
astonished to see, instead of the frog, a handsome prince, gazing on her
with the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, and standing at the head
of her bed.

He told her that he had been enchanted by a spiteful fairy, who had
changed him into a frog; and that he had been fated so to abide till
some princess should take him out of the spring, and let him eat from
her plate, and sleep upon her bed for three nights. ‘You,’ said the
prince, ‘have broken his cruel charm, and now I have nothing to wish for
but that you should go with me into my father’s kingdom, where I will
marry you, and love you as long as you live.’

The young princess, you may be sure, was not long in saying ‘Yes’ to
all this; and as they spoke a gay coach drove up, with eight beautiful
horses, decked with plumes of feathers and a golden harness; and behind
the coach rode the prince’s servant, faithful Heinrich, who had bewailed
the misfortunes of his dear master during his enchantment so long and so
bitterly, that his heart had well-nigh burst.

They then took leave of the king, and got into the coach with eight
horses, and all set out, full of joy and merriment, for the prince’s
kingdom, which they reached safely; and there they lived happily a great
many years.




CAT AND MOUSE IN PARTNERSHIP

A certain cat had made the acquaintance of a mouse, and had said so much
to her about the great love and friendship she felt for her, that at
length the mouse agreed that they should live and keep house together.
‘But we must make a provision for winter, or else we shall suffer
from hunger,’ said the cat; ‘and you, little mouse, cannot venture
everywhere, or you will be caught in a trap some day.’ The good advice
was followed, and a pot of fat was bought, but they did not know where
to put it. At length, after much consideration, the cat said: ‘I know no
place where it will be better stored up than in the church, for no one
dares take anything away from there. We will set it beneath the altar,
and not touch it until we are really in need of it.’ So the pot was
placed in safety, but it was not long before the cat had a great
yearning for it, and said to the mouse: ‘I want to tell you something,
little mouse; my cousin has brought a little son into the world, and has
asked me to be godmother; he is white with brown spots, and I am to hold
him over the font at the christening. Let me go out today, and you look
after the house by yourself.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ answered the mouse, ‘by all
means go, and if you get anything very good to eat, think of me. I
should like a drop of sweet red christening wine myself.’ All this,
however, was untrue; the cat had no cousin, and had not been asked to
be godmother. She went straight to the church, stole to the pot of fat,
began to lick at it, and licked the top of the fat off. Then she took a
walk upon the roofs of the town, looked out for opportunities, and then
stretched herself in the sun, and licked her lips whenever she thought
of the pot of fat, and not until it was evening did she return home.
‘Well, here you are again,’ said the mouse, ‘no doubt you have had a
merry day.’ ‘All went off well,’ answered the cat. ‘What name did they
give the child?’ ‘Top off!’ said the cat quite coolly. ‘Top off!’ cried
the mouse, ‘that is a very odd and uncommon name, is it a usual one in
your family?’ ‘What does that matter,’ said the cat, ‘it is no worse
than Crumb-stealer, as your godchildren are called.’

Before long the cat was seized by another fit of yearning. She said to
the mouse: ‘You must do me a favour, and once more manage the house for
a day alone. I am again asked to be godmother, and, as the child has a
white ring round its neck, I cannot refuse.’ The good mouse consented,
but the cat crept behind the town walls to the church, and devoured
half the pot of fat. ‘Nothing ever seems so good as what one keeps to
oneself,’ said she, and was quite satisfied with her day’s work. When
she went home the mouse inquired: ‘And what was the child christened?’
‘Half-done,’ answered the cat. ‘Half-done! What are you saying? I
never heard the name in my life, I’ll wager anything it is not in the
calendar!’

The cat’s mouth soon began to water for some more licking. ‘All good
things go in threes,’ said she, ‘I am asked to stand godmother again.
The child is quite black, only it has white paws, but with that
exception, it has not a single white hair on its whole body; this only
happens once every few years, you will let me go, won’t you?’ ‘Top-off!
Half-done!’ answered the mouse, ‘they are such odd names, they make me
very thoughtful.’ ‘You sit at home,’ said the cat, ‘in your dark-grey
fur coat and long tail, and are filled with fancies, that’s because
you do not go out in the daytime.’ During the cat’s absence the mouse
cleaned the house, and put it in order, but the greedy cat entirely
emptied the pot of fat. ‘When everything is eaten up one has some
peace,’ said she to herself, and well filled and fat she did not return
home till night. The mouse at once asked what name had been given to
the third child. ‘It will not please you more than the others,’ said the
cat. ‘He is called All-gone.’ ‘All-gone,’ cried the mouse ‘that is the
most suspicious name of all! I have never seen it in print. All-gone;
what can that mean?’ and she shook her head, curled herself up, and lay
down to sleep.

From this time forth no one invited the cat to be godmother, but
when the winter had come and there was no longer anything to be found
outside, the mouse thought of their provision, and said: ‘Come, cat,
we will go to our pot of fat which we have stored up for ourselves--we
shall enjoy that.’ ‘Yes,’ answered the cat, ‘you will enjoy it as much
as you would enjoy sticking that dainty tongue of yours out of the
window.’ They set out on their way, but when they arrived, the pot of
fat certainly was still in its place, but it was empty. ‘Alas!’ said the
mouse, ‘now I see what has happened, now it comes to light! You are a true
friend! You have devoured all when you were standing godmother. First
top off, then half-done, then--’ ‘Will you hold your tongue,’ cried the
cat, ‘one word more, and I will eat you too.’ ‘All-gone’ was already on
the poor mouse’s lips; scarcely had she spoken it before the cat sprang
on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of
the world.




THE GOOSE-GIRL

The king of a great land died, and left his queen to take care of their
only child. This child was a daughter, who was very beautiful; and her
mother loved her dearly, and was very kind to her. And there was a good
fairy too, who was fond of the princess, and helped her mother to watch
over her. When she grew up, she was betrothed to a prince who lived a
great way off; and as the time drew near for her to be married, she
got ready to set off on her journey to his country. Then the queen her
mother, packed up a great many costly things; jewels, and gold, and
silver; trinkets, fine dresses, and in short everything that became a
royal bride. And she gave her a waiting-maid to ride with her, and give
her into the bridegroom’s hands; and each had a horse for the journey.
Now the princess’s horse was the fairy’s gift, and it was called Falada,
and could speak.

When the time came for them to set out, the fairy went into her
bed-chamber, and took a little knife, and cut off a lock of her hair,
and gave it to the princess, and said, ‘Take care of it, dear child; for
it is a charm that may be of use to you on the road.’ Then they all took
a sorrowful leave of the princess; and she put the lock of hair into
her bosom, got upon her horse, and set off on her journey to her
bridegroom’s kingdom.

One day, as they were riding along by a brook, the princess began to
feel very thirsty: and she said to her maid, ‘Pray get down, and fetch
me some water in my golden cup out of yonder brook, for I want to
drink.’ ‘Nay,’ said the maid, ‘if you are thirsty, get off yourself, and
stoop down by the water and drink; I shall not be your waiting-maid any
longer.’ Then she was so thirsty that she got down, and knelt over the
little brook, and drank; for she was frightened, and dared not bring out
her golden cup; and she wept and said, ‘Alas! what will become of me?’
And the lock answered her, and said:

 ‘Alas! alas! if thy mother knew it,
  Sadly, sadly, would she rue it.’

But the princess was very gentle and meek, so she said nothing to her
maid’s ill behaviour, but got upon her horse again.

Then all rode farther on their journey, till the day grew so warm, and
the sun so scorching, that the bride began to feel very thirsty again;
and at last, when they came to a river, she forgot her maid’s rude
speech, and said, ‘Pray get down, and fetch me some water to drink in
my golden cup.’ But the maid answered her, and even spoke more haughtily
than before: ‘Drink if you will, but I shall not be your waiting-maid.’
Then the princess was so thirsty that she got off her horse, and lay
down, and held her head over the running stream, and cried and said,
‘What will become of me?’ And the lock of hair answered her again:

 ‘Alas! alas! if thy mother knew it,
  Sadly, sadly, would she rue it.’

And as she leaned down to drink, the lock of hair fell from her bosom,
and floated away with the water. Now she was so frightened that she did
not see it; but her maid saw it, and was very glad, for she knew the
charm; and she saw that the poor bride would be in her power, now that
she had lost the hair. So when the bride had done drinking, and would
have got upon Falada again, the maid said, ‘I shall ride upon Falada,
and you may have my horse instead’; so she was forced to give up her
horse, and soon afterwards to take off her royal clothes and put on her
maid’s shabby ones.

At last, as they drew near the end of their journey, this treacherous
servant threatened to kill her mistress if she ever told anyone what had
happened. But Falada saw it all, and marked it well.

Then the waiting-maid got upon Falada, and the real bride rode upon the
other horse, and they went on in this way till at last they came to the
royal court. There was great joy at their coming, and the prince flew to
meet them, and lifted the maid from her horse, thinking she was the one
who was to be his wife; and she was led upstairs to the royal chamber;
but the true princess was told to stay in the court below.

Now the old king happened just then to have nothing else to do; so he
amused himself by sitting at his kitchen window, looking at what was
going on; and he saw her in the courtyard. As she looked very pretty,
and too delicate for a waiting-maid, he went up into the royal chamber
to ask the bride who it was she had brought with her, that was thus left
standing in the court below. ‘I brought her with me for the sake of her
company on the road,’ said she; ‘pray give the girl some work to do,
that she may not be idle.’ The old king could not for some time think
of any work for her to do; but at last he said, ‘I have a lad who takes
care of my geese; she may go and help him.’ Now the name of this lad,
that the real bride was to help in watching the king’s geese, was
Curdken.

But the false bride said to the prince, ‘Dear husband, pray do me one
piece of kindness.’ ‘That I will,’ said the prince. ‘Then tell one of
your slaughterers to cut off the head of the horse I rode upon, for it
was very unruly, and plagued me sadly on the road’; but the truth was,
she was very much afraid lest Falada should some day or other speak, and
tell all she had done to the princess. She carried her point, and the
faithful Falada was killed; but when the true princess heard of it, she
wept, and begged the man to nail up Falada’s head against a large
dark gate of the city, through which she had to pass every morning
and evening, that there she might still see him sometimes. Then the
slaughterer said he would do as she wished; and cut off the head, and
nailed it up under the dark gate.

Early the next morning, as she and Curdken went out through the gate,
she said sorrowfully:

 ‘Falada, Falada, there thou hangest!’

and the head answered:

 ‘Bride, bride, there thou gangest!
  Alas! alas! if thy mother knew it,
  Sadly, sadly, would she rue it.’

Then they went out of the city, and drove the geese on. And when she
came to the meadow, she sat down upon a bank there, and let down her
waving locks of hair, which were all of pure silver; and when Curdken
saw it glitter in the sun, he ran up, and would have pulled some of the
locks out, but she cried:

 ‘Blow, breezes, blow!
  Let Curdken’s hat go!
  Blow, breezes, blow!
  Let him after it go!
  O’er hills, dales, and rocks,
  Away be it whirl’d
  Till the silvery locks
  Are all comb’d and curl’d!

Then there came a wind, so strong that it blew off Curdken’s hat; and
away it flew over the hills: and he was forced to turn and run after
it; till, by the time he came back, she had done combing and curling her
hair, and had put it up again safe. Then he was very angry and sulky,
and would not speak to her at all; but they watched the geese until it
grew dark in the evening, and then drove them homewards.

The next morning, as they were going through the dark gate, the poor
girl looked up at Falada’s head, and cried:

 ‘Falada, Falada, there thou hangest!’

and the head answered:

 ‘Bride, bride, there thou gangest!
  Alas! alas! if thy mother knew it,
  Sadly, sadly, would she rue it.’

Then she drove on the geese, and sat down again in the meadow, and began
to comb out her hair as before; and Curdken ran up to her, and wanted to
take hold of it; but she cried out quickly:

 ‘Blow, breezes, blow!
  Let Curdken’s hat go!
  Blow, breezes, blow!
  Let him after it go!
  O’er hills, dales, and rocks,
  Away be it whirl’d
  Till the silvery locks
  Are all comb’d and curl’d!

Then the wind came and blew away his hat; and off it flew a great way,
over the hills and far away, so that he had to run after it; and when
he came back she had bound up her hair again, and all was safe. So they
watched the geese till it grew dark.

In the evening, after they came home, Curdken went to the old king, and
said, ‘I cannot have that strange girl to help me to keep the geese any
longer.’ ‘Why?’ said the king. ‘Because, instead of doing any good, she
does nothing but tease me all day long.’ Then the king made him tell him
what had happened. And Curdken said, ‘When we go in the morning through
the dark gate with our flock of geese, she cries and talks with the head
of a horse that hangs upon the wall, and says:

 ‘Falada, Falada, there thou hangest!’

and the head answers:

 ‘Bride, bride, there thou gangest!
  Alas! alas! if thy mother knew it,
  Sadly, sadly, would she rue it.’

And Curdken went on telling the king what had happened upon the meadow
where the geese fed; how his hat was blown away; and how he was forced
to run after it, and to leave his flock of geese to themselves. But the
old king told the boy to go out again the next day: and when morning
came, he placed himself behind the dark gate, and heard how she spoke
to Falada, and how Falada answered. Then he went into the field, and
hid himself in a bush by the meadow’s side; and he soon saw with his own
eyes how they drove the flock of geese; and how, after a little time,
she let down her hair that glittered in the sun. And then he heard her
say:

 ‘Blow, breezes, blow!
  Let Curdken’s hat go!
  Blow, breezes, blow!
  Let him after it go!
  O’er hills, dales, and rocks,
  Away be it whirl’d
  Till the silvery locks
  Are all comb’d and curl’d!

And soon came a gale of wind, and carried away Curdken’s hat, and away
went Curdken after it, while the girl went on combing and curling her
hair. All this the old king saw: so he went home without being seen; and
when the little goose-girl came back in the evening he called her aside,
and asked her why she did so: but she burst into tears, and said, ‘That
I must not tell you or any man, or I shall lose my life.’

But the old king begged so hard, that she had no peace till she had told
him all the tale, from beginning to end, word for word. And it was very
lucky for her that she did so, for when she had done the king ordered
royal clothes to be put upon her, and gazed on her with wonder, she was
so beautiful. Then he called his son and told him that he had only a
false bride; for that she was merely a waiting-maid, while the true
bride stood by. And the young king rejoiced when he saw her beauty, and
heard how meek and patient she had been; and without saying anything to
the false bride, the king ordered a great feast to be got ready for all
his court. The bridegroom sat at the top, with the false princess on one
side, and the true one on the other; but nobody knew her again, for her
beauty was quite dazzling to their eyes; and she did not seem at all
like the little goose-girl, now that she had her brilliant dress on.

When they had eaten and drank, and were very merry, the old king said
he would tell them a tale. So he began, and told all the story of the
princess, as if it was one that he had once heard; and he asked the
true waiting-maid what she thought ought to be done to anyone who would
behave thus. ‘Nothing better,’ said this false bride, ‘than that she
should be thrown into a cask stuck round with sharp nails, and that
two white horses should be put to it, and should drag it from street to
street till she was dead.’ ‘Thou art she!’ said the old king; ‘and as
thou has judged thyself, so shall it be done to thee.’ And the young
king was then married to his true wife, and they reigned over the
kingdom in peace and happiness all their lives; and the good fairy came
to see them, and restored the faithful Falada to life again.




THE ADVENTURES OF CHANTICLEER AND PARTLET


1. HOW THEY WENT TO THE MOUNTAINS TO EAT NUTS

‘The nuts are quite ripe now,’ said Chanticleer to his wife Partlet,
‘suppose we go together to the mountains, and eat as many as we can,
before the squirrel takes them all away.’ ‘With all my heart,’ said
Partlet, ‘let us go and make a holiday of it together.’

So they went to the mountains; and as it was a lovely day, they stayed
there till the evening. Now, whether it was that they had eaten so many
nuts that they could not walk, or whether they were lazy and would not,
I do not know: however, they took it into their heads that it did not
become them to go home on foot. So Chanticleer began to build a little
carriage of nutshells: and when it was finished, Partlet jumped into
it and sat down, and bid Chanticleer harness himself to it and draw her
home. ‘That’s a good joke!’ said Chanticleer; ‘no, that will never do;
I had rather by half walk home; I’ll sit on the box and be coachman,
if you like, but I’ll not draw.’ While this was passing, a duck came
quacking up and cried out, ‘You thieving vagabonds, what business have
you in my grounds? I’ll give it you well for your insolence!’ and upon
that she fell upon Chanticleer most lustily. But Chanticleer was no
coward, and returned the duck’s blows with his sharp spurs so fiercely
that she soon began to cry out for mercy; which was only granted her
upon condition that she would draw the carriage home for them. This she
agreed to do; and Chanticleer got upon the box, and drove, crying, ‘Now,
duck, get on as fast as you can.’ And away they went at a pretty good
pace.

After they had travelled along a little way, they met a needle and a pin
walking together along the road: and the needle cried out, ‘Stop, stop!’
and said it was so dark that they could hardly find their way, and such
dirty walking they could not get on at all: he told them that he and his
friend, the pin, had been at a public-house a few miles off, and had sat
drinking till they had forgotten how late it was; he begged therefore
that the travellers would be so kind as to give them a lift in their
carriage. Chanticleer observing that they were but thin fellows, and not
likely to take up much room, told them they might ride, but made them
promise not to dirty the wheels of the carriage in getting in, nor to
tread on Partlet’s toes.

Late at night they arrived at an inn; and as it was bad travelling in
the dark, and the duck seemed much tired, and waddled about a good
deal from one side to the other, they made up their minds to fix their
quarters there: but the landlord at first was unwilling, and said his
house was full, thinking they might not be very respectable company:
however, they spoke civilly to him, and gave him the egg which Partlet
had laid by the way, and said they would give him the duck, who was in
the habit of laying one every day: so at last he let them come in, and
they bespoke a handsome supper, and spent the evening very jollily.

Early in the morning, before it was quite light, and when nobody was
stirring in the inn, Chanticleer awakened his wife, and, fetching the
egg, they pecked a hole in it, ate it up, and threw the shells into the
fireplace: they then went to the pin and needle, who were fast asleep,
and seizing them by the heads, stuck one into the landlord’s easy chair
and the other into his handkerchief; and, having done this, they crept
away as softly as possible. However, the duck, who slept in the open
air in the yard, heard them coming, and jumping into the brook which ran
close by the inn, soon swam out of their reach.

An hour or two afterwards the landlord got up, and took his handkerchief
to wipe his face, but the pin ran into him and pricked him: then he
walked into the kitchen to light his pipe at the fire, but when he
stirred it up the eggshells flew into his eyes, and almost blinded him.
‘Bless me!’ said he, ‘all the world seems to have a design against my
head this morning’: and so saying, he threw himself sulkily into his
easy chair; but, oh dear! the needle ran into him; and this time the
pain was not in his head. He now flew into a very great passion, and,
suspecting the company who had come in the night before, he went to look
after them, but they were all off; so he swore that he never again
would take in such a troop of vagabonds, who ate a great deal, paid no
reckoning, and gave him nothing for his trouble but their apish tricks.


2. HOW CHANTICLEER AND PARTLET WENT TO VISIT MR KORBES

Another day, Chanticleer and Partlet wished to ride out together;
so Chanticleer built a handsome carriage with four red wheels, and
harnessed six mice to it; and then he and Partlet got into the carriage,
and away they drove. Soon afterwards a cat met them, and said, ‘Where
are you going?’ And Chanticleer replied,

 ‘All on our way
  A visit to pay
  To Mr Korbes, the fox, today.’

Then the cat said, ‘Take me with you,’ Chanticleer said, ‘With all my
heart: get up behind, and be sure you do not fall off.’

 ‘Take care of this handsome coach of mine,
  Nor dirty my pretty red wheels so fine!
  Now, mice, be ready,
  And, wheels, run steady!
  For we are going a visit to pay
  To Mr Korbes, the fox, today.’

Soon after came up a millstone, an egg, a duck, and a pin; and
Chanticleer gave them all leave to get into the carriage and go with
them.

When they arrived at Mr Korbes’s house, he was not at home; so the mice
drew the carriage into the coach-house, Chanticleer and Partlet flew
upon a beam, the cat sat down in the fireplace, the duck got into
the washing cistern, the pin stuck himself into the bed pillow, the
millstone laid himself over the house door, and the egg rolled himself
up in the towel.

When Mr Korbes came home, he went to the fireplace to make a fire; but
the cat threw all the ashes in his eyes: so he ran to the kitchen to
wash himself; but there the duck splashed all the water in his face; and
when he tried to wipe himself, the egg broke to pieces in the towel all
over his face and eyes. Then he was very angry, and went without his
supper to bed; but when he laid his head on the pillow, the pin ran into
his cheek: at this he became quite furious, and, jumping up, would have
run out of the house; but when he came to the door, the millstone fell
down on his head, and killed him on the spot.


3. HOW PARTLET DIED AND WAS BURIED, AND HOW CHANTICLEER DIED OF GRIEF

Another day Chanticleer and Partlet agreed to go again to the mountains
to eat nuts; and it was settled that all the nuts which they found
should be shared equally between them. Now Partlet found a very large
nut; but she said nothing about it to Chanticleer, and kept it all to
herself: however, it was so big that she could not swallow it, and it
stuck in her throat. Then she was in a great fright, and cried out to
Chanticleer, ‘Pray run as fast as you can, and fetch me some water, or I
shall be choked.’ Chanticleer ran as fast as he could to the river, and
said, ‘River, give me some water, for Partlet lies in the mountain, and
will be choked by a great nut.’ The river said, ‘Run first to the bride,
and ask her for a silken cord to draw up the water.’ Chanticleer ran to
the bride, and said, ‘Bride, you must give me a silken cord, for then
the river will give me water, and the water I will carry to Partlet, who
lies on the mountain, and will be choked by a great nut.’ But the bride
said, ‘Run first, and bring me my garland that is hanging on a willow
in the garden.’ Then Chanticleer ran to the garden, and took the garland
from the bough where it hung, and brought it to the bride; and then
the bride gave him the silken cord, and he took the silken cord to
the river, and the river gave him water, and he carried the water to
Partlet; but in the meantime she was choked by the great nut, and lay
quite dead, and never moved any more.

Then Chanticleer was very sorry, and cried bitterly; and all the beasts
came and wept with him over poor Partlet. And six mice built a little
hearse to carry her to her grave; and when it was ready they harnessed
themselves before it, and Chanticleer drove them. On the way they
met the fox. ‘Where are you going, Chanticleer?’ said he. ‘To bury my
Partlet,’ said the other. ‘May I go with you?’ said the fox. ‘Yes; but
you must get up behind, or my horses will not be able to draw you.’ Then
the fox got up behind; and presently the wolf, the bear, the goat, and
all the beasts of the wood, came and climbed upon the hearse.

So on they went till they came to a rapid stream. ‘How shall we get
over?’ said Chanticleer. Then said a straw, ‘I will lay myself across,
and you may pass over upon me.’ But as the mice were going over, the
straw slipped away and fell into the water, and the six mice all fell in
and were drowned. What was to be done? Then a large log of wood came
and said, ‘I am big enough; I will lay myself across the stream, and you
shall pass over upon me.’ So he laid himself down; but they managed
so clumsily, that the log of wood fell in and was carried away by the
stream. Then a stone, who saw what had happened, came up and kindly
offered to help poor Chanticleer by laying himself across the stream;
and this time he got safely to the other side with the hearse, and
managed to get Partlet out of it; but the fox and the other mourners,
who were sitting behind, were too heavy, and fell back into the water
and were all carried away by the stream and drowned.

Thus Chanticleer was left alone with his dead Partlet; and having dug
a grave for her, he laid her in it, and made a little hillock over her.
Then he sat down by the grave, and wept and mourned, till at last he
died too; and so all were dead.




RAPUNZEL

There were once a man and a woman who had long in vain wished for a
child. At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire.
These people had a little window at the back of their house from which
a splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful
flowers and herbs. It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no
one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had
great power and was dreaded by all the world. One day the woman was
standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a
bed which was planted with the most beautiful rampion (rapunzel), and it
looked so fresh and green that she longed for it, she quite pined away,
and began to look pale and miserable. Then her husband was alarmed, and
asked: ‘What ails you, dear wife?’ ‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘if I can’t eat
some of the rampion, which is in the garden behind our house, I shall
die.’ The man, who loved her, thought: ‘Sooner than let your wife die,
bring her some of the rampion yourself, let it cost what it will.’
At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the
enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rampion, and took it to his
wife. She at once made herself a salad of it, and ate it greedily. It
tasted so good to her--so very good, that the next day she longed for it
three times as much as before. If he was to have any rest, her husband
must once more descend into the garden. In the gloom of evening
therefore, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down the
wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before
him. ‘How can you dare,’ said she with angry look, ‘descend into my
garden and steal my rampion like a thief? You shall suffer for it!’
‘Ah,’ answered he, ‘let mercy take the place of justice, I only made
up my mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your rampion from the
window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she
had not got some to eat.’ Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be
softened, and said to him: ‘If the case be as you say, I will allow
you to take away with you as much rampion as you will, only I make one
condition, you must give me the child which your wife will bring into
the world; it shall be well treated, and I will care for it like a
mother.’ The man in his terror consented to everything, and when the
woman was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the
child the name of Rapunzel, and took it away with her.

Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun. When she was
twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in
a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a
little window. When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself
beneath it and cried:

 ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
  Let down your hair to me.’

Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she
heard the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses,
wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair
fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.

After a year or two, it came to pass that the king’s son rode through
the forest and passed by the tower. Then he heard a song, which was so
charming that he stood still and listened. This was Rapunzel, who in her
solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound. The king’s
son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower,
but none was to be found. He rode home, but the singing had so deeply
touched his heart, that every day he went out into the forest and
listened to it. Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw
that an enchantress came there, and he heard how she cried:

 ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
  Let down your hair to me.’

Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress
climbed up to her. ‘If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too
will try my fortune,’ said he, and the next day when it began to grow
dark, he went to the tower and cried:

 ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
  Let down your hair to me.’

Immediately the hair fell down and the king’s son climbed up.

At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes
had never yet beheld, came to her; but the king’s son began to talk to
her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred
that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her.
Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take
him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she
thought: ‘He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does’; and she said
yes, and laid her hand in his. She said: ‘I will willingly go away with
you, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk
every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when
that is ready I will descend, and you will take me on your horse.’ They
agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the
old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until
once Rapunzel said to her: ‘Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that
you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young king’s son--he
is with me in a moment.’ ‘Ah! you wicked child,’ cried the enchantress.
‘What do I hear you say! I thought I had separated you from all
the world, and yet you have deceived me!’ In her anger she clutched
Rapunzel’s beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand,
seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut
off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless
that she took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great
grief and misery.

On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress
fastened the braids of hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the
window, and when the king’s son came and cried:

 ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
  Let down your hair to me.’

she let the hair down. The king’s son ascended, but instead of finding
his dearest Rapunzel, he found the enchantress, who gazed at him with
wicked and venomous looks. ‘Aha!’ she cried mockingly, ‘you would fetch
your dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest;
the cat has got it, and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is
lost to you; you will never see her again.’ The king’s son was beside
himself with pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower. He
escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his
eyes. Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but
roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of
his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at
length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she
had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a
voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it, and
when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two
of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again, and he could
see with them as before. He led her to his kingdom where he was
joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterwards, happy and
contented.




FUNDEVOGEL

There was once a forester who went into the forest to hunt, and as
he entered it he heard a sound of screaming as if a little child were
there. He followed the sound, and at last came to a high tree, and at
the top of this a little child was sitting, for the mother had fallen
asleep under the tree with the child, and a bird of prey had seen it in
her arms, had flown down, snatched it away, and set it on the high tree.

The forester climbed up, brought the child down, and thought to himself:
‘You will take him home with you, and bring him up with your Lina.’ He
took it home, therefore, and the two children grew up together. And the
one, which he had found on a tree was called Fundevogel, because a bird
had carried it away. Fundevogel and Lina loved each other so dearly that
when they did not see each other they were sad.

Now the forester had an old cook, who one evening took two pails and
began to fetch water, and did not go once only, but many times, out
to the spring. Lina saw this and said, ‘Listen, old Sanna, why are you
fetching so much water?’ ‘If you will never repeat it to anyone, I will
tell you why.’ So Lina said, no, she would never repeat it to anyone,
and then the cook said: ‘Early tomorrow morning, when the forester
is out hunting, I will heat the water, and when it is boiling in the
kettle, I will throw in Fundevogel, and will boil him in it.’

Early next morning the forester got up and went out hunting, and when he
was gone the children were still in bed. Then Lina said to Fundevogel:
‘If you will never leave me, I too will never leave you.’ Fundevogel
said: ‘Neither now, nor ever will I leave you.’ Then said Lina: ‘Then
will I tell you. Last night, old Sanna carried so many buckets of water
into the house that I asked her why she was doing that, and she said
that if I would promise not to tell anyone, and she said that early
tomorrow morning when father was out hunting, she would set the kettle
full of water, throw you into it and boil you; but we will get up
quickly, dress ourselves, and go away together.’

The two children therefore got up, dressed themselves quickly, and went
away. When the water in the kettle was boiling, the cook went into the
bedroom to fetch Fundevogel and throw him into it. But when she came in,
and went to the beds, both the children were gone. Then she was terribly
alarmed, and she said to herself: ‘What shall I say now when the
forester comes home and sees that the children are gone? They must be
followed instantly to get them back again.’

Then the cook sent three servants after them, who were to run and
overtake the children. The children, however, were sitting outside the
forest, and when they saw from afar the three servants running, Lina
said to Fundevogel: ‘Never leave me, and I will never leave you.’
Fundevogel said: ‘Neither now, nor ever.’ Then said Lina: ‘Do you become
a rose-tree, and I the rose upon it.’ When the three servants came to
the forest, nothing was there but a rose-tree and one rose on it, but
the children were nowhere. Then said they: ‘There is nothing to be done
here,’ and they went home and told the cook that they had seen nothing
in the forest but a little rose-bush with one rose on it. Then the
old cook scolded and said: ‘You simpletons, you should have cut the
rose-bush in two, and have broken off the rose and brought it home with
you; go, and do it at once.’ They had therefore to go out and look for
the second time. The children, however, saw them coming from a distance.
Then Lina said: ‘Fundevogel, never leave me, and I will never leave
you.’ Fundevogel said: ‘Neither now; nor ever.’ Said Lina: ‘Then do you
become a church, and I’ll be the chandelier in it.’ So when the three
servants came, nothing was there but a church, with a chandelier in
it. They said therefore to each other: ‘What can we do here, let us go
home.’ When they got home, the cook asked if they had not found them;
so they said no, they had found nothing but a church, and there was a
chandelier in it. And the cook scolded them and said: ‘You fools! why
did you not pull the church to pieces, and bring the chandelier home
with you?’ And now the old cook herself got on her legs, and went with
the three servants in pursuit of the children. The children, however,
saw from afar that the three servants were coming, and the cook waddling
after them. Then said Lina: ‘Fundevogel, never leave me, and I will
never leave you.’ Then said Fundevogel: ‘Neither now, nor ever.’
Said Lina: ‘Be a fishpond, and I will be the duck upon it.’ The cook,
however, came up to them, and when she saw the pond she lay down by it,
and was about to drink it up. But the duck swam quickly to her, seized
her head in its beak and drew her into the water, and there the old
witch had to drown. Then the children went home together, and were
heartily delighted, and if they have not died, they are living still.




THE VALIANT LITTLE TAILOR

One summer’s morning a little tailor was sitting on his table by the
window; he was in good spirits, and sewed with all his might. Then came
a peasant woman down the street crying: ‘Good jams, cheap! Good jams,
cheap!’ This rang pleasantly in the tailor’s ears; he stretched his
delicate head out of the window, and called: ‘Come up here, dear woman;
here you will get rid of your goods.’ The woman came up the three steps
to the tailor with her heavy basket, and he made her unpack all the pots
for him. He inspected each one, lifted it up, put his nose to it, and
at length said: ‘The jam seems to me to be good, so weigh me out four
ounces, dear woman, and if it is a quarter of a pound that is of no
consequence.’ The woman who had hoped to find a good sale, gave him
what he desired, but went away quite angry and grumbling. ‘Now, this jam
shall be blessed by God,’ cried the little tailor, ‘and give me health
and strength’; so he brought the bread out of the cupboard, cut himself
a piece right across the loaf and spread the jam over it. ‘This won’t
taste bitter,’ said he, ‘but I will just finish the jacket before I
take a bite.’ He laid the bread near him, sewed on, and in his joy, made
bigger and bigger stitches. In the meantime the smell of the sweet jam
rose to where the flies were sitting in great numbers, and they were
attracted and descended on it in hosts. ‘Hi! who invited you?’ said the
little tailor, and drove the unbidden guests away. The flies, however,
who understood no German, would not be turned away, but came back
again in ever-increasing companies. The little tailor at last lost all
patience, and drew a piece of cloth from the hole under his work-table,
and saying: ‘Wait, and I will give it to you,’ struck it mercilessly on
them. When he drew it away and counted, there lay before him no fewer
than seven, dead and with legs stretched out. ‘Are you a fellow of that
sort?’ said he, and could not help admiring his own bravery. ‘The whole
town shall know of this!’ And the little tailor hastened to cut himself
a girdle, stitched it, and embroidered on it in large letters: ‘Seven at
one stroke!’ ‘What, the town!’ he continued, ‘the whole world shall hear
of it!’ and his heart wagged with joy like a lamb’s tail. The tailor
put on the girdle, and resolved to go forth into the world, because he
thought his workshop was too small for his valour. Before he went away,
he sought about in the house to see if there was anything which he could
take with him; however, he found nothing but an old cheese, and that
he put in his pocket. In front of the door he observed a bird which
had caught itself in the thicket. It had to go into his pocket with the
cheese. Now he took to the road boldly, and as he was light and nimble,
he felt no fatigue. The road led him up a mountain, and when he had
reached the highest point of it, there sat a powerful giant looking
peacefully about him. The little tailor went bravely up, spoke to him,
and said: ‘Good day, comrade, so you are sitting there overlooking the
wide-spread world! I am just on my way thither, and want to try my luck.
Have you any inclination to go with me?’ The giant looked contemptuously
at the tailor, and said: ‘You ragamuffin! You miserable creature!’

‘Oh, indeed?’ answered the little tailor, and unbuttoned his coat, and
showed the giant the girdle, ‘there may you read what kind of a man I
am!’ The giant read: ‘Seven at one stroke,’ and thought that they had
been men whom the tailor had killed, and began to feel a little respect
for the tiny fellow. Nevertheless, he wished to try him first, and took
a stone in his hand and squeezed it together so that water dropped out
of it. ‘Do that likewise,’ said the giant, ‘if you have strength.’ ‘Is
that all?’ said the tailor, ‘that is child’s play with us!’ and put his
hand into his pocket, brought out the soft cheese, and pressed it until
the liquid ran out of it. ‘Faith,’ said he, ‘that was a little better,
wasn’t it?’ The giant did not know what to say, and could not believe it
of the little man. Then the giant picked up a stone and threw it so high
that the eye could scarcely follow it. ‘Now, little mite of a man, do
that likewise,’ ‘Well thrown,’ said the tailor, ‘but after all the stone
came down to earth again; I will throw you one which shall never come
back at all,’ and he put his hand into his pocket, took out the bird,
and threw it into the air. The bird, delighted with its liberty,
rose, flew away and did not come back. ‘How does that shot please you,
comrade?’ asked the tailor. ‘You can certainly throw,’ said the giant,
‘but now we will see if you are able to carry anything properly.’ He
took the little tailor to a mighty oak tree which lay there felled on
the ground, and said: ‘If you are strong enough, help me to carry the
tree out of the forest.’ ‘Readily,’ answered the little man; ‘take you
the trunk on your shoulders, and I will raise up the branches and twigs;
after all, they are the heaviest.’ The giant took the trunk on his
shoulder, but the tailor seated himself on a branch, and the giant, who
could not look round, had to carry away the whole tree, and the little
tailor into the bargain: he behind, was quite merry and happy, and
whistled the song: ‘Three tailors rode forth from the gate,’ as if
carrying the tree were child’s play. The giant, after he had dragged the
heavy burden part of the way, could go no further, and cried: ‘Hark
you, I shall have to let the tree fall!’ The tailor sprang nimbly down,
seized the tree with both arms as if he had been carrying it, and said
to the giant: ‘You are such a great fellow, and yet cannot even carry
the tree!’

They went on together, and as they passed a cherry-tree, the giant laid
hold of the top of the tree where the ripest fruit was hanging, bent it
down, gave it into the tailor’s hand, and bade him eat. But the little
tailor was much too weak to hold the tree, and when the giant let it go,
it sprang back again, and the tailor was tossed into the air with it.
When he had fallen down again without injury, the giant said: ‘What is
this? Have you not strength enough to hold the weak twig?’ ‘There is no
lack of strength,’ answered the little tailor. ‘Do you think that could
be anything to a man who has struck down seven at one blow? I leapt over
the tree because the huntsmen are shooting down there in the thicket.
Jump as I did, if you can do it.’ The giant made the attempt but he
could not get over the tree, and remained hanging in the branches, so
that in this also the tailor kept the upper hand.

The giant said: ‘If you are such a valiant fellow, come with me into our
cavern and spend the night with us.’ The little tailor was willing, and
followed him. When they went into the cave, other giants were sitting
there by the fire, and each of them had a roasted sheep in his hand and
was eating it. The little tailor looked round and thought: ‘It is much
more spacious here than in my workshop.’ The giant showed him a bed, and
said he was to lie down in it and sleep. The bed, however, was too
big for the little tailor; he did not lie down in it, but crept into
a corner. When it was midnight, and the giant thought that the little
tailor was lying in a sound sleep, he got up, took a great iron bar,
cut through the bed with one blow, and thought he had finished off the
grasshopper for good. With the earliest dawn the giants went into the
forest, and had quite forgotten the little tailor, when all at once he
walked up to them quite merrily and boldly. The giants were terrified,
they were afraid that he would strike them all dead, and ran away in a
great hurry.

The little tailor went onwards, always following his own pointed nose.
After he had walked for a long time, he came to the courtyard of a royal
palace, and as he felt weary, he lay down on the grass and fell asleep.
Whilst he lay there, the people came and inspected him on all sides, and
read on his girdle: ‘Seven at one stroke.’ ‘Ah!’ said they, ‘what does
the great warrior want here in the midst of peace? He must be a mighty
lord.’ They went and announced him to the king, and gave it as their
opinion that if war should break out, this would be a weighty and useful
man who ought on no account to be allowed to depart. The counsel pleased
the king, and he sent one of his courtiers to the little tailor to offer
him military service when he awoke. The ambassador remained standing by
the sleeper, waited until he stretched his limbs and opened his eyes,
and then conveyed to him this proposal. ‘For this very reason have
I come here,’ the tailor replied, ‘I am ready to enter the king’s
service.’ He was therefore honourably received, and a special dwelling
was assigned him.

The soldiers, however, were set against the little tailor, and wished
him a thousand miles away. ‘What is to be the end of this?’ they said
among themselves. ‘If we quarrel with him, and he strikes about him,
seven of us will fall at every blow; not one of us can stand against
him.’ They came therefore to a decision, betook themselves in a body to
the king, and begged for their dismissal. ‘We are not prepared,’ said
they, ‘to stay with a man who kills seven at one stroke.’ The king was
sorry that for the sake of one he should lose all his faithful servants,
wished that he had never set eyes on the tailor, and would willingly
have been rid of him again. But he did not venture to give him his
dismissal, for he dreaded lest he should strike him and all his people
dead, and place himself on the royal throne. He thought about it for a
long time, and at last found good counsel. He sent to the little tailor
and caused him to be informed that as he was a great warrior, he had one
request to make to him. In a forest of his country lived two giants,
who caused great mischief with their robbing, murdering, ravaging,
and burning, and no one could approach them without putting himself in
danger of death. If the tailor conquered and killed these two giants, he
would give him his only daughter to wife, and half of his kingdom as a
dowry, likewise one hundred horsemen should go with him to assist him.
‘That would indeed be a fine thing for a man like me!’ thought the
little tailor. ‘One is not offered a beautiful princess and half a
kingdom every day of one’s life!’ ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied, ‘I will soon
subdue the giants, and do not require the help of the hundred horsemen
to do it; he who can hit seven with one blow has no need to be afraid of
two.’

The little tailor went forth, and the hundred horsemen followed him.
When he came to the outskirts of the forest, he said to his followers:
‘Just stay waiting here, I alone will soon finish off the giants.’ Then
he bounded into the forest and looked about right and left. After a
while he perceived both giants. They lay sleeping under a tree, and
snored so that the branches waved up and down. The little tailor, not
idle, gathered two pocketsful of stones, and with these climbed up the
tree. When he was halfway up, he slipped down by a branch, until he sat
just above the sleepers, and then let one stone after another fall on
the breast of one of the giants. For a long time the giant felt nothing,
but at last he awoke, pushed his comrade, and said: ‘Why are you
knocking me?’ ‘You must be dreaming,’ said the other, ‘I am not knocking
you.’ They laid themselves down to sleep again, and then the tailor
threw a stone down on the second. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ cried
the other ‘Why are you pelting me?’ ‘I am not pelting you,’ answered
the first, growling. They disputed about it for a time, but as they were
weary they let the matter rest, and their eyes closed once more. The
little tailor began his game again, picked out the biggest stone, and
threw it with all his might on the breast of the first giant. ‘That
is too bad!’ cried he, and sprang up like a madman, and pushed his
companion against the tree until it shook. The other paid him back in
the same coin, and they got into such a rage that they tore up trees and
belaboured each other so long, that at last they both fell down dead on
the ground at the same time. Then the little tailor leapt down. ‘It is
a lucky thing,’ said he, ‘that they did not tear up the tree on which
I was sitting, or I should have had to sprint on to another like a
squirrel; but we tailors are nimble.’ He drew out his sword and gave
each of them a couple of thrusts in the breast, and then went out to the
horsemen and said: ‘The work is done; I have finished both of them
off, but it was hard work! They tore up trees in their sore need, and
defended themselves with them, but all that is to no purpose when a man
like myself comes, who can kill seven at one blow.’ ‘But are you not
wounded?’ asked the horsemen. ‘You need not concern yourself about
that,’ answered the tailor, ‘they have not bent one hair of mine.’ The
horsemen would not believe him, and rode into the forest; there they
found the giants swimming in their blood, and all round about lay the
torn-up trees.

The little tailor demanded of the king the promised reward; he, however,
repented of his promise, and again bethought himself how he could get
rid of the hero. ‘Before you receive my daughter, and the half of my
kingdom,’ said he to him, ‘you must perform one more heroic deed. In
the forest roams a unicorn which does great harm, and you must catch
it first.’ ‘I fear one unicorn still less than two giants. Seven at one
blow, is my kind of affair.’ He took a rope and an axe with him, went
forth into the forest, and again bade those who were sent with him to
wait outside. He had not long to seek. The unicorn soon came towards
him, and rushed directly on the tailor, as if it would gore him with its
horn without more ado. ‘Softly, softly; it can’t be done as quickly as
that,’ said he, and stood still and waited until the animal was quite
close, and then sprang nimbly behind the tree. The unicorn ran against
the tree with all its strength, and stuck its horn so fast in the trunk
that it had not the strength enough to draw it out again, and thus it
was caught. ‘Now, I have got the bird,’ said the tailor, and came out
from behind the tree and put the rope round its neck, and then with his
axe he hewed the horn out of the tree, and when all was ready he led the
beast away and took it to the king.

The king still would not give him the promised reward, and made a third
demand. Before the wedding the tailor was to catch him a wild boar that
made great havoc in the forest, and the huntsmen should give him their
help. ‘Willingly,’ said the tailor, ‘that is child’s play!’ He did not
take the huntsmen with him into the forest, and they were well pleased
that he did not, for the wild boar had several times received them in
such a manner that they had no inclination to lie in wait for him. When
the boar perceived the tailor, it ran on him with foaming mouth and
whetted tusks, and was about to throw him to the ground, but the hero
fled and sprang into a chapel which was near and up to the window at
once, and in one bound out again. The boar ran after him, but the tailor
ran round outside and shut the door behind it, and then the raging
beast, which was much too heavy and awkward to leap out of the window,
was caught. The little tailor called the huntsmen thither that they
might see the prisoner with their own eyes. The hero, however, went to
the king, who was now, whether he liked it or not, obliged to keep his
promise, and gave his daughter and the half of his kingdom. Had he known
that it was no warlike hero, but a little tailor who was standing before
him, it would have gone to his heart still more than it did. The wedding
was held with great magnificence and small joy, and out of a tailor a
king was made.

After some time the young queen heard her husband say in his dreams at
night: ‘Boy, make me the doublet, and patch the pantaloons, or else I
will rap the yard-measure over your ears.’ Then she discovered in what
state of life the young lord had been born, and next morning complained
of her wrongs to her father, and begged him to help her to get rid of
her husband, who was nothing else but a tailor. The king comforted her
and said: ‘Leave your bedroom door open this night, and my servants
shall stand outside, and when he has fallen asleep shall go in, bind
him, and take him on board a ship which shall carry him into the wide
world.’ The woman was satisfied with this; but the king’s armour-bearer,
who had heard all, was friendly with the young lord, and informed him of
the whole plot. ‘I’ll put a screw into that business,’ said the little
tailor. At night he went to bed with his wife at the usual time, and
when she thought that he had fallen asleep, she got up, opened the door,
and then lay down again. The little tailor, who was only pretending to
be asleep, began to cry out in a clear voice: ‘Boy, make me the doublet
and patch me the pantaloons, or I will rap the yard-measure over your
ears. I smote seven at one blow. I killed two giants, I brought away one
unicorn, and caught a wild boar, and am I to fear those who are standing
outside the room.’ When these men heard the tailor speaking thus, they
were overcome by a great dread, and ran as if the wild huntsman were
behind them, and none of them would venture anything further against
him. So the little tailor was and remained a king to the end of his
life.




HANSEL AND GRETEL

Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his
two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had
little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the
land, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought
over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he
groaned and said to his wife: ‘What is to become of us? How are we
to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for
ourselves?’ ‘I’ll tell you what, husband,’ answered the woman, ‘early
tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where
it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each
of them one more piece of bread, and then we will go to our work and
leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be
rid of them.’ ‘No, wife,’ said the man, ‘I will not do that; how can I
bear to leave my children alone in the forest?--the wild animals would
soon come and tear them to pieces.’ ‘O, you fool!’ said she, ‘then we
must all four die of hunger, you may as well plane the planks for our
coffins,’ and she left him no peace until he consented. ‘But I feel very
sorry for the poor children, all the same,’ said the man.

The two children had also not been able to sleep for hunger, and had
heard what their stepmother had said to their father. Gretel wept
bitter tears, and said to Hansel: ‘Now all is over with us.’ ‘Be quiet,
Gretel,’ said Hansel, ‘do not distress yourself, I will soon find a way
to help us.’ And when the old folks had fallen asleep, he got up, put
on his little coat, opened the door below, and crept outside. The moon
shone brightly, and the white pebbles which lay in front of the house
glittered like real silver pennies. Hansel stooped and stuffed the
little pocket of his coat with as many as he could get in. Then he went
back and said to Gretel: ‘Be comforted, dear little sister, and sleep in
peace, God will not forsake us,’ and he lay down again in his bed. When
day dawned, but before the sun had risen, the woman came and awoke the
two children, saying: ‘Get up, you sluggards! we are going into the
forest to fetch wood.’ She gave each a little piece of bread, and said:
‘There is something for your dinner, but do not eat it up before then,
for you will get nothing else.’ Gretel took the bread under her apron,
as Hansel had the pebbles in his pocket. Then they all set out together
on the way to the forest. When they had walked a short time, Hansel
stood still and peeped back at the house, and did so again and again.
His father said: ‘Hansel, what are you looking at there and staying
behind for? Pay attention, and do not forget how to use your legs.’ ‘Ah,
father,’ said Hansel, ‘I am looking at my little white cat, which is
sitting up on the roof, and wants to say goodbye to me.’ The wife said:
‘Fool, that is not your little cat, that is the morning sun which is
shining on the chimneys.’ Hansel, however, had not been looking back at
the cat, but had been constantly throwing one of the white pebble-stones
out of his pocket on the road.

When they had reached the middle of the forest, the father said: ‘Now,
children, pile up some wood, and I will light a fire that you may not
be cold.’ Hansel and Gretel gathered brushwood together, as high as a
little hill. The brushwood was lighted, and when the flames were burning
very high, the woman said: ‘Now, children, lay yourselves down by the
fire and rest, we will go into the forest and cut some wood. When we
have done, we will come back and fetch you away.’

Hansel and Gretel sat by the fire, and when noon came, each ate a little
piece of bread, and as they heard the strokes of the wood-axe they
believed that their father was near. It was not the axe, however, but
a branch which he had fastened to a withered tree which the wind was
blowing backwards and forwards. And as they had been sitting such a long
time, their eyes closed with fatigue, and they fell fast asleep. When
at last they awoke, it was already dark night. Gretel began to cry and
said: ‘How are we to get out of the forest now?’ But Hansel comforted
her and said: ‘Just wait a little, until the moon has risen, and then we
will soon find the way.’ And when the full moon had risen, Hansel took
his little sister by the hand, and followed the pebbles which shone like
newly-coined silver pieces, and showed them the way.

They walked the whole night long, and by break of day came once more
to their father’s house. They knocked at the door, and when the woman
opened it and saw that it was Hansel and Gretel, she said: ‘You naughty
children, why have you slept so long in the forest?--we thought you were
never coming back at all!’ The father, however, rejoiced, for it had cut
him to the heart to leave them behind alone.

Not long afterwards, there was once more great dearth throughout the
land, and the children heard their mother saying at night to their
father: ‘Everything is eaten again, we have one half loaf left, and that
is the end. The children must go, we will take them farther into the
wood, so that they will not find their way out again; there is no other
means of saving ourselves!’ The man’s heart was heavy, and he thought:
‘It would be better for you to share the last mouthful with your
children.’ The woman, however, would listen to nothing that he had to
say, but scolded and reproached him. He who says A must say B, likewise,
and as he had yielded the first time, he had to do so a second time
also.

The children, however, were still awake and had heard the conversation.
When the old folks were asleep, Hansel again got up, and wanted to go
out and pick up pebbles as he had done before, but the woman had locked
the door, and Hansel could not get out. Nevertheless he comforted his
little sister, and said: ‘Do not cry, Gretel, go to sleep quietly, the
good God will help us.’

Early in the morning came the woman, and took the children out of their
beds. Their piece of bread was given to them, but it was still smaller
than the time before. On the way into the forest Hansel crumbled his
in his pocket, and often stood still and threw a morsel on the ground.
‘Hansel, why do you stop and look round?’ said the father, ‘go on.’ ‘I
am looking back at my little pigeon which is sitting on the roof, and
wants to say goodbye to me,’ answered Hansel. ‘Fool!’ said the woman,
‘that is not your little pigeon, that is the morning sun that is shining
on the chimney.’ Hansel, however little by little, threw all the crumbs
on the path.

The woman led the children still deeper into the forest, where they had
never in their lives been before. Then a great fire was again made, and
the mother said: ‘Just sit there, you children, and when you are tired
you may sleep a little; we are going into the forest to cut wood, and in
the evening when we are done, we will come and fetch you away.’ When
it was noon, Gretel shared her piece of bread with Hansel, who had
scattered his by the way. Then they fell asleep and evening passed, but
no one came to the poor children. They did not awake until it was dark
night, and Hansel comforted his little sister and said: ‘Just wait,
Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread
which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again.’ When
the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many
thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked
them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: ‘We shall soon find the way,’ but
they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day
too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest,
and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat but two or three
berries, which grew on the ground. And as they were so weary that their
legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell
asleep.

It was now three mornings since they had left their father’s house. They
began to walk again, but they always came deeper into the forest, and if
help did not come soon, they must die of hunger and weariness. When it
was mid-day, they saw a beautiful snow-white bird sitting on a bough,
which sang so delightfully that they stood still and listened to it. And
when its song was over, it spread its wings and flew away before them,
and they followed it until they reached a little house, on the roof of
which it alighted; and when they approached the little house they saw
that it was built of bread and covered with cakes, but that the windows
were of clear sugar. ‘We will set to work on that,’ said Hansel, ‘and
have a good meal. I will eat a bit of the roof, and you Gretel, can eat
some of the window, it will taste sweet.’ Hansel reached up above, and
broke off a little of the roof to try how it tasted, and Gretel leant
against the window and nibbled at the panes. Then a soft voice cried
from the parlour:

 ‘Nibble, nibble, gnaw,
  Who is nibbling at my little house?’

The children answered:

 ‘The wind, the wind,
  The heaven-born wind,’

and went on eating without disturbing themselves. Hansel, who liked the
taste of the roof, tore down a great piece of it, and Gretel pushed out
the whole of one round window-pane, sat down, and enjoyed herself with
it. Suddenly the door opened, and a woman as old as the hills, who
supported herself on crutches, came creeping out. Hansel and Gretel were
so terribly frightened that they let fall what they had in their
hands. The old woman, however, nodded her head, and said: ‘Oh, you dear
children, who has brought you here? do come in, and stay with me. No
harm shall happen to you.’ She took them both by the hand, and led them
into her little house. Then good food was set before them, milk and
pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterwards two pretty little
beds were covered with clean white linen, and Hansel and Gretel lay down
in them, and thought they were in heaven.

The old woman had only pretended to be so kind; she was in reality
a wicked witch, who lay in wait for children, and had only built the
little house of bread in order to entice them there. When a child fell
into her power, she killed it, cooked and ate it, and that was a feast
day with her. Witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have
a keen scent like the beasts, and are aware when human beings draw near.
When Hansel and Gretel came into her neighbourhood, she laughed with
malice, and said mockingly: ‘I have them, they shall not escape me
again!’ Early in the morning before the children were awake, she was
already up, and when she saw both of them sleeping and looking so
pretty, with their plump and rosy cheeks she muttered to herself: ‘That
will be a dainty mouthful!’ Then she seized Hansel with her shrivelled
hand, carried him into a little stable, and locked him in behind a
grated door. Scream as he might, it would not help him. Then she went to
Gretel, shook her till she awoke, and cried: ‘Get up, lazy thing, fetch
some water, and cook something good for your brother, he is in the
stable outside, and is to be made fat. When he is fat, I will eat him.’
Gretel began to weep bitterly, but it was all in vain, for she was
forced to do what the wicked witch commanded.

And now the best food was cooked for poor Hansel, but Gretel got nothing
but crab-shells. Every morning the woman crept to the little stable, and
cried: ‘Hansel, stretch out your finger that I may feel if you will soon
be fat.’ Hansel, however, stretched out a little bone to her, and
the old woman, who had dim eyes, could not see it, and thought it was
Hansel’s finger, and was astonished that there was no way of fattening
him. When four weeks had gone by, and Hansel still remained thin, she
was seized with impatience and would not wait any longer. ‘Now, then,
Gretel,’ she cried to the girl, ‘stir yourself, and bring some water.
Let Hansel be fat or lean, tomorrow I will kill him, and cook him.’ Ah,
how the poor little sister did lament when she had to fetch the water,
and how her tears did flow down her cheeks! ‘Dear God, do help us,’ she
cried. ‘If the wild beasts in the forest had but devoured us, we should
at any rate have died together.’ ‘Just keep your noise to yourself,’
said the old woman, ‘it won’t help you at all.’

Early in the morning, Gretel had to go out and hang up the cauldron with
the water, and light the fire. ‘We will bake first,’ said the old woman,
‘I have already heated the oven, and kneaded the dough.’ She pushed poor
Gretel out to the oven, from which flames of fire were already darting.
‘Creep in,’ said the witch, ‘and see if it is properly heated, so that
we can put the bread in.’ And once Gretel was inside, she intended to
shut the oven and let her bake in it, and then she would eat her, too.
But Gretel saw what she had in mind, and said: ‘I do not know how I am
to do it; how do I get in?’ ‘Silly goose,’ said the old woman. ‘The door
is big enough; just look, I can get in myself!’ and she crept up and
thrust her head into the oven. Then Gretel gave her a push that drove
her far into it, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Oh! then
she began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away and the godless
witch was miserably burnt to death.

Gretel, however, ran like lightning to Hansel, opened his little stable,
and cried: ‘Hansel, we are saved! The old witch is dead!’ Then Hansel
sprang like a bird from its cage when the door is opened. How they did
rejoice and embrace each other, and dance about and kiss each other! And
as they had no longer any need to fear her, they went into the witch’s
house, and in every corner there stood chests full of pearls and jewels.
‘These are far better than pebbles!’ said Hansel, and thrust into his
pockets whatever could be got in, and Gretel said: ‘I, too, will take
something home with me,’ and filled her pinafore full. ‘But now we must
be off,’ said Hansel, ‘that we may get out of the witch’s forest.’

When they had walked for two hours, they came to a great stretch of
water. ‘We cannot cross,’ said Hansel, ‘I see no foot-plank, and no
bridge.’ ‘And there is also no ferry,’ answered Gretel, ‘but a white
duck is swimming there: if I ask her, she will help us over.’ Then she
cried:

 ‘Little duck, little duck, dost thou see,
  Hansel and Gretel are waiting for thee?
  There’s never a plank, or bridge in sight,
  Take us across on thy back so white.’

The duck came to them, and Hansel seated himself on its back, and told
his sister to sit by him. ‘No,’ replied Gretel, ‘that will be too heavy
for the little duck; she shall take us across, one after the other.’ The
good little duck did so, and when they were once safely across and had
walked for a short time, the forest seemed to be more and more familiar
to them, and at length they saw from afar their father’s house. Then
they began to run, rushed into the parlour, and threw themselves round
their father’s neck. The man had not known one happy hour since he had
left the children in the forest; the woman, however, was dead. Gretel
emptied her pinafore until pearls and precious stones ran about the
room, and Hansel threw one handful after another out of his pocket to
add to them. Then all anxiety was at an end, and they lived together
in perfect happiness. My tale is done, there runs a mouse; whosoever
catches it, may make himself a big fur cap out of it.




THE MOUSE, THE BIRD, AND THE SAUSAGE

Once upon a time, a mouse, a bird, and a sausage, entered into
partnership and set up house together. For a long time all went well;
they lived in great comfort, and prospered so far as to be able to add
considerably to their stores. The bird’s duty was to fly daily into the
wood and bring in fuel; the mouse fetched the water, and the sausage saw
to the cooking.

When people are too well off they always begin to long for something
new. And so it came to pass, that the bird, while out one day, met a
fellow bird, to whom he boastfully expatiated on the excellence of his
household arrangements. But the other bird sneered at him for being a
poor simpleton, who did all the hard work, while the other two stayed
at home and had a good time of it. For, when the mouse had made the fire
and fetched in the water, she could retire into her little room and rest
until it was time to set the table. The sausage had only to watch the
pot to see that the food was properly cooked, and when it was near
dinner-time, he just threw himself into the broth, or rolled in and out
among the vegetables three or four times, and there they were, buttered,
and salted, and ready to be served. Then, when the bird came home and
had laid aside his burden, they sat down to table, and when they had
finished their meal, they could sleep their fill till the following
morning: and that was really a very delightful life.

Influenced by those remarks, the bird next morning refused to bring in
the wood, telling the others that he had been their servant long enough,
and had been a fool into the bargain, and that it was now time to make a
change, and to try some other way of arranging the work. Beg and pray
as the mouse and the sausage might, it was of no use; the bird remained
master of the situation, and the venture had to be made. They therefore
drew lots, and it fell to the sausage to bring in the wood, to the mouse
to cook, and to the bird to fetch the water.

And now what happened? The sausage started in search of wood, the bird
made the fire, and the mouse put on the pot, and then these two waited
till the sausage returned with the fuel for the following day. But the
sausage remained so long away, that they became uneasy, and the bird
flew out to meet him. He had not flown far, however, when he came across
a dog who, having met the sausage, had regarded him as his legitimate
booty, and so seized and swallowed him. The bird complained to the dog
of this bare-faced robbery, but nothing he said was of any avail, for
the dog answered that he found false credentials on the sausage, and
that was the reason his life had been forfeited.

He picked up the wood, and flew sadly home, and told the mouse all he
had seen and heard. They were both very unhappy, but agreed to make the
best of things and to remain with one another.

So now the bird set the table, and the mouse looked after the food and,
wishing to prepare it in the same way as the sausage, by rolling in and
out among the vegetables to salt and butter them, she jumped into the
pot; but she stopped short long before she reached the bottom, having
already parted not only with her skin and hair, but also with life.

Presently the bird came in and wanted to serve up the dinner, but he
could nowhere see the cook. In his alarm and flurry, he threw the wood
here and there about the floor, called and searched, but no cook was to
be found. Then some of the wood that had been carelessly thrown down,
caught fire and began to blaze. The bird hastened to fetch some water,
but his pail fell into the well, and he after it, and as he was unable
to recover himself, he was drowned.




MOTHER HOLLE

Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters; one of them
was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy. The mother,
however, loved the ugly and lazy one best, because she was her own
daughter, and so the other, who was only her stepdaughter, was made
to do all the work of the house, and was quite the Cinderella of the
family. Her stepmother sent her out every day to sit by the well in
the high road, there to spin until she made her fingers bleed. Now it
chanced one day that some blood fell on to the spindle, and as the girl
stopped over the well to wash it off, the spindle suddenly sprang out
of her hand and fell into the well. She ran home crying to tell of her
misfortune, but her stepmother spoke harshly to her, and after giving
her a violent scolding, said unkindly, ‘As you have let the spindle fall
into the well you may go yourself and fetch it out.’

The girl went back to the well not knowing what to do, and at last in
her distress she jumped into the water after the spindle.

She remembered nothing more until she awoke and found herself in a
beautiful meadow, full of sunshine, and with countless flowers blooming
in every direction.

She walked over the meadow, and presently she came upon a baker’s oven
full of bread, and the loaves cried out to her, ‘Take us out, take us
out, or alas! we shall be burnt to a cinder; we were baked through long
ago.’ So she took the bread-shovel and drew them all out.

She went on a little farther, till she came to a tree full of apples.
‘Shake me, shake me, I pray,’ cried the tree; ‘my apples, one and all,
are ripe.’ So she shook the tree, and the apples came falling down upon
her like rain; but she continued shaking until there was not a single
apple left upon it. Then she carefully gathered the apples together in a
heap and walked on again.

The next thing she came to was a little house, and there she saw an old
woman looking out, with such large teeth, that she was terrified, and
turned to run away. But the old woman called after her, ‘What are you
afraid of, dear child? Stay with me; if you will do the work of my house
properly for me, I will make you very happy. You must be very careful,
however, to make my bed in the right way, for I wish you always to shake
it thoroughly, so that the feathers fly about; then they say, down there
in the world, that it is snowing; for I am Mother Holle.’ The old woman
spoke so kindly, that the girl summoned up courage and agreed to enter
into her service.

She took care to do everything according to the old woman’s bidding and
every time she made the bed she shook it with all her might, so that the
feathers flew about like so many snowflakes. The old woman was as good
as her word: she never spoke angrily to her, and gave her roast and
boiled meats every day.

So she stayed on with Mother Holle for some time, and then she began
to grow unhappy. She could not at first tell why she felt sad, but she
became conscious at last of great longing to go home; then she knew she
was homesick, although she was a thousand times better off with Mother
Holle than with her mother and sister. After waiting awhile, she went
to Mother Holle and said, ‘I am so homesick, that I cannot stay with
you any longer, for although I am so happy here, I must return to my own
people.’

Then Mother Holle said, ‘I am pleased that you should want to go back
to your own people, and as you have served me so well and faithfully, I
will take you home myself.’

Thereupon she led the girl by the hand up to a broad gateway. The gate
was opened, and as the girl passed through, a shower of gold fell upon
her, and the gold clung to her, so that she was covered with it from
head to foot.

‘That is a reward for your industry,’ said Mother Holle, and as she
spoke she handed her the spindle which she had dropped into the well.

The gate was then closed, and the girl found herself back in the old
world close to her mother’s house. As she entered the courtyard, the
cock who was perched on the well, called out:

 ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!
  Your golden daughter’s come back to you.’

Then she went in to her mother and sister, and as she was so richly
covered with gold, they gave her a warm welcome. She related to them
all that had happened, and when the mother heard how she had come by her
great riches, she thought she should like her ugly, lazy daughter to go
and try her fortune. So she made the sister go and sit by the well
and spin, and the girl pricked her finger and thrust her hand into a
thorn-bush, so that she might drop some blood on to the spindle; then
she threw it into the well, and jumped in herself.

Like her sister she awoke in the beautiful meadow, and walked over it
till she came to the oven. ‘Take us out, take us out, or alas! we shall
be burnt to a cinder; we were baked through long ago,’ cried the loaves
as before. But the lazy girl answered, ‘Do you think I am going to dirty
my hands for you?’ and walked on.

Presently she came to the apple-tree. ‘Shake me, shake me, I pray; my
apples, one and all, are ripe,’ it cried. But she only answered, ‘A nice
thing to ask me to do, one of the apples might fall on my head,’ and
passed on.

At last she came to Mother Holle’s house, and as she had heard all about
the large teeth from her sister, she was not afraid of them, and engaged
herself without delay to the old woman.

The first day she was very obedient and industrious, and exerted herself
to please Mother Holle, for she thought of the gold she should get in
return. The next day, however, she began to dawdle over her work, and
the third day she was more idle still; then she began to lie in bed in
the mornings and refused to get up. Worse still, she neglected to
make the old woman’s bed properly, and forgot to shake it so that the
feathers might fly about. So Mother Holle very soon got tired of her,
and told her she might go. The lazy girl was delighted at this, and
thought to herself, ‘The gold will soon be mine.’ Mother Holle led her,
as she had led her sister, to the broad gateway; but as she was passing
through, instead of the shower of gold, a great bucketful of pitch came
pouring over her.

‘That is in return for your services,’ said the old woman, and she shut
the gate.

So the lazy girl had to go home covered with pitch, and the cock on the
well called out as she saw her:

 ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!
  Your dirty daughter’s come back to you.’

But, try what she would, she could not get the pitch off and it stuck to
her as long as she lived.




LITTLE RED-CAP [LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD]

Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone
who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was
nothing that she would not have given to the child. Once she gave her a
little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never
wear anything else; so she was always called ‘Little Red-Cap.’

One day her mother said to her: ‘Come, Little Red-Cap, here is a piece
of cake and a bottle of wine; take them to your grandmother, she is ill
and weak, and they will do her good. Set out before it gets hot, and
when you are going, walk nicely and quietly and do not run off the path,
or you may fall and break the bottle, and then your grandmother will
get nothing; and when you go into her room, don’t forget to say, “Good
morning”, and don’t peep into every corner before you do it.’

‘I will take great care,’ said Little Red-Cap to her mother, and gave
her hand on it.

The grandmother lived out in the wood, half a league from the village,
and just as Little Red-Cap entered the wood, a wolf met her. Red-Cap
did not know what a wicked creature he was, and was not at all afraid of
him.

‘Good day, Little Red-Cap,’ said he.

‘Thank you kindly, wolf.’

‘Whither away so early, Little Red-Cap?’

‘To my grandmother’s.’

‘What have you got in your apron?’

‘Cake and wine; yesterday was baking-day, so poor sick grandmother is to
have something good, to make her stronger.’

‘Where does your grandmother live, Little Red-Cap?’

‘A good quarter of a league farther on in the wood; her house stands
under the three large oak-trees, the nut-trees are just below; you
surely must know it,’ replied Little Red-Cap.

The wolf thought to himself: ‘What a tender young creature! what a nice
plump mouthful--she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must
act craftily, so as to catch both.’ So he walked for a short time by
the side of Little Red-Cap, and then he said: ‘See, Little Red-Cap, how
pretty the flowers are about here--why do you not look round? I believe,
too, that you do not hear how sweetly the little birds are singing; you
walk gravely along as if you were going to school, while everything else
out here in the wood is merry.’

Little Red-Cap raised her eyes, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing
here and there through the trees, and pretty flowers growing everywhere,
she thought: ‘Suppose I take grandmother a fresh nosegay; that would
please her too. It is so early in the day that I shall still get there
in good time’; and so she ran from the path into the wood to look for
flowers. And whenever she had picked one, she fancied that she saw a
still prettier one farther on, and ran after it, and so got deeper and
deeper into the wood.

Meanwhile the wolf ran straight to the grandmother’s house and knocked
at the door.

‘Who is there?’

‘Little Red-Cap,’ replied the wolf. ‘She is bringing cake and wine; open
the door.’

‘Lift the latch,’ called out the grandmother, ‘I am too weak, and cannot
get up.’

The wolf lifted the latch, the door sprang open, and without saying a
word he went straight to the grandmother’s bed, and devoured her. Then
he put on her clothes, dressed himself in her cap laid himself in bed
and drew the curtains.

Little Red-Cap, however, had been running about picking flowers,
and when she had gathered so many that she could carry no more, she
remembered her grandmother, and set out on the way to her.

She was surprised to find the cottage-door standing open, and when she
went into the room, she had such a strange feeling that she said to
herself: ‘Oh dear! how uneasy I feel today, and at other times I like
being with grandmother so much.’ She called out: ‘Good morning,’ but
received no answer; so she went to the bed and drew back the curtains.
There lay her grandmother with her cap pulled far over her face, and
looking very strange.

‘Oh! grandmother,’ she said, ‘what big ears you have!’

‘The better to hear you with, my child,’ was the reply.

‘But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!’ she said.

‘The better to see you with, my dear.’

‘But, grandmother, what large hands you have!’

‘The better to hug you with.’

‘Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!’

‘The better to eat you with!’

And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was out of
bed and swallowed up Red-Cap.

When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in the bed,
fell asleep and began to snore very loud. The huntsman was just passing
the house, and thought to himself: ‘How the old woman is snoring! I must
just see if she wants anything.’ So he went into the room, and when he
came to the bed, he saw that the wolf was lying in it. ‘Do I find you
here, you old sinner!’ said he. ‘I have long sought you!’ Then just as
he was going to fire at him, it occurred to him that the wolf might have
devoured the grandmother, and that she might still be saved, so he did
not fire, but took a pair of scissors, and began to cut open the stomach
of the sleeping wolf. When he had made two snips, he saw the little
Red-Cap shining, and then he made two snips more, and the little girl
sprang out, crying: ‘Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was
inside the wolf’; and after that the aged grandmother came out alive
also, but scarcely able to breathe. Red-Cap, however, quickly fetched
great stones with which they filled the wolf’s belly, and when he awoke,
he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at
once, and fell dead.

Then all three were delighted. The huntsman drew off the wolf’s skin and
went home with it; the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine which
Red-Cap had brought, and revived, but Red-Cap thought to herself: ‘As
long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the
wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so.’




It also related that once when Red-Cap was again taking cakes to the old
grandmother, another wolf spoke to her, and tried to entice her from the
path. Red-Cap, however, was on her guard, and went straight forward on
her way, and told her grandmother that she had met the wolf, and that he
had said ‘good morning’ to her, but with such a wicked look in his eyes,
that if they had not been on the public road she was certain he would
have eaten her up. ‘Well,’ said the grandmother, ‘we will shut the door,
that he may not come in.’ Soon afterwards the wolf knocked, and cried:
‘Open the door, grandmother, I am Little Red-Cap, and am bringing you
some cakes.’ But they did not speak, or open the door, so the grey-beard
stole twice or thrice round the house, and at last jumped on the roof,
intending to wait until Red-Cap went home in the evening, and then to
steal after her and devour her in the darkness. But the grandmother
saw what was in his thoughts. In front of the house was a great stone
trough, so she said to the child: ‘Take the pail, Red-Cap; I made some
sausages yesterday, so carry the water in which I boiled them to the
trough.’ Red-Cap carried until the great trough was quite full. Then the
smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and he sniffed and peeped down,
and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep
his footing and began to slip, and slipped down from the roof straight
into the great trough, and was drowned. But Red-Cap went joyously home,
and no one ever did anything to harm her again.




THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

There was once a miller who had one beautiful daughter, and as she was
grown up, he was anxious that she should be well married and provided
for. He said to himself, ‘I will give her to the first suitable man who
comes and asks for her hand.’ Not long after a suitor appeared, and as
he appeared to be very rich and the miller could see nothing in him with
which to find fault, he betrothed his daughter to him. But the girl did
not care for the man as a girl ought to care for her betrothed husband.
She did not feel that she could trust him, and she could not look at him
nor think of him without an inward shudder. One day he said to her, ‘You
have not yet paid me a visit, although we have been betrothed for some
time.’ ‘I do not know where your house is,’ she answered. ‘My house is
out there in the dark forest,’ he said. She tried to excuse herself by
saying that she would not be able to find the way thither. Her betrothed
only replied, ‘You must come and see me next Sunday; I have already
invited guests for that day, and that you may not mistake the way, I
will strew ashes along the path.’

When Sunday came, and it was time for the girl to start, a feeling of
dread came over her which she could not explain, and that she might
be able to find her path again, she filled her pockets with peas and
lentils to sprinkle on the ground as she went along. On reaching the
entrance to the forest she found the path strewed with ashes, and these
she followed, throwing down some peas on either side of her at every
step she took. She walked the whole day until she came to the deepest,
darkest part of the forest. There she saw a lonely house, looking so
grim and mysterious, that it did not please her at all. She stepped
inside, but not a soul was to be seen, and a great silence reigned
throughout. Suddenly a voice cried:

 ‘Turn back, turn back, young maiden fair,
  Linger not in this murderers’ lair.’

The girl looked up and saw that the voice came from a bird hanging in a
cage on the wall. Again it cried:

 ‘Turn back, turn back, young maiden fair,
  Linger not in this murderers’ lair.’

The girl passed on, going from room to room of the house, but they were
all empty, and still she saw no one. At last she came to the cellar,
and there sat a very, very old woman, who could not keep her head from
shaking. ‘Can you tell me,’ asked the girl, ‘if my betrothed husband
lives here?’

‘Ah, you poor child,’ answered the old woman, ‘what a place for you to
come to! This is a murderers’ den. You think yourself a promised bride,
and that your marriage will soon take place, but it is with death that
you will keep your marriage feast. Look, do you see that large cauldron
of water which I am obliged to keep on the fire! As soon as they have
you in their power they will kill you without mercy, and cook and eat
you, for they are eaters of men. If I did not take pity on you and save
you, you would be lost.’

Thereupon the old woman led her behind a large cask, which quite hid her
from view. ‘Keep as still as a mouse,’ she said; ‘do not move or speak,
or it will be all over with you. Tonight, when the robbers are
all asleep, we will flee together. I have long been waiting for an
opportunity to escape.’

The words were hardly out of her mouth when the godless crew returned,
dragging another young girl along with them. They were all drunk, and
paid no heed to her cries and lamentations. They gave her wine to drink,
three glasses full, one of white wine, one of red, and one of yellow,
and with that her heart gave way and she died. Then they tore off her
dainty clothing, laid her on a table, and cut her beautiful body into
pieces, and sprinkled salt upon it.

The poor betrothed girl crouched trembling and shuddering behind the
cask, for she saw what a terrible fate had been intended for her by
the robbers. One of them now noticed a gold ring still remaining on
the little finger of the murdered girl, and as he could not draw it off
easily, he took a hatchet and cut off the finger; but the finger sprang
into the air, and fell behind the cask into the lap of the girl who was
hiding there. The robber took a light and began looking for it, but he
could not find it. ‘Have you looked behind the large cask?’ said one of
the others. But the old woman called out, ‘Come and eat your suppers,
and let the thing be till tomorrow; the finger won’t run away.’

‘The old woman is right,’ said the robbers, and they ceased looking for
the finger and sat down.

The old woman then mixed a sleeping draught with their wine, and before
long they were all lying on the floor of the cellar, fast asleep and
snoring. As soon as the girl was assured of this, she came from behind
the cask. She was obliged to step over the bodies of the sleepers, who
were lying close together, and every moment she was filled with renewed
dread lest she should awaken them. But God helped her, so that she
passed safely over them, and then she and the old woman went upstairs,
opened the door, and hastened as fast as they could from the murderers’
den. They found the ashes scattered by the wind, but the peas and
lentils had sprouted, and grown sufficiently above the ground, to guide
them in the moonlight along the path. All night long they walked, and it
was morning before they reached the mill. Then the girl told her father
all that had happened.

The day came that had been fixed for the marriage. The bridegroom
arrived and also a large company of guests, for the miller had taken
care to invite all his friends and relations. As they sat at the feast,
each guest in turn was asked to tell a tale; the bride sat still and did
not say a word.

‘And you, my love,’ said the bridegroom, turning to her, ‘is there no
tale you know? Tell us something.’

‘I will tell you a dream, then,’ said the bride. ‘I went alone through a
forest and came at last to a house; not a soul could I find within, but
a bird that was hanging in a cage on the wall cried:

 ‘Turn back, turn back, young maiden fair,
  Linger not in this murderers’ lair.’

and again a second time it said these words.’

‘My darling, this is only a dream.’

‘I went on through the house from room to room, but they were all empty,
and everything was so grim and mysterious. At last I went down to the
cellar, and there sat a very, very old woman, who could not keep her
head still. I asked her if my betrothed lived here, and she answered,
“Ah, you poor child, you are come to a murderers’ den; your betrothed
does indeed live here, but he will kill you without mercy and afterwards
cook and eat you.”’

‘My darling, this is only a dream.’

‘The old woman hid me behind a large cask, and scarcely had she done
this when the robbers returned home, dragging a young girl along with
them. They gave her three kinds of wine to drink, white, red, and
yellow, and with that she died.’

‘My darling, this is only a dream.’

‘Then they tore off her dainty clothing, and cut her beautiful body into
pieces and sprinkled salt upon it.’

‘My darling, this is only a dream.’

‘And one of the robbers saw that there was a gold ring still left on her
finger, and as it was difficult to draw off, he took a hatchet and cut
off her finger; but the finger sprang into the air and fell behind the
great cask into my lap. And here is the finger with the ring.’ And
with these words the bride drew forth the finger and shewed it to the
assembled guests.

The bridegroom, who during this recital had grown deadly pale, up and
tried to escape, but the guests seized him and held him fast. They
delivered him up to justice, and he and all his murderous band were
condemned to death for their wicked deeds.




TOM THUMB

A poor woodman sat in his cottage one night, smoking his pipe by the
fireside, while his wife sat by his side spinning. ‘How lonely it is,
wife,’ said he, as he puffed out a long curl of smoke, ‘for you and me
to sit here by ourselves, without any children to play about and amuse
us while other people seem so happy and merry with their children!’
‘What you say is very true,’ said the wife, sighing, and turning round
her wheel; ‘how happy should I be if I had but one child! If it were
ever so small--nay, if it were no bigger than my thumb--I should be very
happy, and love it dearly.’ Now--odd as you may think it--it came to
pass that this good woman’s wish was fulfilled, just in the very way she
had wished it; for, not long afterwards, she had a little boy, who was
quite healthy and strong, but was not much bigger than my thumb. So
they said, ‘Well, we cannot say we have not got what we wished for, and,
little as he is, we will love him dearly.’ And they called him Thomas
Thumb.

They gave him plenty of food, yet for all they could do he never grew
bigger, but kept just the same size as he had been when he was born.
Still, his eyes were sharp and sparkling, and he soon showed himself to
be a clever little fellow, who always knew well what he was about.

One day, as the woodman was getting ready to go into the wood to cut
fuel, he said, ‘I wish I had someone to bring the cart after me, for I
want to make haste.’ ‘Oh, father,’ cried Tom, ‘I will take care of that;
the cart shall be in the wood by the time you want it.’ Then the woodman
laughed, and said, ‘How can that be? you cannot reach up to the horse’s
bridle.’ ‘Never mind that, father,’ said Tom; ‘if my mother will only
harness the horse, I will get into his ear and tell him which way to
go.’ ‘Well,’ said the father, ‘we will try for once.’

When the time came the mother harnessed the horse to the cart, and put
Tom into his ear; and as he sat there the little man told the beast how
to go, crying out, ‘Go on!’ and ‘Stop!’ as he wanted: and thus the horse
went on just as well as if the woodman had driven it himself into the
wood. It happened that as the horse was going a little too fast, and Tom
was calling out, ‘Gently! gently!’ two strangers came up. ‘What an odd
thing that is!’ said one: ‘there is a cart going along, and I hear a
carter talking to the horse, but yet I can see no one.’ ‘That is queer,
indeed,’ said the other; ‘let us follow the cart, and see where it
goes.’ So they went on into the wood, till at last they came to the
place where the woodman was. Then Tom Thumb, seeing his father, cried
out, ‘See, father, here I am with the cart, all right and safe! now take
me down!’ So his father took hold of the horse with one hand, and with
the other took his son out of the horse’s ear, and put him down upon a
straw, where he sat as merry as you please.

The two strangers were all this time looking on, and did not know what
to say for wonder. At last one took the other aside, and said, ‘That
little urchin will make our fortune, if we can get him, and carry him
about from town to town as a show; we must buy him.’ So they went up to
the woodman, and asked him what he would take for the little man. ‘He
will be better off,’ said they, ‘with us than with you.’ ‘I won’t sell
him at all,’ said the father; ‘my own flesh and blood is dearer to me
than all the silver and gold in the world.’ But Tom, hearing of the
bargain they wanted to make, crept up his father’s coat to his shoulder
and whispered in his ear, ‘Take the money, father, and let them have me;
I’ll soon come back to you.’

So the woodman at last said he would sell Tom to the strangers for a
large piece of gold, and they paid the price. ‘Where would you like to
sit?’ said one of them. ‘Oh, put me on the rim of your hat; that will be
a nice gallery for me; I can walk about there and see the country as we
go along.’ So they did as he wished; and when Tom had taken leave of his
father they took him away with them.

They journeyed on till it began to be dusky, and then the little man
said, ‘Let me get down, I’m tired.’ So the man took off his hat, and
put him down on a clod of earth, in a ploughed field by the side of the
road. But Tom ran about amongst the furrows, and at last slipped into
an old mouse-hole. ‘Good night, my masters!’ said he, ‘I’m off! mind and
look sharp after me the next time.’ Then they ran at once to the place,
and poked the ends of their sticks into the mouse-hole, but all in vain;
Tom only crawled farther and farther in; and at last it became quite
dark, so that they were forced to go their way without their prize, as
sulky as could be.

When Tom found they were gone, he came out of his hiding-place. ‘What
dangerous walking it is,’ said he, ‘in this ploughed field! If I were to
fall from one of these great clods, I should undoubtedly break my neck.’
At last, by good luck, he found a large empty snail-shell. ‘This is
lucky,’ said he, ‘I can sleep here very well’; and in he crept.

Just as he was falling asleep, he heard two men passing by, chatting
together; and one said to the other, ‘How can we rob that rich parson’s
house of his silver and gold?’ ‘I’ll tell you!’ cried Tom. ‘What noise
was that?’ said the thief, frightened; ‘I’m sure I heard someone speak.’
They stood still listening, and Tom said, ‘Take me with you, and I’ll
soon show you how to get the parson’s money.’ ‘But where are you?’ said
they. ‘Look about on the ground,’ answered he, ‘and listen where the
sound comes from.’ At last the thieves found him out, and lifted him
up in their hands. ‘You little urchin!’ they said, ‘what can you do for
us?’ ‘Why, I can get between the iron window-bars of the parson’s house,
and throw you out whatever you want.’ ‘That’s a good thought,’ said the
thieves; ‘come along, we shall see what you can do.’

When they came to the parson’s house, Tom slipped through the
window-bars into the room, and then called out as loud as he could bawl,
‘Will you have all that is here?’ At this the thieves were frightened,
and said, ‘Softly, softly! Speak low, that you may not awaken anybody.’
But Tom seemed as if he did not understand them, and bawled out again,
‘How much will you have? Shall I throw it all out?’ Now the cook lay in
the next room; and hearing a noise she raised herself up in her bed and
listened. Meantime the thieves were frightened, and ran off a little
way; but at last they plucked up their hearts, and said, ‘The little
urchin is only trying to make fools of us.’ So they came back and
whispered softly to him, saying, ‘Now let us have no more of your
roguish jokes; but throw us out some of the money.’ Then Tom called out
as loud as he could, ‘Very well! hold your hands! here it comes.’

The cook heard this quite plain, so she sprang out of bed, and ran to
open the door. The thieves ran off as if a wolf was at their tails: and
the maid, having groped about and found nothing, went away for a light.
By the time she came back, Tom had slipped off into the barn; and when
she had looked about and searched every hole and corner, and found
nobody, she went to bed, thinking she must have been dreaming with her
eyes open.

The little man crawled about in the hay-loft, and at last found a snug
place to finish his night’s rest in; so he laid himself down, meaning
to sleep till daylight, and then find his way home to his father and
mother. But alas! how woefully he was undone! what crosses and sorrows
happen to us all in this world! The cook got up early, before daybreak,
to feed the cows; and going straight to the hay-loft, carried away
a large bundle of hay, with the little man in the middle of it, fast
asleep. He still, however, slept on, and did not awake till he found
himself in the mouth of the cow; for the cook had put the hay into the
cow’s rick, and the cow had taken Tom up in a mouthful of it. ‘Good
lack-a-day!’ said he, ‘how came I to tumble into the mill?’ But he soon
found out where he really was; and was forced to have all his wits about
him, that he might not get between the cow’s teeth, and so be crushed to
death. At last down he went into her stomach. ‘It is rather dark,’ said
he; ‘they forgot to build windows in this room to let the sun in; a
candle would be no bad thing.’

Though he made the best of his bad luck, he did not like his quarters at
all; and the worst of it was, that more and more hay was always coming
down, and the space left for him became smaller and smaller. At last he
cried out as loud as he could, ‘Don’t bring me any more hay! Don’t bring
me any more hay!’

The maid happened to be just then milking the cow; and hearing someone
speak, but seeing nobody, and yet being quite sure it was the same voice
that she had heard in the night, she was so frightened that she fell off
her stool, and overset the milk-pail. As soon as she could pick herself
up out of the dirt, she ran off as fast as she could to her master the
parson, and said, ‘Sir, sir, the cow is talking!’ But the parson
said, ‘Woman, thou art surely mad!’ However, he went with her into the
cow-house, to try and see what was the matter.

Scarcely had they set foot on the threshold, when Tom called out, ‘Don’t
bring me any more hay!’ Then the parson himself was frightened; and
thinking the cow was surely bewitched, told his man to kill her on the
spot. So the cow was killed, and cut up; and the stomach, in which Tom
lay, was thrown out upon a dunghill.

Tom soon set himself to work to get out, which was not a very easy
task; but at last, just as he had made room to get his head out, fresh
ill-luck befell him. A hungry wolf sprang out, and swallowed up the
whole stomach, with Tom in it, at one gulp, and ran away.

Tom, however, was still not disheartened; and thinking the wolf would
not dislike having some chat with him as he was going along, he called
out, ‘My good friend, I can show you a famous treat.’ ‘Where’s that?’
said the wolf. ‘In such and such a house,’ said Tom, describing his own
father’s house. ‘You can crawl through the drain into the kitchen and
then into the pantry, and there you will find cakes, ham, beef, cold
chicken, roast pig, apple-dumplings, and everything that your heart can
wish.’

The wolf did not want to be asked twice; so that very night he went to
the house and crawled through the drain into the kitchen, and then into
the pantry, and ate and drank there to his heart’s content. As soon as
he had had enough he wanted to get away; but he had eaten so much that
he could not go out by the same way he came in.

This was just what Tom had reckoned upon; and now he began to set up a
great shout, making all the noise he could. ‘Will you be easy?’ said the
wolf; ‘you’ll awaken everybody in the house if you make such a clatter.’
‘What’s that to me?’ said the little man; ‘you have had your frolic, now
I’ve a mind to be merry myself’; and he began, singing and shouting as
loud as he could.

The woodman and his wife, being awakened by the noise, peeped through
a crack in the door; but when they saw a wolf was there, you may well
suppose that they were sadly frightened; and the woodman ran for his
axe, and gave his wife a scythe. ‘Do you stay behind,’ said the woodman,
‘and when I have knocked him on the head you must rip him up with the
scythe.’ Tom heard all this, and cried out, ‘Father, father! I am here,
the wolf has swallowed me.’ And his father said, ‘Heaven be praised! we
have found our dear child again’; and he told his wife not to use the
scythe for fear she should hurt him. Then he aimed a great blow, and
struck the wolf on the head, and killed him on the spot! and when he was
dead they cut open his body, and set Tommy free. ‘Ah!’ said the father,
‘what fears we have had for you!’ ‘Yes, father,’ answered he; ‘I have
travelled all over the world, I think, in one way or other, since we
parted; and now I am very glad to come home and get fresh air again.’
‘Why, where have you been?’ said his father. ‘I have been in a
mouse-hole--and in a snail-shell--and down a cow’s throat--and in the
wolf’s belly; and yet here I am again, safe and sound.’

‘Well,’ said they, ‘you are come back, and we will not sell you again
for all the riches in the world.’

Then they hugged and kissed their dear little son, and gave him plenty
to eat and drink, for he was very hungry; and then they fetched new
clothes for him, for his old ones had been quite spoiled on his journey.
So Master Thumb stayed at home with his father and mother, in peace; for
though he had been so great a traveller, and had done and seen so many
fine things, and was fond enough of telling the whole story, he always
agreed that, after all, there’s no place like HOME!




RUMPELSTILTSKIN

By the side of a wood, in a country a long way off, ran a fine stream
of water; and upon the stream there stood a mill. The miller’s house was
close by, and the miller, you must know, had a very beautiful daughter.
She was, moreover, very shrewd and clever; and the miller was so proud
of her, that he one day told the king of the land, who used to come and
hunt in the wood, that his daughter could spin gold out of straw. Now
this king was very fond of money; and when he heard the miller’s boast
his greediness was raised, and he sent for the girl to be brought before
him. Then he led her to a chamber in his palace where there was a great
heap of straw, and gave her a spinning-wheel, and said, ‘All this must
be spun into gold before morning, as you love your life.’ It was in vain
that the poor maiden said that it was only a silly boast of her father,
for that she could do no such thing as spin straw into gold: the chamber
door was locked, and she was left alone.

She sat down in one corner of the room, and began to bewail her hard
fate; when on a sudden the door opened, and a droll-looking little man
hobbled in, and said, ‘Good morrow to you, my good lass; what are you
weeping for?’ ‘Alas!’ said she, ‘I must spin this straw into gold, and
I know not how.’ ‘What will you give me,’ said the hobgoblin, ‘to do it
for you?’ ‘My necklace,’ replied the maiden. He took her at her word,
and sat himself down to the wheel, and whistled and sang:

 ‘Round about, round about,
    Lo and behold!
  Reel away, reel away,
    Straw into gold!’

And round about the wheel went merrily; the work was quickly done, and
the straw was all spun into gold.

When the king came and saw this, he was greatly astonished and pleased;
but his heart grew still more greedy of gain, and he shut up the poor
miller’s daughter again with a fresh task. Then she knew not what to do,
and sat down once more to weep; but the dwarf soon opened the door, and
said, ‘What will you give me to do your task?’ ‘The ring on my finger,’
said she. So her little friend took the ring, and began to work at the
wheel again, and whistled and sang:

 ‘Round about, round about,
    Lo and behold!
  Reel away, reel away,
    Straw into gold!’

till, long before morning, all was done again.

The king was greatly delighted to see all this glittering treasure;
but still he had not enough: so he took the miller’s daughter to a yet
larger heap, and said, ‘All this must be spun tonight; and if it is,
you shall be my queen.’ As soon as she was alone that dwarf came in, and
said, ‘What will you give me to spin gold for you this third time?’
‘I have nothing left,’ said she. ‘Then say you will give me,’ said
the little man, ‘the first little child that you may have when you are
queen.’ ‘That may never be,’ thought the miller’s daughter: and as she
knew no other way to get her task done, she said she would do what he
asked. Round went the wheel again to the old song, and the manikin once
more spun the heap into gold. The king came in the morning, and, finding
all he wanted, was forced to keep his word; so he married the miller’s
daughter, and she really became queen.

At the birth of her first little child she was very glad, and forgot the
dwarf, and what she had said. But one day he came into her room, where
she was sitting playing with her baby, and put her in mind of it. Then
she grieved sorely at her misfortune, and said she would give him all
the wealth of the kingdom if he would let her off, but in vain; till at
last her tears softened him, and he said, ‘I will give you three days’
grace, and if during that time you tell me my name, you shall keep your
child.’

Now the queen lay awake all night, thinking of all the odd names that
she had ever heard; and she sent messengers all over the land to find
out new ones. The next day the little man came, and she began with
TIMOTHY, ICHABOD, BENJAMIN, JEREMIAH, and all the names she could
remember; but to all and each of them he said, ‘Madam, that is not my
name.’

The second day she began with all the comical names she could hear of,
BANDY-LEGS, HUNCHBACK, CROOK-SHANKS, and so on; but the little gentleman
still said to every one of them, ‘Madam, that is not my name.’

The third day one of the messengers came back, and said, ‘I have
travelled two days without hearing of any other names; but yesterday, as
I was climbing a high hill, among the trees of the forest where the fox
and the hare bid each other good night, I saw a little hut; and before
the hut burnt a fire; and round about the fire a funny little dwarf was
dancing upon one leg, and singing:

 “Merrily the feast I’ll make.
  Today I’ll brew, tomorrow bake;
  Merrily I’ll dance and sing,
  For next day will a stranger bring.
  Little does my lady dream
  Rumpelstiltskin is my name!”

When the queen heard this she jumped for joy, and as soon as her little
friend came she sat down upon her throne, and called all her court round
to enjoy the fun; and the nurse stood by her side with the baby in her
arms, as if it was quite ready to be given up. Then the little man began
to chuckle at the thought of having the poor child, to take home with
him to his hut in the woods; and he cried out, ‘Now, lady, what is my
name?’ ‘Is it JOHN?’ asked she. ‘No, madam!’ ‘Is it TOM?’ ‘No, madam!’
‘Is it JEMMY?’ ‘It is not.’ ‘Can your name be RUMPELSTILTSKIN?’ said the
lady slyly. ‘Some witch told you that!--some witch told you that!’ cried
the little man, and dashed his right foot in a rage so deep into the
floor, that he was forced to lay hold of it with both hands to pull it
out.

Then he made the best of his way off, while the nurse laughed and the
baby crowed; and all the court jeered at him for having had so much
trouble for nothing, and said, ‘We wish you a very good morning, and a
merry feast, Mr RUMPLESTILTSKIN!’




CLEVER GRETEL

There was once a cook named Gretel, who wore shoes with red heels, and
when she walked out with them on, she turned herself this way and that,
was quite happy and thought: ‘You certainly are a pretty girl!’ And when
she came home she drank, in her gladness of heart, a draught of wine,
and as wine excites a desire to eat, she tasted the best of whatever she
was cooking until she was satisfied, and said: ‘The cook must know what
the food is like.’

It came to pass that the master one day said to her: ‘Gretel, there is a
guest coming this evening; prepare me two fowls very daintily.’ ‘I will
see to it, master,’ answered Gretel. She killed two fowls, scalded them,
plucked them, put them on the spit, and towards evening set them before
the fire, that they might roast. The fowls began to turn brown, and were
nearly ready, but the guest had not yet arrived. Then Gretel called out
to her master: ‘If the guest does not come, I must take the fowls away
from the fire, but it will be a sin and a shame if they are not eaten
the moment they are at their juiciest.’ The master said: ‘I will run
myself, and fetch the guest.’ When the master had turned his back,
Gretel laid the spit with the fowls on one side, and thought: ‘Standing
so long by the fire there, makes one sweat and thirsty; who knows
when they will come? Meanwhile, I will run into the cellar, and take a
drink.’ She ran down, set a jug, said: ‘God bless it for you, Gretel,’
and took a good drink, and thought that wine should flow on, and should
not be interrupted, and took yet another hearty draught.

Then she went and put the fowls down again to the fire, basted them,
and drove the spit merrily round. But as the roast meat smelt so good,
Gretel thought: ‘Something might be wrong, it ought to be tasted!’
She touched it with her finger, and said: ‘Ah! how good fowls are! It
certainly is a sin and a shame that they are not eaten at the right
time!’ She ran to the window, to see if the master was not coming with
his guest, but she saw no one, and went back to the fowls and thought:
‘One of the wings is burning! I had better take it off and eat it.’
So she cut it off, ate it, and enjoyed it, and when she had done, she
thought: ‘The other must go down too, or else master will observe that
something is missing.’ When the two wings were eaten, she went and
looked for her master, and did not see him. It suddenly occurred to
her: ‘Who knows? They are perhaps not coming at all, and have turned in
somewhere.’ Then she said: ‘Well, Gretel, enjoy yourself, one fowl has
been cut into, take another drink, and eat it up entirely; when it is
eaten you will have some peace, why should God’s good gifts be spoilt?’
So she ran into the cellar again, took an enormous drink and ate up the
one chicken in great glee. When one of the chickens was swallowed down,
and still her master did not come, Gretel looked at the other and said:
‘What one is, the other should be likewise, the two go together; what’s
right for the one is right for the other; I think if I were to take
another draught it would do me no harm.’ So she took another hearty
drink, and let the second chicken follow the first.

While she was making the most of it, her master came and cried: ‘Hurry
up, Gretel, the guest is coming directly after me!’ ‘Yes, sir, I will
soon serve up,’ answered Gretel. Meantime the master looked to see that
the table was properly laid, and took the great knife, wherewith he was
going to carve the chickens, and sharpened it on the steps. Presently
the guest came, and knocked politely and courteously at the house-door.
Gretel ran, and looked to see who was there, and when she saw the guest,
she put her finger to her lips and said: ‘Hush! hush! go away as quickly
as you can, if my master catches you it will be the worse for you; he
certainly did ask you to supper, but his intention is to cut off your
two ears. Just listen how he is sharpening the knife for it!’ The guest
heard the sharpening, and hurried down the steps again as fast as he
could. Gretel was not idle; she ran screaming to her master, and cried:
‘You have invited a fine guest!’ ‘Why, Gretel? What do you mean by
that?’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘he has taken the chickens which I was just
going to serve up, off the dish, and has run away with them!’ ‘That’s a
nice trick!’ said her master, and lamented the fine chickens. ‘If he had
but left me one, so that something remained for me to eat.’ He called to
him to stop, but the guest pretended not to hear. Then he ran after him
with the knife still in his hand, crying: ‘Just one, just one,’ meaning
that the guest should leave him just one chicken, and not take both. The
guest, however, thought no otherwise than that he was to give up one of
his ears, and ran as if fire were burning under him, in order to take
them both with him.




THE OLD MAN AND HIS GRANDSON

There was once a very old man, whose eyes had become dim, his ears dull
of hearing, his knees trembled, and when he sat at table he could hardly
hold the spoon, and spilt the broth upon the table-cloth or let it run
out of his mouth. His son and his son’s wife were disgusted at this, so
the old grandfather at last had to sit in the corner behind the stove,
and they gave him his food in an earthenware bowl, and not even enough
of it. And he used to look towards the table with his eyes full of
tears. Once, too, his trembling hands could not hold the bowl, and it
fell to the ground and broke. The young wife scolded him, but he said
nothing and only sighed. Then they brought him a wooden bowl for a few
half-pence, out of which he had to eat.

They were once sitting thus when the little grandson of four years old
began to gather together some bits of wood upon the ground. ‘What are
you doing there?’ asked the father. ‘I am making a little trough,’
answered the child, ‘for father and mother to eat out of when I am big.’

The man and his wife looked at each other for a while, and presently
began to cry. Then they took the old grandfather to the table, and
henceforth always let him eat with them, and likewise said nothing if he
did spill a little of anything.




THE LITTLE PEASANT

There was a certain village wherein no one lived but really rich
peasants, and just one poor one, whom they called the little peasant. He
had not even so much as a cow, and still less money to buy one, and
yet he and his wife did so wish to have one. One day he said to her:
‘Listen, I have a good idea, there is our gossip the carpenter, he shall
make us a wooden calf, and paint it brown, so that it looks like any
other, and in time it will certainly get big and be a cow.’ the woman
also liked the idea, and their gossip the carpenter cut and planed
the calf, and painted it as it ought to be, and made it with its head
hanging down as if it were eating.

Next morning when the cows were being driven out, the little peasant
called the cow-herd in and said: ‘Look, I have a little calf there,
but it is still small and has to be carried.’ The cow-herd said: ‘All
right,’ and took it in his arms and carried it to the pasture, and set
it among the grass. The little calf always remained standing like one
which was eating, and the cow-herd said: ‘It will soon run by itself,
just look how it eats already!’ At night when he was going to drive the
herd home again, he said to the calf: ‘If you can stand there and eat
your fill, you can also go on your four legs; I don’t care to drag you
home again in my arms.’ But the little peasant stood at his door, and
waited for his little calf, and when the cow-herd drove the cows through
the village, and the calf was missing, he inquired where it was. The
cow-herd answered: ‘It is still standing out there eating. It would not
stop and come with us.’ But the little peasant said: ‘Oh, but I must
have my beast back again.’ Then they went back to the meadow together,
but someone had stolen the calf, and it was gone. The cow-herd said: ‘It
must have run away.’ The peasant, however, said: ‘Don’t tell me
that,’ and led the cow-herd before the mayor, who for his carelessness
condemned him to give the peasant a cow for the calf which had run away.

And now the little peasant and his wife had the cow for which they had
so long wished, and they were heartily glad, but they had no food for
it, and could give it nothing to eat, so it soon had to be killed. They
salted the flesh, and the peasant went into the town and wanted to sell
the skin there, so that he might buy a new calf with the proceeds. On
the way he passed by a mill, and there sat a raven with broken wings,
and out of pity he took him and wrapped him in the skin. But as the
weather grew so bad and there was a storm of rain and wind, he could
go no farther, and turned back to the mill and begged for shelter. The
miller’s wife was alone in the house, and said to the peasant: ‘Lay
yourself on the straw there,’ and gave him a slice of bread and cheese.
The peasant ate it, and lay down with his skin beside him, and the woman
thought: ‘He is tired and has gone to sleep.’ In the meantime came the
parson; the miller’s wife received him well, and said: ‘My husband is
out, so we will have a feast.’ The peasant listened, and when he heard
them talk about feasting he was vexed that he had been forced to make
shift with a slice of bread and cheese. Then the woman served up four
different things, roast meat, salad, cakes, and wine.

Just as they were about to sit down and eat, there was a knocking
outside. The woman said: ‘Oh, heavens! It is my husband!’ she quickly
hid the roast meat inside the tiled stove, the wine under the pillow,
the salad on the bed, the cakes under it, and the parson in the closet
on the porch. Then she opened the door for her husband, and said: ‘Thank
heaven, you are back again! There is such a storm, it looks as if the
world were coming to an end.’ The miller saw the peasant lying on the
straw, and asked, ‘What is that fellow doing there?’ ‘Ah,’ said the
wife, ‘the poor knave came in the storm and rain, and begged for
shelter, so I gave him a bit of bread and cheese, and showed him where
the straw was.’ The man said: ‘I have no objection, but be quick and get
me something to eat.’ The woman said: ‘But I have nothing but bread and
cheese.’ ‘I am contented with anything,’ replied the husband, ‘so far as
I am concerned, bread and cheese will do,’ and looked at the peasant and
said: ‘Come and eat some more with me.’ The peasant did not require to
be invited twice, but got up and ate. After this the miller saw the skin
in which the raven was, lying on the ground, and asked: ‘What have you
there?’ The peasant answered: ‘I have a soothsayer inside it.’ ‘Can
he foretell anything to me?’ said the miller. ‘Why not?’ answered
the peasant: ‘but he only says four things, and the fifth he keeps to
himself.’ The miller was curious, and said: ‘Let him foretell something
for once.’ Then the peasant pinched the raven’s head, so that he croaked
and made a noise like krr, krr. The miller said: ‘What did he say?’ The
peasant answered: ‘In the first place, he says that there is some wine
hidden under the pillow.’ ‘Bless me!’ cried the miller, and went there
and found the wine. ‘Now go on,’ said he. The peasant made the raven
croak again, and said: ‘In the second place, he says that there is some
roast meat in the tiled stove.’ ‘Upon my word!’ cried the miller, and
went thither, and found the roast meat. The peasant made the raven
prophesy still more, and said: ‘Thirdly, he says that there is some
salad on the bed.’ ‘That would be a fine thing!’ cried the miller, and
went there and found the salad. At last the peasant pinched the raven
once more till he croaked, and said: ‘Fourthly, he says that there
are some cakes under the bed.’ ‘That would be a fine thing!’ cried the
miller, and looked there, and found the cakes.

And now the two sat down to the table together, but the miller’s wife
was frightened to death, and went to bed and took all the keys with
her. The miller would have liked much to know the fifth, but the little
peasant said: ‘First, we will quickly eat the four things, for the fifth
is something bad.’ So they ate, and after that they bargained how much
the miller was to give for the fifth prophecy, until they agreed on
three hundred talers. Then the peasant once more pinched the raven’s
head till he croaked loudly. The miller asked: ‘What did he say?’ The
peasant replied: ‘He says that the Devil is hiding outside there in
the closet on the porch.’ The miller said: ‘The Devil must go out,’ and
opened the house-door; then the woman was forced to give up the keys,
and the peasant unlocked the closet. The parson ran out as fast as he
could, and the miller said: ‘It was true; I saw the black rascal with my
own eyes.’ The peasant, however, made off next morning by daybreak with
the three hundred talers.

At home the small peasant gradually launched out; he built a beautiful
house, and the peasants said: ‘The small peasant has certainly been to
the place where golden snow falls, and people carry the gold home in
shovels.’ Then the small peasant was brought before the mayor, and
bidden to say from whence his wealth came. He answered: ‘I sold my cow’s
skin in the town, for three hundred talers.’ When the peasants heard
that, they too wished to enjoy this great profit, and ran home, killed
all their cows, and stripped off their skins in order to sell them in
the town to the greatest advantage. The mayor, however, said: ‘But my
servant must go first.’ When she came to the merchant in the town, he
did not give her more than two talers for a skin, and when the others
came, he did not give them so much, and said: ‘What can I do with all
these skins?’

Then the peasants were vexed that the small peasant should have thus
outwitted them, wanted to take vengeance on him, and accused him of this
treachery before the mayor. The innocent little peasant was unanimously
sentenced to death, and was to be rolled into the water, in a barrel
pierced full of holes. He was led forth, and a priest was brought who
was to say a mass for his soul. The others were all obliged to retire to
a distance, and when the peasant looked at the priest, he recognized the
man who had been with the miller’s wife. He said to him: ‘I set you free
from the closet, set me free from the barrel.’ At this same moment up
came, with a flock of sheep, the very shepherd whom the peasant knew had
long been wishing to be mayor, so he cried with all his might: ‘No, I
will not do it; if the whole world insists on it, I will not do it!’ The
shepherd hearing that, came up to him, and asked: ‘What are you about?
What is it that you will not do?’ The peasant said: ‘They want to make
me mayor, if I will but put myself in the barrel, but I will not do it.’
The shepherd said: ‘If nothing more than that is needful in order to be
mayor, I would get into the barrel at once.’ The peasant said: ‘If you
will get in, you will be mayor.’ The shepherd was willing, and got in,
and the peasant shut the top down on him; then he took the shepherd’s
flock for himself, and drove it away. The parson went to the crowd,
and declared that the mass had been said. Then they came and rolled the
barrel towards the water. When the barrel began to roll, the shepherd
cried: ‘I am quite willing to be mayor.’ They believed no otherwise than
that it was the peasant who was saying this, and answered: ‘That is
what we intend, but first you shall look about you a little down below
there,’ and they rolled the barrel down into the water.

After that the peasants went home, and as they were entering the
village, the small peasant also came quietly in, driving a flock of
sheep and looking quite contented. Then the peasants were astonished,
and said: ‘Peasant, from whence do you come? Have you come out of the
water?’ ‘Yes, truly,’ replied the peasant, ‘I sank deep, deep down,
until at last I got to the bottom; I pushed the bottom out of the
barrel, and crept out, and there were pretty meadows on which a number
of lambs were feeding, and from thence I brought this flock away with
me.’ Said the peasants: ‘Are there any more there?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said he,
‘more than I could want.’ Then the peasants made up their minds that
they too would fetch some sheep for themselves, a flock apiece, but the
mayor said: ‘I come first.’ So they went to the water together, and just
then there were some of the small fleecy clouds in the blue sky, which
are called little lambs, and they were reflected in the water, whereupon
the peasants cried: ‘We already see the sheep down below!’ The mayor
pressed forward and said: ‘I will go down first, and look about me, and
if things promise well I’ll call you.’ So he jumped in; splash! went
the water; it sounded as if he were calling them, and the whole crowd
plunged in after him as one man. Then the entire village was dead, and
the small peasant, as sole heir, became a rich man.




FREDERICK AND CATHERINE

There was once a man called Frederick: he had a wife whose name was
Catherine, and they had not long been married. One day Frederick said.
‘Kate! I am going to work in the fields; when I come back I shall be
hungry so let me have something nice cooked, and a good draught of ale.’
‘Very well,’ said she, ‘it shall all be ready.’ When dinner-time drew
nigh, Catherine took a nice steak, which was all the meat she had, and
put it on the fire to fry. The steak soon began to look brown, and to
crackle in the pan; and Catherine stood by with a fork and turned it:
then she said to herself, ‘The steak is almost ready, I may as well go
to the cellar for the ale.’ So she left the pan on the fire and took a
large jug and went into the cellar and tapped the ale cask. The beer ran
into the jug and Catherine stood looking on. At last it popped into her
head, ‘The dog is not shut up--he may be running away with the steak;
that’s well thought of.’ So up she ran from the cellar; and sure enough
the rascally cur had got the steak in his mouth, and was making off with
it.

Away ran Catherine, and away ran the dog across the field: but he ran
faster than she, and stuck close to the steak. ‘It’s all gone, and “what
can’t be cured must be endured”,’ said Catherine. So she turned round;
and as she had run a good way and was tired, she walked home leisurely
to cool herself.

Now all this time the ale was running too, for Catherine had not turned
the cock; and when the jug was full the liquor ran upon the floor till
the cask was empty. When she got to the cellar stairs she saw what had
happened. ‘My stars!’ said she, ‘what shall I do to keep Frederick from
seeing all this slopping about?’ So she thought a while; and at last
remembered that there was a sack of fine meal bought at the last fair,
and that if she sprinkled this over the floor it would suck up the ale
nicely. ‘What a lucky thing,’ said she, ‘that we kept that meal! we have
now a good use for it.’ So away she went for it: but she managed to set
it down just upon the great jug full of beer, and upset it; and thus
all the ale that had been saved was set swimming on the floor also. ‘Ah!
well,’ said she, ‘when one goes another may as well follow.’ Then she
strewed the meal all about the cellar, and was quite pleased with her
cleverness, and said, ‘How very neat and clean it looks!’

At noon Frederick came home. ‘Now, wife,’ cried he, ‘what have you for
dinner?’ ‘O Frederick!’ answered she, ‘I was cooking you a steak; but
while I went down to draw the ale, the dog ran away with it; and while
I ran after him, the ale ran out; and when I went to dry up the ale
with the sack of meal that we got at the fair, I upset the jug: but the
cellar is now quite dry, and looks so clean!’ ‘Kate, Kate,’ said he,
‘how could you do all this?’ Why did you leave the steak to fry, and the
ale to run, and then spoil all the meal?’ ‘Why, Frederick,’ said she, ‘I
did not know I was doing wrong; you should have told me before.’

The husband thought to himself, ‘If my wife manages matters thus, I must
look sharp myself.’ Now he had a good deal of gold in the house: so he
said to Catherine, ‘What pretty yellow buttons these are! I shall put
them into a box and bury them in the garden; but take care that you
never go near or meddle with them.’ ‘No, Frederick,’ said she, ‘that
I never will.’ As soon as he was gone, there came by some pedlars with
earthenware plates and dishes, and they asked her whether she would buy.
‘Oh dear me, I should like to buy very much, but I have no money: if
you had any use for yellow buttons, I might deal with you.’ ‘Yellow
buttons!’ said they: ‘let us have a look at them.’ ‘Go into the garden
and dig where I tell you, and you will find the yellow buttons: I dare
not go myself.’ So the rogues went: and when they found what these
yellow buttons were, they took them all away, and left her plenty of
plates and dishes. Then she set them all about the house for a show:
and when Frederick came back, he cried out, ‘Kate, what have you been
doing?’ ‘See,’ said she, ‘I have bought all these with your yellow
buttons: but I did not touch them myself; the pedlars went themselves
and dug them up.’ ‘Wife, wife,’ said Frederick, ‘what a pretty piece of
work you have made! those yellow buttons were all my money: how came you
to do such a thing?’ ‘Why,’ answered she, ‘I did not know there was any
harm in it; you should have told me.’

Catherine stood musing for a while, and at last said to her husband,
‘Hark ye, Frederick, we will soon get the gold back: let us run after
the thieves.’ ‘Well, we will try,’ answered he; ‘but take some butter
and cheese with you, that we may have something to eat by the way.’
‘Very well,’ said she; and they set out: and as Frederick walked the
fastest, he left his wife some way behind. ‘It does not matter,’ thought
she: ‘when we turn back, I shall be so much nearer home than he.’

Presently she came to the top of a hill, down the side of which there
was a road so narrow that the cart wheels always chafed the trees
on each side as they passed. ‘Ah, see now,’ said she, ‘how they have
bruised and wounded those poor trees; they will never get well.’ So she
took pity on them, and made use of the butter to grease them all, so
that the wheels might not hurt them so much. While she was doing this
kind office one of her cheeses fell out of the basket, and rolled down
the hill. Catherine looked, but could not see where it had gone; so she
said, ‘Well, I suppose the other will go the same way and find you; he
has younger legs than I have.’ Then she rolled the other cheese after
it; and away it went, nobody knows where, down the hill. But she said
she supposed that they knew the road, and would follow her, and she
could not stay there all day waiting for them.

At last she overtook Frederick, who desired her to give him something to
eat. Then she gave him the dry bread. ‘Where are the butter and cheese?’
said he. ‘Oh!’ answered she, ‘I used the butter to grease those poor
trees that the wheels chafed so: and one of the cheeses ran away so I
sent the other after it to find it, and I suppose they are both on
the road together somewhere.’ ‘What a goose you are to do such silly
things!’ said the husband. ‘How can you say so?’ said she; ‘I am sure
you never told me not.’

They ate the dry bread together; and Frederick said, ‘Kate, I hope you
locked the door safe when you came away.’ ‘No,’ answered she, ‘you did
not tell me.’ ‘Then go home, and do it now before we go any farther,’
said Frederick, ‘and bring with you something to eat.’

Catherine did as he told her, and thought to herself by the way,
‘Frederick wants something to eat; but I don’t think he is very fond of
butter and cheese: I’ll bring him a bag of fine nuts, and the vinegar,
for I have often seen him take some.’

When she reached home, she bolted the back door, but the front door she
took off the hinges, and said, ‘Frederick told me to lock the door, but
surely it can nowhere be so safe if I take it with me.’ So she took
her time by the way; and when she overtook her husband she cried
out, ‘There, Frederick, there is the door itself, you may watch it as
carefully as you please.’ ‘Alas! alas!’ said he, ‘what a clever wife I
have! I sent you to make the house fast, and you take the door away, so
that everybody may go in and out as they please--however, as you have
brought the door, you shall carry it about with you for your pains.’
‘Very well,’ answered she, ‘I’ll carry the door; but I’ll not carry the
nuts and vinegar bottle also--that would be too much of a load; so if
you please, I’ll fasten them to the door.’

Frederick of course made no objection to that plan, and they set off
into the wood to look for the thieves; but they could not find them: and
when it grew dark, they climbed up into a tree to spend the night there.
Scarcely were they up, than who should come by but the very rogues they
were looking for. They were in truth great rascals, and belonged to that
class of people who find things before they are lost; they were tired;
so they sat down and made a fire under the very tree where Frederick and
Catherine were. Frederick slipped down on the other side, and picked up
some stones. Then he climbed up again, and tried to hit the thieves on
the head with them: but they only said, ‘It must be near morning, for
the wind shakes the fir-apples down.’

Catherine, who had the door on her shoulder, began to be very tired;
but she thought it was the nuts upon it that were so heavy: so she said
softly, ‘Frederick, I must let the nuts go.’ ‘No,’ answered he, ‘not
now, they will discover us.’ ‘I can’t help that: they must go.’ ‘Well,
then, make haste and throw them down, if you will.’ Then away rattled
the nuts down among the boughs and one of the thieves cried, ‘Bless me,
it is hailing.’

A little while after, Catherine thought the door was still very heavy:
so she whispered to Frederick, ‘I must throw the vinegar down.’ ‘Pray
don’t,’ answered he, ‘it will discover us.’ ‘I can’t help that,’ said
she, ‘go it must.’ So she poured all the vinegar down; and the thieves
said, ‘What a heavy dew there is!’

At last it popped into Catherine’s head that it was the door itself that
was so heavy all the time: so she whispered, ‘Frederick, I must throw
the door down soon.’ But he begged and prayed her not to do so, for he
was sure it would betray them. ‘Here goes, however,’ said she: and down
went the door with such a clatter upon the thieves, that they cried
out ‘Murder!’ and not knowing what was coming, ran away as fast as they
could, and left all the gold. So when Frederick and Catherine came down,
there they found all their money safe and sound.




SWEETHEART ROLAND

There was once upon a time a woman who was a real witch and had two
daughters, one ugly and wicked, and this one she loved because she was
her own daughter, and one beautiful and good, and this one she hated,
because she was her stepdaughter. The stepdaughter once had a pretty
apron, which the other fancied so much that she became envious, and
told her mother that she must and would have that apron. ‘Be quiet, my
child,’ said the old woman, ‘and you shall have it. Your stepsister has
long deserved death; tonight when she is asleep I will come and cut her
head off. Only be careful that you are at the far side of the bed, and
push her well to the front.’ It would have been all over with the poor
girl if she had not just then been standing in a corner, and heard
everything. All day long she dared not go out of doors, and when bedtime
had come, the witch’s daughter got into bed first, so as to lie at the
far side, but when she was asleep, the other pushed her gently to the
front, and took for herself the place at the back, close by the wall. In
the night, the old woman came creeping in, she held an axe in her right
hand, and felt with her left to see if anyone were lying at the outside,
and then she grasped the axe with both hands, and cut her own child’s
head off.

When she had gone away, the girl got up and went to her sweetheart, who
was called Roland, and knocked at his door. When he came out, she said
to him: ‘Listen, dearest Roland, we must fly in all haste; my stepmother
wanted to kill me, but has struck her own child. When daylight comes,
and she sees what she has done, we shall be lost.’ ‘But,’ said Roland,
‘I counsel you first to take away her magic wand, or we cannot escape
if she pursues us.’ The maiden fetched the magic wand, and she took the
dead girl’s head and dropped three drops of blood on the ground, one in
front of the bed, one in the kitchen, and one on the stairs. Then she
hurried away with her lover.

When the old witch got up next morning, she called her daughter, and
wanted to give her the apron, but she did not come. Then the witch
cried: ‘Where are you?’ ‘Here, on the stairs, I am sweeping,’ answered
the first drop of blood. The old woman went out, but saw no one on the
stairs, and cried again: ‘Where are you?’ ‘Here in the kitchen, I am
warming myself,’ cried the second drop of blood. She went into the
kitchen, but found no one. Then she cried again: ‘Where are you?’ ‘Ah,
here in the bed, I am sleeping,’ cried the third drop of blood. She went
into the room to the bed. What did she see there? Her own child,
whose head she had cut off, bathed in her blood. The witch fell into
a passion, sprang to the window, and as she could look forth quite far
into the world, she perceived her stepdaughter hurrying away with her
sweetheart Roland. ‘That shall not help you,’ cried she, ‘even if you
have got a long way off, you shall still not escape me.’ She put on her
many-league boots, in which she covered an hour’s walk at every step,
and it was not long before she overtook them. The girl, however, when
she saw the old woman striding towards her, changed, with her magic
wand, her sweetheart Roland into a lake, and herself into a duck
swimming in the middle of it. The witch placed herself on the shore,
threw breadcrumbs in, and went to endless trouble to entice the duck;
but the duck did not let herself be enticed, and the old woman had to
go home at night as she had come. At this the girl and her sweetheart
Roland resumed their natural shapes again, and they walked on the whole
night until daybreak. Then the maiden changed herself into a beautiful
flower which stood in the midst of a briar hedge, and her sweetheart
Roland into a fiddler. It was not long before the witch came striding up
towards them, and said to the musician: ‘Dear musician, may I pluck that
beautiful flower for myself?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied, ‘I will play to
you while you do it.’ As she was hastily creeping into the hedge and was
just going to pluck the flower, knowing perfectly well who the flower
was, he began to play, and whether she would or not, she was forced
to dance, for it was a magical dance. The faster he played, the more
violent springs was she forced to make, and the thorns tore her clothes
from her body, and pricked her and wounded her till she bled, and as he
did not stop, she had to dance till she lay dead on the ground.

As they were now set free, Roland said: ‘Now I will go to my father and
arrange for the wedding.’ ‘Then in the meantime I will stay here and
wait for you,’ said the girl, ‘and that no one may recognize me, I will
change myself into a red stone landmark.’ Then Roland went away, and the
girl stood like a red landmark in the field and waited for her beloved.
But when Roland got home, he fell into the snares of another, who so
fascinated him that he forgot the maiden. The poor girl remained there a
long time, but at length, as he did not return at all, she was sad, and
changed herself into a flower, and thought: ‘Someone will surely come
this way, and trample me down.’

It befell, however, that a shepherd kept his sheep in the field and saw
the flower, and as it was so pretty, plucked it, took it with him, and
laid it away in his chest. From that time forth, strange things happened
in the shepherd’s house. When he arose in the morning, all the work was
already done, the room was swept, the table and benches cleaned, the
fire in the hearth was lighted, and the water was fetched, and at noon,
when he came home, the table was laid, and a good dinner served. He
could not conceive how this came to pass, for he never saw a human being
in his house, and no one could have concealed himself in it. He was
certainly pleased with this good attendance, but still at last he was so
afraid that he went to a wise woman and asked for her advice. The wise
woman said: ‘There is some enchantment behind it, listen very early some
morning if anything is moving in the room, and if you see anything, no
matter what it is, throw a white cloth over it, and then the magic will
be stopped.’

The shepherd did as she bade him, and next morning just as day dawned,
he saw the chest open, and the flower come out. Swiftly he
sprang towards it, and threw a white cloth over it. Instantly the
transformation came to an end, and a beautiful girl stood before him,
who admitted to him that she had been the flower, and that up to this
time she had attended to his house-keeping. She told him her story,
and as she pleased him he asked her if she would marry him, but she
answered: ‘No,’ for she wanted to remain faithful to her sweetheart
Roland, although he had deserted her. Nevertheless, she promised not to
go away, but to continue keeping house for the shepherd.

And now the time drew near when Roland’s wedding was to be celebrated,
and then, according to an old custom in the country, it was announced
that all the girls were to be present at it, and sing in honour of the
bridal pair. When the faithful maiden heard of this, she grew so sad
that she thought her heart would break, and she would not go thither,
but the other girls came and took her. When it came to her turn to sing,
she stepped back, until at last she was the only one left, and then she
could not refuse. But when she began her song, and it reached Roland’s
ears, he sprang up and cried: ‘I know the voice, that is the true
bride, I will have no other!’ Everything he had forgotten, and which had
vanished from his mind, had suddenly come home again to his heart. Then
the faithful maiden held her wedding with her sweetheart Roland, and
grief came to an end and joy began.




SNOWDROP

It was the middle of winter, when the broad flakes of snow were falling
around, that the queen of a country many thousand miles off sat working
at her window. The frame of the window was made of fine black ebony, and
as she sat looking out upon the snow, she pricked her finger, and three
drops of blood fell upon it. Then she gazed thoughtfully upon the red
drops that sprinkled the white snow, and said, ‘Would that my little
daughter may be as white as that snow, as red as that blood, and as
black as this ebony windowframe!’ And so the little girl really did grow
up; her skin was as white as snow, her cheeks as rosy as the blood, and
her hair as black as ebony; and she was called Snowdrop.

But this queen died; and the king soon married another wife, who became
queen, and was very beautiful, but so vain that she could not bear
to think that anyone could be handsomer than she was. She had a fairy
looking-glass, to which she used to go, and then she would gaze upon
herself in it, and say:

 ‘Tell me, glass, tell me true!
  Of all the ladies in the land,
  Who is fairest, tell me, who?’

And the glass had always answered:

 ‘Thou, queen, art the fairest in all the land.’

But Snowdrop grew more and more beautiful; and when she was seven years
old she was as bright as the day, and fairer than the queen herself.
Then the glass one day answered the queen, when she went to look in it
as usual:

 ‘Thou, queen, art fair, and beauteous to see,
  But Snowdrop is lovelier far than thee!’

When she heard this she turned pale with rage and envy, and called to
one of her servants, and said, ‘Take Snowdrop away into the wide wood,
that I may never see her any more.’ Then the servant led her away; but
his heart melted when Snowdrop begged him to spare her life, and he
said, ‘I will not hurt you, thou pretty child.’ So he left her by
herself; and though he thought it most likely that the wild beasts would
tear her in pieces, he felt as if a great weight were taken off his
heart when he had made up his mind not to kill her but to leave her to
her fate, with the chance of someone finding and saving her.

Then poor Snowdrop wandered along through the wood in great fear; and
the wild beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm. In the
evening she came to a cottage among the hills, and went in to rest, for
her little feet would carry her no further. Everything was spruce and
neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there
were seven little plates, seven little loaves, and seven little glasses
with wine in them; and seven knives and forks laid in order; and by
the wall stood seven little beds. As she was very hungry, she picked
a little piece of each loaf and drank a very little wine out of each
glass; and after that she thought she would lie down and rest. So she
tried all the little beds; but one was too long, and another was too
short, till at last the seventh suited her: and there she laid herself
down and went to sleep.

By and by in came the masters of the cottage. Now they were seven little
dwarfs, that lived among the mountains, and dug and searched for gold.
They lighted up their seven lamps, and saw at once that all was not
right. The first said, ‘Who has been sitting on my stool?’ The second,
‘Who has been eating off my plate?’ The third, ‘Who has been picking my
bread?’ The fourth, ‘Who has been meddling with my spoon?’ The fifth,
‘Who has been handling my fork?’ The sixth, ‘Who has been cutting with
my knife?’ The seventh, ‘Who has been drinking my wine?’ Then the first
looked round and said, ‘Who has been lying on my bed?’ And the rest came
running to him, and everyone cried out that somebody had been upon his
bed. But the seventh saw Snowdrop, and called all his brethren to come
and see her; and they cried out with wonder and astonishment and brought
their lamps to look at her, and said, ‘Good heavens! what a lovely child
she is!’ And they were very glad to see her, and took care not to wake
her; and the seventh dwarf slept an hour with each of the other dwarfs
in turn, till the night was gone.

In the morning Snowdrop told them all her story; and they pitied her,
and said if she would keep all things in order, and cook and wash and
knit and spin for them, she might stay where she was, and they would
take good care of her. Then they went out all day long to their work,
seeking for gold and silver in the mountains: but Snowdrop was left at
home; and they warned her, and said, ‘The queen will soon find out where
you are, so take care and let no one in.’

But the queen, now that she thought Snowdrop was dead, believed that she
must be the handsomest lady in the land; and she went to her glass and
said:

 ‘Tell me, glass, tell me true!
  Of all the ladies in the land,
  Who is fairest, tell me, who?’

And the glass answered:

 ‘Thou, queen, art the fairest in all this land:
  But over the hills, in the greenwood shade,
  Where the seven dwarfs their dwelling have made,
  There Snowdrop is hiding her head; and she
  Is lovelier far, O queen! than thee.’

Then the queen was very much frightened; for she knew that the glass
always spoke the truth, and was sure that the servant had betrayed her.
And she could not bear to think that anyone lived who was more beautiful
than she was; so she dressed herself up as an old pedlar, and went
her way over the hills, to the place where the dwarfs dwelt. Then she
knocked at the door, and cried, ‘Fine wares to sell!’ Snowdrop looked
out at the window, and said, ‘Good day, good woman! what have you to
sell?’ ‘Good wares, fine wares,’ said she; ‘laces and bobbins of all
colours.’ ‘I will let the old lady in; she seems to be a very good
sort of body,’ thought Snowdrop, as she ran down and unbolted the door.
‘Bless me!’ said the old woman, ‘how badly your stays are laced! Let me
lace them up with one of my nice new laces.’ Snowdrop did not dream of
any mischief; so she stood before the old woman; but she set to work
so nimbly, and pulled the lace so tight, that Snowdrop’s breath was
stopped, and she fell down as if she were dead. ‘There’s an end to all
thy beauty,’ said the spiteful queen, and went away home.

In the evening the seven dwarfs came home; and I need not say how
grieved they were to see their faithful Snowdrop stretched out upon the
ground, as if she was quite dead. However, they lifted her up, and when
they found what ailed her, they cut the lace; and in a little time she
began to breathe, and very soon came to life again. Then they said, ‘The
old woman was the queen herself; take care another time, and let no one
in when we are away.’

When the queen got home, she went straight to her glass, and spoke to it
as before; but to her great grief it still said:

 ‘Thou, queen, art the fairest in all this land:
  But over the hills, in the greenwood shade,
  Where the seven dwarfs their dwelling have made,
  There Snowdrop is hiding her head; and she
  Is lovelier far, O queen! than thee.’

Then the blood ran cold in her heart with spite and malice, to see that
Snowdrop still lived; and she dressed herself up again, but in quite
another dress from the one she wore before, and took with her a poisoned
comb. When she reached the dwarfs’ cottage, she knocked at the door, and
cried, ‘Fine wares to sell!’ But Snowdrop said, ‘I dare not let anyone
in.’ Then the queen said, ‘Only look at my beautiful combs!’ and gave
her the poisoned one. And it looked so pretty, that she took it up and
put it into her hair to try it; but the moment it touched her head,
the poison was so powerful that she fell down senseless. ‘There you may
lie,’ said the queen, and went her way. But by good luck the dwarfs
came in very early that evening; and when they saw Snowdrop lying on
the ground, they thought what had happened, and soon found the poisoned
comb. And when they took it away she got well, and told them all that
had passed; and they warned her once more not to open the door to
anyone.

Meantime the queen went home to her glass, and shook with rage when she
read the very same answer as before; and she said, ‘Snowdrop shall die,
if it cost me my life.’ So she went by herself into her chamber, and got
ready a poisoned apple: the outside looked very rosy and tempting, but
whoever tasted it was sure to die. Then she dressed herself up as a
peasant’s wife, and travelled over the hills to the dwarfs’ cottage,
and knocked at the door; but Snowdrop put her head out of the window and
said, ‘I dare not let anyone in, for the dwarfs have told me not.’ ‘Do
as you please,’ said the old woman, ‘but at any rate take this pretty
apple; I will give it you.’ ‘No,’ said Snowdrop, ‘I dare not take it.’
‘You silly girl!’ answered the other, ‘what are you afraid of? Do you
think it is poisoned? Come! do you eat one part, and I will eat the
other.’ Now the apple was so made up that one side was good, though the
other side was poisoned. Then Snowdrop was much tempted to taste, for
the apple looked so very nice; and when she saw the old woman eat, she
could wait no longer. But she had scarcely put the piece into her mouth,
when she fell down dead upon the ground. ‘This time nothing will save
thee,’ said the queen; and she went home to her glass, and at last it
said:

 ‘Thou, queen, art the fairest of all the fair.’

And then her wicked heart was glad, and as happy as such a heart could
be.

When evening came, and the dwarfs had gone home, they found Snowdrop
lying on the ground: no breath came from her lips, and they were afraid
that she was quite dead. They lifted her up, and combed her hair, and
washed her face with wine and water; but all was in vain, for the little
girl seemed quite dead. So they laid her down upon a bier, and all seven
watched and bewailed her three whole days; and then they thought they
would bury her: but her cheeks were still rosy; and her face looked just
as it did while she was alive; so they said, ‘We will never bury her in
the cold ground.’ And they made a coffin of glass, so that they might
still look at her, and wrote upon it in golden letters what her name
was, and that she was a king’s daughter. And the coffin was set among
the hills, and one of the dwarfs always sat by it and watched. And the
birds of the air came too, and bemoaned Snowdrop; and first of all came
an owl, and then a raven, and at last a dove, and sat by her side.

And thus Snowdrop lay for a long, long time, and still only looked as
though she was asleep; for she was even now as white as snow, and as red
as blood, and as black as ebony. At last a prince came and called at the
dwarfs’ house; and he saw Snowdrop, and read what was written in golden
letters. Then he offered the dwarfs money, and prayed and besought them
to let him take her away; but they said, ‘We will not part with her for
all the gold in the world.’ At last, however, they had pity on him, and
gave him the coffin; but the moment he lifted it up to carry it home
with him, the piece of apple fell from between her lips, and Snowdrop
awoke, and said, ‘Where am I?’ And the prince said, ‘Thou art quite safe
with me.’

Then he told her all that had happened, and said, ‘I love you far better
than all the world; so come with me to my father’s palace, and you shall
be my wife.’ And Snowdrop consented, and went home with the prince;
and everything was got ready with great pomp and splendour for their
wedding.

To the feast was asked, among the rest, Snowdrop’s old enemy the queen;
and as she was dressing herself in fine rich clothes, she looked in the
glass and said:

 ‘Tell me, glass, tell me true!
  Of all the ladies in the land,
  Who is fairest, tell me, who?’

And the glass answered:

 ‘Thou, lady, art loveliest here, I ween;
  But lovelier far is the new-made queen.’

When she heard this she started with rage; but her envy and curiosity
were so great, that she could not help setting out to see the bride. And
when she got there, and saw that it was no other than Snowdrop, who, as
she thought, had been dead a long while, she choked with rage, and fell
down and died: but Snowdrop and the prince lived and reigned happily
over that land many, many years; and sometimes they went up into the
mountains, and paid a visit to the little dwarfs, who had been so kind
to Snowdrop in her time of need.




THE PINK

There was once upon a time a queen to whom God had given no children.
Every morning she went into the garden and prayed to God in heaven to
bestow on her a son or a daughter. Then an angel from heaven came to her
and said: ‘Be at rest, you shall have a son with the power of wishing,
so that whatsoever in the world he wishes for, that shall he have.’ Then
she went to the king, and told him the joyful tidings, and when the time
was come she gave birth to a son, and the king was filled with gladness.

Every morning she went with the child to the garden where the wild
beasts were kept, and washed herself there in a clear stream. It
happened once when the child was a little older, that it was lying in
her arms and she fell asleep. Then came the old cook, who knew that the
child had the power of wishing, and stole it away, and he took a hen,
and cut it in pieces, and dropped some of its blood on the queen’s apron
and on her dress. Then he carried the child away to a secret place,
where a nurse was obliged to suckle it, and he ran to the king and
accused the queen of having allowed her child to be taken from her by
the wild beasts. When the king saw the blood on her apron, he believed
this, fell into such a passion that he ordered a high tower to be built,
in which neither sun nor moon could be seen and had his wife put into
it, and walled up. Here she was to stay for seven years without meat
or drink, and die of hunger. But God sent two angels from heaven in the
shape of white doves, which flew to her twice a day, and carried her
food until the seven years were over.

The cook, however, thought to himself: ‘If the child has the power of
wishing, and I am here, he might very easily get me into trouble.’ So
he left the palace and went to the boy, who was already big enough to
speak, and said to him: ‘Wish for a beautiful palace for yourself with
a garden, and all else that pertains to it.’ Scarcely were the words out
of the boy’s mouth, when everything was there that he had wished for.
After a while the cook said to him: ‘It is not well for you to be so
alone, wish for a pretty girl as a companion.’ Then the king’s son
wished for one, and she immediately stood before him, and was more
beautiful than any painter could have painted her. The two played
together, and loved each other with all their hearts, and the old cook
went out hunting like a nobleman. The thought occurred to him, however,
that the king’s son might some day wish to be with his father, and thus
bring him into great peril. So he went out and took the maiden aside,
and said: ‘Tonight when the boy is asleep, go to his bed and plunge this
knife into his heart, and bring me his heart and tongue, and if you do
not do it, you shall lose your life.’ Thereupon he went away, and when
he returned next day she had not done it, and said: ‘Why should I shed
the blood of an innocent boy who has never harmed anyone?’ The cook once
more said: ‘If you do not do it, it shall cost you your own life.’ When
he had gone away, she had a little hind brought to her, and ordered her
to be killed, and took her heart and tongue, and laid them on a plate,
and when she saw the old man coming, she said to the boy: ‘Lie down in
your bed, and draw the clothes over you.’ Then the wicked wretch came in
and said: ‘Where are the boy’s heart and tongue?’ The girl reached the
plate to him, but the king’s son threw off the quilt, and said: ‘You old
sinner, why did you want to kill me? Now will I pronounce thy sentence.
You shall become a black poodle and have a gold collar round your neck,
and shall eat burning coals, till the flames burst forth from your
throat.’ And when he had spoken these words, the old man was changed
into a poodle dog, and had a gold collar round his neck, and the cooks
were ordered to bring up some live coals, and these he ate, until the
flames broke forth from his throat. The king’s son remained there a
short while longer, and he thought of his mother, and wondered if she
were still alive. At length he said to the maiden: ‘I will go home to my
own country; if you will go with me, I will provide for you.’ ‘Ah,’
she replied, ‘the way is so long, and what shall I do in a strange land
where I am unknown?’ As she did not seem quite willing, and as they
could not be parted from each other, he wished that she might be changed
into a beautiful pink, and took her with him. Then he went away to his
own country, and the poodle had to run after him. He went to the tower
in which his mother was confined, and as it was so high, he wished for
a ladder which would reach up to the very top. Then he mounted up and
looked inside, and cried: ‘Beloved mother, Lady Queen, are you still
alive, or are you dead?’ She answered: ‘I have just eaten, and am still
satisfied,’ for she thought the angels were there. Said he: ‘I am your
dear son, whom the wild beasts were said to have torn from your arms;
but I am alive still, and will soon set you free.’ Then he descended
again, and went to his father, and caused himself to be announced as a
strange huntsman, and asked if he could offer him service. The king said
yes, if he was skilful and could get game for him, he should come to
him, but that deer had never taken up their quarters in any part of the
district or country. Then the huntsman promised to procure as much game
for him as he could possibly use at the royal table. So he summoned all
the huntsmen together, and bade them go out into the forest with him.
And he went with them and made them form a great circle, open at one end
where he stationed himself, and began to wish. Two hundred deer and more
came running inside the circle at once, and the huntsmen shot them.
Then they were all placed on sixty country carts, and driven home to the
king, and for once he was able to deck his table with game, after having
had none at all for years.

Now the king felt great joy at this, and commanded that his entire
household should eat with him next day, and made a great feast. When
they were all assembled together, he said to the huntsman: ‘As you are
so clever, you shall sit by me.’ He replied: ‘Lord King, your majesty
must excuse me, I am a poor huntsman.’ But the king insisted on it,
and said: ‘You shall sit by me,’ until he did it. Whilst he was sitting
there, he thought of his dearest mother, and wished that one of the
king’s principal servants would begin to speak of her, and would ask how
it was faring with the queen in the tower, and if she were alive still,
or had perished. Hardly had he formed the wish than the marshal began,
and said: ‘Your majesty, we live joyously here, but how is the queen
living in the tower? Is she still alive, or has she died?’ But the king
replied: ‘She let my dear son be torn to pieces by wild beasts; I will
not have her named.’ Then the huntsman arose and said: ‘Gracious lord
father she is alive still, and I am her son, and I was not carried away
by wild beasts, but by that wretch the old cook, who tore me from her
arms when she was asleep, and sprinkled her apron with the blood of a
chicken.’ Thereupon he took the dog with the golden collar, and said:
‘That is the wretch!’ and caused live coals to be brought, and these the
dog was compelled to devour before the sight of all, until flames burst
forth from its throat. On this the huntsman asked the king if he would
like to see the dog in his true shape, and wished him back into the form
of the cook, in the which he stood immediately, with his white apron,
and his knife by his side. When the king saw him he fell into a passion,
and ordered him to be cast into the deepest dungeon. Then the huntsman
spoke further and said: ‘Father, will you see the maiden who brought me
up so tenderly and who was afterwards to murder me, but did not do it,
though her own life depended on it?’ The king replied: ‘Yes, I would
like to see her.’ The son said: ‘Most gracious father, I will show her
to you in the form of a beautiful flower,’ and he thrust his hand into
his pocket and brought forth the pink, and placed it on the royal table,
and it was so beautiful that the king had never seen one to equal it.
Then the son said: ‘Now will I show her to you in her own form,’ and
wished that she might become a maiden, and she stood there looking so
beautiful that no painter could have made her look more so.

And the king sent two waiting-maids and two attendants into the tower,
to fetch the queen and bring her to the royal table. But when she was
led in she ate nothing, and said: ‘The gracious and merciful God who has
supported me in the tower, will soon set me free.’ She lived three days
more, and then died happily, and when she was buried, the two white
doves which had brought her food to the tower, and were angels of
heaven, followed her body and seated themselves on her grave. The aged
king ordered the cook to be torn in four pieces, but grief consumed the
king’s own heart, and he soon died. His son married the beautiful maiden
whom he had brought with him as a flower in his pocket, and whether they
are still alive or not, is known to God.




CLEVER ELSIE

There was once a man who had a daughter who was called Clever Elsie. And
when she had grown up her father said: ‘We will get her married.’ ‘Yes,’
said the mother, ‘if only someone would come who would have her.’ At
length a man came from a distance and wooed her, who was called Hans;
but he stipulated that Clever Elsie should be really smart. ‘Oh,’ said
the father, ‘she has plenty of good sense’; and the mother said: ‘Oh,
she can see the wind coming up the street, and hear the flies coughing.’
‘Well,’ said Hans, ‘if she is not really smart, I won’t have her.’ When
they were sitting at dinner and had eaten, the mother said: ‘Elsie, go
into the cellar and fetch some beer.’ Then Clever Elsie took the pitcher
from the wall, went into the cellar, and tapped the lid briskly as she
went, so that the time might not appear long. When she was below she
fetched herself a chair, and set it before the barrel so that she had
no need to stoop, and did not hurt her back or do herself any unexpected
injury. Then she placed the can before her, and turned the tap, and
while the beer was running she would not let her eyes be idle, but
looked up at the wall, and after much peering here and there, saw a
pick-axe exactly above her, which the masons had accidentally left
there.

Then Clever Elsie began to weep and said: ‘If I get Hans, and we have
a child, and he grows big, and we send him into the cellar here to draw
beer, then the pick-axe will fall on his head and kill him.’ Then she
sat and wept and screamed with all the strength of her body, over the
misfortune which lay before her. Those upstairs waited for the drink,
but Clever Elsie still did not come. Then the woman said to the servant:
‘Just go down into the cellar and see where Elsie is.’ The maid went and
found her sitting in front of the barrel, screaming loudly. ‘Elsie why
do you weep?’ asked the maid. ‘Ah,’ she answered, ‘have I not reason to
weep? If I get Hans, and we have a child, and he grows big, and has to
draw beer here, the pick-axe will perhaps fall on his head, and kill
him.’ Then said the maid: ‘What a clever Elsie we have!’ and sat down
beside her and began loudly to weep over the misfortune. After a while,
as the maid did not come back, and those upstairs were thirsty for the
beer, the man said to the boy: ‘Just go down into the cellar and see
where Elsie and the girl are.’ The boy went down, and there sat Clever
Elsie and the girl both weeping together. Then he asked: ‘Why are you
weeping?’ ‘Ah,’ said Elsie, ‘have I not reason to weep? If I get Hans,
and we have a child, and he grows big, and has to draw beer here, the
pick-axe will fall on his head and kill him.’ Then said the boy: ‘What
a clever Elsie we have!’ and sat down by her, and likewise began to
howl loudly. Upstairs they waited for the boy, but as he still did not
return, the man said to the woman: ‘Just go down into the cellar and see
where Elsie is!’ The woman went down, and found all three in the midst
of their lamentations, and inquired what was the cause; then Elsie told
her also that her future child was to be killed by the pick-axe, when it
grew big and had to draw beer, and the pick-axe fell down. Then said the
mother likewise: ‘What a clever Elsie we have!’ and sat down and wept
with them. The man upstairs waited a short time, but as his wife did not
come back and his thirst grew ever greater, he said: ‘I must go into the
cellar myself and see where Elsie is.’ But when he got into the cellar,
and they were all sitting together crying, and he heard the reason, and
that Elsie’s child was the cause, and the Elsie might perhaps bring one
into the world some day, and that he might be killed by the pick-axe, if
he should happen to be sitting beneath it, drawing beer just at the very
time when it fell down, he cried: ‘Oh, what a clever Elsie!’ and sat
down, and likewise wept with them. The bridegroom stayed upstairs alone
for a long time; then as no one would come back he thought: ‘They must be
waiting for me below: I too must go there and see what they are about.’
When he got down, the five of them were sitting screaming and lamenting
quite piteously, each out-doing the other. ‘What misfortune has happened
then?’ asked he. ‘Ah, dear Hans,’ said Elsie, ‘if we marry each other
and have a child, and he is big, and we perhaps send him here to draw
something to drink, then the pick-axe which has been left up there might
dash his brains out if it were to fall down, so have we not reason to
weep?’ ‘Come,’ said Hans, ‘more understanding than that is not needed
for my household, as you are such a clever Elsie, I will have you,’ and
seized her hand, took her upstairs with him, and married her.

After Hans had had her some time, he said: ‘Wife, I am going out to work
and earn some money for us; go into the field and cut the corn that we
may have some bread.’ ‘Yes, dear Hans, I will do that.’ After Hans had
gone away, she cooked herself some good broth and took it into the field
with her. When she came to the field she said to herself: ‘What shall I
do; shall I cut first, or shall I eat first? Oh, I will eat first.’ Then
she drank her cup of broth and when she was fully satisfied, she once
more said: ‘What shall I do? Shall I cut first, or shall I sleep first?
I will sleep first.’ Then she lay down among the corn and fell asleep.
Hans had been at home for a long time, but Elsie did not come; then said
he: ‘What a clever Elsie I have; she is so industrious that she does not
even come home to eat.’ But when evening came and she still stayed away,
Hans went out to see what she had cut, but nothing was cut, and she
was lying among the corn asleep. Then Hans hastened home and brought
a fowler’s net with little bells and hung it round about her, and she
still went on sleeping. Then he ran home, shut the house-door, and sat
down in his chair and worked. At length, when it was quite dark, Clever
Elsie awoke and when she got up there was a jingling all round about
her, and the bells rang at each step which she took. Then she was
alarmed, and became uncertain whether she really was Clever Elsie or
not, and said: ‘Is it I, or is it not I?’ But she knew not what answer
to make to this, and stood for a time in doubt; at length she thought:
‘I will go home and ask if it be I, or if it be not I, they will be sure
to know.’ She ran to the door of her own house, but it was shut; then
she knocked at the window and cried: ‘Hans, is Elsie within?’ ‘Yes,’
answered Hans, ‘she is within.’ Hereupon she was terrified, and said:
‘Ah, heavens! Then it is not I,’ and went to another door; but when the
people heard the jingling of the bells they would not open it, and she
could get in nowhere. Then she ran out of the village, and no one has
seen her since.




THE MISER IN THE BUSH

A farmer had a faithful and diligent servant, who had worked hard for
him three years, without having been paid any wages. At last it came
into the man’s head that he would not go on thus without pay any longer;
so he went to his master, and said, ‘I have worked hard for you a long
time, I will trust to you to give me what I deserve to have for my
trouble.’ The farmer was a sad miser, and knew that his man was very
simple-hearted; so he took out threepence, and gave him for every year’s
service a penny. The poor fellow thought it was a great deal of money to
have, and said to himself, ‘Why should I work hard, and live here on bad
fare any longer? I can now travel into the wide world, and make myself
merry.’ With that he put his money into his purse, and set out, roaming
over hill and valley.

As he jogged along over the fields, singing and dancing, a little dwarf
met him, and asked him what made him so merry. ‘Why, what should make
me down-hearted?’ said he; ‘I am sound in health and rich in purse, what
should I care for? I have saved up my three years’ earnings and have it
all safe in my pocket.’ ‘How much may it come to?’ said the little man.
‘Full threepence,’ replied the countryman. ‘I wish you would give them
to me,’ said the other; ‘I am very poor.’ Then the man pitied him, and
gave him all he had; and the little dwarf said in return, ‘As you have
such a kind honest heart, I will grant you three wishes--one for every
penny; so choose whatever you like.’ Then the countryman rejoiced at
his good luck, and said, ‘I like many things better than money: first, I
will have a bow that will bring down everything I shoot at; secondly,
a fiddle that will set everyone dancing that hears me play upon it; and
thirdly, I should like that everyone should grant what I ask.’ The dwarf
said he should have his three wishes; so he gave him the bow and fiddle,
and went his way.

Our honest friend journeyed on his way too; and if he was merry before,
he was now ten times more so. He had not gone far before he met an old
miser: close by them stood a tree, and on the topmost twig sat a thrush
singing away most joyfully. ‘Oh, what a pretty bird!’ said the miser; ‘I
would give a great deal of money to have such a one.’ ‘If that’s all,’
said the countryman, ‘I will soon bring it down.’ Then he took up his
bow, and down fell the thrush into the bushes at the foot of the tree.
The miser crept into the bush to find it; but directly he had got into
the middle, his companion took up his fiddle and played away, and the
miser began to dance and spring about, capering higher and higher in
the air. The thorns soon began to tear his clothes till they all hung
in rags about him, and he himself was all scratched and wounded, so that
the blood ran down. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ cried the miser, ‘Master!
master! pray let the fiddle alone. What have I done to deserve this?’
‘Thou hast shaved many a poor soul close enough,’ said the other; ‘thou
art only meeting thy reward’: so he played up another tune. Then the
miser began to beg and promise, and offered money for his liberty; but
he did not come up to the musician’s price for some time, and he danced
him along brisker and brisker, and the miser bid higher and higher, till
at last he offered a round hundred of florins that he had in his purse,
and had just gained by cheating some poor fellow. When the countryman
saw so much money, he said, ‘I will agree to your proposal.’ So he took
the purse, put up his fiddle, and travelled on very pleased with his
bargain.

Meanwhile the miser crept out of the bush half-naked and in a piteous
plight, and began to ponder how he should take his revenge, and serve
his late companion some trick. At last he went to the judge, and
complained that a rascal had robbed him of his money, and beaten him
into the bargain; and that the fellow who did it carried a bow at his
back and a fiddle hung round his neck. Then the judge sent out his
officers to bring up the accused wherever they should find him; and he
was soon caught and brought up to be tried.

The miser began to tell his tale, and said he had been robbed of
his money. ‘No, you gave it me for playing a tune to you.’ said the
countryman; but the judge told him that was not likely, and cut the
matter short by ordering him off to the gallows.

So away he was taken; but as he stood on the steps he said, ‘My Lord
Judge, grant me one last request.’ ‘Anything but thy life,’ replied the
other. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I do not ask my life; only to let me play upon
my fiddle for the last time.’ The miser cried out, ‘Oh, no! no! for
heaven’s sake don’t listen to him! don’t listen to him!’ But the judge
said, ‘It is only this once, he will soon have done.’ The fact was, he
could not refuse the request, on account of the dwarf’s third gift.

Then the miser said, ‘Bind me fast, bind me fast, for pity’s sake.’ But
the countryman seized his fiddle, and struck up a tune, and at the first
note judge, clerks, and jailer were in motion; all began capering, and
no one could hold the miser. At the second note the hangman let his
prisoner go, and danced also, and by the time he had played the first
bar of the tune, all were dancing together--judge, court, and miser, and
all the people who had followed to look on. At first the thing was merry
and pleasant enough; but when it had gone on a while, and there seemed
to be no end of playing or dancing, they began to cry out, and beg him
to leave off; but he stopped not a whit the more for their entreaties,
till the judge not only gave him his life, but promised to return him
the hundred florins.

Then he called to the miser, and said, ‘Tell us now, you vagabond, where
you got that gold, or I shall play on for your amusement only,’ ‘I stole
it,’ said the miser in the presence of all the people; ‘I acknowledge
that I stole it, and that you earned it fairly.’ Then the countryman
stopped his fiddle, and left the miser to take his place at the gallows.




ASHPUTTEL

The wife of a rich man fell sick; and when she felt that her end drew
nigh, she called her only daughter to her bed-side, and said, ‘Always be
a good girl, and I will look down from heaven and watch over you.’ Soon
afterwards she shut her eyes and died, and was buried in the garden;
and the little girl went every day to her grave and wept, and was always
good and kind to all about her. And the snow fell and spread a beautiful
white covering over the grave; but by the time the spring came, and the
sun had melted it away again, her father had married another wife. This
new wife had two daughters of her own, that she brought home with her;
they were fair in face but foul at heart, and it was now a sorry time
for the poor little girl. ‘What does the good-for-nothing want in the
parlour?’ said they; ‘they who would eat bread should first earn it;
away with the kitchen-maid!’ Then they took away her fine clothes, and
gave her an old grey frock to put on, and laughed at her, and turned her
into the kitchen.

There she was forced to do hard work; to rise early before daylight, to
bring the water, to make the fire, to cook and to wash. Besides that,
the sisters plagued her in all sorts of ways, and laughed at her. In the
evening when she was tired, she had no bed to lie down on, but was made
to lie by the hearth among the ashes; and as this, of course, made her
always dusty and dirty, they called her Ashputtel.

It happened once that the father was going to the fair, and asked his
wife’s daughters what he should bring them. ‘Fine clothes,’ said the
first; ‘Pearls and diamonds,’ cried the second. ‘Now, child,’ said he
to his own daughter, ‘what will you have?’ ‘The first twig, dear
father, that brushes against your hat when you turn your face to come
homewards,’ said she. Then he bought for the first two the fine clothes
and pearls and diamonds they had asked for: and on his way home, as he
rode through a green copse, a hazel twig brushed against him, and almost
pushed off his hat: so he broke it off and brought it away; and when he
got home he gave it to his daughter. Then she took it, and went to
her mother’s grave and planted it there; and cried so much that it was
watered with her tears; and there it grew and became a fine tree. Three
times every day she went to it and cried; and soon a little bird came
and built its nest upon the tree, and talked with her, and watched over
her, and brought her whatever she wished for.

Now it happened that the king of that land held a feast, which was to
last three days; and out of those who came to it his son was to choose
a bride for himself. Ashputtel’s two sisters were asked to come; so they
called her up, and said, ‘Now, comb our hair, brush our shoes, and tie
our sashes for us, for we are going to dance at the king’s feast.’
Then she did as she was told; but when all was done she could not help
crying, for she thought to herself, she should so have liked to have
gone with them to the ball; and at last she begged her mother very hard
to let her go. ‘You, Ashputtel!’ said she; ‘you who have nothing to
wear, no clothes at all, and who cannot even dance--you want to go to
the ball? And when she kept on begging, she said at last, to get rid of
her, ‘I will throw this dishful of peas into the ash-heap, and if in
two hours’ time you have picked them all out, you shall go to the feast
too.’

Then she threw the peas down among the ashes, but the little maiden ran
out at the back door into the garden, and cried out:

 ‘Hither, hither, through the sky,
  Turtle-doves and linnets, fly!
  Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay,
  Hither, hither, haste away!
  One and all come help me, quick!
  Haste ye, haste ye!--pick, pick, pick!’

Then first came two white doves, flying in at the kitchen window; next
came two turtle-doves; and after them came all the little birds under
heaven, chirping and fluttering in: and they flew down into the ashes.
And the little doves stooped their heads down and set to work, pick,
pick, pick; and then the others began to pick, pick, pick: and among
them all they soon picked out all the good grain, and put it into a dish
but left the ashes. Long before the end of the hour the work was quite
done, and all flew out again at the windows.

Then Ashputtel brought the dish to her mother, overjoyed at the thought
that now she should go to the ball. But the mother said, ‘No, no! you
slut, you have no clothes, and cannot dance; you shall not go.’ And when
Ashputtel begged very hard to go, she said, ‘If you can in one hour’s
time pick two of those dishes of peas out of the ashes, you shall go
too.’ And thus she thought she should at least get rid of her. So she
shook two dishes of peas into the ashes.

But the little maiden went out into the garden at the back of the house,
and cried out as before:

 ‘Hither, hither, through the sky,
  Turtle-doves and linnets, fly!
  Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay,
  Hither, hither, haste away!
  One and all come help me, quick!
  Haste ye, haste ye!--pick, pick, pick!’

Then first came two white doves in at the kitchen window; next came two
turtle-doves; and after them came all the little birds under heaven,
chirping and hopping about. And they flew down into the ashes; and the
little doves put their heads down and set to work, pick, pick, pick; and
then the others began pick, pick, pick; and they put all the good grain
into the dishes, and left all the ashes. Before half an hour’s time all
was done, and out they flew again. And then Ashputtel took the dishes to
her mother, rejoicing to think that she should now go to the ball.
But her mother said, ‘It is all of no use, you cannot go; you have no
clothes, and cannot dance, and you would only put us to shame’: and off
she went with her two daughters to the ball.

Now when all were gone, and nobody left at home, Ashputtel went
sorrowfully and sat down under the hazel-tree, and cried out:

 ‘Shake, shake, hazel-tree,
  Gold and silver over me!’

Then her friend the bird flew out of the tree, and brought a gold and
silver dress for her, and slippers of spangled silk; and she put them
on, and followed her sisters to the feast. But they did not know her,
and thought it must be some strange princess, she looked so fine and
beautiful in her rich clothes; and they never once thought of Ashputtel,
taking it for granted that she was safe at home in the dirt.

The king’s son soon came up to her, and took her by the hand and danced
with her, and no one else: and he never left her hand; but when anyone
else came to ask her to dance, he said, ‘This lady is dancing with me.’

Thus they danced till a late hour of the night; and then she wanted to
go home: and the king’s son said, ‘I shall go and take care of you to
your home’; for he wanted to see where the beautiful maiden lived. But
she slipped away from him, unawares, and ran off towards home; and as
the prince followed her, she jumped up into the pigeon-house and shut
the door. Then he waited till her father came home, and told him that
the unknown maiden, who had been at the feast, had hid herself in the
pigeon-house. But when they had broken open the door they found no one
within; and as they came back into the house, Ashputtel was lying, as
she always did, in her dirty frock by the ashes, and her dim little
lamp was burning in the chimney. For she had run as quickly as she could
through the pigeon-house and on to the hazel-tree, and had there taken
off her beautiful clothes, and put them beneath the tree, that the bird
might carry them away, and had lain down again amid the ashes in her
little grey frock.

The next day when the feast was again held, and her father, mother, and
sisters were gone, Ashputtel went to the hazel-tree, and said:

 ‘Shake, shake, hazel-tree,
  Gold and silver over me!’

And the bird came and brought a still finer dress than the one she
had worn the day before. And when she came in it to the ball, everyone
wondered at her beauty: but the king’s son, who was waiting for her,
took her by the hand, and danced with her; and when anyone asked her to
dance, he said as before, ‘This lady is dancing with me.’

When night came she wanted to go home; and the king’s son followed here
as before, that he might see into what house she went: but she sprang
away from him all at once into the garden behind her father’s house.
In this garden stood a fine large pear-tree full of ripe fruit; and
Ashputtel, not knowing where to hide herself, jumped up into it without
being seen. Then the king’s son lost sight of her, and could not find
out where she was gone, but waited till her father came home, and said
to him, ‘The unknown lady who danced with me has slipped away, and I
think she must have sprung into the pear-tree.’ The father thought to
himself, ‘Can it be Ashputtel?’ So he had an axe brought; and they cut
down the tree, but found no one upon it. And when they came back into
the kitchen, there lay Ashputtel among the ashes; for she had slipped
down on the other side of the tree, and carried her beautiful clothes
back to the bird at the hazel-tree, and then put on her little grey
frock.

The third day, when her father and mother and sisters were gone, she
went again into the garden, and said:

 ‘Shake, shake, hazel-tree,
  Gold and silver over me!’

Then her kind friend the bird brought a dress still finer than the
former one, and slippers which were all of gold: so that when she came
to the feast no one knew what to say, for wonder at her beauty: and the
king’s son danced with nobody but her; and when anyone else asked her to
dance, he said, ‘This lady is _my_ partner, sir.’

When night came she wanted to go home; and the king’s son would go with
her, and said to himself, ‘I will not lose her this time’; but, however,
she again slipped away from him, though in such a hurry that she dropped
her left golden slipper upon the stairs.

The prince took the shoe, and went the next day to the king his father,
and said, ‘I will take for my wife the lady that this golden slipper
fits.’ Then both the sisters were overjoyed to hear it; for they
had beautiful feet, and had no doubt that they could wear the golden
slipper. The eldest went first into the room where the slipper was, and
wanted to try it on, and the mother stood by. But her great toe could
not go into it, and the shoe was altogether much too small for her. Then
the mother gave her a knife, and said, ‘Never mind, cut it off; when you
are queen you will not care about toes; you will not want to walk.’ So
the silly girl cut off her great toe, and thus squeezed on the shoe,
and went to the king’s son. Then he took her for his bride, and set her
beside him on his horse, and rode away with her homewards.

But on their way home they had to pass by the hazel-tree that Ashputtel
had planted; and on the branch sat a little dove singing:

 ‘Back again! back again! look to the shoe!
  The shoe is too small, and not made for you!
  Prince! prince! look again for thy bride,
  For she’s not the true one that sits by thy side.’

Then the prince got down and looked at her foot; and he saw, by the
blood that streamed from it, what a trick she had played him. So he
turned his horse round, and brought the false bride back to her home,
and said, ‘This is not the right bride; let the other sister try and put
on the slipper.’ Then she went into the room and got her foot into the
shoe, all but the heel, which was too large. But her mother squeezed it
in till the blood came, and took her to the king’s son: and he set her
as his bride by his side on his horse, and rode away with her.

But when they came to the hazel-tree the little dove sat there still,
and sang:

 ‘Back again! back again! look to the shoe!
  The shoe is too small, and not made for you!
  Prince! prince! look again for thy bride,
  For she’s not the true one that sits by thy side.’

Then he looked down, and saw that the blood streamed so much from the
shoe, that her white stockings were quite red. So he turned his horse
and brought her also back again. ‘This is not the true bride,’ said he
to the father; ‘have you no other daughters?’ ‘No,’ said he; ‘there is
only a little dirty Ashputtel here, the child of my first wife; I am
sure she cannot be the bride.’ The prince told him to send her. But the
mother said, ‘No, no, she is much too dirty; she will not dare to show
herself.’ However, the prince would have her come; and she first washed
her face and hands, and then went in and curtsied to him, and he reached
her the golden slipper. Then she took her clumsy shoe off her left foot,
and put on the golden slipper; and it fitted her as if it had been made
for her. And when he drew near and looked at her face he knew her, and
said, ‘This is the right bride.’ But the mother and both the sisters
were frightened, and turned pale with anger as he took Ashputtel on his
horse, and rode away with her. And when they came to the hazel-tree, the
white dove sang:

 ‘Home! home! look at the shoe!
  Princess! the shoe was made for you!
  Prince! prince! take home thy bride,
  For she is the true one that sits by thy side!’

And when the dove had done its song, it came flying, and perched upon
her right shoulder, and so went home with her.




THE WHITE SNAKE

A long time ago there lived a king who was famed for his wisdom through
all the land. Nothing was hidden from him, and it seemed as if news of
the most secret things was brought to him through the air. But he had a
strange custom; every day after dinner, when the table was cleared,
and no one else was present, a trusty servant had to bring him one more
dish. It was covered, however, and even the servant did not know what
was in it, neither did anyone know, for the king never took off the
cover to eat of it until he was quite alone.

This had gone on for a long time, when one day the servant, who took
away the dish, was overcome with such curiosity that he could not help
carrying the dish into his room. When he had carefully locked the door,
he lifted up the cover, and saw a white snake lying on the dish. But
when he saw it he could not deny himself the pleasure of tasting it,
so he cut of a little bit and put it into his mouth. No sooner had it
touched his tongue than he heard a strange whispering of little voices
outside his window. He went and listened, and then noticed that it was
the sparrows who were chattering together, and telling one another of
all kinds of things which they had seen in the fields and woods. Eating
the snake had given him power of understanding the language of animals.

Now it so happened that on this very day the queen lost her most
beautiful ring, and suspicion of having stolen it fell upon this trusty
servant, who was allowed to go everywhere. The king ordered the man to
be brought before him, and threatened with angry words that unless he
could before the morrow point out the thief, he himself should be looked
upon as guilty and executed. In vain he declared his innocence; he was
dismissed with no better answer.

In his trouble and fear he went down into the courtyard and took thought
how to help himself out of his trouble. Now some ducks were sitting
together quietly by a brook and taking their rest; and, whilst they
were making their feathers smooth with their bills, they were having a
confidential conversation together. The servant stood by and listened.
They were telling one another of all the places where they had been
waddling about all the morning, and what good food they had found; and
one said in a pitiful tone: ‘Something lies heavy on my stomach; as
I was eating in haste I swallowed a ring which lay under the queen’s
window.’ The servant at once seized her by the neck, carried her to the
kitchen, and said to the cook: ‘Here is a fine duck; pray, kill her.’
‘Yes,’ said the cook, and weighed her in his hand; ‘she has spared
no trouble to fatten herself, and has been waiting to be roasted long
enough.’ So he cut off her head, and as she was being dressed for the
spit, the queen’s ring was found inside her.

The servant could now easily prove his innocence; and the king, to make
amends for the wrong, allowed him to ask a favour, and promised him
the best place in the court that he could wish for. The servant refused
everything, and only asked for a horse and some money for travelling, as
he had a mind to see the world and go about a little. When his request
was granted he set out on his way, and one day came to a pond, where he
saw three fishes caught in the reeds and gasping for water. Now, though
it is said that fishes are dumb, he heard them lamenting that they must
perish so miserably, and, as he had a kind heart, he got off his
horse and put the three prisoners back into the water. They leapt with
delight, put out their heads, and cried to him: ‘We will remember you
and repay you for saving us!’

He rode on, and after a while it seemed to him that he heard a voice in
the sand at his feet. He listened, and heard an ant-king complain: ‘Why
cannot folks, with their clumsy beasts, keep off our bodies? That stupid
horse, with his heavy hoofs, has been treading down my people without
mercy!’ So he turned on to a side path and the ant-king cried out to
him: ‘We will remember you--one good turn deserves another!’

The path led him into a wood, and there he saw two old ravens standing
by their nest, and throwing out their young ones. ‘Out with you, you
idle, good-for-nothing creatures!’ cried they; ‘we cannot find food for
you any longer; you are big enough, and can provide for yourselves.’
But the poor young ravens lay upon the ground, flapping their wings, and
crying: ‘Oh, what helpless chicks we are! We must shift for ourselves,
and yet we cannot fly! What can we do, but lie here and starve?’ So the
good young fellow alighted and killed his horse with his sword, and gave
it to them for food. Then they came hopping up to it, satisfied their
hunger, and cried: ‘We will remember you--one good turn deserves
another!’

And now he had to use his own legs, and when he had walked a long
way, he came to a large city. There was a great noise and crowd in
the streets, and a man rode up on horseback, crying aloud: ‘The king’s
daughter wants a husband; but whoever seeks her hand must perform a hard
task, and if he does not succeed he will forfeit his life.’ Many had
already made the attempt, but in vain; nevertheless when the youth
saw the king’s daughter he was so overcome by her great beauty that he
forgot all danger, went before the king, and declared himself a suitor.

So he was led out to the sea, and a gold ring was thrown into it, before
his eyes; then the king ordered him to fetch this ring up from the
bottom of the sea, and added: ‘If you come up again without it you will
be thrown in again and again until you perish amid the waves.’ All the
people grieved for the handsome youth; then they went away, leaving him
alone by the sea.

He stood on the shore and considered what he should do, when suddenly
he saw three fishes come swimming towards him, and they were the very
fishes whose lives he had saved. The one in the middle held a mussel in
its mouth, which it laid on the shore at the youth’s feet, and when he
had taken it up and opened it, there lay the gold ring in the shell.
Full of joy he took it to the king and expected that he would grant him
the promised reward.

But when the proud princess perceived that he was not her equal in
birth, she scorned him, and required him first to perform another
task. She went down into the garden and strewed with her own hands ten
sacksful of millet-seed on the grass; then she said: ‘Tomorrow morning
before sunrise these must be picked up, and not a single grain be
wanting.’

The youth sat down in the garden and considered how it might be possible
to perform this task, but he could think of nothing, and there he sat
sorrowfully awaiting the break of day, when he should be led to death.
But as soon as the first rays of the sun shone into the garden he saw
all the ten sacks standing side by side, quite full, and not a single
grain was missing. The ant-king had come in the night with thousands
and thousands of ants, and the grateful creatures had by great industry
picked up all the millet-seed and gathered them into the sacks.

Presently the king’s daughter herself came down into the garden, and was
amazed to see that the young man had done the task she had given him.
But she could not yet conquer her proud heart, and said: ‘Although he
has performed both the tasks, he shall not be my husband until he had
brought me an apple from the Tree of Life.’ The youth did not know where
the Tree of Life stood, but he set out, and would have gone on for ever,
as long as his legs would carry him, though he had no hope of finding
it. After he had wandered through three kingdoms, he came one evening to
a wood, and lay down under a tree to sleep. But he heard a rustling in
the branches, and a golden apple fell into his hand. At the same time
three ravens flew down to him, perched themselves upon his knee, and
said: ‘We are the three young ravens whom you saved from starving; when
we had grown big, and heard that you were seeking the Golden Apple,
we flew over the sea to the end of the world, where the Tree of Life
stands, and have brought you the apple.’ The youth, full of joy, set out
homewards, and took the Golden Apple to the king’s beautiful daughter,
who had now no more excuses left to make. They cut the Apple of Life in
two and ate it together; and then her heart became full of love for him,
and they lived in undisturbed happiness to a great age.




THE WOLF AND THE SEVEN LITTLE KIDS

There was once upon a time an old goat who had seven little kids, and
loved them with all the love of a mother for her children. One day she
wanted to go into the forest and fetch some food. So she called all
seven to her and said: ‘Dear children, I have to go into the forest,
be on your guard against the wolf; if he comes in, he will devour you
all--skin, hair, and everything. The wretch often disguises himself, but
you will know him at once by his rough voice and his black feet.’ The
kids said: ‘Dear mother, we will take good care of ourselves; you may go
away without any anxiety.’ Then the old one bleated, and went on her way
with an easy mind.

It was not long before someone knocked at the house-door and called:
‘Open the door, dear children; your mother is here, and has brought
something back with her for each of you.’ But the little kids knew that
it was the wolf, by the rough voice. ‘We will not open the door,’ cried
they, ‘you are not our mother. She has a soft, pleasant voice, but
your voice is rough; you are the wolf!’ Then the wolf went away to a
shopkeeper and bought himself a great lump of chalk, ate this and made
his voice soft with it. Then he came back, knocked at the door of the
house, and called: ‘Open the door, dear children, your mother is here
and has brought something back with her for each of you.’ But the wolf
had laid his black paws against the window, and the children saw them
and cried: ‘We will not open the door, our mother has not black feet
like you: you are the wolf!’ Then the wolf ran to a baker and said: ‘I
have hurt my feet, rub some dough over them for me.’ And when the baker
had rubbed his feet over, he ran to the miller and said: ‘Strew some
white meal over my feet for me.’ The miller thought to himself: ‘The
wolf wants to deceive someone,’ and refused; but the wolf said: ‘If you
will not do it, I will devour you.’ Then the miller was afraid, and made
his paws white for him. Truly, this is the way of mankind.

So now the wretch went for the third time to the house-door, knocked at
it and said: ‘Open the door for me, children, your dear little mother
has come home, and has brought every one of you something back from the
forest with her.’ The little kids cried: ‘First show us your paws that
we may know if you are our dear little mother.’ Then he put his paws
in through the window and when the kids saw that they were white, they
believed that all he said was true, and opened the door. But who should
come in but the wolf! They were terrified and wanted to hide themselves.
One sprang under the table, the second into the bed, the third into the
stove, the fourth into the kitchen, the fifth into the cupboard, the
sixth under the washing-bowl, and the seventh into the clock-case. But
the wolf found them all, and used no great ceremony; one after the
other he swallowed them down his throat. The youngest, who was in
the clock-case, was the only one he did not find. When the wolf had
satisfied his appetite he took himself off, laid himself down under a
tree in the green meadow outside, and began to sleep. Soon afterwards
the old goat came home again from the forest. Ah! what a sight she saw
there! The house-door stood wide open. The table, chairs, and benches
were thrown down, the washing-bowl lay broken to pieces, and the quilts
and pillows were pulled off the bed. She sought her children, but they
were nowhere to be found. She called them one after another by name, but
no one answered. At last, when she came to the youngest, a soft voice
cried: ‘Dear mother, I am in the clock-case.’ She took the kid out, and
it told her that the wolf had come and had eaten all the others. Then
you may imagine how she wept over her poor children.

At length in her grief she went out, and the youngest kid ran with her.
When they came to the meadow, there lay the wolf by the tree and snored
so loud that the branches shook. She looked at him on every side and
saw that something was moving and struggling in his gorged belly. ‘Ah,
heavens,’ she said, ‘is it possible that my poor children whom he has
swallowed down for his supper, can be still alive?’ Then the kid had to
run home and fetch scissors, and a needle and thread, and the goat cut
open the monster’s stomach, and hardly had she made one cut, than one
little kid thrust its head out, and when she had cut farther, all six
sprang out one after another, and were all still alive, and had suffered
no injury whatever, for in his greediness the monster had swallowed them
down whole. What rejoicing there was! They embraced their dear mother,
and jumped like a tailor at his wedding. The mother, however, said: ‘Now
go and look for some big stones, and we will fill the wicked beast’s
stomach with them while he is still asleep.’ Then the seven kids dragged
the stones thither with all speed, and put as many of them into this
stomach as they could get in; and the mother sewed him up again in the
greatest haste, so that he was not aware of anything and never once
stirred.

When the wolf at length had had his fill of sleep, he got on his legs,
and as the stones in his stomach made him very thirsty, he wanted to
go to a well to drink. But when he began to walk and to move about, the
stones in his stomach knocked against each other and rattled. Then cried
he:

 ‘What rumbles and tumbles
  Against my poor bones?
  I thought ‘twas six kids,
  But it feels like big stones.’

And when he got to the well and stooped over the water to drink, the
heavy stones made him fall in, and he drowned miserably. When the seven
kids saw that, they came running to the spot and cried aloud: ‘The wolf
is dead! The wolf is dead!’ and danced for joy round about the well with
their mother.




THE QUEEN BEE

Two kings’ sons once upon a time went into the world to seek their
fortunes; but they soon fell into a wasteful foolish way of living, so
that they could not return home again. Then their brother, who was a
little insignificant dwarf, went out to seek for his brothers: but when
he had found them they only laughed at him, to think that he, who was so
young and simple, should try to travel through the world, when they, who
were so much wiser, had been unable to get on. However, they all set
out on their journey together, and came at last to an ant-hill. The two
elder brothers would have pulled it down, in order to see how the poor
ants in their fright would run about and carry off their eggs. But the
little dwarf said, ‘Let the poor things enjoy themselves, I will not
suffer you to trouble them.’

So on they went, and came to a lake where many many ducks were swimming
about. The two brothers wanted to catch two, and roast them. But the
dwarf said, ‘Let the poor things enjoy themselves, you shall not kill
them.’ Next they came to a bees’-nest in a hollow tree, and there was
so much honey that it ran down the trunk; and the two brothers wanted to
light a fire under the tree and kill the bees, so as to get their honey.
But the dwarf held them back, and said, ‘Let the pretty insects enjoy
themselves, I cannot let you burn them.’

At length the three brothers came to a castle: and as they passed by the
stables they saw fine horses standing there, but all were of marble, and
no man was to be seen. Then they went through all the rooms, till they
came to a door on which were three locks: but in the middle of the door
was a wicket, so that they could look into the next room. There they saw
a little grey old man sitting at a table; and they called to him once or
twice, but he did not hear: however, they called a third time, and then
he rose and came out to them.

He said nothing, but took hold of them and led them to a beautiful
table covered with all sorts of good things: and when they had eaten and
drunk, he showed each of them to a bed-chamber.

The next morning he came to the eldest and took him to a marble table,
where there were three tablets, containing an account of the means by
which the castle might be disenchanted. The first tablet said: ‘In the
wood, under the moss, lie the thousand pearls belonging to the king’s
daughter; they must all be found: and if one be missing by set of sun,
he who seeks them will be turned into marble.’

The eldest brother set out, and sought for the pearls the whole day:
but the evening came, and he had not found the first hundred: so he was
turned into stone as the tablet had foretold.

The next day the second brother undertook the task; but he succeeded no
better than the first; for he could only find the second hundred of the
pearls; and therefore he too was turned into stone.

At last came the little dwarf’s turn; and he looked in the moss; but it
was so hard to find the pearls, and the job was so tiresome!--so he sat
down upon a stone and cried. And as he sat there, the king of the ants
(whose life he had saved) came to help him, with five thousand ants; and
it was not long before they had found all the pearls and laid them in a
heap.

The second tablet said: ‘The key of the princess’s bed-chamber must be
fished up out of the lake.’ And as the dwarf came to the brink of it,
he saw the two ducks whose lives he had saved swimming about; and they
dived down and soon brought in the key from the bottom.

The third task was the hardest. It was to choose out the youngest and
the best of the king’s three daughters. Now they were all beautiful, and
all exactly alike: but he was told that the eldest had eaten a piece of
sugar, the next some sweet syrup, and the youngest a spoonful of honey;
so he was to guess which it was that had eaten the honey.

Then came the queen of the bees, who had been saved by the little dwarf
from the fire, and she tried the lips of all three; but at last she sat
upon the lips of the one that had eaten the honey: and so the dwarf knew
which was the youngest. Thus the spell was broken, and all who had been
turned into stones awoke, and took their proper forms. And the dwarf
married the youngest and the best of the princesses, and was king after
her father’s death; but his two brothers married the other two sisters.




THE ELVES AND THE SHOEMAKER

There was once a shoemaker, who worked very hard and was very honest:
but still he could not earn enough to live upon; and at last all he
had in the world was gone, save just leather enough to make one pair of
shoes.

Then he cut his leather out, all ready to make up the next day, meaning
to rise early in the morning to his work. His conscience was clear and
his heart light amidst all his troubles; so he went peaceably to bed,
left all his cares to Heaven, and soon fell asleep. In the morning after
he had said his prayers, he sat himself down to his work; when, to his
great wonder, there stood the shoes all ready made, upon the table. The
good man knew not what to say or think at such an odd thing happening.
He looked at the workmanship; there was not one false stitch in the
whole job; all was so neat and true, that it was quite a masterpiece.

The same day a customer came in, and the shoes suited him so well that
he willingly paid a price higher than usual for them; and the poor
shoemaker, with the money, bought leather enough to make two pairs more.
In the evening he cut out the work, and went to bed early, that he might
get up and begin betimes next day; but he was saved all the trouble, for
when he got up in the morning the work was done ready to his hand. Soon
in came buyers, who paid him handsomely for his goods, so that he bought
leather enough for four pair more. He cut out the work again overnight
and found it done in the morning, as before; and so it went on for some
time: what was got ready in the evening was always done by daybreak, and
the good man soon became thriving and well off again.

One evening, about Christmas-time, as he and his wife were sitting over
the fire chatting together, he said to her, ‘I should like to sit up and
watch tonight, that we may see who it is that comes and does my work for
me.’ The wife liked the thought; so they left a light burning, and hid
themselves in a corner of the room, behind a curtain that was hung up
there, and watched what would happen.

As soon as it was midnight, there came in two little naked dwarfs; and
they sat themselves upon the shoemaker’s bench, took up all the work
that was cut out, and began to ply with their little fingers, stitching
and rapping and tapping away at such a rate, that the shoemaker was all
wonder, and could not take his eyes off them. And on they went, till the
job was quite done, and the shoes stood ready for use upon the table.
This was long before daybreak; and then they bustled away as quick as
lightning.

The next day the wife said to the shoemaker. ‘These little wights have
made us rich, and we ought to be thankful to them, and do them a good
turn if we can. I am quite sorry to see them run about as they do; and
indeed it is not very decent, for they have nothing upon their backs to
keep off the cold. I’ll tell you what, I will make each of them a shirt,
and a coat and waistcoat, and a pair of pantaloons into the bargain; and
do you make each of them a little pair of shoes.’

The thought pleased the good cobbler very much; and one evening, when
all the things were ready, they laid them on the table, instead of the
work that they used to cut out, and then went and hid themselves, to
watch what the little elves would do.

About midnight in they came, dancing and skipping, hopped round the
room, and then went to sit down to their work as usual; but when they
saw the clothes lying for them, they laughed and chuckled, and seemed
mightily delighted.

Then they dressed themselves in the twinkling of an eye, and danced and
capered and sprang about, as merry as could be; till at last they danced
out at the door, and away over the green.

The good couple saw them no more; but everything went well with them
from that time forward, as long as they lived.




THE JUNIPER-TREE

Long, long ago, some two thousand years or so, there lived a rich
man with a good and beautiful wife. They loved each other dearly, but
sorrowed much that they had no children. So greatly did they desire
to have one, that the wife prayed for it day and night, but still they
remained childless.

In front of the house there was a court, in which grew a juniper-tree.
One winter’s day the wife stood under the tree to peel some apples, and
as she was peeling them, she cut her finger, and the blood fell on the
snow. ‘Ah,’ sighed the woman heavily, ‘if I had but a child, as red as
blood and as white as snow,’ and as she spoke the words, her heart grew
light within her, and it seemed to her that her wish was granted, and
she returned to the house feeling glad and comforted. A month passed,
and the snow had all disappeared; then another month went by, and all
the earth was green. So the months followed one another, and first the
trees budded in the woods, and soon the green branches grew thickly
intertwined, and then the blossoms began to fall. Once again the wife
stood under the juniper-tree, and it was so full of sweet scent that her
heart leaped for joy, and she was so overcome with her happiness, that
she fell on her knees. Presently the fruit became round and firm, and
she was glad and at peace; but when they were fully ripe she picked the
berries and ate eagerly of them, and then she grew sad and ill. A little
while later she called her husband, and said to him, weeping. ‘If I
die, bury me under the juniper-tree.’ Then she felt comforted and happy
again, and before another month had passed she had a little child, and
when she saw that it was as white as snow and as red as blood, her joy
was so great that she died.

Her husband buried her under the juniper-tree, and wept bitterly for
her. By degrees, however, his sorrow grew less, and although at times he
still grieved over his loss, he was able to go about as usual, and later
on he married again.

He now had a little daughter born to him; the child of his first wife
was a boy, who was as red as blood and as white as snow. The mother
loved her daughter very much, and when she looked at her and then looked
at the boy, it pierced her heart to think that he would always stand in
the way of her own child, and she was continually thinking how she could
get the whole of the property for her. This evil thought took possession
of her more and more, and made her behave very unkindly to the boy. She
drove him from place to place with cuffings and buffetings, so that the
poor child went about in fear, and had no peace from the time he left
school to the time he went back.

One day the little daughter came running to her mother in the
store-room, and said, ‘Mother, give me an apple.’ ‘Yes, my child,’ said
the wife, and she gave her a beautiful apple out of the chest; the chest
had a very heavy lid and a large iron lock.

‘Mother,’ said the little daughter again, ‘may not brother have one
too?’ The mother was angry at this, but she answered, ‘Yes, when he
comes out of school.’

Just then she looked out of the window and saw him coming, and it seemed
as if an evil spirit entered into her, for she snatched the apple out
of her little daughter’s hand, and said, ‘You shall not have one before
your brother.’ She threw the apple into the chest and shut it to. The
little boy now came in, and the evil spirit in the wife made her say
kindly to him, ‘My son, will you have an apple?’ but she gave him a
wicked look. ‘Mother,’ said the boy, ‘how dreadful you look! Yes, give
me an apple.’ The thought came to her that she would kill him. ‘Come
with me,’ she said, and she lifted up the lid of the chest; ‘take one
out for yourself.’ And as he bent over to do so, the evil spirit urged
her, and crash! down went the lid, and off went the little boy’s head.
Then she was overwhelmed with fear at the thought of what she had done.
‘If only I can prevent anyone knowing that I did it,’ she thought. So
she went upstairs to her room, and took a white handkerchief out of
her top drawer; then she set the boy’s head again on his shoulders, and
bound it with the handkerchief so that nothing could be seen, and placed
him on a chair by the door with an apple in his hand.

Soon after this, little Marleen came up to her mother who was stirring
a pot of boiling water over the fire, and said, ‘Mother, brother is
sitting by the door with an apple in his hand, and he looks so pale;
and when I asked him to give me the apple, he did not answer, and that
frightened me.’

‘Go to him again,’ said her mother, ‘and if he does not answer, give him
a box on the ear.’ So little Marleen went, and said, ‘Brother, give me
that apple,’ but he did not say a word; then she gave him a box on the
ear, and his head rolled off. She was so terrified at this, that she ran
crying and screaming to her mother. ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘I have knocked off
brother’s head,’ and then she wept and wept, and nothing would stop her.

‘What have you done!’ said her mother, ‘but no one must know about it,
so you must keep silence; what is done can’t be undone; we will make
him into puddings.’ And she took the little boy and cut him up, made him
into puddings, and put him in the pot. But Marleen stood looking on,
and wept and wept, and her tears fell into the pot, so that there was no
need of salt.

Presently the father came home and sat down to his dinner; he asked,
‘Where is my son?’ The mother said nothing, but gave him a large dish of
black pudding, and Marleen still wept without ceasing.

The father again asked, ‘Where is my son?’

‘Oh,’ answered the wife, ‘he is gone into the country to his mother’s
great uncle; he is going to stay there some time.’

‘What has he gone there for, and he never even said goodbye to me!’

‘Well, he likes being there, and he told me he should be away quite six
weeks; he is well looked after there.’

‘I feel very unhappy about it,’ said the husband, ‘in case it should not
be all right, and he ought to have said goodbye to me.’

With this he went on with his dinner, and said, ‘Little Marleen, why do
you weep? Brother will soon be back.’ Then he asked his wife for more
pudding, and as he ate, he threw the bones under the table.

Little Marleen went upstairs and took her best silk handkerchief out of
her bottom drawer, and in it she wrapped all the bones from under the
table and carried them outside, and all the time she did nothing but
weep. Then she laid them in the green grass under the juniper-tree, and
she had no sooner done so, then all her sadness seemed to leave her,
and she wept no more. And now the juniper-tree began to move, and the
branches waved backwards and forwards, first away from one another, and
then together again, as it might be someone clapping their hands for
joy. After this a mist came round the tree, and in the midst of it there
was a burning as of fire, and out of the fire there flew a beautiful
bird, that rose high into the air, singing magnificently, and when it
could no more be seen, the juniper-tree stood there as before, and the
silk handkerchief and the bones were gone.

Little Marleen now felt as lighthearted and happy as if her brother were
still alive, and she went back to the house and sat down cheerfully to
the table and ate.

The bird flew away and alighted on the house of a goldsmith and began to
sing:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;
  My father grieved when I was gone;
  My sister loved me best of all;
  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie
  Underneath the juniper-tree
  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

The goldsmith was in his workshop making a gold chain, when he heard the
song of the bird on his roof. He thought it so beautiful that he got
up and ran out, and as he crossed the threshold he lost one of his
slippers. But he ran on into the middle of the street, with a slipper on
one foot and a sock on the other; he still had on his apron, and still
held the gold chain and the pincers in his hands, and so he stood gazing
up at the bird, while the sun came shining brightly down on the street.

‘Bird,’ he said, ‘how beautifully you sing! Sing me that song again.’

‘Nay,’ said the bird, ‘I do not sing twice for nothing. Give that gold
chain, and I will sing it you again.’

‘Here is the chain, take it,’ said the goldsmith. ‘Only sing me that
again.’

The bird flew down and took the gold chain in his right claw, and then
he alighted again in front of the goldsmith and sang:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;
  My father grieved when I was gone;
  My sister loved me best of all;
  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie
  Underneath the juniper-tree
  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

Then he flew away, and settled on the roof of a shoemaker’s house and
sang:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;
  My father grieved when I was gone;
  My sister loved me best of all;
  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie
  Underneath the juniper-tree
  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

The shoemaker heard him, and he jumped up and ran out in his
shirt-sleeves, and stood looking up at the bird on the roof with his
hand over his eyes to keep himself from being blinded by the sun.

‘Bird,’ he said, ‘how beautifully you sing!’ Then he called through the
door to his wife: ‘Wife, come out; here is a bird, come and look at it
and hear how beautifully it sings.’ Then he called his daughter and the
children, then the apprentices, girls and boys, and they all ran up the
street to look at the bird, and saw how splendid it was with its red
and green feathers, and its neck like burnished gold, and eyes like two
bright stars in its head.

‘Bird,’ said the shoemaker, ‘sing me that song again.’

‘Nay,’ answered the bird, ‘I do not sing twice for nothing; you must
give me something.’

‘Wife,’ said the man, ‘go into the garret; on the upper shelf you will
see a pair of red shoes; bring them to me.’ The wife went in and fetched
the shoes.

‘There, bird,’ said the shoemaker, ‘now sing me that song again.’

The bird flew down and took the red shoes in his left claw, and then he
went back to the roof and sang:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;
  My father grieved when I was gone;
  My sister loved me best of all;
  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie
  Underneath the juniper-tree
  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

When he had finished, he flew away. He had the chain in his right claw
and the shoes in his left, and he flew right away to a mill, and the
mill went ‘Click clack, click clack, click clack.’ Inside the mill were
twenty of the miller’s men hewing a stone, and as they went ‘Hick hack,
hick hack, hick hack,’ the mill went ‘Click clack, click clack, click
clack.’

The bird settled on a lime-tree in front of the mill and sang:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;

then one of the men left off,

  My father grieved when I was gone;

two more men left off and listened,

  My sister loved me best of all;

then four more left off,

  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie

now there were only eight at work,

  Underneath

And now only five,

  the juniper-tree.

And now only one,

  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

then he looked up and the last one had left off work.

‘Bird,’ he said, ‘what a beautiful song that is you sing! Let me hear it
too; sing it again.’

‘Nay,’ answered the bird, ‘I do not sing twice for nothing; give me that
millstone, and I will sing it again.’

‘If it belonged to me alone,’ said the man, ‘you should have it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the others: ‘if he will sing again, he can have it.’

The bird came down, and all the twenty millers set to and lifted up the
stone with a beam; then the bird put his head through the hole and took
the stone round his neck like a collar, and flew back with it to the
tree and sang--

 ‘My mother killed her little son;
  My father grieved when I was gone;
  My sister loved me best of all;
  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie
  Underneath the juniper-tree
  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

And when he had finished his song, he spread his wings, and with the
chain in his right claw, the shoes in his left, and the millstone round
his neck, he flew right away to his father’s house.

The father, the mother, and little Marleen were having their dinner.

‘How lighthearted I feel,’ said the father, ‘so pleased and cheerful.’

‘And I,’ said the mother, ‘I feel so uneasy, as if a heavy thunderstorm
were coming.’

But little Marleen sat and wept and wept.

Then the bird came flying towards the house and settled on the roof.

‘I do feel so happy,’ said the father, ‘and how beautifully the sun
shines; I feel just as if I were going to see an old friend again.’

‘Ah!’ said the wife, ‘and I am so full of distress and uneasiness that
my teeth chatter, and I feel as if there were a fire in my veins,’ and
she tore open her dress; and all the while little Marleen sat in the
corner and wept, and the plate on her knees was wet with her tears.

The bird now flew to the juniper-tree and began singing:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;

the mother shut her eyes and her ears, that she might see and hear
nothing, but there was a roaring sound in her ears like that of a
violent storm, and in her eyes a burning and flashing like lightning:

  My father grieved when I was gone;

‘Look, mother,’ said the man, ‘at the beautiful bird that is singing so
magnificently; and how warm and bright the sun is, and what a delicious
scent of spice in the air!’

  My sister loved me best of all;

then little Marleen laid her head down on her knees and sobbed.

‘I must go outside and see the bird nearer,’ said the man.

‘Ah, do not go!’ cried the wife. ‘I feel as if the whole house were in
flames!’

But the man went out and looked at the bird.

 She laid her kerchief over me,
 And took my bones that they might lie
 Underneath the juniper-tree
 Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

With that the bird let fall the gold chain, and it fell just round the
man’s neck, so that it fitted him exactly.

He went inside, and said, ‘See, what a splendid bird that is; he has
given me this beautiful gold chain, and looks so beautiful himself.’

But the wife was in such fear and trouble, that she fell on the floor,
and her cap fell from her head.

Then the bird began again:

 ‘My mother killed her little son;

‘Ah me!’ cried the wife, ‘if I were but a thousand feet beneath the
earth, that I might not hear that song.’

  My father grieved when I was gone;

then the woman fell down again as if dead.

  My sister loved me best of all;

‘Well,’ said little Marleen, ‘I will go out too and see if the bird will
give me anything.’

So she went out.

  She laid her kerchief over me,
  And took my bones that they might lie

and he threw down the shoes to her,

  Underneath the juniper-tree
  Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!’

And she now felt quite happy and lighthearted; she put on the shoes and
danced and jumped about in them. ‘I was so miserable,’ she said, ‘when I
came out, but that has all passed away; that is indeed a splendid bird,
and he has given me a pair of red shoes.’

The wife sprang up, with her hair standing out from her head like flames
of fire. ‘Then I will go out too,’ she said, ‘and see if it will lighten
my misery, for I feel as if the world were coming to an end.’

But as she crossed the threshold, crash! the bird threw the millstone
down on her head, and she was crushed to death.

The father and little Marleen heard the sound and ran out, but they only
saw mist and flame and fire rising from the spot, and when these had
passed, there stood the little brother, and he took the father and
little Marleen by the hand; then they all three rejoiced, and went
inside together and sat down to their dinners and ate.




THE TURNIP

There were two brothers who were both soldiers; the one was rich and
the other poor. The poor man thought he would try to better himself; so,
pulling off his red coat, he became a gardener, and dug his ground well,
and sowed turnips.

When the seed came up, there was one plant bigger than all the rest; and
it kept getting larger and larger, and seemed as if it would never cease
growing; so that it might have been called the prince of turnips for
there never was such a one seen before, and never will again. At last it
was so big that it filled a cart, and two oxen could hardly draw it; and
the gardener knew not what in the world to do with it, nor whether it
would be a blessing or a curse to him. One day he said to himself, ‘What
shall I do with it? if I sell it, it will bring no more than another;
and for eating, the little turnips are better than this; the best thing
perhaps is to carry it and give it to the king as a mark of respect.’

Then he yoked his oxen, and drew the turnip to the court, and gave it
to the king. ‘What a wonderful thing!’ said the king; ‘I have seen many
strange things, but such a monster as this I never saw. Where did you
get the seed? or is it only your good luck? If so, you are a true child
of fortune.’ ‘Ah, no!’ answered the gardener, ‘I am no child of fortune;
I am a poor soldier, who never could get enough to live upon; so I
laid aside my red coat, and set to work, tilling the ground. I have a
brother, who is rich, and your majesty knows him well, and all the world
knows him; but because I am poor, everybody forgets me.’

The king then took pity on him, and said, ‘You shall be poor no
longer. I will give you so much that you shall be even richer than your
brother.’ Then he gave him gold and lands and flocks, and made him so
rich that his brother’s fortune could not at all be compared with his.

When the brother heard of all this, and how a turnip had made the
gardener so rich, he envied him sorely, and bethought himself how he
could contrive to get the same good fortune for himself. However, he
determined to manage more cleverly than his brother, and got together a
rich present of gold and fine horses for the king; and thought he must
have a much larger gift in return; for if his brother had received so
much for only a turnip, what must his present be worth?

The king took the gift very graciously, and said he knew not what to
give in return more valuable and wonderful than the great turnip; so
the soldier was forced to put it into a cart, and drag it home with him.
When he reached home, he knew not upon whom to vent his rage and spite;
and at length wicked thoughts came into his head, and he resolved to
kill his brother.

So he hired some villains to murder him; and having shown them where to
lie in ambush, he went to his brother, and said, ‘Dear brother, I have
found a hidden treasure; let us go and dig it up, and share it between
us.’ The other had no suspicions of his roguery: so they went out
together, and as they were travelling along, the murderers rushed out
upon him, bound him, and were going to hang him on a tree.

But whilst they were getting all ready, they heard the trampling of a
horse at a distance, which so frightened them that they pushed their
prisoner neck and shoulders together into a sack, and swung him up by a
cord to the tree, where they left him dangling, and ran away. Meantime
he worked and worked away, till he made a hole large enough to put out
his head.

When the horseman came up, he proved to be a student, a merry fellow,
who was journeying along on his nag, and singing as he went. As soon as
the man in the sack saw him passing under the tree, he cried out, ‘Good
morning! good morning to thee, my friend!’ The student looked about
everywhere; and seeing no one, and not knowing where the voice came
from, cried out, ‘Who calls me?’

Then the man in the tree answered, ‘Lift up thine eyes, for behold here
I sit in the sack of wisdom; here have I, in a short time, learned great
and wondrous things. Compared to this seat, all the learning of the
schools is as empty air. A little longer, and I shall know all that man
can know, and shall come forth wiser than the wisest of mankind. Here
I discern the signs and motions of the heavens and the stars; the laws
that control the winds; the number of the sands on the seashore; the
healing of the sick; the virtues of all simples, of birds, and of
precious stones. Wert thou but once here, my friend, though wouldst feel
and own the power of knowledge.

The student listened to all this and wondered much; at last he said,
‘Blessed be the day and hour when I found you; cannot you contrive to
let me into the sack for a little while?’ Then the other answered, as if
very unwillingly, ‘A little space I may allow thee to sit here, if thou
wilt reward me well and entreat me kindly; but thou must tarry yet an
hour below, till I have learnt some little matters that are yet unknown
to me.’

So the student sat himself down and waited a while; but the time hung
heavy upon him, and he begged earnestly that he might ascend forthwith,
for his thirst for knowledge was great. Then the other pretended to give
way, and said, ‘Thou must let the sack of wisdom descend, by untying
yonder cord, and then thou shalt enter.’ So the student let him down,
opened the sack, and set him free. ‘Now then,’ cried he, ‘let me ascend
quickly.’ As he began to put himself into the sack heels first, ‘Wait a
while,’ said the gardener, ‘that is not the way.’ Then he pushed him
in head first, tied up the sack, and soon swung up the searcher after
wisdom dangling in the air. ‘How is it with thee, friend?’ said he,
‘dost thou not feel that wisdom comes unto thee? Rest there in peace,
till thou art a wiser man than thou wert.’

So saying, he trotted off on the student’s nag, and left the poor fellow
to gather wisdom till somebody should come and let him down.




CLEVER HANS

The mother of Hans said: ‘Whither away, Hans?’ Hans answered: ‘To
Gretel.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘Oh, I’ll behave well. Goodbye, mother.’
‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans comes to Gretel. ‘Good day, Gretel.’ ‘Good day,
Hans. What do you bring that is good?’ ‘I bring nothing, I want to have
something given me.’ Gretel presents Hans with a needle, Hans says:
‘Goodbye, Gretel.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’

Hans takes the needle, sticks it into a hay-cart, and follows the cart
home. ‘Good evening, mother.’ ‘Good evening, Hans. Where have you been?’
‘With Gretel.’ ‘What did you take her?’ ‘Took nothing; had something
given me.’ ‘What did Gretel give you?’ ‘Gave me a needle.’ ‘Where is the
needle, Hans?’ ‘Stuck in the hay-cart.’ ‘That was ill done, Hans. You
should have stuck the needle in your sleeve.’ ‘Never mind, I’ll do
better next time.’

‘Whither away, Hans?’ ‘To Gretel, mother.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘Oh,
I’ll behave well. Goodbye, mother.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans comes to
Gretel. ‘Good day, Gretel.’ ‘Good day, Hans. What do you bring that is
good?’ ‘I bring nothing. I want to have something given to me.’ Gretel
presents Hans with a knife. ‘Goodbye, Gretel.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans
takes the knife, sticks it in his sleeve, and goes home. ‘Good evening,
mother.’ ‘Good evening, Hans. Where have you been?’ ‘With Gretel.’ What
did you take her?’ ‘Took her nothing, she gave me something.’ ‘What did
Gretel give you?’ ‘Gave me a knife.’ ‘Where is the knife, Hans?’ ‘Stuck
in my sleeve.’ ‘That’s ill done, Hans, you should have put the knife in
your pocket.’ ‘Never mind, will do better next time.’

‘Whither away, Hans?’ ‘To Gretel, mother.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘Oh,
I’ll behave well. Goodbye, mother.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans comes to
Gretel. ‘Good day, Gretel.’ ‘Good day, Hans. What good thing do you
bring?’ ‘I bring nothing, I want something given me.’ Gretel presents
Hans with a young goat. ‘Goodbye, Gretel.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans takes
the goat, ties its legs, and puts it in his pocket. When he gets home it
is suffocated. ‘Good evening, mother.’ ‘Good evening, Hans. Where have
you been?’ ‘With Gretel.’ ‘What did you take her?’ ‘Took nothing, she
gave me something.’ ‘What did Gretel give you?’ ‘She gave me a goat.’
‘Where is the goat, Hans?’ ‘Put it in my pocket.’ ‘That was ill done,
Hans, you should have put a rope round the goat’s neck.’ ‘Never mind,
will do better next time.’

‘Whither away, Hans?’ ‘To Gretel, mother.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘Oh,
I’ll behave well. Goodbye, mother.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans comes to
Gretel. ‘Good day, Gretel.’ ‘Good day, Hans. What good thing do you
bring?’ ‘I bring nothing, I want something given me.’ Gretel presents
Hans with a piece of bacon. ‘Goodbye, Gretel.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’

Hans takes the bacon, ties it to a rope, and drags it away behind him.
The dogs come and devour the bacon. When he gets home, he has the rope
in his hand, and there is no longer anything hanging on to it. ‘Good
evening, mother.’ ‘Good evening, Hans. Where have you been?’ ‘With
Gretel.’ ‘What did you take her?’ ‘I took her nothing, she gave me
something.’ ‘What did Gretel give you?’ ‘Gave me a bit of bacon.’ ‘Where
is the bacon, Hans?’ ‘I tied it to a rope, brought it home, dogs took
it.’ ‘That was ill done, Hans, you should have carried the bacon on your
head.’ ‘Never mind, will do better next time.’

‘Whither away, Hans?’ ‘To Gretel, mother.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘I’ll
behave well. Goodbye, mother.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’ Hans comes to Gretel.
‘Good day, Gretel.’ ‘Good day, Hans, What good thing do you bring?’ ‘I
bring nothing, but would have something given.’ Gretel presents Hans
with a calf. ‘Goodbye, Gretel.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’

Hans takes the calf, puts it on his head, and the calf kicks his face.
‘Good evening, mother.’ ‘Good evening, Hans. Where have you been?’ ‘With
Gretel.’ ‘What did you take her?’ ‘I took nothing, but had something
given me.’ ‘What did Gretel give you?’ ‘A calf.’ ‘Where have you the
calf, Hans?’ ‘I set it on my head and it kicked my face.’ ‘That was
ill done, Hans, you should have led the calf, and put it in the stall.’
‘Never mind, will do better next time.’

‘Whither away, Hans?’ ‘To Gretel, mother.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘I’ll
behave well. Goodbye, mother.’ ‘Goodbye, Hans.’

Hans comes to Gretel. ‘Good day, Gretel.’ ‘Good day, Hans. What good
thing do you bring?’ ‘I bring nothing, but would have something given.’
Gretel says to Hans: ‘I will go with you.’

Hans takes Gretel, ties her to a rope, leads her to the rack, and binds
her fast. Then Hans goes to his mother. ‘Good evening, mother.’ ‘Good
evening, Hans. Where have you been?’ ‘With Gretel.’ ‘What did you take
her?’ ‘I took her nothing.’ ‘What did Gretel give you?’ ‘She gave me
nothing, she came with me.’ ‘Where have you left Gretel?’ ‘I led her by
the rope, tied her to the rack, and scattered some grass for her.’ ‘That
was ill done, Hans, you should have cast friendly eyes on her.’ ‘Never
mind, will do better.’

Hans went into the stable, cut out all the calves’ and sheep’s eyes,
and threw them in Gretel’s face. Then Gretel became angry, tore herself
loose and ran away, and was no longer the bride of Hans.




THE THREE LANGUAGES

An aged count once lived in Switzerland, who had an only son, but he
was stupid, and could learn nothing. Then said the father: ‘Hark you,
my son, try as I will I can get nothing into your head. You must go from
hence, I will give you into the care of a celebrated master, who shall
see what he can do with you.’ The youth was sent into a strange town,
and remained a whole year with the master. At the end of this time,
he came home again, and his father asked: ‘Now, my son, what have you
learnt?’ ‘Father, I have learnt what the dogs say when they bark.’ ‘Lord
have mercy on us!’ cried the father; ‘is that all you have learnt? I
will send you into another town, to another master.’ The youth was taken
thither, and stayed a year with this master likewise. When he came back
the father again asked: ‘My son, what have you learnt?’ He answered:
‘Father, I have learnt what the birds say.’ Then the father fell into a
rage and said: ‘Oh, you lost man, you have spent the precious time and
learnt nothing; are you not ashamed to appear before my eyes? I will
send you to a third master, but if you learn nothing this time also, I
will no longer be your father.’ The youth remained a whole year with the
third master also, and when he came home again, and his father inquired:
‘My son, what have you learnt?’ he answered: ‘Dear father, I have this
year learnt what the frogs croak.’ Then the father fell into the most
furious anger, sprang up, called his people thither, and said: ‘This man
is no longer my son, I drive him forth, and command you to take him
out into the forest, and kill him.’ They took him forth, but when they
should have killed him, they could not do it for pity, and let him go,
and they cut the eyes and tongue out of a deer that they might carry
them to the old man as a token.

The youth wandered on, and after some time came to a fortress where he
begged for a night’s lodging. ‘Yes,’ said the lord of the castle, ‘if
you will pass the night down there in the old tower, go thither; but I
warn you, it is at the peril of your life, for it is full of wild dogs,
which bark and howl without stopping, and at certain hours a man has to
be given to them, whom they at once devour.’ The whole district was in
sorrow and dismay because of them, and yet no one could do anything to
stop this. The youth, however, was without fear, and said: ‘Just let me
go down to the barking dogs, and give me something that I can throw to
them; they will do nothing to harm me.’ As he himself would have it so,
they gave him some food for the wild animals, and led him down to the
tower. When he went inside, the dogs did not bark at him, but wagged
their tails quite amicably around him, ate what he set before them, and
did not hurt one hair of his head. Next morning, to the astonishment of
everyone, he came out again safe and unharmed, and said to the lord of
the castle: ‘The dogs have revealed to me, in their own language, why
they dwell there, and bring evil on the land. They are bewitched, and
are obliged to watch over a great treasure which is below in the tower,
and they can have no rest until it is taken away, and I have likewise
learnt, from their discourse, how that is to be done.’ Then all who
heard this rejoiced, and the lord of the castle said he would adopt him
as a son if he accomplished it successfully. He went down again, and
as he knew what he had to do, he did it thoroughly, and brought a chest
full of gold out with him. The howling of the wild dogs was henceforth
heard no more; they had disappeared, and the country was freed from the
trouble.

After some time he took it in his head that he would travel to Rome. On
the way he passed by a marsh, in which a number of frogs were sitting
croaking. He listened to them, and when he became aware of what they
were saying, he grew very thoughtful and sad. At last he arrived in
Rome, where the Pope had just died, and there was great doubt among
the cardinals as to whom they should appoint as his successor. They at
length agreed that the person should be chosen as pope who should be
distinguished by some divine and miraculous token. And just as that was
decided on, the young count entered into the church, and suddenly two
snow-white doves flew on his shoulders and remained sitting there. The
ecclesiastics recognized therein the token from above, and asked him on
the spot if he would be pope. He was undecided, and knew not if he were
worthy of this, but the doves counselled him to do it, and at length he
said yes. Then was he anointed and consecrated, and thus was fulfilled
what he had heard from the frogs on his way, which had so affected him,
that he was to be his Holiness the Pope. Then he had to sing a mass, and
did not know one word of it, but the two doves sat continually on his
shoulders, and said it all in his ear.




THE FOX AND THE CAT

It happened that the cat met the fox in a forest, and as she thought to
herself: ‘He is clever and full of experience, and much esteemed in the
world,’ she spoke to him in a friendly way. ‘Good day, dear Mr Fox,
how are you? How is all with you? How are you getting on in these hard
times?’ The fox, full of all kinds of arrogance, looked at the cat from
head to foot, and for a long time did not know whether he would give
any answer or not. At last he said: ‘Oh, you wretched beard-cleaner, you
piebald fool, you hungry mouse-hunter, what can you be thinking of? Have
you the cheek to ask how I am getting on? What have you learnt? How
many arts do you understand?’ ‘I understand but one,’ replied the
cat, modestly. ‘What art is that?’ asked the fox. ‘When the hounds are
following me, I can spring into a tree and save myself.’ ‘Is that all?’
said the fox. ‘I am master of a hundred arts, and have into the bargain
a sackful of cunning. You make me sorry for you; come with me, I will
teach you how people get away from the hounds.’ Just then came a hunter
with four dogs. The cat sprang nimbly up a tree, and sat down at the top
of it, where the branches and foliage quite concealed her. ‘Open your
sack, Mr Fox, open your sack,’ cried the cat to him, but the dogs had
already seized him, and were holding him fast. ‘Ah, Mr Fox,’ cried the
cat. ‘You with your hundred arts are left in the lurch! Had you been
able to climb like me, you would not have lost your life.’




THE FOUR CLEVER BROTHERS

‘Dear children,’ said a poor man to his four sons, ‘I have nothing to
give you; you must go out into the wide world and try your luck. Begin
by learning some craft or another, and see how you can get on.’ So the
four brothers took their walking-sticks in their hands, and their little
bundles on their shoulders, and after bidding their father goodbye, went
all out at the gate together. When they had got on some way they came
to four crossways, each leading to a different country. Then the eldest
said, ‘Here we must part; but this day four years we will come back
to this spot, and in the meantime each must try what he can do for
himself.’

So each brother went his way; and as the eldest was hastening on a man
met him, and asked him where he was going, and what he wanted. ‘I am
going to try my luck in the world, and should like to begin by learning
some art or trade,’ answered he. ‘Then,’ said the man, ‘go with me, and
I will teach you to become the cunningest thief that ever was.’ ‘No,’
said the other, ‘that is not an honest calling, and what can one look
to earn by it in the end but the gallows?’ ‘Oh!’ said the man, ‘you need
not fear the gallows; for I will only teach you to steal what will be
fair game: I meddle with nothing but what no one else can get or care
anything about, and where no one can find you out.’ So the young man
agreed to follow his trade, and he soon showed himself so clever, that
nothing could escape him that he had once set his mind upon.

The second brother also met a man, who, when he found out what he was
setting out upon, asked him what craft he meant to follow. ‘I do not
know yet,’ said he. ‘Then come with me, and be a star-gazer. It is a
noble art, for nothing can be hidden from you, when once you understand
the stars.’ The plan pleased him much, and he soon became such a skilful
star-gazer, that when he had served out his time, and wanted to leave
his master, he gave him a glass, and said, ‘With this you can see all
that is passing in the sky and on earth, and nothing can be hidden from
you.’

The third brother met a huntsman, who took him with him, and taught him
so well all that belonged to hunting, that he became very clever in the
craft of the woods; and when he left his master he gave him a bow, and
said, ‘Whatever you shoot at with this bow you will be sure to hit.’

The youngest brother likewise met a man who asked him what he wished to
do. ‘Would not you like,’ said he, ‘to be a tailor?’ ‘Oh, no!’ said
the young man; ‘sitting cross-legged from morning to night, working
backwards and forwards with a needle and goose, will never suit me.’
‘Oh!’ answered the man, ‘that is not my sort of tailoring; come with me,
and you will learn quite another kind of craft from that.’ Not knowing
what better to do, he came into the plan, and learnt tailoring from the
beginning; and when he left his master, he gave him a needle, and said,
‘You can sew anything with this, be it as soft as an egg or as hard as
steel; and the joint will be so fine that no seam will be seen.’

After the space of four years, at the time agreed upon, the four
brothers met at the four cross-roads; and having welcomed each other,
set off towards their father’s home, where they told him all that had
happened to them, and how each had learned some craft.

Then, one day, as they were sitting before the house under a very high
tree, the father said, ‘I should like to try what each of you can do in
this way.’ So he looked up, and said to the second son, ‘At the top of
this tree there is a chaffinch’s nest; tell me how many eggs there are
in it.’ The star-gazer took his glass, looked up, and said, ‘Five.’
‘Now,’ said the father to the eldest son, ‘take away the eggs without
letting the bird that is sitting upon them and hatching them know
anything of what you are doing.’ So the cunning thief climbed up the
tree, and brought away to his father the five eggs from under the bird;
and it never saw or felt what he was doing, but kept sitting on at its
ease. Then the father took the eggs, and put one on each corner of the
table, and the fifth in the middle, and said to the huntsman, ‘Cut all
the eggs in two pieces at one shot.’ The huntsman took up his bow, and
at one shot struck all the five eggs as his father wished.

‘Now comes your turn,’ said he to the young tailor; ‘sew the eggs and
the young birds in them together again, so neatly that the shot shall
have done them no harm.’ Then the tailor took his needle, and sewed the
eggs as he was told; and when he had done, the thief was sent to take
them back to the nest, and put them under the bird without its knowing
it. Then she went on sitting, and hatched them: and in a few days they
crawled out, and had only a little red streak across their necks, where
the tailor had sewn them together.

‘Well done, sons!’ said the old man; ‘you have made good use of your
time, and learnt something worth the knowing; but I am sure I do not
know which ought to have the prize. Oh, that a time might soon come for
you to turn your skill to some account!’

Not long after this there was a great bustle in the country; for the
king’s daughter had been carried off by a mighty dragon, and the king
mourned over his loss day and night, and made it known that whoever
brought her back to him should have her for a wife. Then the four
brothers said to each other, ‘Here is a chance for us; let us try
what we can do.’ And they agreed to see whether they could not set the
princess free. ‘I will soon find out where she is, however,’ said the
star-gazer, as he looked through his glass; and he soon cried out, ‘I
see her afar off, sitting upon a rock in the sea, and I can spy the
dragon close by, guarding her.’ Then he went to the king, and asked for
a ship for himself and his brothers; and they sailed together over the
sea, till they came to the right place. There they found the princess
sitting, as the star-gazer had said, on the rock; and the dragon was
lying asleep, with his head upon her lap. ‘I dare not shoot at him,’
said the huntsman, ‘for I should kill the beautiful young lady also.’
‘Then I will try my skill,’ said the thief, and went and stole her away
from under the dragon, so quietly and gently that the beast did not know
it, but went on snoring.

Then away they hastened with her full of joy in their boat towards the
ship; but soon came the dragon roaring behind them through the air; for
he awoke and missed the princess. But when he got over the boat, and
wanted to pounce upon them and carry off the princess, the huntsman took
up his bow and shot him straight through the heart so that he fell down
dead. They were still not safe; for he was such a great beast that in
his fall he overset the boat, and they had to swim in the open sea
upon a few planks. So the tailor took his needle, and with a few large
stitches put some of the planks together; and he sat down upon these,
and sailed about and gathered up all pieces of the boat; and then tacked
them together so quickly that the boat was soon ready, and they then
reached the ship and got home safe.

When they had brought home the princess to her father, there was great
rejoicing; and he said to the four brothers, ‘One of you shall marry
her, but you must settle amongst yourselves which it is to be.’ Then
there arose a quarrel between them; and the star-gazer said, ‘If I had
not found the princess out, all your skill would have been of no use;
therefore she ought to be mine.’ ‘Your seeing her would have been of
no use,’ said the thief, ‘if I had not taken her away from the dragon;
therefore she ought to be mine.’ ‘No, she is mine,’ said the huntsman;
‘for if I had not killed the dragon, he would, after all, have torn you
and the princess into pieces.’ ‘And if I had not sewn the boat together
again,’ said the tailor, ‘you would all have been drowned, therefore she
is mine.’ Then the king put in a word, and said, ‘Each of you is right;
and as all cannot have the young lady, the best way is for neither of
you to have her: for the truth is, there is somebody she likes a great
deal better. But to make up for your loss, I will give each of you, as a
reward for his skill, half a kingdom.’ So the brothers agreed that this
plan would be much better than either quarrelling or marrying a lady who
had no mind to have them. And the king then gave to each half a kingdom,
as he had said; and they lived very happily the rest of their days, and
took good care of their father; and somebody took better care of the
young lady, than to let either the dragon or one of the craftsmen have
her again.




LILY AND THE LION

A merchant, who had three daughters, was once setting out upon a
journey; but before he went he asked each daughter what gift he should
bring back for her. The eldest wished for pearls; the second for jewels;
but the third, who was called Lily, said, ‘Dear father, bring me a
rose.’ Now it was no easy task to find a rose, for it was the middle
of winter; yet as she was his prettiest daughter, and was very fond of
flowers, her father said he would try what he could do. So he kissed all
three, and bid them goodbye.

And when the time came for him to go home, he had bought pearls and
jewels for the two eldest, but he had sought everywhere in vain for the
rose; and when he went into any garden and asked for such a thing, the
people laughed at him, and asked him whether he thought roses grew in
snow. This grieved him very much, for Lily was his dearest child; and as
he was journeying home, thinking what he should bring her, he came to a
fine castle; and around the castle was a garden, in one half of which it
seemed to be summer-time and in the other half winter. On one side the
finest flowers were in full bloom, and on the other everything looked
dreary and buried in the snow. ‘A lucky hit!’ said he, as he called to
his servant, and told him to go to a beautiful bed of roses that was
there, and bring him away one of the finest flowers.

This done, they were riding away well pleased, when up sprang a fierce
lion, and roared out, ‘Whoever has stolen my roses shall be eaten up
alive!’ Then the man said, ‘I knew not that the garden belonged to you;
can nothing save my life?’ ‘No!’ said the lion, ‘nothing, unless you
undertake to give me whatever meets you on your return home; if you
agree to this, I will give you your life, and the rose too for your
daughter.’ But the man was unwilling to do so and said, ‘It may be my
youngest daughter, who loves me most, and always runs to meet me when
I go home.’ Then the servant was greatly frightened, and said, ‘It may
perhaps be only a cat or a dog.’ And at last the man yielded with a
heavy heart, and took the rose; and said he would give the lion whatever
should meet him first on his return.

And as he came near home, it was Lily, his youngest and dearest
daughter, that met him; she came running, and kissed him, and welcomed
him home; and when she saw that he had brought her the rose, she was
still more glad. But her father began to be very sorrowful, and to weep,
saying, ‘Alas, my dearest child! I have bought this flower at a high
price, for I have said I would give you to a wild lion; and when he has
you, he will tear you in pieces, and eat you.’ Then he told her all that
had happened, and said she should not go, let what would happen.

But she comforted him, and said, ‘Dear father, the word you have given
must be kept; I will go to the lion, and soothe him: perhaps he will let
me come safe home again.’

The next morning she asked the way she was to go, and took leave of her
father, and went forth with a bold heart into the wood. But the lion was
an enchanted prince. By day he and all his court were lions, but in the
evening they took their right forms again. And when Lily came to the
castle, he welcomed her so courteously that she agreed to marry him. The
wedding-feast was held, and they lived happily together a long time. The
prince was only to be seen as soon as evening came, and then he held his
court; but every morning he left his bride, and went away by himself,
she knew not whither, till the night came again.

After some time he said to her, ‘Tomorrow there will be a great feast in
your father’s house, for your eldest sister is to be married; and if
you wish to go and visit her my lions shall lead you thither.’ Then she
rejoiced much at the thoughts of seeing her father once more, and set
out with the lions; and everyone was overjoyed to see her, for they had
thought her dead long since. But she told them how happy she was, and
stayed till the feast was over, and then went back to the wood.

Her second sister was soon after married, and when Lily was asked to
go to the wedding, she said to the prince, ‘I will not go alone this
time--you must go with me.’ But he would not, and said that it would be
a very hazardous thing; for if the least ray of the torch-light should
fall upon him his enchantment would become still worse, for he should be
changed into a dove, and be forced to wander about the world for seven
long years. However, she gave him no rest, and said she would take care
no light should fall upon him. So at last they set out together, and
took with them their little child; and she chose a large hall with thick
walls for him to sit in while the wedding-torches were lighted; but,
unluckily, no one saw that there was a crack in the door. Then the
wedding was held with great pomp, but as the train came from the church,
and passed with the torches before the hall, a very small ray of light
fell upon the prince. In a moment he disappeared, and when his wife came
in and looked for him, she found only a white dove; and it said to her,
‘Seven years must I fly up and down over the face of the earth, but
every now and then I will let fall a white feather, that will show you
the way I am going; follow it, and at last you may overtake and set me
free.’

This said, he flew out at the door, and poor Lily followed; and every
now and then a white feather fell, and showed her the way she was to
journey. Thus she went roving on through the wide world, and looked
neither to the right hand nor to the left, nor took any rest, for seven
years. Then she began to be glad, and thought to herself that the time
was fast coming when all her troubles should end; yet repose was still
far off, for one day as she was travelling on she missed the white
feather, and when she lifted up her eyes she could nowhere see the dove.
‘Now,’ thought she to herself, ‘no aid of man can be of use to me.’ So
she went to the sun and said, ‘Thou shinest everywhere, on the hill’s
top and the valley’s depth--hast thou anywhere seen my white dove?’
‘No,’ said the sun, ‘I have not seen it; but I will give thee a
casket--open it when thy hour of need comes.’

So she thanked the sun, and went on her way till eventide; and when
the moon arose, she cried unto it, and said, ‘Thou shinest through the
night, over field and grove--hast thou nowhere seen my white dove?’
‘No,’ said the moon, ‘I cannot help thee but I will give thee an
egg--break it when need comes.’

Then she thanked the moon, and went on till the night-wind blew; and she
raised up her voice to it, and said, ‘Thou blowest through every tree
and under every leaf--hast thou not seen my white dove?’ ‘No,’ said the
night-wind, ‘but I will ask three other winds; perhaps they have seen
it.’ Then the east wind and the west wind came, and said they too had
not seen it, but the south wind said, ‘I have seen the white dove--he
has fled to the Red Sea, and is changed once more into a lion, for the
seven years are passed away, and there he is fighting with a dragon;
and the dragon is an enchanted princess, who seeks to separate him from
you.’ Then the night-wind said, ‘I will give thee counsel. Go to the
Red Sea; on the right shore stand many rods--count them, and when thou
comest to the eleventh, break it off, and smite the dragon with it; and
so the lion will have the victory, and both of them will appear to you
in their own forms. Then look round and thou wilt see a griffin, winged
like bird, sitting by the Red Sea; jump on to his back with thy beloved
one as quickly as possible, and he will carry you over the waters to
your home. I will also give thee this nut,’ continued the night-wind.
‘When you are half-way over, throw it down, and out of the waters will
immediately spring up a high nut-tree on which the griffin will be able
to rest, otherwise he would not have the strength to bear you the whole
way; if, therefore, thou dost forget to throw down the nut, he will let
you both fall into the sea.’

So our poor wanderer went forth, and found all as the night-wind had
said; and she plucked the eleventh rod, and smote the dragon, and the
lion forthwith became a prince, and the dragon a princess again. But
no sooner was the princess released from the spell, than she seized
the prince by the arm and sprang on to the griffin’s back, and went off
carrying the prince away with her.

Thus the unhappy traveller was again forsaken and forlorn; but she
took heart and said, ‘As far as the wind blows, and so long as the cock
crows, I will journey on, till I find him once again.’ She went on for
a long, long way, till at length she came to the castle whither the
princess had carried the prince; and there was a feast got ready, and
she heard that the wedding was about to be held. ‘Heaven aid me now!’
said she; and she took the casket that the sun had given her, and found
that within it lay a dress as dazzling as the sun itself. So she put it
on, and went into the palace, and all the people gazed upon her; and
the dress pleased the bride so much that she asked whether it was to be
sold. ‘Not for gold and silver.’ said she, ‘but for flesh and blood.’
The princess asked what she meant, and she said, ‘Let me speak with the
bridegroom this night in his chamber, and I will give thee the dress.’
At last the princess agreed, but she told her chamberlain to give the
prince a sleeping draught, that he might not hear or see her. When
evening came, and the prince had fallen asleep, she was led into
his chamber, and she sat herself down at his feet, and said: ‘I have
followed thee seven years. I have been to the sun, the moon, and the
night-wind, to seek thee, and at last I have helped thee to overcome
the dragon. Wilt thou then forget me quite?’ But the prince all the time
slept so soundly, that her voice only passed over him, and seemed like
the whistling of the wind among the fir-trees.

Then poor Lily was led away, and forced to give up the golden dress; and
when she saw that there was no help for her, she went out into a meadow,
and sat herself down and wept. But as she sat she bethought herself of
the egg that the moon had given her; and when she broke it, there ran
out a hen and twelve chickens of pure gold, that played about, and then
nestled under the old one’s wings, so as to form the most beautiful
sight in the world. And she rose up and drove them before her, till the
bride saw them from her window, and was so pleased that she came forth
and asked her if she would sell the brood. ‘Not for gold or silver, but
for flesh and blood: let me again this evening speak with the bridegroom
in his chamber, and I will give thee the whole brood.’

Then the princess thought to betray her as before, and agreed to
what she asked: but when the prince went to his chamber he asked
the chamberlain why the wind had whistled so in the night. And the
chamberlain told him all--how he had given him a sleeping draught, and
how a poor maiden had come and spoken to him in his chamber, and was
to come again that night. Then the prince took care to throw away the
sleeping draught; and when Lily came and began again to tell him what
woes had befallen her, and how faithful and true to him she had been,
he knew his beloved wife’s voice, and sprang up, and said, ‘You have
awakened me as from a dream, for the strange princess had thrown a spell
around me, so that I had altogether forgotten you; but Heaven hath sent
you to me in a lucky hour.’

And they stole away out of the palace by night unawares, and seated
themselves on the griffin, who flew back with them over the Red Sea.
When they were half-way across Lily let the nut fall into the water,
and immediately a large nut-tree arose from the sea, whereon the griffin
rested for a while, and then carried them safely home. There they found
their child, now grown up to be comely and fair; and after all their
troubles they lived happily together to the end of their days.




THE FOX AND THE HORSE

A farmer had a horse that had been an excellent faithful servant to
him: but he was now grown too old to work; so the farmer would give him
nothing more to eat, and said, ‘I want you no longer, so take yourself
off out of my stable; I shall not take you back again until you are
stronger than a lion.’ Then he opened the door and turned him adrift.

The poor horse was very melancholy, and wandered up and down in the
wood, seeking some little shelter from the cold wind and rain. Presently
a fox met him: ‘What’s the matter, my friend?’ said he, ‘why do you hang
down your head and look so lonely and woe-begone?’ ‘Ah!’ replied the
horse, ‘justice and avarice never dwell in one house; my master has
forgotten all that I have done for him so many years, and because I
can no longer work he has turned me adrift, and says unless I become
stronger than a lion he will not take me back again; what chance can I
have of that? he knows I have none, or he would not talk so.’

However, the fox bid him be of good cheer, and said, ‘I will help you;
lie down there, stretch yourself out quite stiff, and pretend to be
dead.’ The horse did as he was told, and the fox went straight to the
lion who lived in a cave close by, and said to him, ‘A little way off
lies a dead horse; come with me and you may make an excellent meal of
his carcase.’ The lion was greatly pleased, and set off immediately; and
when they came to the horse, the fox said, ‘You will not be able to eat
him comfortably here; I’ll tell you what--I will tie you fast to
his tail, and then you can draw him to your den, and eat him at your
leisure.’

This advice pleased the lion, so he laid himself down quietly for the
fox to make him fast to the horse. But the fox managed to tie his legs
together and bound all so hard and fast that with all his strength he
could not set himself free. When the work was done, the fox clapped the
horse on the shoulder, and said, ‘Jip! Dobbin! Jip!’ Then up he sprang,
and moved off, dragging the lion behind him. The beast began to roar
and bellow, till all the birds of the wood flew away for fright; but the
horse let him sing on, and made his way quietly over the fields to his
master’s house.

‘Here he is, master,’ said he, ‘I have got the better of him’: and when
the farmer saw his old servant, his heart relented, and he said. ‘Thou
shalt stay in thy stable and be well taken care of.’ And so the poor old
horse had plenty to eat, and lived--till he died.




THE BLUE LIGHT

There was once upon a time a soldier who for many years had served the
king faithfully, but when the war came to an end could serve no longer
because of the many wounds which he had received. The king said to him:
‘You may return to your home, I need you no longer, and you will not
receive any more money, for he only receives wages who renders me
service for them.’ Then the soldier did not know how to earn a living,
went away greatly troubled, and walked the whole day, until in the
evening he entered a forest. When darkness came on, he saw a light,
which he went up to, and came to a house wherein lived a witch. ‘Do give
me one night’s lodging, and a little to eat and drink,’ said he to
her, ‘or I shall starve.’ ‘Oho!’ she answered, ‘who gives anything to a
run-away soldier? Yet will I be compassionate, and take you in, if you
will do what I wish.’ ‘What do you wish?’ said the soldier. ‘That you
should dig all round my garden for me, tomorrow.’ The soldier consented,
and next day laboured with all his strength, but could not finish it by
the evening. ‘I see well enough,’ said the witch, ‘that you can do no
more today, but I will keep you yet another night, in payment for
which you must tomorrow chop me a load of wood, and chop it small.’ The
soldier spent the whole day in doing it, and in the evening the witch
proposed that he should stay one night more. ‘Tomorrow, you shall only
do me a very trifling piece of work. Behind my house, there is an old
dry well, into which my light has fallen, it burns blue, and never goes
out, and you shall bring it up again.’ Next day the old woman took him
to the well, and let him down in a basket. He found the blue light, and
made her a signal to draw him up again. She did draw him up, but when he
came near the edge, she stretched down her hand and wanted to take the
blue light away from him. ‘No,’ said he, perceiving her evil intention,
‘I will not give you the light until I am standing with both feet upon
the ground.’ The witch fell into a passion, let him fall again into the
well, and went away.

The poor soldier fell without injury on the moist ground, and the blue
light went on burning, but of what use was that to him? He saw very well
that he could not escape death. He sat for a while very sorrowfully,
then suddenly he felt in his pocket and found his tobacco pipe, which
was still half full. ‘This shall be my last pleasure,’ thought he,
pulled it out, lit it at the blue light and began to smoke. When the
smoke had circled about the cavern, suddenly a little black dwarf stood
before him, and said: ‘Lord, what are your commands?’ ‘What my commands
are?’ replied the soldier, quite astonished. ‘I must do everything you
bid me,’ said the little man. ‘Good,’ said the soldier; ‘then in the
first place help me out of this well.’ The little man took him by the
hand, and led him through an underground passage, but he did not forget
to take the blue light with him. On the way the dwarf showed him the
treasures which the witch had collected and hidden there, and the
soldier took as much gold as he could carry. When he was above, he said
to the little man: ‘Now go and bind the old witch, and carry her before
the judge.’ In a short time she came by like the wind, riding on a wild
tom-cat and screaming frightfully. Nor was it long before the little man
reappeared. ‘It is all done,’ said he, ‘and the witch is already hanging
on the gallows. What further commands has my lord?’ inquired the dwarf.
‘At this moment, none,’ answered the soldier; ‘you can return home, only
be at hand immediately, if I summon you.’ ‘Nothing more is needed than
that you should light your pipe at the blue light, and I will appear
before you at once.’ Thereupon he vanished from his sight.

The soldier returned to the town from which he came. He went to the
best inn, ordered himself handsome clothes, and then bade the landlord
furnish him a room as handsome as possible. When it was ready and the
soldier had taken possession of it, he summoned the little black manikin
and said: ‘I have served the king faithfully, but he has dismissed me,
and left me to hunger, and now I want to take my revenge.’ ‘What am I to
do?’ asked the little man. ‘Late at night, when the king’s daughter is
in bed, bring her here in her sleep, she shall do servant’s work for
me.’ The manikin said: ‘That is an easy thing for me to do, but a very
dangerous thing for you, for if it is discovered, you will fare ill.’
When twelve o’clock had struck, the door sprang open, and the manikin
carried in the princess. ‘Aha! are you there?’ cried the soldier, ‘get
to your work at once! Fetch the broom and sweep the chamber.’ When
she had done this, he ordered her to come to his chair, and then he
stretched out his feet and said: ‘Pull off my boots,’ and then he
threw them in her face, and made her pick them up again, and clean
and brighten them. She, however, did everything he bade her, without
opposition, silently and with half-shut eyes. When the first cock
crowed, the manikin carried her back to the royal palace, and laid her
in her bed.

Next morning when the princess arose she went to her father, and told
him that she had had a very strange dream. ‘I was carried through the
streets with the rapidity of lightning,’ said she, ‘and taken into a
soldier’s room, and I had to wait upon him like a servant, sweep his
room, clean his boots, and do all kinds of menial work. It was only a
dream, and yet I am just as tired as if I really had done everything.’
‘The dream may have been true,’ said the king. ‘I will give you a piece
of advice. Fill your pocket full of peas, and make a small hole in the
pocket, and then if you are carried away again, they will fall out and
leave a track in the streets.’ But unseen by the king, the manikin was
standing beside him when he said that, and heard all. At night when
the sleeping princess was again carried through the streets, some peas
certainly did fall out of her pocket, but they made no track, for the
crafty manikin had just before scattered peas in every street there
was. And again the princess was compelled to do servant’s work until
cock-crow.

Next morning the king sent his people out to seek the track, but it was
all in vain, for in every street poor children were sitting, picking up
peas, and saying: ‘It must have rained peas, last night.’ ‘We must think
of something else,’ said the king; ‘keep your shoes on when you go to
bed, and before you come back from the place where you are taken, hide
one of them there, I will soon contrive to find it.’ The black manikin
heard this plot, and at night when the soldier again ordered him to
bring the princess, revealed it to him, and told him that he knew of no
expedient to counteract this stratagem, and that if the shoe were found
in the soldier’s house it would go badly with him. ‘Do what I bid you,’
replied the soldier, and again this third night the princess was obliged
to work like a servant, but before she went away, she hid her shoe under
the bed.

Next morning the king had the entire town searched for his daughter’s
shoe. It was found at the soldier’s, and the soldier himself, who at the
entreaty of the dwarf had gone outside the gate, was soon brought back,
and thrown into prison. In his flight he had forgotten the most valuable
things he had, the blue light and the gold, and had only one ducat in
his pocket. And now loaded with chains, he was standing at the window of
his dungeon, when he chanced to see one of his comrades passing by. The
soldier tapped at the pane of glass, and when this man came up, said to
him: ‘Be so kind as to fetch me the small bundle I have left lying in
the inn, and I will give you a ducat for doing it.’ His comrade ran
thither and brought him what he wanted. As soon as the soldier was alone
again, he lighted his pipe and summoned the black manikin. ‘Have no
fear,’ said the latter to his master. ‘Go wheresoever they take you, and
let them do what they will, only take the blue light with you.’ Next day
the soldier was tried, and though he had done nothing wicked, the judge
condemned him to death. When he was led forth to die, he begged a last
favour of the king. ‘What is it?’ asked the king. ‘That I may smoke one
more pipe on my way.’ ‘You may smoke three,’ answered the king, ‘but do
not imagine that I will spare your life.’ Then the soldier pulled out
his pipe and lighted it at the blue light, and as soon as a few wreaths
of smoke had ascended, the manikin was there with a small cudgel in his
hand, and said: ‘What does my lord command?’ ‘Strike down to earth that
false judge there, and his constable, and spare not the king who has
treated me so ill.’ Then the manikin fell on them like lightning,
darting this way and that way, and whosoever was so much as touched by
his cudgel fell to earth, and did not venture to stir again. The king
was terrified; he threw himself on the soldier’s mercy, and merely to
be allowed to live at all, gave him his kingdom for his own, and his
daughter to wife.




THE RAVEN

There was once a queen who had a little daughter, still too young to run
alone. One day the child was very troublesome, and the mother could not
quiet it, do what she would. She grew impatient, and seeing the ravens
flying round the castle, she opened the window, and said: ‘I wish you
were a raven and would fly away, then I should have a little peace.’
Scarcely were the words out of her mouth, when the child in her arms was
turned into a raven, and flew away from her through the open window. The
bird took its flight to a dark wood and remained there for a long time,
and meanwhile the parents could hear nothing of their child.

Long after this, a man was making his way through the wood when he heard
a raven calling, and he followed the sound of the voice. As he drew
near, the raven said, ‘I am by birth a king’s daughter, but am now under
the spell of some enchantment; you can, however, set me free.’ ‘What
am I to do?’ he asked. She replied, ‘Go farther into the wood until you
come to a house, wherein lives an old woman; she will offer you food and
drink, but you must not take of either; if you do, you will fall into
a deep sleep, and will not be able to help me. In the garden behind the
house is a large tan-heap, and on that you must stand and watch for me.
I shall drive there in my carriage at two o’clock in the afternoon for
three successive days; the first day it will be drawn by four white, the
second by four chestnut, and the last by four black horses; but if you
fail to keep awake and I find you sleeping, I shall not be set free.’

The man promised to do all that she wished, but the raven said, ‘Alas! I
know even now that you will take something from the woman and be unable
to save me.’ The man assured her again that he would on no account touch
a thing to eat or drink.

When he came to the house and went inside, the old woman met him, and
said, ‘Poor man! how tired you are! Come in and rest and let me give you
something to eat and drink.’

‘No,’ answered the man, ‘I will neither eat not drink.’

But she would not leave him alone, and urged him saying, ‘If you will
not eat anything, at least you might take a draught of wine; one drink
counts for nothing,’ and at last he allowed himself to be persuaded, and
drank.

As it drew towards the appointed hour, he went outside into the garden
and mounted the tan-heap to await the raven. Suddenly a feeling of
fatigue came over him, and unable to resist it, he lay down for a little
while, fully determined, however, to keep awake; but in another minute
his eyes closed of their own accord, and he fell into such a deep sleep,
that all the noises in the world would not have awakened him. At two
o’clock the raven came driving along, drawn by her four white horses;
but even before she reached the spot, she said to herself, sighing, ‘I
know he has fallen asleep.’ When she entered the garden, there she found
him as she had feared, lying on the tan-heap, fast asleep. She got out
of her carriage and went to him; she called him and shook him, but it
was all in vain, he still continued sleeping.

The next day at noon, the old woman came to him again with food and
drink which he at first refused. At last, overcome by her persistent
entreaties that he would take something, he lifted the glass and drank
again.

Towards two o’clock he went into the garden and on to the tan-heap to
watch for the raven. He had not been there long before he began to feel
so tired that his limbs seemed hardly able to support him, and he could
not stand upright any longer; so again he lay down and fell fast asleep.
As the raven drove along her four chestnut horses, she said sorrowfully
to herself, ‘I know he has fallen asleep.’ She went as before to look
for him, but he slept, and it was impossible to awaken him.

The following day the old woman said to him, ‘What is this? You are not
eating or drinking anything, do you want to kill yourself?’

He answered, ‘I may not and will not either eat or drink.’

But she put down the dish of food and the glass of wine in front of him,
and when he smelt the wine, he was unable to resist the temptation, and
took a deep draught.

When the hour came round again he went as usual on to the tan-heap in
the garden to await the king’s daughter, but he felt even more overcome
with weariness than on the two previous days, and throwing himself down,
he slept like a log. At two o’clock the raven could be seen approaching,
and this time her coachman and everything about her, as well as her
horses, were black.

She was sadder than ever as she drove along, and said mournfully, ‘I
know he has fallen asleep, and will not be able to set me free.’ She
found him sleeping heavily, and all her efforts to awaken him were of no
avail. Then she placed beside him a loaf, and some meat, and a flask
of wine, of such a kind, that however much he took of them, they would
never grow less. After that she drew a gold ring, on which her name was
engraved, off her finger, and put it upon one of his. Finally, she laid
a letter near him, in which, after giving him particulars of the food
and drink she had left for him, she finished with the following words:
‘I see that as long as you remain here you will never be able to set me
free; if, however, you still wish to do so, come to the golden castle
of Stromberg; this is well within your power to accomplish.’ She then
returned to her carriage and drove to the golden castle of Stromberg.

When the man awoke and found that he had been sleeping, he was grieved
at heart, and said, ‘She has no doubt been here and driven away again,
and it is now too late for me to save her.’ Then his eyes fell on the
things which were lying beside him; he read the letter, and knew from it
all that had happened. He rose up without delay, eager to start on his
way and to reach the castle of Stromberg, but he had no idea in which
direction he ought to go. He travelled about a long time in search of it
and came at last to a dark forest, through which he went on walking for
fourteen days and still could not find a way out. Once more the night
came on, and worn out he lay down under a bush and fell asleep. Again
the next day he pursued his way through the forest, and that evening,
thinking to rest again, he lay down as before, but he heard such a
howling and wailing that he found it impossible to sleep. He waited till
it was darker and people had begun to light up their houses, and then
seeing a little glimmer ahead of him, he went towards it.

He found that the light came from a house which looked smaller than
it really was, from the contrast of its height with that of an immense
giant who stood in front of it. He thought to himself, ‘If the giant
sees me going in, my life will not be worth much.’ However, after a
while he summoned up courage and went forward. When the giant saw him,
he called out, ‘It is lucky for that you have come, for I have not had
anything to eat for a long time. I can have you now for my supper.’ ‘I
would rather you let that alone,’ said the man, ‘for I do not willingly
give myself up to be eaten; if you are wanting food I have enough to
satisfy your hunger.’ ‘If that is so,’ replied the giant, ‘I will leave
you in peace; I only thought of eating you because I had nothing else.’

So they went indoors together and sat down, and the man brought out the
bread, meat, and wine, which although he had eaten and drunk of them,
were still unconsumed. The giant was pleased with the good cheer, and
ate and drank to his heart’s content. When he had finished his supper
the man asked him if he could direct him to the castle of Stromberg.
The giant said, ‘I will look on my map; on it are marked all the towns,
villages, and houses.’ So he fetched his map, and looked for the castle,
but could not find it. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I have larger maps
upstairs in the cupboard, we will look on those,’ but they searched in
vain, for the castle was not marked even on these. The man now thought
he should like to continue his journey, but the giant begged him to
remain for a day or two longer until the return of his brother, who was
away in search of provisions. When the brother came home, they asked him
about the castle of Stromberg, and he told them he would look on his own
maps as soon as he had eaten and appeased his hunger. Accordingly, when
he had finished his supper, they all went up together to his room and
looked through his maps, but the castle was not to be found. Then he
fetched other older maps, and they went on looking for the castle until
at last they found it, but it was many thousand miles away. ‘How shall I
be able to get there?’ asked the man. ‘I have two hours to spare,’ said
the giant, ‘and I will carry you into the neighbourhood of the castle; I
must then return to look after the child who is in our care.’

The giant, thereupon, carried the man to within about a hundred leagues
of the castle, where he left him, saying, ‘You will be able to walk the
remainder of the way yourself.’ The man journeyed on day and night
till he reached the golden castle of Stromberg. He found it situated,
however, on a glass mountain, and looking up from the foot he saw the
enchanted maiden drive round her castle and then go inside. He was
overjoyed to see her, and longed to get to the top of the mountain, but
the sides were so slippery that every time he attempted to climb he
fell back again. When he saw that it was impossible to reach her, he was
greatly grieved, and said to himself, ‘I will remain here and wait for
her,’ so he built himself a little hut, and there he sat and watched for
a whole year, and every day he saw the king’s daughter driving round her
castle, but still was unable to get nearer to her.

Looking out from his hut one day he saw three robbers fighting and he
called out to them, ‘God be with you.’ They stopped when they heard the
call, but looking round and seeing nobody, they went on again with their
fighting, which now became more furious. ‘God be with you,’ he cried
again, and again they paused and looked about, but seeing no one went
back to their fighting. A third time he called out, ‘God be with you,’
and then thinking he should like to know the cause of dispute between
the three men, he went out and asked them why they were fighting so
angrily with one another. One of them said that he had found a stick,
and that he had but to strike it against any door through which he
wished to pass, and it immediately flew open. Another told him that he
had found a cloak which rendered its wearer invisible; and the third had
caught a horse which would carry its rider over any obstacle, and even
up the glass mountain. They had been unable to decide whether they
would keep together and have the things in common, or whether they would
separate. On hearing this, the man said, ‘I will give you something in
exchange for those three things; not money, for that I have not got,
but something that is of far more value. I must first, however, prove
whether all you have told me about your three things is true.’ The
robbers, therefore, made him get on the horse, and handed him the stick
and the cloak, and when he had put this round him he was no longer
visible. Then he fell upon them with the stick and beat them one after
another, crying, ‘There, you idle vagabonds, you have got what you
deserve; are you satisfied now!’

After this he rode up the glass mountain. When he reached the gate of
the castle, he found it closed, but he gave it a blow with his stick,
and it flew wide open at once and he passed through. He mounted the
steps and entered the room where the maiden was sitting, with a golden
goblet full of wine in front of her. She could not see him for he still
wore his cloak. He took the ring which she had given him off his finger,
and threw it into the goblet, so that it rang as it touched the bottom.
‘That is my own ring,’ she exclaimed, ‘and if that is so the man must
also be here who is coming to set me free.’

She sought for him about the castle, but could find him nowhere.
Meanwhile he had gone outside again and mounted his horse and thrown off
the cloak. When therefore she came to the castle gate she saw him, and
cried aloud for joy. Then he dismounted and took her in his arms; and
she kissed him, and said, ‘Now you have indeed set me free, and tomorrow
we will celebrate our marriage.’




THE GOLDEN GOOSE

There was a man who had three sons, the youngest of whom was called
Dummling,[*] and was despised, mocked, and sneered at on every occasion.

It happened that the eldest wanted to go into the forest to hew wood,
and before he went his mother gave him a beautiful sweet cake and a
bottle of wine in order that he might not suffer from hunger or thirst.

When he entered the forest he met a little grey-haired old man who bade
him good day, and said: ‘Do give me a piece of cake out of your pocket,
and let me have a draught of your wine; I am so hungry and thirsty.’ But
the clever son answered: ‘If I give you my cake and wine, I shall have
none for myself; be off with you,’ and he left the little man standing
and went on.

But when he began to hew down a tree, it was not long before he made a
false stroke, and the axe cut him in the arm, so that he had to go home
and have it bound up. And this was the little grey man’s doing.

After this the second son went into the forest, and his mother gave him,
like the eldest, a cake and a bottle of wine. The little old grey man
met him likewise, and asked him for a piece of cake and a drink of wine.
But the second son, too, said sensibly enough: ‘What I give you will be
taken away from myself; be off!’ and he left the little man standing and
went on. His punishment, however, was not delayed; when he had made a
few blows at the tree he struck himself in the leg, so that he had to be
carried home.

Then Dummling said: ‘Father, do let me go and cut wood.’ The father
answered: ‘Your brothers have hurt themselves with it, leave it alone,
you do not understand anything about it.’ But Dummling begged so long
that at last he said: ‘Just go then, you will get wiser by hurting
yourself.’ His mother gave him a cake made with water and baked in the
cinders, and with it a bottle of sour beer.

When he came to the forest the little old grey man met him likewise,
and greeting him, said: ‘Give me a piece of your cake and a drink out
of your bottle; I am so hungry and thirsty.’ Dummling answered: ‘I have
only cinder-cake and sour beer; if that pleases you, we will sit
down and eat.’ So they sat down, and when Dummling pulled out his
cinder-cake, it was a fine sweet cake, and the sour beer had become good
wine. So they ate and drank, and after that the little man said: ‘Since
you have a good heart, and are willing to divide what you have, I will
give you good luck. There stands an old tree, cut it down, and you will
find something at the roots.’ Then the little man took leave of him.

Dummling went and cut down the tree, and when it fell there was a goose
sitting in the roots with feathers of pure gold. He lifted her up, and
taking her with him, went to an inn where he thought he would stay the
night. Now the host had three daughters, who saw the goose and were
curious to know what such a wonderful bird might be, and would have
liked to have one of its golden feathers.

The eldest thought: ‘I shall soon find an opportunity of pulling out a
feather,’ and as soon as Dummling had gone out she seized the goose by
the wing, but her finger and hand remained sticking fast to it.

The second came soon afterwards, thinking only of how she might get a
feather for herself, but she had scarcely touched her sister than she
was held fast.

At last the third also came with the like intent, and the others
screamed out: ‘Keep away; for goodness’ sake keep away!’ But she did
not understand why she was to keep away. ‘The others are there,’ she
thought, ‘I may as well be there too,’ and ran to them; but as soon as
she had touched her sister, she remained sticking fast to her. So they
had to spend the night with the goose.

The next morning Dummling took the goose under his arm and set out,
without troubling himself about the three girls who were hanging on to
it. They were obliged to run after him continually, now left, now right,
wherever his legs took him.

In the middle of the fields the parson met them, and when he saw the
procession he said: ‘For shame, you good-for-nothing girls, why are you
running across the fields after this young man? Is that seemly?’ At the
same time he seized the youngest by the hand in order to pull her away,
but as soon as he touched her he likewise stuck fast, and was himself
obliged to run behind.

Before long the sexton came by and saw his master, the parson, running
behind three girls. He was astonished at this and called out: ‘Hi!
your reverence, whither away so quickly? Do not forget that we have a
christening today!’ and running after him he took him by the sleeve, but
was also held fast to it.

Whilst the five were trotting thus one behind the other, two labourers
came with their hoes from the fields; the parson called out to them
and begged that they would set him and the sexton free. But they had
scarcely touched the sexton when they were held fast, and now there were
seven of them running behind Dummling and the goose.

Soon afterwards he came to a city, where a king ruled who had a daughter
who was so serious that no one could make her laugh. So he had put forth
a decree that whosoever should be able to make her laugh should marry
her. When Dummling heard this, he went with his goose and all her train
before the king’s daughter, and as soon as she saw the seven people
running on and on, one behind the other, she began to laugh quite
loudly, and as if she would never stop. Thereupon Dummling asked to have
her for his wife; but the king did not like the son-in-law, and made all
manner of excuses and said he must first produce a man who could drink
a cellarful of wine. Dummling thought of the little grey man, who could
certainly help him; so he went into the forest, and in the same place
where he had felled the tree, he saw a man sitting, who had a very
sorrowful face. Dummling asked him what he was taking to heart so
sorely, and he answered: ‘I have such a great thirst and cannot quench
it; cold water I cannot stand, a barrel of wine I have just emptied, but
that to me is like a drop on a hot stone!’

‘There, I can help you,’ said Dummling, ‘just come with me and you shall
be satisfied.’

He led him into the king’s cellar, and the man bent over the huge
barrels, and drank and drank till his loins hurt, and before the day was
out he had emptied all the barrels. Then Dummling asked once more
for his bride, but the king was vexed that such an ugly fellow, whom
everyone called Dummling, should take away his daughter, and he made a
new condition; he must first find a man who could eat a whole mountain
of bread. Dummling did not think long, but went straight into the
forest, where in the same place there sat a man who was tying up his
body with a strap, and making an awful face, and saying: ‘I have eaten a
whole ovenful of rolls, but what good is that when one has such a hunger
as I? My stomach remains empty, and I must tie myself up if I am not to
die of hunger.’

At this Dummling was glad, and said: ‘Get up and come with me; you shall
eat yourself full.’ He led him to the king’s palace where all the
flour in the whole Kingdom was collected, and from it he caused a huge
mountain of bread to be baked. The man from the forest stood before it,
began to eat, and by the end of one day the whole mountain had vanished.
Then Dummling for the third time asked for his bride; but the king again
sought a way out, and ordered a ship which could sail on land and on
water. ‘As soon as you come sailing back in it,’ said he, ‘you shall
have my daughter for wife.’

Dummling went straight into the forest, and there sat the little grey
man to whom he had given his cake. When he heard what Dummling wanted,
he said: ‘Since you have given me to eat and to drink, I will give you
the ship; and I do all this because you once were kind to me.’ Then he
gave him the ship which could sail on land and water, and when the king
saw that, he could no longer prevent him from having his daughter. The
wedding was celebrated, and after the king’s death, Dummling inherited
his kingdom and lived for a long time contentedly with his wife.

     [*] Simpleton




THE WATER OF LIFE

Long before you or I were born, there reigned, in a country a great way
off, a king who had three sons. This king once fell very ill--so ill
that nobody thought he could live. His sons were very much grieved
at their father’s sickness; and as they were walking together very
mournfully in the garden of the palace, a little old man met them and
asked what was the matter. They told him that their father was very ill,
and that they were afraid nothing could save him. ‘I know what would,’
said the little old man; ‘it is the Water of Life. If he could have a
draught of it he would be well again; but it is very hard to get.’ Then
the eldest son said, ‘I will soon find it’: and he went to the sick
king, and begged that he might go in search of the Water of Life, as
it was the only thing that could save him. ‘No,’ said the king. ‘I had
rather die than place you in such great danger as you must meet with in
your journey.’ But he begged so hard that the king let him go; and the
prince thought to himself, ‘If I bring my father this water, he will
make me sole heir to his kingdom.’

Then he set out: and when he had gone on his way some time he came to a
deep valley, overhung with rocks and woods; and as he looked around, he
saw standing above him on one of the rocks a little ugly dwarf, with a
sugarloaf cap and a scarlet cloak; and the dwarf called to him and said,
‘Prince, whither so fast?’ ‘What is that to thee, you ugly imp?’ said
the prince haughtily, and rode on.

But the dwarf was enraged at his behaviour, and laid a fairy spell
of ill-luck upon him; so that as he rode on the mountain pass became
narrower and narrower, and at last the way was so straitened that he
could not go to step forward: and when he thought to have turned his
horse round and go back the way he came, he heard a loud laugh ringing
round him, and found that the path was closed behind him, so that he was
shut in all round. He next tried to get off his horse and make his way
on foot, but again the laugh rang in his ears, and he found himself
unable to move a step, and thus he was forced to abide spellbound.

Meantime the old king was lingering on in daily hope of his son’s
return, till at last the second son said, ‘Father, I will go in search
of the Water of Life.’ For he thought to himself, ‘My brother is surely
dead, and the kingdom will fall to me if I find the water.’ The king was
at first very unwilling to let him go, but at last yielded to his wish.
So he set out and followed the same road which his brother had done,
and met with the same elf, who stopped him at the same spot in the
mountains, saying, as before, ‘Prince, prince, whither so fast?’ ‘Mind
your own affairs, busybody!’ said the prince scornfully, and rode on.

But the dwarf put the same spell upon him as he put on his elder
brother, and he, too, was at last obliged to take up his abode in the
heart of the mountains. Thus it is with proud silly people, who think
themselves above everyone else, and are too proud to ask or take advice.

When the second prince had thus been gone a long time, the youngest son
said he would go and search for the Water of Life, and trusted he should
soon be able to make his father well again. So he set out, and the dwarf
met him too at the same spot in the valley, among the mountains, and
said, ‘Prince, whither so fast?’ And the prince said, ‘I am going in
search of the Water of Life, because my father is ill, and like to die:
can you help me? Pray be kind, and aid me if you can!’ ‘Do you know
where it is to be found?’ asked the dwarf. ‘No,’ said the prince, ‘I do
not. Pray tell me if you know.’ ‘Then as you have spoken to me kindly,
and are wise enough to seek for advice, I will tell you how and where to
go. The water you seek springs from a well in an enchanted castle; and,
that you may be able to reach it in safety, I will give you an iron wand
and two little loaves of bread; strike the iron door of the castle three
times with the wand, and it will open: two hungry lions will be lying
down inside gaping for their prey, but if you throw them the bread they
will let you pass; then hasten on to the well, and take some of the
Water of Life before the clock strikes twelve; for if you tarry longer
the door will shut upon you for ever.’

Then the prince thanked his little friend with the scarlet cloak for his
friendly aid, and took the wand and the bread, and went travelling on
and on, over sea and over land, till he came to his journey’s end, and
found everything to be as the dwarf had told him. The door flew open at
the third stroke of the wand, and when the lions were quieted he went on
through the castle and came at length to a beautiful hall. Around it he
saw several knights sitting in a trance; then he pulled off their rings
and put them on his own fingers. In another room he saw on a table a
sword and a loaf of bread, which he also took. Further on he came to a
room where a beautiful young lady sat upon a couch; and she welcomed him
joyfully, and said, if he would set her free from the spell that bound
her, the kingdom should be his, if he would come back in a year and
marry her. Then she told him that the well that held the Water of Life
was in the palace gardens; and bade him make haste, and draw what he
wanted before the clock struck twelve.

He walked on; and as he walked through beautiful gardens he came to a
delightful shady spot in which stood a couch; and he thought to himself,
as he felt tired, that he would rest himself for a while, and gaze on
the lovely scenes around him. So he laid himself down, and sleep
fell upon him unawares, so that he did not wake up till the clock was
striking a quarter to twelve. Then he sprang from the couch dreadfully
frightened, ran to the well, filled a cup that was standing by him full
of water, and hastened to get away in time. Just as he was going out of
the iron door it struck twelve, and the door fell so quickly upon him
that it snapped off a piece of his heel.

When he found himself safe, he was overjoyed to think that he had got
the Water of Life; and as he was going on his way homewards, he passed
by the little dwarf, who, when he saw the sword and the loaf, said, ‘You
have made a noble prize; with the sword you can at a blow slay whole
armies, and the bread will never fail you.’ Then the prince thought
to himself, ‘I cannot go home to my father without my brothers’; so he
said, ‘My dear friend, cannot you tell me where my two brothers are, who
set out in search of the Water of Life before me, and never came back?’
‘I have shut them up by a charm between two mountains,’ said the dwarf,
‘because they were proud and ill-behaved, and scorned to ask advice.’
The prince begged so hard for his brothers, that the dwarf at last set
them free, though unwillingly, saying, ‘Beware of them, for they have
bad hearts.’ Their brother, however, was greatly rejoiced to see them,
and told them all that had happened to him; how he had found the Water
of Life, and had taken a cup full of it; and how he had set a beautiful
princess free from a spell that bound her; and how she had engaged to
wait a whole year, and then to marry him, and to give him the kingdom.

Then they all three rode on together, and on their way home came to a
country that was laid waste by war and a dreadful famine, so that it was
feared all must die for want. But the prince gave the king of the land
the bread, and all his kingdom ate of it. And he lent the king the
wonderful sword, and he slew the enemy’s army with it; and thus the
kingdom was once more in peace and plenty. In the same manner he
befriended two other countries through which they passed on their way.

When they came to the sea, they got into a ship and during their voyage
the two eldest said to themselves, ‘Our brother has got the water which
we could not find, therefore our father will forsake us and give him the
kingdom, which is our right’; so they were full of envy and revenge, and
agreed together how they could ruin him. Then they waited till he was
fast asleep, and poured the Water of Life out of the cup, and took it
for themselves, giving him bitter sea-water instead.

When they came to their journey’s end, the youngest son brought his cup
to the sick king, that he might drink and be healed. Scarcely, however,
had he tasted the bitter sea-water when he became worse even than he was
before; and then both the elder sons came in, and blamed the youngest
for what they had done; and said that he wanted to poison their father,
but that they had found the Water of Life, and had brought it with them.
He no sooner began to drink of what they brought him, than he felt his
sickness leave him, and was as strong and well as in his younger days.
Then they went to their brother, and laughed at him, and said, ‘Well,
brother, you found the Water of Life, did you? You have had the trouble
and we shall have the reward. Pray, with all your cleverness, why did
not you manage to keep your eyes open? Next year one of us will take
away your beautiful princess, if you do not take care. You had better
say nothing about this to our father, for he does not believe a word you
say; and if you tell tales, you shall lose your life into the bargain:
but be quiet, and we will let you off.’

The old king was still very angry with his youngest son, and thought
that he really meant to have taken away his life; so he called his court
together, and asked what should be done, and all agreed that he ought to
be put to death. The prince knew nothing of what was going on, till one
day, when the king’s chief huntsmen went a-hunting with him, and they
were alone in the wood together, the huntsman looked so sorrowful that
the prince said, ‘My friend, what is the matter with you?’ ‘I cannot and
dare not tell you,’ said he. But the prince begged very hard, and said,
‘Only tell me what it is, and do not think I shall be angry, for I will
forgive you.’ ‘Alas!’ said the huntsman; ‘the king has ordered me to
shoot you.’ The prince started at this, and said, ‘Let me live, and I
will change dresses with you; you shall take my royal coat to show to my
father, and do you give me your shabby one.’ ‘With all my heart,’ said
the huntsman; ‘I am sure I shall be glad to save you, for I could not
have shot you.’ Then he took the prince’s coat, and gave him the shabby
one, and went away through the wood.

Some time after, three grand embassies came to the old king’s court,
with rich gifts of gold and precious stones for his youngest son; now
all these were sent from the three kings to whom he had lent his sword
and loaf of bread, in order to rid them of their enemy and feed their
people. This touched the old king’s heart, and he thought his son might
still be guiltless, and said to his court, ‘O that my son were still
alive! how it grieves me that I had him killed!’ ‘He is still alive,’
said the huntsman; ‘and I am glad that I had pity on him, but let him
go in peace, and brought home his royal coat.’ At this the king was
overwhelmed with joy, and made it known throughout all his kingdom, that
if his son would come back to his court he would forgive him.

Meanwhile the princess was eagerly waiting till her deliverer should
come back; and had a road made leading up to her palace all of shining
gold; and told her courtiers that whoever came on horseback, and rode
straight up to the gate upon it, was her true lover; and that they must
let him in: but whoever rode on one side of it, they must be sure was
not the right one; and that they must send him away at once.

The time soon came, when the eldest brother thought that he would make
haste to go to the princess, and say that he was the one who had set
her free, and that he should have her for his wife, and the kingdom with
her. As he came before the palace and saw the golden road, he stopped to
look at it, and he thought to himself, ‘It is a pity to ride upon this
beautiful road’; so he turned aside and rode on the right-hand side of
it. But when he came to the gate, the guards, who had seen the road
he took, said to him, he could not be what he said he was, and must go
about his business.

The second prince set out soon afterwards on the same errand; and when
he came to the golden road, and his horse had set one foot upon it,
he stopped to look at it, and thought it very beautiful, and said to
himself, ‘What a pity it is that anything should tread here!’ Then he
too turned aside and rode on the left side of it. But when he came to
the gate the guards said he was not the true prince, and that he too
must go away about his business; and away he went.

Now when the full year was come round, the third brother left the forest
in which he had lain hid for fear of his father’s anger, and set out in
search of his betrothed bride. So he journeyed on, thinking of her all
the way, and rode so quickly that he did not even see what the road was
made of, but went with his horse straight over it; and as he came to the
gate it flew open, and the princess welcomed him with joy, and said
he was her deliverer, and should now be her husband and lord of the
kingdom. When the first joy at their meeting was over, the princess told
him she had heard of his father having forgiven him, and of his wish to
have him home again: so, before his wedding with the princess, he went
to visit his father, taking her with him. Then he told him everything;
how his brothers had cheated and robbed him, and yet that he had borne
all those wrongs for the love of his father. And the old king was very
angry, and wanted to punish his wicked sons; but they made their escape,
and got into a ship and sailed away over the wide sea, and where they
went to nobody knew and nobody cared.

And now the old king gathered together his court, and asked all his
kingdom to come and celebrate the wedding of his son and the princess.
And young and old, noble and squire, gentle and simple, came at once
on the summons; and among the rest came the friendly dwarf, with the
sugarloaf hat, and a new scarlet cloak.

  And the wedding was held, and the merry bells run.
  And all the good people they danced and they sung,
  And feasted and frolick’d I can’t tell how long.




THE TWELVE HUNTSMEN

There was once a king’s son who had a bride whom he loved very much. And
when he was sitting beside her and very happy, news came that his father
lay sick unto death, and desired to see him once again before his end.
Then he said to his beloved: ‘I must now go and leave you, I give you
a ring as a remembrance of me. When I am king, I will return and fetch
you.’ So he rode away, and when he reached his father, the latter was
dangerously ill, and near his death. He said to him: ‘Dear son, I wished
to see you once again before my end, promise me to marry as I wish,’ and
he named a certain king’s daughter who was to be his wife. The son was
in such trouble that he did not think what he was doing, and said: ‘Yes,
dear father, your will shall be done,’ and thereupon the king shut his
eyes, and died.

When therefore the son had been proclaimed king, and the time of
mourning was over, he was forced to keep the promise which he had given
his father, and caused the king’s daughter to be asked in marriage, and
she was promised to him. His first betrothed heard of this, and fretted
so much about his faithfulness that she nearly died. Then her father
said to her: ‘Dearest child, why are you so sad? You shall have
whatsoever you will.’ She thought for a moment and said: ‘Dear father,
I wish for eleven girls exactly like myself in face, figure, and size.’
The father said: ‘If it be possible, your desire shall be fulfilled,’
and he caused a search to be made in his whole kingdom, until eleven
young maidens were found who exactly resembled his daughter in face,
figure, and size.

When they came to the king’s daughter, she had twelve suits of
huntsmen’s clothes made, all alike, and the eleven maidens had to put
on the huntsmen’s clothes, and she herself put on the twelfth suit.
Thereupon she took her leave of her father, and rode away with them,
and rode to the court of her former betrothed, whom she loved so dearly.
Then she asked if he required any huntsmen, and if he would take all of
them into his service. The king looked at her and did not know her, but
as they were such handsome fellows, he said: ‘Yes,’ and that he would
willingly take them, and now they were the king’s twelve huntsmen.

The king, however, had a lion which was a wondrous animal, for he knew
all concealed and secret things. It came to pass that one evening he
said to the king: ‘You think you have twelve huntsmen?’ ‘Yes,’ said the
king, ‘they are twelve huntsmen.’ The lion continued: ‘You are mistaken,
they are twelve girls.’ The king said: ‘That cannot be true! How
will you prove that to me?’ ‘Oh, just let some peas be strewn in the
ante-chamber,’ answered the lion, ‘and then you will soon see. Men have
a firm step, and when they walk over peas none of them stir, but girls
trip and skip, and drag their feet, and the peas roll about.’ The king
was well pleased with the counsel, and caused the peas to be strewn.

There was, however, a servant of the king’s who favoured the huntsmen,
and when he heard that they were going to be put to this test he went to
them and repeated everything, and said: ‘The lion wants to make the king
believe that you are girls.’ Then the king’s daughter thanked him, and
said to her maidens: ‘Show some strength, and step firmly on the peas.’
So next morning when the king had the twelve huntsmen called before
him, and they came into the ante-chamber where the peas were lying, they
stepped so firmly on them, and had such a strong, sure walk, that not
one of the peas either rolled or stirred. Then they went away again,
and the king said to the lion: ‘You have lied to me, they walk just like
men.’ The lion said: ‘They have been informed that they were going to
be put to the test, and have assumed some strength. Just let twelve
spinning-wheels be brought into the ante-chamber, and they will go to
them and be pleased with them, and that is what no man would do.’
The king liked the advice, and had the spinning-wheels placed in the
ante-chamber.

But the servant, who was well disposed to the huntsmen, went to them,
and disclosed the project. So when they were alone the king’s daughter
said to her eleven girls: ‘Show some constraint, and do not look round
at the spinning-wheels.’ And next morning when the king had his twelve
huntsmen summoned, they went through the ante-chamber, and never once
looked at the spinning-wheels. Then the king again said to the lion:
‘You have deceived me, they are men, for they have not looked at the
spinning-wheels.’ The lion replied: ‘They have restrained themselves.’
The king, however, would no longer believe the lion.

The twelve huntsmen always followed the king to the chase, and his
liking for them continually increased. Now it came to pass that
once when they were out hunting, news came that the king’s bride was
approaching. When the true bride heard that, it hurt her so much that
her heart was almost broken, and she fell fainting to the ground. The
king thought something had happened to his dear huntsman, ran up to him,
wanted to help him, and drew his glove off. Then he saw the ring which
he had given to his first bride, and when he looked in her face he
recognized her. Then his heart was so touched that he kissed her, and
when she opened her eyes he said: ‘You are mine, and I am yours, and
no one in the world can alter that.’ He sent a messenger to the other
bride, and entreated her to return to her own kingdom, for he had a wife
already, and someone who had just found an old key did not require a new
one. Thereupon the wedding was celebrated, and the lion was again taken
into favour, because, after all, he had told the truth.




THE KING OF THE GOLDEN MOUNTAIN

There was once a merchant who had only one child, a son, that was very
young, and barely able to run alone. He had two richly laden ships then
making a voyage upon the seas, in which he had embarked all his wealth,
in the hope of making great gains, when the news came that both were
lost. Thus from being a rich man he became all at once so very poor that
nothing was left to him but one small plot of land; and there he often
went in an evening to take his walk, and ease his mind of a little of
his trouble.

One day, as he was roaming along in a brown study, thinking with no
great comfort on what he had been and what he now was, and was like
to be, all on a sudden there stood before him a little, rough-looking,
black dwarf. ‘Prithee, friend, why so sorrowful?’ said he to the
merchant; ‘what is it you take so deeply to heart?’ ‘If you would do me
any good I would willingly tell you,’ said the merchant. ‘Who knows but
I may?’ said the little man: ‘tell me what ails you, and perhaps you
will find I may be of some use.’ Then the merchant told him how all his
wealth was gone to the bottom of the sea, and how he had nothing left
but that little plot of land. ‘Oh, trouble not yourself about that,’
said the dwarf; ‘only undertake to bring me here, twelve years hence,
whatever meets you first on your going home, and I will give you as much
as you please.’ The merchant thought this was no great thing to ask;
that it would most likely be his dog or his cat, or something of that
sort, but forgot his little boy Heinel; so he agreed to the bargain, and
signed and sealed the bond to do what was asked of him.

But as he drew near home, his little boy was so glad to see him that he
crept behind him, and laid fast hold of his legs, and looked up in
his face and laughed. Then the father started, trembling with fear and
horror, and saw what it was that he had bound himself to do; but as no
gold was come, he made himself easy by thinking that it was only a joke
that the dwarf was playing him, and that, at any rate, when the money
came, he should see the bearer, and would not take it in.

About a month afterwards he went upstairs into a lumber-room to look
for some old iron, that he might sell it and raise a little money; and
there, instead of his iron, he saw a large pile of gold lying on the
floor. At the sight of this he was overjoyed, and forgetting all about
his son, went into trade again, and became a richer merchant than
before.

Meantime little Heinel grew up, and as the end of the twelve years drew
near the merchant began to call to mind his bond, and became very sad
and thoughtful; so that care and sorrow were written upon his face. The
boy one day asked what was the matter, but his father would not tell for
some time; at last, however, he said that he had, without knowing it,
sold him for gold to a little, ugly-looking, black dwarf, and that the
twelve years were coming round when he must keep his word. Then Heinel
said, ‘Father, give yourself very little trouble about that; I shall be
too much for the little man.’

When the time came, the father and son went out together to the place
agreed upon: and the son drew a circle on the ground, and set himself
and his father in the middle of it. The little black dwarf soon came,
and walked round and round about the circle, but could not find any way
to get into it, and he either could not, or dared not, jump over it. At
last the boy said to him. ‘Have you anything to say to us, my friend, or
what do you want?’ Now Heinel had found a friend in a good fairy, that
was fond of him, and had told him what to do; for this fairy knew what
good luck was in store for him. ‘Have you brought me what you said you
would?’ said the dwarf to the merchant. The old man held his tongue, but
Heinel said again, ‘What do you want here?’ The dwarf said, ‘I come to
talk with your father, not with you.’ ‘You have cheated and taken in my
father,’ said the son; ‘pray give him up his bond at once.’ ‘Fair and
softly,’ said the little old man; ‘right is right; I have paid my money,
and your father has had it, and spent it; so be so good as to let me
have what I paid it for.’ ‘You must have my consent to that first,’ said
Heinel, ‘so please to step in here, and let us talk it over.’ The old
man grinned, and showed his teeth, as if he should have been very glad
to get into the circle if he could. Then at last, after a long talk,
they came to terms. Heinel agreed that his father must give him up, and
that so far the dwarf should have his way: but, on the other hand, the
fairy had told Heinel what fortune was in store for him, if he followed
his own course; and he did not choose to be given up to his hump-backed
friend, who seemed so anxious for his company.

So, to make a sort of drawn battle of the matter, it was settled that
Heinel should be put into an open boat, that lay on the sea-shore hard
by; that the father should push him off with his own hand, and that he
should thus be set adrift, and left to the bad or good luck of wind and
weather. Then he took leave of his father, and set himself in the boat,
but before it got far off a wave struck it, and it fell with one side
low in the water, so the merchant thought that poor Heinel was lost, and
went home very sorrowful, while the dwarf went his way, thinking that at
any rate he had had his revenge.

The boat, however, did not sink, for the good fairy took care of her
friend, and soon raised the boat up again, and it went safely on. The
young man sat safe within, till at length it ran ashore upon an unknown
land. As he jumped upon the shore he saw before him a beautiful castle
but empty and dreary within, for it was enchanted. ‘Here,’ said he to
himself, ‘must I find the prize the good fairy told me of.’ So he once
more searched the whole palace through, till at last he found a white
snake, lying coiled up on a cushion in one of the chambers.

Now the white snake was an enchanted princess; and she was very glad
to see him, and said, ‘Are you at last come to set me free? Twelve
long years have I waited here for the fairy to bring you hither as she
promised, for you alone can save me. This night twelve men will come:
their faces will be black, and they will be dressed in chain armour.
They will ask what you do here, but give no answer; and let them do
what they will--beat, whip, pinch, prick, or torment you--bear all; only
speak not a word, and at twelve o’clock they must go away. The second
night twelve others will come: and the third night twenty-four, who
will even cut off your head; but at the twelfth hour of that night their
power is gone, and I shall be free, and will come and bring you the
Water of Life, and will wash you with it, and bring you back to life
and health.’ And all came to pass as she had said; Heinel bore all, and
spoke not a word; and the third night the princess came, and fell on his
neck and kissed him. Joy and gladness burst forth throughout the castle,
the wedding was celebrated, and he was crowned king of the Golden
Mountain.

They lived together very happily, and the queen had a son. And thus
eight years had passed over their heads, when the king thought of his
father; and he began to long to see him once again. But the queen was
against his going, and said, ‘I know well that misfortunes will come
upon us if you go.’ However, he gave her no rest till she agreed. At his
going away she gave him a wishing-ring, and said, ‘Take this ring, and
put it on your finger; whatever you wish it will bring you; only promise
never to make use of it to bring me hence to your father’s house.’ Then
he said he would do what she asked, and put the ring on his finger, and
wished himself near the town where his father lived.

Heinel found himself at the gates in a moment; but the guards would
not let him go in, because he was so strangely clad. So he went up to a
neighbouring hill, where a shepherd dwelt, and borrowed his old frock,
and thus passed unknown into the town. When he came to his father’s
house, he said he was his son; but the merchant would not believe him,
and said he had had but one son, his poor Heinel, who he knew was long
since dead: and as he was only dressed like a poor shepherd, he would
not even give him anything to eat. The king, however, still vowed that
he was his son, and said, ‘Is there no mark by which you would know me
if I am really your son?’ ‘Yes,’ said his mother, ‘our Heinel had a mark
like a raspberry on his right arm.’ Then he showed them the mark, and
they knew that what he had said was true.

He next told them how he was king of the Golden Mountain, and was
married to a princess, and had a son seven years old. But the merchant
said, ‘that can never be true; he must be a fine king truly who travels
about in a shepherd’s frock!’ At this the son was vexed; and forgetting
his word, turned his ring, and wished for his queen and son. In an
instant they stood before him; but the queen wept, and said he had
broken his word, and bad luck would follow. He did all he could to
soothe her, and she at last seemed to be appeased; but she was not so in
truth, and was only thinking how she should punish him.

One day he took her to walk with him out of the town, and showed her
the spot where the boat was set adrift upon the wide waters. Then he sat
himself down, and said, ‘I am very much tired; sit by me, I will rest my
head in your lap, and sleep a while.’ As soon as he had fallen asleep,
however, she drew the ring from his finger, and crept softly away, and
wished herself and her son at home in their kingdom. And when he awoke
he found himself alone, and saw that the ring was gone from his finger.
‘I can never go back to my father’s house,’ said he; ‘they would say I
am a sorcerer: I will journey forth into the world, till I come again to
my kingdom.’

So saying he set out and travelled till he came to a hill, where three
giants were sharing their father’s goods; and as they saw him pass they
cried out and said, ‘Little men have sharp wits; he shall part the goods
between us.’ Now there was a sword that cut off an enemy’s head whenever
the wearer gave the words, ‘Heads off!’; a cloak that made the owner
invisible, or gave him any form he pleased; and a pair of boots that
carried the wearer wherever he wished. Heinel said they must first let
him try these wonderful things, then he might know how to set a value
upon them. Then they gave him the cloak, and he wished himself a fly,
and in a moment he was a fly. ‘The cloak is very well,’ said he: ‘now
give me the sword.’ ‘No,’ said they; ‘not unless you undertake not to
say, “Heads off!” for if you do we are all dead men.’ So they gave it
him, charging him to try it on a tree. He next asked for the boots also;
and the moment he had all three in his power, he wished himself at
the Golden Mountain; and there he was at once. So the giants were left
behind with no goods to share or quarrel about.

As Heinel came near his castle he heard the sound of merry music; and
the people around told him that his queen was about to marry another
husband. Then he threw his cloak around him, and passed through the
castle hall, and placed himself by the side of the queen, where no one
saw him. But when anything to eat was put upon her plate, he took it
away and ate it himself; and when a glass of wine was handed to her, he
took it and drank it; and thus, though they kept on giving her meat and
drink, her plate and cup were always empty.

Upon this, fear and remorse came over her, and she went into her chamber
alone, and sat there weeping; and he followed her there. ‘Alas!’ said
she to herself, ‘was I not once set free? Why then does this enchantment
still seem to bind me?’

‘False and fickle one!’ said he. ‘One indeed came who set thee free, and
he is now near thee again; but how have you used him? Ought he to
have had such treatment from thee?’ Then he went out and sent away the
company, and said the wedding was at an end, for that he was come back
to the kingdom. But the princes, peers, and great men mocked at him.
However, he would enter into no parley with them, but only asked them
if they would go in peace or not. Then they turned upon him and tried
to seize him; but he drew his sword. ‘Heads Off!’ cried he; and with the
word the traitors’ heads fell before him, and Heinel was once more king
of the Golden Mountain.




DOCTOR KNOWALL

There was once upon a time a poor peasant called Crabb, who drove with
two oxen a load of wood to the town, and sold it to a doctor for two
talers. When the money was being counted out to him, it so happened that
the doctor was sitting at table, and when the peasant saw how well he
ate and drank, his heart desired what he saw, and would willingly
have been a doctor too. So he remained standing a while, and at length
inquired if he too could not be a doctor. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the doctor,
‘that is soon managed.’ ‘What must I do?’ asked the peasant. ‘In the
first place buy yourself an A B C book of the kind which has a cock on
the frontispiece; in the second, turn your cart and your two oxen into
money, and get yourself some clothes, and whatsoever else pertains to
medicine; thirdly, have a sign painted for yourself with the words: “I
am Doctor Knowall,” and have that nailed up above your house-door.’ The
peasant did everything that he had been told to do. When he had doctored
people awhile, but not long, a rich and great lord had some money
stolen. Then he was told about Doctor Knowall who lived in such and such
a village, and must know what had become of the money. So the lord had
the horses harnessed to his carriage, drove out to the village, and
asked Crabb if he were Doctor Knowall. Yes, he was, he said. Then he was
to go with him and bring back the stolen money. ‘Oh, yes, but Grete, my
wife, must go too.’ The lord was willing, and let both of them have a
seat in the carriage, and they all drove away together. When they came
to the nobleman’s castle, the table was spread, and Crabb was told to
sit down and eat. ‘Yes, but my wife, Grete, too,’ said he, and he seated
himself with her at the table. And when the first servant came with a
dish of delicate fare, the peasant nudged his wife, and said: ‘Grete,
that was the first,’ meaning that was the servant who brought the first
dish. The servant, however, thought he intended by that to say: ‘That is
the first thief,’ and as he actually was so, he was terrified, and said
to his comrade outside: ‘The doctor knows all: we shall fare ill, he
said I was the first.’ The second did not want to go in at all, but was
forced. So when he went in with his dish, the peasant nudged his wife,
and said: ‘Grete, that is the second.’ This servant was equally alarmed,
and he got out as fast as he could. The third fared no better, for the
peasant again said: ‘Grete, that is the third.’ The fourth had to carry
in a dish that was covered, and the lord told the doctor that he was to
show his skill, and guess what was beneath the cover. Actually, there
were crabs. The doctor looked at the dish, had no idea what to say, and
cried: ‘Ah, poor Crabb.’ When the lord heard that, he cried: ‘There! he
knows it; he must also know who has the money!’

On this the servants looked terribly uneasy, and made a sign to the
doctor that they wished him to step outside for a moment. When therefore
he went out, all four of them confessed to him that they had stolen
the money, and said that they would willingly restore it and give him a
heavy sum into the bargain, if he would not denounce them, for if he
did they would be hanged. They led him to the spot where the money was
concealed. With this the doctor was satisfied, and returned to the hall,
sat down to the table, and said: ‘My lord, now will I search in my book
where the gold is hidden.’ The fifth servant, however, crept into the
stove to hear if the doctor knew still more. But the doctor sat still
and opened his A B C book, turned the pages backwards and forwards, and
looked for the cock. As he could not find it immediately he said: ‘I
know you are there, so you had better come out!’ Then the fellow in the
stove thought that the doctor meant him, and full of terror, sprang out,
crying: ‘That man knows everything!’ Then Doctor Knowall showed the lord
where the money was, but did not say who had stolen it, and received
from both sides much money in reward, and became a renowned man.




THE SEVEN RAVENS

There was once a man who had seven sons, and last of all one daughter.
Although the little girl was very pretty, she was so weak and small that
they thought she could not live; but they said she should at once be
christened.

So the father sent one of his sons in haste to the spring to get some
water, but the other six ran with him. Each wanted to be first at
drawing the water, and so they were in such a hurry that all let their
pitchers fall into the well, and they stood very foolishly looking at
one another, and did not know what to do, for none dared go home. In the
meantime the father was uneasy, and could not tell what made the
young men stay so long. ‘Surely,’ said he, ‘the whole seven must have
forgotten themselves over some game of play’; and when he had waited
still longer and they yet did not come, he flew into a rage and wished
them all turned into ravens. Scarcely had he spoken these words when he
heard a croaking over his head, and looked up and saw seven ravens as
black as coal flying round and round. Sorry as he was to see his wish
so fulfilled, he did not know how what was done could be undone, and
comforted himself as well as he could for the loss of his seven sons
with his dear little daughter, who soon became stronger and every day
more beautiful.

For a long time she did not know that she had ever had any brothers; for
her father and mother took care not to speak of them before her: but one
day by chance she heard the people about her speak of them. ‘Yes,’ said
they, ‘she is beautiful indeed, but still ‘tis a pity that her brothers
should have been lost for her sake.’ Then she was much grieved, and went
to her father and mother, and asked if she had any brothers, and what
had become of them. So they dared no longer hide the truth from her, but
said it was the will of Heaven, and that her birth was only the innocent
cause of it; but the little girl mourned sadly about it every day, and
thought herself bound to do all she could to bring her brothers back;
and she had neither rest nor ease, till at length one day she stole
away, and set out into the wide world to find her brothers, wherever
they might be, and free them, whatever it might cost her.

She took nothing with her but a little ring which her father and mother
had given her, a loaf of bread in case she should be hungry, a little
pitcher of water in case she should be thirsty, and a little stool
to rest upon when she should be weary. Thus she went on and on, and
journeyed till she came to the world’s end; then she came to the sun,
but the sun looked much too hot and fiery; so she ran away quickly to
the moon, but the moon was cold and chilly, and said, ‘I smell flesh
and blood this way!’ so she took herself away in a hurry and came to the
stars, and the stars were friendly and kind to her, and each star sat
upon his own little stool; but the morning star rose up and gave her a
little piece of wood, and said, ‘If you have not this little piece of
wood, you cannot unlock the castle that stands on the glass-mountain,
and there your brothers live.’ The little girl took the piece of wood,
rolled it up in a little cloth, and went on again until she came to the
glass-mountain, and found the door shut. Then she felt for the little
piece of wood; but when she unwrapped the cloth it was not there, and
she saw she had lost the gift of the good stars. What was to be done?
She wanted to save her brothers, and had no key of the castle of the
glass-mountain; so this faithful little sister took a knife out of her
pocket and cut off her little finger, that was just the size of the
piece of wood she had lost, and put it in the door and opened it.

As she went in, a little dwarf came up to her, and said, ‘What are you
seeking for?’ ‘I seek for my brothers, the seven ravens,’ answered she.
Then the dwarf said, ‘My masters are not at home; but if you will wait
till they come, pray step in.’ Now the little dwarf was getting their
dinner ready, and he brought their food upon seven little plates, and
their drink in seven little glasses, and set them upon the table, and
out of each little plate their sister ate a small piece, and out of each
little glass she drank a small drop; but she let the ring that she had
brought with her fall into the last glass.

On a sudden she heard a fluttering and croaking in the air, and the
dwarf said, ‘Here come my masters.’ When they came in, they wanted to
eat and drink, and looked for their little plates and glasses. Then said
one after the other,

‘Who has eaten from my little plate? And who has been drinking out of my
little glass?’

 ‘Caw! Caw! well I ween
  Mortal lips have this way been.’

When the seventh came to the bottom of his glass, and found there the
ring, he looked at it, and knew that it was his father’s and mother’s,
and said, ‘O that our little sister would but come! then we should be
free.’ When the little girl heard this (for she stood behind the door
all the time and listened), she ran forward, and in an instant all
the ravens took their right form again; and all hugged and kissed each
other, and went merrily home.




THE WEDDING OF MRS FOX


FIRST STORY

There was once upon a time an old fox with nine tails, who believed that
his wife was not faithful to him, and wished to put her to the test. He
stretched himself out under the bench, did not move a limb, and behaved
as if he were stone dead. Mrs Fox went up to her room, shut herself in,
and her maid, Miss Cat, sat by the fire, and did the cooking. When it
became known that the old fox was dead, suitors presented themselves.
The maid heard someone standing at the house-door, knocking. She went
and opened it, and it was a young fox, who said:

 ‘What may you be about, Miss Cat?
  Do you sleep or do you wake?’

She answered:

 ‘I am not sleeping, I am waking,
  Would you know what I am making?
  I am boiling warm beer with butter,
  Will you be my guest for supper?’

‘No, thank you, miss,’ said the fox, ‘what is Mrs Fox doing?’ The maid
replied:

 ‘She is sitting in her room,
  Moaning in her gloom,
  Weeping her little eyes quite red,
  Because old Mr Fox is dead.’

‘Do just tell her, miss, that a young fox is here, who would like to woo
her.’ ‘Certainly, young sir.’

  The cat goes up the stairs trip, trap,
  The door she knocks at tap, tap, tap,
 ‘Mistress Fox, are you inside?’
 ‘Oh, yes, my little cat,’ she cried.
 ‘A wooer he stands at the door out there.’
 ‘What does he look like, my dear?’

‘Has he nine as beautiful tails as the late Mr Fox?’ ‘Oh, no,’ answered
the cat, ‘he has only one.’ ‘Then I will not have him.’

Miss Cat went downstairs and sent the wooer away. Soon afterwards there
was another knock, and another fox was at the door who wished to woo Mrs
Fox. He had two tails, but he did not fare better than the first. After
this still more came, each with one tail more than the other, but they
were all turned away, until at last one came who had nine tails, like
old Mr Fox. When the widow heard that, she said joyfully to the cat:

 ‘Now open the gates and doors all wide,
  And carry old Mr Fox outside.’

But just as the wedding was going to be solemnized, old Mr Fox stirred
under the bench, and cudgelled all the rabble, and drove them and Mrs
Fox out of the house.


SECOND STORY

When old Mr Fox was dead, the wolf came as a suitor, and knocked at the
door, and the cat who was servant to Mrs Fox, opened it for him. The
wolf greeted her, and said:

 ‘Good day, Mrs Cat of Kehrewit,
  How comes it that alone you sit?
  What are you making good?’

The cat replied:

 ‘In milk I’m breaking bread so sweet,
  Will you be my guest, and eat?’

‘No, thank you, Mrs Cat,’ answered the wolf. ‘Is Mrs Fox not at home?’

The cat said:

 ‘She sits upstairs in her room,
  Bewailing her sorrowful doom,
  Bewailing her trouble so sore,
  For old Mr Fox is no more.’

The wolf answered:

 ‘If she’s in want of a husband now,
  Then will it please her to step below?’
  The cat runs quickly up the stair,
  And lets her tail fly here and there,
  Until she comes to the parlour door.
  With her five gold rings at the door she knocks:
 ‘Are you within, good Mistress Fox?
  If you’re in want of a husband now,
  Then will it please you to step below?

Mrs Fox asked: ‘Has the gentleman red stockings on, and has he a pointed
mouth?’ ‘No,’ answered the cat. ‘Then he won’t do for me.’

When the wolf was gone, came a dog, a stag, a hare, a bear, a lion, and
all the beasts of the forest, one after the other. But one of the good
qualities which old Mr Fox had possessed, was always lacking, and the
cat had continually to send the suitors away. At length came a young
fox. Then Mrs Fox said: ‘Has the gentleman red stockings on, and has a
little pointed mouth?’ ‘Yes,’ said the cat, ‘he has.’ ‘Then let him come
upstairs,’ said Mrs Fox, and ordered the servant to prepare the wedding
feast.

 ‘Sweep me the room as clean as you can,
  Up with the window, fling out my old man!
  For many a fine fat mouse he brought,
  Yet of his wife he never thought,
  But ate up every one he caught.’

Then the wedding was solemnized with young Mr Fox, and there was much
rejoicing and dancing; and if they have not left off, they are dancing
still.




THE SALAD

As a merry young huntsman was once going briskly along through a wood,
there came up a little old woman, and said to him, ‘Good day, good day;
you seem merry enough, but I am hungry and thirsty; do pray give me
something to eat.’ The huntsman took pity on her, and put his hand in
his pocket and gave her what he had. Then he wanted to go his way; but
she took hold of him, and said, ‘Listen, my friend, to what I am going
to tell you; I will reward you for your kindness; go your way, and after
a little time you will come to a tree where you will see nine birds
sitting on a cloak. Shoot into the midst of them, and one will fall down
dead: the cloak will fall too; take it, it is a wishing-cloak, and when
you wear it you will find yourself at any place where you may wish to
be. Cut open the dead bird, take out its heart and keep it, and you will
find a piece of gold under your pillow every morning when you rise. It
is the bird’s heart that will bring you this good luck.’

The huntsman thanked her, and thought to himself, ‘If all this does
happen, it will be a fine thing for me.’ When he had gone a hundred
steps or so, he heard a screaming and chirping in the branches over him,
and looked up and saw a flock of birds pulling a cloak with their bills
and feet; screaming, fighting, and tugging at each other as if
each wished to have it himself. ‘Well,’ said the huntsman, ‘this is
wonderful; this happens just as the old woman said’; then he shot into
the midst of them so that their feathers flew all about. Off went the
flock chattering away; but one fell down dead, and the cloak with it.
Then the huntsman did as the old woman told him, cut open the bird, took
out the heart, and carried the cloak home with him.

The next morning when he awoke he lifted up his pillow, and there lay
the piece of gold glittering underneath; the same happened next day, and
indeed every day when he arose. He heaped up a great deal of gold, and
at last thought to himself, ‘Of what use is this gold to me whilst I am
at home? I will go out into the world and look about me.’

Then he took leave of his friends, and hung his bag and bow about his
neck, and went his way. It so happened that his road one day led through
a thick wood, at the end of which was a large castle in a green meadow,
and at one of the windows stood an old woman with a very beautiful young
lady by her side looking about them. Now the old woman was a witch, and
said to the young lady, ‘There is a young man coming out of the wood who
carries a wonderful prize; we must get it away from him, my dear child,
for it is more fit for us than for him. He has a bird’s heart that
brings a piece of gold under his pillow every morning.’ Meantime the
huntsman came nearer and looked at the lady, and said to himself, ‘I
have been travelling so long that I should like to go into this castle
and rest myself, for I have money enough to pay for anything I want’;
but the real reason was, that he wanted to see more of the beautiful
lady. Then he went into the house, and was welcomed kindly; and it was
not long before he was so much in love that he thought of nothing else
but looking at the lady’s eyes, and doing everything that she wished.
Then the old woman said, ‘Now is the time for getting the bird’s heart.’
So the lady stole it away, and he never found any more gold under his
pillow, for it lay now under the young lady’s, and the old woman took it
away every morning; but he was so much in love that he never missed his
prize.

‘Well,’ said the old witch, ‘we have got the bird’s heart, but not the
wishing-cloak yet, and that we must also get.’ ‘Let us leave him that,’
said the young lady; ‘he has already lost his wealth.’ Then the witch
was very angry, and said, ‘Such a cloak is a very rare and wonderful
thing, and I must and will have it.’ So she did as the old woman told
her, and set herself at the window, and looked about the country and
seemed very sorrowful; then the huntsman said, ‘What makes you so sad?’
‘Alas! dear sir,’ said she, ‘yonder lies the granite rock where all the
costly diamonds grow, and I want so much to go there, that whenever I
think of it I cannot help being sorrowful, for who can reach it? only
the birds and the flies--man cannot.’ ‘If that’s all your grief,’ said
the huntsman, ‘I’ll take you there with all my heart’; so he drew her under
his cloak, and the moment he wished to be on the granite mountain they
were both there. The diamonds glittered so on all sides that they were
delighted with the sight and picked up the finest. But the old witch
made a deep sleep come upon him, and he said to the young lady, ‘Let us
sit down and rest ourselves a little, I am so tired that I cannot stand
any longer.’ So they sat down, and he laid his head in her lap and
fell asleep; and whilst he was sleeping on she took the cloak from
his shoulders, hung it on her own, picked up the diamonds, and wished
herself home again.

When he awoke and found that his lady had tricked him, and left him
alone on the wild rock, he said, ‘Alas! what roguery there is in the
world!’ and there he sat in great grief and fear, not knowing what to
do. Now this rock belonged to fierce giants who lived upon it; and as
he saw three of them striding about, he thought to himself, ‘I can only
save myself by feigning to be asleep’; so he laid himself down as if he
were in a sound sleep. When the giants came up to him, the first pushed
him with his foot, and said, ‘What worm is this that lies here curled
up?’ ‘Tread upon him and kill him,’ said the second. ‘It’s not worth the
trouble,’ said the third; ‘let him live, he’ll go climbing higher up the
mountain, and some cloud will come rolling and carry him away.’ And they
passed on. But the huntsman had heard all they said; and as soon as they
were gone, he climbed to the top of the mountain, and when he had sat
there a short time a cloud came rolling around him, and caught him in a
whirlwind and bore him along for some time, till it settled in a garden,
and he fell quite gently to the ground amongst the greens and cabbages.

Then he looked around him, and said, ‘I wish I had something to eat, if
not I shall be worse off than before; for here I see neither apples
nor pears, nor any kind of fruits, nothing but vegetables.’ At last he
thought to himself, ‘I can eat salad, it will refresh and strengthen
me.’ So he picked out a fine head and ate of it; but scarcely had he
swallowed two bites when he felt himself quite changed, and saw with
horror that he was turned into an ass. However, he still felt very
hungry, and the salad tasted very nice; so he ate on till he came
to another kind of salad, and scarcely had he tasted it when he felt
another change come over him, and soon saw that he was lucky enough to
have found his old shape again.

Then he laid himself down and slept off a little of his weariness; and
when he awoke the next morning he broke off a head both of the good and
the bad salad, and thought to himself, ‘This will help me to my fortune
again, and enable me to pay off some folks for their treachery.’ So he
went away to try and find the castle of his friends; and after wandering
about a few days he luckily found it. Then he stained his face all over
brown, so that even his mother would not have known him, and went into
the castle and asked for a lodging; ‘I am so tired,’ said he, ‘that I
can go no farther.’ ‘Countryman,’ said the witch, ‘who are you? and what
is your business?’ ‘I am,’ said he, ‘a messenger sent by the king to
find the finest salad that grows under the sun. I have been lucky
enough to find it, and have brought it with me; but the heat of the sun
scorches so that it begins to wither, and I don’t know that I can carry
it farther.’

When the witch and the young lady heard of his beautiful salad, they
longed to taste it, and said, ‘Dear countryman, let us just taste it.’
‘To be sure,’ answered he; ‘I have two heads of it with me, and will
give you one’; so he opened his bag and gave them the bad. Then the
witch herself took it into the kitchen to be dressed; and when it was
ready she could not wait till it was carried up, but took a few leaves
immediately and put them in her mouth, and scarcely were they swallowed
when she lost her own form and ran braying down into the court in the
form of an ass. Now the servant-maid came into the kitchen, and seeing
the salad ready, was going to carry it up; but on the way she too felt a
wish to taste it as the old woman had done, and ate some leaves; so she
also was turned into an ass and ran after the other, letting the dish
with the salad fall on the ground. The messenger sat all this time with
the beautiful young lady, and as nobody came with the salad and she
longed to taste it, she said, ‘I don’t know where the salad can be.’
Then he thought something must have happened, and said, ‘I will go
into the kitchen and see.’ And as he went he saw two asses in the court
running about, and the salad lying on the ground. ‘All right!’ said
he; ‘those two have had their share.’ Then he took up the rest of
the leaves, laid them on the dish and brought them to the young lady,
saying, ‘I bring you the dish myself that you may not wait any longer.’
So she ate of it, and like the others ran off into the court braying
away.

Then the huntsman washed his face and went into the court that they
might know him. ‘Now you shall be paid for your roguery,’ said he; and
tied them all three to a rope and took them along with him till he
came to a mill and knocked at the window. ‘What’s the matter?’ said the
miller. ‘I have three tiresome beasts here,’ said the other; ‘if you
will take them, give them food and room, and treat them as I tell you,
I will pay you whatever you ask.’ ‘With all my heart,’ said the miller;
‘but how shall I treat them?’ Then the huntsman said, ‘Give the old
one stripes three times a day and hay once; give the next (who was
the servant-maid) stripes once a day and hay three times; and give
the youngest (who was the beautiful lady) hay three times a day and
no stripes’: for he could not find it in his heart to have her beaten.
After this he went back to the castle, where he found everything he
wanted.

Some days after, the miller came to him and told him that the old ass
was dead; ‘The other two,’ said he, ‘are alive and eat, but are so
sorrowful that they cannot last long.’ Then the huntsman pitied them,
and told the miller to drive them back to him, and when they came, he
gave them some of the good salad to eat. And the beautiful young lady
fell upon her knees before him, and said, ‘O dearest huntsman! forgive
me all the ill I have done you; my mother forced me to it, it was
against my will, for I always loved you very much. Your wishing-cloak
hangs up in the closet, and as for the bird’s heart, I will give it you
too.’ But he said, ‘Keep it, it will be just the same thing, for I mean
to make you my wife.’ So they were married, and lived together very
happily till they died.




THE STORY OF THE YOUTH WHO WENT FORTH TO LEARN WHAT FEAR WAS

A certain father had two sons, the elder of who was smart and sensible,
and could do everything, but the younger was stupid and could neither
learn nor understand anything, and when people saw him they said:
‘There’s a fellow who will give his father some trouble!’ When anything
had to be done, it was always the elder who was forced to do it; but
if his father bade him fetch anything when it was late, or in the
night-time, and the way led through the churchyard, or any other dismal
place, he answered: ‘Oh, no father, I’ll not go there, it makes me
shudder!’ for he was afraid. Or when stories were told by the fire at
night which made the flesh creep, the listeners sometimes said: ‘Oh,
it makes us shudder!’ The younger sat in a corner and listened with
the rest of them, and could not imagine what they could mean. ‘They are
always saying: “It makes me shudder, it makes me shudder!” It does not
make me shudder,’ thought he. ‘That, too, must be an art of which I
understand nothing!’

Now it came to pass that his father said to him one day: ‘Hearken to me,
you fellow in the corner there, you are growing tall and strong, and you
too must learn something by which you can earn your bread. Look how your
brother works, but you do not even earn your salt.’ ‘Well, father,’ he
replied, ‘I am quite willing to learn something--indeed, if it could but
be managed, I should like to learn how to shudder. I don’t understand
that at all yet.’ The elder brother smiled when he heard that, and
thought to himself: ‘Goodness, what a blockhead that brother of mine is!
He will never be good for anything as long as he lives! He who wants to
be a sickle must bend himself betimes.’

The father sighed, and answered him: ‘You shall soon learn what it is to
shudder, but you will not earn your bread by that.’

Soon after this the sexton came to the house on a visit, and the father
bewailed his trouble, and told him how his younger son was so backward
in every respect that he knew nothing and learnt nothing. ‘Just think,’
said he, ‘when I asked him how he was going to earn his bread, he
actually wanted to learn to shudder.’ ‘If that be all,’ replied the
sexton, ‘he can learn that with me. Send him to me, and I will soon
polish him.’ The father was glad to do it, for he thought: ‘It will
train the boy a little.’ The sexton therefore took him into his house,
and he had to ring the church bell. After a day or two, the sexton awoke
him at midnight, and bade him arise and go up into the church tower and
ring the bell. ‘You shall soon learn what shuddering is,’ thought he,
and secretly went there before him; and when the boy was at the top of
the tower and turned round, and was just going to take hold of the bell
rope, he saw a white figure standing on the stairs opposite the sounding
hole. ‘Who is there?’ cried he, but the figure made no reply, and did
not move or stir. ‘Give an answer,’ cried the boy, ‘or take yourself
off, you have no business here at night.’

The sexton, however, remained standing motionless that the boy might
think he was a ghost. The boy cried a second time: ‘What do you want
here?--speak if you are an honest fellow, or I will throw you down the
steps!’ The sexton thought: ‘He can’t mean to be as bad as his words,’
uttered no sound and stood as if he were made of stone. Then the boy
called to him for the third time, and as that was also to no purpose,
he ran against him and pushed the ghost down the stairs, so that it fell
down the ten steps and remained lying there in a corner. Thereupon he
rang the bell, went home, and without saying a word went to bed, and
fell asleep. The sexton’s wife waited a long time for her husband, but
he did not come back. At length she became uneasy, and wakened the boy,
and asked: ‘Do you know where my husband is? He climbed up the tower
before you did.’ ‘No, I don’t know,’ replied the boy, ‘but someone was
standing by the sounding hole on the other side of the steps, and as he
would neither gave an answer nor go away, I took him for a scoundrel,
and threw him downstairs. Just go there and you will see if it was he.
I should be sorry if it were.’ The woman ran away and found her husband,
who was lying moaning in the corner, and had broken his leg.

She carried him down, and then with loud screams she hastened to the
boy’s father, ‘Your boy,’ cried she, ‘has been the cause of a great
misfortune! He has thrown my husband down the steps so that he broke his
leg. Take the good-for-nothing fellow out of our house.’ The father was
terrified, and ran thither and scolded the boy. ‘What wicked tricks
are these?’ said he. ‘The devil must have put them into your head.’
‘Father,’ he replied, ‘do listen to me. I am quite innocent. He was
standing there by night like one intent on doing evil. I did not know
who it was, and I entreated him three times either to speak or to go
away.’ ‘Ah,’ said the father, ‘I have nothing but unhappiness with you.
Go out of my sight. I will see you no more.’

‘Yes, father, right willingly, wait only until it is day. Then will I
go forth and learn how to shudder, and then I shall, at any rate,
understand one art which will support me.’ ‘Learn what you will,’ spoke
the father, ‘it is all the same to me. Here are fifty talers for you.
Take these and go into the wide world, and tell no one from whence you
come, and who is your father, for I have reason to be ashamed of you.’
‘Yes, father, it shall be as you will. If you desire nothing more than
that, I can easily keep it in mind.’

When the day dawned, therefore, the boy put his fifty talers into his
pocket, and went forth on the great highway, and continually said to
himself: ‘If I could but shudder! If I could but shudder!’ Then a man
approached who heard this conversation which the youth was holding with
himself, and when they had walked a little farther to where they could
see the gallows, the man said to him: ‘Look, there is the tree where
seven men have married the ropemaker’s daughter, and are now learning
how to fly. Sit down beneath it, and wait till night comes, and you will
soon learn how to shudder.’ ‘If that is all that is wanted,’ answered
the youth, ‘it is easily done; but if I learn how to shudder as fast as
that, you shall have my fifty talers. Just come back to me early in the
morning.’ Then the youth went to the gallows, sat down beneath it, and
waited till evening came. And as he was cold, he lighted himself a fire,
but at midnight the wind blew so sharply that in spite of his fire, he
could not get warm. And as the wind knocked the hanged men against each
other, and they moved backwards and forwards, he thought to himself:
‘If you shiver below by the fire, how those up above must freeze and
suffer!’ And as he felt pity for them, he raised the ladder, and climbed
up, unbound one of them after the other, and brought down all seven.
Then he stoked the fire, blew it, and set them all round it to warm
themselves. But they sat there and did not stir, and the fire caught
their clothes. So he said: ‘Take care, or I will hang you up again.’ The
dead men, however, did not hear, but were quite silent, and let their
rags go on burning. At this he grew angry, and said: ‘If you will not
take care, I cannot help you, I will not be burnt with you,’ and he hung
them up again each in his turn. Then he sat down by his fire and fell
asleep, and the next morning the man came to him and wanted to have
the fifty talers, and said: ‘Well do you know how to shudder?’ ‘No,’
answered he, ‘how should I know? Those fellows up there did not open
their mouths, and were so stupid that they let the few old rags which
they had on their bodies get burnt.’ Then the man saw that he would not
get the fifty talers that day, and went away saying: ‘Such a youth has
never come my way before.’

The youth likewise went his way, and once more began to mutter to
himself: ‘Ah, if I could but shudder! Ah, if I could but shudder!’ A
waggoner who was striding behind him heard this and asked: ‘Who are
you?’ ‘I don’t know,’ answered the youth. Then the waggoner asked: ‘From
whence do you come?’ ‘I know not.’ ‘Who is your father?’ ‘That I may
not tell you.’ ‘What is it that you are always muttering between your
teeth?’ ‘Ah,’ replied the youth, ‘I do so wish I could shudder, but
no one can teach me how.’ ‘Enough of your foolish chatter,’ said the
waggoner. ‘Come, go with me, I will see about a place for you.’ The
youth went with the waggoner, and in the evening they arrived at an inn
where they wished to pass the night. Then at the entrance of the parlour
the youth again said quite loudly: ‘If I could but shudder! If I could
but shudder!’ The host who heard this, laughed and said: ‘If that is
your desire, there ought to be a good opportunity for you here.’ ‘Ah,
be silent,’ said the hostess, ‘so many prying persons have already lost
their lives, it would be a pity and a shame if such beautiful eyes as
these should never see the daylight again.’

But the youth said: ‘However difficult it may be, I will learn it. For
this purpose indeed have I journeyed forth.’ He let the host have
no rest, until the latter told him, that not far from thence stood a
haunted castle where anyone could very easily learn what shuddering was,
if he would but watch in it for three nights. The king had promised that
he who would venture should have his daughter to wife, and she was the
most beautiful maiden the sun shone on. Likewise in the castle lay great
treasures, which were guarded by evil spirits, and these treasures would
then be freed, and would make a poor man rich enough. Already many men
had gone into the castle, but as yet none had come out again. Then the
youth went next morning to the king, and said: ‘If it be allowed, I will
willingly watch three nights in the haunted castle.’

The king looked at him, and as the youth pleased him, he said: ‘You may
ask for three things to take into the castle with you, but they must
be things without life.’ Then he answered: ‘Then I ask for a fire, a
turning lathe, and a cutting-board with the knife.’

The king had these things carried into the castle for him during the
day. When night was drawing near, the youth went up and made himself
a bright fire in one of the rooms, placed the cutting-board and knife
beside it, and seated himself by the turning-lathe. ‘Ah, if I could
but shudder!’ said he, ‘but I shall not learn it here either.’ Towards
midnight he was about to poke his fire, and as he was blowing it,
something cried suddenly from one corner: ‘Au, miau! how cold we are!’
‘You fools!’ cried he, ‘what are you crying about? If you are cold, come
and take a seat by the fire and warm yourselves.’ And when he had said
that, two great black cats came with one tremendous leap and sat down
on each side of him, and looked savagely at him with their fiery
eyes. After a short time, when they had warmed themselves, they said:
‘Comrade, shall we have a game of cards?’ ‘Why not?’ he replied, ‘but
just show me your paws.’ Then they stretched out their claws. ‘Oh,’ said
he, ‘what long nails you have! Wait, I must first cut them for you.’
Thereupon he seized them by the throats, put them on the cutting-board
and screwed their feet fast. ‘I have looked at your fingers,’ said he,
‘and my fancy for card-playing has gone,’ and he struck them dead and
threw them out into the water. But when he had made away with these two,
and was about to sit down again by his fire, out from every hole and
corner came black cats and black dogs with red-hot chains, and more
and more of them came until he could no longer move, and they yelled
horribly, and got on his fire, pulled it to pieces, and tried to put
it out. He watched them for a while quietly, but at last when they were
going too far, he seized his cutting-knife, and cried: ‘Away with you,
vermin,’ and began to cut them down. Some of them ran away, the others
he killed, and threw out into the fish-pond. When he came back he fanned
the embers of his fire again and warmed himself. And as he thus sat, his
eyes would keep open no longer, and he felt a desire to sleep. Then he
looked round and saw a great bed in the corner. ‘That is the very thing
for me,’ said he, and got into it. When he was just going to shut his
eyes, however, the bed began to move of its own accord, and went over
the whole of the castle. ‘That’s right,’ said he, ‘but go faster.’ Then
the bed rolled on as if six horses were harnessed to it, up and down,
over thresholds and stairs, but suddenly hop, hop, it turned over upside
down, and lay on him like a mountain. But he threw quilts and pillows up
in the air, got out and said: ‘Now anyone who likes, may drive,’ and
lay down by his fire, and slept till it was day. In the morning the king
came, and when he saw him lying there on the ground, he thought the evil
spirits had killed him and he was dead. Then said he: ‘After all it is a
pity,--for so handsome a man.’ The youth heard it, got up, and said: ‘It
has not come to that yet.’ Then the king was astonished, but very glad,
and asked how he had fared. ‘Very well indeed,’ answered he; ‘one
night is past, the two others will pass likewise.’ Then he went to the
innkeeper, who opened his eyes very wide, and said: ‘I never expected to
see you alive again! Have you learnt how to shudder yet?’ ‘No,’ said he,
‘it is all in vain. If someone would but tell me!’

The second night he again went up into the old castle, sat down by the
fire, and once more began his old song: ‘If I could but shudder!’ When
midnight came, an uproar and noise of tumbling about was heard; at
first it was low, but it grew louder and louder. Then it was quiet for
a while, and at length with a loud scream, half a man came down the
chimney and fell before him. ‘Hullo!’ cried he, ‘another half belongs
to this. This is not enough!’ Then the uproar began again, there was a
roaring and howling, and the other half fell down likewise. ‘Wait,’ said
he, ‘I will just stoke up the fire a little for you.’ When he had done
that and looked round again, the two pieces were joined together, and a
hideous man was sitting in his place. ‘That is no part of our bargain,’
said the youth, ‘the bench is mine.’ The man wanted to push him away;
the youth, however, would not allow that, but thrust him off with all
his strength, and seated himself again in his own place. Then still more
men fell down, one after the other; they brought nine dead men’s legs
and two skulls, and set them up and played at nine-pins with them. The
youth also wanted to play and said: ‘Listen you, can I join you?’ ‘Yes,
if you have any money.’ ‘Money enough,’ replied he, ‘but your balls are
not quite round.’ Then he took the skulls and put them in the lathe and
turned them till they were round. ‘There, now they will roll better!’
said he. ‘Hurrah! now we’ll have fun!’ He played with them and lost some
of his money, but when it struck twelve, everything vanished from his
sight. He lay down and quietly fell asleep. Next morning the king came
to inquire after him. ‘How has it fared with you this time?’ asked he.
‘I have been playing at nine-pins,’ he answered, ‘and have lost a couple
of farthings.’ ‘Have you not shuddered then?’ ‘What?’ said he, ‘I have
had a wonderful time! If I did but know what it was to shudder!’

The third night he sat down again on his bench and said quite sadly:
‘If I could but shudder.’ When it grew late, six tall men came in and
brought a coffin. Then he said: ‘Ha, ha, that is certainly my little
cousin, who died only a few days ago,’ and he beckoned with his finger,
and cried: ‘Come, little cousin, come.’ They placed the coffin on the
ground, but he went to it and took the lid off, and a dead man lay
therein. He felt his face, but it was cold as ice. ‘Wait,’ said he, ‘I
will warm you a little,’ and went to the fire and warmed his hand and
laid it on the dead man’s face, but he remained cold. Then he took him
out, and sat down by the fire and laid him on his breast and rubbed his
arms that the blood might circulate again. As this also did no good, he
thought to himself: ‘When two people lie in bed together, they warm each
other,’ and carried him to the bed, covered him over and lay down by
him. After a short time the dead man became warm too, and began to move.
Then said the youth, ‘See, little cousin, have I not warmed you?’ The
dead man, however, got up and cried: ‘Now will I strangle you.’

‘What!’ said he, ‘is that the way you thank me? You shall at once go
into your coffin again,’ and he took him up, threw him into it, and shut
the lid. Then came the six men and carried him away again. ‘I cannot
manage to shudder,’ said he. ‘I shall never learn it here as long as I
live.’

Then a man entered who was taller than all others, and looked terrible.
He was old, however, and had a long white beard. ‘You wretch,’ cried he,
‘you shall soon learn what it is to shudder, for you shall die.’ ‘Not so
fast,’ replied the youth. ‘If I am to die, I shall have to have a say
in it.’ ‘I will soon seize you,’ said the fiend. ‘Softly, softly, do not
talk so big. I am as strong as you are, and perhaps even stronger.’
‘We shall see,’ said the old man. ‘If you are stronger, I will let you
go--come, we will try.’ Then he led him by dark passages to a smith’s
forge, took an axe, and with one blow struck an anvil into the ground.
‘I can do better than that,’ said the youth, and went to the other
anvil. The old man placed himself near and wanted to look on, and his
white beard hung down. Then the youth seized the axe, split the anvil
with one blow, and in it caught the old man’s beard. ‘Now I have you,’
said the youth. ‘Now it is your turn to die.’ Then he seized an iron bar
and beat the old man till he moaned and entreated him to stop, when he
would give him great riches. The youth drew out the axe and let him go.
The old man led him back into the castle, and in a cellar showed him
three chests full of gold. ‘Of these,’ said he, ‘one part is for the
poor, the other for the king, the third yours.’ In the meantime it
struck twelve, and the spirit disappeared, so that the youth stood in
darkness. ‘I shall still be able to find my way out,’ said he, and felt
about, found the way into the room, and slept there by his fire.
Next morning the king came and said: ‘Now you must have learnt what
shuddering is?’ ‘No,’ he answered; ‘what can it be? My dead cousin was
here, and a bearded man came and showed me a great deal of money down
below, but no one told me what it was to shudder.’ ‘Then,’ said the
king, ‘you have saved the castle, and shall marry my daughter.’ ‘That
is all very well,’ said he, ‘but still I do not know what it is to
shudder!’

Then the gold was brought up and the wedding celebrated; but howsoever
much the young king loved his wife, and however happy he was, he still
said always: ‘If I could but shudder--if I could but shudder.’ And this
at last angered her. Her waiting-maid said: ‘I will find a cure for him;
he shall soon learn what it is to shudder.’ She went out to the stream
which flowed through the garden, and had a whole bucketful of gudgeons
brought to her. At night when the young king was sleeping, his wife was
to draw the clothes off him and empty the bucket full of cold water
with the gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would
sprawl about him. Then he woke up and cried: ‘Oh, what makes me shudder
so?--what makes me shudder so, dear wife? Ah! now I know what it is to
shudder!’




KING GRISLY-BEARD

A great king of a land far away in the East had a daughter who was very
beautiful, but so proud, and haughty, and conceited, that none of the
princes who came to ask her in marriage was good enough for her, and she
only made sport of them.

Once upon a time the king held a great feast, and asked thither all
her suitors; and they all sat in a row, ranged according to their
rank--kings, and princes, and dukes, and earls, and counts, and barons,
and knights. Then the princess came in, and as she passed by them she
had something spiteful to say to every one. The first was too fat: ‘He’s
as round as a tub,’ said she. The next was too tall: ‘What a maypole!’
said she. The next was too short: ‘What a dumpling!’ said she. The
fourth was too pale, and she called him ‘Wallface.’ The fifth was too
red, so she called him ‘Coxcomb.’ The sixth was not straight enough;
so she said he was like a green stick, that had been laid to dry over
a baker’s oven. And thus she had some joke to crack upon every one: but
she laughed more than all at a good king who was there. ‘Look at
him,’ said she; ‘his beard is like an old mop; he shall be called
Grisly-beard.’ So the king got the nickname of Grisly-beard.

But the old king was very angry when he saw how his daughter behaved,
and how she ill-treated all his guests; and he vowed that, willing or
unwilling, she should marry the first man, be he prince or beggar, that
came to the door.

Two days after there came by a travelling fiddler, who began to play
under the window and beg alms; and when the king heard him, he said,
‘Let him come in.’ So they brought in a dirty-looking fellow; and when
he had sung before the king and the princess, he begged a boon. Then the
king said, ‘You have sung so well, that I will give you my daughter for
your wife.’ The princess begged and prayed; but the king said, ‘I have
sworn to give you to the first comer, and I will keep my word.’ So words
and tears were of no avail; the parson was sent for, and she was married
to the fiddler. When this was over the king said, ‘Now get ready to
go--you must not stay here--you must travel on with your husband.’

Then the fiddler went his way, and took her with him, and they soon came
to a great wood. ‘Pray,’ said she, ‘whose is this wood?’ ‘It belongs
to King Grisly-beard,’ answered he; ‘hadst thou taken him, all had been
thine.’ ‘Ah! unlucky wretch that I am!’ sighed she; ‘would that I had
married King Grisly-beard!’ Next they came to some fine meadows. ‘Whose
are these beautiful green meadows?’ said she. ‘They belong to King
Grisly-beard, hadst thou taken him, they had all been thine.’ ‘Ah!
unlucky wretch that I am!’ said she; ‘would that I had married King
Grisly-beard!’

Then they came to a great city. ‘Whose is this noble city?’ said she.
‘It belongs to King Grisly-beard; hadst thou taken him, it had all been
thine.’ ‘Ah! wretch that I am!’ sighed she; ‘why did I not marry King
Grisly-beard?’ ‘That is no business of mine,’ said the fiddler: ‘why
should you wish for another husband? Am not I good enough for you?’

At last they came to a small cottage. ‘What a paltry place!’ said she;
‘to whom does that little dirty hole belong?’ Then the fiddler said,
‘That is your and my house, where we are to live.’ ‘Where are your
servants?’ cried she. ‘What do we want with servants?’ said he; ‘you
must do for yourself whatever is to be done. Now make the fire, and put
on water and cook my supper, for I am very tired.’ But the princess knew
nothing of making fires and cooking, and the fiddler was forced to help
her. When they had eaten a very scanty meal they went to bed; but the
fiddler called her up very early in the morning to clean the house. Thus
they lived for two days: and when they had eaten up all there was in the
cottage, the man said, ‘Wife, we can’t go on thus, spending money and
earning nothing. You must learn to weave baskets.’ Then he went out and
cut willows, and brought them home, and she began to weave; but it made
her fingers very sore. ‘I see this work won’t do,’ said he: ‘try and
spin; perhaps you will do that better.’ So she sat down and tried to
spin; but the threads cut her tender fingers till the blood ran. ‘See
now,’ said the fiddler, ‘you are good for nothing; you can do no work:
what a bargain I have got! However, I’ll try and set up a trade in pots
and pans, and you shall stand in the market and sell them.’ ‘Alas!’
sighed she, ‘if any of my father’s court should pass by and see me
standing in the market, how they will laugh at me!’

But her husband did not care for that, and said she must work, if she
did not wish to die of hunger. At first the trade went well; for many
people, seeing such a beautiful woman, went to buy her wares, and paid
their money without thinking of taking away the goods. They lived on
this as long as it lasted; and then her husband bought a fresh lot of
ware, and she sat herself down with it in the corner of the market; but
a drunken soldier soon came by, and rode his horse against her stall,
and broke all her goods into a thousand pieces. Then she began to cry,
and knew not what to do. ‘Ah! what will become of me?’ said she; ‘what
will my husband say?’ So she ran home and told him all. ‘Who would
have thought you would have been so silly,’ said he, ‘as to put an
earthenware stall in the corner of the market, where everybody passes?
but let us have no more crying; I see you are not fit for this sort of
work, so I have been to the king’s palace, and asked if they did not
want a kitchen-maid; and they say they will take you, and there you will
have plenty to eat.’

Thus the princess became a kitchen-maid, and helped the cook to do all
the dirtiest work; but she was allowed to carry home some of the meat
that was left, and on this they lived.

She had not been there long before she heard that the king’s eldest son
was passing by, going to be married; and she went to one of the windows
and looked out. Everything was ready, and all the pomp and brightness of
the court was there. Then she bitterly grieved for the pride and folly
which had brought her so low. And the servants gave her some of the rich
meats, which she put into her basket to take home.

All on a sudden, as she was going out, in came the king’s son in golden
clothes; and when he saw a beautiful woman at the door, he took her
by the hand, and said she should be his partner in the dance; but she
trembled for fear, for she saw that it was King Grisly-beard, who was
making sport of her. However, he kept fast hold, and led her in; and the
cover of the basket came off, so that the meats in it fell about. Then
everybody laughed and jeered at her; and she was so abashed, that she
wished herself a thousand feet deep in the earth. She sprang to the
door to run away; but on the steps King Grisly-beard overtook her, and
brought her back and said, ‘Fear me not! I am the fiddler who has lived
with you in the hut. I brought you there because I really loved you. I
am also the soldier that overset your stall. I have done all this only
to cure you of your silly pride, and to show you the folly of your
ill-treatment of me. Now all is over: you have learnt wisdom, and it is
time to hold our marriage feast.’

Then the chamberlains came and brought her the most beautiful robes; and
her father and his whole court were there already, and welcomed her home
on her marriage. Joy was in every face and every heart. The feast was
grand; they danced and sang; all were merry; and I only wish that you
and I had been of the party.




IRON HANS

There was once upon a time a king who had a great forest near his
palace, full of all kinds of wild animals. One day he sent out a
huntsman to shoot him a roe, but he did not come back. ‘Perhaps some
accident has befallen him,’ said the king, and the next day he sent out
two more huntsmen who were to search for him, but they too stayed away.
Then on the third day, he sent for all his huntsmen, and said: ‘Scour
the whole forest through, and do not give up until you have found all
three.’ But of these also, none came home again, none were seen again.
From that time forth, no one would any longer venture into the forest,
and it lay there in deep stillness and solitude, and nothing was seen
of it, but sometimes an eagle or a hawk flying over it. This lasted for
many years, when an unknown huntsman announced himself to the king as
seeking a situation, and offered to go into the dangerous forest. The
king, however, would not give his consent, and said: ‘It is not safe in
there; I fear it would fare with you no better than with the others,
and you would never come out again.’ The huntsman replied: ‘Lord, I will
venture it at my own risk, of fear I know nothing.’

The huntsman therefore betook himself with his dog to the forest. It was
not long before the dog fell in with some game on the way, and wanted to
pursue it; but hardly had the dog run two steps when it stood before a
deep pool, could go no farther, and a naked arm stretched itself out of
the water, seized it, and drew it under. When the huntsman saw that, he
went back and fetched three men to come with buckets and bale out the
water. When they could see to the bottom there lay a wild man whose body
was brown like rusty iron, and whose hair hung over his face down to his
knees. They bound him with cords, and led him away to the castle. There
was great astonishment over the wild man; the king, however, had him put
in an iron cage in his courtyard, and forbade the door to be opened
on pain of death, and the queen herself was to take the key into her
keeping. And from this time forth everyone could again go into the
forest with safety.

The king had a son of eight years, who was once playing in the
courtyard, and while he was playing, his golden ball fell into the cage.
The boy ran thither and said: ‘Give me my ball out.’ ‘Not till you have
opened the door for me,’ answered the man. ‘No,’ said the boy, ‘I will
not do that; the king has forbidden it,’ and ran away. The next day he
again went and asked for his ball; the wild man said: ‘Open my door,’
but the boy would not. On the third day the king had ridden out hunting,
and the boy went once more and said: ‘I cannot open the door even if I
wished, for I have not the key.’ Then the wild man said: ‘It lies under
your mother’s pillow, you can get it there.’ The boy, who wanted to have
his ball back, cast all thought to the winds, and brought the key. The
door opened with difficulty, and the boy pinched his fingers. When it
was open the wild man stepped out, gave him the golden ball, and hurried
away. The boy had become afraid; he called and cried after him: ‘Oh,
wild man, do not go away, or I shall be beaten!’ The wild man turned
back, took him up, set him on his shoulder, and went with hasty steps
into the forest. When the king came home, he observed the empty cage,
and asked the queen how that had happened. She knew nothing about it,
and sought the key, but it was gone. She called the boy, but no one
answered. The king sent out people to seek for him in the fields, but
they did not find him. Then he could easily guess what had happened, and
much grief reigned in the royal court.

When the wild man had once more reached the dark forest, he took the boy
down from his shoulder, and said to him: ‘You will never see your father
and mother again, but I will keep you with me, for you have set me free,
and I have compassion on you. If you do all I bid you, you shall fare
well. Of treasure and gold have I enough, and more than anyone in the
world.’ He made a bed of moss for the boy on which he slept, and the
next morning the man took him to a well, and said: ‘Behold, the gold
well is as bright and clear as crystal, you shall sit beside it, and
take care that nothing falls into it, or it will be polluted. I will
come every evening to see if you have obeyed my order.’ The boy placed
himself by the brink of the well, and often saw a golden fish or a
golden snake show itself therein, and took care that nothing fell in.
As he was thus sitting, his finger hurt him so violently that he
involuntarily put it in the water. He drew it quickly out again, but saw
that it was quite gilded, and whatsoever pains he took to wash the gold
off again, all was to no purpose. In the evening Iron Hans came back,
looked at the boy, and said: ‘What has happened to the well?’ ‘Nothing
nothing,’ he answered, and held his finger behind his back, that the
man might not see it. But he said: ‘You have dipped your finger into
the water, this time it may pass, but take care you do not again let
anything go in.’ By daybreak the boy was already sitting by the well and
watching it. His finger hurt him again and he passed it over his head,
and then unhappily a hair fell down into the well. He took it quickly
out, but it was already quite gilded. Iron Hans came, and already knew
what had happened. ‘You have let a hair fall into the well,’ said he.
‘I will allow you to watch by it once more, but if this happens for the
third time then the well is polluted and you can no longer remain with
me.’

On the third day, the boy sat by the well, and did not stir his finger,
however much it hurt him. But the time was long to him, and he looked at
the reflection of his face on the surface of the water. And as he
still bent down more and more while he was doing so, and trying to look
straight into the eyes, his long hair fell down from his shoulders into
the water. He raised himself up quickly, but the whole of the hair of
his head was already golden and shone like the sun. You can imagine how
terrified the poor boy was! He took his pocket-handkerchief and tied it
round his head, in order that the man might not see it. When he came he
already knew everything, and said: ‘Take the handkerchief off.’ Then the
golden hair streamed forth, and let the boy excuse himself as he might,
it was of no use. ‘You have not stood the trial and can stay here no
longer. Go forth into the world, there you will learn what poverty is.
But as you have not a bad heart, and as I mean well by you, there is
one thing I will grant you; if you fall into any difficulty, come to the
forest and cry: “Iron Hans,” and then I will come and help you. My
power is great, greater than you think, and I have gold and silver in
abundance.’

Then the king’s son left the forest, and walked by beaten and unbeaten
paths ever onwards until at length he reached a great city. There he
looked for work, but could find none, and he learnt nothing by which he
could help himself. At length he went to the palace, and asked if they
would take him in. The people about court did not at all know what use
they could make of him, but they liked him, and told him to stay. At
length the cook took him into his service, and said he might carry wood
and water, and rake the cinders together. Once when it so happened that
no one else was at hand, the cook ordered him to carry the food to the
royal table, but as he did not like to let his golden hair be seen, he
kept his little cap on. Such a thing as that had never yet come under
the king’s notice, and he said: ‘When you come to the royal table you
must take your hat off.’ He answered: ‘Ah, Lord, I cannot; I have a bad
sore place on my head.’ Then the king had the cook called before him
and scolded him, and asked how he could take such a boy as that into his
service; and that he was to send him away at once. The cook, however,
had pity on him, and exchanged him for the gardener’s boy.

And now the boy had to plant and water the garden, hoe and dig, and bear
the wind and bad weather. Once in summer when he was working alone in
the garden, the day was so warm he took his little cap off that the air
might cool him. As the sun shone on his hair it glittered and flashed so
that the rays fell into the bedroom of the king’s daughter, and up she
sprang to see what that could be. Then she saw the boy, and cried to
him: ‘Boy, bring me a wreath of flowers.’ He put his cap on with all
haste, and gathered wild field-flowers and bound them together. When he
was ascending the stairs with them, the gardener met him, and said: ‘How
can you take the king’s daughter a garland of such common flowers? Go
quickly, and get another, and seek out the prettiest and rarest.’ ‘Oh,
no,’ replied the boy, ‘the wild ones have more scent, and will please
her better.’ When he got into the room, the king’s daughter said: ‘Take
your cap off, it is not seemly to keep it on in my presence.’ He again
said: ‘I may not, I have a sore head.’ She, however, caught at his
cap and pulled it off, and then his golden hair rolled down on his
shoulders, and it was splendid to behold. He wanted to run out, but she
held him by the arm, and gave him a handful of ducats. With these he
departed, but he cared nothing for the gold pieces. He took them to the
gardener, and said: ‘I present them to your children, they can play with
them.’ The following day the king’s daughter again called to him that he
was to bring her a wreath of field-flowers, and then he went in with it,
she instantly snatched at his cap, and wanted to take it away from him,
but he held it fast with both hands. She again gave him a handful of
ducats, but he would not keep them, and gave them to the gardener for
playthings for his children. On the third day things went just the
same; she could not get his cap away from him, and he would not have her
money.

Not long afterwards, the country was overrun by war. The king gathered
together his people, and did not know whether or not he could offer any
opposition to the enemy, who was superior in strength and had a mighty
army. Then said the gardener’s boy: ‘I am grown up, and will go to the
wars also, only give me a horse.’ The others laughed, and said: ‘Seek
one for yourself when we are gone, we will leave one behind us in the
stable for you.’ When they had gone forth, he went into the stable, and
led the horse out; it was lame of one foot, and limped hobblety jib,
hobblety jib; nevertheless he mounted it, and rode away to the dark
forest. When he came to the outskirts, he called ‘Iron Hans’ three
times so loudly that it echoed through the trees. Thereupon the wild man
appeared immediately, and said: ‘What do you desire?’ ‘I want a strong
steed, for I am going to the wars.’ ‘That you shall have, and still more
than you ask for.’ Then the wild man went back into the forest, and it
was not long before a stable-boy came out of it, who led a horse that
snorted with its nostrils, and could hardly be restrained, and behind
them followed a great troop of warriors entirely equipped in iron, and
their swords flashed in the sun. The youth made over his three-legged
horse to the stable-boy, mounted the other, and rode at the head of the
soldiers. When he got near the battlefield a great part of the king’s
men had already fallen, and little was wanting to make the rest give
way. Then the youth galloped thither with his iron soldiers, broke like
a hurricane over the enemy, and beat down all who opposed him. They
began to flee, but the youth pursued, and never stopped, until there
was not a single man left. Instead of returning to the king, however, he
conducted his troop by byways back to the forest, and called forth Iron
Hans. ‘What do you desire?’ asked the wild man. ‘Take back your horse
and your troops, and give me my three-legged horse again.’ All that he
asked was done, and soon he was riding on his three-legged horse. When
the king returned to his palace, his daughter went to meet him, and
wished him joy of his victory. ‘I am not the one who carried away the
victory,’ said he, ‘but a strange knight who came to my assistance with
his soldiers.’ The daughter wanted to hear who the strange knight was,
but the king did not know, and said: ‘He followed the enemy, and I did
not see him again.’ She inquired of the gardener where his boy was, but
he smiled, and said: ‘He has just come home on his three-legged horse,
and the others have been mocking him, and crying: “Here comes our
hobblety jib back again!” They asked, too: “Under what hedge have you
been lying sleeping all the time?” So he said: “I did the best of all,
and it would have gone badly without me.” And then he was still more
ridiculed.’

The king said to his daughter: ‘I will proclaim a great feast that shall
last for three days, and you shall throw a golden apple. Perhaps the
unknown man will show himself.’ When the feast was announced, the youth
went out to the forest, and called Iron Hans. ‘What do you desire?’
asked he. ‘That I may catch the king’s daughter’s golden apple.’ ‘It is
as safe as if you had it already,’ said Iron Hans. ‘You shall likewise
have a suit of red armour for the occasion, and ride on a spirited
chestnut-horse.’ When the day came, the youth galloped to the spot, took
his place amongst the knights, and was recognized by no one. The king’s
daughter came forward, and threw a golden apple to the knights, but none
of them caught it but he, only as soon as he had it he galloped away.

On the second day Iron Hans equipped him as a white knight, and gave him
a white horse. Again he was the only one who caught the apple, and
he did not linger an instant, but galloped off with it. The king grew
angry, and said: ‘That is not allowed; he must appear before me and tell
his name.’ He gave the order that if the knight who caught the apple,
should go away again they should pursue him, and if he would not come
back willingly, they were to cut him down and stab him.

On the third day, he received from Iron Hans a suit of black armour and
a black horse, and again he caught the apple. But when he was riding off
with it, the king’s attendants pursued him, and one of them got so near
him that he wounded the youth’s leg with the point of his sword. The
youth nevertheless escaped from them, but his horse leapt so violently
that the helmet fell from the youth’s head, and they could see that he
had golden hair. They rode back and announced this to the king.

The following day the king’s daughter asked the gardener about his
boy. ‘He is at work in the garden; the queer creature has been at the
festival too, and only came home yesterday evening; he has likewise
shown my children three golden apples which he has won.’

The king had him summoned into his presence, and he came and again had
his little cap on his head. But the king’s daughter went up to him and
took it off, and then his golden hair fell down over his shoulders, and
he was so handsome that all were amazed. ‘Are you the knight who came
every day to the festival, always in different colours, and who caught
the three golden apples?’ asked the king. ‘Yes,’ answered he, ‘and here
the apples are,’ and he took them out of his pocket, and returned them
to the king. ‘If you desire further proof, you may see the wound which
your people gave me when they followed me. But I am likewise the knight
who helped you to your victory over your enemies.’ ‘If you can perform
such deeds as that, you are no gardener’s boy; tell me, who is your
father?’ ‘My father is a mighty king, and gold have I in plenty as great
as I require.’ ‘I well see,’ said the king, ‘that I owe my thanks to
you; can I do anything to please you?’ ‘Yes,’ answered he, ‘that indeed
you can. Give me your daughter to wife.’ The maiden laughed, and said:
‘He does not stand much on ceremony, but I have already seen by his
golden hair that he was no gardener’s boy,’ and then she went and
kissed him. His father and mother came to the wedding, and were in great
delight, for they had given up all hope of ever seeing their dear
son again. And as they were sitting at the marriage-feast, the music
suddenly stopped, the doors opened, and a stately king came in with a
great retinue. He went up to the youth, embraced him and said: ‘I am
Iron Hans, and was by enchantment a wild man, but you have set me free;
all the treasures which I possess, shall be your property.’




CAT-SKIN

There was once a king, whose queen had hair of the purest gold, and was
so beautiful that her match was not to be met with on the whole face of
the earth. But this beautiful queen fell ill, and when she felt that her
end drew near she called the king to her and said, ‘Promise me that you
will never marry again, unless you meet with a wife who is as beautiful
as I am, and who has golden hair like mine.’ Then when the king in his
grief promised all she asked, she shut her eyes and died. But the king
was not to be comforted, and for a long time never thought of taking
another wife. At last, however, his wise men said, ‘this will not do;
the king must marry again, that we may have a queen.’ So messengers were
sent far and wide, to seek for a bride as beautiful as the late queen.
But there was no princess in the world so beautiful; and if there had
been, still there was not one to be found who had golden hair. So the
messengers came home, and had had all their trouble for nothing.

Now the king had a daughter, who was just as beautiful as her mother,
and had the same golden hair. And when she was grown up, the king looked
at her and saw that she was just like this late queen: then he said to
his courtiers, ‘May I not marry my daughter? She is the very image of my
dead wife: unless I have her, I shall not find any bride upon the whole
earth, and you say there must be a queen.’ When the courtiers heard this
they were shocked, and said, ‘Heaven forbid that a father should marry
his daughter! Out of so great a sin no good can come.’ And his daughter
was also shocked, but hoped the king would soon give up such thoughts;
so she said to him, ‘Before I marry anyone I must have three dresses:
one must be of gold, like the sun; another must be of shining silver,
like the moon; and a third must be dazzling as the stars: besides this,
I want a mantle of a thousand different kinds of fur put together, to
which every beast in the kingdom must give a part of his skin.’ And thus
she thought he would think of the matter no more. But the king made the
most skilful workmen in his kingdom weave the three dresses: one golden,
like the sun; another silvery, like the moon; and a third sparkling,
like the stars: and his hunters were told to hunt out all the beasts in
his kingdom, and to take the finest fur out of their skins: and thus a
mantle of a thousand furs was made.

When all were ready, the king sent them to her; but she got up in the
night when all were asleep, and took three of her trinkets, a golden
ring, a golden necklace, and a golden brooch, and packed the three
dresses--of the sun, the moon, and the stars--up in a nutshell, and
wrapped herself up in the mantle made of all sorts of fur, and besmeared
her face and hands with soot. Then she threw herself upon Heaven for
help in her need, and went away, and journeyed on the whole night, till
at last she came to a large wood. As she was very tired, she sat herself
down in the hollow of a tree and soon fell asleep: and there she slept
on till it was midday.

Now as the king to whom the wood belonged was hunting in it, his dogs
came to the tree, and began to snuff about, and run round and round, and
bark. ‘Look sharp!’ said the king to the huntsmen, ‘and see what sort
of game lies there.’ And the huntsmen went up to the tree, and when they
came back again said, ‘In the hollow tree there lies a most wonderful
beast, such as we never saw before; its skin seems to be of a thousand
kinds of fur, but there it lies fast asleep.’ ‘See,’ said the king, ‘if
you can catch it alive, and we will take it with us.’ So the huntsmen
took it up, and the maiden awoke and was greatly frightened, and said,
‘I am a poor child that has neither father nor mother left; have pity on
me and take me with you.’ Then they said, ‘Yes, Miss Cat-skin, you will
do for the kitchen; you can sweep up the ashes, and do things of that
sort.’ So they put her into the coach, and took her home to the king’s
palace. Then they showed her a little corner under the staircase, where
no light of day ever peeped in, and said, ‘Cat-skin, you may lie and
sleep there.’ And she was sent into the kitchen, and made to fetch wood
and water, to blow the fire, pluck the poultry, pick the herbs, sift the
ashes, and do all the dirty work.

Thus Cat-skin lived for a long time very sorrowfully. ‘Ah! pretty
princess!’ thought she, ‘what will now become of thee?’ But it happened
one day that a feast was to be held in the king’s castle, so she said to
the cook, ‘May I go up a little while and see what is going on? I will
take care and stand behind the door.’ And the cook said, ‘Yes, you may
go, but be back again in half an hour’s time, to rake out the ashes.’
Then she took her little lamp, and went into her cabin, and took off the
fur skin, and washed the soot from off her face and hands, so that her
beauty shone forth like the sun from behind the clouds. She next opened
her nutshell, and brought out of it the dress that shone like the sun,
and so went to the feast. Everyone made way for her, for nobody knew
her, and they thought she could be no less than a king’s daughter. But
the king came up to her, and held out his hand and danced with her; and
he thought in his heart, ‘I never saw any one half so beautiful.’

When the dance was at an end she curtsied; and when the king looked
round for her, she was gone, no one knew wither. The guards that stood
at the castle gate were called in: but they had seen no one. The truth
was, that she had run into her little cabin, pulled off her dress,
blackened her face and hands, put on the fur-skin cloak, and was
Cat-skin again. When she went into the kitchen to her work, and began
to rake the ashes, the cook said, ‘Let that alone till the morning, and
heat the king’s soup; I should like to run up now and give a peep: but
take care you don’t let a hair fall into it, or you will run a chance of
never eating again.’

As soon as the cook went away, Cat-skin heated the king’s soup, and
toasted a slice of bread first, as nicely as ever she could; and when it
was ready, she went and looked in the cabin for her little golden ring,
and put it into the dish in which the soup was. When the dance was over,
the king ordered his soup to be brought in; and it pleased him so well,
that he thought he had never tasted any so good before. At the bottom
he saw a gold ring lying; and as he could not make out how it had got
there, he ordered the cook to be sent for. The cook was frightened when
he heard the order, and said to Cat-skin, ‘You must have let a hair fall
into the soup; if it be so, you will have a good beating.’ Then he went
before the king, and he asked him who had cooked the soup. ‘I did,’
answered the cook. But the king said, ‘That is not true; it was better
done than you could do it.’ Then he answered, ‘To tell the truth I did
not cook it, but Cat-skin did.’ ‘Then let Cat-skin come up,’ said the
king: and when she came he said to her, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am a poor
child,’ said she, ‘that has lost both father and mother.’ ‘How came you
in my palace?’ asked he. ‘I am good for nothing,’ said she, ‘but to be
scullion-girl, and to have boots and shoes thrown at my head.’ ‘But how
did you get the ring that was in the soup?’ asked the king. Then she
would not own that she knew anything about the ring; so the king sent
her away again about her business.

After a time there was another feast, and Cat-skin asked the cook to let
her go up and see it as before. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘but come again in half
an hour, and cook the king the soup that he likes so much.’ Then she
ran to her little cabin, washed herself quickly, and took her dress
out which was silvery as the moon, and put it on; and when she went in,
looking like a king’s daughter, the king went up to her, and rejoiced at
seeing her again, and when the dance began he danced with her. After the
dance was at an end she managed to slip out, so slyly that the king did
not see where she was gone; but she sprang into her little cabin, and
made herself into Cat-skin again, and went into the kitchen to cook the
soup. Whilst the cook was above stairs, she got the golden necklace and
dropped it into the soup; then it was brought to the king, who ate it,
and it pleased him as well as before; so he sent for the cook, who
was again forced to tell him that Cat-skin had cooked it. Cat-skin was
brought again before the king, but she still told him that she was only
fit to have boots and shoes thrown at her head.

But when the king had ordered a feast to be got ready for the third
time, it happened just the same as before. ‘You must be a witch,
Cat-skin,’ said the cook; ‘for you always put something into your soup,
so that it pleases the king better than mine.’ However, he let her go up
as before. Then she put on her dress which sparkled like the stars, and
went into the ball-room in it; and the king danced with her again, and
thought she had never looked so beautiful as she did then. So whilst
he was dancing with her, he put a gold ring on her finger without her
seeing it, and ordered that the dance should be kept up a long time.
When it was at an end, he would have held her fast by the hand, but she
slipped away, and sprang so quickly through the crowd that he lost sight
of her: and she ran as fast as she could into her little cabin under
the stairs. But this time she kept away too long, and stayed beyond the
half-hour; so she had not time to take off her fine dress, and threw her
fur mantle over it, and in her haste did not blacken herself all over
with soot, but left one of her fingers white.

Then she ran into the kitchen, and cooked the king’s soup; and as soon
as the cook was gone, she put the golden brooch into the dish. When the
king got to the bottom, he ordered Cat-skin to be called once more, and
soon saw the white finger, and the ring that he had put on it whilst
they were dancing: so he seized her hand, and kept fast hold of it, and
when she wanted to loose herself and spring away, the fur cloak fell off
a little on one side, and the starry dress sparkled underneath it.

Then he got hold of the fur and tore it off, and her golden hair and
beautiful form were seen, and she could no longer hide herself: so she
washed the soot and ashes from her face, and showed herself to be the
most beautiful princess upon the face of the earth. But the king said,
‘You are my beloved bride, and we will never more be parted from each
other.’ And the wedding feast was held, and a merry day it was, as ever
was heard of or seen in that country, or indeed in any other.




SNOW-WHITE AND ROSE-RED

There was once a poor widow who lived in a lonely cottage. In front of
the cottage was a garden wherein stood two rose-trees, one of which bore
white and the other red roses. She had two children who were like the
two rose-trees, and one was called Snow-white, and the other Rose-red.
They were as good and happy, as busy and cheerful as ever two children
in the world were, only Snow-white was more quiet and gentle than
Rose-red. Rose-red liked better to run about in the meadows and fields
seeking flowers and catching butterflies; but Snow-white sat at home
with her mother, and helped her with her housework, or read to her when
there was nothing to do.

The two children were so fond of one another that they always held each
other by the hand when they went out together, and when Snow-white said:
‘We will not leave each other,’ Rose-red answered: ‘Never so long as we
live,’ and their mother would add: ‘What one has she must share with the
other.’

They often ran about the forest alone and gathered red berries, and no
beasts did them any harm, but came close to them trustfully. The little
hare would eat a cabbage-leaf out of their hands, the roe grazed by
their side, the stag leapt merrily by them, and the birds sat still upon
the boughs, and sang whatever they knew.

No mishap overtook them; if they had stayed too late in the forest, and
night came on, they laid themselves down near one another upon the moss,
and slept until morning came, and their mother knew this and did not
worry on their account.

Once when they had spent the night in the wood and the dawn had roused
them, they saw a beautiful child in a shining white dress sitting near
their bed. He got up and looked quite kindly at them, but said nothing
and went into the forest. And when they looked round they found that
they had been sleeping quite close to a precipice, and would certainly
have fallen into it in the darkness if they had gone only a few paces
further. And their mother told them that it must have been the angel who
watches over good children.

Snow-white and Rose-red kept their mother’s little cottage so neat that
it was a pleasure to look inside it. In the summer Rose-red took care
of the house, and every morning laid a wreath of flowers by her mother’s
bed before she awoke, in which was a rose from each tree. In the winter
Snow-white lit the fire and hung the kettle on the hob. The kettle
was of brass and shone like gold, so brightly was it polished. In the
evening, when the snowflakes fell, the mother said: ‘Go, Snow-white, and
bolt the door,’ and then they sat round the hearth, and the mother took
her spectacles and read aloud out of a large book, and the two girls
listened as they sat and spun. And close by them lay a lamb upon the
floor, and behind them upon a perch sat a white dove with its head
hidden beneath its wings.

One evening, as they were thus sitting comfortably together, someone
knocked at the door as if he wished to be let in. The mother said:
‘Quick, Rose-red, open the door, it must be a traveller who is seeking
shelter.’ Rose-red went and pushed back the bolt, thinking that it was a
poor man, but it was not; it was a bear that stretched his broad, black
head within the door.

Rose-red screamed and sprang back, the lamb bleated, the dove fluttered,
and Snow-white hid herself behind her mother’s bed. But the bear began
to speak and said: ‘Do not be afraid, I will do you no harm! I am
half-frozen, and only want to warm myself a little beside you.’

‘Poor bear,’ said the mother, ‘lie down by the fire, only take care that
you do not burn your coat.’ Then she cried: ‘Snow-white, Rose-red, come
out, the bear will do you no harm, he means well.’ So they both came
out, and by-and-by the lamb and dove came nearer, and were not afraid
of him. The bear said: ‘Here, children, knock the snow out of my coat a
little’; so they brought the broom and swept the bear’s hide clean;
and he stretched himself by the fire and growled contentedly and
comfortably. It was not long before they grew quite at home, and played
tricks with their clumsy guest. They tugged his hair with their hands,
put their feet upon his back and rolled him about, or they took a
hazel-switch and beat him, and when he growled they laughed. But the
bear took it all in good part, only when they were too rough he called
out: ‘Leave me alive, children,

  Snow-white, Rose-red,
  Will you beat your wooer dead?’

When it was bed-time, and the others went to bed, the mother said to the
bear: ‘You can lie there by the hearth, and then you will be safe from
the cold and the bad weather.’ As soon as day dawned the two children
let him out, and he trotted across the snow into the forest.

Henceforth the bear came every evening at the same time, laid himself
down by the hearth, and let the children amuse themselves with him as
much as they liked; and they got so used to him that the doors were
never fastened until their black friend had arrived.

When spring had come and all outside was green, the bear said one
morning to Snow-white: ‘Now I must go away, and cannot come back for the
whole summer.’ ‘Where are you going, then, dear bear?’ asked Snow-white.
‘I must go into the forest and guard my treasures from the wicked
dwarfs. In the winter, when the earth is frozen hard, they are obliged
to stay below and cannot work their way through; but now, when the sun
has thawed and warmed the earth, they break through it, and come out to
pry and steal; and what once gets into their hands, and in their caves,
does not easily see daylight again.’

Snow-white was quite sorry at his departure, and as she unbolted the
door for him, and the bear was hurrying out, he caught against the bolt
and a piece of his hairy coat was torn off, and it seemed to Snow-white
as if she had seen gold shining through it, but she was not sure about
it. The bear ran away quickly, and was soon out of sight behind the
trees.

A short time afterwards the mother sent her children into the forest
to get firewood. There they found a big tree which lay felled on the
ground, and close by the trunk something was jumping backwards and
forwards in the grass, but they could not make out what it was. When
they came nearer they saw a dwarf with an old withered face and a
snow-white beard a yard long. The end of the beard was caught in a
crevice of the tree, and the little fellow was jumping about like a dog
tied to a rope, and did not know what to do.

He glared at the girls with his fiery red eyes and cried: ‘Why do you
stand there? Can you not come here and help me?’ ‘What are you up to,
little man?’ asked Rose-red. ‘You stupid, prying goose!’ answered the
dwarf: ‘I was going to split the tree to get a little wood for cooking.
The little bit of food that we people get is immediately burnt up with
heavy logs; we do not swallow so much as you coarse, greedy folk. I had
just driven the wedge safely in, and everything was going as I wished;
but the cursed wedge was too smooth and suddenly sprang out, and the
tree closed so quickly that I could not pull out my beautiful white
beard; so now it is tight and I cannot get away, and the silly, sleek,
milk-faced things laugh! Ugh! how odious you are!’

The children tried very hard, but they could not pull the beard out, it
was caught too fast. ‘I will run and fetch someone,’ said Rose-red. ‘You
senseless goose!’ snarled the dwarf; ‘why should you fetch someone? You
are already two too many for me; can you not think of something better?’
‘Don’t be impatient,’ said Snow-white, ‘I will help you,’ and she pulled
her scissors out of her pocket, and cut off the end of the beard.

As soon as the dwarf felt himself free he laid hold of a bag which lay
amongst the roots of the tree, and which was full of gold, and lifted it
up, grumbling to himself: ‘Uncouth people, to cut off a piece of my fine
beard. Bad luck to you!’ and then he swung the bag upon his back, and
went off without even once looking at the children.

Some time afterwards Snow-white and Rose-red went to catch a dish
of fish. As they came near the brook they saw something like a large
grasshopper jumping towards the water, as if it were going to leap in.
They ran to it and found it was the dwarf. ‘Where are you going?’ said
Rose-red; ‘you surely don’t want to go into the water?’ ‘I am not such
a fool!’ cried the dwarf; ‘don’t you see that the accursed fish wants
to pull me in?’ The little man had been sitting there fishing, and
unluckily the wind had tangled up his beard with the fishing-line; a
moment later a big fish made a bite and the feeble creature had not
strength to pull it out; the fish kept the upper hand and pulled the
dwarf towards him. He held on to all the reeds and rushes, but it was of
little good, for he was forced to follow the movements of the fish, and
was in urgent danger of being dragged into the water.

The girls came just in time; they held him fast and tried to free his
beard from the line, but all in vain, beard and line were entangled fast
together. There was nothing to do but to bring out the scissors and cut
the beard, whereby a small part of it was lost. When the dwarf saw that
he screamed out: ‘Is that civil, you toadstool, to disfigure a man’s
face? Was it not enough to clip off the end of my beard? Now you have
cut off the best part of it. I cannot let myself be seen by my people.
I wish you had been made to run the soles off your shoes!’ Then he took
out a sack of pearls which lay in the rushes, and without another word
he dragged it away and disappeared behind a stone.

It happened that soon afterwards the mother sent the two children to the
town to buy needles and thread, and laces and ribbons. The road led them
across a heath upon which huge pieces of rock lay strewn about. There
they noticed a large bird hovering in the air, flying slowly round and
round above them; it sank lower and lower, and at last settled near a
rock not far away. Immediately they heard a loud, piteous cry. They ran
up and saw with horror that the eagle had seized their old acquaintance
the dwarf, and was going to carry him off.

The children, full of pity, at once took tight hold of the little man,
and pulled against the eagle so long that at last he let his booty go.
As soon as the dwarf had recovered from his first fright he cried
with his shrill voice: ‘Could you not have done it more carefully! You
dragged at my brown coat so that it is all torn and full of holes, you
clumsy creatures!’ Then he took up a sack full of precious stones, and
slipped away again under the rock into his hole. The girls, who by
this time were used to his ingratitude, went on their way and did their
business in town.

As they crossed the heath again on their way home they surprised the
dwarf, who had emptied out his bag of precious stones in a clean spot,
and had not thought that anyone would come there so late. The evening
sun shone upon the brilliant stones; they glittered and sparkled with
all colours so beautifully that the children stood still and stared
at them. ‘Why do you stand gaping there?’ cried the dwarf, and his
ashen-grey face became copper-red with rage. He was still cursing when a
loud growling was heard, and a black bear came trotting towards them out
of the forest. The dwarf sprang up in a fright, but he could not reach
his cave, for the bear was already close. Then in the dread of his heart
he cried: ‘Dear Mr Bear, spare me, I will give you all my treasures;
look, the beautiful jewels lying there! Grant me my life; what do you
want with such a slender little fellow as I? you would not feel me
between your teeth. Come, take these two wicked girls, they are tender
morsels for you, fat as young quails; for mercy’s sake eat them!’ The
bear took no heed of his words, but gave the wicked creature a single
blow with his paw, and he did not move again.

The girls had run away, but the bear called to them: ‘Snow-white and
Rose-red, do not be afraid; wait, I will come with you.’ Then they
recognized his voice and waited, and when he came up to them suddenly
his bearskin fell off, and he stood there a handsome man, clothed all in
gold. ‘I am a king’s son,’ he said, ‘and I was bewitched by that wicked
dwarf, who had stolen my treasures; I have had to run about the forest
as a savage bear until I was freed by his death. Now he has got his
well-deserved punishment.

Snow-white was married to him, and Rose-red to his brother, and they
divided between them the great treasure which the dwarf had gathered
together in his cave. The old mother lived peacefully and happily with
her children for many years. She took the two rose-trees with her, and
they stood before her window, and every year bore the most beautiful
roses, white and red.


*****


The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), were born
in Hanau, near Frankfurt, in the German state of Hesse. Throughout
their lives they remained close friends, and both studied law at Marburg
University. Jacob was a pioneer in the study of German philology,
and although Wilhelm’s work was hampered by poor health the brothers
collaborated in the creation of a German dictionary, not completed until
a century after their deaths. But they were best (and universally) known
for the collection of over two hundred folk tales they made from oral
sources and published in two volumes of ‘Nursery and Household Tales’ in
1812 and 1814. Although their intention was to preserve such material as
part of German cultural and literary history, and their collection was
first published with scholarly notes and no illustration, the tales soon
came into the possession of young readers. This was in part due to Edgar
Taylor, who made the first English translation in 1823, selecting about
fifty stories ‘with the amusement of some young friends principally in
view.’ They have been an essential ingredient of children’s reading ever
since.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, by Frederick Douglass

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
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it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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Title: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
       An American Slave

Author: Frederick Douglass

Release Date: January 10, 2006 [EBook #23]
Last Updated: November 17, 2013

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREDERICK DOUGLASS ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger









    Note from the original file: This electronic book is being released at
    this time to honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. [Born January
    15, 1929] [Officially celebrated January 20, 1992]



NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.


BOSTON

PUBLISHED AT THE ANTI-SLAVERY OFFICE, NO. 25 CORNHILL 1845

ENTERED, ACCORDING TO ACT OF CONGRESS, IN THE YEAR 1845 BY FREDERICK
DOUGLASS, IN THE CLERK'S OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS.






 CONTENTS



 PREFACE

 LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.

 FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

 CHAPTER I

 CHAPTER II

 CHAPTER III

 CHAPTER IV

 CHAPTER V

 CHAPTER VI

 CHAPTER VII

 CHAPTER VIII

 CHAPTER IX

 CHAPTER X

 CHAPTER XI

 APPENDIX

 A PARODY








PREFACE

In the month of August, 1841, I attended an anti-slavery convention
in Nantucket, at which it was my happiness to become acquainted with
_Frederick Douglass_, the writer of the following Narrative. He was a
stranger to nearly every member of that body; but, having recently made
his escape from the southern prison-house of bondage, and feeling
his curiosity excited to ascertain the principles and measures of the
abolitionists,--of whom he had heard a somewhat vague description while
he was a slave,--he was induced to give his attendance, on the occasion
alluded to, though at that time a resident in New Bedford.

Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence!--fortunate for the millions of
his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful
thraldom!--fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of
universal liberty!--fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has
already done so much to save and bless!--fortunate for a large circle of
friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly
secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his virtuous traits of
character, by his ever-abiding remembrance of those who are in bonds, as
being bound with them!--fortunate for the multitudes, in various parts of
our republic, whose minds he has enlightened on the subject of slavery,
and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or roused to virtuous
indignation by his stirring eloquence against the enslavers of
men!--fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into the field of
public usefulness, "gave the world assurance of a MAN," quickened the
slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work
of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free!

I shall never forget his first speech at the convention--the
extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind--the powerful impression
it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise--the
applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous
remarks. I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment;
certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by
it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more
clear than ever. There stood one, in physical proportion and stature
commanding and exact--in intellect richly endowed--in natural eloquence
a prodigy--in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the
angels"--yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,--trembling for his safety,
hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white
person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the
love of God and humanity! Capable of high attainments as an intellectual
and moral being--needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of
cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his
race--by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms
of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a
chattel personal, nevertheless!

A beloved friend from New Bedford prevailed on _Mr. Douglass_ to address
the convention: He came forward to the platform with a hesitancy and
embarrassment, necessarily the attendants of a sensitive mind in such a
novel position. After apologizing for his ignorance, and reminding the
audience that slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and
heart, he proceeded to narrate some of the facts in his own history as
a slave, and in the course of his speech gave utterance to many noble
thoughts and thrilling reflections. As soon as he had taken his seat,
filled with hope and admiration, I rose, and declared that _Patrick
Henry_, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more eloquent in the
cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to from the lips of
that hunted fugitive. So I believed at that time--such is my belief
now. I reminded the audience of the peril which surrounded this
self-emancipated young man at the North,--even in Massachusetts, on the
soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, among the descendants of revolutionary
sires; and I appealed to them, whether they would ever allow him to
be carried back into slavery,--law or no law, constitution or no
constitution. The response was unanimous and in thunder-tones--"NO!"
"Will you succor and protect him as a brother-man--a resident of the old
Bay State?" "YES!" shouted the whole mass, with an energy so startling,
that the ruthless tyrants south of Mason and Dixon's line might almost
have heard the mighty burst of feeling, and recognized it as the pledge
of an invincible determination, on the part of those who gave it, never
to betray him that wanders, but to hide the outcast, and firmly to abide
the consequences.

It was at once deeply impressed upon my mind, that, if _Mr. Douglass_
could be persuaded to consecrate his time and talents to the promotion
of the anti-slavery enterprise, a powerful impetus would be given to
it, and a stunning blow at the same time inflicted on northern prejudice
against a colored complexion. I therefore endeavored to instil hope
and courage into his mind, in order that he might dare to engage in a
vocation so anomalous and responsible for a person in his situation; and
I was seconded in this effort by warm-hearted friends, especially by the
late General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, _Mr. John
A. Collins_, whose judgment in this instance entirely coincided with
my own. At first, he could give no encouragement; with unfeigned
diffidence, he expressed his conviction that he was not adequate to
the performance of so great a task; the path marked out was wholly an
untrodden one; he was sincerely apprehensive that he should do more
harm than good. After much deliberation, however, he consented to make
a trial; and ever since that period, he has acted as a lecturing
agent, under the auspices either of the American or the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society. In labors he has been most abundant; and his
success in combating prejudice, in gaining proselytes, in agitating the
public mind, has far surpassed the most sanguine expectations that were
raised at the commencement of his brilliant career. He has borne himself
with gentleness and meekness, yet with true manliness of character. As
a public speaker, he excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation,
strength of reasoning, and fluency of language. There is in him that
union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment
of the heads and a winning of the hearts of others. May his strength
continue to be equal to his day! May he continue to "grow in grace, and
in the knowledge of God," that he may be increasingly serviceable in the
cause of bleeding humanity, whether at home or abroad!

It is certainly a very remarkable fact, that one of the most efficient
advocates of the slave population, now before the public, is a fugitive
slave, in the person of _Frederick Douglass_; and that the free colored
population of the United States are as ably represented by one of their
own number, in the person of _Charles Lenox Remond_, whose eloquent
appeals have extorted the highest applause of multitudes on both sides
of the Atlantic. Let the calumniators of the colored race despise
themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and henceforth
cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who require nothing
but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point of human
excellence.

It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the
population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings
and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale
of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been left
undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their
moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind;
and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most
frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for centuries! To
illustrate the effect of slavery on the white man,--to show that he has
no powers of endurance, in such a condition, superior to those of
his black brother,--_Daniel O'connell_, the distinguished advocate of
universal emancipation, and the mightiest champion of prostrate but not
conquered Ireland, relates the following anecdote in a speech delivered
by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the Loyal National
Repeal Association, March 31, 1845. "No matter," said _Mr. O'connell_,
"under what specious term it may disguise itself, slavery is still
hideous. _It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every
noble faculty of man._ An American sailor, who was cast away on the
shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at
the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified--he
had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language,
could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English, which
nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty
in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence of _The Domestic
Institution_!" Admitting this to have been an extraordinary case of
mental deterioration, it proves at least that the white slave can sink
as low in the scale of humanity as the black one.

_Mr. Douglass_ has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in
his own style, and according to the best of his ability, rather than
to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own production;
and, considering how long and dark was the career he had to run as a
slave,--how few have been his opportunities to improve his mind since he
broke his iron fetters,--it is, in my judgment, highly creditable to his
head and heart. He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving
breast, an afflicted spirit,--without being filled with an unutterable
abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a
determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable
system,--without trembling for the fate of this country in the hands of
a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose arm
is not shortened that it cannot save,--must have a flinty heart, and be
qualified to act the part of a trafficker "in slaves and the souls of
men." I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements;
that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing
drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather
than overstates a single fact in regard to _slavery as it is_. The
experience of _Frederick Douglass_, as a slave, was not a peculiar one;
his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a
very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in which
State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated
than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Many have suffered incomparably
more, while very few on the plantations have suffered less, than
himself. Yet how deplorable was his situation! what terrible
chastisements were inflicted upon his person! what still more shocking
outrages were perpetrated upon his mind! with all his noble powers and
sublime aspirations, how like a brute was he treated, even by those
professing to have the same mind in them that was in Christ Jesus! to
what dreadful liabilities was he continually subjected! how destitute
of friendly counsel and aid, even in his greatest extremities! how heavy
was the midnight of woe which shrouded in blackness the last ray of
hope, and filled the future with terror and gloom! what longings after
freedom took possession of his breast, and how his misery augmented,
in proportion as he grew reflective and intelligent,--thus demonstrating
that a happy slave is an extinct man! how he thought, reasoned, felt,
under the lash of the driver, with the chains upon his limbs! what
perils he encountered in his endeavors to escape from his horrible doom!
and how signal have been his deliverance and preservation in the midst
of a nation of pitiless enemies!

This Narrative contains many affecting incidents, many passages of great
eloquence and power; but I think the most thrilling one of them all
is the description _Douglass_ gives of his feelings, as he stood
soliloquizing respecting his fate, and the chances of his one day being
a freeman, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay--viewing the receding
vessels as they flew with their white wings before the breeze, and
apostrophizing them as animated by the living spirit of freedom. Who
can read that passage, and be insensible to its pathos and sublimity?
Compressed into it is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling,
and sentiment--all that can, all that need be urged, in the form of
expostulation, entreaty, rebuke, against that crime of crimes,--making
man the property of his fellow-man! O, how accursed is that system,
which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine image, reduces
those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with
four-footed beasts, and exalts the dealer in human flesh above all that
is called God! Why should its existence be prolonged one hour? Is it not
evil, only evil, and that continually? What does its presence imply but
the absence of all fear of God, all regard for man, on the part of the
people of the United States? Heaven speed its eternal overthrow!

So profoundly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that
they are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any
recital of the cruelties which are daily inflicted on its victims. They
do not deny that the slaves are held as property; but that terrible
fact seems to convey to their minds no idea of injustice, exposure
to outrage, or savage barbarity. Tell them of cruel scourgings, of
mutilations and brandings, of scenes of pollution and blood, of the
banishment of all light and knowledge, and they affect to be greatly
indignant at such enormous exaggerations, such wholesale misstatements,
such abominable libels on the character of the southern planters! As if
all these direful outrages were not the natural results of slavery!
As if it were less cruel to reduce a human being to the condition of
a thing, than to give him a severe flagellation, or to deprive him of
necessary food and clothing! As if whips, chains, thumb-screws, paddles,
blood-hounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all indispensable
to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their ruthless
oppressors! As if, when the marriage institution is abolished,
concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when all
the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect
the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed
over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive sway!
Skeptics of this character abound in society. In some few instances,
their incredulity arises from a want of reflection; but, generally, it
indicates a hatred of the light, a desire to shield slavery from the
assaults of its foes, a contempt of the colored race, whether bond or
free. Such will try to discredit the shocking tales of slaveholding
cruelty which are recorded in this truthful Narrative; but they will
labor in vain. _Mr. Douglass_ has frankly disclosed the place of his
birth, the names of those who claimed ownership in his body and soul,
and the names also of those who committed the crimes which he has
alleged against them. His statements, therefore, may easily be
disproved, if they are untrue.

In the course of his Narrative, he relates two instances of murderous
cruelty,--in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging
to a neighboring plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his
lordly domain in quest of fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out
the brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape
a bloody scourging. _Mr. Douglass_ states that in neither of these
instances was any thing done by way of legal arrest or judicial
investigation. The Baltimore American, of March 17, 1845, relates
a similar case of atrocity, perpetrated with similar impunity--as
follows:--"_Shooting a slave._--We learn, upon the authority of a letter
from Charles county, Maryland, received by a gentleman of this city,
that a young man, named Matthews, a nephew of General Matthews, and
whose father, it is believed, holds an office at Washington, killed one
of the slaves upon his father's farm by shooting him. The letter states
that young Matthews had been left in charge of the farm; that he gave
an order to the servant, which was disobeyed, when he proceeded to
the house, _obtained a gun, and, returning, shot the servant._ He
immediately, the letter continues, fled to his father's residence,
where he still remains unmolested."--Let it never be forgotten, that no
slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on
the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony
of colored witnesses, whether bond or free. By the slave code, they are
adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man, as though
they were indeed a part of the brute creation. Hence, there is no
legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave
population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with
impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more
horrible state of society?

The effect of a religious profession on the conduct of southern masters
is vividly described in the following Narrative, and shown to be any
thing but salutary. In the nature of the case, it must be in the highest
degree pernicious. The testimony of _Mr. Douglass_, on this point, is
sustained by a cloud of witnesses, whose veracity is unimpeachable. "A
slaveholder's profession of Christianity is a palpable imposture. He
is a felon of the highest grade. He is a man-stealer. It is of no
importance what you put in the other scale."

Reader! are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on the
side of their down-trodden victims? If with the former, then are you the
foe of God and man. If with the latter, what are you prepared to do
and dare in their behalf? Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your
efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free. Come what
may--cost what it may--inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the
breeze, as your religious and political motto--"NO COMPROMISE WITH
SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!"

WM. LLOYD GARRISON BOSTON, _May_ 1, 1845.






LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.

BOSTON, APRIL 22, 1845.

My Dear Friend:

You remember the old fable of "The Man and the Lion," where the lion
complained that he should not be so misrepresented "when the lions wrote
history."

I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history." We have been
left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary
evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest sufficiently satisfied
with what, it is evident, must be, in general, the results of such a
relation, without seeking farther to find whether they have followed in
every instance. Indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a week,
and love to count the lashes on the slave's back, are seldom the "stuff"
out of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made. I remember
that, in 1838, many were waiting for the results of the West India
experiment, before they could come into our ranks. Those "results" have
come long ago; but, alas! few of that number have come with them, as
converts. A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests
than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,--and to hate slavery
for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,--before he
is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.

I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of
God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice
done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had
mastered your A B C, or knew where the "white sails" of the Chesapeake
were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave,
not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel
and blighting death which gathers over his soul.

In connection with this, there is one circumstance which makes your
recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early insight the
more remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we are
told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what
it is at its best estate--gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and
then imagination may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture,
as she travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the
Shadow of Death, where the Mississippi sweeps along.

Again, we have known you long, and can put the most entire confidence in
your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one who has heard you speak
has felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your book will feel,
persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No
one-sided portrait,--no wholesale complaints,--but strict justice done,
whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment, the deadly
system with which it was strangely allied. You have been with us, too,
some years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights, which your
race enjoy at the North, with that "noon of night" under which they
labor south of Mason and Dixon's line. Tell us whether, after all, the
half-free colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than the pampered
slave of the rice swamps!

In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out
some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the bitter drops, which
even you have drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations, no
individual ills, but such as must mingle always and necessarily in
the lot of every slave. They are the essential ingredients, not the
occasional results, of the system.

After all, I shall read your book with trembling for you. Some years
ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace,
you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of
all. With the exception of a vague description, so I continued, till the
other day, when you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the time,
whether to thank you or not for the sight of them, when I reflected that
it was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell
their names! They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the Declaration of
Independence with the halter about their necks. You, too, publish your
declaration of freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the
broad lands which the Constitution of the United States overshadows,
there is no single spot,--however narrow or desolate,--where a fugitive
slave can plant himself and say, "I am safe." The whole armory of
Northern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in your
place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.

You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, endeared as you are to so
many warm hearts by rare gifts, and a still rarer devotion of them to
the service of others. But it will be owing only to your labors, and the
fearless efforts of those who, trampling the laws and Constitution of
the country under their feet, are determined that they will "hide the
outcast," and that their hearths shall be, spite of the law, an asylum
for the oppressed, if, some time or other, the humblest may stand in our
streets, and bear witness in safety against the cruelties of which he
has been the victim.

Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome
your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating
contrary to the "statute in such case made and provided." Go on, my dear
friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved, so as by
fire, from the dark prison-house, shall stereotype these free,
illegal pulses into statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a
blood-stained Union, shall glory in being the house of refuge for the
oppressed,--till we no longer merely "_hide_ the outcast," or make
a merit of standing idly by while he is hunted in our midst; but,
consecrating anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the
oppressed, proclaim our _welcome_ to the slave so loudly, that the tones
shall reach every hut in the Carolinas, and make the broken-hearted
bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.

God speed the day!

_Till then, and ever,_ Yours truly, WENDELL PHILLIPS






FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

Frederick Douglass was born in slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington
Bailey near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. He was not sure of the
exact year of his birth, but he knew that it was 1817 or 1818. As a
young boy he was sent to Baltimore, to be a house servant, where he
learned to read and write, with the assistance of his master's wife. In
1838 he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he married
Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore. Soon
thereafter he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1841 he
addressed a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in
Nantucket and so greatly impressed the group that they immediately
employed him as an agent. He was such an impressive orator that numerous
persons doubted if he had ever been a slave, so he wrote _Narrative Of
The Life Of Frederick Douglass_. During the Civil War he assisted in the
recruiting of colored men for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments
and consistently argued for the emancipation of slaves. After the war he
was active in securing and protecting the rights of the freemen. In his
later years, at different times, he was secretary of the Santo Domingo
Commission, marshall and recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia,
and United States Minister to Haiti. His other autobiographical works
are _My Bondage And My Freedom_ and _Life And Times Of Frederick
Douglass_, published in 1855 and 1881 respectively. He died in 1895.






CHAPTER I

I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from
Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my
age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the
larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of
theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep
their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave
who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than
planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A
want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me
even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could
not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not
allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed
all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and
evidence of a restless spirit. The nearest estimate I can give makes me
now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this,
from hearing my master say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen
years old.

My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and
Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was of a darker
complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.

My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever
heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my
master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know
nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I were
separated when I was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother. It is
a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part
children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the
child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and
hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is
placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For
what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the
development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and
destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the
inevitable result.

I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times
in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at
night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from
my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the
whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work. She was
a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at
sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to
the contrary--a permission which they seldom get, and one that gives
to him that gives it the proud name of being a kind master. I do not
recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me
in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long
before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place
between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived,
and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about
seven years old, on one of my master's farms, near Lee's Mill. I was not
allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She
was gone long before I knew any thing about it. Never having enjoyed, to
any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful
care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I
should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.

Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation
of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my father, may or
may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to
my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that
slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children
of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers;
and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and
make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as
pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases
not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and
father.

I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves
invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with,
than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their
mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom
do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she
sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of
showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black
slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his
slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel
as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children
to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to
do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself,
but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few
shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his
naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to
his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for
himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.

Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was
doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great
statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the
inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled
or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of
people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery,
from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their
increase do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument,
that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the
lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is
certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for
thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe
their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently
their own masters.

I have had two masters. My first master's name was Anthony. I do not
remember his first name. He was generally called Captain Anthony--a title
which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the Chesapeake Bay.
He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned two or three farms,
and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were under the care of an
overseer. The overseer's name was Plummer. Mr. Plummer was a miserable
drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed
with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash
the women's heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at
his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind himself.
Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder. It required extraordinary
barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man,
hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take
great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the
dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine,
whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she
was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from
his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.
The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran
fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream,
and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would
he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I
ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well
remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was
the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be
a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the
blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which
I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could
commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.

This occurrence took place very soon after I went to live with my old
master, and under the following circumstances. Aunt Hester went out one
night,--where or for what I do not know,--and happened to be absent
when my master desired her presence. He had ordered her not to go
out evenings, and warned her that she must never let him catch her in
company with a young man, who was paying attention to her belonging to
Colonel Lloyd. The young man's name was Ned Roberts, generally called
Lloyd's Ned. Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to
conjecture. She was a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions,
having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance,
among the colored or white women of our neighborhood.

Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had been
found in company with Lloyd's Ned; which circumstance, I found, from
what he said while whipping her, was the chief offence. Had he been a
man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in
protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him will not
suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced whipping Aunt
Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to
waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then
told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d----d b---h.
After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope, and led her
to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He
made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now
stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their
full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said
to her, "Now, you d----d b---h, I'll learn you how to disobey my orders!"
and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy
cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from
her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so
terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a
closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction
was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me.
I had never seen any thing like it before. I had always lived with my
grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was put to
raise the children of the younger women. I had therefore been, until
now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the
plantation.






CHAPTER II

My master's family consisted of two sons, Andrew and Richard; one
daughter, Lucretia, and her husband, Captain Thomas Auld. They lived in
one house, upon the home plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. My master
was Colonel Lloyd's clerk and superintendent. He was what might be
called the overseer of the overseers. I spent two years of childhood on
this plantation in my old master's family. It was here that I witnessed
the bloody transaction recorded in the first chapter; and as I received
my first impressions of slavery on this plantation, I will give some
description of it, and of slavery as it there existed. The plantation is
about twelve miles north of Easton, in Talbot county, and is situated
on the border of Miles River. The principal products raised upon it were
tobacco, corn, and wheat. These were raised in great abundance; so that,
with the products of this and the other farms belonging to him, he was
able to keep in almost constant employment a large sloop, in carrying
them to market at Baltimore. This sloop was named Sally Lloyd, in honor
of one of the colonel's daughters. My master's son-in-law, Captain Auld,
was master of the vessel; she was otherwise manned by the colonel's
own slaves. Their names were Peter, Isaac, Rich, and Jake. These
were esteemed very highly by the other slaves, and looked upon as the
privileged ones of the plantation; for it was no small affair, in the
eyes of the slaves, to be allowed to see Baltimore.

Colonel Lloyd kept from three to four hundred slaves on his home
plantation, and owned a large number more on the neighboring farms
belonging to him. The names of the farms nearest to the home plantation
were Wye Town and New Design. "Wye Town" was under the overseership of
a man named Noah Willis. New Design was under the overseership of a
Mr. Townsend. The overseers of these, and all the rest of the farms,
numbering over twenty, received advice and direction from the managers
of the home plantation. This was the great business place. It was the
seat of government for the whole twenty farms. All disputes among
the overseers were settled here. If a slave was convicted of any high
misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run
away, he was brought immediately here, severely whipped, put on board
the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some
other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining.

Here, too, the slaves of all the other farms received their monthly
allowance of food, and their yearly clothing. The men and women slaves
received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork,
or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal. Their yearly
clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen
trousers, like the shirts, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter,
made of coarse negro cloth, one pair of stockings, and one pair of
shoes; the whole of which could not have cost more than seven dollars.
The allowance of the slave children was given to their mothers, or the
old women having the care of them. The children unable to work in the
field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to
them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year.
When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance-day.
Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might
be seen at all seasons of the year.

There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be
considered such, and none but the men and women had these. This,
however, is not considered a very great privation. They find less
difficulty from the want of beds, than from the want of time to sleep;
for when their day's work in the field is done, the most of them having
their washing, mending, and cooking to do, and having few or none of
the ordinary facilities for doing either of these, very many of their
sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day;
and when this is done, old and young, male and female, married and
single, drop down side by side, on one common bed,--the cold, damp
floor,--each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets;
and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver's
horn. At the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field.
There must be no halting; every one must be at his or her post; and woe
betides them who hear not this morning summons to the field; for if
they are not awakened by the sense of hearing, they are by the sense of
feeling: no age nor sex finds any favor. Mr. Severe, the overseer, used
to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick
and heavy cowskin, ready to whip any one who was so unfortunate as not
to hear, or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to
start for the field at the sound of the horn.

Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man. I have seen him whip a
woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this,
too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother's
release. He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish
barbarity. Added to his cruelty, he was a profane swearer. It was enough
to chill the blood and stiffen the hair of an ordinary man to hear him
talk. Scarce a sentence escaped him but that was commenced or concluded
by some horrid oath. The field was the place to witness his cruelty
and profanity. His presence made it both the field of blood and of
blasphemy. From the rising till the going down of the sun, he was
cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field, in
the most frightful manner. His career was short. He died very soon after
I went to Colonel Lloyd's; and he died as he lived, uttering, with his
dying groans, bitter curses and horrid oaths. His death was regarded by
the slaves as the result of a merciful providence.

Mr. Severe's place was filled by a Mr. Hopkins. He was a very different
man. He was less cruel, less profane, and made less noise, than Mr.
Severe. His course was characterized by no extraordinary demonstrations
of cruelty. He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. He was
called by the slaves a good overseer.

The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country
village. All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed
here. The shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing, cartwrighting,
coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed by the slaves
on the home plantation. The whole place wore a business-like aspect very
unlike the neighboring farms. The number of houses, too, conspired
to give it advantage over the neighboring farms. It was called by the
slaves the _Great House Farm._ Few privileges were esteemed higher, by
the slaves of the out-farms, than that of being selected to do
errands at the Great House Farm. It was associated in their minds with
greatness. A representative could not be prouder of his election to
a seat in the American Congress, than a slave on one of the out-farms
would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm. They
regarded it as evidence of great confidence reposed in them by their
overseers; and it was on this account, as well as a constant desire to
be out of the field from under the driver's lash, that they esteemed
it a high privilege, one worth careful living for. He was called the
smartest and most trusty fellow, who had this honor conferred upon
him the most frequently. The competitors for this office sought as
diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the
political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits
of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd's slaves, as are seen in the
slaves of the political parties.

The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly
allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly
enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods,
for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once
the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as
they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came
up, came out--if not in the word, in the sound;--and as frequently in
the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic
sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment
in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to
weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this,
when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following
words:--


     "I am going away to the Great House Farm!
     O, yea! O, yea! O!"

This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem
unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to
themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those
songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of
slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject
could do.

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and
apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I
neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a
tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension;
they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and
complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone
was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance
from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit,
and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in
tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even
now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of
feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace
my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.
I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to
deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren
in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing
effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on
allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him,
in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers
of his soul,--and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because
"there is no flesh in his obdurate heart."

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find
persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of
their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a
greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs
of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by
them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such
is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to
express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike
uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast
away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as
evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the
songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.






CHAPTER III

Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden, which afforded
almost constant employment for four men, besides the chief gardener,
(Mr. M'Durmond.) This garden was probably the greatest attraction of
the place. During the summer months, people came from far and near--from
Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis--to see it. It abounded in fruits of
almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the
delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of
trouble on the plantation. Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation to
the hungry swarms of boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to the
colonel, few of whom had the virtue or the vice to resist it. Scarcely a
day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to take the lash
for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems
to keep his slaves out of the garden. The last and most successful one
was that of tarring his fence all around; after which, if a slave was
caught with any tar upon his person, it was deemed sufficient proof that
he had either been into the garden, or had tried to get in. In either
case, he was severely whipped by the chief gardener. This plan worked
well; the slaves became as fearful of tar as of the lash. They seemed to
realize the impossibility of touching _tar_ without being defiled.

The colonel also kept a splendid riding equipage. His stable and
carriage-house presented the appearance of some of our large city livery
establishments. His horses were of the finest form and noblest blood.
His carriage-house contained three splendid coaches, three or four gigs,
besides dearborns and barouches of the most fashionable style.

This establishment was under the care of two slaves--old Barney and young
Barney--father and son. To attend to this establishment was their sole
work. But it was by no means an easy employment; for in nothing was
Colonel Lloyd more particular than in the management of his horses. The
slightest inattention to these was unpardonable, and was visited upon
those, under whose care they were placed, with the severest punishment;
no excuse could shield them, if the colonel only suspected any want of
attention to his horses--a supposition which he frequently indulged, and
one which, of course, made the office of old and young Barney a very
trying one. They never knew when they were safe from punishment. They
were frequently whipped when least deserving, and escaped whipping when
most deserving it. Every thing depended upon the looks of the horses,
and the state of Colonel Lloyd's own mind when his horses were brought
to him for use. If a horse did not move fast enough, or hold his head
high enough, it was owing to some fault of his keepers. It was painful
to stand near the stable-door, and hear the various complaints against
the keepers when a horse was taken out for use. "This horse has not had
proper attention. He has not been sufficiently rubbed and curried, or
he has not been properly fed; his food was too wet or too dry; he got it
too soon or too late; he was too hot or too cold; he had too much hay,
and not enough of grain; or he had too much grain, and not enough
of hay; instead of old Barney's attending to the horse, he had very
improperly left it to his son." To all these complaints, no matter how
unjust, the slave must answer never a word. Colonel Lloyd could not
brook any contradiction from a slave. When he spoke, a slave must
stand, listen, and tremble; and such was literally the case. I have seen
Colonel Lloyd make old Barney, a man between fifty and sixty years of
age, uncover his bald head, kneel down upon the cold, damp ground, and
receive upon his naked and toil-worn shoulders more than thirty
lashes at the time. Colonel Lloyd had three sons--Edward, Murray, and
Daniel,--and three sons-in-law, Mr. Winder, Mr. Nicholson, and Mr.
Lowndes. All of these lived at the Great House Farm, and enjoyed the
luxury of whipping the servants when they pleased, from old Barney down
to William Wilkes, the coach-driver. I have seen Winder make one of the
house-servants stand off from him a suitable distance to be touched with
the end of his whip, and at every stroke raise great ridges upon his
back.

To describe the wealth of Colonel Lloyd would be almost equal
to describing the riches of Job. He kept from ten to fifteen
house-servants. He was said to own a thousand slaves, and I think this
estimate quite within the truth. Colonel Lloyd owned so many that he did
not know them when he saw them; nor did all the slaves of the out-farms
know him. It is reported of him, that, while riding along the road one
day, he met a colored man, and addressed him in the usual manner of
speaking to colored people on the public highways of the south: "Well,
boy, whom do you belong to?" "To Colonel Lloyd," replied the slave.
"Well, does the colonel treat you well?" "No, sir," was the ready reply.
"What, does he work you too hard?" "Yes, sir." "Well, don't he give you
enough to eat?" "Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such as it is."

The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on;
the man also went on about his business, not dreaming that he had been
conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of
the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then
informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master,
he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained
and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment's warning, he was snatched
away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more
unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of
telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions.

It is partly in consequence of such facts, that slaves, when inquired
of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost
universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind.
The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves,
to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. The
frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the
maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth
rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove
themselves a part of the human family. If they have any thing to say of
their masters, it is generally in their masters' favor, especially when
speaking to an untried man. I have been frequently asked, when a
slave, if I had a kind master, and do not remember ever to have given a
negative answer; nor did I, in pursuing this course, consider myself as
uttering what was absolutely false; for I always measured the kindness
of my master by the standard of kindness set up among slaveholders
around us. Moreover, slaves are like other people, and imbibe prejudices
quite common to others. They think their own better than that of others.
Many, under the influence of this prejudice, think their own masters are
better than the masters of other slaves; and this, too, in some cases,
when the very reverse is true. Indeed, it is not uncommon for slaves
even to fall out and quarrel among themselves about the relative
goodness of their masters, each contending for the superior goodness of
his own over that of the others. At the very same time, they mutually
execrate their masters when viewed separately. It was so on our
plantation. When Colonel Lloyd's slaves met the slaves of Jacob Jepson,
they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters; Colonel
Lloyd's slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr. Jepson's
slaves that he was the smartest, and most of a man. Colonel Lloyd's
slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson. Mr.
Jepson's slaves would boast his ability to whip Colonel Lloyd. These
quarrels would almost always end in a fight between the parties, and
those that whipped were supposed to have gained the point at issue. They
seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to
themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be a slave; but to
be a poor man's slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!






CHAPTER IV

Mr. Hopkins remained but a short time in the office of overseer. Why his
career was so short, I do not know, but suppose he lacked the necessary
severity to suit Colonel Lloyd. Mr. Hopkins was succeeded by Mr. Austin
Gore, a man possessing, in an eminent degree, all those traits of
character indispensable to what is called a first-rate overseer. Mr.
Gore had served Colonel Lloyd, in the capacity of overseer, upon one
of the out-farms, and had shown himself worthy of the high station of
overseer upon the home or Great House Farm.

Mr. Gore was proud, ambitious, and persevering. He was artful, cruel,
and obdurate. He was just the man for such a place, and it was just the
place for such a man. It afforded scope for the full exercise of all his
powers, and he seemed to be perfectly at home in it. He was one of those
who could torture the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the part of
the slave, into impudence, and would treat it accordingly. There must
be no answering back to him; no explanation was allowed a slave, showing
himself to have been wrongfully accused. Mr. Gore acted fully up to
the maxim laid down by slaveholders,--"It is better that a dozen
slaves should suffer under the lash, than that the overseer should be
convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault."
No matter how innocent a slave might be--it availed him nothing,
when accused by Mr. Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to
be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always
following the other with immutable certainty. To escape punishment was
to escape accusation; and few slaves had the fortune to do either, under
the overseership of Mr. Gore. He was just proud enough to demand the
most debasing homage of the slave, and quite servile enough to crouch,
himself, at the feet of the master. He was ambitious enough to be
contented with nothing short of the highest rank of overseers, and
persevering enough to reach the height of his ambition. He was cruel
enough to inflict the severest punishment, artful enough to descend to
the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice
of a reproving conscience. He was, of all the overseers, the most
dreaded by the slaves. His presence was painful; his eye flashed
confusion; and seldom was his sharp, shrill voice heard, without
producing horror and trembling in their ranks.

Mr. Gore was a grave man, and, though a young man, he indulged in no
jokes, said no funny words, seldom smiled. His words were in perfect
keeping with his looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his
words. Overseers will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with the
slaves; not so with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded but
to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with
his whip, never using the former where the latter would answer as well.
When he whipped, he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no
consequences. He did nothing reluctantly, no matter how disagreeable;
always at his post, never inconsistent. He never promised but to fulfil.
He was, in a word, a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like
coolness.

His savage barbarity was equalled only by the consummate coolness with
which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves
under his charge. Mr. Gore once undertook to whip one of Colonel Lloyd's
slaves, by the name of Demby. He had given Demby but few stripes, when,
to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself into a creek,
and stood there at the depth of his shoulders, refusing to come out. Mr.
Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did
not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was
given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and
third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without
consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an
additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his
standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled
body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he
had stood.

A thrill of horror flashed through every soul upon the plantation,
excepting Mr. Gore. He alone seemed cool and collected. He was asked by
Colonel Lloyd and my old master, why he resorted to this extraordinary
expedient. His reply was, (as well as I can remember,) that Demby had
become unmanageable. He was setting a dangerous example to the other
slaves,--one which, if suffered to pass without some such demonstration
on his part, would finally lead to the total subversion of all rule and
order upon the plantation. He argued that if one slave refused to be
corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy
the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves,
and the enslavement of the whites. Mr. Gore's defence was satisfactory.
He was continued in his station as overseer upon the home plantation.
His fame as an overseer went abroad. His horrid crime was not even
submitted to judicial investigation. It was committed in the presence of
slaves, and they of course could neither institute a suit, nor testify
against him; and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest
and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensured by the
community in which he lives. Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael's, Talbot
county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he very
probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as he was then, as
highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not
been stained with his brother's blood.

I speak advisedly when I say this,--that killing a slave, or any colored
person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by
the courts or the community. Mr. Thomas Lanman, of St. Michael's, killed
two slaves, one of whom he killed with a hatchet, by knocking his brains
out. He used to boast of the commission of the awful and bloody deed. I
have heard him do so laughingly, saying, among other things, that he was
the only benefactor of his country in the company, and that when others
would do as much as he had done, we should be relieved of "the d----d
niggers."

The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks, living but a short distance from where I
used to live, murdered my wife's cousin, a young girl between fifteen
and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible
manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor
girl expired in a few hours afterward. She was immediately buried, but
had not been in her untimely grave but a few hours before she was taken
up and examined by the coroner, who decided that she had come to her
death by severe beating. The offence for which this girl was thus
murdered was this:--She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks's
baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried. She,
having lost her rest for several nights previous, did not hear the
crying. They were both in the room with Mrs. Hicks. Mrs. Hicks, finding
the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed, seized an oak stick of wood
by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl's nose and breastbone,
and thus ended her life. I will not say that this most horrid murder
produced no sensation in the community. It did produce sensation, but
not enough to bring the murderess to punishment. There was a warrant
issued for her arrest, but it was never served. Thus she escaped not
only punishment, but even the pain of being arraigned before a court for
her horrid crime.

Whilst I am detailing bloody deeds which took place during my stay
on Colonel Lloyd's plantation, I will briefly narrate another, which
occurred about the same time as the murder of Demby by Mr. Gore.

Colonel Lloyd's slaves were in the habit of spending a part of their
nights and Sundays in fishing for oysters, and in this way made up the
deficiency of their scanty allowance. An old man belonging to Colonel
Lloyd, while thus engaged, happened to get beyond the limits of Colonel
Lloyd's, and on the premises of Mr. Beal Bondly. At this trespass, Mr.
Bondly took offence, and with his musket came down to the shore, and
blew its deadly contents into the poor old man.

Mr. Bondly came over to see Colonel Lloyd the next day, whether to pay
him for his property, or to justify himself in what he had done, I know
not. At any rate, this whole fiendish transaction was soon hushed up.
There was very little said about it at all, and nothing done. It was
a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a
half-cent to kill a "nigger," and a half-cent to bury one.






CHAPTER V

As to my own treatment while I lived on Colonel Lloyd's plantation,
it was very similar to that of the other slave children. I was not old
enough to work in the field, and there being little else than field work
to do, I had a great deal of leisure time. The most I had to do was to
drive up the cows at evening, keep the fowls out of the garden, keep the
front yard clean, and run of errands for my old master's daughter, Mrs.
Lucretia Auld. The most of my leisure time I spent in helping Master
Daniel Lloyd in finding his birds, after he had shot them. My connection
with Master Daniel was of some advantage to me. He became quite attached
to me, and was a sort of protector of me. He would not allow the older
boys to impose upon me, and would divide his cakes with me.

I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from any
thing else than hunger and cold. I suffered much from hunger, but much
more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost
naked--no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a
coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must
have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal
a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into
this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in
and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen
with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.

We were not regularly allowanced. Our food was coarse corn meal boiled.
This was called _mush_. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough,
and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so
many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush;
some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked
hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was
strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.

I was probably between seven and eight years old when I left Colonel
Lloyd's plantation. I left it with joy. I shall never forget the ecstasy
with which I received the intelligence that my old master (Anthony)
had determined to let me go to Baltimore, to live with Mr. Hugh Auld,
brother to my old master's son-in-law, Captain Thomas Auld. I received
this information about three days before my departure. They were three
of the happiest days I ever enjoyed. I spent the most part of all these
three days in the creek, washing off the plantation scurf, and preparing
myself for my departure.

The pride of appearance which this would indicate was not my own. I
spent the time in washing, not so much because I wished to, but because
Mrs. Lucretia had told me I must get all the dead skin off my feet and
knees before I could go to Baltimore; for the people in Baltimore were
very cleanly, and would laugh at me if I looked dirty. Besides, she was
going to give me a pair of trousers, which I should not put on unless
I got all the dirt off me. The thought of owning a pair of trousers was
great indeed! It was almost a sufficient motive, not only to make me
take off what would be called by pig-drovers the mange, but the skin
itself. I went at it in good earnest, working for the first time with
the hope of reward.

The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all suspended
in my case. I found no severe trial in my departure. My home was
charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel
that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying. My
mother was dead, my grandmother lived far off, so that I seldom saw her.
I had two sisters and one brother, that lived in the same house with me;
but the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the
fact of our relationship from our memories. I looked for home elsewhere,
and was confident of finding none which I should relish less than the
one which I was leaving. If, however, I found in my new home hardship,
hunger, whipping, and nakedness, I had the consolation that I should not
have escaped any one of them by staying. Having already had more than
a taste of them in the house of my old master, and having endured them
there, I very naturally inferred my ability to endure them elsewhere,
and especially at Baltimore; for I had something of the feeling about
Baltimore that is expressed in the proverb, that "being hanged in
England is preferable to dying a natural death in Ireland." I had the
strongest desire to see Baltimore. Cousin Tom, though not fluent in
speech, had inspired me with that desire by his eloquent description
of the place. I could never point out any thing at the Great House,
no matter how beautiful or powerful, but that he had seen something at
Baltimore far exceeding, both in beauty and strength, the object which I
pointed out to him. Even the Great House itself, with all its pictures,
was far inferior to many buildings in Baltimore. So strong was my
desire, that I thought a gratification of it would fully compensate
for whatever loss of comforts I should sustain by the exchange. I left
without a regret, and with the highest hopes of future happiness.

We sailed out of Miles River for Baltimore on a Saturday morning. I
remember only the day of the week, for at that time I had no knowledge
of the days of the month, nor the months of the year. On setting sail, I
walked aft, and gave to Colonel Lloyd's plantation what I hoped would be
the last look. I then placed myself in the bows of the sloop, and there
spent the remainder of the day in looking ahead, interesting myself in
what was in the distance rather than in things near by or behind.

In the afternoon of that day, we reached Annapolis, the capital of the
State. We stopped but a few moments, so that I had no time to go on
shore. It was the first large town that I had ever seen, and though it
would look small compared with some of our New England factory villages,
I thought it a wonderful place for its size--more imposing even than the
Great House Farm!

We arrived at Baltimore early on Sunday morning, landing at Smith's
Wharf, not far from Bowley's Wharf. We had on board the sloop a large
flock of sheep; and after aiding in driving them to the slaughterhouse
of Mr. Curtis on Louden Slater's Hill, I was conducted by Rich, one of
the hands belonging on board of the sloop, to my new home in Alliciana
Street, near Mr. Gardner's ship-yard, on Fells Point.

Mr. and Mrs. Auld were both at home, and met me at the door with their
little son Thomas, to take care of whom I had been given. And here I saw
what I had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the most
kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld. I wish
I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I beheld
it. It was a new and strange sight to me, brightening up my pathway
with the light of happiness. Little Thomas was told, there was his
Freddy,--and I was told to take care of little Thomas; and thus I entered
upon the duties of my new home with the most cheering prospect ahead.

I look upon my departure from Colonel Lloyd's plantation as one of
the most interesting events of my life. It is possible, and even quite
probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that
plantation to Baltimore, I should have to-day, instead of being here
seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness
of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of
slavery. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the
gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. I have ever regarded it as the
first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever since
attended me, and marked my life with so many favors. I regarded the
selection of myself as being somewhat remarkable. There were a number
of slave children that might have been sent from the plantation to
Baltimore. There were those younger, those older, and those of the same
age. I was chosen from among them all, and was the first, last, and only
choice.

I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this
event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But
I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed
the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of
incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my
own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment
of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold
me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in
slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from
me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.
This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and
praise.






CHAPTER VI

My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at
the door,--a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had
never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to
her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living.
She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business,
she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and
dehumanizing effects of slavery. I was utterly astonished at her
goodness. I scarcely knew how to behave towards her. She was entirely
unlike any other white woman I had ever seen. I could not approach her
as I was accustomed to approach other white ladies. My early instruction
was all out of place. The crouching servility, usually so acceptable a
quality in a slave, did not answer when manifested toward her. Her favor
was not gained by it; she seemed to be disturbed by it. She did not
deem it impudent or unmannerly for a slave to look her in the face.
The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her presence, and none
left without feeling better for having seen her. Her face was made of
heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music.

But, alas! this kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The
fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon
commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence
of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet
accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic
face gave place to that of a demon.

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly
commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she
assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at
this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at
once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other
things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to
read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an
inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his
master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would _spoil_ the best nigger
in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of
myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever
unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no
value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great
deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These
words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay
slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.
It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious
things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but
struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most
perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the
black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that
moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just
what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it.
Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind
mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the
merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the
difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and
a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The
very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife
with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince
me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me
the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the
results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he
most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most
hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was
to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he
so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire
me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe
almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly
aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked
difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed
in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a
slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys
privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is
a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and
check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the
plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity
of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave.
Few are willing to incur the odium attaching to the reputation of being
a cruel master; and above all things, they would not be known as not
giving a slave enough to eat. Every city slaveholder is anxious to have
it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well; and it is due to them
to say, that most of them do give their slaves enough to eat. There are,
however, some painful exceptions to this rule. Directly opposite to us,
on Philpot Street, lived Mr. Thomas Hamilton. He owned two slaves. Their
names were Henrietta and Mary. Henrietta was about twenty-two years
of age, Mary was about fourteen; and of all the mangled and emaciated
creatures I ever looked upon, these two were the most so. His heart
must be harder than stone, that could look upon these unmoved. The
head, neck, and shoulders of Mary were literally cut to pieces. I have
frequently felt her head, and found it nearly covered with festering
sores, caused by the lash of her cruel mistress. I do not know that her
master ever whipped her, but I have been an eye-witness to the cruelty
of Mrs. Hamilton. I used to be in Mr. Hamilton's house nearly every day.
Mrs. Hamilton used to sit in a large chair in the middle of the room,
with a heavy cowskin always by her side, and scarce an hour passed
during the day but was marked by the blood of one of these slaves. The
girls seldom passed her without her saying, "Move faster, you _black
gip!_" at the same time giving them a blow with the cowskin over the
head or shoulders, often drawing the blood. She would then say, "Take
that, you _black gip!_" continuing, "If you don't move faster, I'll move
you!" Added to the cruel lashings to which these slaves were subjected,
they were kept nearly half-starved. They seldom knew what it was to eat
a full meal. I have seen Mary contending with the pigs for the offal
thrown into the street. So much was Mary kicked and cut to pieces, that
she was oftener called "_pecked_" than by her name.






CHAPTER VII

I lived in Master Hugh's family about seven years. During this time, I
succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was
compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My
mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance
with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to
instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one
else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did
not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the
depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was
at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of
irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as
though I were a brute.

My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in
the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with
her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.
In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to
perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and
that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but
dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When
I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was
no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for
the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that
came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of
these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became
stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like
fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to
instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's precepts. She
finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband
himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had
commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her
more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that
here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up
of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed
her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon
demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were
incompatible with each other.

From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room
any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having
a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this,
however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in
teaching me the alphabet, had given me the _inch,_ and no precaution
could prevent me from taking the _ell._

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful,
was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in
the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With
their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places,
I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I
always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly,
I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry
bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I
was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many
of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to
bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me
that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly tempted to give
the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the
gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;--not that
it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an
unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country.
It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that they lived on
Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard. I used to talk
this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes say to them, I
wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. "You
will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, _but I am a slave for life!_
Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?" These words used
to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and
console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be
free.

I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being _a slave for
life_ began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got
hold of a book entitled "The Columbian Orator." Every opportunity I
got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter,
I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was
represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue
represented the conversation which took place between them, when the
slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument
in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was
disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as
well as impressive things in reply to his master--things which had the
desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the
voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.

In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and
in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me.
I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue
to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed
through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I
gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of
even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation
of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading
of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the
arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved
me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than
the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led
to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light
than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to
Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced
us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most
wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very
discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning
to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable
anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to
read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view
of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the
horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of
agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often
wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile
to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was
this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was
no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within
sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom
had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to
disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in
every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my
wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing
without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from
every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved
in every storm.

I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself
dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I
should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have
been killed. While in this state of mind, I was eager to hear any one
speak of slavery. I was a ready listener. Every little while, I could
hear something about the abolitionists. It was some time before I found
what the word meant. It was always used in such connections as to make
it an interesting word to me. If a slave ran away and succeeded in
getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or
did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of
as the fruit of _abolition._ Hearing the word in this connection very
often, I set about learning what it meant. The dictionary afforded me
little or no help. I found it was "the act of abolishing;" but then I
did not know what was to be abolished. Here I was perplexed. I did not
dare to ask any one about its meaning, for I was satisfied that it was
something they wanted me to know very little about. After a patient
waiting, I got one of our city papers, containing an account of the
number of petitions from the north, praying for the abolition of slavery
in the District of Columbia, and of the slave trade between the States.
From this time I understood the words _abolition_ and _abolitionist,_
and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to hear
something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves. The light broke in
upon me by degrees. I went one day down on the wharf of Mr. Waters;
and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I went, unasked, and
helped them. When we had finished, one of them came to me and asked
me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, "Are ye a slave for
life?" I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply
affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so
fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. He said it
was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run away to the north;
that I should find friends there, and that I should be free. I pretended
not to be interested in what they said, and treated them as if I did not
understand them; for I feared they might be treacherous. White men have
been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward,
catch them and return them to their masters. I was afraid that these
seemingly good men might use me so; but I nevertheless remembered their
advice, and from that time I resolved to run away. I looked forward to
a time at which it would be safe for me to escape. I was too young to
think of doing so immediately; besides, I wished to learn how to write,
as I might have occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with
the hope that I should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would
learn to write.

The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by
being in Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship
carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use,
write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was
intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side, it
would be marked thus--"L." When a piece was for the starboard side, it
would be marked thus--"S." A piece for the larboard side forward, would
be marked thus--"L. F." When a piece was for starboard side forward,
it would be marked thus--"S. F." For larboard aft, it would be marked
thus--"L. A." For starboard aft, it would be marked thus--"S. A." I soon
learned the names of these letters, and for what they were intended when
placed upon a piece of timber in the ship-yard. I immediately commenced
copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters
named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I
would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, "I
don't believe you. Let me see you try it." I would then make the letters
which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that.
In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite
possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time,
my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and
ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I
then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster's Spelling
Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. By this
time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to
write, and had written over a number of copy-books. These had been
brought home, and shown to some of our near neighbors, and then laid
aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting at the Wilk Street
meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to take care of the
house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the
spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what he had written. I
continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of
Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally
succeeded in learning how to write.






CHAPTER VIII

In a very short time after I went to live at Baltimore, my old master's
youngest son Richard died; and in about three years and six months after
his death, my old master, Captain Anthony, died, leaving only his son,
Andrew, and daughter, Lucretia, to share his estate. He died while on a
visit to see his daughter at Hillsborough. Cut off thus unexpectedly,
he left no will as to the disposal of his property. It was therefore
necessary to have a valuation of the property, that it might be equally
divided between Mrs. Lucretia and Master Andrew. I was immediately sent
for, to be valued with the other property. Here again my feelings rose
up in detestation of slavery. I had now a new conception of my degraded
condition. Prior to this, I had become, if not insensible to my lot,
at least partly so. I left Baltimore with a young heart overborne with
sadness, and a soul full of apprehension. I took passage with Captain
Rowe, in the schooner Wild Cat, and, after a sail of about twenty-four
hours, I found myself near the place of my birth. I had now been absent
from it almost, if not quite, five years. I, however, remembered the
place very well. I was only about five years old when I left it, to go
and live with my old master on Colonel Lloyd's plantation; so that I was
now between ten and eleven years old.

We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and
young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine.
There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all
holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to
the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth,
maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At
this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of
slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.

After the valuation, then came the division. I have no language to
express the high excitement and deep anxiety which were felt among us
poor slaves during this time. Our fate for life was now to be decided.
we had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we
were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough--against all our
wishes, prayers, and entreaties--to sunder forever the dearest friends,
dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings. In addition
to the pain of separation, there was the horrid dread of falling into
the hands of Master Andrew. He was known to us all as being a most cruel
wretch,--a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement and
profligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father's
property. We all felt that we might as well be sold at once to the
Georgia traders, as to pass into his hands; for we knew that that would
be our inevitable condition,--a condition held by us all in the utmost
horror and dread.

I suffered more anxiety than most of my fellow-slaves. I had known what
it was to be kindly treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They
had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and
women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. Their backs had been made
familiar with the bloody lash, so that they had become callous; mine was
yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings, and few slaves
could boast of a kinder master and mistress than myself; and the thought
of passing out of their hands into those of Master Andrew--a man who, but
a few days before, to give me a sample of his bloody disposition, took
my little brother by the throat, threw him on the ground, and with the
heel of his boot stamped upon his head till the blood gushed from his
nose and ears--was well calculated to make me anxious as to my fate.
After he had committed this savage outrage upon my brother, he turned
to me, and said that was the way he meant to serve me one of these
days,--meaning, I suppose, when I came into his possession.

Thanks to a kind Providence, I fell to the portion of Mrs. Lucretia, and
was sent immediately back to Baltimore, to live again in the family
of Master Hugh. Their joy at my return equalled their sorrow at my
departure. It was a glad day to me. I had escaped a worse than lion's
jaws. I was absent from Baltimore, for the purpose of valuation and
division, just about one month, and it seemed to have been six.

Very soon after my return to Baltimore, my mistress, Lucretia, died,
leaving her husband and one child, Amanda; and in a very short time
after her death, Master Andrew died. Now all the property of my old
master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers,--strangers who
had had nothing to do with accumulating it. Not a slave was left free.
All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one thing
in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction
of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable
loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old
grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old
age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his
plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his
service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood,
served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the
cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left
a slave--a slave for life--a slave in the hands of strangers; and in
their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her
great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being
gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or
her own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude
and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having
outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning
and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but
little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and
complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs,
they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little
mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting
herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to
die! If my poor old grandmother now lives, she lives to suffer in utter
loneliness; she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children,
the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren. They
are, in the language of the slave's poet, Whittier,--


     "Gone, gone, sold and gone
     To the rice swamp dank and lone,
     Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
     Where the noisome insect stings,
     Where the fever-demon strews
     Poison with the falling dews,
     Where the sickly sunbeams glare
     Through the hot and misty air:—
     Gone, gone, sold and gone
     To the rice swamp dank and lone,
     From Virginia hills and waters—
     Woe is me, my stolen daughters!"

The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once
sang and danced in her presence, are gone. She gropes her way, in the
darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her
children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the
screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And
now, when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head
inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence
meet, and helpless infancy and painful old age combine together--at
this time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that
tenderness and affection which children only can exercise towards a
declining parent--my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve
children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim
embers. She stands--she sits--she staggers--she falls--she groans--she
dies--and there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to
wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place beneath
the sod her fallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit for these
things?

In about two years after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Thomas
married his second wife. Her name was Rowena Hamilton. She was the
eldest daughter of Mr. William Hamilton. Master now lived in St.
Michael's. Not long after his marriage, a misunderstanding took place
between himself and Master Hugh; and as a means of punishing his
brother, he took me from him to live with himself at St. Michael's. Here
I underwent another most painful separation. It, however, was not so
severe as the one I dreaded at the division of property; for, during
this interval, a great change had taken place in Master Hugh and his
once kind and affectionate wife. The influence of brandy upon him, and
of slavery upon her, had effected a disastrous change in the characters
of both; so that, as far as they were concerned, I thought I had little
to lose by the change. But it was not to them that I was attached. It
was to those little Baltimore boys that I felt the strongest attachment.
I had received many good lessons from them, and was still receiving
them, and the thought of leaving them was painful indeed. I was leaving,
too, without the hope of ever being allowed to return. Master Thomas had
said he would never let me return again. The barrier betwixt himself and
brother he considered impassable.

I then had to regret that I did not at least make the attempt to carry
out my resolution to run away; for the chances of success are tenfold
greater from the city than from the country.

I sailed from Baltimore for St. Michael's in the sloop Amanda, Captain
Edward Dodson. On my passage, I paid particular attention to the
direction which the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia. I found,
instead of going down, on reaching North Point they went up the bay,
in a north-easterly direction. I deemed this knowledge of the utmost
importance. My determination to run away was again revived. I resolved
to wait only so long as the offering of a favorable opportunity. When
that came, I was determined to be off.






CHAPTER IX

I have now reached a period of my life when I can give dates. I left
Baltimore, and went to live with Master Thomas Auld, at St. Michael's,
in March, 1832. It was now more than seven years since I lived with him
in the family of my old master, on Colonel Lloyd's plantation. We of
course were now almost entire strangers to each other. He was to me a
new master, and I to him a new slave. I was ignorant of his temper and
disposition; he was equally so of mine. A very short time, however,
brought us into full acquaintance with each other. I was made acquainted
with his wife not less than with himself. They were well matched, being
equally mean and cruel. I was now, for the first time during a space
of more than seven years, made to feel the painful gnawings of hunger--a
something which I had not experienced before since I left Colonel
Lloyd's plantation. It went hard enough with me then, when I could look
back to no period at which I had enjoyed a sufficiency. It was tenfold
harder after living in Master Hugh's family, where I had always had
enough to eat, and of that which was good. I have said Master Thomas was
a mean man. He was so. Not to give a slave enough to eat, is regarded as
the most aggravated development of meanness even among slaveholders. The
rule is, no matter how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it.
This is the theory; and in the part of Maryland from which I came, it
is the general practice,--though there are many exceptions. Master Thomas
gave us enough of neither coarse nor fine food. There were four slaves
of us in the kitchen--my sister Eliza, my aunt Priscilla, Henny, and
myself; and we were allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal
per week, and very little else, either in the shape of meat or
vegetables. It was not enough for us to subsist upon. We were therefore
reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our
neighbors. This we did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy in
the time of need, the one being considered as legitimate as the other.
A great many times have we poor creatures been nearly perishing
with hunger, when food in abundance lay mouldering in the safe and
smoke-house, and our pious mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that
mistress and her husband would kneel every morning, and pray that God
would bless them in basket and store!

Bad as all slaveholders are, we seldom meet one destitute of every
element of character commanding respect. My master was one of this rare
sort. I do not know of one single noble act ever performed by him. The
leading trait in his character was meanness; and if there were any other
element in his nature, it was made subject to this. He was mean; and,
like most other mean men, he lacked the ability to conceal his meanness.
Captain Auld was not born a slaveholder. He had been a poor man, master
only of a Bay craft. He came into possession of all his slaves by
marriage; and of all men, adopted slaveholders are the worst. He was
cruel, but cowardly. He commanded without firmness. In the enforcement
of his rules, he was at times rigid, and at times lax. At times, he
spoke to his slaves with the firmness of Napoleon and the fury of a
demon; at other times, he might well be mistaken for an inquirer who
had lost his way. He did nothing of himself. He might have passed for a
lion, but for his ears. In all things noble which he attempted, his own
meanness shone most conspicuous. His airs, words, and actions, were the
airs, words, and actions of born slaveholders, and, being assumed, were
awkward enough. He was not even a good imitator. He possessed all the
disposition to deceive, but wanted the power. Having no resources within
himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he
was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an
object of contempt, and was held as such even by his slaves. The luxury
of having slaves of his own to wait upon him was something new and
unprepared for. He was a slaveholder without the ability to hold slaves.
He found himself incapable of managing his slaves either by force,
fear, or fraud. We seldom called him "master;" we generally called him
"Captain Auld," and were hardly disposed to title him at all. I doubt
not that our conduct had much to do with making him appear awkward,
and of consequence fretful. Our want of reverence for him must have
perplexed him greatly. He wished to have us call him master, but lacked
the firmness necessary to command us to do so. His wife used to insist
upon our calling him so, but to no purpose. In August, 1832, my master
attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county,
and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his
conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did
not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was
disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane
to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his
character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I
believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than
before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity
to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his
conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding
cruelty. He made the greatest pretensions to piety. His house was
the house of prayer. He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very
soon distinguished himself among his brethren, and was soon made a
class-leader and exhorter. His activity in revivals was great, and he
proved himself an instrument in the hands of the church in converting
many souls. His house was the preachers' home. They used to take great
pleasure in coming there to put up; for while he starved us, he stuffed
them. We have had three or four preachers there at a time. The names
of those who used to come most frequently while I lived there, were Mr.
Storks, Mr. Ewery, Mr. Humphry, and Mr. Hickey. I have also seen Mr.
George Cookman at our house. We slaves loved Mr. Cookman. We believed
him to be a good man. We thought him instrumental in getting Mr. Samuel
Harrison, a very rich slaveholder, to emancipate his slaves; and by some
means got the impression that he was laboring to effect the emancipation
of all the slaves. When he was at our house, we were sure to be called
in to prayers. When the others were there, we were sometimes called in
and sometimes not. Mr. Cookman took more notice of us than either of
the other ministers. He could not come among us without betraying his
sympathy for us, and, stupid as we were, we had the sagacity to see it.

While I lived with my master in St. Michael's, there was a white
young man, a Mr. Wilson, who proposed to keep a Sabbath school for the
instruction of such slaves as might be disposed to learn to read the New
Testament. We met but three times, when Mr. West and Mr. Fairbanks,
both class-leaders, with many others, came upon us with sticks and other
missiles, drove us off, and forbade us to meet again. Thus ended our
little Sabbath school in the pious town of St. Michael's.

I have said my master found religious sanction for his cruelty. As an
example, I will state one of many facts going to prove the charge.
I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy
cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip;
and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of
Scripture--"He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be
beaten with many stripes."

Master would keep this lacerated young woman tied up in this horrid
situation four or five hours at a time. I have known him to tie her up
early in the morning, and whip her before breakfast; leave her, go to
his store, return at dinner, and whip her again, cutting her in the
places already made raw with his cruel lash. The secret of master's
cruelty toward "Henny" is found in the fact of her being almost
helpless. When quite a child, she fell into the fire, and burned herself
horribly. Her hands were so burnt that she never got the use of them.
She could do very little but bear heavy burdens. She was to master a
bill of expense; and as he was a mean man, she was a constant offence
to him. He seemed desirous of getting the poor girl out of existence.
He gave her away once to his sister; but, being a poor gift, she was
not disposed to keep her. Finally, my benevolent master, to use his
own words, "set her adrift to take care of herself." Here was a
recently-converted man, holding on upon the mother, and at the same time
turning out her helpless child, to starve and die! Master Thomas was one
of the many pious slaveholders who hold slaves for the very charitable
purpose of taking care of them.

My master and myself had quite a number of differences. He found
me unsuitable to his purpose. My city life, he said, had had a very
pernicious effect upon me. It had almost ruined me for every good
purpose, and fitted me for every thing which was bad. One of my greatest
faults was that of letting his horse run away, and go down to his
father-inlaw's farm, which was about five miles from St. Michael's. I
would then have to go after it. My reason for this kind of carelessness,
or carefulness, was, that I could always get something to eat when I
went there. Master William Hamilton, my master's father-in-law, always
gave his slaves enough to eat. I never left there hungry, no matter
how great the need of my speedy return. Master Thomas at length said he
would stand it no longer. I had lived with him nine months, during
which time he had given me a number of severe whippings, all to no good
purpose. He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken; and, for
this purpose, he let me for one year to a man named Edward Covey. Mr.
Covey was a poor man, a farm-renter. He rented the place upon which he
lived, as also the hands with which he tilled it. Mr. Covey had acquired
a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation
was of immense value to him. It enabled him to get his farm tilled with
much less expense to himself than he could have had it done without such
a reputation. Some slaveholders thought it not much loss to allow Mr.
Covey to have their slaves one year, for the sake of the training to
which they were subjected, without any other compensation. He could hire
young help with great ease, in consequence of this reputation. Added
to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of
religion--a pious soul--a member and a class-leader in the
Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a
"nigger-breaker." I was aware of all the facts, having been made
acquainted with them by a young man who had lived there. I nevertheless
made the change gladly; for I was sure of getting enough to eat, which
is not the smallest consideration to a hungry man.






CHAPTER X

I had left Master Thomas's house, and went to live with Mr. Covey, on
the 1st of January, 1833. I was now, for the first time in my life, a
field hand. In my new employment, I found myself even more awkward than
a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home
but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my
back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large
as my little finger. The details of this affair are as follows: Mr.
Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days in
the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave me
a team of unbroken oxen. He told me which was the in-hand ox, and which
the off-hand one. He then tied the end of a large rope around the horns
of the in-hand ox, and gave me the other end of it, and told me, if
the oxen started to run, that I must hold on upon the rope. I had
never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. I, however,
succeeded in getting to the edge of the woods with little difficulty;
but I had got a very few rods into the woods, when the oxen took fright,
and started full tilt, carrying the cart against trees, and over stumps,
in the most frightful manner. I expected every moment that my brains
would be dashed out against the trees. After running thus for a
considerable distance, they finally upset the cart, dashing it with
great force against a tree, and threw themselves into a dense thicket.
How I escaped death, I do not know. There I was, entirely alone, in a
thick wood, in a place new to me. My cart was upset and shattered, my
oxen were entangled among the young trees, and there was none to
help me. After a long spell of effort, I succeeded in getting my cart
righted, my oxen disentangled, and again yoked to the cart. I now
proceeded with my team to the place where I had, the day before, been
chopping wood, and loaded my cart pretty heavily, thinking in this way
to tame my oxen. I then proceeded on my way home. I had now consumed
one half of the day. I got out of the woods safely, and now felt out of
danger. I stopped my oxen to open the woods gate; and just as I did so,
before I could get hold of my ox-rope, the oxen again started, rushed
through the gate, catching it between the wheel and the body of the
cart, tearing it to pieces, and coming within a few inches of crushing
me against the gate-post. Thus twice, in one short day, I escaped death
by the merest chance. On my return, I told Mr. Covey what had happened,
and how it happened. He ordered me to return to the woods again
immediately. I did so, and he followed on after me. Just as I got into
the woods, he came up and told me to stop my cart, and that he would
teach me how to trifle away my time, and break gates. He then went to
a large gum-tree, and with his axe cut three large switches, and, after
trimming them up neatly with his pocketknife, he ordered me to take
off my clothes. I made him no answer, but stood with my clothes on. He
repeated his order. I still made him no answer, nor did I move to strip
myself. Upon this he rushed at me with the fierceness of a tiger, tore
off my clothes, and lashed me till he had worn out his switches, cutting
me so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time after.
This whipping was the first of a number just like it, and for similar
offences.

I lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months, of that
year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me. I was seldom free
from a sore back. My awkwardness was almost always his excuse for
whipping me. We were worked fully up to the point of endurance. Long
before day we were up, our horses fed, and by the first approach of day
we were off to the field with our hoes and ploughing teams. Mr. Covey
gave us enough to eat, but scarce time to eat it. We were often less
than five minutes taking our meals. We were often in the field from the
first approach of day till its last lingering ray had left us; and
at saving-fodder time, midnight often caught us in the field binding
blades.

Covey would be out with us. The way he used to stand it, was this. He
would spend the most of his afternoons in bed. He would then come out
fresh in the evening, ready to urge us on with his words, example, and
frequently with the whip. Mr. Covey was one of the few slaveholders who
could and did work with his hands. He was a hard-working man. He knew by
himself just what a man or a boy could do. There was no deceiving him.
His work went on in his absence almost as well as in his presence; and
he had the faculty of making us feel that he was ever present with us.
This he did by surprising us. He seldom approached the spot where we
were at work openly, if he could do it secretly. He always aimed at
taking us by surprise. Such was his cunning, that we used to call him,
among ourselves, "the snake." When we were at work in the cornfield, he
would sometimes crawl on his hands and knees to avoid detection, and
all at once he would rise nearly in our midst, and scream out, "Ha, ha!
Come, come! Dash on, dash on!" This being his mode of attack, it was
never safe to stop a single minute. His comings were like a thief in the
night. He appeared to us as being ever at hand. He was under every
tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the
plantation. He would sometimes mount his horse, as if bound to St.
Michael's, a distance of seven miles, and in half an hour afterwards you
would see him coiled up in the corner of the wood-fence, watching every
motion of the slaves. He would, for this purpose, leave his horse tied
up in the woods. Again, he would sometimes walk up to us, and give us
orders as though he was upon the point of starting on a long journey,
turn his back upon us, and make as though he was going to the house
to get ready; and, before he would get half way thither, he would turn
short and crawl into a fence-corner, or behind some tree, and there
watch us till the going down of the sun.

Mr. Covey's _forte_ consisted in his power to deceive. His life was
devoted to planning and perpetrating the grossest deceptions. Every
thing he possessed in the shape of learning or religion, he made conform
to his disposition to deceive. He seemed to think himself equal to
deceiving the Almighty. He would make a short prayer in the morning, and
a long prayer at night; and, strange as it may seem, few men would
at times appear more devotional than he. The exercises of his family
devotions were always commenced with singing; and, as he was a very poor
singer himself, the duty of raising the hymn generally came upon me. He
would read his hymn, and nod at me to commence. I would at times do so;
at others, I would not. My non-compliance would almost always produce
much confusion. To show himself independent of me, he would start and
stagger through with his hymn in the most discordant manner. In this
state of mind, he prayed with more than ordinary spirit. Poor man! such
was his disposition, and success at deceiving, I do verily believe that
he sometimes deceived himself into the solemn belief, that he was a
sincere worshipper of the most high God; and this, too, at a time when
he may be said to have been guilty of compelling his woman slave to
commit the sin of adultery. The facts in the case are these: Mr. Covey
was a poor man; he was just commencing in life; he was only able to buy
one slave; and, shocking as is the fact, he bought her, as he said, for
_a breeder_. This woman was named Caroline. Mr. Covey bought her from
Mr. Thomas Lowe, about six miles from St. Michael's. She was a large,
able-bodied woman, about twenty years old. She had already given birth
to one child, which proved her to be just what he wanted. After buying
her, he hired a married man of Mr. Samuel Harrison, to live with him one
year; and him he used to fasten up with her every night! The result was,
that, at the end of the year, the miserable woman gave birth to twins.
At this result Mr. Covey seemed to be highly pleased, both with the man
and the wretched woman. Such was his joy, and that of his wife, that
nothing they could do for Caroline during her confinement was too good,
or too hard, to be done. The children were regarded as being quite an
addition to his wealth.

If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the
bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of
my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked in all weathers. It was never too
hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for
us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order
of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him,
and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable
when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me.
Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and
spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the
disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my
eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man
transformed into a brute!

Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like
stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I
would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul,
accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and
then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition.
I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was
prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this
plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.

Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad
bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable
globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to
the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and
torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the
deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty
banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful
eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The
sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel
utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour
out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the
moving multitude of ships:--

"You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my
chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and
I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels,
that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I
were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your
protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go
on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O,
why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone;
she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending
slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any
God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught,
or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever.
I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die
standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am
free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall
live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet
bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in a north-east course from
North Point. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay,
I will turn my canoe adrift, and walk straight through Delaware into
Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass;
I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity
offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up
under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I fret?
I can bear as much as any of them. Besides, I am but a boy, and all boys
are bound to some one. It may be that my misery in slavery will only
increase my happiness when I get free. There is a better day coming."

Thus I used to think, and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost
to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to my
wretched lot.

I have already intimated that my condition was much worse, during the
first six months of my stay at Mr. Covey's, than in the last six. The
circumstances leading to the change in Mr. Covey's course toward me form
an epoch in my humble history. You have seen how a man was made a slave;
you shall see how a slave was made a man. On one of the hottest days
of the month of August, 1833, Bill Smith, William Hughes, a slave named
Eli, and myself, were engaged in fanning wheat. Hughes was clearing the
fanned wheat from before the fan. Eli was turning, Smith was feeding,
and I was carrying wheat to the fan. The work was simple, requiring
strength rather than intellect; yet, to one entirely unused to such
work, it came very hard. About three o'clock of that day, I broke down;
my strength failed me; I was seized with a violent aching of the head,
attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb. Finding what
was coming, I nerved myself up, feeling it would never do to stop work.
I stood as long as I could stagger to the hopper with grain. When I
could stand no longer, I fell, and felt as if held down by an immense
weight. The fan of course stopped; every one had his own work to do;
and no one could do the work of the other, and have his own go on at the
same time.

Mr. Covey was at the house, about one hundred yards from the
treading-yard where we were fanning. On hearing the fan stop, he left
immediately, and came to the spot where we were. He hastily inquired
what the matter was. Bill answered that I was sick, and there was no
one to bring wheat to the fan. I had by this time crawled away under the
side of the post and rail-fence by which the yard was enclosed, hoping
to find relief by getting out of the sun. He then asked where I was. He
was told by one of the hands. He came to the spot, and, after looking at
me awhile, asked me what was the matter. I told him as well as I could,
for I scarce had strength to speak. He then gave me a savage kick in
the side, and told me to get up. I tried to do so, but fell back in the
attempt. He gave me another kick, and again told me to rise. I again
tried, and succeeded in gaining my feet; but, stooping to get the tub
with which I was feeding the fan, I again staggered and fell. While down
in this situation, Mr. Covey took up the hickory slat with which Hughes
had been striking off the half-bushel measure, and with it gave me
a heavy blow upon the head, making a large wound, and the blood ran
freely; and with this again told me to get up. I made no effort to
comply, having now made up my mind to let him do his worst. In a short
time after receiving this blow, my head grew better. Mr. Covey had now
left me to my fate. At this moment I resolved, for the first time, to go
to my master, enter a complaint, and ask his protection. In order to
do this, I must that afternoon walk seven miles; and this, under the
circumstances, was truly a severe undertaking. I was exceedingly feeble;
made so as much by the kicks and blows which I received, as by the
severe fit of sickness to which I had been subjected. I, however,
watched my chance, while Covey was looking in an opposite direction,
and started for St. Michael's. I succeeded in getting a considerable
distance on my way to the woods, when Covey discovered me, and called
after me to come back, threatening what he would do if I did not come. I
disregarded both his calls and his threats, and made my way to the
woods as fast as my feeble state would allow; and thinking I might
be overhauled by him if I kept the road, I walked through the woods,
keeping far enough from the road to avoid detection, and near enough
to prevent losing my way. I had not gone far before my little strength
again failed me. I could go no farther. I fell down, and lay for a
considerable time. The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head.
For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I
should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop
the wound. After lying there about three quarters of an hour, I nerved
myself up again, and started on my way, through bogs and briers,
barefooted and bareheaded, tearing my feet sometimes at nearly every
step; and after a journey of about seven miles, occupying some five
hours to perform it, I arrived at master's store. I then presented an
appearance enough to affect any but a heart of iron. From the crown of
my head to my feet, I was covered with blood. My hair was all clotted
with dust and blood; my shirt was stiff with blood. I suppose I looked
like a man who had escaped a den of wild beasts, and barely escaped
them. In this state I appeared before my master, humbly entreating
him to interpose his authority for my protection. I told him all the
circumstances as well as I could, and it seemed, as I spoke, at times to
affect him. He would then walk the floor, and seek to justify Covey by
saying he expected I deserved it. He asked me what I wanted. I told him,
to let me get a new home; that as sure as I lived with Mr. Covey again,
I should live with but to die with him; that Covey would surely kill me;
he was in a fair way for it. Master Thomas ridiculed the idea that there
was any danger of Mr. Covey's killing me, and said that he knew Mr.
Covey; that he was a good man, and that he could not think of taking me
from him; that, should he do so, he would lose the whole year's wages;
that I belonged to Mr. Covey for one year, and that I must go back to
him, come what might; and that I must not trouble him with any more
stories, or that he would himself _get hold of me_. After threatening
me thus, he gave me a very large dose of salts, telling me that I might
remain in St. Michael's that night, (it being quite late,) but that I
must be off back to Mr. Covey's early in the morning; and that if I did
not, he would _get hold of me,_ which meant that he would whip me.
I remained all night, and, according to his orders, I started off to
Covey's in the morning, (Saturday morning,) wearied in body and broken
in spirit. I got no supper that night, or breakfast that morning. I
reached Covey's about nine o'clock; and just as I was getting over the
fence that divided Mrs. Kemp's fields from ours, out ran Covey with
his cowskin, to give me another whipping. Before he could reach me, I
succeeded in getting to the cornfield; and as the corn was very high, it
afforded me the means of hiding. He seemed very angry, and searched for
me a long time. My behavior was altogether unaccountable. He finally
gave up the chase, thinking, I suppose, that I must come home for
something to eat; he would give himself no further trouble in looking
for me. I spent that day mostly in the woods, having the alternative
before me,--to go home and be whipped to death, or stay in the woods and
be starved to death. That night, I fell in with Sandy Jenkins, a slave
with whom I was somewhat acquainted. Sandy had a free wife who lived
about four miles from Mr. Covey's; and it being Saturday, he was on his
way to see her. I told him my circumstances, and he very kindly invited
me to go home with him. I went home with him, and talked this whole
matter over, and got his advice as to what course it was best for me to
pursue. I found Sandy an old adviser. He told me, with great solemnity,
I must go back to Covey; but that before I went, I must go with him into
another part of the woods, where there was a certain _root,_ which, if
I would take some of it with me, carrying it _always on my right side,_
would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to
whip me. He said he had carried it for years; and since he had done so,
he had never received a blow, and never expected to while he carried it.
I at first rejected the idea, that the simple carrying of a root in my
pocket would have any such effect as he had said, and was not disposed
to take it; but Sandy impressed the necessity with much earnestness,
telling me it could do no harm, if it did no good. To please him, I at
length took the root, and, according to his direction, carried it upon
my right side. This was Sunday morning. I immediately started for
home; and upon entering the yard gate, out came Mr. Covey on his way to
meeting. He spoke to me very kindly, bade me drive the pigs from a lot
near by, and passed on towards the church. Now, this singular conduct of
Mr. Covey really made me begin to think that there was something in the
_root_ which Sandy had given me; and had it been on any other day than
Sunday, I could have attributed the conduct to no other cause than the
influence of that root; and as it was, I was half inclined to think the
_root_ to be something more than I at first had taken it to be. All went
well till Monday morning. On this morning, the virtue of the _root_ was
fully tested. Long before daylight, I was called to go and rub, curry,
and feed, the horses. I obeyed, and was glad to obey. But whilst thus
engaged, whilst in the act of throwing down some blades from the loft,
Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half
out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As
soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did
so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor.
Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased;
but at this moment--from whence came the spirit I don't know--I resolved
to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard
by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him.
My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all
aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him
uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my
fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and,
while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the
act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close
under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in
the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening
Hughes, but Covey also. When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his
courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I
told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for
six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer. With
that, he strove to drag me to a stick that was lying just out of the
stable door. He meant to knock me down. But just as he was leaning
over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by his collar, and
brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground. By this time, Bill came.
Covey called upon him for assistance. Bill wanted to know what he could
do. Covey said, "Take hold of him, take hold of him!" Bill said his
master hired him out to work, and not to help to whip me; so he left
Covey and myself to fight our own battle out. We were at it for nearly
two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great
rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped
me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I
considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for
he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole six months
afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his
finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn't want to
get hold of me again. "No," thought I, "you need not; for you will come
off worse than you did before."

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a
slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived
within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed
self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.
The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for
whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand
the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by
force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was
a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of
freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance
took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain
a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in
fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man
who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

From this time I was never again what might be called fairly whipped,
though I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had several fights,
but was never whipped.

It was for a long time a matter of surprise to me why Mr. Covey did not
immediately have me taken by the constable to the whipping-post, and
there regularly whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a white
man in defence of myself. And the only explanation I can now think of
does not entirely satisfy me; but such as it is, I will give it. Mr.
Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate
overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable importance to him.
That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me--a boy about sixteen
years old--to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been
lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished.

My term of actual service to Mr. Edward Covey ended on Christmas day,
1833. The days between Christmas and New Year's day are allowed as
holidays; and, accordingly, we were not required to perform any labor,
more than to feed and take care of the stock. This time we regarded as
our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it
nearly as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance, were
generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society. This
time, however, was spent in various ways. The staid, sober, thinking
and industrious ones of our number would employ themselves in making
corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars, and baskets; and another class of us
would spend the time in hunting opossums, hares, and coons. But by far
the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball,
wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky;
and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable
to the feelings of our masters. A slave who would work during the
holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them. He
was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master. It was deemed
a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as lazy
indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means, during
the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas.

From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I
believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of
the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the
slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest
doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves.
These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the
rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would
be forced up to the wildest desperation; and woe betide the slaveholder,
the day he ventures to remove or hinder the operation of those
conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a spirit will go forth in
their midst, more to be dreaded than the most appalling earthquake.

The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and
inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by
the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the
result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the
down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because they
would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because
they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. This will be seen
by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those
days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of
their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with
freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For
instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his
own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan
is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whisky
without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole
multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous
freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him
with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of
liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just
what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was
little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly
too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the
holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a
long breath, and marched to the field,--feeling, upon the whole, rather
glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was
freedom, back to the arms of slavery.

I have said that this mode of treatment is a part of the whole system
of fraud and inhumanity of slavery. It is so. The mode here adopted to
disgust the slave with freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse
of it, is carried out in other things. For instance, a slave loves
molasses; he steals some. His master, in many cases, goes off to town,
and buys a large quantity; he returns, takes his whip, and commands the
slave to eat the molasses, until the poor fellow is made sick at the
very mention of it. The same mode is sometimes adopted to make the
slaves refrain from asking for more food than their regular allowance.
A slave runs through his allowance, and applies for more. His master is
enraged at him; but, not willing to send him off without food, gives him
more than is necessary, and compels him to eat it within a given time.
Then, if he complains that he cannot eat it, he is said to be satisfied
neither full nor fasting, and is whipped for being hard to please! I
have an abundance of such illustrations of the same principle, drawn
from my own observation, but think the cases I have cited sufficient.
The practice is a very common one.

On the first of January, 1834, I left Mr. Covey, and went to live with
Mr. William Freeland, who lived about three miles from St. Michael's. I
soon found Mr. Freeland a very different man from Mr. Covey. Though not
rich, he was what would be called an educated southern gentleman.
Mr. Covey, as I have shown, was a well-trained negro-breaker and
slave-driver. The former (slaveholder though he was) seemed to possess
some regard for honor, some reverence for justice, and some respect for
humanity. The latter seemed totally insensible to all such sentiments.
Mr. Freeland had many of the faults peculiar to slaveholders, such as
being very passionate and fretful; but I must do him the justice to say,
that he was exceedingly free from those degrading vices to which Mr.
Covey was constantly addicted. The one was open and frank, and we always
knew where to find him. The other was a most artful deceiver, and
could be understood only by such as were skilful enough to detect his
cunningly-devised frauds. Another advantage I gained in my new master
was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in
my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly,
that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid
crimes,--a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,--a sanctifier of
the most hateful frauds,--and a dark shelter under, which the darkest,
foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the
strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of
slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a
religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all
slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the
worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and
cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a
religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.
Very near Mr. Freeland lived the Rev. Daniel Weeden, and in the same
neighborhood lived the Rev. Rigby Hopkins. These were members and
ministers in the Reformed Methodist Church. Mr. Weeden owned, among
others, a woman slave, whose name I have forgotten. This woman's
back, for weeks, was kept literally raw, made so by the lash of this
merciless, _religious_ wretch. He used to hire hands. His maxim was,
Behave well or behave ill, it is the duty of a master occasionally to
whip a slave, to remind him of his master's authority. Such was his
theory, and such his practice.

Mr. Hopkins was even worse than Mr. Weeden. His chief boast was his
ability to manage slaves. The peculiar feature of his government was
that of whipping slaves in advance of deserving it. He always managed to
have one or more of his slaves to whip every Monday morning. He did this
to alarm their fears, and strike terror into those who escaped. His
plan was to whip for the smallest offences, to prevent the commission
of large ones. Mr. Hopkins could always find some excuse for whipping
a slave. It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding life, to
see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to
make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word, or motion,--a mistake,
accident, or want of power,--are all matters for which a slave may be
whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has
the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when
spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be
taken down a button-hole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at
the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and
should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct,
when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence,--one of the
greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty. Does he ever venture to
suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by
his master? He is indeed presumptuous, and getting above himself; and
nothing less than a flogging will do for him. Does he, while ploughing,
break a plough,--or, while hoeing, break a hoe? It is owing to his
carelessness, and for it a slave must always be whipped. Mr. Hopkins
could always find something of this sort to justify the use of the lash,
and he seldom failed to embrace such opportunities. There was not a man
in the whole county, with whom the slaves who had the getting their own
home, would not prefer to live, rather than with this Rev. Mr. Hopkins.
And yet there was not a man any where round, who made higher professions
of religion, or was more active in revivals,--more attentive to the
class, love-feast, prayer and preaching meetings, or more devotional in
his family,--that prayed earlier, later, louder, and longer,--than this
same reverend slave-driver, Rigby Hopkins.

But to return to Mr. Freeland, and to my experience while in his
employment. He, like Mr. Covey, gave us enough to eat; but, unlike Mr.
Covey, he also gave us sufficient time to take our meals. He worked us
hard, but always between sunrise and sunset. He required a good deal of
work to be done, but gave us good tools with which to work. His farm was
large, but he employed hands enough to work it, and with ease, compared
with many of his neighbors. My treatment, while in his employment, was
heavenly, compared with what I experienced at the hands of Mr. Edward
Covey.

Mr. Freeland was himself the owner of but two slaves. Their names were
Henry Harris and John Harris. The rest of his hands he hired. These
consisted of myself, Sandy Jenkins,* and Handy Caldwell.


     *This is the same man who gave me the roots to prevent my
     being whipped by Mr. Covey. He was "a clever soul." We used
     frequently to talk about the fight with Covey, and as often
     as we did so, he would claim my success as the result of the
     roots which he gave me. This superstition is very common
     among the more ignorant slaves. A slave seldom dies but that
     his death is attributed to trickery.

Henry and John were quite intelligent, and in a very little while after
I went there, I succeeded in creating in them a strong desire to learn
how to read. This desire soon sprang up in the others also. They very
soon mustered up some old spelling-books, and nothing would do but that
I must keep a Sabbath school. I agreed to do so, and accordingly devoted
my Sundays to teaching these my loved fellow-slaves how to read. Neither
of them knew his letters when I went there. Some of the slaves of the
neighboring farms found what was going on, and also availed themselves
of this little opportunity to learn to read. It was understood, among
all who came, that there must be as little display about it as possible.
It was necessary to keep our religious masters at St. Michael's
unacquainted with the fact, that, instead of spending the Sabbath in
wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn how to
read the will of God; for they had much rather see us engaged in those
degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and
accountable beings. My blood boils as I think of the bloody manner in
which Messrs. Wright Fairbanks and Garrison West, both class-leaders, in
connection with many others, rushed in upon us with sticks and stones,
and broke up our virtuous little Sabbath school, at St. Michael's--all
calling themselves Christians! humble followers of the Lord Jesus
Christ! But I am again digressing.

I held my Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man, whose
name I deem it imprudent to mention; for should it be known, it might
embarrass him greatly, though the crime of holding the school was
committed ten years ago. I had at one time over forty scholars, and
those of the right sort, ardently desiring to learn. They were of all
ages, though mostly men and women. I look back to those Sundays with an
amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my
soul. The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest
engagement with which I was ever blessed. We loved each other, and to
leave them at the close of the Sabbath was a severe cross indeed. When
I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house
of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask,
"Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he hold the
thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver
the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?" These dear souls came not
to Sabbath school because it was popular to do so, nor did I teach them
because it was reputable to be thus engaged. Every moment they spent
in that school, they were liable to be taken up, and given thirty-nine
lashes. They came because they wished to learn. Their minds had
been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental
darkness. I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul to be
doing something that looked like bettering the condition of my race. I
kept up my school nearly the whole year I lived with Mr. Freeland; and,
beside my Sabbath school, I devoted three evenings in the week, during
the winter, to teaching the slaves at home. And I have the happiness to
know, that several of those who came to Sabbath school learned how to
read; and that one, at least, is now free through my agency.

The year passed off smoothly. It seemed only about half as long as the
year which preceded it. I went through it without receiving a single
blow. I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master
I ever had, _till I became my own master._ For the ease with which I
passed the year, I was, however, somewhat indebted to the society of
my fellow-slaves. They were noble souls; they not only possessed loving
hearts, but brave ones. We were linked and interlinked with each other.
I loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced
since. It is sometimes said that we slaves do not love and confide in
each other. In answer to this assertion, I can say, I never loved any or
confided in any people more than my fellow-slaves, and especially those
with whom I lived at Mr. Freeland's. I believe we would have died for
each other. We never undertook to do any thing, of any importance,
without a mutual consultation. We never moved separately. We were
one; and as much so by our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual
hardships to which we were necessarily subjected by our condition as
slaves.

At the close of the year 1834, Mr. Freeland again hired me of my master,
for the year 1835. But, by this time, I began to want to live _upon
free land_ as well as _with Freeland;_ and I was no longer content,
therefore, to live with him or any other slaveholder. I began, with the
commencement of the year, to prepare myself for a final struggle, which
should decide my fate one way or the other. My tendency was upward. I
was fast approaching manhood, and year after year had passed, and I was
still a slave. These thoughts roused me--I must do something. I therefore
resolved that 1835 should not pass without witnessing an attempt, on
my part, to secure my liberty. But I was not willing to cherish this
determination alone. My fellow-slaves were dear to me. I was anxious to
have them participate with me in this, my life-giving determination.
I therefore, though with great prudence, commenced early to ascertain
their views and feelings in regard to their condition, and to imbue
their minds with thoughts of freedom. I bent myself to devising ways and
means for our escape, and meanwhile strove, on all fitting occasions,
to impress them with the gross fraud and inhumanity of slavery. I went
first to Henry, next to John, then to the others. I found, in them all,
warm hearts and noble spirits. They were ready to hear, and ready to
act when a feasible plan should be proposed. This was what I wanted.
I talked to them of our want of manhood, if we submitted to our
enslavement without at least one noble effort to be free. We met often,
and consulted frequently, and told our hopes and fears, recounted the
difficulties, real and imagined, which we should be called on to
meet. At times we were almost disposed to give up, and try to content
ourselves with our wretched lot; at others, we were firm and unbending
in our determination to go. Whenever we suggested any plan, there was
shrinking--the odds were fearful. Our path was beset with the greatest
obstacles; and if we succeeded in gaining the end of it, our right to be
free was yet questionable--we were yet liable to be returned to bondage.
We could see no spot, this side of the ocean, where we could be free.
We knew nothing about Canada. Our knowledge of the north did not extend
farther than New York; and to go there, and be forever harassed with the
frightful liability of being returned to slavery--with the certainty of
being treated tenfold worse than before--the thought was truly a horrible
one, and one which it was not easy to overcome. The case sometimes stood
thus: At every gate through which we were to pass, we saw a watchman--at
every ferry a guard--on every bridge a sentinel--and in every wood a
patrol. We were hemmed in upon every side. Here were the difficulties,
real or imagined--the good to be sought, and the evil to be shunned. On
the one hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully
upon us,--its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and
even now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh. On the other hand,
away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north
star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a doubtful
freedom--half frozen--beckoning us to come and share its hospitality.
This in itself was sometimes enough to stagger us; but when we permitted
ourselves to survey the road, we were frequently appalled. Upon either
side we saw grim death, assuming the most horrid shapes. Now it was
starvation, causing us to eat our own flesh;--now we were contending with
the waves, and were drowned;--now we were overtaken, and torn to pieces
by the fangs of the terrible bloodhound. We were stung by scorpions,
chased by wild beasts, bitten by snakes, and finally, after having
nearly reached the desired spot,--after swimming rivers, encountering
wild beasts, sleeping in the woods, suffering hunger and nakedness,--we
were overtaken by our pursuers, and, in our resistance, we were shot
dead upon the spot! I say, this picture sometimes appalled us, and made
us


     "rather bear those ills we had,
     Than fly to others, that we knew not of."

In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick
Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful
liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I
should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

Sandy, one of our number, gave up the notion, but still encouraged us.
Our company then consisted of Henry Harris, John Harris, Henry Bailey,
Charles Roberts, and myself. Henry Bailey was my uncle, and belonged
to my master. Charles married my aunt: he belonged to my master's
father-in-law, Mr. William Hamilton.

The plan we finally concluded upon was, to get a large canoe belonging
to Mr. Hamilton, and upon the Saturday night previous to Easter
holidays, paddle directly up the Chesapeake Bay. On our arrival at the
head of the bay, a distance of seventy or eighty miles from where we
lived, it was our purpose to turn our canoe adrift, and follow the
guidance of the north star till we got beyond the limits of Maryland.
Our reason for taking the water route was, that we were less liable to
be suspected as runaways; we hoped to be regarded as fishermen;
whereas, if we should take the land route, we should be subjected to
interruptions of almost every kind. Any one having a white face, and
being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination.

The week before our intended start, I wrote several protections, one for
each of us. As well as I can remember, they were in the following words,
to wit:--


     "This is to certify that I, the undersigned, have given the bearer, my
     servant, full liberty to go to Baltimore, and spend the Easter holidays.
     Written with mine own hand, &c., 1835.

     "WILLIAM HAMILTON,


"Near St. Michael's, in Talbot county, Maryland."

We were not going to Baltimore; but, in going up the bay, we went toward
Baltimore, and these protections were only intended to protect us while
on the bay.

As the time drew near for our departure, our anxiety became more and
more intense. It was truly a matter of life and death with us. The
strength of our determination was about to be fully tested. At this
time, I was very active in explaining every difficulty, removing every
doubt, dispelling every fear, and inspiring all with the firmness
indispensable to success in our undertaking; assuring them that half was
gained the instant we made the move; we had talked long enough; we were
now ready to move; if not now, we never should be; and if we did
not intend to move now, we had as well fold our arms, sit down, and
acknowledge ourselves fit only to be slaves. This, none of us were
prepared to acknowledge. Every man stood firm; and at our last meeting,
we pledged ourselves afresh, in the most solemn manner, that, at the
time appointed, we would certainly start in pursuit of freedom. This
was in the middle of the week, at the end of which we were to be off. We
went, as usual, to our several fields of labor, but with bosoms highly
agitated with thoughts of our truly hazardous undertaking. We tried to
conceal our feelings as much as possible; and I think we succeeded very
well.

After a painful waiting, the Saturday morning, whose night was to
witness our departure, came. I hailed it with joy, bring what of sadness
it might. Friday night was a sleepless one for me. I probably felt more
anxious than the rest, because I was, by common consent, at the head of
the whole affair. The responsibility of success or failure lay heavily
upon me. The glory of the one, and the confusion of the other, were
alike mine. The first two hours of that morning were such as I never
experienced before, and hope never to again. Early in the morning, we
went, as usual, to the field. We were spreading manure; and all at once,
while thus engaged, I was overwhelmed with an indescribable feeling, in
the fulness of which I turned to Sandy, who was near by, and said, "We
are betrayed!" "Well," said he, "that thought has this moment struck
me." We said no more. I was never more certain of any thing.

The horn was blown as usual, and we went up from the field to the house
for breakfast. I went for the form, more than for want of any thing to
eat that morning. Just as I got to the house, in looking out at the lane
gate, I saw four white men, with two colored men. The white men were
on horseback, and the colored ones were walking behind, as if tied. I
watched them a few moments till they got up to our lane gate. Here they
halted, and tied the colored men to the gate-post. I was not yet certain
as to what the matter was. In a few moments, in rode Mr. Hamilton, with
a speed betokening great excitement. He came to the door, and inquired
if Master William was in. He was told he was at the barn. Mr. Hamilton,
without dismounting, rode up to the barn with extraordinary speed. In
a few moments, he and Mr. Freeland returned to the house. By this time,
the three constables rode up, and in great haste dismounted, tied their
horses, and met Master William and Mr. Hamilton returning from the barn;
and after talking awhile, they all walked up to the kitchen door. There
was no one in the kitchen but myself and John. Henry and Sandy were up
at the barn. Mr. Freeland put his head in at the door, and called me by
name, saying, there were some gentlemen at the door who wished to see
me. I stepped to the door, and inquired what they wanted. They at once
seized me, and, without giving me any satisfaction, tied me--lashing my
hands closely together. I insisted upon knowing what the matter was.
They at length said, that they had learned I had been in a "scrape,"
and that I was to be examined before my master; and if their information
proved false, I should not be hurt.

In a few moments, they succeeded in tying John. They then turned to
Henry, who had by this time returned, and commanded him to cross his
hands. "I won't!" said Henry, in a firm tone, indicating his readiness
to meet the consequences of his refusal. "Won't you?" said Tom Graham,
the constable. "No, I won't!" said Henry, in a still stronger tone. With
this, two of the constables pulled out their shining pistols, and swore,
by their Creator, that they would make him cross his hands or kill him.
Each cocked his pistol, and, with fingers on the trigger, walked up to
Henry, saying, at the same time, if he did not cross his hands, they
would blow his damned heart out. "Shoot me, shoot me!" said Henry; "you
can't kill me but once. Shoot, shoot,--and be damned! _I won't be tied!_"
This he said in a tone of loud defiance; and at the same time, with
a motion as quick as lightning, he with one single stroke dashed the
pistols from the hand of each constable. As he did this, all hands fell
upon him, and, after beating him some time, they finally overpowered
him, and got him tied.

During the scuffle, I managed, I know not how, to get my pass out, and,
without being discovered, put it into the fire. We were all now tied;
and just as we were to leave for Easton jail, Betsy Freeland, mother of
William Freeland, came to the door with her hands full of biscuits, and
divided them between Henry and John. She then delivered herself of a
speech, to the following effect:--addressing herself to me, she said,
"_You devil! You yellow devil!_ it was you that put it into the heads of
Henry and John to run away. But for you, you long-legged mulatto devil!
Henry nor John would never have thought of such a thing." I made no
reply, and was immediately hurried off towards St. Michael's. Just a
moment previous to the scuffle with Henry, Mr. Hamilton suggested the
propriety of making a search for the protections which he had understood
Frederick had written for himself and the rest. But, just at the moment
he was about carrying his proposal into effect, his aid was needed in
helping to tie Henry; and the excitement attending the scuffle caused
them either to forget, or to deem it unsafe, under the circumstances, to
search. So we were not yet convicted of the intention to run away.

When we got about half way to St. Michael's, while the constables having
us in charge were looking ahead, Henry inquired of me what he should do
with his pass. I told him to eat it with his biscuit, and own nothing;
and we passed the word around, "_Own nothing;_" and "_Own nothing!_"
said we all. Our confidence in each other was unshaken. We were resolved
to succeed or fail together, after the calamity had befallen us as much
as before. We were now prepared for any thing. We were to be dragged
that morning fifteen miles behind horses, and then to be placed in
the Easton jail. When we reached St. Michael's, we underwent a sort of
examination. We all denied that we ever intended to run away. We did
this more to bring out the evidence against us, than from any hope of
getting clear of being sold; for, as I have said, we were ready for
that. The fact was, we cared but little where we went, so we went
together. Our greatest concern was about separation. We dreaded that
more than any thing this side of death. We found the evidence against us
to be the testimony of one person; our master would not tell who it
was; but we came to a unanimous decision among ourselves as to who
their informant was. We were sent off to the jail at Easton. When we got
there, we were delivered up to the sheriff, Mr. Joseph Graham, and by
him placed in jail. Henry, John, and myself, were placed in one
room together--Charles, and Henry Bailey, in another. Their object in
separating us was to hinder concert.

We had been in jail scarcely twenty minutes, when a swarm of slave
traders, and agents for slave traders, flocked into jail to look at us,
and to ascertain if we were for sale. Such a set of beings I never saw
before! I felt myself surrounded by so many fiends from perdition. A
band of pirates never looked more like their father, the devil. They
laughed and grinned over us, saying, "Ah, my boys! we have got you,
haven't we?" And after taunting us in various ways, they one by one
went into an examination of us, with intent to ascertain our value.
They would impudently ask us if we would not like to have them for our
masters. We would make them no answer, and leave them to find out as
best they could. Then they would curse and swear at us, telling us that
they could take the devil out of us in a very little while, if we were
only in their hands.

While in jail, we found ourselves in much more comfortable quarters than
we expected when we went there. We did not get much to eat, nor that
which was very good; but we had a good clean room, from the windows of
which we could see what was going on in the street, which was very much
better than though we had been placed in one of the dark, damp cells.
Upon the whole, we got along very well, so far as the jail and its
keeper were concerned. Immediately after the holidays were over,
contrary to all our expectations, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Freeland came up
to Easton, and took Charles, the two Henrys, and John, out of jail, and
carried them home, leaving me alone. I regarded this separation as
a final one. It caused me more pain than any thing else in the whole
transaction. I was ready for any thing rather than separation. I
supposed that they had consulted together, and had decided that, as I
was the whole cause of the intention of the others to run away, it was
hard to make the innocent suffer with the guilty; and that they had,
therefore, concluded to take the others home, and sell me, as a warning
to the others that remained. It is due to the noble Henry to say, he
seemed almost as reluctant at leaving the prison as at leaving home
to come to the prison. But we knew we should, in all probability,
be separated, if we were sold; and since he was in their hands, he
concluded to go peaceably home.

I was now left to my fate. I was all alone, and within the walls of a
stone prison. But a few days before, and I was full of hope. I expected
to have been safe in a land of freedom; but now I was covered with
gloom, sunk down to the utmost despair. I thought the possibility of
freedom was gone. I was kept in this way about one week, at the end of
which, Captain Auld, my master, to my surprise and utter astonishment,
came up, and took me out, with the intention of sending me, with a
gentleman of his acquaintance, into Alabama. But, from some cause or
other, he did not send me to Alabama, but concluded to send me back to
Baltimore, to live again with his brother Hugh, and to learn a trade.

Thus, after an absence of three years and one month, I was once more
permitted to return to my old home at Baltimore. My master sent me
away, because there existed against me a very great prejudice in the
community, and he feared I might be killed.

In a few weeks after I went to Baltimore, Master Hugh hired me to Mr.
William Gardner, an extensive ship-builder, on Fell's Point. I was put
there to learn how to calk. It, however, proved a very unfavorable place
for the accomplishment of this object. Mr. Gardner was engaged that
spring in building two large man-of-war brigs, professedly for the
Mexican government. The vessels were to be launched in the July of that
year, and in failure thereof, Mr. Gardner was to lose a considerable
sum; so that when I entered, all was hurry. There was no time to learn
any thing. Every man had to do that which he knew how to do. In entering
the shipyard, my orders from Mr. Gardner were, to do whatever the
carpenters commanded me to do. This was placing me at the beck and call
of about seventy-five men. I was to regard all these as masters. Their
word was to be my law. My situation was a most trying one. At times I
needed a dozen pair of hands. I was called a dozen ways in the space of
a single minute. Three or four voices would strike my ear at the same
moment. It was--"Fred., come help me to cant this timber here."--"Fred.,
come carry this timber yonder."--"Fred., bring that roller here."--"Fred.,
go get a fresh can of water."--"Fred., come help saw off the end of this
timber."--"Fred., go quick, and get the crowbar."--"Fred., hold on the
end of this fall."--"Fred., go to the blacksmith's shop, and get a new
punch."--"Hurra, Fred! run and bring me a cold chisel."--"I say, Fred.,
bear a hand, and get up a fire as quick as lightning under that
steam-box."--"Halloo, nigger! come, turn this grindstone."--"Come, come!
move, move! and _bowse_ this timber forward."--"I say, darky, blast
your eyes, why don't you heat up some pitch?"--"Halloo! halloo! halloo!"
(Three voices at the same time.) "Come here!--Go there!--Hold on where you
are! Damn you, if you move, I'll knock your brains out!"

This was my school for eight months; and I might have remained there
longer, but for a most horrid fight I had with four of the white
apprentices, in which my left eye was nearly knocked out, and I was
horribly mangled in other respects. The facts in the case were
these: Until a very little while after I went there, white and black
ship-carpenters worked side by side, and no one seemed to see any
impropriety in it. All hands seemed to be very well satisfied. Many of
the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very
well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would
not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as alleged,
was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would soon
take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown
out of employment. They therefore felt called upon at once to put a stop
to it. And, taking advantage of Mr. Gardner's necessities, they broke
off, swearing they would work no longer, unless he would discharge his
black carpenters. Now, though this did not extend to me in form, it
did reach me in fact. My fellow-apprentices very soon began to feel it
degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs, and
talk about the "niggers" taking the country, saying we all ought to be
killed; and, being encouraged by the journeymen, they commenced
making my condition as hard as they could, by hectoring me around, and
sometimes striking me. I, of course, kept the vow I made after the fight
with Mr. Covey, and struck back again, regardless of consequences; and
while I kept them from combining, I succeeded very well; for I could
whip the whole of them, taking them separately. They, however, at
length combined, and came upon me, armed with sticks, stones, and heavy
handspikes. One came in front with a half brick. There was one at each
side of me, and one behind me. While I was attending to those in front,
and on either side, the one behind ran up with the handspike, and struck
me a heavy blow upon the head. It stunned me. I fell, and with this they
all ran upon me, and fell to beating me with their fists. I let them
lay on for a while, gathering strength. In an instant, I gave a sudden
surge, and rose to my hands and knees. Just as I did that, one of their
number gave me, with his heavy boot, a powerful kick in the left eye.
My eyeball seemed to have burst. When they saw my eye closed, and badly
swollen, they left me. With this I seized the handspike, and for a time
pursued them. But here the carpenters interfered, and I thought I might
as well give it up. It was impossible to stand my hand against so
many. All this took place in sight of not less than fifty white
ship-carpenters, and not one interposed a friendly word; but some cried,
"Kill the damned nigger! Kill him! kill him! He struck a white person."
I found my only chance for life was in flight. I succeeded in getting
away without an additional blow, and barely so; for to strike a white
man is death by Lynch law,--and that was the law in Mr. Gardner's
ship-yard; nor is there much of any other out of Mr. Gardner's
ship-yard.

I went directly home, and told the story of my wrongs to Master Hugh;
and I am happy to say of him, irreligious as he was, his conduct
was heavenly, compared with that of his brother Thomas under similar
circumstances. He listened attentively to my narration of the
circumstances leading to the savage outrage, and gave many proofs of
his strong indignation at it. The heart of my once overkind mistress was
again melted into pity. My puffed-out eye and blood-covered face moved
her to tears. She took a chair by me, washed the blood from my face,
and, with a mother's tenderness, bound up my head, covering the wounded
eye with a lean piece of fresh beef. It was almost compensation for my
suffering to witness, once more, a manifestation of kindness from this,
my once affectionate old mistress. Master Hugh was very much enraged. He
gave expression to his feelings by pouring out curses upon the heads
of those who did the deed. As soon as I got a little the better of my
bruises, he took me with him to Esquire Watson's, on Bond Street, to
see what could be done about the matter. Mr. Watson inquired who saw
the assault committed. Master Hugh told him it was done in Mr. Gardner's
ship-yard at midday, where there were a large company of men at work.
"As to that," he said, "the deed was done, and there was no question as
to who did it." His answer was, he could do nothing in the case, unless
some white man would come forward and testify. He could issue no warrant
on my word. If I had been killed in the presence of a thousand colored
people, their testimony combined would have been insufficient to have
arrested one of the murderers. Master Hugh, for once, was compelled to
say this state of things was too bad. Of course, it was impossible to
get any white man to volunteer his testimony in my behalf, and against
the white young men. Even those who may have sympathized with me were
not prepared to do this. It required a degree of courage unknown to them
to do so; for just at that time, the slightest manifestation of humanity
toward a colored person was denounced as abolitionism, and that name
subjected its bearer to frightful liabilities. The watchwords of
the bloody-minded in that region, and in those days, were, "Damn the
abolitionists!" and "Damn the niggers!" There was nothing done, and
probably nothing would have been done if I had been killed. Such
was, and such remains, the state of things in the Christian city of
Baltimore.

Master Hugh, finding he could get no redress, refused to let me go back
again to Mr. Gardner. He kept me himself, and his wife dressed my wound
till I was again restored to health. He then took me into the ship-yard
of which he was foreman, in the employment of Mr. Walter Price. There I
was immediately set to calking, and very soon learned the art of using
my mallet and irons. In the course of one year from the time I left Mr.
Gardner's, I was able to command the highest wages given to the most
experienced calkers. I was now of some importance to my master. I was
bringing him from six to seven dollars per week. I sometimes brought him
nine dollars per week: my wages were a dollar and a half a day. After
learning how to calk, I sought my own employment, made my own contracts,
and collected the money which I earned. My pathway became much more
smooth than before; my condition was now much more comfortable. When I
could get no calking to do, I did nothing. During these leisure times,
those old notions about freedom would steal over me again. When in
Mr. Gardner's employment, I was kept in such a perpetual whirl of
excitement, I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in
thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty. I have observed this
in my experience of slavery,--that whenever my condition was improved,
instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire
to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I
have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a
thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision,
and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be
able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel
that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases
to be a man.

I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I
contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my
own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver
every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because he earned
it,--not because he had any hand in earning it,--not because I owed it to
him,--nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but
solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of
the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same.






CHAPTER XI

I now come to that part of my life during which I planned, and finally
succeeded in making, my escape from slavery. But before narrating any of
the peculiar circumstances, I deem it proper to make known my intention
not to state all the facts connected with the transaction. My reasons
for pursuing this course may be understood from the following: First,
were I to give a minute statement of all the facts, it is not only
possible, but quite probable, that others would thereby be involved in
the most embarrassing difficulties. Secondly, such a statement would
most undoubtedly induce greater vigilance on the part of slaveholders
than has existed heretofore among them; which would, of course, be the
means of guarding a door whereby some dear brother bondman might escape
his galling chains. I deeply regret the necessity that impels me
to suppress any thing of importance connected with my experience in
slavery. It would afford me great pleasure indeed, as well as materially
add to the interest of my narrative, were I at liberty to gratify a
curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of many, by an accurate
statement of all the facts pertaining to my most fortunate escape. But
I must deprive myself of this pleasure, and the curious of the
gratification which such a statement would afford. I would allow myself
to suffer under the greatest imputations which evil-minded men might
suggest, rather than exculpate myself, and thereby run the hazard
of closing the slightest avenue by which a brother slave might clear
himself of the chains and fetters of slavery.

I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of
our western friends have conducted what they call the _underground
railroad,_ but which I think, by their open declarations, has been made
most emphatically the _upper-ground railroad._ I honor those good
men and women for their noble daring, and applaud them for willingly
subjecting themselves to bloody persecution, by openly avowing their
participation in the escape of slaves. I, however, can see very little
good resulting from such a course, either to themselves or the slaves
escaping; while, upon the other hand, I see and feel assured that those
open declarations are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, who
are seeking to escape. They do nothing towards enlightening the slave,
whilst they do much towards enlightening the master. They stimulate him
to greater watchfulness, and enhance his power to capture his slave. We
owe something to the slave south of the line as well as to those north
of it; and in aiding the latter on their way to freedom, we should be
careful to do nothing which would be likely to hinder the former from
escaping from slavery. I would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly
ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. I would leave him
to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever
ready to snatch from his infernal grasp his trembling prey. Let him be
left to feel his way in the dark; let darkness commensurate with his
crime hover over him; and let him feel that at every step he takes,
in pursuit of the flying bondman, he is running the frightful risk of
having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible agency. Let us render
the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the
footprints of our flying brother. But enough of this. I will now proceed
to the statement of those facts, connected with my escape, for which
I am alone responsible, and for which no one can be made to suffer but
myself.

In the early part of the year 1838, I became quite restless. I could see
no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my
toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly
wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a
robber-like fierceness, and ask, "Is this all?" He was satisfied with
nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him
six dollars, sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the
opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to the
whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my
mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them. I always felt
worse for having received any thing; for I feared that the giving me a
few cents would ease his conscience, and make him feel himself to be a
pretty honorable sort of robber. My discontent grew upon me. I was ever
on the look-out for means of escape; and, finding no direct means, I
determined to try to hire my time, with a view of getting money with
which to make my escape. In the spring of 1838, when Master Thomas came
to Baltimore to purchase his spring goods, I got an opportunity, and
applied to him to allow me to hire my time. He unhesitatingly refused my
request, and told me this was another stratagem by which to escape. He
told me I could go nowhere but that he could get me; and that, in the
event of my running away, he should spare no pains in his efforts to
catch me. He exhorted me to content myself, and be obedient. He told me,
if I would be happy, I must lay out no plans for the future. He said, if
I behaved myself properly, he would take care of me. Indeed, he advised
me to complete thoughtlessness of the future, and taught me to depend
solely upon him for happiness. He seemed to see fully the pressing
necessity of setting aside my intellectual nature, in order to
contentment in slavery. But in spite of him, and even in spite of
myself, I continued to think, and to think about the injustice of my
enslavement, and the means of escape.

About two months after this, I applied to Master Hugh for the privilege
of hiring my time. He was not acquainted with the fact that I had
applied to Master Thomas, and had been refused. He too, at first,
seemed disposed to refuse; but, after some reflection, he granted me the
privilege, and proposed the following terms: I was to be allowed all my
time, make all contracts with those for whom I worked, and find my own
employment; and, in return for this liberty, I was to pay him three
dollars at the end of each week; find myself in calking tools, and in
board and clothing. My board was two dollars and a half per week. This,
with the wear and tear of clothing and calking tools, made my regular
expenses about six dollars per week. This amount I was compelled to make
up, or relinquish the privilege of hiring my time. Rain or shine, work
or no work, at the end of each week the money must be forthcoming, or I
must give up my privilege. This arrangement, it will be perceived, was
decidedly in my master's favor. It relieved him of all need of
looking after me. His money was sure. He received all the benefits
of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all the evils of a
slave, and suffered all the care and anxiety of a freeman. I found it a
hard bargain. But, hard as it was, I thought it better than the old mode
of getting along. It was a step towards freedom to be allowed to bear
the responsibilities of a freeman, and I was determined to hold on upon
it. I bent myself to the work of making money. I was ready to work
at night as well as day, and by the most untiring perseverance and
industry, I made enough to meet my expenses, and lay up a little money
every week. I went on thus from May till August. Master Hugh then
refused to allow me to hire my time longer. The ground for his refusal
was a failure on my part, one Saturday night, to pay him for my week's
time. This failure was occasioned by my attending a camp meeting
about ten miles from Baltimore. During the week, I had entered into an
engagement with a number of young friends to start from Baltimore to the
camp ground early Saturday evening; and being detained by my employer,
I was unable to get down to Master Hugh's without disappointing the
company. I knew that Master Hugh was in no special need of the money
that night. I therefore decided to go to camp meeting, and upon my
return pay him the three dollars. I staid at the camp meeting one day
longer than I intended when I left. But as soon as I returned, I called
upon him to pay him what he considered his due. I found him very angry;
he could scarce restrain his wrath. He said he had a great mind to give
me a severe whipping. He wished to know how I dared go out of the city
without asking his permission. I told him I hired my time and while
I paid him the price which he asked for it, I did not know that I was
bound to ask him when and where I should go. This reply troubled him;
and, after reflecting a few moments, he turned to me, and said I should
hire my time no longer; that the next thing he should know of, I would
be running away. Upon the same plea, he told me to bring my tools and
clothing home forthwith. I did so; but instead of seeking work, as I had
been accustomed to do previously to hiring my time, I spent the whole
week without the performance of a single stroke of work. I did this in
retaliation. Saturday night, he called upon me as usual for my week's
wages. I told him I had no wages; I had done no work that week. Here
we were upon the point of coming to blows. He raved, and swore his
determination to get hold of me. I did not allow myself a single word;
but was resolved, if he laid the weight of his hand upon me, it should
be blow for blow. He did not strike me, but told me that he would find
me in constant employment in future. I thought the matter over during
the next day, Sunday, and finally resolved upon the third day of
September, as the day upon which I would make a second attempt to
secure my freedom. I now had three weeks during which to prepare for my
journey. Early on Monday morning, before Master Hugh had time to make
any engagement for me, I went out and got employment of Mr. Butler, at
his ship-yard near the drawbridge, upon what is called the City Block,
thus making it unnecessary for him to seek employment for me. At the
end of the week, I brought him between eight and nine dollars. He seemed
very well pleased, and asked why I did not do the same the week before.
He little knew what my plans were. My object in working steadily was to
remove any suspicion he might entertain of my intent to run away; and
in this I succeeded admirably. I suppose he thought I was never better
satisfied with my condition than at the very time during which I was
planning my escape. The second week passed, and again I carried him
my full wages; and so well pleased was he, that he gave me twenty-five
cents, (quite a large sum for a slaveholder to give a slave,) and bade
me to make a good use of it. I told him I would.

Things went on without very smoothly indeed, but within there was
trouble. It is impossible for me to describe my feelings as the time of
my contemplated start drew near. I had a number of warmhearted friends
in Baltimore,--friends that I loved almost as I did my life,--and
the thought of being separated from them forever was painful beyond
expression. It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery,
who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to
their friends. The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most
painful thought with which I had to contend. The love of them was my
tender point, and shook my decision more than all things else. Besides
the pain of separation, the dread and apprehension of a failure exceeded
what I had experienced at my first attempt. The appalling defeat I then
sustained returned to torment me. I felt assured that, if I failed in
this attempt, my case would be a hopeless one--it would seal my fate as a
slave forever. I could not hope to get off with any thing less than the
severest punishment, and being placed beyond the means of escape. It
required no very vivid imagination to depict the most frightful scenes
through which I should have to pass, in case I failed. The wretchedness
of slavery, and the blessedness of freedom, were perpetually before me.
It was life and death with me. But I remained firm, and, according to my
resolution, on the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and
succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any
kind. How I did so,--what means I adopted,--what direction I travelled,
and by what mode of conveyance,--I must leave unexplained, for the
reasons before mentioned.

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a
free State. I have never been able to answer the question with any
satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever
experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to
feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a
pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New
York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This
state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with
a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be
taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in
itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness
overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect
stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands
of my own brethren--children of a common Father, and yet I dared not to
unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was afraid to speak to any
one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the
hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait
for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie
in wait for their prey. The motto which I adopted when I started from
slavery was this--"Trust no man!" I saw in every white man an enemy, and
in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful
situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or
imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave
in a strange land--a land given up to be the hunting-ground for
slaveholders--whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers--where he is
every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by
his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!--I say, let
him place himself in my situation--without home or friends--without money
or credit--wanting shelter, and no one to give it--wanting bread, and no
money to buy it,--and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by
merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to
go, or where to stay,--perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence
and means of escape,--in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible
gnawings of hunger,--in the midst of houses, yet having no home,--among
fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose
greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is
only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the
helpless fish upon which they subsist,--I say, let him be placed in this
most trying situation,--the situation in which I was placed,--then, and
not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how
to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

Thank Heaven, I remained but a short time in this distressed situation.
I was relieved from it by the humane hand of _Mr. David Ruggles_, whose
vigilance, kindness, and perseverance, I shall never forget. I am
glad of an opportunity to express, as far as words can, the love and
gratitude I bear him. Mr. Ruggles is now afflicted with blindness, and
is himself in need of the same kind offices which he was once so forward
in the performance of toward others. I had been in New York but a few
days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to his
boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lespenard Streets. Mr.
Ruggles was then very deeply engaged in the memorable _Darg_ case, as
well as attending to a number of other fugitive slaves, devising ways
and means for their successful escape; and, though watched and hemmed in
on almost every side, he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.

Very soon after I went to Mr. Ruggles, he wished to know of me where
I wanted to go; as he deemed it unsafe for me to remain in New York. I
told him I was a calker, and should like to go where I could get work.
I thought of going to Canada; but he decided against it, and in favor of
my going to New Bedford, thinking I should be able to get work there at
my trade. At this time, Anna,* my intended wife, came on; for I wrote
to her immediately after my arrival at New York, (notwithstanding
my homeless, houseless, and helpless condition,) informing her of my
successful flight, and wishing her to come on forthwith. In a few days
after her arrival, Mr. Ruggles called in the Rev. J. W. C. Pennington,
who, in the presence of Mr. Ruggles, Mrs. Michaels, and two or three
others, performed the marriage ceremony, and gave us a certificate, of
which the following is an exact copy:--


"This may certify, that I joined together in holy matrimony Frederick
Johnson** and Anna Murray, as man and wife, in the presence of Mr. David
Ruggles and Mrs. Michaels.

"JAMES W. C. PENNINGTON "_New York, Sept. 15, 1838_"


          *She was free.

          **I had changed my name from Frederick _Bailey_ to that of
          _Johnson_.

Upon receiving this certificate, and a five-dollar bill from Mr.
Ruggles, I shouldered one part of our baggage, and Anna took up
the other, and we set out forthwith to take passage on board of the
steamboat John W. Richmond for Newport, on our way to New Bedford. Mr.
Ruggles gave me a letter to a Mr. Shaw in Newport, and told me, in case
my money did not serve me to New Bedford, to stop in Newport and obtain
further assistance; but upon our arrival at Newport, we were so anxious
to get to a place of safety, that, notwithstanding we lacked the
necessary money to pay our fare, we decided to take seats in the stage,
and promise to pay when we got to New Bedford. We were encouraged to do
this by two excellent gentlemen, residents of New Bedford, whose names I
afterward ascertained to be Joseph Ricketson and William C. Taber.
They seemed at once to understand our circumstances, and gave us
such assurance of their friendliness as put us fully at ease in their
presence.

It was good indeed to meet with such friends, at such a time. Upon
reaching New Bedford, we were directed to the house of Mr. Nathan
Johnson, by whom we were kindly received, and hospitably provided
for. Both Mr. and Mrs. Johnson took a deep and lively interest in
our welfare. They proved themselves quite worthy of the name of
abolitionists. When the stage-driver found us unable to pay our fare, he
held on upon our baggage as security for the debt. I had but to mention
the fact to Mr. Johnson, and he forthwith advanced the money.

We now began to feel a degree of safety, and to prepare ourselves for
the duties and responsibilities of a life of freedom. On the morning
after our arrival at New Bedford, while at the breakfast-table, the
question arose as to what name I should be called by. The name given me
by my mother was, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey." I, however,
had dispensed with the two middle names long before I left Maryland so
that I was generally known by the name of "Frederick Bailey." I started
from Baltimore bearing the name of "Stanley." When I got to New York, I
again changed my name to "Frederick Johnson," and thought that would
be the last change. But when I got to New Bedford, I found it necessary
again to change my name. The reason of this necessity was, that there
were so many Johnsons in New Bedford, it was already quite difficult to
distinguish between them. I gave Mr. Johnson the privilege of
choosing me a name, but told him he must not take from me the name of
"Frederick." I must hold on to that, to preserve a sense of my identity.
Mr. Johnson had just been reading the "Lady of the Lake," and at once
suggested that my name be "Douglass." From that time until now I have
been called "Frederick Douglass;" and as I am more widely known by that
name than by either of the others, I shall continue to use it as my own.

I was quite disappointed at the general appearance of things in New
Bedford. The impression which I had received respecting the character
and condition of the people of the north, I found to be singularly
erroneous. I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of
the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at
the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the
south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern
people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were about upon a level
with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew _they_ were
exceedingly poor, and I had been accustomed to regard their poverty as
the necessary consequence of their being non-slaveholders. I had somehow
imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no
wealth, and very little refinement. And upon coming to the north, I
expected to meet with a rough, hard-handed, and uncultivated population,
living in the most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing of the
ease, luxury, pomp, and grandeur of southern slaveholders. Such being my
conjectures, any one acquainted with the appearance of New Bedford may
very readily infer how palpably I must have seen my mistake.

In the afternoon of the day when I reached New Bedford, I visited the
wharves, to take a view of the shipping. Here I found myself surrounded
with the strongest proofs of wealth. Lying at the wharves, and riding in
the stream, I saw many ships of the finest model, in the best order, and
of the largest size. Upon the right and left, I was walled in by granite
warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity
with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this, almost every
body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had
been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from
those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or
horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed
to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went
at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened the deep
interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his
own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange. From the
wharves I strolled around and over the town, gazing with wonder
and admiration at the splendid churches, beautiful dwellings, and
finely-cultivated gardens; evincing an amount of wealth, comfort, taste,
and refinement, such as I had never seen in any part of slaveholding
Maryland.

Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no
dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked
children and barefooted women, such as I had been accustomed to see in
Hillsborough, Easton, St. Michael's, and Baltimore. The people looked
more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland.
I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being
saddened by seeing extreme poverty. But the most astonishing as well
as the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored
people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a
refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven
years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently
enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders
in Maryland. I will venture to assert, that my friend Mr. Nathan Johnson
(of whom I can say with a grateful heart, "I was hungry, and he gave me
meat; I was thirsty, and he gave me drink; I was a stranger, and he took
me in") lived in a neater house; dined at a better table; took, paid
for, and read, more newspapers; better understood the moral, religious,
and political character of the nation,--than nine tenths of the
slaveholders in Talbot county Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a working
man. His hands were hardened by toil, and not his alone, but those also
of Mrs. Johnson. I found the colored people much more spirited than
I had supposed they would be. I found among them a determination to
protect each other from the blood-thirsty kidnapper, at all hazards.
Soon after my arrival, I was told of a circumstance which illustrated
their spirit. A colored man and a fugitive slave were on unfriendly
terms. The former was heard to threaten the latter with informing his
master of his whereabouts. Straightway a meeting was called among the
colored people, under the stereotyped notice, "Business of importance!"
The betrayer was invited to attend. The people came at the appointed
hour, and organized the meeting by appointing a very religious old
gentleman as president, who, I believe, made a prayer, after which he
addressed the meeting as follows: "_Friends, we have got him here, and
I would recommend that you young men just take him outside the door,
and kill him!_" With this, a number of them bolted at him; but they were
intercepted by some more timid than themselves, and the betrayer escaped
their vengeance, and has not been seen in New Bedford since. I believe
there have been no more such threats, and should there be hereafter, I
doubt not that death would be the consequence.

I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop
with a load of oil. It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went
at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It
was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those
who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to
be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment
I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I
had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and newly-married
wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence. When I got
through with that job, I went in pursuit of a job of calking; but such
was the strength of prejudice against color, among the white calkers,
that they refused to work with me, and of course I could get no
employment.*


     * I am told that colored persons can now get employment at
     calking in New Bedford—a result of anti-slavery effort.

Finding my trade of no immediate benefit, I threw off my calking
habiliments, and prepared myself to do any kind of work I could get to
do. Mr. Johnson kindly let me have his wood-horse and saw, and I very
soon found myself a plenty of work. There was no work too hard--none
too dirty. I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal, carry wood, sweep the
chimney, or roll oil casks,--all of which I did for nearly three years in
New Bedford, before I became known to the anti-slavery world.

In about four months after I went to New Bedford, there came a young man
to me, and inquired if I did not wish to take the "Liberator." I told
him I did; but, just having made my escape from slavery, I remarked that
I was unable to pay for it then. I, however, finally became a subscriber
to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to week with such
feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to describe. The
paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire.
Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds--its scathing denunciations of
slaveholders--its faithful exposures of slavery--and its powerful attacks
upon the upholders of the institution--sent a thrill of joy through my
soul, such as I had never felt before!

I had not long been a reader of the "Liberator," before I got a pretty
correct idea of the principles, measures and spirit of the anti-slavery
reform. I took right hold of the cause. I could do but little; but what
I could, I did with a joyful heart, and never felt happier than when
in an anti-slavery meeting. I seldom had much to say at the meetings,
because what I wanted to say was said so much better by others. But,
while attending an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, on the 11th of
August, 1841, I felt strongly moved to speak, and was at the same time
much urged to do so by Mr. William C. Coffin, a gentleman who had heard
me speak in the colored people's meeting at New Bedford. It was a severe
cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt myself a
slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke
but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I
desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been
engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren--with what success, and with
what devotion, I leave those acquainted with my labors to decide.






APPENDIX

I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have,
in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting
religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious
views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability
of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief
explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean
strictly to apply to the _slaveholding religion_ of this land, and
with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the
Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize
the widest possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good,
pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and
wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy
of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity
of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping,
cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the
religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all
misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
Never was there a clearer case of "stealing the livery of the court of
heaven to serve the devil in." I am filled with unutterable loathing
when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the
horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have
men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries,
and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the
blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and
claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs
me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on
Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation.
He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as
the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to
read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the
God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole
millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of
wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family
relation is the same that scatters whole families,--sundering husbands
and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,--leaving the hut
vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against
theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build
churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase
Bibles for the _Poor Heathen! All For The Glory Of God And The Good Of
Souls!_ The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime
in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave
are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of
religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together.
The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of
fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm
and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The
dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence
of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his
blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return,
covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have
religion and robbery the allies of each other--devils dressed in angels'
robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.


     "Just God! and these are they,
     Who minister at thine altar, God of right!
     Men who their hands, with prayer and blessing, lay
     On Israel's ark of light.

     "What! preach, and kidnap men?
     Give thanks, and rob thy own afflicted poor?
     Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then
     Bolt hard the captive's door?

     "What! servants of thy own
     Merciful Son, who came to seek and save
     The homeless and the outcast, fettering down
     The tasked and plundered slave!

     "Pilate and Herod friends!
     Chief priests and rulers, as of old, combine!
     Just God and holy! is that church which lends
     Strength to the spoiler thine?"

The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may
be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, "They
bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's
shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their
fingers. All their works they do for to be seen of men.--They love the
uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, . . .
. . . and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.--But woe unto you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against
men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are
entering to go in. Ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make
long prayers; therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation. Ye
compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye
make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.--Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise,
and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment,
mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the
other undone. Ye blind guides! which strain at a gnat, and swallow a
camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make
clean the outside of the cup and of the platter; but within, they are
full of extortion and excess.--Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all
uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but
within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."

Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of
the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain
at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our
churches? They would be shocked at the proposition of fellowshipping
a _sheep_-stealer; and at the same time they hug to their communion a
_man_-stealer, and brand me with being an infidel, if I find fault with
them for it. They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward
forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of
the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. They are always ready to sacrifice,
but seldom to show mercy. They are they who are represented as
professing to love God whom they have not seen, whilst they hate their
brother whom they have seen. They love the heathen on the other side of
the globe. They can pray for him, pay money to have the Bible put into
his hand, and missionaries to instruct him; while they despise and
totally neglect the heathen at their own doors.

Such is, very briefly, my view of the religion of this land; and to
avoid any misunderstanding, growing out of the use of general terms, I
mean by the religion of this land, that which is revealed in the words,
deeds, and actions, of those bodies, north and south, calling themselves
Christian churches, and yet in union with slaveholders. It is against
religion, as presented by these bodies, that I have felt it my duty to
testify.

I conclude these remarks by copying the following portrait of the
religion of the south, (which is, by communion and fellowship, the
religion of the north,) which I soberly affirm is "true to the life,"
and without caricature or the slightest exaggeration. It is said to
have been drawn, several years before the present anti-slavery agitation
began, by a northern Methodist preacher, who, while residing at the
south, had an opportunity to see slaveholding morals, manners, and
piety, with his own eyes. "Shall I not visit for these things? saith the
Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?"




               <b>A PARODY</b>

     "Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell
     How pious priests whip Jack and Nell,
     And women buy and children sell,
     And preach all sinners down to hell,
     And sing of heavenly union.

     "They'll bleat and baa, dona like goats,
     Gorge down black sheep, and strain at motes,
     Array their backs in fine black coats,
     Then seize their negroes by their throats,
     And choke, for heavenly union.

     "They'll church you if you sip a dram,
     And damn you if you steal a lamb;
     Yet rob old Tony, Doll, and Sam,
     Of human rights, and bread and ham;
     Kidnapper's heavenly union.

     "They'll loudly talk of Christ's reward,
     And bind his image with a cord,
     And scold, and swing the lash abhorred,
     And sell their brother in the Lord
     To handcuffed heavenly union.

     "They'll read and sing a sacred song,
     And make a prayer both loud and long,
     And teach the right and do the wrong,
     Hailing the brother, sister throng,
     With words of heavenly union.

     "We wonder how such saints can sing,
     Or praise the Lord upon the wing,
     Who roar, and scold, and whip, and sting,
     And to their slaves and mammon cling,
     In guilty conscience union.

     "They'll raise tobacco, corn, and rye,
     And drive, and thieve, and cheat, and lie,
     And lay up treasures in the sky,
     By making switch and cowskin fly,
     In hope of heavenly union.

     "They'll crack old Tony on the skull,
     And preach and roar like Bashan bull,
     Or braying ass, of mischief full,
     Then seize old Jacob by the wool,
     And pull for heavenly union.

     "A roaring, ranting, sleek man-thief,
     Who lived on mutton, veal, and beef,
     Yet never would afford relief
     To needy, sable sons of grief,
     Was big with heavenly union.

     "'Love not the world,' the preacher said,
     And winked his eye, and shook his head;
     He seized on Tom, and Dick, and Ned,
     Cut short their meat, and clothes, and bread,
     Yet still loved heavenly union.

     "Another preacher whining spoke
     Of One whose heart for sinners broke:
     He tied old Nanny to an oak,
     And drew the blood at every stroke,
     And prayed for heavenly union.

     "Two others oped their iron jaws,
     And waved their children-stealing paws;
     There sat their children in gewgaws;
     By stinting negroes' backs and maws,
     They kept up heavenly union.

     "All good from Jack another takes,
     And entertains their flirts and rakes,
     Who dress as sleek as glossy snakes,
     And cram their mouths with sweetened cakes;
     And this goes down for union."

Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something
toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening
the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in
bonds--faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for
success in my humble efforts--and solemnly pledging my self anew to the
sacred cause,--I subscribe myself,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. LYNN, _Mass., April_ 28, 1845.

THE END













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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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Title: The Souls of Black Folk

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Release Date: January 29, 2008 [EBook #408]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK ***









The Souls of Black Folk

by

W.E.B. Du Bois




Herein Is Written


        The Forethought
    I.  Of Our Spiritual Strivings
   II.  Of the Dawn of Freedom
  III.  Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
   IV.  Of the Meaning of Progress
    V.  Of the Wings of Atalanta
   VI.  Of the Training of Black Men
  VII.  Of the Black Belt
 VIII.  Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
   IX.  Of the Sons of Master and Man
    X.  Of the Faith of the Fathers
   XI.  Of the Passing of the First-Born
  XII.  Of Alexander Crummell
 XIII.  Of the Coming of John
  XIV.  Of the Sorrow Songs
        The Afterthought
        Selected Bibliography [Updater's note: missing from e-book]




To Burghardt and Yolande

The Lost and the Found




The Forethought

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the
strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth
Century.  This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader;
for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color
line.  I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity,
studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the
faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden
there.

I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the
spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and
strive.  First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation
meant to them, and what was its aftermath.  In a third chapter I have
pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized
candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day.
Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two
worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central
problem of training men for life.  Venturing now into deeper detail, I
have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of
the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the
present relations of the sons of master and man.  Leaving, then, the
white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may
view faintly its deeper recesses,--the meaning of its religion, the
passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.
All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a
chapter of song.

Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other
guise.  For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered
and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly,
The World's Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science.  Before each chapter,
as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,--some echo of
haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black
souls in the dark past.  And, finally, need I add that I who speak here
am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the
Veil?

W.E.B Du B.

ATLANTA, GA., FEB. 1, 1903.




I

Of Our Spiritual Strivings

  O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
    All night long crying with a mournful cry,
  As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
      The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
    O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
      All night long the water is crying to me.

  Unresting water, there shall never be rest
    Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
  And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
      And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
    All life long crying without avail,
      As the water all night long is crying to me.

  ARTHUR SYMONS.


Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it.  All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem?  they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make
your blood boil?  At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the
boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require.  To the real
question, How does it feel to be a problem?  I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,--peculiar even for
one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in
Europe.  It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were.  I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in
the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea.  In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous
visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and exchange.  The exchange was
merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,--refused it
peremptorily, with a glance.  Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast
veil.  I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in
a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.  That sky was bluest
when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a
foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.  Alas, with the years all
this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all
their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.  But they should
not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing
the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,--some
way.  With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their
youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the
pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or
wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a
stranger in mine own house?  The shades of the prison-house closed
round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but
relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must
plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the
stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world.  It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.  One ever feels his
twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into
a better and truer self.  In this merging he wishes neither of the
older selves to be lost.  He would not Africanize America, for America
has too much to teach the world and Africa.  He would not bleach his
Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro
blood has a message for the world.  He simply wishes to make it
possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being
cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of
Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and
use his best powers and his latent genius.  These powers of body and
mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.  Through history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.  Here
in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning
hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power,
like weakness.  And yet it is not weakness,--it is the contradiction of
double aims.  The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan--on the
one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of  mere hewers of wood
and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig
for a poverty-stricken horde--could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause.  By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks.  The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the
knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh
and blood.  The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder
souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and
doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him
was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and
he could not articulate the message of another people.  This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand
thousand people,--has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking
false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make
them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine
event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped
Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro
for two centuries.  To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery
was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root
of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of
sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied
Israelites.  In song and exhortation swelled one refrain--Liberty; in
his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.
At last it came,--suddenly, fearfully, like a dream.  With one wild
carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive
cadences:--

  "Shout, O children!
  Shout, you're free!
  For God has bought your liberty!"


Years have passed away since then,--ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast.  In
vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:--

  "Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
  Shall never tremble!"


The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land.  Whatever of good may have come
in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests
upon the Negro people,--a disappointment all the more bitter because
the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a
lowly people.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,--like a
tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host.  The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies
of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the
contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom.  As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea.  The ideal of liberty demanded
for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him.  The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible
sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and
perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.  And
why not?  Had not votes made war and emancipated millions?  Had not
votes enfranchised the freedmen?  Was anything impossible to a power
that had done all this?  A million black men started with renewed zeal
to vote themselves into the kingdom.  So the decade flew away, the
revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering,
but still inspired.  Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new
vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,--a
powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided,
another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day.  It was the ideal
of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to
know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the
longing to know.  Here at last seemed to have been discovered the
mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and
law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to
overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools
know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.  It
was weary work.  The cold statistician wrote down the inches of
progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had
slipped or some one had fallen.  To the tired climbers, the horizon was
ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far
away.  If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no
resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least
gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child
of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness,
self-realization, self-respect.  In those sombre forests of his
striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,--darkly as
through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his
power, of his mission.  He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain
his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.  For the
first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named
Negro problem.  He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home,
without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with
rich, landed, skilled neighbors.  To be a poor man is hard, but to be a
poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.  He
felt the weight of his ignorance,--not simply of letters, but of life,
of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.  Nor
was his burden all poverty and ignorance.  The red stain of bastardy,
which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had
stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African
chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from
white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems.  But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards
and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man
is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair.  Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime,
the "higher" against the "lower" races.  To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance.  But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the
ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain
for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,--before this there
rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation
save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals
which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt
and hate.  Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo!
we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve?  And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men?  Away with the black man's ballot, by force or
fraud,--and behold the suicide of a race!  Nevertheless, out of the
evil came something of good,--the more careful adjustment of education
to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social
responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of
progress.

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks
our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and
without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings.  The
bright ideals of the past,--physical freedom, political power, the
training of brains and the training of hands,--all these in turn have
waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast.  Are they
all wrong,--all false?  No, not that, but each alone was over-simple
and incomplete,--the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond
imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to
know our power.  To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and
welded into one.  The training of the schools we need to-day more than
ever,--the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all
the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,--else what shall
save us from a second slavery?  Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still
seek,--the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire.  Work, culture, liberty,--all these we
need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each
growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that
swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained
through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and
developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or
contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater
ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American
soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both
so sadly lack.  We the darker ones come even now not altogether
empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human
spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes;
there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the
Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and
African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple
faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.  Will
America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with
light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel
wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of
the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great
republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond
the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an
historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers,
and in the name of human opportunity.


And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming
pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail,
that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.




II

Of the Dawn of Freedom

  Careless seems the great Avenger;
    History's lessons but record
  One death-grapple in the darkness
    'Twixt old systems and the Word;
  Truth forever on the scaffold,
    Wrong forever on the throne;
  Yet that scaffold sways the future,
    And behind the dim unknown
  Standeth God within the shadow
    Keeping watch above His own.

  LOWELL.


The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in
Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.  It was a phase
of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who
marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points,
of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as
we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the
conflict.  Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced
itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer.  No sooner had
Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly
guised, sprang from the earth,--What shall be done with Negroes?
Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the
query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and
intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro
problems of to-day.

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to
1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro.  In effect, this tale
of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called
the Freedmen's Bureau,--one of the most singular and interesting of the
attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race
and social condition.

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President,
and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West,
penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within
their lines.  They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone
like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin,
with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging
whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,--a horde
of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark
distress.  Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally
logical to opposite sorts of minds.  Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly
declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to
work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under
martial law.  Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was hastily
countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently.
"Hereafter," he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into
your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call
for them deliver them."  Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some
of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that
their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with
forts and plantations.  Evidently, too, slaves were a source of
strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and
producers.  "They constitute a military resource," wrote Secretary
Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned
over to the enemy is too plain to discuss."  So gradually the tone of
the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives,
and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers.  This
complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering
fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies
marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White
House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New
Year's, 1863.  A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro
soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to
enlist.  Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done.  The
stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept
inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily?  Are
we to find food and shelter for women and children?"

It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a
sense the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau.  He was a firm friend of
Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned
lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially
detailed from the ranks to study the conditions.  First, he cared for
the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured
Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port Royal experiment
of making free workingmen out of slaves.  Before his experiment was
barely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such
proportions that it was taken from the hands of the over-burdened
Treasury Department and given to the army officials.  Already centres
of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New
Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well
as at Port Royal.  Army chaplains found here new and fruitful fields;
"superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt at
systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving
work to the others.

Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of the touching appeals
from Pierce and from these other centres of distress.  There was the
American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now
full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the National
Freedmen's Relief Association, the American Freedmen's Union, the
Western Freedmen's Aid Commission,--in all fifty or more active
organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers
southward.  All they did was needed, for the destitution of the
freedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and the
situation was daily growing worse rather than better.

And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter
of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor
problem of vast dimensions.  Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they
worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they
received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly.  In these and
other ways were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the
freedmen.  The broader economic organization thus clearly demanded
sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined.
Here it was that Pierce's Port Royal plan of leased plantations and
guided workmen pointed out the rough way.  In Washington the military
governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened
confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in
the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages.  General Dix gave
over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and
West.  The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of
cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work.  The systems of
control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange
little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its
ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and
its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more.  It made
out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired
into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and
established a system of public schools.  So, too, Colonel Eaton, the
superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred
thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton
land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year.  In South Carolina was
General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk.  He succeeded
Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased
abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman,
after that terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the
wretched camp followers.

Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the
Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro.  Some see all significance in
the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of
the Lost Cause.  But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so
deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the
rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size,
almost engulfing and choking them.  In vain were they ordered back, in
vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and
writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and
naked horde of tens of thousands.  There too came the characteristic
military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned
rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and
the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and
set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war."
So read the celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen."

All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and
perplex the government and the nation.  Directly after the Emancipation
Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a
Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported.  The following June
a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in
favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection, and
employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were
afterwards followed.  Petitions came in to President Lincoln from
distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a
comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a
bureau which should be "charged with the study of plans and execution
of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and
humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be
emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new
state of voluntary industry."

Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by
putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury
agents.  Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and
lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to
"provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general
welfare" of the freedmen.  Most of the army officers greeted this as a
welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary
Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations,
which were afterward closely followed by General Howard.  Under
Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the
Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August,
1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of "public
policy," and the army was again in control.

Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in
March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a
Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department.  Charles Sumner, who had
charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned
lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute
for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department.
This bill passed, but too late for action by the House.  The debates
wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general
question of slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits
of the measure in hand.  Then the national election took place; and the
administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country,
addressed itself to the matter more seriously.  A conference between
the two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure
which contained the chief provisions of Sumner's bill, but made the
proposed organization a department independent of both the War and the
Treasury officials.  The bill was conservative, giving the new
department "general superintendence of all freedmen."  Its purpose was
to "establish regulations" for them, protect them, lease them lands,
adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their
"next friend." There were many limitations attached to the powers thus
granted, and the organization was made permanent.  Nevertheless, the
Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference committee was appointed.
This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled
through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865
establishing in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands."

This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and
uncertain in outline.  A Bureau was created, "to continue during the
present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter," to which was
given "the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the
control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," under "such
rules and regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and
approved by the President."  A Commissioner, appointed by the President
and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not
exceeding ten clerks.  The President might also appoint assistant
commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices military
officials might be detailed at regular pay.  The Secretary of War could
issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned
property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and
sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.

Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the
emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation.  It was a tremendous
undertaking.  Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of
millions of men,--and not ordinary men either, but black men
emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old;
and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a
time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered
population of their former masters.  Any man might well have hesitated
to assume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite
powers, and limited resources.  Probably no one but a soldier would
have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier
could be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries
and expenses.

Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his
successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner
of the new Bureau.  He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of
age.  He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at
Gettysburg, and but the year before had been assigned to the command of
the Department of Tennessee.  An honest man, with too much faith in
human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had
had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of
the work before him.  And of that work it has been truly said that "no
approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which
does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of
political and social progress, the organization and administration of
the Freedmen's Bureau."

On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his
office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work.  A
curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic
experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized
charity, unorganized almsgiving,--all reeling on under the guise of
helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the
war and the cursing and silence of angry men.  On May 19 the new
government--for a government it really was--issued its constitution;
commissioners were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who
were to take charge of "all subjects relating to refugees and
freedmen," and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent
alone.  The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent
societies, and declared: "It will be the object of all commissioners to
introduce practicable systems of compensated labor," and to establish
schools.  Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed.  They
were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief
establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts
of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized
in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves,
and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their
employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the
circular said: "Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for
those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve
the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the
freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare."

No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local
organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties
appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work.
First, there were the abandoned lands of the South.  It had long been
the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the
chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the
slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,--a sort of poetic
justice, said some.  But this poetry done into solemn prose meant
either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast
appropriations.  Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no
sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight
hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the
Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away.  The second difficulty lay in
perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide
field of work.  Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly
ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child's
task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization had
to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing
system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for
this work must be sought for in an army still busy with war
operations,--men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate
social work,--or among the questionable camp followers of an invading
host.  Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as it was pushed, the
problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the
beginning.  Nevertheless, three things that year's work did, well worth
the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it
transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the
farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England
schoolma'am.

The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,--the tale of a
mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St.
Louis seemed to his.  Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the
calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of
the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet.  Rich and poor they
were, serious and curious.  Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother,
now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New
England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South.  They did
their work well.  In that first year they taught one hundred thousand
souls, and more.

Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized
Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast
possibilities.  An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult
to end as to begin.  Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when
Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau
and enlarge its powers.  This measure received, at the hands of
Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention than its
predecessor.  The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer
conception of the work of Emancipation.  The champions of the bill
argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau was still a
military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of
the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the
ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government.  The opponents of the
measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war
measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers,
was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to
irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of
possibly hundreds of millions.  These two arguments were unanswered,
and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the
Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that
the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and
that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical
reenslavement.  The bill which finally passed enlarged and made
permanent the Freedmen's Bureau.  It was promptly vetoed by President
Johnson as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and
failed of passage over the veto.  Meantime, however, the breach between
Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the
lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16.

The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form,--the form by
which it will be known to posterity and judged of men.  It extended the
existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional
assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of
regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on
nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro
schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance.
The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely
in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases the
departmental military commander was now made also assistant
commissioner.  It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a
full-fledged government of men.  It made laws, executed them and
interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished
crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures
as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied
ends.  Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor
to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely
any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at
one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau."

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not
forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties.  Lee had
surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at
loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870.  Guerrilla
raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending
its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening
as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution.  In a time of
perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social
uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining
place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean
task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a
social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of
war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside
Bereavement,--in such a case, the work of any instrument of social
regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure.  The very name of
the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and
better men had refused even to argue,--that life amid free Negroes was
simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from
unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and
even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst,
it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and
foe.  He had emerged from slavery,--not the worst slavery in the world,
not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had
here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,--but
withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were
concerned, classed the black man and the ox together.  And the Negro
knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been,
Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this
slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had
writhed and shivered.  They welcomed freedom with a cry.  They shrank
from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the
friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to
use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty.  So the cleft between the white and black South grew.  Idle to
say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were
pitiable.  Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against
each other,--the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the
slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman
or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded
men.  Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming
ages,--the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit
themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to
the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all;
who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form,
with hate in his eyes;--and the other, a form hovering dark and
mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent in love over
the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken
eyes of his wife,--aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his
lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark
boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after
"damned Niggers."  These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and
no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the
present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating,
their children's children live today.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869,
let us look upon four years of its work as a whole.  There were, in
1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas,
ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men.  The deeds of
these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical
suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying
and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of
bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all
these activities.

Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation.  In fifty months twenty-one million free rations
were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars.  Next came the
difficult question of labor.  First, thirty thousand black men were
transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms,
back to the critical trial of a new way of working.  Plain instructions
went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their
employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be
no peonage or forced labor.  So far, so good; but where local agents
differed toto caelo in capacity and character, where the personnel was
continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied.  The largest
element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen
were willing, even eager, to work.  So labor contracts were
written,--fifty thousand in a single State,--laborers advised, wages
guaranteed, and employers supplied.  In truth, the organization became
a vast labor bureau,--not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and
there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men.
The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant
and the idler,--the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate
slavery under another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as
perpetual rest,--the Devil and the Deep Sea.

In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the
Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely checked.
Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands
were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a
total revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black
tenants.  Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were
sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to the
very few freedmen who had tools and capital.  But the vision of "forty
acres and a mule"--the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a
landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the
freedmen--was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment.  And
those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the
Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to
know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to
the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's
Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after
their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a
mistake--somewhere.  If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift
rather than by bounty of the government.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of
the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary
education among all classes in the South.  It not only called the
school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them
schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human
culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath.  The
opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and
showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an
educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.  And the South was not wholly
wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always
will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and
discontent.  Nevertheless, men strive to know.  Perhaps some inkling of
this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the
bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies
smouldering in the South, but not flaming.  Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and
Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were
expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.

Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other
enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital
already.  The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and
his pay and bounty as a soldier.  Payments to Negro soldiers were at
first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that
the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely
filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers.
Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress,
by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the
Freedmen's Bureau.  In two years six million dollars was thus
distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded
eight million dollars.  Even in this system fraud was frequent; but
still the work put needed capital in the hands of practical paupers,
and some, at least, was well spent.

The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau's work lay
in the exercise of its judicial functions.  The regular Bureau court
consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and
one of the Bureau.  If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly
judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in
time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other activities and
the character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the
black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance.
On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts
was impossible.  In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen,
to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from
gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a
thankless, hopeless task.  The former masters of the land were
peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over
and again, with scant courtesy from army officers.  The former slaves
were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful
men.  Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for punishing
whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely
institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks.  Almost every law
and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to
reduce the Negroes to serfdom,--to make them the slaves of the State,
if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were
found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a
power and independence which they could not yet use.  It is all well
enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those
who bore the burden in the heat of the day.  It is full easy now to see
that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw
his land ruled by "mules and niggers," was really benefited by the
passing of slavery.  It is not difficult now to say to the young
freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen his father's head
beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the
meek shall inherit the earth.  Above all, nothing is more convenient
than to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evil day,
and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.

All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just.  Someone had
blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was
criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of
control there would have been far more than there was.  Had that
control been from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all
intents and purposes.  Coming as the control did from without, perfect
men and methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect
agents and questionable methods, the work accomplished was not
undeserving of commendation.

 Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the
Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus:
for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865,
and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of
free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured
the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the
free common school in the South.  On the other hand, it failed to begin
the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to
guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged
self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied
promises to furnish the freedmen with land.  Its successes were the
result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the
eager striving of black men.  Its failures were the result of bad local
agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.

Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities,
large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was
naturally open to repeated and bitter attack.  It sustained a searching
Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870.
Its archives and few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy
transferred from Howard's control, in his absence, to the supervision
of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary's recommendation.
Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the
Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in
1874.  In both of these trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen's
Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work
commended.  Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to
light,--the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were
faulty; several cases of defalcation were proved, and other frauds
strongly suspected; there were some business transactions which savored
of dangerous speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the
smirch of the Freedmen's Bank.

Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part of the Freedmen's
Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it.  With the prestige
of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusual
respectability and national reputation, this banking institution had
made a remarkable start in the development of that thrift among black
folk which slavery had kept them from knowing.  Then in one sad day
came the crash,--all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen
disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,--all the faith in
saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that
a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made
good.  Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much
to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and
bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for
their especial aid.  Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to
say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the
blows of its selfish friends or the dark machinations of its foes,
perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies unwritten history.

Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked
not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for
any such institution at all.  Such attacks came primarily from the
Border States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis,
of Kentucky, when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to
promote strife and conflict between the white and black races . . . by
a grant of unconstitutional power."  The argument gathered tremendous
strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness.  For,
argued the plain common-sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional,
unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardian over its
helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,--to make those
wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot.  Moreover,
the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued
this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with
white votes, we certainly can with black votes.  So justice and force
joined hands.

The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and
restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,
would easily have chosen the latter.  It was rather a choice between
suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep
human bondage away.  Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to
admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single
Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a
system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was
scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.  In
such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race,
and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of
the war.  Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race
feud.  And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its
swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and
feel only indifference and contempt.

Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to
government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to
the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far
better policy,--a permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system
of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a
system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such
institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building
associations, and social settlements.  All this vast expenditure of
money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective
citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most
perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself.  It came to regard its
work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all
present perplexities.  The political ambition of many of its agents and
proteges led it far afield into questionable activities, until the
South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the
good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred.
So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth
Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men.  The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy
heritage of this generation.  To-day, when new and vaster problems are
destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it
not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?  For this much
all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not
free.  In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may
not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural
South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an
economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary.  In the most cultured sections and cities of the South
the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges.  Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis.  Taxation without representation is the
rule of their political life.  And the result of all this is, and in
nature must have been, lawlessness and crime.  That is the large legacy
of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.


I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest.  And there
in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which
the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go.  On the tainted air broods
fear.  Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed.  The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the
color-line.




III

Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

  From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
  *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *
  Hereditary bondsmen!  Know ye not
  Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

  BYRON.

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro
since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington.  It began at
the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of
astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and
hesitation overtook the freedmen's sons,--then it was that his leading
began.  Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the
psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having
bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its
energies on Dollars.  His programme of industrial education,
conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and
political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830
up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the
American Missionary Association had from the first taught various
trades; and Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance
with the best of the Southerners.  But Mr. Washington first
indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy,
and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path
into a veritable Way of Life.  And the tale of the methods by which he
did this is a fascinating study of human life.

It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme
after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the
applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the
North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did
not convert the Negroes themselves.

To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising
the white South was Mr. Washington's first task; and this, at the time
Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible.
And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: "In
all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and
yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."  This
"Atlanta Compromise" is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr.
Washington's career.  The South interpreted it in different ways: the
radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil
and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived
working basis for mutual understanding.  So both approved it, and
to-day its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since
Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largest personal following.

Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington's work in gaining place
and consideration in the North.  Others less shrewd and tactful had
formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between
them; but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and
training, so by singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of
the age which was dominating the North.  And so thoroughly did he learn
the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of
material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a
French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed
to him the acme of absurdities.  One wonders what Socrates and St.
Francis of Assisi would say to this.

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his
age is a mark of the successful man.  It is as though Nature must needs
make men narrow in order to give them force.  So Mr. Washington's cult
has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered,
his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded.  To-day he
stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and
one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions.  One
hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so
little, has done so much.  And yet the time is come when one may speak
in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of
Mr. Washington's career, as well as of his triumphs, without being
thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier
to do ill than well in the world.

The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been
of this broad character.  In the South especially has he had to walk
warily to avoid the harshest judgments,--and naturally so, for he is
dealing with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section.
Twice--once when at the Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War
he alluded to the color-prejudice that is "eating away the vitals of
the South," and once when he dined with President Roosevelt--has the
resulting Southern criticism been violent enough to threaten seriously
his popularity.  In the North the feeling has several times forced
itself into words, that Mr. Washington's counsels of submission
overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational
programme was unnecessarily narrow.  Usually, however, such criticism
has not found open expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the
Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowledge that the schools
founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-sacrificing
spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule.  While, then,
criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing
public opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the
solution of a wearisome problem into his hands, and say, "If that is
all you and your race ask, take it."

Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the
strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting at times to
bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent even though
largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of the
nation.  Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; the
disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds.
But aside from this, there is among educated and thoughtful colored men
in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and
apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr.
Washington's theories have gained.  These same men admire his sincerity
of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor which is
doing something worth the doing.  They cooperate with Mr. Washington as
far as they conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute
to this man's tact and power that, steering as he must between so many
diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of
all.

But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous
thing.  It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence
and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so
passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.  Honest and
earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly
touched,--criticism of writers by readers,--this is the soul of
democracy and the safeguard of modern society.  If the best of the
American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not
recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain.
Yet there is also irreparable loss,--a loss of that peculiarly valuable
education which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds
and commissions its own leaders.  The way in which this is done is at
once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth.
History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how
infinitely changeful is its type and character!  And of all types and
kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group
within a group?--that curious double movement where real progress may
be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression.  All this is
the social student's inspiration and despair.

Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in
the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which
in the light of present conditions is worth while studying.  When
sticks and stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people,
their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to and conquest
of natural forces.  But when to earth and brute is added an environment
of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take
three main forms,--a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to
adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or,
finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development
despite environing opinion.  The influence of all of these attitudes at
various times can be traced in the history of the American Negro, and
in the evolution of his successive leaders.

Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the
veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted
leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge,--typified in the
terrible Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all
the Americas in fear of insurrection.  The liberalizing tendencies of
the latter half of the eighteenth century brought, along with kindlier
relations between black and white, thoughts of ultimate adjustment and
assimilation.  Such aspiration was especially voiced in the earnest
songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem
and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments of Banneker and Derham, and
the political demands of the Cuffes.

Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the
previous humanitarian ardor.  The disappointment and impatience of the
Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two
movements.  The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague
rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at
insurrection,--in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey
in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia under the terrible Nat
Turner.  In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious
attempt at self-development was made.  In Philadelphia and New York
color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from white
churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution
among the Negroes known as the African Church,--an organization still
living and controlling in its various branches over a million of men.

Walker's wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the
world was changing after the coming of the cotton-gin.  By 1830 slavery
seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly
cowed into submission.  The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the
mulatto immigrants from the West Indies, began to change the basis of
their demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that
they themselves were freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation
with the nation on the same terms with other men.  Thus, Forten and
Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven,
Barbadoes of Boston, and others, strove singly and together as men,
they said, not as slaves; as "people of color," not as "Negroes."  The
trend of the times, however, refused them recognition save in
individual and exceptional cases, considered them as one with all the
despised blacks, and they soon found themselves striving to keep even
the rights they formerly had of voting and working and moving as
freemen.  Schemes of migration and colonization arose among them; but
these they refused to entertain, and they eventually turned to the
Abolition movement as a final refuge.

Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of
self-assertion and self-development dawned.  To be sure, ultimate
freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the
assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main
reliance, and John Brown's raid was the extreme of its logic.  After
the war and emancipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the
greatest of American Negro leaders, still led the host.
Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the main programme,
and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the
Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater social
significance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.

Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes,
the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in
the great night.  Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the
ideals of his early manhood,--ultimate assimilation through
self-assertion, and on no other terms.  For a time Price arose as a new
leader, destined, it seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old
ideals in a form less repugnant to the white South.  But he passed away
in his prime.  Then came the new leader.  Nearly all the former ones
had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought
to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save Douglass, little
known outside their race.  But Booker T. Washington arose as
essentially the leader not of one race but of two,--a compromiser
between the South, the North, and the Negro.  Naturally the Negroes
resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered
their civil and political rights, even though this was to be exchanged
for larger chances of economic development.  The rich and dominating
North, however, was not only weary of the race problem, but was
investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of
peaceful cooperation.  Thus, by national opinion, the Negroes began to
recognize Mr. Washington's leadership; and the voice of criticism was
hushed.

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of
adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to
make his programme unique.  This is an age of unusual economic
development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic
cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as
apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.
Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in
closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is
therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically
accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.  Again, in our own
land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to
race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of
the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens.  In other
periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to
self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of
submission is advocated.  In the history of nearly all other races and
peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly
self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who
voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not
worth civilizing.

In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only
through submission.  Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people
give up, at least for the present, three things,--

First, political power,

Second, insistence on civil rights,

Third, higher education of Negro youth,--and concentrate all their
energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
conciliation of the South.  This policy has been courageously and
insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant
for perhaps ten years.  As a result of this tender of the palm-branch,
what has been the return?  In these years there have occurred:

1.  The disfranchisement of the Negro.

2.  The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for
the Negro.

3.  The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher
training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's
teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped
their speedier accomplishment.  The question then comes: Is it
possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective
progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights,
made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for
developing their exceptional men?  If history and reason give any
distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO.  And Mr.
Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career:

1.  He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and
property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive
methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and
exist without the right of suffrage.

2.  He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time
counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to
sap the manhood of any race in the long run.

3.  He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates
institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools,
nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers
trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.

This triple paradox in Mr. Washington's position is the object of
criticism by two classes of colored Americans.  One class is
spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel,
Vesey, and Turner, and they represent the attitude of revolt and
revenge; they hate the white South blindly and distrust the white race
generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the
Negro's only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the United
States.  And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more effectually
made this programme seem hopeless than the recent course of the United
States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and
the Philippines,--for where in the world may we go and be safe from
lying and brute force?

The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has
hitherto said little aloud.  They deprecate the sight of scattered
counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making
their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a
general discharge of venom from small-minded opponents.  Nevertheless,
the questions involved are so fundamental and serious that it is
difficult to see how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E.
Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much longer be
silent.  Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three
things:

1.  The right to vote.

2.  Civic equality.

3.  The education of youth according to ability.  They acknowledge Mr.
Washington's invaluable service in counselling patience and courtesy in
such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when
ignorant whites are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in
the suffrage should not be applied; they know that the low social level
of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against
it, but they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless
color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro's
degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of barbarism, and
not its systematic encouragement and pampering by all agencies of
social power from the Associated Press to the Church of Christ.  They
advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of Negro common schools
supplemented by thorough industrial training; but they are surprised
that a man of Mr. Washington's insight cannot see that no such
educational system ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than
that of the well-equipped college and university, and they insist that
there is a demand for a few such institutions throughout the South to
train the best of the Negro youth as teachers, professional men, and
leaders.

This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation
toward the white South; they accept the "Atlanta Compromise" in its
broadest interpretation; they recognize, with him, many signs of
promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section;
they know that no easy task has been laid upon a region already
tottering under heavy burdens.  But, nevertheless, they insist that the
way to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in
indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and
criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of
the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to do the same, but
at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their
higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the
realm of possibility.  They do not expect that the free right to vote,
to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they
do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the
blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a
people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing
them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a
people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing
themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in
season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood,
that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need
education as well as white boys.

In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate
demands of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honored
leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy
responsibility,--a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to
the struggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men
whose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but
especially a responsibility to this nation,--this common Fatherland.
It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong
to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to
do so.  The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the
North and South after the frightful difference of a generation ago
ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to
those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is
to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same
black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority,
then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every
consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all
civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement
with Mr. Booker T. Washington.  We have no right to sit silently by
while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our
children, black and white.

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly.
The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past,
and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it.  Furthermore, to
no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the
South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the
South.  The South is not "solid"; it is a land in the ferment of social
change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to
praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to
condemn the good.  Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what
the South needs,--needs it for the sake of her own white sons and
daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral
development.

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is
not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner
hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers
wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his
upward development, while others--usually the sons of the masters--wish
to help him to rise.  National opinion has enabled this last class to
maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially
in property, life, and limb.  Through the pressure of the money-makers,
the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in
the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educated who
fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some have urged
his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused
to lynch and abuse any black man.  To praise this intricate whirl of
thought and prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against
"the South" is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor
Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page,
and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the
imperative duty of thinking black men.

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several
instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to
the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama
constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in
other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister
schemes and unfortunate happenings.  Notwithstanding this, it is
equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left
by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is justified
in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's
degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure to
rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly,
that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts.  Each of
these propositions is a dangerous half-truth.  The supplementary truths
must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are
potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro's position; second,
industrial and common-school training were necessarily slow in planting
because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher
institutions,--it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different
development was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable
before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the
Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally
true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather
aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser
environing group, he cannot hope for great success.

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington
is especially to be criticised.  His doctrine has tended to make the
whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the
Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic
spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the
hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting
these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert
her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly
wronged and is still wronging.  The North--her co-partner in
guilt--cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold.  We
cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy"
alone.  If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country
survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and
delicate,--a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their
greatest leader.  So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience,
and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and
strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength
of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host.  But
so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does
not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the
emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher
training and ambition of our brighter minds,--so far as he, the South,
or the Nation, does this,--we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.
By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights
which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great
words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these
truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."




IV

Of the Meaning of Progress

  Willst Du Deine Macht verkunden,
  Wahle sie die frei von Sunden,
  Steh'n in Deinem ew'gen Haus!
  Deine Geister sende aus!
  Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
  Die nicht fuhlen, die nicht weinen!
  Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wahle,
  Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!

  SCHILLER.


Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the
broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet
the Alleghanies.  I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought
that Tennessee--beyond the Veil--was theirs alone, and in vacation time
they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county
school-commissioners.  Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not
soon forget that summer, seventeen years ago.

First, there was a Teachers' Institute at the county-seat; and there
distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers
fractions and spelling and other mysteries,--white teachers in the
morning, Negroes at night.  A picnic now and then, and a supper, and
the rough world was softened by laughter and song.  I remember how--
But I wander.

There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the
hunt for schools.  I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally
afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is
wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never
hunted a country school has something to learn of the pleasures of the
chase.  I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind
before me under the burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of
heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead; I
feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again, "Got a teacher?
Yes."  So I walked on and on--horses were too expensive--until I had
wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of "varmints"
and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men
lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.

Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from
the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east.  There
I found at last a little school.  Josie told me of it; she was a thin,
homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair.  I
had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great
willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was
resting on her way to town.  The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and
Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school
over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there;
that she herself longed to learn,--and thus she ran on, talking fast
and loud, with much earnestness and energy.

Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the
blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged
into the wood, and came out at Josie's home.  It was a dull frame
cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid
peach-trees.  The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant,
with no touch of vulgarity.  The mother was different,--strong,
bustling, and energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition
to live "like folks." There was a crowd of children.  Two boys had gone
away.  There remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John,
tall, awkward, and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking;
and two babies of indefinite age.  Then there was Josie herself.  She
seemed to be the centre of the family: always busy at service, or at
home, or berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like
her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father.  She had about her a
certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would
willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for
her and hers.  I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love
them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for
their knowledge of their own ignorance.  There was with them no
affectation.  The mother would scold the father for being so "easy";
Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that
it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.

I secured the school.  I remember the day I rode horseback out to the
commissioner's house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the
white school.  The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed
and the water jingled, and we rode on.  "Come in," said the
commissioner,--"come in.  Have a seat.  Yes, that certificate will do.
Stay to dinner.  What do you want a month?"  "Oh," thought I, "this is
lucky"; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate
first, then I--alone.

The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter
his corn.  It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near
the sweetest of springs.  There was an entrance where a door once was,
and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs
served as windows.  Furniture was scarce.  A pale blackboard crouched
in the corner.  My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at
critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be
returned every night.  Seats for the children--these puzzled me much.
I was haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs,
but, alas! the reality was rough plank benches without backs, and at
times without legs.  They had the one virtue of making naps
dangerous,--possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.

It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened.  I trembled
when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the
growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me.
First came Josie and her brothers and sisters.  The longing to know, to
be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star
above this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she studied
doggedly.  There were the Dowells from their farm over toward
Alexandria,--Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes;
Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife of a brother, and the
younger brood.

There were the Burkes,--two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny
haughty-eyed girl.  Fat Reuben's little chubby girl came, with golden
face and old-gold hair, faithful and solemn.  'Thenie was on hand
early,--a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and
looked after her little bow-legged brother.  When her mother could
spare her, 'Tildy came,--a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and
tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely.  And then the
big boys,--the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of
mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders; and the
rest.

There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their
faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare
and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a
twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster's blue-black
spelling-book.  I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had
in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous.  We read and
spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to
stories of the world beyond the hill.  At times the school would
dwindle away, and I would start out.  I would visit Mun Eddings, who
lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming
face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all
last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed.
Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would
tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother,
whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the
baby.  "But we'll start them again next week."  When the Lawrences
stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning
had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far
into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero "pro Archia Poeta" into the
simplest English with local applications, and usually convinced
them--for a week or so.

On Friday nights I often went home with some of the
children,--sometimes to Doc Burke's farm.  He was a great, loud, thin
Black, ever working, and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill
and dale where he lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and
the "white folks would get it all."  His wife was a magnificent Amazon,
with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the
children were strong and beautiful.  They lived in a
one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the spring.
The front room was full of great fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and
there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired centre-table.  In the
tiny back kitchen I was often invited to "take out and help" myself to
fried chicken and wheat biscuit, "meat" and corn pone, string-beans and
berries.  At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach of
bedtime in the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly
avoided.  First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed
away in one great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the
father discreetly slipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed;
then, blowing out the dim light, they retired in the dark.  In the
morning all were up and away before I thought of awaking.  Across the
road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went outdoors while the teacher
retired, because they did not boast the luxury of a kitchen.

I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of
good country fare.  Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and
hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,--he preached
now and then,--and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was
happy and prosperous.  Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life
was less lovely; for instance, 'Tildy's mother was incorrigibly dirty,
Reuben's larder was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects
wandered over the Eddingses' beds.  Best of all I loved to go to
Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled
and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked
at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was "mighty little"
wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it "looked like"
they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed
and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how "mean" some of the
white folks were.

For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum.
The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted
and haunted Alexandria.  Alexandria was "town,"--a straggling, lazy
village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms,
Dicks, and Captains.  Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village
of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted
cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty.  The dwellings were
scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of
the hamlet, the Methodist, and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches.  These,
in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored schoolhouse.  Hither my
little world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds, and
gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest
at the altar of the "old-time religion."  Then the soft melody and
mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it;
and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a
common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,
from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity.  All
this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe
for speech, were spoken in various languages.  Those whose eyes
twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of
the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound
to bring all things right in His own good time.  The mass of those to
whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a
puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little,
and yet it ridiculed their offering.  Such a paradox they could not
understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or
shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.  There were, however, some--such as
Josie, Jim, and Ben--to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood
tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and
story and half-awakened thought.  Ill could they be content, born
without and beyond the World.  And their weak wings beat against their
barriers,--barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous
moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.


The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,--these were the years that passed
after I left my little school.  When they were past, I came by chance
once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel
of melody.  As I lingered there in the joy and pain of meeting old
school-friends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again
beyond the blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other
days, and to learn how life had gone with my school-children; and I
went.

Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply, "We've had a
heap of trouble since you've been away."  I had feared for Jim.  With a
cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made
a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet.  But here he was, angry
with life and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with
stealing wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which
the furious fool hurled after him.  They told Jim to run away; but he
would not run, and the constable came that afternoon.  It grieved
Josie, and great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his
little brother through the bars of Lebanon jail.  At last the two came
back together in the dark night.  The mother cooked supper, and Josie
emptied her purse, and the boys stole away.  Josie grew thin and
silent, yet worked the more.  The hill became steep for the quiet old
father, and with the boys away there was little to do in the valley.
Josie helped them to sell the old farm, and they moved nearer town.
Brother Dennis, the carpenter, built a new house with six rooms; Josie
toiled a year in Nashville, and brought back ninety dollars to furnish
the house and change it to a home.

When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud
and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the
passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a
nameless child.  Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of
schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,--worked until, on a
summer's day, some one married another; then Josie crept to her mother
like a hurt child, and slept--and sleeps.

I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley.  The Lawrences
have gone,--father and son forever,--and the other son lazily digs in
the earth to live.  A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat
Reuben.  Reuben is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever,
though his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has grown into a
bouncing woman, and is ploughing corn on the hot hillside.  There are
babies a-plenty, and one half-witted girl.  Across the valley is a
house I did not know before, and there I found, rocking one baby and
expecting another, one of my schoolgirls, a daughter of Uncle Bird
Dowell.  She looked somewhat worried with her new duties, but soon
bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty
husband, and the horse and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.

My log schoolhouse was gone.  In its place stood Progress; and
Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.  The crazy foundation
stones still marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not
far away, on six weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps
twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked.  Some
of the window-glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay
mournfully under the house.  I peeped through the window half
reverently, and found things that were more familiar.  The blackboard
had grown by about two feet, and the seats were still without backs.
The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every year there is a session
of school.  As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I
felt glad, very glad, and yet--

After two long drinks I started on.  There was the great double
log-house on the corner.  I remembered the broken, blighted family that
used to live there.  The strong, hard face of the mother, with its
wilderness of hair, rose before me.  She had driven her husband away,
and while I taught school a strange man lived there, big and jovial,
and people talked.  I felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come to
naught from such a home.  But this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy
farmer in Smith County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared
for little 'Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her.  A hard
life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he was
homely and crooked.  There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint,
who had definite notions about "niggers," and hired Ben a summer and
would not pay him.  Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together,
and in broad daylight went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard-fisted
farmer set upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast.  Doc Burke
saved a murder and a lynching that day.

The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres.  For it
is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years.
So I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes.  They used to have a certain
magnificent barbarism about them that I liked.  They were never vulgar,
never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an
unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back,
and naps in the corner.  I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neill
boys.  It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farm-hands.  I
saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders,
had passed from the world.  Then I came to the Burkes' gate and peered
through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were
the same fences around the old farm save to the left, where lay
twenty-five other acres.  And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed
the hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room cottage.

The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt.  Indeed,
the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out
of debt, being so used to it.  Some day he must stop, for his massive
frame is showing decline.  The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like
physique of other days was broken.  The children had grown up.  Rob,
the image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter.  Birdie, my
school baby of six, had grown to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and
tawny.  "Edgar is gone," said the mother, with head half bowed,--"gone
to work in Nashville; he and his father couldn't agree."

Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback
down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell's.  The road and the
stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it.
We splashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered
and laughed.  He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of
ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl,
was not there.  She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away.  We
wound on down the stream till we came to a gate that I did not
recognize, but the boy insisted that it was "Uncle Bird's."  The farm
was fat with the growing crop.  In that little valley was a strange
stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen youth and
left age and childhood there.  We sat and talked that night after the
chores were done.  Uncle Bird was grayer, and his eyes did not see so
well, but he was still jovial.  We talked of the acres bought,--one
hundred and twenty-five,--of the new guest-chamber added, of Martha's
marrying.  Then we talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow
hung over the other daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to
Nashville to school.  At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night
fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a night like that, 'Thenie came
wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape the blows of her
husband.  And next morning she died in the home that her little
bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed
mother.

My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and
Death.  How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie
lies?  How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat?
How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!  And
all this life and love and strife and failure,--is it the twilight of
nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?

Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.




V

Of the Wings of Atalanta

  O black boy of Atlanta!
    But half was spoken;
  The slave's chains and the master's
    Alike are broken;
  The one curse of the races
    Held both in tether;
  They are rising--all are rising--
    The black and white together.

  WHITTIER.


South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred
Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the
future.  I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day
had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of
Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the
tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and
roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl
of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.

Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of
the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its
sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the
sea.  And the sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea,
till the city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for
her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,--perhaps with some
bitterness, with a touch, of reclame,--and yet with real earnestness,
and real sweat.

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to
see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel
the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell
on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live,
something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that
with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something
sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best.  All this
is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it
excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.

Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned
resolutely toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of
purple and gold:--Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta,
Gateway to the Land of the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of
web and woof for the world.  So the city crowned her hundred hills with
factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched
long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury in his coming.  And the Nation
talked of her striving.


Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull
Boeotia; you know the tale,--how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would
marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid
three apples of gold in the way.  She fled like a shadow, paused,
startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled
again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew
over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his
arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion of
their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed.  If
Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.

Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led
to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the race
of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the
gambler's code of the Bourse; and in all our Nation's striving is not
the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay?  So common is this
that one-half think it normal; so unquestioned, that we almost fear to
question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not
rightly to be rich.  And if this is the fault of America, how dire a
danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping
for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!

It was no maiden's idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful
wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,--feudalism,
poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and
Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race.  How heavy a
journey for weary feet!  what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all
this hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the
red waste of sun-baked clay!  How fleet must Atalanta be if she will
not be tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!

The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,--some sneer,
"all too few."  There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto of
the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten
Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,--and as she ran
she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot.  She forgot
the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,--that new-world heir of the
grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor
with his foibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to
apples of gold,--to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more
unscrupulous.  Golden apples are beautiful--I remember the lawless days
of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and
field--and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no
despicable parvenu.  Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this
old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes
and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily
Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal
of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.

Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is
beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with
vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern
life beneath pretence and ostentation.  For every social ill the
panacea of Wealth has been urged,--wealth to overthrow the remains of
the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth
to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them
working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender
for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and
Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.

Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,--the
Black World beyond the Veil.  Today it makes little difference to
Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills.  In
the soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain,
unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and
will and do for himself,--and let no man dream that day will never
come,--then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but
words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood.
To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the
strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil
are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of
serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the
Veil of Race.  Few know of these problems, few who know notice them;
and yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,--a field
for somebody sometime to discover.  Hither has the temptation of
Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now
indirectly and anon directly must influence the larger for good or ill,
the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars.  The old
leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro
social consciousness, are being replaced by new; neither the black
preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago.  Into
their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid
porters and artisans, the business-men,--all those with property and
money.  And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the
Other-world, goes too the same inevitable change in ideals.  The South
laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of
Negro,--the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his
incorruptible honesty and dignified humility.  He is passing away just
as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from
not dissimilar causes,--the sudden transformation of a fair far-off
ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the
consequent deification of Bread.

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals
of this people--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague
dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger
is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration,
will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold.  Here
stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that
must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in
the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some
ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples
before her?  What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for
righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all
and end-all of life?  What if to the Mammonism of America be added the
rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South
be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black
millions?  Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty
and Truth gone glimmering?  Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom
which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our
fathers' blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of
gold,--into lawless lust with Hippomenes?


The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories.  On
one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold
relief against the sky.  The beauty of the group lies in its simple
unity:--a broad lawn of green rising from the red street and mingled
roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; and in
the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful,
sparingly decorated, and with one low spire.  It is a restful group,
--one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible.  There I
live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life.  In
winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures
pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell.  In the morning,
when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and
laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from
the busy city below,--children all dark and heavy-haired,--to join
their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice.  In a
half-dozen class-rooms they gather then,--here to follow the love-song
of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander
among the stars, there to wander among men and nations,--and elsewhere
other well-worn ways of knowing this queer world.  Nothing new, no
time-saving devices,--simply old time-glorified methods of delving for
Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the
good of living.  The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that
was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato,
that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the
freedmen's sons by Atlanta University.  And this course of study will
not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content
richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will
ever have one goal,--not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of
that life which meat nourishes.

The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing
mean or selfish.  Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia,
is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the
determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest
possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with
their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,--all this is the burden of
their talk and dream.  Here, amid a wide desert of caste and
proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a
deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and
the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and
breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a
future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:

  "Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren."


They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta
before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but
those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat
uproariously.  They were right when they sought to found a new
educational system upon the University: where, forsooth, shall we
ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge?  The roots
of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and
from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of
the University has been the broad foundation-stone on which is built
the kindergarten's A B C.

But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the
problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years and decades; in
therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and
lowering the standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard
through the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled
them universities.  They forgot, too, just as their successors are
forgetting, the rule of inequality:--that of the million black youth,
some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and
capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of
blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be
college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a
missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free
workman among serfs.  And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is
almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a
blacksmith; almost, but not quite.


The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or
to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite
society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment
between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment
which forms the secret of civilization.  Such an institution the South
of to-day sorely needs.  She has religion, earnest, bigoted:--religion
that on both sides the Veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth
commandments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones.  She has, as
Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that
broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew of human living and
doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real life to-day
confronting her.  The need of the South is knowledge and culture,--not
in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy
abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the
Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from
the curse of the Boeotian lovers.

The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South.  They
alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit.  They
will not guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for--ah,
thoughtful Hippomenes!--do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life?
But they will guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in
the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and
undefiled.  Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising
the education of the masses, and niggardly in the support of colleges.
Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul
breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing
fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial
selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for lack
of broadly cultured men.  And if this is the white South's need and
danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen's sons!
how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the
conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions!  Let us build
the Southern university--William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas,
Tulane, Vanderbilt, and the others--fit to live; let us build, too, the
Negro universities:--Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at
the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship
has been held above the temptation of numbers.  Why not here, and
perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning
and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South
a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic
tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to other hands, and
giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?

Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and
kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and
tolerance,--all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children
of the university.  So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not
upside down.

Teach workers to work,--a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys
and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for they have less
knowledge of working and none to teach them.  Teach thinkers to
think,--a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and
they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think
aright.  If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best
education for one or seven or sixty million souls! shall we teach them
trades, or train them in liberal arts?  Neither and both: teach the
workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of
carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools.  Nor
can we pause here.  We are training not isolated men but a living group
of men,--nay, a group within a group.  And the final product of our
training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.
And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends
of living,--not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.  The worker
must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the
thinker must think for truth, not for fame.  And all this is gained
only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education;
by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search
for Truth; by founding the common school on the university, and the
industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not
a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion.


When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers itself
from the seas and comes murmuring westward.  And at its bidding, the
smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and
covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle
above Stone Hall.  And they say that yon gray mist is the tunic of
Atalanta pausing over her golden apples.  Fly, my maiden, fly, for
yonder comes Hippomenes!




VI

Of the Training of Black Men

  Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
  And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
    Were't not a Shame--were't not a Shame for him
  In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

  OMAR KHAYYAM (FITZGERALD).


From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the
slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to
our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world
here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in
culture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying
them.  Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth
nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white.  The larger humanity
strives to feel in this contact of living Nations and sleeping hordes a
thrill of new life in the world, crying, "If the contact of Life and
Sleep be Death, shame on such Life."  To be sure, behind this thought
lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,--the making of brown men
to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.

The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river
is the thought of the older South,--the sincere and passionate belief
that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and
called it a Negro,--a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable
within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the
Veil.  To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,--some of
them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence
we dare not let them, and we build about them walls so high, and hang
between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall not even
think of breaking through.

And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,--the
thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter
of men who are black and whitened, crying "Liberty, Freedom,
Opportunity--vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living
men!"  To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,--suppose,
after all, the World is right and we are less than men?  Suppose this
mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest
and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a
shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet
sure of their right to demand it.  This is the tangle of thought and
afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men
for life.

Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante,
lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and
awful.  Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and
wild we have within our threshold,--a stalwart laboring force, suited
to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse
to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss.  If, on the
other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus
caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the
future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?
Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the
rights of all in the whirl of work.

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a
heavy fact.  Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be
reckoned with soberly.  They cannot be laughed away, nor always
successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature.
And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone.  They must be
recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way
of civilization and religion and common decency.  They can be met in
but one way,--by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by
catholicity of taste and culture.  And so, too, the native ambition and
aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful,
must not lightly be dealt with.  To stimulate wildly weak and untrained
minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to
welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very
laps.  The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at
once the path of honor and humanity.

And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially
contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to
the lips of all:--such human training as will best use the labor of all
men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us
poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp
out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned
souls within the Veil, and the mounting fury of shackled men.

But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle
straight, what have we uttered but a truism?  Training for life teaches
living; but what training for the profitable living together of black
men and white?  A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have
seemed easier.  Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was
needful solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for
ordinary vermin.  To-day we have climbed to heights where we would open
at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to
many, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not
wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in
part according to deftness and aim, talent and character.  This
programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that
part of the land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we
are dealing with two backward peoples.  To make here in human education
that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent--of
the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium--has been there, as
it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment
and frequent mistakes.

In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in
Southern education since the Civil War.  From the close of the war
until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief.
There were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen's
Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation.  Then
followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building
of complete school systems in the South.  Normal schools and colleges
were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the
public schools.  There was the inevitable tendency of war to
underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the
slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm.
Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885
to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South.  The land saw
glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals.  The
educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a
field of work ever broader and deeper.  The Negro colleges, hurriedly
founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of
varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing
little more than common-school work, and the common schools were
training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and
training these too often poorly.  At the same time the white South, by
reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the
more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and
crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the marvellous
pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread
and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the
freedmen.  In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro education
sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic
quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom,
and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,
lawlessness and ruthless competition.

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to
full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered
answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer
of singular wisdom and timeliness.  From the very first in nearly all
the schools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but
now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in
direct touch with the South's magnificent industrial development, and
given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple of
Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the
temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader
question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in
America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material
advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is
the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and
to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever-recurring query of the
ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?  And
men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in
recent educational movements.  The tendency is here, born of slavery
and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to
regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be
trained with an eye single to future dividends.  Race-prejudices, which
keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as
useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the
ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings.  And above
all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that
sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character
rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger
and delusion of black.

Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational
efforts to aid the Negro.  In the four periods I have mentioned, we
find first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the
preparation of teachers for a vast public-school system; then the
launching and expansion of that school system amid increasing
difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and
growing industries.  This development has been sharply ridiculed as a
logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature.  Soothly we have been told
that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro
to work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and write,
and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed
the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.

That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it
needs but a little thought to prove.  Progress in human affairs is more
often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and
the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his
vantage-ground.  Thus it was no accident that gave birth to
universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair
Harvard the first flower of our wilderness.  So in the South: the mass
of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so
necessary to modern workingmen.  They must first have the common school
to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher
schools to teach teachers for the common schools.  The white teachers
who flocked South went to establish such a common-school system.  Few
held the idea of founding colleges; most of them at first would have
laughed at the idea.  But they faced, as all men since them have faced,
that central paradox of the South,--the social separation of the races.
At that time it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations
between black and white, in work and government and family life.  Since
then a new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs
has grown up,--an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet
singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasm at the
color-line across which men pass at their peril.  Thus, then and now,
there stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply
in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and
school, on railway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets
and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in
hospitals and graveyards.  There is still enough of contact for large
economic and group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough and
deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races
anything like that sympathetic and effective group-training and
leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all
backward peoples must have for effectual progress.

This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and
trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a
common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools
could be founded until there were teachers to teach them.  Southern
whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers
could not be had.  If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself,
and the most effective help that could be given him was the
establishment of schools to train Negro teachers.  This conclusion was
slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until
simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or
systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to
furnish teachers for the untaught.  Above the sneers of critics at the
obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing
rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black
teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of
the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.

Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader
development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then some
became high schools.  And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one
year or more of studies of college grade.  This development was reached
with different degrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is
still a high school, while Fisk University started her college in 1871,
and Spelman Seminary about 1896.  In all cases the aim was
identical,--to maintain the standards of the lower training by giving
teachers and leaders the best practicable training; and above all, to
furnish the black world with adequate standards of human culture and
lofty ideals of life.  It was not enough that the teachers of teachers
should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far
as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter
civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters,
but of life itself.

It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with
higher institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage
common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time
strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college and university
training.  That this was an inevitable and necessary development,
sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is,
a question in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if
the higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and
unsound methods.  Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread
and positive.  A prominent Southern journal voiced this in a recent
editorial.

"The experiment that has been made to give the colored students
classical training has not been satisfactory.  Even though many were
able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way,
learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and
import of their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or
valuable occupation for their future.  The whole scheme has proved a
waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state."

While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and
overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient
number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the
undertaking?  Are not too many students prematurely forced into this
work?  Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro
with his environment?  And do these graduates succeed in real life?
Such natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a
Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable
answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction.  We
must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the
Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to
listen to evidence.

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to
deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too
many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some
cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality
has sometimes been sought.  But all this can be said of higher
education throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of
educational growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate
demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched.  And this latter
question can be settled in but one way,--by a first-hand study of the
facts.  If we leave out of view all institutions which have not
actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New
England high school, even though they be called colleges; if then we
take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many
misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are
they? what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?

And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta,
Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is
peculiar, almost unique.  Through the shining trees that whisper before
me as I write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite,
covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have placed
there,--


   "GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER
   AND FRIEND AND OF THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED,
   AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY,
   THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN
              MIGHT BE BLESSED."


This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a
friend; not cash, but character.  It was not and is not money these
seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts
beating with red blood;--a gift which to-day only their own kindred and
race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to
their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing
in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid
greed and cheap vainglory.  The teachers in these institutions came not
to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the
defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them.  The colleges
they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons
of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best
traditions of New England.  They lived and ate together, studied and
worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light.  In actual formal
content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in
educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living
souls.

From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the
bachelor's degree.  The number in itself is enough to put at rest the
argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher
training.  If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout
the land, in both college and secondary training, be counted,
Commissioner Harris assures us "it must be increased to five times its
present average" to equal the average of the land.

Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable
numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to
prove.  To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many
of whom have been reported as brilliant students, have received the
bachelor's degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other
leading colleges.  Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro
graduates, of whom the crucial query must be made, How far did their
training fit them for life?  It is of course extremely difficult to
collect satisfactory data on such a point,--difficult to reach the men,
to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge that testimony by any
generally acceptable criterion of success.  In 1900, the Conference at
Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, and published
the results.  First they sought to know what these graduates were
doing, and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the
living.  The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by
the reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in the main
the reports were worthy of credence.  Fifty-three per cent of these
graduates were teachers,--presidents of institutions, heads of normal
schools, principals of city school-systems, and the like.  Seventeen
per cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the
professions, chiefly as physicians.  Over six per cent were merchants,
farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the government
civil-service.  Granting even that a considerable proportion of the
third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness.
Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have
corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I have followed
carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and some
of the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have
builded, and looked at life through their eyes.  Comparing them as a
class with my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot
hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader
spirit of helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with
more consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter
difficulties than among Negro college-bred men.  They have, to be sure,
their proportion of ne'er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools,
but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not
that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university
men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes,
and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a
certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.

With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have
usually been conservative, careful leaders.  They have seldom been
agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have
worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South.
As teachers, they have given the South a commendable system of city
schools and large numbers of private normal-schools and academies.
Colored college-bred men have worked side by side with white college
graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone of
Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and
Atlanta.  And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates,
from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of
agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a
majority of the heads of departments.  In the professions, college men
are slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and
preventing the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal
protection for the liberty and property of the toiling masses.  All
this is needful work.  Who would do it if Negroes did not?  How could
Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it?  If white
people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and
doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in
the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher
training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half
thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in
the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the
question then comes, What place in the future development of the South
ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy?  That the
present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually
yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is
clear.  But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience.
If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are
to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying
a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet
subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human
intimacy,--if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress
amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will
call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern
history.  It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and
black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will
triumph.  So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being
recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university
education seems imminent.  But the very voices that cry hail to this
good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the
higher education of the Negro.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be
built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent
proletariat.  Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers
and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of
Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to
read the riddle of the world.  By taking away their best equipped
teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces
of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with
their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands
of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues?  We ought
not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the
active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for
higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in
the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges;
from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100
graduates.  From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three
periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates.  Here, then, is the plain
thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to
knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside
their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of
water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more
intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so
largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk.  Such
waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with
civilization.  And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and
skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more
and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present,
until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found
energies athwart the current of advance.  Even to-day the masses of the
Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the
moral crookedness of yours.  You may marshal strong indictments against
them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic,
have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O
Southern Gentlemen!  If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who
brought us?  When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage,
they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic
concubinage and prostitution.  And if in just fury you accuse their
vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may
reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black
women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two
millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.  And finally,
when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer
that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin
abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which
in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South,
and West.

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,--I will not insist
that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the
nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of
the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in
the guise of terrible truth.  I insist that the question of the future
is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the
past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies
may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white
neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future.  That one wise
method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the
great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth.  And this
the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are
working to accomplish.  But these alone are not enough.  The
foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep
in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent
structure.  Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come,
--problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the
true valuing of the things of life; and all these and other inevitable
problems of civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for
himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible
solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich
experience of the past?  Is there not, with such a group and in such a
crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained
minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and
over-refinement?  Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so
manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and
the fool.  We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their
stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains.  They already
dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and
dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the
loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men
emancipated by training and culture.

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of
the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact
and cooperation.  And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.
Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must
persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of
culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign
human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks
a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate
and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new.  Such souls
aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly
bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again.  Herein the longing of
black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their
experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange
rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of
view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human
hearts.  And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the
chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer
spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.  Across the color line I move
arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women
glide in gilded halls.  From out the caves of evening that swing
between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon
Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all
graciously with no scorn nor condescension.  So, wed with Truth, I
dwell above the Veil.  Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly
America?  Is this the life you long to change into the dull red
hideousness of Georgia?  Are you so afraid lest peering from this high
Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?




VII

Of the Black Belt

  I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
  As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
  Look not upon me, because I am black,
  Because the sun hath looked upon me:
  My mother's children were angry with me;
  They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
  But mine own vineyard have I not kept.

  THE SONG OF SOLOMON.


Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson
soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left.
Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed
leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay.
Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic
ground.  Right across our track, three hundred and sixty years ago,
wandered the cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the
Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in the
grim forests to the west.  Here sits Atlanta, the city of a hundred
hills, with something Western, something Southern, and something quite
its own, in its busy life.  Just this side Atlanta is the land of the
Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was
crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the
Negro problem,--the centre of those nine million men who are America's
dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.

Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro
population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the
Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State.  No other
State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,--a
population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in 1800;
no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of
Africans.  Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the
circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not
calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and
slaves.  Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians,
like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their
own hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the
smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the
middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away, and
the slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.

Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some summers ago,
there used to come a strong protest against slavery from the Scotch
Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system.
But not till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even
checked; while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it.
How the Africans poured in!--fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and
then, from Virginia and from smugglers, two thousand a year for many
years more.  So the thirty thousand Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled
in a decade,--were over a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two
hundred thousand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war.
Thus like a snake the black population writhed upward.

But we must hasten on our journey.  This that we pass as we near
Atlanta is the ancient land of the Cherokees,--that brave Indian nation
which strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United
States Government drove them beyond the Mississippi.  If you wish to
ride with me you must come into the "Jim Crow Car."  There will be no
objection,--already four other white men, and a little white girl with
her nurse, are in there.  Usually the races are mixed in there; but the
white coach is all white.  Of course this car is not so good as the
other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable.  The discomfort lies
chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder--and in mine.

We rumble south in quite a business-like way.  The bare red clay and
pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place
appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled.
This is the land of the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians
had to seize it.  The towns grow more frequent and more interesting,
and brand-new cotton mills rise on every side.  Below Macon the world
grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,--that strange land of
shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now
only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond.  The "Jim
Crow Car" grows larger and a shade better; three rough field-hands and
two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboy still spreads
his wares at one end.  The sun is setting, but we can see the great
cotton country as we enter it,--the soil now dark and fertile, now thin
and gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings,--all the way to
Albany.

At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop.  Two hundred miles
south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one
hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten
thousand Negroes and two thousand whites.  The Flint River winds down
from Andersonville, and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat,
hurries on to join the Chattahoochee and the sea.  Andrew Jackson knew
the Flint well, and marched across it once to avenge the Indian
Massacre at Fort Mims.  That was in 1814, not long before the battle of
New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all
Dougherty County, and much other rich land, was ceded to Georgia.
Still, settlers fought shy of this land, for the Indians were all
about, and they were unpleasant neighbors in those days.  The panic of
1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned the planters from
the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east Georgia,
toward the West.  The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and
settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken
fortunes.  For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a
great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory,
and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land;
and here the corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.

Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town, with a broad
sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes,--whites
usually to the north, and blacks to the south.  Six days in the week
the town looks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and
prolonged naps.  But on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges
itself upon the place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours
through the streets, fills the stores, blocks the sidewalks, chokes the
thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the town.  They are black,
sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a
degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the
Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow.  They drink considerable quantities
of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at
times, but seldom quarrel or fight.  They walk up and down the streets,
meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee,
cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home--happy? well no, not
exactly happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.

Thus Albany is a real capital,--a typical Southern county town, the
centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with
the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for
buying and selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice
and law.  Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life
so little, that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded
country district.  Now the world has well-nigh forgotten what the
country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered
far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without
train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of
sand and gloomy soil.

It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,--a sort of dull,
determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us
some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out
on the long country roads, that we might see this unknown world.
Finally we started.  It was about ten in the morning, bright with a
faint breeze, and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the
Flint.  We passed the scattered box-like cabins of the brickyard hands,
and the long tenement-row facetiously called "The Ark," and were soon
in the open country, and on the confines of the great plantations of
other days.  There is the "Joe Fields place"; a rough old fellow was
he, and had killed many a "nigger" in his day.  Twelve miles his
plantation used to run,--a regular barony.  It is nearly all gone now;
only straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to
Jews and Negroes.  Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged,
and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants.  Here is one of them
now,--a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate,
but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare.  This
distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of
yonder moss-grown cabin with its one square room.

From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, a dark comely face
is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day
occurrences here.  Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a
good-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now
the broken staff of the widow.  He might be well-to-do, they say; but
he carouses too much in Albany.  And the half-desolate spirit of
neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres.  In
times past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have
rotted away.

The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken.  Here are the remnants of
the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons; but
the souls of them are passed.  The houses lie in half ruin, or have
wholly disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are
wandering in the world.  Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom
masters.  Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in
war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow.  Then he
went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant remains; but
the shadow-hand of the master's grand-nephew or cousin or creditor
stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent
remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor.  Only black
tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must.  Ten
miles we have ridden to-day and have seen no white face.

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the
gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields.  This, then, is the Cotton
Kingdom,--the shadow of a marvellous dream.  And where is the King?
Perhaps this is he,--the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres
with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt.  So we sit
musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a
fairer scene suddenly in view,--a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the
road, and near it a little store.  A tall bronzed man rises from the
porch as we hail him, and comes out to our carriage.  He is six feet in
height, with a sober face that smiles gravely.  He walks too straight
to be a tenant,--yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres.  "The land
is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty," he
explains, and cotton is low.  Three black tenants live on his place,
and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap,
and soda, for the neighborhood.  Here is his gin-house with new
machinery just installed.  Three hundred bales of cotton went through
it last year.  Two children he has sent away to school.  Yes, he says
sadly, he is getting on, but cotton is down to four cents; I know how
Debt sits staring at him.

Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom
have not wholly disappeared.  We plunge even now into great groves of
oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.
This was the "home-house" of the Thompsons,--slave-barons who drove
their coach and four in the merry past.  All is silence now, and ashes,
and tangled weeds.  The owner put his whole fortune into the rising
cotton industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the
eighties he packed up and stole away.  Yonder is another grove, with
unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths.  The Big House
stands in half-ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the
street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant.  A
shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute.  He digs hard
to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place.  She
married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.

Now and again we come to churches.  Here is one now,--Shepherd's, they
call it,--a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on stilts of
stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting
here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at
almost any time.  And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes;
and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near
gather here and talk and eat and sing.  There is a schoolhouse near,--a
very airy, empty shed; but even this is an improvement, for usually the
school is held in the church.  The churches vary from log-huts to those
like Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing to this little house that
sits demurely on the county line.  It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps
ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough unplaned benches,
resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes.  Opposite the door is a
square home-made desk.  In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in
the other a dim blackboard.  It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have
seen in Dougherty, save in town.  Back of the schoolhouse is a
lodgehouse two stories high and not quite finished.  Societies meet
there,--societies "to care for the sick and bury the dead"; and these
societies grow and flourish.

We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to turn west
along the county-line, when all these sights were pointed out to us by
a kindly old man, black, white-haired, and seventy.  Forty-five years
he had lived here, and now supports himself and his old wife by the
help of the steer tethered yonder and the charity of his black
neighbors.  He shows us the farm of the Hills just across the county
line in Baker,--a widow and two strapping sons, who raised ten bales
(one need not add "cotton" down here) last year.  There are fences and
pigs and cows, and the soft-voiced, velvet-skinned young Memnon, who
sauntered half-bashfully over to greet the strangers, is proud of his
home.  We turn now to the west along the county line.  Great dismantled
trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking their
naked gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond.  There
is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that
suggests power,--a naked grandeur, as it were.  The houses are bare and
straight; there are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers.  So
when, as here at Rawdon's, one sees a vine clinging to a little porch,
and home-like windows peeping over the fences, one takes a long breath.
I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in
civilization.  This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either
hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty.  Here lies
the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury.  And here are no
fences.  But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings
break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near.  Of
course Harrison Gohagen,--a quiet yellow man, young, smooth-faced, and
diligent,--of course he is lord of some hundred acres, and we expect to
see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds and laughing children.
For has he not fine fences?  And those over yonder, why should they
build fences on the rack-rented land?  It will only increase their rent.

On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old plantations,
till there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings,--wood and brick,
mills and houses, and scattered cabins.  It seemed quite a village.  As
it came nearer and nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings
were rotten, the bricks were falling out, the mills were silent, and
the store was closed.  Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit
of lazy life.  I could imagine the place under some weird spell, and
was half-minded to search out the princess.  An old ragged black man,
honest, simple, and improvident, told us the tale.  The Wizard of the
North--the Capitalist--had rushed down in the seventies to woo this coy
dark soil.  He bought a square mile or more, and for a time the
field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed.  Then came a
change.  The agent's son embezzled the funds and ran off with them.
Then the agent himself disappeared.  Finally the new agent stole even
the books, and the company in wrath closed its business and its houses,
refused to sell, and let houses and furniture and machinery rust and
rot.  So the Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of
dishonesty, and stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.

Somehow that plantation ended our day's journey; for I could not shake
off the influence of that silent scene.  Back toward town we glided,
past the straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted pond
where the air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume.  White
slender-legged curlews flitted by us, and the garnet blooms of the
cotton looked gay against the green and purple stalks.  A peasant girl
was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned and black-limbed.  All this we
saw, but the spell still lay upon us.

How curious a land is this,--how full of untold story, of tragedy and
laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic
past, and big with future promise!  This is the Black Belt of Georgia.
Dougherty County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called
it the Egypt of the Confederacy.  It is full of historic interest.
First there is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows
sullenly southward.  The shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge,
forlorn and dark.  Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss and brackish
waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl.  In one place the wood
is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds.  Then the
swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts,
dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living
green.  Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuriance of
undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background,
until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in
its weird savage splendor.  Once we crossed a black silent stream,
where the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow
and green, seemed like some vast cathedral,--some green Milan builded
of wildwood.  And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce
tragedy of seventy years ago.  Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had
risen in the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance.  His war-cry reached
the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the
Chattahoochee to the sea.  Men and women and children fled and fell
before them as they swept into Dougherty.  In yonder shadows a dark and
hideously painted warrior glided stealthily on,--another and another,
until three hundred had crept into the treacherous swamp.  Then the
false slime closing about them called the white men from the east.
Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was
hushed and the Indians glided back into the west.  Small wonder the
wood is red.

Then came the black slaves.  Day after day the clank of chained feet
marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich
swamp lands.  Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the
motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the
Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West
Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.
A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand
Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land,
valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars.
Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and
Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich.  In a
single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of
lands was tripled.  It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life
of careless extravagance among the masters.  Four and six bobtailed
thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay
entertainment were the rule.  Parks and groves were laid out, rich with
flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled "big
house," with its porch and columns and great fireplaces.

And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,--a
certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and
tinsel built upon a groan?  "This land was a little Hell," said a
ragged, brown, and grave-faced man to me.  We were seated near a
roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master's
home.  "I've seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked
aside, and the plough never stopped.  Down in the guard-house, there's
where the blood ran."

With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall.  The
masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only the irresponsible
overseers on the land.  And the result is such ruin as this, the Lloyd
"home-place":--great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles and
chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where
once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting
bellows and wood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old
mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the
slaves who once waited on its tables; while the family of the master
has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off
the remnants of an earldom.  So we ride on, past phantom gates and
falling homes,--past the once flourishing farms of the Smiths, the
Gandys, and the Lagores,--and find all dilapidated and half ruined,
even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits
alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient
coach each day.

This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,--the rich granary whence
potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged
Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.
Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families,
wealth, and slaves.  Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land
began to tell.  The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above
the loam.  The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and
fatal was their farming.  Then came the revolution of war and
Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,--and now, what is the
Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for the nation's weal
or woe?

It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain.
Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare feet; she was
married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young
husband, hoeing to support her, at thirty cents a day without board.
Across the way is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres
shrewdly won and held.  There is a store conducted by his black son, a
blacksmith shop, and a ginnery.  Five miles below here is a town owned
and controlled by one white New Englander.  He owns almost a Rhode
Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds of black laborers.
Their cabins look better than most, and the farm, with machinery and
fertilizers, is much more business-like than any in the county,
although the manager drives hard bargains in wages.  When now we turn
and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of
prostitutes,--two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the
houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two
years ago; so he was hanged for rape.  And here, too, is the high
whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called;
the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals,--the black
folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because
they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its
income by their forced labor.

Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride
westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach
and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land
of Canaan.  Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting,
born in the swift days of Reconstruction,--"improvement" companies,
wine companies, mills and factories; most failed, and foreigners fell
heir.  It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint.  The
forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is
the "Oakey Woods," with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks and
palmettos.  But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the
merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to
the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend
beneath the burden of it all.  Here and there a man has raised his head
above these murky waters.  We passed one fenced stock-farm with grass
and grazing cattle, that looked very home-like after endless corn and
cotton.  Here and there are black free-holders: there is the gaunt
dull-black Jackson, with his hundred acres.  "I says, 'Look up!  If you
don't look up you can't get up,'" remarks Jackson, philosophically.
And he's gotten up.  Dark Carter's neat barns would do credit to New
England.  His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man
died last fall the master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate.
"And them white folks will get it, too," said my yellow gossip.

I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable feeling that the
Negro is rising.  Even then, however, the fields, as we proceed, begin
to redden and the trees disappear.  Rows of old cabins appear filled
with renters and laborers,--cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most
part, although here and there the very age and decay makes the scene
picturesque.  A young black fellow greets us.  He is twenty-two, and
just married.  Until last year he had good luck renting; then cotton
fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he had.  So he moved here,
where the rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner inflexible; he
rents a forty-dollar mule for twenty dollars a year.  Poor lad!--a
slave at twenty-two.  This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was a
part of the famous Bolton estate.  After the war it was for many years
worked by gangs of Negro convicts,--and black convicts then were even
more plentiful than now; it was a way of making Negroes work, and the
question of guilt was a minor one.  Hard tales of cruelty and
mistreatment of the chained freemen are told, but the county
authorities were deaf until the free-labor market was nearly ruined by
wholesale migration.  Then they took the convicts from the plantations,
but not until one of the fairest regions of the "Oakey Woods" had been
ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which only a Yankee or an
immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants.

No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles to our
carriage and talks hopelessly.  Why should he strive?  Every year finds
him deeper in debt.  How strange that Georgia, the world-heralded
refuge of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as
ruthlessly as ever England did!  The poor land groans with its
birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to
the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much.  Of his
meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent, and
most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit.
Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black man has labored under
that system, and now, turned day-laborer, is supporting his wife and
boarding himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a week, received
only part of the year.

The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring plantation.
Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the great log prison still
standing.  A dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts
filled with surly ignorant tenants.  "What rent do you pay here?" I
inquired.  "I don't know,--what is it, Sam?"  "All we make," answered
Sam.  It is a depressing place,--bare, unshaded, with no charm of past
association, only a memory of forced human toil,--now, then, and before
the war.  They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout
this region.  There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness
which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro.  At best, the
natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into
sullenness and gloom.  And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but
hot anger.  I remember one big red-eyed black whom we met by the
roadside.  Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with
nothing, and still having nothing.  To be sure, he had given four
children a common-school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had
not allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a
little stock and kept ahead.  As it is, he is hopelessly in debt,
disappointed, and embittered.  He stopped us to inquire after the black
boy in Albany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for
loud talking on the sidewalk.  And then he said slowly: "Let a white
man touch me, and he dies; I don't boast this,--I don't say it around
loud, or before the children,--but I mean it.  I've seen them whip my
father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by--"
and we passed on.

Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oak-trees, was of
quite different fibre.  Happy?--Well, yes; he laughed and flipped
pebbles, and thought the world was as it was.  He had worked here
twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule.  Children?  Yes,
seven; but they hadn't been to school this year,--couldn't afford books
and clothes, and couldn't spare their work.  There go part of them to
the fields now,--three big boys astride mules, and a strapping girl
with bare brown legs.  Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce
hate and vindictiveness there;--these are the extremes of the Negro
problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred.

Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the ordinary.
One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide detour
to avoid the snakes.  He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn
and characterful brown face.  He had a sort of self-contained
quaintness and rough humor impossible to describe; a certain cynical
earnestness that puzzled one.  "The niggers were jealous of me over on
the other place," he said, "and so me and the old woman begged this
piece of woods, and I cleared it up myself.  Made nothing for two
years, but I reckon I've got a crop now."  The cotton looked tall and
rich, and we praised it.  He curtsied low, and then bowed almost to the
ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious.
Then he continued, "My mule died last week,"--a calamity in this land
equal to a devastating fire in town,--"but a white man loaned me
another."  Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets along with white
folks."  We turned the conversation.  "Bears? deer?" he answered,
"well, I should say there were," and he let fly a string of brave
oaths, as he told hunting-tales of the swamp.  We left him standing
still in the middle of the road looking after us, and yet apparently
not noticing us.

The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was bought soon
after the war by an English syndicate, the "Dixie Cotton and Corn
Company."  A marvellous deal of style their factor put on, with his
servants and coach-and-six; so much so that the concern soon landed in
inextricable bankruptcy.  Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man
comes each winter out of the North and collects his high rents.  I know
not which are the more touching,--such old empty houses, or the homes
of the masters' sons.  Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those
white doors,--tales of poverty, of struggle, of disappointment.  A
revolution such as that of '63 is a terrible thing; they that rose rich
in the morning often slept in paupers' beds.  Beggars and vulgar
speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray.
See yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad
crops!  It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of the
struggling father wrote home from the city for money.  Money!  Where
was it to come from?  And so the son rose in the night and killed his
baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead.  And the world passed
on.

I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful bit of
forest and a singing brook.  A long low house faced us, with porch and
flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the
evening sun.  But the window-panes were gone, the pillars were
worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof was falling in.  Half curiously I
peered through the unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the
hall, was written in once gay letters a faded "Welcome."

Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the
northwest.  Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that
half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest.  Then, too, there are fewer
signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing
and money-getting.  White people are more in evidence here, and farmer
and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee landlord and
rack-rented tenant.  The crops have neither the luxuriance of the
richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were
fences and meadows here and there.  Most of this land was poor, and
beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the war.  Since then his
poor relations and foreign immigrants have seized it.  The returns of
the farmer are too small to allow much for wages, and yet he will not
sell off small farms.  There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked
fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and "paid out enough
for fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the owner will not sell off
a few acres.

Two children--a boy and a girl--are hoeing sturdily in the fields on
the farm where Corliss works.  He is smooth-faced and brown, and is
fencing up his pigs.  He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but the
Cotton Seed Oil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he
says it hardly pays him.  He points out a stately old house over the
way as the home of "Pa Willis."  We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis"
was the tall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a
generation, and led them well.  He was a Baptist preacher, and when he
died, two thousand black people followed him to the grave; and now they
preach his funeral sermon each year.  His widow lives here,--a
weazened, sharp-featured little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we
greeted her.  Further on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro
farmer in the county.  It is a joy to meet him,--a great
broad-shouldered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial.  Six
hundred and fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants.  A neat
and tidy home nestled in a flower-garden, and a little store stands
beside it.

We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting and
struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the Sennet plantation, with
its Negro overseer.  Then the character of the farms begins to change.
Nearly all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white,
and the cabins are bare board-houses scattered here and there.  The
rents are high, and day-laborers and "contract" hands abound.  It is a
keen, hard struggle for living here, and few have time to talk.  Tired
with the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville.  It is a silent
cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of its
stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher.  They tell great
tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the railroads came to
Albany; now it is chiefly a memory.  Riding down the street, we stop at
the preacher's and seat ourselves before the door.  It was one of those
scenes one cannot soon forget:--a wide, low, little house, whose
motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little porch.  There we
sat, after the long hot drive, drinking cool water,--the talkative
little storekeeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black
woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture
of helpless misfortune who called in just to see the preacher; and
finally the neat matronly preacher's wife, plump, yellow, and
intelligent.  "Own land?" said the wife; "well, only this house."  Then
she added quietly.  "We did buy seven hundred acres across up yonder,
and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it.  Sells was the owner."
"Sells!" echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the
balustrade and listening, "he's a regular cheat.  I worked for him
thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which
were to be cashed at the end of the month.  But he never cashed
them,--kept putting me off.  Then the sheriff came and took my mule and
corn and furniture--" "Furniture?  But furniture is exempt from seizure
by law."  "Well, he took it just the same," said the hard-faced man.




VIII

Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece

  But the Brute said in his breast, "Till the mills I grind
          have ceased,
  The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast!

     "On the strong and cunning few
     Cynic favors I will strew;
  I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
  From the patient and the low

  I will take the joys they know;
      They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
  Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
  Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.

  WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.


Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest,--its golden
fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with
dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from
Carolina to Texas across that Black and human Sea?  I have sometimes
half suspected that here the winged ram Chrysomallus left that Fleece
after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the
shadowy East three thousand years ago; and certainly one might frame a
pretty and not far-fetched analogy of witchery and dragons' teeth, and
blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of the
Golden Fleece in the Black Sea.

And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its
birthplace, woven.  For the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and
most significant thing in the New South to-day.  All through the
Carolinas and Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red
buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and noisy withal that they
scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land.  Perhaps they sprang
from dragons' teeth.  So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world
still bows beneath her sceptre.  Even the markets that once defied the
parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and
reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the Black Belt.

To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us
that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved from the Black to the
White Belt,--that the Negro of to-day raises not more than half of the
cotton crop.  Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and
more than doubled, since the era of slavery, and that, even granting
their contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger
than that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes.  So the Negro
forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and
this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes
the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and
carefully.  It is so much easier to assume that we know it all.  Or
perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are
loth to have them disturbed by facts.  And yet how little we really
know of these millions,--of their daily lives and longings, of their
homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of
their crimes!  All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the
masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in
time and space, and differing widely in training and culture.  To-day,
then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and
seek simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one
county there.

Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites.  The
country is rich, yet the people are poor.  The keynote of the Black
Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued
inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income
cover expense.  This is the direct heritage of the South from the
wasteful economies of the slave regime; but it was emphasized and
brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves.  In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half
millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three
millions,--making five and a half millions of property, the value of
which depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculative
demand for land once marvellously rich but already partially
devitalized by careless and exhaustive culture.  The war then meant a
financial crash; in place of the five and a half millions of 1860,
there remained in 1870 only farms valued at less than two millions.
With this came increased competition in cotton culture from the rich
lands of Texas; a steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed,
from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents
in 1898.  Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners
of the cotton-belt in debt.  And if things went ill with the master,
how fared it with the man?

The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as
imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia.  The Big House was
smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near the slave cabins.
Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings;
sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or edging the road
that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare.  The form
and disposition of the laborers' cabins throughout the Black Belt is
to-day the same as in slavery days.  Some live in the self-same cabins,
others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old.  All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives.  The
general character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the
whole unaltered.  There were in the county, outside the corporate town
of Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898.  Out of all
these, only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms; only
fourteen have five rooms or more.  The mass live in one- and two-room
homes.

The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no unfair index of
their condition.  If, then, we inquire more carefully into these Negro
homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory.  All over the face of the
land is the one-room cabin,--now standing in the shadow of the Big
House, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields.  It is nearly always old and bare,
built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled.  Light and
ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in
the wall with its wooden shutter.  There is no glass, porch, or
ornamentation without.  Within is a fireplace, black and smoky, and
usually unsteady with age.  A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and
a few chairs compose the furniture; while a stray show-bill or a
newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls.  Now and then one may
find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated, and
anything but homes.

Above all, the cabins are crowded.  We have come to associate crowding
with homes in cities almost exclusively.  This is primarily because we
have so little accurate knowledge of country life.  Here in Dougherty
County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two
rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes
there are twenty-five persons.  The worst tenement abominations of New
York do not have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms.  Of
course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is in many
respects worse than the larger single country room.  In other respects
it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy
floor.  The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may
spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.

There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom
born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers
would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similar
reasons, give better work.  Secondly, the Negroes, used to such
accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what
better houses mean.  Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet
come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the
standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that a
Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give
more efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler
herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents.  Lastly,
among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the
laborer become a better farmer.  If he is ambitious, he moves to town
or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost
hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house that is
given him without protest.

In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live.  The families are both
small and large; there are many single tenants,--widows and bachelors,
and remnants of broken groups.  The system of labor and the size of the
houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown
children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes
into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and
many newly married couples, but comparatively few families with
half-grown and grown sons and daughters.  The average size of Negro
families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from
economic stress.  In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over
half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellum
Negroes.  Today, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of
the Negro girls under twenty are married.  The young men marry between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty
and thirty.  Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning
sufficient to rear and support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in
the country districts, to sexual immorality.  The form of this
immorality, however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less
frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine.  Rather, it
takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has
been formed.  The number of separated persons is thirty-five to the
thousand,--a very large number.  It would of course be unfair to
compare this number with divorce statistics, for many of these
separated women are in reality widowed, were the truth known, and in
other cases the separation is not permanent.  Nevertheless, here lies
the seat of greatest moral danger.  There is little or no prostitution
among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families, as found
by house-to-house investigation, deserve to be classed as decent people
with considerable regard for female chastity.  To be sure, the ideas of
the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits
and notions.  Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in
Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest.  The plague-spot
in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation.  This is no
sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipation.  It is the plain
heritage from slavery.  In those days Sam, with his master's consent,
"took up" with Mary.  No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life
of the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed
with.  If now the master needed Sam's work in another plantation or in
another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the
slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken,
and then it was clearly to the master's interest to have both of them
take new mates.  This widespread custom of two centuries has not been
eradicated in thirty years.  To-day Sam's grandson "takes up" with a
woman without license or ceremony; they live together decently and
honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and wife.
Sometimes these unions are never broken until death; but in too many
cases family quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more
frequently the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation,
and a broken household is the result.  The Negro church has done much
to stop this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed
by the pastors.  Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only
a general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it.

Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to
characterize it as poor and ignorant.  Perhaps ten per cent compose the
well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent
are thoroughly lewd and vicious.  The rest, over eighty per cent, are
poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a
degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness.  Such class
lines are by no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the
price of cotton.  The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed.
We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or
write.  This but partially expresses the fact.  They are ignorant of
the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function
of government, of individual worth and possibilities,--of nearly all
those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from
learning.  Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social
atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy's mature years.
America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp
and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings.  We often
forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.  Ignorant
it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and
thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and
weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the
grim horizon of its life,--all this, even as you and I. These black
thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident and careless;
they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the
great town-world on Saturday; they have their loafers and their
rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully
for a return, and under circumstances that would call forth equal
voluntary effort from few if any other modern laboring class.  Over
eighty-eight per cent of them--men, women, and children--are farmers.
Indeed, this is almost the only industry.  Most of the children get
their schooling after the "crops are laid by," and very few there are
that stay in school after the spring work has begun.  Child-labor is to
be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and
stunting physical development.  With the grown men of the county there
is little variety in work: thirteen hundred are farmers, and two
hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans,
ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and four teachers.  This
narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen
hundred and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants
and washerwomen, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six
seamstresses.

Among this people there is no leisure class.  We often forget that in
the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world
earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or
resting after the heat of the strife.  But here ninety-six per cent are
toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into
a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of
the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth.  The
dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the
thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town.  The toil, like all farm
toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few tools
to relieve its burdensome drudgery.  But with all this, it is work in
the pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is
scarce.

The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse.  For nine
or ten months in succession the crops will come if asked: garden
vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in
August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas.
And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that
leaves the toilers in debt.  Why is this?

Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are flanked by
great oak forests, is a plantation; many thousands of acres it used to
run, here and there, and beyond the great wood.  Thirteen hundred human
beings here obeyed the call of one,--were his in body, and largely in
soul.  One of them lives there yet,--a short, stocky man, his
dull-brown face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair
gray-white.  The crops?  Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable.
Getting on?  No--he wasn't getting on at all.  Smith of Albany
"furnishes" him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of cotton.  Can't
make anything at that.  Why didn't he buy land!  Humph!  Takes money to
buy land.  And he turns away.  Free!  The most piteous thing amid all
the black ruin of war-time, amid the broken fortunes of the masters,
the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an
empire,--the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman
who threw down his hoe because the world called him free.  What did
such a mockery of freedom mean?  Not a cent of money, not an inch of
land, not a mouthful of victuals,--not even ownership of the rags on
his back.  Free!  On Saturday, once or twice a month, the old master,
before the war, used to dole out bacon and meal to his Negroes.  And
after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness
dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old
master still doled out his bacon and meal.  The legal form of service
was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or "cropping"
was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became
a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with
indeterminate wages in fact.

Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted
their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began.  The merchant
of the Black Belt is a curious institution,--part banker, part
landlord, part banker, and part despot.  His store, which used most
frequently to stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a
weekly village, has now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant
follows him.  The merchant keeps everything,--clothes and shoes, coffee
and sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs,
seed and fertilizer,--and what he has not in stock he can give you an
order for at the store across the way.  Here, then, comes the tenant,
Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent landlord's agent
for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the
merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and calls
out, "Well, Sam, what do you want?"  Sam wants him to "furnish"
him,--i.e., to advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps
seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold.  If Sam seems a
favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes
a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a
week's rations.  As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear above the
ground, another mortgage is given on the "crop."  Every Saturday, or at
longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant for his "rations"; a
family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat side-pork and a
couple of bushels of cornmeal a month.  Besides this, clothing and
shoes must be furnished; if Sam or his family is sick, there are orders
on the druggist and doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the
blacksmith, etc.  If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is
often encouraged to buy more,--sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy.
But he is seldom encouraged to save.  When cotton rose to ten cents
last fall, the shrewd merchants of Dougherty County sold a thousand
buggies in one season, mostly to black men.

The security offered for such transactions--a crop and chattel
mortgage--may at first seem slight.  And, indeed, the merchants tell
many a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at
night, mules disappearing, and tenants absconding.  But on the whole
the merchant of the Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the
section.  So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law
about the tenant, that the black man has often simply to choose between
pauperism and crime; he "waives" all homestead exemptions in his
contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put
almost in the full control of the land-owner and of the merchant.  When
the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as soon as it
is ready for market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the
landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as
sometimes happens, there is anything left, he hands it over to the
black serf for his Christmas celebration.

The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture
and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant.  The currency of the Black
Belt is cotton.  It is a crop always salable for ready money, not
usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which
the Negroes know how to raise.  The landlord therefore demands his rent
in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop.
There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his
crops,--he cannot under this system.  Moreover, the system is bound to
bankrupt the tenant.  I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon
on the River road.  A young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly,
his elbows on his knees.  His dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid,
silent.

"Hello!" cried my driver,--he has a most imprudent way of addressing
these people, though they seem used to it,--"what have you got there?"

"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping.  The meat lay uncovered in
the bottom of the wagon,--a great thin side of fat pork covered with
salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.

"What did you pay for that meat?"

"Ten cents a pound."  It could have been bought for six or seven cents
cash.

"And the meal?"

"Two dollars."  One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town.
Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought
for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a
half.

Yet it is not wholly his fault.  The Negro farmer started
behind,--started in debt.  This was not his choosing, but the crime of
this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its
Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine
matinees, just as though God really were dead.  Once in debt, it is no
easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant
families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year's work in debt
to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and
the remaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred
dollars.  The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the
whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars.  In a more
prosperous year the situation is far better; but on the average the
majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that
they work for board and clothes.  Such an economic organization is
radically wrong.  Whose is the blame?

The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible.  And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the
nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread
opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only
by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work.  Without doubt,
some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free-labor system
to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the
Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers.
Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of
the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge.  And to all
this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system
of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the
mass of black laborers.  Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in
history been just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries.  Such is the situation of the mass of the
Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about it.
Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results
of this pondering.  I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log,
aimlessly whittling a stick.  He muttered to me with the murmur of many
ages, when he said: "White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and
night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better classes of
Negroes do to improve their situation?  One of two things: if any way
possible, they buy land; if not, they migrate to town.  Just as
centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf to escape into the
freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are hindrances laid in the
way of county laborers.  In considerable parts of all the Gulf States,
and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on
the plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages.  Especially is this true in districts
where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor
whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse
with their advancing fellows.  If such a peon should run away, the
sheriff, elected by white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch
the fugitive, return him, and ask no questions.  If he escape to
another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be
depended upon to secure his return.  Even if some unduly officious
person insist upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his
conviction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be bought
by the master.  Such a system is impossible in the more civilized parts
of the South, or near the large towns and cities; but in those vast
stretches of land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of
the Thirteenth Amendment is sadly broken.  This represents the lowest
economic depths of the black American peasant; and in a study of the
rise and condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic
progress from the modern serfdom.

Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the free
movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration-agent
laws.  The "Associated Press" recently informed the world of the arrest
of a young white man in Southern Georgia who represented the "Atlantic
Naval Supplies Company," and who "was caught in the act of enticing
hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer."  The crime for which
this young man was arrested is taxed five hundred dollars for each
county in which the employment agent proposes to gather laborers for
work outside the State.  Thus the Negroes' ignorance of the
labor-market outside his own vicinity is increased rather than
diminished by the laws of nearly every Southern State.

Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts and
small towns of the South, that the character of all Negroes unknown to
the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man.  This
is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose
protection the new-made freedman was put.  In many instances this
system has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the
protection and guidance of the former master's family, or other white
friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality.  But the same
system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities
to recognize the right of a Negro to change his habitation and to be
master of his own fortunes.  A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia,
for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway
and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white
interrogator.  If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too
independent or "sassy," he may be arrested or summarily driven away.

Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or
unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a
system of white patronage exists over large areas.  Besides this, the
chance for lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater
in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more serious race
disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the count
between master and man,--as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair.  As a
result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and,
second, the Migration to Town.  The Black Belt was not, as many
assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic
conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,--a massing
of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace
and tranquillity necessary to economic advance.  This movement took
place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished
the desired results.  The rush to town since 1880 is the
counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of
the Black Belt.

In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this
experiment in huddling for protection.  Only ten per cent of the adult
population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the
whites four or five to one.  There is undoubtedly a security to the
blacks in their very numbers,--a personal freedom from arbitrary
treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite
of low wages and economic distress.  But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and
leaving the broad acres behind.  Why is this?  Why do not the Negroes
become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has
for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and
statesman?

To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and
know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to
unravelling the snarl of centuries,--to such men very often the whole
trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's
word, "Shiftless!"  They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw
last summer.  We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of
a long hot day.  A couple of young black fellows passed us in a
muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in the ear.  One was
driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows on his knees,--a
happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility.  The other was
fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon.  As we passed we noticed an ear
of corn fall from the wagon.  They never saw it,--not they.  A rod
farther on we noted another ear on the ground; and between that
creeping mule and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn.  Shiftless?
Yes, the personification of shiftlessness.  And yet follow those boys:
they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they'll be up with the sun; they
work hard when they do work, and they work willingly.  They have no
sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere
cash.  They'll loaf before your face and work behind your back with
good-natured honesty.  They'll steal a watermelon, and hand you back
your lost purse intact.  Their great defect as laborers lies in their
lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion.  They
are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful;
they are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance
get on about as well as the provident.  Above all, they cannot see why
they should take unusual pains to make the white man's land better, or
to fatten his mule, or save his corn.  On the other hand, the white
land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by
increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of
their own, would be sure to result in failure.  He shows his Northern
visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the
worn-out soil and mortgaged acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!

Now it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on
their respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each
other.  The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and
misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the
fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because the white man gives
him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any
misfortune happens to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of
"white folks."  On the other hand, the masters and the masters' sons
have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to
be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire
to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and
careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful.  "Why,
you niggers have an easier time than I do," said a puzzled Albany
merchant to his black customer.  "Yes," he replied, "and so does yo'
hogs."

Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a
starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty
have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is.
All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then
of social classes, among a homogeneous population.  To-day the
following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these
Negroes.

A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who
are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and
wage-laborers.  There are left five per cent of money-renters and six
per cent of freeholders,--the "Upper Ten" of the land.  The croppers
are entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or
money to keep them from seed-time to harvest.  All they furnish is
their labor; the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and
house; and at the end of the year the laborer gets from a third to a
half of the crop.  Out of his share, however, comes pay and interest
for food and clothing advanced him during the year.  Thus we have a
laborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose
capital is largely his employees' wages.  It is an unsatisfactory
arrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor
land with hard-pressed owners.

Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work
the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton and
supported by the crop-mortgage system.  After the war this system was
attractive to the freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its
possibility for making a surplus.  But with the carrying out of the
crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of
debt, the position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of
practically unrewarded toil.  Formerly all tenants had some capital,
and often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-rent, and
failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and probably not
over half of them to-day own their mules.  The change from cropper to
tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent.  If, now, the rent fixed
was reasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive.  On the
other hand, if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the
result was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peasantry.
There is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in Dougherty
County every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and of
the strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the
landlords and merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest.  If
cotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the
rent remained or followed reluctantly.  If the tenant worked hard and
raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year
the crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt.
There were, of course, exceptions to this,--cases of personal kindness
and forbearance; but in the vast majority of cases the rule was to
extract the uttermost farthing from the mass of the black farm laborers.

The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of his crop in
rent.  The result of such rack-rent can only be evil,--abuse and
neglect of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers,
and a widespread sense of injustice.  "Wherever the country is poor,"
cried Arthur Young, "it is in the hands of metayers," and "their
condition is more wretched than that of day-laborers."  He was talking
of Italy a century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty
County to-day.  And especially is that true to-day which he declares
was true in France before the Revolution: "The metayers are considered
as little better than menial servants, removable at pleasure, and
obliged to conform in all things to the will of the landlords."  On
this low plane half the black population of Dougherty County--perhaps
more than half the black millions of this land--are to-day struggling.

A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive money
wages for their work.  Some receive a house with perhaps a garden-spot;
then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixed
wages are given at the end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty
dollars, out of which the supplies must be paid for, with interest.
About eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of
semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid by the month
or year, and are either "furnished" by their own savings or perhaps
more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment.  Such
laborers receive from thirty-five to fifty cents a day during the
working season.  They are usually young unmarried persons, some being
women; and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more
seldom, become renters.

The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging
classes, and form five per cent of the families.  The sole advantage of
this small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the
increased responsibility which comes through having money transactions.
While some of the renters differ little in condition from the metayers,
yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and
are the ones who eventually become land-owners.  Their better character
and greater shrewdness enable them to gain, perhaps to demand, better
terms in rents; rented farms, varying from forty to a hundred acres,
bear an average rental of about fifty-four dollars a year.  The men who
conduct such farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to
metayers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be
land-owners.

In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders.
If there were any such at that time,--and there may have been a
few,--their land was probably held in the name of some white patron,--a
method not uncommon during slavery.  In 1875 ownership of land had
begun with seven hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had
increased to over sixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in
1890 and ten thousand in 1900.  The total assessed property has in this
same period risen from eighty thousand dollars in 1875 to two hundred
and forty thousand dollars in 1900.

Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some
respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies; they are the
panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898.  Besides this, the
system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is
somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value; there are no
assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver.  Thus
public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year.  Certainly these figures show the small amount of
accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the consequent large
dependence of their property on temporary prosperity.  They have little
to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy
of the cotton-market far more than the whites.  And thus the
land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient
class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class
of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses.  Of
one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893,
a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the
rest between 1870 and 1884.  In all, one hundred and eighty-five
Negroes have owned land in this county since 1875.

If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or
left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer
thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold.  And yet
these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,--a proof of no
little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people.  If they
had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in
an enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good,
then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant.
But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of
poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize
two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous
effort.  The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class,
means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the
world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.

Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt,
only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into
peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow
and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market.  Fully
ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of
them sit in hopeless serfdom.  For these there is one other avenue of
escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely,
migration to town.  A glance at the distribution of land among the
black owners curiously reveals this fact.  In 1898 the holdings were as
follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families; forty to two hundred
and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fifty to one
thousand acres, thirteen families; one thousand or more acres, two
families.  Now in 1890 there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of
these were under forty acres.  The great increase of holdings, then,
has come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their
owners really share in the town life; this is a part of the rush to
town.  And for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from the
narrow and hard conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how
many tenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long
procession?  Is it not strange compensation?  The sin of the country
districts is visited on the town, and the social sores of city life
to-day may, here in Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near
and far, look for their final healing without the city walls.




IX

Of the Sons of Master and Man

  Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
  We press too close in church and mart
  To keep a dream or grave apart.

  MRS. BROWNING.


The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to
have new exemplification during the new century.  Indeed, the
characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with
the world's undeveloped peoples.  Whatever we may say of the results of
such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action
not pleasant to look back upon.  War, murder, slavery, extermination,
and debauchery,--this has again and again been the result of carrying
civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the
heathen without the law.  Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience
of the modern world to be told complacently that all this has been
right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of
righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors.  It would
certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this; and yet
there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily
explained away.  We feel and know that there are many delicate
differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain
much of history and social development.  At the same time, too, we know
that these considerations have never adequately explained or excused
the triumph of brute force and cunning over weakness and innocence.

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century
to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the
fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the
true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that
is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium
on greed and impudence and cruelty.  To bring this hope to fruition, we
are compelled daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of
the phenomena of race-contact,--to a study frank and fair, and not
falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears.  And we have in the
South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords,--a field,
to be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath
his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all
about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous
race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation
must increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we
must ask, what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the
South? and we must be answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by
a plain, unvarnished tale.

In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations
to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication:
there is, first, the physical proximity of home and dwelling-places,
the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of
neighborhoods.  Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are the
economic relations,--the methods by which individuals cooperate for
earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the
production of wealth.  Next, there are the political relations, the
cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and
paying the burden of taxation.  In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference,
through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual
formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call
public opinion.  Closely allied with this come the various forms of
social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house
gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage.  Finally, there are the
varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent
endeavor.  These are the principal ways in which men living in the same
communities are brought into contact with each other.  It is my present
task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the black race
in the South meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of
everyday life.

First, as to physical dwelling.  It is usually possible to draw in
nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on
the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes.  The
winding and intricacy of the geographical color-line varies, of course,
in different communities.  I know some towns where a straight line
drawn through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of
the whites from nine-tenths of the blacks.  In other towns the older
settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in
still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up
amid surrounding whites.  Usually in cities each street has its
distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close
proximity.  Even in the country something of this segregation is
manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of
the Black Belt.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural
clustering by social grades common to all communities.  A Negro slum
may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is
quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable
Negro district.  One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the
whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like
close proximity.  It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town
and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other.
This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the
close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house,
one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while
at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the
field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family.  One
can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father's
parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to
grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture.  On the other hand,
the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white
people do not have the black man's best interests at heart has been
intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the
better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.

Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground
made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic
effort.  And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the
cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too
readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood.  The average American
can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers.  To him the Southern problem is simply that of making
efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them the requisite
technical skill and the help of invested capital.  The problem,
however, is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that
these workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves.  They
exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training;
they are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or
careful.  If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed
to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of
workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of
the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of
the modern self-reliant democratic laborer.  What the black laborer
needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts
in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to
prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race
have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous
education in submission, carelessness, and stealing.  After
Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group
leadership and training of the Negro laborer.  I will not stop here to
inquire whose duty it was--whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose
edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but
I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were
not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without
skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection
of law, order, and decency,--left in a great land, not to settle down
to slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown
almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best
of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant
is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights
or welfare of his neighbor.

For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day
which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of
the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their
trade-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten
commercial customs, and their long experience.  It is, rather, a copy
of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory
acts,--the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle.  The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern
gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has
never returned to them.  Rather it has passed to those men who have
come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New
South,--the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and
power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants.
Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black,
have fallen; and this to their sorrow.  For the laborers as such, there
is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither
sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends.
Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer.  Even the white
laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to
maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital.
The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating.  But among
the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice
which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites
to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated,
as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the
freedmen from slavery.  With this training it is difficult for the
freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and
the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the
whites.

Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or
oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst
and most unscrupulous men in each community.  The crop-lien system
which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result
of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of
cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which
can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime.  I
have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy
and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in
the face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to
him pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to
labor on his own land at thirty cents a day.  I have seen a black
farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to
his farm and strip it of every single marketable article,--mules,
ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks,
looking-glass,--and all this without a sheriff or officer, in the face
of the law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a single
responsible person any account or reckoning.  And such proceedings can
happen, and will happen, in any community where a class of ignorant
toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice beyond the pale of
sympathy and race-brotherhood.  So long as the best elements of a
community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for
the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed upon by
these swindlers and rascals.

This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all
advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black
landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are
accumulating property and making good citizens.  But it does mean that
this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might
easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are
handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and
that, above all, the personnel of the successful class is left to
chance and accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable
methods of selection.  As a remedy for this, there is but one possible
procedure.  We must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a
fact,--deplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and
dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time
can efface.  We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several
generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that
close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which
their present situation so eloquently demands.  Such leadership, such
social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.  For
some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such
leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes the capability of
individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern
civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their
fellows.  If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic
situation, and here is the imperative demand for trained Negro leaders
of character and intelligence,--men of skill, men of light and leading,
college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of
culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization,
and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by
force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of
common blood and ideals.  But if such men are to be effective they must
have some power,--they must be backed by the best public opinion of
these communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such
weapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispensable to
human progress.

Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power
of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third form
of contact between whites and blacks in the South,--political activity.

In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be
traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government.
In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution
to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage.  We argued, as we
thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so
true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political
destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of
their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that
it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,--with the right to have
a voice in the policy of the state,--that the greatest good to the
greatest number could be attained.  To be sure, there were objections
to these arguments, but we thought we had answered them tersely and
convincingly; if some one complained of the ignorance of voters, we
answered, "Educate them."  If another complained of their venality, we
replied, "Disfranchise them or put them in jail."  And, finally, to the
men who feared demagogues and the natural perversity of some human
beings we insisted that time and bitter experience would teach the most
hardheaded.  It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in
the South was raised.  Here was a defenceless people suddenly made
free.  How were they to be protected from those who did not believe in
their freedom and were determined to thwart it?  Not by force, said the
North; not by government guardianship, said the South; then by the
ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people, said the
Common Sense of the Nation.  No one thought, at the time, that the
ex-slaves could use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but
they did think that the possession of so great power by a great class
in the nation would compel their fellows to educate this class to its
intelligent use.

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of
moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the
wake of war overtook us.  So flagrant became the political scandals
that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics
consequently became disreputable.  Men began to pride themselves on
having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly
with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.  In this
state of mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro
vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to leave
politics entirely alone.  The decent and reputable citizens of the
North who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the
exaggerated importance with which the Negro regarded the franchise.
Thus it easily happened that more and more the better class of Negroes
followed the advice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no
further interest in politics, leaving to the careless and the venal of
their race the exercise of their rights as voters.  The black vote that
still remained was not trained and educated, but further debauched by
open and unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voter
was thoroughly inoculated with the idea that politics was a method of
private gain by disreputable means.

And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the
perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the
purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the
raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic
citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children's
children,--in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic
virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South?  Are
we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless
form of human activity?  Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up
their right to take such an interest, without a protest?  I am not
saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of
ignorance, pauperism, and crime.  But few have pretended that the
present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a
purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case
that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the
black man from politics.

Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question
of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro?  Can we
establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the
South who, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in
shaping the laws under which they live and work?  Can the modern
organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic
government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel
respect for their welfare,--can this system be carried out in the South
when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and
powerless in its own defence?  To-day the black man of the South has
almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those
taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they
shall do it; as to who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made.
It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to
get law-makers in some States even to listen to the respectful
presentation of the black man's side of a current controversy.  Daily
the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as
protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression.
The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are
executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black
people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused
law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would
rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings
of the Negro people; I should be the last to withhold sympathy from the
white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems.  I
freely acknowledged that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a
partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their
stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as
they can start and fight the world's battles alone.  I have already
pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance
the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the
representatives of the best white Southern public opinion were the
ruling and guiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated
would be fairly well fulfilled.  But the point I have insisted upon and
now emphasize again, is that the best opinion of the South to-day is
not the ruling opinion.  That to leave the Negro helpless and without a
ballot to-day is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but
rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is
no truer of the South than of the North,--of the North than of Europe:
in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any
class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at
the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful
fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and
seldom will withstand.

Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely
connected with the question of Negro crime.  There can be no doubt that
crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years,
and that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct
criminal class among the blacks.  In explaining this unfortunate
development, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of
Emancipation was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the
police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves.
As to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict slave
system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime.  But when these
variously constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on
the sea of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be
forced up or down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world.  So
great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant
a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the
beginning of a differentiation of social grades.  Now a rising group of
people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass,
but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still
clinging in the mould.  The appearance, therefore, of the Negro
criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety,
it should not occasion surprise.

Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and
delicate dealing with these criminals.  Their offences at first were
those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity
or ungoverned viciousness.  Such misdemeanors needed discriminating
treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full
proof of guilt.  For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the
South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police
system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that
every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.  Thus grew up a
double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue
leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred
on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of
discrimination.  For, as I have said, the police system of the South
was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of
criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was
convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and
almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving
the blacks.  It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of
color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge.  Thus
Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and
oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.

When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty
stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary,
murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the
color-line: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white
witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest
deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one's own social caste, was
lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.
On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt
or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion
beyond law, reason, and decency.  Such a situation is bound to increase
crime, and has increased it.  To natural viciousness and vagrancy are
being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the
latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic
development often impossible.

But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the
punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being
trained to crime.  And here again the peculiar conditions of the South
have prevented proper precautions.  I have seen twelve-year-old boys
working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front
of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this
indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children makes the
chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery.  The struggle for
reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other
States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some
communities to the suicidal results of this policy.

It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the
homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens.
We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and
the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school
system in the South has almost dropped from view.  Of every five
dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white
schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the
white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for
reform.  If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks?  I am
becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of
common-school training in the South, that the national government must
soon step in and aid popular education in some way.  To-day it has been
only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of
the South that the Negro's share of the school fund has not been cut
down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that movement not
only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength.  What in
the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained
and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political
rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities?  What
can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the
dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are
themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to
its senses?

I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and
political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have
conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and
education.  But after all that has been said on these more tangible
matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a
proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or
fix in terms easily understood by strangers.  It is, in fine, the
atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one
little actions which go to make up life.  In any community or nation it
is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most
essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.
What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South,
where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has
been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human
souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of
spirit, as ever a people experienced.  Within and without the sombre
veil of color vast social forces have been at work,--efforts for human
betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and
comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and
sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled
sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.

The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of
black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up
with that of the nation.  And yet the casual observer visiting the
South sees at first little of this.  He notes the growing frequency of
dark faces as he rides along,--but otherwise the days slip lazily on,
the sun shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as
other worlds he has visited.  Indeed, on the question of questions--the
Negro problem--he hears so little that there almost seems to be a
conspiracy of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then
usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeed almost every one
seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land, until the
astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after all there IS any problem
here.  But if he lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps
in a sudden whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter
intensity; more likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had
not at first noticed.  Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the
shadows of the color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites;
then he is suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face;
or again at the close of a day's wandering he may find himself in some
strange assembly, where all faces are tinged brown or black, and where
he has the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger.  He realizes
at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in
two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach
and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,--then they divide and
flow wide apart.  It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one
occurs, the swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for
a moment, as when the other day a black man and a white woman were
arrested for talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two
worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is
almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where
the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and
sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other.  Before and
directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the
races.  They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often
attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other.
But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally
meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers
of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and
independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and
leaders of the blacks.  Between them, however, and the best element of
the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce.  They go to
separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly
separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they
are beginning to read different papers and books.  To most libraries,
lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at
all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes
who might otherwise be attracted.  The daily paper chronicles the
doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy;
and so on, throughout the category of means for intellectual
communication,--schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment,
and the like,--it is usually true that the very representatives of the
two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to
be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that
one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other
thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent.  Moreover, in a land
where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is
for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a
situation is extremely difficult to correct.  The white man, as well as
the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of
friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous
fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody
has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous
force of unwritten law against the innovators.

It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social
contact between the races.  Nothing has come to replace that finer
sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the
radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent
years has caused almost completely to disappear.  In a world where it
means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look
frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a
world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than
legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,--one can imagine
the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities
between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and
streetcars.

Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,--the
opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous
acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny.  On the other
hand, in matters of simple almsgiving, where there can be no question
of social contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick, the South,
as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is generous
to a fault.  The black beggar is never turned away without a good deal
more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quick
response.  I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when I refrained
from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be
discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: "Were any
black people receiving aid?"  "Why," said he, "they were all black."

And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem.  Human
advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of
sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity.  And
here is a land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher
striving for the good and noble and true, the color-line comes to
separate natural friends and coworkers; while at the bottom of the
social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that
same line wavers and disappears.

I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between the
sons of master and man in the South.  I have not glossed over matters
for policy's sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort
of thing.  On the other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfair
exaggerations creep in.  I do not doubt that in some Southern
communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while I
am no less certain that in other communities they are far worse.

Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and
perplex the best conscience of the South.  Deeply religious and
intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites, they feel acutely
the false position in which the Negro problems place them.  Such an
essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the
caste-levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of
opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with each
generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat
contradiction to their beliefs and professions.  But just as often as
they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro
stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if
there were nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or
other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be
comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance,
shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?  can a self-respecting group hold
anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and
survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of
our fathers or the hope of our children?  The argument so put is of
great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of
thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses
is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate historical cause
for this, and unmistakable evidence that no small number have, in spite
of tremendous disadvantages, risen to the level of American
civilization.  And when, by proscription and prejudice, these same
Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people,
simply because they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages
thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium on
the very things you complain of,--inefficiency and crime.  Draw lines
of crime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and uncompromisingly as
you will, for these things must be proscribed; but a color-line not
only does not accomplish this purpose, but thwarts it.

In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South depends on
the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and
appreciate and sympathize with each other's position,--for the Negro to
realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the
masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than
they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a
color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same
despised class.

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the
sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply
that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice.  They both
act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will
bring the desired effect.  Both must change, or neither can improve to
any great extent.  The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary
tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely
without discouragement and retrogression.  And the condition of the
Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination.  Only by a union
of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical
period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,

  "That mind and soul according well,
  May make one music as before,
            But vaster."




X

Of the Faith of the Fathers

  Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
    Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
  Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,--

    There, there alone for thee

    May white peace be.

  Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
    What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
  Who cry with little noises 'neath the thunder

    Of Ages ground to sand,

    To a little sand.

  FIONA MACLEOD.


It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a
dark Sunday night.  The road wandered from our rambling log-house up
the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear
dimly across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,--soft, thrilling,
powerful, that swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears.  I was a
country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a
Southern Negro revival.  To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps
as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very
quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have happened those clear
Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated the sermon with a wild scream,
or interrupted the long prayer with a loud Amen!  And so most striking
to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched
aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of
black folk.  A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to
seize us,--a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible
reality to song and word.  The black and massive form of the preacher
swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in
singular eloquence.  The people moaned and fluttered, and then the
gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the
air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and
groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never
conceived before.

Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the
untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious
feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and
funny, but as seen they are awful.  Three things characterized this
religion of the slave,--the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.  The
Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on
American soil.  A leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an
intriguer, an idealist,--all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of
a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number.  The combination
of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with
consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain
it.  The type, of course, varies according to time and place, from the
West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the nineteenth,
and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or New York.

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its
touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement,
still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life
and longing yet born on American soil.  Sprung from the African
forests, where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted,
changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until,
under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of
a people's sorrow, despair, and hope.

Finally the Frenzy of "Shouting," when the Spirit of the Lord passed
by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was
the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed
in than all the rest.  It varied in expression from the silent rapt
countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical
fervor,--the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro
and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the
trance.  All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as
Delphi and Endor.  And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that
many generations firmly believed that without this visible
manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the
Invisible.

These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up
to the time of Emancipation.  Since under the peculiar circumstances of
the black man's environment they were the one expression of his higher
life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both
socially and psychologically.  Numerous are the attractive lines of
inquiry that here group themselves.  What did slavery mean to the
African savage?  What was his attitude toward the World and Life?  What
seemed to him good and evil,--God and Devil?  Whither went his longings
and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and
disappointments?  Answers to such questions can come only from a study
of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from
the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of
Chicago.

Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be
slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries.
The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to
the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts.
Especially is this noticeable in the South, where theology and
religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North,
and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro
thought and methods.  The mass of "gospel" hymns which has swept
through American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song
consists largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears
that caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of
the Jubilee songs.  It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion
is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no
uninteresting part of American history.

The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteristic expression of African
character.  Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the
"First Baptist"--a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more
persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small
organ, and stained-glass windows.  Underneath is a large assembly room
with benches.  This building is the central club-house of a community
of a thousand or more Negroes.  Various organizations meet here,--the
church proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies,
women's societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various
kinds.  Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five
or six regular weekly religious services.  Considerable sums of money
are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle,
strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed.
At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a
religious centre of great power.  Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven,
Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are
laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to
withstand conversion.  Back of this more formal religion, the Church
often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family
life, and the final authority on what is Good and Right.

Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm,
all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice
and social condition.  In the great city churches the same tendency is
noticeable and in many respects emphasized.  A great church like the
Bethel of Philadelphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice
seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand
dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government
consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an
executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors;
general church meetings for making laws; sub-divided groups led by
class leaders, a company of militia, and twenty-four auxiliary
societies.  The activity of a church like this is immense and
far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these organizations
throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the
world.

Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a little
investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least,
practically every American Negro is a church member.  Some, to be sure,
are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend
services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social
centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church.  The
census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half
millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons,
and in some Southern States one in every two persons.  Besides these
there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members, attend
and take part in many of the activities of the church.  There is an
organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation,
and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars' worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million
dollars in all.

Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation.  The question now is, What have been the successive steps
of this social history and what are the present tendencies?  First, we
must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear
itself without definite historical foundations.  These foundations we
can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not
start in America.  He was brought from a definite social
environment,--the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest.  His religion was
nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding
influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and
sacrifice.  The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and
the West Indian sugar-fields.  The plantation organization replaced the
clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far
greater and more despotic powers.  Forced and long-continued toil
became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and
polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity.  It was a
terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the
former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest
or Medicine-man.  He early appeared on the plantation and found his
function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the
comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment,
and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.  Thus, as bard,
physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the
slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church
was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized;
rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the
members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.
Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of
expediency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after
the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.

Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church.
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith;
secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the
monogamic Negro home.  From the very circumstances of its beginning,
the church was confined to the plantation, and consisted primarily of a
series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of
movement was allowed, still this geographical limitation was always
important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and
democratic Baptist faith among the slaves.  At the same time, the
visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament.
To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes,
and has a million and a half communicants.  Next in popularity came the
churches organized in connection with the white neighboring churches,
chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few Episcopalian and others.  The
Methodists still form the second greatest denomination, with nearly a
million members.  The faith of these two leading denominations was more
suited to the slave church from the prominence they gave to religious
feeling and fervor.  The Negro membership in other denominations has
always been small and relatively unimportant, although the
Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent
classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making headway in certain
sections.  After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the
Negro churches largely severed such affiliations as they had had with
the white churches, either by choice or by compulsion.  The Baptist
churches became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to
unite for purposes of episcopal government.  This gave rise to the
great African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the
world, to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black
conferences and churches in this and other denominations.

The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this
communistic institution and in the morals of its members.  But
especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the
expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true
elsewhere.  Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of
the church to the more important inner ethical life of the people who
compose it.  The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a
religious animal,--a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural.  Endowed with a rich tropical
imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,
elves and witches; full of strange influences,--of Good to be implored,
of Evil to be propitiated.  Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph
of Evil over him.  All the hateful powers of the Under-world were
striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his
heart.  He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,--exorcism
and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites,
spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims.
Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the
witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group
life, and that vein of vague superstition which characterizes the
unlettered Negro even to-day was deepened and strengthened.

In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the
Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away
under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with
hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system,
and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life.  Nothing
suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive
submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity.  Slave masters
early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within
certain bounds.  The long system of repression and degradation of the
Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him
a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength
degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of
the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering.  The
Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered
conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining
patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great
Day when He should lead His dark children home,--this became his
comforting dream.  His preacher repeated the prophecy, and his bards
sang,--

  "Children, we all shall be free
  When the Lord shall appear!"


This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in "Uncle Tom,"
came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side
by side with the martyr.  Under the lax moral life of the plantation,
where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a
religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less
strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime.  Many of
the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed
in this period of the slave's ethical growth.  Here it was that the
Home was ruined under the very shadow of the Church, white and black;
here habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness
replaced hopeful strife.

With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of
a class of free Negroes came a change.  We often neglect the influence
of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers
and the small weight he had in the history of the nation.  But we must
not forget that his chief influence was internal,--was exerted on the
black world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader.
Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New
Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness;
but not all of them.  The free Negro leader early arose and his chief
characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery
question.  Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream.  His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a
note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand.  The
"Coming of the Lord" swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing
to be hoped for in this day.  Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible
discussion this desire for freedom seized the black millions still in
bondage, and became their one ideal of life.  The black bards caught
new notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,--

  "O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
  Before I'll be a slave
  I'll be buried in my grave,
  And go home to my Lord
  And be free."


For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified
itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad
in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had
become a religion to the black world.  Thus, when Emancipation finally
came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord.  His
fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies,
the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social
upheaval.  He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had
he to do with it?  Was it not the Lord's doing, and marvellous in his
eyes?  Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new
wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and
brought the crisis of to-day.

It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion.  First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in
close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although
imperfectly, the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be
affected more or less directly by all the religious and ethical forces
that are to-day moving the United States.  These questions and
movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them)
all-important question of their civil, political, and economic status.
They must perpetually discuss the "Negro Problem,"--must live, move,
and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its light or
darkness.  With this come, too, peculiar problems of their inner
life,--of the status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training of
children, the accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime.  All
this must mean a time of intense ethical ferment, of religious
heart-searching and intellectual unrest.  From the double life every
American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by
the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the
fifteenth century,--from this must arise a painful self-consciousness,
an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is
fatal to self-confidence.  The worlds within and without the Veil of
Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not
in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the
soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.  Such a double life,
with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must
give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to
pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.

In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly
picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and
is tingeing and changing his religious life.  Feeling that his rights
and his dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public
conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the
reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining
new strength and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma.
Conscious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter
and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint
and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith.
On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and more
tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-Negro movement its
patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no
ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the
black man's strength.  Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in
anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.  The one type of Negro stands
almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a
traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals
remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets
that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment.  But, after
all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into
black,--the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?

To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in
the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first
tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise.
It is no idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the
old-time Negro,--the frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for
the earlier religious age of submission and humility.  With all his
laziness and lack of many elements of true manhood, he was at least
open-hearted, faithful, and sincere.  To-day he is gone, but who is to
blame for his going?  Is it not those very persons who mourn for him?
Is it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction, to found a
society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral fibre of
a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten
to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites?
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and
the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must
be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged
weapon against itself.  And how natural this is!  The death of Denmark
Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present
hopelessness of physical defence.  Political defence is becoming less
and less available, and economic defence is still only partially
effective.  But there is a patent defence at hand,--the defence of
deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying.  It is the same defence
which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their
character for centuries.  To-day the young Negro of the South who would
succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but
rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he
must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut
his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal
advantage in deception and lying.  His real thoughts, his real
aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he
must not complain.  Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these
growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage.  With
this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some
prosperity.  Without this there is riot, migration, or crime.  Nor is
this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather
the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to
share modern culture?  The price of culture is a Lie.

On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the
radicalism of the Negro.  Driven from his birthright in the South by a
situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive
nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a
decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination.
At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and
lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened.  The soul, long
pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom.  What
wonder that every tendency is to excess,--radical complaint, radical
remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence.  Some sink, some rise.
The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell
and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the
better classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white
and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose
bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape.  They
despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but
offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist
side by side with its masters.  Feeling deeply and keenly the
tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls
are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact
that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to
intensify it and make it more maddening.

Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus
sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North
and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social
conflict within their ranks.  Their churches are differentiating,--now
into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable
from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social
and business institutions catering to the desire for information and
amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both
within and without the black world, and preaching in effect if not in
word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.

But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of
the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human
souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great
night a new religious ideal.  Some day the Awakening will come, when
the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward
the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that
makes life worth living--Liberty, Justice, and Right--is marked "For
White People Only."




XI

Of the Passing of the First-Born

  O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
  The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
  The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
  WHO HATH REMEMBERED ME?  WHO HATH FORGOTTEN?
  Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
  But the world shall end when I forget.

  SWINBURNE.


"Unto you a child is born," sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered
into my room one brown October morning.  Then the fear of fatherhood
mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and
how it felt--what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled
itself.  And I thought in awe of her,--she who had slept with Death to
tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously
wandering.  I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to myself
half wonderingly, "Wife and child?  Wife and child?"--fled fast and
faster than boat and steam-car, and yet must ever impatiently await
them; away from the hard-voiced city, away from the flickering sea into
my own Berkshire Hills that sit all sadly guarding the gates of
Massachusetts.

Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the
sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to win
a life, and won.  What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail
from an unknown world,--all head and voice?  I handle it curiously, and
watch perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing.  I did not love
it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my
girl-mother, she whom now I saw unfolding like the glory of the
morning--the transfigured woman.  Through her I came to love the wee
thing, as it grew strong; as its little soul unfolded itself in twitter
and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught the gleam and
flash of life.  How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and
dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect
little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa
had moulded into his features!  I held him in my arms, after we had
sped far away from our Southern home,--held him, and glanced at the hot
red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and
felt a vague unrest.  Why was his hair tinted with gold?  An evil omen
was golden hair in my life.  Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed
out and killed the blue?--for brown were his father's eyes, and his
father's father's.  And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it
fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.

Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,--a
Negro and a Negro's son.  Holding in that little head--ah,
bitterly!--he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny
dimpled hand--ah, wearily!--to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and
seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land
whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.  I saw the
shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city
towering above the blood-red land.  I held my face beside his little
cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they
began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my
life.

So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so
tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months
distant from the All-life,--we were not far from worshipping this
revelation of the divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and
moulded itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and idealized
her every effort.  No hands but hers must touch and garnish those
little limbs; no dress or frill must touch them that had not wearied
her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland, and she
and he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue and in it held
communion.  I too mused above his little white bed; saw the strength of
my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength
of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the
wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the
Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.

And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the
full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from
the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun
quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta.  And then one night
the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny
hands trembled; and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we
knew baby was sick.  Ten days he lay there,--a swift week and three
endless days, wasting, wasting away.  Cheerily the mother nursed him
the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled again.
Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away and Fear
crouched beside the little bed.

Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror, and joy and
sleep slipped away.  I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from
dull and dreamless trance,--crying, "The Shadow of Death!  The Shadow
of Death!"  Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the gray
physician,--the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death.  The hours
trembled on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired
thing across the lamplight.  Then we two alone looked upon the child as
he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his stringlike
hands,--the Shadow of Death!  And we spoke no word, and turned away.

He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the
western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not, and the
trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless.  I saw his
breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt
like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in
its train.  The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the
windows, the same green grass glinted in the setting sun.  Only in the
chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing--a childless
mother.

I shirk not.  I long for work.  I pant for a life full of striving.  I
am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even
quail before the awful shadow of the Veil.  But hearken, O Death!  Is
not this my life hard enough,--is not that dull land that stretches its
sneering web about me cold enough,--is not all the world beyond these
four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter
here,--thou, O Death?  About my head the thundering storm beat like a
heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of the
weak; but what cared I, within my home beside my wife and baby boy?
Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness that thou must
needs enter there,--thou, O Death?

A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it
brighter,--sweet as a summer's day beside the Housatonic.  The world
loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his
wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him.  I
can see him now, changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to
darkening frowns, and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched
the world.  He knew no color-line, poor dear--and the Veil, though it
shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun.  He loved the white
matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls
alone, uncolored and unclothed.  I--yea, all men--are larger and purer
by the infinite breadth of that one little life.  She who in simple
clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he had flown, "He
will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things."  And I, far more
ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit alone winding
words and muttering, "If still he be, and he be There, and there be a
There, let him be happy, O Fate!"

Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and
sweet-smelling flowers.  The trees whispered to the grass, but the
children sat with hushed faces.  And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal
day,--the wraith of Life.  We seemed to rumble down an unknown street
behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in
our ears.  The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those
pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,--they only
glanced and said, "Niggers!"

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth
there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his
flowers and his little folded hands.  In vain, in vain!--for where, O
God!  beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in
peace,--where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is
free?

All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my
heart,--nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the
Veil,--and my soul whispers ever to me saying, "Not dead, not dead, but
escaped; not bond, but free."  No bitter meanness now shall sicken his
baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy
boyhood.  Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should
grow choked and deformed within the Veil!  I might have known that
yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was
peering far beyond this narrow Now.  In the poise of his little
curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which
his father had hardly crushed in his own heart?  For what, forsooth,
shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty
million fellows?  Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your
ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you
to cringe and bow.  Better far this nameless void that stops my life
than a sea of sorrow for you.

Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,--aye,
and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the
end.  Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil
and set the prisoned free.  Not for me,--I shall die in my bonds,--but
for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the
morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?" but
"Can he work?"  When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" but "Do
they know?"  Some morning this may be, long, long years to come.  But
now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep
voice, THOU SHALT FOREGO!  And all have I foregone at that command, and
with small complaint,--all save that fair young form that lies so
coldly wed with death in the nest I had builded.

If one must have gone, why not I?  Why may I not rest me from this
restlessness and sleep from this wide waking?  Was not the world's
alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning?  Are
there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this
little body could lightly be tossed away?  The wretched of my race that
line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love
sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak.  Perhaps
now he knows the All-love, and needs not to be wise.  Sleep, then,
child,--sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless
patter of little feet--above the Veil.




XII

Of Alexander Crummell

  Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint
  As from beyond the limit of the world,
  Like the last echo born of a great cry,
  Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
  Around a king returning from his wars.

  TENNYSON.


This is the story of a human heart,--the tale of a black boy who many
long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world
and know himself.  Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that
lay gray and dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation
of Hate, that stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of
Despair, that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever
steals along with twilight.  Above all, you must hear of the vales he
crossed,--the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of
Death.

I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce commencement season,
amid its bustle and crush.  Tall, frail, and black he stood, with
simple dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding.  I talked with
him apart, where the storming of the lusty young orators could not harm
us.  I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I began
to feel the fineness of his character,--his calm courtesy, the
sweetness of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth
of life.  Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the
prophets of the world.  Some seer he seemed, that came not from the
crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing Now,--that
mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so splendid
and sordid.  Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world of
mine, within the Veil.

He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the
echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to
look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that
paused over his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas
as he looked down the world.  The slave-ship still groaned across the
Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black
father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears.  From the
low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at
nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land
of slaves.

So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of
Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figure
alone,--ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father,
and a form that fell in vast and shapeless folds.  Thus the temptation
of Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,--gliding stealthily into
his laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and
night with rough, rude turbulence.  So the black boy asked of sky and
sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither
the world nor the world's rough ways.

Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide
land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same
temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms.  For them, perhaps,
some one will some day lift the Veil,--will come tenderly and cheerily
into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as
Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell.  And before
the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark.  Beriah Green
had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous
boys.  "I'm going to bring a black boy here to educate," said Beriah
Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say.
"Oho!" laughed the boys.  "Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander came.
Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and
hungry, four hundred miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan.  But
the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition
schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp.  The black boy
trudged away.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,--the age when
half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark
of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and
tramps and thieves, and millionaires and--sometimes--Negroes, became
throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we
half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too!  Hast Thou seen Sorrow
and the dull waters of Hopelessness?  Hast Thou known Life?"  And then
all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World
of Worlds, how shall man make you one?"

So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a
revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which they
had not dreamed before.  And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of
sympathy and inspiration.  The shadowy, formless thing--the temptation
of Hate, that hovered between him and the world--grew fainter and less
sinister.  It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and
lingered thick at the edges.  Through it the child now first saw the
blue and gold of life,--the sun-swept road that ran 'twixt heaven and
earth until in one far-off wan wavering line they met and kissed.  A
vision of life came to the growing boy,--mystic, wonderful.  He raised
his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air.
Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting
through the trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation
calling,--calling faintly, calling loudly.  He heard the hateful clank
of their chains; he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within
him a protest and a prophecy.  And he girded himself to walk down the
world.

A voice and vision called him to be a priest,--a seer to lead the
uncalled out of the house of bondage.  He saw the headless host turn
toward him like the whirling of mad waters,--he stretched forth his
hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there
swept across the vision the temptation of Despair.

They were not wicked men,--the problem of life is not the problem of
the wicked,--they were calm, good men, Bishops of the Apostolic Church
of God, and strove toward righteousness.  They said slowly, "It is all
very natural--it is even commendable; but the General Theological
Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro."  And when that
thin, half-grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their
hands kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, "Now,--of
course, we--we know how YOU feel about it; but you see it is
impossible,--that is--well--it is premature.  Sometime, we
trust--sincerely trust--all such distinctions will fade away; but now
the world is as it is."

This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it
doggedly.  Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading,
arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final
NO: until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish,
unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God's law.  And
then from that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and
left an earth gray and stern rolling on beneath a dark despair.  Even
the kind hands that stretched themselves toward him from out the depths
of that dull morning seemed but parts of the purple shadows.  He saw
them coldly, and asked, "Why should I strive by special grace when the
way of the world is closed to me?"  All gently yet, the hands urged him
on,--the hands of young John Jay, that daring father's daring son; the
hands of the good folk of Boston, that free city.  And yet, with a way
to the priesthood of the Church open at last before him, the cloud
lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul's the venerable Bishop
raised his white arms above the Negro deacon--even then the burden had
not lifted from that heart, for there had passed a glory from the earth.

And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in
vain.  Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life.  More
critically he studied the situation.  Deep down below the slavery and
servitude of the Negro people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long
years of mistreatment had emphasized.  The dearth of strong moral
character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great
shortcoming, and here he would begin.  He would gather the best of his
people into some little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach, and
inspire them, till the leaven spread, till the children grew, till the
world hearkened, till--till--and then across his dream gleamed some
faint after-glow of that first fair vision of youth--only an
after-glow, for there had passed a glory from the earth.

One day--it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling merrily with
the May winds of New England--he stood at last in his own chapel in
Providence, a priest of the Church.  The days sped by, and the dark
young clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his
prayers with a soft, earnest voice; he haunted the streets and accosted
the wayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying.  He
worked and toiled, week by week, day by day, month by month.  And yet
month by month the congregation dwindled, week by week the hollow walls
echoed more sharply, day by day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day
by day the third temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within
the Veil; a temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just a
shade of mockery in its smooth tones.  First it came casually, in the
cadence of a voice: "Oh, colored folks?  Yes."  Or perhaps more
definitely: "What do you EXPECT?"  In voice and gesture lay the
doubt--the temptation of Doubt.  How he hated it, and stormed at it
furiously!  "Of course they are capable," he cried; "of course they can
learn and strive and achieve--" and "Of course," added the temptation
softly, "they do nothing of the sort."  Of all the three temptations,
this one struck the deepest.  Hate?  He had outgrown so childish a
thing.  Despair?  He had steeled his right arm against it, and fought
it with the vigor of determination.  But to doubt the worth of his
life-work,--to doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul
loved because it was his; to find listless squalor instead of eager
endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering, "They do not care; they
cannot know; they are dumb driven cattle,--why cast your pearls before
swine?"--this, this seemed more than man could bear; and he closed the
door, and sank upon the steps of the chancel, and cast his robe upon
the floor and writhed.

The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy chapel
when he arose.  He folded his vestments, put away the hymn-books, and
closed the great Bible.  He stepped out into the twilight, looked back
upon the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door.
Then he walked briskly to the Bishop, and told the Bishop what the
Bishop already knew.  "I have failed," he said simply.  And gaining
courage by the confession, he added: "What I need is a larger
constituency.  There are comparatively few Negroes here, and perhaps
they are not of the best.  I must go where the field is wider, and try
again."  So the Bishop sent him to Philadelphia, with a letter to
Bishop Onderdonk.

Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,--corpulent,
red-faced, and the author of several thrilling tracts on Apostolic
Succession.  It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself
for a pleasant season of contemplation, when the bell must needs ring,
and there must burst in upon the Bishop a letter and a thin, ungainly
Negro.  Bishop Onderdonk read the letter hastily and frowned.
Fortunately, his mind was already clear on this point; and he cleared
his brow and looked at Crummell.  Then he said, slowly and
impressively: "I will receive you into this diocese on one condition:
no Negro priest can sit in my church convention, and no Negro church
must ask for representation there."

I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure,
nervously twitching his hat before the massive abdomen of Bishop
Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of the
bookcases, where Fox's "Lives of the Martyrs" nestled happily beside
"The Whole Duty of Man."  I seem to see the wide eyes of the Negro
wander past the Bishop's broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors
of the cabinet glow in the sunlight.  A little blue fly is trying to
cross the yawning keyhole.  He marches briskly up to it, peers into the
chasm in a surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers reflectively;
then he essays its depths, and, finding it bottomless, draws back
again.  The dark-faced priest finds himself wondering if the fly too
has faced its Valley of Humiliation, and if it will plunge into
it,--when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily across,
leaving the watcher wingless and alone.

Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him.  The rich walls
wheeled away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding on through
life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge,--here, the Valley of
Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  And I know not
which be darker,--no, not I. But this I know: in yonder Vale of the
Humble stand to-day a million swarthy men, who willingly would

  ". . . bear the whips and scorns of time,
  The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
  The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
  The insolence of office, and the spurns
  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,"--

all this and more would they bear did they but know that this were
sacrifice and not a meaner thing.  So surged the thought within that
lone black breast.  The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then,
recollecting that there was really nothing to say, considerately said
nothing, only sat tapping his foot impatiently.  But Alexander Crummell
said, slowly and heavily: "I will never enter your diocese on such
terms."  And saying this, he turned and passed into the Valley of the
Shadow of Death.  You might have noted only the physical dying, the
shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul lay deeper death
than that.  He found a chapel in New York,--the church of his father;
he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned by his fellow
priests.  Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a beggar with
outstretched hands.  Englishmen clasped them,--Wilberforce and Stanley,
Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie
bade him rest awhile at Queen's College in Cambridge, and there he
lingered, struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his
degree in '53.  Restless still, and unsatisfied, he turned toward
Africa, and for long years, amid the spawn of the slave-smugglers,
sought a new heaven and a new earth.

So the man groped for light; all this was not Life,--it was the
world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one who
vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a
death that is more than death,--the passing of a soul that has missed
its duty.  Twenty years he wandered,--twenty years and more; and yet
the hard rasping question kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's
name, am I on earth for?"  In the narrow New York parish his soul
seemed cramped and smothered.  In the fine old air of the English
University he heard the millions wailing over the sea.  In the wild
fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood helpless and alone.

You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,--you who in the swift
whirl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvellous vision, have
fronted life and asked its riddle face to face.  And if you find that
riddle hard to read, remember that yonder black boy finds it just a
little harder; if it is difficult for you to find and face your duty,
it is a shade more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the
blood and dust of battle, remember that to him the dust is thicker and
the battle fiercer.  No wonder the wanderers fall!  No wonder we point
to thief and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the never-ending
throng of unhearsed dead!  The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives few
of its pilgrims back to the world.

But Alexander Crummell it gave back.  Out of the temptation of Hate,
and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled
by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home across the
waters, humble and strong, gentle and determined.  He bent to all the
gibes and prejudices, to all hatred and discrimination, with that rare
courtesy which is the armor of pure souls.  He fought among his own,
the low, the grasping, and the wicked, with that unbending
righteousness which is the sword of the just.  He never faltered, he
seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the
old, helping the weak, guiding the strong.

So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of
those who walk within the Veil.  They who live without knew not nor
dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration which the
dull gauze of caste decreed that most men should not know.  And now
that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose
dear memory I bring this little tribute.  I can see his face still,
dark and heavy-lined beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now
with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at some human
wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past.  The
more I met Alexander Crummell, the more I felt how much that world was
losing which knew so little of him.  In another age he might have sat
among the elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another
country mothers might have sung him to the cradles.

He did his work,--he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here
he worked alone, with so little human sympathy.  His name to-day, in
this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden
with no incense of memory or emulation.  And herein lies the tragedy of
the age: not that men are poor,--all men know something of poverty; not
that men are wicked,--who is good? not that men are ignorant,--what is
Truth?  Nay, but that men know so little of men.


He sat one morning gazing toward the sea.  He smiled and said, "The
gate is rusty on the hinges."  That night at starrise a wind came
moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I
loved fled like a flame across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.

I wonder where he is to-day?  I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as
he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King,--a dark and
pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as
he laid those heart-wrung talents down, "Well done!" while round about
the morning stars sat singing.




XIII

Of the Coming of John

  What bring they 'neath the midnight,
    Beside the River-sea?
  They bring the human heart wherein
    No nightly calm can be;
  That droppeth never with the wind,
    Nor drieth with the dew;
  O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
    To cover spirits too.

   The river floweth on.

  MRS. BROWNING.


Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a
great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and
meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops
against a wide green lawn.  It is a broad, restful place, with two
large buildings outlined against the west.  When at evening the winds
come swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city's smoke
hangs wearily above the valley, then the red west glows like a
dreamland down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supper-bell,
throws the passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the
sky.  Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the sinister
light to flit before the city like dim warning ghosts.  Perhaps they
are; for this is Wells Institute, and these black students have few
dealings with the white city below.

And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark form that
ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain
Hall,--for Jones is never on time.  A long, straggling fellow he is,
brown and hard-haired, who seems to be growing straight out of his
clothes, and walks with a half-apologetic roll.  He used perpetually to
set the quiet dining-room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his
place after the bell had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly
awkward.  And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him
much,--that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or
artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction
with the world.

He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks
of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and the
sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising
only here and there in long, low islands.  The white folk of Altamaha
voted John a good boy,--fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields,
handy everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful.  But they
shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him off to school.
"It'll spoil him,--ruin him," they said; and they talked as though they
knew.  But full half the black folk followed him proudly to the
station, and carried his queer little trunk and many bundles.  And
there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and
the boys clapped him on the back.  So the train came, and he pinched
his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms about his mother's
neck, and then was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow
world that flamed and flared about the doubtful pilgrim.  Up the coast
they hurried, past the squares and palmettos of Savannah, through the
cotton-fields and through the weary night, to Millville, and came with
the morning to the noise and bustle of Johnstown.

And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and watched the
train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to the
world, had thereafter one ever-recurring word,--"When John comes." Then
what parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new
furniture in the front room,--perhaps even a new front room; and there
would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a
big wedding; all this and more--when John comes.  But the white people
shook their heads.

At first he was coming at Christmas-time,--but the vacation proved too
short; and then, the next summer,--but times were hard and schooling
costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown.  And so it drifted to
the next summer, and the next,--till playmates scattered, and mother
grew gray, and sister went up to the Judge's kitchen to work.  And
still the legend lingered,--"When John comes."

Up at the Judge's they rather liked this refrain; for they too had a
John--a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long
summer's day to its close with his darker namesake.  "Yes, sir!  John
is at Princeton, sir," said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge
every morning as he marched down to the post-office.  "Showing the
Yankees what a Southern gentleman can do," he added; and strode home
again with his letters and papers.  Up at the great pillared house they
lingered long over the Princeton letter,--the Judge and his frail wife,
his sister and growing daughters.  "It'll make a man of him," said the
Judge, "college is the place."  And then he asked the shy little
waitress, "Well, Jennie, how's your John?" and added reflectively, "Too
bad, too bad your mother sent him off--it will spoil him."  And the
waitress wondered.

Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting, half
consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an
inarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that
all would think.  And yet it was singular that few thought of two
Johns,--for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black; and
the white folk thought of another John, and he was white.  And neither
world thought the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest.

Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case of
John Jones.  For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sort of
moulding.  He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and
never able to work consecutively at anything.  He did not know how to
study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness,
carelessness, and appalling good-humor, we were sore perplexed.  One
night we sat in faculty-meeting, worried and serious; for Jones was in
trouble again.  This last escapade was too much, and so we solemnly
voted "that Jones, on account of repeated disorder and inattention to
work, be suspended for the rest of the term."

It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really
serious thing was when the Dean told him he must leave school.  He
stared at the gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes.  "Why,--why,"
he faltered, "but--I haven't graduated!"  Then the Dean slowly and
clearly explained, reminding him of the tardiness and the carelessness,
of the poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise and disorder,
until the fellow hung his head in confusion.  Then he said quickly,
"But you won't tell mammy and sister,--you won't write mammy, now will
you?  For if you won't I'll go out into the city and work, and come
back next term and show you something."  So the Dean promised
faithfully, and John shouldered his little trunk, giving neither word
nor look to the giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street to the
great city, with sober eyes and a set and serious face.

Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious
look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it
again.  When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged
strength.  It was a hard struggle, for things did not come easily to
him,--few crowding memories of early life and teaching came to help him
on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove was of his own
building, and he builded slow and hard.  As the light dawned
lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before the
vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering through and
beyond the world of men into a world of thought.  And the thoughts at
times puzzled him sorely; he could not see just why the circle was not
square, and carried it out fifty-six decimal places one
midnight,--would have gone further, indeed, had not the matron rapped
for lights out.  He caught terrible colds lying on his back in the
meadows of nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had grave
doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected the
Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he
pondered long over every new Greek word, and wondered why this meant
that and why it couldn't mean something else, and how it must have felt
to think all things in Greek.  So he thought and puzzled along for
himself,--pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily, and walking
steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped and
surrendered.

Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow
and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and
collars got less soiled.  Now and then his boots shone, and a new
dignity crept into his walk.  And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness
growing in his eyes began to expect something of this plodding boy.
Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who
watched him felt four more years of change, which almost transformed
the tall, grave man who bowed to us commencement morning.  He had left
his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion and of men.
He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered he had
seen so little before.  He grew slowly to feel almost for the first
time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first
noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before,
differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that
in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh.
He felt angry now when men did not call him "Mister," he clenched his
hands at the "Jim Crow" cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed
in him and his.  A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague
bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning
a way around these crooked things.  Daily he found himself shrinking
from the choked and narrow life of his native town.  And yet he always
planned to go back to Altamaha,--always planned to work there.  Still,
more and more as the day approached he hesitated with a nameless dread;
and even the day after graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of
the Dean to send him North with the quartette during the summer
vacation, to sing for the Institute.  A breath of air before the
plunge, he said to himself in half apology.

It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were
brilliant with moving men.  They reminded John of the sea, as he sat in
the square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright and
dark, so grave and gay.  He scanned their rich and faultless clothes,
the way they carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered
into the hurrying carriages.  Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said,
"This is the World."  The notion suddenly seized him to see where the
world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying
all one way.  So when a tall, light-haired young man and a little
talkative lady came by, he rose half hesitatingly and followed them.
Up the street they went, past stores and gay shops, across a broad
square, until with a hundred others they entered the high portal of a
great building.

He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his
pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded.  There seemed
really no time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to
the busy clerk, and received simply a ticket but no change.  When at
last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not
what, he stood stockstill amazed.  "Be careful," said a low voice
behind him; "you must not lynch the colored gentleman simply because
he's in your way," and a girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of her
fair-haired escort.  A shade of annoyance passed over the escort's
face.  "You WILL not understand us at the South," he said half
impatiently, as if continuing an argument.  "With all your professions,
one never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations between
white and black as are everyday occurrences with us.  Why, I remember
my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and
surely no two,--WELL!" The man stopped short and flushed to the roots
of his hair, for there directly beside his reserved orchestra chairs
sat the Negro he had stumbled over in the hallway.  He hesitated and
grew pale with anger, called the usher and gave him his card, with a
few peremptory words, and slowly sat down.  The lady deftly changed the
subject.

All this John did not see, for he sat in a half-daze minding the scene
about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the
moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed
all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more
beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and
started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of
Lohengrin's swan.  The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept
through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune.  He closed
his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the
lady's arm.  And the lady drew away.  A deep longing swelled in all his
heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that
low life that held him prisoned and befouled.  If he could only live up
in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of
blood!  Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all?  And if he
had called, what right had he to call when a world like this lay open
before men?

Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away.
He looked thoughtfully across the hall, and wondered why the beautiful
gray-haired woman looked so listless, and what the little man could be
whispering about.  He would not like to be listless and idle, he
thought, for he felt with the music the movement of power within him.
If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard,--aye, bitter
hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility, without the
cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul.  When at last a soft
sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a
far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of
his mother.  And his heart sank below the waters, even as the sea-sand
sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again with
that last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into
the sky.

It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time
notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying
politely, "Will you step this way, please, sir?"  A little surprised,
he arose quickly at the last tap, and, turning to leave his seat,
looked full into the face of the fair-haired young man.  For the first
time the young man recognized his dark boyhood playmate, and John knew
that it was the Judge's son.  The White John started, lifted his hand,
and then froze into his chair; the black John smiled lightly, then
grimly, and followed the usher down the aisle.  The manager was sorry,
very, very sorry,--but he explained that some mistake had been made in
selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the
money, of course,--and indeed felt the matter keenly, and so forth,
and--before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the
square and down the broad streets, and as he passed the park he
buttoned his coat and said, "John Jones, you're a natural-born fool."
Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he
wrote another, and threw it in the fire.  Then he seized a scrap of
paper and wrote: "Dear Mother and Sister--I am coming--John."

"Perhaps," said John, as he settled himself on the train, "perhaps I am
to blame myself in struggling against my manifest destiny simply
because it looks hard and unpleasant.  Here is my duty to Altamaha
plain before me; perhaps they'll let me help settle the Negro problems
there,--perhaps they won't.  'I will go in to the King, which is not
according to the law; and if I perish, I perish.'" And then he mused
and dreamed, and planned a life-work; and the train flew south.

Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the world knew John was
coming.  The homes were scrubbed and scoured,--above all, one; the
gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a new
gingham.  With some finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists
and Presbyterians were induced to join in a monster welcome at the
Baptist Church; and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on
every corner as to the exact extent and nature of John's
accomplishments.  It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day when he
came.  The black town flocked to the depot, with a little of the white
at the edges,--a happy throng, with "Good-mawnings" and "Howdys" and
laughing and joking and jostling.  Mother sat yonder in the window
watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously fingering
her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyes peering
from out a tangled wilderness of hair.  John rose gloomily as the train
stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim Crow" car; he stepped to the
platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and
dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of
mud.  An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all
seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall,
strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and
there; then, lingering neither for handshaking nor gossip, started
silently up the street, raising his hat merely to the last eager old
aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment.  The people were distinctly
bewildered.  This silent, cold man,--was this John?  Where was his
smile and hearty hand-grasp?  "'Peared kind o' down in the mouf," said
the Methodist preacher thoughtfully.  "Seemed monstus stuck up,"
complained a Baptist sister.  But the white postmaster from the edge of
the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks plainly.  "That damn
Nigger," said he, as he shouldered the mail and arranged his tobacco,
"has gone North and got plum full o' fool notions; but they won't work
in Altamaha."  And the crowd melted away.

The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure.  Rain
spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in the ice-cream.
When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing.
The three preachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow
John's manner seemed to throw a blanket over everything,--he seemed so
cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that the
Methodist brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited not a
single "Amen"; the Presbyterian prayer was but feebly responded to, and
even the Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so
mixed up in his favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping
fully fifteen minutes sooner than he meant.  The people moved uneasily
in their seats as John rose to reply.  He spoke slowly and
methodically.  The age, he said, demanded new ideas; we were far
different from those men of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries,--with broader ideas of human brotherhood and destiny.  Then
he spoke of the rise of charity and popular education, and particularly
of the spread of wealth and work.  The question was, then, he added
reflectively, looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part the
Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century.  He
sketched in vague outline the new Industrial School that might rise
among these pines, he spoke in detail of the charitable and
philanthropic work that might be organized, of money that might be
saved for banks and business.  Finally he urged unity, and deprecated
especially religious and denominational bickering.  "To-day," he said,
with a smile, "the world cares little whether a man be Baptist or
Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and
true.  What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in river
or washbowl, or not at all?  Let's leave all that littleness, and look
higher."  Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down.  A
painful hush seized that crowded mass.  Little had they understood of
what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue, save the last word about
baptism; that they knew, and they sat very still while the clock
ticked.  Then at last a low suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner,
and an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight
up into the pulpit.  He was wrinkled and black, with scant gray and
tufted hair; his voice and hands shook as with palsy; but on his face
lay the intense rapt look of the religious fanatic.  He seized the
Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it inarticulate, and
then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful eloquence.  He
quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till
the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking
arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour
gathered itself and rushed into the air.  John never knew clearly what
the old man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing
denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with
amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on
something this little world held sacred.  He arose silently, and passed
out into the night.  Down toward the sea he went, in the fitful
starlight, half conscious of the girl who followed timidly after him.
When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned to his little sister
and looked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with sudden pain how
little thought he had given her.  He put his arm about her and let her
passion of tears spend itself on his shoulder.

Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.

"John," she said, "does it make every one--unhappy when they study and
learn lots of things?"

He paused and smiled.  "I am afraid it does," he said.

"And, John, are you glad you studied?"

"Yes," came the answer, slowly but positively.

She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully,
"I wish I was unhappy,--and--and," putting both arms about his neck, "I
think I am, a little, John."

It was several days later that John walked up to the Judge's house to
ask for the privilege of teaching the Negro school.  The Judge himself
met him at the front door, stared a little hard at him, and said
brusquely, "Go 'round to the kitchen door, John, and wait."  Sitting on
the kitchen steps, John stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed.  What
on earth had come over him?  Every step he made offended some one.  He
had come to save his people, and before he left the depot he had hurt
them.  He sought to teach them at the church, and had outraged their
deepest feelings.  He had schooled himself to be respectful to the
Judge, and then blundered into his front door.  And all the time he had
meant right,--and yet, and yet, somehow he found it so hard and strange
to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about
him.  He could not remember that he used to have any difficulty in the
past, when life was glad and gay.  The world seemed smooth and easy
then.  Perhaps,--but his sister came to the kitchen door just then and
said the Judge awaited him.

The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning's mail, and he did
not ask John to sit down.  He plunged squarely into the business.
"You've come for the school, I suppose.  Well John, I want to speak to
you plainly.  You know I'm a friend to your people.  I've helped you
and your family, and would have done more if you hadn't got the notion
of going off.  Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all
their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in
this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to
be the equal of white men.  In their place, your people can be honest
and respectful; and God knows, I'll do what I can to help them.  But
when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white
women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if we
have to lynch every Nigger in the land.  Now, John, the question is,
are you, with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the
situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as
your fathers were,--I knew your father, John, he belonged to my
brother, and he was a good Nigger.  Well--well, are you going to be
like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and
equality into these folks' heads, and make them discontented and
unhappy?"

"I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson," answered John,
with a brevity that did not escape the keen old man.  He hesitated a
moment, and then said shortly, "Very well,--we'll try you awhile.
Good-morning."

It was a full month after the opening of the Negro school that the
other John came home, tall, gay, and headstrong.  The mother wept, the
sisters sang.  The whole white town was glad.  A proud man was the
Judge, and it was a goodly sight to see the two swinging down Main
Street together.  And yet all did not go smoothly between them, for the
younger man could not and did not veil his contempt for the little
town, and plainly had his heart set on New York.  Now the one cherished
ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor of Altamaha,
representative to the legislature, and--who could say?--governor of
Georgia.  So the argument often waxed hot between them.  "Good heavens,
father," the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar
and stood by the fireplace, "you surely don't expect a young fellow
like me to settle down permanently in this--this God-forgotten town
with nothing but mud and Negroes?"  "I did," the Judge would answer
laconically; and on this particular day it seemed from the gathering
scowl that he was about to add something more emphatic, but neighbors
had already begun to drop in to admire his son, and the conversation
drifted.

"Heah that John is livenin' things up at the darky school," volunteered
the postmaster, after a pause.

"What now?" asked the Judge, sharply.

"Oh, nothin' in particulah,--just his almighty air and uppish ways.
B'lieve I did heah somethin' about his givin' talks on the French
Revolution, equality, and such like.  He's what I call a dangerous
Nigger."

"Have you heard him say anything out of the way?"

"Why, no,--but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lot of rot.  Then, too,
I don't need to heah: a Nigger what won't say 'sir' to a white man,
or--"

"Who is this John?" interrupted the son.

"Why, it's little black John, Peggy's son,--your old playfellow."

The young man's face flushed angrily, and then he laughed.

"Oh," said he, "it's the darky that tried to force himself into a seat
beside the lady I was escorting--"

But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more.  He had been nettled all
day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took his hat
and cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse.

For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get things started in the
rickety old shanty that sheltered his school.  The Negroes were rent
into factions for and against him, the parents were careless, the
children irregular and dirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely
missing.  Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed to see at
last some glimmering of dawn.  The attendance was larger and the
children were a shade cleaner this week.  Even the booby class in
reading showed a little comforting progress.  So John settled himself
with renewed patience this afternoon.

"Now, Mandy," he said cheerfully, "that's better; but you mustn't chop
your words up so: 'If--the-man--goes.' Why, your little brother even
wouldn't tell a story that way, now would he?"

"Naw, suh, he cain't talk."

"All right; now let's try again: 'If the man--'

"John!"

The whole school started in surprise, and the teacher half arose, as
the red, angry face of the Judge appeared in the open doorway.

"John, this school is closed.  You children can go home and get to
work.  The white people of Altamaha are not spending their money on
black folks to have their heads crammed with impudence and lies.  Clear
out!  I'll lock the door myself."

Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered aimlessly
about after his father's abrupt departure.  In the house there was
little to interest him; the books were old and stale, the local
newspaper flat, and the women had retired with headaches and sewing.
He tried a nap, but it was too warm.  So he sauntered out into the
fields, complaining disconsolately, "Good Lord! how long will this
imprisonment last!"  He was not a bad fellow,--just a little spoiled
and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father.  He seemed a
young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on the great black stump at
the edge of the pines idly swinging his legs and smoking.  "Why, there
isn't even a girl worth getting up a respectable flirtation with," he
growled.  Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy figure hurrying
toward him on the narrow path.  He looked with interest at first, and
then burst into a laugh as he said, "Well, I declare, if it isn't
Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid!  Why, I never noticed before
what a trim little body she is.  Hello, Jennie!  Why, you haven't
kissed me since I came home," he said gaily.  The young girl stared at
him in surprise and confusion,--faltered something inarticulate, and
attempted to pass.  But a wilful mood had seized the young idler, and
he caught at her arm.  Frightened, she slipped by; and half
mischievously he turned and ran after her through the tall pines.

Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John slowly, with
his head down.  He had turned wearily homeward from the schoolhouse;
then, thinking to shield his mother from the blow, started to meet his
sister as she came from work and break the news of his dismissal to
her.  "I'll go away," he said slowly; "I'll go away and find work, and
send for them.  I cannot live here longer."  And then the fierce,
buried anger surged up into his throat.  He waved his arms and hurried
wildly up the path.

The great brown sea lay silent.  The air scarce breathed.  The dying
day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold.  There
came from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky.
There was only a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart,
seeing neither sun nor sea, but starting as from a dream at the
frightened cry that woke the pines, to see his dark sister struggling
in the arms of a tall and fair-haired man.

He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all the
pent-up hatred of his great black arm, and the body lay white and still
beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood.  John looked at
it dreamily, then walked back to the house briskly, and said in a soft
voice, "Mammy, I'm going away--I'm going to be free."

She gazed at him dimly and faltered, "No'th, honey, is yo' gwine No'th
agin?"

He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above the waters, and
said, "Yes, mammy, I'm going--North."

Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow lane, up by the
straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself on the
great black stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain.
Yonder in the gray past he had played with that dead boy, romping
together under the solemn trees.  The night deepened; he thought of the
boys at Johnstown.  He wondered how Brown had turned out, and Carey?
And Jones,--Jones?  Why, he was Jones, and he wondered what they would
all say when they knew, when they knew, in that great long dining-room
with its hundreds of merry eyes.  Then as the sheen of the starlight
stole over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert
hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan.
Hark! was it music, or the hurry and shouting of men?  Yes, surely!
Clear and high the faint sweet melody rose and fluttered like a living
thing, so that the very earth trembled as with the tramp of horses and
murmur of angry men.

He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange
melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses
galloping, galloping on.  With an effort he roused himself, bent
forward, and looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the "Song
of the Bride,"--

  "Freudig gefuhrt, ziehet dahin."

Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows
dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until at last
they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard
white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury.  Oh, how he pitied
him,--pitied him,--and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope.
Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and
turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.

And the world whistled in his ears.




XIV

Of the Sorrow Songs

  I walk through the churchyard
      To lay this body down;
  I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
  I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
  I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
  I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
  And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
      When I lay this body down.

  NEGRO SONG.


They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days--Sorrow
Songs--for they were weary at heart.  And so before each thought that I
have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these
weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men.
Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely.  They
came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew
them as of me and of mine.  Then in after years when I came to
Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over
the pale city.  To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs
themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil.
Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful
melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the
voices of the past.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God
himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has
expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.  And so
by fateful chance the Negro folk-song--the rhythmic cry of the
slave--stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the
most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above
all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but
notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of
the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the
nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten.  Some, like "Near the
lake where drooped the willow," passed into current airs and their
source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the "minstrel" stage
and their memory died away.  Then in war-time came the singular Port
Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the
first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to
heart with no third witness.  The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where
they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and
moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black
Belt.  Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their
hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss
McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty.  But the world
listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the
slave songs so deeply into the world's heart that it can never wholly
forget them again.

There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the
changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from
Kirby Smith.  Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and
finally served in the Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville.  Here he formed a
Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and
taught them to sing.  And then they taught him to sing, and when once
the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White,
he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as
they had sung to him.  So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee
Singers began.  North to Cincinnati they rode,--four half-clothed black
boys and five girl-women,--led by a man with a cause and a purpose.
They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black
bishop blessed them.  Then they went, fighting cold and starvation,
shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever
the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of
applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the
world.  They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome
them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his "Nigger
Minstrels."  So their songs conquered till they sang across the land
and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland,
Holland and Switzerland.  Seven years they sang, and brought back a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.

Since their day they have been imitated--sometimes well, by the singers
of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes.
Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music,
and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears
scarce know from the real.  But the true Negro folk-song still lives in
the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of
the Negro people.

What are these songs, and what do they mean?  I know little of music
and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men,
and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of
the slave to the world.  They tell us in these eager days that life was
joyous to the black slave, careless and happy.  I can easily believe
this of some, of many.  But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs.  They
are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer
world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more
ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of
development.  My grandfather's grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch
trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and
Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the
harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a
heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:

  Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
  Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
  Ben d' nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d' le.


The child sang it to his children and they to their children's
children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we
sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its
words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.

This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the
strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John":

  "You may bury me in the East,
   You may bury me in the West,
   But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,"

--the voice of exile.

Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of
melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and
songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave.  One of these I have just
mentioned.  Another whose strains begin this book is "Nobody knows the
trouble I've seen."  When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United
States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a
brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news.  An
old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all
the mass joined with her, swaying.  And the soldier wept.

The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,-"Swing
low, sweet chariot,"--whose bars begin the life story of "Alexander
Crummell."  Then there is the song of many waters, "Roll, Jordan,
roll," a mighty chorus with minor cadences.  There were many songs of
the fugitive like that which opens "The Wings of Atalanta," and the
more familiar "Been a-listening."  The seventh is the song of the End
and the Beginning--"My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to
fall"; a strain of this is placed before "The Dawn of Freedom."  The
song of groping--"My way's cloudy"--begins "The Meaning of Progress";
the ninth is the song of this chapter--"Wrestlin' Jacob, the day is
a-breaking,"--a paean of hopeful strife.  The last master song is the
song of songs--"Steal away,"--sprung from "The Faith of the Fathers."

There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and
characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the
third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily
make a selection on more scientific principles.  There are, too, songs
that seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there is
the maze-like medley, "Bright sparkles," one phrase of which heads "The
Black Belt"; the Easter carol, "Dust, dust and ashes"; the dirge, "My
mother's took her flight and gone home"; and that burst of melody
hovering over "The Passing of the First-Born"--"I hope my mother will
be there in that beautiful world on high."

These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of
which "You may bury me in the East" is the first, and songs like "March
on" (chapter six) and "Steal away" are the second.  The first is
African music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending
of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land.  The result is
still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the
elements are both Negro and Caucasian.  One might go further and find a
fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have
been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated
whole phrases of Negro melody, as "Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe."
Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and
imitations--the Negro "minstrel" songs, many of the "gospel" hymns, and
some of the contemporary "coon" songs,--a mass of music in which the
novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.

In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world.  Such a
message is naturally veiled and half articulate.  Words and music have
lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology
have displaced the older sentiment.  Once in a while we catch a strange
word of an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a
river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to
music of singular sweetness.  Purely secular songs are few in number,
partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of
words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger,
and the music less often caught.  Of nearly all the songs, however, the
music is distinctly sorrowful.  The ten master songs I have mentioned
tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they
grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.

The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of
evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath
conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.  Like all primitive folk,
the slave stood near to Nature's heart.  Life was a "rough and rolling
sea" like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the "Wilderness" was
the home of God, and the "lonesome valley" led to the way of life.
"Winter'll soon be over," was the picture of life and death to a
tropical imagination.  The sudden wild thunderstorms of the South awed
and impressed the Negroes,--at times the rumbling seemed to them
"mournful," at times imperious:

  "My Lord calls me,
  He calls me by the thunder,
  The trumpet sounds it in my soul."


The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words.  One sees
the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:

  "Dere's no rain to wet you,
   Dere's no sun to burn you,
   Oh, push along, believer,
   I want to go home."


The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:

  "O Lord, keep me from sinking down,"

and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:

  "Jesus is dead and God's gone away."


Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail
of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:

  My soul wants something that's new, that's new


Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with
another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here
and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences.  Mother
and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call
for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the
rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown.  Strange
blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain:

  "Yonder's my ole mudder,
   Been waggin' at de hill so long;
  'Bout time she cross over,
   Git home bime-by."

Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless" and the "Farewell,
farewell, my only child."

Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories--the frivolous and
light, and the sad.  Of deep successful love there is ominous silence,
and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and
meaning:

  Poor Ro-sy, poor gal; Poor Ro-sy,
  poor gal; Ro-sy break my poor heart,
  Heav'n shall-a-be my home.


A black woman said of the song, "It can't be sung without a full heart
and a troubled sperrit."  The same voice sings here that sings in the
German folk-song:

    "Jetz Geh i' an's brunele, trink' aber net."


Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and
even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps--who
knows?--back to his ancient forests again.  Later days transfigured his
fatalism, and amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang:

  "Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
   But the Lord shall bear my spirit home."


The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo
characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave.
Especially is this true of Bible phrases.  "Weep, O captive daughter of
Zion," is quaintly turned into "Zion, weep-a-low," and the wheels of
Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till
he says:

 "There's a little wheel a-turnin' in-a-my heart."


As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised by some
leading minstrel of the religious band.  The circumstances of the
gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of
allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or
double lines, and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer
tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts,
chiefly paraphrases of the Bible.  Three short series of verses have
always attracted me,--the one that heads this chapter, of one line of
which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, "Never, it seems
to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for
peace uttered more plaintively."  The second and third are descriptions
of the Last Judgment,--the one a late improvisation, with some traces
of outside influence:


  "Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
   And the moon drips away into blood,
   And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
   Blessed be the name of the Lord."

And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:

  "Michael, haul the boat ashore,
   Then you'll hear the horn they blow,
   Then you'll hear the trumpet sound,
   Trumpet sound the world around,
   Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
   Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
   Trumpet sound for you and me."


Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope--a
faith in the ultimate justice of things.  The minor cadences of despair
change often to triumph and calm confidence.  Sometimes it is faith in
life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless
justice in some fair world beyond.  But whichever it is, the meaning is
always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their
souls and not by their skins.  Is such a hope justified?  Do the Sorrow
Songs sing true?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of
races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven
inefficiency and not worth the saving.  Such an assumption is the
arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds
of men.  A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible,
would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life.
Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have
scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization.  So wofully
unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the
meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human
perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of
science.  Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before
Shakespeare was born?  Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and
flickered, flamed, and died in Africa?  So long as the world stands
meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its
ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity
to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country?  How came it yours?  Before the Pilgrims landed we were
here.  Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with
yours: a gift of story and song--soft, stirring melody in an
ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to
beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of
this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak
hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit.  Around us
the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of
the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and
subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have
billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars
of the God of Right.  Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely
passive.  Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof
of this nation,--we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled
our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded
with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and
Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.  Our song, our toil,
our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in
blood-brotherhood.  Are not these gifts worth the giving?  Is not this
work and striving?  Would America have been America without her Negro
people?

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung.  If
somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good,
pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend
the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.  Free, free as the sunshine
trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as
yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick
and mortar below--swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous
treble and darkening bass.  My children, my little children, are
singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:

  Let us cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler,
  Cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler, Let us
  cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler
  A-long the heav-en-ly way.

And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning,
and goes his way.




The Afterthought

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not
still-born into the world wilderness.  Let there spring, Gentle One,
from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the
harvest wonderful.  Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth,
and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations,
in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.  Thus
in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and
these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed




THE END








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Project Gutenberg’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving

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almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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Title: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Author: Washington Irving

Posting Date: June 25, 2008 [EBook #41]
Release Date: October, 1992
Last Updated: September 14, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW ***




Produced by Ilana M. (Kingsley) Newby and Greg Newby





THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW


by Washington Irving





FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE LATE DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER.


        A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,
          Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
        And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
          Forever flushing round a summer sky.
                                         CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.


In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern
shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated
by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always
prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas
when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which
by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly
known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in
former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the
inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village
tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact,
but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic.
Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little
valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the
quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it,
with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional
whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound
that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in
squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one
side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature
is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it
broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated
by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might
steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the
remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this
little valley.

From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its
inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this
sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and
its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the
neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the
land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place
was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the
settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of
his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by
Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under
the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of
the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are
given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and
visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in
the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots,
and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across
the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare,
with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her
gambols.

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and
seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the
apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some
to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away
by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War,
and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in
the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not
confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and
especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed,
certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been
careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this
spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the
churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly
quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes
passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being
belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has
furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and
the spectre is known at all the country firesides, by the name of the
Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not
confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously
imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake
they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are
sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and
begin to grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions.

I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud, for it is in such
little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the
great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain
fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is
making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country,
sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still
water, which border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and
bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic
harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current. Though many
years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet
I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same
families vegetating in its sheltered bosom.

In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American
history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the
name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,”
 in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the
vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the
Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends
forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters.
The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall,
but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands
that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for
shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was
small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a
long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his
spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along
the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and
fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of
famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a
cornfield.

His schoolhouse was a low building of one large room, rudely constructed
of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with leaves of
old copybooks. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours, by a
withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set against the
window shutters; so that though a thief might get in with perfect ease,
he would find some embarrassment in getting out,--an idea most probably
borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an
eelpot. The schoolhouse stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation,
just at the foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close by, and
a formidable birch-tree growing at one end of it. From hence the low
murmur of his pupils’ voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard
in a drowsy summer’s day, like the hum of a beehive; interrupted now and
then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or
command, or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he
urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Truth to
say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim,
“Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Ichabod Crane’s scholars certainly
were not spoiled.

I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel
potentates of the school who joy in the smart of their subjects; on
the contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than
severity; taking the burden off the backs of the weak, and laying it on
those of the strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least
flourish of the rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of
justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little
tough wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled
and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. All this he called “doing
his duty by their parents;” and he never inflicted a chastisement
without following it by the assurance, so consolatory to the smarting
urchin, that “he would remember it and thank him for it the longest day
he had to live.”

When school hours were over, he was even the companion and playmate
of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoons would convoy some of
the smaller ones home, who happened to have pretty sisters, or good
housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard. Indeed,
it behooved him to keep on good terms with his pupils. The revenue
arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely
sufficient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder,
and, though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help
out his maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those
parts, boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers whose children
he instructed. With these he lived successively a week at a time, thus
going the rounds of the neighborhood, with all his worldly effects tied
up in a cotton handkerchief.

That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of his rustic
patrons, who are apt to consider the costs of schooling a grievous
burden, and schoolmasters as mere drones, he had various ways of
rendering himself both useful and agreeable. He assisted the farmers
occasionally in the lighter labors of their farms, helped to make
hay, mended the fences, took the horses to water, drove the cows from
pasture, and cut wood for the winter fire. He laid aside, too, all the
dominant dignity and absolute sway with which he lorded it in his little
empire, the school, and became wonderfully gentle and ingratiating.
He found favor in the eyes of the mothers by petting the children,
particularly the youngest; and like the lion bold, which whilom so
magnanimously the lamb did hold, he would sit with a child on one knee,
and rock a cradle with his foot for whole hours together.

In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing-master of the
neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the
young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him on
Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band
of chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away
the palm from the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above
all the rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers still
to be heard in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off,
quite to the opposite side of the millpond, on a still Sunday morning,
which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod
Crane. Thus, by divers little makeshifts, in that ingenious way which is
commonly denominated “by hook and by crook,” the worthy pedagogue got on
tolerably enough, and was thought, by all who understood nothing of the
labor of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it.

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female
circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle,
gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to
the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the
parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir
at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary
dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver
teapot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the
smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the
churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from
the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their
amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a
whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent millpond; while the
more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior
elegance and address.

From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling gazette,
carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that
his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover,
esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read
several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s
“History of New England Witchcraft,” in which, by the way, he most
firmly and potently believed.

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple
credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting
it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his
residence in this spell-bound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous
for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school
was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of
clover bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and
there con over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of
evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he
wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse
where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that
witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,--the moan of the
whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that
harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the
sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The
fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now
and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across
his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging
his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up
the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’s token. His
only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away
evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes and the good people of Sleepy
Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with
awe at hearing his nasal melody, “in linked sweetness long drawn out,”
 floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.

Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter
evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire,
with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and
listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted
fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses,
and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the
Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by
his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous
sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of
Connecticut; and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon
comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did
absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!

But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in
the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the
crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show
its face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk
homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the
dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he
eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from
some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered
with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How often
did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the
frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest
he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! And how
often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling
among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of
his nightly scourings!

All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind
that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time,
and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely
perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would
have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his
works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more
perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of
witches put together, and that was--a woman.

Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each week,
to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel,
the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a
blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting
and rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s peaches, and universally famed,
not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a
little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was
a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off
her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her
great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting
stomacher of the olden time, and withal a provokingly short petticoat,
to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.

Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is
not to be wondered at that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his
eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion.
Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented,
liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or
his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those
everything was snug, happy and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with
his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty
abundance, rather than the style in which he lived. His stronghold was
situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered,
fertile nooks in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A
great elm tree spread its broad branches over it, at the foot of which
bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well
formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away through the grass, to
a neighboring brook, that babbled along among alders and dwarf willows.
Hard by the farmhouse was a vast barn, that might have served for a
church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the
treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from
morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the
eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching
the weather, some with their heads under their wings or buried in their
bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames,
were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were
grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens, from whence sallied
forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air.
A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond,
convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling
through the farmyard, and Guinea fowls fretting about it, like
ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry. Before
the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a
warrior and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings and crowing
in the pride and gladness of his heart,--sometimes tearing up the earth
with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of
wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.

The pedagogue’s mouth watered as he looked upon this sumptuous promise
of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind’s eye, he pictured to
himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly,
and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a
comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were
swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes,
like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In
the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy
relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with
its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory
sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back,
in a side dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which
his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great
green eyes over the fat meadow lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye,
of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burdened with ruddy
fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart
yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his
imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned
into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and
shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized
his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole
family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household
trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself
bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for
Kentucky, Tennessee,--or the Lord knows where!

When he entered the house, the conquest of his heart was complete. It
was one of those spacious farmhouses, with high-ridged but lowly sloping
roofs, built in the style handed down from the first Dutch settlers; the
low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being
closed up in bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, various
utensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighboring
river. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great
spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various
uses to which this important porch might be devoted. From this piazza
the wondering Ichabod entered the hall, which formed the centre of the
mansion, and the place of usual residence. Here rows of resplendent
pewter, ranged on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner
stood a huge bag of wool, ready to be spun; in another, a quantity of
linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of
dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the walls, mingled
with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep into
the best parlor, where the claw-footed chairs and dark mahogany tables
shone like mirrors; andirons, with their accompanying shovel and
tongs, glistened from their covert of asparagus tops; mock-oranges and
conch-shells decorated the mantelpiece; strings of various-colored birds
eggs were suspended above it; a great ostrich egg was hung from
the centre of the room, and a corner cupboard, knowingly left open,
displayed immense treasures of old silver and well-mended china.

From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight, the
peace of his mind was at an end, and his only study was how to gain the
affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel. In this enterprise,
however, he had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of
a knight-errant of yore, who seldom had anything but giants, enchanters,
fiery dragons, and such like easily conquered adversaries, to contend
with and had to make his way merely through gates of iron and brass,
and walls of adamant to the castle keep, where the lady of his heart was
confined; all which he achieved as easily as a man would carve his way
to the centre of a Christmas pie; and then the lady gave him her hand as
a matter of course. Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to
the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims
and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and
impediments; and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of
real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers, who beset every
portal to her heart, keeping a watchful and angry eye upon each other,
but ready to fly out in the common cause against any new competitor.

Among these, the most formidable was a burly, roaring, roystering blade,
of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom
Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of
strength and hardihood. He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed,
with short curly black hair, and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance,
having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frame
and great powers of limb he had received the nickname of BROM BONES,
by which he was universally known. He was famed for great knowledge and
skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar.
He was foremost at all races and cock fights; and, with the ascendancy
which bodily strength always acquires in rustic life, was the umpire in
all disputes, setting his hat on one side, and giving his decisions with
an air and tone that admitted of no gainsay or appeal. He was always
ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than
ill-will in his composition; and with all his overbearing roughness,
there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at bottom. He had three or
four boon companions, who regarded him as their model, and at the
head of whom he scoured the country, attending every scene of feud or
merriment for miles round. In cold weather he was distinguished by a
fur cap, surmounted with a flaunting fox’s tail; and when the folks at a
country gathering descried this well-known crest at a distance, whisking
about among a squad of hard riders, they always stood by for a squall.
Sometimes his crew would be heard dashing along past the farmhouses at
midnight, with whoop and halloo, like a troop of Don Cossacks; and the
old dames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a moment till
the hurry-scurry had clattered by, and then exclaim, “Ay, there goes
Brom Bones and his gang!” The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture
of awe, admiration, and good-will; and, when any madcap prank or rustic
brawl occurred in the vicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted
Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.

This rantipole hero had for some time singled out the blooming Katrina
for the object of his uncouth gallantries, and though his amorous
toyings were something like the gentle caresses and endearments of a
bear, yet it was whispered that she did not altogether discourage his
hopes. Certain it is, his advances were signals for rival candidates to
retire, who felt no inclination to cross a lion in his amours; insomuch,
that when his horse was seen tied to Van Tassel’s paling, on a Sunday
night, a sure sign that his master was courting, or, as it is termed,
“sparking,” within, all other suitors passed by in despair, and carried
the war into other quarters.

Such was the formidable rival with whom Ichabod Crane had to contend,
and, considering all things, a stouter man than he would have shrunk
from the competition, and a wiser man would have despaired. He had,
however, a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature;
he was in form and spirit like a supple-jack--yielding, but tough;
though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the
slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away--jerk!--he was as erect,
and carried his head as high as ever.

To have taken the field openly against his rival would have been
madness; for he was not a man to be thwarted in his amours, any more
than that stormy lover, Achilles. Ichabod, therefore, made his advances
in a quiet and gently insinuating manner. Under cover of his character
of singing-master, he made frequent visits at the farmhouse; not that he
had anything to apprehend from the meddlesome interference of parents,
which is so often a stumbling-block in the path of lovers. Balt Van
Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even
than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let
her have her way in everything. His notable little wife, too, had enough
to do to attend to her housekeeping and manage her poultry; for, as she
sagely observed, ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked
after, but girls can take care of themselves. Thus, while the busy dame
bustled about the house, or plied her spinning-wheel at one end of the
piazza, honest Balt would sit smoking his evening pipe at the other,
watching the achievements of a little wooden warrior, who, armed with a
sword in each hand, was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle
of the barn. In the mean time, Ichabod would carry on his suit with the
daughter by the side of the spring under the great elm, or sauntering
along in the twilight, that hour so favorable to the lover’s eloquence.

I profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won. To me they
have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but
one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand
avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a
great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of
generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle
for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common
hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed
sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero. Certain it is, this
was not the case with the redoubtable Brom Bones; and from the moment
Ichabod Crane made his advances, the interests of the former evidently
declined: his horse was no longer seen tied to the palings on Sunday
nights, and a deadly feud gradually arose between him and the preceptor
of Sleepy Hollow.

Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature, would fain have
carried matters to open warfare and have settled their pretensions
to the lady, according to the mode of those most concise and simple
reasoners, the knights-errant of yore,--by single combat; but Ichabod
was too conscious of the superior might of his adversary to enter the
lists against him; he had overheard a boast of Bones, that he would
“double the schoolmaster up, and lay him on a shelf of his own
schoolhouse;” and he was too wary to give him an opportunity. There was
something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacific system; it
left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery in
his disposition, and to play off boorish practical jokes upon his rival.
Ichabod became the object of whimsical persecution to Bones and his gang
of rough riders. They harried his hitherto peaceful domains; smoked
out his singing school by stopping up the chimney; broke into the
schoolhouse at night, in spite of its formidable fastenings of withe
and window stakes, and turned everything topsy-turvy, so that the poor
schoolmaster began to think all the witches in the country held
their meetings there. But what was still more annoying, Brom took all
opportunities of turning him into ridicule in presence of his mistress,
and had a scoundrel dog whom he taught to whine in the most ludicrous
manner, and introduced as a rival of Ichabod’s, to instruct her in
psalmody.

In this way matters went on for some time, without producing any
material effect on the relative situations of the contending powers. On
a fine autumnal afternoon, Ichabod, in pensive mood, sat enthroned on
the lofty stool from whence he usually watched all the concerns of his
little literary realm. In his hand he swayed a ferule, that sceptre of
despotic power; the birch of justice reposed on three nails behind the
throne, a constant terror to evil doers, while on the desk before
him might be seen sundry contraband articles and prohibited weapons,
detected upon the persons of idle urchins, such as half-munched apples,
popguns, whirligigs, fly-cages, and whole legions of rampant little
paper gamecocks. Apparently there had been some appalling act of justice
recently inflicted, for his scholars were all busily intent upon their
books, or slyly whispering behind them with one eye kept upon the
master; and a kind of buzzing stillness reigned throughout the
schoolroom. It was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a negro in
tow-cloth jacket and trowsers, a round-crowned fragment of a hat,
like the cap of Mercury, and mounted on the back of a ragged, wild,
half-broken colt, which he managed with a rope by way of halter. He came
clattering up to the school door with an invitation to Ichabod to attend
a merry-making or “quilting frolic,” to be held that evening at
Mynheer Van Tassel’s; and having delivered his message with that air of
importance, and effort at fine language, which a negro is apt to display
on petty embassies of the kind, he dashed over the brook, and was seen
scampering away up the hollow, full of the importance and hurry of his
mission.

All was now bustle and hubbub in the late quiet schoolroom. The scholars
were hurried through their lessons without stopping at trifles; those
who were nimble skipped over half with impunity, and those who were
tardy had a smart application now and then in the rear, to quicken their
speed or help them over a tall word. Books were flung aside without
being put away on the shelves, inkstands were overturned, benches thrown
down, and the whole school was turned loose an hour before the usual
time, bursting forth like a legion of young imps, yelping and racketing
about the green in joy at their early emancipation.

The gallant Ichabod now spent at least an extra half hour at his toilet,
brushing and furbishing up his best, and indeed only suit of rusty
black, and arranging his locks by a bit of broken looking-glass that
hung up in the schoolhouse. That he might make his appearance before his
mistress in the true style of a cavalier, he borrowed a horse from the
farmer with whom he was domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman of the
name of Hans Van Ripper, and, thus gallantly mounted, issued forth like
a knight-errant in quest of adventures. But it is meet I should, in
the true spirit of romantic story, give some account of the looks
and equipments of my hero and his steed. The animal he bestrode was
a broken-down plow-horse, that had outlived almost everything but its
viciousness. He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck, and a head like
a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burs;
one eye had lost its pupil, and was glaring and spectral, but the other
had the gleam of a genuine devil in it. Still he must have had fire and
mettle in his day, if we may judge from the name he bore of Gunpowder.
He had, in fact, been a favorite steed of his master’s, the choleric Van
Ripper, who was a furious rider, and had infused, very probably, some of
his own spirit into the animal; for, old and broken-down as he looked,
there was more of the lurking devil in him than in any young filly in
the country.

Ichabod was a suitable figure for such a steed. He rode with short
stirrups, which brought his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle;
his sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers’; he carried his whip
perpendicularly in his hand, like a sceptre, and as his horse jogged on,
the motion of his arms was not unlike the flapping of a pair of wings. A
small wool hat rested on the top of his nose, for so his scanty strip of
forehead might be called, and the skirts of his black coat fluttered out
almost to the horses tail. Such was the appearance of Ichabod and his
steed as they shambled out of the gate of Hans Van Ripper, and it was
altogether such an apparition as is seldom to be met with in broad
daylight.

It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and
serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always
associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober
brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped
by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet.
Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the
air; the bark of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech
and hickory-nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from
the neighboring stubble field.

The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In the fullness
of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking from bush to
bush, and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety
around them. There was the honest cock robin, the favorite game of
stripling sportsmen, with its loud querulous note; and the twittering
blackbirds flying in sable clouds; and the golden-winged woodpecker with
his crimson crest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the
cedar bird, with its red-tipt wings and yellow-tipt tail and its little
monteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that noisy coxcomb, in his
gay light blue coat and white underclothes, screaming and chattering,
nodding and bobbing and bowing, and pretending to be on good terms with
every songster of the grove.

As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom
of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly
autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples; some hanging in
oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels
for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press.
Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears
peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes
and hasty-pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning
up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of
the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat
fields breathing the odor of the beehive, and as he beheld them, soft
anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered,
and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand
of Katrina Van Tassel.

Thus feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and “sugared
suppositions,” he journeyed along the sides of a range of hills which
look out upon some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson. The sun
gradually wheeled his broad disk down in the west. The wide bosom of the
Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a
gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant
mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air
to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually
into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the
mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the
precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth
to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering
in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging
uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed
along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the
air.

It was toward evening that Ichabod arrived at the castle of the Heer
Van Tassel, which he found thronged with the pride and flower of the
adjacent country. Old farmers, a spare leathern-faced race, in homespun
coats and breeches, blue stockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter
buckles. Their brisk, withered little dames, in close-crimped caps,
long-waisted short gowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors and
pincushions, and gay calico pockets hanging on the outside. Buxom
lasses, almost as antiquated as their mothers, excepting where a straw
hat, a fine ribbon, or perhaps a white frock, gave symptoms of city
innovation. The sons, in short square-skirted coats, with rows of
stupendous brass buttons, and their hair generally queued in the fashion
of the times, especially if they could procure an eel-skin for the
purpose, it being esteemed throughout the country as a potent nourisher
and strengthener of the hair.

Brom Bones, however, was the hero of the scene, having come to the
gathering on his favorite steed Daredevil, a creature, like himself,
full of mettle and mischief, and which no one but himself could manage.
He was, in fact, noted for preferring vicious animals, given to all
kinds of tricks which kept the rider in constant risk of his neck, for
he held a tractable, well-broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit.

Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon
the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered the state parlor of Van
Tassel’s mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses, with their
luxurious display of red and white; but the ample charms of a genuine
Dutch country tea-table, in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped up
platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only
to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the
tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and
short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of
cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies;
besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes
of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention
broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and
cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated
them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the
midst--Heaven bless the mark! I want breath and time to discuss this
banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story.
Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but
did ample justice to every dainty.

He was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated in proportion
as his skin was filled with good cheer, and whose spirits rose with
eating, as some men’s do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his
large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that
he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury
and splendor. Then, he thought, how soon he’d turn his back upon the old
schoolhouse; snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every
other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors
that should dare to call him comrade!

Old Baltus Van Tassel moved about among his guests with a face dilated
with content and good humor, round and jolly as the harvest moon. His
hospitable attentions were brief, but expressive, being confined to a
shake of the hand, a slap on the shoulder, a loud laugh, and a pressing
invitation to “fall to, and help themselves.”

And now the sound of the music from the common room, or hall, summoned
to the dance. The musician was an old gray-headed negro, who had
been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for more than half a
century. His instrument was as old and battered as himself. The greater
part of the time he scraped on two or three strings, accompanying every
movement of the bow with a motion of the head; bowing almost to the
ground, and stamping with his foot whenever a fresh couple were to
start.

Ichabod prided himself upon his dancing as much as upon his vocal
powers. Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle; and to have seen his
loosely hung frame in full motion, and clattering about the room, you
would have thought St. Vitus himself, that blessed patron of the dance,
was figuring before you in person. He was the admiration of all the
negroes; who, having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm
and the neighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black faces at
every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene, rolling their
white eyeballs, and showing grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear. How
could the flogger of urchins be otherwise than animated and joyous? The
lady of his heart was his partner in the dance, and smiling graciously
in reply to all his amorous oglings; while Brom Bones, sorely smitten
with love and jealousy, sat brooding by himself in one corner.

When the dance was at an end, Ichabod was attracted to a knot of the
sager folks, who, with Old Van Tassel, sat smoking at one end of the
piazza, gossiping over former times, and drawing out long stories about
the war.

This neighborhood, at the time of which I am speaking, was one of those
highly favored places which abound with chronicle and great men. The
British and American line had run near it during the war; it had,
therefore, been the scene of marauding and infested with refugees,
cowboys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had
elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little
becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to
make himself the hero of every exploit.

There was the story of Doffue Martling, a large blue-bearded Dutchman,
who had nearly taken a British frigate with an old iron nine-pounder
from a mud breastwork, only that his gun burst at the sixth discharge.
And there was an old gentleman who shall be nameless, being too rich
a mynheer to be lightly mentioned, who, in the battle of White Plains,
being an excellent master of defence, parried a musket-ball with a small
sword, insomuch that he absolutely felt it whiz round the blade, and
glance off at the hilt; in proof of which he was ready at any time to
show the sword, with the hilt a little bent. There were several more
that had been equally great in the field, not one of whom but was
persuaded that he had a considerable hand in bringing the war to a happy
termination.

But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that
succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the
kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered,
long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting
throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides,
there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they
have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in
their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from
the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their
rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the
reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established
Dutch communities.

The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories
in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow.
There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted
region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting
all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at
Van Tassel’s, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful
legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning
cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the
unfortunate Major André was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood.
Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the
dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights
before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the
stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the
Headless Horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling
the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the
graves in the churchyard.

The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a
favorite haunt of troubled spirits. It stands on a knoll, surrounded by
locust-trees and lofty elms, from among which its decent, whitewashed
walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the
shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet
of water, bordered by high trees, between which, peeps may be caught at
the blue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard, where
the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at
least the dead might rest in peace. On one side of the church extends a
wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook among broken rocks and
trunks of fallen trees. Over a deep black part of the stream, not far
from the church, was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led
to it, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhanging trees,
which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime; but occasioned a
fearful darkness at night. Such was one of the favorite haunts of
the Headless Horseman, and the place where he was most frequently
encountered. The tale was told of old Brouwer, a most heretical
disbeliever in ghosts, how he met the Horseman returning from his foray
into Sleepy Hollow, and was obliged to get up behind him; how they
galloped over bush and brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached
the bridge; when the Horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw old
Brouwer into the brook, and sprang away over the tree-tops with a clap
of thunder.

This story was immediately matched by a thrice marvellous adventure of
Brom Bones, who made light of the Galloping Hessian as an arrant jockey.
He affirmed that on returning one night from the neighboring village of
Sing Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had
offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won it
too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but just as they
came to the church bridge, the Hessian bolted, and vanished in a flash
of fire.

All these tales, told in that drowsy undertone with which men talk in
the dark, the countenances of the listeners only now and then receiving
a casual gleam from the glare of a pipe, sank deep in the mind of
Ichabod. He repaid them in kind with large extracts from his invaluable
author, Cotton Mather, and added many marvellous events that had taken
place in his native State of Connecticut, and fearful sights which he
had seen in his nightly walks about Sleepy Hollow.

The revel now gradually broke up. The old farmers gathered together
their families in their wagons, and were heard for some time rattling
along the hollow roads, and over the distant hills. Some of the
damsels mounted on pillions behind their favorite swains, and their
light-hearted laughter, mingling with the clatter of hoofs, echoed along
the silent woodlands, sounding fainter and fainter, until they gradually
died away,--and the late scene of noise and frolic was all silent and
deserted. Ichabod only lingered behind, according to the custom of
country lovers, to have a tête-à-tête with the heiress; fully convinced
that he was now on the high road to success. What passed at this
interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know.
Something, however, I fear me, must have gone wrong, for he certainly
sallied forth, after no very great interval, with an air quite desolate
and chapfallen. Oh, these women! these women! Could that girl have been
playing off any of her coquettish tricks? Was her encouragement of the
poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival?
Heaven only knows, not I! Let it suffice to say, Ichabod stole forth
with the air of one who had been sacking a henroost, rather than a fair
lady’s heart. Without looking to the right or left to notice the scene
of rural wealth, on which he had so often gloated, he went straight to
the stable, and with several hearty cuffs and kicks roused his steed
most uncourteously from the comfortable quarters in which he was soundly
sleeping, dreaming of mountains of corn and oats, and whole valleys of
timothy and clover.

It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod, heavy-hearted and
crestfallen, pursued his travels homewards, along the sides of the
lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, and which he had traversed so
cheerily in the afternoon. The hour was as dismal as himself. Far below
him the Tappan Zee spread its dusky and indistinct waste of waters, with
here and there the tall mast of a sloop, riding quietly at anchor under
the land. In the dead hush of midnight, he could even hear the barking
of the watchdog from the opposite shore of the Hudson; but it was
so vague and faint as only to give an idea of his distance from this
faithful companion of man. Now and then, too, the long-drawn crowing
of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some
farmhouse away among the hills--but it was like a dreaming sound in his
ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy
chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog from a
neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and turning suddenly in
his bed.

All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon
now came crowding upon his recollection. The night grew darker and
darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds
occasionally hid them from his sight. He had never felt so lonely and
dismal. He was, moreover, approaching the very place where many of the
scenes of the ghost stories had been laid. In the centre of the road
stood an enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant above all the
other trees of the neighborhood, and formed a kind of landmark. Its
limbs were gnarled and fantastic, large enough to form trunks for
ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into
the air. It was connected with the tragical story of the unfortunate
André, who had been taken prisoner hard by; and was universally known
by the name of Major André’s tree. The common people regarded it with a
mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for the
fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales of strange
sights, and doleful lamentations, told concerning it.

As Ichabod approached this fearful tree, he began to whistle; he thought
his whistle was answered; it was but a blast sweeping sharply through
the dry branches. As he approached a little nearer, he thought he saw
something white, hanging in the midst of the tree: he paused and ceased
whistling but, on looking more narrowly, perceived that it was a place
where the tree had been scathed by lightning, and the white wood laid
bare. Suddenly he heard a groan--his teeth chattered, and his knees
smote against the saddle: it was but the rubbing of one huge bough upon
another, as they were swayed about by the breeze. He passed the tree in
safety, but new perils lay before him.

About two hundred yards from the tree, a small brook crossed the road,
and ran into a marshy and thickly-wooded glen, known by the name of
Wiley’s Swamp. A few rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge
over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the
wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines,
threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest
trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate André was
captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vines were the
sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. This has ever since been
considered a haunted stream, and fearful are the feelings of the
schoolboy who has to pass it alone after dark.

As he approached the stream, his heart began to thump; he summoned up,
however, all his resolution, gave his horse half a score of kicks in the
ribs, and attempted to dash briskly across the bridge; but instead of
starting forward, the perverse old animal made a lateral movement, and
ran broadside against the fence. Ichabod, whose fears increased with the
delay, jerked the reins on the other side, and kicked lustily with the
contrary foot: it was all in vain; his steed started, it is true, but
it was only to plunge to the opposite side of the road into a thicket of
brambles and alder bushes. The schoolmaster now bestowed both whip and
heel upon the starveling ribs of old Gunpowder, who dashed forward,
snuffling and snorting, but came to a stand just by the bridge, with a
suddenness that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head.
Just at this moment a plashy tramp by the side of the bridge caught the
sensitive ear of Ichabod. In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin
of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen and towering. It
stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic
monster ready to spring upon the traveller.

The hair of the affrighted pedagogue rose upon his head with terror.
What was to be done? To turn and fly was now too late; and besides,
what chance was there of escaping ghost or goblin, if such it was, which
could ride upon the wings of the wind? Summoning up, therefore, a
show of courage, he demanded in stammering accents, “Who are you?”
 He received no reply. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated
voice. Still there was no answer. Once more he cudgelled the sides
of the inflexible Gunpowder, and, shutting his eyes, broke forth with
involuntary fervor into a psalm tune. Just then the shadowy object of
alarm put itself in motion, and with a scramble and a bound stood at
once in the middle of the road. Though the night was dark and dismal,
yet the form of the unknown might now in some degree be ascertained. He
appeared to be a horseman of large dimensions, and mounted on a black
horse of powerful frame. He made no offer of molestation or sociability,
but kept aloof on one side of the road, jogging along on the blind side
of old Gunpowder, who had now got over his fright and waywardness.

Ichabod, who had no relish for this strange midnight companion, and
bethought himself of the adventure of Brom Bones with the Galloping
Hessian, now quickened his steed in hopes of leaving him behind. The
stranger, however, quickened his horse to an equal pace. Ichabod pulled
up, and fell into a walk, thinking to lag behind,--the other did the
same. His heart began to sink within him; he endeavored to resume his
psalm tune, but his parched tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and
he could not utter a stave. There was something in the moody and
dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and
appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On mounting a rising
ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief
against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was
horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!--but his horror was
still more increased on observing that the head, which should have
rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his
saddle! His terror rose to desperation; he rained a shower of kicks and
blows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion
the slip; but the spectre started full jump with him. Away, then, they
dashed through thick and thin; stones flying and sparks flashing at
every bound. Ichabod’s flimsy garments fluttered in the air, as
he stretched his long lank body away over his horse’s head, in the
eagerness of his flight.

They had now reached the road which turns off to Sleepy Hollow; but
Gunpowder, who seemed possessed with a demon, instead of keeping up it,
made an opposite turn, and plunged headlong downhill to the left. This
road leads through a sandy hollow shaded by trees for about a quarter
of a mile, where it crosses the bridge famous in goblin story; and just
beyond swells the green knoll on which stands the whitewashed church.

As yet the panic of the steed had given his unskilful rider an apparent
advantage in the chase, but just as he had got half way through the
hollow, the girths of the saddle gave way, and he felt it slipping from
under him. He seized it by the pommel, and endeavored to hold it firm,
but in vain; and had just time to save himself by clasping old Gunpowder
round the neck, when the saddle fell to the earth, and he heard it
trampled under foot by his pursuer. For a moment the terror of Hans Van
Ripper’s wrath passed across his mind,--for it was his Sunday saddle;
but this was no time for petty fears; the goblin was hard on his
haunches; and (unskilful rider that he was!) he had much ado to maintain
his seat; sometimes slipping on one side, sometimes on another, and
sometimes jolted on the high ridge of his horse’s backbone, with a
violence that he verily feared would cleave him asunder.

An opening in the trees now cheered him with the hopes that the church
bridge was at hand. The wavering reflection of a silver star in the
bosom of the brook told him that he was not mistaken. He saw the walls
of the church dimly glaring under the trees beyond. He recollected the
place where Brom Bones’s ghostly competitor had disappeared. “If I can
but reach that bridge,” thought Ichabod, “I am safe.” Just then he heard
the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied
that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kick in the ribs, and
old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; he thundered over the resounding
planks; he gained the opposite side; and now Ichabod cast a look behind
to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of
fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups,
and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to
dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium
with a tremendous crash,--he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and
Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider, passed by like a
whirlwind.

The next morning the old horse was found without his saddle, and with
the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master’s
gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast; dinner-hour
came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the schoolhouse, and
strolled idly about the banks of the brook; but no schoolmaster. Hans
Van Ripper now began to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor
Ichabod, and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent
investigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading
to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of
horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed,
were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of
the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the
unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.

The brook was searched, but the body of the schoolmaster was not to
be discovered. Hans Van Ripper as executor of his estate, examined the
bundle which contained all his worldly effects. They consisted of two
shirts and a half; two stocks for the neck; a pair or two of worsted
stockings; an old pair of corduroy small-clothes; a rusty razor; a book
of psalm tunes full of dog’s-ears; and a broken pitch-pipe. As to the
books and furniture of the schoolhouse, they belonged to the community,
excepting Cotton Mather’s “History of Witchcraft,” a “New England
Almanac,” and a book of dreams and fortune-telling; in which last was
a sheet of foolscap much scribbled and blotted in several fruitless
attempts to make a copy of verses in honor of the heiress of Van Tassel.
These magic books and the poetic scrawl were forthwith consigned to the
flames by Hans Van Ripper; who, from that time forward, determined to
send his children no more to school, observing that he never knew
any good come of this same reading and writing. Whatever money the
schoolmaster possessed, and he had received his quarter’s pay but a
day or two before, he must have had about his person at the time of his
disappearance.

The mysterious event caused much speculation at the church on the
following Sunday. Knots of gazers and gossips were collected in the
churchyard, at the bridge, and at the spot where the hat and pumpkin
had been found. The stories of Brouwer, of Bones, and a whole budget of
others were called to mind; and when they had diligently considered them
all, and compared them with the symptoms of the present case, they shook
their heads, and came to the conclusion that Ichabod had been carried
off by the Galloping Hessian. As he was a bachelor, and in nobody’s
debt, nobody troubled his head any more about him; the school was
removed to a different quarter of the hollow, and another pedagogue
reigned in his stead.

It is true, an old farmer, who had been down to New York on a visit
several years after, and from whom this account of the ghostly adventure
was received, brought home the intelligence that Ichabod Crane was still
alive; that he had left the neighborhood partly through fear of the
goblin and Hans Van Ripper, and partly in mortification at having been
suddenly dismissed by the heiress; that he had changed his quarters to a
distant part of the country; had kept school and studied law at the same
time; had been admitted to the bar; turned politician; electioneered;
written for the newspapers; and finally had been made a justice of
the Ten Pound Court. Brom Bones, too, who, shortly after his rival’s
disappearance conducted the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar,
was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod
was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the
pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter
than he chose to tell.

The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these
matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by
supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often told about the
neighborhood round the winter evening fire. The bridge became more than
ever an object of superstitious awe; and that may be the reason why the
road has been altered of late years, so as to approach the church by
the border of the millpond. The schoolhouse being deserted soon fell to
decay, and was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the unfortunate
pedagogue and the plowboy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening,
has often fancied his voice at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm
tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.



POSTSCRIPT.

FOUND IN THE HANDWRITING OF MR. KNICKERBOCKER.

The preceding tale is given almost in the precise words in which I
heard it related at a Corporation meeting at the ancient city of
Manhattoes, at which were present many of its sagest and most
illustrious burghers. The narrator was a pleasant, shabby, gentlemanly
old fellow, in pepper-and-salt clothes, with a sadly humourous face,
and one whom I strongly suspected of being poor--he made such efforts
to be entertaining. When his story was concluded, there was much
laughter and approbation, particularly from two or three deputy
aldermen, who had been asleep the greater part of the time. There was,
however, one tall, dry-looking old gentleman, with beetling eyebrows,
who maintained a grave and rather severe face throughout, now and then
folding his arms, inclining his head, and looking down upon the floor,
as if turning a doubt over in his mind. He was one of your wary men,
who never laugh but upon good grounds--when they have reason and law on
their side. When the mirth of the rest of the company had subsided, and
silence was restored, he leaned one arm on the elbow of his chair, and
sticking the other akimbo, demanded, with a slight, but exceedingly
sage motion of the head, and contraction of the brow, what was the
moral of the story, and what it went to prove?

The story-teller, who was just putting a glass of wine to his lips, as
a refreshment after his toils, paused for a moment, looked at his
inquirer with an air of infinite deference, and, lowering the glass
slowly to the table, observed that the story was intended most
logically to prove--

“That there is no situation in life but has its advantages and
pleasures--provided we will but take a joke as we find it:

“That, therefore, he that runs races with goblin troopers is likely to
have rough riding of it.

“Ergo, for a country schoolmaster to be refused the hand of a Dutch
heiress is a certain step to high preferment in the state.”

The cautious old gentleman knit his brows tenfold closer after this
explanation, being sorely puzzled by the ratiocination of the
syllogism, while, methought, the one in pepper-and-salt eyed him with
something of a triumphant leer. At length he observed that all this was
very well, but still he thought the story a little on the
extravagant--there were one or two points on which he had his doubts.

“Faith, sir,” replied the story-teller, “as to that matter, I don’t
believe one-half of it myself.”  D. K.

THE END.




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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release Date: June 9, 2008 [EBook #174]
[This file last updated on July 2, 2011]
[This file last updated on July 23, 2014]


Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ***




Produced by Judith Boss.  HTML version by Al Haines.










The Picture of Dorian Gray

by

Oscar Wilde




THE PREFACE

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.  To reveal art and
conceal the artist is art's aim.  The critic is he who can translate
into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful
things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming.  This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated.  For these there is hope.  They are the elect to whom
beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well
written, or badly written.  That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing
his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass.  The moral life of man forms part
of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists
in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.  No artist desires to prove
anything.  Even things that are true can be proved.  No artist has
ethical sympathies.  An ethical sympathy in an artist is an
unpardonable mannerism of style.  No artist is ever morbid.  The artist
can express everything.  Thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art.  Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for
an art.  From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is
the art of the musician.  From the point of view of feeling, the
actor's craft is the type.  All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.  Those who read
the symbol do so at their peril.  It is the spectator, and not life,
that art really mirrors.  Diversity of opinion about a work of art
shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.  When critics disagree,
the artist is in accord with himself.  We can forgive a man for making
a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.  The only excuse for
making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

               All art is quite useless.

                            OSCAR WILDE




CHAPTER 1

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light
summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through
the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate
perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was
lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry
Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured
blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to
bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then
the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long
tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window,
producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of
those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of
an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of
swiftness and motion.  The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their
way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous
insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine,
seemed to make the stillness more oppressive.  The dim roar of London
was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist
himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago
caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many
strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so
skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his
face, and seemed about to linger there.  But he suddenly started up,
and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he
sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he
feared he might awake.

"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said
Lord Henry languidly.  "You must certainly send it next year to the
Grosvenor.  The Academy is too large and too vulgar.  Whenever I have
gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been
able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that
I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.  The Grosvenor
is really the only place."

"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head
back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at
Oxford.  "No, I won't send it anywhere."

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through
the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls
from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette.  "Not send it anywhere?  My
dear fellow, why?  Have you any reason?  What odd chaps you painters
are!  You do anything in the world to gain a reputation.  As soon as
you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.  It is silly of you,
for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
and that is not being talked about.  A portrait like this would set you
far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite
jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."

"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit
it.  I have put too much of myself into it."

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

"Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same."

"Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you
were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with
your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young
Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why,
my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an
intellectual expression and all that.  But beauty, real beauty, ends
where an intellectual expression begins.  Intellect is in itself a mode
of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.  The moment one
sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something
horrid.  Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.
How perfectly hideous they are!  Except, of course, in the Church.  But
then in the Church they don't think.  A bishop keeps on saying at the
age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen,
and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but
whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks.  I feel quite sure of
that.  He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always
here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in
summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.  Don't flatter
yourself, Basil:  you are not in the least like him."

"You don't understand me, Harry," answered the artist.  "Of course I am
not like him.  I know that perfectly well.  Indeed, I should be sorry
to look like him.  You shrug your shoulders?  I am telling you the
truth.  There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual
distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the
faltering steps of kings.  It is better not to be different from one's
fellows.  The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.
They can sit at their ease and gape at the play.  If they know nothing
of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.  They
live as we all should live--undisturbed, indifferent, and without
disquiet.  They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it
from alien hands.  Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they
are--my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks--we
shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."

"Dorian Gray?  Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across the
studio towards Basil Hallward.

"Yes, that is his name.  I didn't intend to tell it to you."

"But why not?"

"Oh, I can't explain.  When I like people immensely, I never tell their
names to any one.  It is like surrendering a part of them.  I have
grown to love secrecy.  It seems to be the one thing that can make
modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.  The commonest thing is
delightful if one only hides it.  When I leave town now I never tell my
people where I am going.  If I did, I would lose all my pleasure.  It
is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great
deal of romance into one's life.  I suppose you think me awfully
foolish about it?"

"Not at all," answered Lord Henry, "not at all, my dear Basil.  You
seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that
it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.  I
never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing.
When we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go
down to the Duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the
most serious faces.  My wife is very good at it--much better, in fact,
than I am.  She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do.
But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all.  I sometimes
wish she would; but she merely laughs at me."

"I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry," said Basil
Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden.  "I
believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are
thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues.  You are an extraordinary
fellow.  You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.
Your cynicism is simply a pose."

"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,"
cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the
garden together and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that
stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush.  The sunlight slipped over
the polished leaves.  In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.

After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch.  "I am afraid I must be
going, Basil," he murmured, "and before I go, I insist on your
answering a question I put to you some time ago."

"What is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.

"You know quite well."

"I do not, Harry."

"Well, I will tell you what it is.  I want you to explain to me why you
won't exhibit Dorian Gray's picture.  I want the real reason."

"I told you the real reason."

"No, you did not.  You said it was because there was too much of
yourself in it.  Now, that is childish."

"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every
portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not
of the sitter.  The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.  It is
not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on
the coloured canvas, reveals himself.  The reason I will not exhibit
this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of
my own soul."

Lord Henry laughed.  "And what is that?" he asked.

"I will tell you," said Hallward; but an expression of perplexity came
over his face.

"I am all expectation, Basil," continued his companion, glancing at him.

"Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry," answered the painter;
"and I am afraid you will hardly understand it.  Perhaps you will
hardly believe it."

Lord Henry smiled, and leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from
the grass and examined it.  "I am quite sure I shall understand it," he
replied, gazing intently at the little golden, white-feathered disk,
"and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it
is quite incredible."

The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy
lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the
languid air.  A grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a
blue thread a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze
wings.  Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart
beating, and wondered what was coming.

"The story is simply this," said the painter after some time.  "Two
months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon's. You know we poor
artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to
remind the public that we are not savages.  With an evening coat and a
white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain
a reputation for being civilized.  Well, after I had been in the room
about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious
academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at
me.  I turned half-way round and saw Dorian Gray for the first time.
When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale.  A curious sensation
of terror came over me.  I knew that I had come face to face with some
one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to
do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art
itself.  I did not want any external influence in my life.  You know
yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature.  I have always been my
own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray.
Then--but I don't know how to explain it to you.  Something seemed to
tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life.  I had
a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and
exquisite sorrows.  I grew afraid and turned to quit the room.  It was
not conscience that made me do so:  it was a sort of cowardice.  I take
no credit to myself for trying to escape."

"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil.
Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.  That is all."

"I don't believe that, Harry, and I don't believe you do either.
However, whatever was my motive--and it may have been pride, for I used
to be very proud--I certainly struggled to the door.  There, of course,
I stumbled against Lady Brandon.  'You are not going to run away so
soon, Mr. Hallward?' she screamed out.  You know her curiously shrill
voice?"

"Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry,
pulling the daisy to bits with his long nervous fingers.

"I could not get rid of her.  She brought me up to royalties, and
people with stars and garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras
and parrot noses.  She spoke of me as her dearest friend.  I had only
met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me.  I
believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at
least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the
nineteenth-century standard of immortality.  Suddenly I found myself
face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely
stirred me.  We were quite close, almost touching.  Our eyes met again.
It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him.
Perhaps it was not so reckless, after all.  It was simply inevitable.
We would have spoken to each other without any introduction.  I am sure
of that.  Dorian told me so afterwards.  He, too, felt that we were
destined to know each other."

"And how did Lady Brandon describe this wonderful young man?" asked his
companion.  "I know she goes in for giving a rapid _precis_ of all her
guests.  I remember her bringing me up to a truculent and red-faced old
gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my
ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to
everybody in the room, the most astounding details.  I simply fled.  I
like to find out people for myself.  But Lady Brandon treats her guests
exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods.  She either explains them
entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants
to know."

"Poor Lady Brandon!  You are hard on her, Harry!" said Hallward
listlessly.

"My dear fellow, she tried to found a _salon_, and only succeeded in
opening a restaurant.  How could I admire her?  But tell me, what did
she say about Mr. Dorian Gray?"

"Oh, something like, 'Charming boy--poor dear mother and I absolutely
inseparable.  Quite forget what he does--afraid he--doesn't do
anything--oh, yes, plays the piano--or is it the violin, dear Mr.
Gray?'  Neither of us could help laughing, and we became friends at
once."

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far
the best ending for one," said the young lord, plucking another daisy.

Hallward shook his head.  "You don't understand what friendship is,
Harry," he murmured--"or what enmity is, for that matter.  You like
every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."

"How horribly unjust of you!" cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat back
and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelled skeins of
glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the
summer sky.  "Yes; horribly unjust of you.  I make a great difference
between people.  I choose my friends for their good looks, my
acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good
intellects.  A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
I have not got one who is a fool.  They are all men of some
intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.  Is that
very vain of me?  I think it is rather vain."

"I should think it was, Harry.  But according to your category I must
be merely an acquaintance."

"My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance."

"And much less than a friend.  A sort of brother, I suppose?"

"Oh, brothers!  I don't care for brothers.  My elder brother won't die,
and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."

"Harry!" exclaimed Hallward, frowning.

"My dear fellow, I am not quite serious.  But I can't help detesting my
relations.  I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand
other people having the same faults as ourselves.  I quite sympathize
with the rage of the English democracy against what they call the vices
of the upper orders.  The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and
immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of
us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves.  When
poor Southwark got into the divorce court, their indignation was quite
magnificent.  And yet I don't suppose that ten per cent of the
proletariat live correctly."

"I don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is
more, Harry, I feel sure you don't either."

Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard and tapped the toe of his
patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane.  "How English you are
Basil!  That is the second time you have made that observation.  If one
puts forward an idea to a true Englishman--always a rash thing to
do--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong.
The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes
it oneself.  Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do
with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.  Indeed, the
probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely
intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured
by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.  However, I don't
propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you.  I
like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
principles better than anything else in the world.  Tell me more about
Mr. Dorian Gray.  How often do you see him?"

"Every day.  I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day.  He is
absolutely necessary to me."

"How extraordinary!  I thought you would never care for anything but
your art."

"He is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely.  "I sometimes
think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the
world's history.  The first is the appearance of a new medium for art,
and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also.
What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of
Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will
some day be to me.  It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from
him, sketch from him.  Of course, I have done all that.  But he is much
more to me than a model or a sitter.  I won't tell you that I am
dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such
that art cannot express it.  There is nothing that art cannot express,
and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good
work, is the best work of my life.  But in some curious way--I wonder
will you understand me?--his personality has suggested to me an
entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style.  I see
things differently, I think of them differently.  I can now recreate
life in a way that was hidden from me before.  'A dream of form in days
of thought'--who is it who says that?  I forget; but it is what Dorian
Gray has been to me.  The merely visible presence of this lad--for he
seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over
twenty--his merely visible presence--ah!  I wonder can you realize all
that that means?  Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh
school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic
spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek.  The harmony of
soul and body--how much that is!  We in our madness have separated the
two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is
void.  Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me!  You remember
that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price
but which I would not part with?  It is one of the best things I have
ever done.  And why is it so?  Because, while I was painting it, Dorian
Gray sat beside me.  Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and
for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I
had always looked for and always missed."

"Basil, this is extraordinary!  I must see Dorian Gray."

Hallward got up from the seat and walked up and down the garden.  After
some time he came back.  "Harry," he said, "Dorian Gray is to me simply
a motive in art.  You might see nothing in him.  I see everything in
him.  He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is
there.  He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner.  I find
him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of
certain colours.  That is all."

"Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked Lord Henry.

"Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of
all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never
cared to speak to him.  He knows nothing about it.  He shall never know
anything about it.  But the world might guess it, and I will not bare
my soul to their shallow prying eyes.  My heart shall never be put
under their microscope.  There is too much of myself in the thing,
Harry--too much of myself!"

"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are.  They know how useful passion
is for publication.  Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

"I hate them for it," cried Hallward.  "An artist should create
beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.  We
live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of
autobiography.  We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.  Some day I
will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall
never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."

"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you.  It is only
the intellectually lost who ever argue.  Tell me, is Dorian Gray very
fond of you?"

The painter considered for a few moments.  "He likes me," he answered
after a pause; "I know he likes me.  Of course I flatter him
dreadfully.  I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I
know I shall be sorry for having said.  As a rule, he is charming to
me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things.  Now and
then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real
delight in giving me pain.  Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away
my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put
in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a
summer's day."

"Days in summer, Basil, are apt to linger," murmured Lord Henry.
"Perhaps you will tire sooner than he will.  It is a sad thing to think
of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.  That
accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate
ourselves.  In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have
something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and
facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.  The thoroughly
well-informed man--that is the modern ideal.  And the mind of the
thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing.  It is like a
_bric-a-brac_ shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
its proper value.  I think you will tire first, all the same.  Some day
you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little
out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something.
You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think
that he has behaved very badly to you.  The next time he calls, you
will be perfectly cold and indifferent.  It will be a great pity, for
it will alter you.  What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance
of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind
is that it leaves one so unromantic."

"Harry, don't talk like that.  As long as I live, the personality of
Dorian Gray will dominate me.  You can't feel what I feel.  You change
too often."

"Ah, my dear Basil, that is exactly why I can feel it.  Those who are
faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who
know love's tragedies."  And Lord Henry struck a light on a dainty
silver case and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and
satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase.  There was
a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy,
and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like
swallows.  How pleasant it was in the garden!  And how delightful other
people's emotions were!--much more delightful than their ideas, it
seemed to him.  One's own soul, and the passions of one's
friends--those were the fascinating things in life.  He pictured to
himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed
by staying so long with Basil Hallward.  Had he gone to his aunt's, he
would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole
conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the
necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the
importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity
in their own lives.  The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift,
and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.  It was
charming to have escaped all that!  As he thought of his aunt, an idea
seemed to strike him.  He turned to Hallward and said, "My dear fellow,
I have just remembered."

"Remembered what, Harry?"

"Where I heard the name of Dorian Gray."

"Where was it?" asked Hallward, with a slight frown.

"Don't look so angry, Basil.  It was at my aunt, Lady Agatha's.  She
told me she had discovered a wonderful young man who was going to help
her in the East End, and that his name was Dorian Gray.  I am bound to
state that she never told me he was good-looking. Women have no
appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.  She said
that he was very earnest and had a beautiful nature.  I at once
pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horribly
freckled, and tramping about on huge feet.  I wish I had known it was
your friend."

"I am very glad you didn't, Harry."

"Why?"

"I don't want you to meet him."

"You don't want me to meet him?"

"No."

"Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming into
the garden.

"You must introduce me now," cried Lord Henry, laughing.

The painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight.
"Ask Mr. Gray to wait, Parker:  I shall be in in a few moments." The
man bowed and went up the walk.

Then he looked at Lord Henry.  "Dorian Gray is my dearest friend," he
said.  "He has a simple and a beautiful nature.  Your aunt was quite
right in what she said of him.  Don't spoil him.  Don't try to
influence him.  Your influence would be bad.  The world is wide, and
has many marvellous people in it.  Don't take away from me the one
person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses:  my life as an
artist depends on him.  Mind, Harry, I trust you."  He spoke very
slowly, and the words seemed wrung out of him almost against his will.

"What nonsense you talk!" said Lord Henry, smiling, and taking Hallward
by the arm, he almost led him into the house.



CHAPTER 2

As they entered they saw Dorian Gray.  He was seated at the piano, with
his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann's
"Forest Scenes."  "You must lend me these, Basil," he cried.  "I want
to learn them.  They are perfectly charming."

"That entirely depends on how you sit to-day, Dorian."

"Oh, I am tired of sitting, and I don't want a life-sized portrait of
myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool in a
wilful, petulant manner.  When he caught sight of Lord Henry, a faint
blush coloured his cheeks for a moment, and he started up.  "I beg your
pardon, Basil, but I didn't know you had any one with you."

"This is Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian, an old Oxford friend of mine.  I
have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now you
have spoiled everything."

"You have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Gray," said Lord
Henry, stepping forward and extending his hand.  "My aunt has often
spoken to me about you.  You are one of her favourites, and, I am
afraid, one of her victims also."

"I am in Lady Agatha's black books at present," answered Dorian with a
funny look of penitence.  "I promised to go to a club in Whitechapel
with her last Tuesday, and I really forgot all about it.  We were to
have played a duet together--three duets, I believe.  I don't know what
she will say to me.  I am far too frightened to call."

"Oh, I will make your peace with my aunt.  She is quite devoted to you.
And I don't think it really matters about your not being there.  The
audience probably thought it was a duet.  When Aunt Agatha sits down to
the piano, she makes quite enough noise for two people."

"That is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered Dorian,
laughing.

Lord Henry looked at him.  Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome,
with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp
gold hair.  There was something in his face that made one trust him at
once.  All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's
passionate purity.  One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from
the world.  No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.

"You are too charming to go in for philanthropy, Mr. Gray--far too
charming." And Lord Henry flung himself down on the divan and opened
his cigarette-case.

The painter had been busy mixing his colours and getting his brushes
ready.  He was looking worried, and when he heard Lord Henry's last
remark, he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said,
"Harry, I want to finish this picture to-day. Would you think it
awfully rude of me if I asked you to go away?"

Lord Henry smiled and looked at Dorian Gray.  "Am I to go, Mr. Gray?"
he asked.

"Oh, please don't, Lord Henry.  I see that Basil is in one of his sulky
moods, and I can't bear him when he sulks.  Besides, I want you to tell
me why I should not go in for philanthropy."

"I don't know that I shall tell you that, Mr. Gray.  It is so tedious a
subject that one would have to talk seriously about it.  But I
certainly shall not run away, now that you have asked me to stop.  You
don't really mind, Basil, do you?  You have often told me that you
liked your sitters to have some one to chat to."

Hallward bit his lip.  "If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay.
Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself."

Lord Henry took up his hat and gloves.  "You are very pressing, Basil,
but I am afraid I must go.  I have promised to meet a man at the
Orleans.  Good-bye, Mr. Gray.  Come and see me some afternoon in Curzon
Street.  I am nearly always at home at five o'clock. Write to me when
you are coming.  I should be sorry to miss you."

"Basil," cried Dorian Gray, "if Lord Henry Wotton goes, I shall go,
too.  You never open your lips while you are painting, and it is
horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant.  Ask
him to stay.  I insist upon it."

"Stay, Harry, to oblige Dorian, and to oblige me," said Hallward,
gazing intently at his picture.  "It is quite true, I never talk when I
am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious
for my unfortunate sitters.  I beg you to stay."

"But what about my man at the Orleans?"

The painter laughed.  "I don't think there will be any difficulty about
that.  Sit down again, Harry.  And now, Dorian, get up on the platform,
and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what Lord Henry
says.  He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the
single exception of myself."

Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais with the air of a young Greek
martyr, and made a little _moue_ of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he
had rather taken a fancy.  He was so unlike Basil.  They made a
delightful contrast.  And he had such a beautiful voice.  After a few
moments he said to him, "Have you really a very bad influence, Lord
Henry?  As bad as Basil says?"

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray.  All influence
is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view."

"Why?"

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul.  He does
not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions.  His
virtues are not real to him.  His sins, if there are such things as
sins, are borrowed.  He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an
actor of a part that has not been written for him.  The aim of life is
self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each
of us is here for.  People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.  They
have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to
one's self.  Of course, they are charitable.  They feed the hungry and
clothe the beggar.  But their own souls starve, and are naked.  Courage
has gone out of our race.  Perhaps we never really had it.  The terror
of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is
the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.  And
yet--"

"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good
boy," said the painter, deep in his work and conscious only that a look
had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.

"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with
that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of
him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man
were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to
every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I
believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we
would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the
Hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it
may be.  But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.  The
mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial
that mars our lives.  We are punished for our refusals.  Every impulse
that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.  The body
sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of
purification.  Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure,
or the luxury of a regret.  The only way to get rid of a temptation is
to yield to it.  Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for
the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its
monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.  It has been said that
the great events of the world take place in the brain.  It is in the
brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place
also.  You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your
rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid,
thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping
dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame--"

"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me.  I don't know
what to say.  There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.  Don't
speak.  Let me think.  Or, rather, let me try not to think."

For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips and
eyes strangely bright.  He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh
influences were at work within him.  Yet they seemed to him to have
come really from himself.  The few words that Basil's friend had said
to him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in
them--had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before,
but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.

Music had stirred him like that.  Music had troubled him many times.
But music was not articulate.  It was not a new world, but rather
another chaos, that it created in us.  Words!  Mere words!  How
terrible they were!  How clear, and vivid, and cruel!  One could not
escape from them.  And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!  They
seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to
have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.  Mere
words!  Was there anything so real as words?

Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood.
He understood them now.  Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him.
It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire.  Why had he not
known it?

With his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him.  He knew the precise
psychological moment when to say nothing.  He felt intensely
interested.  He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had
produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen,
a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he
wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through a similar experience.
He had merely shot an arrow into the air.  Had it hit the mark?  How
fascinating the lad was!

Hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that had
the true refinement and perfect delicacy that in art, at any rate comes
only from strength.  He was unconscious of the silence.

"Basil, I am tired of standing," cried Dorian Gray suddenly.  "I must
go out and sit in the garden.  The air is stifling here."

"My dear fellow, I am so sorry.  When I am painting, I can't think of
anything else.  But you never sat better.  You were perfectly still.
And I have caught the effect I wanted--the half-parted lips and the
bright look in the eyes.  I don't know what Harry has been saying to
you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression.
I suppose he has been paying you compliments.  You mustn't believe a
word that he says."

"He has certainly not been paying me compliments.  Perhaps that is the
reason that I don't believe anything he has told me."

"You know you believe it all," said Lord Henry, looking at him with his
dreamy languorous eyes.  "I will go out to the garden with you.  It is
horribly hot in the studio.  Basil, let us have something iced to
drink, something with strawberries in it."

"Certainly, Harry.  Just touch the bell, and when Parker comes I will
tell him what you want.  I have got to work up this background, so I
will join you later on.  Don't keep Dorian too long.  I have never been
in better form for painting than I am to-day. This is going to be my
masterpiece.  It is my masterpiece as it stands."

Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his
face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their
perfume as if it had been wine.  He came close to him and put his hand
upon his shoulder.  "You are quite right to do that," he murmured.
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul."

The lad started and drew back.  He was bareheaded, and the leaves had
tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads.
There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are
suddenly awakened.  His finely chiselled nostrils quivered, and some
hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling.

"Yes," continued Lord Henry, "that is one of the great secrets of
life--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means
of the soul.  You are a wonderful creation.  You know more than you
think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away.  He could not help liking
the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him.  His romantic,
olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him.  There was
something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating.
His cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm.  They
moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their
own.  But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid.  Why had
it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?  He had known
Basil Hallward for months, but the friendship between them had never
altered him.  Suddenly there had come some one across his life who
seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery.  And, yet, what was
there to be afraid of?  He was not a schoolboy or a girl.  It was
absurd to be frightened.

"Let us go and sit in the shade," said Lord Henry.  "Parker has brought
out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare, you will be
quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again.  You really must
not allow yourself to become sunburnt.  It would be unbecoming."

"What can it matter?" cried Dorian Gray, laughing, as he sat down on
the seat at the end of the garden.

"It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray."

"Why?"

"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing
worth having."

"I don't feel that, Lord Henry."

"No, you don't feel it now.  Some day, when you are old and wrinkled
and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and
passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you
will feel it terribly.  Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.
Will it always be so? ... You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr.
Gray.  Don't frown.  You have.  And beauty is a form of genius--is
higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.  It is of the
great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the
reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon.  It
cannot be questioned.  It has its divine right of sovereignty.  It
makes princes of those who have it.  You smile?  Ah! when you have lost
it you won't smile.... People say sometimes that beauty is only
superficial.  That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as
thought is.  To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.  It is only
shallow people who do not judge by appearances.  The true mystery of
the world is the visible, not the invisible.... Yes, Mr. Gray, the
gods have been good to you.  But what the gods give they quickly take
away.  You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly,
and fully.  When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then
you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or
have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of
your past will make more bitter than defeats.  Every month as it wanes
brings you nearer to something dreadful.  Time is jealous of you, and
wars against your lilies and your roses.  You will become sallow, and
hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed.  You will suffer horribly.... Ah!
realize your youth while you have it.  Don't squander the gold of your
days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,
or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar.
These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age.  Live!  Live
the wonderful life that is in you!  Let nothing be lost upon you.  Be
always searching for new sensations.  Be afraid of nothing.... A new
Hedonism--that is what our century wants.  You might be its visible
symbol.  With your personality there is nothing you could not do.  The
world belongs to you for a season.... The moment I met you I saw that
you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really
might be.  There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must
tell you something about yourself.  I thought how tragic it would be if
you were wasted.  For there is such a little time that your youth will
last--such a little time.  The common hill-flowers wither, but they
blossom again.  The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.
In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after
year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars.  But we
never get back our youth.  The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty
becomes sluggish.  Our limbs fail, our senses rot.  We degenerate into
hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were
too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the
courage to yield to.  Youth!  Youth!  There is absolutely nothing in
the world but youth!"

Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering.  The spray of lilac fell
from his hand upon the gravel.  A furry bee came and buzzed round it
for a moment.  Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated
globe of the tiny blossoms.  He watched it with that strange interest
in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import
make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we
cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays
sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.  After a time the
bee flew away.  He saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian
convolvulus.  The flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to
and fro.

Suddenly the painter appeared at the door of the studio and made
staccato signs for them to come in.  They turned to each other and
smiled.

"I am waiting," he cried.  "Do come in.  The light is quite perfect,
and you can bring your drinks."

They rose up and sauntered down the walk together.  Two green-and-white
butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree at the corner of
the garden a thrush began to sing.

"You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray," said Lord Henry, looking at
him.

"Yes, I am glad now.  I wonder shall I always be glad?"

"Always!  That is a dreadful word.  It makes me shudder when I hear it.
Women are so fond of using it.  They spoil every romance by trying to
make it last for ever.  It is a meaningless word, too.  The only
difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice
lasts a little longer."

As they entered the studio, Dorian Gray put his hand upon Lord Henry's
arm.  "In that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured,
flushing at his own boldness, then stepped up on the platform and
resumed his pose.

Lord Henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair and watched him.
The sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound that
broke the stillness, except when, now and then, Hallward stepped back
to look at his work from a distance.  In the slanting beams that
streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden.  The
heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything.

After about a quarter of an hour Hallward stopped painting, looked for
a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long time at the picture,
biting the end of one of his huge brushes and frowning.  "It is quite
finished," he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in
long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas.

Lord Henry came over and examined the picture.  It was certainly a
wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well.

"My dear fellow, I congratulate you most warmly," he said.  "It is the
finest portrait of modern times.  Mr. Gray, come over and look at
yourself."

The lad started, as if awakened from some dream.

"Is it really finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform.

"Quite finished," said the painter.  "And you have sat splendidly
to-day. I am awfully obliged to you."

"That is entirely due to me," broke in Lord Henry.  "Isn't it, Mr.
Gray?"

Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture
and turned towards it.  When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks
flushed for a moment with pleasure.  A look of joy came into his eyes,
as if he had recognized himself for the first time.  He stood there
motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to
him, but not catching the meaning of his words.  The sense of his own
beauty came on him like a revelation.  He had never felt it before.
Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the
charming exaggeration of friendship.  He had listened to them, laughed
at them, forgotten them.  They had not influenced his nature.  Then had
come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his
terrible warning of its brevity.  That had stirred him at the time, and
now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full
reality of the description flashed across him.  Yes, there would be a
day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and
colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed.  The scarlet
would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from his hair.  The
life that was to make his soul would mar his body.  He would become
dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.

As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a
knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver.  His eyes
deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears.  He felt
as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.

"Don't you like it?" cried Hallward at last, stung a little by the
lad's silence, not understanding what it meant.

"Of course he likes it," said Lord Henry.  "Who wouldn't like it?  It
is one of the greatest things in modern art.  I will give you anything
you like to ask for it.  I must have it."

"It is not my property, Harry."

"Whose property is it?"

"Dorian's, of course," answered the painter.

"He is a very lucky fellow."

"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon
his own portrait.  "How sad it is!  I shall grow old, and horrible, and
dreadful.  But this picture will remain always young.  It will never be
older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other
way!  If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was
to grow old!  For that--for that--I would give everything!  Yes, there
is nothing in the whole world I would not give!  I would give my soul
for that!"

"You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil," cried Lord
Henry, laughing.  "It would be rather hard lines on your work."

"I should object very strongly, Harry," said Hallward.

Dorian Gray turned and looked at him.  "I believe you would, Basil.
You like your art better than your friends.  I am no more to you than a
green bronze figure.  Hardly as much, I dare say."

The painter stared in amazement.  It was so unlike Dorian to speak like
that.  What had happened?  He seemed quite angry.  His face was flushed
and his cheeks burning.

"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your
silver Faun.  You will like them always.  How long will you like me?
Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose.  I know, now, that when one
loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
Your picture has taught me that.  Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right.
Youth is the only thing worth having.  When I find that I am growing
old, I shall kill myself."

Hallward turned pale and caught his hand.  "Dorian!  Dorian!" he cried,
"don't talk like that.  I have never had such a friend as you, and I
shall never have such another.  You are not jealous of material things,
are you?--you who are finer than any of them!"

"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.  I am jealous of
the portrait you have painted of me.  Why should it keep what I must
lose?  Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives
something to it.  Oh, if it were only the other way!  If the picture
could change, and I could be always what I am now!  Why did you paint
it?  It will mock me some day--mock me horribly!"  The hot tears welled
into his eyes; he tore his hand away and, flinging himself on the
divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying.

"This is your doing, Harry," said the painter bitterly.

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "It is the real Dorian Gray--that
is all."

"It is not."

"If it is not, what have I to do with it?"

"You should have gone away when I asked you," he muttered.

"I stayed when you asked me," was Lord Henry's answer.

"Harry, I can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between
you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have ever
done, and I will destroy it.  What is it but canvas and colour?  I will
not let it come across our three lives and mar them."

Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid
face and tear-stained eyes, looked at him as he walked over to the deal
painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window.  What
was he doing there?  His fingers were straying about among the litter
of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something.  Yes, it was for
the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel.  He had
found it at last.  He was going to rip up the canvas.

With a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to
Hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of
the studio.  "Don't, Basil, don't!" he cried.  "It would be murder!"

"I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian," said the painter
coldly when he had recovered from his surprise.  "I never thought you
would."

"Appreciate it?  I am in love with it, Basil.  It is part of myself.  I
feel that."

"Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and
sent home.  Then you can do what you like with yourself." And he walked
across the room and rang the bell for tea.  "You will have tea, of
course, Dorian?  And so will you, Harry?  Or do you object to such
simple pleasures?"

"I adore simple pleasures," said Lord Henry.  "They are the last refuge
of the complex.  But I don't like scenes, except on the stage.  What
absurd fellows you are, both of you!  I wonder who it was defined man
as a rational animal.  It was the most premature definition ever given.
Man is many things, but he is not rational.  I am glad he is not, after
all--though I wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture.  You
had much better let me have it, Basil.  This silly boy doesn't really
want it, and I really do."

"If you let any one have it but me, Basil, I shall never forgive you!"
cried Dorian Gray; "and I don't allow people to call me a silly boy."

"You know the picture is yours, Dorian.  I gave it to you before it
existed."

"And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you
don't really object to being reminded that you are extremely young."

"I should have objected very strongly this morning, Lord Henry."

"Ah! this morning!  You have lived since then."

There came a knock at the door, and the butler entered with a laden
tea-tray and set it down upon a small Japanese table.  There was a
rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted Georgian urn.
Two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page.  Dorian Gray
went over and poured out the tea.  The two men sauntered languidly to
the table and examined what was under the covers.

"Let us go to the theatre to-night," said Lord Henry.  "There is sure
to be something on, somewhere.  I have promised to dine at White's, but
it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire to say that I
am ill, or that I am prevented from coming in consequence of a
subsequent engagement.  I think that would be a rather nice excuse:  it
would have all the surprise of candour."

"It is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered Hallward.
"And, when one has them on, they are so horrid."

"Yes," answered Lord Henry dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth
century is detestable.  It is so sombre, so depressing.  Sin is the
only real colour-element left in modern life."

"You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."

"Before which Dorian?  The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the
one in the picture?"

"Before either."

"I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry," said the
lad.

"Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?"

"I can't, really.  I would sooner not.  I have a lot of work to do."

"Well, then, you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray."

"I should like that awfully."

The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture.
"I shall stay with the real Dorian," he said, sadly.

"Is it the real Dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, strolling
across to him.  "Am I really like that?"

"Yes; you are just like that."

"How wonderful, Basil!"

"At least you are like it in appearance.  But it will never alter,"
sighed Hallward.  "That is something."

"What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry.  "Why,
even in love it is purely a question for physiology.  It has nothing to
do with our own will.  Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old
men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say."

"Don't go to the theatre to-night, Dorian," said Hallward.  "Stop and
dine with me."

"I can't, Basil."

"Why?"

"Because I have promised Lord Henry Wotton to go with him."

"He won't like you the better for keeping your promises.  He always
breaks his own.  I beg you not to go."

Dorian Gray laughed and shook his head.

"I entreat you."

The lad hesitated, and looked over at Lord Henry, who was watching them
from the tea-table with an amused smile.

"I must go, Basil," he answered.

"Very well," said Hallward, and he went over and laid down his cup on
the tray.  "It is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had
better lose no time.  Good-bye, Harry.  Good-bye, Dorian.  Come and see
me soon.  Come to-morrow."

"Certainly."

"You won't forget?"

"No, of course not," cried Dorian.

"And ... Harry!"

"Yes, Basil?"

"Remember what I asked you, when we were in the garden this morning."

"I have forgotten it."

"I trust you."

"I wish I could trust myself," said Lord Henry, laughing.  "Come, Mr.
Gray, my hansom is outside, and I can drop you at your own place.
Good-bye, Basil.  It has been a most interesting afternoon."

As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a
sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.



CHAPTER 3

At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon
Street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor, a genial
if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called
selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was
considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him.
His father had been our ambassador at Madrid when Isabella was young
and Prim unthought of, but had retired from the diplomatic service in a
capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at
Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by
reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his dispatches,
and his inordinate passion for pleasure.  The son, who had been his
father's secretary, had resigned along with his chief, somewhat
foolishly as was thought at the time, and on succeeding some months
later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great
aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.  He had two large town
houses, but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble, and
took most of his meals at his club.  He paid some attention to the
management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself
for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of
having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of
burning wood on his own hearth.  In politics he was a Tory, except when
the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them
for being a pack of Radicals.  He was a hero to his valet, who bullied
him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn.
Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the
country was going to the dogs.  His principles were out of date, but
there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.

When Lord Henry entered the room, he found his uncle sitting in a rough
shooting-coat, smoking a cheroot and grumbling over _The Times_.  "Well,
Harry," said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so early?  I
thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till
five."

"Pure family affection, I assure you, Uncle George.  I want to get
something out of you."

"Money, I suppose," said Lord Fermor, making a wry face.  "Well, sit
down and tell me all about it.  Young people, nowadays, imagine that
money is everything."

"Yes," murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; "and
when they grow older they know it.  But I don't want money.  It is only
people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and I never pay
mine.  Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly
upon it.  Besides, I always deal with Dartmoor's tradesmen, and
consequently they never bother me.  What I want is information:  not
useful information, of course; useless information."

"Well, I can tell you anything that is in an English Blue Book, Harry,
although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense.  When I was in
the Diplomatic, things were much better.  But I hear they let them in
now by examination.  What can you expect?  Examinations, sir, are pure
humbug from beginning to end.  If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite
enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him."

"Mr. Dorian Gray does not belong to Blue Books, Uncle George," said
Lord Henry languidly.

"Mr. Dorian Gray?  Who is he?" asked Lord Fermor, knitting his bushy
white eyebrows.

"That is what I have come to learn, Uncle George.  Or rather, I know
who he is.  He is the last Lord Kelso's grandson.  His mother was a
Devereux, Lady Margaret Devereux.  I want you to tell me about his
mother.  What was she like?  Whom did she marry?  You have known nearly
everybody in your time, so you might have known her.  I am very much
interested in Mr. Gray at present.  I have only just met him."

"Kelso's grandson!" echoed the old gentleman.  "Kelso's grandson! ...
Of course.... I knew his mother intimately.  I believe I was at her
christening.  She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Margaret
Devereux, and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless
young fellow--a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern in a foot regiment, or
something of that kind.  Certainly.  I remember the whole thing as if
it happened yesterday.  The poor chap was killed in a duel at Spa a few
months after the marriage.  There was an ugly story about it.  They
said Kelso got some rascally adventurer, some Belgian brute, to insult
his son-in-law in public--paid him, sir, to do it, paid him--and that
the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon.  The thing was
hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone at the club for some
time afterwards.  He brought his daughter back with him, I was told,
and she never spoke to him again.  Oh, yes; it was a bad business.  The
girl died, too, died within a year.  So she left a son, did she?  I had
forgotten that.  What sort of boy is he?  If he is like his mother, he
must be a good-looking chap."

"He is very good-looking," assented Lord Henry.

"I hope he will fall into proper hands," continued the old man.  "He
should have a pot of money waiting for him if Kelso did the right thing
by him.  His mother had money, too.  All the Selby property came to
her, through her grandfather.  Her grandfather hated Kelso, thought him
a mean dog.  He was, too.  Came to Madrid once when I was there.  Egad,
I was ashamed of him.  The Queen used to ask me about the English noble
who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about their fares.  They
made quite a story of it.  I didn't dare show my face at Court for a
month.  I hope he treated his grandson better than he did the jarvies."

"I don't know," answered Lord Henry.  "I fancy that the boy will be
well off.  He is not of age yet.  He has Selby, I know.  He told me so.
And ... his mother was very beautiful?"

"Margaret Devereux was one of the loveliest creatures I ever saw,
Harry.  What on earth induced her to behave as she did, I never could
understand.  She could have married anybody she chose.  Carlington was
mad after her.  She was romantic, though.  All the women of that family
were.  The men were a poor lot, but, egad! the women were wonderful.
Carlington went on his knees to her.  Told me so himself.  She laughed
at him, and there wasn't a girl in London at the time who wasn't after
him.  And by the way, Harry, talking about silly marriages, what is
this humbug your father tells me about Dartmoor wanting to marry an
American?  Ain't English girls good enough for him?"

"It is rather fashionable to marry Americans just now, Uncle George."

"I'll back English women against the world, Harry," said Lord Fermor,
striking the table with his fist.

"The betting is on the Americans."

"They don't last, I am told," muttered his uncle.

"A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a
steeplechase.  They take things flying.  I don't think Dartmoor has a
chance."

"Who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman.  "Has she got any?"

Lord Henry shook his head.  "American girls are as clever at concealing
their parents, as English women are at concealing their past," he said,
rising to go.

"They are pork-packers, I suppose?"

"I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor's sake.  I am told that
pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after
politics."

"Is she pretty?"

"She behaves as if she was beautiful.  Most American women do.  It is
the secret of their charm."

"Why can't these American women stay in their own country?  They are
always telling us that it is the paradise for women."

"It is.  That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively
anxious to get out of it," said Lord Henry.  "Good-bye, Uncle George.
I shall be late for lunch, if I stop any longer.  Thanks for giving me
the information I wanted.  I always like to know everything about my
new friends, and nothing about my old ones."

"Where are you lunching, Harry?"

"At Aunt Agatha's. I have asked myself and Mr. Gray.  He is her latest
_protege_."

"Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with
her charity appeals.  I am sick of them.  Why, the good woman thinks
that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads."

"All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.  It is their
distinguishing characteristic."

The old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his
servant.  Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street
and turned his steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.

So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage.  Crudely as it had
been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a
strange, almost modern romance.  A beautiful woman risking everything
for a mad passion.  A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a
hideous, treacherous crime.  Months of voiceless agony, and then a
child born in pain.  The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to
solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man.  Yes; it was an
interesting background.  It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it
were.  Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something
tragic.  Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might
blow.... And how charming he had been at dinner the night before, as
with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat
opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer
rose the wakening wonder of his face.  Talking to him was like playing
upon an exquisite violin.  He answered to every touch and thrill of the
bow.... There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of
influence.  No other activity was like it.  To project one's soul into
some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's
own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of
passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though
it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in
that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited
and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and
grossly common in its aims.... He was a marvellous type, too, this lad,
whom by so curious a chance he had met in Basil's studio, or could be
fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate.  Grace was his, and the
white purity of boyhood, and beauty such as old Greek marbles kept for
us.  There was nothing that one could not do with him.  He could be
made a Titan or a toy.  What a pity it was that such beauty was
destined to fade! ...  And Basil?  From a psychological point of view,
how interesting he was!  The new manner in art, the fresh mode of
looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence
of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in
dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing
herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for
her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are
wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things
becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value,
as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect
form whose shadow they made real:  how strange it all was!  He
remembered something like it in history.  Was it not Plato, that artist
in thought, who had first analyzed it?  Was it not Buonarotti who had
carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own
century it was strange.... Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray
what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned
the wonderful portrait.  He would seek to dominate him--had already,
indeed, half done so.  He would make that wonderful spirit his own.
There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.

Suddenly he stopped and glanced up at the houses.  He found that he had
passed his aunt's some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back.
When he entered the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they
had gone in to lunch.  He gave one of the footmen his hat and stick and
passed into the dining-room.

"Late as usual, Harry," cried his aunt, shaking her head at him.

He invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next to
her, looked round to see who was there.  Dorian bowed to him shyly from
the end of the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his cheek.
Opposite was the Duchess of Harley, a lady of admirable good-nature and
good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample
architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are
described by contemporary historians as stoutness.  Next to her sat, on
her right, Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical member of Parliament, who
followed his leader in public life and in private life followed the
best cooks, dining with the Tories and thinking with the Liberals, in
accordance with a wise and well-known rule.  The post on her left was
occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable
charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence,
having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he
had to say before he was thirty.  His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur,
one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so
dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book.
Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most
intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a ministerial statement
in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely
earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once
himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of
them ever quite escape.

"We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry," cried the duchess,
nodding pleasantly to him across the table.  "Do you think he will
really marry this fascinating young person?"

"I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess."

"How dreadful!" exclaimed Lady Agatha.  "Really, some one should
interfere."

"I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American
dry-goods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.

"My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas."

"Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising
her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.

"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.

The duchess looked puzzled.

"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha.  "He never means
anything that he says."

"When America was discovered," said the Radical member--and he began to
give some wearisome facts.  Like all people who try to exhaust a
subject, he exhausted his listeners.  The duchess sighed and exercised
her privilege of interruption.  "I wish to goodness it never had been
discovered at all!" she exclaimed.  "Really, our girls have no chance
nowadays.  It is most unfair."

"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr.
Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."

"Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the
duchess vaguely.  "I must confess that most of them are extremely
pretty.  And they dress well, too.  They get all their dresses in
Paris.  I wish I could afford to do the same."

"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir
Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.

"Really!  And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the
duchess.

"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.

Sir Thomas frowned.  "I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced
against that great country," he said to Lady Agatha.  "I have travelled
all over it in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters,
are extremely civil.  I assure you that it is an education to visit it."

"But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?" asked Mr.
Erskine plaintively.  "I don't feel up to the journey."

Sir Thomas waved his hand.  "Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on
his shelves. We practical men like to see things, not to read about
them. The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are
absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing
characteristic. Yes, Mr. Erskine, an absolutely reasonable people. I
assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans."

"How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry.  "I can stand brute force, but brute
reason is quite unbearable.  There is something unfair about its use.
It is hitting below the intellect."

"I do not understand you," said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.

"I do, Lord Henry," murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile.

"Paradoxes are all very well in their way...." rejoined the baronet.

"Was that a paradox?" asked Mr. Erskine.  "I did not think so.  Perhaps
it was.  Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth.  To test
reality we must see it on the tight rope.  When the verities become
acrobats, we can judge them."

"Dear me!" said Lady Agatha, "how you men argue!  I am sure I never can
make out what you are talking about.  Oh!  Harry, I am quite vexed with
you.  Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give up
the East End?  I assure you he would be quite invaluable.  They would
love his playing."

"I want him to play to me," cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked
down the table and caught a bright answering glance.

"But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.

"I can sympathize with everything except suffering," said Lord Henry,
shrugging his shoulders.  "I cannot sympathize with that.  It is too
ugly, too horrible, too distressing.  There is something terribly
morbid in the modern sympathy with pain.  One should sympathize with
the colour, the beauty, the joy of life.  The less said about life's
sores, the better."

"Still, the East End is a very important problem," remarked Sir Thomas
with a grave shake of the head.

"Quite so," answered the young lord.  "It is the problem of slavery,
and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves."

The politician looked at him keenly.  "What change do you propose,
then?" he asked.

Lord Henry laughed.  "I don't desire to change anything in England
except the weather," he answered.  "I am quite content with philosophic
contemplation.  But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt
through an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should
appeal to science to put us straight.  The advantage of the emotions is
that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is
not emotional."

"But we have such grave responsibilities," ventured Mrs. Vandeleur
timidly.

"Terribly grave," echoed Lady Agatha.

Lord Henry looked over at Mr. Erskine.  "Humanity takes itself too
seriously.  It is the world's original sin.  If the caveman had known
how to laugh, history would have been different."

"You are really very comforting," warbled the duchess.  "I have always
felt rather guilty when I came to see your dear aunt, for I take no
interest at all in the East End.  For the future I shall be able to
look her in the face without a blush."

"A blush is very becoming, Duchess," remarked Lord Henry.

"Only when one is young," she answered.  "When an old woman like myself
blushes, it is a very bad sign.  Ah!  Lord Henry, I wish you would tell
me how to become young again."

He thought for a moment.  "Can you remember any great error that you
committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her across
the table.

"A great many, I fear," she cried.

"Then commit them over again," he said gravely.  "To get back one's
youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies."

"A delightful theory!" she exclaimed.  "I must put it into practice."

"A dangerous theory!" came from Sir Thomas's tight lips.  Lady Agatha
shook her head, but could not help being amused.  Mr. Erskine listened.

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and
discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are
one's mistakes."

A laugh ran round the table.

He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and
transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent
with fancy and winged it with paradox.  The praise of folly, as he went
on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and
catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her
wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the
hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober.  Facts fled
before her like frightened forest things.  Her white feet trod the huge
press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round
her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over
the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides.  It was an extraordinary
improvisation.  He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him,
and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose
temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and
to lend colour to his imagination.  He was brilliant, fantastic,
irresponsible.  He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they
followed his pipe, laughing.  Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him,
but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips
and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.

At last, liveried in the costume of the age, reality entered the room
in the shape of a servant to tell the duchess that her carriage was
waiting.  She wrung her hands in mock despair.  "How annoying!" she
cried.  "I must go.  I have to call for my husband at the club, to take
him to some absurd meeting at Willis's Rooms, where he is going to be
in the chair.  If I am late he is sure to be furious, and I couldn't
have a scene in this bonnet.  It is far too fragile.  A harsh word
would ruin it.  No, I must go, dear Agatha.  Good-bye, Lord Henry, you
are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing.  I am sure I don't
know what to say about your views.  You must come and dine with us some
night.  Tuesday?  Are you disengaged Tuesday?"

"For you I would throw over anybody, Duchess," said Lord Henry with a
bow.

"Ah! that is very nice, and very wrong of you," she cried; "so mind you
come"; and she swept out of the room, followed by Lady Agatha and the
other ladies.

When Lord Henry had sat down again, Mr. Erskine moved round, and taking
a chair close to him, placed his hand upon his arm.

"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?"

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine.  I
should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely
as a Persian carpet and as unreal.  But there is no literary public in
England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias.
Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the
beauty of literature."

"I fear you are right," answered Mr. Erskine.  "I myself used to have
literary ambitions, but I gave them up long ago.  And now, my dear
young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you
really meant all that you said to us at lunch?"

"I quite forget what I said," smiled Lord Henry.  "Was it all very bad?"

"Very bad indeed.  In fact I consider you extremely dangerous, and if
anything happens to our good duchess, we shall all look on you as being
primarily responsible.  But I should like to talk to you about life.
The generation into which I was born was tedious.  Some day, when you
are tired of London, come down to Treadley and expound to me your
philosophy of pleasure over some admirable Burgundy I am fortunate
enough to possess."

"I shall be charmed.  A visit to Treadley would be a great privilege.
It has a perfect host, and a perfect library."

"You will complete it," answered the old gentleman with a courteous
bow.  "And now I must bid good-bye to your excellent aunt.  I am due at
the Athenaeum.  It is the hour when we sleep there."

"All of you, Mr. Erskine?"

"Forty of us, in forty arm-chairs. We are practising for an English
Academy of Letters."

Lord Henry laughed and rose.  "I am going to the park," he cried.

As he was passing out of the door, Dorian Gray touched him on the arm.
"Let me come with you," he murmured.

"But I thought you had promised Basil Hallward to go and see him,"
answered Lord Henry.

"I would sooner come with you; yes, I feel I must come with you.  Do
let me.  And you will promise to talk to me all the time?  No one talks
so wonderfully as you do."

"Ah!  I have talked quite enough for to-day," said Lord Henry, smiling.
"All I want now is to look at life.  You may come and look at it with
me, if you care to."



CHAPTER 4

One afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a luxurious
arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in Mayfair.  It
was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high panelled
wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-coloured frieze and ceiling
of raised plasterwork, and its brickdust felt carpet strewn with silk,
long-fringed Persian rugs.  On a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette
by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of Les Cent Nouvelles, bound for
Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve and powdered with the gilt daisies
that Queen had selected for her device.  Some large blue china jars and
parrot-tulips were ranged on the mantelshelf, and through the small
leaded panes of the window streamed the apricot-coloured light of a
summer day in London.

Lord Henry had not yet come in.  He was always late on principle, his
principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.  So the lad was
looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages
of an elaborately illustrated edition of Manon Lescaut that he had
found in one of the book-cases. The formal monotonous ticking of the
Louis Quatorze clock annoyed him.  Once or twice he thought of going
away.

At last he heard a step outside, and the door opened.  "How late you
are, Harry!" he murmured.

"I am afraid it is not Harry, Mr. Gray," answered a shrill voice.

He glanced quickly round and rose to his feet.  "I beg your pardon.  I
thought--"

"You thought it was my husband.  It is only his wife.  You must let me
introduce myself.  I know you quite well by your photographs.  I think
my husband has got seventeen of them."

"Not seventeen, Lady Henry?"

"Well, eighteen, then.  And I saw you with him the other night at the
opera."  She laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her
vague forget-me-not eyes.  She was a curious woman, whose dresses
always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a
tempest.  She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion
was never returned, she had kept all her illusions.  She tried to look
picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.  Her name was
Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.

"That was at Lohengrin, Lady Henry, I think?"

"Yes; it was at dear Lohengrin.  I like Wagner's music better than
anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other
people hearing what one says.  That is a great advantage, don't you
think so, Mr. Gray?"

The same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her
fingers began to play with a long tortoise-shell paper-knife.

Dorian smiled and shook his head:  "I am afraid I don't think so, Lady
Henry.  I never talk during music--at least, during good music.  If one
hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation."

"Ah! that is one of Harry's views, isn't it, Mr. Gray?  I always hear
Harry's views from his friends.  It is the only way I get to know of
them.  But you must not think I don't like good music.  I adore it, but
I am afraid of it.  It makes me too romantic.  I have simply worshipped
pianists--two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me.  I don't know what
it is about them.  Perhaps it is that they are foreigners.  They all
are, ain't they?  Even those that are born in England become foreigners
after a time, don't they?  It is so clever of them, and such a
compliment to art.  Makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it?  You have
never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray?  You must come.  I
can't afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners.  They make
one's rooms look so picturesque.  But here is Harry!  Harry, I came in
to look for you, to ask you something--I forget what it was--and I
found Mr. Gray here.  We have had such a pleasant chat about music.  We
have quite the same ideas.  No; I think our ideas are quite different.
But he has been most pleasant.  I am so glad I've seen him."

"I am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said Lord Henry, elevating his
dark, crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused
smile.  "So sorry I am late, Dorian.  I went to look after a piece of
old brocade in Wardour Street and had to bargain for hours for it.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

"I am afraid I must be going," exclaimed Lady Henry, breaking an
awkward silence with her silly sudden laugh.  "I have promised to drive
with the duchess.  Good-bye, Mr. Gray.  Good-bye, Harry.  You are
dining out, I suppose?  So am I. Perhaps I shall see you at Lady
Thornbury's."

"I dare say, my dear," said Lord Henry, shutting the door behind her
as, looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the
rain, she flitted out of the room, leaving a faint odour of
frangipanni.  Then he lit a cigarette and flung himself down on the
sofa.

"Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, Dorian," he said after a
few puffs.

"Why, Harry?"

"Because they are so sentimental."

"But I like sentimental people."

"Never marry at all, Dorian.  Men marry because they are tired; women,
because they are curious:  both are disappointed."

"I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry.  I am too much in love.
That is one of your aphorisms.  I am putting it into practice, as I do
everything that you say."

"Who are you in love with?" asked Lord Henry after a pause.

"With an actress," said Dorian Gray, blushing.

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "That is a rather commonplace
_debut_."

"You would not say so if you saw her, Harry."

"Who is she?"

"Her name is Sibyl Vane."

"Never heard of her."

"No one has.  People will some day, however.  She is a genius."

"My dear boy, no woman is a genius.  Women are a decorative sex.  They
never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.  Women
represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the
triumph of mind over morals."

"Harry, how can you?"

"My dear Dorian, it is quite true.  I am analysing women at present, so
I ought to know.  The subject is not so abstruse as I thought it was.
I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain
and the coloured.  The plain women are very useful.  If you want to
gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down
to supper.  The other women are very charming.  They commit one
mistake, however.  They paint in order to try and look young.  Our
grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly.  _Rouge_ and
_esprit_ used to go together.  That is all over now.  As long as a woman
can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly
satisfied.  As for conversation, there are only five women in London
worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent
society.  However, tell me about your genius.  How long have you known
her?"

"Ah!  Harry, your views terrify me."

"Never mind that.  How long have you known her?"

"About three weeks."

"And where did you come across her?"

"I will tell you, Harry, but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it.
After all, it never would have happened if I had not met you.  You
filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life.  For days
after I met you, something seemed to throb in my veins.  As I lounged
in the park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at every one
who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they
led.  Some of them fascinated me.  Others filled me with terror.  There
was an exquisite poison in the air.  I had a passion for sensations....
Well, one evening about seven o'clock, I determined to go out in search
of some adventure.  I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours,
with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins,
as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me.  I fancied
a thousand things.  The mere danger gave me a sense of delight.  I
remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we
first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret
of life.  I don't know what I expected, but I went out and wandered
eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black
grassless squares.  About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little
theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills.  A hideous
Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was
standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar.  He had greasy
ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled
shirt. 'Have a box, my Lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off
his hat with an air of gorgeous servility.  There was something about
him, Harry, that amused me.  He was such a monster.  You will laugh at
me, I know, but I really went in and paid a whole guinea for the
stage-box. To the present day I can't make out why I did so; and yet if
I hadn't--my dear Harry, if I hadn't--I should have missed the greatest
romance of my life.  I see you are laughing.  It is horrid of you!"

"I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you.  But you
should not say the greatest romance of your life.  You should say the
first romance of your life.  You will always be loved, and you will
always be in love with love.  A _grande passion_ is the privilege of
people who have nothing to do.  That is the one use of the idle classes
of a country.  Don't be afraid.  There are exquisite things in store
for you.  This is merely the beginning."

"Do you think my nature so shallow?" cried Dorian Gray angrily.

"No; I think your nature so deep."

"How do you mean?"

"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really
the shallow people.  What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity,
I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life
of the intellect--simply a confession of failure.  Faithfulness!  I
must analyse it some day.  The passion for property is in it.  There
are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that
others might pick them up.  But I don't want to interrupt you.  Go on
with your story."

"Well, I found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a
vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face.  I looked out from behind the
curtain and surveyed the house.  It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and
cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake. The gallery and pit were
fairly full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and
there was hardly a person in what I suppose they called the
dress-circle.  Women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there
was a terrible consumption of nuts going on."

"It must have been just like the palmy days of the British drama."

"Just like, I should fancy, and very depressing.  I began to wonder
what on earth I should do when I caught sight of the play-bill.  What
do you think the play was, Harry?"

"I should think 'The Idiot Boy', or 'Dumb but Innocent'.  Our fathers
used to like that sort of piece, I believe.  The longer I live, Dorian,
the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is
not good enough for us.  In art, as in politics, _les grandperes ont
toujours tort_."

"This play was good enough for us, Harry.  It was Romeo and Juliet.  I
must admit that I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare
done in such a wretched hole of a place.  Still, I felt interested, in
a sort of way.  At any rate, I determined to wait for the first act.
There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who sat
at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the
drop-scene was drawn up and the play began.  Romeo was a stout elderly
gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure
like a beer-barrel. Mercutio was almost as bad.  He was played by the
low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most
friendly terms with the pit.  They were both as grotesque as the
scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a country-booth. But
Juliet!  Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a
little, flowerlike face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of
dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were
like the petals of a rose.  She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen
in my life.  You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that
beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.  I tell you,
Harry, I could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came
across me.  And her voice--I never heard such a voice.  It was very low
at first, with deep mellow notes that seemed to fall singly upon one's
ear.  Then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a
distant hautboy.  In the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy
that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing.  There
were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins.  You
know how a voice can stir one.  Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane
are two things that I shall never forget.  When I close my eyes, I hear
them, and each of them says something different.  I don't know which to
follow.  Why should I not love her?  Harry, I do love her.  She is
everything to me in life.  Night after night I go to see her play.  One
evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen.  I have
seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from
her lover's lips.  I have watched her wandering through the forest of
Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap.
She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and
given him rue to wear and bitter herbs to taste of.  She has been
innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reedlike
throat.  I have seen her in every age and in every costume.  Ordinary
women never appeal to one's imagination.  They are limited to their
century.  No glamour ever transfigures them.  One knows their minds as
easily as one knows their bonnets.  One can always find them.  There is
no mystery in any of them.  They ride in the park in the morning and
chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon.  They have their stereotyped
smile and their fashionable manner.  They are quite obvious.  But an
actress!  How different an actress is!  Harry! why didn't you tell me
that the only thing worth loving is an actress?"

"Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian."

"Oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces."

"Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces.  There is an extraordinary
charm in them, sometimes," said Lord Henry.

"I wish now I had not told you about Sibyl Vane."

"You could not have helped telling me, Dorian.  All through your life
you will tell me everything you do."

"Yes, Harry, I believe that is true.  I cannot help telling you things.
You have a curious influence over me.  If I ever did a crime, I would
come and confess it to you.  You would understand me."

"People like you--the wilful sunbeams of life--don't commit crimes,
Dorian.  But I am much obliged for the compliment, all the same.  And
now tell me--reach me the matches, like a good boy--thanks--what are
your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?"

Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes.
"Harry!  Sibyl Vane is sacred!"

"It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian," said
Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice.  "But why
should you be annoyed?  I suppose she will belong to you some day.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one
always ends by deceiving others.  That is what the world calls a
romance.  You know her, at any rate, I suppose?"

"Of course I know her.  On the first night I was at the theatre, the
horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was over and
offered to take me behind the scenes and introduce me to her.  I was
furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead for hundreds
of years and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in Verona.  I
think, from his blank look of amazement, that he was under the
impression that I had taken too much champagne, or something."

"I am not surprised."

"Then he asked me if I wrote for any of the newspapers.  I told him I
never even read them.  He seemed terribly disappointed at that, and
confided to me that all the dramatic critics were in a conspiracy
against him, and that they were every one of them to be bought."

"I should not wonder if he was quite right there.  But, on the other
hand, judging from their appearance, most of them cannot be at all
expensive."

"Well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means," laughed Dorian.
"By this time, however, the lights were being put out in the theatre,
and I had to go.  He wanted me to try some cigars that he strongly
recommended.  I declined.  The next night, of course, I arrived at the
place again.  When he saw me, he made me a low bow and assured me that
I was a munificent patron of art.  He was a most offensive brute,
though he had an extraordinary passion for Shakespeare.  He told me
once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were entirely
due to 'The Bard,' as he insisted on calling him.  He seemed to think
it a distinction."

"It was a distinction, my dear Dorian--a great distinction.  Most
people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose
of life.  To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.  But when
did you first speak to Miss Sibyl Vane?"

"The third night.  She had been playing Rosalind.  I could not help
going round.  I had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at
me--at least I fancied that she had.  The old Jew was persistent.  He
seemed determined to take me behind, so I consented.  It was curious my
not wanting to know her, wasn't it?"

"No; I don't think so."

"My dear Harry, why?"

"I will tell you some other time.  Now I want to know about the girl."

"Sibyl?  Oh, she was so shy and so gentle.  There is something of a
child about her.  Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I told
her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious
of her power.  I think we were both rather nervous.  The old Jew stood
grinning at the doorway of the dusty greenroom, making elaborate
speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other like
children.  He would insist on calling me 'My Lord,' so I had to assure
Sibyl that I was not anything of the kind.  She said quite simply to
me, 'You look more like a prince.  I must call you Prince Charming.'"

"Upon my word, Dorian, Miss Sibyl knows how to pay compliments."

"You don't understand her, Harry.  She regarded me merely as a person
in a play.  She knows nothing of life.  She lives with her mother, a
faded tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta
dressing-wrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had seen
better days."

"I know that look.  It depresses me," murmured Lord Henry, examining
his rings.

"The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest
me."

"You were quite right.  There is always something infinitely mean about
other people's tragedies."

"Sibyl is the only thing I care about.  What is it to me where she came
from?  From her little head to her little feet, she is absolutely and
entirely divine.  Every night of my life I go to see her act, and every
night she is more marvellous."

"That is the reason, I suppose, that you never dine with me now.  I
thought you must have some curious romance on hand.  You have; but it
is not quite what I expected."

"My dear Harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and I have
been to the opera with you several times," said Dorian, opening his
blue eyes in wonder.

"You always come dreadfully late."

"Well, I can't help going to see Sibyl play," he cried, "even if it is
only for a single act.  I get hungry for her presence; and when I think
of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I
am filled with awe."

"You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can't you?"

He shook his head.  "To-night she is Imogen," he answered, "and
to-morrow night she will be Juliet."

"When is she Sibyl Vane?"

"Never."

"I congratulate you."

"How horrid you are!  She is all the great heroines of the world in
one.  She is more than an individual.  You laugh, but I tell you she
has genius.  I love her, and I must make her love me.  You, who know
all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me!  I
want to make Romeo jealous.  I want the dead lovers of the world to
hear our laughter and grow sad.  I want a breath of our passion to stir
their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.  My God,
Harry, how I worship her!"  He was walking up and down the room as he
spoke.  Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks.  He was terribly
excited.

Lord Henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure.  How different
he was now from the shy frightened boy he had met in Basil Hallward's
studio!  His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of
scarlet flame.  Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and
desire had come to meet it on the way.

"And what do you propose to do?" said Lord Henry at last.

"I want you and Basil to come with me some night and see her act.  I
have not the slightest fear of the result.  You are certain to
acknowledge her genius.  Then we must get her out of the Jew's hands.
She is bound to him for three years--at least for two years and eight
months--from the present time.  I shall have to pay him something, of
course.  When all that is settled, I shall take a West End theatre and
bring her out properly.  She will make the world as mad as she has made
me."

"That would be impossible, my dear boy."

"Yes, she will.  She has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in
her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it
is personalities, not principles, that move the age."

"Well, what night shall we go?"

"Let me see.  To-day is Tuesday.  Let us fix to-morrow. She plays
Juliet to-morrow."

"All right.  The Bristol at eight o'clock; and I will get Basil."

"Not eight, Harry, please.  Half-past six.  We must be there before the
curtain rises.  You must see her in the first act, where she meets
Romeo."

"Half-past six!  What an hour!  It will be like having a meat-tea, or
reading an English novel.  It must be seven.  No gentleman dines before
seven.  Shall you see Basil between this and then?  Or shall I write to
him?"

"Dear Basil!  I have not laid eyes on him for a week.  It is rather
horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful
frame, specially designed by himself, and, though I am a little jealous
of the picture for being a whole month younger than I am, I must admit
that I delight in it.  Perhaps you had better write to him.  I don't
want to see him alone.  He says things that annoy me.  He gives me good
advice."

Lord Henry smiled.  "People are very fond of giving away what they need
most themselves.  It is what I call the depth of generosity."

"Oh, Basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit
of a Philistine.  Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered
that."

"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his
work.  The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his
prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.  The only artists I
have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists.  Good
artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly
uninteresting in what they are.  A great poet, a really great poet, is
the most unpoetical of all creatures.  But inferior poets are
absolutely fascinating.  The worse their rhymes are, the more
picturesque they look.  The mere fact of having published a book of
second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.  He lives the
poetry that he cannot write.  The others write the poetry that they
dare not realize."

"I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, putting some
perfume on his handkerchief out of a large, gold-topped bottle that
stood on the table.  "It must be, if you say it.  And now I am off.
Imogen is waiting for me.  Don't forget about to-morrow. Good-bye."

As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
to think.  Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as
Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused
him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.  He was pleased by
it.  It made him a more interesting study.  He had been always
enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary
subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no
import.  And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by
vivisecting others.  Human life--that appeared to him the one thing
worth investigating.  Compared to it there was nothing else of any
value.  It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of
pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass,
nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the
imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.  There
were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken
of them.  There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through
them if one sought to understand their nature.  And, yet, what a great
reward one received!  How wonderful the whole world became to one!  To
note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life
of the intellect--to observe where they met, and where they separated,
at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at
discord--there was a delight in that!  What matter what the cost was?
One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

He was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his
brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical
words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned
to this white girl and bowed in worship before her.  To a large extent
the lad was his own creation.  He had made him premature.  That was
something.  Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its
secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were
revealed before the veil was drawn away.  Sometimes this was the effect
of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately
with the passions and the intellect.  But now and then a complex
personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed,
in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces,
just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.

Yes, the lad was premature.  He was gathering his harvest while it was
yet spring.  The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was
becoming self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him.  With his
beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at.
It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end.  He was like
one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem
to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty,
and whose wounds are like red roses.

Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were!  There was
animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade.  Who could
say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?
How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists!
And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various
schools!  Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin?  Or was the
body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought?  The separation of
spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter
was a mystery also.

He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a
science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us.  As it
was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.
Experience was of no ethical value.  It was merely the name men gave to
their mistakes.  Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of
warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation
of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow
and showed us what to avoid.  But there was no motive power in
experience.  It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself.
All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same
as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we
would do many times, and with joy.

It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by
which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and
certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to
promise rich and fruitful results.  His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane
was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest.  There was no
doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire
for new experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex
passion.  What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of
boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination,
changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from
sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous.  It was the
passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most
strongly over us.  Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we
were conscious.  It often happened that when we thought we were
experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

While Lord Henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the
door, and his valet entered and reminded him it was time to dress for
dinner.  He got up and looked out into the street.  The sunset had
smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite.
The panes glowed like plates of heated metal.  The sky above was like a
faded rose.  He thought of his friend's young fiery-coloured life and
wondered how it was all going to end.

When he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram
lying on the hall table.  He opened it and found it was from Dorian
Gray.  It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl
Vane.



CHAPTER 5

"Mother, Mother, I am so happy!" whispered the girl, burying her face
in the lap of the faded, tired-looking woman who, with back turned to
the shrill intrusive light, was sitting in the one arm-chair that their
dingy sitting-room contained.  "I am so happy!" she repeated, "and you
must be happy, too!"

Mrs. Vane winced and put her thin, bismuth-whitened hands on her
daughter's head.  "Happy!" she echoed, "I am only happy, Sibyl, when I
see you act.  You must not think of anything but your acting.  Mr.
Isaacs has been very good to us, and we owe him money."

The girl looked up and pouted.  "Money, Mother?" she cried, "what does
money matter?  Love is more than money."

"Mr. Isaacs has advanced us fifty pounds to pay off our debts and to
get a proper outfit for James.  You must not forget that, Sibyl.  Fifty
pounds is a very large sum.  Mr. Isaacs has been most considerate."

"He is not a gentleman, Mother, and I hate the way he talks to me,"
said the girl, rising to her feet and going over to the window.

"I don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder
woman querulously.

Sibyl Vane tossed her head and laughed.  "We don't want him any more,
Mother.  Prince Charming rules life for us now." Then she paused.  A
rose shook in her blood and shadowed her cheeks.  Quick breath parted
the petals of her lips.  They trembled.  Some southern wind of passion
swept over her and stirred the dainty folds of her dress.  "I love
him," she said simply.

"Foolish child! foolish child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in answer.
The waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to the
words.

The girl laughed again.  The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.  Her
eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a
moment, as though to hide their secret.  When they opened, the mist of
a dream had passed across them.

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at
prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name
of common sense.  She did not listen.  She was free in her prison of
passion.  Her prince, Prince Charming, was with her.  She had called on
memory to remake him.  She had sent her soul to search for him, and it
had brought him back.  His kiss burned again upon her mouth.  Her
eyelids were warm with his breath.

Then wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery.  This
young man might be rich.  If so, marriage should be thought of.
Against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning.  The
arrows of craft shot by her.  She saw the thin lips moving, and smiled.

Suddenly she felt the need to speak.  The wordy silence troubled her.
"Mother, Mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much?  I know why
I love him.  I love him because he is like what love himself should be.
But what does he see in me?  I am not worthy of him.  And yet--why, I
cannot tell--though I feel so much beneath him, I don't feel humble.  I
feel proud, terribly proud.  Mother, did you love my father as I love
Prince Charming?"

The elder woman grew pale beneath the coarse powder that daubed her
cheeks, and her dry lips twitched with a spasm of pain.  Sybil rushed
to her, flung her arms round her neck, and kissed her.  "Forgive me,
Mother.  I know it pains you to talk about our father.  But it only
pains you because you loved him so much.  Don't look so sad.  I am as
happy to-day as you were twenty years ago.  Ah! let me be happy for
ever!"

"My child, you are far too young to think of falling in love.  Besides,
what do you know of this young man?  You don't even know his name.  The
whole thing is most inconvenient, and really, when James is going away
to Australia, and I have so much to think of, I must say that you
should have shown more consideration.  However, as I said before, if he
is rich ..."

"Ah!  Mother, Mother, let me be happy!"

Mrs. Vane glanced at her, and with one of those false theatrical
gestures that so often become a mode of second nature to a
stage-player, clasped her in her arms.  At this moment, the door opened
and a young lad with rough brown hair came into the room.  He was
thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large and somewhat
clumsy in movement.  He was not so finely bred as his sister.  One
would hardly have guessed the close relationship that existed between
them.  Mrs. Vane fixed her eyes on him and intensified her smile.  She
mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience.  She felt sure
that the _tableau_ was interesting.

"You might keep some of your kisses for me, Sibyl, I think," said the
lad with a good-natured grumble.

"Ah! but you don't like being kissed, Jim," she cried.  "You are a
dreadful old bear."  And she ran across the room and hugged him.

James Vane looked into his sister's face with tenderness.  "I want you
to come out with me for a walk, Sibyl.  I don't suppose I shall ever
see this horrid London again.  I am sure I don't want to."

"My son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured Mrs. Vane, taking up
a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch it.  She
felt a little disappointed that he had not joined the group.  It would
have increased the theatrical picturesqueness of the situation.

"Why not, Mother?  I mean it."

"You pain me, my son.  I trust you will return from Australia in a
position of affluence.  I believe there is no society of any kind in
the Colonies--nothing that I would call society--so when you have made
your fortune, you must come back and assert yourself in London."

"Society!" muttered the lad.  "I don't want to know anything about
that.  I should like to make some money to take you and Sibyl off the
stage.  I hate it."

"Oh, Jim!" said Sibyl, laughing, "how unkind of you!  But are you
really going for a walk with me?  That will be nice!  I was afraid you
were going to say good-bye to some of your friends--to Tom Hardy, who
gave you that hideous pipe, or Ned Langton, who makes fun of you for
smoking it.  It is very sweet of you to let me have your last
afternoon.  Where shall we go?  Let us go to the park."

"I am too shabby," he answered, frowning.  "Only swell people go to the
park."

"Nonsense, Jim," she whispered, stroking the sleeve of his coat.

He hesitated for a moment.  "Very well," he said at last, "but don't be
too long dressing."  She danced out of the door.  One could hear her
singing as she ran upstairs.  Her little feet pattered overhead.

He walked up and down the room two or three times.  Then he turned to
the still figure in the chair.  "Mother, are my things ready?" he asked.

"Quite ready, James," she answered, keeping her eyes on her work.  For
some months past she had felt ill at ease when she was alone with this
rough stern son of hers.  Her shallow secret nature was troubled when
their eyes met.  She used to wonder if he suspected anything.  The
silence, for he made no other observation, became intolerable to her.
She began to complain.  Women defend themselves by attacking, just as
they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.  "I hope you will be
contented, James, with your sea-faring life," she said.  "You must
remember that it is your own choice.  You might have entered a
solicitor's office.  Solicitors are a very respectable class, and in
the country often dine with the best families."

"I hate offices, and I hate clerks," he replied.  "But you are quite
right.  I have chosen my own life.  All I say is, watch over Sibyl.
Don't let her come to any harm.  Mother, you must watch over her."

"James, you really talk very strangely.  Of course I watch over Sibyl."

"I hear a gentleman comes every night to the theatre and goes behind to
talk to her.  Is that right?  What about that?"

"You are speaking about things you don't understand, James.  In the
profession we are accustomed to receive a great deal of most gratifying
attention.  I myself used to receive many bouquets at one time.  That
was when acting was really understood.  As for Sibyl, I do not know at
present whether her attachment is serious or not.  But there is no
doubt that the young man in question is a perfect gentleman.  He is
always most polite to me.  Besides, he has the appearance of being
rich, and the flowers he sends are lovely."

"You don't know his name, though," said the lad harshly.

"No," answered his mother with a placid expression in her face.  "He
has not yet revealed his real name.  I think it is quite romantic of
him.  He is probably a member of the aristocracy."

James Vane bit his lip.  "Watch over Sibyl, Mother," he cried, "watch
over her."

"My son, you distress me very much.  Sibyl is always under my special
care.  Of course, if this gentleman is wealthy, there is no reason why
she should not contract an alliance with him.  I trust he is one of the
aristocracy.  He has all the appearance of it, I must say.  It might be
a most brilliant marriage for Sibyl.  They would make a charming
couple.  His good looks are really quite remarkable; everybody notices
them."

The lad muttered something to himself and drummed on the window-pane
with his coarse fingers.  He had just turned round to say something
when the door opened and Sibyl ran in.

"How serious you both are!" she cried.  "What is the matter?"

"Nothing," he answered.  "I suppose one must be serious sometimes.
Good-bye, Mother; I will have my dinner at five o'clock. Everything is
packed, except my shirts, so you need not trouble."

"Good-bye, my son," she answered with a bow of strained stateliness.

She was extremely annoyed at the tone he had adopted with her, and
there was something in his look that had made her feel afraid.

"Kiss me, Mother," said the girl.  Her flowerlike lips touched the
withered cheek and warmed its frost.

"My child! my child!" cried Mrs. Vane, looking up to the ceiling in
search of an imaginary gallery.

"Come, Sibyl," said her brother impatiently.  He hated his mother's
affectations.

They went out into the flickering, wind-blown sunlight and strolled
down the dreary Euston Road.  The passersby glanced in wonder at the
sullen heavy youth who, in coarse, ill-fitting clothes, was in the
company of such a graceful, refined-looking girl.  He was like a common
gardener walking with a rose.

Jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of
some stranger.  He had that dislike of being stared at, which comes on
geniuses late in life and never leaves the commonplace.  Sibyl,
however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing.  Her
love was trembling in laughter on her lips.  She was thinking of Prince
Charming, and, that she might think of him all the more, she did not
talk of him, but prattled on about the ship in which Jim was going to
sail, about the gold he was certain to find, about the wonderful
heiress whose life he was to save from the wicked, red-shirted
bushrangers.  For he was not to remain a sailor, or a supercargo, or
whatever he was going to be.  Oh, no!  A sailor's existence was
dreadful.  Fancy being cooped up in a horrid ship, with the hoarse,
hump-backed waves trying to get in, and a black wind blowing the masts
down and tearing the sails into long screaming ribands!  He was to
leave the vessel at Melbourne, bid a polite good-bye to the captain,
and go off at once to the gold-fields. Before a week was over he was to
come across a large nugget of pure gold, the largest nugget that had
ever been discovered, and bring it down to the coast in a waggon
guarded by six mounted policemen.  The bushrangers were to attack them
three times, and be defeated with immense slaughter.  Or, no.  He was
not to go to the gold-fields at all.  They were horrid places, where
men got intoxicated, and shot each other in bar-rooms, and used bad
language.  He was to be a nice sheep-farmer, and one evening, as he was
riding home, he was to see the beautiful heiress being carried off by a
robber on a black horse, and give chase, and rescue her.  Of course,
she would fall in love with him, and he with her, and they would get
married, and come home, and live in an immense house in London.  Yes,
there were delightful things in store for him.  But he must be very
good, and not lose his temper, or spend his money foolishly.  She was
only a year older than he was, but she knew so much more of life.  He
must be sure, also, to write to her by every mail, and to say his
prayers each night before he went to sleep.  God was very good, and
would watch over him.  She would pray for him, too, and in a few years
he would come back quite rich and happy.

The lad listened sulkily to her and made no answer.  He was heart-sick
at leaving home.

Yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose.
Inexperienced though he was, he had still a strong sense of the danger
of Sibyl's position.  This young dandy who was making love to her could
mean her no good.  He was a gentleman, and he hated him for that, hated
him through some curious race-instinct for which he could not account,
and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him.  He was
conscious also of the shallowness and vanity of his mother's nature,
and in that saw infinite peril for Sibyl and Sibyl's happiness.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge
them; sometimes they forgive them.

His mother!  He had something on his mind to ask of her, something that
he had brooded on for many months of silence.  A chance phrase that he
had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached his ears
one night as he waited at the stage-door, had set loose a train of
horrible thoughts.  He remembered it as if it had been the lash of a
hunting-crop across his face.  His brows knit together into a wedge-like
furrow, and with a twitch of pain he bit his underlip.

"You are not listening to a word I am saying, Jim," cried Sibyl, "and I
am making the most delightful plans for your future.  Do say something."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Oh! that you will be a good boy and not forget us," she answered,
smiling at him.

He shrugged his shoulders.  "You are more likely to forget me than I am
to forget you, Sibyl."

She flushed.  "What do you mean, Jim?" she asked.

"You have a new friend, I hear.  Who is he?  Why have you not told me
about him?  He means you no good."

"Stop, Jim!" she exclaimed.  "You must not say anything against him.  I
love him."

"Why, you don't even know his name," answered the lad.  "Who is he?  I
have a right to know."

"He is called Prince Charming.  Don't you like the name.  Oh! you silly
boy! you should never forget it.  If you only saw him, you would think
him the most wonderful person in the world.  Some day you will meet
him--when you come back from Australia.  You will like him so much.
Everybody likes him, and I ... love him.  I wish you could come to the
theatre to-night. He is going to be there, and I am to play Juliet.
Oh! how I shall play it!  Fancy, Jim, to be in love and play Juliet!
To have him sitting there!  To play for his delight!  I am afraid I may
frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them.  To be in love is to
surpass one's self.  Poor dreadful Mr. Isaacs will be shouting 'genius'
to his loafers at the bar.  He has preached me as a dogma; to-night he
will announce me as a revelation.  I feel it.  And it is all his, his
only, Prince Charming, my wonderful lover, my god of graces.  But I am
poor beside him.  Poor?  What does that matter?  When poverty creeps in
at the door, love flies in through the window.  Our proverbs want
rewriting.  They were made in winter, and it is summer now; spring-time
for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies."

"He is a gentleman," said the lad sullenly.

"A prince!" she cried musically.  "What more do you want?"

"He wants to enslave you."

"I shudder at the thought of being free."

"I want you to beware of him."

"To see him is to worship him; to know him is to trust him."

"Sibyl, you are mad about him."

She laughed and took his arm.  "You dear old Jim, you talk as if you
were a hundred.  Some day you will be in love yourself.  Then you will
know what it is.  Don't look so sulky.  Surely you should be glad to
think that, though you are going away, you leave me happier than I have
ever been before.  Life has been hard for us both, terribly hard and
difficult.  But it will be different now.  You are going to a new
world, and I have found one.  Here are two chairs; let us sit down and
see the smart people go by."

They took their seats amidst a crowd of watchers.  The tulip-beds
across the road flamed like throbbing rings of fire.  A white
dust--tremulous cloud of orris-root it seemed--hung in the panting air.
The brightly coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous
butterflies.

She made her brother talk of himself, his hopes, his prospects.  He
spoke slowly and with effort.  They passed words to each other as
players at a game pass counters.  Sibyl felt oppressed.  She could not
communicate her joy.  A faint smile curving that sullen mouth was all
the echo she could win.  After some time she became silent.  Suddenly
she caught a glimpse of golden hair and laughing lips, and in an open
carriage with two ladies Dorian Gray drove past.

She started to her feet.  "There he is!" she cried.

"Who?" said Jim Vane.

"Prince Charming," she answered, looking after the victoria.

He jumped up and seized her roughly by the arm.  "Show him to me.
Which is he?  Point him out.  I must see him!" he exclaimed; but at
that moment the Duke of Berwick's four-in-hand came between, and when
it had left the space clear, the carriage had swept out of the park.

"He is gone," murmured Sibyl sadly.  "I wish you had seen him."

"I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever does
you any wrong, I shall kill him."

She looked at him in horror.  He repeated his words.  They cut the air
like a dagger.  The people round began to gape.  A lady standing close
to her tittered.

"Come away, Jim; come away," she whispered.  He followed her doggedly
as she passed through the crowd.  He felt glad at what he had said.

When they reached the Achilles Statue, she turned round.  There was
pity in her eyes that became laughter on her lips.  She shook her head
at him.  "You are foolish, Jim, utterly foolish; a bad-tempered boy,
that is all.  How can you say such horrible things?  You don't know
what you are talking about.  You are simply jealous and unkind.  Ah!  I
wish you would fall in love.  Love makes people good, and what you said
was wicked."

"I am sixteen," he answered, "and I know what I am about.  Mother is no
help to you.  She doesn't understand how to look after you.  I wish now
that I was not going to Australia at all.  I have a great mind to chuck
the whole thing up.  I would, if my articles hadn't been signed."

"Oh, don't be so serious, Jim.  You are like one of the heroes of those
silly melodramas Mother used to be so fond of acting in.  I am not
going to quarrel with you.  I have seen him, and oh! to see him is
perfect happiness.  We won't quarrel.  I know you would never harm any
one I love, would you?"

"Not as long as you love him, I suppose," was the sullen answer.

"I shall love him for ever!" she cried.

"And he?"

"For ever, too!"

"He had better."

She shrank from him.  Then she laughed and put her hand on his arm.  He
was merely a boy.

At the Marble Arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close to
their shabby home in the Euston Road.  It was after five o'clock, and
Sibyl had to lie down for a couple of hours before acting.  Jim
insisted that she should do so.  He said that he would sooner part with
her when their mother was not present.  She would be sure to make a
scene, and he detested scenes of every kind.

In Sybil's own room they parted.  There was jealousy in the lad's
heart, and a fierce murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it seemed
to him, had come between them.  Yet, when her arms were flung round his
neck, and her fingers strayed through his hair, he softened and kissed
her with real affection.  There were tears in his eyes as he went
downstairs.

His mother was waiting for him below.  She grumbled at his
unpunctuality, as he entered.  He made no answer, but sat down to his
meagre meal.  The flies buzzed round the table and crawled over the
stained cloth.  Through the rumble of omnibuses, and the clatter of
street-cabs, he could hear the droning voice devouring each minute that
was left to him.

After some time, he thrust away his plate and put his head in his
hands.  He felt that he had a right to know.  It should have been told
to him before, if it was as he suspected.  Leaden with fear, his mother
watched him.  Words dropped mechanically from her lips.  A tattered
lace handkerchief twitched in her fingers.  When the clock struck six,
he got up and went to the door.  Then he turned back and looked at her.
Their eyes met.  In hers he saw a wild appeal for mercy.  It enraged
him.

"Mother, I have something to ask you," he said.  Her eyes wandered
vaguely about the room.  She made no answer.  "Tell me the truth.  I
have a right to know.  Were you married to my father?"

She heaved a deep sigh.  It was a sigh of relief.  The terrible moment,
the moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had dreaded,
had come at last, and yet she felt no terror.  Indeed, in some measure
it was a disappointment to her.  The vulgar directness of the question
called for a direct answer.  The situation had not been gradually led
up to.  It was crude.  It reminded her of a bad rehearsal.

"No," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life.

"My father was a scoundrel then!" cried the lad, clenching his fists.

She shook her head.  "I knew he was not free.  We loved each other very
much.  If he had lived, he would have made provision for us.  Don't
speak against him, my son.  He was your father, and a gentleman.
Indeed, he was highly connected."

An oath broke from his lips.  "I don't care for myself," he exclaimed,
"but don't let Sibyl.... It is a gentleman, isn't it, who is in love
with her, or says he is?  Highly connected, too, I suppose."

For a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman.  Her
head drooped.  She wiped her eyes with shaking hands.  "Sibyl has a
mother," she murmured; "I had none."

The lad was touched.  He went towards her, and stooping down, he kissed
her.  "I am sorry if I have pained you by asking about my father," he
said, "but I could not help it.  I must go now.  Good-bye. Don't forget
that you will have only one child now to look after, and believe me
that if this man wrongs my sister, I will find out who he is, track him
down, and kill him like a dog.  I swear it."

The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that
accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid
to her.  She was familiar with the atmosphere.  She breathed more
freely, and for the first time for many months she really admired her
son.  She would have liked to have continued the scene on the same
emotional scale, but he cut her short.  Trunks had to be carried down
and mufflers looked for.  The lodging-house drudge bustled in and out.
There was the bargaining with the cabman.  The moment was lost in
vulgar details.  It was with a renewed feeling of disappointment that
she waved the tattered lace handkerchief from the window, as her son
drove away.  She was conscious that a great opportunity had been
wasted.  She consoled herself by telling Sibyl how desolate she felt
her life would be, now that she had only one child to look after.  She
remembered the phrase.  It had pleased her.  Of the threat she said
nothing.  It was vividly and dramatically expressed.  She felt that
they would all laugh at it some day.



CHAPTER 6

"I suppose you have heard the news, Basil?" said Lord Henry that
evening as Hallward was shown into a little private room at the Bristol
where dinner had been laid for three.

"No, Harry," answered the artist, giving his hat and coat to the bowing
waiter.  "What is it?  Nothing about politics, I hope!  They don't
interest me.  There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons
worth painting, though many of them would be the better for a little
whitewashing."

"Dorian Gray is engaged to be married," said Lord Henry, watching him
as he spoke.

Hallward started and then frowned.  "Dorian engaged to be married!" he
cried.  "Impossible!"

"It is perfectly true."

"To whom?"

"To some little actress or other."

"I can't believe it.  Dorian is far too sensible."

"Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear
Basil."

"Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry."

"Except in America," rejoined Lord Henry languidly.  "But I didn't say
he was married.  I said he was engaged to be married.  There is a great
difference.  I have a distinct remembrance of being married, but I have
no recollection at all of being engaged.  I am inclined to think that I
never was engaged."

"But think of Dorian's birth, and position, and wealth.  It would be
absurd for him to marry so much beneath him."

"If you want to make him marry this girl, tell him that, Basil.  He is
sure to do it, then.  Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it
is always from the noblest motives."

"I hope the girl is good, Harry.  I don't want to see Dorian tied to
some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his
intellect."

"Oh, she is better than good--she is beautiful," murmured Lord Henry,
sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters. "Dorian says she is
beautiful, and he is not often wrong about things of that kind.  Your
portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal
appearance of other people.  It has had that excellent effect, amongst
others.  We are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget his
appointment."

"Are you serious?"

"Quite serious, Basil.  I should be miserable if I thought I should
ever be more serious than I am at the present moment."

"But do you approve of it, Harry?" asked the painter, walking up and
down the room and biting his lip.  "You can't approve of it, possibly.
It is some silly infatuation."

"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now.  It is an absurd
attitude to take towards life.  We are not sent into the world to air
our moral prejudices.  I never take any notice of what common people
say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.  If a
personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality
selects is absolutely delightful to me.  Dorian Gray falls in love with
a beautiful girl who acts Juliet, and proposes to marry her.  Why not?
If he wedded Messalina, he would be none the less interesting.  You
know I am not a champion of marriage.  The real drawback to marriage is
that it makes one unselfish.  And unselfish people are colourless.
They lack individuality.  Still, there are certain temperaments that
marriage makes more complex.  They retain their egotism, and add to it
many other egos.  They are forced to have more than one life.  They
become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should
fancy, the object of man's existence.  Besides, every experience is of
value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an
experience.  I hope that Dorian Gray will make this girl his wife,
passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become
fascinated by some one else.  He would be a wonderful study."

"You don't mean a single word of all that, Harry; you know you don't.
If Dorian Gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than
yourself.  You are much better than you pretend to be."

Lord Henry laughed.  "The reason we all like to think so well of others
is that we are all afraid for ourselves.  The basis of optimism is
sheer terror.  We think that we are generous because we credit our
neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a
benefit to us.  We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account,
and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare
our pockets.  I mean everything that I have said.  I have the greatest
contempt for optimism.  As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but
one whose growth is arrested.  If you want to mar a nature, you have
merely to reform it.  As for marriage, of course that would be silly,
but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women.
I will certainly encourage them.  They have the charm of being
fashionable.  But here is Dorian himself.  He will tell you more than I
can."

"My dear Harry, my dear Basil, you must both congratulate me!" said the
lad, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings and
shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn.  "I have never been so
happy.  Of course, it is sudden--all really delightful things are.  And
yet it seems to me to be the one thing I have been looking for all my
life." He was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked
extraordinarily handsome.

"I hope you will always be very happy, Dorian," said Hallward, "but I
don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement.
You let Harry know."

"And I don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in Lord
Henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder and smiling as he spoke.
"Come, let us sit down and try what the new _chef_ here is like, and then
you will tell us how it all came about."

"There is really not much to tell," cried Dorian as they took their
seats at the small round table.  "What happened was simply this.  After
I left you yesterday evening, Harry, I dressed, had some dinner at that
little Italian restaurant in Rupert Street you introduced me to, and
went down at eight o'clock to the theatre.  Sibyl was playing Rosalind.
Of course, the scenery was dreadful and the Orlando absurd.  But Sibyl!
You should have seen her!  When she came on in her boy's clothes, she
was perfectly wonderful.  She wore a moss-coloured velvet jerkin with
cinnamon sleeves, slim, brown, cross-gartered hose, a dainty little
green cap with a hawk's feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak
lined with dull red.  She had never seemed to me more exquisite.  She
had all the delicate grace of that Tanagra figurine that you have in
your studio, Basil.  Her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves
round a pale rose.  As for her acting--well, you shall see her
to-night. She is simply a born artist.  I sat in the dingy box
absolutely enthralled.  I forgot that I was in London and in the
nineteenth century.  I was away with my love in a forest that no man
had ever seen.  After the performance was over, I went behind and spoke
to her.  As we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes
a look that I had never seen there before.  My lips moved towards hers.
We kissed each other.  I can't describe to you what I felt at that
moment.  It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one
perfect point of rose-coloured joy.  She trembled all over and shook
like a white narcissus.  Then she flung herself on her knees and kissed
my hands.  I feel that I should not tell you all this, but I can't help
it.  Of course, our engagement is a dead secret.  She has not even told
her own mother.  I don't know what my guardians will say.  Lord Radley
is sure to be furious.  I don't care.  I shall be of age in less than a
year, and then I can do what I like.  I have been right, Basil, haven't
I, to take my love out of poetry and to find my wife in Shakespeare's
plays?  Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their
secret in my ear.  I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and
kissed Juliet on the mouth."

"Yes, Dorian, I suppose you were right," said Hallward slowly.

"Have you seen her to-day?" asked Lord Henry.

Dorian Gray shook his head.  "I left her in the forest of Arden; I
shall find her in an orchard in Verona."

Lord Henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner.  "At what
particular point did you mention the word marriage, Dorian?  And what
did she say in answer?  Perhaps you forgot all about it."

"My dear Harry, I did not treat it as a business transaction, and I did
not make any formal proposal.  I told her that I loved her, and she
said she was not worthy to be my wife.  Not worthy!  Why, the whole
world is nothing to me compared with her."

"Women are wonderfully practical," murmured Lord Henry, "much more
practical than we are.  In situations of that kind we often forget to
say anything about marriage, and they always remind us."

Hallward laid his hand upon his arm.  "Don't, Harry.  You have annoyed
Dorian.  He is not like other men.  He would never bring misery upon
any one.  His nature is too fine for that."

Lord Henry looked across the table.  "Dorian is never annoyed with me,"
he answered.  "I asked the question for the best reason possible, for
the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any
question--simple curiosity.  I have a theory that it is always the
women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women.  Except,
of course, in middle-class life.  But then the middle classes are not
modern."

Dorian Gray laughed, and tossed his head.  "You are quite incorrigible,
Harry; but I don't mind.  It is impossible to be angry with you.  When
you see Sibyl Vane, you will feel that the man who could wrong her
would be a beast, a beast without a heart.  I cannot understand how any
one can wish to shame the thing he loves.  I love Sibyl Vane.  I want
to place her on a pedestal of gold and to see the world worship the
woman who is mine.  What is marriage?  An irrevocable vow.  You mock at
it for that.  Ah! don't mock.  It is an irrevocable vow that I want to
take.  Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.  When I
am with her, I regret all that you have taught me.  I become different
from what you have known me to be.  I am changed, and the mere touch of
Sibyl Vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating,
poisonous, delightful theories."

"And those are ...?" asked Lord Henry, helping himself to some salad.

"Oh, your theories about life, your theories about love, your theories
about pleasure.  All your theories, in fact, Harry."

"Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about," he answered
in his slow melodious voice.  "But I am afraid I cannot claim my theory
as my own.  It belongs to Nature, not to me.  Pleasure is Nature's
test, her sign of approval.  When we are happy, we are always good, but
when we are good, we are not always happy."

"Ah! but what do you mean by good?" cried Basil Hallward.

"Yes," echoed Dorian, leaning back in his chair and looking at Lord
Henry over the heavy clusters of purple-lipped irises that stood in the
centre of the table, "what do you mean by good, Harry?"

"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he replied, touching
the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers.
"Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.  One's own
life--that is the important thing.  As for the lives of one's
neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt
one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern.  Besides,
individualism has really the higher aim.  Modern morality consists in
accepting the standard of one's age.  I consider that for any man of
culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest
immorality."

"But, surely, if one lives merely for one's self, Harry, one pays a
terrible price for doing so?" suggested the painter.

"Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays.  I should fancy that
the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but
self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege
of the rich."

"One has to pay in other ways but money."

"What sort of ways, Basil?"

"Oh!  I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in ... well, in the
consciousness of degradation."

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "My dear fellow, mediaeval art is
charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date.  One can use them in
fiction, of course.  But then the only things that one can use in
fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.  Believe me,
no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever
knows what a pleasure is."

"I know what pleasure is," cried Dorian Gray.  "It is to adore some
one."

"That is certainly better than being adored," he answered, toying with
some fruits.  "Being adored is a nuisance.  Women treat us just as
humanity treats its gods.  They worship us, and are always bothering us
to do something for them."

"I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to
us," murmured the lad gravely.  "They create love in our natures.  They
have a right to demand it back."

"That is quite true, Dorian," cried Hallward.

"Nothing is ever quite true," said Lord Henry.

"This is," interrupted Dorian.  "You must admit, Harry, that women give
to men the very gold of their lives."

"Possibly," he sighed, "but they invariably want it back in such very
small change.  That is the worry.  Women, as some witty Frenchman once
put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always
prevent us from carrying them out."

"Harry, you are dreadful!  I don't know why I like you so much."

"You will always like me, Dorian," he replied.  "Will you have some
coffee, you fellows?  Waiter, bring coffee, and _fine-champagne_, and
some cigarettes.  No, don't mind the cigarettes--I have some.  Basil, I
can't allow you to smoke cigars.  You must have a cigarette.  A
cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure.  It is exquisite,
and it leaves one unsatisfied.  What more can one want?  Yes, Dorian,
you will always be fond of me.  I represent to you all the sins you
have never had the courage to commit."

"What nonsense you talk, Harry!" cried the lad, taking a light from a
fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table.
"Let us go down to the theatre.  When Sibyl comes on the stage you will
have a new ideal of life.  She will represent something to you that you
have never known."

"I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his
eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion.  I am afraid, however,
that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing.  Still, your
wonderful girl may thrill me.  I love acting.  It is so much more real
than life.  Let us go.  Dorian, you will come with me.  I am so sorry,
Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham.  You must follow
us in a hansom."

They got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing.  The
painter was silent and preoccupied.  There was a gloom over him.  He
could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better
than many other things that might have happened.  After a few minutes,
they all passed downstairs.  He drove off by himself, as had been
arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in
front of him.  A strange sense of loss came over him.  He felt that
Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the
past.  Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the
crowded flaring streets became blurred to his eyes.  When the cab drew
up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.



CHAPTER 7

For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat
Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with
an oily tremulous smile.  He escorted them to their box with a sort of
pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands and talking at the top
of his voice.  Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever.  He felt as if
he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban.  Lord
Henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him.  At least he declared he
did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand and assuring him that he
was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius and gone
bankrupt over a poet.  Hallward amused himself with watching the faces
in the pit.  The heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight
flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow fire.  The youths
in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and hung them
over the side.  They talked to each other across the theatre and shared
their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them.  Some women
were laughing in the pit.  Their voices were horribly shrill and
discordant.  The sound of the popping of corks came from the bar.

"What a place to find one's divinity in!" said Lord Henry.

"Yes!" answered Dorian Gray.  "It was here I found her, and she is
divine beyond all living things.  When she acts, you will forget
everything.  These common rough people, with their coarse faces and
brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage.  They
sit silently and watch her.  They weep and laugh as she wills them to
do.  She makes them as responsive as a violin.  She spiritualizes them,
and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self."

"The same flesh and blood as one's self!  Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed
Lord Henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery through his
opera-glass.

"Don't pay any attention to him, Dorian," said the painter.  "I
understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl.  Any one you love
must be marvellous, and any girl who has the effect you describe must
be fine and noble.  To spiritualize one's age--that is something worth
doing.  If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without
one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have
been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and
lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of
all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.  This
marriage is quite right.  I did not think so at first, but I admit it
now.  The gods made Sibyl Vane for you.  Without her you would have
been incomplete."

"Thanks, Basil," answered Dorian Gray, pressing his hand.  "I knew that
you would understand me.  Harry is so cynical, he terrifies me.  But
here is the orchestra.  It is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for
about five minutes.  Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl
to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything
that is good in me."

A quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of
applause, Sibyl Vane stepped on to the stage.  Yes, she was certainly
lovely to look at--one of the loveliest creatures, Lord Henry thought,
that he had ever seen.  There was something of the fawn in her shy
grace and startled eyes.  A faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a
mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded
enthusiastic house.  She stepped back a few paces and her lips seemed
to tremble.  Basil Hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud.
Motionless, and as one in a dream, sat Dorian Gray, gazing at her.
Lord Henry peered through his glasses, murmuring, "Charming! charming!"

The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's
dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends.  The band, such
as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began.  Through
the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a
creature from a finer world.  Her body swayed, while she danced, as a
plant sways in the water.  The curves of her throat were the curves of
a white lily.  Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.

Yet she was curiously listless.  She showed no sign of joy when her
eyes rested on Romeo.  The few words she had to speak--

    Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
        Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
    For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
        And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss--

with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly
artificial manner.  The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view
of tone it was absolutely false.  It was wrong in colour.  It took away
all the life from the verse.  It made the passion unreal.

Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her.  He was puzzled and anxious.
Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him.  She seemed to
them to be absolutely incompetent.  They were horribly disappointed.

Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony scene of
the second act.  They waited for that.  If she failed there, there was
nothing in her.

She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight.  That could not
be denied.  But the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew
worse as she went on.  Her gestures became absurdly artificial.  She
overemphasized everything that she had to say.  The beautiful passage--

    Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
    Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
    For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night--

was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been
taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. When she
leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines--

        Although I joy in thee,
    I have no joy of this contract to-night:
    It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
    Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
    Ere one can say, "It lightens."  Sweet, good-night!
    This bud of love by summer's ripening breath
    May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet--

she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. It was
not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely
self-contained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete failure.

Even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their
interest in the play. They got restless, and began to talk loudly and
to whistle. The Jew manager, who was standing at the back of the
dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. The only person unmoved was
the girl herself.

When the second act was over, there came a storm of hisses, and Lord
Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat.  "She is quite
beautiful, Dorian," he said, "but she can't act.  Let us go."

"I am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard
bitter voice.  "I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an
evening, Harry.  I apologize to you both."

"My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill," interrupted
Hallward.  "We will come some other night."

"I wish she were ill," he rejoined.  "But she seems to me to be simply
callous and cold.  She has entirely altered.  Last night she was a
great artist.  This evening she is merely a commonplace mediocre
actress."

"Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian.  Love is a more
wonderful thing than art."

"They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry.  "But
do let us go.  Dorian, you must not stay here any longer.  It is not
good for one's morals to see bad acting.  Besides, I don't suppose you
will want your wife to act, so what does it matter if she plays Juliet
like a wooden doll?  She is very lovely, and if she knows as little
about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful
experience.  There are only two kinds of people who are really
fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know
absolutely nothing.  Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic!
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is
unbecoming.  Come to the club with Basil and myself.  We will smoke
cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane.  She is beautiful.
What more can you want?"

"Go away, Harry," cried the lad.  "I want to be alone.  Basil, you must
go.  Ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?"  The hot tears came
to his eyes.  His lips trembled, and rushing to the back of the box, he
leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.

"Let us go, Basil," said Lord Henry with a strange tenderness in his
voice, and the two young men passed out together.

A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up and the curtain rose
on the third act.  Dorian Gray went back to his seat.  He looked pale,
and proud, and indifferent.  The play dragged on, and seemed
interminable.  Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots
and laughing.  The whole thing was a _fiasco_.  The last act was played
to almost empty benches.  The curtain went down on a titter and some
groans.

As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into the
greenroom.  The girl was standing there alone, with a look of triumph
on her face.  Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire.  There was a
radiance about her.  Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of
their own.

When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy
came over her.  "How badly I acted to-night, Dorian!" she cried.

"Horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement.  "Horribly!  It
was dreadful.  Are you ill?  You have no idea what it was.  You have no
idea what I suffered."

The girl smiled.  "Dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with
long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to
the red petals of her mouth.  "Dorian, you should have understood.  But
you understand now, don't you?"

"Understand what?" he asked, angrily.

"Why I was so bad to-night. Why I shall always be bad.  Why I shall
never act well again."

He shrugged his shoulders.  "You are ill, I suppose.  When you are ill
you shouldn't act.  You make yourself ridiculous.  My friends were
bored.  I was bored."

She seemed not to listen to him.  She was transfigured with joy.  An
ecstasy of happiness dominated her.

"Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one
reality of my life.  It was only in the theatre that I lived.  I
thought that it was all true.  I was Rosalind one night and Portia the
other.  The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia
were mine also.  I believed in everything.  The common people who acted
with me seemed to me to be godlike.  The painted scenes were my world.
I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real.  You came--oh, my
beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison.  You taught me what
reality really is.  To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw
through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in
which I had always played.  To-night, for the first time, I became
conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the
moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and
that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not
what I wanted to say.  You had brought me something higher, something
of which all art is but a reflection.  You had made me understand what
love really is.  My love!  My love!  Prince Charming!  Prince of life!
I have grown sick of shadows.  You are more to me than all art can ever
be.  What have I to do with the puppets of a play?  When I came on
to-night, I could not understand how it was that everything had gone
from me.  I thought that I was going to be wonderful.  I found that I
could do nothing.  Suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant.
The knowledge was exquisite to me.  I heard them hissing, and I smiled.
What could they know of love such as ours?  Take me away, Dorian--take
me away with you, where we can be quite alone.  I hate the stage.  I
might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that
burns me like fire.  Oh, Dorian, Dorian, you understand now what it
signifies?  Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to
play at being in love.  You have made me see that."

He flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face.  "You have
killed my love," he muttered.

She looked at him in wonder and laughed.  He made no answer.  She came
across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his hair.  She knelt
down and pressed his hands to her lips.  He drew them away, and a
shudder ran through him.

Then he leaped up and went to the door.  "Yes," he cried, "you have
killed my love.  You used to stir my imagination.  Now you don't even
stir my curiosity.  You simply produce no effect.  I loved you because
you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you
realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the
shadows of art.  You have thrown it all away.  You are shallow and
stupid.  My God! how mad I was to love you!  What a fool I have been!
You are nothing to me now.  I will never see you again.  I will never
think of you.  I will never mention your name.  You don't know what you
were to me, once.  Why, once ... Oh, I can't bear to think of it!  I
wish I had never laid eyes upon you!  You have spoiled the romance of
my life.  How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art!
Without your art, you are nothing.  I would have made you famous,
splendid, magnificent.  The world would have worshipped you, and you
would have borne my name.  What are you now?  A third-rate actress with
a pretty face."

The girl grew white, and trembled.  She clenched her hands together,
and her voice seemed to catch in her throat.  "You are not serious,
Dorian?" she murmured.  "You are acting."

"Acting!  I leave that to you.  You do it so well," he answered
bitterly.

She rose from her knees and, with a piteous expression of pain in her
face, came across the room to him.  She put her hand upon his arm and
looked into his eyes.  He thrust her back.  "Don't touch me!" he cried.

A low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet and lay
there like a trampled flower.  "Dorian, Dorian, don't leave me!" she
whispered.  "I am so sorry I didn't act well.  I was thinking of you
all the time.  But I will try--indeed, I will try.  It came so suddenly
across me, my love for you.  I think I should never have known it if
you had not kissed me--if we had not kissed each other.  Kiss me again,
my love.  Don't go away from me.  I couldn't bear it.  Oh! don't go
away from me.  My brother ... No; never mind.  He didn't mean it.  He
was in jest.... But you, oh! can't you forgive me for to-night? I will
work so hard and try to improve.  Don't be cruel to me, because I love
you better than anything in the world.  After all, it is only once that
I have not pleased you.  But you are quite right, Dorian.  I should
have shown myself more of an artist.  It was foolish of me, and yet I
couldn't help it.  Oh, don't leave me, don't leave me." A fit of
passionate sobbing choked her.  She crouched on the floor like a
wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at
her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain.  There is
always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has
ceased to love.  Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.
Her tears and sobs annoyed him.

"I am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice.  "I don't wish
to be unkind, but I can't see you again.  You have disappointed me."

She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer.  Her little
hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him.  He
turned on his heel and left the room.  In a few moments he was out of
the theatre.

Where he went to he hardly knew.  He remembered wandering through dimly
lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking
houses.  Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after
him.  Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves
like monstrous apes.  He had seen grotesque children huddled upon
door-steps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.

As the dawn was just breaking, he found himself close to Covent Garden.
The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed
itself into a perfect pearl.  Huge carts filled with nodding lilies
rumbled slowly down the polished empty street.  The air was heavy with
the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an
anodyne for his pain.  He followed into the market and watched the men
unloading their waggons.  A white-smocked carter offered him some
cherries.  He thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money
for them, and began to eat them listlessly.  They had been plucked at
midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them.  A long
line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red
roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge,
jade-green piles of vegetables.  Under the portico, with its grey,
sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls,
waiting for the auction to be over.  Others crowded round the swinging
doors of the coffee-house in the piazza.  The heavy cart-horses slipped
and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings.
Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks.  Iris-necked
and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds.

After a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home.  For a few
moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent
square, with its blank, close-shuttered windows and its staring blinds.
The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like
silver against it.  From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke
was rising.  It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.

In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge, that
hung from the ceiling of the great, oak-panelled hall of entrance,
lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals
of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire.  He turned them out and,
having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library
towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the
ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had
decorated for himself and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries
that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal.  As
he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait
Basil Hallward had painted of him.  He started back as if in surprise.
Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled.  After he
had taken the button-hole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate.
Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it.  In
the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk
blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed.  The
expression looked different.  One would have said that there was a
touch of cruelty in the mouth.  It was certainly strange.

He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind.  The
bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky
corners, where they lay shuddering.  But the strange expression that he
had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be
more intensified even.  The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the
lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking
into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory
Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly
into its polished depths.  No line like that warped his red lips.  What
did it mean?

He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it
again.  There were no signs of any change when he looked into the
actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression
had altered.  It was not a mere fancy of his own.  The thing was
horribly apparent.

He threw himself into a chair and began to think.  Suddenly there
flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio the
day the picture had been finished.  Yes, he remembered it perfectly.
He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the
portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the
face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that
the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and
thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness
of his then just conscious boyhood.  Surely his wish had not been
fulfilled?  Such things were impossible.  It seemed monstrous even to
think of them.  And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the
touch of cruelty in the mouth.

Cruelty!  Had he been cruel?  It was the girl's fault, not his.  He had
dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he
had thought her great.  Then she had disappointed him.  She had been
shallow and unworthy.  And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over
him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little
child.  He remembered with what callousness he had watched her.  Why
had he been made like that?  Why had such a soul been given to him?
But he had suffered also.  During the three terrible hours that the
play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of
torture.  His life was well worth hers.  She had marred him for a
moment, if he had wounded her for an age.  Besides, women were better
suited to bear sorrow than men.  They lived on their emotions.  They
only thought of their emotions.  When they took lovers, it was merely
to have some one with whom they could have scenes.  Lord Henry had told
him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were.  Why should he trouble
about Sibyl Vane?  She was nothing to him now.

But the picture?  What was he to say of that?  It held the secret of
his life, and told his story.  It had taught him to love his own
beauty.  Would it teach him to loathe his own soul?  Would he ever look
at it again?

No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses.  The
horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it.
Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that
makes men mad.  The picture had not changed.  It was folly to think so.

Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel
smile.  Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight.  Its blue eyes
met his own.  A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the
painted image of himself, came over him.  It had altered already, and
would alter more.  Its gold would wither into grey.  Its red and white
roses would die.  For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck
and wreck its fairness.  But he would not sin.  The picture, changed or
unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience.  He would
resist temptation.  He would not see Lord Henry any more--would not, at
any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil
Hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for
impossible things.  He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends,
marry her, try to love her again.  Yes, it was his duty to do so.  She
must have suffered more than he had.  Poor child!  He had been selfish
and cruel to her.  The fascination that she had exercised over him
would return.  They would be happy together.  His life with her would
be beautiful and pure.

He got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front of the
portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it.  "How horrible!" he murmured
to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it.  When he
stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath.  The fresh morning
air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions.  He thought only of
Sibyl.  A faint echo of his love came back to him.  He repeated her
name over and over again.  The birds that were singing in the
dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.



CHAPTER 8

It was long past noon when he awoke.  His valet had crept several times
on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring, and had wondered
what made his young master sleep so late.  Finally his bell sounded,
and Victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile of letters, on
a small tray of old Sevres china, and drew back the olive-satin
curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in front of the
three tall windows.

"Monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling.

"What o'clock is it, Victor?" asked Dorian Gray drowsily.

"One hour and a quarter, Monsieur."

How late it was!  He sat up, and having sipped some tea, turned over
his letters.  One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought by
hand that morning.  He hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside.
The others he opened listlessly.  They contained the usual collection
of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes
of charity concerts, and the like that are showered on fashionable
young men every morning during the season.  There was a rather heavy
bill for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set that he had not yet
had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely
old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when
unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were several
very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders
offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the
most reasonable rates of interest.

After about ten minutes he got up, and throwing on an elaborate
dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the
onyx-paved bathroom.  The cool water refreshed him after his long
sleep.  He seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through.  A
dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once
or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it.

As soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a
light French breakfast that had been laid out for him on a small round
table close to the open window.  It was an exquisite day.  The warm air
seemed laden with spices.  A bee flew in and buzzed round the
blue-dragon bowl that, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, stood before
him.  He felt perfectly happy.

Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the
portrait, and he started.

"Too cold for Monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the
table.  "I shut the window?"

Dorian shook his head.  "I am not cold," he murmured.

Was it all true?  Had the portrait really changed?  Or had it been
simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where
there had been a look of joy?  Surely a painted canvas could not alter?
The thing was absurd.  It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day.
It would make him smile.

And, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing!  First in
the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of
cruelty round the warped lips.  He almost dreaded his valet leaving the
room.  He knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the
portrait.  He was afraid of certainty.  When the coffee and cigarettes
had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a wild desire to
tell him to remain.  As the door was closing behind him, he called him
back.  The man stood waiting for his orders.  Dorian looked at him for
a moment.  "I am not at home to any one, Victor," he said with a sigh.
The man bowed and retired.

Then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on
a luxuriously cushioned couch that stood facing the screen.  The screen
was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a
rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern.  He scanned it curiously,
wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life.

Should he move it aside, after all?  Why not let it stay there?  What
was the use of knowing? If the thing was true, it was terrible.  If it
was not true, why trouble about it?  But what if, by some fate or
deadlier chance, eyes other than his spied behind and saw the horrible
change?  What should he do if Basil Hallward came and asked to look at
his own picture?  Basil would be sure to do that.  No; the thing had to
be examined, and at once.  Anything would be better than this dreadful
state of doubt.

He got up and locked both doors.  At least he would be alone when he
looked upon the mask of his shame.  Then he drew the screen aside and
saw himself face to face.  It was perfectly true.  The portrait had
altered.

As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he
found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost
scientific interest.  That such a change should have taken place was
incredible to him.  And yet it was a fact.  Was there some subtle
affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form
and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him?  Could it be
that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they
made true?  Or was there some other, more terrible reason?  He
shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there,
gazing at the picture in sickened horror.

One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him.  It had made him
conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane.  It was not
too late to make reparation for that.  She could still be his wife.
His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would
be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil
Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would
be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the
fear of God to us all.  There were opiates for remorse, drugs that
could lull the moral sense to sleep.  But here was a visible symbol of
the degradation of sin.  Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men
brought upon their souls.

Three o'clock struck, and four, and the half-hour rang its double
chime, but Dorian Gray did not stir.  He was trying to gather up the
scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern; to find his
way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was
wandering.  He did not know what to do, or what to think.  Finally, he
went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had
loved, imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness.  He
covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of
pain.  There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we
feel that no one else has a right to blame us.  It is the confession,
not the priest, that gives us absolution.  When Dorian had finished the
letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.

Suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard Lord Henry's
voice outside.  "My dear boy, I must see you.  Let me in at once.  I
can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."

He made no answer at first, but remained quite still.  The knocking
still continued and grew louder.  Yes, it was better to let Lord Henry
in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel
with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was
inevitable.  He jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture,
and unlocked the door.

"I am so sorry for it all, Dorian," said Lord Henry as he entered.
"But you must not think too much about it."

"Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?" asked the lad.

"Yes, of course," answered Lord Henry, sinking into a chair and slowly
pulling off his yellow gloves.  "It is dreadful, from one point of
view, but it was not your fault.  Tell me, did you go behind and see
her, after the play was over?"

"Yes."

"I felt sure you had.  Did you make a scene with her?"

"I was brutal, Harry--perfectly brutal.  But it is all right now.  I am
not sorry for anything that has happened.  It has taught me to know
myself better."

"Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it in that way!  I was afraid I
would find you plunged in remorse and tearing that nice curly hair of
yours."

"I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head and
smiling.  "I am perfectly happy now.  I know what conscience is, to
begin with.  It is not what you told me it was.  It is the divinest
thing in us.  Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more--at least not before
me.  I want to be good.  I can't bear the idea of my soul being
hideous."

"A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian!  I congratulate you
on it.  But how are you going to begin?"

"By marrying Sibyl Vane."

"Marrying Sibyl Vane!" cried Lord Henry, standing up and looking at him
in perplexed amazement.  "But, my dear Dorian--"

"Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say.  Something dreadful
about marriage.  Don't say it.  Don't ever say things of that kind to
me again.  Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me.  I am not going to
break my word to her.  She is to be my wife."

"Your wife!  Dorian! ... Didn't you get my letter?  I wrote to you this
morning, and sent the note down by my own man."

"Your letter?  Oh, yes, I remember.  I have not read it yet, Harry.  I
was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like.  You
cut life to pieces with your epigrams."

"You know nothing then?"

"What do you mean?"

Lord Henry walked across the room, and sitting down by Dorian Gray,
took both his hands in his own and held them tightly.  "Dorian," he
said, "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that Sibyl Vane
is dead."

A cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet,
tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp.  "Dead!  Sibyl dead!
It is not true!  It is a horrible lie!  How dare you say it?"

"It is quite true, Dorian," said Lord Henry, gravely.  "It is in all
the morning papers.  I wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one
till I came.  There will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must
not be mixed up in it.  Things like that make a man fashionable in
Paris.  But in London people are so prejudiced.  Here, one should never
make one's _debut_ with a scandal.  One should reserve that to give an
interest to one's old age.  I suppose they don't know your name at the
theatre?  If they don't, it is all right.  Did any one see you going
round to her room?  That is an important point."

Dorian did not answer for a few moments.  He was dazed with horror.
Finally he stammered, in a stifled voice, "Harry, did you say an
inquest?  What did you mean by that?  Did Sibyl--? Oh, Harry, I can't
bear it!  But be quick.  Tell me everything at once."

"I have no doubt it was not an accident, Dorian, though it must be put
in that way to the public.  It seems that as she was leaving the
theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had
forgotten something upstairs.  They waited some time for her, but she
did not come down again.  They ultimately found her lying dead on the
floor of her dressing-room. She had swallowed something by mistake,
some dreadful thing they use at theatres.  I don't know what it was,
but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it.  I should fancy it
was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously."

"Harry, Harry, it is terrible!" cried the lad.

"Yes; it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed
up in it.  I see by _The Standard_ that she was seventeen.  I should have
thought she was almost younger than that.  She looked such a child, and
seemed to know so little about acting.  Dorian, you mustn't let this
thing get on your nerves.  You must come and dine with me, and
afterwards we will look in at the opera.  It is a Patti night, and
everybody will be there.  You can come to my sister's box.  She has got
some smart women with her."

"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself,
"murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife.
Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that.  The birds sing just as
happily in my garden.  And to-night I am to dine with you, and then go
on to the opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose, afterwards.  How
extraordinarily dramatic life is!  If I had read all this in a book,
Harry, I think I would have wept over it.  Somehow, now that it has
happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.
Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my
life.  Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been
addressed to a dead girl.  Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent
people we call the dead?  Sibyl!  Can she feel, or know, or listen?
Oh, Harry, how I loved her once!  It seems years ago to me now.  She
was everything to me.  Then came that dreadful night--was it really
only last night?--when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke.
She explained it all to me.  It was terribly pathetic.  But I was not
moved a bit.  I thought her shallow.  Suddenly something happened that
made me afraid.  I can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible.  I
said I would go back to her.  I felt I had done wrong.  And now she is
dead.  My God!  My God!  Harry, what shall I do?  You don't know the
danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight.  She would
have done that for me.  She had no right to kill herself.  It was
selfish of her."

"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case
and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever
reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible
interest in life.  If you had married this girl, you would have been
wretched.  Of course, you would have treated her kindly.  One can
always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.  But she would
have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her.  And
when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes
dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's
husband has to pay for.  I say nothing about the social mistake, which
would have been abject--which, of course, I would not have allowed--but
I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an
absolute failure."

"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room
and looking horribly pale.  "But I thought it was my duty.  It is not
my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was
right.  I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good
resolutions--that they are always made too late.  Mine certainly were."

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific
laws.  Their origin is pure vanity.  Their result is absolutely _nil_.
They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions
that have a certain charm for the weak.  That is all that can be said
for them.  They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they
have no account."

"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?  I
don't think I am heartless.  Do you?"

"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be
entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry with
his sweet melancholy smile.

The lad frowned.  "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he rejoined,
"but I am glad you don't think I am heartless.  I am nothing of the
kind.  I know I am not.  And yet I must admit that this thing that has
happened does not affect me as it should.  It seems to me to be simply
like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.  It has all the terrible
beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but
by which I have not been wounded."

"It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an
exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism, "an
extremely interesting question.  I fancy that the true explanation is
this:  It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style.  They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.  They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives.  If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.  Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play.  Or rather we are both.  We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us.  In the present case, what is it that
has really happened?  Some one has killed herself for love of you.  I
wish that I had ever had such an experience.  It would have made me in
love with love for the rest of my life.  The people who have adored
me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have
always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them,
or they to care for me.  They have become stout and tedious, and when I
meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences.  That awful memory of
woman!  What a fearful thing it is!  And what an utter intellectual
stagnation it reveals!  One should absorb the colour of life, but one
should never remember its details.  Details are always vulgar."

"I must sow poppies in my garden," sighed Dorian.

"There is no necessity," rejoined his companion.  "Life has always
poppies in her hands.  Of course, now and then things linger.  I once
wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic
mourning for a romance that would not die.  Ultimately, however, it did
die.  I forget what killed it.  I think it was her proposing to
sacrifice the whole world for me.  That is always a dreadful moment.
It fills one with the terror of eternity.  Well--would you believe
it?--a week ago, at Lady Hampshire's, I found myself seated at dinner
next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole
thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future.  I had
buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.  She dragged it out again and
assured me that I had spoiled her life.  I am bound to state that she
ate an enormous dinner, so I did not feel any anxiety.  But what a lack
of taste she showed!  The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
But women never know when the curtain has fallen.  They always want a
sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over,
they propose to continue it.  If they were allowed their own way, every
comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in
a farce.  They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of
art.  You are more fortunate than I am.  I assure you, Dorian, that not
one of the women I have known would have done for me what Sibyl Vane
did for you.  Ordinary women always console themselves.  Some of them
do it by going in for sentimental colours.  Never trust a woman who
wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who
is fond of pink ribbons.  It always means that they have a history.
Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good
qualities of their husbands.  They flaunt their conjugal felicity in
one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.  Religion
consoles some.  Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a
woman once told me, and I can quite understand it.  Besides, nothing
makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.  Conscience makes
egotists of us all.  Yes; there is really no end to the consolations
that women find in modern life.  Indeed, I have not mentioned the most
important one."

"What is that, Harry?" said the lad listlessly.

"Oh, the obvious consolation.  Taking some one else's admirer when one
loses one's own.  In good society that always whitewashes a woman.  But
really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the
women one meets!  There is something to me quite beautiful about her
death.  I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with,
such as romance, passion, and love."

"I was terribly cruel to her.  You forget that."

"I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more
than anything else.  They have wonderfully primitive instincts.  We
have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their
masters, all the same.  They love being dominated.  I am sure you were
splendid.  I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can
fancy how delightful you looked.  And, after all, you said something to
me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely
fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key
to everything."

"What was that, Harry?"

"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of
romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that
if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."

"She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his
face in his hands.

"No, she will never come to life.  She has played her last part.  But
you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply
as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful
scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.  The girl never really
lived, and so she has never really died.  To you at least she was
always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and
left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's
music sounded richer and more full of joy.  The moment she touched
actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.
Mourn for Ophelia, if you like.  Put ashes on your head because
Cordelia was strangled.  Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of
Brabantio died.  But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane.  She was
less real than they are."

There was a silence.  The evening darkened in the room.  Noiselessly,
and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden.  The
colours faded wearily out of things.

After some time Dorian Gray looked up.  "You have explained me to
myself, Harry," he murmured with something of a sigh of relief.  "I
felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I
could not express it to myself.  How well you know me!  But we will not
talk again of what has happened.  It has been a marvellous experience.
That is all.  I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as
marvellous."

"Life has everything in store for you, Dorian.  There is nothing that
you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do."

"But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled?  What
then?"

"Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go, "then, my dear Dorian, you
would have to fight for your victories.  As it is, they are brought to
you.  No, you must keep your good looks.  We live in an age that reads
too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.  We
cannot spare you.  And now you had better dress and drive down to the
club.  We are rather late, as it is."

"I think I shall join you at the opera, Harry.  I feel too tired to eat
anything.  What is the number of your sister's box?"

"Twenty-seven, I believe.  It is on the grand tier.  You will see her
name on the door.  But I am sorry you won't come and dine."

"I don't feel up to it," said Dorian listlessly.  "But I am awfully
obliged to you for all that you have said to me.  You are certainly my
best friend.  No one has ever understood me as you have."

"We are only at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered Lord
Henry, shaking him by the hand.  "Good-bye. I shall see you before
nine-thirty, I hope.  Remember, Patti is singing."

As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell, and in
a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down.
He waited impatiently for him to go.  The man seemed to take an
interminable time over everything.

As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen and drew it back.  No;
there was no further change in the picture.  It had received the news
of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.  It was
conscious of the events of life as they occurred.  The vicious cruelty
that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the
very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was.  Or
was it indifferent to results?  Did it merely take cognizance of what
passed within the soul?  He wondered, and hoped that some day he would
see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he
hoped it.

Poor Sibyl!  What a romance it had all been!  She had often mimicked
death on the stage.  Then Death himself had touched her and taken her
with him.  How had she played that dreadful last scene?  Had she cursed
him, as she died?  No; she had died for love of him, and love would
always be a sacrament to him now.  She had atoned for everything by the
sacrifice she had made of her life.  He would not think any more of
what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the
theatre.  When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic
figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of
love.  A wonderful tragic figure?  Tears came to his eyes as he
remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy
tremulous grace.  He brushed them away hastily and looked again at the
picture.

He felt that the time had really come for making his choice.  Or had
his choice already been made?  Yes, life had decided that for
him--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life.  Eternal youth,
infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder
sins--he was to have all these things.  The portrait was to bear the
burden of his shame: that was all.

A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that
was in store for the fair face on the canvas.  Once, in boyish mockery
of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips
that now smiled so cruelly at him.  Morning after morning he had sat
before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as
it seemed to him at times.  Was it to alter now with every mood to
which he yielded?  Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to
be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that
had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair?
The pity of it! the pity of it!

For a moment, he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that
existed between him and the picture might cease.  It had changed in
answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain
unchanged.  And yet, who, that knew anything about life, would
surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that
chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?
Besides, was it really under his control?  Had it indeed been prayer
that had produced the substitution?  Might there not be some curious
scientific reason for it all?  If thought could exercise its influence
upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon
dead and inorganic things?  Nay, without thought or conscious desire,
might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods
and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?
But the reason was of no importance.  He would never again tempt by a
prayer any terrible power.  If the picture was to alter, it was to
alter.  That was all.  Why inquire too closely into it?

For there would be a real pleasure in watching it.  He would be able to
follow his mind into its secret places.  This portrait would be to him
the most magical of mirrors.  As it had revealed to him his own body,
so it would reveal to him his own soul.  And when winter came upon it,
he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of
summer.  When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid
mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood.
Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade.  Not one pulse of
his life would ever weaken.  Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be
strong, and fleet, and joyous.  What did it matter what happened to the
coloured image on the canvas?  He would be safe.  That was everything.

He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture,
smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was
already waiting for him.  An hour later he was at the opera, and Lord
Henry was leaning over his chair.



CHAPTER 9

As he was sitting at breakfast next morning, Basil Hallward was shown
into the room.

"I am so glad I have found you, Dorian," he said gravely.  "I called
last night, and they told me you were at the opera.  Of course, I knew
that was impossible.  But I wish you had left word where you had really
gone to.  I passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy
might be followed by another.  I think you might have telegraphed for
me when you heard of it first.  I read of it quite by chance in a late
edition of _The Globe_ that I picked up at the club.  I came here at once
and was miserable at not finding you.  I can't tell you how
heart-broken I am about the whole thing.  I know what you must suffer.
But where were you?  Did you go down and see the girl's mother?  For a
moment I thought of following you there.  They gave the address in the
paper.  Somewhere in the Euston Road, isn't it?  But I was afraid of
intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten.  Poor woman!  What a
state she must be in!  And her only child, too!  What did she say about
it all?"

"My dear Basil, how do I know?" murmured Dorian Gray, sipping some
pale-yellow wine from a delicate, gold-beaded bubble of Venetian glass
and looking dreadfully bored.  "I was at the opera.  You should have
come on there.  I met Lady Gwendolen, Harry's sister, for the first
time.  We were in her box.  She is perfectly charming; and Patti sang
divinely.  Don't talk about horrid subjects.  If one doesn't talk about
a thing, it has never happened.  It is simply expression, as Harry
says, that gives reality to things.  I may mention that she was not the
woman's only child.  There is a son, a charming fellow, I believe.  But
he is not on the stage.  He is a sailor, or something.  And now, tell
me about yourself and what you are painting."

"You went to the opera?" said Hallward, speaking very slowly and with a
strained touch of pain in his voice.  "You went to the opera while
Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging?  You can talk to me
of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely, before
the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in?  Why,
man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!"

"Stop, Basil!  I won't hear it!" cried Dorian, leaping to his feet.
"You must not tell me about things.  What is done is done.  What is
past is past."

"You call yesterday the past?"

"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it?  It is only
shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.  A man who
is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a
pleasure.  I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions.  I want to
use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

"Dorian, this is horrible!  Something has changed you completely.  You
look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come
down to my studio to sit for his picture.  But you were simple,
natural, and affectionate then.  You were the most unspoiled creature
in the whole world.  Now, I don't know what has come over you.  You
talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you.  It is all Harry's
influence.  I see that."

The lad flushed up and, going to the window, looked out for a few
moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden.  "I owe a great
deal to Harry, Basil," he said at last, "more than I owe to you.  You
only taught me to be vain."

"Well, I am punished for that, Dorian--or shall be some day."

"I don't know what you mean, Basil," he exclaimed, turning round.  "I
don't know what you want.  What do you want?"

"I want the Dorian Gray I used to paint," said the artist sadly.

"Basil," said the lad, going over to him and putting his hand on his
shoulder, "you have come too late.  Yesterday, when I heard that Sibyl
Vane had killed herself--"

"Killed herself!  Good heavens! is there no doubt about that?" cried
Hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror.

"My dear Basil!  Surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident?  Of
course she killed herself."

The elder man buried his face in his hands.  "How fearful," he
muttered, and a shudder ran through him.

"No," said Dorian Gray, "there is nothing fearful about it.  It is one
of the great romantic tragedies of the age.  As a rule, people who act
lead the most commonplace lives.  They are good husbands, or faithful
wives, or something tedious.  You know what I mean--middle-class virtue
and all that kind of thing.  How different Sibyl was!  She lived her
finest tragedy.  She was always a heroine.  The last night she
played--the night you saw her--she acted badly because she had known
the reality of love.  When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet
might have died.  She passed again into the sphere of art.  There is
something of the martyr about her.  Her death has all the pathetic
uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty.  But, as I was saying,
you must not think I have not suffered.  If you had come in yesterday
at a particular moment--about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to
six--you would have found me in tears.  Even Harry, who was here, who
brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through.  I
suffered immensely.  Then it passed away.  I cannot repeat an emotion.
No one can, except sentimentalists.  And you are awfully unjust, Basil.
You come down here to console me.  That is charming of you.  You find
me consoled, and you are furious.  How like a sympathetic person!  You
remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who
spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance
redressed, or some unjust law altered--I forget exactly what it was.
Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment.  He
had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of _ennui_, and became a
confirmed misanthrope.  And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really
want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to
see it from a proper artistic point of view.  Was it not Gautier who
used to write about _la consolation des arts_?  I remember picking up a
little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that
delightful phrase.  Well, I am not like that young man you told me of
when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say
that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life.  I
love beautiful things that one can touch and handle.  Old brocades,
green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings,
luxury, pomp--there is much to be got from all these.  But the artistic
temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to
me.  To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to
escape the suffering of life.  I know you are surprised at my talking
to you like this.  You have not realized how I have developed.  I was a
schoolboy when you knew me.  I am a man now.  I have new passions, new
thoughts, new ideas.  I am different, but you must not like me less.  I
am changed, but you must always be my friend.  Of course, I am very
fond of Harry.  But I know that you are better than he is.  You are not
stronger--you are too much afraid of life--but you are better.  And how
happy we used to be together!  Don't leave me, Basil, and don't quarrel
with me.  I am what I am.  There is nothing more to be said."

The painter felt strangely moved.  The lad was infinitely dear to him,
and his personality had been the great turning point in his art.  He
could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more.  After all, his
indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away.  There
was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble.

"Well, Dorian," he said at length, with a sad smile, "I won't speak to
you again about this horrible thing, after to-day.  I only trust your
name won't be mentioned in connection with it.  The inquest is to take
place this afternoon.  Have they summoned you?"

Dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his face at
the mention of the word "inquest."  There was something so crude and
vulgar about everything of the kind.  "They don't know my name," he
answered.

"But surely she did?"

"Only my Christian name, and that I am quite sure she never mentioned
to any one.  She told me once that they were all rather curious to
learn who I was, and that she invariably told them my name was Prince
Charming.  It was pretty of her.  You must do me a drawing of Sibyl,
Basil.  I should like to have something more of her than the memory of
a few kisses and some broken pathetic words."

"I will try and do something, Dorian, if it would please you.  But you
must come and sit to me yourself again.  I can't get on without you."

"I can never sit to you again, Basil.  It is impossible!" he exclaimed,
starting back.

The painter stared at him.  "My dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried.
"Do you mean to say you don't like what I did of you?  Where is it?
Why have you pulled the screen in front of it?  Let me look at it.  It
is the best thing I have ever done.  Do take the screen away, Dorian.
It is simply disgraceful of your servant hiding my work like that.  I
felt the room looked different as I came in."

"My servant has nothing to do with it, Basil.  You don't imagine I let
him arrange my room for me?  He settles my flowers for me
sometimes--that is all.  No; I did it myself.  The light was too strong
on the portrait."

"Too strong!  Surely not, my dear fellow?  It is an admirable place for
it.  Let me see it."  And Hallward walked towards the corner of the
room.

A cry of terror broke from Dorian Gray's lips, and he rushed between
the painter and the screen.  "Basil," he said, looking very pale, "you
must not look at it.  I don't wish you to."

"Not look at my own work!  You are not serious.  Why shouldn't I look
at it?" exclaimed Hallward, laughing.

"If you try to look at it, Basil, on my word of honour I will never
speak to you again as long as I live.  I am quite serious.  I don't
offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any.  But, remember,
if you touch this screen, everything is over between us."

Hallward was thunderstruck.  He looked at Dorian Gray in absolute
amazement.  He had never seen him like this before.  The lad was
actually pallid with rage.  His hands were clenched, and the pupils of
his eyes were like disks of blue fire.  He was trembling all over.

"Dorian!"

"Don't speak!"

"But what is the matter?  Of course I won't look at it if you don't
want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel and going over
towards the window.  "But, really, it seems rather absurd that I
shouldn't see my own work, especially as I am going to exhibit it in
Paris in the autumn.  I shall probably have to give it another coat of
varnish before that, so I must see it some day, and why not to-day?"

"To exhibit it!  You want to exhibit it?" exclaimed Dorian Gray, a
strange sense of terror creeping over him.  Was the world going to be
shown his secret?  Were people to gape at the mystery of his life?
That was impossible.  Something--he did not know what--had to be done
at once.

"Yes; I don't suppose you will object to that.  Georges Petit is going
to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the Rue de
Seze, which will open the first week in October.  The portrait will
only be away a month.  I should think you could easily spare it for
that time.  In fact, you are sure to be out of town.  And if you keep
it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it."

Dorian Gray passed his hand over his forehead.  There were beads of
perspiration there.  He felt that he was on the brink of a horrible
danger.  "You told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he
cried.  "Why have you changed your mind?  You people who go in for
being consistent have just as many moods as others have.  The only
difference is that your moods are rather meaningless.  You can't have
forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world
would induce you to send it to any exhibition.  You told Harry exactly
the same thing." He stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into
his eyes.  He remembered that Lord Henry had said to him once, half
seriously and half in jest, "If you want to have a strange quarter of
an hour, get Basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture.  He
told me why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me."  Yes, perhaps
Basil, too, had his secret.  He would ask him and try.

"Basil," he said, coming over quite close and looking him straight in
the face, "we have each of us a secret.  Let me know yours, and I shall
tell you mine.  What was your reason for refusing to exhibit my
picture?"

The painter shuddered in spite of himself.  "Dorian, if I told you, you
might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me.  I
could not bear your doing either of those two things.  If you wish me
never to look at your picture again, I am content.  I have always you
to look at.  If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden
from the world, I am satisfied.  Your friendship is dearer to me than
any fame or reputation."

"No, Basil, you must tell me," insisted Dorian Gray.  "I think I have a
right to know."  His feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity
had taken its place.  He was determined to find out Basil Hallward's
mystery.

"Let us sit down, Dorian," said the painter, looking troubled.  "Let us
sit down.  And just answer me one question.  Have you noticed in the
picture something curious?--something that probably at first did not
strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?"

"Basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling
hands and gazing at him with wild startled eyes.

"I see you did.  Don't speak.  Wait till you hear what I have to say.
Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most
extraordinary influence over me.  I was dominated, soul, brain, and
power, by you.  You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen
ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.  I
worshipped you.  I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke.  I
wanted to have you all to myself.  I was only happy when I was with
you.  When you were away from me, you were still present in my art....
Of course, I never let you know anything about this.  It would have
been impossible.  You would not have understood it.  I hardly
understood it myself.  I only knew that I had seen perfection face to
face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--too
wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril
of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them....  Weeks and
weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you.  Then came a
new development.  I had drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as
Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with
heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing
across the green turbid Nile.  You had leaned over the still pool of
some Greek woodland and seen in the water's silent silver the marvel of
your own face.  And it had all been what art should be--unconscious,
ideal, and remote.  One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I
determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are,
not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own
time.  Whether it was the realism of the method, or the mere wonder of
your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or
veil, I cannot tell.  But I know that as I worked at it, every flake
and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret.  I grew afraid
that others would know of my idolatry.  I felt, Dorian, that I had told
too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.  Then it was that
I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited.  You were a
little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me.
Harry, to whom I talked about it, laughed at me.  But I did not mind
that.  When the picture was finished, and I sat alone with it, I felt
that I was right.... Well, after a few days the thing left my studio,
and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its
presence, it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I
had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking
and that I could paint.  Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a
mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really
shown in the work one creates.  Art is always more abstract than we
fancy.  Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all.  It
often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than
it ever reveals him.  And so when I got this offer from Paris, I
determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition.
It never occurred to me that you would refuse.  I see now that you were
right.  The picture cannot be shown.  You must not be angry with me,
Dorian, for what I have told you.  As I said to Harry, once, you are
made to be worshipped."

Dorian Gray drew a long breath.  The colour came back to his cheeks,
and a smile played about his lips.  The peril was over.  He was safe
for the time.  Yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the
painter who had just made this strange confession to him, and wondered
if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a
friend.  Lord Henry had the charm of being very dangerous.  But that
was all.  He was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of.
Would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange
idolatry?  Was that one of the things that life had in store?

"It is extraordinary to me, Dorian," said Hallward, "that you should
have seen this in the portrait.  Did you really see it?"

"I saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed to me very
curious."

"Well, you don't mind my looking at the thing now?"

Dorian shook his head.  "You must not ask me that, Basil.  I could not
possibly let you stand in front of that picture."

"You will some day, surely?"

"Never."

"Well, perhaps you are right.  And now good-bye, Dorian.  You have been
the one person in my life who has really influenced my art.  Whatever I
have done that is good, I owe to you.  Ah! you don't know what it cost
me to tell you all that I have told you."

"My dear Basil," said Dorian, "what have you told me?  Simply that you
felt that you admired me too much.  That is not even a compliment."

"It was not intended as a compliment.  It was a confession.  Now that I
have made it, something seems to have gone out of me.  Perhaps one
should never put one's worship into words."

"It was a very disappointing confession."

"Why, what did you expect, Dorian?  You didn't see anything else in the
picture, did you?  There was nothing else to see?"

"No; there was nothing else to see.  Why do you ask?  But you mustn't
talk about worship.  It is foolish.  You and I are friends, Basil, and
we must always remain so."

"You have got Harry," said the painter sadly.

"Oh, Harry!" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter.  "Harry spends
his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing what is
improbable.  Just the sort of life I would like to lead.  But still I
don't think I would go to Harry if I were in trouble.  I would sooner
go to you, Basil."

"You will sit to me again?"

"Impossible!"

"You spoil my life as an artist by refusing, Dorian.  No man comes
across two ideal things.  Few come across one."

"I can't explain it to you, Basil, but I must never sit to you again.
There is something fatal about a portrait.  It has a life of its own.
I will come and have tea with you.  That will be just as pleasant."

"Pleasanter for you, I am afraid," murmured Hallward regretfully.  "And
now good-bye. I am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once
again.  But that can't be helped.  I quite understand what you feel
about it."

As he left the room, Dorian Gray smiled to himself.  Poor Basil!  How
little he knew of the true reason!  And how strange it was that,
instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had
succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend!  How
much that strange confession explained to him!  The painter's absurd
fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his
curious reticences--he understood them all now, and he felt sorry.
There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured
by romance.

He sighed and touched the bell.  The portrait must be hidden away at
all costs.  He could not run such a risk of discovery again.  It had
been mad of him to have allowed the thing to remain, even for an hour,
in a room to which any of his friends had access.



CHAPTER 10

When his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly and wondered if
he had thought of peering behind the screen.  The man was quite
impassive and waited for his orders.  Dorian lit a cigarette and walked
over to the glass and glanced into it.  He could see the reflection of
Victor's face perfectly.  It was like a placid mask of servility.
There was nothing to be afraid of, there.  Yet he thought it best to be
on his guard.

Speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the house-keeper that he
wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker and ask him to
send two of his men round at once.  It seemed to him that as the man
left the room his eyes wandered in the direction of the screen.  Or was
that merely his own fancy?

After a few moments, in her black silk dress, with old-fashioned thread
mittens on her wrinkled hands, Mrs. Leaf bustled into the library.  He
asked her for the key of the schoolroom.

"The old schoolroom, Mr. Dorian?" she exclaimed.  "Why, it is full of
dust.  I must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it.
It is not fit for you to see, sir.  It is not, indeed."

"I don't want it put straight, Leaf.  I only want the key."

"Well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it.  Why, it
hasn't been opened for nearly five years--not since his lordship died."

He winced at the mention of his grandfather.  He had hateful memories
of him.  "That does not matter," he answered.  "I simply want to see
the place--that is all.  Give me the key."

"And here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over the contents
of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands.  "Here is the key.  I'll
have it off the bunch in a moment.  But you don't think of living up
there, sir, and you so comfortable here?"

"No, no," he cried petulantly.  "Thank you, Leaf.  That will do."

She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail of
the household.  He sighed and told her to manage things as she thought
best.  She left the room, wreathed in smiles.

As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round
the room.  His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily
embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century
Venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near Bologna.
Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in.  It had perhaps
served often as a pall for the dead.  Now it was to hide something that
had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death
itself--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image
on the canvas.  They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace.  They
would defile it and make it shameful.  And yet the thing would still
live on.  It would be always alive.

He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil
the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away.  Basil
would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence, and the still
more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament.  The love
that he bore him--for it was really love--had nothing in it that was
not noble and intellectual.  It was not that mere physical admiration
of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses
tire.  It was such love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and
Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.  Yes, Basil could have saved him.
But it was too late now.  The past could always be annihilated.
Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that.  But the future was
inevitable.  There were passions in him that would find their terrible
outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.

He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that
covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen.
Was the face on the canvas viler than before?  It seemed to him that it
was unchanged, and yet his loathing of it was intensified.  Gold hair,
blue eyes, and rose-red lips--they all were there.  It was simply the
expression that had altered.  That was horrible in its cruelty.
Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow Basil's
reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been!--how shallow, and of what little
account!  His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and
calling him to judgement.  A look of pain came across him, and he flung
the rich pall over the picture.  As he did so, a knock came to the
door.  He passed out as his servant entered.

"The persons are here, Monsieur."

He felt that the man must be got rid of at once.  He must not be
allowed to know where the picture was being taken to.  There was
something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes.
Sitting down at the writing-table he scribbled a note to Lord Henry,
asking him to send him round something to read and reminding him that
they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.

"Wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in
here."

In two or three minutes there was another knock, and Mr. Hubbard
himself, the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street, came in
with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant.  Mr. Hubbard was a
florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was
considerably tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the
artists who dealt with him.  As a rule, he never left his shop.  He
waited for people to come to him.  But he always made an exception in
favour of Dorian Gray.  There was something about Dorian that charmed
everybody.  It was a pleasure even to see him.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled
hands.  "I thought I would do myself the honour of coming round in
person.  I have just got a beauty of a frame, sir.  Picked it up at a
sale.  Old Florentine.  Came from Fonthill, I believe.  Admirably
suited for a religious subject, Mr. Gray."

"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, Mr.
Hubbard.  I shall certainly drop in and look at the frame--though I
don't go in much at present for religious art--but to-day I only want a
picture carried to the top of the house for me.  It is rather heavy, so
I thought I would ask you to lend me a couple of your men."

"No trouble at all, Mr. Gray.  I am delighted to be of any service to
you.  Which is the work of art, sir?"

"This," replied Dorian, moving the screen back.  "Can you move it,
covering and all, just as it is?  I don't want it to get scratched
going upstairs."

"There will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker,
beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from
the long brass chains by which it was suspended.  "And, now, where
shall we carry it to, Mr. Gray?"

"I will show you the way, Mr. Hubbard, if you will kindly follow me.
Or perhaps you had better go in front.  I am afraid it is right at the
top of the house.  We will go up by the front staircase, as it is
wider."

He held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and
began the ascent.  The elaborate character of the frame had made the
picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious
protests of Mr. Hubbard, who had the true tradesman's spirited dislike
of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, Dorian put his hand to it
so as to help them.

"Something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man when they
reached the top landing.  And he wiped his shiny forehead.

"I am afraid it is rather heavy," murmured Dorian as he unlocked the
door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious
secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.

He had not entered the place for more than four years--not, indeed,
since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child, and then
as a study when he grew somewhat older.  It was a large,
well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord
Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness
to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and
desired to keep at a distance.  It appeared to Dorian to have but
little changed.  There was the huge Italian _cassone_, with its
fantastically painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which
he had so often hidden himself as a boy.  There the satinwood book-case
filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks.  On the wall behind it was
hanging the same ragged Flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen
were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by,
carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists.  How well he
remembered it all!  Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to
him as he looked round.  He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish
life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait
was to be hidden away.  How little he had thought, in those dead days,
of all that was in store for him!

But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as
this.  He had the key, and no one else could enter it.  Beneath its
purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden,
and unclean.  What did it matter?  No one could see it.  He himself
would not see it.  Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his
soul?  He kept his youth--that was enough.  And, besides, might not
his nature grow finer, after all?  There was no reason that the future
should be so full of shame.  Some love might come across his life, and
purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already
stirring in spirit and in flesh--those curious unpictured sins whose
very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm.  Perhaps, some
day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive
mouth, and he might show to the world Basil Hallward's masterpiece.

No; that was impossible.  Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing
upon the canvas was growing old.  It might escape the hideousness of
sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it.  The cheeks would
become hollow or flaccid.  Yellow crow's feet would creep round the
fading eyes and make them horrible.  The hair would lose its
brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross,
as the mouths of old men are.  There would be the wrinkled throat, the
cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the
grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.  The picture
had to be concealed.  There was no help for it.

"Bring it in, Mr. Hubbard, please," he said, wearily, turning round.
"I am sorry I kept you so long.  I was thinking of something else."

"Always glad to have a rest, Mr. Gray," answered the frame-maker, who
was still gasping for breath.  "Where shall we put it, sir?"

"Oh, anywhere.  Here:  this will do.  I don't want to have it hung up.
Just lean it against the wall.  Thanks."

"Might one look at the work of art, sir?"

Dorian started.  "It would not interest you, Mr. Hubbard," he said,
keeping his eye on the man.  He felt ready to leap upon him and fling
him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that
concealed the secret of his life.  "I shan't trouble you any more now.
I am much obliged for your kindness in coming round."

"Not at all, not at all, Mr. Gray.  Ever ready to do anything for you,
sir." And Mr. Hubbard tramped downstairs, followed by the assistant,
who glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough
uncomely face.  He had never seen any one so marvellous.

When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Dorian locked the door
and put the key in his pocket.  He felt safe now.  No one would ever
look upon the horrible thing.  No eye but his would ever see his shame.

On reaching the library, he found that it was just after five o'clock
and that the tea had been already brought up.  On a little table of
dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre, a present from Lady
Radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty professional invalid who had
spent the preceding winter in Cairo, was lying a note from Lord Henry,
and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn
and the edges soiled.  A copy of the third edition of _The St. James's
Gazette_ had been placed on the tea-tray. It was evident that Victor had
returned.  He wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were
leaving the house and had wormed out of them what they had been doing.
He would be sure to miss the picture--had no doubt missed it already,
while he had been laying the tea-things. The screen had not been set
back, and a blank space was visible on the wall.  Perhaps some night he
might find him creeping upstairs and trying to force the door of the
room.  It was a horrible thing to have a spy in one's house.  He had
heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some
servant who had read a letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked
up a card with an address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower
or a shred of crumpled lace.

He sighed, and having poured himself out some tea, opened Lord Henry's
note.  It was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper,
and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at
eight-fifteen. He opened _The St. James's_ languidly, and looked through
it.  A red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye.  It drew
attention to the following paragraph:


INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS.--An inquest was held this morning at the Bell
Tavern, Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the body of
Sibyl Vane, a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre,
Holborn.  A verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who
was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of
Dr. Birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased.


He frowned, and tearing the paper in two, went across the room and
flung the pieces away.  How ugly it all was!  And how horribly real
ugliness made things!  He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for
having sent him the report.  And it was certainly stupid of him to have
marked it with red pencil.  Victor might have read it.  The man knew
more than enough English for that.

Perhaps he had read it and had begun to suspect something.  And, yet,
what did it matter?  What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's
death?  There was nothing to fear.  Dorian Gray had not killed her.

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.  What was
it, he wondered.  He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal
stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange
Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung
himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves.  After a
few minutes he became absorbed.  It was the strangest book that he had
ever read.  It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the
delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb
show before him.  Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly
made real to him.  Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually
revealed.

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being,
indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who
spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his
own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through
which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere
artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue,
as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.  The
style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid
and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, of technical
expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work
of some of the finest artists of the French school of _Symbolistes_.
There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in
colour.  The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical
philosophy.  One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the
spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions
of a modern sinner.  It was a poisonous book.  The heavy odour of
incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.  The
mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so
full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,
produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter,
a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of
the falling day and creeping shadows.

Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed
through the windows.  He read on by its wan light till he could read no
more.  Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the
lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed
the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his
bedside and began to dress for dinner.

It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found
Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much bored.

"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your
fault.  That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the
time was going."

"Yes, I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his
chair.

"I didn't say I liked it, Harry.  I said it fascinated me.  There is a
great difference."

"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry.  And they passed
into the dining-room.



CHAPTER 11

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of
this book.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never
sought to free himself from it.  He procured from Paris no less than
nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the
changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have
almost entirely lost control.  The hero, the wonderful young Parisian
in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely
blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself.  And,
indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own
life, written before he had lived it.

In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero.  He
never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat
grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still
water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was
occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once, apparently,
been so remarkable.  It was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in
nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its
place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its
really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow and
despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he
had most dearly valued.

For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and
many others besides him, seemed never to leave him.  Even those who had
heard the most evil things against him--and from time to time strange
rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the
chatter of the clubs--could not believe anything to his dishonour when
they saw him.  He had always the look of one who had kept himself
unspotted from the world.  Men who talked grossly became silent when
Dorian Gray entered the room.  There was something in the purity of his
face that rebuked them.  His mere presence seemed to recall to them the
memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.  They wondered how one
so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an
age that was at once sordid and sensual.

Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged
absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were
his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep
upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left
him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil
Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on
the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him
from the polished glass.  The very sharpness of the contrast used to
quicken his sense of pleasure.  He grew more and more enamoured of his
own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and
terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead
or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which
were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.  He would
place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture,
and smile.  He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.

There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own
delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little
ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in
disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he
had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant
because it was purely selfish.  But moments such as these were rare.
That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as
they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase
with gratification.  The more he knew, the more he desired to know.  He
had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to
society.  Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each
Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the
world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the
day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art.  His little
dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were
noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited,
as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with
its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered
cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver.  Indeed, there were many,
especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw,
in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often
dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of
the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and
perfect manner of a citizen of the world.  To them he seemed to be of
the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make
themselves perfect by the worship of beauty."  Like Gautier, he was one
for whom "the visible world existed."

And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the
arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment
universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert
the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for
him.  His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to
time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of
the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in
everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of
his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.

For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost
immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a
subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the
London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the
Satyricon once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be
something more than a mere _arbiter elegantiarum_, to be consulted on the
wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a
cane.  He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have
its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the
spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.
But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had
never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal
merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or
to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a
new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the
dominant characteristic.  As he looked back upon man moving through
history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss.  So much had been
surrendered! and to such little purpose!  There had been mad wilful
rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose
origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more
terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance,
they had sought to escape; Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out
the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to
the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.

Yes:  there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism
that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely
puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.  It was
to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to
accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any
mode of passionate experience.  Its aim, indeed, was to be experience
itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might
be.  Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar
profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing.  But it was to
teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
itself but a moment.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either
after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of
death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through
the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality
itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,
and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one
might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled
with the malady of reverie.  Gradually white fingers creep through the
curtains, and they appear to tremble.  In black fantastic shapes, dumb
shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there.  Outside,
there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men
going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down
from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it
feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from
her purple cave.  Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by
degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we
watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.  The wan
mirrors get back their mimic life.  The flameless tapers stand where we
had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been
studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the
letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
Nothing seems to us changed.  Out of the unreal shadows of the night
comes back the real life that we had known.  We have to resume it where
we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the
necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of
stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids
might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in
the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh
shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in
which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of
joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray
to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his
search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and
possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and
then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
of it.

It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman
Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great
attraction for him.  The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all
the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb
rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity
of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it
sought to symbolize.  He loved to kneel down on the cold marble
pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly
and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or
raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid
wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "_panis
caelestis_," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the
Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his
breast for his sins.  The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their
lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their
subtle fascination for him.  As he passed out, he used to look with
wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of
one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn
grating the true story of their lives.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable
for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which
there are no stars and the moon is in travail.  Mysticism, with its
marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a
season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of
the _Darwinismus_ movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in
tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the
brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of
the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
morbid or healthy, normal or diseased.  Yet, as has been said of him
before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance
compared with life itself.  He felt keenly conscious of how barren all
intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual
mysteries to reveal.

And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their
manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums
from the East.  He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not
its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their
true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one
mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets
that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often
to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several
influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers;
of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that
sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to
be able to expel melancholy from the soul.

At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long
latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of
olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad
gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled
Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while
grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching
upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of
reed or brass and charmed--or feigned to charm--great hooded snakes and
horrible horned adders.  The harsh intervals and shrill discords of
barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's
beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell
unheeded on his ear.  He collected together from all parts of the world
the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of
dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact
with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them.  He had
the mysterious _juruparis_ of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not
allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been
subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the
Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human
bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile, and the sonorous green
jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular
sweetness.  He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when
they were shaken; the long _clarin_ of the Mexicans, into which the
performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the
harsh _ture_ of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who
sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a
distance of three leagues; the _teponaztli_, that has two vibrating
tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an
elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the _yotl_-bells of
the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge
cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the
one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican
temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a
description.  The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated
him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like
Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous
voices.  Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his
box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt
pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work
of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.

On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a
costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered
with five hundred and sixty pearls.  This taste enthralled him for
years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him.  He would often
spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various
stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that
turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver,
the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,
carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red
cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their
alternate layers of ruby and sapphire.  He loved the red gold of the
sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow
of the milky opal.  He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of
extraordinary size and richness of colour, and had a turquoise _de la
vieille roche_ that was the envy of all the connoisseurs.

He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels.  In Alphonso's
Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real
jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of
Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes "with
collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." There was a gem in
the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition
of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into
a magical sleep and slain.  According to the great alchemist, Pierre de
Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India
made him eloquent.  The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth
provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine.  The
garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her
colour.  The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus,
that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids.
Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a
newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison.  The
bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm
that could cure the plague.  In the nests of Arabian birds was the
aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any
danger by fire.

The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand,
as the ceremony of his coronation.  The gates of the palace of John the
Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake
inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." Over the gable
were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the
gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night.  In Lodge's
strange romance 'A Margarite of America', it was stated that in the
chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of the
world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of
chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." Marco Polo
had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the
mouths of the dead.  A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that
the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned
for seven moons over its loss.  When the Huns lured the king into the
great pit, he flung it away--Procopius tells the story--nor was it ever
found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight
of gold pieces for it.  The King of Malabar had shown to a certain
Venetian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god
that he worshipped.

When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of
France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome,
and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.
Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and
twenty-one diamonds.  Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand
marks, which was covered with balas rubies.  Hall described Henry VIII,
on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a
jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other
rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses."
The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold
filigrane.  Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour
studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with
turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap _parseme_ with pearls.  Henry II wore
jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with
twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients.  The ducal hat of Charles
the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race, was hung with
pear-shaped pearls and studded with sapphires.

How exquisite life had once been!  How gorgeous in its pomp and
decoration!  Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

Then he turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that
performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern
nations of Europe.  As he investigated the subject--and he always had
an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment
in whatever he took up--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the
ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.  He, at any
rate, had escaped that.  Summer followed summer, and the yellow
jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the
story of their shame, but he was unchanged.  No winter marred his face
or stained his flowerlike bloom.  How different it was with material
things!  Where had they passed to?  Where was the great crocus-coloured
robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena?  Where the huge velarium
that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail
of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a
chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined steeds?  He longed to see the
curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were
displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
Pontus and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests,
rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature"; and
the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which
were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "_Madame, je suis tout
joyeux_," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold
thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four
pearls.  He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims
for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen
hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the
king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings
were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked
in gold."  Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of
black velvet powdered with crescents and suns.  Its curtains were of
damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver
ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it
stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black
velvet upon cloth of silver.  Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides
fifteen feet high in his apartment.  The state bed of Sobieski, King of
Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with
verses from the Koran.  Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully
chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions.  It
had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of
Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy.

And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite
specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting
the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and
stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that
from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air," and
"running water," and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from Java;
elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair
blue silks and wrought with _fleurs-de-lis_, birds and images; veils of
_lacis_ worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish
velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese _Foukousas_,
with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds.

He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed
he had for everything connected with the service of the Church.  In the
long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house, he had
stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the
raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and
fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by
the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted pain.
He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask,
figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in
six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the
pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreys were divided
into panels representing scenes from the life of the Virgin, and the
coronation of the Virgin was figured in coloured silks upon the hood.
This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.  Another cope was of
green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves,
from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which
were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals.  The morse
bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work.  The orphreys were
woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with
medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian.
He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold
brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with
representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, and
embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of
white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins
and _fleurs-de-lis_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and
many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria.  In the mystic offices to
which such things were put, there was something that quickened his
imagination.

For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely
house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he
could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times
to be almost too great to be borne.  Upon the walls of the lonely
locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with
his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him
the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the
purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.  For weeks he would not go there,
would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart,
his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence.
Then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to
dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day,
until he was driven away.  On his return he would sit in front of the
picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other
times, with that pride of individualism that is half the
fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure at the misshapen
shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.

After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and
gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as
well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they had more
than once spent the winter.  He hated to be separated from the picture
that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that during his
absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the
elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.

He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.  It was true
that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness
of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn
from that?  He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him.  He had
not painted it.  What was it to him how vile and full of shame it
looked?  Even if he told them, would they believe it?

Yet he was afraid.  Sometimes when he was down at his great house in
Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank
who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton
luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly
leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not
been tampered with and that the picture was still there.  What if it
should be stolen?  The mere thought made him cold with horror.  Surely
the world would know his secret then.  Perhaps the world already
suspected it.

For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him.
He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth
and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it was
said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into the
smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another
gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out.  Curious stories
became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.  It
was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a
low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with
thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.  His
extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear
again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass
him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though
they were determined to discover his secret.

Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice,
and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his
charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth
that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer
to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about
him.  It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most
intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.  Women who had
wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and
set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or
horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.

Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many his
strange and dangerous charm.  His great wealth was a certain element of
security.  Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to
believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and
fascinating.  It feels instinctively that manners are of more
importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability
is of much less value than the possession of a good _chef_.  And, after
all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has
given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private
life.  Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold _entrees_, as
Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject, and there is
possibly a good deal to be said for his view.  For the canons of good
society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art.  Form is
absolutely essential to it.  It should have the dignity of a ceremony,
as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of
a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful
to us.  Is insincerity such a terrible thing?  I think not.  It is
merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion.  He used to wonder at the
shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing
simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.  To him, man was a
being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform
creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and
passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies
of the dead.  He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery
of his country house and look at the various portraits of those whose
blood flowed in his veins.  Here was Philip Herbert, described by
Francis Osborne, in his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and
King James, as one who was "caressed by the Court for his handsome
face, which kept him not long company."  Was it young Herbert's life
that he sometimes led?  Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body
to body till it had reached his own?  Was it some dim sense of that
ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause,
give utterance, in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had
so changed his life?  Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled
surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet.  What had this
man's legacy been?  Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him
some inheritance of sin and shame?  Were his own actions merely the
dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize?  Here, from the
fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl
stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves.  A flower was in her right hand,
and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses.  On
a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple.  There were large
green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes.  He knew her life, and
the strange stories that were told about her lovers.  Had he something
of her temperament in him?  These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to
look curiously at him.  What of George Willoughby, with his powdered
hair and fantastic patches?  How evil he looked!  The face was
saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with
disdain.  Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
were so overladen with rings.  He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars.  What of the
second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his
wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
Fitzherbert?  How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls
and insolent pose!  What passions had he bequeathed?  The world had
looked upon him as infamous.  He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast.  Beside him hung the
portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black.  Her blood,
also, stirred within him.  How curious it all seemed!  And his mother
with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew
what he had got from her.  He had got from her his beauty, and his
passion for the beauty of others.  She laughed at him in her loose
Bacchante dress.  There were vine leaves in her hair.  The purple
spilled from the cup she was holding.  The carnations of the painting
had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and
brilliancy of colour.  They seemed to follow him wherever he went.

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.  There
were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history
was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act
and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it
had been in his brain and in his passions.  He felt that he had known
them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of
subtlety.  It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
been his own.

The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy.  In the seventh chapter he tells how,
crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the
flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _taedium vitae_, that comes
on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear
emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of
pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the
Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero
Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with
colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon
from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.

Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the
two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious
tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and
beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made
monstrous or mad:  Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and
painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death
from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as
Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of
Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was
bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used
hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with
roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse,
with Fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the blood
of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence,
child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by his
debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white
and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy
that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose
melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a
passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the
Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when
gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery
took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid veins the blood of
three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the
lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome
as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and
gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a
shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles
VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned
him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had
sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards
painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his
trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto
Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page,
and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow
piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep,
and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.

There was a horrible fascination in them all.  He saw them at night,
and they troubled his imagination in the day.  The Renaissance knew of
strange manners of poisoning--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted
torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander
and by an amber chain.  Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.  There
were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he
could realize his conception of the beautiful.



CHAPTER 12

It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth
birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.

He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's, where he
had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold
and foggy.  At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street,
a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast and with the collar of
his grey ulster turned up.  He had a bag in his hand.  Dorian
recognized him.  It was Basil Hallward.  A strange sense of fear, for
which he could not account, came over him.  He made no sign of
recognition and went on quickly in the direction of his own house.

But Hallward had seen him.  Dorian heard him first stopping on the
pavement and then hurrying after him.  In a few moments, his hand was
on his arm.

"Dorian!  What an extraordinary piece of luck!  I have been waiting for
you in your library ever since nine o'clock. Finally I took pity on
your tired servant and told him to go to bed, as he let me out.  I am
off to Paris by the midnight train, and I particularly wanted to see
you before I left.  I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as
you passed me.  But I wasn't quite sure.  Didn't you recognize me?"

"In this fog, my dear Basil?  Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor
Square.  I believe my house is somewhere about here, but I don't feel
at all certain about it.  I am sorry you are going away, as I have not
seen you for ages.  But I suppose you will be back soon?"

"No:  I am going to be out of England for six months.  I intend to take
a studio in Paris and shut myself up till I have finished a great
picture I have in my head.  However, it wasn't about myself I wanted to
talk.  Here we are at your door.  Let me come in for a moment.  I have
something to say to you."

"I shall be charmed.  But won't you miss your train?" said Dorian Gray
languidly as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his
latch-key.

The lamplight struggled out through the fog, and Hallward looked at his
watch.  "I have heaps of time," he answered.  "The train doesn't go
till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven.  In fact, I was on my
way to the club to look for you, when I met you.  You see, I shan't
have any delay about luggage, as I have sent on my heavy things.  All I
have with me is in this bag, and I can easily get to Victoria in twenty
minutes."

Dorian looked at him and smiled.  "What a way for a fashionable painter
to travel!  A Gladstone bag and an ulster!  Come in, or the fog will
get into the house.  And mind you don't talk about anything serious.
Nothing is serious nowadays.  At least nothing should be."

Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the
library.  There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open
hearth.  The lamps were lit, and an open Dutch silver spirit-case
stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on
a little marqueterie table.

"You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian.  He gave me
everything I wanted, including your best gold-tipped cigarettes.  He is
a most hospitable creature.  I like him much better than the Frenchman
you used to have.  What has become of the Frenchman, by the bye?"

Dorian shrugged his shoulders.  "I believe he married Lady Radley's
maid, and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.
Anglomania is very fashionable over there now, I hear.  It seems silly
of the French, doesn't it?  But--do you know?--he was not at all a bad
servant.  I never liked him, but I had nothing to complain about.  One
often imagines things that are quite absurd.  He was really very
devoted to me and seemed quite sorry when he went away.  Have another
brandy-and-soda? Or would you like hock-and-seltzer? I always take
hock-and-seltzer myself.  There is sure to be some in the next room."

"Thanks, I won't have anything more," said the painter, taking his cap
and coat off and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the
corner.  "And now, my dear fellow, I want to speak to you seriously.
Don't frown like that.  You make it so much more difficult for me."

"What is it all about?" cried Dorian in his petulant way, flinging
himself down on the sofa.  "I hope it is not about myself.  I am tired
of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else."

"It is about yourself," answered Hallward in his grave deep voice, "and
I must say it to you.  I shall only keep you half an hour."

Dorian sighed and lit a cigarette.  "Half an hour!" he murmured.

"It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your own
sake that I am speaking.  I think it right that you should know that
the most dreadful things are being said against you in London."

"I don't wish to know anything about them.  I love scandals about other
people, but scandals about myself don't interest me.  They have not got
the charm of novelty."

"They must interest you, Dorian.  Every gentleman is interested in his
good name.  You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and
degraded.  Of course, you have your position, and your wealth, and all
that kind of thing.  But position and wealth are not everything.  Mind
you, I don't believe these rumours at all.  At least, I can't believe
them when I see you.  Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's
face.  It cannot be concealed.  People talk sometimes of secret vices.
There are no such things.  If a wretched man has a vice, it shows
itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the
moulding of his hands even.  Somebody--I won't mention his name, but
you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done.  I had
never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the
time, though I have heard a good deal since.  He offered an extravagant
price.  I refused him.  There was something in the shape of his fingers
that I hated.  I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied
about him.  His life is dreadful.  But you, Dorian, with your pure,
bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth--I can't
believe anything against you.  And yet I see you very seldom, and you
never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I
hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I
don't know what to say.  Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of
Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it?  Why is it that so
many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite you to
theirs?  You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley.  I met him at dinner
last week.  Your name happened to come up in conversation, in
connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the
Dudley.  Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most
artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl
should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the
same room with.  I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked
him what he meant.  He told me.  He told me right out before everybody.
It was horrible!  Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?  There
was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.  You were
his great friend.  There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England
with a tarnished name.  You and he were inseparable.  What about Adrian
Singleton and his dreadful end?  What about Lord Kent's only son and
his career?  I met his father yesterday in St. James's Street.  He
seemed broken with shame and sorrow.  What about the young Duke of
Perth?  What sort of life has he got now?  What gentleman would
associate with him?"

"Stop, Basil.  You are talking about things of which you know nothing,"
said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt
in his voice.  "You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.
It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows
anything about mine.  With such blood as he has in his veins, how could
his record be clean?  You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.
Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?  If Kent's
silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me?  If
Adrian Singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am I his
keeper?  I know how people chatter in England.  The middle classes air
their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper
about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try
and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with
the people they slander.  In this country, it is enough for a man to
have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead
themselves?  My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land
of the hypocrite."

"Dorian," cried Hallward, "that is not the question.  England is bad
enough I know, and English society is all wrong.  That is the reason
why I want you to be fine.  You have not been fine.  One has a right to
judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends.  Yours seem to
lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity.  You have filled them
with a madness for pleasure.  They have gone down into the depths.  You
led them there.  Yes:  you led them there, and yet you can smile, as
you are smiling now.  And there is worse behind.  I know you and Harry
are inseparable.  Surely for that reason, if for none other, you should
not have made his sister's name a by-word."

"Take care, Basil.  You go too far."

"I must speak, and you must listen.  You shall listen.  When you met
Lady Gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her.  Is there
a single decent woman in London now who would drive with her in the
park?  Why, even her children are not allowed to live with her.  Then
there are other stories--stories that you have been seen creeping at
dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest
dens in London.  Are they true?  Can they be true?  When I first heard
them, I laughed.  I hear them now, and they make me shudder.  What
about your country-house and the life that is led there?  Dorian, you
don't know what is said about you.  I won't tell you that I don't want
to preach to you.  I remember Harry saying once that every man who
turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by
saying that, and then proceeded to break his word.  I do want to preach
to you.  I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect
you.  I want you to have a clean name and a fair record.  I want you to
get rid of the dreadful people you associate with.  Don't shrug your
shoulders like that.  Don't be so indifferent.  You have a wonderful
influence.  Let it be for good, not for evil.  They say that you
corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite
sufficient for you to enter a house for shame of some kind to follow
after.  I don't know whether it is so or not.  How should I know?  But
it is said of you.  I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.
Lord Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford.  He showed me
a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in
her villa at Mentone.  Your name was implicated in the most terrible
confession I ever read.  I told him that it was absurd--that I knew you
thoroughly and that you were incapable of anything of the kind.  Know
you?  I wonder do I know you?  Before I could answer that, I should
have to see your soul."

"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa and
turning almost white from fear.

"Yes," answered Hallward gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his
voice, "to see your soul.  But only God can do that."

A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man.  "You
shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the
table.  "Come:  it is your own handiwork.  Why shouldn't you look at
it?  You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose.
Nobody would believe you.  If they did believe you, they would like me
all the better for it.  I know the age better than you do, though you
will prate about it so tediously.  Come, I tell you.  You have
chattered enough about corruption.  Now you shall look on it face to
face."

There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered.  He stamped
his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner.  He felt a
terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret,
and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of
all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the
hideous memory of what he had done.

"Yes," he continued, coming closer to him and looking steadfastly into
his stern eyes, "I shall show you my soul.  You shall see the thing
that you fancy only God can see."

Hallward started back.  "This is blasphemy, Dorian!" he cried.  "You
must not say things like that.  They are horrible, and they don't mean
anything."

"You think so?"  He laughed again.

"I know so.  As for what I said to you to-night, I said it for your
good.  You know I have been always a stanch friend to you."

"Don't touch me.  Finish what you have to say."

A twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face.  He paused for
a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him.  After all, what
right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray?  If he had done a
tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered!
Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fire-place, and
stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frostlike ashes and
their throbbing cores of flame.

"I am waiting, Basil," said the young man in a hard clear voice.

He turned round.  "What I have to say is this," he cried.  "You must
give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against
you.  If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to
end, I shall believe you.  Deny them, Dorian, deny them!  Can't you see
what I am going through?  My God! don't tell me that you are bad, and
corrupt, and shameful."

Dorian Gray smiled.  There was a curl of contempt in his lips.  "Come
upstairs, Basil," he said quietly.  "I keep a diary of my life from day
to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written.  I shall
show it to you if you come with me."

"I shall come with you, Dorian, if you wish it.  I see I have missed my
train.  That makes no matter.  I can go to-morrow. But don't ask me to
read anything to-night. All I want is a plain answer to my question."

"That shall be given to you upstairs.  I could not give it here.  You
will not have to read long."



CHAPTER 13

He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward
following close behind.  They walked softly, as men do instinctively at
night.  The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase.  A
rising wind made some of the windows rattle.

When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the
floor, and taking out the key, turned it in the lock.  "You insist on
knowing, Basil?" he asked in a low voice.

"Yes."

"I am delighted," he answered, smiling.  Then he added, somewhat
harshly, "You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know
everything about me.  You have had more to do with my life than you
think"; and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in.  A
cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in
a flame of murky orange.  He shuddered.  "Shut the door behind you," he
whispered, as he placed the lamp on the table.

Hallward glanced round him with a puzzled expression.  The room looked
as if it had not been lived in for years.  A faded Flemish tapestry, a
curtained picture, an old Italian _cassone_, and an almost empty
book-case--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and
a table.  As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was
standing on the mantelshelf, he saw that the whole place was covered
with dust and that the carpet was in holes.  A mouse ran scuffling
behind the wainscoting.  There was a damp odour of mildew.

"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil?  Draw that
curtain back, and you will see mine."

The voice that spoke was cold and cruel.  "You are mad, Dorian, or
playing a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.

"You won't? Then I must do it myself," said the young man, and he tore
the curtain from its rod and flung it on the ground.

An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the
dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him.  There was
something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing.
Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at!
The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that
marvellous beauty.  There was still some gold in the thinning hair and
some scarlet on the sensual mouth.  The sodden eyes had kept something
of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet
completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat.
Yes, it was Dorian himself.  But who had done it?  He seemed to
recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design.  The
idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid.  He seized the lighted candle,
and held it to the picture.  In the left-hand corner was his own name,
traced in long letters of bright vermilion.

It was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire.  He had never
done that.  Still, it was his own picture.  He knew it, and he felt as
if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice.  His
own picture!  What did it mean?  Why had it altered?  He turned and
looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man.  His mouth twitched,
and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate.  He passed his hand
across his forehead.  It was dank with clammy sweat.

The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with
that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are
absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting.  There was neither
real sorrow in it nor real joy.  There was simply the passion of the
spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes.  He had taken
the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.

"What does this mean?" cried Hallward, at last.  His own voice sounded
shrill and curious in his ears.

"Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian Gray, crushing the flower in
his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my
good looks.  One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who
explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me
that revealed to me the wonder of beauty.  In a mad moment that, even
now, I don't know whether I regret or not, I made a wish, perhaps you
would call it a prayer...."

"I remember it!  Oh, how well I remember it!  No! the thing is
impossible.  The room is damp.  Mildew has got into the canvas.  The
paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them.  I tell you the
thing is impossible."

"Ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the
window and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass.

"You told me you had destroyed it."

"I was wrong.  It has destroyed me."

"I don't believe it is my picture."

"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.

"My ideal, as you call it..."

"As you called it."

"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful.  You were to me such
an ideal as I shall never meet again.  This is the face of a satyr."

"It is the face of my soul."

"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped!  It has the eyes of a
devil."

"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with a
wild gesture of despair.

Hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it.  "My God!  If it
is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life,
why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you
to be!" He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it.  The
surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it.  It was
from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come.
Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were
slowly eating the thing away.  The rotting of a corpse in a watery
grave was not so fearful.

His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and
lay there sputtering.  He placed his foot on it and put it out.  Then
he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table
and buried his face in his hands.

"Good God, Dorian, what a lesson!  What an awful lesson!" There was no
answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window.  "Pray,
Dorian, pray," he murmured.  "What is it that one was taught to say in
one's boyhood?  'Lead us not into temptation.  Forgive us our sins.
Wash away our iniquities.'  Let us say that together.  The prayer of
your pride has been answered.  The prayer of your repentance will be
answered also.  I worshipped you too much.  I am punished for it.  You
worshipped yourself too much.  We are both punished."

Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed
eyes.  "It is too late, Basil," he faltered.

"It is never too late, Dorian.  Let us kneel down and try if we cannot
remember a prayer.  Isn't there a verse somewhere, 'Though your sins be
as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow'?"

"Those words mean nothing to me now."

"Hush!  Don't say that.  You have done enough evil in your life.  My
God!  Don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"

Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable
feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had
been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his
ear by those grinning lips.  The mad passions of a hunted animal
stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table,
more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything.  He glanced
wildly around.  Something glimmered on the top of the painted chest
that faced him.  His eye fell on it.  He knew what it was.  It was a
knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord,
and had forgotten to take away with him.  He moved slowly towards it,
passing Hallward as he did so.  As soon as he got behind him, he seized
it and turned round.  Hallward stirred in his chair as if he was going
to rise.  He rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that
is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table and
stabbing again and again.

There was a stifled groan and the horrible sound of some one choking
with blood.  Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively,
waving grotesque, stiff-fingered hands in the air.  He stabbed him
twice more, but the man did not move.  Something began to trickle on
the floor.  He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down.  Then
he threw the knife on the table, and listened.

He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet.  He
opened the door and went out on the landing.  The house was absolutely
quiet.  No one was about.  For a few seconds he stood bending over the
balustrade and peering down into the black seething well of darkness.
Then he took out the key and returned to the room, locking himself in
as he did so.

The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with
bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms.  Had it not been
for the red jagged tear in the neck and the clotted black pool that was
slowly widening on the table, one would have said that the man was
simply asleep.

How quickly it had all been done!  He felt strangely calm, and walking
over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the balcony.  The wind
had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's
tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes.  He looked down and saw the
policeman going his rounds and flashing the long beam of his lantern on
the doors of the silent houses.  The crimson spot of a prowling hansom
gleamed at the corner and then vanished.  A woman in a fluttering shawl
was creeping slowly by the railings, staggering as she went.  Now and
then she stopped and peered back.  Once, she began to sing in a hoarse
voice.  The policeman strolled over and said something to her.  She
stumbled away, laughing.  A bitter blast swept across the square.  The
gas-lamps flickered and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their
black iron branches to and fro.  He shivered and went back, closing the
window behind him.

Having reached the door, he turned the key and opened it.  He did not
even glance at the murdered man.  He felt that the secret of the whole
thing was not to realize the situation.  The friend who had painted the
fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due had gone out of his
life.  That was enough.

Then he remembered the lamp.  It was a rather curious one of Moorish
workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished
steel, and studded with coarse turquoises.  Perhaps it might be missed
by his servant, and questions would be asked.  He hesitated for a
moment, then he turned back and took it from the table.  He could not
help seeing the dead thing.  How still it was!  How horribly white the
long hands looked!  It was like a dreadful wax image.

Having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs.  The
woodwork creaked and seemed to cry out as if in pain.  He stopped
several times and waited.  No:  everything was still.  It was merely
the sound of his own footsteps.

When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner.
They must be hidden away somewhere.  He unlocked a secret press that
was in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own curious
disguises, and put them into it.  He could easily burn them afterwards.
Then he pulled out his watch.  It was twenty minutes to two.

He sat down and began to think.  Every year--every month, almost--men
were strangled in England for what he had done.  There had been a
madness of murder in the air.  Some red star had come too close to the
earth.... And yet, what evidence was there against him?  Basil Hallward
had left the house at eleven.  No one had seen him come in again.  Most
of the servants were at Selby Royal.  His valet had gone to bed....
Paris!  Yes.  It was to Paris that Basil had gone, and by the midnight
train, as he had intended.  With his curious reserved habits, it would
be months before any suspicions would be roused.  Months!  Everything
could be destroyed long before then.

A sudden thought struck him.  He put on his fur coat and hat and went
out into the hall.  There he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of
the policeman on the pavement outside and seeing the flash of the
bull's-eye reflected in the window.  He waited and held his breath.

After a few moments he drew back the latch and slipped out, shutting
the door very gently behind him.  Then he began ringing the bell.  In
about five minutes his valet appeared, half-dressed and looking very
drowsy.

"I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said, stepping in;
"but I had forgotten my latch-key. What time is it?"

"Ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and
blinking.

"Ten minutes past two?  How horribly late!  You must wake me at nine
to-morrow. I have some work to do."

"All right, sir."

"Did any one call this evening?"

"Mr. Hallward, sir.  He stayed here till eleven, and then he went away
to catch his train."

"Oh!  I am sorry I didn't see him.  Did he leave any message?"

"No, sir, except that he would write to you from Paris, if he did not
find you at the club."

"That will do, Francis.  Don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow."

"No, sir."

The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.

Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed into the
library.  For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room,
biting his lip and thinking.  Then he took down the Blue Book from one
of the shelves and began to turn over the leaves.  "Alan Campbell, 152,
Hertford Street, Mayfair."  Yes; that was the man he wanted.



CHAPTER 14

At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of
chocolate on a tray and opened the shutters.  Dorian was sleeping quite
peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his
cheek.  He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.

The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as
he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he
had been lost in some delightful dream.  Yet he had not dreamed at all.
His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain.
But youth smiles without any reason.  It is one of its chiefest charms.

He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his
chocolate.  The mellow November sun came streaming into the room.  The
sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air.  It was
almost like a morning in May.

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent,
blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there
with terrible distinctness.  He winced at the memory of all that he had
suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for
Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came
back to him, and he grew cold with passion.  The dead man was still
sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now.  How horrible that was!
Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken
or grow mad.  There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory
than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride
more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of
joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the
senses.  But this was not one of them.  It was a thing to be driven out
of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might
strangle one itself.

When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and
then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual
care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and
scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once.  He spent a long time
also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet
about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for the
servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence.  At some of
the letters, he smiled.  Three of them bored him.  One he read several
times over and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his
face.  "That awful thing, a woman's memory!" as Lord Henry had once
said.

After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his lips slowly
with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait, and going over to the
table, sat down and wrote two letters.  One he put in his pocket, the
other he handed to the valet.

"Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell
is out of town, get his address."

As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon a
piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and
then human faces.  Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew
seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward.  He frowned, and
getting up, went over to the book-case and took out a volume at hazard.
He was determined that he would not think about what had happened until
it became absolutely necessary that he should do so.

When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page
of the book.  It was Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Charpentier's
Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching.  The binding was
of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted
pomegranates.  It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton.  As he
turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of
Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "_du supplice encore mal lavee_," with
its downy red hairs and its "_doigts de faune_."  He glanced at his own
white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and
passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:

     Sur une gamme chromatique,
       Le sein de perles ruisselant,
     La Venus de l'Adriatique
       Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

     Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
       Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
     S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
       Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

     L'esquif aborde et me depose,
       Jetant son amarre au pilier,
     Devant une facade rose,
       Sur le marbre d'un escalier.


How exquisite they were!  As one read them, one seemed to be floating
down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black
gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains.  The mere lines looked
to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as
one pushes out to the Lido.  The sudden flashes of colour reminded him
of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the
tall honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through
the dim, dust-stained arcades.  Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he
kept saying over and over to himself:

     "Devant une facade rose,
        Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

The whole of Venice was in those two lines.  He remembered the autumn
that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to
mad delightful follies.  There was romance in every place.  But Venice,
like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true
romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.  Basil had
been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret.  Poor
Basil!  What a horrible way for a man to die!

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget.  He read
of the swallows that fly in and out of the little _cafe_ at Smyrna where
the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants
smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he
read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of
granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot,
lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and
white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes
that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those
verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that
curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "_monstre
charmant_" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre.  But after a
time the book fell from his hand.  He grew nervous, and a horrible fit
of terror came over him.  What if Alan Campbell should be out of
England?  Days would elapse before he could come back.  Perhaps he
might refuse to come.  What could he do then?  Every moment was of
vital importance.

They had been great friends once, five years before--almost
inseparable, indeed.  Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.
When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled:  Alan
Campbell never did.

He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real
appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the
beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian.  His
dominant intellectual passion was for science.  At Cambridge he had
spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken
a good class in the Natural Science Tripos of his year.  Indeed, he was
still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his
own in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the
annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for
Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up
prescriptions.  He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and
played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs.  In
fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray
together--music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to
be able to exercise whenever he wished--and, indeed, exercised often
without being conscious of it.  They had met at Lady Berkshire's the
night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always
seen together at the opera and wherever good music was going on.  For
eighteen months their intimacy lasted.  Campbell was always either at
Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square.  To him, as to many others, Dorian
Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in
life.  Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one
ever knew.  But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when
they met and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any
party at which Dorian Gray was present.  He had changed, too--was
strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing
music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was
called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time
left in which to practise.  And this was certainly true.  Every day he
seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once
or twice in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain
curious experiments.

This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for.  Every second he kept
glancing at the clock.  As the minutes went by he became horribly
agitated.  At last he got up and began to pace up and down the room,
looking like a beautiful caged thing.  He took long stealthy strides.
His hands were curiously cold.

The suspense became unbearable.  Time seemed to him to be crawling with
feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the
jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice.  He knew what was waiting
for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands
his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight
and driven the eyeballs back into their cave.  It was useless.  The
brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made
grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving
masks.  Then, suddenly, time stopped for him.  Yes:  that blind,
slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being
dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its
grave, and showed it to him.  He stared at it.  Its very horror made
him stone.

At last the door opened and his servant entered.  He turned glazed eyes
upon him.

"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.

A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back
to his cheeks.

"Ask him to come in at once, Francis."  He felt that he was himself
again.  His mood of cowardice had passed away.

The man bowed and retired.  In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in,
looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

"Alan!  This is kind of you.  I thank you for coming."

"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray.  But you said it
was a matter of life and death."  His voice was hard and cold.  He
spoke with slow deliberation.  There was a look of contempt in the
steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian.  He kept his hands in
the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the
gesture with which he had been greeted.

"Yes:  it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one
person.  Sit down."

Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him.
The two men's eyes met.  In Dorian's there was infinite pity.  He knew
that what he was going to do was dreadful.

After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very
quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he
had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room
to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table.
He has been dead ten hours now.  Don't stir, and don't look at me like
that.  Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do
not concern you.  What you have to do is this--"

"Stop, Gray.  I don't want to know anything further.  Whether what you
have told me is true or not true doesn't concern me.  I entirely
decline to be mixed up in your life.  Keep your horrible secrets to
yourself.  They don't interest me any more."

"Alan, they will have to interest you.  This one will have to interest
you.  I am awfully sorry for you, Alan.  But I can't help myself.  You
are the one man who is able to save me.  I am forced to bring you into
the matter.  I have no option.  Alan, you are scientific.  You know
about chemistry and things of that kind.  You have made experiments.
What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs--to
destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left.  Nobody saw this
person come into the house.  Indeed, at the present moment he is
supposed to be in Paris.  He will not be missed for months.  When he is
missed, there must be no trace of him found here.  You, Alan, you must
change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes
that I may scatter in the air."

"You are mad, Dorian."

"Ah!  I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."

"You are mad, I tell you--mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to
help you, mad to make this monstrous confession.  I will have nothing
to do with this matter, whatever it is.  Do you think I am going to
peril my reputation for you?  What is it to me what devil's work you
are up to?"

"It was suicide, Alan."

"I am glad of that.  But who drove him to it?  You, I should fancy."

"Do you still refuse to do this for me?"

"Of course I refuse.  I will have absolutely nothing to do with it.  I
don't care what shame comes on you.  You deserve it all.  I should not
be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced.  How dare you ask
me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror?  I should
have thought you knew more about people's characters.  Your friend Lord
Henry Wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever else
he has taught you.  Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you.
You have come to the wrong man.  Go to some of your friends.  Don't
come to me."

"Alan, it was murder.  I killed him.  You don't know what he had made
me suffer.  Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or
the marring of it than poor Harry has had.  He may not have intended
it, the result was the same."

"Murder!  Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to?  I shall not
inform upon you.  It is not my business.  Besides, without my stirring
in the matter, you are certain to be arrested.  Nobody ever commits a
crime without doing something stupid.  But I will have nothing to do
with it."

"You must have something to do with it.  Wait, wait a moment; listen to
me.  Only listen, Alan.  All I ask of you is to perform a certain
scientific experiment.  You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the
horrors that you do there don't affect you.  If in some hideous
dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a
leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow
through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject.  You
would not turn a hair.  You would not believe that you were doing
anything wrong.  On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were
benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the
world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind.
What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.
Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are
accustomed to work at.  And, remember, it is the only piece of evidence
against me.  If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to be
discovered unless you help me."

"I have no desire to help you.  You forget that.  I am simply
indifferent to the whole thing.  It has nothing to do with me."

"Alan, I entreat you.  Think of the position I am in.  Just before you
came I almost fainted with terror.  You may know terror yourself some
day.  No! don't think of that.  Look at the matter purely from the
scientific point of view.  You don't inquire where the dead things on
which you experiment come from.  Don't inquire now.  I have told you
too much as it is.  But I beg of you to do this.  We were friends once,
Alan."

"Don't speak about those days, Dorian--they are dead."

"The dead linger sometimes.  The man upstairs will not go away.  He is
sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms.  Alan!
Alan!  If you don't come to my assistance, I am ruined.  Why, they will
hang me, Alan!  Don't you understand?  They will hang me for what I
have done."

"There is no good in prolonging this scene.  I absolutely refuse to do
anything in the matter.  It is insane of you to ask me."

"You refuse?"

"Yes."

"I entreat you, Alan."

"It is useless."

The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray's eyes.  Then he stretched
out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it.  He
read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the
table.  Having done this, he got up and went over to the window.

Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and
opened it.  As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell
back in his chair.  A horrible sense of sickness came over him.  He
felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.

After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and
came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.

"I am so sorry for you, Alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no
alternative.  I have a letter written already.  Here it is.  You see
the address.  If you don't help me, I must send it.  If you don't help
me, I will send it.  You know what the result will be.  But you are
going to help me.  It is impossible for you to refuse now.  I tried to
spare you.  You will do me the justice to admit that.  You were stern,
harsh, offensive.  You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat
me--no living man, at any rate.  I bore it all.  Now it is for me to
dictate terms."

Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him.

"Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan.  You know what they are.
The thing is quite simple.  Come, don't work yourself into this fever.
The thing has to be done.  Face it, and do it."

A groan broke from Campbell's lips and he shivered all over.  The
ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing
time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be
borne.  He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his
forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already
come upon him.  The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead.
It was intolerable.  It seemed to crush him.

"Come, Alan, you must decide at once."

"I cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter
things.

"You must.  You have no choice.  Don't delay."

He hesitated a moment.  "Is there a fire in the room upstairs?"

"Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos."

"I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."

"No, Alan, you must not leave the house.  Write out on a sheet of
notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab and bring the
things back to you."

Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope
to his assistant.  Dorian took the note up and read it carefully.  Then
he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as
soon as possible and to bring the things with him.

As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up
from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with a
kind of ague.  For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke.  A
fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was
like the beat of a hammer.

As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and looking at Dorian
Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears.  There was something in
the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him.
"You are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered.

"Hush, Alan.  You have saved my life," said Dorian.

"Your life?  Good heavens! what a life that is!  You have gone from
corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime.  In
doing what I am going to do--what you force me to do--it is not of your
life that I am thinking."

"Ah, Alan," murmured Dorian with a sigh, "I wish you had a thousandth
part of the pity for me that I have for you." He turned away as he
spoke and stood looking out at the garden.  Campbell made no answer.

After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant
entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil
of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps.

"Shall I leave the things here, sir?" he asked Campbell.

"Yes," said Dorian.  "And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another
errand for you.  What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies
Selby with orchids?"

"Harden, sir."

"Yes--Harden.  You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden
personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,
and to have as few white ones as possible.  In fact, I don't want any
white ones.  It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty
place--otherwise I wouldn't bother you about it."

"No trouble, sir.  At what time shall I be back?"

Dorian looked at Campbell.  "How long will your experiment take, Alan?"
he said in a calm indifferent voice.  The presence of a third person in
the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.

Campbell frowned and bit his lip.  "It will take about five hours," he
answered.

"It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven,
Francis.  Or stay:  just leave my things out for dressing.  You can
have the evening to yourself.  I am not dining at home, so I shall not
want you."

"Thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room.

"Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost.  How heavy this chest is!
I'll take it for you.  You bring the other things."  He spoke rapidly
and in an authoritative manner.  Campbell felt dominated by him.  They
left the room together.

When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned
it in the lock.  Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his
eyes.  He shuddered.  "I don't think I can go in, Alan," he murmured.

"It is nothing to me.  I don't require you," said Campbell coldly.

Dorian half opened the door.  As he did so, he saw the face of his
portrait leering in the sunlight.  On the floor in front of it the torn
curtain was lying.  He remembered that the night before he had
forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas,
and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.

What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on
one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood?  How horrible
it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the
silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing
whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that
it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.

He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with
half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in, determined that
he would not look even once upon the dead man.  Then, stooping down and
taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the
picture.

There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed
themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him.  He heard
Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other
things that he had required for his dreadful work.  He began to wonder
if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had
thought of each other.

"Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.

He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing into a
glistening yellow face.  As he was going downstairs, he heard the key
being turned in the lock.

It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library.  He
was pale, but absolutely calm.  "I have done what you asked me to do,"
he muttered. "And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again."

"You have saved me from ruin, Alan.  I cannot forget that," said Dorian
simply.

As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs.  There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room.  But the thing that had been sitting
at the table was gone.



CHAPTER 15

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants.  His forehead was
throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his
manner as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as
ever.  Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to
play a part.  Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could
have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any
tragedy of our age.  Those finely shaped fingers could never have
clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God
and goodness.  He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his
demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a
double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who
was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe as the
remains of really remarkable ugliness.  She had proved an excellent
wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her
husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed,
and married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she
devoted herself now to the pleasures of French fiction, French cookery,
and French _esprit_ when she could get it.

Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that
she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life.  "I know, my
dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say,
"and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake.  It is most
fortunate that you were not thought of at the time.  As it was, our
bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to
raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with anybody.
However, that was all Narborough's fault.  He was dreadfully
short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who
never sees anything."

Her guests this evening were rather tedious.  The fact was, as she
explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married
daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her.  "I think it
is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered.  "Of course I go and
stay with them every summer after I come from Homburg, but then an old
woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake
them up.  You don't know what an existence they lead down there.  It is
pure unadulterated country life.  They get up early, because they have
so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to
think about.  There has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since
the time of Queen Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep
after dinner.  You shan't sit next either of them.  You shall sit by me
and amuse me."

Dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round the room.  Yes:
it was certainly a tedious party.  Two of the people he had never seen
before, and the others consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those
middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies,
but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; Lady Ruxton, an
overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always
trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly plain that to
her great disappointment no one would ever believe anything against
her; Mrs. Erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp and
Venetian-red hair; Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy
dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces that, once
seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked,
white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the
impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of
ideas.

He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough, looking at the
great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the
mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed:  "How horrid of Henry Wotton to be
so late!  I sent round to him this morning on chance and he promised
faithfully not to disappoint me."

It was some consolation that Harry was to be there, and when the door
opened and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some
insincere apology, he ceased to feel bored.

But at dinner he could not eat anything.  Plate after plate went away
untasted.  Lady Narborough kept scolding him for what she called "an
insult to poor Adolphe, who invented the _menu_ specially for you," and
now and then Lord Henry looked across at him, wondering at his silence
and abstracted manner.  From time to time the butler filled his glass
with champagne.  He drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase.

"Dorian," said Lord Henry at last, as the _chaud-froid_ was being handed
round, "what is the matter with you to-night? You are quite out of
sorts."

"I believe he is in love," cried Lady Narborough, "and that he is
afraid to tell me for fear I should be jealous.  He is quite right.  I
certainly should."

"Dear Lady Narborough," murmured Dorian, smiling, "I have not been in
love for a whole week--not, in fact, since Madame de Ferrol left town."

"How you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old lady.
"I really cannot understand it."

"It is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl,
Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry.  "She is the one link between us and
your short frocks."

"She does not remember my short frocks at all, Lord Henry.  But I
remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago, and how _decolletee_
she was then."

"She is still _decolletee_," he answered, taking an olive in his long
fingers; "and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an
_edition de luxe_ of a bad French novel.  She is really wonderful, and
full of surprises.  Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary.
When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief."

"How can you, Harry!" cried Dorian.

"It is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess.  "But her
third husband, Lord Henry!  You don't mean to say Ferrol is the fourth?"

"Certainly, Lady Narborough."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"Well, ask Mr. Gray.  He is one of her most intimate friends."

"Is it true, Mr. Gray?"

"She assures me so, Lady Narborough," said Dorian.  "I asked her
whether, like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and
hung at her girdle.  She told me she didn't, because none of them had
had any hearts at all."

"Four husbands!  Upon my word that is _trop de zele_."

"_Trop d'audace_, I tell her," said Dorian.

"Oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear.  And what is Ferrol
like?  I don't know him."

"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,"
said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.

Lady Narborough hit him with her fan.  "Lord Henry, I am not at all
surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked."

"But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows.
"It can only be the next world.  This world and I are on excellent
terms."

"Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady,
shaking her head.

Lord Henry looked serious for some moments.  "It is perfectly
monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying
things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely
true."

"Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair.

"I hope so," said his hostess, laughing.  "But really, if you all
worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way, I shall have to marry
again so as to be in the fashion."

"You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord Henry.
"You were far too happy.  When a woman marries again, it is because she
detested her first husband.  When a man marries again, it is because he
adored his first wife.  Women try their luck; men risk theirs."

"Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady.

"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the
rejoinder.  "Women love us for our defects.  If we have enough of them,
they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.  You will never
ask me to dinner again after saying this, I am afraid, Lady Narborough,
but it is quite true."

"Of course it is true, Lord Henry.  If we women did not love you for
your defects, where would you all be?  Not one of you would ever be
married.  You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors.  Not, however,
that that would alter you much.  Nowadays all the married men live like
bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men."

"_Fin de siecle_," murmured Lord Henry.

"_Fin du globe_," answered his hostess.

"I wish it were _fin du globe_," said Dorian with a sigh.  "Life is a
great disappointment."

"Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't
tell me that you have exhausted life.  When a man says that one knows
that life has exhausted him.  Lord Henry is very wicked, and I
sometimes wish that I had been; but you are made to be good--you look
so good.  I must find you a nice wife.  Lord Henry, don't you think
that Mr. Gray should get married?"

"I am always telling him so, Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry with a
bow.

"Well, we must look out for a suitable match for him.  I shall go
through Debrett carefully to-night and draw out a list of all the
eligible young ladies."

"With their ages, Lady Narborough?" asked Dorian.

"Of course, with their ages, slightly edited.  But nothing must be done
in a hurry.  I want it to be what _The Morning Post_ calls a suitable
alliance, and I want you both to be happy."

"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord
Henry.  "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love
her."

"Ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair
and nodding to Lady Ruxton.  "You must come and dine with me soon
again.  You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what Sir
Andrew prescribes for me.  You must tell me what people you would like
to meet, though.  I want it to be a delightful gathering."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past," he answered.
"Or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?"

"I fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up.  "A thousand pardons,
my dear Lady Ruxton," she added, "I didn't see you hadn't finished your
cigarette."

"Never mind, Lady Narborough.  I smoke a great deal too much.  I am
going to limit myself, for the future."

"Pray don't, Lady Ruxton," said Lord Henry.  "Moderation is a fatal
thing.  Enough is as bad as a meal.  More than enough is as good as a
feast."

Lady Ruxton glanced at him curiously.  "You must come and explain that
to me some afternoon, Lord Henry.  It sounds a fascinating theory," she
murmured, as she swept out of the room.

"Now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal,"
cried Lady Narborough from the door.  "If you do, we are sure to
squabble upstairs."

The men laughed, and Mr. Chapman got up solemnly from the foot of the
table and came up to the top.  Dorian Gray changed his seat and went
and sat by Lord Henry.  Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about
the situation in the House of Commons.  He guffawed at his adversaries.
The word _doctrinaire_--word full of terror to the British
mind--reappeared from time to time between his explosions.  An
alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.  He hoisted the
Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought.  The inherited stupidity of the
race--sound English common sense he jovially termed it--was shown to be
the proper bulwark for society.

A smile curved Lord Henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at
Dorian.

"Are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked.  "You seemed rather out of
sorts at dinner."

"I am quite well, Harry.  I am tired.  That is all."

"You were charming last night.  The little duchess is quite devoted to
you.  She tells me she is going down to Selby."

"She has promised to come on the twentieth."

"Is Monmouth to be there, too?"

"Oh, yes, Harry."

"He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her.  She is very
clever, too clever for a woman.  She lacks the indefinable charm of
weakness.  It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image
precious.  Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay.
White porcelain feet, if you like.  They have been through the fire,
and what fire does not destroy, it hardens.  She has had experiences."

"How long has she been married?" asked Dorian.

"An eternity, she tells me.  I believe, according to the peerage, it is
ten years, but ten years with Monmouth must have been like eternity,
with time thrown in.  Who else is coming?"

"Oh, the Willoughbys, Lord Rugby and his wife, our hostess, Geoffrey
Clouston, the usual set.  I have asked Lord Grotrian."

"I like him," said Lord Henry.  "A great many people don't, but I find
him charming.  He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by
being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type."

"I don't know if he will be able to come, Harry.  He may have to go to
Monte Carlo with his father."

"Ah! what a nuisance people's people are!  Try and make him come.  By
the way, Dorian, you ran off very early last night.  You left before
eleven.  What did you do afterwards?  Did you go straight home?"

Dorian glanced at him hurriedly and frowned.

"No, Harry," he said at last, "I did not get home till nearly three."

"Did you go to the club?"

"Yes," he answered.  Then he bit his lip.  "No, I don't mean that.  I
didn't go to the club.  I walked about.  I forget what I did.... How
inquisitive you are, Harry!  You always want to know what one has been
doing.  I always want to forget what I have been doing.  I came in at
half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time.  I had left my
latch-key at home, and my servant had to let me in.  If you want any
corroborative evidence on the subject, you can ask him."

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "My dear fellow, as if I cared!
Let us go up to the drawing-room. No sherry, thank you, Mr. Chapman.
Something has happened to you, Dorian.  Tell me what it is.  You are
not yourself to-night."

"Don't mind me, Harry.  I am irritable, and out of temper.  I shall
come round and see you to-morrow, or next day.  Make my excuses to Lady
Narborough.  I shan't go upstairs.  I shall go home.  I must go home."

"All right, Dorian.  I dare say I shall see you to-morrow at tea-time.
The duchess is coming."

"I will try to be there, Harry," he said, leaving the room.  As he
drove back to his own house, he was conscious that the sense of terror
he thought he had strangled had come back to him.  Lord Henry's casual
questioning had made him lose his nerve for the moment, and he wanted
his nerve still.  Things that were dangerous had to be destroyed.  He
winced.  He hated the idea of even touching them.

Yet it had to be done.  He realized that, and when he had locked the
door of his library, he opened the secret press into which he had
thrust Basil Hallward's coat and bag.  A huge fire was blazing.  He
piled another log on it.  The smell of the singeing clothes and burning
leather was horrible.  It took him three-quarters of an hour to consume
everything.  At the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some
Algerian pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and
forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar.

Suddenly he started.  His eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed
nervously at his underlip.  Between two of the windows stood a large
Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony and inlaid with ivory and blue
lapis.  He watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate
and make afraid, as though it held something that he longed for and yet
almost loathed.  His breath quickened.  A mad craving came over him.
He lit a cigarette and then threw it away.  His eyelids drooped till
the long fringed lashes almost touched his cheek.  But he still watched
the cabinet.  At last he got up from the sofa on which he had been
lying, went over to it, and having unlocked it, touched some hidden
spring.  A triangular drawer passed slowly out.  His fingers moved
instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something.  It was a
small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought,
the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with
round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads.  He opened it.
Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and
persistent.

He hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his
face.  Then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly
hot, he drew himself up and glanced at the clock.  It was twenty
minutes to twelve.  He put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as
he did so, and went into his bedroom.

As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian Gray,
dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat, crept
quietly out of his house.  In Bond Street he found a hansom with a good
horse.  He hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver an address.

The man shook his head.  "It is too far for me," he muttered.

"Here is a sovereign for you," said Dorian.  "You shall have another if
you drive fast."

"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour," and
after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove rapidly
towards the river.



CHAPTER 16

A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly
in the dripping mist.  The public-houses were just closing, and dim men
and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors.  From
some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter.  In others,
drunkards brawled and screamed.

Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead, Dorian
Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city, and
now and then he repeated to himself the words that Lord Henry had said
to him on the first day they had met, "To cure the soul by means of the
senses, and the senses by means of the soul."  Yes, that was the
secret.  He had often tried it, and would try it again now.  There were
opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the
memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were
new.

The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull.  From time to time a
huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.  The
gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy.  Once the
man lost his way and had to drive back half a mile.  A steam rose from
the horse as it splashed up the puddles.  The sidewindows of the hansom
were clogged with a grey-flannel mist.

"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of
the soul!"  How the words rang in his ears!  His soul, certainly, was
sick to death.  Was it true that the senses could cure it?  Innocent
blood had been spilled.  What could atone for that?  Ah! for that there
was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness
was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing
out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one.
Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken to him as he had done?  Who
had made him a judge over others?  He had said things that were
dreadful, horrible, not to be endured.

On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him, at each
step.  He thrust up the trap and called to the man to drive faster.
The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him.  His throat burned
and his delicate hands twitched nervously together.  He struck at the
horse madly with his stick.  The driver laughed and whipped up.  He
laughed in answer, and the man was silent.

The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black web of some
sprawling spider.  The monotony became unbearable, and as the mist
thickened, he felt afraid.

Then they passed by lonely brickfields.  The fog was lighter here, and
he could see the strange, bottle-shaped kilns with their orange,
fanlike tongues of fire.  A dog barked as they went by, and far away in
the darkness some wandering sea-gull screamed.  The horse stumbled in a
rut, then swerved aside and broke into a gallop.

After some time they left the clay road and rattled again over
rough-paven streets.  Most of the windows were dark, but now and then
fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamplit blind.  He
watched them curiously.  They moved like monstrous marionettes and made
gestures like live things.  He hated them.  A dull rage was in his
heart.  As they turned a corner, a woman yelled something at them from
an open door, and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred
yards.  The driver beat at them with his whip.

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.  Certainly with
hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray shaped and reshaped
those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he had found in
them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and justified, by
intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would
still have dominated his temper.  From cell to cell of his brain crept
the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all
man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre.
Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real,
became dear to him now for that very reason.  Ugliness was the one
reality.  The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of
disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more
vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious
shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song.  They were what he needed
for forgetfulness.  In three days he would be free.

Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane.  Over
the low roofs and jagged chimney-stacks of the houses rose the black
masts of ships.  Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to the
yards.

"Somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through the
trap.

Dorian started and peered round.  "This will do," he answered, and
having got out hastily and given the driver the extra fare he had
promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay.  Here and
there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman.  The
light shook and splintered in the puddles.  A red glare came from an
outward-bound steamer that was coaling.  The slimy pavement looked like
a wet mackintosh.

He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if he
was being followed.  In about seven or eight minutes he reached a small
shabby house that was wedged in between two gaunt factories.  In one of
the top-windows stood a lamp.  He stopped and gave a peculiar knock.

After a little time he heard steps in the passage and the chain being
unhooked.  The door opened quietly, and he went in without saying a
word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the
shadow as he passed.  At the end of the hall hung a tattered green
curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him
in from the street.  He dragged it aside and entered a long low room
which looked as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. Shrill
flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the fly-blown mirrors that
faced them, were ranged round the walls.  Greasy reflectors of ribbed
tin backed them, making quivering disks of light.  The floor was
covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and there into mud,
and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor.  Some Malays were
crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with bone counters and
showing their white teeth as they chattered.  In one corner, with his
head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the
tawdrily painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two
haggard women, mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his
coat with an expression of disgust.  "He thinks he's got red ants on
him," laughed one of them, as Dorian passed by.  The man looked at her
in terror and began to whimper.

At the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a
darkened chamber.  As Dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the
heavy odour of opium met him.  He heaved a deep breath, and his
nostrils quivered with pleasure.  When he entered, a young man with
smooth yellow hair, who was bending over a lamp lighting a long thin
pipe, looked up at him and nodded in a hesitating manner.

"You here, Adrian?" muttered Dorian.

"Where else should I be?" he answered, listlessly.  "None of the chaps
will speak to me now."

"I thought you had left England."

"Darlington is not going to do anything.  My brother paid the bill at
last.  George doesn't speak to me either.... I don't care," he added
with a sigh.  "As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends.
I think I have had too many friends."

Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such
fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses.  The twisted limbs, the
gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him.  He knew in
what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were
teaching them the secret of some new joy.  They were better off than he
was.  He was prisoned in thought.  Memory, like a horrible malady, was
eating his soul away.  From time to time he seemed to see the eyes of
Basil Hallward looking at him.  Yet he felt he could not stay.  The
presence of Adrian Singleton troubled him.  He wanted to be where no
one would know who he was.  He wanted to escape from himself.

"I am going on to the other place," he said after a pause.

"On the wharf?"

"Yes."

"That mad-cat is sure to be there.  They won't have her in this place
now."

Dorian shrugged his shoulders.  "I am sick of women who love one.
Women who hate one are much more interesting.  Besides, the stuff is
better."

"Much the same."

"I like it better.  Come and have something to drink.  I must have
something."

"I don't want anything," murmured the young man.

"Never mind."

Adrian Singleton rose up wearily and followed Dorian to the bar.  A
half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a hideous
greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers in front of
them.  The women sidled up and began to chatter.  Dorian turned his
back on them and said something in a low voice to Adrian Singleton.

A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one of
the women.  "We are very proud to-night," she sneered.

"For God's sake don't talk to me," cried Dorian, stamping his foot on
the ground.  "What do you want?  Money?  Here it is.  Don't ever talk
to me again."

Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes, then
flickered out and left them dull and glazed.  She tossed her head and
raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers.  Her companion
watched her enviously.

"It's no use," sighed Adrian Singleton.  "I don't care to go back.
What does it matter?  I am quite happy here."

"You will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said Dorian,
after a pause.

"Perhaps."

"Good night, then."

"Good night," answered the young man, passing up the steps and wiping
his parched mouth with a handkerchief.

Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face.  As he drew
the curtain aside, a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips of the
woman who had taken his money.  "There goes the devil's bargain!" she
hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice.

"Curse you!" he answered, "don't call me that."

She snapped her fingers.  "Prince Charming is what you like to be
called, ain't it?" she yelled after him.

The drowsy sailor leaped to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly
round.  The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear.  He
rushed out as if in pursuit.

Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain.  His
meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered
if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as
Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult.  He bit his
lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad.  Yet, after all, what did
it matter to him?  One's days were too brief to take the burden of
another's errors on one's shoulders.  Each man lived his own life and
paid his own price for living it.  The only pity was one had to pay so
often for a single fault.  One had to pay over and over again, indeed.
In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or
for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of
the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful
impulses.  Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their
will.  They move to their terrible end as automatons move.  Choice is
taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at
all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its
charm.  For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are
sins of disobedience.  When that high spirit, that morning star of
evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.

Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul hungry for
rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his step as he went, but
as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him often as a
short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going, he felt himself
suddenly seized from behind, and before he had time to defend himself,
he was thrust back against the wall, with a brutal hand round his
throat.

He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched the
tightening fingers away.  In a second he heard the click of a revolver,
and saw the gleam of a polished barrel, pointing straight at his head,
and the dusky form of a short, thick-set man facing him.

"What do you want?" he gasped.

"Keep quiet," said the man.  "If you stir, I shoot you."

"You are mad.  What have I done to you?"

"You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," was the answer, "and Sibyl Vane
was my sister.  She killed herself.  I know it.  Her death is at your
door.  I swore I would kill you in return.  For years I have sought
you.  I had no clue, no trace.  The two people who could have described
you were dead.  I knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call
you.  I heard it to-night by chance.  Make your peace with God, for
to-night you are going to die."

Dorian Gray grew sick with fear.  "I never knew her," he stammered.  "I
never heard of her.  You are mad."

"You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane, you
are going to die."  There was a horrible moment.  Dorian did not know
what to say or do.  "Down on your knees!" growled the man.  "I give you
one minute to make your peace--no more.  I go on board to-night for
India, and I must do my job first.  One minute.  That's all."

Dorian's arms fell to his side.  Paralysed with terror, he did not know
what to do.  Suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain.  "Stop," he
cried.  "How long ago is it since your sister died?  Quick, tell me!"

"Eighteen years," said the man.  "Why do you ask me?  What do years
matter?"

"Eighteen years," laughed Dorian Gray, with a touch of triumph in his
voice.  "Eighteen years!  Set me under the lamp and look at my face!"

James Vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant.
Then he seized Dorian Gray and dragged him from the archway.

Dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to show him
the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen, for the face
of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of boyhood, all the
unstained purity of youth.  He seemed little more than a lad of twenty
summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than his sister had been
when they had parted so many years ago.  It was obvious that this was
not the man who had destroyed her life.

He loosened his hold and reeled back.  "My God! my God!" he cried, "and
I would have murdered you!"

Dorian Gray drew a long breath.  "You have been on the brink of
committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly.
"Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own
hands."

"Forgive me, sir," muttered James Vane.  "I was deceived.  A chance
word I heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track."

"You had better go home and put that pistol away, or you may get into
trouble," said Dorian, turning on his heel and going slowly down the
street.

James Vane stood on the pavement in horror.  He was trembling from head
to foot.  After a little while, a black shadow that had been creeping
along the dripping wall moved out into the light and came close to him
with stealthy footsteps.  He felt a hand laid on his arm and looked
round with a start.  It was one of the women who had been drinking at
the bar.

"Why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting haggard face quite
close to his.  "I knew you were following him when you rushed out from
Daly's. You fool!  You should have killed him.  He has lots of money,
and he's as bad as bad."

"He is not the man I am looking for," he answered, "and I want no man's
money.  I want a man's life.  The man whose life I want must be nearly
forty now.  This one is little more than a boy.  Thank God, I have not
got his blood upon my hands."

The woman gave a bitter laugh.  "Little more than a boy!" she sneered.
"Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me
what I am."

"You lie!" cried James Vane.

She raised her hand up to heaven.  "Before God I am telling the truth,"
she cried.

"Before God?"

"Strike me dumb if it ain't so.  He is the worst one that comes here.
They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face.  It's nigh
on eighteen years since I met him.  He hasn't changed much since then.
I have, though," she added, with a sickly leer.

"You swear this?"

"I swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth.  "But don't give
me away to him," she whined; "I am afraid of him.  Let me have some
money for my night's lodging."

He broke from her with an oath and rushed to the corner of the street,
but Dorian Gray had disappeared.  When he looked back, the woman had
vanished also.



CHAPTER 17

A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby
Royal, talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband,
a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests.  It was tea-time,
and the mellow light of the huge, lace-covered lamp that stood on the
table lit up the delicate china and hammered silver of the service at
which the duchess was presiding.  Her white hands were moving daintily
among the cups, and her full red lips were smiling at something that
Dorian had whispered to her.  Lord Henry was lying back in a
silk-draped wicker chair, looking at them.  On a peach-coloured divan
sat Lady Narborough, pretending to listen to the duke's description of
the last Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection.  Three
young men in elaborate smoking-suits were handing tea-cakes to some of
the women.  The house-party consisted of twelve people, and there were
more expected to arrive on the next day.

"What are you two talking about?" said Lord Henry, strolling over to
the table and putting his cup down.  "I hope Dorian has told you about
my plan for rechristening everything, Gladys.  It is a delightful idea."

"But I don't want to be rechristened, Harry," rejoined the duchess,
looking up at him with her wonderful eyes.  "I am quite satisfied with
my own name, and I am sure Mr. Gray should be satisfied with his."

"My dear Gladys, I would not alter either name for the world.  They are
both perfect.  I was thinking chiefly of flowers.  Yesterday I cut an
orchid, for my button-hole. It was a marvellous spotted thing, as
effective as the seven deadly sins.  In a thoughtless moment I asked
one of the gardeners what it was called.  He told me it was a fine
specimen of _Robinsoniana_, or something dreadful of that kind.  It is a
sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to
things.  Names are everything.  I never quarrel with actions.  My one
quarrel is with words.  That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in
literature.  The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled
to use one.  It is the only thing he is fit for."

"Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked.

"His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian.

"I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess.

"I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair.  "From
a label there is no escape!  I refuse the title."

"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.

"You wish me to defend my throne, then?"

"Yes."

"I give the truths of to-morrow."

"I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered.

"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood.

"Of your shield, Harry, not of your spear."

"I never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand.

"That is your error, Harry, believe me.  You value beauty far too much."

"How can you say that?  I admit that I think that it is better to be
beautiful than to be good.  But on the other hand, no one is more ready
than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly."

"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess.
"What becomes of your simile about the orchid?"

"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys.  You, as a good
Tory, must not underrate them.  Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly
virtues have made our England what she is."

"You don't like your country, then?" she asked.

"I live in it."

"That you may censure it the better."

"Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he inquired.

"What do they say of us?"

"That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop."

"Is that yours, Harry?"

"I give it to you."

"I could not use it.  It is too true."

"You need not be afraid.  Our countrymen never recognize a description."

"They are practical."

"They are more cunning than practical.  When they make up their ledger,
they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."

"Still, we have done great things."

"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."

"We have carried their burden."

"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."

She shook her head.  "I believe in the race," she cried.

"It represents the survival of the pushing."

"It has development."

"Decay fascinates me more."

"What of art?" she asked.

"It is a malady."

"Love?"

"An illusion."

"Religion?"

"The fashionable substitute for belief."

"You are a sceptic."

"Never!  Scepticism is the beginning of faith."

"What are you?"

"To define is to limit."

"Give me a clue."

"Threads snap.  You would lose your way in the labyrinth."

"You bewilder me.  Let us talk of some one else."

"Our host is a delightful topic.  Years ago he was christened Prince
Charming."

"Ah! don't remind me of that," cried Dorian Gray.

"Our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess,
colouring.  "I believe he thinks that Monmouth married me on purely
scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern
butterfly."

"Well, I hope he won't stick pins into you, Duchess," laughed Dorian.

"Oh! my maid does that already, Mr. Gray, when she is annoyed with me."

"And what does she get annoyed with you about, Duchess?"

"For the most trivial things, Mr. Gray, I assure you.  Usually because
I come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her that I must be dressed by
half-past eight."

"How unreasonable of her!  You should give her warning."

"I daren't, Mr. Gray.  Why, she invents hats for me.  You remember the
one I wore at Lady Hilstone's garden-party?  You don't, but it is nice
of you to pretend that you do.  Well, she made it out of nothing.  All
good hats are made out of nothing."

"Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry.  "Every
effect that one produces gives one an enemy.  To be popular one must be
a mediocrity."

"Not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule
the world.  I assure you we can't bear mediocrities.  We women, as some
one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if
you ever love at all."

"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured Dorian.

"Ah! then, you never really love, Mr. Gray," answered the duchess with
mock sadness.

"My dear Gladys!" cried Lord Henry.  "How can you say that?  Romance
lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion.  It merely
intensifies it.  We can have in life but one great experience at best,
and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as
possible."

"Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?" asked the duchess after
a pause.

"Especially when one has been wounded by it," answered Lord Henry.

The duchess turned and looked at Dorian Gray with a curious expression
in her eyes.  "What do you say to that, Mr. Gray?" she inquired.

Dorian hesitated for a moment.  Then he threw his head back and
laughed.  "I always agree with Harry, Duchess."

"Even when he is wrong?"

"Harry is never wrong, Duchess."

"And does his philosophy make you happy?"

"I have never searched for happiness.  Who wants happiness?  I have
searched for pleasure."

"And found it, Mr. Gray?"

"Often.  Too often."

The duchess sighed.  "I am searching for peace," she said, "and if I
don't go and dress, I shall have none this evening."

"Let me get you some orchids, Duchess," cried Dorian, starting to his
feet and walking down the conservatory.

"You are flirting disgracefully with him," said Lord Henry to his
cousin.  "You had better take care.  He is very fascinating."

"If he were not, there would be no battle."

"Greek meets Greek, then?"

"I am on the side of the Trojans.  They fought for a woman."

"They were defeated."

"There are worse things than capture," she answered.

"You gallop with a loose rein."

"Pace gives life," was the _riposte_.

"I shall write it in my diary to-night."

"What?"

"That a burnt child loves the fire."

"I am not even singed.  My wings are untouched."

"You use them for everything, except flight."

"Courage has passed from men to women.  It is a new experience for us."

"You have a rival."

"Who?"

He laughed.  "Lady Narborough," he whispered.  "She perfectly adores
him."

"You fill me with apprehension.  The appeal to antiquity is fatal to us
who are romanticists."

"Romanticists!  You have all the methods of science."

"Men have educated us."

"But not explained you."

"Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.

"Sphinxes without secrets."

She looked at him, smiling.  "How long Mr. Gray is!" she said.  "Let us
go and help him.  I have not yet told him the colour of my frock."

"Ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys."

"That would be a premature surrender."

"Romantic art begins with its climax."

"I must keep an opportunity for retreat."

"In the Parthian manner?"

"They found safety in the desert.  I could not do that."

"Women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had he
finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory came
a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall.  Everybody
started up.  The duchess stood motionless in horror.  And with fear in
his eyes, Lord Henry rushed through the flapping palms to find Dorian
Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a deathlike swoon.

He was carried at once into the blue drawing-room and laid upon one of
the sofas.  After a short time, he came to himself and looked round
with a dazed expression.

"What has happened?" he asked.  "Oh!  I remember.  Am I safe here,
Harry?" He began to tremble.

"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, "you merely fainted.  That was
all.  You must have overtired yourself.  You had better not come down
to dinner.  I will take your place."

"No, I will come down," he said, struggling to his feet.  "I would
rather come down.  I must not be alone."

He went to his room and dressed.  There was a wild recklessness of
gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill of
terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the
window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the
face of James Vane watching him.



CHAPTER 18

The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the
time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet
indifferent to life itself.  The consciousness of being hunted, snared,
tracked down, had begun to dominate him.  If the tapestry did but
tremble in the wind, he shook.  The dead leaves that were blown against
the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild
regrets.  When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face
peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to
lay its hand upon his heart.

But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of
the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him.  Actual
life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the
imagination.  It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet
of sin.  It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen
brood.  In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor
the good rewarded.  Success was given to the strong, failure thrust
upon the weak.  That was all.  Besides, had any stranger been prowling
round the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the
keepers.  Had any foot-marks been found on the flower-beds, the
gardeners would have reported it.  Yes, it had been merely fancy.
Sibyl Vane's brother had not come back to kill him.  He had sailed away
in his ship to founder in some winter sea.  From him, at any rate, he
was safe.  Why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who he
was.  The mask of youth had saved him.

And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think
that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them
visible form, and make them move before one!  What sort of life would
his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from
silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear
as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep!
As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and
the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder.  Oh! in what a
wild hour of madness he had killed his friend!  How ghastly the mere
memory of the scene!  He saw it all again.  Each hideous detail came
back to him with added horror.  Out of the black cave of time, terrible
and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.  When Lord Henry
came in at six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will
break.

It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out.  There was
something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that
seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life.  But
it was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had
caused the change.  His own nature had revolted against the excess of
anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm.
With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so.  Their
strong passions must either bruise or bend.  They either slay the man,
or themselves die.  Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on.  The
loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
Besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a
terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with
something of pity and not a little of contempt.

After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden
and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. The crisp
frost lay like salt upon the grass.  The sky was an inverted cup of
blue metal.  A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake.

At the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey
Clouston, the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of
his gun.  He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take
the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered
bracken and rough undergrowth.

"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.

"Not very good, Dorian.  I think most of the birds have gone to the
open.  I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new
ground."

Dorian strolled along by his side.  The keen aromatic air, the brown
and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of the
beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of the guns
that followed, fascinated him and filled him with a sense of delightful
freedom.  He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the
high indifference of joy.

Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front
of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing it
forward, started a hare.  It bolted for a thicket of alders.  Sir
Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something in the
animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed Dorian Gray, and he
cried out at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey.  Let it live."

"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare bounded
into the thicket, he fired.  There were two cries heard, the cry of a
hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is
worse.

"Good heavens!  I have hit a beater!" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey.  "What an
ass the man was to get in front of the guns!  Stop shooting there!" he
called out at the top of his voice.  "A man is hurt."

The head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand.

"Where, sir?  Where is he?" he shouted.  At the same time, the firing
ceased along the line.

"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
"Why on earth don't you keep your men back?  Spoiled my shooting for
the day."

Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing the
lithe swinging branches aside.  In a few moments they emerged, dragging
a body after them into the sunlight.  He turned away in horror.  It
seemed to him that misfortune followed wherever he went.  He heard Sir
Geoffrey ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative answer of
the keeper.  The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with
faces.  There was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of
voices.  A great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the
boughs overhead.

After a few moments--that were to him, in his perturbed state, like
endless hours of pain--he felt a hand laid on his shoulder.  He started
and looked round.

"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting is
stopped for to-day. It would not look well to go on."

"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered bitterly.  "The
whole thing is hideous and cruel.  Is the man ...?"

He could not finish the sentence.

"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry.  "He got the whole charge of
shot in his chest.  He must have died almost instantaneously.  Come;
let us go home."

They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly
fifty yards without speaking.  Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry and
said, with a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."

"What is?" asked Lord Henry.  "Oh! this accident, I suppose.  My dear
fellow, it can't be helped.  It was the man's own fault.  Why did he
get in front of the guns?  Besides, it is nothing to us.  It is rather
awkward for Geoffrey, of course.  It does not do to pepper beaters.  It
makes people think that one is a wild shot.  And Geoffrey is not; he
shoots very straight.  But there is no use talking about the matter."

Dorian shook his head.  "It is a bad omen, Harry.  I feel as if
something horrible were going to happen to some of us.  To myself,
perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes, with a gesture of
pain.

The elder man laughed.  "The only horrible thing in the world is _ennui_,
Dorian.  That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.  But we
are not likely to suffer from it unless these fellows keep chattering
about this thing at dinner.  I must tell them that the subject is to be
tabooed.  As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen.  Destiny
does not send us heralds.  She is too wise or too cruel for that.
Besides, what on earth could happen to you, Dorian?  You have
everything in the world that a man can want.  There is no one who would
not be delighted to change places with you."

"There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry.  Don't
laugh like that.  I am telling you the truth.  The wretched peasant who
has just died is better off than I am.  I have no terror of death.  It
is the coming of death that terrifies me.  Its monstrous wings seem to
wheel in the leaden air around me.  Good heavens! don't you see a man
moving behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for me?"

Lord Henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand
was pointing.  "Yes," he said, smiling, "I see the gardener waiting for
you.  I suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on
the table to-night. How absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow!  You
must come and see my doctor, when we get back to town."

Dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching.  The
man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at Lord Henry in a hesitating
manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed to his master.
"Her Grace told me to wait for an answer," he murmured.

Dorian put the letter into his pocket.  "Tell her Grace that I am
coming in," he said, coldly.  The man turned round and went rapidly in
the direction of the house.

"How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord Henry.
"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most.  A woman will
flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on."

"How fond you are of saying dangerous things, Harry!  In the present
instance, you are quite astray.  I like the duchess very much, but I
don't love her."

"And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you
are excellently matched."

"You are talking scandal, Harry, and there is never any basis for
scandal."

"The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said Lord Henry,
lighting a cigarette.

"You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."

"The world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer.

"I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in
his voice.  "But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the
desire.  I am too much concentrated on myself.  My own personality has
become a burden to me.  I want to escape, to go away, to forget.  It
was silly of me to come down here at all.  I think I shall send a wire
to Harvey to have the yacht got ready.  On a yacht one is safe."

"Safe from what, Dorian?  You are in some trouble.  Why not tell me
what it is?  You know I would help you."

"I can't tell you, Harry," he answered sadly.  "And I dare say it is
only a fancy of mine.  This unfortunate accident has upset me.  I have
a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me."

"What nonsense!"

"I hope it is, but I can't help feeling it.  Ah! here is the duchess,
looking like Artemis in a tailor-made gown.  You see we have come back,
Duchess."

"I have heard all about it, Mr. Gray," she answered.  "Poor Geoffrey is
terribly upset.  And it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare.
How curious!"

"Yes, it was very curious.  I don't know what made me say it.  Some
whim, I suppose.  It looked the loveliest of little live things.  But I
am sorry they told you about the man.  It is a hideous subject."

"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry.  "It has no
psychological value at all.  Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on
purpose, how interesting he would be!  I should like to know some one
who had committed a real murder."

"How horrid of you, Harry!" cried the duchess.  "Isn't it, Mr. Gray?
Harry, Mr. Gray is ill again.  He is going to faint."

Dorian drew himself up with an effort and smiled.  "It is nothing,
Duchess," he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order.  That is
all.  I am afraid I walked too far this morning.  I didn't hear what
Harry said.  Was it very bad?  You must tell me some other time.  I
think I must go and lie down.  You will excuse me, won't you?"

They had reached the great flight of steps that led from the
conservatory on to the terrace.  As the glass door closed behind
Dorian, Lord Henry turned and looked at the duchess with his slumberous
eyes.  "Are you very much in love with him?" he asked.

She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
"I wish I knew," she said at last.

He shook his head.  "Knowledge would be fatal.  It is the uncertainty
that charms one.  A mist makes things wonderful."

"One may lose one's way."

"All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."

"What is that?"

"Disillusion."

"It was my _debut_ in life," she sighed.

"It came to you crowned."

"I am tired of strawberry leaves."

"They become you."

"Only in public."

"You would miss them," said Lord Henry.

"I will not part with a petal."

"Monmouth has ears."

"Old age is dull of hearing."

"Has he never been jealous?"

"I wish he had been."

He glanced about as if in search of something.  "What are you looking
for?" she inquired.

"The button from your foil," he answered.  "You have dropped it."

She laughed.  "I have still the mask."

"It makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply.

She laughed again.  Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet
fruit.

Upstairs, in his own room, Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa, with terror
in every tingling fibre of his body.  Life had suddenly become too
hideous a burden for him to bear.  The dreadful death of the unlucky
beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed to him to
pre-figure death for himself also.  He had nearly swooned at what Lord
Henry had said in a chance mood of cynical jesting.

At five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave him orders to
pack his things for the night-express to town, and to have the brougham
at the door by eight-thirty. He was determined not to sleep another
night at Selby Royal.  It was an ill-omened place.  Death walked there
in the sunlight.  The grass of the forest had been spotted with blood.

Then he wrote a note to Lord Henry, telling him that he was going up to
town to consult his doctor and asking him to entertain his guests in
his absence.  As he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to
the door, and his valet informed him that the head-keeper wished to see
him.  He frowned and bit his lip.  "Send him in," he muttered, after
some moments' hesitation.

As soon as the man entered, Dorian pulled his chequebook out of a
drawer and spread it out before him.

"I suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident of this
morning, Thornton?" he said, taking up a pen.

"Yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper.

"Was the poor fellow married?  Had he any people dependent on him?"
asked Dorian, looking bored.  "If so, I should not like them to be left
in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary."

"We don't know who he is, sir.  That is what I took the liberty of
coming to you about."

"Don't know who he is?" said Dorian, listlessly.  "What do you mean?
Wasn't he one of your men?"

"No, sir.  Never saw him before.  Seems like a sailor, sir."

The pen dropped from Dorian Gray's hand, and he felt as if his heart
had suddenly stopped beating.  "A sailor?" he cried out.  "Did you say
a sailor?"

"Yes, sir.  He looks as if he had been a sort of sailor; tattooed on
both arms, and that kind of thing."

"Was there anything found on him?" said Dorian, leaning forward and
looking at the man with startled eyes.  "Anything that would tell his
name?"

"Some money, sir--not much, and a six-shooter. There was no name of any
kind.  A decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. A sort of sailor we
think."

Dorian started to his feet.  A terrible hope fluttered past him.  He
clutched at it madly.  "Where is the body?" he exclaimed.  "Quick!  I
must see it at once."

"It is in an empty stable in the Home Farm, sir.  The folk don't like
to have that sort of thing in their houses.  They say a corpse brings
bad luck."

"The Home Farm!  Go there at once and meet me.  Tell one of the grooms
to bring my horse round.  No. Never mind.  I'll go to the stables
myself.  It will save time."

In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the
long avenue as hard as he could go.  The trees seemed to sweep past him
in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his
path.  Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him.
He lashed her across the neck with his crop.  She cleft the dusky air
like an arrow.  The stones flew from her hoofs.

At last he reached the Home Farm.  Two men were loitering in the yard.
He leaped from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them.  In the
farthest stable a light was glimmering.  Something seemed to tell him
that the body was there, and he hurried to the door and put his hand
upon the latch.

There he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink of a
discovery that would either make or mar his life.  Then he thrust the
door open and entered.

On a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body of a man
dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers.  A spotted
handkerchief had been placed over the face.  A coarse candle, stuck in
a bottle, sputtered beside it.

Dorian Gray shuddered.  He felt that his could not be the hand to take
the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants to
come to him.

"Take that thing off the face.  I wish to see it," he said, clutching
at the door-post for support.

When the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward.  A cry of joy
broke from his lips.  The man who had been shot in the thicket was
James Vane.

He stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body.  As he rode
home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew he was safe.



CHAPTER 19

"There is no use your telling me that you are going to be good," cried
Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled
with rose-water. "You are quite perfect.  Pray, don't change."

Dorian Gray shook his head.  "No, Harry, I have done too many dreadful
things in my life.  I am not going to do any more.  I began my good
actions yesterday."

"Where were you yesterday?"

"In the country, Harry.  I was staying at a little inn by myself."

"My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the
country.  There are no temptations there.  That is the reason why
people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized.
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to.  There are
only two ways by which man can reach it.  One is by being cultured, the
other by being corrupt.  Country people have no opportunity of being
either, so they stagnate."

"Culture and corruption," echoed Dorian.  "I have known something of
both.  It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found
together.  For I have a new ideal, Harry.  I am going to alter.  I
think I have altered."

"You have not yet told me what your good action was.  Or did you say
you had done more than one?" asked his companion as he spilled into his
plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries and, through a
perforated, shell-shaped spoon, snowed white sugar upon them.

"I can tell you, Harry.  It is not a story I could tell to any one
else.  I spared somebody.  It sounds vain, but you understand what I
mean.  She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane.  I
think it was that which first attracted me to her.  You remember Sibyl,
don't you?  How long ago that seems!  Well, Hetty was not one of our
own class, of course.  She was simply a girl in a village.  But I
really loved her.  I am quite sure that I loved her.  All during this
wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her
two or three times a week.  Yesterday she met me in a little orchard.
The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was
laughing.  We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn.
Suddenly I determined to leave her as flowerlike as I had found her."

"I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill
of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry.  "But I can finish
your idyll for you.  You gave her good advice and broke her heart.
That was the beginning of your reformation."

"Harry, you are horrible!  You mustn't say these dreadful things.
Hetty's heart is not broken.  Of course, she cried and all that.  But
there is no disgrace upon her.  She can live, like Perdita, in her
garden of mint and marigold."

"And weep over a faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry, laughing, as he
leaned back in his chair.  "My dear Dorian, you have the most curiously
boyish moods.  Do you think this girl will ever be really content now
with any one of her own rank?  I suppose she will be married some day
to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman.  Well, the fact of having
met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she
will be wretched.  From a moral point of view, I cannot say that I
think much of your great renunciation.  Even as a beginning, it is
poor.  Besides, how do you know that Hetty isn't floating at the
present moment in some starlit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies
round her, like Ophelia?"

"I can't bear this, Harry!  You mock at everything, and then suggest
the most serious tragedies.  I am sorry I told you now.  I don't care
what you say to me.  I know I was right in acting as I did.  Poor
Hetty!  As I rode past the farm this morning, I saw her white face at
the window, like a spray of jasmine.  Don't let us talk about it any
more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action I have
done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever
known, is really a sort of sin.  I want to be better.  I am going to be
better.  Tell me something about yourself.  What is going on in town?
I have not been to the club for days."

"The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."

"I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said
Dorian, pouring himself out some wine and frowning slightly.

"My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and
the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having
more than one topic every three months.  They have been very fortunate
lately, however.  They have had my own divorce-case and Alan Campbell's
suicide.  Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist.
Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the grey ulster who left
for Paris by the midnight train on the ninth of November was poor
Basil, and the French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris
at all.  I suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has
been seen in San Francisco.  It is an odd thing, but every one who
disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco.  It must be a
delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world."

"What do you think has happened to Basil?" asked Dorian, holding up his
Burgundy against the light and wondering how it was that he could
discuss the matter so calmly.

"I have not the slightest idea.  If Basil chooses to hide himself, it
is no business of mine.  If he is dead, I don't want to think about
him.  Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me.  I hate it."

"Why?" said the younger man wearily.

"Because," said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt
trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything
nowadays except that.  Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in
the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.  Let us have our
coffee in the music-room, Dorian.  You must play Chopin to me.  The man
with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely.  Poor Victoria!
I was very fond of her.  The house is rather lonely without her.  Of
course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit.  But then one
regrets the loss even of one's worst habits.  Perhaps one regrets them
the most.  They are such an essential part of one's personality."

Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and passing into the next
room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white
and black ivory of the keys.  After the coffee had been brought in, he
stopped, and looking over at Lord Henry, said, "Harry, did it ever
occur to you that Basil was murdered?"

Lord Henry yawned.  "Basil was very popular, and always wore a
Waterbury watch.  Why should he have been murdered?  He was not clever
enough to have enemies.  Of course, he had a wonderful genius for
painting.  But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as
possible.  Basil was really rather dull.  He only interested me once,
and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration
for you and that you were the dominant motive of his art."

"I was very fond of Basil," said Dorian with a note of sadness in his
voice.  "But don't people say that he was murdered?"

"Oh, some of the papers do.  It does not seem to me to be at all
probable.  I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not
the sort of man to have gone to them.  He had no curiosity.  It was his
chief defect."

"What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?"
said the younger man.  He watched him intently after he had spoken.

"I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that
doesn't suit you.  All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder.  I am sorry if I hurt
your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true.  Crime belongs
exclusively to the lower orders.  I don't blame them in the smallest
degree.  I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us,
simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations."

"A method of procuring sensations?  Do you think, then, that a man who
has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again?
Don't tell me that."

"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried Lord
Henry, laughing.  "That is one of the most important secrets of life.
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake.  One should
never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.  But let us
pass from poor Basil.  I wish I could believe that he had come to such
a really romantic end as you suggest, but I can't. I dare say he fell
into the Seine off an omnibus and that the conductor hushed up the
scandal.  Yes:  I should fancy that was his end.  I see him lying now
on his back under those dull-green waters, with the heavy barges
floating over him and long weeds catching in his hair.  Do you know, I
don't think he would have done much more good work.  During the last
ten years his painting had gone off very much."

Dorian heaved a sigh, and Lord Henry strolled across the room and began
to stroke the head of a curious Java parrot, a large, grey-plumaged
bird with pink crest and tail, that was balancing itself upon a bamboo
perch.  As his pointed fingers touched it, it dropped the white scurf
of crinkled lids over black, glasslike eyes and began to sway backwards
and forwards.

"Yes," he continued, turning round and taking his handkerchief out of
his pocket; "his painting had quite gone off.  It seemed to me to have
lost something.  It had lost an ideal.  When you and he ceased to be
great friends, he ceased to be a great artist.  What was it separated
you?  I suppose he bored you.  If so, he never forgave you.  It's a
habit bores have.  By the way, what has become of that wonderful
portrait he did of you?  I don't think I have ever seen it since he
finished it.  Oh!  I remember your telling me years ago that you had
sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the
way.  You never got it back?  What a pity! it was really a
masterpiece.  I remember I wanted to buy it.  I wish I had now.  It
belonged to Basil's best period.  Since then, his work was that curious
mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man
to be called a representative British artist.  Did you advertise for
it?  You should."

"I forget," said Dorian.  "I suppose I did.  But I never really liked
it.  I am sorry I sat for it.  The memory of the thing is hateful to
me.  Why do you talk of it?  It used to remind me of those curious
lines in some play--Hamlet, I think--how do they run?--

    "Like the painting of a sorrow,
     A face without a heart."

Yes:  that is what it was like."

Lord Henry laughed.  "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is
his heart," he answered, sinking into an arm-chair.

Dorian Gray shook his head and struck some soft chords on the piano.
"'Like the painting of a sorrow,'" he repeated, "'a face without a
heart.'"

The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes.  "By
the way, Dorian," he said after a pause, "'what does it profit a man if
he gain the whole world and lose--how does the quotation run?--his own
soul'?"

The music jarred, and Dorian Gray started and stared at his friend.
"Why do you ask me that, Harry?"

"My dear fellow," said Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise,
"I asked you because I thought you might be able to give me an answer.
That is all.  I was going through the park last Sunday, and close by
the Marble Arch there stood a little crowd of shabby-looking people
listening to some vulgar street-preacher. As I passed by, I heard the
man yelling out that question to his audience.  It struck me as being
rather dramatic.  London is very rich in curious effects of that kind.
A wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly
white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful
phrase flung into the air by shrill hysterical lips--it was really very
good in its way, quite a suggestion.  I thought of telling the prophet
that art had a soul, but that man had not.  I am afraid, however, he
would not have understood me."

"Don't, Harry.  The soul is a terrible reality.  It can be bought, and
sold, and bartered away.  It can be poisoned, or made perfect.  There
is a soul in each one of us.  I know it."

"Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?"

"Quite sure."

"Ah! then it must be an illusion.  The things one feels absolutely
certain about are never true.  That is the fatality of faith, and the
lesson of romance.  How grave you are!  Don't be so serious.  What have
you or I to do with the superstitions of our age?  No:  we have given
up our belief in the soul.  Play me something.  Play me a nocturne,
Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept
your youth.  You must have some secret.  I am only ten years older than
you are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow.  You are really
wonderful, Dorian.  You have never looked more charming than you do
to-night. You remind me of the day I saw you first.  You were rather
cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary.  You have changed, of
course, but not in appearance.  I wish you would tell me your secret.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take
exercise, get up early, or be respectable.  Youth!  There is nothing
like it.  It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth.  The only
people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much
younger than myself.  They seem in front of me.  Life has revealed to
them her latest wonder.  As for the aged, I always contradict the aged.
I do it on principle.  If you ask them their opinion on something that
happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in
1820, when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew
absolutely nothing.  How lovely that thing you are playing is!  I
wonder, did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the
villa and the salt spray dashing against the panes?  It is marvellously
romantic.  What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that
is not imitative!  Don't stop.  I want music to-night. It seems to me
that you are the young Apollo and that I am Marsyas listening to you.
I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of.  The
tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.  I am
amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.  Ah, Dorian, how happy you are!
What an exquisite life you have had!  You have drunk deeply of
everything.  You have crushed the grapes against your palate.  Nothing
has been hidden from you.  And it has all been to you no more than the
sound of music.  It has not marred you.  You are still the same."

"I am not the same, Harry."

"Yes, you are the same.  I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
Don't spoil it by renunciations.  At present you are a perfect type.
Don't make yourself incomplete.  You are quite flawless now.  You need
not shake your head:  you know you are.  Besides, Dorian, don't deceive
yourself.  Life is not governed by will or intention.  Life is a
question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which
thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.  You may fancy
yourself safe and think yourself strong.  But a chance tone of colour
in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once
loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten
poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music
that you had ceased to play--I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things
like these that our lives depend.  Browning writes about that
somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us.  There are
moments when the odour of _lilas blanc_ passes suddenly across me, and I
have to live the strangest month of my life over again.  I wish I could
change places with you, Dorian.  The world has cried out against us
both, but it has always worshipped you.  It always will worship you.
You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is
afraid it has found.  I am so glad that you have never done anything,
never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything
outside of yourself!  Life has been your art.  You have set yourself to
music.  Your days are your sonnets."

Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair.
"Yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but I am not going to
have the same life, Harry.  And you must not say these extravagant
things to me.  You don't know everything about me.  I think that if you
did, even you would turn from me.  You laugh.  Don't laugh."

"Why have you stopped playing, Dorian?  Go back and give me the
nocturne over again.  Look at that great, honey-coloured moon that
hangs in the dusky air.  She is waiting for you to charm her, and if
you play she will come closer to the earth.  You won't?  Let us go to
the club, then.  It has been a charming evening, and we must end it
charmingly.  There is some one at White's who wants immensely to know
you--young Lord Poole, Bournemouth's eldest son.  He has already copied
your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you.  He is quite
delightful and rather reminds me of you."

"I hope not," said Dorian with a sad look in his eyes.  "But I am tired
to-night, Harry.  I shan't go to the club.  It is nearly eleven, and I
want to go to bed early."

"Do stay.  You have never played so well as to-night. There was
something in your touch that was wonderful.  It had more expression
than I had ever heard from it before."

"It is because I am going to be good," he answered, smiling.  "I am a
little changed already."

"You cannot change to me, Dorian," said Lord Henry.  "You and I will
always be friends."

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once.  I should not forgive that.
Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one.  It
does harm."

"My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize.  You will soon be
going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people
against all the sins of which you have grown tired.  You are much too
delightful to do that.  Besides, it is no use.  You and I are what we
are, and will be what we will be.  As for being poisoned by a book,
there is no such thing as that.  Art has no influence upon action.  It
annihilates the desire to act.  It is superbly sterile.  The books that
the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
That is all.  But we won't discuss literature.  Come round to-morrow. I
am going to ride at eleven.  We might go together, and I will take you
to lunch afterwards with Lady Branksome.  She is a charming woman, and
wants to consult you about some tapestries she is thinking of buying.
Mind you come.  Or shall we lunch with our little duchess?  She says
she never sees you now.  Perhaps you are tired of Gladys?  I thought
you would be.  Her clever tongue gets on one's nerves.  Well, in any
case, be here at eleven."

"Must I really come, Harry?"

"Certainly.  The park is quite lovely now.  I don't think there have
been such lilacs since the year I met you."

"Very well.  I shall be here at eleven," said Dorian.  "Good night,
Harry."  As he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, as if he
had something more to say.  Then he sighed and went out.



CHAPTER 20

It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and
did not even put his silk scarf round his throat.  As he strolled home,
smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him.  He
heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian Gray." He
remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared
at, or talked about.  He was tired of hearing his own name now.  Half
the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was
that no one knew who he was.  He had often told the girl whom he had
lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him.  He had
told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and
answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly.  What a
laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing.  And how pretty she had
been in her cotton dresses and her large hats!  She knew nothing, but
she had everything that he had lost.

When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him.  He sent
him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and
began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.

Was it really true that one could never change?  He felt a wild longing
for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as
Lord Henry had once called it.  He knew that he had tarnished himself,
filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he
had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible
joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had
been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to
shame.  But was it all irretrievable?  Was there no hope for him?

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that
the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the
unsullied splendour of eternal youth!  All his failure had been due to
that.  Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure
swift penalty along with it.  There was purification in punishment.
Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be
the prayer of man to a most just God.

The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many
years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids
laughed round it as of old.  He took it up, as he had done on that
night of horror when he had first noted the change in the fatal
picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished
shield.  Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a
mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "The world is changed
because you are made of ivory and gold.  The curves of your lips
rewrite history."  The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated
them over and over to himself.  Then he loathed his own beauty, and
flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters
beneath his heel.  It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty
and the youth that he had prayed for.  But for those two things, his
life might have been free from stain.  His beauty had been to him but a
mask, his youth but a mockery.  What was youth at best?  A green, an
unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.  Why had he
worn its livery?  Youth had spoiled him.

It was better not to think of the past.  Nothing could alter that.  It
was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think.  James
Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard.  Alan Campbell
had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the
secret that he had been forced to know.  The excitement, such as it
was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away.  It was
already waning.  He was perfectly safe there.  Nor, indeed, was it the
death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind.  It was the
living death of his own soul that troubled him.  Basil had painted the
portrait that had marred his life.  He could not forgive him that.  It
was the portrait that had done everything.  Basil had said things to
him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience.  The
murder had been simply the madness of a moment.  As for Alan Campbell,
his suicide had been his own act.  He had chosen to do it.  It was
nothing to him.

A new life!  That was what he wanted.  That was what he was waiting
for.  Surely he had begun it already.  He had spared one innocent
thing, at any rate.  He would never again tempt innocence.  He would be
good.

As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in
the locked room had changed.  Surely it was not still so horrible as it
had been?  Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel
every sign of evil passion from the face.  Perhaps the signs of evil
had already gone away.  He would go and look.

He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs.  As he unbarred the
door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face
and lingered for a moment about his lips.  Yes, he would be good, and
the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror
to him.  He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.

He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and
dragged the purple hanging from the portrait.  A cry of pain and
indignation broke from him.  He could see no change, save that in the
eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of
the hypocrite.  The thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if
possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed
brighter, and more like blood newly spilled.  Then he trembled.  Had it
been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed?  Or the
desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking
laugh?  Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things
finer than we are ourselves?  Or, perhaps, all these?  And why was the
red stain larger than it had been?  It seemed to have crept like a
horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers.  There was blood on the
painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand
that had not held the knife.  Confess?  Did it mean that he was to
confess?  To give himself up and be put to death?  He laughed.  He felt
that the idea was monstrous.  Besides, even if he did confess, who
would believe him?  There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere.
Everything belonging to him had been destroyed.  He himself had burned
what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad.
They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was
his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public
atonement.  There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to
earth as well as to heaven.  Nothing that he could do would cleanse him
till he had told his own sin.  His sin?  He shrugged his shoulders.
The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him.  He was thinking
of Hetty Merton.  For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul
that he was looking at.  Vanity?  Curiosity?  Hypocrisy?  Had there
been nothing more in his renunciation than that?  There had been
something more.  At least he thought so.  But who could tell? ... No.
There had been nothing more.  Through vanity he had spared her.  In
hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness.  For curiosity's sake he
had tried the denial of self.  He recognized that now.

But this murder--was it to dog him all his life?  Was he always to be
burdened by his past?  Was he really to confess?  Never.  There was
only one bit of evidence left against him.  The picture itself--that
was evidence.  He would destroy it.  Why had he kept it so long?  Once
it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old.  Of
late he had felt no such pleasure.  It had kept him awake at night.
When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes
should look upon it.  It had brought melancholy across his passions.
Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy.  It had been like
conscience to him.  Yes, it had been conscience.  He would destroy it.

He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.  He
had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it.  It
was bright, and glistened.  As it had killed the painter, so it would
kill the painter's work, and all that that meant.  It would kill the
past, and when that was dead, he would be free.  It would kill this
monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at
peace.  He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it.

There was a cry heard, and a crash.  The cry was so horrible in its
agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms.
Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped and looked
up at the great house.  They walked on till they met a policeman and
brought him back.  The man rang the bell several times, but there was
no answer.  Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was
all dark.  After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico
and watched.

"Whose house is that, Constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen.

"Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.

They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered.  One of
them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.

Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics
were talking in low whispers to each other.  Old Mrs. Leaf was crying
and wringing her hands.  Francis was as pale as death.

After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the
footmen and crept upstairs.  They knocked, but there was no reply.
They called out.  Everything was still.  Finally, after vainly trying
to force the door, they got on the roof and dropped down on to the
balcony.  The windows yielded easily--their bolts were old.

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait
of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his
exquisite youth and beauty.  Lying on the floor was a dead man, in
evening dress, with a knife in his heart.  He was withered, wrinkled,
and loathsome of visage.  It was not till they had examined the rings
that they recognized who it was.









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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

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Title: A Christmas Carol
       A Ghost Story of Christmas

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: August 11, 2004 [EBook #46]
Last Updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHRISTMAS CAROL ***




Produced by Jose Menendez




A CHRISTMAS CAROL

IN PROSE
BEING
A Ghost Story of Christmas

by Charles Dickens



PREFACE

I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book,
to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other,
with the season, or with me.  May it haunt their houses
pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant,
                                   C. D.
December, 1843.



CONTENTS

Stave   I: Marley's Ghost
Stave  II: The First of the Three Spirits
Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits
Stave  IV: The Last of the Spirits
Stave   V: The End of It



STAVE I:  MARLEY'S GHOST

MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that. The register of his burial was
signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker,
and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and
Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he
chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to
regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery
in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors
is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that
Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did.
How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were
partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge
was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole
assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and
sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully
cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent
man of business on the very day of the funeral,
and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to
the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley
was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or
nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going
to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that
Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there
would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a
stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts,
than there would be in any other middle-aged
gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy
spot--say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance--
literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name.
There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse
door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as
Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the
business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley,
but he answered to both names. It was all the
same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone,
Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,
clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,
from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire;
secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The
cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed
nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his
eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his
grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his
eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low
temperature always about with him; he iced his office in
the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on
Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather
chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he,
no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no
pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't
know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and
snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage
over him in only one respect. They often "came down"
handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with
gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you?
When will you come to see me?" No beggars implored
him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him
what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all
his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of
Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to
know him; and when they saw him coming on, would
tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and
then would wag their tails as though they said, "No
eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing
he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths
of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance,
was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.

Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year,
on Christmas Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his
counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy
withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside,
go wheezing up and down, beating their hands
upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the
pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had
only just gone three, but it was quite dark already--
it had not been light all day--and candles were flaring
in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like
ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog
came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was
so dense without, that although the court was of the
narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.
To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring
everything, one might have thought that Nature
lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open
that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a
dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying
letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's
fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one
coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept
the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the
clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted
that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore
the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to
warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being
a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried
a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's
nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was
the first intimation he had of his approach.

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the
fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was
all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his
eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's
nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What
right have you to be merry? What reason have you
to be merry? You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What
right have you to be dismal? What reason have you
to be morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur
of the moment, said, "Bah!" again; and followed it up
with "Humbug."

"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I
live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas!
Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas
time to you but a time for paying bills without
money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but
not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books
and having every item in 'em through a round dozen
of months presented dead against you? If I could
work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot
who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips,
should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.

"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly, "keep Christmas
in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you
don't keep it."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much
good may it do you! Much good it has ever done
you!"

"There are many things from which I might have
derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare
say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the
rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas
time, when it has come round--apart from the
veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything
belonging to it can be apart from that--as a
good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar
of the year, when men and women seem by one consent
to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think
of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race
of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore,
uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or
silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me
good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded.
Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety,
he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark
for ever.

"Let me hear another sound from you," said
Scrooge, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing
your situation! You're quite a powerful speaker,
sir," he added, turning to his nephew. "I wonder you
don't go into Parliament."

"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow."

Scrooge said that he would see him--yes, indeed he
did. He went the whole length of the expression,
and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

"But why?" cried Scrooge's nephew. "Why?"

"Why did you get married?" said Scrooge.

"Because I fell in love."

"Because you fell in love!" growled Scrooge, as if
that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous
than a merry Christmas. "Good afternoon!"

"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before
that happened. Why give it as a reason for not
coming now?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you;
why cannot we be friends?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so
resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I
have been a party. But I have made the trial in
homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas
humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

"And A Happy New Year!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

His nephew left the room without an angry word,
notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to
bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who,
cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned
them cordially.

"There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge; who
overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen shillings a
week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry
Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam."

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had
let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen,
pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off,
in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in
their hands, and bowed to him.

"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe," said one of the
gentlemen, referring to his list. "Have I the pleasure
of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?"

"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,"
Scrooge replied. "He died seven years ago, this very
night."

"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented
by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting
his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred
spirits. At the ominous word "liberality," Scrooge
frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials
back.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,"
said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight
provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer
greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in
want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands
are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down
the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge.
"Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish
I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour,
then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first,
that something had occurred to stop them in their
useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to
hear it."

"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish
Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,"
returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring
to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink,
and means of warmth. We choose this time, because
it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt,
and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down
for?"

"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you
ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.
I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't
afford to make idle people merry. I help to support
the establishments I have mentioned--they cost
enough; and those who are badly off must go there."

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had
better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Besides--excuse me--I don't know that."

"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.

"It's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's
enough for a man to understand his own business, and
not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies
me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue
their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed
his labours with an improved opinion of himself,
and in a more facetious temper than was usual
with him.

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that
people ran about with flaring links, proffering their
services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct
them on their way. The ancient tower of a church,
whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down
at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became
invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the
clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if
its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.
The cold became intense. In the main street, at the
corner of the court, some labourers were repairing
the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier,
round which a party of ragged men and boys were
gathered: warming their hands and winking their
eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug
being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed,
and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness
of the shops where holly sprigs and berries
crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale
faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers'
trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant,
with which it was next to impossible to believe that
such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything
to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the
mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks
and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's
household should; and even the little tailor, whom he
had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for
being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up
to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean
wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing, searching, biting
cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped
the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather
as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then
indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The
owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled
by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs,
stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with
a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

        "God bless you, merry gentleman!
         May nothing you dismay!"

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action,
that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to
the fog and even more congenial frost.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house
arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his
stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant
clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out,
and put on his hat.

"You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?" said
Scrooge.

"If quite convenient, sir."

"It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not
fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd
think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"

The clerk smiled faintly.

"And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think me ill-used,
when I pay a day's wages for no work."

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every
twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning
his great-coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must
have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next
morning."

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge
walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a
twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his
white comforter dangling below his waist (for he
boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill,
at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in
honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home
to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play
at blindman's-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual
melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and
beguiled the rest of the evening with his
banker's-book, went home to bed. He lived in
chambers which had once belonged to his deceased
partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a
lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so
little business to be, that one could scarcely help
fancying it must have run there when it was a young
house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses,
and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough
now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but
Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.
The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew
its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.
The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway
of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of
the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the
threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all
particular about the knocker on the door, except that it
was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had
seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what
is called fancy about him as any man in the city of
London, even including--which is a bold word--the
corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be
borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one
thought on Marley, since his last mention of his
seven years' dead partner that afternoon. And then
let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened
that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door,
saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate
process of change--not a knocker, but Marley's face.

Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow
as the other objects in the yard were, but had a
dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark
cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked
at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly
spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The
hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air;
and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly
motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it
horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the
face and beyond its control, rather than a part of
its own expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it
was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood
was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it
had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue.
But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished,
turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before
he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind
it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the
sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall.
But there was nothing on the back of the door, except
the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he
said "Pooh, pooh!" and closed it with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder.
Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's
cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal
of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to
be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and
walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too:
trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six
up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad
young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you
might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken
it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall
and the door towards the balustrades: and done it
easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room
to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge
thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before
him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of
the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well,
so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with
Scrooge's dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before
he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms
to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection
of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they
should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under
the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin
ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had
a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the
bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,
which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude
against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard,
old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three
legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked
himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his
custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off
his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and
his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take
his gruel.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a
bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and
brood over it, before he could extract the least
sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel.
The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch
merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint
Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures.
There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters;
Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending
through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams,
Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats,
hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts;
and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came
like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the
whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first,
with power to shape some picture on its surface from
the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would
have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.

"Humbug!" said Scrooge; and walked across the
room.

After several turns, he sat down again. As he
threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened
to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the
room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten
with a chamber in the highest story of the
building. It was with great astonishment, and with
a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he
saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in
the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it
rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute,
but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had
begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking
noise, deep down below; as if some person were
dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the
wine-merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have
heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as
dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound,
and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors
below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight
towards his door.

"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it."

His colour changed though, when, without a pause,
it came on through the heavy door, and passed into
the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the
dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know
him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail,
usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on
the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts,
and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was
clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound
about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge
observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks,
ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him,
and looking through his waistcoat, could see
the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no
bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he
looked the phantom through and through, and saw
it standing before him; though he felt the chilling
influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very
texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head
and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before;
he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.
"What do you want with me?"

"Much!"--Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"Who were you then?" said Scrooge, raising his
voice. "You're particular, for a shade." He was going
to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more
appropriate.

"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."

"Can you--can you sit down?" asked Scrooge, looking
doubtfully at him.

"I can."

"Do it, then."

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know
whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in
a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event
of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity
of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat
down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he
were quite used to it.

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't," said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of
your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking
jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means
waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be
smart, as a means of distracting his own attention,
and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice
disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence
for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very
deuce with him. There was something very awful,
too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal
atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it
himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the
Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts,
and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour
from an oven.

"You see this toothpick?" said Scrooge, returning
quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned;
and wishing, though it were only for a second, to
divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.

"I do," replied the Ghost.

"You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.

"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."

"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I have but to swallow
this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a
legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug,
I tell you! humbug!"

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook
its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that
Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself
from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was
his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage
round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors,
its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands
before his face.

"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do
you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do
you believe in me or not?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits
walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned,
"that the spirit within him should walk abroad among
his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that
spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so
after death. It is doomed to wander through the
world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot
share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to
happiness!"

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain
and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell
me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.
"I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded
it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I
wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the
weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?
It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven
Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since.
It is a ponderous chain!"

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the
expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty
or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see
nothing.

"Jacob," he said, imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley,
tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"

"I have none to give," the Ghost replied. "It comes
from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed
by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor
can I tell you what I would. A very little more is
all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I
cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked
beyond our counting-house--mark me!--in life my
spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our
money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before
me!"

It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became
thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.
Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now,
but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his
knees.

"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,"
Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though
with humility and deference.

"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.

"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. "And travelling
all the time!"

"The whole time," said the Ghost. "No rest, no
peace. Incessant torture of remorse."

"You travel fast?" said Scrooge.

"On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.

"You might have got over a great quantity of
ground in seven years," said Scrooge.

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and
clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of
the night, that the Ward would have been justified in
indicting it for a nuisance.

"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the
phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour
by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into
eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is
all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit
working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may
be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast
means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of
regret can make amends for one life's opportunity
misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"

"But you were always a good man of business,
Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this
to himself.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands
again. "Mankind was my business. The common
welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance,
and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings
of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business!"

It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were
the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it
heavily upon the ground again.

"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said,
"I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of
fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never
raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise
Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to
which its light would have conducted me!"

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the
spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake
exceedingly.

"Hear me!" cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly
gone."

"I will," said Scrooge. "But don't be hard upon
me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!"

"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that
you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible
beside you many and many a day."

It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered,
and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"That is no light part of my penance," pursued
the Ghost. "I am here to-night to warn you, that you
have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A
chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."

"You were always a good friend to me," said
Scrooge. "Thank'ee!"

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by
Three Spirits."

Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the
Ghost's had done.

"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned,
Jacob?" he demanded, in a faltering voice.

"It is."

"I--I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.

"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot
hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow,
when the bell tolls One."

"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over,
Jacob?" hinted Scrooge.

"Expect the second on the next night at the same
hour. The third upon the next night when the last
stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see
me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you
remember what has passed between us!"

When it had said these words, the spectre took its
wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head,
as before. Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its
teeth made, when the jaws were brought together
by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again,
and found his supernatural visitor confronting him
in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and
about its arm.

The apparition walked backward from him; and at
every step it took, the window raised itself a little,
so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.

It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did.
When they were within two paces of each other,
Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to
come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear:
for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible
of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of
lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and
self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment,
joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the
bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his
curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither
and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they
went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's
Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments)
were linked together; none were free. Many had
been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He
had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white
waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to
its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist
a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below,
upon a door-step. The misery with them all was,
clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in
human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist
enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and
their spirit voices faded together; and the night became
as it had been when he walked home.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door
by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked,
as he had locked it with his own hands, and
the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say "Humbug!"
but stopped at the first syllable. And being,
from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues
of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or
the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of
the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to
bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the
instant.


STAVE II:  THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS

WHEN Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed,
he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from
the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to
pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a
neighbouring church struck the four quarters. So he listened
for the hour.

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from
six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to
twelve; then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he
went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have
got into the works. Twelve!

He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most
preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve:
and stopped.

"Why, it isn't possible," said Scrooge, "that I can have
slept through a whole day and far into another night. It
isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and
this is twelve at noon!"

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed,
and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub
the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he
could see anything; and could see very little then. All he
could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely
cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro,
and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been
if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the
world.  This was a great relief, because "three days after sight
of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his
order," and so forth, would have become a mere United States'
security if there were no days to count by.

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought
it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it.  The more he
thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavoured
not to think, the more he thought.

Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved
within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his
mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first
position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through,
"Was it a dream or not?"

Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters
more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned
him of a visitation when the bell tolled one.  He resolved to lie
awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he could
no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was perhaps the
wisest resolution in his power.

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he
must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock.
At length it broke upon his listening ear.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter past," said Scrooge, counting.

"Ding, dong!"

"Half-past!" said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter to it," said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"The hour itself," said Scrooge, triumphantly, "and nothing else!"

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a
deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE.  Light flashed up in the room
upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a
hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his
back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains
of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a
half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the
unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now
to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure--like a child: yet not so like a
child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural
medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded
from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions.
Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was
white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in
it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were
very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold
were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately
formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic
of the purest white; and round its waist was bound
a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held
a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular
contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed
with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was,
that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear
jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was
doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a
great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing
steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt
sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another,
and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so
the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a
thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs,
now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a
body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible
in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the
very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and
clear as ever.

"Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to
me?" asked Scrooge.

"I am!"

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if
instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

"Who, and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Long Past?" inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish
stature.

"No. Your past."

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if
anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire
to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

"What!" exclaimed the Ghost, "would you so soon put out,
with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough
that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and
force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon
my brow!"

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend
or any knowledge of having wilfully "bonneted" the Spirit at
any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what
business brought him there.

"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.

Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not
help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been
more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard
him thinking, for it said immediately:

"Your reclamation, then. Take heed!"

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him
gently by the arm.

"Rise! and walk with me!"

It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the
weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes;
that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below
freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers,
dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at
that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand,
was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit
made towards the window, clasped his robe in supplication.

"I am a mortal," Scrooge remonstrated, "and liable to fall."

"Bear but a touch of my hand there," said the Spirit,
laying it upon his heart, "and you shall be upheld in more
than this!"

As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall,
and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either
hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it
was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished
with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon
the ground.

"Good Heaven!" said Scrooge, clasping his hands together,
as he looked about him. "I was bred in this place. I was
a boy here!"

The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch,
though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still
present to the old man's sense of feeling. He was conscious
of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected
with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares
long, long, forgotten!

"Your lip is trembling," said the Ghost. "And what is
that upon your cheek?"

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice,
that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him
where he would.

"You recollect the way?" inquired the Spirit.

"Remember it!" cried Scrooge with fervour; "I could
walk it blindfold."

"Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!" observed
the Ghost. "Let us go on."

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every
gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared
in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.
Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them
with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in
country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys
were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the
broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air
laughed to hear it!

"These are but shadows of the things that have been," said
the Ghost. "They have no consciousness of us."

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge
knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond
all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and
his heart leap up as they went past! Why was he filled
with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry
Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for
their several homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge?
Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done
to him?

"The school is not quite deserted," said the Ghost. "A
solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still."

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane, and
soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little
weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell
hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken
fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls
were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their
gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables;
and the coach-houses and sheds were over-run with grass.
Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state, within; for
entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open
doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished,
cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in the air, a
chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow
with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too
much to eat.

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a
door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and
disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by
lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely
boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down
upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he
used to be.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle
from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the
half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among
the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle
swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in
the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening
influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his
younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in
foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at:
stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and
leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's
dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know! One Christmas
time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone,
he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And
Valentine," said Scrooge, "and his wild brother, Orson; there
they go! And what's his name, who was put down in his
drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see him!
And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii;
there he is upon his head! Serve him right. I'm glad of it.
What business had he to be married to the Princess!"

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature
on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between
laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited
face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in
the city, indeed.

"There's the Parrot!" cried Scrooge. "Green body and
yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the
top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called
him, when he came home again after sailing round the
island. 'Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin
Crusoe?'  The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't.
It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running
for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!"

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his
usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, "Poor
boy!" and cried again.

"I wish," Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his
pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his
cuff: "but it's too late now."

"What is the matter?" asked the Spirit.

"Nothing," said Scrooge. "Nothing. There was a boy
singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should
like to have given him something: that's all."

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand:
saying as it did so, "Let us see another Christmas!"

Scrooge's former self grew larger at the words, and the
room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk,
the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the
ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how
all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you
do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything
had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all
the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly.
Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of
his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy,
came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and
often kissing him, addressed him as her "Dear, dear
brother."

"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the
child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh.
"To bring you home, home, home!"

"Home, little Fan?" returned the boy.

"Yes!" said the child, brimful of glee. "Home, for good
and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder
than he used to be, that home's like Heaven! He spoke so
gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that
I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come
home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach
to bring you. And you're to be a man!" said the child,
opening her eyes, "and are never to come back here; but
first, we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have
the merriest time in all the world."

"You are quite a woman, little Fan!" exclaimed the boy.

She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his
head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on
tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her
childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing loth to
go, accompanied her.

A terrible voice in the hall cried, "Bring down Master
Scrooge's box, there!" and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster
himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious
condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind
by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his
sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that
ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial
and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold.
Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a
block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments
of those dainties to the young people: at the same time,
sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of "something"
to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman,
but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had
rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied
on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster
good-bye right willingly; and getting into it, drove
gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels dashing the
hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens
like spray.

"Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have
withered," said the Ghost. "But she had a large heart!"

"So she had," cried Scrooge. "You're right. I will not
gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!"

"She died a woman," said the Ghost, "and had, as I think,
children."

"One child," Scrooge returned.

"True," said the Ghost. "Your nephew!"

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly,
"Yes."

Although they had but that moment left the school behind
them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city,
where shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy
carts and coaches battled for the way, and all the strife and
tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by
the dressing of the shops, that here too it was Christmas
time again; but it was evening, and the streets were
lighted up.

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked
Scrooge if he knew it.

"Know it!" said Scrooge. "Was I apprenticed here!"

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh
wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two
inches taller he must have knocked his head against the
ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:

"Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it's Fezziwig
alive again!"

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the
clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his
hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over
himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and
called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

"Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!"

Scrooge's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly
in, accompanied by his fellow-'prentice.

"Dick Wilkins, to be sure!" said Scrooge to the Ghost.
"Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached
to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear!"

"Yo ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig. "No more work to-night.
Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's
have the shutters up," cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap
of his hands, "before a man can say Jack Robinson!"

You wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it!
They charged into the street with the shutters--one, two,
three--had 'em up in their places--four, five, six--barred
'em and pinned 'em--seven, eight, nine--and came back
before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

"Hilli-ho!" cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the
high desk, with wonderful agility. "Clear away, my lads,
and let's have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup,
Ebenezer!"

Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared
away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking
on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if
it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was
swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon
the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and
bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter's
night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the
lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty
stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial
smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and
lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they
broke. In came all the young men and women employed in
the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the
baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend,
the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was
suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying
to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who
was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress.
In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly,
some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling;
in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went,
twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again
the other way; down the middle and up again; round
and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old
top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top
couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top
couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When
this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his
hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the
fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially
provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his
reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no
dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home,
exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man
resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more
dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there
was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece
of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.
But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast
and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort
of man who knew his business better than you or I could
have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley."  Then
old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top
couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them;
three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were
not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no
notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many--ah, four times--old
Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would
Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner
in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me
higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue
from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the
dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given
time, what would have become of them next. And when old
Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance;
advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and
curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to
your place; Fezziwig "cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared
to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without
a stagger.

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up.
Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side
of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually
as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.
When everybody had retired but the two 'prentices, they did
the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away,
and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a
counter in the back-shop.

During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a
man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene,
and with his former self. He corroborated everything,
remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent
the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the
bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from
them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious
that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its
head burnt very clear.

"A small matter," said the Ghost, "to make these silly
folks so full of gratitude."

"Small!" echoed Scrooge.

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices,
who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig:
and when he had done so, said,

"Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of
your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so
much that he deserves this praise?"

"It isn't that," said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and
speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self.
"It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy
or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a
pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and
looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is
impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness
he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."

He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.

"What is the matter?" asked the Ghost.

"Nothing particular," said Scrooge.

"Something, I think?" the Ghost insisted.

"No," said Scrooge, "No. I should like to be able to say
a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all."

His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance
to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by
side in the open air.

"My time grows short," observed the Spirit. "Quick!"

This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he
could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again
Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime
of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later
years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice.
There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which
showed the passion that had taken root, and where the
shadow of the growing tree would fall.

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young
girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears,
which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of
Christmas Past.

"It matters little," she said, softly. "To you, very little.
Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort
you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have
no just cause to grieve."

"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.

"A golden one."

"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said.
"There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and
there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity
as the pursuit of wealth!"

"You fear the world too much," she answered, gently.
"All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being
beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your
nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion,
Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"

"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so
much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you."

She shook her head.

"Am I?"

"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were
both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could
improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You
are changed. When it was made, you were another man."

"I was a boy," he said impatiently.

"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you
are," she returned. "I am. That which promised happiness
when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that
we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of
this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it,
and can release you."

"Have I ever sought release?"

"In words. No. Never."

"In what, then?"

"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another
atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In
everything that made my love of any worth or value in your
sight. If this had never been between us," said the girl,
looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; "tell me,
would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!"

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in
spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, "You think
not."

"I would gladly think otherwise if I could," she answered,
"Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this,
I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you
were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe
that you would choose a dowerless girl--you who, in your
very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or,
choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your
one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your
repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I
release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you
once were."

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from
him, she resumed.

"You may--the memory of what is past half makes me
hope you will--have pain in this. A very, very brief time,
and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an
unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you
awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!"

She left him, and they parted.

"Spirit!" said Scrooge, "show me no more! Conduct
me home. Why do you delight to torture me?"

"One shadow more!" exclaimed the Ghost.

"No more!" cried Scrooge. "No more. I don't wish to
see it. Show me no more!"

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms,
and forced him to observe what happened next.

They were in another scene and place; a room, not very
large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter
fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge
believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely
matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this
room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children
there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count;
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not
forty children conducting themselves like one, but every
child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences
were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care;
on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily,
and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to
mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands
most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of
them! Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I
wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have crushed that
braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little
shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to
save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they
did, bold young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should
have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment,
and never come straight again. And yet I should
have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have
questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have
looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never
raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of
which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should
have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence
of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its
value.

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a
rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and
plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed
and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who
came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys
and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and
the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter!
The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his
pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight
by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back,
and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of
wonder and delight with which the development of every
package was received! The terrible announcement that the
baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan
into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having
swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter!
The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy,
and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike.
It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions
got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the
top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever,
when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning
fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his
own fireside; and when he thought that such another
creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might
have called him father, and been a spring-time in the
haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

"Belle," said the husband, turning to his wife with a
smile, "I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon."

"Who was it?"

"Guess!"

"How can I? Tut, don't I know?" she added in the
same breath, laughing as he laughed. "Mr. Scrooge."

"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as
it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could
scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point
of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in
the world, I do believe."

"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a broken voice, "remove me
from this place."

"I told you these were shadows of the things that have
been," said the Ghost. "That they are what they are, do
not blame me!"

"Remove me!" Scrooge exclaimed, "I cannot bear it!"

He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon
him with a face, in which in some strange way there were
fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.

"Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!"

In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which
the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was
undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed
that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly
connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the
extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down
upon its head.

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher
covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down
with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed
from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an
irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own
bedroom.  He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand
relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank
into a heavy sleep.


STAVE III:  THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS

AWAKING in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and
sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had
no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the
stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness
in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding
a conference with the second messenger despatched to him
through Jacob Marley's intervention. But finding that he
turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which
of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put
them every one aside with his own hands; and lying down
again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For
he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its
appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and
made nervous.

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves
on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually
equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their
capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for
anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which
opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and
comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for
Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you
to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of
strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and
rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by
any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the
Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a
violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter
of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay
upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy
light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the
hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than
a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it
meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive
that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of
spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of
knowing it. At last, however, he began to think--as you or
I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not
in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done
in it, and would unquestionably have done it too--at last, I
say, he began to think that the source and secret of this
ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence,
on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking
full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in
his slippers to the door.

The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange
voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He
obeyed.

It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.
But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls
and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a
perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming
berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and
ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had
been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring
up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had
never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and
many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form
a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn,
great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages,
mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,
cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears,
immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that
made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy
state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to
see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's
horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge,
as he came peeping round the door.

"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost. "Come in! and know
me better, man!"

Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this
Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and
though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like
to meet them.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit.
"Look upon me!"

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple
green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment
hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was
bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any
artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the
garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other
covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining
icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its
genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice,
its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded
round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword
was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.

"You have never seen the like of me before!" exclaimed
the Spirit.

"Never," Scrooge made answer to it.

"Have never walked forth with the younger members of
my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers
born in these later years?" pursued the Phantom.

"I don't think I have," said Scrooge. "I am afraid I have
not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit?"

"More than eighteen hundred," said the Ghost.

"A tremendous family to provide for!" muttered Scrooge.

The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.

"Spirit," said Scrooge submissively, "conduct me where
you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt
a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have aught
to teach me, let me profit by it."

"Touch my robe!"

Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game,
poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings,
fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room,
the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood
in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the
weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and
not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the
pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of
their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see
it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting
into artificial little snow-storms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows
blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow
upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground;
which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by
the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed
and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace
in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy,
and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist,
half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended
in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great
Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away
to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful
in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest
summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops
were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another
from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious
snowball--better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest--
laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it
went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the
fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats
of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out
into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were
ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in
the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking
from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went
by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were
pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there
were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence
to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might
water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy
and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among
the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered
leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting
off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great
compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and
beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after
dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among
these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and
stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was
something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and
round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps
two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such
glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the
counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller
parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled
up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended
scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even
that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so
extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight,
the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and
spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on
feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs
were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in
modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that
everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but
the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful
promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other
at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left
their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to
fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in
the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people
were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which
they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own,
worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws
to peck at if they chose.

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and
chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in
their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the
same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and
nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners
to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor revellers
appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with
Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and taking off the
covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their
dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind
of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words
between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he
shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good
humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame
to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love
it, so it was!

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and
yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners
and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of
wet above each baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as
if its stones were cooking too.

"Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from
your torch?" asked Scrooge.

"There is. My own."

"Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?"
asked Scrooge.

"To any kindly given. To a poor one most."

"Why to a poor one most?" asked Scrooge.

"Because it needs it most."

"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder
you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should
desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent
enjoyment."

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You would deprive them of their means of dining every
seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said
to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?" said
Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."

"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your
name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit,
"who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion,
pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness
in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and
kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge
their doings on themselves, not us."

Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on,
invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the
town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which
Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that notwithstanding
his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place
with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as
gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible
he could have done in any lofty hall.

And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in
showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind,
generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor
men, that led him straight to Scrooge's clerk's; for there he
went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe; and
on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped
to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinkling of his
torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen "Bob" a-week
himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his
Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present
blessed his four-roomed house!

Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out
but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons,
which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and
she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of
her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter
Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and
getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private
property, conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the
day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly
attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.
And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing
in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the
goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious
thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced
about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the
skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked
him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up,
knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and
peeled.

"What has ever got your precious father then?" said Mrs.
Cratchit. "And your brother, Tiny Tim! And Martha
warn't as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour?"

"Here's Martha, mother!" said a girl, appearing as she
spoke.

"Here's Martha, mother!" cried the two young Cratchits.
"Hurrah! There's such a goose, Martha!"

"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!"
said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off
her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.

"We'd a deal of work to finish up last night," replied the
girl, "and had to clear away this morning, mother!"

"Well! Never mind so long as you are come," said Mrs.
Cratchit. "Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have
a warm, Lord bless ye!"

"No, no! There's father coming," cried the two young
Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha,
hide!"

So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father,
with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe,
hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned
up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his
shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and
had his limbs supported by an iron frame!

"Why, where's our Martha?" cried Bob Cratchit, looking
round.

"Not coming," said Mrs. Cratchit.

"Not coming!" said Bob, with a sudden declension in his
high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way
from church, and had come home rampant. "Not coming
upon Christmas Day!"

Martha didn't like to see him disappointed, if it were only
in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet
door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits
hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house,
that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.

"And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs. Cratchit,
when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had
hugged his daughter to his heart's content.

"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he
gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the
strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home,
that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he
was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember
upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind
men see."

Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and
trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing
strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back
came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by
his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while
Bob, turning up his cuffs--as if, poor fellow, they were
capable of being made more shabby--compounded some hot
mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round
and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter,
and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the
goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose
the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a
black swan was a matter of course--and in truth it was
something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made
the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot;
Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour;
Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted
the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny
corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for
everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard
upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest
they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be
helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was
said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs.
Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared
to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the
long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of
delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim,
excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with
the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe
there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and
flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal
admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes,
it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as
Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small
atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at
last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest
Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to
the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss
Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone--too nervous to
bear witnesses--to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should
break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got
over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they
were merry with the goose--a supposition at which the two
young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were
supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of
the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the
cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next
door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that!
That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit
entered--flushed, but smiling proudly--with the pudding,
like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half
of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with
Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly
too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by
Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that
now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had
had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had
something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it
was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have
been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed
to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the
hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the
jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges
were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the
fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in
what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and
at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass.
Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as
golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with
beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and
cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

"A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!"

Which all the family re-echoed.

"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father's side upon his little
stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he
loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and
dreaded that he might be taken from him.

"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt
before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."

"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor
chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully
preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future,
the child will die."

"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he
will be spared."

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none
other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here.
What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and
decrease the surplus population."

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by
the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not
adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered
What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what
men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the
sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live
than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear
the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life
among his hungry brothers in the dust!"

Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast
his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on
hearing his own name.

"Mr. Scrooge!" said Bob; "I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the
Founder of the Feast!"

"The Founder of the Feast indeed!" cried Mrs. Cratchit,
reddening. "I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece
of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good
appetite for it."

"My dear," said Bob, "the children! Christmas Day."

"It should be Christmas Day, I am sure," said she, "on
which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard,
unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert!
Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow!"

"My dear," was Bob's mild answer, "Christmas Day."

"I'll drink his health for your sake and the Day's," said
Mrs. Cratchit, "not for his. Long life to him! A merry
Christmas and a happy new year! He'll be very merry and
very happy, I have no doubt!"

The children drank the toast after her. It was the first of
their proceedings which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank
it last of all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge
was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast
a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for full
five minutes.

After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier than
before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done
with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his
eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full
five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed
tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of business;
and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from
between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular
investments he should favour when he came into the receipt
of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor
apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work
she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch,
and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a
good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at
home. Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some
days before, and how the lord "was much about as tall as
Peter;" at which Peter pulled up his collars so high that you
couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All this
time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and
by-and-bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in
the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice,
and sang it very well indeed.

There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not
a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes
were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty;
and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside
of a pawnbroker's. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased
with one another, and contented with the time; and when
they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings
of the Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon
them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty
heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets,
the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and
all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of
the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot
plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep
red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness.
There all the children of the house were running out
into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins,
uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. Here, again,
were shadows on the window-blind of guests assembling; and
there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted,
and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near
neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single man who saw
them enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!

But, if you had judged from the numbers of people on
their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought
that no one was at home to give them welcome when they
got there, instead of every house expecting company, and
piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how
the Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and
opened its capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with
a generous hand, its bright and harmless mirth on everything
within its reach! The very lamplighter, who ran on before,
dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was
dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly
as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter
that he had any company but Christmas!

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they
stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses
of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place
of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed,
or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner;
and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass.
Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery
red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a
sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in
the thick gloom of darkest night.

"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.

"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of
the earth," returned the Spirit. "But they know me. See!"

A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they
advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and
stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a
glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their
children and their children's children, and another generation
beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire.
The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling
of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a
Christmas song--it had been a very old song when he was a
boy--and from time to time they all joined in the chorus.
So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite
blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour
sank again.

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his
robe, and passing on above the moor, sped--whither? Not
to sea? To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw
the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them;
and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it
rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it
had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league
or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,
the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse.
Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds
--born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the
water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made
a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed
out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their
horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they
wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and
one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and
scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship
might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in
itself.

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea
--on, on--until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any
shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman
at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who
had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations;
but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his
companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward
hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or
sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another
on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared
to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those
he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted
to remember him.

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the
moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it
was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown
abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death: it
was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear
a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge
to recognise it as his own nephew's and to find himself in a
bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling
by his side, and looking at that same nephew with approving
affability!

"Ha, ha!" laughed Scrooge's nephew. "Ha, ha, ha!"

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a
man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can
say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me,
and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that
while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing
in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and
good-humour. When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way: holding
his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the
most extravagant contortions: Scrooge's niece, by marriage,
laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends being
not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.

"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!" cried
Scrooge's nephew. "He believed it too!"

"More shame for him, Fred!" said Scrooge's niece,
indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything by
halves. They are always in earnest.

She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled,
surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that
seemed made to be kissed--as no doubt it was; all kinds of
good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another
when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever
saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what
you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too.
Oh, perfectly satisfactory.

"He's a comical old fellow," said Scrooge's nephew, "that's
the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However,
his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing
to say against him."

"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred," hinted Scrooge's niece.
"At least you always tell me so."

"What of that, my dear!" said Scrooge's nephew. "His
wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good with it.
He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the
satisfaction of thinking--ha, ha, ha!--that he is ever going
to benefit US with it."

"I have no patience with him," observed Scrooge's niece.
Scrooge's niece's sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed
the same opinion.

"Oh, I have!" said Scrooge's nephew. "I am sorry for
him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers
by his ill whims! Himself, always. Here, he takes it into
his head to dislike us, and he won't come and dine with us.
What's the consequence? He don't lose much of a dinner."

"Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner," interrupted
Scrooge's niece. Everybody else said the same, and they
must be allowed to have been competent judges, because
they had just had dinner; and, with the dessert upon the
table, were clustered round the fire, by lamplight.

"Well! I'm very glad to hear it," said Scrooge's nephew,
"because I haven't great faith in these young housekeepers.
What do you say, Topper?"

Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's
sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast,
who had no right to express an opinion on the subject.
Whereat Scrooge's niece's sister--the plump one with the lace
tucker: not the one with the roses--blushed.

"Do go on, Fred," said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands.
"He never finishes what he begins to say! He is such a
ridiculous fellow!"

Scrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh, and as it was
impossible to keep the infection off; though the plump sister
tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar; his example was
unanimously followed.

"I was only going to say," said Scrooge's nephew, "that
the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making
merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant
moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses
pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts,
either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty chambers. I
mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he
likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas
till he dies, but he can't help thinking better of it--I defy
him--if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after
year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only
puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds,
that's something; and I think I shook him yesterday."

It was their turn to laugh now at the notion of his shaking
Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much
caring what they laughed at, so that they laughed at any
rate, he encouraged them in their merriment, and passed the
bottle joyously.

After tea, they had some music. For they were a musical
family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a
Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who
could growl away in the bass like a good one, and never
swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face
over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and
played among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing:
you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had
been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the
boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of
Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the
things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he
softened more and more; and thought that if he could have
listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the
kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands,
without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob
Marley.

But they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After
a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children
sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its
mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop! There was first
a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was. And I
no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he
had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done
thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the
Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after
that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the
credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons,
tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano,
smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went,
there went he! He always knew where the plump sister was.
He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up
against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would
have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would
have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly
have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister.
She often cried out that it wasn't fair; and it really was not.
But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her
silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got
her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his
conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to
know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her
head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by
pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain
about her neck; was vile, monstrous! No doubt she told
him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in
office, they were so very confidential together, behind the
curtains.

Scrooge's niece was not one of the blind-man's buff party,
but was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool,
in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close
behind her. But she joined in the forfeits, and loved her
love to admiration with all the letters of the alphabet.
Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was
very great, and to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat
her sisters hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as Topper
could have told you. There might have been twenty people there,
young and old, but they all played, and so did Scrooge; for
wholly forgetting in the interest he had in what was going on, that
his voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with
his guess quite loud, and very often guessed quite right, too;
for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut
in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in
his head to be.

The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood,
and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like
a boy to be allowed to stay until the guests departed. But
this the Spirit said could not be done.

"Here is a new game," said Scrooge. "One half hour,
Spirit, only one!"

It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew
had to think of something, and the rest must find out what;
he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case
was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he was exposed,
elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live
animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes,
and lived in London, and walked about the streets,
and wasn't made a show of, and wasn't led by anybody, and
didn't live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market,
and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a
tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh
question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a
fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that
he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last
the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:

"I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know
what it is!"

"What is it?" cried Fred.

"It's your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!"

Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal
sentiment, though some objected that the reply to "Is it a
bear?" ought to have been "Yes;" inasmuch as an answer
in the negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts
from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any tendency
that way.

"He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure," said
Fred, "and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health.
Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the
moment; and I say, 'Uncle Scrooge!'"

"Well! Uncle Scrooge!" they cried.

"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old
man, whatever he is!" said Scrooge's nephew. "He wouldn't
take it from me, but may he have it, nevertheless. Uncle
Scrooge!"

Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light
of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious
company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech,
if the Ghost had given him time. But the whole scene
passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his
nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they
visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood
beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands,
and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they
were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was
rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery's every
refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not
made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his
blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.

It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge
had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared
to be condensed into the space of time they passed
together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained
unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly
older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of
it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when,
looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place,
he noticed that its hair was grey.

"Are spirits' lives so short?" asked Scrooge.

"My life upon this globe, is very brief," replied the Ghost.
"It ends to-night."

"To-night!" cried Scrooge.

"To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing
near."

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at
that moment.

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said
Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see
something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding
from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was
the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed
the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,
wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where
graceful youth should have filled their features out, and
touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled
hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and
pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No
change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any
grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has
monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to
him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but
the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie
of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon
them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,
and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for
on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out
its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye!
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.
And bide the end!"

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him
for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not.
As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the
prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes,
beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like
a mist along the ground, towards him.


STAVE IV:  THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS

THE Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When
it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in
the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to
scatter gloom and mystery.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed
its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible
save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been
difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it
from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside
him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a
solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither
spoke nor moved.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To
Come?" said Scrooge.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its
hand.

"You are about to show me shadows of the things that
have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,"
Scrooge pursued. "Is that so, Spirit?"

The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an
instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head.
That was the only answer he received.

Although well used to ghostly company by this time,
Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled
beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when
he prepared to follow it. The Spirit paused a moment, as
observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him
with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the
dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon
him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost,
could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap
of black.

"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more
than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose
is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another
man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company,
and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak
to me?"

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight
before them.

"Lead on!" said Scrooge. "Lead on! The night is
waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead
on, Spirit!"

The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him.
Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him
up, he thought, and carried him along.

They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather
seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its
own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on
'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down,
and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in
groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully
with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had
seen them often.

The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men.
Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge
advanced to listen to their talk.

"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I
don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's
dead."

"When did he die?" inquired another.

"Last night, I believe."

"Why, what was the matter with him?" asked a third,
taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box.
"I thought he'd never die."

"God knows," said the first, with a yawn.

"What has he done with his money?" asked a red-faced
gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his
nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.

"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin,
yawning again. "Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't
left it to me. That's all I know."

This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.

"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral," said the same
speaker; "for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go
to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?"

"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided," observed the
gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. "But I must
be fed, if I make one."

Another laugh.

"Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,"
said the first speaker, "for I never wear black gloves, and I
never eat lunch. But I'll offer to go, if anybody else will.
When I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that I wasn't
his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak
whenever we met. Bye, bye!"

Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with
other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the
Spirit for an explanation.

The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed
to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking
that the explanation might lie here.

He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business:
very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point
always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point
of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.

"How are you?" said one.

"How are you?" returned the other.

"Well!" said the first. "Old Scratch has got his own at
last, hey?"

"So I am told," returned the second. "Cold, isn't it?"

"Seasonable for Christmas time. You're not a skater, I
suppose?"

"No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!"

Not another word. That was their meeting, their
conversation, and their parting.

Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the
Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so
trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden
purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be.
They could scarcely be supposed to have any bearing on the
death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past, and this
Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of any
one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could
apply them. But nothing doubting that to whomsoever they
applied they had some latent moral for his own improvement,
he resolved to treasure up every word he heard,
and everything he saw; and especially to observe the
shadow of himself when it appeared. For he had an expectation
that the conduct of his future self would give him
the clue he missed, and would render the solution of these
riddles easy.

He looked about in that very place for his own image; but
another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the
clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he
saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured
in through the Porch. It gave him little surprise, however;
for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and
thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried
out in this.

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its
outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his
thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and
its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes
were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and feel
very cold.

They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part
of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before,
although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The
ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched;
the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and
archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the
whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.

Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed,
beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags,
bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor
within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges,
files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets
that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in
mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and
sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a
charcoal stove, made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal,
nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the
cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous
tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury
of calm retirement.

Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this
man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the
shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another woman,
similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely followed by
a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight
of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each
other. After a short period of blank astonishment, in which
the old man with the pipe had joined them, they all three
burst into a laugh.

"Let the charwoman alone to be the first!" cried she who
had entered first. "Let the laundress alone to be the second;
and let the undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look
here, old Joe, here's a chance! If we haven't all three met
here without meaning it!"

"You couldn't have met in a better place," said old Joe,
removing his pipe from his mouth. "Come into the parlour.
You were made free of it long ago, you know; and the other
two an't strangers. Stop till I shut the door of the shop.
Ah! How it skreeks! There an't such a rusty bit of metal
in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and I'm sure there's
no such old bones here, as mine. Ha, ha! We're all suitable
to our calling, we're well matched. Come into the
parlour. Come into the parlour."

The parlour was the space behind the screen of rags. The
old man raked the fire together with an old stair-rod, and
having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night), with the
stem of his pipe, put it in his mouth again.

While he did this, the woman who had already spoken
threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting
manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and
looking with a bold defiance at the other two.

"What odds then! What odds, Mrs. Dilber?" said the
woman. "Every person has a right to take care of themselves.
He always did."

"That's true, indeed!" said the laundress. "No man
more so."

"Why then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid,
woman; who's the wiser? We're not going to pick holes in
each other's coats, I suppose?"

"No, indeed!" said Mrs. Dilber and the man together.
"We should hope not."

"Very well, then!" cried the woman. "That's enough.
Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like these?
Not a dead man, I suppose."

"No, indeed," said Mrs. Dilber, laughing.

"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old
screw," pursued the woman, "why wasn't he natural in his
lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look
after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying
gasping out his last there, alone by himself."

"It's the truest word that ever was spoke," said Mrs.
Dilber. "It's a judgment on him."

"I wish it was a little heavier judgment," replied the
woman; "and it should have been, you may depend upon it,
if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that
bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. Speak out
plain. I'm not afraid to be the first, nor afraid for them to
see it. We know pretty well that we were helping ourselves,
before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the bundle,
Joe."

But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this;
and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first,
produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two,
a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no
great value, were all. They were severally examined and
appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed
to give for each, upon the wall, and added them up into a
total when he found there was nothing more to come.

"That's your account," said Joe, "and I wouldn't give
another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it.
Who's next?"

Mrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing
apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of
sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall
in the same manner.

"I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine,
and that's the way I ruin myself," said old Joe. "That's
your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made
it an open question, I'd repent of being so liberal and knock
off half-a-crown."

"And now undo my bundle, Joe," said the first woman.

Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience
of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots,
dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff.

"What do you call this?" said Joe. "Bed-curtains!"

"Ah!" returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward
on her crossed arms. "Bed-curtains!"

"You don't mean to say you took 'em down, rings and
all, with him lying there?" said Joe.

"Yes I do," replied the woman. "Why not?"

"You were born to make your fortune," said Joe, "and
you'll certainly do it."

"I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything
in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He
was, I promise you, Joe," returned the woman coolly. "Don't
drop that oil upon the blankets, now."

"His blankets?" asked Joe.

"Whose else's do you think?" replied the woman. "He
isn't likely to take cold without 'em, I dare say."

"I hope he didn't die of anything catching? Eh?" said
old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.

"Don't you be afraid of that," returned the woman. "I
an't so fond of his company that I'd loiter about him for
such things, if he did. Ah! you may look through that
shirt till your eyes ache; but you won't find a hole in it, nor
a threadbare place. It's the best he had, and a fine one too.
They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me."

"What do you call wasting of it?" asked old Joe.

"Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure," replied
the woman with a laugh. "Somebody was fool enough to
do it, but I took it off again. If calico an't good enough for
such a purpose, it isn't good enough for anything. It's quite
as becoming to the body. He can't look uglier than he did
in that one."

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat
grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by
the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and
disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they
had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.

"Ha, ha!" laughed the same woman, when old Joe,
producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their
several gains upon the ground. "This is the end of it, you
see! He frightened every one away from him when he was
alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!"

"Spirit!" said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. "I
see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own.
My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is
this!"

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now
he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which,
beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up,
which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful
language.

The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with
any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience
to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it
was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon
the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept,
uncared for, was the body of this man.

Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand
was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted
that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon
Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the face. He thought
of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it;
but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss
the spectre at his side.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar
here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy
command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved,
revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair
to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is
not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released;
it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the
hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm,
and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike!
And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow
the world with life immortal!

No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and
yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He
thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be
his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard-dealing, griping cares?
They have brought him to a rich end, truly!

He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a
woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this
or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be
kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was
a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What
they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so
restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.

"Spirit!" he said, "this is a fearful place. In leaving it,
I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!"

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the
head.

"I understand you," Scrooge returned, "and I would do
it, if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have
not the power."

Again it seemed to look upon him.

"If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion
caused by this man's death," said Scrooge quite agonised,
"show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!"

The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a
moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room
by daylight, where a mother and her children were.

She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness;
for she walked up and down the room; started at every
sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock;
tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly
bear the voices of the children in their play.

At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried
to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was
careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was
a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight
of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.

He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for
him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news
(which was not until after a long silence), he appeared
embarrassed how to answer.

"Is it good?" she said, "or bad?"--to help him.

"Bad," he answered.

"We are quite ruined?"

"No. There is hope yet, Caroline."

"If he relents," she said, amazed, "there is! Nothing is
past hope, if such a miracle has happened."

"He is past relenting," said her husband. "He is dead."

She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke
truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she
said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next
moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of
her heart.

"What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of last
night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a
week's delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid
me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not only
very ill, but dying, then."

"To whom will our debt be transferred?"

"I don't know. But before that time we shall be ready
with the money; and even though we were not, it would be
a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his
successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline!"

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter.
The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what
they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier
house for this man's death! The only emotion that the
Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of
pleasure.

"Let me see some tenderness connected with a death," said
Scrooge; "or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just
now, will be for ever present to me."

The Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar
to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and
there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They
entered poor Bob Cratchit's house; the dwelling he had
visited before; and found the mother and the children seated
round the fire.

Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as
still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter,
who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters
were engaged in sewing. But surely they were very quiet!

"'And He took a child, and set him in the midst of
them.'"

Where had Scrooge heard those words? He had not
dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he
and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not
go on?

The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her
hand up to her face.

"The colour hurts my eyes," she said.

The colour? Ah, poor Tiny Tim!

"They're better now again," said Cratchit's wife. "It
makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn't show weak
eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world. It
must be near his time."

"Past it rather," Peter answered, shutting up his book.
"But I think he has walked a little slower than he used,
these few last evenings, mother."

They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a
steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:

"I have known him walk with--I have known him walk
with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed."

"And so have I," cried Peter. "Often."

"And so have I," exclaimed another. So had all.

"But he was very light to carry," she resumed, intent upon
her work, "and his father loved him so, that it was no
trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the door!"

She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter
--he had need of it, poor fellow--came in. His tea
was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried who should
help him to it most. Then the two young Cratchits got
upon his knees and laid, each child a little cheek, against
his face, as if they said, "Don't mind it, father. Don't be
grieved!"

Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to
all the family. He looked at the work upon the table, and
praised the industry and speed of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls.
They would be done long before Sunday, he said.

"Sunday! You went to-day, then, Robert?" said his
wife.

"Yes, my dear," returned Bob. "I wish you could have
gone. It would have done you good to see how green a
place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I
would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child!"
cried Bob. "My little child!"

He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he
could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther
apart perhaps than they were.

He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above,
which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas.
There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were
signs of some one having been there, lately. Poor Bob sat
down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed
himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what
had happened, and went down again quite happy.

They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother
working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness
of Mr. Scrooge's nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but
once, and who, meeting him in the street that day, and seeing
that he looked a little--"just a little down you know," said
Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him. "On
which," said Bob, "for he is the pleasantest-spoken gentleman
you ever heard, I told him. 'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr.
Cratchit,' he said, 'and heartily sorry for your good wife.'
By the bye, how he ever knew that, I don't know."

"Knew what, my dear?"

"Why, that you were a good wife," replied Bob.

"Everybody knows that!" said Peter.

"Very well observed, my boy!" cried Bob. "I hope they
do. 'Heartily sorry,' he said, 'for your good wife. If I
can be of service to you in any way,' he said, giving me
his card, 'that's where I live. Pray come to me.' Now, it
wasn't," cried Bob, "for the sake of anything he might be
able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was
quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known our
Tiny Tim, and felt with us."

"I'm sure he's a good soul!" said Mrs. Cratchit.

"You would be surer of it, my dear," returned Bob, "if
you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn't be at all surprised--
mark what I say!--if he got Peter a better situation."

"Only hear that, Peter," said Mrs. Cratchit.

"And then," cried one of the girls, "Peter will be keeping
company with some one, and setting up for himself."

"Get along with you!" retorted Peter, grinning.

"It's just as likely as not," said Bob, "one of these days;
though there's plenty of time for that, my dear. But however
and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we
shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim--shall we--or this
first parting that there was among us?"

"Never, father!" cried they all.

"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when
we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he
was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among
ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it."

"No, never, father!" they all cried again.

"I am very happy," said little Bob, "I am very happy!"

Mrs. Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the
two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook
hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from
God!

"Spectre," said Scrooge, "something informs me that our
parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not
how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?"

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as
before--though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there
seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were
in the Future--into the resorts of business men, but showed
him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything,
but went straight on, as to the end just now desired,
until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.

"This court," said Scrooge, "through which we hurry now,
is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length
of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be,
in days to come!"

The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.

"The house is yonder," Scrooge exclaimed. "Why do you
point away?"

The inexorable finger underwent no change.

Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked
in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was
not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself.
The Phantom pointed as before.

He joined it once again, and wondering why and whither
he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate.
He paused to look round before entering.

A churchyard. Here, then; the wretched man whose name
he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a
worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and
weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up
with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A
worthy place!

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to
One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was
exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new
meaning in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,"
said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the
shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of
things that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which
it stood.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if
persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the
courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is
thus with what you show me!"

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and
following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected
grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon
his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me!
I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must
have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I
am past all hope!"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he
fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities
me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you
have shown me, by an altered life!"

The kind hand trembled.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it
all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the
Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I
will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I
may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to
free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it.
The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate
reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress.
It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.


STAVE V:  THE END OF IT

YES! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own,
the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time
before him was his own, to make amends in!

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"
Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits
of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley!
Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say
it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!"

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions,
that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his
call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the
Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.

"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of
his bed-curtains in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings
and all. They are here--I am here--the shadows of the
things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will
be. I know they will!"

His hands were busy with his garments all this time;
turning them inside out, putting them on upside down,
tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every
kind of extravagance.

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and
crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of
himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I
am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I
am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to
everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo
here! Whoop! Hallo!"

He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing
there: perfectly winded.

"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried
Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
"There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley
entered! There's the corner where the Ghost of Christmas
Present, sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering
Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
Ha ha ha!"

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so
many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!

"I don't know what day of the month it is!" said
Scrooge. "I don't know how long I've been among the
Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never
mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop!
Hallo here!"

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing
out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang,
hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang,
clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his
head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold;
cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight;
Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious!
Glorious!

"What's to-day!" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a
boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look
about him.

"EH?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.

"To-day!" replied the boy. "Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."

"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I
haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night.
They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of
course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"

"Hallo!" returned the boy.

"Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one,
at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.

"I should hope I did," replied the lad.

"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy!
Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that
was hanging up there?--Not the little prize Turkey: the
big one?"

"What, the one as big as me?" returned the boy.

"What a delightful boy!" said Scrooge. "It's a pleasure
to talk to him. Yes, my buck!"

"It's hanging there now," replied the boy.

"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it."

"Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy.

"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy
it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the
direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and
I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than
five minutes and I'll give you half-a-crown!"

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady
hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!" whispered Scrooge,
rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. "He sha'n't
know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe
Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's
will be!"

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady
one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to
open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's
man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker
caught his eye.

"I shall love it, as long as I live!" cried Scrooge, patting
it with his hand. "I scarcely ever looked at it before.
What an honest expression it has in its face! It's a
wonderful knocker!--Here's the Turkey! Hallo! Whoop!
How are you! Merry Christmas!"

It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his
legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a
minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,"
said Scrooge. "You must have a cab."

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with
which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which
he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed
the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle
with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and
chuckled till he cried.

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to
shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when
you don't dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the
end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of
sticking-plaister over it, and been quite satisfied.

He dressed himself "all in his best," and at last got out
into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth,
as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present;
and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded
every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly
pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows
said, "Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!"
And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe
sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.

He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he
beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his
counting-house the day before, and said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I
believe?"  It sent a pang across his heart to think how this
old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but he
knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.

"My dear sir," said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and
taking the old gentleman by both his hands. "How do you
do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of
you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!"

"Mr. Scrooge?"

"Yes," said Scrooge. "That is my name, and I fear it
may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon.
And will you have the goodness"--here Scrooge whispered in
his ear.

"Lord bless me!" cried the gentleman, as if his breath
were taken away. "My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?"

"If you please," said Scrooge. "Not a farthing less. A
great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.
Will you do me that favour?"

"My dear sir," said the other, shaking hands with him.
"I don't know what to say to such munifi--"

"Don't say anything, please," retorted Scrooge. "Come
and see me. Will you come and see me?"

"I will!" cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he
meant to do it.

"Thank'ee," said Scrooge. "I am much obliged to you.
I thank you fifty times. Bless you!"

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and
watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children
on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into
the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found
that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never
dreamed that any walk--that anything--could give him so
much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps
towards his nephew's house.

He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the
courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and
did it:

"Is your master at home, my dear?" said Scrooge to the
girl. Nice girl! Very.

"Yes, sir."

"Where is he, my love?" said Scrooge.

"He's in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I'll
show you up-stairs, if you please."

"Thank'ee. He knows me," said Scrooge, with his hand
already on the dining-room lock. "I'll go in here, my dear."

He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door.
They were looking at the table (which was spread out in
great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous
on such points, and like to see that everything is right.

"Fred!" said Scrooge.

Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started!
Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting
in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done
it, on any account.

"Why bless my soul!" cried Fred, "who's that?"

"It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner.
Will you let me in, Fred?"

Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.
He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier.
His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he
came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did
every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful
games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!

But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was
early there. If he could only be there first, and catch Bob
Cratchit coming late! That was the thing he had set his
heart upon.

And he did it; yes, he did! The clock struck nine. No
Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen
minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his
door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.

His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter
too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his
pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.

"Hallo!" growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as
near as he could feign it. "What do you mean by coming
here at this time of day?"

"I am very sorry, sir," said Bob. "I am behind my time."

"You are?" repeated Scrooge. "Yes. I think you are.
Step this way, sir, if you please."

"It's only once a year, sir," pleaded Bob, appearing from
the Tank. "It shall not be repeated. I was making rather
merry yesterday, sir."

"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend," said Scrooge, "I
am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And
therefore," he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving
Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into
the Tank again; "and therefore I am about to raise your
salary!"

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He
had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it,
holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help
and a strait-waistcoat.

"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness
that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the
back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I
have given you, for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and
endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss
your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of
smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another
coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"


Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and
infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was
a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a
master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or
any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old
world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him,
but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was
wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this
globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill
of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these
would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they
should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in
less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was
quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon
the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was
always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas
well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that
be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim
observed, God bless Us, Every One!





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The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Correct Account of the Horrible Occurence,
by Anonymous


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Title: A Correct Account of the Horrible Occurence
       The Bishop of Clogher ... a Common Soldier!


Author: Anonymous



Release Date: October 7, 2018  [eBook #58053]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CORRECT ACCOUNT OF THE HORRIBLE
OCCURENCE***


Transcribed from the [1822] J. L. Marks edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

                     [Picture: Pamphlet front cover]





                            A CORRECT ACCOUNT
                                  OF THE
                          _HORRIBLE OCCURRENCE_


        Which took place at a Public-house in St. James’s Market,
                     in which it was discovered that

                      _The Right Rev. Father in God_

                                   THE
                            BISHOP OF CLOGHER,

             Lately transferred from the Bishopric of Ferns,

                        WAS A PRINCIPAL ACTOR WITH

                            A Common Soldier!

To the disgrace not only of the Cloth, to which he was attached, and as a
Commissioner of the Board of Education, and a Dictator of Public Morals,
but as a Member of that Nation which gave him Birth!

                                * * * * *

                                _LONDON_:
               PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY & FOR J. L. MARKS,
                    23, RUSSELL COURT, COVENT GARDEN.

                                * * * * *

                            _Price Sixpence_.




PREFACE.


TO hold the vicious up to odium and contempt should be at all times a
particular care of the Press; but when every powerful engine is exerted
to veil the vices of the privileged ranks, and to make it appear that
crime is peculiar to those who constitute what _are called_ the lower
classes, it becomes a sacred and _imperative duty_.

We know there are some who, from a pretended regard to religion, would
suppress every fact that exposes the licentious conduct of its ministers,
but, nine times out of ten, this is mere hypocritical cant to support
those who “bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay on men’s
shoulders.”  The mistaken infidel may connect religion with the conduct
of its professors, but the truly religious person makes no distinction of
vice but its comparative enormity, and the more he venerates the doctrine
of Christianity, the greater abhorrence he feels towards the wretch who
violates every principle of the religion which it is his duty to
inculcate.

We see a certain Association evincing a most scandalous partiality, by
SELECTING the objects of their prosecution from those most unable to
defend themselves! we participate in the general feeling of censure
against them, and believe that they have done more injury to the cause
they profess to support, than the united efforts of the persecuted
parties could possibly have effected.  This will ever be the case when
exertions are influenced only by feelings of _policy_ instead of
_principle_, for if as much pains were taken to keep improper characters
_without_ the pale of the church, as there is art exerted to defend them
through thick and thin, when they have _entered_ it, the CLOTH would
probably never have been disgraced by the “Rev. Father in God,” whose
notoriety promises to eclipse that of all former brothers in divinity.

The name of the Prelate may have appeared in the subscription columns of
a newspaper, the only place where the charity of many is heard of.  Nay,
we have little doubt but it might be found in the list of subscribers to
the _highly respectable association_ the “_Bridge street gang_” or the
“_Society for the suppression of vice_.”  We would not rob _him_ of any
action of _merit_ on this score, or them of any claim to _respectability_
in the eye of the public; for ourselves we would say, “Woe unto you,
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye—also outwardly appear righteous
unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”  Any comment
on the case itself must be superfluous, we therefore give it to the
reader as extracted verbatim from the Statesman.




From the Statesman.


                                                          _July_ 22, 1822.

OUR readers have often had to oblige us by their attention to what we
have said of the blessed THING.  We are now going to trouble them upon an
extraordinary occasion indeed, and are going to give an instance of the
baseness and infamy of the London newspapers, such as we never before had
it in our power to give; and such as we are quite sure will, before we
have done with it, implant the character of everlasting infamy upon that
corrupt press, which has so long been boasting of its independence and
its honour.  What a deal we have heard about the press being the
_guardian of public morals_!  What volumes have we read about its powers
of correction of evil!  We have, indeed, heard a part of it condemned,
the unstamped part of it; that part of it has been pointed out the refuse
part; as the vile part; as the part which required laws to restrain it,
to cramp it, to load it, to destroy it if possible.  We have heard
honourable Members in the honourable House, make a distinction between
the _respectable_ part of the press and another part, which they
denominated disrespectable.  We have heard volumes upon volumes of
commendation, praise and puffery, about this respectable part of the
press.  We have always denominated it infamous; we have always said that
that part of it which was not absolutely in the pay of Corruption was
engaged in a sham warfare, quite as serviceable to Corruption as the
efforts of her own hirelings; and that with perhaps a trifling exception
or two, it was a mass of infamous fraud carried on under the name of
impartiality; sending forth lies, endless in number, and boundless in
magnitude, vomiting forth calumnies on the defenceless, and suppressing,
through the means of bribes, directly or indirectly received, every fact
that could tend to expose the thing, and give the common people their
fair chance in society.  This has been the character of this infamous
press ever since we have known it; but we shall presently have to show
our readers, that it has now surpassed even its own infamy, and done a
deed so black as to make its former infamies turn pale.

We have first to insert an article from the weekly paper called _The
Observer_; to which paper the public will be in great part indebted for
the knowledge of the horrible affair which the article describes.  We
shall then offer a few observations, that may serve just for the present
on the manner in which the thing has been and is likely to be illustrated
by the circumstances of the transaction alluded to; and then we shall lay
before our readers an account of the conduct of the “respectable” and
infamous part of the press, upon this occasion; naming the several
papers; and making them as notorious; as it is in our power to make them.

          _From the Observer Sunday Newspaper_, _July_ 21, 1822.

                      HORRIBLE OCCURRENCE.—SATURDAY.

    “It is our painful and disgusting task this day to notice a charge
    which has been made against a _Right Reverend Bishop_, at
    Marlborough-street police office, at which human nature revolts.  The
    circumstances are of such public notoriety at the west end of the
    town, that it would be in vain, _if any delicacy were due_ to the
    party accused, to attempt to keep them from general observation.  The
    individual to whom we allude was recently promoted to an Irish
    bishopric, and is _nearly related to a Peer in Parliament_.  He is an
    elderly man, and we understand was much respected in that class of
    society to which he belonged.  On Friday night it appears _that he
    was detected in a back room of the White Lion public-house_, _in St.
    Alban’s place_, _St. James’s_, in a situation with a _private __in
    the Foot Guards_, to which we will not more minutely allude, but
    which led to his instant apprehension and removal with his companion
    _to the watch house_.  There were not fewer than _seven witnesses_ to
    the fact; and it would seem that the Reverend Prelate with difficulty
    escaped the _vengeance of the populace_, who, if not prevented by the
    peace-officers, would have sacrificed him to their indignation on the
    spot.  As it was, he was _severely beaten_.  On being secured in the
    watch-house, he offered bail any amount for his liberation; but this
    was very properly refused, and he remained locked up in the cell
    during the night in a state of mind which may be more easily imagined
    than described.  Yesterday morning he was conveyed in a hackney-coach
    to Marlborough street, and was soon afterwards followed by the
    soldier.  They were both pursued by the _execrations and revilings of
    the crowd_ which had been collected on so extraordinary an occasion.
    Mr. Dyer, the presiding magistrate, determined on a _private
    examination_, at which Mr. Alley, who attended for the Bishop, was
    present.  The witnesses were called in separately, but their
    testimony was in all respects consistent, and the case established
    was to a _certain extent_ of the clearest nature.  Mr. Alley,
    however, submitted that as the capital charge had not been borne out,
    his client was _entitled to bail_; a proposition to which we
    understand Mr. Dyer _was obliged to accede_; and the wretched
    offender was permitted, in the course of the day, _to go at large_,
    upon _finding sureties_ to the amount of _one thousand pounds_.  The
    soldier, _not so fortunate_, was committed _to take his trial_.—For
    reasons which are obvious, we decline entering more minutely into the
    details of this most shocking affair; but we ought in justice _to a
    worthy prelate_, whose name has _unfortunately been mentioned_ by
    mistake, in connection with the charge, to request our readers _to
    reflect_ before they come to a _positive determination_ as _to the
    party really implicated_.”

When our readers have gone through this article, and have heard us
declare our perfect conviction of its truth; when they have heard us say,
that it is agreeable, as far as it goes, with the enquiries which we have
made, when they have further heard, that the scene of the brutal
transaction was in a back room of the public-house above mentioned; that
the parties had drawn the curtains of the room, but had left a part that
the curtains did not cover but that might be seen through; that a little
girl (vindicatress of her sex!) happening to go into the back court into
which the window looked, wondering to see the curtains drawn, had the
curiosity to look in, where she saw the parties engaged in that way not
to be described, that the little girl (better guardian of public morals
than the respectable part of the press) ran to the landlord, who came out
with other persons with him, who were all witnesses of the fact, to that
certain extent, at least, of which the _Observer_ speaks; that after
this, the landlord and others laudably went, dashed in the door, took the
parties in the state of Achilles as far as nakedness was necessary to
their intentions; that they then dragged them to the watch-house, in that
very same state: when our readers have heard all this, they will
naturally cry aloud, “why is the _name_ of this Bishop suppressed?”  It
is a Bishop the article says.  It is a “venerable prelate;” it is a Right
Reverend Father in God; and why then, is his name suppressed?  The
_Observer_ informs us that another “worthy prelate” has been named; and
unfortunately named; and the _Observer_ requests its readers to reflect
before they come to a positive determination as to who the party is.
What, _are all the Bishops_ then, to live under this imputation or
suspicion?  Are all the Bishops to be suspected for the sake of this
wretch, as the _Observer_ itself justly calls him?  This would be
injustice towards the Bishops in general, equal to that which the most
respectable and most infamous part of the press has been guilty.  We
shall do our duty.  And we here inform our readers: without anticipating
the decisions of courts of justice; without pretending to know whether
the alledged crime can be proved or not; without pretending to anticipate
any thing of this sort, we inform our readers of that which they all
ought to know, that the person, who was taken from the White Lion
public-house above-mentioned to the watch-house, and who was afterwards
taken from the watch-house to Marlborough-street, and who was held to
bail as above-mentioned; we here inform our readers that that person who
was so taken along with the soldier of the guards was the _Honourable_
and _Right Reverend Father in God_, PERCY JOCELYN, Lord _Lord Bishop of
Clogher_, (lately translated to that Bishopric from the Bishopric of
Ferns,) a _Commissioner of the board of Education_ (“education of the
country!”) brother of the late _Earl of Roden_.

Having performed this duty, a duty due not less to the Bishops than to
the public, we have further to observe, that a man was tried in Ireland,
no great while ago, on the charge of having threatened this Bishop to
accuse him of such a crime; and, our readers will hear it with
shudderings of horror, this man was _condemned to death_, and, of course,
upon the oath of this Bishop!  We believe the man was respited and
transported.  Upon this we shall make no further observations for the
present.  Our readers will need no observations from us, indeed, to
convince them how well things like this are calculated to excite the envy
of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world.

To return to the article in the _Observer_, we are somewhat surprised, if
it be true, that Mr. Dyer should have “_found himself obliged_,” and so
quickly, too, and without any remanding, to let the prisoner loose upon
bail; and the public will not fail to observe, and to reflect a little
upon the amount of this bail of a thousand pounds, _in such a case_, and
relating to such a party.  The public will recollect the bail, the
sureties to which Mr. Carlile is sentenced, and compare that case with
this.  A thousand pounds, not, probably, a tenth part of one year’s
produce of his Bishopric.  The _Observer_ may be in error about this.
The fact has not been officially announced.  If all the other facts
stated by the _Observer_ be true, what is the sum of a thousand pounds!
How is that to hold such a person to stand trial!  What _sureties_ are
there in a thousand pounds in such a case!  Whether he ever take his
trial or not; the thing will take its trial before the English people;
and on that trial the thing is now put.

The _Observer_ tell us, that the _soldier_ was not so fortunate.  _He
could not get bail_! and was COMMITTED TO TAKE HIS TRIAL!  Well said,
THING! it was very hard that those who bailed the Bishop would not bail
the soldier.  The Bishop himself might have been bail for him.  His
Bishopric of Clogher was sufficient surety for a whole battalion.  Very
hard, indeed, that he was not to be bailed too!  But there will be time
enough to talk about this.  The main thing is for us to keep a sharp look
out, and see how the THING; to see how the “education of the country;”
how the envy of the surrounding nations and admiration of the world will
work this matter!

In the mean while, let us look at the conduct of the respectable and
infamous part of the press of this day, just looking back in one instance
to yesterday.

Our readers will observe, that the articles which we have quoted were in
the Observer of yesterday, consequently the thing was known to the
editors of all the morning papers.  If such a thing had taken place
between two labourers, mechanics, or tradesmen, how it would have been
blazoned about through the morning papers of this day!  What a cry would
have been set up by these respectable and infamous guardians of the
public morals!  But now, what has been their conduct?  The Morning Post,
the British Press, the Morning Herald, and the Morning Advertizer, have
given a part, and a part only, of what they found in the Observer.

The Morning Herald and the British Press gave nearly the words of the
Observe but inserted the article in as obscure a manner as possible.  The
Morning Post curtails the article of the Observer to about a fifth part,
and puts it at the bottom of a column, in a part of the paper likely to
escape observation.  The Morning Advertiser curtails the article still
further; bestows no expression of horror upon the deed, and merely says,
“That a person of consideration and a soldier were taken to the office,
charged with a _gross misdemeanor_.”

We now come to the Morning Chronicle, which fills four columns of its
paper with Mr. Hume’s nonsensical resolutions about the National Debt and
the operations of the Sinking Fund; but which can spare only just seven
lines, put in the obscurest part of all of the paper, to say that “two
persons” (and not a word about a bishop!) were discovered in a public
house, and so forth.  But we will take the very words of the Chronicle.
They will not fill up much space; and they will enable the public to
judge of the real character of this paper.

    “A Sunday paper states that on Friday night, _two persons_ were
    discovered at public-house in St. James’s market, in a situation
    which left no doubt respecting the nature of their crime, that they
    were taken to watch-house, and brought to a Police-office on Saturday
    morning, when it appeared from papers in the pocket of the one, that
    he filled a high station, which we will not name.  The magistrate is
    said to have admitted them to bail.”

“Two persons!”  And the _Chronicle_ could find out nothing but two
persons; though it had read the _Observer_ as well as we, and though it
would not take us much to prove that the _Chronicle_ must have heard all
about the matter on _Saturday night_, seeing that an Evening paper in the
neighbourhood _had the intelligence actually composed and going to the
press on Saturday afternoon_, and had stopped the press to cancel the
matter!  From what motive this cancelling took place, let the indignant
public judge.  The _Chronicle_, had this been an affair between two
persons in common life, would have rung us such a peel upon the subject
as would not soon have been forgotten; and let our readers judge how
powerful must have been the motive that could have induced it, not only
to abridge the article of the _Observer_, not only to tell less than it
had read in the Sunday paper; not only to cram this important matter into
seven lines and hide it at the bottom of a column; not only this, but to
talk of _two persons_; not to name a Bishop or a soldier at all; and to
be guilty of the infamous injustice of imputing by implication the crime
indiscriminately to all classes of Englishmen!

Let us now come to the elect of the respectable part of the press: _John
Bull_; the _New Times_; and the OLD TIMES.  We have already told our
readers, that these were all of the same stamp; and now we shall see.
_John Bull_ is quite silent.  _John_ came out very late on Sunday
morning.  There was a rumour on float on Saturday, and we have already
related, that an evening paper had actually got the matter set up; that
is to say the types composed for printing an account of the transaction!
and that it was induced to stop the press, take out the article, scatter
the types and put in another article in its stead, probably an article
from the Vice Society or from some Bible Society.  What happened to John
Bull we do not know precisely; but something seems to have seized John
all at once early on Sunday morning, or in the middle of the night
before.  For, we sent to get John’s paper, on Sunday morning about ten
o’clock; and the vender of the paper informed us, that it would not come
out till very late, because an _accident had happened to the machinery_
in the office.  This was the story told to those who went to buy the
paper!  Yes, our readers will see that John’s machinery had been operated
upon by something perfectly accidental, and yet of a very potent nature.

Now. we come to that brace of brothers, the _New_ and _Old Times_.
Perfectly silent both!  Not a single word upon the subject,—not a single
allusion to it, though the Old one has actually put forth this day two
papers, which it _sells for one_, in pursuance of those desperate efforts
which it is making to sustain itself.  It has two papers, measuring
nearly two feet square, containing 16 square feet of print, one and a
half square foot of which consists of an advertisement of the Irish
Subscription.  In the whole of this 16 feet of square print, room was not
to be found for the insertion of one single word about the Bishop and the
Soldier! not a single allusion.  Nothing that could let its readers
suppose that such a thing had taken place.  The _cause_ of this need not
be stated to our readers: they will all see the cause at once; and they
will all despise the man that they shall in future see with one of these
papers in his hand.

We could here, if we had time, refer to the statement of Dr. O’Meara, or
rather to what the Times has said about the bribe of £3000, the evidence
of which Buonaparte found amongst the papers of the run-away Bourbon.  We
must leave that to be noticed another time; and in the mean time request
our readers to pay attention to the facts which we have now stated, never
forgetting the sentences on JOSEPH SWAN, Mr. CARLILE, his wife and
sister.  We have said before and we repeat it, that the THING is now
fairly on its trail.  In former cases, there may have been doubts and
difficulties in the way; there may have been that which blinded and
deluded honest and well-meaning people; but here the matter lies in a
nut-shell.  Here the question is too plain to admit of being obscured and
too monstrous to admit of palliation.  The time cannot be distant when
the decision shall take place; and in the mean time we beseech our
readers to keep watch; to look at the conduct of all these papers, to
contrast that conduct with that which they shewed in the case of the
Vere-street gang, to compare their present conduct; their present silence
with the unsparing, but just and laudable abhorrence which they then
expressed: our readers are requested to make this comparison, at the same
time that they make a comparison between the rank and riches of the party
now offending, and the obscurity and comparative poverty of the parties
then offending.  They are requested to do this, and we are sure they will
exclaim with us, that this “respectable part of the press” is surely the
most infamous thing that ever existed in any country in the world.

We must quit the subject for the present; but not without assuring our
readers that, strong as corruption is, great as are her powers of
smothering and stifling, she will not have it in her power to stifle the
truth in this case.  We care not how the THING acts.  Let the THING do
what it pleases; and let the public watch it; look sharp after the
movements of the THING, and see what it will do.  Thus we close our
remarks for the present, leaving the public, as we trust it will, to
congratulate itself on the existence of one newspaper that cannot be
_hushed_ into silence.

We cannot dismiss this article without observing that it is with great
and unfeigned _sorrow_ that we have to record this degradation of rank
and dignity; but the way to uphold rank and dignity is not to be guilty
of such base partiality as that which we have noticed; and the best way
is to single out, as we have done, the guilty, and leave it to be
supposed that it forms an exception to the mass.

                                * * * * *

                                 _FINIS._

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

        Printed by J. L. Marks, 23, Russell-court, Covent Garden.




***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CORRECT ACCOUNT OF THE HORRIBLE
OCCURENCE***


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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, Illustrated
by F. H. Townsend


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org





Title: Jane Eyre
       an Autobiography


Author: Charlotte Bronte



Release Date: April 29, 2007  [eBook #1260]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JANE EYRE***





Transcribed from the 1897 Service & Paton edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





JANE EYRE
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY


BY
CHARLOTTE BRONTE

_ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND_

London
SERVICE & PATON
5 HENRIETTA STREET
1897

_The Illustrations_
_in this Volume are the copyright of_
SERVICE & PATON, _London_

TO
W. M. THACKERAY, ESQ.,

This Work
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

BY
THE AUTHOR




PREFACE


A preface to the first edition of "Jane Eyre" being unnecessary, I gave
none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and
miscellaneous remark.

My thanks are due in three quarters.

To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with
few pretensions.

To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an
obscure aspirant.

To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical
sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended
Author.

The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I
must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are
certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and
high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them,
_i.e._, to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially,
Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.

Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me,
I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not,
therefore, to be overlooked.  I mean the timorous or carping few who
doubt the tendency of such books as "Jane Eyre:" in whose eyes whatever
is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against
bigotry--that parent of crime--an insult to piety, that regent of God on
earth.  I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I
would remind them of certain simple truths.

Conventionality is not morality.  Self-righteousness is not religion.  To
attack the first is not to assail the last.  To pluck the mask from the
face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of
Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as
is vice from virtue.  Men too often confound them: they should not be
confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human
doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be
substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ.  There is--I repeat
it--a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly
and clearly the line of separation between them.

The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been
accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show
pass for sterling worth--to let white-washed walls vouch for clean
shrines.  It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose--to rase the
gilding, and show base metal under it--to penetrate the sepulchre, and
reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him.

Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning
him, but evil; probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah better;
yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears
to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.

There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle
delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of
society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah
and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like
and as vital--a mien as dauntless and as daring.  Is the satirist of
"Vanity Fair" admired in high places?  I cannot tell; but I think if some
of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over
whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his
warnings in time--they or their seed might yet escape a fatal
Rimoth-Gilead.

Why have I alluded to this man?  I have alluded to him, Reader, because I
think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his
contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first
social regenerator of the day--as the very master of that working corps
who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I
think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that
suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent.  They say he
is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers.  He
resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on
carrion, but Thackeray never does.  His wit is bright, his humour
attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that
the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-
cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb.  Finally, I have
alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him--if he will accept the tribute
of a total stranger--I have dedicated this second edition of "JANE EYRE."

CURRER BELL.

_December_ 21_st_, 1847.




NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION


I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of "Jane Eyre"
affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my
claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone.  If,
therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed
to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently,
denied where it is justly due.

This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already have
been made, and to prevent future errors.

CURRER BELL.

_April_ 13_th_, 1848.




CHAPTER I


There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.  We had been
wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but
since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold
winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so
penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly
afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with
nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie,
the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to
Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama
in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with
her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying)
looked perfectly happy.  Me, she had dispensed from joining the group;
saying, "She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a
distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her
own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a
more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly
manner--something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were--she really
must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy,
little children."

"What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked.

"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something
truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner.  Be
seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent."

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there.  It
contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care
that it should be one stored with pictures.  I mounted into the window-
seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having
drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double
retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left
were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the
drear November day.  At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my
book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.  Afar, it offered a
pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.

I returned to my book--Bewick's History of British Birds: the letterpress
thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were
certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite
as a blank.  They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of
"the solitary rocks and promontories" by them only inhabited; of the
coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the
Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape--

   "Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
   Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
   Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
   Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland,
Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast
sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,--that
reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation
of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround
the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold."  Of
these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all
the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains,
but strangely impressive.  The words in these introductory pages
connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance
to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken
boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing
through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with
its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon,
girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the
hour of eventide.

The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.

The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over
quickly: it was an object of terror.

So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant
crowd surrounding a gallows.

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped
understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as
interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings,
when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her
ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and
while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and crimped her nightcap
borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure
taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I
discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way.  I
feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon.  The breakfast-
room door opened.

"Boh!  Madam Mope!" cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he
found the room apparently empty.

"Where the dickens is she!" he continued.  "Lizzy!  Georgy! (calling to
his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain--bad
animal!"

"It is well I drew the curtain," thought I; and I wished fervently he
might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out
himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just
put her head in at the door, and said at once--

"She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack."

And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged
forth by the said Jack.

"What do you want?" I asked, with awkward diffidence.

"Say, 'What do you want, Master Reed?'" was the answer.  "I want you to
come here;" and seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a
gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.

John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I,
for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and
unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and
large extremities.  He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him
bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks.  He ought
now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month
or two, "on account of his delicate health."  Mr. Miles, the master,
affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats
sent him from home; but the mother's heart turned from an opinion so
harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John's
sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after
home.

John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy
to me.  He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week,
nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared
him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near.
There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired,
because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his
inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by
taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the
subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did
both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind
her back.

Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three
minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without
damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the
blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would
presently deal it.  I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all
at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly.  I tottered,
and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his
chair.

"That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since," said he,
"and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look
you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!"

Accustomed to John Reed's abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it;
my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the
insult.

"What were you doing behind the curtain?" he asked.

"I was reading."

"Show the book."

I returned to the window and fetched it thence.

"You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says;
you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not
to live here with gentlemen's children like us, and eat the same meals we
do, and wear clothes at our mama's expense.  Now, I'll teach you to
rummage my bookshelves: for they _are_ mine; all the house belongs to me,
or will do in a few years.  Go and stand by the door, out of the way of
the mirror and the windows."

I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him
lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively
started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume
was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and
cutting it.  The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its
climax; other feelings succeeded.

"Wicked and cruel boy!" I said.  "You are like a murderer--you are like a
slave-driver--you are like the Roman emperors!"

I had read Goldsmith's History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of
Nero, Caligula, etc.  Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never
thought thus to have declared aloud.

"What! what!" he cried.  "Did she say that to me?  Did you hear her,
Eliza and Georgiana?  Won't I tell mama? but first--"

He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had
closed with a desperate thing.  I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer.
I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was
sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time
predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort.  I don't very
well know what I did with my hands, but he called me "Rat!  Rat!" and
bellowed out aloud.  Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for
Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene, followed
by Bessie and her maid Abbot.  We were parted: I heard the words--

"Dear! dear!  What a fury to fly at Master John!"

"Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!"

Then Mrs. Reed subjoined--

"Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there."  Four hands were
immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.




CHAPTER II


I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which
greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed
to entertain of me.  The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather
_out_ of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment's
mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any
other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.

"Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she's like a mad cat."

"For shame! for shame!" cried the lady's-maid.  "What shocking conduct,
Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress's son!  Your
young master."

"Master!  How is he my master?  Am I a servant?"

"No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.
There, sit down, and think over your wickedness."

They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed,
and had thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise from it like a
spring; their two pair of hands arrested me instantly.

"If you don't sit still, you must be tied down," said Bessie.  "Miss
Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break mine directly."

Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature.  This
preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a
little of the excitement out of me.

"Don't take them off," I cried; "I will not stir."

In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands.

"Mind you don't," said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that I was
really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss Abbot
stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as
incredulous of my sanity.

"She never did so before," at last said Bessie, turning to the Abigail.

"But it was always in her," was the reply.  "I've told Missis often my
opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me.  She's an underhand
little thing: I never saw a girl of her age with so much cover."

Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said--"You ought to
be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps
you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse."

I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very
first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind.  This
reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very
painful and crushing, but only half intelligible.  Miss Abbot joined in--

"And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed
and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with
them.  They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it
is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to
them."

"What we tell you is for your good," added Bessie, in no harsh voice,
"you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have
a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send you
away, I am sure."

"Besides," said Miss Abbot, "God will punish her: He might strike her
dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?  Come,
Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn't have her heart for anything.  Say
your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don't
repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and
fetch you away."

They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.

The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say
never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall
rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it
contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the
mansion.  A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with
curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre;
the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half
shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red;
the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the
walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe,
the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany.  Out
of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-
up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles
counterpane.  Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair
near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and
looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.

This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because
remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be
so seldom entered.  The house-maid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe
from the mirrors and the furniture a week's quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed
herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain
secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her
jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last
words lies the secret of the red-room--the spell which kept it so lonely
in spite of its grandeur.

Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his
last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the
undertaker's men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had
guarded it from frequent intrusion.

My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted,
was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me;
to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken
reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled
windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty
of the bed and room.  I was not quite sure whether they had locked the
door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see.  Alas! yes: no
jail was ever more secure.  Returning, I had to cross before the looking-
glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed.
All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality:
and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and
arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all
else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of
the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie's evening stories
represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing
before the eyes of belated travellers.  I returned to my stool.

Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for
complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave
was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush
of retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present.

All John Reed's violent tyrannies, all his sisters' proud indifference,
all his mother's aversion, all the servants' partiality, turned up in my
disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well.  Why was I always
suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned?  Why
could I never please?  Why was it useless to try to win any one's favour?
Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected.  Georgiana, who had
a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage,
was universally indulged.  Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls,
seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase
indemnity for every fault.  John no one thwarted, much less punished;
though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks,
set the dogs at the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit,
and broke the buds off the choicest plants in the conservatory: he called
his mother "old girl," too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin,
similar to his own; bluntly disregarded her wishes; not unfrequently tore
and spoiled her silk attire; and he was still "her own darling."  I dared
commit no fault: I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naughty
and tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon, and from noon to
night.

My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received: no
one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned
against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was loaded with
general opprobrium.

"Unjust!--unjust!" said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into
precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up,
instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable
oppression--as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never
eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.

What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon!  How all my
brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection!  Yet in what
darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!  I could
not answer the ceaseless inward question--_why_ I thus suffered; now, at
the distance of--I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had nothing
in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage.  If
they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them.  They were not
bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one
amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in
capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their
interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the
germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment.  I
know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome,
romping child--though equally dependent and friendless--Mrs. Reed would
have endured my presence more complacently; her children would have
entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants
would have been less prone to make me the scapegoat of the nursery.

Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four o'clock, and the
beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight.  I heard the rain
still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling
in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then
my courage sank.  My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn
depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire.  All said I was
wicked, and perhaps I might be so; what thought had I been but just
conceiving of starving myself to death?  That certainly was a crime: and
was I fit to die?  Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church
an inviting bourne?  In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie
buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with
gathering dread.  I could not remember him; but I knew that he was my own
uncle--my mother's brother--that he had taken me when a parentless infant
to his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of
Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own children.
Mrs. Reed probably considered she had kept this promise; and so she had,
I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her; but how could she
really like an interloper not of her race, and unconnected with her,
after her husband's death, by any tie?  It must have been most irksome to
find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a
parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial
alien permanently intruded on her own family group.

A singular notion dawned upon me.  I doubted not--never doubted--that if
Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I
sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls--occasionally also
turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaning mirror--I began to
recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the
violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the
perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed's spirit,
harassed by the wrongs of his sister's child, might quit its
abode--whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the
departed--and rise before me in this chamber.  I wiped my tears and
hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a
preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed
face, bending over me with strange pity.  This idea, consolatory in
theory, I felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I
endeavoured to stifle it--I endeavoured to be firm.  Shaking my hair from
my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room;
at this moment a light gleamed on the wall.  Was it, I asked myself, a
ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind?  No; moonlight
was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling
and quivered over my head.  I can now conjecture readily that this streak
of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some
one across the lawn: but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken
as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a
herald of some coming vision from another world.  My heart beat thick, my
head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of
wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance
broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort.
Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and
Abbot entered.

"Miss Eyre, are you ill?" said Bessie.

"What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!" exclaimed Abbot.

"Take me out!  Let me go into the nursery!" was my cry.

"What for?  Are you hurt?  Have you seen something?" again demanded
Bessie.

"Oh!  I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come."  I had now got
hold of Bessie's hand, and she did not snatch it from me.

"She has screamed out on purpose," declared Abbot, in some disgust.  "And
what a scream!  If she had been in great pain one would have excused it,
but she only wanted to bring us all here: I know her naughty tricks."

"What is all this?" demanded another voice peremptorily; and Mrs. Reed
came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown rustling stormily.
"Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left
in the red-room till I came to her myself."

"Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma'am," pleaded Bessie.

"Let her go," was the only answer.  "Loose Bessie's hand, child: you
cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured.  I abhor
artifice, particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks
will not answer: you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on
condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you
then."

"O aunt! have pity!  Forgive me!  I cannot endure it--let me be punished
some other way!  I shall be killed if--"

"Silence!  This violence is all most repulsive:" and so, no doubt, she
felt it.  I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on
me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous
duplicity.

Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my now frantic
anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in, without
farther parley.  I heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was gone,
I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene.




CHAPTER III


The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a
frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed
with thick black bars.  I heard voices, too, speaking with a hollow
sound, and as if muffled by a rush of wind or water: agitation,
uncertainty, and an all-predominating sense of terror confused my
faculties.  Ere long, I became aware that some one was handling me;
lifting me up and supporting me in a sitting posture, and that more
tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before.  I rested my head
against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy.

In five minutes more the cloud of bewilderment dissolved: I knew quite
well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the nursery
fire.  It was night: a candle burnt on the table; Bessie stood at the bed-
foot with a basin in her hand, and a gentleman sat in a chair near my
pillow, leaning over me.

I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and
security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room, an
individual not belonging to Gateshead, and not related to Mrs. Reed.
Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me
than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutinised the
face of the gentleman: I knew him; it was Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary,
sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing: for
herself and the children she employed a physician.

"Well, who am I?" he asked.

I pronounced his name, offering him at the same time my hand: he took it,
smiling and saying, "We shall do very well by-and-by."  Then he laid me
down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very careful that I was
not disturbed during the night.  Having given some further directions,
and intimates that he should call again the next day, he departed; to my
grief: I felt so sheltered and befriended while he sat in the chair near
my pillow; and as he closed the door after him, all the room darkened and
my heart again sank: inexpressible sadness weighed it down.

"Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?" asked Bessie, rather softly.

Scarcely dared I answer her; for I feared the next sentence might be
rough.  "I will try."

"Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?"

"No, thank you, Bessie."

"Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o'clock; but you
may call me if you want anything in the night."

Wonderful civility this!  It emboldened me to ask a question.

"Bessie, what is the matter with me?  Am I ill?"

"You fell sick, I suppose, in the red-room with crying; you'll be better
soon, no doubt."

Bessie went into the housemaid's apartment, which was near.  I heard her
say--

"Sarah, come and sleep with me in the nursery; I daren't for my life be
alone with that poor child to-night: she might die; it's such a strange
thing she should have that fit: I wonder if she saw anything.  Missis was
rather too hard."

Sarah came back with her; they both went to bed; they were whispering
together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep.  I caught scraps of
their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer
the main subject discussed.

"Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished"--"A great
black dog behind him"--"Three loud raps on the chamber door"--"A light in
the churchyard just over his grave," etc., etc.

At last both slept: the fire and the candle went out.  For me, the
watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; strained by
dread: such dread as children only can feel.

No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-
room; it only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to
this day.  Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental
suffering, but I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did:
while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my
bad propensities.

Next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by
the nursery hearth.  I felt physically weak and broken down: but my worse
ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which
kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop
from my cheek than another followed.  Yet, I thought, I ought to have
been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all gone out in
the carriage with their mama.  Abbot, too, was sewing in another room,
and Bessie, as she moved hither and thither, putting away toys and
arranging drawers, addressed to me every now and then a word of unwonted
kindness.  This state of things should have been to me a paradise of
peace, accustomed as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless
fagging; but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such a state that no
calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably.

Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart
on a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise,
nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir in
me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often
petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more
closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a
privilege.  This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was
cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it.  Vain
favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished
for, too late!  I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird,
the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and
tart away.  Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word _book_ acted as
a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver's Travels from
the library.  This book I had again and again perused with delight.  I
considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of
interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves,
having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under
mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at
length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of
England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker,
and the population more scant; whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in
my creed, solid parts of the earth's surface, I doubted not that I might
one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields,
houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds
of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs,
the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other.  Yet, when
this cherished volume was now placed in my hand--when I turned over its
leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now,
never failed to find--all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt
goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most
desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions.  I closed the
book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the
untasted tart.

Bessie had now finished dusting and tidying the room, and having washed
her hands, she opened a certain little drawer, full of splendid shreds of
silk and satin, and began making a new bonnet for Georgiana's doll.
Meantime she sang: her song was--

   "In the days when we went gipsying,
      A long time ago."

I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for
Bessie had a sweet voice,--at least, I thought so.  But now, though her
voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness.
Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very
lingeringly; "A long time ago" came out like the saddest cadence of a
funeral hymn.  She passed into another ballad, this time a really doleful
one.

   "My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary;
      Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;
   Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary
      Over the path of the poor orphan child.

   Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
      Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled?
   Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
      Watch o'er the steps of a poor orphan child.

   Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing,
      Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild,
   God, in His mercy, protection is showing,
      Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.

   Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing,
      Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,
   Still will my Father, with promise and blessing,
      Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.

   There is a thought that for strength should avail me,
      Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled;
   Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me;
      God is a friend to the poor orphan child."

"Come, Miss Jane, don't cry," said Bessie as she finished.  She might as
well have said to the fire, "don't burn!" but how could she divine the
morbid suffering to which I was a prey?  In the course of the morning Mr.
Lloyd came again.

"What, already up!" said he, as he entered the nursery.  "Well, nurse,
how is she?"

Bessie answered that I was doing very well.

"Then she ought to look more cheerful.  Come here, Miss Jane: your name
is Jane, is it not?"

"Yes, sir, Jane Eyre."

"Well, you have been crying, Miss Jane Eyre; can you tell me what about?
Have you any pain?"

"No, sir."

"Oh!  I daresay she is crying because she could not go out with Missis in
the carriage," interposed Bessie.

"Surely not! why, she is too old for such pettishness."

I thought so too; and my self-esteem being wounded by the false charge, I
answered promptly, "I never cried for such a thing in my life: I hate
going out in the carriage.  I cry because I am miserable."

"Oh fie, Miss!" said Bessie.

The good apothecary appeared a little puzzled.  I was standing before
him; he fixed his eyes on me very steadily: his eyes were small and grey;
not very bright, but I dare say I should think them shrewd now: he had a
hard-featured yet good-natured looking face.  Having considered me at
leisure, he said--

"What made you ill yesterday?"

"She had a fall," said Bessie, again putting in her word.

"Fall! why, that is like a baby again!  Can't she manage to walk at her
age?  She must be eight or nine years old."

"I was knocked down," was the blunt explanation, jerked out of me by
another pang of mortified pride; "but that did not make me ill," I added;
while Mr. Lloyd helped himself to a pinch of snuff.

As he was returning the box to his waistcoat pocket, a loud bell rang for
the servants' dinner; he knew what it was.  "That's for you, nurse," said
he; "you can go down; I'll give Miss Jane a lecture till you come back."

Bessie would rather have stayed, but she was obliged to go, because
punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall.

"The fall did not make you ill; what did, then?" pursued Mr. Lloyd when
Bessie was gone.

"I was shut up in a room where there is a ghost till after dark."

I saw Mr. Lloyd smile and frown at the same time.

"Ghost!  What, you are a baby after all!  You are afraid of ghosts?"

"Of Mr. Reed's ghost I am: he died in that room, and was laid out there.
Neither Bessie nor any one else will go into it at night, if they can
help it; and it was cruel to shut me up alone without a candle,--so cruel
that I think I shall never forget it."

"Nonsense!  And is it that makes you so miserable?  Are you afraid now in
daylight?"

"No: but night will come again before long: and besides,--I am
unhappy,--very unhappy, for other things."

"What other things?  Can you tell me some of them?"

How much I wished to reply fully to this question!  How difficult it was
to frame any answer!  Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their
feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know
not how to express the result of the process in words.  Fearful, however,
of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by
imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre,
though, as far as it went, true response.

"For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters."

"You have a kind aunt and cousins."

Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced--

"But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red-room."

Mr. Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box.

"Don't you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?" asked he.  "Are
you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?"

"It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here
than a servant."

"Pooh! you can't be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?"

"If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can
never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman."

"Perhaps you may--who knows?  Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?"

"I think not, sir."

"None belonging to your father?"

"I don't know.  I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might
have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about
them."

"If you had such, would you like to go to them?"

I reflected.  Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to
children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable
poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes,
scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty
for me was synonymous with degradation.

"No; I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply.

"Not even if they were kind to you?"

I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being
kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be
uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing
their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the
village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at
the price of caste.

"But are your relatives so very poor?  Are they working people?"

"I cannot tell; Aunt Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly
set: I should not like to go a begging."

"Would you like to go to school?"

Again I reflected: I scarcely knew what school was: Bessie sometimes
spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore
backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise: John
Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed's tastes were
no rule for mine, and if Bessie's accounts of school-discipline (gathered
from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to
Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain
accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought,
equally attractive.  She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and
flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could
play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate;
till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened.  Besides, school
would be a complete change: it implied a long journey, an entire
separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.

"I should indeed like to go to school," was the audible conclusion of my
musings.

"Well, well! who knows what may happen?" said Mr. Lloyd, as he got up.
"The child ought to have change of air and scene," he added, speaking to
himself; "nerves not in a good state."

Bessie now returned; at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling up
the gravel-walk.

"Is that your mistress, nurse?" asked Mr. Lloyd.  "I should like to speak
to her before I go."

Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out.
In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume,
from after-occurrences, that the apothecary ventured to recommend my
being sent to school; and the recommendation was no doubt readily enough
adopted; for as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when
both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as
they thought, asleep, "Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid
of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she
were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand."  Abbot, I think,
gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.

On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot's
communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that
my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who
considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so
irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that
after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the
typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town
where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent:
that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month
of each other.

Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, "Poor Miss Jane
is to be pitied, too, Abbot."

"Yes," responded Abbot; "if she were a nice, pretty child, one might
compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a
little toad as that."

"Not a great deal, to be sure," agreed Bessie: "at any rate, a beauty
like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition."

"Yes, I doat on Miss Georgiana!" cried the fervent Abbot.  "Little
darling!--with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour
as she has; just as if she were painted!--Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh
rabbit for supper."

"So could I--with a roast onion.  Come, we'll go down."  They went.




CHAPTER IV


From my discourse with Mr. Lloyd, and from the above reported conference
between Bessie and Abbot, I gathered enough of hope to suffice as a
motive for wishing to get well: a change seemed near,--I desired and
waited it in silence.  It tarried, however: days and weeks passed: I had
regained my normal state of health, but no new allusion was made to the
subject over which I brooded.  Mrs. Reed surveyed me at times with a
severe eye, but seldom addressed me: since my illness, she had drawn a
more marked line of separation than ever between me and her own children;
appointing me a small closet to sleep in by myself, condemning me to take
my meals alone, and pass all my time in the nursery, while my cousins
were constantly in the drawing-room.  Not a hint, however, did she drop
about sending me to school: still I felt an instinctive certainty that
she would not long endure me under the same roof with her; for her
glance, now more than ever, when turned on me, expressed an insuperable
and rooted aversion.

Eliza and Georgiana, evidently acting according to orders, spoke to me as
little as possible: John thrust his tongue in his cheek whenever he saw
me, and once attempted chastisement; but as I instantly turned against
him, roused by the same sentiment of deep ire and desperate revolt which
had stirred my corruption before, he thought it better to desist, and ran
from me tittering execrations, and vowing I had burst his nose.  I had
indeed levelled at that prominent feature as hard a blow as my knuckles
could inflict; and when I saw that either that or my look daunted him, I
had the greatest inclination to follow up my advantage to purpose; but he
was already with his mama.  I heard him in a blubbering tone commence the
tale of how "that nasty Jane Eyre" had flown at him like a mad cat: he
was stopped rather harshly--

"Don't talk to me about her, John: I told you not to go near her; she is
not worthy of notice; I do not choose that either you or your sisters
should associate with her."

Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly, and without at all
deliberating on my words--

"They are not fit to associate with me."

Mrs. Reed was rather a stout woman; but, on hearing this strange and
audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me like a
whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge of my crib,
dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or utter one
syllable during the remainder of the day.

"What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?" was my scarcely
voluntary demand.  I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed as if my
tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance:
something spoke out of me over which I had no control.

"What?" said Mrs. Reed under her breath: her usually cold composed grey
eye became troubled with a look like fear; she took her hand from my arm,
and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether I were child or
fiend.  I was now in for it.

"My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see all you do and think; and so can
papa and mama: they know how you shut me up all day long, and how you
wish me dead."

Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits: she shook me most soundly, she boxed
both my ears, and then left me without a word.  Bessie supplied the
hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she proved beyond a
doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a
roof.  I half believed her; for I felt indeed only bad feelings surging
in my breast.

November, December, and half of January passed away.  Christmas and the
New Year had been celebrated at Gateshead with the usual festive cheer;
presents had been interchanged, dinners and evening parties given.  From
every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded: my share of the gaiety
consisted in witnessing the daily apparelling of Eliza and Georgiana, and
seeing them descend to the drawing-room, dressed out in thin muslin
frocks and scarlet sashes, with hair elaborately ringletted; and
afterwards, in listening to the sound of the piano or the harp played
below, to the passing to and fro of the butler and footman, to the
jingling of glass and china as refreshments were handed, to the broken
hum of conversation as the drawing-room door opened and closed.  When
tired of this occupation, I would retire from the stairhead to the
solitary and silent nursery: there, though somewhat sad, I was not
miserable.  To speak truth, I had not the least wish to go into company,
for in company I was very rarely noticed; and if Bessie had but been kind
and companionable, I should have deemed it a treat to spend the evenings
quietly with her, instead of passing them under the formidable eye of
Mrs. Reed, in a room full of ladies and gentlemen.  But Bessie, as soon
as she had dressed her young ladies, used to take herself off to the
lively regions of the kitchen and housekeeper's room, generally bearing
the candle along with her.  I then sat with my doll on my knee till the
fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure that nothing worse
than myself haunted the shadowy room; and when the embers sank to a dull
red, I undressed hastily, tugging at knots and strings as I best might,
and sought shelter from cold and darkness in my crib.  To this crib I
always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth
of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in
loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature
scarecrow.  It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I
doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of
sensation.  I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and
when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it
to be happy likewise.

Long did the hours seem while I waited the departure of the company, and
listened for the sound of Bessie's step on the stairs: sometimes she
would come up in the interval to seek her thimble or her scissors, or
perhaps to bring me something by way of supper--a bun or a
cheese-cake--then she would sit on the bed while I ate it, and when I had
finished, she would tuck the clothes round me, and twice she kissed me,
and said, "Good night, Miss Jane."  When thus gentle, Bessie seemed to me
the best, prettiest, kindest being in the world; and I wished most
intensely that she would always be so pleasant and amiable, and never
push me about, or scold, or task me unreasonably, as she was too often
wont to do.  Bessie Lee must, I think, have been a girl of good natural
capacity, for she was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of
narrative; so, at least, I judge from the impression made on me by her
nursery tales.  She was pretty too, if my recollections of her face and
person are correct.  I remember her as a slim young woman, with black
hair, dark eyes, very nice features, and good, clear complexion; but she
had a capricious and hasty temper, and indifferent ideas of principle or
justice: still, such as she was, I preferred her to any one else at
Gateshead Hall.

It was the fifteenth of January, about nine o'clock in the morning:
Bessie was gone down to breakfast; my cousins had not yet been summoned
to their mama; Eliza was putting on her bonnet and warm garden-coat to go
and feed her poultry, an occupation of which she was fond: and not less
so of selling the eggs to the housekeeper and hoarding up the money she
thus obtained.  She had a turn for traffic, and a marked propensity for
saving; shown not only in the vending of eggs and chickens, but also in
driving hard bargains with the gardener about flower-roots, seeds, and
slips of plants; that functionary having orders from Mrs. Reed to buy of
his young lady all the products of her parterre she wished to sell: and
Eliza would have sold the hair off her head if she could have made a
handsome profit thereby.  As to her money, she first secreted it in odd
corners, wrapped in a rag or an old curl-paper; but some of these hoards
having been discovered by the housemaid, Eliza, fearful of one day losing
her valued treasure, consented to intrust it to her mother, at a usurious
rate of interest--fifty or sixty per cent.; which interest she exacted
every quarter, keeping her accounts in a little book with anxious
accuracy.

Georgiana sat on a high stool, dressing her hair at the glass, and
interweaving her curls with artificial flowers and faded feathers, of
which she had found a store in a drawer in the attic.  I was making my
bed, having received strict orders from Bessie to get it arranged before
she returned (for Bessie now frequently employed me as a sort of under-
nurserymaid, to tidy the room, dust the chairs, &c.).  Having spread the
quilt and folded my night-dress, I went to the window-seat to put in
order some picture-books and doll's house furniture scattered there; an
abrupt command from Georgiana to let her playthings alone (for the tiny
chairs and mirrors, the fairy plates and cups, were her property) stopped
my proceedings; and then, for lack of other occupation, I fell to
breathing on the frost-flowers with which the window was fretted, and
thus clearing a space in the glass through which I might look out on the
grounds, where all was still and petrified under the influence of a hard
frost.

From this window were visible the porter's lodge and the carriage-road,
and just as I had dissolved so much of the silver-white foliage veiling
the panes as left room to look out, I saw the gates thrown open and a
carriage roll through.  I watched it ascending the drive with
indifference; carriages often came to Gateshead, but none ever brought
visitors in whom I was interested; it stopped in front of the house, the
door-bell rang loudly, the new-comer was admitted.  All this being
nothing to me, my vacant attention soon found livelier attraction in the
spectacle of a little hungry robin, which came and chirruped on the twigs
of the leafless cherry-tree nailed against the wall near the casement.
The remains of my breakfast of bread and milk stood on the table, and
having crumbled a morsel of roll, I was tugging at the sash to put out
the crumbs on the window-sill, when Bessie came running upstairs into the
nursery.

"Miss Jane, take off your pinafore; what are you doing there?  Have you
washed your hands and face this morning?"  I gave another tug before I
answered, for I wanted the bird to be secure of its bread: the sash
yielded; I scattered the crumbs, some on the stone sill, some on the
cherry-tree bough, then, closing the window, I replied--

"No, Bessie; I have only just finished dusting."

"Troublesome, careless child! and what are you doing now?  You look quite
red, as if you had been about some mischief: what were you opening the
window for?"

I was spared the trouble of answering, for Bessie seemed in too great a
hurry to listen to explanations; she hauled me to the washstand,
inflicted a merciless, but happily brief scrub on my face and hands with
soap, water, and a coarse towel; disciplined my head with a bristly
brush, denuded me of my pinafore, and then hurrying me to the top of the
stairs, bid me go down directly, as I was wanted in the breakfast-room.

I would have asked who wanted me: I would have demanded if Mrs. Reed was
there; but Bessie was already gone, and had closed the nursery-door upon
me.  I slowly descended.  For nearly three months, I had never been
called to Mrs. Reed's presence; restricted so long to the nursery, the
breakfast, dining, and drawing-rooms were become for me awful regions, on
which it dismayed me to intrude.

I now stood in the empty hall; before me was the breakfast-room door, and
I stopped, intimidated and trembling.  What a miserable little poltroon
had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days!  I
feared to return to the nursery, and feared to go forward to the parlour;
ten minutes I stood in agitated hesitation; the vehement ringing of the
breakfast-room bell decided me; I _must_ enter.

"Who could want me?" I asked inwardly, as with both hands I turned the
stiff door-handle, which, for a second or two, resisted my efforts.  "What
should I see besides Aunt Reed in the apartment?--a man or a woman?"  The
handle turned, the door unclosed, and passing through and curtseying low,
I looked up at--a black pillar!--such, at least, appeared to me, at first
sight, the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug:
the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft
by way of capital.

Mrs. Reed occupied her usual seat by the fireside; she made a signal to
me to approach; I did so, and she introduced me to the stony stranger
with the words: "This is the little girl respecting whom I applied to
you."

_He_, for it was a man, turned his head slowly towards where I stood, and
having examined me with the two inquisitive-looking grey eyes which
twinkled under a pair of bushy brows, said solemnly, and in a bass voice,
"Her size is small: what is her age?"

"Ten years."

"So much?" was the doubtful answer; and he prolonged his scrutiny for
some minutes.  Presently he addressed me--"Your name, little girl?"

"Jane Eyre, sir."

In uttering these words I looked up: he seemed to me a tall gentleman;
but then I was very little; his features were large, and they and all the
lines of his frame were equally harsh and prim.

"Well, Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?"

Impossible to reply to this in the affirmative: my little world held a
contrary opinion: I was silent.  Mrs. Reed answered for me by an
expressive shake of the head, adding soon, "Perhaps the less said on that
subject the better, Mr. Brocklehurst."

"Sorry indeed to hear it! she and I must have some talk;" and bending
from the perpendicular, he installed his person in the arm-chair opposite
Mrs. Reed's.  "Come here," he said.

I stepped across the rug; he placed me square and straight before him.
What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a
great nose! and what a mouth! and what large prominent teeth!

"No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a
naughty little girl.  Do you know where the wicked go after death?"

"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.

"And what is hell?  Can you tell me that?"

"A pit full of fire."

"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for
ever?"

"No, sir."

"What must you do to avoid it?"

I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable:
"I must keep in good health, and not die."

"How can you keep in good health?  Children younger than you die daily.  I
buried a little child of five years old only a day or two since,--a good
little child, whose soul is now in heaven.  It is to be feared the same
could not be said of you were you to be called hence."

Not being in a condition to remove his doubt, I only cast my eyes down on
the two large feet planted on the rug, and sighed, wishing myself far
enough away.

"I hope that sigh is from the heart, and that you repent of ever having
been the occasion of discomfort to your excellent benefactress."

"Benefactress! benefactress!" said I inwardly: "they all call Mrs. Reed
my benefactress; if so, a benefactress is a disagreeable thing."

"Do you say your prayers night and morning?" continued my interrogator.

"Yes, sir."

"Do you read your Bible?"

"Sometimes."

"With pleasure?  Are you fond of it?"

"I like Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel, and
a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job
and Jonah."

"And the Psalms?  I hope you like them?"

"No, sir."

"No? oh, shocking!  I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six
Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a
gingerbread-nut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: 'Oh! the
verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;' says he, 'I wish to be a little
angel here below;' he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant
piety."

"Psalms are not interesting," I remarked.

"That proves you have a wicked heart; and you must pray to God to change
it: to give you a new and clean one: to take away your heart of stone and
give you a heart of flesh."

I was about to propound a question, touching the manner in which that
operation of changing my heart was to be performed, when Mrs. Reed
interposed, telling me to sit down; she then proceeded to carry on the
conversation herself.

"Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated in the letter which I wrote to
you three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite the character
and disposition I could wish: should you admit her into Lowood school, I
should be glad if the superintendent and teachers were requested to keep
a strict eye on her, and, above all, to guard against her worst fault, a
tendency to deceit.  I mention this in your hearing, Jane, that you may
not attempt to impose on Mr. Brocklehurst."

Well might I dread, well might I dislike Mrs. Reed; for it was her nature
to wound me cruelly; never was I happy in her presence; however carefully
I obeyed, however strenuously I strove to please her, my efforts were
still repulsed and repaid by such sentences as the above.  Now, uttered
before a stranger, the accusation cut me to the heart; I dimly perceived
that she was already obliterating hope from the new phase of existence
which she destined me to enter; I felt, though I could not have expressed
the feeling, that she was sowing aversion and unkindness along my future
path; I saw myself transformed under Mr. Brocklehurst's eye into an
artful, noxious child, and what could I do to remedy the injury?

"Nothing, indeed," thought I, as I struggled to repress a sob, and
hastily wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of my anguish.

"Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child," said Mr. Brocklehurst; "it
is akin to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in the lake
burning with fire and brimstone; she shall, however, be watched, Mrs.
Reed.  I will speak to Miss Temple and the teachers."

"I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects,"
continued my benefactress; "to be made useful, to be kept humble: as for
the vacations, she will, with your permission, spend them always at
Lowood."

"Your decisions are perfectly judicious, madam," returned Mr.
Brocklehurst.  "Humility is a Christian grace, and one peculiarly
appropriate to the pupils of Lowood; I, therefore, direct that especial
care shall be bestowed on its cultivation amongst them.  I have studied
how best to mortify in them the worldly sentiment of pride; and, only the
other day, I had a pleasing proof of my success.  My second daughter,
Augusta, went with her mama to visit the school, and on her return she
exclaimed: 'Oh, dear papa, how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood
look, with their hair combed behind their ears, and their long pinafores,
and those little holland pockets outside their frocks--they are almost
like poor people's children! and,' said she, 'they looked at my dress and
mama's, as if they had never seen a silk gown before.'"

"This is the state of things I quite approve," returned Mrs. Reed; "had I
sought all England over, I could scarcely have found a system more
exactly fitting a child like Jane Eyre.  Consistency, my dear Mr.
Brocklehurst; I advocate consistency in all things."

"Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties; and it has been
observed in every arrangement connected with the establishment of Lowood:
plain fare, simple attire, unsophisticated accommodations, hardy and
active habits; such is the order of the day in the house and its
inhabitants."

"Quite right, sir.  I may then depend upon this child being received as a
pupil at Lowood, and there being trained in conformity to her position
and prospects?"

"Madam, you may: she shall be placed in that nursery of chosen plants,
and I trust she will show herself grateful for the inestimable privilege
of her election."

"I will send her, then, as soon as possible, Mr. Brocklehurst; for, I
assure you, I feel anxious to be relieved of a responsibility that was
becoming too irksome."

"No doubt, no doubt, madam; and now I wish you good morning.  I shall
return to Brocklehurst Hall in the course of a week or two: my good
friend, the Archdeacon, will not permit me to leave him sooner.  I shall
send Miss Temple notice that she is to expect a new girl, so that there
will be no difficulty about receiving her.  Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Mr. Brocklehurst; remember me to Mrs. and Miss Brocklehurst,
and to Augusta and Theodore, and Master Broughton Brocklehurst."

"I will, madam.  Little girl, here is a book entitled the 'Child's
Guide,' read it with prayer, especially that part containing 'An account
of the awfully sudden death of Martha G---, a naughty child addicted to
falsehood and deceit.'"

With these words Mr. Brocklehurst put into my hand a thin pamphlet sewn
in a cover, and having rung for his carriage, he departed.

Mrs. Reed and I were left alone: some minutes passed in silence; she was
sewing, I was watching her.  Mrs. Reed might be at that time some six or
seven and thirty; she was a woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and
strong-limbed, not tall, and, though stout, not obese: she had a somewhat
large face, the under jaw being much developed and very solid; her brow
was low, her chin large and prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently
regular; under her light eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of ruth; her
skin was dark and opaque, her hair nearly flaxen; her constitution was
sound as a bell--illness never came near her; she was an exact, clever
manager; her household and tenantry were thoroughly under her control;
her children only at times defied her authority and laughed it to scorn;
she dressed well, and had a presence and port calculated to set off
handsome attire.

Sitting on a low stool, a few yards from her arm-chair, I examined her
figure; I perused her features.  In my hand I held the tract containing
the sudden death of the Liar, to which narrative my attention had been
pointed as to an appropriate warning.  What had just passed; what Mrs.
Reed had said concerning me to Mr. Brocklehurst; the whole tenor of their
conversation, was recent, raw, and stinging in my mind; I had felt every
word as acutely as I had heard it plainly, and a passion of resentment
fomented now within me.

Mrs. Reed looked up from her work; her eye settled on mine, her fingers
at the same time suspended their nimble movements.

"Go out of the room; return to the nursery," was her mandate.  My look or
something else must have struck her as offensive, for she spoke with
extreme though suppressed irritation.  I got up, I went to the door; I
came back again; I walked to the window, across the room, then close up
to her.

_Speak_ I must: I had been trodden on severely, and _must_ turn: but how?
What strength had I to dart retaliation at my antagonist?  I gathered my
energies and launched them in this blunt sentence--

"I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I
do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except
John Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl,
Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I."

Mrs. Reed's hands still lay on her work inactive: her eye of ice
continued to dwell freezingly on mine.

"What more have you to say?" she asked, rather in the tone in which a
person might address an opponent of adult age than such as is ordinarily
used to a child.

That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had.  Shaking from
head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued--

"I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again
as long as I live.  I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and
if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say
the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with
miserable cruelty."

"How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?"

"How dare I, Mrs. Reed?  How dare I?  Because it is the _truth_.  You
think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or
kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity.  I shall remember
how you thrust me back--roughly and violently thrust me back--into the
red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony;
though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, 'Have mercy!  Have
mercy, Aunt Reed!'  And that punishment you made me suffer because your
wicked boy struck me--knocked me down for nothing.  I will tell anybody
who asks me questions, this exact tale.  People think you a good woman,
but you are bad, hard-hearted.  _You_ are deceitful!"

{How dare I, Mrs. Reed?  How dare I?  Because it is the truth: p30.jpg}

Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with
the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt.  It seemed as if
an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-
for liberty.  Not without cause was this sentiment: Mrs. Reed looked
frightened; her work had slipped from her knee; she was lifting up her
hands, rocking herself to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she
would cry.

"Jane, you are under a mistake: what is the matter with you?  Why do you
tremble so violently?  Would you like to drink some water?"

"No, Mrs. Reed."

"Is there anything else you wish for, Jane?  I assure you, I desire to be
your friend."

"Not you.  You told Mr. Brocklehurst I had a bad character, a deceitful
disposition; and I'll let everybody at Lowood know what you are, and what
you have done."

"Jane, you don't understand these things: children must be corrected for
their faults."

"Deceit is not my fault!" I cried out in a savage, high voice.

"But you are passionate, Jane, that you must allow: and now return to the
nursery--there's a dear--and lie down a little."

"I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs.
Reed, for I hate to live here."

"I will indeed send her to school soon," murmured Mrs. Reed _sotto voce_;
and gathering up her work, she abruptly quitted the apartment.

I was left there alone--winner of the field.  It was the hardest battle I
had fought, and the first victory I had gained: I stood awhile on the
rug, where Mr. Brocklehurst had stood, and I enjoyed my conqueror's
solitude.  First, I smiled to myself and felt elate; but this fierce
pleasure subsided in me as fast as did the accelerated throb of my
pulses.  A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot
give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without
experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction.  A
ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a
meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed: the same
ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have
represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half-an-hour's
silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the
dreariness of my hated and hating position.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine
it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and
corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.  Willingly
would I now have gone and asked Mrs. Reed's pardon; but I knew, partly
from experience and partly from instinct, that was the way to make her
repulse me with double scorn, thereby re-exciting every turbulent impulse
of my nature.

I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce speaking;
fain find nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than that of sombre
indignation.  I took a book--some Arabian tales; I sat down and
endeavoured to read.  I could make no sense of the subject; my own
thoughts swam always between me and the page I had usually found
fascinating.  I opened the glass-door in the breakfast-room: the
shrubbery was quite still: the black frost reigned, unbroken by sun or
breeze, through the grounds.  I covered my head and arms with the skirt
of my frock, and went out to walk in a part of the plantation which was
quite sequestrated; but I found no pleasure in the silent trees, the
falling fir-cones, the congealed relics of autumn, russet leaves, swept
by past winds in heaps, and now stiffened together.  I leaned against a
gate, and looked into an empty field where no sheep were feeding, where
the short grass was nipped and blanched.  It was a very grey day; a most
opaque sky, "onding on snaw," canopied all; thence flakes felt it
intervals, which settled on the hard path and on the hoary lea without
melting.  I stood, a wretched child enough, whispering to myself over and
over again, "What shall I do?--what shall I do?"

All at once I heard a clear voice call, "Miss Jane! where are you?  Come
to lunch!"

It was Bessie, I knew well enough; but I did not stir; her light step
came tripping down the path.

"You naughty little thing!" she said.  "Why don't you come when you are
called?"

Bessie's presence, compared with the thoughts over which I had been
brooding, seemed cheerful; even though, as usual, she was somewhat cross.
The fact is, after my conflict with and victory over Mrs. Reed, I was not
disposed to care much for the nursemaid's transitory anger; and I _was_
disposed to bask in her youthful lightness of heart.  I just put my two
arms round her and said, "Come, Bessie! don't scold."

The action was more frank and fearless than any I was habituated to
indulge in: somehow it pleased her.

"You are a strange child, Miss Jane," she said, as she looked down at me;
"a little roving, solitary thing: and you are going to school, I
suppose?"

I nodded.

"And won't you be sorry to leave poor Bessie?"

"What does Bessie care for me?  She is always scolding me."

"Because you're such a queer, frightened, shy little thing.  You should
be bolder."

"What! to get more knocks?"

"Nonsense!  But you are rather put upon, that's certain.  My mother said,
when she came to see me last week, that she would not like a little one
of her own to be in your place.--Now, come in, and I've some good news
for you."

"I don't think you have, Bessie."

"Child! what do you mean?  What sorrowful eyes you fix on me!  Well, but
Missis and the young ladies and Master John are going out to tea this
afternoon, and you shall have tea with me.  I'll ask cook to bake you a
little cake, and then you shall help me to look over your drawers; for I
am soon to pack your trunk.  Missis intends you to leave Gateshead in a
day or two, and you shall choose what toys you like to take with you."

"Bessie, you must promise not to scold me any more till I go."

"Well, I will; but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be afraid of
me.  Don't start when I chance to speak rather sharply; it's so
provoking."

"I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I
have got used to you, and I shall soon have another set of people to
dread."

"If you dread them they'll dislike you."

"As you do, Bessie?"

"I don't dislike you, Miss; I believe I am fonder of you than of all the
others."

"You don't show it."

"You little sharp thing! you've got quite a new way of talking.  What
makes you so venturesome and hardy?"

"Why, I shall soon be away from you, and besides"--I was going to say
something about what had passed between me and Mrs. Reed, but on second
thoughts I considered it better to remain silent on that head.

"And so you're glad to leave me?"

"Not at all, Bessie; indeed, just now I'm rather sorry."

"Just now! and rather!  How coolly my little lady says it!  I dare say
now if I were to ask you for a kiss you wouldn't give it me: you'd say
you'd _rather_ not."

"I'll kiss you and welcome: bend your head down."  Bessie stooped; we
mutually embraced, and I followed her into the house quite comforted.
That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; and in the evening Bessie
told me some of her most enchanting stories, and sang me some of her
sweetest songs.  Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.




CHAPTER V


Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January,
when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and
nearly dressed.  I had risen half-an-hour before her entrance, and had
washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just
setting, whose rays streamed through the narrow window near my crib.  I
was to leave Gateshead that day by a coach which passed the lodge gates
at six a.m.  Bessie was the only person yet risen; she had lit a fire in
the nursery, where she now proceeded to make my breakfast.  Few children
can eat when excited with the thoughts of a journey; nor could I.  Bessie,
having pressed me in vain to take a few spoonfuls of the boiled milk and
bread she had prepared for me, wrapped up some biscuits in a paper and
put them into my bag; then she helped me on with my pelisse and bonnet,
and wrapping herself in a shawl, she and I left the nursery.  As we
passed Mrs. Reed's bedroom, she said, "Will you go in and bid Missis good-
bye?"

"No, Bessie: she came to my crib last night when you were gone down to
supper, and said I need not disturb her in the morning, or my cousins
either; and she told me to remember that she had always been my best
friend, and to speak of her and be grateful to her accordingly."

"What did you say, Miss?"

"Nothing: I covered my face with the bedclothes, and turned from her to
the wall."

"That was wrong, Miss Jane."

"It was quite right, Bessie.  Your Missis has not been my friend: she has
been my foe."

"O Miss Jane! don't say so!"

"Good-bye to Gateshead!" cried I, as we passed through the hall and went
out at the front door.

The moon was set, and it was very dark; Bessie carried a lantern, whose
light glanced on wet steps and gravel road sodden by a recent thaw.  Raw
and chill was the winter morning: my teeth chattered as I hastened down
the drive.  There was a light in the porter's lodge: when we reached it,
we found the porter's wife just kindling her fire: my trunk, which had
been carried down the evening before, stood corded at the door.  It
wanted but a few minutes of six, and shortly after that hour had struck,
the distant roll of wheels announced the coming coach; I went to the door
and watched its lamps approach rapidly through the gloom.

"Is she going by herself?" asked the porter's wife.

"Yes."

"And how far is it?"

"Fifty miles."

"What a long way!  I wonder Mrs. Reed is not afraid to trust her so far
alone."

The coach drew up; there it was at the gates with its four horses and its
top laden with passengers: the guard and coachman loudly urged haste; my
trunk was hoisted up; I was taken from Bessie's neck, to which I clung
with kisses.

"Be sure and take good care of her," cried she to the guard, as he lifted
me into the inside.

"Ay, ay!" was the answer: the door was slapped to, a voice exclaimed "All
right," and on we drove.  Thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead;
thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed, remote and
mysterious regions.

I remember but little of the journey; I only know that the day seemed to
me of a preternatural length, and that we appeared to travel over
hundreds of miles of road.  We passed through several towns, and in one,
a very large one, the coach stopped; the horses were taken out, and the
passengers alighted to dine.  I was carried into an inn, where the guard
wanted me to have some dinner; but, as I had no appetite, he left me in
an immense room with a fireplace at each end, a chandelier pendent from
the ceiling, and a little red gallery high up against the wall filled
with musical instruments.  Here I walked about for a long time, feeling
very strange, and mortally apprehensive of some one coming in and
kidnapping me; for I believed in kidnappers, their exploits having
frequently figured in Bessie's fireside chronicles.  At last the guard
returned; once more I was stowed away in the coach, my protector mounted
his own seat, sounded his hollow horn, and away we rattled over the
"stony street" of L-.

The afternoon came on wet and somewhat misty: as it waned into dusk, I
began to feel that we were getting very far indeed from Gateshead: we
ceased to pass through towns; the country changed; great grey hills
heaved up round the horizon: as twilight deepened, we descended a valley,
dark with wood, and long after night had overclouded the prospect, I
heard a wild wind rushing amongst trees.

Lulled by the sound, I at last dropped asleep; I had not long slumbered
when the sudden cessation of motion awoke me; the coach-door was open,
and a person like a servant was standing at it: I saw her face and dress
by the light of the lamps.

"Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?" she asked.  I answered
"Yes," and was then lifted out; my trunk was handed down, and the coach
instantly drove away.

I was stiff with long sitting, and bewildered with the noise and motion
of the coach: Gathering my faculties, I looked about me.  Rain, wind, and
darkness filled the air; nevertheless, I dimly discerned a wall before me
and a door open in it; through this door I passed with my new guide: she
shut and locked it behind her.  There was now visible a house or
houses--for the building spread far--with many windows, and lights
burning in some; we went up a broad pebbly path, splashing wet, and were
admitted at a door; then the servant led me through a passage into a room
with a fire, where she left me alone.

I stood and warmed my numbed fingers over the blaze, then I looked round;
there was no candle, but the uncertain light from the hearth showed, by
intervals, papered walls, carpet, curtains, shining mahogany furniture:
it was a parlour, not so spacious or splendid as the drawing-room at
Gateshead, but comfortable enough.  I was puzzling to make out the
subject of a picture on the wall, when the door opened, and an individual
carrying a light entered; another followed close behind.

The first was a tall lady with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pale and large
forehead; her figure was partly enveloped in a shawl, her countenance was
grave, her bearing erect.

"The child is very young to be sent alone," said she, putting her candle
down on the table.  She considered me attentively for a minute or two,
then further added--

"She had better be put to bed soon; she looks tired: are you tired?" she
asked, placing her hand on my shoulder.

"A little, ma'am."

"And hungry too, no doubt: let her have some supper before she goes to
bed, Miss Miller.  Is this the first time you have left your parents to
come to school, my little girl?"

I explained to her that I had no parents.  She inquired how long they had
been dead: then how old I was, what was my name, whether I could read,
write, and sew a little: then she touched my cheek gently with her
forefinger, and saying, "She hoped I should be a good child," dismissed
me along with Miss Miller.

The lady I had left might be about twenty-nine; the one who went with me
appeared some years younger: the first impressed me by her voice, look,
and air.  Miss Miller was more ordinary; ruddy in complexion, though of a
careworn countenance; hurried in gait and action, like one who had always
a multiplicity of tasks on hand: she looked, indeed, what I afterwards
found she really was, an under-teacher.  Led by her, I passed from
compartment to compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and
irregular building; till, emerging from the total and somewhat dreary
silence pervading that portion of the house we had traversed, we came
upon the hum of many voices, and presently entered a wide, long room,
with great deal tables, two at each end, on each of which burnt a pair of
candles, and seated all round on benches, a congregation of girls of
every age, from nine or ten to twenty.  Seen by the dim light of the
dips, their number to me appeared countless, though not in reality
exceeding eighty; they were uniformly dressed in brown stuff frocks of
quaint fashion, and long holland pinafores.  It was the hour of study;
they were engaged in conning over their to-morrow's task, and the hum I
had heard was the combined result of their whispered repetitions.

Miss Miller signed to me to sit on a bench near the door, then walking up
to the top of the long room she cried out--

"Monitors, collect the lesson-books and put them away!"

Four tall girls arose from different tables, and going round, gathered
the books and removed them.  Miss Miller again gave the word of command--

"Monitors, fetch the supper-trays!"

The tall girls went out and returned presently, each bearing a tray, with
portions of something, I knew not what, arranged thereon, and a pitcher
of water and mug in the middle of each tray.  The portions were handed
round; those who liked took a draught of the water, the mug being common
to all.  When it came to my turn, I drank, for I was thirsty, but did not
touch the food, excitement and fatigue rendering me incapable of eating:
I now saw, however, that it was a thin oaten cake shared into fragments.

The meal over, prayers were read by Miss Miller, and the classes filed
off, two and two, upstairs.  Overpowered by this time with weariness, I
scarcely noticed what sort of a place the bedroom was, except that, like
the schoolroom, I saw it was very long.  To-night I was to be Miss
Miller's bed-fellow; she helped me to undress: when laid down I glanced
at the long rows of beds, each of which was quickly filled with two
occupants; in ten minutes the single light was extinguished, and amidst
silence and complete darkness I fell asleep.

The night passed rapidly.  I was too tired even to dream; I only once
awoke to hear the wind rave in furious gusts, and the rain fall in
torrents, and to be sensible that Miss Miller had taken her place by my
side.  When I again unclosed my eyes, a loud bell was ringing; the girls
were up and dressing; day had not yet begun to dawn, and a rushlight or
two burned in the room.  I too rose reluctantly; it was bitter cold, and
I dressed as well as I could for shivering, and washed when there was a
basin at liberty, which did not occur soon, as there was but one basin to
six girls, on the stands down the middle of the room.  Again the bell
rang: all formed in file, two and two, and in that order descended the
stairs and entered the cold and dimly lit schoolroom: here prayers were
read by Miss Miller; afterwards she called out--

"Form classes!"

A great tumult succeeded for some minutes, during which Miss Miller
repeatedly exclaimed, "Silence!" and "Order!"  When it subsided, I saw
them all drawn up in four semicircles, before four chairs, placed at the
four tables; all held books in their hands, and a great book, like a
Bible, lay on each table, before the vacant seat.  A pause of some
seconds succeeded, filled up by the low, vague hum of numbers; Miss
Miller walked from class to class, hushing this indefinite sound.

A distant bell tinkled: immediately three ladies entered the room, each
walked to a table and took her seat.  Miss Miller assumed the fourth
vacant chair, which was that nearest the door, and around which the
smallest of the children were assembled: to this inferior class I was
called, and placed at the bottom of it.

Business now began, the day's Collect was repeated, then certain texts of
Scripture were said, and to these succeeded a protracted reading of
chapters in the Bible, which lasted an hour.  By the time that exercise
was terminated, day had fully dawned.  The indefatigable bell now sounded
for the fourth time: the classes were marshalled and marched into another
room to breakfast: how glad I was to behold a prospect of getting
something to eat!  I was now nearly sick from inanition, having taken so
little the day before.

The refectory was a great, low-ceiled, gloomy room; on two long tables
smoked basins of something hot, which, however, to my dismay, sent forth
an odour far from inviting.  I saw a universal manifestation of
discontent when the fumes of the repast met the nostrils of those
destined to swallow it; from the van of the procession, the tall girls of
the first class, rose the whispered words--

"Disgusting!  The porridge is burnt again!"

"Silence!" ejaculated a voice; not that of Miss Miller, but one of the
upper teachers, a little and dark personage, smartly dressed, but of
somewhat morose aspect, who installed herself at the top of one table,
while a more buxom lady presided at the other.  I looked in vain for her
I had first seen the night before; she was not visible: Miss Miller
occupied the foot of the table where I sat, and a strange,
foreign-looking, elderly lady, the French teacher, as I afterwards found,
took the corresponding seat at the other board.  A long grace was said
and a hymn sung; then a servant brought in some tea for the teachers, and
the meal began.

Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion
without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I
perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess; burnt porridge is almost as
bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it.  The spoons
were moved slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it;
but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished.  Breakfast was over,
and none had breakfasted.  Thanks being returned for what we had not got,
and a second hymn chanted, the refectory was evacuated for the
schoolroom.  I was one of the last to go out, and in passing the tables,
I saw one teacher take a basin of the porridge and taste it; she looked
at the others; all their countenances expressed displeasure, and one of
them, the stout one, whispered--

"Abominable stuff!  How shameful!"

A quarter of an hour passed before lessons again began, during which the
schoolroom was in a glorious tumult; for that space of time it seemed to
be permitted to talk loud and more freely, and they used their privilege.
The whole conversation ran on the breakfast, which one and all abused
roundly.  Poor things! it was the sole consolation they had.  Miss Miller
was now the only teacher in the room: a group of great girls standing
about her spoke with serious and sullen gestures.  I heard the name of
Mr. Brocklehurst pronounced by some lips; at which Miss Miller shook her
head disapprovingly; but she made no great effort to check the general
wrath; doubtless she shared in it.

A clock in the schoolroom struck nine; Miss Miller left her circle, and
standing in the middle of the room, cried--

"Silence!  To your seats!"

Discipline prevailed: in five minutes the confused throng was resolved
into order, and comparative silence quelled the Babel clamour of tongues.
The upper teachers now punctually resumed their posts: but still, all
seemed to wait.  Ranged on benches down the sides of the room, the eighty
girls sat motionless and erect; a quaint assemblage they appeared, all
with plain locks combed from their faces, not a curl visible; in brown
dresses, made high and surrounded by a narrow tucker about the throat,
with little pockets of holland (shaped something like a Highlander's
purse) tied in front of their frocks, and destined to serve the purpose
of a work-bag: all, too, wearing woollen stockings and country-made
shoes, fastened with brass buckles.  Above twenty of those clad in this
costume were full-grown girls, or rather young women; it suited them ill,
and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest.

I was still looking at them, and also at intervals examining the
teachers--none of whom precisely pleased me; for the stout one was a
little coarse, the dark one not a little fierce, the foreigner harsh and
grotesque, and Miss Miller, poor thing! looked purple, weather-beaten,
and over-worked--when, as my eye wandered from face to face, the whole
school rose simultaneously, as if moved by a common spring.

What was the matter?  I had heard no order given: I was puzzled.  Ere I
had gathered my wits, the classes were again seated: but as all eyes were
now turned to one point, mine followed the general direction, and
encountered the personage who had received me last night.  She stood at
the bottom of the long room, on the hearth; for there was a fire at each
end; she surveyed the two rows of girls silently and gravely.  Miss
Miller approaching, seemed to ask her a question, and having received her
answer, went back to her place, and said aloud--

"Monitor of the first class, fetch the globes!"

While the direction was being executed, the lady consulted moved slowly
up the room.  I suppose I have a considerable organ of veneration, for I
retain yet the sense of admiring awe with which my eyes traced her steps.
Seen now, in broad daylight, she looked tall, fair, and shapely; brown
eyes with a benignant light in their irids, and a fine pencilling of long
lashes round, relieved the whiteness of her large front; on each of her
temples her hair, of a very dark brown, was clustered in round curls,
according to the fashion of those times, when neither smooth bands nor
long ringlets were in vogue; her dress, also in the mode of the day, was
of purple cloth, relieved by a sort of Spanish trimming of black velvet;
a gold watch (watches were not so common then as now) shone at her
girdle.  Let the reader add, to complete the picture, refined features; a
complexion, if pale, clear; and a stately air and carriage, and he will
have, at least, as clearly as words can give it, a correct idea of the
exterior of Miss Temple--Maria Temple, as I afterwards saw the name
written in a prayer-book intrusted to me to carry to church.

The superintendent of Lowood (for such was this lady) having taken her
seat before a pair of globes placed on one of the tables, summoned the
first class round her, and commenced giving a lesson on geography; the
lower classes were called by the teachers: repetitions in history,
grammar, &c., went on for an hour; writing and arithmetic succeeded, and
music lessons were given by Miss Temple to some of the elder girls.  The
duration of each lesson was measured by the clock, which at last struck
twelve.  The superintendent rose--

"I have a word to address to the pupils," said she.

The tumult of cessation from lessons was already breaking forth, but it
sank at her voice.  She went on--

"You had this morning a breakfast which you could not eat; you must be
hungry:--I have ordered that a lunch of bread and cheese shall be served
to all."

The teachers looked at her with a sort of surprise.

"It is to be done on my responsibility," she added, in an explanatory
tone to them, and immediately afterwards left the room.

The bread and cheese was presently brought in and distributed, to the
high delight and refreshment of the whole school.  The order was now
given "To the garden!"  Each put on a coarse straw bonnet, with strings
of coloured calico, and a cloak of grey frieze.  I was similarly
equipped, and, following the stream, I made my way into the open air.

The garden was a wide inclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to
exclude every glimpse of prospect; a covered verandah ran down one side,
and broad walks bordered a middle space divided into scores of little
beds: these beds were assigned as gardens for the pupils to cultivate,
and each bed had an owner.  When full of flowers they would doubtless
look pretty; but now, at the latter end of January, all was wintry blight
and brown decay.  I shuddered as I stood and looked round me: it was an
inclement day for outdoor exercise; not positively rainy, but darkened by
a drizzling yellow fog; all under foot was still soaking wet with the
floods of yesterday.  The stronger among the girls ran about and engaged
in active games, but sundry pale and thin ones herded together for
shelter and warmth in the verandah; and amongst these, as the dense mist
penetrated to their shivering frames, I heard frequently the sound of a
hollow cough.

As yet I had spoken to no one, nor did anybody seem to take notice of me;
I stood lonely enough: but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed;
it did not oppress me much.  I leant against a pillar of the verandah,
drew my grey mantle close about me, and, trying to forget the cold which
nipped me without, and the unsatisfied hunger which gnawed me within,
delivered myself up to the employment of watching and thinking.  My
reflections were too undefined and fragmentary to merit record: I hardly
yet knew where I was; Gateshead and my past life seemed floated away to
an immeasurable distance; the present was vague and strange, and of the
future I could form no conjecture.  I looked round the convent-like
garden, and then up at the house--a large building, half of which seemed
grey and old, the other half quite new.  The new part, containing the
schoolroom and dormitory, was lit by mullioned and latticed windows,
which gave it a church-like aspect; a stone tablet over the door bore
this inscription:--

"Lowood Institution.--This portion was rebuilt A.D. ---, by Naomi
Brocklehurst, of Brocklehurst Hall, in this county."  "Let your light so
shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your
Father which is in heaven."--St. Matt. v. 16.

I read these words over and over again: I felt that an explanation
belonged to them, and was unable fully to penetrate their import.  I was
still pondering the signification of "Institution," and endeavouring to
make out a connection between the first words and the verse of Scripture,
when the sound of a cough close behind me made me turn my head.  I saw a
girl sitting on a stone bench near; she was bent over a book, on the
perusal of which she seemed intent: from where I stood I could see the
title--it was "Rasselas;" a name that struck me as strange, and
consequently attractive.  In turning a leaf she happened to look up, and
I said to her directly--

"Is your book interesting?"  I had already formed the intention of asking
her to lend it to me some day.

"I like it," she answered, after a pause of a second or two, during which
she examined me.

"What is it about?" I continued.  I hardly know where I found the
hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was
contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a
chord of sympathy somewhere; for I too liked reading, though of a
frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious
or substantial.

"You may look at it," replied the girl, offering me the book.

I did so; a brief examination convinced me that the contents were less
taking than the title: "Rasselas" looked dull to my trifling taste; I saw
nothing about fairies, nothing about genii; no bright variety seemed
spread over the closely-printed pages.  I returned it to her; she
received it quietly, and without saying anything she was about to relapse
into her former studious mood: again I ventured to disturb her--

"Can you tell me what the writing on that stone over the door means?  What
is Lowood Institution?"

"This house where you are come to live."

"And why do they call it Institution?  Is it in any way different from
other schools?"

"It is partly a charity-school: you and I, and all the rest of us, are
charity-children.  I suppose you are an orphan: are not either your
father or your mother dead?"

"Both died before I can remember."

"Well, all the girls here have lost either one or both parents, and this
is called an institution for educating orphans."

"Do we pay no money?  Do they keep us for nothing?"

"We pay, or our friends pay, fifteen pounds a year for each."

"Then why do they call us charity-children?"

"Because fifteen pounds is not enough for board and teaching, and the
deficiency is supplied by subscription."

"Who subscribes?"

"Different benevolent-minded ladies and gentlemen in this neighbourhood
and in London."

"Who was Naomi Brocklehurst?"

"The lady who built the new part of this house as that tablet records,
and whose son overlooks and directs everything here."

"Why?"

"Because he is treasurer and manager of the establishment."

"Then this house does not belong to that tall lady who wears a watch, and
who said we were to have some bread and cheese?"

"To Miss Temple?  Oh, no!  I wish it did: she has to answer to Mr.
Brocklehurst for all she does.  Mr. Brocklehurst buys all our food and
all our clothes."

"Does he live here?"

"No--two miles off, at a large hall."

"Is he a good man?"

"He is a clergyman, and is said to do a great deal of good."

"Did you say that tall lady was called Miss Temple?"

"Yes."

"And what are the other teachers called?"

"The one with red cheeks is called Miss Smith; she attends to the work,
and cuts out--for we make our own clothes, our frocks, and pelisses, and
everything; the little one with black hair is Miss Scatcherd; she teaches
history and grammar, and hears the second class repetitions; and the one
who wears a shawl, and has a pocket-handkerchief tied to her side with a
yellow ribband, is Madame Pierrot: she comes from Lisle, in France, and
teaches French."

"Do you like the teachers?"

"Well enough."

"Do you like the little black one, and the Madame ---?--I cannot
pronounce her name as you do."

"Miss Scatcherd is hasty--you must take care not to offend her; Madame
Pierrot is not a bad sort of person."

"But Miss Temple is the best--isn't she?"

"Miss Temple is very good and very clever; she is above the rest, because
she knows far more than they do."

"Have you been long here?"

"Two years."

"Are you an orphan?"

"My mother is dead."

"Are you happy here?"

"You ask rather too many questions.  I have given you answers enough for
the present: now I want to read."

But at that moment the summons sounded for dinner; all re-entered the
house.  The odour which now filled the refectory was scarcely more
appetising than that which had regaled our nostrils at breakfast: the
dinner was served in two huge tin-plated vessels, whence rose a strong
steam redolent of rancid fat.  I found the mess to consist of indifferent
potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together.  Of
this preparation a tolerably abundant plateful was apportioned to each
pupil.  I ate what I could, and wondered within myself whether every
day's fare would be like this.

After dinner, we immediately adjourned to the schoolroom: lessons
recommenced, and were continued till five o'clock.

The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl with whom
I had conversed in the verandah dismissed in disgrace by Miss Scatcherd
from a history class, and sent to stand in the middle of the large
schoolroom.  The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious,
especially for so great a girl--she looked thirteen or upwards.  I
expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but to my
surprise she neither wept nor blushed: composed, though grave, she stood,
the central mark of all eyes.  "How can she bear it so quietly--so
firmly?" I asked of myself.  "Were I in her place, it seems to me I
should wish the earth to open and swallow me up.  She looks as if she
were thinking of something beyond her punishment--beyond her situation:
of something not round her nor before her.  I have heard of day-dreams--is
she in a day-dream now?  Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure
they do not see it--her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart:
she is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really
present.  I wonder what sort of a girl she is--whether good or naughty."

Soon after five p.m. we had another meal, consisting of a small mug of
coffee, and half-a-slice of brown bread.  I devoured my bread and drank
my coffee with relish; but I should have been glad of as much more--I was
still hungry.  Half-an-hour's recreation succeeded, then study; then the
glass of water and the piece of oat-cake, prayers, and bed.  Such was my
first day at Lowood.




CHAPTER VI


The next day commenced as before, getting up and dressing by rushlight;
but this morning we were obliged to dispense with the ceremony of
washing; the water in the pitchers was frozen.  A change had taken place
in the weather the preceding evening, and a keen north-east wind,
whistling through the crevices of our bedroom windows all night long, had
made us shiver in our beds, and turned the contents of the ewers to ice.

Before the long hour and a half of prayers and Bible-reading was over, I
felt ready to perish with cold.  Breakfast-time came at last, and this
morning the porridge was not burnt; the quality was eatable, the quantity
small.  How small my portion seemed!  I wished it had been doubled.

In the course of the day I was enrolled a member of the fourth class, and
regular tasks and occupations were assigned me: hitherto, I had only been
a spectator of the proceedings at Lowood; I was now to become an actor
therein.  At first, being little accustomed to learn by heart, the
lessons appeared to me both long and difficult; the frequent change from
task to task, too, bewildered me; and I was glad when, about three
o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Smith put into my hands a border of muslin
two yards long, together with needle, thimble, &c., and sent me to sit in
a quiet corner of the schoolroom, with directions to hem the same.  At
that hour most of the others were sewing likewise; but one class still
stood round Miss Scatcherd's chair reading, and as all was quiet, the
subject of their lessons could be heard, together with the manner in
which each girl acquitted herself, and the animadversions or
commendations of Miss Scatcherd on the performance.  It was English
history: among the readers I observed my acquaintance of the verandah: at
the commencement of the lesson, her place had been at the top of the
class, but for some error of pronunciation, or some inattention to stops,
she was suddenly sent to the very bottom.  Even in that obscure position,
Miss Scatcherd continued to make her an object of constant notice: she
was continually addressing to her such phrases as the following:--

"Burns" (such it seems was her name: the girls here were all called by
their surnames, as boys are elsewhere), "Burns, you are standing on the
side of your shoe; turn your toes out immediately."  "Burns, you poke
your chin most unpleasantly; draw it in."  "Burns, I insist on your
holding your head up; I will not have you before me in that attitude,"
&c. &c.

A chapter having been read through twice, the books were closed and the
girls examined.  The lesson had comprised part of the reign of Charles
I., and there were sundry questions about tonnage and poundage and ship-
money, which most of them appeared unable to answer; still, every little
difficulty was solved instantly when it reached Burns: her memory seemed
to have retained the substance of the whole lesson, and she was ready
with answers on every point.  I kept expecting that Miss Scatcherd would
praise her attention; but, instead of that, she suddenly cried out--

"You dirty, disagreeable girl! you have never cleaned your nails this
morning!"

Burns made no answer: I wondered at her silence.  "Why," thought I, "does
she not explain that she could neither clean her nails nor wash her face,
as the water was frozen?"

My attention was now called off by Miss Smith desiring me to hold a skein
of thread: while she was winding it, she talked to me from time to time,
asking whether I had ever been at school before, whether I could mark,
stitch, knit, &c.; till she dismissed me, I could not pursue my
observations on Miss Scatcherd's movements.  When I returned to my seat,
that lady was just delivering an order of which I did not catch the
import; but Burns immediately left the class, and going into the small
inner room where the books were kept, returned in half a minute, carrying
in her hand a bundle of twigs tied together at one end.  This ominous
tool she presented to Miss Scatcherd with a respectful curtesy; then she
quietly, and without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher
instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the
bunch of twigs.  Not a tear rose to Burns' eye; and, while I paused from
my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment
of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face
altered its ordinary expression.

"Hardened girl!" exclaimed Miss Scatcherd; "nothing can correct you of
your slatternly habits: carry the rod away."

Burns obeyed: I looked at her narrowly as she emerged from the
book-closet; she was just putting back her handkerchief into her pocket,
and the trace of a tear glistened on her thin cheek.

The play-hour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction of the
day at Lowood: the bit of bread, the draught of coffee swallowed at five
o'clock had revived vitality, if it had not satisfied hunger: the long
restraint of the day was slackened; the schoolroom felt warmer than in
the morning--its fires being allowed to burn a little more brightly, to
supply, in some measure, the place of candles, not yet introduced: the
ruddy gloaming, the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave
one a welcome sense of liberty.

On the evening of the day on which I had seen Miss Scatcherd flog her
pupil, Burns, I wandered as usual among the forms and tables and laughing
groups without a companion, yet not feeling lonely: when I passed the
windows, I now and then lifted a blind, and looked out; it snowed fast, a
drift was already forming against the lower panes; putting my ear close
to the window, I could distinguish from the gleeful tumult within, the
disconsolate moan of the wind outside.

Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would
have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the
separation; that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure
chaos would have disturbed my peace! as it was, I derived from both a
strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl
more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise
to clamour.

Jumping over forms, and creeping under tables, I made my way to one of
the fire-places; there, kneeling by the high wire fender, I found Burns,
absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a
book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers.

"Is it still 'Rasselas'?" I asked, coming behind her.

"Yes," she said, "and I have just finished it."

And in five minutes more she shut it up.  I was glad of this.  "Now,"
thought I, "I can perhaps get her to talk."  I sat down by her on the
floor.

"What is your name besides Burns?"

"Helen."

"Do you come a long way from here?"

"I come from a place farther north, quite on the borders of Scotland."

"Will you ever go back?"

"I hope so; but nobody can be sure of the future."

"You must wish to leave Lowood?"

"No! why should I?  I was sent to Lowood to get an education; and it
would be of no use going away until I have attained that object."

"But that teacher, Miss Scatcherd, is so cruel to you?"

"Cruel?  Not at all!  She is severe: she dislikes my faults."

"And if I were in your place I should dislike her; I should resist her.
If she struck me with that rod, I should get it from her hand; I should
break it under her nose."

"Probably you would do nothing of the sort: but if you did, Mr.
Brocklehurst would expel you from the school; that would be a great grief
to your relations.  It is far better to endure patiently a smart which
nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil
consequences will extend to all connected with you; and besides, the
Bible bids us return good for evil."

"But then it seems disgraceful to be flogged, and to be sent to stand in
the middle of a room full of people; and you are such a great girl: I am
far younger than you, and I could not bear it."

"Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is
weak and silly to say you _cannot bear_ what it is your fate to be
required to bear."

I heard her with wonder: I could not comprehend this doctrine of
endurance; and still less could I understand or sympathise with the
forbearance she expressed for her chastiser.  Still I felt that Helen
Burns considered things by a light invisible to my eyes.  I suspected she
might be right and I wrong; but I would not ponder the matter deeply;
like Felix, I put it off to a more convenient season.

"You say you have faults, Helen: what are they?  To me you seem very
good."

"Then learn from me, not to judge by appearances: I am, as Miss Scatcherd
said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things, in order; I am
careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have
no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot _bear_ to be subjected
to systematic arrangements.  This is all very provoking to Miss
Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and particular."

"And cross and cruel," I added; but Helen Burns would not admit my
addition: she kept silence.

"Is Miss Temple as severe to you as Miss Scatcherd?"

At the utterance of Miss Temple's name, a soft smile flitted over her
grave face.

"Miss Temple is full of goodness; it pains her to be severe to any one,
even the worst in the school: she sees my errors, and tells me of them
gently; and, if I do anything worthy of praise, she gives me my meed
liberally.  One strong proof of my wretchedly defective nature is, that
even her expostulations, so mild, so rational, have not influence to cure
me of my faults; and even her praise, though I value it most highly,
cannot stimulate me to continued care and foresight."

"That is curious," said I, "it is so easy to be careful."

"For _you_ I have no doubt it is.  I observed you in your class this
morning, and saw you were closely attentive: your thoughts never seemed
to wander while Miss Miller explained the lesson and questioned you.  Now,
mine continually rove away; when I should be listening to Miss Scatcherd,
and collecting all she says with assiduity, often I lose the very sound
of her voice; I fall into a sort of dream.  Sometimes I think I am in
Northumberland, and that the noises I hear round me are the bubbling of a
little brook which runs through Deepden, near our house;--then, when it
comes to my turn to reply, I have to be awakened; and having heard
nothing of what was read for listening to the visionary brook, I have no
answer ready."

"Yet how well you replied this afternoon."

"It was mere chance; the subject on which we had been reading had
interested me.  This afternoon, instead of dreaming of Deepden, I was
wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly and
unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did; and I thought what a pity it
was that, with his integrity and conscientiousness, he could see no
farther than the prerogatives of the crown.  If he had but been able to
look to a distance, and see how what they call the spirit of the age was
tending!  Still, I like Charles--I respect him--I pity him, poor murdered
king!  Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right
to shed.  How dared they kill him!"

Helen was talking to herself now: she had forgotten I could not very well
understand her--that I was ignorant, or nearly so, of the subject she
discussed.  I recalled her to my level.

"And when Miss Temple teaches you, do your thoughts wander then?"

"No, certainly, not often; because Miss Temple has generally something to
say which is newer than my own reflections; her language is singularly
agreeable to me, and the information she communicates is often just what
I wished to gain."

"Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?"

"Yes, in a passive way: I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides
me.  There is no merit in such goodness."

"A great deal: you are good to those who are good to you.  It is all I
ever desire to be.  If people were always kind and obedient to those who
are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way:
they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would
grow worse and worse.  When we are struck at without a reason, we should
strike back again very hard; I am sure we should--so hard as to teach the
person who struck us never to do it again."

"You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older: as yet you are
but a little untaught girl."

"But I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to
please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me
unjustly.  It is as natural as that I should love those who show me
affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved."

"Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and
civilised nations disown it."

"How?  I don't understand."

"It is not violence that best overcomes hate--nor vengeance that most
certainly heals injury."

"What then?"

"Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts;
make His word your rule, and His conduct your example."

"What does He say?"

"Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate
you and despitefully use you."

"Then I should love Mrs. Reed, which I cannot do; I should bless her son
John, which is impossible."

In her turn, Helen Burns asked me to explain, and I proceeded forthwith
to pour out, in my own way, the tale of my sufferings and resentments.
Bitter and truculent when excited, I spoke as I felt, without reserve or
softening.

Helen heard me patiently to the end: I expected she would then make a
remark, but she said nothing.

"Well," I asked impatiently, "is not Mrs. Reed a hard-hearted, bad
woman?"

"She has been unkind to you, no doubt; because you see, she dislikes your
cast of character, as Miss Scatcherd does mine; but how minutely you
remember all she has done and said to you!  What a singularly deep
impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart!  No ill-usage
so brands its record on my feelings.  Would you not be happier if you
tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it
excited?  Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity
or registering wrongs.  We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with
faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall
put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and
sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the
spark of the spirit will remain,--the impalpable principle of light and
thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence
it came it will return; perhaps again to be communicated to some being
higher than man--perhaps to pass through gradations of glory, from the
pale human soul to brighten to the seraph!  Surely it will never, on the
contrary, be suffered to degenerate from man to fiend?  No; I cannot
believe that: I hold another creed: which no one ever taught me, and
which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling: for
it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest--a mighty home, not a
terror and an abyss.  Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly
distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely
forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never
worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice
never crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end."

Helen's head, always drooping, sank a little lower as she finished this
sentence.  I saw by her look she wished no longer to talk to me, but
rather to converse with her own thoughts.  She was not allowed much time
for meditation: a monitor, a great rough girl, presently came up,
exclaiming in a strong Cumberland accent--

"Helen Burns, if you don't go and put your drawer in order, and fold up
your work this minute, I'll tell Miss Scatcherd to come and look at it!"

Helen sighed as her reverie fled, and getting up, obeyed the monitor
without reply as without delay.




CHAPTER VII


My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the golden age either;
it comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself
to new rules and unwonted tasks.  The fear of failure in these points
harassed me worse than the physical hardships of my lot; though these
were no trifles.

During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and, after
their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented our stirring beyond
the garden walls, except to go to church; but within these limits we had
to pass an hour every day in the open air.  Our clothing was insufficient
to protect us from the severe cold: we had no boots, the snow got into
our shoes and melted there: our ungloved hands became numbed and covered
with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting
irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet
inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes
into my shoes in the morning.  Then the scanty supply of food was
distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely
sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid.  From this deficiency of
nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger
pupils: whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they would
coax or menace the little ones out of their portion.  Many a time I have
shared between two claimants the precious morsel of brown bread
distributed at tea-time; and after relinquishing to a third half the
contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the remainder with an
accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger.

Sundays were dreary days in that wintry season.  We had to walk two miles
to Brocklebridge Church, where our patron officiated.  We set out cold,
we arrived at church colder: during the morning service we became almost
paralysed.  It was too far to return to dinner, and an allowance of cold
meat and bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our ordinary
meals, was served round between the services.

At the close of the afternoon service we returned by an exposed and hilly
road, where the bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summits
to the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces.

I can remember Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our drooping
line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered, gathered close
about her, and encouraging us, by precept and example, to keep up our
spirits, and march forward, as she said, "like stalwart soldiers."  The
other teachers, poor things, were generally themselves too much dejected
to attempt the task of cheering others.

How we longed for the light and heat of a blazing fire when we got back!
But, to the little ones at least, this was denied: each hearth in the
schoolroom was immediately surrounded by a double row of great girls, and
behind them the younger children crouched in groups, wrapping their
starved arms in their pinafores.

A little solace came at tea-time, in the shape of a double ration of
bread--a whole, instead of a half, slice--with the delicious addition of
a thin scrape of butter: it was the hebdomadal treat to which we all
looked forward from Sabbath to Sabbath.  I generally contrived to reserve
a moiety of this bounteous repast for myself; but the remainder I was
invariably obliged to part with.

The Sunday evening was spent in repeating, by heart, the Church
Catechism, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew; and
in listening to a long sermon, read by Miss Miller, whose irrepressible
yawns attested her weariness.  A frequent interlude of these performances
was the enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half-dozen of little
girls, who, overpowered with sleep, would fall down, if not out of the
third loft, yet off the fourth form, and be taken up half dead.  The
remedy was, to thrust them forward into the centre of the schoolroom, and
oblige them to stand there till the sermon was finished.  Sometimes their
feet failed them, and they sank together in a heap; they were then
propped up with the monitors' high stools.

I have not yet alluded to the visits of Mr. Brocklehurst; and indeed that
gentleman was from home during the greater part of the first month after
my arrival; perhaps prolonging his stay with his friend the archdeacon:
his absence was a relief to me.  I need not say that I had my own reasons
for dreading his coming: but come he did at last.

One afternoon (I had then been three weeks at Lowood), as I was sitting
with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my eyes,
raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure just
passing: I recognised almost instinctively that gaunt outline; and when,
two minutes after, all the school, teachers included, rose _en masse_, it
was not necessary for me to look up in order to ascertain whose entrance
they thus greeted.  A long stride measured the schoolroom, and presently
beside Miss Temple, who herself had risen, stood the same black column
which had frowned on me so ominously from the hearthrug of Gateshead.  I
now glanced sideways at this piece of architecture.  Yes, I was right: it
was Mr. Brocklehurst, buttoned up in a surtout, and looking longer,
narrower, and more rigid than ever.

I had my own reasons for being dismayed at this apparition; too well I
remembered the perfidious hints given by Mrs. Reed about my disposition,
&c.; the promise pledged by Mr. Brocklehurst to apprise Miss Temple and
the teachers of my vicious nature.  All along I had been dreading the
fulfilment of this promise,--I had been looking out daily for the "Coming
Man," whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to
brand me as a bad child for ever: now there he was.

He stood at Miss Temple's side; he was speaking low in her ear: I did not
doubt he was making disclosures of my villainy; and I watched her eye
with painful anxiety, expecting every moment to see its dark orb turn on
me a glance of repugnance and contempt.  I listened too; and as I
happened to be seated quite at the top of the room, I caught most of what
he said: its import relieved me from immediate apprehension.

"I suppose, Miss Temple, the thread I bought at Lowton will do; it struck
me that it would be just of the quality for the calico chemises, and I
sorted the needles to match.  You may tell Miss Smith that I forgot to
make a memorandum of the darning needles, but she shall have some papers
sent in next week; and she is not, on any account, to give out more than
one at a time to each pupil: if they have more, they are apt to be
careless and lose them.  And, O ma'am!  I wish the woollen stockings were
better looked to!--when I was here last, I went into the kitchen-garden
and examined the clothes drying on the line; there was a quantity of
black hose in a very bad state of repair: from the size of the holes in
them I was sure they had not been well mended from time to time."

He paused.

"Your directions shall be attended to, sir," said Miss Temple.

"And, ma'am," he continued, "the laundress tells me some of the girls
have two clean tuckers in the week: it is too much; the rules limit them
to one."

"I think I can explain that circumstance, sir.  Agnes and Catherine
Johnstone were invited to take tea with some friends at Lowton last
Thursday, and I gave them leave to put on clean tuckers for the
occasion."

Mr. Brocklehurst nodded.

"Well, for once it may pass; but please not to let the circumstance occur
too often.  And there is another thing which surprised me; I find, in
settling accounts with the housekeeper, that a lunch, consisting of bread
and cheese, has twice been served out to the girls during the past
fortnight.  How is this?  I looked over the regulations, and I find no
such meal as lunch mentioned.  Who introduced this innovation? and by
what authority?"

"I must be responsible for the circumstance, sir," replied Miss Temple:
"the breakfast was so ill prepared that the pupils could not possibly eat
it; and I dared not allow them to remain fasting till dinner-time."

"Madam, allow me an instant.  You are aware that my plan in bringing up
these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence,
but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying.  Should any little
accidental disappointment of the appetite occur, such as the spoiling of
a meal, the under or the over dressing of a dish, the incident ought not
to be neutralised by replacing with something more delicate the comfort
lost, thus pampering the body and obviating the aim of this institution;
it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by
encouraging them to evince fortitude under temporary privation.  A brief
address on those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicious
instructor would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of
the primitive Christians; to the torments of martyrs; to the exhortations
of our blessed Lord Himself, calling upon His disciples to take up their
cross and follow Him; to His warnings that man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His
divine consolations, "If ye suffer hunger or thirst for My sake, happy
are ye."  Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt
porridge, into these children's mouths, you may indeed feed their vile
bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!"

Mr. Brocklehurst again paused--perhaps overcome by his feelings.  Miss
Temple had looked down when he first began to speak to her; but she now
gazed straight before her, and her face, naturally pale as marble,
appeared to be assuming also the coldness and fixity of that material;
especially her mouth, closed as if it would have required a sculptor's
chisel to open it, and her brow settled gradually into petrified
severity.

Meantime, Mr. Brocklehurst, standing on the hearth with his hands behind
his back, majestically surveyed the whole school.  Suddenly his eye gave
a blink, as if it had met something that either dazzled or shocked its
pupil; turning, he said in more rapid accents than he had hitherto used--

"Miss Temple, Miss Temple, what--_what_ is that girl with curled hair?
Red hair, ma'am, curled--curled all over?"  And extending his cane he
pointed to the awful object, his hand shaking as he did so.

"It is Julia Severn," replied Miss Temple, very quietly.

"Julia Severn, ma'am!  And why has she, or any other, curled hair?  Why,
in defiance of every precept and principle of this house, does she
conform to the world so openly--here in an evangelical, charitable
establishment--as to wear her hair one mass of curls?"

"Julia's hair curls naturally," returned Miss Temple, still more quietly.

"Naturally!  Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls
to be the children of Grace: and why that abundance?  I have again and
again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly,
plainly.  Miss Temple, that girl's hair must be cut off entirely; I will
send a barber to-morrow: and I see others who have far too much of the
excrescence--that tall girl, tell her to turn round.  Tell all the first
form to rise up and direct their faces to the wall."

Miss Temple passed her handkerchief over her lips, as if to smooth away
the involuntary smile that curled them; she gave the order, however, and
when the first class could take in what was required of them, they
obeyed.  Leaning a little back on my bench, I could see the looks and
grimaces with which they commented on this manoeuvre: it was a pity Mr.
Brocklehurst could not see them too; he would perhaps have felt that,
whatever he might do with the outside of the cup and platter, the inside
was further beyond his interference than he imagined.

He scrutinised the reverse of these living medals some five minutes, then
pronounced sentence.  These words fell like the knell of doom--

"All those top-knots must be cut off."

Miss Temple seemed to remonstrate.

"Madam," he pursued, "I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not of
this world: my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the
flesh; to teach them to clothe themselves with shame-facedness and
sobriety, not with braided hair and costly apparel; and each of the young
persons before us has a string of hair twisted in plaits which vanity
itself might have woven; these, I repeat, must be cut off; think of the
time wasted, of--"

Mr. Brocklehurst was here interrupted: three other visitors, ladies, now
entered the room.  They ought to have come a little sooner to have heard
his lecture on dress, for they were splendidly attired in velvet, silk,
and furs.  The two younger of the trio (fine girls of sixteen and
seventeen) had grey beaver hats, then in fashion, shaded with ostrich
plumes, and from under the brim of this graceful head-dress fell a
profusion of light tresses, elaborately curled; the elder lady was
enveloped in a costly velvet shawl, trimmed with ermine, and she wore a
false front of French curls.

These ladies were deferentially received by Miss Temple, as Mrs. and the
Misses Brocklehurst, and conducted to seats of honour at the top of the
room.  It seems they had come in the carriage with their reverend
relative, and had been conducting a rummaging scrutiny of the room
upstairs, while he transacted business with the housekeeper, questioned
the laundress, and lectured the superintendent.  They now proceeded to
address divers remarks and reproofs to Miss Smith, who was charged with
the care of the linen and the inspection of the dormitories: but I had no
time to listen to what they said; other matters called off and enchanted
my attention.

Hitherto, while gathering up the discourse of Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss
Temple, I had not, at the same time, neglected precautions to secure my
personal safety; which I thought would be effected, if I could only elude
observation.  To this end, I had sat well back on the form, and while
seeming to be busy with my sum, had held my slate in such a manner as to
conceal my face: I might have escaped notice, had not my treacherous
slate somehow happened to slip from my hand, and falling with an
obtrusive crash, directly drawn every eye upon me; I knew it was all over
now, and, as I stooped to pick up the two fragments of slate, I rallied
my forces for the worst.  It came.

"A careless girl!" said Mr. Brocklehurst, and immediately after--"It is
the new pupil, I perceive."  And before I could draw breath, "I must not
forget I have a word to say respecting her."  Then aloud: how loud it
seemed to me!  "Let the child who broke her slate come forward!"

Of my own accord I could not have stirred; I was paralysed: but the two
great girls who sit on each side of me, set me on my legs and pushed me
towards the dread judge, and then Miss Temple gently assisted me to his
very feet, and I caught her whispered counsel--

"Don't be afraid, Jane, I saw it was an accident; you shall not be
punished."

The kind whisper went to my heart like a dagger.

"Another minute, and she will despise me for a hypocrite," thought I; and
an impulse of fury against Reed, Brocklehurst, and Co. bounded in my
pulses at the conviction.  I was no Helen Burns.

"Fetch that stool," said Mr. Brocklehurst, pointing to a very high one
from which a monitor had just risen: it was brought.

"Place the child upon it."

And I was placed there, by whom I don't know: I was in no condition to
note particulars; I was only aware that they had hoisted me up to the
height of Mr. Brocklehurst's nose, that he was within a yard of me, and
that a spread of shot orange and purple silk pelisses and a cloud of
silvery plumage extended and waved below me.

Mr. Brocklehurst hemmed.

"Ladies," said he, turning to his family, "Miss Temple, teachers, and
children, you all see this girl?"

Of course they did; for I felt their eyes directed like burning-glasses
against my scorched skin.

"You see she is yet young; you observe she possesses the ordinary form of
childhood; God has graciously given her the shape that He has given to
all of us; no signal deformity points her out as a marked character.  Who
would think that the Evil One had already found a servant and agent in
her?  Yet such, I grieve to say, is the case."

A pause--in which I began to steady the palsy of my nerves, and to feel
that the Rubicon was passed; and that the trial, no longer to be shirked,
must be firmly sustained.

"My dear children," pursued the black marble clergyman, with pathos,
"this is a sad, a melancholy occasion; for it becomes my duty to warn
you, that this girl, who might be one of God's own lambs, is a little
castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and
an alien.  You must be on your guard against her; you must shun her
example; if necessary, avoid her company, exclude her from your sports,
and shut her out from your converse.  Teachers, you must watch her: keep
your eyes on her movements, weigh well her words, scrutinise her actions,
punish her body to save her soul: if, indeed, such salvation be possible,
for (my tongue falters while I tell it) this girl, this child, the native
of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its
prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut--this girl is--a liar!"

Now came a pause of ten minutes, during which I, by this time in perfect
possession of my wits, observed all the female Brocklehursts produce
their pocket-handkerchiefs and apply them to their optics, while the
elderly lady swayed herself to and fro, and the two younger ones
whispered, "How shocking!"  Mr. Brocklehurst resumed.

"This I learned from her benefactress; from the pious and charitable lady
who adopted her in her orphan state, reared her as her own daughter, and
whose kindness, whose generosity the unhappy girl repaid by an
ingratitude so bad, so dreadful, that at last her excellent patroness was
obliged to separate her from her own young ones, fearful lest her vicious
example should contaminate their purity: she has sent her here to be
healed, even as the Jews of old sent their diseased to the troubled pool
of Bethesda; and, teachers, superintendent, I beg of you not to allow the
waters to stagnate round her."

With this sublime conclusion, Mr. Brocklehurst adjusted the top button of
his surtout, muttered something to his family, who rose, bowed to Miss
Temple, and then all the great people sailed in state from the room.
Turning at the door, my judge said--

"Let her stand half-an-hour longer on that stool, and let no one speak to
her during the remainder of the day."

There was I, then, mounted aloft; I, who had said I could not bear the
shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the room, was now
exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy.  What my sensations were
no language can describe; but just as they all rose, stifling my breath
and constricting my throat, a girl came up and passed me: in passing, she
lifted her eyes.  What a strange light inspired them!  What an
extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me!  How the new feeling
bore me up!  It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim,
and imparted strength in the transit.  I mastered the rising hysteria,
lifted up my head, and took a firm stand on the stool.  Helen Burns asked
some slight question about her work of Miss Smith, was chidden for the
triviality of the inquiry, returned to her place, and smiled at me as she
again went by.  What a smile!  I remember it now, and I know that it was
the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage; it lit up her marked
lineaments, her thin face, her sunken grey eye, like a reflection from
the aspect of an angel.  Yet at that moment Helen Burns wore on her arm
"the untidy badge;" scarcely an hour ago I had heard her condemned by
Miss Scatcherd to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow because she
had blotted an exercise in copying it out.  Such is the imperfect nature
of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes
like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to
the full brightness of the orb.




CHAPTER VIII


Ere the half-hour ended, five o'clock struck; school was dismissed, and
all were gone into the refectory to tea.  I now ventured to descend: it
was deep dusk; I retired into a corner and sat down on the floor.  The
spell by which I had been so far supported began to dissolve; reaction
took place, and soon, so overwhelming was the grief that seized me, I
sank prostrate with my face to the ground.  Now I wept: Helen Burns was
not here; nothing sustained me; left to myself I abandoned myself, and my
tears watered the boards.  I had meant to be so good, and to do so much
at Lowood: to make so many friends, to earn respect and win affection.
Already I had made visible progress: that very morning I had reached the
head of my class; Miss Miller had praised me warmly; Miss Temple had
smiled approbation; she had promised to teach me drawing, and to let me
learn French, if I continued to make similar improvement two months
longer: and then I was well received by my fellow-pupils; treated as an
equal by those of my own age, and not molested by any; now, here I lay
again crushed and trodden on; and could I ever rise more?

"Never," I thought; and ardently I wished to die.  While sobbing out this
wish in broken accents, some one approached: I started up--again Helen
Burns was near me; the fading fires just showed her coming up the long,
vacant room; she brought my coffee and bread.

"Come, eat something," she said; but I put both away from me, feeling as
if a drop or a crumb would have choked me in my present condition.  Helen
regarded me, probably with surprise: I could not now abate my agitation,
though I tried hard; I continued to weep aloud.  She sat down on the
ground near me, embraced her knees with her arms, and rested her head
upon them; in that attitude she remained silent as an Indian.  I was the
first who spoke--

"Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a
liar?"

"Everybody, Jane?  Why, there are only eighty people who have heard you
called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions."

"But what have I to do with millions?  The eighty, I know, despise me."

"Jane, you are mistaken: probably not one in the school either despises
or dislikes you: many, I am sure, pity you much."

"How can they pity me after what Mr. Brocklehurst has said?"

"Mr. Brocklehurst is not a god: nor is he even a great and admired man:
he is little liked here; he never took steps to make himself liked.  Had
he treated you as an especial favourite, you would have found enemies,
declared or covert, all around you; as it is, the greater number would
offer you sympathy if they dared.  Teachers and pupils may look coldly on
you for a day or two, but friendly feelings are concealed in their
hearts; and if you persevere in doing well, these feelings will ere long
appear so much the more evidently for their temporary suppression.
Besides, Jane"--she paused.

"Well, Helen?" said I, putting my hand into hers: she chafed my fingers
gently to warm them, and went on--

"If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own
conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be
without friends."

"No; I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if
others don't love me I would rather die than live--I cannot bear to be
solitary and hated, Helen.  Look here; to gain some real affection from
you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly
submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to
stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest--"

"Hush, Jane! you think too much of the love of human beings; you are too
impulsive, too vehement; the sovereign hand that created your frame, and
put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble
self, or than creatures feeble as you.  Besides this earth, and besides
the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits:
that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us,
for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and
shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see
our tortures, recognise our innocence (if innocent we be: as I know you
are of this charge which Mr. Brocklehurst has weakly and pompously
repeated at second-hand from Mrs. Reed; for I read a sincere nature in
your ardent eyes and on your clear front), and God waits only the
separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward.  Why,
then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon
over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness--to glory?"

I was silent; Helen had calmed me; but in the tranquillity she imparted
there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness.  I felt the impression of
woe as she spoke, but I could not tell whence it came; and when, having
done speaking, she breathed a little fast and coughed a short cough, I
momentarily forgot my own sorrows to yield to a vague concern for her.

Resting my head on Helen's shoulder, I put my arms round her waist; she
drew me to her, and we reposed in silence.  We had not sat long thus,
when another person came in.  Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a
rising wind, had left the moon bare; and her light, streaming in through
a window near, shone full both on us and on the approaching figure, which
we at once recognised as Miss Temple.

"I came on purpose to find you, Jane Eyre," said she; "I want you in my
room; and as Helen Burns is with you, she may come too."

We went; following the superintendent's guidance, we had to thread some
intricate passages, and mount a staircase before we reached her
apartment; it contained a good fire, and looked cheerful.  Miss Temple
told Helen Burns to be seated in a low arm-chair on one side of the
hearth, and herself taking another, she called me to her side.

"Is it all over?" she asked, looking down at my face.  "Have you cried
your grief away?"

"I am afraid I never shall do that."

"Why?"

"Because I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma'am, and everybody else,
will now think me wicked."

"We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child.  Continue to
act as a good girl, and you will satisfy us."

"Shall I, Miss Temple?"

"You will," said she, passing her arm round me.  "And now tell me who is
the lady whom Mr. Brocklehurst called your benefactress?"

"Mrs. Reed, my uncle's wife.  My uncle is dead, and he left me to her
care."

"Did she not, then, adopt you of her own accord?"

"No, ma'am; she was sorry to have to do it: but my uncle, as I have often
heard the servants say, got her to promise before he died that she would
always keep me."

"Well now, Jane, you know, or at least I will tell you, that when a
criminal is accused, he is always allowed to speak in his own defence.
You have been charged with falsehood; defend yourself to me as well as
you can.  Say whatever your memory suggests is true; but add nothing and
exaggerate nothing."

I resolved, in the depth of my heart, that I would be most moderate--most
correct; and, having reflected a few minutes in order to arrange
coherently what I had to say, I told her all the story of my sad
childhood.  Exhausted by emotion, my language was more subdued than it
generally was when it developed that sad theme; and mindful of Helen's
warnings against the indulgence of resentment, I infused into the
narrative far less of gall and wormwood than ordinary.  Thus restrained
and simplified, it sounded more credible: I felt as I went on that Miss
Temple fully believed me.

In the course of the tale I had mentioned Mr. Lloyd as having come to see
me after the fit: for I never forgot the, to me, frightful episode of the
red-room: in detailing which, my excitement was sure, in some degree, to
break bounds; for nothing could soften in my recollection the spasm of
agony which clutched my heart when Mrs. Reed spurned my wild supplication
for pardon, and locked me a second time in the dark and haunted chamber.

I had finished: Miss Temple regarded me a few minutes in silence; she
then said--

"I know something of Mr. Lloyd; I shall write to him; if his reply agrees
with your statement, you shall be publicly cleared from every imputation;
to me, Jane, you are clear now."

She kissed me, and still keeping me at her side (where I was well
contented to stand, for I derived a child's pleasure from the
contemplation of her face, her dress, her one or two ornaments, her white
forehead, her clustered and shining curls, and beaming dark eyes), she
proceeded to address Helen Burns.

"How are you to-night, Helen?  Have you coughed much to-day?"

"Not quite so much, I think, ma'am."

"And the pain in your chest?"

"It is a little better."

Miss Temple got up, took her hand and examined her pulse; then she
returned to her own seat: as she resumed it, I heard her sigh low.  She
was pensive a few minutes, then rousing herself, she said cheerfully--

"But you two are my visitors to-night; I must treat you as such."  She
rang her bell.

"Barbara," she said to the servant who answered it, "I have not yet had
tea; bring the tray and place cups for these two young ladies."

And a tray was soon brought.  How pretty, to my eyes, did the china cups
and bright teapot look, placed on the little round table near the fire!
How fragrant was the steam of the beverage, and the scent of the toast!
of which, however, I, to my dismay (for I was beginning to be hungry)
discerned only a very small portion: Miss Temple discerned it too.

"Barbara," said she, "can you not bring a little more bread and butter?
There is not enough for three."

Barbara went out: she returned soon--

"Madam, Mrs. Harden says she has sent up the usual quantity."

Mrs. Harden, be it observed, was the housekeeper: a woman after Mr.
Brocklehurst's own heart, made up of equal parts of whalebone and iron.

"Oh, very well!" returned Miss Temple; "we must make it do, Barbara, I
suppose."  And as the girl withdrew she added, smiling, "Fortunately, I
have it in my power to supply deficiencies for this once."

Having invited Helen and me to approach the table, and placed before each
of us a cup of tea with one delicious but thin morsel of toast, she got
up, unlocked a drawer, and taking from it a parcel wrapped in paper,
disclosed presently to our eyes a good-sized seed-cake.

"I meant to give each of you some of this to take with you," said she,
"but as there is so little toast, you must have it now," and she
proceeded to cut slices with a generous hand.

We feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia; and not the least
delight of the entertainment was the smile of gratification with which
our hostess regarded us, as we satisfied our famished appetites on the
delicate fare she liberally supplied.

Tea over and the tray removed, she again summoned us to the fire; we sat
one on each side of her, and now a conversation followed between her and
Helen, which it was indeed a privilege to be admitted to hear.

Miss Temple had always something of serenity in her air, of state in her
mien, of refined propriety in her language, which precluded deviation
into the ardent, the excited, the eager: something which chastened the
pleasure of those who looked on her and listened to her, by a controlling
sense of awe; and such was my feeling now: but as to Helen Burns, I was
struck with wonder.

The refreshing meal, the brilliant fire, the presence and kindness of her
beloved instructress, or, perhaps, more than all these, something in her
own unique mind, had roused her powers within her.  They woke, they
kindled: first, they glowed in the bright tint of her cheek, which till
this hour I had never seen but pale and bloodless; then they shone in the
liquid lustre of her eyes, which had suddenly acquired a beauty more
singular than that of Miss Temple's--a beauty neither of fine colour nor
long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of
radiance.  Then her soul sat on her lips, and language flowed, from what
source I cannot tell.  Has a girl of fourteen a heart large enough,
vigorous enough, to hold the swelling spring of pure, full, fervid
eloquence?  Such was the characteristic of Helen's discourse on that, to
me, memorable evening; her spirit seemed hastening to live within a very
brief span as much as many live during a protracted existence.

They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past;
of countries far away; of secrets of nature discovered or guessed at:
they spoke of books: how many they had read!  What stores of knowledge
they possessed!  Then they seemed so familiar with French names and
French authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple
asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her
father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and
construe a page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration
expanding at every sounding line.  She had scarcely finished ere the bell
announced bedtime! no delay could be admitted; Miss Temple embraced us
both, saying, as she drew us to her heart--

"God bless you, my children!"

Helen she held a little longer than me: she let her go more reluctantly;
it was Helen her eye followed to the door; it was for her she a second
time breathed a sad sigh; for her she wiped a tear from her cheek.

On reaching the bedroom, we heard the voice of Miss Scatcherd: she was
examining drawers; she had just pulled out Helen Burns's, and when we
entered Helen was greeted with a sharp reprimand, and told that to-morrow
she should have half-a-dozen of untidily folded articles pinned to her
shoulder.

"My things were indeed in shameful disorder," murmured Helen to me, in a
low voice: "I intended to have arranged them, but I forgot."

Next morning, Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece
of pasteboard the word "Slattern," and bound it like a phylactery round
Helen's large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead.  She wore
it till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as a deserved
punishment.  The moment Miss Scatcherd withdrew after afternoon school, I
ran to Helen, tore it off, and thrust it into the fire: the fury of which
she was incapable had been burning in my soul all day, and tears, hot and
large, had continually been scalding my cheek; for the spectacle of her
sad resignation gave me an intolerable pain at the heart.

About a week subsequently to the incidents above narrated, Miss Temple,
who had written to Mr. Lloyd, received his answer: it appeared that what
he said went to corroborate my account.  Miss Temple, having assembled
the whole school, announced that inquiry had been made into the charges
alleged against Jane Eyre, and that she was most happy to be able to
pronounce her completely cleared from every imputation.  The teachers
then shook hands with me and kissed me, and a murmur of pleasure ran
through the ranks of my companions.

Thus relieved of a grievous load, I from that hour set to work afresh,
resolved to pioneer my way through every difficulty: I toiled hard, and
my success was proportionate to my efforts; my memory, not naturally
tenacious, improved with practice; exercise sharpened my wits; in a few
weeks I was promoted to a higher class; in less than two months I was
allowed to commence French and drawing.  I learned the first two tenses
of the verb _Etre_, and sketched my first cottage (whose walls, by-the-
bye, outrivalled in slope those of the leaning tower of Pisa), on the
same day.  That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in
imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes, or white bread
and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings: I
feasted instead on the spectacle of ideal drawings, which I saw in the
dark; all the work of my own hands: freely pencilled houses and trees,
picturesque rocks and ruins, Cuyp-like groups of cattle, sweet paintings
of butterflies hovering over unblown roses, of birds picking at ripe
cherries, of wren's nests enclosing pearl-like eggs, wreathed about with
young ivy sprays.  I examined, too, in thought, the possibility of my
ever being able to translate currently a certain little French story
which Madame Pierrot had that day shown me; nor was that problem solved
to my satisfaction ere I fell sweetly asleep.

Well has Solomon said--"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a
stalled ox and hatred therewith."

I would not now have exchanged Lowood with all its privations for
Gateshead and its daily luxuries.




CHAPTER IX


But the privations, or rather the hardships, of Lowood lessened.  Spring
drew on: she was indeed already come; the frosts of winter had ceased;
its snows were melted, its cutting winds ameliorated.  My wretched feet,
flayed and swollen to lameness by the sharp air of January, began to heal
and subside under the gentler breathings of April; the nights and
mornings no longer by their Canadian temperature froze the very blood in
our veins; we could now endure the play-hour passed in the garden:
sometimes on a sunny day it began even to be pleasant and genial, and a
greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested
the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning
brighter traces of her steps.  Flowers peeped out amongst the leaves;
snow-drops, crocuses, purple auriculas, and golden-eyed pansies.  On
Thursday afternoons (half-holidays) we now took walks, and found still
sweeter flowers opening by the wayside, under the hedges.

I discovered, too, that a great pleasure, an enjoyment which the horizon
only bounded, lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our
garden: this pleasure consisted in prospect of noble summits girdling a
great hill-hollow, rich in verdure and shadow; in a bright beck, full of
dark stones and sparkling eddies.  How different had this scene looked
when I viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in
frost, shrouded with snow!--when mists as chill as death wandered to the
impulse of east winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down "ing" and
holm till they blended with the frozen fog of the beck!  That beck itself
was then a torrent, turbid and curbless: it tore asunder the wood, and
sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or
whirling sleet; and for the forest on its banks, _that_ showed only ranks
of skeletons.

April advanced to May: a bright serene May it was; days of blue sky,
placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales filled up its
duration.  And now vegetation matured with vigour; Lowood shook loose its
tresses; it became all green, all flowery; its great elm, ash, and oak
skeletons were restored to majestic life; woodland plants sprang up
profusely in its recesses; unnumbered varieties of moss filled its
hollows, and it made a strange ground-sunshine out of the wealth of its
wild primrose plants: I have seen their pale gold gleam in overshadowed
spots like scatterings of the sweetest lustre.  All this I enjoyed often
and fully, free, unwatched, and almost alone: for this unwonted liberty
and pleasure there was a cause, to which it now becomes my task to
advert.

Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak of it
as bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream?
Assuredly, pleasant enough: but whether healthy or not is another
question.

That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred
pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the
Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and
dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an
hospital.

Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to
receive infection: forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one
time.  Classes were broken up, rules relaxed.  The few who continued well
were allowed almost unlimited license; because the medical attendant
insisted on the necessity of frequent exercise to keep them in health:
and had it been otherwise, no one had leisure to watch or restrain them.
Miss Temple's whole attention was absorbed by the patients: she lived in
the sick-room, never quitting it except to snatch a few hours' rest at
night.  The teachers were fully occupied with packing up and making other
necessary preparations for the departure of those girls who were
fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing to remove
them from the seat of contagion.  Many, already smitten, went home only
to die: some died at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly, the
nature of the malady forbidding delay.

While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its
frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while
its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the
pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that
bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out
of doors.  Its garden, too, glowed with flowers: hollyhocks had sprung up
tall as trees, lilies had opened, tulips and roses were in bloom; the
borders of the little beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double
daisies; the sweetbriars gave out, morning and evening, their scent of
spice and apples; and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most
of the inmates of Lowood, except to furnish now and then a handful of
herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin.

But I, and the rest who continued well, enjoyed fully the beauties of the
scene and season; they let us ramble in the wood, like gipsies, from
morning till night; we did what we liked, went where we liked: we lived
better too.  Mr. Brocklehurst and his family never came near Lowood now:
household matters were not scrutinised into; the cross housekeeper was
gone, driven away by the fear of infection; her successor, who had been
matron at the Lowton Dispensary, unused to the ways of her new abode,
provided with comparative liberality.  Besides, there were fewer to feed;
the sick could eat little; our breakfast-basins were better filled; when
there was no time to prepare a regular dinner, which often happened, she
would give us a large piece of cold pie, or a thick slice of bread and
cheese, and this we carried away with us to the wood, where we each chose
the spot we liked best, and dined sumptuously.

My favourite seat was a smooth and broad stone, rising white and dry from
the very middle of the beck, and only to be got at by wading through the
water; a feat I accomplished barefoot.  The stone was just broad enough
to accommodate, comfortably, another girl and me, at that time my chosen
comrade--one Mary Ann Wilson; a shrewd, observant personage, whose
society I took pleasure in, partly because she was witty and original,
and partly because she had a manner which set me at my ease.  Some years
older than I, she knew more of the world, and could tell me many things I
liked to hear: with her my curiosity found gratification: to my faults
also she gave ample indulgence, never imposing curb or rein on anything I
said.  She had a turn for narrative, I for analysis; she liked to inform,
I to question; so we got on swimmingly together, deriving much
entertainment, if not much improvement, from our mutual intercourse.

And where, meantime, was Helen Burns?  Why did I not spend these sweet
days of liberty with her?  Had I forgotten her? or was I so worthless as
to have grown tired of her pure society?  Surely the Mary Ann Wilson I
have mentioned was inferior to my first acquaintance: she could only tell
me amusing stories, and reciprocate any racy and pungent gossip I chose
to indulge in; while, if I have spoken truth of Helen, she was qualified
to give those who enjoyed the privilege of her converse a taste of far
higher things.

True, reader; and I knew and felt this: and though I am a defective
being, with many faults and few redeeming points, yet I never tired of
Helen Burns; nor ever ceased to cherish for her a sentiment of
attachment, as strong, tender, and respectful as any that ever animated
my heart.  How could it be otherwise, when Helen, at all times and under
all circumstances, evinced for me a quiet and faithful friendship, which
ill-humour never soured, nor irritation never troubled?  But Helen was
ill at present: for some weeks she had been removed from my sight to I
knew not what room upstairs.  She was not, I was told, in the hospital
portion of the house with the fever patients; for her complaint was
consumption, not typhus: and by consumption I, in my ignorance,
understood something mild, which time and care would be sure to
alleviate.

I was confirmed in this idea by the fact of her once or twice coming
downstairs on very warm sunny afternoons, and being taken by Miss Temple
into the garden; but, on these occasions, I was not allowed to go and
speak to her; I only saw her from the schoolroom window, and then not
distinctly; for she was much wrapped up, and sat at a distance under the
verandah.

One evening, in the beginning of June, I had stayed out very late with
Mary Ann in the wood; we had, as usual, separated ourselves from the
others, and had wandered far; so far that we lost our way, and had to ask
it at a lonely cottage, where a man and woman lived, who looked after a
herd of half-wild swine that fed on the mast in the wood.  When we got
back, it was after moonrise: a pony, which we knew to be the surgeon's,
was standing at the garden door.  Mary Ann remarked that she supposed
some one must be very ill, as Mr. Bates had been sent for at that time of
the evening.  She went into the house; I stayed behind a few minutes to
plant in my garden a handful of roots I had dug up in the forest, and
which I feared would wither if I left them till the morning.  This done,
I lingered yet a little longer: the flowers smelt so sweet as the dew
fell; it was such a pleasant evening, so serene, so warm; the still
glowing west promised so fairly another fine day on the morrow; the moon
rose with such majesty in the grave east.  I was noting these things and
enjoying them as a child might, when it entered my mind as it had never
done before:--

"How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying!
This world is pleasant--it would be dreary to be called from it, and to
have to go who knows where?"

And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had
been infused into it concerning heaven and hell; and for the first time
it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each
side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one
point where it stood--the present; all the rest was formless cloud and
vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging
amid that chaos.  While pondering this new idea, I heard the front door
open; Mr. Bates came out, and with him was a nurse.  After she had seen
him mount his horse and depart, she was about to close the door, but I
ran up to her.

"How is Helen Burns?"

"Very poorly," was the answer.

"Is it her Mr. Bates has been to see?"

"Yes."

"And what does he say about her?"

"He says she'll not be here long."

This phrase, uttered in my hearing yesterday, would have only conveyed
the notion that she was about to be removed to Northumberland, to her own
home.  I should not have suspected that it meant she was dying; but I
knew instantly now!  It opened clear on my comprehension that Helen Burns
was numbering her last days in this world, and that she was going to be
taken to the region of spirits, if such region there were.  I experienced
a shock of horror, then a strong thrill of grief, then a desire--a
necessity to see her; and I asked in what room she lay.

"She is in Miss Temple's room," said the nurse.

"May I go up and speak to her?"

"Oh no, child!  It is not likely; and now it is time for you to come in;
you'll catch the fever if you stop out when the dew is falling."

The nurse closed the front door; I went in by the side entrance which led
to the schoolroom: I was just in time; it was nine o'clock, and Miss
Miller was calling the pupils to go to bed.

It might be two hours later, probably near eleven, when I--not having
been able to fall asleep, and deeming, from the perfect silence of the
dormitory, that my companions were all wrapt in profound repose--rose
softly, put on my frock over my night-dress, and, without shoes, crept
from the apartment, and set off in quest of Miss Temple's room.  It was
quite at the other end of the house; but I knew my way; and the light of
the unclouded summer moon, entering here and there at passage windows,
enabled me to find it without difficulty.  An odour of camphor and burnt
vinegar warned me when I came near the fever room: and I passed its door
quickly, fearful lest the nurse who sat up all night should hear me.  I
dreaded being discovered and sent back; for I _must_ see Helen,--I must
embrace her before she died,--I must give her one last kiss, exchange
with her one last word.

Having descended a staircase, traversed a portion of the house below, and
succeeded in opening and shutting, without noise, two doors, I reached
another flight of steps; these I mounted, and then just opposite to me
was Miss Temple's room.  A light shone through the keyhole and from under
the door; a profound stillness pervaded the vicinity.  Coming near, I
found the door slightly ajar; probably to admit some fresh air into the
close abode of sickness.  Indisposed to hesitate, and full of impatient
impulses--soul and senses quivering with keen throes--I put it back and
looked in.  My eye sought Helen, and feared to find death.

Close by Miss Temple's bed, and half covered with its white curtains,
there stood a little crib.  I saw the outline of a form under the
clothes, but the face was hid by the hangings: the nurse I had spoken to
in the garden sat in an easy-chair asleep; an unsnuffed candle burnt
dimly on the table.  Miss Temple was not to be seen: I knew afterwards
that she had been called to a delirious patient in the fever-room.  I
advanced; then paused by the crib side: my hand was on the curtain, but I
preferred speaking before I withdrew it.  I still recoiled at the dread
of seeing a corpse.

"Helen!" I whispered softly, "are you awake?"

She stirred herself, put back the curtain, and I saw her face, pale,
wasted, but quite composed: she looked so little changed that my fear was
instantly dissipated.

"Can it be you, Jane?" she asked, in her own gentle voice.

"Oh!" I thought, "she is not going to die; they are mistaken: she could
not speak and look so calmly if she were."

I got on to her crib and kissed her: her forehead was cold, and her cheek
both cold and thin, and so were her hand and wrist; but she smiled as of
old.

"Why are you come here, Jane?  It is past eleven o'clock: I heard it
strike some minutes since."

"I came to see you, Helen: I heard you were very ill, and I could not
sleep till I had spoken to you."

"You came to bid me good-bye, then: you are just in time probably."

"Are you going somewhere, Helen?  Are you going home?"

"Yes; to my long home--my last home."

"No, no, Helen!"  I stopped, distressed.  While I tried to devour my
tears, a fit of coughing seized Helen; it did not, however, wake the
nurse; when it was over, she lay some minutes exhausted; then she
whispered--

"Jane, your little feet are bare; lie down and cover yourself with my
quilt."

I did so: she put her arm over me, and I nestled close to her.  After a
long silence, she resumed, still whispering--

"I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be
sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about.  We all must die
one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is
gentle and gradual: my mind is at rest.  I leave no one to regret me
much: I have only a father; and he is lately married, and will not miss
me.  By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings.  I had not
qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have
been continually at fault."

"But where are you going to, Helen?  Can you see?  Do you know?"

"I believe; I have faith: I am going to God."

"Where is God?  What is God?"

"My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created.  I rely
implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the
hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him,
reveal Him to me."

"You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven, and
that our souls can get to it when we die?"

"I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign
my immortal part to Him without any misgiving.  God is my father; God is
my friend: I love Him; I believe He loves me."

"And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?"

"You will come to the same region of happiness: be received by the same
mighty, universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane."

Again I questioned, but this time only in thought.  "Where is that
region?  Does it exist?"  And I clasped my arms closer round Helen; she
seemed dearer to me than ever; I felt as if I could not let her go; I lay
with my face hidden on her neck.  Presently she said, in the sweetest
tone--

"How comfortable I am!  That last fit of coughing has tired me a little;
I feel as if I could sleep: but don't leave me, Jane; I like to have you
near me."

"I'll stay with you, _dear_ Helen: no one shall take me away."

"Are you warm, darling?"

"Yes."

"Good-night, Jane."

"Good-night, Helen."

She kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered.

When I awoke it was day: an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I
was in somebody's arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through
the passage back to the dormitory.  I was not reprimanded for leaving my
bed; people had something else to think about; no explanation was
afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned
that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid
in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round
her neck.  I was asleep, and Helen was--dead.

Her grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard: for fifteen years after her
death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a grey marble tablet
marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word "Resurgam."




CHAPTER X


Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant
existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many
chapters.  But this is not to be a regular autobiography.  I am only
bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some
degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in
silence: a few lines only are necessary to keep up the links of
connection.

When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood,
it gradually disappeared from thence; but not till its virulence and the
number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school.  Inquiry
was made into the origin of the scourge, and by degrees various facts
came out which excited public indignation in a high degree.  The
unhealthy nature of the site; the quantity and quality of the children's
food; the brackish, fetid water used in its preparation; the pupils'
wretched clothing and accommodations--all these things were discovered,
and the discovery produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but
beneficial to the institution.

Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed
largely for the erection of a more convenient building in a better
situation; new regulations were made; improvements in diet and clothing
introduced; the funds of the school were intrusted to the management of a
committee.  Mr. Brocklehurst, who, from his wealth and family
connections, could not be overlooked, still retained the post of
treasurer; but he was aided in the discharge of his duties by gentlemen
of rather more enlarged and sympathising minds: his office of inspector,
too, was shared by those who knew how to combine reason with strictness,
comfort with economy, compassion with uprightness.  The school, thus
improved, became in time a truly useful and noble institution.  I
remained an inmate of its walls, after its regeneration, for eight years:
six as pupil, and two as teacher; and in both capacities I bear my
testimony to its value and importance.

During these eight years my life was uniform: but not unhappy, because it
was not inactive.  I had the means of an excellent education placed
within my reach; a fondness for some of my studies, and a desire to excel
in all, together with a great delight in pleasing my teachers, especially
such as I loved, urged me on: I availed myself fully of the advantages
offered me.  In time I rose to be the first girl of the first class; then
I was invested with the office of teacher; which I discharged with zeal
for two years: but at the end of that time I altered.

Miss Temple, through all changes, had thus far continued superintendent
of the seminary: to her instruction I owed the best part of my
acquirements; her friendship and society had been my continual solace;
she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly,
companion.  At this period she married, removed with her husband (a
clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant
county, and consequently was lost to me.

From the day she left I was no longer the same: with her was gone every
settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a
home to me.  I had imbibed from her something of her nature and much of
her habits: more harmonious thoughts: what seemed better regulated
feelings had become the inmates of my mind.  I had given in allegiance to
duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content: to the eyes of
others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued
character.

But destiny, in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, came between me and
Miss Temple: I saw her in her travelling dress step into a post-chaise,
shortly after the marriage ceremony; I watched the chaise mount the hill
and disappear beyond its brow; and then retired to my own room, and there
spent in solitude the greatest part of the half-holiday granted in honour
of the occasion.

I walked about the chamber most of the time.  I imagined myself only to
be regretting my loss, and thinking how to repair it; but when my
reflections were concluded, and I looked up and found that the afternoon
was gone, and evening far advanced, another discovery dawned on me,
namely, that in the interval I had undergone a transforming process; that
my mind had put off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple--or rather that
she had taken with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her
vicinity--and that now I was left in my natural element, and beginning to
feel the stirring of old emotions.  It did not seem as if a prop were
withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to
be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was no
more.  My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been
of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide,
and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and
excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse,
to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

I went to my window, opened it, and looked out.  There were the two wings
of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts of Lowood;
there was the hilly horizon.  My eye passed all other objects to rest on
those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those I longed to surmount; all
within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile
limits.  I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain,
and vanishing in a gorge between two; how I longed to follow it farther!
I recalled the time when I had travelled that very road in a coach; I
remembered descending that hill at twilight; an age seemed to have
elapsed since the day which brought me first to Lowood, and I had never
quitted it since.  My vacations had all been spent at school: Mrs. Reed
had never sent for me to Gateshead; neither she nor any of her family had
ever been to visit me.  I had had no communication by letter or message
with the outer world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits and
notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and
preferences, and antipathies--such was what I knew of existence.  And now
I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in
one afternoon.  I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I
uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.  I
abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus:
that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: "Then," I cried,
half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!"

Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs.

I was not free to resume the interrupted chain of my reflections till
bedtime: even then a teacher who occupied the same room with me kept me
from the subject to which I longed to recur, by a prolonged effusion of
small talk.  How I wished sleep would silence her.  It seemed as if,
could I but go back to the idea which had last entered my mind as I stood
at the window, some inventive suggestion would rise for my relief.

Miss Gryce snored at last; she was a heavy Welshwoman, and till now her
habitual nasal strains had never been regarded by me in any other light
than as a nuisance; to-night I hailed the first deep notes with
satisfaction; I was debarrassed of interruption; my half-effaced thought
instantly revived.

"A new servitude!  There is something in that," I soliloquised (mentally,
be it understood; I did not talk aloud), "I know there is, because it
does not sound too sweet; it is not like such words as Liberty,
Excitement, Enjoyment: delightful sounds truly; but no more than sounds
for me; and so hollow and fleeting that it is mere waste of time to
listen to them.  But Servitude!  That must be matter of fact.  Any one
may serve: I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve
elsewhere.  Can I not get so much of my own will?  Is not the thing
feasible?  Yes--yes--the end is not so difficult; if I had only a brain
active enough to ferret out the means of attaining it."

I sat up in bed by way of arousing this said brain: it was a chilly
night; I covered my shoulders with a shawl, and then I proceeded _to
think_ again with all my might.

"What do I want?  A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under
new circumstances: I want this because it is of no use wanting anything
better.  How do people do to get a new place?  They apply to friends, I
suppose: I have no friends.  There are many others who have no friends,
who must look about for themselves and be their own helpers; and what is
their resource?"

I could not tell: nothing answered me; I then ordered my brain to find a
response, and quickly.  It worked and worked faster: I felt the pulses
throb in my head and temples; but for nearly an hour it worked in chaos;
and no result came of its efforts.  Feverish with vain labour, I got up
and took a turn in the room; undrew the curtain, noted a star or two,
shivered with cold, and again crept to bed.

A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion
on my pillow; for as I lay down, it came quietly and naturally to my
mind.--"Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the
_---shire Herald_."

"How?  I know nothing about advertising."

Replies rose smooth and prompt now:--

"You must enclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a
cover directed to the editor of the _Herald_; you must put it, the first
opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed
to J.E., at the post-office there; you can go and inquire in about a week
after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly."

This scheme I went over twice, thrice; it was then digested in my mind; I
had it in a clear practical form: I felt satisfied, and fell asleep.

With earliest day, I was up: I had my advertisement written, enclosed,
and directed before the bell rang to rouse the school; it ran thus:--

"A young lady accustomed to tuition" (had I not been a teacher two
years?) "is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private family
where the children are under fourteen" (I thought that as I was barely
eighteen, it would not do to undertake the guidance of pupils nearer my
own age).  "She is qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English
education, together with French, Drawing, and Music" (in those days,
reader, this now narrow catalogue of accomplishments, would have been
held tolerably comprehensive).  "Address, J.E., Post-office, Lowton, ---
shire."

This document remained locked in my drawer all day: after tea, I asked
leave of the new superintendent to go to Lowton, in order to perform some
small commissions for myself and one or two of my fellow-teachers;
permission was readily granted; I went.  It was a walk of two miles, and
the evening was wet, but the days were still long; I visited a shop or
two, slipped the letter into the post-office, and came back through heavy
rain, with streaming garments, but with a relieved heart.

The succeeding week seemed long: it came to an end at last, however, like
all sublunary things, and once more, towards the close of a pleasant
autumn day, I found myself afoot on the road to Lowton.  A picturesque
track it was, by the way; lying along the side of the beck and through
the sweetest curves of the dale: but that day I thought more of the
letters, that might or might not be awaiting me at the little burgh
whither I was bound, than of the charms of lea and water.

My ostensible errand on this occasion was to get measured for a pair of
shoes; so I discharged that business first, and when it was done, I
stepped across the clean and quiet little street from the shoemaker's to
the post-office: it was kept by an old dame, who wore horn spectacles on
her nose, and black mittens on her hands.

"Are there any letters for J.E.?" I asked.

She peered at me over her spectacles, and then she opened a drawer and
fumbled among its contents for a long time, so long that my hopes began
to falter.  At last, having held a document before her glasses for nearly
five minutes, she presented it across the counter, accompanying the act
by another inquisitive and mistrustful glance--it was for J.E.

"Is there only one?" I demanded.

"There are no more," said she; and I put it in my pocket and turned my
face homeward: I could not open it then; rules obliged me to be back by
eight, and it was already half-past seven.

Various duties awaited me on my arrival.  I had to sit with the girls
during their hour of study; then it was my turn to read prayers; to see
them to bed: afterwards I supped with the other teachers.  Even when we
finally retired for the night, the inevitable Miss Gryce was still my
companion: we had only a short end of candle in our candlestick, and I
dreaded lest she should talk till it was all burnt out; fortunately,
however, the heavy supper she had eaten produced a soporific effect: she
was already snoring before I had finished undressing.  There still
remained an inch of candle: I now took out my letter; the seal was an
initial F.; I broke it; the contents were brief.

"If J.E., who advertised in the _---shire Herald_ of last Thursday,
possesses the acquirements mentioned, and if she is in a position to give
satisfactory references as to character and competency, a situation can
be offered her where there is but one pupil, a little girl, under ten
years of age; and where the salary is thirty pounds per annum.  J.E. is
requested to send references, name, address, and all particulars to the
direction:--

"Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield, near Millcote, ---shire."

I examined the document long: the writing was old-fashioned and rather
uncertain, like that of an elderly lady.  This circumstance was
satisfactory: a private fear had haunted me, that in thus acting for
myself, and by my own guidance, I ran the risk of getting into some
scrape; and, above all things, I wished the result of my endeavours to be
respectable, proper, _en regle_.  I now felt that an elderly lady was no
bad ingredient in the business I had on hand.  Mrs. Fairfax!  I saw her
in a black gown and widow's cap; frigid, perhaps, but not uncivil: a
model of elderly English respectability.  Thornfield! that, doubtless,
was the name of her house: a neat orderly spot, I was sure; though I
failed in my efforts to conceive a correct plan of the premises.
Millcote, ---shire; I brushed up my recollections of the map of England,
yes, I saw it; both the shire and the town.  ---shire was seventy miles
nearer London than the remote county where I now resided: that was a
recommendation to me.  I longed to go where there was life and movement:
Millcote was a large manufacturing town on the banks of the A-; a busy
place enough, doubtless: so much the better; it would be a complete
change at least.  Not that my fancy was much captivated by the idea of
long chimneys and clouds of smoke--"but," I argued, "Thornfield will,
probably, be a good way from the town."

Here the socket of the candle dropped, and the wick went out.

Next day new steps were to be taken; my plans could no longer be confined
to my own breast; I must impart them in order to achieve their success.
Having sought and obtained an audience of the superintendent during the
noontide recreation, I told her I had a prospect of getting a new
situation where the salary would be double what I now received (for at
Lowood I only got 15 pounds per annum); and requested she would break the
matter for me to Mr. Brocklehurst, or some of the committee, and
ascertain whether they would permit me to mention them as references.  She
obligingly consented to act as mediatrix in the matter.  The next day she
laid the affair before Mr. Brocklehurst, who said that Mrs. Reed must be
written to, as she was my natural guardian.  A note was accordingly
addressed to that lady, who returned for answer, that "I might do as I
pleased: she had long relinquished all interference in my affairs."  This
note went the round of the committee, and at last, after what appeared to
me most tedious delay, formal leave was given me to better my condition
if I could; and an assurance added, that as I had always conducted myself
well, both as teacher and pupil, at Lowood, a testimonial of character
and capacity, signed by the inspectors of that institution, should
forthwith be furnished me.

This testimonial I accordingly received in about a month, forwarded a
copy of it to Mrs. Fairfax, and got that lady's reply, stating that she
was satisfied, and fixing that day fortnight as the period for my
assuming the post of governess in her house.

I now busied myself in preparations: the fortnight passed rapidly.  I had
not a very large wardrobe, though it was adequate to my wants; and the
last day sufficed to pack my trunk,--the same I had brought with me eight
years ago from Gateshead.

The box was corded, the card nailed on.  In half-an-hour the carrier was
to call for it to take it to Lowton, whither I myself was to repair at an
early hour the next morning to meet the coach.  I had brushed my black
stuff travelling-dress, prepared my bonnet, gloves, and muff; sought in
all my drawers to see that no article was left behind; and now having
nothing more to do, I sat down and tried to rest.  I could not; though I
had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too
much excited.  A phase of my life was closing to-night, a new one opening
to-morrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly
while the change was being accomplished.

"Miss," said a servant who met me in the lobby, where I was wandering
like a troubled spirit, "a person below wishes to see you."

"The carrier, no doubt," I thought, and ran downstairs without inquiry.  I
was passing the back-parlour or teachers' sitting-room, the door of which
was half open, to go to the kitchen, when some one ran out--

"It's her, I am sure!--I could have told her anywhere!" cried the
individual who stopped my progress and took my hand.

I looked: I saw a woman attired like a well-dressed servant, matronly,
yet still young; very good-looking, with black hair and eyes, and lively
complexion.

"Well, who is it?" she asked, in a voice and with a smile I half
recognised; "you've not quite forgotten me, I think, Miss Jane?"

In another second I was embracing and kissing her rapturously: "Bessie!
Bessie!  Bessie!" that was all I said; whereat she half laughed, half
cried, and we both went into the parlour.  By the fire stood a little
fellow of three years old, in plaid frock and trousers.

"That is my little boy," said Bessie directly.

"Then you are married, Bessie?"

"Yes; nearly five years since to Robert Leaven, the coachman; and I've a
little girl besides Bobby there, that I've christened Jane."

"And you don't live at Gateshead?"

"I live at the lodge: the old porter has left."

"Well, and how do they all get on?  Tell me everything about them,
Bessie: but sit down first; and, Bobby, come and sit on my knee, will
you?" but Bobby preferred sidling over to his mother.

"You're not grown so very tall, Miss Jane, nor so very stout," continued
Mrs. Leaven.  "I dare say they've not kept you too well at school: Miss
Reed is the head and shoulders taller than you are; and Miss Georgiana
would make two of you in breadth."

"Georgiana is handsome, I suppose, Bessie?"

"Very.  She went up to London last winter with her mama, and there
everybody admired her, and a young lord fell in love with her: but his
relations were against the match; and--what do you think?--he and Miss
Georgiana made it up to run away; but they were found out and stopped.  It
was Miss Reed that found them out: I believe she was envious; and now she
and her sister lead a cat and dog life together; they are always
quarrelling--"

"Well, and what of John Reed?"

"Oh, he is not doing so well as his mama could wish.  He went to college,
and he got--plucked, I think they call it: and then his uncles wanted him
to be a barrister, and study the law: but he is such a dissipated young
man, they will never make much of him, I think."

"What does he look like?"

"He is very tall: some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he
has such thick lips."

"And Mrs. Reed?"

"Missis looks stout and well enough in the face, but I think she's not
quite easy in her mind: Mr. John's conduct does not please her--he spends
a deal of money."

"Did she send you here, Bessie?"

"No, indeed: but I have long wanted to see you, and when I heard that
there had been a letter from you, and that you were going to another part
of the country, I thought I'd just set off, and get a look at you before
you were quite out of my reach."

"I am afraid you are disappointed in me, Bessie."  I said this laughing:
I perceived that Bessie's glance, though it expressed regard, did in no
shape denote admiration.

"No, Miss Jane, not exactly: you are genteel enough; you look like a
lady, and it is as much as ever I expected of you: you were no beauty as
a child."

I smiled at Bessie's frank answer: I felt that it was correct, but I
confess I was not quite indifferent to its import: at eighteen most
people wish to please, and the conviction that they have not an exterior
likely to second that desire brings anything but gratification.

"I dare say you are clever, though," continued Bessie, by way of solace.
"What can you do?  Can you play on the piano?"

"A little."

There was one in the room; Bessie went and opened it, and then asked me
to sit down and give her a tune: I played a waltz or two, and she was
charmed.

"The Miss Reeds could not play as well!" said she exultingly.  "I always
said you would surpass them in learning: and can you draw?"

"That is one of my paintings over the chimney-piece."  It was a landscape
in water colours, of which I had made a present to the superintendent, in
acknowledgment of her obliging mediation with the committee on my behalf,
and which she had framed and glazed.

"Well, that is beautiful, Miss Jane!  It is as fine a picture as any Miss
Reed's drawing-master could paint, let alone the young ladies themselves,
who could not come near it: and have you learnt French?"

"Yes, Bessie, I can both read it and speak it."

"And you can work on muslin and canvas?"

"I can."

"Oh, you are quite a lady, Miss Jane!  I knew you would be: you will get
on whether your relations notice you or not.  There was something I
wanted to ask you.  Have you ever heard anything from your father's
kinsfolk, the Eyres?"

"Never in my life."

"Well, you know Missis always said they were poor and quite despicable:
and they may be poor; but I believe they are as much gentry as the Reeds
are; for one day, nearly seven years ago, a Mr. Eyre came to Gateshead
and wanted to see you; Missis said you were at school fifty miles off; he
seemed so much disappointed, for he could not stay: he was going on a
voyage to a foreign country, and the ship was to sail from London in a
day or two.  He looked quite a gentleman, and I believe he was your
father's brother."

"What foreign country was he going to, Bessie?"

"An island thousands of miles off, where they make wine--the butler did
tell me--"

"Madeira?" I suggested.

"Yes, that is it--that is the very word."

"So he went?"

"Yes; he did not stay many minutes in the house: Missis was very high
with him; she called him afterwards a 'sneaking tradesman.'  My Robert
believes he was a wine-merchant."

"Very likely," I returned; "or perhaps clerk or agent to a
wine-merchant."

Bessie and I conversed about old times an hour longer, and then she was
obliged to leave me: I saw her again for a few minutes the next morning
at Lowton, while I was waiting for the coach.  We parted finally at the
door of the Brocklehurst Arms there: each went her separate way; she set
off for the brow of Lowood Fell to meet the conveyance which was to take
her back to Gateshead, I mounted the vehicle which was to bear me to new
duties and a new life in the unknown environs of Millcote.




CHAPTER XI


A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and
when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a
room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on
the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such
ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George
the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of
the death of Wolfe.  All this is visible to you by the light of an oil
lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near
which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the
table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen
hours' exposure to the rawness of an October day: I left Lowton at four
o'clock a.m., and the Millcote town clock is now just striking eight.

Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in
my mind.  I thought when the coach stopped here there would be some one
to meet me; I looked anxiously round as I descended the wooden steps the
"boots" placed for my convenience, expecting to hear my name pronounced,
and to see some description of carriage waiting to convey me to
Thornfield.  Nothing of the sort was visible; and when I asked a waiter
if any one had been to inquire after a Miss Eyre, I was answered in the
negative: so I had no resource but to request to be shown into a private
room: and here I am waiting, while all sorts of doubts and fears are
troubling my thoughts.

It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself
quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain
whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by
many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.  The charm of
adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then
the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when
half-an-hour elapsed and still I was alone.  I bethought myself to ring
the bell.

"Is there a place in this neighbourhood called Thornfield?" I asked of
the waiter who answered the summons.

"Thornfield?  I don't know, ma'am; I'll inquire at the bar."  He
vanished, but reappeared instantly--

"Is your name Eyre, Miss?"

"Yes."

"Person here waiting for you."

I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the
inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit
street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance.

"This will be your luggage, I suppose?" said the man rather abruptly when
he saw me, pointing to my trunk in the passage.

"Yes."  He hoisted it on to the vehicle, which was a sort of car, and
then I got in; before he shut me up, I asked him how far it was to
Thornfield.

"A matter of six miles."

"How long shall we be before we get there?"

"Happen an hour and a half."

He fastened the car door, climbed to his own seat outside, and we set
off.  Our progress was leisurely, and gave me ample time to reflect; I
was content to be at length so near the end of my journey; and as I
leaned back in the comfortable though not elegant conveyance, I meditated
much at my ease.

"I suppose," thought I, "judging from the plainness of the servant and
carriage, Mrs. Fairfax is not a very dashing person: so much the better;
I never lived amongst fine people but once, and I was very miserable with
them.  I wonder if she lives alone except this little girl; if so, and if
she is in any degree amiable, I shall surely be able to get on with her;
I will do my best; it is a pity that doing one's best does not always
answer.  At Lowood, indeed, I took that resolution, kept it, and
succeeded in pleasing; but with Mrs. Reed, I remember my best was always
spurned with scorn.  I pray God Mrs. Fairfax may not turn out a second
Mrs. Reed; but if she does, I am not bound to stay with her! let the
worst come to the worst, I can advertise again.  How far are we on our
road now, I wonder?"

I let down the window and looked out; Millcote was behind us; judging by
the number of its lights, it seemed a place of considerable magnitude,
much larger than Lowton.  We were now, as far as I could see, on a sort
of common; but there were houses scattered all over the district; I felt
we were in a different region to Lowood, more populous, less picturesque;
more stirring, less romantic.

The roads were heavy, the night misty; my conductor let his horse walk
all the way, and the hour and a half extended, I verily believe, to two
hours; at last he turned in his seat and said--

"You're noan so far fro' Thornfield now."

Again I looked out: we were passing a church; I saw its low broad tower
against the sky, and its bell was tolling a quarter; I saw a narrow
galaxy of lights too, on a hillside, marking a village or hamlet.  About
ten minutes after, the driver got down and opened a pair of gates: we
passed through, and they clashed to behind us.  We now slowly ascended a
drive, and came upon the long front of a house: candlelight gleamed from
one curtained bow-window; all the rest were dark.  The car stopped at the
front door; it was opened by a maid-servant; I alighted and went in.

"Will you walk this way, ma'am?" said the girl; and I followed her across
a square hall with high doors all round: she ushered me into a room whose
double illumination of fire and candle at first dazzled me, contrasting
as it did with the darkness to which my eyes had been for two hours
inured; when I could see, however, a cosy and agreeable picture presented
itself to my view.

A snug small room; a round table by a cheerful fire; an arm-chair high-
backed and old-fashioned, wherein sat the neatest imaginable little
elderly lady, in widow's cap, black silk gown, and snowy muslin apron;
exactly like what I had fancied Mrs. Fairfax, only less stately and
milder looking.  She was occupied in knitting; a large cat sat demurely
at her feet; nothing in short was wanting to complete the beau-ideal of
domestic comfort.  A more reassuring introduction for a new governess
could scarcely be conceived; there was no grandeur to overwhelm, no
stateliness to embarrass; and then, as I entered, the old lady got up and
promptly and kindly came forward to meet me.

"How do you do, my dear?  I am afraid you have had a tedious ride; John
drives so slowly; you must be cold, come to the fire."

"Mrs. Fairfax, I suppose?" said I.

"Yes, you are right: do sit down."

She conducted me to her own chair, and then began to remove my shawl and
untie my bonnet-strings; I begged she would not give herself so much
trouble.

"Oh, it is no trouble; I dare say your own hands are almost numbed with
cold.  Leah, make a little hot negus and cut a sandwich or two: here are
the keys of the storeroom."

And she produced from her pocket a most housewifely bunch of keys, and
delivered them to the servant.

"Now, then, draw nearer to the fire," she continued.  "You've brought
your luggage with you, haven't you, my dear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'll see it carried into your room," she said, and bustled out.

"She treats me like a visitor," thought I.  "I little expected such a
reception; I anticipated only coldness and stiffness: this is not like
what I have heard of the treatment of governesses; but I must not exult
too soon."

She returned; with her own hands cleared her knitting apparatus and a
book or two from the table, to make room for the tray which Leah now
brought, and then herself handed me the refreshments.  I felt rather
confused at being the object of more attention than I had ever before
received, and, that too, shown by my employer and superior; but as she
did not herself seem to consider she was doing anything out of her place,
I thought it better to take her civilities quietly.

"Shall I have the pleasure of seeing Miss Fairfax to-night?" I asked,
when I had partaken of what she offered me.

"What did you say, my dear?  I am a little deaf," returned the good lady,
approaching her ear to my mouth.

I repeated the question more distinctly.

"Miss Fairfax?  Oh, you mean Miss Varens!  Varens is the name of your
future pupil."

"Indeed!  Then she is not your daughter?"

"No,--I have no family."

I should have followed up my first inquiry, by asking in what way Miss
Varens was connected with her; but I recollected it was not polite to ask
too many questions: besides, I was sure to hear in time.

"I am so glad," she continued, as she sat down opposite to me, and took
the cat on her knee; "I am so glad you are come; it will be quite
pleasant living here now with a companion.  To be sure it is pleasant at
any time; for Thornfield is a fine old hall, rather neglected of late
years perhaps, but still it is a respectable place; yet you know in
winter-time one feels dreary quite alone in the best quarters.  I say
alone--Leah is a nice girl to be sure, and John and his wife are very
decent people; but then you see they are only servants, and one can't
converse with them on terms of equality: one must keep them at due
distance, for fear of losing one's authority.  I'm sure last winter (it
was a very severe one, if you recollect, and when it did not snow, it
rained and blew), not a creature but the butcher and postman came to the
house, from November till February; and I really got quite melancholy
with sitting night after night alone; I had Leah in to read to me
sometimes; but I don't think the poor girl liked the task much: she felt
it confining.  In spring and summer one got on better: sunshine and long
days make such a difference; and then, just at the commencement of this
autumn, little Adela Varens came and her nurse: a child makes a house
alive all at once; and now you are here I shall be quite gay."

My heart really warmed to the worthy lady as I heard her talk; and I drew
my chair a little nearer to her, and expressed my sincere wish that she
might find my company as agreeable as she anticipated.

"But I'll not keep you sitting up late to-night," said she; "it is on the
stroke of twelve now, and you have been travelling all day: you must feel
tired.  If you have got your feet well warmed, I'll show you your
bedroom.  I've had the room next to mine prepared for you; it is only a
small apartment, but I thought you would like it better than one of the
large front chambers: to be sure they have finer furniture, but they are
so dreary and solitary, I never sleep in them myself."

I thanked her for her considerate choice, and as I really felt fatigued
with my long journey, expressed my readiness to retire.  She took her
candle, and I followed her from the room.  First she went to see if the
hall-door was fastened; having taken the key from the lock, she led the
way upstairs.  The steps and banisters were of oak; the staircase window
was high and latticed; both it and the long gallery into which the
bedroom doors opened looked as if they belonged to a church rather than a
house.  A very chill and vault-like air pervaded the stairs and gallery,
suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude; and I was glad, when
finally ushered into my chamber, to find it of small dimensions, and
furnished in ordinary, modern style.

When Mrs. Fairfax had bidden me a kind good-night, and I had fastened my
door, gazed leisurely round, and in some measure effaced the eerie
impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious staircase, and
that long, cold gallery, by the livelier aspect of my little room, I
remembered that, after a day of bodily fatigue and mental anxiety, I was
now at last in safe haven.  The impulse of gratitude swelled my heart,
and I knelt down at the bedside, and offered up thanks where thanks were
due; not forgetting, ere I rose, to implore aid on my further path, and
the power of meriting the kindness which seemed so frankly offered me
before it was earned.  My couch had no thorns in it that night; my
solitary room no fears.  At once weary and content, I slept soon and
soundly: when I awoke it was broad day.

The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in
between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered walls and a
carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood,
that my spirits rose at the view.  Externals have a great effect on the
young: I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that
was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils.
My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to
hope, seemed all astir.  I cannot precisely define what they expected,
but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at
an indefinite future period.

I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain--for I had no
article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity--I was still
by nature solicitous to be neat.  It was not my habit to be disregardful
of appearance or careless of the impression I made: on the contrary, I
ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want
of beauty would permit.  I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer;
I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry
mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I
felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so
irregular and so marked.  And why had I these aspirations and these
regrets?  It would be difficult to say: I could not then distinctly say
it to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too.
However, when I had brushed my hair very smooth, and put on my black
frock--which, Quakerlike as it was, at least had the merit of fitting to
a nicety--and adjusted my clean white tucker, I thought I should do
respectably enough to appear before Mrs. Fairfax, and that my new pupil
would not at least recoil from me with antipathy.  Having opened my
chamber window, and seen that I left all things straight and neat on the
toilet table, I ventured forth.

Traversing the long and matted gallery, I descended the slippery steps of
oak; then I gained the hall: I halted there a minute; I looked at some
pictures on the walls (one, I remember, represented a grim man in a
cuirass, and one a lady with powdered hair and a pearl necklace), at a
bronze lamp pendent from the ceiling, at a great clock whose case was of
oak curiously carved, and ebon black with time and rubbing.  Everything
appeared very stately and imposing to me; but then I was so little
accustomed to grandeur.  The hall-door, which was half of glass, stood
open; I stepped over the threshold.  It was a fine autumn morning; the
early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields;
advancing on to the lawn, I looked up and surveyed the front of the
mansion.  It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though
considerable: a gentleman's manor-house, not a nobleman's seat:
battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look.  Its grey front
stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing tenants
were now on the wing: they flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in a
great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where
an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as oaks, at
once explained the etymology of the mansion's designation.  Farther off
were hills: not so lofty as those round Lowood, nor so craggy, nor so
like barriers of separation from the living world; but yet quiet and
lonely hills enough, and seeming to embrace Thornfield with a seclusion I
had not expected to find existent so near the stirring locality of
Millcote.  A little hamlet, whose roofs were blent with trees, straggled
up the side of one of these hills; the church of the district stood
nearer Thornfield: its old tower-top looked over a knoll between the
house and gates.

I was yet enjoying the calm prospect and pleasant fresh air, yet
listening with delight to the cawing of the rooks, yet surveying the
wide, hoary front of the hall, and thinking what a great place it was for
one lonely little dame like Mrs. Fairfax to inhabit, when that lady
appeared at the door.

"What! out already?" said she.  "I see you are an early riser."  I went
up to her, and was received with an affable kiss and shake of the hand.

"How do you like Thornfield?" she asked.  I told her I liked it very
much.

"Yes," she said, "it is a pretty place; but I fear it will be getting out
of order, unless Mr. Rochester should take it into his head to come and
reside here permanently; or, at least, visit it rather oftener: great
houses and fine grounds require the presence of the proprietor."

"Mr. Rochester!" I exclaimed.  "Who is he?"

"The owner of Thornfield," she responded quietly.  "Did you not know he
was called Rochester?"

Of course I did not--I had never heard of him before; but the old lady
seemed to regard his existence as a universally understood fact, with
which everybody must be acquainted by instinct.

"I thought," I continued, "Thornfield belonged to you."

"To me?  Bless you, child; what an idea!  To me!  I am only the
housekeeper--the manager.  To be sure I am distantly related to the
Rochesters by the mother's side, or at least my husband was; he was a
clergyman, incumbent of Hay--that little village yonder on the hill--and
that church near the gates was his.  The present Mr. Rochester's mother
was a Fairfax, and second cousin to my husband: but I never presume on
the connection--in fact, it is nothing to me; I consider myself quite in
the light of an ordinary housekeeper: my employer is always civil, and I
expect nothing more."

"And the little girl--my pupil!"

"She is Mr. Rochester's ward; he commissioned me to find a governess for
her.  He intended to have her brought up in ---shire, I believe.  Here
she comes, with her 'bonne,' as she calls her nurse."  The enigma then
was explained: this affable and kind little widow was no great dame; but
a dependant like myself.  I did not like her the worse for that; on the
contrary, I felt better pleased than ever.  The equality between her and
me was real; not the mere result of condescension on her part: so much
the better--my position was all the freer.

As I was meditating on this discovery, a little girl, followed by her
attendant, came running up the lawn.  I looked at my pupil, who did not
at first appear to notice me: she was quite a child, perhaps seven or
eight years old, slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face, and a
redundancy of hair falling in curls to her waist.

"Good morning, Miss Adela," said Mrs. Fairfax.  "Come and speak to the
lady who is to teach you, and to make you a clever woman some day."  She
approached.

"C'est la ma gouverante!" said she, pointing to me, and addressing her
nurse; who answered--

"Mais oui, certainement."

"Are they foreigners?" I inquired, amazed at hearing the French language.

"The nurse is a foreigner, and Adela was born on the Continent; and, I
believe, never left it till within six months ago.  When she first came
here she could speak no English; now she can make shift to talk it a
little: I don't understand her, she mixes it so with French; but you will
make out her meaning very well, I dare say."

Fortunately I had had the advantage of being taught French by a French
lady; and as I had always made a point of conversing with Madame Pierrot
as often as I could, and had besides, during the last seven years, learnt
a portion of French by heart daily--applying myself to take pains with my
accent, and imitating as closely as possible the pronunciation of my
teacher, I had acquired a certain degree of readiness and correctness in
the language, and was not likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle
Adela.  She came and shook hand with me when she heard that I was her
governess; and as I led her in to breakfast, I addressed some phrases to
her in her own tongue: she replied briefly at first, but after we were
seated at the table, and she had examined me some ten minutes with her
large hazel eyes, she suddenly commenced chattering fluently.

"Ah!" cried she, in French, "you speak my language as well as Mr.
Rochester does: I can talk to you as I can to him, and so can Sophie.  She
will be glad: nobody here understands her: Madame Fairfax is all English.
Sophie is my nurse; she came with me over the sea in a great ship with a
chimney that smoked--how it did smoke!--and I was sick, and so was
Sophie, and so was Mr. Rochester.  Mr. Rochester lay down on a sofa in a
pretty room called the salon, and Sophie and I had little beds in another
place.  I nearly fell out of mine; it was like a shelf.  And
Mademoiselle--what is your name?"

"Eyre--Jane Eyre."

"Aire?  Bah!  I cannot say it.  Well, our ship stopped in the morning,
before it was quite daylight, at a great city--a huge city, with very
dark houses and all smoky; not at all like the pretty clean town I came
from; and Mr. Rochester carried me in his arms over a plank to the land,
and Sophie came after, and we all got into a coach, which took us to a
beautiful large house, larger than this and finer, called an hotel.  We
stayed there nearly a week: I and Sophie used to walk every day in a
great green place full of trees, called the Park; and there were many
children there besides me, and a pond with beautiful birds in it, that I
fed with crumbs."

"Can you understand her when she runs on so fast?" asked Mrs. Fairfax.

I understood her very well, for I had been accustomed to the fluent
tongue of Madame Pierrot.

"I wish," continued the good lady, "you would ask her a question or two
about her parents: I wonder if she remembers them?"

"Adele," I inquired, "with whom did you live when you were in that pretty
clean town you spoke of?"

"I lived long ago with mama; but she is gone to the Holy Virgin.  Mama
used to teach me to dance and sing, and to say verses.  A great many
gentlemen and ladies came to see mama, and I used to dance before them,
or to sit on their knees and sing to them: I liked it.  Shall I let you
hear me sing now?"

She had finished her breakfast, so I permitted her to give a specimen of
her accomplishments.  Descending from her chair, she came and placed
herself on my knee; then, folding her little hands demurely before her,
shaking back her curls and lifting her eyes to the ceiling, she commenced
singing a song from some opera.  It was the strain of a forsaken lady,
who, after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls pride to her aid;
desires her attendant to deck her in her brightest jewels and richest
robes, and resolves to meet the false one that night at a ball, and prove
to him, by the gaiety of her demeanour, how little his desertion has
affected her.

The subject seemed strangely chosen for an infant singer; but I suppose
the point of the exhibition lay in hearing the notes of love and jealousy
warbled with the lisp of childhood; and in very bad taste that point was:
at least I thought so.

Adele sang the canzonette tunefully enough, and with the _naivete_ of her
age.  This achieved, she jumped from my knee and said, "Now,
Mademoiselle, I will repeat you some poetry."

Assuming an attitude, she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La
Fontaine."  She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to
punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness
of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been
carefully trained.

"Was it your mama who taught you that piece?" I asked.

"Yes, and she just used to say it in this way: 'Qu' avez vous donc? lui
dit un de ces rats; parlez!'  She made me lift my hand--so--to remind me
to raise my voice at the question.  Now shall I dance for you?"

"No, that will do: but after your mama went to the Holy Virgin, as you
say, with whom did you live then?"

"With Madame Frederic and her husband: she took care of me, but she is
nothing related to me.  I think she is poor, for she had not so fine a
house as mama.  I was not long there.  Mr. Rochester asked me if I would
like to go and live with him in England, and I said yes; for I knew Mr.
Rochester before I knew Madame Frederic, and he was always kind to me and
gave me pretty dresses and toys: but you see he has not kept his word,
for he has brought me to England, and now he is gone back again himself,
and I never see him."

After breakfast, Adele and I withdrew to the library, which room, it
appears, Mr. Rochester had directed should be used as the schoolroom.
Most of the books were locked up behind glass doors; but there was one
bookcase left open containing everything that could be needed in the way
of elementary works, and several volumes of light literature, poetry,
biography, travels, a few romances, &c.  I suppose he had considered that
these were all the governess would require for her private perusal; and,
indeed, they contented me amply for the present; compared with the scanty
pickings I had now and then been able to glean at Lowood, they seemed to
offer an abundant harvest of entertainment and information.  In this
room, too, there was a cabinet piano, quite new and of superior tone;
also an easel for painting and a pair of globes.

I found my pupil sufficiently docile, though disinclined to apply: she
had not been used to regular occupation of any kind.  I felt it would be
injudicious to confine her too much at first; so, when I had talked to
her a great deal, and got her to learn a little, and when the morning had
advanced to noon, I allowed her to return to her nurse.  I then proposed
to occupy myself till dinner-time in drawing some little sketches for her
use.

As I was going upstairs to fetch my portfolio and pencils, Mrs. Fairfax
called to me: "Your morning school-hours are over now, I suppose," said
she.  She was in a room the folding-doors of which stood open: I went in
when she addressed me.  It was a large, stately apartment, with purple
chairs and curtains, a Turkey carpet, walnut-panelled walls, one vast
window rich in slanted glass, and a lofty ceiling, nobly moulded.  Mrs.
Fairfax was dusting some vases of fine purple spar, which stood on a
sideboard.

"What a beautiful room!" I exclaimed, as I looked round; for I had never
before seen any half so imposing.

"Yes; this is the dining-room.  I have just opened the window, to let in
a little air and sunshine; for everything gets so damp in apartments that
are seldom inhabited; the drawing-room yonder feels like a vault."

She pointed to a wide arch corresponding to the window, and hung like it
with a Tyrian-dyed curtain, now looped up.  Mounting to it by two broad
steps, and looking through, I thought I caught a glimpse of a fairy
place, so bright to my novice-eyes appeared the view beyond.  Yet it was
merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread
with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers;
both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine-leaves, beneath
which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the
ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemian
glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the
general blending of snow and fire.

"In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!" said I.  "No dust, no
canvas coverings: except that the air feels chilly, one would think they
were inhabited daily."

"Why, Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester's visits here are rare, they are
always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to
find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his
arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness."

"Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?"

"Not particularly so; but he has a gentleman's tastes and habits, and he
expects to have things managed in conformity to them."

"Do you like him?  Is he generally liked?"

"Oh, yes; the family have always been respected here.  Almost all the
land in this neighbourhood, as far as you can see, has belonged to the
Rochesters time out of mind."

"Well, but, leaving his land out of the question, do you like him?  Is he
liked for himself?"

"I have no cause to do otherwise than like him; and I believe he is
considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants: but he has never
lived much amongst them."

"But has he no peculiarities?  What, in short, is his character?"

"Oh! his character is unimpeachable, I suppose.  He is rather peculiar,
perhaps: he has travelled a great deal, and seen a great deal of the
world, I should think.  I dare say he is clever, but I never had much
conversation with him."

"In what way is he peculiar?"

"I don't know--it is not easy to describe--nothing striking, but you feel
it when he speaks to you; you cannot be always sure whether he is in jest
or earnest, whether he is pleased or the contrary; you don't thoroughly
understand him, in short--at least, I don't: but it is of no consequence,
he is a very good master."

This was all the account I got from Mrs. Fairfax of her employer and
mine.  There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a
character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons
or things: the good lady evidently belonged to this class; my queries
puzzled, but did not draw her out.  Mr. Rochester was Mr. Rochester in
her eyes; a gentleman, a landed proprietor--nothing more: she inquired
and searched no further, and evidently wondered at my wish to gain a more
definite notion of his identity.

When we left the dining-room, she proposed to show me over the rest of
the house; and I followed her upstairs and downstairs, admiring as I
went; for all was well arranged and handsome.  The large front chambers I
thought especially grand: and some of the third-storey rooms, though dark
and low, were interesting from their air of antiquity.  The furniture
once appropriated to the lower apartments had from time to time been
removed here, as fashions changed: and the imperfect light entering by
their narrow casement showed bedsteads of a hundred years old; chests in
oak or walnut, looking, with their strange carvings of palm branches and
cherubs' heads, like types of the Hebrew ark; rows of venerable chairs,
high-backed and narrow; stools still more antiquated, on whose cushioned
tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by
fingers that for two generations had been coffin-dust.  All these relics
gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the
past: a shrine of memory.  I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of
these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on
one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of
oak; shaded, others, with wrought old English hangings crusted with thick
work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and
strangest human beings,--all which would have looked strange, indeed, by
the pallid gleam of moonlight.

"Do the servants sleep in these rooms?" I asked.

"No; they occupy a range of smaller apartments to the back; no one ever
sleeps here: one would almost say that, if there were a ghost at
Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt."

"So I think: you have no ghost, then?"

"None that I ever heard of," returned Mrs. Fairfax, smiling.

"Nor any traditions of one? no legends or ghost stories?"

"I believe not.  And yet it is said the Rochesters have been rather a
violent than a quiet race in their time: perhaps, though, that is the
reason they rest tranquilly in their graves now."

"Yes--'after life's fitful fever they sleep well,'" I muttered.  "Where
are you going now, Mrs. Fairfax?" for she was moving away.

"On to the leads; will you come and see the view from thence?"  I
followed still, up a very narrow staircase to the attics, and thence by a
ladder and through a trap-door to the roof of the hall.  I was now on a
level with the crow colony, and could see into their nests.  Leaning over
the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out
like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the grey base of
the mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber;
the wood, dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with
moss than the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road,
the tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun; the horizon
bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white.  No
feature in the scene was extraordinary, but all was pleasing.  When I
turned from it and repassed the trap-door, I could scarcely see my way
down the ladder; the attic seemed black as a vault compared with that
arch of blue air to which I had been looking up, and to that sunlit scene
of grove, pasture, and green hill, of which the hall was the centre, and
over which I had been gazing with delight.

Mrs. Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trap-door; I, by drift
of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the
narrow garret staircase.  I lingered in the long passage to which this
led, separating the front and back rooms of the third storey: narrow,
low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking,
with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some
Bluebeard's castle.

While I paced softly on, the last sound I expected to hear in so still a
region, a laugh, struck my ear.  It was a curious laugh; distinct,
formal, mirthless.  I stopped: the sound ceased, only for an instant; it
began again, louder: for at first, though distinct, it was very low.  It
passed off in a clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every
lonely chamber; though it originated but in one, and I could have pointed
out the door whence the accents issued.

"Mrs. Fairfax!" I called out: for I now heard her descending the great
stairs.  "Did you hear that loud laugh?  Who is it?"

"Some of the servants, very likely," she answered: "perhaps Grace Poole."

"Did you hear it?" I again inquired.

"Yes, plainly: I often hear her: she sews in one of these rooms.
Sometimes Leah is with her; they are frequently noisy together."

The laugh was repeated in its low, syllabic tone, and terminated in an
odd murmur.

"Grace!" exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax.

I really did not expect any Grace to answer; for the laugh was as tragic,
as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it was high
noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious
cachinnation; but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should
have been superstitiously afraid.  However, the event showed me I was a
fool for entertaining a sense even of surprise.

The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out,--a woman of between
thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a hard,
plain face: any apparition less romantic or less ghostly could scarcely
be conceived.

"Too much noise, Grace," said Mrs. Fairfax.  "Remember directions!"  Grace
curtseyed silently and went in.

"She is a person we have to sew and assist Leah in her housemaid's work,"
continued the widow; "not altogether unobjectionable in some points, but
she does well enough.  By-the-bye, how have you got on with your new
pupil this morning?"

The conversation, thus turned on Adele, continued till we reached the
light and cheerful region below.  Adele came running to meet us in the
hall, exclaiming--

"Mesdames, vous etes servies!" adding, "J'ai bien faim, moi!"

We found dinner ready, and waiting for us in Mrs. Fairfax's room.




CHAPTER XII


The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to
Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance
with the place and its inmates.  Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she
appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education
and average intelligence.  My pupil was a lively child, who had been
spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as she was
committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any
quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her
little freaks, and became obedient and teachable.  She had no great
talents, no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of
feeling or taste which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of
childhood; but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her
below it.  She made reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious,
though perhaps not very profound, affection; and by her simplicity, gay
prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of
attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other's society.

This, _par parenthese_, will be thought cool language by persons who
entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the
duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an
idolatrous devotion: but I am not writing to flatter parental egotism, to
echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.  I felt a
conscientious solicitude for Adele's welfare and progress, and a quiet
liking for her little self: just as I cherished towards Mrs. Fairfax a
thankfulness for her kindness, and a pleasure in her society
proportionate to the tranquil regard she had for me, and the moderation
of her mind and character.

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then,
when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the
gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played
with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed
the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having
reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and
along dim sky-line--that then I longed for a power of vision which might
overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions
full of life I had heard of but never seen--that then I desired more of
practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind,
of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.
I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I
believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and
what I believed in I wished to behold.

Who blames me?  Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented.  I
could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to
pain sometimes.  Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of
the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and
solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright
visions rose before it--and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to
let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled
it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward
ear to a tale that was never ended--a tale my imagination created, and
narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire,
feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with
tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot
find it.  Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and
millions are in silent revolt against their lot.  Nobody knows how many
rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life
which people earth.  Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but
women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and
a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from
too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would
suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures
to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and
knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.  It is
thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or
learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh: the same
peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had thrilled
me: I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.  There
were days when she was quite silent; but there were others when I could
not account for the sounds she made.  Sometimes I saw her: she would come
out of her room with a basin, or a plate, or a tray in her hand, go down
to the kitchen and shortly return, generally (oh, romantic reader,
forgive me for telling the plain truth!) bearing a pot of porter.  Her
appearance always acted as a damper to the curiosity raised by her oral
oddities: hard-featured and staid, she had no point to which interest
could attach.  I made some attempts to draw her into conversation, but
she seemed a person of few words: a monosyllabic reply usually cut short
every effort of that sort.

The other members of the household, viz., John and his wife, Leah the
housemaid, and Sophie the French nurse, were decent people; but in no
respect remarkable; with Sophie I used to talk French, and sometimes I
asked her questions about her native country; but she was not of a
descriptive or narrative turn, and generally gave such vapid and confused
answers as were calculated rather to check than encourage inquiry.

October, November, December passed away.  One afternoon in January, Mrs.
Fairfax had begged a holiday for Adele, because she had a cold; and, as
Adele seconded the request with an ardour that reminded me how precious
occasional holidays had been to me in my own childhood, I accorded it,
deeming that I did well in showing pliability on the point.  It was a
fine, calm day, though very cold; I was tired of sitting still in the
library through a whole long morning: Mrs. Fairfax had just written a
letter which was waiting to be posted, so I put on my bonnet and cloak
and volunteered to carry it to Hay; the distance, two miles, would be a
pleasant winter afternoon walk.  Having seen Adele comfortably seated in
her little chair by Mrs. Fairfax's parlour fireside, and given her her
best wax doll (which I usually kept enveloped in silver paper in a
drawer) to play with, and a story-book for change of amusement; and
having replied to her "Revenez bientot, ma bonne amie, ma chere Mdlle.
Jeannette," with a kiss I set out.

The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely; I walked fast
till I got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and analyse the
species of pleasure brooding for me in the hour and situation.  It was
three o'clock; the church bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the
charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and
pale-beaming sun.  I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild
roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now
possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter
delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose.  If a breath of
air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an
evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as
still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path.
Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now
browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the
hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.

This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay; having reached the middle,
I sat down on a stile which led thence into a field.  Gathering my mantle
about me, and sheltering my hands in my muff, I did not feel the cold,
though it froze keenly; as was attested by a sheet of ice covering the
causeway, where a little brooklet, now congealed, had overflowed after a
rapid thaw some days since.  From my seat I could look down on
Thornfield: the grey and battlemented hall was the principal object in
the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose against the west.  I
lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and
clear behind them.  I then turned eastward.

On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but
brightening momentarily, she looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees,
sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys: it was yet a mile distant,
but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.
My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could
not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks
threading their passes.  That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of
the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.

A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so
far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic clatter, which
effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass of a
crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the
foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and
blended clouds where tint melts into tint.

The din was on the causeway: a horse was coming; the windings of the lane
yet hid it, but it approached.  I was just leaving the stile; yet, as the
path was narrow, I sat still to let it go by.  In those days I was young,
and all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories
of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish; and when they
recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what
childhood could give.  As this horse approached, and as I watched for it
to appear through the dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie's tales,
wherein figured a North-of-England spirit called a "Gytrash," which, in
the form of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways, and
sometimes came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now coming upon
me.

It was very near, but not yet in sight; when, in addition to the tramp,
tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the hazel stems
glided a great dog, whose black and white colour made him a distinct
object against the trees.  It was exactly one form of Bessie's Gytrash--a
lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head: it passed me, however,
quietly enough; not staying to look up, with strange pretercanine eyes,
in my face, as I half expected it would.  The horse followed,--a tall
steed, and on its back a rider.  The man, the human being, broke the
spell at once.  Nothing ever rode the Gytrash: it was always alone; and
goblins, to my notions, though they might tenant the dumb carcasses of
beasts, could scarce covet shelter in the commonplace human form.  No
Gytrash was this,--only a traveller taking the short cut to Millcote.  He
passed, and I went on; a few steps, and I turned: a sliding sound and an
exclamation of "What the deuce is to do now?" and a clattering tumble,
arrested my attention.  Man and horse were down; they had slipped on the
sheet of ice which glazed the causeway.  The dog came bounding back, and
seeing his master in a predicament, and hearing the horse groan, barked
till the evening hills echoed the sound, which was deep in proportion to
his magnitude.  He snuffed round the prostrate group, and then he ran up
to me; it was all he could do,--there was no other help at hand to
summon.  I obeyed him, and walked down to the traveller, by this time
struggling himself free of his steed.  His efforts were so vigorous, I
thought he could not be much hurt; but I asked him the question--

"Are you injured, sir?"

I think he was swearing, but am not certain; however, he was pronouncing
some formula which prevented him from replying to me directly.

"Can I do anything?" I asked again.

"You must just stand on one side," he answered as he rose, first to his
knees, and then to his feet.  I did; whereupon began a heaving, stamping,
clattering process, accompanied by a barking and baying which removed me
effectually some yards' distance; but I would not be driven quite away
till I saw the event.  This was finally fortunate; the horse was
re-established, and the dog was silenced with a "Down, Pilot!"  The
traveller now, stooping, felt his foot and leg, as if trying whether they
were sound; apparently something ailed them, for he halted to the stile
whence I had just risen, and sat down.

I was in the mood for being useful, or at least officious, I think, for I
now drew near him again.

"If you are hurt, and want help, sir, I can fetch some one either from
Thornfield Hall or from Hay."

"Thank you: I shall do: I have no broken bones,--only a sprain;" and
again he stood up and tried his foot, but the result extorted an
involuntary "Ugh!"

Something of daylight still lingered, and the moon was waxing bright: I
could see him plainly.  His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, fur
collared and steel clasped; its details were not apparent, but I traced
the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest.  He
had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and
gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth,
but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five.  I felt
no fear of him, and but little shyness.  Had he been a handsome, heroic-
looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus
questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked.  I
had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one.  I
had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry,
fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape,
I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have
sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would
fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.

If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humoured to me when I
addressed him; if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with
thanks, I should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew
inquiries: but the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my
ease: I retained my station when he waved to me to go, and announced--

"I cannot think of leaving you, sir, at so late an hour, in this solitary
lane, till I see you are fit to mount your horse."

He looked at me when I said this; he had hardly turned his eyes in my
direction before.

"I should think you ought to be at home yourself," said he, "if you have
a home in this neighbourhood: where do you come from?"

"From just below; and I am not at all afraid of being out late when it is
moonlight: I will run over to Hay for you with pleasure, if you wish it:
indeed, I am going there to post a letter."

"You live just below--do you mean at that house with the battlements?"
pointing to Thornfield Hall, on which the moon cast a hoary gleam,
bringing it out distinct and pale from the woods that, by contrast with
the western sky, now seemed one mass of shadow.

"Yes, sir."

"Whose house is it?"

"Mr. Rochester's."

"Do you know Mr. Rochester?"

"No, I have never seen him."

"He is not resident, then?"

"No."

"Can you tell me where he is?"

"I cannot."

"You are not a servant at the hall, of course.  You are--"  He stopped,
ran his eye over my dress, which, as usual, was quite simple: a black
merino cloak, a black beaver bonnet; neither of them half fine enough for
a lady's-maid.  He seemed puzzled to decide what I was; I helped him.

"I am the governess."

"Ah, the governess!" he repeated; "deuce take me, if I had not forgotten!
The governess!" and again my raiment underwent scrutiny.  In two minutes
he rose from the stile: his face expressed pain when he tried to move.

"I cannot commission you to fetch help," he said; "but you may help me a
little yourself, if you will be so kind."

"Yes, sir."

"You have not an umbrella that I can use as a stick?"

"No."

"Try to get hold of my horse's bridle and lead him to me: you are not
afraid?"

I should have been afraid to touch a horse when alone, but when told to
do it, I was disposed to obey.  I put down my muff on the stile, and went
up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a
spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on
effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling
fore-feet.  The traveller waited and watched for some time, and at last
he laughed.

{I was mortally afraid of its trampling forefeet: p107.jpg}

"I see," he said, "the mountain will never be brought to Mahomet, so all
you can do is to aid Mahomet to go to the mountain; I must beg of you to
come here."

I came.  "Excuse me," he continued: "necessity compels me to make you
useful."  He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on me with
some stress, limped to his horse.  Having once caught the bridle, he
mastered it directly and sprang to his saddle; grimacing grimly as he
made the effort, for it wrenched his sprain.

"Now," said he, releasing his under lip from a hard bite, "just hand me
my whip; it lies there under the hedge."

I sought it and found it.

"Thank you; now make haste with the letter to Hay, and return as fast as
you can."

A touch of a spurred heel made his horse first start and rear, and then
bound away; the dog rushed in his traces; all three vanished,

   "Like heath that, in the wilderness,
   The wild wind whirls away."

I took up my muff and walked on.  The incident had occurred and was gone
for me: it _was_ an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a
sense; yet it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life.  My
help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have
done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an
active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.  The new face,
too, was like a new picture introduced to the gallery of memory; and it
was dissimilar to all the others hanging there: firstly, because it was
masculine; and, secondly, because it was dark, strong, and stern.  I had
it still before me when I entered Hay, and slipped the letter into the
post-office; I saw it as I walked fast down-hill all the way home.  When
I came to the stile, I stopped a minute, looked round and listened, with
an idea that a horse's hoofs might ring on the causeway again, and that a
rider in a cloak, and a Gytrash-like Newfoundland dog, might be again
apparent: I saw only the hedge and a pollard willow before me, rising up
still and straight to meet the moonbeams; I heard only the faintest waft
of wind roaming fitful among the trees round Thornfield, a mile distant;
and when I glanced down in the direction of the murmur, my eye,
traversing the hall-front, caught a light kindling in a window: it
reminded me that I was late, and I hurried on.

I did not like re-entering Thornfield.  To pass its threshold was to
return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome
staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil
Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only,
was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,--to slip
again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still
existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I
was becoming incapable of appreciating.  What good it would have done me
at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling
life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for
the calm amidst which I now repined!  Yes, just as much good as it would
do a man tired of sitting still in a "too easy chair" to take a long
walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances,
as it would be under his.

I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and
forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I
could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn
from the gloomy house--from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as
it appeared to me--to that sky expanded before me,--a blue sea absolved
from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb
seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had
come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark
in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling
stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow
when I viewed them.  Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck
in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-
door, and went in.

The hall was not dark, nor yet was it lit, only by the high-hung bronze
lamp; a warm glow suffused both it and the lower steps of the oak
staircase.  This ruddy shine issued from the great dining-room, whose two-
leaved door stood open, and showed a genial fire in the grate, glancing
on marble hearth and brass fire-irons, and revealing purple draperies and
polished furniture, in the most pleasant radiance.  It revealed, too, a
group near the mantelpiece: I had scarcely caught it, and scarcely become
aware of a cheerful mingling of voices, amongst which I seemed to
distinguish the tones of Adele, when the door closed.

I hastened to Mrs. Fairfax's room; there was a fire there too, but no
candle, and no Mrs. Fairfax.  Instead, all alone, sitting upright on the
rug, and gazing with gravity at the blaze, I beheld a great black and
white long-haired dog, just like the Gytrash of the lane.  It was so like
it that I went forward and said--"Pilot" and the thing got up and came to
me and snuffed me.  I caressed him, and he wagged his great tail; but he
looked an eerie creature to be alone with, and I could not tell whence he
had come.  I rang the bell, for I wanted a candle; and I wanted, too, to
get an account of this visitant.  Leah entered.

"What dog is this?"

"He came with master."

"With whom?"

"With master--Mr. Rochester--he is just arrived."

"Indeed! and is Mrs. Fairfax with him?"

"Yes, and Miss Adele; they are in the dining-room, and John is gone for a
surgeon; for master has had an accident; his horse fell and his ankle is
sprained."

"Did the horse fall in Hay Lane?"

"Yes, coming down-hill; it slipped on some ice."

"Ah!  Bring me a candle will you Leah?"

Leah brought it; she entered, followed by Mrs. Fairfax, who repeated the
news; adding that Mr. Carter the surgeon was come, and was now with Mr.
Rochester: then she hurried out to give orders about tea, and I went
upstairs to take off my things.




CHAPTER XIII


Mr. Rochester, it seems, by the surgeon's orders, went to bed early that
night; nor did he rise soon next morning.  When he did come down, it was
to attend to business: his agent and some of his tenants were arrived,
and waiting to speak with him.

Adele and I had now to vacate the library: it would be in daily
requisition as a reception-room for callers.  A fire was lit in an
apartment upstairs, and there I carried our books, and arranged it for
the future schoolroom.  I discerned in the course of the morning that
Thornfield Hall was a changed place: no longer silent as a church, it
echoed every hour or two to a knock at the door, or a clang of the bell;
steps, too, often traversed the hall, and new voices spoke in different
keys below; a rill from the outer world was flowing through it; it had a
master: for my part, I liked it better.

Adele was not easy to teach that day; she could not apply: she kept
running to the door and looking over the banisters to see if she could
get a glimpse of Mr. Rochester; then she coined pretexts to go
downstairs, in order, as I shrewdly suspected, to visit the library,
where I knew she was not wanted; then, when I got a little angry, and
made her sit still, she continued to talk incessantly of her "ami,
Monsieur Edouard Fairfax _de_ Rochester," as she dubbed him (I had not
before heard his prenomens), and to conjecture what presents he had
brought her: for it appears he had intimated the night before, that when
his luggage came from Millcote, there would be found amongst it a little
box in whose contents she had an interest.

"Et cela doit signifier," said she, "qu'il y aura la dedans un cadeau
pour moi, et peut-etre pour vous aussi, mademoiselle.  Monsieur a parle
de vous: il m'a demande le nom de ma gouvernante, et si elle n'etait pas
une petite personne, assez mince et un peu pale.  J'ai dit qu'oui: car
c'est vrai, n'est-ce pas, mademoiselle?"

I and my pupil dined as usual in Mrs. Fairfax's parlour; the afternoon
was wild and snowy, and we passed it in the schoolroom.  At dark I
allowed Adele to put away books and work, and to run downstairs; for,
from the comparative silence below, and from the cessation of appeals to
the door-bell, I conjectured that Mr. Rochester was now at liberty.  Left
alone, I walked to the window; but nothing was to be seen thence:
twilight and snowflakes together thickened the air, and hid the very
shrubs on the lawn.  I let down the curtain and went back to the
fireside.

In the clear embers I was tracing a view, not unlike a picture I
remembered to have seen of the castle of Heidelberg, on the Rhine, when
Mrs. Fairfax came in, breaking up by her entrance the fiery mosaic I had
been piercing together, and scattering too some heavy unwelcome thoughts
that were beginning to throng on my solitude.

"Mr. Rochester would be glad if you and your pupil would take tea with
him in the drawing-room this evening," said she: "he has been so much
engaged all day that he could not ask to see you before."

"When is his tea-time?" I inquired.

"Oh, at six o'clock: he keeps early hours in the country.  You had better
change your frock now; I will go with you and fasten it.  Here is a
candle."

"Is it necessary to change my frock?"

"Yes, you had better: I always dress for the evening when Mr. Rochester
is here."

This additional ceremony seemed somewhat stately; however, I repaired to
my room, and, with Mrs. Fairfax's aid, replaced my black stuff dress by
one of black silk; the best and the only additional one I had, except one
of light grey, which, in my Lowood notions of the toilette, I thought too
fine to be worn, except on first-rate occasions.

"You want a brooch," said Mrs. Fairfax.  I had a single little pearl
ornament which Miss Temple gave me as a parting keepsake: I put it on,
and then we went downstairs.  Unused as I was to strangers, it was rather
a trial to appear thus formally summoned in Mr. Rochester's presence.  I
let Mrs. Fairfax precede me into the dining-room, and kept in her shade
as we crossed that apartment; and, passing the arch, whose curtain was
now dropped, entered the elegant recess beyond.

Two wax candles stood lighted on the table, and two on the mantelpiece;
basking in the light and heat of a superb fire, lay Pilot--Adele knelt
near him.  Half reclined on a couch appeared Mr. Rochester, his foot
supported by the cushion; he was looking at Adele and the dog: the fire
shone full on his face.  I knew my traveller with his broad and jetty
eyebrows; his square forehead, made squarer by the horizontal sweep of
his black hair.  I recognised his decisive nose, more remarkable for
character than beauty; his full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler;
his grim mouth, chin, and jaw--yes, all three were very grim, and no
mistake.  His shape, now divested of cloak, I perceived harmonised in
squareness with his physiognomy: I suppose it was a good figure in the
athletic sense of the term--broad chested and thin flanked, though
neither tall nor graceful.

Mr. Rochester must have been aware of the entrance of Mrs. Fairfax and
myself; but it appeared he was not in the mood to notice us, for he never
lifted his head as we approached.

"Here is Miss Eyre, sir," said Mrs. Fairfax, in her quiet way.  He bowed,
still not taking his eyes from the group of the dog and child.

"Let Miss Eyre be seated," said he: and there was something in the forced
stiff bow, in the impatient yet formal tone, which seemed further to
express, "What the deuce is it to me whether Miss Eyre be there or not?
At this moment I am not disposed to accost her."

I sat down quite disembarrassed.  A reception of finished politeness
would probably have confused me: I could not have returned or repaid it
by answering grace and elegance on my part; but harsh caprice laid me
under no obligation; on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the
freak of manner, gave me the advantage.  Besides, the eccentricity of the
proceeding was piquant: I felt interested to see how he would go on.

He went on as a statue would, that is, he neither spoke nor moved.  Mrs.
Fairfax seemed to think it necessary that some one should be amiable, and
she began to talk.  Kindly, as usual--and, as usual, rather trite--she
condoled with him on the pressure of business he had had all day; on the
annoyance it must have been to him with that painful sprain: then she
commended his patience and perseverance in going through with it.

"Madam, I should like some tea," was the sole rejoinder she got.  She
hastened to ring the bell; and when the tray came, she proceeded to
arrange the cups, spoons, &c., with assiduous celerity.  I and Adele went
to the table; but the master did not leave his couch.

"Will you hand Mr. Rochester's cup?" said Mrs. Fairfax to me; "Adele
might perhaps spill it."

I did as requested.  As he took the cup from my hand, Adele, thinking the
moment propitious for making a request in my favour, cried out--

"N'est-ce pas, monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre dans
votre petit coffre?"

"Who talks of cadeaux?" said he gruffly.  "Did you expect a present, Miss
Eyre?  Are you fond of presents?" and he searched my face with eyes that
I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.

"I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them: they are generally
thought pleasant things."

"Generally thought?  But what do _you_ think?"

"I should be obliged to take time, sir, before I could give you an answer
worthy of your acceptance: a present has many faces to it, has it not?
and one should consider all, before pronouncing an opinion as to its
nature."

"Miss Eyre, you are not so unsophisticated as Adele: she demands a
'cadeau,' clamorously, the moment she sees me: you beat about the bush."

"Because I have less confidence in my deserts than Adele has: she can
prefer the claim of old acquaintance, and the right too of custom; for
she says you have always been in the habit of giving her playthings; but
if I had to make out a case I should be puzzled, since I am a stranger,
and have done nothing to entitle me to an acknowledgment."

"Oh, don't fall back on over-modesty!  I have examined Adele, and find
you have taken great pains with her: she is not bright, she has no
talents; yet in a short time she has made much improvement."

"Sir, you have now given me my 'cadeau;' I am obliged to you: it is the
meed teachers most covet--praise of their pupils' progress."

"Humph!" said Mr. Rochester, and he took his tea in silence.

"Come to the fire," said the master, when the tray was taken away, and
Mrs. Fairfax had settled into a corner with her knitting; while Adele was
leading me by the hand round the room, showing me the beautiful books and
ornaments on the consoles and chiffonnieres.  We obeyed, as in duty
bound; Adele wanted to take a seat on my knee, but she was ordered to
amuse herself with Pilot.

"You have been resident in my house three months?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you came from--?"

"From Lowood school, in ---shire."

"Ah! a charitable concern.  How long were you there?"

"Eight years."

"Eight years! you must be tenacious of life.  I thought half the time in
such a place would have done up any constitution!  No wonder you have
rather the look of another world.  I marvelled where you had got that
sort of face.  When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought
unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you
had bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet.  Who are your parents?"

"I have none."

"Nor ever had, I suppose: do you remember them?"

"No."

"I thought not.  And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on
that stile?"

"For whom, sir?"

"For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them.  Did I
break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the
causeway?"

I shook my head.  "The men in green all forsook England a hundred years
ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done.  "And not even in Hay
Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them.  I don't
think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their
revels more."

Mrs. Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and, with raised eyebrows, seemed
wondering what sort of talk this was.

"Well," resumed Mr. Rochester, "if you disown parents, you must have some
sort of kinsfolk: uncles and aunts?"

"No; none that I ever saw."

"And your home?"

"I have none."

"Where do your brothers and sisters live?"

"I have no brothers or sisters."

"Who recommended you to come here?"

"I advertised, and Mrs. Fairfax answered my advertisement."

"Yes," said the good lady, who now knew what ground we were upon, "and I
am daily thankful for the choice Providence led me to make.  Miss Eyre
has been an invaluable companion to me, and a kind and careful teacher to
Adele."

"Don't trouble yourself to give her a character," returned Mr. Rochester:
"eulogiums will not bias me; I shall judge for myself.  She began by
felling my horse."

"Sir?" said Mrs. Fairfax.

"I have to thank her for this sprain."

The widow looked bewildered.

"Miss Eyre, have you ever lived in a town?"

"No, sir."

"Have you seen much society?"

"None but the pupils and teachers of Lowood, and now the inmates of
Thornfield."

"Have you read much?"

"Only such books as came in my way; and they have not been numerous or
very learned."

"You have lived the life of a nun: no doubt you are well drilled in
religious forms;--Brocklehurst, who I understand directs Lowood, is a
parson, is he not?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you girls probably worshipped him, as a convent full of religieuses
would worship their director."

"Oh, no."

"You are very cool!  No!  What! a novice not worship her priest!  That
sounds blasphemous."

"I disliked Mr. Brocklehurst; and I was not alone in the feeling.  He is
a harsh man; at once pompous and meddling; he cut off our hair; and for
economy's sake bought us bad needles and thread, with which we could
hardly sew."

"That was very false economy," remarked Mrs. Fairfax, who now again
caught the drift of the dialogue.

"And was that the head and front of his offending?" demanded Mr.
Rochester.

"He starved us when he had the sole superintendence of the provision
department, before the committee was appointed; and he bored us with long
lectures once a week, and with evening readings from books of his own
inditing, about sudden deaths and judgments, which made us afraid to go
to bed."

"What age were you when you went to Lowood?"

"About ten."

"And you stayed there eight years: you are now, then, eighteen?"

I assented.

"Arithmetic, you see, is useful; without its aid, I should hardly have
been able to guess your age.  It is a point difficult to fix where the
features and countenance are so much at variance as in your case.  And
now what did you learn at Lowood?  Can you play?"

"A little."

"Of course: that is the established answer.  Go into the library--I mean,
if you please.--(Excuse my tone of command; I am used to say, 'Do this,'
and it is done: I cannot alter my customary habits for one new
inmate.)--Go, then, into the library; take a candle with you; leave the
door open; sit down to the piano, and play a tune."

I departed, obeying his directions.

"Enough!" he called out in a few minutes.  "You play _a little_, I see;
like any other English school-girl; perhaps rather better than some, but
not well."

I closed the piano and returned.  Mr. Rochester continued--"Adele showed
me some sketches this morning, which she said were yours.  I don't know
whether they were entirely of your doing; probably a master aided you?"

"No, indeed!" I interjected.

"Ah! that pricks pride.  Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch
for its contents being original; but don't pass your word unless you are
certain: I can recognise patchwork."

"Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir."

I brought the portfolio from the library.

"Approach the table," said he; and I wheeled it to his couch.  Adele and
Mrs. Fairfax drew near to see the pictures.

"No crowding," said Mr. Rochester: "take the drawings from my hand as I
finish with them; but don't push your faces up to mine."

He deliberately scrutinised each sketch and painting.  Three he laid
aside; the others, when he had examined them, he swept from him.

"Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax," said he, "and look at
them with Adele;--you" (glancing at me) "resume your seat, and answer my
questions.  I perceive those pictures were done by one hand: was that
hand yours?"

"Yes."

"And when did you find time to do them?  They have taken much time, and
some thought."

"I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no
other occupation."

"Where did you get your copies?"

"Out of my head."

"That head I see now on your shoulders?"

"Yes, sir."

"Has it other furniture of the same kind within?"

"I should think it may have: I should hope--better."

He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately.

While he is so occupied, I will tell you, reader, what they are: and
first, I must premise that they are nothing wonderful.  The subjects had,
indeed, risen vividly on my mind.  As I saw them with the spiritual eye,
before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would
not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale
portrait of the thing I had conceived.

These pictures were in water-colours.  The first represented clouds low
and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse;
so, too, was the foreground; or rather, the nearest billows, for there
was no land.  One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged
mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with
foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched
with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering
distinctness as my pencil could impart.  Sinking below the bird and mast,
a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only
limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill,
with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze.  Beyond and above
spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky
was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I
could combine.  The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments
below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark
and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm
or by electric travail.  On the neck lay a pale reflection like
moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from
which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star.

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky:
a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along
the horizon.  Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a
head,--a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against
it.  Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew
up before the lower features a sable veil, a brow quite bloodless, white
as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the
glassiness of despair, alone were visible.  Above the temples, amidst
wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and
consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles
of a more lurid tinge.  This pale crescent was "the likeness of a kingly
crown;" what it diademed was "the shape which shape had none."

"Were you happy when you painted these pictures?" asked Mr. Rochester
presently.

"I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy.  To paint them, in short, was
to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known."

"That is not saying much.  Your pleasures, by your own account, have been
few; but I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist's dreamland while
you blent and arranged these strange tints.  Did you sit at them long
each day?"

"I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation, and I sat at them
from morning till noon, and from noon till night: the length of the
midsummer days favoured my inclination to apply."

"And you felt self-satisfied with the result of your ardent labours?"

"Far from it.  I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my
handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite
powerless to realise."

"Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more,
probably.  You had not enough of the artist's skill and science to give
it full being: yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar.  As to
the thoughts, they are elfish.  These eyes in the Evening Star you must
have seen in a dream.  How could you make them look so clear, and yet not
at all brilliant? for the planet above quells their rays.  And what
meaning is that in their solemn depth?  And who taught you to paint wind?
There is a high gale in that sky, and on this hill-top.  Where did you
see Latmos?  For that is Latmos.  There! put the drawings away!"

I had scarce tied the strings of the portfolio, when, looking at his
watch, he said abruptly--

"It is nine o'clock: what are you about, Miss Eyre, to let Adele sit up
so long?  Take her to bed."

Adele went to kiss him before quitting the room: he endured the caress,
but scarcely seemed to relish it more than Pilot would have done, nor so
much.

"I wish you all good-night, now," said he, making a movement of the hand
towards the door, in token that he was tired of our company, and wished
to dismiss us.  Mrs. Fairfax folded up her knitting: I took my portfolio:
we curtseyed to him, received a frigid bow in return, and so withdrew.

"You said Mr. Rochester was not strikingly peculiar, Mrs. Fairfax," I
observed, when I rejoined her in her room, after putting Adele to bed.

"Well, is he?"

"I think so: he is very changeful and abrupt."

"True: no doubt he may appear so to a stranger, but I am so accustomed to
his manner, I never think of it; and then, if he has peculiarities of
temper, allowance should be made."

"Why?"

"Partly because it is his nature--and we can none of us help our nature;
and partly because he has painful thoughts, no doubt, to harass him, and
make his spirits unequal."

"What about?"

"Family troubles, for one thing."

"But he has no family."

"Not now, but he has had--or, at least, relatives.  He lost his elder
brother a few years since."

"His _elder_ brother?"

"Yes.  The present Mr. Rochester has not been very long in possession of
the property; only about nine years."

"Nine years is a tolerable time.  Was he so very fond of his brother as
to be still inconsolable for his loss?"

"Why, no--perhaps not.  I believe there were some misunderstandings
between them.  Mr. Rowland Rochester was not quite just to Mr. Edward;
and perhaps he prejudiced his father against him.  The old gentleman was
fond of money, and anxious to keep the family estate together.  He did
not like to diminish the property by division, and yet he was anxious
that Mr. Edward should have wealth, too, to keep up the consequence of
the name; and, soon after he was of age, some steps were taken that were
not quite fair, and made a great deal of mischief.  Old Mr. Rochester and
Mr. Rowland combined to bring Mr. Edward into what he considered a
painful position, for the sake of making his fortune: what the precise
nature of that position was I never clearly knew, but his spirit could
not brook what he had to suffer in it.  He is not very forgiving: he
broke with his family, and now for many years he has led an unsettled
kind of life.  I don't think he has ever been resident at Thornfield for
a fortnight together, since the death of his brother without a will left
him master of the estate; and, indeed, no wonder he shuns the old place."

"Why should he shun it?"

"Perhaps he thinks it gloomy."

The answer was evasive.  I should have liked something clearer; but Mrs.
Fairfax either could not, or would not, give me more explicit information
of the origin and nature of Mr. Rochester's trials.  She averred they
were a mystery to herself, and that what she knew was chiefly from
conjecture.  It was evident, indeed, that she wished me to drop the
subject, which I did accordingly.




CHAPTER XIV


For several subsequent days I saw little of Mr. Rochester.  In the
mornings he seemed much engaged with business, and, in the afternoon,
gentlemen from Millcote or the neighbourhood called, and sometimes stayed
to dine with him.  When his sprain was well enough to admit of horse
exercise, he rode out a good deal; probably to return these visits, as he
generally did not come back till late at night.

During this interval, even Adele was seldom sent for to his presence, and
all my acquaintance with him was confined to an occasional rencontre in
the hall, on the stairs, or in the gallery, when he would sometimes pass
me haughtily and coldly, just acknowledging my presence by a distant nod
or a cool glance, and sometimes bow and smile with gentlemanlike
affability.  His changes of mood did not offend me, because I saw that I
had nothing to do with their alternation; the ebb and flow depended on
causes quite disconnected with me.

One day he had had company to dinner, and had sent for my portfolio; in
order, doubtless, to exhibit its contents: the gentlemen went away early,
to attend a public meeting at Millcote, as Mrs. Fairfax informed me; but
the night being wet and inclement, Mr. Rochester did not accompany them.
Soon after they were gone he rang the bell: a message came that I and
Adele were to go downstairs.  I brushed Adele's hair and made her neat,
and having ascertained that I was myself in my usual Quaker trim, where
there was nothing to retouch--all being too close and plain, braided
locks included, to admit of disarrangement--we descended, Adele wondering
whether the _petit coffre_ was at length come; for, owing to some
mistake, its arrival had hitherto been delayed.  She was gratified: there
it stood, a little carton, on the table when we entered the dining-room.
She appeared to know it by instinct.

"Ma boite! ma boite!" exclaimed she, running towards it.

"Yes, there is your 'boite' at last: take it into a corner, you genuine
daughter of Paris, and amuse yourself with disembowelling it," said the
deep and rather sarcastic voice of Mr. Rochester, proceeding from the
depths of an immense easy-chair at the fireside.  "And mind," he
continued, "don't bother me with any details of the anatomical process,
or any notice of the condition of the entrails: let your operation be
conducted in silence: tiens-toi tranquille, enfant; comprends-tu?"

Adele seemed scarcely to need the warning--she had already retired to a
sofa with her treasure, and was busy untying the cord which secured the
lid.  Having removed this impediment, and lifted certain silvery
envelopes of tissue paper, she merely exclaimed--

"Oh ciel!  Que c'est beau!" and then remained absorbed in ecstatic
contemplation.

"Is Miss Eyre there?" now demanded the master, half rising from his seat
to look round to the door, near which I still stood.

"Ah! well, come forward; be seated here."  He drew a chair near his own.
"I am not fond of the prattle of children," he continued; "for, old
bachelor as I am, I have no pleasant associations connected with their
lisp.  It would be intolerable to me to pass a whole evening
_tete-a-tete_ with a brat.  Don't draw that chair farther off, Miss Eyre;
sit down exactly where I placed it--if you please, that is.  Confound
these civilities!  I continually forget them.  Nor do I particularly
affect simple-minded old ladies.  By-the-bye, I must have mine in mind;
it won't do to neglect her; she is a Fairfax, or wed to one; and blood is
said to be thicker than water."

He rang, and despatched an invitation to Mrs. Fairfax, who soon arrived,
knitting-basket in hand.

"Good evening, madam; I sent to you for a charitable purpose.  I have
forbidden Adele to talk to me about her presents, and she is bursting
with repletion: have the goodness to serve her as auditress and
interlocutrice; it will be one of the most benevolent acts you ever
performed."

Adele, indeed, no sooner saw Mrs. Fairfax, than she summoned her to her
sofa, and there quickly filled her lap with the porcelain, the ivory, the
waxen contents of her "boite;" pouring out, meantime, explanations and
raptures in such broken English as she was mistress of.

"Now I have performed the part of a good host," pursued Mr. Rochester,
"put my guests into the way of amusing each other, I ought to be at
liberty to attend to my own pleasure.  Miss Eyre, draw your chair still a
little farther forward: you are yet too far back; I cannot see you
without disturbing my position in this comfortable chair, which I have no
mind to do."

I did as I was bid, though I would much rather have remained somewhat in
the shade; but Mr. Rochester had such a direct way of giving orders, it
seemed a matter of course to obey him promptly.

We were, as I have said, in the dining-room: the lustre, which had been
lit for dinner, filled the room with a festal breadth of light; the large
fire was all red and clear; the purple curtains hung rich and ample
before the lofty window and loftier arch; everything was still, save the
subdued chat of Adele (she dared not speak loud), and, filling up each
pause, the beating of winter rain against the panes.

Mr. Rochester, as he sat in his damask-covered chair, looked different to
what I had seen him look before; not quite so stern--much less gloomy.
There was a smile on his lips, and his eyes sparkled, whether with wine
or not, I am not sure; but I think it very probable.  He was, in short,
in his after-dinner mood; more expanded and genial, and also more self-
indulgent than the frigid and rigid temper of the morning; still he
looked preciously grim, cushioning his massive head against the swelling
back of his chair, and receiving the light of the fire on his granite-
hewn features, and in his great, dark eyes; for he had great, dark eyes,
and very fine eyes, too--not without a certain change in their depths
sometimes, which, if it was not softness, reminded you, at least, of that
feeling.

He had been looking two minutes at the fire, and I had been looking the
same length of time at him, when, turning suddenly, he caught my gaze
fastened on his physiognomy.

"You examine me, Miss Eyre," said he: "do you think me handsome?"

I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by
something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped
from my tongue before I was aware--"No, sir."

"Ah!  By my word! there is something singular about you," said he: "you
have the air of a little _nonnette_; quaint, quiet, grave, and simple, as
you sit with your hands before you, and your eyes generally bent on the
carpet (except, by-the-bye, when they are directed piercingly to my face;
as just now, for instance); and when one asks you a question, or makes a
remark to which you are obliged to reply, you rap out a round rejoinder,
which, if not blunt, is at least brusque.  What do you mean by it?"

"Sir, I was too plain; I beg your pardon.  I ought to have replied that
it was not easy to give an impromptu answer to a question about
appearances; that tastes mostly differ; and that beauty is of little
consequence, or something of that sort."

"You ought to have replied no such thing.  Beauty of little consequence,
indeed!  And so, under pretence of softening the previous outrage, of
stroking and soothing me into placidity, you stick a sly penknife under
my ear!  Go on: what fault do you find with me, pray?  I suppose I have
all my limbs and all my features like any other man?"

"Mr. Rochester, allow me to disown my first answer: I intended no pointed
repartee: it was only a blunder."

"Just so: I think so: and you shall be answerable for it.  Criticise me:
does my forehead not please you?"

He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his
brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an
abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen.

"Now, ma'am, am I a fool?"

"Far from it, sir.  You would, perhaps, think me rude if I inquired in
return whether you are a philanthropist?"

"There again!  Another stick of the penknife, when she pretended to pat
my head: and that is because I said I did not like the society of
children and old women (low be it spoken!).  No, young lady, I am not a
general philanthropist; but I bear a conscience;" and he pointed to the
prominences which are said to indicate that faculty, and which,
fortunately for him, were sufficiently conspicuous; giving, indeed, a
marked breadth to the upper part of his head: "and, besides, I once had a
kind of rude tenderness of heart.  When I was as old as you, I was a
feeling fellow enough, partial to the unfledged, unfostered, and unlucky;
but Fortune has knocked me about since: she has even kneaded me with her
knuckles, and now I flatter myself I am hard and tough as an India-rubber
ball; pervious, though, through a chink or two still, and with one
sentient point in the middle of the lump.  Yes: does that leave hope for
me?"

"Hope of what, sir?"

"Of my final re-transformation from India-rubber back to flesh?"

"Decidedly he has had too much wine," I thought; and I did not know what
answer to make to his queer question: how could I tell whether he was
capable of being re-transformed?

"You looked very much puzzled, Miss Eyre; and though you are not pretty
any more than I am handsome, yet a puzzled air becomes you; besides, it
is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away from my
physiognomy, and busies them with the worsted flowers of the rug; so
puzzle on.  Young lady, I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative
to-night."

With this announcement he rose from his chair, and stood, leaning his arm
on the marble mantelpiece: in that attitude his shape was seen plainly as
well as his face; his unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost
to his length of limb.  I am sure most people would have thought him an
ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much
ease in his demeanour; such a look of complete indifference to his own
external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other
qualities, intrinsic or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere
personal attractiveness, that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared
the indifference, and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the
confidence.

"I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night," he repeated,
"and that is why I sent for you: the fire and the chandelier were not
sufficient company for me; nor would Pilot have been, for none of these
can talk.  Adele is a degree better, but still far below the mark; Mrs.
Fairfax ditto; you, I am persuaded, can suit me if you will: you puzzled
me the first evening I invited you down here.  I have almost forgotten
you since: other ideas have driven yours from my head; but to-night I am
resolved to be at ease; to dismiss what importunes, and recall what
pleases.  It would please me now to draw you out--to learn more of
you--therefore speak."

Instead of speaking, I smiled; and not a very complacent or submissive
smile either.

"Speak," he urged.

"What about, sir?"

"Whatever you like.  I leave both the choice of subject and the manner of
treating it entirely to yourself."

Accordingly I sat and said nothing: "If he expects me to talk for the
mere sake of talking and showing off, he will find he has addressed
himself to the wrong person," I thought.

"You are dumb, Miss Eyre."

I was dumb still.  He bent his head a little towards me, and with a
single hasty glance seemed to dive into my eyes.

"Stubborn?" he said, "and annoyed.  Ah! it is consistent.  I put my
request in an absurd, almost insolent form.  Miss Eyre, I beg your
pardon.  The fact is, once for all, I don't wish to treat you like an
inferior: that is" (correcting himself), "I claim only such superiority
as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's
advance in experience.  This is legitimate, _et j'y tiens_, as Adele
would say; and it is by virtue of this superiority, and this alone, that
I desire you to have the goodness to talk to me a little now, and divert
my thoughts, which are galled with dwelling on one point--cankering as a
rusty nail."

He had deigned an explanation, almost an apology, and I did not feel
insensible to his condescension, and would not seem so.

"I am willing to amuse you, if I can, sir--quite willing; but I cannot
introduce a topic, because how do I know what will interest you?  Ask me
questions, and I will do my best to answer them."

"Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be
a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I
stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have
battled through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and
roamed over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of
people in one house?"

"Do as you please, sir."

"That is no answer; or rather it is a very irritating, because a very
evasive one.  Reply clearly."

"I don't think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you
are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have;
your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time
and experience."

"Humph!  Promptly spoken.  But I won't allow that, seeing that it would
never suit my case, as I have made an indifferent, not to say a bad, use
of both advantages.  Leaving superiority out of the question, then, you
must still agree to receive my orders now and then, without being piqued
or hurt by the tone of command.  Will you?"

I smiled: I thought to myself Mr. Rochester _is_ peculiar--he seems to
forget that he pays me 30 pounds per annum for receiving his orders.

"The smile is very well," said he, catching instantly the passing
expression; "but speak too."

"I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves to
inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and hurt by
their orders."

"Paid subordinates!  What! you are my paid subordinate, are you?  Oh yes,
I had forgotten the salary!  Well then, on that mercenary ground, will
you agree to let me hector a little?"

"No, sir, not on that ground; but, on the ground that you did forget it,
and that you care whether or not a dependent is comfortable in his
dependency, I agree heartily."

"And will you consent to dispense with a great many conventional forms
and phrases, without thinking that the omission arises from insolence?"

"I am sure, sir, I should never mistake informality for insolence: one I
rather like, the other nothing free-born would submit to, even for a
salary."

"Humbug!  Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary;
therefore, keep to yourself, and don't venture on generalities of which
you are intensely ignorant.  However, I mentally shake hands with you for
your answer, despite its inaccuracy; and as much for the manner in which
it was said, as for the substance of the speech; the manner was frank and
sincere; one does not often see such a manner: no, on the contrary,
affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of
one's meaning are the usual rewards of candour.  Not three in three
thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered me as you have
just done.  But I don't mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a
different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.
And then, after all, I go too fast in my conclusions: for what I yet
know, you may be no better than the rest; you may have intolerable
defects to counterbalance your few good points."

"And so may you," I thought.  My eye met his as the idea crossed my mind:
he seemed to read the glance, answering as if its import had been spoken
as well as imagined--

"Yes, yes, you are right," said he; "I have plenty of faults of my own: I
know it, and I don't wish to palliate them, I assure you.  God wot I need
not be too severe about others; I have a past existence, a series of
deeds, a colour of life to contemplate within my own breast, which might
well call my sneers and censures from my neighbours to myself.  I
started, or rather (for like other defaulters, I like to lay half the
blame on ill fortune and adverse circumstances) was thrust on to a wrong
tack at the age of one-and-twenty, and have never recovered the right
course since: but I might have been very different; I might have been as
good as you--wiser--almost as stainless.  I envy you your peace of mind,
your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory.  Little girl, a memory
without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure--an
inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?"

"How was your memory when you were eighteen, sir?"

"All right then; limpid, salubrious: no gush of bilge water had turned it
to fetid puddle.  I was your equal at eighteen--quite your equal.  Nature
meant me to be, on the whole, a good man, Miss Eyre; one of the better
kind, and you see I am not so.  You would say you don't see it; at least
I flatter myself I read as much in your eye (beware, by-the-bye, what you
express with that organ; I am quick at interpreting its language).  Then
take my word for it,--I am not a villain: you are not to suppose that--not
to attribute to me any such bad eminence; but, owing, I verily believe,
rather to circumstances than to my natural bent, I am a trite commonplace
sinner, hackneyed in all the poor petty dissipations with which the rich
and worthless try to put on life.  Do you wonder that I avow this to you?
Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself
elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people
will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to
tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they
will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their
indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting
and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations."

"How do you know?--how can you guess all this, sir?"

"I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were
writing my thoughts in a diary.  You would say, I should have been
superior to circumstances; so I should--so I should; but you see I was
not.  When fate wronged me, I had not the wisdom to remain cool: I turned
desperate; then I degenerated.  Now, when any vicious simpleton excites
my disgust by his paltry ribaldry, I cannot flatter myself that I am
better than he: I am forced to confess that he and I are on a level.  I
wish I had stood firm--God knows I do!  Dread remorse when you are
tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life."

"Repentance is said to be its cure, sir."

"It is not its cure.  Reformation may be its cure; and I could reform--I
have strength yet for that--if--but where is the use of thinking of it,
hampered, burdened, cursed as I am?  Besides, since happiness is
irrevocably denied me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I
_will_ get it, cost what it may."

"Then you will degenerate still more, sir."

"Possibly: yet why should I, if I can get sweet, fresh pleasure?  And I
may get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee gathers on the
moor."

"It will sting--it will taste bitter, sir."

"How do you know?--you never tried it.  How very serious--how very solemn
you look: and you are as ignorant of the matter as this cameo head"
(taking one from the mantelpiece).  "You have no right to preach to me,
you neophyte, that have not passed the porch of life, and are absolutely
unacquainted with its mysteries."

"I only remind you of your own words, sir: you said error brought
remorse, and you pronounced remorse the poison of existence."

"And who talks of error now?  I scarcely think the notion that flittered
across my brain was an error.  I believe it was an inspiration rather
than a temptation: it was very genial, very soothing--I know that.  Here
it comes again!  It is no devil, I assure you; or if it be, it has put on
the robes of an angel of light.  I think I must admit so fair a guest
when it asks entrance to my heart."

"Distrust it, sir; it is not a true angel."

"Once more, how do you know?  By what instinct do you pretend to
distinguish between a fallen seraph of the abyss and a messenger from the
eternal throne--between a guide and a seducer?"

"I judged by your countenance, sir, which was troubled when you said the
suggestion had returned upon you.  I feel sure it will work you more
misery if you listen to it."

"Not at all--it bears the most gracious message in the world: for the
rest, you are not my conscience-keeper, so don't make yourself uneasy.
Here, come in, bonny wanderer!"

He said this as if he spoke to a vision, viewless to any eye but his own;
then, folding his arms, which he had half extended, on his chest, he
seemed to enclose in their embrace the invisible being.

"Now," he continued, again addressing me, "I have received the pilgrim--a
disguised deity, as I verily believe.  Already it has done me good: my
heart was a sort of charnel; it will now be a shrine."

"To speak truth, sir, I don't understand you at all: I cannot keep up the
conversation, because it has got out of my depth.  Only one thing, I
know: you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that
you regretted your own imperfection;--one thing I can comprehend: you
intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane.  It seems
to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to
become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you
began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would in
a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to
which you might revert with pleasure."

"Justly thought; rightly said, Miss Eyre; and, at this moment, I am
paving hell with energy."

"Sir?"

"I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as flint.
Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than they have
been."

"And better?"

"And better--so much better as pure ore is than foul dross.  You seem to
doubt me; I don't doubt myself: I know what my aim is, what my motives
are; and at this moment I pass a law, unalterable as that of the Medes
and Persians, that both are right."

"They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalise them."

"They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute:
unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules."

"That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it
is liable to abuse."

"Sententious sage! so it is: but I swear by my household gods not to
abuse it."

"You are human and fallible."

"I am: so are you--what then?"

"The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine
and perfect alone can be safely intrusted."

"What power?"

"That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action,--'Let it be
right.'"

"'Let it be right'--the very words: you have pronounced them."

"_May_ it be right then," I said, as I rose, deeming it useless to
continue a discourse which was all darkness to me; and, besides, sensible
that the character of my interlocutor was beyond my penetration; at
least, beyond its present reach; and feeling the uncertainty, the vague
sense of insecurity, which accompanies a conviction of ignorance.

"Where are you going?"

"To put Adele to bed: it is past her bedtime."

"You are afraid of me, because I talk like a Sphynx."

"Your language is enigmatical, sir: but though I am bewildered, I am
certainly not afraid."

"You _are_ afraid--your self-love dreads a blunder."

"In that sense I do feel apprehensive--I have no wish to talk nonsense."

"If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake
it for sense.  Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre?  Don't trouble yourself to
answer--I see you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily: believe
me, you are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious.
The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your
features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear
in the presence of a man and a brother--or father, or master, or what you
will--to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in
time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it
impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements
will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now.  I see at
intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars
of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but
free, it would soar cloud-high.  You are still bent on going?"

"It has struck nine, sir."

"Never mind,--wait a minute: Adele is not ready to go to bed yet.  My
position, Miss Eyre, with my back to the fire, and my face to the room,
favours observation.  While talking to you, I have also occasionally
watched Adele (I have my own reasons for thinking her a curious
study,--reasons that I may, nay, that I shall, impart to you some day).
She pulled out of her box, about ten minutes ago, a little pink silk
frock; rapture lit her face as she unfolded it; coquetry runs in her
blood, blends with her brains, and seasons the marrow of her bones.  'Il
faut que je l'essaie!' cried she, 'et a l'instant meme!' and she rushed
out of the room.  She is now with Sophie, undergoing a robing process: in
a few minutes she will re-enter; and I know what I shall see,--a
miniature of Celine Varens, as she used to appear on the boards at the
rising of--But never mind that.  However, my tenderest feelings are about
to receive a shock: such is my presentiment; stay now, to see whether it
will be realised."

Ere long, Adele's little foot was heard tripping across the hall.  She
entered, transformed as her guardian had predicted.  A dress of
rose-coloured satin, very short, and as full in the skirt as it could be
gathered, replaced the brown frock she had previously worn; a wreath of
rosebuds circled her forehead; her feet were dressed in silk stockings
and small white satin sandals.

"Est-ce que ma robe va bien?" cried she, bounding forwards; "et mes
souliers? et mes bas?  Tenez, je crois que je vais danser!"

And spreading out her dress, she chasseed across the room till, having
reached Mr. Rochester, she wheeled lightly round before him on tip-toe,
then dropped on one knee at his feet, exclaiming--

"Monsieur, je vous remercie mille fois de votre bonte;" then rising, she
added, "C'est comme cela que maman faisait, n'est-ce pas, monsieur?"

"Pre-cise-ly!" was the answer; "and, 'comme cela,' she charmed my English
gold out of my British breeches' pocket.  I have been green, too, Miss
Eyre,--ay, grass green: not a more vernal tint freshens you now than once
freshened me.  My Spring is gone, however, but it has left me that French
floweret on my hands, which, in some moods, I would fain be rid of.  Not
valuing now the root whence it sprang; having found that it was of a sort
which nothing but gold dust could manure, I have but half a liking to the
blossom, especially when it looks so artificial as just now.  I keep it
and rear it rather on the Roman Catholic principle of expiating numerous
sins, great or small, by one good work.  I'll explain all this some day.
Good-night."




CHAPTER XV


Mr. Rochester did, on a future occasion, explain it.  It was one
afternoon, when he chanced to meet me and Adele in the grounds: and while
she played with Pilot and her shuttlecock, he asked me to walk up and
down a long beech avenue within sight of her.

He then said that she was the daughter of a French opera-dancer, Celine
Varens, towards whom he had once cherished what he called a "_grande
passion_."  This passion Celine had professed to return with even
superior ardour.  He thought himself her idol, ugly as he was: he
believed, as he said, that she preferred his "_taille d'athlete_" to the
elegance of the Apollo Belvidere.

"And, Miss Eyre, so much was I flattered by this preference of the Gallic
sylph for her British gnome, that I installed her in an hotel; gave her a
complete establishment of servants, a carriage, cashmeres, diamonds,
dentelles, &c.  In short, I began the process of ruining myself in the
received style, like any other spoony.  I had not, it seems, the
originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode
the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the
beaten centre.  I had--as I deserved to have--the fate of all other
spoonies.  Happening to call one evening when Celine did not expect me, I
found her out; but it was a warm night, and I was tired with strolling
through Paris, so I sat down in her boudoir; happy to breathe the air
consecrated so lately by her presence.  No,--I exaggerate; I never
thought there was any consecrating virtue about her: it was rather a sort
of pastille perfume she had left; a scent of musk and amber, than an
odour of sanctity.  I was just beginning to stifle with the fumes of
conservatory flowers and sprinkled essences, when I bethought myself to
open the window and step out on to the balcony.  It was moonlight and
gaslight besides, and very still and serene.  The balcony was furnished
with a chair or two; I sat down, and took out a cigar,--I will take one
now, if you will excuse me."

Here ensued a pause, filled up by the producing and lighting of a cigar;
having placed it to his lips and breathed a trail of Havannah incense on
the freezing and sunless air, he went on--

"I liked bonbons too in those days, Miss Eyre, and I was
_croquant_--(overlook the barbarism)--_croquant_ chocolate comfits, and
smoking alternately, watching meantime the equipages that rolled along
the fashionable streets towards the neighbouring opera-house, when in an
elegant close carriage drawn by a beautiful pair of English horses, and
distinctly seen in the brilliant city-night, I recognised the 'voiture' I
had given Celine.  She was returning: of course my heart thumped with
impatience against the iron rails I leant upon.  The carriage stopped, as
I had expected, at the hotel door; my flame (that is the very word for an
opera inamorata) alighted: though muffed in a cloak--an unnecessary
encumbrance, by-the-bye, on so warm a June evening--I knew her instantly
by her little foot, seen peeping from the skirt of her dress, as she
skipped from the carriage-step.  Bending over the balcony, I was about to
murmur 'Mon ange'--in a tone, of course, which should be audible to the
ear of love alone--when a figure jumped from the carriage after her;
cloaked also; but that was a spurred heel which had rung on the pavement,
and that was a hatted head which now passed under the arched _porte
cochere_ of the hotel.

"You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre?  Of course not: I need not
ask you; because you never felt love.  You have both sentiments yet to
experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall
waken it.  You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in
which your youth has hitherto slid away.  Floating on with closed eyes
and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the
bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base.  But I tell
you--and you may mark my words--you will come some day to a craggy pass
in the channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into
whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on
crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer
current--as I am now.

"I like this day; I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and
stillness of the world under this frost.  I like Thornfield, its
antiquity, its retirement, its old crow-trees and thorn-trees, its grey
facade, and lines of dark windows reflecting that metal welkin: and yet
how long have I abhorred the very thought of it, shunned it like a great
plague-house?  How I do still abhor--"

He ground his teeth and was silent: he arrested his step and struck his
boot against the hard ground.  Some hated thought seemed to have him in
its grip, and to hold him so tightly that he could not advance.

We were ascending the avenue when he thus paused; the hall was before us.
Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare such as I
never saw before or since.  Pain, shame, ire, impatience, disgust,
detestation, seemed momentarily to hold a quivering conflict in the large
pupil dilating under his ebon eyebrow.  Wild was the wrestle which should
be paramount; but another feeling rose and triumphed: something hard and
cynical: self-willed and resolute: it settled his passion and petrified
his countenance: he went on--

"During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with
my destiny.  She stood there, by that beech-trunk--a hag like one of
those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres.  'You like
Thornfield?' she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air
a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front,
between the upper and lower row of windows, 'Like it if you can!  Like it
if you dare!'

"'I will like it,' said I; 'I dare like it;' and" (he subjoined moodily)
"I will keep my word; I will break obstacles to happiness, to
goodness--yes, goodness.  I wish to be a better man than I have been,
than I am; as Job's leviathan broke the spear, the dart, and the
habergeon, hindrances which others count as iron and brass, I will esteem
but straw and rotten wood."

Adele here ran before him with her shuttlecock.  "Away!" he cried
harshly; "keep at a distance, child; or go in to Sophie!"  Continuing
then to pursue his walk in silence, I ventured to recall him to the point
whence he had abruptly diverged--

"Did you leave the balcony, sir," I asked, "when Mdlle. Varens entered?"

I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question, but, on
the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his eyes
towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow.  "Oh, I had
forgotten Celine!  Well, to resume.  When I saw my charmer thus come in
accompanied by a cavalier, I seemed to hear a hiss, and the green snake
of jealousy, rising on undulating coils from the moonlit balcony, glided
within my waistcoat, and ate its way in two minutes to my heart's core.
Strange!" he exclaimed, suddenly starting again from the point.  "Strange
that I should choose you for the confidant of all this, young lady;
passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the
most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his
opera-mistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you!  But the last
singularity explains the first, as I intimated once before: you, with
your gravity, considerateness, and caution were made to be the recipient
of secrets.  Besides, I know what sort of a mind I have placed in
communication with my own: I know it is one not liable to take infection:
it is a peculiar mind: it is a unique one.  Happily I do not mean to harm
it: but, if I did, it would not take harm from me.  The more you and I
converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me."
After this digression he proceeded--

"I remained in the balcony.  'They will come to her boudoir, no doubt,'
thought I: 'let me prepare an ambush.'  So putting my hand in through the
open window, I drew the curtain over it, leaving only an opening through
which I could take observations; then I closed the casement, all but a
chink just wide enough to furnish an outlet to lovers' whispered vows:
then I stole back to my chair; and as I resumed it the pair came in.  My
eye was quickly at the aperture.  Celine's chamber-maid entered, lit a
lamp, left it on the table, and withdrew.  The couple were thus revealed
to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,'
shining in satin and jewels,--my gifts of course,--and there was her
companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a
vicomte--a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in
society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so
absolutely.  On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was
instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine sank
under an extinguisher.  A woman who could betray me for such a rival was
not worth contending for; she deserved only scorn; less, however, than I,
who had been her dupe.

"They began to talk; their conversation eased me completely: frivolous,
mercenary, heartless, and senseless, it was rather calculated to weary
than enrage a listener.  A card of mine lay on the table; this being
perceived, brought my name under discussion.  Neither of them possessed
energy or wit to belabour me soundly, but they insulted me as coarsely as
they could in their little way: especially Celine, who even waxed rather
brilliant on my personal defects--deformities she termed them.  Now it
had been her custom to launch out into fervent admiration of what she
called my '_beaute male_:' wherein she differed diametrically from you,
who told me point-blank, at the second interview, that you did not think
me handsome.  The contrast struck me at the time and--"

Adele here came running up again.

"Monsieur, John has just been to say that your agent has called and
wishes to see you."

"Ah! in that case I must abridge.  Opening the window, I walked in upon
them; liberated Celine from my protection; gave her notice to vacate her
hotel; offered her a purse for immediate exigencies; disregarded screams,
hysterics, prayers, protestations, convulsions; made an appointment with
the vicomte for a meeting at the Bois de Boulogne.  Next morning I had
the pleasure of encountering him; left a bullet in one of his poor
etiolated arms, feeble as the wing of a chicken in the pip, and then
thought I had done with the whole crew.  But unluckily the Varens, six
months before, had given me this filette Adele, who, she affirmed, was my
daughter; and perhaps she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim
paternity written in her countenance: Pilot is more like me than she.
Some years after I had broken with the mother, she abandoned her child,
and ran away to Italy with a musician or singer.  I acknowledged no
natural claim on Adele's part to be supported by me, nor do I now
acknowledge any, for I am not her father; but hearing that she was quite
destitute, I e'en took the poor thing out of the slime and mud of Paris,
and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an
English country garden.  Mrs. Fairfax found you to train it; but now you
know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl, you
will perhaps think differently of your post and protegee: you will be
coming to me some day with notice that you have found another place--that
you beg me to look out for a new governess, &c.--Eh?"

"No: Adele is not answerable for either her mother's faults or yours: I
have a regard for her; and now that I know she is, in a sense,
parentless--forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir--I shall
cling closer to her than before.  How could I possibly prefer the spoilt
pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess as a nuisance, to a
lonely little orphan, who leans towards her as a friend?"

"Oh, that is the light in which you view it!  Well, I must go in now; and
you too: it darkens."

But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adele and Pilot--ran a race
with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock.  When we went
in, and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her on my knee; kept
her there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she liked: not rebuking
even some little freedoms and trivialities into which she was apt to
stray when much noticed, and which betrayed in her a superficiality of
character, inherited probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an
English mind.  Still she had her merits; and I was disposed to appreciate
all that was good in her to the utmost.  I sought in her countenance and
features a likeness to Mr. Rochester, but found none: no trait, no turn
of expression announced relationship.  It was a pity: if she could but
have been proved to resemble him, he would have thought more of her.

It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the night,
that I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me.  As he had
said, there was probably nothing at all extraordinary in the substance of
the narrative itself: a wealthy Englishman's passion for a French dancer,
and her treachery to him, were every-day matters enough, no doubt, in
society; but there was something decidedly strange in the paroxysm of
emotion which had suddenly seized him when he was in the act of
expressing the present contentment of his mood, and his newly revived
pleasure in the old hall and its environs.  I meditated wonderingly on
this incident; but gradually quitting it, as I found it for the present
inexplicable, I turned to the consideration of my master's manner to
myself.  The confidence he had thought fit to repose in me seemed a
tribute to my discretion: I regarded and accepted it as such.  His
deportment had now for some weeks been more uniform towards me than at
the first.  I never seemed in his way; he did not take fits of chilling
hauteur: when he met me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed welcome; he
had always a word and sometimes a smile for me: when summoned by formal
invitation to his presence, I was honoured by a cordiality of reception
that made me feel I really possessed the power to amuse him, and that
these evening conferences were sought as much for his pleasure as for my
benefit.

I, indeed, talked comparatively little, but I heard him talk with relish.
It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind
unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not
mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their
interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange
novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a keen delight in
receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he
portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he
disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion.

The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint: the friendly
frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to
him.  I felt at times as if he were my relation rather than my master:
yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it
was his way.  So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest
added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin
crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled
up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.

And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes?  No, reader: gratitude, and
many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I
best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the
brightest fire.  Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not,
for he brought them frequently before me.  He was proud, sardonic, harsh
to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew that his
great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others.  He
was moody, too; unaccountably so; I more than once, when sent for to read
to him, found him sitting in his library alone, with his head bent on his
folded arms; and, when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant, scowl
blackened his features.  But I believed that his moodiness, his
harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say _former_, for now he
seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate.  I
believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles,
and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education
instilled, or destiny encouraged.  I thought there were excellent
materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat
spoiled and tangled.  I cannot deny that I grieved for his grief,
whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it.

Though I had now extinguished my candle and was laid down in bed, I could
not sleep for thinking of his look when he paused in the avenue, and told
how his destiny had risen up before him, and dared him to be happy at
Thornfield.

"Why not?" I asked myself.  "What alienates him from the house?  Will he
leave it again soon?  Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than
a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks.  If he
does go, the change will be doleful.  Suppose he should be absent spring,
summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days will seem!"

I hardly know whether I had slept or not after this musing; at any rate,
I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious,
which sounded, I thought, just above me.  I wished I had kept my candle
burning: the night was drearily dark; my spirits were depressed.  I rose
and sat up in bed, listening.  The sound was hushed.

I tried again to sleep; but my heart beat anxiously: my inward
tranquillity was broken.  The clock, far down in the hall, struck two.
Just then it seemed my chamber-door was touched; as if fingers had swept
the panels in groping a way along the dark gallery outside.  I said, "Who
is there?"  Nothing answered.  I was chilled with fear.

All at once I remembered that it might be Pilot, who, when the kitchen-
door chanced to be left open, not unfrequently found his way up to the
threshold of Mr. Rochester's chamber: I had seen him lying there myself
in the mornings.  The idea calmed me somewhat: I lay down.  Silence
composes the nerves; and as an unbroken hush now reigned again through
the whole house, I began to feel the return of slumber.  But it was not
fated that I should sleep that night.  A dream had scarcely approached my
ear, when it fled affrighted, scared by a marrow-freezing incident
enough.

This was a demoniac laugh--low, suppressed, and deep--uttered, as it
seemed, at the very keyhole of my chamber door.  The head of my bed was
near the door, and I thought at first the goblin-laugher stood at my
bedside--or rather, crouched by my pillow: but I rose, looked round, and
could see nothing; while, as I still gazed, the unnatural sound was
reiterated: and I knew it came from behind the panels.  My first impulse
was to rise and fasten the bolt; my next, again to cry out, "Who is
there?"

Something gurgled and moaned.  Ere long, steps retreated up the gallery
towards the third-storey staircase: a door had lately been made to shut
in that staircase; I heard it open and close, and all was still.

"Was that Grace Poole? and is she possessed with a devil?" thought I.
Impossible now to remain longer by myself: I must go to Mrs. Fairfax.  I
hurried on my frock and a shawl; I withdrew the bolt and opened the door
with a trembling hand.  There was a candle burning just outside, and on
the matting in the gallery.  I was surprised at this circumstance: but
still more was I amazed to perceive the air quite dim, as if filled with
smoke; and, while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence
these blue wreaths issued, I became further aware of a strong smell of
burning.

Something creaked: it was a door ajar; and that door was Mr. Rochester's,
and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence.  I thought no more of Mrs.
Fairfax; I thought no more of Grace Poole, or the laugh: in an instant, I
was within the chamber.  Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the
curtains were on fire.  In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr. Rochester
lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep.

"Wake! wake!" I cried.  I shook him, but he only murmured and turned: the
smoke had stupefied him.  Not a moment could be lost: the very sheets
were kindling, I rushed to his basin and ewer; fortunately, one was wide
and the other deep, and both were filled with water.  I heaved them up,
deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my
own water-jug, baptized the couch afresh, and, by God's aid, succeeded in
extinguishing the flames which were devouring it.

The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of a pitcher which I flung
from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the
shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr. Rochester at last.
Though it was now dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him
fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of
water.

"Is there a flood?" he cried.

"No, sir," I answered; "but there has been a fire: get up, do; you are
quenched now; I will fetch you a candle."

"In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?" he
demanded.  "What have you done with me, witch, sorceress?  Who is in the
room besides you?  Have you plotted to drown me?"

"I will fetch you a candle, sir; and, in Heaven's name, get up.  Somebody
has plotted something: you cannot too soon find out who and what it is."

"There!  I am up now; but at your peril you fetch a candle yet: wait two
minutes till I get into some dry garments, if any dry there be--yes, here
is my dressing-gown.  Now run!"

I did run; I brought the candle which still remained in the gallery.  He
took it from my hand, held it up, and surveyed the bed, all blackened and
scorched, the sheets drenched, the carpet round swimming in water.

"What is it? and who did it?" he asked.  I briefly related to him what
had transpired: the strange laugh I had heard in the gallery: the step
ascending to the third storey; the smoke,--the smell of fire which had
conducted me to his room; in what state I had found matters there, and
how I had deluged him with all the water I could lay hands on.

{"What is it and who did it?" he asked: p140.jpg}

He listened very gravely; his face, as I went on, expressed more concern
than astonishment; he did not immediately speak when I had concluded.

"Shall I call Mrs. Fairfax?" I asked.

"Mrs. Fairfax?  No; what the deuce would you call her for?  What can she
do?  Let her sleep unmolested."

"Then I will fetch Leah, and wake John and his wife."

"Not at all: just be still.  You have a shawl on.  If you are not warm
enough, you may take my cloak yonder; wrap it about you, and sit down in
the arm-chair: there,--I will put it on.  Now place your feet on the
stool, to keep them out of the wet.  I am going to leave you a few
minutes.  I shall take the candle.  Remain where you are till I return;
be as still as a mouse.  I must pay a visit to the second storey.  Don't
move, remember, or call any one."

He went: I watched the light withdraw.  He passed up the gallery very
softly, unclosed the staircase door with as little noise as possible,
shut it after him, and the last ray vanished.  I was left in total
darkness.  I listened for some noise, but heard nothing.  A very long
time elapsed.  I grew weary: it was cold, in spite of the cloak; and then
I did not see the use of staying, as I was not to rouse the house.  I was
on the point of risking Mr. Rochester's displeasure by disobeying his
orders, when the light once more gleamed dimly on the gallery wall, and I
heard his unshod feet tread the matting.  "I hope it is he," thought I,
"and not something worse."

He re-entered, pale and very gloomy.  "I have found it all out," said he,
setting his candle down on the washstand; "it is as I thought."

"How, sir?"

He made no reply, but stood with his arms folded, looking on the ground.
At the end of a few minutes he inquired in rather a peculiar tone--

"I forget whether you said you saw anything when you opened your chamber
door."

"No, sir, only the candlestick on the ground."

"But you heard an odd laugh?  You have heard that laugh before, I should
think, or something like it?"

"Yes, sir: there is a woman who sews here, called Grace Poole,--she
laughs in that way.  She is a singular person."

"Just so.  Grace Poole--you have guessed it.  She is, as you say,
singular--very.  Well, I shall reflect on the subject.  Meantime, I am
glad that you are the only person, besides myself, acquainted with the
precise details of to-night's incident.  You are no talking fool: say
nothing about it.  I will account for this state of affairs" (pointing to
the bed): "and now return to your own room.  I shall do very well on the
sofa in the library for the rest of the night.  It is near four:--in two
hours the servants will be up."

"Good-night, then, sir," said I, departing.

He seemed surprised--very inconsistently so, as he had just told me to
go.

"What!" he exclaimed, "are you quitting me already, and in that way?"

"You said I might go, sir."

"But not without taking leave; not without a word or two of
acknowledgment and good-will: not, in short, in that brief, dry fashion.
Why, you have saved my life!--snatched me from a horrible and
excruciating death! and you walk past me as if we were mutual strangers!
At least shake hands."

He held out his hand; I gave him mine: he took it first in one, them in
both his own.

"You have saved my life: I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a
debt.  I cannot say more.  Nothing else that has being would have been
tolerable to me in the character of creditor for such an obligation: but
you: it is different;--I feel your benefits no burden, Jane."

He paused; gazed at me: words almost visible trembled on his lips,--but
his voice was checked.

"Good-night again, sir.  There is no debt, benefit, burden, obligation,
in the case."

"I knew," he continued, "you would do me good in some way, at some
time;--I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression
and smile did not"--(again he stopped)--"did not" (he proceeded hastily)
"strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing.  People talk of
natural sympathies; I have heard of good genii: there are grains of truth
in the wildest fable.  My cherished preserver, goodnight!"

Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look.

"I am glad I happened to be awake," I said: and then I was going.

"What! you _will_ go?"

"I am cold, sir."

"Cold?  Yes,--and standing in a pool!  Go, then, Jane; go!"  But he still
retained my hand, and I could not free it.  I bethought myself of an
expedient.

"I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir," said I.

"Well, leave me:" he relaxed his fingers, and I was gone.

I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep.  Till morning dawned I
was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled
under surges of joy.  I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a
shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale,
wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I
could not reach it, even in fancy--a counteracting breeze blew off land,
and continually drove me back.  Sense would resist delirium: judgment
would warn passion.  Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.




CHAPTER XVI


I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which followed
this sleepless night: I wanted to hear his voice again, yet feared to
meet his eye.  During the early part of the morning, I momentarily
expected his coming; he was not in the frequent habit of entering the
schoolroom, but he did step in for a few minutes sometimes, and I had the
impression that he was sure to visit it that day.

But the morning passed just as usual: nothing happened to interrupt the
quiet course of Adele's studies; only soon after breakfast, I heard some
bustle in the neighbourhood of Mr. Rochester's chamber, Mrs. Fairfax's
voice, and Leah's, and the cook's--that is, John's wife--and even John's
own gruff tones.  There were exclamations of "What a mercy master was not
burnt in his bed!"  "It is always dangerous to keep a candle lit at
night."  "How providential that he had presence of mind to think of the
water-jug!"  "I wonder he waked nobody!"  "It is to be hoped he will not
take cold with sleeping on the library sofa," &c.

To much confabulation succeeded a sound of scrubbing and setting to
rights; and when I passed the room, in going downstairs to dinner, I saw
through the open door that all was again restored to complete order; only
the bed was stripped of its hangings.  Leah stood up in the window-seat,
rubbing the panes of glass dimmed with smoke.  I was about to address
her, for I wished to know what account had been given of the affair: but,
on advancing, I saw a second person in the chamber--a woman sitting on a
chair by the bedside, and sewing rings to new curtains.  That woman was
no other than Grace Poole.

There she sat, staid and taciturn-looking, as usual, in her brown stuff
gown, her check apron, white handkerchief, and cap.  She was intent on
her work, in which her whole thoughts seemed absorbed: on her hard
forehead, and in her commonplace features, was nothing either of the
paleness or desperation one would have expected to see marking the
countenance of a woman who had attempted murder, and whose intended
victim had followed her last night to her lair, and (as I believed),
charged her with the crime she wished to perpetrate.  I was
amazed--confounded.  She looked up, while I still gazed at her: no start,
no increase or failure of colour betrayed emotion, consciousness of
guilt, or fear of detection.  She said "Good morning, Miss," in her usual
phlegmatic and brief manner; and taking up another ring and more tape,
went on with her sewing.

"I will put her to some test," thought I: "such absolute impenetrability
is past comprehension."

"Good morning, Grace," I said.  "Has anything happened here?  I thought I
heard the servants all talking together a while ago."

"Only master had been reading in his bed last night; he fell asleep with
his candle lit, and the curtains got on fire; but, fortunately, he awoke
before the bed-clothes or the wood-work caught, and contrived to quench
the flames with the water in the ewer."

"A strange affair!" I said, in a low voice: then, looking at her
fixedly--"Did Mr. Rochester wake nobody?  Did no one hear him move?"

She again raised her eyes to me, and this time there was something of
consciousness in their expression.  She seemed to examine me warily; then
she answered--

"The servants sleep so far off, you know, Miss, they would not be likely
to hear.  Mrs. Fairfax's room and yours are the nearest to master's; but
Mrs. Fairfax said she heard nothing: when people get elderly, they often
sleep heavy."  She paused, and then added, with a sort of assumed
indifference, but still in a marked and significant tone--"But you are
young, Miss; and I should say a light sleeper: perhaps you may have heard
a noise?"

"I did," said I, dropping my voice, so that Leah, who was still polishing
the panes, could not hear me, "and at first I thought it was Pilot: but
Pilot cannot laugh; and I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one."

She took a new needleful of thread, waxed it carefully, threaded her
needle with a steady hand, and then observed, with perfect composure--

"It is hardly likely master would laugh, I should think, Miss, when he
was in such danger: You must have been dreaming."

"I was not dreaming," I said, with some warmth, for her brazen coolness
provoked me.  Again she looked at me; and with the same scrutinising and
conscious eye.

"Have you told master that you heard a laugh?" she inquired.

"I have not had the opportunity of speaking to him this morning."

"You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the
gallery?" she further asked.

She appeared to be cross-questioning me, attempting to draw from me
information unawares.  The idea struck me that if she discovered I knew
or suspected her guilt, she would be playing of some of her malignant
pranks on me; I thought it advisable to be on my guard.

"On the contrary," said I, "I bolted my door."

"Then you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night before
you get into bed?"

"Fiend! she wants to know my habits, that she may lay her plans
accordingly!"  Indignation again prevailed over prudence: I replied
sharply, "Hitherto I have often omitted to fasten the bolt: I did not
think it necessary.  I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be
dreaded at Thornfield Hall: but in future" (and I laid marked stress on
the words) "I shall take good care to make all secure before I venture to
lie down."

"It will be wise so to do," was her answer: "this neighbourhood is as
quiet as any I know, and I never heard of the hall being attempted by
robbers since it was a house; though there are hundreds of pounds' worth
of plate in the plate-closet, as is well known.  And you see, for such a
large house, there are very few servants, because master has never lived
here much; and when he does come, being a bachelor, he needs little
waiting on: but I always think it best to err on the safe side; a door is
soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any
mischief that may be about.  A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all
to Providence; but I say Providence will not dispense with the means,
though He often blesses them when they are used discreetly."  And here
she closed her harangue: a long one for her, and uttered with the
demureness of a Quakeress.

I still stood absolutely dumfoundered at what appeared to me her
miraculous self-possession and most inscrutable hypocrisy, when the cook
entered.

"Mrs. Poole," said she, addressing Grace, "the servants' dinner will soon
be ready: will you come down?"

"No; just put my pint of porter and bit of pudding on a tray, and I'll
carry it upstairs."

"You'll have some meat?"

"Just a morsel, and a taste of cheese, that's all."

"And the sago?"

"Never mind it at present: I shall be coming down before teatime: I'll
make it myself."

The cook here turned to me, saying that Mrs. Fairfax was waiting for me:
so I departed.

I hardly heard Mrs. Fairfax's account of the curtain conflagration during
dinner, so much was I occupied in puzzling my brains over the enigmatical
character of Grace Poole, and still more in pondering the problem of her
position at Thornfield and questioning why she had not been given into
custody that morning, or, at the very least, dismissed from her master's
service.  He had almost as much as declared his conviction of her
criminality last night: what mysterious cause withheld him from accusing
her?  Why had he enjoined me, too, to secrecy?  It was strange: a bold,
vindictive, and haughty gentleman seemed somehow in the power of one of
the meanest of his dependants; so much in her power, that even when she
lifted her hand against his life, he dared not openly charge her with the
attempt, much less punish her for it.

Had Grace been young and handsome, I should have been tempted to think
that tenderer feelings than prudence or fear influenced Mr. Rochester in
her behalf; but, hard-favoured and matronly as she was, the idea could
not be admitted.  "Yet," I reflected, "she has been young once; her youth
would be contemporary with her master's: Mrs. Fairfax told me once, she
had lived here many years.  I don't think she can ever have been pretty;
but, for aught I know, she may possess originality and strength of
character to compensate for the want of personal advantages.  Mr.
Rochester is an amateur of the decided and eccentric: Grace is eccentric
at least.  What if a former caprice (a freak very possible to a nature so
sudden and headstrong as his) has delivered him into her power, and she
now exercises over his actions a secret influence, the result of his own
indiscretion, which he cannot shake off, and dare not disregard?"  But,
having reached this point of conjecture, Mrs. Poole's square, flat
figure, and uncomely, dry, even coarse face, recurred so distinctly to my
mind's eye, that I thought, "No; impossible! my supposition cannot be
correct.  Yet," suggested the secret voice which talks to us in our own
hearts, "you are not beautiful either, and perhaps Mr. Rochester approves
you: at any rate, you have often felt as if he did; and last
night--remember his words; remember his look; remember his voice!"

I well remembered all; language, glance, and tone seemed at the moment
vividly renewed.  I was now in the schoolroom; Adele was drawing; I bent
over her and directed her pencil.  She looked up with a sort of start.

"Qu' avez-vous, mademoiselle?" said she.  "Vos doigts tremblent comme la
feuille, et vos joues sont rouges: mais, rouges comme des cerises!"

"I am hot, Adele, with stooping!"  She went on sketching; I went on
thinking.

I hastened to drive from my mind the hateful notion I had been conceiving
respecting Grace Poole; it disgusted me.  I compared myself with her, and
found we were different.  Bessie Leaven had said I was quite a lady; and
she spoke truth--I was a lady.  And now I looked much better than I did
when Bessie saw me; I had more colour and more flesh, more life, more
vivacity, because I had brighter hopes and keener enjoyments.

"Evening approaches," said I, as I looked towards the window.  "I have
never heard Mr. Rochester's voice or step in the house to-day; but surely
I shall see him before night: I feared the meeting in the morning; now I
desire it, because expectation has been so long baffled that it is grown
impatient."

When dusk actually closed, and when Adele left me to go and play in the
nursery with Sophie, I did most keenly desire it.  I listened for the
bell to ring below; I listened for Leah coming up with a message; I
fancied sometimes I heard Mr. Rochester's own tread, and I turned to the
door, expecting it to open and admit him.  The door remained shut;
darkness only came in through the window.  Still it was not late; he
often sent for me at seven and eight o'clock, and it was yet but six.
Surely I should not be wholly disappointed to-night, when I had so many
things to say to him!  I wanted again to introduce the subject of Grace
Poole, and to hear what he would answer; I wanted to ask him plainly if
he really believed it was she who had made last night's hideous attempt;
and if so, why he kept her wickedness a secret.  It little mattered
whether my curiosity irritated him; I knew the pleasure of vexing and
soothing him by turns; it was one I chiefly delighted in, and a sure
instinct always prevented me from going too far; beyond the verge of
provocation I never ventured; on the extreme brink I liked well to try my
skill.  Retaining every minute form of respect, every propriety of my
station, I could still meet him in argument without fear or uneasy
restraint; this suited both him and me.

A tread creaked on the stairs at last.  Leah made her appearance; but it
was only to intimate that tea was ready in Mrs. Fairfax's room.  Thither
I repaired, glad at least to go downstairs; for that brought me, I
imagined, nearer to Mr. Rochester's presence.

"You must want your tea," said the good lady, as I joined her; "you ate
so little at dinner.  I am afraid," she continued, "you are not well to-
day: you look flushed and feverish."

"Oh, quite well!  I never felt better."

"Then you must prove it by evincing a good appetite; will you fill the
teapot while I knit off this needle?"  Having completed her task, she
rose to draw down the blind, which she had hitherto kept up, by way, I
suppose, of making the most of daylight, though dusk was now fast
deepening into total obscurity.

"It is fair to-night," said she, as she looked through the panes, "though
not starlight; Mr. Rochester has, on the whole, had a favourable day for
his journey."

"Journey!--Is Mr. Rochester gone anywhere?  I did not know he was out."

"Oh, he set off the moment he had breakfasted!  He is gone to the Leas,
Mr. Eshton's place, ten miles on the other side Millcote.  I believe
there is quite a party assembled there; Lord Ingram, Sir George Lynn,
Colonel Dent, and others."

"Do you expect him back to-night?"

"No--nor to-morrow either; I should think he is very likely to stay a
week or more: when these fine, fashionable people get together, they are
so surrounded by elegance and gaiety, so well provided with all that can
please and entertain, they are in no hurry to separate.  Gentlemen
especially are often in request on such occasions; and Mr. Rochester is
so talented and so lively in society, that I believe he is a general
favourite: the ladies are very fond of him; though you would not think
his appearance calculated to recommend him particularly in their eyes:
but I suppose his acquirements and abilities, perhaps his wealth and good
blood, make amends for any little fault of look."

"Are there ladies at the Leas?"

"There are Mrs. Eshton and her three daughters--very elegant young ladies
indeed; and there are the Honourable Blanche and Mary Ingram, most
beautiful women, I suppose: indeed I have seen Blanche, six or seven
years since, when she was a girl of eighteen.  She came here to a
Christmas ball and party Mr. Rochester gave.  You should have seen the
dining-room that day--how richly it was decorated, how brilliantly lit
up!  I should think there were fifty ladies and gentlemen present--all of
the first county families; and Miss Ingram was considered the belle of
the evening."

"You saw her, you say, Mrs. Fairfax: what was she like?"

"Yes, I saw her.  The dining-room doors were thrown open; and, as it was
Christmas-time, the servants were allowed to assemble in the hall, to
hear some of the ladies sing and play.  Mr. Rochester would have me to
come in, and I sat down in a quiet corner and watched them.  I never saw
a more splendid scene: the ladies were magnificently dressed; most of
them--at least most of the younger ones--looked handsome; but Miss Ingram
was certainly the queen."

"And what was she like?"

"Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck: olive
complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr.
Rochester's: large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels.  And then
she had such a fine head of hair; raven-black and so becomingly arranged:
a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest
curls I ever saw.  She was dressed in pure white; an amber-coloured scarf
was passed over her shoulder and across her breast, tied at the side, and
descending in long, fringed ends below her knee.  She wore an
amber-coloured flower, too, in her hair: it contrasted well with the
jetty mass of her curls."

"She was greatly admired, of course?"

"Yes, indeed: and not only for her beauty, but for her accomplishments.
She was one of the ladies who sang: a gentleman accompanied her on the
piano.  She and Mr. Rochester sang a duet."

"Mr. Rochester?  I was not aware he could sing."

"Oh! he has a fine bass voice, and an excellent taste for music."

"And Miss Ingram: what sort of a voice had she?"

"A very rich and powerful one: she sang delightfully; it was a treat to
listen to her;--and she played afterwards.  I am no judge of music, but
Mr. Rochester is; and I heard him say her execution was remarkably good."

"And this beautiful and accomplished lady, she is not yet married?"

"It appears not: I fancy neither she nor her sister have very large
fortunes.  Old Lord Ingram's estates were chiefly entailed, and the
eldest son came in for everything almost."

"But I wonder no wealthy nobleman or gentleman has taken a fancy to her:
Mr. Rochester, for instance.  He is rich, is he not?"

"Oh! yes.  But you see there is a considerable difference in age: Mr.
Rochester is nearly forty; she is but twenty-five."

"What of that?  More unequal matches are made every day."

"True: yet I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea
of the sort.  But you eat nothing: you have scarcely tasted since you
began tea."

"No: I am too thirsty to eat.  Will you let me have another cup?"

I was about again to revert to the probability of a union between Mr.
Rochester and the beautiful Blanche; but Adele came in, and the
conversation was turned into another channel.

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into
my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring
back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's
boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense.

Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes,
wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night--of the general
state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason
having come forward and told, in her own quiet way a plain, unvarnished
tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the
ideal;--I pronounced judgment to this effect:--

That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life;
that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies,
and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.

"_You_," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester?  _You_ gifted with the
power of pleasing him?  _You_ of importance to him in any way?  Go! your
folly sickens me.  And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens
of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man
of the world to a dependent and a novice.  How dared you?  Poor stupid
dupe!--Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to
yourself this morning the brief scene of last night?--Cover your face and
be ashamed!  He said something in praise of your eyes, did he?  Blind
puppy!  Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed
senselessness!  It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior,
who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women
to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and
unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and
responded to, must lead, _ignis-fatuus_-like, into miry wilds whence there
is no extrication.

"Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: to-morrow, place the glass
before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully, without
softening one defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing
irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected,
poor, and plain.'

"Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory--you have one prepared in your
drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest
tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully
the loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and
sweetest lines, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of
Blanche Ingram; remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye;--What! you
revert to Mr. Rochester as a model!  Order!  No snivel!--no sentiment!--no
regret!  I will endure only sense and resolution.  Recall the august yet
harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust; let the round and
dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand; omit neither diamond ring
nor gold bracelet; portray faithfully the attire, aerial lace and
glistening satin, graceful scarf and golden rose; call it 'Blanche, an
accomplished lady of rank.'

"Whenever, in future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks
well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them: say, 'Mr.
Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if he chose to
strive for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this
indigent and insignificant plebeian?'"

"I'll do it," I resolved: and having framed this determination, I grew
calm, and fell asleep.

I kept my word.  An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait in
crayons; and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory miniature
of an imaginary Blanche Ingram.  It looked a lovely face enough, and when
compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast was as great as self-
control could desire.  I derived benefit from the task: it had kept my
head and hands employed, and had given force and fixedness to the new
impressions I wished to stamp indelibly on my heart.

Ere long, I had reason to congratulate myself on the course of wholesome
discipline to which I had thus forced my feelings to submit.  Thanks to
it, I was able to meet subsequent occurrences with a decent calm, which,
had they found me unprepared, I should probably have been unequal to
maintain, even externally.




CHAPTER XVII


A week passed, and no news arrived of Mr. Rochester: ten days, and still
he did not come.  Mrs. Fairfax said she should not be surprised if he
were to go straight from the Leas to London, and thence to the Continent,
and not show his face again at Thornfield for a year to come; he had not
unfrequently quitted it in a manner quite as abrupt and unexpected.  When
I heard this, I was beginning to feel a strange chill and failing at the
heart.  I was actually permitting myself to experience a sickening sense
of disappointment; but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles,
I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got
over the temporary blunder--how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr.
Rochester's movements a matter in which I had any cause to take a vital
interest.  Not that I humbled myself by a slavish notion of inferiority:
on the contrary, I just said--

"You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield, further than to
receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protegee, and to be
grateful for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do your duty,
you have a right to expect at his hands.  Be sure that is the only tie he
seriously acknowledges between you and him; so don't make him the object
of your fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth.  He is not
of your order: keep to your caste, and be too self-respecting to lavish
the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not
wanted and would be despised."

I went on with my day's business tranquilly; but ever and anon vague
suggestions kept wandering across my brain of reasons why I should quit
Thornfield; and I kept involuntarily framing advertisements and pondering
conjectures about new situations: these thoughts I did not think to
check; they might germinate and bear fruit if they could.

Mr. Rochester had been absent upwards of a fortnight, when the post
brought Mrs. Fairfax a letter.

"It is from the master," said she, as she looked at the direction.  "Now
I suppose we shall know whether we are to expect his return or not."

And while she broke the seal and perused the document, I went on taking
my coffee (we were at breakfast): it was hot, and I attributed to that
circumstance a fiery glow which suddenly rose to my face.  Why my hand
shook, and why I involuntarily spilt half the contents of my cup into my
saucer, I did not choose to consider.

"Well, I sometimes think we are too quiet; but we run a chance of being
busy enough now: for a little while at least," said Mrs. Fairfax, still
holding the note before her spectacles.

Ere I permitted myself to request an explanation, I tied the string of
Adele's pinafore, which happened to be loose: having helped her also to
another bun and refilled her mug with milk, I said, nonchalantly--

"Mr. Rochester is not likely to return soon, I suppose?"

"Indeed he is--in three days, he says: that will be next Thursday; and
not alone either.  I don't know how many of the fine people at the Leas
are coming with him: he sends directions for all the best bedrooms to be
prepared; and the library and drawing-rooms are to be cleaned out; I am
to get more kitchen hands from the George Inn, at Millcote, and from
wherever else I can; and the ladies will bring their maids and the
gentlemen their valets: so we shall have a full house of it."  And Mrs.
Fairfax swallowed her breakfast and hastened away to commence operations.

The three days were, as she had foretold, busy enough.  I had thought all
the rooms at Thornfield beautifully clean and well arranged; but it
appears I was mistaken.  Three women were got to help; and such
scrubbing, such brushing, such washing of paint and beating of carpets,
such taking down and putting up of pictures, such polishing of mirrors
and lustres, such lighting of fires in bedrooms, such airing of sheets
and feather-beds on hearths, I never beheld, either before or since.
Adele ran quite wild in the midst of it: the preparations for company and
the prospect of their arrival, seemed to throw her into ecstasies.  She
would have Sophie to look over all her "toilettes," as she called frocks;
to furbish up any that were "_passees_," and to air and arrange the new.
For herself, she did nothing but caper about in the front chambers, jump
on and off the bedsteads, and lie on the mattresses and piled-up bolsters
and pillows before the enormous fires roaring in the chimneys.  From
school duties she was exonerated: Mrs. Fairfax had pressed me into her
service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping (or hindering) her
and the cook; learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and French
pastry, to truss game and garnish desert-dishes.

The party were expected to arrive on Thursday afternoon, in time for
dinner at six.  During the intervening period I had no time to nurse
chimeras; and I believe I was as active and gay as anybody--Adele
excepted.  Still, now and then, I received a damping check to my
cheerfulness; and was, in spite of myself, thrown back on the region of
doubts and portents, and dark conjectures.  This was when I chanced to
see the third-storey staircase door (which of late had always been kept
locked) open slowly, and give passage to the form of Grace Poole, in prim
cap, white apron, and handkerchief; when I watched her glide along the
gallery, her quiet tread muffled in a list slipper; when I saw her look
into the bustling, topsy-turvy bedrooms,--just say a word, perhaps, to
the charwoman about the proper way to polish a grate, or clean a marble
mantelpiece, or take stains from papered walls, and then pass on.  She
would thus descend to the kitchen once a day, eat her dinner, smoke a
moderate pipe on the hearth, and go back, carrying her pot of porter with
her, for her private solace, in her own gloomy, upper haunt.  Only one
hour in the twenty-four did she pass with her fellow-servants below; all
the rest of her time was spent in some low-ceiled, oaken chamber of the
second storey: there she sat and sewed--and probably laughed drearily to
herself,--as companionless as a prisoner in his dungeon.

The strangest thing of all was, that not a soul in the house, except me,
noticed her habits, or seemed to marvel at them: no one discussed her
position or employment; no one pitied her solitude or isolation.  I once,
indeed, overheard part of a dialogue between Leah and one of the
charwomen, of which Grace formed the subject.  Leah had been saying
something I had not caught, and the charwoman remarked--

"She gets good wages, I guess?"

"Yes," said Leah; "I wish I had as good; not that mine are to complain
of,--there's no stinginess at Thornfield; but they're not one fifth of
the sum Mrs. Poole receives.  And she is laying by: she goes every
quarter to the bank at Millcote.  I should not wonder but she has saved
enough to keep her independent if she liked to leave; but I suppose she's
got used to the place; and then she's not forty yet, and strong and able
for anything.  It is too soon for her to give up business."

"She is a good hand, I daresay," said the charwoman.

"Ah!--she understands what she has to do,--nobody better," rejoined Leah
significantly; "and it is not every one could fill her shoes--not for all
the money she gets."

"That it is not!" was the reply.  "I wonder whether the master--"

The charwoman was going on; but here Leah turned and perceived me, and
she instantly gave her companion a nudge.

"Doesn't she know?" I heard the woman whisper.

Leah shook her head, and the conversation was of course dropped.  All I
had gathered from it amounted to this,--that there was a mystery at
Thornfield; and that from participation in that mystery I was purposely
excluded.

Thursday came: all work had been completed the previous evening; carpets
were laid down, bed-hangings festooned, radiant white counterpanes
spread, toilet tables arranged, furniture rubbed, flowers piled in vases:
both chambers and saloons looked as fresh and bright as hands could make
them.  The hall, too, was scoured; and the great carved clock, as well as
the steps and banisters of the staircase, were polished to the brightness
of glass; in the dining-room, the sideboard flashed resplendent with
plate; in the drawing-room and boudoir, vases of exotics bloomed on all
sides.

Afternoon arrived: Mrs. Fairfax assumed her best black satin gown, her
gloves, and her gold watch; for it was her part to receive the
company,--to conduct the ladies to their rooms, &c.  Adele, too, would be
dressed: though I thought she had little chance of being introduced to
the party that day at least.  However, to please her, I allowed Sophie to
apparel her in one of her short, full muslin frocks.  For myself, I had
no need to make any change; I should not be called upon to quit my
sanctum of the schoolroom; for a sanctum it was now become to me,--"a
very pleasant refuge in time of trouble."

It had been a mild, serene spring day--one of those days which, towards
the end of March or the beginning of April, rise shining over the earth
as heralds of summer.  It was drawing to an end now; but the evening was
even warm, and I sat at work in the schoolroom with the window open.

"It gets late," said Mrs. Fairfax, entering in rustling state.  "I am
glad I ordered dinner an hour after the time Mr. Rochester mentioned; for
it is past six now.  I have sent John down to the gates to see if there
is anything on the road: one can see a long way from thence in the
direction of Millcote."  She went to the window.  "Here he is!" said she.
"Well, John" (leaning out), "any news?"

"They're coming, ma'am," was the answer.  "They'll be here in ten
minutes."

Adele flew to the window.  I followed, taking care to stand on one side,
so that, screened by the curtain, I could see without being seen.

The ten minutes John had given seemed very long, but at last wheels were
heard; four equestrians galloped up the drive, and after them came two
open carriages.  Fluttering veils and waving plumes filled the vehicles;
two of the cavaliers were young, dashing-looking gentlemen; the third was
Mr. Rochester, on his black horse, Mesrour, Pilot bounding before him; at
his side rode a lady, and he and she were the first of the party.  Her
purple riding-habit almost swept the ground, her veil streamed long on
the breeze; mingling with its transparent folds, and gleaming through
them, shone rich raven ringlets.

"Miss Ingram!" exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax, and away she hurried to her post
below.

The cavalcade, following the sweep of the drive, quickly turned the angle
of the house, and I lost sight of it.  Adele now petitioned to go down;
but I took her on my knee, and gave her to understand that she must not
on any account think of venturing in sight of the ladies, either now or
at any other time, unless expressly sent for: that Mr. Rochester would be
very angry, &c.  "Some natural tears she shed" on being told this; but as
I began to look very grave, she consented at last to wipe them.

A joyous stir was now audible in the hall: gentlemen's deep tones and
ladies' silvery accents blent harmoniously together, and distinguishable
above all, though not loud, was the sonorous voice of the master of
Thornfield Hall, welcoming his fair and gallant guests under its roof.
Then light steps ascended the stairs; and there was a tripping through
the gallery, and soft cheerful laughs, and opening and closing doors,
and, for a time, a hush.

"Elles changent de toilettes," said Adele; who, listening attentively,
had followed every movement; and she sighed.

"Chez maman," said she, "quand il y avait du monde, je le suivais
partout, au salon et a leurs chambres; souvent je regardais les femmes de
chambre coiffer et habiller les dames, et c'etait si amusant: comme cela
on apprend."

"Don't you feel hungry, Adele?"

"Mais oui, mademoiselle: voila cinq ou six heures que nous n'avons pas
mange."

"Well now, while the ladies are in their rooms, I will venture down and
get you something to eat."

And issuing from my asylum with precaution, I sought a back-stairs which
conducted directly to the kitchen.  All in that region was fire and
commotion; the soup and fish were in the last stage of projection, and
the cook hung over her crucibles in a frame of mind and body threatening
spontaneous combustion.  In the servants' hall two coachmen and three
gentlemen's gentlemen stood or sat round the fire; the abigails, I
suppose, were upstairs with their mistresses; the new servants, that had
been hired from Millcote, were bustling about everywhere.  Threading this
chaos, I at last reached the larder; there I took possession of a cold
chicken, a roll of bread, some tarts, a plate or two and a knife and
fork: with this booty I made a hasty retreat.  I had regained the
gallery, and was just shutting the back-door behind me, when an
accelerated hum warned me that the ladies were about to issue from their
chambers.  I could not proceed to the schoolroom without passing some of
their doors, and running the risk of being surprised with my cargo of
victualage; so I stood still at this end, which, being windowless, was
dark: quite dark now, for the sun was set and twilight gathering.

Presently the chambers gave up their fair tenants one after another: each
came out gaily and airily, with dress that gleamed lustrous through the
dusk.  For a moment they stood grouped together at the other extremity of
the gallery, conversing in a key of sweet subdued vivacity: they then
descended the staircase almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down
a hill.  Their collective appearance had left on me an impression of high-
born elegance, such as I had never before received.

I found Adele peeping through the schoolroom door, which she held ajar.
"What beautiful ladies!" cried she in English.  "Oh, I wish I might go to
them!  Do you think Mr. Rochester will send for us by-and-bye, after
dinner?"

"No, indeed, I don't; Mr. Rochester has something else to think about.
Never mind the ladies to-night; perhaps you will see them to-morrow: here
is your dinner."

She was really hungry, so the chicken and tarts served to divert her
attention for a time.  It was well I secured this forage, or both she, I,
and Sophie, to whom I conveyed a share of our repast, would have run a
chance of getting no dinner at all: every one downstairs was too much
engaged to think of us.  The dessert was not carried out till after nine
and at ten footmen were still running to and fro with trays and coffee-
cups.  I allowed Adele to sit up much later than usual; for she declared
she could not possibly go to sleep while the doors kept opening and
shutting below, and people bustling about.  Besides, she added, a message
might possibly come from Mr. Rochester when she was undressed; "et alors
quel dommage!"

I told her stories as long as she would listen to them; and then for a
change I took her out into the gallery.  The hall lamp was now lit, and
it amused her to look over the balustrade and watch the servants passing
backwards and forwards.  When the evening was far advanced, a sound of
music issued from the drawing-room, whither the piano had been removed;
Adele and I sat down on the top step of the stairs to listen.  Presently
a voice blent with the rich tones of the instrument; it was a lady who
sang, and very sweet her notes were.  The solo over, a duet followed, and
then a glee: a joyous conversational murmur filled up the intervals.  I
listened long: suddenly I discovered that my ear was wholly intent on
analysing the mingled sounds, and trying to discriminate amidst the
confusion of accents those of Mr. Rochester; and when it caught them,
which it soon did, it found a further task in framing the tones, rendered
by distance inarticulate, into words.

The clock struck eleven.  I looked at Adele, whose head leant against my
shoulder; her eyes were waxing heavy, so I took her up in my arms and
carried her off to bed.  It was near one before the gentlemen and ladies
sought their chambers.

The next day was as fine as its predecessor: it was devoted by the party
to an excursion to some site in the neighbourhood.  They set out early in
the forenoon, some on horseback, the rest in carriages; I witnessed both
the departure and the return.  Miss Ingram, as before, was the only lady
equestrian; and, as before, Mr. Rochester galloped at her side; the two
rode a little apart from the rest.  I pointed out this circumstance to
Mrs. Fairfax, who was standing at the window with me--

"You said it was not likely they should think of being married," said I,
"but you see Mr. Rochester evidently prefers her to any of the other
ladies."

"Yes, I daresay: no doubt he admires her."

"And she him," I added; "look how she leans her head towards him as if
she were conversing confidentially; I wish I could see her face; I have
never had a glimpse of it yet."

"You will see her this evening," answered Mrs. Fairfax.  "I happened to
remark to Mr. Rochester how much Adele wished to be introduced to the
ladies, and he said: 'Oh! let her come into the drawing-room after
dinner; and request Miss Eyre to accompany her.'"

"Yes; he said that from mere politeness: I need not go, I am sure," I
answered.

"Well, I observed to him that as you were unused to company, I did not
think you would like appearing before so gay a party--all strangers; and
he replied, in his quick way--'Nonsense!  If she objects, tell her it is
my particular wish; and if she resists, say I shall come and fetch her in
case of contumacy.'"

"I will not give him that trouble," I answered.  "I will go, if no better
may be; but I don't like it.  Shall you be there, Mrs. Fairfax?"

"No; I pleaded off, and he admitted my plea.  I'll tell you how to manage
so as to avoid the embarrassment of making a formal entrance, which is
the most disagreeable part of the business.  You must go into the drawing-
room while it is empty, before the ladies leave the dinner-table; choose
your seat in any quiet nook you like; you need not stay long after the
gentlemen come in, unless you please: just let Mr. Rochester see you are
there and then slip away--nobody will notice you."

"Will these people remain long, do you think?"

"Perhaps two or three weeks, certainly not more.  After the Easter
recess, Sir George Lynn, who was lately elected member for Millcote, will
have to go up to town and take his seat; I daresay Mr. Rochester will
accompany him: it surprises me that he has already made so protracted a
stay at Thornfield."

It was with some trepidation that I perceived the hour approach when I
was to repair with my charge to the drawing-room.  Adele had been in a
state of ecstasy all day, after hearing she was to be presented to the
ladies in the evening; and it was not till Sophie commenced the operation
of dressing her that she sobered down.  Then the importance of the
process quickly steadied her, and by the time she had her curls arranged
in well-smoothed, drooping clusters, her pink satin frock put on, her
long sash tied, and her lace mittens adjusted, she looked as grave as any
judge.  No need to warn her not to disarrange her attire: when she was
dressed, she sat demurely down in her little chair, taking care
previously to lift up the satin skirt for fear she should crease it, and
assured me she would not stir thence till I was ready.  This I quickly
was: my best dress (the silver-grey one, purchased for Miss Temple's
wedding, and never worn since) was soon put on; my hair was soon
smoothed; my sole ornament, the pearl brooch, soon assumed.  We
descended.

Fortunately there was another entrance to the drawing-room than that
through the saloon where they were all seated at dinner.  We found the
apartment vacant; a large fire burning silently on the marble hearth, and
wax candles shining in bright solitude, amid the exquisite flowers with
which the tables were adorned.  The crimson curtain hung before the arch:
slight as was the separation this drapery formed from the party in the
adjoining saloon, they spoke in so low a key that nothing of their
conversation could be distinguished beyond a soothing murmur.

Adele, who appeared to be still under the influence of a most solemnising
impression, sat down, without a word, on the footstool I pointed out to
her.  I retired to a window-seat, and taking a book from a table near,
endeavoured to read.  Adele brought her stool to my feet; ere long she
touched my knee.

"What is it, Adele?"

"Est-ce que je ne puis pas prendrie une seule de ces fleurs magnifiques,
mademoiselle?  Seulement pour completer ma toilette."

"You think too much of your 'toilette,' Adele: but you may have a
flower."  And I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash.  She
sighed a sigh of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were
now full.  I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress:
there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little
Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress.

A soft sound of rising now became audible; the curtain was swept back
from the arch; through it appeared the dining-room, with its lit lustre
pouring down light on the silver and glass of a magnificent
dessert-service covering a long table; a band of ladies stood in the
opening; they entered, and the curtain fell behind them.

There were but eight; yet, somehow, as they flocked in, they gave the
impression of a much larger number.  Some of them were very tall; many
were dressed in white; and all had a sweeping amplitude of array that
seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies the moon.  I rose and
curtseyed to them: one or two bent their heads in return, the others only
stared at me.

They dispersed about the room, reminding me, by the lightness and
buoyancy of their movements, of a flock of white plumy birds.  Some of
them threw themselves in half-reclining positions on the sofas and
ottomans: some bent over the tables and examined the flowers and books:
the rest gathered in a group round the fire: all talked in a low but
clear tone which seemed habitual to them.  I knew their names afterwards,
and may as well mention them now.

First, there was Mrs. Eshton and two of her daughters.  She had evidently
been a handsome woman, and was well preserved still.  Of her daughters,
the eldest, Amy, was rather little: naive, and child-like in face and
manner, and piquant in form; her white muslin dress and blue sash became
her well.  The second, Louisa, was taller and more elegant in figure;
with a very pretty face, of that order the French term _minois chiffone_:
both sisters were fair as lilies.

Lady Lynn was a large and stout personage of about forty, very erect,
very haughty-looking, richly dressed in a satin robe of changeful sheen:
her dark hair shone glossily under the shade of an azure plume, and
within the circlet of a band of gems.

Mrs. Colonel Dent was less showy; but, I thought, more lady-like.  She
had a slight figure, a pale, gentle face, and fair hair.  Her black satin
dress, her scarf of rich foreign lace, and her pearl ornaments, pleased
me better than the rainbow radiance of the titled dame.

But the three most distinguished--partly, perhaps, because the tallest
figures of the band--were the Dowager Lady Ingram and her daughters,
Blanche and Mary.  They were all three of the loftiest stature of women.
The Dowager might be between forty and fifty: her shape was still fine;
her hair (by candle-light at least) still black; her teeth, too, were
still apparently perfect.  Most people would have termed her a splendid
woman of her age: and so she was, no doubt, physically speaking; but then
there was an expression of almost insupportable haughtiness in her
bearing and countenance.  She had Roman features and a double chin,
disappearing into a throat like a pillar: these features appeared to me
not only inflated and darkened, but even furrowed with pride; and the
chin was sustained by the same principle, in a position of almost
preternatural erectness.  She had, likewise, a fierce and a hard eye: it
reminded me of Mrs. Reed's; she mouthed her words in speaking; her voice
was deep, its inflections very pompous, very dogmatical,--very
intolerable, in short.  A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some
gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a
truly imperial dignity.

Blanche and Mary were of equal stature,--straight and tall as poplars.
Mary was too slim for her height, but Blanche was moulded like a Dian.  I
regarded her, of course, with special interest.  First, I wished to see
whether her appearance accorded with Mrs. Fairfax's description;
secondly, whether it at all resembled the fancy miniature I had painted
of her; and thirdly--it will out!--whether it were such as I should fancy
likely to suit Mr. Rochester's taste.

As far as person went, she answered point for point, both to my picture
and Mrs. Fairfax's description.  The noble bust, the sloping shoulders,
the graceful neck, the dark eyes and black ringlets were all there;--but
her face?  Her face was like her mother's; a youthful unfurrowed
likeness: the same low brow, the same high features, the same pride.  It
was not, however, so saturnine a pride! she laughed continually; her
laugh was satirical, and so was the habitual expression of her arched and
haughty lip.

Genius is said to be self-conscious.  I cannot tell whether Miss Ingram
was a genius, but she was self-conscious--remarkably self-conscious
indeed.  She entered into a discourse on botany with the gentle Mrs.
Dent.  It seemed Mrs. Dent had not studied that science: though, as she
said, she liked flowers, "especially wild ones;" Miss Ingram had, and she
ran over its vocabulary with an air.  I presently perceived she was (what
is vernacularly termed) _trailing_ Mrs. Dent; that is, playing on her
ignorance--her _trail_ might be clever, but it was decidedly not good-
natured.  She played: her execution was brilliant; she sang: her voice
was fine; she talked French apart to her mamma; and she talked it well,
with fluency and with a good accent.

Mary had a milder and more open countenance than Blanche; softer features
too, and a skin some shades fairer (Miss Ingram was dark as a
Spaniard)--but Mary was deficient in life: her face lacked expression,
her eye lustre; she had nothing to say, and having once taken her seat,
remained fixed like a statue in its niche.  The sisters were both attired
in spotless white.

And did I now think Miss Ingram such a choice as Mr. Rochester would be
likely to make?  I could not tell--I did not know his taste in female
beauty.  If he liked the majestic, she was the very type of majesty: then
she was accomplished, sprightly.  Most gentlemen would admire her, I
thought; and that he _did_ admire her, I already seemed to have obtained
proof: to remove the last shade of doubt, it remained but to see them
together.

You are not to suppose, reader, that Adele has all this time been sitting
motionless on the stool at my feet: no; when the ladies entered, she
rose, advanced to meet them, made a stately reverence, and said with
gravity--

"Bon jour, mesdames."

And Miss Ingram had looked down at her with a mocking air, and exclaimed,
"Oh, what a little puppet!"

Lady Lynn had remarked, "It is Mr. Rochester's ward, I suppose--the
little French girl he was speaking of."

Mrs. Dent had kindly taken her hand, and given her a kiss.

Amy and Louisa Eshton had cried out simultaneously--"What a love of a
child!"

And then they had called her to a sofa, where she now sat, ensconced
between them, chattering alternately in French and broken English;
absorbing not only the young ladies' attention, but that of Mrs. Eshton
and Lady Lynn, and getting spoilt to her heart's content.

At last coffee is brought in, and the gentlemen are summoned.  I sit in
the shade--if any shade there be in this brilliantly-lit apartment; the
window-curtain half hides me.  Again the arch yawns; they come.  The
collective appearance of the gentlemen, like that of the ladies, is very
imposing: they are all costumed in black; most of them are tall, some
young.  Henry and Frederick Lynn are very dashing sparks indeed; and
Colonel Dent is a fine soldierly man.  Mr. Eshton, the magistrate of the
district, is gentleman-like: his hair is quite white, his eyebrows and
whiskers still dark, which gives him something of the appearance of a
"pere noble de theatre."  Lord Ingram, like his sisters, is very tall;
like them, also, he is handsome; but he shares Mary's apathetic and
listless look: he seems to have more length of limb than vivacity of
blood or vigour of brain.

And where is Mr. Rochester?

He comes in last: I am not looking at the arch, yet I see him enter.  I
try to concentrate my attention on those netting-needles, on the meshes
of the purse I am forming--I wish to think only of the work I have in my
hands, to see only the silver beads and silk threads that lie in my lap;
whereas, I distinctly behold his figure, and I inevitably recall the
moment when I last saw it; just after I had rendered him, what he deemed,
an essential service, and he, holding my hand, and looking down on my
face, surveyed me with eyes that revealed a heart full and eager to
overflow; in whose emotions I had a part.  How near had I approached him
at that moment!  What had occurred since, calculated to change his and my
relative positions?  Yet now, how distant, how far estranged we were!  So
far estranged, that I did not expect him to come and speak to me.  I did
not wonder, when, without looking at me, he took a seat at the other side
of the room, and began conversing with some of the ladies.

No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I
might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily
to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise,
and the irids would fix on him.  I looked, and had an acute pleasure in
looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely
point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel
who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and
drinks divine draughts nevertheless.

Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer."  My master's
colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows,
deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth,--all energy, decision,
will,--were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than
beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite
mastered me,--that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them
in his.  I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought
hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now,
at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and
strong!  He made me love him without looking at me.

I compared him with his guests.  What was the gallant grace of the Lynns,
the languid elegance of Lord Ingram,--even the military distinction of
Colonel Dent, contrasted with his look of native pith and genuine power?
I had no sympathy in their appearance, their expression: yet I could
imagine that most observers would call them attractive, handsome,
imposing; while they would pronounce Mr. Rochester at once harsh-featured
and melancholy-looking.  I saw them smile, laugh--it was nothing; the
light of the candles had as much soul in it as their smile; the tinkle of
the bell as much significance as their laugh.  I saw Mr. Rochester
smile:--his stern features softened; his eye grew both brilliant and
gentle, its ray both searching and sweet.  He was talking, at the moment,
to Louisa and Amy Eshton.  I wondered to see them receive with calm that
look which seemed to me so penetrating: I expected their eyes to fall,
their colour to rise under it; yet I was glad when I found they were in
no sense moved.  "He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is
not of their kind.  I believe he is of mine;--I am sure he is--I feel
akin to him--I understand the language of his countenance and movements:
though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and
heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.  Did
I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive
my salary at his hands?  Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other
light than as a paymaster?  Blasphemy against nature!  Every good, true,
vigorous feeling I have gathers impulsively round him.  I know I must
conceal my sentiments: I must smother hope; I must remember that he
cannot care much for me.  For when I say that I am of his kind, I do not
mean that I have his force to influence, and his spell to attract; I mean
only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him.  I must,
then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered:--and yet, while I
breathe and think, I must love him."

Coffee is handed.  The ladies, since the gentlemen entered, have become
lively as larks; conversation waxes brisk and merry.  Colonel Dent and
Mr. Eshton argue on politics; their wives listen.  The two proud
dowagers, Lady Lynn and Lady Ingram, confabulate together.  Sir
George--whom, by-the-bye, I have forgotten to describe,--a very big, and
very fresh-looking country gentleman, stands before their sofa, coffee-
cup in hand, and occasionally puts in a word.  Mr. Frederick Lynn has
taken a seat beside Mary Ingram, and is showing her the engravings of a
splendid volume: she looks, smiles now and then, but apparently says
little.  The tall and phlegmatic Lord Ingram leans with folded arms on
the chair-back of the little and lively Amy Eshton; she glances up at
him, and chatters like a wren: she likes him better than she does Mr.
Rochester.  Henry Lynn has taken possession of an ottoman at the feet of
Louisa: Adele shares it with him: he is trying to talk French with her,
and Louisa laughs at his blunders.  With whom will Blanche Ingram pair?
She is standing alone at the table, bending gracefully over an album.  She
seems waiting to be sought; but she will not wait too long: she herself
selects a mate.

Mr. Rochester, having quitted the Eshtons, stands on the hearth as
solitary as she stands by the table: she confronts him, taking her
station on the opposite side of the mantelpiece.

"Mr. Rochester, I thought you were not fond of children?"

"Nor am I."

"Then, what induced you to take charge of such a little doll as that?"
(pointing to Adele).  "Where did you pick her up?"

"I did not pick her up; she was left on my hands."

"You should have sent her to school."

"I could not afford it: schools are so dear."

"Why, I suppose you have a governess for her: I saw a person with her
just now--is she gone?  Oh, no! there she is still, behind the window-
curtain.  You pay her, of course; I should think it quite as
expensive,--more so; for you have them both to keep in addition."

I feared--or should I say, hoped?--the allusion to me would make Mr.
Rochester glance my way; and I involuntarily shrank farther into the
shade: but he never turned his eyes.

"I have not considered the subject," said he indifferently, looking
straight before him.

"No, you men never do consider economy and common sense.  You should hear
mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think,
a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest
ridiculous, and all incubi--were they not, mama?"

"Did you speak, my own?"

The young lady thus claimed as the dowager's special property, reiterated
her question with an explanation.

"My dearest, don't mention governesses; the word makes me nervous.  I
have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice.  I thank
Heaven I have now done with them!"

Mrs. Dent here bent over to the pious lady and whispered something in her
ear; I suppose, from the answer elicited, it was a reminder that one of
the anathematised race was present.

"Tant pis!" said her Ladyship, "I hope it may do her good!"  Then, in a
lower tone, but still loud enough for me to hear, "I noticed her; I am a
judge of physiognomy, and in hers I see all the faults of her class."

"What are they, madam?" inquired Mr. Rochester aloud.

"I will tell you in your private ear," replied she, wagging her turban
three times with portentous significancy.

"But my curiosity will be past its appetite; it craves food now."

"Ask Blanche; she is nearer you than I."

"Oh, don't refer him to me, mama!  I have just one word to say of the
whole tribe; they are a nuisance.  Not that I ever suffered much from
them; I took care to turn the tables.  What tricks Theodore and I used to
play on our Miss Wilsons, and Mrs. Greys, and Madame Jouberts!  Mary was
always too sleepy to join in a plot with spirit.  The best fun was with
Madame Joubert: Miss Wilson was a poor sickly thing, lachrymose and low-
spirited, not worth the trouble of vanquishing, in short; and Mrs. Grey
was coarse and insensible; no blow took effect on her.  But poor Madame
Joubert!  I see her yet in her raging passions, when we had driven her to
extremities--spilt our tea, crumbled our bread and butter, tossed our
books up to the ceiling, and played a charivari with the ruler and desk,
the fender and fire-irons.  Theodore, do you remember those merry days?"

"Yaas, to be sure I do," drawled Lord Ingram; "and the poor old stick
used to cry out 'Oh you villains childs!'--and then we sermonised her on
the presumption of attempting to teach such clever blades as we were,
when she was herself so ignorant."

"We did; and, Tedo, you know, I helped you in prosecuting (or
persecuting) your tutor, whey-faced Mr. Vining--the parson in the pip, as
we used to call him.  He and Miss Wilson took the liberty of falling in
love with each other--at least Tedo and I thought so; we surprised sundry
tender glances and sighs which we interpreted as tokens of 'la belle
passion,' and I promise you the public soon had the benefit of our
discovery; we employed it as a sort of lever to hoist our dead-weights
from the house.  Dear mama, there, as soon as she got an inkling of the
business, found out that it was of an immoral tendency.  Did you not, my
lady-mother?"

"Certainly, my best.  And I was quite right: depend on that: there are a
thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and tutors should never
be tolerated a moment in any well-regulated house; firstly--"

"Oh, gracious, mama!  Spare us the enumeration!  _Au reste_, we all know
them: danger of bad example to innocence of childhood; distractions and
consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached--mutual alliance
and reliance; confidence thence resulting--insolence accompanying--mutiny
and general blow-up.  Am I right, Baroness Ingram, of Ingram Park?"

"My lily-flower, you are right now, as always."

"Then no more need be said: change the subject."

Amy Eshton, not hearing or not heeding this dictum, joined in with her
soft, infantine tone: "Louisa and I used to quiz our governess too; but
she was such a good creature, she would bear anything: nothing put her
out.  She was never cross with us; was she, Louisa?"

"No, never: we might do what we pleased; ransack her desk and her
workbox, and turn her drawers inside out; and she was so good-natured,
she would give us anything we asked for."

"I suppose, now," said Miss Ingram, curling her lip sarcastically, "we
shall have an abstract of the memoirs of all the governesses extant: in
order to avert such a visitation, I again move the introduction of a new
topic.  Mr. Rochester, do you second my motion?"

"Madam, I support you on this point, as on every other."

"Then on me be the onus of bringing it forward.  Signior Eduardo, are you
in voice to-night?"

"Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be."

"Then, signior, I lay on you my sovereign behest to furbish up your lungs
and other vocal organs, as they will be wanted on my royal service."

"Who would not be the Rizzio of so divine a Mary?"

"A fig for Rizzio!" cried she, tossing her head with all its curls, as
she moved to the piano.  "It is my opinion the fiddler David must have
been an insipid sort of fellow; I like black Bothwell better: to my mind
a man is nothing without a spice of the devil in him; and history may say
what it will of James Hepburn, but I have a notion, he was just the sort
of wild, fierce, bandit hero whom I could have consented to gift with my
hand."

"Gentlemen, you hear!  Now which of you most resembles Bothwell?" cried
Mr. Rochester.

"I should say the preference lies with you," responded Colonel Dent.

"On my honour, I am much obliged to you," was the reply.

Miss Ingram, who had now seated herself with proud grace at the piano,
spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced a brilliant
prelude; talking meantime.  She appeared to be on her high horse
to-night; both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only
the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors: she was evidently bent
on striking them as something very dashing and daring indeed.

"Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!" exclaimed she,
rattling away at the instrument.  "Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a
step beyond papa's park gates: nor to go even so far without mama's
permission and guardianship!  Creatures so absorbed in care about their
pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man
had anything to do with beauty!  As if loveliness were not the special
prerogative of woman--her legitimate appanage and heritage!  I grant an
ugly _woman_ is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the
_gentlemen_, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour:
let their motto be:--Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a
fillip.  Such should be my device, were I a man."

"Whenever I marry," she continued after a pause which none interrupted,
"I am resolved my husband shall not be a rival, but a foil to me.  I will
suffer no competitor near the throne; I shall exact an undivided homage:
his devotions shall not be shared between me and the shape he sees in his
mirror.  Mr. Rochester, now sing, and I will play for you."

"I am all obedience," was the response.

"Here then is a Corsair-song.  Know that I doat on Corsairs; and for that
reason, sing it _con spirito_."

"Commands from Miss Ingram's lips would put spirit into a mug of milk and
water."

"Take care, then: if you don't please me, I will shame you by showing how
such things _should_ be done."

"That is offering a premium on incapacity: I shall now endeavour to
fail."

"Gardez-vous en bien!  If you err wilfully, I shall devise a
proportionate punishment."

"Miss Ingram ought to be clement, for she has it in her power to inflict
a chastisement beyond mortal endurance."

"Ha! explain!" commanded the lady.

"Pardon me, madam: no need of explanation; your own fine sense must
inform you that one of your frowns would be a sufficient substitute for
capital punishment."

"Sing!" said she, and again touching the piano, she commenced an
accompaniment in spirited style.

"Now is my time to slip away," thought I: but the tones that then severed
the air arrested me.  Mrs. Fairfax had said Mr. Rochester possessed a
fine voice: he did--a mellow, powerful bass, into which he threw his own
feeling, his own force; finding a way through the ear to the heart, and
there waking sensation strangely.  I waited till the last deep and full
vibration had expired--till the tide of talk, checked an instant, had
resumed its flow; I then quitted my sheltered corner and made my exit by
the side-door, which was fortunately near.  Thence a narrow passage led
into the hall: in crossing it, I perceived my sandal was loose; I stopped
to tie it, kneeling down for that purpose on the mat at the foot of the
staircase.  I heard the dining-room door unclose; a gentleman came out;
rising hastily, I stood face to face with him: it was Mr. Rochester.

"How do you do?" he asked.

"I am very well, sir."

"Why did you not come and speak to me in the room?"

I thought I might have retorted the question on him who put it: but I
would not take that freedom.  I answered--

"I did not wish to disturb you, as you seemed engaged, sir."

"What have you been doing during my absence?"

"Nothing particular; teaching Adele as usual."

"And getting a good deal paler than you were--as I saw at first sight.
What is the matter?"

"Nothing at all, sir."

"Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?"

"Not the least."

"Return to the drawing-room: you are deserting too early."

"I am tired, sir."

He looked at me for a minute.

"And a little depressed," he said.  "What about?  Tell me."

"Nothing--nothing, sir.  I am not depressed."

"But I affirm that you are: so much depressed that a few more words would
bring tears to your eyes--indeed, they are there now, shining and
swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag.
If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a
servant passing, I would know what all this means.  Well, to-night I
excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you
to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect
it.  Now go, and send Sophie for Adele.  Good-night, my--"  He stopped,
bit his lip, and abruptly left me.




CHAPTER XVIII


Merry days were these at Thornfield Hall; and busy days too: how
different from the first three months of stillness, monotony, and
solitude I had passed beneath its roof!  All sad feelings seemed now
driven from the house, all gloomy associations forgotten: there was life
everywhere, movement all day long.  You could not now traverse the
gallery, once so hushed, nor enter the front chambers, once so
tenantless, without encountering a smart lady's-maid or a dandy valet.

The kitchen, the butler's pantry, the servants' hall, the entrance hall,
were equally alive; and the saloons were only left void and still when
the blue sky and halcyon sunshine of the genial spring weather called
their occupants out into the grounds.  Even when that weather was broken,
and continuous rain set in for some days, no damp seemed cast over
enjoyment: indoor amusements only became more lively and varied, in
consequence of the stop put to outdoor gaiety.

I wondered what they were going to do the first evening a change of
entertainment was proposed: they spoke of "playing charades," but in my
ignorance I did not understand the term.  The servants were called in,
the dining-room tables wheeled away, the lights otherwise disposed, the
chairs placed in a semicircle opposite the arch.  While Mr. Rochester and
the other gentlemen directed these alterations, the ladies were running
up and down stairs ringing for their maids.  Mrs. Fairfax was summoned to
give information respecting the resources of the house in shawls,
dresses, draperies of any kind; and certain wardrobes of the third storey
were ransacked, and their contents, in the shape of brocaded and hooped
petticoats, satin sacques, black modes, lace lappets, &c., were brought
down in armfuls by the abigails; then a selection was made, and such
things as were chosen were carried to the boudoir within the
drawing-room.

Meantime, Mr. Rochester had again summoned the ladies round him, and was
selecting certain of their number to be of his party.  "Miss Ingram is
mine, of course," said he: afterwards he named the two Misses Eshton, and
Mrs. Dent.  He looked at me: I happened to be near him, as I had been
fastening the clasp of Mrs. Dent's bracelet, which had got loose.

"Will you play?" he asked.  I shook my head.  He did not insist, which I
rather feared he would have done; he allowed me to return quietly to my
usual seat.

He and his aids now withdrew behind the curtain: the other party, which
was headed by Colonel Dent, sat down on the crescent of chairs.  One of
the gentlemen, Mr. Eshton, observing me, seemed to propose that I should
be asked to join them; but Lady Ingram instantly negatived the notion.

"No," I heard her say: "she looks too stupid for any game of the sort."

Ere long a bell tinkled, and the curtain drew up.  Within the arch, the
bulky figure of Sir George Lynn, whom Mr. Rochester had likewise chosen,
was seen enveloped in a white sheet: before him, on a table, lay open a
large book; and at his side stood Amy Eshton, draped in Mr. Rochester's
cloak, and holding a book in her hand.  Somebody, unseen, rang the bell
merrily; then Adele (who had insisted on being one of her guardian's
party), bounded forward, scattering round her the contents of a basket of
flowers she carried on her arm.  Then appeared the magnificent figure of
Miss Ingram, clad in white, a long veil on her head, and a wreath of
roses round her brow; by her side walked Mr. Rochester, and together they
drew near the table.  They knelt; while Mrs. Dent and Louisa Eshton,
dressed also in white, took up their stations behind them.  A ceremony
followed, in dumb show, in which it was easy to recognise the pantomime
of a marriage.  At its termination, Colonel Dent and his party consulted
in whispers for two minutes, then the Colonel called out--

"Bride!" Mr. Rochester bowed, and the curtain fell.

A considerable interval elapsed before it again rose.  Its second rising
displayed a more elaborately prepared scene than the last.  The drawing-
room, as I have before observed, was raised two steps above the dining-
room, and on the top of the upper step, placed a yard or two back within
the room, appeared a large marble basin--which I recognised as an
ornament of the conservatory--where it usually stood, surrounded by
exotics, and tenanted by gold fish--and whence it must have been
transported with some trouble, on account of its size and weight.

Seated on the carpet, by the side of this basin, was seen Mr. Rochester,
costumed in shawls, with a turban on his head.  His dark eyes and swarthy
skin and Paynim features suited the costume exactly: he looked the very
model of an Eastern emir, an agent or a victim of the bowstring.
Presently advanced into view Miss Ingram.  She, too, was attired in
oriental fashion: a crimson scarf tied sash-like round the waist: an
embroidered handkerchief knotted about her temples; her
beautifully-moulded arms bare, one of them upraised in the act of
supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully on her head.  Both her cast of
form and feature, her complexion and her general air, suggested the idea
of some Israelitish princess of the patriarchal days; and such was
doubtless the character she intended to represent.

She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she
again lifted it to her head.  The personage on the well-brink now seemed
to accost her; to make some request:--"She hasted, let down her pitcher
on her hand, and gave him to drink."  From the bosom of his robe he then
produced a casket, opened it and showed magnificent bracelets and
earrings; she acted astonishment and admiration; kneeling, he laid the
treasure at her feet; incredulity and delight were expressed by her looks
and gestures; the stranger fastened the bracelets on her arms and the
rings in her ears.  It was Eliezer and Rebecca: the camels only were
wanting.

The divining party again laid their heads together: apparently they could
not agree about the word or syllable the scene illustrated.  Colonel
Dent, their spokesman, demanded "the tableau of the whole;" whereupon the
curtain again descended.

On its third rising only a portion of the drawing-room was disclosed; the
rest being concealed by a screen, hung with some sort of dark and coarse
drapery.  The marble basin was removed; in its place, stood a deal table
and a kitchen chair: these objects were visible by a very dim light
proceeding from a horn lantern, the wax candles being all extinguished.

Amidst this sordid scene, sat a man with his clenched hands resting on
his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground.  I knew Mr. Rochester; though
the begrimed face, the disordered dress (his coat hanging loose from one
arm, as if it had been almost torn from his back in a scuffle), the
desperate and scowling countenance, the rough, bristling hair might well
have disguised him.  As he moved, a chain clanked; to his wrists were
attached fetters.

"Bridewell!" exclaimed Colonel Dent, and the charade was solved.

A sufficient interval having elapsed for the performers to resume their
ordinary costume, they re-entered the dining-room.  Mr. Rochester led in
Miss Ingram; she was complimenting him on his acting.

"Do you know," said she, "that, of the three characters, I liked you in
the last best?  Oh, had you but lived a few years earlier, what a gallant
gentleman-highwayman you would have made!"

"Is all the soot washed from my face?" he asked, turning it towards her.

"Alas! yes: the more's the pity!  Nothing could be more becoming to your
complexion than that ruffian's rouge."

"You would like a hero of the road then?"

"An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian
bandit; and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate."

"Well, whatever I am, remember you are my wife; we were married an hour
since, in the presence of all these witnesses."  She giggled, and her
colour rose.

"Now, Dent," continued Mr. Rochester, "it is your turn."  And as the
other party withdrew, he and his band took the vacated seats.  Miss
Ingram placed herself at her leader's right hand; the other diviners
filled the chairs on each side of him and her.  I did not now watch the
actors; I no longer waited with interest for the curtain to rise; my
attention was absorbed by the spectators; my eyes, erewhile fixed on the
arch, were now irresistibly attracted to the semicircle of chairs.  What
charade Colonel Dent and his party played, what word they chose, how they
acquitted themselves, I no longer remember; but I still see the
consultation which followed each scene: I see Mr. Rochester turn to Miss
Ingram, and Miss Ingram to him; I see her incline her head towards him,
till the jetty curls almost touch his shoulder and wave against his
cheek; I hear their mutual whisperings; I recall their interchanged
glances; and something even of the feeling roused by the spectacle
returns in memory at this moment.

I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could
not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice
me--because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once
turn his eyes in my direction--because I saw all his attentions
appropriated by a great lady, who scorned to touch me with the hem of her
robes as she passed; who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me
by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to
merit observation.  I could not unlove him, because I felt sure he would
soon marry this very lady--because I read daily in her a proud security
in his intentions respecting her--because I witnessed hourly in him a
style of courtship which, if careless and choosing rather to be sought
than to seek, was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its
very pride, irresistible.

There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though
much to create despair.  Much too, you will think, reader, to engender
jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a
woman in Miss Ingram's.  But I was not jealous: or very rarely;--the
nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word.  Miss
Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the
feeling.  Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say.  She was very
showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant
attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing
bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted
by its freshness.  She was not good; she was not original: she used to
repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an
opinion of her own.  She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did
not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were
not in her.  Too often she betrayed this, by the undue vent she gave to a
spiteful antipathy she had conceived against little Adele: pushing her
away with some contumelious epithet if she happened to approach her;
sometimes ordering her from the room, and always treating her with
coldness and acrimony.  Other eyes besides mine watched these
manifestations of character--watched them closely, keenly, shrewdly.  Yes;
the future bridegroom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended
a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity--this guardedness
of his--this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one's defects--this
obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever-
torturing pain arose.

I saw he was going to marry her, for family, perhaps political reasons,
because her rank and connections suited him; I felt he had not given her
his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win from him
that treasure.  This was the point--this was where the nerve was touched
and teased--this was where the fever was sustained and fed: _she could
not charm him_.

If she had managed the victory at once, and he had yielded and sincerely
laid his heart at her feet, I should have covered my face, turned to the
wall, and (figuratively) have died to them.  If Miss Ingram had been a
good and noble woman, endowed with force, fervour, kindness, sense, I
should have had one vital struggle with two tigers--jealousy and despair:
then, my heart torn out and devoured, I should have admired
her--acknowledged her excellence, and been quiet for the rest of my days:
and the more absolute her superiority, the deeper would have been my
admiration--the more truly tranquil my quiescence.  But as matters really
stood, to watch Miss Ingram's efforts at fascinating Mr. Rochester, to
witness their repeated failure--herself unconscious that they did fail;
vainly fancying that each shaft launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly
pluming herself on success, when her pride and self-complacency repelled
further and further what she wished to allure--to witness _this_, was to
be at once under ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint.

Because, when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded.  Arrows
that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester's breast and fell
harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have
quivered keen in his proud heart--have called love into his stern eye,
and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a
silent conquest might have been won.

"Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to draw so
near to him?" I asked myself.  "Surely she cannot truly like him, or not
like him with true affection!  If she did, she need not coin her smiles
so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so
elaborate, graces so multitudinous.  It seems to me that she might, by
merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get
nigher his heart.  I have seen in his face a far different expression
from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him;
but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and
calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it--to answer what he
asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace--and
it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a
fostering sunbeam.  How will she manage to please him when they are
married?  I do not think she will manage it; and yet it might be managed;
and his wife might, I verily believe, be the very happiest woman the sun
shines on."

I have not yet said anything condemnatory of Mr. Rochester's project of
marrying for interest and connections.  It surprised me when I first
discovered that such was his intention: I had thought him a man unlikely
to be influenced by motives so commonplace in his choice of a wife; but
the longer I considered the position, education, &c., of the parties, the
less I felt justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram
for acting in conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them,
doubtless, from their childhood.  All their class held these principles:
I supposed, then, they had reasons for holding them such as I could not
fathom.  It seemed to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take
to my bosom only such a wife as I could love; but the very obviousness of
the advantages to the husband's own happiness offered by this plan
convinced me that there must be arguments against its general adoption of
which I was quite ignorant: otherwise I felt sure all the world would act
as I wished to act.

But in other points, as well as this, I was growing very lenient to my
master: I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a
sharp look-out.  It had formerly been my endeavour to study all sides of
his character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing
of both, to form an equitable judgment.  Now I saw no bad.  The sarcasm
that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only
like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but
their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid.  And as for the
vague something--was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a
desponding expression?--that opened upon a careful observer, now and
then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange
depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and
shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and
had suddenly felt the ground quiver and seen it gape: that something, I,
at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with
palsied nerves.  Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare--to
divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might
look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their
nature.

Meantime, while I thought only of my master and his future bride--saw
only them, heard only their discourse, and considered only their
movements of importance--the rest of the party were occupied with their
own separate interests and pleasures.  The Ladies Lynn and Ingram
continued to consort in solemn conferences, where they nodded their two
turbans at each other, and held up their four hands in confronting
gestures of surprise, or mystery, or horror, according to the theme on
which their gossip ran, like a pair of magnified puppets.  Mild Mrs. Dent
talked with good-natured Mrs. Eshton; and the two sometimes bestowed a
courteous word or smile on me.  Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and Mr.
Eshton discussed politics, or county affairs, or justice business.  Lord
Ingram flirted with Amy Eshton; Louisa played and sang to and with one of
the Messrs. Lynn; and Mary Ingram listened languidly to the gallant
speeches of the other.  Sometimes all, as with one consent, suspended
their by-play to observe and listen to the principal actors: for, after
all, Mr. Rochester and--because closely connected with him--Miss Ingram
were the life and soul of the party.  If he was absent from the room an
hour, a perceptible dulness seemed to steal over the spirits of his
guests; and his re-entrance was sure to give a fresh impulse to the
vivacity of conversation.

The want of his animating influence appeared to be peculiarly felt one
day that he had been summoned to Millcote on business, and was not likely
to return till late.  The afternoon was wet: a walk the party had
proposed to take to see a gipsy camp, lately pitched on a common beyond
Hay, was consequently deferred.  Some of the gentlemen were gone to the
stables: the younger ones, together with the younger ladies, were playing
billiards in the billiard-room.  The dowagers Ingram and Lynn sought
solace in a quiet game at cards.  Blanche Ingram, after having repelled,
by supercilious taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to
draw her into conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental
tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the
library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and
prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of
absence.  The room and the house were silent: only now and then the
merriment of the billiard-players was heard from above.

It was verging on dusk, and the clock had already given warning of the
hour to dress for dinner, when little Adele, who knelt by me in the
drawing-room window-seat, suddenly exclaimed--

"Voila, Monsieur Rochester, qui revient!"

I turned, and Miss Ingram darted forwards from her sofa: the others, too,
looked up from their several occupations; for at the same time a
crunching of wheels and a splashing tramp of horse-hoofs became audible
on the wet gravel.  A post-chaise was approaching.

"What can possess him to come home in that style?" said Miss Ingram.  "He
rode Mesrour (the black horse), did he not, when he went out? and Pilot
was with him:--what has he done with the animals?"

As she said this, she approached her tall person and ample garments so
near the window, that I was obliged to bend back almost to the breaking
of my spine: in her eagerness she did not observe me at first, but when
she did, she curled her lip and moved to another casement.  The
post-chaise stopped; the driver rang the door-bell, and a gentleman
alighted attired in travelling garb; but it was not Mr. Rochester; it was
a tall, fashionable-looking man, a stranger.

"How provoking!" exclaimed Miss Ingram: "you tiresome monkey!"
(apostrophising Adele), "who perched you up in the window to give false
intelligence?" and she cast on me an angry glance, as if I were in fault.

Some parleying was audible in the hall, and soon the new-comer entered.
He bowed to Lady Ingram, as deeming her the eldest lady present.

"It appears I come at an inopportune time, madam," said he, "when my
friend, Mr. Rochester, is from home; but I arrive from a very long
journey, and I think I may presume so far on old and intimate
acquaintance as to instal myself here till he returns."

His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being
somewhat unusual,--not precisely foreign, but still not altogether
English: his age might be about Mr. Rochester's,--between thirty and
forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a
fine-looking man, at first sight especially.  On closer examination, you
detected something in his face that displeased, or rather that failed to
please.  His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large
and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life--at
least so I thought.

The sound of the dressing-bell dispersed the party.  It was not till
after dinner that I saw him again: he then seemed quite at his ease.  But
I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck me as being at
the same time unsettled and inanimate.  His eye wandered, and had no
meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never
remembered to have seen.  For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking
man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that
smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape: no firmness in that aquiline
nose and small cherry mouth; there was no thought on the low, even
forehead; no command in that blank, brown eye.

As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of the
girandoles on the mantelpiece beaming full over him--for he occupied an
arm-chair drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking still nearer, as if
he were cold, I compared him with Mr. Rochester.  I think (with deference
be it spoken) the contrast could not be much greater between a sleek
gander and a fierce falcon: between a meek sheep and the rough-coated
keen-eyed dog, its guardian.

He had spoken of Mr. Rochester as an old friend.  A curious friendship
theirs must have been: a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old adage
that "extremes meet."

Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times scraps
of their conversation across the room.  At first I could not make much
sense of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton and Mary
Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary sentences that
reached me at intervals.  These last were discussing the stranger; they
both called him "a beautiful man."  Louisa said he was "a love of a
creature," and she "adored him;" and Mary instanced his "pretty little
mouth, and nice nose," as her ideal of the charming.

"And what a sweet-tempered forehead he has!" cried Louisa,--"so
smooth--none of those frowning irregularities I dislike so much; and such
a placid eye and smile!"

And then, to my great relief, Mr. Henry Lynn summoned them to the other
side of the room, to settle some point about the deferred excursion to
Hay Common.

I was now able to concentrate my attention on the group by the fire, and
I presently gathered that the new-comer was called Mr. Mason; then I
learned that he was but just arrived in England, and that he came from
some hot country: which was the reason, doubtless, his face was so
sallow, and that he sat so near the hearth, and wore a surtout in the
house.  Presently the words Jamaica, Kingston, Spanish Town, indicated
the West Indies as his residence; and it was with no little surprise I
gathered, ere long, that he had there first seen and become acquainted
with Mr. Rochester.  He spoke of his friend's dislike of the burning
heats, the hurricanes, and rainy seasons of that region.  I knew Mr.
Rochester had been a traveller: Mrs. Fairfax had said so; but I thought
the continent of Europe had bounded his wanderings; till now I had never
heard a hint given of visits to more distant shores.

I was pondering these things, when an incident, and a somewhat unexpected
one, broke the thread of my musings.  Mr. Mason, shivering as some one
chanced to open the door, asked for more coal to be put on the fire,
which had burnt out its flame, though its mass of cinder still shone hot
and red.  The footman who brought the coal, in going out, stopped near
Mr. Eshton's chair, and said something to him in a low voice, of which I
heard only the words, "old woman,"--"quite troublesome."

"Tell her she shall be put in the stocks if she does not take herself
off," replied the magistrate.

"No--stop!" interrupted Colonel Dent.  "Don't send her away, Eshton; we
might turn the thing to account; better consult the ladies."  And
speaking aloud, he continued--"Ladies, you talked of going to Hay Common
to visit the gipsy camp; Sam here says that one of the old Mother Bunches
is in the servants' hall at this moment, and insists upon being brought
in before 'the quality,' to tell them their fortunes.  Would you like to
see her?"

"Surely, colonel," cried Lady Ingram, "you would not encourage such a low
impostor?  Dismiss her, by all means, at once!"

"But I cannot persuade her to go away, my lady," said the footman; "nor
can any of the servants: Mrs. Fairfax is with her just now, entreating
her to be gone; but she has taken a chair in the chimney-corner, and says
nothing shall stir her from it till she gets leave to come in here."

"What does she want?" asked Mrs. Eshton.

"'To tell the gentry their fortunes,' she says, ma'am; and she swears she
must and will do it."

"What is she like?" inquired the Misses Eshton, in a breath.

"A shockingly ugly old creature, miss; almost as black as a crock."

"Why, she's a real sorceress!" cried Frederick Lynn.  "Let us have her
in, of course."

"To be sure," rejoined his brother; "it would be a thousand pities to
throw away such a chance of fun."

"My dear boys, what are you thinking about?" exclaimed Mrs. Lynn.

"I cannot possibly countenance any such inconsistent proceeding," chimed
in the Dowager Ingram.

"Indeed, mama, but you can--and will," pronounced the haughty voice of
Blanche, as she turned round on the piano-stool; where till now she had
sat silent, apparently examining sundry sheets of music.  "I have a
curiosity to hear my fortune told: therefore, Sam, order the beldame
forward."

"My darling Blanche! recollect--"

"I do--I recollect all you can suggest; and I must have my will--quick,
Sam!"

"Yes--yes--yes!" cried all the juveniles, both ladies and gentlemen.  "Let
her come--it will be excellent sport!"

The footman still lingered.  "She looks such a rough one," said he.

"Go!" ejaculated Miss Ingram, and the man went.

Excitement instantly seized the whole party: a running fire of raillery
and jests was proceeding when Sam returned.

"She won't come now," said he.  "She says it's not her mission to appear
before the 'vulgar herd' (them's her words).  I must show her into a room
by herself, and then those who wish to consult her must go to her one by
one."

"You see now, my queenly Blanche," began Lady Ingram, "she encroaches.  Be
advised, my angel girl--and--"

"Show her into the library, of course," cut in the "angel girl."  "It is
not my mission to listen to her before the vulgar herd either: I mean to
have her all to myself.  Is there a fire in the library?"

"Yes, ma'am--but she looks such a tinkler."

"Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding."

Again Sam vanished; and mystery, animation, expectation rose to full flow
once more.

"She's ready now," said the footman, as he reappeared.  "She wishes to
know who will be her first visitor."

"I think I had better just look in upon her before any of the ladies go,"
said Colonel Dent.

"Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming."

Sam went and returned.

"She says, sir, that she'll have no gentlemen; they need not trouble
themselves to come near her; nor," he added, with difficulty suppressing
a titter, "any ladies either, except the young, and single."

"By Jove, she has taste!" exclaimed Henry Lynn.

Miss Ingram rose solemnly: "I go first," she said, in a tone which might
have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope, mounting a breach in the van
of his men.

"Oh, my best! oh, my dearest! pause--reflect!" was her mama's cry; but
she swept past her in stately silence, passed through the door which
Colonel Dent held open, and we heard her enter the library.

A comparative silence ensued.  Lady Ingram thought it "le cas" to wring
her hands: which she did accordingly.  Miss Mary declared she felt, for
her part, she never dared venture.  Amy and Louisa Eshton tittered under
their breath, and looked a little frightened.

The minutes passed very slowly: fifteen were counted before the library-
door again opened.  Miss Ingram returned to us through the arch.

Would she laugh?  Would she take it as a joke?  All eyes met her with a
glance of eager curiosity, and she met all eyes with one of rebuff and
coldness; she looked neither flurried nor merry: she walked stiffly to
her seat, and took it in silence.

"Well, Blanche?" said Lord Ingram.

"What did she say, sister?" asked Mary.

"What did you think?  How do you feel?--Is she a real fortune-teller?"
demanded the Misses Eshton.

"Now, now, good people," returned Miss Ingram, "don't press upon me.
Really your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited: you seem,
by the importance of you all--my good mama included--ascribe to this
matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine witch in the house, who
is in close alliance with the old gentleman.  I have seen a gipsy
vagabond; she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of palmistry
and told me what such people usually tell.  My whim is gratified; and now
I think Mr. Eshton will do well to put the hag in the stocks to-morrow
morning, as he threatened."

Miss Ingram took a book, leant back in her chair, and so declined further
conversation.  I watched her for nearly half-an-hour: during all that
time she never turned a page, and her face grew momently darker, more
dissatisfied, and more sourly expressive of disappointment.  She had
obviously not heard anything to her advantage: and it seemed to me, from
her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that she herself,
notwithstanding her professed indifference, attached undue importance to
whatever revelations had been made her.

{During all that time she never turned a page: p184.jpg}

Meantime, Mary Ingram, Amy and Louisa Eshton, declared they dared not go
alone; and yet they all wished to go.  A negotiation was opened through
the medium of the ambassador, Sam; and after much pacing to and fro,
till, I think, the said Sam's calves must have ached with the exercise,
permission was at last, with great difficulty, extorted from the rigorous
Sibyl, for the three to wait upon her in a body.

Their visit was not so still as Miss Ingram's had been: we heard
hysterical giggling and little shrieks proceeding from the library; and
at the end of about twenty minutes they burst the door open, and came
running across the hall, as if they were half-scared out of their wits.

"I am sure she is something not right!" they cried, one and all.  "She
told us such things!  She knows all about us!" and they sank breathless
into the various seats the gentlemen hastened to bring them.

Pressed for further explanation, they declared she had told them of
things they had said and done when they were mere children; described
books and ornaments they had in their boudoirs at home: keepsakes that
different relations had presented to them.  They affirmed that she had
even divined their thoughts, and had whispered in the ear of each the
name of the person she liked best in the world, and informed them of what
they most wished for.

Here the gentlemen interposed with earnest petitions to be further
enlightened on these two last-named points; but they got only blushes,
ejaculations, tremors, and titters, in return for their importunity.  The
matrons, meantime, offered vinaigrettes and wielded fans; and again and
again reiterated the expression of their concern that their warning had
not been taken in time; and the elder gentlemen laughed, and the younger
urged their services on the agitated fair ones.

In the midst of the tumult, and while my eyes and ears were fully engaged
in the scene before me, I heard a hem close at my elbow: I turned, and
saw Sam.

"If you please, miss, the gipsy declares that there is another young
single lady in the room who has not been to her yet, and she swears she
will not go till she has seen all.  I thought it must be you: there is no
one else for it.  What shall I tell her?"

"Oh, I will go by all means," I answered: and I was glad of the
unexpected opportunity to gratify my much-excited curiosity.  I slipped
out of the room, unobserved by any eye--for the company were gathered in
one mass about the trembling trio just returned--and I closed the door
quietly behind me.

"If you like, miss," said Sam, "I'll wait in the hall for you; and if she
frightens you, just call and I'll come in."

"No, Sam, return to the kitchen: I am not in the least afraid."  Nor was
I; but I was a good deal interested and excited.




CHAPTER XIX


The library looked tranquil enough as I entered it, and the Sibyl--if
Sibyl she were--was seated snugly enough in an easy-chair at the chimney-
corner.  She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet: or rather, a broad-
brimmed gipsy hat, tied down with a striped handkerchief under her chin.
An extinguished candle stood on the table; she was bending over the fire,
and seemed reading in a little black book, like a prayer-book, by the
light of the blaze: she muttered the words to herself, as most old women
do, while she read; she did not desist immediately on my entrance: it
appeared she wished to finish a paragraph.

I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with
sitting at a distance from the drawing-room fire.  I felt now as composed
as ever I did in my life: there was nothing indeed in the gipsy's
appearance to trouble one's calm.  She shut her book and slowly looked
up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she
raised it, that it was a strange one.  It looked all brown and black: elf-
locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin,
and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at
once, with a bold and direct gaze.

"Well, and you want your fortune told?" she said, in a voice as decided
as her glance, as harsh as her features.

"I don't care about it, mother; you may please yourself: but I ought to
warn you, I have no faith."

"It's like your impudence to say so: I expected it of you; I heard it in
your step as you crossed the threshold."

"Did you?  You've a quick ear."

"I have; and a quick eye and a quick brain."

"You need them all in your trade."

"I do; especially when I've customers like you to deal with.  Why don't
you tremble?"

"I'm not cold."

"Why don't you turn pale?"

"I am not sick."

"Why don't you consult my art?"

"I'm not silly."

The old crone "nichered" a laugh under her bonnet and bandage; she then
drew out a short black pipe, and lighting it began to smoke.  Having
indulged a while in this sedative, she raised her bent body, took the
pipe from her lips, and while gazing steadily at the fire, said very
deliberately--"You are cold; you are sick; and you are silly."

"Prove it," I rejoined.

"I will, in few words.  You are cold, because you are alone: no contact
strikes the fire from you that is in you.  You are sick; because the best
of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far away
from you.  You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not beckon
it to approach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits
you."

She again put her short black pipe to her lips, and renewed her smoking
with vigour.

"You might say all that to almost any one who you knew lived as a
solitary dependent in a great house."

"I might say it to almost any one: but would it be true of almost any
one?"

"In my circumstances."

"Yes; just so, in _your_ circumstances: but find me another precisely
placed as you are."

"It would be easy to find you thousands."

"You could scarcely find me one.  If you knew it, you are peculiarly
situated: very near happiness; yes, within reach of it.  The materials
are all prepared; there only wants a movement to combine them.  Chance
laid them somewhat apart; let them be once approached and bliss results."

"I don't understand enigmas.  I never could guess a riddle in my life."

"If you wish me to speak more plainly, show me your palm."

"And I must cross it with silver, I suppose?"

"To be sure."

I gave her a shilling: she put it into an old stocking-foot which she
took out of her pocket, and having tied it round and returned it, she
told me to hold out my hand.  I did.  She approached her face to the
palm, and pored over it without touching it.

"It is too fine," said she.  "I can make nothing of such a hand as that;
almost without lines: besides, what is in a palm?  Destiny is not written
there."

"I believe you," said I.

"No," she continued, "it is in the face: on the forehead, about the eyes,
in the lines of the mouth.  Kneel, and lift up your head."

"Ah! now you are coming to reality," I said, as I obeyed her.  "I shall
begin to put some faith in you presently."

I knelt within half a yard of her.  She stirred the fire, so that a
ripple of light broke from the disturbed coal: the glare, however, as she
sat, only threw her face into deeper shadow: mine, it illumined.

"I wonder with what feelings you came to me to-night," she said, when she
had examined me a while.  "I wonder what thoughts are busy in your heart
during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the fine people flitting
before you like shapes in a magic-lantern: just as little sympathetic
communion passing between you and them as if they were really mere
shadows of human forms, and not the actual substance."

"I feel tired often, sleepy sometimes, but seldom sad."

"Then you have some secret hope to buoy you up and please you with
whispers of the future?"

"Not I.  The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings to
set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself."

"A mean nutriment for the spirit to exist on: and sitting in that window-
seat (you see I know your habits )--"

"You have learned them from the servants."

"Ah! you think yourself sharp.  Well, perhaps I have: to speak truth, I
have an acquaintance with one of them, Mrs. Poole--"

I started to my feet when I heard the name.

"You have--have you?" thought I; "there is diablerie in the business
after all, then!"

"Don't be alarmed," continued the strange being; "she's a safe hand is
Mrs. Poole: close and quiet; any one may repose confidence in her.  But,
as I was saying: sitting in that window-seat, do you think of nothing but
your future school?  Have you no present interest in any of the company
who occupy the sofas and chairs before you?  Is there not one face you
study? one figure whose movements you follow with at least curiosity?"

"I like to observe all the faces and all the figures."

"But do you never single one from the rest--or it may be, two?"

"I do frequently; when the gestures or looks of a pair seem telling a
tale: it amuses me to watch them."

"What tale do you like best to hear?"

"Oh, I have not much choice!  They generally run on the same
theme--courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe--marriage."

"And do you like that monotonous theme?"

"Positively, I don't care about it: it is nothing to me."

"Nothing to you?  When a lady, young and full of life and health,
charming with beauty and endowed with the gifts of rank and fortune, sits
and smiles in the eyes of a gentleman you--"

"I what?"

"You know--and perhaps think well of."

"I don't know the gentlemen here.  I have scarcely interchanged a
syllable with one of them; and as to thinking well of them, I consider
some respectable, and stately, and middle-aged, and others young,
dashing, handsome, and lively: but certainly they are all at liberty to
be the recipients of whose smiles they please, without my feeling
disposed to consider the transaction of any moment to me."

"You don't know the gentlemen here?  You have not exchanged a syllable
with one of them?  Will you say that of the master of the house!"

"He is not at home."

"A profound remark!  A most ingenious quibble!  He went to Millcote this
morning, and will be back here to-night or to-morrow: does that
circumstance exclude him from the list of your acquaintance--blot him, as
it were, out of existence?"

"No; but I can scarcely see what Mr. Rochester has to do with the theme
you had introduced."

"I was talking of ladies smiling in the eyes of gentlemen; and of late so
many smiles have been shed into Mr. Rochester's eyes that they overflow
like two cups filled above the brim: have you never remarked that?"

"Mr. Rochester has a right to enjoy the society of his guests."

"No question about his right: but have you never observed that, of all
the tales told here about matrimony, Mr. Rochester has been favoured with
the most lively and the most continuous?"

"The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator."  I said
this rather to myself than to the gipsy, whose strange talk, voice,
manner, had by this time wrapped me in a kind of dream.  One unexpected
sentence came from her lips after another, till I got involved in a web
of mystification; and wondered what unseen spirit had been sitting for
weeks by my heart watching its workings and taking record of every pulse.

"Eagerness of a listener!" repeated she: "yes; Mr. Rochester has sat by
the hour, his ear inclined to the fascinating lips that took such delight
in their task of communicating; and Mr. Rochester was so willing to
receive and looked so grateful for the pastime given him; you have
noticed this?"

"Grateful!  I cannot remember detecting gratitude in his face."

"Detecting!  You have analysed, then.  And what did you detect, if not
gratitude?"

I said nothing.

"You have seen love: have you not?--and, looking forward, you have seen
him married, and beheld his bride happy?"

"Humph!  Not exactly.  Your witch's skill is rather at fault sometimes."

"What the devil have you seen, then?"

"Never mind: I came here to inquire, not to confess.  Is it known that
Mr. Rochester is to be married?"

"Yes; and to the beautiful Miss Ingram."

"Shortly?"

"Appearances would warrant that conclusion: and, no doubt (though, with
an audacity that wants chastising out of you, you seem to question it),
they will be a superlatively happy pair.  He must love such a handsome,
noble, witty, accomplished lady; and probably she loves him, or, if not
his person, at least his purse.  I know she considers the Rochester
estate eligible to the last degree; though (God pardon me!) I told her
something on that point about an hour ago which made her look wondrous
grave: the corners of her mouth fell half an inch.  I would advise her
blackaviced suitor to look out: if another comes, with a longer or
clearer rent-roll,--he's dished--"

"But, mother, I did not come to hear Mr. Rochester's fortune: I came to
hear my own; and you have told me nothing of it."

"Your fortune is yet doubtful: when I examined your face, one trait
contradicted another.  Chance has meted you a measure of happiness: that
I know.  I knew it before I came here this evening.  She has laid it
carefully on one side for you.  I saw her do it.  It depends on yourself
to stretch out your hand, and take it up: but whether you will do so, is
the problem I study.  Kneel again on the rug."

"Don't keep me long; the fire scorches me."

{She did not stoop towards me, but only gazed, leaning back in her chair:
p190.jpg}

I knelt.  She did not stoop towards me, but only gazed, leaning back in
her chair.  She began muttering,--

"The flame flickers in the eye; the eye shines like dew; it looks soft
and full of feeling; it smiles at my jargon: it is susceptible;
impression follows impression through its clear sphere; where it ceases
to smile, it is sad; an unconscious lassitude weighs on the lid: that
signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness.  It turns from me; it
will not suffer further scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance,
the truth of the discoveries I have already made,--to disown the charge
both of sensibility and chagrin: its pride and reserve only confirm me in
my opinion.  The eye is favourable.

"As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to
impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent
on much the heart experiences.  Mobile and flexible, it was never
intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a
mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection
for its interlocutor.  That feature too is propitious.

"I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow
professes to say,--'I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances
require me so to do.  I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.  I have an
inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous
delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford
to give.'  The forehead declares, 'Reason sits firm and holds the reins,
and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild
chasms.  The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they
are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment
shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in
every decision.  Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but
I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the
dictates of conscience.'

"Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected.  I have formed
my plans--right plans I deem them--and in them I have attended to the
claims of conscience, the counsels of reason.  I know how soon youth
would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one
dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want
sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution--such is not my taste.  I wish to foster,
not to blight--to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood--no, nor of
brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet--That will
do.  I think I rave in a kind of exquisite delirium.  I should wish now
to protract this moment _ad infinitum_; but I dare not.  So far I have
governed myself thoroughly.  I have acted as I inwardly swore I would
act; but further might try me beyond my strength.  Rise, Miss Eyre: leave
me; the play is played out'."

Where was I?  Did I wake or sleep?  Had I been dreaming?  Did I dream
still?  The old woman's voice had changed: her accent, her gesture, and
all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass--as the speech of my
own tongue.  I got up, but did not go.  I looked; I stirred the fire, and
I looked again: but she drew her bonnet and her bandage closer about her
face, and again beckoned me to depart.  The flame illuminated her hand
stretched out: roused now, and on the alert for discoveries, I at once
noticed that hand.  It was no more the withered limb of eld than my own;
it was a rounded supple member, with smooth fingers, symmetrically
turned; a broad ring flashed on the little finger, and stooping forward,
I looked at it, and saw a gem I had seen a hundred times before.  Again I
looked at the face; which was no longer turned from me--on the contrary,
the bonnet was doffed, the bandage displaced, the head advanced.

"Well, Jane, do you know me?" asked the familiar voice.

"Only take off the red cloak, sir, and then--"

"But the string is in a knot--help me."

"Break it, sir."

"There, then--'Off, ye lendings!'"  And Mr. Rochester stepped out of his
disguise.

"Now, sir, what a strange idea!"

"But well carried out, eh?  Don't you think so?"

"With the ladies you must have managed well."

"But not with you?"

"You did not act the character of a gipsy with me."

"What character did I act?  My own?"

"No; some unaccountable one.  In short, I believe you have been trying to
draw me out--or in; you have been talking nonsense to make me talk
nonsense.  It is scarcely fair, sir."

"Do you forgive me, Jane?"

"I cannot tell till I have thought it all over.  If, on reflection, I
find I have fallen into no great absurdity, I shall try to forgive you;
but it was not right."

"Oh, you have been very correct--very careful, very sensible."

I reflected, and thought, on the whole, I had.  It was a comfort; but,
indeed, I had been on my guard almost from the beginning of the
interview.  Something of masquerade I suspected.  I knew gipsies and
fortune-tellers did not express themselves as this seeming old woman had
expressed herself; besides I had noted her feigned voice, her anxiety to
conceal her features.  But my mind had been running on Grace Poole--that
living enigma, that mystery of mysteries, as I considered her.  I had
never thought of Mr. Rochester.

"Well," said he, "what are you musing about?  What does that grave smile
signify?"

"Wonder and self-congratulation, sir.  I have your permission to retire
now, I suppose?"

"No; stay a moment; and tell me what the people in the drawing-room
yonder are doing."

"Discussing the gipsy, I daresay."

"Sit down!--Let me hear what they said about me."

"I had better not stay long, sir; it must be near eleven o'clock.  Oh,
are you aware, Mr. Rochester, that a stranger has arrived here since you
left this morning?"

"A stranger!--no; who can it be?  I expected no one; is he gone?"

"No; he said he had known you long, and that he could take the liberty of
installing himself here till you returned."

"The devil he did!  Did he give his name?"

"His name is Mason, sir; and he comes from the West Indies; from Spanish
Town, in Jamaica, I think."

Mr. Rochester was standing near me; he had taken my hand, as if to lead
me to a chair.  As I spoke he gave my wrist a convulsive grip; the smile
on his lips froze: apparently a spasm caught his breath.

"Mason!--the West Indies!" he said, in the tone one might fancy a
speaking automaton to enounce its single words; "Mason!--the West
Indies!" he reiterated; and he went over the syllables three times,
growing, in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes: he hardly
seemed to know what he was doing.

"Do you feel ill, sir?" I inquired.

"Jane, I've got a blow; I've got a blow, Jane!"  He staggered.

"Oh, lean on me, sir."

"Jane, you offered me your shoulder once before; let me have it now."

"Yes, sir, yes; and my arm."

He sat down, and made me sit beside him.  Holding my hand in both his
own, he chafed it; gazing on me, at the same time, with the most troubled
and dreary look.

"My little friend!" said he, "I wish I were in a quiet island with only
you; and trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me."

"Can I help you, sir?--I'd give my life to serve you."

"Jane, if aid is wanted, I'll seek it at your hands; I promise you that."

"Thank you, sir.  Tell me what to do,--I'll try, at least, to do it."

"Fetch me now, Jane, a glass of wine from the dining-room: they will be
at supper there; and tell me if Mason is with them, and what he is
doing."

I went.  I found all the party in the dining-room at supper, as Mr.
Rochester had said; they were not seated at table,--the supper was
arranged on the sideboard; each had taken what he chose, and they stood
about here and there in groups, their plates and glasses in their hands.
Every one seemed in high glee; laughter and conversation were general and
animated.  Mr. Mason stood near the fire, talking to Colonel and Mrs.
Dent, and appeared as merry as any of them.  I filled a wine-glass (I saw
Miss Ingram watch me frowningly as I did so: she thought I was taking a
liberty, I daresay), and I returned to the library.

Mr. Rochester's extreme pallor had disappeared, and he looked once more
firm and stern.  He took the glass from my hand.

"Here is to your health, ministrant spirit!" he said.  He swallowed the
contents and returned it to me.  "What are they doing, Jane?"

"Laughing and talking, sir."

"They don't look grave and mysterious, as if they had heard something
strange?"

"Not at all: they are full of jests and gaiety."

"And Mason?"

"He was laughing too."

"If all these people came in a body and spat at me, what would you do,
Jane?"

"Turn them out of the room, sir, if I could."

He half smiled.  "But if I were to go to them, and they only looked at me
coldly, and whispered sneeringly amongst each other, and then dropped off
and left me one by one, what then?  Would you go with them?"

"I rather think not, sir: I should have more pleasure in staying with
you."

"To comfort me?"

"Yes, sir, to comfort you, as well as I could."

"And if they laid you under a ban for adhering to me?"

"I, probably, should know nothing about their ban; and if I did, I should
care nothing about it."

"Then, you could dare censure for my sake?"

"I could dare it for the sake of any friend who deserved my adherence; as
you, I am sure, do."

"Go back now into the room; step quietly up to Mason, and whisper in his
ear that Mr. Rochester is come and wishes to see him: show him in here
and then leave me."

"Yes, sir."

I did his behest.  The company all stared at me as I passed straight
among them.  I sought Mr. Mason, delivered the message, and preceded him
from the room: I ushered him into the library, and then I went upstairs.

At a late hour, after I had been in bed some time, I heard the visitors
repair to their chambers: I distinguished Mr. Rochester's voice, and
heard him say, "This way, Mason; this is your room."

He spoke cheerfully: the gay tones set my heart at ease.  I was soon
asleep.




CHAPTER XX


I had forgotten to draw my curtain, which I usually did, and also to let
down my window-blind.  The consequence was, that when the moon, which was
full and bright (for the night was fine), came in her course to that
space in the sky opposite my casement, and looked in at me through the
unveiled panes, her glorious gaze roused me.  Awaking in the dead of
night, I opened my eyes on her disk--silver-white and crystal clear.  It
was beautiful, but too solemn; I half rose, and stretched my arm to draw
the curtain.

Good God!  What a cry!

The night--its silence--its rest, was rent in twain by a savage, a sharp,
a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall.

My pulse stopped: my heart stood still; my stretched arm was paralysed.
The cry died, and was not renewed.  Indeed, whatever being uttered that
fearful shriek could not soon repeat it: not the widest-winged condor on
the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from the cloud
shrouding his eyrie.  The thing delivering such utterance must rest ere
it could repeat the effort.

It came out of the third storey; for it passed overhead.  And
overhead--yes, in the room just above my chamber-ceiling--I now heard a
struggle: a deadly one it seemed from the noise; and a half-smothered
voice shouted--

"Help! help! help!" three times rapidly.

"Will no one come?" it cried; and then, while the staggering and stamping
went on wildly, I distinguished through plank and plaster:--

"Rochester!  Rochester! for God's sake, come!"

A chamber-door opened: some one ran, or rushed, along the gallery.
Another step stamped on the flooring above and something fell; and there
was silence.

I had put on some clothes, though horror shook all my limbs; I issued
from my apartment.  The sleepers were all aroused: ejaculations,
terrified murmurs sounded in every room; door after door unclosed; one
looked out and another looked out; the gallery filled.  Gentlemen and
ladies alike had quitted their beds; and "Oh! what is it?"--"Who is
hurt?"--"What has happened?"--"Fetch a light!"--"Is it fire?"--"Are there
robbers?"--"Where shall we run?" was demanded confusedly on all hands.
But for the moonlight they would have been in complete darkness.  They
ran to and fro; they crowded together: some sobbed, some stumbled: the
confusion was inextricable.

"Where the devil is Rochester?" cried Colonel Dent.  "I cannot find him
in his bed."

"Here! here!" was shouted in return.  "Be composed, all of you: I'm
coming."

And the door at the end of the gallery opened, and Mr. Rochester advanced
with a candle: he had just descended from the upper storey.  One of the
ladies ran to him directly; she seized his arm: it was Miss Ingram.

"What awful event has taken place?" said she.  "Speak! let us know the
worst at once!"

"But don't pull me down or strangle me," he replied: for the Misses
Eshton were clinging about him now; and the two dowagers, in vast white
wrappers, were bearing down on him like ships in full sail.

"All's right!--all's right!" he cried.  "It's a mere rehearsal of Much
Ado about Nothing.  Ladies, keep off, or I shall wax dangerous."

And dangerous he looked: his black eyes darted sparks.  Calming himself
by an effort, he added--

"A servant has had the nightmare; that is all.  She's an excitable,
nervous person: she construed her dream into an apparition, or something
of that sort, no doubt; and has taken a fit with fright.  Now, then, I
must see you all back into your rooms; for, till the house is settled,
she cannot be looked after.  Gentlemen, have the goodness to set the
ladies the example.  Miss Ingram, I am sure you will not fail in evincing
superiority to idle terrors.  Amy and Louisa, return to your nests like a
pair of doves, as you are.   Mesdames" (to the dowagers), "you will take
cold to a dead certainty, if you stay in this chill gallery any longer."

And so, by dint of alternate coaxing and commanding, he contrived to get
them all once more enclosed in their separate dormitories.  I did not
wait to be ordered back to mine, but retreated unnoticed, as unnoticed I
had left it.

Not, however, to go to bed: on the contrary, I began and dressed myself
carefully.  The sounds I had heard after the scream, and the words that
had been uttered, had probably been heard only by me; for they had
proceeded from the room above mine: but they assured me that it was not a
servant's dream which had thus struck horror through the house; and that
the explanation Mr. Rochester had given was merely an invention framed to
pacify his guests.  I dressed, then, to be ready for emergencies.  When
dressed, I sat a long time by the window looking out over the silent
grounds and silvered fields and waiting for I knew not what.  It seemed
to me that some event must follow the strange cry, struggle, and call.

No: stillness returned: each murmur and movement ceased gradually, and in
about an hour Thornfield Hall was again as hushed as a desert.  It seemed
that sleep and night had resumed their empire.  Meantime the moon
declined: she was about to set.  Not liking to sit in the cold and
darkness, I thought I would lie down on my bed, dressed as I was.  I left
the window, and moved with little noise across the carpet; as I stooped
to take off my shoes, a cautious hand tapped low at the door.

"Am I wanted?" I asked.

"Are you up?" asked the voice I expected to hear, viz., my master's.

"Yes, sir."

"And dressed?"

"Yes."

"Come out, then, quietly."

I obeyed.  Mr. Rochester stood in the gallery holding a light.

"I want you," he said: "come this way: take your time, and make no
noise."

My slippers were thin: I could walk the matted floor as softly as a cat.
He glided up the gallery and up the stairs, and stopped in the dark, low
corridor of the fateful third storey: I had followed and stood at his
side.

"Have you a sponge in your room?" he asked in a whisper.

"Yes, sir."

"Have you any salts--volatile salts?"

"Yes."

"Go back and fetch both."

I returned, sought the sponge on the washstand, the salts in my drawer,
and once more retraced my steps.  He still waited; he held a key in his
hand: approaching one of the small, black doors, he put it in the lock;
he paused, and addressed me again.

"You don't turn sick at the sight of blood?"

"I think I shall not: I have never been tried yet."

I felt a thrill while I answered him; but no coldness, and no faintness.

"Just give me your hand," he said: "it will not do to risk a fainting
fit."

I put my fingers into his.  "Warm and steady," was his remark: he turned
the key and opened the door.

I saw a room I remembered to have seen before, the day Mrs. Fairfax
showed me over the house: it was hung with tapestry; but the tapestry was
now looped up in one part, and there was a door apparent, which had then
been concealed.  This door was open; a light shone out of the room
within: I heard thence a snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog
quarrelling.  Mr. Rochester, putting down his candle, said to me, "Wait a
minute," and he went forward to the inner apartment.  A shout of laughter
greeted his entrance; noisy at first, and terminating in Grace Poole's
own goblin ha! ha!  _She_ then was there.  He made some sort of
arrangement without speaking, though I heard a low voice address him: he
came out and closed the door behind him.

"Here, Jane!" he said; and I walked round to the other side of a large
bed, which with its drawn curtains concealed a considerable portion of
the chamber.  An easy-chair was near the bed-head: a man sat in it,
dressed with the exception of his coat; he was still; his head leant
back; his eyes were closed.  Mr. Rochester held the candle over him; I
recognised in his pale and seemingly lifeless face--the stranger, Mason:
I saw too that his linen on one side, and one arm, was almost soaked in
blood.

"Hold the candle," said Mr. Rochester, and I took it: he fetched a basin
of water from the washstand: "Hold that," said he.  I obeyed.  He took
the sponge, dipped it in, and moistened the corpse-like face; he asked
for my smelling-bottle, and applied it to the nostrils.  Mr. Mason
shortly unclosed his eyes; he groaned.  Mr. Rochester opened the shirt of
the wounded man, whose arm and shoulder were bandaged: he sponged away
blood, trickling fast down.

"Is there immediate danger?" murmured Mr. Mason.

"Pooh!  No--a mere scratch.  Don't be so overcome, man: bear up!  I'll
fetch a surgeon for you now, myself: you'll be able to be removed by
morning, I hope.  Jane," he continued.

"Sir?"

"I shall have to leave you in this room with this gentleman, for an hour,
or perhaps two hours: you will sponge the blood as I do when it returns:
if he feels faint, you will put the glass of water on that stand to his
lips, and your salts to his nose.  You will not speak to him on any
pretext--and--Richard, it will be at the peril of your life if you speak
to her: open your lips--agitate yourself--and I'll not answer for the
consequences."

Again the poor man groaned; he looked as if he dared not move; fear,
either of death or of something else, appeared almost to paralyse him.
Mr. Rochester put the now bloody sponge into my hand, and I proceeded to
use it as he had done.  He watched me a second, then saying,
"Remember!--No conversation," he left the room.  I experienced a strange
feeling as the key grated in the lock, and the sound of his retreating
step ceased to be heard.

Here then I was in the third storey, fastened into one of its mystic
cells; night around me; a pale and bloody spectacle under my eyes and
hands; a murderess hardly separated from me by a single door: yes--that
was appalling--the rest I could bear; but I shuddered at the thought of
Grace Poole bursting out upon me.

I must keep to my post, however.  I must watch this ghastly
countenance--these blue, still lips forbidden to unclose--these eyes now
shut, now opening, now wandering through the room, now fixing on me, and
ever glazed with the dulness of horror.  I must dip my hand again and
again in the basin of blood and water, and wipe away the trickling gore.
I must see the light of the unsnuffed candle wane on my employment; the
shadows darken on the wrought, antique tapestry round me, and grow black
under the hangings of the vast old bed, and quiver strangely over the
doors of a great cabinet opposite--whose front, divided into twelve
panels, bore, in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each
enclosed in its separate panel as in a frame; while above them at the top
rose an ebon crucifix and a dying Christ.

According as the shifting obscurity and flickering gleam hovered here or
glanced there, it was now the bearded physician, Luke, that bent his
brow; now St. John's long hair that waved; and anon the devilish face of
Judas, that grew out of the panel, and seemed gathering life and
threatening a revelation of the arch-traitor--of Satan himself--in his
subordinate's form.

Amidst all this, I had to listen as well as watch: to listen for the
movements of the wild beast or the fiend in yonder side den.  But since
Mr. Rochester's visit it seemed spellbound: all the night I heard but
three sounds at three long intervals,--a step creak, a momentary renewal
of the snarling, canine noise, and a deep human groan.

Then my own thoughts worried me.  What crime was this that lived
incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor
subdued by the owner?--what mystery, that broke out now in fire and now
in blood, at the deadest hours of night?  What creature was it, that,
masked in an ordinary woman's face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a
mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?

And this man I bent over--this commonplace, quiet stranger--how had he
become involved in the web of horror? and why had the Fury flown at him?
What made him seek this quarter of the house at an untimely season, when
he should have been asleep in bed?  I had heard Mr. Rochester assign him
an apartment below--what brought him here!  And why, now, was he so tame
under the violence or treachery done him?  Why did he so quietly submit
to the concealment Mr. Rochester enforced?  Why _did_ Mr. Rochester
enforce this concealment?  His guest had been outraged, his own life on a
former occasion had been hideously plotted against; and both attempts he
smothered in secrecy and sank in oblivion!  Lastly, I saw Mr. Mason was
submissive to Mr. Rochester; that the impetuous will of the latter held
complete sway over the inertness of the former: the few words which had
passed between them assured me of this.  It was evident that in their
former intercourse, the passive disposition of the one had been
habitually influenced by the active energy of the other: whence then had
arisen Mr. Rochester's dismay when he heard of Mr. Mason's arrival?  Why
had the mere name of this unresisting individual--whom his word now
sufficed to control like a child--fallen on him, a few hours since, as a
thunderbolt might fall on an oak?

Oh!  I could not forget his look and his paleness when he whispered:
"Jane, I have got a blow--I have got a blow, Jane."  I could not forget
how the arm had trembled which he rested on my shoulder: and it was no
light matter which could thus bow the resolute spirit and thrill the
vigorous frame of Fairfax Rochester.

"When will he come?  When will he come?" I cried inwardly, as the night
lingered and lingered--as my bleeding patient drooped, moaned, sickened:
and neither day nor aid arrived.  I had, again and again, held the water
to Mason's white lips; again and again offered him the stimulating salts:
my efforts seemed ineffectual: either bodily or mental suffering, or loss
of blood, or all three combined, were fast prostrating his strength.  He
moaned so, and looked so weak, wild, and lost, I feared he was dying; and
I might not even speak to him.

The candle, wasted at last, went out; as it expired, I perceived streaks
of grey light edging the window curtains: dawn was then approaching.
Presently I heard Pilot bark far below, out of his distant kennel in the
courtyard: hope revived.  Nor was it unwarranted: in five minutes more
the grating key, the yielding lock, warned me my watch was relieved.  It
could not have lasted more than two hours: many a week has seemed
shorter.

Mr. Rochester entered, and with him the surgeon he had been to fetch.

"Now, Carter, be on the alert," he said to this last: "I give you but
half-an-hour for dressing the wound, fastening the bandages, getting the
patient downstairs and all."

"But is he fit to move, sir?"

"No doubt of it; it is nothing serious; he is nervous, his spirits must
be kept up.  Come, set to work."

Mr. Rochester drew back the thick curtain, drew up the holland blind, let
in all the daylight he could; and I was surprised and cheered to see how
far dawn was advanced: what rosy streaks were beginning to brighten the
east.  Then he approached Mason, whom the surgeon was already handling.

"Now, my good fellow, how are you?" he asked.

"She's done for me, I fear," was the faint reply.

"Not a whit!--courage!  This day fortnight you'll hardly be a pin the
worse of it: you've lost a little blood; that's all.  Carter, assure him
there's no danger."

"I can do that conscientiously," said Carter, who had now undone the
bandages; "only I wish I could have got here sooner: he would not have
bled so much--but how is this?  The flesh on the shoulder is torn as well
as cut.  This wound was not done with a knife: there have been teeth
here!"

"She bit me," he murmured.  "She worried me like a tigress, when
Rochester got the knife from her."

"You should not have yielded: you should have grappled with her at once,"
said Mr. Rochester.

"But under such circumstances, what could one do?" returned Mason.  "Oh,
it was frightful!" he added, shuddering.  "And I did not expect it: she
looked so quiet at first."

"I warned you," was his friend's answer; "I said--be on your guard when
you go near her.  Besides, you might have waited till to-morrow, and had
me with you: it was mere folly to attempt the interview to-night, and
alone."

"I thought I could have done some good."

"You thought! you thought!  Yes, it makes me impatient to hear you: but,
however, you have suffered, and are likely to suffer enough for not
taking my advice; so I'll say no more.  Carter--hurry!--hurry!  The sun
will soon rise, and I must have him off."

"Directly, sir; the shoulder is just bandaged.  I must look to this other
wound in the arm: she has had her teeth here too, I think."

"She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart," said Mason.

I saw Mr. Rochester shudder: a singularly marked expression of disgust,
horror, hatred, warped his countenance almost to distortion; but he only
said--

"Come, be silent, Richard, and never mind her gibberish: don't repeat
it."

"I wish I could forget it," was the answer.

"You will when you are out of the country: when you get back to Spanish
Town, you may think of her as dead and buried--or rather, you need not
think of her at all."

"Impossible to forget this night!"

"It is not impossible: have some energy, man.  You thought you were as
dead as a herring two hours since, and you are all alive and talking now.
There!--Carter has done with you or nearly so; I'll make you decent in a
trice.  Jane" (he turned to me for the first time since his re-entrance),
"take this key: go down into my bedroom, and walk straight forward into
my dressing-room: open the top drawer of the wardrobe and take out a
clean shirt and neck-handkerchief: bring them here; and be nimble."

I went; sought the repository he had mentioned, found the articles named,
and returned with them.

"Now," said he, "go to the other side of the bed while I order his
toilet; but don't leave the room: you may be wanted again."

I retired as directed.

"Was anybody stirring below when you went down, Jane?" inquired Mr.
Rochester presently.

"No, sir; all was very still."

"We shall get you off cannily, Dick: and it will be better, both for your
sake, and for that of the poor creature in yonder.  I have striven long
to avoid exposure, and I should not like it to come at last.  Here,
Carter, help him on with his waist-coat.  Where did you leave your furred
cloak?  You can't travel a mile without that, I know, in this damned cold
climate.  In your room?--Jane, run down to Mr. Mason's room,--the one
next mine,--and fetch a cloak you will see there."

Again I ran, and again returned, bearing an immense mantle lined and
edged with fur.

"Now, I've another errand for you," said my untiring master; "you must
away to my room again.  What a mercy you are shod with velvet, Jane!--a
clod-hopping messenger would never do at this juncture.  You must open
the middle drawer of my toilet-table and take out a little phial and a
little glass you will find there,--quick!"

I flew thither and back, bringing the desired vessels.

"That's well!  Now, doctor, I shall take the liberty of administering a
dose myself, on my own responsibility.  I got this cordial at Rome, of an
Italian charlatan--a fellow you would have kicked, Carter.  It is not a
thing to be used indiscriminately, but it is good upon occasion: as now,
for instance.  Jane, a little water."

He held out the tiny glass, and I half filled it from the water-bottle on
the washstand.

"That will do;--now wet the lip of the phial."

I did so; he measured twelve drops of a crimson liquid, and presented it
to Mason.

"Drink, Richard: it will give you the heart you lack, for an hour or so."

"But will it hurt me?--is it inflammatory?"

"Drink! drink! drink!"

Mr. Mason obeyed, because it was evidently useless to resist.  He was
dressed now: he still looked pale, but he was no longer gory and sullied.
Mr. Rochester let him sit three minutes after he had swallowed the
liquid; he then took his arm--

"Now I am sure you can get on your feet," he said--"try."

The patient rose.

"Carter, take him under the other shoulder.  Be of good cheer, Richard;
step out--that's it!"

"I do feel better," remarked Mr. Mason.

"I am sure you do.  Now, Jane, trip on before us away to the backstairs;
unbolt the side-passage door, and tell the driver of the post-chaise you
will see in the yard--or just outside, for I told him not to drive his
rattling wheels over the pavement--to be ready; we are coming: and, Jane,
if any one is about, come to the foot of the stairs and hem."

It was by this time half-past five, and the sun was on the point of
rising; but I found the kitchen still dark and silent.  The side-passage
door was fastened; I opened it with as little noise as possible: all the
yard was quiet; but the gates stood wide open, and there was a
post-chaise, with horses ready harnessed, and driver seated on the box,
stationed outside.  I approached him, and said the gentlemen were coming;
he nodded: then I looked carefully round and listened.  The stillness of
early morning slumbered everywhere; the curtains were yet drawn over the
servants' chamber windows; little birds were just twittering in the
blossom-blanched orchard trees, whose boughs drooped like white garlands
over the wall enclosing one side of the yard; the carriage horses stamped
from time to time in their closed stables: all else was still.

The gentlemen now appeared.  Mason, supported by Mr. Rochester and the
surgeon, seemed to walk with tolerable ease: they assisted him into the
chaise; Carter followed.

"Take care of him," said Mr. Rochester to the latter, "and keep him at
your house till he is quite well: I shall ride over in a day or two to
see how he gets on.  Richard, how is it with you?"

"The fresh air revives me, Fairfax."

"Leave the window open on his side, Carter; there is no wind--good-bye,
Dick."

"Fairfax--"

"Well what is it?"

"Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be: let
her--" he stopped and burst into tears.

"I do my best; and have done it, and will do it," was the answer: he shut
up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away.

"Yet would to God there was an end of all this!" added Mr. Rochester, as
he closed and barred the heavy yard-gates.

This done, he moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a door in
the wall bordering the orchard.  I, supposing he had done with me,
prepared to return to the house; again, however, I heard him call "Jane!"
He had opened the portal and stood at it, waiting for me.

"Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments," he said; "that
house is a mere dungeon: don't you feel it so?"

"It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir."

"The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes," he answered; "and you
see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is
slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate,
and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.  Now _here_" (he
pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) "all is real, sweet, and
pure."

He strayed down a walk edged with box, with apple trees, pear trees, and
cherry trees on one side, and a border on the other full of all sorts of
old-fashioned flowers, stocks, sweet-williams, primroses, pansies,
mingled with southernwood, sweet-briar, and various fragrant herbs.  They
were fresh now as a succession of April showers and gleams, followed by a
lovely spring morning, could make them: the sun was just entering the
dappled east, and his light illumined the wreathed and dewy orchard trees
and shone down the quiet walks under them.

"Jane, will you have a flower?"

He gathered a half-blown rose, the first on the bush, and offered it to
me.

"Thank you, sir."

"Do you like this sunrise, Jane?  That sky with its high and light clouds
which are sure to melt away as the day waxes warm--this placid and balmly
atmosphere?"

"I do, very much."

"You have passed a strange night, Jane."

"Yes, sir."

"And it has made you look pale--were you afraid when I left you alone
with Mason?"

"I was afraid of some one coming out of the inner room."

"But I had fastened the door--I had the key in my pocket: I should have
been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb--my pet lamb--so near a
wolf's den, unguarded: you were safe."

"Will Grace Poole live here still, sir?"

"Oh yes! don't trouble your head about her--put the thing out of your
thoughts."

"Yet it seems to me your life is hardly secure while she stays."

"Never fear--I will take care of myself."

"Is the danger you apprehended last night gone by now, sir?"

"I cannot vouch for that till Mason is out of England: nor even then.  To
live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater-crust which may crack and
spue fire any day."

"But Mr. Mason seems a man easily led.  Your influence, sir, is evidently
potent with him: he will never set you at defiance or wilfully injure
you."

"Oh, no!  Mason will not defy me; nor, knowing it, will he hurt me--but,
unintentionally, he might in a moment, by one careless word, deprive me,
if not of life, yet for ever of happiness."

"Tell him to be cautious, sir: let him know what you fear, and show him
how to avert the danger."

He laughed sardonically, hastily took my hand, and as hastily threw it
from him.

"If I could do that, simpleton, where would the danger be?  Annihilated
in a moment.  Ever since I have known Mason, I have only had to say to
him 'Do that,' and the thing has been done.  But I cannot give him orders
in this case: I cannot say 'Beware of harming me, Richard;' for it is
imperative that I should keep him ignorant that harm to me is possible.
Now you look puzzled; and I will puzzle you further.  You are my little
friend, are you not?"

"I like to serve you, sir, and to obey you in all that is right."

"Precisely: I see you do.  I see genuine contentment in your gait and
mien, your eye and face, when you are helping me and pleasing me--working
for me, and with me, in, as you characteristically say, '_all that is
right_:' for if I bid you do what you thought wrong, there would be no
light-footed running, no neat-handed alacrity, no lively glance and
animated complexion.  My friend would then turn to me, quiet and pale,
and would say, 'No, sir; that is impossible: I cannot do it, because it
is wrong;' and would become immutable as a fixed star.  Well, you too
have power over me, and may injure me: yet I dare not show you where I am
vulnerable, lest, faithful and friendly as you are, you should transfix
me at once."

"If you have no more to fear from Mr. Mason than you have from me, sir,
you are very safe."

"God grant it may be so!  Here, Jane, is an arbour; sit down."

The arbour was an arch in the wall, lined with ivy; it contained a rustic
seat.  Mr. Rochester took it, leaving room, however, for me: but I stood
before him.

"Sit," he said; "the bench is long enough for two.  You don't hesitate to
take a place at my side, do you?  Is that wrong, Jane?"

I answered him by assuming it: to refuse would, I felt, have been unwise.

"Now, my little friend, while the sun drinks the dew--while all the
flowers in this old garden awake and expand, and the birds fetch their
young ones' breakfast out of the Thornfield, and the early bees do their
first spell of work--I'll put a case to you, which you must endeavour to
suppose your own: but first, look at me, and tell me you are at ease, and
not fearing that I err in detaining you, or that you err in staying."

"No, sir; I am content."

"Well then, Jane, call to aid your fancy:--suppose you were no longer a
girl well reared and disciplined, but a wild boy indulged from childhood
upwards; imagine yourself in a remote foreign land; conceive that you
there commit a capital error, no matter of what nature or from what
motives, but one whose consequences must follow you through life and
taint all your existence.  Mind, I don't say a _crime_; I am not speaking
of shedding of blood or any other guilty act, which might make the
perpetrator amenable to the law: my word is _error_.  The results of what
you have done become in time to you utterly insupportable; you take
measures to obtain relief: unusual measures, but neither unlawful nor
culpable.  Still you are miserable; for hope has quitted you on the very
confines of life: your sun at noon darkens in an eclipse, which you feel
will not leave it till the time of setting.  Bitter and base associations
have become the sole food of your memory: you wander here and there,
seeking rest in exile: happiness in pleasure--I mean in heartless,
sensual pleasure--such as dulls intellect and blights feeling.
Heart-weary and soul-withered, you come home after years of voluntary
banishment: you make a new acquaintance--how or where no matter: you find
in this stranger much of the good and bright qualities which you have
sought for twenty years, and never before encountered; and they are all
fresh, healthy, without soil and without taint.  Such society revives,
regenerates: you feel better days come back--higher wishes, purer
feelings; you desire to recommence your life, and to spend what remains
to you of days in a way more worthy of an immortal being.  To attain this
end, are you justified in overleaping an obstacle of custom--a mere
conventional impediment which neither your conscience sanctifies nor your
judgment approves?"

He paused for an answer: and what was I to say?  Oh, for some good spirit
to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response!  Vain aspiration!  The
west wind whispered in the ivy round me; but no gentle Ariel borrowed its
breath as a medium of speech: the birds sang in the tree-tops; but their
song, however sweet, was inarticulate.

Again Mr. Rochester propounded his query:

"Is the wandering and sinful, but now rest-seeking and repentant, man
justified in daring the world's opinion, in order to attach to him for
ever this gentle, gracious, genial stranger, thereby securing his own
peace of mind and regeneration of life?"

"Sir," I answered, "a wanderer's repose or a sinner's reformation should
never depend on a fellow-creature.  Men and women die; philosophers
falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has
suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to
amend and solace to heal."

"But the instrument--the instrument!  God, who does the work, ordains the
instrument.  I have myself--I tell it you without parable--been a
worldly, dissipated, restless man; and I believe I have found the
instrument for my cure in--"

He paused: the birds went on carolling, the leaves lightly rustling.  I
almost wondered they did not check their songs and whispers to catch the
suspended revelation; but they would have had to wait many minutes--so
long was the silence protracted.  At last I looked up at the tardy
speaker: he was looking eagerly at me.

"Little friend," said he, in quite a changed tone--while his face changed
too, losing all its softness and gravity, and becoming harsh and
sarcastic--"you have noticed my tender penchant for Miss Ingram: don't
you think if I married her she would regenerate me with a vengeance?"

He got up instantly, went quite to the other end of the walk, and when he
came back he was humming a tune.

"Jane, Jane," said he, stopping before me, "you are quite pale with your
vigils: don't you curse me for disturbing your rest?"

"Curse you?  No, sir."

"Shake hands in confirmation of the word.  What cold fingers!  They were
warmer last night when I touched them at the door of the mysterious
chamber.  Jane, when will you watch with me again?"

"Whenever I can be useful, sir."

"For instance, the night before I am married!  I am sure I shall not be
able to sleep.  Will you promise to sit up with me to bear me company?  To
you I can talk of my lovely one: for now you have seen her and know her."

"Yes, sir."

"She's a rare one, is she not, Jane?"

"Yes, sir."

"A strapper--a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom; with hair just
such as the ladies of Carthage must have had.  Bless me! there's Dent and
Lynn in the stables!  Go in by the shrubbery, through that wicket."

As I went one way, he went another, and I heard him in the yard, saying
cheerfully--

"Mason got the start of you all this morning; he was gone before sunrise:
I rose at four to see him off."




CHAPTER XXI


Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are
signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not
yet found the key.  I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because
I have had strange ones of my own.  Sympathies, I believe, exist (for
instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives
asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to
which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension.
And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with
man.

When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie
Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little
child; and that to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either
to one's self or one's kin.  The saying might have worn out of my memory,
had not a circumstance immediately followed which served indelibly to fix
it there.  The next day Bessie was sent for home to the deathbed of her
little sister.

Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during
the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not
brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my
arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with
daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water.  It was
a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled
close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition
evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive
nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.

I did not like this iteration of one idea--this strange recurrence of one
image, and I grew nervous as bedtime approached and the hour of the
vision drew near.  It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had
been roused on that moonlight night when I heard the cry; and it was on
the afternoon of the day following I was summoned downstairs by a message
that some one wanted me in Mrs. Fairfax's room.  On repairing thither, I
found a man waiting for me, having the appearance of a gentleman's
servant: he was dressed in deep mourning, and the hat he held in his hand
was surrounded with a crape band.

"I daresay you hardly remember me, Miss," he said, rising as I entered;
"but my name is Leaven: I lived coachman with Mrs. Reed when you were at
Gateshead, eight or nine years since, and I live there still."

"Oh, Robert! how do you do?  I remember you very well: you used to give
me a ride sometimes on Miss Georgiana's bay pony.  And how is Bessie?  You
are married to Bessie?"

"Yes, Miss: my wife is very hearty, thank you; she brought me another
little one about two months since--we have three now--and both mother and
child are thriving."

"And are the family well at the house, Robert?"

"I am sorry I can't give you better news of them, Miss: they are very
badly at present--in great trouble."

"I hope no one is dead," I said, glancing at his black dress.  He too
looked down at the crape round his hat and replied--

"Mr. John died yesterday was a week, at his chambers in London."

"Mr. John?"

"Yes."

"And how does his mother bear it?"

"Why, you see, Miss Eyre, it is not a common mishap: his life has been
very wild: these last three years he gave himself up to strange ways, and
his death was shocking."

"I heard from Bessie he was not doing well."

"Doing well!  He could not do worse: he ruined his health and his estate
amongst the worst men and the worst women.  He got into debt and into
jail: his mother helped him out twice, but as soon as he was free he
returned to his old companions and habits.  His head was not strong: the
knaves he lived amongst fooled him beyond anything I ever heard.  He came
down to Gateshead about three weeks ago and wanted missis to give up all
to him.  Missis refused: her means have long been much reduced by his
extravagance; so he went back again, and the next news was that he was
dead.  How he died, God knows!--they say he killed himself."

I was silent: the things were frightful.  Robert Leaven resumed--

"Missis had been out of health herself for some time: she had got very
stout, but was not strong with it; and the loss of money and fear of
poverty were quite breaking her down.  The information about Mr. John's
death and the manner of it came too suddenly: it brought on a stroke.  She
was three days without speaking; but last Tuesday she seemed rather
better: she appeared as if she wanted to say something, and kept making
signs to my wife and mumbling.  It was only yesterday morning, however,
that Bessie understood she was pronouncing your name; and at last she
made out the words, 'Bring Jane--fetch Jane Eyre: I want to speak to
her.'  Bessie is not sure whether she is in her right mind, or means
anything by the words; but she told Miss Reed and Miss Georgiana, and
advised them to send for you.  The young ladies put it off at first; but
their mother grew so restless, and said, 'Jane, Jane,' so many times,
that at last they consented.  I left Gateshead yesterday: and if you can
get ready, Miss, I should like to take you back with me early to-morrow
morning."

"Yes, Robert, I shall be ready: it seems to me that I ought to go."

"I think so too, Miss.  Bessie said she was sure you would not refuse:
but I suppose you will have to ask leave before you can get off?"

"Yes; and I will do it now;" and having directed him to the servants'
hall, and recommended him to the care of John's wife, and the attentions
of John himself, I went in search of Mr. Rochester.

He was not in any of the lower rooms; he was not in the yard, the
stables, or the grounds.  I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had seen him;--yes:
she believed he was playing billiards with Miss Ingram.  To the billiard-
room I hastened: the click of balls and the hum of voices resounded
thence; Mr. Rochester, Miss Ingram, the two Misses Eshton, and their
admirers, were all busied in the game.  It required some courage to
disturb so interesting a party; my errand, however, was one I could not
defer, so I approached the master where he stood at Miss Ingram's side.
She turned as I drew near, and looked at me haughtily: her eyes seemed to
demand, "What can the creeping creature want now?" and when I said, in a
low voice, "Mr. Rochester," she made a movement as if tempted to order me
away.  I remember her appearance at the moment--it was very graceful and
very striking: she wore a morning robe of sky-blue crape; a gauzy azure
scarf was twisted in her hair.  She had been all animation with the game,
and irritated pride did not lower the expression of her haughty
lineaments.

"Does that person want you?" she inquired of Mr. Rochester; and Mr.
Rochester turned to see who the "person" was.  He made a curious
grimace--one of his strange and equivocal demonstrations--threw down his
cue and followed me from the room.

"Well, Jane?" he said, as he rested his back against the schoolroom door,
which he had shut.

"If you please, sir, I want leave of absence for a week or two."

"What to do?--where to go?"

"To see a sick lady who has sent for me."

"What sick lady?--where does she live?"

"At Gateshead; in ---shire."

"-shire?  That is a hundred miles off!  Who may she be that sends for
people to see her that distance?"

"Her name is Reed, sir--Mrs. Reed."

"Reed of Gateshead?  There was a Reed of Gateshead, a magistrate."

"It is his widow, sir."

"And what have you to do with her?  How do you know her?"

"Mr. Reed was my uncle--my mother's brother."

"The deuce he was!  You never told me that before: you always said you
had no relations."

"None that would own me, sir.  Mr. Reed is dead, and his wife cast me
off."

"Why?"

"Because I was poor, and burdensome, and she disliked me."

"But Reed left children?--you must have cousins?  Sir George Lynn was
talking of a Reed of Gateshead yesterday, who, he said, was one of the
veriest rascals on town; and Ingram was mentioning a Georgiana Reed of
the same place, who was much admired for her beauty a season or two ago
in London."

"John Reed is dead, too, sir: he ruined himself and half-ruined his
family, and is supposed to have committed suicide.  The news so shocked
his mother that it brought on an apoplectic attack."

"And what good can you do her?  Nonsense, Jane!  I would never think of
running a hundred miles to see an old lady who will, perhaps, be dead
before you reach her: besides, you say she cast you off."

"Yes, sir, but that is long ago; and when her circumstances were very
different: I could not be easy to neglect her wishes now."

"How long will you stay?"

"As short a time as possible, sir."

"Promise me only to stay a week--"

"I had better not pass my word: I might be obliged to break it."

"At all events you _will_ come back: you will not be induced under any
pretext to take up a permanent residence with her?"

"Oh, no!  I shall certainly return if all be well."

"And who goes with you?  You don't travel a hundred miles alone."

"No, sir, she has sent her coachman."

"A person to be trusted?"

"Yes, sir, he has lived ten years in the family."

Mr. Rochester meditated.  "When do you wish to go?"

"Early to-morrow morning, sir."

"Well, you must have some money; you can't travel without money, and I
daresay you have not much: I have given you no salary yet.  How much have
you in the world, Jane?" he asked, smiling.

I drew out my purse; a meagre thing it was.  "Five shillings, sir."  He
took the purse, poured the hoard into his palm, and chuckled over it as
if its scantiness amused him.  Soon he produced his pocket-book: "Here,"
said he, offering me a note; it was fifty pounds, and he owed me but
fifteen.  I told him I had no change.

"I don't want change; you know that.  Take your wages."

I declined accepting more than was my due.  He scowled at first; then, as
if recollecting something, he said--

"Right, right!  Better not give you all now: you would, perhaps, stay
away three months if you had fifty pounds.  There are ten; is it not
plenty?"

"Yes, sir, but now you owe me five."

"Come back for it, then; I am your banker for forty pounds."

"Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business to you
while I have the opportunity."

"Matter of business?  I am curious to hear it."

"You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly to be
married?"

"Yes; what then?"

"In that case, sir, Adele ought to go to school: I am sure you will
perceive the necessity of it."

"To get her out of my bride's way, who might otherwise walk over her
rather too emphatically?  There's sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of
it.  Adele, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march
straight to--the devil?"

"I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere."

"In course!" he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of
features equally fantastic and ludicrous.  He looked at me some minutes.

"And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by
you to seek a place, I suppose?"

"No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in
asking favours of them--but I shall advertise."

"You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!" he growled.  "At your peril
you advertise!  I wish I had only offered you a sovereign instead of ten
pounds.  Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I've a use for it."

"And so have I, sir," I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind
me.  "I could not spare the money on any account."

"Little niggard!" said he, "refusing me a pecuniary request!  Give me
five pounds, Jane."

"Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence."

"Just let me look at the cash."

"No, sir; you are not to be trusted."

"Jane!"

"Sir?"

"Promise me one thing."

"I'll promise you anything, sir, that I think I am likely to perform."

"Not to advertise: and to trust this quest of a situation to me.  I'll
find you one in time."

"I shall be glad so to do, sir, if you, in your turn, will promise that I
and Adele shall be both safe out of the house before your bride enters
it."

"Very well! very well!  I'll pledge my word on it.  You go to-morrow,
then?"

"Yes, sir; early."

"Shall you come down to the drawing-room after dinner?"

"No, sir, I must prepare for the journey."

"Then you and I must bid good-bye for a little while?"

"I suppose so, sir."

"And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane?  Teach me; I'm
not quite up to it."

"They say, Farewell, or any other form they prefer."

"Then say it."

"Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present."

"What must I say?"

"The same, if you like, sir."

"Farewell, Miss Eyre, for the present; is that all?"

"Yes?"

"It seems stingy, to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly.  I should like
something else: a little addition to the rite.  If one shook hands, for
instance; but no--that would not content me either.  So you'll do no more
than say Farewell, Jane?"

"It is enough, sir: as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word
as in many."

"Very likely; but it is blank and cool--'Farewell.'"

"How long is he going to stand with his back against that door?" I asked
myself; "I want to commence my packing."  The dinner-bell rang, and
suddenly away he bolted, without another syllable: I saw him no more
during the day, and was off before he had risen in the morning.

I reached the lodge at Gateshead about five o'clock in the afternoon of
the first of May: I stepped in there before going up to the hall.  It was
very clean and neat: the ornamental windows were hung with little white
curtains; the floor was spotless; the grate and fire-irons were burnished
bright, and the fire burnt clear.  Bessie sat on the hearth, nursing her
last-born, and Robert and his sister played quietly in a corner.

"Bless you!--I knew you would come!" exclaimed Mrs. Leaven, as I entered.

"Yes, Bessie," said I, after I had kissed her; "and I trust I am not too
late.  How is Mrs. Reed?--Alive still, I hope."

"Yes, she is alive; and more sensible and collected than she was.  The
doctor says she may linger a week or two yet; but he hardly thinks she
will finally recover."

"Has she mentioned me lately?"

"She was talking of you only this morning, and wishing you would come,
but she is sleeping now, or was ten minutes ago, when I was up at the
house.  She generally lies in a kind of lethargy all the afternoon, and
wakes up about six or seven.  Will you rest yourself here an hour, Miss,
and then I will go up with you?"

Robert here entered, and Bessie laid her sleeping child in the cradle and
went to welcome him: afterwards she insisted on my taking off my bonnet
and having some tea; for she said I looked pale and tired.  I was glad to
accept her hospitality; and I submitted to be relieved of my travelling
garb just as passively as I used to let her undress me when a child.

Old times crowded fast back on me as I watched her bustling about--setting
out the tea-tray with her best china, cutting bread and butter, toasting
a tea-cake, and, between whiles, giving little Robert or Jane an
occasional tap or push, just as she used to give me in former days.
Bessie had retained her quick temper as well as her light foot and good
looks.

Tea ready, I was going to approach the table; but she desired me to sit
still, quite in her old peremptory tones.  I must be served at the
fireside, she said; and she placed before me a little round stand with my
cup and a plate of toast, absolutely as she used to accommodate me with
some privately purloined dainty on a nursery chair: and I smiled and
obeyed her as in bygone days.

She wanted to know if I was happy at Thornfield Hall, and what sort of a
person the mistress was; and when I told her there was only a master,
whether he was a nice gentleman, and if I liked him.  I told her he was
rather an ugly man, but quite a gentleman; and that he treated me kindly,
and I was content.  Then I went on to describe to her the gay company
that had lately been staying at the house; and to these details Bessie
listened with interest: they were precisely of the kind she relished.

In such conversation an hour was soon gone: Bessie restored to me my
bonnet, &c., and, accompanied by her, I quitted the lodge for the hall.
It was also accompanied by her that I had, nearly nine years ago, walked
down the path I was now ascending.  On a dark, misty, raw morning in
January, I had left a hostile roof with a desperate and embittered
heart--a sense of outlawry and almost of reprobation--to seek the chilly
harbourage of Lowood: that bourne so far away and unexplored.  The same
hostile roof now again rose before me: my prospects were doubtful yet;
and I had yet an aching heart.  I still felt as a wanderer on the face of
the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers,
and less withering dread of oppression.  The gaping wound of my wrongs,
too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished.

"You shall go into the breakfast-room first," said Bessie, as she
preceded me through the hall; "the young ladies will be there."

In another moment I was within that apartment.  There was every article
of furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was first introduced
to Mr. Brocklehurst: the very rug he had stood upon still covered the
hearth.  Glancing at the bookcases, I thought I could distinguish the two
volumes of Bewick's British Birds occupying their old place on the third
shelf, and Gulliver's Travels and the Arabian Nights ranged just above.
The inanimate objects were not changed; but the living things had altered
past recognition.

Two young ladies appeared before me; one very tall, almost as tall as
Miss Ingram--very thin too, with a sallow face and severe mien.  There
was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme
plainness of a straight-skirted, black, stuff dress, a starched linen
collar, hair combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a
string of ebony beads and a crucifix.  This I felt sure was Eliza, though
I could trace little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and
colourless visage.

The other was as certainly Georgiana: but not the Georgiana I
remembered--the slim and fairy-like girl of eleven.  This was a
full-blown, very plump damsel, fair as waxwork, with handsome and regular
features, languishing blue eyes, and ringleted yellow hair.  The hue of
her dress was black too; but its fashion was so different from her
sister's--so much more flowing and becoming--it looked as stylish as the
other's looked puritanical.

In each of the sisters there was one trait of the mother--and only one;
the thin and pallid elder daughter had her parent's Cairngorm eye: the
blooming and luxuriant younger girl had her contour of jaw and
chin--perhaps a little softened, but still imparting an indescribable
hardness to the countenance otherwise so voluptuous and buxom.

Both ladies, as I advanced, rose to welcome me, and both addressed me by
the name of "Miss Eyre."  Eliza's greeting was delivered in a short,
abrupt voice, without a smile; and then she sat down again, fixed her
eyes on the fire, and seemed to forget me.  Georgiana added to her "How
d'ye do?" several commonplaces about my journey, the weather, and so on,
uttered in rather a drawling tone: and accompanied by sundry side-glances
that measured me from head to foot--now traversing the folds of my drab
merino pelisse, and now lingering on the plain trimming of my cottage
bonnet.  Young ladies have a remarkable way of letting you know that they
think you a "quiz" without actually saying the words.  A certain
superciliousness of look, coolness of manner, nonchalance of tone,
express fully their sentiments on the point, without committing them by
any positive rudeness in word or deed.

A sneer, however, whether covert or open, had now no longer that power
over me it once possessed: as I sat between my cousins, I was surprised
to find how easy I felt under the total neglect of the one and the semi-
sarcastic attentions of the other--Eliza did not mortify, nor Georgiana
ruffle me.  The fact was, I had other things to think about; within the
last few months feelings had been stirred in me so much more potent than
any they could raise--pains and pleasures so much more acute and
exquisite had been excited than any it was in their power to inflict or
bestow--that their airs gave me no concern either for good or bad.

"How is Mrs. Reed?" I asked soon, looking calmly at Georgiana, who
thought fit to bridle at the direct address, as if it were an unexpected
liberty.

"Mrs. Reed?  Ah! mama, you mean; she is extremely poorly: I doubt if you
can see her to-night."

"If," said I, "you would just step upstairs and tell her I am come, I
should be much obliged to you."

Georgiana almost started, and she opened her blue eyes wild and wide.  "I
know she had a particular wish to see me," I added, "and I would not
defer attending to her desire longer than is absolutely necessary."

"Mama dislikes being disturbed in an evening," remarked Eliza.  I soon
rose, quietly took off my bonnet and gloves, uninvited, and said I would
just step out to Bessie--who was, I dared say, in the kitchen--and ask
her to ascertain whether Mrs. Reed was disposed to receive me or not to-
night.  I went, and having found Bessie and despatched her on my errand,
I proceeded to take further measures.  It had heretofore been my habit
always to shrink from arrogance: received as I had been to-day, I should,
a year ago, have resolved to quit Gateshead the very next morning; now,
it was disclosed to me all at once that that would be a foolish plan.  I
had taken a journey of a hundred miles to see my aunt, and I must stay
with her till she was better--or dead: as to her daughters' pride or
folly, I must put it on one side, make myself independent of it.  So I
addressed the housekeeper; asked her to show me a room, told her I should
probably be a visitor here for a week or two, had my trunk conveyed to my
chamber, and followed it thither myself: I met Bessie on the landing.

"Missis is awake," said she; "I have told her you are here: come and let
us see if she will know you."

I did not need to be guided to the well-known room, to which I had so
often been summoned for chastisement or reprimand in former days.  I
hastened before Bessie; I softly opened the door: a shaded light stood on
the table, for it was now getting dark.  There was the great four-post
bed with amber hangings as of old; there the toilet-table, the armchair,
and the footstool, at which I had a hundred times been sentenced to
kneel, to ask pardon for offences by me uncommitted.  I looked into a
certain corner near, half-expecting to see the slim outline of a once
dreaded switch which used to lurk there, waiting to leap out imp-like and
lace my quivering palm or shrinking neck.  I approached the bed; I opened
the curtains and leant over the high-piled pillows.

Well did I remember Mrs. Reed's face, and I eagerly sought the familiar
image.  It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance
and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion.  I had left this woman in
bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion
than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to
forget and forgive all injuries--to be reconciled and clasp hands in
amity.

The well-known face was there: stern, relentless as ever--there was that
peculiar eye which nothing could melt, and the somewhat raised,
imperious, despotic eyebrow.  How often had it lowered on me menace and
hate! and how the recollection of childhood's terrors and sorrows revived
as I traced its harsh line now!  And yet I stooped down and kissed her:
she looked at me.

"Is this Jane Eyre?" she said.

"Yes, Aunt Reed.  How are you, dear aunt?"

I had once vowed that I would never call her aunt again: I thought it no
sin to forget and break that vow now.  My fingers had fastened on her
hand which lay outside the sheet: had she pressed mine kindly, I should
at that moment have experienced true pleasure.  But unimpressionable
natures are not so soon softened, nor are natural antipathies so readily
eradicated.  Mrs. Reed took her hand away, and, turning her face rather
from me, she remarked that the night was warm.  Again she regarded me so
icily, I felt at once that her opinion of me--her feeling towards me--was
unchanged and unchangeable.  I knew by her stony eye--opaque to
tenderness, indissoluble to tears--that she was resolved to consider me
bad to the last; because to believe me good would give her no generous
pleasure: only a sense of mortification.

I felt pain, and then I felt ire; and then I felt a determination to
subdue her--to be her mistress in spite both of her nature and her will.
My tears had risen, just as in childhood: I ordered them back to their
source.  I brought a chair to the bed-head: I sat down and leaned over
the pillow.

"You sent for me," I said, "and I am here; and it is my intention to stay
till I see how you get on."

"Oh, of course!  You have seen my daughters?"

"Yes."

"Well, you may tell them I wish you to stay till I can talk some things
over with you I have on my mind: to-night it is too late, and I have a
difficulty in recalling them.  But there was something I wished to
say--let me see--"

The wandering look and changed utterance told what wreck had taken place
in her once vigorous frame.  Turning restlessly, she drew the bedclothes
round her; my elbow, resting on a corner of the quilt, fixed it down: she
was at once irritated.

"Sit up!" said she; "don't annoy me with holding the clothes fast.  Are
you Jane Eyre?"

"I am Jane Eyre."

"I have had more trouble with that child than any one would believe.  Such
a burden to be left on my hands--and so much annoyance as she caused me,
daily and hourly, with her incomprehensible disposition, and her sudden
starts of temper, and her continual, unnatural watchings of one's
movements!  I declare she talked to me once like something mad, or like a
fiend--no child ever spoke or looked as she did; I was glad to get her
away from the house.  What did they do with her at Lowood?  The fever
broke out there, and many of the pupils died.  She, however, did not die:
but I said she did--I wish she had died!"

"A strange wish, Mrs. Reed; why do you hate her so?"

"I had a dislike to her mother always; for she was my husband's only
sister, and a great favourite with him: he opposed the family's disowning
her when she made her low marriage; and when news came of her death, he
wept like a simpleton.  He would send for the baby; though I entreated
him rather to put it out to nurse and pay for its maintenance.  I hated
it the first time I set my eyes on it--a sickly, whining, pining thing!
It would wail in its cradle all night long--not screaming heartily like
any other child, but whimpering and moaning.  Reed pitied it; and he used
to nurse it and notice it as if it had been his own: more, indeed, than
he ever noticed his own at that age.  He would try to make my children
friendly to the little beggar: the darlings could not bear it, and he was
angry with them when they showed their dislike.  In his last illness, he
had it brought continually to his bedside; and but an hour before he
died, he bound me by vow to keep the creature.  I would as soon have been
charged with a pauper brat out of a workhouse: but he was weak, naturally
weak.  John does not at all resemble his father, and I am glad of it:
John is like me and like my brothers--he is quite a Gibson.  Oh, I wish
he would cease tormenting me with letters for money?  I have no more
money to give him: we are getting poor.  I must send away half the
servants and shut up part of the house; or let it off.  I can never
submit to do that--yet how are we to get on?  Two-thirds of my income
goes in paying the interest of mortgages.  John gambles dreadfully, and
always loses--poor boy!  He is beset by sharpers: John is sunk and
degraded--his look is frightful--I feel ashamed for him when I see him."

She was getting much excited.  "I think I had better leave her now," said
I to Bessie, who stood on the other side of the bed.

"Perhaps you had, Miss: but she often talks in this way towards night--in
the morning she is calmer."

I rose.  "Stop!" exclaimed Mrs. Reed, "there is another thing I wished to
say.  He threatens me--he continually threatens me with his own death, or
mine: and I dream sometimes that I see him laid out with a great wound in
his throat, or with a swollen and blackened face.  I am come to a strange
pass: I have heavy troubles.  What is to be done?  How is the money to be
had?"

Bessie now endeavoured to persuade her to take a sedative draught: she
succeeded with difficulty.  Soon after, Mrs. Reed grew more composed, and
sank into a dozing state.  I then left her.

More than ten days elapsed before I had again any conversation with her.
She continued either delirious or lethargic; and the doctor forbade
everything which could painfully excite her.  Meantime, I got on as well
as I could with Georgiana and Eliza.  They were very cold, indeed, at
first.  Eliza would sit half the day sewing, reading, or writing, and
scarcely utter a word either to me or her sister.  Georgiana would
chatter nonsense to her canary bird by the hour, and take no notice of
me.  But I was determined not to seem at a loss for occupation or
amusement: I had brought my drawing materials with me, and they served me
for both.

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take
a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching
fancy vignettes, representing any scene that happened momentarily to
shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse
of sea between two rocks; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disk;
a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-
flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest,
under a wreath of hawthorn-bloom.

One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be,
I did not care or know.  I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad
point, and worked away.  Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and
prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour
gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features.
Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then
followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full
nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm
chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black
whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and
waved above the forehead.  Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last,
because they required the most careful working.  I drew them large; I
shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids
lustrous and large.  "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I
surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the
shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy
touch or two secured success.  There, I had a friend's face under my
gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs
on me?  I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed
and content.

"Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had
approached me unnoticed.  I responded that it was merely a fancy head,
and hurried it beneath the other sheets.  Of course, I lied: it was, in
fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester.  But what was that
to her, or to any one but myself?  Georgiana also advanced to look.  The
other drawings pleased her much, but she called that "an ugly man." They
both seemed surprised at my skill.  I offered to sketch their portraits;
and each, in turn, sat for a pencil outline.  Then Georgiana produced her
album.  I promised to contribute a water-colour drawing: this put her at
once into good humour.  She proposed a walk in the grounds.  Before we
had been out two hours, we were deep in a confidential conversation: she
had favoured me with a description of the brilliant winter she had spent
in London two seasons ago--of the admiration she had there excited--the
attention she had received; and I even got hints of the titled conquest
she had made.  In the course of the afternoon and evening these hints
were enlarged on: various soft conversations were reported, and
sentimental scenes represented; and, in short, a volume of a novel of
fashionable life was that day improvised by her for my benefit.  The
communications were renewed from day to day: they always ran on the same
theme--herself, her loves, and woes.  It was strange she never once
adverted either to her mother's illness, or her brother's death, or the
present gloomy state of the family prospects.  Her mind seemed wholly
taken up with reminiscences of past gaiety, and aspirations after
dissipations to come.  She passed about five minutes each day in her
mother's sick-room, and no more.

Eliza still spoke little: she had evidently no time to talk.  I never saw
a busier person than she seemed to be; yet it was difficult to say what
she did: or rather, to discover any result of her diligence.  She had an
alarm to call her up early.  I know not how she occupied herself before
breakfast, but after that meal she divided her time into regular
portions, and each hour had its allotted task.  Three times a day she
studied a little book, which I found, on inspection, was a Common Prayer
Book.  I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and
she said, "the Rubric."  Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold
thread, the border of a square crimson cloth, almost large enough for a
carpet.  In answer to my inquiries after the use of this article, she
informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church lately
erected near Gateshead.  Two hours she devoted to her diary; two to
working by herself in the kitchen-garden; and one to the regulation of
her accounts.  She seemed to want no company; no conversation.  I believe
she was happy in her way: this routine sufficed for her; and nothing
annoyed her so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to
vary its clockwork regularity.

She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative than
usual, that John's conduct, and the threatened ruin of the family, had
been a source of profound affliction to her: but she had now, she said,
settled her mind, and formed her resolution.  Her own fortune she had
taken care to secure; and when her mother died--and it was wholly
improbable, she tranquilly remarked, that she should either recover or
linger long--she would execute a long-cherished project: seek a
retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured from
disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a frivolous
world.  I asked if Georgiana would accompany her.

"Of course not.  Georgiana and she had nothing in common: they never had
had.  She would not be burdened with her society for any consideration.
Georgiana should take her own course; and she, Eliza, would take hers."

Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time
in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and
wishing over and over again that her aunt Gibson would send her an
invitation up to town.  "It would be so much better," she said, "if she
could only get out of the way for a month or two, till all was over."  I
did not ask what she meant by "all being over," but I suppose she
referred to the expected decease of her mother and the gloomy sequel of
funeral rites.  Eliza generally took no more notice of her sister's
indolence and complaints than if no such murmuring, lounging object had
been before her.  One day, however, as she put away her account-book and
unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus--

"Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never
allowed to cumber the earth.  You had no right to be born, for you make
no use of life.  Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a
reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some
other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or
himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you
are ill-treated, neglected, miserable.  Then, too, existence for you must
be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a
dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be
flattered--you must have music, dancing, and society--or you languish,
you die away.  Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you
independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own?  Take one day;
share it into sections; to each section apportion its task: leave no
stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes--include
all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid
regularity.  The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun;
and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant
moment: you have had to seek no one's company, conversation, sympathy,
forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to
do.  Take this advice: the first and last I shall offer you; then you
will not want me or any one else, happen what may.  Neglect it--go on as
heretofore, craving, whining, and idling--and suffer the results of your
idiocy, however bad and insuperable they may be.  I tell you this
plainly; and listen: for though I shall no more repeat what I am now
about to say, I shall steadily act on it.  After my mother's death, I
wash my hands of you: from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in
Gateshead Church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never known
each other.  You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the
same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest
claim: I can tell you this--if the whole human race, ourselves excepted,
were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you
in the old world, and betake myself to the new."

She closed her lips.

"You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade,"
answered Georgiana.  "Everybody knows you are the most selfish, heartless
creature in existence: and _I_ know your spiteful hatred towards me: I
have had a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord
Edwin Vere: you could not bear me to be raised above you, to have a
title, to be received into circles where you dare not show your face, and
so you acted the spy and informer, and ruined my prospects for ever."
Georgiana took out her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour
afterwards; Eliza sat cold, impassable, and assiduously industrious.

True, generous feeling is made small account of by some, but here were
two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably
savourless for the want of it.  Feeling without judgment is a washy
draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and
husky a morsel for human deglutition.

It was a wet and windy afternoon: Georgiana had fallen asleep on the sofa
over the perusal of a novel; Eliza was gone to attend a saint's-day
service at the new church--for in matters of religion she was a rigid
formalist: no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she
considered her devotional duties; fair or foul, she went to church thrice
every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers.

I bethought myself to go upstairs and see how the dying woman sped, who
lay there almost unheeded: the very servants paid her but a remittent
attention: the hired nurse, being little looked after, would slip out of
the room whenever she could.  Bessie was faithful; but she had her own
family to mind, and could only come occasionally to the hall.  I found
the sick-room unwatched, as I had expected: no nurse was there; the
patient lay still, and seemingly lethargic; her livid face sunk in the
pillows: the fire was dying in the grate.  I renewed the fuel,
re-arranged the bedclothes, gazed awhile on her who could not now gaze on
me, and then I moved away to the window.

The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tempestuously:
"One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly
elements.  Whither will that spirit--now struggling to quit its material
tenement--flit when at length released?"

In pondering the great mystery, I thought of Helen Burns, recalled her
dying words--her faith--her doctrine of the equality of disembodied
souls.  I was still listening in thought to her well-remembered
tones--still picturing her pale and spiritual aspect, her wasted face and
sublime gaze, as she lay on her placid deathbed, and whispered her
longing to be restored to her divine Father's bosom--when a feeble voice
murmured from the couch behind: "Who is that?"

I knew Mrs. Reed had not spoken for days: was she reviving?  I went up to
her.

"It is I, Aunt Reed."

"Who--I?" was her answer.  "Who are you?" looking at me with surprise and
a sort of alarm, but still not wildly.  "You are quite a stranger to
me--where is Bessie?"

"She is at the lodge, aunt."

"Aunt," she repeated.  "Who calls me aunt?  You are not one of the
Gibsons; and yet I know you--that face, and the eyes and forehead, are
quiet familiar to me: you are like--why, you are like Jane Eyre!"

I said nothing: I was afraid of occasioning some shock by declaring my
identity.

"Yet," said she, "I am afraid it is a mistake: my thoughts deceive me.  I
wished to see Jane Eyre, and I fancy a likeness where none exists:
besides, in eight years she must be so changed."  I now gently assured
her that I was the person she supposed and desired me to be: and seeing
that I was understood, and that her senses were quite collected, I
explained how Bessie had sent her husband to fetch me from Thornfield.

"I am very ill, I know," she said ere long.  "I was trying to turn myself
a few minutes since, and find I cannot move a limb.  It is as well I
should ease my mind before I die: what we think little of in health,
burdens us at such an hour as the present is to me.  Is the nurse here?
or is there no one in the room but you?"

I assured her we were alone.

"Well, I have twice done you a wrong which I regret now.  One was in
breaking the promise which I gave my husband to bring you up as my own
child; the other--" she stopped.  "After all, it is of no great
importance, perhaps," she murmured to herself: "and then I may get
better; and to humble myself so to her is painful."

She made an effort to alter her position, but failed: her face changed;
she seemed to experience some inward sensation--the precursor, perhaps,
of the last pang.

"Well, I must get it over.  Eternity is before me: I had better tell
her.--Go to my dressing-case, open it, and take out a letter you will see
there."

I obeyed her directions.  "Read the letter," she said.

It was short, and thus conceived:--

   "Madam,--Will you have the goodness to send me the address of my
   niece, Jane Eyre, and to tell me how she is?  It is my intention to
   write shortly and desire her to come to me at Madeira.  Providence has
   blessed my endeavours to secure a competency; and as I am unmarried
   and childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and bequeath her at
   my death whatever I may have to leave.--I am, Madam, &c., &c.,

   "JOHN EYRE, Madeira."

It was dated three years back.

"Why did I never hear of this?" I asked.

"Because I disliked you too fixedly and thoroughly ever to lend a hand in
lifting you to prosperity.  I could not forget your conduct to me,
Jane--the fury with which you once turned on me; the tone in which you
declared you abhorred me the worst of anybody in the world; the
unchildlike look and voice with which you affirmed that the very thought
of me made you sick, and asserted that I had treated you with miserable
cruelty.  I could not forget my own sensations when you thus started up
and poured out the venom of your mind: I felt fear as if an animal that I
had struck or pushed had looked up at me with human eyes and cursed me in
a man's voice.--Bring me some water!  Oh, make haste!"

"Dear Mrs. Reed," said I, as I offered her the draught she required,
"think no more of all this, let it pass away from your mind.  Forgive me
for my passionate language: I was a child then; eight, nine years have
passed since that day."

She heeded nothing of what I said; but when she had tasted the water and
drawn breath, she went on thus--

"I tell you I could not forget it; and I took my revenge: for you to be
adopted by your uncle, and placed in a state of ease and comfort, was
what I could not endure.  I wrote to him; I said I was sorry for his
disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead: she had died of typhus fever at
Lowood.  Now act as you please: write and contradict my assertion--expose
my falsehood as soon as you like.  You were born, I think, to be my
torment: my last hour is racked by the recollection of a deed which, but
for you, I should never have been tempted to commit."

"If you could but be persuaded to think no more of it, aunt, and to
regard me with kindness and forgiveness"

"You have a very bad disposition," said she, "and one to this day I feel
it impossible to understand: how for nine years you could be patient and
quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and
violence, I can never comprehend."

"My disposition is not so bad as you think: I am passionate, but not
vindictive.  Many a time, as a little child, I should have been glad to
love you if you would have let me; and I long earnestly to be reconciled
to you now: kiss me, aunt."

I approached my cheek to her lips: she would not touch it.  She said I
oppressed her by leaning over the bed, and again demanded water.  As I
laid her down--for I raised her and supported her on my arm while she
drank--I covered her ice-cold and clammy hand with mine: the feeble
fingers shrank from my touch--the glazing eyes shunned my gaze.

"Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have my
full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's, and be at peace."

Poor, suffering woman! it was too late for her to make now the effort to
change her habitual frame of mind: living, she had ever hated me--dying,
she must hate me still.

The nurse now entered, and Bessie followed.  I yet lingered half-an-hour
longer, hoping to see some sign of amity: but she gave none.  She was
fast relapsing into stupor; nor did her mind again rally: at twelve
o'clock that night she died.  I was not present to close her eyes, nor
were either of her daughters.  They came to tell us the next morning that
all was over.  She was by that time laid out.  Eliza and I went to look
at her: Georgiana, who had burst out into loud weeping, said she dared
not go.  There was stretched Sarah Reed's once robust and active frame,
rigid and still: her eye of flint was covered with its cold lid; her brow
and strong traits wore yet the impress of her inexorable soul.  A strange
and solemn object was that corpse to me.  I gazed on it with gloom and
pain: nothing soft, nothing sweet, nothing pitying, or hopeful, or
subduing did it inspire; only a grating anguish for _her_ woes--not _my_
loss--and a sombre tearless dismay at the fearfulness of death in such a
form.

Eliza surveyed her parent calmly.  After a silence of some minutes she
observed--

"With her constitution she should have lived to a good old age: her life
was shortened by trouble."  And then a spasm constricted her mouth for an
instant: as it passed away she turned and left the room, and so did I.
Neither of us had dropt a tear.




CHAPTER XXII


Mr. Rochester had given me but one week's leave of absence: yet a month
elapsed before I quitted Gateshead.  I wished to leave immediately after
the funeral, but Georgiana entreated me to stay till she could get off to
London, whither she was now at last invited by her uncle, Mr. Gibson, who
had come down to direct his sister's interment and settle the family
affairs.  Georgiana said she dreaded being left alone with Eliza; from
her she got neither sympathy in her dejection, support in her fears, nor
aid in her preparations; so I bore with her feeble-minded wailings and
selfish lamentations as well as I could, and did my best in sewing for
her and packing her dresses.  It is true, that while I worked, she would
idle; and I thought to myself, "If you and I were destined to live always
together, cousin, we would commence matters on a different footing.  I
should not settle tamely down into being the forbearing party; I should
assign you your share of labour, and compel you to accomplish it, or else
it should be left undone: I should insist, also, on your keeping some of
those drawling, half-insincere complaints hushed in your own breast.  It
is only because our connection happens to be very transitory, and comes
at a peculiarly mournful season, that I consent thus to render it so
patient and compliant on my part."

At last I saw Georgiana off; but now it was Eliza's turn to request me to
stay another week.  Her plans required all her time and attention, she
said; she was about to depart for some unknown bourne; and all day long
she stayed in her own room, her door bolted within, filling trunks,
emptying drawers, burning papers, and holding no communication with any
one.  She wished me to look after the house, to see callers, and answer
notes of condolence.

One morning she told me I was at liberty.  "And," she added, "I am
obliged to you for your valuable services and discreet conduct!  There is
some difference between living with such an one as you and with
Georgiana: you perform your own part in life and burden no one.
To-morrow," she continued, "I set out for the Continent.  I shall take up
my abode in a religious house near Lisle--a nunnery you would call it;
there I shall be quiet and unmolested.  I shall devote myself for a time
to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study
of the workings of their system: if I find it to be, as I half suspect it
is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently
and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the
veil."

I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to dissuade
her from it.  "The vocation will fit you to a hair," I thought: "much
good may it do you!"

When we parted, she said: "Good-bye, cousin Jane Eyre; I wish you well:
you have some sense."

I then returned: "You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you
have, I suppose, in another year will be walled up alive in a French
convent.  However, it is not my business, and so it suits you, I don't
much care."

"You are in the right," said she; and with these words we each went our
separate way.  As I shall not have occasion to refer either to her or her
sister again, I may as well mention here, that Georgiana made an
advantageous match with a wealthy worn-out man of fashion, and that Eliza
actually took the veil, and is at this day superior of the convent where
she passed the period of her novitiate, and which she endowed with her
fortune.

How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or
short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation.  I had
known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after a long
walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to
come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good
fire, and to be unable to get either.  Neither of these returnings was
very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point,
increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came.  The return
to Thornfield was yet to be tried.

My journey seemed tedious--very tedious: fifty miles one day, a night
spent at an inn; fifty miles the next day.  During the first twelve hours
I thought of Mrs. Reed in her last moments; I saw her disfigured and
discoloured face, and heard her strangely altered voice.  I mused on the
funeral day, the coffin, the hearse, the black train of tenants and
servants--few was the number of relatives--the gaping vault, the silent
church, the solemn service.  Then I thought of Eliza and Georgiana; I
beheld one the cynosure of a ball-room, the other the inmate of a convent
cell; and I dwelt on and analysed their separate peculiarities of person
and character.  The evening arrival at the great town of--scattered these
thoughts; night gave them quite another turn: laid down on my traveller's
bed, I left reminiscence for anticipation.

I was going back to Thornfield: but how long was I to stay there?  Not
long; of that I was sure.  I had heard from Mrs. Fairfax in the interim
of my absence: the party at the hall was dispersed; Mr. Rochester had
left for London three weeks ago, but he was then expected to return in a
fortnight.  Mrs. Fairfax surmised that he was gone to make arrangements
for his wedding, as he had talked of purchasing a new carriage: she said
the idea of his marrying Miss Ingram still seemed strange to her; but
from what everybody said, and from what she had herself seen, she could
no longer doubt that the event would shortly take place.  "You would be
strangely incredulous if you did doubt it," was my mental comment.  "I
don't doubt it."

The question followed, "Where was I to go?"  I dreamt of Miss Ingram all
the night: in a vivid morning dream I saw her closing the gates of
Thornfield against me and pointing me out another road; and Mr. Rochester
looked on with his arms folded--smiling sardonically, as it seemed, at
both her and me.

I had not notified to Mrs. Fairfax the exact day of my return; for I did
not wish either car or carriage to meet me at Millcote.  I proposed to
walk the distance quietly by myself; and very quietly, after leaving my
box in the ostler's care, did I slip away from the George Inn, about six
o'clock of a June evening, and take the old road to Thornfield: a road
which lay chiefly through fields, and was now little frequented.

It was not a bright or splendid summer evening, though fair and soft: the
haymakers were at work all along the road; and the sky, though far from
cloudless, was such as promised well for the future: its blue--where blue
was visible--was mild and settled, and its cloud strata high and thin.
The west, too, was warm: no watery gleam chilled it--it seemed as if
there was a fire lit, an altar burning behind its screen of marbled
vapour, and out of apertures shone a golden redness.

I felt glad as the road shortened before me: so glad that I stopped once
to ask myself what that joy meant: and to remind reason that it was not
to my home I was going, or to a permanent resting-place, or to a place
where fond friends looked out for me and waited my arrival.  "Mrs.
Fairfax will smile you a calm welcome, to be sure," said I; "and little
Adele will clap her hands and jump to see you: but you know very well you
are thinking of another than they, and that he is not thinking of you."

But what is so headstrong as youth?  What so blind as inexperience?  These
affirmed that it was pleasure enough to have the privilege of again
looking on Mr. Rochester, whether he looked on me or not; and they
added--"Hasten! hasten! be with him while you may: but a few more days or
weeks, at most, and you are parted from him for ever!"  And then I
strangled a new-born agony--a deformed thing which I could not persuade
myself to own and rear--and ran on.

They are making hay, too, in Thornfield meadows: or rather, the labourers
are just quitting their work, and returning home with their rakes on
their shoulders, now, at the hour I arrive.  I have but a field or two to
traverse, and then I shall cross the road and reach the gates.  How full
the hedges are of roses!  But I have no time to gather any; I want to be
at the house.  I passed a tall briar, shooting leafy and flowery branches
across the path; I see the narrow stile with stone steps; and I see--Mr.
Rochester sitting there, a book and a pencil in his hand; he is writing.

Well, he is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have is unstrung: for a moment
I am beyond my own mastery.  What does it mean?  I did not think I should
tremble in this way when I saw him, or lose my voice or the power of
motion in his presence.  I will go back as soon as I can stir: I need not
make an absolute fool of myself.  I know another way to the house.  It
does not signify if I knew twenty ways; for he has seen me.

"Hillo!" he cries; and he puts up his book and his pencil.  "There you
are!  Come on, if you please."

I suppose I do come on; though in what fashion I know not; being scarcely
cognisant of my movements, and solicitous only to appear calm; and, above
all, to control the working muscles of my face--which I feel rebel
insolently against my will, and struggle to express what I had resolved
to conceal.  But I have a veil--it is down: I may make shift yet to
behave with decent composure.

"And this is Jane Eyre?  Are you coming from Millcote, and on foot?
Yes--just one of your tricks: not to send for a carriage, and come
clattering over street and road like a common mortal, but to steal into
the vicinage of your home along with twilight, just as if you were a
dream or a shade.  What the deuce have you done with yourself this last
month?"

"I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead."

"A true Janian reply!  Good angels be my guard!  She comes from the other
world--from the abode of people who are dead; and tells me so when she
meets me alone here in the gloaming!  If I dared, I'd touch you, to see
if you are substance or shadow, you elf!--but I'd as soon offer to take
hold of a blue _ignis fatuus_ light in a marsh.  Truant! truant!" he
added, when he had paused an instant.  "Absent from me a whole month, and
forgetting me quite, I'll be sworn!"

I knew there would be pleasure in meeting my master again, even though
broken by the fear that he was so soon to cease to be my master, and by
the knowledge that I was nothing to him: but there was ever in Mr.
Rochester (so at least I thought) such a wealth of the power of
communicating happiness, that to taste but of the crumbs he scattered to
stray and stranger birds like me, was to feast genially.  His last words
were balm: they seemed to imply that it imported something to him whether
I forgot him or not.  And he had spoken of Thornfield as my home--would
that it were my home!

He did not leave the stile, and I hardly liked to ask to go by.  I
inquired soon if he had not been to London.

"Yes; I suppose you found that out by second-sight."

"Mrs. Fairfax told me in a letter."

"And did she inform you what I went to do?"

"Oh, yes, sir!  Everybody knew your errand."

"You must see the carriage, Jane, and tell me if you don't think it will
suit Mrs. Rochester exactly; and whether she won't look like Queen
Boadicea, leaning back against those purple cushions.  I wish, Jane, I
were a trifle better adapted to match with her externally.  Tell me now,
fairy as you are--can't you give me a charm, or a philter, or something
of that sort, to make me a handsome man?"

"It would be past the power of magic, sir;" and, in thought, I added, "A
loving eye is all the charm needed: to such you are handsome enough; or
rather your sternness has a power beyond beauty."

Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen to
me incomprehensible: in the present instance he took no notice of my
abrupt vocal response; but he smiled at me with a certain smile he had of
his own, and which he used but on rare occasions.  He seemed to think it
too good for common purposes: it was the real sunshine of feeling--he
shed it over me now.

"Pass, Janet," said he, making room for me to cross the stile: "go up
home, and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold."

All I had now to do was to obey him in silence: no need for me to
colloquise further.  I got over the stile without a word, and meant to
leave him calmly.  An impulse held me fast--a force turned me round.  I
said--or something in me said for me, and in spite of me--

"Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness.  I am strangely glad
to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home--my only home."

I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he
tried.  Little Adele was half wild with delight when she saw me.  Mrs.
Fairfax received me with her usual plain friendliness.  Leah smiled, and
even Sophie bid me "bon soir" with glee.  This was very pleasant; there
is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and
feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

I that evening shut my eyes resolutely against the future: I stopped my
ears against the voice that kept warning me of near separation and coming
grief.  When tea was over and Mrs. Fairfax had taken her knitting, and I
had assumed a low seat near her, and Adele, kneeling on the carpet, had
nestled close up to me, and a sense of mutual affection seemed to
surround us with a ring of golden peace, I uttered a silent prayer that
we might not be parted far or soon; but when, as we thus sat, Mr.
Rochester entered, unannounced, and looking at us, seemed to take
pleasure in the spectacle of a group so amicable--when he said he
supposed the old lady was all right now that she had got her adopted
daughter back again, and added that he saw Adele was "prete a croquer sa
petite maman Anglaise"--I half ventured to hope that he would, even after
his marriage, keep us together somewhere under the shelter of his
protection, and not quite exiled from the sunshine of his presence.

A fortnight of dubious calm succeeded my return to Thornfield Hall.
Nothing was said of the master's marriage, and I saw no preparation going
on for such an event.  Almost every day I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had
yet heard anything decided: her answer was always in the negative.  Once
she said she had actually put the question to Mr. Rochester as to when he
was going to bring his bride home; but he had answered her only by a joke
and one of his queer looks, and she could not tell what to make of him.

One thing specially surprised me, and that was, there were no journeyings
backward and forward, no visits to Ingram Park: to be sure it was twenty
miles off, on the borders of another county; but what was that distance
to an ardent lover?  To so practised and indefatigable a horseman as Mr.
Rochester, it would be but a morning's ride.  I began to cherish hopes I
had no right to conceive: that the match was broken off; that rumour had
been mistaken; that one or both parties had changed their minds.  I used
to look at my master's face to see if it were sad or fierce; but I could
not remember the time when it had been so uniformly clear of clouds or
evil feelings.  If, in the moments I and my pupil spent with him, I
lacked spirits and sank into inevitable dejection, he became even gay.
Never had he called me more frequently to his presence; never been kinder
to me when there--and, alas! never had I loved him so well.




CHAPTER XXIII


A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant
as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour even singly, our wave-
girt land.  It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South,
like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the
cliffs of Albion.  The hay was all got in; the fields round Thornfield
were green and shorn; the roads white and baked; the trees were in their
dark prime; hedge and wood, full-leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted
well with the sunny hue of the cleared meadows between.

On Midsummer-eve, Adele, weary with gathering wild strawberries in Hay
Lane half the day, had gone to bed with the sun.  I watched her drop
asleep, and when I left her, I sought the garden.

It was now the sweetest hour of the twenty-four:--"Day its fervid fires
had wasted," and dew fell cool on panting plain and scorched summit.
Where the sun had gone down in simple state--pure of the pomp of
clouds--spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and
furnace flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and
wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven.  The east had its own
charm or fine deep blue, and its own modest gem, a casino and solitary
star: soon it would boast the moon; but she was yet beneath the horizon.

I walked a while on the pavement; but a subtle, well-known scent--that of
a cigar--stole from some window; I saw the library casement open a
handbreadth; I knew I might be watched thence; so I went apart into the
orchard.  No nook in the grounds more sheltered and more Eden-like; it
was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers: a very high wall shut it out
from the court, on one side; on the other, a beech avenue screened it
from the lawn.  At the bottom was a sunk fence; its sole separation from
lonely fields: a winding walk, bordered with laurels and terminating in a
giant horse-chestnut, circled at the base by a seat, led down to the
fence.  Here one could wander unseen.  While such honey-dew fell, such
silence reigned, such gloaming gathered, I felt as if I could haunt such
shade for ever; but in threading the flower and fruit parterres at the
upper part of the enclosure, enticed there by the light the now rising
moon cast on this more open quarter, my step is stayed--not by sound, not
by sight, but once more by a warning fragrance.

Sweet-briar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose have long been
yielding their evening sacrifice of incense: this new scent is neither of
shrub nor flower; it is--I know it well--it is Mr. Rochester's cigar.  I
look round and I listen.  I see trees laden with ripening fruit.  I hear
a nightingale warbling in a wood half a mile off; no moving form is
visible, no coming step audible; but that perfume increases: I must flee.
I make for the wicket leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester
entering.  I step aside into the ivy recess; he will not stay long: he
will soon return whence he came, and if I sit still he will never see me.

But no--eventide is as pleasant to him as to me, and this antique garden
as attractive; and he strolls on, now lifting the gooseberry-tree
branches to look at the fruit, large as plums, with which they are laden;
now taking a ripe cherry from the wall; now stooping towards a knot of
flowers, either to inhale their fragrance or to admire the dew-beads on
their petals.  A great moth goes humming by me; it alights on a plant at
Mr. Rochester's foot: he sees it, and bends to examine it.

"Now, he has his back towards me," thought I, "and he is occupied too;
perhaps, if I walk softly, I can slip away unnoticed."

I trode on an edging of turf that the crackle of the pebbly gravel might
not betray me: he was standing among the beds at a yard or two distant
from where I had to pass; the moth apparently engaged him.  "I shall get
by very well," I meditated.  As I crossed his shadow, thrown long over
the garden by the moon, not yet risen high, he said quietly, without
turning--

"Jane, come and look at this fellow."

I had made no noise: he had not eyes behind--could his shadow feel?  I
started at first, and then I approached him.

"Look at his wings," said he, "he reminds me rather of a West Indian
insect; one does not often see so large and gay a night-rover in England;
there! he is flown."

The moth roamed away.  I was sheepishly retreating also; but Mr.
Rochester followed me, and when we reached the wicket, he said--

"Turn back: on so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house; and
surely no one can wish to go to bed while sunset is thus at meeting with
moonrise."

It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough
at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an
excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or
plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful
embarrassment.  I did not like to walk at this hour alone with Mr.
Rochester in the shadowy orchard; but I could not find a reason to allege
for leaving him.  I followed with lagging step, and thoughts busily bent
on discovering a means of extrication; but he himself looked so composed
and so grave also, I became ashamed of feeling any confusion: the evil--if
evil existent or prospective there was--seemed to lie with me only; his
mind was unconscious and quiet.

"Jane," he recommenced, as we entered the laurel walk, and slowly strayed
down in the direction of the sunk fence and the horse-chestnut,
"Thornfield is a pleasant place in summer, is it not?"

"Yes, sir."

"You must have become in some degree attached to the house,--you, who
have an eye for natural beauties, and a good deal of the organ of
Adhesiveness?"

"I am attached to it, indeed."

"And though I don't comprehend how it is, I perceive you have acquired a
degree of regard for that foolish little child Adele, too; and even for
simple dame Fairfax?"

"Yes, sir; in different ways, I have an affection for both."

"And would be sorry to part with them?"

"Yes."

"Pity!" he said, and sighed and paused.  "It is always the way of events
in this life," he continued presently: "no sooner have you got settled in
a pleasant resting-place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move
on, for the hour of repose is expired."

"Must I move on, sir?" I asked.  "Must I leave Thornfield?"

"I believe you must, Jane.  I am sorry, Janet, but I believe indeed you
must."

This was a blow: but I did not let it prostrate me.

"Well, sir, I shall be ready when the order to march comes."

"It is come now--I must give it to-night."

"Then you _are_ going to be married, sir?"

"Ex-act-ly--pre-cise-ly: with your usual acuteness, you have hit the nail
straight on the head."

"Soon, sir?"

"Very soon, my--that is, Miss Eyre: and you'll remember, Jane, the first
time I, or Rumour, plainly intimated to you that it was my intention to
put my old bachelor's neck into the sacred noose, to enter into the holy
estate of matrimony--to take Miss Ingram to my bosom, in short (she's an
extensive armful: but that's not to the point--one can't have too much of
such a very excellent thing as my beautiful Blanche): well, as I was
saying--listen to me, Jane!  You're not turning your head to look after
more moths, are you?  That was only a lady-clock, child, 'flying away
home.'  I wish to remind you that it was you who first said to me, with
that discretion I respect in you--with that foresight, prudence, and
humility which befit your responsible and dependent position--that in
case I married Miss Ingram, both you and little Adele had better trot
forthwith.  I pass over the sort of slur conveyed in this suggestion on
the character of my beloved; indeed, when you are far away, Janet, I'll
try to forget it: I shall notice only its wisdom; which is such that I
have made it my law of action.  Adele must go to school; and you, Miss
Eyre, must get a new situation."

"Yes, sir, I will advertise immediately: and meantime, I suppose--" I was
going to say, "I suppose I may stay here, till I find another shelter to
betake myself to:" but I stopped, feeling it would not do to risk a long
sentence, for my voice was not quite under command.

"In about a month I hope to be a bridegroom," continued Mr. Rochester;
"and in the interim, I shall myself look out for employment and an asylum
for you."

"Thank you, sir; I am sorry to give--"

"Oh, no need to apologise!  I consider that when a dependent does her
duty as well as you have done yours, she has a sort of claim upon her
employer for any little assistance he can conveniently render her; indeed
I have already, through my future mother-in-law, heard of a place that I
think will suit: it is to undertake the education of the five daughters
of Mrs. Dionysius O'Gall of Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught, Ireland.  You'll
like Ireland, I think: they're such warm-hearted people there, they say."

"It is a long way off, sir."

"No matter--a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the
distance."

"Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier--"

"From what, Jane?"

"From England and from Thornfield: and--"

"Well?"

"From _you_, sir."

I said this almost involuntarily, and, with as little sanction of free
will, my tears gushed out.  I did not cry so as to be heard, however; I
avoided sobbing.  The thought of Mrs. O'Gall and Bitternutt Lodge struck
cold to my heart; and colder the thought of all the brine and foam,
destined, as it seemed, to rush between me and the master at whose side I
now walked, and coldest the remembrance of the wider ocean--wealth,
caste, custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably
loved.

"It is a long way," I again said.

"It is, to be sure; and when you get to Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught,
Ireland, I shall never see you again, Jane: that's morally certain.  I
never go over to Ireland, not having myself much of a fancy for the
country.  We have been good friends, Jane; have we not?"

"Yes, sir."

"And when friends are on the eve of separation, they like to spend the
little time that remains to them close to each other.  Come! we'll talk
over the voyage and the parting quietly half-an-hour or so, while the
stars enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder: here is the
chestnut tree: here is the bench at its old roots.  Come, we will sit
there in peace to-night, though we should never more be destined to sit
there together."  He seated me and himself.

"It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little
friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be
helped?  Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"

I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.

"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to
you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string
somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a
similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little
frame.  And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of
land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be
snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.
As for you,--you'd forget me."

"That I _never_ should, sir: you know--"  Impossible to proceed.

"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?  Listen!"

In listening, I sobbed convulsively; for I could repress what I endured
no longer; I was obliged to yield, and I was shaken from head to foot
with acute distress.  When I did speak, it was only to express an
impetuous wish that I had never been born, or never come to Thornfield.

"Because you are sorry to leave it?"

The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was
claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway, and asserting a right to
predominate, to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last: yes,--and to
speak.

"I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield:--I love it, because I
have lived in it a full and delightful life,--momentarily at least.  I
have not been trampled on.  I have not been petrified.  I have not been
buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion
with what is bright and energetic and high.  I have talked, face to face,
with what I reverence, with what I delight in,--with an original, a
vigorous, an expanded mind.  I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it
strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from
you for ever.  I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking
on the necessity of death."

"Where do you see the necessity?" he asked suddenly.

"Where?  You, sir, have placed it before me."

"In what shape?"

"In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman,--your bride."

"My bride!  What bride?  I have no bride!"

"But you will have."

"Yes;--I will!--I will!"  He set his teeth.

"Then I must go:--you have said it yourself."

"No: you must stay!  I swear it--and the oath shall be kept."

"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion.  "Do
you think I can stay to become nothing to you?  Do you think I am an
automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of
bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my
cup?  Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am
soulless and heartless?  You think wrong!--I have as much soul as
you,--and full as much heart!  And if God had gifted me with some beauty
and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it
is now for me to leave you.  I am not talking to you now through the
medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my
spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the
grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"

"As we are!" repeated Mr. Rochester--"so," he added, enclosing me in his
arms.  Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: "so,
Jane!"

"Yes, so, sir," I rejoined: "and yet not so; for you are a married man--or
as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you--to one with
whom you have no sympathy--whom I do not believe you truly love; for I
have seen and heard you sneer at her.  I would scorn such a union:
therefore I am better than you--let me go!"

"Where, Jane?  To Ireland?"

"Yes--to Ireland.  I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now."

"Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is
rending its own plumage in its desperation."

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an
independent will, which I now exert to leave you."

Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him.

"And your will shall decide your destiny," he said: "I offer you my hand,
my heart, and a share of all my possessions."

"You play a farce, which I merely laugh at."

"I ask you to pass through life at my side--to be my second self, and
best earthly companion."

"For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide by it."

"Jane, be still a few moments: you are over-excited: I will be still
too."

A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through
the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away--away--to an indefinite
distance--it died.  The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the
hour: in listening to it, I again wept.  Mr. Rochester sat quiet, looking
at me gently and seriously.  Some time passed before he spoke; he at last
said--

"Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one another."

"I will never again come to your side: I am torn away now, and cannot
return."

"But, Jane, I summon you as my wife: it is you only I intend to marry."

I was silent: I thought he mocked me.

"Come, Jane--come hither."

"Your bride stands between us."

He rose, and with a stride reached me.

"My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my equal
is here, and my likeness.  Jane, will you marry me?"

Still I did not answer, and still I writhed myself from his grasp: for I
was still incredulous.

"Do you doubt me, Jane?"

"Entirely."

"You have no faith in me?"

"Not a whit."

"Am I a liar in your eyes?" he asked passionately.  "Little sceptic, you
_shall_ be convinced.  What love have I for Miss Ingram?  None: and that
you know.  What love has she for me?  None: as I have taken pains to
prove: I caused a rumour to reach her that my fortune was not a third of
what was supposed, and after that I presented myself to see the result;
it was coldness both from her and her mother.  I would not--I could
not--marry Miss Ingram.  You--you strange, you almost unearthly thing!--I
love as my own flesh.  You--poor and obscure, and small and plain as you
are--I entreat to accept me as a husband."

"What, me!" I ejaculated, beginning in his earnestness--and especially in
his incivility--to credit his sincerity: "me who have not a friend in the
world but you--if you are my friend: not a shilling but what you have
given me?"

"You, Jane, I must have you for my own--entirely my own.  Will you be
mine?  Say yes, quickly."

"Mr. Rochester, let me look at your face: turn to the moonlight."

"Why?"

"Because I want to read your countenance--turn!"

"There! you will find it scarcely more legible than a crumpled, scratched
page.  Read on: only make haste, for I suffer."

His face was very much agitated and very much flushed, and there were
strong workings in the features, and strange gleams in the eyes.

"Oh, Jane, you torture me!" he exclaimed.  "With that searching and yet
faithful and generous look, you torture me!"

"How can I do that?  If you are true, and your offer real, my only
feelings to you must be gratitude and devotion--they cannot torture."

"Gratitude!" he ejaculated; and added wildly--"Jane accept me quickly.
Say, Edward--give me my name--Edward--I will marry you."

"Are you in earnest?  Do you truly love me?  Do you sincerely wish me to
be your wife?"

"I do; and if an oath is necessary to satisfy you, I swear it."

"Then, sir, I will marry you."

"Edward--my little wife!"

"Dear Edward!"

"Come to me--come to me entirely now," said he; and added, in his deepest
tone, speaking in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine, "Make my
happiness--I will make yours."

"God pardon me!" he subjoined ere long; "and man meddle not with me: I
have her, and will hold her."

"There is no one to meddle, sir.  I have no kindred to interfere."

"No--that is the best of it," he said.  And if I had loved him less I
should have thought his accent and look of exultation savage; but,
sitting by him, roused from the nightmare of parting--called to the
paradise of union--I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so
abundant a flow.  Again and again he said, "Are you happy, Jane?"  And
again and again I answered, "Yes."  After which he murmured, "It will
atone--it will atone.  Have I not found her friendless, and cold, and
comfortless?  Will I not guard, and cherish, and solace her?  Is there
not love in my heart, and constancy in my resolves?  It will expiate at
God's tribunal.  I know my Maker sanctions what I do.  For the world's
judgment--I wash my hands thereof.  For man's opinion--I defy it."

But what had befallen the night?  The moon was not yet set, and we were
all in shadow: I could scarcely see my master's face, near as I was.  And
what ailed the chestnut tree? it writhed and groaned; while wind roared
in the laurel walk, and came sweeping over us.

"We must go in," said Mr. Rochester: "the weather changes.  I could have
sat with thee till morning, Jane."

"And so," thought I, "could I with you."  I should have said so, perhaps,
but a livid, vivid spark leapt out of a cloud at which I was looking, and
there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal; and I thought only
of hiding my dazzled eyes against Mr. Rochester's shoulder.

The rain rushed down.  He hurried me up the walk, through the grounds,
and into the house; but we were quite wet before we could pass the
threshold.  He was taking off my shawl in the hall, and shaking the water
out of my loosened hair, when Mrs. Fairfax emerged from her room.  I did
not observe her at first, nor did Mr. Rochester.  The lamp was lit.  The
clock was on the stroke of twelve.

"Hasten to take off your wet things," said he; "and before you go, good-
night--good-night, my darling!"

He kissed me repeatedly.  When I looked up, on leaving his arms, there
stood the widow, pale, grave, and amazed.  I only smiled at her, and ran
upstairs.  "Explanation will do for another time," thought I.  Still,
when I reached my chamber, I felt a pang at the idea she should even
temporarily misconstrue what she had seen.  But joy soon effaced every
other feeling; and loud as the wind blew, near and deep as the thunder
crashed, fierce and frequent as the lightning gleamed, cataract-like as
the rain fell during a storm of two hours' duration, I experienced no
fear and little awe.  Mr. Rochester came thrice to my door in the course
of it, to ask if I was safe and tranquil: and that was comfort, that was
strength for anything.

Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adele came running in to tell
me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been
struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.




CHAPTER XXIV


As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and wondered if
it were a dream.  I could not be certain of the reality till I had seen
Mr. Rochester again, and heard him renew his words of love and promise.

While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it
was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour;
and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and
borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.  I had often been unwilling to
look at my master, because I feared he could not be pleased at my look;
but I was sure I might lift my face to his now, and not cool his
affection by its expression.  I took a plain but clean and light summer
dress from my drawer and put it on: it seemed no attire had ever so well
become me, because none had I ever worn in so blissful a mood.

I was not surprised, when I ran down into the hall, to see that a
brilliant June morning had succeeded to the tempest of the night; and to
feel, through the open glass door, the breathing of a fresh and fragrant
breeze.  Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy.  A beggar-woman and
her little boy--pale, ragged objects both--were coming up the walk, and I
ran down and gave them all the money I happened to have in my purse--some
three or four shillings: good or bad, they must partake of my jubilee.
The rooks cawed, and blither birds sang; but nothing was so merry or so
musical as my own rejoicing heart.

Mrs. Fairfax surprised me by looking out of the window with a sad
countenance, and saying gravely--"Miss Eyre, will you come to breakfast?"
During the meal she was quiet and cool: but I could not undeceive her
then.  I must wait for my master to give explanations; and so must she.  I
ate what I could, and then I hastened upstairs.  I met Adele leaving the
schoolroom.

"Where are you going?  It is time for lessons."

"Mr. Rochester has sent me away to the nursery."

"Where is he?"

"In there," pointing to the apartment she had left; and I went in, and
there he stood.

"Come and bid me good-morning," said he.  I gladly advanced; and it was
not merely a cold word now, or even a shake of the hand that I received,
but an embrace and a kiss.  It seemed natural: it seemed genial to be so
well loved, so caressed by him.

"Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty," said he: "truly
pretty this morning.  Is this my pale, little elf?  Is this my mustard-
seed?  This little sunny-faced girl with the dimpled cheek and rosy lips;
the satin-smooth hazel hair, and the radiant hazel eyes?"  (I had green
eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were
new-dyed, I suppose.)

"It is Jane Eyre, sir."

"Soon to be Jane Rochester," he added: "in four weeks, Janet; not a day
more.  Do you hear that?"

I did, and I could not quite comprehend it: it made me giddy.  The
feeling, the announcement sent through me, was something stronger than
was consistent with joy--something that smote and stunned.  It was, I
think almost fear.

"You blushed, and now you are white, Jane: what is that for?"

"Because you gave me a new name--Jane Rochester; and it seems so
strange."

"Yes, Mrs. Rochester," said he; "young Mrs. Rochester--Fairfax
Rochester's girl-bride."

"It can never be, sir; it does not sound likely.  Human beings never
enjoy complete happiness in this world.  I was not born for a different
destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is
a fairy tale--a day-dream."

"Which I can and will realise.  I shall begin to-day.  This morning I
wrote to my banker in London to send me certain jewels he has in his
keeping,--heirlooms for the ladies of Thornfield.  In a day or two I hope
to pour them into your lap: for every privilege, every attention shall be
yours that I would accord a peer's daughter, if about to marry her."

"Oh, sir!--never rain jewels!  I don't like to hear them spoken of.
Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange: I would rather not
have them."

"I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet on
your forehead,--which it will become: for nature, at least, has stamped
her patent of nobility on this brow, Jane; and I will clasp the bracelets
on these fine wrists, and load these fairy-like fingers with rings."

"No, no, sir! think of other subjects, and speak of other things, and in
another strain.  Don't address me as if I were a beauty; I am your plain,
Quakerish governess."

"You are a beauty in my eyes, and a beauty just after the desire of my
heart,--delicate and aerial."

"Puny and insignificant, you mean.  You are dreaming, sir,--or you are
sneering.  For God's sake don't be ironical!"

"I will make the world acknowledge you a beauty, too," he went on, while
I really became uneasy at the strain he had adopted, because I felt he
was either deluding himself or trying to delude me.  "I will attire my
Jane in satin and lace, and she shall have roses in her hair; and I will
cover the head I love best with a priceless veil."

"And then you won't know me, sir; and I shall not be your Jane Eyre any
longer, but an ape in a harlequin's jacket--a jay in borrowed plumes.  I
would as soon see you, Mr. Rochester, tricked out in stage-trappings, as
myself clad in a court-lady's robe; and I don't call you handsome, sir,
though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you.  Don't
flatter me."

He pursued his theme, however, without noticing my deprecation.  "This
very day I shall take you in the carriage to Millcote, and you must
choose some dresses for yourself.  I told you we shall be married in four
weeks.  The wedding is to take place quietly, in the church down below
yonder; and then I shall waft you away at once to town.  After a brief
stay there, I shall bear my treasure to regions nearer the sun: to French
vineyards and Italian plains; and she shall see whatever is famous in old
story and in modern record: she shall taste, too, of the life of cities;
and she shall learn to value herself by just comparison with others."

"Shall I travel?--and with you, sir?"

"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and
Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you:
wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also.  Ten years
since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage as my
companions: now I shall revisit it healed and cleansed, with a very angel
as my comforter."

I laughed at him as he said this.  "I am not an angel," I asserted; "and
I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.  Mr. Rochester, you must
neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me--for you will not get
it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all
anticipate."

"What do you anticipate of me?"

"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,--a very little
while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and
then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when
you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,--_like_ me, I
say, not _love_ me.  I suppose your love will effervesce in six months,
or less.  I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned
as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends.  Yet, after all, as
a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my
dear master."

"Distasteful! and like you again!  I think I shall like you again, and
yet again: and I will make you confess I do not only _like_, but _love_
you--with truth, fervour, constancy."

"Yet are you not capricious, sir?"

"To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I
find out they have neither souls nor hearts--when they open to me a
perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness,
and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul
made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break--at once
supple and stable, tractable and consistent--I am ever tender and true."

"Had you ever experience of such a character, sir?  Did you ever love
such an one?"

"I love it now."

"But before me: if I, indeed, in any respect come up to your difficult
standard?"

"I never met your likeness.  Jane, you please me, and you master me--you
seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I
am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up
my arm to my heart.  I am influenced--conquered; and the influence is
sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery
beyond any triumph I can win.  Why do you smile, Jane?  What does that
inexplicable, that uncanny turn of countenance mean?"

"I was thinking, sir (you will excuse the idea; it was involuntary), I
was thinking of Hercules and Samson with their charmers--"

"You were, you little elfish--"

"Hush, sir!  You don't talk very wisely just now; any more than those
gentlemen acted very wisely.  However, had they been married, they would
no doubt by their severity as husbands have made up for their softness as
suitors; and so will you, I fear.  I wonder how you will answer me a year
hence, should I ask a favour it does not suit your convenience or
pleasure to grant."

"Ask me something now, Jane,--the least thing: I desire to be entreated--"

"Indeed I will, sir; I have my petition all ready."

"Speak!  But if you look up and smile with that countenance, I shall
swear concession before I know to what, and that will make a fool of me."

"Not at all, sir; I ask only this: don't send for the jewels, and don't
crown me with roses: you might as well put a border of gold lace round
that plain pocket handkerchief you have there."

"I might as well 'gild refined gold.'  I know it: your request is granted
then--for the time.  I will remand the order I despatched to my banker.
But you have not yet asked for anything; you have prayed a gift to be
withdrawn: try again."

"Well then, sir, have the goodness to gratify my curiosity, which is much
piqued on one point."

He looked disturbed.  "What? what?" he said hastily.  "Curiosity is a
dangerous petition: it is well I have not taken a vow to accord every
request--"

"But there can be no danger in complying with this, sir."

"Utter it, Jane: but I wish that instead of a mere inquiry into, perhaps,
a secret, it was a wish for half my estate."

"Now, King Ahasuerus!  What do I want with half your estate?  Do you
think I am a Jew-usurer, seeking good investment in land?  I would much
rather have all your confidence.  You will not exclude me from your
confidence if you admit me to your heart?"

"You are welcome to all my confidence that is worth having, Jane; but for
God's sake, don't desire a useless burden!  Don't long for poison--don't
turn out a downright Eve on my hands!"

"Why not, sir?  You have just been telling me how much you liked to be
conquered, and how pleasant over-persuasion is to you.  Don't you think I
had better take advantage of the confession, and begin and coax and
entreat--even cry and be sulky if necessary--for the sake of a mere essay
of my power?"

"I dare you to any such experiment.  Encroach, presume, and the game is
up."

"Is it, sir?  You soon give in.  How stern you look now!  Your eyebrows
have become as thick as my finger, and your forehead resembles what, in
some very astonishing poetry, I once saw styled, 'a blue-piled
thunderloft.'  That will be your married look, sir, I suppose?"

"If that will be _your_ married look, I, as a Christian, will soon give
up the notion of consorting with a mere sprite or salamander.  But what
had you to ask, thing,--out with it?"

"There, you are less than civil now; and I like rudeness a great deal
better than flattery.  I had rather be a _thing_ than an angel.  This is
what I have to ask,--Why did you take such pains to make me believe you
wished to marry Miss Ingram?"

"Is that all?  Thank God it is no worse!"  And now he unknit his black
brows; looked down, smiling at me, and stroked my hair, as if well
pleased at seeing a danger averted.  "I think I may confess," he
continued, "even although I should make you a little indignant, Jane--and
I have seen what a fire-spirit you can be when you are indignant.  You
glowed in the cool moonlight last night, when you mutinied against fate,
and claimed your rank as my equal.  Janet, by-the-bye, it was you who
made me the offer."

"Of course I did.  But to the point if you please, sir--Miss Ingram?"

"Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you
as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be
the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end."

"Excellent!  Now you are small--not one whit bigger than the end of my
little finger.  It was a burning shame and a scandalous disgrace to act
in that way.  Did you think nothing of Miss Ingram's feelings, sir?"

"Her feelings are concentrated in one--pride; and that needs humbling.
Were you jealous, Jane?"

"Never mind, Mr. Rochester: it is in no way interesting to you to know
that.  Answer me truly once more.  Do you think Miss Ingram will not
suffer from your dishonest coquetry?  Won't she feel forsaken and
deserted?"

"Impossible!--when I told you how she, on the contrary, deserted me: the
idea of my insolvency cooled, or rather extinguished, her flame in a
moment."

"You have a curious, designing mind, Mr. Rochester.  I am afraid your
principles on some points are eccentric."

"My principles were never trained, Jane: they may have grown a little
awry for want of attention."

"Once again, seriously; may I enjoy the great good that has been
vouchsafed to me, without fearing that any one else is suffering the
bitter pain I myself felt a while ago?"

"That you may, my good little girl: there is not another being in the
world has the same pure love for me as yourself--for I lay that pleasant
unction to my soul, Jane, a belief in your affection."

I turned my lips to the hand that lay on my shoulder.  I loved him very
much--more than I could trust myself to say--more than words had power to
express.

"Ask something more," he said presently; "it is my delight to be
entreated, and to yield."

I was again ready with my request.  "Communicate your intentions to Mrs.
Fairfax, sir: she saw me with you last night in the hall, and she was
shocked.  Give her some explanation before I see her again.  It pains me
to be misjudged by so good a woman."

"Go to your room, and put on your bonnet," he replied.  "I mean you to
accompany me to Millcote this morning; and while you prepare for the
drive, I will enlighten the old lady's understanding.  Did she think,
Janet, you had given the world for love, and considered it well lost?"

"I believe she thought I had forgotten my station, and yours, sir."

"Station! station!--your station is in my heart, and on the necks of
those who would insult you, now or hereafter.--Go."

I was soon dressed; and when I heard Mr. Rochester quit Mrs. Fairfax's
parlour, I hurried down to it.  The old lady, had been reading her
morning portion of Scripture--the Lesson for the day; her Bible lay open
before her, and her spectacles were upon it.  Her occupation, suspended
by Mr. Rochester's announcement, seemed now forgotten: her eyes, fixed on
the blank wall opposite, expressed the surprise of a quiet mind stirred
by unwonted tidings.  Seeing me, she roused herself: she made a sort of
effort to smile, and framed a few words of congratulation; but the smile
expired, and the sentence was abandoned unfinished.  She put up her
spectacles, shut the Bible, and pushed her chair back from the table.

"I feel so astonished," she began, "I hardly know what to say to you,
Miss Eyre.  I have surely not been dreaming, have I?  Sometimes I half
fall asleep when I am sitting alone and fancy things that have never
happened.  It has seemed to me more than once when I have been in a doze,
that my dear husband, who died fifteen years since, has come in and sat
down beside me; and that I have even heard him call me by my name, Alice,
as he used to do.  Now, can you tell me whether it is actually true that
Mr. Rochester has asked you to marry him?  Don't laugh at me.  But I
really thought he came in here five minutes ago, and said that in a month
you would be his wife."

"He has said the same thing to me," I replied.

"He has!  Do you believe him?  Have you accepted him?"

"Yes."

She looked at me bewildered.  "I could never have thought it.  He is a
proud man: all the Rochesters were proud: and his father, at least, liked
money.  He, too, has always been called careful.  He means to marry you?"

"He tells me so."

She surveyed my whole person: in her eyes I read that they had there
found no charm powerful enough to solve the enigma.

"It passes me!" she continued; "but no doubt, it is true since you say
so.  How it will answer, I cannot tell: I really don't know.  Equality of
position and fortune is often advisable in such cases; and there are
twenty years of difference in your ages.  He might almost be your
father."

"No, indeed, Mrs. Fairfax!" exclaimed I, nettled; "he is nothing like my
father!  No one, who saw us together, would suppose it for an instant.
Mr. Rochester looks as young, and is as young, as some men at five-and-
twenty."

"Is it really for love he is going to marry you?" she asked.

I was so hurt by her coldness and scepticism, that the tears rose to my
eyes.

"I am sorry to grieve you," pursued the widow; "but you are so young, and
so little acquainted with men, I wished to put you on your guard.  It is
an old saying that 'all is not gold that glitters;' and in this case I do
fear there will be something found to be different to what either you or
I expect."

"Why?--am I a monster?" I said: "is it impossible that Mr. Rochester
should have a sincere affection for me?"

"No: you are very well; and much improved of late; and Mr. Rochester, I
daresay, is fond of you.  I have always noticed that you were a sort of
pet of his.  There are times when, for your sake, I have been a little
uneasy at his marked preference, and have wished to put you on your
guard: but I did not like to suggest even the possibility of wrong.  I
knew such an idea would shock, perhaps offend you; and you were so
discreet, and so thoroughly modest and sensible, I hoped you might be
trusted to protect yourself.  Last night I cannot tell you what I
suffered when I sought all over the house, and could find you nowhere,
nor the master either; and then, at twelve o'clock, saw you come in with
him."

"Well, never mind that now," I interrupted impatiently; "it is enough
that all was right."

"I hope all will be right in the end," she said: "but believe me, you
cannot be too careful.  Try and keep Mr. Rochester at a distance:
distrust yourself as well as him.  Gentlemen in his station are not
accustomed to marry their governesses."

I was growing truly irritated: happily, Adele ran in.

"Let me go,--let me go to Millcote too!" she cried.  "Mr. Rochester
won't: though there is so much room in the new carriage.  Beg him to let
me go mademoiselle."

"That I will, Adele;" and I hastened away with her, glad to quit my
gloomy monitress.  The carriage was ready: they were bringing it round to
the front, and my master was pacing the pavement, Pilot following him
backwards and forwards.

"Adele may accompany us, may she not, sir?"

"I told her no.  I'll have no brats!--I'll have only you."

"Do let her go, Mr. Rochester, if you please: it would be better."

"Not it: she will be a restraint."

He was quite peremptory, both in look and voice.  The chill of Mrs.
Fairfax's warnings, and the damp of her doubts were upon me: something of
unsubstantiality and uncertainty had beset my hopes.  I half lost the
sense of power over him.  I was about mechanically to obey him, without
further remonstrance; but as he helped me into the carriage, he looked at
my face.

"What is the matter?" he asked; "all the sunshine is gone.  Do you really
wish the bairn to go?  Will it annoy you if she is left behind?"

"I would far rather she went, sir."

"Then off for your bonnet, and back like a flash of lightning!" cried he
to Adele.

She obeyed him with what speed she might.

"After all, a single morning's interruption will not matter much," said
he, "when I mean shortly to claim you--your thoughts, conversation, and
company--for life."

Adele, when lifted in, commenced kissing me, by way of expressing her
gratitude for my intercession: she was instantly stowed away into a
corner on the other side of him.  She then peeped round to where I sat;
so stern a neighbour was too restrictive to him, in his present fractious
mood, she dared whisper no observations, nor ask of him any information.

"Let her come to me," I entreated: "she will, perhaps, trouble you, sir:
there is plenty of room on this side."

He handed her over as if she had been a lapdog.  "I'll send her to school
yet," he said, but now he was smiling.

Adele heard him, and asked if she was to go to school "sans
mademoiselle?"

"Yes," he replied, "absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take
mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the
white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me
there, and only me."

"She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her," observed Adele.

"I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides
in the moon are bleached with manna, Adele."

"She will want to warm herself: what will she do for a fire?"

"Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I'll carry her
up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater."

"Oh, qu' elle y sera mal--peu comfortable!  And her clothes, they will
wear out: how can she get new ones?"

Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled.  "Hem!" said he.  "What would you
do, Adele?  Cudgel your brains for an expedient.  How would a white or a
pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think?  And one could cut a pretty
enough scarf out of a rainbow."

"She is far better as she is," concluded Adele, after musing some time:
"besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon.  If I
were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you."

"She has consented: she has pledged her word."

"But you can't get her there; there is no road to the moon: it is all
air; and neither you nor she can fly."

"Adele, look at that field."  We were now outside Thornfield gates, and
bowling lightly along the smooth road to Millcote, where the dust was
well laid by the thunderstorm, and, where the low hedges and lofty timber
trees on each side glistened green and rain-refreshed.

"In that field, Adele, I was walking late one evening about a fortnight
since--the evening of the day you helped me to make hay in the orchard
meadows; and, as I was tired with raking swaths, I sat down to rest me on
a stile; and there I took out a little book and a pencil, and began to
write about a misfortune that befell me long ago, and a wish I had for
happy days to come: I was writing away very fast, though daylight was
fading from the leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two
yards off me.  I looked at it.  It was a little thing with a veil of
gossamer on its head.  I beckoned it to come near me; it stood soon at my
knee.  I never spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words; but I
read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless colloquy was to this
effect--

"It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to
make me happy: I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely
place--such as the moon, for instance--and it nodded its head towards her
horn, rising over Hay-hill: it told me of the alabaster cave and silver
vale where we might live.  I said I should like to go; but reminded it,
as you did me, that I had no wings to fly.

"'Oh,' returned the fairy, 'that does not signify!  Here is a talisman
will remove all difficulties;' and she held out a pretty gold ring.  'Put
it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours, and
you are mine; and we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.'
She nodded again at the moon.  The ring, Adele, is in my breeches-pocket,
under the disguise of a sovereign: but I mean soon to change it to a ring
again."

"But what has mademoiselle to do with it?  I don't care for the fairy:
you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?"

"Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.  Whereupon I
told her not to mind his badinage; and she, on her part, evinced a fund
of genuine French scepticism: denominating Mr. Rochester "un vrai
menteur," and assuring him that she made no account whatever of his
"contes de fee," and that "du reste, il n'y avait pas de fees, et quand
meme il y en avait:" she was sure they would never appear to him, nor
ever give him rings, or offer to live with him in the moon.

The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing one to me.  Mr.
Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse: there I was
ordered to choose half-a-dozen dresses.  I hated the business, I begged
leave to defer it: no--it should be gone through with now.  By dint of
entreaties expressed in energetic whispers, I reduced the half-dozen to
two: these however, he vowed he would select himself.  With anxiety I
watched his eye rove over the gay stores: he fixed on a rich silk of the
most brilliant amethyst dye, and a superb pink satin.  I told him in a
new series of whispers, that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a
silver bonnet at once: I should certainly never venture to wear his
choice.  With infinite difficulty, for he was stubborn as a stone, I
persuaded him to make an exchange in favour of a sober black satin and
pearl-grey silk.  "It might pass for the present," he said; "but he would
yet see me glittering like a parterre."

Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a
jewellers shop: the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a
sense of annoyance and degradation.  As we re-entered the carriage, and I
sat back feverish and fagged, I remembered what, in the hurry of events,
dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten--the letter of my uncle, John
Eyre, to Mrs. Reed: his intention to adopt me and make me his legatee.
"It would, indeed, be a relief," I thought, "if I had ever so small an
independency; I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr.
Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden shower falling
daily round me.  I will write to Madeira the moment I get home, and tell
my uncle John I am going to be married, and to whom: if I had but a
prospect of one day bringing Mr. Rochester an accession of fortune, I
could better endure to be kept by him now."  And somewhat relieved by
this idea (which I failed not to execute that day), I ventured once more
to meet my master's and lover's eye, which most pertinaciously sought
mine, though I averted both face and gaze.  He smiled; and I thought his
smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow
on a slave his gold and gems had enriched: I crushed his hand, which was
ever hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it back to him red with the
passionate pressure.

"You need not look in that way," I said; "if you do, I'll wear nothing
but my old Lowood frocks to the end of the chapter.  I'll be married in
this lilac gingham: you may make a dressing-gown for yourself out of the
pearl-grey silk, and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black
satin."

He chuckled; he rubbed his hands.  "Oh, it is rich to see and hear her?"
he exclaimed.  "Is she original?  Is she piquant?  I would not exchange
this one little English girl for the Grand Turk's whole seraglio, gazelle-
eyes, houri forms, and all!"

The Eastern allusion bit me again.  "I'll not stand you an inch in the
stead of a seraglio," I said; "so don't consider me an equivalent for
one.  If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir,
to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-
purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend
satisfactorily here."

"And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of
flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?"

"I'll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to
them that are enslaved--your harem inmates amongst the rest.  I'll get
admitted there, and I'll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as
you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands:
nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a
charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred."

"I would consent to be at your mercy, Jane."

"I would have no mercy, Mr. Rochester, if you supplicated for it with an
eye like that.  While you looked so, I should be certain that whatever
charter you might grant under coercion, your first act, when released,
would be to violate its conditions."

"Why, Jane, what would you have?  I fear you will compel me to go through
a private marriage ceremony, besides that performed at the altar.  You
will stipulate, I see, for peculiar terms--what will they be?"

"I only want an easy mind, sir; not crushed by crowded obligations.  Do
you remember what you said of Celine Varens?--of the diamonds, the
cashmeres you gave her?  I will not be your English Celine Varens.  I
shall continue to act as Adele's governess; by that I shall earn my board
and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides.  I'll furnish my own
wardrobe out of that money, and you shall give me nothing but--"

"Well, but what?"

"Your regard; and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit."

"Well, for cool native impudence and pure innate pride, you haven't your
equal," said he.  We were now approaching Thornfield.  "Will it please
you to dine with me to-day?" he asked, as we re-entered the gates.

"No, thank you, sir."

"And what for, 'no, thank you?' if one may inquire."

"I never have dined with you, sir: and I see no reason why I should now:
till--"

"Till what?  You delight in half-phrases."

"Till I can't help it."

"Do you suppose I eat like an ogre or a ghoul, that you dread being the
companion of my repast?"

"I have formed no supposition on the subject, sir; but I want to go on as
usual for another month."

"You will give up your governessing slavery at once."

"Indeed, begging your pardon, sir, I shall not.  I shall just go on with
it as usual.  I shall keep out of your way all day, as I have been
accustomed to do: you may send for me in the evening, when you feel
disposed to see me, and I'll come then; but at no other time."

"I want a smoke, Jane, or a pinch of snuff, to comfort me under all this,
'pour me donner une contenance,' as Adele would say; and unfortunately I
have neither my cigar-case, nor my snuff-box.  But listen--whisper.  It
is your time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently; and when
once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I'll
just--figuratively speaking--attach you to a chain like this" (touching
his watch-guard).  "Yes, bonny wee thing, I'll wear you in my bosom, lest
my jewel I should tyne."

He said this as he helped me to alight from the carriage, and while he
afterwards lifted out Adele, I entered the house, and made good my
retreat upstairs.

He duly summoned me to his presence in the evening.  I had prepared an
occupation for him; for I was determined not to spend the whole time in a
_tete-a-tete_ conversation.  I remembered his fine voice; I knew he liked
to sing--good singers generally do.  I was no vocalist myself, and, in
his fastidious judgment, no musician, either; but I delighted in
listening when the performance was good.  No sooner had twilight, that
hour of romance, began to lower her blue and starry banner over the
lattice, than I rose, opened the piano, and entreated him, for the love
of heaven, to give me a song.  He said I was a capricious witch, and that
he would rather sing another time; but I averred that no time was like
the present.

"Did I like his voice?" he asked.

"Very much."  I was not fond of pampering that susceptible vanity of his;
but for once, and from motives of expediency, I would e'en soothe and
stimulate it.

"Then, Jane, you must play the accompaniment."

"Very well, sir, I will try."

I did try, but was presently swept off the stool and denominated "a
little bungler."  Being pushed unceremoniously to one side--which was
precisely what I wished--he usurped my place, and proceeded to accompany
himself: for he could play as well as sing.  I hied me to the
window-recess.  And while I sat there and looked out on the still trees
and dim lawn, to a sweet air was sung in mellow tones the following
strain:--

   "The truest love that ever heart
      Felt at its kindled core,
   Did through each vein, in quickened start,
      The tide of being pour.

   Her coming was my hope each day,
      Her parting was my pain;
   The chance that did her steps delay
      Was ice in every vein.

   I dreamed it would be nameless bliss,
      As I loved, loved to be;
   And to this object did I press
      As blind as eagerly.

   But wide as pathless was the space
      That lay our lives between,
   And dangerous as the foamy race
      Of ocean-surges green.

   And haunted as a robber-path
      Through wilderness or wood;
   For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath,
      Between our spirits stood.

   I dangers dared; I hindrance scorned;
      I omens did defy:
   Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,
      I passed impetuous by.

   On sped my rainbow, fast as light;
      I flew as in a dream;
   For glorious rose upon my sight
      That child of Shower and Gleam.

   Still bright on clouds of suffering dim
      Shines that soft, solemn joy;
   Nor care I now, how dense and grim
      Disasters gather nigh.

   I care not in this moment sweet,
      Though all I have rushed o'er
   Should come on pinion, strong and fleet,
      Proclaiming vengeance sore:

   Though haughty Hate should strike me down,
      Right, bar approach to me,
   And grinding Might, with furious frown,
      Swear endless enmity.

   My love has placed her little hand
      With noble faith in mine,
   And vowed that wedlock's sacred band
      Our nature shall entwine.

   My love has sworn, with sealing kiss,
      With me to live--to die;
   I have at last my nameless bliss.
      As I love--loved am I!"

He rose and came towards me, and I saw his face all kindled, and his full
falcon-eye flashing, and tenderness and passion in every lineament.  I
quailed momentarily--then I rallied.  Soft scene, daring demonstration, I
would not have; and I stood in peril of both: a weapon of defence must be
prepared--I whetted my tongue: as he reached me, I asked with asperity,
"whom he was going to marry now?"

"That was a strange question to be put by his darling Jane."

"Indeed!  I considered it a very natural and necessary one: he had talked
of his future wife dying with him.  What did he mean by such a pagan
idea?  _I_ had no intention of dying with him--he might depend on that."

"Oh, all he longed, all he prayed for, was that I might live with him!
Death was not for such as I."

"Indeed it was: I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had:
but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee."

"Would I forgive him for the selfish idea, and prove my pardon by a
reconciling kiss?"

"No: I would rather be excused."

Here I heard myself apostrophised as a "hard little thing;" and it was
added, "any other woman would have been melted to marrow at hearing such
stanzas crooned in her praise."

I assured him I was naturally hard--very flinty, and that he would often
find me so; and that, moreover, I was determined to show him divers
rugged points in my character before the ensuing four weeks elapsed: he
should know fully what sort of a bargain he had made, while there was yet
time to rescind it.

"Would I be quiet and talk rationally?"

"I would be quiet if he liked, and as to talking rationally, I flattered
myself I was doing that now."

He fretted, pished, and pshawed.  "Very good," I thought; "you may fume
and fidget as you please: but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I
am certain.  I like you more than I can say; but I'll not sink into a
bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee I'll keep you from
the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that
distance between you and myself most conducive to our real mutual
advantage."

From less to more, I worked him up to considerable irritation; then,
after he had retired, in dudgeon, quite to the other end of the room, I
got up, and saying, "I wish you good-night, sir," in my natural and
wonted respectful manner, I slipped out by the side-door and got away.

The system thus entered on, I pursued during the whole season of
probation; and with the best success.  He was kept, to be sure, rather
cross and crusty; but on the whole I could see he was excellently
entertained, and that a lamb-like submission and turtle-dove sensibility,
while fostering his despotism more, would have pleased his judgment,
satisfied his common-sense, and even suited his taste less.

In other people's presence I was, as formerly, deferential and quiet; any
other line of conduct being uncalled for: it was only in the evening
conferences I thus thwarted and afflicted him.  He continued to send for
me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared
before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as "love" and "darling" on
his lips: the best words at my service were "provoking puppet,"
"malicious elf," "sprite," "changeling," &c.  For caresses, too, I now
got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss
on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear.  It was all right: at present I
decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender.  Mrs.
Fairfax, I saw, approved me: her anxiety on my account vanished;
therefore I was certain I did well.  Meantime, Mr. Rochester affirmed I
was wearing him to skin and bone, and threatened awful vengeance for my
present conduct at some period fast coming.  I laughed in my sleeve at
his menaces.  "I can keep you in reasonable check now," I reflected; "and
I don't doubt to be able to do it hereafter: if one expedient loses its
virtue, another must be devised."

Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have
pleased than teased him.  My future husband was becoming to me my whole
world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven.  He stood
between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes
between man and the broad sun.  I could not, in those days, see God for
His creature: of whom I had made an idol.




CHAPTER XXV


The month of courtship had wasted: its very last hours were being
numbered.  There was no putting off the day that advanced--the bridal
day; and all preparations for its arrival were complete.  _I_, at least,
had nothing more to do: there were my trunks, packed, locked, corded,
ranged in a row along the wall of my little chamber; to-morrow, at this
time, they would be far on their road to London: and so should I
(D.V.),--or rather, not I, but one Jane Rochester, a person whom as yet I
knew not.  The cards of address alone remained to nail on: they lay, four
little squares, in the drawer.  Mr. Rochester had himself written the
direction, "Mrs. Rochester, --- Hotel, London," on each: I could not
persuade myself to affix them, or to have them affixed.  Mrs. Rochester!
She did not exist: she would not be born till to-morrow, some time after
eight o'clock a.m.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the
world alive before I assigned to her all that property.  It was enough
that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be
hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet:
for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the
pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped
portmanteau.  I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like
apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour--nine o'clock--gave out
certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.  "I
will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said.  "I am feverish: I hear
the wind blowing: I will go out of doors and feel it."

It was not only the hurry of preparation that made me feverish; not only
the anticipation of the great change--the new life which was to commence
to-morrow: both these circumstances had their share, doubtless, in
producing that restless, excited mood which hurried me forth at this late
hour into the darkening grounds: but a third cause influenced my mind
more than they.

I had at heart a strange and anxious thought.  Something had happened
which I could not comprehend; no one knew of or had seen the event but
myself: it had taken place the preceding night.  Mr. Rochester that night
was absent from home; nor was he yet returned: business had called him to
a small estate of two or three farms he possessed thirty miles
off--business it was requisite he should settle in person, previous to
his meditated departure from England.  I waited now his return; eager to
disburthen my mind, and to seek of him the solution of the enigma that
perplexed me.  Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret
to him, you shall share the confidence.

I sought the orchard, driven to its shelter by the wind, which all day
had blown strong and full from the south, without, however, bringing a
speck of rain.  Instead of subsiding as night drew on, it seemed to
augment its rush and deepen its roar: the trees blew steadfastly one way,
never writhing round, and scarcely tossing back their boughs once in an
hour; so continuous was the strain bending their branchy heads
northward--the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on
mass: no glimpse of blue sky had been visible that July day.

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind,
delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering
through space.  Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of the
chestnut-tree; it stood up black and riven: the trunk, split down the
centre, gasped ghastly.  The cloven halves were not broken from each
other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below;
though community of vitality was destroyed--the sap could flow no more:
their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests
would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might
be said to form one tree--a ruin, but an entire ruin.

"You did right to hold fast to each other," I said: as if the monster-
splinters were living things, and could hear me.  "I think, scathed as
you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life
in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots:
you will never have green leaves more--never more see birds making nests
and singing idyls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over
with you: but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to
sympathise with him in his decay."  As I looked up at them, the moon
appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure;
her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one
bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep
drift of cloud.  The wind fell, for a second, round Thornfield; but far
away over wood and water, poured a wild, melancholy wail: it was sad to
listen to, and I ran off again.

Here and there I strayed through the orchard, gathered up the apples with
which the grass round the tree roots was thickly strewn; then I employed
myself in dividing the ripe from the unripe; I carried them into the
house and put them away in the store-room.  Then I repaired to the
library to ascertain whether the fire was lit, for, though summer, I knew
on such a gloomy evening Mr. Rochester would like to see a cheerful
hearth when he came in: yes, the fire had been kindled some time, and
burnt well.  I placed his arm-chair by the chimney-corner: I wheeled the
table near it: I let down the curtain, and had the candles brought in
ready for lighting.  More restless than ever, when I had completed these
arrangements I could not sit still, nor even remain in the house: a
little time-piece in the room and the old clock in the hall
simultaneously struck ten.

"How late it grows!" I said.  "I will run down to the gates: it is
moonlight at intervals; I can see a good way on the road.  He may be
coming now, and to meet him will save some minutes of suspense."

The wind roared high in the great trees which embowered the gates; but
the road as far as I could see, to the right hand and the left, was all
still and solitary: save for the shadows of clouds crossing it at
intervals as the moon looked out, it was but a long pale line, unvaried
by one moving speck.

A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked--a tear of disappointment and
impatience; ashamed of it, I wiped it away.  I lingered; the moon shut
herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of dense
cloud: the night grew dark; rain came driving fast on the gale.

"I wish he would come!  I wish he would come!" I exclaimed, seized with
hypochondriac foreboding.  I had expected his arrival before tea; now it
was dark: what could keep him?  Had an accident happened?  The event of
last night again recurred to me.  I interpreted it as a warning of
disaster.  I feared my hopes were too bright to be realised; and I had
enjoyed so much bliss lately that I imagined my fortune had passed its
meridian, and must now decline.

"Well, I cannot return to the house," I thought; "I cannot sit by the
fireside, while he is abroad in inclement weather: better tire my limbs
than strain my heart; I will go forward and meet him."

I set out; I walked fast, but not far: ere I had measured a quarter of a
mile, I heard the tramp of hoofs; a horseman came on, full gallop; a dog
ran by his side.  Away with evil presentiment!  It was he: here he was,
mounted on Mesrour, followed by Pilot.  He saw me; for the moon had
opened a blue field in the sky, and rode in it watery bright: he took his
hat off, and waved it round his head.  I now ran to meet him.

"There!" he exclaimed, as he stretched out his hand and bent from the
saddle: "You can't do without me, that is evident.  Step on my boot-toe;
give me both hands: mount!"

I obeyed: joy made me agile: I sprang up before him.  A hearty kissing I
got for a welcome, and some boastful triumph, which I swallowed as well
as I could.  He checked himself in his exultation to demand, "But is
there anything the matter, Janet, that you come to meet me at such an
hour?  Is there anything wrong?"

"No, but I thought you would never come.  I could not bear to wait in the
house for you, especially with this rain and wind."

"Rain and wind, indeed!  Yes, you are dripping like a mermaid; pull my
cloak round you: but I think you are feverish, Jane: both your cheek and
hand are burning hot.  I ask again, is there anything the matter?"

"Nothing now; I am neither afraid nor unhappy."

"Then you have been both?"

"Rather: but I'll tell you all about it by-and-bye, sir; and I daresay
you will only laugh at me for my pains."

"I'll laugh at you heartily when to-morrow is past; till then I dare not:
my prize is not certain.  This is you, who have been as slippery as an
eel this last month, and as thorny as a briar-rose?  I could not lay a
finger anywhere but I was pricked; and now I seem to have gathered up a
stray lamb in my arms.  You wandered out of the fold to seek your
shepherd, did you, Jane?"

"I wanted you: but don't boast.  Here we are at Thornfield: now let me
get down."

He landed me on the pavement.  As John took his horse, and he followed me
into the hall, he told me to make haste and put something dry on, and
then return to him in the library; and he stopped me, as I made for the
staircase, to extort a promise that I would not be long: nor was I long;
in five minutes I rejoined him.  I found him at supper.

"Take a seat and bear me company, Jane: please God, it is the last meal
but one you will eat at Thornfield Hall for a long time."

I sat down near him, but told him I could not eat.  "Is it because you
have the prospect of a journey before you, Jane?  Is it the thoughts of
going to London that takes away your appetite?"

"I cannot see my prospects clearly to-night, sir; and I hardly know what
thoughts I have in my head.  Everything in life seems unreal."

"Except me: I am substantial enough--touch me."

"You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all: you are a mere dream."

He held out his hand, laughing.  "Is that a dream?" said he, placing it
close to my eyes.  He had a rounded, muscular, and vigorous hand, as well
as a long, strong arm.

"Yes; though I touch it, it is a dream," said I, as I put it down from
before my face.  "Sir, have you finished supper?"

"Yes, Jane."

I rang the bell and ordered away the tray.  When we were again alone, I
stirred the fire, and then took a low seat at my master's knee.

"It is near midnight," I said.

"Yes: but remember, Jane, you promised to wake with me the night before
my wedding."

"I did; and I will keep my promise, for an hour or two at least: I have
no wish to go to bed."

"Are all your arrangements complete?"

"All, sir."

"And on my part likewise," he returned, "I have settled everything; and
we shall leave Thornfield to-morrow, within half-an-hour after our return
from church."

"Very well, sir."

"With what an extraordinary smile you uttered that word--'very well,'
Jane!  What a bright spot of colour you have on each cheek! and how
strangely your eyes glitter!  Are you well?"

"I believe I am."

"Believe!  What is the matter?  Tell me what you feel."

"I could not, sir: no words could tell you what I feel.  I wish this
present hour would never end: who knows with what fate the next may come
charged?"

"This is hypochondria, Jane.  You have been over-excited, or
over-fatigued."

"Do you, sir, feel calm and happy?"

"Calm?--no: but happy--to the heart's core."

I looked up at him to read the signs of bliss in his face: it was ardent
and flushed.

"Give me your confidence, Jane," he said: "relieve your mind of any
weight that oppresses it, by imparting it to me.  What do you fear?--that
I shall not prove a good husband?"

"It is the idea farthest from my thoughts."

"Are you apprehensive of the new sphere you are about to enter?--of the
new life into which you are passing?"

"No."

"You puzzle me, Jane: your look and tone of sorrowful audacity perplex
and pain me.  I want an explanation."

"Then, sir, listen.  You were from home last night?"

"I was: I know that; and you hinted a while ago at something which had
happened in my absence:--nothing, probably, of consequence; but, in
short, it has disturbed you.  Let me hear it.  Mrs. Fairfax has said
something, perhaps? or you have overheard the servants talk?--your
sensitive self-respect has been wounded?"

"No, sir."  It struck twelve--I waited till the time-piece had concluded
its silver chime, and the clock its hoarse, vibrating stroke, and then I
proceeded.

"All day yesterday I was very busy, and very happy in my ceaseless
bustle; for I am not, as you seem to think, troubled by any haunting
fears about the new sphere, et cetera: I think it a glorious thing to
have the hope of living with you, because I love you.  No, sir, don't
caress me now--let me talk undisturbed.  Yesterday I trusted well in
Providence, and believed that events were working together for your good
and mine: it was a fine day, if you recollect--the calmness of the air
and sky forbade apprehensions respecting your safety or comfort on your
journey.  I walked a little while on the pavement after tea, thinking of
you; and I beheld you in imagination so near me, I scarcely missed your
actual presence.  I thought of the life that lay before me--_your_ life,
sir--an existence more expansive and stirring than my own: as much more
so as the depths of the sea to which the brook runs are than the shallows
of its own strait channel.  I wondered why moralists call this world a
dreary wilderness: for me it blossomed like a rose.  Just at sunset, the
air turned cold and the sky cloudy: I went in, Sophie called me upstairs
to look at my wedding-dress, which they had just brought; and under it in
the box I found your present--the veil which, in your princely
extravagance, you sent for from London: resolved, I suppose, since I
would not have jewels, to cheat me into accepting something as costly.  I
smiled as I unfolded it, and devised how I would tease you about your
aristocratic tastes, and your efforts to masque your plebeian bride in
the attributes of a peeress.  I thought how I would carry down to you the
square of unembroidered blond I had myself prepared as a covering for my
low-born head, and ask if that was not good enough for a woman who could
bring her husband neither fortune, beauty, nor connections.  I saw
plainly how you would look; and heard your impetuous republican answers,
and your haughty disavowal of any necessity on your part to augment your
wealth, or elevate your standing, by marrying either a purse or a
coronet."

"How well you read me, you witch!" interposed Mr. Rochester: "but what
did you find in the veil besides its embroidery?  Did you find poison, or
a dagger, that you look so mournful now?"

"No, no, sir; besides the delicacy and richness of the fabric, I found
nothing save Fairfax Rochester's pride; and that did not scare me,
because I am used to the sight of the demon.  But, sir, as it grew dark,
the wind rose: it blew yesterday evening, not as it blows now--wild and
high--but 'with a sullen, moaning sound' far more eerie.  I wished you
were at home.  I came into this room, and the sight of the empty chair
and fireless hearth chilled me.  For some time after I went to bed, I
could not sleep--a sense of anxious excitement distressed me.  The gale
still rising, seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful under-sound; whether
in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred,
doubtful yet doleful at every lull; at last I made out it must be some
dog howling at a distance.  I was glad when it ceased.  On sleeping, I
continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night.  I continued also
the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful
consciousness of some barrier dividing us.  During all my first sleep, I
was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed
me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a
very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in
my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear.  I thought, sir, that you
were on the road a long way before me; and I strained every nerve to
overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat
you to stop--but my movements were fettered, and my voice still died away
inarticulate; while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther every
moment."

"And these dreams weigh on your spirits now, Jane, when I am close to
you?  Little nervous subject!  Forget visionary woe, and think only of
real happiness!  You say you love me, Janet: yes--I will not forget that;
and you cannot deny it.  _Those_ words did not die inarticulate on your
lips.  I heard them clear and soft: a thought too solemn perhaps, but
sweet as music--'I think it is a glorious thing to have the hope of
living with you, Edward, because I love you.'  Do you love me,
Jane?--repeat it."

"I do, sir--I do, with my whole heart."

"Well," he said, after some minutes' silence, "it is strange; but that
sentence has penetrated my breast painfully.  Why?  I think because you
said it with such an earnest, religious energy, and because your upward
gaze at me now is the very sublime of faith, truth, and devotion: it is
too much as if some spirit were near me.  Look wicked, Jane: as you know
well how to look: coin one of your wild, shy, provoking smiles; tell me
you hate me--tease me, vex me; do anything but move me: I would rather be
incensed than saddened."

"I will tease you and vex you to your heart's content, when I have
finished my tale: but hear me to the end."

"I thought, Jane, you had told me all.  I thought I had found the source
of your melancholy in a dream."

I shook my head.  "What! is there more?  But I will not believe it to be
anything important.  I warn you of incredulity beforehand.  Go on."

The disquietude of his air, the somewhat apprehensive impatience of his
manner, surprised me: but I proceeded.

"I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the
retreat of bats and owls.  I thought that of all the stately front
nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very
fragile-looking.  I wandered, on a moonlight night, through the grass-
grown enclosure within: here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there
over a fallen fragment of cornice.  Wrapped up in a shawl, I still
carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere,
however tired were my arms--however much its weight impeded my progress,
I must retain it.  I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the
road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years and
for a distant country.  I climbed the thin wall with frantic perilous
haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled
from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung
round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me; at last I gained the
summit.  I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment.
The blast blew so strong I could not stand.  I sat down on the narrow
ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap: you turned an angle of the
road: I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was
shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and
woke."

"Now, Jane, that is all."

"All the preface, sir; the tale is yet to come.  On waking, a gleam
dazzled my eyes; I thought--Oh, it is daylight!  But I was mistaken; it
was only candlelight.  Sophie, I supposed, had come in.  There was a
light in the dressing-table, and the door of the closet, where, before
going to bed, I had hung my wedding-dress and veil, stood open; I heard a
rustling there.  I asked, 'Sophie, what are you doing?'  No one answered;
but a form emerged from the closet; it took the light, held it aloft, and
surveyed the garments pendent from the portmanteau.  'Sophie!  Sophie!'  I
again cried: and still it was silent.  I had risen up in bed, I bent
forward: first surprise, then bewilderment, came over me; and then my
blood crept cold through my veins.  Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie,
it was not Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax: it was not--no, I was sure of
it, and am still--it was not even that strange woman, Grace Poole."

"It must have been one of them," interrupted my master.

"No, sir, I solemnly assure you to the contrary.  The shape standing
before me had never crossed my eyes within the precincts of Thornfield
Hall before; the height, the contour were new to me."

"Describe it, Jane."

"It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair
hanging long down her back.  I know not what dress she had on: it was
white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell."

"Did you see her face?"

"Not at first.  But presently she took my veil from its place; she held
it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and
turned to the mirror.  At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage
and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass."

"And how were they?"

"Fearful and ghastly to me--oh, sir, I never saw a face like it!  It was
a discoloured face--it was a savage face.  I wish I could forget the roll
of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!"

"Ghosts are usually pale, Jane."

"This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow
furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes.  Shall
I tell you of what it reminded me?"

"You may."

"Of the foul German spectre--the Vampyre."

"Ah!--what did it do?"

"Sir, it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and
flinging both on the floor, trampled on them."

{It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and
flinging both on the floor, trampled on them: p272.jpg}

"Afterwards?"

"It drew aside the window-curtain and looked out; perhaps it saw dawn
approaching, for, taking the candle, it retreated to the door.  Just at
my bedside, the figure stopped: the fiery eyes glared upon me--she thrust
up her candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes.  I was
aware her lurid visage flamed over mine, and I lost consciousness: for
the second time in my life--only the second time--I became insensible
from terror."

"Who was with you when you revived?"

"No one, sir, but the broad day.  I rose, bathed my head and face in
water, drank a long draught; felt that though enfeebled I was not ill,
and determined that to none but you would I impart this vision.  Now,
sir, tell me who and what that woman was?"

"The creature of an over-stimulated brain; that is certain.  I must be
careful of you, my treasure: nerves like yours were not made for rough
handling."

"Sir, depend on it, my nerves were not in fault; the thing was real: the
transaction actually took place."

"And your previous dreams, were they real too?  Is Thornfield Hall a
ruin?  Am I severed from you by insuperable obstacles?  Am I leaving you
without a tear--without a kiss--without a word?"

"Not yet."

"Am I about to do it?  Why, the day is already commenced which is to bind
us indissolubly; and when we are once united, there shall be no
recurrence of these mental terrors: I guarantee that."

"Mental terrors, sir!  I wish I could believe them to be only such: I
wish it more now than ever; since even you cannot explain to me the
mystery of that awful visitant."

"And since I cannot do it, Jane, it must have been unreal."

"But, sir, when I said so to myself on rising this morning, and when I
looked round the room to gather courage and comfort from the cheerful
aspect of each familiar object in full daylight, there--on the carpet--I
saw what gave the distinct lie to my hypothesis,--the veil, torn from top
to bottom in two halves!"

I felt Mr. Rochester start and shudder; he hastily flung his arms round
me.  "Thank God!" he exclaimed, "that if anything malignant did come near
you last night, it was only the veil that was harmed.  Oh, to think what
might have happened!"

He drew his breath short, and strained me so close to him, I could
scarcely pant.  After some minutes' silence, he continued, cheerily--

"Now, Janet, I'll explain to you all about it.  It was half dream, half
reality.  A woman did, I doubt not, enter your room: and that woman
was--must have been--Grace Poole.  You call her a strange being yourself:
from all you know, you have reason so to call her--what did she do to me?
what to Mason?  In a state between sleeping and waking, you noticed her
entrance and her actions; but feverish, almost delirious as you were, you
ascribed to her a goblin appearance different from her own: the long
dishevelled hair, the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature, were
figments of imagination; results of nightmare: the spiteful tearing of
the veil was real: and it is like her.  I see you would ask why I keep
such a woman in my house: when we have been married a year and a day, I
will tell you; but not now.  Are you satisfied, Jane?  Do you accept my
solution of the mystery?"

I reflected, and in truth it appeared to me the only possible one:
satisfied I was not, but to please him I endeavoured to appear
so--relieved, I certainly did feel; so I answered him with a contented
smile.  And now, as it was long past one, I prepared to leave him.

"Does not Sophie sleep with Adele in the nursery?" he asked, as I lit my
candle.

"Yes, sir."

"And there is room enough in Adele's little bed for you.  You must share
it with her to-night, Jane: it is no wonder that the incident you have
related should make you nervous, and I would rather you did not sleep
alone: promise me to go to the nursery."

"I shall be very glad to do so, sir."

"And fasten the door securely on the inside.  Wake Sophie when you go
upstairs, under pretence of requesting her to rouse you in good time to-
morrow; for you must be dressed and have finished breakfast before eight.
And now, no more sombre thoughts: chase dull care away, Janet.  Don't you
hear to what soft whispers the wind has fallen? and there is no more
beating of rain against the window-panes: look here" (he lifted up the
curtain)--"it is a lovely night!"

It was.  Half heaven was pure and stainless: the clouds, now trooping
before the wind, which had shifted to the west, were filing off eastward
in long, silvered columns.  The moon shone peacefully.

"Well," said Mr. Rochester, gazing inquiringly into my eyes, "how is my
Janet now?"

"The night is serene, sir; and so am I."

"And you will not dream of separation and sorrow to-night; but of happy
love and blissful union."

This prediction was but half fulfilled: I did not indeed dream of sorrow,
but as little did I dream of joy; for I never slept at all.  With little
Adele in my arms, I watched the slumber of childhood--so tranquil, so
passionless, so innocent--and waited for the coming day: all my life was
awake and astir in my frame: and as soon as the sun rose I rose too.  I
remember Adele clung to me as I left her: I remember I kissed her as I
loosened her little hands from my neck; and I cried over her with strange
emotion, and quitted her because I feared my sobs would break her still
sound repose.  She seemed the emblem of my past life; and here I was now
to array myself to meet, the dread, but adored, type of my unknown future
day.




CHAPTER XXVI


Sophie came at seven to dress me: she was very long indeed in
accomplishing her task; so long that Mr. Rochester, grown, I suppose,
impatient of my delay, sent up to ask why I did not come.  She was just
fastening my veil (the plain square of blond after all) to my hair with a
brooch; I hurried from under her hands as soon as I could.

"Stop!" she cried in French.  "Look at yourself in the mirror: you have
not taken one peep."

So I turned at the door: I saw a robed and veiled figure, so unlike my
usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger.  "Jane!" called
a voice, and I hastened down.  I was received at the foot of the stairs
by Mr. Rochester.

"Lingerer!" he said, "my brain is on fire with impatience, and you tarry
so long!"

He took me into the dining-room, surveyed me keenly all over, pronounced
me "fair as a lily, and not only the pride of his life, but the desire of
his eyes," and then telling me he would give me but ten minutes to eat
some breakfast, he rang the bell.  One of his lately hired servants, a
footman, answered it.

"Is John getting the carriage ready?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is the luggage brought down?"

"They are bringing it down, sir."

"Go you to the church: see if Mr. Wood (the clergyman) and the clerk are
there: return and tell me."

The church, as the reader knows, was but just beyond the gates; the
footman soon returned.

"Mr. Wood is in the vestry, sir, putting on his surplice."

"And the carriage?"

"The horses are harnessing."

"We shall not want it to go to church; but it must be ready the moment we
return: all the boxes and luggage arranged and strapped on, and the
coachman in his seat."

"Yes, sir."

"Jane, are you ready?"

I rose.  There were no groomsmen, no bridesmaids, no relatives to wait
for or marshal: none but Mr. Rochester and I.  Mrs. Fairfax stood in the
hall as we passed.   I would fain have spoken to her, but my hand was
held by a grasp of iron: I was hurried along by a stride I could hardly
follow; and to look at Mr. Rochester's face was to feel that not a second
of delay would be tolerated for any purpose.  I wonder what other
bridegroom ever looked as he did--so bent up to a purpose, so grimly
resolute: or who, under such steadfast brows, ever revealed such flaming
and flashing eyes.

I know not whether the day was fair or foul; in descending the drive, I
gazed neither on sky nor earth: my heart was with my eyes; and both
seemed migrated into Mr. Rochester's frame.  I wanted to see the
invisible thing on which, as we went along, he appeared to fasten a
glance fierce and fell.  I wanted to feel the thoughts whose force he
seemed breasting and resisting.

At the churchyard wicket he stopped: he discovered I was quite out of
breath.  "Am I cruel in my love?" he said.  "Delay an instant: lean on
me, Jane."

And now I can recall the picture of the grey old house of God rising calm
before me, of a rook wheeling round the steeple, of a ruddy morning sky
beyond.  I remember something, too, of the green grave-mounds; and I have
not forgotten, either, two figures of strangers straying amongst the low
hillocks and reading the mementoes graven on the few mossy head-stones.  I
noticed them, because, as they saw us, they passed round to the back of
the church; and I doubted not they were going to enter by the side-aisle
door and witness the ceremony.  By Mr. Rochester they were not observed;
he was earnestly looking at my face from which the blood had, I daresay,
momentarily fled: for I felt my forehead dewy, and my cheeks and lips
cold.  When I rallied, which I soon did, he walked gently with me up the
path to the porch.

We entered the quiet and humble temple; the priest waited in his white
surplice at the lowly altar, the clerk beside him.  All was still: two
shadows only moved in a remote corner.  My conjecture had been correct:
the strangers had slipped in before us, and they now stood by the vault
of the Rochesters, their backs towards us, viewing through the rails the
old time-stained marble tomb, where a kneeling angel guarded the remains
of Damer de Rochester, slain at Marston Moor in the time of the civil
wars, and of Elizabeth, his wife.

Our place was taken at the communion rails.  Hearing a cautious step
behind me, I glanced over my shoulder: one of the strangers--a gentleman,
evidently--was advancing up the chancel.  The service began.  The
explanation of the intent of matrimony was gone through; and then the
clergyman came a step further forward, and, bending slightly towards Mr.
Rochester, went on.

"I require and charge you both (as ye will answer at the dreadful day of
judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed), that if
either of you know any impediment why ye may not lawfully be joined
together in matrimony, ye do now confess it; for be ye well assured that
so many as are coupled together otherwise than God's Word doth allow, are
not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful."

He paused, as the custom is.  When is the pause after that sentence ever
broken by reply?  Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years.  And the
clergyman, who had not lifted his eyes from his book, and had held his
breath but for a moment, was proceeding: his hand was already stretched
towards Mr. Rochester, as his lips unclosed to ask, "Wilt thou have this
woman for thy wedded wife?"--when a distinct and near voice said--

"The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment."

The clergyman looked up at the speaker and stood mute; the clerk did the
same; Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under
his feet: taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head or eyes, he
said, "Proceed."

Profound silence fell when he had uttered that word, with deep but low
intonation.  Presently Mr. Wood said--

"I cannot proceed without some investigation into what has been asserted,
and evidence of its truth or falsehood."

"The ceremony is quite broken off," subjoined the voice behind us.  "I am
in a condition to prove my allegation: an insuperable impediment to this
marriage exists."

Mr. Rochester heard, but heeded not: he stood stubborn and rigid, making
no movement but to possess himself of my hand.  What a hot and strong
grasp he had! and how like quarried marble was his pale, firm, massive
front at this moment!  How his eye shone, still watchful, and yet wild
beneath!

Mr. Wood seemed at a loss.  "What is the nature of the impediment?" he
asked.  "Perhaps it may be got over--explained away?"

"Hardly," was the answer.  "I have called it insuperable, and I speak
advisedly."

The speaker came forward and leaned on the rails.  He continued, uttering
each word distinctly, calmly, steadily, but not loudly--

"It simply consists in the existence of a previous marriage.  Mr.
Rochester has a wife now living."

My nerves vibrated to those low-spoken words as they had never vibrated
to thunder--my blood felt their subtle violence as it had never felt
frost or fire; but I was collected, and in no danger of swooning.  I
looked at Mr. Rochester: I made him look at me.  His whole face was
colourless rock: his eye was both spark and flint.  He disavowed nothing:
he seemed as if he would defy all things.  Without speaking, without
smiling, without seeming to recognise in me a human being, he only twined
my waist with his arm and riveted me to his side.

"Who are you?" he asked of the intruder.

"My name is Briggs, a solicitor of --- Street, London."

"And you would thrust on me a wife?"

"I would remind you of your lady's existence, sir, which the law
recognises, if you do not."

"Favour me with an account of her--with her name, her parentage, her
place of abode."

"Certainly."  Mr. Briggs calmly took a paper from his pocket, and read
out in a sort of official, nasal voice:--

"'I affirm and can prove that on the 20th of October A.D. --- (a date of
fifteen years back), Edward Fairfax Rochester, of Thornfield Hall, in the
county of ---, and of Ferndean Manor, in ---shire, England, was married
to my sister, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, daughter of Jonas Mason, merchant,
and of Antoinetta his wife, a Creole, at --- church, Spanish Town,
Jamaica.  The record of the marriage will be found in the register of
that church--a copy of it is now in my possession.  Signed, Richard
Mason.'"

"That--if a genuine document--may prove I have been married, but it does
not prove that the woman mentioned therein as my wife is still living."

"She was living three months ago," returned the lawyer.

"How do you know?"

"I have a witness to the fact, whose testimony even you, sir, will
scarcely controvert."

"Produce him--or go to hell."

"I will produce him first--he is on the spot.  Mr. Mason, have the
goodness to step forward."

Mr. Rochester, on hearing the name, set his teeth; he experienced, too, a
sort of strong convulsive quiver; near to him as I was, I felt the
spasmodic movement of fury or despair run through his frame.  The second
stranger, who had hitherto lingered in the background, now drew near; a
pale face looked over the solicitor's shoulder--yes, it was Mason
himself.  Mr. Rochester turned and glared at him.  His eye, as I have
often said, was a black eye: it had now a tawny, nay, a bloody light in
its gloom; and his face flushed--olive cheek and hueless forehead
received a glow as from spreading, ascending heart-fire: and he stirred,
lifted his strong arm--he could have struck Mason, dashed him on the
church-floor, shocked by ruthless blow the breath from his body--but
Mason shrank away, and cried faintly, "Good God!"  Contempt fell cool on
Mr. Rochester--his passion died as if a blight had shrivelled it up: he
only asked--"What have _you_ to say?"

An inaudible reply escaped Mason's white lips.

"The devil is in it if you cannot answer distinctly.  I again demand,
what have you to say?"

"Sir--sir," interrupted the clergyman, "do not forget you are in a sacred
place."  Then addressing Mason, he inquired gently, "Are you aware, sir,
whether or not this gentleman's wife is still living?"

"Courage," urged the lawyer,--"speak out."

"She is now living at Thornfield Hall," said Mason, in more articulate
tones: "I saw her there last April.  I am her brother."

"At Thornfield Hall!" ejaculated the clergyman.  "Impossible!  I am an
old resident in this neighbourhood, sir, and I never heard of a Mrs.
Rochester at Thornfield Hall."

I saw a grim smile contort Mr. Rochester's lips, and he muttered--

"No, by God!  I took care that none should hear of it--or of her under
that name."  He mused--for ten minutes he held counsel with himself: he
formed his resolve, and announced it--

"Enough! all shall bolt out at once, like the bullet from the barrel.
Wood, close your book and take off your surplice; John Green (to the
clerk), leave the church: there will be no wedding to-day."  The man
obeyed.

Mr. Rochester continued, hardily and recklessly: "Bigamy is an ugly
word!--I meant, however, to be a bigamist; but fate has out-manoeuvred
me, or Providence has checked me,--perhaps the last.  I am little better
than a devil at this moment; and, as my pastor there would tell me,
deserve no doubt the sternest judgments of God, even to the quenchless
fire and deathless worm.  Gentlemen, my plan is broken up:--what this
lawyer and his client say is true: I have been married, and the woman to
whom I was married lives!  You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at
the house up yonder, Wood; but I daresay you have many a time inclined
your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch
and ward.  Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister:
some, my cast-off mistress.  I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I
married fifteen years ago,--Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute
personage, who is now, with his quivering limbs and white cheeks, showing
you what a stout heart men may bear.  Cheer up, Dick!--never fear me!--I'd
almost as soon strike a woman as you.  Bertha Mason is mad; and she came
of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations!  Her
mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!--as I found out
after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets
before.  Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points.
I had a charming partner--pure, wise, modest: you can fancy I was a happy
man.  I went through rich scenes!  Oh! my experience has been heavenly,
if you only knew it!  But I owe you no further explanation.  Briggs,
Wood, Mason, I invite you all to come up to the house and visit Mrs.
Poole's patient, and _my wife_!  You shall see what sort of a being I was
cheated into espousing, and judge whether or not I had a right to break
the compact, and seek sympathy with something at least human.  This
girl," he continued, looking at me, "knew no more than you, Wood, of the
disgusting secret: she thought all was fair and legal and never dreamt
she was going to be entrapped into a feigned union with a defrauded
wretch, already bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner!  Come all of
you--follow!"

Still holding me fast, he left the church: the three gentlemen came
after.  At the front door of the hall we found the carriage.

"Take it back to the coach-house, John," said Mr. Rochester coolly; "it
will not be wanted to-day."

At our entrance, Mrs. Fairfax, Adele, Sophie, Leah, advanced to meet and
greet us.

"To the right-about--every soul!" cried the master; "away with your
congratulations!  Who wants them?  Not I!--they are fifteen years too
late!"

He passed on and ascended the stairs, still holding my hand, and still
beckoning the gentlemen to follow him, which they did.  We mounted the
first staircase, passed up the gallery, proceeded to the third storey:
the low, black door, opened by Mr. Rochester's master-key, admitted us to
the tapestried room, with its great bed and its pictorial cabinet.

"You know this place, Mason," said our guide; "she bit and stabbed you
here."

He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door: this,
too, he opened.  In a room without a window, there burnt a fire guarded
by a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from the ceiling by a
chain.  Grace Poole bent over the fire, apparently cooking something in a
saucepan.  In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure
ran backwards and forwards.  What it was, whether beast or human being,
one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all
fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was
covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a
mane, hid its head and face.

"Good-morrow, Mrs. Poole!" said Mr. Rochester.  "How are you? and how is
your charge to-day?"

"We're tolerable, sir, I thank you," replied Grace, lifting the boiling
mess carefully on to the hob: "rather snappish, but not 'rageous."

A fierce cry seemed to give the lie to her favourable report: the clothed
hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind-feet.

"Ah! sir, she sees you!" exclaimed Grace: "you'd better not stay."

"Only a few moments, Grace: you must allow me a few moments."

"Take care then, sir!--for God's sake, take care!"

The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and
gazed wildly at her visitors.  I recognised well that purple face,--those
bloated features.  Mrs. Poole advanced.

"Keep out of the way," said Mr. Rochester, thrusting her aside: "she has
no knife now, I suppose, and I'm on my guard."

"One never knows what she has, sir: she is so cunning: it is not in
mortal discretion to fathom her craft."

"We had better leave her," whispered Mason.

"Go to the devil!" was his brother-in-law's recommendation.

"'Ware!" cried Grace.  The three gentlemen retreated simultaneously.  Mr.
Rochester flung me behind him: the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat
viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek: they struggled.  She was a
big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent
besides: she showed virile force in the contest--more than once she
almost throttled him, athletic as he was.  He could have settled her with
a well-planted blow; but he would not strike: he would only wrestle.  At
last he mastered her arms; Grace Poole gave him a cord, and he pinioned
them behind her: with more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a
chair.  The operation was performed amidst the fiercest yells and the
most convulsive plunges.  Mr. Rochester then turned to the spectators: he
looked at them with a smile both acrid and desolate.

"That is _my wife_," said he.  "Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am
ever to know--such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure
hours!  And _this_ is what I wished to have" (laying his hand on my
shoulder): "this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth
of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon, I wanted her just
as a change after that fierce ragout.  Wood and Briggs, look at the
difference!  Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder--this
face with that mask--this form with that bulk; then judge me, priest of
the gospel and man of the law, and remember with what judgment ye judge
ye shall be judged!  Off with you now.  I must shut up my prize."

We all withdrew.  Mr. Rochester stayed a moment behind us, to give some
further order to Grace Poole.  The solicitor addressed me as he descended
the stair.

"You, madam," said he, "are cleared from all blame: your uncle will be
glad to hear it--if, indeed, he should be still living--when Mr. Mason
returns to Madeira."

"My uncle!  What of him?  Do you know him?"

"Mr. Mason does.  Mr. Eyre has been the Funchal correspondent of his
house for some years.  When your uncle received your letter intimating
the contemplated union between yourself and Mr. Rochester, Mr. Mason, who
was staying at Madeira to recruit his health, on his way back to Jamaica,
happened to be with him.  Mr. Eyre mentioned the intelligence; for he
knew that my client here was acquainted with a gentleman of the name of
Rochester.  Mr. Mason, astonished and distressed as you may suppose,
revealed the real state of matters.  Your uncle, I am sorry to say, is
now on a sick bed; from which, considering the nature of his
disease--decline--and the stage it has reached, it is unlikely he will
ever rise.  He could not then hasten to England himself, to extricate you
from the snare into which you had fallen, but he implored Mr. Mason to
lose no time in taking steps to prevent the false marriage.  He referred
him to me for assistance.  I used all despatch, and am thankful I was not
too late: as you, doubtless, must be also.  Were I not morally certain
that your uncle will be dead ere you reach Madeira, I would advise you to
accompany Mr. Mason back; but as it is, I think you had better remain in
England till you can hear further, either from or of Mr. Eyre.  Have we
anything else to stay for?" he inquired of Mr. Mason.

"No, no--let us be gone," was the anxious reply; and without waiting to
take leave of Mr. Rochester, they made their exit at the hall door.  The
clergyman stayed to exchange a few sentences, either of admonition or
reproof, with his haughty parishioner; this duty done, he too departed.

I heard him go as I stood at the half-open door of my own room, to which
I had now withdrawn.  The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the
bolt that none might intrude, and proceeded--not to weep, not to mourn, I
was yet too calm for that, but--mechanically to take off the wedding
dress, and replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday, as I
thought, for the last time.  I then sat down: I felt weak and tired.  I
leaned my arms on a table, and my head dropped on them.  And now I
thought: till now I had only heard, seen, moved--followed up and down
where I was led or dragged--watched event rush on event, disclosure open
beyond disclosure: but _now_, _I thought_.

The morning had been a quiet morning enough--all except the brief scene
with the lunatic: the transaction in the church had not been noisy; there
was no explosion of passion, no loud altercation, no dispute, no defiance
or challenge, no tears, no sobs: a few words had been spoken, a calmly
pronounced objection to the marriage made; some stern, short questions
put by Mr. Rochester; answers, explanations given, evidence adduced; an
open admission of the truth had been uttered by my master; then the
living proof had been seen; the intruders were gone, and all was over.

I was in my own room as usual--just myself, without obvious change:
nothing had smitten me, or scathed me, or maimed me.  And yet where was
the Jane Eyre of yesterday?--where was her life?--where were her
prospects?

Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman--almost a bride, was a
cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were
desolate.  A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December
storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed
the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes
which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with
untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and
flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and
white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.  My hopes were all dead--struck
with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in
the land of Egypt.  I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so
blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could
never revive.  I looked at my love: that feeling which was my
master's--which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering
child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not
seek Mr. Rochester's arms--it could not derive warmth from his breast.
Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted--confidence
destroyed!  Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for he was not
what I had thought him.  I would not ascribe vice to him; I would not say
he had betrayed me; but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from
his idea, and from his presence I must go: _that_ I perceived well.
When--how--whither, I could not yet discern; but he himself, I doubted
not, would hurry me from Thornfield.  Real affection, it seemed, he could
not have for me; it had been only fitful passion: that was balked; he
would want me no more.  I should fear even to cross his path now: my view
must be hateful to him.  Oh, how blind had been my eyes!  How weak my
conduct!

My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round
me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow.  Self-abandoned,
relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up
bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and
felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.
I lay faint, longing to be dead.  One idea only still throbbed life-like
within me--a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered prayer: these
words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that
should be whispered, but no energy was found to express them--

"Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help."

It was near: and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it--as I
had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips--it
came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me.  The whole
consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith
death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass.  That
bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, "the waters came into my soul;
I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the
floods overflowed me."




CHAPTER XXVII


Some time in the afternoon I raised my head, and looking round and seeing
the western sun gilding the sign of its decline on the wall, I asked,
"What am I to do?"

But the answer my mind gave--"Leave Thornfield at once"--was so prompt,
so dread, that I stopped my ears.  I said I could not bear such words
now.  "That I am not Edward Rochester's bride is the least part of my
woe," I alleged: "that I have wakened out of most glorious dreams, and
found them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and master; but
that I must leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is intolerable.  I
cannot do it."

But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it and foretold that
I should do it.  I wrestled with my own resolution: I wanted to be weak
that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out
for me; and Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat, told
her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and
swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded
depths of agony.

"Let me be torn away," then I cried.  "Let another help me!"

"No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall
yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your
heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it."

I rose up suddenly, terror-struck at the solitude which so ruthless a
judge haunted,--at the silence which so awful a voice filled.  My head
swam as I stood erect.  I perceived that I was sickening from excitement
and inanition; neither meat nor drink had passed my lips that day, for I
had taken no breakfast.  And, with a strange pang, I now reflected that,
long as I had been shut up here, no message had been sent to ask how I
was, or to invite me to come down: not even little Adele had tapped at
the door; not even Mrs. Fairfax had sought me.  "Friends always forget
those whom fortune forsakes," I murmured, as I undrew the bolt and passed
out.  I stumbled over an obstacle: my head was still dizzy, my sight was
dim, and my limbs were feeble.  I could not soon recover myself.  I fell,
but not on to the ground: an outstretched arm caught me.  I looked up--I
was supported by Mr. Rochester, who sat in a chair across my chamber
threshold.

"You come out at last," he said.  "Well, I have been waiting for you
long, and listening: yet not one movement have I heard, nor one sob: five
minutes more of that death-like hush, and I should have forced the lock
like a burglar.  So you shun me?--you shut yourself up and grieve alone!
I would rather you had come and upbraided me with vehemence.  You are
passionate.  I expected a scene of some kind.  I was prepared for the hot
rain of tears; only I wanted them to be shed on my breast: now a
senseless floor has received them, or your drenched handkerchief.  But I
err: you have not wept at all!  I see a white cheek and a faded eye, but
no trace of tears.  I suppose, then, your heart has been weeping blood?"

"Well, Jane! not a word of reproach?  Nothing bitter--nothing poignant?
Nothing to cut a feeling or sting a passion?  You sit quietly where I
have placed you, and regard me with a weary, passive look."

"Jane, I never meant to wound you thus.  If the man who had but one
little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread
and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake
slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder
more than I now rue mine.  Will you ever forgive me?"

Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.  There was such deep
remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his
manner; and besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and
mien--I forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my
heart's core.

"You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?" ere long he inquired
wistfully--wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness,
the result rather of weakness than of will.

"Yes, sir."

"Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me."

"I cannot: I am tired and sick.  I want some water."  He heaved a sort of
shuddering sigh, and taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs.  At
first I did not know to what room he had borne me; all was cloudy to my
glazed sight: presently I felt the reviving warmth of a fire; for, summer
as it was, I had become icy cold in my chamber.  He put wine to my lips;
I tasted it and revived; then I ate something he offered me, and was soon
myself.  I was in the library--sitting in his chair--he was quite near.
"If I could go out of life now, without too sharp a pang, it would be
well for me," I thought; "then I should not have to make the effort of
cracking my heart-strings in rending them from among Mr. Rochester's.  I
must leave him, it appears.  I do not want to leave him--I cannot leave
him."

"How are you now, Jane?"

"Much better, sir; I shall be well soon."

"Taste the wine again, Jane."

I obeyed him; then he put the glass on the table, stood before me, and
looked at me attentively.  Suddenly he turned away, with an inarticulate
exclamation, full of passionate emotion of some kind; he walked fast
through the room and came back; he stooped towards me as if to kiss me;
but I remembered caresses were now forbidden.  I turned my face away and
put his aside.

"What!--How is this?" he exclaimed hastily.  "Oh, I know! you won't kiss
the husband of Bertha Mason?  You consider my arms filled and my embraces
appropriated?"

"At any rate, there is neither room nor claim for me, sir."

"Why, Jane?  I will spare you the trouble of much talking; I will answer
for you--Because I have a wife already, you would reply.--I guess
rightly?"

"Yes."

"If you think so, you must have a strange opinion of me; you must regard
me as a plotting profligate--a base and low rake who has been simulating
disinterested love in order to draw you into a snare deliberately laid,
and strip you of honour and rob you of self-respect.  What do you say to
that?  I see you can say nothing in the first place, you are faint still,
and have enough to do to draw your breath; in the second place, you
cannot yet accustom yourself to accuse and revile me, and besides, the
flood-gates of tears are opened, and they would rush out if you spoke
much; and you have no desire to expostulate, to upbraid, to make a scene:
you are thinking how _to act_--_talking_ you consider is of no use.  I
know you--I am on my guard."

"Sir, I do not wish to act against you," I said; and my unsteady voice
warned me to curtail my sentence.

"Not in your sense of the word, but in mine you are scheming to destroy
me.  You have as good as said that I am a married man--as a married man
you will shun me, keep out of my way: just now you have refused to kiss
me.  You intend to make yourself a complete stranger to me: to live under
this roof only as Adele's governess; if ever I say a friendly word to
you, if ever a friendly feeling inclines you again to me, you will
say,--'That man had nearly made me his mistress: I must be ice and rock
to him;' and ice and rock you will accordingly become."

I cleared and steadied my voice to reply: "All is changed about me, sir;
I must change too--there is no doubt of that; and to avoid fluctuations
of feeling, and continual combats with recollections and associations,
there is only one way--Adele must have a new governess, sir."

"Oh, Adele will go to school--I have settled that already; nor do I mean
to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of
Thornfield Hall--this accursed place--this tent of Achan--this insolent
vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open
sky--this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion
of such as we imagine.  Jane, you shall not stay here, nor will I.  I was
wrong ever to bring you to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was
haunted.  I charged them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all
knowledge of the curse of the place; merely because I feared Adele never
would have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was
housed, and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac
elsewhere--though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more
retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely
enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in
the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement.
Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge: but to
each villain his own vice; and mine is not a tendency to indirect
assassination, even of what I most hate.

"Concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was
something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near a
upas-tree: that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always was.  But I'll
shut up Thornfield Hall: I'll nail up the front door and board the lower
windows: I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to live here with _my
wife_, as you term that fearful hag: Grace will do much for money, and
she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her
company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms, when _my wife_
is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night, to
stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones, and so on--"

"Sir," I interrupted him, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady:
you speak of her with hate--with vindictive antipathy.  It is cruel--she
cannot help being mad."

"Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you don't
know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because
she is mad I hate her.  If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?"

"I do indeed, sir."

"Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about
the sort of love of which I am capable.  Every atom of your flesh is as
dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.  Your
mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure
still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait
waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you
flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you
in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive.  I should not
shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you
should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you
with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and
never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of
recognition for me.--But why do I follow that train of ideas?  I was
talking of removing you from Thornfield.  All, you know, is prepared for
prompt departure: to-morrow you shall go.  I only ask you to endure one
more night under this roof, Jane; and then, farewell to its miseries and
terrors for ever!  I have a place to repair to, which will be a secure
sanctuary from hateful reminiscences, from unwelcome intrusion--even from
falsehood and slander."

"And take Adele with you, sir," I interrupted; "she will be a companion
for you."

"What do you mean, Jane?  I told you I would send Adele to school; and
what do I want with a child for a companion, and not my own child,--a
French dancer's bastard?  Why do you importune me about her!  I say, why
do you assign Adele to me for a companion?"

"You spoke of a retirement, sir; and retirement and solitude are dull:
too dull for you."

"Solitude! solitude!" he reiterated with irritation.  "I see I must come
to an explanation.  I don't know what sphynx-like expression is forming
in your countenance.  You are to share my solitude.  Do you understand?"

I shook my head: it required a degree of courage, excited as he was
becoming, even to risk that mute sign of dissent.  He had been walking
fast about the room, and he stopped, as if suddenly rooted to one spot.
He looked at me long and hard: I turned my eyes from him, fixed them on
the fire, and tried to assume and maintain a quiet, collected aspect.

"Now for the hitch in Jane's character," he said at last, speaking more
calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak.  "The reel of silk
has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot
and a puzzle: here it is.  Now for vexation, and exasperation, and
endless trouble!  By God!  I long to exert a fraction of Samson's
strength, and break the entanglement like tow!"

He recommenced his walk, but soon again stopped, and this time just
before me.

"Jane! will you hear reason?" (he stooped and approached his lips to my
ear); "because, if you won't, I'll try violence."  His voice was hoarse;
his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond
and plunge headlong into wild license.  I saw that in another moment, and
with one impetus of frenzy more, I should be able to do nothing with him.
The present--the passing second of time--was all I had in which to
control and restrain him--a movement of repulsion, flight, fear would
have sealed my doom,--and his.  But I was not afraid: not in the least.  I
felt an inward power; a sense of influence, which supported me.  The
crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian,
perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe.  I took hold of
his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers, and said to him,
soothingly--

"Sit down; I'll talk to you as long as you like, and hear all you have to
say, whether reasonable or unreasonable."

He sat down: but he did not get leave to speak directly.  I had been
struggling with tears for some time: I had taken great pains to repress
them, because I knew he would not like to see me weep.  Now, however, I
considered it well to let them flow as freely and as long as they liked.
If the flood annoyed him, so much the better.  So I gave way and cried
heartily.

Soon I heard him earnestly entreating me to be composed.  I said I could
not while he was in such a passion.

"But I am not angry, Jane: I only love you too well; and you had steeled
your little pale face with such a resolute, frozen look, I could not
endure it.  Hush, now, and wipe your eyes."

His softened voice announced that he was subdued; so I, in my turn,
became calm.  Now he made an effort to rest his head on my shoulder, but
I would not permit it.  Then he would draw me to him: no.

"Jane! Jane!" he said, in such an accent of bitter sadness it thrilled
along every nerve I had; "you don't love me, then?  It was only my
station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued?  Now that you think me
disqualified to become your husband, you recoil from my touch as if I
were some toad or ape."

These words cut me: yet what could I do or I say?  I ought probably to
have done or said nothing; but I was so tortured by a sense of remorse at
thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish to drop balm
where I had wounded.

"I _do_ love you," I said, "more than ever: but I must not show or
indulge the feeling: and this is the last time I must express it."

"The last time, Jane!  What! do you think you can live with me, and see
me daily, and yet, if you still love me, be always cold and distant?"

"No, sir; that I am certain I could not; and therefore I see there is but
one way: but you will be furious if I mention it."

"Oh, mention it!  If I storm, you have the art of weeping."

"Mr. Rochester, I must leave you."

"For how long, Jane?  For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair--which
is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face--which looks feverish?"

"I must leave Adele and Thornfield.  I must part with you for my whole
life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange
scenes."

"Of course: I told you you should.  I pass over the madness about parting
from me.  You mean you must become a part of me.  As to the new
existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married.
You shall be Mrs. Rochester--both virtually and nominally.  I shall keep
only to you so long as you and I live.  You shall go to a place I have in
the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the
Mediterranean.  There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most
innocent life.  Never fear that I wish to lure you into error--to make
you my mistress.  Why did you shake your head?  Jane, you must be
reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic."

His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed:
still I dared to speak.

"Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by
yourself.  If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your
mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical--is false."

"Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man--you forget that: I am not long-
enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate.  Out of pity to me and
yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and--beware!"

He bared his wrist, and offered it to me: the blood was forsaking his
cheek and lips, they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands.
To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel: to
yield was out of the question.  I did what human beings do instinctively
when they are driven to utter extremity--looked for aid to one higher
than man: the words "God help me!" burst involuntarily from my lips.

"I am a fool!" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly.  "I keep telling her I am
not married, and do not explain to her why.  I forget she knows nothing
of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my
infernal union with her.  Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in
opinion, when she knows all that I know!  Just put your hand in mine,
Janet--that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove
you are near me--and I will in a few words show you the real state of the
case.  Can you listen to me?"

"Yes, sir; for hours if you will."

"I ask only minutes.  Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the
eldest son of my house: that I had once a brother older than I?"

"I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once."

"And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?"

"I have understood something to that effect."

"Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property
together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving
me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland.
Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man.  I
must be provided for by a wealthy marriage.  He sought me a partner
betimes.  Mr. Mason, a West India planter and merchant, was his old
acquaintance.  He was certain his possessions were real and vast: he made
inquiries.  Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he learned
from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of thirty
thousand pounds: that sufficed.  When I left college, I was sent out to
Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me.  My father said
nothing about her money; but he told me Miss Mason was the boast of
Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie.  I found her a fine
woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic.  Her
family wished to secure me because I was of a good race; and so did she.
They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed.  I seldom saw her
alone, and had very little private conversation with her.  She flattered
me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and
accomplishments.  All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy
me.  I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being
ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her.  There is no
folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience,
the rashness, the blindness of youth, will not hurry a man to its
commission.  Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she
allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was.  Oh,
I have no respect for myself when I think of that act!--an agony of
inward contempt masters me.  I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not
even know her.  I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her
nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor
refinement in her mind or manners--and, I married her:--gross,
grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was!  With less sin I might
have--But let me remember to whom I am speaking."

"My bride's mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead.  The
honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a
lunatic asylum.  There was a younger brother, too--a complete dumb idiot.
The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate, whilst I abhor
all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection in his feeble
mind, shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister,
and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me), will probably be in
the same state one day.  My father and my brother Rowland knew all this;
but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the
plot against me."

"These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of
concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife,
even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious
to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of
being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger--when I found
that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day
with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained
between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from
her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile--when I
perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because
no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and
unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory,
exacting orders--even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I
curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in
secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.

"Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details: some strong words
shall express what I have to say.  I lived with that woman upstairs four
years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her character
ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast
and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would
not use cruelty.  What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant
propensities!  How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on
me!  Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me
through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man
bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste.

"My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four years my
father died too.  I was rich enough now--yet poor to hideous indigence: a
nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with
mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me.  And I could not
rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered
that _my wife_ was mad--her excesses had prematurely developed the germs
of insanity.  Jane, you don't like my narrative; you look almost
sick--shall I defer the rest to another day?"

"No, sir, finish it now; I pity you--I do earnestly pity you."

"Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute,
which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer
it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is
a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant
contempt for those who have endured them.  But that is not your pity,
Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this
moment--with which your eyes are now almost overflowing--with which your
heart is heaving--with which your hand is trembling in mine.  Your pity,
my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very
natal pang of the divine passion.  I accept it, Jane; let the daughter
have free advent--my arms wait to receive her."

"Now, sir, proceed; what did you do when you found she was mad?"

"Jane, I approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was
all that intervened between me and the gulf.  In the eyes of the world, I
was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour; but I resolved to be clean in
my own sight--and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her
crimes, and wrenched myself from connection with her mental defects.
Still, society associated my name and person with hers; I yet saw her and
heard her daily: something of her breath (faugh!) mixed with the air I
breathed; and besides, I remembered I had once been her husband--that
recollection was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to me; moreover,
I knew that while she lived I could never be the husband of another and
better wife; and, though five years my senior (her family and her father
had lied to me even in the particular of her age), she was likely to live
as long as I, being as robust in frame as she was infirm in mind.  Thus,
at the age of twenty-six, I was hopeless.

"One night I had been awakened by her yells--(since the medical men had
pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up)--it was a fiery
West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the
hurricanes of those climates.  Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and
opened the window.  The air was like sulphur-steams--I could find no
refreshment anywhere.  Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly
round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull
like an earthquake--black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was
setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball--she threw
her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of
tempest.  I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my
ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein
she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such
language!--no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she:
though two rooms off, I heard every word--the thin partitions of the West
India house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.

"'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell: this is the air--those are the
sounds of the bottomless pit!  I have a right to deliver myself from it
if I can.  The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the
heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul.  Of the fanatic's burning eternity
I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present
one--let me break away, and go home to God!'

"I said this whilst I knelt down at, and unlocked a trunk which contained
a brace of loaded pistols: I mean to shoot myself.  I only entertained
the intention for a moment; for, not being insane, the crisis of
exquisite and unalloyed despair, which had originated the wish and design
of self-destruction, was past in a second.

"A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open
casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew
pure.  I then framed and fixed a resolution.  While I walked under the
dripping orange-trees of my wet garden, and amongst its drenched
pomegranates and pine-apples, and while the refulgent dawn of the tropics
kindled round me--I reasoned thus, Jane--and now listen; for it was true
Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path to
follow.

"The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves,
and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried up
and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living
blood--my being longed for renewal--my soul thirsted for a pure draught.
I saw hope revive--and felt regeneration possible.  From a flowery arch
at the bottom of my garden I gazed over the sea--bluer than the sky: the
old world was beyond; clear prospects opened thus:--

"'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe: there it is not known what a
sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is bound to you.  You may
take the maniac with you to England; confine her with due attendance and
precautions at Thornfield: then travel yourself to what clime you will,
and form what new tie you like.  That woman, who has so abused your long-
suffering, so sullied your name, so outraged your honour, so blighted
your youth, is not your wife, nor are you her husband.  See that she is
cared for as her condition demands, and you have done all that God and
humanity require of you.  Let her identity, her connection with yourself,
be buried in oblivion: you are bound to impart them to no living being.
Place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation with secrecy,
and leave her.'

"I acted precisely on this suggestion.  My father and brother had not
made my marriage known to their acquaintance; because, in the very first
letter I wrote to apprise them of the union--having already begun to
experience extreme disgust of its consequences, and, from the family
character and constitution, seeing a hideous future opening to me--I
added an urgent charge to keep it secret: and very soon the infamous
conduct of the wife my father had selected for me was such as to make him
blush to own her as his daughter-in-law.  Far from desiring to publish
the connection, he became as anxious to conceal it as myself.

"To England, then, I conveyed her; a fearful voyage I had with such a
monster in the vessel.  Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield,
and saw her safely lodged in that third-storey room, of whose secret
inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast's den--a
goblin's cell.  I had some trouble in finding an attendant for her, as it
was necessary to select one on whose fidelity dependence could be placed;
for her ravings would inevitably betray my secret: besides, she had lucid
intervals of days--sometimes weeks--which she filled up with abuse of me.
At last I hired Grace Poole from the Grimbsy Retreat.  She and the
surgeon, Carter (who dressed Mason's wounds that night he was stabbed and
worried), are the only two I have ever admitted to my confidence.  Mrs.
Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no
precise knowledge as to facts.  Grace has, on the whole, proved a good
keeper; though, owing partly to a fault of her own, of which it appears
nothing can cure her, and which is incident to her harassing profession,
her vigilance has been more than once lulled and baffled.  The lunatic is
both cunning and malignant; she has never failed to take advantage of her
guardian's temporary lapses; once to secrete the knife with which she
stabbed her brother, and twice to possess herself of the key of her cell,
and issue therefrom in the night-time.  On the first of these occasions,
she perpetrated the attempt to burn me in my bed; on the second, she paid
that ghastly visit to you.  I thank Providence, who watched over you,
that she then spent her fury on your wedding apparel, which perhaps
brought back vague reminiscences of her own bridal days: but on what
might have happened, I cannot endure to reflect.  When I think of the
thing which flew at my throat this morning, hanging its black and scarlet
visage over the nest of my dove, my blood curdles--"

"And what, sir," I asked, while he paused, "did you do when you had
settled her here?  Where did you go?"

"What did I do, Jane?  I transformed myself into a will-o'-the-wisp.
Where did I go?  I pursued wanderings as wild as those of the
March-spirit.  I sought the Continent, and went devious through all its
lands.  My fixed desire was to seek and find a good and intelligent
woman, whom I could love: a contrast to the fury I left at Thornfield--"

"But you could not marry, sir."

"I had determined and was convinced that I could and ought.  It was not
my original intention to deceive, as I have deceived you.  I meant to
tell my tale plainly, and make my proposals openly: and it appeared to me
so absolutely rational that I should be considered free to love and be
loved, I never doubted some woman might be found willing and able to
understand my case and accept me, in spite of the curse with which I was
burdened."

"Well, sir?"

"When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile.  You open your
eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement,
as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted
to read the tablet of one's heart.  But before I go on, tell me what you
mean by your 'Well, sir?'  It is a small phrase very frequent with you;
and which many a time has drawn me on and on through interminable talk: I
don't very well know why."

"I mean,--What next?  How did you proceed?  What came of such an event?"

"Precisely! and what do you wish to know now?"

"Whether you found any one you liked: whether you asked her to marry you;
and what she said."

"I can tell you whether I found any one I liked, and whether I asked her
to marry me: but what she said is yet to be recorded in the book of Fate.
For ten long years I roved about, living first in one capital, then
another: sometimes in St. Petersburg; oftener in Paris; occasionally in
Rome, Naples, and Florence.  Provided with plenty of money and the
passport of an old name, I could choose my own society: no circles were
closed against me.  I sought my ideal of a woman amongst English ladies,
French countesses, Italian signoras, and German grafinnen.  I could not
find her.  Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, I thought I caught a glance,
heard a tone, beheld a form, which announced the realisation of my dream:
but I was presently undeserved.  You are not to suppose that I desired
perfection, either of mind or person.  I longed only for what suited
me--for the antipodes of the Creole: and I longed vainly.  Amongst them
all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free, I--warned as I was of
the risks, the horrors, the loathings of incongruous unions--would have
asked to marry me.  Disappointment made me reckless.  I tried
dissipation--never debauchery: that I hated, and hate.  That was my
Indian Messalina's attribute: rooted disgust at it and her restrained me
much, even in pleasure.  Any enjoyment that bordered on riot seemed to
approach me to her and her vices, and I eschewed it.

"Yet I could not live alone; so I tried the companionship of mistresses.
The first I chose was Celine Varens--another of those steps which make a
man spurn himself when he recalls them.  You already know what she was,
and how my liaison with her terminated.  She had two successors: an
Italian, Giacinta, and a German, Clara; both considered singularly
handsome.  What was their beauty to me in a few weeks?  Giacinta was
unprincipled and violent: I tired of her in three months.  Clara was
honest and quiet; but heavy, mindless, and unimpressible: not one whit to
my taste.  I was glad to give her a sufficient sum to set her up in a
good line of business, and so get decently rid of her.  But, Jane, I see
by your face you are not forming a very favourable opinion of me just
now.  You think me an unfeeling, loose-principled rake: don't you?"

"I don't like you so well as I have done sometimes, indeed, sir.  Did it
not seem to you in the least wrong to live in that way, first with one
mistress and then another?  You talk of it as a mere matter of course."

"It was with me; and I did not like it.  It was a grovelling fashion of
existence: I should never like to return to it.  Hiring a mistress is the
next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always
by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is
degrading.  I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine,
Giacinta, and Clara."

I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain
inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching
that had ever been instilled into me, as--under any pretext--with any
justification--through any temptation--to become the successor of these
poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in
his mind desecrated their memory.  I did not give utterance to this
conviction: it was enough to feel it.  I impressed it on my heart, that
it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial.

"Now, Jane, why don't you say 'Well, sir?'  I have not done.  You are
looking grave.  You disapprove of me still, I see.  But let me come to
the point.  Last January, rid of all mistresses--in a harsh, bitter frame
of mind, the result of a useless, roving, lonely life--corroded with
disappointment, sourly disposed against all men, and especially against
all womankind (for I began to regard the notion of an intellectual,
faithful, loving woman as a mere dream), recalled by business, I came
back to England.

"On a frosty winter afternoon, I rode in sight of Thornfield Hall.
Abhorred spot!  I expected no peace--no pleasure there.  On a stile in
Hay Lane I saw a quiet little figure sitting by itself.  I passed it as
negligently as I did the pollard willow opposite to it: I had no
presentiment of what it would be to me; no inward warning that the
arbitress of my life--my genius for good or evil--waited there in humble
guise.  I did not know it, even when, on the occasion of Mesrour's
accident, it came up and gravely offered me help.  Childish and slender
creature!  It seemed as if a linnet had hopped to my foot and proposed to
bear me on its tiny wing.  I was surly; but the thing would not go: it
stood by me with strange perseverance, and looked and spoke with a sort
of authority.  I must be aided, and by that hand: and aided I was.

"When once I had pressed the frail shoulder, something new--a fresh sap
and sense--stole into my frame.  It was well I had learnt that this elf
must return to me--that it belonged to my house down below--or I could
not have felt it pass away from under my hand, and seen it vanish behind
the dim hedge, without singular regret.  I heard you come home that
night, Jane, though probably you were not aware that I thought of you or
watched for you.  The next day I observed you--myself unseen--for half-an-
hour, while you played with Adele in the gallery.  It was a snowy day, I
recollect, and you could not go out of doors.  I was in my room; the door
was ajar: I could both listen and watch.  Adele claimed your outward
attention for a while; yet I fancied your thoughts were elsewhere: but
you were very patient with her, my little Jane; you talked to her and
amused her a long time.  When at last she left you, you lapsed at once
into deep reverie: you betook yourself slowly to pace the gallery.  Now
and then, in passing a casement, you glanced out at the thick-falling
snow; you listened to the sobbing wind, and again you paced gently on and
dreamed.  I think those day visions were not dark: there was a
pleasurable illumination in your eye occasionally, a soft excitement in
your aspect, which told of no bitter, bilious, hypochondriac brooding:
your look revealed rather the sweet musings of youth when its spirit
follows on willing wings the flight of Hope up and on to an ideal heaven.
The voice of Mrs. Fairfax, speaking to a servant in the hall, wakened
you: and how curiously you smiled to and at yourself, Janet!  There was
much sense in your smile: it was very shrewd, and seemed to make light of
your own abstraction.  It seemed to say--'My fine visions are all very
well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal.  I have a rosy
sky and a green flowery Eden in my brain; but without, I am perfectly
aware, lies at my feet a rough tract to travel, and around me gather
black tempests to encounter.'  You ran downstairs and demanded of Mrs.
Fairfax some occupation: the weekly house accounts to make up, or
something of that sort, I think it was.  I was vexed with you for getting
out of my sight.

"Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you to my
presence.  An unusual--to me--a perfectly new character I suspected was
yours: I desired to search it deeper and know it better.  You entered the
room with a look and air at once shy and independent: you were quaintly
dressed--much as you are now.  I made you talk: ere long I found you full
of strange contrasts.  Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your
air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature,
but absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making
herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet
when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your
interlocutor's face: there was penetration and power in each glance you
gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers.
Very soon you seemed to get used to me: I believe you felt the existence
of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was
astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquillised your
manner: snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or
displeasure at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at
me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe.  I was at once
content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and
wished to see more.  Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and
sought your company rarely.  I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to
prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance:
besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I
handled the flower freely its bloom would fade--the sweet charm of
freshness would leave it.  I did not then know that it was no transitory
blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an
indestructible gem.  Moreover, I wished to see whether you would seek me
if I shunned you--but you did not; you kept in the schoolroom as still as
your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon,
and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect.
Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a thoughtful look; not
despondent, for you were not sickly; but not buoyant, for you had little
hope, and no actual pleasure.  I wondered what you thought of me, or if
you ever thought of me, and resolved to find this out.

"I resumed my notice of you.  There was something glad in your glance,
and genial in your manner, when you conversed: I saw you had a social
heart; it was the silent schoolroom--it was the tedium of your life--that
made you mournful.  I permitted myself the delight of being kind to you;
kindness stirred emotion soon: your face became soft in expression, your
tones gentle; I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful happy
accent.  I used to enjoy a chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time:
there was a curious hesitation in your manner: you glanced at me with a
slight trouble--a hovering doubt: you did not know what my caprice might
be--whether I was going to play the master and be stern, or the friend
and be benignant.  I was now too fond of you often to simulate the first
whim; and, when I stretched my hand out cordially, such bloom and light
and bliss rose to your young, wistful features, I had much ado often to
avoid straining you then and there to my heart."

"Don't talk any more of those days, sir," I interrupted, furtively
dashing away some tears from my eyes; his language was torture to me; for
I knew what I must do--and do soon--and all these reminiscences, and
these revelations of his feelings only made my work more difficult.

"No, Jane," he returned: "what necessity is there to dwell on the Past,
when the Present is so much surer--the Future so much brighter?"

I shuddered to hear the infatuated assertion.

"You see now how the case stands--do you not?" he continued.  "After a
youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary
solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have
found you.  You are my sympathy--my better self--my good angel.  I am
bound to you with a strong attachment.  I think you good, gifted, lovely:
a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you,
draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you,
and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.

"It was because I felt and knew this, that I resolved to marry you.  To
tell me that I had already a wife is empty mockery: you know now that I
had but a hideous demon.  I was wrong to attempt to deceive you; but I
feared a stubbornness that exists in your character.  I feared early
instilled prejudice: I wanted to have you safe before hazarding
confidences.  This was cowardly: I should have appealed to your nobleness
and magnanimity at first, as I do now--opened to you plainly my life of
agony--described to you my hunger and thirst after a higher and worthier
existence--shown to you, not my _resolution_ (that word is weak), but my
resistless _bent_ to love faithfully and well, where I am faithfully and
well loved in return.  Then I should have asked you to accept my pledge
of fidelity and to give me yours.  Jane--give it me now."

A pause.

"Why are you silent, Jane?"

I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals.
Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning!  Not a human being
that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him
who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and
idol.  One drear word comprised my intolerable duty--"Depart!"

"Jane, you understand what I want of you?  Just this promise--'I will be
yours, Mr. Rochester.'"

"Mr. Rochester, I will _not_ be yours."

Another long silence.

"Jane!" recommenced he, with a gentleness that broke me down with grief,
and turned me stone-cold with ominous terror--for this still voice was
the pant of a lion rising--"Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world,
and to let me go another?"

"I do."

"Jane" (bending towards and embracing me), "do you mean it now?"

"I do."

"And now?" softly kissing my forehead and cheek.

"I do," extricating myself from restraint rapidly and completely.

"Oh, Jane, this is bitter!  This--this is wicked.  It would not be wicked
to love me."

"It would to obey you."

A wild look raised his brows--crossed his features: he rose; but he
forebore yet.  I laid my hand on the back of a chair for support: I
shook, I feared--but I resolved.

"One instant, Jane.  Give one glance to my horrible life when you are
gone.  All happiness will be torn away with you.  What then is left?  For
a wife I have but the maniac upstairs: as well might you refer me to some
corpse in yonder churchyard.  What shall I do, Jane?  Where turn for a
companion and for some hope?"

"Do as I do: trust in God and yourself.  Believe in heaven.  Hope to meet
again there."

"Then you will not yield?"

"No."

"Then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed?"  His voice
rose.

"I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil."

"Then you snatch love and innocence from me?  You fling me back on lust
for a passion--vice for an occupation?"

"Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it for
myself.  We were born to strive and endure--you as well as I: do so.  You
will forget me before I forget you."

"You make me a liar by such language: you sully my honour.  I declared I
could not change: you tell me to my face I shall change soon.  And what a
distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved
by your conduct!  Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than
to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? for
you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend
by living with me?"

This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned
traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him.  They
spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly.  "Oh,
comply!" it said.  "Think of his misery; think of his danger--look at his
state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the
recklessness following on despair--soothe him; save him; love him; tell
him you love him and will be his.  Who in the world cares for _you_? or
who will be injured by what you do?"

Still indomitable was the reply--"_I_ care for myself.  The more
solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will
respect myself.  I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.  I
will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not
mad--as I am now.  Laws and principles are not for the times when there
is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul
rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they
shall be.  If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would
be their worth?  They have a worth--so I have always believed; and if I
cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane--quite insane: with my
veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its
throbs.  Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have
at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot."

I did.  Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so.  His
fury was wrought to the highest: he must yield to it for a moment,
whatever followed; he crossed the floor and seized my arm and grasped my
waist.  He seemed to devour me with his flaming glance: physically, I
felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow
of a furnace: mentally, I still possessed my soul, and with it the
certainty of ultimate safety.  The soul, fortunately, has an
interpreter--often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter--in
the eye.  My eye rose to his; and while I looked in his fierce face I
gave an involuntary sigh; his gripe was painful, and my over-taxed
strength almost exhausted.

"Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once so
frail and so indomitable.  A mere reed she feels in my hand!"  (And he
shook me with the force of his hold.)  "I could bend her with my finger
and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed
her?  Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking
out of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph.
Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful
creature!  If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only
let the captive loose.  Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate
would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay
dwelling-place.  And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue
and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame.  Of yourself you
could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would:
seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence--you
will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance.  Oh! come, Jane, come!"

As he said this, he released me from his clutch, and only looked at me.
The look was far worse to resist than the frantic strain: only an idiot,
however, would have succumbed now.  I had dared and baffled his fury; I
must elude his sorrow: I retired to the door.

"You are going, Jane?"

"I am going, sir."

"You are leaving me?"

"Yes."

"You will not come?  You will not be my comforter, my rescuer?  My deep
love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?"

What unutterable pathos was in his voice!  How hard it was to reiterate
firmly, "I am going."

"Jane!"

"Mr. Rochester!"

"Withdraw, then,--I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish.
Go up to your own room; think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a
glance on my sufferings--think of me."

He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa.  "Oh, Jane! my
hope--my love--my life!" broke in anguish from his lips.  Then came a
deep, strong sob.

I had already gained the door; but, reader, I walked back--walked back as
determinedly as I had retreated.  I knelt down by him; I turned his face
from the cushion to me; I kissed his cheek; I smoothed his hair with my
hand.

"God bless you, my dear master!" I said.  "God keep you from harm and
wrong--direct you, solace you--reward you well for your past kindness to
me."

"Little Jane's love would have been my best reward," he answered;
"without it, my heart is broken.  But Jane will give me her love:
yes--nobly, generously."

Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes;
erect he sprang; he held his arms out; but I evaded the embrace, and at
once quitted the room.

"Farewell!" was the cry of my heart as I left him.  Despair added,
"Farewell for ever!"

* * * * *

That night I never thought to sleep; but a slumber fell on me as soon as
I lay down in bed.  I was transported in thought to the scenes of
childhood: I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night
was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears.  The light that long
ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly
to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscured
ceiling.  I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to clouds, high
and dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about
to sever.  I watched her come--watched with the strangest anticipation;
as though some word of doom were to be written on her disk.  She broke
forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the
sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form
shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward.  It gazed and
gazed on me.  It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone,
yet so near, it whispered in my heart--

"My daughter, flee temptation."

"Mother, I will."

So I answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream.  It was yet
night, but July nights are short: soon after midnight, dawn comes.  "It
cannot be too early to commence the task I have to fulfil," thought I.  I
rose: I was dressed; for I had taken off nothing but my shoes.  I knew
where to find in my drawers some linen, a locket, a ring.  In seeking
these articles, I encountered the beads of a pearl necklace Mr. Rochester
had forced me to accept a few days ago.  I left that; it was not mine: it
was the visionary bride's who had melted in air.  The other articles I
made up in a parcel; my purse, containing twenty shillings (it was all I
had), I put in my pocket: I tied on my straw bonnet, pinned my shawl,
took the parcel and my slippers, which I would not put on yet, and stole
from my room.

"Farewell, kind Mrs. Fairfax!" I whispered, as I glided past her door.
"Farewell, my darling Adele!" I said, as I glanced towards the nursery.
No thought could be admitted of entering to embrace her.  I had to
deceive a fine ear: for aught I knew it might now be listening.

I would have got past Mr. Rochester's chamber without a pause; but my
heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot was forced
to stop also.  No sleep was there: the inmate was walking restlessly from
wall to wall; and again and again he sighed while I listened.  There was
a heaven--a temporary heaven--in this room for me, if I chose: I had but
to go in and to say--

"Mr. Rochester, I will love you and live with you through life till
death," and a fount of rapture would spring to my lips.  I thought of
this.

That kind master, who could not sleep now, was waiting with impatience
for day.  He would send for me in the morning; I should be gone.  He
would have me sought for: vainly.  He would feel himself forsaken; his
love rejected: he would suffer; perhaps grow desperate.  I thought of
this too.  My hand moved towards the lock: I caught it back, and glided
on.

Drearily I wound my way downstairs: I knew what I had to do, and I did it
mechanically.  I sought the key of the side-door in the kitchen; I
sought, too, a phial of oil and a feather; I oiled the key and the lock.
I got some water, I got some bread: for perhaps I should have to walk
far; and my strength, sorely shaken of late, must not break down.  All
this I did without one sound.  I opened the door, passed out, shut it
softly.  Dim dawn glimmered in the yard.  The great gates were closed and
locked; but a wicket in one of them was only latched.  Through that I
departed: it, too, I shut; and now I was out of Thornfield.

A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the contrary
direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often noticed,
and wondered where it led: thither I bent my steps.  No reflection was to
be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward.
Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future.  The
first was a page so heavenly sweet--so deadly sad--that to read one line
of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy.  The last was
an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.

I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise.  I believe it
was a lovely summer morning: I know my shoes, which I had put on when I
left the house, were soon wet with dew.  But I looked neither to rising
sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature.  He who is taken out to pass
through a fair scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers that
smile on his road, but of the block and axe-edge; of the disseverment of
bone and vein; of the grave gaping at the end: and I thought of drear
flight and homeless wandering--and oh! with agony I thought of what I
left.  I could not help it.  I thought of him now--in his room--watching
the sunrise; hoping I should soon come to say I would stay with him and
be his.  I longed to be his; I panted to return: it was not too late; I
could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement.  As yet my flight, I
was sure, was undiscovered.  I could go back and be his comforter--his
pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin.  Oh, that fear of his
self-abandonment--far worse than my abandonment--how it goaded me!  It
was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract
it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in.  Birds began
singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds
were emblems of love.  What was I?  In the midst of my pain of heart and
frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself.  I had no solace from
self-approbation: none even from self-respect.  I had
injured--wounded--left my master.  I was hateful in my own eyes.  Still I
could not turn, nor retrace one step.  God must have led me on.  As to my
own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled
the other.  I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way: fast,
fast I went like one delirious.  A weakness, beginning inwardly,
extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some
minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf.  I had some fear--or hope--that
here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and
knees, and then again raised to my feet--as eager and as determined as
ever to reach the road.

When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge; and
while I sat, I heard wheels, and saw a coach come on.  I stood up and
lifted my hand; it stopped.  I asked where it was going: the driver named
a place a long way off, and where I was sure Mr. Rochester had no
connections.  I asked for what sum he would take me there; he said thirty
shillings; I answered I had but twenty; well, he would try to make it do.
He further gave me leave to get into the inside, as the vehicle was
empty: I entered, was shut in, and it rolled on its way.

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!  May your eyes never
shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine.  May
you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in
that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the
instrument of evil to what you wholly love.




CHAPTER XXVIII


Two days are passed.  It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me
down at a place called Whitcross; he could take me no farther for the sum
I had given, and I was not possessed of another shilling in the world.
The coach is a mile off by this time; I am alone.  At this moment I
discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the coach,
where I had placed it for safety; there it remains, there it must remain;
and now, I am absolutely destitute.

Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up
where four roads meet: whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a
distance and in darkness.  Four arms spring from its summit: the nearest
town to which these point is, according to the inscription, distant ten
miles; the farthest, above twenty.  From the well-known names of these
towns I learn in what county I have lighted; a north-midland shire, dusk
with moorland, ridged with mountain: this I see.  There are great moors
behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond
that deep valley at my feet.  The population here must be thin, and I see
no passengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north, and
south--white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the
heather grows deep and wild to their very verge.  Yet a chance traveller
might pass by; and I wish no eye to see me now: strangers would wonder
what I am doing, lingering here at the sign-post, evidently objectless
and lost.  I might be questioned: I could give no answer but what would
sound incredible and excite suspicion.  Not a tie holds me to human
society at this moment--not a charm or hope calls me where my
fellow-creatures are--none that saw me would have a kind thought or a
good wish for me.  I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I
will seek her breast and ask repose.

I struck straight into the heath; I held on to a hollow I saw deeply
furrowing the brown moorside; I waded knee-deep in its dark growth; I
turned with its turnings, and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a
hidden angle, I sat down under it.  High banks of moor were about me; the
crag protected my head: the sky was over that.

Some time passed before I felt tranquil even here: I had a vague dread
that wild cattle might be near, or that some sportsman or poacher might
discover me.  If a gust of wind swept the waste, I looked up, fearing it
was the rush of a bull; if a plover whistled, I imagined it a man.
Finding my apprehensions unfounded, however, and calmed by the deep
silence that reigned as evening declined at nightfall, I took confidence.
As yet I had not thought; I had only listened, watched, dreaded; now I
regained the faculty of reflection.

What was I to do?  Where to go?  Oh, intolerable questions, when I could
do nothing and go nowhere!--when a long way must yet be measured by my
weary, trembling limbs before I could reach human habitation--when cold
charity must be entreated before I could get a lodging: reluctant
sympathy importuned, almost certain repulse incurred, before my tale
could be listened to, or one of my wants relieved!

I touched the heath: it was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer
day.  I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above
the chasm ridge.  The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze
whispered.  Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me,
outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust,
rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness.  To-night, at
least, I would be her guest, as I was her child: my mother would lodge me
without money and without price.  I had one morsel of bread yet: the
remnant of a roll I had bought in a town we passed through at noon with a
stray penny--my last coin.  I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and
there, like jet beads in the heath: I gathered a handful and ate them
with the bread.  My hunger, sharp before, was, if not satisfied, appeased
by this hermit's meal.  I said my evening prayers at its conclusion, and
then chose my couch.

{I said my evening prayers: p311.jpg}

Beside the crag the heath was very deep: when I lay down my feet were
buried in it; rising high on each side, it left only a narrow space for
the night-air to invade.  I folded my shawl double, and spread it over me
for a coverlet; a low, mossy swell was my pillow.  Thus lodged, I was
not, at least--at the commencement of the night, cold.

My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it.  It
plained of its gaping wounds, its inward bleeding, its riven chords.  It
trembled for Mr. Rochester and his doom; it bemoaned him with bitter
pity; it demanded him with ceaseless longing; and, impotent as a bird
with both wings broken, it still quivered its shattered pinions in vain
attempts to seek him.

Worn out with this torture of thought, I rose to my knees.  Night was
come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the
companionship of fear.  We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we
feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread
before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel
their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His
omnipotence, His omnipresence.  I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr.
Rochester.  Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky-
way.  Remembering what it was--what countless systems there swept space
like a soft trace of light--I felt the might and strength of God.  Sure
was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that
neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured.  I turned
my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of
spirits.  Mr. Rochester was safe; he was God's, and by God would he be
guarded.  I again nestled to the breast of the hill; and ere long in
sleep forgot sorrow.

But next day, Want came to me pale and bare.  Long after the little birds
had left their nests; long after bees had come in the sweet prime of day
to gather the heath honey before the dew was dried--when the long morning
shadows were curtailed, and the sun filled earth and sky--I got up, and I
looked round me.

What a still, hot, perfect day!  What a golden desert this spreading
moor!  Everywhere sunshine.  I wished I could live in it and on it.  I
saw a lizard run over the crag; I saw a bee busy among the sweet
bilberries.  I would fain at the moment have become bee or lizard, that I
might have found fitting nutriment, permanent shelter here.  But I was a
human being, and had a human being's wants: I must not linger where there
was nothing to supply them.  I rose; I looked back at the bed I had left.
Hopeless of the future, I wished but this--that my Maker had that night
thought good to require my soul of me while I slept; and that this weary
frame, absolved by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to
decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness.
Life, however, was yet in my possession, with all its requirements, and
pains, and responsibilities.  The burden must be carried; the want
provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled.  I set
out.

Whitcross regained, I followed a road which led from the sun, now fervent
and high.  By no other circumstance had I will to decide my choice.  I
walked a long time, and when I thought I had nearly done enough, and
might conscientiously yield to the fatigue that almost overpowered
me--might relax this forced action, and, sitting down on a stone I saw
near, submit resistlessly to the apathy that clogged heart and limb--I
heard a bell chime--a church bell.

I turned in the direction of the sound, and there, amongst the romantic
hills, whose changes and aspect I had ceased to note an hour ago, I saw a
hamlet and a spire.  All the valley at my right hand was full of pasture-
fields, and cornfields, and wood; and a glittering stream ran zig-zag
through the varied shades of green, the mellowing grain, the sombre
woodland, the clear and sunny lea.  Recalled by the rumbling of wheels to
the road before me, I saw a heavily-laden waggon labouring up the hill,
and not far beyond were two cows and their drover.  Human life and human
labour were near.  I must struggle on: strive to live and bend to toil
like the rest.

About two o'clock p.m. I entered the village.  At the bottom of its one
street there was a little shop with some cakes of bread in the window.  I
coveted a cake of bread.  With that refreshment I could perhaps regain a
degree of energy: without it, it would be difficult to proceed.  The wish
to have some strength and some vigour returned to me as soon as I was
amongst my fellow-beings.  I felt it would be degrading to faint with
hunger on the causeway of a hamlet.  Had I nothing about me I could offer
in exchange for one of these rolls?  I considered.  I had a small silk
handkerchief tied round my throat; I had my gloves.  I could hardly tell
how men and women in extremities of destitution proceeded.  I did not
know whether either of these articles would be accepted: probably they
would not; but I must try.

I entered the shop: a woman was there.  Seeing a respectably-dressed
person, a lady as she supposed, she came forward with civility.  How
could she serve me?  I was seized with shame: my tongue would not utter
the request I had prepared.  I dared not offer her the half-worn gloves,
the creased handkerchief: besides, I felt it would be absurd.  I only
begged permission to sit down a moment, as I was tired.  Disappointed in
the expectation of a customer, she coolly acceded to my request.  She
pointed to a seat; I sank into it.  I felt sorely urged to weep; but
conscious how unseasonable such a manifestation would be, I restrained
it.  Soon I asked her "if there were any dressmaker or plain-workwoman in
the village?"

"Yes; two or three.  Quite as many as there was employment for."

I reflected.  I was driven to the point now.  I was brought face to face
with Necessity.  I stood in the position of one without a resource,
without a friend, without a coin.  I must do something.  What?  I must
apply somewhere.  Where?

"Did she know of any place in the neighbourhood where a servant was
wanted?"

"Nay; she couldn't say."

"What was the chief trade in this place?  What did most of the people
do?"

"Some were farm labourers; a good deal worked at Mr. Oliver's
needle-factory, and at the foundry."

"Did Mr. Oliver employ women?"

"Nay; it was men's work."

"And what do the women do?"

"I knawn't," was the answer.  "Some does one thing, and some another.
Poor folk mun get on as they can."

She seemed to be tired of my questions: and, indeed, what claim had I to
importune her?  A neighbour or two came in; my chair was evidently
wanted.  I took leave.

I passed up the street, looking as I went at all the houses to the right
hand and to the left; but I could discover no pretext, nor see an
inducement to enter any.  I rambled round the hamlet, going sometimes to
a little distance and returning again, for an hour or more.  Much
exhausted, and suffering greatly now for want of food, I turned aside
into a lane and sat down under the hedge.  Ere many minutes had elapsed,
I was again on my feet, however, and again searching something--a
resource, or at least an informant.  A pretty little house stood at the
top of the lane, with a garden before it, exquisitely neat and
brilliantly blooming.  I stopped at it.  What business had I to approach
the white door or touch the glittering knocker?  In what way could it
possibly be the interest of the inhabitants of that dwelling to serve me?
Yet I drew near and knocked.  A mild-looking, cleanly-attired young woman
opened the door.  In such a voice as might be expected from a hopeless
heart and fainting frame--a voice wretchedly low and faltering--I asked
if a servant was wanted here?

"No," said she; "we do not keep a servant."

"Can you tell me where I could get employment of any kind?" I continued.
"I am a stranger, without acquaintance in this place.  I want some work:
no matter what."

But it was not her business to think for me, or to seek a place for me:
besides, in her eyes, how doubtful must have appeared my character,
position, tale.  She shook her head, she "was sorry she could give me no
information," and the white door closed, quite gently and civilly: but it
shut me out.  If she had held it open a little longer, I believe I should
have begged a piece of bread; for I was now brought low.

I could not bear to return to the sordid village, where, besides, no
prospect of aid was visible.  I should have longed rather to deviate to a
wood I saw not far off, which appeared in its thick shade to offer
inviting shelter; but I was so sick, so weak, so gnawed with nature's
cravings, instinct kept me roaming round abodes where there was a chance
of food.  Solitude would be no solitude--rest no rest--while the vulture,
hunger, thus sank beak and talons in my side.

I drew near houses; I left them, and came back again, and again I
wandered away: always repelled by the consciousness of having no claim to
ask--no right to expect interest in my isolated lot.  Meantime, the
afternoon advanced, while I thus wandered about like a lost and starving
dog.  In crossing a field, I saw the church spire before me: I hastened
towards it.  Near the churchyard, and in the middle of a garden, stood a
well-built though small house, which I had no doubt was the parsonage.  I
remembered that strangers who arrive at a place where they have no
friends, and who want employment, sometimes apply to the clergyman for
introduction and aid.  It is the clergyman's function to help--at least
with advice--those who wished to help themselves.  I seemed to have
something like a right to seek counsel here.  Renewing then my courage,
and gathering my feeble remains of strength, I pushed on.  I reached the
house, and knocked at the kitchen-door.  An old woman opened: I asked was
this the parsonage?

"Yes."

"Was the clergyman in?"

"No."

"Would he be in soon?"

"No, he was gone from home."

"To a distance?"

"Not so far--happen three mile.  He had been called away by the sudden
death of his father: he was at Marsh End now, and would very likely stay
there a fortnight longer."

"Was there any lady of the house?"

"Nay, there was naught but her, and she was housekeeper;" and of her,
reader, I could not bear to ask the relief for want of which I was
sinking; I could not yet beg; and again I crawled away.

Once more I took off my handkerchief--once more I thought of the cakes of
bread in the little shop.  Oh, for but a crust! for but one mouthful to
allay the pang of famine!  Instinctively I turned my face again to the
village; I found the shop again, and I went in; and though others were
there besides the woman I ventured the request--"Would she give me a roll
for this handkerchief?"

She looked at me with evident suspicion: "Nay, she never sold stuff i'
that way."

Almost desperate, I asked for half a cake; she again refused.  "How could
she tell where I had got the handkerchief?" she said.

"Would she take my gloves?"

"No! what could she do with them?"

Reader, it is not pleasant to dwell on these details.  Some say there is
enjoyment in looking back to painful experience past; but at this day I
can scarcely bear to review the times to which I allude: the moral
degradation, blent with the physical suffering, form too distressing a
recollection ever to be willingly dwelt on.  I blamed none of those who
repulsed me.  I felt it was what was to be expected, and what could not
be helped: an ordinary beggar is frequently an object of suspicion; a
well-dressed beggar inevitably so.  To be sure, what I begged was
employment; but whose business was it to provide me with employment?  Not,
certainly, that of persons who saw me then for the first time, and who
knew nothing about my character.  And as to the woman who would not take
my handkerchief in exchange for her bread, why, she was right, if the
offer appeared to her sinister or the exchange unprofitable.  Let me
condense now.  I am sick of the subject.

A little before dark I passed a farm-house, at the open door of which the
farmer was sitting, eating his supper of bread and cheese.  I stopped and
said--

"Will you give me a piece of bread? for I am very hungry."  He cast on me
a glance of surprise; but without answering, he cut a thick slice from
his loaf, and gave it to me.  I imagine he did not think I was a beggar,
but only an eccentric sort of lady, who had taken a fancy to his brown
loaf.  As soon as I was out of sight of his house, I sat down and ate it.

I could not hope to get a lodging under a roof, and sought it in the wood
I have before alluded to.  But my night was wretched, my rest broken: the
ground was damp, the air cold: besides, intruders passed near me more
than once, and I had again and again to change my quarters; no sense of
safety or tranquillity befriended me.  Towards morning it rained; the
whole of the following day was wet.  Do not ask me, reader, to give a
minute account of that day; as before, I sought work; as before, I was
repulsed; as before, I starved; but once did food pass my lips.  At the
door of a cottage I saw a little girl about to throw a mess of cold
porridge into a pig trough.  "Will you give me that?" I asked.

{"Will you give me that?"  I asked: p316.jpg}

She stared at me.  "Mother!" she exclaimed, "there is a woman wants me to
give her these porridge."

"Well lass," replied a voice within, "give it her if she's a beggar.  T'
pig doesn't want it."

The girl emptied the stiffened mould into my hand, and I devoured it
ravenously.

As the wet twilight deepened, I stopped in a solitary bridle-path, which
I had been pursuing an hour or more.

"My strength is quite failing me," I said in a soliloquy.  "I feel I
cannot go much farther.  Shall I be an outcast again this night?  While
the rain descends so, must I lay my head on the cold, drenched ground?  I
fear I cannot do otherwise: for who will receive me?  But it will be very
dreadful, with this feeling of hunger, faintness, chill, and this sense
of desolation--this total prostration of hope.  In all likelihood,
though, I should die before morning.  And why cannot I reconcile myself
to the prospect of death?  Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life?
Because I know, or believe, Mr. Rochester is living: and then, to die of
want and cold is a fate to which nature cannot submit passively.  Oh,
Providence! sustain me a little longer!  Aid!--direct me!"

My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape.  I saw I had
strayed far from the village: it was quite out of sight.  The very
cultivation surrounding it had disappeared.  I had, by cross-ways and by-
paths, once more drawn near the tract of moorland; and now, only a few
fields, almost as wild and unproductive as the heath from which they were
scarcely reclaimed, lay between me and the dusky hill.

"Well, I would rather die yonder than in a street or on a frequented
road," I reflected.  "And far better that crows and ravens--if any ravens
there be in these regions--should pick my flesh from my bones, than that
they should be prisoned in a workhouse coffin and moulder in a pauper's
grave."

To the hill, then, I turned.  I reached it.  It remained now only to find
a hollow where I could lie down, and feel at least hidden, if not secure.
But all the surface of the waste looked level.  It showed no variation
but of tint: green, where rush and moss overgrew the marshes; black,
where the dry soil bore only heath.  Dark as it was getting, I could
still see these changes, though but as mere alternations of light and
shade; for colour had faded with the daylight.

My eye still roved over the sullen swell and along the moor-edge,
vanishing amidst the wildest scenery, when at one dim point, far in among
the marshes and the ridges, a light sprang up.  "That is an _ignis
fatuus_," was my first thought; and I expected it would soon vanish.  It
burnt on, however, quite steadily, neither receding nor advancing.  "Is
it, then, a bonfire just kindled?" I questioned.  I watched to see
whether it would spread: but no; as it did not diminish, so it did not
enlarge.  "It may be a candle in a house," I then conjectured; "but if
so, I can never reach it.  It is much too far away: and were it within a
yard of me, what would it avail?  I should but knock at the door to have
it shut in my face."

And I sank down where I stood, and hid my face against the ground.  I lay
still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died
moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the
skin.  Could I but have stiffened to the still frost--the friendly
numbness of death--it might have pelted on; I should not have felt it;
but my yet living flesh shuddered at its chilling influence.  I rose ere
long.

The light was yet there, shining dim but constant through the rain.  I
tried to walk again: I dragged my exhausted limbs slowly towards it.  It
led me aslant over the hill, through a wide bog, which would have been
impassable in winter, and was splashy and shaking even now, in the height
of summer.  Here I fell twice; but as often I rose and rallied my
faculties.  This light was my forlorn hope: I must gain it.

Having crossed the marsh, I saw a trace of white over the moor.  I
approached it; it was a road or a track: it led straight up to the light,
which now beamed from a sort of knoll, amidst a clump of trees--firs,
apparently, from what I could distinguish of the character of their forms
and foliage through the gloom.  My star vanished as I drew near: some
obstacle had intervened between me and it.  I put out my hand to feel the
dark mass before me: I discriminated the rough stones of a low wall--above
it, something like palisades, and within, a high and prickly hedge.  I
groped on.  Again a whitish object gleamed before me: it was a gate--a
wicket; it moved on its hinges as I touched it.  On each side stood a
sable bush-holly or yew.

Entering the gate and passing the shrubs, the silhouette of a house rose
to view, black, low, and rather long; but the guiding light shone
nowhere.  All was obscurity.  Were the inmates retired to rest?  I feared
it must be so.  In seeking the door, I turned an angle: there shot out
the friendly gleam again, from the lozenged panes of a very small
latticed window, within a foot of the ground, made still smaller by the
growth of ivy or some other creeping plant, whose leaves clustered thick
over the portion of the house wall in which it was set.  The aperture was
so screened and narrow, that curtain or shutter had been deemed
unnecessary; and when I stooped down and put aside the spray of foliage
shooting over it, I could see all within.  I could see clearly a room
with a sanded floor, clean scoured; a dresser of walnut, with pewter
plates ranged in rows, reflecting the redness and radiance of a glowing
peat-fire.  I could see a clock, a white deal table, some chairs.  The
candle, whose ray had been my beacon, burnt on the table; and by its
light an elderly woman, somewhat rough-looking, but scrupulously clean,
like all about her, was knitting a stocking.

I noticed these objects cursorily only--in them there was nothing
extraordinary.  A group of more interest appeared near the hearth,
sitting still amidst the rosy peace and warmth suffusing it.  Two young,
graceful women--ladies in every point--sat, one in a low rocking-chair,
the other on a lower stool; both wore deep mourning of crape and
bombazeen, which sombre garb singularly set off very fair necks and
faces: a large old pointer dog rested its massive head on the knee of one
girl--in the lap of the other was cushioned a black cat.

A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants!  Who were
they?  They could not be the daughters of the elderly person at the
table; for she looked like a rustic, and they were all delicacy and
cultivation.  I had nowhere seen such faces as theirs: and yet, as I
gazed on them, I seemed intimate with every lineament.  I cannot call
them handsome--they were too pale and grave for the word: as they each
bent over a book, they looked thoughtful almost to severity.  A stand
between them supported a second candle and two great volumes, to which
they frequently referred, comparing them, seemingly, with the smaller
books they held in their hands, like people consulting a dictionary to
aid them in the task of translation.  This scene was as silent as if all
the figures had been shadows and the firelit apartment a picture: so
hushed was it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the clock
tick in its obscure corner; and I even fancied I could distinguish the
click-click of the woman's knitting-needles.  When, therefore, a voice
broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me.

"Listen, Diana," said one of the absorbed students; "Franz and old Daniel
are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which
he has awakened in terror--listen!"  And in a low voice she read
something, of which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an
unknown tongue--neither French nor Latin.  Whether it were Greek or
German I could not tell.

"That is strong," she said, when she had finished: "I relish it."  The
other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated,
while she gazed at the fire, a line of what had been read.  At a later
day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the
line: though, when I first heard it, it was only like a stroke on
sounding brass to me--conveying no meaning:--

"'Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.'  Good! good!"
she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled.  "There you have a
dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you!  The line is worth a
hundred pages of fustian.  'Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines
Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.'  I like it!"

Both were again silent.

"Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old woman,
looking up from her knitting.

"Yes, Hannah--a far larger country than England, where they talk in no
other way."

"Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t' one t'other:
and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?"

"We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all--for we
are not as clever as you think us, Hannah.  We don't speak German, and we
cannot read it without a dictionary to help us."

"And what good does it do you?"

"We mean to teach it some time--or at least the elements, as they say;
and then we shall get more money than we do now."

"Varry like: but give ower studying; ye've done enough for to-night."

"I think we have: at least I'm tired.  Mary, are you?"

"Mortally: after all, it's tough work fagging away at a language with no
master but a lexicon."

"It is, especially such a language as this crabbed but glorious Deutsch.
I wonder when St. John will come home."

"Surely he will not be long now: it is just ten (looking at a little gold
watch she drew from her girdle).  It rains fast, Hannah: will you have
the goodness to look at the fire in the parlour?"

The woman rose: she opened a door, through which I dimly saw a passage:
soon I heard her stir a fire in an inner room; she presently came back.

"Ah, childer!" said she, "it fair troubles me to go into yond' room now:
it looks so lonesome wi' the chair empty and set back in a corner."

She wiped her eyes with her apron: the two girls, grave before, looked
sad now.

"But he is in a better place," continued Hannah: "we shouldn't wish him
here again.  And then, nobody need to have a quieter death nor he had."

"You say he never mentioned us?" inquired one of the ladies.

"He hadn't time, bairn: he was gone in a minute, was your father.  He had
been a bit ailing like the day before, but naught to signify; and when
Mr. St. John asked if he would like either o' ye to be sent for, he fair
laughed at him.  He began again with a bit of a heaviness in his head the
next day--that is, a fortnight sin'--and he went to sleep and niver
wakened: he wor a'most stark when your brother went into t' chamber and
fand him.  Ah, childer! that's t' last o' t' old stock--for ye and Mr.
St. John is like of different soart to them 'at's gone; for all your
mother wor mich i' your way, and a'most as book-learned.  She wor the
pictur' o' ye, Mary: Diana is more like your father."

I thought them so similar I could not tell where the old servant (for
such I now concluded her to be) saw the difference.  Both were fair
complexioned and slenderly made; both possessed faces full of distinction
and intelligence.  One, to be sure, had hair a shade darker than the
other, and there was a difference in their style of wearing it; Mary's
pale brown locks were parted and braided smooth: Diana's duskier tresses
covered her neck with thick curls.  The clock struck ten.

"Ye'll want your supper, I am sure," observed Hannah; "and so will Mr.
St. John when he comes in."

And she proceeded to prepare the meal.  The ladies rose; they seemed
about to withdraw to the parlour.  Till this moment, I had been so intent
on watching them, their appearance and conversation had excited in me so
keen an interest, I had half-forgotten my own wretched position: now it
recurred to me.  More desolate, more desperate than ever, it seemed from
contrast.  And how impossible did it appear to touch the inmates of this
house with concern on my behalf; to make them believe in the truth of my
wants and woes--to induce them to vouchsafe a rest for my wanderings!  As
I groped out the door, and knocked at it hesitatingly, I felt that last
idea to be a mere chimera.  Hannah opened.

"What do you want?" she inquired, in a voice of surprise, as she surveyed
me by the light of the candle she held.

"May I speak to your mistresses?" I said.

"You had better tell me what you have to say to them.  Where do you come
from?"

"I am a stranger."

"What is your business here at this hour?"

"I want a night's shelter in an out-house or anywhere, and a morsel of
bread to eat."

Distrust, the very feeling I dreaded, appeared in Hannah's face.  "I'll
give you a piece of bread," she said, after a pause; "but we can't take
in a vagrant to lodge.  It isn't likely."

"Do let me speak to your mistresses."

"No, not I.  What can they do for you?  You should not be roving about
now; it looks very ill."

"But where shall I go if you drive me away?  What shall I do?"

"Oh, I'll warrant you know where to go and what to do.  Mind you don't do
wrong, that's all.  Here is a penny; now go--"

"A penny cannot feed me, and I have no strength to go farther.  Don't
shut the door:--oh, don't, for God's sake!"

"I must; the rain is driving in--"

"Tell the young ladies.  Let me see them--"

"Indeed, I will not.  You are not what you ought to be, or you wouldn't
make such a noise.  Move off."

"But I must die if I am turned away."

"Not you.  I'm fear'd you have some ill plans agate, that bring you about
folk's houses at this time o' night.  If you've any
followers--housebreakers or such like--anywhere near, you may tell them
we are not by ourselves in the house; we have a gentleman, and dogs, and
guns."  Here the honest but inflexible servant clapped the door to and
bolted it within.

This was the climax.  A pang of exquisite suffering--a throe of true
despair--rent and heaved my heart.  Worn out, indeed, I was; not another
step could I stir.  I sank on the wet doorstep: I groaned--I wrung my
hands--I wept in utter anguish.  Oh, this spectre of death!  Oh, this
last hour, approaching in such horror!  Alas, this isolation--this
banishment from my kind!  Not only the anchor of hope, but the footing of
fortitude was gone--at least for a moment; but the last I soon
endeavoured to regain.

"I can but die," I said, "and I believe in God.  Let me try to wait His
will in silence."

These words I not only thought, but uttered; and thrusting back all my
misery into my heart, I made an effort to compel it to remain there--dumb
and still.

"All men must die," said a voice quite close at hand; "but all are not
condemned to meet a lingering and premature doom, such as yours would be
if you perished here of want."

"Who or what speaks?" I asked, terrified at the unexpected sound, and
incapable now of deriving from any occurrence a hope of aid.  A form was
near--what form, the pitch-dark night and my enfeebled vision prevented
me from distinguishing.  With a loud long knock, the new-comer appealed
to the door.

"Is it you, Mr. St. John?" cried Hannah.

"Yes--yes; open quickly."

"Well, how wet and cold you must be, such a wild night as it is!  Come
in--your sisters are quite uneasy about you, and I believe there are bad
folks about.  There has been a beggar-woman--I declare she is not gone
yet!--laid down there.  Get up! for shame!  Move off, I say!"

"Hush, Hannah!  I have a word to say to the woman.  You have done your
duty in excluding, now let me do mine in admitting her.  I was near, and
listened to both you and her.  I think this is a peculiar case--I must at
least examine into it.  Young woman, rise, and pass before me into the
house."

{Hush, Hannah; I have a word to say to the woman: p323.jpg}

With difficulty I obeyed him.  Presently I stood within that clean,
bright kitchen--on the very hearth--trembling, sickening; conscious of an
aspect in the last degree ghastly, wild, and weather-beaten.  The two
ladies, their brother, Mr. St. John, the old servant, were all gazing at
me.

"St. John, who is it?" I heard one ask.

"I cannot tell: I found her at the door," was the reply.

"She does look white," said Hannah.

"As white as clay or death," was responded.  "She will fall: let her
sit."

And indeed my head swam: I dropped, but a chair received me.  I still
possessed my senses, though just now I could not speak.

"Perhaps a little water would restore her.  Hannah, fetch some.  But she
is worn to nothing.  How very thin, and how very bloodless!"

"A mere spectre!"

"Is she ill, or only famished?"

"Famished, I think.  Hannah, is that milk?  Give it me, and a piece of
bread."

Diana (I knew her by the long curls which I saw drooping between me and
the fire as she bent over me) broke some bread, dipped it in milk, and
put it to my lips.  Her face was near mine: I saw there was pity in it,
and I felt sympathy in her hurried breathing.  In her simple words, too,
the same balm-like emotion spoke: "Try to eat."

"Yes--try," repeated Mary gently; and Mary's hand removed my sodden
bonnet and lifted my head.  I tasted what they offered me: feebly at
first, eagerly soon.

"Not too much at first--restrain her," said the brother; "she has had
enough."  And he withdrew the cup of milk and the plate of bread.

"A little more, St. John--look at the avidity in her eyes."

"No more at present, sister.  Try if she can speak now--ask her her
name."

I felt I could speak, and I answered--"My name is Jane Elliott."  Anxious
as ever to avoid discovery, I had before resolved to assume an _alias_.

"And where do you live?  Where are your friends?"

I was silent.

"Can we send for any one you know?"

I shook my head.

"What account can you give of yourself?"

Somehow, now that I had once crossed the threshold of this house, and
once was brought face to face with its owners, I felt no longer outcast,
vagrant, and disowned by the wide world.  I dared to put off the
mendicant--to resume my natural manner and character.  I began once more
to know myself; and when Mr. St. John demanded an account--which at
present I was far too weak to render--I said after a brief pause--

"Sir, I can give you no details to-night."

"But what, then," said he, "do you expect me to do for you?"

"Nothing," I replied.  My strength sufficed for but short answers.  Diana
took the word--

"Do you mean," she asked, "that we have now given you what aid you
require? and that we may dismiss you to the moor and the rainy night?"

I looked at her.  She had, I thought, a remarkable countenance, instinct
both with power and goodness.  I took sudden courage.  Answering her
compassionate gaze with a smile, I said--"I will trust you.  If I were a
masterless and stray dog, I know that you would not turn me from your
hearth to-night: as it is, I really have no fear.  Do with me and for me
as you like; but excuse me from much discourse--my breath is short--I
feel a spasm when I speak."  All three surveyed me, and all three were
silent.

"Hannah," said Mr. St. John, at last, "let her sit there at present, and
ask her no questions; in ten minutes more, give her the remainder of that
milk and bread.  Mary and Diana, let us go into the parlour and talk the
matter over."

They withdrew.  Very soon one of the ladies returned--I could not tell
which.  A kind of pleasant stupor was stealing over me as I sat by the
genial fire.  In an undertone she gave some directions to Hannah.  Ere
long, with the servant's aid, I contrived to mount a staircase; my
dripping clothes were removed; soon a warm, dry bed received me.  I
thanked God--experienced amidst unutterable exhaustion a glow of grateful
joy--and slept.




CHAPTER XXIX


The recollection of about three days and nights succeeding this is very
dim in my mind.  I can recall some sensations felt in that interval; but
few thoughts framed, and no actions performed.  I knew I was in a small
room and in a narrow bed.  To that bed I seemed to have grown; I lay on
it motionless as a stone; and to have torn me from it would have been
almost to kill me.  I took no note of the lapse of time--of the change
from morning to noon, from noon to evening.  I observed when any one
entered or left the apartment: I could even tell who they were; I could
understand what was said when the speaker stood near to me; but I could
not answer; to open my lips or move my limbs was equally impossible.
Hannah, the servant, was my most frequent visitor.  Her coming disturbed
me.  I had a feeling that she wished me away: that she did not understand
me or my circumstances; that she was prejudiced against me.  Diana and
Mary appeared in the chamber once or twice a day.  They would whisper
sentences of this sort at my bedside--

"It is very well we took her in."

"Yes; she would certainly have been found dead at the door in the morning
had she been left out all night.  I wonder what she has gone through?"

"Strange hardships, I imagine--poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer?"

"She is not an uneducated person, I should think, by her manner of
speaking; her accent was quite pure; and the clothes she took off, though
splashed and wet, were little worn and fine."

"She has a peculiar face; fleshless and haggard as it is, I rather like
it; and when in good health and animated, I can fancy her physiognomy
would be agreeable."

Never once in their dialogues did I hear a syllable of regret at the
hospitality they had extended to me, or of suspicion of, or aversion to,
myself.  I was comforted.

Mr. St. John came but once: he looked at me, and said my state of
lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted
fatigue.  He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor: nature, he was
sure, would manage best, left to herself.  He said every nerve had been
overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while.
There was no disease.  He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when
once commenced.  These opinions he delivered in a few words, in a quiet,
low voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man little
accustomed to expansive comment, "Rather an unusual physiognomy;
certainly, not indicative of vulgarity or degradation."

"Far otherwise," responded Diana.  "To speak truth, St. John, my heart
rather warms to the poor little soul.  I wish we may be able to benefit
her permanently."

"That is hardly likely," was the reply.  "You will find she is some young
lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends, and has probably
injudiciously left them.  We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to
them, if she is not obstinate: but I trace lines of force in her face
which make me sceptical of her tractability."  He stood considering me
some minutes; then added, "She looks sensible, but not at all handsome."

"She is so ill, St. John."

"Ill or well, she would always be plain.  The grace and harmony of beauty
are quite wanting in those features."

On the third day I was better; on the fourth, I could speak, move, rise
in bed, and turn.  Hannah had brought me some gruel and dry toast, about,
as I supposed, the dinner-hour.  I had eaten with relish: the food was
good--void of the feverish flavour which had hitherto poisoned what I had
swallowed.  When she left me, I felt comparatively strong and revived:
ere long satiety of repose and desire for action stirred me.  I wished to
rise; but what could I put on?  Only my damp and bemired apparel; in
which I had slept on the ground and fallen in the marsh.  I felt ashamed
to appear before my benefactors so clad.  I was spared the humiliation.

On a chair by the bedside were all my own things, clean and dry.  My
black silk frock hung against the wall.  The traces of the bog were
removed from it; the creases left by the wet smoothed out: it was quite
decent.  My very shoes and stockings were purified and rendered
presentable.  There were the means of washing in the room, and a comb and
brush to smooth my hair.  After a weary process, and resting every five
minutes, I succeeded in dressing myself.  My clothes hung loose on me;
for I was much wasted, but I covered deficiencies with a shawl, and once
more, clean and respectable looking--no speck of the dirt, no trace of
the disorder I so hated, and which seemed so to degrade me, left--I crept
down a stone staircase with the aid of the banisters, to a narrow low
passage, and found my way presently to the kitchen.

It was full of the fragrance of new bread and the warmth of a generous
fire.  Hannah was baking.  Prejudices, it is well known, are most
difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened
or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
Hannah had been cold and stiff, indeed, at the first: latterly she had
begun to relent a little; and when she saw me come in tidy and
well-dressed, she even smiled.

"What, you have got up!" she said.  "You are better, then.  You may sit
you down in my chair on the hearthstone, if you will."

She pointed to the rocking-chair: I took it.  She bustled about,
examining me every now and then with the corner of her eye.  Turning to
me, as she took some loaves from the oven, she asked bluntly--

"Did you ever go a-begging afore you came here?"

I was indignant for a moment; but remembering that anger was out of the
question, and that I had indeed appeared as a beggar to her, I answered
quietly, but still not without a certain marked firmness--

"You are mistaken in supposing me a beggar.  I am no beggar; any more
than yourself or your young ladies."

After a pause she said, "I dunnut understand that: you've like no house,
nor no brass, I guess?"

"The want of house or brass (by which I suppose you mean money) does not
make a beggar in your sense of the word."

"Are you book-learned?" she inquired presently.

"Yes, very."

"But you've never been to a boarding-school?"

"I was at a boarding-school eight years."

She opened her eyes wide.  "Whatever cannot ye keep yourself for, then?"

"I have kept myself; and, I trust, shall keep myself again.  What are you
going to do with these gooseberries?" I inquired, as she brought out a
basket of the fruit.

"Mak' 'em into pies."

"Give them to me and I'll pick them."

"Nay; I dunnut want ye to do nought."

"But I must do something.  Let me have them."

She consented; and she even brought me a clean towel to spread over my
dress, "lest," as she said, "I should mucky it."

"Ye've not been used to sarvant's wark, I see by your hands," she
remarked.  "Happen ye've been a dressmaker?"

"No, you are wrong.  And now, never mind what I have been: don't trouble
your head further about me; but tell me the name of the house where we
are."

"Some calls it Marsh End, and some calls it Moor House."

"And the gentleman who lives here is called Mr. St. John?"

"Nay; he doesn't live here: he is only staying a while.  When he is at
home, he is in his own parish at Morton."

"That village a few miles off?

"Aye."

"And what is he?"

"He is a parson."

I remembered the answer of the old housekeeper at the parsonage, when I
had asked to see the clergyman.  "This, then, was his father's
residence?"

"Aye; old Mr. Rivers lived here, and his father, and grandfather, and
gurt (great) grandfather afore him."

"The name, then, of that gentleman, is Mr. St. John Rivers?"

"Aye; St. John is like his kirstened name."

"And his sisters are called Diana and Mary Rivers?"

"Yes."

"Their father is dead?"

"Dead three weeks sin' of a stroke."

"They have no mother?"

"The mistress has been dead this mony a year."

"Have you lived with the family long?"

"I've lived here thirty year.  I nursed them all three."

"That proves you must have been an honest and faithful servant.  I will
say so much for you, though you have had the incivility to call me a
beggar."

She again regarded me with a surprised stare.  "I believe," she said, "I
was quite mista'en in my thoughts of you: but there is so mony cheats
goes about, you mun forgie me."

"And though," I continued, rather severely, "you wished to turn me from
the door, on a night when you should not have shut out a dog."

"Well, it was hard: but what can a body do?  I thought more o' th'
childer nor of mysel: poor things!  They've like nobody to tak' care on
'em but me.  I'm like to look sharpish."

I maintained a grave silence for some minutes.

"You munnut think too hardly of me," she again remarked.

"But I do think hardly of you," I said; "and I'll tell you why--not so
much because you refused to give me shelter, or regarded me as an
impostor, as because you just now made it a species of reproach that I
had no 'brass' and no house.  Some of the best people that ever lived
have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not
to consider poverty a crime."

"No more I ought," said she: "Mr. St. John tells me so too; and I see I
wor wrang--but I've clear a different notion on you now to what I had.
You look a raight down dacent little crater."

"That will do--I forgive you now.  Shake hands."

She put her floury and horny hand into mine; another and heartier smile
illumined her rough face, and from that moment we were friends.

Hannah was evidently fond of talking.  While I picked the fruit, and she
made the paste for the pies, she proceeded to give me sundry details
about her deceased master and mistress, and "the childer," as she called
the young people.

Old Mr. Rivers, she said, was a plain man enough, but a gentleman, and of
as ancient a family as could be found.  Marsh End had belonged to the
Rivers ever since it was a house: and it was, she affirmed, "aboon two
hundred year old--for all it looked but a small, humble place, naught to
compare wi' Mr. Oliver's grand hall down i' Morton Vale.  But she could
remember Bill Oliver's father a journeyman needlemaker; and th' Rivers
wor gentry i' th' owd days o' th' Henrys, as onybody might see by looking
into th' registers i' Morton Church vestry."  Still, she allowed, "the
owd maister was like other folk--naught mich out o' t' common way: stark
mad o' shooting, and farming, and sich like."  The mistress was
different.  She was a great reader, and studied a deal; and the "bairns"
had taken after her.  There was nothing like them in these parts, nor
ever had been; they had liked learning, all three, almost from the time
they could speak; and they had always been "of a mak' of their own."  Mr.
St. John, when he grew up, would go to college and be a parson; and the
girls, as soon as they left school, would seek places as governesses: for
they had told her their father had some years ago lost a great deal of
money by a man he had trusted turning bankrupt; and as he was now not
rich enough to give them fortunes, they must provide for themselves.  They
had lived very little at home for a long while, and were only come now to
stay a few weeks on account of their father's death; but they did so like
Marsh End and Morton, and all these moors and hills about.  They had been
in London, and many other grand towns; but they always said there was no
place like home; and then they were so agreeable with each other--never
fell out nor "threaped."  She did not know where there was such a family
for being united.

Having finished my task of gooseberry picking, I asked where the two
ladies and their brother were now.

"Gone over to Morton for a walk; but they would be back in half-an-hour
to tea."

They returned within the time Hannah had allotted them: they entered by
the kitchen door.  Mr. St. John, when he saw me, merely bowed and passed
through; the two ladies stopped: Mary, in a few words, kindly and calmly
expressed the pleasure she felt in seeing me well enough to be able to
come down; Diana took my hand: she shook her head at me.

"You should have waited for my leave to descend," she said.  "You still
look very pale--and so thin!  Poor child!--poor girl!"

Diana had a voice toned, to my ear, like the cooing of a dove.  She
possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter.  Her whole face
seemed to me full of charm.  Mary's countenance was equally
intelligent--her features equally pretty; but her expression was more
reserved, and her manners, though gentle, more distant.  Diana looked and
spoke with a certain authority: she had a will, evidently.  It was my
nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers,
and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active
will.

"And what business have you here?" she continued.  "It is not your place.
Mary and I sit in the kitchen sometimes, because at home we like to be
free, even to license--but you are a visitor, and must go into the
parlour."

"I am very well here."

"Not at all, with Hannah bustling about and covering you with flour."

"Besides, the fire is too hot for you," interposed Mary.

"To be sure," added her sister.  "Come, you must be obedient."  And still
holding my hand she made me rise, and led me into the inner room.

"Sit there," she said, placing me on the sofa, "while we take our things
off and get the tea ready; it is another privilege we exercise in our
little moorland home--to prepare our own meals when we are so inclined,
or when Hannah is baking, brewing, washing, or ironing."

She closed the door, leaving me solus with Mr. St. John, who sat
opposite, a book or newspaper in his hand.  I examined first, the
parlour, and then its occupant.

The parlour was rather a small room, very plainly furnished, yet
comfortable, because clean and neat.  The old-fashioned chairs were very
bright, and the walnut-wood table was like a looking-glass.  A few
strange, antique portraits of the men and women of other days decorated
the stained walls; a cupboard with glass doors contained some books and
an ancient set of china.  There was no superfluous ornament in the
room--not one modern piece of furniture, save a brace of workboxes and a
lady's desk in rosewood, which stood on a side-table:
everything--including the carpet and curtains--looked at once well worn
and well saved.

Mr. St. John--sitting as still as one of the dusty pictures on the walls,
keeping his eyes fixed on the page he perused, and his lips mutely
sealed--was easy enough to examine.  Had he been a statue instead of a
man, he could not have been easier.  He was young--perhaps from twenty-
eight to thirty--tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a
Greek face, very pure in outline: quite a straight, classic nose; quite
an Athenian mouth and chin.  It is seldom, indeed, an English face comes
so near the antique models as did his.  He might well be a little shocked
at the irregularity of my lineaments, his own being so harmonious.  His
eyes were large and blue, with brown lashes; his high forehead,
colourless as ivory, was partially streaked over by careless locks of
fair hair.

This is a gentle delineation, is it not, reader?  Yet he whom it
describes scarcely impressed one with the idea of a gentle, a yielding,
an impressible, or even of a placid nature.  Quiescent as he now sat,
there was something about his nostril, his mouth, his brow, which, to my
perceptions, indicated elements within either restless, or hard, or
eager.  He did not speak to me one word, nor even direct to me one
glance, till his sisters returned.  Diana, as she passed in and out, in
the course of preparing tea, brought me a little cake, baked on the top
of the oven.

"Eat that now," she said: "you must be hungry.  Hannah says you have had
nothing but some gruel since breakfast."

I did not refuse it, for my appetite was awakened and keen.  Mr. Rivers
now closed his book, approached the table, and, as he took a seat, fixed
his blue pictorial-looking eyes full on me.  There was an unceremonious
directness, a searching, decided steadfastness in his gaze now, which
told that intention, and not diffidence, had hitherto kept it averted
from the stranger.

"You are very hungry," he said.

"I am, sir."  It is my way--it always was my way, by instinct--ever to
meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.

"It is well for you that a low fever has forced you to abstain for the
last three days: there would have been danger in yielding to the cravings
of your appetite at first.  Now you may eat, though still not
immoderately."

"I trust I shall not eat long at your expense, sir," was my very clumsily-
contrived, unpolished answer.

"No," he said coolly: "when you have indicated to us the residence of
your friends, we can write to them, and you may be restored to home."

"That, I must plainly tell you, is out of my power to do; being
absolutely without home and friends."

The three looked at me, but not distrustfully; I felt there was no
suspicion in their glances: there was more of curiosity.  I speak
particularly of the young ladies.  St. John's eyes, though clear enough
in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom.  He
seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's
thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of
keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than
to encourage.

"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you are completely isolated from
every connection?"

"I do.  Not a tie links me to any living thing: not a claim do I possess
to admittance under any roof in England."

"A most singular position at your age!"

Here I saw his glance directed to my hands, which were folded on the
table before me.  I wondered what he sought there: his words soon
explained the quest.

"You have never been married?  You are a spinster?"

Diana laughed.  "Why, she can't be above seventeen or eighteen years old,
St. John," said she.

"I am near nineteen: but I am not married.  No."

I felt a burning glow mount to my face; for bitter and agitating
recollections were awakened by the allusion to marriage.  They all saw
the embarrassment and the emotion.  Diana and Mary relieved me by turning
their eyes elsewhere than to my crimsoned visage; but the colder and
sterner brother continued to gaze, till the trouble he had excited forced
out tears as well as colour.

"Where did you last reside?" he now asked.

"You are too inquisitive, St. John," murmured Mary in a low voice; but he
leaned over the table and required an answer by a second firm and
piercing look.

"The name of the place where, and of the person with whom I lived, is my
secret," I replied concisely.

"Which, if you like, you have, in my opinion, a right to keep, both from
St. John and every other questioner," remarked Diana.

"Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help you," he
said.  "And you need help, do you not?"

"I need it, and I seek it so far, sir, that some true philanthropist will
put me in the way of getting work which I can do, and the remuneration
for which will keep me, if but in the barest necessaries of life."

"I know not whether I am a true philanthropist; yet I am willing to aid
you to the utmost of my power in a purpose so honest.  First, then, tell
me what you have been accustomed to do, and what you _can_ do."

I had now swallowed my tea.  I was mightily refreshed by the beverage; as
much so as a giant with wine: it gave new tone to my unstrung nerves, and
enabled me to address this penetrating young judge steadily.

"Mr. Rivers," I said, turning to him, and looking at him, as he looked at
me, openly and without diffidence, "you and your sisters have done me a
great service--the greatest man can do his fellow-being; you have rescued
me, by your noble hospitality, from death.  This benefit conferred gives
you an unlimited claim on my gratitude, and a claim, to a certain extent,
on my confidence.  I will tell you as much of the history of the wanderer
you have harboured, as I can tell without compromising my own peace of
mind--my own security, moral and physical, and that of others.

"I am an orphan, the daughter of a clergyman.  My parents died before I
could know them.  I was brought up a dependant; educated in a charitable
institution.  I will even tell you the name of the establishment, where I
passed six years as a pupil, and two as a teacher--Lowood Orphan Asylum,
---shire: you will have heard of it, Mr. Rivers?--the Rev. Robert
Brocklehurst is the treasurer."

"I have heard of Mr. Brocklehurst, and I have seen the school."

"I left Lowood nearly a year since to become a private governess.  I
obtained a good situation, and was happy.  This place I was obliged to
leave four days before I came here.  The reason of my departure I cannot
and ought not to explain: it would be useless, dangerous, and would sound
incredible.  No blame attached to me: I am as free from culpability as
any one of you three.  Miserable I am, and must be for a time; for the
catastrophe which drove me from a house I had found a paradise was of a
strange and direful nature.  I observed but two points in planning my
departure--speed, secrecy: to secure these, I had to leave behind me
everything I possessed except a small parcel; which, in my hurry and
trouble of mind, I forgot to take out of the coach that brought me to
Whitcross.  To this neighbourhood, then, I came, quite destitute.  I
slept two nights in the open air, and wandered about two days without
crossing a threshold: but twice in that space of time did I taste food;
and it was when brought by hunger, exhaustion, and despair almost to the
last gasp, that you, Mr. Rivers, forbade me to perish of want at your
door, and took me under the shelter of your roof.  I know all your
sisters have done for me since--for I have not been insensible during my
seeming torpor--and I owe to their spontaneous, genuine, genial
compassion as large a debt as to your evangelical charity."

"Don't make her talk any more now, St. John," said Diana, as I paused;
"she is evidently not yet fit for excitement.  Come to the sofa and sit
down now, Miss Elliott."

I gave an involuntary half start at hearing the _alias_: I had forgotten
my new name.  Mr. Rivers, whom nothing seemed to escape, noticed it at
once.

"You said your name was Jane Elliott?" he observed.

"I did say so; and it is the name by which I think it expedient to be
called at present, but it is not my real name, and when I hear it, it
sounds strange to me."

"Your real name you will not give?"

"No: I fear discovery above all things; and whatever disclosure would
lead to it, I avoid."

"You are quite right, I am sure," said Diana.  "Now do, brother, let her
be at peace a while."

But when St. John had mused a few moments he recommenced as imperturbably
and with as much acumen as ever.

"You would not like to be long dependent on our hospitality--you would
wish, I see, to dispense as soon as may be with my sisters' compassion,
and, above all, with my _charity_ (I am quite sensible of the distinction
drawn, nor do I resent it--it is just): you desire to be independent of
us?"

"I do: I have already said so.  Show me how to work, or how to seek work:
that is all I now ask; then let me go, if it be but to the meanest
cottage; but till then, allow me to stay here: I dread another essay of
the horrors of homeless destitution."

"Indeed you _shall_ stay here," said Diana, putting her white hand on my
head.  "You _shall_," repeated Mary, in the tone of undemonstrative
sincerity which seemed natural to her.

"My sisters, you see, have a pleasure in keeping you," said Mr. St. John,
"as they would have a pleasure in keeping and cherishing a half-frozen
bird, some wintry wind might have driven through their casement.  I feel
more inclination to put you in the way of keeping yourself, and shall
endeavour to do so; but observe, my sphere is narrow.  I am but the
incumbent of a poor country parish: my aid must be of the humblest sort.
And if you are inclined to despise the day of small things, seek some
more efficient succour than such as I can offer."

"She has already said that she is willing to do anything honest she can
do," answered Diana for me; "and you know, St. John, she has no choice of
helpers: she is forced to put up with such crusty people as you."

"I will be a dressmaker; I will be a plain-workwoman; I will be a
servant, a nurse-girl, if I can be no better," I answered.

"Right," said Mr. St. John, quite coolly.  "If such is your spirit, I
promise to aid you, in my own time and way."

He now resumed the book with which he had been occupied before tea.  I
soon withdrew, for I had talked as much, and sat up as long, as my
present strength would permit.




CHAPTER XXX


The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them.  In
a few days I had so far recovered my health that I could sit up all day,
and walk out sometimes.  I could join with Diana and Mary in all their
occupations; converse with them as much as they wished, and aid them when
and where they would allow me.  There was a reviving pleasure in this
intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time--the pleasure
arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles.

I liked to read what they liked to read: what they enjoyed, delighted me;
what they approved, I reverenced.  They loved their sequestered home.  I,
too, in the grey, small, antique structure, with its low roof, its
latticed casements, its mouldering walls, its avenue of aged firs--all
grown aslant under the stress of mountain winds; its garden, dark with
yew and holly--and where no flowers but of the hardiest species would
bloom--found a charm both potent and permanent.  They clung to the purple
moors behind and around their dwelling--to the hollow vale into which the
pebbly bridle-path leading from their gate descended, and which wound
between fern-banks first, and then amongst a few of the wildest little
pasture-fields that ever bordered a wilderness of heath, or gave
sustenance to a flock of grey moorland sheep, with their little mossy-
faced lambs:--they clung to this scene, I say, with a perfect enthusiasm
of attachment.  I could comprehend the feeling, and share both its
strength and truth.  I saw the fascination of the locality.  I felt the
consecration of its loneliness: my eye feasted on the outline of swell
and sweep--on the wild colouring communicated to ridge and dell by moss,
by heath-bell, by flower-sprinkled turf, by brilliant bracken, and mellow
granite crag.  These details were just to me what they were to them--so
many pure and sweet sources of pleasure.  The strong blast and the soft
breeze; the rough and the halcyon day; the hours of sunrise and sunset;
the moonlight and the clouded night, developed for me, in these regions,
the same attraction as for them--wound round my faculties the same spell
that entranced theirs.

Indoors we agreed equally well.  They were both more accomplished and
better read than I was; but with eagerness I followed in the path of
knowledge they had trodden before me.  I devoured the books they lent me:
then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them in the evening what I
had perused during the day.  Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion:
we coincided, in short, perfectly.

If in our trio there was a superior and a leader, it was Diana.
Physically, she far excelled me: she was handsome; she was vigorous.  In
her animal spirits there was an affluence of life and certainty of flow,
such as excited my wonder, while it baffled my comprehension.  I could
talk a while when the evening commenced, but the first gush of vivacity
and fluency gone, I was fain to sit on a stool at Diana's feet, to rest
my head on her knee, and listen alternately to her and Mary, while they
sounded thoroughly the topic on which I had but touched.  Diana offered
to teach me German.  I liked to learn of her: I saw the part of
instructress pleased and suited her; that of scholar pleased and suited
me no less.  Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection--of the strongest
kind--was the result.  They discovered I could draw: their pencils and
colour-boxes were immediately at my service.  My skill, greater in this
one point than theirs, surprised and charmed them.  Mary would sit and
watch me by the hour together: then she would take lessons; and a docile,
intelligent, assiduous pupil she made.  Thus occupied, and mutually
entertained, days passed like hours, and weeks like days.

As to Mr. St John, the intimacy which had arisen so naturally and rapidly
between me and his sisters did not extend to him.  One reason of the
distance yet observed between us was, that he was comparatively seldom at
home: a large proportion of his time appeared devoted to visiting the
sick and poor among the scattered population of his parish.

No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions: rain or
fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat,
and, followed by his father's old pointer, Carlo, go out on his mission
of love or duty--I scarcely know in which light he regarded it.
Sometimes, when the day was very unfavourable, his sisters would
expostulate.  He would then say, with a peculiar smile, more solemn than
cheerful--

"And if I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from
these easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the future I
propose to myself?"

Diana and Mary's general answer to this question was a sigh, and some
minutes of apparently mournful meditation.

But besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to
friendship with him: he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even of
a brooding nature.  Zealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his
life and habits, he yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity,
that inward content, which should be the reward of every sincere
Christian and practical philanthropist.  Often, of an evening, when he
sat at the window, his desk and papers before him, he would cease reading
or writing, rest his chin on his hand, and deliver himself up to I know
not what course of thought; but that it was perturbed and exciting might
be seen in the frequent flash and changeful dilation of his eye.

I think, moreover, that Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it
was to his sisters.  He expressed once, and but once in my hearing, a
strong sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and an inborn affection
for the dark roof and hoary walls he called his home; but there was more
of gloom than pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was
manifested; and never did he seem to roam the moors for the sake of their
soothing silence--never seek out or dwell upon the thousand peaceful
delights they could yield.

Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had an opportunity
of gauging his mind.  I first got an idea of its calibre when I heard him
preach in his own church at Morton.  I wish I could describe that sermon:
but it is past my power.  I cannot even render faithfully the effect it
produced on me.

It began calm--and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice went, it
was calm to the end: an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal
breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervous language.
This grew to force--compressed, condensed, controlled.  The heart was
thrilled, the mind astonished, by the power of the preacher: neither were
softened.  Throughout there was a strange bitterness; an absence of
consolatory gentleness; stern allusions to Calvinistic
doctrines--election, predestination, reprobation--were frequent; and each
reference to these points sounded like a sentence pronounced for doom.
When he had done, instead of feeling better, calmer, more enlightened by
his discourse, I experienced an inexpressible sadness; for it seemed to
me--I know not whether equally so to others--that the eloquence to which
I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of
disappointment--where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and
disquieting aspirations.  I was sure St. John Rivers--pure-lived,
conscientious, zealous as he was--had not yet found that peace of God
which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it, I thought, than
had I with my concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost
elysium--regrets to which I have latterly avoided referring, but which
possessed me and tyrannised over me ruthlessly.

Meantime a month was gone.  Diana and Mary were soon to leave Moor House,
and return to the far different life and scene which awaited them, as
governesses in a large, fashionable, south-of-England city, where each
held a situation in families by whose wealthy and haughty members they
were regarded only as humble dependants, and who neither knew nor sought
out their innate excellences, and appreciated only their acquired
accomplishments as they appreciated the skill of their cook or the taste
of their waiting-woman.  Mr. St. John had said nothing to me yet about
the employment he had promised to obtain for me; yet it became urgent
that I should have a vocation of some kind.  One morning, being left
alone with him a few minutes in the parlour, I ventured to approach the
window-recess--which his table, chair, and desk consecrated as a kind of
study--and I was going to speak, though not very well knowing in what
words to frame my inquiry--for it is at all times difficult to break the
ice of reserve glassing over such natures as his--when he saved me the
trouble by being the first to commence a dialogue.

Looking up as I drew near--"You have a question to ask of me?" he said.

"Yes; I wish to know whether you have heard of any service I can offer
myself to undertake?"

"I found or devised something for you three weeks ago; but as you seemed
both useful and happy here--as my sisters had evidently become attached
to you, and your society gave them unusual pleasure--I deemed it
inexpedient to break in on your mutual comfort till their approaching
departure from Marsh End should render yours necessary."

"And they will go in three days now?" I said.

"Yes; and when they go, I shall return to the parsonage at Morton: Hannah
will accompany me; and this old house will be shut up."

I waited a few moments, expecting he would go on with the subject first
broached: but he seemed to have entered another train of reflection: his
look denoted abstraction from me and my business.  I was obliged to
recall him to a theme which was of necessity one of close and anxious
interest to me.

"What is the employment you had in view, Mr. Rivers?  I hope this delay
will not have increased the difficulty of securing it."

"Oh, no; since it is an employment which depends only on me to give, and
you to accept."

He again paused: there seemed a reluctance to continue.  I grew
impatient: a restless movement or two, and an eager and exacting glance
fastened on his face, conveyed the feeling to him as effectually as words
could have done, and with less trouble.

"You need be in no hurry to hear," he said: "let me frankly tell you, I
have nothing eligible or profitable to suggest.  Before I explain,
recall, if you please, my notice, clearly given, that if I helped you, it
must be as the blind man would help the lame.  I am poor; for I find
that, when I have paid my father's debts, all the patrimony remaining to
me will be this crumbling grange, the row of scathed firs behind, and the
patch of moorish soil, with the yew-trees and holly-bushes in front.  I
am obscure: Rivers is an old name; but of the three sole descendants of
the race, two earn the dependant's crust among strangers, and the third
considers himself an alien from his native country--not only for life,
but in death.  Yes, and deems, and is bound to deem, himself honoured by
the lot, and aspires but after the day when the cross of separation from
fleshly ties shall be laid on his shoulders, and when the Head of that
church-militant of whose humblest members he is one, shall give the word,
'Rise, follow Me!'"

St. John said these words as he pronounced his sermons, with a quiet,
deep voice; with an unflushed cheek, and a coruscating radiance of
glance.  He resumed--

"And since I am myself poor and obscure, I can offer you but a service of
poverty and obscurity.  _You_ may even think it degrading--for I see now
your habits have been what the world calls refined: your tastes lean to
the ideal, and your society has at least been amongst the educated; but
_I_ consider that no service degrades which can better our race.  I hold
that the more arid and unreclaimed the soil where the Christian
labourer's task of tillage is appointed him--the scantier the meed his
toil brings--the higher the honour.  His, under such circumstances, is
the destiny of the pioneer; and the first pioneers of the Gospel were the
Apostles--their captain was Jesus, the Redeemer, Himself."

"Well?" I said, as he again paused--"proceed."

He looked at me before he proceeded: indeed, he seemed leisurely to read
my face, as if its features and lines were characters on a page.  The
conclusions drawn from this scrutiny he partially expressed in his
succeeding observations.

"I believe you will accept the post I offer you," said he, "and hold it
for a while: not permanently, though: any more than I could permanently
keep the narrow and narrowing--the tranquil, hidden office of English
country incumbent; for in your nature is an alloy as detrimental to
repose as that in mine, though of a different kind."

"Do explain," I urged, when he halted once more.

"I will; and you shall hear how poor the proposal is,--how trivial--how
cramping.  I shall not stay long at Morton, now that my father is dead,
and that I am my own master.  I shall leave the place probably in the
course of a twelve-month; but while I do stay, I will exert myself to the
utmost for its improvement.  Morton, when I came to it two years ago, had
no school: the children of the poor were excluded from every hope of
progress.  I established one for boys: I mean now to open a second school
for girls.  I have hired a building for the purpose, with a cottage of
two rooms attached to it for the mistress's house.  Her salary will be
thirty pounds a year: her house is already furnished, very simply, but
sufficiently, by the kindness of a lady, Miss Oliver; the only daughter
of the sole rich man in my parish--Mr. Oliver, the proprietor of a needle-
factory and iron-foundry in the valley.  The same lady pays for the
education and clothing of an orphan from the workhouse, on condition that
she shall aid the mistress in such menial offices connected with her own
house and the school as her occupation of teaching will prevent her
having time to discharge in person.  Will you be this mistress?"

He put the question rather hurriedly; he seemed half to expect an
indignant, or at least a disdainful rejection of the offer: not knowing
all my thoughts and feelings, though guessing some, he could not tell in
what light the lot would appear to me.  In truth it was humble--but then
it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum: it was plodding--but then,
compared with that of a governess in a rich house, it was independent;
and the fear of servitude with strangers entered my soul like iron: it
was not ignoble--not unworthy--not mentally degrading, I made my
decision.

"I thank you for the proposal, Mr. Rivers, and I accept it with all my
heart."

"But you comprehend me?" he said.  "It is a village school: your scholars
will be only poor girls--cottagers' children--at the best, farmers'
daughters.  Knitting, sewing, reading, writing, ciphering, will be all
you will have to teach.  What will you do with your accomplishments?
What, with the largest portion of your mind--sentiments--tastes?"

"Save them till they are wanted.  They will keep."

"You know what you undertake, then?"

"I do."

He now smiled: and not a bitter or a sad smile, but one well pleased and
deeply gratified.

"And when will you commence the exercise of your function?"

"I will go to my house to-morrow, and open the school, if you like, next
week."

"Very well: so be it."

He rose and walked through the room.  Standing still, he again looked at
me.  He shook his head.

"What do you disapprove of, Mr. Rivers?" I asked.

"You will not stay at Morton long: no, no!"

"Why?  What is your reason for saying so?"

"I read it in your eye; it is not of that description which promises the
maintenance of an even tenor in life."

"I am not ambitious."

He started at the word "ambitious."  He repeated, "No.  What made you
think of ambition?  Who is ambitious?  I know I am: but how did you find
it out?"

"I was speaking of myself."

"Well, if you are not ambitious, you are--"  He paused.

"What?"

"I was going to say, impassioned: but perhaps you would have
misunderstood the word, and been displeased.  I mean, that human
affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you.  I am sure
you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to
devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus:
any more than I can be content," he added, with emphasis, "to live here
buried in morass, pent in with mountains--my nature, that God gave me,
contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed--made useless.  You
hear now how I contradict myself.  I, who preached contentment with a
humble lot, and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood and drawers
of water in God's service--I, His ordained minister, almost rave in my
restlessness.  Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by
some means."

He left the room.  In this brief hour I had learnt more of him than in
the whole previous month: yet still he puzzled me.

Diana and Mary Rivers became more sad and silent as the day approached
for leaving their brother and their home.  They both tried to appear as
usual; but the sorrow they had to struggle against was one that could not
be entirely conquered or concealed.  Diana intimated that this would be a
different parting from any they had ever yet known.  It would probably,
as far as St. John was concerned, be a parting for years: it might be a
parting for life.

"He will sacrifice all to his long-framed resolves," she said: "natural
affection and feelings more potent still.  St. John looks quiet, Jane;
but he hides a fever in his vitals.  You would think him gentle, yet in
some things he is inexorable as death; and the worst of it is, my
conscience will hardly permit me to dissuade him from his severe
decision: certainly, I cannot for a moment blame him for it.  It is
right, noble, Christian: yet it breaks my heart!"  And the tears gushed
to her fine eyes.  Mary bent her head low over her work.

"We are now without father: we shall soon be without home and brother,"
she murmured.

At that moment a little accident supervened, which seemed decreed by fate
purposely to prove the truth of the adage, that "misfortunes never come
singly," and to add to their distresses the vexing one of the slip
between the cup and the lip.  St. John passed the window reading a
letter.  He entered.

"Our uncle John is dead," said he.

Both the sisters seemed struck: not shocked or appalled; the tidings
appeared in their eyes rather momentous than afflicting.

"Dead?" repeated Diana.

"Yes."

She riveted a searching gaze on her brother's face.  "And what then?" she
demanded, in a low voice.

"What then, Die?" he replied, maintaining a marble immobility of feature.
"What then?  Why--nothing.  Read."

He threw the letter into her lap.  She glanced over it, and handed it to
Mary.  Mary perused it in silence, and returned it to her brother.  All
three looked at each other, and all three smiled--a dreary, pensive smile
enough.

"Amen!  We can yet live," said Diana at last.

"At any rate, it makes us no worse off than we were before," remarked
Mary.

"Only it forces rather strongly on the mind the picture of what _might
have been_," said Mr. Rivers, "and contrasts it somewhat too vividly with
what _is_."

He folded the letter, locked it in his desk, and again went out.

For some minutes no one spoke.  Diana then turned to me.

"Jane, you will wonder at us and our mysteries," she said, "and think us
hard-hearted beings not to be more moved at the death of so near a
relation as an uncle; but we have never seen him or known him.  He was my
mother's brother.  My father and he quarrelled long ago.  It was by his
advice that my father risked most of his property in the speculation that
ruined him.  Mutual recrimination passed between them: they parted in
anger, and were never reconciled.  My uncle engaged afterwards in more
prosperous undertakings: it appears he realised a fortune of twenty
thousand pounds.  He was never married, and had no near kindred but
ourselves and one other person, not more closely related than we.  My
father always cherished the idea that he would atone for his error by
leaving his possessions to us; that letter informs us that he has
bequeathed every penny to the other relation, with the exception of
thirty guineas, to be divided between St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers,
for the purchase of three mourning rings.  He had a right, of course, to
do as he pleased: and yet a momentary damp is cast on the spirits by the
receipt of such news.  Mary and I would have esteemed ourselves rich with
a thousand pounds each; and to St. John such a sum would have been
valuable, for the good it would have enabled him to do."

This explanation given, the subject was dropped, and no further reference
made to it by either Mr. Rivers or his sisters.  The next day I left
Marsh End for Morton.  The day after, Diana and Mary quitted it for
distant B-.  In a week, Mr. Rivers and Hannah repaired to the parsonage:
and so the old grange was abandoned.




CHAPTER XXXI


My home, then, when I at last find a home,--is a cottage; a little room
with whitewashed walls and a sanded floor, containing four painted chairs
and a table, a clock, a cupboard, with two or three plates and dishes,
and a set of tea-things in delf.  Above, a chamber of the same dimensions
as the kitchen, with a deal bedstead and chest of drawers; small, yet too
large to be filled with my scanty wardrobe: though the kindness of my
gentle and generous friends has increased that, by a modest stock of such
things as are necessary.

It is evening.  I have dismissed, with the fee of an orange, the little
orphan who serves me as a handmaid.  I am sitting alone on the hearth.
This morning, the village school opened.  I had twenty scholars.  But
three of the number can read: none write or cipher.  Several knit, and a
few sew a little.  They speak with the broadest accent of the district.
At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other's
language.  Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as
ignorant; but others are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a
disposition that pleases me.  I must not forget that these coarsely-clad
little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest
genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement,
intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in
those of the best-born.  My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I
shall find some happiness in discharging that office.  Much enjoyment I
do not expect in the life opening before me: yet it will, doubtless, if I
regulate my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, yield me enough to live
on from day to day.

Was I very gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder
bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon?  Not to deceive
myself, I must reply--No: I felt desolate to a degree.  I felt--yes,
idiot that I am--I felt degraded.  I doubted I had taken a step which
sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence.  I was
weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I
heard and saw round me.  But let me not hate and despise myself too much
for these feelings; I know them to be wrong--that is a great step gained;
I shall strive to overcome them.  To-morrow, I trust, I shall get the
better of them partially; and in a few weeks, perhaps, they will be quite
subdued.  In a few months, it is possible, the happiness of seeing
progress, and a change for the better in my scholars may substitute
gratification for disgust.

Meantime, let me ask myself one question--Which is better?--To have
surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort--no
struggle;--but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on
the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the
luxuries of a pleasure villa: to have been now living in France, Mr.
Rochester's mistress; delirious with his love half my time--for he
would--oh, yes, he would have loved me well for a while.  He _did_ love
me--no one will ever love me so again.  I shall never more know the sweet
homage given to beauty, youth, and grace--for never to any one else shall
I seem to possess these charms.  He was fond and proud of me--it is what
no man besides will ever be.--But where am I wandering, and what am I
saying, and above all, feeling?  Whether is it better, I ask, to be a
slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles--fevered with delusive bliss one
hour--suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the
next--or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy
mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?

Yes; I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and
scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment.  God
directed me to a correct choice: I thank His providence for the guidance!

Having brought my eventide musings to this point, I rose, went to my
door, and looked at the sunset of the harvest-day, and at the quiet
fields before my cottage, which, with the school, was distant half a mile
from the village.  The birds were singing their last strains--

   "The air was mild, the dew was balm."

While I looked, I thought myself happy, and was surprised to find myself
ere long weeping--and why?  For the doom which had reft me from adhesion
to my master: for him I was no more to see; for the desperate grief and
fatal fury--consequences of my departure--which might now, perhaps, be
dragging him from the path of right, too far to leave hope of ultimate
restoration thither.  At this thought, I turned my face aside from the
lovely sky of eve and lonely vale of Morton--I say _lonely_, for in that
bend of it visible to me there was no building apparent save the church
and the parsonage, half-hid in trees, and, quite at the extremity, the
roof of Vale Hall, where the rich Mr. Oliver and his daughter lived.  I
hid my eyes, and leant my head against the stone frame of my door; but
soon a slight noise near the wicket which shut in my tiny garden from the
meadow beyond it made me look up.  A dog--old Carlo, Mr. Rivers' pointer,
as I saw in a moment--was pushing the gate with his nose, and St. John
himself leant upon it with folded arms; his brow knit, his gaze, grave
almost to displeasure, fixed on me.  I asked him to come in.

"No, I cannot stay; I have only brought you a little parcel my sisters
left for you.  I think it contains a colour-box, pencils, and paper."

I approached to take it: a welcome gift it was.  He examined my face, I
thought, with austerity, as I came near: the traces of tears were
doubtless very visible upon it.

"Have you found your first day's work harder than you expected?" he
asked.

"Oh, no!  On the contrary, I think in time I shall get on with my
scholars very well."

"But perhaps your accommodations--your cottage--your furniture--have
disappointed your expectations?  They are, in truth, scanty enough; but--"
I interrupted--

"My cottage is clean and weather-proof; my furniture sufficient and
commodious.  All I see has made me thankful, not despondent.  I am not
absolutely such a fool and sensualist as to regret the absence of a
carpet, a sofa, and silver plate; besides, five weeks ago I had nothing--I
was an outcast, a beggar, a vagrant; now I have acquaintance, a home, a
business.  I wonder at the goodness of God; the generosity of my friends;
the bounty of my lot.  I do not repine."

"But you feel solitude an oppression?  The little house there behind you
is dark and empty."

"I have hardly had time yet to enjoy a sense of tranquillity, much less
to grow impatient under one of loneliness."

"Very well; I hope you feel the content you express: at any rate, your
good sense will tell you that it is too soon yet to yield to the
vacillating fears of Lot's wife.  What you had left before I saw you, of
course I do not know; but I counsel you to resist firmly every temptation
which would incline you to look back: pursue your present career
steadily, for some months at least."

"It is what I mean to do," I answered.  St. John continued--

"It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent
of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience.  God has
given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our
energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get--when our will
strains after a path we may not follow--we need neither starve from
inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another
nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to
taste--and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road
as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if
rougher than it.

"A year ago I was myself intensely miserable, because I thought I had
made a mistake in entering the ministry: its uniform duties wearied me to
death.  I burnt for the more active life of the world--for the more
exciting toils of a literary career--for the destiny of an artist,
author, orator; anything rather than that of a priest: yes, the heart of
a politician, of a soldier, of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a
luster after power, beat under my curate's surplice.  I considered; my
life was so wretched, it must be changed, or I must die.  After a season
of darkness and struggling, light broke and relief fell: my cramped
existence all at once spread out to a plain without bounds--my powers
heard a call from heaven to rise, gather their full strength, spread
their wings, and mount beyond ken.  God had an errand for me; to bear
which afar, to deliver it well, skill and strength, courage and
eloquence, the best qualifications of soldier, statesman, and orator,
were all needed: for these all centre in the good missionary.

"A missionary I resolved to be.  From that moment my state of mind
changed; the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty, leaving
nothing of bondage but its galling soreness--which time only can heal.  My
father, indeed, imposed the determination, but since his death, I have
not a legitimate obstacle to contend with; some affairs settled, a
successor for Morton provided, an entanglement or two of the feelings
broken through or cut asunder--a last conflict with human weakness, in
which I know I shall overcome, because I have vowed that I _will_
overcome--and I leave Europe for the East."

He said this, in his peculiar, subdued, yet emphatic voice; looking, when
he had ceased speaking, not at me, but at the setting sun, at which I
looked too.  Both he and I had our backs towards the path leading up the
field to the wicket.  We had heard no step on that grass-grown track; the
water running in the vale was the one lulling sound of the hour and
scene; we might well then start when a gay voice, sweet as a silver bell,
exclaimed--

"Good evening, Mr. Rivers.  And good evening, old Carlo.  Your dog is
quicker to recognise his friends than you are, sir; he pricked his ears
and wagged his tail when I was at the bottom of the field, and you have
your back towards me now."

It was true.  Though Mr. Rivers had started at the first of those musical
accents, as if a thunderbolt had split a cloud over his head, he stood
yet, at the close of the sentence, in the same attitude in which the
speaker had surprised him--his arm resting on the gate, his face directed
towards the west.  He turned at last, with measured deliberation.  A
vision, as it seemed to me, had risen at his side.  There appeared,
within three feet of him, a form clad in pure white--a youthful, graceful
form: full, yet fine in contour; and when, after bending to caress Carlo,
it lifted up its head, and threw back a long veil, there bloomed under
his glance a face of perfect beauty.  Perfect beauty is a strong
expression; but I do not retrace or qualify it: as sweet features as ever
the temperate clime of Albion moulded; as pure hues of rose and lily as
ever her humid gales and vapoury skies generated and screened, justified,
in this instance, the term.  No charm was wanting, no defect was
perceptible; the young girl had regular and delicate lineaments; eyes
shaped and coloured as we see them in lovely pictures, large, and dark,
and full; the long and shadowy eyelash which encircles a fine eye with so
soft a fascination; the pencilled brow which gives such clearness; the
white smooth forehead, which adds such repose to the livelier beauties of
tint and ray; the cheek oval, fresh, and smooth; the lips, fresh too,
ruddy, healthy, sweetly formed; the even and gleaming teeth without flaw;
the small dimpled chin; the ornament of rich, plenteous tresses--all
advantages, in short, which, combined, realise the ideal of beauty, were
fully hers.  I wondered, as I looked at this fair creature: I admired her
with my whole heart.  Nature had surely formed her in a partial mood;
and, forgetting her usual stinted step-mother dole of gifts, had endowed
this, her darling, with a grand-dame's bounty.

What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel?  I naturally asked
myself that question as I saw him turn to her and look at her; and, as
naturally, I sought the answer to the inquiry in his countenance.  He had
already withdrawn his eye from the Peri, and was looking at a humble tuft
of daisies which grew by the wicket.

"A lovely evening, but late for you to be out alone," he said, as he
crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot.

"Oh, I only came home from S-" (she mentioned the name of a large town
some twenty miles distant) "this afternoon.  Papa told me you had opened
your school, and that the new mistress was come; and so I put on my
bonnet after tea, and ran up the valley to see her: this is she?"
pointing to me.

"It is," said St. John.

"Do you think you shall like Morton?" she asked of me, with a direct and
naive simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if child-like.

"I hope I shall.  I have many inducements to do so."

"Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?"

"Quite."

"Do you like your house?"

"Very much."

"Have I furnished it nicely?"

"Very nicely, indeed."

"And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?"

"You have indeed.  She is teachable and handy."  (This then, I thought,
is Miss Oliver, the heiress; favoured, it seems, in the gifts of fortune,
as well as in those of nature!  What happy combination of the planets
presided over her birth, I wonder?)

"I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes," she added.  "It will
be a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a change.  Mr.
Rivers, I have been _so_ gay during my stay at S-.  Last night, or rather
this morning, I was dancing till two o'clock.  The ---th regiment are
stationed there since the riots; and the officers are the most agreeable
men in the world: they put all our young knife-grinders and scissor
merchants to shame."

It seemed to me that Mr. St. John's under lip protruded, and his upper
lip curled a moment.  His mouth certainly looked a good deal compressed,
and the lower part of his face unusually stern and square, as the
laughing girl gave him this information.  He lifted his gaze, too, from
the daisies, and turned it on her.  An unsmiling, a searching, a meaning
gaze it was.  She answered it with a second laugh, and laughter well
became her youth, her roses, her dimples, her bright eyes.

As he stood, mute and grave, she again fell to caressing Carlo.  "Poor
Carlo loves me," said she.  "_He_ is not stern and distant to his
friends; and if he could speak, he would not be silent."

As she patted the dog's head, bending with native grace before his young
and austere master, I saw a glow rise to that master's face.  I saw his
solemn eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with resistless emotion.
Flushed and kindled thus, he looked nearly as beautiful for a man as she
for a woman.  His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of
despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made a
vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty.  But he curbed it, I think,
as a resolute rider would curb a rearing steed.  He responded neither by
word nor movement to the gentle advances made him.

"Papa says you never come to see us now," continued Miss Oliver, looking
up.  "You are quite a stranger at Vale Hall.  He is alone this evening,
and not very well: will you return with me and visit him?"

"It is not a seasonable hour to intrude on Mr. Oliver," answered St.
John.

"Not a seasonable hour!  But I declare it is.  It is just the hour when
papa most wants company: when the works are closed and he has no business
to occupy him.  Now, Mr. Rivers, _do_ come.  Why are you so very shy, and
so very sombre?"  She filled up the hiatus his silence left by a reply of
her own.

"I forgot!" she exclaimed, shaking her beautiful curled head, as if
shocked at herself.  "I am so giddy and thoughtless!  _Do_ excuse me.  It
had slipped my memory that you have good reasons to be indisposed for
joining in my chatter.  Diana and Mary have left you, and Moor House is
shut up, and you are so lonely.  I am sure I pity you.  Do come and see
papa."

"Not to-night, Miss Rosamond, not to-night."

Mr. St. John spoke almost like an automaton: himself only knew the effort
it cost him thus to refuse.

"Well, if you are so obstinate, I will leave you; for I dare not stay any
longer: the dew begins to fall.  Good evening!"

She held out her hand.  He just touched it.  "Good evening!" he repeated,
in a voice low and hollow as an echo.  She turned, but in a moment
returned.

"Are you well?" she asked.  Well might she put the question: his face was
blanched as her gown.

"Quite well," he enunciated; and, with a bow, he left the gate.  She went
one way; he another.  She turned twice to gaze after him as she tripped
fairy-like down the field; he, as he strode firmly across, never turned
at all.

This spectacle of another's suffering and sacrifice rapt my thoughts from
exclusive meditation on my own.  Diana Rivers had designated her brother
"inexorable as death."  She had not exaggerated.




CHAPTER XXXII


I continued the labours of the village-school as actively and faithfully
as I could.  It was truly hard work at first.  Some time elapsed before,
with all my efforts, I could comprehend my scholars and their nature.
Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me
hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike: but I soon found I
was mistaken.  There was a difference amongst them as amongst the
educated; and when I got to know them, and they me, this difference
rapidly developed itself.  Their amazement at me, my language, my rules,
and ways, once subsided, I found some of these heavy-looking, gaping
rustics wake up into sharp-witted girls enough.  Many showed themselves
obliging, and amiable too; and I discovered amongst them not a few
examples of natural politeness, and innate self-respect, as well as of
excellent capacity, that won both my goodwill and my admiration.  These
soon took a pleasure in doing their work well, in keeping their persons
neat, in learning their tasks regularly, in acquiring quiet and orderly
manners.  The rapidity of their progress, in some instances, was even
surprising; and an honest and happy pride I took in it: besides, I began
personally to like some of the best girls; and they liked me.  I had
amongst my scholars several farmers' daughters: young women grown,
almost.  These could already read, write, and sew; and to them I taught
the elements of grammar, geography, history, and the finer kinds of
needlework.  I found estimable characters amongst them--characters
desirous of information and disposed for improvement--with whom I passed
many a pleasant evening hour in their own homes.  Their parents then (the
farmer and his wife) loaded me with attentions.  There was an enjoyment
in accepting their simple kindness, and in repaying it by a
consideration--a scrupulous regard to their feelings--to which they were
not, perhaps, at all times accustomed, and which both charmed and
benefited them; because, while it elevated them in their own eyes, it
made them emulous to merit the deferential treatment they received.

I felt I became a favourite in the neighbourhood.  Whenever I went out, I
heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly
smiles.  To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of
working people, is like "sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;" serene
inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray.  At this period of my life,
my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection:
and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful
existence--after a day passed in honourable exertion amongst my scholars,
an evening spent in drawing or reading contentedly alone--I used to rush
into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the
ideal, the stirring, the stormy--dreams where, amidst unusual scenes,
charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still
again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and
then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye,
touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him--the hope of
passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first
force and fire.  Then I awoke.  Then I recalled where I was, and how
situated.  Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering;
and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and
heard the burst of passion.  By nine o'clock the next morning I was
punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady
duties of the day.

Rosamond Oliver kept her word in coming to visit me.  Her call at the
school was generally made in the course of her morning ride.  She would
canter up to the door on her pony, followed by a mounted livery servant.
Anything more exquisite than her appearance, in her purple habit, with
her Amazon's cap of black velvet placed gracefully above the long curls
that kissed her cheek and floated to her shoulders, can scarcely be
imagined: and it was thus she would enter the rustic building, and glide
through the dazzled ranks of the village children.  She generally came at
the hour when Mr. Rivers was engaged in giving his daily catechising
lesson.  Keenly, I fear, did the eye of the visitress pierce the young
pastor's heart.  A sort of instinct seemed to warn him of her entrance,
even when he did not see it; and when he was looking quite away from the
door, if she appeared at it, his cheek would glow, and his marble-seeming
features, though they refused to relax, changed indescribably, and in
their very quiescence became expressive of a repressed fervour, stronger
than working muscle or darting glance could indicate.

Of course, she knew her power: indeed, he did not, because he could not,
conceal it from her.  In spite of his Christian stoicism, when she went
up and addressed him, and smiled gaily, encouragingly, even fondly in his
face, his hand would tremble and his eye burn.  He seemed to say, with
his sad and resolute look, if he did not say it with his lips, "I love
you, and I know you prefer me.  It is not despair of success that keeps
me dumb.  If I offered my heart, I believe you would accept it.  But that
heart is already laid on a sacred altar: the fire is arranged round it.
It will soon be no more than a sacrifice consumed."

And then she would pout like a disappointed child; a pensive cloud would
soften her radiant vivacity; she would withdraw her hand hastily from
his, and turn in transient petulance from his aspect, at once so heroic
and so martyr-like.  St. John, no doubt, would have given the world to
follow, recall, retain her, when she thus left him; but he would not give
one chance of heaven, nor relinquish, for the elysium of her love, one
hope of the true, eternal Paradise.  Besides, he could not bind all that
he had in his nature--the rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest--in
the limits of a single passion.  He could not--he would not--renounce his
wild field of mission warfare for the parlours and the peace of Vale
Hall.  I learnt so much from himself in an inroad I once, despite his
reserve, had the daring to make on his confidence.

Miss Oliver already honoured me with frequent visits to my cottage.  I
had learnt her whole character, which was without mystery or disguise:
she was coquettish but not heartless; exacting, but not worthlessly
selfish.  She had been indulged from her birth, but was not absolutely
spoilt.  She was hasty, but good-humoured; vain (she could not help it,
when every glance in the glass showed her such a flush of loveliness),
but not affected; liberal-handed; innocent of the pride of wealth;
ingenuous; sufficiently intelligent; gay, lively, and unthinking: she was
very charming, in short, even to a cool observer of her own sex like me;
but she was not profoundly interesting or thoroughly impressive.  A very
different sort of mind was hers from that, for instance, of the sisters
of St. John.  Still, I liked her almost as I liked my pupil Adele; except
that, for a child whom we have watched over and taught, a closer
affection is engendered than we can give an equally attractive adult
acquaintance.

She had taken an amiable caprice to me.  She said I was like Mr. Rivers,
only, certainly, she allowed, "not one-tenth so handsome, though I was a
nice neat little soul enough, but he was an angel."  I was, however,
good, clever, composed, and firm, like him.  I was a _lusus naturae_, she
affirmed, as a village schoolmistress: she was sure my previous history,
if known, would make a delightful romance.

One evening, while, with her usual child-like activity, and thoughtless
yet not offensive inquisitiveness, she was rummaging the cupboard and the
table-drawer of my little kitchen, she discovered first two French books,
a volume of Schiller, a German grammar and dictionary, and then my
drawing-materials and some sketches, including a pencil-head of a pretty
little cherub-like girl, one of my scholars, and sundry views from
nature, taken in the Vale of Morton and on the surrounding moors.  She
was first transfixed with surprise, and then electrified with delight.

"Had I done these pictures?  Did I know French and German?  What a
love--what a miracle I was!  I drew better than her master in the first
school in S-.  Would I sketch a portrait of her, to show to papa?"

"With pleasure," I replied; and I felt a thrill of artist-delight at the
idea of copying from so perfect and radiant a model.  She had then on a
dark-blue silk dress; her arms and her neck were bare; her only ornament
was her chestnut tresses, which waved over her shoulders with all the
wild grace of natural curls.  I took a sheet of fine card-board, and drew
a careful outline.  I promised myself the pleasure of colouring it; and,
as it was getting late then, I told her she must come and sit another
day.

She made such a report of me to her father, that Mr. Oliver himself
accompanied her next evening--a tall, massive-featured, middle-aged, and
grey-headed man, at whose side his lovely daughter looked like a bright
flower near a hoary turret.  He appeared a taciturn, and perhaps a proud
personage; but he was very kind to me.  The sketch of Rosamond's portrait
pleased him highly: he said I must make a finished picture of it.  He
insisted, too, on my coming the next day to spend the evening at Vale
Hall.

I went.  I found it a large, handsome residence, showing abundant
evidences of wealth in the proprietor.  Rosamond was full of glee and
pleasure all the time I stayed.  Her father was affable; and when he
entered into conversation with me after tea, he expressed in strong terms
his approbation of what I had done in Morton school, and said he only
feared, from what he saw and heard, I was too good for the place, and
would soon quit it for one more suitable.

"Indeed," cried Rosamond, "she is clever enough to be a governess in a
high family, papa."

I thought I would far rather be where I am than in any high family in the
land.  Mr. Oliver spoke of Mr. Rivers--of the Rivers family--with great
respect.  He said it was a very old name in that neighbourhood; that the
ancestors of the house were wealthy; that all Morton had once belonged to
them; that even now he considered the representative of that house might,
if he liked, make an alliance with the best.  He accounted it a pity that
so fine and talented a young man should have formed the design of going
out as a missionary; it was quite throwing a valuable life away.  It
appeared, then, that her father would throw no obstacle in the way of
Rosamond's union with St. John.  Mr. Oliver evidently regarded the young
clergyman's good birth, old name, and sacred profession as sufficient
compensation for the want of fortune.

It was the 5th of November, and a holiday.  My little servant, after
helping me to clean my house, was gone, well satisfied with the fee of a
penny for her aid.  All about me was spotless and bright--scoured floor,
polished grate, and well-rubbed chairs.  I had also made myself neat, and
had now the afternoon before me to spend as I would.

The translation of a few pages of German occupied an hour; then I got my
palette and pencils, and fell to the more soothing, because easier
occupation, of completing Rosamond Oliver's miniature.  The head was
finished already: there was but the background to tint and the drapery to
shade off; a touch of carmine, too, to add to the ripe lips--a soft curl
here and there to the tresses--a deeper tinge to the shadow of the lash
under the azured eyelid.  I was absorbed in the execution of these nice
details, when, after one rapid tap, my door unclosed, admitting St. John
Rivers.

"I am come to see how you are spending your holiday," he said.  "Not, I
hope, in thought?  No, that is well: while you draw you will not feel
lonely.  You see, I mistrust you still, though you have borne up
wonderfully so far.  I have brought you a book for evening solace," and
he laid on the table a new publication--a poem: one of those genuine
productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days--the
golden age of modern literature.  Alas! the readers of our era are less
favoured.  But courage!  I will not pause either to accuse or repine.  I
know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power
over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence,
their presence, their liberty and strength again one day.  Powerful
angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble
ones weep over their destruction.  Poetry destroyed?  Genius banished?
No!  Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought.  No; they
not only live, but reign and redeem: and without their divine influence
spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.

While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of "Marmion" (for
"Marmion" it was), St. John stooped to examine my drawing.  His tall
figure sprang erect again with a start: he said nothing.  I looked up at
him: he shunned my eye.  I knew his thoughts well, and could read his
heart plainly; at the moment I felt calmer and cooler than he: I had then
temporarily the advantage of him, and I conceived an inclination to do
him some good, if I could.

"With all his firmness and self-control," thought I, "he tasks himself
too far: locks every feeling and pang within--expresses, confesses,
imparts nothing.  I am sure it would benefit him to talk a little about
this sweet Rosamond, whom he thinks he ought not to marry: I will make
him talk."

I said first, "Take a chair, Mr. Rivers."  But he answered, as he always
did, that he could not stay.  "Very well," I responded, mentally, "stand
if you like; but you shall not go just yet, I am determined: solitude is
at least as bad for you as it is for me.  I'll try if I cannot discover
the secret spring of your confidence, and find an aperture in that marble
breast through which I can shed one drop of the balm of sympathy."

"Is this portrait like?" I asked bluntly.

"Like!  Like whom?  I did not observe it closely."

"You did, Mr. Rivers."

He almost started at my sudden and strange abruptness: he looked at me
astonished.  "Oh, that is nothing yet," I muttered within.  "I don't mean
to be baffled by a little stiffness on your part; I'm prepared to go to
considerable lengths."  I continued, "You observed it closely and
distinctly; but I have no objection to your looking at it again," and I
rose and placed it in his hand.

"A well-executed picture," he said; "very soft, clear colouring; very
graceful and correct drawing."

"Yes, yes; I know all that.  But what of the resemblance?  Who is it
like?"

Mastering some hesitation, he answered, "Miss Oliver, I presume."

"Of course.  And now, sir, to reward you for the accurate guess, I will
promise to paint you a careful and faithful duplicate of this very
picture, provided you admit that the gift would be acceptable to you.  I
don't wish to throw away my time and trouble on an offering you would
deem worthless."

He continued to gaze at the picture: the longer he looked, the firmer he
held it, the more he seemed to covet it.  "It is like!" he murmured; "the
eye is well managed: the colour, light, expression, are perfect.  It
smiles!"

"Would it comfort, or would it wound you to have a similar painting?  Tell
me that.  When you are at Madagascar, or at the Cape, or in India, would
it be a consolation to have that memento in your possession? or would the
sight of it bring recollections calculated to enervate and distress?"

He now furtively raised his eyes: he glanced at me, irresolute,
disturbed: he again surveyed the picture.

"That I should like to have it is certain: whether it would be judicious
or wise is another question."

Since I had ascertained that Rosamond really preferred him, and that her
father was not likely to oppose the match, I--less exalted in my views
than St. John--had been strongly disposed in my own heart to advocate
their union.  It seemed to me that, should he become the possessor of Mr.
Oliver's large fortune, he might do as much good with it as if he went
and laid his genius out to wither, and his strength to waste, under a
tropical sun.  With this persuasion I now answered--

"As far as I can see, it would be wiser and more judicious if you were to
take to yourself the original at once."

By this time he had sat down: he had laid the picture on the table before
him, and with his brow supported on both hands, hung fondly over it.  I
discerned he was now neither angry nor shocked at my audacity.  I saw
even that to be thus frankly addressed on a subject he had deemed
unapproachable--to hear it thus freely handled--was beginning to be felt
by him as a new pleasure--an unhoped-for relief.  Reserved people often
really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than
the expansive.  The sternest-seeming stoic is human after all; and to
"burst" with boldness and good-will into "the silent sea" of their souls
is often to confer on them the first of obligations.

"She likes you, I am sure," said I, as I stood behind his chair, "and her
father respects you.  Moreover, she is a sweet girl--rather thoughtless;
but you would have sufficient thought for both yourself and her.  You
ought to marry her."

"_Does_ she like me?" he asked.

"Certainly; better than she likes any one else.  She talks of you
continually: there is no subject she enjoys so much or touches upon so
often."

"It is very pleasant to hear this," he said--"very: go on for another
quarter of an hour."  And he actually took out his watch and laid it upon
the table to measure the time.

"But where is the use of going on," I asked, "when you are probably
preparing some iron blow of contradiction, or forging a fresh chain to
fetter your heart?"

"Don't imagine such hard things.  Fancy me yielding and melting, as I am
doing: human love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind and
overflowing with sweet inundation all the field I have so carefully and
with such labour prepared--so assiduously sown with the seeds of good
intentions, of self-denying plans.  And now it is deluged with a
nectarous flood--the young germs swamped--delicious poison cankering
them: now I see myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at
Vale Hall at my bride Rosamond Oliver's feet: she is talking to me with
her sweet voice--gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has
copied so well--smiling at me with these coral lips.  She is mine--I am
hers--this present life and passing world suffice to me.  Hush! say
nothing--my heart is full of delight--my senses are entranced--let the
time I marked pass in peace."

I humoured him: the watch ticked on: he breathed fast and low: I stood
silent.  Amidst this hush the quartet sped; he replaced the watch, laid
the picture down, rose, and stood on the hearth.

"Now," said he, "that little space was given to delirium and delusion.  I
rested my temples on the breast of temptation, and put my neck
voluntarily under her yoke of flowers.  I tasted her cup.  The pillow was
burning: there is an asp in the garland: the wine has a bitter taste: her
promises are hollow--her offers false: I see and know all this."

I gazed at him in wonder.

"It is strange," pursued he, "that while I love Rosamond Oliver so
wildly--with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of
which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating--I experience at
the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she would not make me a
good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should
discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months'
rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret.  This I know."

"Strange indeed!" I could not help ejaculating.

"While something in me," he went on, "is acutely sensible to her charms,
something else is as deeply impressed with her defects: they are such
that she could sympathise in nothing I aspired to--co-operate in nothing
I undertook.  Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer, a female apostle?  Rosamond
a missionary's wife?  No!"

"But you need not be a missionary.  You might relinquish that scheme."

"Relinquish!  What! my vocation?  My great work?  My foundation laid on
earth for a mansion in heaven?  My hopes of being numbered in the band
who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their
race--of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance--of substituting
peace for war--freedom for bondage--religion for superstition--the hope
of heaven for the fear of hell?  Must I relinquish that?  It is dearer
than the blood in my veins.  It is what I have to look forward to, and to
live for."

After a considerable pause, I said--"And Miss Oliver?  Are her
disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?"

"Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers: in less than a
month, my image will be effaced from her heart.  She will forget me; and
will marry, probably, some one who will make her far happier than I
should do."

"You speak coolly enough; but you suffer in the conflict.  You are
wasting away."

"No.  If I get a little thin, it is with anxiety about my prospects, yet
unsettled--my departure, continually procrastinated.  Only this morning,
I received intelligence that the successor, whose arrival I have been so
long expecting, cannot be ready to replace me for three months to come
yet; and perhaps the three months may extend to six."

"You tremble and become flushed whenever Miss Oliver enters the
schoolroom."

Again the surprised expression crossed his face.  He had not imagined
that a woman would dare to speak so to a man.  For me, I felt at home in
this sort of discourse.  I could never rest in communication with strong,
discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed
the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of
confidence, and won a place by their heart's very hearthstone.

"You are original," said he, "and not timid.  There is something brave in
your spirit, as well as penetrating in your eye; but allow me to assure
you that you partially misinterpret my emotions.  You think them more
profound and potent than they are.  You give me a larger allowance of
sympathy than I have a just claim to.  When I colour, and when I shade
before Miss Oliver, I do not pity myself.  I scorn the weakness.  I know
it is ignoble: a mere fever of the flesh: not, I declare, the convulsion
of the soul.  _That_ is just as fixed as a rock, firm set in the depths
of a restless sea.  Know me to be what I am--a cold hard man."

I smiled incredulously.

"You have taken my confidence by storm," he continued, "and now it is
much at your service.  I am simply, in my original state--stripped of
that blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity--a
cold, hard, ambitious man.  Natural affection only, of all the
sentiments, has permanent power over me.  Reason, and not feeling, is my
guide; my ambition is unlimited: my desire to rise higher, to do more
than others, insatiable.  I honour endurance, perseverance, industry,
talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and
mount to lofty eminence.  I watch your career with interest, because I
consider you a specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman: not
because I deeply compassionate what you have gone through, or what you
still suffer."

"You would describe yourself as a mere pagan philosopher," I said.

"No.  There is this difference between me and deistic philosophers: I
believe; and I believe the Gospel.  You missed your epithet.  I am not a
pagan, but a Christian philosopher--a follower of the sect of Jesus.  As
His disciple I adopt His pure, His merciful, His benignant doctrines.  I
advocate them: I am sworn to spread them.  Won in youth to religion, she
has cultivated my original qualities thus:--From the minute germ, natural
affection, she has developed the overshadowing tree, philanthropy.  From
the wild stringy root of human uprightness, she has reared a due sense of
the Divine justice.  Of the ambition to win power and renown for my
wretched self, she has formed the ambition to spread my Master's kingdom;
to achieve victories for the standard of the cross.  So much has religion
done for me; turning the original materials to the best account; pruning
and training nature.  But she could not eradicate nature: nor will it be
eradicated 'till this mortal shall put on immortality.'"

Having said this, he took his hat, which lay on the table beside my
palette.  Once more he looked at the portrait.

"She _is_ lovely," he murmured.  "She is well named the Rose of the
World, indeed!"

"And may I not paint one like it for you?"

"_Cui bono_?  No."

He drew over the picture the sheet of thin paper on which I was
accustomed to rest my hand in painting, to prevent the cardboard from
being sullied.  What he suddenly saw on this blank paper, it was
impossible for me to tell; but something had caught his eye.  He took it
up with a snatch; he looked at the edge; then shot a glance at me,
inexpressibly peculiar, and quite incomprehensible: a glance that seemed
to take and make note of every point in my shape, face, and dress; for it
traversed all, quick, keen as lightning.  His lips parted, as if to
speak: but he checked the coming sentence, whatever it was.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"Nothing in the world," was the reply; and, replacing the paper, I saw
him dexterously tear a narrow slip from the margin.  It disappeared in
his glove; and, with one hasty nod and "good-afternoon," he vanished.

"Well!" I exclaimed, using an expression of the district, "that caps the
globe, however!"

I, in my turn, scrutinised the paper; but saw nothing on it save a few
dingy stains of paint where I had tried the tint in my pencil.  I
pondered the mystery a minute or two; but finding it insolvable, and
being certain it could not be of much moment, I dismissed, and soon
forgot it.




CHAPTER XXXIII


When Mr. St. John went, it was beginning to snow; the whirling storm
continued all night.  The next day a keen wind brought fresh and blinding
falls; by twilight the valley was drifted up and almost impassable.  I
had closed my shutter, laid a mat to the door to prevent the snow from
blowing in under it, trimmed my fire, and after sitting nearly an hour on
the hearth listening to the muffled fury of the tempest, I lit a candle,
took down "Marmion," and beginning--

   "Day set on Norham's castled steep,
   And Tweed's fair river broad and deep,
      And Cheviot's mountains lone;
   The massive towers, the donjon keep,
   The flanking walls that round them sweep,
      In yellow lustre shone"--

I soon forgot storm in music.

I heard a noise: the wind, I thought, shook the door.  No; it was St.
John Rivers, who, lifting the latch, came in out of the frozen
hurricane--the howling darkness--and stood before me: the cloak that
covered his tall figure all white as a glacier.  I was almost in
consternation, so little had I expected any guest from the blocked-up
vale that night.

"Any ill news?" I demanded.  "Has anything happened?"

"No.  How very easily alarmed you are!" he answered, removing his cloak
and hanging it up against the door, towards which he again coolly pushed
the mat which his entrance had deranged.  He stamped the snow from his
boots.

"I shall sully the purity of your floor," said he, "but you must excuse
me for once."  Then he approached the fire.  "I have had hard work to get
here, I assure you," he observed, as he warmed his hands over the flame.
"One drift took me up to the waist; happily the snow is quite soft yet."

"But why are you come?" I could not forbear saying.

"Rather an inhospitable question to put to a visitor; but since you ask
it, I answer simply to have a little talk with you; I got tired of my
mute books and empty rooms.  Besides, since yesterday I have experienced
the excitement of a person to whom a tale has been half-told, and who is
impatient to hear the sequel."

He sat down.  I recalled his singular conduct of yesterday, and really I
began to fear his wits were touched.  If he were insane, however, his was
a very cool and collected insanity: I had never seen that
handsome-featured face of his look more like chiselled marble than it did
just now, as he put aside his snow-wet hair from his forehead and let the
firelight shine free on his pale brow and cheek as pale, where it grieved
me to discover the hollow trace of care or sorrow now so plainly graved.
I waited, expecting he would say something I could at least comprehend;
but his hand was now at his chin, his finger on his lip: he was thinking.
It struck me that his hand looked wasted like his face.  A perhaps
uncalled-for gush of pity came over my heart: I was moved to say--

"I wish Diana or Mary would come and live with you: it is too bad that
you should be quite alone; and you are recklessly rash about your own
health."

"Not at all," said he: "I care for myself when necessary.  I am well now.
What do you see amiss in me?"

This was said with a careless, abstracted indifference, which showed that
my solicitude was, at least in his opinion, wholly superfluous.  I was
silenced.

He still slowly moved his finger over his upper lip, and still his eye
dwelt dreamily on the glowing grate; thinking it urgent to say something,
I asked him presently if he felt any cold draught from the door, which
was behind him.

"No, no!" he responded shortly and somewhat testily.

"Well," I reflected, "if you won't talk, you may be still; I'll let you
alone now, and return to my book."

So I snuffed the candle and resumed the perusal of "Marmion."  He soon
stirred; my eye was instantly drawn to his movements; he only took out a
morocco pocket-book, thence produced a letter, which he read in silence,
folded it, put it back, relapsed into meditation.  It was vain to try to
read with such an inscrutable fixture before me; nor could I, in
impatience, consent to be dumb; he might rebuff me if he liked, but talk
I would.

"Have you heard from Diana and Mary lately?"

"Not since the letter I showed you a week ago."

"There has not been any change made about your own arrangements?  You
will not be summoned to leave England sooner than you expected?"

"I fear not, indeed: such chance is too good to befall me."  Baffled so
far, I changed my ground.  I bethought myself to talk about the school
and my scholars.

"Mary Garrett's mother is better, and Mary came back to the school this
morning, and I shall have four new girls next week from the Foundry
Close--they would have come to-day but for the snow."

"Indeed!"

"Mr. Oliver pays for two."

"Does he?"

"He means to give the whole school a treat at Christmas."

"I know."

"Was it your suggestion?"

"No."

"Whose, then?"

"His daughter's, I think."

"It is like her: she is so good-natured."

"Yes."

Again came the blank of a pause: the clock struck eight strokes.  It
aroused him; he uncrossed his legs, sat erect, turned to me.

"Leave your book a moment, and come a little nearer the fire," he said.

Wondering, and of my wonder finding no end, I complied.

"Half-an-hour ago," he pursued, "I spoke of my impatience to hear the
sequel of a tale: on reflection, I find the matter will be better managed
by my assuming the narrator's part, and converting you into a listener.
Before commencing, it is but fair to warn you that the story will sound
somewhat hackneyed in your ears; but stale details often regain a degree
of freshness when they pass through new lips.  For the rest, whether
trite or novel, it is short.

"Twenty years ago, a poor curate--never mind his name at this moment--fell
in love with a rich man's daughter; she fell in love with him, and
married him, against the advice of all her friends, who consequently
disowned her immediately after the wedding.  Before two years passed, the
rash pair were both dead, and laid quietly side by side under one slab.
(I have seen their grave; it formed part of the pavement of a huge
churchyard surrounding the grim, soot-black old cathedral of an overgrown
manufacturing town in ---shire.)  They left a daughter, which, at its
very birth, Charity received in her lap--cold as that of the snow-drift I
almost stuck fast in to-night.  Charity carried the friendless thing to
the house of its rich maternal relations; it was reared by an aunt-in-
law, called (I come to names now) Mrs. Reed of Gateshead.  You start--did
you hear a noise?  I daresay it is only a rat scrambling along the
rafters of the adjoining schoolroom: it was a barn before I had it
repaired and altered, and barns are generally haunted by rats.--To
proceed.  Mrs. Reed kept the orphan ten years: whether it was happy or
not with her, I cannot say, never having been told; but at the end of
that time she transferred it to a place you know--being no other than
Lowood School, where you so long resided yourself.  It seems her career
there was very honourable: from a pupil, she became a teacher, like
yourself--really it strikes me there are parallel points in her history
and yours--she left it to be a governess: there, again, your fates were
analogous; she undertook the education of the ward of a certain Mr.
Rochester."

"Mr. Rivers!" I interrupted.

"I can guess your feelings," he said, "but restrain them for a while: I
have nearly finished; hear me to the end.  Of Mr. Rochester's character I
know nothing, but the one fact that he professed to offer honourable
marriage to this young girl, and that at the very altar she discovered he
had a wife yet alive, though a lunatic.  What his subsequent conduct and
proposals were is a matter of pure conjecture; but when an event
transpired which rendered inquiry after the governess necessary, it was
discovered she was gone--no one could tell when, where, or how.  She had
left Thornfield Hall in the night; every research after her course had
been vain: the country had been scoured far and wide; no vestige of
information could be gathered respecting her.  Yet that she should be
found is become a matter of serious urgency: advertisements have been put
in all the papers; I myself have received a letter from one Mr. Briggs, a
solicitor, communicating the details I have just imparted.  Is it not an
odd tale?"

"Just tell me this," said I, "and since you know so much, you surely can
tell it me--what of Mr. Rochester?  How and where is he?  What is he
doing?  Is he well?"

"I am ignorant of all concerning Mr. Rochester: the letter never mentions
him but to narrate the fraudulent and illegal attempt I have adverted to.
You should rather ask the name of the governess--the nature of the event
which requires her appearance."

"Did no one go to Thornfield Hall, then?  Did no one see Mr. Rochester?"

"I suppose not."

"But they wrote to him?"

"Of course."

"And what did he say?  Who has his letters?"

"Mr. Briggs intimates that the answer to his application was not from Mr.
Rochester, but from a lady: it is signed 'Alice Fairfax.'"

I felt cold and dismayed: my worst fears then were probably true: he had
in all probability left England and rushed in reckless desperation to
some former haunt on the Continent.  And what opiate for his severe
sufferings--what object for his strong passions--had he sought there?  I
dared not answer the question.  Oh, my poor master--once almost my
husband--whom I had often called "my dear Edward!"

"He must have been a bad man," observed Mr. Rivers.

"You don't know him--don't pronounce an opinion upon him," I said, with
warmth.

"Very well," he answered quietly: "and indeed my head is otherwise
occupied than with him: I have my tale to finish.  Since you won't ask
the governess's name, I must tell it of my own accord.  Stay!  I have it
here--it is always more satisfactory to see important points written
down, fairly committed to black and white."

And the pocket-book was again deliberately produced, opened, sought
through; from one of its compartments was extracted a shabby slip of
paper, hastily torn off: I recognised in its texture and its stains of
ultra-marine, and lake, and vermillion, the ravished margin of the
portrait-cover.  He got up, held it close to my eyes: and I read, traced
in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words "JANE EYRE"--the work
doubtless of some moment of abstraction.

"Briggs wrote to me of a Jane Eyre:" he said, "the advertisements
demanded a Jane Eyre: I knew a Jane Elliott.--I confess I had my
suspicions, but it was only yesterday afternoon they were at once
resolved into certainty.  You own the name and renounce the _alias_?"

"Yes--yes; but where is Mr. Briggs?  He perhaps knows more of Mr.
Rochester than you do."

"Briggs is in London.  I should doubt his knowing anything at all about
Mr. Rochester; it is not in Mr. Rochester he is interested.  Meantime,
you forget essential points in pursuing trifles: you do not inquire why
Mr. Briggs sought after you--what he wanted with you."

"Well, what did he want?"

"Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr. Eyre of Madeira, is dead; that
he has left you all his property, and that you are now rich--merely
that--nothing more."

"I!--rich?"

"Yes, you, rich--quite an heiress."

Silence succeeded.

"You must prove your identity of course," resumed St. John presently: "a
step which will offer no difficulties; you can then enter on immediate
possession.  Your fortune is vested in the English funds; Briggs has the
will and the necessary documents."

Here was a new card turned up!  It is a fine thing, reader, to be lifted
in a moment from indigence to wealth--a very fine thing; but not a matter
one can comprehend, or consequently enjoy, all at once.  And then there
are other chances in life far more thrilling and rapture-giving: _this_
is solid, an affair of the actual world, nothing ideal about it: all its
associations are solid and sober, and its manifestations are the same.
One does not jump, and spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a
fortune; one begins to consider responsibilities, and to ponder business;
on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares, and we contain
ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow.

Besides, the words Legacy, Bequest, go side by side with the words,
Death, Funeral.  My uncle I had heard was dead--my only relative; ever
since being made aware of his existence, I had cherished the hope of one
day seeing him: now, I never should.  And then this money came only to
me: not to me and a rejoicing family, but to my isolated self.  It was a
grand boon doubtless; and independence would be glorious--yes, I felt
that--that thought swelled my heart.

"You unbend your forehead at last," said Mr. Rivers.  "I thought Medusa
had looked at you, and that you were turning to stone.  Perhaps now you
will ask how much you are worth?"

"How much am I worth?"

"Oh, a trifle!  Nothing of course to speak of--twenty thousand pounds, I
think they say--but what is that?"

"Twenty thousand pounds?"

Here was a new stunner--I had been calculating on four or five thousand.
This news actually took my breath for a moment: Mr. St. John, whom I had
never heard laugh before, laughed now.

"Well," said he, "if you had committed a murder, and I had told you your
crime was discovered, you could scarcely look more aghast."

"It is a large sum--don't you think there is a mistake?"

"No mistake at all."

"Perhaps you have read the figures wrong--it may be two thousand!"

"It is written in letters, not figures,--twenty thousand."

I again felt rather like an individual of but average gastronomical
powers sitting down to feast alone at a table spread with provisions for
a hundred.  Mr. Rivers rose now and put his cloak on.

"If it were not such a very wild night," he said, "I would send Hannah
down to keep you company: you look too desperately miserable to be left
alone.  But Hannah, poor woman! could not stride the drifts so well as I:
her legs are not quite so long: so I must e'en leave you to your sorrows.
Good-night."

He was lifting the latch: a sudden thought occurred to me.  "Stop one
minute!" I cried.

"Well?"

"It puzzles me to know why Mr. Briggs wrote to you about me; or how he
knew you, or could fancy that you, living in such an out-of-the-way
place, had the power to aid in my discovery."

"Oh!  I am a clergyman," he said; "and the clergy are often appealed to
about odd matters."  Again the latch rattled.

"No; that does not satisfy me!" I exclaimed: and indeed there was
something in the hasty and unexplanatory reply which, instead of
allaying, piqued my curiosity more than ever.

"It is a very strange piece of business," I added; "I must know more
about it."

"Another time."

"No; to-night!--to-night!" and as he turned from the door, I placed
myself between it and him.  He looked rather embarrassed.

"You certainly shall not go till you have told me all," I said.

"I would rather not just now."

"You shall!--you must!"

"I would rather Diana or Mary informed you."

Of course these objections wrought my eagerness to a climax: gratified it
must be, and that without delay; and I told him so.

"But I apprised you that I was a hard man," said he, "difficult to
persuade."

"And I am a hard woman,--impossible to put off."

{And I am a hard woman,--impossible to put off: p369.jpg}

"And then," he pursued, "I am cold: no fervour infects me."

"Whereas I am hot, and fire dissolves ice.  The blaze there has thawed
all the snow from your cloak; by the same token, it has streamed on to my
floor, and made it like a trampled street.  As you hope ever to be
forgiven, Mr. Rivers, the high crime and misdemeanour of spoiling a
sanded kitchen, tell me what I wish to know."

"Well, then," he said, "I yield; if not to your earnestness, to your
perseverance: as stone is worn by continual dropping.  Besides, you must
know some day,--as well now as later.  Your name is Jane Eyre?"

"Of course: that was all settled before."

"You are not, perhaps, aware that I am your namesake?--that I was
christened St. John Eyre Rivers?"

"No, indeed!  I remember now seeing the letter E. comprised in your
initials written in books you have at different times lent me; but I
never asked for what name it stood.  But what then?  Surely--"

I stopped: I could not trust myself to entertain, much less to express,
the thought that rushed upon me--that embodied itself,--that, in a
second, stood out a strong, solid probability.  Circumstances knit
themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order: the chain that had been
lying hitherto a formless lump of links was drawn out straight,--every
ring was perfect, the connection complete.  I knew, by instinct, how the
matter stood, before St. John had said another word; but I cannot expect
the reader to have the same intuitive perception, so I must repeat his
explanation.

"My mother's name was Eyre; she had two brothers; one a clergyman, who
married Miss Jane Reed, of Gateshead; the other, John Eyre, Esq.,
merchant, late of Funchal, Madeira.  Mr. Briggs, being Mr. Eyre's
solicitor, wrote to us last August to inform us of our uncle's death, and
to say that he had left his property to his brother the clergyman's
orphan daughter, overlooking us, in consequence of a quarrel, never
forgiven, between him and my father.  He wrote again a few weeks since,
to intimate that the heiress was lost, and asking if we knew anything of
her.  A name casually written on a slip of paper has enabled me to find
her out.  You know the rest."  Again he was going, but I set my back
against the door.

"Do let me speak," I said; "let me have one moment to draw breath and
reflect."  I paused--he stood before me, hat in hand, looking composed
enough.  I resumed--

"Your mother was my father's sister?"

"Yes."

"My aunt, consequently?"

He bowed.

"My uncle John was your uncle John?  You, Diana, and Mary are his
sister's children, as I am his brother's child?"

"Undeniably."

"You three, then, are my cousins; half our blood on each side flows from
the same source?"

"We are cousins; yes."

I surveyed him.  It seemed I had found a brother: one I could be proud
of,--one I could love; and two sisters, whose qualities were such, that,
when I knew them but as mere strangers, they had inspired me with genuine
affection and admiration.  The two girls, on whom, kneeling down on the
wet ground, and looking through the low, latticed window of Moor House
kitchen, I had gazed with so bitter a mixture of interest and despair,
were my near kinswomen; and the young and stately gentleman who had found
me almost dying at his threshold was my blood relation.  Glorious
discovery to a lonely wretch!  This was wealth indeed!--wealth to the
heart!--a mine of pure, genial affections.  This was a blessing, bright,
vivid, and exhilarating;--not like the ponderous gift of gold: rich and
welcome enough in its way, but sobering from its weight.  I now clapped
my hands in sudden joy--my pulse bounded, my veins thrilled.

"Oh, I am glad!--I am glad!" I exclaimed.

St. John smiled.  "Did I not say you neglected essential points to pursue
trifles?" he asked.  "You were serious when I told you you had got a
fortune; and now, for a matter of no moment, you are excited."

"What can you mean?  It may be of no moment to you; you have sisters and
don't care for a cousin; but I had nobody; and now three relations,--or
two, if you don't choose to be counted,--are born into my world
full-grown.  I say again, I am glad!"

I walked fast through the room: I stopped, half suffocated with the
thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle
them:--thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere
long.  I looked at the blank wall: it seemed a sky thick with ascending
stars,--every one lit me to a purpose or delight.  Those who had saved my
life, whom, till this hour, I had loved barrenly, I could now benefit.
They were under a yoke,--I could free them: they were scattered,--I could
reunite them: the independence, the affluence which was mine, might be
theirs too.  Were we not four?  Twenty thousand pounds shared equally
would be five thousand each, justice--enough and to spare: justice would
be done,--mutual happiness secured.  Now the wealth did not weigh on me:
now it was not a mere bequest of coin,--it was a legacy of life, hope,
enjoyment.

How I looked while these ideas were taking my spirit by storm, I cannot
tell; but I perceived soon that Mr. Rivers had placed a chair behind me,
and was gently attempting to make me sit down on it.  He also advised me
to be composed; I scorned the insinuation of helplessness and
distraction, shook off his hand, and began to walk about again.

"Write to Diana and Mary to-morrow," I said, "and tell them to come home
directly.  Diana said they would both consider themselves rich with a
thousand pounds, so with five thousand they will do very well."

"Tell me where I can get you a glass of water," said St. John; "you must
really make an effort to tranquillise your feelings."

"Nonsense! and what sort of an effect will the bequest have on you?  Will
it keep you in England, induce you to marry Miss Oliver, and settle down
like an ordinary mortal?"

"You wander: your head becomes confused.  I have been too abrupt in
communicating the news; it has excited you beyond your strength."

"Mr. Rivers! you quite put me out of patience: I am rational enough; it
is you who misunderstand, or rather who affect to misunderstand."

"Perhaps, if you explained yourself a little more fully, I should
comprehend better."

"Explain!  What is there to explain?  You cannot fail to see that twenty
thousand pounds, the sum in question, divided equally between the nephew
and three nieces of our uncle, will give five thousand to each?  What I
want is, that you should write to your sisters and tell them of the
fortune that has accrued to them."

"To you, you mean."

"I have intimated my view of the case: I am incapable of taking any
other.  I am not brutally selfish, blindly unjust, or fiendishly
ungrateful.  Besides, I am resolved I will have a home and connections.  I
like Moor House, and I will live at Moor House; I like Diana and Mary,
and I will attach myself for life to Diana and Mary.  It would please and
benefit me to have five thousand pounds; it would torment and oppress me
to have twenty thousand; which, moreover, could never be mine in justice,
though it might in law.  I abandon to you, then, what is absolutely
superfluous to me.  Let there be no opposition, and no discussion about
it; let us agree amongst each other, and decide the point at once."

"This is acting on first impulses; you must take days to consider such a
matter, ere your word can be regarded as valid."

"Oh! if all you doubt is my sincerity, I am easy: you see the justice of
the case?"

"I _do_ see a certain justice; but it is contrary to all custom.  Besides,
the entire fortune is your right: my uncle gained it by his own efforts;
he was free to leave it to whom he would: he left it to you.  After all,
justice permits you to keep it: you may, with a clear conscience,
consider it absolutely your own."

"With me," said I, "it is fully as much a matter of feeling as of
conscience: I must indulge my feelings; I so seldom have had an
opportunity of doing so.  Were you to argue, object, and annoy me for a
year, I could not forego the delicious pleasure of which I have caught a
glimpse--that of repaying, in part, a mighty obligation, and winning to
myself lifelong friends."

"You think so now," rejoined St. John, "because you do not know what it
is to possess, nor consequently to enjoy wealth: you cannot form a notion
of the importance twenty thousand pounds would give you; of the place it
would enable you to take in society; of the prospects it would open to
you: you cannot--"

"And you," I interrupted, "cannot at all imagine the craving I have for
fraternal and sisterly love.  I never had a home, I never had brothers or
sisters; I must and will have them now: you are not reluctant to admit me
and own me, are you?"

"Jane, I will be your brother--my sisters will be your sisters--without
stipulating for this sacrifice of your just rights."

"Brother?  Yes; at the distance of a thousand leagues!  Sisters?  Yes;
slaving amongst strangers!  I, wealthy--gorged with gold I never earned
and do not merit!  You, penniless!  Famous equality and fraternisation!
Close union!  Intimate attachment!"

"But, Jane, your aspirations after family ties and domestic happiness may
be realised otherwise than by the means you contemplate: you may marry."

"Nonsense, again!  Marry!  I don't want to marry, and never shall marry."

"That is saying too much: such hazardous affirmations are a proof of the
excitement under which you labour."

"It is not saying too much: I know what I feel, and how averse are my
inclinations to the bare thought of marriage.  No one would take me for
love; and I will not be regarded in the light of a mere money
speculation.  And I do not want a stranger--unsympathising, alien,
different from me; I want my kindred: those with whom I have full fellow-
feeling.  Say again you will be my brother: when you uttered the words I
was satisfied, happy; repeat them, if you can, repeat them sincerely."

"I think I can.  I know I have always loved my own sisters; and I know on
what my affection for them is grounded,--respect for their worth and
admiration of their talents.  You too have principle and mind: your
tastes and habits resemble Diana's and Mary's; your presence is always
agreeable to me; in your conversation I have already for some time found
a salutary solace.  I feel I can easily and naturally make room in my
heart for you, as my third and youngest sister."

"Thank you: that contents me for to-night.  Now you had better go; for if
you stay longer, you will perhaps irritate me afresh by some mistrustful
scruple."

"And the school, Miss Eyre?  It must now be shut up, I suppose?"

"No.  I will retain my post of mistress till you get a substitute."

He smiled approbation: we shook hands, and he took leave.

I need not narrate in detail the further struggles I had, and arguments I
used, to get matters regarding the legacy settled as I wished.  My task
was a very hard one; but, as I was absolutely resolved--as my cousins saw
at length that my mind was really and immutably fixed on making a just
division of the property--as they must in their own hearts have felt the
equity of the intention; and must, besides, have been innately conscious
that in my place they would have done precisely what I wished to do--they
yielded at length so far as to consent to put the affair to arbitration.
The judges chosen were Mr. Oliver and an able lawyer: both coincided in
my opinion: I carried my point.  The instruments of transfer were drawn
out: St. John, Diana, Mary, and I, each became possessed of a competency.




CHAPTER XXXIV


It was near Christmas by the time all was settled: the season of general
holiday approached.  I now closed Morton school, taking care that the
parting should not be barren on my side.  Good fortune opens the hand as
well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely
received, is but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the
sensations.  I had long felt with pleasure that many of my rustic
scholars liked me, and when we parted, that consciousness was confirmed:
they manifested their affection plainly and strongly.  Deep was my
gratification to find I had really a place in their unsophisticated
hearts: I promised them that never a week should pass in future that I
did not visit them, and give them an hour's teaching in their school.

Mr. Rivers came up as, having seen the classes, now numbering sixty
girls, file out before me, and locked the door, I stood with the key in
my hand, exchanging a few words of special farewell with some half-dozen
of my best scholars: as decent, respectable, modest, and well-informed
young women as could be found in the ranks of the British peasantry.  And
that is saying a great deal; for after all, the British peasantry are the
best taught, best mannered, most self-respecting of any in Europe: since
those days I have seen paysannes and Bauerinnen; and the best of them
seemed to me ignorant, coarse, and besotted, compared with my Morton
girls.

"Do you consider you have got your reward for a season of exertion?"
asked Mr. Rivers, when they were gone.  "Does not the consciousness of
having done some real good in your day and generation give pleasure?"

"Doubtless."

"And you have only toiled a few months!  Would not a life devoted to the
task of regenerating your race be well spent?"

"Yes," I said; "but I could not go on for ever so: I want to enjoy my own
faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people.  I must enjoy
them now; don't recall either my mind or body to the school; I am out of
it and disposed for full holiday."

He looked grave.  "What now?  What sudden eagerness is this you evince?
What are you going to do?"

"To be active: as active as I can.  And first I must beg you to set
Hannah at liberty, and get somebody else to wait on you."

"Do you want her?"

"Yes, to go with me to Moor House.  Diana and Mary will be at home in a
week, and I want to have everything in order against their arrival."

"I understand.  I thought you were for flying off on some excursion.  It
is better so: Hannah shall go with you."

"Tell her to be ready by to-morrow then; and here is the schoolroom key:
I will give you the key of my cottage in the morning."

He took it.  "You give it up very gleefully," said he; "I don't quite
understand your light-heartedness, because I cannot tell what employment
you propose to yourself as a substitute for the one you are
relinquishing.  What aim, what purpose, what ambition in life have you
now?"

"My first aim will be to _clean down_ (do you comprehend the full force
of the expression?)--to _clean down_ Moor House from chamber to cellar;
my next to rub it up with bees-wax, oil, and an indefinite number of
cloths, till it glitters again; my third, to arrange every chair, table,
bed, carpet, with mathematical precision; afterwards I shall go near to
ruin you in coals and peat to keep up good fires in every room; and
lastly, the two days preceding that on which your sisters are expected
will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of
currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up
of materials for mince-pies, and solemnising of other culinary rites, as
words can convey but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you.
My purpose, in short, is to have all things in an absolutely perfect
state of readiness for Diana and Mary before next Thursday; and my
ambition is to give them a beau-ideal of a welcome when they come."

St. John smiled slightly: still he was dissatisfied.

"It is all very well for the present," said he; "but seriously, I trust
that when the first flush of vivacity is over, you will look a little
higher than domestic endearments and household joys."

"The best things the world has!" I interrupted.

"No, Jane, no: this world is not the scene of fruition; do not attempt to
make it so: nor of rest; do not turn slothful."

"I mean, on the contrary, to be busy."

"Jane, I excuse you for the present: two months' grace I allow you for
the full enjoyment of your new position, and for pleasing yourself with
this late-found charm of relationship; but _then_, I hope you will begin
to look beyond Moor House and Morton, and sisterly society, and the
selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilised affluence.  I hope your
energies will then once more trouble you with their strength."

I looked at him with surprise.  "St. John," I said, "I think you are
almost wicked to talk so.  I am disposed to be as content as a queen, and
you try to stir me up to restlessness!  To what end?"

"To the end of turning to profit the talents which God has committed to
your keeping; and of which He will surely one day demand a strict
account.  Jane, I shall watch you closely and anxiously--I warn you of
that.  And try to restrain the disproportionate fervour with which you
throw yourself into commonplace home pleasures.  Don't cling so
tenaciously to ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardour for an
adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite transient objects.  Do you
hear, Jane?"

"Yes; just as if you were speaking Greek.  I feel I have adequate cause
to be happy, and I _will_ be happy.  Goodbye!"

Happy at Moor House I was, and hard I worked; and so did Hannah: she was
charmed to see how jovial I could be amidst the bustle of a house turned
topsy-turvy--how I could brush, and dust, and clean, and cook.  And
really, after a day or two of confusion worse confounded, it was
delightful by degrees to invoke order from the chaos ourselves had made.
I had previously taken a journey to S--- to purchase some new furniture:
my cousins having given me _carte blanche_ to effect what alterations I
pleased, and a sum having been set aside for that purpose.  The ordinary
sitting-room and bedrooms I left much as they were: for I knew Diana and
Mary would derive more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables,
and chairs, and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest
innovations.  Still some novelty was necessary, to give to their return
the piquancy with which I wished it to be invested.  Dark handsome new
carpets and curtains, an arrangement of some carefully selected antique
ornaments in porcelain and bronze, new coverings, and mirrors, and
dressing-cases, for the toilet tables, answered the end: they looked
fresh without being glaring.  A spare parlour and bedroom I refurnished
entirely, with old mahogany and crimson upholstery: I laid canvas on the
passage, and carpets on the stairs.  When all was finished, I thought
Moor House as complete a model of bright modest snugness within, as it
was, at this season, a specimen of wintry waste and desert dreariness
without.

The eventful Thursday at length came.  They were expected about dark, and
ere dusk fires were lit upstairs and below; the kitchen was in perfect
trim; Hannah and I were dressed, and all was in readiness.

St. John arrived first.  I had entreated him to keep quite clear of the
house till everything was arranged: and, indeed, the bare idea of the
commotion, at once sordid and trivial, going on within its walls sufficed
to scare him to estrangement.  He found me in the kitchen, watching the
progress of certain cakes for tea, then baking.  Approaching the hearth,
he asked, "If I was at last satisfied with housemaid's work?"  I answered
by inviting him to accompany me on a general inspection of the result of
my labours.  With some difficulty, I got him to make the tour of the
house.  He just looked in at the doors I opened; and when he had wandered
upstairs and downstairs, he said I must have gone through a great deal of
fatigue and trouble to have effected such considerable changes in so
short a time: but not a syllable did he utter indicating pleasure in the
improved aspect of his abode.

This silence damped me.  I thought perhaps the alterations had disturbed
some old associations he valued.  I inquired whether this was the case:
no doubt in a somewhat crest-fallen tone.

"Not at all; he had, on the contrary, remarked that I had scrupulously
respected every association: he feared, indeed, I must have bestowed more
thought on the matter than it was worth.  How many minutes, for instance,
had I devoted to studying the arrangement of this very room?--By-the-bye,
could I tell him where such a book was?"

I showed him the volume on the shelf: he took it down, and withdrawing to
his accustomed window recess, he began to read it.

Now, I did not like this, reader.  St. John was a good man; but I began
to feel he had spoken truth of himself when he said he was hard and cold.
The humanities and amenities of life had no attraction for him--its
peaceful enjoyments no charm.  Literally, he lived only to aspire--after
what was good and great, certainly; but still he would never rest, nor
approve of others resting round him.  As I looked at his lofty forehead,
still and pale as a white stone--at his fine lineaments fixed in study--I
comprehended all at once that he would hardly make a good husband: that
it would be a trying thing to be his wife.  I understood, as by
inspiration, the nature of his love for Miss Oliver; I agreed with him
that it was but a love of the senses.  I comprehended how he should
despise himself for the feverish influence it exercised over him; how he
should wish to stifle and destroy it; how he should mistrust its ever
conducting permanently to his happiness or hers.  I saw he was of the
material from which nature hews her heroes--Christian and Pagan--her
lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors: a steadfast bulwark for great
interests to rest upon; but, at the fireside, too often a cold cumbrous
column, gloomy and out of place.

"This parlour is not his sphere," I reflected: "the Himalayan ridge or
Caffre bush, even the plague-cursed Guinea Coast swamp would suit him
better.  Well may he eschew the calm of domestic life; it is not his
element: there his faculties stagnate--they cannot develop or appear to
advantage.  It is in scenes of strife and danger--where courage is
proved, and energy exercised, and fortitude tasked--that he will speak
and move, the leader and superior.  A merry child would have the
advantage of him on this hearth.  He is right to choose a missionary's
career--I see it now."

"They are coming! they are coming!" cried Hannah, throwing open the
parlour door.  At the same moment old Carlo barked joyfully.  Out I ran.
It was now dark; but a rumbling of wheels was audible.  Hannah soon had a
lantern lit.  The vehicle had stopped at the wicket; the driver opened
the door: first one well-known form, then another, stepped out.  In a
minute I had my face under their bonnets, in contact first with Mary's
soft cheek, then with Diana's flowing curls.  They laughed--kissed
me--then Hannah: patted Carlo, who was half wild with delight; asked
eagerly if all was well; and being assured in the affirmative, hastened
into the house.

They were stiff with their long and jolting drive from Whitcross, and
chilled with the frosty night air; but their pleasant countenances
expanded to the cheerful firelight.  While the driver and Hannah brought
in the boxes, they demanded St. John.  At this moment he advanced from
the parlour.  They both threw their arms round his neck at once.  He gave
each one quiet kiss, said in a low tone a few words of welcome, stood a
while to be talked to, and then, intimating that he supposed they would
soon rejoin him in the parlour, withdrew there as to a place of refuge.

I had lit their candles to go upstairs, but Diana had first to give
hospitable orders respecting the driver; this done, both followed me.
They were delighted with the renovation and decorations of their rooms;
with the new drapery, and fresh carpets, and rich tinted china vases:
they expressed their gratification ungrudgingly.  I had the pleasure of
feeling that my arrangements met their wishes exactly, and that what I
had done added a vivid charm to their joyous return home.

Sweet was that evening.  My cousins, full of exhilaration, were so
eloquent in narrative and comment, that their fluency covered St. John's
taciturnity: he was sincerely glad to see his sisters; but in their glow
of fervour and flow of joy he could not sympathise.  The event of the
day--that is, the return of Diana and Mary--pleased him; but the
accompaniments of that event, the glad tumult, the garrulous glee of
reception irked him: I saw he wished the calmer morrow was come.  In the
very meridian of the night's enjoyment, about an hour after tea, a rap
was heard at the door.  Hannah entered with the intimation that "a poor
lad was come, at that unlikely time, to fetch Mr. Rivers to see his
mother, who was drawing away."

"Where does she live, Hannah?"

"Clear up at Whitcross Brow, almost four miles off, and moor and moss all
the way."

"Tell him I will go."

"I'm sure, sir, you had better not.  It's the worst road to travel after
dark that can be: there's no track at all over the bog.  And then it is
such a bitter night--the keenest wind you ever felt.  You had better send
word, sir, that you will be there in the morning."

But he was already in the passage, putting on his cloak; and without one
objection, one murmur, he departed.  It was then nine o'clock: he did not
return till midnight.  Starved and tired enough he was: but he looked
happier than when he set out.  He had performed an act of duty; made an
exertion; felt his own strength to do and deny, and was on better terms
with himself.

I am afraid the whole of the ensuing week tried his patience.  It was
Christmas week: we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort
of merry domestic dissipation.  The air of the moors, the freedom of
home, the dawn of prosperity, acted on Diana and Mary's spirits like some
life-giving elixir: they were gay from morning till noon, and from noon
till night.  They could always talk; and their discourse, witty, pithy,
original, had such charms for me, that I preferred listening to, and
sharing in it, to doing anything else.  St. John did not rebuke our
vivacity; but he escaped from it: he was seldom in the house; his parish
was large, the population scattered, and he found daily business in
visiting the sick and poor in its different districts.

One morning at breakfast, Diana, after looking a little pensive for some
minutes, asked him, "If his plans were yet unchanged."

"Unchanged and unchangeable," was the reply.  And he proceeded to inform
us that his departure from England was now definitively fixed for the
ensuing year.

"And Rosamond Oliver?" suggested Mary, the words seeming to escape her
lips involuntarily: for no sooner had she uttered them, than she made a
gesture as if wishing to recall them.  St. John had a book in his hand--it
was his unsocial custom to read at meals--he closed it, and looked up.

"Rosamond Oliver," said he, "is about to be married to Mr. Granby, one of
the best connected and most estimable residents in S-, grandson and heir
to Sir Frederic Granby: I had the intelligence from her father
yesterday."

His sisters looked at each other and at me; we all three looked at him:
he was serene as glass.

"The match must have been got up hastily," said Diana: "they cannot have
known each other long."

"But two months: they met in October at the county ball at S-.  But where
there are no obstacles to a union, as in the present case, where the
connection is in every point desirable, delays are unnecessary: they will
be married as soon as S--- Place, which Sir Frederic gives up to them,
can he refitted for their reception."

The first time I found St. John alone after this communication, I felt
tempted to inquire if the event distressed him: but he seemed so little
to need sympathy, that, so far from venturing to offer him more, I
experienced some shame at the recollection of what I had already
hazarded.  Besides, I was out of practice in talking to him: his reserve
was again frozen over, and my frankness was congealed beneath it.  He had
not kept his promise of treating me like his sisters; he continually made
little chilling differences between us, which did not at all tend to the
development of cordiality: in short, now that I was acknowledged his
kinswoman, and lived under the same roof with him, I felt the distance
between us to be far greater than when he had known me only as the
village schoolmistress.  When I remembered how far I had once been
admitted to his confidence, I could hardly comprehend his present
frigidity.

Such being the case, I felt not a little surprised when he raised his
head suddenly from the desk over which he was stooping, and said--

"You see, Jane, the battle is fought and the victory won."

Startled at being thus addressed, I did not immediately reply: after a
moment's hesitation I answered--

"But are you sure you are not in the position of those conquerors whose
triumphs have cost them too dear?  Would not such another ruin you?"

"I think not; and if I were, it does not much signify; I shall never be
called upon to contend for such another.  The event of the conflict is
decisive: my way is now clear; I thank God for it!"  So saying, he
returned to his papers and his silence.

As our mutual happiness (_i.e._, Diana's, Mary's, and mine) settled into
a quieter character, and we resumed our usual habits and regular studies,
St. John stayed more at home: he sat with us in the same room, sometimes
for hours together.  While Mary drew, Diana pursued a course of
encyclopaedic reading she had (to my awe and amazement) undertaken, and I
fagged away at German, he pondered a mystic lore of his own: that of some
Eastern tongue, the acquisition of which he thought necessary to his
plans.

Thus engaged, he appeared, sitting in his own recess, quiet and absorbed
enough; but that blue eye of his had a habit of leaving the outlandish-
looking grammar, and wandering over, and sometimes fixing upon us, his
fellow-students, with a curious intensity of observation: if caught, it
would be instantly withdrawn; yet ever and anon, it returned searchingly
to our table.  I wondered what it meant: I wondered, too, at the punctual
satisfaction he never failed to exhibit on an occasion that seemed to me
of small moment, namely, my weekly visit to Morton school; and still more
was I puzzled when, if the day was unfavourable, if there was snow, or
rain, or high wind, and his sisters urged me not to go, he would
invariably make light of their solicitude, and encourage me to accomplish
the task without regard to the elements.

"Jane is not such a weakling as you would make her," he would say: "she
can bear a mountain blast, or a shower, or a few flakes of snow, as well
as any of us.  Her constitution is both sound and elastic;--better
calculated to endure variations of climate than many more robust."

And when I returned, sometimes a good deal tired, and not a little
weather-beaten, I never dared complain, because I saw that to murmur
would be to vex him: on all occasions fortitude pleased him; the reverse
was a special annoyance.

One afternoon, however, I got leave to stay at home, because I really had
a cold.  His sisters were gone to Morton in my stead: I sat reading
Schiller; he, deciphering his crabbed Oriental scrolls.  As I exchanged a
translation for an exercise, I happened to look his way: there I found
myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye.  How long it
had been searching me through and through, and over and over, I cannot
tell: so keen was it, and yet so cold, I felt for the moment
superstitious--as if I were sitting in the room with something uncanny.

"Jane, what are you doing?"

"Learning German."

"I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee."

"You are not in earnest?"

"In such earnest that I must have it so: and I will tell you why."

He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he was
himself at present studying; that, as he advanced, he was apt to forget
the commencement; that it would assist him greatly to have a pupil with
whom he might again and again go over the elements, and so fix them
thoroughly in his mind; that his choice had hovered for some time between
me and his sisters; but that he had fixed on me because he saw I could
sit at a task the longest of the three.  Would I do him this favour?  I
should not, perhaps, have to make the sacrifice long, as it wanted now
barely three months to his departure.

St. John was not a man to be lightly refused: you felt that every
impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was deep-graved and
permanent.  I consented.  When Diana and Mary returned, the former found
her scholar transferred from her to her brother: she laughed, and both
she and Mary agreed that St. John should never have persuaded them to
such a step.  He answered quietly--

"I know it."

I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting master:
he expected me to do a great deal; and when I fulfilled his expectations,
he, in his own way, fully testified his approbation.  By degrees, he
acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind:
his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference.  I
could no longer talk or laugh freely when he was by, because a tiresomely
importunate instinct reminded me that vivacity (at least in me) was
distasteful to him.  I was so fully aware that only serious moods and
occupations were acceptable, that in his presence every effort to sustain
or follow any other became vain: I fell under a freezing spell.  When he
said "go," I went; "come," I came; "do this," I did it.  But I did not
love my servitude: I wished, many a time, he had continued to neglect me.

One evening when, at bedtime, his sisters and I stood round him, bidding
him good-night, he kissed each of them, as was his custom; and, as was
equally his custom, he gave me his hand.  Diana, who chanced to be in a
frolicsome humour (_she_ was not painfully controlled by his will; for
hers, in another way, was as strong), exclaimed--

"St. John! you used to call Jane your third sister, but you don't treat
her as such: you should kiss her too."

She pushed me towards him.  I thought Diana very provoking, and felt
uncomfortably confused; and while I was thus thinking and feeling, St.
John bent his head; his Greek face was brought to a level with mine, his
eyes questioned my eyes piercingly--he kissed me.  There are no such
things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical
cousin's salute belonged to one of these classes; but there may be
experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss.  When given, he viewed
me to learn the result; it was not striking: I am sure I did not blush;
perhaps I might have turned a little pale, for I felt as if this kiss
were a seal affixed to my fetters.  He never omitted the ceremony
afterwards, and the gravity and quiescence with which I underwent it,
seemed to invest it for him with a certain charm.

As for me, I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily
more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my
faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the
adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation.  He wanted to
train me to an elevation I could never reach; it racked me hourly to
aspire to the standard he uplifted.  The thing was as impossible as to
mould my irregular features to his correct and classic pattern, to give
to my changeable green eyes the sea-blue tint and solemn lustre of his
own.

Not his ascendancy alone, however, held me in thrall at present.  Of late
it had been easy enough for me to look sad: a cankering evil sat at my
heart and drained my happiness at its source--the evil of suspense.

Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amidst these
changes of place and fortune.  Not for a moment.  His idea was still with
me, because it was not a vapour sunshine could disperse, nor a
sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a
tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed.  The craving to
know what had become of him followed me everywhere; when I was at Morton,
I re-entered my cottage every evening to think of that; and now at Moor
House, I sought my bedroom each night to brood over it.

In the course of my necessary correspondence with Mr. Briggs about the
will, I had inquired if he knew anything of Mr. Rochester's present
residence and state of health; but, as St. John had conjectured, he was
quite ignorant of all concerning him.  I then wrote to Mrs. Fairfax,
entreating information on the subject.  I had calculated with certainty
on this step answering my end: I felt sure it would elicit an early
answer.  I was astonished when a fortnight passed without reply; but when
two months wore away, and day after day the post arrived and brought
nothing for me, I fell a prey to the keenest anxiety.

I wrote again: there was a chance of my first letter having missed.
Renewed hope followed renewed effort: it shone like the former for some
weeks, then, like it, it faded, flickered: not a line, not a word reached
me.  When half a year wasted in vain expectancy, my hope died out, and
then I felt dark indeed.

A fine spring shone round me, which I could not enjoy.  Summer
approached; Diana tried to cheer me: she said I looked ill, and wished to
accompany me to the sea-side.  This St. John opposed; he said I did not
want dissipation, I wanted employment; my present life was too
purposeless, I required an aim; and, I suppose, by way of supplying
deficiencies, he prolonged still further my lessons in Hindostanee, and
grew more urgent in requiring their accomplishment: and I, like a fool,
never thought of resisting him--I could not resist him.

One day I had come to my studies in lower spirits than usual; the ebb was
occasioned by a poignantly felt disappointment.  Hannah had told me in
the morning there was a letter for me, and when I went down to take it,
almost certain that the long-looked for tidings were vouchsafed me at
last, I found only an unimportant note from Mr. Briggs on business.  The
bitter check had wrung from me some tears; and now, as I sat poring over
the crabbed characters and flourishing tropes of an Indian scribe, my
eyes filled again.

St. John called me to his side to read; in attempting to do this my voice
failed me: words were lost in sobs.  He and I were the only occupants of
the parlour: Diana was practising her music in the drawing-room, Mary was
gardening--it was a very fine May day, clear, sunny, and breezy.  My
companion expressed no surprise at this emotion, nor did he question me
as to its cause; he only said--

"We will wait a few minutes, Jane, till you are more composed."  And
while I smothered the paroxysm with all haste, he sat calm and patient,
leaning on his desk, and looking like a physician watching with the eye
of science an expected and fully understood crisis in a patient's malady.
Having stifled my sobs, wiped my eyes, and muttered something about not
being very well that morning, I resumed my task, and succeeded in
completing it.  St. John put away my books and his, locked his desk, and
said--

"Now, Jane, you shall take a walk; and with me."

"I will call Diana and Mary."

"No; I want only one companion this morning, and that must be you.  Put
on your things; go out by the kitchen-door: take the road towards the
head of Marsh Glen: I will join you in a moment."

I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings
with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute
submission and determined revolt.  I have always faithfully observed the
one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic
vehemence, into the other; and as neither present circumstances
warranted, nor my present mood inclined me to mutiny, I observed careful
obedience to St. John's directions; and in ten minutes I was treading the
wild track of the glen, side by side with him.

The breeze was from the west: it came over the hills, sweet with scents
of heath and rush; the sky was of stainless blue; the stream descending
the ravine, swelled with past spring rains, poured along plentiful and
clear, catching golden gleams from the sun, and sapphire tints from the
firmament.  As we advanced and left the track, we trod a soft turf, mossy
fine and emerald green, minutely enamelled with a tiny white flower, and
spangled with a star-like yellow blossom: the hills, meantime, shut us
quite in; for the glen, towards its head, wound to their very core.

"Let us rest here," said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of
a battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the beck
rushed down a waterfall; and where, still a little farther, the mountain
shook off turf and flower, had only heath for raiment and crag for
gem--where it exaggerated the wild to the savage, and exchanged the fresh
for the frowning--where it guarded the forlorn hope of solitude, and a
last refuge for silence.

I took a seat: St. John stood near me.  He looked up the pass and down
the hollow; his glance wandered away with the stream, and returned to
traverse the unclouded heaven which coloured it: he removed his hat, let
the breeze stir his hair and kiss his brow.  He seemed in communion with
the genius of the haunt: with his eye he bade farewell to something.

"And I shall see it again," he said aloud, "in dreams when I sleep by the
Ganges: and again in a more remote hour--when another slumber overcomes
me--on the shore of a darker stream!"

Strange words of a strange love!  An austere patriot's passion for his
fatherland!  He sat down; for half-an-hour we never spoke; neither he to
me nor I to him: that interval past, he recommenced--

"Jane, I go in six weeks; I have taken my berth in an East Indiaman which
sails on the 20th of June."

"God will protect you; for you have undertaken His work," I answered.

"Yes," said he, "there is my glory and joy.  I am the servant of an
infallible Master.  I am not going out under human guidance, subject to
the defective laws and erring control of my feeble fellow-worms: my king,
my lawgiver, my captain, is the All-perfect.  It seems strange to me that
all round me do not burn to enlist under the same banner,--to join in the
same enterprise."

"All have not your powers, and it would be folly for the feeble to wish
to march with the strong."

"I do not speak to the feeble, or think of them: I address only such as
are worthy of the work, and competent to accomplish it."

"Those are few in number, and difficult to discover."

"You say truly; but when found, it is right to stir them up--to urge and
exhort them to the effort--to show them what their gifts are, and why
they were given--to speak Heaven's message in their ear,--to offer them,
direct from God, a place in the ranks of His chosen."

"If they are really qualified for the task, will not their own hearts be
the first to inform them of it?"

I felt as if an awful charm was framing round and gathering over me: I
trembled to hear some fatal word spoken which would at once declare and
rivet the spell.

"And what does _your_ heart say?" demanded St. John.

"My heart is mute,--my heart is mute," I answered, struck and thrilled.

"Then I must speak for it," continued the deep, relentless voice.  "Jane,
come with me to India: come as my helpmeet and fellow-labourer."

The glen and sky spun round: the hills heaved!  It was as if I had heard
a summons from Heaven--as if a visionary messenger, like him of
Macedonia, had enounced, "Come over and help us!"  But I was no
apostle,--I could not behold the herald,--I could not receive his call.

"Oh, St. John!" I cried, "have some mercy!"

I appealed to one who, in the discharge of what he believed his duty,
knew neither mercy nor remorse.  He continued--

"God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife.  It is not
personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for
labour, not for love.  A missionary's wife you must--shall be.  You shall
be mine: I claim you--not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign's
service."

"I am not fit for it: I have no vocation," I said.

He had calculated on these first objections: he was not irritated by
them.  Indeed, as he leaned back against the crag behind him, folded his
arms on his chest, and fixed his countenance, I saw he was prepared for a
long and trying opposition, and had taken in a stock of patience to last
him to its close--resolved, however, that that close should be conquest
for him.

"Humility, Jane," said he, "is the groundwork of Christian virtues: you
say right that you are not fit for the work.  Who is fit for it?  Or who,
that ever was truly called, believed himself worthy of the summons?  I,
for instance, am but dust and ashes.  With St. Paul, I acknowledge myself
the chiefest of sinners; but I do not suffer this sense of my personal
vileness to daunt me.  I know my Leader: that He is just as well as
mighty; and while He has chosen a feeble instrument to perform a great
task, He will, from the boundless stores of His providence, supply the
inadequacy of the means to the end.  Think like me, Jane--trust like me.
It is the Rock of Ages I ask you to lean on: do not doubt but it will
bear the weight of your human weakness."

"I do not understand a missionary life: I have never studied missionary
labours."

"There I, humble as I am, can give you the aid you want: I can set you
your task from hour to hour; stand by you always; help you from moment to
moment.  This I could do in the beginning: soon (for I know your powers)
you would be as strong and apt as myself, and would not require my help."

"But my powers--where are they for this undertaking?  I do not feel them.
Nothing speaks or stirs in me while you talk.  I am sensible of no light
kindling--no life quickening--no voice counselling or cheering.  Oh, I
wish I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a
rayless dungeon, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths--the fear
of being persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish!"

"I have an answer for you--hear it.  I have watched you ever since we
first met: I have made you my study for ten months.  I have proved you in
that time by sundry tests: and what have I seen and elicited?  In the
village school I found you could perform well, punctually, uprightly,
labour uncongenial to your habits and inclinations; I saw you could
perform it with capacity and tact: you could win while you controlled.  In
the calm with which you learnt you had become suddenly rich, I read a
mind clear of the vice of Demas:--lucre had no undue power over you.  In
the resolute readiness with which you cut your wealth into four shares,
keeping but one to yourself, and relinquishing the three others to the
claim of abstract justice, I recognised a soul that revelled in the flame
and excitement of sacrifice.  In the tractability with which, at my wish,
you forsook a study in which you were interested, and adopted another
because it interested me; in the untiring assiduity with which you have
since persevered in it--in the unflagging energy and unshaken temper with
which you have met its difficulties--I acknowledge the complement of the
qualities I seek.  Jane, you are docile, diligent, disinterested,
faithful, constant, and courageous; very gentle, and very heroic: cease
to mistrust yourself--I can trust you unreservedly.  As a conductress of
Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance will
be to me invaluable."

My iron shroud contracted round me; persuasion advanced with slow sure
step.  Shut my eyes as I would, these last words of his succeeded in
making the way, which had seemed blocked up, comparatively clear.  My
work, which had appeared so vague, so hopelessly diffuse, condensed
itself as he proceeded, and assumed a definite form under his shaping
hand.  He waited for an answer.  I demanded a quarter of an hour to
think, before I again hazarded a reply.

"Very willingly," he rejoined; and rising, he strode a little distance up
the pass, threw himself down on a swell of heath, and there lay still.

{He threw himself down on a swell of heath, and there lay still:
p389.jpg}

"I _can_ do what he wants me to do: I am forced to see and acknowledge
that," I meditated,--"that is, if life be spared me.  But I feel mine is
not the existence to be long protracted under an Indian sun.  What then?
He does not care for that: when my time came to die, he would resign me,
in all serenity and sanctity, to the God who gave me.  The case is very
plain before me.  In leaving England, I should leave a loved but empty
land--Mr. Rochester is not there; and if he were, what is, what can that
ever be to me?  My business is to live without him now: nothing so
absurd, so weak as to drag on from day to day, as if I were waiting some
impossible change in circumstances, which might reunite me to him.  Of
course (as St. John once said) I must seek another interest in life to
replace the one lost: is not the occupation he now offers me truly the
most glorious man can adopt or God assign?  Is it not, by its noble cares
and sublime results, the one best calculated to fill the void left by
uptorn affections and demolished hopes?  I believe I must say, Yes--and
yet I shudder.  Alas!  If I join St. John, I abandon half myself: if I go
to India, I go to premature death.  And how will the interval between
leaving England for India, and India for the grave, be filled?  Oh, I
know well!  That, too, is very clear to my vision.  By straining to
satisfy St. John till my sinews ache, I _shall_ satisfy him--to the
finest central point and farthest outward circle of his expectations.  If
I _do_ go with him--if I _do_ make the sacrifice he urges, I will make it
absolutely: I will throw all on the altar--heart, vitals, the entire
victim.  He will never love me; but he shall approve me; I will show him
energies he has not yet seen, resources he has never suspected.  Yes, I
can work as hard as he can, and with as little grudging.

"Consent, then, to his demand is possible: but for one item--one dreadful
item.  It is--that he asks me to be his wife, and has no more of a
husband's heart for me than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the
stream is foaming in yonder gorge.  He prizes me as a soldier would a
good weapon; and that is all.  Unmarried to him, this would never grieve
me; but can I let him complete his calculations--coolly put into practice
his plans--go through the wedding ceremony?  Can I receive from him the
bridal ring, endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would
scrupulously observe) and know that the spirit was quite absent?  Can I
bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice
made on principle?  No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous.  I will
never undergo it.  As his sister, I might accompany him--not as his wife:
I will tell him so."

I looked towards the knoll: there he lay, still as a prostrate column;
his face turned to me: his eye beaming watchful and keen.  He started to
his feet and approached me.

"I am ready to go to India, if I may go free."

"Your answer requires a commentary," he said; "it is not clear."

"You have hitherto been my adopted brother--I, your adopted sister: let
us continue as such: you and I had better not marry."

He shook his head.  "Adopted fraternity will not do in this case.  If you
were my real sister it would be different: I should take you, and seek no
wife.  But as it is, either our union must be consecrated and sealed by
marriage, or it cannot exist: practical obstacles oppose themselves to
any other plan.  Do you not see it, Jane?  Consider a moment--your strong
sense will guide you."

I did consider; and still my sense, such as it was, directed me only to
the fact that we did not love each other as man and wife should: and
therefore it inferred we ought not to marry.  I said so.  "St. John," I
returned, "I regard you as a brother--you, me as a sister: so let us
continue."

"We cannot--we cannot," he answered, with short, sharp determination: "it
would not do.  You have said you will go with me to India: remember--you
have said that."

"Conditionally."

"Well--well.  To the main point--the departure with me from England, the
co-operation with me in my future labours--you do not object.  You have
already as good as put your hand to the plough: you are too consistent to
withdraw it.  You have but one end to keep in view--how the work you have
undertaken can best be done.  Simplify your complicated interests,
feelings, thoughts, wishes, aims; merge all considerations in one
purpose: that of fulfilling with effect--with power--the mission of your
great Master.  To do so, you must have a coadjutor: not a brother--that
is a loose tie--but a husband.  I, too, do not want a sister: a sister
might any day be taken from me.  I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can
influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death."

I shuddered as he spoke: I felt his influence in my marrow--his hold on
my limbs.

"Seek one elsewhere than in me, St. John: seek one fitted to you."

"One fitted to my purpose, you mean--fitted to my vocation.  Again I tell
you it is not the insignificant private individual--the mere man, with
the man's selfish senses--I wish to mate: it is the missionary."

"And I will give the missionary my energies--it is all he wants--but not
myself: that would be only adding the husk and shell to the kernel.  For
them he has no use: I retain them."

"You cannot--you ought not.  Do you think God will be satisfied with half
an oblation?  Will He accept a mutilated sacrifice?  It is the cause of
God I advocate: it is under His standard I enlist you.  I cannot accept
on His behalf a divided allegiance: it must be entire."

"Oh!  I will give my heart to God," I said.  "_You_ do not want it."

I will not swear, reader, that there was not something of repressed
sarcasm both in the tone in which I uttered this sentence, and in the
feeling that accompanied it.  I had silently feared St. John till now,
because I had not understood him.  He had held me in awe, because he had
held me in doubt.  How much of him was saint, how much mortal, I could
not heretofore tell: but revelations were being made in this conference:
the analysis of his nature was proceeding before my eyes.  I saw his
fallibilities: I comprehended them.  I understood that, sitting there
where I did, on the bank of heath, and with that handsome form before me,
I sat at the feet of a man, caring as I.  The veil fell from his hardness
and despotism.  Having felt in him the presence of these qualities, I
felt his imperfection and took courage.  I was with an equal--one with
whom I might argue--one whom, if I saw good, I might resist.

He was silent after I had uttered the last sentence, and I presently
risked an upward glance at his countenance.

His eye, bent on me, expressed at once stern surprise and keen inquiry.
"Is she sarcastic, and sarcastic to _me_!" it seemed to say.  "What does
this signify?"

"Do not let us forget that this is a solemn matter," he said ere long;
"one of which we may neither think nor talk lightly without sin.  I
trust, Jane, you are in earnest when you say you will serve your heart to
God: it is all I want.  Once wrench your heart from man, and fix it on
your Maker, the advancement of that Maker's spiritual kingdom on earth
will be your chief delight and endeavour; you will be ready to do at once
whatever furthers that end.  You will see what impetus would be given to
your efforts and mine by our physical and mental union in marriage: the
only union that gives a character of permanent conformity to the
destinies and designs of human beings; and, passing over all minor
caprices--all trivial difficulties and delicacies of feeling--all scruple
about the degree, kind, strength or tenderness of mere personal
inclination--you will hasten to enter into that union at once."

"Shall I?" I said briefly; and I looked at his features, beautiful in
their harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity; at his
brow, commanding but not open; at his eyes, bright and deep and
searching, but never soft; at his tall imposing figure; and fancied
myself in idea _his wife_.  Oh! it would never do!  As his curate, his
comrade, all would be right: I would cross oceans with him in that
capacity; toil under Eastern suns, in Asian deserts with him in that
office; admire and emulate his courage and devotion and vigour;
accommodate quietly to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his
ineradicable ambition; discriminate the Christian from the man:
profoundly esteem the one, and freely forgive the other.  I should suffer
often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity: my body would be
under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free.  I
should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural unenslaved
feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness.  There would
be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came,
and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered which his austerity
could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as
his wife--at his side always, and always restrained, and always
checked--forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel
it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame
consumed vital after vital--_this_ would be unendurable.

"St. John!" I exclaimed, when I had got so far in my meditation.

"Well?" he answered icily.

"I repeat I freely consent to go with you as your fellow-missionary, but
not as your wife; I cannot marry you and become part of you."

"A part of me you must become," he answered steadily; "otherwise the
whole bargain is void.  How can I, a man not yet thirty, take out with me
to India a girl of nineteen, unless she be married to me?  How can we be
for ever together--sometimes in solitudes, sometimes amidst savage
tribes--and unwed?"

"Very well," I said shortly; "under the circumstances, quite as well as
if I were either your real sister, or a man and a clergyman like
yourself."

"It is known that you are not my sister; I cannot introduce you as such:
to attempt it would be to fasten injurious suspicions on us both.  And
for the rest, though you have a man's vigorous brain, you have a woman's
heart and--it would not do."

"It would do," I affirmed with some disdain, "perfectly well.  I have a
woman's heart, but not where you are concerned; for you I have only a
comrade's constancy; a fellow-soldier's frankness, fidelity, fraternity,
if you like; a neophyte's respect and submission to his hierophant:
nothing more--don't fear."

"It is what I want," he said, speaking to himself; "it is just what I
want.  And there are obstacles in the way: they must be hewn down.  Jane,
you would not repent marrying me--be certain of that; we _must_ be
married.  I repeat it: there is no other way; and undoubtedly enough of
love would follow upon marriage to render the union right even in your
eyes."

"I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up and
stood before him, leaning my back against the rock.  "I scorn the
counterfeit sentiment you offer: yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you
offer it."

He looked at me fixedly, compressing his well-cut lips while he did so.
Whether he was incensed or surprised, or what, it was not easy to tell:
he could command his countenance thoroughly.

"I scarcely expected to hear that expression from you," he said: "I think
I have done and uttered nothing to deserve scorn."

I was touched by his gentle tone, and overawed by his high, calm mien.

"Forgive me the words, St. John; but it is your own fault that I have
been roused to speak so unguardedly.  You have introduced a topic on
which our natures are at variance--a topic we should never discuss: the
very name of love is an apple of discord between us.  If the reality were
required, what should we do?  How should we feel?  My dear cousin,
abandon your scheme of marriage--forget it."

"No," said he; "it is a long-cherished scheme, and the only one which can
secure my great end: but I shall urge you no further at present.
To-morrow, I leave home for Cambridge: I have many friends there to whom
I should wish to say farewell.  I shall be absent a fortnight--take that
space of time to consider my offer: and do not forget that if you reject
it, it is not me you deny, but God.  Through my means, He opens to you a
noble career; as my wife only can you enter upon it.  Refuse to be my
wife, and you limit yourself for ever to a track of selfish ease and
barren obscurity.  Tremble lest in that case you should be numbered with
those who have denied the faith, and are worse than infidels!"

He had done.  Turning from me, he once more

   "Looked to river, looked to hill."

But this time his feelings were all pent in his heart: I was not worthy
to hear them uttered.  As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in
his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere
and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected
submission--the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has
detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to
sympathise: in short, as a man, he would have wished to coerce me into
obedience: it was only as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with
my perversity, and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance.

That night, after he had kissed his sisters, he thought proper to forget
even to shake hands with me, but left the room in silence.  I--who,
though I had no love, had much friendship for him--was hurt by the marked
omission: so much hurt that tears started to my eyes.

"I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane," said Diana, "during
your walk on the moor.  But go after him; he is now lingering in the
passage expecting you--he will make it up."

I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be
happy than dignified; and I ran after him--he stood at the foot of the
stairs.

"Good-night, St. John," said I.

"Good-night, Jane," he replied calmly.

"Then shake hands," I added.

What a cold, loose touch, he impressed on my fingers!  He was deeply
displeased by what had occurred that day; cordiality would not warm, nor
tears move him.  No happy reconciliation was to be had with him--no
cheering smile or generous word: but still the Christian was patient and
placid; and when I asked him if he forgave me, he answered that he was
not in the habit of cherishing the remembrance of vexation; that he had
nothing to forgive, not having been offended.

And with that answer he left me.  I would much rather he had knocked me
down.




CHAPTER XXXV


He did not leave for Cambridge the next day, as he had said he would.  He
deferred his departure a whole week, and during that time he made me feel
what severe punishment a good yet stern, a conscientious yet implacable
man can inflict on one who has offended him.  Without one overt act of
hostility, one upbraiding word, he contrived to impress me momently with
the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favour.

Not that St. John harboured a spirit of unchristian vindictiveness--not
that he would have injured a hair of my head, if it had been fully in his
power to do so.  Both by nature and principle, he was superior to the
mean gratification of vengeance: he had forgiven me for saying I scorned
him and his love, but he had not forgotten the words; and as long as he
and I lived he never would forget them.  I saw by his look, when he
turned to me, that they were always written on the air between me and
him; whenever I spoke, they sounded in my voice to his ear, and their
echo toned every answer he gave me.

He did not abstain from conversing with me: he even called me as usual
each morning to join him at his desk; and I fear the corrupt man within
him had a pleasure unimparted to, and unshared by, the pure Christian, in
evincing with what skill he could, while acting and speaking apparently
just as usual, extract from every deed and every phrase the spirit of
interest and approval which had formerly communicated a certain austere
charm to his language and manner.  To me, he was in reality become no
longer flesh, but marble; his eye was a cold, bright, blue gem; his
tongue a speaking instrument--nothing more.

All this was torture to me--refined, lingering torture.  It kept up a
slow fire of indignation and a trembling trouble of grief, which harassed
and crushed me altogether.  I felt how--if I were his wife, this good
man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon kill me, without drawing
from my veins a single drop of blood, or receiving on his own crystal
conscience the faintest stain of crime.  Especially I felt this when I
made any attempt to propitiate him.  No ruth met my ruth.  _He_
experienced no suffering from estrangement--no yearning after
reconciliation; and though, more than once, my fast falling tears
blistered the page over which we both bent, they produced no more effect
on him than if his heart had been really a matter of stone or metal.  To
his sisters, meantime, he was somewhat kinder than usual: as if afraid
that mere coldness would not sufficiently convince me how completely I
was banished and banned, he added the force of contrast; and this I am
sure he did not by force, but on principle.

The night before he left home, happening to see him walking in the garden
about sunset, and remembering, as I looked at him, that this man,
alienated as he now was, had once saved my life, and that we were near
relations, I was moved to make a last attempt to regain his friendship.  I
went out and approached him as he stood leaning over the little gate; I
spoke to the point at once.

"St. John, I am unhappy because you are still angry with me.  Let us be
friends."

"I hope we are friends," was the unmoved reply; while he still watched
the rising of the moon, which he had been contemplating as I approached.

"No, St. John, we are not friends as we were.  You know that."

"Are we not?  That is wrong.  For my part, I wish you no ill and all
good."

"I believe you, St. John; for I am sure you are incapable of wishing any
one ill; but, as I am your kinswoman, I should desire somewhat more of
affection than that sort of general philanthropy you extend to mere
strangers."

"Of course," he said.  "Your wish is reasonable, and I am far from
regarding you as a stranger."

This, spoken in a cool, tranquil tone, was mortifying and baffling
enough.  Had I attended to the suggestions of pride and ire, I should
immediately have left him; but something worked within me more strongly
than those feelings could.  I deeply venerated my cousin's talent and
principle.  His friendship was of value to me: to lose it tried me
severely.  I would not so soon relinquish the attempt to reconquer it.

"Must we part in this way, St. John?  And when you go to India, will you
leave me so, without a kinder word than you have yet spoken?"

He now turned quite from the moon and faced me.

"When I go to India, Jane, will I leave you!  What! do you not go to
India?"

"You said I could not unless I married you."

"And you will not marry me!  You adhere to that resolution?"

Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into
the ice of their questions?  How much of the fall of the avalanche is in
their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure?

"No.  St. John, I will not marry you.  I adhere to my resolution."

The avalanche had shaken and slid a little forward, but it did not yet
crash down.

"Once more, why this refusal?" he asked.

"Formerly," I answered, "because you did not love me; now, I reply,
because you almost hate me.  If I were to marry you, you would kill me.
You are killing me now."

His lips and cheeks turned white--quite white.

"_I should kill you_--_I am killing you_?  Your words are such as ought
not to be used: violent, unfeminine, and untrue.  They betray an
unfortunate state of mind: they merit severe reproof: they would seem
inexcusable, but that it is the duty of man to forgive his fellow even
until seventy-and-seven times."

I had finished the business now.  While earnestly wishing to erase from
his mind the trace of my former offence, I had stamped on that tenacious
surface another and far deeper impression, I had burnt it in.

"Now you will indeed hate me," I said.  "It is useless to attempt to
conciliate you: I see I have made an eternal enemy of you."

A fresh wrong did these words inflict: the worse, because they touched on
the truth.  That bloodless lip quivered to a temporary spasm.  I knew the
steely ire I had whetted.  I was heart-wrung.

"You utterly misinterpret my words," I said, at once seizing his hand: "I
have no intention to grieve or pain you--indeed, I have not."

Most bitterly he smiled--most decidedly he withdrew his hand from mine.
"And now you recall your promise, and will not go to India at all, I
presume?" said he, after a considerable pause.

"Yes, I will, as your assistant," I answered.

A very long silence succeeded.  What struggle there was in him between
Nature and Grace in this interval, I cannot tell: only singular gleams
scintillated in his eyes, and strange shadows passed over his face.  He
spoke at last.

"I before proved to you the absurdity of a single woman of your age
proposing to accompany abroad a single man of mine.  I proved it to you
in such terms as, I should have thought, would have prevented your ever
again alluding to the plan.  That you have done so, I regret--for your
sake."

I interrupted him.  Anything like a tangible reproach gave me courage at
once.  "Keep to common sense, St. John: you are verging on nonsense.  You
pretend to be shocked by what I have said.  You are not really shocked:
for, with your superior mind, you cannot be either so dull or so
conceited as to misunderstand my meaning.  I say again, I will be your
curate, if you like, but never your wife."

Again he turned lividly pale; but, as before, controlled his passion
perfectly.  He answered emphatically but calmly--

"A female curate, who is not my wife, would never suit me.  With me,
then, it seems, you cannot go: but if you are sincere in your offer, I
will, while in town, speak to a married missionary, whose wife needs a
coadjutor.  Your own fortune will make you independent of the Society's
aid; and thus you may still be spared the dishonour of breaking your
promise and deserting the band you engaged to join."

Now I never had, as the reader knows, either given any formal promise or
entered into any engagement; and this language was all much too hard and
much too despotic for the occasion.  I replied--

"There is no dishonour, no breach of promise, no desertion in the case.  I
am not under the slightest obligation to go to India, especially with
strangers.  With you I would have ventured much, because I admire,
confide in, and, as a sister, I love you; but I am convinced that, go
when and with whom I would, I should not live long in that climate."

"Ah! you are afraid of yourself," he said, curling his lip.

"I am.  God did not give me my life to throw away; and to do as you wish
me would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing suicide.
Moreover, before I definitively resolve on quitting England, I will know
for certain whether I cannot be of greater use by remaining in it than by
leaving it."

"What do you mean?"

"It would be fruitless to attempt to explain; but there is a point on
which I have long endured painful doubt, and I can go nowhere till by
some means that doubt is removed."

"I know where your heart turns and to what it clings.  The interest you
cherish is lawless and unconsecrated.  Long since you ought to have
crushed it: now you should blush to allude to it.  You think of Mr.
Rochester?"

It was true.  I confessed it by silence.

"Are you going to seek Mr. Rochester?"

"I must find out what is become of him."

"It remains for me, then," he said, "to remember you in my prayers, and
to entreat God for you, in all earnestness, that you may not indeed
become a castaway.  I had thought I recognised in you one of the chosen.
But God sees not as man sees: _His_ will be done--"

He opened the gate, passed through it, and strayed away down the glen.  He
was soon out of sight.

On re-entering the parlour, I found Diana standing at the window, looking
very thoughtful.  Diana was a great deal taller than I: she put her hand
on my shoulder, and, stooping, examined my face.

"Jane," she said, "you are always agitated and pale now.  I am sure there
is something the matter.  Tell me what business St. John and you have on
hands.  I have watched you this half hour from the window; you must
forgive my being such a spy, but for a long time I have fancied I hardly
know what.  St. John is a strange being--"

She paused--I did not speak: soon she resumed--

"That brother of mine cherishes peculiar views of some sort respecting
you, I am sure: he has long distinguished you by a notice and interest he
never showed to any one else--to what end?  I wish he loved you--does he,
Jane?"

I put her cool hand to my hot forehead; "No, Die, not one whit."

"Then why does he follow you so with his eyes, and get you so frequently
alone with him, and keep you so continually at his side?  Mary and I had
both concluded he wished you to marry him."

"He does--he has asked me to be his wife."

Diana clapped her hands.  "That is just what we hoped and thought!  And
you will marry him, Jane, won't you?  And then he will stay in England."

"Far from that, Diana; his sole idea in proposing to me is to procure a
fitting fellow-labourer in his Indian toils."

"What!  He wishes you to go to India?"

"Yes."

"Madness!" she exclaimed.  "You would not live three months there, I am
certain.  You never shall go: you have not consented, have you, Jane?"

"I have refused to marry him--"

"And have consequently displeased him?" she suggested.

"Deeply: he will never forgive me, I fear: yet I offered to accompany him
as his sister."

"It was frantic folly to do so, Jane.  Think of the task you
undertook--one of incessant fatigue, where fatigue kills even the strong,
and you are weak.  St. John--you know him--would urge you to
impossibilities: with him there would be no permission to rest during the
hot hours; and unfortunately, I have noticed, whatever he exacts, you
force yourself to perform.  I am astonished you found courage to refuse
his hand.  You do not love him then, Jane?"

"Not as a husband."

"Yet he is a handsome fellow."

"And I am so plain, you see, Die.  We should never suit."

"Plain!  You?  Not at all.  You are much too pretty, as well as too good,
to be grilled alive in Calcutta."  And again she earnestly conjured me to
give up all thoughts of going out with her brother.

"I must indeed," I said; "for when just now I repeated the offer of
serving him for a deacon, he expressed himself shocked at my want of
decency.  He seemed to think I had committed an impropriety in proposing
to accompany him unmarried: as if I had not from the first hoped to find
in him a brother, and habitually regarded him as such."

"What makes you say he does not love you, Jane?"

"You should hear himself on the subject.  He has again and again
explained that it is not himself, but his office he wishes to mate.  He
has told me I am formed for labour--not for love: which is true, no
doubt.  But, in my opinion, if I am not formed for love, it follows that
I am not formed for marriage.  Would it not be strange, Die, to be
chained for life to a man who regarded one but as a useful tool?"

"Insupportable--unnatural--out of the question!"

"And then," I continued, "though I have only sisterly affection for him
now, yet, if forced to be his wife, I can imagine the possibility of
conceiving an inevitable, strange, torturing kind of love for him,
because he is so talented; and there is often a certain heroic grandeur
in his look, manner, and conversation.  In that case, my lot would become
unspeakably wretched.  He would not want me to love him; and if I showed
the feeling, he would make me sensible that it was a superfluity,
unrequired by him, unbecoming in me.  I know he would."

"And yet St. John is a good man," said Diana.

"He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings
and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views.  It is
better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in
his progress, he should trample them down.  Here he comes!  I will leave
you, Diana."  And I hastened upstairs as I saw him entering the garden.

But I was forced to meet him again at supper.  During that meal he
appeared just as composed as usual.  I had thought he would hardly speak
to me, and I was certain he had given up the pursuit of his matrimonial
scheme: the sequel showed I was mistaken on both points.  He addressed me
precisely in his ordinary manner, or what had, of late, been his ordinary
manner--one scrupulously polite.  No doubt he had invoked the help of the
Holy Spirit to subdue the anger I had roused in him, and now believed he
had forgiven me once more.

For the evening reading before prayers, he selected the twenty-first
chapter of Revelation.  It was at all times pleasant to listen while from
his lips fell the words of the Bible: never did his fine voice sound at
once so sweet and full--never did his manner become so impressive in its
noble simplicity, as when he delivered the oracles of God: and to-night
that voice took a more solemn tone--that manner a more thrilling
meaning--as he sat in the midst of his household circle (the May moon
shining in through the uncurtained window, and rendering almost
unnecessary the light of the candle on the table): as he sat there,
bending over the great old Bible, and described from its page the vision
of the new heaven and the new earth--told how God would come to dwell
with men, how He would wipe away all tears from their eyes, and promised
that there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, nor any
more pain, because the former things were passed away.

The succeeding words thrilled me strangely as he spoke them: especially
as I felt, by the slight, indescribable alteration in sound, that in
uttering them, his eye had turned on me.

"He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and
he shall be my son.  But," was slowly, distinctly read, "the fearful, the
unbelieving, &c., shall have their part in the lake which burneth with
fire and brimstone, which is the second death."

Henceforward, I knew what fate St. John feared for me.

A calm, subdued triumph, blent with a longing earnestness, marked his
enunciation of the last glorious verses of that chapter.  The reader
believed his name was already written in the Lamb's book of life, and he
yearned after the hour which should admit him to the city to which the
kings of the earth bring their glory and honour; which has no need of sun
or moon to shine in it, because the glory of God lightens it, and the
Lamb is the light thereof.

In the prayer following the chapter, all his energy gathered--all his
stern zeal woke: he was in deep earnest, wrestling with God, and resolved
on a conquest.  He supplicated strength for the weak-hearted; guidance
for wanderers from the fold: a return, even at the eleventh hour, for
those whom the temptations of the world and the flesh were luring from
the narrow path.  He asked, he urged, he claimed the boon of a brand
snatched from the burning.  Earnestness is ever deeply solemn: first, as
I listened to that prayer, I wondered at his; then, when it continued and
rose, I was touched by it, and at last awed.  He felt the greatness and
goodness of his purpose so sincerely: others who heard him plead for it,
could not but feel it too.

The prayer over, we took leave of him: he was to go at a very early hour
in the morning.  Diana and Mary having kissed him, left the room--in
compliance, I think, with a whispered hint from him: I tendered my hand,
and wished him a pleasant journey.

"Thank you, Jane.  As I said, I shall return from Cambridge in a
fortnight: that space, then, is yet left you for reflection.  If I
listened to human pride, I should say no more to you of marriage with me;
but I listen to my duty, and keep steadily in view my first aim--to do
all things to the glory of God.  My Master was long-suffering: so will I
be.  I cannot give you up to perdition as a vessel of wrath:
repent--resolve, while there is yet time.  Remember, we are bid to work
while it is day--warned that 'the night cometh when no man shall work.'
Remember the fate of Dives, who had his good things in this life.  God
give you strength to choose that better part which shall not be taken
from you!"

He laid his hand on my head as he uttered the last words.  He had spoken
earnestly, mildly: his look was not, indeed, that of a lover beholding
his mistress, but it was that of a pastor recalling his wandering
sheep--or better, of a guardian angel watching the soul for which he is
responsible.  All men of talent, whether they be men of feeling or not;
whether they be zealots, or aspirants, or despots--provided only they be
sincere--have their sublime moments, when they subdue and rule.  I felt
veneration for St. John--veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me
at once to the point I had so long shunned.  I was tempted to cease
struggling with him--to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf
of his existence, and there lose my own.  I was almost as hard beset by
him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another.  I was
a fool both times.  To have yielded then would have been an error of
principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgment.  So
I think at this hour, when I look back to the crisis through the quiet
medium of time: I was unconscious of folly at the instant.

I stood motionless under my hierophant's touch.  My refusals were
forgotten--my fears overcome--my wrestlings paralysed.  The
Impossible--_i.e._, my marriage with St. John--was fast becoming the
Possible.  All was changing utterly with a sudden sweep.  Religion
called--Angels beckoned--God commanded--life rolled together like a
scroll--death's gates opening, showed eternity beyond: it seemed, that
for safety and bliss there, all here might be sacrificed in a second.  The
dim room was full of visions.

"Could you decide now?" asked the missionary.  The inquiry was put in
gentle tones: he drew me to him as gently.  Oh, that gentleness! how far
more potent is it than force!  I could resist St. John's wrath: I grew
pliant as a reed under his kindness.  Yet I knew all the time, if I
yielded now, I should not the less be made to repent, some day, of my
former rebellion.  His nature was not changed by one hour of solemn
prayer: it was only elevated.

"I could decide if I were but certain," I answered: "were I but convinced
that it is God's will I should marry you, I could vow to marry you here
and now--come afterwards what would!"

"My prayers are heard!" ejaculated St. John.  He pressed his hand firmer
on my head, as if he claimed me: he surrounded me with his arm, _almost_
as if he loved me (I say _almost_--I knew the difference--for I had felt
what it was to be loved; but, like him, I had now put love out of the
question, and thought only of duty).  I contended with my inward dimness
of vision, before which clouds yet rolled.  I sincerely, deeply,
fervently longed to do what was right; and only that.  "Show me, show me
the path!" I entreated of Heaven.  I was excited more than I had ever
been; and whether what followed was the effect of excitement the reader
shall judge.

All the house was still; for I believe all, except St. John and myself,
were now retired to rest.  The one candle was dying out: the room was
full of moonlight.  My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb.
Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it
through, and passed at once to my head and extremities.  The feeling was
not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as
startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had
been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake.
They rose expectant: eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my
bones.

"What have you heard?  What do you see?" asked St. John.  I saw nothing,
but I heard a voice somewhere cry--

"Jane!  Jane!  Jane!"--nothing more.

"O God! what is it?" I gasped.

I might have said, "Where is it?" for it did not seem in the room--nor in
the house--nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air--nor from
under the earth--nor from overhead.  I had heard it--where, or whence,
for ever impossible to know!  And it was the voice of a human being--a
known, loved, well-remembered voice--that of Edward Fairfax Rochester;
and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently.

"I am coming!" I cried.  "Wait for me!  Oh, I will come!"  I flew to the
door and looked into the passage: it was dark.  I ran out into the
garden: it was void.

"Where are you?" I exclaimed.

The hills beyond Marsh Glen sent the answer faintly back--"Where are
you?"  I listened.  The wind sighed low in the firs: all was moorland
loneliness and midnight hush.

"Down superstition!" I commented, as that spectre rose up black by the
black yew at the gate.  "This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft:
it is the work of nature.  She was roused, and did--no miracle--but her
best."

I broke from St. John, who had followed, and would have detained me.  It
was _my_ time to assume ascendency.  _My_ powers were in play and in
force.  I told him to forbear question or remark; I desired him to leave
me: I must and would be alone.  He obeyed at once.  Where there is energy
to command well enough, obedience never fails.  I mounted to my chamber;
locked myself in; fell on my knees; and prayed in my way--a different way
to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.  I seemed to penetrate
very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His
feet.  I rose from the thanksgiving--took a resolve--and lay down,
unscared, enlightened--eager but for the daylight.




CHAPTER XXXVI


The daylight came.  I rose at dawn.  I busied myself for an hour or two
with arranging my things in my chamber, drawers, and wardrobe, in the
order wherein I should wish to leave them during a brief absence.
Meantime, I heard St. John quit his room.  He stopped at my door: I
feared he would knock--no, but a slip of paper was passed under the door.
I took it up.  It bore these words--

"You left me too suddenly last night.  Had you stayed but a little
longer, you would have laid your hand on the Christian's cross and the
angel's crown.  I shall expect your clear decision when I return this day
fortnight.  Meantime, watch and pray that you enter not into temptation:
the spirit, I trust, is willing, but the flesh, I see, is weak.  I shall
pray for you hourly.--Yours, ST. JOHN."

"My spirit," I answered mentally, "is willing to do what is right; and my
flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when
once that will is distinctly known to me.  At any rate, it shall be
strong enough to search--inquire--to grope an outlet from this cloud of
doubt, and find the open day of certainty."

It was the first of June; yet the morning was overcast and chilly: rain
beat fast on my casement.  I heard the front-door open, and St. John pass
out.  Looking through the window, I saw him traverse the garden.  He took
the way over the misty moors in the direction of Whitcross--there he
would meet the coach.

"In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin," thought
I: "I too have a coach to meet at Whitcross.  I too have some to see and
ask after in England, before I depart for ever."

It wanted yet two hours of breakfast-time.  I filled the interval in
walking softly about my room, and pondering the visitation which had
given my plans their present bent.  I recalled that inward sensation I
had experienced: for I could recall it, with all its unspeakable
strangeness.  I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence
it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in _me_--not in the external
world.  I asked was it a mere nervous impression--a delusion?  I could
not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration.  The wondrous
shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which shook the foundations
of Paul and Silas's prison; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell
and loosed its bands--it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it
sprang trembling, listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a cry on my
startled ear, and in my quaking heart and through my spirit, which
neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success of
one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous
body.

"Ere many days," I said, as I terminated my musings, "I will know
something of him whose voice seemed last night to summon me.  Letters
have proved of no avail--personal inquiry shall replace them."

At breakfast I announced to Diana and Mary that I was going a journey,
and should be absent at least four days.

"Alone, Jane?" they asked.

"Yes; it was to see or hear news of a friend about whom I had for some
time been uneasy."

They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they had
believed me to be without any friends save them: for, indeed, I had often
said so; but, with their true natural delicacy, they abstained from
comment, except that Diana asked me if I was sure I was well enough to
travel.  I looked very pale, she observed.  I replied, that nothing ailed
me save anxiety of mind, which I hoped soon to alleviate.

It was easy to make my further arrangements; for I was troubled with no
inquiries--no surmises.  Having once explained to them that I could not
now be explicit about my plans, they kindly and wisely acquiesced in the
silence with which I pursued them, according to me the privilege of free
action I should under similar circumstances have accorded them.

I left Moor House at three o'clock p.m., and soon after four I stood at
the foot of the sign-post of Whitcross, waiting the arrival of the coach
which was to take me to distant Thornfield.  Amidst the silence of those
solitary roads and desert hills, I heard it approach from a great
distance.  It was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one
summer evening on this very spot--how desolate, and hopeless, and
objectless!  It stopped as I beckoned.  I entered--not now obliged to
part with my whole fortune as the price of its accommodation.  Once more
on the road to Thornfield, I felt like the messenger-pigeon flying home.

It was a journey of six-and-thirty hours.  I had set out from Whitcross
on a Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday morning the
coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn, situated in the midst
of scenery whose green hedges and large fields and low pastoral hills
(how mild of feature and verdant of hue compared with the stern North-
Midland moors of Morton!) met my eye like the lineaments of a once
familiar face.  Yes, I knew the character of this landscape: I was sure
we were near my bourne.

"How far is Thornfield Hall from here?" I asked of the ostler.

"Just two miles, ma'am, across the fields."

"My journey is closed," I thought to myself.  I got out of the coach,
gave a box I had into the ostler's charge, to be kept till I called for
it; paid my fare; satisfied the coachman, and was going: the brightening
day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, "The
Rochester Arms."  My heart leapt up: I was already on my master's very
lands.  It fell again: the thought struck it:--

"Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you
know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten,
who besides him is there?  His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do
with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence.  You have lost
your labour--you had better go no farther," urged the monitor.  "Ask
information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek:
they can solve your doubts at once.  Go up to that man, and inquire if
Mr. Rochester be at home."

The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on
it.  I so dreaded a reply that would crush me with despair.  To prolong
doubt was to prolong hope.  I might yet once more see the Hall under the
ray of her star.  There was the stile before me--the very fields through
which I had hurried, blind, deaf, distracted with a revengeful fury
tracking and scourging me, on the morning I fled from Thornfield: ere I
well knew what course I had resolved to take, I was in the midst of them.
How fast I walked!  How I ran sometimes!  How I looked forward to catch
the first view of the well-known woods!  With what feelings I welcomed
single trees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill between
them!

At last the woods rose; the rookery clustered dark; a loud cawing broke
the morning stillness.  Strange delight inspired me: on I hastened.
Another field crossed--a lane threaded--and there were the courtyard
walls--the back offices: the house itself, the rookery still hid.  "My
first view of it shall be in front," I determined, "where its bold
battlements will strike the eye nobly at once, and where I can single out
my master's very window: perhaps he will be standing at it--he rises
early: perhaps he is now walking in the orchard, or on the pavement in
front.  Could I but see him!--but a moment!  Surely, in that case, I
should not be so mad as to run to him?  I cannot tell--I am not certain.
And if I did--what then?  God bless him!  What then?  Who would be hurt
by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me?  I rave: perhaps
at this moment he is watching the sun rise over the Pyrenees, or on the
tideless sea of the south."

I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard--turned its angle:
there was a gate just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone
pillars crowned by stone balls.  From behind one pillar I could peep
round quietly at the full front of the mansion.  I advanced my head with
precaution, desirous to ascertain if any bedroom window-blinds were yet
drawn up: battlements, windows, long front--all from this sheltered
station were at my command.

The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey.  I
wonder what they thought.  They must have considered I was very careful
and timid at first, and that gradually I grew very bold and reckless.  A
peep, and then a long stare; and then a departure from my niche and a
straying out into the meadow; and a sudden stop full in front of the
great mansion, and a protracted, hardy gaze towards it.  "What
affectation of diffidence was this at first?" they might have demanded;
"what stupid regardlessness now?"

Hear an illustration, reader.

A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a
glimpse of her fair face without waking her.  He steals softly over the
grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses--fancying she has stirred: he
withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen.  All is still: he again
advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he
lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty--warm,
and blooming, and lovely, in rest.  How hurried was their first glance!
But how they fix!  How he starts!  How he suddenly and vehemently clasps
in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his
finger!  How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it
wildly!  He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears
to waken by any sound he can utter--by any movement he can make.  He
thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.

I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened
ruin.

No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed!--to peep up at chamber
lattices, fearing life was astir behind them!  No need to listen for
doors opening--to fancy steps on the pavement or the gravel-walk!  The
lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned void.  The
front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a well-like wall, very
high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof,
no battlements, no chimneys--all had crashed in.

And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome
wild.  No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never received
an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church aisle.  The
grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the Hall had fallen--by
conflagration: but how kindled?  What story belonged to this disaster?
What loss, besides mortar and marble and wood-work had followed upon it?
Had life been wrecked as well as property?  If so, whose?  Dreadful
question: there was no one here to answer it--not even dumb sign, mute
token.

In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated
interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late
occurrence.  Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch,
winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements; for, amidst the
drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: grass and
weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen rafters.  And oh!
where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck?  In what land?  Under
what auspices?  My eye involuntarily wandered to the grey church tower
near the gates, and I asked, "Is he with Damer de Rochester, sharing the
shelter of his narrow marble house?"

Some answer must be had to these questions.  I could find it nowhere but
at the inn, and thither, ere long, I returned.  The host himself brought
my breakfast into the parlour.  I requested him to shut the door and sit
down: I had some questions to ask him.  But when he complied, I scarcely
knew how to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers.  And yet
the spectacle of desolation I had just left prepared me in a measure for
a tale of misery.  The host was a respectable-looking, middle-aged man.

"You know Thornfield Hall, of course?" I managed to say at last.

"Yes, ma'am; I lived there once."

"Did you?"  Not in my time, I thought: you are a stranger to me.

"I was the late Mr. Rochester's butler," he added.

The late!  I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I had been
trying to evade.

"The late!" I gasped.  "Is he dead?"

"I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward's father," he explained.  I
breathed again: my blood resumed its flow.  Fully assured by these words
that Mr. Edward--_my_ Mr. Rochester (God bless him, wherever he was!)--was
at least alive: was, in short, "the present gentleman."  Gladdening
words!  It seemed I could hear all that was to come--whatever the
disclosures might be--with comparative tranquillity.  Since he was not in
the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the
Antipodes.

"Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?" I asked, knowing, of
course, what the answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring the
direct question as to where he really was.

"No, ma'am--oh, no!  No one is living there.  I suppose you are a
stranger in these parts, or you would have heard what happened last
autumn,--Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin: it was burnt down just about
harvest-time.  A dreadful calamity! such an immense quantity of valuable
property destroyed: hardly any of the furniture could be saved.  The fire
broke out at dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote,
the building was one mass of flame.  It was a terrible spectacle: I
witnessed it myself."

"At dead of night!" I muttered.  Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality
at Thornfield.  "Was it known how it originated?" I demanded.

"They guessed, ma'am: they guessed.  Indeed, I should say it was
ascertained beyond a doubt.  You are not perhaps aware," he continued,
edging his chair a little nearer the table, and speaking low, "that there
was a lady--a--a lunatic, kept in the house?"

"I have heard something of it."

"She was kept in very close confinement, ma'am: people even for some
years was not absolutely certain of her existence.  No one saw her: they
only knew by rumour that such a person was at the Hall; and who or what
she was it was difficult to conjecture.  They said Mr. Edward had brought
her from abroad, and some believed she had been his mistress.  But a
queer thing happened a year since--a very queer thing."

I feared now to hear my own story.  I endeavoured to recall him to the
main fact.

"And this lady?"

"This lady, ma'am," he answered, "turned out to be Mr. Rochester's wife!
The discovery was brought about in the strangest way.  There was a young
lady, a governess at the Hall, that Mr. Rochester fell in--"

"But the fire," I suggested.

"I'm coming to that, ma'am--that Mr. Edward fell in love with.  The
servants say they never saw anybody so much in love as he was: he was
after her continually.  They used to watch him--servants will, you know,
ma'am--and he set store on her past everything: for all, nobody but him
thought her so very handsome.  She was a little small thing, they say,
almost like a child.  I never saw her myself; but I've heard Leah, the
house-maid, tell of her.  Leah liked her well enough.  Mr. Rochester was
about forty, and this governess not twenty; and you see, when gentlemen
of his age fall in love with girls, they are often like as if they were
bewitched.  Well, he would marry her."

"You shall tell me this part of the story another time," I said; "but now
I have a particular reason for wishing to hear all about the fire.  Was
it suspected that this lunatic, Mrs. Rochester, had any hand in it?"

"You've hit it, ma'am: it's quite certain that it was her, and nobody but
her, that set it going.  She had a woman to take care of her called Mrs.
Poole--an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy, but for one
fault--a fault common to a deal of them nurses and matrons--she _kept a
private bottle of gin by her_, and now and then took a drop over-much.  It
is excusable, for she had a hard life of it: but still it was dangerous;
for when Mrs. Poole was fast asleep after the gin and water, the mad
lady, who was as cunning as a witch, would take the keys out of her
pocket, let herself out of her chamber, and go roaming about the house,
doing any wild mischief that came into her head.  They say she had nearly
burnt her husband in his bed once: but I don't know about that.  However,
on this night, she set fire first to the hangings of the room next her
own, and then she got down to a lower storey, and made her way to the
chamber that had been the governess's--(she was like as if she knew
somehow how matters had gone on, and had a spite at her)--and she kindled
the bed there; but there was nobody sleeping in it, fortunately.  The
governess had run away two months before; and for all Mr. Rochester
sought her as if she had been the most precious thing he had in the
world, he never could hear a word of her; and he grew savage--quite
savage on his disappointment: he never was a wild man, but he got
dangerous after he lost her.  He would be alone, too.  He sent Mrs.
Fairfax, the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance; but he did
it handsomely, for he settled an annuity on her for life: and she
deserved it--she was a very good woman.  Miss Adele, a ward he had, was
put to school.  He broke off acquaintance with all the gentry, and shut
himself up like a hermit at the Hall."

"What! did he not leave England?"

"Leave England?  Bless you, no!  He would not cross the door-stones of
the house, except at night, when he walked just like a ghost about the
grounds and in the orchard as if he had lost his senses--which it is my
opinion he had; for a more spirited, bolder, keener gentleman than he was
before that midge of a governess crossed him, you never saw, ma'am.  He
was not a man given to wine, or cards, or racing, as some are, and he was
not so very handsome; but he had a courage and a will of his own, if ever
man had.  I knew him from a boy, you see: and for my part, I have often
wished that Miss Eyre had been sunk in the sea before she came to
Thornfield Hall."

"Then Mr. Rochester was at home when the fire broke out?"

"Yes, indeed was he; and he went up to the attics when all was burning
above and below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them
down himself, and went back to get his mad wife out of her cell.  And
then they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was
standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting out till
they could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes.
She was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming
against the flames as she stood.  I witnessed, and several more
witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend through the sky-light on to the roof; we
heard him call 'Bertha!'  We saw him approach her; and then, ma'am, she
yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the
pavement."

{The next minute she lay smashed on the pavement: p413.jpg}

"Dead?"

"Dead!  Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were
scattered."

"Good God!"

"You may well say so, ma'am: it was frightful!"

He shuddered.

"And afterwards?" I urged.

"Well, ma'am, afterwards the house was burnt to the ground: there are
only some bits of walls standing now."

"Were any other lives lost?"

"No--perhaps it would have been better if there had."

"What do you mean?"

"Poor Mr. Edward!" he ejaculated, "I little thought ever to have seen it!
Some say it was a just judgment on him for keeping his first marriage
secret, and wanting to take another wife while he had one living: but I
pity him, for my part."

"You said he was alive?" I exclaimed.

"Yes, yes: he is alive; but many think he had better be dead."

"Why?  How?"  My blood was again running cold.  "Where is he?" I
demanded.  "Is he in England?"

"Ay--ay--he's in England; he can't get out of England, I fancy--he's a
fixture now."

What agony was this!  And the man seemed resolved to protract it.

"He is stone-blind," he said at last.  "Yes, he is stone-blind, is Mr.
Edward."

I had dreaded worse.  I had dreaded he was mad.  I summoned strength to
ask what had caused this calamity.

"It was all his own courage, and a body may say, his kindness, in a way,
ma'am: he wouldn't leave the house till every one else was out before
him.  As he came down the great staircase at last, after Mrs. Rochester
had flung herself from the battlements, there was a great crash--all
fell.  He was taken out from under the ruins, alive, but sadly hurt: a
beam had fallen in such a way as to protect him partly; but one eye was
knocked out, and one hand so crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to
amputate it directly.  The other eye inflamed: he lost the sight of that
also.  He is now helpless, indeed--blind and a cripple."

"Where is he?  Where does he now live?"

"At Ferndean, a manor-house on a farm he has, about thirty miles off:
quite a desolate spot."

"Who is with him?"

"Old John and his wife: he would have none else.  He is quite broken
down, they say."

"Have you any sort of conveyance?"

"We have a chaise, ma'am, a very handsome chaise."

"Let it be got ready instantly; and if your post-boy can drive me to
Ferndean before dark this day, I'll pay both you and him twice the hire
you usually demand."




CHAPTER XXXVII


The manor-house of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity,
moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood.  I
had heard of it before.  Mr. Rochester often spoke of it, and sometimes
went there.  His father had purchased the estate for the sake of the game
covers.  He would have let the house, but could find no tenant, in
consequence of its ineligible and insalubrious site.  Ferndean then
remained uninhabited and unfurnished, with the exception of some two or
three rooms fitted up for the accommodation of the squire when he went
there in the season to shoot.

To this house I came just ere dark on an evening marked by the
characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small penetrating
rain.  The last mile I performed on foot, having dismissed the chaise and
driver with the double remuneration I had promised.  Even when within a
very short distance of the manor-house, you could see nothing of it, so
thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it.  Iron gates
between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through
them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees.  There
was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle between hoar and
knotty shafts and under branched arches.  I followed it, expecting soon
to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and
farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible.

I thought I had taken a wrong direction and lost my way.  The darkness of
natural as well as of sylvan dusk gathered over me.  I looked round in
search of another road.  There was none: all was interwoven stem,
columnar trunk, dense summer foliage--no opening anywhere.

I proceeded: at last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently
I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim light,
distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying
walls.  Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a
space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle.
There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling
a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest.  The house
presented two pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and
narrow: the front door was narrow too, one step led up to it.  The whole
looked, as the host of the Rochester Arms had said, "quite a desolate
spot."  It was as still as a church on a week-day: the pattering rain on
the forest leaves was the only sound audible in its vicinage.

"Can there be life here?" I asked.

Yes, life of some kind there was; for I heard a movement--that narrow
front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the
grange.

It opened slowly: a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the
step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel
whether it rained.  Dusk as it was, I had recognised him--it was my
master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other.

I stayed my step, almost my breath, and stood to watch him--to examine
him, myself unseen, and alas! to him invisible.  It was a sudden meeting,
and one in which rapture was kept well in check by pain.  I had no
difficulty in restraining my voice from exclamation, my step from hasty
advance.

His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever: his port
was still erect, his hair was still raven black; nor were his features
altered or sunk: not in one year's space, by any sorrow, could his
athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted.  But in his
countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that
reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to
approach in his sullen woe.  The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes
cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson.

And, reader, do you think I feared him in his blind ferocity?--if you do,
you little know me.  A soft hope blest with my sorrow that soon I should
dare to drop a kiss on that brow of rock, and on those lips so sternly
sealed beneath it: but not yet.  I would not accost him yet.

He descended the one step, and advanced slowly and gropingly towards the
grass-plat.  Where was his daring stride now?  Then he paused, as if he
knew not which way to turn.  He lifted his hand and opened his eyelids;
gazed blank, and with a straining effort, on the sky, and toward the
amphitheatre of trees: one saw that all to him was void darkness.  He
stretched his right hand (the left arm, the mutilated one, he kept hidden
in his bosom); he seemed to wish by touch to gain an idea of what lay
around him: he met but vacancy still; for the trees were some yards off
where he stood.  He relinquished the endeavour, folded his arms, and
stood quiet and mute in the rain, now falling fast on his uncovered head.
At this moment John approached him from some quarter.

"Will you take my arm, sir?" he said; "there is a heavy shower coming on:
had you not better go in?"

"Let me alone," was the answer.

John withdrew without having observed me.  Mr. Rochester now tried to
walk about: vainly,--all was too uncertain.  He groped his way back to
the house, and, re-entering it, closed the door.

I now drew near and knocked: John's wife opened for me.  "Mary," I said,
"how are you?"

She started as if she had seen a ghost: I calmed her.  To her hurried "Is
it really you, miss, come at this late hour to this lonely place?"  I
answered by taking her hand; and then I followed her into the kitchen,
where John now sat by a good fire.  I explained to them, in few words,
that I had heard all which had happened since I left Thornfield, and that
I was come to see Mr. Rochester.  I asked John to go down to the turn-
pike-house, where I had dismissed the chaise, and bring my trunk, which I
had left there: and then, while I removed my bonnet and shawl, I
questioned Mary as to whether I could be accommodated at the Manor House
for the night; and finding that arrangements to that effect, though
difficult, would not be impossible, I informed her I should stay.  Just
at this moment the parlour-bell rang.

"When you go in," said I, "tell your master that a person wishes to speak
to him, but do not give my name."

"I don't think he will see you," she answered; "he refuses everybody."

When she returned, I inquired what he had said.  "You are to send in your
name and your business," she replied.  She then proceeded to fill a glass
with water, and place it on a tray, together with candles.

"Is that what he rang for?" I asked.

"Yes: he always has candles brought in at dark, though he is blind."

"Give the tray to me; I will carry it in."

I took it from her hand: she pointed me out the parlour door.  The tray
shook as I held it; the water spilt from the glass; my heart struck my
ribs loud and fast.  Mary opened the door for me, and shut it behind me.

This parlour looked gloomy: a neglected handful of fire burnt low in the
grate; and, leaning over it, with his head supported against the high,
old-fashioned mantelpiece, appeared the blind tenant of the room.  His
old dog, Pilot, lay on one side, removed out of the way, and coiled up as
if afraid of being inadvertently trodden upon.  Pilot pricked up his ears
when I came in: then he jumped up with a yelp and a whine, and bounded
towards me: he almost knocked the tray from my hands.  I set it on the
table; then patted him, and said softly, "Lie down!"  Mr. Rochester
turned mechanically to _see_ what the commotion was: but as he _saw_
nothing, he returned and sighed.

"Give me the water, Mary," he said.

I approached him with the now only half-filled glass; Pilot followed me,
still excited.

"What is the matter?" he inquired.

"Down, Pilot!" I again said.  He checked the water on its way to his
lips, and seemed to listen: he drank, and put the glass down.  "This is
you, Mary, is it not?"

"Mary is in the kitchen," I answered.

He put out his hand with a quick gesture, but not seeing where I stood,
he did not touch me.  "Who is this?  Who is this?" he demanded, trying,
as it seemed, to _see_ with those sightless eyes--unavailing and
distressing attempt!  "Answer me--speak again!" he ordered, imperiously
and aloud.

"Will you have a little more water, sir?  I spilt half of what was in the
glass," I said.

"_Who_ is it?  _What_ is it?  Who speaks?"

"Pilot knows me, and John and Mary know I am here.  I came only this
evening," I answered.

"Great God!--what delusion has come over me?  What sweet madness has
seized me?"

"No delusion--no madness: your mind, sir, is too strong for delusion,
your health too sound for frenzy."

"And where is the speaker?  Is it only a voice?  Oh!  I _cannot_ see, but
I must feel, or my heart will stop and my brain burst.  Whatever--whoever
you are--be perceptible to the touch or I cannot live!"

He groped; I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.

"Her very fingers!" he cried; "her small, slight fingers!  If so there
must be more of her."

The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my
shoulder--neck--waist--I was entwined and gathered to him.

"Is it Jane?  _What_ is it?  This is her shape--this is her size--"

"And this her voice," I added.  "She is all here: her heart, too.  God
bless you, sir!  I am glad to be so near you again."

"Jane Eyre!--Jane Eyre," was all he said.

"My dear master," I answered, "I am Jane Eyre: I have found you out--I am
come back to you."

"In truth?--in the flesh?  My living Jane?"

"You touch me, sir,--you hold me, and fast enough: I am not cold like a
corpse, nor vacant like air, am I?"

"My living darling!  These are certainly her limbs, and these her
features; but I cannot be so blest, after all my misery.  It is a dream;
such dreams as I have had at night when I have clasped her once more to
my heart, as I do now; and kissed her, as thus--and felt that she loved
me, and trusted that she would not leave me."

"Which I never will, sir, from this day."

"Never will, says the vision?  But I always woke and found it an empty
mockery; and I was desolate and abandoned--my life dark, lonely,
hopeless--my soul athirst and forbidden to drink--my heart famished and
never to be fed.  Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will
fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before
you go--embrace me, Jane."

"There, sir--and there!"'

I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I swept his
hair from his brow, and kissed that too.  He suddenly seemed to arouse
himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.

"It is you--is it, Jane?  You are come back to me then?"

"I am."

"And you do not lie dead in some ditch under some stream?  And you are
not a pining outcast amongst strangers?"

"No, sir!  I am an independent woman now."

"Independent!  What do you mean, Jane?"

"My uncle in Madeira is dead, and he left me five thousand pounds."

"Ah! this is practical--this is real!" he cried: "I should never dream
that.  Besides, there is that peculiar voice of hers, so animating and
piquant, as well as soft: it cheers my withered heart; it puts life into
it.--What, Janet!  Are you an independent woman?  A rich woman?"

"If you won't let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close
up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want
company of an evening."

"But as you are rich, Jane, you have now, no doubt, friends who will look
after you, and not suffer you to devote yourself to a blind lameter like
me?"

"I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own
mistress."

"And you will stay with me?"

"Certainly--unless you object.  I will be your neighbour, your nurse,
your housekeeper.  I find you lonely: I will be your companion--to read
to you, to walk with you, to sit with you, to wait on you, to be eyes and
hands to you.  Cease to look so melancholy, my dear master; you shall not
be left desolate, so long as I live."

He replied not: he seemed serious--abstracted; he sighed; he half-opened
his lips as if to speak: he closed them again.  I felt a little
embarrassed.  Perhaps I had too rashly over-leaped conventionalities; and
he, like St. John, saw impropriety in my inconsiderateness.  I had indeed
made my proposal from the idea that he wished and would ask me to be his
wife: an expectation, not the less certain because unexpressed, had
buoyed me up, that he would claim me at once as his own.  But no hint to
that effect escaping him and his countenance becoming more overcast, I
suddenly remembered that I might have been all wrong, and was perhaps
playing the fool unwittingly; and I began gently to withdraw myself from
his arms--but he eagerly snatched me closer.

"No--no--Jane; you must not go.  No--I have touched you, heard you, felt
the comfort of your presence--the sweetness of your consolation: I cannot
give up these joys.  I have little left in myself--I must have you.  The
world may laugh--may call me absurd, selfish--but it does not signify.  My
very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly
vengeance on its frame."

"Well, sir, I will stay with you: I have said so."

"Yes--but you understand one thing by staying with me; and I understand
another.  You, perhaps, could make up your mind to be about my hand and
chair--to wait on me as a kind little nurse (for you have an affectionate
heart and a generous spirit, which prompt you to make sacrifices for
those you pity), and that ought to suffice for me no doubt.  I suppose I
should now entertain none but fatherly feelings for you: do you think so?
Come--tell me."

"I will think what you like, sir: I am content to be only your nurse, if
you think it better."

"But you cannot always be my nurse, Janet: you are young--you must marry
one day."

"I don't care about being married."

"You should care, Janet: if I were what I once was, I would try to make
you care--but--a sightless block!"

He relapsed again into gloom.  I, on the contrary, became more cheerful,
and took fresh courage: these last words gave me an insight as to where
the difficulty lay; and as it was no difficulty with me, I felt quite
relieved from my previous embarrassment.  I resumed a livelier vein of
conversation.

"It is time some one undertook to rehumanise you," said I, parting his
thick and long uncut locks; "for I see you are being metamorphosed into a
lion, or something of that sort.  You have a 'faux air' of Nebuchadnezzar
in the fields about you, that is certain: your hair reminds me of eagles'
feathers; whether your nails are grown like birds' claws or not, I have
not yet noticed."

"On this arm, I have neither hand nor nails," he said, drawing the
mutilated limb from his breast, and showing it to me.  "It is a mere
stump--a ghastly sight!  Don't you think so, Jane?"

"It is a pity to see it; and a pity to see your eyes--and the scar of
fire on your forehead: and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving
you too well for all this; and making too much of you."

"I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and my
cicatrised visage."

"Did you?  Don't tell me so--lest I should say something disparaging to
your judgment.  Now, let me leave you an instant, to make a better fire,
and have the hearth swept up.  Can you tell when there is a good fire?"

"Yes; with the right eye I see a glow--a ruddy haze."

"And you see the candles?"

"Very dimly--each is a luminous cloud."

"Can you see me?"

"No, my fairy: but I am only too thankful to hear and feel you."

"When do you take supper?"

"I never take supper."

"But you shall have some to-night.  I am hungry: so are you, I daresay,
only you forget."

Summoning Mary, I soon had the room in more cheerful order: I prepared
him, likewise, a comfortable repast.  My spirits were excited, and with
pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper, and for a long time
after.  There was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and
vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I
suited him; all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him.
Delightful consciousness!  It brought to life and light my whole nature:
in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine.  Blind as he
was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead: his
lineaments softened and warmed.

After supper, he began to ask me many questions, of where I had been,
what I had been doing, how I had found him out; but I gave him only very
partial replies: it was too late to enter into particulars that night.
Besides, I wished to touch no deep-thrilling chord--to open no fresh well
of emotion in his heart: my sole present aim was to cheer him.  Cheered,
as I have said, he was: and yet but by fits.  If a moment's silence broke
the conversation, he would turn restless, touch me, then say, "Jane."

"You are altogether a human being, Jane?  You are certain of that?"

{You are altogether a human being, Jane?  You are certain of that?:
p422.jpg}

"I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester."

"Yet how, on this dark and doleful evening, could you so suddenly rise on
my lone hearth?  I stretched my hand to take a glass of water from a
hireling, and it was given me by you: I asked a question, expecting
John's wife to answer me, and your voice spoke at my ear."

"Because I had come in, in Mary's stead, with the tray."

"And there is enchantment in the very hour I am now spending with you.
Who can tell what a dark, dreary, hopeless life I have dragged on for
months past?  Doing nothing, expecting nothing; merging night in day;
feeling but the sensation of cold when I let the fire go out, of hunger
when I forgot to eat: and then a ceaseless sorrow, and, at times, a very
delirium of desire to behold my Jane again.  Yes: for her restoration I
longed, far more than for that of my lost sight.  How can it be that Jane
is with me, and says she loves me?  Will she not depart as suddenly as
she came?  To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more."

A commonplace, practical reply, out of the train of his own disturbed
ideas, was, I was sure, the best and most reassuring for him in this
frame of mind.  I passed my finger over his eyebrows, and remarked that
they were scorched, and that I would apply something which would make
them grow as broad and black as ever.

"Where is the use of doing me good in any way, beneficent spirit, when,
at some fatal moment, you will again desert me--passing like a shadow,
whither and how to me unknown, and for me remaining afterwards
undiscoverable?

"Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?"

"What for, Jane?"

"Just to comb out this shaggy black mane.  I find you rather alarming,
when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy, but I am
sure, you are more like a brownie."

"Am I hideous, Jane?"

"Very, sir: you always were, you know."

"Humph!  The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever you have
sojourned."

"Yet I have been with good people; far better than you: a hundred times
better people; possessed of ideas and views you never entertained in your
life: quite more refined and exalted."

"Who the deuce have you been with?"

"If you twist in that way you will make me pull the hair out of your
head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my
substantiality."

"Who have you been with, Jane?"

"You shall not get it out of me to-night, sir; you must wait till
to-morrow; to leave my tale half told, will, you know, be a sort of
security that I shall appear at your breakfast table to finish it.  By
the bye, I must mind not to rise on your hearth with only a glass of
water then: I must bring an egg at the least, to say nothing of fried
ham."

"You mocking changeling--fairy-born and human-bred!  You make me feel as
I have not felt these twelve months.  If Saul could have had you for his
David, the evil spirit would have been exorcised without the aid of the
harp."

"There, sir, you are redd up and made decent.  Now I'll leave you: I have
been travelling these last three days, and I believe I am tired.  Good
night."

"Just one word, Jane: were there only ladies in the house where you have
been?"

I laughed and made my escape, still laughing as I ran upstairs.  "A good
idea!"  I thought with glee.  "I see I have the means of fretting him out
of his melancholy for some time to come."

Very early the next morning I heard him up and astir, wandering from one
room to another.  As soon as Mary came down I heard the question: "Is
Miss Eyre here?"  Then: "Which room did you put her into?  Was it dry?  Is
she up?  Go and ask if she wants anything; and when she will come down."

I came down as soon as I thought there was a prospect of breakfast.
Entering the room very softly, I had a view of him before he discovered
my presence.  It was mournful, indeed, to witness the subjugation of that
vigorous spirit to a corporeal infirmity.  He sat in his chair--still,
but not at rest: expectant evidently; the lines of now habitual sadness
marking his strong features.  His countenance reminded one of a lamp
quenched, waiting to be re-lit--and alas! it was not himself that could
now kindle the lustre of animated expression: he was dependent on another
for that office!  I had meant to be gay and careless, but the
powerlessness of the strong man touched my heart to the quick: still I
accosted him with what vivacity I could.

"It is a bright, sunny morning, sir," I said.  "The rain is over and
gone, and there is a tender shining after it: you shall have a walk
soon."

I had wakened the glow: his features beamed.

"Oh, you are indeed there, my skylark!  Come to me.  You are not gone:
not vanished?  I heard one of your kind an hour ago, singing high over
the wood: but its song had no music for me, any more than the rising sun
had rays.  All the melody on earth is concentrated in my Jane's tongue to
my ear (I am glad it is not naturally a silent one): all the sunshine I
can feel is in her presence."

The water stood in my eyes to hear this avowal of his dependence; just as
if a royal eagle, chained to a perch, should be forced to entreat a
sparrow to become its purveyor.  But I would not be lachrymose: I dashed
off the salt drops, and busied myself with preparing breakfast.

Most of the morning was spent in the open air.  I led him out of the wet
and wild wood into some cheerful fields: I described to him how
brilliantly green they were; how the flowers and hedges looked refreshed;
how sparklingly blue was the sky.  I sought a seat for him in a hidden
and lovely spot, a dry stump of a tree; nor did I refuse to let him, when
seated, place me on his knee.  Why should I, when both he and I were
happier near than apart?  Pilot lay beside us: all was quiet.  He broke
out suddenly while clasping me in his arms--

"Cruel, cruel deserter!  Oh, Jane, what did I feel when I discovered you
had fled from Thornfield, and when I could nowhere find you; and, after
examining your apartment, ascertained that you had taken no money, nor
anything which could serve as an equivalent!  A pearl necklace I had
given you lay untouched in its little casket; your trunks were left
corded and locked as they had been prepared for the bridal tour.  What
could my darling do, I asked, left destitute and penniless?  And what did
she do?  Let me hear now."

Thus urged, I began the narrative of my experience for the last year.  I
softened considerably what related to the three days of wandering and
starvation, because to have told him all would have been to inflict
unnecessary pain: the little I did say lacerated his faithful heart
deeper than I wished.

I should not have left him thus, he said, without any means of making my
way: I should have told him my intention.  I should have confided in him:
he would never have forced me to be his mistress.  Violent as he had
seemed in his despair, he, in truth, loved me far too well and too
tenderly to constitute himself my tyrant: he would have given me half his
fortune, without demanding so much as a kiss in return, rather than I
should have flung myself friendless on the wide world.  I had endured, he
was certain, more than I had confessed to him.

"Well, whatever my sufferings had been, they were very short," I
answered: and then I proceeded to tell him how I had been received at
Moor House; how I had obtained the office of schoolmistress, &c.  The
accession of fortune, the discovery of my relations, followed in due
order.  Of course, St. John Rivers' name came in frequently in the
progress of my tale.  When I had done, that name was immediately taken
up.

"This St. John, then, is your cousin?"

"Yes."

"You have spoken of him often: do you like him?"

"He was a very good man, sir; I could not help liking him."

"A good man.  Does that mean a respectable well-conducted man of fifty?
Or what does it mean?"

"St John was only twenty-nine, sir."

"'_Jeune encore_,' as the French say.  Is he a person of low stature,
phlegmatic, and plain.  A person whose goodness consists rather in his
guiltlessness of vice, than in his prowess in virtue."

"He is untiringly active.  Great and exalted deeds are what he lives to
perform."

"But his brain?  That is probably rather soft?  He means well: but you
shrug your shoulders to hear him talk?"

"He talks little, sir: what he does say is ever to the point.  His brain
is first-rate, I should think not impressible, but vigorous."

"Is he an able man, then?"

"Truly able."

"A thoroughly educated man?"

"St. John is an accomplished and profound scholar."

"His manners, I think, you said are not to your taste?--priggish and
parsonic?"

"I never mentioned his manners; but, unless I had a very bad taste, they
must suit it; they are polished, calm, and gentlemanlike."

"His appearance,--I forget what description you gave of his appearance;--a
sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted
up on his thick-soled high-lows, eh?"

"St. John dresses well.  He is a handsome man: tall, fair, with blue
eyes, and a Grecian profile."

(Aside.)  "Damn him!"--(To me.)  "Did you like him, Jane?"

"Yes, Mr. Rochester, I liked him: but you asked me that before."

I perceived, of course, the drift of my interlocutor.  Jealousy had got
hold of him: she stung him; but the sting was salutary: it gave him
respite from the gnawing fang of melancholy.  I would not, therefore,
immediately charm the snake.

"Perhaps you would rather not sit any longer on my knee, Miss Eyre?" was
the next somewhat unexpected observation.

"Why not, Mr. Rochester?"

"The picture you have just drawn is suggestive of a rather too
overwhelming contrast.  Your words have delineated very prettily a
graceful Apollo: he is present to your imagination,--tall, fair, blue-
eyed, and with a Grecian profile.  Your eyes dwell on a Vulcan,--a real
blacksmith, brown, broad-shouldered: and blind and lame into the
bargain."

"I never thought of it, before; but you certainly are rather like Vulcan,
sir."

"Well, you can leave me, ma'am: but before you go" (and he retained me by
a firmer grasp than ever), "you will be pleased just to answer me a
question or two."  He paused.

"What questions, Mr. Rochester?"

Then followed this cross-examination.

"St. John made you schoolmistress of Morton before he knew you were his
cousin?"

"Yes."

"You would often see him?  He would visit the school sometimes?"

"Daily."

"He would approve of your plans, Jane?  I know they would be clever, for
you are a talented creature!"

"He approved of them--yes."

"He would discover many things in you he could not have expected to find?
Some of your accomplishments are not ordinary."

"I don't know about that."

"You had a little cottage near the school, you say: did he ever come
there to see you?"

"Now and then?"

"Of an evening?"

"Once or twice."

A pause.

"How long did you reside with him and his sisters after the cousinship
was discovered?"

"Five months."

"Did Rivers spend much time with the ladies of his family?"

"Yes; the back parlour was both his study and ours: he sat near the
window, and we by the table."

"Did he study much?"

"A good deal."

"What?"

"Hindostanee."

"And what did you do meantime?"

"I learnt German, at first."

"Did he teach you?"

"He did not understand German."

"Did he teach you nothing?"

"A little Hindostanee."

"Rivers taught you Hindostanee?"

"Yes, sir."

"And his sisters also?"

"No."

"Only you?"

"Only me."

"Did you ask to learn?"

"No."

"He wished to teach you?"

"Yes."

A second pause.

"Why did he wish it?  Of what use could Hindostanee be to you?"

"He intended me to go with him to India."

"Ah! here I reach the root of the matter.  He wanted you to marry him?"

"He asked me to marry him."

"That is a fiction--an impudent invention to vex me."

"I beg your pardon, it is the literal truth: he asked me more than once,
and was as stiff about urging his point as ever you could be."

"Miss Eyre, I repeat it, you can leave me.  How often am I to say the
same thing?  Why do you remain pertinaciously perched on my knee, when I
have given you notice to quit?"

"Because I am comfortable there."

"No, Jane, you are not comfortable there, because your heart is not with
me: it is with this cousin--this St. John.  Oh, till this moment, I
thought my little Jane was all mine!  I had a belief she loved me even
when she left me: that was an atom of sweet in much bitter.  Long as we
have been parted, hot tears as I have wept over our separation, I never
thought that while I was mourning her, she was loving another!  But it is
useless grieving.  Jane, leave me: go and marry Rivers."

"Shake me off, then, sir,--push me away, for I'll not leave you of my own
accord."

"Jane, I ever like your tone of voice: it still renews hope, it sounds so
truthful.  When I hear it, it carries me back a year.  I forget that you
have formed a new tie.  But I am not a fool--go--"

"Where must I go, sir?"

"Your own way--with the husband you have chosen."

"Who is that?"

"You know--this St. John Rivers."

"He is not my husband, nor ever will be.  He does not love me: I do not
love him.  He loves (as he _can_ love, and that is not as you love) a
beautiful young lady called Rosamond.  He wanted to marry me only because
he thought I should make a suitable missionary's wife, which she would
not have done.  He is good and great, but severe; and, for me, cold as an
iceberg.  He is not like you, sir: I am not happy at his side, nor near
him, nor with him.  He has no indulgence for me--no fondness.  He sees
nothing attractive in me; not even youth--only a few useful mental
points.--Then I must leave you, sir, to go to him?"

I shuddered involuntarily, and clung instinctively closer to my blind but
beloved master.  He smiled.

"What, Jane!  Is this true?  Is such really the state of matters between
you and Rivers?"

"Absolutely, sir!  Oh, you need not be jealous!  I wanted to tease you a
little to make you less sad: I thought anger would be better than grief.
But if you wish me to love you, could you but see how much I _do_ love
you, you would be proud and content.  All my heart is yours, sir: it
belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest
of me from your presence for ever."

Again, as he kissed me, painful thoughts darkened his aspect.

"My seared vision!  My crippled strength!" he murmured regretfully.

I caressed, in order to soothe him.  I knew of what he was thinking, and
wanted to speak for him, but dared not.  As he turned aside his face a
minute, I saw a tear slide from under the sealed eyelid, and trickle down
the manly cheek.  My heart swelled.

"I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield
orchard," he remarked ere long.  "And what right would that ruin have to
bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?"

"You are no ruin, sir--no lightning-struck tree: you are green and
vigorous.  Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or
not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow
they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength
offers them so safe a prop."

Again he smiled: I gave him comfort.

"You speak of friends, Jane?" he asked.

"Yes, of friends," I answered rather hesitatingly: for I knew I meant
more than friends, but could not tell what other word to employ.  He
helped me.

"Ah!  Jane.  But I want a wife."

"Do you, sir?"

"Yes: is it news to you?"

"Of course: you said nothing about it before."

"Is it unwelcome news?"

"That depends on circumstances, sir--on your choice."

"Which you shall make for me, Jane.  I will abide by your decision."

"Choose then, sir--_her who loves you best_."

"I will at least choose--_her I love best_.  Jane, will you marry me?"

"Yes, sir."

"A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead about by the hand?"

"Yes, sir."

"A crippled man, twenty years older than you, whom you will have to wait
on?"

"Yes, sir."

"Truly, Jane?"

"Most truly, sir."

"Oh! my darling!  God bless you and reward you!"

"Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life--if ever I thought a
good thought--if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer--if ever I
wished a righteous wish,--I am rewarded now.  To be your wife is, for me,
to be as happy as I can be on earth."

"Because you delight in sacrifice."

"Sacrifice!  What do I sacrifice?  Famine for food, expectation for
content.  To be privileged to put my arms round what I value--to press my
lips to what I love--to repose on what I trust: is that to make a
sacrifice?  If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice."

"And to bear with my infirmities, Jane: to overlook my deficiencies."

"Which are none, sir, to me.  I love you better now, when I can really be
useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you
disdained every part but that of the giver and protector."

"Hitherto I have hated to be helped--to be led: henceforth, I feel I
shall hate it no more.  I did not like to put my hand into a hireling's,
but it is pleasant to feel it circled by Jane's little fingers.  I
preferred utter loneliness to the constant attendance of servants; but
Jane's soft ministry will be a perpetual joy.  Jane suits me: do I suit
her?"

"To the finest fibre of my nature, sir."

"The case being so, we have nothing in the world to wait for: we must be
married instantly."

He looked and spoke with eagerness: his old impetuosity was rising.

"We must become one flesh without any delay, Jane: there is but the
licence to get--then we marry."

"Mr. Rochester, I have just discovered the sun is far declined from its
meridian, and Pilot is actually gone home to his dinner.  Let me look at
your watch."

"Fasten it into your girdle, Janet, and keep it henceforward: I have no
use for it."

"It is nearly four o'clock in the afternoon, sir.  Don't you feel
hungry?"

"The third day from this must be our wedding-day, Jane.  Never mind fine
clothes and jewels, now: all that is not worth a fillip."

"The sun has dried up all the rain-drops, sir.  The breeze is still: it
is quite hot."

"Do you know, Jane, I have your little pearl necklace at this moment
fastened round my bronze scrag under my cravat?  I have worn it since the
day I lost my only treasure, as a memento of her."

"We will go home through the wood: that will be the shadiest way."

He pursued his own thoughts without heeding me.

"Jane! you think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells
with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now.  He sees not
as man sees, but far clearer: judges not as man judges, but far more
wisely.  I did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower--breathed
guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent snatched it from me.  I, in my stiff-
necked rebellion, almost cursed the dispensation: instead of bending to
the decree, I defied it.  Divine justice pursued its course; disasters
came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow
of death.  _His_ chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has
humbled me for ever.  You know I was proud of my strength: but what is it
now, when I must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its
weakness?  Of late, Jane--only--only of late--I began to see and
acknowledge the hand of God in my doom.  I began to experience remorse,
repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker.  I began sometimes to
pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere.

"Some days since: nay, I can number them--four; it was last Monday night,
a singular mood came over me: one in which grief replaced frenzy--sorrow,
sullenness.  I had long had the impression that since I could nowhere
find you, you must be dead.  Late that night--perhaps it might be between
eleven and twelve o'clock--ere I retired to my dreary rest, I supplicated
God, that, if it seemed good to Him, I might soon be taken from this
life, and admitted to that world to come, where there was still hope of
rejoining Jane.

"I was in my own room, and sitting by the window, which was open: it
soothed me to feel the balmy night-air; though I could see no stars and
only by a vague, luminous haze, knew the presence of a moon.  I longed
for thee, Janet!  Oh, I longed for thee both with soul and flesh!  I
asked of God, at once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long
enough desolate, afflicted, tormented; and might not soon taste bliss and
peace once more.  That I merited all I endured, I acknowledged--that I
could scarcely endure more, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my
heart's wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words--'Jane!
Jane!  Jane!'"

"Did you speak these words aloud?"

"I did, Jane.  If any listener had heard me, he would have thought me
mad: I pronounced them with such frantic energy."

"And it was last Monday night, somewhere near midnight?"

"Yes; but the time is of no consequence: what followed is the strange
point.  You will think me superstitious,--some superstition I have in my
blood, and always had: nevertheless, this is true--true at least it is
that I heard what I now relate.

"As I exclaimed 'Jane!  Jane!  Jane!' a voice--I cannot tell whence the
voice came, but I know whose voice it was--replied, 'I am coming: wait
for me;' and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words--'Where
are you?'

"I'll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened to my
mind: yet it is difficult to express what I want to express.  Ferndean is
buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls dull, and dies
unreverberating.  'Where are you?' seemed spoken amongst mountains; for I
heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words.  Cooler and fresher at the
moment the gale seemed to visit my brow: I could have deemed that in some
wild, lone scene, I and Jane were meeting.  In spirit, I believe we must
have met.  You no doubt were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane:
perhaps your soul wandered from its cell to comfort mine; for those were
your accents--as certain as I live--they were yours!"

Reader, it was on Monday night--near midnight--that I too had received
the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to
it.  I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative, but made no disclosure in
return.  The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be
communicated or discussed.  If I told anything, my tale would be such as
must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer: and
that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the
deeper shade of the supernatural.  I kept these things then, and pondered
them in my heart.

"You cannot now wonder," continued my master, "that when you rose upon me
so unexpectedly last night, I had difficulty in believing you any other
than a mere voice and vision, something that would melt to silence and
annihilation, as the midnight whisper and mountain echo had melted
before.  Now, I thank God!  I know it to be otherwise.  Yes, I thank
God!"

He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from his
brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in mute
devotion.  Only the last words of the worship were audible.

"I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered
mercy.  I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead
henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!"

Then he stretched his hand out to be led.  I took that dear hand, held it
a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much
lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide.  We
entered the wood, and wended homeward.




CHAPTER XXXVIII--CONCLUSION


Reader, I married him.  A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and
clerk, were alone present.  When we got back from church, I went into the
kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner and John
cleaning the knives, and I said--

"Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning."  The
housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of
people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece
of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some
shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy
wonderment.  Mary did look up, and she did stare at me: the ladle with
which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for
some three minutes hang suspended in air; and for the same space of time
John's knives also had rest from the polishing process: but Mary, bending
again over the roast, said only--

"Have you, Miss?  Well, for sure!"

A short time after she pursued--"I seed you go out with the master, but I
didn't know you were gone to church to be wed;" and she basted away.
John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear.

"I telled Mary how it would be," he said: "I knew what Mr. Edward" (John
was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet of the
house, therefore, he often gave him his Christian name)--"I knew what Mr.
Edward would do; and I was certain he would not wait long neither: and
he's done right, for aught I know.  I wish you joy, Miss!" and he
politely pulled his forelock.

"Thank you, John.  Mr. Rochester told me to give you and Mary this."  I
put into his hand a five-pound note.  Without waiting to hear more, I
left the kitchen.  In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I
caught the words--

"She'll happen do better for him nor ony o't' grand ladies."  And again,
"If she ben't one o' th' handsomest, she's noan faal and varry
good-natured; and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody may see that."

I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had
done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted.  Diana and Mary
approved the step unreservedly.  Diana announced that she would just give
me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and see me.

"She had better not wait till then, Jane," said Mr. Rochester, when I
read her letter to him; "if she does, she will be too late, for our
honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your
grave or mine."

How St. John received the news, I don't know: he never answered the
letter in which I communicated it: yet six months after he wrote to me,
without, however, mentioning Mr. Rochester's name or alluding to my
marriage.  His letter was then calm, and, though very serious, kind.  He
has maintained a regular, though not frequent, correspondence ever since:
he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live without God in
the world, and only mind earthly things.

You have not quite forgotten little Adele, have you, reader?  I had not;
I soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester, to go and see her at
the school where he had placed her.  Her frantic joy at beholding me
again moved me much.  She looked pale and thin: she said she was not
happy.  I found the rules of the establishment were too strict, its
course of study too severe for a child of her age: I took her home with
me.  I meant to become her governess once more, but I soon found this
impracticable; my time and cares were now required by another--my husband
needed them all.  So I sought out a school conducted on a more indulgent
system, and near enough to permit of my visiting her often, and bringing
her home sometimes.  I took care she should never want for anything that
could contribute to her comfort: she soon settled in her new abode,
became very happy there, and made fair progress in her studies.  As she
grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her
French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and
obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled.  By her
grateful attention to me and mine, she has long since well repaid any
little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her.

My tale draws to its close: one word respecting my experience of married
life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose names have most
frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have done.

I have now been married ten years.  I know what it is to live entirely
for and with what I love best on earth.  I hold myself supremely
blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's
life as fully as he is mine.  No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I
am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.  I know
no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than
we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate
bosoms; consequently, we are ever together.  To be together is for us to
be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.  We talk, I
believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and
an audible thinking.  All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his
confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character--perfect
concord is the result.

Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps
it was that circumstance that drew us so very near--that knit us so very
close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.
Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye.  He saw
nature--he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his
behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river,
cloud, sunbeam--of the landscape before us; of the weather round us--and
impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his
eye.  Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of
conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to
be done.  And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most
exquisite, even though sad--because he claimed these services without
painful shame or damping humiliation.  He loved me so truly, that he knew
no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him so
fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.

One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his
dictation, he came and bent over me, and said--"Jane, have you a
glittering ornament round your neck?"

I had a gold watch-chain: I answered "Yes."

"And have you a pale blue dress on?"

{And have you a pale blue dress on?: p435.jpg}

I had.  He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the
obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was
sure of it.

He and I went up to London.  He had the advice of an eminent oculist; and
he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye.  He cannot now see
very distinctly: he cannot read or write much; but he can find his way
without being led by the hand: the sky is no longer a blank to him--the
earth no longer a void.  When his first-born was put into his arms, he
could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once
were--large, brilliant, and black.  On that occasion, he again, with a
full heart, acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy.

My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because those we most
love are happy likewise.  Diana and Mary Rivers are both married:
alternately, once every year, they come to see us, and we go to see them.
Diana's husband is a captain in the navy, a gallant officer and a good
man.  Mary's is a clergyman, a college friend of her brother's, and, from
his attainments and principles, worthy of the connection.  Both Captain
Fitzjames and Mr. Wharton love their wives, and are loved by them.

As to St. John Rivers, he left England: he went to India.  He entered on
the path he had marked for himself; he pursues it still.  A more
resolute, indefatigable pioneer never wrought amidst rocks and dangers.
Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, he
labours for his race; he clears their painful way to improvement; he hews
down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it.  He
may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the
sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from
the onslaught of Apollyon.  His is the exaction of the apostle, who
speaks but for Christ, when he says--"Whosoever will come after me, let
him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me."  His is the
ambition of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the
first rank of those who are redeemed from the earth--who stand without
fault before the throne of God, who share the last mighty victories of
the Lamb, who are called, and chosen, and faithful.

St. John is unmarried: he never will marry now.  Himself has hitherto
sufficed to the toil, and the toil draws near its close: his glorious sun
hastens to its setting.  The last letter I received from him drew from my
eyes human tears, and yet filled my heart with divine joy: he anticipated
his sure reward, his incorruptible crown.  I know that a stranger's hand
will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been
called at length into the joy of his Lord.  And why weep for this?  No
fear of death will darken St. John's last hour: his mind will be
unclouded, his heart will be undaunted, his hope will be sure, his faith
steadfast.  His own words are a pledge of this--

"My Master," he says, "has forewarned me.  Daily He announces more
distinctly,--'Surely I come quickly!' and hourly I more eagerly
respond,--'Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!'"



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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor
Dostoyevsky



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Title: The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Release Date: February 12, 2009 [Ebook #28054]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF‐8


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV***





                          The Brothers Karamazov

                      Translated from the Russian of

                            Fyodor Dostoyevsky

                           by Constance Garnett

                             The Lowell Press

                                 New York





CONTENTS


Part I
   Book I. The History Of A Family
      Chapter I. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
      Chapter II. He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son
      Chapter III. The Second Marriage And The Second Family
      Chapter IV. The Third Son, Alyosha
      Chapter V. Elders
   Book II. An Unfortunate Gathering
      Chapter I. They Arrive At The Monastery
      Chapter II. The Old Buffoon
      Chapter III. Peasant Women Who Have Faith
      Chapter IV. A Lady Of Little Faith
      Chapter V. So Be It! So Be It!
      Chapter VI. Why Is Such A Man Alive?
      Chapter VII. A Young Man Bent On A Career
      Chapter VIII. The Scandalous Scene
   Book III. The Sensualists
      Chapter I. In The Servants’ Quarters
      Chapter II. Lizaveta
      Chapter III. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Verse
      Chapter IV. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Anecdote
      Chapter V. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—"Heels Up"
      Chapter VI. Smerdyakov
      Chapter VII. The Controversy
      Chapter VIII. Over The Brandy
      Chapter IX. The Sensualists
      Chapter X. Both Together
      Chapter XI. Another Reputation Ruined
Part II
   Book IV. Lacerations
      Chapter I. Father Ferapont
      Chapter II. At His Father’s
      Chapter III. A Meeting With The Schoolboys
      Chapter IV. At The Hohlakovs’
      Chapter V. A Laceration In The Drawing‐Room
      Chapter VI. A Laceration In The Cottage
      Chapter VII. And In The Open Air
   Book V. Pro And Contra
      Chapter I. The Engagement
      Chapter II. Smerdyakov With A Guitar
      Chapter III. The Brothers Make Friends
      Chapter IV. Rebellion
      Chapter V. The Grand Inquisitor
      Chapter VI. For Awhile A Very Obscure One
      Chapter VII. “It’s Always Worth While Speaking To A Clever Man”
   Book VI. The Russian Monk
      Chapter I. Father Zossima And His Visitors
      Chapter II. The Duel
      Chapter III. Conversations And Exhortations Of Father Zossima
Part III
   Book VII. Alyosha
      Chapter I. The Breath Of Corruption
      Chapter II. A Critical Moment
      Chapter III. An Onion
      Chapter IV. Cana Of Galilee
   Book VIII. Mitya
      Chapter I. Kuzma Samsonov
      Chapter II. Lyagavy
      Chapter III. Gold‐Mines
      Chapter IV. In The Dark
      Chapter V. A Sudden Resolution
      Chapter VI. “I Am Coming, Too!”
      Chapter VII. The First And Rightful Lover
      Chapter VIII. Delirium
   Book IX. The Preliminary Investigation
      Chapter I. The Beginning Of Perhotin’s Official Career
      Chapter II. The Alarm
      Chapter III. The Sufferings Of A Soul, The First Ordeal
      Chapter IV. The Second Ordeal
      Chapter V. The Third Ordeal
      Chapter VI. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya
      Chapter VII. Mitya’s Great Secret. Received With Hisses
      Chapter VIII. The Evidence Of The Witnesses. The Babe
      Chapter IX. They Carry Mitya Away
Part IV
   Book X. The Boys
      Chapter I. Kolya Krassotkin
      Chapter II. Children
      Chapter III. The Schoolboy
      Chapter IV. The Lost Dog
      Chapter V. By Ilusha’s Bedside
      Chapter VI. Precocity
      Chapter VII. Ilusha
   Book XI. Ivan
      Chapter I. At Grushenka’s
      Chapter II. The Injured Foot
      Chapter III. A Little Demon
      Chapter IV. A Hymn And A Secret
      Chapter V. Not You, Not You!
      Chapter VI. The First Interview With Smerdyakov
      Chapter VII. The Second Visit To Smerdyakov
      Chapter VIII. The Third And Last Interview With Smerdyakov
      Chapter IX. The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
      Chapter X. “It Was He Who Said That”
   Book XII. A Judicial Error
      Chapter I. The Fatal Day
      Chapter II. Dangerous Witnesses
      Chapter III. The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts
      Chapter IV. Fortune Smiles On Mitya
      Chapter V. A Sudden Catastrophe
      Chapter VI. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Sketches Of Character
      Chapter VII. An Historical Survey
      Chapter VIII. A Treatise On Smerdyakov
      Chapter IX. The Galloping Troika. The End Of The Prosecutor’s
      Speech.
      Chapter X. The Speech For The Defense. An Argument That Cuts Both
      Ways
      Chapter XI. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery
      Chapter XII. And There Was No Murder Either
      Chapter XIII. A Corrupter Of Thought
      Chapter XIV. The Peasants Stand Firm
Epilogue
   Chapter I. Plans For Mitya’s Escape
   Chapter II. For A Moment The Lie Becomes Truth
   Chapter III. Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech At The Stone
Footnotes






PART I




Book I. The History Of A Family



Chapter I. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov


Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and
still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which
happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper
place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we
used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own
estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a
type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of
those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their
worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch,
for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest;
he ran to dine at other men’s tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet
at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard
cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless,
fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not
stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and
intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of
it.

He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by his first
wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s first
wife, Adelaïda Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly rich and distinguished noble
family, also landowners in our district, the Miüsovs. How it came to pass
that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and moreover one of those
vigorous, intelligent girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes
also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny
weakling, as we all called him, I won’t attempt to explain. I knew a young
lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an
enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have
married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and
ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid
river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to
satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Indeed, if
this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less
picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most
likely the suicide would never have taken place. This is a fact, and
probably there have been not a few similar instances in the last two or
three generations. Adelaïda Ivanovna Miüsov’s action was similarly, no
doubt, an echo of other people’s ideas, and was due to the irritation
caused by lack of mental freedom. She wanted, perhaps, to show her
feminine independence, to override class distinctions and the despotism of
her family. And a pliable imagination persuaded her, we must suppose, for
a brief moment, that Fyodor Pavlovitch, in spite of his parasitic
position, was one of the bold and ironical spirits of that progressive
epoch, though he was, in fact, an ill‐natured buffoon and nothing more.
What gave the marriage piquancy was that it was preceded by an elopement,
and this greatly captivated Adelaïda Ivanovna’s fancy. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
position at the time made him specially eager for any such enterprise, for
he was passionately anxious to make a career in one way or another. To
attach himself to a good family and obtain a dowry was an alluring
prospect. As for mutual love it did not exist apparently, either in the
bride or in him, in spite of Adelaïda Ivanovna’s beauty. This was,
perhaps, a unique case of the kind in the life of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who
was always of a voluptuous temper, and ready to run after any petticoat on
the slightest encouragement. She seems to have been the only woman who
made no particular appeal to his senses.

Immediately after the elopement Adelaïda Ivanovna discerned in a flash
that she had no feeling for her husband but contempt. The marriage
accordingly showed itself in its true colors with extraordinary rapidity.
Although the family accepted the event pretty quickly and apportioned the
runaway bride her dowry, the husband and wife began to lead a most
disorderly life, and there were everlasting scenes between them. It was
said that the young wife showed incomparably more generosity and dignity
than Fyodor Pavlovitch, who, as is now known, got hold of all her money up
to twenty‐five thousand roubles as soon as she received it, so that those
thousands were lost to her for ever. The little village and the rather
fine town house which formed part of her dowry he did his utmost for a
long time to transfer to his name, by means of some deed of conveyance. He
would probably have succeeded, merely from her moral fatigue and desire to
get rid of him, and from the contempt and loathing he aroused by his
persistent and shameless importunity. But, fortunately, Adelaïda
Ivanovna’s family intervened and circumvented his greediness. It is known
for a fact that frequent fights took place between the husband and wife,
but rumor had it that Fyodor Pavlovitch did not beat his wife but was
beaten by her, for she was a hot‐tempered, bold, dark‐browed, impatient
woman, possessed of remarkable physical strength. Finally, she left the
house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovitch with a destitute divinity
student, leaving Mitya, a child of three years old, in her husband’s
hands. Immediately Fyodor Pavlovitch introduced a regular harem into the
house, and abandoned himself to orgies of drunkenness. In the intervals he
used to drive all over the province, complaining tearfully to each and all
of Adelaïda Ivanovna’s having left him, going into details too disgraceful
for a husband to mention in regard to his own married life. What seemed to
gratify him and flatter his self‐love most was to play the ridiculous part
of the injured husband, and to parade his woes with embellishments.

“One would think that you’d got a promotion, Fyodor Pavlovitch, you seem
so pleased in spite of your sorrow,” scoffers said to him. Many even added
that he was glad of a new comic part in which to play the buffoon, and
that it was simply to make it funnier that he pretended to be unaware of
his ludicrous position. But, who knows, it may have been simplicity. At
last he succeeded in getting on the track of his runaway wife. The poor
woman turned out to be in Petersburg, where she had gone with her divinity
student, and where she had thrown herself into a life of complete
emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovitch at once began bustling about, making
preparations to go to Petersburg, with what object he could not himself
have said. He would perhaps have really gone; but having determined to do
so he felt at once entitled to fortify himself for the journey by another
bout of reckless drinking. And just at that time his wife’s family
received the news of her death in Petersburg. She had died quite suddenly
in a garret, according to one story, of typhus, or as another version had
it, of starvation. Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s
death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting
with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant
depart in peace,” but others say he wept without restraint like a little
child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the
repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true,
that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who
released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more
naïve and simple‐hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.



Chapter II. He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son


You can easily imagine what a father such a man could be and how he would
bring up his children. His behavior as a father was exactly what might be
expected. He completely abandoned the child of his marriage with Adelaïda
Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of his matrimonial grievances, but
simply because he forgot him. While he was wearying every one with his
tears and complaints, and turning his house into a sink of debauchery, a
faithful servant of the family, Grigory, took the three‐year‐old Mitya
into his care. If he hadn’t looked after him there would have been no one
even to change the baby’s little shirt.

It happened moreover that the child’s relations on his mother’s side
forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no longer living, his widow,
Mitya’s grandmother, had moved to Moscow, and was seriously ill, while his
daughters were married, so that Mitya remained for almost a whole year in
old Grigory’s charge and lived with him in the servant’s cottage. But if
his father had remembered him (he could not, indeed, have been altogether
unaware of his existence) he would have sent him back to the cottage, as
the child would only have been in the way of his debaucheries. But a
cousin of Mitya’s mother, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, happened to return
from Paris. He lived for many years afterwards abroad, but was at that
time quite a young man, and distinguished among the Miüsovs as a man of
enlightened ideas and of European culture, who had been in the capitals
and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type
common in the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had come
into contact with many of the most Liberal men of his epoch, both in
Russia and abroad. He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in
his declining years was very fond of describing the three days of the
Paris Revolution of February 1848, hinting that he himself had almost
taken part in the fighting on the barricades. This was one of the most
grateful recollections of his youth. He had an independent property of
about a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style. His splendid estate
lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands of our
famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an endless
lawsuit, almost as soon as he came into the estate, concerning the rights
of fishing in the river or wood‐cutting in the forest, I don’t know
exactly which. He regarded it as his duty as a citizen and a man of
culture to open an attack upon the “clericals.” Hearing all about Adelaïda
Ivanovna, whom he, of course, remembered, and in whom he had at one time
been interested, and learning of the existence of Mitya, he intervened, in
spite of all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch.
He made the latter’s acquaintance for the first time, and told him
directly that he wished to undertake the child’s education. He used long
afterwards to tell as a characteristic touch, that when he began to speak
of Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch looked for some time as though he did not
understand what child he was talking about, and even as though he was
surprised to hear that he had a little son in the house. The story may
have been exaggerated, yet it must have been something like the truth.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing an
unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even to
his own direct disadvantage, as, for instance, in the present case. This
habit, however, is characteristic of a very great number of people, some
of them very clever ones, not like Fyodor Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch
carried the business through vigorously, and was appointed, with Fyodor
Pavlovitch, joint guardian of the child, who had a small property, a house
and land, left him by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, pass into this
cousin’s keeping, but as the latter had no family of his own, and after
securing the revenues of his estates was in haste to return at once to
Paris, he left the boy in charge of one of his cousins, a lady living in
Moscow. It came to pass that, settling permanently in Paris he, too,
forgot the child, especially when the Revolution of February broke out,
making an impression on his mind that he remembered all the rest of his
life. The Moscow lady died, and Mitya passed into the care of one of her
married daughters. I believe he changed his home a fourth time later on. I
won’t enlarge upon that now, as I shall have much to tell later of Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s firstborn, and must confine myself now to the most essential
facts about him, without which I could not begin my story.

In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch, was the
only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s three sons who grew up in the belief that
he had property, and that he would be independent on coming of age. He
spent an irregular boyhood and youth. He did not finish his studies at the
gymnasium, he got into a military school, then went to the Caucasus, was
promoted, fought a duel, and was degraded to the ranks, earned promotion
again, led a wild life, and spent a good deal of money. He did not begin
to receive any income from Fyodor Pavlovitch until he came of age, and
until then got into debt. He saw and knew his father, Fyodor Pavlovitch,
for the first time on coming of age, when he visited our neighborhood on
purpose to settle with him about his property. He seems not to have liked
his father. He did not stay long with him, and made haste to get away,
having only succeeded in obtaining a sum of money, and entering into an
agreement for future payments from the estate, of the revenues and value
of which he was unable (a fact worthy of note), upon this occasion, to get
a statement from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time
then (this, too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated
idea of his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with this,
as it fell in with his own designs. He gathered only that the young man
was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated, and
that if he could only obtain ready money he would be satisfied, although
only, of course, for a short time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take
advantage of this fact, sending him from time to time small doles,
installments. In the end, when four years later, Mitya, losing patience,
came a second time to our little town to settle up once for all with his
father, it turned out to his amazement that he had nothing, that it was
difficult to get an account even, that he had received the whole value of
his property in sums of money from Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was perhaps even
in debt to him, that by various agreements into which he had, of his own
desire, entered at various previous dates, he had no right to expect
anything more, and so on, and so on. The young man was overwhelmed,
suspected deceit and cheating, and was almost beside himself. And, indeed,
this circumstance led to the catastrophe, the account of which forms the
subject of my first introductory story, or rather the external side of it.
But before I pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
other two sons, and of their origin.



Chapter III. The Second Marriage And The Second Family


Very shortly after getting his four‐year‐old Mitya off his hands Fyodor
Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted eight years.
He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very young girl, from
another province, where he had gone upon some small piece of business in
company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch was a drunkard and a vicious
debauchee he never neglected investing his capital, and managed his
business affairs very successfully, though, no doubt, not over‐
scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the daughter of an obscure deacon, and
was left from childhood an orphan without relations. She grew up in the
house of a general’s widow, a wealthy old lady of good position, who was
at once her benefactress and tormentor. I do not know the details, but I
have only heard that the orphan girl, a meek and gentle creature, was once
cut down from a halter in which she was hanging from a nail in the loft,
so terrible were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting nagging
of this old woman, who was apparently not bad‐hearted but had become an
insufferable tyrant through idleness.

Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him and he
was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed an elopement
to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she would not on any
account have married him if she had known a little more about him in time.
But she lived in another province; besides, what could a little girl of
sixteen know about it, except that she would be better at the bottom of
the river than remaining with her benefactress. So the poor child
exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not get a
penny this time, for the general’s widow was furious. She gave them
nothing and cursed them both. But he had not reckoned on a dowry; what
allured him was the remarkable beauty of the innocent girl, above all her
innocent appearance, which had a peculiar attraction for a vicious
profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser types of feminine
beauty.

“Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor,” he used to say
afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this might,
of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had received no
dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her “from the halter,” he
did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel that she had “wronged”
him, he took advantage of her phenomenal meekness and submissiveness to
trample on the elementary decencies of marriage. He gathered loose women
into his house, and carried on orgies of debauchery in his wife’s
presence. To show what a pass things had come to, I may mention that
Grigory, the gloomy, stupid, obstinate, argumentative servant, who had
always hated his first mistress, Adelaïda Ivanovna, took the side of his
new mistress. He championed her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a
manner little befitting a servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels
and drove all the disorderly women out of the house. In the end this
unhappy young woman, kept in terror from her childhood, fell into that
kind of nervous disease which is most frequently found in peasant women
who are said to be “possessed by devils.” At times after terrible fits of
hysterics she even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor Pavlovitch two
sons, Ivan and Alexey, the eldest in the first year of marriage and the
second three years later. When she died, little Alexey was in his fourth
year, and, strange as it seems, I know that he remembered his mother all
his life, like a dream, of course. At her death almost exactly the same
thing happened to the two little boys as to their elder brother, Mitya.
They were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father. They were
looked after by the same Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they were
found by the tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother. She was
still alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the insult done
her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as to her Sofya’s
manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous surroundings she
declared aloud two or three times to her retainers:

“It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.”

Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s widow
suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she did a great deal.
It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had not seen for those eight
years, came in to her drunk. The story is that instantly upon seeing him,
without any sort of explanation, she gave him two good, resounding slaps
on the face, seized him by a tuft of hair, and shook him three times up
and down. Then, without a word, she went straight to the cottage to the
two boys. Seeing, at the first glance, that they were unwashed and in
dirty linen, she promptly gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and
announcing that she would carry off both the children she wrapped them
just as they were in a rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her
own town. Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word,
and when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow
and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for the orphans.”
“You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she
drove away.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good thing, and
did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to any proposition
in regard to his children’s education. As for the slaps she had given him,
he drove all over the town telling the story.

It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she left the boys
in her will a thousand roubles each “for their instruction, and so that
all be spent on them exclusively, with the condition that it be so
portioned out as to last till they are twenty‐one, for it is more than
adequate provision for such children. If other people think fit to throw
away their money, let them.” I have not read the will myself, but I heard
there was something queer of the sort, very whimsically expressed. The
principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility of the
province, turned out, however, to be an honest man. Writing to Fyodor
Pavlovitch, and discerning at once that he could extract nothing from him
for his children’s education (though the latter never directly refused but
only procrastinated as he always did in such cases, and was, indeed, at
times effusively sentimental), Yefim Petrovitch took a personal interest
in the orphans. He became especially fond of the younger, Alexey, who
lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the reader to note this
from the beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man of a generosity and
humanity rarely to be met with, the young people were more indebted for
their education and bringing up than to any one. He kept the two thousand
roubles left to them by the general’s widow intact, so that by the time
they came of age their portions had been doubled by the accumulation of
interest. He educated them both at his own expense, and certainly spent
far more than a thousand roubles upon each of them. I won’t enter into a
detailed account of their boyhood and youth, but will only mention a few
of the most important events. Of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that he
grew into a somewhat morose and reserved, though far from timid boy. At
ten years old he had realized that they were living not in their own home
but on other people’s charity, and that their father was a man of whom it
was disgraceful to speak. This boy began very early, almost in his infancy
(so they say at least), to show a brilliant and unusual aptitude for
learning. I don’t know precisely why, but he left the family of Yefim
Petrovitch when he was hardly thirteen, entering a Moscow gymnasium, and
boarding with an experienced and celebrated teacher, an old friend of
Yefim Petrovitch. Ivan used to declare afterwards that this was all due to
the “ardor for good works” of Yefim Petrovitch, who was captivated by the
idea that the boy’s genius should be trained by a teacher of genius. But
neither Yefim Petrovitch nor this teacher was living when the young man
finished at the gymnasium and entered the university. As Yefim Petrovitch
had made no provision for the payment of the tyrannical old lady’s legacy,
which had grown from one thousand to two, it was delayed, owing to
formalities inevitable in Russia, and the young man was in great straits
for the first two years at the university, as he was forced to keep
himself all the time he was studying. It must be noted that he did not
even attempt to communicate with his father, perhaps from pride, from
contempt for him, or perhaps from his cool common sense, which told him
that from such a father he would get no real assistance. However that may
have been, the young man was by no means despondent and succeeded in
getting work, at first giving sixpenny lessons and afterwards getting
paragraphs on street incidents into the newspapers under the signature of
“Eye‐Witness.” These paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting and
piquant that they were soon taken. This alone showed the young man’s
practical and intellectual superiority over the masses of needy and
unfortunate students of both sexes who hang about the offices of the
newspapers and journals, unable to think of anything better than
everlasting entreaties for copying and translations from the French.
Having once got into touch with the editors Ivan Fyodorovitch always kept
up his connection with them, and in his latter years at the university he
published brilliant reviews of books upon various special subjects, so
that he became well known in literary circles. But only in his last year
he suddenly succeeded in attracting the attention of a far wider circle of
readers, so that a great many people noticed and remembered him. It was
rather a curious incident. When he had just left the university and was
preparing to go abroad upon his two thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovitch
published in one of the more important journals a strange article, which
attracted general notice, on a subject of which he might have been
supposed to know nothing, as he was a student of natural science. The
article dealt with a subject which was being debated everywhere at the
time—the position of the ecclesiastical courts. After discussing several
opinions on the subject he went on to explain his own view. What was most
striking about the article was its tone, and its unexpected conclusion.
Many of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as on their side.
And yet not only the secularists but even atheists joined them in their
applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined that the article was
nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque. I mention this incident
particularly because this article penetrated into the famous monastery in
our neighborhood, where the inmates, being particularly interested in the
question of the ecclesiastical courts, were completely bewildered by it.
Learning the author’s name, they were interested in his being a native of
the town and the son of “that Fyodor Pavlovitch.” And just then it was
that the author himself made his appearance among us.

Why Ivan Fyodorovitch had come amongst us I remember asking myself at the
time with a certain uneasiness. This fateful visit, which was the first
step leading to so many consequences, I never fully explained to myself.
It seemed strange on the face of it that a young man so learned, so proud,
and apparently so cautious, should suddenly visit such an infamous house
and a father who had ignored him all his life, hardly knew him, never
thought of him, and would not under any circumstances have given him
money, though he was always afraid that his sons Ivan and Alexey would
also come to ask him for it. And here the young man was staying in the
house of such a father, had been living with him for two months, and they
were on the best possible terms. This last fact was a special cause of
wonder to many others as well as to me. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, of
whom we have spoken already, the cousin of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s first wife,
happened to be in the neighborhood again on a visit to his estate. He had
come from Paris, which was his permanent home. I remember that he was more
surprised than any one when he made the acquaintance of the young man, who
interested him extremely, and with whom he sometimes argued and not
without an inner pang compared himself in acquirements.

“He is proud,” he used to say, “he will never be in want of pence; he has
got money enough to go abroad now. What does he want here? Every one can
see that he hasn’t come for money, for his father would never give him
any. He has no taste for drink and dissipation, and yet his father can’t
do without him. They get on so well together!”

That was the truth; the young man had an unmistakable influence over his
father, who positively appeared to be behaving more decently and even
seemed at times ready to obey his son, though often extremely and even
spitefully perverse.

It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come partly at the request
of, and in the interests of, his elder brother, Dmitri, whom he saw for
the first time on this very visit, though he had before leaving Moscow
been in correspondence with him about an important matter of more concern
to Dmitri than himself. What that business was the reader will learn fully
in due time. Yet even when I did know of this special circumstance I still
felt Ivan Fyodorovitch to be an enigmatic figure, and thought his visit
rather mysterious.

I may add that Ivan appeared at the time in the light of a mediator
between his father and his elder brother Dmitri, who was in open quarrel
with his father and even planning to bring an action against him.

The family, I repeat, was now united for the first time, and some of its
members met for the first time in their lives. The younger brother,
Alexey, had been a year already among us, having been the first of the
three to arrive. It is of that brother Alexey I find it most difficult to
speak in this introduction. Yet I must give some preliminary account of
him, if only to explain one queer fact, which is that I have to introduce
my hero to the reader wearing the cassock of a novice. Yes, he had been
for the last year in our monastery, and seemed willing to be cloistered
there for the rest of his life.



Chapter IV. The Third Son, Alyosha


He was only twenty, his brother Ivan was in his twenty‐fourth year at the
time, while their elder brother Dmitri was twenty‐seven. First of all, I
must explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my
opinion at least, was not even a mystic. I may as well give my full
opinion from the beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and
that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it
struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from
the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. And the reason
this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at that time, as
he thought, an extraordinary being, our celebrated elder, Zossima, to whom
he became attached with all the warm first love of his ardent heart. But I
do not dispute that he was very strange even at that time, and had been so
indeed from his cradle. I have mentioned already, by the way, that though
he lost his mother in his fourth year he remembered her all his life—her
face, her caresses, “as though she stood living before me.” Such memories
may persist, as every one knows, from an even earlier age, even from two
years old, but scarcely standing out through a whole lifetime like spots
of light out of darkness, like a corner torn out of a huge picture, which
has all faded and disappeared except that fragment. That is how it was
with him. He remembered one still summer evening, an open window, the
slanting rays of the setting sun (that he recalled most vividly of all);
in a corner of the room the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on
her knees before the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and
moans, snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt,
and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both arms to
the image as though to put him under the Mother’s protection ... and
suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from her in terror. That was the
picture! And Alyosha remembered his mother’s face at that minute. He used
to say that it was frenzied but beautiful as he remembered. But he rarely
cared to speak of this memory to any one. In his childhood and youth he
was by no means expansive, and talked little indeed, but not from shyness
or a sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, from something different,
from a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and unconcerned with
other people, but so important to him that he seemed, as it were, to
forget others on account of it. But he was fond of people: he seemed
throughout his life to put implicit trust in people: yet no one ever
looked on him as a simpleton or naïve person. There was something about
him which made one feel at once (and it was so all his life afterwards)
that he did not care to be a judge of others—that he would never take it
upon himself to criticize and would never condemn any one for anything. He
seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though
often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one could
surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth. Coming at twenty to
his father’s house, which was a very sink of filthy debauchery, he, chaste
and pure as he was, simply withdrew in silence when to look on was
unbearable, but without the slightest sign of contempt or condemnation.
His father, who had once been in a dependent position, and so was
sensitive and ready to take offense, met him at first with distrust and
sullenness. “He does not say much,” he used to say, “and thinks the more.”
But soon, within a fortnight indeed, he took to embracing him and kissing
him terribly often, with drunken tears, with sottish sentimentality, yet
he evidently felt a real and deep affection for him, such as he had never
been capable of feeling for any one before.

Every one, indeed, loved this young man wherever he went, and it was so
from his earliest childhood. When he entered the household of his patron
and benefactor, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, he gained the hearts of all the
family, so that they looked on him quite as their own child. Yet he
entered the house at such a tender age that he could not have acted from
design nor artfulness in winning affection. So that the gift of making
himself loved directly and unconsciously was inherent in him, in his very
nature, so to speak. It was the same at school, though he seemed to be
just one of those children who are distrusted, sometimes ridiculed, and
even disliked by their schoolfellows. He was dreamy, for instance, and
rather solitary. From his earliest childhood he was fond of creeping into
a corner to read, and yet he was a general favorite all the while he was
at school. He was rarely playful or merry, but any one could see at the
first glance that this was not from any sullenness. On the contrary he was
bright and good‐tempered. He never tried to show off among his
schoolfellows. Perhaps because of this, he was never afraid of any one,
yet the boys immediately understood that he was not proud of his
fearlessness and seemed to be unaware that he was bold and courageous. He
never resented an insult. It would happen that an hour after the offense
he would address the offender or answer some question with as trustful and
candid an expression as though nothing had happened between them. And it
was not that he seemed to have forgotten or intentionally forgiven the
affront, but simply that he did not regard it as an affront, and this
completely conquered and captivated the boys. He had one characteristic
which made all his schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top want to
mock at him, not from malice but because it amused them. This
characteristic was a wild fanatical modesty and chastity. He could not
bear to hear certain words and certain conversations about women. There
are “certain” words and conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in
schools. Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking
in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and
images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak. More than
that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception of is familiar to
quite young children of our intellectual and higher classes. There is no
moral depravity, no real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the
appearance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as something
refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha
Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they
used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout
nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried
to hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults
in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with
being a “regular girl,” and what’s more they looked upon it with
compassion as a weakness. He was always one of the best in the class but
was never first.

At the time of Yefim Petrovitch’s death Alyosha had two more years to
complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable widow went almost
immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with her whole
family, which consisted only of women and girls. Alyosha went to live in
the house of two distant relations of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies whom he had
never seen before. On what terms he lived with them he did not know
himself. It was very characteristic of him, indeed, that he never cared at
whose expense he was living. In that respect he was a striking contrast to
his elder brother Ivan, who struggled with poverty for his first two years
in the university, maintained himself by his own efforts, and had from
childhood been bitterly conscious of living at the expense of his
benefactor. But this strange trait in Alyosha’s character must not, I
think, be criticized too severely, for at the slightest acquaintance with
him any one would have perceived that Alyosha was one of those youths,
almost of the type of religious enthusiast, who, if they were suddenly to
come into possession of a large fortune, would not hesitate to give it
away for the asking, either for good works or perhaps to a clever rogue.
In general he seemed scarcely to know the value of money, not, of course,
in a literal sense. When he was given pocket‐money, which he never asked
for, he was either terribly careless of it so that it was gone in a
moment, or he kept it for weeks together, not knowing what to do with it.

In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, a man very sensitive on the
score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the following judgment,
after getting to know Alyosha:

“Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might leave alone
without a penny, in the center of an unknown town of a million
inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he would not die of cold and
hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once; and if he were not, he
would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him no effort or
humiliation. And to shelter him would be no burden, but, on the contrary,
would probably be looked on as a pleasure.”

He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium. A year before the end of
the course he suddenly announced to the ladies that he was going to see
his father about a plan which had occurred to him. They were sorry and
unwilling to let him go. The journey was not an expensive one, and the
ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a parting present from his
benefactor’s family. They provided him liberally with money and even
fitted him out with new clothes and linen. But he returned half the money
they gave him, saying that he intended to go third class. On his arrival
in the town he made no answer to his father’s first inquiry why he had
come before completing his studies, and seemed, so they say, unusually
thoughtful. It soon became apparent that he was looking for his mother’s
tomb. He practically acknowledged at the time that that was the only
object of his visit. But it can hardly have been the whole reason of it.
It is more probable that he himself did not understand and could not
explain what had suddenly arisen in his soul, and drawn him irresistibly
into a new, unknown, but inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovitch could not show
him where his second wife was buried, for he had never visited her grave
since he had thrown earth upon her coffin, and in the course of years had
entirely forgotten where she was buried.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, by the way, had for some time previously not been
living in our town. Three or four years after his wife’s death he had gone
to the south of Russia and finally turned up in Odessa, where he spent
several years. He made the acquaintance at first, in his own words, “of a
lot of low Jews, Jewesses, and Jewkins,” and ended by being received by
“Jews high and low alike.” It may be presumed that at this period he
developed a peculiar faculty for making and hoarding money. He finally
returned to our town only three years before Alyosha’s arrival. His former
acquaintances found him looking terribly aged, although he was by no means
an old man. He behaved not exactly with more dignity but with more
effrontery. The former buffoon showed an insolent propensity for making
buffoons of others. His depravity with women was not simply what it used
to be, but even more revolting. In a short time he opened a great number
of new taverns in the district. It was evident that he had perhaps a
hundred thousand roubles or not much less. Many of the inhabitants of the
town and district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good
security. Of late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more
irresponsible, more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence, used to
begin one thing and go on with another, as though he were letting himself
go altogether. He was more and more frequently drunk. And, if it had not
been for the same servant Grigory, who by that time had aged considerably
too, and used to look after him sometimes almost like a tutor, Fyodor
Pavlovitch might have got into terrible scrapes. Alyosha’s arrival seemed
to affect even his moral side, as though something had awakened in this
prematurely old man which had long been dead in his soul.

“Do you know,” he used often to say, looking at Alyosha, “that you are
like her, ‘the crazy woman’ ”—that was what he used to call his dead wife,
Alyosha’s mother. Grigory it was who pointed out the “crazy woman’s” grave
to Alyosha. He took him to our town cemetery and showed him in a remote
corner a cast‐iron tombstone, cheap but decently kept, on which were
inscribed the name and age of the deceased and the date of her death, and
below a four‐lined verse, such as are commonly used on old‐fashioned
middle‐class tombs. To Alyosha’s amazement this tomb turned out to be
Grigory’s doing. He had put it up on the poor “crazy woman’s” grave at his
own expense, after Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom he had often pestered about the
grave, had gone to Odessa, abandoning the grave and all his memories.
Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of his mother’s grave.
He only listened to Grigory’s minute and solemn account of the erection of
the tomb; he stood with bowed head and walked away without uttering a
word. It was perhaps a year before he visited the cemetery again. But this
little episode was not without an influence upon Fyodor Pavlovitch—and a
very original one. He suddenly took a thousand roubles to our monastery to
pay for requiems for the soul of his wife; but not for the second,
Alyosha’s mother, the “crazy woman,” but for the first, Adelaïda Ivanovna,
who used to thrash him. In the evening of the same day he got drunk and
abused the monks to Alyosha. He himself was far from being religious; he
had probably never put a penny candle before the image of a saint. Strange
impulses of sudden feeling and sudden thought are common in such types.

I have mentioned already that he looked bloated. His countenance at this
time bore traces of something that testified unmistakably to the life he
had led. Besides the long fleshy bags under his little, always insolent,
suspicious, and ironical eyes; besides the multitude of deep wrinkles in
his little fat face, the Adam’s apple hung below his sharp chin like a
great, fleshy goiter, which gave him a peculiar, repulsive, sensual
appearance; add to that a long rapacious mouth with full lips, between
which could be seen little stumps of black decayed teeth. He slobbered
every time he began to speak. He was fond indeed of making fun of his own
face, though, I believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used
particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very
delicate and conspicuously aquiline. “A regular Roman nose,” he used to
say, “with my goiter I’ve quite the countenance of an ancient Roman
patrician of the decadent period.” He seemed proud of it.

Not long after visiting his mother’s grave Alyosha suddenly announced that
he wanted to enter the monastery, and that the monks were willing to
receive him as a novice. He explained that this was his strong desire, and
that he was solemnly asking his consent as his father. The old man knew
that the elder Zossima, who was living in the monastery hermitage, had
made a special impression upon his “gentle boy.”

“That is the most honest monk among them, of course,” he observed, after
listening in thoughtful silence to Alyosha, and seeming scarcely surprised
at his request. “H’m!... So that’s where you want to be, my gentle boy?”

He was half drunk, and suddenly he grinned his slow half‐drunken grin,
which was not without a certain cunning and tipsy slyness. “H’m!... I had
a presentiment that you would end in something like this. Would you
believe it? You were making straight for it. Well, to be sure you have
your own two thousand. That’s a dowry for you. And I’ll never desert you,
my angel. And I’ll pay what’s wanted for you there, if they ask for it.
But, of course, if they don’t ask, why should we worry them? What do you
say? You know, you spend money like a canary, two grains a week. H’m!...
Do you know that near one monastery there’s a place outside the town where
every baby knows there are none but ‘the monks’ wives’ living, as they are
called. Thirty women, I believe. I have been there myself. You know, it’s
interesting in its own way, of course, as a variety. The worst of it is
it’s awfully Russian. There are no French women there. Of course they
could get them fast enough, they have plenty of money. If they get to hear
of it they’ll come along. Well, there’s nothing of that sort here, no
‘monks’ wives,’ and two hundred monks. They’re honest. They keep the
fasts. I admit it.... H’m.... So you want to be a monk? And do you know
I’m sorry to lose you, Alyosha; would you believe it, I’ve really grown
fond of you? Well, it’s a good opportunity. You’ll pray for us sinners; we
have sinned too much here. I’ve always been thinking who would pray for
me, and whether there’s any one in the world to do it. My dear boy, I’m
awfully stupid about that. You wouldn’t believe it. Awfully. You see,
however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep thinking—from time
to time, of course, not all the while. It’s impossible, I think, for the
devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die. Then
I wonder—hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do
they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in the
monastery probably believe that there’s a ceiling in hell, for instance.
Now I’m ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it more
refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is. And, after all, what
does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn’t? But, do you know,
there’s a damnable question involved in it? If there’s no ceiling there
can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is
unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and
if they don’t drag me down what justice is there in the world? _Il
faudrait les inventer_, those hooks, on purpose for me alone, for, if you
only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard I am.”

“But there are no hooks there,” said Alyosha, looking gently and seriously
at his father.

“Yes, yes, only the shadows of hooks, I know, I know. That’s how a
Frenchman described hell: ‘_J’ai bu l’ombre d’un cocher qui avec l’ombre
d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’une carrosse._’ How do you know there are
no hooks, darling? When you’ve lived with the monks you’ll sing a
different tune. But go and get at the truth there, and then come and tell
me. Anyway it’s easier going to the other world if one knows what there is
there. Besides, it will be more seemly for you with the monks than here
with me, with a drunken old man and young harlots ... though you’re like
an angel, nothing touches you. And I dare say nothing will touch you
there. That’s why I let you go, because I hope for that. You’ve got all
your wits about you. You will burn and you will burn out; you will be
healed and come back again. And I will wait for you. I feel that you’re
the only creature in the world who has not condemned me. My dear boy, I
feel it, you know. I can’t help feeling it.”

And he even began blubbering. He was sentimental. He was wicked and
sentimental.



Chapter V. Elders


Some of my readers may imagine that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic,
poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive dreamer. On the contrary,
Alyosha was at this time a well‐grown, red‐cheeked, clear‐eyed lad of
nineteen, radiant with health. He was very handsome, too, graceful,
moderately tall, with hair of a dark brown, with a regular, rather long,
oval‐shaped face, and wide‐set dark gray, shining eyes; he was very
thoughtful, and apparently very serene. I shall be told, perhaps, that red
cheeks are not incompatible with fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy
that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the
monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are
never a stumbling‐block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose
realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will
always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if
he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather
disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he
admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does
not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.
If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to
admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not
believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!”
Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed
solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his
secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not
finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is
true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice.
I’ll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only
because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented
itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from
darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our
last epoch—that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it
and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength
of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice
everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to
understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of
all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of
their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply
tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set
before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength
of many of them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite
direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As
soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God
and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: “I want to
live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.” In the same way,
if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once
have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the
labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the
question of the form taken by atheism to‐day, the question of the tower of
Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up
heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go
on living as before. It is written: “Give all that thou hast to the poor
and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect.”

Alyosha said to himself: “I can’t give two roubles instead of ‘all,’ and
only go to mass instead of ‘following Him.’ ” Perhaps his memories of
childhood brought back our monastery, to which his mother may have taken
him to mass. Perhaps the slanting sunlight and the holy image to which his
poor “crazy” mother had held him up still acted upon his imagination.
Brooding on these things he may have come to us perhaps only to see
whether here he could sacrifice all or only “two roubles,” and in the
monastery he met this elder. I must digress to explain what an “elder” is
in Russian monasteries, and I am sorry that I do not feel very competent
to do so. I will try, however, to give a superficial account of it in a
few words. Authorities on the subject assert that the institution of
“elders” is of recent date, not more than a hundred years old in our
monasteries, though in the orthodox East, especially in Sinai and Athos,
it has existed over a thousand years. It is maintained that it existed in
ancient times in Russia also, but through the calamities which overtook
Russia—the Tartars, civil war, the interruption of relations with the East
after the destruction of Constantinople—this institution fell into
oblivion. It was revived among us towards the end of last century by one
of the great “ascetics,” as they called him, Païssy Velitchkovsky, and his
disciples. But to this day it exists in few monasteries only, and has
sometimes been almost persecuted as an innovation in Russia. It flourished
especially in the celebrated Kozelski Optin Monastery. When and how it was
introduced into our monastery I cannot say. There had already been three
such elders and Zossima was the last of them. But he was almost dying of
weakness and disease, and they had no one to take his place. The question
for our monastery was an important one, for it had not been distinguished
by anything in particular till then: they had neither relics of saints,
nor wonder‐working ikons, nor glorious traditions, nor historical
exploits. It had flourished and been glorious all over Russia through its
elders, to see and hear whom pilgrims had flocked for thousands of miles
from all parts.

What was such an elder? An elder was one who took your soul, your will,
into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder, you renounce your
own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete self‐
abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible school of abnegation, is
undertaken voluntarily, in the hope of self‐conquest, of self‐mastery, in
order, after a life of obedience, to attain perfect freedom, that is, from
self; to escape the lot of those who have lived their whole life without
finding their true selves in themselves. This institution of elders is not
founded on theory, but was established in the East from the practice of a
thousand years. The obligations due to an elder are not the ordinary
“obedience” which has always existed in our Russian monasteries. The
obligation involves confession to the elder by all who have submitted
themselves to him, and to the indissoluble bond between him and them.

The story is told, for instance, that in the early days of Christianity
one such novice, failing to fulfill some command laid upon him by his
elder, left his monastery in Syria and went to Egypt. There, after great
exploits, he was found worthy at last to suffer torture and a martyr’s
death for the faith. When the Church, regarding him as a saint, was
burying him, suddenly, at the deacon’s exhortation, “Depart all ye
unbaptized,” the coffin containing the martyr’s body left its place and
was cast forth from the church, and this took place three times. And only
at last they learnt that this holy man had broken his vow of obedience and
left his elder, and, therefore, could not be forgiven without the elder’s
absolution in spite of his great deeds. Only after this could the funeral
take place. This, of course, is only an old legend. But here is a recent
instance.

A monk was suddenly commanded by his elder to quit Athos, which he loved
as a sacred place and a haven of refuge, and to go first to Jerusalem to
do homage to the Holy Places and then to go to the north to Siberia:
“There is the place for thee and not here.” The monk, overwhelmed with
sorrow, went to the Œcumenical Patriarch at Constantinople and besought
him to release him from his obedience. But the Patriarch replied that not
only was he unable to release him, but there was not and could not be on
earth a power which could release him except the elder who had himself
laid that duty upon him. In this way the elders are endowed in certain
cases with unbounded and inexplicable authority. That is why in many of
our monasteries the institution was at first resisted almost to
persecution. Meantime the elders immediately began to be highly esteemed
among the people. Masses of the ignorant people as well as men of
distinction flocked, for instance, to the elders of our monastery to
confess their doubts, their sins, and their sufferings, and ask for
counsel and admonition. Seeing this, the opponents of the elders declared
that the sacrament of confession was being arbitrarily and frivolously
degraded, though the continual opening of the heart to the elder by the
monk or the layman had nothing of the character of the sacrament. In the
end, however, the institution of elders has been retained and is becoming
established in Russian monasteries. It is true, perhaps, that this
instrument which had stood the test of a thousand years for the moral
regeneration of a man from slavery to freedom and to moral perfectibility
may be a two‐edged weapon and it may lead some not to humility and
complete self‐control but to the most Satanic pride, that is, to bondage
and not to freedom.

The elder Zossima was sixty‐five. He came of a family of landowners, had
been in the army in early youth, and served in the Caucasus as an officer.
He had, no doubt, impressed Alyosha by some peculiar quality of his soul.
Alyosha lived in the cell of the elder, who was very fond of him and let
him wait upon him. It must be noted that Alyosha was bound by no
obligation and could go where he pleased and be absent for whole days.
Though he wore the monastic dress it was voluntarily, not to be different
from others. No doubt he liked to do so. Possibly his youthful imagination
was deeply stirred by the power and fame of his elder. It was said that so
many people had for years past come to confess their sins to Father
Zossima and to entreat him for words of advice and healing, that he had
acquired the keenest intuition and could tell from an unknown face what a
new‐comer wanted, and what was the suffering on his conscience. He
sometimes astounded and almost alarmed his visitors by his knowledge of
their secrets before they had spoken a word.

Alyosha noticed that many, almost all, went in to the elder for the first
time with apprehension and uneasiness, but came out with bright and happy
faces. Alyosha was particularly struck by the fact that Father Zossima was
not at all stern. On the contrary, he was always almost gay. The monks
used to say that he was more drawn to those who were more sinful, and the
greater the sinner the more he loved him. There were, no doubt, up to the
end of his life, among the monks some who hated and envied him, but they
were few in number and they were silent, though among them were some of
great dignity in the monastery, one, for instance, of the older monks
distinguished for his strict keeping of fasts and vows of silence. But the
majority were on Father Zossima’s side and very many of them loved him
with all their hearts, warmly and sincerely. Some were almost fanatically
devoted to him, and declared, though not quite aloud, that he was a saint,
that there could be no doubt of it, and, seeing that his end was near,
they anticipated miracles and great glory to the monastery in the
immediate future from his relics. Alyosha had unquestioning faith in the
miraculous power of the elder, just as he had unquestioning faith in the
story of the coffin that flew out of the church. He saw many who came with
sick children or relatives and besought the elder to lay hands on them and
to pray over them, return shortly after—some the next day—and, falling in
tears at the elder’s feet, thank him for healing their sick.

Whether they had really been healed or were simply better in the natural
course of the disease was a question which did not exist for Alyosha, for
he fully believed in the spiritual power of his teacher and rejoiced in
his fame, in his glory, as though it were his own triumph. His heart
throbbed, and he beamed, as it were, all over when the elder came out to
the gates of the hermitage into the waiting crowd of pilgrims of the
humbler class who had flocked from all parts of Russia on purpose to see
the elder and obtain his blessing. They fell down before him, wept, kissed
his feet, kissed the earth on which he stood, and wailed, while the women
held up their children to him and brought him the sick “possessed with
devils.” The elder spoke to them, read a brief prayer over them, blessed
them, and dismissed them. Of late he had become so weak through attacks of
illness that he was sometimes unable to leave his cell, and the pilgrims
waited for him to come out for several days. Alyosha did not wonder why
they loved him so, why they fell down before him and wept with emotion
merely at seeing his face. Oh! he understood that for the humble soul of
the Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the
everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world’s, it was
the greatest need and comfort to find some one or something holy to fall
down before and worship.

“Among us there is sin, injustice, and temptation, but yet, somewhere on
earth there is some one holy and exalted. He has the truth; he knows the
truth; so it is not dead upon the earth; so it will come one day to us,
too, and rule over all the earth according to the promise.”

Alyosha knew that this was just how the people felt and even reasoned. He
understood it, but that the elder Zossima was this saint and custodian of
God’s truth—of that he had no more doubt than the weeping peasants and the
sick women who held out their children to the elder. The conviction that
after his death the elder would bring extraordinary glory to the monastery
was even stronger in Alyosha than in any one there, and, of late, a kind
of deep flame of inner ecstasy burnt more and more strongly in his heart.
He was not at all troubled at this elder’s standing as a solitary example
before him.

“No matter. He is holy. He carries in his heart the secret of renewal for
all: that power which will, at last, establish truth on the earth, and all
men will be holy and love one another, and there will be no more rich nor
poor, no exalted nor humbled, but all will be as the children of God, and
the true Kingdom of Christ will come.” That was the dream in Alyosha’s
heart.

The arrival of his two brothers, whom he had not known till then, seemed
to make a great impression on Alyosha. He more quickly made friends with
his half‐brother Dmitri (though he arrived later) than with his own
brother Ivan. He was extremely interested in his brother Ivan, but when
the latter had been two months in the town, though they had met fairly
often, they were still not intimate. Alyosha was naturally silent, and he
seemed to be expecting something, ashamed about something, while his
brother Ivan, though Alyosha noticed at first that he looked long and
curiously at him, seemed soon to have left off thinking of him. Alyosha
noticed it with some embarrassment. He ascribed his brother’s indifference
at first to the disparity of their age and education. But he also wondered
whether the absence of curiosity and sympathy in Ivan might be due to some
other cause entirely unknown to him. He kept fancying that Ivan was
absorbed in something—something inward and important—that he was striving
towards some goal, perhaps very hard to attain, and that that was why he
had no thought for him. Alyosha wondered, too, whether there was not some
contempt on the part of the learned atheist for him—a foolish novice. He
knew for certain that his brother was an atheist. He could not take
offense at this contempt, if it existed; yet, with an uneasy embarrassment
which he did not himself understand, he waited for his brother to come
nearer to him. Dmitri used to speak of Ivan with the deepest respect and
with a peculiar earnestness. From him Alyosha learnt all the details of
the important affair which had of late formed such a close and remarkable
bond between the two elder brothers. Dmitri’s enthusiastic references to
Ivan were the more striking in Alyosha’s eyes since Dmitri was, compared
with Ivan, almost uneducated, and the two brothers were such a contrast in
personality and character that it would be difficult to find two men more
unlike.

It was at this time that the meeting, or, rather gathering of the members
of this inharmonious family took place in the cell of the elder who had
such an extraordinary influence on Alyosha. The pretext for this gathering
was a false one. It was at this time that the discord between Dmitri and
his father seemed at its acutest stage and their relations had become
insufferably strained. Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to have been the first to
suggest, apparently in joke, that they should all meet in Father Zossima’s
cell, and that, without appealing to his direct intervention, they might
more decently come to an understanding under the conciliating influence of
the elder’s presence. Dmitri, who had never seen the elder, naturally
supposed that his father was trying to intimidate him, but, as he secretly
blamed himself for his outbursts of temper with his father on several
recent occasions, he accepted the challenge. It must be noted that he was
not, like Ivan, staying with his father, but living apart at the other end
of the town. It happened that Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, who was staying
in the district at the time, caught eagerly at the idea. A Liberal of the
forties and fifties, a freethinker and atheist, he may have been led on by
boredom or the hope of frivolous diversion. He was suddenly seized with
the desire to see the monastery and the holy man. As his lawsuit with the
monastery still dragged on, he made it the pretext for seeing the
Superior, in order to attempt to settle it amicably. A visitor coming with
such laudable intentions might be received with more attention and
consideration than if he came from simple curiosity. Influences from
within the monastery were brought to bear on the elder, who of late had
scarcely left his cell, and had been forced by illness to deny even his
ordinary visitors. In the end he consented to see them, and the day was
fixed.

“Who has made me a judge over them?” was all he said, smilingly, to
Alyosha.

Alyosha was much perturbed when he heard of the proposed visit. Of all the
wrangling, quarrelsome party, Dmitri was the only one who could regard the
interview seriously. All the others would come from frivolous motives,
perhaps insulting to the elder. Alyosha was well aware of that. Ivan and
Miüsov would come from curiosity, perhaps of the coarsest kind, while his
father might be contemplating some piece of buffoonery. Though he said
nothing, Alyosha thoroughly understood his father. The boy, I repeat, was
far from being so simple as every one thought him. He awaited the day with
a heavy heart. No doubt he was always pondering in his mind how the family
discord could be ended. But his chief anxiety concerned the elder. He
trembled for him, for his glory, and dreaded any affront to him,
especially the refined, courteous irony of Miüsov and the supercilious
half‐utterances of the highly educated Ivan. He even wanted to venture on
warning the elder, telling him something about them, but, on second
thoughts, said nothing. He only sent word the day before, through a
friend, to his brother Dmitri, that he loved him and expected him to keep
his promise. Dmitri wondered, for he could not remember what he had
promised, but he answered by letter that he would do his utmost not to let
himself be provoked “by vileness,” but that, although he had a deep
respect for the elder and for his brother Ivan, he was convinced that the
meeting was either a trap for him or an unworthy farce.

“Nevertheless I would rather bite out my tongue than be lacking in respect
to the sainted man whom you reverence so highly,” he wrote in conclusion.
Alyosha was not greatly cheered by the letter.




Book II. An Unfortunate Gathering



Chapter I. They Arrive At The Monastery


It was a warm, bright day at the end of August. The interview with the
elder had been fixed for half‐past eleven, immediately after late mass.
Our visitors did not take part in the service, but arrived just as it was
over. First an elegant open carriage, drawn by two valuable horses, drove
up with Miüsov and a distant relative of his, a young man of twenty,
called Pyotr Fomitch Kalganov. This young man was preparing to enter the
university. Miüsov, with whom he was staying for the time, was trying to
persuade him to go abroad to the university of Zurich or Jena. The young
man was still undecided. He was thoughtful and absent‐minded. He was nice‐
looking, strongly built, and rather tall. There was a strange fixity in
his gaze at times. Like all very absent‐minded people he would sometimes
stare at a person without seeing him. He was silent and rather awkward,
but sometimes, when he was alone with any one, he became talkative and
effusive, and would laugh at anything or nothing. But his animation
vanished as quickly as it appeared. He was always well and even
elaborately dressed; he had already some independent fortune and
expectations of much more. He was a friend of Alyosha’s.

In an ancient, jolting, but roomy, hired carriage, with a pair of old
pinkish‐gray horses, a long way behind Miüsov’s carriage, came Fyodor
Pavlovitch, with his son Ivan. Dmitri was late, though he had been
informed of the time the evening before. The visitors left their carriage
at the hotel, outside the precincts, and went to the gates of the
monastery on foot. Except Fyodor Pavlovitch, none of the party had ever
seen the monastery, and Miüsov had probably not even been to church for
thirty years. He looked about him with curiosity, together with assumed
ease. But, except the church and the domestic buildings, though these too
were ordinary enough, he found nothing of interest in the interior of the
monastery. The last of the worshippers were coming out of the church,
bareheaded and crossing themselves. Among the humbler people were a few of
higher rank—two or three ladies and a very old general. They were all
staying at the hotel. Our visitors were at once surrounded by beggars, but
none of them gave them anything, except young Kalganov, who took a ten‐
copeck piece out of his purse, and, nervous and embarrassed—God knows
why!—hurriedly gave it to an old woman, saying: “Divide it equally.” None
of his companions made any remark upon it, so that he had no reason to be
embarrassed; but, perceiving this, he was even more overcome.

It was strange that their arrival did not seem expected, and that they
were not received with special honor, though one of them had recently made
a donation of a thousand roubles, while another was a very wealthy and
highly cultured landowner, upon whom all in the monastery were in a sense
dependent, as a decision of the lawsuit might at any moment put their
fishing rights in his hands. Yet no official personage met them.

Miüsov looked absent‐mindedly at the tombstones round the church, and was
on the point of saying that the dead buried here must have paid a pretty
penny for the right of lying in this “holy place,” but refrained. His
liberal irony was rapidly changing almost into anger.

“Who the devil is there to ask in this imbecile place? We must find out,
for time is passing,” he observed suddenly, as though speaking to himself.

All at once there came up a bald‐headed, elderly man with ingratiating
little eyes, wearing a full, summer overcoat. Lifting his hat, he
introduced himself with a honeyed lisp as Maximov, a landowner of Tula. He
at once entered into our visitors’ difficulty.

“Father Zossima lives in the hermitage, apart, four hundred paces from the
monastery, the other side of the copse.”

“I know it’s the other side of the copse,” observed Fyodor Pavlovitch,
“but we don’t remember the way. It is a long time since we’ve been here.”

“This way, by this gate, and straight across the copse ... the copse. Come
with me, won’t you? I’ll show you. I have to go.... I am going myself.
This way, this way.”

They came out of the gate and turned towards the copse. Maximov, a man of
sixty, ran rather than walked, turning sideways to stare at them all, with
an incredible degree of nervous curiosity. His eyes looked starting out of
his head.

“You see, we have come to the elder upon business of our own,” observed
Miüsov severely. “That personage has granted us an audience, so to speak,
and so, though we thank you for showing us the way, we cannot ask you to
accompany us.”

“I’ve been there. I’ve been already; _un chevalier parfait_,” and Maximov
snapped his fingers in the air.

“Who is a _chevalier_?” asked Miüsov.

“The elder, the splendid elder, the elder! The honor and glory of the
monastery, Zossima. Such an elder!”

But his incoherent talk was cut short by a very pale, wan‐looking monk of
medium height, wearing a monk’s cap, who overtook them. Fyodor Pavlovitch
and Miüsov stopped.

The monk, with an extremely courteous, profound bow, announced:

“The Father Superior invites all of you gentlemen to dine with him after
your visit to the hermitage. At one o’clock, not later. And you also,” he
added, addressing Maximov.

“That I certainly will, without fail,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, hugely
delighted at the invitation. “And, believe me, we’ve all given our word to
behave properly here.... And you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, will you go, too?”

“Yes, of course. What have I come for but to study all the customs here?
The only obstacle to me is your company....”

“Yes, Dmitri Fyodorovitch is non‐existent as yet.”

“It would be a capital thing if he didn’t turn up. Do you suppose I like
all this business, and in your company, too? So we will come to dinner.
Thank the Father Superior,” he said to the monk.

“No, it is my duty now to conduct you to the elder,” answered the monk.

“If so I’ll go straight to the Father Superior—to the Father Superior,”
babbled Maximov.

“The Father Superior is engaged just now. But as you please—” the monk
hesitated.

“Impertinent old man!” Miüsov observed aloud, while Maximov ran back to
the monastery.

“He’s like von Sohn,” Fyodor Pavlovitch said suddenly.

“Is that all you can think of?... In what way is he like von Sohn? Have
you ever seen von Sohn?”

“I’ve seen his portrait. It’s not the features, but something indefinable.
He’s a second von Sohn. I can always tell from the physiognomy.”

“Ah, I dare say you are a connoisseur in that. But, look here, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, you said just now that we had given our word to behave
properly. Remember it. I advise you to control yourself. But, if you begin
to play the fool I don’t intend to be associated with you here.... You see
what a man he is”—he turned to the monk—“I’m afraid to go among decent
people with him.” A fine smile, not without a certain slyness, came on to
the pale, bloodless lips of the monk, but he made no reply, and was
evidently silent from a sense of his own dignity. Miüsov frowned more than
ever.

“Oh, devil take them all! An outer show elaborated through centuries, and
nothing but charlatanism and nonsense underneath,” flashed through
Miüsov’s mind.

“Here’s the hermitage. We’ve arrived,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch. “The gates
are shut.”

And he repeatedly made the sign of the cross to the saints painted above
and on the sides of the gates.

“When you go to Rome you must do as the Romans do. Here in this hermitage
there are twenty‐five saints being saved. They look at one another, and
eat cabbages. And not one woman goes in at this gate. That’s what is
remarkable. And that really is so. But I did hear that the elder receives
ladies,” he remarked suddenly to the monk.

“Women of the people are here too now, lying in the portico there waiting.
But for ladies of higher rank two rooms have been built adjoining the
portico, but outside the precincts—you can see the windows—and the elder
goes out to them by an inner passage when he is well enough. They are
always outside the precincts. There is a Harkov lady, Madame Hohlakov,
waiting there now with her sick daughter. Probably he has promised to come
out to her, though of late he has been so weak that he has hardly shown
himself even to the people.”

“So then there are loopholes, after all, to creep out of the hermitage to
the ladies. Don’t suppose, holy father, that I mean any harm. But do you
know that at Athos not only the visits of women are not allowed, but no
creature of the female sex—no hens, nor turkey‐hens, nor cows.”

“Fyodor Pavlovitch, I warn you I shall go back and leave you here. They’ll
turn you out when I’m gone.”

“But I’m not interfering with you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. Look,” he cried
suddenly, stepping within the precincts, “what a vale of roses they live
in!”

Though there were no roses now, there were numbers of rare and beautiful
autumn flowers growing wherever there was space for them, and evidently
tended by a skillful hand; there were flower‐beds round the church, and
between the tombs; and the one‐storied wooden house where the elder lived
was also surrounded with flowers.

“And was it like this in the time of the last elder, Varsonofy? He didn’t
care for such elegance. They say he used to jump up and thrash even ladies
with a stick,” observed Fyodor Pavlovitch, as he went up the steps.

“The elder Varsonofy did sometimes seem rather strange, but a great deal
that’s told is foolishness. He never thrashed any one,” answered the monk.
“Now, gentlemen, if you will wait a minute I will announce you.”

“Fyodor Pavlovitch, for the last time, your compact, do you hear? Behave
properly or I will pay you out!” Miüsov had time to mutter again.

“I can’t think why you are so agitated,” Fyodor Pavlovitch observed
sarcastically. “Are you uneasy about your sins? They say he can tell by
one’s eyes what one has come about. And what a lot you think of their
opinion! you, a Parisian, and so advanced. I’m surprised at you.”

But Miüsov had no time to reply to this sarcasm. They were asked to come
in. He walked in, somewhat irritated.

“Now, I know myself, I am annoyed, I shall lose my temper and begin to
quarrel—and lower myself and my ideas,” he reflected.



Chapter II. The Old Buffoon


They entered the room almost at the same moment that the elder came in
from his bedroom. There were already in the cell, awaiting the elder, two
monks of the hermitage, one the Father Librarian, and the other Father
Païssy, a very learned man, so they said, in delicate health, though not
old. There was also a tall young man, who looked about two and twenty,
standing in the corner throughout the interview. He had a broad, fresh
face, and clever, observant, narrow brown eyes, and was wearing ordinary
dress. He was a divinity student, living under the protection of the
monastery. His expression was one of unquestioning, but self‐respecting,
reverence. Being in a subordinate and dependent position, and so not on an
equality with the guests, he did not greet them with a bow.

Father Zossima was accompanied by a novice, and by Alyosha. The two monks
rose and greeted him with a very deep bow, touching the ground with their
fingers; then kissed his hand. Blessing them, the elder replied with as
deep a reverence to them, and asked their blessing. The whole ceremony was
performed very seriously and with an appearance of feeling, not like an
everyday rite. But Miüsov fancied that it was all done with intentional
impressiveness. He stood in front of the other visitors. He ought—he had
reflected upon it the evening before—from simple politeness, since it was
the custom here, to have gone up to receive the elder’s blessing, even if
he did not kiss his hand. But when he saw all this bowing and kissing on
the part of the monks he instantly changed his mind. With dignified
gravity he made a rather deep, conventional bow, and moved away to a
chair. Fyodor Pavlovitch did the same, mimicking Miüsov like an ape. Ivan
bowed with great dignity and courtesy, but he too kept his hands at his
sides, while Kalganov was so confused that he did not bow at all. The
elder let fall the hand raised to bless them, and bowing to them again,
asked them all to sit down. The blood rushed to Alyosha’s cheeks. He was
ashamed. His forebodings were coming true.

Father Zossima sat down on a very old‐fashioned mahogany sofa, covered
with leather, and made his visitors sit down in a row along the opposite
wall on four mahogany chairs, covered with shabby black leather. The monks
sat, one at the door and the other at the window. The divinity student,
the novice, and Alyosha remained standing. The cell was not very large and
had a faded look. It contained nothing but the most necessary furniture,
of coarse and poor quality. There were two pots of flowers in the window,
and a number of holy pictures in the corner. Before one huge ancient ikon
of the Virgin a lamp was burning. Near it were two other holy pictures in
shining settings, and, next them, carved cherubims, china eggs, a Catholic
cross of ivory, with a Mater Dolorosa embracing it, and several foreign
engravings from the great Italian artists of past centuries. Next to these
costly and artistic engravings were several of the roughest Russian prints
of saints and martyrs, such as are sold for a few farthings at all the
fairs. On the other walls were portraits of Russian bishops, past and
present.

Miüsov took a cursory glance at all these “conventional” surroundings and
bent an intent look upon the elder. He had a high opinion of his own
insight, a weakness excusable in him as he was fifty, an age at which a
clever man of the world of established position can hardly help taking
himself rather seriously. At the first moment he did not like Zossima.
There was, indeed, something in the elder’s face which many people besides
Miüsov might not have liked. He was a short, bent, little man, with very
weak legs, and though he was only sixty‐five, he looked at least ten years
older. His face was very thin and covered with a network of fine wrinkles,
particularly numerous about his eyes, which were small, light‐colored,
quick, and shining like two bright points. He had a sprinkling of gray
hair about his temples. His pointed beard was small and scanty, and his
lips, which smiled frequently, were as thin as two threads. His nose was
not long, but sharp, like a bird’s beak.

“To all appearances a malicious soul, full of petty pride,” thought
Miüsov. He felt altogether dissatisfied with his position.

A cheap little clock on the wall struck twelve hurriedly, and served to
begin the conversation.

“Precisely to our time,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, “but no sign of my son,
Dmitri. I apologize for him, sacred elder!” (Alyosha shuddered all over at
“sacred elder.”) “I am always punctual myself, minute for minute,
remembering that punctuality is the courtesy of kings....”

“But you are not a king, anyway,” Miüsov muttered, losing his self‐
restraint at once.

“Yes; that’s true. I’m not a king, and, would you believe it, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, I was aware of that myself. But, there! I always say the
wrong thing. Your reverence,” he cried, with sudden pathos, “you behold
before you a buffoon in earnest! I introduce myself as such. It’s an old
habit, alas! And if I sometimes talk nonsense out of place it’s with an
object, with the object of amusing people and making myself agreeable. One
must be agreeable, mustn’t one? I was seven years ago in a little town
where I had business, and I made friends with some merchants there. We
went to the captain of police because we had to see him about something,
and to ask him to dine with us. He was a tall, fat, fair, sulky man, the
most dangerous type in such cases. It’s their liver. I went straight up to
him, and with the ease of a man of the world, you know, ‘Mr. Ispravnik,’
said I, ‘be our Napravnik.’ ‘What do you mean by Napravnik?’ said he. I
saw, at the first half‐second, that it had missed fire. He stood there so
glum. ‘I wanted to make a joke,’ said I, ‘for the general diversion, as
Mr. Napravnik is our well‐known Russian orchestra conductor and what we
need for the harmony of our undertaking is some one of that sort.’ And I
explained my comparison very reasonably, didn’t I? ‘Excuse me,’ said he,
‘I am an Ispravnik, and I do not allow puns to be made on my calling.’ He
turned and walked away. I followed him, shouting, ‘Yes, yes, you are an
Ispravnik, not a Napravnik.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘since you called me a
Napravnik I am one.’ And would you believe it, it ruined our business! And
I’m always like that, always like that. Always injuring myself with my
politeness. Once, many years ago, I said to an influential person: ‘Your
wife is a ticklish lady,’ in an honorable sense, of the moral qualities,
so to speak. But he asked me, ‘Why, have you tickled her?’ I thought I’d
be polite, so I couldn’t help saying, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me a fine
tickling on the spot. Only that happened long ago, so I’m not ashamed to
tell the story. I’m always injuring myself like that.”

“You’re doing it now,” muttered Miüsov, with disgust.

Father Zossima scrutinized them both in silence.

“Am I? Would you believe it, I was aware of that, too, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, and let me tell you, indeed, I foresaw I should as soon as
I began to speak. And do you know I foresaw, too, that you’d be the first
to remark on it. The minute I see my joke isn’t coming off, your
reverence, both my cheeks feel as though they were drawn down to the lower
jaw and there is almost a spasm in them. That’s been so since I was young,
when I had to make jokes for my living in noblemen’s families. I am an
inveterate buffoon, and have been from birth up, your reverence, it’s as
though it were a craze in me. I dare say it’s a devil within me. But only
a little one. A more serious one would have chosen another lodging. But
not your soul, Pyotr Alexandrovitch; you’re not a lodging worth having
either. But I do believe—I believe in God, though I have had doubts of
late. But now I sit and await words of wisdom. I’m like the philosopher,
Diderot, your reverence. Did you ever hear, most Holy Father, how Diderot
went to see the Metropolitan Platon, in the time of the Empress Catherine?
He went in and said straight out, ‘There is no God.’ To which the great
bishop lifted up his finger and answered, ‘The fool hath said in his heart
there is no God.’ And he fell down at his feet on the spot. ‘I believe,’
he cried, ‘and will be christened.’ And so he was. Princess Dashkov was
his godmother, and Potyomkin his godfather.”

“Fyodor Pavlovitch, this is unbearable! You know you’re telling lies and
that that stupid anecdote isn’t true. Why are you playing the fool?” cried
Miüsov in a shaking voice.

“I suspected all my life that it wasn’t true,” Fyodor Pavlovitch cried
with conviction. “But I’ll tell you the whole truth, gentlemen. Great
elder! Forgive me, the last thing about Diderot’s christening I made up
just now. I never thought of it before. I made it up to add piquancy. I
play the fool, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, to make myself agreeable. Though I
really don’t know myself, sometimes, what I do it for. And as for Diderot,
I heard as far as ‘the fool hath said in his heart’ twenty times from the
gentry about here when I was young. I heard your aunt, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, tell the story. They all believe to this day that the
infidel Diderot came to dispute about God with the Metropolitan
Platon....”

Miüsov got up, forgetting himself in his impatience. He was furious, and
conscious of being ridiculous.

What was taking place in the cell was really incredible. For forty or
fifty years past, from the times of former elders, no visitors had entered
that cell without feelings of the profoundest veneration. Almost every one
admitted to the cell felt that a great favor was being shown him. Many
remained kneeling during the whole visit. Of those visitors, many had been
men of high rank and learning, some even freethinkers, attracted by
curiosity, but all without exception had shown the profoundest reverence
and delicacy, for here there was no question of money, but only, on the
one side love and kindness, and on the other penitence and eager desire to
decide some spiritual problem or crisis. So that such buffoonery amazed
and bewildered the spectators, or at least some of them. The monks, with
unchanged countenances, waited, with earnest attention, to hear what the
elder would say, but seemed on the point of standing up, like Miüsov.
Alyosha stood, with hanging head, on the verge of tears. What seemed to
him strangest of all was that his brother Ivan, on whom alone he had
rested his hopes, and who alone had such influence on his father that he
could have stopped him, sat now quite unmoved, with downcast eyes,
apparently waiting with interest to see how it would end, as though he had
nothing to do with it. Alyosha did not dare to look at Rakitin, the
divinity student, whom he knew almost intimately. He alone in the
monastery knew Rakitin’s thoughts.

“Forgive me,” began Miüsov, addressing Father Zossima, “for perhaps I seem
to be taking part in this shameful foolery. I made a mistake in believing
that even a man like Fyodor Pavlovitch would understand what was due on a
visit to so honored a personage. I did not suppose I should have to
apologize simply for having come with him....”

Pyotr Alexandrovitch could say no more, and was about to leave the room,
overwhelmed with confusion.

“Don’t distress yourself, I beg.” The elder got on to his feeble legs, and
taking Pyotr Alexandrovitch by both hands, made him sit down again. “I beg
you not to disturb yourself. I particularly beg you to be my guest.” And
with a bow he went back and sat down again on his little sofa.

“Great elder, speak! Do I annoy you by my vivacity?” Fyodor Pavlovitch
cried suddenly, clutching the arms of his chair in both hands, as though
ready to leap up from it if the answer were unfavorable.

“I earnestly beg you, too, not to disturb yourself, and not to be uneasy,”
the elder said impressively. “Do not trouble. Make yourself quite at home.
And, above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root
of it all.”

“Quite at home? To be my natural self? Oh, that is much too much, but I
accept it with grateful joy. Do you know, blessed Father, you’d better not
invite me to be my natural self. Don’t risk it.... I will not go so far as
that myself. I warn you for your own sake. Well, the rest is still plunged
in the mists of uncertainty, though there are people who’d be pleased to
describe me for you. I mean that for you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. But as for
you, holy being, let me tell you, I am brimming over with ecstasy.”

He got up, and throwing up his hands, declaimed, “Blessed be the womb that
bare thee, and the paps that gave thee suck—the paps especially. When you
said just now, ‘Don’t be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root
of it all,’ you pierced right through me by that remark, and read me to
the core. Indeed, I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than
all, and that they all take me for a buffoon. So I say, ‘Let me really
play the buffoon. I am not afraid of your opinion, for you are every one
of you worse than I am.’ That is why I am a buffoon. It is from shame,
great elder, from shame; it’s simply over‐sensitiveness that makes me
rowdy. If I had only been sure that every one would accept me as the
kindest and wisest of men, oh, Lord, what a good man I should have been
then! Teacher!” he fell suddenly on his knees, “what must I do to gain
eternal life?”

It was difficult even now to decide whether he was joking or really moved.

Father Zossima, lifting his eyes, looked at him, and said with a smile:

“You have known for a long time what you must do. You have sense enough:
don’t give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech; don’t give way
to sensual lust; and, above all, to the love of money. And close your
taverns. If you can’t close all, at least two or three. And, above
all—don’t lie.”

“You mean about Diderot?”

“No, not about Diderot. Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies
to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot
distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect
for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and
in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to
passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all
from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to
himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes
very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has
insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied
and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a
mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first
to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great
pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness. But get up, sit
down, I beg you. All this, too, is deceitful posturing....”

“Blessed man! Give me your hand to kiss.”

Fyodor Pavlovitch skipped up, and imprinted a rapid kiss on the elder’s
thin hand. “It is, it is pleasant to take offense. You said that so well,
as I never heard it before. Yes, I have been all my life taking offense,
to please myself, taking offense on esthetic grounds, for it is not so
much pleasant as distinguished sometimes to be insulted—that you had
forgotten, great elder, it is distinguished! I shall make a note of that.
But I have been lying, lying positively my whole life long, every day and
hour of it. Of a truth, I am a lie, and the father of lies. Though I
believe I am not the father of lies. I am getting mixed in my texts. Say,
the son of lies, and that will be enough. Only ... my angel ... I may
sometimes talk about Diderot! Diderot will do no harm, though sometimes a
word will do harm. Great elder, by the way, I was forgetting, though I had
been meaning for the last two years to come here on purpose to ask and to
find out something. Only do tell Pyotr Alexandrovitch not to interrupt me.
Here is my question: Is it true, great Father, that the story is told
somewhere in the _Lives of the Saints_ of a holy saint martyred for his
faith who, when his head was cut off at last, stood up, picked up his
head, and, ‘courteously kissing it,’ walked a long way, carrying it in his
hands. Is that true or not, honored Father?”

“No, it is untrue,” said the elder.

“There is nothing of the kind in all the lives of the saints. What saint
do you say the story is told of?” asked the Father Librarian.

“I do not know what saint. I do not know, and can’t tell. I was deceived.
I was told the story. I had heard it, and do you know who told it? Pyotr
Alexandrovitch Miüsov here, who was so angry just now about Diderot. He it
was who told the story.”

“I have never told it you, I never speak to you at all.”

“It is true you did not tell me, but you told it when I was present. It
was three years ago. I mentioned it because by that ridiculous story you
shook my faith, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. You knew nothing of it, but I went
home with my faith shaken, and I have been getting more and more shaken
ever since. Yes, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, you were the cause of a great fall.
That was not a Diderot!”

Fyodor Pavlovitch got excited and pathetic, though it was perfectly clear
to every one by now that he was playing a part again. Yet Miüsov was stung
by his words.

“What nonsense, and it is all nonsense,” he muttered. “I may really have
told it, some time or other ... but not to you. I was told it myself. I
heard it in Paris from a Frenchman. He told me it was read at our mass
from the _Lives of the Saints_ ... he was a very learned man who had made
a special study of Russian statistics and had lived a long time in
Russia.... I have not read the _Lives of the Saints_ myself, and I am not
going to read them ... all sorts of things are said at dinner—we were
dining then.”

“Yes, you were dining then, and so I lost my faith!” said Fyodor
Pavlovitch, mimicking him.

“What do I care for your faith?” Miüsov was on the point of shouting, but
he suddenly checked himself, and said with contempt, “You defile
everything you touch.”

The elder suddenly rose from his seat. “Excuse me, gentlemen, for leaving
you a few minutes,” he said, addressing all his guests. “I have visitors
awaiting me who arrived before you. But don’t you tell lies all the same,”
he added, turning to Fyodor Pavlovitch with a good‐humored face. He went
out of the cell. Alyosha and the novice flew to escort him down the steps.
Alyosha was breathless: he was glad to get away, but he was glad, too,
that the elder was good‐humored and not offended. Father Zossima was going
towards the portico to bless the people waiting for him there. But Fyodor
Pavlovitch persisted in stopping him at the door of the cell.

“Blessed man!” he cried, with feeling. “Allow me to kiss your hand once
more. Yes, with you I could still talk, I could still get on. Do you think
I always lie and play the fool like this? Believe me, I have been acting
like this all the time on purpose to try you. I have been testing you all
the time to see whether I could get on with you. Is there room for my
humility beside your pride? I am ready to give you a testimonial that one
can get on with you! But now, I’ll be quiet; I will keep quiet all the
time. I’ll sit in a chair and hold my tongue. Now it is for you to speak,
Pyotr Alexandrovitch. You are the principal person left now—for ten
minutes.”



Chapter III. Peasant Women Who Have Faith


Near the wooden portico below, built on to the outer wall of the precinct,
there was a crowd of about twenty peasant women. They had been told that
the elder was at last coming out, and they had gathered together in
anticipation. Two ladies, Madame Hohlakov and her daughter, had also come
out into the portico to wait for the elder, but in a separate part of it
set aside for women of rank.

Madame Hohlakov was a wealthy lady, still young and attractive, and always
dressed with taste. She was rather pale, and had lively black eyes. She
was not more than thirty‐three, and had been five years a widow. Her
daughter, a girl of fourteen, was partially paralyzed. The poor child had
not been able to walk for the last six months, and was wheeled about in a
long reclining chair. She had a charming little face, rather thin from
illness, but full of gayety. There was a gleam of mischief in her big dark
eyes with their long lashes. Her mother had been intending to take her
abroad ever since the spring, but they had been detained all the summer by
business connected with their estate. They had been staying a week in our
town, where they had come more for purposes of business than devotion, but
had visited Father Zossima once already, three days before. Though they
knew that the elder scarcely saw any one, they had now suddenly turned up
again, and urgently entreated “the happiness of looking once again on the
great healer.”

The mother was sitting on a chair by the side of her daughter’s invalid
carriage, and two paces from her stood an old monk, not one of our
monastery, but a visitor from an obscure religious house in the far north.
He too sought the elder’s blessing.

But Father Zossima, on entering the portico, went first straight to the
peasants who were crowded at the foot of the three steps that led up into
the portico. Father Zossima stood on the top step, put on his stole, and
began blessing the women who thronged about him. One crazy woman was led
up to him. As soon as she caught sight of the elder she began shrieking
and writhing as though in the pains of childbirth. Laying the stole on her
forehead, he read a short prayer over her, and she was at once soothed and
quieted.

I do not know how it may be now, but in my childhood I often happened to
see and hear these “possessed” women in the villages and monasteries. They
used to be brought to mass; they would squeal and bark like a dog so that
they were heard all over the church. But when the sacrament was carried in
and they were led up to it, at once the “possession” ceased, and the sick
women were always soothed for a time. I was greatly impressed and amazed
at this as a child; but then I heard from country neighbors and from my
town teachers that the whole illness was simulated to avoid work, and that
it could always be cured by suitable severity; various anecdotes were told
to confirm this. But later on I learnt with astonishment from medical
specialists that there is no pretense about it, that it is a terrible
illness to which women are subject, specially prevalent among us in
Russia, and that it is due to the hard lot of the peasant women. It is a
disease, I was told, arising from exhausting toil too soon after hard,
abnormal and unassisted labor in childbirth, and from the hopeless misery,
from beatings, and so on, which some women were not able to endure like
others. The strange and instant healing of the frantic and struggling
woman as soon as she was led up to the holy sacrament, which had been
explained to me as due to malingering and the trickery of the “clericals,”
arose probably in the most natural manner. Both the women who supported
her and the invalid herself fully believed as a truth beyond question that
the evil spirit in possession of her could not hold out if the sick woman
were brought to the sacrament and made to bow down before it. And so, with
a nervous and psychically deranged woman, a sort of convulsion of the
whole organism always took place, and was bound to take place, at the
moment of bowing down to the sacrament, aroused by the expectation of the
miracle of healing and the implicit belief that it would come to pass; and
it did come to pass, though only for a moment. It was exactly the same now
as soon as the elder touched the sick woman with the stole.

Many of the women in the crowd were moved to tears of ecstasy by the
effect of the moment: some strove to kiss the hem of his garment, others
cried out in sing‐song voices.

He blessed them all and talked with some of them. The “possessed” woman he
knew already. She came from a village only six versts from the monastery,
and had been brought to him before.

“But here is one from afar.” He pointed to a woman by no means old but
very thin and wasted, with a face not merely sunburnt but almost blackened
by exposure. She was kneeling and gazing with a fixed stare at the elder;
there was something almost frenzied in her eyes.

“From afar off, Father, from afar off! From two hundred miles from here.
From afar off, Father, from afar off!” the woman began in a sing‐song
voice as though she were chanting a dirge, swaying her head from side to
side with her cheek resting in her hand.

There is silent and long‐suffering sorrow to be met with among the
peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief
that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent
in wailing. This is particularly common with women. But it is no lighter a
grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart
still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense
of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to
reopen the wound.

“You are of the tradesman class?” said Father Zossima, looking curiously
at her.

“Townfolk we are, Father, townfolk. Yet we are peasants though we live in
the town. I have come to see you, O Father! We heard of you, Father, we
heard of you. I have buried my little son, and I have come on a
pilgrimage. I have been in three monasteries, but they told me, ‘Go,
Nastasya, go to them’—that is to you. I have come; I was yesterday at the
service, and to‐day I have come to you.”

“What are you weeping for?”

“It’s my little son I’m grieving for, Father. He was three years old—three
years all but three months. For my little boy, Father, I’m in anguish, for
my little boy. He was the last one left. We had four, my Nikita and I, and
now we’ve no children, our dear ones have all gone. I buried the first
three without grieving overmuch, and now I have buried the last I can’t
forget him. He seems always standing before me. He never leaves me. He has
withered my heart. I look at his little clothes, his little shirt, his
little boots, and I wail. I lay out all that is left of him, all his
little things. I look at them and wail. I say to Nikita, my husband, ‘Let
me go on a pilgrimage, master.’ He is a driver. We’re not poor people,
Father, not poor; he drives our own horse. It’s all our own, the horse and
the carriage. And what good is it all to us now? My Nikita has begun
drinking while I am away. He’s sure to. It used to be so before. As soon
as I turn my back he gives way to it. But now I don’t think about him.
It’s three months since I left home. I’ve forgotten him. I’ve forgotten
everything. I don’t want to remember. And what would our life be now
together? I’ve done with him, I’ve done. I’ve done with them all. I don’t
care to look upon my house and my goods. I don’t care to see anything at
all!”

“Listen, mother,” said the elder. “Once in olden times a holy saint saw in
the Temple a mother like you weeping for her little one, her only one,
whom God had taken. ‘Knowest thou not,’ said the saint to her, ‘how bold
these little ones are before the throne of God? Verily there are none
bolder than they in the Kingdom of Heaven. “Thou didst give us life, O
Lord,” they say, “and scarcely had we looked upon it when Thou didst take
it back again.” And so boldly they ask and ask again that God gives them
at once the rank of angels. Therefore,’ said the saint, ‘thou, too, O
mother, rejoice and weep not, for thy little son is with the Lord in the
fellowship of the angels.’ That’s what the saint said to the weeping
mother of old. He was a great saint and he could not have spoken falsely.
Therefore you too, mother, know that your little one is surely before the
throne of God, is rejoicing and happy, and praying to God for you, and
therefore weep not, but rejoice.”

The woman listened to him, looking down with her cheek in her hand. She
sighed deeply.

“My Nikita tried to comfort me with the same words as you. ‘Foolish one,’
he said, ‘why weep? Our son is no doubt singing with the angels before
God.’ He says that to me, but he weeps himself. I see that he cries like
me. ‘I know, Nikita,’ said I. ‘Where could he be if not with the Lord God?
Only, here with us now he is not as he used to sit beside us before.’ And
if only I could look upon him one little time, if only I could peep at him
one little time, without going up to him, without speaking, if I could be
hidden in a corner and only see him for one little minute, hear him
playing in the yard, calling in his little voice, ‘Mammy, where are you?’
If only I could hear him pattering with his little feet about the room
just once, only once; for so often, so often I remember how he used to run
to me and shout and laugh, if only I could hear his little feet I should
know him! But he’s gone, Father, he’s gone, and I shall never hear him
again. Here’s his little sash, but him I shall never see or hear now.”

She drew out of her bosom her boy’s little embroidered sash, and as soon
as she looked at it she began shaking with sobs, hiding her eyes with her
fingers through which the tears flowed in a sudden stream.

“It is Rachel of old,” said the elder, “weeping for her children, and will
not be comforted because they are not. Such is the lot set on earth for
you mothers. Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and
be not consoled, but weep. Only every time that you weep be sure to
remember that your little son is one of the angels of God, that he looks
down from there at you and sees you, and rejoices at your tears, and
points at them to the Lord God; and a long while yet will you keep that
great mother’s grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your
bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart
and delivers it from sin. And I shall pray for the peace of your child’s
soul. What was his name?”

“Alexey, Father.”

“A sweet name. After Alexey, the man of God?”

“Yes, Father.”

“What a saint he was! I will remember him, mother, and your grief in my
prayers, and I will pray for your husband’s health. It is a sin for you to
leave him. Your little one will see from heaven that you have forsaken his
father, and will weep over you. Why do you trouble his happiness? He is
living, for the soul lives for ever, and though he is not in the house he
is near you, unseen. How can he go into the house when you say that the
house is hateful to you? To whom is he to go if he find you not together,
his father and mother? He comes to you in dreams now, and you grieve. But
then he will send you gentle dreams. Go to your husband, mother; go this
very day.”

“I will go, Father, at your word. I will go. You’ve gone straight to my
heart. My Nikita, my Nikita, you are waiting for me,” the woman began in a
sing‐song voice; but the elder had already turned away to a very old
woman, dressed like a dweller in the town, not like a pilgrim. Her eyes
showed that she had come with an object, and in order to say something.
She said she was the widow of a non‐commissioned officer, and lived close
by in the town. Her son Vasenka was in the commissariat service, and had
gone to Irkutsk in Siberia. He had written twice from there, but now a
year had passed since he had written. She did inquire about him, but she
did not know the proper place to inquire.

“Only the other day Stepanida Ilyinishna—she’s a rich merchant’s wife—said
to me, ‘You go, Prohorovna, and put your son’s name down for prayer in the
church, and pray for the peace of his soul as though he were dead. His
soul will be troubled,’ she said, ‘and he will write you a letter.’ And
Stepanida Ilyinishna told me it was a certain thing which had been many
times tried. Only I am in doubt.... Oh, you light of ours! is it true or
false, and would it be right?”

“Don’t think of it. It’s shameful to ask the question. How is it possible
to pray for the peace of a living soul? And his own mother too! It’s a
great sin, akin to sorcery. Only for your ignorance it is forgiven you.
Better pray to the Queen of Heaven, our swift defense and help, for his
good health, and that she may forgive you for your error. And another
thing I will tell you, Prohorovna. Either he will soon come back to you,
your son, or he will be sure to send a letter. Go, and henceforward be in
peace. Your son is alive, I tell you.”

“Dear Father, God reward you, our benefactor, who prays for all of us and
for our sins!”

But the elder had already noticed in the crowd two glowing eyes fixed upon
him. An exhausted, consumptive‐looking, though young peasant woman was
gazing at him in silence. Her eyes besought him, but she seemed afraid to
approach.

“What is it, my child?”

“Absolve my soul, Father,” she articulated softly, and slowly sank on her
knees and bowed down at his feet. “I have sinned, Father. I am afraid of
my sin.”

The elder sat down on the lower step. The woman crept closer to him, still
on her knees.

“I am a widow these three years,” she began in a half‐whisper, with a sort
of shudder. “I had a hard life with my husband. He was an old man. He used
to beat me cruelly. He lay ill; I thought looking at him, if he were to
get well, if he were to get up again, what then? And then the thought came
to me—”

“Stay!” said the elder, and he put his ear close to her lips.

The woman went on in a low whisper, so that it was almost impossible to
catch anything. She had soon done.

“Three years ago?” asked the elder.

“Three years. At first I didn’t think about it, but now I’ve begun to be
ill, and the thought never leaves me.”

“Have you come from far?”

“Over three hundred miles away.”

“Have you told it in confession?”

“I have confessed it. Twice I have confessed it.”

“Have you been admitted to Communion?”

“Yes. I am afraid. I am afraid to die.”

“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don’t fret. If only your penitence
fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin
on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant!
Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God.
Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of
repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe
that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your
sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner
there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not.
Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the
dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in
truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All
things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even
as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will
God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world
by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”

He signed her three times with the cross, took from his own neck a little
ikon and put it upon her. She bowed down to the earth without speaking.

He got up and looked cheerfully at a healthy peasant woman with a tiny
baby in her arms.

“From Vyshegorye, dear Father.”

“Five miles you have dragged yourself with the baby. What do you want?”

“I’ve come to look at you. I have been to you before—or have you
forgotten? You’ve no great memory if you’ve forgotten me. They told us you
were ill. Thinks I, I’ll go and see him for myself. Now I see you, and
you’re not ill! You’ll live another twenty years. God bless you! There are
plenty to pray for you; how should you be ill?”

“I thank you for all, daughter.”

“By the way, I have a thing to ask, not a great one. Here are sixty
copecks. Give them, dear Father, to some one poorer than me. I thought as
I came along, better give through him. He’ll know whom to give to.”

“Thanks, my dear, thanks! You are a good woman. I love you. I will do so
certainly. Is that your little girl?”

“My little girl, Father, Lizaveta.”

“May the Lord bless you both, you and your babe Lizaveta! You have
gladdened my heart, mother. Farewell, dear children, farewell, dear ones.”

He blessed them all and bowed low to them.



Chapter IV. A Lady Of Little Faith


A visitor looking on the scene of his conversation with the peasants and
his blessing them shed silent tears and wiped them away with her
handkerchief. She was a sentimental society lady of genuinely good
disposition in many respects. When the elder went up to her at last she
met him enthusiastically.

“Ah, what I have been feeling, looking on at this touching scene!...” She
could not go on for emotion. “Oh, I understand the people’s love for you.
I love the people myself. I want to love them. And who could help loving
them, our splendid Russian people, so simple in their greatness!”

“How is your daughter’s health? You wanted to talk to me again?”

“Oh, I have been urgently begging for it, I have prayed for it! I was
ready to fall on my knees and kneel for three days at your windows until
you let me in. We have come, great healer, to express our ardent
gratitude. You have healed my Lise, healed her completely, merely by
praying over her last Thursday and laying your hands upon her. We have
hastened here to kiss those hands, to pour out our feelings and our
homage.”

“What do you mean by healed? But she is still lying down in her chair.”

“But her night fevers have entirely ceased ever since Thursday,” said the
lady with nervous haste. “And that’s not all. Her legs are stronger. This
morning she got up well; she had slept all night. Look at her rosy cheeks,
her bright eyes! She used to be always crying, but now she laughs and is
gay and happy. This morning she insisted on my letting her stand up, and
she stood up for a whole minute without any support. She wagers that in a
fortnight she’ll be dancing a quadrille. I’ve called in Doctor
Herzenstube. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I am amazed; I can make
nothing of it.’ And would you have us not come here to disturb you, not
fly here to thank you? Lise, thank him—thank him!”

Lise’s pretty little laughing face became suddenly serious. She rose in
her chair as far as she could and, looking at the elder, clasped her hands
before him, but could not restrain herself and broke into laughter.

“It’s at him,” she said, pointing to Alyosha, with childish vexation at
herself for not being able to repress her mirth.

If any one had looked at Alyosha standing a step behind the elder, he
would have caught a quick flush crimsoning his cheeks in an instant. His
eyes shone and he looked down.

“She has a message for you, Alexey Fyodorovitch. How are you?” the mother
went on, holding out her exquisitely gloved hand to Alyosha.

The elder turned round and all at once looked attentively at Alyosha. The
latter went nearer to Lise and, smiling in a strangely awkward way, held
out his hand to her too. Lise assumed an important air.

“Katerina Ivanovna has sent you this through me.” She handed him a little
note. “She particularly begs you to go and see her as soon as possible;
that you will not fail her, but will be sure to come.”

“She asks me to go and see her? Me? What for?” Alyosha muttered in great
astonishment. His face at once looked anxious. “Oh, it’s all to do with
Dmitri Fyodorovitch and—what has happened lately,” the mother explained
hurriedly. “Katerina Ivanovna has made up her mind, but she must see you
about it.... Why, of course, I can’t say. But she wants to see you at
once. And you will go to her, of course. It is a Christian duty.”

“I have only seen her once,” Alyosha protested with the same perplexity.

“Oh, she is such a lofty, incomparable creature! If only for her
suffering.... Think what she has gone through, what she is enduring now!
Think what awaits her! It’s all terrible, terrible!”

“Very well, I will come,” Alyosha decided, after rapidly scanning the
brief, enigmatic note, which consisted of an urgent entreaty that he would
come, without any sort of explanation.

“Oh, how sweet and generous that would be of you!” cried Lise with sudden
animation. “I told mamma you’d be sure not to go. I said you were saving
your soul. How splendid you are! I’ve always thought you were splendid.
How glad I am to tell you so!”

“Lise!” said her mother impressively, though she smiled after she had said
it.

“You have quite forgotten us, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said; “you never
come to see us. Yet Lise has told me twice that she is never happy except
with you.”

Alyosha raised his downcast eyes and again flushed, and again smiled
without knowing why. But the elder was no longer watching him. He had
begun talking to a monk who, as mentioned before, had been awaiting his
entrance by Lise’s chair. He was evidently a monk of the humblest, that is
of the peasant, class, of a narrow outlook, but a true believer, and, in
his own way, a stubborn one. He announced that he had come from the far
north, from Obdorsk, from Saint Sylvester, and was a member of a poor
monastery, consisting of only ten monks. The elder gave him his blessing
and invited him to come to his cell whenever he liked.

“How can you presume to do such deeds?” the monk asked suddenly, pointing
solemnly and significantly at Lise. He was referring to her “healing.”

“It’s too early, of course, to speak of that. Relief is not complete cure,
and may proceed from different causes. But if there has been any healing,
it is by no power but God’s will. It’s all from God. Visit me, Father,” he
added to the monk. “It’s not often I can see visitors. I am ill, and I
know that my days are numbered.”

“Oh, no, no! God will not take you from us. You will live a long, long
time yet,” cried the lady. “And in what way are you ill? You look so well,
so gay and happy.”

“I am extraordinarily better to‐day. But I know that it’s only for a
moment. I understand my disease now thoroughly. If I seem so happy to you,
you could never say anything that would please me so much. For men are
made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say
to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the
saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.”

“Oh, how you speak! What bold and lofty words!” cried the lady. “You seem
to pierce with your words. And yet—happiness, happiness—where is it? Who
can say of himself that he is happy? Oh, since you have been so good as to
let us see you once more to‐day, let me tell you what I could not utter
last time, what I dared not say, all I am suffering and have been for so
long! I am suffering! Forgive me! I am suffering!”

And in a rush of fervent feeling she clasped her hands before him.

“From what specially?”

“I suffer ... from lack of faith.”

“Lack of faith in God?”

“Oh, no, no! I dare not even think of that. But the future life—it is such
an enigma! And no one, no one can solve it. Listen! You are a healer, you
are deeply versed in the human soul, and of course I dare not expect you
to believe me entirely, but I assure you on my word of honor that I am not
speaking lightly now. The thought of the life beyond the grave distracts
me to anguish, to terror. And I don’t know to whom to appeal, and have not
dared to all my life. And now I am so bold as to ask you. Oh, God! What
will you think of me now?”

She clasped her hands.

“Don’t distress yourself about my opinion of you,” said the elder. “I
quite believe in the sincerity of your suffering.”

“Oh, how thankful I am to you! You see, I shut my eyes and ask myself if
every one has faith, where did it come from? And then they do say that it
all comes from terror at the menacing phenomena of nature, and that none
of it’s real. And I say to myself, ‘What if I’ve been believing all my
life, and when I come to die there’s nothing but the burdocks growing on
my grave?’ as I read in some author. It’s awful! How—how can I get back my
faith? But I only believed when I was a little child, mechanically,
without thinking of anything. How, how is one to prove it? I have come now
to lay my soul before you and to ask you about it. If I let this chance
slip, no one all my life will answer me. How can I prove it? How can I
convince myself? Oh, how unhappy I am! I stand and look about me and see
that scarcely any one else cares; no one troubles his head about it, and
I’m the only one who can’t stand it. It’s deadly—deadly!”

“No doubt. But there’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of it.”

“How?”

“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively
and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of
the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to
perfect self‐forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will
believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has
been tried. This is certain.”

“In active love? There’s another question—and such a question! You see, I
so love humanity that—would you believe it?—I often dream of forsaking all
that I have, leaving Lise, and becoming a sister of mercy. I close my eyes
and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of strength to
overcome all obstacles. No wounds, no festering sores could at that moment
frighten me. I would bind them up and wash them with my own hands. I would
nurse the afflicted. I would be ready to kiss such wounds.”

“It is much, and well that your mind is full of such dreams and not
others. Sometime, unawares, you may do a good deed in reality.”

“Yes. But could I endure such a life for long?” the lady went on
fervently, almost frantically. “That’s the chief question—that’s my most
agonizing question. I shut my eyes and ask myself, ‘Would you persevere
long on that path? And if the patient whose wounds you are washing did not
meet you with gratitude, but worried you with his whims, without valuing
or remarking your charitable services, began abusing you and rudely
commanding you, and complaining to the superior authorities of you (which
often happens when people are in great suffering)—what then? Would you
persevere in your love, or not?’ And do you know, I came with horror to
the conclusion that, if anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it
would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my payment
at once—that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I
am incapable of loving any one.”

She was in a very paroxysm of self‐castigation, and, concluding, she
looked with defiant resolution at the elder.

“It’s just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder.
“He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as
frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he
said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the
less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come
to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I
might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary;
and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two
days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his
personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In
twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too
long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing
his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But
it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more
ardent becomes my love for humanity.’ ”

“But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”

“No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it
will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so
deeply and sincerely know yourself. If you have been talking to me so
sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did from
me just now, then of course you will not attain to anything in the
achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and your
whole life will slip away like a phantom. In that case you will naturally
cease to think of the future life too, and will of yourself grow calmer
after a fashion in the end.”

“You have crushed me! Only now, as you speak, I understand that I was
really only seeking your approbation for my sincerity when I told you I
could not endure ingratitude. You have revealed me to myself. You have
seen through me and explained me to myself!”

“Are you speaking the truth? Well, now, after such a confession, I believe
that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness,
always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it.
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness
to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every
hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself.
What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of
your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the
consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own
faint‐heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at
your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for
love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in
the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does
not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as
though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some
people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you
see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther
from your goal instead of nearer to it—at that very moment I predict that
you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who
has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you. Forgive me for
not being able to stay longer with you. They are waiting for me. Good‐by.”

The lady was weeping.

“Lise, Lise! Bless her—bless her!” she cried, starting up suddenly.

“She does not deserve to be loved. I have seen her naughtiness all along,”
the elder said jestingly. “Why have you been laughing at Alexey?”

Lise had in fact been occupied in mocking at him all the time. She had
noticed before that Alyosha was shy and tried not to look at her, and she
found this extremely amusing. She waited intently to catch his eye.
Alyosha, unable to endure her persistent stare, was irresistibly and
suddenly drawn to glance at her, and at once she smiled triumphantly in
his face. Alyosha was even more disconcerted and vexed. At last he turned
away from her altogether and hid behind the elder’s back. After a few
minutes, drawn by the same irresistible force, he turned again to see
whether he was being looked at or not, and found Lise almost hanging out
of her chair to peep sideways at him, eagerly waiting for him to look.
Catching his eye, she laughed so that the elder could not help saying,
“Why do you make fun of him like that, naughty girl?”

Lise suddenly and quite unexpectedly blushed. Her eyes flashed and her
face became quite serious. She began speaking quickly and nervously in a
warm and resentful voice:

“Why has he forgotten everything, then? He used to carry me about when I
was little. We used to play together. He used to come to teach me to read,
do you know. Two years ago, when he went away, he said that he would never
forget me, that we were friends for ever, for ever, for ever! And now he’s
afraid of me all at once. Am I going to eat him? Why doesn’t he want to
come near me? Why doesn’t he talk? Why won’t he come and see us? It’s not
that you won’t let him. We know that he goes everywhere. It’s not good
manners for me to invite him. He ought to have thought of it first, if he
hasn’t forgotten me. No, now he’s saving his soul! Why have you put that
long gown on him? If he runs he’ll fall.”

And suddenly she hid her face in her hand and went off into irresistible,
prolonged, nervous, inaudible laughter. The elder listened to her with a
smile, and blessed her tenderly. As she kissed his hand she suddenly
pressed it to her eyes and began crying.

“Don’t be angry with me. I’m silly and good for nothing ... and perhaps
Alyosha’s right, quite right, in not wanting to come and see such a
ridiculous girl.”

“I will certainly send him,” said the elder.



Chapter V. So Be It! So Be It!


The elder’s absence from his cell had lasted for about twenty‐five
minutes. It was more than half‐past twelve, but Dmitri, on whose account
they had all met there, had still not appeared. But he seemed almost to be
forgotten, and when the elder entered the cell again, he found his guests
engaged in eager conversation. Ivan and the two monks took the leading
share in it. Miüsov, too, was trying to take a part, and apparently very
eagerly, in the conversation. But he was unsuccessful in this also. He was
evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect,
which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with
Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed
him.

“Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is
progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,”
he thought.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, who had given his word to sit still and be quiet, had
actually been quiet for some time, but he watched his neighbor Miüsov with
an ironical little smile, obviously enjoying his discomfiture. He had been
waiting for some time to pay off old scores, and now he could not let the
opportunity slip. Bending over his shoulder he began teasing him again in
a whisper.

“Why didn’t you go away just now, after the ‘courteously kissing’? Why did
you consent to remain in such unseemly company? It was because you felt
insulted and aggrieved, and you remained to vindicate yourself by showing
off your intelligence. Now you won’t go till you’ve displayed your
intellect to them.”

“You again?... On the contrary, I’m just going.”

“You’ll be the last, the last of all to go!” Fyodor Pavlovitch delivered
him another thrust, almost at the moment of Father Zossima’s return.

The discussion died down for a moment, but the elder, seating himself in
his former place, looked at them all as though cordially inviting them to
go on. Alyosha, who knew every expression of his face, saw that he was
fearfully exhausted and making a great effort. Of late he had been liable
to fainting fits from exhaustion. His face had the pallor that was common
before such attacks, and his lips were white. But he evidently did not
want to break up the party. He seemed to have some special object of his
own in keeping them. What object? Alyosha watched him intently.

“We are discussing this gentleman’s most interesting article,” said Father
Iosif, the librarian, addressing the elder, and indicating Ivan. “He
brings forward much that is new, but I think the argument cuts both ways.
It is an article written in answer to a book by an ecclesiastical
authority on the question of the ecclesiastical court, and the scope of
its jurisdiction.”

“I’m sorry I have not read your article, but I’ve heard of it,” said the
elder, looking keenly and intently at Ivan.

“He takes up a most interesting position,” continued the Father Librarian.
“As far as Church jurisdiction is concerned he is apparently quite opposed
to the separation of Church from State.”

“That’s interesting. But in what sense?” Father Zossima asked Ivan.

The latter, at last, answered him, not condescendingly, as Alyosha had
feared, but with modesty and reserve, with evident goodwill and apparently
without the slightest _arrière‐pensée_.

“I start from the position that this confusion of elements, that is, of
the essential principles of Church and State, will, of course, go on for
ever, in spite of the fact that it is impossible for them to mingle, and
that the confusion of these elements cannot lead to any consistent or even
normal results, for there is falsity at the very foundation of it.
Compromise between the Church and State in such questions as, for
instance, jurisdiction, is, to my thinking, impossible in any real sense.
My clerical opponent maintains that the Church holds a precise and defined
position in the State. I maintain, on the contrary, that the Church ought
to include the whole State, and not simply to occupy a corner in it, and,
if this is, for some reason, impossible at present, then it ought, in
reality, to be set up as the direct and chief aim of the future
development of Christian society!”

“Perfectly true,” Father Païssy, the silent and learned monk, assented
with fervor and decision.

“The purest Ultramontanism!” cried Miüsov impatiently, crossing and
recrossing his legs.

“Oh, well, we have no mountains,” cried Father Iosif, and turning to the
elder he continued: “Observe the answer he makes to the following
‘fundamental and essential’ propositions of his opponent, who is, you must
note, an ecclesiastic. First, that ‘no social organization can or ought to
arrogate to itself power to dispose of the civic and political rights of
its members.’ Secondly, that ‘criminal and civil jurisdiction ought not to
belong to the Church, and is inconsistent with its nature, both as a
divine institution and as an organization of men for religious objects,’
and, finally, in the third place, ‘the Church is a kingdom not of this
world.’ ”

“A most unworthy play upon words for an ecclesiastic!” Father Païssy could
not refrain from breaking in again. “I have read the book which you have
answered,” he added, addressing Ivan, “and was astounded at the words ‘the
Church is a kingdom not of this world.’ If it is not of this world, then
it cannot exist on earth at all. In the Gospel, the words ‘not of this
world’ are not used in that sense. To play with such words is
indefensible. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to set up the Church upon earth.
The Kingdom of Heaven, of course, is not of this world, but in Heaven; but
it is only entered through the Church which has been founded and
established upon earth. And so a frivolous play upon words in such a
connection is unpardonable and improper. The Church is, in truth, a
kingdom and ordained to rule, and in the end must undoubtedly become the
kingdom ruling over all the earth. For that we have the divine promise.”

He ceased speaking suddenly, as though checking himself. After listening
attentively and respectfully Ivan went on, addressing the elder with
perfect composure and as before with ready cordiality:

“The whole point of my article lies in the fact that during the first
three centuries Christianity only existed on earth in the Church and was
nothing but the Church. When the pagan Roman Empire desired to become
Christian, it inevitably happened that, by becoming Christian, it included
the Church but remained a pagan State in very many of its departments. In
reality this was bound to happen. But Rome as a State retained too much of
the pagan civilization and culture, as, for example, in the very objects
and fundamental principles of the State. The Christian Church entering
into the State could, of course, surrender no part of its fundamental
principles—the rock on which it stands—and could pursue no other aims than
those which have been ordained and revealed by God Himself, and among them
that of drawing the whole world, and therefore the ancient pagan State
itself, into the Church. In that way (that is, with a view to the future)
it is not the Church that should seek a definite position in the State,
like ‘every social organization,’ or as ‘an organization of men for
religious purposes’ (as my opponent calls the Church), but, on the
contrary, every earthly State should be, in the end, completely
transformed into the Church and should become nothing else but a Church,
rejecting every purpose incongruous with the aims of the Church. All this
will not degrade it in any way or take from its honor and glory as a great
State, nor from the glory of its rulers, but only turns it from a false,
still pagan, and mistaken path to the true and rightful path, which alone
leads to the eternal goal. This is why the author of the book _On the
Foundations of Church Jurisdiction_ would have judged correctly if, in
seeking and laying down those foundations, he had looked upon them as a
temporary compromise inevitable in our sinful and imperfect days. But as
soon as the author ventures to declare that the foundations which he
predicates now, part of which Father Iosif just enumerated, are the
permanent, essential, and eternal foundations, he is going directly
against the Church and its sacred and eternal vocation. That is the gist
of my article.”

“That is, in brief,” Father Païssy began again, laying stress on each
word, “according to certain theories only too clearly formulated in the
nineteenth century, the Church ought to be transformed into the State, as
though this would be an advance from a lower to a higher form, so as to
disappear into it, making way for science, for the spirit of the age, and
civilization. And if the Church resists and is unwilling, some corner will
be set apart for her in the State, and even that under control—and this
will be so everywhere in all modern European countries. But Russian hopes
and conceptions demand not that the Church should pass as from a lower
into a higher type into the State, but, on the contrary, that the State
should end by being worthy to become only the Church and nothing else. So
be it! So be it!”

“Well, I confess you’ve reassured me somewhat,” Miüsov said smiling, again
crossing his legs. “So far as I understand, then, the realization of such
an ideal is infinitely remote, at the second coming of Christ. That’s as
you please. It’s a beautiful Utopian dream of the abolition of war,
diplomacy, banks, and so on—something after the fashion of socialism,
indeed. But I imagined that it was all meant seriously, and that the
Church might be _now_ going to try criminals, and sentence them to
beating, prison, and even death.”

“But if there were none but the ecclesiastical court, the Church would not
even now sentence a criminal to prison or to death. Crime and the way of
regarding it would inevitably change, not all at once of course, but
fairly soon,” Ivan replied calmly, without flinching.

“Are you serious?” Miüsov glanced keenly at him.

“If everything became the Church, the Church would exclude all the
criminal and disobedient, and would not cut off their heads,” Ivan went
on. “I ask you, what would become of the excluded? He would be cut off
then not only from men, as now, but from Christ. By his crime he would
have transgressed not only against men but against the Church of Christ.
This is so even now, of course, strictly speaking, but it is not clearly
enunciated, and very, very often the criminal of to‐day compromises with
his conscience: ‘I steal,’ he says, ‘but I don’t go against the Church.
I’m not an enemy of Christ.’ That’s what the criminal of to‐day is
continually saying to himself, but when the Church takes the place of the
State it will be difficult for him, in opposition to the Church all over
the world, to say: ‘All men are mistaken, all in error, all mankind are
the false Church. I, a thief and murderer, am the only true Christian
Church.’ It will be very difficult to say this to himself; it requires a
rare combination of unusual circumstances. Now, on the other side, take
the Church’s own view of crime: is it not bound to renounce the present
almost pagan attitude, and to change from a mechanical cutting off of its
tainted member for the preservation of society, as at present, into
completely and honestly adopting the idea of the regeneration of the man,
of his reformation and salvation?”

“What do you mean? I fail to understand again,” Miüsov interrupted. “Some
sort of dream again. Something shapeless and even incomprehensible. What
is excommunication? What sort of exclusion? I suspect you are simply
amusing yourself, Ivan Fyodorovitch.”

“Yes, but you know, in reality it is so now,” said the elder suddenly, and
all turned to him at once. “If it were not for the Church of Christ there
would be nothing to restrain the criminal from evil‐doing, no real
chastisement for it afterwards; none, that is, but the mechanical
punishment spoken of just now, which in the majority of cases only
embitters the heart; and not the real punishment, the only effectual one,
the only deterrent and softening one, which lies in the recognition of sin
by conscience.”

“How is that, may one inquire?” asked Miüsov, with lively curiosity.

“Why,” began the elder, “all these sentences to exile with hard labor, and
formerly with flogging also, reform no one, and what’s more, deter hardly
a single criminal, and the number of crimes does not diminish but is
continually on the increase. You must admit that. Consequently the
security of society is not preserved, for, although the obnoxious member
is mechanically cut off and sent far away out of sight, another criminal
always comes to take his place at once, and often two of them. If anything
does preserve society, even in our time, and does regenerate and transform
the criminal, it is only the law of Christ speaking in his conscience. It
is only by recognizing his wrong‐doing as a son of a Christian
society—that is, of the Church—that he recognizes his sin against
society—that is, against the Church. So that it is only against the
Church, and not against the State, that the criminal of to‐day can
recognize that he has sinned. If society, as a Church, had jurisdiction,
then it would know when to bring back from exclusion and to reunite to
itself. Now the Church having no real jurisdiction, but only the power of
moral condemnation, withdraws of her own accord from punishing the
criminal actively. She does not excommunicate him but simply persists in
motherly exhortation of him. What is more, the Church even tries to
preserve all Christian communion with the criminal. She admits him to
church services, to the holy sacrament, gives him alms, and treats him
more as a captive than as a convict. And what would become of the
criminal, O Lord, if even the Christian society—that is, the Church—were
to reject him even as the civil law rejects him and cuts him off? What
would become of him if the Church punished him with her excommunication as
the direct consequence of the secular law? There could be no more terrible
despair, at least for a Russian criminal, for Russian criminals still have
faith. Though, who knows, perhaps then a fearful thing would happen,
perhaps the despairing heart of the criminal would lose its faith and then
what would become of him? But the Church, like a tender, loving mother,
holds aloof from active punishment herself, as the sinner is too severely
punished already by the civil law, and there must be at least some one to
have pity on him. The Church holds aloof, above all, because its judgment
is the only one that contains the truth, and therefore cannot practically
and morally be united to any other judgment even as a temporary
compromise. She can enter into no compact about that. The foreign
criminal, they say, rarely repents, for the very doctrines of to‐day
confirm him in the idea that his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction
against an unjustly oppressive force. Society cuts him off completely by a
force that triumphs over him mechanically and (so at least they say of
themselves in Europe) accompanies this exclusion with hatred,
forgetfulness, and the most profound indifference as to the ultimate fate
of the erring brother. In this way, it all takes place without the
compassionate intervention of the Church, for in many cases there are no
churches there at all, for though ecclesiastics and splendid church
buildings remain, the churches themselves have long ago striven to pass
from Church into State and to disappear in it completely. So it seems at
least in Lutheran countries. As for Rome, it was proclaimed a State
instead of a Church a thousand years ago. And so the criminal is no longer
conscious of being a member of the Church and sinks into despair. If he
returns to society, often it is with such hatred that society itself
instinctively cuts him off. You can judge for yourself how it must end. In
many cases it would seem to be the same with us, but the difference is
that besides the established law courts we have the Church too, which
always keeps up relations with the criminal as a dear and still precious
son. And besides that, there is still preserved, though only in thought,
the judgment of the Church, which though no longer existing in practice is
still living as a dream for the future, and is, no doubt, instinctively
recognized by the criminal in his soul. What was said here just now is
true too, that is, that if the jurisdiction of the Church were introduced
in practice in its full force, that is, if the whole of the society were
changed into the Church, not only the judgment of the Church would have
influence on the reformation of the criminal such as it never has now, but
possibly also the crimes themselves would be incredibly diminished. And
there can be no doubt that the Church would look upon the criminal and the
crime of the future in many cases quite differently and would succeed in
restoring the excluded, in restraining those who plan evil, and in
regenerating the fallen. It is true,” said Father Zossima, with a smile,
“the Christian society now is not ready and is only resting on some seven
righteous men, but as they are never lacking, it will continue still
unshaken in expectation of its complete transformation from a society
almost heathen in character into a single universal and all‐powerful
Church. So be it, so be it! Even though at the end of the ages, for it is
ordained to come to pass! And there is no need to be troubled about times
and seasons, for the secret of the times and seasons is in the wisdom of
God, in His foresight, and His love. And what in human reckoning seems
still afar off, may by the Divine ordinance be close at hand, on the eve
of its appearance. And so be it, so be it!”

“So be it, so be it!” Father Païssy repeated austerely and reverently.

“Strange, extremely strange!” Miüsov pronounced, not so much with heat as
with latent indignation.

“What strikes you as so strange?” Father Iosif inquired cautiously.

“Why, it’s beyond anything!” cried Miüsov, suddenly breaking out; “the
State is eliminated and the Church is raised to the position of the State.
It’s not simply Ultramontanism, it’s arch‐Ultramontanism! It’s beyond the
dreams of Pope Gregory the Seventh!”

“You are completely misunderstanding it,” said Father Païssy sternly.
“Understand, the Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is
Rome and its dream. That is the third temptation of the devil. On the
contrary, the State is transformed into the Church, will ascend and become
a Church over the whole world—which is the complete opposite of
Ultramontanism and Rome, and your interpretation, and is only the glorious
destiny ordained for the Orthodox Church. This star will arise in the
east!”

Miüsov was significantly silent. His whole figure expressed extraordinary
personal dignity. A supercilious and condescending smile played on his
lips. Alyosha watched it all with a throbbing heart. The whole
conversation stirred him profoundly. He glanced casually at Rakitin, who
was standing immovable in his place by the door listening and watching
intently though with downcast eyes. But from the color in his cheeks
Alyosha guessed that Rakitin was probably no less excited, and he knew
what caused his excitement.

“Allow me to tell you one little anecdote, gentlemen,” Miüsov said
impressively, with a peculiarly majestic air. “Some years ago, soon after
the _coup d’état_ of December, I happened to be calling in Paris on an
extremely influential personage in the Government, and I met a very
interesting man in his house. This individual was not precisely a
detective but was a sort of superintendent of a whole regiment of
political detectives—a rather powerful position in its own way. I was
prompted by curiosity to seize the opportunity of conversation with him.
And as he had not come as a visitor but as a subordinate official bringing
a special report, and as he saw the reception given me by his chief, he
deigned to speak with some openness, to a certain extent only, of course.
He was rather courteous than open, as Frenchmen know how to be courteous,
especially to a foreigner. But I thoroughly understood him. The subject
was the socialist revolutionaries who were at that time persecuted. I will
quote only one most curious remark dropped by this person. ‘We are not
particularly afraid,’ said he, ‘of all these socialists, anarchists,
infidels, and revolutionists; we keep watch on them and know all their
goings on. But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God
and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the
people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who
is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.’
The words struck me at the time, and now they have suddenly come back to
me here, gentlemen.”

“You apply them to us, and look upon us as socialists?” Father Païssy
asked directly, without beating about the bush.

But before Pyotr Alexandrovitch could think what to answer, the door
opened, and the guest so long expected, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, came in. They
had, in fact, given up expecting him, and his sudden appearance caused
some surprise for a moment.



Chapter VI. Why Is Such A Man Alive?


Dmitri Fyodorovitch, a young man of eight and twenty, of medium height and
agreeable countenance, looked older than his years. He was muscular, and
showed signs of considerable physical strength. Yet there was something
not healthy in his face. It was rather thin, his cheeks were hollow, and
there was an unhealthy sallowness in their color. His rather large,
prominent, dark eyes had an expression of firm determination, and yet
there was a vague look in them, too. Even when he was excited and talking
irritably, his eyes somehow did not follow his mood, but betrayed
something else, sometimes quite incongruous with what was passing. “It’s
hard to tell what he’s thinking,” those who talked to him sometimes
declared. People who saw something pensive and sullen in his eyes were
startled by his sudden laugh, which bore witness to mirthful and light‐
hearted thoughts at the very time when his eyes were so gloomy. A certain
strained look in his face was easy to understand at this moment. Every one
knew, or had heard of, the extremely restless and dissipated life which he
had been leading of late, as well as of the violent anger to which he had
been roused in his quarrels with his father. There were several stories
current in the town about it. It is true that he was irascible by nature,
“of an unstable and unbalanced mind,” as our justice of the peace,
Katchalnikov, happily described him.

He was stylishly and irreproachably dressed in a carefully buttoned frock‐
coat. He wore black gloves and carried a top‐hat. Having only lately left
the army, he still had mustaches and no beard. His dark brown hair was
cropped short, and combed forward on his temples. He had the long,
determined stride of a military man. He stood still for a moment on the
threshold, and glancing at the whole party went straight up to the elder,
guessing him to be their host. He made him a low bow, and asked his
blessing. Father Zossima, rising in his chair, blessed him. Dmitri kissed
his hand respectfully, and with intense feeling, almost anger, he said:

“Be so generous as to forgive me for having kept you waiting so long, but
Smerdyakov, the valet sent me by my father, in reply to my inquiries, told
me twice over that the appointment was for one. Now I suddenly learn—”

“Don’t disturb yourself,” interposed the elder. “No matter. You are a
little late. It’s of no consequence....”

“I’m extremely obliged to you, and expected no less from your goodness.”

Saying this, Dmitri bowed once more. Then, turning suddenly towards his
father, made him, too, a similarly low and respectful bow. He had
evidently considered it beforehand, and made this bow in all seriousness,
thinking it his duty to show his respect and good intentions.

Although Fyodor Pavlovitch was taken unawares, he was equal to the
occasion. In response to Dmitri’s bow he jumped up from his chair and made
his son a bow as low in return. His face was suddenly solemn and
impressive, which gave him a positively malignant look. Dmitri bowed
generally to all present, and without a word walked to the window with his
long, resolute stride, sat down on the only empty chair, near Father
Païssy, and, bending forward, prepared to listen to the conversation he
had interrupted.

Dmitri’s entrance had taken no more than two minutes, and the conversation
was resumed. But this time Miüsov thought it unnecessary to reply to
Father Païssy’s persistent and almost irritable question.

“Allow me to withdraw from this discussion,” he observed with a certain
well‐bred nonchalance. “It’s a subtle question, too. Here Ivan
Fyodorovitch is smiling at us. He must have something interesting to say
about that also. Ask him.”

“Nothing special, except one little remark,” Ivan replied at once.
“European Liberals in general, and even our liberal dilettanti, often mix
up the final results of socialism with those of Christianity. This wild
notion is, of course, a characteristic feature. But it’s not only Liberals
and dilettanti who mix up socialism and Christianity, but, in many cases,
it appears, the police—the foreign police, of course—do the same. Your
Paris anecdote is rather to the point, Pyotr Alexandrovitch.”

“I ask your permission to drop this subject altogether,” Miüsov repeated.
“I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather
characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago,
in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in
argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their
neighbors. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind,
and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing
to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality.
Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in
that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in
immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of
the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be
immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That’s not all. He
ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not
believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be
changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that
egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as
the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position.
From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric
and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch’s theories.”

“Excuse me,” Dmitri cried suddenly; “if I’ve heard aright, crime must not
only be permitted but even recognized as the inevitable and the most
rational outcome of his position for every infidel! Is that so or not?”

“Quite so,” said Father Païssy.

“I’ll remember it.”

Having uttered these words Dmitri ceased speaking as suddenly as he had
begun. Every one looked at him with curiosity.

“Is that really your conviction as to the consequences of the
disappearance of the faith in immortality?” the elder asked Ivan suddenly.

“Yes. That was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no
immortality.”

“You are blessed in believing that, or else most unhappy.”

“Why unhappy?” Ivan asked smiling.

“Because, in all probability you don’t believe yourself in the immortality
of your soul, nor in what you have written yourself in your article on
Church jurisdiction.”

“Perhaps you are right! ... But I wasn’t altogether joking,” Ivan suddenly
and strangely confessed, flushing quickly.

“You were not altogether joking. That’s true. The question is still
fretting your heart, and not answered. But the martyr likes sometimes to
divert himself with his despair, as it were driven to it by despair
itself. Meanwhile, in your despair, you, too, divert yourself with
magazine articles, and discussions in society, though you don’t believe
your own arguments, and with an aching heart mock at them inwardly....
That question you have not answered, and it is your great grief, for it
clamors for an answer.”

“But can it be answered by me? Answered in the affirmative?” Ivan went on
asking strangely, still looking at the elder with the same inexplicable
smile.

“If it can’t be decided in the affirmative, it will never be decided in
the negative. You know that that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all
its suffering is due to it. But thank the Creator who has given you a
lofty heart capable of such suffering; of thinking and seeking higher
things, for our dwelling is in the heavens. God grant that your heart will
attain the answer on earth, and may God bless your path.”

The elder raised his hand and would have made the sign of the cross over
Ivan from where he stood. But the latter rose from his seat, went up to
him, received his blessing, and kissing his hand went back to his place in
silence. His face looked firm and earnest. This action and all the
preceding conversation, which was so surprising from Ivan, impressed every
one by its strangeness and a certain solemnity, so that all were silent
for a moment, and there was a look almost of apprehension in Alyosha’s
face. But Miüsov suddenly shrugged his shoulders. And at the same moment
Fyodor Pavlovitch jumped up from his seat.

“Most pious and holy elder,” he cried, pointing to Ivan, “that is my son,
flesh of my flesh, the dearest of my flesh! He is my most dutiful Karl
Moor, so to speak, while this son who has just come in, Dmitri, against
whom I am seeking justice from you, is the undutiful Franz Moor—they are
both out of Schiller’s _Robbers_, and so I am the reigning Count von Moor!
Judge and save us! We need not only your prayers but your prophecies!”

“Speak without buffoonery, and don’t begin by insulting the members of
your family,” answered the elder, in a faint, exhausted voice. He was
obviously getting more and more fatigued, and his strength was failing.

“An unseemly farce which I foresaw when I came here!” cried Dmitri
indignantly. He too leapt up. “Forgive it, reverend Father,” he added,
addressing the elder. “I am not a cultivated man, and I don’t even know
how to address you properly, but you have been deceived and you have been
too good‐natured in letting us meet here. All my father wants is a
scandal. Why he wants it only he can tell. He always has some motive. But
I believe I know why—”

“They all blame me, all of them!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch in his turn.
“Pyotr Alexandrovitch here blames me too. You have been blaming me, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, you have!” he turned suddenly to Miüsov, although the
latter was not dreaming of interrupting him. “They all accuse me of having
hidden the children’s money in my boots, and cheated them, but isn’t there
a court of law? There they will reckon out for you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
from your notes, your letters, and your agreements, how much money you
had, how much you have spent, and how much you have left. Why does Pyotr
Alexandrovitch refuse to pass judgment? Dmitri is not a stranger to him.
Because they are all against me, while Dmitri Fyodorovitch is in debt to
me, and not a little, but some thousands of which I have documentary
proof. The whole town is echoing with his debaucheries. And where he was
stationed before, he several times spent a thousand or two for the
seduction of some respectable girl; we know all about that, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, in its most secret details. I’ll prove it.... Would you
believe it, holy Father, he has captivated the heart of the most honorable
of young ladies of good family and fortune, daughter of a gallant colonel,
formerly his superior officer, who had received many honors and had the
Anna Order on his breast. He compromised the girl by his promise of
marriage, now she is an orphan and here; she is betrothed to him, yet
before her very eyes he is dancing attendance on a certain enchantress.
And although this enchantress has lived in, so to speak, civil marriage
with a respectable man, yet she is of an independent character, an
unapproachable fortress for everybody, just like a legal wife—for she is
virtuous, yes, holy Fathers, she is virtuous. Dmitri Fyodorovitch wants to
open this fortress with a golden key, and that’s why he is insolent to me
now, trying to get money from me, though he has wasted thousands on this
enchantress already. He’s continually borrowing money for the purpose.
From whom do you think? Shall I say, Mitya?”

“Be silent!” cried Dmitri, “wait till I’m gone. Don’t dare in my presence
to asperse the good name of an honorable girl! That you should utter a
word about her is an outrage, and I won’t permit it!”

He was breathless.

“Mitya! Mitya!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch hysterically, squeezing out a
tear. “And is your father’s blessing nothing to you? If I curse you, what
then?”

“Shameless hypocrite!” exclaimed Dmitri furiously.

“He says that to his father! his father! What would he be with others?
Gentlemen, only fancy; there’s a poor but honorable man living here,
burdened with a numerous family, a captain who got into trouble and was
discharged from the army, but not publicly, not by court‐martial, with no
slur on his honor. And three weeks ago, Dmitri seized him by the beard in
a tavern, dragged him out into the street and beat him publicly, and all
because he is an agent in a little business of mine.”

“It’s all a lie! Outwardly it’s the truth, but inwardly a lie!” Dmitri was
trembling with rage. “Father, I don’t justify my action. Yes, I confess it
publicly, I behaved like a brute to that captain, and I regret it now, and
I’m disgusted with myself for my brutal rage. But this captain, this agent
of yours, went to that lady whom you call an enchantress, and suggested to
her from you, that she should take I.O.U.’s of mine which were in your
possession, and should sue me for the money so as to get me into prison by
means of them, if I persisted in claiming an account from you of my
property. Now you reproach me for having a weakness for that lady when you
yourself incited her to captivate me! She told me so to my face.... She
told me the story and laughed at you.... You wanted to put me in prison
because you are jealous of me with her, because you’d begun to force your
attentions upon her; and I know all about that, too; she laughed at you
for that as well—you hear—she laughed at you as she described it. So here
you have this man, this father who reproaches his profligate son!
Gentlemen, forgive my anger, but I foresaw that this crafty old man would
only bring you together to create a scandal. I had come to forgive him if
he held out his hand; to forgive him, and ask forgiveness! But as he has
just this minute insulted not only me, but an honorable young lady, for
whom I feel such reverence that I dare not take her name in vain, I have
made up my mind to show up his game, though he is my father....”

He could not go on. His eyes were glittering and he breathed with
difficulty. But every one in the cell was stirred. All except Father
Zossima got up from their seats uneasily. The monks looked austere but
waited for guidance from the elder. He sat still, pale, not from
excitement but from the weakness of disease. An imploring smile lighted up
his face; from time to time he raised his hand, as though to check the
storm, and, of course, a gesture from him would have been enough to end
the scene; but he seemed to be waiting for something and watched them
intently as though trying to make out something which was not perfectly
clear to him. At last Miüsov felt completely humiliated and disgraced.

“We are all to blame for this scandalous scene,” he said hotly. “But I did
not foresee it when I came, though I knew with whom I had to deal. This
must be stopped at once! Believe me, your reverence, I had no precise
knowledge of the details that have just come to light, I was unwilling to
believe them, and I learn for the first time.... A father is jealous of
his son’s relations with a woman of loose behavior and intrigues with the
creature to get his son into prison! This is the company in which I have
been forced to be present! I was deceived. I declare to you all that I was
as much deceived as any one.”

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” yelled Fyodor Pavlovitch suddenly, in an unnatural
voice, “if you were not my son I would challenge you this instant to a
duel ... with pistols, at three paces ... across a handkerchief,” he
ended, stamping with both feet.

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when
they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears
of emotion in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later,
they are able to whisper to themselves, “You know you are lying, you
shameless old sinner! You’re acting now, in spite of your ‘holy’ wrath.”

Dmitri frowned painfully, and looked with unutterable contempt at his
father.

“I thought ... I thought,” he said, in a soft and, as it were, controlled
voice, “that I was coming to my native place with the angel of my heart,
my betrothed, to cherish his old age, and I find nothing but a depraved
profligate, a despicable clown!”

“A duel!” yelled the old wretch again, breathless and spluttering at each
syllable. “And you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, let me tell you that
there has never been in all your family a loftier, and more honest—you
hear—more honest woman than this ‘creature,’ as you have dared to call
her! And you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, have abandoned your betrothed for that
‘creature,’ so you must yourself have thought that your betrothed couldn’t
hold a candle to her. That’s the woman called a ‘creature’!”

“Shameful!” broke from Father Iosif.

“Shameful and disgraceful!” Kalganov, flushing crimson, cried in a boyish
voice, trembling with emotion. He had been silent till that moment.

“Why is such a man alive?” Dmitri, beside himself with rage, growled in a
hollow voice, hunching up his shoulders till he looked almost deformed.
“Tell me, can he be allowed to go on defiling the earth?” He looked round
at every one and pointed at the old man. He spoke evenly and deliberately.

“Listen, listen, monks, to the parricide!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch,
rushing up to Father Iosif. “That’s the answer to your ‘shameful!’ What is
shameful? That ‘creature,’ that ‘woman of loose behavior’ is perhaps
holier than you are yourselves, you monks who are seeking salvation! She
fell perhaps in her youth, ruined by her environment. But she loved much,
and Christ himself forgave the woman ‘who loved much.’ ”

“It was not for such love Christ forgave her,” broke impatiently from the
gentle Father Iosif.

“Yes, it was for such, monks, it was! You save your souls here, eating
cabbage, and think you are the righteous. You eat a gudgeon a day, and you
think you bribe God with gudgeon.”

“This is unendurable!” was heard on all sides in the cell.

But this unseemly scene was cut short in a most unexpected way. Father
Zossima rose suddenly from his seat. Almost distracted with anxiety for
the elder and every one else, Alyosha succeeded, however, in supporting
him by the arm. Father Zossima moved towards Dmitri and reaching him sank
on his knees before him. Alyosha thought that he had fallen from weakness,
but this was not so. The elder distinctly and deliberately bowed down at
Dmitri’s feet till his forehead touched the floor. Alyosha was so
astounded that he failed to assist him when he got up again. There was a
faint smile on his lips.

“Good‐by! Forgive me, all of you!” he said, bowing on all sides to his
guests.

Dmitri stood for a few moments in amazement. Bowing down to him—what did
it mean? Suddenly he cried aloud, “Oh, God!” hid his face in his hands,
and rushed out of the room. All the guests flocked out after him, in their
confusion not saying good‐by, or bowing to their host. Only the monks went
up to him again for a blessing.

“What did it mean, falling at his feet like that? Was it symbolic or
what?” said Fyodor Pavlovitch, suddenly quieted and trying to reopen
conversation without venturing to address anybody in particular. They were
all passing out of the precincts of the hermitage at the moment.

“I can’t answer for a madhouse and for madmen,” Miüsov answered at once
ill‐humoredly, “but I will spare myself your company, Fyodor Pavlovitch,
and, trust me, for ever. Where’s that monk?”

“That monk,” that is, the monk who had invited them to dine with the
Superior, did not keep them waiting. He met them as soon as they came down
the steps from the elder’s cell, as though he had been waiting for them
all the time.

“Reverend Father, kindly do me a favor. Convey my deepest respect to the
Father Superior, apologize for me, personally, Miüsov, to his reverence,
telling him that I deeply regret that owing to unforeseen circumstances I
am unable to have the honor of being present at his table, greatly as I
should desire to do so,” Miüsov said irritably to the monk.

“And that unforeseen circumstance, of course, is myself,” Fyodor
Pavlovitch cut in immediately. “Do you hear, Father; this gentleman
doesn’t want to remain in my company or else he’d come at once. And you
shall go, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, pray go to the Father Superior and good
appetite to you. I will decline, and not you. Home, home, I’ll eat at
home, I don’t feel equal to it here, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, my amiable
relative.”

“I am not your relative and never have been, you contemptible man!”

“I said it on purpose to madden you, because you always disclaim the
relationship, though you really are a relation in spite of your shuffling.
I’ll prove it by the church calendar. As for you, Ivan, stay if you like.
I’ll send the horses for you later. Propriety requires you to go to the
Father Superior, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, to apologize for the disturbance
we’ve been making....”

“Is it true that you are going home? Aren’t you lying?”

“Pyotr Alexandrovitch! How could I dare after what’s happened! Forgive me,
gentlemen, I was carried away! And upset besides! And, indeed, I am
ashamed. Gentlemen, one man has the heart of Alexander of Macedon and
another the heart of the little dog Fido. Mine is that of the little dog
Fido. I am ashamed! After such an escapade how can I go to dinner, to
gobble up the monastery’s sauces? I am ashamed, I can’t. You must excuse
me!”

“The devil only knows, what if he deceives us?” thought Miüsov, still
hesitating, and watching the retreating buffoon with distrustful eyes. The
latter turned round, and noticing that Miüsov was watching him, waved him
a kiss.

“Well, are you coming to the Superior?” Miüsov asked Ivan abruptly.

“Why not? I was especially invited yesterday.”

“Unfortunately I feel myself compelled to go to this confounded dinner,”
said Miüsov with the same irritability, regardless of the fact that the
monk was listening. “We ought, at least, to apologize for the disturbance,
and explain that it was not our doing. What do you think?”

“Yes, we must explain that it wasn’t our doing. Besides, father won’t be
there,” observed Ivan.

“Well, I should hope not! Confound this dinner!”

They all walked on, however. The monk listened in silence. On the road
through the copse he made one observation however—that the Father Superior
had been waiting a long time, and that they were more than half an hour
late. He received no answer. Miüsov looked with hatred at Ivan.

“Here he is, going to the dinner as though nothing had happened,” he
thought. “A brazen face, and the conscience of a Karamazov!”



Chapter VII. A Young Man Bent On A Career


Alyosha helped Father Zossima to his bedroom and seated him on his bed. It
was a little room furnished with the bare necessities. There was a narrow
iron bedstead, with a strip of felt for a mattress. In the corner, under
the ikons, was a reading‐desk with a cross and the Gospel lying on it. The
elder sank exhausted on the bed. His eyes glittered and he breathed hard.
He looked intently at Alyosha, as though considering something.

“Go, my dear boy, go. Porfiry is enough for me. Make haste, you are needed
there, go and wait at the Father Superior’s table.”

“Let me stay here,” Alyosha entreated.

“You are more needed there. There is no peace there. You will wait, and be
of service. If evil spirits rise up, repeat a prayer. And remember, my
son”—the elder liked to call him that—“this is not the place for you in
the future. When it is God’s will to call me, leave the monastery. Go away
for good.”

Alyosha started.

“What is it? This is not your place for the time. I bless you for great
service in the world. Yours will be a long pilgrimage. And you will have
to take a wife, too. You will have to bear _all_ before you come back.
There will be much to do. But I don’t doubt of you, and so I send you
forth. Christ is with you. Do not abandon Him and He will not abandon you.
You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is
my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness. Work, work unceasingly.
Remember my words, for although I shall talk with you again, not only my
days but my hours are numbered.”

Alyosha’s face again betrayed strong emotion. The corners of his mouth
quivered.

“What is it again?” Father Zossima asked, smiling gently. “The worldly may
follow the dead with tears, but here we rejoice over the father who is
departing. We rejoice and pray for him. Leave me, I must pray. Go, and
make haste. Be near your brothers. And not near one only, but near both.”

Father Zossima raised his hand to bless him. Alyosha could make no
protest, though he had a great longing to remain. He longed, moreover, to
ask the significance of his bowing to Dmitri, the question was on the tip
of his tongue, but he dared not ask it. He knew that the elder would have
explained it unasked if he had thought fit. But evidently it was not his
will. That action had made a terrible impression on Alyosha; he believed
blindly in its mysterious significance. Mysterious, and perhaps awful.

As he hastened out of the hermitage precincts to reach the monastery in
time to serve at the Father Superior’s dinner, he felt a sudden pang at
his heart, and stopped short. He seemed to hear again Father Zossima’s
words, foretelling his approaching end. What he had foretold so exactly
must infallibly come to pass. Alyosha believed that implicitly. But how
could he be left without him? How could he live without seeing and hearing
him? Where should he go? He had told him not to weep, and to leave the
monastery. Good God! It was long since Alyosha had known such anguish. He
hurried through the copse that divided the monastery from the hermitage,
and unable to bear the burden of his thoughts, he gazed at the ancient
pines beside the path. He had not far to go—about five hundred paces. He
expected to meet no one at that hour, but at the first turn of the path he
noticed Rakitin. He was waiting for some one.

“Are you waiting for me?” asked Alyosha, overtaking him.

“Yes,” grinned Rakitin. “You are hurrying to the Father Superior, I know;
he has a banquet. There’s not been such a banquet since the Superior
entertained the Bishop and General Pahatov, do you remember? I shan’t be
there, but you go and hand the sauces. Tell me one thing, Alexey, what
does that vision mean? That’s what I want to ask you.”

“What vision?”

“That bowing to your brother, Dmitri. And didn’t he tap the ground with
his forehead, too!”

“You speak of Father Zossima?”

“Yes, of Father Zossima.”

“Tapped the ground?”

“Ah, an irreverent expression! Well, what of it? Anyway, what does that
vision mean?”

“I don’t know what it means, Misha.”

“I knew he wouldn’t explain it to you! There’s nothing wonderful about it,
of course, only the usual holy mummery. But there was an object in the
performance. All the pious people in the town will talk about it and
spread the story through the province, wondering what it meant. To my
thinking the old man really has a keen nose; he sniffed a crime. Your
house stinks of it.”

“What crime?”

Rakitin evidently had something he was eager to speak of.

“It’ll be in your family, this crime. Between your brothers and your rich
old father. So Father Zossima flopped down to be ready for what may turn
up. If something happens later on, it’ll be: ‘Ah, the holy man foresaw it,
prophesied it!’ though it’s a poor sort of prophecy, flopping like that.
‘Ah, but it was symbolic,’ they’ll say, ‘an allegory,’ and the devil knows
what all! It’ll be remembered to his glory: ‘He predicted the crime and
marked the criminal!’ That’s always the way with these crazy fanatics;
they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple. Like
your elder, he takes a stick to a just man and falls at the feet of a
murderer.”

“What crime? What murderer? What do you mean?”

Alyosha stopped dead. Rakitin stopped, too.

“What murderer? As though you didn’t know! I’ll bet you’ve thought of it
before. That’s interesting, too, by the way. Listen, Alyosha, you always
speak the truth, though you’re always between two stools. Have you thought
of it or not? Answer.”

“I have,” answered Alyosha in a low voice. Even Rakitin was taken aback.

“What? Have you really?” he cried.

“I ... I’ve not exactly thought it,” muttered Alyosha, “but directly you
began speaking so strangely, I fancied I had thought of it myself.”

“You see? (And how well you expressed it!) Looking at your father and your
brother Mitya to‐day you thought of a crime. Then I’m not mistaken?”

“But wait, wait a minute,” Alyosha broke in uneasily. “What has led you to
see all this? Why does it interest you? That’s the first question.”

“Two questions, disconnected, but natural. I’ll deal with them separately.
What led me to see it? I shouldn’t have seen it, if I hadn’t suddenly
understood your brother Dmitri, seen right into the very heart of him all
at once. I caught the whole man from one trait. These very honest but
passionate people have a line which mustn’t be crossed. If it were, he’d
run at your father with a knife. But your father’s a drunken and abandoned
old sinner, who can never draw the line—if they both let themselves go,
they’ll both come to grief.”

“No, Misha, no. If that’s all, you’ve reassured me. It won’t come to
that.”

“But why are you trembling? Let me tell you; he may be honest, our Mitya
(he is stupid, but honest), but he’s—a sensualist. That’s the very
definition and inner essence of him. It’s your father has handed him on
his low sensuality. Do you know, I simply wonder at you, Alyosha, how you
can have kept your purity. You’re a Karamazov too, you know! In your
family sensuality is carried to a disease. But now, these three
sensualists are watching one another, with their knives in their belts.
The three of them are knocking their heads together, and you may be the
fourth.”

“You are mistaken about that woman. Dmitri—despises her,” said Alyosha,
with a sort of shudder.

“Grushenka? No, brother, he doesn’t despise her. Since he has openly
abandoned his betrothed for her, he doesn’t despise her. There’s something
here, my dear boy, that you don’t understand yet. A man will fall in love
with some beauty, with a woman’s body, or even with a part of a woman’s
body (a sensualist can understand that), and he’ll abandon his own
children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia,
too. If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s humane, he’ll murder; if he’s
faithful, he’ll deceive. Pushkin, the poet of women’s feet, sung of their
feet in his verse. Others don’t sing their praises, but they can’t look at
their feet without a thrill—and it’s not only their feet. Contempt’s no
help here, brother, even if he did despise Grushenka. He does, but he
can’t tear himself away.”

“I understand that,” Alyosha jerked out suddenly.

“Really? Well, I dare say you do understand, since you blurt it out at the
first word,” said Rakitin, malignantly. “That escaped you unawares, and
the confession’s the more precious. So it’s a familiar subject; you’ve
thought about it already, about sensuality, I mean! Oh, you virgin soul!
You’re a quiet one, Alyosha, you’re a saint, I know, but the devil only
knows what you’ve thought about, and what you know already! You are pure,
but you’ve been down into the depths.... I’ve been watching you a long
time. You’re a Karamazov yourself; you’re a thorough Karamazov—no doubt
birth and selection have something to answer for. You’re a sensualist from
your father, a crazy saint from your mother. Why do you tremble? Is it
true, then? Do you know, Grushenka has been begging me to bring you along.
‘I’ll pull off his cassock,’ she says. You can’t think how she keeps
begging me to bring you. I wondered why she took such an interest in you.
Do you know, she’s an extraordinary woman, too!”

“Thank her and say I’m not coming,” said Alyosha, with a strained smile.
“Finish what you were saying, Misha. I’ll tell you my idea after.”

“There’s nothing to finish. It’s all clear. It’s the same old tune,
brother. If even you are a sensualist at heart, what of your brother,
Ivan? He’s a Karamazov, too. What is at the root of all you Karamazovs is
that you’re all sensual, grasping and crazy! Your brother Ivan writes
theological articles in joke, for some idiotic, unknown motive of his own,
though he’s an atheist, and he admits it’s a fraud himself—that’s your
brother Ivan. He’s trying to get Mitya’s betrothed for himself, and I
fancy he’ll succeed, too. And what’s more, it’s with Mitya’s consent. For
Mitya will surrender his betrothed to him to be rid of her, and escape to
Grushenka. And he’s ready to do that in spite of all his nobility and
disinterestedness. Observe that. Those are the most fatal people! Who the
devil can make you out? He recognizes his vileness and goes on with it!
Let me tell you, too, the old man, your father, is standing in Mitya’s way
now. He has suddenly gone crazy over Grushenka. His mouth waters at the
sight of her. It’s simply on her account he made that scene in the cell
just now, simply because Miüsov called her an ‘abandoned creature.’ He’s
worse than a tom‐cat in love. At first she was only employed by him in
connection with his taverns and in some other shady business, but now he
has suddenly realized all she is and has gone wild about her. He keeps
pestering her with his offers, not honorable ones, of course. And they’ll
come into collision, the precious father and son, on that path! But
Grushenka favors neither of them, she’s still playing with them, and
teasing them both, considering which she can get most out of. For though
she could filch a lot of money from the papa he wouldn’t marry her, and
maybe he’ll turn stingy in the end, and keep his purse shut. That’s where
Mitya’s value comes in; he has no money, but he’s ready to marry her. Yes,
ready to marry her! to abandon his betrothed, a rare beauty, Katerina
Ivanovna, who’s rich, and the daughter of a colonel, and to marry
Grushenka, who has been the mistress of a dissolute old merchant,
Samsonov, a coarse, uneducated, provincial mayor. Some murderous conflict
may well come to pass from all this, and that’s what your brother Ivan is
waiting for. It would suit him down to the ground. He’ll carry off
Katerina Ivanovna, for whom he is languishing, and pocket her dowry of
sixty thousand. That’s very alluring to start with, for a man of no
consequence and a beggar. And, take note, he won’t be wronging Mitya, but
doing him the greatest service. For I know as a fact that Mitya only last
week, when he was with some gypsy girls drunk in a tavern, cried out aloud
that he was unworthy of his betrothed, Katya, but that his brother Ivan,
he was the man who deserved her. And Katerina Ivanovna will not in the end
refuse such a fascinating man as Ivan. She’s hesitating between the two of
them already. And how has that Ivan won you all, so that you all worship
him? He is laughing at you, and enjoying himself at your expense.”

“How do you know? How can you speak so confidently?” Alyosha asked
sharply, frowning.

“Why do you ask, and are frightened at my answer? It shows that you know
I’m speaking the truth.”

“You don’t like Ivan. Ivan wouldn’t be tempted by money.”

“Really? And the beauty of Katerina Ivanovna? It’s not only the money,
though a fortune of sixty thousand is an attraction.”

“Ivan is above that. He wouldn’t make up to any one for thousands. It is
not money, it’s not comfort Ivan is seeking. Perhaps it’s suffering he is
seeking.”

“What wild dream now? Oh, you—aristocrats!”

“Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted
by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don’t want millions,
but an answer to their questions.”

“That’s plagiarism, Alyosha. You’re quoting your elder’s phrases. Ah, Ivan
has set you a problem!” cried Rakitin, with undisguised malice. His face
changed, and his lips twitched. “And the problem’s a stupid one. It is no
good guessing it. Rack your brains—you’ll understand it. His article is
absurd and ridiculous. And did you hear his stupid theory just now: if
there’s no immortality of the soul, then there’s no virtue, and everything
is lawful. (And by the way, do you remember how your brother Mitya cried
out: ‘I will remember!’) An attractive theory for scoundrels!—(I’m being
abusive, that’s stupid.) Not for scoundrels, but for pedantic _poseurs_,
‘haunted by profound, unsolved doubts.’ He’s showing off, and what it all
comes to is, ‘on the one hand we cannot but admit’ and ‘on the other it
must be confessed!’ His whole theory is a fraud! Humanity will find in
itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality.
It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.”

Rakitin could hardly restrain himself in his heat, but, suddenly, as
though remembering something, he stopped short.

“Well, that’s enough,” he said, with a still more crooked smile. “Why are
you laughing? Do you think I’m a vulgar fool?”

“No, I never dreamed of thinking you a vulgar fool. You are clever but ...
never mind, I was silly to smile. I understand your getting hot about it,
Misha. I guess from your warmth that you are not indifferent to Katerina
Ivanovna yourself; I’ve suspected that for a long time, brother, that’s
why you don’t like my brother Ivan. Are you jealous of him?”

“And jealous of her money, too? Won’t you add that?”

“I’ll say nothing about money. I am not going to insult you.”

“I believe it, since you say so, but confound you, and your brother Ivan
with you. Don’t you understand that one might very well dislike him, apart
from Katerina Ivanovna. And why the devil should I like him? He
condescends to abuse me, you know. Why haven’t I a right to abuse him?”

“I never heard of his saying anything about you, good or bad. He doesn’t
speak of you at all.”

“But I heard that the day before yesterday at Katerina Ivanovna’s he was
abusing me for all he was worth—you see what an interest he takes in your
humble servant. And which is the jealous one after that, brother, I can’t
say. He was so good as to express the opinion that, if I don’t go in for
the career of an archimandrite in the immediate future and don’t become a
monk, I shall be sure to go to Petersburg and get on to some solid
magazine as a reviewer, that I shall write for the next ten years, and in
the end become the owner of the magazine, and bring it out on the liberal
and atheistic side, with a socialistic tinge, with a tiny gloss of
socialism, but keeping a sharp look out all the time, that is, keeping in
with both sides and hoodwinking the fools. According to your brother’s
account, the tinge of socialism won’t hinder me from laying by the
proceeds and investing them under the guidance of some Jew, till at the
end of my career I build a great house in Petersburg and move my
publishing offices to it, and let out the upper stories to lodgers. He has
even chosen the place for it, near the new stone bridge across the Neva,
which they say is to be built in Petersburg.”

“Ah, Misha, that’s just what will really happen, every word of it,” cried
Alyosha, unable to restrain a good‐humored smile.

“You are pleased to be sarcastic, too, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

“No, no, I’m joking, forgive me. I’ve something quite different in my
mind. But, excuse me, who can have told you all this? You can’t have been
at Katerina Ivanovna’s yourself when he was talking about you?”

“I wasn’t there, but Dmitri Fyodorovitch was; and I heard him tell it with
my own ears; if you want to know, he didn’t tell me, but I overheard him,
unintentionally, of course, for I was sitting in Grushenka’s bedroom and I
couldn’t go away because Dmitri Fyodorovitch was in the next room.”

“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten she was a relation of yours.”

“A relation! That Grushenka a relation of mine!” cried Rakitin, turning
crimson. “Are you mad? You’re out of your mind!”

“Why, isn’t she a relation of yours? I heard so.”

“Where can you have heard it? You Karamazovs brag of being an ancient,
noble family, though your father used to run about playing the buffoon at
other men’s tables, and was only admitted to the kitchen as a favor. I may
be only a priest’s son, and dirt in the eyes of noblemen like you, but
don’t insult me so lightly and wantonly. I have a sense of honor, too,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, I couldn’t be a relation of Grushenka, a common
harlot. I beg you to understand that!”

Rakitin was intensely irritated.

“Forgive me, for goodness’ sake, I had no idea ... besides ... how can you
call her a harlot? Is she ... that sort of woman?” Alyosha flushed
suddenly. “I tell you again, I heard that she was a relation of yours. You
often go to see her, and you told me yourself you’re not her lover. I
never dreamed that you of all people had such contempt for her! Does she
really deserve it?”

“I may have reasons of my own for visiting her. That’s not your business.
But as for relationship, your brother, or even your father, is more likely
to make her yours than mine. Well, here we are. You’d better go to the
kitchen. Hullo! what’s wrong, what is it? Are we late? They can’t have
finished dinner so soon! Have the Karamazovs been making trouble again? No
doubt they have. Here’s your father and your brother Ivan after him.
They’ve broken out from the Father Superior’s. And look, Father Isidor’s
shouting out something after them from the steps. And your father’s
shouting and waving his arms. I expect he’s swearing. Bah, and there goes
Miüsov driving away in his carriage. You see, he’s going. And there’s old
Maximov running!—there must have been a row. There can’t have been any
dinner. Surely they’ve not been beating the Father Superior! Or have they,
perhaps, been beaten? It would serve them right!”

There was reason for Rakitin’s exclamations. There had been a scandalous,
an unprecedented scene. It had all come from the impulse of a moment.



Chapter VIII. The Scandalous Scene


Miüsov, as a man of breeding and delicacy, could not but feel some inward
qualms, when he reached the Father Superior’s with Ivan: he felt ashamed
of having lost his temper. He felt that he ought to have disdained that
despicable wretch, Fyodor Pavlovitch, too much to have been upset by him
in Father Zossima’s cell, and so to have forgotten himself. “The monks
were not to blame, in any case,” he reflected, on the steps. “And if
they’re decent people here (and the Father Superior, I understand, is a
nobleman) why not be friendly and courteous with them? I won’t argue, I’ll
fall in with everything, I’ll win them by politeness, and ... and ... show
them that I’ve nothing to do with that Æsop, that buffoon, that Pierrot,
and have merely been taken in over this affair, just as they have.”

He determined to drop his litigation with the monastery, and relinquish
his claims to the wood‐cutting and fishery rights at once. He was the more
ready to do this because the rights had become much less valuable, and he
had indeed the vaguest idea where the wood and river in question were.

These excellent intentions were strengthened when he entered the Father
Superior’s dining‐room, though, strictly speaking, it was not a dining‐
room, for the Father Superior had only two rooms altogether; they were,
however, much larger and more comfortable than Father Zossima’s. But there
was no great luxury about the furnishing of these rooms either. The
furniture was of mahogany, covered with leather, in the old‐fashioned
style of 1820; the floor was not even stained, but everything was shining
with cleanliness, and there were many choice flowers in the windows; the
most sumptuous thing in the room at the moment was, of course, the
beautifully decorated table. The cloth was clean, the service shone; there
were three kinds of well‐baked bread, two bottles of wine, two of
excellent mead, and a large glass jug of kvas—both the latter made in the
monastery, and famous in the neighborhood. There was no vodka. Rakitin
related afterwards that there were five dishes: fish‐soup made of
sterlets, served with little fish patties; then boiled fish served in a
special way; then salmon cutlets, ice pudding and compote, and finally,
blanc‐mange. Rakitin found out about all these good things, for he could
not resist peeping into the kitchen, where he already had a footing. He
had a footing everywhere, and got information about everything. He was of
an uneasy and envious temper. He was well aware of his own considerable
abilities, and nervously exaggerated them in his self‐conceit. He knew he
would play a prominent part of some sort, but Alyosha, who was attached to
him, was distressed to see that his friend Rakitin was dishonorable, and
quite unconscious of being so himself, considering, on the contrary, that
because he would not steal money left on the table he was a man of the
highest integrity. Neither Alyosha nor any one else could have influenced
him in that.

Rakitin, of course, was a person of too little consequence to be invited
to the dinner, to which Father Iosif, Father Païssy, and one other monk
were the only inmates of the monastery invited. They were already waiting
when Miüsov, Kalganov, and Ivan arrived. The other guest, Maximov, stood a
little aside, waiting also. The Father Superior stepped into the middle of
the room to receive his guests. He was a tall, thin, but still vigorous
old man, with black hair streaked with gray, and a long, grave, ascetic
face. He bowed to his guests in silence. But this time they approached to
receive his blessing. Miüsov even tried to kiss his hand, but the Father
Superior drew it back in time to avoid the salute. But Ivan and Kalganov
went through the ceremony in the most simple‐hearted and complete manner,
kissing his hand as peasants do.

“We must apologize most humbly, your reverence,” began Miüsov, simpering
affably, and speaking in a dignified and respectful tone. “Pardon us for
having come alone without the gentleman you invited, Fyodor Pavlovitch. He
felt obliged to decline the honor of your hospitality, and not without
reason. In the reverend Father Zossima’s cell he was carried away by the
unhappy dissension with his son, and let fall words which were quite out
of keeping ... in fact, quite unseemly ... as”—he glanced at the
monks—“your reverence is, no doubt, already aware. And therefore,
recognizing that he had been to blame, he felt sincere regret and shame,
and begged me, and his son Ivan Fyodorovitch, to convey to you his
apologies and regrets. In brief, he hopes and desires to make amends
later. He asks your blessing, and begs you to forget what has taken
place.”

As he uttered the last word of his tirade, Miüsov completely recovered his
self‐complacency, and all traces of his former irritation disappeared. He
fully and sincerely loved humanity again.

The Father Superior listened to him with dignity, and, with a slight bend
of the head, replied:

“I sincerely deplore his absence. Perhaps at our table he might have
learnt to like us, and we him. Pray be seated, gentlemen.”

He stood before the holy image, and began to say grace, aloud. All bent
their heads reverently, and Maximov clasped his hands before him, with
peculiar fervor.

It was at this moment that Fyodor Pavlovitch played his last prank. It
must be noted that he really had meant to go home, and really had felt the
impossibility of going to dine with the Father Superior as though nothing
had happened, after his disgraceful behavior in the elder’s cell. Not that
he was so very much ashamed of himself—quite the contrary perhaps. But
still he felt it would be unseemly to go to dinner. Yet his creaking
carriage had hardly been brought to the steps of the hotel, and he had
hardly got into it, when he suddenly stopped short. He remembered his own
words at the elder’s: “I always feel when I meet people that I am lower
than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon; so I say let me play
the buffoon, for you are, every one of you, stupider and lower than I.” He
longed to revenge himself on every one for his own unseemliness. He
suddenly recalled how he had once in the past been asked, “Why do you hate
so and so, so much?” And he had answered them, with his shameless
impudence, “I’ll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a
dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”

Remembering that now, he smiled quietly and malignantly, hesitating for a
moment. His eyes gleamed, and his lips positively quivered. “Well, since I
have begun, I may as well go on,” he decided. His predominant sensation at
that moment might be expressed in the following words, “Well, there is no
rehabilitating myself now. So let me shame them for all I am worth. I will
show them I don’t care what they think—that’s all!”

He told the coachman to wait, while with rapid steps he returned to the
monastery and straight to the Father Superior’s. He had no clear idea what
he would do, but he knew that he could not control himself, and that a
touch might drive him to the utmost limits of obscenity, but only to
obscenity, to nothing criminal, nothing for which he could be legally
punished. In the last resort, he could always restrain himself, and had
marveled indeed at himself, on that score, sometimes. He appeared in the
Father Superior’s dining‐room, at the moment when the prayer was over, and
all were moving to the table. Standing in the doorway, he scanned the
company, and laughing his prolonged, impudent, malicious chuckle, looked
them all boldly in the face. “They thought I had gone, and here I am
again,” he cried to the whole room.

For one moment every one stared at him without a word; and at once every
one felt that something revolting, grotesque, positively scandalous, was
about to happen. Miüsov passed immediately from the most benevolent frame
of mind to the most savage. All the feelings that had subsided and died
down in his heart revived instantly.

“No! this I cannot endure!” he cried. “I absolutely cannot! and ... I
certainly cannot!”

The blood rushed to his head. He positively stammered; but he was beyond
thinking of style, and he seized his hat.

“What is it he cannot?” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, “that he absolutely
cannot and certainly cannot? Your reverence, am I to come in or not? Will
you receive me as your guest?”

“You are welcome with all my heart,” answered the Superior. “Gentlemen!”
he added, “I venture to beg you most earnestly to lay aside your
dissensions, and to be united in love and family harmony—with prayer to
the Lord at our humble table.”

“No, no, it is impossible!” cried Miüsov, beside himself.

“Well, if it is impossible for Pyotr Alexandrovitch, it is impossible for
me, and I won’t stop. That is why I came. I will keep with Pyotr
Alexandrovitch everywhere now. If you will go away, Pyotr Alexandrovitch,
I will go away too, if you remain, I will remain. You stung him by what
you said about family harmony, Father Superior, he does not admit he is my
relation. That’s right, isn’t it, von Sohn? Here’s von Sohn. How are you,
von Sohn?”

“Do you mean me?” muttered Maximov, puzzled.

“Of course I mean you,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch. “Who else? The Father
Superior could not be von Sohn.”

“But I am not von Sohn either. I am Maximov.”

“No, you are von Sohn. Your reverence, do you know who von Sohn was? It
was a famous murder case. He was killed in a house of harlotry—I believe
that is what such places are called among you—he was killed and robbed,
and in spite of his venerable age, he was nailed up in a box and sent from
Petersburg to Moscow in the luggage van, and while they were nailing him
up, the harlots sang songs and played the harp, that is to say, the piano.
So this is that very von Sohn. He has risen from the dead, hasn’t he, von
Sohn?”

“What is happening? What’s this?” voices were heard in the group of monks.

“Let us go,” cried Miüsov, addressing Kalganov.

“No, excuse me,” Fyodor Pavlovitch broke in shrilly, taking another step
into the room. “Allow me to finish. There in the cell you blamed me for
behaving disrespectfully just because I spoke of eating gudgeon, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch. Miüsov, my relation, prefers to have _plus de noblesse que
de sincérité_ in his words, but I prefer in mine _plus de sincérité que de
noblesse_, and—damn the _noblesse_! That’s right, isn’t it, von Sohn?
Allow me, Father Superior, though I am a buffoon and play the buffoon, yet
I am the soul of honor, and I want to speak my mind. Yes, I am the soul of
honor, while in Pyotr Alexandrovitch there is wounded vanity and nothing
else. I came here perhaps to have a look and speak my mind. My son,
Alexey, is here, being saved. I am his father; I care for his welfare, and
it is my duty to care. While I’ve been playing the fool, I have been
listening and having a look on the sly; and now I want to give you the
last act of the performance. You know how things are with us? As a thing
falls, so it lies. As a thing once has fallen, so it must lie for ever.
Not a bit of it! I want to get up again. Holy Father, I am indignant with
you. Confession is a great sacrament, before which I am ready to bow down
reverently; but there in the cell, they all kneel down and confess aloud.
Can it be right to confess aloud? It was ordained by the holy Fathers to
confess in secret: then only your confession will be a mystery, and so it
was of old. But how can I explain to him before every one that I did this
and that ... well, you understand what—sometimes it would not be proper to
talk about it—so it is really a scandal! No, Fathers, one might be carried
along with you to the Flagellants, I dare say ... at the first opportunity
I shall write to the Synod, and I shall take my son, Alexey, home.”

We must note here that Fyodor Pavlovitch knew where to look for the weak
spot. There had been at one time malicious rumors which had even reached
the Archbishop (not only regarding our monastery, but in others where the
institution of elders existed) that too much respect was paid to the
elders, even to the detriment of the authority of the Superior, that the
elders abused the sacrament of confession and so on and so on—absurd
charges which had died away of themselves everywhere. But the spirit of
folly, which had caught up Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was bearing him on the
current of his own nerves into lower and lower depths of ignominy,
prompted him with this old slander. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not understand a
word of it, and he could not even put it sensibly, for on this occasion no
one had been kneeling and confessing aloud in the elder’s cell, so that he
could not have seen anything of the kind. He was only speaking from
confused memory of old slanders. But as soon as he had uttered his foolish
tirade, he felt he had been talking absurd nonsense, and at once longed to
prove to his audience, and above all to himself, that he had not been
talking nonsense. And, though he knew perfectly well that with each word
he would be adding more and more absurdity, he could not restrain himself,
and plunged forward blindly.

“How disgraceful!” cried Pyotr Alexandrovitch.

“Pardon me!” said the Father Superior. “It was said of old, ‘Many have
begun to speak against me and have uttered evil sayings about me. And
hearing it I have said to myself: it is the correction of the Lord and He
has sent it to heal my vain soul.’ And so we humbly thank you, honored
guest!” and he made Fyodor Pavlovitch a low bow.

“Tut—tut—tut—sanctimoniousness and stock phrases! Old phrases and old
gestures. The old lies and formal prostrations. We know all about them. A
kiss on the lips and a dagger in the heart, as in Schiller’s _Robbers_. I
don’t like falsehood, Fathers, I want the truth. But the truth is not to
be found in eating gudgeon and that I proclaim aloud! Father monks, why do
you fast? Why do you expect reward in heaven for that? Why, for reward
like that I will come and fast too! No, saintly monk, you try being
virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in
a monastery at other people’s expense, and without expecting a reward up
aloft for it—you’ll find that a bit harder. I can talk sense, too, Father
Superior. What have they got here?” He went up to the table. “Old port
wine, mead brewed by the Eliseyev Brothers. Fie, fie, fathers! That is
something beyond gudgeon. Look at the bottles the fathers have brought
out, he he he! And who has provided it all? The Russian peasant, the
laborer, brings here the farthing earned by his horny hand, wringing it
from his family and the tax‐gatherer! You bleed the people, you know, holy
fathers.”

“This is too disgraceful!” said Father Iosif.

Father Païssy kept obstinately silent. Miüsov rushed from the room, and
Kalganov after him.

“Well, Father, I will follow Pyotr Alexandrovitch! I am not coming to see
you again. You may beg me on your knees, I shan’t come. I sent you a
thousand roubles, so you have begun to keep your eye on me. He he he! No,
I’ll say no more. I am taking my revenge for my youth, for all the
humiliation I endured.” He thumped the table with his fist in a paroxysm
of simulated feeling. “This monastery has played a great part in my life!
It has cost me many bitter tears. You used to set my wife, the crazy one,
against me. You cursed me with bell and book, you spread stories about me
all over the place. Enough, fathers! This is the age of Liberalism, the
age of steamers and railways. Neither a thousand, nor a hundred roubles,
no, nor a hundred farthings will you get out of me!”

It must be noted again that our monastery never had played any great part
in his life, and he never had shed a bitter tear owing to it. But he was
so carried away by his simulated emotion, that he was for one moment
almost believing it himself. He was so touched he was almost weeping. But
at that very instant, he felt that it was time to draw back.

The Father Superior bowed his head at his malicious lie, and again spoke
impressively:

“It is written again, ‘Bear circumspectly and gladly dishonor that cometh
upon thee by no act of thine own, be not confounded and hate not him who
hath dishonored thee.’ And so will we.”

“Tut, tut, tut! Bethinking thyself and the rest of the rigmarole. Bethink
yourselves, Fathers, I will go. But I will take my son, Alexey, away from
here for ever, on my parental authority. Ivan Fyodorovitch, my most
dutiful son, permit me to order you to follow me. Von Sohn, what have you
to stay for? Come and see me now in the town. It is fun there. It is only
one short verst; instead of lenten oil, I will give you sucking‐pig and
kasha. We will have dinner with some brandy and liqueur to it.... I’ve
cloudberry wine. Hey, von Sohn, don’t lose your chance.” He went out,
shouting and gesticulating.

It was at that moment Rakitin saw him and pointed him out to Alyosha.

“Alexey!” his father shouted, from far off, catching sight of him. “You
come home to me to‐day, for good, and bring your pillow and mattress, and
leave no trace behind.”

Alyosha stood rooted to the spot, watching the scene in silence.
Meanwhile, Fyodor Pavlovitch had got into the carriage, and Ivan was about
to follow him in grim silence without even turning to say good‐by to
Alyosha. But at this point another almost incredible scene of grotesque
buffoonery gave the finishing touch to the episode. Maximov suddenly
appeared by the side of the carriage. He ran up, panting, afraid of being
too late. Rakitin and Alyosha saw him running. He was in such a hurry that
in his impatience he put his foot on the step on which Ivan’s left foot
was still resting, and clutching the carriage he kept trying to jump in.
“I am going with you!” he kept shouting, laughing a thin mirthful laugh
with a look of reckless glee in his face. “Take me, too.”

“There!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, delighted. “Did I not say he was von
Sohn. It is von Sohn himself, risen from the dead. Why, how did you tear
yourself away? What did you _vonsohn_ there? And how could you get away
from the dinner? You must be a brazen‐faced fellow! I am that myself, but
I am surprised at you, brother! Jump in, jump in! Let him pass, Ivan. It
will be fun. He can lie somewhere at our feet. Will you lie at our feet,
von Sohn? Or perch on the box with the coachman. Skip on to the box, von
Sohn!”

But Ivan, who had by now taken his seat, without a word gave Maximov a
violent punch in the breast and sent him flying. It was quite by chance he
did not fall.

“Drive on!” Ivan shouted angrily to the coachman.

“Why, what are you doing, what are you about? Why did you do that?” Fyodor
Pavlovitch protested.

But the carriage had already driven away. Ivan made no reply.

“Well, you are a fellow,” Fyodor Pavlovitch said again.

After a pause of two minutes, looking askance at his son, “Why, it was you
got up all this monastery business. You urged it, you approved of it. Why
are you angry now?”

“You’ve talked rot enough. You might rest a bit now,” Ivan snapped
sullenly.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was silent again for two minutes.

“A drop of brandy would be nice now,” he observed sententiously, but Ivan
made no response.

“You shall have some, too, when we get home.”

Ivan was still silent.

Fyodor Pavlovitch waited another two minutes.

“But I shall take Alyosha away from the monastery, though you will dislike
it so much, most honored Karl von Moor.”

Ivan shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and turning away stared at the
road. And they did not speak again all the way home.




Book III. The Sensualists



Chapter I. In The Servants’ Quarters


The Karamazovs’ house was far from being in the center of the town, but it
was not quite outside it. It was a pleasant‐looking old house of two
stories, painted gray, with a red iron roof. It was roomy and snug, and
might still last many years. There were all sorts of unexpected little
cupboards and closets and staircases. There were rats in it, but Fyodor
Pavlovitch did not altogether dislike them. “One doesn’t feel so solitary
when one’s left alone in the evening,” he used to say. It was his habit to
send the servants away to the lodge for the night and to lock himself up
alone. The lodge was a roomy and solid building in the yard. Fyodor
Pavlovitch used to have the cooking done there, although there was a
kitchen in the house; he did not like the smell of cooking, and, winter
and summer alike, the dishes were carried in across the courtyard. The
house was built for a large family; there was room for five times as many,
with their servants. But at the time of our story there was no one living
in the house but Fyodor Pavlovitch and his son Ivan. And in the lodge
there were only three servants: old Grigory, and his old wife Marfa, and a
young man called Smerdyakov. Of these three we must say a few words. Of
old Grigory we have said something already. He was firm and determined and
went blindly and obstinately for his object, if once he had been brought
by any reasons (and they were often very illogical ones) to believe that
it was immutably right. He was honest and incorruptible. His wife, Marfa
Ignatyevna, had obeyed her husband’s will implicitly all her life, yet she
had pestered him terribly after the emancipation of the serfs. She was set
on leaving Fyodor Pavlovitch and opening a little shop in Moscow with
their small savings. But Grigory decided then, once for all, that “the
woman’s talking nonsense, for every woman is dishonest,” and that they
ought not to leave their old master, whatever he might be, for “that was
now their duty.”

“Do you understand what duty is?” he asked Marfa Ignatyevna.

“I understand what duty means, Grigory Vassilyevitch, but why it’s our
duty to stay here I never shall understand,” Marfa answered firmly.

“Well, don’t understand then. But so it shall be. And you hold your
tongue.”

And so it was. They did not go away, and Fyodor Pavlovitch promised them a
small sum for wages, and paid it regularly. Grigory knew, too, that he had
an indisputable influence over his master. It was true, and he was aware
of it. Fyodor Pavlovitch was an obstinate and cunning buffoon, yet, though
his will was strong enough “in some of the affairs of life,” as he
expressed it, he found himself, to his surprise, extremely feeble in
facing certain other emergencies. He knew his weaknesses and was afraid of
them. There are positions in which one has to keep a sharp look out. And
that’s not easy without a trustworthy man, and Grigory was a most
trustworthy man. Many times in the course of his life Fyodor Pavlovitch
had only just escaped a sound thrashing through Grigory’s intervention,
and on each occasion the old servant gave him a good lecture. But it
wasn’t only thrashings that Fyodor Pavlovitch was afraid of. There were
graver occasions, and very subtle and complicated ones, when Fyodor
Pavlovitch could not have explained the extraordinary craving for some one
faithful and devoted, which sometimes unaccountably came upon him all in a
moment. It was almost a morbid condition. Corrupt and often cruel in his
lust, like some noxious insect, Fyodor Pavlovitch was sometimes, in
moments of drunkenness, overcome by superstitious terror and a moral
convulsion which took an almost physical form. “My soul’s simply quaking
in my throat at those times,” he used to say. At such moments he liked to
feel that there was near at hand, in the lodge if not in the room, a
strong, faithful man, virtuous and unlike himself, who had seen all his
debauchery and knew all his secrets, but was ready in his devotion to
overlook all that, not to oppose him, above all, not to reproach him or
threaten him with anything, either in this world or in the next, and, in
case of need, to defend him—from whom? From somebody unknown, but terrible
and dangerous. What he needed was to feel that there was _another_ man, an
old and tried friend, that he might call him in his sick moments merely to
look at his face, or, perhaps, exchange some quite irrelevant words with
him. And if the old servant were not angry, he felt comforted, and if he
were angry, he was more dejected. It happened even (very rarely however)
that Fyodor Pavlovitch went at night to the lodge to wake Grigory and
fetch him for a moment. When the old man came, Fyodor Pavlovitch would
begin talking about the most trivial matters, and would soon let him go
again, sometimes even with a jest. And after he had gone, Fyodor
Pavlovitch would get into bed with a curse and sleep the sleep of the
just. Something of the same sort had happened to Fyodor Pavlovitch on
Alyosha’s arrival. Alyosha “pierced his heart” by “living with him, seeing
everything and blaming nothing.” Moreover, Alyosha brought with him
something his father had never known before: a complete absence of
contempt for him and an invariable kindness, a perfectly natural
unaffected devotion to the old man who deserved it so little. All this was
a complete surprise to the old profligate, who had dropped all family
ties. It was a new and surprising experience for him, who had till then
loved nothing but “evil.” When Alyosha had left him, he confessed to
himself that he had learnt something he had not till then been willing to
learn.

I have mentioned already that Grigory had detested Adelaïda Ivanovna, the
first wife of Fyodor Pavlovitch and the mother of Dmitri, and that he had,
on the contrary, protected Sofya Ivanovna, the poor “crazy woman,” against
his master and any one who chanced to speak ill or lightly of her. His
sympathy for the unhappy wife had become something sacred to him, so that
even now, twenty years after, he could not bear a slighting allusion to
her from any one, and would at once check the offender. Externally,
Grigory was cold, dignified and taciturn, and spoke, weighing his words,
without frivolity. It was impossible to tell at first sight whether he
loved his meek, obedient wife; but he really did love her, and she knew
it.

Marfa Ignatyevna was by no means foolish; she was probably, indeed,
cleverer than her husband, or, at least, more prudent than he in worldly
affairs, and yet she had given in to him in everything without question or
complaint ever since her marriage, and respected him for his spiritual
superiority. It was remarkable how little they spoke to one another in the
course of their lives, and only of the most necessary daily affairs. The
grave and dignified Grigory thought over all his cares and duties alone,
so that Marfa Ignatyevna had long grown used to knowing that he did not
need her advice. She felt that her husband respected her silence, and took
it as a sign of her good sense. He had never beaten her but once, and then
only slightly. Once during the year after Fyodor Pavlovitch’s marriage
with Adelaïda Ivanovna, the village girls and women—at that time
serfs—were called together before the house to sing and dance. They were
beginning “In the Green Meadows,” when Marfa, at that time a young woman,
skipped forward and danced “the Russian Dance,” not in the village
fashion, but as she had danced it when she was a servant in the service of
the rich Miüsov family, in their private theater, where the actors were
taught to dance by a dancing master from Moscow. Grigory saw how his wife
danced, and, an hour later, at home in their cottage he gave her a lesson,
pulling her hair a little. But there it ended: the beating was never
repeated, and Marfa Ignatyevna gave up dancing.

God had not blessed them with children. One child was born but it died.
Grigory was fond of children, and was not ashamed of showing it. When
Adelaïda Ivanovna had run away, Grigory took Dmitri, then a child of three
years old, combed his hair and washed him in a tub with his own hands, and
looked after him for almost a year. Afterwards he had looked after Ivan
and Alyosha, for which the general’s widow had rewarded him with a slap in
the face; but I have already related all that. The only happiness his own
child had brought him had been in the anticipation of its birth. When it
was born, he was overwhelmed with grief and horror. The baby had six
fingers. Grigory was so crushed by this, that he was not only silent till
the day of the christening, but kept away in the garden. It was spring,
and he spent three days digging the kitchen garden. The third day was
fixed for christening the baby: mean‐time Grigory had reached a
conclusion. Going into the cottage where the clergy were assembled and the
visitors had arrived, including Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was to stand god‐
father, he suddenly announced that the baby “ought not to be christened at
all.” He announced this quietly, briefly, forcing out his words, and
gazing with dull intentness at the priest.

“Why not?” asked the priest with good‐humored surprise.

“Because it’s a dragon,” muttered Grigory.

“A dragon? What dragon?”

Grigory did not speak for some time. “It’s a confusion of nature,” he
muttered vaguely, but firmly, and obviously unwilling to say more.

They laughed, and of course christened the poor baby. Grigory prayed
earnestly at the font, but his opinion of the new‐born child remained
unchanged. Yet he did not interfere in any way. As long as the sickly
infant lived he scarcely looked at it, tried indeed not to notice it, and
for the most part kept out of the cottage. But when, at the end of a
fortnight, the baby died of thrush, he himself laid the child in its
little coffin, looked at it in profound grief, and when they were filling
up the shallow little grave he fell on his knees and bowed down to the
earth. He did not for years afterwards mention his child, nor did Marfa
speak of the baby before him, and, even if Grigory were not present, she
never spoke of it above a whisper. Marfa observed that, from the day of
the burial, he devoted himself to “religion,” and took to reading the
_Lives of the Saints_, for the most part sitting alone and in silence, and
always putting on his big, round, silver‐rimmed spectacles. He rarely read
aloud, only perhaps in Lent. He was fond of the Book of Job, and had
somehow got hold of a copy of the sayings and sermons of “the God‐fearing
Father Isaac the Syrian,” which he read persistently for years together,
understanding very little of it, but perhaps prizing and loving it the
more for that. Of late he had begun to listen to the doctrines of the sect
of Flagellants settled in the neighborhood. He was evidently shaken by
them, but judged it unfitting to go over to the new faith. His habit of
theological reading gave him an expression of still greater gravity.

He was perhaps predisposed to mysticism. And the birth of his deformed
child, and its death, had, as though by special design, been accompanied
by another strange and marvelous event, which, as he said later, had left
a “stamp” upon his soul. It happened that, on the very night after the
burial of his child, Marfa was awakened by the wail of a new‐born baby.
She was frightened and waked her husband. He listened and said he thought
it was more like some one groaning, “it might be a woman.” He got up and
dressed. It was a rather warm night in May. As he went down the steps, he
distinctly heard groans coming from the garden. But the gate from the yard
into the garden was locked at night, and there was no other way of
entering it, for it was enclosed all round by a strong, high fence. Going
back into the house, Grigory lighted a lantern, took the garden key, and
taking no notice of the hysterical fears of his wife, who was still
persuaded that she heard a child crying, and that it was her own baby
crying and calling for her, went into the garden in silence. There he
heard at once that the groans came from the bath‐house that stood near the
garden gate, and that they were the groans of a woman. Opening the door of
the bath‐house, he saw a sight which petrified him. An idiot girl, who
wandered about the streets and was known to the whole town by the nickname
of Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya (Stinking Lizaveta), had got into the bath‐
house and had just given birth to a child. She lay dying with the baby
beside her. She said nothing, for she had never been able to speak. But
her story needs a chapter to itself.



Chapter II. Lizaveta


There was one circumstance which struck Grigory particularly, and
confirmed a very unpleasant and revolting suspicion. This Lizaveta was a
dwarfish creature, “not five foot within a wee bit,” as many of the pious
old women said pathetically about her, after her death. Her broad,
healthy, red face had a look of blank idiocy and the fixed stare in her
eyes was unpleasant, in spite of their meek expression. She wandered
about, summer and winter alike, barefooted, wearing nothing but a hempen
smock. Her coarse, almost black hair curled like lamb’s wool, and formed a
sort of huge cap on her head. It was always crusted with mud, and had
leaves, bits of stick, and shavings clinging to it, as she always slept on
the ground and in the dirt. Her father, a homeless, sickly drunkard,
called Ilya, had lost everything and lived many years as a workman with
some well‐to‐do tradespeople. Her mother had long been dead. Spiteful and
diseased, Ilya used to beat Lizaveta inhumanly whenever she returned to
him. But she rarely did so, for every one in the town was ready to look
after her as being an idiot, and so specially dear to God. Ilya’s
employers, and many others in the town, especially of the tradespeople,
tried to clothe her better, and always rigged her out with high boots and
sheepskin coat for the winter. But, although she allowed them to dress her
up without resisting, she usually went away, preferably to the cathedral
porch, and taking off all that had been given her—kerchief, sheepskin,
skirt or boots—she left them there and walked away barefoot in her smock
as before. It happened on one occasion that a new governor of the
province, making a tour of inspection in our town, saw Lizaveta, and was
wounded in his tenderest susceptibilities. And though he was told she was
an idiot, he pronounced that for a young woman of twenty to wander about
in nothing but a smock was a breach of the proprieties, and must not occur
again. But the governor went his way, and Lizaveta was left as she was. At
last her father died, which made her even more acceptable in the eyes of
the religious persons of the town, as an orphan. In fact, every one seemed
to like her; even the boys did not tease her, and the boys of our town,
especially the schoolboys, are a mischievous set. She would walk into
strange houses, and no one drove her away. Every one was kind to her and
gave her something. If she were given a copper, she would take it, and at
once drop it in the alms‐jug of the church or prison. If she were given a
roll or bun in the market, she would hand it to the first child she met.
Sometimes she would stop one of the richest ladies in the town and give it
to her, and the lady would be pleased to take it. She herself never tasted
anything but black bread and water. If she went into an expensive shop,
where there were costly goods or money lying about, no one kept watch on
her, for they knew that if she saw thousands of roubles overlooked by
them, she would not have touched a farthing. She scarcely ever went to
church. She slept either in the church porch or climbed over a hurdle
(there are many hurdles instead of fences to this day in our town) into a
kitchen garden. She used at least once a week to turn up “at home,” that
is at the house of her father’s former employers, and in the winter went
there every night, and slept either in the passage or the cowhouse. People
were amazed that she could stand such a life, but she was accustomed to
it, and, although she was so tiny, she was of a robust constitution. Some
of the townspeople declared that she did all this only from pride, but
that is hardly credible. She could hardly speak, and only from time to
time uttered an inarticulate grunt. How could she have been proud?

It happened one clear, warm, moonlight night in September (many years ago)
five or six drunken revelers were returning from the club at a very late
hour, according to our provincial notions. They passed through the “back‐
way,” which led between the back gardens of the houses, with hurdles on
either side. This way leads out on to the bridge over the long, stinking
pool which we were accustomed to call a river. Among the nettles and
burdocks under the hurdle our revelers saw Lizaveta asleep. They stopped
to look at her, laughing, and began jesting with unbridled licentiousness.
It occurred to one young gentleman to make the whimsical inquiry whether
any one could possibly look upon such an animal as a woman, and so
forth.... They all pronounced with lofty repugnance that it was
impossible. But Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was among them, sprang forward and
declared that it was by no means impossible, and that, indeed, there was a
certain piquancy about it, and so on.... It is true that at that time he
was overdoing his part as a buffoon. He liked to put himself forward and
entertain the company, ostensibly on equal terms, of course, though in
reality he was on a servile footing with them. It was just at the time
when he had received the news of his first wife’s death in Petersburg,
and, with crape upon his hat, was drinking and behaving so shamelessly
that even the most reckless among us were shocked at the sight of him. The
revelers, of course, laughed at this unexpected opinion; and one of them
even began challenging him to act upon it. The others repelled the idea
even more emphatically, although still with the utmost hilarity, and at
last they went on their way. Later on, Fyodor Pavlovitch swore that he had
gone with them, and perhaps it was so, no one knows for certain, and no
one ever knew. But five or six months later, all the town was talking,
with intense and sincere indignation, of Lizaveta’s condition, and trying
to find out who was the miscreant who had wronged her. Then suddenly a
terrible rumor was all over the town that this miscreant was no other than
Fyodor Pavlovitch. Who set the rumor going? Of that drunken band five had
left the town and the only one still among us was an elderly and much
respected civil councilor, the father of grown‐up daughters, who could
hardly have spread the tale, even if there had been any foundation for it.
But rumor pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovitch, and persisted in pointing
at him. Of course this was no great grievance to him: he would not have
troubled to contradict a set of tradespeople. In those days he was proud,
and did not condescend to talk except in his own circle of the officials
and nobles, whom he entertained so well.

At the time, Grigory stood up for his master vigorously. He provoked
quarrels and altercations in defense of him and succeeded in bringing some
people round to his side. “It’s the wench’s own fault,” he asserted, and
the culprit was Karp, a dangerous convict, who had escaped from prison and
whose name was well known to us, as he had hidden in our town. This
conjecture sounded plausible, for it was remembered that Karp had been in
the neighborhood just at that time in the autumn, and had robbed three
people. But this affair and all the talk about it did not estrange popular
sympathy from the poor idiot. She was better looked after than ever. A
well‐to‐do merchant’s widow named Kondratyev arranged to take her into her
house at the end of April, meaning not to let her go out until after the
confinement. They kept a constant watch over her, but in spite of their
vigilance she escaped on the very last day, and made her way into Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s garden. How, in her condition, she managed to climb over the
high, strong fence remained a mystery. Some maintained that she must have
been lifted over by somebody; others hinted at something more uncanny. The
most likely explanation is that it happened naturally—that Lizaveta,
accustomed to clambering over hurdles to sleep in gardens, had somehow
managed to climb this fence, in spite of her condition, and had leapt
down, injuring herself.

Grigory rushed to Marfa and sent her to Lizaveta, while he ran to fetch an
old midwife who lived close by. They saved the baby, but Lizaveta died at
dawn. Grigory took the baby, brought it home, and making his wife sit
down, put it on her lap. “A child of God—an orphan is akin to all,” he
said, “and to us above others. Our little lost one has sent us this, who
has come from the devil’s son and a holy innocent. Nurse him and weep no
more.”

So Marfa brought up the child. He was christened Pavel, to which people
were not slow in adding Fyodorovitch (son of Fyodor). Fyodor Pavlovitch
did not object to any of this, and thought it amusing, though he persisted
vigorously in denying his responsibility. The townspeople were pleased at
his adopting the foundling. Later on, Fyodor Pavlovitch invented a surname
for the child, calling him Smerdyakov, after his mother’s nickname.

So this Smerdyakov became Fyodor Pavlovitch’s second servant, and was
living in the lodge with Grigory and Marfa at the time our story begins.
He was employed as cook. I ought to say something of this Smerdyakov, but
I am ashamed of keeping my readers’ attention so long occupied with these
common menials, and I will go back to my story, hoping to say more of
Smerdyakov in the course of it.



Chapter III. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Verse


Alyosha remained for some time irresolute after hearing the command his
father shouted to him from the carriage. But in spite of his uneasiness he
did not stand still. That was not his way. He went at once to the kitchen
to find out what his father had been doing above. Then he set off,
trusting that on the way he would find some answer to the doubt tormenting
him. I hasten to add that his father’s shouts, commanding him to return
home “with his mattress and pillow” did not frighten him in the least. He
understood perfectly that those peremptory shouts were merely “a flourish”
to produce an effect. In the same way a tradesman in our town who was
celebrating his name‐day with a party of friends, getting angry at being
refused more vodka, smashed up his own crockery and furniture and tore his
own and his wife’s clothes, and finally broke his windows, all for the
sake of effect. Next day, of course, when he was sober, he regretted the
broken cups and saucers. Alyosha knew that his father would let him go
back to the monastery next day, possibly even that evening. Moreover, he
was fully persuaded that his father might hurt any one else, but would not
hurt him. Alyosha was certain that no one in the whole world ever would
want to hurt him, and, what is more, he knew that no one could hurt him.
This was for him an axiom, assumed once for all without question, and he
went his way without hesitation, relying on it.

But at that moment an anxiety of a different sort disturbed him, and
worried him the more because he could not formulate it. It was the fear of
a woman, of Katerina Ivanovna, who had so urgently entreated him in the
note handed to him by Madame Hohlakov to come and see her about something.
This request and the necessity of going had at once aroused an uneasy
feeling in his heart, and this feeling had grown more and more painful all
the morning in spite of the scenes at the hermitage and at the Father
Superior’s. He was not uneasy because he did not know what she would speak
of and what he must answer. And he was not afraid of her simply as a
woman. Though he knew little of women, he had spent his life, from early
childhood till he entered the monastery, entirely with women. He was
afraid of that woman, Katerina Ivanovna. He had been afraid of her from
the first time he saw her. He had only seen her two or three times, and
had only chanced to say a few words to her. He thought of her as a
beautiful, proud, imperious girl. It was not her beauty which troubled
him, but something else. And the vagueness of his apprehension increased
the apprehension itself. The girl’s aims were of the noblest, he knew
that. She was trying to save his brother Dmitri simply through generosity,
though he had already behaved badly to her. Yet, although Alyosha
recognized and did justice to all these fine and generous sentiments, a
shiver began to run down his back as soon as he drew near her house.

He reflected that he would not find Ivan, who was so intimate a friend,
with her, for Ivan was certainly now with his father. Dmitri he was even
more certain not to find there, and he had a foreboding of the reason. And
so his conversation would be with her alone. He had a great longing to run
and see his brother Dmitri before that fateful interview. Without showing
him the letter, he could talk to him about it. But Dmitri lived a long way
off, and he was sure to be away from home too. Standing still for a
minute, he reached a final decision. Crossing himself with a rapid and
accustomed gesture, and at once smiling, he turned resolutely in the
direction of his terrible lady.

He knew her house. If he went by the High Street and then across the
market‐place, it was a long way round. Though our town is small, it is
scattered, and the houses are far apart. And meanwhile his father was
expecting him, and perhaps had not yet forgotten his command. He might be
unreasonable, and so he had to make haste to get there and back. So he
decided to take a short cut by the back‐way, for he knew every inch of the
ground. This meant skirting fences, climbing over hurdles, and crossing
other people’s back‐yards, where every one he met knew him and greeted
him. In this way he could reach the High Street in half the time.

He had to pass the garden adjoining his father’s, and belonging to a
little tumbledown house with four windows. The owner of this house, as
Alyosha knew, was a bedridden old woman, living with her daughter, who had
been a genteel maid‐servant in generals’ families in Petersburg. Now she
had been at home a year, looking after her sick mother. She always dressed
up in fine clothes, though her old mother and she had sunk into such
poverty that they went every day to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s kitchen for soup
and bread, which Marfa gave readily. Yet, though the young woman came up
for soup, she had never sold any of her dresses, and one of these even had
a long train—a fact which Alyosha had learned from Rakitin, who always
knew everything that was going on in the town. He had forgotten it as soon
as he heard it, but now, on reaching the garden, he remembered the dress
with the train, raised his head, which had been bowed in thought, and came
upon something quite unexpected.

Over the hurdle in the garden, Dmitri, mounted on something, was leaning
forward, gesticulating violently, beckoning to him, obviously afraid to
utter a word for fear of being overheard. Alyosha ran up to the hurdle.

“It’s a good thing you looked up. I was nearly shouting to you,” Mitya
said in a joyful, hurried whisper. “Climb in here quickly! How splendid
that you’ve come! I was just thinking of you!”

Alyosha was delighted too, but he did not know how to get over the hurdle.
Mitya put his powerful hand under his elbow to help him jump. Tucking up
his cassock, Alyosha leapt over the hurdle with the agility of a bare‐
legged street urchin.

“Well done! Now come along,” said Mitya in an enthusiastic whisper.

“Where?” whispered Alyosha, looking about him and finding himself in a
deserted garden with no one near but themselves. The garden was small, but
the house was at least fifty paces away.

“There’s no one here. Why do you whisper?” asked Alyosha.

“Why do I whisper? Deuce take it!” cried Dmitri at the top of his voice.
“You see what silly tricks nature plays one. I am here in secret, and on
the watch. I’ll explain later on, but, knowing it’s a secret, I began
whispering like a fool, when there’s no need. Let us go. Over there. Till
then be quiet. I want to kiss you.


    Glory to God in the world,
    Glory to God in me ...


I was just repeating that, sitting here, before you came.”

The garden was about three acres in extent, and planted with trees only
along the fence at the four sides. There were apple‐trees, maples, limes
and birch‐trees. The middle of the garden was an empty grass space, from
which several hundredweight of hay was carried in the summer. The garden
was let out for a few roubles for the summer. There were also plantations
of raspberries and currants and gooseberries laid out along the sides; a
kitchen garden had been planted lately near the house.

Dmitri led his brother to the most secluded corner of the garden. There,
in a thicket of lime‐trees and old bushes of black currant, elder,
snowball‐tree, and lilac, there stood a tumble‐down green summer‐house,
blackened with age. Its walls were of lattice‐work, but there was still a
roof which could give shelter. God knows when this summer‐house was built.
There was a tradition that it had been put up some fifty years before by a
retired colonel called von Schmidt, who owned the house at that time. It
was all in decay, the floor was rotting, the planks were loose, the
woodwork smelled musty. In the summer‐house there was a green wooden table
fixed in the ground, and round it were some green benches upon which it
was still possible to sit. Alyosha had at once observed his brother’s
exhilarated condition, and on entering the arbor he saw half a bottle of
brandy and a wineglass on the table.

“That’s brandy,” Mitya laughed. “I see your look: ‘He’s drinking again!’
Distrust the apparition.


    Distrust the worthless, lying crowd,
    And lay aside thy doubts.


I’m not drinking, I’m only ‘indulging,’ as that pig, your Rakitin, says.
He’ll be a civil councilor one day, but he’ll always talk about
‘indulging.’ Sit down. I could take you in my arms, Alyosha, and press you
to my bosom till I crush you, for in the whole world—in reality—in re‐al‐
i‐ty—(can you take it in?) I love no one but you!”

He uttered the last words in a sort of exaltation.

“No one but you and one ‘jade’ I have fallen in love with, to my ruin. But
being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet
hate her. Remember that! I can talk about it gayly still. Sit down here by
the table and I’ll sit beside you and look at you, and go on talking. You
shall keep quiet and I’ll go on talking, for the time has come. But on
reflection, you know, I’d better speak quietly, for here—here—you can
never tell what ears are listening. I will explain everything; as they
say, ‘the story will be continued.’ Why have I been longing for you? Why
have I been thirsting for you all these days, and just now? (It’s five
days since I’ve cast anchor here.) Because it’s only to you I can tell
everything; because I must, because I need you, because to‐morrow I shall
fly from the clouds, because to‐morrow life is ending and beginning. Have
you ever felt, have you ever dreamt of falling down a precipice into a
pit? That’s just how I’m falling, but not in a dream. And I’m not afraid,
and don’t you be afraid. At least, I am afraid, but I enjoy it. It’s not
enjoyment though, but ecstasy. Damn it all, whatever it is! A strong
spirit, a weak spirit, a womanish spirit—whatever it is! Let us praise
nature: you see what sunshine, how clear the sky is, the leaves are all
green, it’s still summer; four o’clock in the afternoon and the stillness!
Where were you going?”

“I was going to father’s, but I meant to go to Katerina Ivanovna’s first.”

“To her, and to father! Oo! what a coincidence! Why was I waiting for you?
Hungering and thirsting for you in every cranny of my soul and even in my
ribs? Why, to send you to father and to her, Katerina Ivanovna, so as to
have done with her and with father. To send an angel. I might have sent
any one, but I wanted to send an angel. And here you are on your way to
see father and her.”

“Did you really mean to send me?” cried Alyosha with a distressed
expression.

“Stay! You knew it! And I see you understand it all at once. But be quiet,
be quiet for a time. Don’t be sorry, and don’t cry.”

Dmitri stood up, thought a moment, and put his finger to his forehead.

“She’s asked you, written to you a letter or something, that’s why you’re
going to her? You wouldn’t be going except for that?”

“Here is her note.” Alyosha took it out of his pocket. Mitya looked
through it quickly.

“And you were going the back‐way! Oh, gods, I thank you for sending him by
the back‐way, and he came to me like the golden fish to the silly old
fishermen in the fable! Listen, Alyosha, listen, brother! Now I mean to
tell you everything, for I must tell some one. An angel in heaven I’ve
told already; but I want to tell an angel on earth. You are an angel on
earth. You will hear and judge and forgive. And that’s what I need, that
some one above me should forgive. Listen! If two people break away from
everything on earth and fly off into the unknown, or at least one of them,
and before flying off or going to ruin he comes to some one else and says,
‘Do this for me’—some favor never asked before that could only be asked on
one’s deathbed—would that other refuse, if he were a friend or a brother?”

“I will do it, but tell me what it is, and make haste,” said Alyosha.

“Make haste! H’m!... Don’t be in a hurry, Alyosha, you hurry and worry
yourself. There’s no need to hurry now. Now the world has taken a new
turning. Ah, Alyosha, what a pity you can’t understand ecstasy. But what
am I saying to him? As though you didn’t understand it. What an ass I am!
What am I saying? ‘Be noble, O man!’—who says that?”

Alyosha made up his mind to wait. He felt that, perhaps, indeed, his work
lay here. Mitya sank into thought for a moment, with his elbow on the
table and his head in his hand. Both were silent.

“Alyosha,” said Mitya, “you’re the only one who won’t laugh. I should like
to begin—my confession—with Schiller’s _Hymn to Joy_, _An die Freude_! I
don’t know German, I only know it’s called that. Don’t think I’m talking
nonsense because I’m drunk. I’m not a bit drunk. Brandy’s all very well,
but I need two bottles to make me drunk:


    Silenus with his rosy phiz
    Upon his stumbling ass.


But I’ve not drunk a quarter of a bottle, and I’m not Silenus. I’m not
Silenus, though I am strong,(1) for I’ve made a decision once for all.
Forgive me the pun; you’ll have to forgive me a lot more than puns to‐day.
Don’t be uneasy. I’m not spinning it out. I’m talking sense, and I’ll come
to the point in a minute. I won’t keep you in suspense. Stay, how does it
go?”

He raised his head, thought a minute, and began with enthusiasm:


    “Wild and fearful in his cavern
     Hid the naked troglodyte,
     And the homeless nomad wandered
     Laying waste the fertile plain.
     Menacing with spear and arrow
     In the woods the hunter strayed....
     Woe to all poor wretches stranded
     On those cruel and hostile shores!

    “From the peak of high Olympus
     Came the mother Ceres down,
     Seeking in those savage regions
     Her lost daughter Proserpine.
     But the Goddess found no refuge,
     Found no kindly welcome there,
     And no temple bearing witness
     To the worship of the gods.

    “From the fields and from the vineyards
     Came no fruits to deck the feasts,
     Only flesh of bloodstained victims
     Smoldered on the altar‐fires,
     And where’er the grieving goddess
     Turns her melancholy gaze,
     Sunk in vilest degradation
     Man his loathsomeness displays.”


Mitya broke into sobs and seized Alyosha’s hand.

“My dear, my dear, in degradation, in degradation now, too. There’s a
terrible amount of suffering for man on earth, a terrible lot of trouble.
Don’t think I’m only a brute in an officer’s uniform, wallowing in dirt
and drink. I hardly think of anything but of that degraded man—if only I’m
not lying. I pray God I’m not lying and showing off. I think about that
man because I am that man myself.


    Would he purge his soul from vileness
    And attain to light and worth,
    He must turn and cling for ever
    To his ancient Mother Earth.


But the difficulty is how am I to cling for ever to Mother Earth. I don’t
kiss her. I don’t cleave to her bosom. Am I to become a peasant or a
shepherd? I go on and I don’t know whether I’m going to shame or to light
and joy. That’s the trouble, for everything in the world is a riddle! And
whenever I’ve happened to sink into the vilest degradation (and it’s
always been happening) I always read that poem about Ceres and man. Has it
reformed me? Never! For I’m a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit,
I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that
degrading attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of
that degradation I begin a hymn of praise. Let me be accursed. Let me be
vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is
shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am Thy son, O Lord, and I
love Thee, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand.


    Joy everlasting fostereth
    The soul of all creation,
    It is her secret ferment fires
    The cup of life with flame.
    ’Tis at her beck the grass hath turned
    Each blade towards the light
    And solar systems have evolved
    From chaos and dark night,
    Filling the realms of boundless space
    Beyond the sage’s sight.
    At bounteous Nature’s kindly breast,
    All things that breathe drink Joy,
    And birds and beasts and creeping things
    All follow where She leads.
    Her gifts to man are friends in need,
    The wreath, the foaming must,
    To angels—vision of God’s throne,
    To insects—sensual lust.


But enough poetry! I am in tears; let me cry. It may be foolishness that
every one would laugh at. But you won’t laugh. Your eyes are shining, too.
Enough poetry. I want to tell you now about the insects to whom God gave
“sensual lust.”


    To insects—sensual lust.


I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we
Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in
you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because
sensual lust is a tempest—worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and
awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can
be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet
and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man,
brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries
there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as
we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure
the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of
the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is
that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal
of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on
fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too
broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of
it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart.
Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind
beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is
that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are
fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. But a man always
talks of his own ache. Listen, now to come to facts.”



Chapter IV. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Anecdote


“I was leading a wild life then. Father said just now that I spent several
thousand roubles in seducing young girls. That’s a swinish invention, and
there was nothing of the sort. And if there was, I didn’t need money
simply for _that_. With me money is an accessory, the overflow of my
heart, the framework. To‐day she would be my lady, to‐morrow a wench out
of the streets in her place. I entertained them both. I threw away money
by the handful on music, rioting, and gypsies. Sometimes I gave it to the
ladies, too, for they’ll take it greedily, that must be admitted, and be
pleased and thankful for it. Ladies used to be fond of me: not all of
them, but it happened, it happened. But I always liked side‐paths, little
dark back‐alleys behind the main road—there one finds adventures and
surprises, and precious metal in the dirt. I am speaking figuratively,
brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back‐alleys in the
literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you’d know
what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice. I loved
cruelty; am I not a bug, am I not a noxious insect? In fact a Karamazov!
Once we went, a whole lot of us, for a picnic, in seven sledges. It was
dark, it was winter, and I began squeezing a girl’s hand, and forced her
to kiss me. She was the daughter of an official, a sweet, gentle,
submissive creature. She allowed me, she allowed me much in the dark. She
thought, poor thing, that I should come next day to make her an offer (I
was looked upon as a good match, too). But I didn’t say a word to her for
five months. I used to see her in a corner at dances (we were always
having dances), her eyes watching me. I saw how they glowed with fire—a
fire of gentle indignation. This game only tickled that insect lust I
cherished in my soul. Five months later she married an official and left
the town, still angry, and still, perhaps, in love with me. Now they live
happily. Observe that I told no one. I didn’t boast of it. Though I’m full
of low desires, and love what’s low, I’m not dishonorable. You’re
blushing; your eyes flashed. Enough of this filth with you. And all this
was nothing much—wayside blossoms _à la_ Paul de Kock—though the cruel
insect had already grown strong in my soul. I’ve a perfect album of
reminiscences, brother. God bless them, the darlings. I tried to break it
off without quarreling. And I never gave them away. I never bragged of one
of them. But that’s enough. You can’t suppose I brought you here simply to
talk of such nonsense. No, I’m going to tell you something more curious;
and don’t be surprised that I’m glad to tell you, instead of being
ashamed.”

“You say that because I blushed,” Alyosha said suddenly. “I wasn’t
blushing at what you were saying or at what you’ve done. I blushed because
I am the same as you are.”

“You? Come, that’s going a little too far!”

“No, it’s not too far,” said Alyosha warmly (obviously the idea was not a
new one). “The ladder’s the same. I’m at the bottom step, and you’re
above, somewhere about the thirteenth. That’s how I see it. But it’s all
the same. Absolutely the same in kind. Any one on the bottom step is bound
to go up to the top one.”

“Then one ought not to step on at all.”

“Any one who can help it had better not.”

“But can you?”

“I think not.”

“Hush, Alyosha, hush, darling! I could kiss your hand, you touch me so.
That rogue Grushenka has an eye for men. She told me once that she’d
devour you one day. There, there, I won’t! From this field of corruption
fouled by flies, let’s pass to my tragedy, also befouled by flies, that is
by every sort of vileness. Although the old man told lies about my
seducing innocence, there really was something of the sort in my tragedy,
though it was only once, and then it did not come off. The old man who has
reproached me with what never happened does not even know of this fact; I
never told any one about it. You’re the first, except Ivan, of course—Ivan
knows everything. He knew about it long before you. But Ivan’s a tomb.”

“Ivan’s a tomb?”

“Yes.”

Alyosha listened with great attention.

“I was lieutenant in a line regiment, but still I was under supervision,
like a kind of convict. Yet I was awfully well received in the little
town. I spent money right and left. I was thought to be rich; I thought so
myself. But I must have pleased them in other ways as well. Although they
shook their heads over me, they liked me. My colonel, who was an old man,
took a sudden dislike to me. He was always down upon me, but I had
powerful friends, and, moreover, all the town was on my side, so he
couldn’t do me much harm. I was in fault myself for refusing to treat him
with proper respect. I was proud. This obstinate old fellow, who was
really a very good sort, kind‐hearted and hospitable, had had two wives,
both dead. His first wife, who was of a humble family, left a daughter as
unpretentious as herself. She was a young woman of four and twenty when I
was there, and was living with her father and an aunt, her mother’s
sister. The aunt was simple and illiterate; the niece was simple but
lively. I like to say nice things about people. I never knew a woman of
more charming character than Agafya—fancy, her name was Agafya Ivanovna!
And she wasn’t bad‐looking either, in the Russian style: tall, stout, with
a full figure, and beautiful eyes, though a rather coarse face. She had
not married, although she had had two suitors. She refused them, but was
as cheerful as ever. I was intimate with her, not in ‘that’ way, it was
pure friendship. I have often been friendly with women quite innocently. I
used to talk to her with shocking frankness, and she only laughed. Many
women like such freedom, and she was a girl too, which made it very
amusing. Another thing, one could never think of her as a young lady. She
and her aunt lived in her father’s house with a sort of voluntary
humility, not putting themselves on an equality with other people. She was
a general favorite, and of use to every one, for she was a clever
dressmaker. She had a talent for it. She gave her services freely without
asking for payment, but if any one offered her payment, she didn’t refuse.
The colonel, of course, was a very different matter. He was one of the
chief personages in the district. He kept open house, entertained the
whole town, gave suppers and dances. At the time I arrived and joined the
battalion, all the town was talking of the expected return of the
colonel’s second daughter, a great beauty, who had just left a fashionable
school in the capital. This second daughter is Katerina Ivanovna, and she
was the child of the second wife, who belonged to a distinguished
general’s family; although, as I learnt on good authority, she too brought
the colonel no money. She had connections, and that was all. There may
have been expectations, but they had come to nothing.

“Yet, when the young lady came from boarding‐school on a visit, the whole
town revived. Our most distinguished ladies—two ‘Excellencies’ and a
colonel’s wife—and all the rest following their lead, at once took her up
and gave entertainments in her honor. She was the belle of the balls and
picnics, and they got up _tableaux vivants_ in aid of distressed
governesses. I took no notice, I went on as wildly as before, and one of
my exploits at the time set all the town talking. I saw her eyes taking my
measure one evening at the battery commander’s, but I didn’t go up to her,
as though I disdained her acquaintance. I did go up and speak to her at an
evening party not long after. She scarcely looked at me, and compressed
her lips scornfully. ‘Wait a bit. I’ll have my revenge,’ thought I. I
behaved like an awful fool on many occasions at that time, and I was
conscious of it myself. What made it worse was that I felt that ‘Katenka’
was not an innocent boarding‐school miss, but a person of character, proud
and really high‐principled; above all, she had education and intellect,
and I had neither. You think I meant to make her an offer? No, I simply
wanted to revenge myself, because I was such a hero and she didn’t seem to
feel it.

“Meanwhile, I spent my time in drink and riot, till the lieutenant‐colonel
put me under arrest for three days. Just at that time father sent me six
thousand roubles in return for my sending him a deed giving up all claims
upon him—settling our accounts, so to speak, and saying that I wouldn’t
expect anything more. I didn’t understand a word of it at the time. Until
I came here, Alyosha, till the last few days, indeed, perhaps even now, I
haven’t been able to make head or tail of my money affairs with father.
But never mind that, we’ll talk of it later.

“Just as I received the money, I got a letter from a friend telling me
something that interested me immensely. The authorities, I learnt, were
dissatisfied with our lieutenant‐colonel. He was suspected of
irregularities; in fact, his enemies were preparing a surprise for him.
And then the commander of the division arrived, and kicked up the devil of
a shindy. Shortly afterwards he was ordered to retire. I won’t tell you
how it all happened. He had enemies certainly. Suddenly there was a marked
coolness in the town towards him and all his family. His friends all
turned their backs on him. Then I took my first step. I met Agafya
Ivanovna, with whom I’d always kept up a friendship, and said, ‘Do you
know there’s a deficit of 4,500 roubles of government money in your
father’s accounts?’

“ ‘What do you mean? What makes you say so? The general was here not long
ago, and everything was all right.’

“ ‘Then it was, but now it isn’t.’

“She was terribly scared.

“ ‘Don’t frighten me!’ she said. ‘Who told you so?’

“ ‘Don’t be uneasy,’ I said, ‘I won’t tell any one. You know I’m as silent
as the tomb. I only wanted, in view of “possibilities,” to add, that when
they demand that 4,500 roubles from your father, and he can’t produce it,
he’ll be tried, and made to serve as a common soldier in his old age,
unless you like to send me your young lady secretly. I’ve just had money
paid me. I’ll give her four thousand, if you like, and keep the secret
religiously.’

“ ‘Ah, you scoundrel!’—that’s what she said. ‘You wicked scoundrel! How
dare you!’

“She went away furiously indignant, while I shouted after her once more
that the secret should be kept sacred. Those two simple creatures, Agafya
and her aunt, I may as well say at once, behaved like perfect angels all
through this business. They genuinely adored their ‘Katya,’ thought her
far above them, and waited on her, hand and foot. But Agafya told her of
our conversation. I found that out afterwards. She didn’t keep it back,
and of course that was all I wanted.

“Suddenly the new major arrived to take command of the battalion. The old
lieutenant‐colonel was taken ill at once, couldn’t leave his room for two
days, and didn’t hand over the government money. Dr. Kravchenko declared
that he really was ill. But I knew for a fact, and had known for a long
time, that for the last four years the money had never been in his hands
except when the Commander made his visits of inspection. He used to lend
it to a trustworthy person, a merchant of our town called Trifonov, an old
widower, with a big beard and gold‐rimmed spectacles. He used to go to the
fair, do a profitable business with the money, and return the whole sum to
the colonel, bringing with it a present from the fair, as well as interest
on the loan. But this time (I heard all about it quite by chance from
Trifonov’s son and heir, a driveling youth and one of the most vicious in
the world)—this time, I say, Trifonov brought nothing back from the fair.
The lieutenant‐colonel flew to him. ‘I’ve never received any money from
you, and couldn’t possibly have received any.’ That was all the answer he
got. So now our lieutenant‐colonel is confined to the house, with a towel
round his head, while they’re all three busy putting ice on it. All at
once an orderly arrives on the scene with the book and the order to ‘hand
over the battalion money immediately, within two hours.’ He signed the
book (I saw the signature in the book afterwards), stood up, saying he
would put on his uniform, ran to his bedroom, loaded his double‐barreled
gun with a service bullet, took the boot off his right foot, fixed the gun
against his chest, and began feeling for the trigger with his foot. But
Agafya, remembering what I had told her, had her suspicions. She stole up
and peeped into the room just in time. She rushed in, flung herself upon
him from behind, threw her arms round him, and the gun went off, hit the
ceiling, but hurt no one. The others ran in, took away the gun, and held
him by the arms. I heard all about this afterwards. I was at home, it was
getting dusk, and I was just preparing to go out. I had dressed, brushed
my hair, scented my handkerchief, and taken up my cap, when suddenly the
door opened, and facing me in the room stood Katerina Ivanovna.

“It’s strange how things happen sometimes. No one had seen her in the
street, so that no one knew of it in the town. I lodged with two decrepit
old ladies, who looked after me. They were most obliging old things, ready
to do anything for me, and at my request were as silent afterwards as two
cast‐iron posts. Of course I grasped the position at once. She walked in
and looked straight at me, her dark eyes determined, even defiant, but on
her lips and round her mouth I saw uncertainty.

“ ‘My sister told me,’ she began, ‘that you would give me 4,500 roubles if
I came to you for it—myself. I have come ... give me the money!’

“She couldn’t keep it up. She was breathless, frightened, her voice failed
her, and the corners of her mouth and the lines round it quivered.
Alyosha, are you listening, or are you asleep?”

“Mitya, I know you will tell the whole truth,” said Alyosha in agitation.

“I am telling it. If I tell the whole truth just as it happened I shan’t
spare myself. My first idea was a—Karamazov one. Once I was bitten by a
centipede, brother, and laid up a fortnight with fever from it. Well, I
felt a centipede biting at my heart then—a noxious insect, you understand?
I looked her up and down. You’ve seen her? She’s a beauty. But she was
beautiful in another way then. At that moment she was beautiful because
she was noble, and I was a scoundrel; she in all the grandeur of her
generosity and sacrifice for her father, and I—a bug! And, scoundrel as I
was, she was altogether at my mercy, body and soul. She was hemmed in. I
tell you frankly, that thought, that venomous thought, so possessed my
heart that it almost swooned with suspense. It seemed as if there could be
no resisting it; as though I should act like a bug, like a venomous
spider, without a spark of pity. I could scarcely breathe. Understand, I
should have gone next day to ask for her hand, so that it might end
honorably, so to speak, and that nobody would or could know. For though
I’m a man of base desires, I’m honest. And at that very second some voice
seemed to whisper in my ear, ‘But when you come to‐morrow to make your
proposal, that girl won’t even see you; she’ll order her coachman to kick
you out of the yard. “Publish it through all the town,” she would say,
“I’m not afraid of you.” ’ I looked at the young lady, my voice had not
deceived me. That is how it would be, not a doubt of it. I could see from
her face now that I should be turned out of the house. My spite was
roused. I longed to play her the nastiest swinish cad’s trick: to look at
her with a sneer, and on the spot where she stood before me to stun her
with a tone of voice that only a shopman could use.

“ ‘Four thousand! What do you mean? I was joking. You’ve been counting
your chickens too easily, madam. Two hundred, if you like, with all my
heart. But four thousand is not a sum to throw away on such frivolity.
You’ve put yourself out to no purpose.’

“I should have lost the game, of course. She’d have run away. But it would
have been an infernal revenge. It would have been worth it all. I’d have
howled with regret all the rest of my life, only to have played that
trick. Would you believe it, it has never happened to me with any other
woman, not one, to look at her at such a moment with hatred. But, on my
oath, I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful
hatred—that hate which is only a hair’s‐breadth from love, from the
maddest love!

“I went to the window, put my forehead against the frozen pane, and I
remember the ice burnt my forehead like fire. I did not keep her long,
don’t be afraid. I turned round, went up to the table, opened the drawer
and took out a banknote for five thousand roubles (it was lying in a
French dictionary). Then I showed it her in silence, folded it, handed it
to her, opened the door into the passage, and, stepping back, made her a
deep bow, a most respectful, a most impressive bow, believe me! She
shuddered all over, gazed at me for a second, turned horribly pale—white
as a sheet, in fact—and all at once, not impetuously but softly, gently,
bowed down to my feet—not a boarding‐school curtsey, but a Russian bow,
with her forehead to the floor. She jumped up and ran away. I was wearing
my sword. I drew it and nearly stabbed myself with it on the spot; why, I
don’t know. It would have been frightfully stupid, of course. I suppose it
was from delight. Can you understand that one might kill oneself from
delight? But I didn’t stab myself. I only kissed my sword and put it back
in the scabbard—which there was no need to have told you, by the way. And
I fancy that in telling you about my inner conflict I have laid it on
rather thick to glorify myself. But let it pass, and to hell with all who
pry into the human heart! Well, so much for that ‘adventure’ with Katerina
Ivanovna. So now Ivan knows of it, and you—no one else.”

Dmitri got up, took a step or two in his excitement, pulled out his
handkerchief and mopped his forehead, then sat down again, not in the same
place as before, but on the opposite side, so that Alyosha had to turn
quite round to face him.



Chapter V. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—"Heels Up"


“Now,” said Alyosha, “I understand the first half.”

“You understand the first half. That half is a drama, and it was played
out there. The second half is a tragedy, and it is being acted here.”

“And I understand nothing of that second half so far,” said Alyosha.

“And I? Do you suppose I understand it?”

“Stop, Dmitri. There’s one important question. Tell me, you were
betrothed, you are betrothed still?”

“We weren’t betrothed at once, not for three months after that adventure.
The next day I told myself that the incident was closed, concluded, that
there would be no sequel. It seemed to me caddish to make her an offer. On
her side she gave no sign of life for the six weeks that she remained in
the town; except, indeed, for one action. The day after her visit the
maid‐servant slipped round with an envelope addressed to me. I tore it
open: it contained the change out of the banknote. Only four thousand five
hundred roubles was needed, but there was a discount of about two hundred
on changing it. She only sent me about two hundred and sixty. I don’t
remember exactly, but not a note, not a word of explanation. I searched
the packet for a pencil mark—n‐nothing! Well, I spent the rest of the
money on such an orgy that the new major was obliged to reprimand me.

“Well, the lieutenant‐colonel produced the battalion money, to the
astonishment of every one, for nobody believed that he had the money
untouched. He’d no sooner paid it than he fell ill, took to his bed, and,
three weeks later, softening of the brain set in, and he died five days
afterwards. He was buried with military honors, for he had not had time to
receive his discharge. Ten days after his funeral, Katerina Ivanovna, with
her aunt and sister, went to Moscow. And, behold, on the very day they
went away (I hadn’t seen them, didn’t see them off or take leave) I
received a tiny note, a sheet of thin blue paper, and on it only one line
in pencil: ‘I will write to you. Wait. K.’ And that was all.

“I’ll explain the rest now, in two words. In Moscow their fortunes changed
with the swiftness of lightning and the unexpectedness of an Arabian
fairy‐tale. That general’s widow, their nearest relation, suddenly lost
the two nieces who were her heiresses and next‐of‐kin—both died in the
same week of small‐pox. The old lady, prostrated with grief, welcomed
Katya as a daughter, as her one hope, clutched at her, altered her will in
Katya’s favor. But that concerned the future. Meanwhile she gave her, for
present use, eighty thousand roubles, as a marriage portion, to do what
she liked with. She was an hysterical woman. I saw something of her in
Moscow, later.

“Well, suddenly I received by post four thousand five hundred roubles. I
was speechless with surprise, as you may suppose. Three days later came
the promised letter. I have it with me now. You must read it. She offers
to be my wife, offers herself to me. ‘I love you madly,’ she says, ‘even
if you don’t love me, never mind. Be my husband. Don’t be afraid. I won’t
hamper you in any way. I will be your chattel. I will be the carpet under
your feet. I want to love you for ever. I want to save you from yourself.’
Alyosha, I am not worthy to repeat those lines in my vulgar words and in
my vulgar tone, my everlastingly vulgar tone, that I can never cure myself
of. That letter stabs me even now. Do you think I don’t mind—that I don’t
mind still? I wrote her an answer at once, as it was impossible for me to
go to Moscow. I wrote to her with tears. One thing I shall be ashamed of
for ever. I referred to her being rich and having a dowry while I was only
a stuck‐up beggar! I mentioned money! I ought to have borne it in silence,
but it slipped from my pen. Then I wrote at once to Ivan, and told him all
I could about it in a letter of six pages, and sent him to her. Why do you
look like that? Why are you staring at me? Yes, Ivan fell in love with
her; he’s in love with her still. I know that. I did a stupid thing, in
the world’s opinion; but perhaps that one stupid thing may be the saving
of us all now. Oo! Don’t you see what a lot she thinks of Ivan, how she
respects him? When she compares us, do you suppose she can love a man like
me, especially after all that has happened here?”

“But I am convinced that she does love a man like you, and not a man like
him.”

“She loves her own _virtue_, not me.” The words broke involuntarily, and
almost malignantly, from Dmitri. He laughed, but a minute later his eyes
gleamed, he flushed crimson and struck the table violently with his fist.

“I swear, Alyosha,” he cried, with intense and genuine anger at himself;
“you may not believe me, but as God is holy, and as Christ is God, I swear
that though I smiled at her lofty sentiments just now, I know that I am a
million times baser in soul than she, and that these lofty sentiments of
hers are as sincere as a heavenly angel’s. That’s the tragedy of it—that I
know that for certain. What if any one does show off a bit? Don’t I do it
myself? And yet I’m sincere, I’m sincere. As for Ivan, I can understand
how he must be cursing nature now—with his intellect, too! To see the
preference given—to whom, to what? To a monster who, though he is
betrothed and all eyes are fixed on him, can’t restrain his
debaucheries—and before the very eyes of his betrothed! And a man like me
is preferred, while he is rejected. And why? Because a girl wants to
sacrifice her life and destiny out of gratitude. It’s ridiculous! I’ve
never said a word of this to Ivan, and Ivan of course has never dropped a
hint of the sort to me. But destiny will be accomplished, and the best man
will hold his ground while the undeserving one will vanish into his back‐
alley for ever—his filthy back‐alley, his beloved back‐alley, where he is
at home and where he will sink in filth and stench at his own free will
and with enjoyment. I’ve been talking foolishly. I’ve no words left. I use
them at random, but it will be as I have said. I shall drown in the back‐
alley, and she will marry Ivan.”

“Stop, Dmitri,” Alyosha interrupted again with great anxiety. “There’s one
thing you haven’t made clear yet: you are still betrothed all the same,
aren’t you? How can you break off the engagement if she, your betrothed,
doesn’t want to?”

“Yes, formally and solemnly betrothed. It was all done on my arrival in
Moscow, with great ceremony, with ikons, all in fine style. The general’s
wife blessed us, and—would you believe it?—congratulated Katya. ‘You’ve
made a good choice,’ she said, ‘I see right through him.’ And—would you
believe it?—she didn’t like Ivan, and hardly greeted him. I had a lot of
talk with Katya in Moscow. I told her about myself—sincerely, honorably.
She listened to everything.


    There was sweet confusion,
    There were tender words.


Though there were proud words, too. She wrung out of me a mighty promise
to reform. I gave my promise, and here—”

“What?”

“Why, I called to you and brought you out here to‐day, this very
day—remember it—to send you—this very day again—to Katerina Ivanovna,
and—”

“What?”

“To tell her that I shall never come to see her again. Say, ‘He sends you
his compliments.’ ”

“But is that possible?”

“That’s just the reason I’m sending you, in my place, because it’s
impossible. And, how could I tell her myself?”

“And where are you going?”

“To the back‐alley.”

“To Grushenka, then!” Alyosha exclaimed mournfully, clasping his hands.
“Can Rakitin really have told the truth? I thought that you had just
visited her, and that was all.”

“Can a betrothed man pay such visits? Is such a thing possible and with
such a betrothed, and before the eyes of all the world? Confound it, I
have some honor! As soon as I began visiting Grushenka, I ceased to be
betrothed, and to be an honest man. I understand that. Why do you look at
me? You see, I went in the first place to beat her. I had heard, and I
know for a fact now, that that captain, father’s agent, had given
Grushenka an I.O.U. of mine for her to sue me for payment, so as to put an
end to me. They wanted to scare me. I went to beat her. I had had a
glimpse of her before. She doesn’t strike one at first sight. I knew about
her old merchant, who’s lying ill now, paralyzed; but he’s leaving her a
decent little sum. I knew, too, that she was fond of money, that she
hoarded it, and lent it at a wicked rate of interest, that she’s a
merciless cheat and swindler. I went to beat her, and I stayed. The storm
broke—it struck me down like the plague. I’m plague‐stricken still, and I
know that everything is over, that there will never be anything more for
me. The cycle of the ages is accomplished. That’s my position. And though
I’m a beggar, as fate would have it, I had three thousand just then in my
pocket. I drove with Grushenka to Mokroe, a place twenty‐five versts from
here. I got gypsies there and champagne and made all the peasants there
drunk on it, and all the women and girls. I sent the thousands flying. In
three days’ time I was stripped bare, but a hero. Do you suppose the hero
had gained his end? Not a sign of it from her. I tell you that rogue,
Grushenka, has a supple curve all over her body. You can see it in her
little foot, even in her little toe. I saw it, and kissed it, but that was
all, I swear! ‘I’ll marry you if you like,’ she said, ‘you’re a beggar,
you know. Say that you won’t beat me, and will let me do anything I
choose, and perhaps I will marry you.’ She laughed, and she’s laughing
still!”

Dmitri leapt up with a sort of fury. He seemed all at once as though he
were drunk. His eyes became suddenly bloodshot.

“And do you really mean to marry her?”

“At once, if she will. And if she won’t, I shall stay all the same. I’ll
be the porter at her gate. Alyosha!” he cried. He stopped short before
him, and taking him by the shoulders began shaking him violently. “Do you
know, you innocent boy, that this is all delirium, senseless delirium, for
there’s a tragedy here. Let me tell you, Alexey, that I may be a low man,
with low and degraded passions, but a thief and a pickpocket Dmitri
Karamazov never can be. Well, then; let me tell you that I am a thief and
a pickpocket. That very morning, just before I went to beat Grushenka,
Katerina Ivanovna sent for me, and in strict secrecy (why I don’t know, I
suppose she had some reason) asked me to go to the chief town of the
province and to post three thousand roubles to Agafya Ivanovna in Moscow,
so that nothing should be known of it in the town here. So I had that
three thousand roubles in my pocket when I went to see Grushenka, and it
was that money we spent at Mokroe. Afterwards I pretended I had been to
the town, but did not show her the post office receipt. I said I had sent
the money and would bring the receipt, and so far I haven’t brought it.
I’ve forgotten it. Now what do you think you’re going to her to‐day to
say? ‘He sends his compliments,’ and she’ll ask you, ‘What about the
money?’ You might still have said to her, ‘He’s a degraded sensualist, and
a low creature, with uncontrolled passions. He didn’t send your money
then, but wasted it, because, like a low brute, he couldn’t control
himself.’ But still you might have added, ‘He isn’t a thief though. Here
is your three thousand; he sends it back. Send it yourself to Agafya
Ivanovna. But he told me to say “he sends his compliments.” ’ But, as it
is, she will ask, ‘But where is the money?’ ”

“Mitya, you are unhappy, yes! But not as unhappy as you think. Don’t worry
yourself to death with despair.”

“What, do you suppose I’d shoot myself because I can’t get three thousand
to pay back? That’s just it. I shan’t shoot myself. I haven’t the strength
now. Afterwards, perhaps. But now I’m going to Grushenka. I don’t care
what happens.”

“And what then?”

“I’ll be her husband if she deigns to have me, and when lovers come, I’ll
go into the next room. I’ll clean her friends’ goloshes, blow up their
samovar, run their errands.”

“Katerina Ivanovna will understand it all,” Alyosha said solemnly. “She’ll
understand how great this trouble is and will forgive. She has a lofty
mind, and no one could be more unhappy than you. She’ll see that for
herself.”

“She won’t forgive everything,” said Dmitri, with a grin. “There’s
something in it, brother, that no woman could forgive. Do you know what
would be the best thing to do?”

“What?”

“Pay back the three thousand.”

“Where can we get it from? I say, I have two thousand. Ivan will give you
another thousand—that makes three. Take it and pay it back.”

“And when would you get it, your three thousand? You’re not of age,
besides, and you must—you absolutely must—take my farewell to her to‐day,
with the money or without it, for I can’t drag on any longer, things have
come to such a pass. To‐morrow is too late. I shall send you to father.”

“To father?”

“Yes, to father first. Ask him for three thousand.”

“But, Mitya, he won’t give it.”

“As though he would! I know he won’t. Do you know the meaning of despair,
Alexey?”

“Yes.”

“Listen. Legally he owes me nothing. I’ve had it all from him, I know
that. But morally he owes me something, doesn’t he? You know he started
with twenty‐eight thousand of my mother’s money and made a hundred
thousand with it. Let him give me back only three out of the twenty‐eight
thousand, and he’ll draw my soul out of hell, and it will atone for many
of his sins. For that three thousand—I give you my solemn word—I’ll make
an end of everything, and he shall hear nothing more of me. For the last
time I give him the chance to be a father. Tell him God Himself sends him
this chance.”

“Mitya, he won’t give it for anything.”

“I know he won’t. I know it perfectly well. Now, especially. That’s not
all. I know something more. Now, only a few days ago, perhaps only
yesterday he found out for the first time _in earnest_ (underline _in
earnest_) that Grushenka is really perhaps not joking, and really means to
marry me. He knows her nature; he knows the cat. And do you suppose he’s
going to give me money to help to bring that about when he’s crazy about
her himself? And that’s not all, either. I can tell you more than that. I
know that for the last five days he has had three thousand drawn out of
the bank, changed into notes of a hundred roubles, packed into a large
envelope, sealed with five seals, and tied across with red tape. You see
how well I know all about it! On the envelope is written: ‘To my angel,
Grushenka, when she will come to me.’ He scrawled it himself in silence
and in secret, and no one knows that the money’s there except the valet,
Smerdyakov, whom he trusts like himself. So now he has been expecting
Grushenka for the last three or four days; he hopes she’ll come for the
money. He has sent her word of it, and she has sent him word that perhaps
she’ll come. And if she does go to the old man, can I marry her after
that? You understand now why I’m here in secret and what I’m on the watch
for.”

“For her?”

“Yes, for her. Foma has a room in the house of these sluts here. Foma
comes from our parts; he was a soldier in our regiment. He does jobs for
them. He’s watchman at night and goes grouse‐shooting in the day‐time; and
that’s how he lives. I’ve established myself in his room. Neither he nor
the women of the house know the secret—that is, that I am on the watch
here.”

“No one but Smerdyakov knows, then?”

“No one else. He will let me know if she goes to the old man.”

“It was he told you about the money, then?”

“Yes. It’s a dead secret. Even Ivan doesn’t know about the money, or
anything. The old man is sending Ivan to Tchermashnya on a two or three
days’ journey. A purchaser has turned up for the copse: he’ll give eight
thousand for the timber. So the old man keeps asking Ivan to help him by
going to arrange it. It will take him two or three days. That’s what the
old man wants, so that Grushenka can come while he’s away.”

“Then he’s expecting Grushenka to‐day?”

“No, she won’t come to‐day; there are signs. She’s certain not to come,”
cried Mitya suddenly. “Smerdyakov thinks so, too. Father’s drinking now.
He’s sitting at table with Ivan. Go to him, Alyosha, and ask for the three
thousand.”

“Mitya, dear, what’s the matter with you?” cried Alyosha, jumping up from
his place, and looking keenly at his brother’s frenzied face. For one
moment the thought struck him that Dmitri was mad.

“What is it? I’m not insane,” said Dmitri, looking intently and earnestly
at him. “No fear. I am sending you to father, and I know what I’m saying.
I believe in miracles.”

“In miracles?”

“In a miracle of Divine Providence. God knows my heart. He sees my
despair. He sees the whole picture. Surely He won’t let something awful
happen. Alyosha, I believe in miracles. Go!”

“I am going. Tell me, will you wait for me here?”

“Yes. I know it will take some time. You can’t go at him point blank. He’s
drunk now. I’ll wait three hours—four, five, six, seven. Only remember you
must go to Katerina Ivanovna to‐day, if it has to be at midnight, _with
the money or without the money_, and say, ‘He sends his compliments to
you.’ I want you to say that verse to her: ‘He sends his compliments to
you.’ ”

“Mitya! And what if Grushenka comes to‐day—if not to‐day, to‐morrow, or
the next day?”

“Grushenka? I shall see her. I shall rush out and prevent it.”

“And if—”

“If there’s an if, it will be murder. I couldn’t endure it.”

“Who will be murdered?”

“The old man. I shan’t kill her.”

“Brother, what are you saying?”

“Oh, I don’t know.... I don’t know. Perhaps I shan’t kill, and perhaps I
shall. I’m afraid that he will suddenly become so loathsome to me with his
face at that moment. I hate his ugly throat, his nose, his eyes, his
shameless snigger. I feel a physical repulsion. That’s what I’m afraid of.
That’s what may be too much for me.”

“I’ll go, Mitya. I believe that God will order things for the best, that
nothing awful may happen.”

“And I will sit and wait for the miracle. And if it doesn’t come to pass—”

Alyosha went thoughtfully towards his father’s house.



Chapter VI. Smerdyakov


He did in fact find his father still at table. Though there was a dining‐
room in the house, the table was laid as usual in the drawing‐room, which
was the largest room, and furnished with old‐fashioned ostentation. The
furniture was white and very old, upholstered in old, red, silky material.
In the spaces between the windows there were mirrors in elaborate white
and gilt frames, of old‐fashioned carving. On the walls, covered with
white paper, which was torn in many places, there hung two large
portraits—one of some prince who had been governor of the district thirty
years before, and the other of some bishop, also long since dead. In the
corner opposite the door there were several ikons, before which a lamp was
lighted at nightfall ... not so much for devotional purposes as to light
the room. Fyodor Pavlovitch used to go to bed very late, at three or four
o’clock in the morning, and would wander about the room at night or sit in
an arm‐chair, thinking. This had become a habit with him. He often slept
quite alone in the house, sending his servants to the lodge; but usually
Smerdyakov remained, sleeping on a bench in the hall.

When Alyosha came in, dinner was over, but coffee and preserves had been
served. Fyodor Pavlovitch liked sweet things with brandy after dinner.
Ivan was also at table, sipping coffee. The servants, Grigory and
Smerdyakov, were standing by. Both the gentlemen and the servants seemed
in singularly good spirits. Fyodor Pavlovitch was roaring with laughter.
Before he entered the room, Alyosha heard the shrill laugh he knew so
well, and could tell from the sound of it that his father had only reached
the good‐humored stage, and was far from being completely drunk.

“Here he is! Here he is!” yelled Fyodor Pavlovitch, highly delighted at
seeing Alyosha. “Join us. Sit down. Coffee is a lenten dish, but it’s hot
and good. I don’t offer you brandy, you’re keeping the fast. But would you
like some? No; I’d better give you some of our famous liqueur. Smerdyakov,
go to the cupboard, the second shelf on the right. Here are the keys. Look
sharp!”

Alyosha began refusing the liqueur.

“Never mind. If you won’t have it, we will,” said Fyodor Pavlovitch,
beaming. “But stay—have you dined?”

“Yes,” answered Alyosha, who had in truth only eaten a piece of bread and
drunk a glass of kvas in the Father Superior’s kitchen. “Though I should
be pleased to have some hot coffee.”

“Bravo, my darling! He’ll have some coffee. Does it want warming? No, it’s
boiling. It’s capital coffee: Smerdyakov’s making. My Smerdyakov’s an
artist at coffee and at fish patties, and at fish soup, too. You must come
one day and have some fish soup. Let me know beforehand.... But, stay;
didn’t I tell you this morning to come home with your mattress and pillow
and all? Have you brought your mattress? He he he!”

“No, I haven’t,” said Alyosha, smiling, too.

“Ah, but you were frightened, you were frightened this morning, weren’t
you? There, my darling, I couldn’t do anything to vex you. Do you know,
Ivan, I can’t resist the way he looks one straight in the face and laughs?
It makes me laugh all over. I’m so fond of him. Alyosha, let me give you
my blessing—a father’s blessing.”

Alyosha rose, but Fyodor Pavlovitch had already changed his mind.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ll just make the sign of the cross over you, for
now. Sit still. Now we’ve a treat for you, in your own line, too. It’ll
make you laugh. Balaam’s ass has begun talking to us here—and how he
talks! How he talks!”

Balaam’s ass, it appeared, was the valet, Smerdyakov. He was a young man
of about four and twenty, remarkably unsociable and taciturn. Not that he
was shy or bashful. On the contrary, he was conceited and seemed to
despise everybody.

But we must pause to say a few words about him now. He was brought up by
Grigory and Marfa, but the boy grew up “with no sense of gratitude,” as
Grigory expressed it; he was an unfriendly boy, and seemed to look at the
world mistrustfully. In his childhood he was very fond of hanging cats,
and burying them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as
though it were a surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead
cat as though it were a censer. All this he did on the sly, with the
greatest secrecy. Grigory caught him once at this diversion and gave him a
sound beating. He shrank into a corner and sulked there for a week. “He
doesn’t care for you or me, the monster,” Grigory used to say to Marfa,
“and he doesn’t care for any one. Are you a human being?” he said,
addressing the boy directly. “You’re not a human being. You grew from the
mildew in the bath‐house.(2) That’s what you are.” Smerdyakov, it appeared
afterwards, could never forgive him those words. Grigory taught him to
read and write, and when he was twelve years old, began teaching him the
Scriptures. But this teaching came to nothing. At the second or third
lesson the boy suddenly grinned.

“What’s that for?” asked Grigory, looking at him threateningly from under
his spectacles.

“Oh, nothing. God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and
stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?”

Grigory was thunderstruck. The boy looked sarcastically at his teacher.
There was something positively condescending in his expression. Grigory
could not restrain himself. “I’ll show you where!” he cried, and gave the
boy a violent slap on the cheek. The boy took the slap without a word, but
withdrew into his corner again for some days. A week later he had his
first attack of the disease to which he was subject all the rest of his
life—epilepsy. When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of it, his attitude to the boy
seemed changed at once. Till then he had taken no notice of him, though he
never scolded him, and always gave him a copeck when he met him.
Sometimes, when he was in good humor, he would send the boy something
sweet from his table. But as soon as he heard of his illness, he showed an
active interest in him, sent for a doctor, and tried remedies, but the
disease turned out to be incurable. The fits occurred, on an average, once
a month, but at various intervals. The fits varied too, in violence: some
were light and some were very severe. Fyodor Pavlovitch strictly forbade
Grigory to use corporal punishment to the boy, and began allowing him to
come upstairs to him. He forbade him to be taught anything whatever for a
time, too. One day when the boy was about fifteen, Fyodor Pavlovitch
noticed him lingering by the bookcase, and reading the titles through the
glass. Fyodor Pavlovitch had a fair number of books—over a hundred—but no
one ever saw him reading. He at once gave Smerdyakov the key of the
bookcase. “Come, read. You shall be my librarian. You’ll be better sitting
reading than hanging about the courtyard. Come, read this,” and Fyodor
Pavlovitch gave him _Evenings in a Cottage near Dikanka_.

He read a little but didn’t like it. He did not once smile, and ended by
frowning.

“Why? Isn’t it funny?” asked Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Smerdyakov did not speak.

“Answer, stupid!”

“It’s all untrue,” mumbled the boy, with a grin.

“Then go to the devil! You have the soul of a lackey. Stay, here’s
Smaragdov’s _Universal History_. That’s all true. Read that.”

But Smerdyakov did not get through ten pages of Smaragdov. He thought it
dull. So the bookcase was closed again.

Shortly afterwards Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovitch that
Smerdyakov was gradually beginning to show an extraordinary
fastidiousness. He would sit before his soup, take up his spoon and look
into the soup, bend over it, examine it, take a spoonful and hold it to
the light.

“What is it? A beetle?” Grigory would ask.

“A fly, perhaps,” observed Marfa.

The squeamish youth never answered, but he did the same with his bread,
his meat, and everything he ate. He would hold a piece on his fork to the
light, scrutinize it microscopically, and only after long deliberation
decide to put it in his mouth.

“Ach! What fine gentlemen’s airs!” Grigory muttered, looking at him.

When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of this development in Smerdyakov he
determined to make him his cook, and sent him to Moscow to be trained. He
spent some years there and came back remarkably changed in appearance. He
looked extraordinarily old for his age. His face had grown wrinkled,
yellow, and strangely emasculate. In character he seemed almost exactly
the same as before he went away. He was just as unsociable, and showed not
the slightest inclination for any companionship. In Moscow, too, as we
heard afterwards, he had always been silent. Moscow itself had little
interest for him; he saw very little there, and took scarcely any notice
of anything. He went once to the theater, but returned silent and
displeased with it. On the other hand, he came back to us from Moscow well
dressed, in a clean coat and clean linen. He brushed his clothes most
scrupulously twice a day invariably, and was very fond of cleaning his
smart calf boots with a special English polish, so that they shone like
mirrors. He turned out a first‐rate cook. Fyodor Pavlovitch paid him a
salary, almost the whole of which Smerdyakov spent on clothes, pomade,
perfumes, and such things. But he seemed to have as much contempt for the
female sex as for men; he was discreet, almost unapproachable, with them.
Fyodor Pavlovitch began to regard him rather differently. His fits were
becoming more frequent, and on the days he was ill Marfa cooked, which did
not suit Fyodor Pavlovitch at all.

“Why are your fits getting worse?” asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, looking
askance at his new cook. “Would you like to get married? Shall I find you
a wife?”

But Smerdyakov turned pale with anger, and made no reply. Fyodor
Pavlovitch left him with an impatient gesture. The great thing was that he
had absolute confidence in his honesty. It happened once, when Fyodor
Pavlovitch was drunk, that he dropped in the muddy courtyard three
hundred‐rouble notes which he had only just received. He only missed them
next day, and was just hastening to search his pockets when he saw the
notes lying on the table. Where had they come from? Smerdyakov had picked
them up and brought them in the day before.

“Well, my lad, I’ve never met any one like you,” Fyodor Pavlovitch said
shortly, and gave him ten roubles. We may add that he not only believed in
his honesty, but had, for some reason, a liking for him, although the
young man looked as morosely at him as at every one and was always silent.
He rarely spoke. If it had occurred to any one to wonder at the time what
the young man was interested in, and what was in his mind, it would have
been impossible to tell by looking at him. Yet he used sometimes to stop
suddenly in the house, or even in the yard or street, and would stand
still for ten minutes, lost in thought. A physiognomist studying his face
would have said that there was no thought in it, no reflection, but only a
sort of contemplation. There is a remarkable picture by the painter
Kramskoy, called “Contemplation.” There is a forest in winter, and on a
roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a
torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he
is not thinking; he is “contemplating.” If any one touched him he would
start and look at one as though awakening and bewildered. It’s true he
would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been
thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has, hidden
within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period
of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards
them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he
does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many
years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his
soul’s salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native
village, and perhaps do both. There are a good many “contemplatives” among
the peasantry. Well, Smerdyakov was probably one of them, and he probably
was greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.



Chapter VII. The Controversy


But Balaam’s ass had suddenly spoken. The subject was a strange one.
Grigory had gone in the morning to make purchases, and had heard from the
shopkeeper Lukyanov the story of a Russian soldier which had appeared in
the newspaper of that day. This soldier had been taken prisoner in some
remote part of Asia, and was threatened with an immediate agonizing death
if he did not renounce Christianity and follow Islam. He refused to deny
his faith, and was tortured, flayed alive, and died, praising and
glorifying Christ. Grigory had related the story at table. Fyodor
Pavlovitch always liked, over the dessert after dinner, to laugh and talk,
if only with Grigory. This afternoon he was in a particularly good‐humored
and expansive mood. Sipping his brandy and listening to the story, he
observed that they ought to make a saint of a soldier like that, and to
take his skin to some monastery. “That would make the people flock, and
bring the money in.”

Grigory frowned, seeing that Fyodor Pavlovitch was by no means touched,
but, as usual, was beginning to scoff. At that moment Smerdyakov, who was
standing by the door, smiled. Smerdyakov often waited at table towards the
end of dinner, and since Ivan’s arrival in our town he had done so every
day.

“What are you grinning at?” asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, catching the smile
instantly, and knowing that it referred to Grigory.

“Well, my opinion is,” Smerdyakov began suddenly and unexpectedly in a
loud voice, “that if that laudable soldier’s exploit was so very great
there would have been, to my thinking, no sin in it if he had on such an
emergency renounced, so to speak, the name of Christ and his own
christening, to save by that same his life, for good deeds, by which, in
the course of years to expiate his cowardice.”

“How could it not be a sin? You’re talking nonsense. For that you’ll go
straight to hell and be roasted there like mutton,” put in Fyodor
Pavlovitch.

It was at this point that Alyosha came in, and Fyodor Pavlovitch, as we
have seen, was highly delighted at his appearance.

“We’re on your subject, your subject,” he chuckled gleefully, making
Alyosha sit down to listen.

“As for mutton, that’s not so, and there’ll be nothing there for this, and
there shouldn’t be either, if it’s according to justice,” Smerdyakov
maintained stoutly.

“How do you mean ‘according to justice’?” Fyodor Pavlovitch cried still
more gayly, nudging Alyosha with his knee.

“He’s a rascal, that’s what he is!” burst from Grigory. He looked
Smerdyakov wrathfully in the face.

“As for being a rascal, wait a little, Grigory Vassilyevitch,” answered
Smerdyakov with perfect composure. “You’d better consider yourself that,
once I am taken prisoner by the enemies of the Christian race, and they
demand from me to curse the name of God and to renounce my holy
christening, I am fully entitled to act by my own reason, since there
would be no sin in it.”

“But you’ve said that before. Don’t waste words. Prove it,” cried Fyodor
Pavlovitch.

“Soup‐maker!” muttered Grigory contemptuously.

“As for being a soup‐maker, wait a bit, too, and consider for yourself,
Grigory Vassilyevitch, without abusing me. For as soon as I say to those
enemies, ‘No, I’m not a Christian, and I curse my true God,’ then at once,
by God’s high judgment, I become immediately and specially anathema
accursed, and am cut off from the Holy Church, exactly as though I were a
heathen, so that at that very instant, not only when I say it aloud, but
when I think of saying it, before a quarter of a second has passed, I am
cut off. Is that so or not, Grigory Vassilyevitch?”

He addressed Grigory with obvious satisfaction, though he was really
answering Fyodor Pavlovitch’s questions, and was well aware of it, and
intentionally pretending that Grigory had asked the questions.

“Ivan,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch suddenly, “stoop down for me to whisper.
He’s got this all up for your benefit. He wants you to praise him. Praise
him.”

Ivan listened with perfect seriousness to his father’s excited whisper.

“Stay, Smerdyakov, be quiet a minute,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch once more.
“Ivan, your ear again.”

Ivan bent down again with a perfectly grave face.

“I love you as I do Alyosha. Don’t think I don’t love you. Some brandy?”

“Yes.—But you’re rather drunk yourself,” thought Ivan, looking steadily at
his father.

He was watching Smerdyakov with great curiosity.

“You’re anathema accursed, as it is,” Grigory suddenly burst out, “and how
dare you argue, you rascal, after that, if—”

“Don’t scold him, Grigory, don’t scold him,” Fyodor Pavlovitch cut him
short.

“You should wait, Grigory Vassilyevitch, if only a short time, and listen,
for I haven’t finished all I had to say. For at the very moment I become
accursed, at that same highest moment, I become exactly like a heathen,
and my christening is taken off me and becomes of no avail. Isn’t that
so?”

“Make haste and finish, my boy,” Fyodor Pavlovitch urged him, sipping from
his wine‐glass with relish.

“And if I’ve ceased to be a Christian, then I told no lie to the enemy
when they asked whether I was a Christian or not a Christian, seeing I had
already been relieved by God Himself of my Christianity by reason of the
thought alone, before I had time to utter a word to the enemy. And if I
have already been discharged, in what manner and with what sort of justice
can I be held responsible as a Christian in the other world for having
denied Christ, when, through the very thought alone, before denying Him I
had been relieved from my christening? If I’m no longer a Christian, then
I can’t renounce Christ, for I’ve nothing then to renounce. Who will hold
an unclean Tatar responsible, Grigory Vassilyevitch, even in heaven, for
not having been born a Christian? And who would punish him for that,
considering that you can’t take two skins off one ox? For God Almighty
Himself, even if He did make the Tatar responsible, when he dies would
give him the smallest possible punishment, I imagine (since he must be
punished), judging that he is not to blame if he has come into the world
an unclean heathen, from heathen parents. The Lord God can’t surely take a
Tatar and say he was a Christian? That would mean that the Almighty would
tell a real untruth. And can the Lord of Heaven and earth tell a lie, even
in one word?”

Grigory was thunderstruck and looked at the orator, his eyes nearly
starting out of his head. Though he did not clearly understand what was
said, he had caught something in this rigmarole, and stood, looking like a
man who has just hit his head against a wall. Fyodor Pavlovitch emptied
his glass and went off into his shrill laugh.

“Alyosha! Alyosha! What do you say to that! Ah, you casuist! He must have
been with the Jesuits, somewhere, Ivan. Oh, you stinking Jesuit, who
taught you? But you’re talking nonsense, you casuist, nonsense, nonsense,
nonsense. Don’t cry, Grigory, we’ll reduce him to smoke and ashes in a
moment. Tell me this, O ass; you may be right before your enemies, but you
have renounced your faith all the same in your own heart, and you say
yourself that in that very hour you became anathema accursed. And if once
you’re anathema they won’t pat you on the head for it in hell. What do you
say to that, my fine Jesuit?”

“There is no doubt that I have renounced it in my own heart, but there was
no special sin in that. Or if there was sin, it was the most ordinary.”

“How’s that the most ordinary?”

“You lie, accursed one!” hissed Grigory.

“Consider yourself, Grigory Vassilyevitch,” Smerdyakov went on, staid and
unruffled, conscious of his triumph, but, as it were, generous to the
vanquished foe. “Consider yourself, Grigory Vassilyevitch; it is said in
the Scripture that if you have faith, even as a mustard seed, and bid a
mountain move into the sea, it will move without the least delay at your
bidding. Well, Grigory Vassilyevitch, if I’m without faith and you have so
great a faith that you are continually swearing at me, you try yourself
telling this mountain, not to move into the sea for that’s a long way off,
but even to our stinking little river which runs at the bottom of the
garden. You’ll see for yourself that it won’t budge, but will remain just
where it is however much you shout at it, and that shows, Grigory
Vassilyevitch, that you haven’t faith in the proper manner, and only abuse
others about it. Again, taking into consideration that no one in our day,
not only you, but actually no one, from the highest person to the lowest
peasant, can shove mountains into the sea—except perhaps some one man in
the world, or, at most, two, and they most likely are saving their souls
in secret somewhere in the Egyptian desert, so you wouldn’t find them—if
so it be, if all the rest have no faith, will God curse all the rest? that
is, the population of the whole earth, except about two hermits in the
desert, and in His well‐known mercy will He not forgive one of them? And
so I’m persuaded that though I may once have doubted I shall be forgiven
if I shed tears of repentance.”

“Stay!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, in a transport of delight. “So you do
suppose there are two who can move mountains? Ivan, make a note of it,
write it down. There you have the Russian all over!”

“You’re quite right in saying it’s characteristic of the people’s faith,”
Ivan assented, with an approving smile.

“You agree. Then it must be so, if you agree. It’s true, isn’t it,
Alyosha? That’s the Russian faith all over, isn’t it?”

“No, Smerdyakov has not the Russian faith at all,” said Alyosha firmly and
gravely.

“I’m not talking about his faith. I mean those two in the desert, only
that idea. Surely that’s Russian, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s purely Russian,” said Alyosha smiling.

“Your words are worth a gold piece, O ass, and I’ll give it to you to‐day.
But as to the rest you talk nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Let me tell you,
stupid, that we here are all of little faith, only from carelessness,
because we haven’t time; things are too much for us, and, in the second
place, the Lord God has given us so little time, only twenty‐four hours in
the day, so that one hasn’t even time to get sleep enough, much less to
repent of one’s sins. While you have denied your faith to your enemies
when you’d nothing else to think about but to show your faith! So I
consider, brother, that it constitutes a sin.”

“Constitute a sin it may, but consider yourself, Grigory Vassilyevitch,
that it only extenuates it, if it does constitute. If I had believed then
in very truth, as I ought to have believed, then it really would have been
sinful if I had not faced tortures for my faith, and had gone over to the
pagan Mohammedan faith. But, of course, it wouldn’t have come to torture
then, because I should only have had to say at that instant to the
mountain, ‘Move and crush the tormentor,’ and it would have moved and at
the very instant have crushed him like a black‐beetle, and I should have
walked away as though nothing had happened, praising and glorifying God.
But, suppose at that very moment I had tried all that, and cried to that
mountain, ‘Crush these tormentors,’ and it hadn’t crushed them, how could
I have helped doubting, pray, at such a time, and at such a dread hour of
mortal terror? And apart from that, I should know already that I could not
attain to the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven (for since the mountain
had not moved at my word, they could not think very much of my faith up
aloft, and there could be no very great reward awaiting me in the world to
come). So why should I let them flay the skin off me as well, and to no
good purpose? For, even though they had flayed my skin half off my back,
even then the mountain would not have moved at my word or at my cry. And
at such a moment not only doubt might come over one but one might lose
one’s reason from fear, so that one would not be able to think at all.
And, therefore, how should I be particularly to blame if not seeing my
advantage or reward there or here, I should, at least, save my skin. And
so trusting fully in the grace of the Lord I should cherish the hope that
I might be altogether forgiven.”



Chapter VIII. Over The Brandy


The controversy was over. But, strange to say, Fyodor Pavlovitch, who had
been so gay, suddenly began frowning. He frowned and gulped brandy, and it
was already a glass too much.

“Get along with you, Jesuits!” he cried to the servants. “Go away,
Smerdyakov. I’ll send you the gold piece I promised you to‐day, but be
off! Don’t cry, Grigory. Go to Marfa. She’ll comfort you and put you to
bed. The rascals won’t let us sit in peace after dinner,” he snapped
peevishly, as the servants promptly withdrew at his word.

“Smerdyakov always pokes himself in now, after dinner. It’s you he’s so
interested in. What have you done to fascinate him?” he added to Ivan.

“Nothing whatever,” answered Ivan. “He’s pleased to have a high opinion of
me; he’s a lackey and a mean soul. Raw material for revolution, however,
when the time comes.”

“For revolution?”

“There will be others and better ones. But there will be some like him as
well. His kind will come first, and better ones after.”

“And when will the time come?”

“The rocket will go off and fizzle out, perhaps. The peasants are not very
fond of listening to these soup‐makers, so far.”

“Ah, brother, but a Balaam’s ass like that thinks and thinks, and the
devil knows where he gets to.”

“He’s storing up ideas,” said Ivan, smiling.

“You see, I know he can’t bear me, nor any one else, even you, though you
fancy that he has a high opinion of you. Worse still with Alyosha, he
despises Alyosha. But he doesn’t steal, that’s one thing, and he’s not a
gossip, he holds his tongue, and doesn’t wash our dirty linen in public.
He makes capital fish pasties too. But, damn him, is he worth talking
about so much?”

“Of course he isn’t.”

“And as for the ideas he may be hatching, the Russian peasant, generally
speaking, needs thrashing. That I’ve always maintained. Our peasants are
swindlers, and don’t deserve to be pitied, and it’s a good thing they’re
still flogged sometimes. Russia is rich in birches. If they destroyed the
forests, it would be the ruin of Russia. I stand up for the clever people.
We’ve left off thrashing the peasants, we’ve grown so clever, but they go
on thrashing themselves. And a good thing too. ‘For with what measure ye
mete it shall be measured to you again,’ or how does it go? Anyhow, it
will be measured. But Russia’s all swinishness. My dear, if you only knew
how I hate Russia.... That is, not Russia, but all this vice! But maybe I
mean Russia. _Tout cela c’est de la cochonnerie_.... Do you know what I
like? I like wit.”

“You’ve had another glass. That’s enough.”

“Wait a bit. I’ll have one more, and then another, and then I’ll stop. No,
stay, you interrupted me. At Mokroe I was talking to an old man, and he
told me: ‘There’s nothing we like so much as sentencing girls to be
thrashed, and we always give the lads the job of thrashing them. And the
girl he has thrashed to‐day, the young man will ask in marriage to‐morrow.
So it quite suits the girls, too,’ he said. There’s a set of de Sades for
you! But it’s clever, anyway. Shall we go over and have a look at it, eh?
Alyosha, are you blushing? Don’t be bashful, child. I’m sorry I didn’t
stay to dinner at the Superior’s and tell the monks about the girls at
Mokroe. Alyosha, don’t be angry that I offended your Superior this
morning. I lost my temper. If there is a God, if He exists, then, of
course, I’m to blame, and I shall have to answer for it. But if there
isn’t a God at all, what do they deserve, your fathers? It’s not enough to
cut their heads off, for they keep back progress. Would you believe it,
Ivan, that that lacerates my sentiments? No, you don’t believe it as I see
from your eyes. You believe what people say, that I’m nothing but a
buffoon. Alyosha, do you believe that I’m nothing but a buffoon?”

“No, I don’t believe it.”

“And I believe you don’t, and that you speak the truth. You look sincere
and you speak sincerely. But not Ivan. Ivan’s supercilious.... I’d make an
end of your monks, though, all the same. I’d take all that mystic stuff
and suppress it, once for all, all over Russia, so as to bring all the
fools to reason. And the gold and the silver that would flow into the
mint!”

“But why suppress it?” asked Ivan.

“That Truth may prevail. That’s why.”

“Well, if Truth were to prevail, you know, you’d be the first to be robbed
and suppressed.”

“Ah! I dare say you’re right. Ah, I’m an ass!” burst out Fyodor
Pavlovitch, striking himself lightly on the forehead. “Well, your
monastery may stand then, Alyosha, if that’s how it is. And we clever
people will sit snug and enjoy our brandy. You know, Ivan, it must have
been so ordained by the Almighty Himself. Ivan, speak, is there a God or
not? Stay, speak the truth, speak seriously. Why are you laughing again?”

“I’m laughing that you should have made a clever remark just now about
Smerdyakov’s belief in the existence of two saints who could move
mountains.”

“Why, am I like him now, then?”

“Very much.”

“Well, that shows I’m a Russian, too, and I have a Russian characteristic.
And you may be caught in the same way, though you are a philosopher. Shall
I catch you? What do you bet that I’ll catch you to‐morrow. Speak, all the
same, is there a God, or not? Only, be serious. I want you to be serious
now.”

“No, there is no God.”

“Alyosha, is there a God?”

“There is.”

“Ivan, and is there immortality of some sort, just a little, just a tiny
bit?”

“There is no immortality either.”

“None at all?”

“None at all.”

“There’s absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just something?
Anything is better than nothing!”

“Absolute nothingness.”

“Alyosha, is there immortality?”

“There is.”

“God and immortality?”

“God and immortality. In God is immortality.”

“H’m! It’s more likely Ivan’s right. Good Lord! to think what faith, what
force of all kinds, man has lavished for nothing, on that dream, and for
how many thousand years. Who is it laughing at man? Ivan! For the last
time, once for all, is there a God or not? I ask for the last time!”

“And for the last time there is not.”

“Who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?”

“It must be the devil,” said Ivan, smiling.

“And the devil? Does he exist?”

“No, there’s no devil either.”

“It’s a pity. Damn it all, what wouldn’t I do to the man who first
invented God! Hanging on a bitter aspen tree would be too good for him.”

“There would have been no civilization if they hadn’t invented God.”

“Wouldn’t there have been? Without God?”

“No. And there would have been no brandy either. But I must take your
brandy away from you, anyway.”

“Stop, stop, stop, dear boy, one more little glass. I’ve hurt Alyosha’s
feelings. You’re not angry with me, Alyosha? My dear little Alexey!”

“No, I am not angry. I know your thoughts. Your heart is better than your
head.”

“My heart better than my head, is it? Oh, Lord! And that from you. Ivan,
do you love Alyosha?”

“Yes.”

“You must love him” (Fyodor Pavlovitch was by this time very drunk).
“Listen, Alyosha, I was rude to your elder this morning. But I was
excited. But there’s wit in that elder, don’t you think, Ivan?”

“Very likely.”

“There is, there is. _Il y a du Piron là‐dedans._ He’s a Jesuit, a Russian
one, that is. As he’s an honorable person there’s a hidden indignation
boiling within him at having to pretend and affect holiness.”

“But, of course, he believes in God.”

“Not a bit of it. Didn’t you know? Why, he tells every one so, himself.
That is, not every one, but all the clever people who come to him. He said
straight out to Governor Schultz not long ago: ‘_Credo_, but I don’t know
in what.’ ”

“Really?”

“He really did. But I respect him. There’s something of Mephistopheles
about him, or rather of ‘The hero of our time’ ... Arbenin, or what’s his
name?... You see, he’s a sensualist. He’s such a sensualist that I should
be afraid for my daughter or my wife if she went to confess to him. You
know, when he begins telling stories.... The year before last he invited
us to tea, tea with liqueur (the ladies send him liqueur), and began
telling us about old times till we nearly split our sides.... Especially
how he once cured a paralyzed woman. ‘If my legs were not bad I know a
dance I could dance you,’ he said. What do you say to that? ‘I’ve plenty
of tricks in my time,’ said he. He did Dernidov, the merchant, out of
sixty thousand.”

“What, he stole it?”

“He brought him the money as a man he could trust, saying, ‘Take care of
it for me, friend, there’ll be a police search at my place to‐morrow.’ And
he kept it. ‘You have given it to the Church,’ he declared. I said to him:
‘You’re a scoundrel,’ I said. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I’m not a scoundrel, but I’m
broad‐minded.’ But that wasn’t he, that was some one else. I’ve muddled
him with some one else ... without noticing it. Come, another glass and
that’s enough. Take away the bottle, Ivan. I’ve been telling lies. Why
didn’t you stop me, Ivan, and tell me I was lying?”

“I knew you’d stop of yourself.”

“That’s a lie. You did it from spite, from simple spite against me. You
despise me. You have come to me and despised me in my own house.”

“Well, I’m going away. You’ve had too much brandy.”

“I’ve begged you for Christ’s sake to go to Tchermashnya for a day or two,
and you don’t go.”

“I’ll go to‐morrow if you’re so set upon it.”

“You won’t go. You want to keep an eye on me. That’s what you want,
spiteful fellow. That’s why you won’t go.”

The old man persisted. He had reached that state of drunkenness when the
drunkard who has till then been inoffensive tries to pick a quarrel and to
assert himself.

“Why are you looking at me? Why do you look like that? Your eyes look at
me and say, ‘You ugly drunkard!’ Your eyes are mistrustful. They’re
contemptuous.... You’ve come here with some design. Alyosha, here, looks
at me and his eyes shine. Alyosha doesn’t despise me. Alexey, you mustn’t
love Ivan.”

“Don’t be ill‐tempered with my brother. Leave off attacking him,” Alyosha
said emphatically.

“Oh, all right. Ugh, my head aches. Take away the brandy, Ivan. It’s the
third time I’ve told you.”

He mused, and suddenly a slow, cunning grin spread over his face.

“Don’t be angry with a feeble old man, Ivan. I know you don’t love me, but
don’t be angry all the same. You’ve nothing to love me for. You go to
Tchermashnya. I’ll come to you myself and bring you a present. I’ll show
you a little wench there. I’ve had my eye on her a long time. She’s still
running about bare‐foot. Don’t be afraid of bare‐footed wenches—don’t
despise them—they’re pearls!”

And he kissed his hand with a smack.

“To my thinking,” he revived at once, seeming to grow sober the instant he
touched on his favorite topic. “To my thinking ... Ah, you boys! You
children, little sucking‐pigs, to my thinking ... I never thought a woman
ugly in my life—that’s been my rule! Can you understand that? How could
you understand it? You’ve milk in your veins, not blood. You’re not out of
your shells yet. My rule has been that you can always find something
devilishly interesting in every woman that you wouldn’t find in any other.
Only, one must know how to find it, that’s the point! That’s a talent! To
my mind there are no ugly women. The very fact that she is a woman is half
the battle ... but how could you understand that? Even in _vieilles
filles_, even in them you may discover something that makes you simply
wonder that men have been such fools as to let them grow old without
noticing them. Bare‐footed girls or unattractive ones, you must take by
surprise. Didn’t you know that? You must astound them till they’re
fascinated, upset, ashamed that such a gentleman should fall in love with
such a little slut. It’s a jolly good thing that there always are and will
be masters and slaves in the world, so there always will be a little maid‐
of‐all‐work and her master, and you know, that’s all that’s needed for
happiness. Stay ... listen, Alyosha, I always used to surprise your
mother, but in a different way. I paid no attention to her at all, but all
at once, when the minute came, I’d be all devotion to her, crawl on my
knees, kiss her feet, and I always, always—I remember it as though it were
to‐day—reduced her to that tinkling, quiet, nervous, queer little laugh.
It was peculiar to her. I knew her attacks always used to begin like that.
The next day she would begin shrieking hysterically, and this little laugh
was not a sign of delight, though it made a very good counterfeit. That’s
the great thing, to know how to take every one. Once Belyavsky—he was a
handsome fellow, and rich—used to like to come here and hang about
her—suddenly gave me a slap in the face in her presence. And she—such a
mild sheep—why, I thought she would have knocked me down for that blow.
How she set on me! ‘You’re beaten, beaten now,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken a
blow from him. You have been trying to sell me to him,’ she said.... ‘And
how dared he strike you in my presence! Don’t dare come near me again,
never, never! Run at once, challenge him to a duel!’... I took her to the
monastery then to bring her to her senses. The holy Fathers prayed her
back to reason. But I swear, by God, Alyosha, I never insulted the poor
crazy girl! Only once, perhaps, in the first year; then she was very fond
of praying. She used to keep the feasts of Our Lady particularly and used
to turn me out of her room then. I’ll knock that mysticism out of her,
thought I! ‘Here,’ said I, ‘you see your holy image. Here it is. Here I
take it down. You believe it’s miraculous, but here, I’ll spit on it
directly and nothing will happen to me for it!’... When she saw it, good
Lord! I thought she would kill me. But she only jumped up, wrung her
hands, then suddenly hid her face in them, began trembling all over and
fell on the floor ... fell all of a heap. Alyosha, Alyosha, what’s the
matter?”

The old man jumped up in alarm. From the time he had begun speaking about
his mother, a change had gradually come over Alyosha’s face. He flushed
crimson, his eyes glowed, his lips quivered. The old sot had gone
spluttering on, noticing nothing, till the moment when something very
strange happened to Alyosha. Precisely what he was describing in the crazy
woman was suddenly repeated with Alyosha. He jumped up from his seat
exactly as his mother was said to have done, wrung his hands, hid his face
in them, and fell back in his chair, shaking all over in an hysterical
paroxysm of sudden violent, silent weeping. His extraordinary resemblance
to his mother particularly impressed the old man.

“Ivan, Ivan! Water, quickly! It’s like her, exactly as she used to be
then, his mother. Spurt some water on him from your mouth, that’s what I
used to do to her. He’s upset about his mother, his mother,” he muttered
to Ivan.

“But she was my mother, too, I believe, his mother. Was she not?” said
Ivan, with uncontrolled anger and contempt. The old man shrank before his
flashing eyes. But something very strange had happened, though only for a
second; it seemed really to have escaped the old man’s mind that Alyosha’s
mother actually was the mother of Ivan too.

“Your mother?” he muttered, not understanding. “What do you mean? What
mother are you talking about? Was she?... Why, damn it! of course she was
yours too! Damn it! My mind has never been so darkened before. Excuse me,
why, I was thinking, Ivan.... He he he!” He stopped. A broad, drunken,
half‐senseless grin overspread his face.

At that moment a fearful noise and clamor was heard in the hall, there
were violent shouts, the door was flung open, and Dmitri burst into the
room. The old man rushed to Ivan in terror.

“He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me! Don’t let him get at me!” he screamed,
clinging to the skirt of Ivan’s coat.



Chapter IX. The Sensualists


Grigory and Smerdyakov ran into the room after Dmitri. They had been
struggling with him in the passage, refusing to admit him, acting on
instructions given them by Fyodor Pavlovitch some days before. Taking
advantage of the fact that Dmitri stopped a moment on entering the room to
look about him, Grigory ran round the table, closed the double doors on
the opposite side of the room leading to the inner apartments, and stood
before the closed doors, stretching wide his arms, prepared to defend the
entrance, so to speak, with the last drop of his blood. Seeing this,
Dmitri uttered a scream rather than a shout and rushed at Grigory.

“Then she’s there! She’s hidden there! Out of the way, scoundrel!”

He tried to pull Grigory away, but the old servant pushed him back. Beside
himself with fury, Dmitri struck out, and hit Grigory with all his might.
The old man fell like a log, and Dmitri, leaping over him, broke in the
door. Smerdyakov remained pale and trembling at the other end of the room,
huddling close to Fyodor Pavlovitch.

“She’s here!” shouted Dmitri. “I saw her turn towards the house just now,
but I couldn’t catch her. Where is she? Where is she?”

That shout, “She’s here!” produced an indescribable effect on Fyodor
Pavlovitch. All his terror left him.

“Hold him! Hold him!” he cried, and dashed after Dmitri. Meanwhile Grigory
had got up from the floor, but still seemed stunned. Ivan and Alyosha ran
after their father. In the third room something was heard to fall on the
floor with a ringing crash: it was a large glass vase—not an expensive
one—on a marble pedestal which Dmitri had upset as he ran past it.

“At him!” shouted the old man. “Help!”

Ivan and Alyosha caught the old man and were forcibly bringing him back.

“Why do you run after him? He’ll murder you outright,” Ivan cried
wrathfully at his father.

“Ivan! Alyosha! She must be here. Grushenka’s here. He said he saw her
himself, running.”

He was choking. He was not expecting Grushenka at the time, and the sudden
news that she was here made him beside himself. He was trembling all over.
He seemed frantic.

“But you’ve seen for yourself that she hasn’t come,” cried Ivan.

“But she may have come by that other entrance.”

“You know that entrance is locked, and you have the key.”

Dmitri suddenly reappeared in the drawing‐room. He had, of course, found
the other entrance locked, and the key actually was in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
pocket. The windows of all the rooms were also closed, so Grushenka could
not have come in anywhere nor have run out anywhere.

“Hold him!” shrieked Fyodor Pavlovitch, as soon as he saw him again. “He’s
been stealing money in my bedroom.” And tearing himself from Ivan he
rushed again at Dmitri. But Dmitri threw up both hands and suddenly
clutched the old man by the two tufts of hair that remained on his
temples, tugged at them, and flung him with a crash on the floor. He
kicked him two or three times with his heel in the face. The old man
moaned shrilly. Ivan, though not so strong as Dmitri, threw his arms round
him, and with all his might pulled him away. Alyosha helped him with his
slender strength, holding Dmitri in front.

“Madman! You’ve killed him!” cried Ivan.

“Serve him right!” shouted Dmitri breathlessly. “If I haven’t killed him,
I’ll come again and kill him. You can’t protect him!”

“Dmitri! Go away at once!” cried Alyosha commandingly.

“Alexey! You tell me. It’s only you I can believe; was she here just now,
or not? I saw her myself creeping this way by the fence from the lane. I
shouted, she ran away.”

“I swear she’s not been here, and no one expected her.”

“But I saw her.... So she must ... I’ll find out at once where she is....
Good‐by, Alexey! Not a word to Æsop about the money now. But go to
Katerina Ivanovna at once and be sure to say, ‘He sends his compliments to
you!’ Compliments, his compliments! Just compliments and farewell!
Describe the scene to her.”

Meanwhile Ivan and Grigory had raised the old man and seated him in an
arm‐chair. His face was covered with blood, but he was conscious and
listened greedily to Dmitri’s cries. He was still fancying that Grushenka
really was somewhere in the house. Dmitri looked at him with hatred as he
went out.

“I don’t repent shedding your blood!” he cried. “Beware, old man, beware
of your dream, for I have my dream, too. I curse you, and disown you
altogether.”

He ran out of the room.

“She’s here. She must be here. Smerdyakov! Smerdyakov!” the old man
wheezed, scarcely audibly, beckoning to him with his finger.

“No, she’s not here, you old lunatic!” Ivan shouted at him angrily. “Here,
he’s fainting! Water! A towel! Make haste, Smerdyakov!”

Smerdyakov ran for water. At last they got the old man undressed, and put
him to bed. They wrapped a wet towel round his head. Exhausted by the
brandy, by his violent emotion, and the blows he had received, he shut his
eyes and fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. Ivan and
Alyosha went back to the drawing‐room. Smerdyakov removed the fragments of
the broken vase, while Grigory stood by the table looking gloomily at the
floor.

“Shouldn’t you put a wet bandage on your head and go to bed, too?” Alyosha
said to him. “We’ll look after him. My brother gave you a terrible blow—on
the head.”

“He’s insulted me!” Grigory articulated gloomily and distinctly.

“He’s ‘insulted’ his father, not only you,” observed Ivan with a forced
smile.

“I used to wash him in his tub. He’s insulted me,” repeated Grigory.

“Damn it all, if I hadn’t pulled him away perhaps he’d have murdered him.
It wouldn’t take much to do for Æsop, would it?” whispered Ivan to
Alyosha.

“God forbid!” cried Alyosha.

“Why should He forbid?” Ivan went on in the same whisper, with a malignant
grimace. “One reptile will devour the other. And serve them both right,
too.”

Alyosha shuddered.

“Of course I won’t let him be murdered as I didn’t just now. Stay here,
Alyosha, I’ll go for a turn in the yard. My head’s begun to ache.”

Alyosha went to his father’s bedroom and sat by his bedside behind the
screen for about an hour. The old man suddenly opened his eyes and gazed
for a long while at Alyosha, evidently remembering and meditating. All at
once his face betrayed extraordinary excitement.

“Alyosha,” he whispered apprehensively, “where’s Ivan?”

“In the yard. He’s got a headache. He’s on the watch.”

“Give me that looking‐glass. It stands over there. Give it me.”

Alyosha gave him a little round folding looking‐glass which stood on the
chest of drawers. The old man looked at himself in it; his nose was
considerably swollen, and on the left side of his forehead there was a
rather large crimson bruise.

“What does Ivan say? Alyosha, my dear, my only son, I’m afraid of Ivan.
I’m more afraid of Ivan than the other. You’re the only one I’m not afraid
of....”

“Don’t be afraid of Ivan either. He is angry, but he’ll defend you.”

“Alyosha, and what of the other? He’s run to Grushenka. My angel, tell me
the truth, was she here just now or not?”

“No one has seen her. It was a mistake. She has not been here.”

“You know Mitya wants to marry her, to marry her.”

“She won’t marry him.”

“She won’t. She won’t. She won’t. She won’t on any account!”

The old man fairly fluttered with joy, as though nothing more comforting
could have been said to him. In his delight he seized Alyosha’s hand and
pressed it warmly to his heart. Tears positively glittered in his eyes.

“That image of the Mother of God of which I was telling you just now,” he
said. “Take it home and keep it for yourself. And I’ll let you go back to
the monastery.... I was joking this morning, don’t be angry with me. My
head aches, Alyosha.... Alyosha, comfort my heart. Be an angel and tell me
the truth!”

“You’re still asking whether she has been here or not?” Alyosha said
sorrowfully.

“No, no, no. I believe you. I’ll tell you what it is: you go to Grushenka
yourself, or see her somehow; make haste and ask her; see for yourself,
which she means to choose, him or me. Eh? What? Can you?”

“If I see her I’ll ask her,” Alyosha muttered, embarrassed.

“No, she won’t tell you,” the old man interrupted, “she’s a rogue. She’ll
begin kissing you and say that it’s you she wants. She’s a deceitful,
shameless hussy. You mustn’t go to her, you mustn’t!”

“No, father, and it wouldn’t be suitable, it wouldn’t be right at all.”

“Where was he sending you just now? He shouted ‘Go’ as he ran away.”

“To Katerina Ivanovna.”

“For money? To ask her for money?”

“No. Not for money.”

“He’s no money; not a farthing. I’ll settle down for the night, and think
things over, and you can go. Perhaps you’ll meet her.... Only be sure to
come to me to‐morrow in the morning. Be sure to. I have a word to say to
you to‐morrow. Will you come?”

“Yes.”

“When you come, pretend you’ve come of your own accord to ask after me.
Don’t tell any one I told you to. Don’t say a word to Ivan.”

“Very well.”

“Good‐by, my angel. You stood up for me, just now. I shall never forget
it. I’ve a word to say to you to‐morrow—but I must think about it.”

“And how do you feel now?”

“I shall get up to‐morrow and go out, perfectly well, perfectly well!”

Crossing the yard Alyosha found Ivan sitting on the bench at the gateway.
He was sitting writing something in pencil in his note‐book. Alyosha told
Ivan that their father had waked up, was conscious, and had let him go
back to sleep at the monastery.

“Alyosha, I should be very glad to meet you to‐morrow morning,” said Ivan
cordially, standing up. His cordiality was a complete surprise to Alyosha.

“I shall be at the Hohlakovs’ to‐morrow,” answered Alyosha, “I may be at
Katerina Ivanovna’s, too, if I don’t find her now.”

“But you’re going to her now, anyway? For that ‘compliments and
farewell,’ ” said Ivan smiling. Alyosha was disconcerted.

“I think I quite understand his exclamations just now, and part of what
went before. Dmitri has asked you to go to her and say that he—well, in
fact—takes his leave of her?”

“Brother, how will all this horror end between father and Dmitri?”
exclaimed Alyosha.

“One can’t tell for certain. Perhaps in nothing: it may all fizzle out.
That woman is a beast. In any case we must keep the old man indoors and
not let Dmitri in the house.”

“Brother, let me ask one thing more: has any man a right to look at other
men and decide which is worthy to live?”

“Why bring in the question of worth? The matter is most often decided in
men’s hearts on other grounds much more natural. And as for rights—who has
not the right to wish?”

“Not for another man’s death?”

“What even if for another man’s death? Why lie to oneself since all men
live so and perhaps cannot help living so. Are you referring to what I
said just now—that one reptile will devour the other? In that case let me
ask you, do you think me like Dmitri capable of shedding Æsop’s blood,
murdering him, eh?”

“What are you saying, Ivan? Such an idea never crossed my mind. I don’t
think Dmitri is capable of it, either.”

“Thanks, if only for that,” smiled Ivan. “Be sure, I should always defend
him. But in my wishes I reserve myself full latitude in this case. Good‐by
till to‐morrow. Don’t condemn me, and don’t look on me as a villain,” he
added with a smile.

They shook hands warmly as they had never done before. Alyosha felt that
his brother had taken the first step towards him, and that he had
certainly done this with some definite motive.



Chapter X. Both Together


Alyosha left his father’s house feeling even more exhausted and dejected
in spirit than when he had entered it. His mind too seemed shattered and
unhinged, while he felt that he was afraid to put together the disjointed
fragments and form a general idea from all the agonizing and conflicting
experiences of the day. He felt something bordering upon despair, which he
had never known till then. Towering like a mountain above all the rest
stood the fatal, insoluble question: How would things end between his
father and his brother Dmitri with this terrible woman? Now he had himself
been a witness of it, he had been present and seen them face to face. Yet
only his brother Dmitri could be made unhappy, terribly, completely
unhappy: there was trouble awaiting him. It appeared too that there were
other people concerned, far more so than Alyosha could have supposed
before. There was something positively mysterious in it, too. Ivan had
made a step towards him, which was what Alyosha had been long desiring.
Yet now he felt for some reason that he was frightened at it. And these
women? Strange to say, that morning he had set out for Katerina Ivanovna’s
in the greatest embarrassment; now he felt nothing of the kind. On the
contrary, he was hastening there as though expecting to find guidance from
her. Yet to give her this message was obviously more difficult than
before. The matter of the three thousand was decided irrevocably, and
Dmitri, feeling himself dishonored and losing his last hope, might sink to
any depth. He had, moreover, told him to describe to Katerina Ivanovna the
scene which had just taken place with his father.

It was by now seven o’clock, and it was getting dark as Alyosha entered
the very spacious and convenient house in the High Street occupied by
Katerina Ivanovna. Alyosha knew that she lived with two aunts. One of
them, a woman of little education, was that aunt of her half‐sister Agafya
Ivanovna who had looked after her in her father’s house when she came from
boarding‐school. The other aunt was a Moscow lady of style and
consequence, though in straitened circumstances. It was said that they
both gave way in everything to Katerina Ivanovna, and that she only kept
them with her as chaperons. Katerina Ivanovna herself gave way to no one
but her benefactress, the general’s widow, who had been kept by illness in
Moscow, and to whom she was obliged to write twice a week a full account
of all her doings.

When Alyosha entered the hall and asked the maid who opened the door to
him to take his name up, it was evident that they were already aware of
his arrival. Possibly he had been noticed from the window. At least,
Alyosha heard a noise, caught the sound of flying footsteps and rustling
skirts. Two or three women, perhaps, had run out of the room.

Alyosha thought it strange that his arrival should cause such excitement.
He was conducted however to the drawing‐room at once. It was a large room,
elegantly and amply furnished, not at all in provincial style. There were
many sofas, lounges, settees, big and little tables. There were pictures
on the walls, vases and lamps on the tables, masses of flowers, and even
an aquarium in the window. It was twilight and rather dark. Alyosha made
out a silk mantle thrown down on the sofa, where people had evidently just
been sitting; and on a table in front of the sofa were two unfinished cups
of chocolate, cakes, a glass saucer with blue raisins, and another with
sweetmeats. Alyosha saw that he had interrupted visitors, and frowned. But
at that instant the portière was raised, and with rapid, hurrying
footsteps Katerina Ivanovna came in, holding out both hands to Alyosha
with a radiant smile of delight. At the same instant a servant brought in
two lighted candles and set them on the table.

“Thank God! At last you have come too! I’ve been simply praying for you
all day! Sit down.”

Alyosha had been struck by Katerina Ivanovna’s beauty when, three weeks
before, Dmitri had first brought him, at Katerina Ivanovna’s special
request, to be introduced to her. There had been no conversation between
them at that interview, however. Supposing Alyosha to be very shy,
Katerina Ivanovna had talked all the time to Dmitri to spare him. Alyosha
had been silent, but he had seen a great deal very clearly. He was struck
by the imperiousness, proud ease, and self‐confidence of the haughty girl.
And all that was certain, Alyosha felt that he was not exaggerating it. He
thought her great glowing black eyes were very fine, especially with her
pale, even rather sallow, longish face. But in those eyes and in the lines
of her exquisite lips there was something with which his brother might
well be passionately in love, but which perhaps could not be loved for
long. He expressed this thought almost plainly to Dmitri when, after the
visit, his brother besought and insisted that he should not conceal his
impressions on seeing his betrothed.

“You’ll be happy with her, but perhaps—not tranquilly happy.”

“Quite so, brother. Such people remain always the same. They don’t yield
to fate. So you think I shan’t love her for ever.”

“No; perhaps you will love her for ever. But perhaps you won’t always be
happy with her.”

Alyosha had given his opinion at the time, blushing, and angry with
himself for having yielded to his brother’s entreaties and put such
“foolish” ideas into words. For his opinion had struck him as awfully
foolish immediately after he had uttered it. He felt ashamed too of having
given so confident an opinion about a woman. It was with the more
amazement that he felt now, at the first glance at Katerina Ivanovna as
she ran in to him, that he had perhaps been utterly mistaken. This time
her face was beaming with spontaneous good‐natured kindliness, and direct
warm‐hearted sincerity. The “pride and haughtiness,” which had struck
Alyosha so much before, was only betrayed now in a frank, generous energy
and a sort of bright, strong faith in herself. Alyosha realized at the
first glance, at the first word, that all the tragedy of her position in
relation to the man she loved so dearly was no secret to her; that she
perhaps already knew everything, positively everything. And yet, in spite
of that, there was such brightness in her face, such faith in the future.
Alyosha felt at once that he had gravely wronged her in his thoughts. He
was conquered and captivated immediately. Besides all this, he noticed at
her first words that she was in great excitement, an excitement perhaps
quite exceptional and almost approaching ecstasy.

“I was so eager to see you, because I can learn from you the whole
truth—from you and no one else.”

“I have come,” muttered Alyosha confusedly, “I—he sent me.”

“Ah, he sent you! I foresaw that. Now I know everything—everything!” cried
Katerina Ivanovna, her eyes flashing. “Wait a moment, Alexey Fyodorovitch,
I’ll tell you why I’ve been so longing to see you. You see, I know perhaps
far more than you do yourself, and there’s no need for you to tell me
anything. I’ll tell you what I want from you. I want to know your own last
impression of him. I want you to tell me most directly, plainly, coarsely
even (oh, as coarsely as you like!), what you thought of him just now and
of his position after your meeting with him to‐day. That will perhaps be
better than if I had a personal explanation with him, as he does not want
to come to me. Do you understand what I want from you? Now, tell me
simply, tell me every word of the message he sent you with (I knew he
would send you).”

“He told me to give you his compliments—and to say that he would never
come again—but to give you his compliments.”

“His compliments? Was that what he said—his own expression?”

“Yes.”

“Accidentally perhaps he made a mistake in the word, perhaps he did not
use the right word?”

“No; he told me precisely to repeat that word. He begged me two or three
times not to forget to say so.”

Katerina Ivanovna flushed hotly.

“Help me now, Alexey Fyodorovitch. Now I really need your help. I’ll tell
you what I think, and you must simply say whether it’s right or not.
Listen! If he had sent me his compliments in passing, without insisting on
your repeating the words, without emphasizing them, that would be the end
of everything! But if he particularly insisted on those words, if he
particularly told you not to forget to repeat them to me, then perhaps he
was in excitement, beside himself. He had made his decision and was
frightened at it. He wasn’t walking away from me with a resolute step, but
leaping headlong. The emphasis on that phrase may have been simply
bravado.”

“Yes, yes!” cried Alyosha warmly. “I believe that is it.”

“And, if so, he’s not altogether lost. I can still save him. Stay! Did he
not tell you anything about money—about three thousand roubles?”

“He did speak about it, and it’s that more than anything that’s crushing
him. He said he had lost his honor and that nothing matters now,” Alyosha
answered warmly, feeling a rush of hope in his heart and believing that
there really might be a way of escape and salvation for his brother. “But
do you know about the money?” he added, and suddenly broke off.

“I’ve known of it a long time; I telegraphed to Moscow to inquire, and
heard long ago that the money had not arrived. He hadn’t sent the money,
but I said nothing. Last week I learnt that he was still in need of money.
My only object in all this was that he should know to whom to turn, and
who was his true friend. No, he won’t recognize that I am his truest
friend; he won’t know me, and looks on me merely as a woman. I’ve been
tormented all the week, trying to think how to prevent him from being
ashamed to face me because he spent that three thousand. Let him feel
ashamed of himself, let him be ashamed of other people’s knowing, but not
of my knowing. He can tell God everything without shame. Why is it he
still does not understand how much I am ready to bear for his sake? Why,
why doesn’t he know me? How dare he not know me after all that has
happened? I want to save him for ever. Let him forget me as his betrothed.
And here he fears that he is dishonored in my eyes. Why, he wasn’t afraid
to be open with you, Alexey Fyodorovitch. How is it that I don’t deserve
the same?”

The last words she uttered in tears. Tears gushed from her eyes.

“I must tell you,” Alyosha began, his voice trembling too, “what happened
just now between him and my father.”

And he described the whole scene, how Dmitri had sent him to get the
money, how he had broken in, knocked his father down, and after that had
again specially and emphatically begged him to take his compliments and
farewell. “He went to that woman,” Alyosha added softly.

“And do you suppose that I can’t put up with that woman? Does he think I
can’t? But he won’t marry her,” she suddenly laughed nervously. “Could
such a passion last for ever in a Karamazov? It’s passion, not love. He
won’t marry her because she won’t marry him.” Again Katerina Ivanovna
laughed strangely.

“He may marry her,” said Alyosha mournfully, looking down.

“He won’t marry her, I tell you. That girl is an angel. Do you know that?
Do you know that?” Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed suddenly with extraordinary
warmth. “She is one of the most fantastic of fantastic creatures. I know
how bewitching she is, but I know too that she is kind, firm and noble.
Why do you look at me like that, Alexey Fyodorovitch? Perhaps you are
wondering at my words, perhaps you don’t believe me? Agrafena
Alexandrovna, my angel!” she cried suddenly to some one, peeping into the
next room, “come in to us. This is a friend. This is Alyosha. He knows all
about our affairs. Show yourself to him.”

“I’ve only been waiting behind the curtain for you to call me,” said a
soft, one might even say sugary, feminine voice.

The portière was raised and Grushenka herself, smiling and beaming, came
up to the table. A violent revulsion passed over Alyosha. He fixed his
eyes on her and could not take them off. Here she was, that awful woman,
the “beast,” as Ivan had called her half an hour before. And yet one would
have thought the creature standing before him most simple and ordinary, a
good‐natured, kind woman, handsome certainly, but so like other handsome
ordinary women! It is true she was very, very good‐looking with that
Russian beauty so passionately loved by many men. She was a rather tall
woman, though a little shorter than Katerina Ivanovna, who was
exceptionally tall. She had a full figure, with soft, as it were,
noiseless, movements, softened to a peculiar over‐sweetness, like her
voice. She moved, not like Katerina Ivanovna, with a vigorous, bold step,
but noiselessly. Her feet made absolutely no sound on the floor. She sank
softly into a low chair, softly rustling her sumptuous black silk dress,
and delicately nestling her milk‐white neck and broad shoulders in a
costly cashmere shawl. She was twenty‐two years old, and her face looked
exactly that age. She was very white in the face, with a pale pink tint on
her cheeks. The modeling of her face might be said to be too broad, and
the lower jaw was set a trifle forward. Her upper lip was thin, but the
slightly prominent lower lip was at least twice as full, and looked
pouting. But her magnificent, abundant dark brown hair, her sable‐colored
eyebrows and charming gray‐blue eyes with their long lashes would have
made the most indifferent person, meeting her casually in a crowd in the
street, stop at the sight of her face and remember it long after. What
struck Alyosha most in that face was its expression of childlike good
nature. There was a childlike look in her eyes, a look of childish
delight. She came up to the table, beaming with delight and seeming to
expect something with childish, impatient, and confiding curiosity. The
light in her eyes gladdened the soul—Alyosha felt that. There was
something else in her which he could not understand, or would not have
been able to define, and which yet perhaps unconsciously affected him. It
was that softness, that voluptuousness of her bodily movements, that
catlike noiselessness. Yet it was a vigorous, ample body. Under the shawl
could be seen full broad shoulders, a high, still quite girlish bosom. Her
figure suggested the lines of the Venus of Milo, though already in
somewhat exaggerated proportions. That could be divined. Connoisseurs of
Russian beauty could have foretold with certainty that this fresh, still
youthful beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would
“spread”; that the face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very
soon appear upon her forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would
grow coarse and red perhaps—in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment,
the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women. Alyosha,
of course, did not think of this; but though he was fascinated, yet he
wondered with an unpleasant sensation, and as it were regretfully, why she
drawled in that way and could not speak naturally. She did so evidently
feeling there was a charm in the exaggerated, honeyed modulation of the
syllables. It was, of course, only a bad, underbred habit that showed bad
education and a false idea of good manners. And yet this intonation and
manner of speaking impressed Alyosha as almost incredibly incongruous with
the childishly simple and happy expression of her face, the soft, babyish
joy in her eyes. Katerina Ivanovna at once made her sit down in an arm‐
chair facing Alyosha, and ecstatically kissed her several times on her
smiling lips. She seemed quite in love with her.

“This is the first time we’ve met, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said
rapturously. “I wanted to know her, to see her. I wanted to go to her, but
I’d no sooner expressed the wish than she came to me. I knew we should
settle everything together—everything. My heart told me so—I was begged
not to take the step, but I foresaw it would be a way out of the
difficulty, and I was not mistaken. Grushenka has explained everything to
me, told me all she means to do. She flew here like an angel of goodness
and brought us peace and joy.”

“You did not disdain me, sweet, excellent young lady,” drawled Grushenka
in her sing‐song voice, still with the same charming smile of delight.

“Don’t dare to speak to me like that, you sorceress, you witch! Disdain
you! Here, I must kiss your lower lip once more. It looks as though it
were swollen, and now it will be more so, and more and more. Look how she
laughs, Alexey Fyodorovitch! It does one’s heart good to see the angel.”

Alyosha flushed, and faint, imperceptible shivers kept running down him.

“You make so much of me, dear young lady, and perhaps I am not at all
worthy of your kindness.”

“Not worthy! She’s not worthy of it!” Katerina Ivanovna cried again with
the same warmth. “You know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, we’re fanciful, we’re
self‐willed, but proudest of the proud in our little heart. We’re noble,
we’re generous, Alexey Fyodorovitch, let me tell you. We have only been
unfortunate. We were too ready to make every sacrifice for an unworthy,
perhaps, or fickle man. There was one man—one, an officer too, we loved
him, we sacrificed everything to him. That was long ago, five years ago,
and he has forgotten us, he has married. Now he is a widower, he has
written, he is coming here, and, do you know, we’ve loved him, none but
him, all this time, and we’ve loved him all our life! He will come, and
Grushenka will be happy again. For the last five years she’s been
wretched. But who can reproach her, who can boast of her favor? Only that
bedridden old merchant, but he is more like her father, her friend, her
protector. He found her then in despair, in agony, deserted by the man she
loved. She was ready to drown herself then, but the old merchant saved
her—saved her!”

“You defend me very kindly, dear young lady. You are in a great hurry
about everything,” Grushenka drawled again.

“Defend you! Is it for me to defend you? Should I dare to defend you?
Grushenka, angel, give me your hand. Look at that charming soft little
hand, Alexey Fyodorovitch! Look at it! It has brought me happiness and has
lifted me up, and I’m going to kiss it, outside and inside, here, here,
here!”

And three times she kissed the certainly charming, though rather fat, hand
of Grushenka in a sort of rapture. She held out her hand with a charming
musical, nervous little laugh, watched the “sweet young lady,” and
obviously liked having her hand kissed.

“Perhaps there’s rather too much rapture,” thought Alyosha. He blushed. He
felt a peculiar uneasiness at heart the whole time.

“You won’t make me blush, dear young lady, kissing my hand like this
before Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

“Do you think I meant to make you blush?” said Katerina Ivanovna, somewhat
surprised. “Ah, my dear, how little you understand me!”

“Yes, and you too perhaps quite misunderstand me, dear young lady. Maybe
I’m not so good as I seem to you. I’ve a bad heart; I will have my own
way. I fascinated poor Dmitri Fyodorovitch that day simply for fun.”

“But now you’ll save him. You’ve given me your word. You’ll explain it all
to him. You’ll break to him that you have long loved another man, who is
now offering you his hand.”

“Oh, no! I didn’t give you my word to do that. It was you kept talking
about that. I didn’t give you my word.”

“Then I didn’t quite understand you,” said Katerina Ivanovna slowly,
turning a little pale. “You promised—”

“Oh, no, angel lady, I’ve promised nothing,” Grushenka interrupted softly
and evenly, still with the same gay and simple expression. “You see at
once, dear young lady, what a willful wretch I am compared with you. If I
want to do a thing I do it. I may have made you some promise just now. But
now again I’m thinking: I may take to Mitya again. I liked him very much
once—liked him for almost a whole hour. Now maybe I shall go and tell him
to stay with me from this day forward. You see, I’m so changeable.”

“Just now you said—something quite different,” Katerina Ivanovna whispered
faintly.

“Ah, just now! But, you know. I’m such a soft‐hearted, silly creature.
Only think what he’s gone through on my account! What if when I go home I
feel sorry for him? What then?”

“I never expected—”

“Ah, young lady, how good and generous you are compared with me! Now
perhaps you won’t care for a silly creature like me, now you know my
character. Give me your sweet little hand, angelic lady,” she said
tenderly, and with a sort of reverence took Katerina Ivanovna’s hand.

“Here, dear young lady, I’ll take your hand and kiss it as you did mine.
You kissed mine three times, but I ought to kiss yours three hundred times
to be even with you. Well, but let that pass. And then it shall be as God
wills. Perhaps I shall be your slave entirely and want to do your bidding
like a slave. Let it be as God wills, without any agreements and promises.
What a sweet hand—what a sweet hand you have! You sweet young lady, you
incredible beauty!”

She slowly raised the hands to her lips, with the strange object indeed of
“being even” with her in kisses.

Katerina Ivanovna did not take her hand away. She listened with timid hope
to the last words, though Grushenka’s promise to do her bidding like a
slave was very strangely expressed. She looked intently into her eyes; she
still saw in those eyes the same simple‐hearted, confiding expression, the
same bright gayety.

“She’s perhaps too naïve,” thought Katerina Ivanovna, with a gleam of
hope.

Grushenka meanwhile seemed enthusiastic over the “sweet hand.” She raised
it deliberately to her lips. But she held it for two or three minutes near
her lips, as though reconsidering something.

“Do you know, angel lady,” she suddenly drawled in an even more soft and
sugary voice, “do you know, after all, I think I won’t kiss your hand?”
And she laughed a little merry laugh.

“As you please. What’s the matter with you?” said Katerina Ivanovna,
starting suddenly.

“So that you may be left to remember that you kissed my hand, but I didn’t
kiss yours.”

There was a sudden gleam in her eyes. She looked with awful intentness at
Katerina Ivanovna.

“Insolent creature!” cried Katerina Ivanovna, as though suddenly grasping
something. She flushed all over and leapt up from her seat.

Grushenka too got up, but without haste.

“So I shall tell Mitya how you kissed my hand, but I didn’t kiss yours at
all. And how he will laugh!”

“Vile slut! Go away!”

“Ah, for shame, young lady! Ah, for shame! That’s unbecoming for you, dear
young lady, a word like that.”

“Go away! You’re a creature for sale!” screamed Katerina Ivanovna. Every
feature was working in her utterly distorted face.

“For sale indeed! You used to visit gentlemen in the dusk for money once;
you brought your beauty for sale. You see, I know.”

Katerina Ivanovna shrieked, and would have rushed at her, but Alyosha held
her with all his strength.

“Not a step, not a word! Don’t speak, don’t answer her. She’ll go
away—she’ll go at once.”

At that instant Katerina Ivanovna’s two aunts ran in at her cry, and with
them a maid‐servant. All hurried to her.

“I will go away,” said Grushenka, taking up her mantle from the sofa.
“Alyosha, darling, see me home!”

“Go away—go away, make haste!” cried Alyosha, clasping his hands
imploringly.

“Dear little Alyosha, see me home! I’ve got a pretty little story to tell
you on the way. I got up this scene for your benefit, Alyosha. See me
home, dear, you’ll be glad of it afterwards.”

Alyosha turned away, wringing his hands. Grushenka ran out of the house,
laughing musically.

Katerina Ivanovna went into a fit of hysterics. She sobbed, and was shaken
with convulsions. Every one fussed round her.

“I warned you,” said the elder of her aunts. “I tried to prevent your
doing this. You’re too impulsive. How could you do such a thing? You don’t
know these creatures, and they say she’s worse than any of them. You are
too self‐willed.”

“She’s a tigress!” yelled Katerina Ivanovna. “Why did you hold me, Alexey
Fyodorovitch? I’d have beaten her—beaten her!”

She could not control herself before Alyosha; perhaps she did not care to,
indeed.

“She ought to be flogged in public on a scaffold!”

Alyosha withdrew towards the door.

“But, my God!” cried Katerina Ivanovna, clasping her hands. “He! He! He
could be so dishonorable, so inhuman! Why, he told that creature what
happened on that fatal, accursed day! ‘You brought your beauty for sale,
dear young lady.’ She knows it! Your brother’s a scoundrel, Alexey
Fyodorovitch.”

Alyosha wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find a word. His heart
ached.

“Go away, Alexey Fyodorovitch! It’s shameful, it’s awful for me! To‐
morrow, I beg you on my knees, come to‐morrow. Don’t condemn me. Forgive
me. I don’t know what I shall do with myself now!”

Alyosha walked out into the street reeling. He could have wept as she did.
Suddenly he was overtaken by the maid.

“The young lady forgot to give you this letter from Madame Hohlakov; it’s
been left with us since dinner‐time.”

Alyosha took the little pink envelope mechanically and put it, almost
unconsciously, into his pocket.



Chapter XI. Another Reputation Ruined


It was not much more than three‐quarters of a mile from the town to the
monastery. Alyosha walked quickly along the road, at that hour deserted.
It was almost night, and too dark to see anything clearly at thirty paces
ahead. There were cross‐roads half‐way. A figure came into sight under a
solitary willow at the cross‐roads. As soon as Alyosha reached the cross‐
roads the figure moved out and rushed at him, shouting savagely:

“Your money or your life!”

“So it’s you, Mitya,” cried Alyosha, in surprise, violently startled
however.

“Ha ha ha! You didn’t expect me? I wondered where to wait for you. By her
house? There are three ways from it, and I might have missed you. At last
I thought of waiting here, for you had to pass here, there’s no other way
to the monastery. Come, tell me the truth. Crush me like a beetle. But
what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, brother—it’s the fright you gave me. Oh, Dmitri! Father’s blood
just now.” (Alyosha began to cry, he had been on the verge of tears for a
long time, and now something seemed to snap in his soul.) “You almost
killed him—cursed him—and now—here—you’re making jokes—‘Your money or your
life!’ ”

“Well, what of that? It’s not seemly—is that it? Not suitable in my
position?”

“No—I only—”

“Stay. Look at the night. You see what a dark night, what clouds, what a
wind has risen. I hid here under the willow waiting for you. And as God’s
above, I suddenly thought, why go on in misery any longer, what is there
to wait for? Here I have a willow, a handkerchief, a shirt, I can twist
them into a rope in a minute, and braces besides, and why go on burdening
the earth, dishonoring it with my vile presence? And then I heard you
coming—Heavens, it was as though something flew down to me suddenly. So
there is a man, then, whom I love. Here he is, that man, my dear little
brother, whom I love more than any one in the world, the only one I love
in the world. And I loved you so much, so much at that moment that I
thought, ‘I’ll fall on his neck at once.’ Then a stupid idea struck me, to
have a joke with you and scare you. I shouted, like a fool, ‘Your money!’
Forgive my foolery—it was only nonsense, and there’s nothing unseemly in
my soul.... Damn it all, tell me what’s happened. What did she say? Strike
me, crush me, don’t spare me! Was she furious?”

“No, not that.... There was nothing like that, Mitya. There—I found them
both there.”

“Both? Whom?”

“Grushenka at Katerina Ivanovna’s.”

Dmitri was struck dumb.

“Impossible!” he cried. “You’re raving! Grushenka with her?”

Alyosha described all that had happened from the moment he went in to
Katerina Ivanovna’s. He was ten minutes telling his story. He can’t be
said to have told it fluently and consecutively, but he seemed to make it
clear, not omitting any word or action of significance, and vividly
describing, often in one word, his own sensations. Dmitri listened in
silence, gazing at him with a terrible fixed stare, but it was clear to
Alyosha that he understood it all, and had grasped every point. But as the
story went on, his face became not merely gloomy, but menacing. He
scowled, he clenched his teeth, and his fixed stare became still more
rigid, more concentrated, more terrible, when suddenly, with incredible
rapidity, his wrathful, savage face changed, his tightly compressed lips
parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch broke into uncontrolled, spontaneous
laughter. He literally shook with laughter. For a long time he could not
speak.

“So she wouldn’t kiss her hand! So she didn’t kiss it; so she ran away!”
he kept exclaiming with hysterical delight; insolent delight it might have
been called, if it had not been so spontaneous. “So the other one called
her tigress! And a tigress she is! So she ought to be flogged on a
scaffold? Yes, yes, so she ought. That’s just what I think; she ought to
have been long ago. It’s like this, brother, let her be punished, but I
must get better first. I understand the queen of impudence. That’s her all
over! You saw her all over in that hand‐kissing, the she‐devil! She’s
magnificent in her own line! So she ran home? I’ll go—ah—I’ll run to her!
Alyosha, don’t blame me, I agree that hanging is too good for her.”

“But Katerina Ivanovna!” exclaimed Alyosha sorrowfully.

“I see her, too! I see right through her, as I’ve never done before! It’s
a regular discovery of the four continents of the world, that is, of the
five! What a thing to do! That’s just like Katya, who was not afraid to
face a coarse, unmannerly officer and risk a deadly insult on a generous
impulse to save her father! But the pride, the recklessness, the defiance
of fate, the unbounded defiance! You say that aunt tried to stop her? That
aunt, you know, is overbearing, herself. She’s the sister of the general’s
widow in Moscow, and even more stuck‐up than she. But her husband was
caught stealing government money. He lost everything, his estate and all,
and the proud wife had to lower her colors, and hasn’t raised them since.
So she tried to prevent Katya, but she wouldn’t listen to her! She thinks
she can overcome everything, that everything will give way to her. She
thought she could bewitch Grushenka if she liked, and she believed it
herself: she plays a part to herself, and whose fault is it? Do you think
she kissed Grushenka’s hand first, on purpose, with a motive? No, she
really was fascinated by Grushenka, that’s to say, not by Grushenka, but
by her own dream, her own delusion—because it was _her_ dream, _her_
delusion! Alyosha, darling, how did you escape from them, those women? Did
you pick up your cassock and run? Ha ha ha!”

“Brother, you don’t seem to have noticed how you’ve insulted Katerina
Ivanovna by telling Grushenka about that day. And she flung it in her face
just now that she had gone to gentlemen in secret to sell her beauty!
Brother, what could be worse than that insult?”

What worried Alyosha more than anything was that, incredible as it seemed,
his brother appeared pleased at Katerina Ivanovna’s humiliation.

“Bah!” Dmitri frowned fiercely, and struck his forehead with his hand. He
only now realized it, though Alyosha had just told him of the insult, and
Katerina Ivanovna’s cry: “Your brother is a scoundrel!”

“Yes, perhaps, I really did tell Grushenka about that ‘fatal day,’ as
Katya calls it. Yes, I did tell her, I remember! It was that time at
Mokroe. I was drunk, the gypsies were singing.... But I was sobbing. I was
sobbing then, kneeling and praying to Katya’s image, and Grushenka
understood it. She understood it all then. I remember, she cried
herself.... Damn it all! But it’s bound to be so now.... Then she cried,
but now ‘the dagger in the heart’! That’s how women are.”

He looked down and sank into thought.

“Yes, I am a scoundrel, a thorough scoundrel!” he said suddenly, in a
gloomy voice. “It doesn’t matter whether I cried or not, I’m a scoundrel!
Tell her I accept the name, if that’s any comfort. Come, that’s enough.
Good‐by. It’s no use talking! It’s not amusing. You go your way and I
mine. And I don’t want to see you again except as a last resource. Good‐
by, Alexey!”

He warmly pressed Alyosha’s hand, and still looking down, without raising
his head, as though tearing himself away, turned rapidly towards the town.

Alyosha looked after him, unable to believe he would go away so abruptly.

“Stay, Alexey, one more confession to you alone!” cried Dmitri, suddenly
turning back. “Look at me. Look at me well. You see here, here—there’s
terrible disgrace in store for me.” (As he said “here,” Dmitri struck his
chest with his fist with a strange air, as though the dishonor lay
precisely on his chest, in some spot, in a pocket, perhaps, or hanging
round his neck.) “You know me now, a scoundrel, an avowed scoundrel, but
let me tell you that I’ve never done anything before and never shall
again, anything that can compare in baseness with the dishonor which I
bear now at this very minute on my breast, here, here, which will come to
pass, though I’m perfectly free to stop it. I can stop it or carry it
through, note that. Well, let me tell you, I shall carry it through. I
shan’t stop it. I told you everything just now, but I didn’t tell you
this, because even I had not brass enough for it. I can still pull up; if
I do, I can give back the full half of my lost honor to‐morrow. But I
shan’t pull up. I shall carry out my base plan, and you can bear witness
that I told you so beforehand. Darkness and destruction! No need to
explain. You’ll find out in due time. The filthy back‐alley and the she‐
devil. Good‐by. Don’t pray for me, I’m not worth it. And there’s no need,
no need at all.... I don’t need it! Away!”

And he suddenly retreated, this time finally. Alyosha went towards the
monastery.

“What? I shall never see him again! What is he saying?” he wondered
wildly. “Why, I shall certainly see him to‐morrow. I shall look him up. I
shall make a point of it. What does he mean?”

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

He went round the monastery, and crossed the pine‐wood to the hermitage.
The door was opened to him, though no one was admitted at that hour. There
was a tremor in his heart as he went into Father Zossima’s cell.

“Why, why, had he gone forth? Why had he sent him into the world? Here was
peace. Here was holiness. But there was confusion, there was darkness in
which one lost one’s way and went astray at once....”

In the cell he found the novice Porfiry and Father Païssy, who came every
hour to inquire after Father Zossima. Alyosha learnt with alarm that he
was getting worse and worse. Even his usual discourse with the brothers
could not take place that day. As a rule every evening after service the
monks flocked into Father Zossima’s cell, and all confessed aloud their
sins of the day, their sinful thoughts and temptations; even their
disputes, if there had been any. Some confessed kneeling. The elder
absolved, reconciled, exhorted, imposed penance, blessed, and dismissed
them. It was against this general “confession” that the opponents of
“elders” protested, maintaining that it was a profanation of the sacrament
of confession, almost a sacrilege, though this was quite a different
thing. They even represented to the diocesan authorities that such
confessions attained no good object, but actually to a large extent led to
sin and temptation. Many of the brothers disliked going to the elder, and
went against their own will because every one went, and for fear they
should be accused of pride and rebellious ideas. People said that some of
the monks agreed beforehand, saying, “I’ll confess I lost my temper with
you this morning, and you confirm it,” simply in order to have something
to say. Alyosha knew that this actually happened sometimes. He knew, too,
that there were among the monks some who deeply resented the fact that
letters from relations were habitually taken to the elder, to be opened
and read by him before those to whom they were addressed.

It was assumed, of course, that all this was done freely, and in good
faith, by way of voluntary submission and salutary guidance. But, in fact,
there was sometimes no little insincerity, and much that was false and
strained in this practice. Yet the older and more experienced of the monks
adhered to their opinion, arguing that “for those who have come within
these walls sincerely seeking salvation, such obedience and sacrifice will
certainly be salutary and of great benefit; those, on the other hand, who
find it irksome, and repine, are no true monks, and have made a mistake in
entering the monastery—their proper place is in the world. Even in the
temple one cannot be safe from sin and the devil. So it was no good taking
it too much into account.”

“He is weaker, a drowsiness has come over him,” Father Païssy whispered to
Alyosha, as he blessed him. “It’s difficult to rouse him. And he must not
be roused. He waked up for five minutes, sent his blessing to the
brothers, and begged their prayers for him at night. He intends to take
the sacrament again in the morning. He remembered you, Alexey. He asked
whether you had gone away, and was told that you were in the town. ‘I
blessed him for that work,’ he said, ‘his place is there, not here, for
awhile.’ Those were his words about you. He remembered you lovingly, with
anxiety; do you understand how he honored you? But how is it that he has
decided that you shall spend some time in the world? He must have foreseen
something in your destiny! Understand, Alexey, that if you return to the
world, it must be to do the duty laid upon you by your elder, and not for
frivolous vanity and worldly pleasures.”

Father Païssy went out. Alyosha had no doubt that Father Zossima was
dying, though he might live another day or two. Alyosha firmly and
ardently resolved that in spite of his promises to his father, the
Hohlakovs, and Katerina Ivanovna, he would not leave the monastery next
day, but would remain with his elder to the end. His heart glowed with
love, and he reproached himself bitterly for having been able for one
instant to forget him whom he had left in the monastery on his deathbed,
and whom he honored above every one in the world. He went into Father
Zossima’s bedroom, knelt down, and bowed to the ground before the elder,
who slept quietly without stirring, with regular, hardly audible breathing
and a peaceful face.

Alyosha returned to the other room, where Father Zossima had received his
guests in the morning. Taking off his boots, he lay down on the hard,
narrow, leathern sofa, which he had long used as a bed, bringing nothing
but a pillow. The mattress, about which his father had shouted to him that
morning, he had long forgotten to lie on. He took off his cassock, which
he used as a covering. But before going to bed, he fell on his knees and
prayed a long time. In his fervent prayer he did not beseech God to
lighten his darkness but only thirsted for the joyous emotion, which
always visited his soul after the praise and adoration, of which his
evening prayer usually consisted. That joy always brought him light
untroubled sleep. As he was praying, he suddenly felt in his pocket the
little pink note the servant had handed him as he left Katerina
Ivanovna’s. He was disturbed, but finished his prayer. Then, after some
hesitation, he opened the envelope. In it was a letter to him, signed by
Lise, the young daughter of Madame Hohlakov, who had laughed at him before
the elder in the morning.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she wrote, “I am writing to you without any one’s
knowledge, even mamma’s, and I know how wrong it is. But I cannot live
without telling you the feeling that has sprung up in my heart, and this
no one but us two must know for a time. But how am I to say what I want so
much to tell you? Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it’s
not true and that it’s blushing just as I am now, all over. Dear Alyosha,
I love you, I’ve loved you from my childhood, since our Moscow days, when
you were very different from what you are now, and I shall love you all my
life. My heart has chosen you, to unite our lives, and pass them together
till our old age. Of course, on condition that you will leave the
monastery. As for our age we will wait for the time fixed by the law. By
that time I shall certainly be quite strong, I shall be walking and
dancing. There can be no doubt of that.

“You see how I’ve thought of everything. There’s only one thing I can’t
imagine: what you’ll think of me when you read this. I’m always laughing
and being naughty. I made you angry this morning, but I assure you before
I took up my pen, I prayed before the Image of the Mother of God, and now
I’m praying, and almost crying.

“My secret is in your hands. When you come to‐morrow, I don’t know how I
shall look at you. Ah, Alexey Fyodorovitch, what if I can’t restrain
myself like a silly and laugh when I look at you as I did to‐day. You’ll
think I’m a nasty girl making fun of you, and you won’t believe my letter.
And so I beg you, dear one, if you’ve any pity for me, when you come to‐
morrow, don’t look me straight in the face, for if I meet your eyes, it
will be sure to make me laugh, especially as you’ll be in that long gown.
I feel cold all over when I think of it, so when you come, don’t look at
me at all for a time, look at mamma or at the window....

“Here I’ve written you a love‐letter. Oh, dear, what have I done? Alyosha,
don’t despise me, and if I’ve done something very horrid and wounded you,
forgive me. Now the secret of my reputation, ruined perhaps for ever, is
in your hands.

“I shall certainly cry to‐day. Good‐by till our meeting, our _awful_
meeting.—LISE.

“P.S.—Alyosha! You must, must, must come!—LISE.”

Alyosha read the note in amazement, read it through twice, thought a
little, and suddenly laughed a soft, sweet laugh. He started. That laugh
seemed to him sinful. But a minute later he laughed again just as softly
and happily. He slowly replaced the note in the envelope, crossed himself
and lay down. The agitation in his heart passed at once. “God, have mercy
upon all of them, have all these unhappy and turbulent souls in Thy
keeping, and set them in the right path. All ways are Thine. Save them
according to Thy wisdom. Thou art love. Thou wilt send joy to all!”
Alyosha murmured, crossing himself, and falling into peaceful sleep.





PART II




Book IV. Lacerations



Chapter I. Father Ferapont


Alyosha was roused early, before daybreak. Father Zossima woke up feeling
very weak, though he wanted to get out of bed and sit up in a chair. His
mind was quite clear; his face looked very tired, yet bright and almost
joyful. It wore an expression of gayety, kindness and cordiality. “Maybe I
shall not live through the coming day,” he said to Alyosha. Then he
desired to confess and take the sacrament at once. He always confessed to
Father Païssy. After taking the communion, the service of extreme unction
followed. The monks assembled and the cell was gradually filled up by the
inmates of the hermitage. Meantime it was daylight. People began coming
from the monastery. After the service was over the elder desired to kiss
and take leave of every one. As the cell was so small the earlier visitors
withdrew to make room for others. Alyosha stood beside the elder, who was
seated again in his arm‐chair. He talked as much as he could. Though his
voice was weak, it was fairly steady.

“I’ve been teaching you so many years, and therefore I’ve been talking
aloud so many years, that I’ve got into the habit of talking, and so much
so that it’s almost more difficult for me to hold my tongue than to talk,
even now, in spite of my weakness, dear Fathers and brothers,” he jested,
looking with emotion at the group round him.

Alyosha remembered afterwards something of what he said to them. But
though he spoke out distinctly and his voice was fairly steady, his speech
was somewhat disconnected. He spoke of many things, he seemed anxious
before the moment of death to say everything he had not said in his life,
and not simply for the sake of instructing them, but as though thirsting
to share with all men and all creation his joy and ecstasy, and once more
in his life to open his whole heart.

“Love one another, Fathers,” said Father Zossima, as far as Alyosha could
remember afterwards. “Love God’s people. Because we have come here and
shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are
outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of
us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on
earth.... And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly
he must recognize that. Else he would have had no reason to come here.
When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is
responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins,
national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained.
For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for
all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness
of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual
man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man.
For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to
be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite,
universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power
to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world
with your tears.... Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess
your sins to yourself unceasingly. Be not afraid of your sins, even when
perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with
God. Again I say, Be not proud. Be proud neither to the little nor to the
great. Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and
slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the
materialists—and I mean not only the good ones—for there are many good
ones among them, especially in our day—hate not even the wicked ones.
Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none
to pray for them, save too all those who will not pray. And add: it is not
in pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men....
Love God’s people, let not strangers draw away the flock, for if you
slumber in your slothfulness and disdainful pride, or worse still, in
covetousness, they will come from all sides and draw away your flock.
Expound the Gospel to the people unceasingly ... be not extortionate....
Do not love gold and silver, do not hoard them.... Have faith. Cling to
the banner and raise it on high.”

But the elder spoke more disconnectedly than Alyosha reported his words
afterwards. Sometimes he broke off altogether, as though to take breath,
and recover his strength, but he was in a sort of ecstasy. They heard him
with emotion, though many wondered at his words and found them obscure....
Afterwards all remembered those words.

When Alyosha happened for a moment to leave the cell, he was struck by the
general excitement and suspense in the monks who were crowding about it.
This anticipation showed itself in some by anxiety, in others by devout
solemnity. All were expecting that some marvel would happen immediately
after the elder’s death. Their suspense was, from one point of view,
almost frivolous, but even the most austere of the monks were affected by
it. Father Païssy’s face looked the gravest of all.

Alyosha was mysteriously summoned by a monk to see Rakitin, who had
arrived from town with a singular letter for him from Madame Hohlakov. In
it she informed Alyosha of a strange and very opportune incident. It
appeared that among the women who had come on the previous day to receive
Father Zossima’s blessing, there had been an old woman from the town, a
sergeant’s widow, called Prohorovna. She had inquired whether she might
pray for the rest of the soul of her son, Vassenka, who had gone to
Irkutsk, and had sent her no news for over a year. To which Father Zossima
had answered sternly, forbidding her to do so, and saying that to pray for
the living as though they were dead was a kind of sorcery. He afterwards
forgave her on account of her ignorance, and added, “as though reading the
book of the future” (this was Madame Hohlakov’s expression), words of
comfort: “that her son Vassya was certainly alive and he would either come
himself very shortly or send a letter, and that she was to go home and
expect him.” And “Would you believe it?” exclaimed Madame Hohlakov
enthusiastically, “the prophecy has been fulfilled literally indeed, and
more than that.” Scarcely had the old woman reached home when they gave
her a letter from Siberia which had been awaiting her. But that was not
all; in the letter written on the road from Ekaterinenburg, Vassya
informed his mother that he was returning to Russia with an official, and
that three weeks after her receiving the letter he hoped “to embrace his
mother.”

Madame Hohlakov warmly entreated Alyosha to report this new “miracle of
prediction” to the Superior and all the brotherhood. “All, all, ought to
know of it!” she concluded. The letter had been written in haste, the
excitement of the writer was apparent in every line of it. But Alyosha had
no need to tell the monks, for all knew of it already. Rakitin had
commissioned the monk who brought his message “to inform most respectfully
his reverence Father Païssy, that he, Rakitin, has a matter to speak of
with him, of such gravity that he dare not defer it for a moment, and
humbly begs forgiveness for his presumption.” As the monk had given the
message to Father Païssy before that to Alyosha, the latter found after
reading the letter, there was nothing left for him to do but to hand it to
Father Païssy in confirmation of the story.

And even that austere and cautious man, though he frowned as he read the
news of the “miracle,” could not completely restrain some inner emotion.
His eyes gleamed, and a grave and solemn smile came into his lips.

“We shall see greater things!” broke from him.

“We shall see greater things, greater things yet!” the monks around
repeated.

But Father Païssy, frowning again, begged all of them, at least for a
time, not to speak of the matter “till it be more fully confirmed, seeing
there is so much credulity among those of this world, and indeed this
might well have chanced naturally,” he added, prudently, as it were to
satisfy his conscience, though scarcely believing his own disavowal, a
fact his listeners very clearly perceived.

Within the hour the “miracle” was of course known to the whole monastery,
and many visitors who had come for the mass. No one seemed more impressed
by it than the monk who had come the day before from St. Sylvester, from
the little monastery of Obdorsk in the far North. It was he who had been
standing near Madame Hohlakov the previous day and had asked Father
Zossima earnestly, referring to the “healing” of the lady’s daughter, “How
can you presume to do such things?”

He was now somewhat puzzled and did not know whom to believe. The evening
before he had visited Father Ferapont in his cell apart, behind the
apiary, and had been greatly impressed and overawed by the visit. This
Father Ferapont was that aged monk so devout in fasting and observing
silence who has been mentioned already, as antagonistic to Father Zossima
and the whole institution of “elders,” which he regarded as a pernicious
and frivolous innovation. He was a very formidable opponent, although from
his practice of silence he scarcely spoke a word to any one. What made him
formidable was that a number of monks fully shared his feeling, and many
of the visitors looked upon him as a great saint and ascetic, although
they had no doubt that he was crazy. But it was just his craziness
attracted them.

Father Ferapont never went to see the elder. Though he lived in the
hermitage they did not worry him to keep its regulations, and this too
because he behaved as though he were crazy. He was seventy‐five or more,
and he lived in a corner beyond the apiary in an old decaying wooden cell
which had been built long ago for another great ascetic, Father Iona, who
had lived to be a hundred and five, and of whose saintly doings many
curious stories were still extant in the monastery and the neighborhood.

Father Ferapont had succeeded in getting himself installed in this same
solitary cell seven years previously. It was simply a peasant’s hut,
though it looked like a chapel, for it contained an extraordinary number
of ikons with lamps perpetually burning before them—which men brought to
the monastery as offerings to God. Father Ferapont had been appointed to
look after them and keep the lamps burning. It was said (and indeed it was
true) that he ate only two pounds of bread in three days. The beekeeper,
who lived close by the apiary, used to bring him the bread every three
days, and even to this man who waited upon him, Father Ferapont rarely
uttered a word. The four pounds of bread, together with the sacrament
bread, regularly sent him on Sundays after the late mass by the Father
Superior, made up his weekly rations. The water in his jug was changed
every day. He rarely appeared at mass. Visitors who came to do him homage
saw him sometimes kneeling all day long at prayer without looking round.
If he addressed them, he was brief, abrupt, strange, and almost always
rude. On very rare occasions, however, he would talk to visitors, but for
the most part he would utter some one strange saying which was a complete
riddle, and no entreaties would induce him to pronounce a word in
explanation. He was not a priest, but a simple monk. There was a strange
belief, chiefly however among the most ignorant, that Father Ferapont had
communication with heavenly spirits and would only converse with them, and
so was silent with men.

The monk from Obdorsk, having been directed to the apiary by the
beekeeper, who was also a very silent and surly monk, went to the corner
where Father Ferapont’s cell stood. “Maybe he will speak as you are a
stranger and maybe you’ll get nothing out of him,” the beekeeper had
warned him. The monk, as he related afterwards, approached in the utmost
apprehension. It was rather late in the evening. Father Ferapont was
sitting at the door of his cell on a low bench. A huge old elm was lightly
rustling overhead. There was an evening freshness in the air. The monk
from Obdorsk bowed down before the saint and asked his blessing.

“Do you want me to bow down to you, monk?” said Father Ferapont. “Get up!”

The monk got up.

“Blessing, be blessed! Sit beside me. Where have you come from?”

What most struck the poor monk was the fact that in spite of his strict
fasting and great age, Father Ferapont still looked a vigorous old man. He
was tall, held himself erect, and had a thin, but fresh and healthy face.
There was no doubt he still had considerable strength. He was of athletic
build. In spite of his great age he was not even quite gray, and still had
very thick hair and a full beard, both of which had once been black. His
eyes were gray, large and luminous, but strikingly prominent. He spoke
with a broad accent. He was dressed in a peasant’s long reddish coat of
coarse convict cloth (as it used to be called) and had a stout rope round
his waist. His throat and chest were bare. Beneath his coat, his shirt of
the coarsest linen showed almost black with dirt, not having been changed
for months. They said that he wore irons weighing thirty pounds under his
coat. His stockingless feet were thrust in old slippers almost dropping to
pieces.

“From the little Obdorsk monastery, from St. Sylvester,” the monk answered
humbly, whilst his keen and inquisitive, but rather frightened little eyes
kept watch on the hermit.

“I have been at your Sylvester’s. I used to stay there. Is Sylvester
well?”

The monk hesitated.

“You are a senseless lot! How do you keep the fasts?”

“Our dietary is according to the ancient conventual rules. During Lent
there are no meals provided for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For Tuesday
and Thursday we have white bread, stewed fruit with honey, wild berries,
or salt cabbage and wholemeal stirabout. On Saturday white cabbage soup,
noodles with peas, kasha, all with hemp oil. On weekdays we have dried
fish and kasha with the cabbage soup. From Monday till Saturday evening,
six whole days in Holy Week, nothing is cooked, and we have only bread and
water, and that sparingly; if possible not taking food every day, just the
same as is ordered for first week in Lent. On Good Friday nothing is
eaten. In the same way on the Saturday we have to fast till three o’clock,
and then take a little bread and water and drink a single cup of wine. On
Holy Thursday we drink wine and have something cooked without oil or not
cooked at all, inasmuch as the Laodicean council lays down for Holy
Thursday: ‘It is unseemly by remitting the fast on the Holy Thursday to
dishonor the whole of Lent!’ This is how we keep the fast. But what is
that compared with you, holy Father,” added the monk, growing more
confident, “for all the year round, even at Easter, you take nothing but
bread and water, and what we should eat in two days lasts you full seven.
It’s truly marvelous—your great abstinence.”

“And mushrooms?” asked Father Ferapont, suddenly.

“Mushrooms?” repeated the surprised monk.

“Yes. I can give up their bread, not needing it at all, and go away into
the forest and live there on the mushrooms or the berries, but they can’t
give up their bread here, wherefore they are in bondage to the devil.
Nowadays the unclean deny that there is need of such fasting. Haughty and
unclean is their judgment.”

“Och, true,” sighed the monk.

“And have you seen devils among them?” asked Ferapont.

“Among them? Among whom?” asked the monk, timidly.

“I went to the Father Superior on Trinity Sunday last year, I haven’t been
since. I saw a devil sitting on one man’s chest hiding under his cassock,
only his horns poked out; another had one peeping out of his pocket with
such sharp eyes, he was afraid of me; another settled in the unclean belly
of one, another was hanging round a man’s neck, and so he was carrying him
about without seeing him.”

“You—can see spirits?” the monk inquired.

“I tell you I can see, I can see through them. When I was coming out from
the Superior’s I saw one hiding from me behind the door, and a big one, a
yard and a half or more high, with a thick long gray tail, and the tip of
his tail was in the crack of the door and I was quick and slammed the
door, pinching his tail in it. He squealed and began to struggle, and I
made the sign of the cross over him three times. And he died on the spot
like a crushed spider. He must have rotted there in the corner and be
stinking, but they don’t see, they don’t smell it. It’s a year since I
have been there. I reveal it to you, as you are a stranger.”

“Your words are terrible! But, holy and blessed Father,” said the monk,
growing bolder and bolder, “is it true, as they noise abroad even to
distant lands about you, that you are in continual communication with the
Holy Ghost?”

“He does fly down at times.”

“How does he fly down? In what form?”

“As a bird.”

“The Holy Ghost in the form of a dove?”

“There’s the Holy Ghost and there’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can
appear as other birds—sometimes as a swallow, sometimes a goldfinch and
sometimes as a blue‐tit.”

“How do you know him from an ordinary tit?”

“He speaks.”

“How does he speak, in what language?”

“Human language.”

“And what does he tell you?”

“Why, to‐day he told me that a fool would visit me and would ask me
unseemly questions. You want to know too much, monk.”

“Terrible are your words, most holy and blessed Father,” the monk shook
his head. But there was a doubtful look in his frightened little eyes.

“Do you see this tree?” asked Father Ferapont, after a pause.

“I do, blessed Father.”

“You think it’s an elm, but for me it has another shape.”

“What sort of shape?” inquired the monk, after a pause of vain
expectation.

“It happens at night. You see those two branches? In the night it is
Christ holding out His arms to me and seeking me with those arms, I see it
clearly and tremble. It’s terrible, terrible!”

“What is there terrible if it’s Christ Himself?”

“Why, He’ll snatch me up and carry me away.”

“Alive?”

“In the spirit and glory of Elijah, haven’t you heard? He will take me in
His arms and bear me away.”

Though the monk returned to the cell he was sharing with one of the
brothers, in considerable perplexity of mind, he still cherished at heart
a greater reverence for Father Ferapont than for Father Zossima. He was
strongly in favor of fasting, and it was not strange that one who kept so
rigid a fast as Father Ferapont should “see marvels.” His words seemed
certainly queer, but God only could tell what was hidden in those words,
and were not worse words and acts commonly seen in those who have
sacrificed their intellects for the glory of God? The pinching of the
devil’s tail he was ready and eager to believe, and not only in the
figurative sense. Besides he had, before visiting the monastery, a strong
prejudice against the institution of “elders,” which he only knew of by
hearsay and believed to be a pernicious innovation. Before he had been
long at the monastery, he had detected the secret murmurings of some
shallow brothers who disliked the institution. He was, besides, a
meddlesome, inquisitive man, who poked his nose into everything. This was
why the news of the fresh “miracle” performed by Father Zossima reduced
him to extreme perplexity. Alyosha remembered afterwards how their
inquisitive guest from Obdorsk had been continually flitting to and fro
from one group to another, listening and asking questions among the monks
that were crowding within and without the elder’s cell. But he did not pay
much attention to him at the time, and only recollected it afterwards.

He had no thought to spare for it indeed, for when Father Zossima, feeling
tired again, had gone back to bed, he thought of Alyosha as he was closing
his eyes, and sent for him. Alyosha ran at once. There was no one else in
the cell but Father Païssy, Father Iosif, and the novice Porfiry. The
elder, opening his weary eyes and looking intently at Alyosha, asked him
suddenly:

“Are your people expecting you, my son?”

Alyosha hesitated.

“Haven’t they need of you? Didn’t you promise some one yesterday to see
them to‐day?”

“I did promise—to my father—my brothers—others too.”

“You see, you must go. Don’t grieve. Be sure I shall not die without your
being by to hear my last word. To you I will say that word, my son, it
will be my last gift to you. To you, dear son, because you love me. But
now go to keep your promise.”

Alyosha immediately obeyed, though it was hard to go. But the promise that
he should hear his last word on earth, that it should be the last gift to
him, Alyosha, sent a thrill of rapture through his soul. He made haste
that he might finish what he had to do in the town and return quickly.
Father Païssy, too, uttered some words of exhortation which moved and
surprised him greatly. He spoke as they left the cell together.

“Remember, young man, unceasingly,” Father Païssy began, without preface,
“that the science of this world, which has become a great power, has,
especially in the last century, analyzed everything divine handed down to
us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world
have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only
analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is
marvelous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the
gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Has it not lasted nineteen
centuries, is it not still a living, a moving power in the individual soul
and in the masses of people? It is still as strong and living even in the
souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have
renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow
the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of
their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue
than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the
result has been only grotesque. Remember this especially, young man, since
you are being sent into the world by your departing elder. Maybe,
remembering this great day, you will not forget my words, uttered from the
heart for your guidance, seeing you are young, and the temptations of the
world are great and beyond your strength to endure. Well, now go, my
orphan.”

With these words Father Païssy blessed him. As Alyosha left the monastery
and thought them over, he suddenly realized that he had met a new and
unexpected friend, a warmly loving teacher, in this austere monk who had
hitherto treated him sternly. It was as though Father Zossima had
bequeathed him to him at his death, and “perhaps that’s just what had
passed between them,” Alyosha thought suddenly. The philosophic
reflections he had just heard so unexpectedly testified to the warmth of
Father Païssy’s heart. He was in haste to arm the boy’s mind for conflict
with temptation and to guard the young soul left in his charge with the
strongest defense he could imagine.



Chapter II. At His Father’s


First of all, Alyosha went to his father. On the way he remembered that
his father had insisted the day before that he should come without his
brother Ivan seeing him. “Why so?” Alyosha wondered suddenly. “Even if my
father has something to say to me alone, why should I go in unseen? Most
likely in his excitement yesterday he meant to say something different,”
he decided. Yet he was very glad when Marfa Ignatyevna, who opened the
garden gate to him (Grigory, it appeared, was ill in bed in the lodge),
told him in answer to his question that Ivan Fyodorovitch had gone out two
hours ago.

“And my father?”

“He is up, taking his coffee,” Marfa answered somewhat dryly.

Alyosha went in. The old man was sitting alone at the table wearing
slippers and a little old overcoat. He was amusing himself by looking
through some accounts, rather inattentively however. He was quite alone in
the house, for Smerdyakov too had gone out marketing. Though he had got up
early and was trying to put a bold face on it, he looked tired and weak.
His forehead, upon which huge purple bruises had come out during the
night, was bandaged with a red handkerchief; his nose too had swollen
terribly in the night, and some smaller bruises covered it in patches,
giving his whole face a peculiarly spiteful and irritable look. The old
man was aware of this, and turned a hostile glance on Alyosha as he came
in.

“The coffee is cold,” he cried harshly; “I won’t offer you any. I’ve
ordered nothing but a Lenten fish soup to‐day, and I don’t invite any one
to share it. Why have you come?”

“To find out how you are,” said Alyosha.

“Yes. Besides, I told you to come yesterday. It’s all of no consequence.
You need not have troubled. But I knew you’d come poking in directly.”

He said this with almost hostile feeling. At the same time he got up and
looked anxiously in the looking‐glass (perhaps for the fortieth time that
morning) at his nose. He began, too, binding his red handkerchief more
becomingly on his forehead.

“Red’s better. It’s just like the hospital in a white one,” he observed
sententiously. “Well, how are things over there? How is your elder?”

“He is very bad; he may die to‐day,” answered Alyosha. But his father had
not listened, and had forgotten his own question at once.

“Ivan’s gone out,” he said suddenly. “He is doing his utmost to carry off
Mitya’s betrothed. That’s what he is staying here for,” he added
maliciously, and, twisting his mouth, looked at Alyosha.

“Surely he did not tell you so?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, he did, long ago. Would you believe it, he told me three weeks ago?
You don’t suppose he too came to murder me, do you? He must have had some
object in coming.”

“What do you mean? Why do you say such things?” said Alyosha, troubled.

“He doesn’t ask for money, it’s true, but yet he won’t get a farthing from
me. I intend living as long as possible, you may as well know, my dear
Alexey Fyodorovitch, and so I need every farthing, and the longer I live,
the more I shall need it,” he continued, pacing from one corner of the
room to the other, keeping his hands in the pockets of his loose greasy
overcoat made of yellow cotton material. “I can still pass for a man at
five and fifty, but I want to pass for one for another twenty years. As I
get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come
to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up
more and more, simply for myself, my dear son Alexey Fyodorovitch. You may
as well know. For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you.
For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it
on the sly, and I openly. And so all the other sinners fall upon me for
being so simple. And your paradise, Alexey Fyodorovitch, is not to my
taste, let me tell you that; and it’s not the proper place for a
gentleman, your paradise, even if it exists. I believe that I fall asleep
and don’t wake up again, and that’s all. You can pray for my soul if you
like. And if you don’t want to, don’t, damn you! That’s my philosophy.
Ivan talked well here yesterday, though we were all drunk. Ivan is a
conceited coxcomb, but he has no particular learning ... nor education
either. He sits silent and smiles at one without speaking—that’s what
pulls him through.”

Alyosha listened to him in silence.

“Why won’t he talk to me? If he does speak, he gives himself airs. Your
Ivan is a scoundrel! And I’ll marry Grushenka in a minute if I want to.
For if you’ve money, Alexey Fyodorovitch, you have only to want a thing
and you can have it. That’s what Ivan is afraid of, he is on the watch to
prevent me getting married and that’s why he is egging on Mitya to marry
Grushenka himself. He hopes to keep me from Grushenka by that (as though I
should leave him my money if I don’t marry her!). Besides if Mitya marries
Grushenka, Ivan will carry off his rich betrothed, that’s what he’s
reckoning on! He is a scoundrel, your Ivan!”

“How cross you are! It’s because of yesterday; you had better lie down,”
said Alyosha.

“There! you say that,” the old man observed suddenly, as though it had
struck him for the first time, “and I am not angry with you. But if Ivan
said it, I should be angry with him. It is only with you I have good
moments, else you know I am an ill‐natured man.”

“You are not ill‐natured, but distorted,” said Alyosha with a smile.

“Listen. I meant this morning to get that ruffian Mitya locked up and I
don’t know now what I shall decide about it. Of course in these
fashionable days fathers and mothers are looked upon as a prejudice, but
even now the law does not allow you to drag your old father about by the
hair, to kick him in the face in his own house, and brag of murdering him
outright—all in the presence of witnesses. If I liked, I could crush him
and could have him locked up at once for what he did yesterday.”

“Then you don’t mean to take proceedings?”

“Ivan has dissuaded me. I shouldn’t care about Ivan, but there’s another
thing.”

And bending down to Alyosha, he went on in a confidential half‐whisper.

“If I send the ruffian to prison, she’ll hear of it and run to see him at
once. But if she hears that he has beaten me, a weak old man, within an
inch of my life, she may give him up and come to me.... For that’s her
way, everything by contraries. I know her through and through! Won’t you
have a drop of brandy? Take some cold coffee and I’ll pour a quarter of a
glass of brandy into it, it’s delicious, my boy.”

“No, thank you. I’ll take that roll with me if I may,” said Alyosha, and
taking a halfpenny French roll he put it in the pocket of his cassock.
“And you’d better not have brandy, either,” he suggested apprehensively,
looking into the old man’s face.

“You are quite right, it irritates my nerves instead of soothing them.
Only one little glass. I’ll get it out of the cupboard.”

He unlocked the cupboard, poured out a glass, drank it, then locked the
cupboard and put the key back in his pocket.

“That’s enough. One glass won’t kill me.”

“You see you are in a better humor now,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Um! I love you even without the brandy, but with scoundrels I am a
scoundrel. Ivan is not going to Tchermashnya—why is that? He wants to spy
how much I give Grushenka if she comes. They are all scoundrels! But I
don’t recognize Ivan, I don’t know him at all. Where does he come from? He
is not one of us in soul. As though I’d leave him anything! I shan’t leave
a will at all, you may as well know. And I’ll crush Mitya like a beetle. I
squash black‐beetles at night with my slipper; they squelch when you tread
on them. And your Mitya will squelch too. _Your_ Mitya, for you love him.
Yes, you love him and I am not afraid of your loving him. But if Ivan
loved him I should be afraid for myself at his loving him. But Ivan loves
nobody. Ivan is not one of us. People like Ivan are not our sort, my boy.
They are like a cloud of dust. When the wind blows, the dust will be
gone.... I had a silly idea in my head when I told you to come to‐day; I
wanted to find out from you about Mitya. If I were to hand him over a
thousand or maybe two now, would the beggarly wretch agree to take himself
off altogether for five years or, better still, thirty‐five, and without
Grushenka, and give her up once for all, eh?”

“I—I’ll ask him,” muttered Alyosha. “If you would give him three thousand,
perhaps he—”

“That’s nonsense! You needn’t ask him now, no need! I’ve changed my mind.
It was a nonsensical idea of mine. I won’t give him anything, not a penny,
I want my money myself,” cried the old man, waving his hand. “I’ll crush
him like a beetle without it. Don’t say anything to him or else he will
begin hoping. There’s nothing for you to do here, you needn’t stay. Is
that betrothed of his, Katerina Ivanovna, whom he has kept so carefully
hidden from me all this time, going to marry him or not? You went to see
her yesterday, I believe?”

“Nothing will induce her to abandon him.”

“There you see how dearly these fine young ladies love a rake and a
scoundrel. They are poor creatures I tell you, those pale young ladies,
very different from—Ah, if I had his youth and the looks I had then (for I
was better‐looking than he at eight and twenty) I’d have been a conquering
hero just as he is. He is a low cad! But he shan’t have Grushenka, anyway,
he shan’t! I’ll crush him!”

His anger had returned with the last words.

“You can go. There’s nothing for you to do here to‐day,” he snapped
harshly.

Alyosha went up to say good‐by to him, and kissed him on the shoulder.

“What’s that for?” The old man was a little surprised. “We shall see each
other again, or do you think we shan’t?”

“Not at all, I didn’t mean anything.”

“Nor did I, I did not mean anything,” said the old man, looking at him.
“Listen, listen,” he shouted after him, “make haste and come again and
I’ll have a fish soup for you, a fine one, not like to‐day. Be sure to
come! Come to‐morrow, do you hear, to‐morrow!”

And as soon as Alyosha had gone out of the door, he went to the cupboard
again and poured out another half‐glass.

“I won’t have more!” he muttered, clearing his throat, and again he locked
the cupboard and put the key in his pocket. Then he went into his bedroom,
lay down on the bed, exhausted, and in one minute he was asleep.



Chapter III. A Meeting With The Schoolboys


“Thank goodness he did not ask me about Grushenka,” thought Alyosha, as he
left his father’s house and turned towards Madame Hohlakov’s, “or I might
have to tell him of my meeting with Grushenka yesterday.”

Alyosha felt painfully that since yesterday both combatants had renewed
their energies, and that their hearts had grown hard again. “Father is
spiteful and angry, he’s made some plan and will stick to it. And what of
Dmitri? He too will be harder than yesterday, he too must be spiteful and
angry, and he too, no doubt, has made some plan. Oh, I must succeed in
finding him to‐day, whatever happens.”

But Alyosha had not long to meditate. An incident occurred on the road,
which, though apparently of little consequence, made a great impression on
him. Just after he had crossed the square and turned the corner coming out
into Mihailovsky Street, which is divided by a small ditch from the High
Street (our whole town is intersected by ditches), he saw a group of
schoolboys between the ages of nine and twelve, at the bridge. They were
going home from school, some with their bags on their shoulders, others
with leather satchels slung across them, some in short jackets, others in
little overcoats. Some even had those high boots with creases round the
ankles, such as little boys spoilt by rich fathers love to wear. The whole
group was talking eagerly about something, apparently holding a council.
Alyosha had never from his Moscow days been able to pass children without
taking notice of them, and although he was particularly fond of children
of three or thereabout, he liked schoolboys of ten and eleven too. And so,
anxious as he was to‐day, he wanted at once to turn aside to talk to them.
He looked into their excited rosy faces, and noticed at once that all the
boys had stones in their hands. Behind the ditch some thirty paces away,
there was another schoolboy standing by a fence. He too had a satchel at
his side. He was about ten years old, pale, delicate‐looking and with
sparkling black eyes. He kept an attentive and anxious watch on the other
six, obviously his schoolfellows with whom he had just come out of school,
but with whom he had evidently had a feud.

Alyosha went up and, addressing a fair, curly‐headed, rosy boy in a black
jacket, observed:

“When I used to wear a satchel like yours, I always used to carry it on my
left side, so as to have my right hand free, but you’ve got yours on your
right side. So it will be awkward for you to get at it.”

Alyosha had no art or premeditation in beginning with this practical
remark. But it is the only way for a grown‐up person to get at once into
confidential relations with a child, or still more with a group of
children. One must begin in a serious, businesslike way so as to be on a
perfectly equal footing. Alyosha understood it by instinct.

“But he is left‐handed,” another, a fine healthy‐looking boy of eleven,
answered promptly. All the others stared at Alyosha.

“He even throws stones with his left hand,” observed a third.

At that instant a stone flew into the group, but only just grazed the
left‐handed boy, though it was well and vigorously thrown by the boy
standing the other side of the ditch.

“Give it him, hit him back, Smurov,” they all shouted. But Smurov, the
left‐handed boy, needed no telling, and at once revenged himself; he threw
a stone, but it missed the boy and hit the ground. The boy the other side
of the ditch, the pocket of whose coat was visibly bulging with stones,
flung another stone at the group; this time it flew straight at Alyosha
and hit him painfully on the shoulder.

“He aimed it at you, he meant it for you. You are Karamazov, Karamazov!”
the boys shouted, laughing. “Come, all throw at him at once!” and six
stones flew at the boy. One struck the boy on the head and he fell down,
but at once leapt up and began ferociously returning their fire. Both
sides threw stones incessantly. Many of the group had their pockets full
too.

“What are you about! Aren’t you ashamed? Six against one! Why, you’ll kill
him,” cried Alyosha.

He ran forward and met the flying stones to screen the solitary boy. Three
or four ceased throwing for a minute.

“He began first!” cried a boy in a red shirt in an angry childish voice.
“He is a beast, he stabbed Krassotkin in class the other day with a
penknife. It bled. Krassotkin wouldn’t tell tales, but he must be
thrashed.”

“But what for? I suppose you tease him.”

“There, he sent a stone in your back again, he knows you,” cried the
children. “It’s you he is throwing at now, not us. Come, all of you, at
him again, don’t miss, Smurov!” and again a fire of stones, and a very
vicious one, began. The boy the other side of the ditch was hit in the
chest; he screamed, began to cry and ran away uphill towards Mihailovsky
Street. They all shouted: “Aha, he is funking, he is running away. Wisp of
tow!”

“You don’t know what a beast he is, Karamazov, killing is too good for
him,” said the boy in the jacket, with flashing eyes. He seemed to be the
eldest.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Alyosha, “is he a tell‐tale or what?”

The boys looked at one another as though derisively.

“Are you going that way, to Mihailovsky?” the same boy went on. “Catch him
up.... You see he’s stopped again, he is waiting and looking at you.”

“He is looking at you,” the other boys chimed in.

“You ask him, does he like a disheveled wisp of tow. Do you hear, ask him
that!”

There was a general burst of laughter. Alyosha looked at them, and they at
him.

“Don’t go near him, he’ll hurt you,” cried Smurov in a warning voice.

“I shan’t ask him about the wisp of tow, for I expect you tease him with
that question somehow. But I’ll find out from him why you hate him so.”

“Find out then, find out,” cried the boys, laughing.

Alyosha crossed the bridge and walked uphill by the fence, straight
towards the boy.

“You’d better look out,” the boys called after him; “he won’t be afraid of
you. He will stab you in a minute, on the sly, as he did Krassotkin.”

The boy waited for him without budging. Coming up to him, Alyosha saw
facing him a child of about nine years old. He was an undersized weakly
boy with a thin pale face, with large dark eyes that gazed at him
vindictively. He was dressed in a rather shabby old overcoat, which he had
monstrously outgrown. His bare arms stuck out beyond his sleeves. There
was a large patch on the right knee of his trousers, and in his right boot
just at the toe there was a big hole in the leather, carefully blackened
with ink. Both the pockets of his great‐coat were weighed down with
stones. Alyosha stopped two steps in front of him, looking inquiringly at
him. The boy, seeing at once from Alyosha’s eyes that he wouldn’t beat
him, became less defiant, and addressed him first.

“I am alone, and there are six of them. I’ll beat them all, alone!” he
said suddenly, with flashing eyes.

“I think one of the stones must have hurt you badly,” observed Alyosha.

“But I hit Smurov on the head!” cried the boy.

“They told me that you know me, and that you threw a stone at me on
purpose,” said Alyosha.

The boy looked darkly at him.

“I don’t know you. Do you know me?” Alyosha continued.

“Let me alone!” the boy cried irritably; but he did not move, as though he
were expecting something, and again there was a vindictive light in his
eyes.

“Very well, I am going,” said Alyosha; “only I don’t know you and I don’t
tease you. They told me how they tease you, but I don’t want to tease you.
Good‐by!”

“Monk in silk trousers!” cried the boy, following Alyosha with the same
vindictive and defiant expression, and he threw himself into an attitude
of defense, feeling sure that now Alyosha would fall upon him; but Alyosha
turned, looked at him, and walked away. He had not gone three steps before
the biggest stone the boy had in his pocket hit him a painful blow in the
back.

“So you’ll hit a man from behind! They tell the truth, then, when they say
that you attack on the sly,” said Alyosha, turning round again. This time
the boy threw a stone savagely right into Alyosha’s face; but Alyosha just
had time to guard himself, and the stone struck him on the elbow.

“Aren’t you ashamed? What have I done to you?” he cried.

The boy waited in silent defiance, certain that now Alyosha would attack
him. Seeing that even now he would not, his rage was like a little wild
beast’s; he flew at Alyosha himself, and before Alyosha had time to move,
the spiteful child had seized his left hand with both of his and bit his
middle finger. He fixed his teeth in it and it was ten seconds before he
let go. Alyosha cried out with pain and pulled his finger away with all
his might. The child let go at last and retreated to his former distance.
Alyosha’s finger had been badly bitten to the bone, close to the nail; it
began to bleed. Alyosha took out his handkerchief and bound it tightly
round his injured hand. He was a full minute bandaging it. The boy stood
waiting all the time. At last Alyosha raised his gentle eyes and looked at
him.

“Very well,” he said, “you see how badly you’ve bitten me. That’s enough,
isn’t it? Now tell me, what have I done to you?”

The boy stared in amazement.

“Though I don’t know you and it’s the first time I’ve seen you,” Alyosha
went on with the same serenity, “yet I must have done something to you—you
wouldn’t have hurt me like this for nothing. So what have I done? How have
I wronged you, tell me?”

Instead of answering, the boy broke into a loud tearful wail and ran away.
Alyosha walked slowly after him towards Mihailovsky Street, and for a long
time he saw the child running in the distance as fast as ever, not turning
his head, and no doubt still keeping up his tearful wail. He made up his
mind to find him out as soon as he had time, and to solve this mystery.
Just now he had not the time.



Chapter IV. At The Hohlakovs’


Alyosha soon reached Madame Hohlakov’s house, a handsome stone house of
two stories, one of the finest in our town. Though Madame Hohlakov spent
most of her time in another province where she had an estate, or in
Moscow, where she had a house of her own, yet she had a house in our town
too, inherited from her forefathers. The estate in our district was the
largest of her three estates, yet she had been very little in our province
before this time. She ran out to Alyosha in the hall.

“Did you get my letter about the new miracle?” She spoke rapidly and
nervously.

“Yes.”

“Did you show it to every one? He restored the son to his mother!”

“He is dying to‐day,” said Alyosha.

“I have heard, I know, oh, how I long to talk to you, to you or some one,
about all this. No, to you, to you! And how sorry I am I can’t see him!
The whole town is in excitement, they are all suspense. But now—do you
know Katerina Ivanovna is here now?”

“Ah, that’s lucky,” cried Alyosha. “Then I shall see her here. She told me
yesterday to be sure to come and see her to‐day.”

“I know, I know all. I’ve heard exactly what happened yesterday—and the
atrocious behavior of that—creature. _C’est tragique_, and if I’d been in
her place I don’t know what I should have done. And your brother Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, what do you think of him?—my goodness! Alexey Fyodorovitch,
I am forgetting, only fancy; your brother is in there with her, not that
dreadful brother who was so shocking yesterday, but the other, Ivan
Fyodorovitch, he is sitting with her talking; they are having a serious
conversation. If you could only imagine what’s passing between them
now—it’s awful, I tell you it’s lacerating, it’s like some incredible tale
of horror. They are ruining their lives for no reason any one can see.
They both recognize it and revel in it. I’ve been watching for you! I’ve
been thirsting for you! It’s too much for me, that’s the worst of it. I’ll
tell you all about it presently, but now I must speak of something else,
the most important thing—I had quite forgotten what’s most important. Tell
me, why has Lise been in hysterics? As soon as she heard you were here,
she began to be hysterical!”

“_Maman_, it’s you who are hysterical now, not I,” Lise’s voice caroled
through a tiny crack of the door at the side. Her voice sounded as though
she wanted to laugh, but was doing her utmost to control it. Alyosha at
once noticed the crack, and no doubt Lise was peeping through it, but that
he could not see.

“And no wonder, Lise, no wonder ... your caprices will make me hysterical
too. But she is so ill, Alexey Fyodorovitch, she has been so ill all
night, feverish and moaning! I could hardly wait for the morning and for
Herzenstube to come. He says that he can make nothing of it, that we must
wait. Herzenstube always comes and says that he can make nothing of it. As
soon as you approached the house, she screamed, fell into hysterics, and
insisted on being wheeled back into this room here.”

“Mamma, I didn’t know he had come. It wasn’t on his account I wanted to be
wheeled into this room.”

“That’s not true, Lise, Yulia ran to tell you that Alexey Fyodorovitch was
coming. She was on the look‐out for you.”

“My darling mamma, it’s not at all clever of you. But if you want to make
up for it and say something very clever, dear mamma, you’d better tell our
honored visitor, Alexey Fyodorovitch, that he has shown his want of wit by
venturing to us after what happened yesterday and although every one is
laughing at him.”

“Lise, you go too far. I declare I shall have to be severe. Who laughs at
him? I am so glad he has come, I need him, I can’t do without him. Oh,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, I am exceedingly unhappy!”

“But what’s the matter with you, mamma, darling?”

“Ah, your caprices, Lise, your fidgetiness, your illness, that awful night
of fever, that awful everlasting Herzenstube, everlasting, everlasting,
that’s the worst of it! Everything, in fact, everything.... Even that
miracle, too! Oh, how it has upset me, how it has shattered me, that
miracle, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch! And that tragedy in the drawing‐room,
it’s more than I can bear, I warn you. I can’t bear it. A comedy, perhaps,
not a tragedy. Tell me, will Father Zossima live till to‐morrow, will he?
Oh, my God! What is happening to me? Every minute I close my eyes and see
that it’s all nonsense, all nonsense.”

“I should be very grateful,” Alyosha interrupted suddenly, “if you could
give me a clean rag to bind up my finger with. I have hurt it, and it’s
very painful.”

Alyosha unbound his bitten finger. The handkerchief was soaked with blood.
Madame Hohlakov screamed and shut her eyes.

“Good heavens, what a wound, how awful!”

But as soon as Lise saw Alyosha’s finger through the crack, she flung the
door wide open.

“Come, come here,” she cried, imperiously. “No nonsense now! Good heavens,
why did you stand there saying nothing about it all this time? He might
have bled to death, mamma! How did you do it? Water, water! You must wash
it first of all, simply hold it in cold water to stop the pain, and keep
it there, keep it there.... Make haste, mamma, some water in a slop‐basin.
But do make haste,” she finished nervously. She was quite frightened at
the sight of Alyosha’s wound.

“Shouldn’t we send for Herzenstube?” cried Madame Hohlakov.

“Mamma, you’ll be the death of me. Your Herzenstube will come and say that
he can make nothing of it! Water, water! Mamma, for goodness’ sake go
yourself and hurry Yulia, she is such a slowcoach and never can come
quickly! Make haste, mamma, or I shall die.”

“Why, it’s nothing much,” cried Alyosha, frightened at this alarm.

Yulia ran in with water and Alyosha put his finger in it.

“Some lint, mamma, for mercy’s sake, bring some lint and that muddy
caustic lotion for wounds, what’s it called? We’ve got some. You know
where the bottle is, mamma; it’s in your bedroom in the right‐hand
cupboard, there’s a big bottle of it there with the lint.”

“I’ll bring everything in a minute, Lise, only don’t scream and don’t
fuss. You see how bravely Alexey Fyodorovitch bears it. Where did you get
such a dreadful wound, Alexey Fyodorovitch?”

Madame Hohlakov hastened away. This was all Lise was waiting for.

“First of all, answer the question, where did you get hurt like this?” she
asked Alyosha, quickly. “And then I’ll talk to you about something quite
different. Well?”

Instinctively feeling that the time of her mother’s absence was precious
for her, Alyosha hastened to tell her of his enigmatic meeting with the
schoolboys in the fewest words possible. Lise clasped her hands at his
story.

“How can you, and in that dress too, associate with schoolboys?” she cried
angrily, as though she had a right to control him. “You are nothing but a
boy yourself if you can do that, a perfect boy! But you must find out for
me about that horrid boy and tell me all about it, for there’s some
mystery in it. Now for the second thing, but first a question: does the
pain prevent you talking about utterly unimportant things, but talking
sensibly?”

“Of course not, and I don’t feel much pain now.”

“That’s because your finger is in the water. It must be changed directly,
for it will get warm in a minute. Yulia, bring some ice from the cellar
and another basin of water. Now she is gone, I can speak; will you give me
the letter I sent you yesterday, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch—be quick, for
mamma will be back in a minute and I don’t want—”

“I haven’t got the letter.”

“That’s not true, you have. I knew you would say that. You’ve got it in
that pocket. I’ve been regretting that joke all night. Give me back the
letter at once, give it me.”

“I’ve left it at home.”

“But you can’t consider me as a child, a little girl, after that silly
joke! I beg your pardon for that silliness, but you must bring me the
letter, if you really haven’t got it—bring it to‐day, you must, you must.”

“To‐day I can’t possibly, for I am going back to the monastery and I
shan’t come and see you for the next two days—three or four perhaps—for
Father Zossima—”

“Four days, what nonsense! Listen. Did you laugh at me very much?”

“I didn’t laugh at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because I believed all you said.”

“You are insulting me!”

“Not at all. As soon as I read it, I thought that all that would come to
pass, for as soon as Father Zossima dies, I am to leave the monastery.
Then I shall go back and finish my studies, and when you reach the legal
age we will be married. I shall love you. Though I haven’t had time to
think about it, I believe I couldn’t find a better wife than you, and
Father Zossima tells me I must marry.”

“But I am a cripple, wheeled about in a chair,” laughed Lise, flushing
crimson.

“I’ll wheel you about myself, but I’m sure you’ll get well by then.”

“But you are mad,” said Lise, nervously, “to make all this nonsense out of
a joke! Here’s mamma, very _à propos_, perhaps. Mamma, how slow you always
are, how can you be so long! And here’s Yulia with the ice!”

“Oh, Lise, don’t scream, above all things don’t scream. That scream drives
me ... How can I help it when you put the lint in another place? I’ve been
hunting and hunting—I do believe you did it on purpose.”

“But I couldn’t tell that he would come with a bad finger, or else perhaps
I might have done it on purpose. My darling mamma, you begin to say really
witty things.”

“Never mind my being witty, but I must say you show nice feeling for
Alexey Fyodorovitch’s sufferings! Oh, my dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, what’s
killing me is no one thing in particular, not Herzenstube, but everything
together, that’s what is too much for me.”

“That’s enough, mamma, enough about Herzenstube,” Lise laughed gayly.
“Make haste with the lint and the lotion, mamma. That’s simply Goulard’s
water, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I remember the name now, but it’s a splendid
lotion. Would you believe it, mamma, on the way here he had a fight with
the boys in the street, and it was a boy bit his finger, isn’t he a child,
a child himself? Is he fit to be married after that? For only fancy, he
wants to be married, mamma. Just think of him married, wouldn’t it be
funny, wouldn’t it be awful?”

And Lise kept laughing her thin hysterical giggle, looking slyly at
Alyosha.

“But why married, Lise? What makes you talk of such a thing? It’s quite
out of place—and perhaps the boy was rabid.”

“Why, mamma! As though there were rabid boys!”

“Why not, Lise, as though I had said something stupid! Your boy might have
been bitten by a mad dog and he would become mad and bite any one near
him. How well she has bandaged it, Alexey Fyodorovitch! I couldn’t have
done it. Do you still feel the pain?”

“It’s nothing much now.”

“You don’t feel afraid of water?” asked Lise.

“Come, that’s enough, Lise, perhaps I really was rather too quick talking
of the boy being rabid, and you pounced upon it at once Katerina Ivanovna
has only just heard that you are here, Alexey Fyodorovitch, she simply
rushed at me, she’s dying to see you, dying!”

“Ach, mamma, go to them yourself. He can’t go just now, he is in too much
pain.”

“Not at all, I can go quite well,” said Alyosha.

“What! You are going away? Is that what you say?”

“Well, when I’ve seen them, I’ll come back here and we can talk as much as
you like. But I should like to see Katerina Ivanovna at once, for I am
very anxious to be back at the monastery as soon as I can.”

“Mamma, take him away quickly. Alexey Fyodorovitch, don’t trouble to come
and see me afterwards, but go straight back to your monastery and a good
riddance. I want to sleep, I didn’t sleep all night.”

“Ah, Lise, you are only making fun, but how I wish you would sleep!” cried
Madame Hohlakov.

“I don’t know what I’ve done.... I’ll stay another three minutes, five if
you like,” muttered Alyosha.

“Even five! Do take him away quickly, mamma, he is a monster.”

“Lise, you are crazy. Let us go, Alexey Fyodorovitch, she is too
capricious to‐day. I am afraid to cross her. Oh, the trouble one has with
nervous girls! Perhaps she really will be able to sleep after seeing you.
How quickly you have made her sleepy, and how fortunate it is!”

“Ah, mamma, how sweetly you talk! I must kiss you for it, mamma.”

“And I kiss you too, Lise. Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” Madame Hohlakov
began mysteriously and importantly, speaking in a rapid whisper. “I don’t
want to suggest anything, I don’t want to lift the veil, you will see for
yourself what’s going on. It’s appalling. It’s the most fantastic farce.
She loves your brother, Ivan, and she is doing her utmost to persuade
herself she loves your brother, Dmitri. It’s appalling! I’ll go in with
you, and if they don’t turn me out, I’ll stay to the end.”



Chapter V. A Laceration In The Drawing‐Room


But in the drawing‐room the conversation was already over. Katerina
Ivanovna was greatly excited, though she looked resolute. At the moment
Alyosha and Madame Hohlakov entered, Ivan Fyodorovitch stood up to take
leave. His face was rather pale, and Alyosha looked at him anxiously. For
this moment was to solve a doubt, a harassing enigma which had for some
time haunted Alyosha. During the preceding month it had been several times
suggested to him that his brother Ivan was in love with Katerina Ivanovna,
and, what was more, that he meant “to carry her off” from Dmitri. Until
quite lately the idea seemed to Alyosha monstrous, though it worried him
extremely. He loved both his brothers, and dreaded such rivalry between
them. Meantime, Dmitri had said outright on the previous day that he was
glad that Ivan was his rival, and that it was a great assistance to him,
Dmitri. In what way did it assist him? To marry Grushenka? But that
Alyosha considered the worst thing possible. Besides all this, Alyosha had
till the evening before implicitly believed that Katerina Ivanovna had a
steadfast and passionate love for Dmitri; but he had only believed it till
the evening before. He had fancied, too, that she was incapable of loving
a man like Ivan, and that she did love Dmitri, and loved him just as he
was, in spite of all the strangeness of such a passion.

But during yesterday’s scene with Grushenka another idea had struck him.
The word “lacerating,” which Madame Hohlakov had just uttered, almost made
him start, because half waking up towards daybreak that night he had cried
out “Laceration, laceration,” probably applying it to his dream. He had
been dreaming all night of the previous day’s scene at Katerina
Ivanovna’s. Now Alyosha was impressed by Madame Hohlakov’s blunt and
persistent assertion that Katerina Ivanovna was in love with Ivan, and
only deceived herself through some sort of pose, from “self‐laceration,”
and tortured herself by her pretended love for Dmitri from some fancied
duty of gratitude. “Yes,” he thought, “perhaps the whole truth lies in
those words.” But in that case what was Ivan’s position? Alyosha felt
instinctively that a character like Katerina Ivanovna’s must dominate, and
she could only dominate some one like Dmitri, and never a man like Ivan.
For Dmitri might at last submit to her domination “to his own happiness”
(which was what Alyosha would have desired), but Ivan—no, Ivan could not
submit to her, and such submission would not give him happiness. Alyosha
could not help believing that of Ivan. And now all these doubts and
reflections flitted through his mind as he entered the drawing‐room.
Another idea, too, forced itself upon him: “What if she loved neither of
them—neither Ivan nor Dmitri?”

It must be noted that Alyosha felt as it were ashamed of his own thoughts
and blamed himself when they kept recurring to him during the last month.
“What do I know about love and women and how can I decide such questions?”
he thought reproachfully, after such doubts and surmises. And yet it was
impossible not to think about it. He felt instinctively that this rivalry
was of immense importance in his brothers’ lives and that a great deal
depended upon it.

“One reptile will devour the other,” Ivan had pronounced the day before,
speaking in anger of his father and Dmitri. So Ivan looked upon Dmitri as
a reptile, and perhaps had long done so. Was it perhaps since he had known
Katerina Ivanovna? That phrase had, of course, escaped Ivan unawares
yesterday, but that only made it more important. If he felt like that,
what chance was there of peace? Were there not, on the contrary, new
grounds for hatred and hostility in their family? And with which of them
was Alyosha to sympathize? And what was he to wish for each of them? He
loved them both, but what could he desire for each in the midst of these
conflicting interests? He might go quite astray in this maze, and
Alyosha’s heart could not endure uncertainty, because his love was always
of an active character. He was incapable of passive love. If he loved any
one, he set to work at once to help him. And to do so he must know what he
was aiming at; he must know for certain what was best for each, and having
ascertained this it was natural for him to help them both. But instead of
a definite aim, he found nothing but uncertainty and perplexity on all
sides. “It was lacerating,” as was said just now. But what could he
understand even in this “laceration”? He did not understand the first word
in this perplexing maze.

Seeing Alyosha, Katerina Ivanovna said quickly and joyfully to Ivan, who
had already got up to go, “A minute! Stay another minute! I want to hear
the opinion of this person here whom I trust absolutely. Don’t go away,”
she added, addressing Madame Hohlakov. She made Alyosha sit down beside
her, and Madame Hohlakov sat opposite, by Ivan.

“You are all my friends here, all I have in the world, my dear friends,”
she began warmly, in a voice which quivered with genuine tears of
suffering, and Alyosha’s heart warmed to her at once. “You, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, were witness yesterday of that abominable scene, and saw
what I did. You did not see it, Ivan Fyodorovitch, he did. What he thought
of me yesterday I don’t know. I only know one thing, that if it were
repeated to‐day, this minute, I should express the same feelings again as
yesterday—the same feelings, the same words, the same actions. You
remember my actions, Alexey Fyodorovitch; you checked me in one of them”
... (as she said that, she flushed and her eyes shone). “I must tell you
that I can’t get over it. Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I don’t even know
whether I still love _him_. I feel _pity_ for him, and that is a poor sign
of love. If I loved him, if I still loved him, perhaps I shouldn’t be
sorry for him now, but should hate him.”

Her voice quivered, and tears glittered on her eyelashes. Alyosha
shuddered inwardly. “That girl is truthful and sincere,” he thought, “and
she does not love Dmitri any more.”

“That’s true, that’s true,” cried Madame Hohlakov.

“Wait, dear. I haven’t told you the chief, the final decision I came to
during the night. I feel that perhaps my decision is a terrible one—for
me, but I foresee that nothing will induce me to change it—nothing. It
will be so all my life. My dear, kind, ever‐faithful and generous adviser,
the one friend I have in the world, Ivan Fyodorovitch, with his deep
insight into the heart, approves and commends my decision. He knows it.”

“Yes, I approve of it,” Ivan assented, in a subdued but firm voice.

“But I should like Alyosha, too (Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch, forgive my
calling you simply Alyosha), I should like Alexey Fyodorovitch, too, to
tell me before my two friends whether I am right. I feel instinctively
that you, Alyosha, my dear brother (for you are a dear brother to me),”
she said again ecstatically, taking his cold hand in her hot one, “I
foresee that your decision, your approval, will bring me peace, in spite
of all my sufferings, for, after your words, I shall be calm and submit—I
feel that.”

“I don’t know what you are asking me,” said Alyosha, flushing. “I only
know that I love you and at this moment wish for your happiness more than
my own!... But I know nothing about such affairs,” something impelled him
to add hurriedly.

“In such affairs, Alexey Fyodorovitch, in such affairs, the chief thing is
honor and duty and something higher—I don’t know what—but higher perhaps
even than duty. I am conscious of this irresistible feeling in my heart,
and it compels me irresistibly. But it may all be put in two words. I’ve
already decided, even if he marries that—creature,” she began solemnly,
“whom I never, never can forgive, _even then I will not abandon him_.
Henceforward I will never, never abandon him!” she cried, breaking into a
sort of pale, hysterical ecstasy. “Not that I would run after him
continually, get in his way and worry him. Oh, no! I will go away to
another town—where you like—but I will watch over him all my life—I will
watch over him all my life unceasingly. When he becomes unhappy with that
woman, and that is bound to happen quite soon, let him come to me and he
will find a friend, a sister.... Only a sister, of course, and so for
ever; but he will learn at least that that sister is really his sister,
who loves him and has sacrificed all her life to him. I will gain my
point. I will insist on his knowing me and confiding entirely in me,
without reserve,” she cried, in a sort of frenzy. “I will be a god to whom
he can pray—and that, at least, he owes me for his treachery and for what
I suffered yesterday through him. And let him see that all my life I will
be true to him and the promise I gave him, in spite of his being untrue
and betraying me. I will—I will become nothing but a means for his
happiness, or—how shall I say?—an instrument, a machine for his happiness,
and that for my whole life, my whole life, and that he may see that all
his life! That’s my decision. Ivan Fyodorovitch fully approves me.”

She was breathless. She had perhaps intended to express her idea with more
dignity, art and naturalness, but her speech was too hurried and crude. It
was full of youthful impulsiveness, it betrayed that she was still
smarting from yesterday’s insult, and that her pride craved satisfaction.
She felt this herself. Her face suddenly darkened, an unpleasant look came
into her eyes. Alyosha at once saw it and felt a pang of sympathy. His
brother Ivan made it worse by adding:

“I’ve only expressed my own view,” he said. “From any one else, this would
have been affected and overstrained, but from you—no. Any other woman
would have been wrong, but you are right. I don’t know how to explain it,
but I see that you are absolutely genuine and, therefore, you are right.”

“But that’s only for the moment. And what does this moment stand for?
Nothing but yesterday’s insult.” Madame Hohlakov obviously had not
intended to interfere, but she could not refrain from this very just
comment.

“Quite so, quite so,” cried Ivan, with peculiar eagerness, obviously
annoyed at being interrupted, “in any one else this moment would be only
due to yesterday’s impression and would be only a moment. But with
Katerina Ivanovna’s character, that moment will last all her life. What
for any one else would be only a promise is for her an everlasting
burdensome, grim perhaps, but unflagging duty. And she will be sustained
by the feeling of this duty being fulfilled. Your life, Katerina Ivanovna,
will henceforth be spent in painful brooding over your own feelings, your
own heroism, and your own suffering; but in the end that suffering will be
softened and will pass into sweet contemplation of the fulfillment of a
bold and proud design. Yes, proud it certainly is, and desperate in any
case, but a triumph for you. And the consciousness of it will at last be a
source of complete satisfaction and will make you resigned to everything
else.”

This was unmistakably said with some malice and obviously with intention;
even perhaps with no desire to conceal that he spoke ironically and with
intention.

“Oh, dear, how mistaken it all is!” Madame Hohlakov cried again.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch, you speak. I want dreadfully to know what you will
say!” cried Katerina Ivanovna, and burst into tears. Alyosha got up from
the sofa.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” she went on through her tears. “I’m upset, I
didn’t sleep last night. But by the side of two such friends as you and
your brother I still feel strong—for I know—you two will never desert me.”

“Unluckily I am obliged to return to Moscow—perhaps to‐morrow—and to leave
you for a long time—And, unluckily, it’s unavoidable,” Ivan said suddenly.

“To‐morrow—to Moscow!” her face was suddenly contorted; “but—but, dear me,
how fortunate!” she cried in a voice suddenly changed. In one instant
there was no trace left of her tears. She underwent an instantaneous
transformation, which amazed Alyosha. Instead of a poor, insulted girl,
weeping in a sort of “laceration,” he saw a woman completely self‐
possessed and even exceedingly pleased, as though something agreeable had
just happened.

“Oh, not fortunate that I am losing you, of course not,” she corrected
herself suddenly, with a charming society smile. “Such a friend as you are
could not suppose that. I am only too unhappy at losing you.” She rushed
impulsively at Ivan, and seizing both his hands, pressed them warmly. “But
what is fortunate is that you will be able in Moscow to see auntie and
Agafya and to tell them all the horror of my present position. You can
speak with complete openness to Agafya, but spare dear auntie. You will
know how to do that. You can’t think how wretched I was yesterday and this
morning, wondering how I could write them that dreadful letter—for one can
never tell such things in a letter.... Now it will be easy for me to
write, for you will see them and explain everything. Oh, how glad I am!
But I am only glad of that, believe me. Of course, no one can take your
place.... I will run at once to write the letter,” she finished suddenly,
and took a step as though to go out of the room.

“And what about Alyosha and his opinion, which you were so desperately
anxious to hear?” cried Madame Hohlakov. There was a sarcastic, angry note
in her voice.

“I had not forgotten that,” cried Katerina Ivanovna, coming to a sudden
standstill, “and why are you so antagonistic at such a moment?” she added,
with warm and bitter reproachfulness. “What I said, I repeat. I must have
his opinion. More than that, I must have his decision! As he says, so it
shall be. You see how anxious I am for your words, Alexey Fyodorovitch....
But what’s the matter?”

“I couldn’t have believed it. I can’t understand it!” Alyosha cried
suddenly in distress.

“What? What?”

“He is going to Moscow, and you cry out that you are glad. You said that
on purpose! And you begin explaining that you are not glad of that but
sorry to be—losing a friend. But that was acting, too—you were playing a
part—as in a theater!”

“In a theater? What? What do you mean?” exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna,
profoundly astonished, flushing crimson, and frowning.

“Though you assure him you are sorry to lose a friend in him, you persist
in telling him to his face that it’s fortunate he is going,” said Alyosha
breathlessly. He was standing at the table and did not sit down.

“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand myself.... I seemed to see in a flash ... I know I am
not saying it properly, but I’ll say it all the same,” Alyosha went on in
the same shaking and broken voice. “What I see is that perhaps you don’t
love Dmitri at all ... and never have, from the beginning.... And Dmitri,
too, has never loved you ... and only esteems you.... I really don’t know
how I dare to say all this, but somebody must tell the truth ... for
nobody here will tell the truth.”

“What truth?” cried Katerina Ivanovna, and there was an hysterical ring in
her voice.

“I’ll tell you,” Alyosha went on with desperate haste, as though he were
jumping from the top of a house. “Call Dmitri; I will fetch him—and let
him come here and take your hand and take Ivan’s and join your hands. For
you’re torturing Ivan, simply because you love him—and torturing him,
because you love Dmitri through ‘self‐laceration’—with an unreal
love—because you’ve persuaded yourself.”

Alyosha broke off and was silent.

“You ... you ... you are a little religious idiot—that’s what you are!”
Katerina Ivanovna snapped. Her face was white and her lips were moving
with anger.

Ivan suddenly laughed and got up. His hat was in his hand.

“You are mistaken, my good Alyosha,” he said, with an expression Alyosha
had never seen in his face before—an expression of youthful sincerity and
strong, irresistibly frank feeling. “Katerina Ivanovna has never cared for
me! She has known all the time that I cared for her—though I never said a
word of my love to her—she knew, but she didn’t care for me. I have never
been her friend either, not for one moment; she is too proud to need my
friendship. She kept me at her side as a means of revenge. She revenged
with me and on me all the insults which she has been continually receiving
from Dmitri ever since their first meeting. For even that first meeting
has rankled in her heart as an insult—that’s what her heart is like! She
has talked to me of nothing but her love for him. I am going now; but,
believe me, Katerina Ivanovna, you really love him. And the more he
insults you, the more you love him—that’s your ‘laceration.’ You love him
just as he is; you love him for insulting you. If he reformed, you’d give
him up at once and cease to love him. But you need him so as to
contemplate continually your heroic fidelity and to reproach him for
infidelity. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there’s a great deal of
humiliation and self‐abasement about it, but it all comes from pride.... I
am too young and I’ve loved you too much. I know that I ought not to say
this, that it would be more dignified on my part simply to leave you, and
it would be less offensive for you. But I am going far away, and shall
never come back.... It is for ever. I don’t want to sit beside a
‘laceration.’... But I don’t know how to speak now. I’ve said
everything.... Good‐by, Katerina Ivanovna; you can’t be angry with me, for
I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact
that I shall never see you again. Good‐by! I don’t want your hand. You
have tortured me too deliberately for me to be able to forgive you at this
moment. I shall forgive you later, but now I don’t want your hand. ‘Den
Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht,’ ” he added, with a forced smile, showing,
however, that he could read Schiller, and read him till he knew him by
heart—which Alyosha would never have believed. He went out of the room
without saying good‐by even to his hostess, Madame Hohlakov. Alyosha
clasped his hands.

“Ivan!” he cried desperately after him. “Come back, Ivan! No, nothing will
induce him to come back now!” he cried again, regretfully realizing it;
“but it’s my fault, my fault. I began it! Ivan spoke angrily, wrongly.
Unjustly and angrily. He must come back here, come back,” Alyosha kept
exclaiming frantically.

Katerina Ivanovna went suddenly into the next room.

“You have done no harm. You behaved beautifully, like an angel,” Madame
Hohlakov whispered rapidly and ecstatically to Alyosha. “I will do my
utmost to prevent Ivan Fyodorovitch from going.”

Her face beamed with delight, to the great distress of Alyosha, but
Katerina Ivanovna suddenly returned. She had two hundred‐rouble notes in
her hand.

“I have a great favor to ask of you, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she began,
addressing Alyosha with an apparently calm and even voice, as though
nothing had happened. “A week—yes, I think it was a week ago—Dmitri
Fyodorovitch was guilty of a hasty and unjust action—a very ugly action.
There is a low tavern here, and in it he met that discharged officer, that
captain, whom your father used to employ in some business. Dmitri
Fyodorovitch somehow lost his temper with this captain, seized him by the
beard and dragged him out into the street and for some distance along it,
in that insulting fashion. And I am told that his son, a boy, quite a
child, who is at the school here, saw it and ran beside them crying and
begging for his father, appealing to every one to defend him, while every
one laughed. You must forgive me, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I cannot think
without indignation of that disgraceful action of _his_ ... one of those
actions of which only Dmitri Fyodorovitch would be capable in his anger
... and in his passions! I can’t describe it even.... I can’t find my
words. I’ve made inquiries about his victim, and find he is quite a poor
man. His name is Snegiryov. He did something wrong in the army and was
discharged. I can’t tell you what. And now he has sunk into terrible
destitution, with his family—an unhappy family of sick children, and, I
believe, an insane wife. He has been living here a long time; he used to
work as a copying clerk, but now he is getting nothing. I thought if you
... that is I thought ... I don’t know. I am so confused. You see, I
wanted to ask you, my dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, to go to him, to find some
excuse to go to them—I mean to that captain—oh, goodness, how badly I
explain it!—and delicately, carefully, as only you know how to” (Alyosha
blushed), “manage to give him this assistance, these two hundred roubles.
He will be sure to take it.... I mean, persuade him to take it.... Or,
rather, what do I mean? You see it’s not by way of compensation to prevent
him from taking proceedings (for I believe he meant to), but simply a
token of sympathy, of a desire to assist him from me, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch’s betrothed, not from himself.... But you know.... I would go
myself, but you’ll know how to do it ever so much better. He lives in Lake
Street, in the house of a woman called Kalmikov.... For God’s sake, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, do it for me, and now ... now I am rather ... tired. Good‐
by!”

She turned and disappeared behind the portière so quickly that Alyosha had
not time to utter a word, though he wanted to speak. He longed to beg her
pardon, to blame himself, to say something, for his heart was full and he
could not bear to go out of the room without it. But Madame Hohlakov took
him by the hand and drew him along with her. In the hall she stopped him
again as before.

“She is proud, she is struggling with herself; but kind, charming,
generous,” she exclaimed, in a half‐whisper. “Oh, how I love her,
especially sometimes, and how glad I am again of everything! Dear Alexey
Fyodorovitch, you didn’t know, but I must tell you, that we all, all—both
her aunts, I and all of us, Lise, even—have been hoping and praying for
nothing for the last month but that she may give up your favorite Dmitri,
who takes no notice of her and does not care for her, and may marry Ivan
Fyodorovitch—such an excellent and cultivated young man, who loves her
more than anything in the world. We are in a regular plot to bring it
about, and I am even staying on here perhaps on that account.”

“But she has been crying—she has been wounded again,” cried Alyosha.

“Never trust a woman’s tears, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I am never for the
women in such cases. I am always on the side of the men.”

“Mamma, you are spoiling him,” Lise’s little voice cried from behind the
door.

“No, it was all my fault. I am horribly to blame,” Alyosha repeated
unconsoled, hiding his face in his hands in an agony of remorse for his
indiscretion.

“Quite the contrary; you behaved like an angel, like an angel. I am ready
to say so a thousand times over.”

“Mamma, how has he behaved like an angel?” Lise’s voice was heard again.

“I somehow fancied all at once,” Alyosha went on as though he had not
heard Lise, “that she loved Ivan, and so I said that stupid thing.... What
will happen now?”

“To whom, to whom?” cried Lise. “Mamma, you really want to be the death of
me. I ask you and you don’t answer.”

At the moment the maid ran in.

“Katerina Ivanovna is ill.... She is crying, struggling ... hysterics.”

“What is the matter?” cried Lise, in a tone of real anxiety. “Mamma, I
shall be having hysterics, and not she!”

“Lise, for mercy’s sake, don’t scream, don’t persecute me. At your age one
can’t know everything that grown‐up people know. I’ll come and tell you
everything you ought to know. Oh, mercy on us! I am coming, I am
coming.... Hysterics is a good sign, Alexey Fyodorovitch; it’s an
excellent thing that she is hysterical. That’s just as it ought to be. In
such cases I am always against the woman, against all these feminine tears
and hysterics. Run and say, Yulia, that I’ll fly to her. As for Ivan
Fyodorovitch’s going away like that, it’s her own fault. But he won’t go
away. Lise, for mercy’s sake, don’t scream! Oh, yes; you are not
screaming. It’s I am screaming. Forgive your mamma; but I am delighted,
delighted, delighted! Did you notice, Alexey Fyodorovitch, how young, how
young Ivan Fyodorovitch was just now when he went out, when he said all
that and went out? I thought he was so learned, such a _savant_, and all
of a sudden he behaved so warmly, openly, and youthfully, with such
youthful inexperience, and it was all so fine, like you.... And the way he
repeated that German verse, it was just like you! But I must fly, I must
fly! Alexey Fyodorovitch, make haste to carry out her commission, and then
make haste back. Lise, do you want anything now? For mercy’s sake, don’t
keep Alexey Fyodorovitch a minute. He will come back to you at once.”

Madame Hohlakov at last ran off. Before leaving, Alyosha would have opened
the door to see Lise.

“On no account,” cried Lise. “On no account now. Speak through the door.
How have you come to be an angel? That’s the only thing I want to know.”

“For an awful piece of stupidity, Lise! Good‐by!”

“Don’t dare to go away like that!” Lise was beginning.

“Lise, I have a real sorrow! I’ll be back directly, but I have a great,
great sorrow!”

And he ran out of the room.



Chapter VI. A Laceration In The Cottage


He certainly was really grieved in a way he had seldom been before. He had
rushed in like a fool, and meddled in what? In a love‐affair. “But what do
I know about it? What can I tell about such things?” he repeated to
himself for the hundredth time, flushing crimson. “Oh, being ashamed would
be nothing; shame is only the punishment I deserve. The trouble is I shall
certainly have caused more unhappiness.... And Father Zossima sent me to
reconcile and bring them together. Is this the way to bring them
together?” Then he suddenly remembered how he had tried to join their
hands, and he felt fearfully ashamed again. “Though I acted quite
sincerely, I must be more sensible in the future,” he concluded suddenly,
and did not even smile at his conclusion.

Katerina Ivanovna’s commission took him to Lake Street, and his brother
Dmitri lived close by, in a turning out of Lake Street. Alyosha decided to
go to him in any case before going to the captain, though he had a
presentiment that he would not find his brother. He suspected that he
would intentionally keep out of his way now, but he must find him anyhow.
Time was passing: the thought of his dying elder had not left Alyosha for
one minute from the time he set off from the monastery.

There was one point which interested him particularly about Katerina
Ivanovna’s commission; when she had mentioned the captain’s son, the
little schoolboy who had run beside his father crying, the idea had at
once struck Alyosha that this must be the schoolboy who had bitten his
finger when he, Alyosha, asked him what he had done to hurt him. Now
Alyosha felt practically certain of this, though he could not have said
why. Thinking of another subject was a relief, and he resolved to think no
more about the “mischief” he had done, and not to torture himself with
remorse, but to do what he had to do, let come what would. At that thought
he was completely comforted. Turning to the street where Dmitri lodged, he
felt hungry, and taking out of his pocket the roll he had brought from his
father’s, he ate it. It made him feel stronger.

Dmitri was not at home. The people of the house, an old cabinet‐maker, his
son, and his old wife, looked with positive suspicion at Alyosha. “He
hasn’t slept here for the last three nights. Maybe he has gone away,” the
old man said in answer to Alyosha’s persistent inquiries. Alyosha saw that
he was answering in accordance with instructions. When he asked whether he
were not at Grushenka’s or in hiding at Foma’s (Alyosha spoke so freely on
purpose), all three looked at him in alarm. “They are fond of him, they
are doing their best for him,” thought Alyosha. “That’s good.”

At last he found the house in Lake Street. It was a decrepit little house,
sunk on one side, with three windows looking into the street, and with a
muddy yard, in the middle of which stood a solitary cow. He crossed the
yard and found the door opening into the passage. On the left of the
passage lived the old woman of the house with her old daughter. Both
seemed to be deaf. In answer to his repeated inquiry for the captain, one
of them at last understood that he was asking for their lodgers, and
pointed to a door across the passage. The captain’s lodging turned out to
be a simple cottage room. Alyosha had his hand on the iron latch to open
the door, when he was struck by the strange hush within. Yet he knew from
Katerina Ivanovna’s words that the man had a family. “Either they are all
asleep or perhaps they have heard me coming and are waiting for me to open
the door. I’d better knock first,” and he knocked. An answer came, but not
at once, after an interval of perhaps ten seconds.

“Who’s there?” shouted some one in a loud and very angry voice.

Then Alyosha opened the door and crossed the threshold. He found himself
in a regular peasant’s room. Though it was large, it was cumbered up with
domestic belongings of all sorts, and there were several people in it. On
the left was a large Russian stove. From the stove to the window on the
left was a string running across the room, and on it there were rags
hanging. There was a bedstead against the wall on each side, right and
left, covered with knitted quilts. On the one on the left was a pyramid of
four print‐covered pillows, each smaller than the one beneath. On the
other there was only one very small pillow. The opposite corner was
screened off by a curtain or a sheet hung on a string. Behind this curtain
could be seen a bed made up on a bench and a chair. The rough square table
of plain wood had been moved into the middle window. The three windows,
which consisted each of four tiny greenish mildewy panes, gave little
light, and were close shut, so that the room was not very light and rather
stuffy. On the table was a frying‐pan with the remains of some fried eggs,
a half‐eaten piece of bread, and a small bottle with a few drops of vodka.

A woman of genteel appearance, wearing a cotton gown, was sitting on a
chair by the bed on the left. Her face was thin and yellow, and her sunken
cheeks betrayed at the first glance that she was ill. But what struck
Alyosha most was the expression in the poor woman’s eyes—a look of
surprised inquiry and yet of haughty pride. And while he was talking to
her husband, her big brown eyes moved from one speaker to the other with
the same haughty and questioning expression. Beside her at the window
stood a young girl, rather plain, with scanty reddish hair, poorly but
very neatly dressed. She looked disdainfully at Alyosha as he came in.
Beside the other bed was sitting another female figure. She was a very sad
sight, a young girl of about twenty, but hunchback and crippled “with
withered legs,” as Alyosha was told afterwards. Her crutches stood in the
corner close by. The strikingly beautiful and gentle eyes of this poor
girl looked with mild serenity at Alyosha. A man of forty‐five was sitting
at the table, finishing the fried eggs. He was spare, small and weakly
built. He had reddish hair and a scanty light‐colored beard, very much
like a wisp of tow (this comparison and the phrase “a wisp of tow” flashed
at once into Alyosha’s mind for some reason, he remembered it afterwards).
It was obviously this gentleman who had shouted to him, as there was no
other man in the room. But when Alyosha went in, he leapt up from the
bench on which he was sitting, and, hastily wiping his mouth with a ragged
napkin, darted up to Alyosha.

“It’s a monk come to beg for the monastery. A nice place to come to!” the
girl standing in the left corner said aloud. The man spun round instantly
towards her and answered her in an excited and breaking voice:

“No, Varvara, you are wrong. Allow me to ask,” he turned again to Alyosha,
“what has brought you to—our retreat?”

Alyosha looked attentively at him. It was the first time he had seen him.
There was something angular, flurried and irritable about him. Though he
had obviously just been drinking, he was not drunk. There was
extraordinary impudence in his expression, and yet, strange to say, at the
same time there was fear. He looked like a man who had long been kept in
subjection and had submitted to it, and now had suddenly turned and was
trying to assert himself. Or, better still, like a man who wants
dreadfully to hit you but is horribly afraid you will hit him. In his
words and in the intonation of his shrill voice there was a sort of crazy
humor, at times spiteful and at times cringing, and continually shifting
from one tone to another. The question about “our retreat” he had asked as
it were quivering all over, rolling his eyes, and skipping up so close to
Alyosha that he instinctively drew back a step. He was dressed in a very
shabby dark cotton coat, patched and spotted. He wore checked trousers of
an extremely light color, long out of fashion, and of very thin material.
They were so crumpled and so short that he looked as though he had grown
out of them like a boy.

“I am Alexey Karamazov,” Alyosha began in reply.

“I quite understand that, sir,” the gentleman snapped out at once to
assure him that he knew who he was already. “I am Captain Snegiryov, sir,
but I am still desirous to know precisely what has led you—”

“Oh, I’ve come for nothing special. I wanted to have a word with you—if
only you allow me.”

“In that case, here is a chair, sir; kindly be seated. That’s what they
used to say in the old comedies, ‘kindly be seated,’ ” and with a rapid
gesture he seized an empty chair (it was a rough wooden chair, not
upholstered) and set it for him almost in the middle of the room; then,
taking another similar chair for himself, he sat down facing Alyosha, so
close to him that their knees almost touched.

“Nikolay Ilyitch Snegiryov, sir, formerly a captain in the Russian
infantry, put to shame for his vices, but still a captain. Though I might
not be one now for the way I talk; for the last half of my life I’ve
learnt to say ‘sir.’ It’s a word you use when you’ve come down in the
world.”

“That’s very true,” smiled Alyosha. “But is it used involuntarily or on
purpose?”

“As God’s above, it’s involuntary, and I usen’t to use it! I didn’t use
the word ‘sir’ all my life, but as soon as I sank into low water I began
to say ‘sir.’ It’s the work of a higher power. I see you are interested in
contemporary questions, but how can I have excited your curiosity, living
as I do in surroundings impossible for the exercise of hospitality?”

“I’ve come—about that business.”

“About what business?” the captain interrupted impatiently.

“About your meeting with my brother Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Alyosha blurted
out awkwardly.

“What meeting, sir? You don’t mean that meeting? About my ‘wisp of tow,’
then?” He moved closer so that his knees positively knocked against
Alyosha. His lips were strangely compressed like a thread.

“What wisp of tow?” muttered Alyosha.

“He is come to complain of me, father!” cried a voice familiar to
Alyosha—the voice of the schoolboy—from behind the curtain. “I bit his
finger just now.” The curtain was pulled, and Alyosha saw his assailant
lying on a little bed made up on the bench and the chair in the corner
under the ikons. The boy lay covered by his coat and an old wadded quilt.
He was evidently unwell, and, judging by his glittering eyes, he was in a
fever. He looked at Alyosha without fear, as though he felt he was at home
and could not be touched.

“What! Did he bite your finger?” The captain jumped up from his chair.
“Was it your finger he bit?”

“Yes. He was throwing stones with other schoolboys. There were six of them
against him alone. I went up to him, and he threw a stone at me and then
another at my head. I asked him what I had done to him. And then he rushed
at me and bit my finger badly, I don’t know why.”

“I’ll thrash him, sir, at once—this minute!” The captain jumped up from
his seat.

“But I am not complaining at all, I am simply telling you ... I don’t want
him to be thrashed. Besides, he seems to be ill.”

“And do you suppose I’d thrash him? That I’d take my Ilusha and thrash him
before you for your satisfaction? Would you like it done at once, sir?”
said the captain, suddenly turning to Alyosha, as though he were going to
attack him. “I am sorry about your finger, sir; but instead of thrashing
Ilusha, would you like me to chop off my four fingers with this knife here
before your eyes to satisfy your just wrath? I should think four fingers
would be enough to satisfy your thirst for vengeance. You won’t ask for
the fifth one too?” He stopped short with a catch in his throat. Every
feature in his face was twitching and working; he looked extremely
defiant. He was in a sort of frenzy.

“I think I understand it all now,” said Alyosha gently and sorrowfully,
still keeping his seat. “So your boy is a good boy, he loves his father,
and he attacked me as the brother of your assailant.... Now I understand
it,” he repeated thoughtfully. “But my brother Dmitri Fyodorovitch regrets
his action, I know that, and if only it is possible for him to come to
you, or better still, to meet you in that same place, he will ask your
forgiveness before every one—if you wish it.”

“After pulling out my beard, you mean, he will ask my forgiveness? And he
thinks that will be a satisfactory finish, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, no! On the contrary, he will do anything you like and in any way you
like.”

“So if I were to ask his highness to go down on his knees before me in
that very tavern—‘The Metropolis’ it’s called—or in the market‐place, he
would do it?”

“Yes, he would even go down on his knees.”

“You’ve pierced me to the heart, sir. Touched me to tears and pierced me
to the heart! I am only too sensible of your brother’s generosity. Allow
me to introduce my family, my two daughters and my son—my litter. If I
die, who will care for them, and while I live who but they will care for a
wretch like me? That’s a great thing the Lord has ordained for every man
of my sort, sir. For there must be some one able to love even a man like
me.”

“Ah, that’s perfectly true!” exclaimed Alyosha.

“Oh, do leave off playing the fool! Some idiot comes in, and you put us to
shame!” cried the girl by the window, suddenly turning to her father with
a disdainful and contemptuous air.

“Wait a little, Varvara!” cried her father, speaking peremptorily but
looking at her quite approvingly. “That’s her character,” he said,
addressing Alyosha again.


    “And in all nature there was naught
    That could find favor in his eyes—


or rather in the feminine: that could find favor in her eyes. But now let
me present you to my wife, Arina Petrovna. She is crippled, she is forty‐
three; she can move, but very little. She is of humble origin. Arina
Petrovna, compose your countenance. This is Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov.
Get up, Alexey Fyodorovitch.” He took him by the hand and with unexpected
force pulled him up. “You must stand up to be introduced to a lady. It’s
not the Karamazov, mamma, who ... h’m ... etcetera, but his brother,
radiant with modest virtues. Come, Arina Petrovna, come, mamma, first your
hand to be kissed.”

And he kissed his wife’s hand respectfully and even tenderly. The girl at
the window turned her back indignantly on the scene; an expression of
extraordinary cordiality came over the haughtily inquiring face of the
woman.

“Good morning! Sit down, Mr. Tchernomazov,” she said.

“Karamazov, mamma, Karamazov. We are of humble origin,” he whispered
again.

“Well, Karamazov, or whatever it is, but I always think of
Tchernomazov.... Sit down. Why has he pulled you up? He calls me crippled,
but I am not, only my legs are swollen like barrels, and I am shriveled up
myself. Once I used to be so fat, but now it’s as though I had swallowed a
needle.”

“We are of humble origin,” the captain muttered again.

“Oh, father, father!” the hunchback girl, who had till then been silent on
her chair, said suddenly, and she hid her eyes in her handkerchief.

“Buffoon!” blurted out the girl at the window.

“Have you heard our news?” said the mother, pointing at her daughters.
“It’s like clouds coming over; the clouds pass and we have music again.
When we were with the army, we used to have many such guests. I don’t mean
to make any comparisons; every one to their taste. The deacon’s wife used
to come then and say, ‘Alexandr Alexandrovitch is a man of the noblest
heart, but Nastasya Petrovna,’ she would say, ‘is of the brood of hell.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a matter of taste; but you are a little spitfire.’
‘And you want keeping in your place,’ says she. ‘You black sword,’ said I,
‘who asked you to teach me?’ ‘But my breath,’ says she, ‘is clean, and
yours is unclean.’ ‘You ask all the officers whether my breath is
unclean.’ And ever since then I had it in my mind. Not long ago I was
sitting here as I am now, when I saw that very general come in who came
here for Easter, and I asked him: ‘Your Excellency,’ said I, ‘can a lady’s
breath be unpleasant?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘you ought to open a window‐
pane or open the door, for the air is not fresh here.’ And they all go on
like that! And what is my breath to them? The dead smell worse still! ‘I
won’t spoil the air,’ said I, ‘I’ll order some slippers and go away.’ My
darlings, don’t blame your own mother! Nikolay Ilyitch, how is it I can’t
please you? There’s only Ilusha who comes home from school and loves me.
Yesterday he brought me an apple. Forgive your own mother—forgive a poor
lonely creature! Why has my breath become unpleasant to you?”

And the poor mad woman broke into sobs, and tears streamed down her
cheeks. The captain rushed up to her.

“Mamma, mamma, my dear, give over! You are not lonely. Every one loves
you, every one adores you.” He began kissing both her hands again and
tenderly stroking her face; taking the dinner‐napkin, he began wiping away
her tears. Alyosha fancied that he too had tears in his eyes. “There, you
see, you hear?” he turned with a sort of fury to Alyosha, pointing to the
poor imbecile.

“I see and hear,” muttered Alyosha.

“Father, father, how can you—with him! Let him alone!” cried the boy,
sitting up in his bed and gazing at his father with glowing eyes.

“Do give over fooling, showing off your silly antics which never lead to
anything!” shouted Varvara, stamping her foot with passion.

“Your anger is quite just this time, Varvara, and I’ll make haste to
satisfy you. Come, put on your cap, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and I’ll put on
mine. We will go out. I have a word to say to you in earnest, but not
within these walls. This girl sitting here is my daughter Nina; I forgot
to introduce her to you. She is a heavenly angel incarnate ... who has
flown down to us mortals,... if you can understand.”

“There he is shaking all over, as though he is in convulsions!” Varvara
went on indignantly.

“And she there stamping her foot at me and calling me a fool just now, she
is a heavenly angel incarnate too, and she has good reason to call me so.
Come along, Alexey Fyodorovitch, we must make an end.”

And, snatching Alyosha’s hand, he drew him out of the room into the
street.



Chapter VII. And In The Open Air


“The air is fresh, but in my apartment it is not so in any sense of the
word. Let us walk slowly, sir. I should be glad of your kind interest.”

“I too have something important to say to you,” observed Alyosha, “only I
don’t know how to begin.”

“To be sure you must have business with me. You would never have looked in
upon me without some object. Unless you come simply to complain of the
boy, and that’s hardly likely. And, by the way, about the boy: I could not
explain to you in there, but here I will describe that scene to you. My
tow was thicker a week ago—I mean my beard. That’s the nickname they give
to my beard, the schoolboys most of all. Well, your brother Dmitri
Fyodorovitch was pulling me by my beard, I’d done nothing, he was in a
towering rage and happened to come upon me. He dragged me out of the
tavern into the market‐place; at that moment the boys were coming out of
school, and with them Ilusha. As soon as he saw me in such a state he
rushed up to me. ‘Father,’ he cried, ‘father!’ He caught hold of me,
hugged me, tried to pull me away, crying to my assailant, ‘Let go, let go,
it’s my father, forgive him!’—yes, he actually cried ‘forgive him.’ He
clutched at that hand, that very hand, in his little hands and kissed
it.... I remember his little face at that moment, I haven’t forgotten it
and I never shall!”

“I swear,” cried Alyosha, “that my brother will express his most deep and
sincere regret, even if he has to go down on his knees in that same
market‐place.... I’ll make him or he is no brother of mine!”

“Aha, then it’s only a suggestion! And it does not come from him but
simply from the generosity of your own warm heart. You should have said
so. No, in that case allow me to tell you of your brother’s highly
chivalrous soldierly generosity, for he did give expression to it at the
time. He left off dragging me by my beard and released me: ‘You are an
officer,’ he said, ‘and I am an officer, if you can find a decent man to
be your second send me your challenge. I will give satisfaction, though
you are a scoundrel.’ That’s what he said. A chivalrous spirit indeed! I
retired with Ilusha, and that scene is a family record imprinted for ever
on Ilusha’s soul. No, it’s not for us to claim the privileges of noblemen.
Judge for yourself. You’ve just been in our mansion, what did you see
there? Three ladies, one a cripple and weak‐minded, another a cripple and
hunchback and the third not crippled but far too clever. She is a student,
dying to get back to Petersburg, to work for the emancipation of the
Russian woman on the banks of the Neva. I won’t speak of Ilusha, he is
only nine. I am alone in the world, and if I die, what will become of all
of them? I simply ask you that. And if I challenge him and he kills me on
the spot, what then? What will become of them? And worse still, if he
doesn’t kill me but only cripples me: I couldn’t work, but I should still
be a mouth to feed. Who would feed it and who would feed them all? Must I
take Ilusha from school and send him to beg in the streets? That’s what it
means for me to challenge him to a duel. It’s silly talk and nothing
else.”

“He will beg your forgiveness, he will bow down at your feet in the middle
of the market‐place,” cried Alyosha again, with glowing eyes.

“I did think of prosecuting him,” the captain went on, “but look in our
code, could I get much compensation for a personal injury? And then
Agrafena Alexandrovna(3) sent for me and shouted at me: ‘Don’t dare to
dream of it! If you proceed against him, I’ll publish it to all the world
that he beat you for your dishonesty, and then you will be prosecuted.’ I
call God to witness whose was the dishonesty and by whose commands I
acted, wasn’t it by her own and Fyodor Pavlovitch’s? ‘And what’s more,’
she went on, ‘I’ll dismiss you for good and you’ll never earn another
penny from me. I’ll speak to my merchant too’ (that’s what she calls her
old man) ‘and he will dismiss you!’ And if he dismisses me, what can I
earn then from any one? Those two are all I have to look to, for your
Fyodor Pavlovitch has not only given over employing me, for another
reason, but he means to make use of papers I’ve signed to go to law
against me. And so I kept quiet, and you have seen our retreat. But now
let me ask you: did Ilusha hurt your finger much? I didn’t like to go into
it in our mansion before him.”

“Yes, very much, and he was in a great fury. He was avenging you on me as
a Karamazov, I see that now. But if only you had seen how he was throwing
stones at his school‐fellows! It’s very dangerous. They might kill him.
They are children and stupid. A stone may be thrown and break somebody’s
head.”

“That’s just what has happened. He has been bruised by a stone to‐day. Not
on the head but on the chest, just above the heart. He came home crying
and groaning and now he is ill.”

“And you know he attacks them first. He is bitter against them on your
account. They say he stabbed a boy called Krassotkin with a pen‐knife not
long ago.”

“I’ve heard about that too, it’s dangerous. Krassotkin is an official
here, we may hear more about it.”

“I would advise you,” Alyosha went on warmly, “not to send him to school
at all for a time till he is calmer ... and his anger is passed.”

“Anger!” the captain repeated, “that’s just what it is. He is a little
creature, but it’s a mighty anger. You don’t know all, sir. Let me tell
you more. Since that incident all the boys have been teasing him about the
‘wisp of tow.’ Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are
angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
Their teasing has stirred up a gallant spirit in Ilusha. An ordinary boy,
a weak son, would have submitted, have felt ashamed of his father, sir,
but he stood up for his father against them all. For his father and for
truth and justice. For what he suffered when he kissed your brother’s hand
and cried to him ‘Forgive father, forgive him,’—that only God knows—and I,
his father. For our children—not your children, but ours—the children of
the poor gentlemen looked down upon by every one—know what justice means,
sir, even at nine years old. How should the rich know? They don’t explore
such depths once in their lives. But at that moment in the square when he
kissed his hand, at that moment my Ilusha had grasped all that justice
means. That truth entered into him and crushed him for ever, sir,” the
captain said hotly again with a sort of frenzy, and he struck his right
fist against his left palm as though he wanted to show how “the truth”
crushed Ilusha. “That very day, sir, he fell ill with fever and was
delirious all night. All that day he hardly said a word to me, but I
noticed he kept watching me from the corner, though he turned to the
window and pretended to be learning his lessons. But I could see his mind
was not on his lessons. Next day I got drunk to forget my troubles, sinful
man as I am, and I don’t remember much. Mamma began crying, too—I am very
fond of mamma—well, I spent my last penny drowning my troubles. Don’t
despise me for that, sir, in Russia men who drink are the best. The best
men amongst us are the greatest drunkards. I lay down and I don’t remember
about Ilusha, though all that day the boys had been jeering at him at
school. ‘Wisp of tow,’ they shouted, ‘your father was pulled out of the
tavern by his wisp of tow, you ran by and begged forgiveness.’ ”

“On the third day when he came back from school, I saw he looked pale and
wretched. ‘What is it?’ I asked. He wouldn’t answer. Well, there’s no
talking in our mansion without mamma and the girls taking part in it.
What’s more, the girls had heard about it the very first day. Varvara had
begun snarling. ‘You fools and buffoons, can you ever do anything
rational?’ ‘Quite so,’ I said, ‘can we ever do anything rational?’ For the
time I turned it off like that. So in the evening I took the boy out for a
walk, for you must know we go for a walk every evening, always the same
way, along which we are going now—from our gate to that great stone which
lies alone in the road under the hurdle, which marks the beginning of the
town pasture. A beautiful and lonely spot, sir. Ilusha and I walked along
hand in hand as usual. He has a little hand, his fingers are thin and
cold—he suffers with his chest, you know. ‘Father,’ said he, ‘father!’
‘Well?’ said I. I saw his eyes flashing. ‘Father, how he treated you
then!’ ‘It can’t be helped, Ilusha,’ I said. ‘Don’t forgive him, father,
don’t forgive him! At school they say that he has paid you ten roubles for
it.’ ‘No, Ilusha,’ said I, ‘I would not take money from him for anything.’
Then he began trembling all over, took my hand in both his and kissed it
again. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘father, challenge him to a duel, at school they
say you are a coward and won’t challenge him, and that you’ll accept ten
roubles from him.’ ‘I can’t challenge him to a duel, Ilusha,’ I answered.
And I told briefly what I’ve just told you. He listened. ‘Father,’ he
said, ‘anyway don’t forgive it. When I grow up I’ll call him out myself
and kill him.’ His eyes shone and glowed. And of course I am his father,
and I had to put in a word: ‘It’s a sin to kill,’ I said, ‘even in a
duel.’ ‘Father,’ he said, ‘when I grow up, I’ll knock him down, knock the
sword out of his hand, I’ll fall on him, wave my sword over him and say:
“I could kill you, but I forgive you, so there!” ’ You see what the
workings of his little mind have been during these two days; he must have
been planning that vengeance all day, and raving about it at night.

“But he began to come home from school badly beaten, I found out about it
the day before yesterday, and you are right, I won’t send him to that
school any more. I heard that he was standing up against all the class
alone and defying them all, that his heart was full of resentment, of
bitterness—I was alarmed about him. We went for another walk. ‘Father,’ he
asked, ‘are the rich people stronger than any one else on earth?’ ‘Yes,
Ilusha,’ I said, ‘there are no people on earth stronger than the rich.’
‘Father,’ he said, ‘I will get rich, I will become an officer and conquer
everybody. The Tsar will reward me, I will come back here and then no one
will dare—’ Then he was silent and his lips still kept trembling.
‘Father,’ he said, ‘what a horrid town this is.’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I said,
‘it isn’t a very nice town.’ ‘Father, let us move into another town, a
nice one,’ he said, ‘where people don’t know about us.’ ‘We will move, we
will, Ilusha,’ said I, ‘only I must save up for it.’ I was glad to be able
to turn his mind from painful thoughts, and we began to dream of how we
would move to another town, how we would buy a horse and cart. ‘We will
put mamma and your sisters inside, we will cover them up and we’ll walk,
you shall have a lift now and then, and I’ll walk beside, for we must take
care of our horse, we can’t all ride. That’s how we’ll go.’ He was
enchanted at that, most of all at the thought of having a horse and
driving him. For of course a Russian boy is born among horses. We
chattered a long while. Thank God, I thought, I have diverted his mind and
comforted him.

“That was the day before yesterday, in the evening, but last night
everything was changed. He had gone to school in the morning, he came back
depressed, terribly depressed. In the evening I took him by the hand and
we went for a walk; he would not talk. There was a wind blowing and no
sun, and a feeling of autumn; twilight was coming on. We walked along,
both of us depressed. ‘Well, my boy,’ said I, ‘how about our setting off
on our travels?’ I thought I might bring him back to our talk of the day
before. He didn’t answer, but I felt his fingers trembling in my hand. Ah,
I thought, it’s a bad job; there’s something fresh. We had reached the
stone where we are now. I sat down on the stone. And in the air there were
lots of kites flapping and whirling. There were as many as thirty in
sight. Of course, it’s just the season for the kites. ‘Look, Ilusha,’ said
I, ‘it’s time we got out our last year’s kite again. I’ll mend it, where
have you put it away?’ My boy made no answer. He looked away and turned
sideways to me. And then a gust of wind blew up the sand. He suddenly fell
on me, threw both his little arms round my neck and held me tight. You
know, when children are silent and proud, and try to keep back their tears
when they are in great trouble and suddenly break down, their tears fall
in streams. With those warm streams of tears, he suddenly wetted my face.
He sobbed and shook as though he were in convulsions, and squeezed up
against me as I sat on the stone. ‘Father,’ he kept crying, ‘dear father,
how he insulted you!’ And I sobbed too. We sat shaking in each other’s
arms. ‘Ilusha,’ I said to him, ‘Ilusha darling.’ No one saw us then. God
alone saw us, I hope He will record it to my credit. You must thank your
brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch. No, sir, I won’t thrash my boy for your
satisfaction.”

He had gone back to his original tone of resentful buffoonery. Alyosha
felt though that he trusted him, and that if there had been some one else
in his, Alyosha’s place, the man would not have spoken so openly and would
not have told what he had just told. This encouraged Alyosha, whose heart
was trembling on the verge of tears.

“Ah, how I would like to make friends with your boy!” he cried. “If you
could arrange it—”

“Certainly, sir,” muttered the captain.

“But now listen to something quite different!” Alyosha went on. “I have a
message for you. That same brother of mine, Dmitri, has insulted his
betrothed, too, a noble‐hearted girl of whom you have probably heard. I
have a right to tell you of her wrong; I ought to do so, in fact, for
hearing of the insult done to you and learning all about your unfortunate
position, she commissioned me at once—just now—to bring you this help from
her—but only from her alone, not from Dmitri, who has abandoned her. Nor
from me, his brother, nor from any one else, but from her, only from her!
She entreats you to accept her help.... You have both been insulted by the
same man. She thought of you only when she had just received a similar
insult from him—similar in its cruelty, I mean. She comes like a sister to
help a brother in misfortune.... She told me to persuade you to take these
two hundred roubles from her, as from a sister, knowing that you are in
such need. No one will know of it, it can give rise to no unjust slander.
There are the two hundred roubles, and I swear you must take them
unless—unless all men are to be enemies on earth! But there are brothers
even on earth.... You have a generous heart ... you must see that, you
must,” and Alyosha held out two new rainbow‐colored hundred‐rouble notes.

They were both standing at the time by the great stone close to the fence,
and there was no one near. The notes seemed to produce a tremendous
impression on the captain. He started, but at first only from
astonishment. Such an outcome of their conversation was the last thing he
expected. Nothing could have been farther from his dreams than help from
any one—and such a sum!

He took the notes, and for a minute he was almost unable to answer, quite
a new expression came into his face.

“That for me? So much money—two hundred roubles! Good heavens! Why, I
haven’t seen so much money for the last four years! Mercy on us! And she
says she is a sister.... And is that the truth?”

“I swear that all I told you is the truth,” cried Alyosha.

The captain flushed red.

“Listen, my dear, listen. If I take it, I shan’t be behaving like a
scoundrel? In your eyes, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I shan’t be a scoundrel? No,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, listen, listen,” he hurried, touching Alyosha with
both his hands. “You are persuading me to take it, saying that it’s a
sister sends it, but inwardly, in your heart won’t you feel contempt for
me if I take it, eh?”

“No, no, on my salvation I swear I shan’t! And no one will ever know but
me—I, you and she, and one other lady, her great friend.”

“Never mind the lady! Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch, at a moment like this
you must listen, for you can’t understand what these two hundred roubles
mean to me now.” The poor fellow went on rising gradually into a sort of
incoherent, almost wild enthusiasm. He was thrown off his balance and
talked extremely fast, as though afraid he would not be allowed to say all
he had to say.

“Besides its being honestly acquired from a ‘sister,’ so highly respected
and revered, do you know that now I can look after mamma and Nina, my
hunchback angel daughter? Doctor Herzenstube came to me in the kindness of
his heart and was examining them both for a whole hour. ‘I can make
nothing of it,’ said he, but he prescribed a mineral water which is kept
at a chemist’s here. He said it would be sure to do her good, and he
ordered baths, too, with some medicine in them. The mineral water costs
thirty copecks, and she’d need to drink forty bottles perhaps; so I took
the prescription and laid it on the shelf under the ikons, and there it
lies. And he ordered hot baths for Nina with something dissolved in them,
morning and evening. But how can we carry out such a cure in our mansion,
without servants, without help, without a bath, and without water? Nina is
rheumatic all over, I don’t think I told you that. All her right side
aches at night, she is in agony, and, would you believe it, the angel
bears it without groaning for fear of waking us. We eat what we can get,
and she’ll only take the leavings, what you’d scarcely give to a dog. ‘I
am not worth it, I am taking it from you, I am a burden on you,’ that’s
what her angel eyes try to express. We wait on her, but she doesn’t like
it. ‘I am a useless cripple, no good to any one.’ As though she were not
worth it, when she is the saving of all of us with her angelic sweetness.
Without her, without her gentle word it would be hell among us! She
softens even Varvara. And don’t judge Varvara harshly either, she is an
angel too, she, too, has suffered wrong. She came to us for the summer,
and she brought sixteen roubles she had earned by lessons and saved up, to
go back with to Petersburg in September, that is now. But we took her
money and lived on it, so now she has nothing to go back with. Though
indeed she couldn’t go back, for she has to work for us like a slave. She
is like an overdriven horse with all of us on her back. She waits on us
all, mends and washes, sweeps the floor, puts mamma to bed. And mamma is
capricious and tearful and insane! And now I can get a servant with this
money, you understand, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I can get medicines for the
dear creatures, I can send my student to Petersburg, I can buy beef, I can
feed them properly. Good Lord, but it’s a dream!”

Alyosha was delighted that he had brought him such happiness and that the
poor fellow had consented to be made happy.

“Stay, Alexey Fyodorovitch, stay,” the captain began to talk with frenzied
rapidity, carried away by a new day‐dream. “Do you know that Ilusha and I
will perhaps really carry out our dream. We will buy a horse and cart, a
black horse, he insists on its being black, and we will set off as we
pretended the other day. I have an old friend, a lawyer in K. province,
and I heard through a trustworthy man that if I were to go he’d give me a
place as clerk in his office, so, who knows, maybe he would. So I’d just
put mamma and Nina in the cart, and Ilusha could drive, and I’d walk, I’d
walk.... Why, if I only succeed in getting one debt paid that’s owing me,
I should have perhaps enough for that too!”

“There would be enough!” cried Alyosha. “Katerina Ivanovna will send you
as much more as you need, and you know, I have money too, take what you
want, as you would from a brother, from a friend, you can give it back
later.... (You’ll get rich, you’ll get rich!) And you know you couldn’t
have a better idea than to move to another province! It would be the
saving of you, especially of your boy—and you ought to go quickly, before
the winter, before the cold. You must write to us when you are there, and
we will always be brothers.... No, it’s not a dream!”

Alyosha could have hugged him, he was so pleased. But glancing at him he
stopped short. The man was standing with his neck outstretched and his
lips protruding, with a pale and frenzied face. His lips were moving as
though trying to articulate something; no sound came, but still his lips
moved. It was uncanny.

“What is it?” asked Alyosha, startled.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch ... I ... you,” muttered the captain, faltering,
looking at him with a strange, wild, fixed stare, and an air of desperate
resolution. At the same time there was a sort of grin on his lips. “I ...
you, sir ... wouldn’t you like me to show you a little trick I know?” he
murmured, suddenly, in a firm rapid whisper, his voice no longer
faltering.

“What trick?”

“A pretty trick,” whispered the captain. His mouth was twisted on the left
side, his left eye was screwed up. He still stared at Alyosha.

“What is the matter? What trick?” Alyosha cried, now thoroughly alarmed.

“Why, look,” squealed the captain suddenly, and showing him the two notes
which he had been holding by one corner between his thumb and forefinger
during the conversation, he crumpled them up savagely and squeezed them
tight in his right hand. “Do you see, do you see?” he shrieked, pale and
infuriated. And suddenly flinging up his hand, he threw the crumpled notes
on the sand. “Do you see?” he shrieked again, pointing to them. “Look
there!”

And with wild fury he began trampling them under his heel, gasping and
exclaiming as he did so:

“So much for your money! So much for your money! So much for your money!
So much for your money!”

Suddenly he darted back and drew himself up before Alyosha, and his whole
figure expressed unutterable pride.

“Tell those who sent you that the wisp of tow does not sell his honor,” he
cried, raising his arm in the air. Then he turned quickly and began to
run; but he had not run five steps before he turned completely round and
kissed his hand to Alyosha. He ran another five paces and then turned
round for the last time. This time his face was not contorted with
laughter, but quivering all over with tears. In a tearful, faltering,
sobbing voice he cried:

“What should I say to my boy if I took money from you for our shame?”

And then he ran on without turning. Alyosha looked after him,
inexpressibly grieved. Oh, he saw that till the very last moment the man
had not known he would crumple up and fling away the notes. He did not
turn back. Alyosha knew he would not. He would not follow him and call him
back, he knew why. When he was out of sight, Alyosha picked up the two
notes. They were very much crushed and crumpled, and had been pressed into
the sand, but were uninjured and even rustled like new ones when Alyosha
unfolded them and smoothed them out. After smoothing them out, he folded
them up, put them in his pocket and went to Katerina Ivanovna to report on
the success of her commission.




Book V. Pro And Contra



Chapter I. The Engagement


Madame Hohlakov was again the first to meet Alyosha. She was flustered;
something important had happened. Katerina Ivanovna’s hysterics had ended
in a fainting fit, and then “a terrible, awful weakness had followed, she
lay with her eyes turned up and was delirious. Now she was in a fever.
They had sent for Herzenstube; they had sent for the aunts. The aunts were
already here, but Herzenstube had not yet come. They were all sitting in
her room, waiting. She was unconscious now, and what if it turned to brain
fever!”

Madame Hohlakov looked gravely alarmed. “This is serious, serious,” she
added at every word, as though nothing that had happened to her before had
been serious. Alyosha listened with distress, and was beginning to
describe his adventures, but she interrupted him at the first words. She
had not time to listen. She begged him to sit with Lise and wait for her
there.

“Lise,” she whispered almost in his ear, “Lise has greatly surprised me
just now, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch. She touched me, too, and so my heart
forgives her everything. Only fancy, as soon as you had gone, she began to
be truly remorseful for having laughed at you to‐day and yesterday, though
she was not laughing at you, but only joking. But she was seriously sorry
for it, almost ready to cry, so that I was quite surprised. She has never
been really sorry for laughing at me, but has only made a joke of it. And
you know she is laughing at me every minute. But this time she was in
earnest. She thinks a great deal of your opinion, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and
don’t take offense or be wounded by her if you can help it. I am never
hard upon her, for she’s such a clever little thing. Would you believe it?
She said just now that you were a friend of her childhood, ‘the greatest
friend of her childhood’—just think of that—‘greatest friend’—and what
about me? She has very strong feelings and memories, and, what’s more, she
uses these phrases, most unexpected words, which come out all of a sudden
when you least expect them. She spoke lately about a pine‐tree, for
instance: there used to be a pine‐tree standing in our garden in her early
childhood. Very likely it’s standing there still; so there’s no need to
speak in the past tense. Pine‐trees are not like people, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, they don’t change quickly. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘I remember
this pine‐tree as in a dream,’ only she said something so original about
it that I can’t repeat it. Besides, I’ve forgotten it. Well, good‐by! I am
so worried I feel I shall go out of my mind. Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch, I’ve
been out of my mind twice in my life. Go to Lise, cheer her up, as you
always can so charmingly. Lise,” she cried, going to her door, “here I’ve
brought you Alexey Fyodorovitch, whom you insulted so. He is not at all
angry, I assure you; on the contrary, he is surprised that you could
suppose so.”

“_Merci, maman._ Come in, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

Alyosha went in. Lise looked rather embarrassed, and at once flushed
crimson. She was evidently ashamed of something, and, as people always do
in such cases, she began immediately talking of other things, as though
they were of absorbing interest to her at the moment.

“Mamma has just told me all about the two hundred roubles, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, and your taking them to that poor officer ... and she told
me all the awful story of how he had been insulted ... and you know,
although mamma muddles things ... she always rushes from one thing to
another ... I cried when I heard. Well, did you give him the money and how
is that poor man getting on?”

“The fact is I didn’t give it to him, and it’s a long story,” answered
Alyosha, as though he, too, could think of nothing but his regret at
having failed, yet Lise saw perfectly well that he, too, looked away, and
that he, too, was trying to talk of other things.

Alyosha sat down to the table and began to tell his story, but at the
first words he lost his embarrassment and gained the whole of Lise’s
attention as well. He spoke with deep feeling, under the influence of the
strong impression he had just received, and he succeeded in telling his
story well and circumstantially. In old days in Moscow he had been fond of
coming to Lise and describing to her what had just happened to him, what
he had read, or what he remembered of his childhood. Sometimes they had
made day‐dreams and woven whole romances together—generally cheerful and
amusing ones. Now they both felt suddenly transported to the old days in
Moscow, two years before. Lise was extremely touched by his story. Alyosha
described Ilusha with warm feeling. When he finished describing how the
luckless man trampled on the money, Lise could not help clasping her hands
and crying out:

“So you didn’t give him the money! So you let him run away! Oh, dear, you
ought to have run after him!”

“No, Lise; it’s better I didn’t run after him,” said Alyosha, getting up
from his chair and walking thoughtfully across the room.

“How so? How is it better? Now they are without food and their case is
hopeless?”

“Not hopeless, for the two hundred roubles will still come to them. He’ll
take the money to‐morrow. To‐morrow he will be sure to take it,” said
Alyosha, pacing up and down, pondering. “You see, Lise,” he went on,
stopping suddenly before her, “I made one blunder, but that, even that, is
all for the best.”

“What blunder, and why is it for the best?”

“I’ll tell you. He is a man of weak and timorous character; he has
suffered so much and is very good‐natured. I keep wondering why he took
offense so suddenly, for I assure you, up to the last minute, he did not
know that he was going to trample on the notes. And I think now that there
was a great deal to offend him ... and it could not have been otherwise in
his position.... To begin with, he was sore at having been so glad of the
money in my presence and not having concealed it from me. If he had been
pleased, but not so much; if he had not shown it; if he had begun
affecting scruples and difficulties, as other people do when they take
money, he might still endure to take it. But he was too genuinely
delighted, and that was mortifying. Ah, Lise, he is a good and truthful
man—that’s the worst of the whole business. All the while he talked, his
voice was so weak, so broken, he talked so fast, so fast, he kept laughing
such a laugh, or perhaps he was crying—yes, I am sure he was crying, he
was so delighted—and he talked about his daughters—and about the situation
he could get in another town.... And when he had poured out his heart, he
felt ashamed at having shown me his inmost soul like that. So he began to
hate me at once. He is one of those awfully sensitive poor people. What
had made him feel most ashamed was that he had given in too soon and
accepted me as a friend, you see. At first he almost flew at me and tried
to intimidate me, but as soon as he saw the money he had begun embracing
me; he kept touching me with his hands. This must have been how he came to
feel it all so humiliating, and then I made that blunder, a very important
one. I suddenly said to him that if he had not money enough to move to
another town, we would give it to him, and, indeed, I myself would give
him as much as he wanted out of my own money. That struck him all at once.
Why, he thought, did I put myself forward to help him? You know, Lise,
it’s awfully hard for a man who has been injured, when other people look
at him as though they were his benefactors.... I’ve heard that; Father
Zossima told me so. I don’t know how to put it, but I have often seen it
myself. And I feel like that myself, too. And the worst of it was that
though he did not know, up to the very last minute, that he would trample
on the notes, he had a kind of presentiment of it, I am sure of that.
That’s just what made him so ecstatic, that he had that presentiment....
And though it’s so dreadful, it’s all for the best. In fact, I believe
nothing better could have happened.”

“Why, why could nothing better have happened?” cried Lise, looking with
great surprise at Alyosha.

“Because if he had taken the money, in an hour after getting home, he
would be crying with mortification, that’s just what would have happened.
And most likely he would have come to me early to‐morrow, and perhaps have
flung the notes at me and trampled upon them as he did just now. But now
he has gone home awfully proud and triumphant, though he knows he has
‘ruined himself.’ So now nothing could be easier than to make him accept
the two hundred roubles by to‐morrow, for he has already vindicated his
honor, tossed away the money, and trampled it under foot.... He couldn’t
know when he did it that I should bring it to him again to‐morrow, and yet
he is in terrible need of that money. Though he is proud of himself now,
yet even to‐day he’ll be thinking what a help he has lost. He will think
of it more than ever at night, will dream of it, and by to‐morrow morning
he may be ready to run to me to ask forgiveness. It’s just then that I’ll
appear. ‘Here, you are a proud man,’ I shall say: ‘you have shown it; but
now take the money and forgive us!’ And then he will take it!”

Alyosha was carried away with joy as he uttered his last words, “And then
he will take it!” Lise clapped her hands.

“Ah, that’s true! I understand that perfectly now. Ah, Alyosha, how do you
know all this? So young and yet he knows what’s in the heart.... I should
never have worked it out.”

“The great thing now is to persuade him that he is on an equal footing
with us, in spite of his taking money from us,” Alyosha went on in his
excitement, “and not only on an equal, but even on a higher footing.”

“ ‘On a higher footing’ is charming, Alexey Fyodorovitch; but go on, go
on!”

“You mean there isn’t such an expression as ‘on a higher footing’; but
that doesn’t matter because—”

“Oh, no, of course it doesn’t matter. Forgive me, Alyosha, dear.... You
know, I scarcely respected you till now—that is I respected you but on an
equal footing; but now I shall begin to respect you on a higher footing.
Don’t be angry, dear, at my joking,” she put in at once, with strong
feeling. “I am absurd and small, but you, you! Listen, Alexey
Fyodorovitch. Isn’t there in all our analysis—I mean your analysis ... no,
better call it ours—aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor
man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In
deciding so certainly that he will take the money?”

“No, Lise, it’s not contempt,” Alyosha answered, as though he had prepared
himself for the question. “I was thinking of that on the way here. How can
it be contempt when we are all like him, when we are all just the same as
he is? For you know we are just the same, no better. If we are better, we
should have been just the same in his place.... I don’t know about you,
Lise, but I consider that I have a sordid soul in many ways, and his soul
is not sordid; on the contrary, full of fine feeling.... No, Lise, I have
no contempt for him. Do you know, Lise, my elder told me once to care for
most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one
would for the sick in hospitals.”

“Ah, Alexey Fyodorovitch, dear, let us care for people as we would for the
sick!”

“Let us, Lise; I am ready. Though I am not altogether ready in myself. I
am sometimes very impatient and at other times I don’t see things. It’s
different with you.”

“Ah, I don’t believe it! Alexey Fyodorovitch, how happy I am!”

“I am so glad you say so, Lise.”

“Alexey Fyodorovitch, you are wonderfully good, but you are sometimes sort
of formal.... And yet you are not a bit formal really. Go to the door,
open it gently, and see whether mamma is listening,” said Lise, in a
nervous, hurried whisper.

Alyosha went, opened the door, and reported that no one was listening.

“Come here, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” Lise went on, flushing redder and
redder. “Give me your hand—that’s right. I have to make a great
confession, I didn’t write to you yesterday in joke, but in earnest,” and
she hid her eyes with her hand. It was evident that she was greatly
ashamed of the confession.

Suddenly she snatched his hand and impulsively kissed it three times.

“Ah, Lise, what a good thing!” cried Alyosha joyfully. “You know, I was
perfectly sure you were in earnest.”

“Sure? Upon my word!” She put aside his hand, but did not leave go of it,
blushing hotly, and laughing a little happy laugh. “I kiss his hand and he
says, ‘What a good thing!’ ”

But her reproach was undeserved. Alyosha, too, was greatly overcome.

“I should like to please you always, Lise, but I don’t know how to do it,”
he muttered, blushing too.

“Alyosha, dear, you are cold and rude. Do you see? He has chosen me as his
wife and is quite settled about it. He is sure I was in earnest. What a
thing to say! Why, that’s impertinence—that’s what it is.”

“Why, was it wrong of me to feel sure?” Alyosha asked, laughing suddenly.

“Ah, Alyosha, on the contrary, it was delightfully right,” cried Lise,
looking tenderly and happily at him.

Alyosha stood still, holding her hand in his. Suddenly he stooped down and
kissed her on her lips.

“Oh, what are you doing?” cried Lise. Alyosha was terribly abashed.

“Oh, forgive me if I shouldn’t.... Perhaps I’m awfully stupid.... You said
I was cold, so I kissed you.... But I see it was stupid.”

Lise laughed, and hid her face in her hands. “And in that dress!” she
ejaculated in the midst of her mirth. But she suddenly ceased laughing and
became serious, almost stern.

“Alyosha, we must put off kissing. We are not ready for that yet, and we
shall have a long time to wait,” she ended suddenly. “Tell me rather why
you who are so clever, so intellectual, so observant, choose a little
idiot, an invalid like me? Ah, Alyosha, I am awfully happy, for I don’t
deserve you a bit.”

“You do, Lise. I shall be leaving the monastery altogether in a few days.
If I go into the world, I must marry. I know that. _He_ told me to marry,
too. Whom could I marry better than you—and who would have me except you?
I have been thinking it over. In the first place, you’ve known me from a
child and you’ve a great many qualities I haven’t. You are more light‐
hearted than I am; above all, you are more innocent than I am. I have been
brought into contact with many, many things already.... Ah, you don’t
know, but I, too, am a Karamazov. What does it matter if you do laugh and
make jokes, and at me, too? Go on laughing. I am so glad you do. You laugh
like a little child, but you think like a martyr.”

“Like a martyr? How?”

“Yes, Lise, your question just now: whether we weren’t showing contempt
for that poor man by dissecting his soul—that was the question of a
sufferer.... You see, I don’t know how to express it, but any one who
thinks of such questions is capable of suffering. Sitting in your invalid
chair you must have thought over many things already.”

“Alyosha, give me your hand. Why are you taking it away?” murmured Lise in
a failing voice, weak with happiness. “Listen, Alyosha. What will you wear
when you come out of the monastery? What sort of suit? Don’t laugh, don’t
be angry, it’s very, very important to me.”

“I haven’t thought about the suit, Lise; but I’ll wear whatever you like.”

“I should like you to have a dark blue velvet coat, a white piqué
waistcoat, and a soft gray felt hat.... Tell me, did you believe that I
didn’t care for you when I said I didn’t mean what I wrote?”

“No, I didn’t believe it.”

“Oh, you insupportable person, you are incorrigible.”

“You see, I knew that you—seemed to care for me, but I pretended to
believe that you didn’t care for me to make it—easier for you.”

“That makes it worse! Worse and better than all! Alyosha, I am awfully
fond of you. Just before you came this morning, I tried my fortune. I
decided I would ask you for my letter, and if you brought it out calmly
and gave it to me (as might have been expected from you) it would mean
that you did not love me at all, that you felt nothing, and were simply a
stupid boy, good for nothing, and that I am ruined. But you left the
letter at home and that cheered me. You left it behind on purpose, so as
not to give it back, because you knew I would ask for it? That was it,
wasn’t it?”

“Ah, Lise, it was not so a bit. The letter is with me now, and it was this
morning, in this pocket. Here it is.”

Alyosha pulled the letter out laughing, and showed it her at a distance.

“But I am not going to give it to you. Look at it from here.”

“Why, then you told a lie? You, a monk, told a lie!”

“I told a lie if you like,” Alyosha laughed, too. “I told a lie so as not
to give you back the letter. It’s very precious to me,” he added suddenly,
with strong feeling, and again he flushed. “It always will be, and I won’t
give it up to any one!”

Lise looked at him joyfully. “Alyosha,” she murmured again, “look at the
door. Isn’t mamma listening?”

“Very well, Lise, I’ll look; but wouldn’t it be better not to look? Why
suspect your mother of such meanness?”

“What meanness? As for her spying on her daughter, it’s her right, it’s
not meanness!” cried Lise, firing up. “You may be sure, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, that when I am a mother, if I have a daughter like myself I
shall certainly spy on her!”

“Really, Lise? That’s not right.”

“Oh, my goodness! What has meanness to do with it? If she were listening
to some ordinary worldly conversation, it would be meanness, but when her
own daughter is shut up with a young man.... Listen, Alyosha, do you know
I shall spy upon you as soon as we are married, and let me tell you I
shall open all your letters and read them, so you may as well be
prepared.”

“Yes, of course, if so—” muttered Alyosha, “only it’s not right.”

“Ah, how contemptuous! Alyosha, dear, we won’t quarrel the very first day.
I’d better tell you the whole truth. Of course, it’s very wrong to spy on
people, and, of course, I am not right and you are, only I shall spy on
you all the same.”

“Do, then; you won’t find out anything,” laughed Alyosha.

“And, Alyosha, will you give in to me? We must decide that too.”

“I shall be delighted to, Lise, and certain to, only not in the most
important things. Even if you don’t agree with me, I shall do my duty in
the most important things.”

“That’s right; but let me tell you I am ready to give in to you not only
in the most important matters, but in everything. And I am ready to vow to
do so now—in everything, and for all my life!” cried Lise fervently, “and
I’ll do it gladly, gladly! What’s more, I’ll swear never to spy on you,
never once, never to read one of your letters. For you are right and I am
not. And though I shall be awfully tempted to spy, I know that I won’t do
it since you consider it dishonorable. You are my conscience now....
Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch, why have you been so sad lately—both
yesterday and to‐day? I know you have a lot of anxiety and trouble, but I
see you have some special grief besides, some secret one, perhaps?”

“Yes, Lise, I have a secret one, too,” answered Alyosha mournfully. “I see
you love me, since you guessed that.”

“What grief? What about? Can you tell me?” asked Lise with timid entreaty.

“I’ll tell you later, Lise—afterwards,” said Alyosha, confused. “Now you
wouldn’t understand it perhaps—and perhaps I couldn’t explain it.”

“I know your brothers and your father are worrying you, too.”

“Yes, my brothers too,” murmured Alyosha, pondering.

“I don’t like your brother Ivan, Alyosha,” said Lise suddenly.

He noticed this remark with some surprise, but did not answer it.

“My brothers are destroying themselves,” he went on, “my father, too. And
they are destroying others with them. It’s ‘the primitive force of the
Karamazovs,’ as Father Païssy said the other day, a crude, unbridled,
earthly force. Does the spirit of God move above that force? Even that I
don’t know. I only know that I, too, am a Karamazov.... Me a monk, a monk!
Am I a monk, Lise? You said just now that I was.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And perhaps I don’t even believe in God.”

“You don’t believe? What is the matter?” said Lise quietly and gently. But
Alyosha did not answer. There was something too mysterious, too subjective
in these last words of his, perhaps obscure to himself, but yet torturing
him.

“And now on the top of it all, my friend, the best man in the world, is
going, is leaving the earth! If you knew, Lise, how bound up in soul I am
with him! And then I shall be left alone.... I shall come to you, Lise....
For the future we will be together.”

“Yes, together, together! Henceforward we shall be always together, all
our lives! Listen, kiss me, I allow you.”

Alyosha kissed her.

“Come, now go. Christ be with you!” and she made the sign of the cross
over him. “Make haste back to _him_ while he is alive. I see I’ve kept you
cruelly. I’ll pray to‐day for him and you. Alyosha, we shall be happy!
Shall we be happy, shall we?”

“I believe we shall, Lise.”

Alyosha thought it better not to go in to Madame Hohlakov and was going
out of the house without saying good‐by to her. But no sooner had he
opened the door than he found Madame Hohlakov standing before him. From
the first word Alyosha guessed that she had been waiting on purpose to
meet him.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch, this is awful. This is all childish nonsense and
ridiculous. I trust you won’t dream—It’s foolishness, nothing but
foolishness!” she said, attacking him at once.

“Only don’t tell her that,” said Alyosha, “or she will be upset, and
that’s bad for her now.”

“Sensible advice from a sensible young man. Am I to understand that you
only agreed with her from compassion for her invalid state, because you
didn’t want to irritate her by contradiction?”

“Oh, no, not at all. I was quite serious in what I said,” Alyosha declared
stoutly.

“To be serious about it is impossible, unthinkable, and in the first place
I shall never be at home to you again, and I shall take her away, you may
be sure of that.”

“But why?” asked Alyosha. “It’s all so far off. We may have to wait
another year and a half.”

“Ah, Alexey Fyodorovitch, that’s true, of course, and you’ll have time to
quarrel and separate a thousand times in a year and a half. But I am so
unhappy! Though it’s such nonsense, it’s a great blow to me. I feel like
Famusov in the last scene of _Sorrow from Wit_. You are Tchatsky and she
is Sofya, and, only fancy, I’ve run down to meet you on the stairs, and in
the play the fatal scene takes place on the staircase. I heard it all; I
almost dropped. So this is the explanation of her dreadful night and her
hysterics of late! It means love to the daughter but death to the mother.
I might as well be in my grave at once. And a more serious matter still,
what is this letter she has written? Show it me at once, at once!”

“No, there’s no need. Tell me, how is Katerina Ivanovna now? I must know.”

“She still lies in delirium; she has not regained consciousness. Her aunts
are here; but they do nothing but sigh and give themselves airs.
Herzenstube came, and he was so alarmed that I didn’t know what to do for
him. I nearly sent for a doctor to look after him. He was driven home in
my carriage. And on the top of it all, you and this letter! It’s true
nothing can happen for a year and a half. In the name of all that’s holy,
in the name of your dying elder, show me that letter, Alexey Fyodorovitch.
I’m her mother. Hold it in your hand, if you like, and I will read it so.”

“No, I won’t show it to you. Even if she sanctioned it, I wouldn’t. I am
coming to‐morrow, and if you like, we can talk over many things, but now
good‐by!”

And Alyosha ran downstairs and into the street.



Chapter II. Smerdyakov With A Guitar


He had no time to lose indeed. Even while he was saying good‐by to Lise,
the thought had struck him that he must attempt some stratagem to find his
brother Dmitri, who was evidently keeping out of his way. It was getting
late, nearly three o’clock. Alyosha’s whole soul turned to the monastery,
to his dying saint, but the necessity of seeing Dmitri outweighed
everything. The conviction that a great inevitable catastrophe was about
to happen grew stronger in Alyosha’s mind with every hour. What that
catastrophe was, and what he would say at that moment to his brother, he
could perhaps not have said definitely. “Even if my benefactor must die
without me, anyway I won’t have to reproach myself all my life with the
thought that I might have saved something and did not, but passed by and
hastened home. If I do as I intend, I shall be following his great
precept.”

His plan was to catch his brother Dmitri unawares, to climb over the
fence, as he had the day before, get into the garden and sit in the
summer‐house. If Dmitri were not there, thought Alyosha, he would not
announce himself to Foma or the women of the house, but would remain
hidden in the summer‐house, even if he had to wait there till evening. If,
as before, Dmitri were lying in wait for Grushenka to come, he would be
very likely to come to the summer‐house. Alyosha did not, however, give
much thought to the details of his plan, but resolved to act upon it, even
if it meant not getting back to the monastery that day.

Everything happened without hindrance, he climbed over the hurdle almost
in the same spot as the day before, and stole into the summer‐house
unseen. He did not want to be noticed. The woman of the house and Foma
too, if he were here, might be loyal to his brother and obey his
instructions, and so refuse to let Alyosha come into the garden, or might
warn Dmitri that he was being sought and inquired for.

There was no one in the summer‐house. Alyosha sat down and began to wait.
He looked round the summer‐house, which somehow struck him as a great deal
more ancient than before. Though the day was just as fine as yesterday, it
seemed a wretched little place this time. There was a circle on the table,
left no doubt from the glass of brandy having been spilt the day before.
Foolish and irrelevant ideas strayed about his mind, as they always do in
a time of tedious waiting. He wondered, for instance, why he had sat down
precisely in the same place as before, why not in the other seat. At last
he felt very depressed—depressed by suspense and uncertainty. But he had
not sat there more than a quarter of an hour, when he suddenly heard the
thrum of a guitar somewhere quite close. People were sitting, or had only
just sat down, somewhere in the bushes not more than twenty paces away.
Alyosha suddenly recollected that on coming out of the summer‐house the
day before, he had caught a glimpse of an old green low garden‐seat among
the bushes on the left, by the fence. The people must be sitting on it
now. Who were they?

A man’s voice suddenly began singing in a sugary falsetto, accompanying
himself on the guitar:


    With invincible force
    I am bound to my dear.
    O Lord, have mercy
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!


The voice ceased. It was a lackey’s tenor and a lackey’s song. Another
voice, a woman’s, suddenly asked insinuatingly and bashfully, though with
mincing affectation:

“Why haven’t you been to see us for so long, Pavel Fyodorovitch? Why do
you always look down upon us?”

“Not at all,” answered a man’s voice politely, but with emphatic dignity.
It was clear that the man had the best of the position, and that the woman
was making advances. “I believe the man must be Smerdyakov,” thought
Alyosha, “from his voice. And the lady must be the daughter of the house
here, who has come from Moscow, the one who wears the dress with a tail
and goes to Marfa for soup.”

“I am awfully fond of verses of all kinds, if they rhyme,” the woman’s
voice continued. “Why don’t you go on?”

The man sang again:


    What do I care for royal wealth
    If but my dear one be in health?
    Lord have mercy
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!


“It was even better last time,” observed the woman’s voice. “You sang ‘If
my darling be in health’; it sounded more tender. I suppose you’ve
forgotten to‐day.”

“Poetry is rubbish!” said Smerdyakov curtly.

“Oh, no! I am very fond of poetry.”

“So far as it’s poetry, it’s essential rubbish. Consider yourself, who
ever talks in rhyme? And if we were all to talk in rhyme, even though it
were decreed by government, we shouldn’t say much, should we? Poetry is no
good, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“How clever you are! How is it you’ve gone so deep into everything?” The
woman’s voice was more and more insinuating.

“I could have done better than that. I could have known more than that, if
it had not been for my destiny from my childhood up. I would have shot a
man in a duel if he called me names because I am descended from a filthy
beggar and have no father. And they used to throw it in my teeth in
Moscow. It had reached them from here, thanks to Grigory Vassilyevitch.
Grigory Vassilyevitch blames me for rebelling against my birth, but I
would have sanctioned their killing me before I was born that I might not
have come into the world at all. They used to say in the market, and your
mamma too, with great lack of delicacy, set off telling me that her hair
was like a mat on her head, and that she was short of five foot by a wee
bit. Why talk of a wee bit while she might have said ‘a little bit,’ like
every one else? She wanted to make it touching, a regular peasant’s
feeling. Can a Russian peasant be said to feel, in comparison with an
educated man? He can’t be said to have feeling at all, in his ignorance.
From my childhood up when I hear ‘a wee bit,’ I am ready to burst with
rage. I hate all Russia, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“If you’d been a cadet in the army, or a young hussar, you wouldn’t have
talked like that, but would have drawn your saber to defend all Russia.”

“I don’t want to be a hussar, Marya Kondratyevna, and, what’s more, I
should like to abolish all soldiers.”

“And when an enemy comes, who is going to defend us?”

“There’s no need of defense. In 1812 there was a great invasion of Russia
by Napoleon, first Emperor of the French, father of the present one, and
it would have been a good thing if they had conquered us. A clever nation
would have conquered a very stupid one and annexed it. We should have had
quite different institutions.”

“Are they so much better in their own country than we are? I wouldn’t
change a dandy I know of for three young Englishmen,” observed Marya
Kondratyevna tenderly, doubtless accompanying her words with a most
languishing glance.

“That’s as one prefers.”

“But you are just like a foreigner—just like a most gentlemanly foreigner.
I tell you that, though it makes me bashful.”

“If you care to know, the folks there and ours here are just alike in
their vice. They are swindlers, only there the scoundrel wears polished
boots and here he grovels in filth and sees no harm in it. The Russian
people want thrashing, as Fyodor Pavlovitch said very truly yesterday,
though he is mad, and all his children.”

“You said yourself you had such a respect for Ivan Fyodorovitch.”

“But he said I was a stinking lackey. He thinks that I might be unruly. He
is mistaken there. If I had a certain sum in my pocket, I would have left
here long ago. Dmitri Fyodorovitch is lower than any lackey in his
behavior, in his mind, and in his poverty. He doesn’t know how to do
anything, and yet he is respected by every one. I may be only a soup‐
maker, but with luck I could open a café restaurant in Petrovka, in
Moscow, for my cookery is something special, and there’s no one in Moscow,
except the foreigners, whose cookery is anything special. Dmitri
Fyodorovitch is a beggar, but if he were to challenge the son of the first
count in the country, he’d fight him. Though in what way is he better than
I am? For he is ever so much stupider than I am. Look at the money he has
wasted without any need!”

“It must be lovely, a duel,” Marya Kondratyevna observed suddenly.

“How so?”

“It must be so dreadful and so brave, especially when young officers with
pistols in their hands pop at one another for the sake of some lady. A
perfect picture! Ah, if only girls were allowed to look on, I’d give
anything to see one!”

“It’s all very well when you are firing at some one, but when he is firing
straight in your mug, you must feel pretty silly. You’d be glad to run
away, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“You don’t mean you would run away?” But Smerdyakov did not deign to
reply. After a moment’s silence the guitar tinkled again, and he sang
again in the same falsetto:


    Whatever you may say,
    I shall go far away.
    Life will be bright and gay
    In the city far away.
    I shall not grieve,
    I shall not grieve at all,
    I don’t intend to grieve at all.


Then something unexpected happened. Alyosha suddenly sneezed. They were
silent. Alyosha got up and walked towards them. He found Smerdyakov
dressed up and wearing polished boots, his hair pomaded, and perhaps
curled. The guitar lay on the garden‐seat. His companion was the daughter
of the house, wearing a light‐blue dress with a train two yards long. She
was young and would not have been bad‐looking, but that her face was so
round and terribly freckled.

“Will my brother Dmitri soon be back?” asked Alyosha with as much
composure as he could.

Smerdyakov got up slowly; Marya Kondratyevna rose too.

“How am I to know about Dmitri Fyodorovitch? It’s not as if I were his
keeper,” answered Smerdyakov quietly, distinctly, and superciliously.

“But I simply asked whether you do know?” Alyosha explained.

“I know nothing of his whereabouts and don’t want to.”

“But my brother told me that you let him know all that goes on in the
house, and promised to let him know when Agrafena Alexandrovna comes.”

Smerdyakov turned a deliberate, unmoved glance upon him.

“And how did you get in this time, since the gate was bolted an hour ago?”
he asked, looking at Alyosha.

“I came in from the back‐alley, over the fence, and went straight to the
summer‐house. I hope you’ll forgive me,” he added, addressing Marya
Kondratyevna. “I was in a hurry to find my brother.”

“Ach, as though we could take it amiss in you!” drawled Marya
Kondratyevna, flattered by Alyosha’s apology. “For Dmitri Fyodorovitch
often goes to the summer‐house in that way. We don’t know he is here and
he is sitting in the summer‐house.”

“I am very anxious to find him, or to learn from you where he is now.
Believe me, it’s on business of great importance to him.”

“He never tells us,” lisped Marya Kondratyevna.

“Though I used to come here as a friend,” Smerdyakov began again, “Dmitri
Fyodorovitch has pestered me in a merciless way even here by his incessant
questions about the master. ‘What news?’ he’ll ask. ‘What’s going on in
there now? Who’s coming and going?’ and can’t I tell him something more.
Twice already he’s threatened me with death.”

“With death?” Alyosha exclaimed in surprise.

“Do you suppose he’d think much of that, with his temper, which you had a
chance of observing yourself yesterday? He says if I let Agrafena
Alexandrovna in and she passes the night there, I’ll be the first to
suffer for it. I am terribly afraid of him, and if I were not even more
afraid of doing so, I ought to let the police know. God only knows what he
might not do!”

“His honor said to him the other day, ‘I’ll pound you in a mortar!’ ”
added Marya Kondratyevna.

“Oh, if it’s pounding in a mortar, it may be only talk,” observed Alyosha.
“If I could meet him, I might speak to him about that too.”

“Well, the only thing I can tell you is this,” said Smerdyakov, as though
thinking better of it; “I am here as an old friend and neighbor, and it
would be odd if I didn’t come. On the other hand, Ivan Fyodorovitch sent
me first thing this morning to your brother’s lodging in Lake Street,
without a letter, but with a message to Dmitri Fyodorovitch to go to dine
with him at the restaurant here, in the market‐place. I went, but didn’t
find Dmitri Fyodorovitch at home, though it was eight o’clock. ‘He’s been
here, but he is quite gone,’ those were the very words of his landlady.
It’s as though there was an understanding between them. Perhaps at this
moment he is in the restaurant with Ivan Fyodorovitch, for Ivan
Fyodorovitch has not been home to dinner and Fyodor Pavlovitch dined alone
an hour ago, and is gone to lie down. But I beg you most particularly not
to speak of me and of what I have told you, for he’d kill me for nothing
at all.”

“Brother Ivan invited Dmitri to the restaurant to‐day?” repeated Alyosha
quickly.

“That’s so.”

“The Metropolis tavern in the market‐place?”

“The very same.”

“That’s quite likely,” cried Alyosha, much excited. “Thank you,
Smerdyakov; that’s important. I’ll go there at once.”

“Don’t betray me,” Smerdyakov called after him.

“Oh, no, I’ll go to the tavern as though by chance. Don’t be anxious.”

“But wait a minute, I’ll open the gate to you,” cried Marya Kondratyevna.

“No; it’s a short cut, I’ll get over the fence again.”

What he had heard threw Alyosha into great agitation. He ran to the
tavern. It was impossible for him to go into the tavern in his monastic
dress, but he could inquire at the entrance for his brothers and call them
down. But just as he reached the tavern, a window was flung open, and his
brother Ivan called down to him from it.

“Alyosha, can’t you come up here to me? I shall be awfully grateful.”

“To be sure I can, only I don’t quite know whether in this dress—”

“But I am in a room apart. Come up the steps; I’ll run down to meet you.”

A minute later Alyosha was sitting beside his brother. Ivan was alone
dining.



Chapter III. The Brothers Make Friends


Ivan was not, however, in a separate room, but only in a place shut off by
a screen, so that it was unseen by other people in the room. It was the
first room from the entrance with a buffet along the wall. Waiters were
continually darting to and fro in it. The only customer in the room was an
old retired military man drinking tea in a corner. But there was the usual
bustle going on in the other rooms of the tavern; there were shouts for
the waiters, the sound of popping corks, the click of billiard balls, the
drone of the organ. Alyosha knew that Ivan did not usually visit this
tavern and disliked taverns in general. So he must have come here, he
reflected, simply to meet Dmitri by arrangement. Yet Dmitri was not there.

“Shall I order you fish, soup or anything. You don’t live on tea alone, I
suppose,” cried Ivan, apparently delighted at having got hold of Alyosha.
He had finished dinner and was drinking tea.

“Let me have soup, and tea afterwards, I am hungry,” said Alyosha gayly.

“And cherry jam? They have it here. You remember how you used to love
cherry jam when you were little?”

“You remember that? Let me have jam too, I like it still.”

Ivan rang for the waiter and ordered soup, jam and tea.

“I remember everything, Alyosha, I remember you till you were eleven, I
was nearly fifteen. There’s such a difference between fifteen and eleven
that brothers are never companions at those ages. I don’t know whether I
was fond of you even. When I went away to Moscow for the first few years I
never thought of you at all. Then, when you came to Moscow yourself, we
only met once somewhere, I believe. And now I’ve been here more than three
months, and so far we have scarcely said a word to each other. To‐morrow I
am going away, and I was just thinking as I sat here how I could see you
to say good‐by and just then you passed.”

“Were you very anxious to see me, then?”

“Very. I want to get to know you once for all, and I want you to know me.
And then to say good‐by. I believe it’s always best to get to know people
just before leaving them. I’ve noticed how you’ve been looking at me these
three months. There has been a continual look of expectation in your eyes,
and I can’t endure that. That’s how it is I’ve kept away from you. But in
the end I have learned to respect you. The little man stands firm, I
thought. Though I am laughing, I am serious. You do stand firm, don’t you?
I like people who are firm like that whatever it is they stand by, even if
they are such little fellows as you. Your expectant eyes ceased to annoy
me, I grew fond of them in the end, those expectant eyes. You seem to love
me for some reason, Alyosha?”

“I do love you, Ivan. Dmitri says of you—Ivan is a tomb! I say of you,
Ivan is a riddle. You are a riddle to me even now. But I understand
something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning.”

“What’s that?” laughed Ivan.

“You won’t be angry?” Alyosha laughed too.

“Well?”

“That you are just as young as other young men of three and twenty, that
you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact! Now, have I
insulted you dreadfully?”

“On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence,” cried Ivan, warmly and
good‐humoredly. “Would you believe it that ever since that scene with her,
I have thought of nothing else but my youthful greenness, and just as
though you guessed that, you begin about it. Do you know I’ve been sitting
here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith
in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in
fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil‐ridden
chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I
should want to live and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn
away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to
leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away—where I don’t
know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over
everything—every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked
myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would
overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve
come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and
then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy. Some driveling consumptive
moralists—and poets especially—often call that thirst for life base. It’s
a feature of the Karamazovs, it’s true, that thirst for life regardless of
everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal
force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing
for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe
in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they
open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves
you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by
men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old
habit one’s heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you,
eat it, it will do you good. It’s first‐rate soup, they know how to make
it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here.
And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most
precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie
there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of
such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their
science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and
weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been
nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply
because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion.
I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky—that’s all it is. It’s
not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with
one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. Do you
understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?” Ivan laughed suddenly.

“I understand too well, Ivan. One longs to love with one’s inside, with
one’s stomach. You said that so well and I am awfully glad that you have
such a longing for life,” cried Alyosha. “I think every one should love
life above everything in the world.”

“Love life more than the meaning of it?”

“Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless
of logic, and it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it. I have
thought so a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan, you love life, now
you’ve only to try to do the second half and you are saved.”

“You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost! And what does your
second half mean?”

“Why, one has to raise up your dead, who perhaps have not died after all.
Come, let me have tea. I am so glad of our talk, Ivan.”

“I see you are feeling inspired. I am awfully fond of such _professions de
foi_ from such—novices. You are a steadfast person, Alexey. Is it true
that you mean to leave the monastery?”

“Yes, my elder sends me out into the world.”

“We shall see each other then in the world. We shall meet before I am
thirty, when I shall begin to turn aside from the cup. Father doesn’t want
to turn aside from his cup till he is seventy, he dreams of hanging on to
eighty in fact, so he says. He means it only too seriously, though he is a
buffoon. He stands on a firm rock, too, he stands on his sensuality—though
after we are thirty, indeed, there may be nothing else to stand on.... But
to hang on to seventy is nasty, better only to thirty; one might retain ‘a
shadow of nobility’ by deceiving oneself. Have you seen Dmitri to‐day?”

“No, but I saw Smerdyakov,” and Alyosha rapidly, though minutely,
described his meeting with Smerdyakov. Ivan began listening anxiously and
questioned him.

“But he begged me not to tell Dmitri that he had told me about him,” added
Alyosha. Ivan frowned and pondered.

“Are you frowning on Smerdyakov’s account?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, on his account. Damn him, I certainly did want to see Dmitri, but
now there’s no need,” said Ivan reluctantly.

“But are you really going so soon, brother?”

“Yes.”

“What of Dmitri and father? how will it end?” asked Alyosha anxiously.

“You are always harping upon it! What have I to do with it? Am I my
brother Dmitri’s keeper?” Ivan snapped irritably, but then he suddenly
smiled bitterly. “Cain’s answer about his murdered brother, wasn’t it?
Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking at this moment? Well, damn it all, I
can’t stay here to be their keeper, can I? I’ve finished what I had to do,
and I am going. Do you imagine I am jealous of Dmitri, that I’ve been
trying to steal his beautiful Katerina Ivanovna for the last three months?
Nonsense, I had business of my own. I finished it. I am going. I finished
it just now, you were witness.”

“At Katerina Ivanovna’s?”

“Yes, and I’ve released myself once for all. And after all, what have I to
do with Dmitri? Dmitri doesn’t come in. I had my own business to settle
with Katerina Ivanovna. You know, on the contrary, that Dmitri behaved as
though there was an understanding between us. I didn’t ask him to do it,
but he solemnly handed her over to me and gave us his blessing. It’s all
too funny. Ah, Alyosha, if you only knew how light my heart is now! Would
you believe, it, I sat here eating my dinner and was nearly ordering
champagne to celebrate my first hour of freedom. Tfoo! It’s been going on
nearly six months, and all at once I’ve thrown it off. I could never have
guessed even yesterday, how easy it would be to put an end to it if I
wanted.”

“You are speaking of your love, Ivan?”

“Of my love, if you like. I fell in love with the young lady, I worried
myself over her and she worried me. I sat watching over her ... and all at
once it’s collapsed! I spoke this morning with inspiration, but I went
away and roared with laughter. Would you believe it? Yes, it’s the literal
truth.”

“You seem very merry about it now,” observed Alyosha, looking into his
face, which had suddenly grown brighter.

“But how could I tell that I didn’t care for her a bit! Ha ha! It appears
after all I didn’t. And yet how she attracted me! How attractive she was
just now when I made my speech! And do you know she attracts me awfully
even now, yet how easy it is to leave her. Do you think I am boasting?”

“No, only perhaps it wasn’t love.”

“Alyosha,” laughed Ivan, “don’t make reflections about love, it’s unseemly
for you. How you rushed into the discussion this morning! I’ve forgotten
to kiss you for it.... But how she tormented me! It certainly was sitting
by a ‘laceration.’ Ah, she knew how I loved her! She loved me and not
Dmitri,” Ivan insisted gayly. “Her feeling for Dmitri was simply a self‐
laceration. All I told her just now was perfectly true, but the worst of
it is, it may take her fifteen or twenty years to find out that she
doesn’t care for Dmitri, and loves me whom she torments, and perhaps she
may never find it out at all, in spite of her lesson to‐day. Well, it’s
better so; I can simply go away for good. By the way, how is she now? What
happened after I departed?”

Alyosha told him she had been hysterical, and that she was now, he heard,
unconscious and delirious.

“Isn’t Madame Hohlakov laying it on?”

“I think not.”

“I must find out. Nobody dies of hysterics, though. They don’t matter. God
gave woman hysterics as a relief. I won’t go to her at all. Why push
myself forward again?”

“But you told her that she had never cared for you.”

“I did that on purpose. Alyosha, shall I call for some champagne? Let us
drink to my freedom. Ah, if only you knew how glad I am!”

“No, brother, we had better not drink,” said Alyosha suddenly. “Besides I
feel somehow depressed.”

“Yes, you’ve been depressed a long time, I’ve noticed it.”

“Have you settled to go to‐morrow morning, then?”

“Morning? I didn’t say I should go in the morning.... But perhaps it may
be the morning. Would you believe it, I dined here to‐day only to avoid
dining with the old man, I loathe him so. I should have left long ago, so
far as he is concerned. But why are you so worried about my going away?
We’ve plenty of time before I go, an eternity!”

“If you are going away to‐morrow, what do you mean by an eternity?”

“But what does it matter to us?” laughed Ivan. “We’ve time enough for our
talk, for what brought us here. Why do you look so surprised? Answer: why
have we met here? To talk of my love for Katerina Ivanovna, of the old man
and Dmitri? of foreign travel? of the fatal position of Russia? Of the
Emperor Napoleon? Is that it?”

“No.”

“Then you know what for. It’s different for other people; but we in our
green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all. That’s what
we care about. Young Russia is talking about nothing but the eternal
questions now. Just when the old folks are all taken up with practical
questions. Why have you been looking at me in expectation for the last
three months? To ask me, ‘What do you believe, or don’t you believe at
all?’ That’s what your eyes have been meaning for these three months,
haven’t they?”

“Perhaps so,” smiled Alyosha. “You are not laughing at me, now, Ivan?”

“Me laughing! I don’t want to wound my little brother who has been
watching me with such expectation for three months. Alyosha, look straight
at me! Of course I am just such a little boy as you are, only not a
novice. And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I
mean? In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down
in a corner. They’ve never met in their lives before and, when they go out
of the tavern, they won’t meet again for forty years. And what do they
talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the eternal questions,
of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in
God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity
on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they’re the same
questions turned inside out. And masses, masses of the most original
Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions! Isn’t it so?”

“Yes, for real Russians the questions of God’s existence and of
immortality, or, as you say, the same questions turned inside out, come
first and foremost, of course, and so they should,” said Alyosha, still
watching his brother with the same gentle and inquiring smile.

“Well, Alyosha, it’s sometimes very unwise to be a Russian at all, but
anything stupider than the way Russian boys spend their time one can
hardly imagine. But there’s one Russian boy called Alyosha I am awfully
fond of.”

“How nicely you put that in!” Alyosha laughed suddenly.

“Well, tell me where to begin, give your orders. The existence of God,
eh?”

“Begin where you like. You declared yesterday at father’s that there was
no God.” Alyosha looked searchingly at his brother.

“I said that yesterday at dinner on purpose to tease you and I saw your
eyes glow. But now I’ve no objection to discussing with you, and I say so
very seriously. I want to be friends with you, Alyosha, for I have no
friends and want to try it. Well, only fancy, perhaps I too accept God,”
laughed Ivan; “that’s a surprise for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course, if you are not joking now.”

“Joking? I was told at the elder’s yesterday that I was joking. You know,
dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared
that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented. _S’il n’existait
pas Dieu, il faudrait l’inventer._ And man has actually invented God. And
what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really
exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God,
could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man. So holy it
is, so touching, so wise and so great a credit it does to man. As for me,
I’ve long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man. And I
won’t go through all the axioms laid down by Russian boys on that subject,
all derived from European hypotheses; for what’s a hypothesis there, is an
axiom with the Russian boy, and not only with the boys but with their
teachers too, for our Russian professors are often just the same boys
themselves. And so I omit all the hypotheses. For what are we aiming at
now? I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature,
that is what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope,
that’s it, isn’t it? And therefore I tell you that I accept God simply.
But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the
world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of
Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in
space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers,
and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole
universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in
Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which
according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in
infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can’t understand
even that, I can’t expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly
that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian
earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?
And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha,
especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are
utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three
dimensions. And so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more, I accept
His wisdom, His purpose—which are utterly beyond our ken; I believe in the
underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony
in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to
Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which
Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity. There are all sorts of
phrases for it. I seem to be on the right path, don’t I? Yet would you
believe it, in the final result I don’t accept this world of God’s, and,
although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t
accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and
cannot accept. Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering
will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of
human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the
despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind
of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony,
something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all
hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all
the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make
it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with
men—but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t
accept it. Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see
it and say that they’ve met, but still I won’t accept it. That’s what’s at
the root of me, Alyosha; that’s my creed. I am in earnest in what I say. I
began our talk as stupidly as I could on purpose, but I’ve led up to my
confession, for that’s all you want. You didn’t want to hear about God,
but only to know what the brother you love lives by. And so I’ve told
you.”

Ivan concluded his long tirade with marked and unexpected feeling.

“And why did you begin ‘as stupidly as you could’?” asked Alyosha, looking
dreamily at him.

“To begin with, for the sake of being Russian. Russian conversations on
such subjects are always carried on inconceivably stupidly. And secondly,
the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is,
the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence
wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is
honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and
the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.”

“You will explain why you don’t accept the world?” said Alyosha.

“To be sure I will, it’s not a secret, that’s what I’ve been leading up
to. Dear little brother, I don’t want to corrupt you or to turn you from
your stronghold, perhaps I want to be healed by you.” Ivan smiled suddenly
quite like a little gentle child. Alyosha had never seen such a smile on
his face before.



Chapter IV. Rebellion


“I must make you one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never understand
how one can love one’s neighbors. It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind,
that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once
read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen
beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and
began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some
awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from ‘self‐laceration,’
from the self‐laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed
by duty, as a penance laid on him. For any one to love a man, he must be
hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”

“Father Zossima has talked of that more than once,” observed Alyosha; “he,
too, said that the face of a man often hinders many people not practiced
in love, from loving him. But yet there’s a great deal of love in mankind,
and almost Christ‐like love. I know that myself, Ivan.”

“Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can’t understand it, and the
innumerable mass of mankind are with me there. The question is, whether
that’s due to men’s bad qualities or whether it’s inherent in their
nature. To my thinking, Christ‐like love for men is a miracle impossible
on earth. He was God. But we are not gods. Suppose I, for instance, suffer
intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another
and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s
suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you
think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I
once trod on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering;
degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me—hunger, for
instance—my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher
suffering—for an idea, for instance—he will very rarely admit that,
perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man
should have who suffers for an idea. And so he deprives me instantly of
his favor, and not at all from badness of heart. Beggars, especially
genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity
through the newspapers. One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or
even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible. If it
were as on the stage, in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear
silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then
one might like looking at them. But even then we should not love them. But
enough of that. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. I meant to
speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine
ourselves to the sufferings of the children. That reduces the scope of my
argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still we’d better keep to the
children, though it does weaken my case. But, in the first place, children
can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when
they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never are ugly). The second
reason why I won’t speak of grown‐up people is that, besides being
disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation—they’ve eaten
the apple and know good and evil, and they have become ‘like gods.’ They
go on eating it still. But the children haven’t eaten anything, and are so
far innocent. Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you
will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer
horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers’ sins, they must be
punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning
is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on
earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially
such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond
of children, too. And observe, cruel people, the violent, the rapacious,
the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. Children while they
are quite little—up to seven, for instance—are so remote from grown‐up
people; they are different creatures, as it were, of a different species.
I knew a criminal in prison who had, in the course of his career as a
burglar, murdered whole families, including several children. But when he
was in prison, he had a strange affection for them. He spent all his time
at his window, watching the children playing in the prison yard. He
trained one little boy to come up to his window and made great friends
with him.... You don’t know why I am telling you all this, Alyosha? My
head aches and I am sad.”

“You speak with a strange air,” observed Alyosha uneasily, “as though you
were not quite yourself.”

“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, seeming
not to hear his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes committed by
Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general
rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and
children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them
so till morning, and in the morning they hang them—all sorts of things you
can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a
great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as
a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all
he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he
were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children,
too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies
up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before
their mothers’ eyes. Doing it before the mothers’ eyes was what gave zest
to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting.
Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading
Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to
make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points
a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee,
holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the
baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it? By the way,
Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.”

“Brother, what are you driving at?” asked Alyosha.

“I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has
created him in his own image and likeness.”

“Just as he did God, then?” observed Alyosha.

“ ‘It’s wonderful how you can turn words,’ as Polonius says in _Hamlet_,”
laughed Ivan. “You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad. Yours must
be a fine God, if man created Him in his image and likeness. You asked
just now what I was driving at. You see, I am fond of collecting certain
facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort
from newspapers and books, and I’ve already got a fine collection. The
Turks, of course, have gone into it, but they are foreigners. I have
specimens from home that are even better than the Turks. You know we
prefer beating—rods and scourges—that’s our national institution. Nailing
ears is unthinkable for us, for we are, after all, Europeans. But the rod
and the scourge we have always with us and they cannot be taken from us.
Abroad now they scarcely do any beating. Manners are more humane, or laws
have been passed, so that they don’t dare to flog men now. But they make
up for it in another way just as national as ours. And so national that it
would be practically impossible among us, though I believe we are being
inoculated with it, since the religious movement began in our aristocracy.
I have a charming pamphlet, translated from the French, describing how,
quite recently, five years ago, a murderer, Richard, was executed—a young
man, I believe, of three and twenty, who repented and was converted to the
Christian faith at the very scaffold. This Richard was an illegitimate
child who was given as a child of six by his parents to some shepherds on
the Swiss mountains. They brought him up to work for them. He grew up like
a little wild beast among them. The shepherds taught him nothing, and
scarcely fed or clothed him, but sent him out at seven to herd the flock
in cold and wet, and no one hesitated or scrupled to treat him so. Quite
the contrary, they thought they had every right, for Richard had been
given to them as a chattel, and they did not even see the necessity of
feeding him. Richard himself describes how in those years, like the
Prodigal Son in the Gospel, he longed to eat of the mash given to the
pigs, which were fattened for sale. But they wouldn’t even give him that,
and beat him when he stole from the pigs. And that was how he spent all
his childhood and his youth, till he grew up and was strong enough to go
away and be a thief. The savage began to earn his living as a day laborer
in Geneva. He drank what he earned, he lived like a brute, and finished by
killing and robbing an old man. He was caught, tried, and condemned to
death. They are not sentimentalists there. And in prison he was
immediately surrounded by pastors, members of Christian brotherhoods,
philanthropic ladies, and the like. They taught him to read and write in
prison, and expounded the Gospel to him. They exhorted him, worked upon
him, drummed at him incessantly, till at last he solemnly confessed his
crime. He was converted. He wrote to the court himself that he was a
monster, but that in the end God had vouchsafed him light and shown grace.
All Geneva was in excitement about him—all philanthropic and religious
Geneva. All the aristocratic and well‐bred society of the town rushed to
the prison, kissed Richard and embraced him; ‘You are our brother, you
have found grace.’ And Richard does nothing but weep with emotion, ‘Yes,
I’ve found grace! All my youth and childhood I was glad of pigs’ food, but
now even I have found grace. I am dying in the Lord.’ ‘Yes, Richard, die
in the Lord; you have shed blood and must die. Though it’s not your fault
that you knew not the Lord, when you coveted the pigs’ food and were
beaten for stealing it (which was very wrong of you, for stealing is
forbidden); but you’ve shed blood and you must die.’ And on the last day,
Richard, perfectly limp, did nothing but cry and repeat every minute:
‘This is my happiest day. I am going to the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ cry the pastors
and the judges and philanthropic ladies. ‘This is the happiest day of your
life, for you are going to the Lord!’ They all walk or drive to the
scaffold in procession behind the prison van. At the scaffold they call to
Richard: ‘Die, brother, die in the Lord, for even thou hast found grace!’
And so, covered with his brothers’ kisses, Richard is dragged on to the
scaffold, and led to the guillotine. And they chopped off his head in
brotherly fashion, because he had found grace. Yes, that’s characteristic.
That pamphlet is translated into Russian by some Russian philanthropists
of aristocratic rank and evangelical aspirations, and has been distributed
gratis for the enlightenment of the people. The case of Richard is
interesting because it’s national. Though to us it’s absurd to cut off a
man’s head, because he has become our brother and has found grace, yet we
have our own speciality, which is all but worse. Our historical pastime is
the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov
describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, ‘on its meek eyes,’
every one must have seen it. It’s peculiarly Russian. He describes how a
feeble little nag has foundered under too heavy a load and cannot move.
The peasant beats it, beats it savagely, beats it at last not knowing what
he is doing in the intoxication of cruelty, thrashes it mercilessly over
and over again. ‘However weak you are, you must pull, if you die for it.’
The nag strains, and then he begins lashing the poor defenseless creature
on its weeping, on its ‘meek eyes.’ The frantic beast tugs and draws the
load, trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort
of unnatural spasmodic action—it’s awful in Nekrassov. But that’s only a
horse, and God has given horses to be beaten. So the Tatars have taught
us, and they left us the knout as a remembrance of it. But men, too, can
be beaten. A well‐educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own
child with a birch‐rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it.
The papa was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. ‘It stings more,’
said he, and so he began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact there
are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal
sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They
beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more
savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps,
‘Daddy! daddy!’ By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought
into court. A counsel is engaged. The Russian people have long called a
barrister ‘a conscience for hire.’ The counsel protests in his client’s
defense. ‘It’s such a simple thing,’ he says, ‘an everyday domestic event.
A father corrects his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into
court.’ The jury, convinced by him, give a favorable verdict. The public
roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn’t
there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honor!
Charming pictures.

“But I’ve still better things about children. I’ve collected a great,
great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of
five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable
people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it
is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing
children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these
torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane
Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of
children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that
tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no
refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of
course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat
at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off
the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney
disease, and so on.

“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those
cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason
till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of
cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and
because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five
sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they
smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her
mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor
child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even
understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with
her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful
tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and
brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy
must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have
existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he
know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole
world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to ‘dear, kind God’! I
say nothing of the sufferings of grown‐up people, they have eaten the
apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am
making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I’ll leave off if you
like.”

“Never mind. I want to suffer too,” muttered Alyosha.

“One picture, only one more, because it’s so curious, so characteristic,
and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities.
I’ve forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of
serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of
the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections,
the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I
believe, even then—who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure,
are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their
subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his
property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor
neighbors as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of
hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog‐boys—all mounted, and in
uniform. One day a serf‐boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in
play and hurt the paw of the general’s favorite hound. ‘Why is my favorite
dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw.
‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He
was taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that
morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his
dependents, dog‐boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting
parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of
them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the
lock‐up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day, a capital day for hunting.
The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked.
He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry.... ‘Make him run,’
commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog‐boys. The boy runs.... ‘At
him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the
child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s
eyes!... I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of
administering his estates. Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be
shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”

“To be shot,” murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale,
twisted smile.

“Bravo!” cried Ivan, delighted. “If even you say so.... You’re a pretty
monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha
Karamazov!”

“What I said was absurd, but—”

“That’s just the point, that ‘but’!” cried Ivan. “Let me tell you, novice,
that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on
absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without
them. We know what we know!”

“What do you know?”

“I understand nothing,” Ivan went on, as though in delirium. “I don’t want
to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind
long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be
false to the fact, and I have determined to stick to the fact.”

“Why are you trying me?” Alyosha cried, with sudden distress. “Will you
say what you mean at last?”

“Of course, I will; that’s what I’ve been leading up to. You are dear to
me, I don’t want to let you go, and I won’t give you up to your Zossima.”

Ivan for a minute was silent, his face became all at once very sad.

“Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the
other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to
its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I
am a bug, and I recognize in all humility that I cannot understand why the
world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they
were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven,
though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity
them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is
that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows
effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level—but
that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live
by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause
follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it?—I must have
justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite
time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have
believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise
again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I
haven’t suffered, simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure
the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my
own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and
embrace his murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly
understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are
built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the
children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t
answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions,
but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so
unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal
harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond
all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the
harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the
harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I
understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such
solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share
responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this
world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that
the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow
up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I
am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the
universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one
hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou
art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the
fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears,
‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be
reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I
can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take
my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I
live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry
aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer,
‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there
is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher
harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child
who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its
stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not
worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for,
or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them?
Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging
them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do,
since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of
harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t
want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum
of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that
the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace
the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let
her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for
the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of
her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the
torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if
they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole
world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I
don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather
be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my
unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, _even if I were wrong_.
Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to
pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance
ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as
possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha,
only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

“That’s rebellion,” murmured Alyosha, looking down.

“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can
hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I
challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human
destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace
and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to
death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist,
for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you
consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the
truth.”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would
agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood
of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”

“No, I can’t admit it. Brother,” said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing
eyes, “you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would
have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and He
can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent
blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built
the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for
Thy ways are revealed!’ ”

“Ah! the One without sin and His blood! No, I have not forgotten Him; on
the contrary I’ve been wondering all the time how it was you did not bring
Him in before, for usually all arguments on your side put Him in the
foreground. Do you know, Alyosha—don’t laugh! I made a poem about a year
ago. If you can waste another ten minutes on me, I’ll tell it to you.”

“You wrote a poem?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t write it,” laughed Ivan, “and I’ve never written two
lines of poetry in my life. But I made up this poem in prose and I
remembered it. I was carried away when I made it up. You will be my first
reader—that is listener. Why should an author forego even one listener?”
smiled Ivan. “Shall I tell it to you?”

“I am all attention,” said Alyosha.

“My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s a ridiculous thing, but I
want to tell it to you.”



Chapter V. The Grand Inquisitor


“Even this must have a preface—that is, a literary preface,” laughed Ivan,
“and I am a poor hand at making one. You see, my action takes place in the
sixteenth century, and at that time, as you probably learnt at school, it
was customary in poetry to bring down heavenly powers on earth. Not to
speak of Dante, in France, clerks, as well as the monks in the
monasteries, used to give regular performances in which the Madonna, the
saints, the angels, Christ, and God himself were brought on the stage. In
those days it was done in all simplicity. In Victor Hugo’s _Notre Dame de
Paris_ an edifying and gratuitous spectacle was provided for the people in
the Hôtel de Ville of Paris in the reign of Louis XI. in honor of the
birth of the dauphin. It was called _Le bon jugement de la très sainte et
gracieuse Vierge Marie_, and she appears herself on the stage and
pronounces her _bon jugement_. Similar plays, chiefly from the Old
Testament, were occasionally performed in Moscow too, up to the times of
Peter the Great. But besides plays there were all sorts of legends and
ballads scattered about the world, in which the saints and angels and all
the powers of Heaven took part when required. In our monasteries the monks
busied themselves in translating, copying, and even composing such
poems—and even under the Tatars. There is, for instance, one such poem (of
course, from the Greek), _The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell_, with
descriptions as bold as Dante’s. Our Lady visits hell, and the Archangel
Michael leads her through the torments. She sees the sinners and their
punishment. There she sees among others one noteworthy set of sinners in a
burning lake; some of them sink to the bottom of the lake so that they
can’t swim out, and ‘these God forgets’—an expression of extraordinary
depth and force. And so Our Lady, shocked and weeping, falls before the
throne of God and begs for mercy for all in hell—for all she has seen
there, indiscriminately. Her conversation with God is immensely
interesting. She beseeches Him, she will not desist, and when God points
to the hands and feet of her Son, nailed to the Cross, and asks, ‘How can
I forgive His tormentors?’ she bids all the saints, all the martyrs, all
the angels and archangels to fall down with her and pray for mercy on all
without distinction. It ends by her winning from God a respite of
suffering every year from Good Friday till Trinity Day, and the sinners at
once raise a cry of thankfulness from hell, chanting, ‘Thou art just, O
Lord, in this judgment.’ Well, my poem would have been of that kind if it
had appeared at that time. He comes on the scene in my poem, but He says
nothing, only appears and passes on. Fifteen centuries have passed since
He promised to come in His glory, fifteen centuries since His prophet
wrote, ‘Behold, I come quickly’; ‘Of that day and that hour knoweth no
man, neither the Son, but the Father,’ as He Himself predicted on earth.
But humanity awaits him with the same faith and with the same love. Oh,
with greater faith, for it is fifteen centuries since man has ceased to
see signs from heaven.


    No signs from heaven come to‐day
    To add to what the heart doth say.


There was nothing left but faith in what the heart doth say. It is true
there were many miracles in those days. There were saints who performed
miraculous cures; some holy people, according to their biographies, were
visited by the Queen of Heaven herself. But the devil did not slumber, and
doubts were already arising among men of the truth of these miracles. And
just then there appeared in the north of Germany a terrible new heresy. “A
huge star like to a torch” (that is, to a church) “fell on the sources of
the waters and they became bitter.” These heretics began blasphemously
denying miracles. But those who remained faithful were all the more ardent
in their faith. The tears of humanity rose up to Him as before, awaited
His coming, loved Him, hoped for Him, yearned to suffer and die for Him as
before. And so many ages mankind had prayed with faith and fervor, “O Lord
our God, hasten Thy coming,” so many ages called upon Him, that in His
infinite mercy He deigned to come down to His servants. Before that day He
had come down, He had visited some holy men, martyrs and hermits, as is
written in their lives. Among us, Tyutchev, with absolute faith in the
truth of his words, bore witness that


    Bearing the Cross, in slavish dress,
    Weary and worn, the Heavenly King
    Our mother, Russia, came to bless,
    And through our land went wandering.


And that certainly was so, I assure you.

“And behold, He deigned to appear for a moment to the people, to the
tortured, suffering people, sunk in iniquity, but loving Him like
children. My story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time
of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God,
and ‘in the splendid _auto da fé_ the wicked heretics were burnt.’ Oh, of
course, this was not the coming in which He will appear according to His
promise at the end of time in all His heavenly glory, and which will be
sudden ‘as lightning flashing from east to west.’ No, He visited His
children only for a moment, and there where the flames were crackling
round the heretics. In His infinite mercy He came once more among men in
that human shape in which He walked among men for three years fifteen
centuries ago. He came down to the ‘hot pavements’ of the southern town in
which on the day before almost a hundred heretics had, _ad majorem gloriam
Dei_, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent
_auto da fé_, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the
cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population
of Seville.

“He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, every one recognized
Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they
recognized Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround
Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst
with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His
heart, light and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on
the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His
hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with
Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from
childhood, cries out, ‘O Lord, heal me and I shall see Thee!’ and, as it
were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd
weeps and kisses the earth under His feet. Children throw flowers before
Him, sing, and cry hosannah. ‘It is He—it is He!’ all repeat. ‘It must be
He, it can be no one but Him!’ He stops at the steps of the Seville
cathedral at the moment when the weeping mourners are bringing in a little
open white coffin. In it lies a child of seven, the only daughter of a
prominent citizen. The dead child lies hidden in flowers. ‘He will raise
your child,’ the crowd shouts to the weeping mother. The priest, coming to
meet the coffin, looks perplexed, and frowns, but the mother of the dead
child throws herself at His feet with a wail. ‘If it is Thou, raise my
child!’ she cries, holding out her hands to Him. The procession halts, the
coffin is laid on the steps at His feet. He looks with compassion, and His
lips once more softly pronounce, ‘Maiden, arise!’ and the maiden arises.
The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide‐
open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in her
hand.

“There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the
cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an
old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken
eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his
gorgeous cardinal’s robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning
the enemies of the Roman Church—at this moment he is wearing his coarse,
old, monk’s cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants
and slaves and the ‘holy guard.’ He stops at the sight of the crowd and
watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the
coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He
knits his thick gray brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He
holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power,
so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience
to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the
midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead Him away. The
crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old
Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on. The guards
lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison in the ancient
palace of the Holy Inquisition and shut Him in it. The day passes and is
followed by the dark, burning, ‘breathless’ night of Seville. The air is
‘fragrant with laurel and lemon.’ In the pitch darkness the iron door of
the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in
with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind
him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face.
At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.

“ ‘Is it Thou? Thou?’ but receiving no answer, he adds at once, ‘Don’t
answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou
wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst
said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to
hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost Thou know what will be to‐
morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or
only a semblance of Him, but to‐morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee
at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to‐day
kissed Thy feet, to‐morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap
up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,’
he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes
off the Prisoner.”

“I don’t quite understand, Ivan. What does it mean?” Alyosha, who had been
listening in silence, said with a smile. “Is it simply a wild fantasy, or
a mistake on the part of the old man—some impossible _quiproquo_?”

“Take it as the last,” said Ivan, laughing, “if you are so corrupted by
modern realism and can’t stand anything fantastic. If you like it to be a
case of mistaken identity, let it be so. It is true,” he went on,
laughing, “the old man was ninety, and he might well be crazy over his set
idea. He might have been struck by the appearance of the Prisoner. It
might, in fact, be simply his ravings, the delusion of an old man of
ninety, over‐excited by the _auto da fé_ of a hundred heretics the day
before. But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of
identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should
speak out, should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for
ninety years.”

“And the Prisoner too is silent? Does He look at him and not say a word?”

“That’s inevitable in any case,” Ivan laughed again. “The old man has told
Him He hasn’t the right to add anything to what He has said of old. One
may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my
opinion at least. ‘All has been given by Thee to the Pope,’ they say, ‘and
all, therefore, is still in the Pope’s hands, and there is no need for
Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.’
That’s how they speak and write too—the Jesuits, at any rate. I have read
it myself in the works of their theologians. ‘Hast Thou the right to
reveal to us one of the mysteries of that world from which Thou hast
come?’ my old man asks Him, and answers the question for Him. ‘No, Thou
hast not; that Thou mayest not add to what has been said of old, and
mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast
on earth. Whatsoever Thou revealest anew will encroach on men’s freedom of
faith; for it will be manifest as a miracle, and the freedom of their
faith was dearer to Thee than anything in those days fifteen hundred years
ago. Didst Thou not often say then, “I will make you free”? But now Thou
hast seen these “free” men,’ the old man adds suddenly, with a pensive
smile. ‘Yes, we’ve paid dearly for it,’ he goes on, looking sternly at
Him, ‘but at last we have completed that work in Thy name. For fifteen
centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and
over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it’s over for good? Thou lookest
meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell
Thee that now, to‐day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have
perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it
humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what Thou didst?
Was this Thy freedom?’ ”

“I don’t understand again,” Alyosha broke in. “Is he ironical, is he
jesting?”

“Not a bit of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that
at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy.
‘For now’ (he is speaking of the Inquisition, of course) ‘for the first
time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was
created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy? Thou wast warned,’ he says
to Him. ‘Thou hast had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou didst
not listen to those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men
might be made happy. But, fortunately, departing Thou didst hand on the
work to us. Thou hast promised, Thou hast established by Thy word, Thou
hast given to us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou
canst not think of taking it away. Why, then, hast Thou come to hinder
us?’ ”

“And what’s the meaning of ‘no lack of admonitions and warnings’?” asked
Alyosha.

“Why, that’s the chief part of what the old man must say.

“ ‘The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self‐destruction and non‐
existence,’ the old man goes on, ‘the great spirit talked with Thee in the
wilderness, and we are told in the books that he “tempted” Thee. Is that
so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to Thee in
three questions and what Thou didst reject, and what in the books is
called “the temptation”? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real
stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three
temptations. The statement of those three questions was itself the
miracle. If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument
that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from
the books, and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew, and to
do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth—rulers, chief
priests, learned men, philosophers, poets—and had set them the task to
invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but
express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of
the world and of humanity—dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the
earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the
three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and
mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the
miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with
the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal. For in
those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it
were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are
united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature. At the
time it could not be so clear, since the future was unknown; but now that
fifteen hundred years have passed, we see that everything in those three
questions was so justly divined and foretold, and has been so truly
fulfilled, that nothing can be added to them or taken from them.

“ ‘Judge Thyself who was right—Thou or he who questioned Thee then?
Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: “Thou
wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some
promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural
unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing
has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than
freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren
wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a
flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest
Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread.” But Thou wouldst not
deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that
freedom worth, if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that
man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that
earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will
strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, “Who
can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!” Dost Thou
know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of
their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only
hunger? “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!” that’s what they’ll write
on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they
will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building;
the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one
of old, it will not be finished, yet Thou mightest have prevented that new
tower and have cut short the sufferings of men for a thousand years; for
they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their
tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for
we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to
us, “Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven’t
given it!” And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes
the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name,
declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed
themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they
remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say
to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand
themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are
inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share
between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free,
for they are weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious. Thou didst promise
them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly
bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if
for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is
to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures
who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of
the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the
great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea,
who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and
strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but
in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look
on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have
found so dreadful and to rule over them—so awful it will seem to them to
be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in
Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us
again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to
lie.

“ ‘This is the significance of the first question in the wilderness, and
this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou
hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great
secret of this world. Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the
universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find some one to worship.
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so
painfully as to find some one to worship. But man seeks to worship what is
established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship
it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or
the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and
worship; what is essential is that all may be _together_ in it. This
craving for _community_ of worship is the chief misery of every man
individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake
of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set
up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and
worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the
end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall
down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but
have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject
the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down
to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for
the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven. Behold what Thou didst
further. And all again in the name of freedom! I tell Thee that man is
tormented by no greater anxiety than to find some one quickly to whom he
can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill‐fated creature is
born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their
freedom. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread,
and man will worship thee, for nothing is more certain than bread. But if
some one else gains possession of his conscience—oh! then he will cast
away Thy bread and follow after him who has ensnared his conscience. In
that Thou wast right. For the secret of man’s being is not only to live
but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the
object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather
destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.
That is true. But what happened? Instead of taking men’s freedom from
them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man
prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of
good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of
conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold,
instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at
rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and
enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men,
acting as though Thou didst not love them at all—Thou who didst come to
give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom,
Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with
its sufferings for ever. Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should
follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the
rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself
what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his
guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image
and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free
choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for
they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou
hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.

“ ‘So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the
destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what
was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to
conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent
rebels for their happiness—those forces are miracle, mystery and
authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing
so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple
and said to Thee, “If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God
then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up
lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art
the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father.”
But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course,
Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men,
are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making
one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have
lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against
that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted
Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And
couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a
temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and
at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most
agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the
heart? Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would
be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou
didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a
miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects
God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man
cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of
his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft,
though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel. Thou
didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and
reviling Thee, “Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art
He.” Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a
miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou
didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before
the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly
of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by
nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon
them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and
baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou
didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to
feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved
him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less
of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have
been lighter. He is weak and vile. What though he is everywhere now
rebelling against our power, and proud of his rebellion? It is the pride
of a child and a schoolboy. They are little children rioting and barring
out the teacher at school. But their childish delight will end; it will
cost them dear. They will cast down temples and drench the earth with
blood. But they will see at last, the foolish children, that, though they
are rebels, they are impotent rebels, unable to keep up their own
rebellion. Bathed in their foolish tears, they will recognize at last that
He who created them rebels must have meant to mock at them. They will say
this in despair, and their utterance will be a blasphemy which will make
them more unhappy still, for man’s nature cannot bear blasphemy, and in
the end always avenges it on itself. And so unrest, confusion and
unhappiness—that is the present lot of man after Thou didst bear so much
for their freedom! The great prophet tells in vision and in image, that he
saw all those who took part in the first resurrection and that there were
of each tribe twelve thousand. But if there were so many of them, they
must have been not men but gods. They had borne Thy cross, they had
endured scores of years in the barren, hungry wilderness, living upon
locusts and roots—and Thou mayest indeed point with pride at those
children of freedom, of free love, of free and splendid sacrifice for Thy
name. But remember that they were only some thousands; and what of the
rest? And how are the other weak ones to blame, because they could not
endure what the strong have endured? How is the weak soul to blame that it
is unable to receive such terrible gifts? Canst Thou have simply come to
the elect and for the elect? But if so, it is a mystery and we cannot
understand it. And if it is a mystery, we too have a right to preach a
mystery, and to teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their
hearts, not love that matters, but a mystery which they must follow
blindly, even against their conscience. So we have done. We have corrected
Thy work and have founded it upon _miracle_, _mystery_ and _authority_.
And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the
terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted
from their hearts. Were we right teaching them this? Speak! Did we not
love mankind, so meekly acknowledging their feebleness, lovingly
lightening their burden, and permitting their weak nature even sin with
our sanction? Why hast Thou come now to hinder us? And why dost Thou look
silently and searchingly at me with Thy mild eyes? Be angry. I don’t want
Thy love, for I love Thee not. And what use is it for me to hide anything
from Thee? Don’t I know to Whom I am speaking? All that I can say is known
to Thee already. And is it for me to conceal from Thee our mystery?
Perhaps it is Thy will to hear it from my lips. Listen, then. We are not
working with Thee, but with _him_—that is our mystery. It’s long—eight
centuries—since we have been on _his_ side and not on Thine. Just eight
centuries ago, we took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that
last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We
took from him Rome and the sword of Cæsar, and proclaimed ourselves sole
rulers of the earth, though hitherto we have not been able to complete our
work. But whose fault is that? Oh, the work is only beginning, but it has
begun. It has long to await completion and the earth has yet much to
suffer, but we shall triumph and shall be Cæsars, and then we shall plan
the universal happiness of man. But Thou mightest have taken even then the
sword of Cæsar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted
that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all
that man seeks on earth—that is, some one to worship, some one to keep his
conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious
ant‐heap, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last
anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a
universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories,
but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for
they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world‐wide union.
The great conquerors, Timours and Ghenghis‐Khans, whirled like hurricanes
over the face of the earth striving to subdue its people, and they too
were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal
unity. Hadst Thou taken the world and Cæsar’s purple, Thou wouldst have
founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can
rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his
hands? We have taken the sword of Cæsar, and in taking it, of course, have
rejected Thee and followed _him_. Oh, ages are yet to come of the
confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having
begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course,
with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet
and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and
raise the cup, and on it will be written, “Mystery.” But then, and only
then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Thou art proud
of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all.
And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones who could become
elect, have grown weary waiting for Thee, and have transferred and will
transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the
other camp, and end by raising their _free_ banner against Thee. Thou
didst Thyself lift up that banner. But with us all will be happy and will
no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. Oh, we shall
persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their
freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be
lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember
the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them.
Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and
will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries,
that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves,
others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest,
weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: “Yes,
you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you,
save us from ourselves!”

“ ‘Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread
made by their hands from them, to give it to them, without any miracle.
They will see that we do not change the stones to bread, but in truth they
will be more thankful for taking it from our hands than for the bread
itself! For they will remember only too well that in old days, without our
help, even the bread they made turned to stones in their hands, while
since they have come back to us, the very stones have turned to bread in
their hands. Too, too well will they know the value of complete
submission! And until men know that, they will be unhappy. Who is most to
blame for their not knowing it?—speak! Who scattered the flock and sent it
astray on unknown paths? But the flock will come together again and will
submit once more, and then it will be once for all. Then we shall give
them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by
nature. Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst
lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that
they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike
happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to
us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel
at us and will be awe‐stricken before us, and will be proud at our being
so powerful and clever, that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent
flock of thousands of millions. They will tremble impotently before our
wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears
like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us
to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes,
we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their
life like a child’s game, with children’s songs and innocent dance. Oh, we
shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love
us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that
every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we
allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins
we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will
adore us as their saviors who have taken on themselves their sins before
God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them
to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have
children—according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient—and
they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of
their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an
answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will
save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present
in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the
millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For
only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be
thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who
have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.
Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and
beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the
secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of
heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it
certainly would not be for such as they. It is prophesied that Thou wilt
come again in victory, Thou wilt come with Thy chosen, the proud and
strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, but we have
saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds
in her hands the _mystery_, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise
up again, and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her
loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to Thee the
thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have
taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and
say: “Judge us if Thou canst and darest.” Know that I fear Thee not. Know
that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and
locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I
too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful,
thirsting “to make up the number.” But I awakened and would not serve
madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those _who have corrected
Thy work_. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness
of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will
be built up. I repeat, to‐morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at
a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on
which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if any one has ever
deserved our fires, it is Thou. To‐morrow I shall burn Thee. _Dixi._’ ”

Ivan stopped. He was carried away as he talked, and spoke with excitement;
when he had finished, he suddenly smiled.

Alyosha had listened in silence; towards the end he was greatly moved and
seemed several times on the point of interrupting, but restrained himself.
Now his words came with a rush.

“But ... that’s absurd!” he cried, flushing. “Your poem is in praise of
Jesus, not in blame of Him—as you meant it to be. And who will believe you
about freedom? Is that the way to understand it? That’s not the idea of it
in the Orthodox Church.... That’s Rome, and not even the whole of Rome,
it’s false—those are the worst of the Catholics, the Inquisitors, the
Jesuits!... And there could not be such a fantastic creature as your
Inquisitor. What are these sins of mankind they take on themselves? Who
are these keepers of the mystery who have taken some curse upon themselves
for the happiness of mankind? When have they been seen? We know the
Jesuits, they are spoken ill of, but surely they are not what you
describe? They are not that at all, not at all.... They are simply the
Romish army for the earthly sovereignty of the world in the future, with
the Pontiff of Rome for Emperor ... that’s their ideal, but there’s no
sort of mystery or lofty melancholy about it.... It’s simple lust of
power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination—something like a universal
serfdom with them as masters—that’s all they stand for. They don’t even
believe in God perhaps. Your suffering Inquisitor is a mere fantasy.”

“Stay, stay,” laughed Ivan, “how hot you are! A fantasy you say, let it be
so! Of course it’s a fantasy. But allow me to say: do you really think
that the Roman Catholic movement of the last centuries is actually nothing
but the lust of power, of filthy earthly gain? Is that Father Païssy’s
teaching?”

“No, no, on the contrary, Father Païssy did once say something rather the
same as you ... but of course it’s not the same, not a bit the same,”
Alyosha hastily corrected himself.

“A precious admission, in spite of your ‘not a bit the same.’ I ask you
why your Jesuits and Inquisitors have united simply for vile material
gain? Why can there not be among them one martyr oppressed by great sorrow
and loving humanity? You see, only suppose that there was one such man
among all those who desire nothing but filthy material gain—if there’s
only one like my old Inquisitor, who had himself eaten roots in the desert
and made frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and
perfect. But yet all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes
were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain
perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that
millions of God’s creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will
never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never
turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese
that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he
turned back and joined—the clever people. Surely that could have
happened?”

“Joined whom, what clever people?” cried Alyosha, completely carried away.
“They have no such great cleverness and no mysteries and secrets....
Perhaps nothing but Atheism, that’s all their secret. Your Inquisitor does
not believe in God, that’s his secret!”

“What if it is so! At last you have guessed it. It’s perfectly true, it’s
true that that’s the whole secret, but isn’t that suffering, at least for
a man like that, who has wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could
not shake off his incurable love of humanity? In his old age he reached
the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit
could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly,
‘incomplete, empirical creatures created in jest.’ And so, convinced of
this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of the wise spirit, the
dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and
deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet
deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being
led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think
themselves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose
ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long. Is not that
tragic? And if only one such stood at the head of the whole army ‘filled
with the lust of power only for the sake of filthy gain’—would not one
such be enough to make a tragedy? More than that, one such standing at the
head is enough to create the actual leading idea of the Roman Church with
all its armies and Jesuits, its highest idea. I tell you frankly that I
firmly believe that there has always been such a man among those who stood
at the head of the movement. Who knows, there may have been some such even
among the Roman Popes. Who knows, perhaps the spirit of that accursed old
man who loves mankind so obstinately in his own way, is to be found even
now in a whole multitude of such old men, existing not by chance but by
agreement, as a secret league formed long ago for the guarding of the
mystery, to guard it from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them
happy. No doubt it is so, and so it must be indeed. I fancy that even
among the Masons there’s something of the same mystery at the bottom, and
that that’s why the Catholics so detest the Masons as their rivals
breaking up the unity of the idea, while it is so essential that there
should be one flock and one shepherd.... But from the way I defend my idea
I might be an author impatient of your criticism. Enough of it.”

“You are perhaps a Mason yourself!” broke suddenly from Alyosha. “You
don’t believe in God,” he added, speaking this time very sorrowfully. He
fancied besides that his brother was looking at him ironically. “How does
your poem end?” he asked, suddenly looking down. “Or was it the end?”

“I meant to end it like this. When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he
waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down
upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time,
looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man
longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He
suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his
bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered. His
lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: ‘Go, and come
no more ... come not at all, never, never!’ And he let Him out into the
dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.”

“And the old man?”

“The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”

“And you with him, you too?” cried Alyosha, mournfully.

Ivan laughed.

“Why, it’s all nonsense, Alyosha. It’s only a senseless poem of a
senseless student, who could never write two lines of verse. Why do you
take it so seriously? Surely you don’t suppose I am going straight off to
the Jesuits, to join the men who are correcting His work? Good Lord, it’s
no business of mine. I told you, all I want is to live on to thirty, and
then ... dash the cup to the ground!”

“But the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky,
and the woman you love! How will you live, how will you love them?”
Alyosha cried sorrowfully. “With such a hell in your heart and your head,
how can you? No, that’s just what you are going away for, to join them ...
if not, you will kill yourself, you can’t endure it!”

“There is a strength to endure everything,” Ivan said with a cold smile.

“What strength?”

“The strength of the Karamazovs—the strength of the Karamazov baseness.”

“To sink into debauchery, to stifle your soul with corruption, yes?”

“Possibly even that ... only perhaps till I am thirty I shall escape it,
and then—”

“How will you escape it? By what will you escape it? That’s impossible
with your ideas.”

“In the Karamazov way, again.”

“ ‘Everything is lawful,’ you mean? Everything is lawful, is that it?”

Ivan scowled, and all at once turned strangely pale.

“Ah, you’ve caught up yesterday’s phrase, which so offended Miüsov—and
which Dmitri pounced upon so naïvely, and paraphrased!” he smiled queerly.
“Yes, if you like, ‘everything is lawful’ since the word has been said. I
won’t deny it. And Mitya’s version isn’t bad.”

Alyosha looked at him in silence.

“I thought that going away from here I have you at least,” Ivan said
suddenly, with unexpected feeling; “but now I see that there is no place
for me even in your heart, my dear hermit. The formula, ‘all is lawful,’ I
won’t renounce—will you renounce me for that, yes?”

Alyosha got up, went to him and softly kissed him on the lips.

“That’s plagiarism,” cried Ivan, highly delighted. “You stole that from my
poem. Thank you though. Get up, Alyosha, it’s time we were going, both of
us.”

They went out, but stopped when they reached the entrance of the
restaurant.

“Listen, Alyosha,” Ivan began in a resolute voice, “if I am really able to
care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you.
It’s enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan’t lose my
desire for life yet. Is that enough for you? Take it as a declaration of
love if you like. And now you go to the right and I to the left. And it’s
enough, do you hear, enough. I mean even if I don’t go away to‐morrow (I
think I certainly shall go) and we meet again, don’t say a word more on
these subjects. I beg that particularly. And about Dmitri too, I ask you
specially, never speak to me again,” he added, with sudden irritation;
“it’s all exhausted, it has all been said over and over again, hasn’t it?
And I’ll make you one promise in return for it. When at thirty, I want to
‘dash the cup to the ground,’ wherever I may be I’ll come to have one more
talk with you, even though it were from America, you may be sure of that.
I’ll come on purpose. It will be very interesting to have a look at you,
to see what you’ll be by that time. It’s rather a solemn promise, you see.
And we really may be parting for seven years or ten. Come, go now to your
Pater Seraphicus, he is dying. If he dies without you, you will be angry
with me for having kept you. Good‐by, kiss me once more; that’s right, now
go.”

Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without looking back. It was just as
Dmitri had left Alyosha the day before, though the parting had been very
different. The strange resemblance flashed like an arrow through Alyosha’s
mind in the distress and dejection of that moment. He waited a little,
looking after his brother. He suddenly noticed that Ivan swayed as he
walked and that his right shoulder looked lower than his left. He had
never noticed it before. But all at once he turned too, and almost ran to
the monastery. It was nearly dark, and he felt almost frightened;
something new was growing up in him for which he could not account. The
wind had risen again as on the previous evening, and the ancient pines
murmured gloomily about him when he entered the hermitage copse. He almost
ran. “Pater Seraphicus—he got that name from somewhere—where from?”
Alyosha wondered. “Ivan, poor Ivan, and when shall I see you again?...
Here is the hermitage. Yes, yes, that he is, Pater Seraphicus, he will
save me—from him and for ever!”

Several times afterwards he wondered how he could on leaving Ivan so
completely forget his brother Dmitri, though he had that morning, only a
few hours before, so firmly resolved to find him and not to give up doing
so, even should he be unable to return to the monastery that night.



Chapter VI. For Awhile A Very Obscure One


And Ivan, on parting from Alyosha, went home to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s house.
But, strange to say, he was overcome by insufferable depression, which
grew greater at every step he took towards the house. There was nothing
strange in his being depressed; what was strange was that Ivan could not
have said what was the cause of it. He had often been depressed before,
and there was nothing surprising at his feeling so at such a moment, when
he had broken off with everything that had brought him here, and was
preparing that day to make a new start and enter upon a new, unknown
future. He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great
hopes, and great—too great—expectations from life, he could not have given
any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.

Yet at that moment, though the apprehension of the new and unknown
certainly found place in his heart, what was worrying him was something
quite different. “Is it loathing for my father’s house?” he wondered.
“Quite likely; I am so sick of it; and though it’s the last time I shall
cross its hateful threshold, still I loathe it.... No, it’s not that
either. Is it the parting with Alyosha and the conversation I had with
him? For so many years I’ve been silent with the whole world and not
deigned to speak, and all of a sudden I reel off a rigmarole like that.”
It certainly might have been the youthful vexation of youthful
inexperience and vanity—vexation at having failed to express himself,
especially with such a being as Alyosha, on whom his heart had certainly
been reckoning. No doubt that came in, that vexation, it must have done
indeed; but yet that was not it, that was not it either. “I feel sick with
depression and yet I can’t tell what I want. Better not think, perhaps.”

Ivan tried “not to think,” but that, too, was no use. What made his
depression so vexatious and irritating was that it had a kind of casual,
external character—he felt that. Some person or thing seemed to be
standing out somewhere, just as something will sometimes obtrude itself
upon the eye, and though one may be so busy with work or conversation that
for a long time one does not notice it, yet it irritates and almost
torments one till at last one realizes, and removes the offending object,
often quite a trifling and ridiculous one—some article left about in the
wrong place, a handkerchief on the floor, a book not replaced on the
shelf, and so on.

At last, feeling very cross and ill‐humored, Ivan arrived home, and
suddenly, about fifteen paces from the garden gate, he guessed what was
fretting and worrying him.

On a bench in the gateway the valet Smerdyakov was sitting enjoying the
coolness of the evening, and at the first glance at him Ivan knew that the
valet Smerdyakov was on his mind, and that it was this man that his soul
loathed. It all dawned upon him suddenly and became clear. Just before,
when Alyosha had been telling him of his meeting with Smerdyakov, he had
felt a sudden twinge of gloom and loathing, which had immediately stirred
responsive anger in his heart. Afterwards, as he talked, Smerdyakov had
been forgotten for the time; but still he had been in his mind, and as
soon as Ivan parted with Alyosha and was walking home, the forgotten
sensation began to obtrude itself again. “Is it possible that a miserable,
contemptible creature like that can worry me so much?” he wondered, with
insufferable irritation.

It was true that Ivan had come of late to feel an intense dislike for the
man, especially during the last few days. He had even begun to notice in
himself a growing feeling that was almost of hatred for the creature.
Perhaps this hatred was accentuated by the fact that when Ivan first came
to the neighborhood he had felt quite differently. Then he had taken a
marked interest in Smerdyakov, and had even thought him very original. He
had encouraged him to talk to him, although he had always wondered at a
certain incoherence, or rather restlessness, in his mind, and could not
understand what it was that so continually and insistently worked upon the
brain of “the contemplative.” They discussed philosophical questions and
even how there could have been light on the first day when the sun, moon,
and stars were only created on the fourth day, and how that was to be
understood. But Ivan soon saw that, though the sun, moon, and stars might
be an interesting subject, yet that it was quite secondary to Smerdyakov,
and that he was looking for something altogether different. In one way and
another, he began to betray a boundless vanity, and a wounded vanity, too,
and that Ivan disliked. It had first given rise to his aversion. Later on,
there had been trouble in the house. Grushenka had come on the scene, and
there had been the scandals with his brother Dmitri—they discussed that,
too. But though Smerdyakov always talked of that with great excitement, it
was impossible to discover what he desired to come of it. There was, in
fact, something surprising in the illogicality and incoherence of some of
his desires, accidentally betrayed and always vaguely expressed.
Smerdyakov was always inquiring, putting certain indirect but obviously
premeditated questions, but what his object was he did not explain, and
usually at the most important moment he would break off and relapse into
silence or pass to another subject. But what finally irritated Ivan most
and confirmed his dislike for him was the peculiar, revolting familiarity
which Smerdyakov began to show more and more markedly. Not that he forgot
himself and was rude; on the contrary, he always spoke very respectfully,
yet he had obviously begun to consider—goodness knows why!—that there was
some sort of understanding between him and Ivan Fyodorovitch. He always
spoke in a tone that suggested that those two had some kind of compact,
some secret between them, that had at some time been expressed on both
sides, only known to them and beyond the comprehension of those around
them. But for a long while Ivan did not recognize the real cause of his
growing dislike and he had only lately realized what was at the root of
it.

With a feeling of disgust and irritation he tried to pass in at the gate
without speaking or looking at Smerdyakov. But Smerdyakov rose from the
bench, and from that action alone, Ivan knew instantly that he wanted
particularly to talk to him. Ivan looked at him and stopped, and the fact
that he did stop, instead of passing by, as he meant to the minute before,
drove him to fury. With anger and repulsion he looked at Smerdyakov’s
emasculate, sickly face, with the little curls combed forward on his
forehead. His left eye winked and he grinned as if to say, “Where are you
going? You won’t pass by; you see that we two clever people have something
to say to each other.”

Ivan shook. “Get away, miserable idiot. What have I to do with you?” was
on the tip of his tongue, but to his profound astonishment he heard
himself say, “Is my father still asleep, or has he waked?”

He asked the question softly and meekly, to his own surprise, and at once,
again to his own surprise, sat down on the bench. For an instant he felt
almost frightened; he remembered it afterwards. Smerdyakov stood facing
him, his hands behind his back, looking at him with assurance and almost
severity.

“His honor is still asleep,” he articulated deliberately (“You were the
first to speak, not I,” he seemed to say). “I am surprised at you, sir,”
he added, after a pause, dropping his eyes affectedly, setting his right
foot forward, and playing with the tip of his polished boot.

“Why are you surprised at me?” Ivan asked abruptly and sullenly, doing his
utmost to restrain himself, and suddenly realizing, with disgust, that he
was feeling intense curiosity and would not, on any account, have gone
away without satisfying it.

“Why don’t you go to Tchermashnya, sir?” Smerdyakov suddenly raised his
eyes and smiled familiarly. “Why I smile you must understand of yourself,
if you are a clever man,” his screwed‐up left eye seemed to say.

“Why should I go to Tchermashnya?” Ivan asked in surprise.

Smerdyakov was silent again.

“Fyodor Pavlovitch himself has so begged you to,” he said at last, slowly
and apparently attaching no significance to his answer. “I put you off
with a secondary reason,” he seemed to suggest, “simply to say something.”

“Damn you! Speak out what you want!” Ivan cried angrily at last, passing
from meekness to violence.

Smerdyakov drew his right foot up to his left, pulled himself up, but
still looked at him with the same serenity and the same little smile.

“Substantially nothing—but just by way of conversation.”

Another silence followed. They did not speak for nearly a minute. Ivan
knew that he ought to get up and show anger, and Smerdyakov stood before
him and seemed to be waiting as though to see whether he would be angry or
not. So at least it seemed to Ivan. At last he moved to get up. Smerdyakov
seemed to seize the moment.

“I’m in an awful position, Ivan Fyodorovitch. I don’t know how to help
myself,” he said resolutely and distinctly, and at his last word he
sighed. Ivan Fyodorovitch sat down again.

“They are both utterly crazy, they are no better than little children,”
Smerdyakov went on. “I am speaking of your parent and your brother Dmitri
Fyodorovitch. Here Fyodor Pavlovitch will get up directly and begin
worrying me every minute, ‘Has she come? Why hasn’t she come?’ and so on
up till midnight and even after midnight. And if Agrafena Alexandrovna
doesn’t come (for very likely she does not mean to come at all) then he
will be at me again to‐morrow morning, ‘Why hasn’t she come? When will she
come?’—as though I were to blame for it. On the other side it’s no better.
As soon as it gets dark, or even before, your brother will appear with his
gun in his hands: ‘Look out, you rogue, you soup‐maker. If you miss her
and don’t let me know she’s been—I’ll kill you before any one.’ When the
night’s over, in the morning, he, too, like Fyodor Pavlovitch, begins
worrying me to death. ‘Why hasn’t she come? Will she come soon?’ And he,
too, thinks me to blame because his lady hasn’t come. And every day and
every hour they get angrier and angrier, so that I sometimes think I shall
kill myself in a fright. I can’t depend upon them, sir.”

“And why have you meddled? Why did you begin to spy for Dmitri
Fyodorovitch?” said Ivan irritably.

“How could I help meddling? Though, indeed, I haven’t meddled at all, if
you want to know the truth of the matter. I kept quiet from the very
beginning, not daring to answer; but he pitched on me to be his servant.
He has had only one thing to say since: ‘I’ll kill you, you scoundrel, if
you miss her,’ I feel certain, sir, that I shall have a long fit to‐
morrow.”

“What do you mean by ‘a long fit’?”

“A long fit, lasting a long time—several hours, or perhaps a day or two.
Once it went on for three days. I fell from the garret that time. The
struggling ceased and then began again, and for three days I couldn’t come
back to my senses. Fyodor Pavlovitch sent for Herzenstube, the doctor
here, and he put ice on my head and tried another remedy, too.... I might
have died.”

“But they say one can’t tell with epilepsy when a fit is coming. What
makes you say you will have one to‐morrow?” Ivan inquired, with a
peculiar, irritable curiosity.

“That’s just so. You can’t tell beforehand.”

“Besides, you fell from the garret then.”

“I climb up to the garret every day. I might fall from the garret again
to‐morrow. And, if not, I might fall down the cellar steps. I have to go
into the cellar every day, too.”

Ivan took a long look at him.

“You are talking nonsense, I see, and I don’t quite understand you,” he
said softly, but with a sort of menace. “Do you mean to pretend to be ill
to‐morrow for three days, eh?”

Smerdyakov, who was looking at the ground again, and playing with the toe
of his right foot, set the foot down, moved the left one forward, and,
grinning, articulated:

“If I were able to play such a trick, that is, pretend to have a fit—and
it would not be difficult for a man accustomed to them—I should have a
perfect right to use such a means to save myself from death. For even if
Agrafena Alexandrovna comes to see his father while I am ill, his honor
can’t blame a sick man for not telling him. He’d be ashamed to.”

“Hang it all!” Ivan cried, his face working with anger, “why are you
always in such a funk for your life? All my brother Dmitri’s threats are
only hasty words and mean nothing. He won’t kill you; it’s not you he’ll
kill!”

“He’d kill me first of all, like a fly. But even more than that, I am
afraid I shall be taken for an accomplice of his when he does something
crazy to his father.”

“Why should you be taken for an accomplice?”

“They’ll think I am an accomplice, because I let him know the signals as a
great secret.”

“What signals? Whom did you tell? Confound you, speak more plainly.”

“I’m bound to admit the fact,” Smerdyakov drawled with pedantic composure,
“that I have a secret with Fyodor Pavlovitch in this business. As you know
yourself (if only you do know it) he has for several days past locked
himself in as soon as night or even evening comes on. Of late you’ve been
going upstairs to your room early every evening, and yesterday you did not
come down at all, and so perhaps you don’t know how carefully he has begun
to lock himself in at night, and even if Grigory Vassilyevitch comes to
the door he won’t open to him till he hears his voice. But Grigory
Vassilyevitch does not come, because I wait upon him alone in his room
now. That’s the arrangement he made himself ever since this to‐do with
Agrafena Alexandrovna began. But at night, by his orders, I go away to the
lodge so that I don’t get to sleep till midnight, but am on the watch,
getting up and walking about the yard, waiting for Agrafena Alexandrovna
to come. For the last few days he’s been perfectly frantic expecting her.
What he argues is, she is afraid of him, Dmitri Fyodorovitch (Mitya, as he
calls him), ‘and so,’ says he, ‘she’ll come the back‐way, late at night,
to me. You look out for her,’ says he, ‘till midnight and later; and if
she does come, you run up and knock at my door or at the window from the
garden. Knock at first twice, rather gently, and then three times more
quickly, then,’ says he, ‘I shall understand at once that she has come,
and will open the door to you quietly.’ Another signal he gave me in case
anything unexpected happens. At first, two knocks, and then, after an
interval, another much louder. Then he will understand that something has
happened suddenly and that I must see him, and he will open to me so that
I can go and speak to him. That’s all in case Agrafena Alexandrovna can’t
come herself, but sends a message. Besides, Dmitri Fyodorovitch might
come, too, so I must let him know he is near. His honor is awfully afraid
of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, so that even if Agrafena Alexandrovna had come and
were locked in with him, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch were to turn up anywhere
near at the time, I should be bound to let him know at once, knocking
three times. So that the first signal of five knocks means Agrafena
Alexandrovna has come, while the second signal of three knocks means
‘something important to tell you.’ His honor has shown me them several
times and explained them. And as in the whole universe no one knows of
these signals but myself and his honor, so he’d open the door without the
slightest hesitation and without calling out (he is awfully afraid of
calling out aloud). Well, those signals are known to Dmitri Fyodorovitch
too, now.”

“How are they known? Did you tell him? How dared you tell him?”

“It was through fright I did it. How could I dare to keep it back from
him? Dmitri Fyodorovitch kept persisting every day, ‘You are deceiving me,
you are hiding something from me! I’ll break both your legs for you.’ So I
told him those secret signals that he might see my slavish devotion, and
might be satisfied that I was not deceiving him, but was telling him all I
could.”

“If you think that he’ll make use of those signals and try to get in,
don’t let him in.”

“But if I should be laid up with a fit, how can I prevent him coming in
then, even if I dared prevent him, knowing how desperate he is?”

“Hang it! How can you be so sure you are going to have a fit, confound
you? Are you laughing at me?”

“How could I dare laugh at you? I am in no laughing humor with this fear
on me. I feel I am going to have a fit. I have a presentiment. Fright
alone will bring it on.”

“Confound it! If you are laid up, Grigory will be on the watch. Let
Grigory know beforehand; he will be sure not to let him in.”

“I should never dare to tell Grigory Vassilyevitch about the signals
without orders from my master. And as for Grigory Vassilyevitch hearing
him and not admitting him, he has been ill ever since yesterday, and Marfa
Ignatyevna intends to give him medicine to‐morrow. They’ve just arranged
it. It’s a very strange remedy of hers. Marfa Ignatyevna knows of a
preparation and always keeps it. It’s a strong thing made from some herb.
She has the secret of it, and she always gives it to Grigory Vassilyevitch
three times a year when his lumbago’s so bad he is almost paralyzed by it.
Then she takes a towel, wets it with the stuff, and rubs his whole back
for half an hour till it’s quite red and swollen, and what’s left in the
bottle she gives him to drink with a special prayer; but not quite all,
for on such occasions she leaves some for herself, and drinks it herself.
And as they never take strong drink, I assure you they both drop asleep at
once and sleep sound a very long time. And when Grigory Vassilyevitch
wakes up he is perfectly well after it, but Marfa Ignatyevna always has a
headache from it. So, if Marfa Ignatyevna carries out her intention to‐
morrow, they won’t hear anything and hinder Dmitri Fyodorovitch. They’ll
be asleep.”

“What a rigmarole! And it all seems to happen at once, as though it were
planned. You’ll have a fit and they’ll both be unconscious,” cried Ivan.
“But aren’t you trying to arrange it so?” broke from him suddenly, and he
frowned threateningly.

“How could I?... And why should I, when it all depends on Dmitri
Fyodorovitch and his plans?... If he means to do anything, he’ll do it;
but if not, I shan’t be thrusting him upon his father.”

“And why should he go to father, especially on the sly, if, as you say
yourself, Agrafena Alexandrovna won’t come at all?” Ivan went on, turning
white with anger. “You say that yourself, and all the while I’ve been
here, I’ve felt sure it was all the old man’s fancy, and the creature
won’t come to him. Why should Dmitri break in on him if she doesn’t come?
Speak, I want to know what you are thinking!”

“You know yourself why he’ll come. What’s the use of what I think? His
honor will come simply because he is in a rage or suspicious on account of
my illness perhaps, and he’ll dash in, as he did yesterday through
impatience to search the rooms, to see whether she hasn’t escaped him on
the sly. He is perfectly well aware, too, that Fyodor Pavlovitch has a big
envelope with three thousand roubles in it, tied up with ribbon and sealed
with three seals. On it is written in his own hand, ‘To my angel
Grushenka, if she will come,’ to which he added three days later, ‘for my
little chicken.’ There’s no knowing what that might do.”

“Nonsense!” cried Ivan, almost beside himself. “Dmitri won’t come to steal
money and kill my father to do it. He might have killed him yesterday on
account of Grushenka, like the frantic, savage fool he is, but he won’t
steal.”

“He is in very great need of money now—the greatest need, Ivan
Fyodorovitch. You don’t know in what need he is,” Smerdyakov explained,
with perfect composure and remarkable distinctness. “He looks on that
three thousand as his own, too. He said so to me himself. ‘My father still
owes me just three thousand,’ he said. And besides that, consider, Ivan
Fyodorovitch, there is something else perfectly true. It’s as good as
certain, so to say, that Agrafena Alexandrovna will force him, if only she
cares to, to marry her—the master himself, I mean, Fyodor Pavlovitch—if
only she cares to, and of course she may care to. All I’ve said is that
she won’t come, but maybe she’s looking for more than that—I mean to be
mistress here. I know myself that Samsonov, her merchant, was laughing
with her about it, telling her quite openly that it would not be at all a
stupid thing to do. And she’s got plenty of sense. She wouldn’t marry a
beggar like Dmitri Fyodorovitch. So, taking that into consideration, Ivan
Fyodorovitch, reflect that then neither Dmitri Fyodorovitch nor yourself
and your brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch, would have anything after the
master’s death, not a rouble, for Agrafena Alexandrovna would marry him
simply to get hold of the whole, all the money there is. But if your
father were to die now, there’d be some forty thousand for sure, even for
Dmitri Fyodorovitch whom he hates so, for he’s made no will.... Dmitri
Fyodorovitch knows all that very well.”

A sort of shudder passed over Ivan’s face. He suddenly flushed.

“Then why on earth,” he suddenly interrupted Smerdyakov, “do you advise me
to go to Tchermashnya? What did you mean by that? If I go away, you see
what will happen here.” Ivan drew his breath with difficulty.

“Precisely so,” said Smerdyakov, softly and reasonably, watching Ivan
intently, however.

“What do you mean by ‘precisely so’?” Ivan questioned him, with a menacing
light in his eyes, restraining himself with difficulty.

“I spoke because I felt sorry for you. If I were in your place I should
simply throw it all up ... rather than stay on in such a position,”
answered Smerdyakov, with the most candid air looking at Ivan’s flashing
eyes. They were both silent.

“You seem to be a perfect idiot, and what’s more ... an awful scoundrel,
too.” Ivan rose suddenly from the bench. He was about to pass straight
through the gate, but he stopped short and turned to Smerdyakov. Something
strange followed. Ivan, in a sudden paroxysm, bit his lip, clenched his
fists, and, in another minute, would have flung himself on Smerdyakov. The
latter, anyway, noticed it at the same moment, started, and shrank back.
But the moment passed without mischief to Smerdyakov, and Ivan turned in
silence, as it seemed in perplexity, to the gate.

“I am going away to Moscow to‐morrow, if you care to know—early to‐morrow
morning. That’s all!” he suddenly said aloud angrily, and wondered himself
afterwards what need there was to say this then to Smerdyakov.

“That’s the best thing you can do,” he responded, as though he had
expected to hear it; “except that you can always be telegraphed for from
Moscow, if anything should happen here.”

Ivan stopped again, and again turned quickly to Smerdyakov. But a change
had passed over him, too. All his familiarity and carelessness had
completely disappeared. His face expressed attention and expectation,
intent but timid and cringing.

“Haven’t you something more to say—something to add?” could be read in the
intent gaze he fixed on Ivan.

“And couldn’t I be sent for from Tchermashnya, too—in case anything
happened?” Ivan shouted suddenly, for some unknown reason raising his
voice.

“From Tchermashnya, too ... you could be sent for,” Smerdyakov muttered,
almost in a whisper, looking disconcerted, but gazing intently into Ivan’s
eyes.

“Only Moscow is farther and Tchermashnya is nearer. Is it to save my
spending money on the fare, or to save my going so far out of my way, that
you insist on Tchermashnya?”

“Precisely so ...” muttered Smerdyakov, with a breaking voice. He looked
at Ivan with a revolting smile, and again made ready to draw back. But to
his astonishment Ivan broke into a laugh, and went through the gate still
laughing. Any one who had seen his face at that moment would have known
that he was not laughing from lightness of heart, and he could not have
explained himself what he was feeling at that instant. He moved and walked
as though in a nervous frenzy.



Chapter VII. “It’s Always Worth While Speaking To A Clever Man”


And in the same nervous frenzy, too, he spoke. Meeting Fyodor Pavlovitch
in the drawing‐room directly he went in, he shouted to him, waving his
hands, “I am going upstairs to my room, not in to you. Good‐by!” and
passed by, trying not even to look at his father. Very possibly the old
man was too hateful to him at that moment; but such an unceremonious
display of hostility was a surprise even to Fyodor Pavlovitch. And the old
man evidently wanted to tell him something at once and had come to meet
him in the drawing‐room on purpose. Receiving this amiable greeting, he
stood still in silence and with an ironical air watched his son going
upstairs, till he passed out of sight.

“What’s the matter with him?” he promptly asked Smerdyakov, who had
followed Ivan.

“Angry about something. Who can tell?” the valet muttered evasively.

“Confound him! Let him be angry then. Bring in the samovar, and get along
with you. Look sharp! No news?”

Then followed a series of questions such as Smerdyakov had just complained
of to Ivan, all relating to his expected visitor, and these questions we
will omit. Half an hour later the house was locked, and the crazy old man
was wandering along through the rooms in excited expectation of hearing
every minute the five knocks agreed upon. Now and then he peered out into
the darkness, seeing nothing.

It was very late, but Ivan was still awake and reflecting. He sat up late
that night, till two o’clock. But we will not give an account of his
thoughts, and this is not the place to look into that soul—its turn will
come. And even if one tried, it would be very hard to give an account of
them, for there were no thoughts in his brain, but something very vague,
and, above all, intense excitement. He felt himself that he had lost his
bearings. He was fretted, too, by all sorts of strange and almost
surprising desires; for instance, after midnight he suddenly had an
intense irresistible inclination to go down, open the door, go to the
lodge and beat Smerdyakov. But if he had been asked why, he could not have
given any exact reason, except perhaps that he loathed the valet as one
who had insulted him more gravely than any one in the world. On the other
hand, he was more than once that night overcome by a sort of inexplicable
humiliating terror, which he felt positively paralyzed his physical
powers. His head ached and he was giddy. A feeling of hatred was rankling
in his heart, as though he meant to avenge himself on some one. He even
hated Alyosha, recalling the conversation he had just had with him. At
moments he hated himself intensely. Of Katerina Ivanovna he almost forgot
to think, and wondered greatly at this afterwards, especially as he
remembered perfectly that when he had protested so valiantly to Katerina
Ivanovna that he would go away next day to Moscow, something had whispered
in his heart, “That’s nonsense, you are not going, and it won’t be so easy
to tear yourself away as you are boasting now.”

Remembering that night long afterwards, Ivan recalled with peculiar
repulsion how he had suddenly got up from the sofa and had stealthily, as
though he were afraid of being watched, opened the door, gone out on the
staircase and listened to Fyodor Pavlovitch stirring down below, had
listened a long while—some five minutes—with a sort of strange curiosity,
holding his breath while his heart throbbed. And why he had done all this,
why he was listening, he could not have said. That “action” all his life
afterwards he called “infamous,” and at the bottom of his heart, he
thought of it as the basest action of his life. For Fyodor Pavlovitch
himself he felt no hatred at that moment, but was simply intensely curious
to know how he was walking down there below and what he must be doing now.
He wondered and imagined how he must be peeping out of the dark windows
and stopping in the middle of the room, listening, listening—for some one
to knock. Ivan went out on to the stairs twice to listen like this.

About two o’clock when everything was quiet, and even Fyodor Pavlovitch
had gone to bed, Ivan had got into bed, firmly resolved to fall asleep at
once, as he felt fearfully exhausted. And he did fall asleep at once, and
slept soundly without dreams, but waked early, at seven o’clock, when it
was broad daylight. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to feel himself
extraordinarily vigorous. He jumped up at once and dressed quickly; then
dragged out his trunk and began packing immediately. His linen had come
back from the laundress the previous morning. Ivan positively smiled at
the thought that everything was helping his sudden departure. And his
departure certainly was sudden. Though Ivan had said the day before (to
Katerina Ivanovna, Alyosha, and Smerdyakov) that he was leaving next day,
yet he remembered that he had no thought of departure when he went to bed,
or, at least, had not dreamed that his first act in the morning would be
to pack his trunk. At last his trunk and bag were ready. It was about nine
o’clock when Marfa Ignatyevna came in with her usual inquiry, “Where will
your honor take your tea, in your own room or downstairs?” He looked
almost cheerful, but there was about him, about his words and gestures,
something hurried and scattered. Greeting his father affably, and even
inquiring specially after his health, though he did not wait to hear his
answer to the end, he announced that he was starting off in an hour to
return to Moscow for good, and begged him to send for the horses. His
father heard this announcement with no sign of surprise, and forgot in an
unmannerly way to show regret at losing him. Instead of doing so, he flew
into a great flutter at the recollection of some important business of his
own.

“What a fellow you are! Not to tell me yesterday! Never mind; we’ll manage
it all the same. Do me a great service, my dear boy. Go to Tchermashnya on
the way. It’s only to turn to the left from the station at Volovya, only
another twelve versts and you come to Tchermashnya.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s eighty versts to the railway and the train
starts for Moscow at seven o’clock to‐night. I can only just catch it.”

“You’ll catch it to‐morrow or the day after, but to‐day turn off to
Tchermashnya. It won’t put you out much to humor your father! If I hadn’t
had something to keep me here, I would have run over myself long ago, for
I’ve some business there in a hurry. But here I ... it’s not the time for
me to go now.... You see, I’ve two pieces of copse land there. The
Maslovs, an old merchant and his son, will give eight thousand for the
timber. But last year I just missed a purchaser who would have given
twelve. There’s no getting any one about here to buy it. The Maslovs have
it all their own way. One has to take what they’ll give, for no one here
dare bid against them. The priest at Ilyinskoe wrote to me last Thursday
that a merchant called Gorstkin, a man I know, had turned up. What makes
him valuable is that he is not from these parts, so he is not afraid of
the Maslovs. He says he will give me eleven thousand for the copse. Do you
hear? But he’ll only be here, the priest writes, for a week altogether, so
you must go at once and make a bargain with him.”

“Well, you write to the priest; he’ll make the bargain.”

“He can’t do it. He has no eye for business. He is a perfect treasure, I’d
give him twenty thousand to take care of for me without a receipt; but he
has no eye for business, he is a perfect child, a crow could deceive him.
And yet he is a learned man, would you believe it? This Gorstkin looks
like a peasant, he wears a blue kaftan, but he is a regular rogue. That’s
the common complaint. He is a liar. Sometimes he tells such lies that you
wonder why he is doing it. He told me the year before last that his wife
was dead and that he had married another, and would you believe it, there
was not a word of truth in it? His wife has never died at all, she is
alive to this day and gives him a beating twice a week. So what you have
to find out is whether he is lying or speaking the truth, when he says he
wants to buy it and would give eleven thousand.”

“I shall be no use in such a business. I have no eye either.”

“Stay, wait a bit! You will be of use, for I will tell you the signs by
which you can judge about Gorstkin. I’ve done business with him a long
time. You see, you must watch his beard; he has a nasty, thin, red beard.
If his beard shakes when he talks and he gets cross, it’s all right, he is
saying what he means, he wants to do business. But if he strokes his beard
with his left hand and grins—he is trying to cheat you. Don’t watch his
eyes, you won’t find out anything from his eyes, he is a deep one, a
rogue—but watch his beard! I’ll give you a note and you show it to him.
He’s called Gorstkin, though his real name is Lyagavy(4); but don’t call
him so, he will be offended. If you come to an understanding with him, and
see it’s all right, write here at once. You need only write: ‘He’s not
lying.’ Stand out for eleven thousand; one thousand you can knock off, but
not more. Just think! there’s a difference between eight thousand and
eleven thousand. It’s as good as picking up three thousand; it’s not so
easy to find a purchaser, and I’m in desperate need of money. Only let me
know it’s serious, and I’ll run over and fix it up. I’ll snatch the time
somehow. But what’s the good of my galloping over, if it’s all a notion of
the priest’s? Come, will you go?”

“Oh, I can’t spare the time. You must excuse me.”

“Come, you might oblige your father. I shan’t forget it. You’ve no heart,
any of you—that’s what it is? What’s a day or two to you? Where are you
going now—to Venice? Your Venice will keep another two days. I would have
sent Alyosha, but what use is Alyosha in a thing like that? I send you
just because you are a clever fellow. Do you suppose I don’t see that? You
know nothing about timber, but you’ve got an eye. All that is wanted is to
see whether the man is in earnest. I tell you, watch his beard—if his
beard shakes you know he is in earnest.”

“You force me to go to that damned Tchermashnya yourself, then?” cried
Ivan, with a malignant smile.

Fyodor Pavlovitch did not catch, or would not catch, the malignancy, but
he caught the smile.

“Then you’ll go, you’ll go? I’ll scribble the note for you at once.”

“I don’t know whether I shall go. I don’t know. I’ll decide on the way.”

“Nonsense! Decide at once. My dear fellow, decide! If you settle the
matter, write me a line; give it to the priest and he’ll send it on to me
at once. And I won’t delay you more than that. You can go to Venice. The
priest will give you horses back to Volovya station.”

The old man was quite delighted. He wrote the note, and sent for the
horses. A light lunch was brought in, with brandy. When Fyodor Pavlovitch
was pleased, he usually became expansive, but to‐day he seemed to restrain
himself. Of Dmitri, for instance, he did not say a word. He was quite
unmoved by the parting, and seemed, in fact, at a loss for something to
say. Ivan noticed this particularly. “He must be bored with me,” he
thought. Only when accompanying his son out on to the steps, the old man
began to fuss about. He would have kissed him, but Ivan made haste to hold
out his hand, obviously avoiding the kiss. His father saw it at once, and
instantly pulled himself up.

“Well, good luck to you, good luck to you!” he repeated from the steps.
“You’ll come again some time or other? Mind you do come. I shall always be
glad to see you. Well, Christ be with you!”

Ivan got into the carriage.

“Good‐by, Ivan! Don’t be too hard on me!” the father called for the last
time.

The whole household came out to take leave—Smerdyakov, Marfa and Grigory.
Ivan gave them ten roubles each. When he had seated himself in the
carriage, Smerdyakov jumped up to arrange the rug.

“You see ... I am going to Tchermashnya,” broke suddenly from Ivan. Again,
as the day before, the words seemed to drop of themselves, and he laughed,
too, a peculiar, nervous laugh. He remembered it long after.

“It’s a true saying then, that ‘it’s always worth while speaking to a
clever man,’ ” answered Smerdyakov firmly, looking significantly at Ivan.

The carriage rolled away. Nothing was clear in Ivan’s soul, but he looked
eagerly around him at the fields, at the hills, at the trees, at a flock
of geese flying high overhead in the bright sky. And all of a sudden he
felt very happy. He tried to talk to the driver, and he felt intensely
interested in an answer the peasant made him; but a minute later he
realized that he was not catching anything, and that he had not really
even taken in the peasant’s answer. He was silent, and it was pleasant
even so. The air was fresh, pure and cool, the sky bright. The images of
Alyosha and Katerina Ivanovna floated into his mind. But he softly smiled,
blew softly on the friendly phantoms, and they flew away. “There’s plenty
of time for them,” he thought. They reached the station quickly, changed
horses, and galloped to Volovya. “Why is it worth while speaking to a
clever man? What did he mean by that?” The thought seemed suddenly to
clutch at his breathing. “And why did I tell him I was going to
Tchermashnya?” They reached Volovya station. Ivan got out of the carriage,
and the drivers stood round him bargaining over the journey of twelve
versts to Tchermashnya. He told them to harness the horses. He went into
the station house, looked round, glanced at the overseer’s wife, and
suddenly went back to the entrance.

“I won’t go to Tchermashnya. Am I too late to reach the railway by seven,
brothers?”

“We shall just do it. Shall we get the carriage out?”

“At once. Will any one of you be going to the town to‐morrow?”

“To be sure. Mitri here will.”

“Can you do me a service, Mitri? Go to my father’s, to Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, and tell him I haven’t gone to Tchermashnya. Can you?”

“Of course I can. I’ve known Fyodor Pavlovitch a long time.”

“And here’s something for you, for I dare say he won’t give you anything,”
said Ivan, laughing gayly.

“You may depend on it he won’t.” Mitya laughed too. “Thank you, sir. I’ll
be sure to do it.”

At seven o’clock Ivan got into the train and set off to Moscow “Away with
the past. I’ve done with the old world for ever, and may I have no news,
no echo, from it. To a new life, new places and no looking back!” But
instead of delight his soul was filled with such gloom, and his heart
ached with such anguish, as he had never known in his life before. He was
thinking all the night. The train flew on, and only at daybreak, when he
was approaching Moscow, he suddenly roused himself from his meditation.

“I am a scoundrel,” he whispered to himself.

Fyodor Pavlovitch remained well satisfied at having seen his son off. For
two hours afterwards he felt almost happy, and sat drinking brandy. But
suddenly something happened which was very annoying and unpleasant for
every one in the house, and completely upset Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
equanimity at once. Smerdyakov went to the cellar for something and fell
down from the top of the steps. Fortunately, Marfa Ignatyevna was in the
yard and heard him in time. She did not see the fall, but heard his
scream—the strange, peculiar scream, long familiar to her—the scream of
the epileptic falling in a fit. They could not tell whether the fit had
come on him at the moment he was descending the steps, so that he must
have fallen unconscious, or whether it was the fall and the shock that had
caused the fit in Smerdyakov, who was known to be liable to them. They
found him at the bottom of the cellar steps, writhing in convulsions and
foaming at the mouth. It was thought at first that he must have broken
something—an arm or a leg—and hurt himself, but “God had preserved him,”
as Marfa Ignatyevna expressed it—nothing of the kind had happened. But it
was difficult to get him out of the cellar. They asked the neighbors to
help and managed it somehow. Fyodor Pavlovitch himself was present at the
whole ceremony. He helped, evidently alarmed and upset. The sick man did
not regain consciousness; the convulsions ceased for a time, but then
began again, and every one concluded that the same thing would happen, as
had happened a year before, when he accidentally fell from the garret.
They remembered that ice had been put on his head then. There was still
ice in the cellar, and Marfa Ignatyevna had some brought up. In the
evening, Fyodor Pavlovitch sent for Doctor Herzenstube, who arrived at
once. He was a most estimable old man, and the most careful and
conscientious doctor in the province. After careful examination, he
concluded that the fit was a very violent one and might have serious
consequences; that meanwhile he, Herzenstube, did not fully understand it,
but that by to‐morrow morning, if the present remedies were unavailing, he
would venture to try something else. The invalid was taken to the lodge,
to a room next to Grigory’s and Marfa Ignatyevna’s.

Then Fyodor Pavlovitch had one misfortune after another to put up with
that day. Marfa Ignatyevna cooked the dinner, and the soup, compared with
Smerdyakov’s, was “no better than dish‐water,” and the fowl was so dried
up that it was impossible to masticate it. To her master’s bitter, though
deserved, reproaches, Marfa Ignatyevna replied that the fowl was a very
old one to begin with, and that she had never been trained as a cook. In
the evening there was another trouble in store for Fyodor Pavlovitch; he
was informed that Grigory, who had not been well for the last three days,
was completely laid up by his lumbago. Fyodor Pavlovitch finished his tea
as early as possible and locked himself up alone in the house. He was in
terrible excitement and suspense. That evening he reckoned on Grushenka’s
coming almost as a certainty. He had received from Smerdyakov that morning
an assurance “that she had promised to come without fail.” The
incorrigible old man’s heart throbbed with excitement; he paced up and
down his empty rooms listening. He had to be on the alert. Dmitri might be
on the watch for her somewhere, and when she knocked on the window
(Smerdyakov had informed him two days before that he had told her where
and how to knock) the door must be opened at once. She must not be a
second in the passage, for fear—which God forbid!—that she should be
frightened and run away. Fyodor Pavlovitch had much to think of, but never
had his heart been steeped in such voluptuous hopes. This time he could
say almost certainly that she would come!




Book VI. The Russian Monk



Chapter I. Father Zossima And His Visitors


When with an anxious and aching heart Alyosha went into his elder’s cell,
he stood still almost astonished. Instead of a sick man at his last gasp,
perhaps unconscious, as he had feared to find him, he saw him sitting up
in his chair and, though weak and exhausted, his face was bright and
cheerful, he was surrounded by visitors and engaged in a quiet and joyful
conversation. But he had only got up from his bed a quarter of an hour
before Alyosha’s arrival; his visitors had gathered together in his cell
earlier, waiting for him to wake, having received a most confident
assurance from Father Païssy that “the teacher would get up, and as he had
himself promised in the morning, converse once more with those dear to his
heart.” This promise and indeed every word of the dying elder Father
Païssy put implicit trust in. If he had seen him unconscious, if he had
seen him breathe his last, and yet had his promise that he would rise up
and say good‐by to him, he would not have believed perhaps even in death,
but would still have expected the dead man to recover and fulfill his
promise. In the morning as he lay down to sleep, Father Zossima had told
him positively: “I shall not die without the delight of another
conversation with you, beloved of my heart. I shall look once more on your
dear face and pour out my heart to you once again.” The monks, who had
gathered for this probably last conversation with Father Zossima, had all
been his devoted friends for many years. There were four of them: Father
Iosif and Father Païssy, Father Mihaïl, the warden of the hermitage, a man
not very old and far from being learned. He was of humble origin, of
strong will and steadfast faith, of austere appearance, but of deep
tenderness, though he obviously concealed it as though he were almost
ashamed of it. The fourth, Father Anfim, was a very old and humble little
monk of the poorest peasant class. He was almost illiterate, and very
quiet, scarcely speaking to any one. He was the humblest of the humble,
and looked as though he had been frightened by something great and awful
beyond the scope of his intelligence. Father Zossima had a great affection
for this timorous man, and always treated him with marked respect, though
perhaps there was no one he had known to whom he had said less, in spite
of the fact that he had spent years wandering about holy Russia with him.
That was very long ago, forty years before, when Father Zossima first
began his life as a monk in a poor and little monastery at Kostroma, and
when, shortly after, he had accompanied Father Anfim on his pilgrimage to
collect alms for their poor monastery.

The whole party were in the bedroom which, as we mentioned before, was
very small, so that there was scarcely room for the four of them (in
addition to Porfiry, the novice, who stood) to sit round Father Zossima on
chairs brought from the sitting‐room. It was already beginning to get
dark, the room was lighted up by the lamps and the candles before the
ikons.

Seeing Alyosha standing embarrassed in the doorway, Father Zossima smiled
at him joyfully and held out his hand.

“Welcome, my quiet one, welcome, my dear, here you are too. I knew you
would come.”

Alyosha went up to him, bowed down before him to the ground and wept.
Something surged up from his heart, his soul was quivering, he wanted to
sob.

“Come, don’t weep over me yet,” Father Zossima smiled, laying his right
hand on his head. “You see I am sitting up talking; maybe I shall live
another twenty years yet, as that dear good woman from Vishegorye, with
her little Lizaveta in her arms, wished me yesterday. God bless the mother
and the little girl Lizaveta,” he crossed himself. “Porfiry, did you take
her offering where I told you?”

He meant the sixty copecks brought him the day before by the good‐humored
woman to be given “to some one poorer than me.” Such offerings, always of
money gained by personal toil, are made by way of penance voluntarily
undertaken. The elder had sent Porfiry the evening before to a widow,
whose house had been burnt down lately, and who after the fire had gone
with her children begging alms. Porfiry hastened to reply that he had
given the money, as he had been instructed, “from an unknown
benefactress.”

“Get up, my dear boy,” the elder went on to Alyosha. “Let me look at you.
Have you been home and seen your brother?” It seemed strange to Alyosha
that he asked so confidently and precisely, about one of his brothers
only—but which one? Then perhaps he had sent him out both yesterday and
to‐day for the sake of that brother.

“I have seen one of my brothers,” answered Alyosha.

“I mean the elder one, to whom I bowed down.”

“I only saw him yesterday and could not find him to‐day,” said Alyosha.

“Make haste to find him, go again to‐morrow and make haste, leave
everything and make haste. Perhaps you may still have time to prevent
something terrible. I bowed down yesterday to the great suffering in store
for him.”

He was suddenly silent and seemed to be pondering. The words were strange.
Father Iosif, who had witnessed the scene yesterday, exchanged glances
with Father Païssy. Alyosha could not resist asking:

“Father and teacher,” he began with extreme emotion, “your words are too
obscure.... What is this suffering in store for him?”

“Don’t inquire. I seemed to see something terrible yesterday ... as though
his whole future were expressed in his eyes. A look came into his eyes—so
that I was instantly horror‐stricken at what that man is preparing for
himself. Once or twice in my life I’ve seen such a look in a man’s face
... reflecting as it were his future fate, and that fate, alas, came to
pass. I sent you to him, Alexey, for I thought your brotherly face would
help him. But everything and all our fates are from the Lord. ‘Except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it
die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ Remember that. You, Alexey, I’ve many
times silently blessed for your face, know that,” added the elder with a
gentle smile. “This is what I think of you, you will go forth from these
walls, but will live like a monk in the world. You will have many enemies,
but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes,
but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will
make others bless it—which is what matters most. Well, that is your
character. Fathers and teachers,” he addressed his friends with a tender
smile, “I have never till to‐day told even him why the face of this youth
is so dear to me. Now I will tell you. His face has been as it were a
remembrance and a prophecy for me. At the dawn of my life when I was a
child I had an elder brother who died before my eyes at seventeen. And
later on in the course of my life I gradually became convinced that that
brother had been for a guidance and a sign from on high for me. For had he
not come into my life, I should never perhaps, so I fancy at least, have
become a monk and entered on this precious path. He appeared first to me
in my childhood, and here, at the end of my pilgrimage, he seems to have
come to me over again. It is marvelous, fathers and teachers, that Alexey,
who has some, though not a great, resemblance in face, seems to me so like
him spiritually, that many times I have taken him for that young man, my
brother, mysteriously come back to me at the end of my pilgrimage, as a
reminder and an inspiration. So that I positively wondered at so strange a
dream in myself. Do you hear this, Porfiry?” he turned to the novice who
waited on him. “Many times I’ve seen in your face as it were a look of
mortification that I love Alexey more than you. Now you know why that was
so, but I love you too, know that, and many times I grieved at your
mortification. I should like to tell you, dear friends, of that youth, my
brother, for there has been no presence in my life more precious, more
significant and touching. My heart is full of tenderness, and I look at my
whole life at this moment as though living through it again.”

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Here I must observe that this last conversation of Father Zossima with the
friends who visited him on the last day of his life has been partly
preserved in writing. Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov wrote it down from
memory, some time after his elder’s death. But whether this was only the
conversation that took place then, or whether he added to it his notes of
parts of former conversations with his teacher, I cannot determine. In his
account, Father Zossima’s talk goes on without interruption, as though he
told his life to his friends in the form of a story, though there is no
doubt, from other accounts of it, that the conversation that evening was
general. Though the guests did not interrupt Father Zossima much, yet they
too talked, perhaps even told something themselves. Besides, Father
Zossima could not have carried on an uninterrupted narrative, for he was
sometimes gasping for breath, his voice failed him, and he even lay down
to rest on his bed, though he did not fall asleep and his visitors did not
leave their seats. Once or twice the conversation was interrupted by
Father Païssy’s reading the Gospel. It is worthy of note, too, that no one
of them supposed that he would die that night, for on that evening of his
life after his deep sleep in the day he seemed suddenly to have found new
strength, which kept him up through this long conversation. It was like a
last effort of love which gave him marvelous energy; only for a little
time, however, for his life was cut short immediately.... But of that
later. I will only add now that I have preferred to confine myself to the
account given by Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov. It will be shorter and not
so fatiguing, though of course, as I must repeat, Alyosha took a great
deal from previous conversations and added them to it.

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Notes of the Life of the deceased Priest and Monk, the Elder Zossima,
taken from his own words by Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

_(a)_ _Father Zossima’s Brother_

Beloved fathers and teachers, I was born in a distant province in the
north, in the town of V. My father was a gentleman by birth, but of no
great consequence or position. He died when I was only two years old, and
I don’t remember him at all. He left my mother a small house built of
wood, and a fortune, not large, but sufficient to keep her and her
children in comfort. There were two of us, my elder brother Markel and I.
He was eight years older than I was, of hasty irritable temperament, but
kind‐hearted and never ironical. He was remarkably silent, especially at
home with me, his mother, and the servants. He did well at school, but did
not get on with his schoolfellows, though he never quarreled, at least so
my mother has told me. Six months before his death, when he was seventeen,
he made friends with a political exile who had been banished from Moscow
to our town for freethinking, and led a solitary existence there. He was a
good scholar who had gained distinction in philosophy in the university.
Something made him take a fancy to Markel, and he used to ask him to see
him. The young man would spend whole evenings with him during that winter,
till the exile was summoned to Petersburg to take up his post again at his
own request, as he had powerful friends.

It was the beginning of Lent, and Markel would not fast, he was rude and
laughed at it. “That’s all silly twaddle, and there is no God,” he said,
horrifying my mother, the servants, and me too. For though I was only
nine, I too was aghast at hearing such words. We had four servants, all
serfs. I remember my mother selling one of the four, the cook Afimya, who
was lame and elderly, for sixty paper roubles, and hiring a free servant
to take her place.

In the sixth week in Lent, my brother, who was never strong and had a
tendency to consumption, was taken ill. He was tall but thin and delicate‐
looking, and of very pleasing countenance. I suppose he caught cold,
anyway the doctor, who came, soon whispered to my mother that it was
galloping consumption, that he would not live through the spring. My
mother began weeping, and, careful not to alarm my brother, she entreated
him to go to church, to confess and take the sacrament, as he was still
able to move about. This made him angry, and he said something profane
about the church. He grew thoughtful, however; he guessed at once that he
was seriously ill, and that that was why his mother was begging him to
confess and take the sacrament. He had been aware, indeed, for a long time
past, that he was far from well, and had a year before coolly observed at
dinner to our mother and me, “My life won’t be long among you, I may not
live another year,” which seemed now like a prophecy.

Three days passed and Holy Week had come. And on Tuesday morning my
brother began going to church. “I am doing this simply for your sake,
mother, to please and comfort you,” he said. My mother wept with joy and
grief. “His end must be near,” she thought, “if there’s such a change in
him.” But he was not able to go to church long, he took to his bed, so he
had to confess and take the sacrament at home.

It was a late Easter, and the days were bright, fine, and full of
fragrance. I remember he used to cough all night and sleep badly, but in
the morning he dressed and tried to sit up in an arm‐chair. That’s how I
remember him sitting, sweet and gentle, smiling, his face bright and
joyous, in spite of his illness. A marvelous change passed over him, his
spirit seemed transformed. The old nurse would come in and say, “Let me
light the lamp before the holy image, my dear.” And once he would not have
allowed it and would have blown it out.

“Light it, light it, dear, I was a wretch to have prevented you doing it.
You are praying when you light the lamp, and I am praying when I rejoice
seeing you. So we are praying to the same God.”

Those words seemed strange to us, and mother would go to her room and
weep, but when she went in to him she wiped her eyes and looked cheerful.
“Mother, don’t weep, darling,” he would say, “I’ve long to live yet, long
to rejoice with you, and life is glad and joyful.”

“Ah, dear boy, how can you talk of joy when you lie feverish at night,
coughing as though you would tear yourself to pieces.”

“Don’t cry, mother,” he would answer, “life is paradise, and we are all in
paradise, but we won’t see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth
the next day.”

Every one wondered at his words, he spoke so strangely and positively; we
were all touched and wept. Friends came to see us. “Dear ones,” he would
say to them, “what have I done that you should love me so, how can you
love any one like me, and how was it I did not know, I did not appreciate
it before?”

When the servants came in to him he would say continually, “Dear, kind
people, why are you doing so much for me, do I deserve to be waited on? If
it were God’s will for me to live, I would wait on you, for all men should
wait on one another.”

Mother shook her head as she listened. “My darling, it’s your illness
makes you talk like that.”

“Mother, darling,” he would say, “there must be servants and masters, but
if so I will be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me.
And another thing, mother, every one of us has sinned against all men, and
I more than any.”

Mother positively smiled at that, smiled through her tears. “Why, how
could you have sinned against all men, more than all? Robbers and
murderers have done that, but what sin have you committed yet, that you
hold yourself more guilty than all?”

“Mother, little heart of mine,” he said (he had begun using such strange
caressing words at that time), “little heart of mine, my joy, believe me,
every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.
I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully
even. And how is it we went on then living, getting angry and not
knowing?”

So he would get up every day, more and more sweet and joyous and full of
love. When the doctor, an old German called Eisenschmidt, came:

“Well, doctor, have I another day in this world?” he would ask, joking.

“You’ll live many days yet,” the doctor would answer, “and months and
years too.”

“Months and years!” he would exclaim. “Why reckon the days? One day is
enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel,
try to outshine each other and keep grudges against each other? Let’s go
straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss
each other, and glorify life.”

“Your son cannot last long,” the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied
him to the door. “The disease is affecting his brain.”

The windows of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a
shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first
birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at
the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly
begging their forgiveness too: “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me,
for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at
the time, but he shed tears of joy. “Yes,” he said, “there was such a
glory of God all about me: birds, trees, meadows, sky; only I lived in
shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory.”

“You take too many sins on yourself,” mother used to say, weeping.

“Mother, darling, it’s for joy, not for grief I am crying. Though I can’t
explain it to you, I like to humble myself before them, for I don’t know
how to love them enough. If I have sinned against every one, yet all
forgive me, too, and that’s heaven. Am I not in heaven now?”

And there was a great deal more I don’t remember. I remember I went once
into his room when there was no one else there. It was a bright evening,
the sun was setting, and the whole room was lighted up. He beckoned me,
and I went up to him. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my
face tenderly, lovingly; he said nothing for a minute, only looked at me
like that.

“Well,” he said, “run and play now, enjoy life for me too.”

I went out then and ran to play. And many times in my life afterwards I
remembered even with tears how he told me to enjoy life for him too. There
were many other marvelous and beautiful sayings of his, though we did not
understand them at the time. He died the third week after Easter. He was
fully conscious though he could not talk; up to his last hour he did not
change. He looked happy, his eyes beamed and sought us, he smiled at us,
beckoned us. There was a great deal of talk even in the town about his
death. I was impressed by all this at the time, but not too much so,
though I cried a good deal at his funeral. I was young then, a child, but
a lasting impression, a hidden feeling of it all, remained in my heart,
ready to rise up and respond when the time came. So indeed it happened.

_(b) Of the Holy Scriptures in the Life of Father Zossima_

I was left alone with my mother. Her friends began advising her to send me
to Petersburg as other parents did. “You have only one son now,” they
said, “and have a fair income, and you will be depriving him perhaps of a
brilliant career if you keep him here.” They suggested I should be sent to
Petersburg to the Cadet Corps, that I might afterwards enter the Imperial
Guard. My mother hesitated for a long time, it was awful to part with her
only child, but she made up her mind to it at last, though not without
many tears, believing she was acting for my happiness. She brought me to
Petersburg and put me into the Cadet Corps, and I never saw her again. For
she too died three years afterwards. She spent those three years mourning
and grieving for both of us.

From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious
memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early
childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is
any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may
remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is
precious. With my memories of home I count, too, my memories of the Bible,
which, child as I was, I was very eager to read at home. I had a book of
Scripture history then with excellent pictures, called _A Hundred and Four
Stories from the Old and New Testament_, and I learned to read from it. I
have it lying on my shelf now, I keep it as a precious relic of the past.
But even before I learned to read, I remember first being moved to
devotional feeling at eight years old. My mother took me alone to mass (I
don’t remember where my brother was at the time) on the Monday before
Easter. It was a fine day, and I remember to‐day, as though I saw it now,
how the incense rose from the censer and softly floated upwards and,
overhead in the cupola, mingled in rising waves with the sunlight that
streamed in at the little window. I was stirred by the sight, and for the
first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my
heart. A youth came out into the middle of the church carrying a big book,
so large that at the time I fancied he could scarcely carry it. He laid it
on the reading desk, opened it, and began reading, and suddenly for the
first time I understood something read in the church of God. In the land
of Uz, there lived a man, righteous and God‐fearing, and he had great
wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children feasted,
and he loved them very much and prayed for them. “It may be that my sons
have sinned in their feasting.” Now the devil came before the Lord
together with the sons of God, and said to the Lord that he had gone up
and down the earth and under the earth. “And hast thou considered my
servant Job?” God asked of him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to
his great and holy servant. And the devil laughed at God’s words. “Give
him over to me and Thou wilt see that Thy servant will murmur against Thee
and curse Thy name.” And God gave up the just man He loved so, to the
devil. And the devil smote his children and his cattle and scattered his
wealth, all of a sudden like a thunderbolt from heaven. And Job rent his
mantle and fell down upon the ground and cried aloud, “Naked came I out of
my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave
and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and
ever.”

Fathers and teachers, forgive my tears now, for all my childhood rises up
again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then, with the breast of
a little child of eight, and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and
gladness. The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who
talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction,
and His servant crying out: “Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish
me,” and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: “Let my prayer
rise up before Thee,” and again incense from the priest’s censer and the
kneeling and the prayer. Ever since then—only yesterday I took it up—I’ve
never been able to read that sacred tale without tears. And how much that
is great, mysterious and unfathomable there is in it! Afterwards I heard
the words of mockery and blame, proud words, “How could God give up the
most loved of His saints for the diversion of the devil, take from him his
children, smite him with sore boils so that he cleansed the corruption
from his sores with a pot‐sherd—and for no object except to boast to the
devil! ‘See what My saint can suffer for My sake.’ ” But the greatness of
it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery—that the passing earthly
show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the
earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished. The Creator, just as on
the first days of creation He ended each day with praise: “That is good
that I have created,” looks upon Job and again praises His creation. And
Job, praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for
generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was
ordained. Good heavens, what a book it is, and what lessons there are in
it! What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with
it to man! It is like a mold cast of the world and man and human nature,
everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what
mysteries are solved and revealed! God raises Job again, gives him wealth
again. Many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them. But
how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more,
when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with
those new ones, however dear the new ones might be? But he could, he
could. It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes
gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place
of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as
before, my hearts sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting,
its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come
with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life—and over
all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is
ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my
earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, that approaching
life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind
glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

Friends and teachers, I have heard more than once, and of late one may
hear it more often, that the priests, and above all the village priests,
are complaining on all sides of their miserable income and their
humiliating lot. They plainly state, even in print—I’ve read it
myself—that they are unable to teach the Scriptures to the people because
of the smallness of their means, and if Lutherans and heretics come and
lead the flock astray, they let them lead them astray because they have so
little to live upon. May the Lord increase the sustenance that is so
precious to them, for their complaint is just, too. But of a truth I say,
if any one is to blame in the matter, half the fault is ours. For he may
be short of time, he may say truly that he is overwhelmed all the while
with work and services, but still it’s not all the time, even he has an
hour a week to remember God. And he does not work the whole year round.
Let him gather round him once a week, some hour in the evening, if only
the children at first—the fathers will hear of it and they too will begin
to come. There’s no need to build halls for this, let him take them into
his own cottage. They won’t spoil his cottage, they would only be there
one hour. Let him open that book and begin reading it without grand words
or superciliousness, without condescension to them, but gently and kindly,
being glad that he is reading to them and that they are listening with
attention, loving the words himself, only stopping from time to time to
explain words that are not understood by the peasants. Don’t be anxious,
they will understand everything, the orthodox heart will understand all!
Let him read them about Abraham and Sarah, about Isaac and Rebecca, of how
Jacob went to Laban and wrestled with the Lord in his dream and said,
“This place is holy”—and he will impress the devout mind of the peasant.
Let him read, especially to the children, how the brothers sold Joseph,
the tender boy, the dreamer and prophet, into bondage, and told their
father that a wild beast had devoured him, and showed him his blood‐
stained clothes. Let him read them how the brothers afterwards journeyed
into Egypt for corn, and Joseph, already a great ruler, unrecognized by
them, tormented them, accused them, kept his brother Benjamin, and all
through love: “I love you, and loving you I torment you.” For he
remembered all his life how they had sold him to the merchants in the
burning desert by the well, and how, wringing his hands, he had wept and
besought his brothers not to sell him as a slave in a strange land. And
how, seeing them again after many years, he loved them beyond measure, but
he harassed and tormented them in love. He left them at last not able to
bear the suffering of his heart, flung himself on his bed and wept. Then,
wiping his tears away, he went out to them joyful and told them,
“Brothers, I am your brother Joseph!” Let him read them further how happy
old Jacob was on learning that his darling boy was still alive, and how he
went to Egypt leaving his own country, and died in a foreign land,
bequeathing his great prophecy that had lain mysteriously hidden in his
meek and timid heart all his life, that from his offspring, from Judah,
will come the great hope of the world, the Messiah and Saviour.

Fathers and teachers, forgive me and don’t be angry, that like a little
child I’ve been babbling of what you know long ago, and can teach me a
hundred times more skillfully. I only speak from rapture, and forgive my
tears, for I love the Bible. Let him too weep, the priest of God, and be
sure that the hearts of his listeners will throb in response. Only a
little tiny seed is needed—drop it into the heart of the peasant and it
won’t die, it will live in his soul all his life, it will be hidden in the
midst of his darkness and sin, like a bright spot, like a great reminder.
And there’s no need of much teaching or explanation, he will understand it
all simply. Do you suppose that the peasants don’t understand? Try reading
them the touching story of the fair Esther and the haughty Vashti; or the
miraculous story of Jonah in the whale. Don’t forget either the parables
of Our Lord, choose especially from the Gospel of St. Luke (that is what I
did), and then from the Acts of the Apostles the conversion of St. Paul
(that you mustn’t leave out on any account), and from the _Lives of the
Saints_, for instance, the life of Alexey, the man of God and, greatest of
all, the happy martyr and the seer of God, Mary of Egypt—and you will
penetrate their hearts with these simple tales. Give one hour a week to it
in spite of your poverty, only one little hour. And you will see for
yourselves that our people is gracious and grateful, and will repay you a
hundred‐fold. Mindful of the kindness of their priest and the moving words
they have heard from him, they will of their own accord help him in his
fields and in his house, and will treat him with more respect than
before—so that it will even increase his worldly well‐being too. The thing
is so simple that sometimes one is even afraid to put it into words, for
fear of being laughed at, and yet how true it is! One who does not believe
in God will not believe in God’s people. He who believes in God’s people
will see His Holiness too, even though he had not believed in it till
then. Only the people and their future spiritual power will convert our
atheists, who have torn themselves away from their native soil.

And what is the use of Christ’s words, unless we set an example? The
people is lost without the Word of God, for its soul is athirst for the
Word and for all that is good.

In my youth, long ago, nearly forty years ago, I traveled all over Russia
with Father Anfim, collecting funds for our monastery, and we stayed one
night on the bank of a great navigable river with some fishermen. A good‐
looking peasant lad, about eighteen, joined us; he had to hurry back next
morning to pull a merchant’s barge along the bank. I noticed him looking
straight before him with clear and tender eyes. It was a bright, warm,
still, July night, a cool mist rose from the broad river, we could hear
the plash of a fish, the birds were still, all was hushed and beautiful,
everything praying to God. Only we two were not sleeping, the lad and I,
and we talked of the beauty of this world of God’s and of the great
mystery of it. Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee,
all so marvelously know their path, though they have not intelligence,
they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it
themselves. I saw the dear lad’s heart was moved. He told me that he loved
the forest and the forest birds. He was a bird‐catcher, knew the note of
each of them, could call each bird. “I know nothing better than to be in
the forest,” said he, “though all things are good.”

“Truly,” I answered him, “all things are good and fair, because all is
truth. Look,” said I, “at the horse, that great beast that is so near to
man; or the lowly, pensive ox, which feeds him and works for him; look at
their faces, what meekness, what devotion to man, who often beats them
mercilessly. What gentleness, what confidence and what beauty! It’s
touching to know that there’s no sin in them, for all, all except man, is
sinless, and Christ has been with them before us.”

“Why,” asked the boy, “is Christ with them too?”

“It cannot but be so,” said I, “since the Word is for all. All creation
and all creatures, every leaf is striving to the Word, singing glory to
God, weeping to Christ, unconsciously accomplishing this by the mystery of
their sinless life. Yonder,” said I, “in the forest wanders the dreadful
bear, fierce and menacing, and yet innocent in it.” And I told him how
once a bear came to a great saint who had taken refuge in a tiny cell in
the wood. And the great saint pitied him, went up to him without fear and
gave him a piece of bread. “Go along,” said he, “Christ be with you,” and
the savage beast walked away meekly and obediently, doing no harm. And the
lad was delighted that the bear had walked away without hurting the saint,
and that Christ was with him too. “Ah,” said he, “how good that is, how
good and beautiful is all God’s work!” He sat musing softly and sweetly. I
saw he understood. And he slept beside me a light and sinless sleep. May
God bless youth! And I prayed for him as I went to sleep. Lord, send peace
and light to Thy people!



Chapter II. The Duel


_(c) Recollections of Father Zossima’s Youth before he became a Monk. The
Duel_

I spent a long time, almost eight years, in the military cadet school at
Petersburg, and in the novelty of my surroundings there, many of my
childish impressions grew dimmer, though I forgot nothing. I picked up so
many new habits and opinions that I was transformed into a cruel, absurd,
almost savage creature. A surface polish of courtesy and society manners I
did acquire together with the French language.

But we all, myself included, looked upon the soldiers in our service as
cattle. I was perhaps worse than the rest in that respect, for I was so
much more impressionable than my companions. By the time we left the
school as officers, we were ready to lay down our lives for the honor of
the regiment, but no one of us had any knowledge of the real meaning of
honor, and if any one had known it, he would have been the first to
ridicule it. Drunkenness, debauchery and devilry were what we almost
prided ourselves on. I don’t say that we were bad by nature, all these
young men were good fellows, but they behaved badly, and I worst of all.
What made it worse for me was that I had come into my own money, and so I
flung myself into a life of pleasure, and plunged headlong into all the
recklessness of youth.

I was fond of reading, yet strange to say, the Bible was the one book I
never opened at that time, though I always carried it about with me, and I
was never separated from it; in very truth I was keeping that book “for
the day and the hour, for the month and the year,” though I knew it not.

After four years of this life, I chanced to be in the town of K. where our
regiment was stationed at the time. We found the people of the town
hospitable, rich and fond of entertainments. I met with a cordial
reception everywhere, as I was of a lively temperament and was known to be
well off, which always goes a long way in the world. And then a
circumstance happened which was the beginning of it all.

I formed an attachment to a beautiful and intelligent young girl of noble
and lofty character, the daughter of people much respected. They were
well‐to‐do people of influence and position. They always gave me a cordial
and friendly reception. I fancied that the young lady looked on me with
favor and my heart was aflame at such an idea. Later on I saw and fully
realized that I perhaps was not so passionately in love with her at all,
but only recognized the elevation of her mind and character, which I could
not indeed have helped doing. I was prevented, however, from making her an
offer at the time by my selfishness, I was loath to part with the
allurements of my free and licentious bachelor life in the heyday of my
youth, and with my pockets full of money. I did drop some hint as to my
feelings however, though I put off taking any decisive step for a time.
Then, all of a sudden, we were ordered off for two months to another
district.

On my return two months later, I found the young lady already married to a
rich neighboring landowner, a very amiable man, still young though older
than I was, connected with the best Petersburg society, which I was not,
and of excellent education, which I also was not. I was so overwhelmed at
this unexpected circumstance that my mind was positively clouded. The
worst of it all was that, as I learned then, the young landowner had been
a long while betrothed to her, and I had met him indeed many times in her
house, but blinded by my conceit I had noticed nothing. And this
particularly mortified me; almost everybody had known all about it, while
I knew nothing. I was filled with sudden irrepressible fury. With flushed
face I began recalling how often I had been on the point of declaring my
love to her, and as she had not attempted to stop me or to warn me, she
must, I concluded, have been laughing at me all the time. Later on, of
course, I reflected and remembered that she had been very far from
laughing at me; on the contrary, she used to turn off any love‐making on
my part with a jest and begin talking of other subjects; but at that
moment I was incapable of reflecting and was all eagerness for revenge. I
am surprised to remember that my wrath and revengeful feelings were
extremely repugnant to my own nature, for being of an easy temper, I found
it difficult to be angry with any one for long, and so I had to work
myself up artificially and became at last revolting and absurd.

I waited for an opportunity and succeeded in insulting my “rival” in the
presence of a large company. I insulted him on a perfectly extraneous
pretext, jeering at his opinion upon an important public event—it was in
the year 1826(5)—and my jeer was, so people said, clever and effective.
Then I forced him to ask for an explanation, and behaved so rudely that he
accepted my challenge in spite of the vast inequality between us, as I was
younger, a person of no consequence, and of inferior rank. I learned
afterwards for a fact that it was from a jealous feeling on his side also
that my challenge was accepted; he had been rather jealous of me on his
wife’s account before their marriage; he fancied now that if he submitted
to be insulted by me and refused to accept my challenge, and if she heard
of it, she might begin to despise him and waver in her love for him. I
soon found a second in a comrade, an ensign of our regiment. In those days
though duels were severely punished, yet dueling was a kind of fashion
among the officers—so strong and deeply rooted will a brutal prejudice
sometimes be.

It was the end of June, and our meeting was to take place at seven o’clock
the next day on the outskirts of the town—and then something happened that
in very truth was the turning‐point of my life. In the evening, returning
home in a savage and brutal humor, I flew into a rage with my orderly
Afanasy, and gave him two blows in the face with all my might, so that it
was covered with blood. He had not long been in my service and I had
struck him before, but never with such ferocious cruelty. And, believe me,
though it’s forty years ago, I recall it now with shame and pain. I went
to bed and slept for about three hours; when I waked up the day was
breaking. I got up—I did not want to sleep any more—I went to the
window—opened it, it looked out upon the garden; I saw the sun rising; it
was warm and beautiful, the birds were singing.

“What’s the meaning of it?” I thought. “I feel in my heart as it were
something vile and shameful. Is it because I am going to shed blood? No,”
I thought, “I feel it’s not that. Can it be that I am afraid of death,
afraid of being killed? No, that’s not it, that’s not it at all.”... And
all at once I knew what it was: it was because I had beaten Afanasy the
evening before! It all rose before my mind, it all was as it were repeated
over again; he stood before me and I was beating him straight on the face
and he was holding his arms stiffly down, his head erect, his eyes fixed
upon me as though on parade. He staggered at every blow and did not even
dare to raise his hands to protect himself. That is what a man has been
brought to, and that was a man beating a fellow creature! What a crime! It
was as though a sharp dagger had pierced me right through. I stood as if I
were struck dumb, while the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and
the birds were trilling the praise of God.... I hid my face in my hands,
fell on my bed and broke into a storm of tears. And then I remembered my
brother Markel and what he said on his death‐bed to his servants: “My dear
ones, why do you wait on me, why do you love me, am I worth your waiting
on me?”

“Yes, am I worth it?” flashed through my mind. “After all what am I worth,
that another man, a fellow creature, made in the likeness and image of
God, should serve me?” For the first time in my life this question forced
itself upon me. He had said, “Mother, my little heart, in truth we are
each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If
they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.”

“God, can that too be false?” I thought as I wept. “In truth, perhaps, I
am more than all others responsible for all, a greater sinner than all men
in the world.” And all at once the whole truth in its full light appeared
to me; what was I going to do? I was going to kill a good, clever, noble
man, who had done me no wrong, and by depriving his wife of happiness for
the rest of her life, I should be torturing and killing her too. I lay
thus in my bed with my face in the pillow, heedless how the time was
passing. Suddenly my second, the ensign, came in with the pistols to fetch
me.

“Ah,” said he, “it’s a good thing you are up already, it’s time we were
off, come along!”

I did not know what to do and hurried to and fro undecided; we went out to
the carriage, however.

“Wait here a minute,” I said to him. “I’ll be back directly, I have
forgotten my purse.”

And I ran back alone, to Afanasy’s little room.

“Afanasy,” I said, “I gave you two blows on the face yesterday, forgive
me,” I said.

He started as though he were frightened, and looked at me; and I saw that
it was not enough, and on the spot, in my full officer’s uniform, I
dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground.

“Forgive me,” I said.

Then he was completely aghast.

“Your honor ... sir, what are you doing? Am I worth it?”

And he burst out crying as I had done before, hid this face in his hands,
turned to the window and shook all over with his sobs. I flew out to my
comrade and jumped into the carriage.

“Ready,” I cried. “Have you ever seen a conqueror?” I asked him. “Here is
one before you.”

I was in ecstasy, laughing and talking all the way, I don’t remember what
about.

He looked at me. “Well, brother, you are a plucky fellow, you’ll keep up
the honor of the uniform, I can see.”

So we reached the place and found them there, waiting us. We were placed
twelve paces apart; he had the first shot. I stood gayly, looking him full
in the face; I did not twitch an eyelash, I looked lovingly at him, for I
knew what I would do. His shot just grazed my cheek and ear.

“Thank God,” I cried, “no man has been killed,” and I seized my pistol,
turned back and flung it far away into the wood. “That’s the place for
you,” I cried.

I turned to my adversary.

“Forgive me, young fool that I am, sir,” I said, “for my unprovoked insult
to you and for forcing you to fire at me. I am ten times worse than you
and more, maybe. Tell that to the person whom you hold dearest in the
world.”

I had no sooner said this than they all three shouted at me.

“Upon my word,” cried my adversary, annoyed, “if you did not want to
fight, why did not you let me alone?”

“Yesterday I was a fool, to‐day I know better,” I answered him gayly.

“As to yesterday, I believe you, but as for to‐day, it is difficult to
agree with your opinion,” said he.

“Bravo,” I cried, clapping my hands. “I agree with you there too. I have
deserved it!”

“Will you shoot, sir, or not?”

“No, I won’t,” I said; “if you like, fire at me again, but it would be
better for you not to fire.”

The seconds, especially mine, were shouting too: “Can you disgrace the
regiment like this, facing your antagonist and begging his forgiveness! If
I’d only known this!”

I stood facing them all, not laughing now.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “is it really so wonderful in these days to find a
man who can repent of his stupidity and publicly confess his wrongdoing?”

“But not in a duel,” cried my second again.

“That’s what’s so strange,” I said. “For I ought to have owned my fault as
soon as I got here, before he had fired a shot, before leading him into a
great and deadly sin; but we have made our life so grotesque, that to act
in that way would have been almost impossible, for only after I have faced
his shot at the distance of twelve paces could my words have any
significance for him, and if I had spoken before, he would have said, ‘He
is a coward, the sight of the pistols has frightened him, no use to listen
to him.’ Gentlemen,” I cried suddenly, speaking straight from my heart,
“look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the
tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we,
are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for
we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all
its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”

I would have said more but I could not; my voice broke with the sweetness
and youthful gladness of it, and there was such bliss in my heart as I had
never known before in my life.

“All this as rational and edifying,” said my antagonist, “and in any case
you are an original person.”

“You may laugh,” I said to him, laughing too, “but afterwards you will
approve of me.”

“Oh, I am ready to approve of you now,” said he; “will you shake hands?
for I believe you are genuinely sincere.”

“No,” I said, “not now, later on when I have grown worthier and deserve
your esteem, then shake hands and you will do well.”

We went home, my second upbraiding me all the way, while I kissed him. All
my comrades heard of the affair at once and gathered together to pass
judgment on me the same day.

“He has disgraced the uniform,” they said; “let him resign his
commission.”

Some stood up for me: “He faced the shot,” they said.

“Yes, but he was afraid of his other shot and begged for forgiveness.”

“If he had been afraid of being shot, he would have shot his own pistol
first before asking forgiveness, while he flung it loaded into the forest.
No, there’s something else in this, something original.”

I enjoyed listening and looking at them. “My dear friends and comrades,”
said I, “don’t worry about my resigning my commission, for I have done so
already. I have sent in my papers this morning and as soon as I get my
discharge I shall go into a monastery—it’s with that object I am leaving
the regiment.”

When I had said this every one of them burst out laughing.

“You should have told us of that first, that explains everything, we can’t
judge a monk.”

They laughed and could not stop themselves, and not scornfully, but kindly
and merrily. They all felt friendly to me at once, even those who had been
sternest in their censure, and all the following month, before my
discharge came, they could not make enough of me. “Ah, you monk,” they
would say. And every one said something kind to me, they began trying to
dissuade me, even to pity me: “What are you doing to yourself?”

“No,” they would say, “he is a brave fellow, he faced fire and could have
fired his own pistol too, but he had a dream the night before that he
should become a monk, that’s why he did it.”

It was the same thing with the society of the town. Till then I had been
kindly received, but had not been the object of special attention, and now
all came to know me at once and invited me; they laughed at me, but they
loved me. I may mention that although everybody talked openly of our duel,
the authorities took no notice of it, because my antagonist was a near
relation of our general, and as there had been no bloodshed and no serious
consequences, and as I resigned my commission, they took it as a joke. And
I began then to speak aloud and fearlessly, regardless of their laughter,
for it was always kindly and not spiteful laughter. These conversations
mostly took place in the evenings, in the company of ladies; women
particularly liked listening to me then and they made the men listen.

“But how can I possibly be responsible for all?” every one would laugh in
my face. “Can I, for instance, be responsible for you?”

“You may well not know it,” I would answer, “since the whole world has
long been going on a different line, since we consider the veriest lies as
truth and demand the same lies from others. Here I have for once in my
life acted sincerely and, well, you all look upon me as a madman. Though
you are friendly to me, yet, you see, you all laugh at me.”

“But how can we help being friendly to you?” said my hostess, laughing.
The room was full of people. All of a sudden the young lady rose, on whose
account the duel had been fought and whom only lately I had intended to be
my future wife. I had not noticed her coming into the room. She got up,
came to me and held out her hand.

“Let me tell you,” she said, “that I am the first not to laugh at you, but
on the contrary I thank you with tears and express my respect for you for
your action then.”

Her husband, too, came up and then they all approached me and almost
kissed me. My heart was filled with joy, but my attention was especially
caught by a middle‐aged man who came up to me with the others. I knew him
by name already, but had never made his acquaintance nor exchanged a word
with him till that evening.

_(d) The Mysterious Visitor_

He had long been an official in the town; he was in a prominent position,
respected by all, rich and had a reputation for benevolence. He subscribed
considerable sums to the almshouse and the orphan asylum; he was very
charitable, too, in secret, a fact which only became known after his
death. He was a man of about fifty, almost stern in appearance and not
much given to conversation. He had been married about ten years and his
wife, who was still young, had borne him three children. Well, I was
sitting alone in my room the following evening, when my door suddenly
opened and this gentleman walked in.

I must mention, by the way, that I was no longer living in my former
quarters. As soon as I resigned my commission, I took rooms with an old
lady, the widow of a government clerk. My landlady’s servant waited upon
me, for I had moved into her rooms simply because on my return from the
duel I had sent Afanasy back to the regiment, as I felt ashamed to look
him in the face after my last interview with him. So prone is the man of
the world to be ashamed of any righteous action.

“I have,” said my visitor, “with great interest listened to you speaking
in different houses the last few days and I wanted at last to make your
personal acquaintance, so as to talk to you more intimately. Can you, dear
sir, grant me this favor?”

“I can, with the greatest pleasure, and I shall look upon it as an honor.”
I said this, though I felt almost dismayed, so greatly was I impressed
from the first moment by the appearance of this man. For though other
people had listened to me with interest and attention, no one had come to
me before with such a serious, stern and concentrated expression. And now
he had come to see me in my own rooms. He sat down.

“You are, I see, a man of great strength of character,” he said; “as you
have dared to serve the truth, even when by doing so you risked incurring
the contempt of all.”

“Your praise is, perhaps, excessive,” I replied.

“No, it’s not excessive,” he answered; “believe me, such a course of
action is far more difficult than you think. It is that which has
impressed me, and it is only on that account that I have come to you,” he
continued. “Tell me, please, that is if you are not annoyed by my perhaps
unseemly curiosity, what were your exact sensations, if you can recall
them, at the moment when you made up your mind to ask forgiveness at the
duel. Do not think my question frivolous; on the contrary, I have in
asking the question a secret motive of my own, which I will perhaps
explain to you later on, if it is God’s will that we should become more
intimately acquainted.”

All the while he was speaking, I was looking at him straight into the face
and I felt all at once a complete trust in him and great curiosity on my
side also, for I felt that there was some strange secret in his soul.

“You ask what were my exact sensations at the moment when I asked my
opponent’s forgiveness,” I answered; “but I had better tell you from the
beginning what I have not yet told any one else.” And I described all that
had passed between Afanasy and me, and how I had bowed down to the ground
at his feet. “From that you can see for yourself,” I concluded, “that at
the time of the duel it was easier for me, for I had made a beginning
already at home, and when once I had started on that road, to go farther
along it was far from being difficult, but became a source of joy and
happiness.”

I liked the way he looked at me as he listened. “All that,” he said, “is
exceedingly interesting. I will come to see you again and again.”

And from that time forth he came to see me nearly every evening. And we
should have become greater friends, if only he had ever talked of himself.
But about himself he scarcely ever said a word, yet continually asked me
about myself. In spite of that I became very fond of him and spoke with
perfect frankness to him about all my feelings; “for,” thought I, “what
need have I to know his secrets, since I can see without that that he is a
good man? Moreover, though he is such a serious man and my senior, he
comes to see a youngster like me and treats me as his equal.” And I
learned a great deal that was profitable from him, for he was a man of
lofty mind.

“That life is heaven,” he said to me suddenly, “that I have long been
thinking about”; and all at once he added, “I think of nothing else
indeed.” He looked at me and smiled. “I am more convinced of it than you
are, I will tell you later why.”

I listened to him and thought that he evidently wanted to tell me
something.

“Heaven,” he went on, “lies hidden within all of us—here it lies hidden in
me now, and if I will it, it will be revealed to me to‐morrow and for all
time.”

I looked at him; he was speaking with great emotion and gazing
mysteriously at me, as if he were questioning me.

“And that we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins,
you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could
comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon
as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a
dream, but a living reality.”

“And when,” I cried out to him bitterly, “when will that come to pass? and
will it ever come to pass? Is not it simply a dream of ours?”

“What then, you don’t believe it,” he said. “You preach it and don’t
believe it yourself. Believe me, this dream, as you call it, will come to
pass without doubt; it will come, but not now, for every process has its
law. It’s a spiritual, psychological process. To transform the world, to
recreate it afresh, men must turn into another path psychologically. Until
you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to every one,
brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind
of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges
with equal consideration for all. Every one will think his share too small
and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another.
You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have
to go through the period of isolation.”

“What do you mean by isolation?” I asked him.

“Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has
not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one
strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure
the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his
efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self‐destruction, for
instead of self‐realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All
mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in
his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has,
from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them.
He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how
secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps
up, the more he sinks into self‐destructive impotence. For he is
accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the
whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men
and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and
the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men
have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to
be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.
But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will
suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another.
It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have
sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the
Son of Man will be seen in the heavens.... But, until then, we must keep
the banner flying. Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his
conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s
souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love,
that the great idea may not die.”

Our evenings, one after another, were spent in such stirring and fervent
talk. I gave up society and visited my neighbors much less frequently.
Besides, my vogue was somewhat over. I say this, not as blame, for they
still loved me and treated me good‐humoredly, but there’s no denying that
fashion is a great power in society. I began to regard my mysterious
visitor with admiration, for besides enjoying his intelligence, I began to
perceive that he was brooding over some plan in his heart, and was
preparing himself perhaps for a great deed. Perhaps he liked my not
showing curiosity about his secret, not seeking to discover it by direct
question nor by insinuation. But I noticed at last, that he seemed to show
signs of wanting to tell me something. This had become quite evident,
indeed, about a month after he first began to visit me.

“Do you know,” he said to me once, “that people are very inquisitive about
us in the town and wonder why I come to see you so often. But let them
wonder, for _soon all will be explained_.”

Sometimes an extraordinary agitation would come over him, and almost
always on such occasions he would get up and go away. Sometimes he would
fix a long piercing look upon me, and I thought, “He will say something
directly now.” But he would suddenly begin talking of something ordinary
and familiar. He often complained of headache too.

One day, quite unexpectedly indeed, after he had been talking with great
fervor a long time, I saw him suddenly turn pale, and his face worked
convulsively, while he stared persistently at me.

“What’s the matter?” I said; “do you feel ill?”—he had just been
complaining of headache.

“I ... do you know ... I murdered some one.”

He said this and smiled with a face as white as chalk. “Why is it he is
smiling?” The thought flashed through my mind before I realized anything
else. I too turned pale.

“What are you saying?” I cried.

“You see,” he said, with a pale smile, “how much it has cost me to say the
first word. Now I have said it, I feel I’ve taken the first step and shall
go on.”

For a long while I could not believe him, and I did not believe him at
that time, but only after he had been to see me three days running and
told me all about it. I thought he was mad, but ended by being convinced,
to my great grief and amazement. His crime was a great and terrible one.

Fourteen years before, he had murdered the widow of a landowner, a wealthy
and handsome young woman who had a house in our town. He fell passionately
in love with her, declared his feeling and tried to persuade her to marry
him. But she had already given her heart to another man, an officer of
noble birth and high rank in the service, who was at that time away at the
front, though she was expecting him soon to return. She refused his offer
and begged him not to come and see her. After he had ceased to visit her,
he took advantage of his knowledge of the house to enter at night through
the garden by the roof, at great risk of discovery. But, as often happens,
a crime committed with extraordinary audacity is more successful than
others.

Entering the garret through the skylight, he went down the ladder, knowing
that the door at the bottom of it was sometimes, through the negligence of
the servants, left unlocked. He hoped to find it so, and so it was. He
made his way in the dark to her bedroom, where a light was burning. As
though on purpose, both her maids had gone off to a birthday‐party in the
same street, without asking leave. The other servants slept in the
servants’ quarters or in the kitchen on the ground‐floor. His passion
flamed up at the sight of her asleep, and then vindictive, jealous anger
took possession of his heart, and like a drunken man, beside himself, he
thrust a knife into her heart, so that she did not even cry out. Then with
devilish and criminal cunning he contrived that suspicion should fall on
the servants. He was so base as to take her purse, to open her chest with
keys from under her pillow, and to take some things from it, doing it all
as it might have been done by an ignorant servant, leaving valuable papers
and taking only money. He took some of the larger gold things, but left
smaller articles that were ten times as valuable. He took with him, too,
some things for himself as remembrances, but of that later. Having done
this awful deed, he returned by the way he had come.

Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor at any time after in
his life, did any one dream of suspecting that he was the criminal. No one
indeed knew of his love for her, for he was always reserved and silent and
had no friend to whom he would have opened his heart. He was looked upon
simply as an acquaintance, and not a very intimate one, of the murdered
woman, as for the previous fortnight he had not even visited her. A serf
of hers called Pyotr was at once suspected, and every circumstance
confirmed the suspicion. The man knew—indeed his mistress did not conceal
the fact—that having to send one of her serfs as a recruit she had decided
to send him, as he had no relations and his conduct was unsatisfactory.
People had heard him angrily threatening to murder her when he was drunk
in a tavern. Two days before her death, he had run away, staying no one
knew where in the town. The day after the murder, he was found on the road
leading out of the town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket, and his
right hand happened to be stained with blood. He declared that his nose
had been bleeding, but no one believed him. The maids confessed that they
had gone to a party and that the street‐door had been left open till they
returned. And a number of similar details came to light, throwing
suspicion on the innocent servant.

They arrested him, and he was tried for the murder; but a week after the
arrest, the prisoner fell sick of a fever and died unconscious in the
hospital. There the matter ended and the judges and the authorities and
every one in the town remained convinced that the crime had been committed
by no one but the servant who had died in the hospital. And after that the
punishment began.

My mysterious visitor, now my friend, told me that at first he was not in
the least troubled by pangs of conscience. He was miserable a long time,
but not for that reason; only from regret that he had killed the woman he
loved, that she was no more, that in killing her he had killed his love,
while the fire of passion was still in his veins. But of the innocent
blood he had shed, of the murder of a fellow creature, he scarcely
thought. The thought that his victim might have become the wife of another
man was insupportable to him, and so, for a long time, he was convinced in
his conscience that he could not have acted otherwise.

At first he was worried at the arrest of the servant, but his illness and
death soon set his mind at rest, for the man’s death was apparently (so he
reflected at the time) not owing to his arrest or his fright, but a chill
he had taken on the day he ran away, when he had lain all night dead drunk
on the damp ground. The theft of the money and other things troubled him
little, for he argued that the theft had not been committed for gain but
to avert suspicion. The sum stolen was small, and he shortly afterwards
subscribed the whole of it, and much more, towards the funds for
maintaining an almshouse in the town. He did this on purpose to set his
conscience at rest about the theft, and it’s a remarkable fact that for a
long time he really was at peace—he told me this himself. He entered then
upon a career of great activity in the service, volunteered for a
difficult and laborious duty, which occupied him two years, and being a
man of strong will almost forgot the past. Whenever he recalled it, he
tried not to think of it at all. He became active in philanthropy too,
founded and helped to maintain many institutions in the town, did a good
deal in the two capitals, and in both Moscow and Petersburg was elected a
member of philanthropic societies.

At last, however, he began brooding over the past, and the strain of it
was too much for him. Then he was attracted by a fine and intelligent girl
and soon after married her, hoping that marriage would dispel his lonely
depression, and that by entering on a new life and scrupulously doing his
duty to his wife and children, he would escape from old memories
altogether. But the very opposite of what he expected happened. He began,
even in the first month of his marriage, to be continually fretted by the
thought, “My wife loves me—but what if she knew?” When she first told him
that she would soon bear him a child, he was troubled. “I am giving life,
but I have taken life.” Children came. “How dare I love them, teach and
educate them, how can I talk to them of virtue? I have shed blood.” They
were splendid children, he longed to caress them; “and I can’t look at
their innocent candid faces, I am unworthy.”

At last he began to be bitterly and ominously haunted by the blood of his
murdered victim, by the young life he had destroyed, by the blood that
cried out for vengeance. He had begun to have awful dreams. But, being a
man of fortitude, he bore his suffering a long time, thinking: “I shall
expiate everything by this secret agony.” But that hope, too, was vain;
the longer it went on, the more intense was his suffering.

He was respected in society for his active benevolence, though every one
was overawed by his stern and gloomy character. But the more he was
respected, the more intolerable it was for him. He confessed to me that he
had thoughts of killing himself. But he began to be haunted by another
idea—an idea which he had at first regarded as impossible and unthinkable,
though at last it got such a hold on his heart that he could not shake it
off. He dreamed of rising up, going out and confessing in the face of all
men that he had committed murder. For three years this dream had pursued
him, haunting him in different forms. At last he believed with his whole
heart that if he confessed his crime, he would heal his soul and would be
at peace for ever. But this belief filled his heart with terror, for how
could he carry it out? And then came what happened at my duel.

“Looking at you, I have made up my mind.”

I looked at him.

“Is it possible,” I cried, clasping my hands, “that such a trivial
incident could give rise to such a resolution in you?”

“My resolution has been growing for the last three years,” he answered,
“and your story only gave the last touch to it. Looking at you, I
reproached myself and envied you.” He said this to me almost sullenly.

“But you won’t be believed,” I observed; “it’s fourteen years ago.”

“I have proofs, great proofs. I shall show them.”

Then I cried and kissed him.

“Tell me one thing, one thing,” he said (as though it all depended upon
me), “my wife, my children! My wife may die of grief, and though my
children won’t lose their rank and property, they’ll be a convict’s
children and for ever! And what a memory, what a memory of me I shall
leave in their hearts!”

I said nothing.

“And to part from them, to leave them for ever? It’s for ever, you know,
for ever!”

I sat still and repeated a silent prayer. I got up at last, I felt afraid.

“Well?” He looked at me.

“Go!” said I, “confess. Everything passes, only the truth remains. Your
children will understand, when they grow up, the nobility of your
resolution.”

He left me that time as though he had made up his mind. Yet for more than
a fortnight afterwards, he came to me every evening, still preparing
himself, still unable to bring himself to the point. He made my heart
ache. One day he would come determined and say fervently:

“I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen
years I’ve been in hell. I want to suffer. I will take my punishment and
begin to live. You can pass through the world doing wrong, but there’s no
turning back. Now I dare not love my neighbor nor even my own children.
Good God, my children will understand, perhaps, what my punishment has
cost me and will not condemn me! God is not in strength but in truth.”

“All will understand your sacrifice,” I said to him, “if not at once, they
will understand later; for you have served truth, the higher truth, not of
the earth.”

And he would go away seeming comforted, but next day he would come again,
bitter, pale, sarcastic.

“Every time I come to you, you look at me so inquisitively as though to
say, ‘He has still not confessed!’ Wait a bit, don’t despise me too much.
It’s not such an easy thing to do, as you would think. Perhaps I shall not
do it at all. You won’t go and inform against me then, will you?”

And far from looking at him with indiscreet curiosity, I was afraid to
look at him at all. I was quite ill from anxiety, and my heart was full of
tears. I could not sleep at night.

“I have just come from my wife,” he went on. “Do you understand what the
word ‘wife’ means? When I went out, the children called to me, ‘Good‐by,
father, make haste back to read _The Children’s Magazine_ with us.’ No,
you don’t understand that! No one is wise from another man’s woe.”

His eyes were glittering, his lips were twitching. Suddenly he struck the
table with his fist so that everything on it danced—it was the first time
he had done such a thing, he was such a mild man.

“But need I?” he exclaimed, “must I? No one has been condemned, no one has
been sent to Siberia in my place, the man died of fever. And I’ve been
punished by my sufferings for the blood I shed. And I shan’t be believed,
they won’t believe my proofs. Need I confess, need I? I am ready to go on
suffering all my life for the blood I have shed, if only my wife and
children may be spared. Will it be just to ruin them with me? Aren’t we
making a mistake? What is right in this case? And will people recognize
it, will they appreciate it, will they respect it?”

“Good Lord!” I thought to myself, “he is thinking of other people’s
respect at such a moment!” And I felt so sorry for him then, that I
believe I would have shared his fate if it could have comforted him. I saw
he was beside himself. I was aghast, realizing with my heart as well as my
mind what such a resolution meant.

“Decide my fate!” he exclaimed again.

“Go and confess,” I whispered to him. My voice failed me, but I whispered
it firmly. I took up the New Testament from the table, the Russian
translation, and showed him the Gospel of St. John, chapter xii. verse 24:

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.”

I had just been reading that verse when he came in. He read it.

“That’s true,” he said, but he smiled bitterly. “It’s terrible the things
you find in those books,” he said, after a pause. “It’s easy enough to
thrust them upon one. And who wrote them? Can they have been written by
men?”

“The Holy Spirit wrote them,” said I.

“It’s easy for you to prate,” he smiled again, this time almost with
hatred.

I took the book again, opened it in another place and showed him the
Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter x. verse 31. He read:

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

He read it and simply flung down the book. He was trembling all over.

“An awful text,” he said. “There’s no denying you’ve picked out fitting
ones.” He rose from the chair. “Well!” he said, “good‐by, perhaps I shan’t
come again ... we shall meet in heaven. So I have been for fourteen years
‘in the hands of the living God,’ that’s how one must think of those
fourteen years. To‐morrow I will beseech those hands to let me go.”

I wanted to take him in my arms and kiss him, but I did not dare—his face
was contorted and somber. He went away.

“Good God,” I thought, “what has he gone to face!” I fell on my knees
before the ikon and wept for him before the Holy Mother of God, our swift
defender and helper. I was half an hour praying in tears, and it was late,
about midnight. Suddenly I saw the door open and he came in again. I was
surprised.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“I think,” he said, “I’ve forgotten something ... my handkerchief, I
think.... Well, even if I’ve not forgotten anything, let me stay a
little.”

He sat down. I stood over him.

“You sit down, too,” said he.

I sat down. We sat still for two minutes; he looked intently at me and
suddenly smiled—I remembered that—then he got up, embraced me warmly and
kissed me.

“Remember,” he said, “how I came to you a second time. Do you hear,
remember it!”

And he went out.

“To‐morrow,” I thought.

And so it was. I did not know that evening that the next day was his
birthday. I had not been out for the last few days, so I had no chance of
hearing it from any one. On that day he always had a great gathering,
every one in the town went to it. It was the same this time. After dinner
he walked into the middle of the room, with a paper in his hand—a formal
declaration to the chief of his department who was present. This
declaration he read aloud to the whole assembly. It contained a full
account of the crime, in every detail.

“I cut myself off from men as a monster. God has visited me,” he said in
conclusion. “I want to suffer for my sin!”

Then he brought out and laid on the table all the things he had been
keeping for fourteen years, that he thought would prove his crime, the
jewels belonging to the murdered woman which he had stolen to divert
suspicion, a cross and a locket taken from her neck with a portrait of her
betrothed in the locket, her notebook and two letters; one from her
betrothed, telling her that he would soon be with her, and her unfinished
answer left on the table to be sent off next day. He carried off these two
letters—what for? Why had he kept them for fourteen years afterwards
instead of destroying them as evidence against him?

And this is what happened: every one was amazed and horrified, every one
refused to believe it and thought that he was deranged, though all
listened with intense curiosity. A few days later it was fully decided and
agreed in every house that the unhappy man was mad. The legal authorities
could not refuse to take the case up, but they too dropped it. Though the
trinkets and letters made them ponder, they decided that even if they did
turn out to be authentic, no charge could be based on those alone.
Besides, she might have given him those things as a friend, or asked him
to take care of them for her. I heard afterwards, however, that the
genuineness of the things was proved by the friends and relations of the
murdered woman, and that there was no doubt about them. Yet nothing was
destined to come of it, after all.

Five days later, all had heard that he was ill and that his life was in
danger. The nature of his illness I can’t explain, they said it was an
affection of the heart. But it became known that the doctors had been
induced by his wife to investigate his mental condition also, and had come
to the conclusion that it was a case of insanity. I betrayed nothing,
though people ran to question me. But when I wanted to visit him, I was
for a long while forbidden to do so, above all by his wife.

“It’s you who have caused his illness,” she said to me; “he was always
gloomy, but for the last year people noticed that he was peculiarly
excited and did strange things, and now you have been the ruin of him.
Your preaching has brought him to this; for the last month he was always
with you.”

Indeed, not only his wife but the whole town were down upon me and blamed
me. “It’s all your doing,” they said. I was silent and indeed rejoiced at
heart, for I saw plainly God’s mercy to the man who had turned against
himself and punished himself. I could not believe in his insanity.

They let me see him at last, he insisted upon saying good‐by to me. I went
in to him and saw at once, that not only his days, but his hours were
numbered. He was weak, yellow, his hands trembled, he gasped for breath,
but his face was full of tender and happy feeling.

“It is done!” he said. “I’ve long been yearning to see you, why didn’t you
come?”

I did not tell him that they would not let me see him.

“God has had pity on me and is calling me to Himself. I know I am dying,
but I feel joy and peace for the first time after so many years. There was
heaven in my heart from the moment I had done what I had to do. Now I dare
to love my children and to kiss them. Neither my wife nor the judges, nor
any one has believed it. My children will never believe it either. I see
in that God’s mercy to them. I shall die, and my name will be without a
stain for them. And now I feel God near, my heart rejoices as in Heaven
... I have done my duty.”

He could not speak, he gasped for breath, he pressed my hand warmly,
looking fervently at me. We did not talk for long, his wife kept peeping
in at us. But he had time to whisper to me:

“Do you remember how I came back to you that second time, at midnight? I
told you to remember it. You know what I came back for? I came to kill
you!”

I started.

“I went out from you then into the darkness, I wandered about the streets,
struggling with myself. And suddenly I hated you so that I could hardly
bear it. Now, I thought, he is all that binds me, and he is my judge. I
can’t refuse to face my punishment to‐morrow, for he knows all. It was not
that I was afraid you would betray me (I never even thought of that), but
I thought, ‘How can I look him in the face if I don’t confess?’ And if you
had been at the other end of the earth, but alive, it would have been all
the same, the thought was unendurable that you were alive knowing
everything and condemning me. I hated you as though you were the cause, as
though you were to blame for everything. I came back to you then,
remembering that you had a dagger lying on your table. I sat down and
asked you to sit down, and for a whole minute I pondered. If I had killed
you, I should have been ruined by that murder even if I had not confessed
the other. But I didn’t think about that at all, and I didn’t want to
think of it at that moment. I only hated you and longed to revenge myself
on you for everything. The Lord vanquished the devil in my heart. But let
me tell you, you were never nearer death.”

A week later he died. The whole town followed him to the grave. The chief
priest made a speech full of feeling. All lamented the terrible illness
that had cut short his days. But all the town was up in arms against me
after the funeral, and people even refused to see me. Some, at first a few
and afterwards more, began indeed to believe in the truth of his story,
and they visited me and questioned me with great interest and eagerness,
for man loves to see the downfall and disgrace of the righteous. But I
held my tongue, and very shortly after, I left the town, and five months
later by God’s grace I entered upon the safe and blessed path, praising
the unseen finger which had guided me so clearly to it. But I remember in
my prayer to this day, the servant of God, Mihail, who suffered so
greatly.



Chapter III. Conversations And Exhortations Of Father Zossima


_(e) The Russian Monk and his possible Significance_

Fathers and teachers, what is the monk? In the cultivated world the word
is nowadays pronounced by some people with a jeer, and by others it is
used as a term of abuse, and this contempt for the monk is growing. It is
true, alas, it is true, that there are many sluggards, gluttons,
profligates and insolent beggars among monks. Educated people point to
these: “You are idlers, useless members of society, you live on the labor
of others, you are shameless beggars.” And yet how many meek and humble
monks there are, yearning for solitude and fervent prayer in peace! These
are less noticed, or passed over in silence. And how surprised men would
be if I were to say that from these meek monks, who yearn for solitary
prayer, the salvation of Russia will come perhaps once more! For they are
in truth made ready in peace and quiet “for the day and the hour, the
month and the year.” Meanwhile, in their solitude, they keep the image of
Christ fair and undefiled, in the purity of God’s truth, from the times of
the Fathers of old, the Apostles and the martyrs. And when the time comes
they will show it to the tottering creeds of the world. That is a great
thought. That star will rise out of the East.

That is my view of the monk, and is it false? is it too proud? Look at the
worldly and all who set themselves up above the people of God, has not
God’s image and His truth been distorted in them? They have science; but
in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual
world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed
with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the
reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom
of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self‐destruction! For the world says:

“You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the
most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even
multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that
they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of
desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy
and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the
means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting
more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community,
as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the
multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own
nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous
fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury
and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to
wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human
feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to
satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the
poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon
they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask
you is such a man free? I knew one “champion of freedom” who told me
himself that, when he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so
wretched at the privation that he almost went and betrayed his cause for
the sake of getting tobacco again! And such a man says, “I am fighting for
the cause of humanity.”

How can such a one fight? what is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of
some action quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it’s no wonder
that instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead
of serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have
fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation, as my mysterious
visitor and teacher said to me in my youth. And therefore the idea of the
service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is
more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes
treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? What can
become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the
innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what
concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in
accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown
less.

The monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting and prayer are
laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom. I
cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and
wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God’s help I attain
freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. Which is most capable of
conceiving a great idea and serving it—the rich man in his isolation or
the man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and
habits? The monk is reproached for his solitude, “You have secluded
yourself within the walls of the monastery for your own salvation, and
have forgotten the brotherly service of humanity!” But we shall see which
will be most zealous in the cause of brotherly love. For it is not we, but
they, who are in isolation, though they don’t see that. Of old, leaders of
the people came from among us, and why should they not again? The same
meek and humble ascetics will rise up and go out to work for the great
cause. The salvation of Russia comes from the people. And the Russian monk
has always been on the side of the people. We are isolated only if the
people are isolated. The people believe as we do, and an unbelieving
reformer will never do anything in Russia, even if he is sincere in heart
and a genius. Remember that! The people will meet the atheist and overcome
him, and Russia will be one and orthodox. Take care of the peasant and
guard his heart. Go on educating him quietly. That’s your duty as monks,
for the peasant has God in his heart.

(_f_) _Of Masters and Servants, and of whether it is possible for them to
be Brothers in the Spirit_

Of course, I don’t deny that there is sin in the peasants too. And the
fire of corruption is spreading visibly, hourly, working from above
downwards. The spirit of isolation is coming upon the people too. Money‐
lenders and devourers of the commune are rising up. Already the merchant
grows more and more eager for rank, and strives to show himself cultured
though he has not a trace of culture, and to this end meanly despises his
old traditions, and is even ashamed of the faith of his fathers. He visits
princes, though he is only a peasant corrupted. The peasants are rotting
in drunkenness and cannot shake off the habit. And what cruelty to their
wives, to their children even! All from drunkenness! I’ve seen in the
factories children of nine years old, frail, rickety, bent and already
depraved. The stuffy workshop, the din of machinery, work all day long,
the vile language and the drink, the drink—is that what a little child’s
heart needs? He needs sunshine, childish play, good examples all about
him, and at least a little love. There must be no more of this, monks, no
more torturing of children, rise up and preach that, make haste, make
haste!

But God will save Russia, for though the peasants are corrupted and cannot
renounce their filthy sin, yet they know it is cursed by God and that they
do wrong in sinning. So that our people still believe in righteousness,
have faith in God and weep tears of devotion.

It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to
base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they
have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And
that’s consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime? In
Europe the people are already rising up against the rich with violence,
and the leaders of the people are everywhere leading them to bloodshed,
and teaching them that their wrath is righteous. But their “wrath is
accursed, for it is cruel.” But God will save Russia as He has saved her
many times. Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and
their meekness.

Fathers and teachers, watch over the people’s faith and this will not be a
dream. I’ve been struck all my life in our great people by their dignity,
their true and seemly dignity. I’ve seen it myself, I can testify to it,
I’ve seen it and marveled at it, I’ve seen it in spite of the degraded
sins and poverty‐stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not
servile, and even after two centuries of serfdom they are free in manner
and bearing, yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious.
“You are rich and noble, you are clever and talented, well, be so, God
bless you. I respect you, but I know that I too am a man. By the very fact
that I respect you without envy I prove my dignity as a man.”

In truth if they don’t say this (for they don’t know how to say this yet),
that is how they act. I have seen it myself, I have known it myself, and,
would you believe it, the poorer our Russian peasant is, the more
noticeable is that serene goodness, for the rich among them are for the
most part corrupted already, and much of that is due to our carelessness
and indifference. But God will save His people, for Russia is great in her
humility. I dream of seeing, and seem to see clearly already, our future.
It will come to pass, that even the most corrupt of our rich will end by
being ashamed of his riches before the poor, and the poor, seeing his
humility, will understand and give way before him, will respond joyfully
and kindly to his honorable shame. Believe me that it will end in that;
things are moving to that. Equality is to be found only in the spiritual
dignity of man, and that will only be understood among us. If we were
brothers, there would be fraternity, but before that, they will never
agree about the division of wealth. We preserve the image of Christ, and
it will shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world. So may it
be, so may it be!

Fathers and teachers, a touching incident befell me once. In my wanderings
I met in the town of K. my old orderly, Afanasy. It was eight years since
I had parted from him. He chanced to see me in the market‐place,
recognized me, ran up to me, and how delighted he was! He simply pounced
on me: “Master dear, is it you? Is it really you I see?” He took me home
with him.

He was no longer in the army, he was married and already had two little
children. He and his wife earned their living as costermongers in the
market‐place. His room was poor, but bright and clean. He made me sit
down, set the samovar, sent for his wife, as though my appearance were a
festival for them. He brought me his children: “Bless them, Father.”

“Is it for me to bless them? I am only a humble monk. I will pray for
them. And for you, Afanasy Pavlovitch, I have prayed every day since that
day, for it all came from you,” said I. And I explained that to him as
well as I could. And what do you think? The man kept gazing at me and
could not believe that I, his former master, an officer, was now before
him in such a guise and position; it made him shed tears.

“Why are you weeping?” said I, “better rejoice over me, dear friend, whom
I can never forget, for my path is a glad and joyful one.”

He did not say much, but kept sighing and shaking his head over me
tenderly.

“What has became of your fortune?” he asked.

“I gave it to the monastery,” I answered; “we live in common.”

After tea I began saying good‐by, and suddenly he brought out half a
rouble as an offering to the monastery, and another half‐rouble I saw him
thrusting hurriedly into my hand: “That’s for you in your wanderings, it
may be of use to you, Father.”

I took his half‐rouble, bowed to him and his wife, and went out rejoicing.
And on my way I thought: “Here we are both now, he at home and I on the
road, sighing and shaking our heads, no doubt, and yet smiling joyfully in
the gladness of our hearts, remembering how God brought about our
meeting.”

I have never seen him again since then. I had been his master and he my
servant, but now when we exchanged a loving kiss with softened hearts,
there was a great human bond between us. I have thought a great deal about
that, and now what I think is this: Is it so inconceivable that that grand
and simple‐hearted unity might in due time become universal among the
Russian people? I believe that it will come to pass and that the time is
at hand.

And of servants I will add this: In old days when I was young I was often
angry with servants; “the cook had served something too hot, the orderly
had not brushed my clothes.” But what taught me better then was a thought
of my dear brother’s, which I had heard from him in childhood: “Am I worth
it, that another should serve me and be ordered about by me in his poverty
and ignorance?” And I wondered at the time that such simple and self‐
evident ideas should be so slow to occur to our minds.

It is impossible that there should be no servants in the world, but act so
that your servant may be freer in spirit than if he were not a servant.
And why cannot I be a servant to my servant and even let him see it, and
that without any pride on my part or any mistrust on his? Why should not
my servant be like my own kindred, so that I may take him into my family
and rejoice in doing so? Even now this can be done, but it will lead to
the grand unity of men in the future, when a man will not seek servants
for himself, or desire to turn his fellow creatures into servants as he
does now, but on the contrary, will long with his whole heart to be the
servant of all, as the Gospel teaches.

And can it be a dream, that in the end man will find his joy only in deeds
of light and mercy, and not in cruel pleasures as now, in gluttony,
fornication, ostentation, boasting and envious rivalry of one with the
other? I firmly believe that it is not and that the time is at hand.
People laugh and ask: “When will that time come and does it look like
coming?” I believe that with Christ’s help we shall accomplish this great
thing. And how many ideas there have been on earth in the history of man
which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared! Yet when their
destined hour had come, they came forth and spread over the whole earth.
So it will be with us, and our people will shine forth in the world, and
all men will say: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the
corner‐stone of the building.”

And we may ask the scornful themselves: If our hope is a dream, when will
you build up your edifice and order things justly by your intellect alone,
without Christ? If they declare that it is they who are advancing towards
unity, only the most simple‐hearted among them believe it, so that one may
positively marvel at such simplicity. Of a truth, they have more fantastic
dreams than we. They aim at justice, but, denying Christ, they will end by
flooding the earth with blood, for blood cries out for blood, and he that
taketh up the sword shall perish by the sword. And if it were not for
Christ’s covenant, they would slaughter one another down to the last two
men on earth. And those two last men would not be able to restrain each
other in their pride, and the one would slay the other and then himself.
And that would come to pass, were it not for the promise of Christ that
for the sake of the humble and meek the days shall be shortened.

While I was still wearing an officer’s uniform after my duel, I talked
about servants in general society, and I remember every one was amazed at
me. “What!” they asked, “are we to make our servants sit down on the sofa
and offer them tea?” And I answered them: “Why not, sometimes at least?”
Every one laughed. Their question was frivolous and my answer was not
clear; but the thought in it was to some extent right.

(_g_) _Of Prayer, of Love, and of Contact with other Worlds_

Young man, be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer
is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will
give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an
education. Remember, too, every day, and whenever you can, repeat to
yourself, “Lord, have mercy on all who appear before Thee to‐day.” For
every hour and every moment thousands of men leave life on this earth, and
their souls appear before God. And how many of them depart in solitude,
unknown, sad, dejected that no one mourns for them or even knows whether
they have lived or not! And behold, from the other end of the earth
perhaps, your prayer for their rest will rise up to God though you knew
them not nor they you. How touching it must be to a soul standing in dread
before the Lord to feel at that instant that, for him too, there is one to
pray, that there is a fellow creature left on earth to love him too! And
God will look on you both more graciously, for if you have had so much
pity on him, how much will He have pity Who is infinitely more loving and
merciful than you! And He will forgive him for your sake.

Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that
is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all
God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf,
every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love
everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery
in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better
every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all‐
embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of
thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t
deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do
not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin,
and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it,
and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost
every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like
the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to
guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim taught me to love
children. The kind, silent man used often on our wanderings to spend the
farthings given us on sweets and cakes for the children. He could not pass
by a child without emotion. That’s the nature of the man.

At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s
sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always
decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may
subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the
strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch
yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little
child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you
may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image,
unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know
it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all
because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster
in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a
teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire,
it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labor. For we must love not
only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Every one can love
occasionally, even the wicked can.

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it
is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch
in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be
senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at
your side—a little happier, anyway—and children and all animals, if you
were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you
would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all‐embracing love, in a sort
of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure
this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.

My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of
heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not
that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not
say, “Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and
we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and
hindering our good work from being done.” Fly from that dejection,
children! There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and
make yourself responsible for all men’s sins, that is the truth, you know,
friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for
everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and
that you are to blame for every one and for all things. But throwing your
own indolence and impotence on others you will end by sharing the pride of
Satan and murmuring against God.

Of the pride of Satan what I think is this: it is hard for us on earth to
comprehend it, and therefore it is so easy to fall into error and to share
it, even imagining that we are doing something grand and fine. Indeed,
many of the strongest feelings and movements of our nature we cannot
comprehend on earth. Let not that be a stumbling‐block, and think not that
it may serve as a justification to you for anything. For the Eternal Judge
asks of you what you can comprehend and not what you cannot. You will know
that yourself hereafter, for you will behold all things truly then and
will not dispute them. On earth, indeed, we are as it were astray, and if
it were not for the precious image of Christ before us, we should be
undone and altogether lost, as was the human race before the flood. Much
on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a
precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the
higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not
here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot
apprehend the reality of things on earth.

God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His
garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows
lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other
mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the
heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life
and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.

_(h) Can a Man judge his Fellow Creatures? Faith to the End_

Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one
can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal
as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men
to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a
judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous
myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If
you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is
judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without
reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same
spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more
bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched,
mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling‐block to you. It shows his
time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not,
no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and
suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled.
Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and
faith of the saints.

Work without ceasing. If you remember in the night as you go to sleep, “I
have not done what I ought to have done,” rise up at once and do it. If
the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall
down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame
for their not wanting to hear you. And if you cannot speak to them in
their bitterness, serve them in silence and in humility, never losing
hope. If all men abandon you and even drive you away by force, then when
you are left alone fall on the earth and kiss it, water it with your tears
and it will bring forth fruit even though no one has seen or heard you in
your solitude. Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you
were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise
God in your loneliness. And if two of you are gathered together—then there
is a whole world, a world of living love. Embrace each other tenderly and
praise God, for if only in you two His truth has been fulfilled.

If you sin yourself and grieve even unto death for your sins or for your
sudden sin, then rejoice for others, rejoice for the righteous man,
rejoice that if you have sinned, he is righteous and has not sinned.

If the evil‐doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming
distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evil‐doers, shun above all
things that feeling. Go at once and seek suffering for yourself, as though
you were yourself guilty of that wrong. Accept that suffering and bear it
and your heart will find comfort, and you will understand that you too are
guilty, for you might have been a light to the evil‐doers, even as the one
man sinless, and you were not a light to them. If you had been a light,
you would have lightened the path for others too, and the evil‐doer might
perhaps have been saved by your light from his sin. And even though your
light was shining, yet you see men were not saved by it, hold firm and
doubt not the power of the heavenly light. Believe that if they were not
saved, they will be saved hereafter. And if they are not saved hereafter,
then their sons will be saved, for your light will not die even when you
are dead. The righteous man departs, but his light remains. Men are always
saved after the death of the deliverer. Men reject their prophets and slay
them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.
You are working for the whole, you are acting for the future. Seek no
reward, for great is your reward on this earth: the spiritual joy which is
only vouchsafed to the righteous man. Fear not the great nor the mighty,
but be wise and ever serene. Know the measure, know the times, study that.
When you are left alone, pray. Love to throw yourself on the earth and
kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.
Love all men, love everything. Seek that rapture and ecstasy. Water the
earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Don’t be ashamed of
that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God and a great one; it is not
given to many but only to the elect.

_(i) Of Hell and Hell Fire, a Mystic Reflection_

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the
suffering of being unable to love. Once in infinite existence,
immeasurable in time and space, a spiritual creature was given on his
coming to earth, the power of saying, “I am and I love.” Once, only once,
there was given him a moment of active _living_ love, and for that was
earthly life given him, and with it times and seasons. And that happy
creature rejected the priceless gift, prized it and loved it not, scorned
it and remained callous. Such a one, having left the earth, sees Abraham’s
bosom and talks with Abraham as we are told in the parable of the rich man
and Lazarus, and beholds heaven and can go up to the Lord. But that is
just his torment, to rise up to the Lord without ever having loved, to be
brought close to those who have loved when he has despised their love. For
he sees clearly and says to himself, “Now I have understanding, and though
I now thirst to love, there will be nothing great, no sacrifice in my
love, for my earthly life is over, and Abraham will not come even with a
drop of living water (that is the gift of earthly active life) to cool the
fiery thirst of spiritual love which burns in me now, though I despised it
on earth; there is no more life for me and will be no more time! Even
though I would gladly give my life for others, it can never be, for that
life is passed which can be sacrificed for love, and now there is a gulf
fixed between that life and this existence.”

They talk of hell fire in the material sense. I don’t go into that mystery
and I shun it. But I think if there were fire in material sense, they
would be glad of it, for I imagine that in material agony, their still
greater spiritual agony would be forgotten for a moment. Moreover, that
spiritual agony cannot be taken from them, for that suffering is not
external but within them. And if it could be taken from them, I think it
would be bitterer still for the unhappy creatures. For even if the
righteous in Paradise forgave them, beholding their torments, and called
them up to heaven in their infinite love, they would only multiply their
torments, for they would arouse in them still more keenly a flaming thirst
for responsive, active and grateful love which is now impossible. In the
timidity of my heart I imagine, however, that the very recognition of this
impossibility would serve at last to console them. For accepting the love
of the righteous together with the impossibility of repaying it, by this
submissiveness and the effect of this humility, they will attain at last,
as it were, to a certain semblance of that active love which they scorned
in life, to something like its outward expression.... I am sorry, friends
and brothers, that I cannot express this clearly. But woe to those who
have slain themselves on earth, woe to the suicides! I believe that there
can be none more miserable then they. They tell us that it is a sin to
pray for them and outwardly the Church, as it were, renounces them, but in
my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them. Love can never
be an offense to Christ. For such as those I have prayed inwardly all my
life, I confess it, fathers and teachers, and even now I pray for them
every day.

Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of
their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are
some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud
spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are
tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God
and life. They live upon their vindictive pride like a starving man in the
desert sucking blood out of his own body. But they are never satisfied,
and they refuse forgiveness, they curse God Who calls them. They cannot
behold the living God without hatred, and they cry out that the God of
life should be annihilated, that God should destroy Himself and His own
creation. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath for ever and
yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death....

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Here Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov’s manuscript ends. I repeat, it is
incomplete and fragmentary. Biographical details, for instance, cover only
Father Zossima’s earliest youth. Of his teaching and opinions we find
brought together sayings evidently uttered on very different occasions.
His utterances during the last few hours have not been kept separate from
the rest, but their general character can be gathered from what we have in
Alexey Fyodorovitch’s manuscript.

The elder’s death came in the end quite unexpectedly. For although those
who were gathered about him that last evening realized that his death was
approaching, yet it was difficult to imagine that it would come so
suddenly. On the contrary, his friends, as I observed already, seeing him
that night apparently so cheerful and talkative, were convinced that there
was at least a temporary change for the better in his condition. Even five
minutes before his death, they said afterwards wonderingly, it was
impossible to foresee it. He seemed suddenly to feel an acute pain in his
chest, he turned pale and pressed his hands to his heart. All rose from
their seats and hastened to him. But though suffering, he still looked at
them with a smile, sank slowly from his chair on to his knees, then bowed
his face to the ground, stretched out his arms and as though in joyful
ecstasy, praying and kissing the ground, quietly and joyfully gave up his
soul to God.

The news of his death spread at once through the hermitage and reached the
monastery. The nearest friends of the deceased and those whose duty it was
from their position began to lay out the corpse according to the ancient
ritual, and all the monks gathered together in the church. And before dawn
the news of the death reached the town. By the morning all the town was
talking of the event, and crowds were flocking from the town to the
monastery. But this subject will be treated in the next book; I will only
add here that before a day had passed something happened so unexpected, so
strange, upsetting, and bewildering in its effect on the monks and the
townspeople, that after all these years, that day of general suspense is
still vividly remembered in the town.





PART III




Book VII. Alyosha



Chapter I. The Breath Of Corruption


The body of Father Zossima was prepared for burial according to the
established ritual. As is well known, the bodies of dead monks and hermits
are not washed. In the words of the Church Ritual: “If any one of the
monks depart in the Lord, the monk designated (that is, whose office it
is) shall wipe the body with warm water, making first the sign of the
cross with a sponge on the forehead of the deceased, on the breast, on the
hands and feet and on the knees, and that is enough.” All this was done by
Father Païssy, who then clothed the deceased in his monastic garb and
wrapped him in his cloak, which was, according to custom, somewhat slit to
allow of its being folded about him in the form of a cross. On his head he
put a hood with an eight‐cornered cross. The hood was left open and the
dead man’s face was covered with black gauze. In his hands was put an ikon
of the Saviour. Towards morning he was put in the coffin which had been
made ready long before. It was decided to leave the coffin all day in the
cell, in the larger room in which the elder used to receive his visitors
and fellow monks. As the deceased was a priest and monk of the strictest
rule, the Gospel, not the Psalter, had to be read over his body by monks
in holy orders. The reading was begun by Father Iosif immediately after
the requiem service. Father Païssy desired later on to read the Gospel all
day and night over his dead friend, but for the present he, as well as the
Father Superintendent of the Hermitage, was very busy and occupied, for
something extraordinary, an unheard‐of, even “unseemly” excitement and
impatient expectation began to be apparent in the monks, and the visitors
from the monastery hostels, and the crowds of people flocking from the
town. And as time went on, this grew more and more marked. Both the
Superintendent and Father Païssy did their utmost to calm the general
bustle and agitation.

When it was fully daylight, some people began bringing their sick, in most
cases children, with them from the town—as though they had been waiting
expressly for this moment to do so, evidently persuaded that the dead
elder’s remains had a power of healing, which would be immediately made
manifest in accordance with their faith. It was only then apparent how
unquestionably every one in our town had accepted Father Zossima during
his lifetime as a great saint. And those who came were far from being all
of the humbler classes.

This intense expectation on the part of believers displayed with such
haste, such openness, even with impatience and almost insistence,
impressed Father Païssy as unseemly. Though he had long foreseen something
of the sort, the actual manifestation of the feeling was beyond anything
he had looked for. When he came across any of the monks who displayed this
excitement, Father Païssy began to reprove them. “Such immediate
expectation of something extraordinary,” he said, “shows a levity,
possible to worldly people but unseemly in us.”

But little attention was paid him and Father Païssy noticed it uneasily.
Yet he himself (if the whole truth must be told), secretly at the bottom
of his heart, cherished almost the same hopes and could not but be aware
of it, though he was indignant at the too impatient expectation around
him, and saw in it light‐mindedness and vanity. Nevertheless, it was
particularly unpleasant to him to meet certain persons, whose presence
aroused in him great misgivings. In the crowd in the dead man’s cell he
noticed with inward aversion (for which he immediately reproached himself)
the presence of Rakitin and of the monk from Obdorsk, who was still
staying in the monastery. Of both of them Father Païssy felt for some
reason suddenly suspicious—though, indeed, he might well have felt the
same about others.

The monk from Obdorsk was conspicuous as the most fussy in the excited
crowd. He was to be seen everywhere; everywhere he was asking questions,
everywhere he was listening, on all sides he was whispering with a
peculiar, mysterious air. His expression showed the greatest impatience
and even a sort of irritation.

As for Rakitin, he, as appeared later, had come so early to the hermitage
at the special request of Madame Hohlakov. As soon as that good‐hearted
but weak‐minded woman, who could not herself have been admitted to the
hermitage, waked and heard of the death of Father Zossima, she was
overtaken with such intense curiosity that she promptly dispatched Rakitin
to the hermitage, to keep a careful look out and report to her by letter
every half‐hour or so “_everything that takes place_.” She regarded
Rakitin as a most religious and devout young man. He was particularly
clever in getting round people and assuming whatever part he thought most
to their taste, if he detected the slightest advantage to himself from
doing so.

It was a bright, clear day, and many of the visitors were thronging about
the tombs, which were particularly numerous round the church and scattered
here and there about the hermitage. As he walked round the hermitage,
Father Païssy remembered Alyosha and that he had not seen him for some
time, not since the night. And he had no sooner thought of him than he at
once noticed him in the farthest corner of the hermitage garden, sitting
on the tombstone of a monk who had been famous long ago for his
saintliness. He sat with his back to the hermitage and his face to the
wall, and seemed to be hiding behind the tombstone. Going up to him,
Father Païssy saw that he was weeping quietly but bitterly, with his face
hidden in his hands, and that his whole frame was shaking with sobs.
Father Païssy stood over him for a little.

“Enough, dear son, enough, dear,” he pronounced with feeling at last. “Why
do you weep? Rejoice and weep not. Don’t you know that this is the
greatest of his days? Think only where he is now, at this moment!”

Alyosha glanced at him, uncovering his face, which was swollen with crying
like a child’s, but turned away at once without uttering a word and hid
his face in his hands again.

“Maybe it is well,” said Father Païssy thoughtfully; “weep if you must,
Christ has sent you those tears.”

“Your touching tears are but a relief to your spirit and will serve to
gladden your dear heart,” he added to himself, walking away from Alyosha,
and thinking lovingly of him. He moved away quickly, however, for he felt
that he too might weep looking at him.

Meanwhile the time was passing; the monastery services and the requiems
for the dead followed in their due course. Father Païssy again took Father
Iosif’s place by the coffin and began reading the Gospel. But before three
o’clock in the afternoon that something took place to which I alluded at
the end of the last book, something so unexpected by all of us and so
contrary to the general hope, that, I repeat, this trivial incident has
been minutely remembered to this day in our town and all the surrounding
neighborhood. I may add here, for myself personally, that I feel it almost
repulsive to recall that event which caused such frivolous agitation and
was such a stumbling‐block to many, though in reality it was the most
natural and trivial matter. I should, of course, have omitted all mention
of it in my story, if it had not exerted a very strong influence on the
heart and soul of the chief, though future, hero of my story, Alyosha,
forming a crisis and turning‐point in his spiritual development, giving a
shock to his intellect, which finally strengthened it for the rest of his
life and gave it a definite aim.

And so, to return to our story. When before dawn they laid Father
Zossima’s body in the coffin and brought it into the front room, the
question of opening the windows was raised among those who were around the
coffin. But this suggestion made casually by some one was unanswered and
almost unnoticed. Some of those present may perhaps have inwardly noticed
it, only to reflect that the anticipation of decay and corruption from the
body of such a saint was an actual absurdity, calling for compassion (if
not a smile) for the lack of faith and the frivolity it implied. For they
expected something quite different.

And, behold, soon after midday there were signs of something, at first
only observed in silence by those who came in and out and were evidently
each afraid to communicate the thought in his mind. But by three o’clock
those signs had become so clear and unmistakable, that the news swiftly
reached all the monks and visitors in the hermitage, promptly penetrated
to the monastery, throwing all the monks into amazement, and finally, in
the shortest possible time, spread to the town, exciting every one in it,
believers and unbelievers alike. The unbelievers rejoiced, and as for the
believers some of them rejoiced even more than the unbelievers, for “men
love the downfall and disgrace of the righteous,” as the deceased elder
had said in one of his exhortations.

The fact is that a smell of decomposition began to come from the coffin,
growing gradually more marked, and by three o’clock it was quite
unmistakable. In all the past history of our monastery, no such scandal
could be recalled, and in no other circumstances could such a scandal have
been possible, as showed itself in unseemly disorder immediately after
this discovery among the very monks themselves. Afterwards, even many
years afterwards, some sensible monks were amazed and horrified, when they
recalled that day, that the scandal could have reached such proportions.
For in the past, monks of very holy life had died, God‐fearing old men,
whose saintliness was acknowledged by all, yet from their humble coffins,
too, the breath of corruption had come, naturally, as from all dead
bodies, but that had caused no scandal nor even the slightest excitement.
Of course there had been, in former times, saints in the monastery whose
memory was carefully preserved and whose relics, according to tradition,
showed no signs of corruption. This fact was regarded by the monks as
touching and mysterious, and the tradition of it was cherished as
something blessed and miraculous, and as a promise, by God’s grace, of
still greater glory from their tombs in the future.

One such, whose memory was particularly cherished, was an old monk, Job,
who had died seventy years before at the age of a hundred and five. He had
been a celebrated ascetic, rigid in fasting and silence, and his tomb was
pointed out to all visitors on their arrival with peculiar respect and
mysterious hints of great hopes connected with it. (That was the very tomb
on which Father Païssy had found Alyosha sitting in the morning.) Another
memory cherished in the monastery was that of the famous Father Varsonofy,
who was only recently dead and had preceded Father Zossima in the
eldership. He was reverenced during his lifetime as a crazy saint by all
the pilgrims to the monastery. There was a tradition that both of these
had lain in their coffins as though alive, that they had shown no signs of
decomposition when they were buried and that there had been a holy light
in their faces. And some people even insisted that a sweet fragrance came
from their bodies.

Yet, in spite of these edifying memories, it would be difficult to explain
the frivolity, absurdity and malice that were manifested beside the coffin
of Father Zossima. It is my private opinion that several different causes
were simultaneously at work, one of which was the deeply‐rooted hostility
to the institution of elders as a pernicious innovation, an antipathy
hidden deep in the hearts of many of the monks. Even more powerful was
jealousy of the dead man’s saintliness, so firmly established during his
lifetime that it was almost a forbidden thing to question it. For though
the late elder had won over many hearts, more by love than by miracles,
and had gathered round him a mass of loving adherents, none the less, in
fact, rather the more on that account he had awakened jealousy and so had
come to have bitter enemies, secret and open, not only in the monastery
but in the world outside it. He did no one any harm, but “Why do they
think him so saintly?” And that question alone, gradually repeated, gave
rise at last to an intense, insatiable hatred of him. That, I believe, was
why many people were extremely delighted at the smell of decomposition
which came so quickly, for not a day had passed since his death. At the
same time there were some among those who had been hitherto reverently
devoted to the elder, who were almost mortified and personally affronted
by this incident. This was how the thing happened.

As soon as signs of decomposition had begun to appear, the whole aspect of
the monks betrayed their secret motives in entering the cell. They went
in, stayed a little while and hastened out to confirm the news to the
crowd of other monks waiting outside. Some of the latter shook their heads
mournfully, but others did not even care to conceal the delight which
gleamed unmistakably in their malignant eyes. And now no one reproached
them for it, no one raised his voice in protest, which was strange, for
the majority of the monks had been devoted to the dead elder. But it
seemed as though God had in this case let the minority get the upper hand
for a time.

Visitors from outside, particularly of the educated class, soon went into
the cell, too, with the same spying intent. Of the peasantry few went into
the cell, though there were crowds of them at the gates of the hermitage.
After three o’clock the rush of worldly visitors was greatly increased and
this was no doubt owing to the shocking news. People were attracted who
would not otherwise have come on that day and had not intended to come,
and among them were some personages of high standing. But external decorum
was still preserved and Father Païssy, with a stern face, continued firmly
and distinctly reading aloud the Gospel, apparently not noticing what was
taking place around him, though he had, in fact, observed something
unusual long before. But at last the murmurs, first subdued but gradually
louder and more confident, reached even him. “It shows God’s judgment is
not as man’s,” Father Païssy heard suddenly. The first to give utterance
to this sentiment was a layman, an elderly official from the town, known
to be a man of great piety. But he only repeated aloud what the monks had
long been whispering. They had long before formulated this damning
conclusion, and the worst of it was that a sort of triumphant satisfaction
at that conclusion became more and more apparent every moment. Soon they
began to lay aside even external decorum and almost seemed to feel they
had a sort of right to discard it.

“And for what reason can _this_ have happened,” some of the monks said, at
first with a show of regret; “he had a small frame and his flesh was dried
up on his bones, what was there to decay?”

“It must be a sign from heaven,” others hastened to add, and their opinion
was adopted at once without protest. For it was pointed out, too, that if
the decomposition had been natural, as in the case of every dead sinner,
it would have been apparent later, after a lapse of at least twenty‐four
hours, but this premature corruption “was in excess of nature,” and so the
finger of God was evident. It was meant for a sign. This conclusion seemed
irresistible.

Gentle Father Iosif, the librarian, a great favorite of the dead man’s,
tried to reply to some of the evil speakers that “this is not held
everywhere alike,” and that the incorruptibility of the bodies of the just
was not a dogma of the Orthodox Church, but only an opinion, and that even
in the most Orthodox regions, at Athos for instance, they were not greatly
confounded by the smell of corruption, and there the chief sign of the
glorification of the saved was not bodily incorruptibility, but the color
of the bones when the bodies have lain many years in the earth and have
decayed in it. “And if the bones are yellow as wax, that is the great sign
that the Lord has glorified the dead saint, if they are not yellow but
black, it shows that God has not deemed him worthy of such glory—that is
the belief in Athos, a great place, where the Orthodox doctrine has been
preserved from of old, unbroken and in its greatest purity,” said Father
Iosif in conclusion.

But the meek Father’s words had little effect and even provoked a mocking
retort. “That’s all pedantry and innovation, no use listening to it,” the
monks decided. “We stick to the old doctrine, there are all sorts of
innovations nowadays, are we to follow them all?” added others.

“We have had as many holy fathers as they had. There they are among the
Turks, they have forgotten everything. Their doctrine has long been impure
and they have no bells even,” the most sneering added.

Father Iosif walked away, grieving the more since he had put forward his
own opinion with little confidence as though scarcely believing in it
himself. He foresaw with distress that something very unseemly was
beginning and that there were positive signs of disobedience. Little by
little, all the sensible monks were reduced to silence like Father Iosif.
And so it came to pass that all who loved the elder and had accepted with
devout obedience the institution of the eldership were all at once
terribly cast down and glanced timidly in one another’s faces, when they
met. Those who were hostile to the institution of elders, as a novelty,
held up their heads proudly. “There was no smell of corruption from the
late elder Varsonofy, but a sweet fragrance,” they recalled malignantly.
“But he gained that glory not because he was an elder, but because he was
a holy man.”

And this was followed by a shower of criticism and even blame of Father
Zossima. “His teaching was false; he taught that life is a great joy and
not a vale of tears,” said some of the more unreasonable. “He followed the
fashionable belief, he did not recognize material fire in hell,” others,
still more unreasonable, added. “He was not strict in fasting, allowed
himself sweet things, ate cherry jam with his tea, ladies used to send it
to him. Is it for a monk of strict rule to drink tea?” could be heard
among some of the envious. “He sat in pride,” the most malignant declared
vindictively; “he considered himself a saint and he took it as his due
when people knelt before him.” “He abused the sacrament of confession,”
the fiercest opponents of the institution of elders added in a malicious
whisper. And among these were some of the oldest monks, strictest in their
devotion, genuine ascetics, who had kept silent during the life of the
deceased elder, but now suddenly unsealed their lips. And this was
terrible, for their words had great influence on young monks who were not
yet firm in their convictions. The monk from Obdorsk heard all this
attentively, heaving deep sighs and nodding his head. “Yes, clearly Father
Ferapont was right in his judgment yesterday,” and at that moment Father
Ferapont himself made his appearance, as though on purpose to increase the
confusion.

I have mentioned already that he rarely left his wooden cell by the
apiary. He was seldom even seen at church and they overlooked this neglect
on the ground of his craziness, and did not keep him to the rules binding
on all the rest. But if the whole truth is to be told, they hardly had a
choice about it. For it would have been discreditable to insist on
burdening with the common regulations so great an ascetic, who prayed day
and night (he even dropped asleep on his knees). If they had insisted, the
monks would have said, “He is holier than all of us and he follows a rule
harder than ours. And if he does not go to church, it’s because he knows
when he ought to; he has his own rule.” It was to avoid the chance of
these sinful murmurs that Father Ferapont was left in peace.

As every one was aware, Father Ferapont particularly disliked Father
Zossima. And now the news had reached him in his hut that “God’s judgment
is not the same as man’s,” and that something had happened which was “in
excess of nature.” It may well be supposed that among the first to run to
him with the news was the monk from Obdorsk, who had visited him the
evening before and left his cell terror‐stricken.

I have mentioned above, that though Father Païssy, standing firm and
immovable reading the Gospel over the coffin, could not hear nor see what
was passing outside the cell, he gauged most of it correctly in his heart,
for he knew the men surrounding him, well. He was not shaken by it, but
awaited what would come next without fear, watching with penetration and
insight for the outcome of the general excitement.

Suddenly an extraordinary uproar in the passage in open defiance of
decorum burst on his ears. The door was flung open and Father Ferapont
appeared in the doorway. Behind him there could be seen accompanying him a
crowd of monks, together with many people from the town. They did not,
however, enter the cell, but stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting to
see what Father Ferapont would say or do. For they felt with a certain
awe, in spite of their audacity, that he had not come for nothing.
Standing in the doorway, Father Ferapont raised his arms, and under his
right arm the keen inquisitive little eyes of the monk from Obdorsk peeped
in. He alone, in his intense curiosity, could not resist running up the
steps after Father Ferapont. The others, on the contrary, pressed farther
back in sudden alarm when the door was noisily flung open. Holding his
hands aloft, Father Ferapont suddenly roared:

“Casting out I cast out!” and, turning in all directions, he began at once
making the sign of the cross at each of the four walls and four corners of
the cell in succession. All who accompanied Father Ferapont immediately
understood his action. For they knew he always did this wherever he went,
and that he would not sit down or say a word, till he had driven out the
evil spirits.

“Satan, go hence! Satan, go hence!” he repeated at each sign of the cross.
“Casting out I cast out,” he roared again.

He was wearing his coarse gown girt with a rope. His bare chest, covered
with gray hair, could be seen under his hempen shirt. His feet were bare.
As soon as he began waving his arms, the cruel irons he wore under his
gown could be heard clanking.

Father Païssy paused in his reading, stepped forward and stood before him
waiting.

“What have you come for, worthy Father? Why do you offend against good
order? Why do you disturb the peace of the flock?” he said at last,
looking sternly at him.

“What have I come for? You ask why? What is your faith?” shouted Father
Ferapont crazily. “I’ve come here to drive out your visitors, the unclean
devils. I’ve come to see how many have gathered here while I have been
away. I want to sweep them out with a birch broom.”

“You cast out the evil spirit, but perhaps you are serving him yourself,”
Father Païssy went on fearlessly. “And who can say of himself ‘I am holy’?
Can you, Father?”

“I am unclean, not holy. I would not sit in an arm‐chair and would not
have them bow down to me as an idol,” thundered Father Ferapont. “Nowadays
folk destroy the true faith. The dead man, your saint,” he turned to the
crowd, pointing with his finger to the coffin, “did not believe in devils.
He gave medicine to keep off the devils. And so they have become as common
as spiders in the corners. And now he has begun to stink himself. In that
we see a great sign from God.”

The incident he referred to was this. One of the monks was haunted in his
dreams and, later on, in waking moments, by visions of evil spirits. When
in the utmost terror he confided this to Father Zossima, the elder had
advised continual prayer and rigid fasting. But when that was of no use,
he advised him, while persisting in prayer and fasting, to take a special
medicine. Many persons were shocked at the time and wagged their heads as
they talked over it—and most of all Father Ferapont, to whom some of the
censorious had hastened to report this “extraordinary” counsel on the part
of the elder.

“Go away, Father!” said Father Païssy, in a commanding voice, “it’s not
for man to judge but for God. Perhaps we see here a ‘sign’ which neither
you, nor I, nor any one of us is able to comprehend. Go, Father, and do
not trouble the flock!” he repeated impressively.

“He did not keep the fasts according to the rule and therefore the sign
has come. That is clear and it’s a sin to hide it,” the fanatic, carried
away by a zeal that outstripped his reason, would not be quieted. “He was
seduced by sweetmeats, ladies brought them to him in their pockets, he
sipped tea, he worshiped his belly, filling it with sweet things and his
mind with haughty thoughts.... And for this he is put to shame....”

“You speak lightly, Father.” Father Païssy, too, raised his voice. “I
admire your fasting and severities, but you speak lightly like some
frivolous youth, fickle and childish. Go away, Father, I command you!”
Father Païssy thundered in conclusion.

“I will go,” said Ferapont, seeming somewhat taken aback, but still as
bitter. “You learned men! You are so clever you look down upon my
humbleness. I came hither with little learning and here I have forgotten
what I did know, God Himself has preserved me in my weakness from your
subtlety.”

Father Païssy stood over him, waiting resolutely. Father Ferapont paused
and, suddenly leaning his cheek on his hand despondently, pronounced in a
sing‐song voice, looking at the coffin of the dead elder:

“To‐morrow they will sing over him ‘Our Helper and Defender’—a splendid
anthem—and over me when I die all they’ll sing will be ‘What earthly
joy’—a little canticle,”(6) he added with tearful regret. “You are proud
and puffed up, this is a vain place!” he shouted suddenly like a madman,
and with a wave of his hand he turned quickly and quickly descended the
steps. The crowd awaiting him below wavered; some followed him at once and
some lingered, for the cell was still open, and Father Païssy, following
Father Ferapont on to the steps, stood watching him. But the excited old
fanatic was not completely silenced. Walking twenty steps away, he
suddenly turned towards the setting sun, raised both his arms and, as
though some one had cut him down, fell to the ground with a loud scream.

“My God has conquered! Christ has conquered the setting sun!” he shouted
frantically, stretching up his hands to the sun, and falling face
downwards on the ground, he sobbed like a little child, shaken by his
tears and spreading out his arms on the ground. Then all rushed up to him;
there were exclamations and sympathetic sobs ... a kind of frenzy seemed
to take possession of them all.

“This is the one who is a saint! This is the one who is a holy man!” some
cried aloud, losing their fear. “This is he who should be an elder,”
others added malignantly.

“He wouldn’t be an elder ... he would refuse ... he wouldn’t serve a
cursed innovation ... he wouldn’t imitate their foolery,” other voices
chimed in at once. And it is hard to say how far they might have gone, but
at that moment the bell rang summoning them to service. All began crossing
themselves at once. Father Ferapont, too, got up and crossing himself went
back to his cell without looking round, still uttering exclamations which
were utterly incoherent. A few followed him, but the greater number
dispersed, hastening to service. Father Païssy let Father Iosif read in
his place and went down. The frantic outcries of bigots could not shake
him, but his heart was suddenly filled with melancholy for some special
reason and he felt that. He stood still and suddenly wondered, “Why am I
sad even to dejection?” and immediately grasped with surprise that his
sudden sadness was due to a very small and special cause. In the crowd
thronging at the entrance to the cell, he had noticed Alyosha and he
remembered that he had felt at once a pang at heart on seeing him. “Can
that boy mean so much to my heart now?” he asked himself, wondering.

At that moment Alyosha passed him, hurrying away, but not in the direction
of the church. Their eyes met. Alyosha quickly turned away his eyes and
dropped them to the ground, and from the boy’s look alone, Father Païssy
guessed what a great change was taking place in him at that moment.

“Have you, too, fallen into temptation?” cried Father Païssy. “Can you be
with those of little faith?” he added mournfully.

Alyosha stood still and gazed vaguely at Father Païssy, but quickly turned
his eyes away again and again looked on the ground. He stood sideways and
did not turn his face to Father Païssy, who watched him attentively.

“Where are you hastening? The bell calls to service,” he asked again, but
again Alyosha gave no answer.

“Are you leaving the hermitage? What, without asking leave, without asking
a blessing?”

Alyosha suddenly gave a wry smile, cast a strange, very strange, look at
the Father to whom his former guide, the former sovereign of his heart and
mind, his beloved elder, had confided him as he lay dying. And suddenly,
still without speaking, waved his hand, as though not caring even to be
respectful, and with rapid steps walked towards the gates away from the
hermitage.

“You will come back again!” murmured Father Païssy, looking after him with
sorrowful surprise.



Chapter II. A Critical Moment


Father Païssy, of course, was not wrong when he decided that his “dear
boy” would come back again. Perhaps indeed, to some extent, he penetrated
with insight into the true meaning of Alyosha’s spiritual condition. Yet I
must frankly own that it would be very difficult for me to give a clear
account of that strange, vague moment in the life of the young hero I love
so much. To Father Païssy’s sorrowful question, “Are you too with those of
little faith?” I could of course confidently answer for Alyosha, “No, he
is not with those of little faith. Quite the contrary.” Indeed, all his
trouble came from the fact that he was of great faith. But still the
trouble was there and was so agonizing that even long afterwards Alyosha
thought of that sorrowful day as one of the bitterest and most fatal days
of his life. If the question is asked: “Could all his grief and
disturbance have been only due to the fact that his elder’s body had shown
signs of premature decomposition instead of at once performing miracles?”
I must answer without beating about the bush, “Yes, it certainly was.” I
would only beg the reader not to be in too great a hurry to laugh at my
young hero’s pure heart. I am far from intending to apologize for him or
to justify his innocent faith on the ground of his youth, or the little
progress he had made in his studies, or any such reason. I must declare,
on the contrary, that I have genuine respect for the qualities of his
heart. No doubt a youth who received impressions cautiously, whose love
was lukewarm, and whose mind was too prudent for his age and so of little
value, such a young man might, I admit, have avoided what happened to my
hero. But in some cases it is really more creditable to be carried away by
an emotion, however unreasonable, which springs from a great love, than to
be unmoved. And this is even truer in youth, for a young man who is always
sensible is to be suspected and is of little worth—that’s my opinion!

“But,” reasonable people will exclaim perhaps, “every young man cannot
believe in such a superstition and your hero is no model for others.”

To this I reply again, “Yes! my hero had faith, a faith holy and
steadfast, but still I am not going to apologize for him.”

Though I declared above, and perhaps too hastily, that I should not
explain or justify my hero, I see that some explanation is necessary for
the understanding of the rest of my story. Let me say then, it was not a
question of miracles. There was no frivolous and impatient expectation of
miracles in his mind. And Alyosha needed no miracles at the time, for the
triumph of some preconceived idea—oh, no, not at all—what he saw before
all was one figure—the figure of his beloved elder, the figure of that
holy man whom he revered with such adoration. The fact is that all the
love that lay concealed in his pure young heart for every one and
everything had, for the past year, been concentrated—and perhaps wrongly
so—on one being, his beloved elder. It is true that being had for so long
been accepted by him as his ideal, that all his young strength and energy
could not but turn towards that ideal, even to the forgetting at the
moment “of every one and everything.” He remembered afterwards how, on
that terrible day, he had entirely forgotten his brother Dmitri, about
whom he had been so anxious and troubled the day before; he had forgotten,
too, to take the two hundred roubles to Ilusha’s father, though he had so
warmly intended to do so the preceding evening. But again it was not
miracles he needed but only “the higher justice” which had been in his
belief outraged by the blow that had so suddenly and cruelly wounded his
heart. And what does it signify that this “justice” looked for by Alyosha
inevitably took the shape of miracles to be wrought immediately by the
ashes of his adored teacher? Why, every one in the monastery cherished the
same thought and the same hope, even those whose intellects Alyosha
revered, Father Païssy himself, for instance. And so Alyosha, untroubled
by doubts, clothed his dreams too in the same form as all the rest. And a
whole year of life in the monastery had formed the habit of this
expectation in his heart. But it was justice, justice, he thirsted for,
not simply miracles.

And now the man who should, he believed, have been exalted above every one
in the whole world, that man, instead of receiving the glory that was his
due, was suddenly degraded and dishonored! What for? Who had judged him?
Who could have decreed this? Those were the questions that wrung his
inexperienced and virginal heart. He could not endure without
mortification, without resentment even, that the holiest of holy men
should have been exposed to the jeering and spiteful mockery of the
frivolous crowd so inferior to him. Even had there been no miracles, had
there been nothing marvelous to justify his hopes, why this indignity, why
this humiliation, why this premature decay, “in excess of nature,” as the
spiteful monks said? Why this “sign from heaven,” which they so
triumphantly acclaimed in company with Father Ferapont, and why did they
believe they had gained the right to acclaim it? Where is the finger of
Providence? Why did Providence hide its face “at the most critical moment”
(so Alyosha thought it), as though voluntarily submitting to the blind,
dumb, pitiless laws of nature?

That was why Alyosha’s heart was bleeding, and, of course, as I have said
already, the sting of it all was that the man he loved above everything on
earth should be put to shame and humiliated! This murmuring may have been
shallow and unreasonable in my hero, but I repeat again for the third
time—and am prepared to admit that it might be difficult to defend my
feeling—I am glad that my hero showed himself not too reasonable at that
moment, for any man of sense will always come back to reason in time, but,
if love does not gain the upper hand in a boy’s heart at such an
exceptional moment, when will it? I will not, however, omit to mention
something strange, which came for a time to the surface of Alyosha’s mind
at this fatal and obscure moment. This new something was the harassing
impression left by the conversation with Ivan, which now persistently
haunted Alyosha’s mind. At this moment it haunted him. Oh, it was not that
something of the fundamental, elemental, so to speak, faith of his soul
had been shaken. He loved his God and believed in Him steadfastly, though
he was suddenly murmuring against Him. Yet a vague but tormenting and evil
impression left by his conversation with Ivan the day before, suddenly
revived again now in his soul and seemed forcing its way to the surface of
his consciousness.

It had begun to get dusk when Rakitin, crossing the pine copse from the
hermitage to the monastery, suddenly noticed Alyosha, lying face downwards
on the ground under a tree, not moving and apparently asleep. He went up
and called him by his name.

“You here, Alexey? Can you have—” he began wondering but broke off. He had
meant to say, “Can you have come to this?”

Alyosha did not look at him, but from a slight movement Rakitin at once
saw that he heard and understood him.

“What’s the matter?” he went on; but the surprise in his face gradually
passed into a smile that became more and more ironical.

“I say, I’ve been looking for you for the last two hours. You suddenly
disappeared. What are you about? What foolery is this? You might just look
at me...”

Alyosha raised his head, sat up and leaned his back against the tree. He
was not crying, but there was a look of suffering and irritability in his
face. He did not look at Rakitin, however, but looked away to one side of
him.

“Do you know your face is quite changed? There’s none of your famous
mildness to be seen in it. Are you angry with some one? Have they been
ill‐treating you?”

“Let me alone,” said Alyosha suddenly, with a weary gesture of his hand,
still looking away from him.

“Oho! So that’s how we are feeling! So you can shout at people like other
mortals. That is a come‐down from the angels. I say, Alyosha, you have
surprised me, do you hear? I mean it. It’s long since I’ve been surprised
at anything here. I always took you for an educated man....”

Alyosha at last looked at him, but vaguely, as though scarcely
understanding what he said.

“Can you really be so upset simply because your old man has begun to
stink? You don’t mean to say you seriously believed that he was going to
work miracles?” exclaimed Rakitin, genuinely surprised again.

“I believed, I believe, I want to believe, and I will believe, what more
do you want?” cried Alyosha irritably.

“Nothing at all, my boy. Damn it all! why, no schoolboy of thirteen
believes in that now. But there.... So now you are in a temper with your
God, you are rebelling against Him; He hasn’t given promotion, He hasn’t
bestowed the order of merit! Eh, you are a set!”

Alyosha gazed a long while with his eyes half closed at Rakitin, and there
was a sudden gleam in his eyes ... but not of anger with Rakitin.

“I am not rebelling against my God; I simply ‘don’t accept His world.’ ”
Alyosha suddenly smiled a forced smile.

“How do you mean, you don’t accept the world?” Rakitin thought a moment
over his answer. “What idiocy is this?”

Alyosha did not answer.

“Come, enough nonsense, now to business. Have you had anything to eat to‐
day?”

“I don’t remember.... I think I have.”

“You need keeping up, to judge by your face. It makes one sorry to look at
you. You didn’t sleep all night either, I hear, you had a meeting in
there. And then all this bobbery afterwards. Most likely you’ve had
nothing to eat but a mouthful of holy bread. I’ve got some sausage in my
pocket; I’ve brought it from the town in case of need, only you won’t eat
sausage....”

“Give me some.”

“I say! You are going it! Why, it’s a regular mutiny, with barricades!
Well, my boy, we must make the most of it. Come to my place.... I
shouldn’t mind a drop of vodka myself, I am tired to death. Vodka is going
too far for you, I suppose ... or would you like some?”

“Give me some vodka too.”

“Hullo! You surprise me, brother!” Rakitin looked at him in amazement.
“Well, one way or another, vodka or sausage, this is a jolly fine chance
and mustn’t be missed. Come along.”

Alyosha got up in silence and followed Rakitin.

“If your little brother Ivan could see this—wouldn’t he be surprised! By
the way, your brother Ivan set off to Moscow this morning, did you know?”

“Yes,” answered Alyosha listlessly, and suddenly the image of his brother
Dmitri rose before his mind. But only for a minute, and though it reminded
him of something that must not be put off for a moment, some duty, some
terrible obligation, even that reminder made no impression on him, did not
reach his heart and instantly faded out of his mind and was forgotten.
But, a long while afterwards, Alyosha remembered this.

“Your brother Ivan declared once that I was a ‘liberal booby with no
talents whatsoever.’ Once you, too, could not resist letting me know I was
‘dishonorable.’ Well! I should like to see what your talents and sense of
honor will do for you now.” This phrase Rakitin finished to himself in a
whisper.

“Listen!” he said aloud, “let’s go by the path beyond the monastery
straight to the town. Hm! I ought to go to Madame Hohlakov’s by the way.
Only fancy, I’ve written to tell her everything that happened, and would
you believe it, she answered me instantly in pencil (the lady has a
passion for writing notes) that ‘she would never have expected _such
conduct_ from a man of such a reverend character as Father Zossima.’ That
was her very word: ‘conduct.’ She is angry too. Eh, you are a set! Stay!”
he cried suddenly again. He suddenly stopped and taking Alyosha by the
shoulder made him stop too.

“Do you know, Alyosha,” he peeped inquisitively into his eyes, absorbed in
a sudden new thought which had dawned on him, and though he was laughing
outwardly he was evidently afraid to utter that new idea aloud, so
difficult he still found it to believe in the strange and unexpected mood
in which he now saw Alyosha. “Alyosha, do you know where we had better
go?” he brought out at last timidly, and insinuatingly.

“I don’t care ... where you like.”

“Let’s go to Grushenka, eh? Will you come?” pronounced Rakitin at last,
trembling with timid suspense.

“Let’s go to Grushenka,” Alyosha answered calmly, at once, and this prompt
and calm agreement was such a surprise to Rakitin that he almost started
back.

“Well! I say!” he cried in amazement, but seizing Alyosha firmly by the
arm he led him along the path, still dreading that he would change his
mind.

They walked along in silence, Rakitin was positively afraid to talk.

“And how glad she will be, how delighted!” he muttered, but lapsed into
silence again. And indeed it was not to please Grushenka he was taking
Alyosha to her. He was a practical person and never undertook anything
without a prospect of gain for himself. His object in this case was
twofold, first a revengeful desire to see “the downfall of the righteous,”
and Alyosha’s fall “from the saints to the sinners,” over which he was
already gloating in his imagination, and in the second place he had in
view a certain material gain for himself, of which more will be said
later.

“So the critical moment has come,” he thought to himself with spiteful
glee, “and we shall catch it on the hop, for it’s just what we want.”



Chapter III. An Onion


Grushenka lived in the busiest part of the town, near the cathedral
square, in a small wooden lodge in the courtyard belonging to the house of
the widow Morozov. The house was a large stone building of two stories,
old and very ugly. The widow led a secluded life with her two unmarried
nieces, who were also elderly women. She had no need to let her lodge, but
every one knew that she had taken in Grushenka as a lodger, four years
before, solely to please her kinsman, the merchant Samsonov, who was known
to be the girl’s protector. It was said that the jealous old man’s object
in placing his “favorite” with the widow Morozov was that the old woman
should keep a sharp eye on her new lodger’s conduct. But this sharp eye
soon proved to be unnecessary, and in the end the widow Morozov seldom met
Grushenka and did not worry her by looking after her in any way. It is
true that four years had passed since the old man had brought the slim,
delicate, shy, timid, dreamy, and sad girl of eighteen from the chief town
of the province, and much had happened since then. Little was known of the
girl’s history in the town and that little was vague. Nothing more had
been learnt during the last four years, even after many persons had become
interested in the beautiful young woman into whom Agrafena Alexandrovna
had meanwhile developed. There were rumors that she had been at seventeen
betrayed by some one, some sort of officer, and immediately afterwards
abandoned by him. The officer had gone away and afterwards married, while
Grushenka had been left in poverty and disgrace. It was said, however,
that though Grushenka had been raised from destitution by the old man,
Samsonov, she came of a respectable family belonging to the clerical
class, that she was the daughter of a deacon or something of the sort.

And now after four years the sensitive, injured and pathetic little orphan
had become a plump, rosy beauty of the Russian type, a woman of bold and
determined character, proud and insolent. She had a good head for
business, was acquisitive, saving and careful, and by fair means or foul
had succeeded, it was said, in amassing a little fortune. There was only
one point on which all were agreed. Grushenka was not easily to be
approached and except her aged protector there had not been one man who
could boast of her favors during those four years. It was a positive fact,
for there had been a good many, especially during the last two years, who
had attempted to obtain those favors. But all their efforts had been in
vain and some of these suitors had been forced to beat an undignified and
even comic retreat, owing to the firm and ironical resistance they met
from the strong‐willed young person. It was known, too, that the young
person had, especially of late, been given to what is called
“speculation,” and that she had shown marked abilities in that direction,
so that many people began to say that she was no better than a Jew. It was
not that she lent money on interest, but it was known, for instance, that
she had for some time past, in partnership with old Karamazov, actually
invested in the purchase of bad debts for a trifle, a tenth of their
nominal value, and afterwards had made out of them ten times their value.

The old widower Samsonov, a man of large fortune, was stingy and
merciless. He tyrannized over his grown‐up sons, but, for the last year
during which he had been ill and lost the use of his swollen legs, he had
fallen greatly under the influence of his protégée, whom he had at first
kept strictly and in humble surroundings, “on Lenten fare,” as the wits
said at the time. But Grushenka had succeeded in emancipating herself,
while she established in him a boundless belief in her fidelity. The old
man, now long since dead, had had a large business in his day and was also
a noteworthy character, miserly and hard as flint. Though Grushenka’s hold
upon him was so strong that he could not live without her (it had been so
especially for the last two years), he did not settle any considerable
fortune on her and would not have been moved to do so, if she had
threatened to leave him. But he had presented her with a small sum, and
even that was a surprise to every one when it became known.

“You are a wench with brains,” he said to her, when he gave her eight
thousand roubles, “and you must look after yourself, but let me tell you
that except your yearly allowance as before, you’ll get nothing more from
me to the day of my death, and I’ll leave you nothing in my will either.”

And he kept his word; he died and left everything to his sons, whom, with
their wives and children, he had treated all his life as servants.
Grushenka was not even mentioned in his will. All this became known
afterwards. He helped Grushenka with his advice to increase her capital
and put business in her way.

When Fyodor Pavlovitch, who first came into contact with Grushenka over a
piece of speculation, ended to his own surprise by falling madly in love
with her, old Samsonov, gravely ill as he was, was immensely amused. It is
remarkable that throughout their whole acquaintance Grushenka was
absolutely and spontaneously open with the old man, and he seems to have
been the only person in the world with whom she was so. Of late, when
Dmitri too had come on the scene with his love, the old man left off
laughing. On the contrary, he once gave Grushenka a stern and earnest
piece of advice.

“If you have to choose between the two, father or son, you’d better choose
the old man, if only you make sure the old scoundrel will marry you and
settle some fortune on you beforehand. But don’t keep on with the captain,
you’ll get no good out of that.”

These were the very words of the old profligate, who felt already that his
death was not far off and who actually died five months later.

I will note, too, in passing, that although many in our town knew of the
grotesque and monstrous rivalry of the Karamazovs, father and son, the
object of which was Grushenka, scarcely any one understood what really
underlay her attitude to both of them. Even Grushenka’s two servants
(after the catastrophe of which we will speak later) testified in court
that she received Dmitri Fyodorovitch simply from fear because “he
threatened to murder her.” These servants were an old cook, invalidish and
almost deaf, who came from Grushenka’s old home, and her granddaughter, a
smart young girl of twenty, who performed the duties of a maid. Grushenka
lived very economically and her surroundings were anything but luxurious.
Her lodge consisted of three rooms furnished with mahogany furniture in
the fashion of 1820, belonging to her landlady.

It was quite dark when Rakitin and Alyosha entered her rooms, yet they
were not lighted up. Grushenka was lying down in her drawing‐room on the
big, hard, clumsy sofa, with a mahogany back. The sofa was covered with
shabby and ragged leather. Under her head she had two white down pillows
taken from her bed. She was lying stretched out motionless on her back
with her hands behind her head. She was dressed as though expecting some
one, in a black silk dress, with a dainty lace fichu on her head, which
was very becoming. Over her shoulders was thrown a lace shawl pinned with
a massive gold brooch. She certainly was expecting some one. She lay as
though impatient and weary, her face rather pale and her lips and eyes
hot, restlessly tapping the arm of the sofa with the tip of her right
foot. The appearance of Rakitin and Alyosha caused a slight excitement.
From the hall they could hear Grushenka leap up from the sofa and cry out
in a frightened voice, “Who’s there?” But the maid met the visitors and at
once called back to her mistress.

“It’s not he, it’s nothing, only other visitors.”

“What can be the matter?” muttered Rakitin, leading Alyosha into the
drawing‐room.

Grushenka was standing by the sofa as though still alarmed. A thick coil
of her dark brown hair escaped from its lace covering and fell on her
right shoulder, but she did not notice it and did not put it back till she
had gazed at her visitors and recognized them.

“Ah, it’s you, Rakitin? You quite frightened me. Whom have you brought?
Who is this with you? Good heavens, you have brought him!” she exclaimed,
recognizing Alyosha.

“Do send for candles!” said Rakitin, with the free‐and‐easy air of a most
intimate friend, who is privileged to give orders in the house.

“Candles ... of course, candles.... Fenya, fetch him a candle.... Well,
you have chosen a moment to bring him!” she exclaimed again, nodding
towards Alyosha, and turning to the looking‐glass she began quickly
fastening up her hair with both hands. She seemed displeased.

“Haven’t I managed to please you?” asked Rakitin, instantly almost
offended.

“You frightened me, Rakitin, that’s what it is.” Grushenka turned with a
smile to Alyosha. “Don’t be afraid of me, my dear Alyosha, you cannot
think how glad I am to see you, my unexpected visitor. But you frightened
me, Rakitin, I thought it was Mitya breaking in. You see, I deceived him
just now, I made him promise to believe me and I told him a lie. I told
him that I was going to spend the evening with my old man, Kuzma Kuzmitch,
and should be there till late counting up his money. I always spend one
whole evening a week with him making up his accounts. We lock ourselves in
and he counts on the reckoning beads while I sit and put things down in
the book. I am the only person he trusts. Mitya believes that I am there,
but I came back and have been sitting locked in here, expecting some news.
How was it Fenya let you in? Fenya, Fenya, run out to the gate, open it
and look about whether the captain is to be seen! Perhaps he is hiding and
spying, I am dreadfully frightened.”

“There’s no one there, Agrafena Alexandrovna, I’ve just looked out, I keep
running to peep through the crack, I am in fear and trembling myself.”

“Are the shutters fastened, Fenya? And we must draw the curtains—that’s
better!” She drew the heavy curtains herself. “He’d rush in at once if he
saw a light. I am afraid of your brother Mitya to‐day, Alyosha.”

Grushenka spoke aloud, and, though she was alarmed, she seemed very happy
about something.

“Why are you so afraid of Mitya to‐day?” inquired Rakitin. “I should have
thought you were not timid with him, you’d twist him round your little
finger.”

“I tell you, I am expecting news, priceless news, so I don’t want Mitya at
all. And he didn’t believe, I feel he didn’t, that I should stay at Kuzma
Kuzmitch’s. He must be in his ambush now, behind Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, in
the garden, watching for me. And if he’s there, he won’t come here, so
much the better! But I really have been to Kuzma Kuzmitch’s, Mitya
escorted me there. I told him I should stay there till midnight, and I
asked him to be sure to come at midnight to fetch me home. He went away
and I sat ten minutes with Kuzma Kuzmitch and came back here again. Ugh, I
was afraid, I ran for fear of meeting him.”

“And why are you so dressed up? What a curious cap you’ve got on!”

“How curious you are yourself, Rakitin! I tell you, I am expecting a
message. If the message comes, I shall fly, I shall gallop away and you
will see no more of me. That’s why I am dressed up, so as to be ready.”

“And where are you flying to?”

“If you know too much, you’ll get old too soon.”

“Upon my word! You are highly delighted ... I’ve never seen you like this
before. You are dressed up as if you were going to a ball.” Rakitin looked
her up and down.

“Much you know about balls.”

“And do you know much about them?”

“I have seen a ball. The year before last, Kuzma Kuzmitch’s son was
married and I looked on from the gallery. Do you suppose I want to be
talking to you, Rakitin, while a prince like this is standing here. Such a
visitor! Alyosha, my dear boy, I gaze at you and can’t believe my eyes.
Good heavens, can you have come here to see me! To tell you the truth, I
never had a thought of seeing you and I didn’t think that you would ever
come and see me. Though this is not the moment now, I am awfully glad to
see you. Sit down on the sofa, here, that’s right, my bright young moon. I
really can’t take it in even now.... Eh, Rakitin, if only you had brought
him yesterday or the day before! But I am glad as it is! Perhaps it’s
better he has come now, at such a moment, and not the day before
yesterday.”

She gayly sat down beside Alyosha on the sofa, looking at him with
positive delight. And she really was glad, she was not lying when she said
so. Her eyes glowed, her lips laughed, but it was a good‐hearted merry
laugh. Alyosha had not expected to see such a kind expression in her
face.... He had hardly met her till the day before, he had formed an
alarming idea of her, and had been horribly distressed the day before by
the spiteful and treacherous trick she had played on Katerina Ivanovna. He
was greatly surprised to find her now altogether different from what he
had expected. And, crushed as he was by his own sorrow, his eyes
involuntarily rested on her with attention. Her whole manner seemed
changed for the better since yesterday, there was scarcely any trace of
that mawkish sweetness in her speech, of that voluptuous softness in her
movements. Everything was simple and good‐natured, her gestures were
rapid, direct, confiding, but she was greatly excited.

“Dear me, how everything comes together to‐day!” she chattered on again.
“And why I am so glad to see you, Alyosha, I couldn’t say myself! If you
ask me, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Come, don’t you know why you’re glad?” said Rakitin, grinning. “You used
to be always pestering me to bring him, you’d some object, I suppose.”

“I had a different object once, but now that’s over, this is not the
moment. I say, I want you to have something nice. I am so good‐natured
now. You sit down, too, Rakitin; why are you standing? You’ve sat down
already? There’s no fear of Rakitin’s forgetting to look after himself.
Look, Alyosha, he’s sitting there opposite us, so offended that I didn’t
ask him to sit down before you. Ugh, Rakitin is such a one to take
offense!” laughed Grushenka. “Don’t be angry, Rakitin, I’m kind to‐day.
Why are you so depressed, Alyosha? Are you afraid of me?" She peeped into
his eyes with merry mockery”

“He’s sad. The promotion has not been given,” boomed Rakitin.

“What promotion?”

“His elder stinks.”

“What? You are talking some nonsense, you want to say something nasty. Be
quiet, you stupid! Let me sit on your knee, Alyosha, like this.” She
suddenly skipped forward and jumped, laughing, on his knee, like a
nestling kitten, with her right arm about his neck. “I’ll cheer you up, my
pious boy. Yes, really, will you let me sit on your knee? You won’t be
angry? If you tell me, I’ll get off?”

Alyosha did not speak. He sat afraid to move, he heard her words, “If you
tell me, I’ll get off,” but he did not answer. But there was nothing in
his heart such as Rakitin, for instance, watching him malignantly from his
corner, might have expected or fancied. The great grief in his heart
swallowed up every sensation that might have been aroused, and, if only he
could have thought clearly at that moment, he would have realized that he
had now the strongest armor to protect him from every lust and temptation.
Yet in spite of the vague irresponsiveness of his spiritual condition and
the sorrow that overwhelmed him, he could not help wondering at a new and
strange sensation in his heart. This woman, this “dreadful” woman, had no
terror for him now, none of that terror that had stirred in his soul at
any passing thought of woman. On the contrary, this woman, dreaded above
all women, sitting now on his knee, holding him in her arms, aroused in
him now a quite different, unexpected, peculiar feeling, a feeling of the
intensest and purest interest without a trace of fear, of his former
terror. That was what instinctively surprised him.

“You’ve talked nonsense enough,” cried Rakitin, “you’d much better give us
some champagne. You owe it me, you know you do!”

“Yes, I really do. Do you know, Alyosha, I promised him champagne on the
top of everything, if he’d bring you? I’ll have some too! Fenya, Fenya,
bring us the bottle Mitya left! Look sharp! Though I am so stingy, I’ll
stand a bottle, not for you, Rakitin, you’re a toadstool, but he is a
falcon! And though my heart is full of something very different, so be it,
I’ll drink with you. I long for some dissipation.”

“But what is the matter with you? And what is this message, may I ask, or
is it a secret?” Rakitin put in inquisitively, doing his best to pretend
not to notice the snubs that were being continually aimed at him.

“Ech, it’s not a secret, and you know it, too,” Grushenka said, in a voice
suddenly anxious, turning her head towards Rakitin, and drawing a little
away from Alyosha, though she still sat on his knee with her arm round his
neck. “My officer is coming, Rakitin, my officer is coming.”

“I heard he was coming, but is he so near?”

“He is at Mokroe now; he’ll send a messenger from there, so he wrote; I
got a letter from him to‐day. I am expecting the messenger every minute.”

“You don’t say so! Why at Mokroe?”

“That’s a long story, I’ve told you enough.”

“Mitya’ll be up to something now—I say! Does he know or doesn’t he?”

“He know! Of course he doesn’t. If he knew, there would be murder. But I
am not afraid of that now, I am not afraid of his knife. Be quiet,
Rakitin, don’t remind me of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, he has bruised my heart.
And I don’t want to think of that at this moment. I can think of Alyosha
here, I can look at Alyosha ... smile at me, dear, cheer up, smile at my
foolishness, at my pleasure.... Ah, he’s smiling, he’s smiling! How kindly
he looks at me! And you know, Alyosha, I’ve been thinking all this time
you were angry with me, because of the day before yesterday, because of
that young lady. I was a cur, that’s the truth.... But it’s a good thing
it happened so. It was a horrid thing, but a good thing too.” Grushenka
smiled dreamily and a little cruel line showed in her smile. “Mitya told
me that she screamed out that I ‘ought to be flogged.’ I did insult her
dreadfully. She sent for me, she wanted to make a conquest of me, to win
me over with her chocolate.... No, it’s a good thing it did end like
that.” She smiled again. “But I am still afraid of your being angry.”

“Yes, that’s really true,” Rakitin put in suddenly with genuine surprise.
“Alyosha, she is really afraid of a chicken like you.”

“He is a chicken to you, Rakitin ... because you’ve no conscience, that’s
what it is! You see, I love him with all my soul, that’s how it is!
Alyosha, do you believe I love you with all my soul?”

“Ah, you shameless woman! She is making you a declaration, Alexey!”

“Well, what of it, I love him!”

“And what about your officer? And the priceless message from Mokroe?”

“That is quite different.”

“That’s a woman’s way of looking at it!”

“Don’t you make me angry, Rakitin.” Grushenka caught him up hotly. “This
is quite different. I love Alyosha in a different way. It’s true, Alyosha,
I had sly designs on you before. For I am a horrid, violent creature. But
at other times I’ve looked upon you, Alyosha, as my conscience. I’ve kept
thinking ‘how any one like that must despise a nasty thing like me.’ I
thought that the day before yesterday, as I ran home from the young
lady’s. I have thought of you a long time in that way, Alyosha, and Mitya
knows, I’ve talked to him about it. Mitya understands. Would you believe
it, I sometimes look at you and feel ashamed, utterly ashamed of
myself.... And how, and since when, I began to think about you like that,
I can’t say, I don’t remember....”

Fenya came in and put a tray with an uncorked bottle and three glasses of
champagne on the table.

“Here’s the champagne!” cried Rakitin. “You’re excited, Agrafena
Alexandrovna, and not yourself. When you’ve had a glass of champagne,
you’ll be ready to dance. Eh, they can’t even do that properly,” he added,
looking at the bottle. “The old woman’s poured it out in the kitchen and
the bottle’s been brought in warm and without a cork. Well, let me have
some, anyway.”

He went up to the table, took a glass, emptied it at one gulp and poured
himself out another.

“One doesn’t often stumble upon champagne,” he said, licking his lips.
“Now, Alyosha, take a glass, show what you can do! What shall we drink to?
The gates of paradise? Take a glass, Grushenka, you drink to the gates of
paradise, too.”

“What gates of paradise?”

She took a glass, Alyosha took his, tasted it and put it back.

“No, I’d better not,” he smiled gently.

“And you bragged!” cried Rakitin.

“Well, if so, I won’t either,” chimed in Grushenka, “I really don’t want
any. You can drink the whole bottle alone, Rakitin. If Alyosha has some, I
will.”

“What touching sentimentality!” said Rakitin tauntingly; “and she’s
sitting on his knee, too! He’s got something to grieve over, but what’s
the matter with you? He is rebelling against his God and ready to eat
sausage....”

“How so?”

“His elder died to‐day, Father Zossima, the saint.”

“So Father Zossima is dead,” cried Grushenka. “Good God, I did not know!”
She crossed herself devoutly. “Goodness, what have I been doing, sitting
on his knee like this at such a moment!” She started up as though in
dismay, instantly slipped off his knee and sat down on the sofa.

Alyosha bent a long wondering look upon her and a light seemed to dawn in
his face.

“Rakitin,” he said suddenly, in a firm and loud voice; “don’t taunt me
with having rebelled against God. I don’t want to feel angry with you, so
you must be kinder, too, I’ve lost a treasure such as you have never had,
and you cannot judge me now. You had much better look at her—do you see
how she has pity on me? I came here to find a wicked soul—I felt drawn to
evil because I was base and evil myself, and I’ve found a true sister, I
have found a treasure—a loving heart. She had pity on me just now....
Agrafena Alexandrovna, I am speaking of you. You’ve raised my soul from
the depths.”

Alyosha’s lips were quivering and he caught his breath.

“She has saved you, it seems,” laughed Rakitin spitefully. “And she meant
to get you in her clutches, do you realize that?”

“Stay, Rakitin.” Grushenka jumped up. “Hush, both of you. Now I’ll tell
you all about it. Hush, Alyosha, your words make me ashamed, for I am bad
and not good—that’s what I am. And you hush, Rakitin, because you are
telling lies. I had the low idea of trying to get him in my clutches, but
now you are lying, now it’s all different. And don’t let me hear anything
more from you, Rakitin.”

All this Grushenka said with extreme emotion.

“They are both crazy,” said Rakitin, looking at them with amazement. “I
feel as though I were in a madhouse. They’re both getting so feeble
they’ll begin crying in a minute.”

“I shall begin to cry, I shall,” repeated Grushenka. “He called me his
sister and I shall never forget that. Only let me tell you, Rakitin,
though I am bad, I did give away an onion.”

“An onion? Hang it all, you really are crazy.”

Rakitin wondered at their enthusiasm. He was aggrieved and annoyed, though
he might have reflected that each of them was just passing through a
spiritual crisis such as does not come often in a lifetime. But though
Rakitin was very sensitive about everything that concerned himself, he was
very obtuse as regards the feelings and sensations of others—partly from
his youth and inexperience, partly from his intense egoism.

“You see, Alyosha,” Grushenka turned to him with a nervous laugh. “I was
boasting when I told Rakitin I had given away an onion, but it’s not to
boast I tell you about it. It’s only a story, but it’s a nice story. I
used to hear it when I was a child from Matryona, my cook, who is still
with me. It’s like this. Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a
very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good
deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire.
So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could
remember to tell to God; ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said
he, ‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’ And God answered: ‘You take that
onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be
pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to
Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’
The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,’ said he,
‘catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her
out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake,
seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be
pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking
them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon
as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and
she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away. So
that’s the story, Alyosha; I know it by heart, for I am that wicked woman
myself. I boasted to Rakitin that I had given away an onion, but to you
I’ll say: ‘I’ve done nothing but give away one onion all my life, that’s
the only good deed I’ve done.’ So don’t praise me, Alyosha, don’t think me
good, I am bad, I am a wicked woman and you make me ashamed if you praise
me. Eh, I must confess everything. Listen, Alyosha. I was so anxious to
get hold of you that I promised Rakitin twenty‐five roubles if he would
bring you to me. Stay, Rakitin, wait!”

She went with rapid steps to the table, opened a drawer, pulled out a
purse and took from it a twenty‐five rouble note.

“What nonsense! What nonsense!” cried Rakitin, disconcerted.

“Take it. Rakitin, I owe it you, there’s no fear of your refusing it, you
asked for it yourself.” And she threw the note to him.

“Likely I should refuse it,” boomed Rakitin, obviously abashed, but
carrying off his confusion with a swagger. “That will come in very handy;
fools are made for wise men’s profit.”

“And now hold your tongue, Rakitin, what I am going to say now is not for
your ears. Sit down in that corner and keep quiet. You don’t like us, so
hold your tongue.”

“What should I like you for?” Rakitin snarled, not concealing his ill‐
humor. He put the twenty‐five rouble note in his pocket and he felt
ashamed at Alyosha’s seeing it. He had reckoned on receiving his payment
later, without Alyosha’s knowing of it, and now, feeling ashamed, he lost
his temper. Till that moment he had thought it discreet not to contradict
Grushenka too flatly in spite of her snubbing, since he had something to
get out of her. But now he, too, was angry:

“One loves people for some reason, but what have either of you done for
me?”

“You should love people without a reason, as Alyosha does.”

“How does he love you? How has he shown it, that you make such a fuss
about it?”

Grushenka was standing in the middle of the room; she spoke with heat and
there were hysterical notes in her voice.

“Hush, Rakitin, you know nothing about us! And don’t dare to speak to me
like that again. How dare you be so familiar! Sit in that corner and be
quiet, as though you were my footman! And now, Alyosha, I’ll tell you the
whole truth, that you may see what a wretch I am! I am not talking to
Rakitin, but to you. I wanted to ruin you, Alyosha, that’s the holy truth;
I quite meant to. I wanted to so much, that I bribed Rakitin to bring you.
And why did I want to do such a thing? You knew nothing about it, Alyosha,
you turned away from me; if you passed me, you dropped your eyes. And I’ve
looked at you a hundred times before to‐day; I began asking every one
about you. Your face haunted my heart. ‘He despises me,’ I thought; ‘he
won’t even look at me.’ And I felt it so much at last that I wondered at
myself for being so frightened of a boy. I’ll get him in my clutches and
laugh at him. I was full of spite and anger. Would you believe it, nobody
here dares talk or think of coming to Agrafena Alexandrovna with any evil
purpose. Old Kuzma is the only man I have anything to do with here; I was
bound and sold to him; Satan brought us together, but there has been no
one else. But looking at you, I thought, I’ll get him in my clutches and
laugh at him. You see what a spiteful cur I am, and you called me your
sister! And now that man who wronged me has come; I sit here waiting for a
message from him. And do you know what that man has been to me? Five years
ago, when Kuzma brought me here, I used to shut myself up, that no one
might have sight or sound of me. I was a silly slip of a girl; I used to
sit here sobbing; I used to lie awake all night, thinking: ‘Where is he
now, the man who wronged me? He is laughing at me with another woman, most
likely. If only I could see him, if I could meet him again, I’d pay him
out, I’d pay him out!’ At night I used to lie sobbing into my pillow in
the dark, and I used to brood over it; I used to tear my heart on purpose
and gloat over my anger. ‘I’ll pay him out, I’ll pay him out!’ That’s what
I used to cry out in the dark. And when I suddenly thought that I should
really do nothing to him, and that he was laughing at me then, or perhaps
had utterly forgotten me, I would fling myself on the floor, melt into
helpless tears, and lie there shaking till dawn. In the morning I would
get up more spiteful than a dog, ready to tear the whole world to pieces.
And then what do you think? I began saving money, I became hard‐hearted,
grew stout—grew wiser, would you say? No, no one in the whole world sees
it, no one knows it, but when night comes on, I sometimes lie as I did
five years ago, when I was a silly girl, clenching my teeth and crying all
night, thinking, ‘I’ll pay him out, I’ll pay him out!’ Do you hear? Well
then, now you understand me. A month ago a letter came to me—he was
coming, he was a widower, he wanted to see me. It took my breath away;
then I suddenly thought: ‘If he comes and whistles to call me, I shall
creep back to him like a beaten dog.’ I couldn’t believe myself. Am I so
abject? Shall I run to him or not? And I’ve been in such a rage with
myself all this month that I am worse than I was five years ago. Do you
see now, Alyosha, what a violent, vindictive creature I am? I have shown
you the whole truth! I played with Mitya to keep me from running to that
other. Hush, Rakitin, it’s not for you to judge me, I am not speaking to
you. Before you came in, I was lying here waiting, brooding, deciding my
whole future life, and you can never know what was in my heart. Yes,
Alyosha, tell your young lady not to be angry with me for what happened
the day before yesterday.... Nobody in the whole world knows what I am
going through now, and no one ever can know.... For perhaps I shall take a
knife with me to‐day, I can’t make up my mind ...”

And at this “tragic” phrase Grushenka broke down, hid her face in her
hands, flung herself on the sofa pillows, and sobbed like a little child.

Alyosha got up and went to Rakitin.

“Misha,” he said, “don’t be angry. She wounded you, but don’t be angry.
You heard what she said just now? You mustn’t ask too much of human
endurance, one must be merciful.”

Alyosha said this at the instinctive prompting of his heart. He felt
obliged to speak and he turned to Rakitin. If Rakitin had not been there,
he would have spoken to the air. But Rakitin looked at him ironically and
Alyosha stopped short.

“You were so primed up with your elder’s teaching last night that now you
have to let it off on me, Alexey, man of God!” said Rakitin, with a smile
of hatred.

“Don’t laugh, Rakitin, don’t smile, don’t talk of the dead—he was better
than any one in the world!” cried Alyosha, with tears in his voice. “I
didn’t speak to you as a judge but as the lowest of the judged. What am I
beside her? I came here seeking my ruin, and said to myself, ‘What does it
matter?’ in my cowardliness, but she, after five years in torment, as soon
as any one says a word from the heart to her—it makes her forget
everything, forgive everything, in her tears! The man who has wronged her
has come back, he sends for her and she forgives him everything, and
hastens joyfully to meet him and she won’t take a knife with her. She
won’t! No, I am not like that. I don’t know whether you are, Misha, but I
am not like that. It’s a lesson to me.... She is more loving than we....
Have you heard her speak before of what she has just told us? No, you
haven’t; if you had, you’d have understood her long ago ... and the person
insulted the day before yesterday must forgive her, too! She will, when
she knows ... and she shall know.... This soul is not yet at peace with
itself, one must be tender with it ... there may be a treasure in that
soul....”

Alyosha stopped, because he caught his breath. In spite of his ill‐humor
Rakitin looked at him with astonishment. He had never expected such a
tirade from the gentle Alyosha.

“She’s found some one to plead her cause! Why, are you in love with her?
Agrafena Alexandrovna, our monk’s really in love with you, you’ve made a
conquest!” he cried, with a coarse laugh.

Grushenka lifted her head from the pillow and looked at Alyosha with a
tender smile shining on her tear‐stained face.

“Let him alone, Alyosha, my cherub; you see what he is, he is not a person
for you to speak to. Mihail Osipovitch,” she turned to Rakitin, “I meant
to beg your pardon for being rude to you, but now I don’t want to.
Alyosha, come to me, sit down here.” She beckoned to him with a happy
smile. “That’s right, sit here. Tell me,” she shook him by the hand and
peeped into his face, smiling, “tell me, do I love that man or not? the
man who wronged me, do I love him or not? Before you came, I lay here in
the dark, asking my heart whether I loved him. Decide for me, Alyosha, the
time has come, it shall be as you say. Am I to forgive him or not?”

“But you have forgiven him already,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Yes, I really have forgiven him,” Grushenka murmured thoughtfully. “What
an abject heart! To my abject heart!” She snatched up a glass from the
table, emptied it at a gulp, lifted it in the air and flung it on the
floor. The glass broke with a crash. A little cruel line came into her
smile.

“Perhaps I haven’t forgiven him, though,” she said, with a sort of menace
in her voice, and she dropped her eyes to the ground as though she were
talking to herself. “Perhaps my heart is only getting ready to forgive. I
shall struggle with my heart. You see, Alyosha, I’ve grown to love my
tears in these five years.... Perhaps I only love my resentment, not him
...”

“Well, I shouldn’t care to be in his shoes,” hissed Rakitin.

“Well, you won’t be, Rakitin, you’ll never be in his shoes. You shall
black my shoes, Rakitin, that’s the place you are fit for. You’ll never
get a woman like me ... and he won’t either, perhaps ...”

“Won’t he? Then why are you dressed up like that?” said Rakitin, with a
venomous sneer.

“Don’t taunt me with dressing up, Rakitin, you don’t know all that is in
my heart! If I choose to tear off my finery, I’ll tear it off at once,
this minute,” she cried in a resonant voice. “You don’t know what that
finery is for, Rakitin! Perhaps I shall see him and say: ‘Have you ever
seen me look like this before?’ He left me a thin, consumptive cry‐baby of
seventeen. I’ll sit by him, fascinate him and work him up. ‘Do you see
what I am like now?’ I’ll say to him; ‘well, and that’s enough for you, my
dear sir, there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip!’ That may be what
the finery is for, Rakitin.” Grushenka finished with a malicious laugh.
“I’m violent and resentful, Alyosha, I’ll tear off my finery, I’ll destroy
my beauty, I’ll scorch my face, slash it with a knife, and turn beggar. If
I choose, I won’t go anywhere now to see any one. If I choose, I’ll send
Kuzma back all he has ever given me, to‐morrow, and all his money and I’ll
go out charing for the rest of my life. You think I wouldn’t do it,
Rakitin, that I would not dare to do it? I would, I would, I could do it
directly, only don’t exasperate me ... and I’ll send him about his
business, I’ll snap my fingers in his face, he shall never see me again!”

She uttered the last words in an hysterical scream, but broke down again,
hid her face in her hands, buried it in the pillow and shook with sobs.

Rakitin got up.

“It’s time we were off,” he said, “it’s late, we shall be shut out of the
monastery.”

Grushenka leapt up from her place.

“Surely you don’t want to go, Alyosha!” she cried, in mournful surprise.
“What are you doing to me? You’ve stirred up my feeling, tortured me, and
now you’ll leave me to face this night alone!”

“He can hardly spend the night with you! Though if he wants to, let him!
I’ll go alone,” Rakitin scoffed jeeringly.

“Hush, evil tongue!” Grushenka cried angrily at him; “you never said such
words to me as he has come to say.”

“What has he said to you so special?” asked Rakitin irritably.

“I can’t say, I don’t know. I don’t know what he said to me, it went
straight to my heart; he has wrung my heart.... He is the first, the only
one who has pitied me, that’s what it is. Why did you not come before, you
angel?” She fell on her knees before him as though in a sudden frenzy.
“I’ve been waiting all my life for some one like you, I knew that some one
like you would come and forgive me. I believed that, nasty as I am, some
one would really love me, not only with a shameful love!”

“What have I done to you?” answered Alyosha, bending over her with a
tender smile, and gently taking her by the hands; “I only gave you an
onion, nothing but a tiny little onion, that was all!”

He was moved to tears himself as he said it. At that moment there was a
sudden noise in the passage, some one came into the hall. Grushenka jumped
up, seeming greatly alarmed. Fenya ran noisily into the room, crying out:

“Mistress, mistress darling, a messenger has galloped up,” she cried,
breathless and joyful. “A carriage from Mokroe for you, Timofey the
driver, with three horses, they are just putting in fresh horses.... A
letter, here’s the letter, mistress.”

A letter was in her hand and she waved it in the air all the while she
talked. Grushenka snatched the letter from her and carried it to the
candle. It was only a note, a few lines. She read it in one instant.

“He has sent for me,” she cried, her face white and distorted, with a wan
smile; “he whistles! Crawl back, little dog!”

But only for one instant she stood as though hesitating; suddenly the
blood rushed to her head and sent a glow to her cheeks.

“I will go,” she cried; “five years of my life! Good‐by! Good‐by, Alyosha,
my fate is sealed. Go, go, leave me all of you, don’t let me see you
again! Grushenka is flying to a new life.... Don’t you remember evil
against me either, Rakitin. I may be going to my death! Ugh! I feel as
though I were drunk!”

She suddenly left them and ran into her bedroom.

“Well, she has no thoughts for us now!” grumbled Rakitin. “Let’s go, or we
may hear that feminine shriek again. I am sick of all these tears and
cries.”

Alyosha mechanically let himself be led out. In the yard stood a covered
cart. Horses were being taken out of the shafts, men were running to and
fro with a lantern. Three fresh horses were being led in at the open gate.
But when Alyosha and Rakitin reached the bottom of the steps, Grushenka’s
bedroom window was suddenly opened and she called in a ringing voice after
Alyosha:

“Alyosha, give my greetings to your brother Mitya and tell him not to
remember evil against me, though I have brought him misery. And tell him,
too, in my words: ‘Grushenka has fallen to a scoundrel, and not to you,
noble heart.’ And add, too, that Grushenka loved him only one hour, only
one short hour she loved him—so let him remember that hour all his
life—say, ‘Grushenka tells you to!’ ”

She ended in a voice full of sobs. The window was shut with a slam.

“H’m, h’m!” growled Rakitin, laughing, “she murders your brother Mitya and
then tells him to remember it all his life! What ferocity!”

Alyosha made no reply, he seemed not to have heard. He walked fast beside
Rakitin as though in a terrible hurry. He was lost in thought and moved
mechanically. Rakitin felt a sudden twinge as though he had been touched
on an open wound. He had expected something quite different by bringing
Grushenka and Alyosha together. Something very different from what he had
hoped for had happened.

“He is a Pole, that officer of hers,” he began again, restraining himself;
“and indeed he is not an officer at all now. He served in the customs in
Siberia, somewhere on the Chinese frontier, some puny little beggar of a
Pole, I expect. Lost his job, they say. He’s heard now that Grushenka’s
saved a little money, so he’s turned up again—that’s the explanation of
the mystery.”

Again Alyosha seemed not to hear. Rakitin could not control himself.

“Well, so you’ve saved the sinner?” he laughed spitefully. “Have you
turned the Magdalene into the true path? Driven out the seven devils, eh?
So you see the miracles you were looking out for just now have come to
pass!”

“Hush, Rakitin,” Alyosha answered with an aching heart.

“So you despise me now for those twenty‐five roubles? I’ve sold my friend,
you think. But you are not Christ, you know, and I am not Judas.”

“Oh, Rakitin, I assure you I’d forgotten about it,” cried Alyosha, “you
remind me of it yourself....”

But this was the last straw for Rakitin.

“Damnation take you all and each of you!” he cried suddenly, “why the
devil did I take you up? I don’t want to know you from this time forward.
Go alone, there’s your road!”

And he turned abruptly into another street, leaving Alyosha alone in the
dark. Alyosha came out of the town and walked across the fields to the
monastery.



Chapter IV. Cana Of Galilee


It was very late, according to the monastery ideas, when Alyosha returned
to the hermitage; the door‐keeper let him in by a special entrance. It had
struck nine o’clock—the hour of rest and repose after a day of such
agitation for all. Alyosha timidly opened the door and went into the
elder’s cell where his coffin was now standing. There was no one in the
cell but Father Païssy, reading the Gospel in solitude over the coffin,
and the young novice Porfiry, who, exhausted by the previous night’s
conversation and the disturbing incidents of the day, was sleeping the
deep sound sleep of youth on the floor of the other room. Though Father
Païssy heard Alyosha come in, he did not even look in his direction.
Alyosha turned to the right from the door to the corner, fell on his knees
and began to pray.

His soul was overflowing but with mingled feelings; no single sensation
stood out distinctly; on the contrary, one drove out another in a slow,
continual rotation. But there was a sweetness in his heart and, strange to
say, Alyosha was not surprised at it. Again he saw that coffin before him,
the hidden dead figure so precious to him, but the weeping and poignant
grief of the morning was no longer aching in his soul. As soon as he came
in, he fell down before the coffin as before a holy shrine, but joy, joy
was glowing in his mind and in his heart. The one window of the cell was
open, the air was fresh and cool. “So the smell must have become stronger,
if they opened the window,” thought Alyosha. But even this thought of the
smell of corruption, which had seemed to him so awful and humiliating a
few hours before, no longer made him feel miserable or indignant. He began
quietly praying, but he soon felt that he was praying almost mechanically.
Fragments of thought floated through his soul, flashed like stars and went
out again at once, to be succeeded by others. But yet there was reigning
in his soul a sense of the wholeness of things—something steadfast and
comforting—and he was aware of it himself. Sometimes he began praying
ardently, he longed to pour out his thankfulness and love....

But when he had begun to pray, he passed suddenly to something else, and
sank into thought, forgetting both the prayer and what had interrupted it.
He began listening to what Father Païssy was reading, but worn out with
exhaustion he gradually began to doze.

“_And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee;_” read Father
Païssy. “_And the mother of Jesus was there; And both Jesus was called,
and his disciples, to the marriage._”

“Marriage? What’s that?... A marriage!” floated whirling through Alyosha’s
mind. “There is happiness for her, too.... She has gone to the feast....
No, she has not taken the knife.... That was only a tragic phrase.... Well
... tragic phrases should be forgiven, they must be. Tragic phrases
comfort the heart.... Without them, sorrow would be too heavy for men to
bear. Rakitin has gone off to the back alley. As long as Rakitin broods
over his wrongs, he will always go off to the back alley.... But the high
road ... The road is wide and straight and bright as crystal, and the sun
is at the end of it.... Ah!... What’s being read?”...

“_And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have
no wine_” ... Alyosha heard.

“Ah, yes, I was missing that, and I didn’t want to miss it, I love that
passage: it’s Cana of Galilee, the first miracle.... Ah, that miracle! Ah,
that sweet miracle! It was not men’s grief, but their joy Christ visited,
He worked His first miracle to help men’s gladness.... ‘He who loves men
loves their gladness, too’ ... He was always repeating that, it was one of
his leading ideas.... ‘There’s no living without joy,’ Mitya says.... Yes,
Mitya.... ‘Everything that is true and good is always full of
forgiveness,’ he used to say that, too” ...

“_Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what has it to do with thee or me? Mine
hour is not yet come._

“_His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do
it_” ...

“Do it.... Gladness, the gladness of some poor, very poor, people.... Of
course they were poor, since they hadn’t wine enough even at a wedding....
The historians write that, in those days, the people living about the Lake
of Gennesaret were the poorest that can possibly be imagined ... and
another great heart, that other great being, His Mother, knew that He had
come not only to make His great terrible sacrifice. She knew that His
heart was open even to the simple, artless merrymaking of some obscure and
unlearned people, who had warmly bidden Him to their poor wedding. ‘Mine
hour is not yet come,’ He said, with a soft smile (He must have smiled
gently to her). And, indeed, was it to make wine abundant at poor weddings
He had come down to earth? And yet He went and did as she asked Him....
Ah, he is reading again”....

“_Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled
them up to the brim._

“_And he saith unto them, Draw out now and bear unto the governor of the
feast. And they bare it._

“_When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and
knew not whence it was; (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the
governor of the feast called the bridegroom,_

“_And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine;
and when men have well drunk, that which is worse; but thou hast kept the
good wine until now._”

“But what’s this, what’s this? Why is the room growing wider?... Ah, yes
... It’s the marriage, the wedding ... yes, of course. Here are the
guests, here are the young couple sitting, and the merry crowd and ...
Where is the wise governor of the feast? But who is this? Who? Again the
walls are receding.... Who is getting up there from the great table?
What!... He here, too? But he’s in the coffin ... but he’s here, too. He
has stood up, he sees me, he is coming here.... God!”...

Yes, he came up to him, to him, he, the little, thin old man, with tiny
wrinkles on his face, joyful and laughing softly. There was no coffin now,
and he was in the same dress as he had worn yesterday sitting with them,
when the visitors had gathered about him. His face was uncovered, his eyes
were shining. How was this, then? He, too, had been called to the feast.
He, too, at the marriage of Cana in Galilee....

“Yes, my dear, I am called, too, called and bidden,” he heard a soft voice
saying over him. “Why have you hidden yourself here, out of sight? You
come and join us too.”

It was his voice, the voice of Father Zossima. And it must be he, since he
called him!

The elder raised Alyosha by the hand and he rose from his knees.

“We are rejoicing,” the little, thin old man went on. “We are drinking the
new wine, the wine of new, great gladness; do you see how many guests?
Here are the bride and bridegroom, here is the wise governor of the feast,
he is tasting the new wine. Why do you wonder at me? I gave an onion to a
beggar, so I, too, am here. And many here have given only an onion
each—only one little onion.... What are all our deeds? And you, my gentle
one, you, my kind boy, you too have known how to give a famished woman an
onion to‐day. Begin your work, dear one, begin it, gentle one!... Do you
see our Sun, do you see Him?”

“I am afraid ... I dare not look,” whispered Alyosha.

“Do not fear Him. He is terrible in His greatness, awful in His sublimity,
but infinitely merciful. He has made Himself like unto us from love and
rejoices with us. He is changing the water into wine that the gladness of
the guests may not be cut short. He is expecting new guests, He is calling
new ones unceasingly for ever and ever.... There they are bringing new
wine. Do you see they are bringing the vessels....”

Something glowed in Alyosha’s heart, something filled it till it ached,
tears of rapture rose from his soul.... He stretched out his hands,
uttered a cry and waked up.

Again the coffin, the open window, and the soft, solemn, distinct reading
of the Gospel. But Alyosha did not listen to the reading. It was strange,
he had fallen asleep on his knees, but now he was on his feet, and
suddenly, as though thrown forward, with three firm rapid steps he went
right up to the coffin. His shoulder brushed against Father Païssy without
his noticing it. Father Païssy raised his eyes for an instant from his
book, but looked away again at once, seeing that something strange was
happening to the boy. Alyosha gazed for half a minute at the coffin, at
the covered, motionless dead man that lay in the coffin, with the ikon on
his breast and the peaked cap with the octangular cross, on his head. He
had only just been hearing his voice, and that voice was still ringing in
his ears. He was listening, still expecting other words, but suddenly he
turned sharply and went out of the cell.

He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul,
overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault
of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless
above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the
horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white
towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire
sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were
slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the
silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of
the stars....

Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did
not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so
irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing
and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love
it for ever and ever. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love
those tears,” echoed in his soul.

What was he weeping over?

Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were
shining to him from the abyss of space, and “he was not ashamed of that
ecstasy.” There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of
God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over “in contact
with other worlds.” He longed to forgive every one and for everything, and
to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for
everything. “And others are praying for me too,” echoed again in his soul.
But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that
something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his
soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his
mind—and it was for all his life and for ever and ever. He had fallen on
the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and
felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all
his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute.

“Some one visited my soul in that hour,” he used to say afterwards, with
implicit faith in his words.

Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of
his elder, who had bidden him “sojourn in the world.”




Book VIII. Mitya



Chapter I. Kuzma Samsonov


But Dmitri, to whom Grushenka, flying away to a new life, had left her
last greetings, bidding him remember the hour of her love for ever, knew
nothing of what had happened to her, and was at that moment in a condition
of feverish agitation and activity. For the last two days he had been in
such an inconceivable state of mind that he might easily have fallen ill
with brain fever, as he said himself afterwards. Alyosha had not been able
to find him the morning before, and Ivan had not succeeded in meeting him
at the tavern on the same day. The people at his lodgings, by his orders,
concealed his movements.

He had spent those two days literally rushing in all directions,
“struggling with his destiny and trying to save himself,” as he expressed
it himself afterwards, and for some hours he even made a dash out of the
town on urgent business, terrible as it was to him to lose sight of
Grushenka for a moment. All this was explained afterwards in detail, and
confirmed by documentary evidence; but for the present we will only note
the most essential incidents of those two terrible days immediately
preceding the awful catastrophe, that broke so suddenly upon him.

Though Grushenka had, it is true, loved him for an hour, genuinely and
sincerely, yet she tortured him sometimes cruelly and mercilessly. The
worst of it was that he could never tell what she meant to do. To prevail
upon her by force or kindness was also impossible: she would yield to
nothing. She would only have become angry and turned away from him
altogether, he knew that well already. He suspected, quite correctly, that
she, too, was passing through an inward struggle, and was in a state of
extraordinary indecision, that she was making up her mind to something,
and unable to determine upon it. And so, not without good reason, he
divined, with a sinking heart, that at moments she must simply hate him
and his passion. And so, perhaps, it was, but what was distressing
Grushenka he did not understand. For him the whole tormenting question lay
between him and Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Here, we must note, by the way, one certain fact: he was firmly persuaded
that Fyodor Pavlovitch would offer, or perhaps had offered, Grushenka
lawful wedlock, and did not for a moment believe that the old voluptuary
hoped to gain his object for three thousand roubles. Mitya had reached
this conclusion from his knowledge of Grushenka and her character. That
was how it was that he could believe at times that all Grushenka’s
uneasiness rose from not knowing which of them to choose, which was most
to her advantage.

Strange to say, during those days it never occurred to him to think of the
approaching return of the “officer,” that is, of the man who had been such
a fatal influence in Grushenka’s life, and whose arrival she was expecting
with such emotion and dread. It is true that of late Grushenka had been
very silent about it. Yet he was perfectly aware of a letter she had
received a month ago from her seducer, and had heard of it from her own
lips. He partly knew, too, what the letter contained. In a moment of spite
Grushenka had shown him that letter, but to her astonishment he attached
hardly any consequence to it. It would be hard to say why this was.
Perhaps, weighed down by all the hideous horror of his struggle with his
own father for this woman, he was incapable of imagining any danger more
terrible, at any rate for the time. He simply did not believe in a suitor
who suddenly turned up again after five years’ disappearance, still less
in his speedy arrival. Moreover, in the “officer’s” first letter which had
been shown to Mitya, the possibility of his new rival’s visit was very
vaguely suggested. The letter was very indefinite, high‐flown, and full of
sentimentality. It must be noted that Grushenka had concealed from him the
last lines of the letter, in which his return was alluded to more
definitely. He had, besides, noticed at that moment, he remembered
afterwards, a certain involuntary proud contempt for this missive from
Siberia on Grushenka’s face. Grushenka told him nothing of what had passed
later between her and this rival; so that by degrees he had completely
forgotten the officer’s existence.

He felt that whatever might come later, whatever turn things might take,
his final conflict with Fyodor Pavlovitch was close upon him, and must be
decided before anything else. With a sinking heart he was expecting every
moment Grushenka’s decision, always believing that it would come suddenly,
on the impulse of the moment. All of a sudden she would say to him: “Take
me, I’m yours for ever,” and it would all be over. He would seize her and
bear her away at once to the ends of the earth. Oh, then he would bear her
away at once, as far, far away as possible; to the farthest end of Russia,
if not of the earth, then he would marry her, and settle down with her
incognito, so that no one would know anything about them, there, here, or
anywhere. Then, oh, then, a new life would begin at once!

Of this different, reformed and “virtuous” life (“it must, it must be
virtuous”) he dreamed feverishly at every moment. He thirsted for that
reformation and renewal. The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his
own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such
cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for
these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he
could fly away from this accursed place—he would be altogether
regenerated, would enter on a new path. That was what he believed in, and
what he was yearning for.

But all this could only be on condition of the first, the _happy_ solution
of the question. There was another possibility, a different and awful
ending. Suddenly she might say to him: “Go away. I have just come to terms
with Fyodor Pavlovitch. I am going to marry him and don’t want you”—and
then ... but then.... But Mitya did not know what would happen then. Up to
the last hour he didn’t know. That must be said to his credit. He had no
definite intentions, had planned no crime. He was simply watching and
spying in agony, while he prepared himself for the first, happy solution
of his destiny. He drove away any other idea, in fact. But for that ending
a quite different anxiety arose, a new, incidental, but yet fatal and
insoluble difficulty presented itself.

If she were to say to him: “I’m yours; take me away,” how could he take
her away? Where had he the means, the money to do it? It was just at this
time that all sources of revenue from Fyodor Pavlovitch, doles which had
gone on without interruption for so many years, ceased. Grushenka had
money, of course, but with regard to this Mitya suddenly evinced
extraordinary pride; he wanted to carry her away and begin the new life
with her himself, at his own expense, not at hers. He could not conceive
of taking her money, and the very idea caused him a pang of intense
repulsion. I won’t enlarge on this fact or analyze it here, but confine
myself to remarking that this was his attitude at the moment. All this may
have arisen indirectly and unconsciously from the secret stings of his
conscience for the money of Katerina Ivanovna that he had dishonestly
appropriated. “I’ve been a scoundrel to one of them, and I shall be a
scoundrel again to the other directly,” was his feeling then, as he
explained after: “and when Grushenka knows, she won’t care for such a
scoundrel.”

Where then was he to get the means, where was he to get the fateful money?
Without it, all would be lost and nothing could be done, “and only because
I hadn’t the money. Oh, the shame of it!”

To anticipate things: he did, perhaps, know where to get the money, knew,
perhaps, where it lay at that moment. I will say no more of this here, as
it will all be clear later. But his chief trouble, I must explain however
obscurely, lay in the fact that to have that sum he knew of, to _have the
right_ to take it, he must first restore Katerina Ivanovna’s three
thousand—if not, “I’m a common pickpocket, I’m a scoundrel, and I don’t
want to begin a new life as a scoundrel,” Mitya decided. And so he made up
his mind to move heaven and earth to return Katerina Ivanovna that three
thousand, and that _first of all_. The final stage of this decision, so to
say, had been reached only during the last hours, that is, after his last
interview with Alyosha, two days before, on the high‐road, on the evening
when Grushenka had insulted Katerina Ivanovna, and Mitya, after hearing
Alyosha’s account of it, had admitted that he was a scoundrel, and told
him to tell Katerina Ivanovna so, if it could be any comfort to her. After
parting from his brother on that night, he had felt in his frenzy that it
would be better “to murder and rob some one than fail to pay my debt to
Katya. I’d rather every one thought me a robber and a murderer, I’d rather
go to Siberia than that Katya should have the right to say that I deceived
her and stole her money, and used her money to run away with Grushenka and
begin a new life! That I can’t do!” So Mitya decided, grinding his teeth,
and he might well fancy at times that his brain would give way. But
meanwhile he went on struggling....

Strange to say, though one would have supposed there was nothing left for
him but despair—for what chance had he, with nothing in the world, to
raise such a sum?—yet to the very end he persisted in hoping that he would
get that three thousand, that the money would somehow come to him of
itself, as though it might drop from heaven. That is just how it is with
people who, like Dmitri, have never had anything to do with money, except
to squander what has come to them by inheritance without any effort of
their own, and have no notion how money is obtained. A whirl of the most
fantastic notions took possession of his brain immediately after he had
parted with Alyosha two days before, and threw his thoughts into a tangle
of confusion. This is how it was he pitched first on a perfectly wild
enterprise. And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most
impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and seem most practical.

He suddenly determined to go to Samsonov, the merchant who was Grushenka’s
protector, and to propose a “scheme” to him, and by means of it to obtain
from him at once the whole of the sum required. Of the commercial value of
his scheme he had no doubt, not the slightest, and was only uncertain how
Samsonov would look upon his freak, supposing he were to consider it from
any but the commercial point of view. Though Mitya knew the merchant by
sight, he was not acquainted with him and had never spoken a word to him.
But for some unknown reason he had long entertained the conviction that
the old reprobate, who was lying at death’s door, would perhaps not at all
object now to Grushenka’s securing a respectable position, and marrying a
man “to be depended upon.” And he believed not only that he would not
object, but that this was what he desired, and, if opportunity arose, that
he would be ready to help. From some rumor, or perhaps from some stray
word of Grushenka’s, he had gathered further that the old man would
perhaps prefer him to Fyodor Pavlovitch for Grushenka.

Possibly many of the readers of my novel will feel that in reckoning on
such assistance, and being ready to take his bride, so to speak, from the
hands of her protector, Dmitri showed great coarseness and want of
delicacy. I will only observe that Mitya looked upon Grushenka’s past as
something completely over. He looked on that past with infinite pity and
resolved with all the fervor of his passion that when once Grushenka told
him she loved him and would marry him, it would mean the beginning of a
new Grushenka and a new Dmitri, free from every vice. They would forgive
one another and would begin their lives afresh. As for Kuzma Samsonov,
Dmitri looked upon him as a man who had exercised a fateful influence in
that remote past of Grushenka’s, though she had never loved him, and who
was now himself a thing of the past, completely done with, and, so to say,
non‐existent. Besides, Mitya hardly looked upon him as a man at all, for
it was known to every one in the town that he was only a shattered wreck,
whose relations with Grushenka had changed their character and were now
simply paternal, and that this had been so for a long time.

In any case there was much simplicity on Mitya’s part in all this, for in
spite of all his vices, he was a very simple‐hearted man. It was an
instance of this simplicity that Mitya was seriously persuaded that, being
on the eve of his departure for the next world, old Kuzma must sincerely
repent of his past relations with Grushenka, and that she had no more
devoted friend and protector in the world than this, now harmless old man.

After his conversation with Alyosha, at the cross‐roads, he hardly slept
all night, and at ten o’clock next morning, he was at the house of
Samsonov and telling the servant to announce him. It was a very large and
gloomy old house of two stories, with a lodge and outhouses. In the lower
story lived Samsonov’s two married sons with their families, his old
sister, and his unmarried daughter. In the lodge lived two of his clerks,
one of whom also had a large family. Both the lodge and the lower story
were overcrowded, but the old man kept the upper floor to himself, and
would not even let the daughter live there with him, though she waited
upon him, and in spite of her asthma was obliged at certain fixed hours,
and at any time he might call her, to run upstairs to him from below.

This upper floor contained a number of large rooms kept purely for show,
furnished in the old‐fashioned merchant style, with long monotonous rows
of clumsy mahogany chairs along the walls, with glass chandeliers under
shades, and gloomy mirrors on the walls. All these rooms were entirely
empty and unused, for the old man kept to one room, a small, remote
bedroom, where he was waited upon by an old servant with a kerchief on her
head, and by a lad, who used to sit on the locker in the passage. Owing to
his swollen legs, the old man could hardly walk at all, and was only
rarely lifted from his leather arm‐chair, when the old woman supporting
him led him up and down the room once or twice. He was morose and taciturn
even with this old woman.

When he was informed of the arrival of the “captain,” he at once refused
to see him. But Mitya persisted and sent his name up again. Samsonov
questioned the lad minutely: What he looked like? Whether he was drunk?
Was he going to make a row? The answer he received was: that he was sober,
but wouldn’t go away. The old man again refused to see him. Then Mitya,
who had foreseen this, and purposely brought pencil and paper with him,
wrote clearly on the piece of paper the words: “On most important business
closely concerning Agrafena Alexandrovna,” and sent it up to the old man.

After thinking a little Samsonov told the lad to take the visitor to the
drawing‐room, and sent the old woman downstairs with a summons to his
younger son to come upstairs to him at once. This younger son, a man over
six foot and of exceptional physical strength, who was closely‐shaven and
dressed in the European style, though his father still wore a kaftan and a
beard, came at once without a comment. All the family trembled before the
father. The old man had sent for this giant, not because he was afraid of
the “captain” (he was by no means of a timorous temper), but in order to
have a witness in case of any emergency. Supported by his son and the
servant‐lad, he waddled at last into the drawing‐room. It may be assumed
that he felt considerable curiosity. The drawing‐room in which Mitya was
awaiting him was a vast, dreary room that laid a weight of depression on
the heart. It had a double row of windows, a gallery, marbled walls, and
three immense chandeliers with glass lusters covered with shades.

Mitya was sitting on a little chair at the entrance, awaiting his fate
with nervous impatience. When the old man appeared at the opposite door,
seventy feet away, Mitya jumped up at once, and with his long, military
stride walked to meet him. Mitya was well dressed, in a frock‐coat,
buttoned up, with a round hat and black gloves in his hands, just as he
had been three days before at the elder’s, at the family meeting with his
father and brothers. The old man waited for him, standing dignified and
unbending, and Mitya felt at once that he had looked him through and
through as he advanced. Mitya was greatly impressed, too, with Samsonov’s
immensely swollen face. His lower lip, which had always been thick, hung
down now, looking like a bun. He bowed to his guest in dignified silence,
motioned him to a low chair by the sofa, and, leaning on his son’s arm he
began lowering himself on to the sofa opposite, groaning painfully, so
that Mitya, seeing his painful exertions, immediately felt remorseful and
sensitively conscious of his insignificance in the presence of the
dignified person he had ventured to disturb.

“What is it you want of me, sir?” said the old man, deliberately,
distinctly, severely, but courteously, when he was at last seated.

Mitya started, leapt up, but sat down again. Then he began at once
speaking with loud, nervous haste, gesticulating, and in a positive
frenzy. He was unmistakably a man driven into a corner, on the brink of
ruin, catching at the last straw, ready to sink if he failed. Old Samsonov
probably grasped all this in an instant, though his face remained cold and
immovable as a statue’s.

“Most honored sir, Kuzma Kuzmitch, you have no doubt heard more than once
of my disputes with my father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, who robbed me
of my inheritance from my mother ... seeing the whole town is gossiping
about it ... for here every one’s gossiping of what they shouldn’t ... and
besides, it might have reached you through Grushenka ... I beg your
pardon, through Agrafena Alexandrovna ... Agrafena Alexandrovna, the lady
for whom I have the highest respect and esteem ...”

So Mitya began, and broke down at the first sentence. We will not
reproduce his speech word for word, but will only summarize the gist of
it. Three months ago, he said, he had of express intention (Mitya
purposely used these words instead of “intentionally”) consulted a lawyer
in the chief town of the province, “a distinguished lawyer, Kuzma
Kuzmitch, Pavel Pavlovitch Korneplodov. You have perhaps heard of him? A
man of vast intellect, the mind of a statesman ... he knows you, too ...
spoke of you in the highest terms ...” Mitya broke down again. But these
breaks did not deter him. He leapt instantly over the gaps, and struggled
on and on.

This Korneplodov, after questioning him minutely, and inspecting the
documents he was able to bring him (Mitya alluded somewhat vaguely to
these documents, and slurred over the subject with special haste),
reported that they certainly might take proceedings concerning the village
of Tchermashnya, which ought, he said, to have come to him, Mitya, from
his mother, and so checkmate the old villain, his father ... “because
every door was not closed and justice might still find a loophole.” In
fact, he might reckon on an additional sum of six or even seven thousand
roubles from Fyodor Pavlovitch, as Tchermashnya was worth, at least,
twenty‐five thousand, he might say twenty‐eight thousand, in fact,
“thirty, thirty, Kuzma Kuzmitch, and would you believe it, I didn’t get
seventeen from that heartless man!” So he, Mitya, had thrown the business
up, for the time, knowing nothing about the law, but on coming here was
struck dumb by a cross‐claim made upon him (here Mitya went adrift again
and again took a flying leap forward), “so will not you, excellent and
honored Kuzma Kuzmitch, be willing to take up all my claims against that
unnatural monster, and pay me a sum down of only three thousand?... You
see, you cannot, in any case, lose over it. On my honor, my honor, I swear
that. Quite the contrary, you may make six or seven thousand instead of
three.” Above all, he wanted this concluded that very day.

“I’ll do the business with you at a notary’s, or whatever it is ... in
fact, I’m ready to do anything.... I’ll hand over all the deeds ...
whatever you want, sign anything ... and we could draw up the agreement at
once ... and if it were possible, if it were only possible, that very
morning.... You could pay me that three thousand, for there isn’t a
capitalist in this town to compare with you, and so would save me from ...
would save me, in fact ... for a good, I might say an honorable action....
For I cherish the most honorable feelings for a certain person, whom you
know well, and care for as a father. I would not have come, indeed, if it
had not been as a father. And, indeed, it’s a struggle of three in this
business, for it’s fate—that’s a fearful thing, Kuzma Kuzmitch! A tragedy,
Kuzma Kuzmitch, a tragedy! And as you’ve dropped out long ago, it’s a tug‐
of‐war between two. I’m expressing it awkwardly, perhaps, but I’m not a
literary man. You see, I’m on the one side, and that monster on the other.
So you must choose. It’s either I or the monster. It all lies in your
hands—the fate of three lives, and the happiness of two.... Excuse me, I’m
making a mess of it, but you understand ... I see from your venerable eyes
that you understand ... and if you don’t understand, I’m done for ... so
you see!”

Mitya broke off his clumsy speech with that, “so you see!” and jumping up
from his seat, awaited the answer to his foolish proposal. At the last
phrase he had suddenly become hopelessly aware that it had all fallen
flat, above all, that he had been talking utter nonsense.

“How strange it is! On the way here it seemed all right, and now it’s
nothing but nonsense.” The idea suddenly dawned on his despairing mind.
All the while he had been talking, the old man sat motionless, watching
him with an icy expression in his eyes. After keeping him for a moment in
suspense, Kuzma Kuzmitch pronounced at last in the most positive and
chilling tone:

“Excuse me, we don’t undertake such business.”

Mitya suddenly felt his legs growing weak under him.

“What am I to do now, Kuzma Kuzmitch?” he muttered, with a pale smile. “I
suppose it’s all up with me—what do you think?”

“Excuse me....”

Mitya remained standing, staring motionless. He suddenly noticed a
movement in the old man’s face. He started.

“You see, sir, business of that sort’s not in our line,” said the old man
slowly. “There’s the court, and the lawyers—it’s a perfect misery. But if
you like, there is a man here you might apply to.”

“Good heavens! Who is it? You’re my salvation, Kuzma Kuzmitch,” faltered
Mitya.

“He doesn’t live here, and he’s not here just now. He is a peasant, he
does business in timber. His name is Lyagavy. He’s been haggling with
Fyodor Pavlovitch for the last year, over your copse at Tchermashnya. They
can’t agree on the price, maybe you’ve heard? Now he’s come back again and
is staying with the priest at Ilyinskoe, about twelve versts from the
Volovya station. He wrote to me, too, about the business of the copse,
asking my advice. Fyodor Pavlovitch means to go and see him himself. So if
you were to be beforehand with Fyodor Pavlovitch and to make Lyagavy the
offer you’ve made me, he might possibly—”

“A brilliant idea!” Mitya interrupted ecstatically. “He’s the very man, it
would just suit him. He’s haggling with him for it, being asked too much,
and here he would have all the documents entitling him to the property
itself. Ha ha ha!”

And Mitya suddenly went off into his short, wooden laugh, startling
Samsonov.

“How can I thank you, Kuzma Kuzmitch?” cried Mitya effusively.

“Don’t mention it,” said Samsonov, inclining his head.

“But you don’t know, you’ve saved me. Oh, it was a true presentiment
brought me to you.... So now to this priest!”

“No need of thanks.”

“I’ll make haste and fly there. I’m afraid I’ve overtaxed your strength. I
shall never forget it. It’s a Russian says that, Kuzma Kuzmitch, a R‐r‐
russian!”

“To be sure!”

Mitya seized his hand to press it, but there was a malignant gleam in the
old man’s eye. Mitya drew back his hand, but at once blamed himself for
his mistrustfulness.

“It’s because he’s tired,” he thought.

“For her sake! For her sake, Kuzma Kuzmitch! You understand that it’s for
her,” he cried, his voice ringing through the room. He bowed, turned
sharply round, and with the same long stride walked to the door without
looking back. He was trembling with delight.

“Everything was on the verge of ruin and my guardian angel saved me,” was
the thought in his mind. And if such a business man as Samsonov (a most
worthy old man, and what dignity!) had suggested this course, then ...
then success was assured. He would fly off immediately. “I will be back
before night, I shall be back at night and the thing is done. Could the
old man have been laughing at me?” exclaimed Mitya, as he strode towards
his lodging. He could, of course, imagine nothing, but that the advice was
practical “from such a business man” with an understanding of the
business, with an understanding of this Lyagavy (curious surname!). Or—the
old man was laughing at him.

Alas! The second alternative was the correct one. Long afterwards, when
the catastrophe had happened, old Samsonov himself confessed, laughing,
that he had made a fool of the “captain.” He was a cold, spiteful and
sarcastic man, liable to violent antipathies. Whether it was the
“captain’s” excited face, or the foolish conviction of the “rake and
spendthrift,” that he, Samsonov, could be taken in by such a cock‐and‐bull
story as his scheme, or his jealousy of Grushenka, in whose name this
“scapegrace” had rushed in on him with such a tale to get money which
worked on the old man, I can’t tell. But at the instant when Mitya stood
before him, feeling his legs grow weak under him, and frantically
exclaiming that he was ruined, at that moment the old man looked at him
with intense spite, and resolved to make a laughing‐stock of him. When
Mitya had gone, Kuzma Kuzmitch, white with rage, turned to his son and
bade him see to it that that beggar be never seen again, and never
admitted even into the yard, or else he’d—

He did not utter his threat. But even his son, who often saw him enraged,
trembled with fear. For a whole hour afterwards, the old man was shaking
with anger, and by evening he was worse, and sent for the doctor.



Chapter II. Lyagavy


So he must drive at full speed, and he had not the money for horses. He
had forty kopecks, and that was all, all that was left after so many years
of prosperity! But he had at home an old silver watch which had long
ceased to go. He snatched it up and carried it to a Jewish watchmaker who
had a shop in the market‐place. The Jew gave him six roubles for it.

“And I didn’t expect that,” cried Mitya, ecstatically. (He was still in a
state of ecstasy.) He seized his six roubles and ran home. At home he
borrowed three roubles from the people of the house, who loved him so much
that they were pleased to give it him, though it was all they had. Mitya
in his excitement told them on the spot that his fate would be decided
that day, and he described, in desperate haste, the whole scheme he had
put before Samsonov, the latter’s decision, his own hopes for the future,
and so on. These people had been told many of their lodger’s secrets
before, and so looked upon him as a gentleman who was not at all proud,
and almost one of themselves. Having thus collected nine roubles Mitya
sent for posting‐horses to take him to the Volovya station. This was how
the fact came to be remembered and established that “at midday, on the day
before the event, Mitya had not a farthing, and that he had sold his watch
to get money and had borrowed three roubles from his landlord, all in the
presence of witnesses.”

I note this fact, later on it will be apparent why I do so.

Though he was radiant with the joyful anticipation that he would at last
solve all his difficulties, yet, as he drew near Volovya station, he
trembled at the thought of what Grushenka might be doing in his absence.
What if she made up her mind to‐day to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch? This was
why he had gone off without telling her and why he left orders with his
landlady not to let out where he had gone, if any one came to inquire for
him.

“I must, I must get back to‐night,” he repeated, as he was jolted along in
the cart, “and I dare say I shall have to bring this Lyagavy back here ...
to draw up the deed.” So mused Mitya, with a throbbing heart, but alas!
his dreams were not fated to be carried out.

To begin with, he was late, taking a short cut from Volovya station which
turned out to be eighteen versts instead of twelve. Secondly, he did not
find the priest at home at Ilyinskoe; he had gone off to a neighboring
village. While Mitya, setting off there with the same exhausted horses,
was looking for him, it was almost dark.

The priest, a shy and amiable looking little man, informed him at once
that though Lyagavy had been staying with him at first, he was now at
Suhoy Possyolok, that he was staying the night in the forester’s cottage,
as he was buying timber there too. At Mitya’s urgent request that he would
take him to Lyagavy at once, and by so doing “save him, so to speak,” the
priest agreed, after some demur, to conduct him to Suhoy Possyolok; his
curiosity was obviously aroused. But, unluckily, he advised their going on
foot, as it would not be “much over” a verst. Mitya, of course, agreed,
and marched off with his yard‐long strides, so that the poor priest almost
ran after him. He was a very cautious man, though not old.

Mitya at once began talking to him, too, of his plans, nervously and
excitedly asking advice in regard to Lyagavy, and talking all the way. The
priest listened attentively, but gave little advice. He turned off Mitya’s
questions with: “I don’t know. Ah, I can’t say. How can I tell?” and so
on. When Mitya began to speak of his quarrel with his father over his
inheritance, the priest was positively alarmed, as he was in some way
dependent on Fyodor Pavlovitch. He inquired, however, with surprise, why
he called the peasant‐trader Gorstkin, Lyagavy, and obligingly explained
to Mitya that, though the man’s name really was Lyagavy, he was never
called so, as he would be grievously offended at the name, and that he
must be sure to call him Gorstkin, “or you’ll do nothing with him; he
won’t even listen to you,” said the priest in conclusion.

Mitya was somewhat surprised for a moment, and explained that that was
what Samsonov had called him. On hearing this fact, the priest dropped the
subject, though he would have done well to put into words his doubt
whether, if Samsonov had sent him to that peasant, calling him Lyagavy,
there was not something wrong about it and he was turning him into
ridicule. But Mitya had no time to pause over such trifles. He hurried,
striding along, and only when he reached Suhoy Possyolok did he realize
that they had come not one verst, nor one and a half, but at least three.
This annoyed him, but he controlled himself.

They went into the hut. The forester lived in one half of the hut, and
Gorstkin was lodging in the other, the better room the other side of the
passage. They went into that room and lighted a tallow candle. The hut was
extremely overheated. On the table there was a samovar that had gone out,
a tray with cups, an empty rum bottle, a bottle of vodka partly full, and
some half‐eaten crusts of wheaten bread. The visitor himself lay stretched
at full length on the bench, with his coat crushed up under his head for a
pillow, snoring heavily. Mitya stood in perplexity.

“Of course I must wake him. My business is too important. I’ve come in
such haste. I’m in a hurry to get back to‐day,” he said in great
agitation. But the priest and the forester stood in silence, not giving
their opinion. Mitya went up and began trying to wake him himself; he
tried vigorously, but the sleeper did not wake.

“He’s drunk,” Mitya decided. “Good Lord! What am I to do? What am I to
do?” And, terribly impatient, he began pulling him by the arms, by the
legs, shaking his head, lifting him up and making him sit on the bench.
Yet, after prolonged exertions, he could only succeed in getting the
drunken man to utter absurd grunts, and violent, but inarticulate oaths.

“No, you’d better wait a little,” the priest pronounced at last, “for he’s
obviously not in a fit state.”

“He’s been drinking the whole day,” the forester chimed in.

“Good heavens!” cried Mitya. “If only you knew how important it is to me
and how desperate I am!”

“No, you’d better wait till morning,” the priest repeated.

“Till morning? Mercy! that’s impossible!”

And in his despair he was on the point of attacking the sleeping man
again, but stopped short at once, realizing the uselessness of his
efforts. The priest said nothing, the sleepy forester looked gloomy.

“What terrible tragedies real life contrives for people,” said Mitya, in
complete despair. The perspiration was streaming down his face. The priest
seized the moment to put before him, very reasonably, that, even if he
succeeded in wakening the man, he would still be drunk and incapable of
conversation. “And your business is important,” he said, “so you’d
certainly better put it off till morning.” With a gesture of despair Mitya
agreed.

“Father, I will stay here with a light, and seize the favorable moment. As
soon as he wakes I’ll begin. I’ll pay you for the light,” he said to the
forester, “for the night’s lodging, too; you’ll remember Dmitri Karamazov.
Only, Father, I don’t know what we’re to do with you. Where will you
sleep?”

“No, I’m going home. I’ll take his horse and get home,” he said,
indicating the forester. “And now I’ll say good‐by. I wish you all
success.”

So it was settled. The priest rode off on the forester’s horse, delighted
to escape, though he shook his head uneasily, wondering whether he ought
not next day to inform his benefactor Fyodor Pavlovitch of this curious
incident, “or he may in an unlucky hour hear of it, be angry, and withdraw
his favor.”

The forester, scratching himself, went back to his room without a word,
and Mitya sat on the bench to “catch the favorable moment,” as he
expressed it. Profound dejection clung about his soul like a heavy mist. A
profound, intense dejection! He sat thinking, but could reach no
conclusion. The candle burnt dimly, a cricket chirped; it became
insufferably close in the overheated room. He suddenly pictured the
garden, the path behind the garden, the door of his father’s house
mysteriously opening and Grushenka running in. He leapt up from the bench.

“It’s a tragedy!” he said, grinding his teeth. Mechanically he went up to
the sleeping man and looked in his face. He was a lean, middle‐aged
peasant, with a very long face, flaxen curls, and a long, thin, reddish
beard, wearing a blue cotton shirt and a black waistcoat, from the pocket
of which peeped the chain of a silver watch. Mitya looked at his face with
intense hatred, and for some unknown reason his curly hair particularly
irritated him.

What was insufferably humiliating was, that after leaving things of such
importance and making such sacrifices, he, Mitya, utterly worn out, should
with business of such urgency be standing over this dolt on whom his whole
fate depended, while he snored as though there were nothing the matter, as
though he’d dropped from another planet.

“Oh, the irony of fate!” cried Mitya, and, quite losing his head, he fell
again to rousing the tipsy peasant. He roused him with a sort of ferocity,
pulled at him, pushed him, even beat him; but after five minutes of vain
exertions, he returned to his bench in helpless despair, and sat down.

“Stupid! Stupid!” cried Mitya. “And how dishonorable it all is!” something
made him add. His head began to ache horribly. “Should he fling it up and
go away altogether?” he wondered. “No, wait till to‐morrow now. I’ll stay
on purpose. What else did I come for? Besides, I’ve no means of going. How
am I to get away from here now? Oh, the idiocy of it!”

But his head ached more and more. He sat without moving, and unconsciously
dozed off and fell asleep as he sat. He seemed to have slept for two hours
or more. He was waked up by his head aching so unbearably that he could
have screamed. There was a hammering in his temples, and the top of his
head ached. It was a long time before he could wake up fully and
understand what had happened to him.

At last he realized that the room was full of charcoal fumes from the
stove, and that he might die of suffocation. And the drunken peasant still
lay snoring. The candle guttered and was about to go out. Mitya cried out,
and ran staggering across the passage into the forester’s room. The
forester waked up at once, but hearing that the other room was full of
fumes, to Mitya’s surprise and annoyance, accepted the fact with strange
unconcern, though he did go to see to it.

“But he’s dead, he’s dead! and ... what am I to do then?” cried Mitya
frantically.

They threw open the doors, opened a window and the chimney. Mitya brought
a pail of water from the passage. First he wetted his own head, then,
finding a rag of some sort, dipped it into the water, and put it on
Lyagavy’s head. The forester still treated the matter contemptuously, and
when he opened the window said grumpily:

“It’ll be all right, now.”

He went back to sleep, leaving Mitya a lighted lantern. Mitya fussed about
the drunken peasant for half an hour, wetting his head, and gravely
resolved not to sleep all night. But he was so worn out that when he sat
down for a moment to take breath, he closed his eyes, unconsciously
stretched himself full length on the bench and slept like the dead.

It was dreadfully late when he waked. It was somewhere about nine o’clock.
The sun was shining brightly in the two little windows of the hut. The
curly‐headed peasant was sitting on the bench and had his coat on. He had
another samovar and another bottle in front of him. Yesterday’s bottle had
already been finished, and the new one was more than half empty. Mitya
jumped up and saw at once that the cursed peasant was drunk again,
hopelessly and incurably. He stared at him for a moment with wide opened
eyes. The peasant was silently and slyly watching him, with insulting
composure, and even a sort of contemptuous condescension, so Mitya
fancied. He rushed up to him.

“Excuse me, you see ... I ... you’ve most likely heard from the forester
here in the hut. I’m Lieutenant Dmitri Karamazov, the son of the old
Karamazov whose copse you are buying.”

“That’s a lie!” said the peasant, calmly and confidently.

“A lie? You know Fyodor Pavlovitch?”

“I don’t know any of your Fyodor Pavlovitches,” said the peasant, speaking
thickly.

“You’re bargaining with him for the copse, for the copse. Do wake up, and
collect yourself. Father Pavel of Ilyinskoe brought me here. You wrote to
Samsonov, and he has sent me to you,” Mitya gasped breathlessly.

“You’re l‐lying!” Lyagavy blurted out again. Mitya’s legs went cold.

“For mercy’s sake! It isn’t a joke! You’re drunk, perhaps. Yet you can
speak and understand ... or else ... I understand nothing!”

“You’re a painter!”

“For mercy’s sake! I’m Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov. I have an offer to
make you, an advantageous offer ... very advantageous offer, concerning
the copse!”

The peasant stroked his beard importantly.

“No, you’ve contracted for the job and turned out a scamp. You’re a
scoundrel!”

“I assure you you’re mistaken,” cried Mitya, wringing his hands in
despair. The peasant still stroked his beard, and suddenly screwed up his
eyes cunningly.

“No, you show me this: you tell me the law that allows roguery. D’you
hear? You’re a scoundrel! Do you understand that?”

Mitya stepped back gloomily, and suddenly “something seemed to hit him on
the head,” as he said afterwards. In an instant a light seemed to dawn in
his mind, “a light was kindled and I grasped it all.” He stood, stupefied,
wondering how he, after all a man of intelligence, could have yielded to
such folly, have been led into such an adventure, and have kept it up for
almost twenty‐four hours, fussing round this Lyagavy, wetting his head.

“Why, the man’s drunk, dead drunk, and he’ll go on drinking now for a
week; what’s the use of waiting here? And what if Samsonov sent me here on
purpose? What if she—? Oh, God, what have I done?”

The peasant sat watching him and grinning. Another time Mitya might have
killed the fool in a fury, but now he felt as weak as a child. He went
quietly to the bench, took up his overcoat, put it on without a word, and
went out of the hut. He did not find the forester in the next room; there
was no one there. He took fifty kopecks in small change out of his pocket
and put them on the table for his night’s lodging, the candle, and the
trouble he had given. Coming out of the hut he saw nothing but forest all
round. He walked at hazard, not knowing which way to turn out of the hut,
to the right or to the left. Hurrying there the evening before with the
priest, he had not noticed the road. He had no revengeful feeling for
anybody, even for Samsonov, in his heart. He strode along a narrow forest
path, aimless, dazed, without heeding where he was going. A child could
have knocked him down, so weak was he in body and soul. He got out of the
forest somehow, however, and a vista of fields, bare after the harvest,
stretched as far as the eye could see.

“What despair! What death all round!” he repeated, striding on and on.

He was saved by meeting an old merchant who was being driven across
country in a hired trap. When he overtook him, Mitya asked the way, and it
turned out that the old merchant, too, was going to Volovya. After some
discussion Mitya got into the trap. Three hours later they arrived. At
Volovya, Mitya at once ordered posting‐horses to drive to the town, and
suddenly realized that he was appallingly hungry. While the horses were
being harnessed, an omelette was prepared for him. He ate it all in an
instant, ate a huge hunk of bread, ate a sausage, and swallowed three
glasses of vodka. After eating, his spirits and his heart grew lighter. He
flew towards the town, urged on the driver, and suddenly made a new and
“unalterable” plan to procure that “accursed money” before evening. “And
to think, only to think that a man’s life should be ruined for the sake of
that paltry three thousand!” he cried, contemptuously. “I’ll settle it to‐
day.” And if it had not been for the thought of Grushenka and of what
might have happened to her, which never left him, he would perhaps have
become quite cheerful again.... But the thought of her was stabbing him to
the heart every moment, like a sharp knife.

At last they arrived, and Mitya at once ran to Grushenka.



Chapter III. Gold‐Mines


This was the visit of Mitya of which Grushenka had spoken to Rakitin with
such horror. She was just then expecting the “message,” and was much
relieved that Mitya had not been to see her that day or the day before.
She hoped that “please God he won’t come till I’m gone away,” and he
suddenly burst in on her. The rest we know already. To get him off her
hands she suggested at once that he should walk with her to Samsonov’s,
where she said she absolutely must go “to settle his accounts,” and when
Mitya accompanied her at once, she said good‐by to him at the gate, making
him promise to come at twelve o’clock to take her home again. Mitya, too,
was delighted at this arrangement. If she was sitting at Samsonov’s she
could not be going to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, “if only she’s not lying,” he
added at once. But he thought she was not lying from what he saw.

He was that sort of jealous man who, in the absence of the beloved woman,
at once invents all sorts of awful fancies of what may be happening to
her, and how she may be betraying him, but, when shaken, heartbroken,
convinced of her faithlessness, he runs back to her; at the first glance
at her face, her gay, laughing, affectionate face, he revives at once,
lays aside all suspicion and with joyful shame abuses himself for his
jealousy.

After leaving Grushenka at the gate he rushed home. Oh, he had so much
still to do that day! But a load had been lifted from his heart, anyway.

“Now I must only make haste and find out from Smerdyakov whether anything
happened there last night, whether, by any chance, she went to Fyodor
Pavlovitch; ough!” floated through his mind.

Before he had time to reach his lodging, jealousy had surged up again in
his restless heart.

Jealousy! “Othello was not jealous, he was trustful,” observed Pushkin.
And that remark alone is enough to show the deep insight of our great
poet. Othello’s soul was shattered and his whole outlook clouded simply
because _his ideal was destroyed_. But Othello did not begin hiding,
spying, peeping. He was trustful, on the contrary. He had to be led up,
pushed on, excited with great difficulty before he could entertain the
idea of deceit. The truly jealous man is not like that. It is impossible
to picture to oneself the shame and moral degradation to which the jealous
man can descend without a qualm of conscience. And yet it’s not as though
the jealous were all vulgar and base souls. On the contrary, a man of
lofty feelings, whose love is pure and full of self‐sacrifice, may yet
hide under tables, bribe the vilest people, and be familiar with the
lowest ignominy of spying and eavesdropping.

Othello was incapable of making up his mind to faithlessness—not incapable
of forgiving it, but of making up his mind to it—though his soul was as
innocent and free from malice as a babe’s. It is not so with the really
jealous man. It is hard to imagine what some jealous men can make up their
mind to and overlook, and what they can forgive! The jealous are the
readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it. The jealous man can
forgive extraordinarily quickly (though, of course, after a violent
scene), and he is able to forgive infidelity almost conclusively proved,
the very kisses and embraces he has seen, if only he can somehow be
convinced that it has all been “for the last time,” and that his rival
will vanish from that day forward, will depart to the ends of the earth,
or that he himself will carry her away somewhere, where that dreaded rival
will not get near her. Of course the reconciliation is only for an hour.
For, even if the rival did disappear next day, he would invent another one
and would be jealous of him. And one might wonder what there was in a love
that had to be so watched over, what a love could be worth that needed
such strenuous guarding. But that the jealous will never understand. And
yet among them are men of noble hearts. It is remarkable, too, that those
very men of noble hearts, standing hidden in some cupboard, listening and
spying, never feel the stings of conscience at that moment, anyway, though
they understand clearly enough with their “noble hearts” the shameful
depths to which they have voluntarily sunk.

At the sight of Grushenka, Mitya’s jealousy vanished, and, for an instant
he became trustful and generous, and positively despised himself for his
evil feelings. But it only proved that, in his love for the woman, there
was an element of something far higher than he himself imagined, that it
was not only a sensual passion, not only the “curve of her body,” of which
he had talked to Alyosha. But, as soon as Grushenka had gone, Mitya began
to suspect her of all the low cunning of faithlessness, and he felt no
sting of conscience at it.

And so jealousy surged up in him again. He had, in any case, to make
haste. The first thing to be done was to get hold of at least a small,
temporary loan of money. The nine roubles had almost all gone on his
expedition. And, as we all know, one can’t take a step without money. But
he had thought over in the cart where he could get a loan. He had a brace
of fine dueling pistols in a case, which he had not pawned till then
because he prized them above all his possessions.

In the “Metropolis” tavern he had some time since made acquaintance with a
young official and had learnt that this very opulent bachelor was
passionately fond of weapons. He used to buy pistols, revolvers, daggers,
hang them on his wall and show them to acquaintances. He prided himself on
them, and was quite a specialist on the mechanism of the revolver. Mitya,
without stopping to think, went straight to him, and offered to pawn his
pistols to him for ten roubles. The official, delighted, began trying to
persuade him to sell them outright. But Mitya would not consent, so the
young man gave him ten roubles, protesting that nothing would induce him
to take interest. They parted friends.

Mitya was in haste; he rushed towards Fyodor Pavlovitch’s by the back way,
to his arbor, to get hold of Smerdyakov as soon as possible. In this way
the fact was established that three or four hours before a certain event,
of which I shall speak later on, Mitya had not a farthing, and pawned for
ten roubles a possession he valued, though, three hours later, he was in
possession of thousands.... But I am anticipating. From Marya Kondratyevna
(the woman living near Fyodor Pavlovitch’s) he learned the very disturbing
fact of Smerdyakov’s illness. He heard the story of his fall in the
cellar, his fit, the doctor’s visit, Fyodor Pavlovitch’s anxiety; he heard
with interest, too, that his brother Ivan had set off that morning for
Moscow.

“Then he must have driven through Volovya before me,” thought Dmitri, but
he was terribly distressed about Smerdyakov. “What will happen now? Who’ll
keep watch for me? Who’ll bring me word?” he thought. He began greedily
questioning the women whether they had seen anything the evening before.
They quite understood what he was trying to find out, and completely
reassured him. No one had been there. Ivan Fyodorovitch had been there the
night; everything had been perfectly as usual. Mitya grew thoughtful. He
would certainly have to keep watch to‐day, but where? Here or at
Samsonov’s gate? He decided that he must be on the look out both here and
there, and meanwhile ... meanwhile.... The difficulty was that he had to
carry out the new plan that he had made on the journey back. He was sure
of its success, but he must not delay acting upon it. Mitya resolved to
sacrifice an hour to it: “In an hour I shall know everything, I shall
settle everything, and then, then, first of all to Samsonov’s. I’ll
inquire whether Grushenka’s there and instantly be back here again, stay
till eleven, and then to Samsonov’s again to bring her home.” This was
what he decided.

He flew home, washed, combed his hair, brushed his clothes, dressed, and
went to Madame Hohlakov’s. Alas! he had built his hopes on her. He had
resolved to borrow three thousand from that lady. And what was more, he
felt suddenly convinced that she would not refuse to lend it to him. It
may be wondered why, if he felt so certain, he had not gone to her at
first, one of his own sort, so to speak, instead of to Samsonov, a man he
did not know, who was not of his own class, and to whom he hardly knew how
to speak.

But the fact was that he had never known Madame Hohlakov well, and had
seen nothing of her for the last month, and that he knew she could not
endure him. She had detested him from the first because he was engaged to
Katerina Ivanovna, while she had, for some reason, suddenly conceived the
desire that Katerina Ivanovna should throw him over, and marry the
“charming, chivalrously refined Ivan, who had such excellent manners.”
Mitya’s manners she detested. Mitya positively laughed at her, and had
once said about her that she was just as lively and at her ease as she was
uncultivated. But that morning in the cart a brilliant idea had struck
him: “If she is so anxious I should not marry Katerina Ivanovna” (and he
knew she was positively hysterical upon the subject) “why should she
refuse me now that three thousand, just to enable me to leave Katya and
get away from her for ever. These spoilt fine ladies, if they set their
hearts on anything, will spare no expense to satisfy their caprice.
Besides, she’s so rich,” Mitya argued.

As for his “plan” it was just the same as before; it consisted of the
offer of his rights to Tchermashnya—but not with a commercial object, as
it had been with Samsonov, not trying to allure the lady with the
possibility of making a profit of six or seven thousand—but simply as a
security for the debt. As he worked out this new idea, Mitya was enchanted
with it, but so it always was with him in all his undertakings, in all his
sudden decisions. He gave himself up to every new idea with passionate
enthusiasm. Yet, when he mounted the steps of Madame Hohlakov’s house he
felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. At that moment he saw fully, as
a mathematical certainty, that this was his last hope, that if this broke
down, nothing else was left him in the world, but to “rob and murder some
one for the three thousand.” It was half‐past seven when he rang at the
bell.

At first fortune seemed to smile upon him. As soon as he was announced he
was received with extraordinary rapidity. “As though she were waiting for
me,” thought Mitya, and as soon as he had been led to the drawing‐room,
the lady of the house herself ran in, and declared at once that she was
expecting him.

“I was expecting you! I was expecting you! Though I’d no reason to suppose
you would come to see me, as you will admit yourself. Yet, I did expect
you. You may marvel at my instinct, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, but I was
convinced all the morning that you would come.”

“That is certainly wonderful, madam,” observed Mitya, sitting down limply,
“but I have come to you on a matter of great importance.... On a matter of
supreme importance for me, that is, madam ... for me alone ... and I
hasten—”

“I know you’ve come on most important business, Dmitri Fyodorovitch; it’s
not a case of presentiment, no reactionary harking back to the miraculous
(have you heard about Father Zossima?). This is a case of mathematics: you
couldn’t help coming, after all that has passed with Katerina Ivanovna;
you couldn’t, you couldn’t, that’s a mathematical certainty.”

“The realism of actual life, madam, that’s what it is. But allow me to
explain—”

“Realism indeed, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. I’m all for realism now. I’ve seen
too much of miracles. You’ve heard that Father Zossima is dead?”

“No, madam, it’s the first time I’ve heard of it.” Mitya was a little
surprised. The image of Alyosha rose to his mind.

“Last night, and only imagine—”

“Madam,” said Mitya, “I can imagine nothing except that I’m in a desperate
position, and that if you don’t help me, everything will come to grief,
and I first of all. Excuse me for the triviality of the expression, but
I’m in a fever—”

“I know, I know that you’re in a fever. You could hardly fail to be, and
whatever you may say to me, I know beforehand. I have long been thinking
over your destiny, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I am watching over it and studying
it.... Oh, believe me, I’m an experienced doctor of the soul, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch.”

“Madam, if you are an experienced doctor, I’m certainly an experienced
patient,” said Mitya, with an effort to be polite, “and I feel that if you
are watching over my destiny in this way, you will come to my help in my
ruin, and so allow me, at least to explain to you the plan with which I
have ventured to come to you ... and what I am hoping of you.... I have
come, madam—”

“Don’t explain it. It’s of secondary importance. But as for help, you’re
not the first I have helped, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You have most likely
heard of my cousin, Madame Belmesov. Her husband was ruined, ‘had come to
grief,’ as you characteristically express it, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. I
recommended him to take to horse‐breeding, and now he’s doing well. Have
you any idea of horse‐breeding, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?”

“Not the faintest, madam; ah, madam, not the faintest!” cried Mitya, in
nervous impatience, positively starting from his seat. “I simply implore
you, madam, to listen to me. Only give me two minutes of free speech that
I may just explain to you everything, the whole plan with which I have
come. Besides, I am short of time. I’m in a fearful hurry,” Mitya cried
hysterically, feeling that she was just going to begin talking again, and
hoping to cut her short. “I have come in despair ... in the last gasp of
despair, to beg you to lend me the sum of three thousand, a loan, but on
safe, most safe security, madam, with the most trustworthy guarantees!
Only let me explain—”

“You must tell me all that afterwards, afterwards!” Madame Hohlakov with a
gesture demanded silence in her turn, “and whatever you may tell me, I
know it all beforehand; I’ve told you so already. You ask for a certain
sum, for three thousand, but I can give you more, immeasurably more, I
will save you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, but you must listen to me.”

Mitya started from his seat again.

“Madam, will you really be so good!” he cried, with strong feeling. “Good
God, you’ve saved me! You have saved a man from a violent death, from a
bullet.... My eternal gratitude—”

“I will give you more, infinitely more than three thousand!” cried Madame
Hohlakov, looking with a radiant smile at Mitya’s ecstasy.

“Infinitely? But I don’t need so much. I only need that fatal three
thousand, and on my part I can give security for that sum with infinite
gratitude, and I propose a plan which—”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, it’s said and done.” Madame Hohlakov cut him
short, with the modest triumph of beneficence: “I have promised to save
you, and I will save you. I will save you as I did Belmesov. What do you
think of the gold‐mines, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?”

“Of the gold‐mines, madam? I have never thought anything about them.”

“But I have thought of them for you. Thought of them over and over again.
I have been watching you for the last month. I’ve watched you a hundred
times as you’ve walked past, saying to myself: That’s a man of energy who
ought to be at the gold‐mines. I’ve studied your gait and come to the
conclusion: that’s a man who would find gold.”

“From my gait, madam?” said Mitya, smiling.

“Yes, from your gait. You surely don’t deny that character can be told
from the gait, Dmitri Fyodorovitch? Science supports the idea. I’m all for
science and realism now. After all this business with Father Zossima,
which has so upset me, from this very day I’m a realist and I want to
devote myself to practical usefulness. I’m cured. ‘Enough!’ as Turgenev
says.”

“But, madam, the three thousand you so generously promised to lend me—”

“It is yours, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Madame Hohlakov cut in at once. “The
money is as good as in your pocket, not three thousand, but three million,
Dmitri Fyodorovitch, in less than no time. I’ll make you a present of the
idea: you shall find gold‐mines, make millions, return and become a
leading man, and wake us up and lead us to better things. Are we to leave
it all to the Jews? You will found institutions and enterprises of all
sorts. You will help the poor, and they will bless you. This is the age of
railways, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You’ll become famous and indispensable to
the Department of Finance, which is so badly off at present. The
depreciation of the rouble keeps me awake at night, Dmitri Fyodorovitch;
people don’t know that side of me—”

“Madam, madam!” Dmitri interrupted with an uneasy presentiment. “I shall
indeed, perhaps, follow your advice, your wise advice, madam.... I shall
perhaps set off ... to the gold‐mines.... I’ll come and see you again
about it ... many times, indeed ... but now, that three thousand you so
generously ... oh, that would set me free, and if you could to‐day ... you
see, I haven’t a minute, a minute to lose to‐day—”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, enough!” Madame Hohlakov interrupted
emphatically. “The question is, will you go to the gold‐mines or not; have
you quite made up your mind? Answer yes or no.”

“I will go, madam, afterwards.... I’ll go where you like ... but now—”

“Wait!” cried Madame Hohlakov. And jumping up and running to a handsome
bureau with numerous little drawers, she began pulling out one drawer
after another, looking for something with desperate haste.

“The three thousand,” thought Mitya, his heart almost stopping, “and at
the instant ... without any papers or formalities ... that’s doing things
in gentlemanly style! She’s a splendid woman, if only she didn’t talk so
much!”

“Here!” cried Madame Hohlakov, running back joyfully to Mitya, “here is
what I was looking for!”

It was a tiny silver ikon on a cord, such as is sometimes worn next the
skin with a cross.

“This is from Kiev, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” she went on reverently, “from
the relics of the Holy Martyr, Varvara. Let me put it on your neck myself,
and with it dedicate you to a new life, to a new career.”

And she actually put the cord round his neck, and began arranging it. In
extreme embarrassment, Mitya bent down and helped her, and at last he got
it under his neck‐tie and collar through his shirt to his chest.

“Now you can set off,” Madame Hohlakov pronounced, sitting down
triumphantly in her place again.

“Madam, I am so touched. I don’t know how to thank you, indeed ... for
such kindness, but ... If only you knew how precious time is to me....
That sum of money, for which I shall be indebted to your generosity....
Oh, madam, since you are so kind, so touchingly generous to me,” Mitya
exclaimed impulsively, “then let me reveal to you ... though, of course,
you’ve known it a long time ... that I love somebody here.... I have been
false to Katya ... Katerina Ivanovna I should say.... Oh, I’ve behaved
inhumanly, dishonorably to her, but I fell in love here with another woman
... a woman whom you, madam, perhaps, despise, for you know everything
already, but whom I cannot leave on any account, and therefore that three
thousand now—”

“Leave everything, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Madame Hohlakov interrupted in
the most decisive tone. “Leave everything, especially women. Gold‐mines
are your goal, and there’s no place for women there. Afterwards, when you
come back rich and famous, you will find the girl of your heart in the
highest society. That will be a modern girl, a girl of education and
advanced ideas. By that time the dawning woman question will have gained
ground, and the new woman will have appeared.”

“Madam, that’s not the point, not at all....” Mitya clasped his hands in
entreaty.

“Yes, it is, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, just what you need; the very thing
you’re yearning for, though you don’t realize it yourself. I am not at all
opposed to the present woman movement, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The
development of woman, and even the political emancipation of woman in the
near future—that’s my ideal. I’ve a daughter myself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
people don’t know that side of me. I wrote a letter to the author,
Shtchedrin, on that subject. He has taught me so much, so much about the
vocation of woman. So last year I sent him an anonymous letter of two
lines: ‘I kiss and embrace you, my teacher, for the modern woman.
Persevere.’ And I signed myself, ‘A Mother.’ I thought of signing myself
‘A contemporary Mother,’ and hesitated, but I stuck to the simple
‘Mother’; there’s more moral beauty in that, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. And the
word ‘contemporary’ might have reminded him of ‘_The Contemporary_’—a
painful recollection owing to the censorship.... Good Heavens, what is the
matter!”

“Madam!” cried Mitya, jumping up at last, clasping his hands before her in
helpless entreaty. “You will make me weep if you delay what you have so
generously—”

“Oh, do weep, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, do weep! That’s a noble feeling ...
such a path lies open before you! Tears will ease your heart, and later on
you will return rejoicing. You will hasten to me from Siberia on purpose
to share your joy with me—”

“But allow me, too!” Mitya cried suddenly. “For the last time I entreat
you, tell me, can I have the sum you promised me to‐day, if not, when may
I come for it?”

“What sum, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?”

“The three thousand you promised me ... that you so generously—”

“Three thousand? Roubles? Oh, no, I haven’t got three thousand,” Madame
Hohlakov announced with serene amazement. Mitya was stupefied.

“Why, you said just now ... you said ... you said it was as good as in my
hands—”

“Oh, no, you misunderstood me, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. In that case you
misunderstood me. I was talking of the gold‐mines. It’s true I promised
you more, infinitely more than three thousand, I remember it all now, but
I was referring to the gold‐mines.”

“But the money? The three thousand?” Mitya exclaimed, awkwardly.

“Oh, if you meant money, I haven’t any. I haven’t a penny, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch. I’m quarreling with my steward about it, and I’ve just
borrowed five hundred roubles from Miüsov, myself. No, no, I’ve no money.
And, do you know, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, if I had, I wouldn’t give it to
you. In the first place I never lend money. Lending money means losing
friends. And I wouldn’t give it to you particularly. I wouldn’t give it
you, because I like you and want to save you, for all you need is the
gold‐mines, the gold‐mines, the gold‐mines!”

“Oh, the devil!” roared Mitya, and with all his might brought his fist
down on the table.

“Aie! Aie!” cried Madame Hohlakov, alarmed, and she flew to the other end
of the drawing‐room.

Mitya spat on the ground, and strode rapidly out of the room, out of the
house, into the street, into the darkness! He walked like one possessed,
and beating himself on the breast, on the spot where he had struck himself
two days previously, before Alyosha, the last time he saw him in the dark,
on the road. What those blows upon his breast signified, _on that spot_,
and what he meant by it—that was, for the time, a secret which was known
to no one in the world, and had not been told even to Alyosha. But that
secret meant for him more than disgrace; it meant ruin, suicide. So he had
determined, if he did not get hold of the three thousand that would pay
his debt to Katerina Ivanovna, and so remove from his breast, from _that
spot on his breast_, the shame he carried upon it, that weighed on his
conscience. All this will be fully explained to the reader later on, but
now that his last hope had vanished, this man, so strong in appearance,
burst out crying like a little child a few steps from the Hohlakovs’
house. He walked on, and not knowing what he was doing, wiped away his
tears with his fist. In this way he reached the square, and suddenly
became aware that he had stumbled against something. He heard a piercing
wail from an old woman whom he had almost knocked down.

“Good Lord, you’ve nearly killed me! Why don’t you look where you’re
going, scapegrace?”

“Why, it’s you!” cried Mitya, recognizing the old woman in the dark. It
was the old servant who waited on Samsonov, whom Mitya had particularly
noticed the day before.

“And who are you, my good sir?” said the old woman, in quite a different
voice. “I don’t know you in the dark.”

“You live at Kuzma Kuzmitch’s. You’re the servant there?”

“Just so, sir, I was only running out to Prohoritch’s.... But I don’t know
you now.”

“Tell me, my good woman, is Agrafena Alexandrovna there now?” said Mitya,
beside himself with suspense. “I saw her to the house some time ago.”

“She has been there, sir. She stayed a little while, and went off again.”

“What? Went away?” cried Mitya. “When did she go?”

“Why, as soon as she came. She only stayed a minute. She only told Kuzma
Kuzmitch a tale that made him laugh, and then she ran away.”

“You’re lying, damn you!” roared Mitya.

“Aie! Aie!” shrieked the old woman, but Mitya had vanished.

He ran with all his might to the house where Grushenka lived. At the
moment he reached it, Grushenka was on her way to Mokroe. It was not more
than a quarter of an hour after her departure.

Fenya was sitting with her grandmother, the old cook, Matryona, in the
kitchen when “the captain” ran in. Fenya uttered a piercing shriek on
seeing him.

“You scream?” roared Mitya, “where is she?”

But without giving the terror‐stricken Fenya time to utter a word, he fell
all of a heap at her feet.

“Fenya, for Christ’s sake, tell me, where is she?”

“I don’t know. Dmitri Fyodorovitch, my dear, I don’t know. You may kill me
but I can’t tell you.” Fenya swore and protested. “You went out with her
yourself not long ago—”

“She came back!”

“Indeed she didn’t. By God I swear she didn’t come back.”

“You’re lying!” shouted Mitya. “From your terror I know where she is.”

He rushed away. Fenya in her fright was glad she had got off so easily.
But she knew very well that it was only that he was in such haste, or she
might not have fared so well. But as he ran, he surprised both Fenya and
old Matryona by an unexpected action. On the table stood a brass mortar,
with a pestle in it, a small brass pestle, not much more than six inches
long. Mitya already had opened the door with one hand when, with the
other, he snatched up the pestle, and thrust it in his side‐pocket.

“Oh, Lord! He’s going to murder some one!” cried Fenya, flinging up her
hands.



Chapter IV. In The Dark


Where was he running? “Where could she be except at Fyodor Pavlovitch’s?
She must have run straight to him from Samsonov’s, that was clear now. The
whole intrigue, the whole deceit was evident.” ... It all rushed whirling
through his mind. He did not run to Marya Kondratyevna’s. “There was no
need to go there ... not the slightest need ... he must raise no alarm ...
they would run and tell directly.... Marya Kondratyevna was clearly in the
plot, Smerdyakov too, he too, all had been bought over!”

He formed another plan of action: he ran a long way round Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s house, crossing the lane, running down Dmitrovsky Street,
then over the little bridge, and so came straight to the deserted alley at
the back, which was empty and uninhabited, with, on one side the hurdle
fence of a neighbor’s kitchen‐garden, on the other the strong high fence,
that ran all round Fyodor Pavlovitch’s garden. Here he chose a spot,
apparently the very place, where according to the tradition, he knew
Lizaveta had once climbed over it: “If she could climb over it,” the
thought, God knows why, occurred to him, “surely I can.” He did in fact
jump up, and instantly contrived to catch hold of the top of the fence.
Then he vigorously pulled himself up and sat astride on it. Close by, in
the garden stood the bath‐house, but from the fence he could see the
lighted windows of the house too.

“Yes, the old man’s bedroom is lighted up. She’s there!” and he leapt from
the fence into the garden. Though he knew Grigory was ill and very likely
Smerdyakov, too, and that there was no one to hear him, he instinctively
hid himself, stood still, and began to listen. But there was dead silence
on all sides and, as though of design, complete stillness, not the
slightest breath of wind.

“And naught but the whispering silence,” the line for some reason rose to
his mind. “If only no one heard me jump over the fence! I think not.”
Standing still for a minute, he walked softly over the grass in the
garden, avoiding the trees and shrubs. He walked slowly, creeping
stealthily at every step, listening to his own footsteps. It took him five
minutes to reach the lighted window. He remembered that just under the
window there were several thick and high bushes of elder and whitebeam.
The door from the house into the garden on the left‐hand side, was shut;
he had carefully looked on purpose to see, in passing. At last he reached
the bushes and hid behind them. He held his breath. “I must wait now,” he
thought, “to reassure them, in case they heard my footsteps and are
listening ... if only I don’t cough or sneeze.”

He waited two minutes. His heart was beating violently, and, at moments,
he could scarcely breathe. “No, this throbbing at my heart won’t stop,” he
thought. “I can’t wait any longer.” He was standing behind a bush in the
shadow. The light of the window fell on the front part of the bush.

“How red the whitebeam berries are!” he murmured, not knowing why. Softly
and noiselessly, step by step, he approached the window, and raised
himself on tiptoe. All Fyodor Pavlovitch’s bedroom lay open before him. It
was not a large room, and was divided in two parts by a red screen,
“Chinese,” as Fyodor Pavlovitch used to call it. The word “Chinese”
flashed into Mitya’s mind, “and behind the screen, is Grushenka,” thought
Mitya. He began watching Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was wearing his new
striped‐silk dressing‐gown, which Mitya had never seen, and a silk cord
with tassels round the waist. A clean, dandified shirt of fine linen with
gold studs peeped out under the collar of the dressing‐gown. On his head
Fyodor Pavlovitch had the same red bandage which Alyosha had seen.

“He has got himself up,” thought Mitya.

His father was standing near the window, apparently lost in thought.
Suddenly he jerked up his head, listened a moment, and hearing nothing
went up to the table, poured out half a glass of brandy from a decanter
and drank it off. Then he uttered a deep sigh, again stood still a moment,
walked carelessly up to the looking‐glass on the wall, with his right hand
raised the red bandage on his forehead a little, and began examining his
bruises and scars, which had not yet disappeared.

“He’s alone,” thought Mitya, “in all probability he’s alone.”

Fyodor Pavlovitch moved away from the looking‐glass, turned suddenly to
the window and looked out. Mitya instantly slipped away into the shadow.

“She may be there behind the screen. Perhaps she’s asleep by now,” he
thought, with a pang at his heart. Fyodor Pavlovitch moved away from the
window. “He’s looking for her out of the window, so she’s not there. Why
should he stare out into the dark? He’s wild with impatience.” ... Mitya
slipped back at once, and fell to gazing in at the window again. The old
man was sitting down at the table, apparently disappointed. At last he put
his elbow on the table, and laid his right cheek against his hand. Mitya
watched him eagerly.

“He’s alone, he’s alone!” he repeated again. “If she were here, his face
would be different.”

Strange to say, a queer, irrational vexation rose up in his heart that she
was not here. “It’s not that she’s not here,” he explained to himself,
immediately, “but that I can’t tell for certain whether she is or not.”
Mitya remembered afterwards that his mind was at that moment exceptionally
clear, that he took in everything to the slightest detail, and missed no
point. But a feeling of misery, the misery of uncertainty and indecision,
was growing in his heart with every instant. “Is she here or not?” The
angry doubt filled his heart, and suddenly, making up his mind, he put out
his hand and softly knocked on the window frame. He knocked the signal the
old man had agreed upon with Smerdyakov, twice slowly and then three times
more quickly, the signal that meant “Grushenka is here!”

The old man started, jerked up his head, and, jumping up quickly, ran to
the window. Mitya slipped away into the shadow. Fyodor Pavlovitch opened
the window and thrust his whole head out.

“Grushenka, is it you? Is it you?” he said, in a sort of trembling half‐
whisper. “Where are you, my angel, where are you?” He was fearfully
agitated and breathless.

“He’s alone.” Mitya decided.

“Where are you?” cried the old man again; and he thrust his head out
farther, thrust it out to the shoulders, gazing in all directions, right
and left. “Come here, I’ve a little present for you. Come, I’ll show
you....”

“He means the three thousand,” thought Mitya.

“But where are you? Are you at the door? I’ll open it directly.”

And the old man almost climbed out of the window, peering out to the
right, where there was a door into the garden, trying to see into the
darkness. In another second he would certainly have run out to open the
door without waiting for Grushenka’s answer.

Mitya looked at him from the side without stirring. The old man’s profile
that he loathed so, his pendent Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, his lips
that smiled in greedy expectation, were all brightly lighted up by the
slanting lamplight falling on the left from the room. A horrible fury of
hatred suddenly surged up in Mitya’s heart: “There he was, his rival, the
man who had tormented him, had ruined his life!” It was a rush of that
sudden, furious, revengeful anger of which he had spoken, as though
foreseeing it, to Alyosha, four days ago in the arbor, when, in answer to
Alyosha’s question, “How can you say you’ll kill our father?” “I don’t
know, I don’t know,” he had said then. “Perhaps I shall not kill him,
perhaps I shall. I’m afraid he’ll suddenly be so loathsome to me at that
moment. I hate his double chin, his nose, his eyes, his shameless grin. I
feel a personal repulsion. That’s what I’m afraid of, that’s what may be
too much for me.” ... This personal repulsion was growing unendurable.
Mitya was beside himself, he suddenly pulled the brass pestle out of his
pocket.

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

“God was watching over me then,” Mitya himself said afterwards. At that
very moment Grigory waked up on his bed of sickness. Earlier in the
evening he had undergone the treatment which Smerdyakov had described to
Ivan. He had rubbed himself all over with vodka mixed with a secret, very
strong decoction, had drunk what was left of the mixture while his wife
repeated a “certain prayer” over him, after which he had gone to bed.
Marfa Ignatyevna had tasted the stuff, too, and, being unused to strong
drink, slept like the dead beside her husband.

But Grigory waked up in the night, quite suddenly, and, after a moment’s
reflection, though he immediately felt a sharp pain in his back, he sat up
in bed. Then he deliberated again, got up and dressed hurriedly. Perhaps
his conscience was uneasy at the thought of sleeping while the house was
unguarded “in such perilous times.” Smerdyakov, exhausted by his fit, lay
motionless in the next room. Marfa Ignatyevna did not stir. “The stuff’s
been too much for the woman,” Grigory thought, glancing at her, and
groaning, he went out on the steps. No doubt he only intended to look out
from the steps, for he was hardly able to walk, the pain in his back and
his right leg was intolerable. But he suddenly remembered that he had not
locked the little gate into the garden that evening. He was the most
punctual and precise of men, a man who adhered to an unchangeable routine,
and habits that lasted for years. Limping and writhing with pain he went
down the steps and towards the garden. Yes, the gate stood wide open.
Mechanically he stepped into the garden. Perhaps he fancied something,
perhaps caught some sound, and, glancing to the left he saw his master’s
window open. No one was looking out of it then.

“What’s it open for? It’s not summer now,” thought Grigory, and suddenly,
at that very instant he caught a glimpse of something extraordinary before
him in the garden. Forty paces in front of him a man seemed to be running
in the dark, a sort of shadow was moving very fast.

“Good Lord!” cried Grigory beside himself, and forgetting the pain in his
back, he hurried to intercept the running figure. He took a short cut,
evidently he knew the garden better; the flying figure went towards the
bath‐house, ran behind it and rushed to the garden fence. Grigory
followed, not losing sight of him, and ran, forgetting everything. He
reached the fence at the very moment the man was climbing over it. Grigory
cried out, beside himself, pounced on him, and clutched his leg in his two
hands.

Yes, his foreboding had not deceived him. He recognized him, it was he,
the “monster,” the “parricide.”

“Parricide!” the old man shouted so that the whole neighborhood could
hear, but he had not time to shout more, he fell at once, as though struck
by lightning.

Mitya jumped back into the garden and bent over the fallen man. In Mitya’s
hands was a brass pestle, and he flung it mechanically in the grass. The
pestle fell two paces from Grigory, not in the grass but on the path, in a
most conspicuous place. For some seconds he examined the prostrate figure
before him. The old man’s head was covered with blood. Mitya put out his
hand and began feeling it. He remembered afterwards clearly, that he had
been awfully anxious to make sure whether he had broken the old man’s
skull, or simply stunned him with the pestle. But the blood was flowing
horribly; and in a moment Mitya’s fingers were drenched with the hot
stream. He remembered taking out of his pocket the clean white
handkerchief with which he had provided himself for his visit to Madame
Hohlakov, and putting it to the old man’s head, senselessly trying to wipe
the blood from his face and temples. But the handkerchief was instantly
soaked with blood.

“Good heavens! what am I doing it for?” thought Mitya, suddenly pulling
himself together. “If I have broken his skull, how can I find out now? And
what difference does it make now?” he added, hopelessly. “If I’ve killed
him, I’ve killed him.... You’ve come to grief, old man, so there you must
lie!” he said aloud. And suddenly turning to the fence, he vaulted over it
into the lane and fell to running—the handkerchief soaked with blood he
held, crushed up in his right fist, and as he ran he thrust it into the
back pocket of his coat. He ran headlong, and the few passers‐by who met
him in the dark, in the streets, remembered afterwards that they had met a
man running that night. He flew back again to the widow Morozov’s house.

Immediately after he had left it that evening, Fenya had rushed to the
chief porter, Nazar Ivanovitch, and besought him, for Christ’s sake, “not
to let the captain in again to‐day or to‐morrow.” Nazar Ivanovitch
promised, but went upstairs to his mistress who had suddenly sent for him,
and meeting his nephew, a boy of twenty, who had recently come from the
country, on the way up told him to take his place, but forgot to mention
“the captain.” Mitya, running up to the gate, knocked. The lad instantly
recognized him, for Mitya had more than once tipped him. Opening the gate
at once, he let him in, and hastened to inform him with a good‐humored
smile that “Agrafena Alexandrovna is not at home now, you know.”

“Where is she then, Prohor?” asked Mitya, stopping short.

“She set off this evening, some two hours ago, with Timofey, to Mokroe.”

“What for?” cried Mitya.

“That I can’t say. To see some officer. Some one invited her and horses
were sent to fetch her.”

Mitya left him, and ran like a madman to Fenya.



Chapter V. A Sudden Resolution


She was sitting in the kitchen with her grandmother; they were both just
going to bed. Relying on Nazar Ivanovitch, they had not locked themselves
in. Mitya ran in, pounced on Fenya and seized her by the throat.

“Speak at once! Where is she? With whom is she now, at Mokroe?” he roared
furiously.

Both the women squealed.

“Aie! I’ll tell you. Aie! Dmitri Fyodorovitch, darling, I’ll tell you
everything directly, I won’t hide anything,” gabbled Fenya, frightened to
death; “she’s gone to Mokroe, to her officer.”

“What officer?” roared Mitya.

“To her officer, the same one she used to know, the one who threw her over
five years ago,” cackled Fenya, as fast as she could speak.

Mitya withdrew the hands with which he was squeezing her throat. He stood
facing her, pale as death, unable to utter a word, but his eyes showed
that he realized it all, all, from the first word, and guessed the whole
position. Poor Fenya was not in a condition at that moment to observe
whether he understood or not. She remained sitting on the trunk as she had
been when he ran into the room, trembling all over, holding her hands out
before her as though trying to defend herself. She seemed to have grown
rigid in that position. Her wide‐opened, scared eyes were fixed immovably
upon him. And to make matters worse, both his hands were smeared with
blood. On the way, as he ran, he must have touched his forehead with them,
wiping off the perspiration, so that on his forehead and his right cheek
were blood‐stained patches. Fenya was on the verge of hysterics. The old
cook had jumped up and was staring at him like a mad woman, almost
unconscious with terror.

Mitya stood for a moment, then mechanically sank on to a chair next to
Fenya. He sat, not reflecting but, as it were, terror‐stricken, benumbed.
Yet everything was clear as day: that officer, he knew about him, he knew
everything perfectly, he had known it from Grushenka herself, had known
that a letter had come from him a month before. So that for a month, for a
whole month, this had been going on, a secret from him, till the very
arrival of this new man, and he had never thought of him! But how could
he, how could he not have thought of him? Why was it he had forgotten this
officer, like that, forgotten him as soon as he heard of him? That was the
question that faced him like some monstrous thing. And he looked at this
monstrous thing with horror, growing cold with horror.

But suddenly, as gently and mildly as a gentle and affectionate child, he
began speaking to Fenya as though he had utterly forgotten how he had
scared and hurt her just now. He fell to questioning Fenya with an extreme
preciseness, astonishing in his position, and though the girl looked
wildly at his blood‐stained hands, she, too, with wonderful readiness and
rapidity, answered every question as though eager to put the whole truth
and nothing but the truth before him. Little by little, even with a sort
of enjoyment, she began explaining every detail, not wanting to torment
him, but, as it were, eager to be of the utmost service to him. She
described the whole of that day, in great detail, the visit of Rakitin and
Alyosha, how she, Fenya, had stood on the watch, how the mistress had set
off, and how she had called out of the window to Alyosha to give him,
Mitya, her greetings, and to tell him “to remember for ever how she had
loved him for an hour.”

Hearing of the message, Mitya suddenly smiled, and there was a flush of
color on his pale cheeks. At the same moment Fenya said to him, not a bit
afraid now to be inquisitive:

“Look at your hands, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. They’re all over blood!”

“Yes,” answered Mitya mechanically. He looked carelessly at his hands and
at once forgot them and Fenya’s question.

He sank into silence again. Twenty minutes had passed since he had run in.
His first horror was over, but evidently some new fixed determination had
taken possession of him. He suddenly stood up, smiling dreamily.

“What has happened to you, sir?” said Fenya, pointing to his hands again.
She spoke compassionately, as though she felt very near to him now in his
grief. Mitya looked at his hands again.

“That’s blood, Fenya,” he said, looking at her with a strange expression.
“That’s human blood, and my God! why was it shed? But ... Fenya ...
there’s a fence here” (he looked at her as though setting her a riddle),
“a high fence, and terrible to look at. But at dawn to‐morrow, when the
sun rises, Mitya will leap over that fence.... You don’t understand what
fence, Fenya, and, never mind.... You’ll hear to‐morrow and understand ...
and now, good‐by. I won’t stand in her way. I’ll step aside, I know how to
step aside. Live, my joy.... You loved me for an hour, remember Mityenka
Karamazov so for ever.... She always used to call me Mityenka, do you
remember?”

And with those words he went suddenly out of the kitchen. Fenya was almost
more frightened at this sudden departure than she had been when he ran in
and attacked her.

Just ten minutes later Dmitri went in to Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin, the young
official with whom he had pawned his pistols. It was by now half‐past
eight, and Pyotr Ilyitch had finished his evening tea, and had just put
his coat on again to go to the “Metropolis” to play billiards. Mitya
caught him coming out.

Seeing him with his face all smeared with blood, the young man uttered a
cry of surprise.

“Good heavens! What is the matter?”

“I’ve come for my pistols,” said Mitya, “and brought you the money. And
thanks very much. I’m in a hurry, Pyotr Ilyitch, please make haste.”

Pyotr Ilyitch grew more and more surprised; he suddenly caught sight of a
bundle of bank‐notes in Mitya’s hand, and what was more, he had walked in
holding the notes as no one walks in and no one carries money: he had them
in his right hand, and held them outstretched as if to show them.
Perhotin’s servant‐boy, who met Mitya in the passage, said afterwards that
he walked into the passage in the same way, with the money outstretched in
his hand, so he must have been carrying them like that even in the
streets. They were all rainbow‐colored hundred‐rouble notes, and the
fingers holding them were covered with blood.

When Pyotr Ilyitch was questioned later on as to the sum of money, he said
that it was difficult to judge at a glance, but that it might have been
two thousand, or perhaps three, but it was a big, “fat” bundle. “Dmitri
Fyodorovitch,” so he testified afterwards, “seemed unlike himself, too;
not drunk, but, as it were, exalted, lost to everything, but at the same
time, as it were, absorbed, as though pondering and searching for
something and unable to come to a decision. He was in great haste,
answered abruptly and very strangely, and at moments seemed not at all
dejected but quite cheerful.”

“But what _is_ the matter with you? What’s wrong?” cried Pyotr Ilyitch,
looking wildly at his guest. “How is it that you’re all covered with
blood? Have you had a fall? Look at yourself!”

He took him by the elbow and led him to the glass.

Seeing his blood‐stained face, Mitya started and scowled wrathfully.

“Damnation! That’s the last straw,” he muttered angrily, hurriedly
changing the notes from his right hand to the left, and impulsively jerked
the handkerchief out of his pocket. But the handkerchief turned out to be
soaked with blood, too (it was the handkerchief he had used to wipe
Grigory’s face). There was scarcely a white spot on it, and it had not
merely begun to dry, but had stiffened into a crumpled ball and could not
be pulled apart. Mitya threw it angrily on the floor.

“Oh, damn it!” he said. “Haven’t you a rag of some sort ... to wipe my
face?”

“So you’re only stained, not wounded? You’d better wash,” said Pyotr
Ilyitch. “Here’s a wash‐stand. I’ll pour you out some water.”

“A wash‐stand? That’s all right ... but where am I to put this?”

With the strangest perplexity he indicated his bundle of hundred‐rouble
notes, looking inquiringly at Pyotr Ilyitch as though it were for him to
decide what he, Mitya, was to do with his own money.

“In your pocket, or on the table here. They won’t be lost.”

“In my pocket? Yes, in my pocket. All right.... But, I say, that’s all
nonsense,” he cried, as though suddenly coming out of his absorption.
“Look here, let’s first settle that business of the pistols. Give them
back to me. Here’s your money ... because I am in great need of them ...
and I haven’t a minute, a minute to spare.”

And taking the topmost note from the bundle he held it out to Pyotr
Ilyitch.

“But I shan’t have change enough. Haven’t you less?”

“No,” said Mitya, looking again at the bundle, and as though not trusting
his own words he turned over two or three of the topmost ones.

“No, they’re all alike,” he added, and again he looked inquiringly at
Pyotr Ilyitch.

“How have you grown so rich?” the latter asked. “Wait, I’ll send my boy to
Plotnikov’s, they close late—to see if they won’t change it. Here, Misha!”
he called into the passage.

“To Plotnikov’s shop—first‐rate!” cried Mitya, as though struck by an
idea. “Misha,” he turned to the boy as he came in, “look here, run to
Plotnikov’s and tell them that Dmitri Fyodorovitch sends his greetings,
and will be there directly.... But listen, listen, tell them to have
champagne, three dozen bottles, ready before I come, and packed as it was
to take to Mokroe. I took four dozen with me then,” he added (suddenly
addressing Pyotr Ilyitch); “they know all about it, don’t you trouble,
Misha,” he turned again to the boy. “Stay, listen; tell them to put in
cheese, Strasburg pies, smoked fish, ham, caviare, and everything,
everything they’ve got, up to a hundred roubles, or a hundred and twenty
as before.... But wait: don’t let them forget dessert, sweets, pears,
water‐melons, two or three or four—no, one melon’s enough, and chocolate,
candy, toffee, fondants; in fact, everything I took to Mokroe before,
three hundred roubles’ worth with the champagne ... let it be just the
same again. And remember, Misha, if you are called Misha—His name is
Misha, isn’t it?” He turned to Pyotr Ilyitch again.

“Wait a minute,” Protr Ilyitch intervened, listening and watching him
uneasily, “you’d better go yourself and tell them. He’ll muddle it.”

“He will, I see he will! Eh, Misha! Why, I was going to kiss you for the
commission.... If you don’t make a mistake, there’s ten roubles for you,
run along, make haste.... Champagne’s the chief thing, let them bring up
champagne. And brandy, too, and red and white wine, and all I had then....
They know what I had then.”

“But listen!” Pyotr Ilyitch interrupted with some impatience. “I say, let
him simply run and change the money and tell them not to close, and you go
and tell them.... Give him your note. Be off, Misha! Put your best leg
forward!”

Pyotr Ilyitch seemed to hurry Misha off on purpose, because the boy
remained standing with his mouth and eyes wide open, apparently
understanding little of Mitya’s orders, gazing up with amazement and
terror at his blood‐stained face and the trembling bloodstained fingers
that held the notes.

“Well, now come and wash,” said Pyotr Ilyitch sternly. “Put the money on
the table or else in your pocket.... That’s right, come along. But take
off your coat.”

And beginning to help him off with his coat, he cried out again:

“Look, your coat’s covered with blood, too!”

“That ... it’s not the coat. It’s only a little here on the sleeve.... And
that’s only here where the handkerchief lay. It must have soaked through.
I must have sat on the handkerchief at Fenya’s, and the blood’s come
through,” Mitya explained at once with a childlike unconsciousness that
was astounding. Pyotr Ilyitch listened, frowning.

“Well, you must have been up to something; you must have been fighting
with some one,” he muttered.

They began to wash. Pyotr Ilyitch held the jug and poured out the water.
Mitya, in desperate haste, scarcely soaped his hands (they were trembling,
and Pyotr Ilyitch remembered it afterwards). But the young official
insisted on his soaping them thoroughly and rubbing them more. He seemed
to exercise more and more sway over Mitya, as time went on. It may be
noted in passing that he was a young man of sturdy character.

“Look, you haven’t got your nails clean. Now rub your face; here, on your
temples, by your ear.... Will you go in that shirt? Where are you going?
Look, all the cuff of your right sleeve is covered with blood.”

“Yes, it’s all bloody,” observed Mitya, looking at the cuff of his shirt.

“Then change your shirt.”

“I haven’t time. You see I’ll ...” Mitya went on with the same confiding
ingenuousness, drying his face and hands on the towel, and putting on his
coat. “I’ll turn it up at the wrist. It won’t be seen under the coat....
You see!”

“Tell me now, what game have you been up to? Have you been fighting with
some one? In the tavern again, as before? Have you been beating that
captain again?” Pyotr Ilyitch asked him reproachfully. “Whom have you been
beating now ... or killing, perhaps?”

“Nonsense!” said Mitya.

“Why ‘nonsense’?”

“Don’t worry,” said Mitya, and he suddenly laughed. “I smashed an old
woman in the market‐place just now.”

“Smashed? An old woman?”

“An old man!” cried Mitya, looking Pyotr Ilyitch straight in the face,
laughing, and shouting at him as though he were deaf.

“Confound it! An old woman, an old man.... Have you killed some one?”

“We made it up. We had a row—and made it up. In a place I know of. We
parted friends. A fool.... He’s forgiven me.... He’s sure to have forgiven
me by now ... if he had got up, he wouldn’t have forgiven me”—Mitya
suddenly winked—“only damn him, you know, I say, Pyotr Ilyitch, damn him!
Don’t worry about him! I don’t want to just now!” Mitya snapped out,
resolutely.

“Whatever do you want to go picking quarrels with every one for? ... Just
as you did with that captain over some nonsense.... You’ve been fighting
and now you’re rushing off on the spree—that’s you all over! Three dozen
champagne—what do you want all that for?”

“Bravo! Now give me the pistols. Upon my honor I’ve no time now. I should
like to have a chat with you, my dear boy, but I haven’t the time. And
there’s no need, it’s too late for talking. Where’s my money? Where have I
put it?” he cried, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

“You put it on the table ... yourself.... Here it is. Had you forgotten?
Money’s like dirt or water to you, it seems. Here are your pistols. It’s
an odd thing, at six o’clock you pledged them for ten roubles, and now
you’ve got thousands. Two or three I should say.”

“Three, you bet,” laughed Mitya, stuffing the notes into the side‐pocket
of his trousers.

“You’ll lose it like that. Have you found a gold‐mine?”

“The mines? The gold‐mines?” Mitya shouted at the top of his voice and
went off into a roar of laughter. “Would you like to go to the mines,
Perhotin? There’s a lady here who’ll stump up three thousand for you, if
only you’ll go. She did it for me, she’s so awfully fond of gold‐mines. Do
you know Madame Hohlakov?”

“I don’t know her, but I’ve heard of her and seen her. Did she really give
you three thousand? Did she really?” said Pyotr Ilyitch, eyeing him
dubiously.

“As soon as the sun rises to‐morrow, as soon as Phœbus, ever young, flies
upwards, praising and glorifying God, you go to her, this Madame Hohlakov,
and ask her whether she did stump up that three thousand or not. Try and
find out.”

“I don’t know on what terms you are ... since you say it so positively, I
suppose she did give it to you. You’ve got the money in your hand, but
instead of going to Siberia you’re spending it all.... Where are you
really off to now, eh?”

“To Mokroe.”

“To Mokroe? But it’s night!”

“Once the lad had all, now the lad has naught,” cried Mitya suddenly.

“How ‘naught’? You say that with all those thousands!”

“I’m not talking about thousands. Damn thousands! I’m talking of the
female character.


    Fickle is the heart of woman
    Treacherous and full of vice;


I agree with Ulysses. That’s what he says.”

“I don’t understand you!”

“Am I drunk?”

“Not drunk, but worse.”

“I’m drunk in spirit, Pyotr Ilyitch, drunk in spirit! But that’s enough!”

“What are you doing, loading the pistol?”

“I’m loading the pistol.”

Unfastening the pistol‐case, Mitya actually opened the powder horn, and
carefully sprinkled and rammed in the charge. Then he took the bullet and,
before inserting it, held it in two fingers in front of the candle.

“Why are you looking at the bullet?” asked Pyotr Ilyitch, watching him
with uneasy curiosity.

“Oh, a fancy. Why, if you meant to put that bullet in your brain, would
you look at it or not?”

“Why look at it?”

“It’s going into my brain, so it’s interesting to look and see what it’s
like. But that’s foolishness, a moment’s foolishness. Now that’s done,” he
added, putting in the bullet and driving it home with the ramrod. “Pyotr
Ilyitch, my dear fellow, that’s nonsense, all nonsense, and if only you
knew what nonsense! Give me a little piece of paper now.”

“Here’s some paper.”

“No, a clean new piece, writing‐paper. That’s right.”

And taking a pen from the table, Mitya rapidly wrote two lines, folded the
paper in four, and thrust it in his waistcoat pocket. He put the pistols
in the case, locked it up, and kept it in his hand. Then he looked at
Pyotr Ilyitch with a slow, thoughtful smile.

“Now, let’s go.”

“Where are we going? No, wait a minute.... Are you thinking of putting
that bullet in your brain, perhaps?” Pyotr Ilyitch asked uneasily.

“I was fooling about the bullet! I want to live. I love life! You may be
sure of that. I love golden‐haired Phœbus and his warm light.... Dear
Pyotr Ilyitch, do you know how to step aside?”

“What do you mean by ‘stepping aside’?”

“Making way. Making way for a dear creature, and for one I hate. And to
let the one I hate become dear—that’s what making way means! And to say to
them: God bless you, go your way, pass on, while I—”

“While you—?”

“That’s enough, let’s go.”

“Upon my word. I’ll tell some one to prevent your going there,” said Pyotr
Ilyitch, looking at him. “What are you going to Mokroe for, now?”

“There’s a woman there, a woman. That’s enough for you. You shut up.”

“Listen, though you’re such a savage I’ve always liked you.... I feel
anxious.”

“Thanks, old fellow. I’m a savage you say. Savages, savages! That’s what I
am always saying. Savages! Why, here’s Misha! I was forgetting him.”

Misha ran in, post‐haste, with a handful of notes in change, and reported
that every one was in a bustle at the Plotnikovs’; “They’re carrying down
the bottles, and the fish, and the tea; it will all be ready directly.”
Mitya seized ten roubles and handed it to Pyotr Ilyitch, then tossed
another ten‐rouble note to Misha.

“Don’t dare to do such a thing!” cried Pyotr Ilyitch. “I won’t have it in
my house, it’s a bad, demoralizing habit. Put your money away. Here, put
it here, why waste it? It would come in handy to‐morrow, and I dare say
you’ll be coming to me to borrow ten roubles again. Why do you keep
putting the notes in your side‐pocket? Ah, you’ll lose them!”

“I say, my dear fellow, let’s go to Mokroe together.”

“What should I go for?”

“I say, let’s open a bottle at once, and drink to life! I want to drink,
and especially to drink with you. I’ve never drunk with you, have I?”

“Very well, we can go to the ‘Metropolis.’ I was just going there.”

“I haven’t time for that. Let’s drink at the Plotnikovs’, in the back
room. Shall I ask you a riddle?”

“Ask away.”

Mitya took the piece of paper out of his waistcoat pocket, unfolded it and
showed it. In a large, distinct hand was written: “I punish myself for my
whole life, my whole life I punish!”

“I will certainly speak to some one, I’ll go at once,” said Pyotr Ilyitch,
after reading the paper.

“You won’t have time, dear boy, come and have a drink. March!”

Plotnikov’s shop was at the corner of the street, next door but one to
Pyotr Ilyitch’s. It was the largest grocery shop in our town, and by no
means a bad one, belonging to some rich merchants. They kept everything
that could be got in a Petersburg shop, grocery of all sort, wines
“bottled by the brothers Eliseyev,” fruits, cigars, tea, coffee, sugar,
and so on. There were three shop‐assistants and two errand boys always
employed. Though our part of the country had grown poorer, the landowners
had gone away, and trade had got worse, yet the grocery stores flourished
as before, every year with increasing prosperity; there were plenty of
purchasers for their goods.

They were awaiting Mitya with impatience in the shop. They had vivid
recollections of how he had bought, three or four weeks ago, wine and
goods of all sorts to the value of several hundred roubles, paid for in
cash (they would never have let him have anything on credit, of course).
They remembered that then, as now, he had had a bundle of hundred‐rouble
notes in his hand, and had scattered them at random, without bargaining,
without reflecting, or caring to reflect what use so much wine and
provisions would be to him. The story was told all over the town that,
driving off then with Grushenka to Mokroe, he had “spent three thousand in
one night and the following day, and had come back from the spree without
a penny.” He had picked up a whole troop of gypsies (encamped in our
neighborhood at the time), who for two days got money without stint out of
him while he was drunk, and drank expensive wine without stint. People
used to tell, laughing at Mitya, how he had given champagne to grimy‐
handed peasants, and feasted the village women and girls on sweets and
Strasburg pies. Though to laugh at Mitya to his face was rather a risky
proceeding, there was much laughter behind his back, especially in the
tavern, at his own ingenuous public avowal that all he had got out of
Grushenka by this “escapade” was “permission to kiss her foot, and that
was the utmost she had allowed him.”

By the time Mitya and Pyotr Ilyitch reached the shop, they found a cart
with three horses harnessed abreast with bells, and with Andrey, the
driver, ready waiting for Mitya at the entrance. In the shop they had
almost entirely finished packing one box of provisions, and were only
waiting for Mitya’s arrival to nail it down and put it in the cart. Pyotr
Ilyitch was astounded.

“Where did this cart come from in such a hurry?” he asked Mitya.

“I met Andrey as I ran to you, and told him to drive straight here to the
shop. There’s no time to lose. Last time I drove with Timofey, but Timofey
now has gone on before me with the witch. Shall we be very late, Andrey?”

“They’ll only get there an hour at most before us, not even that maybe. I
got Timofey ready to start. I know how he’ll go. Their pace won’t be ours,
Dmitri Fyodorovitch. How could it be? They won’t get there an hour
earlier!” Andrey, a lanky, red‐haired, middle‐aged driver, wearing a full‐
skirted coat, and with a kaftan on his arm, replied warmly.

“Fifty roubles for vodka if we’re only an hour behind them.”

“I warrant the time, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. Ech, they won’t be half an hour
before us, let alone an hour.”

Though Mitya bustled about seeing after things, he gave his orders
strangely, as it were disconnectedly, and inconsecutively. He began a
sentence and forgot the end of it. Pyotr Ilyitch found himself obliged to
come to the rescue.

“Four hundred roubles’ worth, not less than four hundred roubles’ worth,
just as it was then,” commanded Mitya. “Four dozen champagne, not a bottle
less.”

“What do you want with so much? What’s it for? Stay!” cried Pyotr Ilyitch.
“What’s this box? What’s in it? Surely there isn’t four hundred roubles’
worth here?”

The officious shopmen began explaining with oily politeness that the first
box contained only half a dozen bottles of champagne, and only “the most
indispensable articles,” such as savories, sweets, toffee, etc. But the
main part of the goods ordered would be packed and sent off, as on the
previous occasion, in a special cart also with three horses traveling at
full speed, so that it would arrive not more than an hour later than
Dmitri Fyodorovitch himself.

“Not more than an hour! Not more than an hour! And put in more toffee and
fondants. The girls there are so fond of it,” Mitya insisted hotly.

“The fondants are all right. But what do you want with four dozen of
champagne? One would be enough,” said Pyotr Ilyitch, almost angry. He
began bargaining, asking for a bill of the goods, and refused to be
satisfied. But he only succeeded in saving a hundred roubles. In the end
it was agreed that only three hundred roubles’ worth should be sent.

“Well, you may go to the devil!” cried Pyotr Ilyitch, on second thoughts.
“What’s it to do with me? Throw away your money, since it’s cost you
nothing.”

“This way, my economist, this way, don’t be angry.” Mitya drew him into a
room at the back of the shop. “They’ll give us a bottle here directly.
We’ll taste it. Ech, Pyotr Ilyitch, come along with me, for you’re a nice
fellow, the sort I like.”

Mitya sat down on a wicker chair, before a little table, covered with a
dirty dinner‐napkin. Pyotr Ilyitch sat down opposite, and the champagne
soon appeared, and oysters were suggested to the gentlemen. “First‐class
oysters, the last lot in.”

“Hang the oysters. I don’t eat them. And we don’t need anything,” cried
Pyotr Ilyitch, almost angrily.

“There’s no time for oysters,” said Mitya. “And I’m not hungry. Do you
know, friend,” he said suddenly, with feeling, “I never have liked all
this disorder.”

“Who does like it? Three dozen of champagne for peasants, upon my word,
that’s enough to make any one angry!”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking of a higher order. There’s no order
in me, no higher order. But ... that’s all over. There’s no need to grieve
about it. It’s too late, damn it! My whole life has been disorder, and one
must set it in order. Is that a pun, eh?”

“You’re raving, not making puns!”


    “Glory be to God in Heaven,
    Glory be to God in me....


“That verse came from my heart once, it’s not a verse, but a tear.... I
made it myself ... not while I was pulling the captain’s beard,
though....”

“Why do you bring him in all of a sudden?”

“Why do I bring him in? Foolery! All things come to an end; all things are
made equal. That’s the long and short of it.”

“You know, I keep thinking of your pistols.”

“That’s all foolery, too! Drink, and don’t be fanciful. I love life. I’ve
loved life too much, shamefully much. Enough! Let’s drink to life, dear
boy, I propose the toast. Why am I pleased with myself? I’m a scoundrel,
but I’m satisfied with myself. And yet I’m tortured by the thought that
I’m a scoundrel, but satisfied with myself. I bless the creation. I’m
ready to bless God and His creation directly, but ... I must kill one
noxious insect for fear it should crawl and spoil life for others.... Let
us drink to life, dear brother. What can be more precious than life?
Nothing! To life, and to one queen of queens!”

“Let’s drink to life and to your queen, too, if you like.”

They drank a glass each. Although Mitya was excited and expansive, yet he
was melancholy, too. It was as though some heavy, overwhelming anxiety
were weighing upon him.

“Misha ... here’s your Misha come! Misha, come here, my boy, drink this
glass to Phœbus, the golden‐haired, of to‐morrow morn....”

“What are you giving it him for?” cried Pyotr Ilyitch, irritably.

“Yes, yes, yes, let me! I want to!”

“E—ech!”

Misha emptied the glass, bowed, and ran out.

“He’ll remember it afterwards,” Mitya remarked. “Woman, I love woman! What
is woman? The queen of creation! My heart is sad, my heart is sad, Pyotr
Ilyitch. Do you remember Hamlet? ‘I am very sorry, good Horatio! Alas,
poor Yorick!’ Perhaps that’s me, Yorick? Yes, I’m Yorick now, and a skull
afterwards.”

Pyotr Ilyitch listened in silence. Mitya, too, was silent for a while.

“What dog’s that you’ve got here?” he asked the shopman, casually,
noticing a pretty little lap‐dog with dark eyes, sitting in the corner.

“It belongs to Varvara Alexyevna, the mistress,” answered the clerk. “She
brought it and forgot it here. It must be taken back to her.”

“I saw one like it ... in the regiment ...” murmured Mitya dreamily, “only
that one had its hind leg broken.... By the way, Pyotr Ilyitch, I wanted
to ask you: have you ever stolen anything in your life?”

“What a question!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything. From somebody’s pocket, you know. I don’t
mean government money, every one steals that, and no doubt you do,
too....”

“You go to the devil.”

“I’m talking of other people’s money. Stealing straight out of a pocket?
Out of a purse, eh?”

“I stole twenty copecks from my mother when I was nine years old. I took
it off the table on the sly, and held it tight in my hand.”

“Well, and what happened?”

“Oh, nothing. I kept it three days, then I felt ashamed, confessed, and
gave it back.”

“And what then?”

“Naturally I was whipped. But why do you ask? Have you stolen something?”

“I have,” said Mitya, winking slyly.

“What have you stolen?” inquired Pyotr Ilyitch curiously.

“I stole twenty copecks from my mother when I was nine years old, and gave
it back three days after.”

As he said this, Mitya suddenly got up.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, won’t you come now?” called Andrey from the door of
the shop.

“Are you ready? We’ll come!” Mitya started. “A few more last words
and—Andrey, a glass of vodka at starting. Give him some brandy as well!
That box” (the one with the pistols) “put under my seat. Good‐by, Pyotr
Ilyitch, don’t remember evil against me.”

“But you’re coming back to‐morrow?”

“Of course.”

“Will you settle the little bill now?” cried the clerk, springing forward.

“Oh, yes, the bill. Of course.”

He pulled the bundle of notes out of his pocket again, picked out three
hundred roubles, threw them on the counter, and ran hurriedly out of the
shop. Every one followed him out, bowing and wishing him good luck.
Andrey, coughing from the brandy he had just swallowed, jumped up on the
box. But Mitya was only just taking his seat when suddenly to his surprise
he saw Fenya before him. She ran up panting, clasped her hands before him
with a cry, and plumped down at his feet.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, dear good Dmitri Fyodorovitch, don’t harm my
mistress. And it was I told you all about it.... And don’t murder him, he
came first, he’s hers! He’ll marry Agrafena Alexandrovna now. That’s why
he’s come back from Siberia. Dmitri Fyodorovitch, dear, don’t take a
fellow creature’s life!”

“Tut—tut—tut! That’s it, is it? So you’re off there to make trouble!”
muttered Pyotr Ilyitch. “Now, it’s all clear, as clear as daylight. Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, give me your pistols at once if you mean to behave like a
man,” he shouted aloud to Mitya. “Do you hear, Dmitri?”

“The pistols? Wait a bit, brother, I’ll throw them into the pool on the
road,” answered Mitya. “Fenya, get up, don’t kneel to me. Mitya won’t hurt
any one, the silly fool won’t hurt any one again. But I say, Fenya,” he
shouted, after having taken his seat. “I hurt you just now, so forgive me
and have pity on me, forgive a scoundrel.... But it doesn’t matter if you
don’t. It’s all the same now. Now then, Andrey, look alive, fly along full
speed!”

Andrey whipped up the horses, and the bells began ringing.

“Good‐by, Pyotr Ilyitch! My last tear is for you!...”

“He’s not drunk, but he keeps babbling like a lunatic,” Pyotr Ilyitch
thought as he watched him go. He had half a mind to stay and see the cart
packed with the remaining wines and provisions, knowing that they would
deceive and defraud Mitya. But, suddenly feeling vexed with himself, he
turned away with a curse and went to the tavern to play billiards.

“He’s a fool, though he’s a good fellow,” he muttered as he went. “I’ve
heard of that officer, Grushenka’s former flame. Well, if he has turned
up.... Ech, those pistols! Damn it all! I’m not his nurse! Let them do
what they like! Besides, it’ll all come to nothing. They’re a set of
brawlers, that’s all. They’ll drink and fight, fight and make friends
again. They are not men who do anything real. What does he mean by ‘I’m
stepping aside, I’m punishing myself?’ It’ll come to nothing! He’s shouted
such phrases a thousand times, drunk, in the taverns. But now he’s not
drunk. ‘Drunk in spirit’—they’re fond of fine phrases, the villains. Am I
his nurse? He must have been fighting, his face was all over blood. With
whom? I shall find out at the ‘Metropolis.’ And his handkerchief was
soaked in blood.... It’s still lying on my floor.... Hang it!”

He reached the tavern in a bad humor and at once made up a game. The game
cheered him. He played a second game, and suddenly began telling one of
his partners that Dmitri Karamazov had come in for some cash
again—something like three thousand roubles, and had gone to Mokroe again
to spend it with Grushenka.... This news roused singular interest in his
listeners. They all spoke of it, not laughing, but with a strange gravity.
They left off playing.

“Three thousand? But where can he have got three thousand?”

Questions were asked. The story of Madame Hohlakov’s present was received
with skepticism.

“Hasn’t he robbed his old father?—that’s the question.”

“Three thousand! There’s something odd about it.”

“He boasted aloud that he would kill his father; we all heard him, here.
And it was three thousand he talked about ...”

Pyotr Ilyitch listened. All at once he became short and dry in his
answers. He said not a word about the blood on Mitya’s face and hands,
though he had meant to speak of it at first.

They began a third game, and by degrees the talk about Mitya died away.
But by the end of the third game, Pyotr Ilyitch felt no more desire for
billiards; he laid down the cue, and without having supper as he had
intended, he walked out of the tavern. When he reached the market‐place he
stood still in perplexity, wondering at himself. He realized that what he
wanted was to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s and find out if anything had
happened there. “On account of some stupid nonsense—as it’s sure to turn
out—am I going to wake up the household and make a scandal? Fooh! damn it,
is it my business to look after them?”

In a very bad humor he went straight home, and suddenly remembered Fenya.
“Damn it all! I ought to have questioned her just now,” he thought with
vexation, “I should have heard everything.” And the desire to speak to
her, and so find out, became so pressing and importunate that when he was
half‐way home he turned abruptly and went towards the house where
Grushenka lodged. Going up to the gate he knocked. The sound of the knock
in the silence of the night sobered him and made him feel annoyed. And no
one answered him; every one in the house was asleep.

“And I shall be making a fuss!” he thought, with a feeling of positive
discomfort. But instead of going away altogether, he fell to knocking
again with all his might, filling the street with clamor.

“Not coming? Well, I will knock them up, I will!” he muttered at each
knock, fuming at himself, but at the same time he redoubled his knocks on
the gate.



Chapter VI. “I Am Coming, Too!”


But Dmitri Fyodorovitch was speeding along the road. It was a little more
than twenty versts to Mokroe, but Andrey’s three horses galloped at such a
pace that the distance might be covered in an hour and a quarter. The
swift motion revived Mitya. The air was fresh and cool, there were big
stars shining in the sky. It was the very night, and perhaps the very
hour, in which Alyosha fell on the earth, and rapturously swore to love it
for ever and ever.

All was confusion, confusion, in Mitya’s soul, but although many things
were goading his heart, at that moment his whole being was yearning for
her, his queen, to whom he was flying to look on her for the last time.
One thing I can say for certain; his heart did not waver for one instant.
I shall perhaps not be believed when I say that this jealous lover felt
not the slightest jealousy of this new rival, who seemed to have sprung
out of the earth. If any other had appeared on the scene, he would have
been jealous at once, and would perhaps have stained his fierce hands with
blood again. But as he flew through the night, he felt no envy, no
hostility even, for the man who had been her first lover.... It is true he
had not yet seen him.

“Here there was no room for dispute: it was her right and his; this was
her first love which, after five years, she had not forgotten; so she had
loved him only for those five years, and I, how do I come in? What right
have I? Step aside, Mitya, and make way! What am I now? Now everything is
over apart from the officer—even if he had not appeared, everything would
be over ...”

These words would roughly have expressed his feelings, if he had been
capable of reasoning. But he could not reason at that moment. His present
plan of action had arisen without reasoning. At Fenya’s first words, it
had sprung from feeling, and been adopted in a flash, with all its
consequences. And yet, in spite of his resolution, there was confusion in
his soul, an agonizing confusion: his resolution did not give him peace.
There was so much behind that tortured him. And it seemed strange to him,
at moments, to think that he had written his own sentence of death with
pen and paper: “I punish myself,” and the paper was lying there in his
pocket, ready; the pistol was loaded; he had already resolved how, next
morning, he would meet the first warm ray of “golden‐haired Phœbus.”

And yet he could not be quit of the past, of all that he had left behind
and that tortured him. He felt that miserably, and the thought of it sank
into his heart with despair. There was one moment when he felt an impulse
to stop Andrey, to jump out of the cart, to pull out his loaded pistol,
and to make an end of everything without waiting for the dawn. But that
moment flew by like a spark. The horses galloped on, “devouring space,”
and as he drew near his goal, again the thought of her, of her alone, took
more and more complete possession of his soul, chasing away the fearful
images that had been haunting it. Oh, how he longed to look upon her, if
only for a moment, if only from a distance!

“She’s now with _him_,” he thought, “now I shall see what she looks like
with him, her first love, and that’s all I want.” Never had this woman,
who was such a fateful influence in his life, aroused such love in his
breast, such new and unknown feeling, surprising even to himself, a
feeling tender to devoutness, to self‐effacement before her! “I will
efface myself!” he said, in a rush of almost hysterical ecstasy.

They had been galloping nearly an hour. Mitya was silent, and though
Andrey was, as a rule, a talkative peasant, he did not utter a word,
either. He seemed afraid to talk, he only whipped up smartly his three
lean, but mettlesome, bay horses. Suddenly Mitya cried out in horrible
anxiety:

“Andrey! What if they’re asleep?”

This thought fell upon him like a blow. It had not occurred to him before.

“It may well be that they’re gone to bed, by now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

Mitya frowned as though in pain. Yes, indeed ... he was rushing there ...
with such feelings ... while they were asleep ... she was asleep, perhaps,
there too.... An angry feeling surged up in his heart.

“Drive on, Andrey! Whip them up! Look alive!” he cried, beside himself.

“But maybe they’re not in bed!” Andrey went on after a pause. “Timofey
said they were a lot of them there—”

“At the station?”

“Not at the posting‐station, but at Plastunov’s, at the inn, where they
let out horses, too.”

“I know. So you say there are a lot of them? How’s that? Who are they?”
cried Mitya, greatly dismayed at this unexpected news.

“Well, Timofey was saying they’re all gentlefolk. Two from our town—who
they are I can’t say—and there are two others, strangers, maybe more
besides. I didn’t ask particularly. They’ve set to playing cards, so
Timofey said.”

“Cards?”

“So, maybe they’re not in bed if they’re at cards. It’s most likely not
more than eleven.”

“Quicker, Andrey! Quicker!” Mitya cried again, nervously.

“May I ask you something, sir?” said Andrey, after a pause. “Only I’m
afraid of angering you, sir.”

“What is it?”

“Why, Fenya threw herself at your feet just now, and begged you not to
harm her mistress, and some one else, too ... so you see, sir— It’s I am
taking you there ... forgive me, sir, it’s my conscience ... maybe it’s
stupid of me to speak of it—”

Mitya suddenly seized him by the shoulders from behind.

“Are you a driver?” he asked frantically.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you know that one has to make way. What would you say to a driver
who wouldn’t make way for any one, but would just drive on and crush
people? No, a driver mustn’t run over people. One can’t run over a man.
One can’t spoil people’s lives. And if you have spoilt a life—punish
yourself.... If only you’ve spoilt, if only you’ve ruined any one’s
life—punish yourself and go away.”

These phrases burst from Mitya almost hysterically. Though Andrey was
surprised at him, he kept up the conversation.

“That’s right, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, you’re quite right, one mustn’t crush
or torment a man, or any kind of creature, for every creature is created
by God. Take a horse, for instance, for some folks, even among us drivers,
drive anyhow. Nothing will restrain them, they just force it along.”

“To hell?” Mitya interrupted, and went off into his abrupt, short laugh.
“Andrey, simple soul,” he seized him by the shoulders again, “tell me,
will Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov go to hell, or not, what do you think?”

“I don’t know, darling, it depends on you, for you are ... you see, sir,
when the Son of God was nailed on the Cross and died, He went straight
down to hell from the Cross, and set free all sinners that were in agony.
And the devil groaned, because he thought that he would get no more
sinners in hell. And God said to him, then, ‘Don’t groan, for you shall
have all the mighty of the earth, the rulers, the chief judges, and the
rich men, and shall be filled up as you have been in all the ages till I
come again.’ Those were His very words ...”

“A peasant legend! Capital! Whip up the left, Andrey!”

“So you see, sir, who it is hell’s for,” said Andrey, whipping up the left
horse, “but you’re like a little child ... that’s how we look on you ...
and though you’re hasty‐tempered, sir, yet God will forgive you for your
kind heart.”

“And you, do you forgive me, Andrey?”

“What should I forgive you for, sir? You’ve never done me any harm.”

“No, for every one, for every one, you here alone, on the road, will you
forgive me for every one? Speak, simple peasant heart!”

“Oh, sir! I feel afraid of driving you, your talk is so strange.”

But Mitya did not hear. He was frantically praying and muttering to
himself.

“Lord, receive me, with all my lawlessness, and do not condemn me. Let me
pass by Thy judgment ... do not condemn me, for I have condemned myself,
do not condemn me, for I love Thee, O Lord. I am a wretch, but I love
Thee. If Thou sendest me to hell, I shall love Thee there, and from there
I shall cry out that I love Thee for ever and ever.... But let me love to
the end.... Here and now for just five hours ... till the first light of
Thy day ... for I love the queen of my soul ... I love her and I cannot
help loving her. Thou seest my whole heart.... I shall gallop up, I shall
fall before her and say, ‘You are right to pass on and leave me. Farewell
and forget your victim ... never fret yourself about me!’ ”

“Mokroe!” cried Andrey, pointing ahead with his whip.

Through the pale darkness of the night loomed a solid black mass of
buildings, flung down, as it were, in the vast plain. The village of
Mokroe numbered two thousand inhabitants, but at that hour all were
asleep, and only here and there a few lights still twinkled.

“Drive on, Andrey, I come!” Mitya exclaimed, feverishly.

“They’re not asleep,” said Andrey again, pointing with his whip to the
Plastunovs’ inn, which was at the entrance to the village. The six
windows, looking on the street, were all brightly lighted up.

“They’re not asleep,” Mitya repeated joyously. “Quicker, Andrey! Gallop!
Drive up with a dash! Set the bells ringing! Let all know that I have
come. I’m coming! I’m coming, too!”

Andrey lashed his exhausted team into a gallop, drove with a dash and
pulled up his steaming, panting horses at the high flight of steps.

Mitya jumped out of the cart just as the innkeeper, on his way to bed,
peeped out from the steps curious to see who had arrived.

“Trifon Borissovitch, is that you?”

The innkeeper bent down, looked intently, ran down the steps, and rushed
up to the guest with obsequious delight.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, your honor! Do I see you again?”

Trifon Borissovitch was a thick‐set, healthy peasant, of middle height,
with a rather fat face. His expression was severe and uncompromising,
especially with the peasants of Mokroe, but he had the power of assuming
the most obsequious countenance, when he had an inkling that it was to his
interest. He dressed in Russian style, with a shirt buttoning down on one
side, and a full‐skirted coat. He had saved a good sum of money, but was
for ever dreaming of improving his position. More than half the peasants
were in his clutches, every one in the neighborhood was in debt to him.
From the neighboring landowners he bought and rented lands which were
worked by the peasants, in payment of debts which they could never shake
off. He was a widower, with four grown‐up daughters. One of them was
already a widow and lived in the inn with her two children, his
grandchildren, and worked for him like a charwoman. Another of his
daughters was married to a petty official, and in one of the rooms of the
inn, on the wall could be seen, among the family photographs, a miniature
photograph of this official in uniform and official epaulettes. The two
younger daughters used to wear fashionable blue or green dresses, fitting
tight at the back, and with trains a yard long, on Church holidays or when
they went to pay visits. But next morning they would get up at dawn, as
usual, sweep out the rooms with a birch‐broom, empty the slops, and clean
up after lodgers.

In spite of the thousands of roubles he had saved, Trifon Borissovitch was
very fond of emptying the pockets of a drunken guest, and remembering that
not a month ago he had, in twenty‐four hours, made two if not three
hundred roubles out of Dmitri, when he had come on his escapade with
Grushenka, he met him now with eager welcome, scenting his prey the moment
Mitya drove up to the steps.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, dear sir, we see you once more!”

“Stay, Trifon Borissovitch,” began Mitya, “first and foremost, where is
she?”

“Agrafena Alexandrovna?” The inn‐keeper understood at once, looking
sharply into Mitya’s face. “She’s here, too ...”

“With whom? With whom?”

“Some strangers. One is an official gentleman, a Pole, to judge from his
speech. He sent the horses for her from here; and there’s another with
him, a friend of his, or a fellow traveler, there’s no telling. They’re
dressed like civilians.”

“Well, are they feasting? Have they money?”

“Poor sort of a feast! Nothing to boast of, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

“Nothing to boast of? And who are the others?”

“They’re two gentlemen from the town.... They’ve come back from Tcherny,
and are putting up here. One’s quite a young gentleman, a relative of Mr.
Miüsov, he must be, but I’ve forgotten his name ... and I expect you know
the other, too, a gentleman called Maximov. He’s been on a pilgrimage, so
he says, to the monastery in the town. He’s traveling with this young
relation of Mr. Miüsov.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Stay, listen, Trifon Borissovitch. Tell me the chief thing: What of her?
How is she?”

“Oh, she’s only just come. She’s sitting with them.”

“Is she cheerful? Is she laughing?”

“No, I think she’s not laughing much. She’s sitting quite dull. She’s
combing the young gentleman’s hair.”

“The Pole—the officer?”

“He’s not young, and he’s not an officer, either. Not him, sir. It’s the
young gentleman that’s Mr. Miüsov’s relation ... I’ve forgotten his name.”

“Kalganov.”

“That’s it, Kalganov!”

“All right. I’ll see for myself. Are they playing cards?”

“They have been playing, but they’ve left off. They’ve been drinking tea,
the official gentleman asked for liqueurs.”

“Stay, Trifon Borissovitch, stay, my good soul, I’ll see for myself. Now
answer one more question: are the gypsies here?”

“You can’t have the gypsies now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The authorities have
sent them away. But we’ve Jews that play the cymbals and the fiddle in the
village, so one might send for them. They’d come.”

“Send for them. Certainly send for them!” cried Mitya. “And you can get
the girls together as you did then, Marya especially, Stepanida, too, and
Arina. Two hundred roubles for a chorus!”

“Oh, for a sum like that I can get all the village together, though by now
they’re asleep. Are the peasants here worth such kindness, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, or the girls either? To spend a sum like that on such
coarseness and rudeness! What’s the good of giving a peasant a cigar to
smoke, the stinking ruffian! And the girls are all lousy. Besides, I’ll
get my daughters up for nothing, let alone a sum like that. They’ve only
just gone to bed, I’ll give them a kick and set them singing for you. You
gave the peasants champagne to drink the other day, e—ech!”

For all his pretended compassion for Mitya, Trifon Borissovitch had hidden
half a dozen bottles of champagne on that last occasion, and had picked up
a hundred‐rouble note under the table, and it had remained in his
clutches.

“Trifon Borissovitch, I sent more than one thousand flying last time I was
here. Do you remember?”

“You did send it flying. I may well remember. You must have left three
thousand behind you.”

“Well, I’ve come to do the same again, do you see?”

And he pulled out his roll of notes, and held them up before the
innkeeper’s nose.

“Now, listen and remember. In an hour’s time the wine will arrive,
savories, pies, and sweets—bring them all up at once. That box Andrey has
got is to be brought up at once, too. Open it, and hand champagne
immediately. And the girls, we must have the girls, Marya especially.”

He turned to the cart and pulled out the box of pistols.

“Here, Andrey, let’s settle. Here’s fifteen roubles for the drive, and
fifty for vodka ... for your readiness, for your love.... Remember
Karamazov!”

“I’m afraid, sir,” faltered Andrey. “Give me five roubles extra, but more
I won’t take. Trifon Borissovitch, bear witness. Forgive my foolish words
...”

“What are you afraid of?” asked Mitya, scanning him. “Well, go to the
devil, if that’s it!” he cried, flinging him five roubles. “Now, Trifon
Borissovitch, take me up quietly and let me first get a look at them, so
that they don’t see me. Where are they? In the blue room?”

Trifon Borissovitch looked apprehensively at Mitya, but at once obediently
did his bidding. Leading him into the passage, he went himself into the
first large room, adjoining that in which the visitors were sitting, and
took the light away. Then he stealthily led Mitya in, and put him in a
corner in the dark, whence he could freely watch the company without being
seen. But Mitya did not look long, and, indeed, he could not see them, he
saw her, his heart throbbed violently, and all was dark before his eyes.

She was sitting sideways to the table in a low chair, and beside her, on
the sofa, was the pretty youth, Kalganov. She was holding his hand and
seemed to be laughing, while he, seeming vexed and not looking at her, was
saying something in a loud voice to Maximov, who sat the other side of the
table, facing Grushenka. Maximov was laughing violently at something. On
the sofa sat _he_, and on a chair by the sofa there was another stranger.
The one on the sofa was lolling backwards, smoking a pipe, and Mitya had
an impression of a stoutish, broad‐faced, short little man, who was
apparently angry about something. His friend, the other stranger, struck
Mitya as extraordinarily tall, but he could make out nothing more. He
caught his breath. He could not bear it for a minute, he put the pistol‐
case on a chest, and with a throbbing heart he walked, feeling cold all
over, straight into the blue room to face the company.

“Aie!” shrieked Grushenka, the first to notice him.



Chapter VII. The First And Rightful Lover


With his long, rapid strides, Mitya walked straight up to the table.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a loud voice, almost shouting, yet stammering at
every word, “I ... I’m all right! Don’t be afraid!” he exclaimed,
“I—there’s nothing the matter,” he turned suddenly to Grushenka, who had
shrunk back in her chair towards Kalganov, and clasped his hand tightly.
“I ... I’m coming, too. I’m here till morning. Gentlemen, may I stay with
you till morning? Only till morning, for the last time, in this same
room?”

So he finished, turning to the fat little man, with the pipe, sitting on
the sofa. The latter removed his pipe from his lips with dignity and
observed severely:

“_Panie_, we’re here in private. There are other rooms.”

“Why, it’s you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch! What do you mean?” answered Kalganov
suddenly. “Sit down with us. How are you?”

“Delighted to see you, dear ... and precious fellow, I always thought a
lot of you.” Mitya responded, joyfully and eagerly, at once holding out
his hand across the table.

“Aie! How tight you squeeze! You’ve quite broken my fingers,” laughed
Kalganov.

“He always squeezes like that, always,” Grushenka put in gayly, with a
timid smile, seeming suddenly convinced from Mitya’s face that he was not
going to make a scene. She was watching him with intense curiosity and
still some uneasiness. She was impressed by something about him, and
indeed the last thing she expected of him was that he would come in and
speak like this at such a moment.

“Good evening,” Maximov ventured blandly on the left. Mitya rushed up to
him, too.

“Good evening. You’re here, too! How glad I am to find you here, too!
Gentlemen, gentlemen, I—” (He addressed the Polish gentleman with the pipe
again, evidently taking him for the most important person present.) “I
flew here.... I wanted to spend my last day, my last hour in this room, in
this very room ... where I, too, adored ... my queen.... Forgive me,
_panie_,” he cried wildly, “I flew here and vowed— Oh, don’t be afraid,
it’s my last night! Let’s drink to our good understanding. They’ll bring
the wine at once.... I brought this with me.” (Something made him pull out
his bundle of notes.) “Allow me, _panie_! I want to have music, singing, a
revel, as we had before. But the worm, the unnecessary worm, will crawl
away, and there’ll be no more of him. I will commemorate my day of joy on
my last night.”

He was almost choking. There was so much, so much he wanted to say, but
strange exclamations were all that came from his lips. The Pole gazed
fixedly at him, at the bundle of notes in his hand; looked at Grushenka,
and was in evident perplexity.

“If my suverin lady is permitting—” he was beginning.

“What does ‘suverin’ mean? ‘Sovereign,’ I suppose?” interrupted Grushenka.
“I can’t help laughing at you, the way you talk. Sit down, Mitya, what are
you talking about? Don’t frighten us, please. You won’t frighten us, will
you? If you won’t, I am glad to see you ...”

“Me, me frighten you?” cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. “Oh, pass me
by, go your way, I won’t hinder you!...”

And suddenly he surprised them all, and no doubt himself as well, by
flinging himself on a chair, and bursting into tears, turning his head
away to the opposite wall, while his arms clasped the back of the chair
tight, as though embracing it.

“Come, come, what a fellow you are!” cried Grushenka reproachfully.
“That’s just how he comes to see me—he begins talking, and I can’t make
out what he means. He cried like that once before, and now he’s crying
again! It’s shameful! Why are you crying? _As though you had anything to
cry for!_” she added enigmatically, emphasizing each word with some
irritability.

“I ... I’m not crying.... Well, good evening!” He instantly turned round
in his chair, and suddenly laughed, not his abrupt wooden laugh, but a
long, quivering, inaudible nervous laugh.

“Well, there you are again.... Come, cheer up, cheer up!” Grushenka said
to him persuasively. “I’m very glad you’ve come, very glad, Mitya, do you
hear, I’m very glad! I want him to stay here with us,” she said
peremptorily, addressing the whole company, though her words were
obviously meant for the man sitting on the sofa. “I wish it, I wish it!
And if he goes away I shall go, too!” she added with flashing eyes.

“What my queen commands is law!” pronounced the Pole, gallantly kissing
Grushenka’s hand. “I beg you, _panie_, to join our company,” he added
politely, addressing Mitya.

Mitya was jumping up with the obvious intention of delivering another
tirade, but the words did not come.

“Let’s drink, _panie_,” he blurted out instead of making a speech. Every
one laughed.

“Good heavens! I thought he was going to begin again!” Grushenka exclaimed
nervously. “Do you hear, Mitya,” she went on insistently, “don’t prance
about, but it’s nice you’ve brought the champagne. I want some myself, and
I can’t bear liqueurs. And best of all, you’ve come yourself. We were
fearfully dull here.... You’ve come for a spree again, I suppose? But put
your money in your pocket. Where did you get such a lot?”

Mitya had been, all this time, holding in his hand the crumpled bundle of
notes on which the eyes of all, especially of the Poles, were fixed. In
confusion he thrust them hurriedly into his pocket. He flushed. At that
moment the innkeeper brought in an uncorked bottle of champagne, and
glasses on a tray. Mitya snatched up the bottle, but he was so bewildered
that he did not know what to do with it. Kalganov took it from him and
poured out the champagne.

“Another! Another bottle!” Mitya cried to the innkeeper, and, forgetting
to clink glasses with the Pole whom he had so solemnly invited to drink to
their good understanding, he drank off his glass without waiting for any
one else. His whole countenance suddenly changed. The solemn and tragic
expression with which he had entered vanished completely, and a look of
something childlike came into his face. He seemed to have become suddenly
gentle and subdued. He looked shyly and happily at every one, with a
continual nervous little laugh, and the blissful expression of a dog who
has done wrong, been punished, and forgiven. He seemed to have forgotten
everything, and was looking round at every one with a childlike smile of
delight. He looked at Grushenka, laughing continually, and bringing his
chair close up to her. By degrees he had gained some idea of the two
Poles, though he had formed no definite conception of them yet.

The Pole on the sofa struck him by his dignified demeanor and his Polish
accent; and, above all, by his pipe. “Well, what of it? It’s a good thing
he’s smoking a pipe,” he reflected. The Pole’s puffy, middle‐aged face,
with its tiny nose and two very thin, pointed, dyed and impudent‐looking
mustaches, had not so far roused the faintest doubts in Mitya. He was not
even particularly struck by the Pole’s absurd wig made in Siberia, with
love‐locks foolishly combed forward over the temples. “I suppose it’s all
right since he wears a wig,” he went on, musing blissfully. The other,
younger Pole, who was staring insolently and defiantly at the company and
listening to the conversation with silent contempt, still only impressed
Mitya by his great height, which was in striking contrast to the Pole on
the sofa. “If he stood up he’d be six foot three.” The thought flitted
through Mitya’s mind. It occurred to him, too, that this Pole must be the
friend of the other, as it were, a “bodyguard,” and no doubt the big Pole
was at the disposal of the little Pole with the pipe. But this all seemed
to Mitya perfectly right and not to be questioned. In his mood of doglike
submissiveness all feeling of rivalry had died away.

Grushenka’s mood and the enigmatic tone of some of her words he completely
failed to grasp. All he understood, with thrilling heart, was that she was
kind to him, that she had forgiven him, and made him sit by her. He was
beside himself with delight, watching her sip her glass of champagne. The
silence of the company seemed somehow to strike him, however, and he
looked round at every one with expectant eyes.

“Why are we sitting here though, gentlemen? Why don’t you begin doing
something?” his smiling eyes seemed to ask.

“He keeps talking nonsense, and we were all laughing,” Kalganov began
suddenly, as though divining his thought, and pointing to Maximov.

Mitya immediately stared at Kalganov and then at Maximov.

“He’s talking nonsense?” he laughed, his short, wooden laugh, seeming
suddenly delighted at something—“ha ha!”

“Yes. Would you believe it, he will have it that all our cavalry officers
in the twenties married Polish women. That’s awful rot, isn’t it?”

“Polish women?” repeated Mitya, perfectly ecstatic.

Kalganov was well aware of Mitya’s attitude to Grushenka, and he guessed
about the Pole, too, but that did not so much interest him, perhaps did
not interest him at all; what he was interested in was Maximov. He had
come here with Maximov by chance, and he met the Poles here at the inn for
the first time in his life. Grushenka he knew before, and had once been
with some one to see her; but she had not taken to him. But here she
looked at him very affectionately: before Mitya’s arrival, she had been
making much of him, but he seemed somehow to be unmoved by it. He was a
boy, not over twenty, dressed like a dandy, with a very charming fair‐
skinned face, and splendid thick, fair hair. From his fair face looked out
beautiful pale blue eyes, with an intelligent and sometimes even deep
expression, beyond his age indeed, although the young man sometimes looked
and talked quite like a child, and was not at all ashamed of it, even when
he was aware of it himself. As a rule he was very willful, even
capricious, though always friendly. Sometimes there was something fixed
and obstinate in his expression. He would look at you and listen, seeming
all the while to be persistently dreaming over something else. Often he
was listless and lazy, at other times he would grow excited, sometimes,
apparently, over the most trivial matters.

“Only imagine, I’ve been taking him about with me for the last four days,”
he went on, indolently drawling his words, quite naturally though, without
the slightest affectation. “Ever since your brother, do you remember,
shoved him off the carriage and sent him flying. That made me take an
interest in him at the time, and I took him into the country, but he keeps
talking such rot I’m ashamed to be with him. I’m taking him back.”

“The gentleman has not seen Polish ladies, and says what is impossible,”
the Pole with the pipe observed to Maximov.

He spoke Russian fairly well, much better, anyway, than he pretended. If
he used Russian words, he always distorted them into a Polish form.

“But I was married to a Polish lady myself,” tittered Maximov.

“But did you serve in the cavalry? You were talking about the cavalry.
Were you a cavalry officer?” put in Kalganov at once.

“Was he a cavalry officer indeed? Ha ha!” cried Mitya, listening eagerly,
and turning his inquiring eyes to each as he spoke, as though there were
no knowing what he might hear from each.

“No, you see,” Maximov turned to him. “What I mean is that those pretty
Polish ladies ... when they danced the mazurka with our Uhlans ... when
one of them dances a mazurka with a Uhlan she jumps on his knee like a
kitten ... a little white one ... and the _pan_‐father and _pan_‐mother
look on and allow it.... They allow it ... and next day the Uhlan comes
and offers her his hand.... That’s how it is ... offers her his hand, he
he!” Maximov ended, tittering.

“The _pan_ is a _lajdak_!” the tall Pole on the chair growled suddenly and
crossed one leg over the other. Mitya’s eye was caught by his huge greased
boot, with its thick, dirty sole. The dress of both the Poles looked
rather greasy.

“Well, now it’s _lajdak_! What’s he scolding about?” said Grushenka,
suddenly vexed.

“_Pani_ Agrippina, what the gentleman saw in Poland were servant girls,
and not ladies of good birth,” the Pole with the pipe observed to
Grushenka.

“You can reckon on that,” the tall Pole snapped contemptuously.

“What next! Let him talk! People talk, why hinder them? It makes it
cheerful,” Grushenka said crossly.

“I’m not hindering them, _pani_,” said the Pole in the wig, with a long
look at Grushenka, and relapsing into dignified silence he sucked his pipe
again.

“No, no. The Polish gentleman spoke the truth.” Kalganov got excited
again, as though it were a question of vast import. “He’s never been in
Poland, so how can he talk about it? I suppose you weren’t married in
Poland, were you?”

“No, in the Province of Smolensk. Only, a Uhlan had brought her to Russia
before that, my future wife, with her mamma and her aunt, and another
female relation with a grown‐up son. He brought her straight from Poland
and gave her up to me. He was a lieutenant in our regiment, a very nice
young man. At first he meant to marry her himself. But he didn’t marry
her, because she turned out to be lame.”

“So you married a lame woman?” cried Kalganov.

“Yes. They both deceived me a little bit at the time, and concealed it. I
thought she was hopping; she kept hopping.... I thought it was for fun.”

“So pleased she was going to marry you!” yelled Kalganov, in a ringing,
childish voice.

“Yes, so pleased. But it turned out to be quite a different cause.
Afterwards, when we were married, after the wedding, that very evening,
she confessed, and very touchingly asked forgiveness. ‘I once jumped over
a puddle when I was a child,’ she said, ‘and injured my leg.’ He he!”

Kalganov went off into the most childish laughter, almost falling on the
sofa. Grushenka, too, laughed. Mitya was at the pinnacle of happiness.

“Do you know, that’s the truth, he’s not lying now,” exclaimed Kalganov,
turning to Mitya; “and do you know, he’s been married twice; it’s his
first wife he’s talking about. But his second wife, do you know, ran away,
and is alive now.”

“Is it possible?” said Mitya, turning quickly to Maximov with an
expression of the utmost astonishment.

“Yes. She did run away. I’ve had that unpleasant experience,” Maximov
modestly assented, “with a _monsieur_. And what was worse, she’d had all
my little property transferred to her beforehand. ‘You’re an educated
man,’ she said to me. ‘You can always get your living.’ She settled my
business with that. A venerable bishop once said to me: ‘One of your wives
was lame, but the other was too light‐footed.’ He he!”

“Listen, listen!” cried Kalganov, bubbling over, “if he’s telling lies—and
he often is—he’s only doing it to amuse us all. There’s no harm in that,
is there? You know, I sometimes like him. He’s awfully low, but it’s
natural to him, eh? Don’t you think so? Some people are low from self‐
interest, but he’s simply so, from nature. Only fancy, he claims (he was
arguing about it all the way yesterday) that Gogol wrote _Dead Souls_
about him. Do you remember, there’s a landowner called Maximov in it, whom
Nozdryov thrashed. He was charged, do you remember, ‘for inflicting bodily
injury with rods on the landowner Maximov in a drunken condition.’ Would
you believe it, he claims that he was that Maximov and that he was beaten!
Now can it be so? Tchitchikov made his journey, at the very latest, at the
beginning of the twenties, so that the dates don’t fit. He couldn’t have
been thrashed then, he couldn’t, could he?”

It was difficult to imagine what Kalganov was excited about, but his
excitement was genuine. Mitya followed his lead without protest.

“Well, but if they did thrash him!” he cried, laughing.

“It’s not that they thrashed me exactly, but what I mean is—” put in
Maximov.

“What do you mean? Either they thrashed you or they didn’t.”

“What o’clock is it, _panie_?” the Pole, with the pipe, asked his tall
friend, with a bored expression. The other shrugged his shoulders in
reply. Neither of them had a watch.

“Why not talk? Let other people talk. Mustn’t other people talk because
you’re bored?” Grushenka flew at him with evident intention of finding
fault. Something seemed for the first time to flash upon Mitya’s mind.
This time the Pole answered with unmistakable irritability.

“_Pani_, I didn’t oppose it. I didn’t say anything.”

“All right then. Come, tell us your story,” Grushenka cried to Maximov.
“Why are you all silent?”

“There’s nothing to tell, it’s all so foolish,” answered Maximov at once,
with evident satisfaction, mincing a little. “Besides, all that’s by way
of allegory in Gogol, for he’s made all the names have a meaning. Nozdryov
was really called Nosov, and Kuvshinikov had quite a different name, he
was called Shkvornev. Fenardi really was called Fenardi, only he wasn’t an
Italian but a Russian, and Mamsel Fenardi was a pretty girl with her
pretty little legs in tights, and she had a little short skirt with
spangles, and she kept turning round and round, only not for four hours
but for four minutes only, and she bewitched every one...”

“But what were you beaten for?” cried Kalganov.

“For Piron!” answered Maximov.

“What Piron?” cried Mitya.

“The famous French writer, Piron. We were all drinking then, a big party
of us, in a tavern at that very fair. They’d invited me, and first of all
I began quoting epigrams. ‘Is that you, Boileau? What a funny get‐up!’ and
Boileau answers that he’s going to a masquerade, that is to the baths, he
he! And they took it to themselves, so I made haste to repeat another,
very sarcastic, well known to all educated people:


    Yes, Sappho and Phaon are we!
    But one grief is weighing on me.
    You don’t know your way to the sea!


They were still more offended and began abusing me in the most unseemly
way for it. And as ill‐luck would have it, to set things right, I began
telling a very cultivated anecdote about Piron, how he was not accepted
into the French Academy, and to revenge himself wrote his own epitaph:


    Ci‐gît Piron qui ne fut rien,
    Pas même académicien.


They seized me and thrashed me.”

“But what for? What for?”

“For my education. People can thrash a man for anything,” Maximov
concluded, briefly and sententiously.

“Eh, that’s enough! That’s all stupid, I don’t want to listen. I thought
it would be amusing,” Grushenka cut them short, suddenly.

Mitya started, and at once left off laughing. The tall Pole rose upon his
feet, and with the haughty air of a man, bored and out of his element,
began pacing from corner to corner of the room, his hands behind his back.

“Ah, he can’t sit still,” said Grushenka, looking at him contemptuously.
Mitya began to feel anxious. He noticed besides, that the Pole on the sofa
was looking at him with an irritable expression.

“_Panie!_” cried Mitya, “let’s drink! and the other _pan_, too! Let us
drink.”

In a flash he had pulled three glasses towards him, and filled them with
champagne.

“To Poland, _panovie_, I drink to your Poland!” cried Mitya.

“I shall be delighted, _panie_,” said the Pole on the sofa, with dignity
and affable condescension, and he took his glass.

“And the other _pan_, what’s his name? Drink, most illustrious, take your
glass!” Mitya urged.

“Pan Vrublevsky,” put in the Pole on the sofa.

Pan Vrublevsky came up to the table, swaying as he walked.

“To Poland, _panovie!_” cried Mitya, raising his glass. “Hurrah!”

All three drank. Mitya seized the bottle and again poured out three
glasses.

“Now to Russia, _panovie_, and let us be brothers!”

“Pour out some for us,” said Grushenka; “I’ll drink to Russia, too!”

“So will I,” said Kalganov.

“And I would, too ... to Russia, the old grandmother!” tittered Maximov.

“All! All!” cried Mitya. “Trifon Borissovitch, some more bottles!”

The other three bottles Mitya had brought with him were put on the table.
Mitya filled the glasses.

“To Russia! Hurrah!” he shouted again. All drank the toast except the
Poles, and Grushenka tossed off her whole glass at once. The Poles did not
touch theirs.

“How’s this, _panovie_?” cried Mitya, “won’t you drink it?”

Pan Vrublevsky took the glass, raised it and said with a resonant voice:

“To Russia as she was before 1772.”

“Come, that’s better!” cried the other Pole, and they both emptied their
glasses at once.

“You’re fools, you _panovie_,” broke suddenly from Mitya.

“_Panie!_” shouted both the Poles, menacingly, setting on Mitya like a
couple of cocks. Pan Vrublevsky was specially furious.

“Can one help loving one’s own country?” he shouted.

“Be silent! Don’t quarrel! I won’t have any quarreling!” cried Grushenka
imperiously, and she stamped her foot on the floor. Her face glowed, her
eyes were shining. The effects of the glass she had just drunk were
apparent. Mitya was terribly alarmed.

“_Panovie_, forgive me! It was my fault, I’m sorry. Vrublevsky, _panie_
Vrublevsky, I’m sorry.”

“Hold your tongue, you, anyway! Sit down, you stupid!” Grushenka scolded
with angry annoyance.

Every one sat down, all were silent, looking at one another.

“Gentlemen, I was the cause of it all,” Mitya began again, unable to make
anything of Grushenka’s words. “Come, why are we sitting here? What shall
we do ... to amuse ourselves again?”

“Ach, it’s certainly anything but amusing!” Kalganov mumbled lazily.

“Let’s play faro again, as we did just now,” Maximov tittered suddenly.

“Faro? Splendid!” cried Mitya. “If only the _panovie_—”

“It’s lite, _panovie_,” the Pole on the sofa responded, as it were
unwillingly.

“That’s true,” assented Pan Vrublevsky.

“Lite? What do you mean by ‘lite’?” asked Grushenka.

“Late, _pani_! ‘a late hour’ I mean,” the Pole on the sofa explained.

“It’s always late with them. They can never do anything!” Grushenka almost
shrieked in her anger. “They’re dull themselves, so they want others to be
dull. Before you came, Mitya, they were just as silent and kept turning up
their noses at me.”

“My goddess!” cried the Pole on the sofa, “I see you’re not well‐disposed
to me, that’s why I’m gloomy. I’m ready, _panie_,” added he, addressing
Mitya.

“Begin, _panie_,” Mitya assented, pulling his notes out of his pocket, and
laying two hundred‐rouble notes on the table. “I want to lose a lot to
you. Take your cards. Make the bank.”

“We’ll have cards from the landlord, _panie_,” said the little Pole,
gravely and emphatically.

“That’s much the best way,” chimed in Pan Vrublevsky.

“From the landlord? Very good, I understand, let’s get them from him.
Cards!” Mitya shouted to the landlord.

The landlord brought in a new, unopened pack, and informed Mitya that the
girls were getting ready, and that the Jews with the cymbals would most
likely be here soon; but the cart with the provisions had not yet arrived.
Mitya jumped up from the table and ran into the next room to give orders,
but only three girls had arrived, and Marya was not there yet. And he did
not know himself what orders to give and why he had run out. He only told
them to take out of the box the presents for the girls, the sweets, the
toffee and the fondants. “And vodka for Andrey, vodka for Andrey!” he
cried in haste. “I was rude to Andrey!”

Suddenly Maximov, who had followed him out, touched him on the shoulder.

“Give me five roubles,” he whispered to Mitya. “I’ll stake something at
faro, too, he he!”

“Capital! Splendid! Take ten, here!”

Again he took all the notes out of his pocket and picked out one for ten
roubles. “And if you lose that, come again, come again.”

“Very good,” Maximov whispered joyfully, and he ran back again. Mitya,
too, returned, apologizing for having kept them waiting. The Poles had
already sat down, and opened the pack. They looked much more amiable,
almost cordial. The Pole on the sofa had lighted another pipe and was
preparing to throw. He wore an air of solemnity.

“To your places, gentlemen,” cried Pan Vrublevsky.

“No, I’m not going to play any more,” observed Kalganov, “I’ve lost fifty
roubles to them just now.”

“The _pan_ had no luck, perhaps he’ll be lucky this time,” the Pole on the
sofa observed in his direction.

“How much in the bank? To correspond?” asked Mitya.

“That’s according, _panie_, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, as much as
you will stake.”

“A million!” laughed Mitya.

“The Pan Captain has heard of Pan Podvysotsky, perhaps?”

“What Podvysotsky?”

“In Warsaw there was a bank and any one comes and stakes against it.
Podvysotsky comes, sees a thousand gold pieces, stakes against the bank.
The banker says, ‘_Panie_ Podvysotsky, are you laying down the gold, or
must we trust to your honor?’ ‘To my honor, _panie_,’ says Podvysotsky.
‘So much the better.’ The banker throws the dice. Podvysotsky wins. ‘Take
it, _panie_,’ says the banker, and pulling out the drawer he gives him a
million. ‘Take it, _panie_, this is your gain.’ There was a million in the
bank. ‘I didn’t know that,’ says Podvysotsky. ‘_Panie_ Podvysotsky,’ said
the banker, ‘you pledged your honor and we pledged ours.’ Podvysotsky took
the million.”

“That’s not true,” said Kalganov.

“_Panie_ Kalganov, in gentlemanly society one doesn’t say such things.”

“As if a Polish gambler would give away a million!” cried Mitya, but
checked himself at once. “Forgive me, _panie_, it’s my fault again, he
would, he would give away a million, for honor, for Polish honor. You see
how I talk Polish, ha ha! Here, I stake ten roubles, the knave leads.”

“And I put a rouble on the queen, the queen of hearts, the pretty little
_panienotchka_, he he!” laughed Maximov, pulling out his queen, and, as
though trying to conceal it from every one, he moved right up and crossed
himself hurriedly under the table. Mitya won. The rouble won, too.

“A corner!” cried Mitya.

“I’ll bet another rouble, a ‘single’ stake,” Maximov muttered gleefully,
hugely delighted at having won a rouble.

“Lost!” shouted Mitya. “A ‘double’ on the seven!”

The seven too was trumped.

“Stop!” cried Kalganov suddenly.

“Double! Double!” Mitya doubled his stakes, and each time he doubled the
stake, the card he doubled was trumped by the Poles. The rouble stakes
kept winning.

“On the double!” shouted Mitya furiously.

“You’ve lost two hundred, _panie_. Will you stake another hundred?” the
Pole on the sofa inquired.

“What? Lost two hundred already? Then another two hundred! All doubles!”

And pulling his money out of his pocket, Mitya was about to fling two
hundred roubles on the queen, but Kalganov covered it with his hand.

“That’s enough!” he shouted in his ringing voice.

“What’s the matter?” Mitya stared at him.

“That’s enough! I don’t want you to play any more. Don’t!”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t. Hang it, come away. That’s why. I won’t let you go on
playing.”

Mitya gazed at him in astonishment.

“Give it up, Mitya. He may be right. You’ve lost a lot as it is,” said
Grushenka, with a curious note in her voice. Both the Poles rose from
their seats with a deeply offended air.

“Are you joking, _panie_?” said the short man, looking severely at
Kalganov.

“How dare you!” Pan Vrublevsky, too, growled at Kalganov.

“Don’t dare to shout like that,” cried Grushenka. “Ah, you turkey‐cocks!”

Mitya looked at each of them in turn. But something in Grushenka’s face
suddenly struck him, and at the same instant something new flashed into
his mind—a strange new thought!

“_Pani_ Agrippina,” the little Pole was beginning, crimson with anger,
when Mitya suddenly went up to him and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Most illustrious, two words with you.”

“What do you want?”

“In the next room, I’ve two words to say to you, something pleasant, very
pleasant. You’ll be glad to hear it.”

The little _pan_ was taken aback and looked apprehensively at Mitya. He
agreed at once, however, on condition that Pan Vrublevsky went with them.

“The bodyguard? Let him come, and I want him, too. I must have him!” cried
Mitya. “March, _panovie_!”

“Where are you going?” asked Grushenka, anxiously.

“We’ll be back in one moment,” answered Mitya.

There was a sort of boldness, a sudden confidence shining in his eyes. His
face had looked very different when he entered the room an hour before.

He led the Poles, not into the large room where the chorus of girls was
assembling and the table was being laid, but into the bedroom on the
right, where the trunks and packages were kept, and there were two large
beds, with pyramids of cotton pillows on each. There was a lighted candle
on a small deal table in the corner. The small man and Mitya sat down to
this table, facing each other, while the huge Vrublevsky stood beside
them, his hands behind his back. The Poles looked severe but were
evidently inquisitive.

“What can I do for you, _panie_?” lisped the little Pole.

“Well, look here, _panie_, I won’t keep you long. There’s money for you,”
he pulled out his notes. “Would you like three thousand? Take it and go
your way.”

The Pole gazed open‐eyed at Mitya, with a searching look.

“Three thousand, _panie_?” He exchanged glances with Vrublevsky.

“Three, _panovie_, three! Listen, _panie_, I see you’re a sensible man.
Take three thousand and go to the devil, and Vrublevsky with you—d’you
hear? But, at once, this very minute, and for ever. You understand that,
_panie_, for ever. Here’s the door, you go out of it. What have you got
there, a great‐coat, a fur coat? I’ll bring it out to you. They’ll get the
horses out directly, and then—good‐by, _panie_!”

Mitya awaited an answer with assurance. He had no doubts. An expression of
extraordinary resolution passed over the Pole’s face.

“And the money, _panie_?”

“The money, _panie_? Five hundred roubles I’ll give you this moment for
the journey, and as a first installment, and two thousand five hundred to‐
morrow, in the town—I swear on my honor, I’ll get it, I’ll get it at any
cost!” cried Mitya.

The Poles exchanged glances again. The short man’s face looked more
forbidding.

“Seven hundred, seven hundred, not five hundred, at once, this minute,
cash down!” Mitya added, feeling something wrong. “What’s the matter,
_panie_? Don’t you trust me? I can’t give you the whole three thousand
straight off. If I give it, you may come back to her to‐morrow....
Besides, I haven’t the three thousand with me. I’ve got it at home in the
town,” faltered Mitya, his spirit sinking at every word he uttered. “Upon
my word, the money’s there, hidden.”

In an instant an extraordinary sense of personal dignity showed itself in
the little man’s face.

“What next?” he asked ironically. “For shame!” and he spat on the floor.
Pan Vrublevsky spat too.

“You do that, _panie_,” said Mitya, recognizing with despair that all was
over, “because you hope to make more out of Grushenka? You’re a couple of
capons, that’s what you are!”

“This is a mortal insult!” The little Pole turned as red as a crab, and he
went out of the room, briskly, as though unwilling to hear another word.
Vrublevsky swung out after him, and Mitya followed, confused and
crestfallen. He was afraid of Grushenka, afraid that the _pan_ would at
once raise an outcry. And so indeed he did. The Pole walked into the room
and threw himself in a theatrical attitude before Grushenka.

“_Pani_ Agrippina, I have received a mortal insult!” he exclaimed. But
Grushenka suddenly lost all patience, as though they had wounded her in
the tenderest spot.

“Speak Russian! Speak Russian!” she cried, “not another word of Polish!
You used to talk Russian. You can’t have forgotten it in five years.”

She was red with passion.

“_Pani_ Agrippina—”

“My name’s Agrafena, Grushenka, speak Russian or I won’t listen!”

The Pole gasped with offended dignity, and quickly and pompously delivered
himself in broken Russian:

“_Pani_ Agrafena, I came here to forget the past and forgive it, to forget
all that has happened till to‐day—”

“Forgive? Came here to forgive me?” Grushenka cut him short, jumping up
from her seat.

“Just so, _pani_, I’m not pusillanimous, I’m magnanimous. But I was
astounded when I saw your lovers. Pan Mitya offered me three thousand, in
the other room to depart. I spat in the _pan’s_ face.”

“What? He offered you money for me?” cried Grushenka, hysterically. “Is it
true, Mitya? How dare you? Am I for sale?”

“_Panie, panie!_” yelled Mitya, “she’s pure and shining, and I have never
been her lover! That’s a lie....”

“How dare you defend me to him?” shrieked Grushenka. “It wasn’t virtue
kept me pure, and it wasn’t that I was afraid of Kuzma, but that I might
hold up my head when I met him, and tell him he’s a scoundrel. And he did
actually refuse the money?”

“He took it! He took it!” cried Mitya; “only he wanted to get the whole
three thousand at once, and I could only give him seven hundred straight
off.”

“I see: he heard I had money, and came here to marry me!”

“_Pani_ Agrippina!” cried the little Pole. “I’m—a knight, I’m—a nobleman,
and not a _lajdak_. I came here to make you my wife and I find you a
different woman, perverse and shameless.”

“Oh, go back where you came from! I’ll tell them to turn you out and
you’ll be turned out,” cried Grushenka, furious. “I’ve been a fool, a
fool, to have been miserable these five years! And it wasn’t for his sake,
it was my anger made me miserable. And this isn’t he at all! Was he like
this? It might be his father! Where did you get your wig from? He was a
falcon, but this is a gander. He used to laugh and sing to me.... And I’ve
been crying for five years, damned fool, abject, shameless I was!”

She sank back in her low chair and hid her face in her hands. At that
instant the chorus of Mokroe began singing in the room on the left—a
rollicking dance song.

“A regular Sodom!” Vrublevsky roared suddenly. “Landlord, send the
shameless hussies away!”

The landlord, who had been for some time past inquisitively peeping in at
the door, hearing shouts and guessing that his guests were quarreling, at
once entered the room.

“What are you shouting for? D’you want to split your throat?” he said,
addressing Vrublevsky, with surprising rudeness.

“Animal!” bellowed Pan Vrublevsky.

“Animal? And what sort of cards were you playing with just now? I gave you
a pack and you hid it. You played with marked cards! I could send you to
Siberia for playing with false cards, d’you know that, for it’s just the
same as false banknotes....”

And going up to the sofa he thrust his fingers between the sofa back and
the cushion, and pulled out an unopened pack of cards.

“Here’s my pack unopened!”

He held it up and showed it to all in the room. “From where I stood I saw
him slip my pack away, and put his in place of it—you’re a cheat and not a
gentleman!”

“And I twice saw the _pan_ change a card!” cried Kalganov.

“How shameful! How shameful!” exclaimed Grushenka, clasping her hands, and
blushing for genuine shame. “Good Lord, he’s come to that!”

“I thought so, too!” said Mitya. But before he had uttered the words,
Vrublevsky, with a confused and infuriated face, shook his fist at
Grushenka, shouting:

“You low harlot!”

Mitya flew at him at once, clutched him in both hands, lifted him in the
air, and in one instant had carried him into the room on the right, from
which they had just come.

“I’ve laid him on the floor, there,” he announced, returning at once,
gasping with excitement. “He’s struggling, the scoundrel! But he won’t
come back, no fear of that!...”

He closed one half of the folding doors, and holding the other ajar called
out to the little Pole:

“Most illustrious, will you be pleased to retire as well?”

“My dear Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” said Trifon Borissovitch, “make them give
you back the money you lost. It’s as good as stolen from you.”

“I don’t want my fifty roubles back,” Kalganov declared suddenly.

“I don’t want my two hundred, either,” cried Mitya, “I wouldn’t take it
for anything! Let him keep it as a consolation.”

“Bravo, Mitya! You’re a trump, Mitya!” cried Grushenka, and there was a
note of fierce anger in the exclamation.

The little _pan_, crimson with fury but still mindful of his dignity, was
making for the door, but he stopped short and said suddenly, addressing
Grushenka:

“_Pani_, if you want to come with me, come. If not, good‐by.”

And swelling with indignation and importance he went to the door. This was
a man of character: he had so good an opinion of himself that after all
that had passed, he still expected that she would marry him. Mitya slammed
the door after him.

“Lock it,” said Kalganov. But the key clicked on the other side, they had
locked it from within.

“That’s capital!” exclaimed Grushenka relentlessly. “Serve them right!”



Chapter VIII. Delirium


What followed was almost an orgy, a feast to which all were welcome.
Grushenka was the first to call for wine.

“I want to drink. I want to be quite drunk, as we were before. Do you
remember, Mitya, do you remember how we made friends here last time!”

Mitya himself was almost delirious, feeling that his happiness was at
hand. But Grushenka was continually sending him away from her.

“Go and enjoy yourself. Tell them to dance, to make merry, ‘let the stove
and cottage dance’; as we had it last time,” she kept exclaiming. She was
tremendously excited. And Mitya hastened to obey her. The chorus were in
the next room. The room in which they had been sitting till that moment
was too small, and was divided in two by cotton curtains, behind which was
a huge bed with a puffy feather mattress and a pyramid of cotton pillows.
In the four rooms for visitors there were beds. Grushenka settled herself
just at the door. Mitya set an easy chair for her. She had sat in the same
place to watch the dancing and singing “the time before,” when they had
made merry there. All the girls who had come had been there then; the
Jewish band with fiddles and zithers had come, too, and at last the long
expected cart had arrived with the wines and provisions.

Mitya bustled about. All sorts of people began coming into the room to
look on, peasants and their women, who had been roused from sleep and
attracted by the hopes of another marvelous entertainment such as they had
enjoyed a month before. Mitya remembered their faces, greeting and
embracing every one he knew. He uncorked bottles and poured out wine for
every one who presented himself. Only the girls were very eager for the
champagne. The men preferred rum, brandy, and, above all, hot punch. Mitya
had chocolate made for all the girls, and ordered that three samovars
should be kept boiling all night to provide tea and punch for everyone to
help himself.

An absurd chaotic confusion followed, but Mitya was in his natural
element, and the more foolish it became, the more his spirits rose. If the
peasants had asked him for money at that moment, he would have pulled out
his notes and given them away right and left. This was probably why the
landlord, Trifon Borissovitch, kept hovering about Mitya to protect him.
He seemed to have given up all idea of going to bed that night; but he
drank little, only one glass of punch, and kept a sharp look‐out on
Mitya’s interests after his own fashion. He intervened in the nick of
time, civilly and obsequiously persuading Mitya not to give away “cigars
and Rhine wine,” and, above all, money to the peasants as he had done
before. He was very indignant, too, at the peasant girls drinking liqueur,
and eating sweets.

“They’re a lousy lot, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” he said. “I’d give them a
kick, every one of them, and they’d take it as an honor—that’s all they’re
worth!”

Mitya remembered Andrey again, and ordered punch to be sent out to him. “I
was rude to him just now,” he repeated with a sinking, softened voice.
Kalganov did not want to drink, and at first did not care for the girls’
singing; but after he had drunk a couple of glasses of champagne he became
extraordinarily lively, strolling about the room, laughing and praising
the music and the songs, admiring every one and everything. Maximov,
blissfully drunk, never left his side. Grushenka, too, was beginning to
get drunk. Pointing to Kalganov, she said to Mitya:

“What a dear, charming boy he is!”

And Mitya, delighted, ran to kiss Kalganov and Maximov. Oh, great were his
hopes! She had said nothing yet, and seemed, indeed, purposely to refrain
from speaking. But she looked at him from time to time with caressing and
passionate eyes. At last she suddenly gripped his hand and drew him
vigorously to her. She was sitting at the moment in the low chair by the
door.

“How was it you came just now, eh? Have you walked in!... I was
frightened. So you wanted to give me up to him, did you? Did you really
want to?”

“I didn’t want to spoil your happiness!” Mitya faltered blissfully. But
she did not need his answer.

“Well, go and enjoy yourself ...” she sent him away once more. “Don’t cry,
I’ll call you back again.”

He would run away, and she listened to the singing and looked at the
dancing, though her eyes followed him wherever he went. But in another
quarter of an hour she would call him once more and again he would run
back to her.

“Come, sit beside me, tell me, how did you hear about me, and my coming
here yesterday? From whom did you first hear it?”

And Mitya began telling her all about it, disconnectedly, incoherently,
feverishly. He spoke strangely, often frowning, and stopping abruptly.

“What are you frowning at?” she asked.

“Nothing.... I left a man ill there. I’d give ten years of my life for him
to get well, to know he was all right!”

“Well, never mind him, if he’s ill. So you meant to shoot yourself to‐
morrow! What a silly boy! What for? I like such reckless fellows as you,”
she lisped, with a rather halting tongue. “So you would go any length for
me, eh? Did you really mean to shoot yourself to‐morrow, you stupid? No,
wait a little. To‐morrow I may have something to say to you.... I won’t
say it to‐day, but to‐morrow. You’d like it to be to‐day? No, I don’t want
to to‐day. Come, go along now, go and amuse yourself.”

Once, however, she called him, as it were, puzzled and uneasy.

“Why are you sad? I see you’re sad.... Yes, I see it,” she added, looking
intently into his eyes. “Though you keep kissing the peasants and
shouting, I see something. No, be merry. I’m merry; you be merry, too....
I love somebody here. Guess who it is. Ah, look, my boy has fallen asleep,
poor dear, he’s drunk.”

She meant Kalganov. He was, in fact, drunk, and had dropped asleep for a
moment, sitting on the sofa. But he was not merely drowsy from drink; he
felt suddenly dejected, or, as he said, “bored.” He was intensely
depressed by the girls’ songs, which, as the drinking went on, gradually
became coarse and more reckless. And the dances were as bad. Two girls
dressed up as bears, and a lively girl, called Stepanida, with a stick in
her hand, acted the part of keeper, and began to “show them.”

“Look alive, Marya, or you’ll get the stick!”

The bears rolled on the ground at last in the most unseemly fashion, amid
roars of laughter from the closely‐packed crowd of men and women.

“Well, let them! Let them!” said Grushenka sententiously, with an ecstatic
expression on her face. “When they do get a day to enjoy themselves, why
shouldn’t folks be happy?”

Kalganov looked as though he had been besmirched with dirt.

“It’s swinish, all this peasant foolery,” he murmured, moving away; “it’s
the game they play when it’s light all night in summer.”

He particularly disliked one “new” song to a jaunty dance‐tune. It
described how a gentleman came and tried his luck with the girls, to see
whether they would love him:


    The master came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


But the girls could not love the master:


    He would beat me cruelly
    And such love won’t do for me.


Then a gypsy comes along and he, too, tries:


    The gypsy came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


But they couldn’t love the gypsy either:


    He would be a thief, I fear,
    And would cause me many a tear.


And many more men come to try their luck, among them a soldier:


    The soldier came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


But the soldier is rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung
with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience. The song
ends with a merchant:


    The merchant came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


And it appears that he wins their love because:


    The merchant will make gold for me
    And his queen I’ll gladly be.


Kalvanov was positively indignant.

“That’s just a song of yesterday,” he said aloud. “Who writes such things
for them? They might just as well have had a railwayman or a Jew come to
try his luck with the girls; they’d have carried all before them.”

And, almost as though it were a personal affront, he declared, on the
spot, that he was bored, sat down on the sofa and immediately fell asleep.
His pretty little face looked rather pale, as it fell back on the sofa
cushion.

“Look how pretty he is,” said Grushenka, taking Mitya up to him. “I was
combing his hair just now; his hair’s like flax, and so thick....”

And, bending over him tenderly, she kissed his forehead. Kalganov
instantly opened his eyes, looked at her, stood up, and with the most
anxious air inquired where was Maximov?

“So that’s who it is you want.” Grushenka laughed. “Stay with me a minute.
Mitya, run and find his Maximov.”

Maximov, it appeared, could not tear himself away from the girls, only
running away from time to time to pour himself out a glass of liqueur. He
had drunk two cups of chocolate. His face was red, and his nose was
crimson; his eyes were moist and mawkishly sweet. He ran up and announced
that he was going to dance the “sabotière.”

“They taught me all those well‐bred, aristocratic dances when I was
little....”

“Go, go with him, Mitya, and I’ll watch from here how he dances,” said
Grushenka.

“No, no, I’m coming to look on, too,” exclaimed Kalganov, brushing aside
in the most naïve way Grushenka’s offer to sit with him. They all went to
look on. Maximov danced his dance. But it roused no great admiration in
any one but Mitya. It consisted of nothing but skipping and hopping,
kicking up the feet, and at every skip Maximov slapped the upturned sole
of his foot. Kalganov did not like it at all, but Mitya kissed the dancer.

“Thanks. You’re tired perhaps? What are you looking for here? Would you
like some sweets? A cigar, perhaps?”

“A cigarette.”

“Don’t you want a drink?”

“I’ll just have a liqueur.... Have you any chocolates?”

“Yes, there’s a heap of them on the table there. Choose one, my dear
soul!”

“I like one with vanilla ... for old people. He he!”

“No, brother, we’ve none of that special sort.”

“I say,” the old man bent down to whisper in Mitya’s ear. “That girl
there, little Marya, he he! How would it be if you were to help me make
friends with her?”

“So that’s what you’re after! No, brother, that won’t do!”

“I’d do no harm to any one,” Maximov muttered disconsolately.

“Oh, all right, all right. They only come here to dance and sing, you
know, brother. But damn it all, wait a bit!... Eat and drink and be merry,
meanwhile. Don’t you want money?”

“Later on, perhaps,” smiled Maximov.

“All right, all right....”

Mitya’s head was burning. He went outside to the wooden balcony which ran
round the whole building on the inner side, overlooking the courtyard. The
fresh air revived him. He stood alone in a dark corner, and suddenly
clutched his head in both hands. His scattered thoughts came together; his
sensations blended into a whole and threw a sudden light into his mind. A
fearful and terrible light! “If I’m to shoot myself, why not now?” passed
through his mind. “Why not go for the pistols, bring them here, and here,
in this dark dirty corner, make an end?” Almost a minute he stood,
undecided. A few hours earlier, when he had been dashing here, he was
pursued by disgrace, by the theft he had committed, and that blood, that
blood!... But yet it was easier for him then. Then everything was over: he
had lost her, given her up. She was gone, for him—oh, then his death
sentence had been easier for him; at least it had seemed necessary,
inevitable, for what had he to stay on earth for?

But now? Was it the same as then? Now one phantom, one terror at least was
at an end: that first, rightful lover, that fateful figure had vanished,
leaving no trace. The terrible phantom had turned into something so small,
so comic; it had been carried into the bedroom and locked in. It would
never return. She was ashamed, and from her eyes he could see now whom she
loved. Now he had everything to make life happy ... but he could not go on
living, he could not; oh, damnation! “O God! restore to life the man I
knocked down at the fence! Let this fearful cup pass from me! Lord, thou
hast wrought miracles for such sinners as me! But what, what if the old
man’s alive? Oh, then the shame of the other disgrace I would wipe away. I
would restore the stolen money. I’d give it back; I’d get it somehow....
No trace of that shame will remain except in my heart for ever! But no,
no; oh, impossible cowardly dreams! Oh, damnation!”

Yet there was a ray of light and hope in his darkness. He jumped up and
ran back to the room—to her, to her, his queen for ever! Was not one
moment of her love worth all the rest of life, even in the agonies of
disgrace? This wild question clutched at his heart. “To her, to her alone,
to see her, to hear her, to think of nothing, to forget everything, if
only for that night, for an hour, for a moment!” Just as he turned from
the balcony into the passage, he came upon the landlord, Trifon
Borissovitch. He thought he looked gloomy and worried, and fancied he had
come to find him.

“What is it, Trifon Borissovitch? are you looking for me?”

“No, sir.” The landlord seemed disconcerted. “Why should I be looking for
you? Where have you been?”

“Why do you look so glum? You’re not angry, are you? Wait a bit, you shall
soon get to bed.... What’s the time?”

“It’ll be three o’clock. Past three, it must be.”

“We’ll leave off soon. We’ll leave off.”

“Don’t mention it; it doesn’t matter. Keep it up as long as you like....”

“What’s the matter with him?” Mitya wondered for an instant, and he ran
back to the room where the girls were dancing. But she was not there. She
was not in the blue room either; there was no one but Kalganov asleep on
the sofa. Mitya peeped behind the curtain—she was there. She was sitting
in the corner, on a trunk. Bent forward, with her head and arms on the bed
close by, she was crying bitterly, doing her utmost to stifle her sobs
that she might not be heard. Seeing Mitya, she beckoned him to her, and
when he ran to her, she grasped his hand tightly.

“Mitya, Mitya, I loved him, you know. How I have loved him these five
years, all that time! Did I love him or only my own anger? No, him, him!
It’s a lie that it was my anger I loved and not him. Mitya, I was only
seventeen then; he was so kind to me, so merry; he used to sing to me....
Or so it seemed to a silly girl like me.... And now, O Lord, it’s not the
same man. Even his face is not the same; he’s different altogether. I
shouldn’t have known him. I drove here with Timofey, and all the way I was
thinking how I should meet him, what I should say to him, how we should
look at one another. My soul was faint, and all of a sudden it was just as
though he had emptied a pail of dirty water over me. He talked to me like
a schoolmaster, all so grave and learned; he met me so solemnly that I was
struck dumb. I couldn’t get a word in. At first I thought he was ashamed
to talk before his great big Pole. I sat staring at him and wondering why
I couldn’t say a word to him now. It must have been his wife that ruined
him; you know he threw me up to get married. She must have changed him
like that. Mitya, how shameful it is! Oh, Mitya, I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed
for all my life. Curse it, curse it, curse those five years!”

And again she burst into tears, but clung tight to Mitya’s hand and did
not let it go.

“Mitya, darling, stay, don’t go away. I want to say one word to you,” she
whispered, and suddenly raised her face to him. “Listen, tell me who it is
I love? I love one man here. Who is that man? That’s what you must tell
me.”

A smile lighted up her face that was swollen with weeping, and her eyes
shone in the half darkness.

“A falcon flew in, and my heart sank. ‘Fool! that’s the man you love!’
That was what my heart whispered to me at once. You came in and all grew
bright. What’s he afraid of? I wondered. For you were frightened; you
couldn’t speak. It’s not them he’s afraid of—could you be frightened of
any one? It’s me he’s afraid of, I thought, only me. So Fenya told you,
you little stupid, how I called to Alyosha out of the window that I’d
loved Mityenka for one hour, and that I was going now to love ... another.
Mitya, Mitya, how could I be such a fool as to think I could love any one
after you? Do you forgive me, Mitya? Do you forgive me or not? Do you love
me? Do you love me?” She jumped up and held him with both hands on his
shoulders. Mitya, dumb with rapture, gazed into her eyes, at her face, at
her smile, and suddenly clasped her tightly in his arms and kissed her
passionately.

“You will forgive me for having tormented you? It was through spite I
tormented you all. It was for spite I drove the old man out of his
mind.... Do you remember how you drank at my house one day and broke the
wine‐glass? I remembered that and I broke a glass to‐day and drank ‘to my
vile heart.’ Mitya, my falcon, why don’t you kiss me? He kissed me once,
and now he draws back and looks and listens. Why listen to me? Kiss me,
kiss me hard, that’s right. If you love, well, then, love! I’ll be your
slave now, your slave for the rest of my life. It’s sweet to be a slave.
Kiss me! Beat me, ill‐treat me, do what you will with me.... And I do
deserve to suffer. Stay, wait, afterwards, I won’t have that....” she
suddenly thrust him away. “Go along, Mitya, I’ll come and have some wine,
I want to be drunk, I’m going to get drunk and dance; I must, I must!” She
tore herself away from him and disappeared behind the curtain. Mitya
followed like a drunken man.

“Yes, come what may—whatever may happen now, for one minute I’d give the
whole world,” he thought. Grushenka did, in fact, toss off a whole glass
of champagne at one gulp, and became at once very tipsy. She sat down in
the same chair as before, with a blissful smile on her face. Her cheeks
were glowing, her lips were burning, her flashing eyes were moist; there
was passionate appeal in her eyes. Even Kalganov felt a stir at the heart
and went up to her.

“Did you feel how I kissed you when you were asleep just now?” she said
thickly. “I’m drunk now, that’s what it is.... And aren’t you drunk? And
why isn’t Mitya drinking? Why don’t you drink, Mitya? I’m drunk, and you
don’t drink....”

“I am drunk! I’m drunk as it is ... drunk with you ... and now I’ll be
drunk with wine, too.”

He drank off another glass, and—he thought it strange himself—that glass
made him completely drunk. He was suddenly drunk, although till that
moment he had been quite sober, he remembered that. From that moment
everything whirled about him, as though he were delirious. He walked,
laughed, talked to everybody, without knowing what he was doing. Only one
persistent burning sensation made itself felt continually, “like a red‐hot
coal in his heart,” he said afterwards. He went up to her, sat beside her,
gazed at her, listened to her.... She became very talkative, kept calling
every one to her, and beckoned to different girls out of the chorus. When
the girl came up, she either kissed her, or made the sign of the cross
over her. In another minute she might have cried. She was greatly amused
by the “little old man,” as she called Maximov. He ran up every minute to
kiss her hands, “each little finger,” and finally he danced another dance
to an old song, which he sang himself. He danced with special vigor to the
refrain:


    The little pig says—umph! umph! umph!
    The little calf says—moo, moo, moo,
    The little duck says—quack, quack, quack,
    The little goose says—ga, ga, ga.
    The hen goes strutting through the porch;
    Troo‐roo‐roo‐roo‐roo, she’ll say,
    Troo‐roo‐roo‐roo‐roo, she’ll say!


“Give him something, Mitya,” said Grushenka. “Give him a present, he’s
poor, you know. Ah, the poor, the insulted!... Do you know, Mitya, I shall
go into a nunnery. No, I really shall one day, Alyosha said something to
me to‐day that I shall remember all my life.... Yes.... But to‐day let us
dance. To‐morrow to the nunnery, but to‐day we’ll dance. I want to play
to‐day, good people, and what of it? God will forgive us. If I were God,
I’d forgive every one: ‘My dear sinners, from this day forth I forgive
you.’ I’m going to beg forgiveness: ‘Forgive me, good people, a silly
wench.’ I’m a beast, that’s what I am. But I want to pray. I gave a little
onion. Wicked as I’ve been, I want to pray. Mitya, let them dance, don’t
stop them. Every one in the world is good. Every one—even the worst of
them. The world’s a nice place. Though we’re bad the world’s all right.
We’re good and bad, good and bad.... Come, tell me, I’ve something to ask
you: come here every one, and I’ll ask you: Why am I so good? You know I
am good. I’m very good.... Come, why am I so good?”

So Grushenka babbled on, getting more and more drunk. At last she
announced that she was going to dance, too. She got up from her chair,
staggering. “Mitya, don’t give me any more wine—if I ask you, don’t give
it to me. Wine doesn’t give peace. Everything’s going round, the stove,
and everything. I want to dance. Let every one see how I dance ... let
them see how beautifully I dance....”

She really meant it. She pulled a white cambric handkerchief out of her
pocket, and took it by one corner in her right hand, to wave it in the
dance. Mitya ran to and fro, the girls were quiet, and got ready to break
into a dancing song at the first signal. Maximov, hearing that Grushenka
wanted to dance, squealed with delight, and ran skipping about in front of
her, humming:


    With legs so slim and sides so trim
    And its little tail curled tight.


But Grushenka waved her handkerchief at him and drove him away.

“Sh‐h! Mitya, why don’t they come? Let every one come ... to look on. Call
them in, too, that were locked in.... Why did you lock them in? Tell them
I’m going to dance. Let them look on, too....”

Mitya walked with a drunken swagger to the locked door, and began knocking
to the Poles with his fist.

“Hi, you ... Podvysotskys! Come, she’s going to dance. She calls you.”

“_Lajdak!_” one of the Poles shouted in reply.

“You’re a _lajdak_ yourself! You’re a little scoundrel, that’s what you
are.”

“Leave off laughing at Poland,” said Kalganov sententiously. He too was
drunk.

“Be quiet, boy! If I call him a scoundrel, it doesn’t mean that I called
all Poland so. One _lajdak_ doesn’t make a Poland. Be quiet, my pretty
boy, eat a sweetmeat.”

“Ach, what fellows! As though they were not men. Why won’t they make
friends?” said Grushenka, and went forward to dance. The chorus broke into
“Ah, my porch, my new porch!” Grushenka flung back her head, half opened
her lips, smiled, waved her handkerchief, and suddenly, with a violent
lurch, stood still in the middle of the room, looking bewildered.

“I’m weak....” she said in an exhausted voice. “Forgive me.... I’m weak, I
can’t.... I’m sorry.”

She bowed to the chorus, and then began bowing in all directions.

“I’m sorry.... Forgive me....”

“The lady’s been drinking. The pretty lady has been drinking,” voices were
heard saying.

“The lady’s drunk too much,” Maximov explained to the girls, giggling.

“Mitya, lead me away ... take me,” said Grushenka helplessly. Mitya
pounced on her, snatched her up in his arms, and carried the precious
burden through the curtains.

“Well, now I’ll go,” thought Kalganov, and walking out of the blue room,
he closed the two halves of the door after him. But the orgy in the larger
room went on and grew louder and louder. Mitya laid Grushenka on the bed
and kissed her on the lips.

“Don’t touch me....” she faltered, in an imploring voice. “Don’t touch me,
till I’m yours.... I’ve told you I’m yours, but don’t touch me ... spare
me.... With them here, with them close, you mustn’t. He’s here. It’s nasty
here....”

“I’ll obey you! I won’t think of it ... I worship you!” muttered Mitya.
“Yes, it’s nasty here, it’s abominable.”

And still holding her in his arms, he sank on his knees by the bedside.

“I know, though you’re a brute, you’re generous,” Grushenka articulated
with difficulty. “It must be honorable ... it shall be honorable for the
future ... and let us be honest, let us be good, not brutes, but good ...
take me away, take me far away, do you hear? I don’t want it to be here,
but far, far away....”

“Oh, yes, yes, it must be!” said Mitya, pressing her in his arms. “I’ll
take you and we’ll fly away.... Oh, I’d give my whole life for one year
only to know about that blood!”

“What blood?” asked Grushenka, bewildered.

“Nothing,” muttered Mitya, through his teeth. “Grusha, you wanted to be
honest, but I’m a thief. But I’ve stolen money from Katya.... Disgrace, a
disgrace!”

“From Katya, from that young lady? No, you didn’t steal it. Give it her
back, take it from me.... Why make a fuss? Now everything of mine is
yours. What does money matter? We shall waste it anyway.... Folks like us
are bound to waste money. But we’d better go and work the land. I want to
dig the earth with my own hands. We must work, do you hear? Alyosha said
so. I won’t be your mistress, I’ll be faithful to you, I’ll be your slave,
I’ll work for you. We’ll go to the young lady and bow down to her
together, so that she may forgive us, and then we’ll go away. And if she
won’t forgive us, we’ll go, anyway. Take her her money and love me....
Don’t love her.... Don’t love her any more. If you love her, I shall
strangle her.... I’ll put out both her eyes with a needle....”

“I love you. I love only you. I’ll love you in Siberia....”

“Why Siberia? Never mind, Siberia, if you like. I don’t care ... we’ll
work ... there’s snow in Siberia.... I love driving in the snow ... and
must have bells.... Do you hear, there’s a bell ringing? Where is that
bell ringing? There are people coming.... Now it’s stopped.”

She closed her eyes, exhausted, and suddenly fell asleep for an instant.
There had certainly been the sound of a bell in the distance, but the
ringing had ceased. Mitya let his head sink on her breast. He did not
notice that the bell had ceased ringing, nor did he notice that the songs
had ceased, and that instead of singing and drunken clamor there was
absolute stillness in the house. Grushenka opened her eyes.

“What’s the matter? Was I asleep? Yes ... a bell ... I’ve been asleep and
dreamt I was driving over the snow with bells, and I dozed. I was with
some one I loved, with you. And far, far away. I was holding you and
kissing you, nestling close to you. I was cold, and the snow glistened....
You know how the snow glistens at night when the moon shines. It was as
though I was not on earth. I woke up, and my dear one is close to me. How
sweet that is!...”

“Close to you,” murmured Mitya, kissing her dress, her bosom, her hands.
And suddenly he had a strange fancy: it seemed to him that she was looking
straight before her, not at him, not into his face, but over his head,
with an intent, almost uncanny fixity. An expression of wonder, almost of
alarm, came suddenly into her face.

“Mitya, who is that looking at us?” she whispered.

Mitya turned, and saw that some one had, in fact, parted the curtains and
seemed to be watching them. And not one person alone, it seemed.

He jumped up and walked quickly to the intruder.

“Here, come to us, come here,” said a voice, speaking not loudly, but
firmly and peremptorily.

Mitya passed to the other side of the curtain and stood stock still. The
room was filled with people, but not those who had been there before. An
instantaneous shiver ran down his back, and he shuddered. He recognized
all those people instantly. That tall, stout old man in the overcoat and
forage‐cap with a cockade—was the police captain, Mihail Makarovitch. And
that “consumptive‐looking” trim dandy, “who always has such polished
boots”—that was the deputy prosecutor. “He has a chronometer worth four
hundred roubles; he showed it to me.” And that small young man in
spectacles.... Mitya forgot his surname though he knew him, had seen him:
he was the “investigating lawyer,” from the “school of jurisprudence,” who
had only lately come to the town. And this man—the inspector of police,
Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, a man he knew well. And those fellows with the
brass plates on, why are they here? And those other two ... peasants....
And there at the door Kalganov with Trifon Borissovitch....

“Gentlemen! What’s this for, gentlemen?” began Mitya, but suddenly, as
though beside himself, not knowing what he was doing, he cried aloud, at
the top of his voice:

“I un—der—stand!”

The young man in spectacles moved forward suddenly, and stepping up to
Mitya, began with dignity, though hurriedly:

“We have to make ... in brief, I beg you to come this way, this way to the
sofa.... It is absolutely imperative that you should give an explanation.”

“The old man!” cried Mitya frantically. “The old man and his blood!... I
understand.”

And he sank, almost fell, on a chair close by, as though he had been mown
down by a scythe.

“You understand? He understands it! Monster and parricide! Your father’s
blood cries out against you!” the old captain of police roared suddenly,
stepping up to Mitya.

He was beside himself, crimson in the face and quivering all over.

“This is impossible!” cried the small young man. “Mihail Makarovitch,
Mihail Makarovitch, this won’t do!... I beg you’ll allow me to speak. I
should never have expected such behavior from you....”

“This is delirium, gentlemen, raving delirium,” cried the captain of
police; “look at him: drunk, at this time of night, in the company of a
disreputable woman, with the blood of his father on his hands.... It’s
delirium!...”

“I beg you most earnestly, dear Mihail Makarovitch, to restrain your
feelings,” the prosecutor said in a rapid whisper to the old police
captain, “or I shall be forced to resort to—”

But the little lawyer did not allow him to finish. He turned to Mitya, and
delivered himself in a loud, firm, dignified voice:

“Ex‐Lieutenant Karamazov, it is my duty to inform you that you are charged
with the murder of your father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, perpetrated
this night....”

He said something more, and the prosecutor, too, put in something, but
though Mitya heard them he did not understand them. He stared at them all
with wild eyes.




Book IX. The Preliminary Investigation



Chapter I. The Beginning Of Perhotin’s Official Career


Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin, whom we left knocking at the strong locked gates
of the widow Morozov’s house, ended, of course, by making himself heard.
Fenya, who was still excited by the fright she had had two hours before,
and too much “upset” to go to bed, was almost frightened into hysterics on
hearing the furious knocking at the gate. Though she had herself seen him
drive away, she fancied that it must be Dmitri Fyodorovitch knocking
again, no one else could knock so savagely. She ran to the house‐porter,
who had already waked up and gone out to the gate, and began imploring him
not to open it. But having questioned Pyotr Ilyitch, and learned that he
wanted to see Fenya on very “important business,” the man made up his mind
at last to open. Pyotr Ilyitch was admitted into Fenya’s kitchen, but the
girl begged him to allow the house‐porter to be present, “because of her
misgivings.” He began questioning her and at once learnt the most vital
fact, that is, that when Dmitri Fyodorovitch had run out to look for
Grushenka, he had snatched up a pestle from the mortar, and that when he
returned, the pestle was not with him and his hands were smeared with
blood.

“And the blood was simply flowing, dripping from him, dripping!” Fenya
kept exclaiming. This horrible detail was simply the product of her
disordered imagination. But although not “dripping,” Pyotr Ilyitch had
himself seen those hands stained with blood, and had helped to wash them.
Moreover, the question he had to decide was not how soon the blood had
dried, but where Dmitri Fyodorovitch had run with the pestle, or rather,
whether it really was to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, and how he could
satisfactorily ascertain. Pyotr Ilyitch persisted in returning to this
point, and though he found out nothing conclusive, yet he carried away a
conviction that Dmitri Fyodorovitch could have gone nowhere but to his
father’s house, and that therefore something must have happened there.

“And when he came back,” Fenya added with excitement, “I told him the
whole story, and then I began asking him, ‘Why have you got blood on your
hands, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?’ and he answered that that was human blood,
and that he had just killed some one. He confessed it all to me, and
suddenly ran off like a madman. I sat down and began thinking, where’s he
run off to now like a madman? He’ll go to Mokroe, I thought, and kill my
mistress there. I ran out to beg him not to kill her. I was running to his
lodgings, but I looked at Plotnikov’s shop, and saw him just setting off,
and there was no blood on his hands then.” (Fenya had noticed this and
remembered it.) Fenya’s old grandmother confirmed her evidence as far as
she was capable. After asking some further questions, Pyotr Ilyitch left
the house, even more upset and uneasy than he had been when he entered it.

The most direct and the easiest thing for him to do would have been to go
straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, to find out whether anything had happened
there, and if so, what; and only to go to the police captain, as Pyotr
Ilyitch firmly intended doing, when he had satisfied himself of the fact.
But the night was dark, Fyodor Pavlovitch’s gates were strong, and he
would have to knock again. His acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovitch was of
the slightest, and what if, after he had been knocking, they opened to
him, and nothing had happened? Then Fyodor Pavlovitch in his jeering way
would go telling the story all over the town, how a stranger, called
Perhotin, had broken in upon him at midnight to ask if any one had killed
him. It would make a scandal. And scandal was what Pyotr Ilyitch dreaded
more than anything in the world.

Yet the feeling that possessed him was so strong, that though he stamped
his foot angrily and swore at himself, he set off again, not to Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s but to Madame Hohlakov’s. He decided that if she denied
having just given Dmitri Fyodorovitch three thousand roubles, he would go
straight to the police captain, but if she admitted having given him the
money, he would go home and let the matter rest till next morning.

It is, of course, perfectly evident that there was even more likelihood of
causing scandal by going at eleven o’clock at night to a fashionable lady,
a complete stranger, and perhaps rousing her from her bed to ask her an
amazing question, than by going to Fyodor Pavlovitch. But that is just how
it is, sometimes, especially in cases like the present one, with the
decisions of the most precise and phlegmatic people. Pyotr Ilyitch was by
no means phlegmatic at that moment. He remembered all his life how a
haunting uneasiness gradually gained possession of him, growing more and
more painful and driving him on, against his will. Yet he kept cursing
himself, of course, all the way for going to this lady, but “I will get to
the bottom of it, I will!” he repeated for the tenth time, grinding his
teeth, and he carried out his intention.

It was exactly eleven o’clock when he entered Madame Hohlakov’s house. He
was admitted into the yard pretty quickly, but, in response to his inquiry
whether the lady was still up, the porter could give no answer, except
that she was usually in bed by that time.

“Ask at the top of the stairs. If the lady wants to receive you, she’ll
receive you. If she won’t, she won’t.”

Pyotr Ilyitch went up, but did not find things so easy here. The footman
was unwilling to take in his name, but finally called a maid. Pyotr
Ilyitch politely but insistently begged her to inform her lady that an
official, living in the town, called Perhotin, had called on particular
business, and that if it were not of the greatest importance he would not
have ventured to come. “Tell her in those words, in those words exactly,”
he asked the girl.

She went away. He remained waiting in the entry. Madame Hohlakov herself
was already in her bedroom, though not yet asleep. She had felt upset ever
since Mitya’s visit, and had a presentiment that she would not get through
the night without the sick headache which always, with her, followed such
excitement. She was surprised on hearing the announcement from the maid.
She irritably declined to see him, however, though the unexpected visit at
such an hour, of an “official living in the town,” who was a total
stranger, roused her feminine curiosity intensely. But this time Pyotr
Ilyitch was as obstinate as a mule. He begged the maid most earnestly to
take another message in these very words:

“That he had come on business of the greatest importance, and that Madame
Hohlakov might have cause to regret it later, if she refused to see him
now.”

“I plunged headlong,” he described it afterwards.

The maid, gazing at him in amazement, went to take his message again.
Madame Hohlakov was impressed. She thought a little, asked what he looked
like, and learned that he was “very well dressed, young and so polite.” We
may note, parenthetically, that Pyotr Ilyitch was a rather good‐looking
young man, and well aware of the fact. Madame Hohlakov made up her mind to
see him. She was in her dressing‐gown and slippers, but she flung a black
shawl over her shoulders. “The official” was asked to walk into the
drawing‐room, the very room in which Mitya had been received shortly
before. The lady came to meet her visitor, with a sternly inquiring
countenance, and, without asking him to sit down, began at once with the
question:

“What do you want?”

“I have ventured to disturb you, madam, on a matter concerning our common
acquaintance, Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov,” Perhotin began.

But he had hardly uttered the name, when the lady’s face showed signs of
acute irritation. She almost shrieked, and interrupted him in a fury:

“How much longer am I to be worried by that awful man?” she cried
hysterically. “How dare you, sir, how could you venture to disturb a lady
who is a stranger to you, in her own house at such an hour!... And to
force yourself upon her to talk of a man who came here, to this very
drawing‐room, only three hours ago, to murder me, and went stamping out of
the room, as no one would go out of a decent house. Let me tell you, sir,
that I shall lodge a complaint against you, that I will not let it pass.
Kindly leave me at once.... I am a mother.... I ... I—”

“Murder! then he tried to murder you, too?”

“Why, has he killed somebody else?” Madame Hohlakov asked impulsively.

“If you would kindly listen, madam, for half a moment, I’ll explain it all
in a couple of words,” answered Perhotin, firmly. “At five o’clock this
afternoon Dmitri Fyodorovitch borrowed ten roubles from me, and I know for
a fact he had no money. Yet at nine o’clock, he came to see me with a
bundle of hundred‐rouble notes in his hand, about two or three thousand
roubles. His hands and face were all covered with blood, and he looked
like a madman. When I asked him where he had got so much money, he
answered that he had just received it from you, that you had given him a
sum of three thousand to go to the gold‐mines....”

Madame Hohlakov’s face assumed an expression of intense and painful
excitement.

“Good God! He must have killed his old father!” she cried, clasping her
hands. “I have never given him money, never! Oh, run, run!... Don’t say
another word! Save the old man ... run to his father ... run!”

“Excuse me, madam, then you did not give him money? You remember for a
fact that you did not give him any money?”

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t! I refused to give it him, for he could not
appreciate it. He ran out in a fury, stamping. He rushed at me, but I
slipped away.... And let me tell you, as I wish to hide nothing from you
now, that he positively spat at me. Can you fancy that! But why are we
standing? Ah, sit down.”

“Excuse me, I....”

“Or better run, run, you must run and save the poor old man from an awful
death!”

“But if he has killed him already?”

“Ah, good heavens, yes! Then what are we to do now? What do you think we
must do now?”

Meantime she had made Pyotr Ilyitch sit down and sat down herself, facing
him. Briefly, but fairly clearly, Pyotr Ilyitch told her the history of
the affair, that part of it at least which he had himself witnessed. He
described, too, his visit to Fenya, and told her about the pestle. All
these details produced an overwhelming effect on the distracted lady, who
kept uttering shrieks, and covering her face with her hands....

“Would you believe it, I foresaw all this! I have that special faculty,
whatever I imagine comes to pass. And how often I’ve looked at that awful
man and always thought, that man will end by murdering me. And now it’s
happened ... that is, if he hasn’t murdered me, but only his own father,
it’s only because the finger of God preserved me, and what’s more, he was
ashamed to murder me because, in this very place, I put the holy ikon from
the relics of the holy martyr, Saint Varvara, on his neck.... And to think
how near I was to death at that minute, I went close up to him and he
stretched out his neck to me!... Do you know, Pyotr Ilyitch (I think you
said your name was Pyotr Ilyitch), I don’t believe in miracles, but that
ikon and this unmistakable miracle with me now—that shakes me, and I’m
ready to believe in anything you like. Have you heard about Father
Zossima?... But I don’t know what I’m saying ... and only fancy, with the
ikon on his neck he spat at me.... He only spat, it’s true, he didn’t
murder me and ... he dashed away! But what shall we do, what must we do
now? What do you think?”

Pyotr Ilyitch got up, and announced that he was going straight to the
police captain, to tell him all about it, and leave him to do what he
thought fit.

“Oh, he’s an excellent man, excellent! Mihail Makarovitch, I know him. Of
course, he’s the person to go to. How practical you are, Pyotr Ilyitch!
How well you’ve thought of everything! I should never have thought of it
in your place!”

“Especially as I know the police captain very well, too,” observed Pyotr
Ilyitch, who still continued to stand, and was obviously anxious to escape
as quickly as possible from the impulsive lady, who would not let him say
good‐by and go away.

“And be sure, be sure,” she prattled on, “to come back and tell me what
you see there, and what you find out ... what comes to light ... how
they’ll try him ... and what he’s condemned to.... Tell me, we have no
capital punishment, have we? But be sure to come, even if it’s at three
o’clock at night, at four, at half‐past four.... Tell them to wake me, to
wake me, to shake me, if I don’t get up.... But, good heavens, I shan’t
sleep! But wait, hadn’t I better come with you?”

“N—no. But if you would write three lines with your own hand, stating that
you did not give Dmitri Fyodorovitch money, it might, perhaps, be of use
... in case it’s needed....”

“To be sure!” Madame Hohlakov skipped, delighted, to her bureau. “And you
know I’m simply struck, amazed at your resourcefulness, your good sense in
such affairs. Are you in the service here? I’m delighted to think that
you’re in the service here!”

And still speaking, she scribbled on half a sheet of notepaper the
following lines:


    I’ve never in my life lent to that unhappy man, Dmitri
    Fyodorovitch Karamazov (for, in spite of all, he is unhappy),
    three thousand roubles to‐day. I’ve never given him money, never:
    That I swear by all that’s holy!

    K. HOHLAKOV.


“Here’s the note!” she turned quickly to Pyotr Ilyitch. “Go, save him.
It’s a noble deed on your part!”

And she made the sign of the cross three times over him. She ran out to
accompany him to the passage.

“How grateful I am to you! You can’t think how grateful I am to you for
having come to me, first. How is it I haven’t met you before? I shall feel
flattered at seeing you at my house in the future. How delightful it is
that you are living here!... Such precision! Such practical ability!...
They must appreciate you, they must understand you. If there’s anything I
can do, believe me ... oh, I love young people! I’m in love with young
people! The younger generation are the one prop of our suffering country.
Her one hope.... Oh, go, go!...”

But Pyotr Ilyitch had already run away or she would not have let him go so
soon. Yet Madame Hohlakov had made a rather agreeable impression on him,
which had somewhat softened his anxiety at being drawn into such an
unpleasant affair. Tastes differ, as we all know. “She’s by no means so
elderly,” he thought, feeling pleased, “on the contrary I should have
taken her for her daughter.”

As for Madame Hohlakov, she was simply enchanted by the young man. “Such
sense! such exactness! in so young a man! in our day! and all that with
such manners and appearance! People say the young people of to‐day are no
good for anything, but here’s an example!” etc. So she simply forgot this
“dreadful affair,” and it was only as she was getting into bed, that,
suddenly recalling “how near death she had been,” she exclaimed: “Ah, it
is awful, awful!”

But she fell at once into a sound, sweet sleep.

I would not, however, have dwelt on such trivial and irrelevant details,
if this eccentric meeting of the young official with the by no means
elderly widow had not subsequently turned out to be the foundation of the
whole career of that practical and precise young man. His story is
remembered to this day with amazement in our town, and I shall perhaps
have something to say about it, when I have finished my long history of
the Brothers Karamazov.



Chapter II. The Alarm


Our police captain, Mihail Makarovitch Makarov, a retired lieutenant‐
colonel, was a widower and an excellent man. He had only come to us three
years previously, but had won general esteem, chiefly because he “knew how
to keep society together.” He was never without visitors, and could not
have got on without them. Some one or other was always dining with him; he
never sat down to table without guests. He gave regular dinners, too, on
all sorts of occasions, sometimes most surprising ones. Though the fare
was not _recherché_, it was abundant. The fish‐pies were excellent, and
the wine made up in quantity for what it lacked in quality.

The first room his guests entered was a well‐fitted billiard‐room, with
pictures of English race‐horses, in black frames on the walls, an
essential decoration, as we all know, for a bachelor’s billiard‐room.
There was card‐playing every evening at his house, if only at one table.
But at frequent intervals, all the society of our town, with the mammas
and young ladies, assembled at his house to dance. Though Mihail
Makarovitch was a widower, he did not live alone. His widowed daughter
lived with him, with her two unmarried daughters, grown‐up girls, who had
finished their education. They were of agreeable appearance and lively
character, and though every one knew they would have no dowry, they
attracted all the young men of fashion to their grandfather’s house.

Mihail Makarovitch was by no means very efficient in his work, though he
performed his duties no worse than many others. To speak plainly, he was a
man of rather narrow education. His understanding of the limits of his
administrative power could not always be relied upon. It was not so much
that he failed to grasp certain reforms enacted during the present reign,
as that he made conspicuous blunders in his interpretation of them. This
was not from any special lack of intelligence, but from carelessness, for
he was always in too great a hurry to go into the subject.

“I have the heart of a soldier rather than of a civilian,” he used to say
of himself. He had not even formed a definite idea of the fundamental
principles of the reforms connected with the emancipation of the serfs,
and only picked it up, so to speak, from year to year, involuntarily
increasing his knowledge by practice. And yet he was himself a landowner.
Pyotr Ilyitch knew for certain that he would meet some of Mihail
Makarovitch’s visitors there that evening, but he didn’t know which. As it
happened, at that moment the prosecutor, and Varvinsky, our district
doctor, a young man, who had only just come to us from Petersburg after
taking a brilliant degree at the Academy of Medicine, were playing whist
at the police captain’s. Ippolit Kirillovitch, the prosecutor (he was
really the deputy prosecutor, but we always called him the prosecutor),
was rather a peculiar man, of about five and thirty, inclined to be
consumptive, and married to a fat and childless woman. He was vain and
irritable, though he had a good intellect, and even a kind heart. It
seemed that all that was wrong with him was that he had a better opinion
of himself than his ability warranted. And that made him seem constantly
uneasy. He had, moreover, certain higher, even artistic, leanings, towards
psychology, for instance, a special study of the human heart, a special
knowledge of the criminal and his crime. He cherished a grievance on this
ground, considering that he had been passed over in the service, and being
firmly persuaded that in higher spheres he had not been properly
appreciated, and had enemies. In gloomy moments he even threatened to give
up his post, and practice as a barrister in criminal cases. The unexpected
Karamazov case agitated him profoundly: “It was a case that might well be
talked about all over Russia.” But I am anticipating.

Nikolay Parfenovitch Nelyudov, the young investigating lawyer, who had
only come from Petersburg two months before, was sitting in the next room
with the young ladies. People talked about it afterwards and wondered that
all the gentlemen should, as though intentionally, on the evening of “the
crime” have been gathered together at the house of the executive
authority. Yet it was perfectly simple and happened quite naturally.

Ippolit Kirillovitch’s wife had had toothache for the last two days, and
he was obliged to go out to escape from her groans. The doctor, from the
very nature of his being, could not spend an evening except at cards.
Nikolay Parfenovitch Nelyudov had been intending for three days past to
drop in that evening at Mihail Makarovitch’s, so to speak casually, so as
slyly to startle the eldest granddaughter, Olga Mihailovna, by showing
that he knew her secret, that he knew it was her birthday, and that she
was trying to conceal it on purpose, so as not to be obliged to give a
dance. He anticipated a great deal of merriment, many playful jests about
her age, and her being afraid to reveal it, about his knowing her secret
and telling everybody, and so on. The charming young man was a great adept
at such teasing; the ladies had christened him “the naughty man,” and he
seemed to be delighted at the name. He was extremely well‐bred, however,
of good family, education and feelings, and, though leading a life of
pleasure, his sallies were always innocent and in good taste. He was
short, and delicate‐looking. On his white, slender, little fingers he
always wore a number of big, glittering rings. When he was engaged in his
official duties, he always became extraordinarily grave, as though
realizing his position and the sanctity of the obligations laid upon him.
He had a special gift for mystifying murderers and other criminals of the
peasant class during interrogation, and if he did not win their respect,
he certainly succeeded in arousing their wonder.

Pyotr Ilyitch was simply dumbfounded when he went into the police
captain’s. He saw instantly that every one knew. They had positively
thrown down their cards, all were standing up and talking. Even Nikolay
Parfenovitch had left the young ladies and run in, looking strenuous and
ready for action. Pyotr Ilyitch was met with the astounding news that old
Fyodor Pavlovitch really had been murdered that evening in his own house,
murdered and robbed. The news had only just reached them in the following
manner.

Marfa Ignatyevna, the wife of old Grigory, who had been knocked senseless
near the fence, was sleeping soundly in her bed and might well have slept
till morning after the draught she had taken. But, all of a sudden she
waked up, no doubt roused by a fearful epileptic scream from Smerdyakov,
who was lying in the next room unconscious. That scream always preceded
his fits, and always terrified and upset Marfa Ignatyevna. She could never
get accustomed to it. She jumped up and ran half‐awake to Smerdyakov’s
room. But it was dark there, and she could only hear the invalid beginning
to gasp and struggle. Then Marfa Ignatyevna herself screamed out and was
going to call her husband, but suddenly realized that when she had got up,
he was not beside her in bed. She ran back to the bedstead and began
groping with her hands, but the bed was really empty. Then he must have
gone out—where? She ran to the steps and timidly called him. She got no
answer, of course, but she caught the sound of groans far away in the
garden in the darkness. She listened. The groans were repeated, and it was
evident they came from the garden.

“Good Lord! Just as it was with Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya!” she thought
distractedly. She went timidly down the steps and saw that the gate into
the garden was open.

“He must be out there, poor dear,” she thought. She went up to the gate
and all at once she distinctly heard Grigory calling her by name, “Marfa!
Marfa!” in a weak, moaning, dreadful voice.

“Lord, preserve us from harm!” Marfa Ignatyevna murmured, and ran towards
the voice, and that was how she found Grigory. But she found him not by
the fence where he had been knocked down, but about twenty paces off. It
appeared later, that he had crawled away on coming to himself, and
probably had been a long time getting so far, losing consciousness several
times. She noticed at once that he was covered with blood, and screamed at
the top of her voice. Grigory was muttering incoherently:

“He has murdered ... his father murdered.... Why scream, silly ... run ...
fetch some one....”

But Marfa continued screaming, and seeing that her master’s window was
open and that there was a candle alight in the window, she ran there and
began calling Fyodor Pavlovitch. But peeping in at the window, she saw a
fearful sight. Her master was lying on his back, motionless, on the floor.
His light‐colored dressing‐gown and white shirt were soaked with blood.
The candle on the table brightly lighted up the blood and the motionless
dead face of Fyodor Pavlovitch. Terror‐stricken, Marfa rushed away from
the window, ran out of the garden, drew the bolt of the big gate and ran
headlong by the back way to the neighbor, Marya Kondratyevna. Both mother
and daughter were asleep, but they waked up at Marfa’s desperate and
persistent screaming and knocking at the shutter. Marfa, shrieking and
screaming incoherently, managed to tell them the main fact, and to beg for
assistance. It happened that Foma had come back from his wanderings and
was staying the night with them. They got him up immediately and all three
ran to the scene of the crime. On the way, Marya Kondratyevna remembered
that at about eight o’clock she heard a dreadful scream from their garden,
and this was no doubt Grigory’s scream, “Parricide!” uttered when he
caught hold of Mitya’s leg.

“Some one person screamed out and then was silent,” Marya Kondratyevna
explained as she ran. Running to the place where Grigory lay, the two
women with the help of Foma carried him to the lodge. They lighted a
candle and saw that Smerdyakov was no better, that he was writhing in
convulsions, his eyes fixed in a squint, and that foam was flowing from
his lips. They moistened Grigory’s forehead with water mixed with vinegar,
and the water revived him at once. He asked immediately:

“Is the master murdered?”

Then Foma and both the women ran to the house and saw this time that not
only the window, but also the door into the garden was wide open, though
Fyodor Pavlovitch had for the last week locked himself in every night and
did not allow even Grigory to come in on any pretext. Seeing that door
open, they were afraid to go in to Fyodor Pavlovitch “for fear anything
should happen afterwards.” And when they returned to Grigory, the old man
told them to go straight to the police captain. Marya Kondratyevna ran
there and gave the alarm to the whole party at the police captain’s. She
arrived only five minutes before Pyotr Ilyitch, so that his story came,
not as his own surmise and theory, but as the direct confirmation, by a
witness, of the theory held by all, as to the identity of the criminal (a
theory he had in the bottom of his heart refused to believe till that
moment).

It was resolved to act with energy. The deputy police inspector of the
town was commissioned to take four witnesses, to enter Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
house and there to open an inquiry on the spot, according to the regular
forms, which I will not go into here. The district doctor, a zealous man,
new to his work, almost insisted on accompanying the police captain, the
prosecutor, and the investigating lawyer.

I will note briefly that Fyodor Pavlovitch was found to be quite dead,
with his skull battered in. But with what? Most likely with the same
weapon with which Grigory had been attacked. And immediately that weapon
was found, Grigory, to whom all possible medical assistance was at once
given, described in a weak and breaking voice how he had been knocked
down. They began looking with a lantern by the fence and found the brass
pestle dropped in a most conspicuous place on the garden path. There were
no signs of disturbance in the room where Fyodor Pavlovitch was lying. But
by the bed, behind the screen, they picked up from the floor a big and
thick envelope with the inscription: “A present of three thousand roubles
for my angel Grushenka, if she is willing to come.” And below had been
added by Fyodor Pavlovitch, “For my little chicken.” There were three
seals of red sealing‐wax on the envelope, but it had been torn open and
was empty: the money had been removed. They found also on the floor a
piece of narrow pink ribbon, with which the envelope had been tied up.

One piece of Pyotr Ilyitch’s evidence made a great impression on the
prosecutor and the investigating magistrate, namely, his idea that Dmitri
Fyodorovitch would shoot himself before daybreak, that he had resolved to
do so, had spoken of it to Ilyitch, had taken the pistols, loaded them
before him, written a letter, put it in his pocket, etc. When Pyotr
Ilyitch, though still unwilling to believe in it, threatened to tell some
one so as to prevent the suicide, Mitya had answered grinning: “You’ll be
too late.” So they must make haste to Mokroe to find the criminal, before
he really did shoot himself.

“That’s clear, that’s clear!” repeated the prosecutor in great excitement.
“That’s just the way with mad fellows like that: ‘I shall kill myself to‐
morrow, so I’ll make merry till I die!’ ”

The story of how he had bought the wine and provisions excited the
prosecutor more than ever.

“Do you remember the fellow that murdered a merchant called Olsufyev,
gentlemen? He stole fifteen hundred, went at once to have his hair curled,
and then, without even hiding the money, carrying it almost in his hand in
the same way, he went off to the girls.”

All were delayed, however, by the inquiry, the search, and the
formalities, etc., in the house of Fyodor Pavlovitch. It all took time and
so, two hours before starting, they sent on ahead to Mokroe the officer of
the rural police, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch Schmertsov, who had arrived in the
town the morning before to get his pay. He was instructed to avoid raising
the alarm when he reached Mokroe, but to keep constant watch over the
“criminal” till the arrival of the proper authorities, to procure also
witnesses for the arrest, police constables, and so on. Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch did as he was told, preserving his incognito, and giving no
one but his old acquaintance, Trifon Borissovitch, the slightest hint of
his secret business. He had spoken to him just before Mitya met the
landlord in the balcony, looking for him in the dark, and noticed at once
a change in Trifon Borissovitch’s face and voice. So neither Mitya nor any
one else knew that he was being watched. The box with the pistols had been
carried off by Trifon Borissovitch and put in a suitable place. Only after
four o’clock, almost at sunrise, all the officials, the police captain,
the prosecutor, the investigating lawyer, drove up in two carriages, each
drawn by three horses. The doctor remained at Fyodor Pavlovitch’s to make
a post‐mortem next day on the body. But he was particularly interested in
the condition of the servant, Smerdyakov.

“Such violent and protracted epileptic fits, recurring continually for
twenty‐four hours, are rarely to be met with, and are of interest to
science,” he declared enthusiastically to his companions, and as they left
they laughingly congratulated him on his find. The prosecutor and the
investigating lawyer distinctly remembered the doctor’s saying that
Smerdyakov could not outlive the night.

After these long, but I think necessary explanations, we will return to
that moment of our tale at which we broke off.



Chapter III. The Sufferings Of A Soul, The First Ordeal


And so Mitya sat looking wildly at the people round him, not understanding
what was said to him. Suddenly he got up, flung up his hands, and shouted
aloud:

“I’m not guilty! I’m not guilty of that blood! I’m not guilty of my
father’s blood.... I meant to kill him. But I’m not guilty. Not I.”

But he had hardly said this, before Grushenka rushed from behind the
curtain and flung herself at the police captain’s feet.

“It was my fault! Mine! My wickedness!” she cried, in a heartrending
voice, bathed in tears, stretching out her clasped hands towards them. “He
did it through me. I tortured him and drove him to it. I tortured that
poor old man that’s dead, too, in my wickedness, and brought him to this!
It’s my fault, mine first, mine most, my fault!”

“Yes, it’s your fault! You’re the chief criminal! You fury! You harlot!
You’re the most to blame!” shouted the police captain, threatening her
with his hand. But he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The
prosecutor positively seized hold of him.

“This is absolutely irregular, Mihail Makarovitch!” he cried. “You are
positively hindering the inquiry.... You’re ruining the case....” he
almost gasped.

“Follow the regular course! Follow the regular course!” cried Nikolay
Parfenovitch, fearfully excited too, “otherwise it’s absolutely
impossible!...”

“Judge us together!” Grushenka cried frantically, still kneeling. “Punish
us together. I will go with him now, if it’s to death!”

“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya fell on his knees beside
her and held her tight in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he cried, “she’s
not guilty of anything, of any blood, of anything!”

He remembered afterwards that he was forcibly dragged away from her by
several men, and that she was led out, and that when he recovered himself
he was sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood the men with
metal plates. Facing him on the other side of the table sat Nikolay
Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer. He kept persuading him to drink a
little water out of a glass that stood on the table.

“That will refresh you, that will calm you. Be calm, don’t be frightened,”
he added, extremely politely. Mitya (he remembered it afterwards) became
suddenly intensely interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and
another with a transparent bright yellow stone, of great brilliance. And
long afterwards he remembered with wonder how those rings had riveted his
attention through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that he
was utterly unable to tear himself away from them and dismiss them, as
things that had nothing to do with his position. On Mitya’s left side, in
the place where Maximov had been sitting at the beginning of the evening,
the prosecutor was now seated, and on Mitya’s right hand, where Grushenka
had been, was a rosy‐cheeked young man in a sort of shabby hunting‐jacket,
with ink and paper before him. This was the secretary of the investigating
lawyer, who had brought him with him. The police captain was now standing
by the window at the other end of the room, beside Kalganov, who was
sitting there.

“Drink some water,” said the investigating lawyer softly, for the tenth
time.

“I have drunk it, gentlemen, I have ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush me,
punish me, decide my fate!” cried Mitya, staring with terribly fixed wide‐
open eyes at the investigating lawyer.

“So you positively declare that you are not guilty of the death of your
father, Fyodor Pavlovitch?” asked the investigating lawyer, softly but
insistently.

“I am not guilty. I am guilty of the blood of another old man but not of
my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man and knocked
him down.... But it’s hard to have to answer for that murder with another,
a terrible murder of which I am not guilty.... It’s a terrible accusation,
gentlemen, a knock‐down blow. But who has killed my father, who has killed
him? Who can have killed him if I didn’t? It’s marvelous, extraordinary,
impossible.”

“Yes, who can have killed him?” the investigating lawyer was beginning,
but Ippolit Kirillovitch, the prosecutor, glancing at him, addressed
Mitya.

“You need not worry yourself about the old servant, Grigory Vassilyevitch.
He is alive, he has recovered, and in spite of the terrible blows
inflicted, according to his own and your evidence, by you, there seems no
doubt that he will live, so the doctor says, at least.”

“Alive? He’s alive?” cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. His face beamed.
“Lord, I thank Thee for the miracle Thou has wrought for me, a sinner and
evildoer. That’s an answer to my prayer. I’ve been praying all night.” And
he crossed himself three times. He was almost breathless.

“So from this Grigory we have received such important evidence concerning
you, that—” The prosecutor would have continued, but Mitya suddenly jumped
up from his chair.

“One minute, gentlemen, for God’s sake, one minute; I will run to her—”

“Excuse me, at this moment it’s quite impossible,” Nikolay Parfenovitch
almost shrieked. He, too, leapt to his feet. Mitya was seized by the men
with the metal plates, but he sat down of his own accord....

“Gentlemen, what a pity! I wanted to see her for one minute only; I wanted
to tell her that it has been washed away, it has gone, that blood that was
weighing on my heart all night, and that I am not a murderer now!
Gentlemen, she is my betrothed!” he said ecstatically and reverently,
looking round at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh, in one minute
you have given me new life, new heart!... That old man used to carry me in
his arms, gentlemen. He used to wash me in the tub when I was a baby three
years old, abandoned by every one, he was like a father to me!...”

“And so you—” the investigating lawyer began.

“Allow me, gentlemen, allow me one minute more,” interposed Mitya, putting
his elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands. “Let me have
a moment to think, let me breathe, gentlemen. All this is horribly
upsetting, horribly. A man is not a drum, gentlemen!”

“Drink a little more water,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch.

Mitya took his hands from his face and laughed. His eyes were confident.
He seemed completely transformed in a moment. His whole bearing was
changed; he was once more the equal of these men, with all of whom he was
acquainted, as though they had all met the day before, when nothing had
happened, at some social gathering. We may note in passing that, on his
first arrival, Mitya had been made very welcome at the police captain’s,
but later, during the last month especially, Mitya had hardly called at
all, and when the police captain met him, in the street, for instance,
Mitya noticed that he frowned and only bowed out of politeness. His
acquaintance with the prosecutor was less intimate, though he sometimes
paid his wife, a nervous and fanciful lady, visits of politeness, without
quite knowing why, and she always received him graciously and had, for
some reason, taken an interest in him up to the last. He had not had time
to get to know the investigating lawyer, though he had met him and talked
to him twice, each time about the fair sex.

“You’re a most skillful lawyer, I see, Nikolay Parfenovitch,” cried Mitya,
laughing gayly, “but I can help you now. Oh, gentlemen, I feel like a new
man, and don’t be offended at my addressing you so simply and directly.
I’m rather drunk, too, I’ll tell you that frankly. I believe I’ve had the
honor and pleasure of meeting you, Nikolay Parfenovitch, at my kinsman
Miüsov’s. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I don’t pretend to be on equal terms with
you. I understand, of course, in what character I am sitting before you.
Oh, of course, there’s a horrible suspicion ... hanging over me ... if
Grigory has given evidence.... A horrible suspicion! It’s awful, awful, I
understand that! But to business, gentlemen, I am ready, and we will make
an end of it in one moment; for, listen, listen, gentlemen! Since I know
I’m innocent, we can put an end to it in a minute. Can’t we? Can’t we?”

Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and effusively, as though he
positively took his listeners to be his best friends.

“So, for the present, we will write that you absolutely deny the charge
brought against you,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, impressively, and bending
down to the secretary he dictated to him in an undertone what to write.

“Write it down? You want to write that down? Well, write it; I consent, I
give my full consent, gentlemen, only ... do you see?... Stay, stay, write
this. Of disorderly conduct I am guilty, of violence on a poor old man I
am guilty. And there is something else at the bottom of my heart, of which
I am guilty, too—but that you need not write down” (he turned suddenly to
the secretary); “that’s my personal life, gentlemen, that doesn’t concern
you, the bottom of my heart, that’s to say.... But of the murder of my old
father I’m not guilty. That’s a wild idea. It’s quite a wild idea!... I
will prove you that and you’ll be convinced directly.... You will laugh,
gentlemen. You’ll laugh yourselves at your suspicion!...”

“Be calm, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” said the investigating lawyer evidently
trying to allay Mitya’s excitement by his own composure. “Before we go on
with our inquiry, I should like, if you will consent to answer, to hear
you confirm the statement that you disliked your father, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, that you were involved in continual disputes with him. Here at
least, a quarter of an hour ago, you exclaimed that you wanted to kill
him: ‘I didn’t kill him,’ you said, ‘but I wanted to kill him.’ ”

“Did I exclaim that? Ach, that may be so, gentlemen! Yes, unhappily, I did
want to kill him ... many times I wanted to ... unhappily, unhappily!”

“You wanted to. Would you consent to explain what motives precisely led
you to such a sentiment of hatred for your parent?”

“What is there to explain, gentlemen?” Mitya shrugged his shoulders
sullenly, looking down. “I have never concealed my feelings. All the town
knows about it—every one knows in the tavern. Only lately I declared them
in Father Zossima’s cell.... And the very same day, in the evening I beat
my father. I nearly killed him, and I swore I’d come again and kill him,
before witnesses.... Oh, a thousand witnesses! I’ve been shouting it aloud
for the last month, any one can tell you that!... The fact stares you in
the face, it speaks for itself, it cries aloud, but feelings, gentlemen,
feelings are another matter. You see, gentlemen”—Mitya frowned—“it seems
to me that about feelings you’ve no right to question me. I know that you
are bound by your office, I quite understand that, but that’s my affair,
my private, intimate affair, yet ... since I haven’t concealed my feelings
in the past ... in the tavern, for instance, I’ve talked to every one, so
... so I won’t make a secret of it now. You see, I understand, gentlemen,
that there are terrible facts against me in this business. I told every
one that I’d kill him, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been killed. So it
must have been me! Ha ha! I can make allowances for you, gentlemen, I can
quite make allowances. I’m struck all of a heap myself, for who can have
murdered him, if not I? That’s what it comes to, isn’t it? If not I, who
can it be, who? Gentlemen, I want to know, I insist on knowing!” he
exclaimed suddenly. “Where was he murdered? How was he murdered? How, and
with what? Tell me,” he asked quickly, looking at the two lawyers.

“We found him in his study, lying on his back on the floor, with his head
battered in,” said the prosecutor.

“That’s horrible!” Mitya shuddered and, putting his elbows on the table,
hid his face in his right hand.

“We will continue,” interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch. “So what was it that
impelled you to this sentiment of hatred? You have asserted in public, I
believe, that it was based upon jealousy?”

“Well, yes, jealousy. And not only jealousy.”

“Disputes about money?”

“Yes, about money, too.”

“There was a dispute about three thousand roubles, I think, which you
claimed as part of your inheritance?”

“Three thousand! More, more,” cried Mitya hotly; “more than six thousand,
more than ten, perhaps. I told every one so, shouted it at them. But I
made up my mind to let it go at three thousand. I was desperately in need
of that three thousand ... so the bundle of notes for three thousand that
I knew he kept under his pillow, ready for Grushenka, I considered as
simply stolen from me. Yes, gentlemen, I looked upon it as mine, as my own
property....”

The prosecutor looked significantly at the investigating lawyer, and had
time to wink at him on the sly.

“We will return to that subject later,” said the lawyer promptly. “You
will allow us to note that point and write it down; that you looked upon
that money as your own property?”

“Write it down, by all means. I know that’s another fact that tells
against me, but I’m not afraid of facts and I tell them against myself. Do
you hear? Do you know, gentlemen, you take me for a different sort of man
from what I am,” he added, suddenly gloomy and dejected. “You have to deal
with a man of honor, a man of the highest honor; above all—don’t lose
sight of it—a man who’s done a lot of nasty things, but has always been,
and still is, honorable at bottom, in his inner being. I don’t know how to
express it. That’s just what’s made me wretched all my life, that I
yearned to be honorable, that I was, so to say, a martyr to a sense of
honor, seeking for it with a lantern, with the lantern of Diogenes, and
yet all my life I’ve been doing filthy things like all of us, gentlemen
... that is like me alone. That was a mistake, like me alone, me alone!...
Gentlemen, my head aches ...” His brows contracted with pain. “You see,
gentlemen, I couldn’t bear the look of him, there was something in him
ignoble, impudent, trampling on everything sacred, something sneering and
irreverent, loathsome, loathsome. But now that he’s dead, I feel
differently.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t feel differently, but I wish I hadn’t hated him so.”

“You feel penitent?”

“No, not penitent, don’t write that. I’m not much good myself, I’m not
very beautiful, so I had no right to consider him repulsive. That’s what I
mean. Write that down, if you like.”

Saying this Mitya became very mournful. He had grown more and more gloomy
as the inquiry continued.

At that moment another unexpected scene followed. Though Grushenka had
been removed, she had not been taken far away, only into the room next but
one from the blue room, in which the examination was proceeding. It was a
little room with one window, next beyond the large room in which they had
danced and feasted so lavishly. She was sitting there with no one by her
but Maximov, who was terribly depressed, terribly scared, and clung to her
side, as though for security. At their door stood one of the peasants with
a metal plate on his breast. Grushenka was crying, and suddenly her grief
was too much for her, she jumped up, flung up her arms and, with a loud
wail of sorrow, rushed out of the room to him, to her Mitya, and so
unexpectedly that they had not time to stop her. Mitya, hearing her cry,
trembled, jumped up, and with a yell rushed impetuously to meet her, not
knowing what he was doing. But they were not allowed to come together,
though they saw one another. He was seized by the arms. He struggled, and
tried to tear himself away. It took three or four men to hold him. She was
seized too, and he saw her stretching out her arms to him, crying aloud as
they carried her away. When the scene was over, he came to himself again,
sitting in the same place as before, opposite the investigating lawyer,
and crying out to them:

“What do you want with her? Why do you torment her? She’s done nothing,
nothing!...”

The lawyers tried to soothe him. About ten minutes passed like this. At
last Mihail Makarovitch, who had been absent, came hurriedly into the
room, and said in a loud and excited voice to the prosecutor:

“She’s been removed, she’s downstairs. Will you allow me to say one word
to this unhappy man, gentlemen? In your presence, gentlemen, in your
presence.”

“By all means, Mihail Makarovitch,” answered the investigating lawyer. “In
the present case we have nothing against it.”

“Listen, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, my dear fellow,” began the police captain,
and there was a look of warm, almost fatherly, feeling for the luckless
prisoner on his excited face. “I took your Agrafena Alexandrovna
downstairs myself, and confided her to the care of the landlord’s
daughters, and that old fellow Maximov is with her all the time. And I
soothed her, do you hear? I soothed and calmed her. I impressed on her
that you have to clear yourself, so she mustn’t hinder you, must not
depress you, or you may lose your head and say the wrong thing in your
evidence. In fact, I talked to her and she understood. She’s a sensible
girl, my boy, a good‐hearted girl, she would have kissed my old hands,
begging help for you. She sent me herself, to tell you not to worry about
her. And I must go, my dear fellow, I must go and tell her that you are
calm and comforted about her. And so you must be calm, do you understand?
I was unfair to her; she is a Christian soul, gentlemen, yes, I tell you,
she’s a gentle soul, and not to blame for anything. So what am I to tell
her, Dmitri Fyodorovitch? Will you sit quiet or not?”

The good‐natured police captain said a great deal that was irregular, but
Grushenka’s suffering, a fellow creature’s suffering, touched his good‐
natured heart, and tears stood in his eyes. Mitya jumped up and rushed
towards him.

“Forgive me, gentlemen, oh, allow me, allow me!” he cried. “You’ve the
heart of an angel, an angel, Mihail Makarovitch, I thank you for her. I
will, I will be calm, cheerful, in fact. Tell her, in the kindness of your
heart, that I am cheerful, quite cheerful, that I shall be laughing in a
minute, knowing that she has a guardian angel like you. I shall have done
with all this directly, and as soon as I’m free, I’ll be with her, she’ll
see, let her wait. Gentlemen,” he said, turning to the two lawyers, “now
I’ll open my whole soul to you; I’ll pour out everything. We’ll finish
this off directly, finish it off gayly. We shall laugh at it in the end,
shan’t we? But, gentlemen, that woman is the queen of my heart. Oh, let me
tell you that. That one thing I’ll tell you now.... I see I’m with
honorable men. She is my light, she is my holy one, and if only you knew!
Did you hear her cry, ‘I’ll go to death with you’? And what have I, a
penniless beggar, done for her? Why such love for me? How can a clumsy,
ugly brute like me, with my ugly face, deserve such love, that she is
ready to go to exile with me? And how she fell down at your feet for my
sake, just now!... and yet she’s proud and has done nothing! How can I
help adoring her, how can I help crying out and rushing to her as I did
just now? Gentlemen, forgive me! But now, now I am comforted.”

And he sank back in his chair and, covering his face with his hands, burst
into tears. But they were happy tears. He recovered himself instantly. The
old police captain seemed much pleased, and the lawyers also. They felt
that the examination was passing into a new phase. When the police captain
went out, Mitya was positively gay.

“Now, gentlemen, I am at your disposal, entirely at your disposal. And if
it were not for all these trivial details, we should understand one
another in a minute. I’m at those details again. I’m at your disposal,
gentlemen, but I declare that we must have mutual confidence, you in me
and I in you, or there’ll be no end to it. I speak in your interests. To
business, gentlemen, to business, and don’t rummage in my soul; don’t
tease me with trifles, but only ask me about facts and what matters, and I
will satisfy you at once. And damn the details!”

So spoke Mitya. The interrogation began again.



Chapter IV. The Second Ordeal


“You don’t know how you encourage us, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, by your
readiness to answer,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, with an animated air, and
obvious satisfaction beaming in his very prominent, short‐sighted, light
gray eyes, from which he had removed his spectacles a moment before. “And
you have made a very just remark about the mutual confidence, without
which it is sometimes positively impossible to get on in cases of such
importance, if the suspected party really hopes and desires to defend
himself and is in a position to do so. We, on our side, will do everything
in our power, and you can see for yourself how we are conducting the case.
You approve, Ippolit Kirillovitch?” He turned to the prosecutor.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” replied the prosecutor. His tone was somewhat cold,
compared with Nikolay Parfenovitch’s impulsiveness.

I will note once for all that Nikolay Parfenovitch, who had but lately
arrived among us, had from the first felt marked respect for Ippolit
Kirillovitch, our prosecutor, and had become almost his bosom friend. He
was almost the only person who put implicit faith in Ippolit
Kirillovitch’s extraordinary talents as a psychologist and orator and in
the justice of his grievance. He had heard of him in Petersburg. On the
other hand, young Nikolay Parfenovitch was the only person in the whole
world whom our “unappreciated” prosecutor genuinely liked. On their way to
Mokroe they had time to come to an understanding about the present case.
And now as they sat at the table, the sharp‐witted junior caught and
interpreted every indication on his senior colleague’s face—half a word, a
glance, or a wink.

“Gentlemen, only let me tell my own story and don’t interrupt me with
trivial questions and I’ll tell you everything in a moment,” said Mitya
excitedly.

“Excellent! Thank you. But before we proceed to listen to your
communication, will you allow me to inquire as to another little fact of
great interest to us? I mean the ten roubles you borrowed yesterday at
about five o’clock on the security of your pistols, from your friend,
Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin.”

“I pledged them, gentlemen. I pledged them for ten roubles. What more?
That’s all about it. As soon as I got back to town I pledged them.”

“You got back to town? Then you had been out of town?”

“Yes, I went a journey of forty versts into the country. Didn’t you know?”

The prosecutor and Nikolay Parfenovitch exchanged glances.

“Well, how would it be if you began your story with a systematic
description of all you did yesterday, from the morning onwards? Allow us,
for instance, to inquire why you were absent from the town, and just when
you left and when you came back—all those facts.”

“You should have asked me like that from the beginning,” cried Mitya,
laughing aloud, “and, if you like, we won’t begin from yesterday, but from
the morning of the day before; then you’ll understand how, why, and where
I went. I went the day before yesterday, gentlemen, to a merchant of the
town, called Samsonov, to borrow three thousand roubles from him on safe
security. It was a pressing matter, gentlemen, it was a sudden necessity.”

“Allow me to interrupt you,” the prosecutor put in politely. “Why were you
in such pressing need for just that sum, three thousand?”

“Oh, gentlemen, you needn’t go into details, how, when and why, and why
just so much money, and not so much, and all that rigmarole. Why, it’ll
run to three volumes, and then you’ll want an epilogue!”

Mitya said all this with the good‐natured but impatient familiarity of a
man who is anxious to tell the whole truth and is full of the best
intentions.

“Gentlemen!”—he corrected himself hurriedly—“don’t be vexed with me for my
restiveness, I beg you again. Believe me once more, I feel the greatest
respect for you and understand the true position of affairs. Don’t think
I’m drunk. I’m quite sober now. And, besides, being drunk would be no
hindrance. It’s with me, you know, like the saying: ‘When he is sober, he
is a fool; when he is drunk, he is a wise man.’ Ha ha! But I see,
gentlemen, it’s not the proper thing to make jokes to you, till we’ve had
our explanation, I mean. And I’ve my own dignity to keep up, too. I quite
understand the difference for the moment. I am, after all, in the position
of a criminal, and so, far from being on equal terms with you. And it’s
your business to watch me. I can’t expect you to pat me on the head for
what I did to Grigory, for one can’t break old men’s heads with impunity.
I suppose you’ll put me away for him for six months, or a year perhaps, in
a house of correction. I don’t know what the punishment is—but it will be
without loss of the rights of my rank, without loss of my rank, won’t it?
So you see, gentlemen, I understand the distinction between us.... But you
must see that you could puzzle God Himself with such questions. ‘How did
you step? Where did you step? When did you step? And on what did you
step?’ I shall get mixed up, if you go on like this, and you will put it
all down against me. And what will that lead to? To nothing! And even if
it’s nonsense I’m talking now, let me finish, and you, gentlemen, being
men of honor and refinement, will forgive me! I’ll finish by asking you,
gentlemen, to drop that conventional method of questioning. I mean,
beginning from some miserable trifle, how I got up, what I had for
breakfast, how I spat, and where I spat, and so distracting the attention
of the criminal, suddenly stun him with an overwhelming question, ‘Whom
did you murder? Whom did you rob?’ Ha ha! That’s your regulation method,
that’s where all your cunning comes in. You can put peasants off their
guard like that, but not me. I know the tricks. I’ve been in the service,
too. Ha ha ha! You’re not angry, gentlemen? You forgive my impertinence?”
he cried, looking at them with a good‐nature that was almost surprising.
“It’s only Mitya Karamazov, you know, so you can overlook it. It would be
inexcusable in a sensible man; but you can forgive it in Mitya. Ha ha!”

Nikolay Parfenovitch listened, and laughed too. Though the prosecutor did
not laugh, he kept his eyes fixed keenly on Mitya, as though anxious not
to miss the least syllable, the slightest movement, the smallest twitch of
any feature of his face.

“That’s how we have treated you from the beginning,” said Nikolay
Parfenovitch, still laughing. “We haven’t tried to put you out by asking
how you got up in the morning and what you had for breakfast. We began,
indeed, with questions of the greatest importance.”

“I understand. I saw it and appreciated it, and I appreciate still more
your present kindness to me, an unprecedented kindness, worthy of your
noble hearts. We three here are gentlemen, and let everything be on the
footing of mutual confidence between educated, well‐bred people, who have
the common bond of noble birth and honor. In any case, allow me to look
upon you as my best friends at this moment of my life, at this moment when
my honor is assailed. That’s no offense to you, gentlemen, is it?”

“On the contrary. You’ve expressed all that so well, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,”
Nikolay Parfenovitch answered with dignified approbation.

“And enough of those trivial questions, gentlemen, all those tricky
questions!” cried Mitya enthusiastically. “Or there’s simply no knowing
where we shall get to! Is there?”

“I will follow your sensible advice entirely,” the prosecutor interposed,
addressing Mitya. “I don’t withdraw my question, however. It is now
vitally important for us to know exactly why you needed that sum, I mean
precisely three thousand.”

“Why I needed it?... Oh, for one thing and another.... Well, it was to pay
a debt.”

“A debt to whom?”

“That I absolutely refuse to answer, gentlemen. Not because I couldn’t, or
because I shouldn’t dare, or because it would be damaging, for it’s all a
paltry matter and absolutely trifling, but—I won’t, because it’s a matter
of principle: that’s my private life, and I won’t allow any intrusion into
my private life. That’s my principle. Your question has no bearing on the
case, and whatever has nothing to do with the case is my private affair. I
wanted to pay a debt. I wanted to pay a debt of honor but to whom I won’t
say.”

“Allow me to make a note of that,” said the prosecutor.

“By all means. Write down that I won’t say, that I won’t. Write that I
should think it dishonorable to say. Ech! you can write it; you’ve nothing
else to do with your time.”

“Allow me to caution you, sir, and to remind you once more, if you are
unaware of it,” the prosecutor began, with a peculiar and stern
impressiveness, “that you have a perfect right not to answer the questions
put to you now, and we on our side have no right to extort an answer from
you, if you decline to give it for one reason or another. That is entirely
a matter for your personal decision. But it is our duty, on the other
hand, in such cases as the present, to explain and set before you the
degree of injury you will be doing yourself by refusing to give this or
that piece of evidence. After which I will beg you to continue.”

“Gentlemen, I’m not angry ... I ...” Mitya muttered in a rather
disconcerted tone. “Well, gentlemen, you see, that Samsonov to whom I went
then ...”

We will, of course, not reproduce his account of what is known to the
reader already. Mitya was impatiently anxious not to omit the slightest
detail. At the same time he was in a hurry to get it over. But as he gave
his evidence it was written down, and therefore they had continually to
pull him up. Mitya disliked this, but submitted; got angry, though still
good‐humoredly. He did, it is true, exclaim, from time to time,
“Gentlemen, that’s enough to make an angel out of patience!” Or,
“Gentlemen, it’s no good your irritating me.”

But even though he exclaimed he still preserved for a time his genially
expansive mood. So he told them how Samsonov had made a fool of him two
days before. (He had completely realized by now that he had been fooled.)
The sale of his watch for six roubles to obtain money for the journey was
something new to the lawyers. They were at once greatly interested, and
even, to Mitya’s intense indignation, thought it necessary to write the
fact down as a secondary confirmation of the circumstance that he had
hardly a farthing in his pocket at the time. Little by little Mitya began
to grow surly. Then, after describing his journey to see Lyagavy, the
night spent in the stifling hut, and so on, he came to his return to the
town. Here he began, without being particularly urged, to give a minute
account of the agonies of jealousy he endured on Grushenka’s account.

He was heard with silent attention. They inquired particularly into the
circumstance of his having a place of ambush in Marya Kondratyevna’s house
at the back of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s garden to keep watch on Grushenka, and
of Smerdyakov’s bringing him information. They laid particular stress on
this, and noted it down. Of his jealousy he spoke warmly and at length,
and though inwardly ashamed at exposing his most intimate feelings to
“public ignominy,” so to speak, he evidently overcame his shame in order
to tell the truth. The frigid severity, with which the investigating
lawyer, and still more the prosecutor, stared intently at him as he told
his story, disconcerted him at last considerably.

“That boy, Nikolay Parfenovitch, to whom I was talking nonsense about
women only a few days ago, and that sickly prosecutor are not worth my
telling this to,” he reflected mournfully. “It’s ignominious. ‘Be patient,
humble, hold thy peace.’ ” He wound up his reflections with that line. But
he pulled himself together to go on again. When he came to telling of his
visit to Madame Hohlakov, he regained his spirits and even wished to tell
a little anecdote of that lady which had nothing to do with the case. But
the investigating lawyer stopped him, and civilly suggested that he should
pass on to “more essential matters.” At last, when he described his
despair and told them how, when he left Madame Hohlakov’s, he thought that
he’d “get three thousand if he had to murder some one to do it,” they
stopped him again and noted down that he had “meant to murder some one.”
Mitya let them write it without protest. At last he reached the point in
his story when he learned that Grushenka had deceived him and had returned
from Samsonov’s as soon as he left her there, though she had said that she
would stay there till midnight.

“If I didn’t kill Fenya then, gentlemen, it was only because I hadn’t
time,” broke from him suddenly at that point in his story. That, too, was
carefully written down. Mitya waited gloomily, and was beginning to tell
how he ran into his father’s garden when the investigating lawyer suddenly
stopped him, and opening the big portfolio that lay on the sofa beside him
he brought out the brass pestle.

“Do you recognize this object?” he asked, showing it to Mitya.

“Oh, yes,” he laughed gloomily. “Of course I recognize it. Let me have a
look at it.... Damn it, never mind!”

“You have forgotten to mention it,” observed the investigating lawyer.

“Hang it all, I shouldn’t have concealed it from you. Do you suppose I
could have managed without it? It simply escaped my memory.”

“Be so good as to tell us precisely how you came to arm yourself with it.”

“Certainly I will be so good, gentlemen.”

And Mitya described how he took the pestle and ran.

“But what object had you in view in arming yourself with such a weapon?”

“What object? No object. I just picked it up and ran off.”

“What for, if you had no object?”

Mitya’s wrath flared up. He looked intently at “the boy” and smiled
gloomily and malignantly. He was feeling more and more ashamed at having
told “such people” the story of his jealousy so sincerely and
spontaneously.

“Bother the pestle!” broke from him suddenly.

“But still—”

“Oh, to keep off dogs.... Oh, because it was dark.... In case anything
turned up.”

“But have you ever on previous occasions taken a weapon with you when you
went out, since you’re afraid of the dark?”

“Ugh! damn it all, gentlemen! There’s positively no talking to you!” cried
Mitya, exasperated beyond endurance, and turning to the secretary, crimson
with anger, he said quickly, with a note of fury in his voice:

“Write down at once ... at once ... ‘that I snatched up the pestle to go
and kill my father ... Fyodor Pavlovitch ... by hitting him on the head
with it!’ Well, now are you satisfied, gentlemen? Are your minds
relieved?” he said, glaring defiantly at the lawyers.

“We quite understand that you made that statement just now through
exasperation with us and the questions we put to you, which you consider
trivial, though they are, in fact, essential,” the prosecutor remarked
dryly in reply.

“Well, upon my word, gentlemen! Yes, I took the pestle.... What does one
pick things up for at such moments? I don’t know what for. I snatched it
up and ran—that’s all. For to me, gentlemen, _passons_, or I declare I
won’t tell you any more.”

He sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hand. He sat
sideways to them and gazed at the wall, struggling against a feeling of
nausea. He had, in fact, an awful inclination to get up and declare that
he wouldn’t say another word, “not if you hang me for it.”

“You see, gentlemen,” he said at last, with difficulty controlling
himself, “you see. I listen to you and am haunted by a dream.... It’s a
dream I have sometimes, you know.... I often dream it—it’s always the same
... that some one is hunting me, some one I’m awfully afraid of ... that
he’s hunting me in the dark, in the night ... tracking me, and I hide
somewhere from him, behind a door or cupboard, hide in a degrading way,
and the worst of it is, he always knows where I am, but he pretends not to
know where I am on purpose, to prolong my agony, to enjoy my terror....
That’s just what you’re doing now. It’s just like that!”

“Is that the sort of thing you dream about?” inquired the prosecutor.

“Yes, it is. Don’t you want to write it down?” said Mitya, with a
distorted smile.

“No; no need to write it down. But still you do have curious dreams.”

“It’s not a question of dreams now, gentlemen—this is realism, this is
real life! I’m a wolf and you’re the hunters. Well, hunt him down!”

“You are wrong to make such comparisons ...” began Nikolay Parfenovitch,
with extraordinary softness.

“No, I’m not wrong, not at all!” Mitya flared up again, though his
outburst of wrath had obviously relieved his heart. He grew more good‐
humored at every word. “You may not trust a criminal or a man on trial
tortured by your questions, but an honorable man, the honorable impulses
of the heart (I say that boldly!)—no! That you must believe you have no
right indeed ... but—


    Be silent, heart,
    Be patient, humble, hold thy peace.


Well, shall I go on?” he broke off gloomily.

“If you’ll be so kind,” answered Nikolay Parfenovitch.



Chapter V. The Third Ordeal


Though Mitya spoke sullenly, it was evident that he was trying more than
ever not to forget or miss a single detail of his story. He told them how
he had leapt over the fence into his father’s garden; how he had gone up
to the window; told them all that had passed under the window. Clearly,
precisely, distinctly, he described the feelings that troubled him during
those moments in the garden when he longed so terribly to know whether
Grushenka was with his father or not. But, strange to say, both the
lawyers listened now with a sort of awful reserve, looked coldly at him,
asked few questions. Mitya could gather nothing from their faces.

“They’re angry and offended,” he thought. “Well, bother them!”

When he described how he made up his mind at last to make the “signal” to
his father that Grushenka had come, so that he should open the window, the
lawyers paid no attention to the word “signal,” as though they entirely
failed to grasp the meaning of the word in this connection: so much so,
that Mitya noticed it. Coming at last to the moment when, seeing his
father peering out of the window, his hatred flared up and he pulled the
pestle out of his pocket, he suddenly, as though of design, stopped short.
He sat gazing at the wall and was aware that their eyes were fixed upon
him.

“Well?” said the investigating lawyer. “You pulled out the weapon and ...
and what happened then?”

“Then? Why, then I murdered him ... hit him on the head and cracked his
skull.... I suppose that’s your story. That’s it!”

His eyes suddenly flashed. All his smothered wrath suddenly flamed up with
extraordinary violence in his soul.

“Our story?” repeated Nikolay Parfenovitch. “Well—and yours?”

Mitya dropped his eyes and was a long time silent.

“My story, gentlemen? Well, it was like this,” he began softly. “Whether
it was some one’s tears, or my mother prayed to God, or a good angel
kissed me at that instant, I don’t know. But the devil was conquered. I
rushed from the window and ran to the fence. My father was alarmed and,
for the first time, he saw me then, cried out, and sprang back from the
window. I remember that very well. I ran across the garden to the fence
... and there Grigory caught me, when I was sitting on the fence.”

At that point he raised his eyes at last and looked at his listeners. They
seemed to be staring at him with perfectly unruffled attention. A sort of
paroxysm of indignation seized on Mitya’s soul.

“Why, you’re laughing at me at this moment, gentlemen!” he broke off
suddenly.

“What makes you think that?” observed Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“You don’t believe one word—that’s why! I understand, of course, that I
have come to the vital point. The old man’s lying there now with his skull
broken, while I—after dramatically describing how I wanted to kill him,
and how I snatched up the pestle—I suddenly run away from the window. A
romance! Poetry! As though one could believe a fellow on his word. Ha ha!
You are scoffers, gentlemen!”

And he swung round on his chair so that it creaked.

“And did you notice,” asked the prosecutor suddenly, as though not
observing Mitya’s excitement, “did you notice when you ran away from the
window, whether the door into the garden was open?”

“No, it was not open.”

“It was not?”

“It was shut. And who could open it? Bah! the door. Wait a bit!” he seemed
suddenly to bethink himself, and almost with a start:

“Why, did you find the door open?”

“Yes, it was open.”

“Why, who could have opened it if you did not open it yourselves?” cried
Mitya, greatly astonished.

“The door stood open, and your father’s murderer undoubtedly went in at
that door, and, having accomplished the crime, went out again by the same
door,” the prosecutor pronounced deliberately, as though chiseling out
each word separately. “That is perfectly clear. The murder was committed
in the room and _not through the __ window_; that is absolutely certain
from the examination that has been made, from the position of the body and
everything. There can be no doubt of that circumstance.”

Mitya was absolutely dumbfounded.

“But that’s utterly impossible!” he cried, completely at a loss. “I ... I
didn’t go in.... I tell you positively, definitely, the door was shut the
whole time I was in the garden, and when I ran out of the garden. I only
stood at the window and saw him through the window. That’s all, that’s
all.... I remember to the last minute. And if I didn’t remember, it would
be just the same. I know it, for no one knew the signals except
Smerdyakov, and me, and the dead man. And he wouldn’t have opened the door
to any one in the world without the signals.”

“Signals? What signals?” asked the prosecutor, with greedy, almost
hysterical, curiosity. He instantly lost all trace of his reserve and
dignity. He asked the question with a sort of cringing timidity. He
scented an important fact of which he had known nothing, and was already
filled with dread that Mitya might be unwilling to disclose it.

“So you didn’t know!” Mitya winked at him with a malicious and mocking
smile. “What if I won’t tell you? From whom could you find out? No one
knew about the signals except my father, Smerdyakov, and me: that was all.
Heaven knew, too, but it won’t tell you. But it’s an interesting fact.
There’s no knowing what you might build on it. Ha ha! Take comfort,
gentlemen, I’ll reveal it. You’ve some foolish idea in your hearts. You
don’t know the man you have to deal with! You have to do with a prisoner
who gives evidence against himself, to his own damage! Yes, for I’m a man
of honor and you—are not.”

The prosecutor swallowed this without a murmur. He was trembling with
impatience to hear the new fact. Minutely and diffusely Mitya told them
everything about the signals invented by Fyodor Pavlovitch for Smerdyakov.
He told them exactly what every tap on the window meant, tapped the
signals on the table, and when Nikolay Parfenovitch said that he supposed
he, Mitya, had tapped the signal “Grushenka has come,” when he tapped to
his father, he answered precisely that he had tapped that signal, that
“Grushenka had come.”

“So now you can build up your tower,” Mitya broke off, and again turned
away from them contemptuously.

“So no one knew of the signals but your dead father, you, and the valet
Smerdyakov? And no one else?” Nikolay Parfenovitch inquired once more.

“Yes. The valet Smerdyakov, and Heaven. Write down about Heaven. That may
be of use. Besides, you will need God yourselves.”

And they had already, of course, begun writing it down. But while they
wrote, the prosecutor said suddenly, as though pitching on a new idea:

“But if Smerdyakov also knew of these signals and you absolutely deny all
responsibility for the death of your father, was it not he, perhaps, who
knocked the signal agreed upon, induced your father to open to him, and
then ... committed the crime?”

Mitya turned upon him a look of profound irony and intense hatred. His
silent stare lasted so long that it made the prosecutor blink.

“You’ve caught the fox again,” commented Mitya at last; “you’ve got the
beast by the tail. Ha ha! I see through you, Mr. Prosecutor. You thought,
of course, that I should jump at that, catch at your prompting, and shout
with all my might, ‘Aie! it’s Smerdyakov; he’s the murderer.’ Confess
that’s what you thought. Confess, and I’ll go on.”

But the prosecutor did not confess. He held his tongue and waited.

“You’re mistaken. I’m not going to shout ‘It’s Smerdyakov,’ ” said Mitya.

“And you don’t even suspect him?”

“Why, do you suspect him?”

“He is suspected, too.”

Mitya fixed his eyes on the floor.

“Joking apart,” he brought out gloomily. “Listen. From the very beginning,
almost from the moment when I ran out to you from behind the curtain, I’ve
had the thought of Smerdyakov in my mind. I’ve been sitting here, shouting
that I’m innocent and thinking all the time ‘Smerdyakov!’ I can’t get
Smerdyakov out of my head. In fact, I, too, thought of Smerdyakov just
now; but only for a second. Almost at once I thought, ‘No, it’s not
Smerdyakov.’ It’s not his doing, gentlemen.”

“In that case is there anybody else you suspect?” Nikolay Parfenovitch
inquired cautiously.

“I don’t know any one it could be, whether it’s the hand of Heaven or
Satan, but ... not Smerdyakov,” Mitya jerked out with decision.

“But what makes you affirm so confidently and emphatically that it’s not
he?”

“From my conviction—my impression. Because Smerdyakov is a man of the most
abject character and a coward. He’s not a coward, he’s the epitome of all
the cowardice in the world walking on two legs. He has the heart of a
chicken. When he talked to me, he was always trembling for fear I should
kill him, though I never raised my hand against him. He fell at my feet
and blubbered; he has kissed these very boots, literally, beseeching me
‘not to frighten him.’ Do you hear? ‘Not to frighten him.’ What a thing to
say! Why, I offered him money. He’s a puling chicken—sickly, epileptic,
weak‐minded—a child of eight could thrash him. He has no character worth
talking about. It’s not Smerdyakov, gentlemen. He doesn’t care for money;
he wouldn’t take my presents. Besides, what motive had he for murdering
the old man? Why, he’s very likely his son, you know—his natural son. Do
you know that?”

“We have heard that legend. But you are your father’s son, too, you know;
yet you yourself told every one you meant to murder him.”

“That’s a thrust! And a nasty, mean one, too! I’m not afraid! Oh,
gentlemen, isn’t it too base of you to say that to my face? It’s base,
because I told you that myself. I not only wanted to murder him, but I
might have done it. And, what’s more, I went out of my way to tell you of
my own accord that I nearly murdered him. But, you see, I didn’t murder
him; you see, my guardian angel saved me—that’s what you’ve not taken into
account. And that’s why it’s so base of you. For I didn’t kill him, I
didn’t kill him! Do you hear, I did not kill him.”

He was almost choking. He had not been so moved before during the whole
interrogation.

“And what has he told you, gentlemen—Smerdyakov, I mean?” he added
suddenly, after a pause. “May I ask that question?”

“You may ask any question,” the prosecutor replied with frigid severity,
“any question relating to the facts of the case, and we are, I repeat,
bound to answer every inquiry you make. We found the servant Smerdyakov,
concerning whom you inquire, lying unconscious in his bed, in an epileptic
fit of extreme severity, that had recurred, possibly, ten times. The
doctor who was with us told us, after seeing him, that he may possibly not
outlive the night.”

“Well, if that’s so, the devil must have killed him,” broke suddenly from
Mitya, as though until that moment he had been asking himself: “Was it
Smerdyakov or not?”

“We will come back to this later,” Nikolay Parfenovitch decided. “Now,
wouldn’t you like to continue your statement?”

Mitya asked for a rest. His request was courteously granted. After
resting, he went on with his story. But he was evidently depressed. He was
exhausted, mortified and morally shaken. To make things worse the
prosecutor exasperated him, as though intentionally, by vexatious
interruptions about “trifling points.” Scarcely had Mitya described how,
sitting on the wall, he had struck Grigory on the head with the pestle,
while the old man had hold of his left leg, and how he had then jumped
down to look at him, when the prosecutor stopped him to ask him to
describe exactly how he was sitting on the wall. Mitya was surprised.

“Oh, I was sitting like this, astride, one leg on one side of the wall and
one on the other.”

“And the pestle?”

“The pestle was in my hand.”

“Not in your pocket? Do you remember that precisely? Was it a violent blow
you gave him?”

“It must have been a violent one. But why do you ask?”

“Would you mind sitting on the chair just as you sat on the wall then and
showing us just how you moved your arm, and in what direction?”

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?” asked Mitya, looking haughtily at
the speaker; but the latter did not flinch.

Mitya turned abruptly, sat astride on his chair, and swung his arm.

“This was how I struck him! That’s how I knocked him down! What more do
you want?”

“Thank you. May I trouble you now to explain why you jumped down, with
what object, and what you had in view?”

“Oh, hang it!... I jumped down to look at the man I’d hurt ... I don’t
know what for!”

“Though you were so excited and were running away?”

“Yes, though I was excited and running away.”

“You wanted to help him?”

“Help!... Yes, perhaps I did want to help him.... I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? Then you didn’t quite know what you were doing?”

“Not at all. I remember everything—every detail. I jumped down to look at
him, and wiped his face with my handkerchief.”

“We have seen your handkerchief. Did you hope to restore him to
consciousness?”

“I don’t know whether I hoped it. I simply wanted to make sure whether he
was alive or not.”

“Ah! You wanted to be sure? Well, what then?”

“I’m not a doctor. I couldn’t decide. I ran away thinking I’d killed him.
And now he’s recovered.”

“Excellent,” commented the prosecutor. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted.
Kindly proceed.”

Alas! it never entered Mitya’s head to tell them, though he remembered it,
that he had jumped back from pity, and standing over the prostrate figure
had even uttered some words of regret: “You’ve come to grief, old
man—there’s no help for it. Well, there you must lie.”

The prosecutor could only draw one conclusion: that the man had jumped
back “at such a moment and in such excitement simply with the object of
ascertaining whether the _only_ witness of his crime were dead; that he
must therefore have been a man of great strength, coolness, decision and
foresight even at such a moment,” ... and so on. The prosecutor was
satisfied: “I’ve provoked the nervous fellow by ‘trifles’ and he has said
more than he meant to.”

With painful effort Mitya went on. But this time he was pulled up
immediately by Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“How came you to run to the servant, Fedosya Markovna, with your hands so
covered with blood, and, as it appears, your face, too?”

“Why, I didn’t notice the blood at all at the time,” answered Mitya.

“That’s quite likely. It does happen sometimes.” The prosecutor exchanged
glances with Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“I simply didn’t notice. You’re quite right there, prosecutor,” Mitya
assented suddenly.

Next came the account of Mitya’s sudden determination to “step aside” and
make way for their happiness. But he could not make up his mind to open
his heart to them as before, and tell them about “the queen of his soul.”
He disliked speaking of her before these chilly persons “who were
fastening on him like bugs.” And so in response to their reiterated
questions he answered briefly and abruptly:

“Well, I made up my mind to kill myself. What had I left to live for? That
question stared me in the face. Her first rightful lover had come back,
the man who wronged her but who’d hurried back to offer his love, after
five years, and atone for the wrong with marriage.... So I knew it was all
over for me.... And behind me disgrace, and that blood—Grigory’s.... What
had I to live for? So I went to redeem the pistols I had pledged, to load
them and put a bullet in my brain to‐morrow.”

“And a grand feast the night before?”

“Yes, a grand feast the night before. Damn it all, gentlemen! Do make
haste and finish it. I meant to shoot myself not far from here, beyond the
village, and I’d planned to do it at five o’clock in the morning. And I
had a note in my pocket already. I wrote it at Perhotin’s when I loaded my
pistols. Here’s the letter. Read it! It’s not for you I tell it,” he added
contemptuously. He took it from his waistcoat pocket and flung it on the
table. The lawyers read it with curiosity, and, as is usual, added it to
the papers connected with the case.

“And you didn’t even think of washing your hands at Perhotin’s? You were
not afraid then of arousing suspicion?”

“What suspicion? Suspicion or not, I should have galloped here just the
same, and shot myself at five o’clock, and you wouldn’t have been in time
to do anything. If it hadn’t been for what’s happened to my father, you
would have known nothing about it, and wouldn’t have come here. Oh, it’s
the devil’s doing. It was the devil murdered father, it was through the
devil that you found it out so soon. How did you manage to get here so
quick? It’s marvelous, a dream!”

“Mr. Perhotin informed us that when you came to him, you held in your
hands ... your blood‐stained hands ... your money ... a lot of money ... a
bundle of hundred‐rouble notes, and that his servant‐boy saw it too.”

“That’s true, gentlemen. I remember it was so.”

“Now, there’s one little point presents itself. Can you inform us,”
Nikolay Parfenovitch began, with extreme gentleness, “where did you get so
much money all of a sudden, when it appears from the facts, from the
reckoning of time, that you had not been home?”

The prosecutor’s brows contracted at the question being asked so plainly,
but he did not interrupt Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“No, I didn’t go home,” answered Mitya, apparently perfectly composed, but
looking at the floor.

“Allow me then to repeat my question,” Nikolay Parfenovitch went on as
though creeping up to the subject. “Where were you able to procure such a
sum all at once, when by your own confession, at five o’clock the same day
you—”

“I was in want of ten roubles and pledged my pistols with Perhotin, and
then went to Madame Hohlakov to borrow three thousand which she wouldn’t
give me, and so on, and all the rest of it,” Mitya interrupted sharply.
“Yes, gentlemen, I was in want of it, and suddenly thousands turned up,
eh? Do you know, gentlemen, you’re both afraid now ‘what if he won’t tell
us where he got it?’ That’s just how it is. I’m not going to tell you,
gentlemen. You’ve guessed right. You’ll never know,” said Mitya, chipping
out each word with extraordinary determination. The lawyers were silent
for a moment.

“You must understand, Mr. Karamazov, that it is of vital importance for us
to know,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, softly and suavely.

“I understand; but still I won’t tell you.”

The prosecutor, too, intervened, and again reminded the prisoner that he
was at liberty to refuse to answer questions, if he thought it to his
interest, and so on. But in view of the damage he might do himself by his
silence, especially in a case of such importance as—

“And so on, gentlemen, and so on. Enough! I’ve heard that rigmarole
before,” Mitya interrupted again. “I can see for myself how important it
is, and that this is the vital point, and still I won’t say.”

“What is it to us? It’s not our business, but yours. You are doing
yourself harm,” observed Nikolay Parfenovitch nervously.

“You see, gentlemen, joking apart”—Mitya lifted his eyes and looked firmly
at them both—“I had an inkling from the first that we should come to
loggerheads at this point. But at first when I began to give my evidence,
it was all still far away and misty; it was all floating, and I was so
simple that I began with the supposition of mutual confidence existing
between us. Now I can see for myself that such confidence is out of the
question, for in any case we were bound to come to this cursed stumbling‐
block. And now we’ve come to it! It’s impossible and there’s an end of it!
But I don’t blame you. You can’t believe it all simply on my word. I
understand that, of course.”

He relapsed into gloomy silence.

“Couldn’t you, without abandoning your resolution to be silent about the
chief point, could you not, at the same time, give us some slight hint as
to the nature of the motives which are strong enough to induce you to
refuse to answer, at a crisis so full of danger to you?”

Mitya smiled mournfully, almost dreamily.

“I’m much more good‐natured than you think, gentlemen. I’ll tell you the
reason why and give you that hint, though you don’t deserve it. I won’t
speak of that, gentlemen, because it would be a stain on my honor. The
answer to the question where I got the money would expose me to far
greater disgrace than the murder and robbing of my father, if I had
murdered and robbed him. That’s why I can’t tell you. I can’t for fear of
disgrace. What, gentlemen, are you going to write that down?”

“Yes, we’ll write it down,” lisped Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“You ought not to write that down about ‘disgrace.’ I only told you that
in the goodness of my heart. I needn’t have told you. I made you a present
of it, so to speak, and you pounce upon it at once. Oh, well, write—write
what you like,” he concluded, with scornful disgust. “I’m not afraid of
you and I can still hold up my head before you.”

“And can’t you tell us the nature of that disgrace?” Nikolay Parfenovitch
hazarded.

The prosecutor frowned darkly.

“No, no, _c’est fini_, don’t trouble yourselves. It’s not worth while
soiling one’s hands. I have soiled myself enough through you as it is.
You’re not worth it—no one is ... Enough, gentlemen. I’m not going on.”

This was said too peremptorily. Nikolay Parfenovitch did not insist
further, but from Ippolit Kirillovitch’s eyes he saw that he had not given
up hope.

“Can you not, at least, tell us what sum you had in your hands when you
went into Mr. Perhotin’s—how many roubles exactly?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You spoke to Mr. Perhotin, I believe, of having received three thousand
from Madame Hohlakov.”

“Perhaps I did. Enough, gentlemen. I won’t say how much I had.”

“Will you be so good then as to tell us how you came here and what you
have done since you arrived?”

“Oh! you might ask the people here about that. But I’ll tell you if you
like.”

He proceeded to do so, but we won’t repeat his story. He told it dryly and
curtly. Of the raptures of his love he said nothing, but told them that he
abandoned his determination to shoot himself, owing to “new factors in the
case.” He told the story without going into motives or details. And this
time the lawyers did not worry him much. It was obvious that there was no
essential point of interest to them here.

“We shall verify all that. We will come back to it during the examination
of the witnesses, which will, of course, take place in your presence,”
said Nikolay Parfenovitch in conclusion. “And now allow me to request you
to lay on the table everything in your possession, especially all the
money you still have about you.”

“My money, gentlemen? Certainly. I understand that that is necessary. I’m
surprised, indeed, that you haven’t inquired about it before. It’s true I
couldn’t get away anywhere. I’m sitting here where I can be seen. But
here’s my money—count it—take it. That’s all, I think.”

He turned it all out of his pockets; even the small change—two pieces of
twenty copecks—he pulled out of his waistcoat pocket. They counted the
money, which amounted to eight hundred and thirty‐six roubles, and forty
copecks.

“And is that all?” asked the investigating lawyer.

“Yes.”

“You stated just now in your evidence that you spent three hundred roubles
at Plotnikovs’. You gave Perhotin ten, your driver twenty, here you lost
two hundred, then....”

Nikolay Parfenovitch reckoned it all up. Mitya helped him readily. They
recollected every farthing and included it in the reckoning. Nikolay
Parfenovitch hurriedly added up the total.

“With this eight hundred you must have had about fifteen hundred at
first?”

“I suppose so,” snapped Mitya.

“How is it they all assert there was much more?”

“Let them assert it.”

“But you asserted it yourself.”

“Yes, I did, too.”

“We will compare all this with the evidence of other persons not yet
examined. Don’t be anxious about your money. It will be properly taken
care of and be at your disposal at the conclusion of ... what is beginning
... if it appears, or, so to speak, is proved that you have undisputed
right to it. Well, and now....”

Nikolay Parfenovitch suddenly got up, and informed Mitya firmly that it
was his duty and obligation to conduct a minute and thorough search “of
your clothes and everything else....”

“By all means, gentlemen. I’ll turn out all my pockets, if you like.”

And he did, in fact, begin turning out his pockets.

“It will be necessary to take off your clothes, too.”

“What! Undress? Ugh! Damn it! Won’t you search me as I am! Can’t you?”

“It’s utterly impossible, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You must take off your
clothes.”

“As you like,” Mitya submitted gloomily; “only, please, not here, but
behind the curtains. Who will search them?”

“Behind the curtains, of course.”

Nikolay Parfenovitch bent his head in assent. His small face wore an
expression of peculiar solemnity.



Chapter VI. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya


Something utterly unexpected and amazing to Mitya followed. He could
never, even a minute before, have conceived that any one could behave like
that to him, Mitya Karamazov. What was worst of all, there was something
humiliating in it, and on their side something “supercilious and
scornful.” It was nothing to take off his coat, but he was asked to
undress further, or rather not asked but “commanded,” he quite understood
that. From pride and contempt he submitted without a word. Several
peasants accompanied the lawyers and remained on the same side of the
curtain. “To be ready if force is required,” thought Mitya, “and perhaps
for some other reason, too.”

“Well, must I take off my shirt, too?” he asked sharply, but Nikolay
Parfenovitch did not answer. He was busily engaged with the prosecutor in
examining the coat, the trousers, the waistcoat and the cap; and it was
evident that they were both much interested in the scrutiny. “They make no
bones about it,” thought Mitya, “they don’t keep up the most elementary
politeness.”

“I ask you for the second time—need I take off my shirt or not?” he said,
still more sharply and irritably.

“Don’t trouble yourself. We will tell you what to do,” Nikolay
Parfenovitch said, and his voice was positively peremptory, or so it
seemed to Mitya.

Meantime a consultation was going on in undertones between the lawyers.
There turned out to be on the coat, especially on the left side at the
back, a huge patch of blood, dry, and still stiff. There were bloodstains
on the trousers, too. Nikolay Parfenovitch, moreover, in the presence of
the peasant witnesses, passed his fingers along the collar, the cuffs, and
all the seams of the coat and trousers, obviously looking for
something—money, of course. He didn’t even hide from Mitya his suspicion
that he was capable of sewing money up in his clothes.

“He treats me not as an officer but as a thief,” Mitya muttered to
himself. They communicated their ideas to one another with amazing
frankness. The secretary, for instance, who was also behind the curtain,
fussing about and listening, called Nikolay Parfenovitch’s attention to
the cap, which they were also fingering.

“You remember Gridyenko, the copying‐clerk,” observed the secretary. “Last
summer he received the wages of the whole office, and pretended to have
lost the money when he was drunk. And where was it found? Why, in just
such pipings in his cap. The hundred‐rouble notes were screwed up in
little rolls and sewed in the piping.”

Both the lawyers remembered Gridyenko’s case perfectly, and so laid aside
Mitya’s cap, and decided that all his clothes must be more thoroughly
examined later.

“Excuse me,” cried Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly, noticing that the right
cuff of Mitya’s shirt was turned in, and covered with blood, “excuse me,
what’s that, blood?”

“Yes,” Mitya jerked out.

“That is, what blood? ... and why is the cuff turned in?”

Mitya told him how he had got the sleeve stained with blood looking after
Grigory, and had turned it inside when he was washing his hands at
Perhotin’s.

“You must take off your shirt, too. That’s very important as material
evidence.”

Mitya flushed red and flew into a rage.

“What, am I to stay naked?” he shouted.

“Don’t disturb yourself. We will arrange something. And meanwhile take off
your socks.”

“You’re not joking? Is that really necessary?” Mitya’s eyes flashed.

“We are in no mood for joking,” answered Nikolay Parfenovitch sternly.

“Well, if I must—” muttered Mitya, and sitting down on the bed, he took
off his socks. He felt unbearably awkward. All were clothed, while he was
naked, and strange to say, when he was undressed he felt somehow guilty in
their presence, and was almost ready to believe himself that he was
inferior to them, and that now they had a perfect right to despise him.

“When all are undressed, one is somehow not ashamed, but when one’s the
only one undressed and everybody is looking, it’s degrading,” he kept
repeating to himself, again and again. “It’s like a dream, I’ve sometimes
dreamed of being in such degrading positions.” It was a misery to him to
take off his socks. They were very dirty, and so were his underclothes,
and now every one could see it. And what was worse, he disliked his feet.
All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly
loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one, and now they
would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed made him, at once and
intentionally, rougher. He pulled off his shirt, himself.

“Would you like to look anywhere else if you’re not ashamed to?”

“No, there’s no need to, at present.”

“Well, am I to stay naked like this?” he added savagely.

“Yes, that can’t be helped for the time.... Kindly sit down here for a
while. You can wrap yourself in a quilt from the bed, and I ... I’ll see
to all this.”

All the things were shown to the witnesses. The report of the search was
drawn up, and at last Nikolay Parfenovitch went out, and the clothes were
carried out after him. Ippolit Kirillovitch went out, too. Mitya was left
alone with the peasants, who stood in silence, never taking their eyes off
him. Mitya wrapped himself up in the quilt. He felt cold. His bare feet
stuck out, and he couldn’t pull the quilt over so as to cover them.
Nikolay Parfenovitch seemed to be gone a long time, “an insufferable
time.” “He thinks of me as a puppy,” thought Mitya, gnashing his teeth.
“That rotten prosecutor has gone, too, contemptuous no doubt, it disgusts
him to see me naked!”

Mitya imagined, however, that his clothes would be examined and returned
to him. But what was his indignation when Nikolay Parfenovitch came back
with quite different clothes, brought in behind him by a peasant.

“Here are clothes for you,” he observed airily, seeming well satisfied
with the success of his mission. “Mr. Kalganov has kindly provided these
for this unusual emergency, as well as a clean shirt. Luckily he had them
all in his trunk. You can keep your own socks and underclothes.”

Mitya flew into a passion.

“I won’t have other people’s clothes!” he shouted menacingly, “give me my
own!”

“It’s impossible!”

“Give me my own. Damn Kalganov and his clothes, too!”

It was a long time before they could persuade him. But they succeeded
somehow in quieting him down. They impressed upon him that his clothes,
being stained with blood, must be “included with the other material
evidence,” and that they “had not even the right to let him have them now
... taking into consideration the possible outcome of the case.” Mitya at
last understood this. He subsided into gloomy silence and hurriedly
dressed himself. He merely observed, as he put them on, that the clothes
were much better than his old ones, and that he disliked “gaining by the
change.” The coat was, besides, “ridiculously tight. Am I to be dressed up
like a fool ... for your amusement?”

They urged upon him again that he was exaggerating, that Kalganov was only
a little taller, so that only the trousers might be a little too long. But
the coat turned out to be really tight in the shoulders.

“Damn it all! I can hardly button it,” Mitya grumbled. “Be so good as to
tell Mr. Kalganov from me that I didn’t ask for his clothes, and it’s not
my doing that they’ve dressed me up like a clown.”

“He understands that, and is sorry ... I mean, not sorry to lend you his
clothes, but sorry about all this business,” mumbled Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“Confound his sorrow! Well, where now? Am I to go on sitting here?”

He was asked to go back to the “other room.” Mitya went in, scowling with
anger, and trying to avoid looking at any one. Dressed in another man’s
clothes he felt himself disgraced, even in the eyes of the peasants, and
of Trifon Borissovitch, whose face appeared, for some reason, in the
doorway, and vanished immediately. “He’s come to look at me dressed up,”
thought Mitya. He sat down on the same chair as before. He had an absurd
nightmarish feeling, as though he were out of his mind.

“Well, what now? Are you going to flog me? That’s all that’s left for
you,” he said, clenching his teeth and addressing the prosecutor. He would
not turn to Nikolay Parfenovitch, as though he disdained to speak to him.

“He looked too closely at my socks, and turned them inside out on purpose
to show every one how dirty they were—the scoundrel!”

“Well, now we must proceed to the examination of witnesses,” observed
Nikolay Parfenovitch, as though in reply to Mitya’s question.

“Yes,” said the prosecutor thoughtfully, as though reflecting on
something.

“We’ve done what we could in your interest, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Nikolay
Parfenovitch went on, “but having received from you such an uncompromising
refusal to explain to us the source from which you obtained the money
found upon you, we are, at the present moment—”

“What is the stone in your ring?” Mitya interrupted suddenly, as though
awakening from a reverie. He pointed to one of the three large rings
adorning Nikolay Parfenovitch’s right hand.

“Ring?” repeated Nikolay Parfenovitch with surprise.

“Yes, that one ... on your middle finger, with the little veins in it,
what stone is that?” Mitya persisted, like a peevish child.

“That’s a smoky topaz,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, smiling. “Would you
like to look at it? I’ll take it off ...”

“No, don’t take it off,” cried Mitya furiously, suddenly waking up, and
angry with himself. “Don’t take it off ... there’s no need.... Damn it!...
Gentlemen, you’ve sullied my heart! Can you suppose that I would conceal
it from you, if I had really killed my father, that I would shuffle, lie,
and hide myself? No, that’s not like Dmitri Karamazov, that he couldn’t
do, and if I were guilty, I swear I shouldn’t have waited for your coming,
or for the sunrise as I meant at first, but should have killed myself
before this, without waiting for the dawn! I know that about myself now. I
couldn’t have learnt so much in twenty years as I’ve found out in this
accursed night!... And should I have been like this on this night, and at
this moment, sitting with you, could I have talked like this, could I have
moved like this, could I have looked at you and at the world like this, if
I had really been the murderer of my father, when the very thought of
having accidentally killed Grigory gave me no peace all night—not from
fear—oh, not simply from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And
you expect me to be open with such scoffers as you, who see nothing and
believe in nothing, blind moles and scoffers, and to tell you another
nasty thing I’ve done, another disgrace, even if that would save me from
your accusation! No, better Siberia! The man who opened the door to my
father and went in at that door, he killed him, he robbed him. Who was he?
I’m racking my brains and can’t think who. But I can tell you it was not
Dmitri Karamazov, and that’s all I can tell you, and that’s enough,
enough, leave me alone.... Exile me, punish me, but don’t bother me any
more. I’ll say no more. Call your witnesses!”

Mitya uttered his sudden monologue as though he were determined to be
absolutely silent for the future. The prosecutor watched him the whole
time and only when he had ceased speaking, observed, as though it were the
most ordinary thing, with the most frigid and composed air:

“Oh, about the open door of which you spoke just now, we may as well
inform you, by the way, now, of a very interesting piece of evidence of
the greatest importance both to you and to us, that has been given us by
Grigory, the old man you wounded. On his recovery, he clearly and
emphatically stated, in reply to our questions, that when, on coming out
to the steps, and hearing a noise in the garden, he made up his mind to go
into it through the little gate which stood open, before he noticed you
running, as you have told us already, in the dark from the open window
where you saw your father, he, Grigory, glanced to the left, and, while
noticing the open window, observed at the same time, much nearer to him,
the door, standing wide open—that door which you have stated to have been
shut the whole time you were in the garden. I will not conceal from you
that Grigory himself confidently affirms and bears witness that you must
have run from that door, though, of course, he did not see you do so with
his own eyes, since he only noticed you first some distance away in the
garden, running towards the fence.”

Mitya had leapt up from his chair half‐way through this speech.

“Nonsense!” he yelled, in a sudden frenzy, “it’s a barefaced lie. He
couldn’t have seen the door open because it was shut. He’s lying!”

“I consider it my duty to repeat that he is firm in his statement. He does
not waver. He adheres to it. We’ve cross‐examined him several times.”

“Precisely. I have cross‐examined him several times,” Nikolay Parfenovitch
confirmed warmly.

“It’s false, false! It’s either an attempt to slander me, or the
hallucination of a madman,” Mitya still shouted. “He’s simply raving, from
loss of blood, from the wound. He must have fancied it when he came to....
He’s raving.”

“Yes, but he noticed the open door, not when he came to after his
injuries, but before that, as soon as he went into the garden from the
lodge.”

“But it’s false, it’s false! It can’t be so! He’s slandering me from
spite.... He couldn’t have seen it ... I didn’t come from the door,”
gasped Mitya.

The prosecutor turned to Nikolay Parfenovitch and said to him
impressively:

“Confront him with it.”

“Do you recognize this object?”

Nikolay Parfenovitch laid upon the table a large and thick official
envelope, on which three seals still remained intact. The envelope was
empty, and slit open at one end. Mitya stared at it with open eyes.

“It ... it must be that envelope of my father’s, the envelope that
contained the three thousand roubles ... and if there’s inscribed on it,
allow me, ‘For my little chicken’ ... yes—three thousand!” he shouted, “do
you see, three thousand, do you see?”

“Of course, we see. But we didn’t find the money in it. It was empty, and
lying on the floor by the bed, behind the screen.”

For some seconds Mitya stood as though thunderstruck.

“Gentlemen, it’s Smerdyakov!” he shouted suddenly, at the top of his
voice. “It’s he who’s murdered him! He’s robbed him! No one else knew
where the old man hid the envelope. It’s Smerdyakov, that’s clear, now!”

“But you, too, knew of the envelope and that it was under the pillow.”

“I never knew it. I’ve never seen it. This is the first time I’ve looked
at it. I’d only heard of it from Smerdyakov.... He was the only one who
knew where the old man kept it hidden, I didn’t know ...” Mitya was
completely breathless.

“But you told us yourself that the envelope was under your deceased
father’s pillow. You especially stated that it was under the pillow, so
you must have known it.”

“We’ve got it written down,” confirmed Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“Nonsense! It’s absurd! I’d no idea it was under the pillow. And perhaps
it wasn’t under the pillow at all.... It was just a chance guess that it
was under the pillow. What does Smerdyakov say? Have you asked him where
it was? What does Smerdyakov say? that’s the chief point.... And I went
out of my way to tell lies against myself.... I told you without thinking
that it was under the pillow, and now you— Oh, you know how one says the
wrong thing, without meaning it. No one knew but Smerdyakov, only
Smerdyakov, and no one else.... He didn’t even tell me where it was! But
it’s his doing, his doing; there’s no doubt about it, he murdered him,
that’s as clear as daylight now,” Mitya exclaimed more and more
frantically, repeating himself incoherently, and growing more and more
exasperated and excited. “You must understand that, and arrest him at
once.... He must have killed him while I was running away and while
Grigory was unconscious, that’s clear now.... He gave the signal and
father opened to him ... for no one but he knew the signal, and without
the signal father would never have opened the door....”

“But you’re again forgetting the circumstance,” the prosecutor observed,
still speaking with the same restraint, though with a note of triumph,
“that there was no need to give the signal if the door already stood open
when you were there, while you were in the garden....”

“The door, the door,” muttered Mitya, and he stared speechless at the
prosecutor. He sank back helpless in his chair. All were silent.

“Yes, the door!... It’s a nightmare! God is against me!” he exclaimed,
staring before him in complete stupefaction.

“Come, you see,” the prosecutor went on with dignity, “and you can judge
for yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. On the one hand we have the evidence of
the open door from which you ran out, a fact which overwhelms you and us.
On the other side your incomprehensible, persistent, and, so to speak,
obdurate silence with regard to the source from which you obtained the
money which was so suddenly seen in your hands, when only three hours
earlier, on your own showing, you pledged your pistols for the sake of ten
roubles! In view of all these facts, judge for yourself. What are we to
believe, and what can we depend upon? And don’t accuse us of being
‘frigid, cynical, scoffing people,’ who are incapable of believing in the
generous impulses of your heart.... Try to enter into our position ...”

Mitya was indescribably agitated. He turned pale.

“Very well!” he exclaimed suddenly. “I will tell you my secret. I’ll tell
you where I got the money!... I’ll reveal my shame, that I may not have to
blame myself or you hereafter.”

“And believe me, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” put in Nikolay Parfenovitch, in a
voice of almost pathetic delight, “that every sincere and complete
confession on your part at this moment may, later on, have an immense
influence in your favor, and may, indeed, moreover—”

But the prosecutor gave him a slight shove under the table, and he checked
himself in time. Mitya, it is true, had not heard him.



Chapter VII. Mitya’s Great Secret. Received With Hisses


“Gentlemen,” he began, still in the same agitation, “I want to make a full
confession: that money was _my own_.” The lawyers’ faces lengthened. That
was not at all what they expected.

“How do you mean?” faltered Nikolay Parfenovitch, “when at five o’clock on
the same day, from your own confession—”

“Damn five o’clock on the same day and my own confession! That’s nothing
to do with it now! That money was my own, my own, that is, stolen by me
... not mine, I mean, but stolen by me, and it was fifteen hundred
roubles, and I had it on me all the time, all the time ...”

“But where did you get it?”

“I took it off my neck, gentlemen, off this very neck ... it was here,
round my neck, sewn up in a rag, and I’d had it round my neck a long time,
it’s a month since I put it round my neck ... to my shame and disgrace!”

“And from whom did you ... appropriate it?”

“You mean, ‘steal it’? Speak out plainly now. Yes, I consider that I
practically stole it, but, if you prefer, I ‘appropriated it.’ I consider
I stole it. And last night I stole it finally.”

“Last night? But you said that it’s a month since you ... obtained it?...”

“Yes. But not from my father. Not from my father, don’t be uneasy. I
didn’t steal it from my father, but from her. Let me tell you without
interrupting. It’s hard to do, you know. You see, a month ago, I was sent
for by Katerina Ivanovna, formerly my betrothed. Do you know her?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I know you know her. She’s a noble creature, noblest of the noble. But
she has hated me ever so long, oh, ever so long ... and hated me with good
reason, good reason!”

“Katerina Ivanovna!” Nikolay Parfenovitch exclaimed with wonder. The
prosecutor, too, stared.

“Oh, don’t take her name in vain! I’m a scoundrel to bring her into it.
Yes, I’ve seen that she hated me ... a long while.... From the very first,
even that evening at my lodging ... but enough, enough. You’re unworthy
even to know of that. No need of that at all.... I need only tell you that
she sent for me a month ago, gave me three thousand roubles to send off to
her sister and another relation in Moscow (as though she couldn’t have
sent it off herself!) and I ... it was just at that fatal moment in my
life when I ... well, in fact, when I’d just come to love another, her,
she’s sitting down below now, Grushenka. I carried her off here to Mokroe
then, and wasted here in two days half that damned three thousand, but the
other half I kept on me. Well, I’ve kept that other half, that fifteen
hundred, like a locket round my neck, but yesterday I undid it, and spent
it. What’s left of it, eight hundred roubles, is in your hands now,
Nikolay Parfenovitch. That’s the change out of the fifteen hundred I had
yesterday.”

“Excuse me. How’s that? Why, when you were here a month ago you spent
three thousand, not fifteen hundred, everybody knows that.”

“Who knows it? Who counted the money? Did I let any one count it?”

“Why, you told every one yourself that you’d spent exactly three
thousand.”

“It’s true, I did. I told the whole town so, and the whole town said so.
And here, at Mokroe, too, every one reckoned it was three thousand. Yet I
didn’t spend three thousand, but fifteen hundred. And the other fifteen
hundred I sewed into a little bag. That’s how it was, gentlemen. That’s
where I got that money yesterday....”

“This is almost miraculous,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“Allow me to inquire,” observed the prosecutor at last, “have you informed
any one whatever of this circumstance before, I mean that you had fifteen
hundred left about you a month ago?”

“I told no one.”

“That’s strange. Do you mean absolutely no one?”

“Absolutely no one. No one and nobody.”

“What was your reason for this reticence? What was your motive for making
such a secret of it? To be more precise: You have told us at last your
secret, in your words, so ‘disgraceful,’ though in reality—that is, of
course, comparatively speaking—this action, that is, the appropriation of
three thousand roubles belonging to some one else, and, of course, only
for a time is, in my view at least, only an act of the greatest
recklessness and not so disgraceful, when one takes into consideration
your character.... Even admitting that it was an action in the highest
degree discreditable, still, discreditable is not ‘disgraceful.’... Many
people have already guessed, during this last month, about the three
thousand of Katerina Ivanovna’s, that you have spent, and I heard the
legend myself, apart from your confession.... Mihail Makarovitch, for
instance, had heard it, too, so that indeed, it was scarcely a legend, but
the gossip of the whole town. There are indications, too, if I am not
mistaken, that you confessed this yourself to some one, I mean that the
money was Katerina Ivanovna’s, and so, it’s extremely surprising to me
that hitherto, that is, up to the present moment, you have made such an
extraordinary secret of the fifteen hundred you say you put by, apparently
connecting a feeling of positive horror with that secret.... It’s not easy
to believe that it could cost you such distress to confess such a
secret.... You cried out, just now, that Siberia would be better than
confessing it ...”

The prosecutor ceased speaking. He was provoked. He did not conceal his
vexation, which was almost anger, and gave vent to all his accumulated
spleen, disconnectedly and incoherently, without choosing words.

“It’s not the fifteen hundred that’s the disgrace, but that I put it apart
from the rest of the three thousand,” said Mitya firmly.

“Why?” smiled the prosecutor irritably. “What is there disgraceful, to
your thinking, in your having set aside half of the three thousand you had
discreditably, if you prefer, ‘disgracefully,’ appropriated? Your taking
the three thousand is more important than what you did with it. And by the
way, why did you do that—why did you set apart that half, for what
purpose, for what object did you do it? Can you explain that to us?”

“Oh, gentlemen, the purpose is the whole point!” cried Mitya. “I put it
aside because I was vile, that is, because I was calculating, and to be
calculating in such a case is vile ... and that vileness has been going on
a whole month.”

“It’s incomprehensible.”

“I wonder at you. But I’ll make it clearer. Perhaps it really is
incomprehensible. You see, attend to what I say. I appropriate three
thousand entrusted to my honor, I spend it on a spree, say I spend it all,
and next morning I go to her and say, ‘Katya, I’ve done wrong, I’ve
squandered your three thousand,’ well, is that right? No, it’s not
right—it’s dishonest and cowardly, I’m a beast, with no more self‐control
than a beast, that’s so, isn’t it? But still I’m not a thief? Not a
downright thief, you’ll admit! I squandered it, but I didn’t steal it. Now
a second, rather more favorable alternative: follow me carefully, or I may
get confused again—my head’s going round—and so, for the second
alternative: I spend here only fifteen hundred out of the three thousand,
that is, only half. Next day I go and take that half to her: ‘Katya, take
this fifteen hundred from me, I’m a low beast, and an untrustworthy
scoundrel, for I’ve wasted half the money, and I shall waste this, too, so
keep me from temptation!’ Well, what of that alternative? I should be a
beast and a scoundrel, and whatever you like; but not a thief, not
altogether a thief, or I should not have brought back what was left, but
have kept that, too. She would see at once that since I brought back half,
I should pay back what I’d spent, that I should never give up trying to,
that I should work to get it and pay it back. So in that case I should be
a scoundrel, but not a thief, you may say what you like, not a thief!”

“I admit that there is a certain distinction,” said the prosecutor, with a
cold smile. “But it’s strange that you see such a vital difference.”

“Yes, I see a vital difference! Every man may be a scoundrel, and perhaps
every man is a scoundrel, but not every one can be a thief, it takes an
arch‐scoundrel to be that. Oh, of course, I don’t know how to make these
fine distinctions ... but a thief is lower than a scoundrel, that’s my
conviction. Listen, I carry the money about me a whole month, I may make
up my mind to give it back to‐morrow, and I’m a scoundrel no longer, but I
cannot make up my mind, you see, though I’m making up my mind every day,
and every day spurring myself on to do it, and yet for a whole month I
can’t bring myself to it, you see. Is that right to your thinking, is that
right?”

“Certainly, that’s not right, that I can quite understand, and that I
don’t dispute,” answered the prosecutor with reserve. “And let us give up
all discussion of these subtleties and distinctions, and, if you will be
so kind, get back to the point. And the point is, that you have still not
told us, altogether we’ve asked you, why, in the first place, you halved
the money, squandering one half and hiding the other? For what purpose
exactly did you hide it, what did you mean to do with that fifteen
hundred? I insist upon that question, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

“Yes, of course!” cried Mitya, striking himself on the forehead; “forgive
me, I’m worrying you, and am not explaining the chief point, or you’d
understand in a minute, for it’s just the motive of it that’s the
disgrace! You see, it was all to do with the old man, my dead father. He
was always pestering Agrafena Alexandrovna, and I was jealous; I thought
then that she was hesitating between me and him. So I kept thinking every
day, suppose she were to make up her mind all of a sudden, suppose she
were to leave off tormenting me, and were suddenly to say to me, ‘I love
you, not him; take me to the other end of the world.’ And I’d only forty
copecks; how could I take her away, what could I do? Why, I’d be lost. You
see, I didn’t know her then, I didn’t understand her, I thought she wanted
money, and that she wouldn’t forgive my poverty. And so I fiendishly
counted out the half of that three thousand, sewed it up, calculating on
it, sewed it up before I was drunk, and after I had sewn it up, I went off
to get drunk on the rest. Yes, that was base. Do you understand now?”

Both the lawyers laughed aloud.

“I should have called it sensible and moral on your part not to have
squandered it all,” chuckled Nikolay Parfenovitch, “for after all what
does it amount to?”

“Why, that I stole it, that’s what it amounts to! Oh, God, you horrify me
by not understanding! Every day that I had that fifteen hundred sewn up
round my neck, every day and every hour I said to myself, ‘You’re a thief!
you’re a thief!’ Yes, that’s why I’ve been so savage all this month,
that’s why I fought in the tavern, that’s why I attacked my father, it was
because I felt I was a thief. I couldn’t make up my mind, I didn’t dare
even to tell Alyosha, my brother, about that fifteen hundred: I felt I was
such a scoundrel and such a pickpocket. But, do you know, while I carried
it I said to myself at the same time every hour: ‘No, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
you may yet not be a thief.’ Why? Because I might go next day and pay back
that fifteen hundred to Katya. And only yesterday I made up my mind to
tear my amulet off my neck, on my way from Fenya’s to Perhotin. I hadn’t
been able till that moment to bring myself to it. And it was only when I
tore it off that I became a downright thief, a thief and a dishonest man
for the rest of my life. Why? Because, with that I destroyed, too, my
dream of going to Katya and saying, ‘I’m a scoundrel, but not a thief!’ Do
you understand now? Do you understand?”

“What was it made you decide to do it yesterday?” Nikolay Parfenovitch
interrupted.

“Why? It’s absurd to ask. Because I had condemned myself to die at five
o’clock this morning, here, at dawn. I thought it made no difference
whether I died a thief or a man of honor. But I see it’s not so, it turns
out that it does make a difference. Believe me, gentlemen, what has
tortured me most during this night has not been the thought that I’d
killed the old servant, and that I was in danger of Siberia just when my
love was being rewarded, and Heaven was open to me again. Oh, that did
torture me, but not in the same way: not so much as the damned
consciousness that I had torn that damned money off my breast at last and
spent it, and had become a downright thief! Oh, gentlemen, I tell you
again, with a bleeding heart, I have learnt a great deal this night. I
have learnt that it’s not only impossible to live a scoundrel, but
impossible to die a scoundrel.... No, gentlemen, one must die honest....”

Mitya was pale. His face had a haggard and exhausted look, in spite of his
being intensely excited.

“I am beginning to understand you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” the prosecutor
said slowly, in a soft and almost compassionate tone. “But all this, if
you’ll excuse my saying so, is a matter of nerves, in my opinion ... your
overwrought nerves, that’s what it is. And why, for instance, should you
not have saved yourself such misery for almost a month, by going and
returning that fifteen hundred to the lady who had entrusted it to you?
And why could you not have explained things to her, and in view of your
position, which you describe as being so awful, why could you not have had
recourse to the plan which would so naturally have occurred to one’s mind,
that is, after honorably confessing your errors to her, why could you not
have asked her to lend you the sum needed for your expenses, which, with
her generous heart, she would certainly not have refused you in your
distress, especially if it had been with some guarantee, or even on the
security you offered to the merchant Samsonov, and to Madame Hohlakov? I
suppose you still regard that security as of value?”

Mitya suddenly crimsoned.

“Surely you don’t think me such an out and out scoundrel as that? You
can’t be speaking in earnest?” he said, with indignation, looking the
prosecutor straight in the face, and seeming unable to believe his ears.

“I assure you I’m in earnest.... Why do you imagine I’m not serious?” It
was the prosecutor’s turn to be surprised.

“Oh, how base that would have been! Gentlemen, do you know, you are
torturing me! Let me tell you everything, so be it. I’ll confess all my
infernal wickedness, but to put you to shame, and you’ll be surprised
yourselves at the depth of ignominy to which a medley of human passions
can sink. You must know that I already had that plan myself, that plan you
spoke of, just now, prosecutor! Yes, gentlemen, I, too, have had that
thought in my mind all this current month, so that I was on the point of
deciding to go to Katya—I was mean enough for that. But to go to her, to
tell her of my treachery, and for that very treachery, to carry it out,
for the expenses of that treachery, to beg for money from her, Katya (to
beg, do you hear, to beg), and go straight from her to run away with the
other, the rival, who hated and insulted her—to think of it! You must be
mad, prosecutor!”

“Mad I am not, but I did speak in haste, without thinking ... of that
feminine jealousy ... if there could be jealousy in this case, as you
assert ... yes, perhaps there is something of the kind,” said the
prosecutor, smiling.

“But that would have been so infamous!” Mitya brought his fist down on the
table fiercely. “That would have been filthy beyond everything! Yes, do
you know that she might have given me that money, yes, and she would have
given it, too; she’d have been certain to give it, to be revenged on me,
she’d have given it to satisfy her vengeance, to show her contempt for me,
for hers is an infernal nature, too, and she’s a woman of great wrath. I’d
have taken the money, too, oh, I should have taken it; I should have taken
it, and then, for the rest of my life ... oh, God! Forgive me, gentlemen,
I’m making such an outcry because I’ve had that thought in my mind so
lately, only the day before yesterday, that night when I was having all
that bother with Lyagavy, and afterwards yesterday, all day yesterday, I
remember, till that happened ...”

“Till what happened?” put in Nikolay Parfenovitch inquisitively, but Mitya
did not hear it.

“I have made you an awful confession,” Mitya said gloomily in conclusion.
“You must appreciate it, and what’s more, you must respect it, for if not,
if that leaves your souls untouched, then you’ve simply no respect for me,
gentlemen, I tell you that, and I shall die of shame at having confessed
it to men like you! Oh, I shall shoot myself! Yes, I see, I see already
that you don’t believe me. What, you want to write that down, too?” he
cried in dismay.

“Yes, what you said just now,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, looking at him
in surprise, “that is, that up to the last hour you were still
contemplating going to Katerina Ivanovna to beg that sum from her.... I
assure you, that’s a very important piece of evidence for us, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, I mean for the whole case ... and particularly for you,
particularly important for you.”

“Have mercy, gentlemen!” Mitya flung up his hands. “Don’t write that,
anyway; have some shame. Here I’ve torn my heart asunder before you, and
you seize the opportunity and are fingering the wounds in both halves....
Oh, my God!”

In despair he hid his face in his hands.

“Don’t worry yourself so, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” observed the prosecutor,
“everything that is written down will be read over to you afterwards, and
what you don’t agree to we’ll alter as you like. But now I’ll ask you one
little question for the second time. Has no one, absolutely no one, heard
from you of that money you sewed up? That, I must tell you, is almost
impossible to believe.”

“No one, no one, I told you so before, or you’ve not understood anything!
Let me alone!”

“Very well, this matter is bound to be explained, and there’s plenty of
time for it, but meantime, consider; we have perhaps a dozen witnesses
that you yourself spread it abroad, and even shouted almost everywhere
about the three thousand you’d spent here; three thousand, not fifteen
hundred. And now, too, when you got hold of the money you had yesterday,
you gave many people to understand that you had brought three thousand
with you.”

“You’ve got not dozens, but hundreds of witnesses, two hundred witnesses,
two hundred have heard it, thousands have heard it!” cried Mitya.

“Well, you see, all bear witness to it. And the word _all_ means
something.”

“It means nothing. I talked rot, and every one began repeating it.”

“But what need had you to ‘talk rot,’ as you call it?”

“The devil knows. From bravado perhaps ... at having wasted so much
money.... To try and forget that money I had sewn up, perhaps ... yes,
that was why ... damn it ... how often will you ask me that question?
Well, I told a fib, and that was the end of it, once I’d said it, I didn’t
care to correct it. What does a man tell lies for sometimes?”

“That’s very difficult to decide, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, what makes a man
tell lies,” observed the prosecutor impressively. “Tell me, though, was
that ‘amulet,’ as you call it, on your neck, a big thing?”

“No, not big.”

“How big, for instance?”

“If you fold a hundred‐rouble note in half, that would be the size.”

“You’d better show us the remains of it. You must have them somewhere.”

“Damnation, what nonsense! I don’t know where they are.”

“But excuse me: where and when did you take it off your neck? According to
your own evidence you didn’t go home.”

“When I was going from Fenya’s to Perhotin’s, on the way I tore it off my
neck and took out the money.”

“In the dark?”

“What should I want a light for? I did it with my fingers in one minute.”

“Without scissors, in the street?”

“In the market‐place I think it was. Why scissors? It was an old rag. It
was torn in a minute.”

“Where did you put it afterwards?”

“I dropped it there.”

“Where was it, exactly?”

“In the market‐place, in the market‐place! The devil knows whereabouts.
What do you want to know for?”

“That’s extremely important, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. It would be material
evidence in your favor. How is it you don’t understand that? Who helped
you to sew it up a month ago?”

“No one helped me. I did it myself.”

“Can you sew?”

“A soldier has to know how to sew. No knowledge was needed to do that.”

“Where did you get the material, that is, the rag in which you sewed the
money?”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Not at all. And we are in no mood for laughing, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

“I don’t know where I got the rag from—somewhere, I suppose.”

“I should have thought you couldn’t have forgotten it?”

“Upon my word, I don’t remember. I might have torn a bit off my linen.”

“That’s very interesting. We might find in your lodgings to‐morrow the
shirt or whatever it is from which you tore the rag. What sort of rag was
it, cloth or linen?”

“Goodness only knows what it was. Wait a bit.... I believe I didn’t tear
it off anything. It was a bit of calico.... I believe I sewed it up in a
cap of my landlady’s.”

“In your landlady’s cap?”

“Yes. I took it from her.”

“How did you get it?”

“You see, I remember once taking a cap for a rag, perhaps to wipe my pen
on. I took it without asking, because it was a worthless rag. I tore it
up, and I took the notes and sewed them up in it. I believe it was in that
very rag I sewed them. An old piece of calico, washed a thousand times.”

“And you remember that for certain now?”

“I don’t know whether for certain. I think it was in the cap. But, hang
it, what does it matter?”

“In that case your landlady will remember that the thing was lost?”

“No, she won’t, she didn’t miss it. It was an old rag, I tell you, an old
rag not worth a farthing.”

“And where did you get the needle and thread?”

“I’ll stop now. I won’t say any more. Enough of it!” said Mitya, losing
his temper at last.

“It’s strange that you should have so completely forgotten where you threw
the pieces in the market‐place.”

“Give orders for the market‐place to be swept to‐morrow, and perhaps
you’ll find it,” said Mitya, sneering. “Enough, gentlemen, enough!” he
decided, in an exhausted voice. “I see you don’t believe me! Not for a
moment! It’s my fault, not yours. I ought not to have been so ready. Why,
why did I degrade myself by confessing my secret to you? It’s a joke to
you. I see that from your eyes. You led me on to it, prosecutor? Sing a
hymn of triumph if you can.... Damn you, you torturers!”

He bent his head, and hid his face in his hands. The lawyers were silent.
A minute later he raised his head and looked at them almost vacantly. His
face now expressed complete, hopeless despair, and he sat mute and passive
as though hardly conscious of what was happening. In the meantime they had
to finish what they were about. They had immediately to begin examining
the witnesses. It was by now eight o’clock in the morning. The lights had
been extinguished long ago. Mihail Makarovitch and Kalganov, who had been
continually in and out of the room all the while the interrogation had
been going on, had now both gone out again. The lawyers, too, looked very
tired. It was a wretched morning, the whole sky was overcast, and the rain
streamed down in bucketfuls. Mitya gazed blankly out of the window.

“May I look out of the window?” he asked Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly.

“Oh, as much as you like,” the latter replied.

Mitya got up and went to the window.... The rain lashed against its little
greenish panes. He could see the muddy road just below the house, and
farther away, in the rain and mist, a row of poor, black, dismal huts,
looking even blacker and poorer in the rain. Mitya thought of “Phœbus the
golden‐haired,” and how he had meant to shoot himself at his first ray.
“Perhaps it would be even better on a morning like this,” he thought with
a smile, and suddenly, flinging his hand downwards, he turned to his
“torturers.”

“Gentlemen,” he cried, “I see that I am lost! But she? Tell me about her,
I beseech you. Surely she need not be ruined with me? She’s innocent, you
know, she was out of her mind when she cried last night ‘It’s all my
fault!’ She’s done nothing, nothing! I’ve been grieving over her all night
as I sat with you.... Can’t you, won’t you tell me what you are going to
do with her now?”

“You can set your mind quite at rest on that score, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,”
the prosecutor answered at once, with evident alacrity. “We have, so far,
no grounds for interfering with the lady in whom you are so interested. I
trust that it may be the same in the later development of the case.... On
the contrary, we’ll do everything that lies in our power in that matter.
Set your mind completely at rest.”

“Gentlemen, I thank you. I knew that you were honest, straight‐forward
people in spite of everything. You’ve taken a load off my heart.... Well,
what are we to do now? I’m ready.”

“Well, we ought to make haste. We must pass to examining the witnesses
without delay. That must be done in your presence and therefore—”

“Shouldn’t we have some tea first?” interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch, “I
think we’ve deserved it!”

They decided that if tea were ready downstairs (Mihail Makarovitch had, no
doubt, gone down to get some) they would have a glass and then “go on and
on,” putting off their proper breakfast until a more favorable
opportunity. Tea really was ready below, and was soon brought up. Mitya at
first refused the glass that Nikolay Parfenovitch politely offered him,
but afterwards he asked for it himself and drank it greedily. He looked
surprisingly exhausted. It might have been supposed from his Herculean
strength that one night of carousing, even accompanied by the most violent
emotions, could have had little effect on him. But he felt that he could
hardly hold his head up, and from time to time all the objects about him
seemed heaving and dancing before his eyes. “A little more and I shall
begin raving,” he said to himself.



Chapter VIII. The Evidence Of The Witnesses. The Babe


The examination of the witnesses began. But we will not continue our story
in such detail as before. And so we will not dwell on how Nikolay
Parfenovitch impressed on every witness called that he must give his
evidence in accordance with truth and conscience, and that he would
afterwards have to repeat his evidence on oath, how every witness was
called upon to sign the protocol of his evidence, and so on. We will only
note that the point principally insisted upon in the examination was the
question of the three thousand roubles, that is, was the sum spent here,
at Mokroe, by Mitya on the first occasion, a month before, three thousand
or fifteen hundred? And again had he spent three thousand or fifteen
hundred yesterday? Alas, all the evidence given by every one turned out to
be against Mitya. There was not one in his favor, and some witnesses
introduced new, almost crushing facts, in contradiction of his, Mitya’s,
story.

The first witness examined was Trifon Borissovitch. He was not in the
least abashed as he stood before the lawyers. He had, on the contrary, an
air of stern and severe indignation with the accused, which gave him an
appearance of truthfulness and personal dignity. He spoke little, and with
reserve, waited to be questioned, answered precisely and deliberately.
Firmly and unhesitatingly he bore witness that the sum spent a month
before could not have been less than three thousand, that all the peasants
about here would testify that they had heard the sum of three thousand
mentioned by Dmitri Fyodorovitch himself. “What a lot of money he flung
away on the gypsy girls alone! He wasted a thousand, I daresay, on them
alone.”

“I don’t believe I gave them five hundred,” was Mitya’s gloomy comment on
this. “It’s a pity I didn’t count the money at the time, but I was
drunk....”

Mitya was sitting sideways with his back to the curtains. He listened
gloomily, with a melancholy and exhausted air, as though he would say:

“Oh, say what you like. It makes no difference now.”

“More than a thousand went on them, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” retorted Trifon
Borissovitch firmly. “You flung it about at random and they picked it up.
They were a rascally, thievish lot, horse‐stealers, they’ve been driven
away from here, or maybe they’d bear witness themselves how much they got
from you. I saw the sum in your hands, myself—count it I didn’t, you
didn’t let me, that’s true enough—but by the look of it I should say it
was far more than fifteen hundred ... fifteen hundred, indeed! We’ve seen
money too. We can judge of amounts....”

As for the sum spent yesterday he asserted that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had
told him, as soon as he arrived, that he had brought three thousand with
him.

“Come now, is that so, Trifon Borissovitch?” replied Mitya. “Surely I
didn’t declare so positively that I’d brought three thousand?”

“You did say so, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You said it before Andrey. Andrey
himself is still here. Send for him. And in the hall, when you were
treating the chorus, you shouted straight out that you would leave your
sixth thousand here—that is with what you spent before, we must
understand. Stepan and Semyon heard it, and Pyotr Fomitch Kalganov, too,
was standing beside you at the time. Maybe he’d remember it....”

The evidence as to the “sixth” thousand made an extraordinary impression
on the two lawyers. They were delighted with this new mode of reckoning;
three and three made six, three thousand then and three now made six, that
was clear.

They questioned all the peasants suggested by Trifon Borissovitch, Stepan
and Semyon, the driver Andrey, and Kalganov. The peasants and the driver
unhesitatingly confirmed Trifon Borissovitch’s evidence. They noted down,
with particular care, Andrey’s account of the conversation he had had with
Mitya on the road: “ ‘Where,’ says he, ‘am I, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, going,
to heaven or to hell, and shall I be forgiven in the next world or not?’ ”

The psychological Ippolit Kirillovitch heard this with a subtle smile, and
ended by recommending that these remarks as to where Dmitri Fyodorovitch
would go should be “included in the case.”

Kalganov, when called, came in reluctantly, frowning and ill‐humored, and
he spoke to the lawyers as though he had never met them before in his
life, though they were acquaintances whom he had been meeting every day
for a long time past. He began by saying that “he knew nothing about it
and didn’t want to.” But it appeared that he had heard of the “sixth”
thousand, and he admitted that he had been standing close by at the
moment. As far as he could see he “didn’t know” how much money Mitya had
in his hands. He affirmed that the Poles had cheated at cards. In reply to
reiterated questions he stated that, after the Poles had been turned out,
Mitya’s position with Agrafena Alexandrovna had certainly improved, and
that she had said that she loved him. He spoke of Agrafena Alexandrovna
with reserve and respect, as though she had been a lady of the best
society, and did not once allow himself to call her Grushenka. In spite of
the young man’s obvious repugnance at giving evidence, Ippolit
Kirillovitch examined him at great length, and only from him learnt all
the details of what made up Mitya’s “romance,” so to say, on that night.
Mitya did not once pull Kalganov up. At last they let the young man go,
and he left the room with unconcealed indignation.

The Poles, too, were examined. Though they had gone to bed in their room,
they had not slept all night, and on the arrival of the police officers
they hastily dressed and got ready, realizing that they would certainly be
sent for. They gave their evidence with dignity, though not without some
uneasiness. The little Pole turned out to be a retired official of the
twelfth class, who had served in Siberia as a veterinary surgeon. His name
was Mussyalovitch. Pan Vrublevsky turned out to be an uncertificated
dentist. Although Nikolay Parfenovitch asked them questions on entering
the room they both addressed their answers to Mihail Makarovitch, who was
standing on one side, taking him in their ignorance for the most important
person and in command, and addressed him at every word as “Pan Colonel.”
Only after several reproofs from Mihail Makarovitch himself, they grasped
that they had to address their answers to Nikolay Parfenovitch only. It
turned out that they could speak Russian quite correctly except for their
accent in some words. Of his relations with Grushenka, past and present,
Pan Mussyalovitch spoke proudly and warmly, so that Mitya was roused at
once and declared that he would not allow the “scoundrel” to speak like
that in his presence! Pan Mussyalovitch at once called attention to the
word “scoundrel” and begged that it should be put down in the protocol.
Mitya fumed with rage.

“He’s a scoundrel! A scoundrel! You can put that down. And put down, too,
that, in spite of the protocol I still declare that he’s a scoundrel!” he
cried.

Though Nikolay Parfenovitch did insert this in the protocol, he showed the
most praiseworthy tact and management. After sternly reprimanding Mitya,
he cut short all further inquiry into the romantic aspect of the case, and
hastened to pass to what was essential. One piece of evidence given by the
Poles roused special interest in the lawyers: that was how, in that very
room, Mitya had tried to buy off Pan Mussyalovitch, and had offered him
three thousand roubles to resign his claims, seven hundred roubles down,
and the remaining two thousand three hundred “to be paid next day in the
town.” He had sworn at the time that he had not the whole sum with him at
Mokroe, but that his money was in the town. Mitya observed hotly that he
had not said that he would be sure to pay him the remainder next day in
the town. But Pan Vrublevsky confirmed the statement, and Mitya, after
thinking for a moment admitted, frowning, that it must have been as the
Poles stated, that he had been excited at the time, and might indeed have
said so.

The prosecutor positively pounced on this piece of evidence. It seemed to
establish for the prosecution (and they did, in fact, base this deduction
on it) that half, or a part of, the three thousand that had come into
Mitya’s hands might really have been left somewhere hidden in the town, or
even, perhaps, somewhere here, in Mokroe. This would explain the
circumstance, so baffling for the prosecution, that only eight hundred
roubles were to be found in Mitya’s hands. This circumstance had been the
one piece of evidence which, insignificant as it was, had hitherto told,
to some extent, in Mitya’s favor. Now this one piece of evidence in his
favor had broken down. In answer to the prosecutor’s inquiry, where he
would have got the remaining two thousand three hundred roubles, since he
himself had denied having more than fifteen hundred, Mitya confidently
replied that he had meant to offer the “little chap,” not money, but a
formal deed of conveyance of his rights to the village of Tchermashnya,
those rights which he had already offered to Samsonov and Madame Hohlakov.
The prosecutor positively smiled at the “innocence of this subterfuge.”

“And you imagine he would have accepted such a deed as a substitute for
two thousand three hundred roubles in cash?”

“He certainly would have accepted it,” Mitya declared warmly. “Why, look
here, he might have grabbed not two thousand, but four or six, for it. He
would have put his lawyers, Poles and Jews, on to the job, and might have
got, not three thousand, but the whole property out of the old man.”

The evidence of Pan Mussyalovitch was, of course, entered in the protocol
in the fullest detail. Then they let the Poles go. The incident of the
cheating at cards was hardly touched upon. Nikolay Parfenovitch was too
well pleased with them, as it was, and did not want to worry them with
trifles, moreover, it was nothing but a foolish, drunken quarrel over
cards. There had been drinking and disorder enough, that night.... So the
two hundred roubles remained in the pockets of the Poles.

Then old Maximov was summoned. He came in timidly, approached with little
steps, looking very disheveled and depressed. He had, all this time, taken
refuge below with Grushenka, sitting dumbly beside her, and “now and then
he’d begin blubbering over her and wiping his eyes with a blue check
handkerchief,” as Mihail Makarovitch described afterwards. So that she
herself began trying to pacify and comfort him. The old man at once
confessed that he had done wrong, that he had borrowed “ten roubles in my
poverty,” from Dmitri Fyodorovitch, and that he was ready to pay it back.
To Nikolay Parfenovitch’s direct question, had he noticed how much money
Dmitri Fyodorovitch held in his hand, as he must have been able to see the
sum better than any one when he took the note from him, Maximov, in the
most positive manner, declared that there was twenty thousand.

“Have you ever seen so much as twenty thousand before, then?” inquired
Nikolay Parfenovitch, with a smile.

“To be sure I have, not twenty, but seven, when my wife mortgaged my
little property. She’d only let me look at it from a distance, boasting of
it to me. It was a very thick bundle, all rainbow‐colored notes. And
Dmitri Fyodorovitch’s were all rainbow‐colored....”

He was not kept long. At last it was Grushenka’s turn. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was obviously apprehensive of the effect her appearance might
have on Mitya, and he muttered a few words of admonition to him, but Mitya
bowed his head in silence, giving him to understand “that he would not
make a scene.” Mihail Makarovitch himself led Grushenka in. She entered
with a stern and gloomy face, that looked almost composed and sat down
quietly on the chair offered her by Nikolay Parfenovitch. She was very
pale, she seemed to be cold, and wrapped herself closely in her
magnificent black shawl. She was suffering from a slight feverish
chill—the first symptom of the long illness which followed that night. Her
grave air, her direct earnest look and quiet manner made a very favorable
impression on every one. Nikolay Parfenovitch was even a little bit
“fascinated.” He admitted himself, when talking about it afterwards, that
only then had he seen “how handsome the woman was,” for, though he had
seen her several times before, he had always looked upon her as something
of a “provincial hetaira.” “She has the manners of the best society,” he
said enthusiastically, gossiping about her in a circle of ladies. But this
was received with positive indignation by the ladies, who immediately
called him a “naughty man,” to his great satisfaction.

As she entered the room, Grushenka only glanced for an instant at Mitya,
who looked at her uneasily. But her face reassured him at once. After the
first inevitable inquiries and warnings, Nikolay Parfenovitch asked her,
hesitating a little, but preserving the most courteous manner, on what
terms she was with the retired lieutenant, Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov.
To this Grushenka firmly and quietly replied:

“He was an acquaintance. He came to see me as an acquaintance during the
last month.” To further inquisitive questions she answered plainly and
with complete frankness, that, though “at times” she had thought him
attractive, she had not loved him, but had won his heart as well as his
old father’s “in my nasty spite,” that she had seen that Mitya was very
jealous of Fyodor Pavlovitch and every one else; but that had only amused
her. She had never meant to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch, she had simply been
laughing at him. “I had no thoughts for either of them all this last
month. I was expecting another man who had wronged me. But I think,” she
said in conclusion, “that there’s no need for you to inquire about that,
nor for me to answer you, for that’s my own affair.”

Nikolay Parfenovitch immediately acted upon this hint. He again dismissed
the “romantic” aspect of the case and passed to the serious one, that is,
to the question of most importance, concerning the three thousand roubles.
Grushenka confirmed the statement that three thousand roubles had
certainly been spent on the first carousal at Mokroe, and, though she had
not counted the money herself, she had heard that it was three thousand
from Dmitri Fyodorovitch’s own lips.

“Did he tell you that alone, or before some one else, or did you only hear
him speak of it to others in your presence?” the prosecutor inquired
immediately.

To which Grushenka replied that she had heard him say so before other
people, and had heard him say so when they were alone.

“Did he say it to you alone once, or several times?” inquired the
prosecutor, and learned that he had told Grushenka so several times.

Ippolit Kirillovitch was very well satisfied with this piece of evidence.
Further examination elicited that Grushenka knew, too, where that money
had come from, and that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had got it from Katerina
Ivanovna.

“And did you never, once, hear that the money spent a month ago was not
three thousand, but less, and that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had saved half that
sum for his own use?”

“No, I never heard that,” answered Grushenka.

It was explained further that Mitya had, on the contrary, often told her
that he hadn’t a farthing.

“He was always expecting to get some from his father,” said Grushenka in
conclusion.

“Did he never say before you ... casually, or in a moment of irritation,”
Nikolay Parfenovitch put in suddenly, “that he intended to make an attempt
on his father’s life?”

“Ach, he did say so,” sighed Grushenka.

“Once or several times?”

“He mentioned it several times, always in anger.”

“And did you believe he would do it?”

“No, I never believed it,” she answered firmly. “I had faith in his noble
heart.”

“Gentlemen, allow me,” cried Mitya suddenly, “allow me to say one word to
Agrafena Alexandrovna, in your presence.”

“You can speak,” Nikolay Parfenovitch assented.

“Agrafena Alexandrovna!” Mitya got up from his chair, “have faith in God
and in me. I am not guilty of my father’s murder!”

Having uttered these words Mitya sat down again on his chair. Grushenka
stood up and crossed herself devoutly before the ikon. “Thanks be to Thee,
O Lord,” she said, in a voice thrilled with emotion, and still standing,
she turned to Nikolay Parfenovitch and added:

“As he has spoken now, believe it! I know him. He’ll say anything as a
joke or from obstinacy, but he’ll never deceive you against his
conscience. He’s telling the whole truth, you may believe it.”

“Thanks, Agrafena Alexandrovna, you’ve given me fresh courage,” Mitya
responded in a quivering voice.

As to the money spent the previous day, she declared that she did not know
what sum it was, but had heard him tell several people that he had three
thousand with him. And to the question where he got the money, she said
that he had told her that he had “stolen” it from Katerina Ivanovna, and
that she had replied to that that he hadn’t stolen it, and that he must
pay the money back next day. On the prosecutor’s asking her emphatically
whether the money he said he had stolen from Katerina Ivanovna was what he
had spent yesterday, or what he had squandered here a month ago, she
declared that he meant the money spent a month ago, and that that was how
she understood him.

Grushenka was at last released, and Nikolay Parfenovitch informed her
impulsively that she might at once return to the town and that if he could
be of any assistance to her, with horses for example, or if she would care
for an escort, he ... would be—

“I thank you sincerely,” said Grushenka, bowing to him, “I’m going with
this old gentleman, I am driving him back to town with me, and meanwhile,
if you’ll allow me, I’ll wait below to hear what you decide about Dmitri
Fyodorovitch.”

She went out. Mitya was calm, and even looked more cheerful, but only for
a moment. He felt more and more oppressed by a strange physical weakness.
His eyes were closing with fatigue. The examination of the witnesses was,
at last, over. They proceeded to a final revision of the protocol. Mitya
got up, moved from his chair to the corner by the curtain, lay down on a
large chest covered with a rug, and instantly fell asleep.

He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and the
time.

He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long
ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses,
through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the
snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the
earth. And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a fair, long beard. He
was not an old man, somewhere about fifty, and he had on a gray peasant’s
smock. Not far off was a village, he could see the black huts, and half
the huts were burnt down, there were only the charred beams sticking up.
And as they drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a
lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of
brownish color, especially one at the edge, a tall, bony woman, who looked
forty, but might have been only twenty, with a long thin face. And in her
arms was a little baby crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that
there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and
held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.

“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Mitya asked, as they dashed
gayly by.

“It’s the babe,” answered the driver, “the babe weeping.”

And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, “the babe,” and he
liked the peasant’s calling it a “babe.” There seemed more pity in it.

“But why is it weeping?” Mitya persisted stupidly, “why are its little
arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it up?”

“The babe’s cold, its little clothes are frozen and don’t warm it.”

“But why is it? Why?” foolish Mitya still persisted.

“Why, they’re poor people, burnt out. They’ve no bread. They’re begging
because they’ve been burnt out.”

“No, no,” Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. “Tell me why it is
those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor?
Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why
don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why
don’t they feed the babe?”

And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless,
yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way. And
he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was
rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something
for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark‐
faced, dried‐up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears
again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once,
regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the Karamazovs.

“And I’m coming with you. I won’t leave you now for the rest of my life,
I’m coming with you,” he heard close beside him Grushenka’s tender voice,
thrilling with emotion. And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward
towards the light, and he longed to live, to live, to go on and on,
towards the new, beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!

“What! Where?” he exclaimed opening his eyes, and sitting up on the chest,
as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the
protocol read aloud and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had been asleep an
hour or more, but he did not hear Nikolay Parfenovitch. He was suddenly
struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head, which hadn’t
been there when he had leant back, exhausted, on the chest.

“Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?” he cried, with a
sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great
kindness had been shown him.

He never found out who this kind man was; perhaps one of the peasant
witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch’s little secretary, had compassionately
thought to put a pillow under his head; but his whole soul was quivering
with tears. He went to the table and said that he would sign whatever they
liked.

“I’ve had a good dream, gentlemen,” he said in a strange voice, with a new
light, as of joy, in his face.



Chapter IX. They Carry Mitya Away


When the protocol had been signed, Nikolay Parfenovitch turned solemnly to
the prisoner and read him the “Committal,” setting forth, that in such a
year, on such a day, in such a place, the investigating lawyer of such‐
and‐such a district court, having examined so‐and‐so (to wit, Mitya)
accused of this and of that (all the charges were carefully written out)
and having considered that the accused, not pleading guilty to the charges
made against him, had brought forward nothing in his defense, while the
witnesses, so‐and‐so, and so‐and‐so, and the circumstances such‐and‐such
testify against him, acting in accordance with such‐and‐such articles of
the Statute Book, and so on, has ruled, that, in order to preclude so‐and‐
so (Mitya) from all means of evading pursuit and judgment he be detained
in such‐and‐such a prison, which he hereby notifies to the accused and
communicates a copy of this same “Committal” to the deputy prosecutor, and
so on, and so on.

In brief, Mitya was informed that he was, from that moment, a prisoner,
and that he would be driven at once to the town, and there shut up in a
very unpleasant place. Mitya listened attentively, and only shrugged his
shoulders.

“Well, gentlemen, I don’t blame you. I’m ready.... I understand that
there’s nothing else for you to do.”

Nikolay Parfenovitch informed him gently that he would be escorted at once
by the rural police officer, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, who happened to be on
the spot....

“Stay,” Mitya interrupted, suddenly, and impelled by uncontrollable
feeling he pronounced, addressing all in the room:

“Gentlemen, we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and
mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now,
of all I am the lowest reptile! I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve
done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a
blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a
force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the
thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public
shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I
shall be purified, gentlemen? But listen, for the last time, I am not
guilty of my father’s blood. I accept my punishment, not because I killed
him, but because I meant to kill him, and perhaps I really might have
killed him. Still I mean to fight it out with you. I warn you of that.
I’ll fight it out with you to the end, and then God will decide. Good‐by,
gentlemen, don’t be vexed with me for having shouted at you during the
examination. Oh, I was still such a fool then.... In another minute I
shall be a prisoner, but now, for the last time, as a free man, Dmitri
Karamazov offers you his hand. Saying good‐by to you, I say it to all
men.”

His voice quivered and he stretched out his hand, but Nikolay
Parfenovitch, who happened to stand nearest to him, with a sudden, almost
nervous movement, hid his hands behind his back. Mitya instantly noticed
this, and started. He let his outstretched hand fall at once.

“The preliminary inquiry is not yet over,” Nikolay Parfenovitch faltered,
somewhat embarrassed. “We will continue it in the town, and I, for my
part, of course, am ready to wish you all success ... in your defense....
As a matter of fact, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I’ve always been disposed to
regard you as, so to speak, more unfortunate than guilty. All of us here,
if I may make bold to speak for all, we are all ready to recognize that
you are, at bottom, a young man of honor, but, alas, one who has been
carried away by certain passions to a somewhat excessive degree....”

Nikolay Parfenovitch’s little figure was positively majestic by the time
he had finished speaking. It struck Mitya that in another minute this
“boy” would take his arm, lead him to another corner, and renew their
conversation about “girls.” But many quite irrelevant and inappropriate
thoughts sometimes occur even to a prisoner when he is being led out to
execution.

“Gentlemen, you are good, you are humane, may I see _her_ to say ‘good‐by’
for the last time?” asked Mitya.

“Certainly, but considering ... in fact, now it’s impossible except in the
presence of—”

“Oh, well, if it must be so, it must!”

Grushenka was brought in, but the farewell was brief, and of few words,
and did not at all satisfy Nikolay Parfenovitch. Grushenka made a deep bow
to Mitya.

“I have told you I am yours, and I will be yours. I will follow you for
ever, wherever they may send you. Farewell; you are guiltless, though
you’ve been your own undoing.”

Her lips quivered, tears flowed from her eyes.

“Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, for ruining you, too, with my love.”

Mitya would have said something more, but he broke off and went out. He
was at once surrounded by men who kept a constant watch on him. At the
bottom of the steps to which he had driven up with such a dash the day
before with Andrey’s three horses, two carts stood in readiness. Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch, a sturdy, thick‐set man with a wrinkled face, was annoyed
about something, some sudden irregularity. He was shouting angrily. He
asked Mitya to get into the cart with somewhat excessive surliness.

“When I stood him drinks in the tavern, the man had quite a different
face,” thought Mitya, as he got in. At the gates there was a crowd of
people, peasants, women and drivers. Trifon Borissovitch came down the
steps too. All stared at Mitya.

“Forgive me at parting, good people!” Mitya shouted suddenly from the
cart.

“Forgive us too!” he heard two or three voices.

“Good‐by to you, too, Trifon Borissovitch!”

But Trifon Borissovitch did not even turn round. He was, perhaps, too
busy. He, too, was shouting and fussing about something. It appeared that
everything was not yet ready in the second cart, in which two constables
were to accompany Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. The peasant who had been ordered
to drive the second cart was pulling on his smock, stoutly maintaining
that it was not his turn to go, but Akim’s. But Akim was not to be seen.
They ran to look for him. The peasant persisted and besought them to wait.

“You see what our peasants are, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. They’ve no shame!”
exclaimed Trifon Borissovitch. “Akim gave you twenty‐five copecks the day
before yesterday. You’ve drunk it all and now you cry out. I’m simply
surprised at your good‐nature, with our low peasants, Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch, that’s all I can say.”

“But what do we want a second cart for?” Mitya put in. “Let’s start with
the one, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. I won’t be unruly, I won’t run away from
you, old fellow. What do we want an escort for?”

“I’ll trouble you, sir, to learn how to speak to me if you’ve never been
taught. I’m not ‘old fellow’ to you, and you can keep your advice for
another time!” Mavriky Mavrikyevitch snapped out savagely, as though glad
to vent his wrath.

Mitya was reduced to silence. He flushed all over. A moment later he felt
suddenly very cold. The rain had ceased, but the dull sky was still
overcast with clouds, and a keen wind was blowing straight in his face.

“I’ve taken a chill,” thought Mitya, twitching his shoulders.

At last Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, too, got into the cart, sat down heavily,
and, as though without noticing it, squeezed Mitya into the corner. It is
true that he was out of humor and greatly disliked the task that had been
laid upon him.

“Good‐by, Trifon Borissovitch!” Mitya shouted again, and felt himself,
that he had not called out this time from good‐nature, but involuntarily,
from resentment.

But Trifon Borissovitch stood proudly, with both hands behind his back,
and staring straight at Mitya with a stern and angry face, he made no
reply.

“Good‐by, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, good‐by!” he heard all at once the voice of
Kalganov, who had suddenly darted out. Running up to the cart he held out
his hand to Mitya. He had no cap on.

Mitya had time to seize and press his hand.

“Good‐by, dear fellow! I shan’t forget your generosity,” he cried warmly.

But the cart moved and their hands parted. The bell began ringing and
Mitya was driven off.

Kalganov ran back, sat down in a corner, bent his head, hid his face in
his hands, and burst out crying. For a long while he sat like that, crying
as though he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty. Oh, he
believed almost without doubt in Mitya’s guilt.

“What are these people? What can men be after this?” he exclaimed
incoherently, in bitter despondency, almost despair. At that moment he had
no desire to live.

“Is it worth it? Is it worth it?” exclaimed the boy in his grief.





PART IV




Book X. The Boys



Chapter I. Kolya Krassotkin


It was the beginning of November. There had been a hard frost, eleven
degrees Réaumur, without snow, but a little dry snow had fallen on the
frozen ground during the night, and a keen dry wind was lifting and
blowing it along the dreary streets of our town, especially about the
market‐place. It was a dull morning, but the snow had ceased.

Not far from the market‐place, close to Plotnikov’s shop, there stood a
small house, very clean both without and within. It belonged to Madame
Krassotkin, the widow of a former provincial secretary, who had been dead
for fourteen years. His widow, still a nice‐looking woman of thirty‐two,
was living in her neat little house on her private means. She lived in
respectable seclusion; she was of a soft but fairly cheerful disposition.
She was about eighteen at the time of her husband’s death; she had been
married only a year and had just borne him a son. From the day of his
death she had devoted herself heart and soul to the bringing up of her
precious treasure, her boy Kolya. Though she had loved him passionately
those fourteen years, he had caused her far more suffering than happiness.
She had been trembling and fainting with terror almost every day, afraid
he would fall ill, would catch cold, do something naughty, climb on a
chair and fall off it, and so on and so on. When Kolya began going to
school, the mother devoted herself to studying all the sciences with him
so as to help him, and go through his lessons with him. She hastened to
make the acquaintance of the teachers and their wives, even made up to
Kolya’s schoolfellows, and fawned upon them in the hope of thus saving
Kolya from being teased, laughed at, or beaten by them. She went so far
that the boys actually began to mock at him on her account and taunt him
with being a “mother’s darling.”

But the boy could take his own part. He was a resolute boy, “tremendously
strong,” as was rumored in his class, and soon proved to be the fact; he
was agile, strong‐willed, and of an audacious and enterprising temper. He
was good at lessons, and there was a rumor in the school that he could
beat the teacher, Dardanelov, at arithmetic and universal history. Though
he looked down upon every one, he was a good comrade and not supercilious.
He accepted his schoolfellows’ respect as his due, but was friendly with
them. Above all, he knew where to draw the line. He could restrain himself
on occasion, and in his relations with the teachers he never overstepped
that last mystic limit beyond which a prank becomes an unpardonable breach
of discipline. But he was as fond of mischief on every possible occasion
as the smallest boy in the school, and not so much for the sake of
mischief as for creating a sensation, inventing something, something
effective and conspicuous. He was extremely vain. He knew how to make even
his mother give way to him; he was almost despotic in his control of her.
She gave way to him, oh, she had given way to him for years. The one
thought unendurable to her was that her boy had no great love for her. She
was always fancying that Kolya was “unfeeling” to her, and at times,
dissolving into hysterical tears, she used to reproach him with his
coldness. The boy disliked this, and the more demonstrations of feeling
were demanded of him the more he seemed intentionally to avoid them. Yet
it was not intentional on his part but instinctive—it was his character.
His mother was mistaken; he was very fond of her. He only disliked
“sheepish sentimentality,” as he expressed it in his schoolboy language.

There was a bookcase in the house containing a few books that had been his
father’s. Kolya was fond of reading, and had read several of them by
himself. His mother did not mind that and only wondered sometimes at
seeing the boy stand for hours by the bookcase poring over a book instead
of going to play. And in that way Kolya read some things unsuitable for
his age.

Though the boy, as a rule, knew where to draw the line in his mischief, he
had of late begun to play pranks that caused his mother serious alarm. It
is true there was nothing vicious in what he did, but a wild mad
recklessness.

It happened that July, during the summer holidays, that the mother and son
went to another district, forty‐five miles away, to spend a week with a
distant relation, whose husband was an official at the railway station
(the very station, the nearest one to our town, from which a month later
Ivan Fyodorovitch Karamazov set off for Moscow). There Kolya began by
carefully investigating every detail connected with the railways, knowing
that he could impress his schoolfellows when he got home with his newly
acquired knowledge. But there happened to be some other boys in the place
with whom he soon made friends. Some of them were living at the station,
others in the neighborhood; there were six or seven of them, all between
twelve and fifteen, and two of them came from our town. The boys played
together, and on the fourth or fifth day of Kolya’s stay at the station, a
mad bet was made by the foolish boys. Kolya, who was almost the youngest
of the party and rather looked down upon by the others in consequence, was
moved by vanity or by reckless bravado to bet them two roubles that he
would lie down between the rails at night when the eleven o’clock train
was due, and would lie there without moving while the train rolled over
him at full speed. It is true they made a preliminary investigation, from
which it appeared that it was possible to lie so flat between the rails
that the train could pass over without touching, but to lie there was no
joke! Kolya maintained stoutly that he would. At first they laughed at
him, called him a little liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on.
What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses
at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as “a
small boy,” not fit to associate with them, and that was an unendurable
insult.

And so it was resolved to go in the evening, half a mile from the station,
so that the train might have time to get up full speed after leaving the
station. The boys assembled. It was a pitch‐dark night without a moon. At
the time fixed, Kolya lay down between the rails. The five others who had
taken the bet waited among the bushes below the embankment, their hearts
beating with suspense, which was followed by alarm and remorse. At last
they heard in the distance the rumble of the train leaving the station.
Two red lights gleamed out of the darkness; the monster roared as it
approached.

“Run, run away from the rails,” the boys cried to Kolya from the bushes,
breathless with terror. But it was too late: the train darted up and flew
past. The boys rushed to Kolya. He lay without moving. They began pulling
at him, lifting him up. He suddenly got up and walked away without a word.
Then he explained that he had lain there as though he were insensible to
frighten them, but the fact was that he really had lost consciousness, as
he confessed long after to his mother. In this way his reputation as “a
desperate character,” was established for ever. He returned home to the
station as white as a sheet. Next day he had a slight attack of nervous
fever, but he was in high spirits and well pleased with himself. The
incident did not become known at once, but when they came back to the town
it penetrated to the school and even reached the ears of the masters. But
then Kolya’s mother hastened to entreat the masters on her boy’s behalf,
and in the end Dardanelov, a respected and influential teacher, exerted
himself in his favor, and the affair was ignored.

Dardanelov was a middle‐aged bachelor, who had been passionately in love
with Madame Krassotkin for many years past, and had once already, about a
year previously, ventured, trembling with fear and the delicacy of his
sentiments, to offer her most respectfully his hand in marriage. But she
refused him resolutely, feeling that to accept him would be an act of
treachery to her son, though Dardanelov had, to judge from certain
mysterious symptoms, reason for believing that he was not an object of
aversion to the charming but too chaste and tender‐hearted widow. Kolya’s
mad prank seemed to have broken the ice, and Dardanelov was rewarded for
his intercession by a suggestion of hope. The suggestion, it is true, was
a faint one, but then Dardanelov was such a paragon of purity and delicacy
that it was enough for the time being to make him perfectly happy. He was
fond of the boy, though he would have felt it beneath him to try and win
him over, and was severe and strict with him in class. Kolya, too, kept
him at a respectful distance. He learned his lessons perfectly; he was
second in his class, was reserved with Dardanelov, and the whole class
firmly believed that Kolya was so good at universal history that he could
“beat” even Dardanelov. Kolya did indeed ask him the question, “Who
founded Troy?” to which Dardanelov had made a very vague reply, referring
to the movements and migrations of races, to the remoteness of the period,
to the mythical legends. But the question, “Who had founded Troy?” that
is, what individuals, he could not answer, and even for some reason
regarded the question as idle and frivolous. But the boys remained
convinced that Dardanelov did not know who founded Troy. Kolya had read of
the founders of Troy in Smaragdov, whose history was among the books in
his father’s bookcase. In the end all the boys became interested in the
question, who it was that had founded Troy, but Krassotkin would not tell
his secret, and his reputation for knowledge remained unshaken.

After the incident on the railway a certain change came over Kolya’s
attitude to his mother. When Anna Fyodorovna (Madame Krassotkin) heard of
her son’s exploit, she almost went out of her mind with horror. She had
such terrible attacks of hysterics, lasting with intervals for several
days, that Kolya, seriously alarmed at last, promised on his honor that
such pranks should never be repeated. He swore on his knees before the
holy image, and swore by the memory of his father, at Madame Krassotkin’s
instance, and the “manly” Kolya burst into tears like a boy of six. And
all that day the mother and son were constantly rushing into each other’s
arms sobbing. Next day Kolya woke up as “unfeeling” as before, but he had
become more silent, more modest, sterner, and more thoughtful.

Six weeks later, it is true, he got into another scrape, which even
brought his name to the ears of our Justice of the Peace, but it was a
scrape of quite another kind, amusing, foolish, and he did not, as it
turned out, take the leading part in it, but was only implicated in it.
But of this later. His mother still fretted and trembled, but the more
uneasy she became, the greater were the hopes of Dardanelov. It must be
noted that Kolya understood and divined what was in Dardanelov’s heart
and, of course, despised him profoundly for his “feelings”; he had in the
past been so tactless as to show this contempt before his mother, hinting
vaguely that he knew what Dardanelov was after. But from the time of the
railway incident his behavior in this respect also was changed; he did not
allow himself the remotest allusion to the subject and began to speak more
respectfully of Dardanelov before his mother, which the sensitive woman at
once appreciated with boundless gratitude. But at the slightest mention of
Dardanelov by a visitor in Kolya’s presence, she would flush as pink as a
rose. At such moments Kolya would either stare out of the window scowling,
or would investigate the state of his boots, or would shout angrily for
“Perezvon,” the big, shaggy, mangy dog, which he had picked up a month
before, brought home, and kept for some reason secretly indoors, not
showing him to any of his schoolfellows. He bullied him frightfully,
teaching him all sorts of tricks, so that the poor dog howled for him
whenever he was absent at school, and when he came in, whined with
delight, rushed about as if he were crazy, begged, lay down on the ground
pretending to be dead, and so on; in fact, showed all the tricks he had
taught him, not at the word of command, but simply from the zeal of his
excited and grateful heart.

I have forgotten, by the way, to mention that Kolya Krassotkin was the boy
stabbed with a penknife by the boy already known to the reader as the son
of Captain Snegiryov. Ilusha had been defending his father when the
schoolboys jeered at him, shouting the nickname “wisp of tow.”



Chapter II. Children


And so on that frosty, snowy, and windy day in November, Kolya Krassotkin
was sitting at home. It was Sunday and there was no school. It had just
struck eleven, and he particularly wanted to go out “on very urgent
business,” but he was left alone in charge of the house, for it so
happened that all its elder inmates were absent owing to a sudden and
singular event. Madame Krassotkin had let two little rooms, separated from
the rest of the house by a passage, to a doctor’s wife with her two small
children. This lady was the same age as Anna Fyodorovna, and a great
friend of hers. Her husband, the doctor, had taken his departure twelve
months before, going first to Orenburg and then to Tashkend, and for the
last six months she had not heard a word from him. Had it not been for her
friendship with Madame Krassotkin, which was some consolation to the
forsaken lady, she would certainly have completely dissolved away in
tears. And now, to add to her misfortunes, Katerina, her only servant, was
suddenly moved the evening before to announce, to her mistress’s
amazement, that she proposed to bring a child into the world before
morning. It seemed almost miraculous to every one that no one had noticed
the probability of it before. The astounded doctor’s wife decided to move
Katerina while there was still time to an establishment in the town kept
by a midwife for such emergencies. As she set great store by her servant,
she promptly carried out this plan and remained there looking after her.
By the morning all Madame Krassotkin’s friendly sympathy and energy were
called upon to render assistance and appeal to some one for help in the
case.

So both the ladies were absent from home, the Krassotkins’ servant,
Agafya, had gone out to the market, and Kolya was thus left for a time to
protect and look after “the kids,” that is, the son and daughter of the
doctor’s wife, who were left alone. Kolya was not afraid of taking care of
the house, besides he had Perezvon, who had been told to lie flat, without
moving, under the bench in the hall. Every time Kolya, walking to and fro
through the rooms, came into the hall, the dog shook his head and gave two
loud and insinuating taps on the floor with his tail, but alas! the
whistle did not sound to release him. Kolya looked sternly at the luckless
dog, who relapsed again into obedient rigidity. The one thing that
troubled Kolya was “the kids.” He looked, of course, with the utmost scorn
on Katerina’s unexpected adventure, but he was very fond of the bereaved
“kiddies,” and had already taken them a picture‐book. Nastya, the elder, a
girl of eight, could read, and Kostya, the boy, aged seven, was very fond
of being read to by her. Krassotkin could, of course, have provided more
diverting entertainment for them. He could have made them stand side by
side and played soldiers with them, or sent them hiding all over the
house. He had done so more than once before and was not above doing it, so
much so that a report once spread at school that Krassotkin played horses
with the little lodgers at home, prancing with his head on one side like a
trace‐horse. But Krassotkin haughtily parried this thrust, pointing out
that to play horses with boys of one’s own age, boys of thirteen, would
certainly be disgraceful “at this date,” but that he did it for the sake
of “the kids” because he liked them, and no one had a right to call him to
account for his feelings. The two “kids” adored him.

But on this occasion he was in no mood for games. He had very important
business of his own before him, something almost mysterious. Meanwhile
time was passing and Agafya, with whom he could have left the children,
would not come back from market. He had several times already crossed the
passage, opened the door of the lodgers’ room and looked anxiously at “the
kids” who were sitting over the book, as he had bidden them. Every time he
opened the door they grinned at him, hoping he would come in and would do
something delightful and amusing. But Kolya was bothered and did not go
in.

At last it struck eleven and he made up his mind, once for all, that if
that “damned” Agafya did not come back within ten minutes he should go out
without waiting for her, making “the kids” promise, of course, to be brave
when he was away, not to be naughty, not to cry from fright. With this
idea he put on his wadded winter overcoat with its catskin fur collar,
slung his satchel round his shoulder, and, regardless of his mother’s
constantly reiterated entreaties that he would always put on goloshes in
such cold weather, he looked at them contemptuously as he crossed the hall
and went out with only his boots on. Perezvon, seeing him in his outdoor
clothes, began tapping nervously, yet vigorously, on the floor with his
tail. Twitching all over, he even uttered a plaintive whine. But Kolya,
seeing his dog’s passionate excitement, decided that it was a breach of
discipline, kept him for another minute under the bench, and only when he
had opened the door into the passage, whistled for him. The dog leapt up
like a mad creature and rushed bounding before him rapturously.

Kolya opened the door to peep at “the kids.” They were both sitting as
before at the table, not reading but warmly disputing about something. The
children often argued together about various exciting problems of life,
and Nastya, being the elder, always got the best of it. If Kostya did not
agree with her, he almost always appealed to Kolya Krassotkin, and his
verdict was regarded as infallible by both of them. This time the “kids’”
discussion rather interested Krassotkin, and he stood still in the passage
to listen. The children saw he was listening and that made them dispute
with even greater energy.

“I shall never, never believe,” Nastya prattled, “that the old women find
babies among the cabbages in the kitchen‐garden. It’s winter now and there
are no cabbages, and so the old woman couldn’t have taken Katerina a
daughter.”

Kolya whistled to himself.

“Or perhaps they do bring babies from somewhere, but only to those who are
married.”

Kostya stared at Nastya and listened, pondering profoundly.

“Nastya, how silly you are!” he said at last, firmly and calmly. “How can
Katerina have a baby when she isn’t married?”

Nastya was exasperated.

“You know nothing about it,” she snapped irritably. “Perhaps she has a
husband, only he is in prison, so now she’s got a baby.”

“But is her husband in prison?” the matter‐of‐fact Kostya inquired
gravely.

“Or, I tell you what,” Nastya interrupted impulsively, completely
rejecting and forgetting her first hypothesis. “She hasn’t a husband, you
are right there, but she wants to be married, and so she’s been thinking
of getting married, and thinking and thinking of it till now she’s got it,
that is, not a husband but a baby.”

“Well, perhaps so,” Kostya agreed, entirely vanquished. “But you didn’t
say so before. So how could I tell?”

“Come, kiddies,” said Kolya, stepping into the room. “You’re terrible
people, I see.”

“And Perezvon with you!” grinned Kostya, and began snapping his fingers
and calling Perezvon.

“I am in a difficulty, kids,” Krassotkin began solemnly, “and you must
help me. Agafya must have broken her leg, since she has not turned up till
now, that’s certain. I must go out. Will you let me go?”

The children looked anxiously at one another. Their smiling faces showed
signs of uneasiness, but they did not yet fully grasp what was expected of
them.

“You won’t be naughty while I am gone? You won’t climb on the cupboard and
break your legs? You won’t be frightened alone and cry?”

A look of profound despondency came into the children’s faces.

“And I could show you something as a reward, a little copper cannon which
can be fired with real gunpowder.”

The children’s faces instantly brightened. “Show us the cannon,” said
Kostya, beaming all over.

Krassotkin put his hand in his satchel, and pulling out a little bronze
cannon stood it on the table.

“Ah, you are bound to ask that! Look, it’s on wheels.” He rolled the toy
on along the table. “And it can be fired off, too. It can be loaded with
shot and fired off.”

“And it could kill any one?”

“It can kill any one; you’ve only got to aim at anybody,” and Krassotkin
explained where the powder had to be put, where the shot should be rolled
in, showing a tiny hole like a touch‐hole, and told them that it kicked
when it was fired.

The children listened with intense interest. What particularly struck
their imagination was that the cannon kicked.

“And have you got any powder?” Nastya inquired.

“Yes.”

“Show us the powder, too,” she drawled with a smile of entreaty.

Krassotkin dived again into his satchel and pulled out a small flask
containing a little real gunpowder. He had some shot, too, in a screw of
paper. He even uncorked the flask and shook a little powder into the palm
of his hand.

“One has to be careful there’s no fire about, or it would blow up and kill
us all,” Krassotkin warned them sensationally.

The children gazed at the powder with an awe‐stricken alarm that only
intensified their enjoyment. But Kostya liked the shot better.

“And does the shot burn?” he inquired.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Give me a little shot,” he asked in an imploring voice.

“I’ll give you a little shot; here, take it, but don’t show it to your
mother till I come back, or she’ll be sure to think it’s gunpowder, and
will die of fright and give you a thrashing.”

“Mother never does whip us,” Nastya observed at once.

“I know, I only said it to finish the sentence. And don’t you ever deceive
your mother except just this once, until I come back. And so, kiddies, can
I go out? You won’t be frightened and cry when I’m gone?”

“We sha—all cry,” drawled Kostya, on the verge of tears already.

“We shall cry, we shall be sure to cry,” Nastya chimed in with timid
haste.

“Oh, children, children, how fraught with peril are your years! There’s no
help for it, chickens, I shall have to stay with you I don’t know how
long. And time is passing, time is passing, oogh!”

“Tell Perezvon to pretend to be dead!” Kostya begged.

“There’s no help for it, we must have recourse to Perezvon. _Ici_,
Perezvon.” And Kolya began giving orders to the dog, who performed all his
tricks.

He was a rough‐haired dog, of medium size, with a coat of a sort of lilac‐
gray color. He was blind in his right eye, and his left ear was torn. He
whined and jumped, stood and walked on his hind legs, lay on his back with
his paws in the air, rigid as though he were dead. While this last
performance was going on, the door opened and Agafya, Madame Krassotkin’s
servant, a stout woman of forty, marked with small‐pox, appeared in the
doorway. She had come back from market and had a bag full of provisions in
her hand. Holding up the bag of provisions in her left hand she stood
still to watch the dog. Though Kolya had been so anxious for her return,
he did not cut short the performance, and after keeping Perezvon dead for
the usual time, at last he whistled to him. The dog jumped up and began
bounding about in his joy at having done his duty.

“Only think, a dog!” Agafya observed sententiously.

“Why are you late, female?” asked Krassotkin sternly.

“Female, indeed! Go on with you, you brat.”

“Brat?”

“Yes, a brat. What is it to you if I’m late; if I’m late, you may be sure
I have good reason,” muttered Agafya, busying herself about the stove,
without a trace of anger or displeasure in her voice. She seemed quite
pleased, in fact, to enjoy a skirmish with her merry young master.

“Listen, you frivolous young woman,” Krassotkin began, getting up from the
sofa, “can you swear by all you hold sacred in the world and something
else besides, that you will watch vigilantly over the kids in my absence?
I am going out.”

“And what am I going to swear for?” laughed Agafya. “I shall look after
them without that.”

“No, you must swear on your eternal salvation. Else I shan’t go.”

“Well, don’t then. What does it matter to me? It’s cold out; stay at
home.”

“Kids,” Kolya turned to the children, “this woman will stay with you till
I come back or till your mother comes, for she ought to have been back
long ago. She will give you some lunch, too. You’ll give them something,
Agafya, won’t you?”

“That I can do.”

“Good‐by, chickens, I go with my heart at rest. And you, granny,” he added
gravely, in an undertone, as he passed Agafya, “I hope you’ll spare their
tender years and not tell them any of your old woman’s nonsense about
Katerina. _Ici_, Perezvon!”

“Get along with you!” retorted Agafya, really angry this time. “Ridiculous
boy! You want a whipping for saying such things, that’s what you want!”



Chapter III. The Schoolboy


But Kolya did not hear her. At last he could go out. As he went out at the
gate he looked round him, shrugged up his shoulders, and saying “It is
freezing,” went straight along the street and turned off to the right
towards the market‐place. When he reached the last house but one before
the market‐place he stopped at the gate, pulled a whistle out of his
pocket, and whistled with all his might as though giving a signal. He had
not to wait more than a minute before a rosy‐cheeked boy of about eleven,
wearing a warm, neat and even stylish coat, darted out to meet him. This
was Smurov, a boy in the preparatory class (two classes below Kolya
Krassotkin), son of a well‐to‐do official. Apparently he was forbidden by
his parents to associate with Krassotkin, who was well known to be a
desperately naughty boy, so Smurov was obviously slipping out on the sly.
He was—if the reader has not forgotten—one of the group of boys who two
months before had thrown stones at Ilusha. He was the one who told Alyosha
Karamazov about Ilusha.

“I’ve been waiting for you for the last hour, Krassotkin,” said Smurov
stolidly, and the boys strode towards the market‐place.

“I am late,” answered Krassotkin. “I was detained by circumstances. You
won’t be thrashed for coming with me?”

“Come, I say, I’m never thrashed! And you’ve got Perezvon with you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re taking him, too?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! if it were only Zhutchka!”

“That’s impossible. Zhutchka’s non‐existent. Zhutchka is lost in the mists
of obscurity.”

“Ah! couldn’t we do this?” Smurov suddenly stood still. “You see Ilusha
says that Zhutchka was a shaggy, grayish, smoky‐looking dog like Perezvon.
Couldn’t you tell him this is Zhutchka, and he might believe you?”

“Boy, shun a lie, that’s one thing; even with a good object—that’s
another. Above all, I hope you’ve not told them anything about my coming.”

“Heaven forbid! I know what I am about. But you won’t comfort him with
Perezvon,” said Smurov, with a sigh. “You know his father, the captain,
‘the wisp of tow,’ told us that he was going to bring him a real mastiff
pup, with a black nose, to‐day. He thinks that would comfort Ilusha; but I
doubt it.”

“And how is Ilusha?”

“Ah, he is bad, very bad! I believe he’s in consumption: he is quite
conscious, but his breathing! His breathing’s gone wrong. The other day he
asked to have his boots on to be led round the room. He tried to walk, but
he couldn’t stand. ‘Ah, I told you before, father,’ he said, ‘that those
boots were no good. I could never walk properly in them.’ He fancied it
was his boots that made him stagger, but it was simply weakness, really.
He won’t live another week. Herzenstube is looking after him. Now they are
rich again—they’ve got heaps of money.”

“They are rogues.”

“Who are rogues?”

“Doctors and the whole crew of quacks collectively, and also, of course,
individually. I don’t believe in medicine. It’s a useless institution. I
mean to go into all that. But what’s that sentimentality you’ve got up
there? The whole class seems to be there every day.”

“Not the whole class: it’s only ten of our fellows who go to see him every
day. There’s nothing in that.”

“What I don’t understand in all this is the part that Alexey Karamazov is
taking in it. His brother’s going to be tried to‐morrow or next day for
such a crime, and yet he has so much time to spend on sentimentality with
boys.”

“There’s no sentimentality about it. You are going yourself now to make it
up with Ilusha.”

“Make it up with him? What an absurd expression! But I allow no one to
analyze my actions.”

“And how pleased Ilusha will be to see you! He has no idea that you are
coming. Why was it, why was it you wouldn’t come all this time?” Smurov
cried with sudden warmth.

“My dear boy, that’s my business, not yours. I am going of myself because
I choose to, but you’ve all been hauled there by Alexey Karamazov—there’s
a difference, you know. And how do you know? I may not be going to make it
up at all. It’s a stupid expression.”

“It’s not Karamazov at all; it’s not his doing. Our fellows began going
there of themselves. Of course, they went with Karamazov at first. And
there’s been nothing of that sort—no silliness. First one went, and then
another. His father was awfully pleased to see us. You know he will simply
go out of his mind if Ilusha dies. He sees that Ilusha’s dying. And he
seems so glad we’ve made it up with Ilusha. Ilusha asked after you, that
was all. He just asks and says no more. His father will go out of his mind
or hang himself. He behaved like a madman before. You know he is a very
decent man. We made a mistake then. It’s all the fault of that murderer
who beat him then.”

“Karamazov’s a riddle to me all the same. I might have made his
acquaintance long ago, but I like to have a proper pride in some cases.
Besides, I have a theory about him which I must work out and verify.”

Kolya subsided into dignified silence. Smurov, too, was silent. Smurov, of
course, worshiped Krassotkin and never dreamed of putting himself on a
level with him. Now he was tremendously interested at Kolya’s saying that
he was “going of himself” to see Ilusha. He felt that there must be some
mystery in Kolya’s suddenly taking it into his head to go to him that day.
They crossed the market‐place, in which at that hour were many loaded
wagons from the country and a great number of live fowls. The market women
were selling rolls, cottons and threads, etc., in their booths. These
Sunday markets were naïvely called “fairs” in the town, and there were
many such fairs in the year.

Perezvon ran about in the wildest spirits, sniffing about first one side,
then the other. When he met other dogs they zealously smelt each other
over according to the rules of canine etiquette.

“I like to watch such realistic scenes, Smurov,” said Kolya suddenly.
“Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems
to be a law of their nature.”

“Yes; it’s a funny habit.”

“No, it’s not funny; you are wrong there. There’s nothing funny in nature,
however funny it may seem to man with his prejudices. If dogs could reason
and criticize us they’d be sure to find just as much that would be funny
to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their
masters—far more, indeed. I repeat that, because I am convinced that there
is far more foolishness among us. That’s Rakitin’s idea—a remarkable idea.
I am a Socialist, Smurov.”

“And what is a Socialist?” asked Smurov.

“That’s when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no
marriages, and every one has any religion and laws he likes best, and all
the rest of it. You are not old enough to understand that yet. It’s cold,
though.”

“Yes, twelve degrees of frost. Father looked at the thermometer just now.”

“Have you noticed, Smurov, that in the middle of winter we don’t feel so
cold even when there are fifteen or eighteen degrees of frost as we do
now, in the beginning of winter, when there is a sudden frost of twelve
degrees, especially when there is not much snow. It’s because people are
not used to it. Everything is habit with men, everything even in their
social and political relations. Habit is the great motive‐power. What a
funny‐looking peasant!”

Kolya pointed to a tall peasant, with a good‐natured countenance in a long
sheepskin coat, who was standing by his wagon, clapping together his
hands, in their shapeless leather gloves, to warm them. His long fair
beard was all white with frost.

“That peasant’s beard’s frozen,” Kolya cried in a loud provocative voice
as he passed him.

“Lots of people’s beards are frozen,” the peasant replied, calmly and
sententiously.

“Don’t provoke him,” observed Smurov.

“It’s all right; he won’t be cross; he’s a nice fellow. Good‐by, Matvey.”

“Good‐by.”

“Is your name Matvey?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn’t. It was a guess.”

“You don’t say so! You are a schoolboy, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“You get whipped, I expect?”

“Nothing to speak of—sometimes.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Well, yes, it does.”

“Ech, what a life!” The peasant heaved a sigh from the bottom of his
heart.

“Good‐by, Matvey.”

“Good‐by. You are a nice chap, that you are.”

The boys went on.

“That was a nice peasant,” Kolya observed to Smurov. “I like talking to
the peasants, and am always glad to do them justice.”

“Why did you tell a lie, pretending we are thrashed?” asked Smurov.

“I had to say that to please him.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, Smurov, I don’t like being asked the same thing twice. I like
people to understand at the first word. Some things can’t be explained.
According to a peasant’s notions, schoolboys are whipped, and must be
whipped. What would a schoolboy be if he were not whipped? And if I were
to tell him we are not, he’d be disappointed. But you don’t understand
that. One has to know how to talk to the peasants.”

“Only don’t tease them, please, or you’ll get into another scrape as you
did about that goose.”

“So you’re afraid?”

“Don’t laugh, Kolya. Of course I’m afraid. My father would be awfully
cross. I am strictly forbidden to go out with you.”

“Don’t be uneasy, nothing will happen this time. Hallo, Natasha!” he
shouted to a market woman in one of the booths.

“Call me Natasha! What next! My name is Marya,” the middle‐aged market
woman shouted at him.

“I am so glad it’s Marya. Good‐by!”

“Ah, you young rascal! A brat like you to carry on so!”

“I’m in a hurry. I can’t stay now. You shall tell me next Sunday.” Kolya
waved his hand at her, as though she had attacked him and not he her.

“I’ve nothing to tell you next Sunday. You set upon me, you impudent young
monkey. I didn’t say anything,” bawled Marya. “You want a whipping, that’s
what you want, you saucy jackanapes!”

There was a roar of laughter among the other market women round her.
Suddenly a man in a violent rage darted out from the arcade of shops close
by. He was a young man, not a native of the town, with dark, curly hair
and a long, pale face, marked with smallpox. He wore a long blue coat and
a peaked cap, and looked like a merchant’s clerk. He was in a state of
stupid excitement and brandished his fist at Kolya.

“I know you!” he cried angrily, “I know you!”

Kolya stared at him. He could not recall when he could have had a row with
the man. But he had been in so many rows in the street that he could
hardly remember them all.

“Do you?” he asked sarcastically.

“I know you! I know you!” the man repeated idiotically.

“So much the better for you. Well, it’s time I was going. Good‐by!”

“You are at your saucy pranks again?” cried the man. “You are at your
saucy pranks again? I know, you are at it again!”

“It’s not your business, brother, if I am at my saucy pranks again,” said
Kolya, standing still and scanning him.

“Not my business?”

“No; it’s not your business.”

“Whose then? Whose then? Whose then?”

“It’s Trifon Nikititch’s business, not yours.”

“What Trifon Nikititch?” asked the youth, staring with loutish amazement
at Kolya, but still as angry as ever.

Kolya scanned him gravely.

“Have you been to the Church of the Ascension?” he suddenly asked him,
with stern emphasis.

“What Church of Ascension? What for? No, I haven’t,” said the young man,
somewhat taken aback.

“Do you know Sabaneyev?” Kolya went on even more emphatically and even
more severely.

“What Sabaneyev? No, I don’t know him.”

“Well then you can go to the devil,” said Kolya, cutting short the
conversation; and turning sharply to the right he strode quickly on his
way as though he disdained further conversation with a dolt who did not
even know Sabaneyev.

“Stop, heigh! What Sabaneyev?” the young man recovered from his momentary
stupefaction and was as excited as before. “What did he say?” He turned to
the market women with a silly stare.

The women laughed.

“You can never tell what he’s after,” said one of them.

“What Sabaneyev is it he’s talking about?” the young man repeated, still
furious and brandishing his right arm.

“It must be a Sabaneyev who worked for the Kuzmitchovs, that’s who it must
be,” one of the women suggested.

The young man stared at her wildly.

“For the Kuzmitchovs?” repeated another woman. “But his name wasn’t
Trifon. His name’s Kuzma, not Trifon; but the boy said Trifon Nikititch,
so it can’t be the same.”

“His name is not Trifon and not Sabaneyev, it’s Tchizhov,” put in suddenly
a third woman, who had hitherto been silent, listening gravely. “Alexey
Ivanitch is his name. Tchizhov, Alexey Ivanitch.”

“Not a doubt about it, it’s Tchizhov,” a fourth woman emphatically
confirmed the statement.

The bewildered youth gazed from one to another.

“But what did he ask for, what did he ask for, good people?” he cried
almost in desperation. “ ‘Do you know Sabaneyev?’ says he. And who the
devil’s to know who is Sabaneyev?”

“You’re a senseless fellow. I tell you it’s not Sabaneyev, but Tchizhov,
Alexey Ivanitch Tchizhov, that’s who it is!” one of the women shouted at
him impressively.

“What Tchizhov? Who is he? Tell me, if you know.”

“That tall, sniveling fellow who used to sit in the market in the summer.”

“And what’s your Tchizhov to do with me, good people, eh?”

“How can I tell what he’s to do with you?” put in another. “You ought to
know yourself what you want with him, if you make such a clamor about him.
He spoke to you, he did not speak to us, you stupid. Don’t you really know
him?”

“Know whom?”

“Tchizhov.”

“The devil take Tchizhov and you with him. I’ll give him a hiding, that I
will. He was laughing at me!”

“Will give Tchizhov a hiding! More likely he will give you one. You are a
fool, that’s what you are!”

“Not Tchizhov, not Tchizhov, you spiteful, mischievous woman. I’ll give
the boy a hiding. Catch him, catch him, he was laughing at me!”

The woman guffawed. But Kolya was by now a long way off, marching along
with a triumphant air. Smurov walked beside him, looking round at the
shouting group far behind. He too was in high spirits, though he was still
afraid of getting into some scrape in Kolya’s company.

“What Sabaneyev did you mean?” he asked Kolya, foreseeing what his answer
would be.

“How do I know? Now there’ll be a hubbub among them all day. I like to
stir up fools in every class of society. There’s another blockhead, that
peasant there. You know, they say ‘there’s no one stupider than a stupid
Frenchman,’ but a stupid Russian shows it in his face just as much. Can’t
you see it all over his face that he is a fool, that peasant, eh?”

“Let him alone, Kolya. Let’s go on.”

“Nothing could stop me, now I am once off. Hey, good morning, peasant!”

A sturdy‐looking peasant, with a round, simple face and grizzled beard,
who was walking by, raised his head and looked at the boy. He seemed not
quite sober.

“Good morning, if you are not laughing at me,” he said deliberately in
reply.

“And if I am?” laughed Kolya.

“Well, a joke’s a joke. Laugh away. I don’t mind. There’s no harm in a
joke.”

“I beg your pardon, brother, it was a joke.”

“Well, God forgive you!”

“Do you forgive me, too?”

“I quite forgive you. Go along.”

“I say, you seem a clever peasant.”

“Cleverer than you,” the peasant answered unexpectedly, with the same
gravity.

“I doubt it,” said Kolya, somewhat taken aback.

“It’s true, though.”

“Perhaps it is.”

“It is, brother.”

“Good‐by, peasant!”

“Good‐by!”

“There are all sorts of peasants,” Kolya observed to Smurov after a brief
silence. “How could I tell I had hit on a clever one? I am always ready to
recognize intelligence in the peasantry.”

In the distance the cathedral clock struck half‐past eleven. The boys made
haste and they walked as far as Captain Snegiryov’s lodging, a
considerable distance, quickly and almost in silence. Twenty paces from
the house Kolya stopped and told Smurov to go on ahead and ask Karamazov
to come out to him.

“One must sniff round a bit first,” he observed to Smurov.

“Why ask him to come out?” Smurov protested. “You go in; they will be
awfully glad to see you. What’s the sense of making friends in the frost
out here?”

“I know why I want to see him out here in the frost,” Kolya cut him short
in the despotic tone he was fond of adopting with “small boys,” and Smurov
ran to do his bidding.



Chapter IV. The Lost Dog


Kolya leaned against the fence with an air of dignity, waiting for Alyosha
to appear. Yes, he had long wanted to meet him. He had heard a great deal
about him from the boys, but hitherto he had always maintained an
appearance of disdainful indifference when he was mentioned, and he had
even “criticized” what he heard about Alyosha. But secretly he had a great
longing to make his acquaintance; there was something sympathetic and
attractive in all he was told about Alyosha. So the present moment was
important: to begin with, he had to show himself at his best, to show his
independence, “Or he’ll think of me as thirteen and take me for a boy,
like the rest of them. And what are these boys to him? I shall ask him
when I get to know him. It’s a pity I am so short, though. Tuzikov is
younger than I am, yet he is half a head taller. But I have a clever face.
I am not good‐looking. I know I’m hideous, but I’ve a clever face. I
mustn’t talk too freely; if I fall into his arms all at once, he may
think—Tfoo! how horrible if he should think—!”

Such were the thoughts that excited Kolya while he was doing his utmost to
assume the most independent air. What distressed him most was his being so
short; he did not mind so much his “hideous” face, as being so short. On
the wall in a corner at home he had the year before made a pencil‐mark to
show his height, and every two months since he anxiously measured himself
against it to see how much he had gained. But alas! he grew very slowly,
and this sometimes reduced him almost to despair. His face was in reality
by no means “hideous”; on the contrary, it was rather attractive, with a
fair, pale skin, freckled. His small, lively gray eyes had a fearless
look, and often glowed with feeling. He had rather high cheekbones; small,
very red, but not very thick, lips; his nose was small and unmistakably
turned up. “I’ve a regular pug nose, a regular pug nose,” Kolya used to
mutter to himself when he looked in the looking‐glass, and he always left
it with indignation. “But perhaps I haven’t got a clever face?” he
sometimes thought, doubtful even of that. But it must not be supposed that
his mind was preoccupied with his face and his height. On the contrary,
however bitter the moments before the looking‐glass were to him, he
quickly forgot them, and forgot them for a long time, “abandoning himself
entirely to ideas and to real life,” as he formulated it to himself.

Alyosha came out quickly and hastened up to Kolya. Before he reached him,
Kolya could see that he looked delighted. “Can he be so glad to see me?”
Kolya wondered, feeling pleased. We may note here, in passing, that
Alyosha’s appearance had undergone a complete change since we saw him
last. He had abandoned his cassock and was wearing now a well‐cut coat, a
soft, round hat, and his hair had been cropped short. All this was very
becoming to him, and he looked quite handsome. His charming face always
had a good‐humored expression; but there was a gentleness and serenity in
his good‐humor. To Kolya’s surprise, Alyosha came out to him just as he
was, without an overcoat. He had evidently come in haste. He held out his
hand to Kolya at once.

“Here you are at last! How anxious we’ve been to see you!”

“There were reasons which you shall know directly. Anyway, I am glad to
make your acquaintance. I’ve long been hoping for an opportunity, and have
heard a great deal about you,” Kolya muttered, a little breathless.

“We should have met anyway. I’ve heard a great deal about you, too; but
you’ve been a long time coming here.”

“Tell me, how are things going?”

“Ilusha is very ill. He is certainly dying.”

“How awful! You must admit that medicine is a fraud, Karamazov,” cried
Kolya warmly.

“Ilusha has mentioned you often, very often, even in his sleep, in
delirium, you know. One can see that you used to be very, very dear to him
... before the incident ... with the knife.... Then there’s another
reason.... Tell me, is that your dog?”

“Yes, Perezvon.”

“Not Zhutchka?” Alyosha looked at Kolya with eyes full of pity. “Is she
lost for ever?”

“I know you would all like it to be Zhutchka. I’ve heard all about it.”
Kolya smiled mysteriously. “Listen, Karamazov, I’ll tell you all about it.
That’s what I came for; that’s what I asked you to come out here for, to
explain the whole episode to you before we go in,” he began with
animation. “You see, Karamazov, Ilusha came into the preparatory class
last spring. Well, you know what our preparatory class is—a lot of small
boys. They began teasing Ilusha at once. I am two classes higher up, and,
of course, I only look on at them from a distance. I saw the boy was weak
and small, but he wouldn’t give in to them; he fought with them. I saw he
was proud, and his eyes were full of fire. I like children like that. And
they teased him all the more. The worst of it was he was horribly dressed
at the time, his breeches were too small for him, and there were holes in
his boots. They worried him about it; they jeered at him. That I can’t
stand. I stood up for him at once, and gave it to them hot. I beat them,
but they adore me, do you know, Karamazov?” Kolya boasted impulsively;
“but I am always fond of children. I’ve two chickens in my hands at home
now—that’s what detained me to‐day. So they left off beating Ilusha and I
took him under my protection. I saw the boy was proud. I tell you that,
the boy was proud; but in the end he became slavishly devoted to me: he
did my slightest bidding, obeyed me as though I were God, tried to copy
me. In the intervals between the classes he used to run to me at once, and
I’d go about with him. On Sundays, too. They always laugh when an older
boy makes friends with a younger one like that; but that’s a prejudice. If
it’s my fancy, that’s enough. I am teaching him, developing him. Why
shouldn’t I develop him if I like him? Here you, Karamazov, have taken up
with all these nestlings. I see you want to influence the younger
generation—to develop them, to be of use to them, and I assure you this
trait in your character, which I knew by hearsay, attracted me more than
anything. Let us get to the point, though. I noticed that there was a sort
of softness and sentimentality coming over the boy, and you know I have a
positive hatred of this sheepish sentimentality, and I have had it from a
baby. There were contradictions in him, too: he was proud, but he was
slavishly devoted to me, and yet all at once his eyes would flash and he’d
refuse to agree with me; he’d argue, fly into a rage. I used sometimes to
propound certain ideas; I could see that it was not so much that he
disagreed with the ideas, but that he was simply rebelling against me,
because I was cool in responding to his endearments. And so, in order to
train him properly, the tenderer he was, the colder I became. I did it on
purpose: that was my idea. My object was to form his character, to lick
him into shape, to make a man of him ... and besides ... no doubt, you
understand me at a word. Suddenly I noticed for three days in succession
he was downcast and dejected, not because of my coldness, but for
something else, something more important. I wondered what the tragedy was.
I have pumped him and found out that he had somehow got to know
Smerdyakov, who was footman to your late father—it was before his death,
of course—and he taught the little fool a silly trick—that is, a brutal,
nasty trick. He told him to take a piece of bread, to stick a pin in it,
and throw it to one of those hungry dogs who snap up anything without
biting it, and then to watch and see what would happen. So they prepared a
piece of bread like that and threw it to Zhutchka, that shaggy dog there’s
been such a fuss about. The people of the house it belonged to never fed
it at all, though it barked all day. (Do you like that stupid barking,
Karamazov? I can’t stand it.) So it rushed at the bread, swallowed it, and
began to squeal; it turned round and round and ran away, squealing as it
ran out of sight. That was Ilusha’s own account of it. He confessed it to
me, and cried bitterly. He hugged me, shaking all over. He kept on
repeating ‘He ran away squealing’: the sight of that haunted him. He was
tormented by remorse, I could see that. I took it seriously. I determined
to give him a lesson for other things as well. So I must confess I wasn’t
quite straightforward, and pretended to be more indignant perhaps than I
was. ‘You’ve done a nasty thing,’ I said, ‘you are a scoundrel. I won’t
tell of it, of course, but I shall have nothing more to do with you for a
time. I’ll think it over and let you know through Smurov’—that’s the boy
who’s just come with me; he’s always ready to do anything for me—‘whether
I will have anything to do with you in the future or whether I give you up
for good as a scoundrel.’ He was tremendously upset. I must own I felt I’d
gone too far as I spoke, but there was no help for it. I did what I
thought best at the time. A day or two after, I sent Smurov to tell him
that I would not speak to him again. That’s what we call it when two
schoolfellows refuse to have anything more to do with one another.
Secretly I only meant to send him to Coventry for a few days and then, if
I saw signs of repentance, to hold out my hand to him again. That was my
intention. But what do you think happened? He heard Smurov’s message, his
eyes flashed. ‘Tell Krassotkin from me,’ he cried, ‘that I will throw
bread with pins to all the dogs—all—all of them!’ ‘So he’s going in for a
little temper. We must smoke it out of him.’ And I began to treat him with
contempt; whenever I met him I turned away or smiled sarcastically. And
just then that affair with his father happened. You remember? You must
realize that he was fearfully worked up by what had happened already. The
boys, seeing I’d given him up, set on him and taunted him, shouting, ‘Wisp
of tow, wisp of tow!’ And he had soon regular skirmishes with them, which
I am very sorry for. They seem to have given him one very bad beating. One
day he flew at them all as they were coming out of school. I stood a few
yards off, looking on. And, I swear, I don’t remember that I laughed; it
was quite the other way, I felt awfully sorry for him, in another minute I
would have run up to take his part. But he suddenly met my eyes. I don’t
know what he fancied; but he pulled out a penknife, rushed at me, and
struck at my thigh, here in my right leg. I didn’t move. I don’t mind
owning I am plucky sometimes, Karamazov. I simply looked at him
contemptuously, as though to say, ‘This is how you repay all my kindness!
Do it again, if you like, I’m at your service.’ But he didn’t stab me
again; he broke down, he was frightened at what he had done, he threw away
the knife, burst out crying, and ran away. I did not sneak on him, of
course, and I made them all keep quiet, so it shouldn’t come to the ears
of the masters. I didn’t even tell my mother till it had healed up. And
the wound was a mere scratch. And then I heard that the same day he’d been
throwing stones and had bitten your finger—but you understand now what a
state he was in! Well, it can’t be helped: it was stupid of me not to come
and forgive him—that is, to make it up with him—when he was taken ill. I
am sorry for it now. But I had a special reason. So now I’ve told you all
about it ... but I’m afraid it was stupid of me.”

“Oh, what a pity,” exclaimed Alyosha, with feeling, “that I didn’t know
before what terms you were on with him, or I’d have come to you long ago
to beg you to go to him with me. Would you believe it, when he was
feverish he talked about you in delirium. I didn’t know how much you were
to him! And you’ve really not succeeded in finding that dog? His father
and the boys have been hunting all over the town for it. Would you believe
it, since he’s been ill, I’ve three times heard him repeat with tears,
‘It’s because I killed Zhutchka, father, that I am ill now. God is
punishing me for it.’ He can’t get that idea out of his head. And if the
dog were found and proved to be alive, one might almost fancy the joy
would cure him. We have all rested our hopes on you.”

“Tell me, what made you hope that I should be the one to find him?” Kolya
asked, with great curiosity. “Why did you reckon on me rather than any one
else?”

“There was a report that you were looking for the dog, and that you would
bring it when you’d found it. Smurov said something of the sort. We’ve all
been trying to persuade Ilusha that the dog is alive, that it’s been seen.
The boys brought him a live hare; he just looked at it, with a faint
smile, and asked them to set it free in the fields. And so we did. His
father has just this moment come back, bringing him a mastiff pup, hoping
to comfort him with that; but I think it only makes it worse.”

“Tell me, Karamazov, what sort of man is the father? I know him, but what
do you make of him—a mountebank, a buffoon?”

“Oh, no; there are people of deep feeling who have been somehow crushed.
Buffoonery in them is a form of resentful irony against those to whom they
daren’t speak the truth, from having been for years humiliated and
intimidated by them. Believe me, Krassotkin, that sort of buffoonery is
sometimes tragic in the extreme. His whole life now is centered in Ilusha,
and if Ilusha dies, he will either go mad with grief or kill himself. I
feel almost certain of that when I look at him now.”

“I understand you, Karamazov. I see you understand human nature,” Kolya
added, with feeling.

“And as soon as I saw you with a dog, I thought it was Zhutchka you were
bringing.”

“Wait a bit, Karamazov, perhaps we shall find it yet; but this is
Perezvon. I’ll let him go in now and perhaps it will amuse Ilusha more
than the mastiff pup. Wait a bit, Karamazov, you will know something in a
minute. But, I say, I am keeping you here!” Kolya cried suddenly. “You’ve
no overcoat on in this bitter cold. You see what an egoist I am. Oh, we
are all egoists, Karamazov!”

“Don’t trouble; it is cold, but I don’t often catch cold. Let us go in,
though, and, by the way, what is your name? I know you are called Kolya,
but what else?”

“Nikolay—Nikolay Ivanovitch Krassotkin, or, as they say in official
documents, ‘Krassotkin son.’ ” Kolya laughed for some reason, but added
suddenly, “Of course I hate my name Nikolay.”

“Why so?”

“It’s so trivial, so ordinary.”

“You are thirteen?” asked Alyosha.

“No, fourteen—that is, I shall be fourteen very soon, in a fortnight. I’ll
confess one weakness of mine, Karamazov, just to you, since it’s our first
meeting, so that you may understand my character at once. I hate being
asked my age, more than that ... and in fact ... there’s a libelous story
going about me, that last week I played robbers with the preparatory boys.
It’s a fact that I did play with them, but it’s a perfect libel to say I
did it for my own amusement. I have reasons for believing that you’ve
heard the story; but I wasn’t playing for my own amusement, it was for the
sake of the children, because they couldn’t think of anything to do by
themselves. But they’ve always got some silly tale. This is an awful town
for gossip, I can tell you.”

“But what if you had been playing for your own amusement, what’s the
harm?”

“Come, I say, for my own amusement! You don’t play horses, do you?”

“But you must look at it like this,” said Alyosha, smiling. “Grown‐up
people go to the theater and there the adventures of all sorts of heroes
are represented—sometimes there are robbers and battles, too—and isn’t
that just the same thing, in a different form, of course? And young
people’s games of soldiers or robbers in their playtime are also art in
its first stage. You know, they spring from the growing artistic instincts
of the young. And sometimes these games are much better than performances
in the theater, the only difference is that people go there to look at the
actors, while in these games the young people are the actors themselves.
But that’s only natural.”

“You think so? Is that your idea?” Kolya looked at him intently. “Oh, you
know, that’s rather an interesting view. When I go home, I’ll think it
over. I’ll admit I thought I might learn something from you. I’ve come to
learn of you, Karamazov,” Kolya concluded, in a voice full of spontaneous
feeling.

“And I of you,” said Alyosha, smiling and pressing his hand.

Kolya was much pleased with Alyosha. What struck him most was that he
treated him exactly like an equal and that he talked to him just as if he
were “quite grown up.”

“I’ll show you something directly, Karamazov; it’s a theatrical
performance, too,” he said, laughing nervously. “That’s why I’ve come.”

“Let us go first to the people of the house, on the left. All the boys
leave their coats in there, because the room is small and hot.”

“Oh, I’m only coming in for a minute. I’ll keep on my overcoat. Perezvon
will stay here in the passage and be dead. _Ici_, Perezvon, lie down and
be dead! You see how he’s dead. I’ll go in first and explore, then I’ll
whistle to him when I think fit, and you’ll see, he’ll dash in like mad.
Only Smurov must not forget to open the door at the moment. I’ll arrange
it all and you’ll see something.”



Chapter V. By Ilusha’s Bedside


The room inhabited by the family of the retired captain Snegiryov is
already familiar to the reader. It was close and crowded at that moment
with a number of visitors. Several boys were sitting with Ilusha, and
though all of them, like Smurov, were prepared to deny that it was Alyosha
who had brought them and reconciled them with Ilusha, it was really the
fact. All the art he had used had been to take them, one by one, to
Ilusha, without “sheepish sentimentality,” appearing to do so casually and
without design. It was a great consolation to Ilusha in his suffering. He
was greatly touched by seeing the almost tender affection and sympathy
shown him by these boys, who had been his enemies. Krassotkin was the only
one missing and his absence was a heavy load on Ilusha’s heart. Perhaps
the bitterest of all his bitter memories was his stabbing Krassotkin, who
had been his one friend and protector. Clever little Smurov, who was the
first to make it up with Ilusha, thought it was so. But when Smurov hinted
to Krassotkin that Alyosha wanted to come and see him about something, the
latter cut him short, bidding Smurov tell “Karamazov” at once that he knew
best what to do, that he wanted no one’s advice, and that, if he went to
see Ilusha, he would choose his own time for he had “his own reasons.”

That was a fortnight before this Sunday. That was why Alyosha had not been
to see him, as he had meant to. But though he waited, he sent Smurov to
him twice again. Both times Krassotkin met him with a curt, impatient
refusal, sending Alyosha a message not to bother him any more, that if he
came himself, he, Krassotkin, would not go to Ilusha at all. Up to the
very last day, Smurov did not know that Kolya meant to go to Ilusha that
morning, and only the evening before, as he parted from Smurov, Kolya
abruptly told him to wait at home for him next morning, for he would go
with him to the Snegiryovs’, but warned him on no account to say he was
coming, as he wanted to drop in casually. Smurov obeyed. Smurov’s fancy
that Kolya would bring back the lost dog was based on the words Kolya had
dropped that “they must be asses not to find the dog, if it was alive.”
When Smurov, waiting for an opportunity, timidly hinted at his guess about
the dog, Krassotkin flew into a violent rage. “I’m not such an ass as to
go hunting about the town for other people’s dogs when I’ve got a dog of
my own! And how can you imagine a dog could be alive after swallowing a
pin? Sheepish sentimentality, that’s what it is!”

For the last fortnight Ilusha had not left his little bed under the ikons
in the corner. He had not been to school since the day he met Alyosha and
bit his finger. He was taken ill the same day, though for a month
afterwards he was sometimes able to get up and walk about the room and
passage. But latterly he had become so weak that he could not move without
help from his father. His father was terribly concerned about him. He even
gave up drinking and was almost crazy with terror that his boy would die.
And often, especially after leading him round the room on his arm and
putting him back to bed, he would run to a dark corner in the passage and,
leaning his head against the wall, he would break into paroxysms of
violent weeping, stifling his sobs that they might not be heard by Ilusha.

Returning to the room, he would usually begin doing something to amuse and
comfort his precious boy; he would tell him stories, funny anecdotes, or
would mimic comic people he had happened to meet, even imitate the howls
and cries of animals. But Ilusha could not bear to see his father fooling
and playing the buffoon. Though the boy tried not to show how he disliked
it, he saw with an aching heart that his father was an object of contempt,
and he was continually haunted by the memory of the “wisp of tow” and that
“terrible day.”

Nina, Ilusha’s gentle, crippled sister, did not like her father’s
buffoonery either (Varvara had been gone for some time past to Petersburg
to study at the university). But the half‐imbecile mother was greatly
diverted and laughed heartily when her husband began capering about or
performing something. It was the only way she could be amused; all the
rest of the time she was grumbling and complaining that now every one had
forgotten her, that no one treated her with respect, that she was
slighted, and so on. But during the last few days she had completely
changed. She began looking constantly at Ilusha’s bed in the corner and
seemed lost in thought. She was more silent, quieter, and, if she cried,
she cried quietly so as not to be heard. The captain noticed the change in
her with mournful perplexity. The boys’ visits at first only angered her,
but later on their merry shouts and stories began to divert her, and at
last she liked them so much that, if the boys had given up coming, she
would have felt dreary without them. When the children told some story or
played a game, she laughed and clapped her hands. She called some of them
to her and kissed them. She was particularly fond of Smurov.

As for the captain, the presence in his room of the children, who came to
cheer up Ilusha, filled his heart from the first with ecstatic joy. He
even hoped that Ilusha would now get over his depression, and that that
would hasten his recovery. In spite of his alarm about Ilusha, he had not,
till lately, felt one minute’s doubt of his boy’s ultimate recovery.

He met his little visitors with homage, waited upon them hand and foot; he
was ready to be their horse and even began letting them ride on his back,
but Ilusha did not like the game and it was given up. He began buying
little things for them, gingerbread and nuts, gave them tea and cut them
sandwiches. It must be noted that all this time he had plenty of money. He
had taken the two hundred roubles from Katerina Ivanovna just as Alyosha
had predicted he would. And afterwards Katerina Ivanovna, learning more
about their circumstances and Ilusha’s illness, visited them herself, made
the acquaintance of the family, and succeeded in fascinating the half‐
imbecile mother. Since then she had been lavish in helping them, and the
captain, terror‐stricken at the thought that his boy might be dying,
forgot his pride and humbly accepted her assistance.

All this time Doctor Herzenstube, who was called in by Katerina Ivanovna,
came punctually every other day, but little was gained by his visits and
he dosed the invalid mercilessly. But on that Sunday morning a new doctor
was expected, who had come from Moscow, where he had a great reputation.
Katerina Ivanovna had sent for him from Moscow at great expense, not
expressly for Ilusha, but for another object of which more will be said in
its place hereafter. But, as he had come, she had asked him to see Ilusha
as well, and the captain had been told to expect him. He hadn’t the
slightest idea that Kolya Krassotkin was coming, though he had long wished
for a visit from the boy for whom Ilusha was fretting.

At the moment when Krassotkin opened the door and came into the room, the
captain and all the boys were round Ilusha’s bed, looking at a tiny
mastiff pup, which had only been born the day before, though the captain
had bespoken it a week ago to comfort and amuse Ilusha, who was still
fretting over the lost and probably dead Zhutchka. Ilusha, who had heard
three days before that he was to be presented with a puppy, not an
ordinary puppy, but a pedigree mastiff (a very important point, of
course), tried from delicacy of feeling to pretend that he was pleased.
But his father and the boys could not help seeing that the puppy only
served to recall to his little heart the thought of the unhappy dog he had
killed. The puppy lay beside him feebly moving and he, smiling sadly,
stroked it with his thin, pale, wasted hand. Clearly he liked the puppy,
but ... it wasn’t Zhutchka; if he could have had Zhutchka and the puppy,
too, then he would have been completely happy.

“Krassotkin!” cried one of the boys suddenly. He was the first to see him
come in.

Krassotkin’s entrance made a general sensation; the boys moved away and
stood on each side of the bed, so that he could get a full view of Ilusha.
The captain ran eagerly to meet Kolya.

“Please come in ... you are welcome!” he said hurriedly. “Ilusha, Mr.
Krassotkin has come to see you!”

But Krassotkin, shaking hands with him hurriedly, instantly showed his
complete knowledge of the manners of good society. He turned first to the
captain’s wife sitting in her arm‐chair, who was very ill‐humored at the
moment, and was grumbling that the boys stood between her and Ilusha’s bed
and did not let her see the new puppy. With the greatest courtesy he made
her a bow, scraping his foot, and turning to Nina, he made her, as the
only other lady present, a similar bow. This polite behavior made an
extremely favorable impression on the deranged lady.

“There, you can see at once he is a young man that has been well brought
up,” she commented aloud, throwing up her hands; “but as for our other
visitors they come in one on the top of another.”

“How do you mean, mamma, one on the top of another, how is that?” muttered
the captain affectionately, though a little anxious on her account.

“That’s how they ride in. They get on each other’s shoulders in the
passage and prance in like that on a respectable family. Strange sort of
visitors!”

“But who’s come in like that, mamma?”

“Why, that boy came in riding on that one’s back and this one on that
one’s.”

Kolya was already by Ilusha’s bedside. The sick boy turned visibly paler.
He raised himself in the bed and looked intently at Kolya. Kolya had not
seen his little friend for two months, and he was overwhelmed at the sight
of him. He had never imagined that he would see such a wasted, yellow
face, such enormous, feverishly glowing eyes and such thin little hands.
He saw, with grieved surprise, Ilusha’s rapid, hard breathing and dry
lips. He stepped close to him, held out his hand, and almost overwhelmed,
he said:

“Well, old man ... how are you?” But his voice failed him, he couldn’t
achieve an appearance of ease; his face suddenly twitched and the corners
of his mouth quivered. Ilusha smiled a pitiful little smile, still unable
to utter a word. Something moved Kolya to raise his hand and pass it over
Ilusha’s hair.

“Never mind!” he murmured softly to him to cheer him up, or perhaps not
knowing why he said it. For a minute they were silent again.

“Hallo, so you’ve got a new puppy?” Kolya said suddenly, in a most callous
voice.

“Ye—es,” answered Ilusha in a long whisper, gasping for breath.

“A black nose, that means he’ll be fierce, a good house‐dog,” Kolya
observed gravely and stolidly, as if the only thing he cared about was the
puppy and its black nose. But in reality he still had to do his utmost to
control his feelings not to burst out crying like a child, and do what he
would he could not control it. “When it grows up, you’ll have to keep it
on the chain, I’m sure.”

“He’ll be a huge dog!” cried one of the boys.

“Of course he will,” “a mastiff,” “large,” “like this,” “as big as a
calf,” shouted several voices.

“As big as a calf, as a real calf,” chimed in the captain. “I got one like
that on purpose, one of the fiercest breed, and his parents are huge and
very fierce, they stand as high as this from the floor.... Sit down here,
on Ilusha’s bed, or here on the bench. You are welcome, we’ve been hoping
to see you a long time.... You were so kind as to come with Alexey
Fyodorovitch?”

Krassotkin sat on the edge of the bed, at Ilusha’s feet. Though he had
perhaps prepared a free‐and‐easy opening for the conversation on his way,
now he completely lost the thread of it.

“No ... I came with Perezvon. I’ve got a dog now, called Perezvon. A
Slavonic name. He’s out there ... if I whistle, he’ll run in. I’ve brought
a dog, too,” he said, addressing Ilusha all at once. “Do you remember
Zhutchka, old man?” he suddenly fired the question at him.

Ilusha’s little face quivered. He looked with an agonized expression at
Kolya. Alyosha, standing at the door, frowned and signed to Kolya not to
speak of Zhutchka, but he did not or would not notice.

“Where ... is Zhutchka?” Ilusha asked in a broken voice.

“Oh, well, my boy, your Zhutchka’s lost and done for!”

Ilusha did not speak, but he fixed an intent gaze once more on Kolya.
Alyosha, catching Kolya’s eye, signed to him vigorously again, but he
turned away his eyes pretending not to have noticed.

“It must have run away and died somewhere. It must have died after a meal
like that,” Kolya pronounced pitilessly, though he seemed a little
breathless. “But I’ve got a dog, Perezvon ... A Slavonic name.... I’ve
brought him to show you.”

“I don’t want him!” said Ilusha suddenly.

“No, no, you really must see him ... it will amuse you. I brought him on
purpose.... He’s the same sort of shaggy dog.... You allow me to call in
my dog, madam?” He suddenly addressed Madame Snegiryov, with inexplicable
excitement in his manner.

“I don’t want him, I don’t want him!” cried Ilusha, with a mournful break
in his voice. There was a reproachful light in his eyes.

“You’d better,” the captain started up from the chest by the wall on which
he had just sat down, “you’d better ... another time,” he muttered, but
Kolya could not be restrained. He hurriedly shouted to Smurov, “Open the
door,” and as soon as it was open, he blew his whistle. Perezvon dashed
headlong into the room.

“Jump, Perezvon, beg! Beg!” shouted Kolya, jumping up, and the dog stood
erect on its hind‐legs by Ilusha’s bedside. What followed was a surprise
to every one: Ilusha started, lurched violently forward, bent over
Perezvon and gazed at him, faint with suspense.

“It’s ... Zhutchka!” he cried suddenly, in a voice breaking with joy and
suffering.

“And who did you think it was?” Krassotkin shouted with all his might, in
a ringing, happy voice, and bending down he seized the dog and lifted him
up to Ilusha.

“Look, old man, you see, blind of one eye and the left ear is torn, just
the marks you described to me. It was by that I found him. I found him
directly. He did not belong to any one!” he explained, turning quickly to
the captain, to his wife, to Alyosha and then again to Ilusha. “He used to
live in the Fedotovs’ back‐yard. Though he made his home there, they did
not feed him. He was a stray dog that had run away from the village ... I
found him.... You see, old man, he couldn’t have swallowed what you gave
him. If he had, he must have died, he must have! So he must have spat it
out, since he is alive. You did not see him do it. But the pin pricked his
tongue, that is why he squealed. He ran away squealing and you thought
he’d swallowed it. He might well squeal, because the skin of dogs’ mouths
is so tender ... tenderer than in men, much tenderer!” Kolya cried
impetuously, his face glowing and radiant with delight. Ilusha could not
speak. White as a sheet, he gazed open‐mouthed at Kolya, with his great
eyes almost starting out of his head. And if Krassotkin, who had no
suspicion of it, had known what a disastrous and fatal effect such a
moment might have on the sick child’s health, nothing would have induced
him to play such a trick on him. But Alyosha was perhaps the only person
in the room who realized it. As for the captain he behaved like a small
child.

“Zhutchka! It’s Zhutchka!” he cried in a blissful voice, “Ilusha, this is
Zhutchka, your Zhutchka! Mamma, this is Zhutchka!” He was almost weeping.

“And I never guessed!” cried Smurov regretfully. “Bravo, Krassotkin! I
said he’d find the dog and here he’s found him.”

“Here he’s found him!” another boy repeated gleefully.

“Krassotkin’s a brick!” cried a third voice.

“He’s a brick, he’s a brick!” cried the other boys, and they began
clapping.

“Wait, wait,” Krassotkin did his utmost to shout above them all. “I’ll
tell you how it happened, that’s the whole point. I found him, I took him
home and hid him at once. I kept him locked up at home and did not show
him to any one till to‐day. Only Smurov has known for the last fortnight,
but I assured him this dog was called Perezvon and he did not guess. And
meanwhile I taught the dog all sorts of tricks. You should only see all
the things he can do! I trained him so as to bring you a well‐trained dog,
in good condition, old man, so as to be able to say to you, ‘See, old man,
what a fine dog your Zhutchka is now!’ Haven’t you a bit of meat? He’ll
show you a trick that will make you die with laughing. A piece of meat,
haven’t you got any?”

The captain ran across the passage to the landlady, where their cooking
was done. Not to lose precious time, Kolya, in desperate haste, shouted to
Perezvon, “Dead!” And the dog immediately turned round and lay on his back
with its four paws in the air. The boys laughed. Ilusha looked on with the
same suffering smile, but the person most delighted with the dog’s
performance was “mamma.” She laughed at the dog and began snapping her
fingers and calling it, “Perezvon, Perezvon!”

“Nothing will make him get up, nothing!” Kolya cried triumphantly, proud
of his success. “He won’t move for all the shouting in the world, but if I
call to him, he’ll jump up in a minute. Ici, Perezvon!” The dog leapt up
and bounded about, whining with delight. The captain ran back with a piece
of cooked beef.

“Is it hot?” Kolya inquired hurriedly, with a business‐like air, taking
the meat. “Dogs don’t like hot things. No, it’s all right. Look,
everybody, look, Ilusha, look, old man; why aren’t you looking? He does
not look at him, now I’ve brought him.”

The new trick consisted in making the dog stand motionless with his nose
out and putting a tempting morsel of meat just on his nose. The luckless
dog had to stand without moving, with the meat on his nose, as long as his
master chose to keep him, without a movement, perhaps for half an hour.
But he kept Perezvon only for a brief moment.

“Paid for!” cried Kolya, and the meat passed in a flash from the dog’s
nose to his mouth. The audience, of course, expressed enthusiasm and
surprise.

“Can you really have put off coming all this time simply to train the
dog?” exclaimed Alyosha, with an involuntary note of reproach in his
voice.

“Simply for that!” answered Kolya, with perfect simplicity. “I wanted to
show him in all his glory.”

“Perezvon! Perezvon,” called Ilusha suddenly, snapping his thin fingers
and beckoning to the dog.

“What is it? Let him jump up on the bed! _Ici_, Perezvon!” Kolya slapped
the bed and Perezvon darted up by Ilusha. The boy threw both arms round
his head and Perezvon instantly licked his cheek. Ilusha crept close to
him, stretched himself out in bed and hid his face in the dog’s shaggy
coat.

“Dear, dear!” kept exclaiming the captain. Kolya sat down again on the
edge of the bed.

“Ilusha, I can show you another trick. I’ve brought you a little cannon.
You remember, I told you about it before and you said how much you’d like
to see it. Well, here, I’ve brought it to you.”

And Kolya hurriedly pulled out of his satchel the little bronze cannon. He
hurried, because he was happy himself. Another time he would have waited
till the sensation made by Perezvon had passed off, now he hurried on
regardless of all consideration. “You are all happy now,” he felt, “so
here’s something to make you happier!” He was perfectly enchanted himself.

“I’ve been coveting this thing for a long while; it’s for you, old man,
it’s for you. It belonged to Morozov, it was no use to him, he had it from
his brother. I swopped a book from father’s book‐case for it, _A Kinsman
of Mahomet or Salutary Folly_, a scandalous book published in Moscow a
hundred years ago, before they had any censorship. And Morozov has a taste
for such things. He was grateful to me, too....”

Kolya held the cannon in his hand so that all could see and admire it.
Ilusha raised himself, and, with his right arm still round the dog, he
gazed enchanted at the toy. The sensation was even greater when Kolya
announced that he had gunpowder too, and that it could be fired off at
once “if it won’t alarm the ladies.” “Mamma” immediately asked to look at
the toy closer and her request was granted. She was much pleased with the
little bronze cannon on wheels and began rolling it to and fro on her lap.
She readily gave permission for the cannon to be fired, without any idea
of what she had been asked. Kolya showed the powder and the shot. The
captain, as a military man, undertook to load it, putting in a minute
quantity of powder. He asked that the shot might be put off till another
time. The cannon was put on the floor, aiming towards an empty part of the
room, three grains of powder were thrust into the touch‐hole and a match
was put to it. A magnificent explosion followed. Mamma was startled, but
at once laughed with delight. The boys gazed in speechless triumph. But
the captain, looking at Ilusha, was more enchanted than any of them. Kolya
picked up the cannon and immediately presented it to Ilusha, together with
the powder and the shot.

“I got it for you, for you! I’ve been keeping it for you a long time,” he
repeated once more in his delight.

“Oh, give it to me! No, give me the cannon!” mamma began begging like a
little child. Her face showed a piteous fear that she would not get it.
Kolya was disconcerted. The captain fidgeted uneasily.

“Mamma, mamma,” he ran to her, “the cannon’s yours, of course, but let
Ilusha have it, because it’s a present to him, but it’s just as good as
yours. Ilusha will always let you play with it; it shall belong to both of
you, both of you.”

“No, I don’t want it to belong to both of us, I want it to be mine
altogether, not Ilusha’s,” persisted mamma, on the point of tears.

“Take it, mother, here, keep it!” Ilusha cried. “Krassotkin, may I give it
to my mother?” he turned to Krassotkin with an imploring face, as though
he were afraid he might be offended at his giving his present to some one
else.

“Of course you may,” Krassotkin assented heartily, and, taking the cannon
from Ilusha, he handed it himself to mamma with a polite bow. She was so
touched that she cried.

“Ilusha, darling, he’s the one who loves his mamma!” she said tenderly,
and at once began wheeling the cannon to and fro on her lap again.

“Mamma, let me kiss your hand.” The captain darted up to her at once and
did so.

“And I never saw such a charming fellow as this nice boy,” said the
grateful lady, pointing to Krassotkin.

“And I’ll bring you as much powder as you like, Ilusha. We make the powder
ourselves now. Borovikov found out how it’s made—twenty‐four parts of
saltpeter, ten of sulphur and six of birchwood charcoal. It’s all pounded
together, mixed into a paste with water and rubbed through a tammy
sieve—that’s how it’s done.”

“Smurov told me about your powder, only father says it’s not real
gunpowder,” responded Ilusha.

“Not real?” Kolya flushed. “It burns. I don’t know, of course.”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” put in the captain with a guilty face. “I only
said that real powder is not made like that, but that’s nothing, it can be
made so.”

“I don’t know, you know best. We lighted some in a pomatum pot, it burned
splendidly, it all burnt away leaving only a tiny ash. But that was only
the paste, and if you rub it through ... but of course you know best, I
don’t know.... And Bulkin’s father thrashed him on account of our powder,
did you hear?” he turned to Ilusha.

“Yes,” answered Ilusha. He listened to Kolya with immense interest and
enjoyment.

“We had prepared a whole bottle of it and he used to keep it under his
bed. His father saw it. He said it might explode, and thrashed him on the
spot. He was going to make a complaint against me to the masters. He is
not allowed to go about with me now, no one is allowed to go about with me
now. Smurov is not allowed to either, I’ve got a bad name with every one.
They say I’m a ‘desperate character,’ ” Kolya smiled scornfully. “It all
began from what happened on the railway.”

“Ah, we’ve heard of that exploit of yours, too,” cried the captain. “How
could you lie still on the line? Is it possible you weren’t the least
afraid, lying there under the train? Weren’t you frightened?”

The captain was abject in his flattery of Kolya.

“N—not particularly,” answered Kolya carelessly. “What’s blasted my
reputation more than anything here was that cursed goose,” he said,
turning again to Ilusha. But though he assumed an unconcerned air as he
talked, he still could not control himself and was continually missing the
note he tried to keep up.

“Ah! I heard about the goose!” Ilusha laughed, beaming all over. “They
told me, but I didn’t understand. Did they really take you to the court?”

“The most stupid, trivial affair, they made a mountain of a molehill as
they always do,” Kolya began carelessly. “I was walking through the
market‐place here one day, just when they’d driven in the geese. I stopped
and looked at them. All at once a fellow, who is an errand‐boy at
Plotnikov’s now, looked at me and said, ‘What are you looking at the geese
for?’ I looked at him; he was a stupid, moon‐faced fellow of twenty. I am
always on the side of the peasantry, you know. I like talking to the
peasants.... We’ve dropped behind the peasants—that’s an axiom. I believe
you are laughing, Karamazov?”

“No, Heaven forbid, I am listening,” said Alyosha with a most good‐natured
air, and the sensitive Kolya was immediately reassured.

“My theory, Karamazov, is clear and simple,” he hurried on again, looking
pleased. “I believe in the people and am always glad to give them their
due, but I am not for spoiling them, that is a _sine qua non_ ... But I
was telling you about the goose. So I turned to the fool and answered, ‘I
am wondering what the goose thinks about.’ He looked at me quite stupidly,
‘And what does the goose think about?’ he asked. ‘Do you see that cart
full of oats?’ I said. ‘The oats are dropping out of the sack, and the
goose has put its neck right under the wheel to gobble them up—do you
see?’ ‘I see that quite well,’ he said. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘if that cart were
to move on a little, would it break the goose’s neck or not?’ ‘It’d be
sure to break it,’ and he grinned all over his face, highly delighted.
‘Come on, then,’ said I, ‘let’s try.’ ‘Let’s,’ he said. And it did not
take us long to arrange: he stood at the bridle without being noticed, and
I stood on one side to direct the goose. And the owner wasn’t looking, he
was talking to some one, so I had nothing to do, the goose thrust its head
in after the oats of itself, under the cart, just under the wheel. I
winked at the lad, he tugged at the bridle, and crack. The goose’s neck
was broken in half. And, as luck would have it, all the peasants saw us at
that moment and they kicked up a shindy at once. ‘You did that on
purpose!’ ‘No, not on purpose.’ ‘Yes, you did, on purpose!’ Well, they
shouted, ‘Take him to the justice of the peace!’ They took me, too. ‘You
were there, too,’ they said, ‘you helped, you’re known all over the
market!’ And, for some reason, I really am known all over the market,”
Kolya added conceitedly. “We all went off to the justice’s, they brought
the goose, too. The fellow was crying in a great funk, simply blubbering
like a woman. And the farmer kept shouting that you could kill any number
of geese like that. Well, of course, there were witnesses. The justice of
the peace settled it in a minute, that the farmer was to be paid a rouble
for the goose, and the fellow to have the goose. And he was warned not to
play such pranks again. And the fellow kept blubbering like a woman. ‘It
wasn’t me,’ he said, ‘it was he egged me on,’ and he pointed to me. I
answered with the utmost composure that I hadn’t egged him on, that I
simply stated the general proposition, had spoken hypothetically. The
justice of the peace smiled and was vexed with himself at once for having
smiled. ‘I’ll complain to your masters of you, so that for the future you
mayn’t waste your time on such general propositions, instead of sitting at
your books and learning your lessons.’ He didn’t complain to the masters,
that was a joke, but the matter was noised abroad and came to the ears of
the masters. Their ears are long, you know! The classical master,
Kolbasnikov, was particularly shocked about it, but Dardanelov got me off
again. But Kolbasnikov is savage with every one now like a green ass. Did
you know, Ilusha, he is just married, got a dowry of a thousand roubles,
and his bride’s a regular fright of the first rank and the last degree.
The third‐class fellows wrote an epigram on it:


    Astounding news has reached the class,
    Kolbasnikov has been an ass.


And so on, awfully funny, I’ll bring it to you later on. I say nothing
against Dardanelov, he is a learned man, there’s no doubt about it. I
respect men like that and it’s not because he stood up for me.”

“But you took him down about the founders of Troy!” Smurov put in
suddenly, unmistakably proud of Krassotkin at such a moment. He was
particularly pleased with the story of the goose.

“Did you really take him down?” the captain inquired, in a flattering way.
“On the question who founded Troy? We heard of it, Ilusha told me about it
at the time.”

“He knows everything, father, he knows more than any of us!” put in
Ilusha; “he only pretends to be like that, but really he is top in every
subject....”

Ilusha looked at Kolya with infinite happiness.

“Oh, that’s all nonsense about Troy, a trivial matter. I consider this an
unimportant question,” said Kolya with haughty humility. He had by now
completely recovered his dignity, though he was still a little uneasy. He
felt that he was greatly excited and that he had talked about the goose,
for instance, with too little reserve, while Alyosha had looked serious
and had not said a word all the time. And the vain boy began by degrees to
have a rankling fear that Alyosha was silent because he despised him, and
thought he was showing off before him. If he dared to think anything like
that Kolya would—

“I regard the question as quite a trivial one,” he rapped out again,
proudly.

“And I know who founded Troy,” a boy, who had not spoken before, said
suddenly, to the surprise of every one. He was silent and seemed to be
shy. He was a pretty boy of about eleven, called Kartashov. He was sitting
near the door. Kolya looked at him with dignified amazement.

The fact was that the identity of the founders of Troy had become a secret
for the whole school, a secret which could only be discovered by reading
Smaragdov, and no one had Smaragdov but Kolya. One day, when Kolya’s back
was turned, Kartashov hastily opened Smaragdov, which lay among Kolya’s
books, and immediately lighted on the passage relating to the foundation
of Troy. This was a good time ago, but he felt uneasy and could not bring
himself to announce publicly that he too knew who had founded Troy, afraid
of what might happen and of Krassotkin’s somehow putting him to shame over
it. But now he couldn’t resist saying it. For weeks he had been longing
to.

“Well, who did found it?” asked Kolya, turning to him with haughty
superciliousness. He saw from his face that he really did know and at once
made up his mind how to take it. There was, so to speak, a discordant note
in the general harmony.

“Troy was founded by Teucer, Dardanus, Ilius and Tros,” the boy rapped out
at once, and in the same instant he blushed, blushed so, that it was
painful to look at him. But the boys stared at him, stared at him for a
whole minute, and then all the staring eyes turned at once and were
fastened upon Kolya, who was still scanning the audacious boy with
disdainful composure.

“In what sense did they found it?” he deigned to comment at last. “And
what is meant by founding a city or a state? What do they do? Did they go
and each lay a brick, do you suppose?”

There was laughter. The offending boy turned from pink to crimson. He was
silent and on the point of tears. Kolya held him so for a minute.

“Before you talk of a historical event like the foundation of a
nationality, you must first understand what you mean by it,” he admonished
him in stern, incisive tones. “But I attach no consequence to these old
wives’ tales and I don’t think much of universal history in general,” he
added carelessly, addressing the company generally.

“Universal history?” the captain inquired, looking almost scared.

“Yes, universal history! It’s the study of the successive follies of
mankind and nothing more. The only subjects I respect are mathematics and
natural science,” said Kolya. He was showing off and he stole a glance at
Alyosha; his was the only opinion he was afraid of there. But Alyosha was
still silent and still serious as before. If Alyosha had said a word it
would have stopped him, but Alyosha was silent and “it might be the
silence of contempt,” and that finally irritated Kolya.

“The classical languages, too ... they are simply madness, nothing more.
You seem to disagree with me again, Karamazov?”

“I don’t agree,” said Alyosha, with a faint smile.

“The study of the classics, if you ask my opinion, is simply a police
measure, that’s simply why it has been introduced into our schools.” By
degrees Kolya began to get breathless again. “Latin and Greek were
introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect.
It was dull before, so what could they do to make things duller? It was
senseless enough before, so what could they do to make it more senseless?
So they thought of Greek and Latin. That’s my opinion, I hope I shall
never change it,” Kolya finished abruptly. His cheeks were flushed.

“That’s true,” assented Smurov suddenly, in a ringing tone of conviction.
He had listened attentively.

“And yet he is first in Latin himself,” cried one of the group of boys
suddenly.

“Yes, father, he says that and yet he is first in Latin,” echoed Ilusha.

“What of it?” Kolya thought fit to defend himself, though the praise was
very sweet to him. “I am fagging away at Latin because I have to, because
I promised my mother to pass my examination, and I think that whatever you
do, it’s worth doing it well. But in my soul I have a profound contempt
for the classics and all that fraud.... You don’t agree, Karamazov?”

“Why ‘fraud’?” Alyosha smiled again.

“Well, all the classical authors have been translated into all languages,
so it was not for the sake of studying the classics they introduced Latin,
but solely as a police measure, to stupefy the intelligence. So what can
one call it but a fraud?”

“Why, who taught you all this?” cried Alyosha, surprised at last.

“In the first place I am capable of thinking for myself without being
taught. Besides, what I said just now about the classics being translated
our teacher Kolbasnikov has said to the whole of the third class.”

“The doctor has come!” cried Nina, who had been silent till then.

A carriage belonging to Madame Hohlakov drove up to the gate. The captain,
who had been expecting the doctor all the morning, rushed headlong out to
meet him. “Mamma” pulled herself together and assumed a dignified air.
Alyosha went up to Ilusha and began setting his pillows straight. Nina,
from her invalid chair, anxiously watched him putting the bed tidy. The
boys hurriedly took leave. Some of them promised to come again in the
evening. Kolya called Perezvon and the dog jumped off the bed.

“I won’t go away, I won’t go away,” Kolya said hastily to Ilusha. “I’ll
wait in the passage and come back when the doctor’s gone, I’ll come back
with Perezvon.”

But by now the doctor had entered, an important‐looking person with long,
dark whiskers and a shiny, shaven chin, wearing a bearskin coat. As he
crossed the threshold he stopped, taken aback; he probably fancied he had
come to the wrong place. “How is this? Where am I?” he muttered, not
removing his coat nor his peaked sealskin cap. The crowd, the poverty of
the room, the washing hanging on a line in the corner, puzzled him. The
captain, bent double, was bowing low before him.

“It’s here, sir, here, sir,” he muttered cringingly; “it’s here, you’ve
come right, you were coming to us...”

“Sne‐gi‐ryov?” the doctor said loudly and pompously. “Mr. Snegiryov—is
that you?”

“That’s me, sir!”

“Ah!”

The doctor looked round the room with a squeamish air once more and threw
off his coat, displaying to all eyes the grand decoration at his neck. The
captain caught the fur coat in the air, and the doctor took off his cap.

“Where is the patient?” he asked emphatically.



Chapter VI. Precocity


“What do you think the doctor will say to him?” Kolya asked quickly. “What
a repulsive mug, though, hasn’t he? I can’t endure medicine!”

“Ilusha is dying. I think that’s certain,” answered Alyosha, mournfully.

“They are rogues! Medicine’s a fraud! I am glad to have made your
acquaintance, though, Karamazov. I wanted to know you for a long time. I
am only sorry we meet in such sad circumstances.”

Kolya had a great inclination to say something even warmer and more
demonstrative, but he felt ill at ease. Alyosha noticed this, smiled, and
pressed his hand.

“I’ve long learned to respect you as a rare person,” Kolya muttered again,
faltering and uncertain. “I have heard you are a mystic and have been in
the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but ... that hasn’t put me off.
Contact with real life will cure you.... It’s always so with characters
like yours.”

“What do you mean by mystic? Cure me of what?” Alyosha was rather
astonished.

“Oh, God and all the rest of it.”

“What, don’t you believe in God?”

“Oh, I’ve nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis, but
... I admit that He is needed ... for the order of the universe and all
that ... and that if there were no God He would have to be invented,”
added Kolya, beginning to blush. He suddenly fancied that Alyosha might
think he was trying to show off his knowledge and to prove that he was
“grown up.” “I haven’t the slightest desire to show off my knowledge to
him,” Kolya thought indignantly. And all of a sudden he felt horribly
annoyed.

“I must confess I can’t endure entering on such discussions,” he said with
a final air. “It’s possible for one who doesn’t believe in God to love
mankind, don’t you think so? Voltaire didn’t believe in God and loved
mankind?” (“I am at it again,” he thought to himself.)

“Voltaire believed in God, though not very much, I think, and I don’t
think he loved mankind very much either,” said Alyosha quietly, gently,
and quite naturally, as though he were talking to some one of his own age,
or even older. Kolya was particularly struck by Alyosha’s apparent
diffidence about his opinion of Voltaire. He seemed to be leaving the
question for him, little Kolya, to settle.

“Have you read Voltaire?” Alyosha finished.

“No, not to say read.... But I’ve read _Candide_ in the Russian
translation ... in an absurd, grotesque, old translation ... (At it again!
again!)”

“And did you understand it?”

“Oh, yes, everything.... That is ... Why do you suppose I shouldn’t
understand it? There’s a lot of nastiness in it, of course.... Of course I
can understand that it’s a philosophical novel and written to advocate an
idea....” Kolya was getting mixed by now. “I am a Socialist, Karamazov, I
am an incurable Socialist,” he announced suddenly, apropos of nothing.

“A Socialist?” laughed Alyosha. “But when have you had time to become one?
Why, I thought you were only thirteen?”

Kolya winced.

“In the first place I am not thirteen, but fourteen, fourteen in a
fortnight,” he flushed angrily, “and in the second place I am at a
complete loss to understand what my age has to do with it? The question is
what are my convictions, not what is my age, isn’t it?”

“When you are older, you’ll understand for yourself the influence of age
on convictions. I fancied, too, that you were not expressing your own
ideas,” Alyosha answered serenely and modestly, but Kolya interrupted him
hotly:

“Come, you want obedience and mysticism. You must admit that the Christian
religion, for instance, has only been of use to the rich and the powerful
to keep the lower classes in slavery. That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Ah, I know where you read that, and I am sure some one told you so!”
cried Alyosha.

“I say, what makes you think I read it? And certainly no one told me so. I
can think for myself.... I am not opposed to Christ, if you like. He was a
most humane person, and if He were alive to‐day, He would be found in the
ranks of the revolutionists, and would perhaps play a conspicuous part....
There’s no doubt about that.”

“Oh, where, where did you get that from? What fool have you made friends
with?” exclaimed Alyosha.

“Come, the truth will out! It has so chanced that I have often talked to
Mr. Rakitin, of course, but ... old Byelinsky said that, too, so they
say.”

“Byelinsky? I don’t remember. He hasn’t written that anywhere.”

“If he didn’t write it, they say he said it. I heard that from a ... but
never mind.”

“And have you read Byelinsky?”

“Well, no ... I haven’t read all of him, but ... I read the passage about
Tatyana, why she didn’t go off with Onyegin.”

“Didn’t go off with Onyegin? Surely you don’t ... understand that
already?”

“Why, you seem to take me for little Smurov,” said Kolya, with a grin of
irritation. “But please don’t suppose I am such a revolutionist. I often
disagree with Mr. Rakitin. Though I mention Tatyana, I am not at all for
the emancipation of women. I acknowledge that women are a subject race and
must obey. _Les femmes tricottent_, as Napoleon said.” Kolya, for some
reason, smiled, “And on that question at least I am quite of one mind with
that pseudo‐great man. I think, too, that to leave one’s own country and
fly to America is mean, worse than mean—silly. Why go to America when one
may be of great service to humanity here? Now especially. There’s a
perfect mass of fruitful activity open to us. That’s what I answered.”

“What do you mean? Answered whom? Has some one suggested your going to
America already?”

“I must own, they’ve been at me to go, but I declined. That’s between
ourselves, of course, Karamazov; do you hear, not a word to any one. I say
this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the clutches of the
secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge.


    _Long will you remember_
    _The house at the Chain bridge._


Do you remember? It’s splendid. Why are you laughing? You don’t suppose I
am fibbing, do you?” (“What if he should find out that I’ve only that one
number of _The Bell_ in father’s bookcase, and haven’t read any more of
it?” Kolya thought with a shudder.)

“Oh, no, I am not laughing and don’t suppose for a moment that you are
lying. No, indeed, I can’t suppose so, for all this, alas! is perfectly
true. But tell me, have you read Pushkin—_Onyegin_, for instance?... You
spoke just now of Tatyana.”

“No, I haven’t read it yet, but I want to read it. I have no prejudices,
Karamazov; I want to hear both sides. What makes you ask?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Tell me, Karamazov, have you an awful contempt for me?” Kolya rapped out
suddenly and drew himself up before Alyosha, as though he were on drill.
“Be so kind as to tell me, without beating about the bush.”

“I have a contempt for you?” Alyosha looked at him wondering. “What for? I
am only sad that a charming nature such as yours should be perverted by
all this crude nonsense before you have begun life.”

“Don’t be anxious about my nature,” Kolya interrupted, not without
complacency. “But it’s true that I am stupidly sensitive, crudely
sensitive. You smiled just now, and I fancied you seemed to—”

“Oh, my smile meant something quite different. I’ll tell you why I smiled.
Not long ago I read the criticism made by a German who had lived in
Russia, on our students and schoolboys of to‐day. ‘Show a Russian
schoolboy,’ he writes, ‘a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about,
and he will give you back the map next day with corrections on it.’ No
knowledge and unbounded conceit—that’s what the German meant to say about
the Russian schoolboy.”

“Yes, that’s perfectly right,” Kolya laughed suddenly, “exactly so! Bravo
the German! But he did not see the good side, what do you think? Conceit
may be, that comes from youth, that will be corrected if need be, but, on
the other hand, there is an independent spirit almost from childhood,
boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of these sausage
makers, groveling before authority.... But the German was right all the
same. Bravo the German! But Germans want strangling all the same. Though
they are so good at science and learning they must be strangled.”

“Strangled, what for?” smiled Alyosha.

“Well, perhaps I am talking nonsense, I agree. I am awfully childish
sometimes, and when I am pleased about anything I can’t restrain myself
and am ready to talk any stuff. But, I say, we are chattering away here
about nothing, and that doctor has been a long time in there. But perhaps
he’s examining the mamma and that poor crippled Nina. I liked that Nina,
you know. She whispered to me suddenly as I was coming away, ‘Why didn’t
you come before?’ And in such a voice, so reproachfully! I think she is
awfully nice and pathetic.”

“Yes, yes! Well, you’ll be coming often, you will see what she is like. It
would do you a great deal of good to know people like that, to learn to
value a great deal which you will find out from knowing these people,”
Alyosha observed warmly. “That would have more effect on you than
anything.”

“Oh, how I regret and blame myself for not having come sooner!” Kolya
exclaimed, with bitter feeling.

“Yes, it’s a great pity. You saw for yourself how delighted the poor child
was to see you. And how he fretted for you to come!”

“Don’t tell me! You make it worse! But it serves me right. What kept me
from coming was my conceit, my egoistic vanity, and the beastly
wilfullness, which I never can get rid of, though I’ve been struggling
with it all my life. I see that now. I am a beast in lots of ways,
Karamazov!”

“No, you have a charming nature, though it’s been distorted, and I quite
understand why you have had such an influence on this generous, morbidly
sensitive boy,” Alyosha answered warmly.

“And you say that to me!” cried Kolya; “and would you believe it, I
thought—I’ve thought several times since I’ve been here—that you despised
me! If only you knew how I prize your opinion!”

“But are you really so sensitive? At your age! Would you believe it, just
now, when you were telling your story, I thought, as I watched you, that
you must be very sensitive!”

“You thought so? What an eye you’ve got, I say! I bet that was when I was
talking about the goose. That was just when I was fancying you had a great
contempt for me for being in such a hurry to show off, and for a moment I
quite hated you for it, and began talking like a fool. Then I fancied—just
now, here—when I said that if there were no God He would have to be
invented, that I was in too great a hurry to display my knowledge,
especially as I got that phrase out of a book. But I swear I wasn’t
showing off out of vanity, though I really don’t know why. Because I was
so pleased? Yes, I believe it was because I was so pleased ... though it’s
perfectly disgraceful for any one to be gushing directly they are pleased,
I know that. But I am convinced now that you don’t despise me; it was all
my imagination. Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy
all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world,
and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.”

“And you worry every one about you,” smiled Alyosha.

“Yes, I worry every one about me, especially my mother. Karamazov, tell
me, am I very ridiculous now?”

“Don’t think about that, don’t think of it at all!” cried Alyosha. “And
what does ridiculous mean? Isn’t every one constantly being or seeming
ridiculous? Besides, nearly all clever people now are fearfully afraid of
being ridiculous, and that makes them unhappy. All I am surprised at is
that you should be feeling that so early, though I’ve observed it for some
time past, and not only in you. Nowadays the very children have begun to
suffer from it. It’s almost a sort of insanity. The devil has taken the
form of that vanity and entered into the whole generation; it’s simply the
devil,” added Alyosha, without a trace of the smile that Kolya, staring at
him, expected to see. “You are like every one else,” said Alyosha, in
conclusion, “that is, like very many others. Only you must not be like
everybody else, that’s all.”

“Even if every one is like that?”

“Yes, even if every one is like that. You be the only one not like it. You
really are not like every one else, here you are not ashamed to confess to
something bad and even ridiculous. And who will admit so much in these
days? No one. And people have even ceased to feel the impulse to self‐
criticism. Don’t be like every one else, even if you are the only one.”

“Splendid! I was not mistaken in you. You know how to console one. Oh, how
I have longed to know you, Karamazov! I’ve long been eager for this
meeting. Can you really have thought about me, too? You said just now that
you thought of me, too?”

“Yes, I’d heard of you and had thought of you, too ... and if it’s partly
vanity that makes you ask, it doesn’t matter.”

“Do you know, Karamazov, our talk has been like a declaration of love,”
said Kolya, in a bashful and melting voice. “That’s not ridiculous, is
it?”

“Not at all ridiculous, and if it were, it wouldn’t matter, because it’s
been a good thing.” Alyosha smiled brightly.

“But do you know, Karamazov, you must admit that you are a little ashamed
yourself, now.... I see it by your eyes.” Kolya smiled with a sort of sly
happiness.

“Why ashamed?”

“Well, why are you blushing?”

“It was you made me blush,” laughed Alyosha, and he really did blush. “Oh,
well, I am a little, goodness knows why, I don’t know...” he muttered,
almost embarrassed.

“Oh, how I love you and admire you at this moment just because you are
rather ashamed! Because you are just like me,” cried Kolya, in positive
ecstasy. His cheeks glowed, his eyes beamed.

“You know, Kolya, you will be very unhappy in your life,” something made
Alyosha say suddenly.

“I know, I know. How you know it all beforehand!” Kolya agreed at once.

“But you will bless life on the whole, all the same.”

“Just so, hurrah! You are a prophet. Oh, we shall get on together,
Karamazov! Do you know, what delights me most, is that you treat me quite
like an equal. But we are not equals, no, we are not, you are better! But
we shall get on. Do you know, all this last month, I’ve been saying to
myself, ‘Either we shall be friends at once, for ever, or we shall part
enemies to the grave!’ ”

“And saying that, of course, you loved me,” Alyosha laughed gayly.

“I did. I loved you awfully. I’ve been loving and dreaming of you. And how
do you know it all beforehand? Ah, here’s the doctor. Goodness! What will
he tell us? Look at his face!”



Chapter VII. Ilusha


The doctor came out of the room again, muffled in his fur coat and with
his cap on his head. His face looked almost angry and disgusted, as though
he were afraid of getting dirty. He cast a cursory glance round the
passage, looking sternly at Alyosha and Kolya as he did so. Alyosha waved
from the door to the coachman, and the carriage that had brought the
doctor drove up. The captain darted out after the doctor, and, bowing
apologetically, stopped him to get the last word. The poor fellow looked
utterly crushed; there was a scared look in his eyes.

“Your Excellency, your Excellency ... is it possible?” he began, but could
not go on and clasped his hands in despair. Yet he still gazed imploringly
at the doctor, as though a word from him might still change the poor boy’s
fate.

“I can’t help it, I am not God!” the doctor answered offhand, though with
the customary impressiveness.

“Doctor ... your Excellency ... and will it be soon, soon?”

“You must be prepared for anything,” said the doctor in emphatic and
incisive tones, and dropping his eyes, he was about to step out to the
coach.

“Your Excellency, for Christ’s sake!” the terror‐stricken captain stopped
him again. “Your Excellency! but can nothing, absolutely nothing save him
now?”

“It’s not in my hands now,” said the doctor impatiently, “but h’m!...” he
stopped suddenly. “If you could, for instance ... send ... your patient
... at once, without delay” (the words “at once, without delay,” the
doctor uttered with an almost wrathful sternness that made the captain
start) “to Syracuse, the change to the new be‐ne‐ficial climatic
conditions might possibly effect—”

“To Syracuse!” cried the captain, unable to grasp what was said.

“Syracuse is in Sicily,” Kolya jerked out suddenly in explanation. The
doctor looked at him.

“Sicily! your Excellency,” faltered the captain, “but you’ve seen”—he
spread out his hands, indicating his surroundings—“mamma and my family?”

“N—no, Sicily is not the place for the family, the family should go to
Caucasus in the early spring ... your daughter must go to the Caucasus,
and your wife ... after a course of the waters in the Caucasus for her
rheumatism ... must be sent straight to Paris to the mental specialist
Lepelletier; I could give you a note to him, and then ... there might be a
change—”

“Doctor, doctor! But you see!” The captain flung wide his hands again
despairingly, indicating the bare wooden walls of the passage.

“Well, that’s not my business,” grinned the doctor. “I have only told you
the answer of medical science to your question as to possible treatment.
As for the rest, to my regret—”

“Don’t be afraid, apothecary, my dog won’t bite you,” Kolya rapped out
loudly, noticing the doctor’s rather uneasy glance at Perezvon, who was
standing in the doorway. There was a wrathful note in Kolya’s voice. He
used the word apothecary instead of doctor on purpose, and, as he
explained afterwards, used it “to insult him.”

“What’s that?” The doctor flung up his head, staring with surprise at
Kolya. “Who’s this?” he addressed Alyosha, as though asking him to
explain.

“It’s Perezvon’s master, don’t worry about me,” Kolya said incisively
again.

“Perezvon?”(7) repeated the doctor, perplexed.

“He hears the bell, but where it is he cannot tell. Good‐by, we shall meet
in Syracuse.”

“Who’s this? Who’s this?” The doctor flew into a terrible rage.

“He is a schoolboy, doctor, he is a mischievous boy; take no notice of
him,” said Alyosha, frowning and speaking quickly. “Kolya, hold your
tongue!” he cried to Krassotkin. “Take no notice of him, doctor,” he
repeated, rather impatiently.

“He wants a thrashing, a good thrashing!” The doctor stamped in a perfect
fury.

“And you know, apothecary, my Perezvon might bite!” said Kolya, turning
pale, with quivering voice and flashing eyes. “_Ici_, Perezvon!”

“Kolya, if you say another word, I’ll have nothing more to do with you,”
Alyosha cried peremptorily.

“There is only one man in the world who can command Nikolay
Krassotkin—this is the man”; Kolya pointed to Alyosha. “I obey him, good‐
by!”

He stepped forward, opened the door, and quickly went into the inner room.
Perezvon flew after him. The doctor stood still for five seconds in
amazement, looking at Alyosha; then, with a curse, he went out quickly to
the carriage, repeating aloud, “This is ... this is ... I don’t know what
it is!” The captain darted forward to help him into the carriage. Alyosha
followed Kolya into the room. He was already by Ilusha’s bedside. The sick
boy was holding his hand and calling for his father. A minute later the
captain, too, came back.

“Father, father, come ... we ...” Ilusha faltered in violent excitement,
but apparently unable to go on, he flung his wasted arms round his father
and Kolya, uniting them in one embrace, and hugging them as tightly as he
could. The captain suddenly began to shake with dumb sobs, and Kolya’s
lips and chin twitched.

“Father, father! How sorry I am for you!” Ilusha moaned bitterly.

“Ilusha ... darling ... the doctor said ... you would be all right ... we
shall be happy ... the doctor ...” the captain began.

“Ah, father! I know what the new doctor said to you about me.... I saw!”
cried Ilusha, and again he hugged them both with all his strength, hiding
his face on his father’s shoulder.

“Father, don’t cry, and when I die get a good boy, another one ... choose
one of them all, a good one, call him Ilusha and love him instead of
me....”

“Hush, old man, you’ll get well,” Krassotkin cried suddenly, in a voice
that sounded angry.

“But don’t ever forget me, father,” Ilusha went on, “come to my grave ...
and, father, bury me by our big stone, where we used to go for our walk,
and come to me there with Krassotkin in the evening ... and Perezvon ... I
shall expect you.... Father, father!”

His voice broke. They were all three silent, still embracing. Nina was
crying quietly in her chair, and at last seeing them all crying, “mamma,”
too, burst into tears.

“Ilusha! Ilusha!” she exclaimed.

Krassotkin suddenly released himself from Ilusha’s embrace.

“Good‐by, old man, mother expects me back to dinner,” he said quickly.
“What a pity I did not tell her! She will be dreadfully anxious.... But
after dinner I’ll come back to you for the whole day, for the whole
evening, and I’ll tell you all sorts of things, all sorts of things. And
I’ll bring Perezvon, but now I will take him with me, because he will
begin to howl when I am away and bother you. Good‐by!”

And he ran out into the passage. He didn’t want to cry, but in the passage
he burst into tears. Alyosha found him crying.

“Kolya, you must be sure to keep your word and come, or he will be
terribly disappointed,” Alyosha said emphatically.

“I will! Oh, how I curse myself for not having come before!” muttered
Kolya, crying, and no longer ashamed of it.

At that moment the captain flew out of the room, and at once closed the
door behind him. His face looked frenzied, his lips were trembling. He
stood before the two and flung up his arms.

“I don’t want a good boy! I don’t want another boy!” he muttered in a wild
whisper, clenching his teeth. “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my
tongue—” He broke off with a sob and sank on his knees before the wooden
bench. Pressing his fists against his head, he began sobbing with absurd
whimpering cries, doing his utmost that his cries should not be heard in
the room.

Kolya ran out into the street.

“Good‐by, Karamazov? Will you come yourself?” he cried sharply and angrily
to Alyosha.

“I will certainly come in the evening.”

“What was that he said about Jerusalem?... What did he mean by that?”

“It’s from the Bible. ‘If I forget thee, Jerusalem,’ that is, if I forget
all that is most precious to me, if I let anything take its place, then
may—”

“I understand, that’s enough! Mind you come! _Ici_, Perezvon!” he cried
with positive ferocity to the dog, and with rapid strides he went home.




Book XI. Ivan



Chapter I. At Grushenka’s


Alyosha went towards the cathedral square to the widow Morozov’s house to
see Grushenka, who had sent Fenya to him early in the morning with an
urgent message begging him to come. Questioning Fenya, Alyosha learned
that her mistress had been particularly distressed since the previous day.
During the two months that had passed since Mitya’s arrest, Alyosha had
called frequently at the widow Morozov’s house, both from his own
inclination and to take messages for Mitya. Three days after Mitya’s
arrest, Grushenka was taken very ill and was ill for nearly five weeks.
For one whole week she was unconscious. She was very much changed—thinner
and a little sallow, though she had for the past fortnight been well
enough to go out. But to Alyosha her face was even more attractive than
before, and he liked to meet her eyes when he went in to her. A look of
firmness and intelligent purpose had developed in her face. There were
signs of a spiritual transformation in her, and a steadfast, fine and
humble determination that nothing could shake could be discerned in her.
There was a small vertical line between her brows which gave her charming
face a look of concentrated thought, almost austere at the first glance.
There was scarcely a trace of her former frivolity.

It seemed strange to Alyosha, too, that in spite of the calamity that had
overtaken the poor girl, betrothed to a man who had been arrested for a
terrible crime, almost at the instant of their betrothal, in spite of her
illness and the almost inevitable sentence hanging over Mitya, Grushenka
had not yet lost her youthful cheerfulness. There was a soft light in the
once proud eyes, though at times they gleamed with the old vindictive fire
when she was visited by one disturbing thought stronger than ever in her
heart. The object of that uneasiness was the same as ever—Katerina
Ivanovna, of whom Grushenka had even raved when she lay in delirium.
Alyosha knew that she was fearfully jealous of her. Yet Katerina Ivanovna
had not once visited Mitya in his prison, though she might have done it
whenever she liked. All this made a difficult problem for Alyosha, for he
was the only person to whom Grushenka opened her heart and from whom she
was continually asking advice. Sometimes he was unable to say anything.

Full of anxiety he entered her lodging. She was at home. She had returned
from seeing Mitya half an hour before, and from the rapid movement with
which she leapt up from her chair to meet him he saw that she had been
expecting him with great impatience. A pack of cards dealt for a game of
“fools” lay on the table. A bed had been made up on the leather sofa on
the other side and Maximov lay, half‐reclining, on it. He wore a dressing‐
gown and a cotton nightcap, and was evidently ill and weak, though he was
smiling blissfully. When the homeless old man returned with Grushenka from
Mokroe two months before, he had simply stayed on and was still staying
with her. He arrived with her in rain and sleet, sat down on the sofa,
drenched and scared, and gazed mutely at her with a timid, appealing
smile. Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and in the first stage of
fever, almost forgot his existence in all she had to do the first half‐
hour after her arrival. Suddenly she chanced to look at him intently: he
laughed a pitiful, helpless little laugh. She called Fenya and told her to
give him something to eat. All that day he sat in the same place, almost
without stirring. When it got dark and the shutters were closed, Fenya
asked her mistress:

“Is the gentleman going to stay the night, mistress?”

“Yes; make him a bed on the sofa,” answered Grushenka.

Questioning him more in detail, Grushenka learned from him that he had
literally nowhere to go, and that “Mr. Kalganov, my benefactor, told me
straight that he wouldn’t receive me again and gave me five roubles.”

“Well, God bless you, you’d better stay, then,” Grushenka decided in her
grief, smiling compassionately at him. Her smile wrung the old man’s heart
and his lips twitched with grateful tears. And so the destitute wanderer
had stayed with her ever since. He did not leave the house even when she
was ill. Fenya and her grandmother, the cook, did not turn him out, but
went on serving him meals and making up his bed on the sofa. Grushenka had
grown used to him, and coming back from seeing Mitya (whom she had begun
to visit in prison before she was really well) she would sit down and
begin talking to “Maximushka” about trifling matters, to keep her from
thinking of her sorrow. The old man turned out to be a good story‐teller
on occasions, so that at last he became necessary to her. Grushenka saw
scarcely any one else beside Alyosha, who did not come every day and never
stayed long. Her old merchant lay seriously ill at this time, “at his last
gasp” as they said in the town, and he did, in fact, die a week after
Mitya’s trial. Three weeks before his death, feeling the end approaching,
he made his sons, their wives and children, come upstairs to him at last
and bade them not leave him again. From that moment he gave strict orders
to his servants not to admit Grushenka and to tell her if she came, “The
master wishes you long life and happiness and tells you to forget him.”
But Grushenka sent almost every day to inquire after him.

“You’ve come at last!” she cried, flinging down the cards and joyfully
greeting Alyosha, “and Maximushka’s been scaring me that perhaps you
wouldn’t come. Ah, how I need you! Sit down to the table. What will you
have—coffee?”

“Yes, please,” said Alyosha, sitting down at the table. “I am very
hungry.”

“That’s right. Fenya, Fenya, coffee,” cried Grushenka. “It’s been made a
long time ready for you. And bring some little pies, and mind they are
hot. Do you know, we’ve had a storm over those pies to‐day. I took them to
the prison for him, and would you believe it, he threw them back to me: he
would not eat them. He flung one of them on the floor and stamped on it.
So I said to him: ‘I shall leave them with the warder; if you don’t eat
them before evening, it will be that your venomous spite is enough for
you!’ With that I went away. We quarreled again, would you believe it?
Whenever I go we quarrel.”

Grushenka said all this in one breath in her agitation. Maximov, feeling
nervous, at once smiled and looked on the floor.

“What did you quarrel about this time?” asked Alyosha.

“I didn’t expect it in the least. Only fancy, he is jealous of the Pole.
‘Why are you keeping him?’ he said. ‘So you’ve begun keeping him.’ He is
jealous, jealous of me all the time, jealous eating and sleeping! He even
took it into his head to be jealous of Kuzma last week.”

“But he knew about the Pole before?”

“Yes, but there it is. He has known about him from the very beginning, but
to‐day he suddenly got up and began scolding about him. I am ashamed to
repeat what he said. Silly fellow! Rakitin went in as I came out. Perhaps
Rakitin is egging him on. What do you think?” she added carelessly.

“He loves you, that’s what it is: he loves you so much. And now he is
particularly worried.”

“I should think he might be, with the trial to‐morrow. And I went to him
to say something about to‐morrow, for I dread to think what’s going to
happen then. You say that he is worried, but how worried I am! And he
talks about the Pole! He’s too silly! He is not jealous of Maximushka yet,
anyway.”

“My wife was dreadfully jealous over me, too,” Maximov put in his word.

“Jealous of you?” Grushenka laughed in spite of herself. “Of whom could
she have been jealous?”

“Of the servant girls.”

“Hold your tongue, Maximushka, I am in no laughing mood now; I feel angry.
Don’t ogle the pies. I shan’t give you any; they are not good for you, and
I won’t give you any vodka either. I have to look after him, too, just as
though I kept an almshouse,” she laughed.

“I don’t deserve your kindness. I am a worthless creature,” said Maximov,
with tears in his voice. “You would do better to spend your kindness on
people of more use than me.”

“Ech, every one is of use, Maximushka, and how can we tell who’s of most
use? If only that Pole didn’t exist, Alyosha. He’s taken it into his head
to fall ill, too, to‐day. I’ve been to see him also. And I shall send him
some pies, too, on purpose. I hadn’t sent him any, but Mitya accused me of
it, so now I shall send some! Ah, here’s Fenya with a letter! Yes, it’s
from the Poles—begging again!”

Pan Mussyalovitch had indeed sent an extremely long and characteristically
eloquent letter in which he begged her to lend him three roubles. In the
letter was enclosed a receipt for the sum, with a promise to repay it
within three months, signed by Pan Vrublevsky as well. Grushenka had
received many such letters, accompanied by such receipts, from her former
lover during the fortnight of her convalescence. But she knew that the two
Poles had been to ask after her health during her illness. The first
letter Grushenka got from them was a long one, written on large notepaper
and with a big family crest on the seal. It was so obscure and rhetorical
that Grushenka put it down before she had read half, unable to make head
or tail of it. She could not attend to letters then. The first letter was
followed next day by another in which Pan Mussyalovitch begged her for a
loan of two thousand roubles for a very short period. Grushenka left that
letter, too, unanswered. A whole series of letters had followed—one every
day—all as pompous and rhetorical, but the loan asked for, gradually
diminishing, dropped to a hundred roubles, then to twenty‐five, to ten,
and finally Grushenka received a letter in which both the Poles begged her
for only one rouble and included a receipt signed by both.

Then Grushenka suddenly felt sorry for them, and at dusk she went round
herself to their lodging. She found the two Poles in great poverty, almost
destitution, without food or fuel, without cigarettes, in debt to their
landlady. The two hundred roubles they had carried off from Mitya at
Mokroe had soon disappeared. But Grushenka was surprised at their meeting
her with arrogant dignity and self‐assertion, with the greatest punctilio
and pompous speeches. Grushenka simply laughed, and gave her former
admirer ten roubles. Then, laughing, she told Mitya of it and he was not
in the least jealous. But ever since, the Poles had attached themselves to
Grushenka and bombarded her daily with requests for money and she had
always sent them small sums. And now that day Mitya had taken it into his
head to be fearfully jealous.

“Like a fool, I went round to him just for a minute, on the way to see
Mitya, for he is ill, too, my Pole,” Grushenka began again with nervous
haste. “I was laughing, telling Mitya about it. ‘Fancy,’ I said, ‘my Pole
had the happy thought to sing his old songs to me to the guitar. He
thought I would be touched and marry him!’ Mitya leapt up swearing.... So,
there, I’ll send them the pies! Fenya, is it that little girl they’ve
sent? Here, give her three roubles and pack a dozen pies up in a paper and
tell her to take them. And you, Alyosha, be sure to tell Mitya that I did
send them the pies.”

“I wouldn’t tell him for anything,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Ech! You think he is unhappy about it. Why, he’s jealous on purpose. He
doesn’t care,” said Grushenka bitterly.

“On purpose?” queried Alyosha.

“I tell you you are silly, Alyosha. You know nothing about it, with all
your cleverness. I am not offended that he is jealous of a girl like me. I
would be offended if he were not jealous. I am like that. I am not
offended at jealousy. I have a fierce heart, too. I can be jealous myself.
Only what offends me is that he doesn’t love me at all. I tell you he is
jealous now _on purpose_. Am I blind? Don’t I see? He began talking to me
just now of that woman, of Katerina, saying she was this and that, how she
had ordered a doctor from Moscow for him, to try and save him; how she had
ordered the best counsel, the most learned one, too. So he loves her, if
he’ll praise her to my face, more shame to him! He’s treated me badly
himself, so he attacked me, to make out I am in fault first and to throw
it all on me. ‘You were with your Pole before me, so I can’t be blamed for
Katerina,’ that’s what it amounts to. He wants to throw the whole blame on
me. He attacked me on purpose, on purpose, I tell you, but I’ll—”

Grushenka could not finish saying what she would do. She hid her eyes in
her handkerchief and sobbed violently.

“He doesn’t love Katerina Ivanovna,” said Alyosha firmly.

“Well, whether he loves her or not, I’ll soon find out for myself,” said
Grushenka, with a menacing note in her voice, taking the handkerchief from
her eyes. Her face was distorted. Alyosha saw sorrowfully that from being
mild and serene, it had become sullen and spiteful.

“Enough of this foolishness,” she said suddenly; “it’s not for that I sent
for you. Alyosha, darling, to‐morrow—what will happen to‐morrow? That’s
what worries me! And it’s only me it worries! I look at every one and no
one is thinking of it. No one cares about it. Are you thinking about it
even? To‐morrow he’ll be tried, you know. Tell me, how will he be tried?
You know it’s the valet, the valet killed him! Good heavens! Can they
condemn him in place of the valet and will no one stand up for him? They
haven’t troubled the valet at all, have they?”

“He’s been severely cross‐examined,” observed Alyosha thoughtfully; “but
every one came to the conclusion it was not he. Now he is lying very ill.
He has been ill ever since that attack. Really ill,” added Alyosha.

“Oh, dear! couldn’t you go to that counsel yourself and tell him the whole
thing by yourself? He’s been brought from Petersburg for three thousand
roubles, they say.”

“We gave these three thousand together—Ivan, Katerina Ivanovna and I—but
she paid two thousand for the doctor from Moscow herself. The counsel
Fetyukovitch would have charged more, but the case has become known all
over Russia; it’s talked of in all the papers and journals. Fetyukovitch
agreed to come more for the glory of the thing, because the case has
become so notorious. I saw him yesterday.”

“Well? Did you talk to him?” Grushenka put in eagerly.

“He listened and said nothing. He told me that he had already formed his
opinion. But he promised to give my words consideration.”

“Consideration! Ah, they are swindlers! They’ll ruin him. And why did she
send for the doctor?”

“As an expert. They want to prove that Mitya’s mad and committed the
murder when he didn’t know what he was doing”; Alyosha smiled gently; “but
Mitya won’t agree to that.”

“Yes; but that would be the truth if he had killed him!” cried Grushenka.
“He was mad then, perfectly mad, and that was my fault, wretch that I am!
But, of course, he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it! And they are all against
him, the whole town. Even Fenya’s evidence went to prove he had done it.
And the people at the shop, and that official, and at the tavern, too,
before, people had heard him say so! They are all, all against him, all
crying out against him.”

“Yes, there’s a fearful accumulation of evidence,” Alyosha observed
grimly.

“And Grigory—Grigory Vassilyevitch—sticks to his story that the door was
open, persists that he saw it—there’s no shaking him. I went and talked to
him myself. He’s rude about it, too.”

“Yes, that’s perhaps the strongest evidence against him,” said Alyosha.

“And as for Mitya’s being mad, he certainly seems like it now,” Grushenka
began with a peculiarly anxious and mysterious air. “Do you know, Alyosha,
I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time. I go to him
every day and simply wonder at him. Tell me, now, what do you suppose he’s
always talking about? He talks and talks and I can make nothing of it. I
fancied he was talking of something intellectual that I couldn’t
understand in my foolishness. Only he suddenly began talking to me about a
babe—that is, about some child. ‘Why is the babe poor?’ he said. ‘It’s for
that babe I am going to Siberia now. I am not a murderer, but I must go to
Siberia!’ What that meant, what babe, I couldn’t tell for the life of me.
Only I cried when he said it, because he said it so nicely. He cried
himself, and I cried, too. He suddenly kissed me and made the sign of the
cross over me. What did it mean, Alyosha, tell me? What is this babe?”

“It must be Rakitin, who’s been going to see him lately,” smiled Alyosha,
“though ... that’s not Rakitin’s doing. I didn’t see Mitya yesterday. I’ll
see him to‐day.”

“No, it’s not Rakitin; it’s his brother Ivan Fyodorovitch upsetting him.
It’s his going to see him, that’s what it is,” Grushenka began, and
suddenly broke off. Alyosha gazed at her in amazement.

“Ivan’s going? Has he been to see him? Mitya told me himself that Ivan
hasn’t been once.”

“There ... there! What a girl I am! Blurting things out!” exclaimed
Grushenka, confused and suddenly blushing. “Stay, Alyosha, hush! Since
I’ve said so much I’ll tell the whole truth—he’s been to see him twice,
the first directly he arrived. He galloped here from Moscow at once, of
course, before I was taken ill; and the second time was a week ago. He
told Mitya not to tell you about it, under any circumstances; and not to
tell any one, in fact. He came secretly.”

Alyosha sat plunged in thought, considering something. The news evidently
impressed him.

“Ivan doesn’t talk to me of Mitya’s case,” he said slowly. “He’s said very
little to me these last two months. And whenever I go to see him, he seems
vexed at my coming, so I’ve not been to him for the last three weeks.
H’m!... if he was there a week ago ... there certainly has been a change
in Mitya this week.”

“There has been a change,” Grushenka assented quickly. “They have a
secret, they have a secret! Mitya told me himself there was a secret, and
such a secret that Mitya can’t rest. Before then, he was cheerful—and,
indeed, he is cheerful now—but when he shakes his head like that, you
know, and strides about the room and keeps pulling at the hair on his
right temple with his right hand, I know there is something on his mind
worrying him.... I know! He was cheerful before, though, indeed, he is
cheerful to‐day.”

“But you said he was worried.”

“Yes, he is worried and yet cheerful. He keeps on being irritable for a
minute and then cheerful and then irritable again. And you know, Alyosha,
I am constantly wondering at him—with this awful thing hanging over him,
he sometimes laughs at such trifles as though he were a baby himself.”

“And did he really tell you not to tell me about Ivan? Did he say, ‘Don’t
tell him’?”

“Yes, he told me, ‘Don’t tell him.’ It’s you that Mitya’s most afraid of.
Because it’s a secret: he said himself it was a secret. Alyosha, darling,
go to him and find out what their secret is and come and tell me,”
Grushenka besought him with sudden eagerness. “Set my mind at rest that I
may know the worst that’s in store for me. That’s why I sent for you.”

“You think it’s something to do with you? If it were, he wouldn’t have
told you there was a secret.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he wants to tell me, but doesn’t dare to. He warns
me. There is a secret, he tells me, but he won’t tell me what it is.”

“What do you think yourself?”

“What do I think? It’s the end for me, that’s what I think. They all three
have been plotting my end, for Katerina’s in it. It’s all Katerina, it all
comes from her. She is this and that, and that means that I am not. He
tells me that beforehand—warns me. He is planning to throw me over, that’s
the whole secret. They’ve planned it together, the three of them—Mitya,
Katerina, and Ivan Fyodorovitch. Alyosha, I’ve been wanting to ask you a
long time. A week ago he suddenly told me that Ivan was in love with
Katerina, because he often goes to see her. Did he tell me the truth or
not? Tell me, on your conscience, tell me the worst.”

“I won’t tell you a lie. Ivan is not in love with Katerina Ivanovna, I
think.”

“Oh, that’s what I thought! He is lying to me, shameless deceiver, that’s
what it is! And he was jealous of me just now, so as to put the blame on
me afterwards. He is stupid, he can’t disguise what he is doing; he is so
open, you know.... But I’ll give it to him, I’ll give it to him! ‘You
believe I did it,’ he said. He said that to me, to me. He reproached me
with that! God forgive him! You wait, I’ll make it hot for Katerina at the
trial! I’ll just say a word then ... I’ll tell everything then!”

And again she cried bitterly.

“This I can tell you for certain, Grushenka,” Alyosha said, getting up.
“First, that he loves you, loves you more than any one in the world, and
you only, believe me. I know. I do know. The second thing is that I don’t
want to worm his secret out of him, but if he’ll tell me of himself to‐
day, I shall tell him straight out that I have promised to tell you. Then
I’ll come to you to‐day, and tell you. Only ... I fancy ... Katerina
Ivanovna has nothing to do with it, and that the secret is about something
else. That’s certain. It isn’t likely it’s about Katerina Ivanovna, it
seems to me. Good‐by for now.”

Alyosha shook hands with her. Grushenka was still crying. He saw that she
put little faith in his consolation, but she was better for having had her
sorrow out, for having spoken of it. He was sorry to leave her in such a
state of mind, but he was in haste. He had a great many things to do
still.



Chapter II. The Injured Foot


The first of these things was at the house of Madame Hohlakov, and he
hurried there to get it over as quickly as possible and not be too late
for Mitya. Madame Hohlakov had been slightly ailing for the last three
weeks: her foot had for some reason swollen up, and though she was not in
bed, she lay all day half‐reclining on the couch in her boudoir, in a
fascinating but decorous _déshabillé_. Alyosha had once noted with
innocent amusement that, in spite of her illness, Madame Hohlakov had
begun to be rather dressy—top‐knots, ribbons, loose wrappers, had made
their appearance, and he had an inkling of the reason, though he dismissed
such ideas from his mind as frivolous. During the last two months the
young official, Perhotin, had become a regular visitor at the house.

Alyosha had not called for four days and he was in haste to go straight to
Lise, as it was with her he had to speak, for Lise had sent a maid to him
the previous day, specially asking him to come to her “about something
very important,” a request which, for certain reasons, had interest for
Alyosha. But while the maid went to take his name in to Lise, Madame
Hohlakov heard of his arrival from some one, and immediately sent to beg
him to come to her “just for one minute.” Alyosha reflected that it was
better to accede to the mamma’s request, or else she would be sending down
to Lise’s room every minute that he was there. Madame Hohlakov was lying
on a couch. She was particularly smartly dressed and was evidently in a
state of extreme nervous excitement. She greeted Alyosha with cries of
rapture.

“It’s ages, ages, perfect ages since I’ve seen you! It’s a whole week—only
think of it! Ah, but you were here only four days ago, on Wednesday. You
have come to see Lise. I’m sure you meant to slip into her room on tiptoe,
without my hearing you. My dear, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, if you only
knew how worried I am about her! But of that later, though that’s the most
important thing, of that later. Dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, I trust you
implicitly with my Lise. Since the death of Father Zossima—God rest his
soul!” (she crossed herself)—“I look upon you as a monk, though you look
charming in your new suit. Where did you find such a tailor in these
parts? No, no, that’s not the chief thing—of that later. Forgive me for
sometimes calling you Alyosha; an old woman like me may take liberties,”
she smiled coquettishly; “but that will do later, too. The important thing
is that I shouldn’t forget what is important. Please remind me of it
yourself. As soon as my tongue runs away with me, you just say ‘the
important thing?’ Ach! how do I know now what is of most importance? Ever
since Lise took back her promise—her childish promise, Alexey
Fyodorovitch—to marry you, you’ve realized, of course, that it was only
the playful fancy of a sick child who had been so long confined to her
chair—thank God, she can walk now!... that new doctor Katya sent for from
Moscow for your unhappy brother, who will to‐morrow—But why speak of to‐
morrow? I am ready to die at the very thought of to‐morrow. Ready to die
of curiosity.... That doctor was with us yesterday and saw Lise.... I paid
him fifty roubles for the visit. But that’s not the point, that’s not the
point again. You see, I’m mixing everything up. I am in such a hurry. Why
am I in a hurry? I don’t understand. It’s awful how I seem growing unable
to understand anything. Everything seems mixed up in a sort of tangle. I
am afraid you are so bored you will jump up and run away, and that will be
all I shall see of you. Goodness! Why are we sitting here and no coffee?
Yulia, Glafira, coffee!”

Alyosha made haste to thank her, and said that he had only just had
coffee.

“Where?”

“At Agrafena Alexandrovna’s.”

“At ... at that woman’s? Ah, it’s she has brought ruin on every one. I
know nothing about it though. They say she has become a saint, though it’s
rather late in the day. She had better have done it before. What use is it
now? Hush, hush, Alexey Fyodorovitch, for I have so much to say to you
that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing. This awful trial ... I shall
certainly go, I am making arrangements. I shall be carried there in my
chair; besides I can sit up. I shall have people with me. And, you know, I
am a witness. How shall I speak, how shall I speak? I don’t know what I
shall say. One has to take an oath, hasn’t one?”

“Yes; but I don’t think you will be able to go.”

“I can sit up. Ah, you put me out! Ah! this trial, this savage act, and
then they are all going to Siberia, some are getting married, and all this
so quickly, so quickly, everything’s changing, and at last—nothing. All
grow old and have death to look forward to. Well, so be it! I am weary.
This Katya, _cette charmante personne_, has disappointed all my hopes. Now
she is going to follow one of your brothers to Siberia, and your other
brother is going to follow her, and will live in the nearest town, and
they will all torment one another. It drives me out of my mind. Worst of
all—the publicity. The story has been told a million times over in all the
papers in Moscow and Petersburg. Ah! yes, would you believe it, there’s a
paragraph that I was ‘a dear friend’ of your brother’s ——, I can’t repeat
the horrid word. Just fancy, just fancy!”

“Impossible! Where was the paragraph? What did it say?”

“I’ll show you directly. I got the paper and read it yesterday. Here, in
the Petersburg paper _Gossip_. The paper began coming out this year. I am
awfully fond of gossip, and I take it in, and now it pays me out—this is
what gossip comes to! Here it is, here, this passage. Read it.”

And she handed Alyosha a sheet of newspaper which had been under her
pillow.

It was not exactly that she was upset, she seemed overwhelmed and perhaps
everything really was mixed up in a tangle in her head. The paragraph was
very typical, and must have been a great shock to her, but, fortunately
perhaps, she was unable to keep her mind fixed on any one subject at that
moment, and so might race off in a minute to something else and quite
forget the newspaper.

Alyosha was well aware that the story of the terrible case had spread all
over Russia. And, good heavens! what wild rumors about his brother, about
the Karamazovs, and about himself he had read in the course of those two
months, among other equally credible items! One paper had even stated that
he had gone into a monastery and become a monk, in horror at his brother’s
crime. Another contradicted this, and stated that he and his elder, Father
Zossima, had broken into the monastery chest and “made tracks from the
monastery.” The present paragraph in the paper _Gossip_ was under the
heading, “The Karamazov Case at Skotoprigonyevsk.” (That, alas! was the
name of our little town. I had hitherto kept it concealed.) It was brief,
and Madame Hohlakov was not directly mentioned in it. No names appeared,
in fact. It was merely stated that the criminal, whose approaching trial
was making such a sensation—retired army captain, an idle swaggerer, and
reactionary bully—was continually involved in amorous intrigues, and
particularly popular with certain ladies “who were pining in solitude.”
One such lady, a pining widow, who tried to seem young though she had a
grown‐up daughter, was so fascinated by him that only two hours before the
crime she offered him three thousand roubles, on condition that he would
elope with her to the gold mines. But the criminal, counting on escaping
punishment, had preferred to murder his father to get the three thousand
rather than go off to Siberia with the middle‐aged charms of his pining
lady. This playful paragraph finished, of course, with an outburst of
generous indignation at the wickedness of parricide and at the lately
abolished institution of serfdom. Reading it with curiosity, Alyosha
folded up the paper and handed it back to Madame Hohlakov.

“Well, that must be me,” she hurried on again. “Of course I am meant.
Scarcely more than an hour before, I suggested gold mines to him, and here
they talk of ‘middle‐aged charms’ as though that were my motive! He writes
that out of spite! God Almighty forgive him for the middle‐aged charms, as
I forgive him! You know it’s— Do you know who it is? It’s your friend
Rakitin.”

“Perhaps,” said Alyosha, “though I’ve heard nothing about it.”

“It’s he, it’s he! No ‘perhaps’ about it. You know I turned him out of the
house.... You know all that story, don’t you?”

“I know that you asked him not to visit you for the future, but why it
was, I haven’t heard ... from you, at least.”

“Ah, then you’ve heard it from him! He abuses me, I suppose, abuses me
dreadfully?”

“Yes, he does; but then he abuses every one. But why you’ve given him up I
haven’t heard from him either. I meet him very seldom now, indeed. We are
not friends.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you all about it. There’s no help for it, I’ll
confess, for there is one point in which I was perhaps to blame. Only a
little, little point, so little that perhaps it doesn’t count. You see, my
dear boy”—Madame Hohlakov suddenly looked arch and a charming, though
enigmatic, smile played about her lips—“you see, I suspect ... You must
forgive me, Alyosha. I am like a mother to you.... No, no; quite the
contrary. I speak to you now as though you were my father—mother’s quite
out of place. Well, it’s as though I were confessing to Father Zossima,
that’s just it. I called you a monk just now. Well, that poor young man,
your friend, Rakitin (Mercy on us! I can’t be angry with him. I feel
cross, but not very), that frivolous young man, would you believe it,
seems to have taken it into his head to fall in love with me. I only
noticed it later. At first—a month ago—he only began to come oftener to
see me, almost every day; though, of course, we were acquainted before. I
knew nothing about it ... and suddenly it dawned upon me, and I began to
notice things with surprise. You know, two months ago, that modest,
charming, excellent young man, Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin, who’s in the
service here, began to be a regular visitor at the house. You met him here
ever so many times yourself. And he is an excellent, earnest young man,
isn’t he? He comes once every three days, not every day (though I should
be glad to see him every day), and always so well dressed. Altogether, I
love young people, Alyosha, talented, modest, like you, and he has almost
the mind of a statesman, he talks so charmingly, and I shall certainly,
certainly try and get promotion for him. He is a future diplomat. On that
awful day he almost saved me from death by coming in the night. And your
friend Rakitin comes in such boots, and always stretches them out on the
carpet.... He began hinting at his feelings, in fact, and one day, as he
was going, he squeezed my hand terribly hard. My foot began to swell
directly after he pressed my hand like that. He had met Pyotr Ilyitch here
before, and would you believe it, he is always gibing at him, growling at
him, for some reason. I simply looked at the way they went on together and
laughed inwardly. So I was sitting here alone—no, I was laid up then.
Well, I was lying here alone and suddenly Rakitin comes in, and only
fancy! brought me some verses of his own composition—a short poem, on my
bad foot: that is, he described my foot in a poem. Wait a minute—how did
it go?


    A captivating little foot.


It began somehow like that. I can never remember poetry. I’ve got it here.
I’ll show it to you later. But it’s a charming thing—charming; and, you
know, it’s not only about the foot, it had a good moral, too, a charming
idea, only I’ve forgotten it; in fact, it was just the thing for an album.
So, of course, I thanked him, and he was evidently flattered. I’d hardly
had time to thank him when in comes Pyotr Ilyitch, and Rakitin suddenly
looked as black as night. I could see that Pyotr Ilyitch was in the way,
for Rakitin certainly wanted to say something after giving me the verses.
I had a presentiment of it; but Pyotr Ilyitch came in. I showed Pyotr
Ilyitch the verses and didn’t say who was the author. But I am convinced
that he guessed, though he won’t own it to this day, and declares he had
no idea. But he says that on purpose. Pyotr Ilyitch began to laugh at
once, and fell to criticizing it. ‘Wretched doggerel,’ he said they were,
‘some divinity student must have written them,’ and with such vehemence,
such vehemence! Then, instead of laughing, your friend flew into a rage.
‘Good gracious!’ I thought, ‘they’ll fly at each other.’ ‘It was I who
wrote them,’ said he. ‘I wrote them as a joke,’ he said, ‘for I think it
degrading to write verses.... But they are good poetry. They want to put a
monument to your Pushkin for writing about women’s feet, while I wrote
with a moral purpose, and you,’ said he, ‘are an advocate of serfdom.
You’ve no humane ideas,’ said he. ‘You have no modern enlightened
feelings, you are uninfluenced by progress, you are a mere official,’ he
said, ‘and you take bribes.’ Then I began screaming and imploring them.
And, you know, Pyotr Ilyitch is anything but a coward. He at once took up
the most gentlemanly tone, looked at him sarcastically, listened, and
apologized. ‘I’d no idea,’ said he. ‘I shouldn’t have said it, if I had
known. I should have praised it. Poets are all so irritable,’ he said. In
short, he laughed at him under cover of the most gentlemanly tone. He
explained to me afterwards that it was all sarcastic. I thought he was in
earnest. Only as I lay there, just as before you now, I thought, ‘Would
it, or would it not, be the proper thing for me to turn Rakitin out for
shouting so rudely at a visitor in my house?’ And, would you believe it, I
lay here, shut my eyes, and wondered, would it be the proper thing or not.
I kept worrying and worrying, and my heart began to beat, and I couldn’t
make up my mind whether to make an outcry or not. One voice seemed to be
telling me, ‘Speak,’ and the other ‘No, don’t speak.’ And no sooner had
the second voice said that than I cried out, and fainted. Of course, there
was a fuss. I got up suddenly and said to Rakitin, ‘It’s painful for me to
say it, but I don’t wish to see you in my house again.’ So I turned him
out. Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch, I know myself I did wrong. I was putting it
on. I wasn’t angry with him at all, really; but I suddenly fancied—that
was what did it—that it would be such a fine scene.... And yet, believe
me, it was quite natural, for I really shed tears and cried for several
days afterwards, and then suddenly, one afternoon, I forgot all about it.
So it’s a fortnight since he’s been here, and I kept wondering whether he
would come again. I wondered even yesterday, then suddenly last night came
this _Gossip_. I read it and gasped. Who could have written it? He must
have written it. He went home, sat down, wrote it on the spot, sent it,
and they put it in. It was a fortnight ago, you see. But, Alyosha, it’s
awful how I keep talking and don’t say what I want to say. Ah! the words
come of themselves!”

“It’s very important for me to be in time to see my brother to‐day,”
Alyosha faltered.

“To be sure, to be sure! You bring it all back to me. Listen, what is an
aberration?”

“What aberration?” asked Alyosha, wondering.

“In the legal sense. An aberration in which everything is pardonable.
Whatever you do, you will be acquitted at once.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you. This Katya ... Ah! she is a charming, charming creature,
only I never can make out who it is she is in love with. She was with me
some time ago and I couldn’t get anything out of her. Especially as she
won’t talk to me except on the surface now. She is always talking about my
health and nothing else, and she takes up such a tone with me, too. I
simply said to myself, ‘Well, so be it. I don’t care’... Oh, yes. I was
talking of aberration. This doctor has come. You know a doctor has come?
Of course, you know it—the one who discovers madmen. You wrote for him.
No, it wasn’t you, but Katya. It’s all Katya’s doing. Well, you see, a man
may be sitting perfectly sane and suddenly have an aberration. He may be
conscious and know what he is doing and yet be in a state of aberration.
And there’s no doubt that Dmitri Fyodorovitch was suffering from
aberration. They found out about aberration as soon as the law courts were
reformed. It’s all the good effect of the reformed law courts. The doctor
has been here and questioned me about that evening, about the gold mines.
‘How did he seem then?’ he asked me. He must have been in a state of
aberration. He came in shouting, ‘Money, money, three thousand! Give me
three thousand!’ and then went away and immediately did the murder. ‘I
don’t want to murder him,’ he said, and he suddenly went and murdered him.
That’s why they’ll acquit him, because he struggled against it and yet he
murdered him.”

“But he didn’t murder him,” Alyosha interrupted rather sharply. He felt
more and more sick with anxiety and impatience.

“Yes, I know it was that old man Grigory murdered him.”

“Grigory?” cried Alyosha.

“Yes, yes; it was Grigory. He lay as Dmitri Fyodorovitch struck him down,
and then got up, saw the door open, went in and killed Fyodor Pavlovitch.”

“But why, why?”

“Suffering from aberration. When he recovered from the blow Dmitri
Fyodorovitch gave him on the head, he was suffering from aberration; he
went and committed the murder. As for his saying he didn’t, he very likely
doesn’t remember. Only, you know, it’ll be better, ever so much better, if
Dmitri Fyodorovitch murdered him. And that’s how it must have been, though
I say it was Grigory. It certainly was Dmitri Fyodorovitch, and that’s
better, ever so much better! Oh! not better that a son should have killed
his father, I don’t defend that. Children ought to honor their parents,
and yet it would be better if it were he, as you’d have nothing to cry
over then, for he did it when he was unconscious or rather when he was
conscious, but did not know what he was doing. Let them acquit him—that’s
so humane, and would show what a blessing reformed law courts are. I knew
nothing about it, but they say they have been so a long time. And when I
heard it yesterday, I was so struck by it that I wanted to send for you at
once. And if he is acquitted, make him come straight from the law courts
to dinner with me, and I’ll have a party of friends, and we’ll drink to
the reformed law courts. I don’t believe he’d be dangerous; besides, I’ll
invite a great many friends, so that he could always be led out if he did
anything. And then he might be made a justice of the peace or something in
another town, for those who have been in trouble themselves make the best
judges. And, besides, who isn’t suffering from aberration nowadays?—you,
I, all of us are in a state of aberration, and there are ever so many
examples of it: a man sits singing a song, suddenly something annoys him,
he takes a pistol and shoots the first person he comes across, and no one
blames him for it. I read that lately, and all the doctors confirm it. The
doctors are always confirming; they confirm anything. Why, my Lise is in a
state of aberration. She made me cry again yesterday, and the day before,
too, and to‐day I suddenly realized that it’s all due to aberration. Oh,
Lise grieves me so! I believe she’s quite mad. Why did she send for you?
Did she send for you or did you come of yourself?”

“Yes, she sent for me, and I am just going to her.” Alyosha got up
resolutely.

“Oh, my dear, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, perhaps that’s what’s most
important,” Madame Hohlakov cried, suddenly bursting into tears. “God
knows I trust Lise to you with all my heart, and it’s no matter her
sending for you on the sly, without telling her mother. But forgive me, I
can’t trust my daughter so easily to your brother Ivan Fyodorovitch,
though I still consider him the most chivalrous young man. But only fancy,
he’s been to see Lise and I knew nothing about it!”

“How? What? When?” Alyosha was exceedingly surprised. He had not sat down
again and listened standing.

“I will tell you; that’s perhaps why I asked you to come, for I don’t know
now why I did ask you to come. Well, Ivan Fyodorovitch has been to see me
twice, since he came back from Moscow. First time he came as a friend to
call on me, and the second time Katya was here and he came because he
heard she was here. I didn’t, of course, expect him to come often, knowing
what a lot he has to do as it is, _vous comprenez, cette affaire et la
mort terrible de votre papa_. But I suddenly heard he’d been here again,
not to see me but to see Lise. That’s six days ago now. He came, stayed
five minutes, and went away. And I didn’t hear of it till three days
afterwards, from Glafira, so it was a great shock to me. I sent for Lise
directly. She laughed. ‘He thought you were asleep,’ she said, ‘and came
in to me to ask after your health.’ Of course, that’s how it happened. But
Lise, Lise, mercy on us, how she distresses me! Would you believe it, one
night, four days ago, just after you saw her last time, and had gone away,
she suddenly had a fit, screaming, shrieking, hysterics! Why is it I never
have hysterics? Then, next day another fit, and the same thing on the
third, and yesterday too, and then yesterday that aberration. She suddenly
screamed out, ‘I hate Ivan Fyodorovitch. I insist on your never letting
him come to the house again.’ I was struck dumb at these amazing words,
and answered, ‘On what grounds could I refuse to see such an excellent
young man, a young man of such learning too, and so unfortunate?’—for all
this business is a misfortune, isn’t it? She suddenly burst out laughing
at my words, and so rudely, you know. Well, I was pleased; I thought I had
amused her and the fits would pass off, especially as I wanted to refuse
to see Ivan Fyodorovitch anyway on account of his strange visits without
my knowledge, and meant to ask him for an explanation. But early this
morning Lise waked up and flew into a passion with Yulia and, would you
believe it, slapped her in the face. That’s monstrous; I am always polite
to my servants. And an hour later she was hugging Yulia’s feet and kissing
them. She sent a message to me that she wasn’t coming to me at all, and
would never come and see me again, and when I dragged myself down to her,
she rushed to kiss me, crying, and as she kissed me, she pushed me out of
the room without saying a word, so I couldn’t find out what was the
matter. Now, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, I rest all my hopes on you, and, of
course, my whole life is in your hands. I simply beg you to go to Lise and
find out everything from her, as you alone can, and come back and tell
me—me, her mother, for you understand it will be the death of me, simply
the death of me, if this goes on, or else I shall run away. I can stand no
more. I have patience; but I may lose patience, and then ... then
something awful will happen. Ah, dear me! At last, Pyotr Ilyitch!” cried
Madame Hohlakov, beaming all over as she saw Perhotin enter the room. “You
are late, you are late! Well, sit down, speak, put us out of suspense.
What does the counsel say. Where are you off to, Alexey Fyodorovitch?”

“To Lise.”

“Oh, yes. You won’t forget, you won’t forget what I asked you? It’s a
question of life and death!”

“Of course, I won’t forget, if I can ... but I am so late,” muttered
Alyosha, beating a hasty retreat.

“No, be sure, be sure to come in; don’t say ‘If you can.’ I shall die if
you don’t,” Madame Hohlakov called after him, but Alyosha had already left
the room.



Chapter III. A Little Demon


Going in to Lise, he found her half reclining in the invalid‐chair, in
which she had been wheeled when she was unable to walk. She did not move
to meet him, but her sharp, keen eyes were simply riveted on his face.
There was a feverish look in her eyes, her face was pale and yellow.
Alyosha was amazed at the change that had taken place in her in three
days. She was positively thinner. She did not hold out her hand to him. He
touched the thin, long fingers which lay motionless on her dress, then he
sat down facing her, without a word.

“I know you are in a hurry to get to the prison,” Lise said curtly, “and
mamma’s kept you there for hours; she’s just been telling you about me and
Yulia.”

“How do you know?” asked Alyosha.

“I’ve been listening. Why do you stare at me? I want to listen and I do
listen, there’s no harm in that. I don’t apologize.”

“You are upset about something?”

“On the contrary, I am very happy. I’ve only just been reflecting for the
thirtieth time what a good thing it is I refused you and shall not be your
wife. You are not fit to be a husband. If I were to marry you and give you
a note to take to the man I loved after you, you’d take it and be sure to
give it to him and bring an answer back, too. If you were forty, you would
still go on taking my love‐letters for me.”

She suddenly laughed.

“There is something spiteful and yet open‐hearted about you,” Alyosha
smiled to her.

“The open‐heartedness consists in my not being ashamed of myself with you.
What’s more, I don’t want to feel ashamed with you, just with you.
Alyosha, why is it I don’t respect you? I am very fond of you, but I don’t
respect you. If I respected you, I shouldn’t talk to you without shame,
should I?”

“No.”

“But do you believe that I am not ashamed with you?”

“No, I don’t believe it.”

Lise laughed nervously again; she spoke rapidly.

“I sent your brother, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, some sweets in prison. Alyosha,
you know, you are quite pretty! I shall love you awfully for having so
quickly allowed me not to love you.”

“Why did you send for me to‐day, Lise?”

“I wanted to tell you of a longing I have. I should like some one to
torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and go away. I don’t
want to be happy.”

“You are in love with disorder?”

“Yes, I want disorder. I keep wanting to set fire to the house. I keep
imagining how I’ll creep up and set fire to the house on the sly; it must
be on the sly. They’ll try to put it out, but it’ll go on burning. And I
shall know and say nothing. Ah, what silliness! And how bored I am!”

She waved her hand with a look of repulsion.

“It’s your luxurious life,” said Alyosha, softly.

“Is it better, then, to be poor?”

“Yes, it is better.”

“That’s what your monk taught you. That’s not true. Let me be rich and all
the rest poor, I’ll eat sweets and drink cream and not give any to any one
else. Ach, don’t speak, don’t say anything,” she shook her hand at him,
though Alyosha had not opened his mouth. “You’ve told me all that before,
I know it all by heart. It bores me. If I am ever poor, I shall murder
somebody, and even if I am rich, I may murder some one, perhaps—why do
nothing! But do you know, I should like to reap, cut the rye? I’ll marry
you, and you shall become a peasant, a real peasant; we’ll keep a colt,
shall we? Do you know Kalganov?”

“Yes.”

“He is always wandering about, dreaming. He says, ‘Why live in real life?
It’s better to dream. One can dream the most delightful things, but real
life is a bore.’ But he’ll be married soon for all that; he’s been making
love to me already. Can you spin tops?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’s just like a top: he wants to be wound up and set spinning and
then to be lashed, lashed, lashed with a whip. If I marry him, I’ll keep
him spinning all his life. You are not ashamed to be with me?”

“No.”

“You are awfully cross, because I don’t talk about holy things. I don’t
want to be holy. What will they do to one in the next world for the
greatest sin? You must know all about that.”

“God will censure you.” Alyosha was watching her steadily.

“That’s just what I should like. I would go up and they would censure me,
and I would burst out laughing in their faces. I should dreadfully like to
set fire to the house, Alyosha, to our house; you still don’t believe me?”

“Why? There are children of twelve years old, who have a longing to set
fire to something and they do set things on fire, too. It’s a sort of
disease.”

“That’s not true, that’s not true; there may be children, but that’s not
what I mean.”

“You take evil for good; it’s a passing crisis, it’s the result of your
illness, perhaps.”

“You do despise me, though! It’s simply that I don’t want to do good, I
want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness.”

“Why do evil?”

“So that everything might be destroyed. Ah, how nice it would be if
everything were destroyed! You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think of doing a
fearful lot of harm and everything bad, and I should do it for a long
while on the sly and suddenly every one would find it out. Every one will
stand round and point their fingers at me and I would look at them all.
That would be awfully nice. Why would it be so nice, Alyosha?”

“I don’t know. It’s a craving to destroy something good or, as you say, to
set fire to something. It happens sometimes.”

“I not only say it, I shall do it.”

“I believe you.”

“Ah, how I love you for saying you believe me. And you are not lying one
little bit. But perhaps you think that I am saying all this on purpose to
annoy you?”

“No, I don’t think that ... though perhaps there is a little desire to do
that in it, too.”

“There is a little. I never can tell lies to you,” she declared, with a
strange fire in her eyes.

What struck Alyosha above everything was her earnestness. There was not a
trace of humor or jesting in her face now, though, in old days, fun and
gayety never deserted her even at her most “earnest” moments.

“There are moments when people love crime,” said Alyosha thoughtfully.

“Yes, yes! You have uttered my thought; they love crime, every one loves
crime, they love it always, not at some ‘moments.’ You know, it’s as
though people have made an agreement to lie about it and have lied about
it ever since. They all declare that they hate evil, but secretly they all
love it.”

“And are you still reading nasty books?”

“Yes, I am. Mamma reads them and hides them under her pillow and I steal
them.”

“Aren’t you ashamed to destroy yourself?”

“I want to destroy myself. There’s a boy here, who lay down between the
railway lines when the train was passing. Lucky fellow! Listen, your
brother is being tried now for murdering his father and every one loves
his having killed his father.”

“Loves his having killed his father?”

“Yes, loves it; every one loves it! Everybody says it’s so awful, but
secretly they simply love it. I for one love it.”

“There is some truth in what you say about every one,” said Alyosha
softly.

“Oh, what ideas you have!” Lise shrieked in delight. “And you a monk, too!
You wouldn’t believe how I respect you, Alyosha, for never telling lies.
Oh, I must tell you a funny dream of mine. I sometimes dream of devils.
It’s night; I am in my room with a candle and suddenly there are devils
all over the place, in all the corners, under the table, and they open the
doors; there’s a crowd of them behind the doors and they want to come and
seize me. And they are just coming, just seizing me. But I suddenly cross
myself and they all draw back, though they don’t go away altogether, they
stand at the doors and in the corners, waiting. And suddenly I have a
frightful longing to revile God aloud, and so I begin, and then they come
crowding back to me, delighted, and seize me again and I cross myself
again and they all draw back. It’s awful fun. it takes one’s breath away.”

“I’ve had the same dream, too,” said Alyosha suddenly.

“Really?” cried Lise, surprised. “I say, Alyosha, don’t laugh, that’s
awfully important. Could two different people have the same dream?”

“It seems they can.”

“Alyosha, I tell you, it’s awfully important,” Lise went on, with really
excessive amazement. “It’s not the dream that’s important, but your having
the same dream as me. You never lie to me, don’t lie now: is it true? You
are not laughing?”

“It’s true.”

Lise seemed extraordinarily impressed and for half a minute she was
silent.

“Alyosha, come and see me, come and see me more often,” she said suddenly,
in a supplicating voice.

“I’ll always come to see you, all my life,” answered Alyosha firmly.

“You are the only person I can talk to, you know,” Lise began again. “I
talk to no one but myself and you. Only you in the whole world. And to you
more readily than to myself. And I am not a bit ashamed with you, not a
bit. Alyosha, why am I not ashamed with you, not a bit? Alyosha, is it
true that at Easter the Jews steal a child and kill it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a book here in which I read about the trial of a Jew, who took a
child of four years old and cut off the fingers from both hands, and then
crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him and crucified him, and
afterwards, when he was tried, he said that the child died soon, within
four hours. That was ‘soon’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and
he stood admiring it. That’s nice!”

“Nice?”

“Nice; I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang
there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple _compote_. I
am awfully fond of pineapple _compote_. Do you like it?”

Alyosha looked at her in silence. Her pale, sallow face was suddenly
contorted, her eyes burned.

“You know, when I read about that Jew I shook with sobs all night. I kept
fancying how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four years old
understands, you know), and all the while the thought of pineapple
_compote_ haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person,
begging him _particularly_ to come and see me. He came and I suddenly told
him all about the child and the pineapple _compote_. _All_ about it,
_all_, and said that it was nice. He laughed and said it really was nice.
Then he got up and went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he
despise me? Did he despise me? Tell me, tell me, Alyosha, did he despise
me or not?” She sat up on the couch, with flashing eyes.

“Tell me,” Alyosha asked anxiously, “did you send for that person?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you send him a letter?”

“Yes.”

“Simply to ask about that, about that child?”

“No, not about that at all. But when he came, I asked him about that at
once. He answered, laughed, got up and went away.”

“That person behaved honorably,” Alyosha murmured.

“And did he despise me? Did he laugh at me?”

“No, for perhaps he believes in the pineapple _compote_ himself. He is
very ill now, too, Lise.”

“Yes, he does believe in it,” said Lise, with flashing eyes.

“He doesn’t despise any one,” Alyosha went on. “Only he does not believe
any one. If he doesn’t believe in people, of course, he does despise
them.”

“Then he despises me, me?”

“You, too.”

“Good,” Lise seemed to grind her teeth. “When he went out laughing, I felt
that it was nice to be despised. The child with fingers cut off is nice,
and to be despised is nice....”

And she laughed in Alyosha’s face, a feverish malicious laugh.

“Do you know, Alyosha, do you know, I should like—Alyosha, save me!” She
suddenly jumped from the couch, rushed to him and seized him with both
hands. “Save me!” she almost groaned. “Is there any one in the world I
could tell what I’ve told you? I’ve told you the truth, the truth. I shall
kill myself, because I loathe everything! I don’t want to live, because I
loathe everything! I loathe everything, everything. Alyosha, why don’t you
love me in the least?” she finished in a frenzy.

“But I do love you!” answered Alyosha warmly.

“And will you weep over me, will you?”

“Yes.”

“Not because I won’t be your wife, but simply weep for me?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you! It’s only your tears I want. Every one else may punish me and
trample me under foot, every one, every one, not excepting _any one_. For
I don’t love any one. Do you hear, not any one! On the contrary, I hate
him! Go, Alyosha; it’s time you went to your brother”; she tore herself
away from him suddenly.

“How can I leave you like this?” said Alyosha, almost in alarm.

“Go to your brother, the prison will be shut; go, here’s your hat. Give my
love to Mitya, go, go!”

And she almost forcibly pushed Alyosha out of the door. He looked at her
with pained surprise, when he was suddenly aware of a letter in his right
hand, a tiny letter folded up tight and sealed. He glanced at it and
instantly read the address, “To Ivan Fyodorovitch Karamazov.” He looked
quickly at Lise. Her face had become almost menacing.

“Give it to him, you must give it to him!” she ordered him, trembling and
beside herself. “To‐day, at once, or I’ll poison myself! That’s why I sent
for you.”

And she slammed the door quickly. The bolt clicked. Alyosha put the note
in his pocket and went straight downstairs, without going back to Madame
Hohlakov; forgetting her, in fact. As soon as Alyosha had gone, Lise
unbolted the door, opened it a little, put her finger in the crack and
slammed the door with all her might, pinching her finger. Ten seconds
after, releasing her finger, she walked softly, slowly to her chair, sat
up straight in it and looked intently at her blackened finger and at the
blood that oozed from under the nail. Her lips were quivering and she kept
whispering rapidly to herself:

“I am a wretch, wretch, wretch, wretch!”



Chapter IV. A Hymn And A Secret


It was quite late (days are short in November) when Alyosha rang at the
prison gate. It was beginning to get dusk. But Alyosha knew that he would
be admitted without difficulty. Things were managed in our little town, as
everywhere else. At first, of course, on the conclusion of the preliminary
inquiry, relations and a few other persons could only obtain interviews
with Mitya by going through certain inevitable formalities. But later,
though the formalities were not relaxed, exceptions were made for some, at
least, of Mitya’s visitors. So much so, that sometimes the interviews with
the prisoner in the room set aside for the purpose were practically
_tête‐à‐tête_.

These exceptions, however, were few in number; only Grushenka, Alyosha and
Rakitin were treated like this. But the captain of the police, Mihail
Mihailovitch, was very favorably disposed to Grushenka. His abuse of her
at Mokroe weighed on the old man’s conscience, and when he learned the
whole story, he completely changed his view of her. And strange to say,
though he was firmly persuaded of his guilt, yet after Mitya was once in
prison, the old man came to take a more and more lenient view of him. “He
was a man of good heart, perhaps,” he thought, “who had come to grief from
drinking and dissipation.” His first horror had been succeeded by pity. As
for Alyosha, the police captain was very fond of him and had known him for
a long time. Rakitin, who had of late taken to coming very often to see
the prisoner, was one of the most intimate acquaintances of the “police
captain’s young ladies,” as he called them, and was always hanging about
their house. He gave lessons in the house of the prison superintendent,
too, who, though scrupulous in the performance of his duties, was a kind‐
hearted old man. Alyosha, again, had an intimate acquaintance of long
standing with the superintendent, who was fond of talking to him,
generally on sacred subjects. He respected Ivan Fyodorovitch, and stood in
awe of his opinion, though he was a great philosopher himself; “self‐
taught,” of course. But Alyosha had an irresistible attraction for him.
During the last year the old man had taken to studying the Apocryphal
Gospels, and constantly talked over his impressions with his young friend.
He used to come and see him in the monastery and discussed for hours
together with him and with the monks. So even if Alyosha were late at the
prison, he had only to go to the superintendent and everything was made
easy. Besides, every one in the prison, down to the humblest warder, had
grown used to Alyosha. The sentry, of course, did not trouble him so long
as the authorities were satisfied.

When Mitya was summoned from his cell, he always went downstairs, to the
place set aside for interviews. As Alyosha entered the room he came upon
Rakitin, who was just taking leave of Mitya. They were both talking
loudly. Mitya was laughing heartily as he saw him out, while Rakitin
seemed grumbling. Rakitin did not like meeting Alyosha, especially of
late. He scarcely spoke to him, and bowed to him stiffly. Seeing Alyosha
enter now, he frowned and looked away, as though he were entirely absorbed
in buttoning his big, warm, fur‐trimmed overcoat. Then he began looking at
once for his umbrella.

“I must mind not to forget my belongings,” he muttered, simply to say
something.

“Mind you don’t forget other people’s belongings,” said Mitya, as a joke,
and laughed at once at his own wit. Rakitin fired up instantly.

“You’d better give that advice to your own family, who’ve always been a
slave‐driving lot, and not to Rakitin,” he cried, suddenly trembling with
anger.

“What’s the matter? I was joking,” cried Mitya. “Damn it all! They are all
like that,” he turned to Alyosha, nodding towards Rakitin’s hurriedly
retreating figure. “He was sitting here, laughing and cheerful, and all at
once he boils up like that. He didn’t even nod to you. Have you broken
with him completely? Why are you so late? I’ve not been simply waiting,
but thirsting for you the whole morning. But never mind. We’ll make up for
it now.”

“Why does he come here so often? Surely you are not such great friends?”
asked Alyosha. He, too, nodded at the door through which Rakitin had
disappeared.

“Great friends with Rakitin? No, not as much as that. Is it likely—a pig
like that? He considers I am ... a blackguard. They can’t understand a
joke either, that’s the worst of such people. They never understand a
joke, and their souls are dry, dry and flat; they remind me of prison
walls when I was first brought here. But he is a clever fellow, very
clever. Well, Alexey, it’s all over with me now.”

He sat down on the bench and made Alyosha sit down beside him.

“Yes, the trial’s to‐morrow. Are you so hopeless, brother?” Alyosha said,
with an apprehensive feeling.

“What are you talking about?” said Mitya, looking at him rather
uncertainly. “Oh, you mean the trial! Damn it all! Till now we’ve been
talking of things that don’t matter, about this trial, but I haven’t said
a word to you about the chief thing. Yes, the trial is to‐morrow; but it
wasn’t the trial I meant, when I said it was all over with me. Why do you
look at me so critically?”

“What do you mean, Mitya?”

“Ideas, ideas, that’s all! Ethics! What is ethics?”

“Ethics?” asked Alyosha, wondering.

“Yes; is it a science?”

“Yes, there is such a science ... but ... I confess I can’t explain to you
what sort of science it is.”

“Rakitin knows. Rakitin knows a lot, damn him! He’s not going to be a
monk. He means to go to Petersburg. There he’ll go in for criticism of an
elevating tendency. Who knows, he may be of use and make his own career,
too. Ough! they are first‐rate, these people, at making a career! Damn
ethics, I am done for, Alexey, I am, you man of God! I love you more than
any one. It makes my heart yearn to look at you. Who was Karl Bernard?”

“Karl Bernard?” Alyosha was surprised again.

“No, not Karl. Stay, I made a mistake. Claude Bernard. What was he?
Chemist or what?”

“He must be a savant,” answered Alyosha; “but I confess I can’t tell you
much about him, either. I’ve heard of him as a savant, but what sort I
don’t know.”

“Well, damn him, then! I don’t know either,” swore Mitya. “A scoundrel of
some sort, most likely. They are all scoundrels. And Rakitin will make his
way. Rakitin will get on anywhere; he is another Bernard. Ugh, these
Bernards! They are all over the place.”

“But what is the matter?” Alyosha asked insistently.

“He wants to write an article about me, about my case, and so begin his
literary career. That’s what he comes for; he said so himself. He wants to
prove some theory. He wants to say ‘he couldn’t help murdering his father,
he was corrupted by his environment,’ and so on. He explained it all to
me. He is going to put in a tinge of Socialism, he says. But there, damn
the fellow, he can put in a tinge if he likes, I don’t care. He can’t bear
Ivan, he hates him. He’s not fond of you, either. But I don’t turn him
out, for he is a clever fellow. Awfully conceited, though. I said to him
just now, ‘The Karamazovs are not blackguards, but philosophers; for all
true Russians are philosophers, and though you’ve studied, you are not a
philosopher—you are a low fellow.’ He laughed, so maliciously. And I said
to him, ‘_De ideabus non est disputandum_.’ Isn’t that rather good? I can
set up for being a classic, you see!” Mitya laughed suddenly.

“Why is it all over with you? You said so just now,” Alyosha interposed.

“Why is it all over with me? H’m!... The fact of it is ... if you take it
as a whole, I am sorry to lose God—that’s why it is.”

“What do you mean by ‘sorry to lose God’?”

“Imagine: inside, in the nerves, in the head—that is, these nerves are
there in the brain ... (damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the
little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering ... that
is, you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin
quivering, those little tails ... and when they quiver, then an image
appears ... it doesn’t appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes
... and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment—devil
take the moment!—but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it!
That’s why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all
because I’ve got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness.
All that is nonsense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, brother,
and it simply bowled me over. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A
new man’s arising—that I understand.... And yet I am sorry to lose God!”

“Well, that’s a good thing, anyway,” said Alyosha.

“That I am sorry to lose God? It’s chemistry, brother, chemistry! There’s
no help for it, your reverence, you must make way for chemistry. And
Rakitin does dislike God. Ough! doesn’t he dislike Him! That’s the sore
point with all of them. But they conceal it. They tell lies. They pretend.
‘Will you preach this in your reviews?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, well, if I did
it openly, they won’t let it through,’ he said. He laughed. ‘But what will
become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All
things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he
said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said. ‘A clever man
knows his way about, but you’ve put your foot in it, committing a murder,
and now you are rotting in prison.’ He says that to my face! A regular
pig! I used to kick such people out, but now I listen to them. He talks a
lot of sense, too. Writes well. He began reading me an article last week.
I copied out three lines of it. Wait a minute. Here it is.”

Mitya hurriedly pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and read:

“ ‘In order to determine this question, it is above all essential to put
one’s personality in contradiction to one’s reality.’ Do you understand
that?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha. He looked at Mitya and listened to him with
curiosity.

“I don’t understand either. It’s dark and obscure, but intellectual.
‘Every one writes like that now,’ he says, ‘it’s the effect of their
environment.’ They are afraid of the environment. He writes poetry, too,
the rascal. He’s written in honor of Madame Hohlakov’s foot. Ha ha ha!”

“I’ve heard about it,” said Alyosha.

“Have you? And have you heard the poem?”

“No.”

“I’ve got it. Here it is. I’ll read it to you. You don’t know—I haven’t
told you—there’s quite a story about it. He’s a rascal! Three weeks ago he
began to tease me. ‘You’ve got yourself into a mess, like a fool, for the
sake of three thousand, but I’m going to collar a hundred and fifty
thousand. I am going to marry a widow and buy a house in Petersburg.’ And
he told me he was courting Madame Hohlakov. She hadn’t much brains in her
youth, and now at forty she has lost what she had. ‘But she’s awfully
sentimental,’ he says; ‘that’s how I shall get hold of her. When I marry
her, I shall take her to Petersburg and there I shall start a newspaper.’
And his mouth was simply watering, the beast, not for the widow, but for
the hundred and fifty thousand. And he made me believe it. He came to see
me every day. ‘She is coming round,’ he declared. He was beaming with
delight. And then, all of a sudden, he was turned out of the house.
Perhotin’s carrying everything before him, bravo! I could kiss the silly
old noodle for turning him out of the house. And he had written this
doggerel. ‘It’s the first time I’ve soiled my hands with writing poetry,’
he said. ‘It’s to win her heart, so it’s in a good cause. When I get hold
of the silly woman’s fortune, I can be of great social utility.’ They have
this social justification for every nasty thing they do! ‘Anyway it’s
better than your Pushkin’s poetry,’ he said, ‘for I’ve managed to advocate
enlightenment even in that.’ I understand what he means about Pushkin, I
quite see that, if he really was a man of talent and only wrote about
women’s feet. But wasn’t Rakitin stuck up about his doggerel! The vanity
of these fellows! ‘On the convalescence of the swollen foot of the object
of my affections’—he thought of that for a title. He’s a waggish fellow.


    A captivating little foot,
    Though swollen and red and tender!
    The doctors come and plasters put,
    But still they cannot mend her.

    Yet, ’tis not for her foot I dread—
    A theme for Pushkin’s muse more fit—
    It’s not her foot, it is her head:
    I tremble for her loss of wit!

    For as her foot swells, strange to say,
    Her intellect is on the wane—
    Oh, for some remedy I pray
    That may restore both foot and brain!


He is a pig, a regular pig, but he’s very arch, the rascal! And he really
has put in a progressive idea. And wasn’t he angry when she kicked him
out! He was gnashing his teeth!”

“He’s taken his revenge already,” said Alyosha. “He’s written a paragraph
about Madame Hohlakov.”

And Alyosha told him briefly about the paragraph in _Gossip_.

“That’s his doing, that’s his doing!” Mitya assented, frowning. “That’s
him! These paragraphs ... I know ... the insulting things that have been
written about Grushenka, for instance.... And about Katya, too.... H’m!”

He walked across the room with a harassed air.

“Brother, I cannot stay long,” Alyosha said, after a pause. “To‐morrow
will be a great and awful day for you, the judgment of God will be
accomplished ... I am amazed at you, you walk about here, talking of I
don’t know what ...”

“No, don’t be amazed at me,” Mitya broke in warmly. “Am I to talk of that
stinking dog? Of the murderer? We’ve talked enough of him. I don’t want to
say more of the stinking son of Stinking Lizaveta! God will kill him, you
will see. Hush!”

He went up to Alyosha excitedly and kissed him. His eyes glowed.

“Rakitin wouldn’t understand it,” he began in a sort of exaltation; “but
you, you’ll understand it all. That’s why I was thirsting for you. You
see, there’s so much I’ve been wanting to tell you for ever so long, here,
within these peeling walls, but I haven’t said a word about what matters
most; the moment never seems to have come. Now I can wait no longer. I
must pour out my heart to you. Brother, these last two months I’ve found
in myself a new man. A new man has risen up in me. He was hidden in me,
but would never have come to the surface, if it hadn’t been for this blow
from heaven. I am afraid! And what do I care if I spend twenty years in
the mines, breaking ore with a hammer? I am not a bit afraid of that—it’s
something else I am afraid of now: that that new man may leave me. Even
there, in the mines, under‐ground, I may find a human heart in another
convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even
there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen
heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring
up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one
may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them,
hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. Why was it I dreamed
of that ‘babe’ at such a moment? ‘Why is the babe so poor?’ That was a
sign to me at that moment. It’s for the babe I’m going. Because we are all
responsible for all. For all the ‘babes,’ for there are big children as
well as little children. All are ‘babes.’ I go for all, because some one
must go for all. I didn’t kill father, but I’ve got to go. I accept it.
It’s all come to me here, here, within these peeling walls. There are
numbers of them there, hundreds of them underground, with hammers in their
hands. Oh, yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no freedom, but
then, in our great sorrow, we shall rise again to joy, without which man
cannot live nor God exist, for God gives joy: it’s His privilege—a grand
one. Ah, man should be dissolved in prayer! What should I be underground
there without God? Rakitin’s laughing! If they drive God from the earth,
we shall shelter Him underground. One cannot exist in prison without God;
it’s even more impossible than out of prison. And then we men underground
will sing from the bowels of the earth a glorious hymn to God, with Whom
is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!”

Mitya was almost gasping for breath as he uttered his wild speech. He
turned pale, his lips quivered, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Yes, life is full, there is life even underground,” he began again. “You
wouldn’t believe, Alexey, how I want to live now, what a thirst for
existence and consciousness has sprung up in me within these peeling
walls. Rakitin doesn’t understand that; all he cares about is building a
house and letting flats. But I’ve been longing for you. And what is
suffering? I am not afraid of it, even if it were beyond reckoning. I am
not afraid of it now. I was afraid of it before. Do you know, perhaps I
won’t answer at the trial at all.... And I seem to have such strength in
me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be
able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands
of agonies—I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit
alone on a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I
know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun
is there. Alyosha, my angel, all these philosophies are the death of me.
Damn them! Brother Ivan—”

“What of brother Ivan?” interrupted Alyosha, but Mitya did not hear.

“You see, I never had any of these doubts before, but it was all hidden
away in me. It was perhaps just because ideas I did not understand were
surging up in me, that I used to drink and fight and rage. It was to
stifle them in myself, to still them, to smother them. Ivan is not
Rakitin, there is an idea in him. Ivan is a sphinx and is silent; he is
always silent. It’s God that’s worrying me. That’s the only thing that’s
worrying me. What if He doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin’s right—that it’s
an idea made up by men? Then if He doesn’t exist, man is the chief of the
earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good
without God? That’s the question. I always come back to that. For whom is
man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing
the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity without
God. Well, only a sniveling idiot can maintain that. I can’t understand
it. Life’s easy for Rakitin. ‘You’d better think about the extension of
civic rights, or even of keeping down the price of meat. You will show
your love for humanity more simply and directly by that, than by
philosophy.’ I answered him, ‘Well, but you, without a God, are more
likely to raise the price of meat, if it suits you, and make a rouble on
every copeck.’ He lost his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer
me that, Alexey. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a
Chinaman, so it’s a relative thing. Or isn’t it? Is it not relative? A
treacherous question! You won’t laugh if I tell you it’s kept me awake two
nights. I only wonder now how people can live and think nothing about it.
Vanity! Ivan has no God. He has an idea. It’s beyond me. But he is silent.
I believe he is a free‐mason. I asked him, but he is silent. I wanted to
drink from the springs of his soul—he was silent. But once he did drop a
word.”

“What did he say?” Alyosha took it up quickly.

“I said to him, ‘Then everything is lawful, if it is so?’ He frowned.
‘Fyodor Pavlovitch, our papa,’ he said, ‘was a pig, but his ideas were
right enough.’ That was what he dropped. That was all he said. That was
going one better than Rakitin.”

“Yes,” Alyosha assented bitterly. “When was he with you?”

“Of that later; now I must speak of something else. I have said nothing
about Ivan to you before. I put it off to the last. When my business here
is over and the verdict has been given, then I’ll tell you something. I’ll
tell you everything. We’ve something tremendous on hand.... And you shall
be my judge in it. But don’t begin about that now; be silent. You talk of
to‐morrow, of the trial; but, would you believe it, I know nothing about
it.”

“Have you talked to the counsel?”

“What’s the use of the counsel? I told him all about it. He’s a soft,
city‐bred rogue—a Bernard! But he doesn’t believe me—not a bit of it. Only
imagine, he believes I did it. I see it. ‘In that case,’ I asked him, ‘why
have you come to defend me?’ Hang them all! They’ve got a doctor down,
too, want to prove I’m mad. I won’t have that! Katerina Ivanovna wants to
do her ‘duty’ to the end, whatever the strain!” Mitya smiled bitterly.
“The cat! Hard‐hearted creature! She knows that I said of her at Mokroe
that she was a woman of ‘great wrath.’ They repeated it. Yes, the facts
against me have grown numerous as the sands of the sea. Grigory sticks to
his point. Grigory’s honest, but a fool. Many people are honest because
they are fools: that’s Rakitin’s idea. Grigory’s my enemy. And there are
some people who are better as foes than friends. I mean Katerina Ivanovna.
I am afraid, oh, I am afraid she will tell how she bowed to the ground
after that four thousand. She’ll pay it back to the last farthing. I don’t
want her sacrifice; they’ll put me to shame at the trial. I wonder how I
can stand it. Go to her, Alyosha, ask her not to speak of that in the
court, can’t you? But damn it all, it doesn’t matter! I shall get through
somehow. I don’t pity her. It’s her own doing. She deserves what she gets.
I shall have my own story to tell, Alexey.” He smiled bitterly again.
“Only ... only Grusha, Grusha! Good Lord! Why should she have such
suffering to bear?” he exclaimed suddenly, with tears. “Grusha’s killing
me; the thought of her’s killing me, killing me. She was with me just
now....”

“She told me she was very much grieved by you to‐day.”

“I know. Confound my temper! It was jealousy. I was sorry, I kissed her as
she was going. I didn’t ask her forgiveness.”

“Why didn’t you?” exclaimed Alyosha.

Suddenly Mitya laughed almost mirthfully.

“God preserve you, my dear boy, from ever asking forgiveness for a fault
from a woman you love. From one you love especially, however greatly you
may have been in fault. For a woman—devil only knows what to make of a
woman! I know something about them, anyway. But try acknowledging you are
in fault to a woman. Say, ‘I am sorry, forgive me,’ and a shower of
reproaches will follow! Nothing will make her forgive you simply and
directly, she’ll humble you to the dust, bring forward things that have
never happened, recall everything, forget nothing, add something of her
own, and only then forgive you. And even the best, the best of them do it.
She’ll scrape up all the scrapings and load them on your head. They are
ready to flay you alive, I tell you, every one of them, all these angels
without whom we cannot live! I tell you plainly and openly, dear boy,
every decent man ought to be under some woman’s thumb. That’s my
conviction—not conviction, but feeling. A man ought to be magnanimous, and
it’s no disgrace to a man! No disgrace to a hero, not even a Cæsar! But
don’t ever beg her pardon all the same for anything. Remember that rule
given you by your brother Mitya, who’s come to ruin through women. No, I’d
better make it up to Grusha somehow, without begging pardon. I worship
her, Alexey, worship her. Only she doesn’t see it. No, she still thinks I
don’t love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The
past was nothing! In the past it was only those infernal curves of hers
that tortured me, but now I’ve taken all her soul into my soul and through
her I’ve become a man myself. Will they marry us? If they don’t, I shall
die of jealousy. I imagine something every day.... What did she say to you
about me?”

Alyosha repeated all Grushenka had said to him that day. Mitya listened,
made him repeat things, and seemed pleased.

“Then she is not angry at my being jealous?” he exclaimed. “She is a
regular woman! ‘I’ve a fierce heart myself!’ Ah, I love such fierce
hearts, though I can’t bear any one’s being jealous of me. I can’t endure
it. We shall fight. But I shall love her, I shall love her infinitely.
Will they marry us? Do they let convicts marry? That’s the question. And
without her I can’t exist....”

Mitya walked frowning across the room. It was almost dark. He suddenly
seemed terribly worried.

“So there’s a secret, she says, a secret? We have got up a plot against
her, and Katya is mixed up in it, she thinks. No, my good Grushenka,
that’s not it. You are very wide of the mark, in your foolish feminine
way. Alyosha, darling, well, here goes! I’ll tell you our secret!”

He looked round, went close up quickly to Alyosha, who was standing before
him, and whispered to him with an air of mystery, though in reality no one
could hear them: the old warder was dozing in the corner, and not a word
could reach the ears of the soldiers on guard.

“I will tell you all our secret,” Mitya whispered hurriedly. “I meant to
tell you later, for how could I decide on anything without you? You are
everything to me. Though I say that Ivan is superior to us, you are my
angel. It’s your decision will decide it. Perhaps it’s you that is
superior and not Ivan. You see, it’s a question of conscience, question of
the higher conscience—the secret is so important that I can’t settle it
myself, and I’ve put it off till I could speak to you. But anyway it’s too
early to decide now, for we must wait for the verdict. As soon as the
verdict is given, you shall decide my fate. Don’t decide it now. I’ll tell
you now. You listen, but don’t decide. Stand and keep quiet. I won’t tell
you everything. I’ll only tell you the idea, without details, and you keep
quiet. Not a question, not a movement. You agree? But, goodness, what
shall I do with your eyes? I’m afraid your eyes will tell me your
decision, even if you don’t speak. Oo! I’m afraid! Alyosha, listen! Ivan
suggests my _escaping_. I won’t tell you the details: it’s all been
thought out: it can all be arranged. Hush, don’t decide. I should go to
America with Grusha. You know I can’t live without Grusha! What if they
won’t let her follow me to Siberia? Do they let convicts get married? Ivan
thinks not. And without Grusha what should I do there underground with a
hammer? I should only smash my skull with the hammer! But, on the other
hand, my conscience? I should have run away from suffering. A sign has
come, I reject the sign. I have a way of salvation and I turn my back on
it. Ivan says that in America, ‘with the good‐will,’ I can be of more use
than underground. But what becomes of our hymn from underground? What’s
America? America is vanity again! And there’s a lot of swindling in
America, too, I expect. I should have run away from crucifixion! I tell
you, you know, Alexey, because you are the only person who can understand
this. There’s no one else. It’s folly, madness to others, all I’ve told
you of the hymn. They’ll say I’m out of my mind or a fool. I am not out of
my mind and I am not a fool. Ivan understands about the hymn, too. He
understands, only he doesn’t answer—he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t believe
in the hymn. Don’t speak, don’t speak. I see how you look! You have
already decided. Don’t decide, spare me! I can’t live without Grusha. Wait
till after the trial!”

Mitya ended beside himself. He held Alyosha with both hands on his
shoulders, and his yearning, feverish eyes were fixed on his brother’s.

“They don’t let convicts marry, do they?” he repeated for the third time
in a supplicating voice.

Alyosha listened with extreme surprise and was deeply moved.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Is Ivan very keen on it, and whose idea was
it?”

“His, his, and he is very keen on it. He didn’t come to see me at first,
then he suddenly came a week ago and he began about it straight away. He
is awfully keen on it. He doesn’t ask me, but orders me to escape. He
doesn’t doubt of my obeying him, though I showed him all my heart as I
have to you, and told him about the hymn, too. He told me he’d arrange it;
he’s found out about everything. But of that later. He’s simply set on it.
It’s all a matter of money: he’ll pay ten thousand for escape and give me
twenty thousand for America. And he says we can arrange a magnificent
escape for ten thousand.”

“And he told you on no account to tell me?” Alyosha asked again.

“To tell no one, and especially not you; on no account to tell you. He is
afraid, no doubt, that you’ll stand before me as my conscience. Don’t tell
him I told you. Don’t tell him, for anything.”

“You are right,” Alyosha pronounced; “it’s impossible to decide anything
before the trial is over. After the trial you’ll decide of yourself. Then
you’ll find that new man in yourself and he will decide.”

“A new man, or a Bernard who’ll decide _à la_ Bernard, for I believe I’m a
contemptible Bernard myself,” said Mitya, with a bitter grin.

“But, brother, have you no hope then of being acquitted?”

Mitya shrugged his shoulders nervously and shook his head. “Alyosha,
darling, it’s time you were going,” he said, with a sudden haste. “There’s
the superintendent shouting in the yard. He’ll be here directly. We are
late; it’s irregular. Embrace me quickly. Kiss me! Sign me with the cross,
darling, for the cross I have to bear to‐morrow.”

They embraced and kissed.

“Ivan,” said Mitya suddenly, “suggests my escaping; but, of course, he
believes I did it.”

A mournful smile came on to his lips.

“Have you asked him whether he believes it?” asked Alyosha.

“No, I haven’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t the courage. But I
saw it from his eyes. Well, good‐by!”

Once more they kissed hurriedly, and Alyosha was just going out, when
Mitya suddenly called him back.

“Stand facing me! That’s right!” And again he seized Alyosha, putting both
hands on his shoulders. His face became suddenly quite pale, so that it
was dreadfully apparent, even through the gathering darkness. His lips
twitched, his eyes fastened upon Alyosha.

“Alyosha, tell me the whole truth, as you would before God. Do you believe
I did it? Do you, do you in yourself, believe it? The whole truth, don’t
lie!” he cried desperately.

Everything seemed heaving before Alyosha, and he felt something like a
stab at his heart.

“Hush! What do you mean?” he faltered helplessly.

“The whole truth, the whole, don’t lie!” repeated Mitya.

“I’ve never for one instant believed that you were the murderer!” broke in
a shaking voice from Alyosha’s breast, and he raised his right hand in the
air, as though calling God to witness his words.

Mitya’s whole face was lighted up with bliss.

“Thank you!” he articulated slowly, as though letting a sigh escape him
after fainting. “Now you have given me new life. Would you believe it,
till this moment I’ve been afraid to ask you, you, even you. Well, go!
You’ve given me strength for to‐morrow. God bless you! Come, go along!
Love Ivan!” was Mitya’s last word.

Alyosha went out in tears. Such distrustfulness in Mitya, such lack of
confidence even to him, to Alyosha—all this suddenly opened before Alyosha
an unsuspected depth of hopeless grief and despair in the soul of his
unhappy brother. Intense, infinite compassion overwhelmed him instantly.
There was a poignant ache in his torn heart. “Love Ivan!”—he suddenly
recalled Mitya’s words. And he was going to Ivan. He badly wanted to see
Ivan all day. He was as much worried about Ivan as about Mitya, and more
than ever now.



Chapter V. Not You, Not You!


On the way to Ivan he had to pass the house where Katerina Ivanovna was
living. There was light in the windows. He suddenly stopped and resolved
to go in. He had not seen Katerina Ivanovna for more than a week. But now
it struck him that Ivan might be with her, especially on the eve of the
terrible day. Ringing, and mounting the staircase, which was dimly lighted
by a Chinese lantern, he saw a man coming down, and as they met, he
recognized him as his brother. So he was just coming from Katerina
Ivanovna.

“Ah, it’s only you,” said Ivan dryly. “Well, good‐by! You are going to
her?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t advise you to; she’s upset and you’ll upset her more.”

A door was instantly flung open above, and a voice cried suddenly:

“No, no! Alexey Fyodorovitch, have you come from him?”

“Yes, I have been with him.”

“Has he sent me any message? Come up, Alyosha, and you, Ivan Fyodorovitch,
you must come back, you must. Do you hear?”

There was such a peremptory note in Katya’s voice that Ivan, after a
moment’s hesitation, made up his mind to go back with Alyosha.

“She was listening,” he murmured angrily to himself, but Alyosha heard it.

“Excuse my keeping my greatcoat on,” said Ivan, going into the drawing‐
room. “I won’t sit down. I won’t stay more than a minute.”

“Sit down, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” said Katerina Ivanovna, though she
remained standing. She had changed very little during this time, but there
was an ominous gleam in her dark eyes. Alyosha remembered afterwards that
she had struck him as particularly handsome at that moment.

“What did he ask you to tell me?”

“Only one thing,” said Alyosha, looking her straight in the face, “that
you would spare yourself and say nothing at the trial of what” (he was a
little confused) “... passed between you ... at the time of your first
acquaintance ... in that town.”

“Ah! that I bowed down to the ground for that money!” She broke into a
bitter laugh. “Why, is he afraid for me or for himself? He asks me to
spare—whom? Him or myself? Tell me, Alexey Fyodorovitch!”

Alyosha watched her intently, trying to understand her.

“Both yourself and him,” he answered softly.

“I am glad to hear it,” she snapped out maliciously, and she suddenly
blushed.

“You don’t know me yet, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said menacingly. “And I
don’t know myself yet. Perhaps you’ll want to trample me under foot after
my examination to‐morrow.”

“You will give your evidence honorably,” said Alyosha; “that’s all that’s
wanted.”

“Women are often dishonorable,” she snarled. “Only an hour ago I was
thinking I felt afraid to touch that monster ... as though he were a
reptile ... but no, he is still a human being to me! But did he do it? Is
he the murderer?” she cried, all of a sudden, hysterically, turning
quickly to Ivan. Alyosha saw at once that she had asked Ivan that question
before, perhaps only a moment before he came in, and not for the first
time, but for the hundredth, and that they had ended by quarreling.

“I’ve been to see Smerdyakov.... It was you, you who persuaded me that he
murdered his father. It’s only you I believed!” she continued, still
addressing Ivan. He gave her a sort of strained smile. Alyosha started at
her tone. He had not suspected such familiar intimacy between them.

“Well, that’s enough, anyway,” Ivan cut short the conversation. “I am
going. I’ll come to‐morrow.” And turning at once, he walked out of the
room and went straight downstairs.

With an imperious gesture, Katerina Ivanovna seized Alyosha by both hands.

“Follow him! Overtake him! Don’t leave him alone for a minute!” she said,
in a hurried whisper. “He’s mad! Don’t you know that he’s mad? He is in a
fever, nervous fever. The doctor told me so. Go, run after him....”

Alyosha jumped up and ran after Ivan, who was not fifty paces ahead of
him.

“What do you want?” He turned quickly on Alyosha, seeing that he was
running after him. “She told you to catch me up, because I’m mad. I know
it all by heart,” he added irritably.

“She is mistaken, of course; but she is right that you are ill,” said
Alyosha. “I was looking at your face just now. You look very ill, Ivan.”

Ivan walked on without stopping. Alyosha followed him.

“And do you know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, how people do go out of their
mind?” Ivan asked in a voice suddenly quiet, without a trace of
irritation, with a note of the simplest curiosity.

“No, I don’t. I suppose there are all kinds of insanity.”

“And can one observe that one’s going mad oneself?”

“I imagine one can’t see oneself clearly in such circumstances,” Alyosha
answered with surprise.

Ivan paused for half a minute.

“If you want to talk to me, please change the subject,” he said suddenly.

“Oh, while I think of it, I have a letter for you,” said Alyosha timidly,
and he took Lise’s note from his pocket and held it out to Ivan. They were
just under a lamp‐post. Ivan recognized the handwriting at once.

“Ah, from that little demon!” he laughed maliciously, and, without opening
the envelope, he tore it into bits and threw it in the air. The bits were
scattered by the wind.

“She’s not sixteen yet, I believe, and already offering herself,” he said
contemptuously, striding along the street again.

“How do you mean, offering herself?” exclaimed Alyosha.

“As wanton women offer themselves, to be sure.”

“How can you, Ivan, how can you?” Alyosha cried warmly, in a grieved
voice. “She is a child; you are insulting a child! She is ill; she is very
ill, too. She is on the verge of insanity, too, perhaps.... I had hoped to
hear something from you ... that would save her.”

“You’ll hear nothing from me. If she is a child I am not her nurse. Be
quiet, Alexey. Don’t go on about her. I am not even thinking about it.”

They were silent again for a moment.

“She will be praying all night now to the Mother of God to show her how to
act to‐morrow at the trial,” he said sharply and angrily again.

“You ... you mean Katerina Ivanovna?”

“Yes. Whether she’s to save Mitya or ruin him. She’ll pray for light from
above. She can’t make up her mind for herself, you see. She has not had
time to decide yet. She takes me for her nurse, too. She wants me to sing
lullabies to her.”

“Katerina Ivanovna loves you, brother,” said Alyosha sadly.

“Perhaps; but I am not very keen on her.”

“She is suffering. Why do you ... sometimes say things to her that give
her hope?” Alyosha went on, with timid reproach. “I know that you’ve given
her hope. Forgive me for speaking to you like this,” he added.

“I can’t behave to her as I ought—break off altogether and tell her so
straight out,” said Ivan, irritably. “I must wait till sentence is passed
on the murderer. If I break off with her now, she will avenge herself on
me by ruining that scoundrel to‐morrow at the trial, for she hates him and
knows she hates him. It’s all a lie—lie upon lie! As long as I don’t break
off with her, she goes on hoping, and she won’t ruin that monster, knowing
how I want to get him out of trouble. If only that damned verdict would
come!”

The words “murderer” and “monster” echoed painfully in Alyosha’s heart.

“But how can she ruin Mitya?” he asked, pondering on Ivan’s words. “What
evidence can she give that would ruin Mitya?”

“You don’t know that yet. She’s got a document in her hands, in Mitya’s
own writing, that proves conclusively that he did murder Fyodor
Pavlovitch.”

“That’s impossible!” cried Alyosha.

“Why is it impossible? I’ve read it myself.”

“There can’t be such a document!” Alyosha repeated warmly. “There can’t
be, because he’s not the murderer. It’s not he murdered father, not he!”

Ivan suddenly stopped.

“Who is the murderer then, according to you?” he asked, with apparent
coldness. There was even a supercilious note in his voice.

“You know who,” Alyosha pronounced in a low, penetrating voice.

“Who? You mean the myth about that crazy idiot, the epileptic,
Smerdyakov?”

Alyosha suddenly felt himself trembling all over.

“You know who,” broke helplessly from him. He could scarcely breathe.

“Who? Who?” Ivan cried almost fiercely. All his restraint suddenly
vanished.

“I only know one thing,” Alyosha went on, still almost in a whisper, “_it
wasn’t you_ killed father.”

“ ‘Not you’! What do you mean by ‘not you’?” Ivan was thunderstruck.

“It was not you killed father, not you!” Alyosha repeated firmly.

The silence lasted for half a minute.

“I know I didn’t. Are you raving?” said Ivan, with a pale, distorted
smile. His eyes were riveted on Alyosha. They were standing again under a
lamp‐post.

“No, Ivan. You’ve told yourself several times that you are the murderer.”

“When did I say so? I was in Moscow.... When have I said so?” Ivan
faltered helplessly.

“You’ve said so to yourself many times, when you’ve been alone during
these two dreadful months,” Alyosha went on softly and distinctly as
before. Yet he was speaking now, as it were, not of himself, not of his
own will, but obeying some irresistible command. “You have accused
yourself and have confessed to yourself that you are the murderer and no
one else. But you didn’t do it: you are mistaken: you are not the
murderer. Do you hear? It was not you! God has sent me to tell you so.”

They were both silent. The silence lasted a whole long minute. They were
both standing still, gazing into each other’s eyes. They were both pale.
Suddenly Ivan began trembling all over, and clutched Alyosha’s shoulder.

“You’ve been in my room!” he whispered hoarsely. “You’ve been there at
night, when he came.... Confess ... have you seen him, have you seen him?”

“Whom do you mean—Mitya?” Alyosha asked, bewildered.

“Not him, damn the monster!” Ivan shouted, in a frenzy. “Do you know that
he visits me? How did you find out? Speak!”

“Who is _he_! I don’t know whom you are talking about,” Alyosha faltered,
beginning to be alarmed.

“Yes, you do know ... or how could you—? It’s impossible that you don’t
know.”

Suddenly he seemed to check himself. He stood still and seemed to reflect.
A strange grin contorted his lips.

“Brother,” Alyosha began again, in a shaking voice, “I have said this to
you, because you’ll believe my word, I know that. I tell you once and for
all, it’s not you. You hear, once for all! God has put it into my heart to
say this to you, even though it may make you hate me from this hour.”

But by now Ivan had apparently regained his self‐control.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch,” he said, with a cold smile, “I can’t endure
prophets and epileptics—messengers from God especially—and you know that
only too well. I break off all relations with you from this moment and
probably for ever. I beg you to leave me at this turning. It’s the way to
your lodgings, too. You’d better be particularly careful not to come to me
to‐day! Do you hear?”

He turned and walked on with a firm step, not looking back.

“Brother,” Alyosha called after him, “if anything happens to you to‐day,
turn to me before any one!”

But Ivan made no reply. Alyosha stood under the lamp‐post at the cross
roads, till Ivan had vanished into the darkness. Then he turned and walked
slowly homewards. Both Alyosha and Ivan were living in lodgings; neither
of them was willing to live in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s empty house. Alyosha
had a furnished room in the house of some working people. Ivan lived some
distance from him. He had taken a roomy and fairly comfortable lodge
attached to a fine house that belonged to a well‐to‐do lady, the widow of
an official. But his only attendant was a deaf and rheumatic old crone who
went to bed at six o’clock every evening and got up at six in the morning.
Ivan had become remarkably indifferent to his comforts of late, and very
fond of being alone. He did everything for himself in the one room he
lived in, and rarely entered any of the other rooms in his abode.

He reached the gate of the house and had his hand on the bell, when he
suddenly stopped. He felt that he was trembling all over with anger.
Suddenly he let go of the bell, turned back with a curse, and walked with
rapid steps in the opposite direction. He walked a mile and a half to a
tiny, slanting, wooden house, almost a hut, where Marya Kondratyevna, the
neighbor who used to come to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s kitchen for soup and to
whom Smerdyakov had once sung his songs and played on the guitar, was now
lodging. She had sold their little house, and was now living here with her
mother. Smerdyakov, who was ill—almost dying—had been with them ever since
Fyodor Pavlovitch’s death. It was to him Ivan was going now, drawn by a
sudden and irresistible prompting.



Chapter VI. The First Interview With Smerdyakov


This was the third time that Ivan had been to see Smerdyakov since his
return from Moscow. The first time he had seen him and talked to him was
on the first day of his arrival, then he had visited him once more, a
fortnight later. But his visits had ended with that second one, so that it
was now over a month since he had seen him. And he had scarcely heard
anything of him.

Ivan had only returned five days after his father’s death, so that he was
not present at the funeral, which took place the day before he came back.
The cause of his delay was that Alyosha, not knowing his Moscow address,
had to apply to Katerina Ivanovna to telegraph to him, and she, not
knowing his address either, telegraphed to her sister and aunt, reckoning
on Ivan’s going to see them as soon as he arrived in Moscow. But he did
not go to them till four days after his arrival. When he got the telegram,
he had, of course, set off post‐haste to our town. The first to meet him
was Alyosha, and Ivan was greatly surprised to find that, in opposition to
the general opinion of the town, he refused to entertain a suspicion
against Mitya, and spoke openly of Smerdyakov as the murderer. Later on,
after seeing the police captain and the prosecutor, and hearing the
details of the charge and the arrest, he was still more surprised at
Alyosha, and ascribed his opinion only to his exaggerated brotherly
feeling and sympathy with Mitya, of whom Alyosha, as Ivan knew, was very
fond.

By the way, let us say a word or two of Ivan’s feeling to his brother
Dmitri. He positively disliked him; at most, felt sometimes a compassion
for him, and even that was mixed with great contempt, almost repugnance.
Mitya’s whole personality, even his appearance, was extremely unattractive
to him. Ivan looked with indignation on Katerina Ivanovna’s love for his
brother. Yet he went to see Mitya on the first day of his arrival, and
that interview, far from shaking Ivan’s belief in his guilt, positively
strengthened it. He found his brother agitated, nervously excited. Mitya
had been talkative, but very absent‐minded and incoherent. He used violent
language, accused Smerdyakov, and was fearfully muddled. He talked
principally about the three thousand roubles, which he said had been
“stolen” from him by his father.

“The money was mine, it was my money,” Mitya kept repeating. “Even if I
had stolen it, I should have had the right.”

He hardly contested the evidence against him, and if he tried to turn a
fact to his advantage, it was in an absurd and incoherent way. He hardly
seemed to wish to defend himself to Ivan or any one else. Quite the
contrary, he was angry and proudly scornful of the charges against him; he
was continually firing up and abusing every one. He only laughed
contemptuously at Grigory’s evidence about the open door, and declared
that it was “the devil that opened it.” But he could not bring forward any
coherent explanation of the fact. He even succeeded in insulting Ivan
during their first interview, telling him sharply that it was not for
people who declared that “everything was lawful,” to suspect and question
him. Altogether he was anything but friendly with Ivan on that occasion.
Immediately after that interview with Mitya, Ivan went for the first time
to see Smerdyakov.

In the railway train on his way from Moscow, he kept thinking of
Smerdyakov and of his last conversation with him on the evening before he
went away. Many things seemed to him puzzling and suspicious. But when he
gave his evidence to the investigating lawyer Ivan said nothing, for the
time, of that conversation. He put that off till he had seen Smerdyakov,
who was at that time in the hospital.

Doctor Herzenstube and Varvinsky, the doctor he met in the hospital,
confidently asserted in reply to Ivan’s persistent questions, that
Smerdyakov’s epileptic attack was unmistakably genuine, and were surprised
indeed at Ivan asking whether he might not have been shamming on the day
of the catastrophe. They gave him to understand that the attack was an
exceptional one, the fits persisting and recurring several times, so that
the patient’s life was positively in danger, and it was only now, after
they had applied remedies, that they could assert with confidence that the
patient would survive. “Though it might well be,” added Doctor
Herzenstube, “that his reason would be impaired for a considerable period,
if not permanently.” On Ivan’s asking impatiently whether that meant that
he was now mad, they told him that this was not yet the case, in the full
sense of the word, but that certain abnormalities were perceptible. Ivan
decided to find out for himself what those abnormalities were.

At the hospital he was at once allowed to see the patient. Smerdyakov was
lying on a truckle‐bed in a separate ward. There was only one other bed in
the room, and in it lay a tradesman of the town, swollen with dropsy, who
was obviously almost dying; he could be no hindrance to their
conversation. Smerdyakov grinned uncertainly on seeing Ivan, and for the
first instant seemed nervous. So at least Ivan fancied. But that was only
momentary. For the rest of the time he was struck, on the contrary, by
Smerdyakov’s composure. From the first glance Ivan had no doubt that he
was very ill. He was very weak; he spoke slowly, seeming to move his
tongue with difficulty; he was much thinner and sallower. Throughout the
interview, which lasted twenty minutes, he kept complaining of headache
and of pain in all his limbs. His thin emasculate face seemed to have
become so tiny; his hair was ruffled, and his crest of curls in front
stood up in a thin tuft. But in the left eye, which was screwed up and
seemed to be insinuating something, Smerdyakov showed himself unchanged.
“It’s always worth while speaking to a clever man.” Ivan was reminded of
that at once. He sat down on the stool at his feet. Smerdyakov, with
painful effort, shifted his position in bed, but he was not the first to
speak. He remained dumb, and did not even look much interested.

“Can you talk to me?” asked Ivan. “I won’t tire you much.”

“Certainly I can,” mumbled Smerdyakov, in a faint voice. “Has your honor
been back long?” he added patronizingly, as though encouraging a nervous
visitor.

“I only arrived to‐day.... To see the mess you are in here.” Smerdyakov
sighed.

“Why do you sigh? You knew of it all along,” Ivan blurted out.

Smerdyakov was stolidly silent for a while.

“How could I help knowing? It was clear beforehand. But how could I tell
it would turn out like that?”

“What would turn out? Don’t prevaricate! You’ve foretold you’d have a fit;
on the way down to the cellar, you know. You mentioned the very spot.”

“Have you said so at the examination yet?” Smerdyakov queried with
composure.

Ivan felt suddenly angry.

“No, I haven’t yet, but I certainly shall. You must explain a great deal
to me, my man; and let me tell you, I am not going to let you play with
me!”

“Why should I play with you, when I put my whole trust in you, as in God
Almighty?” said Smerdyakov, with the same composure, only for a moment
closing his eyes.

“In the first place,” began Ivan, “I know that epileptic fits can’t be
told beforehand. I’ve inquired; don’t try and take me in. You can’t
foretell the day and the hour. How was it you told me the day and the hour
beforehand, and about the cellar, too? How could you tell that you would
fall down the cellar stairs in a fit, if you didn’t sham a fit on
purpose?”

“I had to go to the cellar anyway, several times a day, indeed,”
Smerdyakov drawled deliberately. “I fell from the garret just in the same
way a year ago. It’s quite true you can’t tell the day and hour of a fit
beforehand, but you can always have a presentiment of it.”

“But you did foretell the day and the hour!”

“In regard to my epilepsy, sir, you had much better inquire of the doctors
here. You can ask them whether it was a real fit or a sham; it’s no use my
saying any more about it.”

“And the cellar? How could you know beforehand of the cellar?”

“You don’t seem able to get over that cellar! As I was going down to the
cellar, I was in terrible dread and doubt. What frightened me most was
losing you and being left without defense in all the world. So I went down
into the cellar thinking, ‘Here, it’ll come on directly, it’ll strike me
down directly, shall I fall?’ And it was through this fear that I suddenly
felt the spasm that always comes ... and so I went flying. All that and
all my previous conversation with you at the gate the evening before, when
I told you how frightened I was and spoke of the cellar, I told all that
to Doctor Herzenstube and Nikolay Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer,
and it’s all been written down in the protocol. And the doctor here, Mr.
Varvinsky, maintained to all of them that it was just the thought of it
brought it on, the apprehension that I might fall. It was just then that
the fit seized me. And so they’ve written it down, that it’s just how it
must have happened, simply from my fear.”

As he finished, Smerdyakov drew a deep breath, as though exhausted.

“Then you have said all that in your evidence?” said Ivan, somewhat taken
aback. He had meant to frighten him with the threat of repeating their
conversation, and it appeared that Smerdyakov had already reported it all
himself.

“What have I to be afraid of? Let them write down the whole truth,”
Smerdyakov pronounced firmly.

“And have you told them every word of our conversation at the gate?”

“No, not to say every word.”

“And did you tell them that you can sham fits, as you boasted then?”

“No, I didn’t tell them that either.”

“Tell me now, why did you send me then to Tchermashnya?”

“I was afraid you’d go away to Moscow; Tchermashnya is nearer, anyway.”

“You are lying; you suggested my going away yourself; you told me to get
out of the way of trouble.”

“That was simply out of affection and my sincere devotion to you,
foreseeing trouble in the house, to spare you. Only I wanted to spare
myself even more. That’s why I told you to get out of harm’s way, that you
might understand that there would be trouble in the house, and would
remain at home to protect your father.”

“You might have said it more directly, you blockhead!” Ivan suddenly fired
up.

“How could I have said it more directly then? It was simply my fear that
made me speak, and you might have been angry, too. I might well have been
apprehensive that Dmitri Fyodorovitch would make a scene and carry away
that money, for he considered it as good as his own; but who could tell
that it would end in a murder like this? I thought that he would only
carry off the three thousand that lay under the master’s mattress in the
envelope, and you see, he’s murdered him. How could you guess it either,
sir?”

“But if you say yourself that it couldn’t be guessed, how could I have
guessed and stayed at home? You contradict yourself!” said Ivan,
pondering.

“You might have guessed from my sending you to Tchermashnya and not to
Moscow.”

“How could I guess it from that?”

Smerdyakov seemed much exhausted, and again he was silent for a minute.

“You might have guessed from the fact of my asking you not to go to
Moscow, but to Tchermashnya, that I wanted to have you nearer, for
Moscow’s a long way off, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch, knowing you are not far
off, would not be so bold. And if anything had happened, you might have
come to protect me, too, for I warned you of Grigory Vassilyevitch’s
illness, and that I was afraid of having a fit. And when I explained those
knocks to you, by means of which one could go in to the deceased, and that
Dmitri Fyodorovitch knew them all through me, I thought that you would
guess yourself that he would be sure to do something, and so wouldn’t go
to Tchermashnya even, but would stay.”

“He talks very coherently,” thought Ivan, “though he does mumble; what’s
the derangement of his faculties that Herzenstube talked of?”

“You are cunning with me, damn you!” he exclaimed, getting angry.

“But I thought at the time that you quite guessed,” Smerdyakov parried
with the simplest air.

“If I’d guessed, I should have stayed,” cried Ivan.

“Why, I thought that it was because you guessed, that you went away in
such a hurry, only to get out of trouble, only to run away and save
yourself in your fright.”

“You think that every one is as great a coward as yourself?”

“Forgive me, I thought you were like me.”

“Of course, I ought to have guessed,” Ivan said in agitation; “and I did
guess there was some mischief brewing on your part ... only you are lying,
you are lying again,” he cried, suddenly recollecting. “Do you remember
how you went up to the carriage and said to me, ‘It’s always worth while
speaking to a clever man’? So you were glad I went away, since you praised
me?”

Smerdyakov sighed again and again. A trace of color came into his face.

“If I was pleased,” he articulated rather breathlessly, “it was simply
because you agreed not to go to Moscow, but to Tchermashnya. For it was
nearer, anyway. Only when I said these words to you, it was not by way of
praise, but of reproach. You didn’t understand it.”

“What reproach?”

“Why, that foreseeing such a calamity you deserted your own father, and
would not protect us, for I might have been taken up any time for stealing
that three thousand.”

“Damn you!” Ivan swore again. “Stay, did you tell the prosecutor and the
investigating lawyer about those knocks?”

“I told them everything just as it was.”

Ivan wondered inwardly again.

“If I thought of anything then,” he began again, “it was solely of some
wickedness on your part. Dmitri might kill him, but that he would steal—I
did not believe that then.... But I was prepared for any wickedness from
you. You told me yourself you could sham a fit. What did you say that
for?”

“It was just through my simplicity, and I never have shammed a fit on
purpose in my life. And I only said so then to boast to you. It was just
foolishness. I liked you so much then, and was open‐hearted with you.”

“My brother directly accuses you of the murder and theft.”

“What else is left for him to do?” said Smerdyakov, with a bitter grin.
“And who will believe him with all the proofs against him? Grigory
Vassilyevitch saw the door open. What can he say after that? But never
mind him! He is trembling to save himself.”

He slowly ceased speaking; then suddenly, as though on reflection, added:

“And look here again. He wants to throw it on me and make out that it is
the work of my hands—I’ve heard that already. But as to my being clever at
shamming a fit: should I have told you beforehand that I could sham one,
if I really had had such a design against your father? If I had been
planning such a murder could I have been such a fool as to give such
evidence against myself beforehand? And to his son, too! Upon my word! Is
that likely? As if that could be, such a thing has never happened. No one
hears this talk of ours now, except Providence itself, and if you were to
tell of it to the prosecutor and Nikolay Parfenovitch you might defend me
completely by doing so, for who would be likely to be such a criminal, if
he is so open‐hearted beforehand? Any one can see that.”

“Well,” and Ivan got up to cut short the conversation, struck by
Smerdyakov’s last argument. “I don’t suspect you at all, and I think it’s
absurd, indeed, to suspect you. On the contrary, I am grateful to you for
setting my mind at rest. Now I am going, but I’ll come again. Meanwhile,
good‐by. Get well. Is there anything you want?”

“I am very thankful for everything. Marfa Ignatyevna does not forget me,
and provides me anything I want, according to her kindness. Good people
visit me every day.”

“Good‐by. But I shan’t say anything of your being able to sham a fit, and
I don’t advise you to, either,” something made Ivan say suddenly.

“I quite understand. And if you don’t speak of that, I shall say nothing
of that conversation of ours at the gate.”

Then it happened that Ivan went out, and only when he had gone a dozen
steps along the corridor, he suddenly felt that there was an insulting
significance in Smerdyakov’s last words. He was almost on the point of
turning back, but it was only a passing impulse, and muttering,
“Nonsense!” he went out of the hospital.

His chief feeling was one of relief at the fact that it was not
Smerdyakov, but Mitya, who had committed the murder, though he might have
been expected to feel the opposite. He did not want to analyze the reason
for this feeling, and even felt a positive repugnance at prying into his
sensations. He felt as though he wanted to make haste to forget something.
In the following days he became convinced of Mitya’s guilt, as he got to
know all the weight of evidence against him. There was evidence of people
of no importance, Fenya and her mother, for instance, but the effect of it
was almost overpowering. As to Perhotin, the people at the tavern, and at
Plotnikov’s shop, as well as the witnesses at Mokroe, their evidence
seemed conclusive. It was the details that were so damning. The secret of
the knocks impressed the lawyers almost as much as Grigory’s evidence as
to the open door. Grigory’s wife, Marfa, in answer to Ivan’s questions,
declared that Smerdyakov had been lying all night the other side of the
partition wall. “He was not three paces from our bed,” and that although
she was a sound sleeper she waked several times and heard him moaning, “He
was moaning the whole time, moaning continually.”

Talking to Herzenstube, and giving it as his opinion that Smerdyakov was
not mad, but only rather weak, Ivan only evoked from the old man a subtle
smile.

“Do you know how he spends his time now?” he asked; “learning lists of
French words by heart. He has an exercise‐book under his pillow with the
French words written out in Russian letters for him by some one, he he
he!”

Ivan ended by dismissing all doubts. He could not think of Dmitri without
repulsion. Only one thing was strange, however. Alyosha persisted that
Dmitri was not the murderer, and that “in all probability” Smerdyakov was.
Ivan always felt that Alyosha’s opinion meant a great deal to him, and so
he was astonished at it now. Another thing that was strange was that
Alyosha did not make any attempt to talk about Mitya with Ivan, that he
never began on the subject and only answered his questions. This, too,
struck Ivan particularly.

But he was very much preoccupied at that time with something quite apart
from that. On his return from Moscow, he abandoned himself hopelessly to
his mad and consuming passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the time
to begin to speak of this new passion of Ivan’s, which left its mark on
all the rest of his life: this would furnish the subject for another
novel, which I may perhaps never write. But I cannot omit to mention here
that when Ivan, on leaving Katerina Ivanovna with Alyosha, as I’ve related
already, told him, “I am not keen on her,” it was an absolute lie: he
loved her madly, though at times he hated her so that he might have
murdered her. Many causes helped to bring about this feeling. Shattered by
what had happened with Mitya, she rushed on Ivan’s return to meet him as
her one salvation. She was hurt, insulted and humiliated in her feelings.
And here the man had come back to her, who had loved her so ardently
before (oh! she knew that very well), and whose heart and intellect she
considered so superior to her own. But the sternly virtuous girl did not
abandon herself altogether to the man she loved, in spite of the Karamazov
violence of his passions and the great fascination he had for her. She was
continually tormented at the same time by remorse for having deserted
Mitya, and in moments of discord and violent anger (and they were
numerous) she told Ivan so plainly. This was what he had called to Alyosha
“lies upon lies.” There was, of course, much that was false in it, and
that angered Ivan more than anything.... But of all this later.

He did, in fact, for a time almost forget Smerdyakov’s existence, and yet,
a fortnight after his first visit to him, he began to be haunted by the
same strange thoughts as before. It’s enough to say that he was
continually asking himself, why was it that on that last night in Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s house he had crept out on to the stairs like a thief and
listened to hear what his father was doing below? Why had he recalled that
afterwards with repulsion? Why next morning, had he been suddenly so
depressed on the journey? Why, as he reached Moscow, had he said to
himself, “I am a scoundrel”? And now he almost fancied that these
tormenting thoughts would make him even forget Katerina Ivanovna, so
completely did they take possession of him again. It was just after
fancying this, that he met Alyosha in the street. He stopped him at once,
and put a question to him:

“Do you remember when Dmitri burst in after dinner and beat father, and
afterwards I told you in the yard that I reserved ‘the right to
desire’?... Tell me, did you think then that I desired father’s death or
not?”

“I did think so,” answered Alyosha, softly.

“It was so, too; it was not a matter of guessing. But didn’t you fancy
then that what I wished was just that ‘one reptile should devour another’;
that is, just that Dmitri should kill father, and as soon as possible ...
and that I myself was even prepared to help to bring that about?”

Alyosha turned rather pale, and looked silently into his brother’s face.

“Speak!” cried Ivan, “I want above everything to know what you thought
then. I want the truth, the truth!”

He drew a deep breath, looking angrily at Alyosha before his answer came.

“Forgive me, I did think that, too, at the time,” whispered Alyosha, and
he did not add one softening phrase.

“Thanks,” snapped Ivan, and, leaving Alyosha, he went quickly on his way.
From that time Alyosha noticed that Ivan began obviously to avoid him and
seemed even to have taken a dislike to him, so much so that Alyosha gave
up going to see him. Immediately after that meeting with him, Ivan had not
gone home, but went straight to Smerdyakov again.



Chapter VII. The Second Visit To Smerdyakov


By that time Smerdyakov had been discharged from the hospital. Ivan knew
his new lodging, the dilapidated little wooden house, divided in two by a
passage on one side of which lived Marya Kondratyevna and her mother, and
on the other, Smerdyakov. No one knew on what terms he lived with them,
whether as a friend or as a lodger. It was supposed afterwards that he had
come to stay with them as Marya Kondratyevna’s betrothed, and was living
there for a time without paying for board or lodging. Both mother and
daughter had the greatest respect for him and looked upon him as greatly
superior to themselves.

Ivan knocked, and, on the door being opened, went straight into the
passage. By Marya Kondratyevna’s directions he went straight to the better
room on the left, occupied by Smerdyakov. There was a tiled stove in the
room and it was extremely hot. The walls were gay with blue paper, which
was a good deal used however, and in the cracks under it cockroaches
swarmed in amazing numbers, so that there was a continual rustling from
them. The furniture was very scanty: two benches against each wall and two
chairs by the table. The table of plain wood was covered with a cloth with
pink patterns on it. There was a pot of geranium on each of the two little
windows. In the corner there was a case of ikons. On the table stood a
little copper samovar with many dents in it, and a tray with two cups. But
Smerdyakov had finished tea and the samovar was out. He was sitting at the
table on a bench. He was looking at an exercise‐book and slowly writing
with a pen. There was a bottle of ink by him and a flat iron candlestick,
but with a composite candle. Ivan saw at once from Smerdyakov’s face that
he had completely recovered from his illness. His face was fresher,
fuller, his hair stood up jauntily in front, and was plastered down at the
sides. He was sitting in a parti‐colored, wadded dressing‐gown, rather
dirty and frayed, however. He had spectacles on his nose, which Ivan had
never seen him wearing before. This trifling circumstance suddenly
redoubled Ivan’s anger: “A creature like that and wearing spectacles!”

Smerdyakov slowly raised his head and looked intently at his visitor
through his spectacles; then he slowly took them off and rose from the
bench, but by no means respectfully, almost lazily, doing the least
possible required by common civility. All this struck Ivan instantly; he
took it all in and noted it at once—most of all the look in Smerdyakov’s
eyes, positively malicious, churlish and haughty. “What do you want to
intrude for?” it seemed to say; “we settled everything then; why have you
come again?” Ivan could scarcely control himself.

“It’s hot here,” he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his overcoat.

“Take off your coat,” Smerdyakov conceded.

Ivan took off his coat and threw it on a bench with trembling hands. He
took a chair, moved it quickly to the table and sat down. Smerdyakov
managed to sit down on his bench before him.

“To begin with, are we alone?” Ivan asked sternly and impulsively. “Can
they overhear us in there?”

“No one can hear anything. You’ve seen for yourself: there’s a passage.”

“Listen, my good fellow; what was that you babbled, as I was leaving the
hospital, that if I said nothing about your faculty of shamming fits, you
wouldn’t tell the investigating lawyer all our conversation at the gate?
What do you mean by _all_? What could you mean by it? Were you threatening
me? Have I entered into some sort of compact with you? Do you suppose I am
afraid of you?”

Ivan said this in a perfect fury, giving him to understand with obvious
intention that he scorned any subterfuge or indirectness and meant to show
his cards. Smerdyakov’s eyes gleamed resentfully, his left eye winked, and
he at once gave his answer, with his habitual composure and deliberation.
“You want to have everything above‐board; very well, you shall have it,”
he seemed to say.

“This is what I meant then, and this is why I said that, that you, knowing
beforehand of this murder of your own parent, left him to his fate, and
that people mightn’t after that conclude any evil about your feelings and
perhaps of something else, too—that’s what I promised not to tell the
authorities.”

Though Smerdyakov spoke without haste and obviously controlling himself,
yet there was something in his voice, determined and emphatic, resentful
and insolently defiant. He stared impudently at Ivan. A mist passed before
Ivan’s eyes for the first moment.

“How? What? Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m perfectly in possession of all my faculties.”

“Do you suppose I _knew_ of the murder?” Ivan cried at last, and he
brought his fist violently on the table. “What do you mean by ‘something
else, too’? Speak, scoundrel!”

Smerdyakov was silent and still scanned Ivan with the same insolent stare.

“Speak, you stinking rogue, what is that ‘something else, too’?”

“The ‘something else’ I meant was that you probably, too, were very
desirous of your parent’s death.”

Ivan jumped up and struck him with all his might on the shoulder, so that
he fell back against the wall. In an instant his face was bathed in tears.
Saying, “It’s a shame, sir, to strike a sick man,” he dried his eyes with
a very dirty blue check handkerchief and sank into quiet weeping. A minute
passed.

“That’s enough! Leave off,” Ivan said peremptorily, sitting down again.
“Don’t put me out of all patience.”

Smerdyakov took the rag from his eyes. Every line of his puckered face
reflected the insult he had just received.

“So you thought then, you scoundrel, that together with Dmitri I meant to
kill my father?”

“I didn’t know what thoughts were in your mind then,” said Smerdyakov
resentfully; “and so I stopped you then at the gate to sound you on that
very point.”

“To sound what, what?”

“Why, that very circumstance, whether you wanted your father to be
murdered or not.”

What infuriated Ivan more than anything was the aggressive, insolent tone
to which Smerdyakov persistently adhered.

“It was you murdered him?” he cried suddenly.

Smerdyakov smiled contemptuously.

“You know of yourself, for a fact, that it wasn’t I murdered him. And I
should have thought that there was no need for a sensible man to speak of
it again.”

“But why, why had you such a suspicion about me at the time?”

“As you know already, it was simply from fear. For I was in such a
position, shaking with fear, that I suspected every one. I resolved to
sound you, too, for I thought if you wanted the same as your brother, then
the business was as good as settled and I should be crushed like a fly,
too.”

“Look here, you didn’t say that a fortnight ago.”

“I meant the same when I talked to you in the hospital, only I thought
you’d understand without wasting words, and that being such a sensible man
you wouldn’t care to talk of it openly.”

“What next! Come answer, answer, I insist: what was it ... what could I
have done to put such a degrading suspicion into your mean soul?”

“As for the murder, you couldn’t have done that and didn’t want to, but as
for wanting some one else to do it, that was just what you did want.”

“And how coolly, how coolly he speaks! But why should I have wanted it;
what grounds had I for wanting it?”

“What grounds had you? What about the inheritance?” said Smerdyakov
sarcastically, and, as it were, vindictively. “Why, after your parent’s
death there was at least forty thousand to come to each of you, and very
likely more, but if Fyodor Pavlovitch got married then to that lady,
Agrafena Alexandrovna, she would have had all his capital made over to her
directly after the wedding, for she’s plenty of sense, so that your parent
would not have left you two roubles between the three of you. And were
they far from a wedding, either? Not a hair’s‐breadth: that lady had only
to lift her little finger and he would have run after her to church, with
his tongue out.”

Ivan restrained himself with painful effort.

“Very good,” he commented at last. “You see, I haven’t jumped up, I
haven’t knocked you down, I haven’t killed you. Speak on. So, according to
you, I had fixed on Dmitri to do it; I was reckoning on him?”

“How could you help reckoning on him? If he killed him, then he would lose
all the rights of a nobleman, his rank and property, and would go off to
exile; so his share of the inheritance would come to you and your brother
Alexey Fyodorovitch in equal parts; so you’d each have not forty, but
sixty thousand each. There’s not a doubt you did reckon on Dmitri
Fyodorovitch.”

“What I put up with from you! Listen, scoundrel, if I had reckoned on any
one then, it would have been on you, not on Dmitri, and I swear I did
expect some wickedness from you ... at the time.... I remember my
impression!”

“I thought, too, for a minute, at the time, that you were reckoning on me
as well,” said Smerdyakov, with a sarcastic grin. “So that it was just by
that more than anything you showed me what was in your mind. For if you
had a foreboding about me and yet went away, you as good as said to me,
‘You can murder my parent, I won’t hinder you!’ ”

“You scoundrel! So that’s how you understood it!”

“It was all that going to Tchermashnya. Why! You were meaning to go to
Moscow and refused all your father’s entreaties to go to Tchermashnya—and
simply at a foolish word from me you consented at once! What reason had
you to consent to Tchermashnya? Since you went to Tchermashnya with no
reason, simply at my word, it shows that you must have expected something
from me.”

“No, I swear I didn’t!” shouted Ivan, grinding his teeth.

“You didn’t? Then you ought, as your father’s son, to have had me taken to
the lock‐up and thrashed at once for my words then ... or at least, to
have given me a punch in the face on the spot, but you were not a bit
angry, if you please, and at once in a friendly way acted on my foolish
word and went away, which was utterly absurd, for you ought to have stayed
to save your parent’s life. How could I help drawing my conclusions?”

Ivan sat scowling, both his fists convulsively pressed on his knees.

“Yes, I am sorry I didn’t punch you in the face,” he said with a bitter
smile. “I couldn’t have taken you to the lock‐up just then. Who would have
believed me and what charge could I bring against you? But the punch in
the face ... oh, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it. Though blows are
forbidden, I should have pounded your ugly face to a jelly.”

Smerdyakov looked at him almost with relish.

“In the ordinary occasions of life,” he said in the same complacent and
sententious tone in which he had taunted Grigory and argued with him about
religion at Fyodor Pavlovitch’s table, “in the ordinary occasions of life,
blows on the face are forbidden nowadays by law, and people have given
them up, but in exceptional occasions of life people still fly to blows,
not only among us but all over the world, be it even the fullest Republic
of France, just as in the time of Adam and Eve, and they never will leave
off, but you, even in an exceptional case, did not dare.”

“What are you learning French words for?” Ivan nodded towards the
exercise‐book lying on the table.

“Why shouldn’t I learn them so as to improve my education, supposing that
I may myself chance to go some day to those happy parts of Europe?”

“Listen, monster.” Ivan’s eyes flashed and he trembled all over. “I am not
afraid of your accusations; you can say what you like about me, and if I
don’t beat you to death, it’s simply because I suspect you of that crime
and I’ll drag you to justice. I’ll unmask you.”

“To my thinking, you’d better keep quiet, for what can you accuse me of,
considering my absolute innocence? and who would believe you? Only if you
begin, I shall tell everything, too, for I must defend myself.”

“Do you think I am afraid of you now?”

“If the court doesn’t believe all I’ve said to you just now, the public
will, and you will be ashamed.”

“That’s as much as to say, ‘It’s always worth while speaking to a sensible
man,’ eh?” snarled Ivan.

“You hit the mark, indeed. And you’d better be sensible.”

Ivan got up, shaking all over with indignation, put on his coat, and
without replying further to Smerdyakov, without even looking at him,
walked quickly out of the cottage. The cool evening air refreshed him.
There was a bright moon in the sky. A nightmare of ideas and sensations
filled his soul. “Shall I go at once and give information against
Smerdyakov? But what information can I give? He is not guilty, anyway. On
the contrary, he’ll accuse me. And in fact, why did I set off for
Tchermashnya then? What for? What for?” Ivan asked himself. “Yes, of
course, I was expecting something and he is right....” And he remembered
for the hundredth time how, on the last night in his father’s house, he
had listened on the stairs. But he remembered it now with such anguish
that he stood still on the spot as though he had been stabbed. “Yes, I
expected it then, that’s true! I wanted the murder, I did want the murder!
Did I want the murder? Did I want it? I must kill Smerdyakov! If I don’t
dare kill Smerdyakov now, life is not worth living!”

Ivan did not go home, but went straight to Katerina Ivanovna and alarmed
her by his appearance. He was like a madman. He repeated all his
conversation with Smerdyakov, every syllable of it. He couldn’t be calmed,
however much she tried to soothe him: he kept walking about the room,
speaking strangely, disconnectedly. At last he sat down, put his elbows on
the table, leaned his head on his hands and pronounced this strange
sentence: “If it’s not Dmitri, but Smerdyakov who’s the murderer, I share
his guilt, for I put him up to it. Whether I did, I don’t know yet. But if
he is the murderer, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am the murderer,
too.”

When Katerina Ivanovna heard that, she got up from her seat without a
word, went to her writing‐table, opened a box standing on it, took out a
sheet of paper and laid it before Ivan. This was the document of which
Ivan spoke to Alyosha later on as a “conclusive proof” that Dmitri had
killed his father. It was the letter written by Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna
when he was drunk, on the very evening he met Alyosha at the crossroads on
the way to the monastery, after the scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, when
Grushenka had insulted her. Then, parting from Alyosha, Mitya had rushed
to Grushenka. I don’t know whether he saw her, but in the evening he was
at the “Metropolis,” where he got thoroughly drunk. Then he asked for pen
and paper and wrote a document of weighty consequences to himself. It was
a wordy, disconnected, frantic letter, a drunken letter in fact. It was
like the talk of a drunken man, who, on his return home, begins with
extraordinary heat telling his wife or one of his household how he has
just been insulted, what a rascal had just insulted him, what a fine
fellow he is on the other hand, and how he will pay that scoundrel out;
and all that at great length, with great excitement and incoherence, with
drunken tears and blows on the table. The letter was written on a dirty
piece of ordinary paper of the cheapest kind. It had been provided by the
tavern and there were figures scrawled on the back of it. There was
evidently not space enough for his drunken verbosity and Mitya not only
filled the margins but had written the last line right across the rest.
The letter ran as follows:


    FATAL KATYA: To‐morrow I will get the money and repay your three
    thousand and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my
    love! Let us make an end! To‐morrow I shall try and get it from
    every one, and if I can’t borrow it, I give you my word of honor I
    shall go to my father and break his skull and take the money from
    under the pillow, if only Ivan has gone. If I have to go to
    Siberia for it, I’ll give you back your three thousand. And
    farewell. I bow down to the ground before you, for I’ve been a
    scoundrel to you. Forgive me! No, better not forgive me, you’ll be
    happier and so shall I! Better Siberia than your love, for I love
    another woman and you got to know her too well to‐day, so how can
    you forgive? I will murder the man who’s robbed me! I’ll leave you
    all and go to the East so as to see no one again. Not _her_
    either, for you are not my only tormentress; she is too. Farewell!

    P.S.—I write my curse, but I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One
    string is left, and it vibrates. Better tear my heart in two! I
    shall kill myself, but first of all that cur. I shall tear three
    thousand from him and fling it to you. Though I’ve been a
    scoundrel to you, I am not a thief! You can expect three thousand.
    The cur keeps it under his mattress, in pink ribbon. I am not a
    thief, but I’ll murder my thief. Katya, don’t look disdainful.
    Dmitri is not a thief! but a murderer! He has murdered his father
    and ruined himself to hold his ground, rather than endure your
    pride. And he doesn’t love you.

    P.P.S.—I kiss your feet, farewell! P.P.P.S.—Katya, pray to God
    that some one’ll give me the money. Then I shall not be steeped in
    gore, and if no one does—I shall! Kill me!

    Your slave and enemy,

    D. KARAMAZOV.


When Ivan read this “document” he was convinced. So then it was his
brother, not Smerdyakov. And if not Smerdyakov, then not he, Ivan. This
letter at once assumed in his eyes the aspect of a logical proof. There
could be no longer the slightest doubt of Mitya’s guilt. The suspicion
never occurred to Ivan, by the way, that Mitya might have committed the
murder in conjunction with Smerdyakov, and, indeed, such a theory did not
fit in with the facts. Ivan was completely reassured. The next morning he
only thought of Smerdyakov and his gibes with contempt. A few days later
he positively wondered how he could have been so horribly distressed at
his suspicions. He resolved to dismiss him with contempt and forget him.
So passed a month. He made no further inquiry about Smerdyakov, but twice
he happened to hear that he was very ill and out of his mind.

“He’ll end in madness,” the young doctor Varvinsky observed about him, and
Ivan remembered this. During the last week of that month Ivan himself
began to feel very ill. He went to consult the Moscow doctor who had been
sent for by Katerina Ivanovna just before the trial. And just at that time
his relations with Katerina Ivanovna became acutely strained. They were
like two enemies in love with one another. Katerina Ivanovna’s “returns”
to Mitya, that is, her brief but violent revulsions of feeling in his
favor, drove Ivan to perfect frenzy. Strange to say, until that last scene
described above, when Alyosha came from Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna, Ivan
had never once, during that month, heard her express a doubt of Mitya’s
guilt, in spite of those “returns” that were so hateful to him. It is
remarkable, too, that while he felt that he hated Mitya more and more
every day, he realized that it was not on account of Katya’s “returns”
that he hated him, but just _because he was the murderer of his father_.
He was conscious of this and fully recognized it to himself.

Nevertheless, he went to see Mitya ten days before the trial and proposed
to him a plan of escape—a plan he had obviously thought over a long time.
He was partly impelled to do this by a sore place still left in his heart
from a phrase of Smerdyakov’s, that it was to his, Ivan’s, advantage that
his brother should be convicted, as that would increase his inheritance
and Alyosha’s from forty to sixty thousand roubles. He determined to
sacrifice thirty thousand on arranging Mitya’s escape. On his return from
seeing him, he was very mournful and dispirited; he suddenly began to feel
that he was anxious for Mitya’s escape, not only to heal that sore place
by sacrificing thirty thousand, but for another reason. “Is it because I
am as much a murderer at heart?” he asked himself. Something very deep
down seemed burning and rankling in his soul. His pride above all suffered
cruelly all that month. But of that later....

When, after his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan suddenly decided with his
hand on the bell of his lodging to go to Smerdyakov, he obeyed a sudden
and peculiar impulse of indignation. He suddenly remembered how Katerina
Ivanovna had only just cried out to him in Alyosha’s presence: “It was
you, you, persuaded me of his” (that is, Mitya’s) “guilt!” Ivan was
thunderstruck when he recalled it. He had never once tried to persuade her
that Mitya was the murderer; on the contrary, he had suspected himself in
her presence, that time when he came back from Smerdyakov. It was _she_,
she, who had produced that “document” and proved his brother’s guilt. And
now she suddenly exclaimed: “I’ve been at Smerdyakov’s myself!” When had
she been there? Ivan had known nothing of it. So she was not at all so
sure of Mitya’s guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What,
what, had he said to her? His heart burned with violent anger. He could
not understand how he could, half an hour before, have let those words
pass and not have cried out at the moment. He let go of the bell and
rushed off to Smerdyakov. “I shall kill him, perhaps, this time,” he
thought on the way.



Chapter VIII. The Third And Last Interview With Smerdyakov


When he was half‐way there, the keen dry wind that had been blowing early
that morning rose again, and a fine dry snow began falling thickly. It did
not lie on the ground, but was whirled about by the wind, and soon there
was a regular snowstorm. There were scarcely any lamp‐posts in the part of
the town where Smerdyakov lived. Ivan strode alone in the darkness,
unconscious of the storm, instinctively picking out his way. His head
ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. He felt that his
hands were twitching convulsively. Not far from Marya Kondratyevna’s
cottage, Ivan suddenly came upon a solitary drunken little peasant. He was
wearing a coarse and patched coat, and was walking in zigzags, grumbling
and swearing to himself. Then suddenly he would begin singing in a husky
drunken voice:


    “Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg;
    I won’t wait till he comes back.”


But he broke off every time at the second line and began swearing again;
then he would begin the same song again. Ivan felt an intense hatred for
him before he had thought about him at all. Suddenly he realized his
presence and felt an irresistible impulse to knock him down. At that
moment they met, and the peasant with a violent lurch fell full tilt
against Ivan, who pushed him back furiously. The peasant went flying
backwards and fell like a log on the frozen ground. He uttered one
plaintive “O—oh!” and then was silent. Ivan stepped up to him. He was
lying on his back, without movement or consciousness. “He will be frozen,”
thought Ivan, and he went on his way to Smerdyakov’s.

In the passage, Marya Kondratyevna, who ran out to open the door with a
candle in her hand, whispered that Smerdyakov was very ill, “It’s not that
he’s laid up, but he seems not himself, and he even told us to take the
tea away; he wouldn’t have any.”

“Why, does he make a row?” asked Ivan coarsely.

“Oh, dear, no, quite the contrary, he’s very quiet. Only please don’t talk
to him too long,” Marya Kondratyevna begged him. Ivan opened the door and
stepped into the room.

It was over‐heated as before, but there were changes in the room. One of
the benches at the side had been removed, and in its place had been put a
large old mahogany leather sofa, on which a bed had been made up, with
fairly clean white pillows. Smerdyakov was sitting on the sofa, wearing
the same dressing‐gown. The table had been brought out in front of the
sofa, so that there was hardly room to move. On the table lay a thick book
in yellow cover, but Smerdyakov was not reading it. He seemed to be
sitting doing nothing. He met Ivan with a slow silent gaze, and was
apparently not at all surprised at his coming. There was a great change in
his face; he was much thinner and sallower. His eyes were sunken and there
were blue marks under them.

“Why, you really are ill?” Ivan stopped short. “I won’t keep you long, I
won’t even take off my coat. Where can one sit down?”

He went to the other end of the table, moved up a chair and sat down on
it.

“Why do you look at me without speaking? I’ve only come with one question,
and I swear I won’t go without an answer. Has the young lady, Katerina
Ivanovna, been with you?”

Smerdyakov still remained silent, looking quietly at Ivan as before.
Suddenly, with a motion of his hand, he turned his face away.

“What’s the matter with you?” cried Ivan.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean by ‘nothing’?”

“Yes, she has. It’s no matter to you. Let me alone.”

“No, I won’t let you alone. Tell me, when was she here?”

“Why, I’d quite forgotten about her,” said Smerdyakov, with a scornful
smile, and turning his face to Ivan again, he stared at him with a look of
frenzied hatred, the same look that he had fixed on him at their last
interview, a month before.

“You seem very ill yourself, your face is sunken; you don’t look like
yourself,” he said to Ivan.

“Never mind my health, tell me what I ask you.”

“But why are your eyes so yellow? The whites are quite yellow. Are you so
worried?” He smiled contemptuously and suddenly laughed outright.

“Listen; I’ve told you I won’t go away without an answer!” Ivan cried,
intensely irritated.

“Why do you keep pestering me? Why do you torment me?” said Smerdyakov,
with a look of suffering.

“Damn it! I’ve nothing to do with you. Just answer my question and I’ll go
away.”

“I’ve no answer to give you,” said Smerdyakov, looking down again.

“You may be sure I’ll make you answer!”

“Why are you so uneasy?” Smerdyakov stared at him, not simply with
contempt, but almost with repulsion. “Is this because the trial begins to‐
morrow? Nothing will happen to you; can’t you believe that at last? Go
home, go to bed and sleep in peace, don’t be afraid of anything.”

“I don’t understand you.... What have I to be afraid of to‐morrow?” Ivan
articulated in astonishment, and suddenly a chill breath of fear did in
fact pass over his soul. Smerdyakov measured him with his eyes.

“You don’t understand?” he drawled reproachfully. “It’s a strange thing a
sensible man should care to play such a farce!”

Ivan looked at him speechless. The startling, incredibly supercilious tone
of this man who had once been his valet, was extraordinary in itself. He
had not taken such a tone even at their last interview.

“I tell you, you’ve nothing to be afraid of. I won’t say anything about
you; there’s no proof against you. I say, how your hands are trembling!
Why are your fingers moving like that? Go home, _you_ did not murder him.”

Ivan started. He remembered Alyosha.

“I know it was not I,” he faltered.

“Do you?” Smerdyakov caught him up again.

Ivan jumped up and seized him by the shoulder.

“Tell me everything, you viper! Tell me everything!”

Smerdyakov was not in the least scared. He only riveted his eyes on Ivan
with insane hatred.

“Well, it was you who murdered him, if that’s it,” he whispered furiously.

Ivan sank back on his chair, as though pondering something. He laughed
malignantly.

“You mean my going away. What you talked about last time?”

“You stood before me last time and understood it all, and you understand
it now.”

“All I understand is that you are mad.”

“Aren’t you tired of it? Here we are face to face; what’s the use of going
on keeping up a farce to each other? Are you still trying to throw it all
on me, to my face? _You_ murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was
only your instrument, your faithful servant, and it was following your
words I did it.”

“_Did_ it? Why, did you murder him?” Ivan turned cold.

Something seemed to give way in his brain, and he shuddered all over with
a cold shiver. Then Smerdyakov himself looked at him wonderingly; probably
the genuineness of Ivan’s horror struck him.

“You don’t mean to say you really did not know?” he faltered
mistrustfully, looking with a forced smile into his eyes. Ivan still gazed
at him, and seemed unable to speak.


    Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg;
    I won’t wait till he comes back,


suddenly echoed in his head.

“Do you know, I am afraid that you are a dream, a phantom sitting before
me,” he muttered.

“There’s no phantom here, but only us two and one other. No doubt he is
here, that third, between us.”

“Who is he? Who is here? What third person?” Ivan cried in alarm, looking
about him, his eyes hastily searching in every corner.

“That third is God Himself—Providence. He is the third beside us now. Only
don’t look for Him, you won’t find Him.”

“It’s a lie that you killed him!” Ivan cried madly. “You are mad, or
teasing me again!”

Smerdyakov, as before, watched him curiously, with no sign of fear. He
could still scarcely get over his incredulity; he still fancied that Ivan
knew everything and was trying to “throw it all on him to his face.”

“Wait a minute,” he said at last in a weak voice, and suddenly bringing up
his left leg from under the table, he began turning up his trouser leg. He
was wearing long white stockings and slippers. Slowly he took off his
garter and fumbled to the bottom of his stocking. Ivan gazed at him, and
suddenly shuddered in a paroxysm of terror.

“He’s mad!” he cried, and rapidly jumping up, he drew back, so that he
knocked his back against the wall and stood up against it, stiff and
straight. He looked with insane terror at Smerdyakov, who, entirely
unaffected by his terror, continued fumbling in his stocking, as though he
were making an effort to get hold of something with his fingers and pull
it out. At last he got hold of it and began pulling it out. Ivan saw that
it was a piece of paper, or perhaps a roll of papers. Smerdyakov pulled it
out and laid it on the table.

“Here,” he said quietly.

“What is it?” asked Ivan, trembling.

“Kindly look at it,” Smerdyakov answered, still in the same low tone.

Ivan stepped up to the table, took up the roll of paper and began
unfolding it, but suddenly he drew back his fingers, as though from
contact with a loathsome reptile.

“Your hands keep twitching,” observed Smerdyakov, and he deliberately
unfolded the bundle himself. Under the wrapper were three packets of
hundred‐rouble notes.

“They are all here, all the three thousand roubles; you need not count
them. Take them,” Smerdyakov suggested to Ivan, nodding at the notes. Ivan
sank back in his chair. He was as white as a handkerchief.

“You frightened me ... with your stocking,” he said, with a strange grin.

“Can you really not have known till now?” Smerdyakov asked once more.

“No, I did not know. I kept thinking of Dmitri. Brother, brother! Ach!” He
suddenly clutched his head in both hands.

“Listen. Did you kill him alone? With my brother’s help or without?”

“It was only with you, with your help, I killed him, and Dmitri
Fyodorovitch is quite innocent.”

“All right, all right. Talk about me later. Why do I keep on trembling? I
can’t speak properly.”

“You were bold enough then. You said ‘everything was lawful,’ and how
frightened you are now,” Smerdyakov muttered in surprise. “Won’t you have
some lemonade? I’ll ask for some at once. It’s very refreshing. Only I
must hide this first.”

And again he motioned at the notes. He was just going to get up and call
at the door to Marya Kondratyevna to make some lemonade and bring it them,
but, looking for something to cover up the notes that she might not see
them, he first took out his handkerchief, and as it turned out to be very
dirty, took up the big yellow book that Ivan had noticed at first lying on
the table, and put it over the notes. The book was _The Sayings of the
Holy Father Isaac the Syrian_. Ivan read it mechanically.

“I won’t have any lemonade,” he said. “Talk of me later. Sit down and tell
me how you did it. Tell me all about it.”

“You’d better take off your greatcoat, or you’ll be too hot.” Ivan, as
though he’d only just thought of it, took off his coat, and, without
getting up from his chair, threw it on the bench.

“Speak, please, speak.”

He seemed calmer. He waited, feeling sure that Smerdyakov would tell him
_all_ about it.

“How it was done?” sighed Smerdyakov. “It was done in a most natural way,
following your very words.”

“Of my words later,” Ivan broke in again, apparently with complete self‐
possession, firmly uttering his words, and not shouting as before. “Only
tell me in detail how you did it. Everything, as it happened. Don’t forget
anything. The details, above everything, the details, I beg you.”

“You’d gone away, then I fell into the cellar.”

“In a fit or in a sham one?”

“A sham one, naturally. I shammed it all. I went quietly down the steps to
the very bottom and lay down quietly, and as I lay down I gave a scream,
and struggled, till they carried me out.”

“Stay! And were you shamming all along, afterwards, and in the hospital?”

“No, not at all. Next day, in the morning, before they took me to the
hospital, I had a real attack and a more violent one than I’ve had for
years. For two days I was quite unconscious.”

“All right, all right. Go on.”

“They laid me on the bed. I knew I’d be the other side of the partition,
for whenever I was ill, Marfa Ignatyevna used to put me there, near them.
She’s always been very kind to me, from my birth up. At night I moaned,
but quietly. I kept expecting Dmitri Fyodorovitch to come.”

“Expecting him? To come to you?”

“Not to me. I expected him to come into the house, for I’d no doubt that
he’d come that night, for being without me and getting no news, he’d be
sure to come and climb over the fence, as he used to, and do something.”

“And if he hadn’t come?”

“Then nothing would have happened. I should never have brought myself to
it without him.”

“All right, all right ... speak more intelligibly, don’t hurry; above all,
don’t leave anything out!”

“I expected him to kill Fyodor Pavlovitch. I thought that was certain, for
I had prepared him for it ... during the last few days.... He knew about
the knocks, that was the chief thing. With his suspiciousness and the fury
which had been growing in him all those days, he was bound to get into the
house by means of those taps. That was inevitable, so I was expecting
him.”

“Stay,” Ivan interrupted; “if he had killed him, he would have taken the
money and carried it away; you must have considered that. What would you
have got by it afterwards? I don’t see.”

“But he would never have found the money. That was only what I told him,
that the money was under the mattress. But that wasn’t true. It had been
lying in a box. And afterwards I suggested to Fyodor Pavlovitch, as I was
the only person he trusted, to hide the envelope with the notes in the
corner behind the ikons, for no one would have guessed that place,
especially if they came in a hurry. So that’s where the envelope lay, in
the corner behind the ikons. It would have been absurd to keep it under
the mattress; the box, anyway, could be locked. But all believe it was
under the mattress. A stupid thing to believe. So if Dmitri Fyodorovitch
had committed the murder, finding nothing, he would either have run away
in a hurry, afraid of every sound, as always happens with murderers, or he
would have been arrested. So I could always have clambered up to the ikons
and have taken away the money next morning or even that night, and it
would have all been put down to Dmitri Fyodorovitch. I could reckon upon
that.”

“But what if he did not kill him, but only knocked him down?”

“If he did not kill him, of course, I would not have ventured to take the
money, and nothing would have happened. But I calculated that he would
beat him senseless, and I should have time to take it then, and then I’d
make out to Fyodor Pavlovitch that it was no one but Dmitri Fyodorovitch
who had taken the money after beating him.”

“Stop ... I am getting mixed. Then it was Dmitri after all who killed him;
you only took the money?”

“No, he didn’t kill him. Well, I might as well have told you now that he
was the murderer.... But I don’t want to lie to you now, because ...
because if you really haven’t understood till now, as I see for myself,
and are not pretending, so as to throw your guilt on me to my very face,
you are still responsible for it all, since you knew of the murder and
charged me to do it, and went away knowing all about it. And so I want to
prove to your face this evening that you are the only real murderer in the
whole affair, and I am not the real murderer, though I did kill him. You
are the rightful murderer.”

“Why, why, am I a murderer? Oh, God!” Ivan cried, unable to restrain
himself at last, and forgetting that he had put off discussing himself
till the end of the conversation. “You still mean that Tchermashnya? Stay,
tell me, why did you want my consent, if you really took Tchermashnya for
consent? How will you explain that now?”

“Assured of your consent, I should have known that you wouldn’t have made
an outcry over those three thousand being lost, even if I’d been
suspected, instead of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, or as his accomplice; on the
contrary, you would have protected me from others.... And when you got
your inheritance you would have rewarded me when you were able, all the
rest of your life. For you’d have received your inheritance through me,
seeing that if he had married Agrafena Alexandrovna, you wouldn’t have had
a farthing.”

“Ah! Then you intended to worry me all my life afterwards,” snarled Ivan.
“And what if I hadn’t gone away then, but had informed against you?”

“What could you have informed? That I persuaded you to go to Tchermashnya?
That’s all nonsense. Besides, after our conversation you would either have
gone away or have stayed. If you had stayed, nothing would have happened.
I should have known that you didn’t want it done, and should have
attempted nothing. As you went away, it meant you assured me that you
wouldn’t dare to inform against me at the trial, and that you’d overlook
my having the three thousand. And, indeed, you couldn’t have prosecuted me
afterwards, because then I should have told it all in the court; that is,
not that I had stolen the money or killed him—I shouldn’t have said
that—but that you’d put me up to the theft and the murder, though I didn’t
consent to it. That’s why I needed your consent, so that you couldn’t have
cornered me afterwards, for what proof could you have had? I could always
have cornered you, revealing your eagerness for your father’s death, and I
tell you the public would have believed it all, and you would have been
ashamed for the rest of your life.”

“Was I then so eager, was I?” Ivan snarled again.

“To be sure you were, and by your consent you silently sanctioned my doing
it.” Smerdyakov looked resolutely at Ivan. He was very weak and spoke
slowly and wearily, but some hidden inner force urged him on. He evidently
had some design. Ivan felt that.

“Go on,” he said. “Tell me what happened that night.”

“What more is there to tell! I lay there and I thought I heard the master
shout. And before that Grigory Vassilyevitch had suddenly got up and came
out, and he suddenly gave a scream, and then all was silence and darkness.
I lay there waiting, my heart beating; I couldn’t bear it. I got up at
last, went out. I saw the window open on the left into the garden, and I
stepped to the left to listen whether he was sitting there alive, and I
heard the master moving about, sighing, so I knew he was alive. ‘Ech!’ I
thought. I went to the window and shouted to the master, ‘It’s I.’ And he
shouted to me, ‘He’s been, he’s been; he’s run away.’ He meant Dmitri
Fyodorovitch had been. ‘He’s killed Grigory!’ ‘Where?’ I whispered.
‘There, in the corner,’ he pointed. He was whispering, too. ‘Wait a bit,’
I said. I went to the corner of the garden to look, and there I came upon
Grigory Vassilyevitch lying by the wall, covered with blood, senseless. So
it’s true that Dmitri Fyodorovitch has been here, was the thought that
came into my head, and I determined on the spot to make an end of it, as
Grigory Vassilyevitch, even if he were alive, would see nothing of it, as
he lay there senseless. The only risk was that Marfa Ignatyevna might wake
up. I felt that at the moment, but the longing to get it done came over
me, till I could scarcely breathe. I went back to the window to the master
and said, ‘She’s here, she’s come; Agrafena Alexandrovna has come, wants
to be let in.’ And he started like a baby. ‘Where is she?’ he fairly
gasped, but couldn’t believe it. ‘She’s standing there,’ said I. ‘Open.’
He looked out of the window at me, half believing and half distrustful,
but afraid to open. ‘Why, he is afraid of me now,’ I thought. And it was
funny. I bethought me to knock on the window‐frame those taps we’d agreed
upon as a signal that Grushenka had come, in his presence, before his
eyes. He didn’t seem to believe my word, but as soon as he heard the taps,
he ran at once to open the door. He opened it. I would have gone in, but
he stood in the way to prevent me passing. ‘Where is she? Where is she?’
He looked at me, all of a tremble. ‘Well,’ thought I, ‘if he’s so
frightened of me as all that, it’s a bad look out!’ And my legs went weak
with fright that he wouldn’t let me in or would call out, or Marfa
Ignatyevna would run up, or something else might happen. I don’t remember
now, but I must have stood pale, facing him. I whispered to him, ‘Why,
she’s there, there, under the window; how is it you don’t see her?’ I
said. ‘Bring her then, bring her.’ ‘She’s afraid,’ said I; ‘she was
frightened at the noise, she’s hidden in the bushes; go and call to her
yourself from the study.’ He ran to the window, put the candle in the
window. ‘Grushenka,’ he cried, ‘Grushenka, are you here?’ Though he cried
that, he didn’t want to lean out of the window, he didn’t want to move
away from me, for he was panic‐stricken; he was so frightened he didn’t
dare to turn his back on me. ‘Why, here she is,’ said I. I went up to the
window and leaned right out of it. ‘Here she is; she’s in the bush,
laughing at you, don’t you see her?’ He suddenly believed it; he was all
of a shake—he was awfully crazy about her—and he leaned right out of the
window. I snatched up that iron paper‐weight from his table; do you
remember, weighing about three pounds? I swung it and hit him on the top
of the skull with the corner of it. He didn’t even cry out. He only sank
down suddenly, and I hit him again and a third time. And the third time I
knew I’d broken his skull. He suddenly rolled on his back, face upwards,
covered with blood. I looked round. There was no blood on me, not a spot.
I wiped the paper‐weight, put it back, went up to the ikons, took the
money out of the envelope, and flung the envelope on the floor and the
pink ribbon beside it. I went out into the garden all of a tremble,
straight to the apple‐tree with a hollow in it—you know that hollow. I’d
marked it long before and put a rag and a piece of paper ready in it. I
wrapped all the notes in the rag and stuffed it deep down in the hole. And
there it stayed for over a fortnight. I took it out later, when I came out
of the hospital. I went back to my bed, lay down and thought, ‘If Grigory
Vassilyevitch has been killed outright it may be a bad job for me, but if
he is not killed and recovers, it will be first‐rate, for then he’ll bear
witness that Dmitri Fyodorovitch has been here, and so he must have killed
him and taken the money.’ Then I began groaning with suspense and
impatience, so as to wake Marfa Ignatyevna as soon as possible. At last
she got up and she rushed to me, but when she saw Grigory Vassilyevitch
was not there, she ran out, and I heard her scream in the garden. And that
set it all going and set my mind at rest.”

He stopped. Ivan had listened all the time in dead silence without
stirring or taking his eyes off him. As he told his story Smerdyakov
glanced at him from time to time, but for the most part kept his eyes
averted. When he had finished he was evidently agitated and was breathing
hard. The perspiration stood out on his face. But it was impossible to
tell whether it was remorse he was feeling, or what.

“Stay,” cried Ivan, pondering. “What about the door? If he only opened the
door to you, how could Grigory have seen it open before? For Grigory saw
it before you went.”

It was remarkable that Ivan spoke quite amicably, in a different tone, not
angry as before, so if any one had opened the door at that moment and
peeped in at them, he would certainly have concluded that they were
talking peaceably about some ordinary, though interesting, subject.

“As for that door and Grigory Vassilyevitch’s having seen it open, that’s
only his fancy,” said Smerdyakov, with a wry smile. “He is not a man, I
assure you, but an obstinate mule. He didn’t see it, but fancied he had
seen it, and there’s no shaking him. It’s just our luck he took that
notion into his head, for they can’t fail to convict Dmitri Fyodorovitch
after that.”

“Listen ...” said Ivan, beginning to seem bewildered again and making an
effort to grasp something. “Listen. There are a lot of questions I want to
ask you, but I forget them ... I keep forgetting and getting mixed up.
Yes. Tell me this at least, why did you open the envelope and leave it
there on the floor? Why didn’t you simply carry off the envelope?... When
you were telling me, I thought you spoke about it as though it were the
right thing to do ... but why, I can’t understand....”

“I did that for a good reason. For if a man had known all about it, as I
did for instance, if he’d seen those notes before, and perhaps had put
them in that envelope himself, and had seen the envelope sealed up and
addressed, with his own eyes, if such a man had done the murder, what
should have made him tear open the envelope afterwards, especially in such
desperate haste, since he’d know for certain the notes must be in the
envelope? No, if the robber had been some one like me, he’d simply have
put the envelope straight in his pocket and got away with it as fast as he
could. But it’d be quite different with Dmitri Fyodorovitch. He only knew
about the envelope by hearsay; he had never seen it, and if he’d found it,
for instance, under the mattress, he’d have torn it open as quickly as
possible to make sure the notes were in it. And he’d have thrown the
envelope down, without having time to think that it would be evidence
against him. Because he was not an habitual thief and had never directly
stolen anything before, for he is a gentleman born, and if he did bring
himself to steal, it would not be regular stealing, but simply taking what
was his own, for he’d told the whole town he meant to before, and had even
bragged aloud before every one that he’d go and take his property from
Fyodor Pavlovitch. I didn’t say that openly to the prosecutor when I was
being examined, but quite the contrary, I brought him to it by a hint, as
though I didn’t see it myself, and as though he’d thought of it himself
and I hadn’t prompted him; so that Mr. Prosecutor’s mouth positively
watered at my suggestion.”

“But can you possibly have thought of all that on the spot?” cried Ivan,
overcome with astonishment. He looked at Smerdyakov again with alarm.

“Mercy on us! Could any one think of it all in such a desperate hurry? It
was all thought out beforehand.”

“Well ... well, it was the devil helped you!” Ivan cried again. “No, you
are not a fool, you are far cleverer than I thought....”

He got up, obviously intending to walk across the room. He was in terrible
distress. But as the table blocked his way, and there was hardly room to
pass between the table and the wall, he only turned round where he stood
and sat down again. Perhaps the impossibility of moving irritated him, as
he suddenly cried out almost as furiously as before.

“Listen, you miserable, contemptible creature! Don’t you understand that
if I haven’t killed you, it’s simply because I am keeping you to answer
to‐morrow at the trial. God sees,” Ivan raised his hand, “perhaps I, too,
was guilty; perhaps I really had a secret desire for my father’s ...
death, but I swear I was not as guilty as you think, and perhaps I didn’t
urge you on at all. No, no, I didn’t urge you on! But no matter, I will
give evidence against myself to‐morrow at the trial. I’m determined to! I
shall tell everything, everything. But we’ll make our appearance together.
And whatever you may say against me at the trial, whatever evidence you
give, I’ll face it; I am not afraid of you. I’ll confirm it all myself!
But you must confess, too! You must, you must; we’ll go together. That’s
how it shall be!”

Ivan said this solemnly and resolutely and from his flashing eyes alone it
could be seen that it would be so.

“You are ill, I see; you are quite ill. Your eyes are yellow,” Smerdyakov
commented, without the least irony, with apparent sympathy in fact.

“We’ll go together,” Ivan repeated. “And if you won’t go, no matter, I’ll
go alone.”

Smerdyakov paused as though pondering.

“There’ll be nothing of the sort, and you won’t go,” he concluded at last
positively.

“You don’t understand me,” Ivan exclaimed reproachfully.

“You’ll be too much ashamed, if you confess it all. And, what’s more, it
will be no use at all, for I shall say straight out that I never said
anything of the sort to you, and that you are either ill (and it looks
like it, too), or that you’re so sorry for your brother that you are
sacrificing yourself to save him and have invented it all against me, for
you’ve always thought no more of me than if I’d been a fly. And who will
believe you, and what single proof have you got?”

“Listen, you showed me those notes just now to convince me.”

Smerdyakov lifted the book off the notes and laid it on one side.

“Take that money away with you,” Smerdyakov sighed.

“Of course, I shall take it. But why do you give it to me, if you
committed the murder for the sake of it?” Ivan looked at him with great
surprise.

“I don’t want it,” Smerdyakov articulated in a shaking voice, with a
gesture of refusal. “I did have an idea of beginning a new life with that
money in Moscow or, better still, abroad. I did dream of it, chiefly
because ‘all things are lawful.’ That was quite right what you taught me,
for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there’s no everlasting God,
there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it. You were right
there. So that’s how I looked at it.”

“Did you come to that of yourself?” asked Ivan, with a wry smile.

“With your guidance.”

“And now, I suppose, you believe in God, since you are giving back the
money?”

“No, I don’t believe,” whispered Smerdyakov.

“Then why are you giving it back?”

“Leave off ... that’s enough!” Smerdyakov waved his hand again. “You used
to say yourself that everything was lawful, so now why are you so upset,
too? You even want to go and give evidence against yourself.... Only
there’ll be nothing of the sort! You won’t go to give evidence,”
Smerdyakov decided with conviction.

“You’ll see,” said Ivan.

“It isn’t possible. You are very clever. You are fond of money, I know
that. You like to be respected, too, for you’re very proud; you are far
too fond of female charms, too, and you mind most of all about living in
undisturbed comfort, without having to depend on any one—that’s what you
care most about. You won’t want to spoil your life for ever by taking such
a disgrace on yourself. You are like Fyodor Pavlovitch, you are more like
him than any of his children; you’ve the same soul as he had.”

“You are not a fool,” said Ivan, seeming struck. The blood rushed to his
face. “You are serious now!” he observed, looking suddenly at Smerdyakov
with a different expression.

“It was your pride made you think I was a fool. Take the money.”

Ivan took the three rolls of notes and put them in his pocket without
wrapping them in anything.

“I shall show them at the court to‐morrow,” he said.

“Nobody will believe you, as you’ve plenty of money of your own; you may
simply have taken it out of your cash‐box and brought it to the court.”

Ivan rose from his seat.

“I repeat,” he said, “the only reason I haven’t killed you is that I need
you for to‐morrow, remember that, don’t forget it!”

“Well, kill me. Kill me now,” Smerdyakov said, all at once looking
strangely at Ivan. “You won’t dare do that even!” he added, with a bitter
smile. “You won’t dare to do anything, you, who used to be so bold!”

“Till to‐morrow,” cried Ivan, and moved to go out.

“Stay a moment.... Show me those notes again.”

Ivan took out the notes and showed them to him. Smerdyakov looked at them
for ten seconds.

“Well, you can go,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “Ivan Fyodorovitch!”
he called after him again.

“What do you want?” Ivan turned without stopping.

“Good‐by!”

“Till to‐morrow!” Ivan cried again, and he walked out of the cottage.

The snowstorm was still raging. He walked the first few steps boldly, but
suddenly began staggering. “It’s something physical,” he thought with a
grin. Something like joy was springing up in his heart. He was conscious
of unbounded resolution; he would make an end of the wavering that had so
tortured him of late. His determination was taken, “and now it will not be
changed,” he thought with relief. At that moment he stumbled against
something and almost fell down. Stopping short, he made out at his feet
the peasant he had knocked down, still lying senseless and motionless. The
snow had almost covered his face. Ivan seized him and lifted him in his
arms. Seeing a light in the little house to the right he went up, knocked
at the shutters, and asked the man to whom the house belonged to help him
carry the peasant to the police‐station, promising him three roubles. The
man got ready and came out. I won’t describe in detail how Ivan succeeded
in his object, bringing the peasant to the police‐station and arranging
for a doctor to see him at once, providing with a liberal hand for the
expenses. I will only say that this business took a whole hour, but Ivan
was well content with it. His mind wandered and worked incessantly.

“If I had not taken my decision so firmly for to‐morrow,” he reflected
with satisfaction, “I should not have stayed a whole hour to look after
the peasant, but should have passed by, without caring about his being
frozen. I am quite capable of watching myself, by the way,” he thought at
the same instant, with still greater satisfaction, “although they have
decided that I am going out of my mind!”

Just as he reached his own house he stopped short, asking himself suddenly
hadn’t he better go at once to the prosecutor and tell him everything. He
decided the question by turning back to the house. “Everything together
to‐morrow!” he whispered to himself, and, strange to say, almost all his
gladness and self‐satisfaction passed in one instant.

As he entered his own room he felt something like a touch of ice on his
heart, like a recollection or, more exactly, a reminder, of something
agonizing and revolting that was in that room now, at that moment, and had
been there before. He sank wearily on his sofa. The old woman brought him
a samovar; he made tea, but did not touch it. He sat on the sofa and felt
giddy. He felt that he was ill and helpless. He was beginning to drop
asleep, but got up uneasily and walked across the room to shake off his
drowsiness. At moments he fancied he was delirious, but it was not illness
that he thought of most. Sitting down again, he began looking round, as
though searching for something. This happened several times. At last his
eyes were fastened intently on one point. Ivan smiled, but an angry flush
suffused his face. He sat a long time in his place, his head propped on
both arms, though he looked sideways at the same point, at the sofa that
stood against the opposite wall. There was evidently something, some
object, that irritated him there, worried him and tormented him.



Chapter IX. The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare


I am not a doctor, but yet I feel that the moment has come when I must
inevitably give the reader some account of the nature of Ivan’s illness.
Anticipating events I can say at least one thing: he was at that moment on
the very eve of an attack of brain fever. Though his health had long been
affected, it had offered a stubborn resistance to the fever which in the
end gained complete mastery over it. Though I know nothing of medicine, I
venture to hazard the suggestion that he really had perhaps, by a terrible
effort of will, succeeded in delaying the attack for a time, hoping, of
course, to check it completely. He knew that he was unwell, but he loathed
the thought of being ill at that fatal time, at the approaching crisis in
his life, when he needed to have all his wits about him, to say what he
had to say boldly and resolutely and “to justify himself to himself.”

He had, however, consulted the new doctor, who had been brought from
Moscow by a fantastic notion of Katerina Ivanovna’s to which I have
referred already. After listening to him and examining him the doctor came
to the conclusion that he was actually suffering from some disorder of the
brain, and was not at all surprised by an admission which Ivan had
reluctantly made him. “Hallucinations are quite likely in your condition,”
the doctor opined, “though it would be better to verify them ... you must
take steps at once, without a moment’s delay, or things will go badly with
you.” But Ivan did not follow this judicious advice and did not take to
his bed to be nursed. “I am walking about, so I am strong enough, if I
drop, it’ll be different then, any one may nurse me who likes,” he
decided, dismissing the subject.

And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium and, as I
have said already, looking persistently at some object on the sofa against
the opposite wall. Some one appeared to be sitting there, though goodness
knows how he had come in, for he had not been in the room when Ivan came
into it, on his return from Smerdyakov. This was a person or, more
accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer
young, _qui faisait la cinquantaine_, as the French say, with rather long,
still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with gray and a small pointed
beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently
made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old,
that had been discarded by smart and well‐to‐do people for the last two
years. His linen and his long scarf‐like neck‐tie were all such as are
worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his
linen was not over‐clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The
visitor’s check trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in
color and too tight for the present fashion. His soft fluffy white hat was
out of keeping with the season.

In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It
looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners
who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at
some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections,
had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming
gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the
position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old
friend to another and received by them for his companionable and
accommodating disposition and as being, after all, a gentleman who could
be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of
honor. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who
can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion
for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary
creatures, either bachelors or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but
if so, the children are always being brought up at a distance, at some
aunt’s, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good society, seeming
ashamed of the relationship. They gradually lose sight of their children
altogether, though at intervals they receive a birthday or Christmas
letter from them and sometimes even answer it.

The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good‐natured, as
accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasion might
arise. He had no watch, but he had a tortoise‐shell lorgnette on a black
ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring
with a cheap opal stone in it.

Ivan was angrily silent and would not begin the conversation. The visitor
waited and sat exactly like a poor relation who had come down from his
room to keep his host company at tea, and was discreetly silent, seeing
that his host was frowning and preoccupied. But he was ready for any
affable conversation as soon as his host should begin it. All at once his
face expressed a sudden solicitude.

“I say,” he began to Ivan, “excuse me, I only mention it to remind you.
You went to Smerdyakov’s to find out about Katerina Ivanovna, but you came
away without finding out anything about her, you probably forgot—”

“Ah, yes,” broke from Ivan and his face grew gloomy with uneasiness. “Yes,
I’d forgotten ... but it doesn’t matter now, never mind, till to‐morrow,”
he muttered to himself, “and you,” he added, addressing his visitor, “I
should have remembered that myself in a minute, for that was just what was
tormenting me! Why do you interfere, as if I should believe that you
prompted me, and that I didn’t remember it of myself?”

“Don’t believe it then,” said the gentleman, smiling amicably, “what’s the
good of believing against your will? Besides, proofs are no help to
believing, especially material proofs. Thomas believed, not because he saw
Christ risen, but because he wanted to believe, before he saw. Look at the
spiritualists, for instance.... I am very fond of them ... only fancy,
they imagine that they are serving the cause of religion, because the
devils show them their horns from the other world. That, they say, is a
material proof, so to speak, of the existence of another world. The other
world and material proofs, what next! And if you come to that, does
proving there’s a devil prove that there’s a God? I want to join an
idealist society, I’ll lead the opposition in it, I’ll say I am a realist,
but not a materialist, he he!”

“Listen,” Ivan suddenly got up from the table. “I seem to be delirious....
I am delirious, in fact, talk any nonsense you like, I don’t care! You
won’t drive me to fury, as you did last time. But I feel somehow
ashamed.... I want to walk about the room.... I sometimes don’t see you
and don’t even hear your voice as I did last time, but I always guess what
you are prating, for it’s I, _I myself speaking, not you_. Only I don’t
know whether I was dreaming last time or whether I really saw you. I’ll
wet a towel and put it on my head and perhaps you’ll vanish into air.”

Ivan went into the corner, took a towel, and did as he said, and with a
wet towel on his head began walking up and down the room.

“I am so glad you treat me so familiarly,” the visitor began.

“Fool,” laughed Ivan, “do you suppose I should stand on ceremony with you?
I am in good spirits now, though I’ve a pain in my forehead ... and in the
top of my head ... only please don’t talk philosophy, as you did last
time. If you can’t take yourself off, talk of something amusing. Talk
gossip, you are a poor relation, you ought to talk gossip. What a
nightmare to have! But I am not afraid of you. I’ll get the better of you.
I won’t be taken to a mad‐house!”

“_C’est charmant_, poor relation. Yes, I am in my natural shape. For what
am I on earth but a poor relation? By the way, I am listening to you and
am rather surprised to find you are actually beginning to take me for
something real, not simply your fancy, as you persisted in declaring last
time—”

“Never for one minute have I taken you for reality,” Ivan cried with a
sort of fury. “You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom. It’s
only that I don’t know how to destroy you and I see I must suffer for a
time. You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself, but
only of one side of me ... of my thoughts and feelings, but only the
nastiest and stupidest of them. From that point of view you might be of
interest to me, if only I had time to waste on you—”

“Excuse me, excuse me, I’ll catch you. When you flew out at Alyosha under
the lamp‐post this evening and shouted to him, ‘You learnt it from _him_!
How do you know that _he_ visits me?’ you were thinking of me then. So for
one brief moment you did believe that I really exist,” the gentleman
laughed blandly.

“Yes, that was a moment of weakness ... but I couldn’t believe in you. I
don’t know whether I was asleep or awake last time. Perhaps I was only
dreaming then and didn’t see you really at all—”

“And why were you so surly with Alyosha just now? He is a dear; I’ve
treated him badly over Father Zossima.”

“Don’t talk of Alyosha! How dare you, you flunkey!” Ivan laughed again.

“You scold me, but you laugh—that’s a good sign. But you are ever so much
more polite than you were last time and I know why: that great resolution
of yours—”

“Don’t speak of my resolution,” cried Ivan, savagely.

“I understand, I understand, _c’est noble, c’est charmant_, you are going
to defend your brother and to sacrifice yourself ... _C’est
chevaleresque_.”

“Hold your tongue, I’ll kick you!”

“I shan’t be altogether sorry, for then my object will be attained. If you
kick me, you must believe in my reality, for people don’t kick ghosts.
Joking apart, it doesn’t matter to me, scold if you like, though it’s
better to be a trifle more polite even to me. ‘Fool, flunkey!’ what
words!”

“Scolding you, I scold myself,” Ivan laughed again, “you are myself,
myself, only with a different face. You just say what I am thinking ...
and are incapable of saying anything new!”

“If I am like you in my way of thinking, it’s all to my credit,” the
gentleman declared, with delicacy and dignity.

“You choose out only my worst thoughts, and what’s more, the stupid ones.
You are stupid and vulgar. You are awfully stupid. No, I can’t put up with
you! What am I to do, what am I to do?” Ivan said through his clenched
teeth.

“My dear friend, above all things I want to behave like a gentleman and to
be recognized as such,” the visitor began in an excess of deprecating and
simple‐hearted pride, typical of a poor relation. “I am poor, but ... I
won’t say very honest, but ... it’s an axiom generally accepted in society
that I am a fallen angel. I certainly can’t conceive how I can ever have
been an angel. If I ever was, it must have been so long ago that there’s
no harm in forgetting it. Now I only prize the reputation of being a
gentlemanly person and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable. I
love men genuinely, I’ve been greatly calumniated! Here when I stay with
you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and that’s what I
like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I
love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed,
here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but
indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming.
Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don’t laugh, that’s just
what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here: I’ve
grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go
and steam myself with merchants and priests. What I dream of is becoming
incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant’s wife
weighing eighteen stone, and of believing all she believes. My ideal is to
go to church and offer a candle in simple‐hearted faith, upon my word it
is. Then there would be an end to my sufferings. I like being doctored
too; in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went and was
vaccinated in a foundling hospital—if only you knew how I enjoyed myself
that day. I subscribed ten roubles in the cause of the Slavs!... But you
are not listening. Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I
know you went yesterday to that doctor ... well, what about your health?
What did the doctor say?”

“Fool!” Ivan snapped out.

“But you are clever, anyway. You are scolding again? I didn’t ask out of
sympathy. You needn’t answer. Now rheumatism has come in again—”

“Fool!” repeated Ivan.

“You keep saying the same thing; but I had such an attack of rheumatism
last year that I remember it to this day.”

“The devil have rheumatism!”

“Why not, if I sometimes put on fleshly form? I put on fleshly form and I
take the consequences. Satan _sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto_.”

“What, what, Satan _sum et nihil humanum_ ... that’s not bad for the
devil!”

“I am glad I’ve pleased you at last.”

“But you didn’t get that from me.” Ivan stopped suddenly, seeming struck.
“That never entered my head, that’s strange.”

“_C’est du nouveau, n’est‐ce pas?_ This time I’ll act honestly and explain
to you. Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion
or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and
real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such
a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the
last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. Yet such
dreams are sometimes seen not by writers, but by the most ordinary people,
officials, journalists, priests.... The subject is a complete enigma. A
statesman confessed to me, indeed, that all his best ideas came to him
when he was asleep. Well, that’s how it is now, though I am your
hallucination, yet just as in a nightmare, I say original things which had
not entered your head before. So I don’t repeat your ideas, yet I am only
your nightmare, nothing more.”

“You are lying, your aim is to convince me you exist apart and are not my
nightmare, and now you are asserting you are a dream.”

“My dear fellow, I’ve adopted a special method to‐day, I’ll explain it to
you afterwards. Stay, where did I break off? Oh, yes! I caught cold then,
only not here but yonder.”

“Where is yonder? Tell me, will you be here long? Can’t you go away?” Ivan
exclaimed almost in despair. He ceased walking to and fro, sat down on the
sofa, leaned his elbows on the table again and held his head tight in both
hands. He pulled the wet towel off and flung it away in vexation. It was
evidently of no use.

“Your nerves are out of order,” observed the gentleman, with a carelessly
easy, though perfectly polite, air. “You are angry with me even for being
able to catch cold, though it happened in a most natural way. I was
hurrying then to a diplomatic _soirée_ at the house of a lady of high rank
in Petersburg, who was aiming at influence in the Ministry. Well, an
evening suit, white tie, gloves, though I was God knows where and had to
fly through space to reach your earth.... Of course, it took only an
instant, but you know a ray of light from the sun takes full eight
minutes, and fancy in an evening suit and open waistcoat. Spirits don’t
freeze, but when one’s in fleshly form, well ... in brief, I didn’t think,
and set off, and you know in those ethereal spaces, in the water that is
above the firmament, there’s such a frost ... at least one can’t call it
frost, you can fancy, 150 degrees below zero! You know the game the
village girls play—they invite the unwary to lick an ax in thirty degrees
of frost, the tongue instantly freezes to it and the dupe tears the skin
off, so it bleeds. But that’s only in 30 degrees, in 150 degrees I imagine
it would be enough to put your finger on the ax and it would be the end of
it ... if only there could be an ax there.”

“And can there be an ax there?” Ivan interrupted, carelessly and
disdainfully. He was exerting himself to the utmost not to believe in the
delusion and not to sink into complete insanity.

“An ax?” the guest interrupted in surprise.

“Yes, what would become of an ax there?” Ivan cried suddenly, with a sort
of savage and insistent obstinacy.

“What would become of an ax in space? _Quelle idée!_ If it were to fall to
any distance, it would begin, I think, flying round the earth without
knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising
and the setting of the ax, _Gatzuk_ would put it in his calendar, that’s
all.”

“You are stupid, awfully stupid,” said Ivan peevishly. “Fib more cleverly
or I won’t listen. You want to get the better of me by realism, to
convince me that you exist, but I don’t want to believe you exist! I won’t
believe it!”

“But I am not fibbing, it’s all the truth; the truth is unhappily hardly
ever amusing. I see you persist in expecting something big of me, and
perhaps something fine. That’s a great pity, for I only give what I can—”

“Don’t talk philosophy, you ass!”

“Philosophy, indeed, when all my right side is numb and I am moaning and
groaning. I’ve tried all the medical faculty: they can diagnose
beautifully, they have the whole of your disease at their finger‐tips, but
they’ve no idea how to cure you. There was an enthusiastic little student
here, ‘You may die,’ said he, ‘but you’ll know perfectly what disease you
are dying of!’ And then what a way they have sending people to
specialists! ‘We only diagnose,’ they say, ‘but go to such‐and‐such a
specialist, he’ll cure you.’ The old doctor who used to cure all sorts of
disease has completely disappeared, I assure you, now there are only
specialists and they all advertise in the newspapers. If anything is wrong
with your nose, they send you to Paris: there, they say, is a European
specialist who cures noses. If you go to Paris, he’ll look at your nose; I
can only cure your right nostril, he’ll tell you, for I don’t cure the
left nostril, that’s not my speciality, but go to Vienna, there there’s a
specialist who will cure your left nostril. What are you to do? I fell
back on popular remedies, a German doctor advised me to rub myself with
honey and salt in the bath‐house. Solely to get an extra bath I went,
smeared myself all over and it did me no good at all. In despair I wrote
to Count Mattei in Milan. He sent me a book and some drops, bless him,
and, only fancy, Hoff’s malt extract cured me! I bought it by accident,
drank a bottle and a half of it, and I was ready to dance, it took it away
completely. I made up my mind to write to the papers to thank him, I was
prompted by a feeling of gratitude, and only fancy, it led to no end of a
bother: not a single paper would take my letter. ‘It would be very
reactionary,’ they said, ‘no one will believe it. _Le diable n’existe
point._ You’d better remain anonymous,’ they advised me. What use is a
letter of thanks if it’s anonymous? I laughed with the men at the
newspaper office; ‘It’s reactionary to believe in God in our days,’ I
said, ‘but I am the devil, so I may be believed in.’ ‘We quite understand
that,’ they said. ‘Who doesn’t believe in the devil? Yet it won’t do, it
might injure our reputation. As a joke, if you like.’ But I thought as a
joke it wouldn’t be very witty. So it wasn’t printed. And do you know, I
have felt sore about it to this day. My best feelings, gratitude, for
instance, are literally denied me simply from my social position.”

“Philosophical reflections again?” Ivan snarled malignantly.

“God preserve me from it, but one can’t help complaining sometimes. I am a
slandered man. You upbraid me every moment with being stupid. One can see
you are young. My dear fellow, intelligence isn’t the only thing! I have
naturally a kind and merry heart. ‘I also write vaudevilles of all sorts.’
You seem to take me for Hlestakov grown old, but my fate is a far more
serious one. Before time was, by some decree which I could never make out,
I was pre‐destined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely good‐hearted and not
at all inclined to negation. ‘No, you must go and deny, without denial
there’s no criticism and what would a journal be without a column of
criticism?’ Without criticism it would be nothing but one ‘hosannah.’ But
nothing but hosannah is not enough for life, the hosannah must be tried in
the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same style. But I don’t meddle in
that, I didn’t create it, I am not answerable for it. Well, they’ve chosen
their scapegoat, they’ve made me write the column of criticism and so life
was made possible. We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask
for annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you.
If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There
would be no events without you, and there must be events. So against the
grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am
commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce
as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course
... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for
suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It
would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but
tedious. But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in
an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all
beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are
laughing— no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are for ever
angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would
give away all this super‐stellar life, all the ranks and honors, simply to
be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone
and set candles at God’s shrine.”

“Then even you don’t believe in God?” said Ivan, with a smile of hatred.

“What can I say?—that is, if you are in earnest—”

“Is there a God or not?” Ivan cried with the same savage intensity.

“Ah, then you are in earnest! My dear fellow, upon my word I don’t know.
There! I’ve said it now!”

“You don’t know, but you see God? No, you are not some one apart, you are
myself, you are I and nothing more! You are rubbish, you are my fancy!”

“Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you, that would be true.
_Je pense, donc je suis_, I know that for a fact; all the rest, all these
worlds, God and even Satan—all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all
that exist of itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a logical
development of my ego which alone has existed for ever: but I make haste
to stop, for I believe you will be jumping up to beat me directly.”

“You’d better tell me some anecdote!” said Ivan miserably.

“There is an anecdote precisely on our subject, or rather a legend, not an
anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief, you see, you say, yet you don’t
believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one like that. We are all
in a muddle over there now and all through your science. Once there used
to be atoms, five senses, four elements, and then everything hung together
somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we’ve
learned that you’ve discovered the chemical molecule and protoplasm and
the devil knows what, we had to lower our crest. There’s a regular muddle,
and, above all, superstition, scandal; there’s as much scandal among us as
among you, you know; a little more in fact, and spying, indeed, for we
have our secret police department where private information is received.
Well, this wild legend belongs to our middle ages—not yours, but ours—and
no one believes it even among us, except the old ladies of eighteen stone,
not your old ladies I mean, but ours. We’ve everything you have, I am
revealing one of our secrets out of friendship for you; though it’s
forbidden. This legend is about Paradise. There was, they say, here on
earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, ‘laws,
conscience, faith,’ and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected
to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before
him. He was astounded and indignant. ‘This is against my principles!’ he
said. And he was punished for that ... that is, you must excuse me, I am
just repeating what I heard myself, it’s only a legend ... he was
sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometers in the dark (we’ve adopted the
metric system, you know) and when he has finished that quadrillion, the
gates of heaven would be opened to him and he’ll be forgiven—”

“And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion
kilometers?” asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.

“What tortures? Ah, don’t ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they
have taken chiefly to moral punishments—‘the stings of conscience’ and all
that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your
manners. And who’s the better for it? Only those who have got no
conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience when they have
none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honor suffer
for it. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them,
especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but
mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned
to the quadrillion kilometers, stood still, looked round and lay down
across the road. ‘I won’t go, I refuse on principle!’ Take the soul of an
enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah,
who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale, and you
get the character of that thinker who lay across the road.”

“What did he lie on there?”

“Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?”

“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was
listening with an unexpected curiosity. “Well, is he lying there now?”

“That’s the point, that he isn’t. He lay there almost a thousand years and
then he got up and went on.”

“What an ass!” cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be
pondering something intently. “Does it make any difference whether he lies
there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometers? It would take a
billion years to walk it?”

“Much more than that. I haven’t got a pencil and paper or I could work it
out. But he got there long ago, and that’s where the story begins.”

“What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?”

“Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may
have been repeated a billion times. Why, it’s become extinct, been frozen;
cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water
above the firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun
it becomes earth—and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly
and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably
tedious—”

“Well, well, what happened when he arrived?”

“Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in, before
he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my thinking his
watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out
that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometers but
a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power! In fact,
he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so, that some persons there of lofty
ideas wouldn’t shake hands with him at first—he’d become too rapidly
reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat, it’s a legend.
I give it for what it’s worth. So that’s the sort of ideas we have on such
subjects even now.”

“I’ve caught you!” Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as though
he had succeeded in remembering something at last. “That anecdote about
the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at
the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfellow
called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The anecdote is so characteristic
that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere. I thought I’d forgotten it
... but I’ve unconsciously recalled it—I recalled it myself—it was not you
telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously remembered like that
even when people are being taken to execution ... it’s come back to me in
a dream. You are that dream! You are a dream, not a living creature!”

“From the vehemence with which you deny my existence,” laughed the
gentleman, “I am convinced that you believe in me.”

“Not in the slightest! I haven’t a hundredth part of a grain of faith in
you!”

“But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the
strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten‐thousandth of a
grain.”

“Not for one minute,” cried Ivan furiously. “But I should like to believe
in you,” he added strangely.

“Aha! There’s an admission! But I am good‐natured. I’ll come to your
assistance again. Listen, it was I caught you, not you me. I told you your
anecdote you’d forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me
completely.”

“You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your
existence!”

“Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and
disbelief—is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you
are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are
inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you
that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my
motive in it. It’s the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me
completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but
a reality. I know you. Then I shall have attained my object, which is an
honorable one. I shall sow in you only a tiny grain of faith and it will
grow into an oak‐tree—and such an oak‐tree that, sitting on it, you will
long to enter the ranks of ‘the hermits in the wilderness and the saintly
women,’ for that is what you are secretly longing for. You’ll dine on
locusts, you’ll wander into the wilderness to save your soul!”

“Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is it, you
scoundrel?”

“One must do a good work sometimes. How ill‐humored you are!”

“Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed
seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?”

“My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and
all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very
precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is sometimes worth a whole
constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest is
priceless! And some of them, on my word, are not inferior to you in
culture, though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths of
belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems
that they are within a hair’s‐breadth of being ‘turned upside down,’ as
the actor Gorbunov says.”

“Well, did you get your nose pulled?”(8)

“My dear fellow,” observed the visitor sententiously, “it’s better to get
off with your nose pulled than without a nose at all. As an afflicted
marquis observed not long ago (he must have been treated by a specialist)
in confession to his spiritual father—a Jesuit. I was present, it was
simply charming. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said, and he beat his breast.
‘My son,’ said the priest evasively, ‘all things are accomplished in
accordance with the inscrutable decrees of Providence, and what seems a
misfortune sometimes leads to extraordinary, though unapparent, benefits.
If stern destiny has deprived you of your nose, it’s to your advantage
that no one can ever pull you by your nose.’ ‘Holy father, that’s no
comfort,’ cried the despairing marquis. ‘I’d be delighted to have my nose
pulled every day of my life, if it were only in its proper place.’ ‘My
son,’ sighs the priest, ‘you can’t expect every blessing at once. This is
murmuring against Providence, who even in this has not forgotten you, for
if you repine as you repined just now, declaring you’d be glad to have
your nose pulled for the rest of your life, your desire has already been
fulfilled indirectly, for when you lost your nose, you were led by the
nose.’ ”

“Fool, how stupid!” cried Ivan.

“My dear friend, I only wanted to amuse you. But I swear that’s the
genuine Jesuit casuistry and I swear that it all happened word for word as
I’ve told you. It happened lately and gave me a great deal of trouble. The
unhappy young man shot himself that very night when he got home. I was by
his side till the very last moment. Those Jesuit confessionals are really
my most delightful diversion at melancholy moments. Here’s another
incident that happened only the other day. A little blonde Norman girl of
twenty—a buxom, unsophisticated beauty that would make your mouth
water—comes to an old priest. She bends down and whispers her sin into the
grating. ‘Why, my daughter, have you fallen again already?’ cries the
priest. ‘O Sancta Maria, what do I hear! Not the same man this time, how
long is this going on? Aren’t you ashamed!’ ‘_Ah, mon père_,’ answers the
sinner with tears of penitence, ‘_ça lui fait tant de plaisir, et à moi si
peu de peine!_’ Fancy, such an answer! I drew back. It was the cry of
nature, better than innocence itself, if you like. I absolved her sin on
the spot and was turning to go, but I was forced to turn back. I heard the
priest at the grating making an appointment with her for the
evening—though he was an old man hard as flint, he fell in an instant! It
was nature, the truth of nature asserted its rights! What, you are turning
up your nose again? Angry again? I don’t know how to please you—”

“Leave me alone, you are beating on my brain like a haunting nightmare,”
Ivan moaned miserably, helpless before his apparition. “I am bored with
you, agonizingly and insufferably. I would give anything to be able to
shake you off!”

“I repeat, moderate your expectations, don’t demand of me ‘everything
great and noble’ and you’ll see how well we shall get on,” said the
gentleman impressively. “You are really angry with me for not having
appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightning, with scorched
wings, but have shown myself in such a modest form. You are wounded, in
the first place, in your esthetic feelings, and, secondly, in your pride.
How could such a vulgar devil visit such a great man as you! Yes, there is
that romantic strain in you, that was so derided by Byelinsky. I can’t
help it, young man, as I got ready to come to you I did think as a joke of
appearing in the figure of a retired general who had served in the
Caucasus, with a star of the Lion and the Sun on my coat. But I was
positively afraid of doing it, for you’d have thrashed me for daring to
pin the Lion and the Sun on my coat, instead of, at least, the Polar Star
or the Sirius. And you keep on saying I am stupid, but, mercy on us! I
make no claim to be equal to you in intelligence. Mephistopheles declared
to Faust that he desired evil, but did only good. Well, he can say what he
likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all
creation who loves the truth and genuinely desires good. I was there when
the Word, Who died on the Cross, rose up into heaven bearing on His bosom
the soul of the penitent thief. I heard the glad shrieks of the cherubim
singing and shouting hosannah and the thunderous rapture of the seraphim
which shook heaven and all creation, and I swear to you by all that’s
sacred, I longed to join the choir and shout hosannah with them all. The
word had almost escaped me, had almost broken from my lips ... you know
how susceptible and esthetically impressionable I am. But common sense—oh,
a most unhappy trait in my character—kept me in due bounds and I let the
moment pass! For what would have happened, I reflected, what would have
happened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have been
extinguished at once and no events could have occurred. And so, solely
from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress the
good moment and to stick to my nasty task. Somebody takes all the credit
of what’s good for Himself, and nothing but nastiness is left for me. But
I don’t envy the honor of a life of idle imposture, I am not ambitious.
Why am I, of all creatures in the world, doomed to be cursed by all decent
people and even to be kicked, for if I put on mortal form I am bound to
take such consequences sometimes? I know, of course, there’s a secret in
it, but they won’t tell me the secret for anything, for then perhaps,
seeing the meaning of it, I might bawl hosannah, and the indispensable
minus would disappear at once, and good sense would reign supreme
throughout the whole world. And that, of course, would mean the end of
everything, even of magazines and newspapers, for who would take them in?
I know that at the end of all things I shall be reconciled. I, too, shall
walk my quadrillion and learn the secret. But till that happens I am
sulking and fulfill my destiny though it’s against the grain—that is, to
ruin thousands for the sake of saving one. How many souls have had to be
ruined and how many honorable reputations destroyed for the sake of that
one righteous man, Job, over whom they made such a fool of me in old days!
Yes, till the secret is revealed, there are two sorts of truths for
me—one, their truth, yonder, which I know nothing about so far, and the
other my own. And there’s no knowing which will turn out the better....
Are you asleep?”

“I might well be,” Ivan groaned angrily. “All my stupid ideas—outgrown,
thrashed out long ago, and flung aside like a dead carcass—you present to
me as something new!”

“There’s no pleasing you! And I thought I should fascinate you by my
literary style. That hosannah in the skies really wasn’t bad, was it? And
then that ironical tone _à la_ Heine, eh?”

“No, I was never such a flunkey! How then could my soul beget a flunkey
like you?”

“My dear fellow, I know a most charming and attractive young Russian
gentleman, a young thinker and a great lover of literature and art, the
author of a promising poem entitled _The Grand Inquisitor_. I was only
thinking of him!”

“I forbid you to speak of _The Grand Inquisitor_,” cried Ivan, crimson
with shame.

“And the _Geological Cataclysm_. Do you remember? That was a poem, now!”

“Hold your tongue, or I’ll kill you!”

“You’ll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to
that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young friends, quivering
with eagerness for life! ‘There are new men,’ you decided last spring,
when you were meaning to come here, ‘they propose to destroy everything
and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they didn’t ask my advice! I
maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the
idea of God in man, that’s how we have to set to work. It’s that, that we
must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon
as men have all of them denied God—and I believe that period, analogous
with geological periods, will come to pass—the old conception of the
universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what’s more, the
old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from
life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world.
Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man‐
god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature
infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from
hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of
the joys of heaven. Every one will know that he is mortal and will accept
death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it’s
useless for him to repine at life’s being a moment, and he will love his
brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment
of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify
its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the
grave’... and so on and so on in the same style. Charming!”

Ivan sat with his eyes on the floor, and his hands pressed to his ears,
but he began trembling all over. The voice continued.

“The question now is, my young thinker reflected, is it possible that such
a period will ever come? If it does, everything is determined and humanity
is settled for ever. But as, owing to man’s inveterate stupidity, this
cannot come about for at least a thousand years, every one who recognizes
the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the
new principles. In that sense, ‘all things are lawful’ for him. What’s
more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no
God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man‐god, even if
he is the only one in the whole world, and promoted to his new position,
he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the
old slave‐man, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands,
the place is holy. Where I stand will be at once the foremost place ...
‘all things are lawful’ and that’s the end of it! That’s all very
charming; but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for
doing it? But that’s our modern Russian all over. He can’t bring himself
to swindle without a moral sanction. He is so in love with truth—”

The visitor talked, obviously carried away by his own eloquence, speaking
louder and louder and looking ironically at his host. But he did not
succeed in finishing; Ivan suddenly snatched a glass from the table and
flung it at the orator.

“_Ah, mais c’est bête enfin_,” cried the latter, jumping up from the sofa
and shaking the drops of tea off himself. “He remembers Luther’s inkstand!
He takes me for a dream and throws glasses at a dream! It’s like a woman!
I suspected you were only pretending to stop up your ears.”

A loud, persistent knocking was suddenly heard at the window. Ivan jumped
up from the sofa.

“Do you hear? You’d better open,” cried the visitor; “it’s your brother
Alyosha with the most interesting and surprising news, I’ll be bound!”

“Be silent, deceiver, I knew it was Alyosha, I felt he was coming, and of
course he has not come for nothing; of course he brings ‘news,’ ” Ivan
exclaimed frantically.

“Open, open to him. There’s a snowstorm and he is your brother. _Monsieur
sait‐il le temps qu’il fait? C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors_.”

The knocking continued. Ivan wanted to rush to the window, but something
seemed to fetter his arms and legs. He strained every effort to break his
chains, but in vain. The knocking at the window grew louder and louder. At
last the chains were broken and Ivan leapt up from the sofa. He looked
round him wildly. Both candles had almost burnt out, the glass he had just
thrown at his visitor stood before him on the table, and there was no one
on the sofa opposite. The knocking on the window frame went on
persistently, but it was by no means so loud as it had seemed in his
dream; on the contrary, it was quite subdued.

“It was not a dream! No, I swear it was not a dream, it all happened just
now!” cried Ivan. He rushed to the window and opened the movable pane.

“Alyosha, I told you not to come,” he cried fiercely to his brother. “In
two words, what do you want? In two words, do you hear?”

“An hour ago Smerdyakov hanged himself,” Alyosha answered from the yard.

“Come round to the steps, I’ll open at once,” said Ivan, going to open the
door to Alyosha.



Chapter X. “It Was He Who Said That”


Alyosha coming in told Ivan that a little over an hour ago Marya
Kondratyevna had run to his rooms and informed him Smerdyakov had taken
his own life. “I went in to clear away the samovar and he was hanging on a
nail in the wall.” On Alyosha’s inquiring whether she had informed the
police, she answered that she had told no one, “but I flew straight to
you, I’ve run all the way.” She seemed perfectly crazy, Alyosha reported,
and was shaking like a leaf. When Alyosha ran with her to the cottage, he
found Smerdyakov still hanging. On the table lay a note: “I destroy my
life of my own will and desire, so as to throw no blame on any one.”
Alyosha left the note on the table and went straight to the police captain
and told him all about it. “And from him I’ve come straight to you,” said
Alyosha, in conclusion, looking intently into Ivan’s face. He had not
taken his eyes off him while he told his story, as though struck by
something in his expression.

“Brother,” he cried suddenly, “you must be terribly ill. You look and
don’t seem to understand what I tell you.”

“It’s a good thing you came,” said Ivan, as though brooding, and not
hearing Alyosha’s exclamation. “I knew he had hanged himself.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know. But I knew. Did I know? Yes, he told me. He told me so just
now.”

Ivan stood in the middle of the room, and still spoke in the same brooding
tone, looking at the ground.

“Who is _he_?” asked Alyosha, involuntarily looking round.

“He’s slipped away.”

Ivan raised his head and smiled softly.

“He was afraid of you, of a dove like you. You are a ‘pure cherub.’ Dmitri
calls you a cherub. Cherub!... the thunderous rapture of the seraphim.
What are seraphim? Perhaps a whole constellation. But perhaps that
constellation is only a chemical molecule. There’s a constellation of the
Lion and the Sun. Don’t you know it?”

“Brother, sit down,” said Alyosha in alarm. “For goodness’ sake, sit down
on the sofa! You are delirious; put your head on the pillow, that’s right.
Would you like a wet towel on your head? Perhaps it will do you good.”

“Give me the towel: it’s here on the chair. I just threw it down there.”

“It’s not here. Don’t worry yourself. I know where it is—here,” said
Alyosha, finding a clean towel, folded up and unused, by Ivan’s dressing‐
table in the other corner of the room. Ivan looked strangely at the towel:
recollection seemed to come back to him for an instant.

“Stay”—he got up from the sofa—“an hour ago I took that new towel from
there and wetted it. I wrapped it round my head and threw it down here ...
How is it it’s dry? There was no other.”

“You put that towel on your head?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, and walked up and down the room an hour ago ... Why have the candles
burnt down so? What’s the time?”

“Nearly twelve.”

“No, no, no!” Ivan cried suddenly. “It was not a dream. He was here; he
was sitting here, on that sofa. When you knocked at the window, I threw a
glass at him ... this one. Wait a minute. I was asleep last time, but this
dream was not a dream. It has happened before. I have dreams now, Alyosha
... yet they are not dreams, but reality. I walk about, talk and see ...
though I am asleep. But he was sitting here, on that sofa there.... He is
frightfully stupid, Alyosha, frightfully stupid.” Ivan laughed suddenly
and began pacing about the room.

“Who is stupid? Of whom are you talking, brother?” Alyosha asked anxiously
again.

“The devil! He’s taken to visiting me. He’s been here twice, almost three
times. He taunted me with being angry at his being a simple devil and not
Satan, with scorched wings, in thunder and lightning. But he is not Satan:
that’s a lie. He is an impostor. He is simply a devil—a paltry, trivial
devil. He goes to the baths. If you undressed him, you’d be sure to find
he had a tail, long and smooth like a Danish dog’s, a yard long, dun
color.... Alyosha, you are cold. You’ve been in the snow. Would you like
some tea? What? Is it cold? Shall I tell her to bring some? _C’est à ne
pas mettre un chien dehors._...”

Alyosha ran to the washing‐stand, wetted the towel, persuaded Ivan to sit
down again, and put the wet towel round his head. He sat down beside him.

“What were you telling me just now about Lise?” Ivan began again. (He was
becoming very talkative.) “I like Lise. I said something nasty about her.
It was a lie. I like her ... I am afraid for Katya to‐morrow. I am more
afraid of her than of anything. On account of the future. She will cast me
off to‐morrow and trample me under foot. She thinks that I am ruining
Mitya from jealousy on her account! Yes, she thinks that! But it’s not so.
To‐morrow the cross, but not the gallows. No, I shan’t hang myself. Do you
know, I can never commit suicide, Alyosha. Is it because I am base? I am
not a coward. Is it from love of life? How did I know that Smerdyakov had
hanged himself? Yes, it was _he_ told me so.”

“And you are quite convinced that there has been some one here?” asked
Alyosha.

“Yes, on that sofa in the corner. You would have driven him away. You did
drive him away: he disappeared when you arrived. I love your face,
Alyosha. Did you know that I loved your face? And _he_ is myself, Alyosha.
All that’s base in me, all that’s mean and contemptible. Yes, I am a
romantic. He guessed it ... though it’s a libel. He is frightfully stupid;
but it’s to his advantage. He has cunning, animal cunning—he knew how to
infuriate me. He kept taunting me with believing in him, and that was how
he made me listen to him. He fooled me like a boy. He told me a great deal
that was true about myself, though. I should never have owned it to
myself. Do you know, Alyosha,” Ivan added in an intensely earnest and
confidential tone, “I should be awfully glad to think that it was _he_ and
not I.”

“He has worn you out,” said Alyosha, looking compassionately at his
brother.

“He’s been teasing me. And you know he does it so cleverly, so cleverly.
‘Conscience! What is conscience? I make it up for myself. Why am I
tormented by it? From habit. From the universal habit of mankind for the
seven thousand years. So let us give it up, and we shall be gods.’ It was
he said that, it was he said that!”

“And not you, not you?” Alyosha could not help crying, looking frankly at
his brother. “Never mind him, anyway; have done with him and forget him.
And let him take with him all that you curse now, and never come back!”

“Yes, but he is spiteful. He laughed at me. He was impudent, Alyosha,”
Ivan said, with a shudder of offense. “But he was unfair to me, unfair to
me about lots of things. He told lies about me to my face. ‘Oh, you are
going to perform an act of heroic virtue: to confess you murdered your
father, that the valet murdered him at your instigation.’ ”

“Brother,” Alyosha interposed, “restrain yourself. It was not you murdered
him. It’s not true!”

“That’s what he says, he, and he knows it. ‘You are going to perform an
act of heroic virtue, and you don’t believe in virtue; that’s what
tortures you and makes you angry, that’s why you are so vindictive.’ He
said that to me about me and he knows what he says.”

“It’s you say that, not he,” exclaimed Alyosha mournfully, “and you say it
because you are ill and delirious, tormenting yourself.”

“No, he knows what he says. ‘You are going from pride,’ he says. ‘You’ll
stand up and say it was I killed him, and why do you writhe with horror?
You are lying! I despise your opinion, I despise your horror!’ He said
that about me. ‘And do you know you are longing for their praise—“he is a
criminal, a murderer, but what a generous soul; he wanted to save his
brother and he confessed.” ’ That’s a lie, Alyosha!” Ivan cried suddenly,
with flashing eyes. “I don’t want the low rabble to praise me, I swear I
don’t! That’s a lie! That’s why I threw the glass at him and it broke
against his ugly face.”

“Brother, calm yourself, stop!” Alyosha entreated him.

“Yes, he knows how to torment one. He’s cruel,” Ivan went on, unheeding.
“I had an inkling from the first what he came for. ‘Granting that you go
through pride, still you had a hope that Smerdyakov might be convicted and
sent to Siberia, and Mitya would be acquitted, while you would only be
punished with moral condemnation’ (‘Do you hear?’ he laughed then)—‘and
some people will praise you. But now Smerdyakov’s dead, he has hanged
himself, and who’ll believe you alone? But yet you are going, you are
going, you’ll go all the same, you’ve decided to go. What are you going
for now?’ That’s awful, Alyosha. I can’t endure such questions. Who dare
ask me such questions?”

“Brother,” interposed Alyosha—his heart sank with terror, but he still
seemed to hope to bring Ivan to reason—“how could he have told you of
Smerdyakov’s death before I came, when no one knew of it and there was no
time for any one to know of it?”

“He told me,” said Ivan firmly, refusing to admit a doubt. “It was all he
did talk about, if you come to that. ‘And it would be all right if you
believed in virtue,’ he said. ‘No matter if they disbelieve you, you are
going for the sake of principle. But you are a little pig like Fyodor
Pavlovitch, and what do you want with virtue? Why do you want to go
meddling if your sacrifice is of no use to any one? Because you don’t know
yourself why you go! Oh, you’d give a great deal to know yourself why you
go! And can you have made up your mind? You’ve not made up your mind.
You’ll sit all night deliberating whether to go or not. But you will go;
you know you’ll go. You know that whichever way you decide, the decision
does not depend on you. You’ll go because you won’t dare not to go. Why
won’t you dare? You must guess that for yourself. That’s a riddle for
you!’ He got up and went away. You came and he went. He called me a
coward, Alyosha! _Le mot de l’énigme_ is that I am a coward. ‘It is not
for such eagles to soar above the earth.’ It was he added that—he! And
Smerdyakov said the same. He must be killed! Katya despises me. I’ve seen
that for a month past. Even Lise will begin to despise me! ‘You are going
in order to be praised.’ That’s a brutal lie! And you despise me too,
Alyosha. Now I am going to hate you again! And I hate the monster, too! I
hate the monster! I don’t want to save the monster. Let him rot in
Siberia! He’s begun singing a hymn! Oh, to‐morrow I’ll go, stand before
them, and spit in their faces!”

He jumped up in a frenzy, flung off the towel, and fell to pacing up and
down the room again. Alyosha recalled what he had just said. “I seem to be
sleeping awake.... I walk, I speak, I see, but I am asleep.” It seemed to
be just like that now. Alyosha did not leave him. The thought passed
through his mind to run for a doctor, but he was afraid to leave his
brother alone: there was no one to whom he could leave him. By degrees
Ivan lost consciousness completely at last. He still went on talking,
talking incessantly, but quite incoherently, and even articulated his
words with difficulty. Suddenly he staggered violently; but Alyosha was in
time to support him. Ivan let him lead him to his bed. Alyosha undressed
him somehow and put him to bed. He sat watching over him for another two
hours. The sick man slept soundly, without stirring, breathing softly and
evenly. Alyosha took a pillow and lay down on the sofa, without
undressing.

As he fell asleep he prayed for Mitya and Ivan. He began to understand
Ivan’s illness. “The anguish of a proud determination. An earnest
conscience!” God, in Whom he disbelieved, and His truth were gaining
mastery over his heart, which still refused to submit. “Yes,” the thought
floated through Alyosha’s head as it lay on the pillow, “yes, if
Smerdyakov is dead, no one will believe Ivan’s evidence; but he will go
and give it.” Alyosha smiled softly. “God will conquer!” he thought. “He
will either rise up in the light of truth, or ... he’ll perish in hate,
revenging on himself and on every one his having served the cause he does
not believe in,” Alyosha added bitterly, and again he prayed for Ivan.




Book XII. A Judicial Error



Chapter I. The Fatal Day


At ten o’clock in the morning of the day following the events I have
described, the trial of Dmitri Karamazov began in our district court.

I hasten to emphasize the fact that I am far from esteeming myself capable
of reporting all that took place at the trial in full detail, or even in
the actual order of events. I imagine that to mention everything with full
explanation would fill a volume, even a very large one. And so I trust I
may not be reproached, for confining myself to what struck me. I may have
selected as of most interest what was of secondary importance, and may
have omitted the most prominent and essential details. But I see I shall
do better not to apologize. I will do my best and the reader will see for
himself that I have done all I can.

And, to begin with, before entering the court, I will mention what
surprised me most on that day. Indeed, as it appeared later, every one was
surprised at it, too. We all knew that the affair had aroused great
interest, that every one was burning with impatience for the trial to
begin, that it had been a subject of talk, conjecture, exclamation and
surmise for the last two months in local society. Every one knew, too,
that the case had become known throughout Russia, but yet we had not
imagined that it had aroused such burning, such intense, interest in every
one, not only among ourselves, but all over Russia. This became evident at
the trial this day.

Visitors had arrived not only from the chief town of our province, but
from several other Russian towns, as well as from Moscow and Petersburg.
Among them were lawyers, ladies, and even several distinguished
personages. Every ticket of admission had been snatched up. A special
place behind the table at which the three judges sat was set apart for the
most distinguished and important of the men visitors; a row of arm‐chairs
had been placed there—something exceptional, which had never been allowed
before. A large proportion—not less than half of the public—were ladies.
There was such a large number of lawyers from all parts that they did not
know where to seat them, for every ticket had long since been eagerly
sought for and distributed. I saw at the end of the room, behind the
platform, a special partition hurriedly put up, behind which all these
lawyers were admitted, and they thought themselves lucky to have standing
room there, for all chairs had been removed for the sake of space, and the
crowd behind the partition stood throughout the case closely packed,
shoulder to shoulder.

Some of the ladies, especially those who came from a distance, made their
appearance in the gallery very smartly dressed, but the majority of the
ladies were oblivious even of dress. Their faces betrayed hysterical,
intense, almost morbid, curiosity. A peculiar fact—established afterwards
by many observations—was that almost all the ladies, or, at least the vast
majority of them, were on Mitya’s side and in favor of his being
acquitted. This was perhaps chiefly owing to his reputation as a conqueror
of female hearts. It was known that two women rivals were to appear in the
case. One of them—Katerina Ivanovna—was an object of general interest. All
sorts of extraordinary tales were told about her, amazing anecdotes of her
passion for Mitya, in spite of his crime. Her pride and “aristocratic
connections” were particularly insisted upon (she had called upon scarcely
any one in the town). People said she intended to petition the Government
for leave to accompany the criminal to Siberia and to be married to him
somewhere in the mines. The appearance of Grushenka in court was awaited
with no less impatience. The public was looking forward with anxious
curiosity to the meeting of the two rivals—the proud aristocratic girl and
“the hetaira.” But Grushenka was a more familiar figure to the ladies of
the district than Katerina Ivanovna. They had already seen “the woman who
had ruined Fyodor Pavlovitch and his unhappy son,” and all, almost without
exception, wondered how father and son could be so in love with “such a
very common, ordinary Russian girl, who was not even pretty.”

In brief, there was a great deal of talk. I know for a fact that there
were several serious family quarrels on Mitya’s account in our town. Many
ladies quarreled violently with their husbands over differences of opinion
about the dreadful case, and it was only natural that the husbands of
these ladies, far from being favorably disposed to the prisoner, should
enter the court bitterly prejudiced against him. In fact, one may say
pretty certainly that the masculine, as distinguished from the feminine,
part of the audience were biased against the prisoner. There were numbers
of severe, frowning, even vindictive faces. Mitya, indeed, had managed to
offend many people during his stay in the town. Some of the visitors were,
of course, in excellent spirits and quite unconcerned as to the fate of
Mitya personally. But all were interested in the trial, and the majority
of the men were certainly hoping for the conviction of the criminal,
except perhaps the lawyers, who were more interested in the legal than in
the moral aspect of the case.

Everybody was excited at the presence of the celebrated lawyer,
Fetyukovitch. His talent was well known, and this was not the first time
he had defended notorious criminal cases in the provinces. And if he
defended them, such cases became celebrated and long remembered all over
Russia. There were stories, too, about our prosecutor and about the
President of the Court. It was said that Ippolit Kirillovitch was in a
tremor at meeting Fetyukovitch, and that they had been enemies from the
beginning of their careers in Petersburg, that though our sensitive
prosecutor, who always considered that he had been aggrieved by some one
in Petersburg because his talents had not been properly appreciated, was
keenly excited over the Karamazov case, and was even dreaming of
rebuilding his flagging fortunes by means of it, Fetyukovitch, they said,
was his one anxiety. But these rumors were not quite just. Our prosecutor
was not one of those men who lose heart in face of danger. On the
contrary, his self‐confidence increased with the increase of danger. It
must be noted that our prosecutor was in general too hasty and morbidly
impressionable. He would put his whole soul into some case and work at it
as though his whole fate and his whole fortune depended on its result.
This was the subject of some ridicule in the legal world, for just by this
characteristic our prosecutor had gained a wider notoriety than could have
been expected from his modest position. People laughed particularly at his
passion for psychology. In my opinion, they were wrong, and our prosecutor
was, I believe, a character of greater depth than was generally supposed.
But with his delicate health he had failed to make his mark at the outset
of his career and had never made up for it later.

As for the President of our Court, I can only say that he was a humane and
cultured man, who had a practical knowledge of his work and progressive
views. He was rather ambitious, but did not concern himself greatly about
his future career. The great aim of his life was to be a man of advanced
ideas. He was, too, a man of connections and property. He felt, as we
learnt afterwards, rather strongly about the Karamazov case, but from a
social, not from a personal standpoint. He was interested in it as a
social phenomenon, in its classification and its character as a product of
our social conditions, as typical of the national character, and so on,
and so on. His attitude to the personal aspect of the case, to its tragic
significance and the persons involved in it, including the prisoner, was
rather indifferent and abstract, as was perhaps fitting, indeed.

The court was packed and overflowing long before the judges made their
appearance. Our court is the best hall in the town—spacious, lofty, and
good for sound. On the right of the judges, who were on a raised platform,
a table and two rows of chairs had been put ready for the jury. On the
left was the place for the prisoner and the counsel for the defense. In
the middle of the court, near the judges, was a table with the “material
proofs.” On it lay Fyodor Pavlovitch’s white silk dressing‐gown, stained
with blood; the fatal brass pestle with which the supposed murder had been
committed; Mitya’s shirt, with a blood‐stained sleeve; his coat, stained
with blood in patches over the pocket in which he had put his
handkerchief; the handkerchief itself, stiff with blood and by now quite
yellow; the pistol loaded by Mitya at Perhotin’s with a view to suicide,
and taken from him on the sly at Mokroe by Trifon Borissovitch; the
envelope in which the three thousand roubles had been put ready for
Grushenka, the narrow pink ribbon with which it had been tied, and many
other articles I don’t remember. In the body of the hall, at some
distance, came the seats for the public. But in front of the balustrade a
few chairs had been placed for witnesses who remained in the court after
giving their evidence.

At ten o’clock the three judges arrived—the President, one honorary
justice of the peace, and one other. The prosecutor, of course, entered
immediately after. The President was a short, stout, thick‐set man of
fifty, with a dyspeptic complexion, dark hair turning gray and cut short,
and a red ribbon, of what Order I don’t remember. The prosecutor struck me
and the others, too, as looking particularly pale, almost green. His face
seemed to have grown suddenly thinner, perhaps in a single night, for I
had seen him looking as usual only two days before. The President began
with asking the court whether all the jury were present.

But I see I can’t go on like this, partly because some things I did not
hear, others I did not notice, and others I have forgotten, but most of
all because, as I have said before, I have literally no time or space to
mention everything that was said and done. I only know that neither side
objected to very many of the jurymen. I remember the twelve jurymen—four
were petty officials of the town, two were merchants, and six peasants and
artisans of the town. I remember, long before the trial, questions were
continually asked with some surprise, especially by ladies: “Can such a
delicate, complex and psychological case be submitted for decision to
petty officials and even peasants?” and “What can an official, still more
a peasant, understand in such an affair?” All the four officials in the
jury were, in fact, men of no consequence and of low rank. Except one who
was rather younger, they were gray‐headed men, little known in society,
who had vegetated on a pitiful salary, and who probably had elderly,
unpresentable wives and crowds of children, perhaps even without shoes and
stockings. At most, they spent their leisure over cards and, of course,
had never read a single book. The two merchants looked respectable, but
were strangely silent and stolid. One of them was close‐shaven, and was
dressed in European style; the other had a small, gray beard, and wore a
red ribbon with some sort of a medal upon it on his neck. There is no need
to speak of the artisans and the peasants. The artisans of
Skotoprigonyevsk are almost peasants, and even work on the land. Two of
them also wore European dress, and, perhaps for that reason, were dirtier
and more uninviting‐looking than the others. So that one might well
wonder, as I did as soon as I had looked at them, “what men like that
could possibly make of such a case?” Yet their faces made a strangely
imposing, almost menacing, impression; they were stern and frowning.

At last the President opened the case of the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov. I don’t quite remember how he described him. The court usher
was told to bring in the prisoner, and Mitya made his appearance. There
was a hush through the court. One could have heard a fly. I don’t know how
it was with others, but Mitya made a most unfavorable impression on me. He
looked an awful dandy in a brand‐new frock‐coat. I heard afterwards that
he had ordered it in Moscow expressly for the occasion from his own
tailor, who had his measure. He wore immaculate black kid gloves and
exquisite linen. He walked in with his yard‐long strides, looking stiffly
straight in front of him, and sat down in his place with a most
unperturbed air.

At the same moment the counsel for defense, the celebrated Fetyukovitch,
entered, and a sort of subdued hum passed through the court. He was a
tall, spare man, with long thin legs, with extremely long, thin, pale
fingers, clean‐shaven face, demurely brushed, rather short hair, and thin
lips that were at times curved into something between a sneer and a smile.
He looked about forty. His face would have been pleasant, if it had not
been for his eyes, which, in themselves small and inexpressive, were set
remarkably close together, with only the thin, long nose as a dividing
line between them. In fact, there was something strikingly birdlike about
his face. He was in evening dress and white tie.

I remember the President’s first questions to Mitya, about his name, his
calling, and so on. Mitya answered sharply, and his voice was so
unexpectedly loud that it made the President start and look at the
prisoner with surprise. Then followed a list of persons who were to take
part in the proceedings—that is, of the witnesses and experts. It was a
long list. Four of the witnesses were not present—Miüsov, who had given
evidence at the preliminary inquiry, but was now in Paris; Madame Hohlakov
and Maximov, who were absent through illness; and Smerdyakov, through his
sudden death, of which an official statement from the police was
presented. The news of Smerdyakov’s death produced a sudden stir and
whisper in the court. Many of the audience, of course, had not heard of
the sudden suicide. What struck people most was Mitya’s sudden outburst As
soon as the statement of Smerdyakov’s death was made, he cried out aloud
from his place:

“He was a dog and died like a dog!”

I remember how his counsel rushed to him, and how the President addressed
him, threatening to take stern measures, if such an irregularity were
repeated. Mitya nodded and in a subdued voice repeated several times
abruptly to his counsel, with no show of regret:

“I won’t again, I won’t. It escaped me. I won’t do it again.”

And, of course, this brief episode did him no good with the jury or the
public. His character was displayed, and it spoke for itself. It was under
the influence of this incident that the opening statement was read. It was
rather short, but circumstantial. It only stated the chief reasons why he
had been arrested, why he must be tried, and so on. Yet it made a great
impression on me. The clerk read it loudly and distinctly. The whole
tragedy was suddenly unfolded before us, concentrated, in bold relief, in
a fatal and pitiless light. I remember how, immediately after it had been
read, the President asked Mitya in a loud impressive voice:

“Prisoner, do you plead guilty?”

Mitya suddenly rose from his seat.

“I plead guilty to drunkenness and dissipation,” he exclaimed, again in a
startling, almost frenzied, voice, “to idleness and debauchery. I meant to
become an honest man for good, just at the moment when I was struck down
by fate. But I am not guilty of the death of that old man, my enemy and my
father. No, no, I am not guilty of robbing him! I could not be. Dmitri
Karamazov is a scoundrel, but not a thief.”

He sat down again, visibly trembling all over. The President again
briefly, but impressively, admonished him to answer only what was asked,
and not to go off into irrelevant exclamations. Then he ordered the case
to proceed. All the witnesses were led up to take the oath. Then I saw
them all together. The brothers of the prisoner were, however, allowed to
give evidence without taking the oath. After an exhortation from the
priest and the President, the witnesses were led away and were made to sit
as far as possible apart from one another. Then they began calling them up
one by one.



Chapter II. Dangerous Witnesses


I do not know whether the witnesses for the defense and for the
prosecution were separated into groups by the President, and whether it
was arranged to call them in a certain order. But no doubt it was so. I
only know that the witnesses for the prosecution were called first. I
repeat I don’t intend to describe all the questions step by step. Besides,
my account would be to some extent superfluous, because in the speeches
for the prosecution and for the defense the whole course of the evidence
was brought together and set in a strong and significant light, and I took
down parts of those two remarkable speeches in full, and will quote them
in due course, together with one extraordinary and quite unexpected
episode, which occurred before the final speeches, and undoubtedly
influenced the sinister and fatal outcome of the trial.

I will only observe that from the first moments of the trial one peculiar
characteristic of the case was conspicuous and observed by all, that is,
the overwhelming strength of the prosecution as compared with the
arguments the defense had to rely upon. Every one realized it from the
first moment that the facts began to group themselves round a single
point, and the whole horrible and bloody crime was gradually revealed.
Every one, perhaps, felt from the first that the case was beyond dispute,
that there was no doubt about it, that there could be really no
discussion, and that the defense was only a matter of form, and that the
prisoner was guilty, obviously and conclusively guilty. I imagine that
even the ladies, who were so impatiently longing for the acquittal of the
interesting prisoner, were at the same time, without exception, convinced
of his guilt. What’s more, I believe they would have been mortified if his
guilt had not been so firmly established, as that would have lessened the
effect of the closing scene of the criminal’s acquittal. That he would be
acquitted, all the ladies, strange to say, were firmly persuaded up to the
very last moment. “He is guilty, but he will be acquitted, from motives of
humanity, in accordance with the new ideas, the new sentiments that had
come into fashion,” and so on, and so on. And that was why they had
crowded into the court so impatiently. The men were more interested in the
contest between the prosecutor and the famous Fetyukovitch. All were
wondering and asking themselves what could even a talent like
Fetyukovitch’s make of such a desperate case; and so they followed his
achievements, step by step, with concentrated attention.

But Fetyukovitch remained an enigma to all up to the very end, up to his
speech. Persons of experience suspected that he had some design, that he
was working towards some object, but it was almost impossible to guess
what it was. His confidence and self‐reliance were unmistakable, however.
Every one noticed with pleasure, moreover, that he, after so short a stay,
not more than three days, perhaps, among us, had so wonderfully succeeded
in mastering the case and “had studied it to a nicety.” People described
with relish, afterwards, how cleverly he had “taken down” all the
witnesses for the prosecution, and as far as possible perplexed them and,
what’s more, had aspersed their reputation and so depreciated the value of
their evidence. But it was supposed that he did this rather by way of
sport, so to speak, for professional glory, to show nothing had been
omitted of the accepted methods, for all were convinced that he could do
no real good by such disparagement of the witnesses, and probably was more
aware of this than any one, having some idea of his own in the background,
some concealed weapon of defense, which he would suddenly reveal when the
time came. But meanwhile, conscious of his strength, he seemed to be
diverting himself.

So, for instance, when Grigory, Fyodor Pavlovitch’s old servant, who had
given the most damning piece of evidence about the open door, was
examined, the counsel for the defense positively fastened upon him when
his turn came to question him. It must be noted that Grigory entered the
hall with a composed and almost stately air, not the least disconcerted by
the majesty of the court or the vast audience listening to him. He gave
evidence with as much confidence as though he had been talking with his
Marfa, only perhaps more respectfully. It was impossible to make him
contradict himself. The prosecutor questioned him first in detail about
the family life of the Karamazovs. The family picture stood out in lurid
colors. It was plain to ear and eye that the witness was guileless and
impartial. In spite of his profound reverence for the memory of his
deceased master, he yet bore witness that he had been unjust to Mitya and
“hadn’t brought up his children as he should. He’d have been devoured by
lice when he was little, if it hadn’t been for me,” he added, describing
Mitya’s early childhood. “It wasn’t fair either of the father to wrong his
son over his mother’s property, which was by right his.”

In reply to the prosecutor’s question what grounds he had for asserting
that Fyodor Pavlovitch had wronged his son in their money relations,
Grigory, to the surprise of every one, had no proof at all to bring
forward, but he still persisted that the arrangement with the son was
“unfair,” and that he ought “to have paid him several thousand roubles
more.” I must note, by the way, that the prosecutor asked this question
whether Fyodor Pavlovitch had really kept back part of Mitya’s inheritance
with marked persistence of all the witnesses who could be asked it, not
excepting Alyosha and Ivan, but he obtained no exact information from any
one; all alleged that it was so, but were unable to bring forward any
distinct proof. Grigory’s description of the scene at the dinner‐table,
when Dmitri had burst in and beaten his father, threatening to come back
to kill him, made a sinister impression on the court, especially as the
old servant’s composure in telling it, his parsimony of words and peculiar
phraseology, were as effective as eloquence. He observed that he was not
angry with Mitya for having knocked him down and struck him on the face;
he had forgiven him long ago, he said. Of the deceased Smerdyakov he
observed, crossing himself, that he was a lad of ability, but stupid and
afflicted, and, worse still, an infidel, and that it was Fyodor Pavlovitch
and his elder son who had taught him to be so. But he defended
Smerdyakov’s honesty almost with warmth, and related how Smerdyakov had
once found the master’s money in the yard, and, instead of concealing it,
had taken it to his master, who had rewarded him with a “gold piece” for
it, and trusted him implicitly from that time forward. He maintained
obstinately that the door into the garden had been open. But he was asked
so many questions that I can’t recall them all.

At last the counsel for the defense began to cross‐examine him, and the
first question he asked was about the envelope in which Fyodor Pavlovitch
was supposed to have put three thousand roubles for “a certain person.”
“Have you ever seen it, you, who were for so many years in close
attendance on your master?” Grigory answered that he had not seen it and
had never heard of the money from any one “till everybody was talking
about it.” This question about the envelope Fetyukovitch put to every one
who could conceivably have known of it, as persistently as the prosecutor
asked his question about Dmitri’s inheritance, and got the same answer
from all, that no one had seen the envelope, though many had heard of it.
From the beginning every one noticed Fetyukovitch’s persistence on this
subject.

“Now, with your permission I’ll ask you a question,” Fetyukovitch said,
suddenly and unexpectedly. “Of what was that balsam, or, rather,
decoction, made, which, as we learn from the preliminary inquiry, you used
on that evening to rub your lumbago, in the hope of curing it?”

Grigory looked blankly at the questioner, and after a brief silence
muttered, “There was saffron in it.”

“Nothing but saffron? Don’t you remember any other ingredient?”

“There was milfoil in it, too.”

“And pepper perhaps?” Fetyukovitch queried.

“Yes, there was pepper, too.”

“Etcetera. And all dissolved in vodka?”

“In spirit.”

There was a faint sound of laughter in the court.

“You see, in spirit. After rubbing your back, I believe, you drank what
was left in the bottle with a certain pious prayer, only known to your
wife?”

“I did.”

“Did you drink much? Roughly speaking, a wine‐glass or two?”

“It might have been a tumbler‐full.”

“A tumbler‐full, even. Perhaps a tumbler and a half?”

Grigory did not answer. He seemed to see what was meant.

“A glass and a half of neat spirit—is not at all bad, don’t you think? You
might see the gates of heaven open, not only the door into the garden?”

Grigory remained silent. There was another laugh in the court. The
President made a movement.

“Do you know for a fact,” Fetyukovitch persisted, “whether you were awake
or not when you saw the open door?”

“I was on my legs.”

“That’s not a proof that you were awake.” (There was again laughter in the
court.) “Could you have answered at that moment, if any one had asked you
a question—for instance, what year it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what year is it, Anno Domini, do you know?”

Grigory stood with a perplexed face, looking straight at his tormentor.
Strange to say, it appeared he really did not know what year it was.

“But perhaps you can tell me how many fingers you have on your hands?”

“I am a servant,” Grigory said suddenly, in a loud and distinct voice. “If
my betters think fit to make game of me, it is my duty to suffer it.”

Fetyukovitch was a little taken aback, and the President intervened,
reminding him that he must ask more relevant questions. Fetyukovitch bowed
with dignity and said that he had no more questions to ask of the witness.
The public and the jury, of course, were left with a grain of doubt in
their minds as to the evidence of a man who might, while undergoing a
certain cure, have seen “the gates of heaven,” and who did not even know
what year he was living in. But before Grigory left the box another
episode occurred. The President, turning to the prisoner, asked him
whether he had any comment to make on the evidence of the last witness.

“Except about the door, all he has said is true,” cried Mitya, in a loud
voice. “For combing the lice off me, I thank him; for forgiving my blows,
I thank him. The old man has been honest all his life and as faithful to
my father as seven hundred poodles.”

“Prisoner, be careful in your language,” the President admonished him.

“I am not a poodle,” Grigory muttered.

“All right, it’s I am a poodle myself,” cried Mitya. “If it’s an insult, I
take it to myself and I beg his pardon. I was a beast and cruel to him. I
was cruel to Æsop too.”

“What Æsop?” the President asked sternly again.

“Oh, Pierrot ... my father, Fyodor Pavlovitch.”

The President again and again warned Mitya impressively and very sternly
to be more careful in his language.

“You are injuring yourself in the opinion of your judges.”

The counsel for the defense was equally clever in dealing with the
evidence of Rakitin. I may remark that Rakitin was one of the leading
witnesses and one to whom the prosecutor attached great significance. It
appeared that he knew everything; his knowledge was amazing, he had been
everywhere, seen everything, talked to everybody, knew every detail of the
biography of Fyodor Pavlovitch and all the Karamazovs. Of the envelope, it
is true, he had only heard from Mitya himself. But he described minutely
Mitya’s exploits in the “Metropolis,” all his compromising doings and
sayings, and told the story of Captain Snegiryov’s “wisp of tow.” But even
Rakitin could say nothing positive about Mitya’s inheritance, and confined
himself to contemptuous generalities.

“Who could tell which of them was to blame, and which was in debt to the
other, with their crazy Karamazov way of muddling things so that no one
could make head or tail of it?” He attributed the tragic crime to the
habits that had become ingrained by ages of serfdom and the distressed
condition of Russia, due to the lack of appropriate institutions. He was,
in fact, allowed some latitude of speech. This was the first occasion on
which Rakitin showed what he could do, and attracted notice. The
prosecutor knew that the witness was preparing a magazine article on the
case, and afterwards in his speech, as we shall see later, quoted some
ideas from the article, showing that he had seen it already. The picture
drawn by the witness was a gloomy and sinister one, and greatly
strengthened the case for the prosecution. Altogether, Rakitin’s discourse
fascinated the public by its independence and the extraordinary nobility
of its ideas. There were even two or three outbreaks of applause when he
spoke of serfdom and the distressed condition of Russia.

But Rakitin, in his youthful ardor, made a slight blunder, of which the
counsel for the defense at once adroitly took advantage. Answering certain
questions about Grushenka, and carried away by the loftiness of his own
sentiments and his success, of which he was, of course, conscious, he went
so far as to speak somewhat contemptuously of Agrafena Alexandrovna as
“the kept mistress of Samsonov.” He would have given a good deal to take
back his words afterwards, for Fetyukovitch caught him out over it at
once. And it was all because Rakitin had not reckoned on the lawyer having
been able to become so intimately acquainted with every detail in so short
a time.

“Allow me to ask,” began the counsel for the defense, with the most
affable and even respectful smile, “you are, of course, the same Mr.
Rakitin whose pamphlet, _The Life of the Deceased Elder, Father Zossima_,
published by the diocesan authorities, full of profound and religious
reflections and preceded by an excellent and devout dedication to the
bishop, I have just read with such pleasure?”

“I did not write it for publication ... it was published afterwards,”
muttered Rakitin, for some reason fearfully disconcerted and almost
ashamed.

“Oh, that’s excellent! A thinker like you can, and indeed ought to, take
the widest view of every social question. Your most instructive pamphlet
has been widely circulated through the patronage of the bishop, and has
been of appreciable service.... But this is the chief thing I should like
to learn from you. You stated just now that you were very intimately
acquainted with Madame Svyetlov.” (It must be noted that Grushenka’s
surname was Svyetlov. I heard it for the first time that day, during the
case.)

“I cannot answer for all my acquaintances.... I am a young man ... and who
can be responsible for every one he meets?” cried Rakitin, flushing all
over.

“I understand, I quite understand,” cried Fetyukovitch, as though he, too,
were embarrassed and in haste to excuse himself. “You, like any other,
might well be interested in an acquaintance with a young and beautiful
woman who would readily entertain the _élite_ of the youth of the
neighborhood, but ... I only wanted to know ... It has come to my
knowledge that Madame Svyetlov was particularly anxious a couple of months
ago to make the acquaintance of the younger Karamazov, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, and promised you twenty‐five roubles, if you would bring him
to her in his monastic dress. And that actually took place on the evening
of the day on which the terrible crime, which is the subject of the
present investigation, was committed. You brought Alexey Karamazov to
Madame Svyetlov, and did you receive the twenty‐five roubles from Madame
Svyetlov as a reward, that’s what I wanted to hear from you?”

“It was a joke.... I don’t see of what interest that can be to you.... I
took it for a joke ... meaning to give it back later....”

“Then you did take— But you have not given it back yet ... or have you?”

“That’s of no consequence,” muttered Rakitin, “I refuse to answer such
questions.... Of course I shall give it back.”

The President intervened, but Fetyukovitch declared he had no more
questions to ask of the witness. Mr. Rakitin left the witness‐box not
absolutely without a stain upon his character. The effect left by the
lofty idealism of his speech was somewhat marred, and Fetyukovitch’s
expression, as he watched him walk away, seemed to suggest to the public
“this is a specimen of the lofty‐minded persons who accuse him.” I
remember that this incident, too, did not pass off without an outbreak
from Mitya. Enraged by the tone in which Rakitin had referred to
Grushenka, he suddenly shouted “Bernard!” When, after Rakitin’s cross‐
examination, the President asked the prisoner if he had anything to say,
Mitya cried loudly:

“Since I’ve been arrested, he has borrowed money from me! He is a
contemptible Bernard and opportunist, and he doesn’t believe in God; he
took the bishop in!”

Mitya, of course, was pulled up again for the intemperance of his
language, but Rakitin was done for. Captain Snegiryov’s evidence was a
failure, too, but from quite a different reason. He appeared in ragged and
dirty clothes, muddy boots, and in spite of the vigilance and expert
observation of the police officers, he turned out to be hopelessly drunk.
On being asked about Mitya’s attack upon him, he refused to answer.

“God bless him. Ilusha told me not to. God will make it up to me yonder.”

“Who told you not to tell? Of whom are you talking?”

“Ilusha, my little son. ‘Father, father, how he insulted you!’ He said
that at the stone. Now he is dying....”

The captain suddenly began sobbing, and plumped down on his knees before
the President. He was hurriedly led away amidst the laughter of the
public. The effect prepared by the prosecutor did not come off at all.

Fetyukovitch went on making the most of every opportunity, and amazed
people more and more by his minute knowledge of the case. Thus, for
example, Trifon Borissovitch made a great impression, of course, very
prejudicial to Mitya. He calculated almost on his fingers that on his
first visit to Mokroe, Mitya must have spent three thousand roubles, “or
very little less. Just think what he squandered on those gypsy girls
alone! And as for our lousy peasants, it wasn’t a case of flinging half a
rouble in the street, he made them presents of twenty‐five roubles each,
at least, he didn’t give them less. And what a lot of money was simply
stolen from him! And if any one did steal, he did not leave a receipt. How
could one catch the thief when he was flinging his money away all the
time? Our peasants are robbers, you know; they have no care for their
souls. And the way he went on with the girls, our village girls! They’re
completely set up since then, I tell you, they used to be poor.” He
recalled, in fact, every item of expense and added it all up. So the
theory that only fifteen hundred had been spent and the rest had been put
aside in a little bag seemed inconceivable.

“I saw three thousand as clear as a penny in his hands, I saw it with my
own eyes; I should think I ought to know how to reckon money,” cried
Trifon Borissovitch, doing his best to satisfy “his betters.”

When Fetyukovitch had to cross‐examine him, he scarcely tried to refute
his evidence, but began asking him about an incident at the first carousal
at Mokroe, a month before the arrest, when Timofey and another peasant
called Akim had picked up on the floor in the passage a hundred roubles
dropped by Mitya when he was drunk, and had given them to Trifon
Borissovitch and received a rouble each from him for doing so. “Well,”
asked the lawyer, “did you give that hundred roubles back to Mr.
Karamazov?” Trifon Borissovitch shuffled in vain.... He was obliged, after
the peasants had been examined, to admit the finding of the hundred
roubles, only adding that he had religiously returned it all to Dmitri
Fyodorovitch “in perfect honesty, and it’s only because his honor was in
liquor at the time, he wouldn’t remember it.” But, as he had denied the
incident of the hundred roubles till the peasants had been called to prove
it, his evidence as to returning the money to Mitya was naturally regarded
with great suspicion. So one of the most dangerous witnesses brought
forward by the prosecution was again discredited.

The same thing happened with the Poles. They took up an attitude of pride
and independence; they vociferated loudly that they had both been in the
service of the Crown, and that “Pan Mitya” had offered them three thousand
“to buy their honor,” and that they had seen a large sum of money in his
hands. Pan Mussyalovitch introduced a terrible number of Polish words into
his sentences, and seeing that this only increased his consequence in the
eyes of the President and the prosecutor, grew more and more pompous, and
ended by talking in Polish altogether. But Fetyukovitch caught them, too,
in his snares. Trifon Borissovitch, recalled, was forced, in spite of his
evasions, to admit that Pan Vrublevsky had substituted another pack of
cards for the one he had provided, and that Pan Mussyalovitch had cheated
during the game. Kalganov confirmed this, and both the Poles left the
witness‐box with damaged reputations, amidst laughter from the public.

Then exactly the same thing happened with almost all the most dangerous
witnesses. Fetyukovitch succeeded in casting a slur on all of them, and
dismissing them with a certain derision. The lawyers and experts were lost
in admiration, and were only at a loss to understand what good purpose
could be served by it, for all, I repeat, felt that the case for the
prosecution could not be refuted, but was growing more and more tragically
overwhelming. But from the confidence of the “great magician” they saw
that he was serene, and they waited, feeling that “such a man” had not
come from Petersburg for nothing, and that he was not a man to return
unsuccessful.



Chapter III. The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts


The evidence of the medical experts, too, was of little use to the
prisoner. And it appeared later that Fetyukovitch had not reckoned much
upon it. The medical line of defense had only been taken up through the
insistence of Katerina Ivanovna, who had sent for a celebrated doctor from
Moscow on purpose. The case for the defense could, of course, lose nothing
by it and might, with luck, gain something from it. There was, however, an
element of comedy about it, through the difference of opinion of the
doctors. The medical experts were the famous doctor from Moscow, our
doctor, Herzenstube, and the young doctor, Varvinsky. The two latter
appeared also as witnesses for the prosecution.

The first to be called in the capacity of expert was Doctor Herzenstube.
He was a gray and bald old man of seventy, of middle height and sturdy
build. He was much esteemed and respected by every one in the town. He was
a conscientious doctor and an excellent and pious man, a Hernguter or
Moravian brother, I am not quite sure which. He had been living amongst us
for many years and behaved with wonderful dignity. He was a kind‐hearted
and humane man. He treated the sick poor and peasants for nothing, visited
them in their slums and huts, and left money for medicine, but he was as
obstinate as a mule. If once he had taken an idea into his head, there was
no shaking it. Almost every one in the town was aware, by the way, that
the famous doctor had, within the first two or three days of his presence
among us, uttered some extremely offensive allusions to Doctor
Herzenstube’s qualifications. Though the Moscow doctor asked twenty‐five
roubles for a visit, several people in the town were glad to take
advantage of his arrival, and rushed to consult him regardless of expense.
All these had, of course, been previously patients of Doctor Herzenstube,
and the celebrated doctor had criticized his treatment with extreme
harshness. Finally, he had asked the patients as soon as he saw them,
“Well, who has been cramming you with nostrums? Herzenstube? He, he!”
Doctor Herzenstube, of course, heard all this, and now all the three
doctors made their appearance, one after another, to be examined.

Doctor Herzenstube roundly declared that the abnormality of the prisoner’s
mental faculties was self‐evident. Then giving his grounds for this
opinion, which I omit here, he added that the abnormality was not only
evident in many of the prisoner’s actions in the past, but was apparent
even now at this very moment. When he was asked to explain how it was
apparent now at this moment, the old doctor, with simple‐hearted
directness, pointed out that the prisoner on entering the court had “an
extraordinary air, remarkable in the circumstances”; that he had “marched
in like a soldier, looking straight before him, though it would have been
more natural for him to look to the left where, among the public, the
ladies were sitting, seeing that he was a great admirer of the fair sex
and must be thinking much of what the ladies are saying of him now,” the
old man concluded in his peculiar language.

I must add that he spoke Russian readily, but every phrase was formed in
German style, which did not, however, trouble him, for it had always been
a weakness of his to believe that he spoke Russian perfectly, better
indeed than Russians. And he was very fond of using Russian proverbs,
always declaring that the Russian proverbs were the best and most
expressive sayings in the whole world. I may remark, too, that in
conversation, through absent‐mindedness he often forgot the most ordinary
words, which sometimes went out of his head, though he knew them
perfectly. The same thing happened, though, when he spoke German, and at
such times he always waved his hand before his face as though trying to
catch the lost word, and no one could induce him to go on speaking till he
had found the missing word. His remark that the prisoner ought to have
looked at the ladies on entering roused a whisper of amusement in the
audience. All our ladies were very fond of our old doctor; they knew, too,
that having been all his life a bachelor and a religious man of exemplary
conduct, he looked upon women as lofty creatures. And so his unexpected
observation struck every one as very queer.

The Moscow doctor, being questioned in his turn, definitely and
emphatically repeated that he considered the prisoner’s mental condition
abnormal in the highest degree. He talked at length and with erudition of
“aberration” and “mania,” and argued that, from all the facts collected,
the prisoner had undoubtedly been in a condition of aberration for several
days before his arrest, and, if the crime had been committed by him, it
must, even if he were conscious of it, have been almost involuntary, as he
had not the power to control the morbid impulse that possessed him.

But apart from temporary aberration, the doctor diagnosed mania, which
premised, in his words, to lead to complete insanity in the future. (It
must be noted that I report this in my own words, the doctor made use of
very learned and professional language.) “All his actions are in
contravention of common sense and logic,” he continued. “Not to refer to
what I have not seen, that is, the crime itself and the whole catastrophe,
the day before yesterday, while he was talking to me, he had an
unaccountably fixed look in his eye. He laughed unexpectedly when there
was nothing to laugh at. He showed continual and inexplicable
irritability, using strange words, ‘Bernard!’ ‘Ethics!’ and others equally
inappropriate.” But the doctor detected mania, above all, in the fact that
the prisoner could not even speak of the three thousand roubles, of which
he considered himself to have been cheated, without extraordinary
irritation, though he could speak comparatively lightly of other
misfortunes and grievances. According to all accounts, he had even in the
past, whenever the subject of the three thousand roubles was touched on,
flown into a perfect frenzy, and yet he was reported to be a disinterested
and not grasping man.

“As to the opinion of my learned colleague,” the Moscow doctor added
ironically in conclusion, “that the prisoner would, on entering the court,
have naturally looked at the ladies and not straight before him, I will
only say that, apart from the playfulness of this theory, it is radically
unsound. For though I fully agree that the prisoner, on entering the court
where his fate will be decided, would not naturally look straight before
him in that fixed way, and that that may really be a sign of his abnormal
mental condition, at the same time I maintain that he would naturally not
look to the left at the ladies, but, on the contrary, to the right to find
his legal adviser, on whose help all his hopes rest and on whose defense
all his future depends.” The doctor expressed his opinion positively and
emphatically.

But the unexpected pronouncement of Doctor Varvinsky gave the last touch
of comedy to the difference of opinion between the experts. In his opinion
the prisoner was now, and had been all along, in a perfectly normal
condition, and, although he certainly must have been in a nervous and
exceedingly excited state before his arrest, this might have been due to
several perfectly obvious causes, jealousy, anger, continual drunkenness,
and so on. But this nervous condition would not involve the mental
aberration of which mention had just been made. As to the question whether
the prisoner should have looked to the left or to the right on entering
the court, “in his modest opinion,” the prisoner would naturally look
straight before him on entering the court, as he had in fact done, as that
was where the judges, on whom his fate depended, were sitting. So that it
was just by looking straight before him that he showed his perfectly
normal state of mind at the present. The young doctor concluded his
“modest” testimony with some heat.

“Bravo, doctor!” cried Mitya, from his seat, “just so!”

Mitya, of course, was checked, but the young doctor’s opinion had a
decisive influence on the judges and on the public, and, as appeared
afterwards, every one agreed with him. But Doctor Herzenstube, when called
as a witness, was quite unexpectedly of use to Mitya. As an old resident
in the town who had known the Karamazov family for years, he furnished
some facts of great value for the prosecution, and suddenly, as though
recalling something, he added:

“But the poor young man might have had a very different life, for he had a
good heart both in childhood and after childhood, that I know. But the
Russian proverb says, ‘If a man has one head, it’s good, but if another
clever man comes to visit him, it would be better still, for then there
will be two heads and not only one.’ ”

“One head is good, but two are better,” the prosecutor put in impatiently.
He knew the old man’s habit of talking slowly and deliberately, regardless
of the impression he was making and of the delay he was causing, and
highly prizing his flat, dull and always gleefully complacent German wit.
The old man was fond of making jokes.

“Oh, yes, that’s what I say,” he went on stubbornly. “One head is good,
but two are much better, but he did not meet another head with wits, and
his wits went. Where did they go? I’ve forgotten the word.” He went on,
passing his hand before his eyes, “Oh, yes, _spazieren_.”

“Wandering?”

“Oh, yes, wandering, that’s what I say. Well, his wits went wandering and
fell in such a deep hole that he lost himself. And yet he was a grateful
and sensitive boy. Oh, I remember him very well, a little chap so high,
left neglected by his father in the back yard, when he ran about without
boots on his feet, and his little breeches hanging by one button.”

A note of feeling and tenderness suddenly came into the honest old man’s
voice. Fetyukovitch positively started, as though scenting something, and
caught at it instantly.

“Oh, yes, I was a young man then.... I was ... well, I was forty‐five
then, and had only just come here. And I was so sorry for the boy then; I
asked myself why shouldn’t I buy him a pound of ... a pound of what? I’ve
forgotten what it’s called. A pound of what children are very fond of,
what is it, what is it?” The doctor began waving his hands again. “It
grows on a tree and is gathered and given to every one....”

“Apples?”

“Oh, no, no. You have a dozen of apples, not a pound.... No, there are a
lot of them, and all little. You put them in the mouth and crack.”

“Nuts?”

“Quite so, nuts, I say so.” The doctor repeated in the calmest way as
though he had been at no loss for a word. “And I bought him a pound of
nuts, for no one had ever bought the boy a pound of nuts before. And I
lifted my finger and said to him, ‘Boy, _Gott der Vater_.’ He laughed and
said, ‘_Gott der Vater_.’... ‘_Gott der Sohn_.’ He laughed again and
lisped, ‘_Gott der Sohn_.’ ‘_Gott der heilige Geist_.’ Then he laughed and
said as best he could, ‘_Gott der heilige Geist_.’ I went away, and two
days after I happened to be passing, and he shouted to me of himself,
‘Uncle, _Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn_,’ and he had only forgotten ‘_Gott
der heilige Geist_.’ But I reminded him of it and I felt very sorry for
him again. But he was taken away, and I did not see him again. Twenty‐
three years passed. I am sitting one morning in my study, a white‐haired
old man, when there walks into the room a blooming young man, whom I
should never have recognized, but he held up his finger and said,
laughing, ‘_Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn_, and _Gott der heilige Geist_.
I have just arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts, for
no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are the only one that ever
did.’ And then I remembered my happy youth and the poor child in the yard,
without boots on his feet, and my heart was touched and I said, ‘You are a
grateful young man, for you have remembered all your life the pound of
nuts I bought you in your childhood.’ And I embraced him and blessed him.
And I shed tears. He laughed, but he shed tears, too ... for the Russian
often laughs when he ought to be weeping. But he did weep; I saw it. And
now, alas!...”

“And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now, too, you saintly man,”
Mitya cried suddenly.

In any case the anecdote made a certain favorable impression on the
public. But the chief sensation in Mitya’s favor was created by the
evidence of Katerina Ivanovna, which I will describe directly. Indeed,
when the witnesses _à décharge_, that is, called by the defense, began
giving evidence, fortune seemed all at once markedly more favorable to
Mitya, and what was particularly striking, this was a surprise even to the
counsel for the defense. But before Katerina Ivanovna was called, Alyosha
was examined, and he recalled a fact which seemed to furnish positive
evidence against one important point made by the prosecution.



Chapter IV. Fortune Smiles On Mitya


It came quite as a surprise even to Alyosha himself. He was not required
to take the oath, and I remember that both sides addressed him very gently
and sympathetically. It was evident that his reputation for goodness had
preceded him. Alyosha gave his evidence modestly and with restraint, but
his warm sympathy for his unhappy brother was unmistakable. In answer to
one question, he sketched his brother’s character as that of a man,
violent‐tempered perhaps and carried away by his passions, but at the same
time honorable, proud and generous, capable of self‐sacrifice, if
necessary. He admitted, however, that, through his passion for Grushenka
and his rivalry with his father, his brother had been of late in an
intolerable position. But he repelled with indignation the suggestion that
his brother might have committed a murder for the sake of gain, though he
recognized that the three thousand roubles had become almost an obsession
with Mitya; that he looked upon them as part of the inheritance he had
been cheated of by his father, and that, indifferent as he was to money as
a rule, he could not even speak of that three thousand without fury. As
for the rivalry of the two “ladies,” as the prosecutor expressed it—that
is, of Grushenka and Katya—he answered evasively and was even unwilling to
answer one or two questions altogether.

“Did your brother tell you, anyway, that he intended to kill your father?”
asked the prosecutor. “You can refuse to answer if you think necessary,”
he added.

“He did not tell me so directly,” answered Alyosha.

“How so? Did he indirectly?”

“He spoke to me once of his hatred for our father and his fear that at an
extreme moment ... at a moment of fury, he might perhaps murder him.”

“And you believed him?”

“I am afraid to say that I did. But I never doubted that some higher
feeling would always save him at the fatal moment, as it has indeed saved
him, for it was not he killed my father,” Alyosha said firmly, in a loud
voice that was heard throughout the court.

The prosecutor started like a war‐horse at the sound of a trumpet.

“Let me assure you that I fully believe in the complete sincerity of your
conviction and do not explain it by or identify it with your affection for
your unhappy brother. Your peculiar view of the whole tragic episode is
known to us already from the preliminary investigation. I won’t attempt to
conceal from you that it is highly individual and contradicts all the
other evidence collected by the prosecution. And so I think it essential
to press you to tell me what facts have led you to this conviction of your
brother’s innocence and of the guilt of another person against whom you
gave evidence at the preliminary inquiry?”

“I only answered the questions asked me at the preliminary inquiry,”
replied Alyosha, slowly and calmly. “I made no accusation against
Smerdyakov of myself.”

“Yet you gave evidence against him?”

“I was led to do so by my brother Dmitri’s words. I was told what took
place at his arrest and how he had pointed to Smerdyakov before I was
examined. I believe absolutely that my brother is innocent, and if he
didn’t commit the murder, then—”

“Then Smerdyakov? Why Smerdyakov? And why are you so completely persuaded
of your brother’s innocence?”

“I cannot help believing my brother. I know he wouldn’t lie to me. I saw
from his face he wasn’t lying.”

“Only from his face? Is that all the proof you have?”

“I have no other proof.”

“And of Smerdyakov’s guilt you have no proof whatever but your brother’s
word and the expression of his face?”

“No, I have no other proof.”

The prosecutor dropped the examination at this point. The impression left
by Alyosha’s evidence on the public was most disappointing. There had been
talk about Smerdyakov before the trial; some one had heard something, some
one had pointed out something else, it was said that Alyosha had gathered
together some extraordinary proofs of his brother’s innocence and
Smerdyakov’s guilt, and after all there was nothing, no evidence except
certain moral convictions so natural in a brother.

But Fetyukovitch began his cross‐examination. On his asking Alyosha when
it was that the prisoner had told him of his hatred for his father and
that he might kill him, and whether he had heard it, for instance, at
their last meeting before the catastrophe, Alyosha started as he answered,
as though only just recollecting and understanding something.

“I remember one circumstance now which I’d quite forgotten myself. It
wasn’t clear to me at the time, but now—”

And, obviously only now for the first time struck by an idea, he recounted
eagerly how, at his last interview with Mitya that evening under the tree,
on the road to the monastery, Mitya had struck himself on the breast, “the
upper part of the breast,” and had repeated several times that he had a
means of regaining his honor, that that means was here, here on his
breast. “I thought, when he struck himself on the breast, he meant that it
was in his heart,” Alyosha continued, “that he might find in his heart
strength to save himself from some awful disgrace which was awaiting him
and which he did not dare confess even to me. I must confess I did think
at the time that he was speaking of our father, and that the disgrace he
was shuddering at was the thought of going to our father and doing some
violence to him. Yet it was just then that he pointed to something on his
breast, so that I remember the idea struck me at the time that the heart
is not on that part of the breast, but below, and that he struck himself
much too high, just below the neck, and kept pointing to that place. My
idea seemed silly to me at the time, but he was perhaps pointing then to
that little bag in which he had fifteen hundred roubles!”

“Just so,” Mitya cried from his place. “That’s right, Alyosha, it was the
little bag I struck with my fist.”

Fetyukovitch flew to him in hot haste entreating him to keep quiet, and at
the same instant pounced on Alyosha. Alyosha, carried away himself by his
recollection, warmly expressed his theory that this disgrace was probably
just that fifteen hundred roubles on him, which he might have returned to
Katerina Ivanovna as half of what he owed her, but which he had yet
determined not to repay her and to use for another purpose—namely, to
enable him to elope with Grushenka, if she consented.

“It is so, it must be so,” exclaimed Alyosha, in sudden excitement. “My
brother cried several times that half of the disgrace, half of it (he said
_half_ several times) he could free himself from at once, but that he was
so unhappy in his weakness of will that he wouldn’t do it ... that he knew
beforehand he was incapable of doing it!”

“And you clearly, confidently remember that he struck himself just on this
part of the breast?” Fetyukovitch asked eagerly.

“Clearly and confidently, for I thought at the time, ‘Why does he strike
himself up there when the heart is lower down?’ and the thought seemed
stupid to me at the time ... I remember its seeming stupid ... it flashed
through my mind. That’s what brought it back to me just now. How could I
have forgotten it till now? It was that little bag he meant when he said
he had the means but wouldn’t give back that fifteen hundred. And when he
was arrested at Mokroe he cried out—I know, I was told it—that he
considered it the most disgraceful act of his life that when he had the
means of repaying Katerina Ivanovna half (half, note!) what he owed her,
he yet could not bring himself to repay the money and preferred to remain
a thief in her eyes rather than part with it. And what torture, what
torture that debt has been to him!” Alyosha exclaimed in conclusion.

The prosecutor, of course, intervened. He asked Alyosha to describe once
more how it had all happened, and several times insisted on the question,
“Had the prisoner seemed to point to anything? Perhaps he had simply
struck himself with his fist on the breast?”

“But it was not with his fist,” cried Alyosha; “he pointed with his
fingers and pointed here, very high up.... How could I have so completely
forgotten it till this moment?”

The President asked Mitya what he had to say to the last witness’s
evidence. Mitya confirmed it, saying that he had been pointing to the
fifteen hundred roubles which were on his breast, just below the neck, and
that that was, of course, the disgrace, “A disgrace I cannot deny, the
most shameful act of my whole life,” cried Mitya. “I might have repaid it
and didn’t repay it. I preferred to remain a thief in her eyes rather than
give it back. And the most shameful part of it was that I knew beforehand
I shouldn’t give it back! You are right, Alyosha! Thanks, Alyosha!”

So Alyosha’s cross‐examination ended. What was important and striking
about it was that one fact at least had been found, and even though this
were only one tiny bit of evidence, a mere hint at evidence, it did go
some little way towards proving that the bag had existed and had contained
fifteen hundred roubles and that the prisoner had not been lying at the
preliminary inquiry when he alleged at Mokroe that those fifteen hundred
roubles were “his own.” Alyosha was glad. With a flushed face he moved
away to the seat assigned to him. He kept repeating to himself: “How was
it I forgot? How could I have forgotten it? And what made it come back to
me now?”

Katerina Ivanovna was called to the witness‐box. As she entered something
extraordinary happened in the court. The ladies clutched their lorgnettes
and opera‐glasses. There was a stir among the men: some stood up to get a
better view. Everybody alleged afterwards that Mitya had turned “white as
a sheet” on her entrance. All in black, she advanced modestly, almost
timidly. It was impossible to tell from her face that she was agitated;
but there was a resolute gleam in her dark and gloomy eyes. I may remark
that many people mentioned that she looked particularly handsome at that
moment. She spoke softly but clearly, so that she was heard all over the
court. She expressed herself with composure, or at least tried to appear
composed. The President began his examination discreetly and very
respectfully, as though afraid to touch on “certain chords,” and showing
consideration for her great unhappiness. But in answer to one of the first
questions Katerina Ivanovna replied firmly that she had been formerly
betrothed to the prisoner, “until he left me of his own accord...” she
added quietly. When they asked her about the three thousand she had
entrusted to Mitya to post to her relations, she said firmly, “I didn’t
give him the money simply to send it off. I felt at the time that he was
in great need of money.... I gave him the three thousand on the
understanding that he should post it within the month if he cared to.
There was no need for him to worry himself about that debt afterwards.”

I will not repeat all the questions asked her and all her answers in
detail. I will only give the substance of her evidence.

“I was firmly convinced that he would send off that sum as soon as he got
money from his father,” she went on. “I have never doubted his
disinterestedness and his honesty ... his scrupulous honesty ... in money
matters. He felt quite certain that he would receive the money from his
father, and spoke to me several times about it. I knew he had a feud with
his father and have always believed that he had been unfairly treated by
his father. I don’t remember any threat uttered by him against his father.
He certainly never uttered any such threat before me. If he had come to me
at that time, I should have at once relieved his anxiety about that
unlucky three thousand roubles, but he had given up coming to see me ...
and I myself was put in such a position ... that I could not invite
him.... And I had no right, indeed, to be exacting as to that money,” she
added suddenly, and there was a ring of resolution in her voice. “I was
once indebted to him for assistance in money for more than three thousand,
and I took it, although I could not at that time foresee that I should
ever be in a position to repay my debt.”

There was a note of defiance in her voice. It was then Fetyukovitch began
his cross‐examination.

“Did that take place not here, but at the beginning of your acquaintance?”
Fetyukovitch suggested cautiously, feeling his way, instantly scenting
something favorable. I must mention in parenthesis that, though
Fetyukovitch had been brought from Petersburg partly at the instance of
Katerina Ivanovna herself, he knew nothing about the episode of the four
thousand roubles given her by Mitya, and of her “bowing to the ground to
him.” She concealed this from him and said nothing about it, and that was
strange. It may be pretty certainly assumed that she herself did not know
till the very last minute whether she would speak of that episode in the
court, and waited for the inspiration of the moment.

No, I can never forget those moments. She began telling her story. She
told everything, the whole episode that Mitya had told Alyosha, and her
bowing to the ground, and her reason. She told about her father and her
going to Mitya, and did not in one word, in a single hint, suggest that
Mitya had himself, through her sister, proposed they should “send him
Katerina Ivanovna” to fetch the money. She generously concealed that and
was not ashamed to make it appear as though she had of her own impulse run
to the young officer, relying on something ... to beg him for the money.
It was something tremendous! I turned cold and trembled as I listened. The
court was hushed, trying to catch each word. It was something unexampled.
Even from such a self‐willed and contemptuously proud girl as she was,
such an extremely frank avowal, such sacrifice, such self‐immolation,
seemed incredible. And for what, for whom? To save the man who had
deceived and insulted her and to help, in however small a degree, in
saving him, by creating a strong impression in his favor. And, indeed, the
figure of the young officer who, with a respectful bow to the innocent
girl, handed her his last four thousand roubles—all he had in the
world—was thrown into a very sympathetic and attractive light, but ... I
had a painful misgiving at heart! I felt that calumny might come of it
later (and it did, in fact, it did). It was repeated all over the town
afterwards with spiteful laughter that the story was perhaps not quite
complete—that is, in the statement that the officer had let the young lady
depart “with nothing but a respectful bow.” It was hinted that something
was here omitted.

“And even if nothing had been omitted, if this were the whole story,” the
most highly respected of our ladies maintained, “even then it’s very
doubtful whether it was creditable for a young girl to behave in that way,
even for the sake of saving her father.”

And can Katerina Ivanovna, with her intelligence, her morbid
sensitiveness, have failed to understand that people would talk like that?
She must have understood it, yet she made up her mind to tell everything.
Of course, all these nasty little suspicions as to the truth of her story
only arose afterwards and at the first moment all were deeply impressed by
it. As for the judges and the lawyers, they listened in reverent, almost
shame‐faced silence to Katerina Ivanovna. The prosecutor did not venture
upon even one question on the subject. Fetyukovitch made a low bow to her.
Oh, he was almost triumphant! Much ground had been gained. For a man to
give his last four thousand on a generous impulse and then for the same
man to murder his father for the sake of robbing him of three thousand—the
idea seemed too incongruous. Fetyukovitch felt that now the charge of
theft, at least, was as good as disproved. “The case” was thrown into
quite a different light. There was a wave of sympathy for Mitya. As for
him.... I was told that once or twice, while Katerina Ivanovna was giving
her evidence, he jumped up from his seat, sank back again, and hid his
face in his hands. But when she had finished, he suddenly cried in a
sobbing voice:

“Katya, why have you ruined me?” and his sobs were audible all over the
court. But he instantly restrained himself, and cried again:

“Now I am condemned!”

Then he sat rigid in his place, with his teeth clenched and his arms
across his chest. Katerina Ivanovna remained in the court and sat down in
her place. She was pale and sat with her eyes cast down. Those who were
sitting near her declared that for a long time she shivered all over as
though in a fever. Grushenka was called.

I am approaching the sudden catastrophe which was perhaps the final cause
of Mitya’s ruin. For I am convinced, so is every one—all the lawyers said
the same afterwards—that if the episode had not occurred, the prisoner
would at least have been recommended to mercy. But of that later. A few
words first about Grushenka.

She, too, was dressed entirely in black, with her magnificent black shawl
on her shoulders. She walked to the witness‐box with her smooth, noiseless
tread, with the slightly swaying gait common in women of full figure. She
looked steadily at the President, turning her eyes neither to the right
nor to the left. To my thinking she looked very handsome at that moment,
and not at all pale, as the ladies alleged afterwards. They declared, too,
that she had a concentrated and spiteful expression. I believe that she
was simply irritated and painfully conscious of the contemptuous and
inquisitive eyes of our scandal‐loving public. She was proud and could not
stand contempt. She was one of those people who flare up, angry and eager
to retaliate, at the mere suggestion of contempt. There was an element of
timidity, too, of course, and inward shame at her own timidity, so it was
not strange that her tone kept changing. At one moment it was angry,
contemptuous and rough, and at another there was a sincere note of self‐
condemnation. Sometimes she spoke as though she were taking a desperate
plunge; as though she felt, “I don’t care what happens, I’ll say it....”
Apropos of her acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovitch, she remarked curtly,
“That’s all nonsense, and was it my fault that he would pester me?” But a
minute later she added, “It was all my fault. I was laughing at them
both—at the old man and at him, too—and I brought both of them to this. It
was all on account of me it happened.”

Samsonov’s name came up somehow. “That’s nobody’s business,” she snapped
at once, with a sort of insolent defiance. “He was my benefactor; he took
me when I hadn’t a shoe to my foot, when my family had turned me out.” The
President reminded her, though very politely, that she must answer the
questions directly, without going off into irrelevant details. Grushenka
crimsoned and her eyes flashed.

The envelope with the notes in it she had not seen, but had only heard
from “that wicked wretch” that Fyodor Pavlovitch had an envelope with
notes for three thousand in it. “But that was all foolishness. I was only
laughing. I wouldn’t have gone to him for anything.”

“To whom are you referring as ‘that wicked wretch’?” inquired the
prosecutor.

“The lackey, Smerdyakov, who murdered his master and hanged himself last
night.”

She was, of course, at once asked what ground she had for such a definite
accusation; but it appeared that she, too, had no grounds for it.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch told me so himself; you can believe him. The woman
who came between us has ruined him; she is the cause of it all, let me
tell you,” Grushenka added. She seemed to be quivering with hatred, and
there was a vindictive note in her voice.

She was again asked to whom she was referring.

“The young lady, Katerina Ivanovna there. She sent for me, offered me
chocolate, tried to fascinate me. There’s not much true shame about her, I
can tell you that....”

At this point the President checked her sternly, begging her to moderate
her language. But the jealous woman’s heart was burning, and she did not
care what she did.

“When the prisoner was arrested at Mokroe,” the prosecutor asked, “every
one saw and heard you run out of the next room and cry out: ‘It’s all my
fault. We’ll go to Siberia together!’ So you already believed him to have
murdered his father?”

“I don’t remember what I felt at the time,” answered Grushenka. “Every one
was crying out that he had killed his father, and I felt that it was my
fault, that it was on my account he had murdered him. But when he said he
wasn’t guilty, I believed him at once, and I believe him now and always
shall believe him. He is not the man to tell a lie.”

Fetyukovitch began his cross‐examination. I remember that among other
things he asked about Rakitin and the twenty‐five roubles “you paid him
for bringing Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov to see you.”

“There was nothing strange about his taking the money,” sneered Grushenka,
with angry contempt. “He was always coming to me for money: he used to get
thirty roubles a month at least out of me, chiefly for luxuries: he had
enough to keep him without my help.”

“What led you to be so liberal to Mr. Rakitin?” Fetyukovitch asked, in
spite of an uneasy movement on the part of the President.

“Why, he is my cousin. His mother was my mother’s sister. But he’s always
besought me not to tell any one here of it, he is so dreadfully ashamed of
me.”

This fact was a complete surprise to every one; no one in the town nor in
the monastery, not even Mitya, knew of it. I was told that Rakitin turned
purple with shame where he sat. Grushenka had somehow heard before she
came into the court that he had given evidence against Mitya, and so she
was angry. The whole effect on the public, of Rakitin’s speech, of his
noble sentiments, of his attacks upon serfdom and the political disorder
of Russia, was this time finally ruined. Fetyukovitch was satisfied: it
was another godsend. Grushenka’s cross‐examination did not last long and,
of course, there could be nothing particularly new in her evidence. She
left a very disagreeable impression on the public; hundreds of
contemptuous eyes were fixed upon her, as she finished giving her evidence
and sat down again in the court, at a good distance from Katerina
Ivanovna. Mitya was silent throughout her evidence. He sat as though
turned to stone, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

Ivan was called to give evidence.



Chapter V. A Sudden Catastrophe


I may note that he had been called before Alyosha. But the usher of the
court announced to the President that, owing to an attack of illness or
some sort of fit, the witness could not appear at the moment, but was
ready to give his evidence as soon as he recovered. But no one seemed to
have heard it and it only came out later.

His entrance was for the first moment almost unnoticed. The principal
witnesses, especially the two rival ladies, had already been questioned.
Curiosity was satisfied for the time; the public was feeling almost
fatigued. Several more witnesses were still to be heard, who probably had
little information to give after all that had been given. Time was
passing. Ivan walked up with extraordinary slowness, looking at no one,
and with his head bowed, as though plunged in gloomy thought. He was
irreproachably dressed, but his face made a painful impression, on me at
least: there was an earthy look in it, a look like a dying man’s. His eyes
were lusterless; he raised them and looked slowly round the court. Alyosha
jumped up from his seat and moaned “Ah!” I remember that, but it was
hardly noticed.

The President began by informing him that he was a witness not on oath,
that he might answer or refuse to answer, but that, of course, he must
bear witness according to his conscience, and so on, and so on. Ivan
listened and looked at him blankly, but his face gradually relaxed into a
smile, and as soon as the President, looking at him in astonishment,
finished, he laughed outright.

“Well, and what else?” he asked in a loud voice.

There was a hush in the court; there was a feeling of something strange.
The President showed signs of uneasiness.

“You ... are perhaps still unwell?” he began, looking everywhere for the
usher.

“Don’t trouble yourself, your excellency, I am well enough and can tell
you something interesting,” Ivan answered with sudden calmness and
respectfulness.

“You have some special communication to make?” the President went on,
still mistrustfully.

Ivan looked down, waited a few seconds and, raising his head, answered,
almost stammering:

“No ... I haven’t. I have nothing particular.”

They began asking him questions. He answered, as it were, reluctantly,
with extreme brevity, with a sort of disgust which grew more and more
marked, though he answered rationally. To many questions he answered that
he did not know. He knew nothing of his father’s money relations with
Dmitri. “I wasn’t interested in the subject,” he added. Threats to murder
his father he had heard from the prisoner. Of the money in the envelope he
had heard from Smerdyakov.

“The same thing over and over again,” he interrupted suddenly, with a look
of weariness. “I have nothing particular to tell the court.”

“I see you are unwell and understand your feelings,” the President began.

He turned to the prosecutor and the counsel for the defense to invite them
to examine the witness, if necessary, when Ivan suddenly asked in an
exhausted voice:

“Let me go, your excellency, I feel very ill.”

And with these words, without waiting for permission, he turned to walk
out of the court. But after taking four steps he stood still, as though he
had reached a decision, smiled slowly, and went back.

“I am like the peasant girl, your excellency ... you know. How does it go?
‘I’ll stand up if I like, and I won’t if I don’t.’ They were trying to put
on her sarafan to take her to church to be married, and she said, ‘I’ll
stand up if I like, and I won’t if I don’t.’... It’s in some book about
the peasantry.”

“What do you mean by that?” the President asked severely.

“Why, this,” Ivan suddenly pulled out a roll of notes. “Here’s the money
... the notes that lay in that envelope” (he nodded towards the table on
which lay the material evidence), “for the sake of which our father was
murdered. Where shall I put them? Mr. Superintendent, take them.”

The usher of the court took the whole roll and handed it to the President.

“How could this money have come into your possession if it is the same
money?” the President asked wonderingly.

“I got them from Smerdyakov, from the murderer, yesterday.... I was with
him just before he hanged himself. It was he, not my brother, killed our
father. He murdered him and I incited him to do it ... Who doesn’t desire
his father’s death?”

“Are you in your right mind?” broke involuntarily from the President.

“I should think I am in my right mind ... in the same nasty mind as all of
you ... as all these ... ugly faces.” He turned suddenly to the audience.
“My father has been murdered and they pretend they are horrified,” he
snarled, with furious contempt. “They keep up the sham with one another.
Liars! They all desire the death of their fathers. One reptile devours
another.... If there hadn’t been a murder, they’d have been angry and gone
home ill‐humored. It’s a spectacle they want! _Panem et circenses_. Though
I am one to talk! Have you any water? Give me a drink for Christ’s sake!”
He suddenly clutched his head.

The usher at once approached him. Alyosha jumped up and cried, “He is ill.
Don’t believe him: he has brain fever.” Katerina Ivanovna rose impulsively
from her seat and, rigid with horror, gazed at Ivan. Mitya stood up and
greedily looked at his brother and listened to him with a wild, strange
smile.

“Don’t disturb yourselves. I am not mad, I am only a murderer,” Ivan began
again. “You can’t expect eloquence from a murderer,” he added suddenly for
some reason and laughed a queer laugh.

The prosecutor bent over to the President in obvious dismay. The two other
judges communicated in agitated whispers. Fetyukovitch pricked up his ears
as he listened: the hall was hushed in expectation. The President seemed
suddenly to recollect himself.

“Witness, your words are incomprehensible and impossible here. Calm
yourself, if you can, and tell your story ... if you really have something
to tell. How can you confirm your statement ... if indeed you are not
delirious?”

“That’s just it. I have no proof. That cur Smerdyakov won’t send you
proofs from the other world ... in an envelope. You think of nothing but
envelopes—one is enough. I’ve no witnesses ... except one, perhaps,” he
smiled thoughtfully.

“Who is your witness?”

“He has a tail, your excellency, and that would be irregular! _Le diable
n’existe point!_ Don’t pay attention: he is a paltry, pitiful devil,” he
added suddenly. He ceased laughing and spoke as it were, confidentially.
“He is here somewhere, no doubt—under that table with the material
evidence on it, perhaps. Where should he sit if not there? You see, listen
to me. I told him I don’t want to keep quiet, and he talked about the
geological cataclysm ... idiocy! Come, release the monster ... he’s been
singing a hymn. That’s because his heart is light! It’s like a drunken man
in the street bawling how ‘Vanka went to Petersburg,’ and I would give a
quadrillion quadrillions for two seconds of joy. You don’t know me! Oh,
how stupid all this business is! Come, take me instead of him! I didn’t
come for nothing.... Why, why is everything so stupid?...”

And he began slowly, and as it were reflectively, looking round him again.
But the court was all excitement by now. Alyosha rushed towards him, but
the court usher had already seized Ivan by the arm.

“What are you about?” he cried, staring into the man’s face, and suddenly
seizing him by the shoulders, he flung him violently to the floor. But the
police were on the spot and he was seized. He screamed furiously. And all
the time he was being removed, he yelled and screamed something
incoherent.

The whole court was thrown into confusion. I don’t remember everything as
it happened. I was excited myself and could not follow. I only know that
afterwards, when everything was quiet again and every one understood what
had happened, the court usher came in for a reprimand, though he very
reasonably explained that the witness had been quite well, that the doctor
had seen him an hour ago, when he had a slight attack of giddiness, but
that, until he had come into the court, he had talked quite consecutively,
so that nothing could have been foreseen—that he had, in fact, insisted on
giving evidence. But before every one had completely regained their
composure and recovered from this scene, it was followed by another.
Katerina Ivanovna had an attack of hysterics. She sobbed, shrieking
loudly, but refused to leave the court, struggled, and besought them not
to remove her. Suddenly she cried to the President:

“There is more evidence I must give at once ... at once! Here is a
document, a letter ... take it, read it quickly, quickly! It’s a letter
from that monster ... that man there, there!” she pointed to Mitya. “It
was he killed his father, you will see that directly. He wrote to me how
he would kill his father! But the other one is ill, he is ill, he is
delirious!” she kept crying out, beside herself.

The court usher took the document she held out to the President, and she,
dropping into her chair, hiding her face in her hands, began convulsively
and noiselessly sobbing, shaking all over, and stifling every sound for
fear she should be ejected from the court. The document she had handed up
was that letter Mitya had written at the “Metropolis” tavern, which Ivan
had spoken of as a “mathematical proof.” Alas! its mathematical
conclusiveness was recognized, and had it not been for that letter, Mitya
might have escaped his doom or, at least, that doom would have been less
terrible. It was, I repeat, difficult to notice every detail. What
followed is still confused to my mind. The President must, I suppose, have
at once passed on the document to the judges, the jury, and the lawyers on
both sides. I only remember how they began examining the witness. On being
gently asked by the President whether she had recovered sufficiently,
Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed impetuously:

“I am ready, I am ready! I am quite equal to answering you,” she added,
evidently still afraid that she would somehow be prevented from giving
evidence. She was asked to explain in detail what this letter was and
under what circumstances she received it.

“I received it the day before the crime was committed, but he wrote it the
day before that, at the tavern—that is, two days before he committed the
crime. Look, it is written on some sort of bill!” she cried breathlessly.
“He hated me at that time, because he had behaved contemptibly and was
running after that creature ... and because he owed me that three
thousand.... Oh! he was humiliated by that three thousand on account of
his own meanness! This is how it happened about that three thousand. I beg
you, I beseech you, to hear me. Three weeks before he murdered his father,
he came to me one morning. I knew he was in want of money, and what he
wanted it for. Yes, yes—to win that creature and carry her off. I knew
then that he had been false to me and meant to abandon me, and it was I,
I, who gave him that money, who offered it to him on the pretext of his
sending it to my sister in Moscow. And as I gave it him, I looked him in
the face and said that he could send it when he liked, ‘in a month’s time
would do.’ How, how could he have failed to understand that I was
practically telling him to his face, ‘You want money to be false to me
with your creature, so here’s the money for you. I give it to you myself.
Take it, if you have so little honor as to take it!’ I wanted to prove
what he was, and what happened? He took it, he took it, and squandered it
with that creature in one night.... But he knew, he knew that I knew all
about it. I assure you he understood, too, that I gave him that money to
test him, to see whether he was so lost to all sense of honor as to take
it from me. I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine, and he
understood it all and he took it—he carried off my money!”

“That’s true, Katya,” Mitya roared suddenly, “I looked into your eyes and
I knew that you were dishonoring me, and yet I took your money. Despise me
as a scoundrel, despise me, all of you! I’ve deserved it!”

“Prisoner,” cried the President, “another word and I will order you to be
removed.”

“That money was a torment to him,” Katya went on with impulsive haste. “He
wanted to repay it me. He wanted to, that’s true; but he needed money for
that creature, too. So he murdered his father, but he didn’t repay me, and
went off with her to that village where he was arrested. There, again, he
squandered the money he had stolen after the murder of his father. And a
day before the murder he wrote me this letter. He was drunk when he wrote
it. I saw it at once, at the time. He wrote it from spite, and feeling
certain, positively certain, that I should never show it to any one, even
if he did kill him, or else he wouldn’t have written it. For he knew I
shouldn’t want to revenge myself and ruin him! But read it, read it
attentively—more attentively, please—and you will see that he had
described it all in his letter, all beforehand, how he would kill his
father and where his money was kept. Look, please, don’t overlook that,
there’s one phrase there, ‘I shall kill him as soon as Ivan has gone
away.’ So he thought it all out beforehand how he would kill him,”
Katerina Ivanovna pointed out to the court with venomous and malignant
triumph. Oh! it was clear she had studied every line of that letter and
detected every meaning underlining it. “If he hadn’t been drunk, he
wouldn’t have written to me; but, look, everything is written there
beforehand, just as he committed the murder after. A complete program of
it!” she exclaimed frantically.

She was reckless now of all consequences to herself, though, no doubt, she
had foreseen them even a month ago, for even then, perhaps, shaking with
anger, she had pondered whether to show it at the trial or not. Now she
had taken the fatal plunge. I remember that the letter was read aloud by
the clerk, directly afterwards, I believe. It made an overwhelming
impression. They asked Mitya whether he admitted having written the
letter.

“It’s mine, mine!” cried Mitya. “I shouldn’t have written it, if I hadn’t
been drunk!... We’ve hated each other for many things, Katya, but I swear,
I swear I loved you even while I hated you, and you didn’t love me!”

He sank back on his seat, wringing his hands in despair. The prosecutor
and counsel for the defense began cross‐examining her, chiefly to
ascertain what had induced her to conceal such a document and to give her
evidence in quite a different tone and spirit just before.

“Yes, yes. I was telling lies just now. I was lying against my honor and
my conscience, but I wanted to save him, for he has hated and despised me
so!” Katya cried madly. “Oh, he has despised me horribly, he has always
despised me, and do you know, he has despised me from the very moment that
I bowed down to him for that money. I saw that.... I felt it at once at
the time, but for a long time I wouldn’t believe it. How often I have read
it in his eyes, ‘You came of yourself, though.’ Oh, he didn’t understand,
he had no idea why I ran to him, he can suspect nothing but baseness, he
judged me by himself, he thought every one was like himself!” Katya hissed
furiously, in a perfect frenzy. “And he only wanted to marry me, because
I’d inherited a fortune, because of that, because of that! I always
suspected it was because of that! Oh, he is a brute! He was always
convinced that I should be trembling with shame all my life before him,
because I went to him then, and that he had a right to despise me for ever
for it, and so to be superior to me—that’s why he wanted to marry me!
That’s so, that’s all so! I tried to conquer him by my love—a love that
knew no bounds. I even tried to forgive his faithlessness; but he
understood nothing, nothing! How could he understand indeed? He is a
monster! I only received that letter the next evening: it was brought me
from the tavern—and only that morning, only that morning I wanted to
forgive him everything, everything—even his treachery!”

The President and the prosecutor, of course, tried to calm her. I can’t
help thinking that they felt ashamed of taking advantage of her hysteria
and of listening to such avowals. I remember hearing them say to her, “We
understand how hard it is for you; be sure we are able to feel for you,”
and so on, and so on. And yet they dragged the evidence out of the raving,
hysterical woman. She described at last with extraordinary clearness,
which is so often seen, though only for a moment, in such over‐wrought
states, how Ivan had been nearly driven out of his mind during the last
two months trying to save “the monster and murderer,” his brother.

“He tortured himself,” she exclaimed, “he was always trying to minimize
his brother’s guilt and confessing to me that he, too, had never loved his
father, and perhaps desired his death himself. Oh, he has a tender, over‐
tender conscience! He tormented himself with his conscience! He told me
everything, everything! He came every day and talked to me as his only
friend. I have the honor to be his only friend!” she cried suddenly with a
sort of defiance, and her eyes flashed. “He had been twice to see
Smerdyakov. One day he came to me and said, ‘If it was not my brother, but
Smerdyakov committed the murder’ (for the legend was circulating
everywhere that Smerdyakov had done it), ‘perhaps I too am guilty, for
Smerdyakov knew I didn’t like my father and perhaps believed that I
desired my father’s death.’ Then I brought out that letter and showed it
him. He was entirely convinced that his brother had done it, and he was
overwhelmed by it. He couldn’t endure the thought that his own brother was
a parricide! Only a week ago I saw that it was making him ill. During the
last few days he has talked incoherently in my presence. I saw his mind
was giving way. He walked about, raving; he was seen muttering in the
streets. The doctor from Moscow, at my request, examined him the day
before yesterday and told me that he was on the eve of brain fever—and all
on his account, on account of this monster! And last night he learnt that
Smerdyakov was dead! It was such a shock that it drove him out of his mind
... and all through this monster, all for the sake of saving the monster!”

Oh, of course, such an outpouring, such an avowal is only possible once in
a lifetime—at the hour of death, for instance, on the way to the scaffold!
But it was in Katya’s character, and it was such a moment in her life. It
was the same impetuous Katya who had thrown herself on the mercy of a
young profligate to save her father; the same Katya who had just before,
in her pride and chastity, sacrificed herself and her maidenly modesty
before all these people, telling of Mitya’s generous conduct, in the hope
of softening his fate a little. And now, again, she sacrificed herself;
but this time it was for another, and perhaps only now—perhaps only at
this moment—she felt and knew how dear that other was to her! She had
sacrificed herself in terror for him, conceiving all of a sudden that he
had ruined himself by his confession that it was he who had committed the
murder, not his brother, she had sacrificed herself to save him, to save
his good name, his reputation!

And yet one terrible doubt occurred to one—was she lying in her
description of her former relations with Mitya?—that was the question. No,
she had not intentionally slandered him when she cried that Mitya despised
her for her bowing down to him! She believed it herself. She had been
firmly convinced, perhaps ever since that bow, that the simple‐hearted
Mitya, who even then adored her, was laughing at her and despising her.
She had loved him with an hysterical, “lacerated” love only from pride,
from wounded pride, and that love was not like love, but more like
revenge. Oh! perhaps that lacerated love would have grown into real love,
perhaps Katya longed for nothing more than that, but Mitya’s faithlessness
had wounded her to the bottom of her heart, and her heart could not
forgive him. The moment of revenge had come upon her suddenly, and all
that had been accumulating so long and so painfully in the offended
woman’s breast burst out all at once and unexpectedly. She betrayed Mitya,
but she betrayed herself, too. And no sooner had she given full expression
to her feelings than the tension of course was over and she was
overwhelmed with shame. Hysterics began again: she fell on the floor,
sobbing and screaming. She was carried out. At that moment Grushenka, with
a wail, rushed towards Mitya before they had time to prevent her.

“Mitya,” she wailed, “your serpent has destroyed you! There, she has shown
you what she is!” she shouted to the judges, shaking with anger. At a
signal from the President they seized her and tried to remove her from the
court. She wouldn’t allow it. She fought and struggled to get back to
Mitya. Mitya uttered a cry and struggled to get to her. He was
overpowered.

Yes, I think the ladies who came to see the spectacle must have been
satisfied—the show had been a varied one. Then I remember the Moscow
doctor appeared on the scene. I believe the President had previously sent
the court usher to arrange for medical aid for Ivan. The doctor announced
to the court that the sick man was suffering from a dangerous attack of
brain fever, and that he must be at once removed. In answer to questions
from the prosecutor and the counsel for the defense he said that the
patient had come to him of his own accord the day before yesterday and
that he had warned him that he had such an attack coming on, but he had
not consented to be looked after. “He was certainly not in a normal state
of mind: he told me himself that he saw visions when he was awake, that he
met several persons in the street, who were dead, and that Satan visited
him every evening,” said the doctor, in conclusion. Having given his
evidence, the celebrated doctor withdrew. The letter produced by Katerina
Ivanovna was added to the material proofs. After some deliberation, the
judges decided to proceed with the trial and to enter both the unexpected
pieces of evidence (given by Ivan and Katerina Ivanovna) on the protocol.

But I will not detail the evidence of the other witnesses, who only
repeated and confirmed what had been said before, though all with their
characteristic peculiarities. I repeat, all was brought together in the
prosecutor’s speech, which I shall quote immediately. Every one was
excited, every one was electrified by the late catastrophe, and all were
awaiting the speeches for the prosecution and the defense with intense
impatience. Fetyukovitch was obviously shaken by Katerina Ivanovna’s
evidence. But the prosecutor was triumphant. When all the evidence had
been taken, the court was adjourned for almost an hour. I believe it was
just eight o’clock when the President returned to his seat and our
prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovitch, began his speech.



Chapter VI. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Sketches Of Character


Ippolit Kirillovitch began his speech, trembling with nervousness, with
cold sweat on his forehead, feeling hot and cold all over by turns. He
described this himself afterwards. He regarded this speech as his _chef‐
d’œuvre_, the _chef‐d’œuvre_ of his whole life, as his swan‐song. He died,
it is true, nine months later of rapid consumption, so that he had the
right, as it turned out, to compare himself to a swan singing his last
song. He had put his whole heart and all the brain he had into that
speech. And poor Ippolit Kirillovitch unexpectedly revealed that at least
some feeling for the public welfare and “the eternal question” lay
concealed in him. Where his speech really excelled was in its sincerity.
He genuinely believed in the prisoner’s guilt; he was accusing him not as
an official duty only, and in calling for vengeance he quivered with a
genuine passion “for the security of society.” Even the ladies in the
audience, though they remained hostile to Ippolit Kirillovitch, admitted
that he made an extraordinary impression on them. He began in a breaking
voice, but it soon gained strength and filled the court to the end of his
speech. But as soon as he had finished, he almost fainted.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” began the prosecutor, “this case has made a stir
throughout Russia. But what is there to wonder at, what is there so
peculiarly horrifying in it for us? We are so accustomed to such crimes!
That’s what’s so horrible, that such dark deeds have ceased to horrify us.
What ought to horrify us is that we are so accustomed to it, and not this
or that isolated crime. What are the causes of our indifference, our
lukewarm attitude to such deeds, to such signs of the times, ominous of an
unenviable future? Is it our cynicism, is it the premature exhaustion of
intellect and imagination in a society that is sinking into decay, in
spite of its youth? Is it that our moral principles are shattered to their
foundations, or is it, perhaps, a complete lack of such principles among
us? I cannot answer such questions; nevertheless they are disturbing, and
every citizen not only must, but ought to be harassed by them. Our newborn
and still timid press has done good service to the public already, for
without it we should never have heard of the horrors of unbridled violence
and moral degradation which are continually made known by the press, not
merely to those who attend the new jury courts established in the present
reign, but to every one. And what do we read almost daily? Of things
beside which the present case grows pale, and seems almost commonplace.
But what is most important is that the majority of our national crimes of
violence bear witness to a widespread evil, now so general among us that
it is difficult to contend against it.

“One day we see a brilliant young officer of high society, at the very
outset of his career, in a cowardly underhand way, without a pang of
conscience, murdering an official who had once been his benefactor, and
the servant girl, to steal his own I.O.U. and what ready money he could
find on him; ‘it will come in handy for my pleasures in the fashionable
world and for my career in the future.’ After murdering them, he puts
pillows under the head of each of his victims; he goes away. Next, a young
hero ‘decorated for bravery’ kills the mother of his chief and benefactor,
like a highwayman, and to urge his companions to join him he asserts that
‘she loves him like a son, and so will follow all his directions and take
no precautions.’ Granted that he is a monster, yet I dare not say in these
days that he is unique. Another man will not commit the murder, but will
feel and think like him, and is as dishonorable in soul. In silence, alone
with his conscience, he asks himself perhaps, ‘What is honor, and isn’t
the condemnation of bloodshed a prejudice?’

“Perhaps people will cry out against me that I am morbid, hysterical, that
it is a monstrous slander, that I am exaggerating. Let them say so—and
heavens! I should be the first to rejoice if it were so! Oh, don’t believe
me, think of me as morbid, but remember my words; if only a tenth, if only
a twentieth part of what I say is true—even so it’s awful! Look how our
young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question
what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all
that relates to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long
been erased in their minds and buried under the sands. Look at our vice,
at our profligates. Fyodor Pavlovitch, the luckless victim in the present
case, was almost an innocent babe compared with many of them. And yet we
all knew him, ‘he lived among us!’...

“Yes, one day perhaps the leading intellects of Russia and of Europe will
study the psychology of Russian crime, for the subject is worth it. But
this study will come later, at leisure, when all the tragic topsy‐turvydom
of to‐day is farther behind us, so that it’s possible to examine it with
more insight and more impartiality than I can do. Now we are either
horrified or pretend to be horrified, though we really gloat over the
spectacle, and love strong and eccentric sensations which tickle our
cynical, pampered idleness. Or, like little children, we brush the
dreadful ghosts away and hide our heads in the pillow so as to return to
our sports and merriment as soon as they have vanished. But we must one
day begin life in sober earnest, we must look at ourselves as a society;
it’s time we tried to grasp something of our social position, or at least
to make a beginning in that direction.

“A great writer(9) of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a swift troika
galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims, ‘Oh, troika, birdlike troika, who
invented thee!’ and adds, in proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the
world stand aside respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping
troika to pass. That may be, they may stand aside, respectfully or no, but
in my poor opinion the great writer ended his book in this way either in
an access of childish and naïve optimism, or simply in fear of the
censorship of the day. For if the troika were drawn by his heroes,
Sobakevitch, Nozdryov, Tchitchikov, it could reach no rational goal,
whoever might be driving it. And those were the heroes of an older
generation, ours are worse specimens still....”

At this point Ippolit Kirillovitch’s speech was interrupted by applause.
The liberal significance of this simile was appreciated. The applause was,
it’s true, of brief duration, so that the President did not think it
necessary to caution the public, and only looked severely in the direction
of the offenders. But Ippolit Kirillovitch was encouraged; he had never
been applauded before! He had been all his life unable to get a hearing,
and now he suddenly had an opportunity of securing the ear of all Russia.

“What, after all, is this Karamazov family, which has gained such an
unenviable notoriety throughout Russia?” he continued. “Perhaps I am
exaggerating, but it seems to me that certain fundamental features of the
educated class of to‐day are reflected in this family picture—only, of
course, in miniature, ‘like the sun in a drop of water.’ Think of that
unhappy, vicious, unbridled old man, who has met with such a melancholy
end, the head of a family! Beginning life of noble birth, but in a poor
dependent position, through an unexpected marriage he came into a small
fortune. A petty knave, a toady and buffoon, of fairly good, though
undeveloped, intelligence, he was, above all, a moneylender, who grew
bolder with growing prosperity. His abject and servile characteristics
disappeared, his malicious and sarcastic cynicism was all that remained.
On the spiritual side he was undeveloped, while his vitality was
excessive. He saw nothing in life but sensual pleasure, and he brought his
children up to be the same. He had no feelings for his duties as a father.
He ridiculed those duties. He left his little children to the servants,
and was glad to be rid of them, forgot about them completely. The old
man’s maxim was _Après moi le déluge_. He was an example of everything
that is opposed to civic duty, of the most complete and malignant
individualism. ‘The world may burn for aught I care, so long as I am all
right,’ and he was all right; he was content, he was eager to go on living
in the same way for another twenty or thirty years. He swindled his own
son and spent his money, his maternal inheritance, on trying to get his
mistress from him. No, I don’t intend to leave the prisoner’s defense
altogether to my talented colleague from Petersburg. I will speak the
truth myself, I can well understand what resentment he had heaped up in
his son’s heart against him.

“But enough, enough of that unhappy old man; he has paid the penalty. Let
us remember, however, that he was a father, and one of the typical fathers
of to‐day. Am I unjust, indeed, in saying that he is typical of many
modern fathers? Alas! many of them only differ in not openly professing
such cynicism, for they are better educated, more cultured, but their
philosophy is essentially the same as his. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but
you have agreed to forgive me. Let us agree beforehand, you need not
believe me, but let me speak. Let me say what I have to say, and remember
something of my words.

“Now for the children of this father, this head of a family. One of them
is the prisoner before us, all the rest of my speech will deal with him.
Of the other two I will speak only cursorily.

“The elder is one of those modern young men of brilliant education and
vigorous intellect, who has lost all faith in everything. He has denied
and rejected much already, like his father. We have all heard him, he was
a welcome guest in local society. He never concealed his opinions, quite
the contrary in fact, which justifies me in speaking rather openly of him
now, of course, not as an individual, but as a member of the Karamazov
family. Another personage closely connected with the case died here by his
own hand last night. I mean an afflicted idiot, formerly the servant, and
possibly the illegitimate son, of Fyodor Pavlovitch, Smerdyakov. At the
preliminary inquiry, he told me with hysterical tears how the young Ivan
Karamazov had horrified him by his spiritual audacity. ‘Everything in the
world is lawful according to him, and nothing must be forbidden in the
future—that is what he always taught me.’ I believe that idiot was driven
out of his mind by this theory, though, of course, the epileptic attacks
from which he suffered, and this terrible catastrophe, have helped to
unhinge his faculties. But he dropped one very interesting observation,
which would have done credit to a more intelligent observer, and that is,
indeed, why I’ve mentioned it: ‘If there is one of the sons that is like
Fyodor Pavlovitch in character, it is Ivan Fyodorovitch.’

“With that remark I conclude my sketch of his character, feeling it
indelicate to continue further. Oh, I don’t want to draw any further
conclusions and croak like a raven over the young man’s future. We’ve seen
to‐day in this court that there are still good impulses in his young
heart, that family feeling has not been destroyed in him by lack of faith
and cynicism, which have come to him rather by inheritance than by the
exercise of independent thought.

“Then the third son. Oh, he is a devout and modest youth, who does not
share his elder brother’s gloomy and destructive theory of life. He has
sought to cling to the ‘ideas of the people,’ or to what goes by that name
in some circles of our intellectual classes. He clung to the monastery,
and was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems to me to have betrayed
unconsciously, and so early, that timid despair which leads so many in our
unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences, and
mistakenly attribute all the mischief to European enlightenment, to return
to their ‘native soil,’ as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their
mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the
withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only
to escape the horrors that terrify them.

“For my part I wish the excellent and gifted young man every success; I
trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the
people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into
gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements
which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to
misunderstanding and gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his
elder brother is suffering.”

Two or three people clapped their hands at the mention of chauvinism and
mysticism. Ippolit Kirillovitch had been, indeed, carried away by his own
eloquence. All this had little to do with the case in hand, to say nothing
of the fact of its being somewhat vague, but the sickly and consumptive
man was overcome by the desire to express himself once in his life. People
said afterwards that he was actuated by unworthy motives in his criticism
of Ivan, because the latter had on one or two occasions got the better of
him in argument, and Ippolit Kirillovitch, remembering it, tried now to
take his revenge. But I don’t know whether it was true. All this was only
introductory, however, and the speech passed to more direct consideration
of the case.

“But to return to the eldest son,” Ippolit Kirillovitch went on. “He is
the prisoner before us. We have his life and his actions, too, before us;
the fatal day has come and all has been brought to the surface. While his
brothers seem to stand for ‘Europeanism’ and ‘the principles of the
people,’ he seems to represent Russia as she is. Oh, not all Russia, not
all! God preserve us, if it were! Yet, here we have her, our mother
Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he is spontaneous, he is a
marvelous mingling of good and evil, he is a lover of culture and
Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the beards of his boon
companions. Oh, he, too, can be good and noble, but only when all goes
well with him. What is more, he can be carried off his feet, positively
carried off his feet by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves,
if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for. He
dislikes paying for anything, but is very fond of receiving, and that’s so
with him in everything. Oh, give him every possible good in life (he
couldn’t be content with less), and put no obstacle in his way, and he
will show that he, too, can be noble. He is not greedy, no, but he must
have money, a great deal of money, and you will see how generously, with
what scorn of filthy lucre, he will fling it all away in the reckless
dissipation of one night. But if he has not money, he will show what he is
ready to do to get it when he is in great need of it. But all this later,
let us take events in their chronological order.

“First, we have before us a poor abandoned child, running about the back‐
yard ‘without boots on his feet,’ as our worthy and esteemed fellow
citizen, of foreign origin, alas! expressed it just now. I repeat it
again, I yield to no one the defense of the criminal. I am here to accuse
him, but to defend him also. Yes, I, too, am human; I, too, can weigh the
influence of home and childhood on the character. But the boy grows up and
becomes an officer; for a duel and other reckless conduct he is exiled to
one of the remote frontier towns of Russia. There he led a wild life as an
officer. And, of course, he needed money, money before all things, and so
after prolonged disputes he came to a settlement with his father, and the
last six thousand was sent him. A letter is in existence in which he
practically gives up his claim to the rest and settles his conflict with
his father over the inheritance on the payment of this six thousand.

“Then came his meeting with a young girl of lofty character and brilliant
education. Oh, I do not venture to repeat the details; you have only just
heard them. Honor, self‐sacrifice were shown there, and I will be silent.
The figure of the young officer, frivolous and profligate, doing homage to
true nobility and a lofty ideal, was shown in a very sympathetic light
before us. But the other side of the medal was unexpectedly turned to us
immediately after in this very court. Again I will not venture to
conjecture why it happened so, but there were causes. The same lady,
bathed in tears of long‐concealed indignation, alleged that he, he of all
men, had despised her for her action, which, though incautious, reckless
perhaps, was still dictated by lofty and generous motives. He, he, the
girl’s betrothed, looked at her with that smile of mockery, which was more
insufferable from him than from any one. And knowing that he had already
deceived her (he had deceived her, believing that she was bound to endure
everything from him, even treachery), she intentionally offered him three
thousand roubles, and clearly, too clearly, let him understand that she
was offering him money to deceive her. ‘Well, will you take it or not, are
you so lost to shame?’ was the dumb question in her scrutinizing eyes. He
looked at her, saw clearly what was in her mind (he’s admitted here before
you that he understood it all), appropriated that three thousand
unconditionally, and squandered it in two days with the new object of his
affections.

“What are we to believe then? The first legend of the young officer
sacrificing his last farthing in a noble impulse of generosity and doing
reverence to virtue, or this other revolting picture? As a rule, between
two extremes one has to find the mean, but in the present case this is not
true. The probability is that in the first case he was genuinely noble,
and in the second as genuinely base. And why? Because he was of the broad
Karamazov character—that’s just what I am leading up to—capable of
combining the most incongruous contradictions, and capable of the greatest
heights and of the greatest depths. Remember the brilliant remark made by
a young observer who has seen the Karamazov family at close quarters—Mr.
Rakitin: ‘The sense of their own degradation is as essential to those
reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their lofty generosity.’ And
that’s true, they need continually this unnatural mixture. Two extremes at
the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their
existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they
include everything and put up with everything.

“By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we’ve just touched upon that three
thousand roubles, and I will venture to anticipate things a little. Can
you conceive that a man like that, on receiving that sum and in such a
way, at the price of such shame, such disgrace, such utter degradation,
could have been capable that very day of setting apart half that sum, that
very day, and sewing it up in a little bag, and would have had the
firmness of character to carry it about with him for a whole month
afterwards, in spite of every temptation and his extreme need of it!
Neither in drunken debauchery in taverns, nor when he was flying into the
country, trying to get from God knows whom, the money so essential to him
to remove the object of his affections from being tempted by his father,
did he bring himself to touch that little bag! Why, if only to avoid
abandoning his mistress to the rival of whom he was so jealous, he would
have been certain to have opened that bag and to have stayed at home to
keep watch over her, and to await the moment when she would say to him at
last ‘I am yours,’ and to fly with her far from their fatal surroundings.

“But no, he did not touch his talisman, and what is the reason he gives
for it? The chief reason, as I have just said, was that when she would
say, ‘I am yours, take me where you will,’ he might have the wherewithal
to take her. But that first reason, in the prisoner’s own words, was of
little weight beside the second. While I have that money on me, he said, I
am a scoundrel, not a thief, for I can always go to my insulted betrothed,
and, laying down half the sum I have fraudulently appropriated, I can
always say to her, ‘You see, I’ve squandered half your money, and shown I
am a weak and immoral man, and, if you like, a scoundrel’ (I use the
prisoner’s own expressions), ‘but though I am a scoundrel, I am not a
thief, for if I had been a thief, I shouldn’t have brought you back this
half of the money, but should have taken it as I did the other half!’ A
marvelous explanation! This frantic, but weak man, who could not resist
the temptation of accepting the three thousand roubles at the price of
such disgrace, this very man suddenly develops the most stoical firmness,
and carries about a thousand roubles without daring to touch it. Does that
fit in at all with the character we have analyzed? No, and I venture to
tell you how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have behaved in such
circumstances, if he really had brought himself to put away the money.

“At the first temptation—for instance, to entertain the woman with whom he
had already squandered half the money—he would have unpicked his little
bag and have taken out some hundred roubles, for why should he have taken
back precisely half the money, that is, fifteen hundred roubles? why not
fourteen hundred? He could just as well have said then that he was not a
thief, because he brought back fourteen hundred roubles. Then another time
he would have unpicked it again and taken out another hundred, and then a
third, and then a fourth, and before the end of the month he would have
taken the last note but one, feeling that if he took back only a hundred
it would answer the purpose, for a thief would have stolen it all. And
then he would have looked at this last note, and have said to himself,
‘It’s really not worth while to give back one hundred; let’s spend that,
too!’ That’s how the real Dmitri Karamazov, as we know him, would have
behaved. One cannot imagine anything more incongruous with the actual fact
than this legend of the little bag. Nothing could be more inconceivable.
But we shall return to that later.”

After touching upon what had come out in the proceedings concerning the
financial relations of father and son, and arguing again and again that it
was utterly impossible, from the facts known, to determine which was in
the wrong, Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to the evidence of the medical
experts in reference to Mitya’s fixed idea about the three thousand owing
him.



Chapter VII. An Historical Survey


“The medical experts have striven to convince us that the prisoner is out
of his mind and, in fact, a maniac. I maintain that he is in his right
mind, and that if he had not been, he would have behaved more cleverly. As
for his being a maniac, that I would agree with, but only in one point,
that is, his fixed idea about the three thousand. Yet I think one might
find a much simpler cause than his tendency to insanity. For my part I
agree thoroughly with the young doctor who maintained that the prisoner’s
mental faculties have always been normal, and that he has only been
irritable and exasperated. The object of the prisoner’s continual and
violent anger was not the sum itself; there was a special motive at the
bottom of it. That motive is jealousy!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch described at length the prisoner’s fatal passion
for Grushenka. He began from the moment when the prisoner went to the
“young person’s” lodgings “to beat her”—“I use his own expression,” the
prosecutor explained—“but instead of beating her, he remained there, at
her feet. That was the beginning of the passion. At the same time the
prisoner’s father was captivated by the same young person—a strange and
fatal coincidence, for they both lost their hearts to her simultaneously,
though both had known her before. And she inspired in both of them the
most violent, characteristically Karamazov passion. We have her own
confession: ‘I was laughing at both of them.’ Yes, the sudden desire to
make a jest of them came over her, and she conquered both of them at once.
The old man, who worshiped money, at once set aside three thousand roubles
as a reward for one visit from her, but soon after that, he would have
been happy to lay his property and his name at her feet, if only she would
become his lawful wife. We have good evidence of this. As for the
prisoner, the tragedy of his fate is evident; it is before us. But such
was the young person’s ‘game.’ The enchantress gave the unhappy young man
no hope until the last moment, when he knelt before her, stretching out
hands that were already stained with the blood of his father and rival. It
was in that position that he was arrested. ‘Send me to Siberia with him, I
have brought him to this, I am most to blame,’ the woman herself cried, in
genuine remorse at the moment of his arrest.

“The talented young man, to whom I have referred already, Mr. Rakitin,
characterized this heroine in brief and impressive terms: ‘She was
disillusioned early in life, deceived and ruined by a betrothed, who
seduced and abandoned her. She was left in poverty, cursed by her
respectable family, and taken under the protection of a wealthy old man,
whom she still, however, considers as her benefactor. There was perhaps
much that was good in her young heart, but it was embittered too early.
She became prudent and saved money. She grew sarcastic and resentful
against society.’ After this sketch of her character it may well be
understood that she might laugh at both of them simply from mischief, from
malice.

“After a month of hopeless love and moral degradation, during which he
betrayed his betrothed and appropriated money entrusted to his honor, the
prisoner was driven almost to frenzy, almost to madness by continual
jealousy—and of whom? His father! And the worst of it was that the crazy
old man was alluring and enticing the object of his affection by means of
that very three thousand roubles, which the son looked upon as his own
property, part of his inheritance from his mother, of which his father was
cheating him. Yes, I admit it was hard to bear! It might well drive a man
to madness. It was not the money, but the fact that this money was used
with such revolting cynicism to ruin his happiness!”

Then the prosecutor went on to describe how the idea of murdering his
father had entered the prisoner’s head, and illustrated his theory with
facts.

“At first he only talked about it in taverns—he was talking about it all
that month. Ah, he likes being always surrounded with company, and he
likes to tell his companions everything, even his most diabolical and
dangerous ideas; he likes to share every thought with others, and expects,
for some reason, that those he confides in will meet him with perfect
sympathy, enter into all his troubles and anxieties, take his part and not
oppose him in anything. If not, he flies into a rage and smashes up
everything in the tavern. [Then followed the anecdote about Captain
Snegiryov.] Those who heard the prisoner began to think at last that he
might mean more than threats, and that such a frenzy might turn threats
into actions.”

Here the prosecutor described the meeting of the family at the monastery,
the conversations with Alyosha, and the horrible scene of violence when
the prisoner had rushed into his father’s house just after dinner.

“I cannot positively assert,” the prosecutor continued, “that the prisoner
fully intended to murder his father before that incident. Yet the idea had
several times presented itself to him, and he had deliberated on it—for
that we have facts, witnesses, and his own words. I confess, gentlemen of
the jury,” he added, “that till to‐day I have been uncertain whether to
attribute to the prisoner conscious premeditation. I was firmly convinced
that he had pictured the fatal moment beforehand, but had only pictured
it, contemplating it as a possibility. He had not definitely considered
when and how he might commit the crime.

“But I was only uncertain till to‐day, till that fatal document was
presented to the court just now. You yourselves heard that young lady’s
exclamation, ‘It is the plan, the program of the murder!’ That is how she
defined that miserable, drunken letter of the unhappy prisoner. And, in
fact, from that letter we see that the whole fact of the murder was
premeditated. It was written two days before, and so we know now for a
fact that, forty‐eight hours before the perpetration of his terrible
design, the prisoner swore that, if he could not get money next day, he
would murder his father in order to take the envelope with the notes from
under his pillow, as soon as Ivan had left. ‘As soon as Ivan had gone
away’—you hear that; so he had thought everything out, weighing every
circumstance, and he carried it all out just as he had written it. The
proof of premeditation is conclusive; the crime must have been committed
for the sake of the money, that is stated clearly, that is written and
signed. The prisoner does not deny his signature.

“I shall be told he was drunk when he wrote it. But that does not diminish
the value of the letter, quite the contrary; he wrote when drunk what he
had planned when sober. Had he not planned it when sober, he would not
have written it when drunk. I shall be asked: Then why did he talk about
it in taverns? A man who premeditates such a crime is silent and keeps it
to himself. Yes, but he talked about it before he had formed a plan, when
he had only the desire, only the impulse to it. Afterwards he talked less
about it. On the evening he wrote that letter at the ‘Metropolis’ tavern,
contrary to his custom he was silent, though he had been drinking. He did
not play billiards, he sat in a corner, talked to no one. He did indeed
turn a shopman out of his seat, but that was done almost unconsciously,
because he could never enter a tavern without making a disturbance. It is
true that after he had taken the final decision, he must have felt
apprehensive that he had talked too much about his design beforehand, and
that this might lead to his arrest and prosecution afterwards. But there
was nothing for it; he could not take his words back, but his luck had
served him before, it would serve him again. He believed in his star, you
know! I must confess, too, that he did a great deal to avoid the fatal
catastrophe. ‘To‐morrow I shall try and borrow the money from every one,’
as he writes in his peculiar language, ‘and if they won’t give it to me,
there will be bloodshed.’ ”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to a detailed description of all Mitya’s
efforts to borrow the money. He described his visit to Samsonov, his
journey to Lyagavy. “Harassed, jeered at, hungry, after selling his watch
to pay for the journey (though he tells us he had fifteen hundred roubles
on him—a likely story), tortured by jealousy at having left the object of
his affections in the town, suspecting that she would go to Fyodor
Pavlovitch in his absence, he returned at last to the town, to find, to
his joy, that she had not been near his father. He accompanied her himself
to her protector. (Strange to say, he doesn’t seem to have been jealous of
Samsonov, which is psychologically interesting.) Then he hastens back to
his ambush in the back gardens, and there learns that Smerdyakov is in a
fit, that the other servant is ill—the coast is clear and he knows the
‘signals’—what a temptation! Still he resists it; he goes off to a lady
who has for some time been residing in the town, and who is highly
esteemed among us, Madame Hohlakov. That lady, who had long watched his
career with compassion, gave him the most judicious advice, to give up his
dissipated life, his unseemly love‐affair, the waste of his youth and
vigor in pot‐house debauchery, and to set off to Siberia to the gold‐
mines: ‘that would be an outlet for your turbulent energies, your romantic
character, your thirst for adventure.’ ”

After describing the result of this conversation and the moment when the
prisoner learnt that Grushenka had not remained at Samsonov’s, the sudden
frenzy of the luckless man worn out with jealousy and nervous exhaustion,
at the thought that she had deceived him and was now with his father,
Ippolit Kirillovitch concluded by dwelling upon the fatal influence of
chance. “Had the maid told him that her mistress was at Mokroe with her
former lover, nothing would have happened. But she lost her head, she
could only swear and protest her ignorance, and if the prisoner did not
kill her on the spot, it was only because he flew in pursuit of his false
mistress.

“But note, frantic as he was, he took with him a brass pestle. Why that?
Why not some other weapon? But since he had been contemplating his plan
and preparing himself for it for a whole month, he would snatch up
anything like a weapon that caught his eye. He had realized for a month
past that any object of the kind would serve as a weapon, so he instantly,
without hesitation, recognized that it would serve his purpose. So it was
by no means unconsciously, by no means involuntarily, that he snatched up
that fatal pestle. And then we find him in his father’s garden—the coast
is clear, there are no witnesses, darkness and jealousy. The suspicion
that she was there, with him, with his rival, in his arms, and perhaps
laughing at him at that moment—took his breath away. And it was not mere
suspicion, the deception was open, obvious. She must be there, in that
lighted room, she must be behind the screen; and the unhappy man would
have us believe that he stole up to the window, peeped respectfully in,
and discreetly withdrew, for fear something terrible and immoral should
happen. And he tries to persuade us of that, us, who understand his
character, who know his state of mind at the moment, and that he knew the
signals by which he could at once enter the house.” At this point Ippolit
Kirillovitch broke off to discuss exhaustively the suspected connection of
Smerdyakov with the murder. He did this very circumstantially, and every
one realized that, although he professed to despise that suspicion, he
thought the subject of great importance.



Chapter VIII. A Treatise On Smerdyakov


“To begin with, what was the source of this suspicion?” (Ippolit
Kirillovitch began.) “The first person who cried out that Smerdyakov had
committed the murder was the prisoner himself at the moment of his arrest,
yet from that time to this he had not brought forward a single fact to
confirm the charge, nor the faintest suggestion of a fact. The charge is
confirmed by three persons only—the two brothers of the prisoner and
Madame Svyetlov. The elder of these brothers expressed his suspicions only
to‐day, when he was undoubtedly suffering from brain fever. But we know
that for the last two months he has completely shared our conviction of
his brother’s guilt and did not attempt to combat that idea. But of that
later. The younger brother has admitted that he has not the slightest fact
to support his notion of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and has only been led to that
conclusion from the prisoner’s own words and the expression of his face.
Yes, that astounding piece of evidence has been brought forward twice to‐
day by him. Madame Svyetlov was even more astounding. ‘What the prisoner
tells you, you must believe; he is not a man to tell a lie.’ That is all
the evidence against Smerdyakov produced by these three persons, who are
all deeply concerned in the prisoner’s fate. And yet the theory of
Smerdyakov’s guilt has been noised about, has been and is still
maintained. Is it credible? Is it conceivable?”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch thought it necessary to describe the personality
of Smerdyakov, “who had cut short his life in a fit of insanity.” He
depicted him as a man of weak intellect, with a smattering of education,
who had been thrown off his balance by philosophical ideas above his level
and certain modern theories of duty, which he learnt in practice from the
reckless life of his master, who was also perhaps his father—Fyodor
Pavlovitch; and, theoretically, from various strange philosophical
conversations with his master’s elder son, Ivan Fyodorovitch, who readily
indulged in this diversion, probably feeling dull or wishing to amuse
himself at the valet’s expense. “He spoke to me himself of his spiritual
condition during the last few days at his father’s house,” Ippolit
Kirillovitch explained; “but others too have borne witness to it—the
prisoner himself, his brother, and the servant Grigory—that is, all who
knew him well.

“Moreover, Smerdyakov, whose health was shaken by his attacks of epilepsy,
had not the courage of a chicken. ‘He fell at my feet and kissed them,’
the prisoner himself has told us, before he realized how damaging such a
statement was to himself. ‘He is an epileptic chicken,’ he declared about
him in his characteristic language. And the prisoner chose him for his
confidant (we have his own word for it) and he frightened him into
consenting at last to act as a spy for him. In that capacity he deceived
his master, revealing to the prisoner the existence of the envelope with
the notes in it and the signals by means of which he could get into the
house. How could he help telling him, indeed? ‘He would have killed me, I
could see that he would have killed me,’ he said at the inquiry, trembling
and shaking even before us, though his tormentor was by that time arrested
and could do him no harm. ‘He suspected me at every instant. In fear and
trembling I hastened to tell him every secret to pacify him, that he might
see that I had not deceived him and let me off alive.’ Those are his own
words. I wrote them down and I remember them. ‘When he began shouting at
me, I would fall on my knees.’

“He was naturally very honest and enjoyed the complete confidence of his
master, ever since he had restored him some money he had lost. So it may
be supposed that the poor fellow suffered pangs of remorse at having
deceived his master, whom he loved as his benefactor. Persons severely
afflicted with epilepsy are, so the most skillful doctors tell us, always
prone to continual and morbid self‐reproach. They worry over their
‘wickedness,’ they are tormented by pangs of conscience, often entirely
without cause; they exaggerate and often invent all sorts of faults and
crimes. And here we have a man of that type who had really been driven to
wrong‐doing by terror and intimidation.

“He had, besides, a strong presentiment that something terrible would be
the outcome of the situation that was developing before his eyes. When
Ivan Fyodorovitch was leaving for Moscow, just before the catastrophe,
Smerdyakov besought him to remain, though he was too timid to tell him
plainly what he feared. He confined himself to hints, but his hints were
not understood.

“It must be observed that he looked on Ivan Fyodorovitch as a protector,
whose presence in the house was a guarantee that no harm would come to
pass. Remember the phrase in Dmitri Karamazov’s drunken letter, ‘I shall
kill the old man, if only Ivan goes away.’ So Ivan Fyodorovitch’s presence
seemed to every one a guarantee of peace and order in the house.

“But he went away, and within an hour of his young master’s departure
Smerdyakov was taken with an epileptic fit. But that’s perfectly
intelligible. Here I must mention that Smerdyakov, oppressed by terror and
despair of a sort, had felt during those last few days that one of the
fits from which he had suffered before at moments of strain, might be
coming upon him again. The day and hour of such an attack cannot, of
course, be foreseen, but every epileptic can feel beforehand that he is
likely to have one. So the doctors tell us. And so, as soon as Ivan
Fyodorovitch had driven out of the yard, Smerdyakov, depressed by his
lonely and unprotected position, went to the cellar. He went down the
stairs wondering if he would have a fit or not, and what if it were to
come upon him at once. And that very apprehension, that very wonder,
brought on the spasm in his throat that always precedes such attacks, and
he fell unconscious into the cellar. And in this perfectly natural
occurrence people try to detect a suspicion, a hint that he was shamming
an attack _on purpose_. But, if it were on purpose, the question arises at
once, what was his motive? What was he reckoning on? What was he aiming
at? I say nothing about medicine: science, I am told, may go astray: the
doctors were not able to discriminate between the counterfeit and the
real. That may be so, but answer me one question: what motive had he for
such a counterfeit? Could he, had he been plotting the murder, have
desired to attract the attention of the household by having a fit just
before?

“You see, gentlemen of the jury, on the night of the murder, there were
five persons in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s—Fyodor Pavlovitch himself (but he did
not kill himself, that’s evident); then his servant, Grigory, but he was
almost killed himself; the third person was Grigory’s wife, Marfa
Ignatyevna, but it would be simply shameful to imagine her murdering her
master. Two persons are left—the prisoner and Smerdyakov. But, if we are
to believe the prisoner’s statement that he is not the murderer, then
Smerdyakov must have been, for there is no other alternative, no one else
can be found. That is what accounts for the artful, astounding accusation
against the unhappy idiot who committed suicide yesterday. Had a shadow of
suspicion rested on any one else, had there been any sixth person, I am
persuaded that even the prisoner would have been ashamed to accuse
Smerdyakov, and would have accused that sixth person, for to charge
Smerdyakov with that murder is perfectly absurd.

“Gentlemen, let us lay aside psychology, let us lay aside medicine, let us
even lay aside logic, let us turn only to the facts and see what the facts
tell us. If Smerdyakov killed him, how did he do it? Alone or with the
assistance of the prisoner? Let us consider the first alternative—that he
did it alone. If he had killed him it must have been with some object, for
some advantage to himself. But not having a shadow of the motive that the
prisoner had for the murder—hatred, jealousy, and so on—Smerdyakov could
only have murdered him for the sake of gain, in order to appropriate the
three thousand roubles he had seen his master put in the envelope. And yet
he tells another person—and a person most closely interested, that is, the
prisoner—everything about the money and the signals, where the envelope
lay, what was written on it, what it was tied up with, and, above all,
told him of those signals by which he could enter the house. Did he do
this simply to betray himself, or to invite to the same enterprise one who
would be anxious to get that envelope for himself? ‘Yes,’ I shall be told,
‘but he betrayed it from fear.’ But how do you explain this? A man who
could conceive such an audacious, savage act, and carry it out, tells
facts which are known to no one else in the world, and which, if he held
his tongue, no one would ever have guessed!

“No, however cowardly he might be, if he had plotted such a crime, nothing
would have induced him to tell any one about the envelope and the signals,
for that was as good as betraying himself beforehand. He would have
invented something, he would have told some lie if he had been forced to
give information, but he would have been silent about that. For, on the
other hand, if he had said nothing about the money, but had committed the
murder and stolen the money, no one in the world could have charged him
with murder for the sake of robbery, since no one but he had seen the
money, no one but he knew of its existence in the house. Even if he had
been accused of the murder, it could only have been thought that he had
committed it from some other motive. But since no one had observed any
such motive in him beforehand, and every one saw, on the contrary, that
his master was fond of him and honored him with his confidence, he would,
of course, have been the last to be suspected. People would have suspected
first the man who had a motive, a man who had himself declared he had such
motives, who had made no secret of it; they would, in fact, have suspected
the son of the murdered man, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. Had Smerdyakov killed
and robbed him, and the son been accused of it, that would, of course,
have suited Smerdyakov. Yet are we to believe that, though plotting the
murder, he told that son, Dmitri, about the money, the envelope, and the
signals? Is that logical? Is that clear?

“When the day of the murder planned by Smerdyakov came, we have him
falling downstairs in a _feigned_ fit—with what object? In the first place
that Grigory, who had been intending to take his medicine, might put it
off and remain on guard, seeing there was no one to look after the house,
and, in the second place, I suppose, that his master seeing that there was
no one to guard him, and in terror of a visit from his son, might redouble
his vigilance and precaution. And, most of all, I suppose that he,
Smerdyakov, disabled by the fit, might be carried from the kitchen, where
he always slept, apart from all the rest, and where he could go in and out
as he liked, to Grigory’s room at the other end of the lodge, where he was
always put, shut off by a screen three paces from their own bed. This was
the immemorial custom established by his master and the kind‐hearted Marfa
Ignatyevna, whenever he had a fit. There, lying behind the screen, he
would most likely, to keep up the sham, have begun groaning, and so
keeping them awake all night (as Grigory and his wife testified). And all
this, we are to believe, that he might more conveniently get up and murder
his master!

“But I shall be told that he shammed illness on purpose that he might not
be suspected and that he told the prisoner of the money and the signals to
tempt him to commit the murder, and when he had murdered him and had gone
away with the money, making a noise, most likely, and waking people,
Smerdyakov got up, am I to believe, and went in—what for? To murder his
master a second time and carry off the money that had already been stolen?
Gentlemen, are you laughing? I am ashamed to put forward such suggestions,
but, incredible as it seems, that’s just what the prisoner alleges. When
he had left the house, had knocked Grigory down and raised an alarm, he
tells us Smerdyakov got up, went in and murdered his master and stole the
money! I won’t press the point that Smerdyakov could hardly have reckoned
on this beforehand, and have foreseen that the furious and exasperated son
would simply come to peep in respectfully, though he knew the signals, and
beat a retreat, leaving Smerdyakov his booty. Gentlemen of the jury, I put
this question to you in earnest; when was the moment when Smerdyakov could
have committed his crime? Name that moment, or you can’t accuse him.

“But, perhaps, the fit was a real one, the sick man suddenly recovered,
heard a shout, and went out. Well—what then? He looked about him and said,
‘Why not go and kill the master?’ And how did he know what had happened,
since he had been lying unconscious till that moment? But there’s a limit
to these flights of fancy.

“ ‘Quite so,’ some astute people will tell me, ‘but what if they were in
agreement? What if they murdered him together and shared the money—what
then?’ A weighty question, truly! And the facts to confirm it are
astounding. One commits the murder and takes all the trouble while his
accomplice lies on one side shamming a fit, apparently to arouse suspicion
in every one, alarm in his master and alarm in Grigory. It would be
interesting to know what motives could have induced the two accomplices to
form such an insane plan.

“But perhaps it was not a case of active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part,
but only of passive acquiescence; perhaps Smerdyakov was intimidated and
agreed not to prevent the murder, and foreseeing that he would be blamed
for letting his master be murdered, without screaming for help or
resisting, he may have obtained permission from Dmitri Karamazov to get
out of the way by shamming a fit—‘you may murder him as you like; it’s
nothing to me.’ But as this attack of Smerdyakov’s was bound to throw the
household into confusion, Dmitri Karamazov could never have agreed to such
a plan. I will waive that point however. Supposing that he did agree, it
would still follow that Dmitri Karamazov is the murderer and the
instigator, and Smerdyakov is only a passive accomplice, and not even an
accomplice, but merely acquiesced against his will through terror.

“But what do we see? As soon as he is arrested the prisoner instantly
throws all the blame on Smerdyakov, not accusing him of being his
accomplice, but of being himself the murderer. ‘He did it alone,’ he says.
‘He murdered and robbed him. It was the work of his hands.’ Strange sort
of accomplices who begin to accuse one another at once! And think of the
risk for Karamazov. After committing the murder while his accomplice lay
in bed, he throws the blame on the invalid, who might well have resented
it and in self‐preservation might well have confessed the truth. For he
might well have seen that the court would at once judge how far he was
responsible, and so he might well have reckoned that if he were punished,
it would be far less severely than the real murderer. But in that case he
would have been certain to make a confession, yet he has not done so.
Smerdyakov never hinted at their complicity, though the actual murderer
persisted in accusing him and declaring that he had committed the crime
alone.

“What’s more, Smerdyakov at the inquiry volunteered the statement that it
was _he_ who had told the prisoner of the envelope of notes and of the
signals, and that, but for him, he would have known nothing about them. If
he had really been a guilty accomplice, would he so readily have made this
statement at the inquiry? On the contrary, he would have tried to conceal
it, to distort the facts or minimize them. But he was far from distorting
or minimizing them. No one but an innocent man, who had no fear of being
charged with complicity, could have acted as he did. And in a fit of
melancholy arising from his disease and this catastrophe he hanged himself
yesterday. He left a note written in his peculiar language, ‘I destroy
myself of my own will and inclination so as to throw no blame on any one.’
What would it have cost him to add: ‘I am the murderer, not Karamazov’?
But that he did not add. Did his conscience lead him to suicide and not to
avowing his guilt?

“And what followed? Notes for three thousand roubles were brought into the
court just now, and we were told that they were the same that lay in the
envelope now on the table before us, and that the witness had received
them from Smerdyakov the day before. But I need not recall the painful
scene, though I will make one or two comments, selecting such trivial ones
as might not be obvious at first sight to every one, and so may be
overlooked. In the first place, Smerdyakov must have given back the money
and hanged himself yesterday from remorse. And only yesterday he confessed
his guilt to Ivan Karamazov, as the latter informs us. If it were not so,
indeed, why should Ivan Fyodorovitch have kept silence till now? And so,
if he has confessed, then why, I ask again, did he not avow the whole
truth in the last letter he left behind, knowing that the innocent
prisoner had to face this terrible ordeal the next day?

“The money alone is no proof. A week ago, quite by chance, the fact came
to the knowledge of myself and two other persons in this court that Ivan
Fyodorovitch had sent two five per cent. coupons of five thousand
each—that is, ten thousand in all—to the chief town of the province to be
changed. I only mention this to point out that any one may have money, and
that it can’t be proved that these notes are the same as were in Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s envelope.

“Ivan Karamazov, after receiving yesterday a communication of such
importance from the real murderer, did not stir. Why didn’t he report it
at once? Why did he put it all off till morning? I think I have a right to
conjecture why. His health had been giving way for a week past: he had
admitted to a doctor and to his most intimate friends that he was
suffering from hallucinations and seeing phantoms of the dead: he was on
the eve of the attack of brain fever by which he has been stricken down
to‐day. In this condition he suddenly heard of Smerdyakov’s death, and at
once reflected, ‘The man is dead, I can throw the blame on him and save my
brother. I have money. I will take a roll of notes and say that Smerdyakov
gave them me before his death.’ You will say that was dishonorable: it’s
dishonorable to slander even the dead, and even to save a brother. True,
but what if he slandered him unconsciously? What if, finally unhinged by
the sudden news of the valet’s death, he imagined it really was so? You
saw the recent scene: you have seen the witness’s condition. He was
standing up and was speaking, but where was his mind?

“Then followed the document, the prisoner’s letter written two days before
the crime, and containing a complete program of the murder. Why, then, are
we looking for any other program? The crime was committed precisely
according to this program, and by no other than the writer of it. Yes,
gentlemen of the jury, it went off without a hitch! He did not run
respectfully and timidly away from his father’s window, though he was
firmly convinced that the object of his affections was with him. No, that
is absurd and unlikely! He went in and murdered him. Most likely he killed
him in anger, burning with resentment, as soon as he looked on his hated
rival. But having killed him, probably with one blow of the brass pestle,
and having convinced himself, after careful search, that she was not
there, he did not, however, forget to put his hand under the pillow and
take out the envelope, the torn cover of which lies now on the table
before us.

“I mention this fact that you may note one, to my thinking, very
characteristic circumstance. Had he been an experienced murderer and had
he committed the murder for the sake of gain only, would he have left the
torn envelope on the floor as it was found, beside the corpse? Had it been
Smerdyakov, for instance, murdering his master to rob him, he would have
simply carried away the envelope with him, without troubling himself to
open it over his victim’s corpse, for he would have known for certain that
the notes were in the envelope—they had been put in and sealed up in his
presence—and had he taken the envelope with him, no one would ever have
known of the robbery. I ask you, gentlemen, would Smerdyakov have behaved
in that way? Would he have left the envelope on the floor?

“No, this was the action of a frantic murderer, a murderer who was not a
thief and had never stolen before that day, who snatched the notes from
under the pillow, not like a thief stealing them, but as though seizing
his own property from the thief who had stolen it. For that was the idea
which had become almost an insane obsession in Dmitri Karamazov in regard
to that money. And pouncing upon the envelope, which he had never seen
before, he tore it open to make sure whether the money was in it, and ran
away with the money in his pocket, even forgetting to consider that he had
left an astounding piece of evidence against himself in that torn envelope
on the floor. All because it was Karamazov, not Smerdyakov, he didn’t
think, he didn’t reflect, and how should he? He ran away; he heard behind
him the servant cry out; the old man caught him, stopped him and was
felled to the ground by the brass pestle.

“The prisoner, moved by pity, leapt down to look at him. Would you believe
it, he tells us that he leapt down out of pity, out of compassion, to see
whether he could do anything for him. Was that a moment to show
compassion? No; he jumped down simply to make certain whether the only
witness of his crime were dead or alive. Any other feeling, any other
motive would be unnatural. Note that he took trouble over Grigory, wiped
his head with his handkerchief and, convincing himself he was dead, he ran
to the house of his mistress, dazed and covered with blood. How was it he
never thought that he was covered with blood and would be at once
detected? But the prisoner himself assures us that he did not even notice
that he was covered with blood. That may be believed, that is very
possible, that always happens at such moments with criminals. On one point
they will show diabolical cunning, while another will escape them
altogether. But he was thinking at that moment of one thing only—where was
_she_? He wanted to find out at once where she was, so he ran to her
lodging and learnt an unexpected and astounding piece of news—she had gone
off to Mokroe to meet her first lover.”



Chapter IX. The Galloping Troika. The End Of The Prosecutor’s Speech.


Ippolit Kirillovitch had chosen the historical method of exposition,
beloved by all nervous orators, who find in its limitation a check on
their own eager rhetoric. At this moment in his speech he went off into a
dissertation on Grushenka’s “first lover,” and brought forward several
interesting thoughts on this theme.

“Karamazov, who had been frantically jealous of every one, collapsed, so
to speak, and effaced himself at once before this first lover. What makes
it all the more strange is that he seems to have hardly thought of this
formidable rival. But he had looked upon him as a remote danger, and
Karamazov always lives in the present. Possibly he regarded him as a
fiction. But his wounded heart grasped instantly that the woman had been
concealing this new rival and deceiving him, because he was anything but a
fiction to her, because he was the one hope of her life. Grasping this
instantly, he resigned himself.

“Gentlemen of the jury, I cannot help dwelling on this unexpected trait in
the prisoner’s character. He suddenly evinces an irresistible desire for
justice, a respect for woman and a recognition of her right to love. And
all this at the very moment when he had stained his hands with his
father’s blood for her sake! It is true that the blood he had shed was
already crying out for vengeance, for, after having ruined his soul and
his life in this world, he was forced to ask himself at that same instant
what he was and what he could be now to her, to that being, dearer to him
than his own soul, in comparison with that former lover who had returned
penitent, with new love, to the woman he had once betrayed, with honorable
offers, with the promise of a reformed and happy life. And he, luckless
man, what could he give her now, what could he offer her?

“Karamazov felt all this, knew that all ways were barred to him by his
crime and that he was a criminal under sentence, and not a man with life
before him! This thought crushed him. And so he instantly flew to one
frantic plan, which, to a man of Karamazov’s character, must have appeared
the one inevitable way out of his terrible position. That way out was
suicide. He ran for the pistols he had left in pledge with his friend
Perhotin and on the way, as he ran, he pulled out of his pocket the money,
for the sake of which he had stained his hands with his father’s gore. Oh,
now he needed money more than ever. Karamazov would die, Karamazov would
shoot himself and it should be remembered! To be sure, he was a poet and
had burnt the candle at both ends all his life. ‘To her, to her! and
there, oh, there I will give a feast to the whole world, such as never was
before, that will be remembered and talked of long after! In the midst of
shouts of wild merriment, reckless gypsy songs and dances I shall raise
the glass and drink to the woman I adore and her new‐found happiness! And
then, on the spot, at her feet, I shall dash out my brains before her and
punish myself! She will remember Mitya Karamazov sometimes, she will see
how Mitya loved her, she will feel for Mitya!’

“Here we see in excess a love of effect, a romantic despair and
sentimentality, and the wild recklessness of the Karamazovs. Yes, but
there is something else, gentlemen of the jury, something that cries out
in the soul, throbs incessantly in the mind, and poisons the heart unto
death—that _something_ is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, its judgment,
its terrible torments! The pistol will settle everything, the pistol is
the only way out! But _beyond_—I don’t know whether Karamazov wondered at
that moment ‘What lies beyond,’ and whether Karamazov could, like Hamlet,
wonder ‘What lies beyond.’ No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their
Hamlets, but we still have our Karamazovs!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch drew a minute picture of Mitya’s preparations,
the scene at Perhotin’s, at the shop, with the drivers. He quoted numerous
words and actions, confirmed by witnesses, and the picture made a terrible
impression on the audience. The guilt of this harassed and desperate man
stood out clear and convincing, when the facts were brought together.

“What need had he of precaution? Two or three times he almost confessed,
hinted at it, all but spoke out.” (Then followed the evidence given by
witnesses.) “He even cried out to the peasant who drove him, ‘Do you know,
you are driving a murderer!’ But it was impossible for him to speak out,
he had to get to Mokroe and there to finish his romance. But what was
awaiting the luckless man? Almost from the first minute at Mokroe he saw
that his invincible rival was perhaps by no means so invincible, that the
toast to their new‐found happiness was not desired and would not be
acceptable. But you know the facts, gentlemen of the jury, from the
preliminary inquiry. Karamazov’s triumph over his rival was complete and
his soul passed into quite a new phase, perhaps the most terrible phase
through which his soul has passed or will pass.

“One may say with certainty, gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecutor
continued, “that outraged nature and the criminal heart bring their own
vengeance more completely than any earthly justice. What’s more, justice
and punishment on earth positively alleviate the punishment of nature and
are, indeed, essential to the soul of the criminal at such moments, as its
salvation from despair. For I cannot imagine the horror and moral
suffering of Karamazov when he learnt that she loved him, that for his
sake she had rejected her first lover, that she was summoning him, Mitya,
to a new life, that she was promising him happiness—and when? When
everything was over for him and nothing was possible!

“By the way, I will note in parenthesis a point of importance for the
light it throws on the prisoner’s position at the moment. This woman, this
love of his, had been till the last moment, till the very instant of his
arrest, a being unattainable, passionately desired by him but
unattainable. Yet why did he not shoot himself then, why did he relinquish
his design and even forget where his pistol was? It was just that
passionate desire for love and the hope of satisfying it that restrained
him. Throughout their revels he kept close to his adored mistress, who was
at the banquet with him and was more charming and fascinating to him than
ever—he did not leave her side, abasing himself in his homage before her.

“His passion might well, for a moment, stifle not only the fear of arrest,
but even the torments of conscience. For a moment, oh, only for a moment!
I can picture the state of mind of the criminal hopelessly enslaved by
these influences—first, the influence of drink, of noise and excitement,
of the thud of the dance and the scream of the song, and of her, flushed
with wine, singing and dancing and laughing to him! Secondly, the hope in
the background that the fatal end might still be far off, that not till
next morning, at least, they would come and take him. So he had a few
hours and that’s much, very much! In a few hours one can think of many
things. I imagine that he felt something like what criminals feel when
they are being taken to the scaffold. They have another long, long street
to pass down and at walking pace, past thousands of people. Then there
will be a turning into another street and only at the end of that street
the dread place of execution! I fancy that at the beginning of the journey
the condemned man, sitting on his shameful cart, must feel that he has
infinite life still before him. The houses recede, the cart moves on—oh,
that’s nothing, it’s still far to the turning into the second street and
he still looks boldly to right and to left at those thousands of callously
curious people with their eyes fixed on him, and he still fancies that he
is just such a man as they. But now the turning comes to the next street.
Oh, that’s nothing, nothing, there’s still a whole street before him, and
however many houses have been passed, he will still think there are many
left. And so to the very end, to the very scaffold.

“This I imagine is how it was with Karamazov then. ‘They’ve not had time
yet,’ he must have thought, ‘I may still find some way out, oh, there’s
still time to make some plan of defense, and now, now—she is so
fascinating!’

“His soul was full of confusion and dread, but he managed, however, to put
aside half his money and hide it somewhere—I cannot otherwise explain the
disappearance of quite half of the three thousand he had just taken from
his father’s pillow. He had been in Mokroe more than once before, he had
caroused there for two days together already, he knew the old big house
with all its passages and outbuildings. I imagine that part of the money
was hidden in that house, not long before the arrest, in some crevice,
under some floor, in some corner, under the roof. With what object? I
shall be asked. Why, the catastrophe may take place at once, of course; he
hadn’t yet considered how to meet it, he hadn’t the time, his head was
throbbing and his heart was with _her_, but money—money was indispensable
in any case! With money a man is always a man. Perhaps such foresight at
such a moment may strike you as unnatural? But he assures us himself that
a month before, at a critical and exciting moment, he had halved his money
and sewn it up in a little bag. And though that was not true, as we shall
prove directly, it shows the idea was a familiar one to Karamazov, he had
contemplated it. What’s more, when he declared at the inquiry that he had
put fifteen hundred roubles in a bag (which never existed) he may have
invented that little bag on the inspiration of the moment, because he had
two hours before divided his money and hidden half of it at Mokroe till
morning, in case of emergency, simply not to have it on himself. Two
extremes, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can contemplate
two extremes and both at once.

“We have looked in the house, but we haven’t found the money. It may still
be there or it may have disappeared next day and be in the prisoner’s
hands now. In any case he was at her side, on his knees before her, she
was lying on the bed, he had his hands stretched out to her and he had so
entirely forgotten everything that he did not even hear the men coming to
arrest him. He hadn’t time to prepare any line of defense in his mind. He
was caught unawares and confronted with his judges, the arbiters of his
destiny.

“Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments in the execution of our duties
when it is terrible for us to face a man, terrible on his account, too!
The moments of contemplating that animal fear, when the criminal sees that
all is lost, but still struggles, still means to struggle, the moments
when every instinct of self‐preservation rises up in him at once and he
looks at you with questioning and suffering eyes, studies you, your face,
your thoughts, uncertain on which side you will strike, and his distracted
mind frames thousands of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to
speak, afraid of giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit, this
animal thirst for self‐preservation, these humiliating moments of the
human soul, are awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the
criminal even in the lawyer. And this was what we all witnessed then.

“At first he was thunderstruck and in his terror dropped some very
compromising phrases. ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it!’ But he quickly restrained
himself. He had not prepared what he was to say, what answer he was to
make, he had nothing but a bare denial ready. ‘I am not guilty of my
father’s death.’ That was his fence for the moment and behind it he hoped
to throw up a barricade of some sort. His first compromising exclamations
he hastened to explain by declaring that he was responsible for the death
of the servant Grigory only. ‘Of that bloodshed I am guilty, but who has
killed my father, gentlemen, who has killed him? Who can have killed him,
_if not I_?’ Do you hear, he asked us that, us, who had come to ask him
that question! Do you hear that phrase uttered with such premature
haste—‘if not I’—the animal cunning, the naïveté, the Karamazov impatience
of it? ‘I didn’t kill him and you mustn’t think I did! I wanted to kill
him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he was in a
hurry, in a terrible hurry), ‘but still I am not guilty, it is not I
murdered him.’ He concedes to us that he wanted to murder him, as though
to say, you can see for yourselves how truthful I am, so you’ll believe
all the sooner that I didn’t murder him. Oh, in such cases the criminal is
often amazingly shallow and credulous.

“At that point one of the lawyers asked him, as it were incidentally, the
most simple question, ‘Wasn’t it Smerdyakov killed him?’ Then, as we
expected, he was horribly angry at our having anticipated him and caught
him unawares, before he had time to pave the way to choose and snatch the
moment when it would be most natural to bring in Smerdyakov’s name. He
rushed at once to the other extreme, as he always does, and began to
assure us that Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was not capable of
it. But don’t believe him, that was only his cunning; he didn’t really
give up the idea of Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he meant to bring him
forward again; for, indeed, he had no one else to bring forward, but he
would do that later, because for the moment that line was spoiled for him.
He would bring him forward perhaps next day, or even a few days later,
choosing an opportunity to cry out to us, ‘You know I was more skeptical
about Smerdyakov than you, you remember that yourselves, but now I am
convinced. He killed him, he must have done!’ And for the present he falls
back upon a gloomy and irritable denial. Impatience and anger prompted
him, however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of how he
looked into his father’s window and how he respectfully withdrew. The
worst of it was that he was unaware of the position of affairs, of the
evidence given by Grigory.

“We proceeded to search him. The search angered, but encouraged him, the
whole three thousand had not been found on him, only half of it. And no
doubt only at that moment of angry silence, the fiction of the little bag
first occurred to him. No doubt he was conscious himself of the
improbability of the story and strove painfully to make it sound more
likely, to weave it into a romance that would sound plausible. In such
cases the first duty, the chief task of the investigating lawyers, is to
prevent the criminal being prepared, to pounce upon him unexpectedly so
that he may blurt out his cherished ideas in all their simplicity,
improbability and inconsistency. The criminal can only be made to speak by
the sudden and apparently incidental communication of some new fact, of
some circumstance of great importance in the case, of which he had no
previous idea and could not have foreseen. We had such a fact in
readiness—that was Grigory’s evidence about the open door through which
the prisoner had run out. He had completely forgotten about that door and
had not even suspected that Grigory could have seen it.

“The effect of it was amazing. He leapt up and shouted to us, ‘Then
Smerdyakov murdered him, it was Smerdyakov!’ and so betrayed the basis of
the defense he was keeping back, and betrayed it in its most improbable
shape, for Smerdyakov could only have committed the murder after he had
knocked Grigory down and run away. When we told him that Grigory saw the
door was open before he fell down, and had heard Smerdyakov behind the
screen as he came out of his bedroom—Karamazov was positively crushed. My
esteemed and witty colleague, Nikolay Parfenovitch, told me afterwards
that he was almost moved to tears at the sight of him. And to improve
matters, the prisoner hastened to tell us about the much‐talked‐of little
bag—so be it, you shall hear this romance!

“Gentlemen of the jury, I have told you already why I consider this
romance not only an absurdity, but the most improbable invention that
could have been brought forward in the circumstances. If one tried for a
bet to invent the most unlikely story, one could hardly find anything more
incredible. The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can
always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real
life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story‐tellers
neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for
such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a
whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that’s
how they are caught. The prisoner was asked the question, ‘Where did you
get the stuff for your little bag and who made it for you?’ ‘I made it
myself.’ ‘And where did you get the linen?’ The prisoner was positively
offended, he thought it almost insulting to ask him such a trivial
question, and would you believe it, his resentment was genuine! But they
are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt.’ ‘Then we shall find that
shirt among your linen to‐morrow, with a piece torn off.’ And only fancy,
gentlemen of the jury, if we really had found that torn shirt (and how
could we have failed to find it in his chest of drawers or trunk?) that
would have been a fact, a material fact in support of his statement! But
he was incapable of that reflection. ‘I don’t remember, it may not have
been off my shirt, I sewed it up in one of my landlady’s caps.’ ‘What sort
of a cap?’ ‘It was an old cotton rag of hers lying about.’ ‘And do you
remember that clearly?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ And he was angry, very angry, and
yet imagine not remembering it! At the most terrible moments of man’s
life, for instance when he is being led to execution, he remembers just
such trifles. He will forget anything but some green roof that has flashed
past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross—that he will remember. He
concealed the making of that little bag from his household, he must have
remembered his humiliating fear that some one might come in and find him
needle in hand, how at the slightest sound he slipped behind the screen
(there is a screen in his lodgings).

“But, gentlemen of the jury, why do I tell you all this, all these
details, trifles?” cried Ippolit Kirillovitch suddenly. “Just because the
prisoner still persists in these absurdities to this moment. He has not
explained anything since that fatal night two months ago, he has not added
one actual illuminating fact to his former fantastic statements; all those
are trivialities. ‘You must believe it on my honor.’ Oh, we are glad to
believe it, we are eager to believe it, even if only on his word of honor!
Are we jackals thirsting for human blood? Show us a single fact in the
prisoner’s favor and we shall rejoice; but let it be a substantial, real
fact, and not a conclusion drawn from the prisoner’s expression by his own
brother, or that when he beat himself on the breast he must have meant to
point to the little bag, in the darkness, too. We shall rejoice at the new
fact, we shall be the first to repudiate our charge, we shall hasten to
repudiate it. But now justice cries out and we persist, we cannot
repudiate anything.”

Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to his final peroration. He looked as though
he was in a fever, he spoke of the blood that cried for vengeance, the
blood of the father murdered by his son, with the base motive of robbery!
He pointed to the tragic and glaring consistency of the facts.

“And whatever you may hear from the talented and celebrated counsel for
the defense,” Ippolit Kirillovitch could not resist adding, “whatever
eloquent and touching appeals may be made to your sensibilities, remember
that at this moment you are in a temple of justice. Remember that you are
the champions of our justice, the champions of our holy Russia, of her
principles, her family, everything that she holds sacred! Yes, you
represent Russia here at this moment, and your verdict will be heard not
in this hall only but will reëcho throughout the whole of Russia, and all
Russia will hear you, as her champions and her judges, and she will be
encouraged or disheartened by your verdict. Do not disappoint Russia and
her expectations. Our fatal troika dashes on in her headlong flight
perhaps to destruction and in all Russia for long past men have stretched
out imploring hands and called a halt to its furious reckless course. And
if other nations stand aside from that troika that may be, not from
respect, as the poet would fain believe, but simply from horror. From
horror, perhaps from disgust. And well it is that they stand aside, but
maybe they will cease one day to do so and will form a firm wall
confronting the hurrying apparition and will check the frenzied rush of
our lawlessness, for the sake of their own safety, enlightenment and
civilization. Already we have heard voices of alarm from Europe, they
already begin to sound. Do not tempt them! Do not heap up their growing
hatred by a sentence justifying the murder of a father by his son!”

Though Ippolit Kirillovitch was genuinely moved, he wound up his speech
with this rhetorical appeal—and the effect produced by him was
extraordinary. When he had finished his speech, he went out hurriedly and,
as I have mentioned before, almost fainted in the adjoining room. There
was no applause in the court, but serious persons were pleased. The ladies
were not so well satisfied, though even they were pleased with his
eloquence, especially as they had no apprehensions as to the upshot of the
trial and had full trust in Fetyukovitch. “He will speak at last and of
course carry all before him.”

Every one looked at Mitya; he sat silent through the whole of the
prosecutor’s speech, clenching his teeth, with his hands clasped, and his
head bowed. Only from time to time he raised his head and listened,
especially when Grushenka was spoken of. When the prosecutor mentioned
Rakitin’s opinion of her, a smile of contempt and anger passed over his
face and he murmured rather audibly, “The Bernards!” When Ippolit
Kirillovitch described how he had questioned and tortured him at Mokroe,
Mitya raised his head and listened with intense curiosity. At one point he
seemed about to jump up and cry out, but controlled himself and only
shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. People talked afterwards of the end
of the speech, of the prosecutor’s feat in examining the prisoner at
Mokroe, and jeered at Ippolit Kirillovitch. “The man could not resist
boasting of his cleverness,” they said.

The court was adjourned, but only for a short interval, a quarter of an
hour or twenty minutes at most. There was a hum of conversation and
exclamations in the audience. I remember some of them.

“A weighty speech,” a gentleman in one group observed gravely.

“He brought in too much psychology,” said another voice.

“But it was all true, the absolute truth!”

“Yes, he is first rate at it.”

“He summed it all up.”

“Yes, he summed us up, too,” chimed in another voice. “Do you remember, at
the beginning of his speech, making out we were all like Fyodor
Pavlovitch?”

“And at the end, too. But that was all rot.”

“And obscure too.”

“He was a little too much carried away.”

“It’s unjust, it’s unjust.”

“No, it was smartly done, anyway. He’s had long to wait, but he’s had his
say, ha ha!”

“What will the counsel for the defense say?”

In another group I heard:

“He had no business to make a thrust at the Petersburg man like that;
‘appealing to your sensibilities’—do you remember?”

“Yes, that was awkward of him.”

“He was in too great a hurry.”

“He is a nervous man.”

“We laugh, but what must the prisoner be feeling?”

“Yes, what must it be for Mitya?”

In a third group:

“What lady is that, the fat one, with the lorgnette, sitting at the end?”

“She is a general’s wife, divorced, I know her.”

“That’s why she has the lorgnette.”

“She is not good for much.”

“Oh, no, she is a piquante little woman.”

“Two places beyond her there is a little fair woman, she is prettier.”

“They caught him smartly at Mokroe, didn’t they, eh?”

“Oh, it was smart enough. We’ve heard it before, how often he has told the
story at people’s houses!”

“And he couldn’t resist doing it now. That’s vanity.”

“He is a man with a grievance, he he!”

“Yes, and quick to take offense. And there was too much rhetoric, such
long sentences.”

“Yes, he tries to alarm us, he kept trying to alarm us. Do you remember
about the troika? Something about ‘They have Hamlets, but we have, so far,
only Karamazovs!’ That was cleverly said!”

“That was to propitiate the liberals. He is afraid of them.”

“Yes, and he is afraid of the lawyer, too.”

“Yes, what will Fetyukovitch say?”

“Whatever he says, he won’t get round our peasants.”

“Don’t you think so?”

A fourth group:

“What he said about the troika was good, that piece about the other
nations.”

“And that was true what he said about other nations not standing it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, in the English Parliament a Member got up last week and speaking
about the Nihilists asked the Ministry whether it was not high time to
intervene, to educate this barbarous people. Ippolit was thinking of him,
I know he was. He was talking about that last week.”

“Not an easy job.”

“Not an easy job? Why not?”

“Why, we’d shut up Kronstadt and not let them have any corn. Where would
they get it?”

“In America. They get it from America now.”

“Nonsense!”

But the bell rang, all rushed to their places. Fetyukovitch mounted the
tribune.



Chapter X. The Speech For The Defense. An Argument That Cuts Both Ways


All was hushed as the first words of the famous orator rang out. The eyes
of the audience were fastened upon him. He began very simply and directly,
with an air of conviction, but not the slightest trace of conceit. He made
no attempt at eloquence, at pathos, or emotional phrases. He was like a
man speaking in a circle of intimate and sympathetic friends. His voice
was a fine one, sonorous and sympathetic, and there was something genuine
and simple in the very sound of it. But every one realized at once that
the speaker might suddenly rise to genuine pathos and “pierce the heart
with untold power.” His language was perhaps more irregular than Ippolit
Kirillovitch’s, but he spoke without long phrases, and indeed, with more
precision. One thing did not please the ladies: he kept bending forward,
especially at the beginning of his speech, not exactly bowing, but as
though he were about to dart at his listeners, bending his long spine in
half, as though there were a spring in the middle that enabled him to bend
almost at right angles.

At the beginning of his speech he spoke rather disconnectedly, without
system, one may say, dealing with facts separately, though, at the end,
these facts formed a whole. His speech might be divided into two parts,
the first consisting of criticism in refutation of the charge, sometimes
malicious and sarcastic. But in the second half he suddenly changed his
tone, and even his manner, and at once rose to pathos. The audience seemed
on the look‐out for it, and quivered with enthusiasm.

He went straight to the point, and began by saying that although he
practiced in Petersburg, he had more than once visited provincial towns to
defend prisoners, of whose innocence he had a conviction or at least a
preconceived idea. “That is what has happened to me in the present case,”
he explained. “From the very first accounts in the newspapers I was struck
by something which strongly prepossessed me in the prisoner’s favor. What
interested me most was a fact which often occurs in legal practice, but
rarely, I think, in such an extreme and peculiar form as in the present
case. I ought to formulate that peculiarity only at the end of my speech,
but I will do so at the very beginning, for it is my weakness to go to
work directly, not keeping my effects in reserve and economizing my
material. That may be imprudent on my part, but at least it’s sincere.
What I have in my mind is this: there is an overwhelming chain of evidence
against the prisoner, and at the same time not one fact that will stand
criticism, if it is examined separately. As I followed the case more
closely in the papers my idea was more and more confirmed, and I suddenly
received from the prisoner’s relatives a request to undertake his defense.
I at once hurried here, and here I became completely convinced. It was to
break down this terrible chain of facts, and to show that each piece of
evidence taken separately was unproved and fantastic, that I undertook the
case.”

So Fetyukovitch began.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he suddenly protested, “I am new to this
district. I have no preconceived ideas. The prisoner, a man of turbulent
and unbridled temper, has not insulted me. But he has insulted perhaps
hundreds of persons in this town, and so prejudiced many people against
him beforehand. Of course I recognize that the moral sentiment of local
society is justly excited against him. The prisoner is of turbulent and
violent temper. Yet he was received in society here; he was even welcome
in the family of my talented friend, the prosecutor.”

(N.B. At these words there were two or three laughs in the audience,
quickly suppressed, but noticed by all. All of us knew that the prosecutor
received Mitya against his will, solely because he had somehow interested
his wife—a lady of the highest virtue and moral worth, but fanciful,
capricious, and fond of opposing her husband, especially in trifles.
Mitya’s visits, however, had not been frequent.)

“Nevertheless I venture to suggest,” Fetyukovitch continued, “that in
spite of his independent mind and just character, my opponent may have
formed a mistaken prejudice against my unfortunate client. Oh, that is so
natural; the unfortunate man has only too well deserved such prejudice.
Outraged morality, and still more outraged taste, is often relentless. We
have, in the talented prosecutor’s speech, heard a stern analysis of the
prisoner’s character and conduct, and his severe critical attitude to the
case was evident. And, what’s more, he went into psychological subtleties
into which he could not have entered, if he had the least conscious and
malicious prejudice against the prisoner. But there are things which are
even worse, even more fatal in such cases, than the most malicious and
consciously unfair attitude. It is worse if we are carried away by the
artistic instinct, by the desire to create, so to speak, a romance,
especially if God has endowed us with psychological insight. Before I
started on my way here, I was warned in Petersburg, and was myself aware,
that I should find here a talented opponent whose psychological insight
and subtlety had gained him peculiar renown in legal circles of recent
years. But profound as psychology is, it’s a knife that cuts both ways.”
(Laughter among the public.) “You will, of course, forgive me my
comparison; I can’t boast of eloquence. But I will take as an example any
point in the prosecutor’s speech.

“The prisoner, running away in the garden in the dark, climbed over the
fence, was seized by the servant, and knocked him down with a brass
pestle. Then he jumped back into the garden and spent five minutes over
the man, trying to discover whether he had killed him or not. And the
prosecutor refuses to believe the prisoner’s statement that he ran to old
Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘such sensibility is impossible at
such a moment, that’s unnatural; he ran to find out whether the only
witness of his crime was dead or alive, and so showed that he had
committed the murder, since he would not have run back for any other
reason.’

“Here you have psychology; but let us take the same method and apply it to
the case the other way round, and our result will be no less probable. The
murderer, we are told, leapt down to find out, as a precaution, whether
the witness was alive or not, yet he had left in his murdered father’s
study, as the prosecutor himself argues, an amazing piece of evidence in
the shape of a torn envelope, with an inscription that there had been
three thousand roubles in it. ‘If he had carried that envelope away with
him, no one in the world would have known of that envelope and of the
notes in it, and that the money had been stolen by the prisoner.’ Those
are the prosecutor’s own words. So on one side you see a complete absence
of precaution, a man who has lost his head and run away in a fright,
leaving that clew on the floor, and two minutes later, when he has killed
another man, we are entitled to assume the most heartless and calculating
foresight in him. But even admitting this was so, it is psychological
subtlety, I suppose, that discerns that under certain circumstances I
become as bloodthirsty and keen‐sighted as a Caucasian eagle, while at the
next I am as timid and blind as a mole. But if I am so bloodthirsty and
cruelly calculating that when I kill a man I only run back to find out
whether he is alive to witness against me, why should I spend five minutes
looking after my victim at the risk of encountering other witnesses? Why
soak my handkerchief, wiping the blood off his head so that it may be
evidence against me later? If he were so cold‐hearted and calculating, why
not hit the servant on the head again and again with the same pestle so as
to kill him outright and relieve himself of all anxiety about the witness?

“Again, though he ran to see whether the witness was alive, he left
another witness on the path, that brass pestle which he had taken from the
two women, and which they could always recognize afterwards as theirs, and
prove that he had taken it from them. And it is not as though he had
forgotten it on the path, dropped it through carelessness or haste, no, he
had flung away his weapon, for it was found fifteen paces from where
Grigory lay. Why did he do so? Just because he was grieved at having
killed a man, an old servant; and he flung away the pestle with a curse,
as a murderous weapon. That’s how it must have been, what other reason
could he have had for throwing it so far? And if he was capable of feeling
grief and pity at having killed a man, it shows that he was innocent of
his father’s murder. Had he murdered him, he would never have run to
another victim out of pity; then he would have felt differently; his
thoughts would have been centered on self‐preservation. He would have had
none to spare for pity, that is beyond doubt. On the contrary, he would
have broken his skull instead of spending five minutes looking after him.
There was room for pity and good‐feeling just because his conscience had
been clear till then. Here we have a different psychology. I have
purposely resorted to this method, gentlemen of the jury, to show that you
can prove anything by it. It all depends on who makes use of it.
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite
unconsciously. I am speaking of the abuse of psychology, gentlemen.”

Sounds of approval and laughter, at the expense of the prosecutor, were
again audible in the court. I will not repeat the speech in detail; I will
only quote some passages from it, some leading points.



Chapter XI. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery


There was one point that struck every one in Fetyukovitch’s speech. He
flatly denied the existence of the fatal three thousand roubles, and
consequently, the possibility of their having been stolen.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “Every new and unprejudiced observer
must be struck by a characteristic peculiarity in the present case,
namely, the charge of robbery, and the complete impossibility of proving
that there was anything to be stolen. We are told that money was
stolen—three thousand roubles—but whether those roubles ever existed,
nobody knows. Consider, how have we heard of that sum, and who has seen
the notes? The only person who saw them, and stated that they had been put
in the envelope, was the servant, Smerdyakov. He had spoken of it to the
prisoner and his brother, Ivan Fyodorovitch, before the catastrophe.
Madame Svyetlov, too, had been told of it. But not one of these three
persons had actually seen the notes, no one but Smerdyakov had seen them.

“Here the question arises, if it’s true that they did exist, and that
Smerdyakov had seen them, when did he see them for the last time? What if
his master had taken the notes from under his bed and put them back in his
cash‐box without telling him? Note, that according to Smerdyakov’s story
the notes were kept under the mattress; the prisoner must have pulled them
out, and yet the bed was absolutely unrumpled; that is carefully recorded
in the protocol. How could the prisoner have found the notes without
disturbing the bed? How could he have helped soiling with his blood‐
stained hands the fine and spotless linen with which the bed had been
purposely made?

“But I shall be asked: What about the envelope on the floor? Yes, it’s
worth saying a word or two about that envelope. I was somewhat surprised
just now to hear the highly talented prosecutor declare of himself—of
himself, observe—that but for that envelope, but for its being left on the
floor, no one in the world would have known of the existence of that
envelope and the notes in it, and therefore of the prisoner’s having
stolen it. And so that torn scrap of paper is, by the prosecutor’s own
admission, the sole proof on which the charge of robbery rests, ‘otherwise
no one would have known of the robbery, nor perhaps even of the money.’
But is the mere fact that that scrap of paper was lying on the floor a
proof that there was money in it, and that that money had been stolen?
Yet, it will be objected, Smerdyakov had seen the money in the envelope.
But when, when had he seen it for the last time, I ask you that? I talked
to Smerdyakov, and he told me that he had seen the notes two days before
the catastrophe. Then why not imagine that old Fyodor Pavlovitch, locked
up alone in impatient and hysterical expectation of the object of his
adoration, may have whiled away the time by breaking open the envelope and
taking out the notes. ‘What’s the use of the envelope?’ he may have asked
himself. ‘She won’t believe the notes are there, but when I show her the
thirty rainbow‐colored notes in one roll, it will make more impression,
you may be sure, it will make her mouth water.’ And so he tears open the
envelope, takes out the money, and flings the envelope on the floor,
conscious of being the owner and untroubled by any fears of leaving
evidence.

“Listen, gentlemen, could anything be more likely than this theory and
such an action? Why is it out of the question? But if anything of the sort
could have taken place, the charge of robbery falls to the ground; if
there was no money, there was no theft of it. If the envelope on the floor
may be taken as evidence that there had been money in it, why may I not
maintain the opposite, that the envelope was on the floor because the
money had been taken from it by its owner?

“But I shall be asked what became of the money if Fyodor Pavlovitch took
it out of the envelope since it was not found when the police searched the
house? In the first place, part of the money was found in the cash‐box,
and secondly, he might have taken it out that morning or the evening
before to make some other use of it, to give or send it away; he may have
changed his idea, his plan of action completely, without thinking it
necessary to announce the fact to Smerdyakov beforehand. And if there is
the barest possibility of such an explanation, how can the prisoner be so
positively accused of having committed murder for the sake of robbery, and
of having actually carried out that robbery? This is encroaching on the
domain of romance. If it is maintained that something has been stolen, the
thing must be produced, or at least its existence must be proved beyond
doubt. Yet no one had ever seen these notes.

“Not long ago in Petersburg a young man of eighteen, hardly more than a
boy, who carried on a small business as a costermonger, went in broad
daylight into a moneychanger’s shop with an ax, and with extraordinary,
typical audacity killed the master of the shop and carried off fifteen
hundred roubles. Five hours later he was arrested, and, except fifteen
roubles he had already managed to spend, the whole sum was found on him.
Moreover, the shopman, on his return to the shop after the murder,
informed the police not only of the exact sum stolen, but even of the
notes and gold coins of which that sum was made up, and those very notes
and coins were found on the criminal. This was followed by a full and
genuine confession on the part of the murderer. That’s what I call
evidence, gentlemen of the jury! In that case I know, I see, I touch the
money, and cannot deny its existence. Is it the same in the present case?
And yet it is a question of life and death.

“Yes, I shall be told, but he was carousing that night, squandering money;
he was shown to have had fifteen hundred roubles—where did he get the
money? But the very fact that only fifteen hundred could be found, and the
other half of the sum could nowhere be discovered, shows that that money
was not the same, and had never been in any envelope. By strict
calculation of time it was proved at the preliminary inquiry that the
prisoner ran straight from those women servants to Perhotin’s without
going home, and that he had been nowhere. So he had been all the time in
company and therefore could not have divided the three thousand in half
and hidden half in the town. It’s just this consideration that has led the
prosecutor to assume that the money is hidden in some crevice at Mokroe.
Why not in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho, gentlemen? Isn’t this
supposition really too fantastic and too romantic? And observe, if that
supposition breaks down, the whole charge of robbery is scattered to the
winds, for in that case what could have become of the other fifteen
hundred roubles? By what miracle could they have disappeared, since it’s
proved the prisoner went nowhere else? And we are ready to ruin a man’s
life with such tales!

“I shall be told that he could not explain where he got the fifteen
hundred that he had, and every one knew that he was without money before
that night. Who knew it, pray? The prisoner has made a clear and
unflinching statement of the source of that money, and if you will have it
so, gentlemen of the jury, nothing can be more probable than that
statement, and more consistent with the temper and spirit of the prisoner.
The prosecutor is charmed with his own romance. A man of weak will, who
had brought himself to take the three thousand so insultingly offered by
his betrothed, could not, we are told, have set aside half and sewn it up,
but would, even if he had done so, have unpicked it every two days and
taken out a hundred, and so would have spent it all in a month. All this,
you will remember, was put forward in a tone that brooked no
contradiction. But what if the thing happened quite differently? What if
you’ve been weaving a romance, and about quite a different kind of man?
That’s just it, you have invented quite a different man!

“I shall be told, perhaps, there are witnesses that he spent on one day
all that three thousand given him by his betrothed a month before the
catastrophe, so he could not have divided the sum in half. But who are
these witnesses? The value of their evidence has been shown in court
already. Besides, in another man’s hand a crust always seems larger, and
no one of these witnesses counted that money; they all judged simply at
sight. And the witness Maximov has testified that the prisoner had twenty
thousand in his hand. You see, gentlemen of the jury, psychology is a two‐
edged weapon. Let me turn the other edge now and see what comes of it.

“A month before the catastrophe the prisoner was entrusted by Katerina
Ivanovna with three thousand roubles to send off by post. But the question
is: is it true that they were entrusted to him in such an insulting and
degrading way as was proclaimed just now? The first statement made by the
young lady on the subject was different, perfectly different. In the
second statement we heard only cries of resentment and revenge, cries of
long‐concealed hatred. And the very fact that the witness gave her first
evidence incorrectly, gives us a right to conclude that her second piece
of evidence may have been incorrect also. The prosecutor will not, dare
not (his own words) touch on that story. So be it. I will not touch on it
either, but will only venture to observe that if a lofty and high‐
principled person, such as that highly respected young lady unquestionably
is, if such a person, I say, allows herself suddenly in court to
contradict her first statement, with the obvious motive of ruining the
prisoner, it is clear that this evidence has been given not impartially,
not coolly. Have not we the right to assume that a revengeful woman might
have exaggerated much? Yes, she may well have exaggerated, in particular,
the insult and humiliation of her offering him the money. No, it was
offered in such a way that it was possible to take it, especially for a
man so easy‐going as the prisoner, above all, as he expected to receive
shortly from his father the three thousand roubles that he reckoned was
owing to him. It was unreflecting of him, but it was just his
irresponsible want of reflection that made him so confident that his
father would give him the money, that he would get it, and so could always
dispatch the money entrusted to him and repay the debt.

“But the prosecutor refuses to allow that he could the same day have set
aside half the money and sewn it up in a little bag. That’s not his
character, he tells us, he couldn’t have had such feelings. But yet he
talked himself of the broad Karamazov nature; he cried out about the two
extremes which a Karamazov can contemplate at once. Karamazov is just such
a two‐sided nature, fluctuating between two extremes, that even when moved
by the most violent craving for riotous gayety, he can pull himself up, if
something strikes him on the other side. And on the other side is
love—that new love which had flamed up in his heart, and for that love he
needed money; oh, far more than for carousing with his mistress. If she
were to say to him, ‘I am yours, I won’t have Fyodor Pavlovitch,’ then he
must have money to take her away. That was more important than carousing.
Could a Karamazov fail to understand it? That anxiety was just what he was
suffering from—what is there improbable in his laying aside that money and
concealing it in case of emergency?

“But time passed, and Fyodor Pavlovitch did not give the prisoner the
expected three thousand; on the contrary, the latter heard that he meant
to use this sum to seduce the woman he, the prisoner, loved. ‘If Fyodor
Pavlovitch doesn’t give the money,’ he thought, ‘I shall be put in the
position of a thief before Katerina Ivanovna.’ And then the idea presented
itself to him that he would go to Katerina Ivanovna, lay before her the
fifteen hundred roubles he still carried round his neck, and say, ‘I am a
scoundrel, but not a thief.’ So here we have already a twofold reason why
he should guard that sum of money as the apple of his eye, why he
shouldn’t unpick the little bag, and spend it a hundred at a time. Why
should you deny the prisoner a sense of honor? Yes, he has a sense of
honor, granted that it’s misplaced, granted it’s often mistaken, yet it
exists and amounts to a passion, and he has proved that.

“But now the affair becomes even more complex; his jealous torments reach
a climax, and those same two questions torture his fevered brain more and
more: ‘If I repay Katerina Ivanovna, where can I find the means to go off
with Grushenka?’ If he behaved wildly, drank, and made disturbances in the
taverns in the course of that month, it was perhaps because he was
wretched and strained beyond his powers of endurance. These two questions
became so acute that they drove him at last to despair. He sent his
younger brother to beg for the last time for the three thousand roubles,
but without waiting for a reply, burst in himself and ended by beating the
old man in the presence of witnesses. After that he had no prospect of
getting it from any one; his father would not give it him after that
beating.

“The same evening he struck himself on the breast, just on the upper part
of the breast where the little bag was, and swore to his brother that he
had the means of not being a scoundrel, but that still he would remain a
scoundrel, for he foresaw that he would not use that means, that he
wouldn’t have the character, that he wouldn’t have the will‐power to do
it. Why, why does the prosecutor refuse to believe the evidence of Alexey
Karamazov, given so genuinely and sincerely, so spontaneously and
convincingly? And why, on the contrary, does he force me to believe in
money hidden in a crevice, in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho?

“The same evening, after his talk with his brother, the prisoner wrote
that fatal letter, and that letter is the chief, the most stupendous proof
of the prisoner having committed robbery! ‘I shall beg from every one, and
if I don’t get it I shall murder my father and shall take the envelope
with the pink ribbon on it from under his mattress as soon as Ivan has
gone.’ A full program of the murder, we are told, so it must have been he.
‘It has all been done as he wrote,’ cries the prosecutor.

“But in the first place, it’s the letter of a drunken man and written in
great irritation; secondly, he writes of the envelope from what he has
heard from Smerdyakov again, for he has not seen the envelope himself; and
thirdly, he wrote it indeed, but how can you prove that he did it? Did the
prisoner take the envelope from under the pillow, did he find the money,
did that money exist indeed? And was it to get money that the prisoner ran
off, if you remember? He ran off post‐haste not to steal, but to find out
where she was, the woman who had crushed him. He was not running to carry
out a program, to carry out what he had written, that is, not for an act
of premeditated robbery, but he ran suddenly, spontaneously, in a jealous
fury. Yes! I shall be told, but when he got there and murdered him he
seized the money, too. But did he murder him after all? The charge of
robbery I repudiate with indignation. A man cannot be accused of robbery,
if it’s impossible to state accurately what he has stolen; that’s an
axiom. But did he murder him without robbery, did he murder him at all? Is
that proved? Isn’t that, too, a romance?”



Chapter XII. And There Was No Murder Either


“Allow me, gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that a man’s life is at
stake and that you must be careful. We have heard the prosecutor himself
admit that until to‐day he hesitated to accuse the prisoner of a full and
conscious premeditation of the crime; he hesitated till he saw that fatal
drunken letter which was produced in court to‐day. ‘All was done as
written.’ But, I repeat again, he was running to her, to seek her, solely
to find out where she was. That’s a fact that can’t be disputed. Had she
been at home, he would not have run away, but would have remained at her
side, and so would not have done what he promised in the letter. He ran
unexpectedly and accidentally, and by that time very likely he did not
even remember his drunken letter. ‘He snatched up the pestle,’ they say,
and you will remember how a whole edifice of psychology was built on that
pestle—why he was bound to look at that pestle as a weapon, to snatch it
up, and so on, and so on. A very commonplace idea occurs to me at this
point: What if that pestle had not been in sight, had not been lying on
the shelf from which it was snatched by the prisoner, but had been put
away in a cupboard? It would not have caught the prisoner’s eye, and he
would have run away without a weapon, with empty hands, and then he would
certainly not have killed any one. How then can I look upon the pestle as
a proof of premeditation?

“Yes, but he talked in the taverns of murdering his father, and two days
before, on the evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and
only quarreled with a shopman in the tavern, because a Karamazov could not
help quarreling, forsooth! But my answer to that is, that, if he was
planning such a murder in accordance with his letter, he certainly would
not have quarreled even with a shopman, and probably would not have gone
into the tavern at all, because a person plotting such a crime seeks quiet
and retirement, seeks to efface himself, to avoid being seen and heard,
and that not from calculation, but from instinct. Gentlemen of the jury,
the psychological method is a two‐edged weapon, and we, too, can use it.
As for all this shouting in taverns throughout the month, don’t we often
hear children, or drunkards coming out of taverns shout, ‘I’ll kill you’?
but they don’t murder any one. And that fatal letter—isn’t that simply
drunken irritability, too? Isn’t that simply the shout of the brawler
outside the tavern, ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill the lot of you!’ Why not,
why could it not be that? What reason have we to call that letter ‘fatal’
rather than absurd? Because his father has been found murdered, because a
witness saw the prisoner running out of the garden with a weapon in his
hand, and was knocked down by him: therefore, we are told, everything was
done as he had planned in writing, and the letter was not ‘absurd,’ but
‘fatal.’

“Now, thank God! we’ve come to the real point: ‘since he was in the
garden, he must have murdered him.’ In those few words: ‘since he _was_,
then he _must_’ lies the whole case for the prosecution. He was there, so
he must have. And what if there is no _must_ about it, even if he was
there? Oh, I admit that the chain of evidence—the coincidences—are really
suggestive. But examine all these facts separately, regardless of their
connection. Why, for instance, does the prosecution refuse to admit the
truth of the prisoner’s statement that he ran away from his father’s
window? Remember the sarcasms in which the prosecutor indulged at the
expense of the respectful and ‘pious’ sentiments which suddenly came over
the murderer. But what if there were something of the sort, a feeling of
religious awe, if not of filial respect? ‘My mother must have been praying
for me at that moment,’ were the prisoner’s words at the preliminary
inquiry, and so he ran away as soon as he convinced himself that Madame
Svyetlov was not in his father’s house. ‘But he could not convince himself
by looking through the window,’ the prosecutor objects. But why couldn’t
he? Why? The window opened at the signals given by the prisoner. Some word
might have been uttered by Fyodor Pavlovitch, some exclamation which
showed the prisoner that she was not there. Why should we assume
everything as we imagine it, as we make up our minds to imagine it? A
thousand things may happen in reality which elude the subtlest
imagination.

“ ‘Yes, but Grigory saw the door open and so the prisoner certainly was in
the house, therefore he killed him.’ Now about that door, gentlemen of the
jury.... Observe that we have only the statement of one witness as to that
door, and he was at the time in such a condition, that— But supposing the
door was open; supposing the prisoner has lied in denying it, from an
instinct of self‐defense, natural in his position; supposing he did go
into the house—well, what then? How does it follow that because he was
there he committed the murder? He might have dashed in, run through the
rooms; might have pushed his father away; might have struck him; but as
soon as he had made sure Madame Svyetlov was not there, he may have run
away rejoicing that she was not there and that he had not killed his
father. And it was perhaps just because he had escaped from the temptation
to kill his father, because he had a clear conscience and was rejoicing at
not having killed him, that he was capable of a pure feeling, the feeling
of pity and compassion, and leapt off the fence a minute later to the
assistance of Grigory after he had, in his excitement, knocked him down.

“With terrible eloquence the prosecutor has described to us the dreadful
state of the prisoner’s mind at Mokroe when love again lay before him
calling him to new life, while love was impossible for him because he had
his father’s bloodstained corpse behind him and beyond that
corpse—retribution. And yet the prosecutor allowed him love, which he
explained, according to his method, talking about his drunken condition,
about a criminal being taken to execution, about it being still far off,
and so on and so on. But again I ask, Mr. Prosecutor, have you not
invented a new personality? Is the prisoner so coarse and heartless as to
be able to think at that moment of love and of dodges to escape
punishment, if his hands were really stained with his father’s blood? No,
no, no! As soon as it was made plain to him that she loved him and called
him to her side, promising him new happiness, oh! then, I protest he must
have felt the impulse to suicide doubled, trebled, and must have killed
himself, if he had his father’s murder on his conscience. Oh, no! he would
not have forgotten where his pistols lay! I know the prisoner: the savage,
stony heartlessness ascribed to him by the prosecutor is inconsistent with
his character. He would have killed himself, that’s certain. He did not
kill himself just because ‘his mother’s prayers had saved him,’ and he was
innocent of his father’s blood. He was troubled, he was grieving that
night at Mokroe only about old Grigory and praying to God that the old man
would recover, that his blow had not been fatal, and that he would not
have to suffer for it. Why not accept such an interpretation of the facts?
What trustworthy proof have we that the prisoner is lying?

“But we shall be told at once again, ‘There is his father’s corpse! If he
ran away without murdering him, who did murder him?’ Here, I repeat, you
have the whole logic of the prosecution. Who murdered him, if not he?
There’s no one to put in his place.

“Gentlemen of the jury, is that really so? Is it positively, actually true
that there is no one else at all? We’ve heard the prosecutor count on his
fingers all the persons who were in that house that night. They were five
in number; three of them, I agree, could not have been responsible—the
murdered man himself, old Grigory, and his wife. There are left then the
prisoner and Smerdyakov, and the prosecutor dramatically exclaims that the
prisoner pointed to Smerdyakov because he had no one else to fix on, that
had there been a sixth person, even a phantom of a sixth person, he would
have abandoned the charge against Smerdyakov at once in shame and have
accused that other. But, gentlemen of the jury, why may I not draw the
very opposite conclusion? There are two persons—the prisoner and
Smerdyakov. Why can I not say that you accuse my client, simply because
you have no one else to accuse? And you have no one else only because you
have determined to exclude Smerdyakov from all suspicion.

“It’s true, indeed, Smerdyakov is accused only by the prisoner, his two
brothers, and Madame Svyetlov. But there are others who accuse him: there
are vague rumors of a question, of a suspicion, an obscure report, a
feeling of expectation. Finally, we have the evidence of a combination of
facts very suggestive, though, I admit, inconclusive. In the first place
we have precisely on the day of the catastrophe that fit, for the
genuineness of which the prosecutor, for some reason, has felt obliged to
make a careful defense. Then Smerdyakov’s sudden suicide on the eve of the
trial. Then the equally startling evidence given in court to‐day by the
elder of the prisoner’s brothers, who had believed in his guilt, but has
to‐day produced a bundle of notes and proclaimed Smerdyakov as the
murderer. Oh, I fully share the court’s and the prosecutor’s conviction
that Ivan Karamazov is suffering from brain fever, that his statement may
really be a desperate effort, planned in delirium, to save his brother by
throwing the guilt on the dead man. But again Smerdyakov’s name is
pronounced, again there is a suggestion of mystery. There is something
unexplained, incomplete. And perhaps it may one day be explained. But we
won’t go into that now. Of that later.

“The court has resolved to go on with the trial, but, meantime, I might
make a few remarks about the character‐sketch of Smerdyakov drawn with
subtlety and talent by the prosecutor. But while I admire his talent I
cannot agree with him. I have visited Smerdyakov, I have seen him and
talked to him, and he made a very different impression on me. He was weak
in health, it is true; but in character, in spirit, he was by no means the
weak man the prosecutor has made him out to be. I found in him no trace of
the timidity on which the prosecutor so insisted. There was no simplicity
about him, either. I found in him, on the contrary, an extreme
mistrustfulness concealed under a mask of _naïveté_, and an intelligence
of considerable range. The prosecutor was too simple in taking him for
weak‐minded. He made a very definite impression on me: I left him with the
conviction that he was a distinctly spiteful creature, excessively
ambitious, vindictive, and intensely envious. I made some inquiries: he
resented his parentage, was ashamed of it, and would clench his teeth when
he remembered that he was the son of ‘stinking Lizaveta.’ He was
disrespectful to the servant Grigory and his wife, who had cared for him
in his childhood. He cursed and jeered at Russia. He dreamed of going to
France and becoming a Frenchman. He used often to say that he hadn’t the
means to do so. I fancy he loved no one but himself and had a strangely
high opinion of himself. His conception of culture was limited to good
clothes, clean shirt‐fronts and polished boots. Believing himself to be
the illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovitch (there is evidence of this), he
might well have resented his position, compared with that of his master’s
legitimate sons. They had everything, he nothing. They had all the rights,
they had the inheritance, while he was only the cook. He told me himself
that he had helped Fyodor Pavlovitch to put the notes in the envelope. The
destination of that sum—a sum which would have made his career—must have
been hateful to him. Moreover, he saw three thousand roubles in new
rainbow‐colored notes. (I asked him about that on purpose.) Oh, beware of
showing an ambitious and envious man a large sum of money at once! And it
was the first time he had seen so much money in the hands of one man. The
sight of the rainbow‐colored notes may have made a morbid impression on
his imagination, but with no immediate results.

“The talented prosecutor, with extraordinary subtlety, sketched for us all
the arguments for and against the hypothesis of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and
asked us in particular what motive he had in feigning a fit. But he may
not have been feigning at all, the fit may have happened quite naturally,
but it may have passed off quite naturally, and the sick man may have
recovered, not completely perhaps, but still regaining consciousness, as
happens with epileptics.

“The prosecutor asks at what moment could Smerdyakov have committed the
murder. But it is very easy to point out that moment. He might have waked
up from deep sleep (for he was only asleep—an epileptic fit is always
followed by a deep sleep) at that moment when the old Grigory shouted at
the top of his voice ‘Parricide!’ That shout in the dark and stillness may
have waked Smerdyakov whose sleep may have been less sound at the moment:
he might naturally have waked up an hour before.

“Getting out of bed, he goes almost unconsciously and with no definite
motive towards the sound to see what’s the matter. His head is still
clouded with his attack, his faculties are half asleep; but, once in the
garden, he walks to the lighted windows and he hears terrible news from
his master, who would be, of course, glad to see him. His mind sets to
work at once. He hears all the details from his frightened master, and
gradually in his disordered brain there shapes itself an idea—terrible,
but seductive and irresistibly logical. To kill the old man, take the
three thousand, and throw all the blame on to his young master. A terrible
lust of money, of booty, might seize upon him as he realized his security
from detection. Oh! these sudden and irresistible impulses come so often
when there is a favorable opportunity, and especially with murderers who
have had no idea of committing a murder beforehand. And Smerdyakov may
have gone in and carried out his plan. With what weapon? Why, with any
stone picked up in the garden. But what for, with what object? Why, the
three thousand which means a career for him. Oh, I am not contradicting
myself—the money may have existed. And perhaps Smerdyakov alone knew where
to find it, where his master kept it. And the covering of the money—the
torn envelope on the floor?

“Just now, when the prosecutor was explaining his subtle theory that only
an inexperienced thief like Karamazov would have left the envelope on the
floor, and not one like Smerdyakov, who would have avoided leaving a piece
of evidence against himself, I thought as I listened that I was hearing
something very familiar, and, would you believe it, I have heard that very
argument, that very conjecture, of how Karamazov would have behaved,
precisely two days before, from Smerdyakov himself. What’s more, it struck
me at the time. I fancied that there was an artificial simplicity about
him; that he was in a hurry to suggest this idea to me that I might fancy
it was my own. He insinuated it, as it were. Did he not insinuate the same
idea at the inquiry and suggest it to the talented prosecutor?

“I shall be asked, ‘What about the old woman, Grigory’s wife? She heard
the sick man moaning close by, all night.’ Yes, she heard it, but that
evidence is extremely unreliable. I knew a lady who complained bitterly
that she had been kept awake all night by a dog in the yard. Yet the poor
beast, it appeared, had only yelped once or twice in the night. And that’s
natural. If any one is asleep and hears a groan he wakes up, annoyed at
being waked, but instantly falls asleep again. Two hours later, again a
groan, he wakes up and falls asleep again; and the same thing again two
hours later—three times altogether in the night. Next morning the sleeper
wakes up and complains that some one has been groaning all night and
keeping him awake. And it is bound to seem so to him: the intervals of two
hours of sleep he does not remember, he only remembers the moments of
waking, so he feels he has been waked up all night.

“But why, why, asks the prosecutor, did not Smerdyakov confess in his last
letter? Why did his conscience prompt him to one step and not to both?
But, excuse me, conscience implies penitence, and the suicide may not have
felt penitence, but only despair. Despair and penitence are two very
different things. Despair may be vindictive and irreconcilable, and the
suicide, laying his hands on himself, may well have felt redoubled hatred
for those whom he had envied all his life.

“Gentlemen of the jury, beware of a miscarriage of justice! What is there
unlikely in all I have put before you just now? Find the error in my
reasoning; find the impossibility, the absurdity. And if there is but a
shade of possibility, but a shade of probability in my propositions, do
not condemn him. And is there only a shade? I swear by all that is sacred,
I fully believe in the explanation of the murder I have just put forward.
What troubles me and makes me indignant is that of all the mass of facts
heaped up by the prosecution against the prisoner, there is not a single
one certain and irrefutable. And yet the unhappy man is to be ruined by
the accumulation of these facts. Yes, the accumulated effect is awful: the
blood, the blood dripping from his fingers, the bloodstained shirt, the
dark night resounding with the shout ‘Parricide!’ and the old man falling
with a broken head. And then the mass of phrases, statements, gestures,
shouts! Oh! this has so much influence, it can so bias the mind; but,
gentlemen of the jury, can it bias your minds? Remember, you have been
given absolute power to bind and to loose, but the greater the power, the
more terrible its responsibility.

“I do not draw back one iota from what I have said just now, but suppose
for one moment I agreed with the prosecution that my luckless client had
stained his hands with his father’s blood. This is only hypothesis, I
repeat; I never for one instant doubt of his innocence. But, so be it, I
assume that my client is guilty of parricide. Even so, hear what I have to
say. I have it in my heart to say something more to you, for I feel that
there must be a great conflict in your hearts and minds.... Forgive my
referring to your hearts and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to
be truthful and sincere to the end. Let us all be sincere!”

At this point the speech was interrupted by rather loud applause. The last
words, indeed, were pronounced with a note of such sincerity that every
one felt that he really might have something to say, and that what he was
about to say would be of the greatest consequence. But the President,
hearing the applause, in a loud voice threatened to clear the court if
such an incident were repeated. Every sound was hushed and Fetyukovitch
began in a voice full of feeling quite unlike the tone he had used
hitherto.



Chapter XIII. A Corrupter Of Thought


“It’s not only the accumulation of facts that threatens my client with
ruin, gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “what is really damning for my
client is one fact—the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary
case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the
triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the
evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you
would have hesitated to ruin a man’s life simply from the prejudice
against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it’s not an
ordinary case of murder, it’s a case of parricide. That impresses men’s
minds, and to such a degree that the very triviality and incompleteness of
the evidence becomes less trivial and less incomplete even to an
unprejudiced mind. How can such a prisoner be acquitted? What if he
committed the murder and gets off unpunished? That is what every one,
almost involuntarily, instinctively, feels at heart.

“Yes, it’s a fearful thing to shed a father’s blood—the father who has
begotten me, loved me, not spared his life for me, grieved over my
illnesses from childhood up, troubled all his life for my happiness, and
has lived in my joys, in my successes. To murder such a father—that’s
inconceivable. Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father—a real father? What
is the meaning of that great word? What is the great idea in that name? We
have just indicated in part what a true father is and what he ought to be.
In the case in which we are now so deeply occupied and over which our
hearts are aching—in the present case, the father, Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, did not correspond to that conception of a father to which we
have just referred. That’s the misfortune. And indeed some fathers are a
misfortune. Let us examine this misfortune rather more closely: we must
shrink from nothing, gentlemen of the jury, considering the importance of
the decision you have to make. It’s our particular duty not to shrink from
any idea, like children or frightened women, as the talented prosecutor
happily expresses it.

“But in the course of his heated speech my esteemed opponent (and he was
my opponent before I opened my lips) exclaimed several times, ‘Oh, I will
not yield the defense of the prisoner to the lawyer who has come down from
Petersburg. I accuse, but I defend also!’ He exclaimed that several times,
but forgot to mention that if this terrible prisoner was for twenty‐three
years so grateful for a mere pound of nuts given him by the only man who
had been kind to him, as a child in his father’s house, might not such a
man well have remembered for twenty‐three years how he ran in his father’s
back‐yard, ‘without boots on his feet and with his little trousers hanging
by one button’—to use the expression of the kind‐hearted doctor,
Herzenstube?

“Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why need we look more closely at this
misfortune, why repeat what we all know already? What did my client meet
with when he arrived here, at his father’s house, and why depict my client
as a heartless egoist and monster? He is uncontrolled, he is wild and
unruly—we are trying him now for that—but who is responsible for his life?
Who is responsible for his having received such an unseemly bringing up,
in spite of his excellent disposition and his grateful and sensitive
heart? Did any one train him to be reasonable? Was he enlightened by
study? Did any one love him ever so little in his childhood? My client was
left to the care of Providence like a beast of the field. He thirsted
perhaps to see his father after long years of separation. A thousand times
perhaps he may, recalling his childhood, have driven away the loathsome
phantoms that haunted his childish dreams and with all his heart he may
have longed to embrace and to forgive his father! And what awaited him? He
was met by cynical taunts, suspicions and wrangling about money. He heard
nothing but revolting talk and vicious precepts uttered daily over the
brandy, and at last he saw his father seducing his mistress from him with
his own money. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, that was cruel and revolting!
And that old man was always complaining of the disrespect and cruelty of
his son. He slandered him in society, injured him, calumniated him, bought
up his unpaid debts to get him thrown into prison.

“Gentlemen of the jury, people like my client, who are fierce, unruly, and
uncontrolled on the surface, are sometimes, most frequently indeed,
exceedingly tender‐hearted, only they don’t express it. Don’t laugh, don’t
laugh at my idea! The talented prosecutor laughed mercilessly just now at
my client for loving Schiller—loving the sublime and beautiful! I should
not have laughed at that in his place. Yes, such natures—oh, let me speak
in defense of such natures, so often and so cruelly misunderstood—these
natures often thirst for tenderness, goodness, and justice, as it were, in
contrast to themselves, their unruliness, their ferocity—they thirst for
it unconsciously. Passionate and fierce on the surface, they are painfully
capable of loving woman, for instance, and with a spiritual and elevated
love. Again do not laugh at me, this is very often the case in such
natures. But they cannot hide their passions—sometimes very coarse—and
that is conspicuous and is noticed, but the inner man is unseen. Their
passions are quickly exhausted; but, by the side of a noble and lofty
creature that seemingly coarse and rough man seeks a new life, seeks to
correct himself, to be better, to become noble and honorable, ‘sublime and
beautiful,’ however much the expression has been ridiculed.

“I said just now that I would not venture to touch upon my client’s
engagement. But I may say half a word. What we heard just now was not
evidence, but only the scream of a frenzied and revengeful woman, and it
was not for her—oh, not for her!—to reproach him with treachery, for she
has betrayed him! If she had had but a little time for reflection she
would not have given such evidence. Oh, do not believe her! No, my client
is not a monster, as she called him!

“The Lover of Mankind on the eve of His Crucifixion said: ‘I am the Good
Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, so that not
one of them might be lost.’ Let not a man’s soul be lost through us!

“I asked just now what does ‘father’ mean, and exclaimed that it was a
great word, a precious name. But one must use words honestly, gentlemen,
and I venture to call things by their right names: such a father as old
Karamazov cannot be called a father and does not deserve to be. Filial
love for an unworthy father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot
be created from nothing: only God can create something from nothing.

“ ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,’ the apostle writes, from
a heart glowing with love. It’s not for the sake of my client that I quote
these sacred words, I mention them for all fathers. Who has authorized me
to preach to fathers? No one. But as a man and a citizen I make my
appeal—_vivos voco!_ We are not long on earth, we do many evil deeds and
say many evil words. So let us all catch a favorable moment when we are
all together to say a good word to each other. That’s what I am doing:
while I am in this place I take advantage of my opportunity. Not for
nothing is this tribune given us by the highest authority—all Russia hears
us! I am not speaking only for the fathers here present, I cry aloud to
all fathers: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.’ Yes, let us
first fulfill Christ’s injunction ourselves and only then venture to
expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of
our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have
made them our enemies ourselves. ‘What measure ye mete it shall be
measured unto you again’—it’s not I who say that, it’s the Gospel precept,
measure to others according as they measure to you. How can we blame
children if they measure us according to our measure?

“Not long ago a servant girl in Finland was suspected of having secretly
given birth to a child. She was watched, and a box of which no one knew
anything was found in the corner of the loft, behind some bricks. It was
opened and inside was found the body of a new‐born child which she had
killed. In the same box were found the skeletons of two other babies
which, according to her own confession, she had killed at the moment of
their birth.

“Gentlemen of the jury, was she a mother to her children? She gave birth
to them, indeed; but was she a mother to them? Would any one venture to
give her the sacred name of mother? Let us be bold, gentlemen, let us be
audacious even: it’s our duty to be so at this moment and not to be afraid
of certain words and ideas like the Moscow women in Ostrovsky’s play, who
are scared at the sound of certain words. No, let us prove that the
progress of the last few years has touched even us, and let us say
plainly, the father is not merely he who begets the child, but he who
begets it and does his duty by it.

“Oh, of course, there is the other meaning, there is the other
interpretation of the word ‘father,’ which insists that any father, even
though he be a monster, even though he be the enemy of his children, still
remains my father simply because he begot me. But this is, so to say, the
mystical meaning which I cannot comprehend with my intellect, but can only
accept by faith, or, better to say, _on faith_, like many other things
which I do not understand, but which religion bids me believe. But in that
case let it be kept outside the sphere of actual life. In the sphere of
actual life, which has, indeed, its own rights, but also lays upon us
great duties and obligations, in that sphere, if we want to be
humane—Christian, in fact—we must, or ought to, act only upon convictions
justified by reason and experience, which have been passed through the
crucible of analysis; in a word, we must act rationally, and not as though
in dream and delirium, that we may not do harm, that we may not ill‐treat
and ruin a man. Then it will be real Christian work, not only mystic, but
rational and philanthropic....”

There was violent applause at this passage from many parts of the court,
but Fetyukovitch waved his hands as though imploring them to let him
finish without interruption. The court relapsed into silence at once. The
orator went on.

“Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to
reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose
on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father
involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature,
especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his
companions. The conventional answer to this question is: ‘He begot you,
and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.’
The youth involuntarily reflects: ‘But did he love me when he begot me?’
he asks, wondering more and more. ‘Was it for my sake he begot me? He did
not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion,
perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity
to drunkenness—that’s all he’s done for me.... Why am I bound to love him
simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life
after?’

“Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not
expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. ‘Drive nature out of the
door and it will fly in at the window,’ and, above all, let us not be
afraid of words, but decide the question according to the dictates of
reason and humanity and not of mystic ideas. How shall it be decided? Why,
like this. Let the son stand before his father and ask him, ‘Father, tell
me, why must I love you? Father, show me that I must love you,’ and if
that father is able to answer him and show him good reason, we have a
real, normal, parental relation, not resting on mystical prejudice, but on
a rational, responsible and strictly humanitarian basis. But if he does
not, there’s an end to the family tie. He is not a father to him, and the
son has a right to look upon him as a stranger, and even an enemy. Our
tribune, gentlemen of the jury, ought to be a school of true and sound
ideas.”

(Here the orator was interrupted by irrepressible and almost frantic
applause. Of course, it was not the whole audience, but a good half of it
applauded. The fathers and mothers present applauded. Shrieks and
exclamations were heard from the gallery, where the ladies were sitting.
Handkerchiefs were waved. The President began ringing his bell with all
his might. He was obviously irritated by the behavior of the audience, but
did not venture to clear the court as he had threatened. Even persons of
high position, old men with stars on their breasts, sitting on specially
reserved seats behind the judges, applauded the orator and waved their
handkerchiefs. So that when the noise died down, the President confined
himself to repeating his stern threat to clear the court, and
Fetyukovitch, excited and triumphant, continued his speech.)

“Gentlemen of the jury, you remember that awful night of which so much has
been said to‐day, when the son got over the fence and stood face to face
with the enemy and persecutor who had begotten him. I insist most
emphatically it was not for money he ran to his father’s house: the charge
of robbery is an absurdity, as I proved before. And it was not to murder
him he broke into the house, oh, no! If he had had that design he would,
at least, have taken the precaution of arming himself beforehand. The
brass pestle he caught up instinctively without knowing why he did it.
Granted that he deceived his father by tapping at the window, granted that
he made his way in—I’ve said already that I do not for a moment believe
that legend, but let it be so, let us suppose it for a moment. Gentlemen,
I swear to you by all that’s holy, if it had not been his father, but an
ordinary enemy, he would, after running through the rooms and satisfying
himself that the woman was not there, have made off, post‐haste, without
doing any harm to his rival. He would have struck him, pushed him away
perhaps, nothing more, for he had no thought and no time to spare for
that. What he wanted to know was where she was. But his father, his
father! The mere sight of the father who had hated him from his childhood,
had been his enemy, his persecutor, and now his unnatural rival, was
enough! A feeling of hatred came over him involuntarily, irresistibly,
clouding his reason. It all surged up in one moment! It was an impulse of
madness and insanity, but also an impulse of nature, irresistibly and
unconsciously (like everything in nature) avenging the violation of its
eternal laws.

“But the prisoner even then did not murder him—I maintain that, I cry that
aloud!—no, he only brandished the pestle in a burst of indignant disgust,
not meaning to kill him, not knowing that he would kill him. Had he not
had this fatal pestle in his hand, he would have only knocked his father
down perhaps, but would not have killed him. As he ran away, he did not
know whether he had killed the old man. Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide. No, the murder of such a father cannot
be called parricide. Such a murder can only be reckoned parricide by
prejudice.

“But I appeal to you again and again from the depths of my soul; did this
murder actually take place? Gentlemen of the jury, if we convict and
punish him, he will say to himself: ‘These people have done nothing for my
bringing up, for my education, nothing to improve my lot, nothing to make
me better, nothing to make me a man. These people have not given me to eat
and to drink, have not visited me in prison and nakedness, and here they
have sent me to penal servitude. I am quits, I owe them nothing now, and
owe no one anything for ever. They are wicked and I will be wicked. They
are cruel and I will be cruel.’ That is what he will say, gentlemen of the
jury. And I swear, by finding him guilty you will only make it easier for
him: you will ease his conscience, he will curse the blood he has shed and
will not regret it. At the same time you will destroy in him the
possibility of becoming a new man, for he will remain in his wickedness
and blindness all his life.

“But do you want to punish him fearfully, terribly, with the most awful
punishment that could be imagined, and at the same time to save him and
regenerate his soul? If so, overwhelm him with your mercy! You will see,
you will hear how he will tremble and be horror‐struck. ‘How can I endure
this mercy? How can I endure so much love? Am I worthy of it?’ That’s what
he will exclaim.

“Oh, I know, I know that heart, that wild but grateful heart, gentlemen of
the jury! It will bow before your mercy; it thirsts for a great and loving
action, it will melt and mount upwards. There are souls which, in their
limitation, blame the whole world. But subdue such a soul with mercy, show
it love, and it will curse its past, for there are many good impulses in
it. Such a heart will expand and see that God is merciful and that men are
good and just. He will be horror‐stricken; he will be crushed by remorse
and the vast obligation laid upon him henceforth. And he will not say
then, ‘I am quits,’ but will say, ‘I am guilty in the sight of all men and
am more unworthy than all.’ With tears of penitence and poignant, tender
anguish, he will exclaim: ‘Others are better than I, they wanted to save
me, not to ruin me!’ Oh, this act of mercy is so easy for you, for in the
absence of anything like real evidence it will be too awful for you to
pronounce: ‘Yes, he is guilty.’

“Better acquit ten guilty men than punish one innocent man! Do you hear,
do you hear that majestic voice from the past century of our glorious
history? It is not for an insignificant person like me to remind you that
the Russian court does not exist for the punishment only, but also for the
salvation of the criminal! Let other nations think of retribution and the
letter of the law, we will cling to the spirit and the meaning—the
salvation and the reformation of the lost. If this is true, if Russia and
her justice are such, she may go forward with good cheer! Do not try to
scare us with your frenzied troikas from which all the nations stand aside
in disgust. Not a runaway troika, but the stately chariot of Russia will
move calmly and majestically to its goal. In your hands is the fate of my
client, in your hands is the fate of Russian justice. You will defend it,
you will save it, you will prove that there are men to watch over it, that
it is in good hands!”



Chapter XIV. The Peasants Stand Firm


This was how Fetyukovitch concluded his speech, and the enthusiasm of the
audience burst like an irresistible storm. It was out of the question to
stop it: the women wept, many of the men wept too, even two important
personages shed tears. The President submitted, and even postponed ringing
his bell. The suppression of such an enthusiasm would be the suppression
of something sacred, as the ladies cried afterwards. The orator himself
was genuinely touched.

And it was at this moment that Ippolit Kirillovitch got up to make certain
objections. People looked at him with hatred. “What? What’s the meaning of
it? He positively dares to make objections,” the ladies babbled. But if
the whole world of ladies, including his wife, had protested he could not
have been stopped at that moment. He was pale, he was shaking with
emotion, his first phrases were even unintelligible, he gasped for breath,
could hardly speak clearly, lost the thread. But he soon recovered
himself. Of this new speech of his I will quote only a few sentences.

“... I am reproached with having woven a romance. But what is this defense
if not one romance on the top of another? All that was lacking was poetry.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, while waiting for his mistress, tears open the envelope
and throws it on the floor. We are even told what he said while engaged in
this strange act. Is not this a flight of fancy? And what proof have we
that he had taken out the money? Who heard what he said? The weak‐minded
idiot, Smerdyakov, transformed into a Byronic hero, avenging society for
his illegitimate birth—isn’t this a romance in the Byronic style? And the
son who breaks into his father’s house and murders him without murdering
him is not even a romance—this is a sphinx setting us a riddle which he
cannot solve himself. If he murdered him, he murdered him, and what’s the
meaning of his murdering him without having murdered him—who can make head
or tail of this?

“Then we are admonished that our tribune is a tribune of true and sound
ideas and from this tribune of ‘sound ideas’ is heard a solemn declaration
that to call the murder of a father ‘parricide’ is nothing but a
prejudice! But if parricide is a prejudice, and if every child is to ask
his father why he is to love him, what will become of us? What will become
of the foundations of society? What will become of the family? Parricide,
it appears, is only a bogy of Moscow merchants’ wives. The most precious,
the most sacred guarantees for the destiny and future of Russian justice
are presented to us in a perverted and frivolous form, simply to attain an
object—to obtain the justification of something which cannot be justified.
‘Oh, crush him by mercy,’ cries the counsel for the defense; but that’s
all the criminal wants, and to‐morrow it will be seen how much he is
crushed. And is not the counsel for the defense too modest in asking only
for the acquittal of the prisoner? Why not found a charity in the honor of
the parricide to commemorate his exploit among future generations?
Religion and the Gospel are corrected—that’s all mysticism, we are told,
and ours is the only true Christianity which has been subjected to the
analysis of reason and common sense. And so they set up before us a false
semblance of Christ! ‘What measure ye mete so it shall be meted unto you
again,’ cried the counsel for the defense, and instantly deduces that
Christ teaches us to measure as it is measured to us—and this from the
tribune of truth and sound sense! We peep into the Gospel only on the eve
of making speeches, in order to dazzle the audience by our acquaintance
with what is, anyway, a rather original composition, which may be of use
to produce a certain effect—all to serve the purpose! But what Christ
commands us is something very different: He bids us beware of doing this,
because the wicked world does this, but we ought to forgive and to turn
the other cheek, and not to measure to our persecutors as they measure to
us. This is what our God has taught us and not that to forbid children to
murder their fathers is a prejudice. And we will not from the tribune of
truth and good sense correct the Gospel of our Lord, Whom the counsel for
the defense deigns to call only ‘the crucified lover of humanity,’ in
opposition to all orthodox Russia, which calls to Him, ‘For Thou art our
God!’ ”

At this the President intervened and checked the over‐zealous speaker,
begging him not to exaggerate, not to overstep the bounds, and so on, as
presidents always do in such cases. The audience, too, was uneasy. The
public was restless: there were even exclamations of indignation.
Fetyukovitch did not so much as reply; he only mounted the tribune to lay
his hand on his heart and, with an offended voice, utter a few words full
of dignity. He only touched again, lightly and ironically, on “romancing”
and “psychology,” and in an appropriate place quoted, “Jupiter, you are
angry, therefore you are wrong,” which provoked a burst of approving
laughter in the audience, for Ippolit Kirillovitch was by no means like
Jupiter. Then, _à propos_ of the accusation that he was teaching the young
generation to murder their fathers, Fetyukovitch observed, with great
dignity, that he would not even answer. As for the prosecutor’s charge of
uttering unorthodox opinions, Fetyukovitch hinted that it was a personal
insinuation and that he had expected in this court to be secure from
accusations “damaging to my reputation as a citizen and a loyal subject.”
But at these words the President pulled him up, too, and Fetyukovitch
concluded his speech with a bow, amid a hum of approbation in the court.
And Ippolit Kirillovitch was, in the opinion of our ladies, “crushed for
good.”

Then the prisoner was allowed to speak. Mitya stood up, but said very
little. He was fearfully exhausted, physically and mentally. The look of
strength and independence with which he had entered in the morning had
almost disappeared. He seemed as though he had passed through an
experience that day, which had taught him for the rest of his life
something very important he had not understood till then. His voice was
weak, he did not shout as before. In his words there was a new note of
humility, defeat and submission.

“What am I to say, gentlemen of the jury? The hour of judgment has come
for me, I feel the hand of God upon me! The end has come to an erring man!
But, before God, I repeat to you, I am innocent of my father’s blood! For
the last time I repeat, it wasn’t I killed him! I was erring, but I loved
what is good. Every instant I strove to reform, but I lived like a wild
beast. I thank the prosecutor, he told me many things about myself that I
did not know; but it’s not true that I killed my father, the prosecutor is
mistaken. I thank my counsel, too. I cried listening to him; but it’s not
true that I killed my father, and he needn’t have supposed it. And don’t
believe the doctors. I am perfectly sane, only my heart is heavy. If you
spare me, if you let me go, I will pray for you. I will be a better man. I
give you my word before God I will! And if you will condemn me, I’ll break
my sword over my head myself and kiss the pieces. But spare me, do not rob
me of my God! I know myself, I shall rebel! My heart is heavy, gentlemen
... spare me!”

He almost fell back in his place: his voice broke: he could hardly
articulate the last phrase. Then the judges proceeded to put the questions
and began to ask both sides to formulate their conclusions.

But I will not describe the details. At last the jury rose to retire for
consultation. The President was very tired, and so his last charge to the
jury was rather feeble. “Be impartial, don’t be influenced by the
eloquence of the defense, but yet weigh the arguments. Remember that there
is a great responsibility laid upon you,” and so on and so on.

The jury withdrew and the court adjourned. People could get up, move
about, exchange their accumulated impressions, refresh themselves at the
buffet. It was very late, almost one o’clock in the night, but nobody went
away: the strain was so great that no one could think of repose. All
waited with sinking hearts; though that is, perhaps, too much to say, for
the ladies were only in a state of hysterical impatience and their hearts
were untroubled. An acquittal, they thought, was inevitable. They all
prepared themselves for a dramatic moment of general enthusiasm. I must
own there were many among the men, too, who were convinced that an
acquittal was inevitable. Some were pleased, others frowned, while some
were simply dejected, not wanting him to be acquitted. Fetyukovitch
himself was confident of his success. He was surrounded by people
congratulating him and fawning upon him.

“There are,” he said to one group, as I was told afterwards, “there are
invisible threads binding the counsel for the defense with the jury. One
feels during one’s speech if they are being formed. I was aware of them.
They exist. Our cause is won. Set your mind at rest.”

“What will our peasants say now?” said one stout, cross‐looking, pock‐
marked gentleman, a landowner of the neighborhood, approaching a group of
gentlemen engaged in conversation.

“But they are not all peasants. There are four government clerks among
them.”

“Yes, there are clerks,” said a member of the district council, joining
the group.

“And do you know that Nazaryev, the merchant with the medal, a juryman?”

“What of him?”

“He is a man with brains.”

“But he never speaks.”

“He is no great talker, but so much the better. There’s no need for the
Petersburg man to teach him: he could teach all Petersburg himself. He’s
the father of twelve children. Think of that!”

“Upon my word, you don’t suppose they won’t acquit him?” one of our young
officials exclaimed in another group.

“They’ll acquit him for certain,” said a resolute voice.

“It would be shameful, disgraceful, not to acquit him!” cried the
official. “Suppose he did murder him—there are fathers and fathers! And,
besides, he was in such a frenzy.... He really may have done nothing but
swing the pestle in the air, and so knocked the old man down. But it was a
pity they dragged the valet in. That was simply an absurd theory! If I’d
been in Fetyukovitch’s place, I should simply have said straight out: ‘He
murdered him; but he is not guilty, hang it all!’ ”

“That’s what he did, only without saying, ‘Hang it all!’ ”

“No, Mihail Semyonovitch, he almost said that, too,” put in a third voice.

“Why, gentlemen, in Lent an actress was acquitted in our town who had cut
the throat of her lover’s lawful wife.”

“Oh, but she did not finish cutting it.”

“That makes no difference. She began cutting it.”

“What did you think of what he said about children? Splendid, wasn’t it?”

“Splendid!”

“And about mysticism, too!”

“Oh, drop mysticism, do!” cried some one else; “think of Ippolit and his
fate from this day forth. His wife will scratch his eyes out to‐morrow for
Mitya’s sake.”

“Is she here?”

“What an idea! If she’d been here she’d have scratched them out in court.
She is at home with toothache. He he he!”

“He he he!”

In a third group:

“I dare say they will acquit Mitenka, after all.”

“I should not be surprised if he turns the ‘Metropolis’ upside down to‐
morrow. He will be drinking for ten days!”

“Oh, the devil!”

“The devil’s bound to have a hand in it. Where should he be if not here?”

“Well, gentlemen, I admit it was eloquent. But still it’s not the thing to
break your father’s head with a pestle! Or what are we coming to?”

“The chariot! Do you remember the chariot?”

“Yes; he turned a cart into a chariot!”

“And to‐morrow he will turn a chariot into a cart, just to suit his
purpose.”

“What cunning chaps there are nowadays! Is there any justice to be had in
Russia?”

But the bell rang. The jury deliberated for exactly an hour, neither more
nor less. A profound silence reigned in the court as soon as the public
had taken their seats. I remember how the jurymen walked into the court.
At last! I won’t repeat the questions in order, and, indeed, I have
forgotten them. I remember only the answer to the President’s first and
chief question: “Did the prisoner commit the murder for the sake of
robbery and with premeditation?” (I don’t remember the exact words.) There
was a complete hush. The foreman of the jury, the youngest of the clerks,
pronounced, in a clear, loud voice, amidst the deathlike stillness of the
court:

“Yes, guilty!”

And the same answer was repeated to every question: “Yes, guilty!” and
without the slightest extenuating comment. This no one had expected;
almost every one had reckoned upon a recommendation to mercy, at least.
The deathlike silence in the court was not broken—all seemed petrified:
those who desired his conviction as well as those who had been eager for
his acquittal. But that was only for the first instant, and it was
followed by a fearful hubbub. Many of the men in the audience were
pleased. Some were rubbing their hands with no attempt to conceal their
joy. Those who disagreed with the verdict seemed crushed, shrugged their
shoulders, whispered, but still seemed unable to realize this. But how
shall I describe the state the ladies were in? I thought they would create
a riot. At first they could scarcely believe their ears. Then suddenly the
whole court rang with exclamations: “What’s the meaning of it? What next?”
They leapt up from their places. They seemed to fancy that it might be at
once reconsidered and reversed. At that instant Mitya suddenly stood up
and cried in a heartrending voice, stretching his hands out before him:

“I swear by God and the dreadful Day of Judgment I am not guilty of my
father’s blood! Katya, I forgive you! Brothers, friends, have pity on the
other woman!”

He could not go on, and broke into a terrible sobbing wail that was heard
all over the court in a strange, unnatural voice unlike his own. From the
farthest corner at the back of the gallery came a piercing shriek—it was
Grushenka. She had succeeded in begging admittance to the court again
before the beginning of the lawyers’ speeches. Mitya was taken away. The
passing of the sentence was deferred till next day. The whole court was in
a hubbub but I did not wait to hear. I only remember a few exclamations I
heard on the steps as I went out.

“He’ll have a twenty years’ trip to the mines!”

“Not less.”

“Well, our peasants have stood firm.”

“And have done for our Mitya.”





EPILOGUE




Chapter I. Plans For Mitya’s Escape


Very early, at nine o’clock in the morning, five days after the trial,
Alyosha went to Katerina Ivanovna’s to talk over a matter of great
importance to both of them, and to give her a message. She sat and talked
to him in the very room in which she had once received Grushenka. In the
next room Ivan Fyodorovitch lay unconscious in a high fever. Katerina
Ivanovna had immediately after the scene at the trial ordered the sick and
unconscious man to be carried to her house, disregarding the inevitable
gossip and general disapproval of the public. One of the two relations who
lived with her had departed to Moscow immediately after the scene in
court, the other remained. But if both had gone away, Katerina Ivanovna
would have adhered to her resolution, and would have gone on nursing the
sick man and sitting by him day and night. Varvinsky and Herzenstube were
attending him. The famous doctor had gone back to Moscow, refusing to give
an opinion as to the probable end of the illness. Though the doctors
encouraged Katerina Ivanovna and Alyosha, it was evident that they could
not yet give them positive hopes of recovery.

Alyosha came to see his sick brother twice a day. But this time he had
specially urgent business, and he foresaw how difficult it would be to
approach the subject, yet he was in great haste. He had another engagement
that could not be put off for that same morning, and there was need of
haste.

They had been talking for a quarter of an hour. Katerina Ivanovna was pale
and terribly fatigued, yet at the same time in a state of hysterical
excitement. She had a presentiment of the reason why Alyosha had come to
her.

“Don’t worry about his decision,” she said, with confident emphasis to
Alyosha. “One way or another he is bound to come to it. He must escape.
That unhappy man, that hero of honor and principle—not he, not Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, but the man lying the other side of that door, who has
sacrificed himself for his brother,” Katya added, with flashing eyes—“told
me the whole plan of escape long ago. You know he has already entered into
negotiations.... I’ve told you something already.... You see, it will
probably come off at the third _étape_ from here, when the party of
prisoners is being taken to Siberia. Oh, it’s a long way off yet. Ivan
Fyodorovitch has already visited the superintendent of the third _étape_.
But we don’t know yet who will be in charge of the party, and it’s
impossible to find that out so long beforehand. To‐morrow perhaps I will
show you in detail the whole plan which Ivan Fyodorovitch left me on the
eve of the trial in case of need.... That was when—do you remember?—you
found us quarreling. He had just gone down‐stairs, but seeing you I made
him come back; do you remember? Do you know what we were quarreling about
then?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha.

“Of course he did not tell you. It was about that plan of escape. He had
told me the main idea three days before, and we began quarreling about it
at once and quarreled for three days. We quarreled because, when he told
me that if Dmitri Fyodorovitch were convicted he would escape abroad with
that creature, I felt furious at once—I can’t tell you why, I don’t know
myself why.... Oh, of course, I was furious then about that creature, and
that she, too, should go abroad with Dmitri!” Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed
suddenly, her lips quivering with anger. “As soon as Ivan Fyodorovitch saw
that I was furious about that woman, he instantly imagined I was jealous
of Dmitri and that I still loved Dmitri. That is how our first quarrel
began. I would not give an explanation, I could not ask forgiveness. I
could not bear to think that such a man could suspect me of still loving
that ... and when I myself had told him long before that I did not love
Dmitri, that I loved no one but him! It was only resentment against that
creature that made me angry with him. Three days later, on the evening you
came, he brought me a sealed envelope, which I was to open at once, if
anything happened to him. Oh, he foresaw his illness! He told me that the
envelope contained the details of the escape, and that if he died or was
taken dangerously ill, I was to save Mitya alone. Then he left me money,
nearly ten thousand—those notes to which the prosecutor referred in his
speech, having learnt from some one that he had sent them to be changed. I
was tremendously impressed to find that Ivan Fyodorovitch had not given up
his idea of saving his brother, and was confiding this plan of escape to
me, though he was still jealous of me and still convinced that I loved
Mitya. Oh, that was a sacrifice! No, you cannot understand the greatness
of such self‐sacrifice, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I wanted to fall at his feet
in reverence, but I thought at once that he would take it only for my joy
at the thought of Mitya’s being saved (and he certainly would have
imagined that!), and I was so exasperated at the mere possibility of such
an unjust thought on his part that I lost my temper again, and instead of
kissing his feet, flew into a fury again! Oh, I am unhappy! It’s my
character, my awful, unhappy character! Oh, you will see, I shall end by
driving him, too, to abandon me for another with whom he can get on
better, like Dmitri. But ... no, I could not bear it, I should kill
myself. And when you came in then, and when I called to you and told him
to come back, I was so enraged by the look of contempt and hatred he
turned on me that—do you remember?—I cried out to you that it was he, he
alone who had persuaded me that his brother Dmitri was a murderer! I said
that malicious thing on purpose to wound him again. He had never, never
persuaded me that his brother was a murderer. On the contrary, it was I
who persuaded him! Oh, my vile temper was the cause of everything! I paved
the way to that hideous scene at the trial. He wanted to show me that he
was an honorable man, and that, even if I loved his brother, he would not
ruin him for revenge or jealousy. So he came to the court ... I am the
cause of it all, I alone am to blame!”

Katya never had made such confessions to Alyosha before, and he felt that
she was now at that stage of unbearable suffering when even the proudest
heart painfully crushes its pride and falls vanquished by grief. Oh,
Alyosha knew another terrible reason of her present misery, though she had
carefully concealed it from him during those days since the trial; but it
would have been for some reason too painful to him if she had been brought
so low as to speak to him now about that. She was suffering for her
“treachery” at the trial, and Alyosha felt that her conscience was
impelling her to confess it to him, to him, Alyosha, with tears and cries
and hysterical writhings on the floor. But he dreaded that moment and
longed to spare her. It made the commission on which he had come even more
difficult. He spoke of Mitya again.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t be anxious about him!” she began
again, sharply and stubbornly. “All that is only momentary, I know him, I
know his heart only too well. You may be sure he will consent to escape.
It’s not as though it would be immediately; he will have time to make up
his mind to it. Ivan Fyodorovitch will be well by that time and will
manage it all himself, so that I shall have nothing to do with it. Don’t
be anxious; he will consent to run away. He has agreed already: do you
suppose he would give up that creature? And they won’t let her go to him,
so he is bound to escape. It’s you he’s most afraid of, he is afraid you
won’t approve of his escape on moral grounds. But you must generously
_allow_ it, if your sanction is so necessary,” Katya added viciously. She
paused and smiled.

“He talks about some hymn,” she went on again, “some cross he has to bear,
some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great deal about it, and
if you knew how he talked!” Katya cried suddenly, with feeling she could
not repress, “if you knew how he loved that wretched man at the moment he
told me, and how he hated him, perhaps, at the same moment. And I heard
his story and his tears with sneering disdain. Brute! Yes, I am a brute. I
am responsible for his fever. But that man in prison is incapable of
suffering,” Katya concluded irritably. “Can such a man suffer? Men like
him never suffer!”

There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words. And
yet it was she who had betrayed him. “Perhaps because she feels how she’s
wronged him she hates him at moments,” Alyosha thought to himself. He
hoped that it was only “at moments.” In Katya’s last words he detected a
challenging note, but he did not take it up.

“I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him yourself.
Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be dishonorable, cowardly,
or something ... unchristian, perhaps?” Katya added, even more defiantly.

“Oh, no. I’ll tell him everything,” muttered Alyosha. “He asks you to come
and see him to‐day,” he blurted out suddenly, looking her steadily in the
face. She started, and drew back a little from him on the sofa.

“Me? Can that be?” she faltered, turning pale.

“It can and ought to be!” Alyosha began emphatically, growing more
animated. “He needs you particularly just now. I would not have opened the
subject and worried you, if it were not necessary. He is ill, he is beside
himself, he keeps asking for you. It is not to be reconciled with you that
he wants you, but only that you would go and show yourself at his door. So
much has happened to him since that day. He realizes that he has injured
you beyond all reckoning. He does not ask your forgiveness—‘It’s
impossible to forgive me,’ he says himself—but only that you would show
yourself in his doorway.”

“It’s so sudden....” faltered Katya. “I’ve had a presentiment all these
days that you would come with that message. I knew he would ask me to
come. It’s impossible!”

“Let it be impossible, but do it. Only think, he realizes for the first
time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life; he had never
grasped it before so fully. He said, ‘If she refuses to come I shall be
unhappy all my life.’ Do you hear? though he is condemned to penal
servitude for twenty years, he is still planning to be happy—is not that
piteous? Think—you must visit him; though he is ruined, he is innocent,”
broke like a challenge from Alyosha. “His hands are clean, there is no
blood on them! For the sake of his infinite sufferings in the future visit
him now. Go, greet him on his way into the darkness—stand at his door,
that is all.... You ought to do it, you ought to!” Alyosha concluded,
laying immense stress on the word “ought.”

“I ought to ... but I cannot....” Katya moaned. “He will look at me.... I
can’t.”

“Your eyes ought to meet. How will you live all your life, if you don’t
make up your mind to do it now?”

“Better suffer all my life.”

“You ought to go, you ought to go,” Alyosha repeated with merciless
emphasis.

“But why to‐day, why at once?... I can’t leave our patient—”

“You can for a moment. It will only be a moment. If you don’t come, he
will be in delirium by to‐night. I would not tell you a lie; have pity on
him!”

“Have pity on _me!_” Katya said, with bitter reproach, and she burst into
tears.

“Then you will come,” said Alyosha firmly, seeing her tears. “I’ll go and
tell him you will come directly.”

“No, don’t tell him so on any account,” cried Katya in alarm. “I will
come, but don’t tell him beforehand, for perhaps I may go, but not go
in.... I don’t know yet—”

Her voice failed her. She gasped for breath. Alyosha got up to go.

“And what if I meet any one?” she said suddenly, in a low voice, turning
white again.

“That’s just why you must go now, to avoid meeting any one. There will be
no one there, I can tell you that for certain. We will expect you,” he
concluded emphatically, and went out of the room.




Chapter II. For A Moment The Lie Becomes Truth


He hurried to the hospital where Mitya was lying now. The day after his
fate was determined, Mitya had fallen ill with nervous fever, and was sent
to the prison division of the town hospital. But at the request of several
persons (Alyosha, Madame Hohlakov, Lise, etc.), Doctor Varvinsky had put
Mitya not with other prisoners, but in a separate little room, the one
where Smerdyakov had been. It is true that there was a sentinel at the
other end of the corridor, and there was a grating over the window, so
that Varvinsky could be at ease about the indulgence he had shown, which
was not quite legal, indeed; but he was a kind‐hearted and compassionate
young man. He knew how hard it would be for a man like Mitya to pass at
once so suddenly into the society of robbers and murderers, and that he
must get used to it by degrees. The visits of relations and friends were
informally sanctioned by the doctor and overseer, and even by the police
captain. But only Alyosha and Grushenka had visited Mitya. Rakitin had
tried to force his way in twice, but Mitya persistently begged Varvinsky
not to admit him.

Alyosha found him sitting on his bed in a hospital dressing‐gown, rather
feverish, with a towel, soaked in vinegar and water, on his head. He
looked at Alyosha as he came in with an undefined expression, but there
was a shade of something like dread discernible in it. He had become
terribly preoccupied since the trial; sometimes he would be silent for
half an hour together, and seemed to be pondering something heavily and
painfully, oblivious of everything about him. If he roused himself from
his brooding and began to talk, he always spoke with a kind of abruptness
and never of what he really wanted to say. He looked sometimes with a face
of suffering at his brother. He seemed to be more at ease with Grushenka
than with Alyosha. It is true, he scarcely spoke to her at all, but as
soon as she came in, his whole face lighted up with joy.

Alyosha sat down beside him on the bed in silence. This time Mitya was
waiting for Alyosha in suspense, but he did not dare ask him a question.
He felt it almost unthinkable that Katya would consent to come, and at the
same time he felt that if she did not come, something inconceivable would
happen. Alyosha understood his feelings.

“Trifon Borissovitch,” Mitya began nervously, “has pulled his whole inn to
pieces, I am told. He’s taken up the flooring, pulled apart the planks,
split up all the gallery, I am told. He is seeking treasure all the
time—the fifteen hundred roubles which the prosecutor said I’d hidden
there. He began playing these tricks, they say, as soon as he got home.
Serve him right, the swindler! The guard here told me yesterday; he comes
from there.”

“Listen,” began Alyosha. “She will come, but I don’t know when. Perhaps
to‐day, perhaps in a few days, that I can’t tell. But she will come, she
will, that’s certain.”

Mitya started, would have said something, but was silent. The news had a
tremendous effect on him. It was evident that he would have liked terribly
to know what had been said, but he was again afraid to ask. Something
cruel and contemptuous from Katya would have cut him like a knife at that
moment.

“This was what she said among other things; that I must be sure to set
your conscience at rest about escaping. If Ivan is not well by then she
will see to it all herself.”

“You’ve spoken of that already,” Mitya observed musingly.

“And you have repeated it to Grusha,” observed Alyosha.

“Yes,” Mitya admitted. “She won’t come this morning.” He looked timidly at
his brother. “She won’t come till the evening. When I told her yesterday
that Katya was taking measures, she was silent, but she set her mouth. She
only whispered, ‘Let her!’ She understood that it was important. I did not
dare to try her further. She understands now, I think, that Katya no
longer cares for me, but loves Ivan.”

“Does she?” broke from Alyosha.

“Perhaps she does not. Only she is not coming this morning,” Mitya
hastened to explain again; “I asked her to do something for me. You know,
Ivan is superior to all of us. He ought to live, not us. He will recover.”

“Would you believe it, though Katya is alarmed about him, she scarcely
doubts of his recovery,” said Alyosha.

“That means that she is convinced he will die. It’s because she is
frightened she’s so sure he will get well.”

“Ivan has a strong constitution, and I, too, believe there’s every hope
that he will get well,” Alyosha observed anxiously.

“Yes, he will get well. But she is convinced that he will die. She has a
great deal of sorrow to bear...” A silence followed. A grave anxiety was
fretting Mitya.

“Alyosha, I love Grusha terribly,” he said suddenly in a shaking voice,
full of tears.

“They won’t let her go out there to you,” Alyosha put in at once.

“And there is something else I wanted to tell you,” Mitya went on, with a
sudden ring in his voice. “If they beat me on the way or out there, I
won’t submit to it. I shall kill some one, and shall be shot for it. And
this will be going on for twenty years! They speak to me rudely as it is.
I’ve been lying here all night, passing judgment on myself. I am not
ready! I am not able to resign myself. I wanted to sing a ‘hymn’; but if a
guard speaks rudely to me, I have not the strength to bear it. For Grusha
I would bear anything ... anything except blows.... But she won’t be
allowed to come there.”

Alyosha smiled gently.

“Listen, brother, once for all,” he said. “This is what I think about it.
And you know that I would not tell you a lie. Listen: you are not ready,
and such a cross is not for you. What’s more, you don’t need such a
martyr’s cross when you are not ready for it. If you had murdered our
father, it would grieve me that you should reject your punishment. But you
are innocent, and such a cross is too much for you. You wanted to make
yourself another man by suffering. I say, only remember that other man
always, all your life and wherever you go; and that will be enough for
you. Your refusal of that great cross will only serve to make you feel all
your life an even greater duty, and that constant feeling will do more to
make you a new man, perhaps, than if you went there. For there you would
not endure it and would repine, and perhaps at last would say: ‘I am
quits.’ The lawyer was right about that. Such heavy burdens are not for
all men. For some they are impossible. These are my thoughts about it, if
you want them so much. If other men would have to answer for your escape,
officers or soldiers, then I would not have ‘allowed’ you,” smiled
Alyosha. “But they declare—the superintendent of that _étape_ told Ivan
himself—that if it’s well managed there will be no great inquiry, and that
they can get off easily. Of course, bribing is dishonest even in such a
case, but I can’t undertake to judge about it, because if Ivan and Katya
commissioned me to act for you, I know I should go and give bribes. I must
tell you the truth. And so I can’t judge of your own action. But let me
assure you that I shall never condemn you. And it would be a strange thing
if I could judge you in this. Now I think I’ve gone into everything.”

“But I do condemn myself!” cried Mitya. “I shall escape, that was settled
apart from you; could Mitya Karamazov do anything but run away? But I
shall condemn myself, and I will pray for my sin for ever. That’s how the
Jesuits talk, isn’t it? Just as we are doing?”

“Yes.” Alyosha smiled gently.

“I love you for always telling the whole truth and never hiding anything,”
cried Mitya, with a joyful laugh. “So I’ve caught my Alyosha being
Jesuitical. I must kiss you for that. Now listen to the rest; I’ll open
the other side of my heart to you. This is what I planned and decided. If
I run away, even with money and a passport, and even to America, I should
be cheered up by the thought that I am not running away for pleasure, not
for happiness, but to another exile as bad, perhaps, as Siberia. It is as
bad, Alyosha, it is! I hate that America, damn it, already. Even though
Grusha will be with me. Just look at her; is she an American? She is
Russian, Russian to the marrow of her bones; she will be homesick for the
mother country, and I shall see every hour that she is suffering for my
sake, that she has taken up that cross for me. And what harm has she done?
And how shall I, too, put up with the rabble out there, though they may be
better than I, every one of them? I hate that America already! And though
they may be wonderful at machinery, every one of them, damn them, they are
not of my soul. I love Russia, Alyosha, I love the Russian God, though I
am a scoundrel myself. I shall choke there!” he exclaimed, his eyes
suddenly flashing. His voice was trembling with tears. “So this is what
I’ve decided, Alyosha, listen,” he began again, mastering his emotion. “As
soon as I arrive there with Grusha, we will set to work at once on the
land, in solitude, somewhere very remote, with wild bears. There must be
some remote parts even there. I am told there are still Redskins there,
somewhere, on the edge of the horizon. So to the country of the _Last of
the Mohicans_, and there we’ll tackle the grammar at once, Grusha and I.
Work and grammar—that’s how we’ll spend three years. And by that time we
shall speak English like any Englishman. And as soon as we’ve learnt
it—good‐by to America! We’ll run here to Russia as American citizens.
Don’t be uneasy—we would not come to this little town. We’d hide
somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be
changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall
make me some sort of wart on my face—what’s the use of their being so
mechanical!—or else I’ll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I
shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won’t recognize us.
And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don’t care. It will show
it’s our fate. We’ll work on the land here, too, somewhere in the wilds,
and I’ll make up as an American all my life. But we shall die on our own
soil. That’s my plan, and it shan’t be altered. Do you approve?”

“Yes,” said Alyosha, not wanting to contradict him. Mitya paused for a
minute and said suddenly:

“And how they worked it up at the trial! Didn’t they work it up!”

“If they had not, you would have been convicted just the same,” said
Alyosha, with a sigh.

“Yes, people are sick of me here! God bless them, but it’s hard,” Mitya
moaned miserably. Again there was silence for a minute.

“Alyosha, put me out of my misery at once!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Tell
me, is she coming now, or not? Tell me? What did she say? How did she say
it?”

“She said she would come, but I don’t know whether she will come to‐day.
It’s hard for her, you know,” Alyosha looked timidly at his brother.

“I should think it is hard for her! Alyosha, it will drive me out of my
mind. Grusha keeps looking at me. She understands. My God, calm my heart:
what is it I want? I want Katya! Do I understand what I want? It’s the
headstrong, evil Karamazov spirit! No, I am not fit for suffering. I am a
scoundrel, that’s all one can say.”

“Here she is!” cried Alyosha.

At that instant Katya appeared in the doorway. For a moment she stood
still, gazing at Mitya with a dazed expression. He leapt impulsively to
his feet, and a scared look came into his face. He turned pale, but a
timid, pleading smile appeared on his lips at once, and with an
irresistible impulse he held out both hands to Katya. Seeing it, she flew
impetuously to him. She seized him by the hands, and almost by force made
him sit down on the bed. She sat down beside him, and still keeping his
hands pressed them violently. Several times they both strove to speak, but
stopped short and again gazed speechless with a strange smile, their eyes
fastened on one another. So passed two minutes.

“Have you forgiven me?” Mitya faltered at last, and at the same moment
turning to Alyosha, his face working with joy, he cried, “Do you hear what
I am asking, do you hear?”

“That’s what I loved you for, that you are generous at heart!” broke from
Katya. “My forgiveness is no good to you, nor yours to me; whether you
forgive me or not, you will always be a sore place in my heart, and I in
yours—so it must be....” She stopped to take breath. “What have I come
for?” she began again with nervous haste: “to embrace your feet, to press
your hands like this, till it hurts—you remember how in Moscow I used to
squeeze them—to tell you again that you are my god, my joy, to tell you
that I love you madly,” she moaned in anguish, and suddenly pressed his
hand greedily to her lips. Tears streamed from her eyes. Alyosha stood
speechless and confounded; he had never expected what he was seeing.

“Love is over, Mitya!” Katya began again, “but the past is painfully dear
to me. Know that you will always be so. But now let what might have been
come true for one minute,” she faltered, with a drawn smile, looking into
his face joyfully again. “You love another woman, and I love another man,
and yet I shall love you for ever, and you will love me; do you know that?
Do you hear? Love me, love me all your life!” she cried, with a quiver
almost of menace in her voice.

“I shall love you, and ... do you know, Katya,” Mitya began, drawing a
deep breath at each word, “do you know, five days ago, that same evening,
I loved you.... When you fell down and were carried out ... All my life!
So it will be, so it will always be—”

So they murmured to one another frantic words, almost meaningless, perhaps
not even true, but at that moment it was all true, and they both believed
what they said implicitly.

“Katya,” cried Mitya suddenly, “do you believe I murdered him? I know you
don’t believe it now, but then ... when you gave evidence.... Surely,
surely you did not believe it!”

“I did not believe it even then. I’ve never believed it. I hated you, and
for a moment I persuaded myself. While I was giving evidence I persuaded
myself and believed it, but when I’d finished speaking I left off
believing it at once. Don’t doubt that! I have forgotten that I came here
to punish myself,” she said, with a new expression in her voice, quite
unlike the loving tones of a moment before.

“Woman, yours is a heavy burden,” broke, as it were, involuntarily from
Mitya.

“Let me go,” she whispered. “I’ll come again. It’s more than I can bear
now.”

She was getting up from her place, but suddenly uttered a loud scream and
staggered back. Grushenka walked suddenly and noiselessly into the room.
No one had expected her. Katya moved swiftly to the door, but when she
reached Grushenka, she stopped suddenly, turned as white as chalk and
moaned softly, almost in a whisper:

“Forgive me!”

Grushenka stared at her and, pausing for an instant, in a vindictive,
venomous voice, answered:

“We are full of hatred, my girl, you and I! We are both full of hatred! As
though we could forgive one another! Save him, and I’ll worship you all my
life.”

“You won’t forgive her!” cried Mitya, with frantic reproach.

“Don’t be anxious, I’ll save him for you!” Katya whispered rapidly, and
she ran out of the room.

“And you could refuse to forgive her when she begged your forgiveness
herself?” Mitya exclaimed bitterly again.

“Mitya, don’t dare to blame her; you have no right to!” Alyosha cried
hotly.

“Her proud lips spoke, not her heart,” Grushenka brought out in a tone of
disgust. “If she saves you I’ll forgive her everything—”

She stopped speaking, as though suppressing something. She could not yet
recover herself. She had come in, as appeared afterwards, accidentally,
with no suspicion of what she would meet.

“Alyosha, run after her!” Mitya cried to his brother; “tell her ... I
don’t know ... don’t let her go away like this!”

“I’ll come to you again at nightfall,” said Alyosha, and he ran after
Katya. He overtook her outside the hospital grounds. She was walking fast,
but as soon as Alyosha caught her up she said quickly:

“No, before that woman I can’t punish myself! I asked her forgiveness
because I wanted to punish myself to the bitter end. She would not forgive
me.... I like her for that!” she added, in an unnatural voice, and her
eyes flashed with fierce resentment.

“My brother did not expect this in the least,” muttered Alyosha. “He was
sure she would not come—”

“No doubt. Let us leave that,” she snapped. “Listen: I can’t go with you
to the funeral now. I’ve sent them flowers. I think they still have money.
If necessary, tell them I’ll never abandon them.... Now leave me, leave
me, please. You are late as it is—the bells are ringing for the
service.... Leave me, please!”




Chapter III. Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech At The Stone


He really was late. They had waited for him and had already decided to
bear the pretty flower‐decked little coffin to the church without him. It
was the coffin of poor little Ilusha. He had died two days after Mitya was
sentenced. At the gate of the house Alyosha was met by the shouts of the
boys, Ilusha’s schoolfellows. They had all been impatiently expecting him
and were glad that he had come at last. There were about twelve of them,
they all had their school‐bags or satchels on their shoulders. “Father
will cry, be with father,” Ilusha had told them as he lay dying, and the
boys remembered it. Kolya Krassotkin was the foremost of them.

“How glad I am you’ve come, Karamazov!” he cried, holding out his hand to
Alyosha. “It’s awful here. It’s really horrible to see it. Snegiryov is
not drunk, we know for a fact he’s had nothing to drink to‐day, but he
seems as if he were drunk ... I am always manly, but this is awful.
Karamazov, if I am not keeping you, one question before you go in?”

“What is it, Kolya?” said Alyosha.

“Is your brother innocent or guilty? Was it he killed your father or was
it the valet? As you say, so it will be. I haven’t slept for the last four
nights for thinking of it.”

“The valet killed him, my brother is innocent,” answered Alyosha.

“That’s what I said,” cried Smurov.

“So he will perish an innocent victim!” exclaimed Kolya; “though he is
ruined he is happy! I could envy him!”

“What do you mean? How can you? Why?” cried Alyosha surprised.

“Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!” said Kolya
with enthusiasm.

“But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horror!” said
Alyosha.

“Of course ... I should like to die for all humanity, and as for disgrace,
I don’t care about that—our names may perish. I respect your brother!”

“And so do I!” the boy, who had once declared that he knew who had founded
Troy, cried suddenly and unexpectedly, and he blushed up to his ears like
a peony as he had done on that occasion.

Alyosha went into the room. Ilusha lay with his hands folded and his eyes
closed in a blue coffin with a white frill round it. His thin face was
hardly changed at all, and strange to say there was no smell of decay from
the corpse. The expression of his face was serious and, as it were,
thoughtful. His hands, crossed over his breast, looked particularly
beautiful, as though chiseled in marble. There were flowers in his hands
and the coffin, inside and out, was decked with flowers, which had been
sent early in the morning by Lise Hohlakov. But there were flowers too
from Katerina Ivanovna, and when Alyosha opened the door, the captain had
a bunch in his trembling hands and was strewing them again over his dear
boy. He scarcely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, and he would not look
at any one, even at his crazy weeping wife, “mamma,” who kept trying to
stand on her crippled legs to get a nearer look at her dead boy. Nina had
been pushed in her chair by the boys close up to the coffin. She sat with
her head pressed to it and she too was no doubt quietly weeping.
Snegiryov’s face looked eager, yet bewildered and exasperated. There was
something crazy about his gestures and the words that broke from him. “Old
man, dear old man!” he exclaimed every minute, gazing at Ilusha. It was
his habit to call Ilusha “old man,” as a term of affection when he was
alive.

“Father, give me a flower, too; take that white one out of his hand and
give it me,” the crazy mother begged, whimpering. Either because the
little white rose in Ilusha’s hand had caught her fancy or that she wanted
one from his hand to keep in memory of him, she moved restlessly,
stretching out her hands for the flower.

“I won’t give it to any one, I won’t give you anything,” Snegiryov cried
callously. “They are his flowers, not yours! Everything is his, nothing is
yours!”

“Father, give mother a flower!” said Nina, lifting her face wet with
tears.

“I won’t give away anything and to her less than any one! She didn’t love
Ilusha. She took away his little cannon and he gave it to her,” the
captain broke into loud sobs at the thought of how Ilusha had given up his
cannon to his mother. The poor, crazy creature was bathed in noiseless
tears, hiding her face in her hands.

The boys, seeing that the father would not leave the coffin and that it
was time to carry it out, stood round it in a close circle and began to
lift it up.

“I don’t want him to be buried in the churchyard,” Snegiryov wailed
suddenly; “I’ll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilusha told me to. I
won’t let him be carried out!”

He had been saying for the last three days that he would bury him by the
stone, but Alyosha, Krassotkin, the landlady, her sister and all the boys
interfered.

“What an idea, bury him by an unholy stone, as though he had hanged
himself!” the old landlady said sternly. “There in the churchyard the
ground has been crossed. He’ll be prayed for there. One can hear the
singing in church and the deacon reads so plainly and verbally that it
will reach him every time just as though it were read over his grave.”

At last the captain made a gesture of despair as though to say, “Take him
where you will.” The boys raised the coffin, but as they passed the
mother, they stopped for a moment and lowered it that she might say good‐
by to Ilusha. But on seeing that precious little face, which for the last
three days she had only looked at from a distance, she trembled all over
and her gray head began twitching spasmodically over the coffin.

“Mother, make the sign of the cross over him, give him your blessing, kiss
him,” Nina cried to her. But her head still twitched like an automaton and
with a face contorted with bitter grief she began, without a word, beating
her breast with her fist. They carried the coffin past her. Nina pressed
her lips to her brother’s for the last time as they bore the coffin by
her. As Alyosha went out of the house he begged the landlady to look after
those who were left behind, but she interrupted him before he had
finished.

“To be sure, I’ll stay with them, we are Christians, too.” The old woman
wept as she said it.

They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more than three
hundred paces. It was a still, clear day, with a slight frost. The church
bells were still ringing. Snegiryov ran fussing and distracted after the
coffin, in his short old summer overcoat, with his head bare and his soft,
old, wide‐brimmed hat in his hand. He seemed in a state of bewildered
anxiety. At one minute he stretched out his hand to support the head of
the coffin and only hindered the bearers, at another he ran alongside and
tried to find a place for himself there. A flower fell on the snow and he
rushed to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the
loss of that flower.

“And the crust of bread, we’ve forgotten the crust!” he cried suddenly in
dismay. But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust of
bread already and that it was in his pocket. He instantly pulled it out
and was reassured.

“Ilusha told me to, Ilusha,” he explained at once to Alyosha. “I was
sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: ‘Father, when my grave
is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly
down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.’ ”

“That’s a good thing,” said Alyosha, “we must often take some.”

“Every day, every day!” said the captain quickly, seeming cheered at the
thought.

They reached the church at last and set the coffin in the middle of it.
The boys surrounded it and remained reverently standing so, all through
the service. It was an old and rather poor church; many of the ikons were
without settings; but such churches are the best for praying in. During
the mass Snegiryov became somewhat calmer, though at times he had
outbursts of the same unconscious and, as it were, incoherent anxiety. At
one moment he went up to the coffin to set straight the cover or the
wreath, when a candle fell out of the candlestick he rushed to replace it
and was a fearful time fumbling over it, then he subsided and stood
quietly by the coffin with a look of blank uneasiness and perplexity.
After the Epistle he suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing
beside him, that the Epistle had not been read properly but did not
explain what he meant. During the prayer, “Like the Cherubim,” he joined
in the singing but did not go on to the end. Falling on his knees, he
pressed his forehead to the stone floor and lay so for a long while.

At last came the funeral service itself and candles were distributed. The
distracted father began fussing about again, but the touching and
impressive funeral prayers moved and roused his soul. He seemed suddenly
to shrink together and broke into rapid, short sobs, which he tried at
first to smother, but at last he sobbed aloud. When they began taking
leave of the dead and closing the coffin, he flung his arms about, as
though he would not allow them to cover Ilusha, and began greedily and
persistently kissing his dead boy on the lips. At last they succeeded in
persuading him to come away from the step, but suddenly he impulsively
stretched out his hand and snatched a few flowers from the coffin. He
looked at them and a new idea seemed to dawn upon him, so that he
apparently forgot his grief for a minute. Gradually he seemed to sink into
brooding and did not resist when the coffin was lifted up and carried to
the grave. It was an expensive one in the churchyard close to the church,
Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it. After the customary rites the grave‐
diggers lowered the coffin. Snegiryov with his flowers in his hands bent
down so low over the open grave that the boys caught hold of his coat in
alarm and pulled him back. He did not seem to understand fully what was
happening. When they began filling up the grave, he suddenly pointed
anxiously at the falling earth and began trying to say something, but no
one could make out what he meant, and he stopped suddenly. Then he was
reminded that he must crumble the bread and he was awfully excited,
snatched up the bread and began pulling it to pieces and flinging the
morsels on the grave.

“Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!” he muttered anxiously.

One of the boys observed that it was awkward for him to crumble the bread
with the flowers in his hands and suggested he should give them to some
one to hold for a time. But he would not do this and seemed indeed
suddenly alarmed for his flowers, as though they wanted to take them from
him altogether. And after looking at the grave, and as it were, satisfying
himself that everything had been done and the bread had been crumbled, he
suddenly, to the surprise of every one, turned, quite composedly even, and
made his way homewards. But his steps became more and more hurried, he
almost ran. The boys and Alyosha kept up with him.

“The flowers are for mamma, the flowers are for mamma! I was unkind to
mamma,” he began exclaiming suddenly.

Some one called to him to put on his hat as it was cold. But he flung the
hat in the snow as though he were angry and kept repeating, “I won’t have
the hat, I won’t have the hat.” Smurov picked it up and carried it after
him. All the boys were crying, and Kolya and the boy who discovered about
Troy most of all. Though Smurov, with the captain’s hat in his hand, was
crying bitterly too, he managed, as he ran, to snatch up a piece of red
brick that lay on the snow of the path, to fling it at the flock of
sparrows that was flying by. He missed them, of course, and went on crying
as he ran. Half‐way, Snegiryov suddenly stopped, stood still for half a
minute, as though struck by something, and suddenly turning back to the
church, ran towards the deserted grave. But the boys instantly overtook
him and caught hold of him on all sides. Then he fell helpless on the snow
as though he had been knocked down, and struggling, sobbing, and wailing,
he began crying out, “Ilusha, old man, dear old man!” Alyosha and Kolya
tried to make him get up, soothing and persuading him.

“Captain, give over, a brave man must show fortitude,” muttered Kolya.

“You’ll spoil the flowers,” said Alyosha, “and mamma is expecting them,
she is sitting crying because you would not give her any before. Ilusha’s
little bed is still there—”

“Yes, yes, mamma!” Snegiryov suddenly recollected, “they’ll take away the
bed, they’ll take it away,” he added as though alarmed that they really
would. He jumped up and ran homewards again. But it was not far off and
they all arrived together. Snegiryov opened the door hurriedly and called
to his wife with whom he had so cruelly quarreled just before:

“Mamma, poor crippled darling, Ilusha has sent you these flowers,” he
cried, holding out to her a little bunch of flowers that had been frozen
and broken while he was struggling in the snow. But at that instant he saw
in the corner, by the little bed, Ilusha’s little boots, which the
landlady had put tidily side by side. Seeing the old, patched, rusty‐
looking, stiff boots he flung up his hands and rushed to them, fell on his
knees, snatched up one boot and, pressing his lips to it, began kissing it
greedily, crying, “Ilusha, old man, dear old man, where are your little
feet?”

“Where have you taken him away? Where have you taken him?” the lunatic
cried in a heartrending voice. Nina, too, broke into sobs. Kolya ran out
of the room, the boys followed him. At last Alyosha too went out.

“Let them weep,” he said to Kolya, “it’s no use trying to comfort them
just now. Let us wait a minute and then go back.”

“No, it’s no use, it’s awful,” Kolya assented. “Do you know, Karamazov,”
he dropped his voice so that no one could hear them, “I feel dreadfully
sad, and if it were only possible to bring him back, I’d give anything in
the world to do it.”

“Ah, so would I,” said Alyosha.

“What do you think, Karamazov? Had we better come back here to‐night?
He’ll be drunk, you know.”

“Perhaps he will. Let us come together, you and I, that will be enough, to
spend an hour with them, with the mother and Nina. If we all come together
we shall remind them of everything again,” Alyosha suggested.

“The landlady is laying the table for them now—there’ll be a funeral
dinner or something, the priest is coming; shall we go back to it,
Karamazov?”

“Of course,” said Alyosha.

“It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such sorrow and then pancakes after it,
it all seems so unnatural in our religion.”

“They are going to have salmon, too,” the boy who had discovered about
Troy observed in a loud voice.

“I beg you most earnestly, Kartashov, not to interrupt again with your
idiotic remarks, especially when one is not talking to you and doesn’t
care to know whether you exist or not!” Kolya snapped out irritably. The
boy flushed crimson but did not dare to reply.

Meantime they were strolling slowly along the path and suddenly Smurov
exclaimed:

“There’s Ilusha’s stone, under which they wanted to bury him.”

They all stood still by the big stone. Alyosha looked and the whole
picture of what Snegiryov had described to him that day, how Ilusha,
weeping and hugging his father, had cried, “Father, father, how he
insulted you,” rose at once before his imagination.

A sudden impulse seemed to come into his soul. With a serious and earnest
expression he looked from one to another of the bright, pleasant faces of
Ilusha’s schoolfellows, and suddenly said to them:

“Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place.”

The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes
upon him.

“Boys, we shall soon part. I shall be for some time with my two brothers,
of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death’s door.
But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall
part. Let us make a compact here, at Ilusha’s stone, that we will never
forget Ilusha and one another. And whatever happens to us later in life,
if we don’t meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how
we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by
the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy,
a kind‐hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father’s honor and resented the
cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we
will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with
most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great
misfortune—still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were
all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the
time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are. My little
doves—let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue
birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces. My dear children,
perhaps you won’t understand what I am saying to you, because I often
speak very unintelligibly, but you’ll remember it all the same and will
agree with my words some time. You must know that there is nothing higher
and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some
good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you
a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved
from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such
memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one
has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be
the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be
unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men’s tears and at those
people who say as Kolya did just now, ‘I want to suffer for all men,’ and
may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may
become—which God forbid—yet, when we recall how we buried Ilusha, how we
loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all
together, at this stone, the cruelest and most mocking of us—if we do
become so—will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at
this moment! What’s more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great
evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest
then!’ Let him laugh to himself, that’s no matter, a man often laughs at
what’s good and kind. That’s only from thoughtlessness. But I assure you,
boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, ‘No, I do wrong
to laugh, for that’s not a thing to laugh at.’ ”

“That will be so, I understand you, Karamazov!” cried Kolya, with flashing
eyes.

The boys were excited and they, too, wanted to say something, but they
restrained themselves, looking with intentness and emotion at the speaker.

“I say this in case we become bad,” Alyosha went on, “but there’s no
reason why we should become bad, is there, boys? Let us be, first and
above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I
say that again. I give you my word for my part that I’ll never forget one
of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty
years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know
whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and
that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of
Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes. Boys,
my dear boys, let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha, clever, brave
and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he
is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as
Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two? You are all dear to me,
boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I
beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us
in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember
all our lives? Who, if not Ilusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to
us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our
hearts from this time forth!”

“Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!” the boys cried in their ringing voices,
with softened faces.

“Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his
coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him
alone against the whole school.”

“We will remember, we will remember,” cried the boys. “He was brave, he
was good!”

“Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya.

“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is
when one does something good and just!”

“Yes, yes,” the boys repeated enthusiastically.

“Karamazov, we love you!” a voice, probably Kartashov’s, cried
impulsively.

“We love you, we love you!” they all caught it up. There were tears in the
eyes of many of them.

“Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya shouted ecstatically.

“And may the dead boy’s memory live for ever!” Alyosha added again with
feeling.

“For ever!” the boys chimed in again.

“Karamazov,” cried Kolya, “can it be true what’s taught us in religion,
that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each
other again, all, Ilusha too?”

“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and
shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!”
Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.

“Ah, how splendid it will be!” broke from Kolya.

“Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don’t be
put out at our eating pancakes—it’s a very old custom and there’s
something nice in that!” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let us go! And now we go
hand in hand.”

“And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya
cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his
exclamation: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”

THE END






FOOTNOTES


    1 In Russian, “silen.”

    2 A proverbial expression in Russia.

    3 Grushenka.

    4 i.e. setter dog.

    5 Probably the public event was the Decabrist plot against the Tsar,
      of December 1825, in which the most distinguished men in Russia were
      concerned.—TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

    6 When a monk’s body is carried out from the cell to the church and
      from the church to the graveyard, the canticle “What earthly joy...”
      is sung. If the deceased was a priest as well as a monk the canticle
      “Our Helper and Defender” is sung instead.

    7 i.e. a chime of bells.

    8 Literally: “Did you get off with a long nose made at you?”—a
      proverbial expression in Russia for failure.

    9 Gogol is meant.





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***FINIS***

Project Gutenberg’s The Essays of Montaigne, Complete, by Michel de Montaigne

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Essays of Montaigne, Complete

Author: Michel de Montaigne

Release Date: September 17, 2006 [EBook #3600]
Last Updated: August 8, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE, COMPLETE ***




Produced by David Widger





ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1.
     Preface
     The Life of Montaigne
     The Letters of Montaigne



PREFACE.

The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in
our literature--a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne.  This great
French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land
of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures.  His Essays,
which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his
productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon
and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, as
Hallam observes, the Frenchman’s literary importance largely results from
the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and
subsequent.  But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the
essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the
circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the
comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of
intellectual intercourse.  Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he
has found men willing to borrow of him as freely.  We need not wonder at
the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved.  He was, without
being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals.  His
book was different from all others which were at that date in the world.
It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels.  It told
its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was
about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new
light on many matters but darkly understood.  Above all, the essayist
uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public
property.  He took the world into his confidence on all subjects.  His
essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the
writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large
variety of operating influences.

Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most
fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most
truthful.  What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect
his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what
relation it bore to external objects.  He investigated his mental
structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the
mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations
abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a
book.

Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design.
He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame.  But he
desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be remembered
by, something which should tell what kind of a man he was--what he felt,
thought, suffered--and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his
expectations.

It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a
certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on,
throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his
renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique
position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be
read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of
intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and
who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in the
sixteenth or the eighteenth century.  This is true fame.  A man of genius
belongs to no period and no country.  He speaks the language of nature,
which is always everywhere the same.

The text of these volumes is taken from the first edition of Cotton’s
version, printed in 3 vols.  8vo, 1685-6, and republished in 1693, 1700,
1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same number of volumes and the same size.
In the earliest impression the errors of the press are corrected merely
as far as page 240 of the first volume, and all the editions follow one
another.  That of 1685-6 was the only one which the translator lived to
see.  He died in 1687, leaving behind him an interesting and little-known
collection of poems, which appeared posthumously, 8vo, 1689.

It was considered imperative to correct Cotton’s translation by a careful
collation with the ‘variorum’ edition of the original, Paris, 1854,
4 vols.  8vo or 12mo, and parallel passages from Florin’s earlier
undertaking have occasionally been inserted at the foot of the page.  A
Life of the Author and all his recovered Letters, sixteen in number, have
also been given; but, as regards the correspondence, it can scarcely be
doubted that it is in a purely fragmentary state.  To do more than
furnish a sketch of the leading incidents in Montaigne’s life seemed, in
the presence of Bayle St. John’s charming and able biography, an attempt
as difficult as it was useless.

The besetting sin of both Montaigne’s translators seems to have been a
propensity for reducing his language and phraseology to the language and
phraseology of the age and country to which they belonged, and, moreover,
inserting paragraphs and words, not here and there only, but constantly
and habitually, from an evident desire and view to elucidate or
strengthen their author’s meaning.  The result has generally been
unfortunate; and I have, in the case of all these interpolations on
Cotton’s part, felt bound, where I did not cancel them, to throw them
down into the notes, not thinking it right that Montaigne should be
allowed any longer to stand sponsor for what he never wrote; and
reluctant, on the other hand, to suppress the intruding matter entirely,
where it appeared to possess a value of its own.

Nor is redundancy or paraphrase the only form of transgression in Cotton,
for there are places in his author which he thought proper to omit, and
it is hardly necessary to say that the restoration of all such matter to
the text was considered essential to its integrity and completeness.

My warmest thanks are due to my father, Mr Registrar Hazlitt, the author
of the well-known and excellent edition of Montaigne published in 1842,
for the important assistance which he has rendered to me in verifying and
retranslating the quotations, which were in a most corrupt state, and of
which Cotton’s English versions were singularly loose and inexact, and
for the zeal with which he has co-operated with me in collating the
English text, line for line and word for word, with the best French
edition.

By the favour of Mr F. W. Cosens, I have had by me, while at work on this
subject, the copy of Cotgrave’s Dictionary, folio, 1650, which belonged
to Cotton.  It has his autograph and copious MSS.  notes, nor is it too
much to presume that it is the very book employed by him in his
translation.
W.  C.  H.
KENSINGTON, November 1877.





BOOK THE FIRST.

CHAP.

I.      That men by various ways arrive at the same end.

II.     Of Sorrow.

III.    That our affections carry themselves beyond us.

IV.     That the soul discharges her passions upon false objects, where
        the true are wanting.

V.      Whether the governor of a place besieged ought himself to go out
        to parley.

VI.     That the hour of parley is dangerous.

VII.    That the intention is judge of our actions

VIII.   Of idleness.

IX.     Of liars.

X.      Of quick or slow speech.

XI.     Of prognostications.

XII.    Of constancy.

XIII.   The ceremony of the interview of princes.

XIV.    That men are justly punished for being obstinate in the defence
        of a fort that is not in reason to be defended.

XV.     Of the punishment of cowardice.

XVI.    A proceeding of some ambassadors.

XVII.   Of fear.

XVIII.  That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death.

XIX.    That to study philosophy is to learn to die.

XX.     Of the force of imagination.

XXI.    That the profit of one man is the damage of another.

XXII.   Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received.

XXIII.  Various events from the same counsel.

XXIV.   Of pedantry.

XXV.    Of the education of children.

XXVI.   That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own capacity.

XXVII.  Of friendship.

XXVIII. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de la Boetie.

XXIX.   Of moderation.

XXX.    Of cannibals.

XXXI.   That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances.

XXXII.  That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of
        life.

XXXIII. That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of reason.

XXXIV.  Of one defect in our government.

XXXV.   Of the custom of wearing clothes.

XXXVI.  Of Cato the Younger.

XXXVII. That we laugh and cry for the same thing.

XXXVIII. Of solitude.

XXXIX.  A consideration upon Cicero.

XL.     That the relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon
        the opinion we have of them.

XLI.    Not to communicate a man’s honour.

XLII.   Of the inequality amongst us.

XLIII.  Of sumptuary laws.

XLIV.   Of sleep.

XLV.    Of the battle of Dreux.

XLVI.   Of names.

XLVII.  Of the uncertainty of our judgment.

XLVIII. Of war-horses, or destriers.

XLIX.   Of ancient customs.

L.      Of Democritus and Heraclitus.

LI.     Of the vanity of words.

LII.    Of the parsimony of the Ancients.

LIII.   Of a saying of Caesar.

LIV.    Of vain subtleties.

LV.     Of smells.

LVI.    Of prayers.

LVII.   Of age.






                         THE LIFE OF MONTAIGNE

[This is translated freely from that prefixed to the ‘variorum’ Paris
edition, 1854, 4 vols.  8vo.  This biography is the more desirable that
it contains all really interesting and important matter in the journal of
the Tour in Germany and Italy, which, as it was merely written under
Montaigne’s dictation, is in the third person, is scarcely worth
publication, as a whole, in an English dress.]


The author of the Essays was born, as he informs us himself, between
eleven and twelve o’clock in the day, the last of February 1533, at the
chateau of St. Michel de Montaigne.  His father, Pierre Eyquem, esquire,
was successively first Jurat of the town of Bordeaux (1530), Under-Mayor
1536, Jurat for the second time in 1540, Procureur in 1546, and at
length Mayor from 1553 to 1556.  He was a man of austere probity, who had
“a particular regard for honour and for propriety in his person and
attire .  .  .   a mighty good faith in his speech, and a conscience and
a religious feeling inclining to superstition, rather than to the other
extreme.” [Essays, ii. 2.]  Pierre Eyquem bestowed great care on the
education of his children, especially on the practical side of it.  To
associate closely his son Michel with the people, and attach him to those
who stand in need of assistance, he caused him to be held at the font by
persons of meanest position; subsequently he put him out to nurse with a
poor villager, and then, at a later period, made him accustom himself to
the most common sort of living, taking care, nevertheless, to cultivate
his mind, and superintend its development without the exercise of undue
rigour or constraint.  Michel, who gives us the minutest account of his
earliest years, charmingly narrates how they used to awake him by the
sound of some agreeable music, and how he learned Latin, without
suffering the rod or shedding a tear, before beginning French, thanks to
the German teacher whom his father had placed near him, and who never
addressed him except in the language of Virgil and Cicero.  The study of
Greek took precedence.  At six years of age young Montaigne went to the
College of Guienne at Bordeaux, where he had as preceptors the most
eminent scholars of the sixteenth century, Nicolas Grouchy, Guerente,
Muret, and Buchanan.  At thirteen he had passed through all the classes,
and as he was destined for the law he left school to study that science.
He was then about fourteen, but these early years of his life are
involved in obscurity.  The next information that we have is that in 1554
he received the appointment of councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux;
in 1559 he was at Bar-le-Duc with the court of Francis II, and in the
year following he was present at Rouen to witness the declaration of the
majority of Charles IX.  We do not know in what manner he was engaged on
these occasions.

Between 1556 and 1563 an important incident occurred in the life of
Montaigne, in the commencement of his romantic friendship with Etienne de
la Boetie, whom he had met, as he tells us, by pure chance at some
festive celebration in the town.  From their very first interview the two
found themselves drawn irresistibly close to one another, and during six
years this alliance was foremost in the heart of Montaigne, as it was
afterwards in his memory, when death had severed it.

Although he blames severely in his own book [Essays, i.  27.] those who,
contrary to the opinion of Aristotle, marry before five-and-thirty,
Montaigne did not wait for the period fixed by the philosopher of
Stagyra, but in 1566, in his thirty-third year, he espoused Francoise de
Chassaigne, daughter of a councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux.  The
history of his early married life vies in obscurity with that of his
youth.  His biographers are not agreed among themselves; and in the
same degree that he lays open to our view all that concerns his secret
thoughts, the innermost mechanism of his mind, he observes too much
reticence in respect to his public functions and conduct, and his social
relations.  The title of Gentleman in Ordinary to the King, which he
assumes, in a preface, and which Henry II.  gives him in a letter, which
we print a little farther on; what he says as to the commotions of
courts, where he passed a portion of his life; the Instructions which he
wrote under the dictation of Catherine de Medici for King Charles IX.,
and his noble correspondence with Henry IV., leave no doubt, however, as
to the part which he played in the transactions of those times, and we
find an unanswerable proof of the esteem in which he was held by the most
exalted personages, in a letter which was addressed to him by Charles at
the time he was admitted to the Order of St. Michael, which was, as he
informs us himself, the highest honour of the French noblesse.

According to Lacroix du Maine, Montaigne, upon the death of his eldest
brother, resigned his post of Councillor, in order to adopt the military
profession, while, if we might credit the President Bouhier, he never
discharged any functions connected with arms.  However, several passages
in the Essays seem to indicate that he not only took service, but that he
was actually in numerous campaigns with the Catholic armies.  Let us add,
that on his monument he is represented in a coat of mail, with his casque
and gauntlets on his right side, and a lion at his feet, all which
signifies, in the language of funeral emblems, that the departed has been
engaged in some important military transactions.

However it may be as to these conjectures, our author, having arrived at
his thirty-eighth year, resolved to dedicate to study and contemplation
the remaining term of his life; and on his birthday, the last of February
1571, he caused a philosophical inscription, in Latin, to be placed upon
one of the walls of his chateau, where it is still to be seen, and of
which the translation is to this effect:--“In the year of Christ .  .  .
in his thirty-eighth year, on the eve of the Calends of March, his
birthday, Michel Montaigne, already weary of court employments and public
honours, withdrew himself entirely into the converse of the learned
virgins where he intends to spend the remaining moiety of the to allotted
to him in tranquil seclusion.”

At the time to which we have come, Montaigne was unknown to the world of
letters, except as a translator and editor.  In 1569 he had published a
translation of the “Natural Theology” of Raymond de Sebonde, which he had
solely undertaken to please his father.  In 1571 he had caused to be
printed at Paris certain ‘opuscucla’ of Etienne de la Boetie; and these
two efforts, inspired in one case by filial duty, and in the other by
friendship, prove that affectionate motives overruled with him mere
personal ambition as a literary man.  We may suppose that he began to
compose the Essays at the very outset of his retirement from public
engagements; for as, according to his own account, observes the President
Bouhier, he cared neither for the chase, nor building, nor gardening, nor
agricultural pursuits, and was exclusively occupied with reading and
reflection, he devoted himself with satisfaction to the task of setting
down his thoughts just as they occurred to him.  Those thoughts became a
book, and the first part of that book, which was to confer immortality on
the writer, appeared at Bordeaux in 1580.  Montaigne was then
fifty-seven; he had suffered for some years past from renal colic and
gravel; and it was with the necessity of distraction from his pain, and
the hope of deriving relief from the waters, that he undertook at this
time a great journey.  As the account which he has left of his travels in
Germany and Italy comprises some highly interesting particulars of his
life and personal history, it seems worth while to furnish a sketch or
analysis of it.

“The Journey, of which we proceed to describe the course simply,” says
the editor of the Itinerary, “had, from Beaumont-sur-Oise to Plombieres,
in Lorraine, nothing sufficiently interesting to detain us .  .  .  we
must go as far, as Basle, of which we have a description, acquainting us
with its physical and political condition at that period, as well as with
the character of its baths.  The passage of Montaigne through Switzerland
is not without interest, as we see there how our philosophical traveller
accommodated himself everywhere to the ways of the country.  The hotels,
the provisions, the Swiss cookery, everything, was agreeable to him; it
appears, indeed, as if he preferred to the French manners and tastes
those of the places he was visiting, and of which the simplicity and
freedom (or frankness) accorded more with his own mode of life and
thinking.  In the towns where he stayed, Montaigne took care to see the
Protestant divines, to make himself conversant with all their dogmas.  He
even had disputations with them occasionally.

“Having left Switzerland he went to Isne, an imperial then on to Augsburg
and Munich.  He afterwards proceeded to the Tyrol, where he was agreeably
surprised, after the warnings which he had received, at the very slight
inconveniences which he suffered, which gave him occasion to remark that
he had all his life distrusted the statements of others respecting
foreign countries, each person’s tastes being according to the notions of
his native place; and that he had consequently set very little on what he
was told beforehand.

“Upon his arrival at Botzen, Montaigne wrote to Francois Hottmann, to say
that he had been so pleased with his visit to Germany that he quitted it
with great regret, although it was to go into Italy.  He then passed
through Brunsol, Trent, where he put up at the Rose; thence going to
Rovera; and here he first lamented the scarcity of crawfish, but made up
for the loss by partaking of truffles cooked in oil and vinegar; oranges,
citrons, and olives, in all of which he delighted.”

After passing a restless night, when he bethought himself in the morning
that there was some new town or district to be seen, he rose, we are
told, with alacrity and pleasure.

His secretary, to whom he dictated his Journal, assures us that he never
saw him take so much interest in surrounding scenes and persons, and
believes that the complete change helped to mitigate his sufferings in
concentrating his attention on other points.  When there was a complaint
made that he had led his party out of the beaten route, and then returned
very near the spot from which they started, his answer was that he had no
settled course, and that he merely proposed to himself to pay visits to
places which he had not seen, and so long as they could not convict him
of traversing the same path twice, or revisiting a point already seen, he
could perceive no harm in his plan.  As to Rome, he cared less to go
there, inasmuch as everybody went there; and he said that he never had a
lacquey who could not tell him all about Florence or Ferrara.  He also
would say that he seemed to himself like those who are reading some
pleasant story or some fine book, of which they fear to come to the end:
he felt so much pleasure in travelling that he dreaded the moment of
arrival at the place where they were to stop for the night.

We see that Montaigne travelled, just as he wrote, completely at his
ease, and without the least constraint, turning, just as he fancied, from
the common or ordinary roads taken by tourists.  The good inns, the soft
beds, the fine views, attracted his notice at every point, and in his
observations on men and things he confines himself chiefly to the
practical side.  The consideration of his health was constantly before
him, and it was in consequence of this that, while at Venice, which
disappointed him, he took occasion to note, for the benefit of readers,
that he had an attack of colic, and that he evacuated two large stones
after supper.  On quitting Venice, he went in succession to Ferrara,
Rovigo, Padua, Bologna (where he had a stomach-ache), Florence, &c.; and
everywhere, before alighting, he made it a rule to send some of his
servants to ascertain where the best accommodation was to be had.  He
pronounced the Florentine women the finest in the world, but had not an
equally good opinion of the food, which was less plentiful than in
Germany, and not so well served.  He lets us understand that in Italy
they send up dishes without dressing, but in Germany they were much
better seasoned, and served with a variety of sauces and gravies.  He
remarked further, that the glasses were singularly small and the wines
insipid.

After dining with the Grand-Duke of Florence, Montaigne passed rapidly
over the intermediate country, which had no fascination for him, and
arrived at Rome on the last day of November, entering by the Porta del
Popolo, and putting up at Bear.  But he afterwards hired, at twenty
crowns a month, fine furnished rooms in the house of a Spaniard, who
included in these terms the use of the kitchen fire.  What most annoyed
him in the Eternal City was the number of Frenchmen he met, who all
saluted him in his native tongue; but otherwise he was very comfortable,
and his stay extended to five months.  A mind like his, full of grand
classical reflections, could not fail to be profoundly impressed in the
presence of the ruins at Rome, and he has enshrined in a magnificent
passage of the Journal the feelings of the moment: “He said,” writes his
secretary, “that at Rome one saw nothing but the sky under which she had
been built, and the outline of her site: that the knowledge we had of her
was abstract, contemplative, not palpable to the actual senses: that
those who said they beheld at least the ruins of Rome, went too far, for
the ruins of so gigantic a structure must have commanded greater
reverence-it was nothing but her sepulchre.  The world, jealous of her,
prolonged empire, had in the first place broken to pieces that admirable
body, and then, when they perceived that the remains attracted worship
and awe, had buried the very wreck itself.--[Compare a passage in one
of Horace Walpole’s letters to Richard West, 22 March 1740 (Cunningham’s
edit.  i.  41), where Walpole, speaking of Rome, describes her very ruins
as ruined.]--As to those small fragments which were still to be seen on
the surface, notwithstanding the assaults of time and all other attacks,
again and again repeated, they had been favoured by fortune to be some
slight evidence of that infinite grandeur which nothing could entirely
extingish.  But it was likely that these disfigured remains were the
least entitled to attention, and that the enemies of that immortal
renown, in their fury, had addressed themselves in the first instance to
the destruction of what was most beautiful and worthiest of preservation;
and that the buildings of this bastard Rome, raised upon the ancient
productions, although they might excite the admiration of the present
age, reminded him of the crows’ and sparrows’ nests built in the walls
and arches of the old churches, destroyed by the Huguenots.  Again, he
was apprehensive, seeing the space which this grave occupied, that the
whole might not have been recovered, and that the burial itself had been
buried.  And, moreover, to see a wretched heap of rubbish, as pieces of
tile and pottery, grow (as it had ages since) to a height equal to that
of Mount Gurson,--[In Perigord.]--and thrice the width of it, appeared to
show a conspiracy of destiny against the glory and pre-eminence of that
city, affording at the same time a novel and extraordinary proof of its
departed greatness.  He (Montaigne) observed that it was difficult to
believe considering the limited area taken up by any of her seven hills
and particularly the two most favoured ones, the Capitoline and the
Palatine, that so many buildings stood on the site.  Judging only from
what is left of the Temple of Concord, along the ‘Forum Romanum’, of
which the fall seems quite recent, like that of some huge mountain split
into horrible crags, it does not look as if more than two such edifices
could have found room on the Capitoline, on which there were at one
period from five-and-twenty to thirty temples, besides private dwellings.
But, in point of fact, there is scarcely any probability of the views
which we take of the city being correct, its plan and form having changed
infinitely; for instance, the ‘Velabrum’, which on account of its
depressed level, received the sewage of the city, and had a lake, has
been raised by artificial accumulation to a height with the other hills,
and Mount Savello has, in truth, grown simply out of the ruins of the
theatre of Marcellus.  He believed that an ancient Roman would not
recognise the place again.  It often happened that in digging down into
earth the workmen came upon the crown of some lofty column, which, though
thus buried, was still standing upright.  The people there have no
recourse to other foundations than the vaults and arches of the old
houses, upon which, as on slabs of rock, they raise their modern palaces.
It is easy to see that several of the ancient streets are thirty feet
below those at present in use.”

Sceptical as Montaigne shows himself in his books, yet during his sojourn
at Rome he manifested a great regard for religion.  He solicited the
honour of being admitted to kiss the feet of the Holy Father, Gregory
XIII.; and the Pontiff exhorted him always to continue in the devotion
which he had hitherto exhibited to the Church and the service of the Most
Christian King.

“After this, one sees,” says the editor of the Journal, “Montaigne
employing all his time in making excursions bout the neighbourhood on
horseback or on foot, in visits, in observations of every kind.  The
churches, the stations, the processions even, the sermons; then the
palaces, the vineyards, the gardens, the public amusements, as the
Carnival, &c.--nothing was overlooked.  He saw a Jewish child
circumcised, and wrote down a most minute account of the operation.  He
met at San Sisto a Muscovite ambassador, the second who had come to Rome
since the pontificate of Paul III.  This minister had despatches from his
court for Venice, addressed to the ‘Grand Governor of the Signory’.  The
court of Muscovy had at that time such limited relations with the other
powers of Europe, and it was so imperfect in its information, that it
thought Venice to be a dependency of the Holy See.”

Of all the particulars with which he has furnished us during his stay at
Rome, the following passage in reference to the Essays is not the least
singular: “The Master of the Sacred Palace returned him his Essays,
castigated in accordance with the views of the learned monks.  ‘He had
only been able to form a judgment of them,’ said he, ‘through a certain
French monk, not understanding French himself’”--we leave Montaigne
himself to tell the story--“and he received so complacently my excuses
and explanations on each of the passages which had been animadverted upon
by the French monk, that he concluded by leaving me at liberty to revise
the text agreeably to the dictates of my own conscience.  I begged him,
on the contrary, to abide by the opinion of the person who had criticised
me, confessing, among other matters, as, for example, in my use of the
word fortune, in quoting historical poets, in my apology for Julian, in
my animadversion on the theory that he who prayed ought to be exempt from
vicious inclinations for the time being; item, in my estimate of cruelty,
as something beyond simple death; item, in my view that a child ought to
be brought up to do everything, and so on; that these were my opinions,
which I did not think wrong; as to other things, I said that the
corrector understood not my meaning.  The Master, who is a clever man,
made many excuses for me, and gave me to suppose that he did not concur
in the suggested improvements; and pleaded very ingeniously for me in my
presence against another (also an Italian) who opposed my sentiments.”

Such is what passed between Montaigne and these two personages at that
time; but when the Essayist was leaving, and went to bid them farewell,
they used very different language to him.  “They prayed me,” says he,
“to pay no attention to the censure passed on my book, in which other
French persons had apprised them that there were many foolish things;
adding, that they honoured my affectionate intention towards the Church,
and my capacity; and had so high an opinion of my candour and
conscientiousness that they should leave it to me to make such
alterations as were proper in the book, when I reprinted it; among other
things, the word fortune.  To excuse themselves for what they had said
against my book, they instanced works of our time by cardinals and other
divines of excellent repute which had been blamed for similar faults,
which in no way affected reputation of the author, or of the publication
as a whole; they requested me to lend the Church the support of my
eloquence (this was their fair speech), and to make longer stay in the
place, where I should be free from all further intrusion on their part.
It seemed to me that we parted very good friends.”

Before quitting Rome, Montaigne received his diploma of citizenship, by
which he was greatly flattered; and after a visit to Tivoli he set out
for Loretto, stopping at Ancona, Fano, and Urbino.  He arrived at the
beginning of May 1581, at Bagno della Villa, where he established
himself, order to try the waters.  There, we find in the Journal, of his
own accord the Essayist lived in the strictest conformity with the
regime, and henceforth we only hear of diet, the effect which the waters
had by degrees upon system, of the manner in which he took them; in a
word, he does not omit an item of the circumstances connected with his
daily routine, his habit of body, his baths, and the rest.  It was no
longer the journal of a traveller which he kept, but the diary of an
invalid,--[“I am reading Montaigne’s Travels, which have lately been
found; there is little in them but the baths and medicines he took, and
what he had everywhere for dinner.”--H.  Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, June
8, 1774.]--attentive to the minutest details of the cure which he was
endeavouring to accomplish: a sort of memorandum book, in which he was
noting down everything that he felt and did, for the benefit of his
medical man at home, who would have the care of his health on his return,
and the attendance on his subsequent infirmities.  Montaigne gives it as
his reason and justification for enlarging to this extent here, that he
had omitted, to his regret, to do so in his visits to other baths, which
might have saved him the trouble of writing at such great length now; but
it is perhaps a better reason in our eyes, that what he wrote he wrote
for his own use.

We find in these accounts, however, many touches which are valuable as
illustrating the manners of the place.  The greater part of the entries
in the Journal, giving the account of these waters, and of the travels,
down to Montaigne’s arrival at the first French town on his homeward
route, are in Italian, because he wished to exercise himself in that
language.

The minute and constant watchfulness of Montaigne over his health and
over himself might lead one to suspect that excessive fear of death which
degenerates into cowardice.  But was it not rather the fear of the
operation for the stone, at that time really formidable?  Or perhaps he
was of the same way of thinking with the Greek poet, of whom Cicero
reports this saying: “I do not desire to die; but the thought of being
dead is indifferent to me.”  Let us hear, however, what he says himself
on this point very frankly: “It would be too weak and unmanly on my part
if, certain as I am of always finding myself in the position of having to
succumb in that way,--[To the stone or gravel.]--and death coming nearer
and nearer to me, I did not make some effort, before the time came, to
bear the trial with fortitude.  For reason prescribes that we should
joyfully accept what it may please God to send us.  Therefore the only
remedy, the only rule, and the sole doctrine for avoiding the evils by
which mankind is surrounded, whatever they are, is to resolve to bear
them so far as our nature permits, or to put an end to them courageously
and promptly.”

He was still at the waters of La Villa, when, on the 7th September 1581,
he learned by letter that he had been elected Mayor of Bordeaux on the
1st August preceding.  This intelligence made him hasten his departure;
and from Lucca he proceeded to Rome.  He again made some stay in that
city, and he there received the letter of the jurats of Bordeaux,
notifying to him officially his election to the Mayoralty, and inviting
him to return as speedily as possible.  He left for France, accompanied
by young D’Estissac and several other gentlemen, who escorted him a
considerable distance; but none went back to France with him, not even
his travelling companion.  He passed by Padua, Milan, Mont Cenis, and
Chambery; thence he went on to Lyons, and lost no time in repairing to
his chateau, after an absence of seventeen months and eight days.

We have just seen that, during his absence in Italy, the author of the
Essays was elected mayor of Bordeaux.  “The gentlemen of Bordeaux,” says
he, “elected me Mayor of their town while I was at a distance from
France, and far from the thought of such a thing.  I excused myself; but
they gave to understand that I was wrong in so doing, it being also the
command of the king that I should stand.”  This the letter which Henry
III. wrote to him on the occasion:

MONSIEUR, DE MONTAIGNE,--Inasmuch as I hold in great esteem your fidelity
and zealous devotion to my service, it has been a pleasure to me to learn
that you have been chosen mayor of my town of Bordeaux.  I have had the
agreeable duty of confirming the selection, and I did so the more
willingly, seeing that it was made during your distant absence; wherefore
it is my desire, and I require and command you expressly that you proceed
without delay to enter on the duties to which you have received so
legitimate a call.  And so you will act in a manner very agreeable to me,
while the contrary will displease me greatly.  Praying God, M. de
Montaigne, to have you in his holy keeping.

“Written at Paris, the 25th day of November 1581.

“HENRI.

“A Monsieur de MONTAIGNE,
Knight of my Order, Gentleman in Ordinary of my
Chamber, being at present in Rome.”

Montaigne, in his new employment, the most important in the province,
obeyed the axiom, that a man may not refuse a duty, though it absorb his
time and attention, and even involve the sacrifice of his blood.  Placed
between two extreme parties, ever on the point of getting to blows, he
showed himself in practice what he is in his book, the friend of a middle
and temperate policy.  Tolerant by character and on principle, he
belonged, like all the great minds of the sixteenth century, to that
political sect which sought to improve, without destroying, institutions;
and we may say of him, what he himself said of La Boetie, “that he had
that maxim indelibly impressed on his mind, to obey and submit himself
religiously to the laws under which he was born.  Affectionately attached
to the repose of his country, an enemy to changes and innovations, he
would have preferred to employ what means he had towards their
discouragement and suppression, than in promoting their success.”  Such
was the platform of his administration.

He applied himself, in an especial manner, to the maintenance of peace
between the two religious factions which at that time divided the town of
Bordeaux; and at the end of his two first years of office, his grateful
fellow-citizens conferred on him (in 1583) the mayoralty for two years
more, a distinction which had been enjoyed, as he tells us, only twice
before.  On the expiration of his official career, after four years’
duration, he could say fairly enough of himself that he left behind him
neither hatred nor cause of offence.

In the midst of the cares of government, Montaigne found time to revise
and enlarge his Essays, which, since their appearance in 1580, were
continually receiving augmentation in the form of additional chapters or
papers.  Two more editions were printed in 1582 and 1587; and during this
time the author, while making alterations in the original text, had
composed part of the Third Book.  He went to Paris to make arrangements
for the publication of his enlarged labours, and a fourth impression in
1588 was the result.  He remained in the capital some time on this
occasion, and it was now that he met for the first time Mademoiselle de
Gournay.  Gifted with an active and inquiring spirit, and, above all,
possessing a sound and healthy tone of mind, Mademoiselle de Gournay had
been carried from her childhood with that tide which set in with
sixteenth century towards controversy, learning, and knowledge.  She
learnt Latin without a master; and when, the age of eighteen, she
accidentally became possessor of a copy of the Essays, she was
transported with delight and admiration.

She quitted the chateau of Gournay, to come and see him.  We cannot do
better, in connection with this journey of sympathy, than to repeat the
words of Pasquier: “That young lady, allied to several great and noble
families of Paris, proposed to herself no other marriage than with her
honour, enriched with the knowledge gained from good books, and, beyond
all others, from the essays of M. de Montaigne, who making in the year
1588 a lengthened stay in the town of Paris, she went there for the
purpose of forming his personal acquaintance; and her mother, Madame de
Gournay, and herself took him back with them to their chateau, where, at
two or three different times, he spent three months altogether, most
welcome of visitors.”  It was from this moment that Mademoiselle de
Gournay dated her adoption as Montaigne’s daughter, a circumstance which
has tended to confer immortality upon her in a far greater measure than
her own literary productions.

Montaigne, on leaving Paris, stayed a short time at Blois, to attend the
meeting of the States-General.  We do not know what part he took in that
assembly: but it is known that he was commissioned, about this period, to
negotiate between Henry of Navarre (afterwards Henry IV.) and the Duke of
Guise.  His political life is almost a blank; but De Thou assures us that
Montaigne enjoyed the confidence of the principal persons of his time.
De Thou, who calls him a frank man without constraint, tells us that,
walking with him and Pasquier in the court at the Castle of Blois, he
heard him pronounce some very remarkable opinions on contemporary events,
and he adds that Montaigne had foreseen that the troubles in France could
not end without witnessing the death of either the King of Navarre or of
the Duke of Guise.  He had made himself so completely master of the views
of these two princes, that he told De Thou that the King of Navarre would
have been prepared to embrace Catholicism, if he had not been afraid of
being abandoned by his party, and that the Duke of Guise, on his part,
had no particular repugnance to the Confession of Augsburg, for which the
Cardinal of Lorraine, his uncle, had inspired him with a liking, if it
had not been for the peril involved in quitting the Romish communion.  It
would have been easy for Montaigne to play, as we call it, a great part
in politics, and create for himself a lofty position but his motto was,
‘Otio et Libertati’; and he returned quietly home to compose a chapter
for his next edition on inconveniences of Greatness.

The author of the Essays was now fifty-five.  The malady which tormented
him grew only worse and worse with years; and yet he occupied himself
continually with reading, meditating, and composition.  He employed the
years 1589, 1590, and 1591 in making fresh additions to his book; and
even in the approaches of old age he might fairly anticipate many happy
hours, when he was attacked by quinsy, depriving him of the power
utterance.  Pasquier, who has left us some details  his last hours,
narrates that he remained three days in full possession of his faculties,
but unable to speak, so that, in order to make known his desires, he was
obliged to resort to writing; and as he felt his end drawing near, he
begged his wife to summon certain of the gentlemen who lived in the
neighbourhood to bid them a last farewell.  When they had arrived, he
caused mass to be celebrated in apartment; and just as the priest was
elevating the host, Montaigne fell forward with his arms extended in
front of him, on the bed, and so expired.  He was in his sixtieth year.
It was the 13th September 1592.

Montaigne was buried near his own house; but a few years after his
decease, his remains were removed to the church of a Commandery of St.
Antoine at Bordeaux, where they still continue.  His monument was
restored in 1803 by a descendant.  It was seen about 1858 by an English
traveller (Mr. St.  John).’--[“Montaigne the Essayist,” by Bayle St.
John, 1858, 2 vols.  8vo, is one of most delightful books of the kind.]--
and was then in good preservation.

In 1595 Mademoiselle de Gournay published a new edition of Montaigne’s
Essays, and the first with the latest emendations of the author, from a
copy presented to her by his widow, and which has not been recovered,
although it is known to have been in existence some years after the date
of the impression, made on its authority.

Coldly as Montaigne’s literary productions appear to have been received
by the generation immediately succeeding his own age, his genius grew
into just appreciation in the seventeenth century, when such great
spirits arose as La Bruyere, Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne.
“O,” exclaimed the Chatelaine des Rochers, “what capital company he is,
the dear man!  he is my old friend; and just for the reason that he is
so, he always seems new.  My God!  how full is that book of sense!”
 Balzac said that he had carried human reason as far and as high as it
could go, both in politics and in morals.  On the other hand, Malebranche
and the writers of Port Royal were against him; some reprehended the
licentiousness of his writings; others their impiety, materialism,
epicureanism.  Even Pascal, who had carefully read the Essays, and gained
no small profit by them, did not spare his reproaches.  But Montaigne has
outlived detraction.  As time has gone on, his admirers and borrowers
have increased in number, and his Jansenism, which recommended him to the
eighteenth century, may not be his least recommendation in the
nineteenth.  Here we have certainly, on the whole, a first-class man, and
one proof of his masterly genius seems to be, that his merits and his
beauties are sufficient to induce us to leave out of consideration
blemishes and faults which would have been fatal to an inferior writer.





                       THE LETTERS OF MONTAIGNE.


I.

To Monsieur de MONTAIGNE

[This account of the death of La Boetie begins imperfectly.  It first
appeared in a little volume of Miscellanies in 1571.  See Hazlitt, ubi
sup.  p.  630.]--As to his last words, doubtless, if any man can
give good account of them, it is I, both because, during the whole of his
sickness he conversed as fully with me as with any one, and also because,
in consequence of the singular and brotherly friendship which we had
entertained for each other, I was perfectly acquainted with the
intentions, opinions, and wishes which he had formed in the course of his
life, as much so, certainly, as one man can possibly be with those of
another man; and because I knew them to be elevated, virtuous, full of
steady resolution, and (after all said) admirable.  I well foresaw that,
if his illness permitted him to express himself, he would allow nothing
to fall from him, in such an extremity, that was not replete with good
example.  I consequently took every care in my power to treasure what was
said.  True it is, Monseigneur, as my memory is not only in itself very
short, but in this case affected by the trouble which I have undergone,
through so heavy and important a loss, that I have forgotten a number of
things which I should wish to have had known; but those which I recollect
shall be related to you as exactly as lies in my power.  For to represent
in full measure his noble career suddenly arrested, to paint to you his
indomitable courage, in a body worn out and prostrated by pain and the
assaults of death, I confess, would demand a far better ability than
mine: because, although, when in former years he discoursed on serious
and important matters, he handled them in such a manner that it was
difficult to reproduce exactly what he said, yet his ideas and his words
at the last seemed to rival each other in serving him.  For I am sure
that I never knew him give birth to such fine conceptions, or display so
much eloquence, as in the time of his sickness.  If, Monseigneur, you
blame me for introducing his more ordinary observations, please to know
that I do so advisedly; for since they proceeded from him at a season of
such great trouble, they indicate the perfect tranquillity of his mind
and thoughts to the last.

On Monday, the 9th day of August 1563, on my return from the Court, I
sent an invitation to him to come and dine with me.  He returned word
that he was obliged, but, being indisposed, he would thank me to do him
the pleasure of spending an hour with him before he started for Medoc.
Shortly after my dinner I went to him.  He had laid himself down on the
bed with his clothes on, and he was already, I perceived, much changed.
He complained of diarrhoea, accompanied by the gripes, and said that he
had it about him ever since he played with M. d’Escars with nothing but
his doublet on, and that with him a cold often brought on such attacks.
I advised him to go as he had proposed, but to stay for the night at
Germignac, which is only about two leagues from the town.  I gave him
this advice, because some houses, near to that where he was ping, were
visited by the plague, about which he was nervous since his return from
Perigord and the Agenois, here it had been raging; and, besides, horse
exercise was, from my own experience, beneficial under similar
circumstances.  He set out, accordingly, with his wife and M.
Bouillhonnas, his uncle.

Early on the following morning, however, I had intelligence from Madame
de la Boetie, that in the night he had fresh and violent attack of
dysentery.  She had called in physician and apothecary, and prayed me to
lose no time coming, which (after dinner) I did.  He was delighted to see
me; and when I was going away, under promise to turn the following day,
he begged me more importunately and affectionately than he was wont to
do, to give him as such of my company as possible.  I was a little
affected; yet was about to leave, when Madame de la Boetie, as if she
foresaw something about to happen, implored me with tears to stay the
night.  When I consented, he seemed to grow more cheerful.  I returned
home the next day, and on the Thursday I paid him another visit.  He had
become worse; and his loss of blood from the dysentery, which reduced his
strength very much, was largely on the increase.  I quitted his side on
Friday, but on Saturday I went to him, and found him very weak.  He then
gave me to understand that his complaint was infectious, and, moreover,
disagreeable and depressing; and that he, knowing thoroughly my
constitution, desired that I should content myself with coming to see him
now and then.  On the contrary, after that I never left his side.

It was only on the Sunday that he began to converse with me on any
subject beyond the immediate one of his illness, and what the ancient
doctors thought of it: we had not touched on public affairs, for I found
at the very outset that he had a dislike to them.

But, on the Sunday, he had a fainting fit; and when he came to himself,
he told me that everything seemed to him confused, as if in a mist and in
disorder, and that, nevertheless, this visitation was not unpleasing to
him.  “Death,” I replied, “has no worse sensation, my brother.”  “None so
bad,” was his answer.  He had had no regular sleep since the beginning of
his illness; and as he became worse and worse, he began to turn his
attention to questions which men commonly occupy themselves with in the
last extremity, despairing now of getting better, and intimating as much
to me.  On that day, as he appeared in tolerably good spirits, I took
occasion to say to him that, in consideration of the singular love I bore
him, it would become me to take care that his affairs, which he had
conducted with such rare prudence in his life, should not be neglected at
present; and that I should regret it if, from want of proper counsel, he
should leave anything unsettled, not only on account of the loss to his
family, but also to his good name.

He thanked me for my kindness; and after a little reflection, as if he
was resolving certain doubts in his own mind, he desired me to summon his
uncle and his wife by themselves, in order that he might acquaint them
with his testamentary dispositions.  I told him that this would shock
them.  “No, no,” he answered, “I will cheer them by making out my case to
be better than it is.”  And then he inquired, whether we were not all
much taken by surprise at his having fainted?  I replied, that it was of
no importance, being incidental to the complaint from which he suffered.
“True, my brother,” said he; “it would be unimportant, even though it
should lead to what you most dread.”  “For you,” I rejoined, “it might be
a happy thing; but I should be the loser, who would thereby be deprived
of so great, so wise, and so steadfast a friend, a friend whose place I
should never see supplied.”  “It is very likely you may not,” was his
answer; “and be sure that one thing which makes me somewhat anxious to
recover, and to delay my journey to that place, whither I am already
half-way gone, is the thought of the loss both you and that poor man and
woman there (referring to his uncle and wife) must sustain; for I love
them with my whole heart, and I feel certain that they will find it very
hard to lose me.  I should also regret it on account of such as have, in
my lifetime, valued me, and whose conversation I should like to have
enjoyed a little longer; and I beseech you, my brother, if I leave the
world, to carry to them for me an assurance of the esteem I entertained
for them to the last moment of my existence.  My birth was, moreover,
scarcely to so little purpose but that, had I lived, I might have done
some service to the public; but, however this may be, I am prepared to
submit to the will of God, when it shall please Him to call me, being
confident of enjoying the tranquillity which you have foretold for me.
As for you, my friend, I feel sure that you are so wise, that you will
control your emotions, and submit to His divine ordinance regarding me;
and I beg of you to see that that good man and woman do not mourn for my
departure unnecessarily.”

He proceeded to inquire how they behaved at present.  “Very well,” said
I, “considering the circumstances.”  “Ah!”  he replied, “that is, so long
as they do not abandon all hope of me; but when that shall be the case,
you will have a hard task to support them.”  It was owing to his strong
regard for his wife and uncle that he studiously disguised from them his
own conviction as to the certainty of his end, and he prayed me to do the
same.  When they were near him he assumed an appearance of gaiety, and
flattered them with hopes.  I then went to call them.  They came, wearing
as composed an air as possible; and when we four were together, he
addressed us, with an untroubled countenance, as follows: “Uncle and
wife, rest assured that no new attack of my disease, or fresh doubt that
I have as to my recovery, has led me to take this step of communicating
to you my intentions, for, thank God, I feel very well and hopeful; but
taught by observation and experience the instability of all human things,
and even of the life to which we are so much attached, and which is,
nevertheless, a mere bubble; and knowing, moreover, that my state of
health brings me more within the danger of death, I have thought proper
to settle my worldly affairs, having the benefit of your advice.”  Then
addressing himself more particularly to his uncle, “Good uncle,” said he,
“if I were to rehearse all the obligations under which I lie to you, I am
sure that I never should make an end.  Let me only say that, wherever I
have been, and with whomsoever I have conversed, I have represented you
as doing for me all that a father could do for a son; both in the care
with which you tended my education, and in the zeal with which you pushed
me forward into public life, so that my whole existence is a testimony of
your good offices towards me.  In short, I am indebted for all that I
have to you, who have been to me as a parent; and therefore I have no
right to part with anything, unless it be with your approval.”

There was a general silence hereupon, and his uncle was prevented from
replying by tears and sobs.  At last he said that whatever he thought for
the best would be agreeable to him; and as he intended to make him his
heir, he was at liberty to dispose of what would be his.

Then he turned to his wife.  “My image,” said he (for so he often called
her, there being some sort of relationship between them), “since I have
been united to you by marriage, which is one of the most weighty and
sacred ties imposed on us by God, for the purpose of maintaining human
society, I have continued to love, cherish, and value you; and I know
that you have returned my affection, for which I have no sufficient
acknowledgment.  I beg you to accept such portion of my estate as I
bequeath to you, and be satisfied with it, though it is very inadequate
to your desert.”

Afterwards he turned to me.  “My brother,” he began, “for whom I have so
entire a love, and whom I selected out of so large a number, thinking to
revive with you that virtuous and sincere friendship which, owing to the
degeneracy of the age, has grown to be almost unknown to us, and now
exists only in certain vestiges of antiquity, I beg of you, as a mark of
my affection to you, to accept my library: a slender offering, but given
with a cordial will, and suitable to you, seeing that you are fond of
learning.  It will be a memorial of your old companion.”

Then he addressed all three of us.  He blessed God that in his extremity
he had the happiness to be surrounded by those whom he held dearest in
the world, and he looked upon it as a fine spectacle, where four persons
were together, so unanimous in their feelings, and loving each other for
each other’s sake.  He commended us one to the other; and proceeded thus:
“My worldly matters being arranged, I must now think of the welfare of my
soul.  I am a Christian; I am a Catholic.  I have lived one, and I shall
die one.  Send for a priest; for I wish to conform to this last Christian
obligation.”  He now concluded his discourse, which he had conducted with
such a firm face and with so distinct an utterance, that whereas, when I
first entered his room, he was feeble, inarticulate in his speech, his
pulse low and feverish, and his features pallid, now, by a sort of
miracle, he appeared to have rallied, and his pulse was so strong that
for the sake of comparison, I asked him to feel mine.

I felt my heart so oppressed at this moment, that I had not the power to
make him any answer; but in the course of two or three hours, solicitous
to keep up his courage, and, likewise, out of the tenderness which I had
had all my life for his honour and fame, wishing a larger number of
witnesses to his admirable fortitude, I said to him, how much I was
ashamed to think that I lacked courage to listen to what he, so great a
sufferer, had the courage to deliver; that down to the present time I had
scarcely conceived that God granted us such command over human
infirmities, and had found a difficulty in crediting the examples I had
read in histories; but that with such evidence of the thing before my
eyes, I gave praise to God that it had shown itself in one so excessively
dear to me, and who loved me so entirely, and that his example would help
me to act in a similar manner when my turn came.  Interrupting me, he
begged that it might happen so, and that the conversation which had
passed between us might not be mere words, but might be impressed deeply
on our minds, to be put in exercise at the first occasion; and that this
was the real object and aim of all philosophy.

He then took my hand, and continued: “Brother, friend, there are many
acts of my life, I think, which have cost me as much difficulty as this
one is likely to do; and, after all, I have been long prepared for it,
and have my lesson by heart.  Have I not lived long enough?  I am just
upon thirty-three.  By the grace of God, my days so far have known
nothing but health and happiness; but in the ordinary course of our
unstable human affairs, this could not have lasted much longer; it would
have become time for me to enter on graver avocations, and I should thus
have involved myself in numberless vexations, and, among them, the
troubles of old age, from which I shall now be exempt.  Moreover, it is
probable that hitherto my life has been spent more simply, and with less
of evil, than if God had spared me, and I had survived to feel the
thirst for riches and worldly prosperity.  I am sure, for my part, that
I now go to God and the place of the blessed.”  He seemed to detect in
my expression some inquietude at his words; and he exclaimed, “What, my
brother, would you make me entertain apprehensions?  Had I any, whom
would it become so much as yourself to remove them?”

The notary, who had been summoned to draw up his will, came in the
evening, and when he had the documents prepared, I inquired of La Boetie
if he would sign them.  “Sign them,” cried he; “I will do so with my own
hand; but I could desire more time, for I feel exceedingly timid and
weak, and in a manner exhausted.”  But when I was going to change the
conversation, he suddenly rallied, said he had but a short time to live,
and asked if the notary wrote rapidly, for he should dictate without
making any pause.  The notary was called, and he dictated his will there
and then with such speed that the man could scarcely keep up with him;
and when he had done, he asked me to read it out, saying to me, “What a
good thing it is to look after what are called our riches.”  ‘Sunt haec,
quoe hominibus vocantur bona’.  As soon as the will was signed, the
chamber being full, he asked me if it would hurt him to talk.  I
answered, that it would not, if he did not speak too loud.  He then
summoned Mademoiselle de Saint Quentin, his niece, to him, and addressed
her thus: “Dear niece, since my earliest acquaintance with thee, I have
observed the marks of, great natural goodness in thee; but the services
which thou rendered to me, with so much affectionate diligence, in my
present and last necessity, inspire me with high hopes of thee; and I am
under great obligations to thee, and give thee most affectionate thanks.
Let me relieve my conscience by counselling thee to be, in the first
place, devout, to God: for this doubtless is our first duty, failing
which all others can be of little advantage or grace, but which, duly
observed, carries with it necessarily all other virtues.  After God, thou
shouldest love thy father and mother--thy mother, my sister, whom I
regard as one of the best and most intelligent of women, and by whom I
beg of thee to let thy own life be regulated.  Allow not thyself to be
led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities
thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but
which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to
negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice.  Credit me, the
greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour.  I
beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was
betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn for me too much--an
injunction which, so far as it is in my power, I lay on all my friends,
since it might seem that by doing so they felt a jealousy of that blessed
condition in which I am about to be placed by death.  I assure thee, my
dear, that if I had the option now of continuing in life or of completing
the voyage on which I have set out, I should find it very hard to choose.
Adieu, dear niece.”

Mademoiselle d’Arsat, his stepdaughter, was next called.  He said to her:
“Daughter, you stand in no great need of advice from me, insomuch as you
have a mother, whom I have ever found most sagacious, and entirely in
conformity with my own opinions and wishes, and whom I have never found
faulty; with such a preceptress, you cannot fail to be properly
instructed.  Do not account it singular that I, with no tie of blood to
you, am interested in you; for, being the child of one who is so closely
allied to me, I am necessarily concerned in what concerns you; and
consequently the affairs of your brother, M. d’Arsat, have ever been
watched by me with as much care as my own; nor perhaps will it be to your
disadvantage that you were my step-daughter.  You enjoy sufficient store
of wealth and beauty; you are a lady of good family; it only remains for
you to add to these possessions the cultivation of your mind, in which I
exhort you not to fail.  I do not think necessary to warn you against
vice, a thing so odious in women, for I would not even suppose that you
could harbour any inclination for it--nay, I believe that you hold the
very name in abhorrence.  Dear daughter, farewell.”

All in the room were weeping and lamenting; but he held without
interruption the thread of his discourse, which was pretty long.  But
when he had done, he directed us all to leave the room, except the women
attendants, whom he styled his garrison.  But first, calling to him my
brother, M. de Beauregard, he said to him: “M. de Beauregard, you have
my best thanks for all the care you have taken of me.  I have now a thing
which I am very anxious indeed to mention to you, and with your
permission I will do so.”  As my brother gave him encouragement to
proceed, he added: “I assure you that I never knew any man who engaged in
the reformation of our Church with greater sincerity, earnestness, and
single-heartedness than yourself.  I consider that you were led to it by
observing the vicious character of our prelates, which no doubt much
requires setting in order, and by imperfections which time has brought
into our Church.  It is not my desire at present  discourage you from
this course, for I would have no one act in opposition to his conscience;
but I wish, having regard to the good repute acquired by your family from
its enduring concord--a family than which none can be dearer to me; a
family, thank God!  no member of which has ever been guilty of dishonour
--in regard, further, to the will of your good father to whom you owe so
much, and of your, uncle, I wish you to avoid extreme means; avoid
harshness and violence: be reconciled with your relatives; do not act
apart, but unite.  You perceive what disasters our quarrels have brought
upon this kingdom, and I anticipate still worse mischiefs; and in your
goodness and wisdom, beware of involving your family in such broils; let
it continue to enjoy its former reputation and happiness.  M. de
Beauregard, take what I say in good part, and as a proof of the
friendship I feel for you.  I postponed till now any communication with
you on the subject, and perhaps the condition in which you see me address
you, may cause my advice and opinion to carry greater authority.”  My
brother expressed his thanks to him cordially.

On the Monday morning he had become so ill that he quite despaired of
himself; and he said to me very pitifully: “Brother, do not you feel pain
for all the pain I am suffering?  Do you not perceive now that the help
you give me has no other effect than that of lengthening my suffering?”

Shortly afterwards he fainted, and we all thought him gone; but by the
application of vinegar and wine he rallied.  But he soon sank, and when
he heard us in lamentation, he murmured, “O God!  who is it that teases
me so?  Why did you break the agreeable repose I was enjoying?  I beg of
you to leave me.”  And then, when he caught the sound of my voice, he
continued: “And art thou, my brother, likewise unwilling to see me at
peace?  O, how thou robbest me of my repose!”  After a while, he seemed
to gain more strength, and called for wine, which he relished, and
declared it to be the finest drink possible.  I, in order to change the
current of his thoughts, put in, “Surely not; water is the best.”  “Ah,
yes,” he returned, “doubtless so;--(Greek phrase)--.”  He had now become,
icy-cold at his extremities, even to his face; a deathly perspiration was
upon him, and his pulse was scarcely perceptible.

This morning he confessed, but the priest had omitted to bring with him
the necessary apparatus for celebrating Mass.  On the Tuesday, however,
M. de la Boetie summoned him to aid him, as he said, in discharging the
last office of a Christian.   After the conclusion of Mass, he took the
sacrament; when the priest was about to depart, he said to him:
“Spiritual father, I implore you humbly, as well as those over whom you
are set, to pray to the Almighty on my behalf; that, if it be decreed in
heaven that I am now to end my life, He will take compassion on my soul,
and pardon me my sins, which are manifold, it not being possible for so
weak and poor a creature as I to obey completely the will of such a
Master; or, if He think fit to keep me longer here, that it may please
Him to release my present extreme anguish, and to direct my footsteps in
the right path, that I may become a better man than I have been.”  He
paused to recover breath a little; priest was about to go away, he called
him back and proceeded: “I desire to say, besides, in your hearing this:
I declare that I was christened and I have lived, and that so I wish to
die, in the faith which Moses preached in Egypt; which afterwards the
Patriarchs accepted and professed in Judaea; and which, in the course of
time, has been transmitted to France and to us.”  He seemed desirous of
adding something more, but he ended with a request to his uncle and me to
send up prayers for him; “for those are,” he said, “the best duties that
Christians can fulfil one for another.”  In the course of talking, his
shoulder was uncovered, and although a man-servant stood near him, he
asked his uncle to re-adjust the clothes.  Then, turning his eyes towards
me, he said, “Ingenui est, cui multum debeas, ei plurimum velle debere.”

M. de Belot called in the afternoon to see him, and M. de la Boetie,
taking his hand, said to him: “I was on the point of discharging my debt,
but my kind creditor has given me a little further time.”  A little while
after, appearing to wake out of a sort of reverie, he uttered words which
he had employed once or twice before in the course of his sickness:
“Ah well, ah well, whenever the hour comes, I await it with pleasure and
fortitude.”  And then, as they were holding his mouth open by force to
give him a draught, he observed to M. de Belot: “An vivere tanti est?”

As the evening approached, he began perceptibly to sink; and while I
supped, he sent for me to come, being no more than the shadow of a man,
or, as he put it himself, ‘non homo, sed species hominis’; and he said to
me with the utmost difficulty: “My brother, my friend, please God I may
realise the imaginations I have just enjoyed.”  Afterwards, having waited
for some time while he remained silent, and by painful efforts was
drawing long sighs (for his tongue at this point began to refuse its
functions), I said, “What are they?”  “Grand, grand!”  he replied.  “I
have never yet failed,” returned I, “to have the honour of hearing your
conceptions and imaginations communicated to me; will you not now still
let me enjoy them?”  “I would indeed,” he answered; “but, my brother,
I am not able to do so; they are admirable, infinite, and unspeakable.”
 We stopped short there, for he could not go on.  A little before, indeed,
he had shown a desire to speak to his wife, and had told her, with as gay
a countenance as he could contrive to assume, that he had a story to tell
her.  And it seemed as if he was making an attempt to gain utterance;
but, his strength failing him, he begged a little wine to resuscitate it.
It was of no avail, for he fainted away suddenly, and was for some time
insensible.  Having become so near a neighbour to death, and hearing the
sobs of Mademoiselle de la Boetie, he called her, and said to her thus:
“My own likeness, you grieve yourself beforehand; will you not have pity
on me?  take courage.  Assuredly, it costs me more than half the pain I
endure, to see you suffer; and reasonably so, because the evils which we
ourselves feel we do not actually ourselves suffer, but it certain
sentient faculties which God plants in us, that feel them: whereas what
we feel on account of others, we feel by consequence of a certain
reasoning process which goes on within our minds.  But I am going away”
 --That he said because his strength was failing him; and fearing that he
had frightened his wife, he resumed, observing: “I am going to sleep.
Good night, my wife; go thy way.”  This was the last farewell he took of
her.

After she had left, “My brother,” said he to me, “keep near me, if you
please;” and then feeling the advance of death more pressing and more
acute, or else the effect of some warm draught which they had made him
swallow, his voice grew stronger and clearer, and he turned quite with
violence in his bed, so that all began again to entertain the hope which
we had lost only upon witnessing his extreme prostration.

At this stage he proceeded, among other things, to pray me again and
again, in a most affectionate manner, to give him a place; so that I was
apprehensive that his reason might be impaired, particularly when, on my
pointing out to him that he was doing himself harm, and that these were
not of the words of a rational man, he did not yield at first, but
redoubled his outcry, saying, “My brother, my brother!  dost thou then
refuse me a place?”  insomuch that he constrained me to demonstrate to
him that, as he breathed and spoke, and had his physical being, therefore
he had his place.  “Yes, yes,” he responded, “I have; but it is not that
which I need; and, besides, when all is said, I have no longer any
existence.”  “God,” I replied, “will grant you a better one soon.”
 “Would it were now, my brother,” was his answer.  “It is now three days
since I have been eager to take my departure.”

Being in this extremity, he frequently called me, merely to satisfy him
that I was at his side.  At length, he composed himself a little to rest,
which strengthened our hopes; so much so, indeed, that I left the room,
and went to rejoice thereupon with Mademoiselle de la Boetie.  But, an
hour or so afterwards, he called me by name once or twice, and then with
a long sigh expired at three o’clock on Wednesday morning, the 18th
August 1563, having lived thirty-two years, nine months, and seventeen
days.




II.

To Monseigneur, Monseigneur de MONTAIGNE.

[This letter is prefixed to Montaigne’s translation of the “Natural
Theology” of Raymond de Sebonde, printed at Paris in 1569.]

In pursuance of the instructions which you gave me last year in your
house at Montaigne, Monseigneur, I have put into a French dress, with my
own hand, Raymond de Sebonde, that great Spanish theologian and
philosopher; and I have divested him, so far as I could, of that rough
bearing and barbaric appearance which you saw him wear at first; that, in
my opinion, he is now qualified to present himself in the best company.
It is perfectly possible that some fastidious persons will detect in the
book some trace of Gascon parentage; but it will be so much the more to
their discredit, that they allowed the task to devolve on one who is
quite a novice in these things.  It is only right, Monseigneur, that the
work should come before the world under your auspices, since whatever
emendations and polish it may have received, are owing to you.  Still I
see well that, if you think proper to balance accounts with the author,
you will find yourself much his debtor; for against his excellent and
religious discourses, his lofty and, so to speak, divine conceptions, you
will find that you will have to set nothing but words and phraseology; a
sort of merchandise so ordinary and commonplace, that whoever has the
most of it, peradventure is the worst off.

Monseigneur, I pray God to grant you a very long and happy life.  From
Paris, this 18th of June 1568.  Your most humble and most obedient son,

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE




III.

To Monsieur, Monsieur de LANSAC,--[This letter appears to belong to
1570.]--Knight of the King’s Order, Privy Councillor, Sub-controller of
his Finance, and Captain of the Cent Gardes of his Household.

MONSIEUR,--I send you the OEconomics of Xenophon, put into French by the
late M. de la Boetie,--[Printed at Paris, 8vo, 1571, and reissued, with
the addition of some notes, in 1572, with a fresh title-page.]--a present
which appears to me to be appropriate, as well because it is the work of
a gentleman of mark,--[Meaning Xenophon.]--a man illustrious in war and
peace, as because it has taken its second shape from a personage whom I
know to have been held by you in affectionate regard during his life.
This will be an inducement to you to continue to cherish towards his
memory, your good opinion and goodwill.  And to be bold with you,
Monsieur, do not fear to increase these sentiments somewhat; for, as you
had knowledge of his high qualities only in his public capacity, it rests
with me to assure you how many endowments he possessed beyond your
personal experience of him.  He did me the honour, while he lived, and I
count it amongst the most fortunate circumstances in my own career, to
have with me a friendship so close and so intricately knit, that no
movement, impulse, thought, of his mind was kept from me, and if I have
not formed a right judgment of him, I must suppose it to be from my own
want of scope.  Indeed, without exaggeration, he was so nearly a prodigy,
that I am afraid of not being credited when I speak of him, even though I
should keep much within the mark of my own actual knowledge.  And for
this time, Monsieur, I shall content myself with praying you, for the
honour and respect we owe to truth, to testify and believe that our
Guienne never beheld his peer among the men of his vocation.  Under the
hope, therefore, that you will pay him his just due, and in order to
refresh him in your memory, I present you this book, which will answer
for me that, were it not for the insufficiency of my power, I would offer
you as willingly something of my own, as an acknowledgment of the
obligations I owe to you, and of the ancient favour and friendship which
you have borne towards the members of our house.  But, Monsieur, in
default of better coin, I offer you in payment the assurance of my desire
to do you humble service.

Monsieur, I pray God to have you in His keeping.  Your obedient servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.




IV.

To Monsieur, Monsieur de MESMES, Lord of Roissy and Malassize, Privy
Councillor to the King.

MONSIEUR,--It is one of the most conspicuous follies committed by men,
to employ the strength of their understanding in overturning and
destroying those opinions which are commonly received among us, and which
afford us satisfaction and content; for while everything beneath heaven
employs the ways and means placed at its disposal by nature for the
advancement and commodity of its being, these, in order to appear of a
more sprightly and enlightened wit, not accepting anything which has not
been tried and balanced a thousand times with the most subtle reasoning,
sacrifice their peace of mind to doubt, uneasiness, and feverish
excitement.  It is not without reason that childhood and simplicity have
been recommended by holy writ itself.  For my part, I prefer to be quiet
rather than clever: give me content, even if I am not to be so wide in my
range.  This is the reason, Monsieur, why, although persons of an
ingenious turn laugh at our care as to what will happen after our own
time, for instance, to our souls, which, lodged elsewhere, will lose all
consciousness of what goes on here below, yet I consider it to be a great
consolation for the frailty and brevity of life, to reflect that we have
the power of prolonging it by reputation and fame; and I embrace very
readily this pleasant and favourable notion original with our being,
without inquiring too critically how or why it is.  Insomuch that having
loved, beyond everything, the late M. de la Boetie, the greatest man, in
my judgment, of our age, I should think myself very negligent of my duty
if I failed, to the utmost of my power, to prevent such a name as his,
and a memory so richly meriting remembrance, from falling into oblivion;
and if I did not use my best endeavour to keep them fresh.  I believe
that he feels something of what I do on his behalf, and that my services
touch and rejoice him.  In fact, he lives in my heart so vividly and so
wholly, that I am loath to believe him committed to the dull ground, or
altogether cast off from communication with us.  Therefore, Monsieur,
since every new light I can shed on him and his name, is so much added to
his second period of existence, and, moreover, since his name is ennobled
and honoured by the place which receives it, it falls to me not only to
extend it as widely as I can, but to confide it to the keeping of persons
of honour and virtue; among whom you hold such a rank, that, to afford
you the opportunity of receiving this new guest, and giving him good
entertainment, I decided on presenting to you this little work, not for
any profit you are likely to derive from it, being well aware that you do
not need to have Plutarch and his companions interpreted to you--but it
is possible that Madame de Roissy, reading in it the order of her
household management and of your happy accord painted to the life, will
be pleased to see how her own natural inclination has not only reached
but surpassed the theories of the wisest philosophers, regarding the
duties and laws of the wedded state.  And, at all events, it will be
always an honour to me, to be able to do anything which shall be for the
pleasure of you and yours, on account of the obligation under which I lie
to serve you.

Monsieur, I pray God to grant you a long and happy life.  From Montaigne,
this 30th April 1570.  Your humble servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.




V.

To Monsieur, Monsieur de L’HOSPITAL, Chancellor of France

MONSEIGNEUR,--I am of the opinion that persons such as you, to whom
fortune and reason have committed the charge of public affairs, are not
more inquisitive in any point than in ascertaining the character of those
in office under you; for no society is so poorly furnished, but that, if
a proper distribution of authority be used, it has persons sufficient for
the discharge of all official duties; and when this is the case, nothing
is wanting to make a State perfect in its constitution.  Now, in
proportion as this is so much to be desired, so it is the more difficult
of accomplishment, since you cannot have eyes to embrace a multitude so
large and so widely extended, nor to see to the bottom of hearts, in
order that you may discover intentions and consciences, matters
principally to be considered; so that there has never been any
commonwealth so well organised, in which we might not detect often enough
defect in such a department or such a choice; and in those systems, where
ignorance and malice, favouritism, intrigue, and violence govern, if any
selection happens to be made on the ground of merit and regularity, we
may doubtless thank Fortune, which, in its capricious movements, has for
once taken the path of reason.

This consideration, Monseigneur, often consoled me, when I beheld M.
Etienne de la Boetie, one of the fittest men for high office in France,
pass his whole life without employment and notice, by his domestic
hearth, to the singular detriment of the public; for, so far as he was
concerned, I may assure you, Monseigneur, that he was so rich in those
treasures which defy fortune, that never was man more satisfied or
content.  I know, indeed, that he was raised to the dignities connected
with his neighbourhood--dignities accounted considerable; and I know
also, that no one ever acquitted himself better of them; and when he died
at the age of thirty-two, he enjoyed a reputation in that way beyond all
who had preceded him.

But for all that, it is no reason that a man should be left a common
soldier, who deserves to become a captain; nor to assign mean functions
to those who are perfectly equal to the highest.  In truth, his powers
were badly economised and too sparingly employed; insomuch that, over and
above his actual work, there was abundant capacity lying idle which might
have been called into service, both to the public advantage and his own
private glory.

Therefore, Monseigneur, since he was so indifferent to his own fame (for
virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together), and since he
lived in an age when others were too dull or too jealous to witness to
his character, I have it marvellously at heart that his memory, at all
events, to which I owe the good offices of a friend, should enjoy the
recompense of his brave life; and that it should survive in the good
report of men of honour and virtue.  On this account, sir, I have been
desirous to bring to light, and present to you, such few Latin verses as
he left behind.  Different from the builder, who places the most
attractive, portion of his house towards the street, and to the draper,
who displays in his window his best goods, that which was most precious
in my friend, the juice and marrow of his genius, departed with him, and
there have remained to us but the bark and the leaves.

The exactly regulated movements of his mind, his piety, his virtue, his
justice, his vivacity, the solidity and soundness of his judgment, the
loftiness of his ideas, raised so far above the common level, his
learning, the grace which accompanied his most ordinary actions, the
tender affection he had for his miserable country, and his supreme and
sworn detestation of all vice, but principally of that villainous traffic
which disguises itself under the honourable name of justice, should
certainly impress all well-disposed persons with a singular love towards
him, and an extraordinary regret for his loss.  But, sir, I am unable to
do justice to all these qualities; and of the fruit of his own studies it
had not entered into his mind to leave any proof to posterity; all that
remains, is the little which, as a pastime, he did at intervals.

However this may be, I beg you, sir, to receive it kindly; and as our
judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser things, and as
even the recreations of illustrious men carry with them, to intelligent
observers, some honourable traits of their origin, I would have you form
from this, some knowledge of him, and hence lovingly cherish his name and
his memory.  In this, sir, you will only reciprocate the high opinion
which he had of your virtue, and realise what he infinitely desired in
his lifetime; for there was no one in the world in whose acquaintance and
friendship he would have been so happy to see himself established, as in
your own.  But if any man is offended by the freedom which I use with the
belongings of another, I can tell him that nothing which has been written
or been laid down, even in the schools of philosophy, respecting the
sacred duties and rights of friendship, could give an adequate idea of
the relations which subsisted between this personage and myself.

Moreover, sir, this slender gift, to make two throws of one stone at the
same time, may likewise serve, if you please, to testify the honour and
respect which I entertain for your ability and high qualities; for as to
those gifts which are adventitious and accidental, it is not to my taste
to take them into account.

Sir, I pray God to grant you a very happy and a very long life.  From
Montaigne, this 30th of April 1570.--Your humble and obedient servant,

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.




To Monsieur, Monsieur de Folx, Privy Councillor, and Ambassador of His
Majesty to the Signory of Venice.--[ Printed before the ‘Vers Francois’
of Etienne de la Boetie, 8vo, Paris, 1572.]

SIR,--Being on the point of commending to you and to posterity the memory
of the late Etienne de la Boetie, as well for his extreme virtue as for
the singular affection which he bore to me, it struck me as an
indiscretion very serious in its results, and meriting some coercion from
our laws, the practice which often prevails of robbing virtue of glory,
its faithful associate, in order to confer it, in accordance with our
private interests and without discrimination, on the first comer; seeing
that our two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment, which
only touch us properly, and as men, through the medium of honour and
dishonour, forasmuch as these penetrate the mind, and come home to our
most intimate feelings: just where animals themselves are susceptible,
more or less, to all other kinds of recompense and corporal chastisement.
Moreover, it is well to notice that the custom of praising virtue, even
in those who are no longer with us, impalpable as it is to them, serves
as a stimulant to the living to imitate their example; just as capital
sentences are carried out by the law, more for the sake of warning to
others, than in relation to those who suffer.  Now, commendation and its
opposite being analogous as regards effects, we cannot easily deny
the fact, that although the law prohibits one man from slandering the
reputation of another, it does not prevent us from bestowing reputation
without cause.  This pernicious licence in respect to the distribution of
praise, has formerly been confined in its area of operations; and it may
be the reason why poetry once lost favour with the more judicious.
However this may be, it cannot be concealed that the vice of falsehood is
one very unbecoming in gentleman, let it assume what guise it will.

As for that personage of whom I am speaking to you, sir he leads me far
away indeed from this kind of language; for the danger in his case is
not, lest I should lend him anything, but that I might take something
from him; and it is his ill-fortune that, while he has supplied me, so
far as ever a man could, with just and obvious opportunities for
commendation, I find myself unable and unqualified to render it to him
--I, who am his debtor for so many vivid communications, and who alone
have it in my power to answer for a million of accomplishments,
perfections, and virtues, latent (thanks to his unkind stars) in so noble
a soul.  For the nature of things having (I know not how) permitted that
truth, fair and acceptable--as it may be of itself, is only embraced
where there are arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds, I see
myself so wanting, both in authority to support my simple testimony, and
in the eloquence requisite for lending it value and weight, that I was on
the eve of relinquishing the task, having nothing of his which would
enable me to exhibit to the world a proof of his genius and knowledge.

In truth, sir, having been overtaken by his fate in the flower of his
age, and in the full enjoyment of the most vigorous health, it had been
his design to publish some day works which would have demonstrated to
posterity what sort of a man he was; and, peradventure, he was
indifferent enough to fame, having formed such a plan in his head, to
proceed no further in it.  But I have come to the conclusion, that it was
far more excusable in him to bury with him all his rare endowments, than
it would be on my part to bury also with me the knowledge of them which I
had acquired from him; and, therefore, having collected with care all the
remains which I found scattered here and there among his papers, I intend
to distribute them so as to recommend his memory to as many persons as
possible, selecting the most suitable and worthy of my acquaintance, and
those whose testimony might do him greatest honour: such as you, sir, who
may very possibly have had some knowledge of him during his life, but
assuredly too slight to discover the perfect extent of his worth.
Posterity may credit me, if it chooses, when I swear upon my conscience,
that I knew and saw him to be such as, all things considered, I could
neither desire nor imagine a genius surpassing his.

I beg you very humbly, sir, not only to take his name under your general
protection, but also these ten or twelve French stanzas, which lay
themselves, as of necessity, under shadow of your patronage.  For I will
not disguise from you, that their publication was deferred, upon the
appearance of his other writings, under the pretext (as it was alleged
yonder at Paris) that they were too crude to come to light.  You will
judge, sir, how much truth there is in this; and since it is thought that
hereabout nothing can be produced in our own dialect but what is
barbarous and unpolished, it falls to you, who, besides your rank as the
first house in Guienne, indeed down from your ancestors, possess every
other sort of qualification, to establish, not merely by your example,
but by your authoritative testimony, that such is not always the case:
the more so that, though ‘tis more natural with the Gascons to act than
talk, yet sometimes they employ the tongue more than the arm, and wit in
place of valour.

For my own part; sir, it is not in my way to judge of such matters; but I
have heard persons who are supposed to understand them, say that these
stanzas are not only worthy to be presented in the market-place, but,
independently of that, as regards beauty and wealth of invention, they
are full of marrow and matter as any compositions of the kind, which have
appeared in our language.  Naturally each workman feels himself more
strong in some special part his art, and those are to be regarded as most
fortunate, who lay hands on the noblest, for all the parts essential to
the construction of any whole are not equally precious.  We find
elsewhere, perhaps, greater delicacy phrase, greater softness and harmony
of language; but imaginative grace, and in the store of pointed wit, I do
not think he has been surpassed; and we should take the account that he
made these things neither his occupation nor his study, and that he
scarcely took a pen in his hand more than once a year, as is shown by the
very slender quantity of his remains.  For you see here, sir, green wood
and dry, without any sort of selection, all that has come into my
possession; insomuch that there are among the rest efforts even of his
boyhood.  In point of fact, he seems to have written them merely to show
that he was capable of dealing with all subjects: for otherwise,
thousands of times, in the course of ordinary conversation, I have heard
things drop from him infinitely more worthy of being admired, infinitely
more worthy of being preserved.

Such, sir, is what justice and affection, forming in this instance a rare
conjunction, oblige me to say of this great and good man; and if I have
at all offended by the freedom which I have taken in addressing myself to
you on such a subject at such a length, be pleased to recollect that the
principal result of greatness and eminence is to lay one open to
importunate appeals on behalf of the rest of the world.  Herewith, after
desiring you to accept my affectionate devotion to your service,
I beseech God to vouchsafe you, sir, a fortunate and prolonged life.
From Montaigne, this 1st of September 1570.--Your obedient servant,

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.





To Mademoiselle de MONTAIGNE, my Wife.--[Printed as a preface to the
“Consolation of Plutarch to his Wife,” published by Montaigne, with
several other tracts by La Boetie, about 1571.]

MY WIFE,--You understand well that it is not proper for a man of the
world, according to the rules of this our time, to continue to court and
caress you; for they say that a sensible person may take a wife indeed,
but that to espouse her is to act like a fool.  Let them talk; I adhere
for my part the custom of the good old days; I also wear my hair as it
used to be then; and, in truth, novelty costs this poor country up to the
present moment so dear (and I do not know whether we have reached the
highest pitch yet), that everywhere and in everything I renounce the
fashion.  Let us live, my wife, you and I, in the old French method.
Now, you may recollect that the late M. de la Boetie, my brother and
inseparable companion, gave me, on his death-bed, all his books and
papers, which have remained ever since the most precious part of my
effects.  I do not wish to keep them niggardly to myself alone, nor do I
deserve to have the exclusive use of them; so that I have resolved to
communicate them to my friends; and because I have none, I believe, more
particularly intimate you, I send you the Consolatory Letter written by
Plutarch to his Wife, translated by him into French; regretting much that
fortune has made it so suitable a present you, and that, having had but
one child, and that a daughter, long looked for, after four years of your
married life it was your lot to lose her in the second year of her age.
But I leave to Plutarch the duty of comforting you, acquainting you with
your duty herein, begging you to put your faith in him for my sake; for
he will reveal to you my own ideas, and will express the matter far
better than I should myself.  Hereupon, my wife, I commend myself very
heartily to your good will, and pray God to have you in His keeping.
From Paris, this 10th September 1570.--Your good husband,

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.




VIII.

To Monsieur DUPUY,--[This is probably the Claude Dupuy, born at Paris in
1545, and one of the fourteen judges sent into Guienne after the treaty
of Fleix in 1580.  It was perhaps under these circumstances that
Montaigne addressed to him the present letter.]--the King’s Councillor in
his Court and Parliament of Paris.

MONSIEUR,--The business of the Sieur de Verres, a prisoner, who is
extremely well known to me, deserves, in the arrival at a decision,
the exercise of the clemency natural to you, if, in the public interest,
you can fairly call it into play.  He has done a thing not only
excusable, according to the military laws of this age, but necessary and
(as we are of opinion) commendable.  He committed the act, without doubt,
unwillingly and under pressure; there is no other passage of his life
which is open to reproach.  I beseech you, sir, to lend the matter your
attentive consideration; you will find the character of it as I represent
it to you.  He is persecuted on this crime, in a way which is far worse
than the offence itself.  If it is likely to be of use to him, I desire
to inform you that he is a man brought up in my house, related to several
respectable families, and a person who, having led an honourable life,
is my particular friend.  By saving him you lay me under an extreme
obligation.  I beg you very humbly to regard him as recommended by me,
and, after kissing your hands, I pray God, sir, to grant you a long and
happy life.  From Castera, this 23d of April [1580].  Your affectionate
servant,
MONTAIGNE.





IX.

To the Jurats of Bordeaux.--[Published from the original among the
archives of the town of Bordeaux, M. Gustave Brunet in the Bulletin du
Bibliophile, July 1839.]

GENTLEMEN,--I trust that the journey of Monsieur de Cursol will be of
advantage to the town.  Having in hand a case so just and so favourable,
you did all in your power to put the business in good trim; and matters
being so well situated, I beg you to excuse my absence for some little
time longer, and I will abridge my stay so far as the pressure of my
affairs permits.  I hope that the delay will be short; however, you will
keep me, if you please, in your good grace, and will command me, if the
occasion shall arise, in employing me in the public service and in yours.
Monsieur de Cursol has also written to me and apprised me of his journey.
I humbly commend myself to you, and pray God, gentlemen, to grant you
long and happy life.  From Montaigne, this 21st of May 1582.  Your humble
brother and servant,
MONTAIGNE.




X.

To the same.--[The original is among the archives of Toulouse.]

GENTLEMEN,--I have taken my fair share of the satisfaction which you
announce to me as feeling at the good despatch of your business, as
reported to you by your deputies, and I regard it as a favourable sign
that you have made such an auspicious commencement of the year.  I hope
to join you at the earliest convenient opportunity.  I recommend myself
very humbly to your gracious consideration, and pray God to grant you,
gentlemen, a happy and long life.  From Montaigne, this 8th February
1585.  Your humble brother and servant,
MONTAIGNE.




XI.

To the same.

GENTLEMEN,--I have here received news of you from M. le Marechal.  I will
not spare either my life or anything else for your service, and will
leave it to your judgment whether the assistance I might be able to
render by my presence at the forthcoming election, would be worth the
risk I should run by going into the town, seeing the bad state it is in,
--[This refers to the plague then raging, and which carried off 14,000
persons at Bordeaux.]--particularly for people coming away from so fine
an air as this is where I am.  I will draw as near to you on Wednesday as
I can, that is, to Feuillas, if the malady has not reached that place,
where, as I write to M. de la Molte, I shall be very pleased to have the
honour of seeing one of you to take your directions, and relieve myself
of the credentials which M. le Marechal will give me for you all:
commending myself hereupon humbly to your good grace, and praying God to
grant you, gentlemen, long and happy life.  At Libourne, this 30th of
July 1585.  Your humble servant and brother,
MONTAIGNE.




XII.--[“According to Dr. Payen, this letter belongs to 1588.  Its
authenticity has been called in question; but wrongly, in our opinion.
See ‘Documents inedits’, 1847, p.  12.”--Note in ‘Essais’, ed.  Paris,
1854, iv.  381.  It does not appear to whom the letter was addressed.]

MONSEIGNEUR,--You have heard of our baggage being taken from us under our
eyes in the forest of Villebois: then, after a good deal of discussion
and delay, of the capture being pronounced illegal by the Prince.  We
dared not, however, proceed on our way, from an uncertainty as to the
safety of our persons, which should have been clearly expressed on our
passports.  The League has done this, M. de Barrant and M. de la
Rochefocault; the storm has burst on me, who had my money in my box.  I
have recovered none of it, and most of my papers and cash--[The French
word is hardes, which St. John renders things.  But compare Chambers’s
“Domestic Annals of Scotland,” 2d ed.  i.  48.]--remain in their
possession.  I have not seen the Prince.  Fifty were lost .  .  .  as for
the Count of Thorigny, he lost some ver plate and a few articles of
clothing.  He diverged from his route to pay a visit to the mourning
ladies at Montresor, where are the remains of his two brothers and his
grandmother, and came to us again in this town, whence we shall resume
our journey shortly.  The journey to Normandy is postponed.  The King has
despatched MM. De Bellieure and de la Guiche to M. de Guise to summon him
to court; we shall be there on Thursday.

From Orleans, this 16th of February, in the morning [1588-9?].--Your very
humble servant,
MONTAIGNE.





XIII.

To Mademoiselle PAULMIER.--[This letter, at the time of the publication
of the variorum edition of 1854, appears to have been in private hands.
See vol.  iv.  p.  382.]

MADEMOISELLE,--My friends know that, from the first moment of our
acquaintance, I have destined a copy of my book for you; for I feel that
you have done it much honour.  The courtesy of M. Paulmier would deprive
me of the pleasure of giving it to you now, for he has obliged me since a
great deal beyond the worth of my book.  You will accept it then, if you
please, as having been yours before I owed it to you, and will confer on
me the favour of loving it, whether for its own sake or for mine; and I
will keep my debt to M. Paulmier undischarged, that I may requite him, if
I have at some other time the means of serving him.




XIV.

To the KING, HENRY IV.--[The original is in the French national library,
in the Dupuy collection.  It was first discovered by M. Achille Jubinal,
who printed it with a facsimile of the entire autograph, in 1850.  St.
John gives the date wrongly as the 1st January 1590.]

SIRE, It is to be above the weight and crowd of your great and important
affairs, to know, as you do, how to lend yourself, and attend to small
matters in their turn, according to the duty of your royal dignity, which
exposes you at all times to every description and degree of person and
employment.  Yet, that your Majesty should have deigned to consider my
letter, and direct a reply to be made to it, I prefer to owe, less to
your strong understanding, than to your kindness of heart.  I have always
looked forward to your enjoyment of your present fortune, and you may
recollect that, even when I had to make confession of itto my cure, I
viewed your successes with satisfaction: now, with the greater propriety
and freedom, I embrace them affectionately.  They serve you where you are
as positive matters of fact; but they serve us here no less by the fame
which they diffuse: the echo carries as much weight as the blow.  We
should not be able to derive from the justice of your cause such powerful
arguments for the maintenance and reduction of your subjects, as we do
from the reports of the success of your undertaking; and then I have to
assure your Majesty, that the recent changes to your advantage, which you
observe hereabouts, the prosperous issue of your proceedings at Dieppe,
have opportunely seconded the honest zeal and marvellous prudence of M.
the Marshal de Matignon, from whom I flatter myself that you do not
receive day by day accounts of such good and signal services without
remembering my assurances and expectations.  I look to the next summer,
not only for fruits which we may eat, but for those to grow out of our
common tranquillity, and that it will pass over our heads with the same
even tenor of happiness, dissipating, like its predecessors, all the fine
promises with which your adversaries sustain the spirits of their
followers.  The popular inclinations resemble a tidal wave; if the
current once commences in your favour, it will go on of its own force to
the end.  I could have desired much that the private gain of the soldiers
of your army, and the necessity for satisfying them, had not deprived
you, especially in this principal town, of the glorious credit of treating
your mutinous subjects, in the midst of victory, with greater clemency
than their own protectors, and that, as distinguished from a passing and
usurped repute, you could have shown them to be really your own, by the
exercise of a protection truly paternal and royal.  In the conduct of
such affairs as you have in hand, men are obliged to have recourse to
unusual expedients.  It is always seen that they are surmounted by their
magnitude and difficulty; it not being found easy to complete the
conquest by arms and force, the end has been accomplished by clemency and
generosity, excellent lures to draw men particularly towards the just and
legitimate side.  If there is to be severity and punishment, let it be
deferred till success has been assured.  A great conqueror of past times
boasts that he gave his enemies as great an inducement to love him, as
his friends.  And here we feel already some effect of the favourable
impression produced upon our rebellious towns by the contrast between
their rude treatment, and that of those which are loyal to you.  Desiring
your Majesty a happiness more tangible and less hazardous, and that you
may be beloved rather than feared by your people, and believing that your
welfare and theirs are of necessity knit together, I rejoice to think that
the progress which you make is one towards more practicable conditions of
peace, as well as towards victory!

Sire, your letter of the last of November came to my hand only just now,
when the time which it pleased you to name for meeting you at Tours had
already passed.  I take it as a singular favour that you should have
deigned to desire a visit from so useless a person, but one who is wholly
yours, and more so even by affection than from duty.  You have acted very
commendably in adapting yourself, in the matter of external forms, to
your new fortunes; but the preservation of your old affability and
frankness in private intercourse is entitled to an equal share of praise.
You have condescended to take thought for my age, no less than for the
desire which I have to see you, where you may be at rest from these
laborious agitations.  Will not that be soon at Paris, Sire?  and may
nothing prevent me from presenting myself there!--Your very humble and
very obedient servant and subject,
MONTAIGNE.

From Montaigne, this 18th of January [1590].




XV.
To the same.--[ This letter is also in the national collection, among the
Dupuy papers.  It was first printed in the “Journal de l’Instruction
Publique,” 4th November 1846.]

SIRE,--The letter which it pleased your majesty to write to me on the
20th of July, was not delivered to me till this morning, and found me
laid up with a very violent tertian ague, a complaint very common in this
part of the country during the last month.  Sire, I consider myself
greatly honoured by the receipt of your commands, and I have not omitted
to communicate to M. the Marshal de Matignon three times most
emphatically my intention and obligation to proceed to him, and even so
far as to indicate the route by which I proposed to join him secretly, if
he thought proper.  Having received no answer, I consider that he has
weighed the difficulty and risk of the journey to me.  Sire, your Majesty
dill do me the favour to believe, if you please, that I shall never
complain of the expense on occasions where I should not hesitate to
devote my life.  I have never derived any substantial benefit whatever
from the bounty of kings, which I have neither sought nor merited; nor
have I had any recompense for the services which I have performed for
them: whereof your majesty is in part aware.  What I have done for your
predecessors I shall do still more readily for you.  I am as rich, Sire,
as I desire to be.  When I shall have exhausted my purse in attendance on
your Majesty at Paris, I will take the liberty to tell you, and then, if
you should regard me as worthy of being retained any longer in your
suite, you will find me more modest in my claims upon you than the
humblest of your officers.

Sire, I pray God for your prosperity and health.  Your very humble and
very obedient servant and subject,
MONTAIGNE.

From Montaigne, this 2d of September [1590].




XVI.

To the Governor of Guienne.

MONSEIGNEUR,--I have received this morning your letter, which I have
communicated to M. de Gourgues, and we have dined together at the house
of M.[the mayor] of Bourdeaux.  As to the inconvenience of transporting
the money named in your memorandum, you see how difficult a thing it is
to provide for; but you may be sure that we shall keep as close a watch
over it as possible.  I used every exertion to discover the man of whom
you spoke.  He has not been here; and M. de Bordeaux has shown me a
letter in which he mentions that he could not come to see the Director of
Bordeaux, as he intended, having been informed that you mistrust him.
The letter is of the day before yesterday.  If I could have found him, I
might perhaps have pursued the gentler course, being uncertain of your
views; but I entreat you nevertheless to feel no manner of doubt that I
refuse to carry out any wishes of yours, and that, where your commands
are concerned, I know no distinction of person or matter.  I hope that
you have in Guienne many as well affected to you as I am.  They report
that the Nantes galleys are advancing towards Brouage.  M. the Marshal de
Biron has not yet left.  Those who were charged to convey the message to
M. d’Usee say that they cannot find him; and I believe that, if he has
been here, he is so no longer.  We keep a vigilant eye on our gates and
guards, and we look after them a little more attentively in your absence,
which makes me apprehensive, not merely on account of the preservation of
the town, but likewise for your oven sake, knowing that the enemies of
the king feel how necessary you are to his service, and how ill we should
prosper without you.  I am afraid that, in the part where you are, you
will be overtaken by so many affairs requiring your attention on every
side, that it will take you a long time and involve great difficulty
before you have disposed of everything.  If there is any important news,
I will despatch an express at once, and you may conclude that nothing is
stirring if you do not hear from me: at the same time begging you to bear
in mind that movements of this kind are wont to be so sudden and
unexpected that, if they occur, they will grasp me by the throat, before
they say a word.  I will do what I can to collect news, and for this
purpose I will make a point of visiting and seeing men of every shade of
opinion.  Down to the present time nothing is stirring.  M. de Londel has
seen me this morning, and we have been arranging for some advances for
the place, where I shall go to-morrow morning.  Since I began this
letter, I have learnt from Chartreux that two gentlemen, describing
themselves as in the service of M. de Guise, and coming from Agen, have
passed near Chartreux; but I was not able to ascertain which road they
have taken.  They are expecting you at Agen.  The Sieur de Mauvesin came
as far as Canteloup, and thence returned, having got some intelligence.
I am in search of one Captain Rous, to whom .  .  .  wrote, trying to
draw him into his cause by all sorts of promises.  The rumour of the two
Nantes galleys ready to descend on Brouage is confirmed as certain; they
carry two companies of foot.  M. de Mercure is at Nantes.  The Sieur de
la Courbe said to M. the President Nesmond that M. d’Elbeuf is on this
side of Angiers, and lodges with his father.  He is drawing towards Lower
Poictou with 4000 foot and 400 or 500 horse, having been reinforced by
the troops of M. de Brissac and others, and M. de Mercure is to join him.
The report goes also that M. du Maine is about to take the command of all
the forces they have collected in Auvergne, and that he will cross Le
Foret to advance on Rouergue and us, that is to say, on the King of
Navarre, against whom all this is being directed.  M. de Lansac is at
Bourg, and has two war vessels, which remain in attendance on him.  His
functions are naval.  I tell you what I learn, and mix up together the
more or less probable hearsay of the town with actual matter of fact,
that you may be in possession of everything.  I beg you most humbly to
return directly affairs may allow you to do so, and assure you that,
meanwhile, we shall not spare our labour, or (if that were necessary) our
life, to maintain the king’s authority throughout.  Monseigneur, I kiss
your hands very respectfully, and pray God to have you in His keeping.
From Bordeaux, Wednesday night, 22d May (1590-91).--Your very humble
servant,

MONTAIGNE.

I have seen no one from the king of Navarre; they say that M. de Biron
has seen him.






            THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.--[Omitted by Cotton.]

READER, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn
thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other
than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all
either to thy service or to my glory.  My powers are not capable of any
such design.  I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my
kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do
shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and
humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the
knowledge they had of me.  Had my intention been to seek the world’s
favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I
desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and
ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint.
My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections and
my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.  If I had
lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet
liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly
have painted myself quite fully and quite naked.  Thus, reader, myself am
the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure
about so frivolous and vain a subject.   Therefore farewell.

From Montaigne, the 12th June 1580--[So in the edition of 1595; the
edition of 1588 has 12th June 1588]



From Montaigne, the 1st March 1580.

     --[See Bonnefon, Montaigne, 1893, p. 254.  The book had been
     licensed for the press on the 9th May previous.  The edition of 1588
     has 12th June 1588;]--




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     Arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds
     Help: no other effect than that of lengthening my suffering
     Judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser thing
     Option now of continuing in life or of completing the voyage
     Two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment
     Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



BOOK THE FIRST

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 2.

I.        That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End.
II.       Of Sorrow.
III.      That our affections carry themselves beyond us.
IV.       That the soul discharges her passions upon false objects, where
          the true are wanting.
V.        Whether the governor of a place besieged ought himself to go
          out to parley.
VI.       That the hour of parley is dangerous.
VII.      That the intention is judge of our actions.
VIII.     Of idleness.
IX.       Of liars.
X.        Of quick or slow speech.
XI.       Of prognostications.
XII.      Of constancy.



CHAPTER I

THAT MEN BY VARIOUS WAYS ARRIVE AT THE SAME END.

The most usual way of appeasing the indignation of such as we have any
way offended, when we see them in possession of the power of revenge,
and find that we absolutely lie at their mercy, is by submission, to move
them to commiseration and pity; and yet bravery, constancy, and
resolution, however quite contrary means, have sometimes served to
produce the same effect.--[Florio’s version begins thus: “The most
vsuall waie to appease those minds wee have offended, when revenge lies
in their hands, and that we stand at their mercie, is by submission to
move them to commiseration and pity: Nevertheless, courage, constancie,
and resolution (means altogether opposite) have sometimes wrought the
same effect.”--] [The spelling is Florio’s D.W.]

Edward, Prince of Wales [Edward, the Black Prince.  D.W.] (the same who
so long governed our Guienne, a personage whose condition and fortune
have in them a great deal of the most notable and most considerable parts
of grandeur), having been highly incensed by the Limousins, and taking
their city by assault, was not, either by the cries of the people, or the
prayers and tears of the women and children, abandoned to slaughter and
prostrate at his feet for mercy, to be stayed from prosecuting his
revenge; till, penetrating further into the town, he at last took notice
of three French gentlemen,--[These were Jean de Villemure, Hugh de la
Roche, and Roger de Beaufort.--Froissart, i. c. 289. {The city was
Limoges.  D.W.}]--who with incredible bravery alone sustained the power
of his victorious army.  Then it was that consideration and respect unto
so remarkable a valour first stopped the torrent of his fury, and that
his clemency, beginning with these three cavaliers, was afterwards
extended to all the remaining inhabitants of the city.

Scanderbeg, Prince of Epirus, pursuing one of his soldiers with purpose
to kill him, the soldier, having in vain tried by all the ways of
humility and supplication to appease him, resolved, as his last refuge,
to face about and await him sword in hand: which behaviour of his gave a
sudden stop to his captain’s fury, who, for seeing him assume so notable
a resolution, received him into grace; an example, however, that might
suffer another interpretation with such as have not read of the
prodigious force and valour of that prince.

The Emperor Conrad III. having besieged Guelph, Duke of Bavaria,--[In
1140, in Weinsberg, Upper Bavaria.]--would not be prevailed upon, what
mean and unmanly satisfactions soever were tendered to him, to condescend
to milder conditions than that the ladies and gentlewomen only who were
in the town with the duke might go out without violation of their honour,
on foot, and with so much only as they could carry about them.  Whereupon
they, out of magnanimity of heart, presently contrived to carry out, upon
their shoulders, their husbands and children, and the duke himself;
a sight at which the emperor was so pleased, that, ravished with the
generosity of the action, he wept for joy, and immediately extinguishing
in his heart the mortal and capital hatred he had conceived against this
duke, he from that time forward treated him and his with all humanity.
The one and the other of these two ways would with great facility work
upon my nature; for I have a marvellous propensity to mercy and mildness,
and to such a degree that I fancy of the two I should sooner surrender my
anger to compassion than to esteem.  And yet pity is reputed a vice
amongst the Stoics, who will that we succour the afflicted, but not that
we should be so affected with their sufferings as to suffer with them.
I conceived these examples not ill suited to the question in hand, and
the rather because therein we observe these great souls assaulted and
tried by these two several ways, to resist the one without relenting, and
to be shook and subjected by the other.  It may be true that to suffer a
man’s heart to be totally subdued by compassion may be imputed to
facility, effeminacy, and over-tenderness; whence it comes to pass that
the weaker natures, as of women, children, and the common sort of people,
are the most subject to it but after having resisted and disdained the
power of groans and tears, to yield to the sole reverence of the sacred
image of Valour, this can be no other than the effect of a strong and
inflexible soul enamoured of and honouring masculine and obstinate
courage.  Nevertheless, astonishment and admiration may, in less generous
minds, beget a like effect: witness the people of Thebes, who, having put
two of their generals upon trial for their lives for having continued in
arms beyond the precise term of their commission, very hardly pardoned
Pelopidas, who, bowing under the weight of so dangerous an accusation,
made no manner of defence for himself, nor produced other arguments than
prayers and supplications; whereas, on the contrary, Epaminondas, falling
to recount magniloquently the exploits he had performed in their service,
and, after a haughty and arrogant manner reproaching them with
ingratitude and injustice, they had not the heart to proceed any further
in his trial, but broke up the court and departed, the whole assembly
highly commending the high courage of this personage.--[Plutarch, How
far a Man may praise Himself, c. 5.]

Dionysius the elder, after having, by a tedious siege and through
exceeding great difficulties, taken the city of Reggio, and in it the
governor Phyton, a very gallant man, who had made so obstinate a defence,
was resolved to make him a tragical example of his revenge: in order
whereunto he first told him, “That he had the day before caused his son
and all his kindred to be drowned.”  To which Phyton returned no other
answer but this: “That they were then by one day happier than he.”  After
which, causing him to be stripped, and delivering him into the hands of
the tormentors, he was by them not only dragged through the streets of
the town, and most ignominiously and cruelly whipped, but moreover
vilified with most bitter and contumelious language: yet still he
maintained his courage entire all the way, with a strong voice and
undaunted countenance proclaiming the honourable and glorious cause of
his death; namely, for that he would not deliver up his country into the
hands of a tyrant; at the same time denouncing against him a speedy
chastisement from the offended gods.  At which Dionysius, reading in his
soldiers’ looks, that instead of being incensed at the haughty language
of this conquered enemy, to the contempt of their captain and his
triumph, they were not only struck with admiration of so rare a virtue,
but moreover inclined to mutiny, and were even ready to rescue the
prisoner out of the hangman’s hands, he caused the torturing to cease,
and afterwards privately caused him to be thrown into the sea.--[Diod.
Sic., xiv. 29.]

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject,
and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.
For Pompey could pardon the whole city of the Mamertines, though
furiously incensed against it, upon the single account of the virtue and
magnanimity of one citizen, Zeno,--[Plutarch calls him Stheno, and also
Sthemnus and Sthenis]--who took the fault of the public wholly upon
himself; neither entreated other favour, but alone to undergo the
punishment for all: and yet Sylla’s host, having in the city of Perugia
--[Plutarch says Preneste, a town of Latium.]--manifested the same
virtue, obtained nothing by it, either for himself or his
fellow-citizens.

And, directly contrary to my first examples, the bravest of all men, and
who was reputed so gracious to all those he overcame, Alexander, having,
after many great difficulties, forced the city of Gaza, and, entering,
found Betis, who commanded there, and of whose valour in the time of this
siege he had most marvellous manifest proof, alone, forsaken by all his
soldiers, his armour hacked and hewed to pieces, covered all over with
blood and wounds, and yet still fighting in the crowd of a number of
Macedonians, who were laying on him on all sides, he said to him, nettled
at so dear-bought a victory (for, in addition to the other damage, he had
two wounds newly received in his own person), “Thou shalt not die, Betis,
as thou dost intend; be sure thou shall suffer all the torments that can
be inflicted on a captive.”  To which menace the other returning no other
answer, but only a fierce and disdainful look; “What,” says Alexander,
observing his haughty and obstinate silence, “is he too stiff to bend a
knee!  Is he too proud to utter one suppliant word!  Truly, I will
conquer this silence; and if I cannot force a word from his mouth, I
will, at least, extract a groan from his heart.”  And thereupon
converting his anger into fury, presently commanded his heels to be bored
through, causing him, alive, to be dragged, mangled, and dismembered at a
cart’s tail.--[Quintus Curtius, iv. 6.  This act of cruelty has been
doubted, notwithstanding the statement of Curtius.]--Was it that the
height of courage was so natural and familiar to this conqueror, that
because he could not admire, he respected it the less?  Or was it that he
conceived valour to be a virtue so peculiar to himself, that his pride
could not, without envy, endure it in another?  Or was it that the
natural impetuosity of his fury was incapable of opposition?  Certainly,
had it been capable of moderation, it is to be believed that in the sack
and desolation of Thebes, to see so many valiant men, lost and totally
destitute of any further defence, cruelly massacred before his eyes,
would have appeased it: where there were above six thousand put to the
sword, of whom not one was seen to fly, or heard to cry out for quarter;
but, on the contrary, every one running here and there to seek out and to
provoke the victorious enemy to help them to an honourable end.  Not one
was seen who, however weakened with wounds, did not in his last gasp yet
endeavour to revenge himself, and with all the arms of a brave despair,
to sweeten his own death in the death of an enemy.  Yet did their valour
create no pity, and the length of one day was not enough to satiate the
thirst of the conqueror’s revenge, but the slaughter continued to the
last drop of blood that was capable of being shed, and stopped not till
it met with none but unarmed persons, old men, women, and children, of
them to carry away to the number of thirty thousand slaves.




CHAPTER II

OF SORROW

No man living is more free from this passion than I, who yet neither like
it in myself nor admire it in others, and yet generally the world, as a
settled thing, is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing
therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.  Foolish and sordid guise!
--[“No man is more free from this passion than I, for I neither love nor
regard it: albeit the world hath undertaken, as it were upon covenant, to
grace it with a particular favour.  Therewith they adorne age, vertue,
and conscience.  Oh foolish and base ornament!”  Florio, 1613, p. 3]
--The Italians have more fitly baptized by this name--[La tristezza]--
malignity; for ‘tis a quality always hurtful, always idle and vain; and
as being cowardly, mean, and base, it is by the Stoics expressly and
particularly forbidden to their sages.

But the story--[Herodotus, iii.  14.]--says that Psammenitus, King of
Egypt, being defeated and taken prisoner by Cambyses, King of Persia,
seeing his own daughter pass by him as prisoner, and in a wretched habit,
with a bucket to draw water, though his friends about him were so
concerned as to break out into tears and lamentations, yet he himself
remained unmoved, without uttering a word, his eyes fixed upon the
ground; and seeing, moreover, his son immediately after led to execution,
still maintained the same countenance; till spying at last one of his
domestic and familiar friends dragged away amongst the captives, he fell
to tearing his hair and beating his breast, with all the other
extravagances of extreme sorrow.

A story that may very fitly be coupled with another of the same kind, of
recent date, of a prince of our own nation, who being at Trent, and
having news there brought him of the death of his elder brother, a
brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of his house, and
soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family,
and having withstood these two assaults with an exemplary resolution; one
of his servants happening a few days after to die, he suffered his
constancy to be overcome by this last accident; and, parting with his
courage, so abandoned himself to sorrow and mourning, that some thence
were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this
last stroke of fortune; but, in truth, it was, that being before brimful
of grief, the least addition overflowed the bounds of all patience.
Which, I think, might also be said of the former example, did not the
story proceed to tell us that Cambyses asking Psammenitus, “Why, not
being moved at the calamity of his son and daughter, he should with so
great impatience bear the misfortune of his friend?”  “It is,” answered
he, “because only this last affliction was to be manifested by tears, the
two first far exceeding all manner of expression.”

And, peradventure, something like this might be working in the fancy of
the ancient painter,--[Cicero, De Orator., c. 22 ; Pliny, xxxv. 10.]--
who having, in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, to represent the sorrow of the
assistants proportionably to the several degrees of interest every one
had in the death of this fair innocent virgin, and having, in the other
figures, laid out the utmost power of his art, when he came to that of
her father, he drew him with a veil over his face, meaning thereby that
no kind of countenance was capable of expressing such a degree of sorrow.
Which is also the reason why the poets feign the miserable mother, Niobe,
having first lost seven sons, and then afterwards as many daughters
(overwhelmed with her losses), to have been at last transformed into a
rock--

               “Diriguisse malis,”

     [“Petrified with her misfortunes.”--Ovid, Met., vi. 304.]

thereby to express that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which
benumbs all our faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we
are able to bear.  And, indeed, the violence and impression of an
excessive grief must of necessity astonish the soul, and wholly deprive
her of her ordinary functions: as it happens to every one of us, who,
upon any sudden alarm of very ill news, find ourselves surprised,
stupefied, and in a manner deprived of all power of motion, so that the
soul, beginning to vent itself in tears and lamentations, seems to free
and disengage itself from the sudden oppression, and to have obtained
some room to work itself out at greater liberty.

          “Et via vix tandem voci laxata dolore est.”

     [“And at length and with difficulty is a passage opened by grief for
     utterance.”--AEneid, xi. 151.]

In the war that Ferdinand made upon the widow of King John of Hungary,
about Buda, a man-at-arms was particularly taken notice of by every one
for his singular gallant behaviour in a certain encounter; and, unknown,
highly commended, and lamented, being left dead upon the place: but by
none so much as by Raisciac, a German lord, who was infinitely enamoured
of so rare a valour.  The body being brought off, and the count, with the
common curiosity coming to view it, the armour was no sooner taken off
but he immediately knew him to be his own son, a thing that added a
second blow to the compassion of all the beholders; only he, without
uttering a word, or turning away his eyes from the woeful object, stood
fixedly contemplating the body of his son, till the vehemency of sorrow
having overcome his vital spirits, made him sink down stone-dead to the
ground.

          “Chi puo dir com’ egli arde, a in picciol fuoco,”

     [“He who can say how he burns with love, has little fire”
      --Petrarca, Sonetto 137.]

say the Innamoratos, when they would represent an ‘insupportable passion.

                         “Misero quod omneis
               Eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
               Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi,
                         Quod loquar amens.
               Lingua sed torpet: tenuis sub artus
               Flamma dimanat; sonitu suopte
               Tintinant aures; gemina teguntur
                         Lumina nocte.”

     [“Love deprives me of all my faculties: Lesbia, when once in thy
     presence, I have not left the power to tell my distracting passion:
     my tongue becomes torpid; a subtle flame creeps through my veins; my
     ears tingle in deafness; my eyes are veiled with darkness.”
      Catullus, Epig. li. 5]

Neither is it in the height and greatest fury of the fit that we are in a
condition to pour out our complaints or our amorous persuasions, the soul
being at that time over-burdened, and labouring with profound thoughts;
and the body dejected and languishing with desire; and thence it is that
sometimes proceed those accidental impotencies that so unseasonably
surprise the lover, and that frigidity which by the force of an
immoderate ardour seizes him even in the very lap of fruition.
--[The edition of 1588 has here, “An accident not unknown to myself.”]--
For all passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are
but moderate:

               “Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.”

     [“Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb.”
      --Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.]

A surprise of unexpected joy does likewise often produce the same effect:

               “Ut me conspexit venientem, et Troja circum
               Arma amens vidit, magnis exterrita monstris,
               Diriguit visu in medio, calor ossa reliquit,
               Labitur, et longo vix tandem tempore fatur.”

     [“When she beheld me advancing, and saw, with stupefaction, the
     Trojan arms around me, terrified with so great a prodigy, she
     fainted away at the very sight: vital warmth forsook her limbs: she
     sinks down, and, after a long interval, with difficulty speaks.”--
     AEneid, iii. 306.]

Besides the examples of the Roman lady, who died for joy to see her son
safe returned from the defeat of Cannae; and of Sophocles and of
Dionysius the Tyrant,--[Pliny, vii.  53.  Diodorus Siculus, however (xv.
c. 20), tells us that Dionysius “was so overjoyed at the news that he
made a great sacrifice upon it to the gods, prepared sumptuous feasts, to
which he invited all his friends, and therein drank so excessively that
it threw him into a very bad distemper.”]--who died of joy; and of
Thalna, who died in Corsica, reading news of the honours the Roman Senate
had decreed in his favour, we have, moreover, one in our time, of Pope
Leo X., who upon news of the taking of Milan, a thing he had so ardently
desired, was rapt with so sudden an excess of joy that he immediately
fell into a fever and died.--[Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, vol.
xiv.]--And for a more notable testimony of the imbecility of human
nature, it is recorded by the ancients--[Pliny, ‘ut supra’]--that
Diodorus the dialectician died upon the spot, out of an extreme passion
of shame, for not having been able in his own school, and in the presence
of a great auditory, to disengage himself from a nice argument that was
propounded to him.  I, for my part, am very little subject to these
violent passions; I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also,
by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.




CHAPTER III

THAT OUR AFFECTIONS CARRY THEMSELVES BEYOND US

Such as accuse mankind of the folly of gaping after future things, and
advise us to make our benefit of those which are present, and to set up
our rest upon them, as having no grasp upon that which is to come, even
less than that which we have upon what is past, have hit upon the most
universal of human errors, if that may be called an error to which nature
herself has disposed us, in order to the continuation of her own work,
prepossessing us, amongst several others, with this deceiving
imagination, as being more jealous of our action than afraid of our
knowledge.

We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves: fear, desire,
hope, still push us on towards the future, depriving us, in the meantime,
of the sense and consideration of that which is to amuse us with the
thought of what shall be, even when we shall be no more.--[Rousseau,
Emile, livre ii.]

          “Calamitosus est animus futuri auxius.”

     [“The mind anxious about the future is unhappy.”
      --Seneca, Epist., 98.]

We find this great precept often repeated in Plato, “Do thine own work,
and know thyself.”  Of which two parts, both the one and the other
generally, comprehend our whole duty, and do each of them in like manner
involve the other; for who will do his own work aright will find that his
first lesson is to know what he is, and that which is proper to himself;
and who rightly understands himself will never mistake another man’s work
for his own, but will love and improve himself above all other things,
will refuse superfluous employments, and reject all unprofitable thoughts
and propositions.  As folly, on the one side, though it should enjoy all
it desire, would notwithstanding never be content, so, on the other,
wisdom, acquiescing in the present, is never dissatisfied with itself.
--[Cicero, Tusc.  Quae., 57, v. 18.]--Epicurus dispenses his sages from
all foresight and care of the future.

Amongst those laws that relate to the dead, I look upon that to be very
sound by which the actions of princes are to be examined after their
decease.--[Diodorus Siculus, i. 6.]-- They are equals with, if not
masters of the laws, and, therefore, what justice could not inflict upon
their persons, ‘tis but reason should be executed upon their reputations
and the estates of their successors--things that we often value above
life itself.  ‘Tis a custom of singular advantage to those countries
where it is in use, and by all good princes to be desired, who have
reason to take it ill, that the memories of the wicked should be used
with the same reverence and respect with their own.  We owe subjection
and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has
respect unto their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only
due to their virtue.  Let us grant to political government to endure them
with patience, however unworthy; to conceal their vices; and to assist
them with our recommendation in their indifferent actions, whilst their
authority stands in need of our support.  But, the relation of prince and
subject being once at an end, there is no reason we should deny the
expression of our real opinions to our own liberty and common justice,
and especially to interdict to good subjects the glory of having
reverently and faithfully served a prince, whose imperfections were to
them so well known; this were to deprive posterity of a useful example.
And such as, out of respect to some private obligation, unjustly espouse
and vindicate the memory of a faulty prince, do private right at the
expense of public justice.  Livy does very truly say,--[xxxv. 48.]--
“That the language of men bred up in courts is always full of vain
ostentation and false testimony, every one indifferently magnifying his
own master, and stretching his commendation to the utmost extent of
virtue and sovereign grandeur.”  Some may condemn the freedom of those
two soldiers who so roundly answered Nero to his beard; the one being
asked by him why he bore him ill-will?  “I loved thee,” answered he,
“whilst thou wert worthy of it, but since thou art become a parricide, an
incendiary, a player, and a coachman, I hate thee as thou dost deserve.”
 And the other, why he should attempt to kill him?  “Because,” said he,
“I could think of no other remedy against thy perpetual mischiefs.”
 --[Tacitus, Annal., xv. 67.]--But the public and universal testimonies
that were given of him after his death (and so will be to all posterity,
both of him and all other wicked princes like him), of his tyrannies and
abominable deportment, who, of a sound judgment, can reprove them?

I am scandalised, that in so sacred a government as that of the
Lacedaemonians there should be mixed so hypocritical a ceremony at the
interment of their kings; where all their confederates and neighbours,
and all sorts and degrees of men and women, as well as their slaves, cut
and slashed their foreheads in token of sorrow, repeating in their cries
and lamentations that that king (let him have been as wicked as the
devil) was the best that ever they had;--[Herodotus, vi.  68.]--by this
means attributing to his quality the praise that only belongs to merit,
and that of right is due to supreme desert, though lodged in the lowest
and most inferior subject.

Aristotle, who will still have a hand in everything, makes a ‘quaere’
upon the saying of Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is
dead: “whether, then, he who has lived and died according to his heart’s
desire, if he have left an ill repute behind him, and that his posterity
be miserable, can be said to be happy?”  Whilst we have life and motion,
we convey ourselves by fancy and preoccupation, whither and to what we
please; but once out of being, we have no more any manner of
communication with that which is, and it had therefore been better said
by Solon that man is never happy, because never so, till he is no more.

                              “Quisquam
          Vix radicitus e vita se tollit, et eicit;
          Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse,
          Nec removet satis a projecto corpore sese, et
          Vindicat.”

     [“Scarcely one man can, even in dying, wholly detach himself from
     the idea of life; in his ignorance he must needs imagine that there
     is in him something that survives him, and cannot sufficiently
     separate or emancipate himself from his remains”
      --Lucretius, iii. 890.]

Bertrand de Guesclin, dying at the siege of the Castle of Rancon, near
unto Puy, in Auvergne, the besieged were afterwards, upon surrender,
enjoined to lay down the keys of the place upon the corpse of the dead
general.  Bartolommeo d’Alviano, the Venetian General, happening to die
in the service of the Republic in Brescia, and his corpse being to be
carried through the territory of Verona, an enemy’s country, most of the
army were inclined to demand safe-conduct from the Veronese; but Theodoro
Trivulzio opposed the motion, rather choosing to make his way by force of
arms, and to run the hazard of a battle, saying it was by no means fit
that he who in his life was never afraid of his enemies should seem to
apprehend them when he was dead.  In truth, in affairs of the same
nature, by the Greek laws, he who made suit to an enemy for a body to
give it burial renounced his victory, and had no more right to erect a
trophy, and he to whom such suit was made was reputed victor.  By this
means it was that Nicias lost the advantage he had visibly obtained over
the Corinthians, and that Agesilaus, on the contrary, assured that which
he had before very doubtfully gained over the Boeotians.--[Plutarch,
Life of Nicias, c. ii.; Life of Agesilaus, c. vi.]

These things might appear strange, had it not been a general practice in
all ages not only to extend the concern of ourselves beyond this life,
but, moreover, to fancy that the favour of Heaven does not only very
often accompany us to the grave, but has also, even after life, a concern
for our ashes.  Of which there are so many ancient examples (to say
nothing of those of our own observation), that it is not necessary I
should longer insist upon it.  Edward I., King of England, having in the
long wars betwixt him and Robert, King of Scotland, had experience of how
great importance his own immediate presence was to the success of his
affairs, having ever been victorious in whatever he undertook in his own
person, when he came to die, bound his son in a solemn oath that, so soon
as he should be dead he should boil his body till the flesh parted from
the bones, and bury the flesh, reserving the bones to carry continually
with him in his army, so often as he should be obliged to go against the
Scots, as if destiny had inevitably attached victory, even to his
remains.  John Zisca, the same who, to vindication of Wicliffe’s
heresies, troubled the Bohemian state, left order that they should flay
him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war
against his enemies, fancying it would contribute to the continuation of
the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them.  In like
manner certain of the Indians, in their battles with the Spaniards,
carried with them the bones of one of their captains, in consideration of
the victories they had formerly obtained under his conduct.  And other
people of the same New World carry about with them, in their wars, the
relics of valiant men who have died in battle, to incite their courage
and advance their fortune.  Of which examples the first reserve nothing
for the tomb but the reputation they have acquired by their former
achievements, but these attribute to them a certain present and active
power.

The proceeding of Captain Bayard is of a better composition, who finding
himself wounded to death with an harquebuss shot, and being importuned to
retire out of the fight, made answer that he would not begin at the last
gasp to turn his back to the enemy, and accordingly still fought on, till
feeling himself too faint and no longer able to sit on his horse, he
commanded his steward to set him down at the foot of a tree, but so that
he might die with his face towards the enemy, which he did.

I must yet add another example, equally remarkable for the present
consideration with any of the former.  The Emperor Maximilian,
great-grandfather to the now King Philip,--[Philip II. of Spain.]--was a
prince endowed throughout with great and extraordinary qualities, and
amongst the rest with a singular beauty of person, but had withal a
humour very contrary to that of other princes, who for the despatch of
their most important affairs convert their close-stool into a chair of
State, which was, that he would never permit any of his bedchamber, how
familiar soever, to see him in that posture, and would steal aside to
make water as religiously as a virgin, shy to discover to his physician
or any other whomsoever those parts that we are accustomed to conceal.
I myself, who have so impudent a way of talking, am, nevertheless,
naturally so modest this way, that unless at the importunity of necessity
or pleasure, I scarcely ever communicate to the sight of any either those
parts or actions that custom orders us to conceal, wherein I suffer more
constraint than I conceive is very well becoming a man, especially of my
profession.  But he nourished this modest humour to such a degree of
superstition as to give express orders in his last will that they should
put him on drawers so soon as he should be dead; to which, methinks, he
would have done well to have added that he should be blindfolded, too,
that put them on.  The charge that Cyrus left with his children, that
neither they, nor any other, should either see or touch his body after
the soul was departed from it,--[Xenophon, Cyropedia, viii. 7.]--I
attribute to some superstitious devotion of his; for both his historian
and himself, amongst their great qualities, marked the whole course of
their lives with a singular respect and reverence to religion.

I was by no means pleased with a story, told me by a man of very great
quality of a relation of mine, and one who had given a very good account
of himself both in peace and war, that, coming to die in a very old age,
of excessive pain of the stone, he spent the last hours of his life in an
extraordinary solicitude about ordering the honour and ceremony of his
funeral, pressing all the men of condition who came to see him to engage
their word to attend him to his grave: importuning this very prince, who
came to visit him at his last gasp, with a most earnest supplication that
he would order his family to be there, and presenting before him several
reasons and examples to prove that it was a respect due to a man of his
condition; and seemed to die content, having obtained this promise, and
appointed the method and order of his funeral parade.  I have seldom
heard of so persistent a vanity.

Another, though contrary curiosity (of which singularity, also, I do not
want domestic example), seems to be somewhat akin to this, that a man
shall cudgel his brains at the last moments of his life to contrive his
obsequies to so particular and unusual a parsimony as of one servant with
a lantern, I see this humour commended, and the appointment of Marcus.
Emilius Lepidus, who forbade his heirs to bestow upon his hearse even the
common ceremonies in use upon such occasions.  Is it yet temperance and
frugality to avoid expense and pleasure of which the use and knowledge
are imperceptible to us?  See, here, an easy and cheap reformation.  If
instruction were at all necessary in this case, I should be of opinion
that in this, as in all other actions of life, each person should
regulate the matter according to his fortune; and the philosopher Lycon
prudently ordered his friends to dispose of his body where they should
think most fit, and as to his funeral, to order it neither too
superfluous nor too mean.  For my part, I should wholly refer the
ordering of this ceremony to custom, and shall, when the time comes,
accordingly leave it to their discretion to whose lot it shall fall to do
me that last office. “Totus hic locus est contemnendus in nobis, non
negligendus in nostris;”--[“The place of our sepulture is to be contemned
by us, but not to be neglected by our friends.”--Cicero, Tusc. i. 45.]--
and it was a holy saying of a saint, “Curatio funeris, conditio
sepultura: pompa exequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solatia, quam subsidia
mortuorum.”--[“The care of death, the place of sepulture, the pomps of
obsequies, are rather consolations to the living than succours to the
dead.” August. De Civit. Dei, i.  12.]--Which made Socrates answer
Crito, who, at death, asked him how he would be buried: “How you will,”
 said he. “If I were to concern myself beyond the present about this
affair, I should be most tempted, as the greatest satisfaction of this
kind, to imitate those who in their lifetime entertain themselves with
the ceremony and honours of their own obsequies beforehand, and are
pleased with beholding their own dead countenance in marble.  Happy are
they who can gratify their senses by insensibility, and live by their
death!”

I am ready to conceive an implacable hatred against all popular
domination, though I think it the most natural and equitable of all, so
oft as I call to mind the inhuman injustice of the people of Athens, who,
without remission, or once vouchsafing to hear what they had to say for
themselves, put to death their brave captains newly returned triumphant
from a naval victory they had obtained over the Lacedaemonians near the
Arginusian Isles, the most bloody and obstinate engagement that ever the
Greeks fought at sea; because (after the victory) they followed up the
blow and pursued the advantages presented to them by the rule of war,
rather than stay to gather up and bury their dead.  And the execution is
yet rendered more odious by the behaviour of Diomedon, who, being one of
the condemned, and a man of most eminent virtue, political and military,
after having heard the sentence, advancing to speak, no audience till
then having been allowed, instead of laying before them his own cause,
or the impiety of so cruel a sentence, only expressed a solicitude for
his judges’ preservation, beseeching the gods to convert this sentence to
their good, and praying that, for neglecting to fulfil the vows which he
and his companions had made (with which he also acquainted them) in
acknowledgment of so glorious a success, they might not draw down the
indignation of the gods upon them; and so without more words went
courageously to his death.

Fortune, a few years after, punished them in the same kind; for Chabrias,
captain-general of their naval forces, having got the better of Pollis,
Admiral of Sparta, at the Isle of Naxos, totally lost the fruits of his
victory, one of very great importance to their affairs, in order not to
incur the danger of this example, and so that he should not lose a few
bodies of his dead friends that were floating in the sea, gave
opportunity to a world of living enemies to sail away in safety, who
afterwards made them pay dear for this unseasonable superstition:--

               “Quaeris, quo jaceas, post obitum, loco?
                    Quo non nata jacent.”

     [“Dost ask where thou shalt lie after death?
     Where things not born lie, that never being had.”]
                                   Seneca, Tyoa. Choro ii. 30.


This other restores the sense of repose to a body without a soul:

     “Neque sepulcrum, quo recipiatur, habeat: portum corporis, ubi,
     remissa human, vita, corpus requiescat a malis.”

     [“Nor let him have a sepulchre wherein he may be received, a haven
     for his body, where, life being gone, that body may rest from its
     woes.”--Ennius, ap.  Cicero, Tusc.  i.  44.]

As nature demonstrates to us that several dead things retain yet an
occult relation to life; wine changes its flavour and complexion in
cellars, according to the changes and seasons of the vine from whence it
came; and the flesh of--venison alters its condition in the
powdering-tub, and its taste according to the laws of the living
flesh of its kind, as it is said.




CHAPTER IV

THAT THE SOUL EXPENDS ITS PASSIONS UPON FALSE OBJECTS, WHERE THE TRUE ARE
WANTING

A gentleman of my country, marvellously tormented with the gout, being
importuned by his physicians totally to abstain from all manner of salt
meats, was wont pleasantly to reply, that in the extremity of his fits he
must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and
cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues
and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain.  But, in good earnest, as
the arm when it is advanced to strike, if it miss the blow, and goes by
the wind, it pains us; and as also, that, to make a pleasant prospect,
the sight should not be lost and dilated in vague air, but have some
bound and object to limit and circumscribe it at a reasonable distance.

         “Ventus ut amittit vires, nisi robore densa
          Occurrant sylvae, spatio diffusus inani.”

     [“As the wind loses its force diffused in void space, unless it in
     its strength encounters the thick wood.”--Lucan, iii.  362.]

So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its
violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and
therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.
Plutarch says of those who are delighted with little dogs and monkeys,
that the amorous part that is in us, for want of a legitimate object,
rather than lie idle, does after that manner forge and create one false
and frivolous.  And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines
rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical a subject,
even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.
After this manner brute beasts direct their fury to fall upon the stone
or weapon that has hurt them, and with their teeth a even execute revenge
upon themselves for the injury they have received from another:

         “Pannonis haud aliter, post ictum saevior ursa,
          Cui jaculum parva Lybis amentavit habena,
          Se rotat in vulnus, telumque irata receptum
          Impetit, et secum fugientem circuit hastam.”

     [“So the she-bear, fiercer after the blow from the Lybian’s thong-
     hurled dart, turns round upon the wound, and attacking the received
     spear, twists it, as she flies.”--Lucan, vi. 220.]

What causes of the misadventures that befall us do we not invent?  what
is it that we do not lay the fault to, right or wrong, that we may have
something to quarrel with?  It is not those beautiful tresses you tear,
nor is it the white bosom that in your anger you so unmercifully beat,
that with an unlucky bullet have slain your beloved brother; quarrel with
something else.  Livy, speaking of the Roman army in Spain, says that for
the loss of the two brothers, their great captains:

          “Flere omnes repente, et offensare capita.”

     [“All at once wept and tore their hair.”-Livy, xxv.  37.]

‘Tis a common practice.  And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the
king, who by handsful pulled his hair off his head for sorrow, “Does this
man think that baldness is a remedy for grief?”--[Cicero, Tusc.  Quest.,
iii.  26.]--Who has not seen peevish gamesters chew and swallow the
cards, and swallow the dice, in revenge for the loss of their money?
Xerxes whipped the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos; Cyrus
employed a whole army several days at work, to revenge himself of the
river Gyndas, for the fright it had put him into in passing over it; and
Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother
had once enjoyed there.

     --[Pleasure--unless ‘plaisir’ were originally ‘deplaisir’--must be
     understood here ironically, for the house was one in which she had
     been imprisoned.--Seneca, De Ira. iii. 22]--

I remember there was a story current, when I was a boy, that one of our
neighbouring kings--[Probably Alfonso XI.  of Castile]--having received
a blow from the hand of God, swore he would be revenged, and in order to
it, made proclamation that for ten years to come no one should pray to
Him, or so much as mention Him throughout his dominions, or, so far as
his authority went, believe in Him; by which they meant to paint not so
much the folly as the vainglory of the nation of which this tale was
told.  They are vices that always go together, but in truth such actions
as these have in them still more of presumption than want of wit.
Augustus Caesar, having been tossed with a tempest at sea, fell to
defying Neptune, and in the pomp of the Circensian games, to be revenged,
deposed his statue from the place it had amongst the other deities.
Wherein he was still less excusable than the former, and less than he was
afterwards when, having lost a battle under Quintilius Varus in Germany,
in rage and despair he went running his head against the wall, crying
out, “O Varus!  give me back my legions!” for these exceed all folly,
forasmuch as impiety is joined therewith, invading God Himself, or at
least Fortune, as if she had ears that were subject to our batteries;
like the Thracians, who when it thunders or lightens, fall to shooting
against heaven with Titanian vengeance, as if by flights of arrows they
intended to bring God to reason.  Though the ancient poet in Plutarch
tells us--

              “Point ne se faut couroucer aux affaires,
               Il ne leur chault de toutes nos choleres.”

     [“We must not trouble the gods with our affairs; they take no heed
     of our angers and disputes.”--Plutarch.]

But we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.




CHAPTER V

WHETHER THE GOVERNOR OF A PLACE BESIEGED OUGHT HIMSELF
TO GO OUT TO PARLEY

Quintus Marcius, the Roman legate in the war against Perseus, King of
Macedon, to gain time wherein to reinforce his army, set on foot some
overtures of accommodation, with which the king being lulled asleep,
concluded a truce for some days, by this means giving his enemy
opportunity and leisure to recruit his forces, which was afterwards the
occasion of the king’s final ruin.  Yet the elder senators, mindful of
their forefathers’ manners, condemned this proceeding as degenerating
from their ancient practice, which, they said, was to fight by valour,
and not by artifice, surprises, and night-encounters; neither by
pretended flight nor unexpected rallies to overcome their enemies; never
making war till having first proclaimed it, and very often assigned both
the hour and place of battle.  Out of this generous principle it was that
they delivered up to Pyrrhus his treacherous physician, and to the
Etrurians their disloyal schoolmaster.  This was, indeed, a procedure
truly Roman, and nothing allied to the Grecian subtlety, nor to the Punic
cunning, where it was reputed a victory of less glory to overcome by
force than by fraud.  Deceit may serve for a need, but he only confesses
himself overcome who knows he is neither subdued by policy nor
misadventure, but by dint of valour, man to man, in a fair and just war.
It very well appears, by the discourse of these good old senators, that
this fine sentence was not yet received amongst them.

               “Dolus, an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?”

     [“What matters whether by valour or by strategem we overcome the
     enemy?”--Aeneid, ii. 390]

The Achaians, says Polybius, abhorred all manner of double-dealing in
war, not reputing it a victory unless where the courage of the enemy was
fairly subdued:

“Eam vir sanctus et sapiens sciet veram esse victoriam, quae, salva fide
et integra dignitate, parabitur.”--[“An honest and prudent man will
acknowledge that only to be a true victory which shall be obtained saving
his own good faith and dignity.”--Florus, i.  12.]--Says another:

          “Vosne velit, an me, regnare hera, quidve ferat,
          fors virtute experiamur.”

     [“Whether you or I shall rule, or what shall happen, let us
     determine by valour.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 12]

In the kingdom of Ternate, amongst those nations which we so broadly call
barbarians, they have a custom never to commence war, till it be first
proclaimed; adding withal an ample declaration of what means they have to
do it with, with what and how many men, what ammunitions, and what, both
offensive and defensive, arms; but also, that being done, if their
enemies do not yield and come to an agreement, they conceive it lawful to
employ without reproach in their wars any means which may help them to
conquer.

The ancient Florentines were so far from seeking to obtain any advantage
over their enemies by surprise, that they always gave them a month’s
warning before they drew their army into the field, by the continual
tolling of a bell they called Martinella.--[After St. Martin.]

For what concerns ourselves, who are not so scrupulous in this affair,
and who attribute the honour of the war to him who has the profit of it,
and who after Lysander say, “Where the lion’s skin is too short, we must
eke it out with a bit from that of a fox”; the most usual occasions of
surprise are derived from this practice, and we hold that there are no
moments wherein a chief ought to be more circumspect, and to have his eye
so much at watch, as those of parleys and treaties of accommodation; and
it is, therefore, become a general rule amongst the martial men of these
latter times, that a governor of a place never ought, in a time of siege,
to go out to parley.  It was for this that in our fathers’ days the
Seigneurs de Montmord and de l’Assigni, defending Mousson against the
Count of Nassau, were so highly censured.  But yet, as to this, it would
be excusable in that governor who, going out, should, notwithstanding,
do it in such manner that the safety and advantage should be on his side;
as Count Guido di Rangone did at Reggio (if we are to believe Du Bellay,
for Guicciardini says it was he himself) when the Seigneur de l’Escut
approached to parley, who stepped so little away from his fort, that a
disorder happening in the interim of parley, not only Monsieur de l’Escut
and his party who were advanced with him, found themselves by much the
weaker, insomuch that Alessandro Trivulcio was there slain, but he
himself follow the Count, and, relying upon his honour, to secure himself
from the danger of the shot within the walls of the town.

Eumenes, being shut up in the city of Nora by Antigonus, and by him
importuned to come out to speak with him, as he sent him word it was fit
he should to a greater man than himself, and one who had now an advantage
over him, returned this noble answer.  “Tell him,” said he, “that I shall
never think any man greater than myself whilst I have my sword in my
hand,” and would not consent to come out to him till first, according to
his own demand, Antigonus had delivered him his own nephew Ptolomeus in
hostage.

And yet some have done very well in going out in person to parley, on the
word of the assailant: witness Henry de Vaux, a cavalier of Champagne,
who being besieged by the English in the Castle of Commercy, and
Bartholomew de Brunes, who commanded at the Leaguer, having so sapped the
greatest part of the castle without, that nothing remained but setting
fire to the props to bury the besieged under the ruins, he requested the
said Henry to come out to speak with him for his own good, which he did
with three more in company; and, his ruin being made apparent to him, he
conceived himself singularly obliged to his enemy, to whose discretion he
and his garrison surrendered themselves; and fire being presently applied
to the mine, the props no sooner began to fail, but the castle was
immediately blown up from its foundations, no one stone being left upon
another.

I could, and do, with great facility, rely upon the faith of another; but
I should very unwillingly do it in such a case, as it should thereby be
judged that it was rather an effect of my despair and want of courage
than voluntarily and out of confidence and security in the faith of him
with whom I had to do.




CHAPTER VI

THAT THE HOUR OF PARLEY DANGEROUS

I saw, notwithstanding, lately at Mussidan, a place not far from my
house, that those who were driven out thence by our army, and others of
their party, highly complained of treachery, for that during a treaty of
accommodation, and in the very interim that their deputies were treating,
they were surprised and cut to pieces: a thing that, peradventure, in
another age, might have had some colour of foul play; but, as I have just
said, the practice of arms in these days is quite another thing, and
there is now no confidence in an enemy excusable till the treaty is
finally sealed; and even then the conqueror has enough to do to keep his
word: so hazardous a thing it is to entrust the observation of the faith
a man has engaged to a town that surrenders upon easy and favourable
conditions, to the licence of a victorious army, and to give the soldier
free entrance into it in the heat of blood.

Lucius AEmilius Regillus, the Roman praetor, having lost his time in
attempting to take the city of Phocaea by force, by reason of the
singular valour wherewith the inhabitants defended themselves,
conditioned, at last, to receive them as friends to the people of Rome,
and to enter the town, as into a confederate city, without any manner of
hostility, of which he gave them all assurance; but having, for the
greater pomp, brought his whole army in with him, it was no more in his
power, with all the endeavour he could use, to restrain his people: so
that, avarice and revenge trampling under foot both his authority and all
military discipline, he there saw a considerable part of the city sacked
and ruined before his face.

Cleomenes was wont to say, “that what mischief soever a man could do his
enemy in time of war was above justice, and nothing accountable to it in
the sight of gods and men.”  And so, having concluded a truce with those
of Argos for seven days, the third night after he fell upon them when
they were all buried in sleep, and put them to the sword, alleging that
there had no nights been mentioned in the truce; but the gods punished
this subtle perfidy.

In a time of parley also; and while the citizens were relying upon their
safety warrant, the city of Casilinum was taken by surprise, and that
even in the age of the justest captains and the most perfect Roman
military discipline; for it is not said that it is not lawful for us, in
time and place, to make advantage of our enemies’ want of understanding,
as well as their want of courage.

And, doubtless, war has naturally many privileges that appear reasonable
even to the prejudice of reason.  And therefore here the rule fails,
“Neminem id agere ut ex alte rius praedetur inscitia.”--[“No one should
preys upon another’s folly.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii.  17.]--But I am
astonished at the great liberty allowed by Xenophon in such cases, and
that both by precept and by the example of several exploits of his
complete emperor; an author of very great authority, I confess, in those
affairs, as being in his own person both a great captain and a
philosopher of the first form of Socrates’ disciples; and yet I cannot
consent to such a measure of licence as he dispenses in all things and
places.

Monsieur d’Aubigny, besieging Capua, and after having directed a furious
battery against it, Signor Fabricio Colonna, governor of the town, having
from a bastion begun to parley, and his soldiers in the meantime being a
little more remiss in their guard, our people entered the place at
unawares, and put them all to the sword.  And of later memory, at Yvoy,
Signor Juliano Romero having played that part of a novice to go out to
parley with the Constable, at his return found his place taken.  But,
that we might not scape scot-free, the Marquess of Pescara having laid
siege to Genoa, where Duke Ottaviano Fregosa commanded under our
protection, and the articles betwixt them being so far advanced that it
was looked upon as a done thing, and upon the point to be concluded, the
Spaniards in the meantime having slipped in, made use of this treachery
as an absolute victory.  And since, at Ligny, in Barrois, where the Count
de Brienne commanded, the emperor having in his own person beleaguered
that place, and Bertheville, the said Count’s lieutenant, going out to
parley, whilst he was capitulating the town was taken.

              “Fu il vincer sempremai laudabil cosa,
               Vincasi o per fortuna, o per ingegno,”

     [“Victory is ever worthy of praise, whether obtained by valour or
     wisdom.”--Ariosto, xv.  I.]

But the philosopher Chrysippus was of another opinion, wherein I also
concur; for he was used to say that those who run a race ought to employ
all the force they have in what they are about, and to run as fast as
they can; but that it is by no means fair in them to lay any hand upon
their adversary to stop him, nor to set a leg before him to throw him
down.  And yet more generous was the answer of that great Alexander to
Polypercon who was persuading him to take the advantage of the night’s
obscurity to fall upon Darius.  “By no means,” said be; “it is not for
such a man as I am to steal a victory, ‘Malo me fortunae poeniteat, quam
victoria pudeat.’”--[“I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be
ashamed of victory.”  Quint. Curt, iv. 13]--

         “Atque idem fugientem baud est dignatus Oroden
          Sternere, nec jacta caecum dare cuspide vulnus
          Obvius, adversoque occurrit, seque viro vir
          Contulit, haud furto melior, sed fortibus armis.”

     [“He deigned not to throw down Orodes as he fled, or with the darted
     spear to give him a wound unseen; but overtaking him, he confronted
     him face to face, and encountered man to man: superior, not in
     stratagem, but in valiant arms.”--AEneid, x.  732.]




CHAPTER VII

THAT THE INTENTION IS JUDGE OF OUR ACTIONS

‘Tis a saying, “That death discharges us of all our obligations.”  I know
some who have taken it in another sense.  Henry VII., King of England,
articled with Don Philip, son to Maximilian the emperor, or (to place him
more honourably) father to the Emperor Charles V., that the said Philip
should deliver up the Duke of Suffolk of the White Rose, his enemy, who
was fled into the Low Countries, into his hands; which Philip accordingly
did, but upon condition, nevertheless, that Henry should attempt nothing
against the life of the said Duke; but coming to die, the king in his
last will commanded his son to put him to death immediately after his
decease.  And lately, in the tragedy that the Duke of Alva presented to
us in the persons of the Counts Horn and Egmont at Brussels,
--[Decapitated 4th June 1568]--there were very remarkable passages, and
one amongst the rest, that Count Egmont (upon the security of whose word
and faith Count Horn had come and surrendered himself to the Duke of
Alva) earnestly entreated that he might first mount the scaffold, to the
end that death might disengage him from the obligation he had passed to
the other.  In which case, methinks, death did not acquit the former of
his promise, and that the second was discharged from it without dying.
We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform, by reason that
effect and performance are not at all in our power, and that, indeed, we
are masters of nothing but the will, in which, by necessity, all the
rules and whole duty of mankind are founded and established: therefore
Count Egmont, conceiving his soul and will indebted to his promise,
although he had not the power to make it good, had doubtless been
absolved of his duty, even though he had outlived the other; but the King
of England wilfully and premeditately breaking his faith, was no more to
be excused for deferring the execution of his infidelity till after his
death than the mason in Herodotus, who having inviolably, during the time
of his life, kept the secret of the treasure of the King of Egypt, his
master, at his death discovered it to his children.--[Herod., ii.  121.]

I have taken notice of several in my time, who, convicted by their
consciences of unjustly detaining the goods of another, have endeavoured
to make amends by their will, and after their decease; but they had as
good do nothing, as either in taking so much time in so pressing an
affair, or in going about to remedy a wrong with so little
dissatisfaction or injury to themselves.  They owe, over and above,
something of their own; and by how much their payment is more strict and
incommodious to themselves, by so much is their restitution more just
meritorious.  Penitency requires penalty; but they yet do worse than
these, who reserve the animosity against their neighbour to the last
gasp, having concealed it during their life; wherein they manifest little
regard of their own honour, irritating the party offended in their
memory; and less to their the power, even out of to make their malice die
with them, but extending the life of their hatred even beyond their own.
Unjust judges, who defer judgment to a time wherein they can have no
knowledge of the cause!  For my part, I shall take care, if I can, that
my death discover nothing that my life has not first and openly declared.




CHAPTER VIII

OF IDLENESS

As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown
rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the
product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are
unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to
cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service;
and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of
themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to
cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with
another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to
some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand
extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of
the imagination--

              “Sicut aqua tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis,
               Sole repercussum, aut radiantis imagine lunae,
               Omnia pervolitat late loca; jamque sub auras
               Erigitur, summique ferit laquearia tecti.”

     [“As when in brazen vats of water the trembling beams of light,
     reflected from the sun, or from the image of the radiant moon,
     swiftly float over every place around, and now are darted up on
     high, and strike the ceilings of the upmost roof.”--
     AEneid, viii. 22.]

--in which wild agitation there is no folly, nor idle fancy they do not
light upon:--

                    “Velut aegri somnia, vanae
               Finguntur species.”

     [“As a sick man’s dreams, creating vain phantasms.”--
     Hor., De Arte Poetica, 7.]

The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said--

          “Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat.”

     [“He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere.”--Martial, vii.  73.]

When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as
possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend
in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I
fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure
to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do,
as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find--

               “Variam semper dant otia mentem,”

     [“Leisure ever creates varied thought.”--Lucan, iv. 704]

that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider,
who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman
would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic
monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at
leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to
commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.




CHAPTER IX

OF LIARS

There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from
memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that
the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine.  My other
faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think
myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous.
Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the
necessary use of memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a
great and powerful goddess), in my country, when they would say a man has
no sense, they say, such an one has no memory; and when I complain of the
defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as though I
accused myself for a fool: not discerning the difference betwixt memory
and understanding, which is to make matters still worse for me.  But they
do me wrong; for experience, rather, daily shows us, on the contrary,
that a strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.  They do,
me, moreover (who am so perfect in nothing as in friendship), a great
wrong in this, that they make the same words which accuse my infirmity,
represent me for an ungrateful person; they bring my affections into
question upon the account of my memory, and from a natural imperfection,
make out a defect of conscience.  “He has forgot,” says one, “this
request, or that promise; he no more remembers his friends; he has forgot
to say or do, or conceal such and such a thing, for my sake.”  And,
truly, I am apt enough to forget many things, but to neglect anything my
friend has given me in charge, I never do it.  And it should be enough,
methinks, that I feel the misery and inconvenience of it, without
branding me with malice, a vice so contrary to my humour.

However, I derive these comforts from my infirmity: first, that it is an
evil from which principally I have found reason to correct a worse, that
would easily enough have grown upon me, namely, ambition; the defect
being intolerable in those who take upon them public affairs.  That, like
examples in the progress of nature demonstrate to us, she has fortified
me in my other faculties proportionably as she has left me unfurnished in
this; I should otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my mind
and judgment upon the bare report of other men, without ever setting them
to work upon their own force, had the inventions and opinions of others
been ever been present with me by the benefit of memory.  That by this
means I am not so talkative, for the magazine of the memory is ever
better furnished with matter than that of the invention.  Had mine been
faithful to me, I had ere this deafened all my friends with my babble,
the subjects themselves arousing and stirring up the little faculty I
have of handling and employing them, heating and distending my discourse,
which were a pity: as I have observed in several of my intimate friends,
who, as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of
things, begin their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many
impertinent circumstances, that though the story be good in itself, they
make a shift to spoil it; and if otherwise, you are either to curse the
strength of their memory or the weakness of their judgment: and it is a
hard thing to close up a discourse, and to cut it short, when you have
once started; there is nothing wherein the force of a horse is so much
seen as in a round and sudden stop.  I see even those who are pertinent
enough, who would, but cannot stop short in their career; for whilst they
are seeking out a handsome period to conclude with, they go on at random,
straggling about upon impertinent trivialities, as men staggering upon
weak legs.  But, above all, old men who retain the memory of things past,
and forget how often they have told them, are dangerous company; and I
have known stories from the mouth of a man of very great quality,
otherwise very pleasant in themselves, become very wearisome by being
repeated a hundred times over and over again to the same people.

Secondly, that, by this means, I the less remember the injuries I have
received; insomuch that, as the ancient said,--[Cicero, Pro Ligar.
c. 12.]--I should have a register of injuries, or a prompter, as Darius,
who, that he might not forget the offence he had received from those of
Athens, so oft as he sat down to dinner, ordered one of his pages three
times to repeat in his ear, “Sir, remember the Athenians”;--[Herod., v.
105.]--and then, again, the places which I revisit, and the books I read
over again, still smile upon me with a fresh novelty.

It is not without good reason said “that he who has not a good memory
should never take upon him the trade of lying.”  I know very well that
the grammarians--[Nigidius, Aulus Gellius, xi.  ii; Nonius, v.  80.]--
distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth
is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be
true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which our
French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be
untrue; and it is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak.  Now,
these do either wholly contrive and invent the untruths they utter, or so
alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie.  When they
disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy,
‘tis very hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped,
by reason that the real truth of the thing, having first taken possession
of the memory, and being there lodged impressed by the medium of
knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not represent
itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there
have so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of
the first true knowledge evermore running in their minds, will be apt to
make them forget those that are illegitimate, and only, forged by their
own fancy.  In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch as there is no
contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less
danger of tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and
without any hold, is very apt to escape the memory, if it be not well
assured.  Of which I had very pleasant experience, at the expense of such
as profess only to form and accommodate their speech to the affair they
have in hand, or to humour of the great folks to whom they are speaking;
for the circumstances to which these men stick not to enslave their faith
and conscience being subject to several changes, their language must vary
accordingly: whence it happens that of the same thing they tell one man
that it is this, and another that it is that, giving it several colours;
which men, if they once come to confer notes, and find out the cheat,
what becomes of this fine art?  To which may be added, that they must of
necessity very often ridiculously trap themselves; for what memory can be
sufficient to retain so many different shapes as they have forged upon
one and the same subject?  I have known many in my time very ambitious of
the repute of this fine wit; but they do not see that if they have the
reputation of it, the effect can no longer be.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice.  We are not men, nor have
other tie upon one another, but by our word.  If we did but discover the
horror and gravity of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and
more justly than other crimes.  I see that parents commonly, and with
indiscretion enough, correct their children for little innocent faults,
and torment them for wanton tricks, that have neither impression nor
consequence; whereas, in my opinion, lying only, and, which is of
something a lower form, obstinacy, are the faults which are to be
severely whipped out of them, both in their infancy and in their
progress, otherwise they grow up and increase with them; and after a
tongue has once got the knack of lying, ‘tis not to be imagined how
impossible it is to reclaim it whence it comes to pass that we see some,
who are otherwise very honest men, so subject and enslaved to this vice.
I have an honest lad to my tailor, whom I never knew guilty of one truth,
no, not when it had been to his advantage.  If falsehood had, like truth,
but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then
take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of
truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound
or limit.  The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil,
infinite and uncertain.  There are a thousand ways to miss the white,
there is only one to hit it.  For my own part, I have this vice in so
great horror, that I am not sure I could prevail with my conscience to
secure myself from the most manifest and extreme danger by an impudent
and solemn lie.  An ancient father says “that a dog we know is better
company than a man whose language we do not understand.”


          “Ut externus alieno pene non sit hominis vice.”

     [“As a foreigner cannot be said to supply us the place of a man.”
      --Pliny, Nat. Hist. vii. I]

And how much less sociable is false speaking than silence?

King Francis I. vaunted that he had by this means nonplussed Francesco
Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, a man very famous
for his science in talking in those days.  This gentleman had been sent
to excuse his master to his Majesty about a thing of very great
consequence, which was this: the King, still to maintain some
intelligence with Italy, out of which he had lately been driven, and
particularly with the duchy of Milan, had thought it convenient to have a
gentleman on his behalf to be with that Duke: an ambassador in effect,
but in outward appearance a private person who pretended to reside there
upon his own particular affairs; for the Duke, much more depending upon
the Emperor, especially at a time when he was in a treaty of marriage
with his niece, daughter to the King of Denmark, who is now dowager of
Lorraine, could not manifest any practice and conference with us without
his great interest.  For this commission one Merveille, a Milanese
gentleman, and an equerry to the King, being thought very fit, was
accordingly despatched thither with private credentials, and instructions
as ambassador, and with other letters of recommendation to the Duke about
his own private concerns, the better to mask and colour the business; and
was so long in that court, that the Emperor at last had some inkling of
his real employment there; which was the occasion of what followed after,
as we suppose; which was, that under pretence of some murder, his trial
was in two days despatched, and his head in the night struck off in
prison.  Messire Francesco being come, and prepared with a long
counterfeit history of the affair (for the King had applied himself to
all the princes of Christendom, as well as to the Duke himself, to demand
satisfaction), had his audience at the morning council; where, after he
had for the support of his cause laid open several plausible
justifications of the fact, that his master had never looked upon this
Merveille for other than a private gentleman and his own subject, who was
there only in order to his own business, neither had he ever lived under
any other aspect; absolutely disowning that he had ever heard he was one
of the King’s household or that his Majesty so much as knew him, so far
was he from taking him for an ambassador: the King, in his turn, pressing
him with several objections and demands, and challenging him on all
sides, tripped him up at last by asking, why, then, the execution was
performed by night, and as it were by stealth?  At which the poor
confounded ambassador, the more handsomely to disengage himself, made
answer, that the Duke would have been very loth, out of respect to his
Majesty, that such an execution should have been performed by day.  Any
one may guess if he was not well rated when he came home, for having so
grossly tripped in the presence of a prince of so delicate a nostril as
King Francis.

Pope Julius II. having sent an ambassador to the King of England to
animate him against King Francis, the ambassador having had his audience,
and the King, before he would give an answer, insisting upon the
difficulties he should find in setting on foot so great a preparation as
would be necessary to attack so potent a King, and urging some reasons to
that effect, the ambassador very unseasonably replied that he had also
himself considered the same difficulties, and had represented them to the
Pope.  From which saying of his, so directly opposite to the thing
propounded and the business he came about, which was immediately to
incite him to war, the King of England first derived the argument (which
he afterward found to be true), that this ambassador, in his own mind,
was on the side of the French; of which having advertised his master, his
estate at his return home was confiscated, and he himself very narrowly
escaped the losing of his head.--[Erasmi Op. (1703), iv. col. 684.]




CHAPTER X

OF QUICK OR SLOW SPEECH

          “Onc ne furent a touts toutes graces donnees.”

     [“All graces were never yet given to any one man.”--A verse
     in one of La Brebis’ Sonnets.]

So we see in the gift of eloquence, wherein some have such a facility and
promptness, and that which we call a present wit so easy, that they are
ever ready upon all occasions, and never to be surprised; and others more
heavy and slow, never venture to utter anything but what they have long
premeditated, and taken great care and pains to fit and prepare.

Now, as we teach young ladies those sports and exercises which are most
proper to set out the grace and beauty of those parts wherein their
chiefest ornament and perfection lie, so it should be in these two
advantages of eloquence, to which the lawyers and preachers of our age
seem principally to pretend.  If I were worthy to advise, the slow
speaker, methinks, should be more proper for the pulpit, and the other
for the bar: and that because the employment of the first does naturally
allow him all the leisure he can desire to prepare himself, and besides,
his career is performed in an even and unintermitted line, without stop
or interruption; whereas the pleader’s business and interest compels him
to enter the lists upon all occasions, and the unexpected objections and
replies of his adverse party jostle him out of his course, and put him,
upon the instant, to pump for new and extempore answers and defences.
Yet, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King Francis at
Marseilles, it happened, quite contrary, that Monsieur Poyet, a man bred
up all his life at the bar, and in the highest repute for eloquence,
having the charge of making the harangue to the Pope committed to him,
and having so long meditated on it beforehand, as, so they said, to have
brought it ready made along with him from Paris; the very day it was to
have been pronounced, the Pope, fearing something might be said that
might give offence to the other princes’ ambassadors who were there
attending on him, sent to acquaint the King with the argument which he
conceived most suiting to the time and place, but, by chance, quite
another thing to that Monsieur de Poyet had taken so much pains about: so
that the fine speech he had prepared was of no use, and he was upon the
instant to contrive another; which finding himself unable to do, Cardinal
du Bellay was constrained to perform that office.  The pleader’s part is,
doubtless, much harder than that of the preacher; and yet, in my opinion,
we see more passable lawyers than preachers, at all events in France.
It should seem that the nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and
sudden, and that of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow.
But he who remains totally silent, for want of leisure to prepare himself
to speak well, and he also whom leisure does noways benefit to better
speaking, are equally unhappy.

‘Tis said of Severus Cassius that he spoke best extempore, that he stood
more obliged to fortune than to his own diligence; that it was an
advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and that his adversaries
were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger should redouble his eloquence.
I know, experimentally, the disposition of nature so impatient of tedious
and elaborate premeditation, that if it do not go frankly and gaily to
work, it can perform nothing to purpose.  We say of some compositions
that they stink of oil and of the lamp, by reason of a certain rough
harshness that laborious handling imprints upon those where it has been
employed.  But besides this, the solicitude of doing well, and a certain
striving and contending of a mind too far strained and overbent upon its
undertaking, breaks and hinders itself like water, that by force of its
own pressing violence and abundance, cannot find a ready issue through
the neck of a bottle or a narrow sluice.  In this condition of nature,
of which I am now speaking, there is this also, that it would not be
disordered and stimulated with such passions as the fury of Cassius (for
such a motion would be too violent and rude); it would not be jostled,
but solicited; it would be roused and heated by unexpected, sudden, and
accidental occasions.  If it be left to itself, it flags and languishes;
agitation only gives it grace and vigour.  I am always worst in my own
possession, and when wholly at my own disposition: accident has more
title to anything that comes from me than I; occasion, company, and even
the very rising and falling of my own voice, extract more from my fancy
than I can find, when I sound and employ it by myself.  By which means,
the things I say are better than those I write, if either were to be
preferred, where neither is worth anything.  This, also, befalls me, that
I do not find myself where I seek myself, and I light upon things more by
chance than by any inquisition of my own judgment.  I perhaps sometimes
hit upon something when I write, that seems quaint and sprightly to me,
though it will appear dull and heavy to another.--But let us leave these
fine compliments; every one talks thus of himself according to his
talent.  But when I come to speak, I am already so lost that I know not
what I was about to say, and in such cases a stranger often finds it out
before me.  If I should make erasure so often as this inconvenience
befalls me, I should make clean work; occasion will, at some other time,
lay it as visible to me as the light, and make me wonder what I should
stick at.




CHAPTER XI

OF PROGNOSTICATIONS

For what concerns oracles, it is certain that a good while before the
coming of Jesus Christ they had begun to lose their credit; for we see
that Cicero troubled to find out the cause of their decay, and he has
these words:

          “Cur isto modo jam oracula Delphis non eduntur,
          non modo nostro aetate, sed jam diu; ut nihil
          possit esse contemptius?”

     [“What is the reason that the oracles at Delphi are no longer
     uttered: not merely in this age of ours, but for a long time past,
     insomuch that nothing is more in contempt?”
      --Cicero, De Divin., ii. 57.]

But as to the other prognostics, calculated from the anatomy of beasts at
sacrifices (to which purpose Plato does, in part, attribute the natural
constitution of the intestines of the beasts themselves), the
scraping of poultry, the flight of birds--

          “Aves quasdam .  .  .  rerum augurandarum
          causa natas esse putamus.”

     [“We think some sorts of birds are purposely created to serve
     the purposes of augury.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., ii. 64.]

claps of thunder, the overflowing of rivers--

          “Multa cernunt Aruspices, multa Augures provident,
          multa oraculis declarantur, multa vaticinationibus,
          multa somniis, multa portentis.”

     [“The Aruspices discern many things, the Augurs foresee many things,
     many things are announced by oracles, many by vaticinations, many by
     dreams, many by portents.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., ii. 65.]

--and others of the like nature, upon which antiquity founded most of
their public and private enterprises, our religion has totally abolished
them.  And although there yet remain amongst us some practices of
divination from the stars, from spirits, from the shapes and complexions
of men, from dreams and the like (a notable example of the wild curiosity
of our nature to grasp at and anticipate future things, as if we had not
enough to do to digest the present)--

               “Cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi,
               Sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam,
               Noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades?...
               Sit subitum, quodcumque paras; sit coeca futuri
               Mens hominum fati, liceat sperare timenti.”

     [“Why, ruler of Olympus, hast thou to anxious mortals thought fit to
     add this care, that they should know by, omens future slaughter?...
     Let whatever thou art preparing be sudden.  Let the mind of men be
     blind to fate in store; let it be permitted to the timid to hope.”
      --Lucan, ii. 14]

               “Ne utile quidem est scire quid futurum sit;
               miserum est enim, nihil proficientem angi,”

     [“It is useless to know what shall come to pass; it is a miserable
     thing to be tormented to no purpose.”
      --Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii. 6.]

yet are they of much less authority now than heretofore.  Which makes so
much more remarkable the example of Francesco, Marquis of Saluzzo, who
being lieutenant to King Francis I. in his ultramontane army, infinitely
favoured and esteemed in our court, and obliged to the king’s bounty for
the marquisate itself, which had been forfeited by his brother; and as to
the rest, having no manner of provocation given him to do it, and even
his own affection opposing any such disloyalty, suffered himself to be so
terrified, as it was confidently reported, with the fine prognostics that
were spread abroad everywhere in favour of the Emperor Charles V., and to
our disadvantage (especially in Italy, where these foolish prophecies
were so far believed, that at Rome great sums of money were ventured out
upon return of greater, when the prognostics came to pass, so certain
they made themselves of our ruin), that, having often bewailed, to those
of his acquaintance who were most intimate with him, the mischiefs that
he saw would inevitably fall upon the Crown of France and the friends he
had in that court, he revolted and turned to the other side; to his own
misfortune, nevertheless, what constellation soever governed at that
time.  But he carried himself in this affair like a man agitated by
divers passions; for having both towns and forces in his hands, the
enemy’s army under Antonio de Leyva close by him, and we not at all
suspecting his design, it had been in his power to have done more than he
did; for we lost no men by this infidelity of his, nor any town, but
Fossano only, and that after a long siege and a brave defence.--[1536]

                   “Prudens futuri temporis exitum
                    Caliginosa nocte premit Deus,
                    Ridetque, si mortalis ultra
                    Fas trepidat.”

     [“A wise God covers with thick night the path of the future, and
     laughs at the man who alarms himself without reason.”
      --Hor., Od., iii. 29.]

                    “Ille potens sui
                    Laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
                    Dixisse vixi!  cras vel atra
                    Nube polum pater occupato,
                    Vel sole puro.”

     [“He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day
     passes on, ‘I HAVE LIVED:’ whether to-morrow our Father shall give
     us a clouded sky or a clear day.”--Hor., Od., iii. 29]

                    “Laetus in praesens animus; quod ultra est,
                    Oderit curare.”

     [“A mind happy, cheerful in the present state, will take good care
     not to think of what is beyond it.”--Ibid., ii. 25]

And those who take this sentence in a contrary sense interpret it amiss:

               “Ista sic reciprocantur, ut et si divinatio sit,
               dii sint; et si dii lint, sit divinatio.”

     [“These things are so far reciprocal that if there be divination,
     there must be deities; and if deities, divination.”--Cicero, De
     Divin., i. 6.]

Much more wisely Pacuvius--

         “Nam istis, qui linguam avium intelligunt,
          Plusque ex alieno jecore sapiunt, quam ex suo,
          Magis audiendum, quam auscultandum, censeo.”


     [“As to those who understand the language of birds, and who rather
     consult the livers of animals other than their own, I had rather
     hear them than attend to them.”
      --Cicero, De Divin., i. 57, ex Pacuvio]

The so celebrated art of divination amongst the Tuscans took its
beginning thus: A labourer striking deep with his cutter into the earth,
saw the demigod Tages ascend, with an infantine aspect, but endued with a
mature and senile wisdom.  Upon the rumour of which, all the people ran
to see the sight, by whom his words and science, containing the
principles and means to attain to this art, were recorded, and kept for
many ages.--[Cicero, De Devina, ii. 23]--A birth suitable to its
progress; I, for my part, should sooner regulate my affairs by the chance
of a die than by such idle and vain dreams.  And, indeed, in all
republics, a good share of the government has ever been referred to
chance.  Plato, in the civil regimen that he models according to his own
fancy, leaves to it the decision of several things of very great
importance, and will, amongst other things, that marriages should be
appointed by lot; attributing so great importance to this accidental
choice as to ordain that the children begotten in such wedlock be brought
up in the country, and those begotten in any other be thrust out as
spurious and base; yet so, that if any of those exiles, notwithstanding,
should, peradventure, in growing up give any good hope of himself, he
might be recalled, as, also, that such as had been retained, should be
exiled, in case they gave little expectation of themselves in their early
growth.

I see some who are mightily given to study and comment upon their
almanacs, and produce them to us as an authority when anything has fallen
out pat; and, for that matter, it is hardly possible but that these
alleged authorities sometimes stumble upon a truth amongst an infinite
number of lies.

          “Quis est enim, qui totum diem jaculans
          non aliquando collineet?”

     [“For who shoots all day at butts that does not sometimes hit the
     white?”--Cicero, De Divin., ii. 59.]

I think never the better of them for some such accidental hit.  There
would be more certainty in it if there were a rule and a truth of always
lying.  Besides, nobody records their flimflams and false prognostics,
forasmuch as they are infinite and common; but if they chop upon one
truth, that carries a mighty report, as being rare, incredible, and
prodigious.  So Diogenes, surnamed the Atheist, answered him in
Samothrace, who, showing him in the temple the several offerings and
stories in painting of those who had escaped shipwreck, said to him,
“Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things, what do you
say to so many persons preserved from death by their especial favour?”
 “Why, I say,” answered he, “that their pictures are not here who were
cast away, who are by much the greater number.”--[Cicero, De Natura
Deor., i.  37.]

Cicero observes that of all the philosophers who have acknowledged a
deity, Xenophanes the Colophonian only has endeavoured to eradicate all
manner of divination--[Cicero, De Divin., i. 3.]--; which makes it the
less a wonder if we have now and then seen some of our princes, sometimes
to their own cost, rely too much upon these vanities.  I had given
anything with my own eyes to see those two great marvels, the book of
Joachim the Calabrian abbot, which foretold all the future Popes, their
names and qualities; and that of the Emperor Leo, which prophesied all
the emperors and patriarchs of Greece.  This I have been an eyewitness
of, that in public confusions, men astonished at their fortune, have
abandoned their own reason, superstitiously to seek out in the stars the
ancient causes and menaces of the present mishaps, and in my time have
been so strangely successful in it, as to make me believe that this being
an amusement of sharp and volatile wits, those who have been versed in
this knack of unfolding and untying riddles, are capable, in any sort of
writing, to find out what they desire.  But above all, that which gives
them the greatest room to play in, is the obscure, ambiguous, and
fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting, where their authors deliver
nothing of clear sense, but shroud all in riddle, to the end that
posterity may interpret and apply it according to its own fancy.

Socrates demon might, perhaps, be no other but a certain impulsion of the
will, which obtruded itself upon him without the advice or consent of his
judgment; and in a soul so enlightened as his was, and so prepared by a
continual exercise of wisdom-and virtue, ‘tis to be supposed those
inclinations of his, though sudden and undigested, were very important
and worthy to be followed.  Every one finds in himself some image of such
agitations, of a prompt, vehement, and fortuitous opinion; and I may well
allow them some authority, who attribute so little to our prudence, and
who also myself have had some, weak in reason, but violent in persuasion
and dissuasion, which were most frequent with Socrates,--[Plato, in his
account of Theages the Pythagorean]--by which I have suffered myself to
be carried away so fortunately, and so much to my own advantage, that
they might have been judged to have had something in them of a divine
inspiration.




CHAPTER XII

OF CONSTANCY

The law of resolution and constancy does not imply that we ought not, as
much as in us lies, to decline and secure ourselves from the mischiefs
and inconveniences that threaten us; nor, consequently, that we shall not
fear lest they should surprise us: on the contrary, all decent and honest
ways and means of securing ourselves from harms, are not only permitted,
but, moreover, commendable, and the business of constancy chiefly is,
bravely to stand to, and stoutly to suffer those inconveniences which are
not possibly to be avoided.  So that there is no supple motion of body,
nor any movement in the handling of arms, how irregular or ungraceful
soever, that we need condemn, if they serve to protect us from the blow
that is made against us.

Several very warlike nations have made use of a retreating and flying way
of fight as a thing of singular advantage, and, by so doing, have made
their backs more dangerous to their enemies than their faces.  Of which
kind of fighting the Turks still retain something in their practice of
arms; and Socrates, in Plato, laughs at Laches, who had defined fortitude
to be a standing firm in the ranks against the enemy.  “What!” says he,
“would it, then, be a reputed cowardice to overcome them by giving
ground?” urging, at the same time, the authority of Homer, who commends
in AEneas the science of flight.  And whereas Laches, considering better
of it, admits the practice as to the Scythians, and, in general, all
cavalry whatever, he again attacks him with the example of the
Lacedaemonian foot--a nation of all other the most obstinate in
maintaining their ground--who, in the battle of Plataea, not being able
to break into the Persian phalanx, bethought themselves to disperse and
retire, that by the enemy supposing they fled, they might break and
disunite that vast body of men in the pursuit, and by that stratagem
obtained the victory.

As for the Scythians, ‘tis said of them, that when Darius went his
expedition to subdue them, he sent, by a herald, highly to reproach their
king, that he always retired before him and declined a battle; to which
Idanthyrses,--[Herod., iv.  127.]--for that was his name, returned
answer, that it was not for fear of him, or of any man living, that he
did so, but that it was the way of marching in practice with his nation,
who had neither tilled fields, cities, nor houses to defend, or to fear
the enemy should make any advantage of but that if he had such a stomach
to fight, let him but come to view their ancient places of sepulture, and
there he should have his fill.

Nevertheless, as to cannon-shot, when a body of men are drawn up in the
face of a train of artillery, as the occasion of war often requires, it
is unhandsome to quit their post to avoid the danger, forasmuch as by
reason of its violence and swiftness we account it inevitable; and many a
one, by ducking, stepping aside, and such other motions of fear, has
been, at all events, sufficiently laughed at by his companions.  And yet,
in the expedition that the Emperor Charles V. made against us into
Provence, the Marquis de Guast going to reconnoitre the city of Arles,
and advancing out of the cover of a windmill, under favour of which he
had made his approach, was perceived by the Seigneurs de Bonneval and the
Seneschal of Agenois, who were walking upon the ‘theatre aux ayenes’; who
having shown him to the Sieur de Villiers, commissary of the artillery,
he pointed a culverin so admirably well, and levelled it so exactly right
against him, that had not the Marquis, seeing fire given to it, slipped
aside, it was certainly concluded the shot had taken him full in the
body.  And, in like manner, some years before, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke
of Urbino, and father to the queen-mother--[Catherine de’ Medici, mother
of Henry III.]--laying siege to Mondolfo, a place in the territories of
the Vicariat in Italy, seeing the cannoneer give fire to a piece that
pointed directly against him, it was well for him that he ducked, for
otherwise the shot, that only razed the top of his head, had doubtless
hit him full in the breast.  To say truth, I do not think that these
evasions are performed upon the account of judgment; for how can any man
living judge of high or low aim on so sudden an occasion?  And it is much
more easy to believe that fortune favoured their apprehension, and that
it might be as well at another time to make them face the danger, as to
seek to avoid it.  For my own part, I confess I cannot forbear starting
when the rattle of a harquebuse thunders in my ears on a sudden, and in a
place where I am not to expect it, which I have also observed in others,
braver fellows than I.

Neither do the Stoics pretend that the soul of their philosopher need be
proof against the first visions and fantasies that surprise him; but, as
to a natural subjection, consent that he should tremble at the terrible
noise of thunder, or the sudden clatter of some falling ruin, and be
affrighted even to paleness and convulsion; and so in other passions,
provided his judgment remain sound and entire, and that the seat of his
reason suffer no concussion nor alteration, and that he yield no consent
to his fright and discomposure.  To him who is not a philosopher, a
fright is the same thing in the first part of it, but quite another thing
in the second; for the impression of passions does not remain
superficially in him, but penetrates farther, even to the very seat of
reason, infecting and corrupting it, so that he judges according to his
fear, and conforms his behaviour to it. In this verse you may see the
true state of the wise Stoic learnedly and plainly expressed:--

          “Mens immota manet; lachrymae volvuntur inanes.”

          [“Though tears flow, the mind remains unmoved.”
           --Virgil, AEneid, iv. 449]

The Peripatetic sage does not exempt himself totally from perturbations
of mind, but he moderates them.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     Almanacs
     Being dead they were then by one day happier than he
     Books I read over again, still smile upon me with  fresh novelty
     Death discharges us of all our obligations
     Difference betwixt memory and understanding
     Do thine own work, and know thyself
     Effect and performance are not at all in our power
     Fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting
     Folly of gaping after future things
     Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain
     He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere
     If they chop upon one truth, that carries a mighty report
     Impotencies that so unseasonably surprise the lover
     Let it be permitted to the timid to hope
     Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb
     Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things
     Nature of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow
     Nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and sudden
     Nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word
     Old men who retain the memory of things past
     Pity is reputed a vice amongst the Stoics
     Rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory
     Reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms
     Say of some compositions that they stink of oil and of the lamp
     Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is dead
     Strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment
     Stumble upon a truth amongst an infinite number of lies
     Suffer those inconveniences which are not possibly to be avoided
     Superstitiously to seek out in the stars the ancient causes
     Their pictures are not here who were cast away
     Things I say are better than those I write
     We are masters of nothing but the will
     We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform
     Where the lion’s skin is too short








ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 3.

XIII.     The ceremony of the interview of princes.
XIV.      That men are justly punished for being obstinate in the defence
          of a fort that is not in reason to be defended
XV.       Of the punishment of cowardice.
XVI.      A proceeding of some ambassadors.
XVII.     Of fear.
XVIII.    That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death.
XIX.      That to study philosophy is to learn to die.
XX.       Of the force of imagination.
XXI.      That the profit of one man is the damage of another.




CHAPTER XIII

THE CEREMONY OF THE INTERVIEW OF PRINCES

There is no subject so frivolous that does not merit a place in this
rhapsody.  According to our common rule of civility, it would be a
notable affront to an equal, and much more to a superior, to fail being
at home when he has given you notice he will come to visit you.  Nay,
Queen Margaret of Navarre--[Marguerite de Valois, authoress of the
‘Heptameron’]--further adds, that it would be a rudeness in a gentleman
to go out, as we so often do, to meet any that is coming to see him, let
him be of what high condition soever; and that it is more respectful and
more civil to stay at home to receive him, if only upon the account of
missing him by the way, and that it is enough to receive him at the door,
and to wait upon him.  For my part, who as much as I can endeavour to
reduce the ceremonies of my house, I very often forget both the one and
the other of these vain offices.  If, peradventure, some one may take
offence at this, I can’t help it; it is much better to offend him once
than myself every day, for it would be a perpetual slavery.  To what end
do we avoid the servile attendance of courts, if we bring the same
trouble home to our own private houses?  It is also a common rule in all
assemblies, that those of less quality are to be first upon the place, by
reason that it is more due to the better sort to make others wait and
expect them.

Nevertheless, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King Francis at
Marseilles,--[in 1533.]--the King, after he had taken order for the
necessary preparations for his reception and entertainment, withdrew out
of the town, and gave the Pope two or three days’ respite for his entry,
and to repose and refresh himself, before he came to him.  And in like
manner, at the assignation of the Pope and the Emperor,--[Charles V.  in
1532.] at Bologna, the Emperor gave the Pope opportunity to come thither
first, and came himself after; for which the reason given was this, that
at all the interviews of such princes, the greater ought to be first at
the appointed place, especially before the other in whose territories the
interview is appointed to be, intimating thereby a kind of deference to
the other, it appearing proper for the less to seek out and to apply
themselves to the greater, and not the greater to them.

Not every country only, but every city and every society has its
particular forms of civility.  There was care enough to this taken in my
education, and I have lived in good company enough to know the
formalities of our own nation, and am able to give lessons in it.  I love
to follow them, but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that
my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies, of which there are some
so troublesome that, provided a man omits them out of discretion, and not
for want of breeding, it will be every whit as handsome.  I have seen
some people rude, by being overcivil and troublesome in their courtesy.

Still, these excesses excepted, the knowledge of courtesy and good
manners is a very necessary study.  It is, like grace and beauty, that
which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first
sight, and in the very beginning of acquaintance; and, consequently, that
which first opens the door and intromits us to instruct ourselves by the
example of others, and to give examples ourselves, if we have any worth
taking notice of and communicating.




CHAPTER XIV

THAT MEN ARE JUSTLY PUNISHED FOR BEING OBSTINATE IN THE DEFENCE
OF A FORT THAT IS NOT IN REASON TO BE DEFENDED

Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues, which, once transgressed,
the next step is into the territories of vice; so that by having too
large a proportion of this heroic virtue, unless a man be very perfect in
its limits, which upon the confines are very hard to discern, he may very
easily unawares run into temerity, obstinacy, and folly.  From this
consideration it is that we have derived the custom, in times of war, to
punish, even with death, those who are obstinate to defend a place that
by the rules of war is not tenable; otherwise men would be so confident
upon the hope of impunity, that not a henroost but would resist and seek
to stop an army.

The Constable Monsieur de Montmorenci, having at the siege of Pavia been
ordered to pass the Ticino, and to take up his quarters in the Faubourg
St. Antonio, being hindered by a tower at the end of the bridge, which
was so obstinate as to endure a battery, hanged every man he found within
it for their labour.  And again, accompanying the Dauphin in his
expedition beyond the Alps, and taking the Castle of Villano by assault,
and all within it being put to the sword by the fury of the soldiers, the
governor and his ensign only excepted, he caused them both to be trussed
up for the same reason; as also did the Captain Martin du Bellay, then
governor of Turin, with the governor of San Buono, in the same country,
all his people having been cut to pieces at the taking of the place.

But forasmuch as the strength or weakness of a fortress is always
measured by the estimate and counterpoise of the forces that attack it
--for a man might reasonably enough despise two culverins, that would be
a madman to abide a battery of thirty pieces of cannon--where also the
greatness of the prince who is master of the field, his reputation, and
the respect that is due unto him, are also put into the balance, there is
danger that the balance be pressed too much in that direction.  And it
may happen that a man is possessed with so great an opinion of himself
and his power, that thinking it unreasonable any place should dare to
shut its gates against him, he puts all to the sword where he meets with
any opposition, whilst his fortune continues; as is plain in the fierce
and arrogant forms of summoning towns and denouncing war, savouring so
much of barbarian pride and insolence, in use amongst the Oriental
princes, and which their successors to this day do yet retain and
practise.  And in that part of the world where the Portuguese subdued the
Indians, they found some states where it was a universal and inviolable
law amongst them that every enemy overcome by the king in person, or by
his lieutenant, was out of composition.

So above all both of ransom and mercy a man should take heed, if he can,
of falling into the hands of a judge who is an enemy and victorious.




CHAPTER XV

OF THE PUNISHMENT OF COWARDICE

I once heard of a prince, and a great captain, having a narration given
him as he sat at table of the proceeding against Monsieur de Vervins, who
was sentenced to death for having surrendered Boulogne to the English,
--[To Henry VIII. in 1544]--openly maintaining that a soldier could not
justly be put to death for want of courage.  And, in truth, ‘tis reason
that a man should make a great difference betwixt faults that merely
proceed from infirmity, and those that are visibly the effects of
treachery and malice: for, in the last, we act against the rules of
reason that nature has imprinted in us; whereas, in the former, it seems
as if we might produce the same nature, who left us in such a state of
imperfection and weakness of courage, for our justification.  Insomuch
that many have thought we are not fairly questionable for anything but
what we commit against our conscience; and it is partly upon this rule
that those ground their opinion who disapprove of capital or sanguinary
punishments inflicted upon heretics and misbelievers; and theirs also who
advocate or a judge is not accountable for having from mere ignorance
failed in his administration.

But as to cowardice, it is certain that the most usual way of chastising
it is by ignominy and and it is supposed that this practice brought into
use by the legislator Charondas; and that, before his time, the laws of
Greece punished those with death who fled from a battle; whereas he
ordained only that they be for three days exposed in the public dressed
in woman’s attire, hoping yet for some service from them, having awakened
their courage by this open shame:

          “Suffundere malis homims sanguinem, quam effundere.”

     [“Rather bring the blood into a man’s cheek than let it out of his
     body.”  Tertullian in his Apologetics.]

It appears also that the Roman laws did anciently punish those with death
who had run away; for Ammianus Marcellinus says that the Emperor Julian
commanded ten of his soldiers, who had turned their backs in an encounter
against the Parthians, to be first degraded, and afterward put to death,
according, says he, to the ancient laws,--[Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiv.
4; xxv. i.]--and yet elsewhere for the like offence he only condemned
others to remain amongst the prisoners under the baggage ensign.  The
severe punishment the people of Rome inflicted upon those who fled from
the battle of Cannae, and those who ran away with Aeneius Fulvius at his
defeat, did not extend to death.  And yet, methinks, ‘tis to be feared,
lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate, and not only faint
friends, but enemies.

Of late memory,--[In 1523]--the Seigneur de Frauget, lieutenant to the
Mareschal de Chatillon’s company, having by the Mareschal de Chabannes
been put in government of Fuentarabia in the place of Monsieur de Lude,
and having surrendered it to the Spaniard, he was for that condemned to
be degraded from all nobility, and both himself and his posterity
declared ignoble, taxable, and for ever incapable of bearing arms, which
severe sentence was afterwards accordingly executed at Lyons.--[In 1536]
--And, since that, all the gentlemen who were in Guise when the Count of
Nassau entered into it, underwent the same punishment, as several others
have done since for the like offence.  Notwithstanding, in case of such a
manifest ignorance or cowardice as exceeds all ordinary example, ‘tis but
reason to take it for a sufficient proof of treachery and malice, and for
such to be punished.




CHAPTER XVI

A PROCEEDING OF SOME AMBASSADORS

I observe in my travels this custom, ever to learn something from the
information of those with whom I confer (which is the best school of all
others), and to put my company upon those subjects they are the best able
to speak of:--

               “Basti al nocchiero ragionar de’ venti,
               Al bifolco dei tori; et le sue piaghe
               Conti’l guerrier; conti’l pastor gli armenti.”

     [“Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; the
     cowherd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his
     flocks.”--An Italian translation of Propertius, ii. i, 43]

For it often falls out that, on the contrary, every one will rather
choose to be prating of another man’s province than his own, thinking it
so much new reputation acquired; witness the jeer Archidamus put upon
Pertander, “that he had quitted the glory of being an excellent physician
to gain the repute of a very bad poet.--[Plutarch, Apoth. of the
Lacedaemonians, ‘in voce’ Archidamus.]--And do but observe how large and
ample Caesar is to make us understand his inventions of building bridges
and contriving engines of war,--[De Bello Gall., iv. 17.]--and how
succinct and reserved in comparison, where he speaks of the offices of
his profession, his own valour, and military conduct.  His exploits
sufficiently prove him a great captain, and that he knew well enough; but
he would be thought an excellent engineer to boot; a quality something
different, and not necessary to be expected in him.  The elder Dionysius
was a very great captain, as it befitted his fortune he should be; but he
took very great pains to get a particular reputation by poetry, and yet
he was never cut out for a poet.  A man of the legal profession being not
long since brought to see a study furnished with all sorts of books, both
of his own and all other faculties, took no occasion at all to entertain
himself with any of them, but fell very rudely and magisterially to
descant upon a barricade placed on the winding stair before the study
door, a thing that a hundred captains and common soldiers see every day
without taking any notice or offence.

          “Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus.”

     [“The lazy ox desires a saddle and bridle; the horse wants to
     plough.”--Hor., Ep., i. 14,43.]

By this course a man shall never improve himself, nor arrive at any
perfection in anything.  He must, therefore, make it his business always
to put the architect, the painter, the statuary, every mechanic artisan,
upon discourse of their own capacities.

And, to this purpose, in reading histories, which is everybody’s subject,
I use to consider what kind of men are the authors: if they be persons
that profess nothing but mere letters, I, in and from them, principally
observe and learn style and language; if physicians, I the rather incline
to credit what they report of the temperature of the air, of the health
and complexions of princes, of wounds and diseases; if lawyers, we are
from them to take notice of the controversies of rights and wrongs, the
establishment of laws and civil government, and the like; if divines, the
affairs of the Church, ecclesiastical censures, marriages, and
dispensations; if courtiers, manners and ceremonies; if soldiers, the
things that properly belong to their trade, and, principally, the
accounts of the actions and enterprises wherein they were personally
engaged; if ambassadors, we are to observe negotiations, intelligences,
and practices, and the manner how they are to be carried on.

And this is the reason why (which perhaps I should have lightly passed
over in another) I dwelt upon and maturely considered one passage in the
history written by Monsieur de Langey, a man of very great judgment in
things of that nature: after having given a narrative of the fine oration
Charles V. had made in the Consistory at Rome, and in the presence of the
Bishop of Macon and Monsieur du Velly, our ambassadors there, wherein he
had mixed several injurious expressions to the dishonour of our nation;
and amongst the rest, “that if his captains and soldiers were not men of
another kind of fidelity, resolution, and sufficiency in the knowledge of
arms than those of the King, he would immediately go with a rope about
his neck and sue to him for mercy” (and it should seem the Emperor had
really this, or a very little better opinion of our military men, for he
afterwards, twice or thrice in his life, said the very same thing); as
also, that he challenged the King to fight him in his shirt with rapier
and poignard in a boat.  The said Sieur de Langey, pursuing his history,
adds that the forenamed ambassadors, sending a despatch to the King of
these things, concealed the greatest part, and particularly the last two
passages.  At which I could not but wonder that it should be in the power
of an ambassador to dispense with anything which he ought to signify to
his master, especially of so great importance as this, coming from the
mouth of such a person, and spoken in so great an assembly; and I should
rather conceive it had been the servant’s duty faithfully to have
represented to him the whole thing as it passed, to the end that the
liberty of selecting, disposing, judging, and concluding might have
remained in him: for either to conceal or to disguise the truth for fear
he should take it otherwise than he ought to do, and lest it should
prompt him to some extravagant resolution, and, in the meantime, to leave
him ignorant of his affairs, should seem, methinks, rather to belong to
him who is to give the law than to him who is only to receive it; to him
who is in supreme command, and not to him who ought to look upon himself
as inferior, not only in authority, but also in prudence and good
counsel.  I, for my part, would not be so served in my little concerns.

We so willingly slip the collar of command upon any pretence whatever,
and are so ready to usurp upon dominion, every one does so naturally
aspire to liberty and power, that no utility whatever derived from the
wit or valour of those he employs ought to be so dear to a superior as a
downright and sincere obedience.  To obey more upon the account of
understanding than of subjection, is to corrupt the office of command
--[Taken from Aulus Gellius, i. 13.]--; insomuch that P. Crassus, the same
whom the Romans reputed five times happy, at the time when he was consul
in Asia, having sent to a Greek engineer to cause the greater of two
masts of ships that he had taken notice of at Athens to be brought to
him, to be employed about some engine of battery he had a design to make;
the other, presuming upon his own science and sufficiency in those
affairs, thought fit to do otherwise than directed, and to bring the
less, which, according to the rules of art, was really more proper for
the use to which it was designed; but Crassus, though he gave ear to his
reasons with great patience, would not, however, take them, how sound or
convincing soever, for current pay, but caused him to be well whipped for
his pains, valuing the interest of discipline much more than that of the
work in hand.

Notwithstanding, we may on the other side consider that so precise and
implicit an obedience as this is only due to positive and limited
commands.  The employment of ambassadors is never so confined, many
things in their management of affairs being wholly referred to the
absolute sovereignty of their own conduct; they do not simply execute,
but also, to their own discretion and wisdom, form and model their
master’s pleasure.  I have, in my time, known men of command checked for
having rather obeyed the express words of the king’s letters, than the
necessity of the affairs they had in hand.  Men of understanding do yet,
to this day, condemn the custom of the kings of Persia to give their
lieutenants and agents so little rein, that, upon the least arising
difficulties, they must fain have recourse to their further commands;
this delay, in so vast an extent of dominion, having often very much
prejudiced their affairs; and Crassus, writing to a man whose profession
it was best to understand those things, and pre-acquainting him to what
use this mast was designed, did he not seem to consult his advice, and in
a manner invite him to interpose his better judgment?




CHAPTER XVII

OF FEAR

          “Obstupui, steteruntque comae et vox faucibus haesit.”

     [“I was amazed, my hair stood on end, and my voice stuck in my
     throat.”  Virgil, AEneid, ii.  774.]

I am not so good a naturalist (as they call it) as to discern by what
secret springs fear has its motion in us; but, be this as it may, ‘tis a
strange passion, and such a one that the physicians say there is no other
whatever that sooner dethrones our judgment from its proper seat; which
is so true, that I myself have seen very many become frantic through
fear; and, even in those of the best settled temper it is most certain
that it begets a terrible astonishment and confusion during the fit.
I omit the vulgar sort, to whom it one while represents their
great-grandsires risen out of their graves in their shrouds, another while
werewolves, nightmares, and chimaeras; but even amongst soldiers, a sort
of men over whom, of all others, it ought to have the least power, how
often has it converted flocks of sheep into armed squadrons, reeds and
bullrushes into pikes and lances, friends into enemies, and the French
white cross into the red cross of Spain!  When Monsieur de Bourbon took
Rome,--[In 1527]--an ensign who was upon guard at Borgo San Pietro was
seized with such a fright upon the first alarm, that he threw himself out
at a breach with his colours upon his shoulder, and ran directly upon the
enemy, thinking he had retreated toward the inward defences of the city,
and with much ado, seeing Monsieur de Bourbon’s people, who thought it
had been a sally upon them, draw up to receive him, at last came to
himself, and saw his error; and then facing about, he retreated full
speed through the same breach by which he had gone out, but not till he
had first blindly advanced above three hundred paces into the open field.
It did not, however, fall out so well with Captain Giulio’s ensign, at
the time when St. Paul was taken from us by the Comte de Bures and
Monsieur de Reu, for he, being so astonished with fear as to throw
himself, colours and all, out of a porthole, was immediately, cut to
pieces by the enemy; and in the same siege, it was a very memorable fear
that so seized, contracted, and froze up the heart of a gentleman, that
he sank down, stone-dead, in the breach, without any manner of wound or
hurt at all.  The like madness does sometimes push on a whole multitude;
for in one of the encounters that Germanicus had with the Germans, two
great parties were so amazed with fear that they ran two opposite ways,
the one to the same place from which the other had fled.--[Tacit, Annal.,
i.  63.]--Sometimes it adds wings to the heels, as in the two first:
sometimes it nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving; as
we read of the Emperor Theophilus, who, in a battle he lost against the
Agarenes, was so astonished and stupefied that he had no power to fly--

               “Adeo pavor etiam auxilia formidat”

     [“So much does fear dread even the means of safety.”--Quint.
     Curt., ii.  II.]

--till such time as Manuel, one of the principal commanders of his army,
having jogged and shaked him so as to rouse him out of his trance, said
to him, “Sir, if you will not follow me, I will kill you; for it is
better you should lose your life than, by being taken, lose your empire.”
 --[Zonaras, lib.  iii.]--But fear does then manifest its utmost power
when it throws us upon a valiant despair, having before deprived us of
all sense both of duty and honour.  In the first pitched battle the
Romans lost against Hannibal, under the Consul Sempronius, a body of ten
thousand foot, that had taken fright, seeing no other escape for their
cowardice, went and threw themselves headlong upon the great battalion of
the enemies, which with marvellous force and fury they charged through
and through, and routed with a very great slaughter of the Carthaginians,
thus purchasing an ignominious flight at the same price they might have
gained a glorious victory.--[Livy, xxi.  56.]

The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, that passion alone,
in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents.  What affliction
could be greater or more just than that of Pompey’s friends, who, in his
ship, were spectators of that horrible murder?  Yet so it was, that the
fear of the Egyptian vessels they saw coming to board them, possessed
them with so great alarm that it is observed they thought of nothing but
calling upon the mariners to make haste, and by force of oars to escape
away, till being arrived at Tyre, and delivered from fear, they had
leisure to turn their thoughts to the loss of their captain, and to give
vent to those tears and lamentations that the other more potent passion
had till then suspended.

          “Tum pavor sapientiam omnem mihiex animo expectorat.”

     [“Then fear drove out all intelligence from my mind.”--Ennius, ap.
     Cicero, Tusc., iv.  8.]

Such as have been well rubbed in some skirmish, may yet, all wounded and
bloody as they are, be brought on again the next day to charge; but such
as have once conceived a good sound fear of the enemy, will never be made
so much as to look him in the face.  Such as are in immediate fear of a
losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual
anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually
poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.  And the
many people who, impatient of the perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged
or drowned themselves, or dashed themselves to pieces, give us
sufficiently to understand that fear is more importunate and
insupportable than death itself.

The Greeks acknowledged another kind of fear, differing from any we have
spoken of yet, that surprises us without any visible cause, by an impulse
from heaven, so that whole nations and whole armies have been struck with
it.  Such a one was that which brought so wonderful a desolation upon
Carthage, where nothing was to be heard but affrighted voices and
outcries; where the inhabitants were seen to sally out of their houses as
to an alarm, and there to charge, wound, and kill one another, as if they
had been enemies come to surprise their city.  All things were in
disorder and fury till, with prayers and sacrifices, they had appeased
their gods--[Diod.  Sic., xv. 7]; and this is that they call panic
terrors.--[Ibid. ; Plutarch on Isis and Osiris, c.  8.]




CHAPTER XVIII

THAT MEN ARE NOT TO JUDGE OF OUR HAPPINESS TILL AFTER DEATH.

     [Charron has borrowed with unusual liberality from this and the
     succeeding chapter.  See Nodier, Questions, p. 206.]

                         “Scilicet ultima semper
               Exspectanda dies homini est; dicique beatus
               Ante obitum nemo supremaque funera debet.”

     [“We should all look forward to our last day: no one can be called
     happy till he is dead and buried.”--Ovid, Met, iii. 135]

The very children know the story of King Croesus to this purpose, who
being taken prisoner by Cyrus, and by him condemned to die, as he was
going to execution cried out, “O Solon, Solon!”  which being presently
reported to Cyrus, and he sending to inquire of him what it meant,
Croesus gave him to understand that he now found the teaching Solon had
formerly given him true to his cost; which was, “That men, however
fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy till they
had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives,” by reason of the
uncertainty and mutability of human things, which, upon very light and
trivial occasions, are subject to be totally changed into a quite
contrary condition.  And so it was that Agesilaus made answer to one who
was saying what a happy young man the King of Persia was, to come so
young to so mighty a kingdom: “‘Tis true,” said he, “but neither was
Priam unhappy at his years.”--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the
Lacedaemonians.]--In a short time, kings of Macedon, successors to that
mighty Alexander, became joiners and scriveners at Rome; a tyrant of
Sicily, a pedant at Corinth; a conqueror of one-half of the world and
general of so many armies, a miserable suppliant to the rascally officers
of a king of Egypt: so much did the prolongation of five or six months of
life cost the great Pompey; and, in our fathers’ days, Ludovico Sforza,
the tenth Duke of Milan, whom all Italy had so long truckled under, was
seen to die a wretched prisoner at Loches, but not till he had lived ten
years in captivity,--[He was imprisoned by Louis XI. in an iron cage]--
which was the worst part of his fortune.  The fairest of all queens,
--[Mary, Queen of Scots.]--widow to the greatest king in Europe, did she
not come to die by the hand of an executioner?  Unworthy and barbarous
cruelty!  And a thousand more examples there are of the same kind; for it
seems that as storms and tempests have a malice against the proud and
overtowering heights of our lofty buildings, there are also spirits above
that are envious of the greatnesses here below:

              “Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
               Obterit, et pulchros fasces, saevasque secures
               Proculcare, ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.”

     [“So true it is that some occult power upsets human affairs, the
     glittering fasces and the cruel axes spurns under foot, and seems to
     make sport of them.”--Lucretius, v.  1231.]

And it should seem, also, that Fortune sometimes lies in wait to surprise
the last hour of our lives, to show the power she has, in a moment, to
overthrow what she was so many years in building, making us cry out with
Laberius:

                         “Nimirum hac die
          Una plus vixi mihi, quam vivendum fuit.”

     [“I have lived longer by this one day than I should have
     done.”--Macrobius, ii.  7.]

And, in this sense, this good advice of Solon may reasonably be taken;
but he, being a philosopher (with which sort of men the favours and
disgraces of Fortune stand for nothing, either to the making a man happy
or unhappy, and with whom grandeurs and powers are accidents of a quality
almost indifferent) I am apt to think that he had some further aim, and
that his meaning was, that the very felicity of life itself, which
depends upon the tranquillity and contentment of a well-descended spirit,
and the resolution and assurance of a well-ordered soul, ought never to
be attributed to any man till he has first been seen to play the last,
and, doubtless, the hardest act of his part.  There may be disguise and
dissimulation in all the rest: where these fine philosophical discourses
are only put on, and where accident, not touching us to the quick, gives
us leisure to maintain the same gravity of aspect; but, in this last
scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting: we must speak out plain,
and discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the pot,

              “Nam vera; voces turn demum pectore ab imo
               Ejiciuntur; et eripitur persona, manet res.”

     [“Then at last truth issues from the heart; the visor’s gone,
     the man remains.”--Lucretius, iii.  57.]

Wherefore, at this last, all the other actions of our life ought to be
tried and sifted: ‘tis the master-day, ‘tis the day that is judge of all
the rest, “‘tis the day,” says one of the ancients,--[Seneca, Ep., 102]--
“that must be judge of all my foregoing years.”  To death do I refer the
assay of the fruit of all my studies: we shall then see whether my
discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart.  I have seen many by
their death give a good or an ill repute to their whole life.  Scipio,
the father-in-law of Pompey, in dying, well removed the ill opinion that
till then every one had conceived of him.  Epaminondas being asked which
of the three he had in greatest esteem, Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself.
“You must first see us die,” said he, “before that question can be
resolved.”--[Plutarch, Apoth.]--And, in truth, he would infinitely
wrong that man who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his
end.

God has ordered all things as it has best pleased Him; but I have, in my
time, seen three of the most execrable persons that ever I knew in all
manner of abominable living, and the most infamous to boot, who all died
a very regular death, and in all circumstances composed, even to
perfection.  There are brave and fortunate deaths: I have seen death cut
the thread of the progress of a prodigious advancement, and in the height
and flower of its increase, of a certain person,--[Montaigne doubtless
refers to his friend Etienne de la Boetie, at whose death in 1563 he was
present.]--with so glorious an end that, in my opinion, his ambitious
and generous designs had nothing in them so high and great as their
interruption.  He arrived, without completing his course, at the place to
which his ambition aimed, with greater glory than he could either have
hoped or desired, anticipating by his fall the name and power to which he
aspired in perfecting his career.  In the judgment I make of another
man’s life, I always observe how he carried himself at his death; and the
principal concern I have for my own is that I may die well--that is,
patiently and tranquilly.




CHAPTER XIX

THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPY IS TO LEARN TO DIE

Cicero says--[Tusc., i.  31.]--“that to study philosophy is nothing but
to prepare one’s self to die.”  The reason of which is, because study and
contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it
separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a
resemblance of death; or, else, because all the wisdom and reasoning in
the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear
to die.  And to say the truth, either our reason mocks us, or it ought to
have no other aim but our contentment only, nor to endeavour anything
but, in sum, to make us live well, and, as the Holy Scripture says, at
our ease.  All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is
our end, though we make use of divers means to attain it: they would,
otherwise, be rejected at the first motion; for who would give ear to him
that should propose affliction and misery for his end?  The controversies
and disputes of the philosophical sects upon this point are merely
verbal:

               “Transcurramus solertissimas nugas”

     [“Let us skip over those subtle trifles.”--Seneca, Ep., 117.]

--there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent
with so sacred a profession; but whatsoever personage a man takes upon
himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it.

Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim,
even in virtue is pleasure.  It amuses me to rattle in ears this word,
which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and
contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other
assistance whatever.  This pleasure, for being more gay, more sinewy,
more robust and more manly, is only the more seriously voluptuous, and we
ought give it the name of pleasure, as that which is more favourable,
gentle, and natural, and not that from which we have denominated it.  The
other and meaner pleasure, if it could deserve this fair name, it ought
to be by way of competition, and not of privilege.  I find it less exempt
from traverses and inconveniences than virtue itself; and, besides that
the enjoyment is more momentary, fluid, and frail, it has its watchings,
fasts, and labours, its sweat and its blood; and, moreover, has
particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding
passions, and so dull a satiety attending it, as equal it to the severest
penance.  And we mistake if we think that these incommodities serve it
for a spur and a seasoning to its sweetness (as in nature one contrary is
quickened by another), or say, when we come to virtue, that like
consequences and difficulties overwhelm and render it austere and
inaccessible; whereas, much more aptly than in voluptuousness, they
ennoble, sharpen, and heighten the perfect and divine pleasure they
procure us.  He renders himself unworthy of it who will counterpoise its
cost with its fruit, and neither understands the blessing nor how to use
it.  Those who preach to us that the quest of it is craggy, difficult,
and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to
tell us that it is always unpleasing?  For what human means will ever
attain its enjoyment?  The most perfect have been fain to content
themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever
possessing it.  But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures
we know, the very pursuit is pleasant.  The attempt ever relishes of the
quality of the thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of,
and consubstantial with, the effect.  The felicity and beatitude that
glitters in Virtue, shines throughout all her appurtenances and avenues,
even to the first entry and utmost limits.

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of
death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life
with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste
of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct.  Which is
the reason why all the rules centre and concur in this one article.  And
although they all in like manner, with common accord, teach us also to
despise pain, poverty, and the other accidents to which human life is
subject, it is not, nevertheless, with the same solicitude, as well by
reason these accidents are not of so great necessity, the greater part of
mankind passing over their whole lives without ever knowing what poverty
is, and some without sorrow or sickness, as Xenophilus the musician, who
lived a hundred and six years in a perfect and continual health; as also
because, at the worst, death can, whenever we please, cut short and put
an end to all other inconveniences.  But as to death, it is inevitable:--

              “Omnes eodem cogimur; omnium
               Versatur urna serius ocius
               Sors exitura, et nos in aeternum
               Exilium impositura cymbae.”

     [“We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is
     to come out of the urn.  All must to eternal exile sail away.”
       --Hor., Od., ii.  3, 25.]

and, consequently, if it frights us, ‘tis a perpetual torment, for which
there is no sort of consolation.  There is no way by which it may not
reach us.  We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as in a
suspected country:

          “Quae, quasi saxum Tantalo, semper impendet.”

          [“Ever, like Tantalus stone, hangs over us.”
            --Cicero, De Finib., i. 18.]

Our courts of justice often send back condemned criminals to be executed
upon the place where the crime was committed; but, carry them to fine
houses by the way, prepare for them the best entertainment you can--

                    “Non Siculae dapes
               Dulcem elaborabunt saporem:
               Non avium cyatheaceae cantus
               Somnum reducent.”

     [“Sicilian dainties will not tickle their palates, nor the melody of
     birds and harps bring back sleep.”--Hor., Od., iii. 1, 18.]

Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey
being continually before their eyes, would not alter and deprave their
palate from tasting these regalios?

         “Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum
          Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura.”

     [“He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring
     his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by
     thinking of the blow to come.”--Claudianus, in Ruf., ii.  137.]

The end of our race is death; ‘tis the necessary object of our aim,
which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a
fit of ague?  The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from
what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness?  They must
bridle the ass by the tail:

          “Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,”

     [“Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards”--Lucretius, iv. 474]

‘tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall.  They affright
people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it
were the name of the devil.  And because the making a man’s will is in
reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to
that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally
given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a
condition of understanding he is to do it.

The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to
their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it
out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead,
said, “Such a one has lived,” or “Such a one has ceased to live”
 --[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c.  22:]--for, provided there was any mention
of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of
consolation.  And from them it is that we have borrowed our expression,
“The late Monsieur such and such a one.”--[“feu Monsieur un tel.”]
Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our
money.  I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the
last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the
year the 1st of January,--[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles
IX. in 1563.  Previously the year commenced at Easter, so that the 1st
January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]--and it is now but
just fifteen days since I was complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make
account to live, at least, as many more.  In the meantime, to trouble a
man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly.  But what?
Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life
otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any
man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think
he has yet twenty good years to come.  Fool that thou art!  who has
assured unto thee the term of life?  Thou dependest upon physicians’
tales: rather consult effects and experience.  According to the common
course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary
favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life.  And that
it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they
arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have
ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare
lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after
five-and-thirty years of age.  It is full both of reason and piety, too,
to take example by the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended
His life at three-and-thirty years.  The greatest man, that was no more
than a man, Alexander, died also at the same age.  How many several ways
has death to surprise us?

              “Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis
               Cautum est in horas.”

     [“Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that
     may at any hour befal him.”--Hor. O. ii.  13, 13.]

To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke
of Brittany,--[Jean II. died 1305.]--should be pressed to death in a
crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into
Lyons?--[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary
neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux.  Bertrand
le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]--Hast thou not
seen one of our kings--[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10,
1559]--killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by
jostle of a hog?--[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]--AEschylus,
threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to
avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise
falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air.  Another was choked with a
grape-stone;--[Val.  Max., ix.  12, ext. 2.]--an emperor killed with
the scratch of a comb in combing his head.  AEmilius Lepidus with a
stumble at his own threshold,--[Pliny, Nat.  Hist., vii.  33.]--
and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the
council-chamber.  And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus
the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of
Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a
Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes.  The poor judge Bebius gave
adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was
condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired.  Whilst Caius
Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed
his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of
mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who
had already given sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at
tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, which, as
it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it,
nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within
five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow.

These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes,
how is it possible a man should disengage himself from the thought of
death, or avoid fancying that it has us every moment by the throat?  What
matter is it, you will say, which way it comes to pass, provided a man
does not terrify himself with the expectation?  For my part, I am of this
mind, and if a man could by any means avoid it, though by creeping under
a calf’s skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift; all I
aim at is, to pass my time at my ease, and the recreations that will most
contribute to it, I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you
will:

              “Praetulerim .  .  .  delirus inersque videri,
               Dum mea delectent mala me, vel denique fallant,
               Quam sapere, et ringi.”

     [“I had rather seem mad and a sluggard, so that my defects are
     agreeable to myself, or that I am not painfully conscious of them,
     than be wise, and chaptious.”--Hor., Ep., ii. 2, 126.]

But ‘tis folly to think of doing anything that way.  They go, they come,
they gallop and dance, and not a word of death.  All this is very fine;
but withal, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their
children, or friends, surprising them at unawares and unprepared, then,
what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair!  Did you ever see
anything so subdued, so changed, and so confounded?  A man must,
therefore, make more early provision for it; and this brutish negligence,
could it possibly lodge in the brain of any man of sense (which I think
utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise too dear.  Were it an enemy
that could be avoided, I would then advise to borrow arms even of
cowardice itself; but seeing it is not, and that it will catch you as
well flying and playing the poltroon, as standing to’t like an honest
man:--

                   “Nempe et fugacem persequitur virum,
                    Nec parcit imbellis juventae
                    Poplitibus timidoque tergo.”

     [“He pursues the flying poltroon, nor spares the hamstrings of the
     unwarlike youth who turns his back”--Hor., Ep., iii. 2, 14.]

And seeing that no temper of arms is of proof to secure us:--

              “Ille licet ferro cautus, se condat et aere,
               Mors tamen inclusum protrahet inde caput”

     [“Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull
     his head out of his armour.”--Propertious iii. 18]

--let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him.  And to begin
to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a
way quite contrary to the common course.  Let us disarm him of his
novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and
have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.  Upon all occasions
represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of
a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us
presently consider, and say to ourselves, “Well, and what if it had been
death itself?”  and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves.
Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of
our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so
far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of
reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of
ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it.  The
Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their
feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into
the room to serve for a memento to their guests:

              “Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum
               Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.”

     [“Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected,
     will be the more welcome.”--Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.]

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has
learned to die has unlearned to serve.  There is nothing evil in life for
him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to
know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.  Paulus
Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner,
sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, “Let him
make that request to himself.”--[ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius,
c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40.]

In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard
for art and industry to perform anything to purpose.  I am in my own
nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more
continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in
the most wanton time of my age:

               “Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret.”

          [“When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.”
            --Catullus, lxviii.]

In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me
possessed with some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, whilst I
was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a
few days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an
entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and
jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same-destiny
was attending me.

          “Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit.”

     [“Presently the present will have gone, never to be recalled.”
      Lucretius, iii.  928.]

Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other.
It is impossible but we must feel a sting in such imaginations as these,
at first; but with often turning and returning them in one’s mind, they,
at last, become so familiar as to be no trouble at all: otherwise, I, for
my part, should be in a perpetual fright and frenzy; for never man was so
distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration.
Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and
vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness
contract my hopes.  Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it
eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done
to-day.  Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our
end; and if we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our
heads, besides the accident that immediately threatens us, we shall find
that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that
sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle
at home, are the one as near it as the other.

     “Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior.”

     [“No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than
     another of to-morrow.”--Seneca, Ep., 91.]

For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear
too short, were it but an hour’s business I had to do.

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a
memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I
told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a
league’s distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when
that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there,
because I was not certain to live till I came home.  As a man that am
eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own
particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like
to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with
him I did not expect long before.  We should always, as near as we can,
be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care,
at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:--

                   “Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo
                    Multa?”

     [“Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?”
       --Hor., Od., ii.  16, 17.]

for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition.
One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a
glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his
daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he
must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son,
as the principal comfort and concern of his being.  For my part, I am,
thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to
dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything
whatsoever.  I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations;
my leave is soon taken of all but myself.  Never did any one prepare to
bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake
hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do.  The
deadest deaths are the best:

                    “‘Miser, O miser,’ aiunt, ‘omnia ademit
               Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.’”

     [“‘Wretch that I am,’ they cry, ‘one fatal day has deprived me of
     all joys of life.’”--Lucretius, iii. 911.]


And the builder,

              “Manuet,” says he, “opera interrupta, minaeque
               Murorum ingentes.”

     [“The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls
     unmade.”--AEneid, iv.  88.]

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the
finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought
to perfection.  We are born to action:

               “Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.”

     [“When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.”
       --Ovid, Amor., ii.  10, 36.]

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to
extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me
planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens
not being finished.  I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of
nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a
chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the
fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:

         “Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum
          jam desiderium rerum super insidet una.”

     [“They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess
     things.”--Lucretius, iii.  913.]

We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours.
To this purpose it was that men first appointed the places of sepulture
adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to
accustom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that
they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end,
that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies
should put us in mind of our frail condition:

              “Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede
               Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira
               Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum
               Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis.”

     [“It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and
     to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with
     the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and
     covering the tables with blood.”--Silius Italicus, xi. 51.]

And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company
with a great image of death, by one that cried out to them, “Drink and be
merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead”; so it is my custom to
have death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth.
Neither is there anything of which I am so inquisitive, and delight to
inform myself, as the manner of men’s deaths, their words, looks, and
bearing; nor any places in history I am so intent upon; and it is
manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a
particular fancy for that subject.  If I were a writer of books, I would
compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who
should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.
Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for
another and less profitable end.

Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so
infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be
quite out of his play when it comes to the push.  Let them say what they
will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is
it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration?
Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be
sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive
that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain
loathing and disdain of life.  I find I have much more ado to digest this
resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a
fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life,
by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I
look upon death with less terror.  Which makes me hope, that the further
I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall
the more easily exchange the one for the other.  And, as I have
experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often
appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that
being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really
afflicted with them.  The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and
delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a
disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify
those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more
troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy
upon me; I hope to find death the same.

Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily
suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily
decay.  What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better
days?

               “Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.”

     [“Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!”---Maximian, vel
     Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.]

Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask
him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body
and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, “Thou fanciest, then, that thou
art yet alive.”--[Seneca, Ep., 77.]--Should a man fall into this
condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such
a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an
insensible pace, step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by
that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the
stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than
the final dissolution of a languishing body, than the death of old age;
forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at
all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is
troublesome and painful.  The body, bent and bowed, has less force to
support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is,
that we are to raise her up firm and erect against the power of this
adversary.  For, as it is impossible she should ever be at rest, whilst
she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may
boast (which is a thing as it were surpassing human condition) that it is
impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance,
should inhabit or have any place in her:

              “Non vulnus instants Tyranni
               Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster
               Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,
               Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus.”

     [“Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul,
     nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the
     strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves.”
      --Hor., Od., iii.  3, 3.]

She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of
necessity, shame, poverty, and all the other injuries of fortune.  Let
us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true
and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to
defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains:

                              “In manicis et
               Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo.
               Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet.  Opinor,
               Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est.”

          [“I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a
          savage keeper.--A god will when I ask Him, set me free.
          This god I think is death.  Death is the term of all things.”
           --Hor., Ep., i.  16, 76.]

Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt
of death.  Not only the argument of reason invites us to it--for why
should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
--but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not
infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of
them?  And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable?
To him that told Socrates, “The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to
death”; “And nature them,” said he.--[Socrates was not condemned to death
by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]--
What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only
step that is to deliver us from all trouble!  As our birth brought us the
birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included.
And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence,
is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
Death is the beginning of another life.  So did we weep, and so much it
cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in
entering into it.  Nothing can be a grievance that is but once.  Is it
reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched?
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long,
nor short, to things that are no more.  Aristotle tells us that there are
certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never
live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning,
die in their youth, and those that die at five in the evening, in their
decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of
continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe?  The most and the
least, of ours, in comparison with eternity, or yet with the duration of
mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less
ridiculous.--[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.]

But nature compels us to it.  “Go out of this world,” says she, “as you
entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without
passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to
death.  Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of
the life of the world.

                    “Inter se mortales mutua vivunt
                    ................................
                    Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt.”

     [“Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners
     in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the
     next comer.--” Lucretius, ii.  75, 78.]

“Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things?  ‘Tis the
condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you
endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves.  This very being of yours
that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death.  The day of
your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave:

          “Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit.”

     [“The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.”
      --Seneca, Her.  Fur., 3 Chor.  874.]

          “Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.”

     [“As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.”
       --Manilius, Ast., iv.  16.]

“All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the
expense of life itself.  The perpetual work of your life is but to lay
the foundation of death.  You are in death, whilst you are in life,
because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you
had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while
you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and
more sensibly and essentially.  If you have made your profit of life, you
have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

               “Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?”

     [“Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?
     “Lucretius, iii.  951.]

“If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was
unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you
desire longer to keep it?

               “‘Cur amplius addere quaeris,
          Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?’

     [“Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and
     be again tormented?”--Lucretius, iii. 914.]

“Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil
as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day
is equal and like to all other days.  There is no other light, no other
shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and
disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall
also entertain your posterity:

               “‘Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes
               Aspicient.’

     [“Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.”
      --Manilius, i. 529.]

“And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all
the acts of my comedy are performed in a year.  If you have observed the
revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth,
the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part,
and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same
thing:

               “‘Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.’

     [“We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.”
      --Lucretius, iii. 1093.]

               “‘Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.’

     [“The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.”
      --Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.]

“I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations:

             “‘Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque
               Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.’

     [“I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: ‘tis the same
     thing over and over again.”--Lucretius iii. 957]

“Give place to others, as others have given place to you.  Equality is
the soul of equity.  Who can complain of being comprehended in the same
destiny, wherein all are involved?  Besides, live as long as you can, you
shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to
no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much
fear, as if you had died at nurse:

               “‘Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,
          Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.’

     [“Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will
     remain eternal.”--Lucretius, iii. 1103]

“And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason
to be displeased.

          “‘In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te,
          Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum,
          Stansque jacentem.’

     [“Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to
     lament you dead, standing on your grave.”--Idem., ibid., 898.]

“Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about:

          “‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit.
          ..................................................
          “‘Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.’

“Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less
than nothing.

        “‘Multo .  .  .  mortem minus ad nos esse putandium,
          Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.’

“Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead:
living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no
more.  Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind
was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the
world; nor does it any more concern you.

         “‘Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas
          Temporis aeterni fuerit.’

     [“Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.”
      --Lucretius iii. 985]

Wherever your life ends, it is all there.  The utility of living consists
not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived
long, and yet lived but a little.  Make use of time while it is present
with you.  It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to
have a sufficient length of life.  Is it possible you can imagine never
to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet
there is no journey but hath its end.  And, if company will make it more
pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same
way?

          “‘Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.’

          [“All things, then, life over, must follow thee.”
           --Lucretius, iii.  981.]

“Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do?  Is there
anything that does not grow old, as well as you?  A thousand men, a
thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that
you die:

        “‘Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est,
          Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris
          Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.’

     [“No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which
     there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of
     death and funerals.”--Lucretius, v.  579.]

“To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no
possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have
been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but
have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying?  It must,
therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither
experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other.  Why dost thou
complain of me and of destiny?  Do we do thee any wrong?  Is it for thee
to govern us, or for us to govern thee?  Though, peradventure, thy age
may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much
a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell.
Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions
under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its
duration, his father Saturn.  Do but seriously consider how much more
insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I
have already given him.  If you had not death, you would eternally curse
me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with
it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too
greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so
established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any
antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have
tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain.  It was I that
taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die
were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ‘Why then he
did not die?’  ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it is indifferent.’--[Diogenes
Laertius, i.  35.]--Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of
this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are
of thy death.  Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to
thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the
cause of lassitude: it does not confess it.  Every day travels towards
death; the last only arrives at it.”  These are the good lessons our
mother Nature teaches.

I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war
the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others,
should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own
houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining
milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be,
notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of
people, than in others of better quality.  I believe, in truth, that it
is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out,
that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of
living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of
astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering
servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed
with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror
round about us; we seem dead and buried already.  Children are afraid
even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor;
and so ‘tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as
from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but
the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day
or two ago, without any manner of apprehension.  Happy is the death that
deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.




CHAPTER XX

OF THE FORCE OF IMAGINATION

            “Fortis imaginatio generat casum,” say the schoolmen.

     [“A strong imagination begets the event itself.”--Axiom. Scholast.]

I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination:
every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it.  It has a very
piercing impression upon me; and I make it my business to avoid, wanting
force to resist it.  I could live by the sole help of healthful and jolly
company: the very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I
often usurp the sensations of another person.  A perpetual cough in
another tickles my lungs and throat.  I more unwillingly visit the sick
in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to
whom I less look.  I take possession of the disease I am concerned at,
and take it to myself.  I do not at all wonder that fancy should give
fevers and sometimes kill such as allow it too much scope, and are too
willing to entertain it.  Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time:
I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old
fellow’s house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with
the patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing
which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be
pleased with his company, that I might come often to see him, by which
means, and by fixing his eyes upon the freshness of my complexion, and
his imagination upon the sprightliness and vigour that glowed in my
youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I
then was, his habit of body might, peradventure, be amended; but he
forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse.  Gallus
Vibius so much bent his mind to find out the essence and motions of
madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a
degree, that he could never after recover his judgment, and might brag
that he was become a fool by too much wisdom.  Some there are who through
fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being
unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the
scaffold, by the stroke of imagination.  We start, tremble, turn pale,
and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed,
feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes
to expiring.  And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with
fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires:--

         “Ut, quasi transactis saepe omnibu rebu, profundant
          Fluminis ingentes, fluctus, vestemque cruentent.”

Although it be no new thing to see horns grown in a night on the forehead
of one that had none when he went to bed, notwithstanding, what befell
Cippus, King of Italy,  is memorable; who having one day been a very
delighted spectator of a bullfight, and having all the night dreamed that
he had horns on his head, did, by the force of imagination, really cause
them to grow there.  Passion gave to the son of Croesus the voice which
nature had denied him.  And Antiochus fell into a fever, inflamed with
the beauty of Stratonice, too deeply imprinted in his soul.  Pliny
pretends to have seen Lucius Cossitius, who from a woman was turned into
a man upon her very wedding-day.  Pontanus and others report the like
metamorphosis to have happened in these latter days in Italy.  And,
through the vehement desire of him and his mother:

          “Volta puer solvit, quae foemina voverat, Iphis.”

Myself passing by Vitry le Francois,  saw a man the Bishop of Soissons
had, in confirmation, called Germain, whom all the inhabitants of the
place had known to be a girl till two-and-twenty years of age, called
Mary.  He was, at the time of my being there, very full of beard, old,
and not married.  He told us, that by straining himself in a leap his
male organs came out; and the girls of that place have, to this day, a
song, wherein they advise one another not to take too great strides, for
fear of being turned into men, as Mary Germain was.  It is no wonder if
this sort of accident frequently happen; for if imagination have any
power in such things, it is so continually and vigorously bent upon this
subject, that to the end it may not so often relapse into the same
thought and violence of desire, it were better, once for all, to give
these young wenches the things they long for.

Some attribute the scars of King Dagobert and of St. Francis to the force
of imagination.  It is said, that by it bodies will sometimes be removed
from their places; and Celsus tells us of a priest whose soul would be
ravished into such an ecstasy that the body would, for a long time,
remain without sense or respiration.  St. Augustine makes mention of
another, who, upon the hearing of any lamentable or doleful cries, would
presently fall into a swoon, and be so far out of himself, that it was in
vain to call, bawl in his ears, pinch or burn him, till he voluntarily
came to himself; and then he would say, that he had heard voices as it
were afar off, and did feel when they pinched and burned him; and, to
prove that this was no obstinate dissimulation in defiance of his sense
of feeling, it was manifest, that all the while he had neither pulse nor
breathing.

‘Tis very probable, that visions, enchantments, and all extraordinary
effects of that nature, derive their credit principally from the power of
imagination, working and making its chiefest impression upon vulgar and
more easy souls, whose belief is so strangely imposed upon, as to think
they see what they do not see.

I am not satisfied whether those pleasant ligatures--[Les nouements
d’aiguillettes, as they were called, knots tied by some one, at a
wedding, on a strip of leather, cotton, or silk, and which, especially
when passed through the wedding-ring, were supposed to have the magical
effect of preventing a consummation of the marriage until they were
untied.  See Louandre, La Sorcellerie, 1853, p. 73.  The same
superstition and appliance existed in England.]--with which this age of
ours is so occupied, that there is almost no other talk, are not mere
voluntary impressions of apprehension and fear; for I know, by
experience, in the case of a particular friend of mine, one for whom I
can be as responsible as for myself, and a man that cannot possibly fall
under any manner of suspicion of insufficiency, and as little of being
enchanted, who having heard a companion of his make a relation of an
unusual frigidity that surprised him at a very unseasonable time; being
afterwards himself engaged upon the same account, the horror of the
former story on a sudden so strangely possessed his imagination, that he
ran the same fortune the other had done; and from that time forward, the
scurvy remembrance of his disaster running in his mind and tyrannising
over him, he was subject to relapse into the same misfortune.  He found
some remedy, however, for this fancy in another fancy, by himself frankly
confessing and declaring beforehand to the party with whom he was to have
to do, this subjection of his, by which means, the agitation of his soul
was, in some sort, appeased; and knowing that, now, some such
misbehaviour was expected from him, the restraint upon his faculties grew
less.  And afterwards, at such times as he was in no such apprehension,
when setting about the act (his thoughts being then disengaged and free,
and his body in its true and natural estate) he was at leisure to cause
the part to be handled and communicated to the knowledge of the other
party, he was totally freed from that vexatious infirmity.  After a man
has once done a woman right, he is never after in danger of misbehaving
himself with that person, unless upon the account of some excusable
weakness.  Neither is this disaster to be feared, but in adventures,
where the soul is overextended with desire or respect, and, especially,
where the opportunity is of an unforeseen and pressing nature; in those
cases, there is no means for a man to defend himself from such a
surprise, as shall put him altogether out of sorts.  I have known some,
who have secured themselves from this mischance, by coming half sated
elsewhere, purposely to abate the ardour of the fury, and others, who,
being grown old, find themselves less impotent by being less able; and
one, who found an advantage in being assured by a friend of his, that he
had a counter-charm of enchantments that would secure him from this
disgrace.  The story itself is not, much amiss, and therefore you shall
have it.

A Count of a very great family, and with whom I was very intimate, being
married to a fair lady, who had formerly been courted by one who was at
the wedding, all his friends were in very great fear; but especially an
old lady his kinswoman, who had the ordering of the solemnity, and in
whose house it was kept, suspecting his rival would offer foul play by
these sorceries.  Which fear she communicated to me.  I bade her rely
upon me: I had, by chance, about me a certain flat plate of gold, whereon
were graven some celestial figures, supposed good against sunstroke or
pains in the head, being applied to the suture: where, that it might the
better remain firm, it was sewed to a ribbon to be tied under the chin; a
foppery cousin-german to this of which I am speaking.  Jaques Pelletier,
who lived in my house, had presented this to me for a singular rarity.
I had a fancy to make some use of this knack, and therefore privately
told the Count, that he might possibly run the same fortune other
bridegrooms had sometimes done, especially some one being in the house,
who, no doubt, would be glad to do him such a courtesy: but let him
boldly go to bed.  For I would do him the office of a friend, and, if
need were, would not spare a miracle it was in my power to do, provided
he would engage to me, upon his honour, to keep it to himself; and only,
when they came to bring him his caudle,--[A custom in France to bring the
bridegroom a caudle in the middle of the night on his wedding-night]--
if matters had not gone well with him, to give me such a sign, and leave
the rest to me.  Now he had had his ears so battered, and his mind so
prepossessed with the eternal tattle of this business, that when he came
to’t, he did really find himself tied with the trouble of his
imagination, and, accordingly, at the time appointed, gave me the sign.
Whereupon, I whispered him in the ear, that he should rise, under
pretence of putting us out of the room, and after a jesting manner pull
my nightgown from my shoulders--we were of much about the same height--
throw it over his own, and there keep it till he had performed what I had
appointed him to do, which was, that when we were all gone out of the
chamber, he should withdraw to make water, should three times repeat such
and such words, and as often do such and such actions; that at every of
the three times, he should tie the ribbon I put into his hand about his
middle, and be sure to place the medal that was fastened to it, the
figures in such a posture, exactly upon his reins, which being done, and
having the last of the three times so well girt and fast tied the ribbon
that it could neither untie nor slip from its place, let him confidently
return to his business, and withal not forget to spread my gown upon the
bed, so that it might be sure to cover them both.  These ape’s tricks are
the main of the effect, our fancy being so far seduced as to believe that
such strange means must, of necessity, proceed from some abstruse
science: their very inanity gives them weight and reverence.  And,
certain it is, that my figures approved themselves more venereal than
solar, more active than prohibitive.  ‘Twas a sudden whimsey, mixed with
a little curiosity, that made me do a thing so contrary to my nature; for
I am an enemy to all subtle and counterfeit actions, and abominate all
manner of trickery, though it be for sport, and to an advantage; for
though the action may not be vicious in itself, its mode is vicious.

Amasis, King of Egypt, having married Laodice, a very beautiful Greek
virgin, though noted for his abilities elsewhere, found himself quite
another man with his wife, and could by no means enjoy her; at which he
was so enraged, that he threatened to kill her, suspecting her to be a
witch.  As ‘tis usual in things that consist in fancy, she put him upon
devotion, and having accordingly made his vows to Venus, he found himself
divinely restored the very first night after his oblations and
sacrifices.  Now women are to blame to entertain us with that disdainful,
coy, and angry countenance, which extinguishes our vigour, as it kindles
our desire; which made the daughter-in-law of Pythagoras--[Theano, the
lady in question was the wife, not the daughter-in-law of Pythagoras.]--
say, “That the woman who goes to bed to a man, must put off her modesty
with her petticoat, and put it on again with the same.”  The soul of the
assailant, being disturbed with many several alarms, readily loses the
power of performance; and whoever the imagination has once put this trick
upon, and confounded with the shame of it (and she never does it but at
the first acquaintance, by reason men are then more ardent and eager, and
also, at this first account a man gives of himself, he is much more
timorous of miscarrying), having made an ill beginning, he enters into
such fever and despite at the accident, as are apt to remain and continue
with him upon following occasions.

Married people, having all their time before them, ought never to compel
or so much as to offer at the feat, if they do not find themselves quite
ready: and it is less unseemly to fail of handselling the nuptial sheets,
when a man perceives himself full of agitation and trembling, and to
await another opportunity at more private and more composed leisure, than
to make himself perpetually miserable, for having misbehaved himself and
been baffled at the first assault.  Till possession be taken, a man that
knows himself subject to this infirmity, should leisurely and by degrees
make several little trials and light offers, without obstinately
attempting at once, to Force an absolute conquest over his own mutinous
and indisposed faculties.  Such as know their members to be naturally
obedient, need take no other care but only to counterplot their
fantasies.

The indocile liberty of this member is very remarkable, so importunately
unruly in its tumidity and impatience, when we do not require it, and so
unseasonably disobedient, when we stand most in need of it: so
imperiously contesting in authority with the will, and with so much
haughty obstinacy denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind.  And
yet, though his rebellion is so universally complained of, and that proof
is thence deduced to condemn him, if he had, nevertheless, feed me
to plead his cause, I should peradventure, bring the rest of his
fellow-members into suspicion of complotting this mischief against him,
out of pure envy at the importance and pleasure especial to his
employment; and to have, by confederacy, armed the whole world against
him, by malevolently charging him alone, with their common offence.  For
let any one consider, whether there is any one part of our bodies that
does not often refuse to perform its office at the precept of the will,
and that does not often exercise its function in defiance of her command.
They have every one of them passions of their own, that rouse and awaken,
stupefy and benumb them, without our leave or consent.  How often do the
involuntary motions of the countenance discover our inward thoughts, and
betray our most private secrets to the bystanders.  The same cause that
animates this member, does also, without our knowledge, animate the
lungs, pulse, and heart, the sight of a pleasing object imperceptibly
diffusing a flame through all our parts, with a feverish motion.  Is
there nothing but these veins and muscles that swell and flag without the
consent, not only of the will, but even of our knowledge also?  We do not
command our hairs to stand on end, nor our skin to shiver either with
fear or desire; the hands often convey themselves to parts to which we do
not direct them; the tongue will be interdict, and the voice congealed,
when we know not how to help it.  When we have nothing to eat, and would
willingly forbid it, the appetite does not, for all that, forbear to stir
up the parts that are subject to it, no more nor less than the other
appetite we were speaking of, and in like manner, as unseasonably leaves
us, when it thinks fit.  The vessels that serve to discharge the belly
have their own proper dilatations and compressions, without and beyond
our concurrence, as well as those which are destined to purge the reins;
and that which, to justify the prerogative of the will, St. Augustine
urges, of having seen a man who could command his rear to discharge as
often together as he pleased, Vives, his commentator, yet further
fortifies with another example in his time,--of one that could break wind
in tune; but these cases do not suppose any more pure obedience in that
part; for is anything commonly more tumultuary or indiscreet?  To which
let me add, that I myself knew one so rude and ungoverned, as for forty
years together made his master vent with one continued and unintermitted
outbursting, and ‘tis like will do so till he die of it.  And I could
heartily wish, that I only knew by reading, how often a man’s belly, by
the denial of one single puff, brings him to the very door of an
exceeding painful death; and that the emperor,--[The Emperor Claudius,
who, however, according to Suetonius (Vita, c. 32), only intended to
authorise this singular privilege by an edict.]--who gave liberty to let
fly in all places, had, at the same time, given us power to do it.  But
for our will, in whose behalf we prefer this accusation, with how much
greater probability may we reproach herself with mutiny and sedition, for
her irregularity and disobedience?  Does she always will what we would
have her to do?  Does she not often will what we forbid her to will, and
that to our manifest prejudice?  Does she suffer herself, more than any
of the rest, to be governed and directed by the results of our reason? To
conclude, I should move, in the behalf of the gentleman, my client, it
might be considered, that in this fact, his cause being inseparably and
indistinctly conjoined with an accessory, yet he only is called in
question, and that by arguments and accusations, which cannot be charged
upon the other; whose business, indeed, it is sometimes inopportunely to
invite, but never to refuse, and invite, moreover, after a tacit and
quiet manner; and therefore is the malice and injustice of his accusers
most manifestly apparent.  But be it how it will, protesting against the
proceedings of the advocates and judges, nature will, in the meantime,
proceed after her own way, who had done but well, had she endowed this
member with some particular privilege; the author of the sole immortal
work of mortals; a divine work, according to Socrates; and love, the
desire of immortality, and himself an immortal demon.

Some one, perhaps, by such an effect of imagination may have had the good
luck to leave behind him here, the scrofula, which his companion who has
come after, has carried with him into Spain.  And ‘tis for this reason
you may see why men in such cases require a mind prepared for the thing
that is to be done.  Why do the physicians possess, before hand, their
patients’ credulity with so many false promises of cure, if not to the
end, that the effect of imagination may supply the imposture of their
decoctions?  They know very well, that a great master of their trade has
given it under his hand, that he has known some with whom the very sight
of physic would work.  All which conceits come now into my head, by the
remembrance of a story was told me by a domestic apothecary of my
father’s, a blunt Swiss, a nation not much addicted to vanity and lying,
of a merchant he had long known at Toulouse, who being a valetudinary,
and much afflicted with the stone, had often occasion to take clysters,
of which he caused several sorts to be prescribed him by the physicians,
acccording to the accidents of his disease; which, being brought him, and
none of the usual forms, as feeling if it were not too hot, and the like,
being omitted, he lay down, the syringe advanced, and all ceremonies
performed, injection alone excepted; after which, the apothecary being
gone, and the patient accommodated as if he had really received a
clyster, he found the same operation and effect that those do who have
taken one indeed; and if at any time the physician did not find the
operation sufficient, he would usually give him two or three more doses,
after the same manner.  And the fellow swore, that to save charges (for
he paid as if he had really taken them) this sick man’s wife, having
sometimes made trial of warm water only, the effect discovered the cheat,
and finding these would do no good, was fain to return to the old way.

A woman fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread, cried and
lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her throat, where she
thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious fellow that was brought to
her, seeing no outward tumour nor alteration, supposing it to be only a
conceit taken at some crust of bread that had hurt her as it went down,
caused her to vomit, and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin,
which the woman no sooner saw, but believing she had cast it up, she
presently found herself eased of her pain.  I myself knew a gentleman,
who having treated a large company at his house, three or four days after
bragged in jest (for there was no such thing), that he had made them eat
of a baked cat; at which, a young gentlewoman, who had been at the feast,
took such a horror, that falling into a violent vomiting and fever, there
was no possible means to save her.  Even brute beasts are subject to the
force of imagination as well as we; witness dogs, who die of grief for
the loss of their masters; and bark and tremble and start in their sleep;
so horses will kick and whinny in their sleep.

Now all this may be attributed to the close affinity and relation betwixt
the soul and the body intercommunicating their fortunes; but ‘tis quite
another thing when the imagination works not only upon one’s own
particular body, but upon that of others also.  And as an infected body
communicates its malady to those that approach or live near it, as we see
in the plague, the smallpox, and sore eyes, that run through whole
families and cities:--

          “Dum spectant oculi laesos, laeduntur et ipsi;
          Multaque corporibus transitione nocent.”

     [“When we look at people with sore eyes, our own eyes become sore.
     Many things are hurtful to our bodies by transition.”
      --Ovid, De Rem. Amor., 615.]

--so the imagination, being vehemently agitated, darts out infection
capable of offending the foreign object.  The ancients had an opinion of
certain women of Scythia, that being animated and enraged against any
one, they killed him only with their looks.  Tortoises and ostriches
hatch their eggs with only looking on them, which infers that their eyes
have in them some ejaculative virtue.  And the eyes of witches are said
to be assailant and hurtful:--

          “Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos.”

     [“Some eye, I know not whose is bewitching my tender lambs.”
      --Virgil, Eclog., iii.  103.]

Magicians are no very good authority with me.  But we experimentally see
that women impart the marks of their fancy to the children they carry in
the womb; witness her that was brought to bed of a Moor; and there was
presented to Charles the Emperor and King of Bohemia, a girl from about
Pisa, all over rough and covered with hair, whom her mother said to be so
conceived by reason of a picture of St. John the Baptist, that hung
within the curtains of her bed.

It is the same with beasts; witness Jacob’s sheep, and the hares and
partridges that the snow turns white upon the mountains.  There was at my
house, a little while ago, a cat seen watching a bird upon the top of a
tree: these, for some time, mutually fixing their eyes one upon another,
the bird at last let herself fall dead into the cat’s claws, either
dazzled by the force of its own imagination, or drawn by some attractive
power of the cat.  Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field,
have, I make no question, heard the story of the falconer, who having
earnestly fixed his eyes upon a kite in the air; laid a wager that he
would bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it
was said; for the tales I borrow I charge upon the consciences of those
from whom I have them.  The discourses are my own, and found themselves
upon the proofs of reason, not of experience; to which every one has
liberty to add his own examples; and who has none, let him not forbear,
the number and varieties of accidents considered, to believe that there
are plenty of them; if I do not apply them well, let some other do it for
me.  And, also, in the subject of which I treat, our manners and motions,
testimonies and instances; how fabulous soever, provided they are
possible, serve as well as the true; whether they have really happened or
no, at Rome or Paris, to John or Peter, ‘tis still within the verge of
human capacity, which serves me to good use.  I see, and make my
advantage of it, as well in shadow as in substance; and amongst the
various readings thereof in history, I cull out the most rare and
memorable to fit my own turn.  There are authors whose only end and
design it is to give an account of things that have happened; mine, if I
could arrive unto it, should be to deliver of what may happen.  There is
a just liberty allowed in the schools, of supposing similitudes, when
they have none at hand.  I do not, however, make any use of that
privilege, and as to that matter, in superstitious religion, surpass all
historical authority.  In the examples which I here bring in, of what I
have heard, read, done, or said, I have forbidden myself to dare to alter
even the most light and indifferent circumstances; my conscience does not
falsify one tittle; what my ignorance may do, I cannot say.

And this it is that makes me sometimes doubt in my own mind, whether a
divine, or a philosopher, and such men of exact and tender prudence and
conscience, are fit to write history: for how can they stake their
reputation upon a popular faith? how be responsible for the opinions of
men they do not know? and with what assurance deliver their conjectures
for current pay?  Of actions performed before their own eyes, wherein
several persons were actors, they would be unwilling to give evidence
upon oath before a judge; and there is no man, so familiarly known to
them, for whose intentions they would become absolute caution.  For my
part, I think it less hazardous to write of things past, than present, by
how much the writer is only to give an account of things every one knows
he must of necessity borrow upon trust.

I am solicited to write the affairs of my own time by some, who fancy I
look upon them with an eye less blinded with passion than another, and
have a clearer insight into them by reason of the free access fortune has
given me to the heads of various factions; but they do not consider, that
to purchase the glory of Sallust, I would not give myself the trouble,
sworn enemy as I am to obligation, assiduity, or perseverance: that there
is nothing so contrary to my style, as a continued narrative, I so often
interrupt and cut myself short in my writing for want of breath; I have
neither composition nor explanation worth anything, and am ignorant,
beyond a child, of the phrases and even the very words proper to express
the most common things; and for that reason it is, that I have undertaken
to say only what I can say, and have accommodated my subject to my
strength.  Should I take one to be my guide, peradventure I should not be
able to keep pace with him; and in the freedom of my liberty might
deliver judgments, which upon better thoughts, and according to reason,
would be illegitimate and punishable.  Plutarch would say of what he has
delivered to us, that it is the work of others: that his examples are all
and everywhere exactly true: that they are useful to posterity, and are
presented with a lustre that will light us the way to virtue, is his own
work.  It is not of so dangerous consequence, as in a medicinal drug,
whether an old story be so or so.




CHAPTER XXI

THAT THE PROFIT OF ONE MAN IS THE DAMAGE OF ANOTHER

Demades the Athenian--[Seneca, De Beneficiis, vi. 38, whence nearly the
whole of this chapter is taken.]--condemned one of his city, whose trade
it was to sell the necessaries for funeral ceremonies, upon pretence that
he demanded unreasonable profit, and that that profit could not accrue to
him, but by the death of a great number of people.  A judgment that
appears to be ill grounded, forasmuch as no profit whatever can possibly
be made but at the expense of another, and that by the same rule he
should condemn all gain of what kind soever.  The merchant only thrives
by the debauchery of youth, the husband man by the dearness of grain, the
architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and officers of justice by
the suits and contentions of men: nay, even the honour and office of
divines are derived from our death and vices.  A physician takes no
pleasure in the health even of his friends, says the ancient Greek comic
writer, nor a soldier in the peace of his country, and so of the rest.
And, which is yet worse, let every one but dive into his own bosom, and
he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at
another’s expense.  Upon which consideration it comes into my head, that
nature does not in this swerve from her general polity; for physicians
hold, that the birth, nourishment, and increase of every thing is the
dissolution and corruption of another:

          “Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit,
          Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante.”

     [“For, whatever from its own confines passes changed, this is at
     once the death of that which before it was.”--Lucretius, ii. 752.]




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     Accommodated my subject to my strength
     Affright people with the very mention of death
     All I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease
     All think he has yet twenty good years to come
     Apprenticeship and a resemblance of death
     Become a fool by too much wisdom
     Both himself and his posterity declared ignoble, taxable
     Caesar: he would be thought an excellent engineer to boot
     Courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study
     Dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end
     Death can, whenever we please, cut short inconveniences
     Death has us every moment by the throat
     Death is a part of you
     Denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind
     Did my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart
     Die well--that is, patiently and tranquilly.
     Discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the po
     Downright and sincere obedience
     Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.
     Fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself
     Fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
     Fear: begets a terrible astonishment and confusion
     Feared, lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate
     Give these young wenches the things they long for
     Have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying?
     How many more have died before they arrived at thy age
     How many several ways has death to surprise us?
     How much more insupportable and painful an immortal life
     I have lived longer by this one day than I should have done
     I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will
     If nature do not help a little, it is very hard
     In this last scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting
     Inclination to love one another at the first sight
     Indocile liberty of this member
     Insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us
     Live at the expense of life itself.
     Much better to offend him once than myself every day
     Nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection
     Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell
     No man more certain than another of to-morrow.--Seneca
     No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried
     Not certain to live till I came home
     Not melancholic, but meditative
     Nothing can be a grievance that is but once
     Philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
     Premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty
     Profit made only at the expense of another
     Rather prating of another man’s province than his own
     Same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago
     Slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk
     some people rude, by being overcivil  in their courtesy
     The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave
     The deadest deaths are the best
     The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear
     There is no long, nor short, to things that are no more
     Thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure
     Things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand
     To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
     Utility of living consists not in the length of days
     Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues
     Valuing the interest of discipline
     Well, and what if it had been death itself?
     What may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day.
     Who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his end.
     Willingly slip the collar of command upon any pretence whatever
     Woman who goes to bed to a man, must put off her modesty
     You must first see us die
     Young and old die upon the same terms






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 4.

XXII.     Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received
XXIII.    Various events from the same counsel.
XXIV.     Of pedantry.



CHAPTER XXII

OF CUSTOM, AND THAT WE SHOULD NOT EASILY CHANGE A LAW RECEIVED

He seems to me to have had a right and true apprehension of the power of
custom, who first invented the story of a country-woman who, having
accustomed herself to play with and carry a young calf in her arms, and
daily continuing to do so as it grew up, obtained this by custom, that,
when grown to be a great ox, she was still able to bear it.  For, in
truth, custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.  She, by
little and little, slily and unperceived, slips in the foot of her
authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the
benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and
tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the
power so much as to lift up our eyes.  We see her, at every turn, forcing
and violating the rules of nature:

          “Usus efficacissimus rerum omnium magister.”

          [“Custom is the best master of all things.”
           --Pliny, Nat.  Hist.,xxvi. 2.]

I refer to her Plato’s cave in his Republic, and the physicians, who so
often submit the reasons of their art to her authority; as the story of
that king, who by custom brought his stomach to that pass, as to live by
poison, and the maid that Albertus reports to have lived upon spiders.
In that new world of the Indies, there were found great nations, and in
very differing climates, who were of the same diet, made provision of
them, and fed them for their tables; as also, they did grasshoppers,
mice, lizards, and bats; and in a time of scarcity of such delicacies, a
toad was sold for six crowns, all which they cook, and dish up with
several sauces.  There were also others found, to whom our diet, and the
flesh we eat, were venomous and mortal:

          “Consuetudinis magna vis est: pernoctant venatores in nive:
          in montibus uri se patiuntur: pugiles, caestibus contusi,
          ne ingemiscunt quidem.”

     [“The power of custom is very great: huntsmen will lie out all
     night in the snow, or suffer themselves to be burned up by the sun
     on the mountains; boxers, hurt by the caestus, never utter a
     groan.”--Cicero, Tusc., ii. 17]

These strange examples will not appear so strange if we consider what we
have ordinary experience of, how much custom stupefies our senses.  We
need not go to what is reported of the people about the cataracts of the
Nile; and what philosophers believe of the music of the spheres, that the
bodies of those circles being solid and smooth, and coming to touch and
rub upon one another, cannot fail of creating a marvellous harmony, the
changes and cadences of which cause the revolutions and dances of the
stars; but that the hearing sense of all creatures here below, being
universally, like that of the Egyptians, deafened, and stupefied with the
continual noise, cannot, how great soever, perceive it--[This passage is
taken from Cicero, “Dream of Scipio”; see his De Republica, vi.  II.  The
Egyptians were said to be stunned by the noise of the Cataracts.]--
Smiths, millers, pewterers, forgemen, and armourers could never be able
to live in the perpetual noise of their own trades, did it strike their
ears with the same violence that it does ours.

My perfumed doublet gratifies my own scent at first; but after I have
worn it three days together, ‘tis only pleasing to the bystanders.  This
is yet more strange, that custom, notwithstanding long intermissions and
intervals, should yet have the power to unite and establish the effect of
its impressions upon our senses, as is manifest in such as live near unto
steeples and the frequent noise of the bells.  I myself lie at home in a
tower, where every morning and evening a very great bell rings out the
Ave Maria: the noise shakes my very tower, and at first seemed
insupportable to me; but I am so used to it, that I hear it without any
manner of offence, and often without awaking at it.

Plato--[Diogenes Laertius, iii. 38.  But he whom Plato censured was not
a boy playing at nuts, but a man throwing dice.]--reprehending a boy for
playing at nuts, “Thou reprovest me,” says the boy, “for a very little
thing.”  “Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing.”  I find that our
greatest vices derive their first propensity from our most tender
infancy, and that our principal education depends upon the nurse.
Mothers are mightily pleased to see a child writhe off the neck of a
chicken, or to please itself with hurting a dog or a cat; and such wise
fathers there are in the world, who look upon it as a notable mark of a
martial spirit, when they hear a son miscall, or see him domineer over a
poor peasant, or a lackey, that dares not reply, nor turn again; and a
great sign of wit, when they see him cheat and overreach his playfellow
by some malicious treachery and deceit.  Yet these are the true seeds and
roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; they bud and put out there, and
afterwards shoot up vigorously, and grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated
by custom.  And it is a very dangerous mistake to excuse these vile
inclinations upon the tenderness of their age, and the triviality of the
subject: first, it is nature that speaks, whose declaration is then more
sincere, and inward thoughts more undisguised, as it is more weak and
young; secondly, the deformity of cozenage does not consist nor depend
upon the difference betwixt crowns and pins; but I rather hold it more
just to conclude thus: why should he not cozen in crowns since he does it
in pins, than as they do, who say they only play for pins, they would not
do it if it were for money?  Children should carefully be instructed to
abhor vices for their own contexture; and the natural deformity of those
vices ought so to be represented to them, that they may not only avoid
them in their actions, but especially so to abominate them in their
hearts, that the very thought should be hateful to them, with what mask
soever they may be disguised.

I know very well, for what concerns myself, that from having been brought
up in my childhood to a plain and straightforward way of dealing, and
from having had an aversion to all manner of juggling and foul play in my
childish sports and recreations (and, indeed, it is to be noted, that the
plays of children are not performed in play, but are to be judged in them
as their most serious actions), there is no game so small wherein from my
own bosom naturally, and without study or endeavour, I have not an
extreme aversion from deceit.  I shuffle and cut and make as much clatter
with the cards, and keep as strict account for farthings, as it were for
double pistoles; when winning or losing against my wife and daughter,
‘tis indifferent to me, as when I play in good earnest with others, for
round sums.  At all times, and in all places, my own eyes are sufficient
to look to my fingers; I am not so narrowly watched by any other, neither
is there any I have more respect to.

I saw the other day, at my own house, a little fellow, a native of
Nantes, born without arms, who has so well taught his feet to perform the
services his hands should have done him, that truly these have half
forgotten their natural office; and, indeed, the fellow calls them his
hands; with them he cuts anything, charges and discharges a pistol,
threads a needle, sews, writes, puts off his hat, combs his head, plays
at cards and dice, and all this with as much dexterity as any other could
do who had more, and more proper limbs to assist him.  The money I gave
him--for he gains his living by shewing these feats--he took in his foot,
as we do in our hand.  I have seen another who, being yet a boy,
flourished a two-handed sword, and, if I may so say, handled a halberd
with the mere motions of his neck and shoulders for want of hands; tossed
them into the air, and caught them again, darted a dagger, and cracked a
whip as well as any coachman in France.

But the effects of custom are much more manifest in the strange
impressions she imprints in our minds, where she meets with less
resistance.  What has she not the power to impose upon our judgments and
beliefs?  Is there any so fantastic opinion (omitting the gross
impostures of religions, with which we see so many great nations, and so
many understanding men, so strangely besotted; for this being beyond the
reach of human reason, any error is more excusable in such as are not
endued, through the divine bounty, with an extraordinary illumination
from above), but, of other opinions, are there any so extravagant, that
she has not planted and established for laws in those parts of the world
upon which she has been pleased to exercise her power?  And therefore
that ancient exclamation was exceeding just:

       “Non pudet physicum, id est speculatorem venatoremque naturae,
        ab animis consuetudine imbutis petere testimonium veritatis?”

     [“Is it not a shame for a natural philosopher, that is, for an
     observer and hunter of nature, to seek testimony of the truth from
     minds prepossessed by custom?”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 30.]

I do believe, that no so absurd or ridiculous fancy can enter into human
imagination, that does not meet with some example of public practice, and
that, consequently, our reason does not ground and back up.  There are
people, amongst whom it is the fashion to turn their backs upon him they
salute, and never look upon the man they intend to honour.  There is a
place, where, whenever the king spits, the greatest ladies of his court
put out their hands to receive it; and another nation, where the most
eminent persons about him stoop to take up his ordure in a linen cloth.
Let us here steal room to insert a story.

A French gentleman was always wont to blow his nose with his fingers (a
thing very much against our fashion), and he justifying himself for so
doing, and he was a man famous for pleasant repartees, he asked me, what
privilege this filthy excrement had, that we must carry about us a fine
handkerchief to receive it, and, which was more, afterwards to lap it
carefully up, and carry it all day about in our pockets, which, he said,
could not but be much more nauseous and offensive, than to see it thrown
away, as we did all other evacuations.  I found that what he said was not
altogether without reason, and by being frequently in his company, that
slovenly action of his was at last grown familiar to me; which
nevertheless we make a face at, when we hear it reported of another
country.  Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature,
and not according to the essence of nature the continually being
accustomed to anything, blinds the eye of our judgment.  Barbarians are
no more a wonder to us, than we are to them; nor with any more reason, as
every one would confess, if after having travelled over those remote
examples, men could settle themselves to reflect upon, and rightly to
confer them, with their own.  Human reason is a tincture almost equally
infused into all our opinions and manners, of what form soever they are;
infinite in matter, infinite in diversity.  But I return to my subject.

There are peoples, where, his wife and children excepted, no one speaks
to the king but through a tube.  In one and the same nation, the virgins
discover those parts that modesty should persuade them to hide, and the
married women carefully cover and conceal them.  To which, this custom,
in another place, has some relation, where chastity, but in marriage, is
of no esteem, for unmarried women may prostitute themselves to as many as
they please, and being got with child, may lawfully take physic, in the
sight of every one, to destroy their fruit.  And, in another place, if a
tradesman marry, all of the same condition, who are invited to the
wedding, lie with the bride before him; and the greater number of them
there is, the greater is her honour, and the opinion of her ability and
strength: if an officer marry, ‘tis the same, the same with a labourer,
or one of mean condition; but then it belongs to the lord of the place to
perform that office; and yet a severe loyalty during marriage is
afterward strictly enjoined.  There are places where brothels of young
men are kept for the pleasure of women; where the wives go to war as well
as the husbands, and not only share in the dangers of battle, but,
moreover, in the honours of command.  Others, where they wear rings not
only through their noses, lips, cheeks, and on their toes, but also
weighty gimmals of gold thrust through their paps and buttocks; where, in
eating, they wipe their fingers upon their thighs, genitories, and the
soles of their feet: where children are excluded, and brothers and
nephews only inherit; and elsewhere, nephews only, saving in the
succession of the prince: where, for the regulation of community in goods
and estates, observed in the country, certain sovereign magistrates have
committed to them the universal charge and overseeing of the agriculture,
and distribution of the fruits, according to the necessity of every one
where they lament the death of children, and feast at the decease of old
men: where they lie ten or twelve in a bed, men and their wives together:
where women, whose husbands come to violent ends, may marry again, and
others not: where the condition of women is looked upon with such
contempt, that they kill all the native females, and buy wives of their
neighbours to supply their use; where husbands may repudiate their wives,
without showing any cause, but wives cannot part from their husbands, for
what cause soever; where husbands may sell their wives in case of
sterility; where they boil the bodies of their dead, and afterward pound
them to a pulp, which they mix with their wine, and drink it; where the
most coveted sepulture is to be eaten by dogs, and elsewhere by birds;
where they believe the souls of the blessed live in all manner of
liberty, in delightful fields, furnished with all sorts of delicacies,
and that it is these souls, repeating the words we utter, which we call
Echo; where they fight in the water, and shoot their arrows with the most
mortal aim, swimming; where, for a sign of subjection, they lift up their
shoulders, and hang down their heads; where they put off their shoes when
they enter the king’s palace; where the eunuchs, who take charge of the
sacred women, have, moreover, their lips and noses cut off, that they may
not be loved; where the priests put out their own eyes, to be better
acquainted with their demons, and the better to receive their oracles;
where every one makes to himself a deity of what he likes best; the
hunter of a lion or a fox, the fisher of some fish; idols of every human
action or passion; in which place, the sun, the moon, and the earth are
the ‘principal deities, and the form of taking an oath is, to touch the
earth, looking up to heaven; where both flesh and fish is eaten raw;
where the greatest oath they take is, to swear by the name of some dead
person of reputation, laying their hand upon his tomb; where the
newyear’s gift the king sends every year to the princes, his vassals, is
fire, which being brought, all the old fire is put out, and the
neighbouring people are bound to fetch of the new, every one for
themselves, upon pain of high treason; where, when the king, to betake
himself wholly to devotion, retires from his administration (which often
falls out), his next successor is obliged to do the same, and the right
of the kingdom devolves to the third in succession: where they vary the
form of government, according to the seeming necessity of affairs: depose
the king when they think good, substituting certain elders to govern in
his stead, and sometimes transferring it into the hands of the
commonality: where men and women are both circumcised and also baptized:
where the soldier, who in one or several engagements, has been so
fortunate as to present seven of the enemies’ heads to the king, is made
noble: where they live in that rare and unsociable opinion of the
mortality of the soul: where the women are delivered without pain or
fear: where the women wear copper leggings upon both legs, and if a louse
bite them, are bound in magnanimity to bite them again, and dare not
marry, till first they have made their king a tender of their virginity,
if he please to accept it: where the ordinary way of salutation is by
putting a finger down to the earth, and then pointing it up toward
heaven: where men carry burdens upon their heads, and women on their
shoulders; where the women make water standing, and the men squatting:
where they send their blood in token of friendship, and offer incense to
the men they would honour, like gods: where, not only to the fourth, but
in any other remote degree, kindred are not permitted to marry: where the
children are four years at nurse, and often twelve; in which place, also,
it is accounted mortal to give the child suck the first day after it is
born: where the correction of the male children is peculiarly designed to
the fathers, and to the mothers of the girls; the punishment being to
hang them by the heels in the smoke: where they circumcise the women:
where they eat all sorts of herbs, without other scruple than of the
badness of the smell: where all things are open the finest houses,
furnished in the richest manner, without doors, windows, trunks, or
chests to lock, a thief being there punished double what they are in
other places: where they crack lice with their teeth like monkeys, and
abhor to see them killed with one’s nails: where in all their lives they
neither cut their hair nor pare their nails; and, in another place, pare
those of the right hand only, letting the left grow for ornament and
bravery: where they suffer the hair on the right side to grow as long as
it will, and shave the other; and in the neighbouring provinces, some let
their hair grow long before, and some behind, shaving close the rest:
where parents let out their children, and husbands their wives, to their
guests to hire: where a man may get his own mother with child, and
fathers make use of their own daughters or sons, without scandal: where,
at their solemn feasts, they interchangeably lend their children to one
another, without any consideration of nearness of blood.  In one place,
men feed upon human flesh; in another, ‘tis reputed a pious office for a
man to kill his father at a certain age; elsewhere, the fathers dispose
of their children, whilst yet in their mothers’ wombs, some to be
preserved and carefully brought up, and others to be abandoned or made
away.  Elsewhere the old husbands lend their wives to young men; and in
another place they are in common without offence; in one place
particularly, the women take it for a mark of honour to have as many gay
fringed tassels at the bottom of their garment, as they have lain with
several men.  Moreover, has not custom made a republic of women
separately by themselves? has it not put arms into their hands, and made
them raise armies and fight battles?  And does she not, by her own
precept, instruct the most ignorant vulgar, and make them perfect in
things which all the philosophy in the world could never beat into the
heads of the wisest men?  For we know entire nations, where death was not
only despised, but entertained with the greatest triumph; where children
of seven years old suffered themselves to be whipped to death, without
changing countenance; where riches were in such contempt, that the
meanest citizen would not have deigned to stoop to take up a purse of
crowns.  And we know regions, very fruitful in all manner of provisions,
where, notwithstanding, the most ordinary diet, and that they are most
pleased with, is only bread, cresses, and water.  Did not custom,
moreover, work that miracle in Chios that, in seven hundred years, it was
never known that ever maid or wife committed any act to the prejudice of
her honour?

To conclude; there is nothing, in my opinion, that she does not, or may
not do; and therefore, with very good reason it is that Pindar calls her
the ruler of the world.  He that was seen to beat his father, and
reproved for so doing, made answer, that it was the custom of their
family; that, in like manner, his father had beaten his grandfather, his
grandfather his great-grandfather, “And this,” says he, pointing to his
son, “when he comes to my age, shall beat me.”  And the father, whom the
son dragged and hauled along the streets, commanded him to stop at a
certain door, for he himself, he said, had dragged his father no farther,
that being the utmost limit of the hereditary outrage the sons used to
practise upon the fathers in their family.  It is as much by custom as
infirmity, says Aristotle, that women tear their hair, bite their nails,
and eat coals and earth, and more by custom than nature that men abuse
themselves with one another.

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature,
proceed from custom; every one, having an inward veneration for the
opinions and manners approved and received amongst his own people,
cannot, without very great reluctance, depart from them, nor apply
himself to them without applause.  In times past, when those of Crete
would curse any one, they prayed the gods to engage him in some ill
custom.  But the principal effect of its power is, so to seize and
ensnare us, that it is hardly in us to disengage ourselves from its
gripe, or so to come to ourselves, as to consider of and to weigh the
things it enjoins.  To say the truth, by reason that we suck it in with
our milk, and that the face of the world presents itself in this posture
to our first sight, it seems as if we were born upon condition to follow
on this track; and the common fancies that we find in repute everywhere
about us, and infused into our minds with the seed of our fathers, appear
to be the most universal and genuine; from whence it comes to pass, that
whatever is off the hinges of custom, is believed to be also off the
hinges of reason; how unreasonably for the most part, God knows.

If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, every one who hears a
good sentence, would immediately consider how it does in any way touch
his own private concern, every one would find, that it was not so much a
good saying, as a severe lash to the ordinary stupidity of his own
judgment: but men receive the precepts and admonitions of truth, as
directed to the common sort, and never to themselves; and instead of
applying them to their own manners, do only very ignorantly and
unprofitably commit them to memory.  But let us return to the empire of
custom.

Such people as have been bred up to liberty, and subject to no other
dominion but the authority of their own will, look upon all other form of
government as monstrous and contrary to nature.  Those who are inured to
monarchy do the same; and what opportunity soever fortune presents them
with to change, even then, when with the greatest difficulties they have
disengaged themselves from one master, that was troublesome and grievous
to them, they presently run, with the same difficulties, to create
another; being unable to take into hatred subjection itself.

‘Tis by the mediation of custom, that every one is content with the place
where he is planted by nature; and the Highlanders of Scotland no more
pant after Touraine; than the Scythians after Thessaly.  Darius asking
certain Greeks what they would take to assume the custom of the Indians,
of eating the dead bodies of their fathers (for that was their use,
believing they could not give them a better nor more noble sepulture than
to bury them in their own bodies), they made answer, that nothing in the
world should hire them to do it; but having also tried to persuade the
Indians to leave their custom, and, after the Greek manner, to burn the
bodies of their fathers, they conceived a still greater horror at the
motion.--[Herodotus, iii. 38.]--Every one does the same, for use veils
from us the true aspect of things.

         “Nil adeo magnum, nec tam mirabile quidquam
          Principio, quod non minuant mirarier omnes Paullatim.”

     [“There is nothing at first so grand, so admirable, which by degrees
     people do not regard with less admiration.”--Lucretius, ii. 1027]

Taking upon me once to justify something in use amongst us, and that was
received with absolute authority for a great many leagues round about us,
and not content, as men commonly do, to establish it only by force of law
and example, but inquiring still further into its origin, I found the
foundation so weak, that I who made it my business to confirm others, was
very near being dissatisfied myself.  ‘Tis by this receipt that Plato
--[Laws, viii.  6.]--undertakes to cure the unnatural and preposterous
loves of his time, as one which he esteems of sovereign virtue, namely,
that the public opinion condemns them; that the poets, and all other
sorts of writers, relate horrible stories of them; a recipe, by virtue of
which the most beautiful daughters no more allure their fathers’ lust;
nor brothers, of the finest shape and fashion, their sisters’ desire; the
very fables of Thyestes, OEdipus, and Macareus, having with the harmony
of their song, infused this wholesome opinion and belief into the tender
brains of children.  Chastity is, in truth, a great and shining virtue,
and of which the utility is sufficiently known; but to treat of it, and
to set it off in its true value, according to nature, is as hard as ‘tis
easy to do so according to custom, laws, and precepts.  The fundamental
and universal reasons are of very obscure and difficult research, and our
masters either lightly pass them over, or not daring so much as to touch
them, precipitate themselves into the liberty and protection of custom,
there puffing themselves out and triumphing to their heart’s content:
such as will not suffer themselves to be withdrawn from this original
source, do yet commit a greater error, and subject themselves to wild
opinions; witness Chrysippus,--[Sextus Empiricus, Pyyrhon.  Hypotyp., i.
14.]--who, in so many of his writings, has strewed the little account he
made of incestuous conjunctions, committed with how near relations
soever.

Whoever would disengage himself from this violent prejudice of custom,
would find several things received with absolute and undoubting opinion,
that have no other support than the hoary head and rivelled face of
ancient usage.  But the mask taken off, and things being referred to the
decision of truth and reason, he will find his judgment as it were
altogether overthrown, and yet restored to a much more sure estate.  For
example, I shall ask him, what can be more strange than to see a people
obliged to obey laws they never understood; bound in all their domestic
affairs, as marriages, donations, wills, sales, and purchases, to rules
they cannot possibly know, being neither written nor published in their
own language, and of which they are of necessity to purchase both the
interpretation and the use?  Not according to the ingenious opinion of
Isocrates,--[Discourse to Nicocles.]--who counselled his king to make
the traffics and negotiations of his subjects, free, frank, and of profit
to them, and their quarrels and disputes burdensome, and laden with heavy
impositions and penalties; but, by a prodigious opinion, to make sale of
reason itself, and to give to laws a course of merchandise.  I think
myself obliged to fortune that, as our historians report, it was a Gascon
gentleman, a countryman of mine, who first opposed Charlemagne, when he
attempted to impose upon us Latin and imperial laws.

What can be more savage, than to see a nation where, by lawful custom,
the office of a judge is bought and sold, where judgments are paid for
with ready money, and where justice may legitimately be denied to him
that has not wherewithal to pay; a merchandise in so great repute, as in
a government to create a fourth estate of wrangling lawyers, to add to
the three ancient ones of the church, nobility, and people; which fourth
estate, having the laws in their own hands, and sovereign power over
men’s lives and fortunes, makes another body separate from nobility:
whence it comes to pass, that there are double laws, those of honour and
those of justice, in many things altogether opposite one to another; the
nobles as rigorously condemning a lie taken, as the other do a lie
revenged: by the law of arms, he shall be degraded from all nobility and
honour who puts up with an affront; and by the civil law, he who
vindicates his reputation by revenge incurs a capital punishment: he who
applies himself to the law for reparation of an offence done to his
honour, disgraces himself; and he who does not, is censured and punished
by the law.  Yet of these two so different things, both of them referring
to one head, the one has the charge of peace, the other of war; those
have the profit, these the honour; those the wisdom, these the virtue;
those the word, these the action; those justice, these valour; those
reason, these force; those the long robe, these the short;--divided
betwixt them.

For what concerns indifferent things, as clothes, who is there seeking to
bring them back to their true use, which is the body’s service and
convenience, and upon which their original grace and fitness depend; for
the most fantastic, in my opinion, that can be imagined, I will instance
amongst others, our flat caps, that long tail of velvet that hangs down
from our women’s heads, with its party-coloured trappings; and that vain
and futile model of a member we cannot in modesty so much as name, which,
nevertheless, we make show and parade of in public.  These
considerations, notwithstanding, will not prevail upon any understanding
man to decline the common mode; but, on the contrary, methinks, all
singular and particular fashions are rather marks of folly and vain
affectation than of sound reason, and that a wise man, within, ought to
withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd, and there keep it at liberty
and in power to judge freely of things; but as to externals, absolutely
to follow and conform himself to the fashion of the time.  Public society
has nothing to do with our thoughts, but the rest, as our actions, our
labours, our fortunes, and our lives, we are to lend and abandon them to
its service and to the common opinion, as did that good and great
Socrates who refused to preserve his life by a disobedience to the
magistrate, though a very wicked and unjust one for it is the rule of
rules, the general law of laws, that every one observe those of the place
wherein he lives.

          [“It is good to obey the laws of one’s country.”
           --Excerpta ex Trag. Gyaecis, Grotio interp., 1626, p. 937.]

And now to another point.  It is a very great doubt, whether any so
manifest benefit can accrue from the alteration of a law received, let it
be what it will, as there is danger and inconvenience in altering it;
forasmuch as government is a structure composed of divers parts and
members joined and united together, with so strict connection, that it is
impossible to stir so much as one brick or stone, but the whole body will
be sensible of it.  The legislator of the Thurians--[Charondas; Diod.
Sic., xii.  24.]--ordained, that whosoever would go about either to
abolish an old law, or to establish a new, should present himself with a
halter about his neck to the people, to the end, that if the innovation
he would introduce should not be approved by every one, he might
immediately be hanged; and he of the Lacedaemonians employed his life to
obtain from his citizens a faithful promise that none of his laws should
be violated.--[Lycurgus; Plutarch, in Vita, c.  22.]--The Ephoros who so
rudely cut the two strings that Phrynis had added to music never stood to
examine whether that addition made better harmony, or that by its means
the instrument was more full and complete; it was enough for him to
condemn the invention, that it was a novelty, and an alteration of the
old fashion.  Which also is the meaning of the old rusty sword carried
before the magistracy of Marseilles.

For my own part, I have a great aversion from a novelty, what face or
what pretence soever it may carry along with it, and have reason, having
been an eyewitness of the great evils it has produced.  For those which
for so many years have lain so heavy upon us, it is not wholly
accountable; but one may say, with colour enough, that it has
accidentally produced and begotten the mischiefs and ruin that have since
happened, both without and against it; it, principally, we are to accuse
for these disorders:

               “Heu! patior telis vulnera facta meis.”

          [“Alas!  The wounds were made by my own weapons.”
           --Ovid, Ep. Phyll. Demophoonti, vers. 48.]

They who give the first shock to a state, are almost naturally the first
overwhelmed in its ruin the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed
by him who was the first motor; he beats and disturbs the water for
another’s net.  The unity and contexture of this monarchy, of this grand
edifice, having been ripped and torn in her old age, by this thing called
innovation, has since laid open a rent, and given sufficient admittance
to such injuries: the royal majesty with greater difficulty declines from
the summit to the middle, then it falls and tumbles headlong from the
middle to the bottom.  But if the inventors do the greater mischief, the
imitators are more vicious to follow examples of which they have felt and
punished both the horror and the offence.  And if there can be any degree
of honour in ill-doing, these last must yield to the others the glory of
contriving, and the courage of making the first attempt.  All sorts of
new disorders easily draw, from this primitive and ever-flowing fountain,
examples and precedents to trouble and discompose our government: we read
in our very laws, made for the remedy of this first evil, the beginning
and pretences of all sorts of wicked enterprises; and that befalls us,
which Thucydides said of the civil wars of his time, that, in favour of
public vices, they gave them new and more plausible names for their
excuse, sweetening and disguising their true titles; which must be done,
forsooth, to reform our conscience and belief:

                    “Honesta oratio est;”

          [“Fine words truly.”--Ter.  And., i. I, 114.]

but the best pretence for innovation is of very dangerous consequence:

          “Aden nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est.”

     [“We are ever wrong in changing ancient ways.”--Livy, xxxiv. 54]

And freely to speak my thoughts, it argues a strange self-love and great
presumption to be so fond of one’s own opinions, that a public peace must
be overthrown to establish them, and to introduce so many inevitable
mischiefs, and so dreadful a corruption of manners, as a civil war and
the mutations of state consequent to it, always bring in their train, and
to introduce them, in a thing of so high concern, into the bowels of
one’s own country.  Can there be worse husbandry than to set up so many
certain and knowing vices against errors that are only contested and
disputable?  And are there any worse sorts of vices than those committed
against a man’s own conscience, and the natural light of his own reason?
The Senate, upon the dispute betwixt it and the people about the
administration of their religion, was bold enough to return this evasion
for current pay:

          “Ad deos id magis, quam ad se, pertinere: ipsos visuros,
          ne sacra sua polluantur;”

     [“Those things belong to the gods to determine than to them; let the
     gods, therefore, take care that their sacred mysteries were not
     profaned.”--Livy, x. 6.]

according to what the oracle answered to those of Delphos who, fearing to
be invaded by the Persians in the Median war, inquired of Apollo, how
they should dispose of the holy treasure of his temple; whether they
should hide, or remove it to some other place?  He returned them answer,
that they should stir nothing from thence, and only take care of
themselves, for he was sufficient to look to what belonged to him.
--[Herodotus, viii. 36.].--

The Christian religion has all the marks of the utmost utility and
justice: but none more manifest than the severe injunction it lays
indifferently upon all to yield absolute obedience to the civil
magistrate, and to maintain and defend the laws.  Of which, what a
wonderful example has the divine wisdom left us, that, to establish the
salvation of mankind, and to conduct His glorious victory over death and
sin, would do it after no other way, but at the mercy of our ordinary
forms of justice subjecting the progress and issue of so high and so
salutiferous an effect, to the blindness and injustice of our customs
and observances; sacrificing the innocent blood of so many of His elect,
and so long a loss of so many years, to the maturing of this inestimable
fruit?  There is a vast difference betwixt the case of one who follows
the forms and laws of his country, and of another who will undertake to
regulate and change them; of whom the first pleads simplicity, obedience,
and example for his excuse, who, whatever he shall do, it cannot be
imputed to malice; ‘tis at the worst but misfortune:

          “Quis est enim, quem non moveat clarissimis monumentis
          testata consignataque antiquitas?”

     [“For who is there that antiquity, attested and confirmed by the
     fairest monuments, cannot move?”--Cicero, De Divin., i. 40.]

besides what Isocrates says, that defect is nearer allied to moderation
than excess: the other is a much more ruffling gamester; for whosoever
shall take upon him to choose and alter, usurps the authority of judging,
and should look well about him, and make it his business to discern
clearly the defect of what he would abolish, and the virtue of what he is
about to introduce.

This so vulgar consideration is that which settled me in my station, and
kept even my most extravagant and ungoverned youth under the rein, so as
not to burden my shoulders with so great a weight, as to render myself
responsible for a science of that importance, and in this to dare, what
in my better and more mature judgment, I durst not do in the most easy
and indifferent things I had been instructed in, and wherein the temerity
of judging is of no consequence at all; it seeming to me very unjust to
go about to subject public and established customs and institutions, to
the weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy (for
private reason has but a private jurisdiction), and to attempt that upon
the divine, which no government will endure a man should do, upon the
civil laws; with which, though human reason has much more commerce than
with the other, yet are they sovereignly judged by their own proper
judges, and the extreme sufficiency serves only to expound and set forth
the law and custom received, and neither to wrest it, nor to introduce
anything, of innovation.  If, sometimes, the divine providence has gone
beyond the rules to which it has necessarily bound and obliged us men,
it is not to give us any dispensation to do the same; those are
masterstrokes of the divine hand, which we are not to imitate, but to
admire, and extraordinary examples, marks of express and particular
purposes, of the nature of miracles, presented before us for
manifestations of its almightiness, equally above both our rules and
force, which it would be folly and impiety to attempt to represent and
imitate; and that we ought not to follow, but to contemplate with the
greatest reverence: acts of His personage, and not for us.  Cotta very
opportunely declares:

     “Quum de religione agitur, Ti. Coruncanium, P. Scipionem,
     P. Scaevolam, pontifices maximos, non Zenonem, aut Cleanthem,
     aut Chrysippum, sequor.”

     [“When matter of religion is in question, I follow the high priests
     T. Coruncanius, P. Scipio, P. Scaevola, and not Zeno, Cleanthes, or
     Chrysippus.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii. 2.]

God knows, in the present quarrel of our civil war, where there are a
hundred articles to dash out and to put in, great and very considerable,
how many there are who can truly boast, they have exactly and perfectly
weighed and understood the grounds and reasons of the one and the other
party; ‘tis a number, if they make any number, that would be able to give
us very little disturbance.  But what becomes of all the rest, under what
ensigns do they march, in what quarter do they lie?  Theirs have the same
effect with other weak and ill-applied medicines; they have only set the
humours they would purge more violently in work, stirred and exasperated
by the conflict, and left them still behind.  The potion was too weak to
purge, but strong enough to weaken us; so that it does not work, but we
keep it still in our bodies, and reap nothing from the operation but
intestine gripes and dolours.

So it is, nevertheless, that Fortune still reserving her authority in
defiance of whatever we are able to do or say, sometimes presents us with
a necessity so urgent, that ‘tis requisite the laws should a little yield
and give way; and when one opposes the increase of an innovation that
thus intrudes itself by violence, to keep a man’s self in so doing, in
all places and in all things within bounds and rules against those who
have the power, and to whom all things are lawful that may in any way
serve to advance their design, who have no other law nor rule but what
serves best to their own purpose, ‘tis a dangerous obligation and an
intolerable inequality:

               “Aditum nocendi perfido praestat fides,”

          [“Putting faith in a treacherous person, opens the door to
          harm.”--Seneca, OEdip., act iii., verse 686.]

forasmuch as the ordinary discipline of a healthful state does not
provide against these extraordinary accidents; it presupposes a body that
supports itself in its principal members and offices, and a common
consent to its obedience and observation.  A legitimate proceeding is
cold, heavy, and constrained, and not fit to make head against a
headstrong and unbridled proceeding.  ‘Tis known to be to this day cast
in the dish of those two great men, Octavius and Cato, in the two civil
wars of Sylla and Caesar, that they would rather suffer their country to
undergo the last extremities, than relieve their fellow-citizens at the
expense of its laws, or be guilty of any innovation; for in truth, in
these last necessities, where there is no other remedy, it would,
peradventure, be more discreetly done, to stoop and yield a little to
receive the blow, than, by opposing without possibility of doing good,
to give occasion to violence to trample all under foot; and better to
make the laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would.
After this manner did he--[Agesilaus.]--who suspended them for
four-and-twenty hours, and he who, for once shifted a day in the
calendar, and that other--[Alexander the Great.]--who of the month of
June made a second of May.  The Lacedaemonians themselves, who were so
religious observers of the laws of their country, being straitened by
one of their own edicts, by which it was expressly forbidden to choose
the same man twice to be admiral; and on the other side, their affairs
necessarily requiring, that Lysander should again take upon him that
command, they made one Aratus admiral; ‘tis true, but withal, Lysander
went general of the navy; and, by the same subtlety, one of their
ambassadors being sent to the Athenians to obtain the revocation of some
decree, and Pericles remonstrating to him, that it was forbidden to take
away the tablet wherein a law had once been engrossed, he advised him to
turn it only, that being not forbidden; and Plutarch commends
Philopoemen, that being born to command, he knew how to do it, not only
according to the laws, but also to overrule even the laws themselves,
when the public necessity so required.




CHAPTER XXIII

VARIOUS EVENTS FROM THE SAME COUNSEL

Jacques Amiot, grand almoner of France, one day related to me this story,
much to the honour of a prince of ours (and ours he was upon several very
good accounts, though originally of foreign extraction),--[The Duc de
Guise, surnamed Le Balafre.]--that in the time of our first commotions,
at the siege of Rouen,--[In 1562]--this prince, having been advertised
by the queen-mother of a conspiracy against his life, and in her letters
particular notice being given him of the person who was to execute the
business (who was a gentleman of Anjou or of Maine, and who to this
effect ordinarily frequented this prince’s house), discovered not a
syllable of this intelligence to any one whatever; but going the next day
to the St. Catherine’s Mount,--[An eminence outside Rouen overlooking the
Seine.  D.W.]--from which our battery played against the town (for it
was during the time of the siege), and having in company with him the
said lord almoner, and another bishop, he saw this gentleman, who had
been denoted to him, and presently sent for him; to whom, being come
before him, seeing him already pale and trembling with the conscience of
his guilt, he thus said, “Monsieur,” such an one, “you guess what I have
to say to you; your countenance discovers it; ‘tis in vain to disguise
your practice, for I am so well informed of your business, that it will
but make worse for you, to go about to conceal or deny it: you know very
well such and such passages” (which were the most secret circumstances of
his conspiracy), “and therefore be sure, as you tender your own life,
to confess to me the whole truth of the design.”  The poor man seeing
himself thus trapped and convicted (for the whole business had been
discovered to the queen by one of the accomplices), was in such a taking,
he knew not what to do; but, folding his hands, to beg and sue for mercy,
he threw himself at his prince’s feet, who taking him up, proceeded to
say, “Come, sir; tell me, have I at any time done you offence?  or have
I, through private hatred or malice, offended any kinsman or friend of
yours?  It is not above three weeks that I have known you; what
inducement, then, could move you to attempt my death?”  To which the
gentleman with a trembling voice replied, “That it was no particular
grudge he had to his person, but the general interest and concern of his
party, and that he had been put upon it by some who had persuaded him it
would be a meritorious act, by any means, to extirpate so great and so
powerful an enemy of their religion.”  “Well,” said the prince, “I will
now let you see, how much more charitable the religion is that I
maintain, than that which you profess: yours has counselled you to kill
me, without hearing me speak, and without ever having given you any cause
of offence; and mine commands me to forgive you, convict as you are, by
your own confession, of a design to kill me without reason.--[Imitated by
Voltaire.  See Nodier, Questions, p. 165.]--Get you gone; let me see you
no more; and, if you are wise, choose henceforward honester men for your
counsellors in your designs.”--[Dampmartin, La Fortune de la Coup, liv.
ii., p. 139]

The Emperor Augustus,--[This story is taken from Seneca, De Clementia,
i.  9.]--being in Gaul, had certain information of a conspiracy L. Cinna
was contriving against him; he therefore resolved to make him an example;
and, to that end, sent to summon his friends to meet the next morning in
counsel.  But the night between he passed in great unquietness of mind,
considering that he was about to put to death a young man, of an
illustrious family, and nephew to the great Pompey, and this made him
break out into several passionate complainings.  “What then,” said he,
“is it possible that I am to live in perpetual anxiety and alarm, and
suffer my would-be assassin, meantime, to walk abroad at liberty?  Shall
he go unpunished, after having conspired against my life, a life that I
have hitherto defended in so many civil wars, in so many battles by land
and by sea?  And after having settled the universal peace of the whole
world, shall this man be pardoned, who has conspired not only to murder,
but to sacrifice me?”--for the conspiracy was to kill him at sacrifice.
After which, remaining for some time silent, he began again, in louder
tones, and exclaimed against himself, saying:  “Why livest thou, if it be
for the good of so many that thou shouldst die? must there be no end of
thy revenges and cruelties?  Is thy life of so great value, that so many
mischiefs must be done to preserve it?”  His wife Livia, seeing him in
this perplexity: “Will you take a woman’s counsel?”  said she.  “Do as
the physicians do, who, when the ordinary recipes will do no good, make
trial of the contrary.  By severity you have hitherto prevailed nothing;
Lepidus has followed Salvidienus; Murena, Lepidus; Caepio, Murena;
Egnatius, Caepio.  Begin now, and try how sweetness and clemency will
succeed.  Cinna is convict; forgive him, he will never henceforth have
the heart to hurt thee, and it will be an act to thy glory.”  Augustus
was well pleased that he had met with an advocate of his own humour;
wherefore, having thanked his wife, and, in the morning, countermanded
his friends he had before summoned to council, he commanded Cinna all
alone to be brought to him; who being accordingly come, and a chair by
his appointment set him, having ordered all the rest out of the room, he
spake to him after this manner: “In the first place, Cinna, I demand of
thee patient audience; do not interrupt me in what I am about to say, and
I will afterwards give thee time and leisure to answer.  Thou knowest,
Cinna,--[This passage, borrowed from Seneca, has been paraphrased in
verse by Corneille.  See Nodier, Questions de la Literature llgale, 1828,
pp. 7, 160.  The monologue of Augustus in this chapter is also from
Seneca.  Ibid., 164.]--that having taken thee prisoner in the enemy’s
camp, and thou an enemy, not only so become, but born so, I gave thee thy
life, restored to thee all thy goods, and, finally, put thee in so good a
posture, by my bounty, of living well and at thy ease, that the
victorious envied the conquered. The sacerdotal office which thou madest
suit to me for, I conferred upon thee, after having denied it to others,
whose fathers have ever borne arms in my service.  After so many
obligations, thou hast undertaken to kill me.”  At which Cinna crying out
that he was very far from entertaining any so wicked a thought: “Thou
dost not keep thy promise, Cinna,” continued Augustus, “that thou wouldst
not interrupt me.  Yes, thou hast undertaken to murder me in such a
place, on such a day, in such and such company, and in such a manner.”
 At which words, seeing Cinna astounded and silent, not upon the account
of his promise so to be, but interdict with the weight of his conscience:
“Why,” proceeded Augustus, “to what end wouldst thou do it?  Is it to be
emperor?  Believe me, the Republic is in very ill condition, if I am the
only man betwixt thee and the empire.  Thou art not able so much as to
defend thy own house, and but t’other day was baffled in a suit, by the
opposed interest of a mere manumitted slave.  What, hast thou neither
means nor power in any other thing, but only to undertake Caesar?  I quit
the throne, if there be no other than I to obstruct thy hopes.  Canst
thou believe that Paulus, that Fabius, that the Cossii and the Servilii,
and so many noble Romans, not only so in title, but who by their virtue
honour their nobility, would suffer or endure thee?”  After this, and a
great deal more that he said to him (for he was two long hours in
speaking), “Now go, Cinna, go thy way: I give thee that life as traitor
and parricide, which I before gave thee in the quality of an enemy.  Let
friendship from this time forward begin betwixt us, and let us show
whether I have given, or thou hast received thy life with the better
faith”; and so departed from him.  Some time after, he preferred him to
the consular dignity, complaining that he had not the confidence to
demand it; had him ever after for his very great friend, and was, at
last, made by him sole heir to all his estate.  Now, from the time of
this accident which befell Augustus in the fortieth year of his age, he
never had any conspiracy or attempt against him, and so reaped the due
reward of this his so generous clemency.  But it did not so happen with
our prince, his moderation and mercy not so securing him, but that he
afterwards fell into the toils of the like treason,--[The Duc de Guise
was assassinated in 1563 by Poltrot.]--so vain and futile a thing is
human prudence; throughout all our projects, counsels and precautions,
Fortune will still be mistress of events.

We repute physicians fortunate when they hit upon a lucky cure, as if
there was no other art but theirs that could not stand upon its own legs,
and whose foundations are too weak to support itself upon its own basis;
as if no other art stood in need of Fortune’s hand to help it.  For my
part, I think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have me:
for, thanks be to God, we have no traffic together.  I am of a quite
contrary humour to other men, for I always despise it; but when I am
sick, instead of recanting, or entering into composition with it, I
begin, moreover, to hate and fear it, telling them who importune me to
take physic, that at all events they must give me time to recover my
strength and health, that I may be the better able to support and
encounter the violence and danger of their potions.  I let nature work,
supposing her to be sufficiently armed with teeth and claws to defend
herself from the assaults of infirmity, and to uphold that contexture,
the dissolution of which she flies and abhors.  I am afraid, lest,
instead of assisting her when close grappled and struggling with disease,
I should assist her adversary, and burden her still more with work to do.

Now, I say, that not in physic only, but in other more certain arts,
fortune has a very great part.

The poetic raptures, the flights of fancy, that ravish and transport the
author out of himself, why should we not attribute them to his good
fortune, since he himself confesses that they exceed his sufficiency and
force, and acknowledges them to proceed from something else than himself,
and that he has them no more in his power than the orators say they have
those extraordinary motions and agitations that sometimes push them
beyond their design.  It is the same in painting, where touches shall
sometimes slip from the hand of the painter, so surpassing both his
conception and his art, as to beget his own admiration and astonishment.
But Fortune does yet more evidently manifest the share she has in all
things of this kind, by the graces and elegances we find in them, not
only beyond the intention, but even without the knowledge of the workman:
a competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other
perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a
richer sense and more quaint expression.

As to military enterprises, every one sees how great a hand Fortune has
in them.  Even in our counsels and deliberations there must, certainly,
be something of chance and good-luck mixed with human prudence; for all
that our wisdom can do alone is no great matter; the more piercing,
quick, and apprehensive it is, the weaker it finds itself, and is by so
much more apt to mistrust itself.  I am of Sylla’s opinion;--[“Who freed
his great deeds from envy by ever attributing them to his good fortune,
and finally by surnaming himself Faustus, the Lucky.”--Plutarch, How far a
Man may praise Himself, c. 9.]--and when I closely examine the most
glorious exploits of war, I perceive, methinks, that those who carry them
on make use of counsel and debate only for custom’s sake, and leave the
best part of the enterprise to Fortune, and relying upon her aid,
transgress, at every turn, the bounds of military conduct and the rules
of war.  There happen, sometimes, fortuitous alacrities and strange
furies in their deliberations, that for the most part prompt them to
follow the worst grounded counsels, and swell their courage beyond the
limits of reason.  Whence it happened that several of the great captains
of old, to justify those rash resolutions, have been fain to tell their
soldiers that they were invited to such attempts by some inspiration,
some sign and prognostic.

Wherefore, in this doubt and uncertainty, that the shortsightedness of
human wisdom to see and choose the best (by reason of the difficulties
that the various accidents and circumstances of things bring along with
them) perplexes us withal, the surest way, in my opinion, did no other
consideration invite us to it, is to pitch upon that wherein is the
greatest appearance of honesty and justice; and not, being certain of the
shortest, to keep the straightest and most direct way; as in the two
examples I have just given, there is no question but it was more noble
and generous in him who had received the offence, to pardon it, than to
do otherwise.  If the former--[The Duc de Guise.]--miscarried in it, he
is not, nevertheless, to be blamed for his good intention; neither does
any one know if he had proceeded otherwise, whether by that means he had
avoided the end his destiny had appointed for him; and he had, moreover,
lost the glory of so humane an act.

You will read in history, of many who have been in such apprehension,
that the most part have taken the course to meet and anticipate
conspiracies against them by punishment and revenge; but I find very few
who have reaped any advantage by this proceeding; witness so many Roman
emperors.  Whoever finds himself in this danger, ought not to expect much
either from his vigilance or power; for how hard a thing is it for a man
to secure himself from an enemy, who lies concealed under the countenance
of the most assiduous friend we have, and to discover and know the wills
and inward thoughts of those who are in our personal service.  ‘Tis to
much purpose to have a guard of foreigners about one, and to be always
fenced about with a pale of armed men; whosoever despises his own life,
is always master of that of another man.--[Seneca, Ep., 4.]--And
moreover, this continual suspicion, that makes a prince jealous of all
the world, must of necessity be a strange torment to him.  Therefore it
was, that Dion, being advertised that Callippus watched all opportunities
to take away his life, had never the heart to inquire more particularly
into it, saying, that he had rather die than live in that misery, that he
must continually stand upon his guard, not only against his enemies, but
his friends also;--[Plutarch, Apothegms.]--which Alexander much more
vividly and more roundly manifested in effect, when, having notice by a
letter from Parmenio, that Philip, his most beloved physician, was by
Darius’ money corrupted to poison him, at the same time he gave the
letter to Philip to read, drank off the potion he had brought him.  Was
not this to express a resolution, that if his friends had a mind to
despatch him out of the world, he was willing to give them opportunity to
do it?  This prince is, indeed, the sovereign pattern of hazardous
actions; but I do not know whether there be another passage in his life
wherein there is so much firm courage as in this, nor so illustrious an
image of the beauty and greatness of his mind.

Those who preach to princes so circumspect and vigilant a jealousy and
distrust, under colour of security, preach to them ruin and dishonour:
nothing noble can be performed without danger.  I know a person,
naturally of a very great daring and enterprising courage, whose good
fortune is continually marred by such persuasions, that he keep himself
close surrounded by his friends, that he must not hearken to any
reconciliation with his ancient enemies, that he must stand aloof, and
not trust his person in hands stronger than his own, what promises or
offers soever they may make him, or what advantages soever he may see
before him.  And I know another, who has unexpectedly advanced his
fortunes by following a clear contrary advice.

Courage, the reputation and glory of which men seek with so greedy an
appetite, presents itself, when need requires, as magnificently in
cuerpo, as in full armour; in a closet, as in a camp; with arms pendant,
as with arms raised.

This over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy to all high and
generous exploits.  Scipio, to sound Syphax’s intention, leaving his
army, abandoning Spain, not yet secure nor well settled in his new
conquest, could pass over into Africa in two small ships, to commit
himself, in an enemy’s country, to the power of a barbarian king, to a
faith untried and unknown, without obligation, without hostage, under the
sole security of the grandeur of his own courage, his good fortune, and
the promise of his high hopes.--[ Livy, xxviii. 17.]

          “Habita fides ipsam plerumque fidem obligat.”

          [“Trust often obliges fidelity.”--Livy, xxii. 22.]

In a life of ambition and glory, it is necessary to hold a stiff rein
upon suspicion: fear and distrust invite and draw on offence.  The most
mistrustful of our kings--[ Louis XI.]--established his affairs
principally by voluntarily committing his life and liberty into his
enemies’ hands, by that action manifesting that he had absolute
confidence in them, to the end they might repose as great an assurance in
him.  Caesar only opposed the authority of his countenance and the
haughty sharpness of his rebukes to his mutinous legions in arms against
him:

                              “Stetit aggere fulti
               Cespitis, intrepidus vultu: meruitque timeri,
               Nil metuens.”

     [“He stood on a mound, his countenance intrepid, and merited to be
     feared, he fearing nothing.”--Lucan, v. 316.]

But it is true, withal, that this undaunted assurance is not to be
represented in its simple and entire form, but by such whom the
apprehension of death, and the worst that can happen, does not terrify
and affright; for to represent a pretended resolution with a pale and
doubtful countenance and trembling limbs, for the service of an important
reconciliation, will effect nothing to purpose.  ‘Tis an excellent way to
gain the heart and will of another, to submit and intrust one’s self to
him, provided it appear to be freely done, and without the constraint of
necessity, and in such a condition, that a man manifestly does it out of
a pure and entire confidence in the party, at least, with a countenance
clear from any cloud of suspicion.  I saw, when I was a boy, a gentleman,
who was governor of a great city, upon occasion of a popular commotion
and fury, not knowing what other course to take, go out of a place of
very great strength and security, and commit himself to the mercy of the
seditious rabble, in hopes by that means to appease the tumult before it
grew to a more formidable head; but it was ill for him that he did so,
for he was there miserably slain.  But I am not, nevertheless, of
opinion, that he committed so great an error in going out, as men
commonly reproach his memory withal, as he did in choosing a gentle and
submissive way for the effecting his purpose, and in endeavouring to
quiet this storm, rather by obeying than commanding, and by entreaty
rather than remonstrance; and I am inclined to believe, that a gracious
severity, with a soldierlike way of commanding, full of security and
confidence, suitable to the quality of his person, and the dignity of his
command, would have succeeded better with him; at least, he had perished
with greater decency and, reputation.  There is nothing so little to be
expected or hoped for from this many-headed monster, in its fury, as
humanity and good nature; it is much more capable of reverence and fear.
I should also reproach him, that having taken a resolution (in my
judgment rather brave than rash) to expose himself, weak and naked, in
this tempestuous sea of enraged madmen, he ought to have stuck to his
text, and not for an instant to have abandoned the high part he had
undertaken; whereas, coming to discover his danger nearer hand, and his
nose happening to bleed, he again changed that demiss and fawning
countenance he had at first put on, into another of fear and amazement,
filling his voice with entreaties and his eyes with tears, and,
endeavouring so to withdraw and secure his person, that carriage more
inflamed their fury, and soon brought the effects of it upon him.

It was upon a time intended that there should be a general muster of
several troops in arms (and that is the most proper occasion of secret
revenges, and there is no place where they can be executed with greater
safety), and there were public and manifest appearances, that there was
no safe coming for some, whose principal and necessary office it was to
review them.  Whereupon a consultation was held, and several counsels
were proposed, as in a case that was very nice and of great difficulty;
and moreover of grave consequence.  Mine, amongst the rest, was, that
they should by all means avoid giving any sign of suspicion, but that the
officers who were most in danger should boldly go, and with cheerful and
erect countenances ride boldly and confidently through the ranks, and
that instead of sparing fire (which the counsels of the major part tended
to) they should entreat the captains to command the soldiers to give
round and full volleys in honour of the spectators, and not to spare
their powder.  This was accordingly done, and served so good use, as to
please and gratify the suspected troops, and thenceforward to beget a
mutual and wholesome confidence and intelligence amongst them.

I look upon Julius Caesar’s way of winning men to him as the best and
finest that can be put in practice.  First, he tried by clemency to make
himself beloved even by his very enemies, contenting himself, in detected
conspiracies, only publicly to declare, that he was pre-acquainted with
them; which being done, he took a noble resolution to await without
solicitude or fear, whatever might be the event, wholly resigning himself
to the protection of the gods and fortune: for, questionless, in this
state he was at the time when he was killed.

A stranger having publicly said, that he could teach Dionysius, the
tyrant of Syracuse, an infallible way to find out and discover all the
conspiracies his subjects could contrive against him, if he would give
him a good sum of money for his pains, Dionysius hearing of it, caused
the man to be brought to him, that he might learn an art so necessary to
his preservation.  The man made answer, that all the art he knew, was,
that he should give him a talent, and afterwards boast that he had
obtained a singular secret from him.  Dionysius liked the invention, and
accordingly caused six hundred crowns to be counted out to him.
--[Plutarch, Apothegms.]--It was not likely he should give so great a
sum to a person unknown, but upon the account of some extraordinary
discovery, and the belief of this served to keep his enemies in awe.
Princes, however, do wisely to publish the informations they receive of
all the practices against their lives, to possess men with an opinion
they have so good intelligence that nothing can be plotted against them,
but they have present notice of it.  The Duke of Athens did a great many
foolish things in the establishment of his new tyranny over Florence:
but this especially was most notable, that having received the first
intimation of the conspiracies the people were hatching against him, from
Matteo di Morozzo, one of the conspirators, he presently put him to
death, to suppress that rumour, that it might not be thought any of the
city disliked his government.

I remember I have formerly read a story--[In Appian’s Civil Wars, book
iv..]--of some Roman of great quality who, flying the tyranny of the
Triumvirate, had a thousand times by the subtlety of as many inventions
escaped from falling into the hands of those that pursued him.  It
happened one day that a troop of horse, which was sent out to take him,
passed close by a brake where he was squat, and missed very narrowly of
spying him: but he considering, at this point, the pains and difficulties
wherein he had so long continued to evade the strict and incessant
searches that were every day made for him, the little pleasure he could
hope for in such a kind of life, and how much better it was for him to
die once for all, than to be perpetually at this pass, he started from
his seat, called them back, showed them his form,--[as of a squatting
hare.]--and voluntarily delivered himself up to their cruelty, by that
means to free both himself and them from further trouble.  To invite a
man’s enemies to come and cut his throat, seems a resolution a little
extravagant and odd; and yet I think he did better to take that course,
than to live in continual feverish fear of an accident for which there
was no cure.  But seeing all the remedies a man can apply to such a
disease, are full of unquietness and uncertainty, ‘tis better with a
manly courage to prepare one’s self for the worst that can happen, and to
extract some consolation from this, that we are not certain the thing we
fear will ever come to pass.




CHAPTER XXIV

OF PEDANTRY

I was often, when a boy, wonderfully concerned to see, in the Italian
farces, a pedant always brought in for the fool of the play, and that the
title of Magister was in no greater reverence amongst us: for being
delivered up to their tuition, what could I do less than be jealous of
their honour and reputation?  I sought indeed to excuse them by the
natural incompatibility betwixt the vulgar sort and men of a finer
thread, both in judgment and knowledge, forasmuch as they go a quite
contrary way to one another: but in this, the thing I most stumbled at
was, that the finest gentlemen were those who most despised them; witness
our famous poet Du Bellay--

          “Mais je hay par sur tout un scavoir pedantesque.”

          [“Of all things I hate pedantic learning.”--Du Bellay]

And ‘twas so in former times; for Plutarch says that Greek and Scholar
were terms of reproach and contempt amongst the Romans.  But since, with
the better experience of age, I find they had very great reason so to do,
and that--

          “Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes.”

     [“The greatest clerks are not the wisest men.”  A proverb given in
     Rabelais’ Gargantua, i. 39.]

But whence it should come to pass, that a mind enriched with the
knowledge of so many things should not become more quick and sprightly,
and that a gross and vulgar understanding should lodge within it, without
correcting and improving itself, all the discourses and judgments of the
greatest minds the world ever had, I am yet to seek.  To admit so many
foreign conceptions, so great, and so high fancies, it is necessary (as a
young lady, one of the greatest princesses of the kingdom, said to me
once, speaking of a certain person) that a man’s own brain must be
crowded and squeezed together into a less compass, to make room for the
others; I should be apt to conclude, that as plants are suffocated and
drowned with too much nourishment, and lamps with too much oil, so with
too much study and matter is the active part of the understanding which,
being embarrassed, and confounded with a great diversity of things, loses
the force and power to disengage itself, and by the pressure of this
weight, is bowed, subjected, and doubled up.  But it is quite otherwise;
for our soul stretches and dilates itself proportionably as it fills; and
in the examples of elder times, we see, quite contrary, men very proper
for public business, great captains, and great statesmen very learned
withal.

And, as to the philosophers, a sort of men remote from all public
affairs, they have been sometimes also despised by the comic liberty of
their times; their opinions and manners making them appear, to men of
another sort, ridiculous.  Would you make them judges of a lawsuit, of
the actions of men? they are ready to take it upon them, and straight
begin to examine if there be life, if there be motion, if man be any
other than an ox;--[“If Montaigne has copied all this from Plato’s
Theatetes, p.127, F.  as it is plain by all which he has added
immediately after, that he has taken it from that dialogue, he has
grossly mistaken Plato’s sentiment, who says here no more than this, that
the philosopher is so ignorant of what his neighbour does, that he scarce
knows whether he is a man, or some other animal:--Coste.”]--what it is to
do and to suffer?  what animals law and justice are?  Do they speak of
the magistrates, or to him, ‘tis with a rude, irreverent, and indecent
liberty.  Do they hear their prince, or a king commended?  they make no
more of him, than of a shepherd, goatherd, or neatherd: a lazy Coridon,
occupied in milking and shearing his herds and flocks, but more rudely
and harshly than the herd or shepherd himself.  Do you repute any man the
greater for being lord of two thousand acres of land? they laugh at such
a pitiful pittance, as laying claim themselves to the whole world for
their possession.  Do you boast of your nobility, as being descended from
seven rich successive ancestors? they look upon you with an eye of
contempt, as men who have not a right idea of the universal image of
nature, and that do not consider how many predecessors every one of us
has had, rich, poor, kings, slaves, Greeks, and barbarians; and though
you were the fiftieth descendant from Hercules, they look upon it as a
great vanity, so highly to value this, which is only a gift of fortune.
And ‘twas so the vulgar sort contemned them, as men ignorant of the most
elementary and ordinary things; as presumptuous and insolent.

But this Platonic picture is far different from that these pedants are
presented by.  Those were envied for raising themselves above the common
sort, for despising the ordinary actions and offices of life, for having
assumed a particular and inimitable way of living, and for using a
certain method of high-flight and obsolete language, quite different from
the ordinary way of speaking: but these are contemned as being as much
below the usual form, as incapable of public employment, as leading a
life and conforming themselves to the mean and vile manners of the
vulgar:

          “Odi ignava opera, philosopha sententia.”

     [“I hate men who jabber about philosophy, but do nothing.”
      --Pacuvius, ap Gellium, xiii. 8.]


For what concerns the philosophers, as I have said, if they were in
science, they were yet much greater in action.  And, as it is said of the
geometrician of Syracuse,--[Archimedes.]--who having been disturbed from
his contemplation, to put some of his skill in practice for the defence
of his country, that he suddenly set on foot dreadful and prodigious
engines, that wrought effects beyond all human expectation; himself,
notwithstanding, disdaining all his handiwork, and thinking in this he
had played the mere mechanic, and violated the dignity of his art, of
which these performances of his he accounted but trivial experiments and
playthings so they, whenever they have been put upon the proof of action,
have been seen to fly to so high a pitch, as made it very well appear,
their souls were marvellously elevated, and enriched by the knowledge of
things.  But some of them, seeing the reins of government in the hands of
incapable men, have avoided all management of political affairs; and he
who demanded of Crates, how long it was necessary to philosophise,
received this answer: “Till our armies are no more commanded by fools.”
 --[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 92.]--Heraclitus resigned the royalty to his
brother; and, to the Ephesians, who reproached him that he spent his time
in playing with children before the temple: “Is it not better,” said he,
“to do so, than to sit at the helm of affairs in your company?”  Others
having their imagination advanced above the world and fortune, have
looked upon the tribunals of justice, and even the thrones of kings, as
paltry and contemptible; insomuch, that Empedocles refused the royalty
that the Agrigentines offered to him.  Thales, once inveighing in
discourse against the pains and care men put themselves to to become
rich, was answered by one in the company, that he did like the fox, who
found fault with what he could not obtain.  Whereupon, he had a mind, for
the jest’s sake, to show them to the contrary; and having, for this
occasion, made a muster of all his wits, wholly to employ them in the
service of profit and gain, he set a traffic on foot, which in one year
brought him in so great riches, that the most experienced in that trade
could hardly in their whole lives, with all their industry, have raked so
much together.--[Diogenes Laertius, Life of Thales, i.  26; Cicero, De
Divin., i.  49.]--That which Aristotle reports of some who called both
him and Anaxagoras, and others of their profession, wise but not prudent,
in not applying their study to more profitable things--though I do not
well digest this verbal distinction--that will not, however, serve to
excuse my pedants, for to see the low and necessitous fortune wherewith
they are content, we have rather reason to pronounce that they are
neither wise nor prudent.

But letting this first reason alone, I think it better to say, that this
evil proceeds from their applying themselves the wrong way to the study
of the sciences; and that, after the manner we are instructed, it is no
wonder if neither the scholars nor the masters become, though more
learned, ever the wiser, or more able.  In plain truth, the cares and
expense our parents are at in our education, point at nothing, but to
furnish our heads with knowledge; but not a word of judgment and virtue.
Cry out, of one that passes by, to the people: “O, what a learned man!”
 and of another, “O, what a good man!”--[Translated from Seneca, Ep.,
88.]--they will not fail to turn their eyes, and address their respect
to the former.  There should then be a third crier, “O, the blockheads!”
 Men are apt presently to inquire, does such a one understand Greek or
Latin?  Is he a poet?  or does he write in prose?  But whether he be
grown better or more discreet, which are qualities of principal concern,
these are never thought of.  We should rather examine, who is better
learned, than who is more learned.

We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the
understanding unfurnished and void.  Like birds who fly abroad to forage
for grain, and bring it home in the beak, without tasting it themselves,
to feed their young; so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there,
out of books, and hold it at the tongue’s end, only to spit it out and
distribute it abroad.  And here I cannot but smile to think how I have
paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind of learning, who myself
am so manifest an example; for, do I not the same thing throughout almost
this whole composition?  I go here and there, culling out of several
books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no
memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where, to
say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places.  We are,
I conceive, knowing only in present knowledge, and not at all in what is
past, or more than is that which is to come.  But the worst on’t is,
their scholars and pupils are no better nourished by this kind of
inspiration; and it makes no deeper impression upon them, but passes from
hand to hand, only to make a show to be tolerable company, and to tell
pretty stories, like a counterfeit coin in counters, of no other use or
value, but to reckon with, or to set up at cards:

          “Apud alios loqui didicerunt non ipsi secum.”

     [“They have learned to speak from others, not from themselves.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, v. 36.]

               “Non est loquendum, sed gubernandum.”

     [“Speaking is not so necessary as governing.”--Seneca, Ep., 108.]

Nature, to shew that there is nothing barbarous where she has the sole
conduct, oftentimes, in nations where art has the least to do, causes
productions of wit, such as may rival the greatest effect of art
whatever.  In relation to what I am now speaking of, the Gascon proverb,
derived from a cornpipe, is very quaint and subtle:

          “Bouha prou bouha, mas a remuda lous dits quem.”

     [“You may blow till your eyes start out; but if once you offer to
     stir your fingers, it is all over.”]

We can say, Cicero says thus; these were the manners of Plato; these are
the very words of Aristotle: but what do we say ourselves?  What do we
judge?  A parrot would say as much as that.

And this puts me in mind of that rich gentleman of Rome,--[Calvisius
Sabinus.  Seneca, Ep., 27.]--who had been solicitous, with very great
expense, to procure men that were excellent in all sorts of science, whom
he had always attending his person, to the end, that when amongst his
friends any occasion fell out of speaking of any subject whatsoever, they
might supply his place, and be ready to prompt him, one with a sentence
of Seneca, another with a verse of Homer, and so forth, every one
according to his talent; and he fancied this knowledge to be his own,
because it was in the heads of those who lived upon his bounty; as they
also do, whose learning consists in having noble libraries.  I know one,
who, when I question him what he knows, he presently calls for a book to
shew me, and dares not venture to tell me so much, as that he has piles
in his posteriors, till first he has consulted his dictionary, what piles
and what posteriors are.

We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle
and superficial learning. We must make it our own.  We are in this very
like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbour’s house to fetch
it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without
remembering to carry any with him home.--[Plutarch, How a Man should
Listen.]--What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if
it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not
nourish and support us?  Can we imagine that Lucullus, whom letters,
without any manner of experience, made so great a captain, learned to be
so after this perfunctory manner?--[Cicero, Acad., ii. I.]--We suffer
ourselves to lean and rely so strongly upon the arm of another, that we
destroy our own strength and vigour.  Would I fortify myself against the
fear of death, it must be at the expense of Seneca: would I extract
consolation for myself or my friend, I borrow it from Cicero.  I might
have found it in myself, had I been trained to make use of my own reason.
I do not like this relative and mendicant understanding; for though we
could become learned by other men’s learning, a man can never be wise but
by his own wisdom:

     [“I hate the wise man, who in his own concern is not wise.”
      --Euripides, ap. Cicero, Ep. Fam., xiii. 15.]

Whence Ennius:

     “Nequidquam sapere sapientem, qui ipse sibi prodesse non quiret.”

     [“That wise man knows nothing, who cannot profit himself by his
     wisdom.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 15.]

                              “Si cupidus, si
               Vanus, et Euganea quantumvis mollior agna.”

     [“If he be grasping, or a boaster, and something softer than an
     Euganean lamb.”--Juvenal, Sat., viii. 14.]

     “Non enim paranda nobis solum, sed fruenda sapientia est.”

     [“For wisdom is not only to be acquired, but to be utilised.”
      --Cicero, De Finib., i. I.]

Dionysius--[It was not Dionysius, but Diogenes the cynic.  Diogenes
Laertius, vi. 27.]--laughed at the grammarians, who set themselves to
inquire into the miseries of Ulysses, and were ignorant of their own;
at musicians, who were so exact in tuning their instruments, and never
tuned their manners; at orators, who made it a study to declare what is
justice, but never took care to do it.  If the mind be not better
disposed, if the judgment be no better settled, I had much rather my
scholar had spent his time at tennis, for, at least, his body would by
that means be in better exercise and breath.  Do but observe him when he
comes back from school, after fifteen or sixteen years that he has been
there; there is nothing so unfit for employment; all you shall find he
has got, is, that his Latin and Greek have only made him a greater
coxcomb than when he went from home.  He should bring back his soul
replete with good literature, and he brings it only swelled and puffed up
with vain and empty shreds and patches of learning; and has really
nothing more in him than he had before.--[Plato’s Dialogues: Protagoras.]

These pedants of ours, as Plato says of the Sophists, their
cousin-germans, are, of all men, they who most pretend to be useful to
mankind, and who alone, of all men, not only do not better and improve
that which is committed to them, as a carpenter or a mason would do, but
make them much worse, and make us pay them for making them worse, to
boot.  If the rule which Protagoras proposed to his pupils were followed
--either that they should give him his own demand, or make affidavit upon
oath in the temple how much they valued the profit they had received
under his tuition, and satisfy him accordingly--my pedagogues would find
themselves sorely gravelled, if they were to be judged by the affidavits
of my experience.  My Perigordin patois very pleasantly calls these
pretenders to learning, ‘lettre-ferits’, as a man should say,
letter-marked--men on whom letters have been stamped by the blow of a
mallet. And, in truth, for the most part, they appear to be deprived even
of common sense; for you see the husbandman and the cobbler go simply and
fairly about their business, speaking only of what they know and
understand; whereas these fellows, to make parade and to get opinion,
mustering this ridiculous knowledge of theirs, that floats on the
superficies of the brain, are perpetually perplexing, and entangling
themselves in their own nonsense. They speak fine words sometimes, ‘tis
true, but let somebody that is wiser apply them.  They are wonderfully
well acquainted with Galen, but not at all with the disease of the
patient; they have already deafened you with a long ribble-row of laws,
but understand nothing of the case in hand; they have the theory of all
things, let who will put it in practice.

I have sat by, when a friend of mine, in my own house, for sport-sake,
has with one of these fellows counterfeited a jargon of Galimatias,
patched up of phrases without head or tail, saving that he interlarded
here and there some terms that had relation to their dispute, and held
the coxcomb in play a whole afternoon together, who all the while thought
he had answered pertinently and learnedly to all his objections; and yet
this was a man of letters, and reputation, and a fine gentleman of the
long robe:

         “Vos, O patricius sanguis, quos vivere par est
          Occipiti caeco, posticae occurrite sannae.”

     [“O you, of patrician blood, to whom it is permitted to live
     with(out) eyes in the back of your head, beware of grimaces at you
     from behind.”--Persius, Sat., i. 61.]

Whosoever shall narrowly pry into and thoroughly sift this sort of
people, wherewith the world is so pestered, will, as I have done, find,
that for the most part, they neither understand others, nor themselves;
and that their memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
and empty; some excepted, whose own nature has of itself formed them into
better fashion.  As I have observed, for example, in Adrian Turnebus, who
having never made other profession than that of mere learning only, and
in that, in my opinion, he was the greatest man that has been these
thousand years, had nothing at all in him of the pedant, but the wearing
of his gown, and a little exterior fashion, that could not be civilised
to courtier ways, which in themselves are nothing.  I hate our people,
who can worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind,
and take their measure by the leg a man makes, by his behaviour, and so
much as the very fashion of his boots, what kind of man he is.  For
within there was not a more polished soul upon earth.  I have often
purposely put him upon arguments quite wide of his profession, wherein I
found he had so clear an insight, so quick an apprehension, so solid a
judgment, that a man would have thought he had never practised any other
thing but arms, and been all his life employed in affairs of State.
These are great and vigorous natures,

                         “Queis arte benigna
          Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan.”

     [“Whom benign Titan (Prometheus) has framed of better clay.”
      --Juvenal, xiv. 34.]

that can keep themselves upright in despite of a pedantic education.  But
it is not enough that our education does not spoil us; it must, moreover,
alter us for the better.

Some of our Parliaments, when they are to admit officers, examine only
their learning; to which some of the others also add the trial of
understanding, by asking their judgment of some case in law; of these the
latter, methinks, proceed with the better method; for although both are
necessary, and that it is very requisite they should be defective in
neither, yet, in truth, knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as
judgment; the last may make shift without the other, but the other never
without this.  For as the Greek verse says--

     [“To what use serves learning, if understanding be away.”
      --Apud Stobaeus, tit. iii., p. 37 (1609).]

Would to God that, for the good of our judicature, these societies were
as well furnished with understanding and conscience as they are with
knowledge.

               “Non vita, sed scolae discimus.”

     [“We do not study for life, but only for the school.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 106.]

We are not to tie learning to the soul, but to work and incorporate them
together: not to tincture it only, but to give it a thorough and perfect
dye; which, if it will not take colour, and meliorate its imperfect
state, it were without question better to let it alone.  ‘Tis a dangerous
weapon, that will hinder and wound its master, if put into an awkward and
unskilful hand:

               “Ut fuerit melius non didicisse.”

          [“So that it were better not to have learned.”
           --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 4.]

And this, peradventure, is the reason why neither we nor theology require
much learning in women; and that Francis, Duke of Brittany, son of John V.,
one talking with him about his marriage with Isabella the daughter of
Scotland, and adding that she was homely bred, and without any manner of
learning, made answer, that he liked her the better, and that a woman was
wise enough, if she could distinguish her husband’s shirt from his
doublet.  So that it is no so great wonder, as they make of it, that our
ancestors had letters in no greater esteem, and that even to this day
they are but rarely met with in the principal councils of princes; and if
the end and design of acquiring riches, which is the only thing we
propose to ourselves, by the means of law, physic, pedantry, and even
divinity itself, did not uphold and keep them in credit, you would, with
doubt, see them in as pitiful a condition as ever.  And what loss would
this be, if they neither instruct us to think well nor to do well?

          “Postquam docti prodierunt, boni desunt.”

     [Seneca, Ep., 95.  “Since the ‘savans’ have made their appearance
     among us, the good people have become eclipsed.”
      --Rousseau, Discours sur les Lettres.]

All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of
goodness.

But the reason I glanced upon but now, may it not also hence proceed,
that, our studies in France having almost no other aim but profit, except
as to those who, by nature born to offices and employments rather of
glory than gain, addict themselves to letters, if at all, only for so
short a time (being taken from their studies before they can come to have
any taste of them, to a profession that has nothing to do with books),
there ordinarily remain no others to apply themselves wholly to learning,
but people of mean condition, who in that only seek the means to live;
and by such people, whose souls are, both by nature and by domestic
education and example, of the basest alloy the fruits of knowledge are
immaturely gathered and ill digested, and delivered to their recipients
quite another thing.  For it is not for knowledge to enlighten a soul
that is dark of itself, nor to make a blind man see.  Her business is not
to find a man’s eyes, but to guide, govern, and direct them, provided he
have sound feet and straight legs to go upon.  Knowledge is an excellent
drug, but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption
and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.
Such a one may have a sight clear enough who looks asquint, and
consequently sees what is good, but does not follow it, and sees
knowledge, but makes no use of it.  Plato’s principal institution in his
Republic is to fit his citizens with employments suitable to their
nature.  Nature can do all, and does all.  Cripples are very unfit for
exercises of the body, and lame souls for exercises of the mind.
Degenerate and vulgar souls are unworthy of philosophy.  If we see a
shoemaker with his shoes out at the toes, we say, ‘tis no wonder; for,
commonly, none go worse shod than they.  In like manner, experience often
presents us a physician worse physicked, a divine less reformed, and
(constantly) a scholar of less sufficiency, than other people.

Old Aristo of Chios had reason to say that philosophers did their
auditors harm, forasmuch as most of the souls of those that heard them
were not capable of deriving benefit from instruction, which, if not
applied to good, would certainly be applied to ill:

     [“They proceeded effeminate debauchees from the school of
     Aristippus, cynics from that of Zeno.”
      --Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii., 31.]

In that excellent institution that Xenophon attributes to the Persians,
we find that they taught their children virtue, as other nations do
letters.  Plato tells us that the eldest son in their royal succession
was thus brought up; after his birth he was delivered, not to women, but
to eunuchs of the greatest authority about their kings for their virtue,
whose charge it was to keep his body healthful and in good plight; and
after he came to seven years of age, to teach him to ride and to go
a-hunting.  When he arrived at fourteen he was transferred into the hands
of four, the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and most valiant
of the nation; of whom the first was to instruct him in religion, the
second to be always upright and sincere, the third to conquer his
appetites and desires, and the fourth to despise all danger.

It is a thing worthy of very great consideration, that in that excellent,
and, in truth, for its perfection, prodigious form of civil regimen set
down by Lycurgus, though so solicitous of the education of children,
as a thing of the greatest concern, and even in the very seat of the
Muses, he should make so little mention of learning; as if that generous
youth, disdaining all other subjection but that of virtue, ought to be
supplied, instead of tutors to read to them arts and sciences, with such
masters as should only instruct them in valour, prudence, and justice;
an example that Plato has followed in his laws.  The manner of their
discipline was to propound to them questions in judgment upon men and
their actions; and if they commended or condemned this or that person or
fact, they were to give a reason for so doing; by which means they at
once sharpened their understanding, and learned what was right.
Astyages, in Xenophon, asks Cyrus to give an account of his last lesson;
and thus it was, “A great boy in our school, having a little short
cassock, by force took a longer from another that was not so tall as he,
and gave him his own in exchange: whereupon I, being appointed judge of
the controversy, gave judgment, that I thought it best each should keep
the coat he had, for that they both of them were better fitted with that
of one another than with their own: upon which my master told me, I had
done ill, in that I had only considered the fitness of the garments,
whereas I ought to have considered the justice of the thing, which
required that no one should have anything forcibly taken from him that is
his own.”  And Cyrus adds that he was whipped for his pains, as we are in
our villages for forgetting the first aorist of------.

     [Cotton’s version of this story commences differently, and includes
     a passage which is not in any of the editions of the original before
     me:

     “Mandane, in Xenophon, asking Cyrus how he would do to learn
     justice, and the other virtues amongst the Medes, having left all
     his masters behind him in Persia?  He made answer, that he had
     learned those things long since; that his master had often made him
     a judge of the differences amongst his schoolfellows, and had one
     day whipped him for giving a wrong sentence.”--W.C.H.]

My pedant must make me a very learned oration, ‘in genere demonstrativo’,
before he can persuade me that his school is like unto that.  They knew
how to go the readiest way to work; and seeing that science, when most
rightly applied and best understood, can do no more but teach us
prudence, moral honesty, and resolution, they thought fit, at first hand,
to initiate their children with the knowledge of effects, and to instruct
them, not by hearsay and rote, but by the experiment of action, in lively
forming and moulding them; not only by words and precepts, but chiefly by
works and examples; to the end it might not be a knowledge in the mind
only, but its complexion and habit: not an acquisition, but a natural
possession.  One asking to this purpose, Agesilaus, what he thought most
proper for boys to learn?  “What they ought to do when they come to be
men,” said he.--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians.  Rousseau
adopts the expression in his Diswuys sur tes Lettres.]--It is no wonder,
if such an institution produced so admirable effects.

They used to go, it is said, to the other cities of Greece, to inquire
out rhetoricians, painters, and musicians; but to Lacedaemon for
legislators, magistrates, and generals of armies; at Athens they learned
to speak well: here to do well; there to disengage themselves from a
sophistical argument, and to unravel the imposture of captious
syllogisms; here to evade the baits and allurements of pleasure, and with
a noble courage and resolution to conquer the menaces of fortune and
death; those cudgelled their brains about words, these made it their
business to inquire into things; there was an eternal babble of the
tongue, here a continual exercise of the soul.  And therefore it is
nothing strange if, when Antipater demanded of them fifty children for
hostages, they made answer, quite contrary to what we should do, that
they would rather give him twice as many full-grown men, so much did they
value the loss of their country’s education.  When Agesilaus courted
Xenophon to send his children to Sparta to be bred, “it is not,” said he,
“there to learn logic or rhetoric, but to be instructed in the noblest of
all sciences, namely, the science to obey and to command.”--[Plutarch,
Life of Agesilaus, c. 7.]

It is very pleasant to see Socrates, after his manner, rallying Hippias,
--[Plato’s Dialogues: Hippias Major.]--who recounts to him what a world
of money he has got, especially in certain little villages of Sicily, by
teaching school, and that he made never a penny at Sparta: “What a
sottish and stupid people,” said Socrates, “are they, without sense or
understanding, that make no account either of grammar or poetry, and only
busy themselves in studying the genealogies and successions of their
kings, the foundations, rises, and declensions of states, and such tales
of a tub!”  After which, having made Hippias from one step to another
acknowledge the excellency of their form of public administration, and
the felicity and virtue of their private life, he leaves him to guess at
the conclusion he makes of the inutilities of his pedantic arts.

Examples have demonstrated to us that in military affairs, and all others
of the like active nature, the study of sciences more softens and
untempers the courages of men than it in any way fortifies and excites
them.  The most potent empire that at this day appears to be in the whole
world is that of the Turks, a people equally inured to the estimation of
arms and the contempt of letters.  I find Rome was more valiant before
she grew so learned.  The most warlike nations at this time in being are
the most rude and ignorant: the Scythians, the Parthians, Tamerlane,
serve for sufficient proof of this.  When the Goths overran Greece, the
only thing that preserved all the libraries from the fire was, that some
one possessed them with an opinion that they were to leave this kind of
furniture entire to the enemy, as being most proper to divert them from
the exercise of arms, and to fix them to a lazy and sedentary life.
When our King Charles VIII., almost without striking a blow, saw himself
possessed of the kingdom of Naples and a considerable part of Tuscany,
the nobles about him attributed this unexpected facility of conquest to
this, that the princes and nobles of Italy, more studied to render
themselves ingenious and learned, than vigorous and warlike.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A parrot would say as much as that
     Agesilaus, what he thought most proper for boys to learn?
     But it is not enough that our education does not spoil us
     Conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature
     Culling out of several books the sentences that best please me
     “Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing”
      Education
     Examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned
     Fear and distrust invite and draw on offence
     Fortune will still be mistress of events
     Fox, who found fault with what he could not obtain
     Fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed
     Gave them new and more plausible names for their excuse
     Give me time to recover my strength and health
     Great presumption to be so fond of one’s own opinions
     Gross impostures of religions
     Hoary head and rivelled face of ancient usage
     Hold a stiff rein upon suspicion
     I have a great aversion from a novelty
     Knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as judgment
     Laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would
     Man can never be wise but by his own wisdom
     Memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
     Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature
     Nothing noble can be performed without danger
     Only set the humours they would purge more violently in work
     Ought not to expect much either from his vigilance or power
     Ought to withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd
     Over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy
     Physic
     Physician worse physicked
     Plays of children are not performed in play
     Present himself with a halter about his neck to the people
     Rome was more valiant before she grew so learned
     Study to declare what is justice, but never took care to do it.
     Testimony of the truth from minds prepossessed by custom?
     They neither instruct us to think well nor to do well
     Think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have me
     Use veils from us the true aspect of things
     Victorious envied the conquered
     We only labour to stuff the memory
     We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust
     Weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy
     What they ought to do when they come to be men
     Whosoever despises his own life, is always master
     Worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 5.

XXV.      Of the education of children.
XXVI.     That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own
          capacity.




CHAPTER XXV

OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

TO MADAME DIANE DE FOIX, Comtesse de Gurson

I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so decrepit or
deformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not, nevertheless, if he
were not totally besotted, and blinded with his paternal affection, that
he did not well enough discern his defects; but that with all defaults he
was still his.  Just so, I see better than any other, that all I write
here are but the idle reveries of a man that has only nibbled upon the
outward crust of sciences in his nonage, and only retained a general and
formless image of them; who has got a little snatch of everything and
nothing of the whole, ‘a la Francoise’.  For I know, in general, that
there is such a thing as physic, as jurisprudence: four parts in
mathematics, and, roughly, what all these aim and point at; and,
peradventure, I yet know farther, what sciences in general pretend unto,
in order to the service of our life: but to dive farther than that, and
to have cudgelled my brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of all
modern learning, or particularly addicted myself to any one science,
I have never done it; neither is there any one art of which I am able to
draw the first lineaments and dead colour; insomuch that there is not a
boy of the lowest form in a school, that may not pretend to be wiser than
I, who am not able to examine him in his first lesson, which, if I am at
any time forced upon, I am necessitated in my own defence, to ask him,
unaptly enough, some universal questions, such as may serve to try his
natural understanding; a lesson as strange and unknown to him, as his is
to me.

I never seriously settled myself to the reading any book of solid
learning but Plutarch and Seneca; and there, like the Danaides, I
eternally fill, and it as constantly runs out; something of which drops
upon this paper, but little or nothing stays with me. History is my
particular game as to matter of reading, or else poetry, for which I have
particular kindness and esteem: for, as Cleanthes said, as the voice,
forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible
and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse
darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and
apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect.  As to the natural
parts I have, of which this is the essay, I find them to bow under the
burden; my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and
stumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no
degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land
before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds,
that I am not able to penetrate.  And taking upon me to write
indifferently of whatever comes into my head, and therein making use of
nothing but my own proper and natural means, if it befall me, as
oft-times it does, accidentally to meet in any good author, the same heads
and commonplaces upon which I have attempted to write (as I did but just
now in Plutarch’s “Discourse of the Force of Imagination”), to see myself
so weak and so forlorn, so heavy and so flat, in comparison of those
better writers, I at once pity or despise myself.  Yet do I please myself
with this, that my opinions have often the honour and good fortune to
jump with theirs, and that I go in the same path, though at a very great
distance, and can say, “Ah, that is so.”  I am farther satisfied to find
that I have a quality, which every one is not blessed withal, which is,
to discern the vast difference between them and me; and notwithstanding
all that, suffer my own inventions, low and feeble as they are, to run on
in their career, without mending or plastering up the defects that this
comparison has laid open to my own view.  And, in plain truth, a man had
need of a good strong back to keep pace with these people.  The
indiscreet scribblers of our times, who, amongst their laborious
nothings, insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors, with a
design, by that means, to illustrate their own writings, do quite
contrary; for this infinite dissimilitude of ornaments renders the
complexion of their own compositions so sallow and deformed, that they
lose much more than they get.

The philosophers, Chrysippus and Epicurus, were in this of two quite
contrary humours: the first not only in his books mixed passages and
sayings of other authors, but entire pieces, and, in one, the whole Medea
of Euripides; which gave Apollodorus occasion to say, that should a man
pick out of his writings all that was none of his, he would leave him
nothing but blank paper: whereas the latter, quite on the contrary, in
three hundred volumes that he left behind him, has not so much as one
quotation.--[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Chyysippus, vii. 181, and
Epicurus, x. 26.]

I happened the other day upon this piece of fortune; I was reading a
French book, where after I had a long time run dreaming over a great many
words, so dull, so insipid, so void of all wit or common sense, that
indeed they were only French words: after a long and tedious travel, I
came at last to meet with a piece that was lofty, rich, and elevated to
the very clouds; of which, had I found either the declivity easy or the
ascent gradual, there had been some excuse; but it was so perpendicular
a precipice, and so wholly cut off from the rest of the work, that by the
first six words, I found myself flying into the other world, and thence
discovered the vale whence I came so deep and low, that I have never had
since the heart to descend into it any more.  If I should set out one of
my discourses with such rich spoils as these, it would but too evidently
manifest the imperfection of my own writing.  To reprehend the fault in
others that I am guilty of myself, appears to me no more unreasonable,
than to condemn, as I often do, those of others in myself: they are to be
everywhere reproved, and ought to have no sanctuary allowed them.  I know
very well how audaciously I myself, at every turn, attempt to equal
myself to my thefts, and to make my style go hand in hand with them, not
without a temerarious hope of deceiving the eyes of my reader from
discerning the difference; but withal it is as much by the benefit of my
application, that I hope to do it, as by that of my invention or any
force of my own.  Besides, I do not offer to contend with the whole body
of these champions, nor hand to hand with anyone of them: ‘tis only by
flights and little light attempts that I engage them; I do not grapple
with them, but try their strength only, and never engage so far as I make
a show to do.  If I could hold them in play, I were a brave fellow; for I
never attack them; but where they are most sinewy and strong.  To cover a
man’s self (as I have seen some do) with another man’s armour, so as not
to discover so much as his fingers’ ends; to carry on a design (as it is
not hard for a man that has anything of a scholar in him, in an ordinary
subject to do) under old inventions patched up here and there with his
own trumpery, and then to endeavour to conceal the theft, and to make it
pass for his own, is first injustice and meanness of spirit in those who
do it, who having nothing in them of their own fit to procure them a
reputation, endeavour to do it by attempting to impose things upon the
world in their own name, which they have no manner of title to; and next,
a ridiculous folly to content themselves with acquiring the ignorant
approbation of the vulgar by such a pitiful cheat, at the price at the
same time of degrading themselves in the eyes of men of understanding,
who turn up their noses at all this borrowed incrustation, yet whose
praise alone is worth the having.  For my own part, there is nothing I
would not sooner do than that, neither have I said so much of others, but
to get a better opportunity to explain myself.  Nor in this do I glance
at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which
sort of writers I have in my time known many very ingenious, and
particularly one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.
These are really men of wit, and that make it appear they are so, both by
that and other ways of writing; as for example, Lipsius, in that learned
and laborious contexture of his Politics.

But, be it how it will, and how inconsiderable soever these ineptitudes
may be, I will say I never intended to conceal them, no more than my old
bald grizzled likeness before them, where the painter has presented you
not with a perfect face, but with mine.  For these are my own particular
opinions and fancies, and I deliver them as only what I myself believe,
and not for what is to be believed by others.  I have no other end in
this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also shall, peradventure,
be another thing to-morrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to
change me.  I have no authority to be believed, neither do I desire it,
being too conscious of my own inerudition to be able to instruct others.

Some one, then, having seen the preceding chapter, the other day told me
at my house, that I should a little farther have extended my discourse on
the education of children.--[“Which, how fit I am to do, let my friends
flatter me if they please, I have in the meantime no such opinion of my
own talent, as to promise myself any very good success from my
endeavour.”  This passage would appear to be an interpolation by Cotton.
At all events, I do not find it in the original editions before me, or in
Coste.]--

Now, madam, if I had any sufficiency in this subject, I could not
possibly better employ it, than to present my best instructions to the
little man that threatens you shortly with a happy birth (for you are too
generous to begin otherwise than with a male); for, having had so great a
hand in the treaty of your marriage, I have a certain particular right
and interest in the greatness and prosperity of the issue that shall
spring from it; beside that, your having had the best of my services so
long in possession, sufficiently obliges me to desire the honour and
advantage of all wherein you shall be concerned.  But, in truth, all I
understand as to that particular is only this, that the greatest and most
important difficulty of human science is the education of children.  For
as in agriculture, the husbandry that is to precede planting, as also
planting itself, is certain, plain, and well known; but after that which
is planted comes to life, there is a great deal more to be done, more art
to be used, more care to be taken, and much more difficulty to cultivate
and bring it to perfection so it is with men; it is no hard matter to get
children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude,
and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.  The symptoms of
their inclinations in that tender age are so obscure, and the promises so
uncertain and fallacious, that it is very hard to establish any solid
judgment or conjecture upon them.  Look at Cimon, for example, and
Themistocles, and a thousand others, who very much deceived the
expectation men had of them.  Cubs of bears and puppies readily discover
their natural inclination; but men, so soon as ever they are grownup,
applying themselves to certain habits, engaging themselves in certain
opinions, and conforming themselves to particular laws and customs,
easily alter, or at least disguise, their true and real disposition; and
yet it is hard to force the propension of nature.  Whence it comes to
pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very
great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children
to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally
unfit.  In this difficulty, nevertheless, I am clearly of opinion, that
they ought to be elemented in the best and most advantageous studies,
without taking too much notice of, or being too superstitious in those
light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years, and to
which Plato, in his Republic, gives, methinks, too much authority.

Madam, science is a very great ornament, and a thing of marvellous use,
especially in persons raised to that degree of fortune in which you are.
And, in truth, in persons of mean and low condition, it cannot perform
its true and genuine office, being naturally more prompt to assist in the
conduct of war, in the government of peoples, in negotiating the leagues
and friendships of princes and foreign nations, than in forming a
syllogism in logic, in pleading a process in law, or in prescribing a
dose of pills in physic.  Wherefore, madam, believing you will not omit
this so necessary feature in the education of your children, who yourself
have tasted its sweetness, and are of a learned extraction (for we yet
have the writings of the ancient Counts of Foix, from whom my lord, your
husband, and yourself, are both of you descended, and Monsieur de
Candale, your uncle, every day obliges the world with others, which will
extend the knowledge of this quality in your family for so many
succeeding ages), I will, upon this occasion, presume to acquaint your
ladyship with one particular fancy of my own, contrary to the common
method, which is all I am able to contribute to your service in this
affair.

The charge of the tutor you shall provide for your son, upon the choice
of whom depends the whole success of his education, has several other
great and considerable parts and duties required in so important a trust,
besides that of which I am about to speak: these, however, I shall not
mention, as being unable to add anything of moment to the common rules:
and in this, wherein I take upon me to advise, he may follow it so far
only as it shall appear advisable.

For a, boy of quality then, who pretends to letters not upon the account
of profit (for so mean an object is unworthy of the grace and favour
of the Muses, and moreover, in it a man directs his service to and
depends upon others), nor so much for outward ornament, as for his own
proper and peculiar use, and to furnish and enrich himself within, having
rather a desire to come out an accomplished cavalier than a mere scholar
or learned man; for such a one, I say, I would, also, have his friends
solicitous to find him out a tutor, who has rather a well-made than a
well-filled head;--[“‘Tete bien faite’, an expression created by
Montaigne, and which has remained a part of our language.”--Servan.]--
seeking, indeed, both the one and the other, but rather of the two to
prefer manners and judgment to mere learning, and that this man should
exercise his charge after a new method.

‘Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their pupil’s
ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the
pupil is only to repeat what the others have said: now I would have a
tutor to correct this error, and, that at the very first, he should
according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to the test,
permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of himself to discern
and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving
him to open it for himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent
and speak, but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.
Socrates, and since him Arcesilaus, made first their scholars speak, and
then they spoke to them--[Diogenes Laertius, iv. 36.]

               “Obest plerumque iis, qui discere volunt,
               auctoritas eorum, qui docent.”

     [“The authority of those who teach, is very often an impediment to
     those who desire to learn.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 5.]

It is good to make him, like a young horse, trot before him, that he may
judge of his going, and how much he is to abate of his own speed, to
accommodate himself to the vigour and capacity of the other.  For want of
which due proportion we spoil all; which also to know how to adjust, and
to keep within an exact and due measure, is one of the hardest things I
know, and ‘tis the effect of a high and well-tempered soul, to know how
to condescend to such puerile motions and to govern and direct them.
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.

Such as, according to our common way of teaching, undertake, with one and
the same lesson, and the same measure of direction, to instruct several
boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and
‘tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found
above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and
discipline.  Let the master not only examine him about the grammatical
construction of the bare words of his lesson, but about the sense and let
him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory,
but by that of his life.  Let him make him put what he has learned into a
hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to
see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking
instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato.  ‘Tis
a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office
unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it
to concoct.  Our minds work only upon trust, when bound and compelled to
follow the appetite of another’s fancy, enslaved and captivated under the
authority of another’s instruction; we have been so subjected to the
trammel, that we have no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own
vigour and liberty are extinct and gone:

                    “Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt.”

          [“They are ever in wardship.”--Seneca, Ep., 33.]

I was privately carried at Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an
Aristotelian, that his most usual thesis was: “That the touchstone and
square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute
conformity to Aristotle’s doctrine; and that all besides was nothing but
inanity and chimera; for that he had seen all, and said all.” A position,
that for having been a little too injuriously and broadly interpreted,
brought him once and long kept him in great danger of the Inquisition at
Rome.

Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and
lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust.
Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those
of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded
to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not,
he will remain in doubt.

               “Che non men the saver, dubbiar m’ aggrata.”

     [“I love to doubt, as well as to know.”--Dante, Inferno, xi. 93]

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason,
they will no more be theirs, but become his own.  Who follows another,
follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing.

          “Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet.”

          [“We are under no king; let each vindicate himself.”
           --Seneca, Ep.,33]

Let him, at least, know that he knows.  It will be necessary that he
imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts;
and no matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know
how to apply it to his own use.  Truth and reason are common to every
one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them
after: ‘tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
he and I equally see and understand them.  Bees cull their several sweets
from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them,
but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their
own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows
from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work
that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment:
his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.
He is not obliged to discover whence he got the materials that have
assisted him, but only to produce what he has himself done with them.
Men that live upon pillage and borrowing, expose their purchases and
buildings to every one’s view: but do not proclaim how they came by the
money.  We do not see the fees and perquisites of a gentleman of the long
robe; but we see the alliances wherewith he fortifies himself and his
family, and the titles and honours he has obtained for him and his.  No
man divulges his revenue; or, at least, which way it comes in but every
one publishes his acquisitions.  The advantages of our study are to
become better and more wise.  ‘Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding
that sees and hears, ‘tis the understanding that improves everything,
that orders everything, and that acts, rules, and reigns: all other
faculties are blind, and deaf, and without soul.  And certainly we render
it timorous and servile, in not allowing it the liberty and privilege to
do anything of itself.  Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of
grammar and rhetoric, or of such and such a sentence of Cicero?  Our
masters stick them, full feathered, in our memories, and there establish
them like oracles, of which the letters and syllables are of the
substance of the thing.  To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies
no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.  That
which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at
his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had
it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book.  A mere bookish learning is
a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no
foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it, according to the
opinion of Plato, who says, that constancy, faith, and sincerity, are the
true philosophy, and the other sciences, that are directed to other ends;
mere adulterate paint.  I could wish that Paluel or Pompey, those two
noted dancers of my time, could have taught us to cut capers, by only
seeing them do it, without stirring from our places, as these men pretend
to inform the understanding without ever setting it to work, or that we
could learn to ride, handle a pike, touch a lute, or sing without the
trouble of practice, as these attempt to make us judge and speak well,
without exercising us in judging or speaking.  Now in this initiation of
our studies in their progress, whatsoever presents itself before us is
book sufficient; a roguish trick of a page, a sottish mistake of a
servant, a jest at the table, are so many new subjects.

And for this reason, conversation with men is of very great use and
travel into foreign countries; not to bring back (as most of our young
monsieurs do) an account only of how many paces Santa Rotonda--[The
Pantheon of Agrippa.]--is in circuit; or of the richness of Signora
Livia’s petticoats; or, as some others, how much Nero’s face, in a statue
in such an old ruin, is longer and broader than that made for him on some
medal; but to be able chiefly to give an account of the humours, manners,
customs, and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may
whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others.  I
would that a boy should be sent abroad very young, and first, so as to
kill two birds with one stone, into those neighbouring nations whose
language is most differing from our own, and to which, if it be not
formed betimes, the tongue will grow too stiff to bend.

And also ‘tis the general opinion of all, that a child should not be
brought up in his mother’s lap.  Mothers are too tender, and their
natural affection is apt to make the most discreet of them all so
overfond, that they can neither find in their hearts to give them due
correction for the faults they may commit, nor suffer them to be inured
to hardships and hazards, as they ought to be.  They will not endure to
see them return all dust and sweat from their exercise, to drink cold
drink when they are hot, nor see them mount an unruly horse, nor take a
foil in hand against a rude fencer, or so much as to discharge a carbine.
And yet there is no remedy; whoever will breed a boy to be good for
anything when he comes to be a man, must by no means spare him when
young, and must very often transgress the rules of physic:

              “Vitamque sub dio, et trepidis agat
               In rebus.”

     [“Let him live in open air, and ever in movement about something.”
      --Horace, Od. ii., 3, 5.]

It is not enough to fortify his soul; you are also to make his sinews
strong; for the soul will be oppressed if not assisted by the members,
and would have too hard a task to discharge two offices alone.  I know
very well to my cost, how much mine groans under the burden, from being
accommodated with a body so tender and indisposed, as eternally leans and
presses upon her; and often in my reading perceive that our masters, in
their writings, make examples pass for magnanimity and fortitude of mind,
which really are rather toughness of skin and hardness of bones; for I
have seen men, women, and children, naturally born of so hard and
insensible a constitution of body, that a sound cudgelling has been less
to them than a flirt with a finger would have been to me, and that would
neither cry out, wince, nor shrink, for a good swinging beating; and when
wrestlers counterfeit the philosophers in patience, ‘tis rather strength
of nerves than stoutness of heart.  Now to be inured to undergo labour,
is to be accustomed to endure pain:

                    “Labor callum obducit dolori.”

     [“Labour hardens us against pain.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 15.]

A boy is to be broken in to the toil and roughness of exercise, so as to
be trained up to the pain and suffering of dislocations, cholics,
cauteries, and even imprisonment and the rack itself; for he may come by
misfortune to be reduced to the worst of these, which (as this world
goes) is sometimes inflicted on the good as well as the bad.  As for
proof, in our present civil war whoever draws his sword against the laws,
threatens the honestest men with the whip and the halter.

And, moreover, by living at home, the authority of this governor, which
ought to be sovereign over the boy he has received into his charge, is
often checked and hindered by the presence of parents; to which may also
be added, that the respect the whole family pay him, as their master’s
son, and the knowledge he has of the estate and greatness he is heir to,
are, in my opinion, no small inconveniences in these tender years.

And yet, even in this conversing with men I spoke of but now, I have
observed this vice, that instead of gathering observations from others,
we make it our whole business to lay ourselves open to them, and are more
concerned how to expose and set out our own commodities, than how to
increase our stock by acquiring new.  Silence, therefore, and modesty are
very advantageous qualities in conversation.  One should, therefore,
train up this boy to be sparing and an husband of his knowledge when he
has acquired it; and to forbear taking exceptions at or reproving every
idle saying or ridiculous story that is said or told in his presence; for
it is a very unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything that is not
agreeable to our own palate.  Let him be satisfied with correcting
himself, and not seem to condemn everything in another he would not do
himself, nor dispute it as against common customs.

               “Licet sapere sine pompa, sine invidia.”

          [“Let us be wise without ostentation, without envy.”
           --Seneca, Ep., 103.]

Let him avoid these vain and uncivil images of authority, this childish
ambition of coveting to appear better bred and more accomplished, than he
really will, by such carriage, discover himself to be.  And, as if
opportunities of interrupting and reprehending were not to be omitted, to
desire thence to derive the reputation of something more than ordinary.
For as it becomes none but great poets to make use of the poetical
licence, so it is intolerable for any but men of great and illustrious
souls to assume privilege above the authority of custom:

     “Si quid Socrates ant Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem
     fecerunt, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere: magnis enim illi et
     divinis bonis hanc licentiam assequebantur.”

     [“If Socrates and Aristippus have committed any act against manners
     and custom, let him not think that he is allowed to do the same; for
     it was by great and divine benefits that they obtained this
     privilege.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 41.]

Let him be instructed not to engage in discourse or dispute but with a
champion worthy of him, and, even there, not to make use of all the
little subtleties that may seem pat for his purpose, but only such
arguments as may best serve him.  Let him be taught to be curious in the
election and choice of his reasons, to abominate impertinence, and
consequently, to affect brevity; but, above all, let him be lessoned to
acquiesce and submit to truth so soon as ever he shall discover it,
whether in his opponent’s argument, or upon better consideration of his
own; for he shall never be preferred to the chair for a mere clatter of
words and syllogisms, and is no further engaged to any argument whatever,
than as he shall in his own judgment approve it: nor yet is arguing a
trade, where the liberty of recantation and getting off upon better
thoughts, are to be sold for ready money:

          “Neque, ut omnia, qux praescripta et imperata sint,
          defendat, necessitate ulla cogitur.”

     [“Neither is their any necessity upon him, that he should defend
     all things that are prescribed and enjoined him.”
      --Cicero, Acad., ii. 3.]

If his governor be of my humour, he will form his will to be a very good
and loyal subject to his prince, very affectionate to his person, and
very stout in his quarrel; but withal he will cool in him the desire of
having any other tie to his service than public duty.  Besides several
other inconveniences that are inconsistent with the liberty every honest
man ought to have, a man’s judgment, being bribed and prepossessed by
these particular obligations, is either blinded and less free to exercise
its function, or is blemished with ingratitude and indiscretion.  A man
that is purely a courtier, can neither have power nor will to speak or
think otherwise than favourably and well of a master, who, amongst so
many millions of other subjects, has picked out him with his own hand to
nourish and advance; this favour, and the profit flowing from it, must
needs, and not without some show of reason, corrupt his freedom and
dazzle him; and we commonly see these people speak in another kind of
phrase than is ordinarily spoken by others of the same nation, though
what they say in that courtly language is not much to be believed.

Let his conscience and virtue be eminently manifest in his speaking, and
have only reason for their guide.  Make him understand, that to
acknowledge the error he shall discover in his own argument, though only
found out by himself, is an effect of judgment and sincerity, which are
the principal things he is to seek after; that obstinacy and contention
are common qualities, most appearing in mean souls; that to revise and
correct himself, to forsake an unjust argument in the height and heat of
dispute, are rare, great, and philosophical qualities.

Let him be advised, being in company, to have his eye and ear in every
corner; for I find that the places of greatest honour are commonly seized
upon by men that have least in them, and that the greatest fortunes are
seldom accompanied with the ablest parts.  I have been present when,
whilst they at the upper end of the chamber have been only commenting the
beauty of the arras, or the flavour of the wine, many things that have
been very finely said at the lower end of the table have been lost and
thrown away.  Let him examine every man’s talent; a peasant, a
bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these
in their several capacities, and something will be picked out of their
discourse whereof some use may be made at one time or another; nay, even
the folly and impertinence of others will contribute to his instruction.
By observing the graces and manners of all he sees, he will create to
himself an emulation of the good, and a contempt of the bad.

Let an honest curiosity be suggested to his fancy of being inquisitive
after everything; whatever there is singular and rare near the place
where he is, let him go and see it; a fine house, a noble fountain, an
eminent man, the place where a battle has been anciently fought, the
passages of Caesar and Charlemagne:

              “Qux tellus sit lenta gelu, quae putris ab aestu,
               Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.”

     [“What country is bound in frost, what land is friable with heat,
     what wind serves fairest for Italy.”--Propertius, iv. 3, 39.]

Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes,
things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know.

In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those who only
live in the records of history; he shall, by reading those books,
converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.  ‘Tis an idle
and vain study to those who make it so by doing it after a negligent
manner, but to those who do it with care and observation, ‘tis a study of
inestimable fruit and value; and the only study, as Plato reports, that
the Lacedaemonians reserved to themselves.  What profit shall he not reap
as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch?  But,
withal, let my governor remember to what end his instructions are
principally directed, and that he do not so much imprint in his pupil’s
memory the date of the ruin of Carthage, as the manners of Hannibal and
Scipio; nor so much where Marcellus died, as why it was unworthy of his
duty that he died there.  Let him not teach him so much the narrative
parts of history as to judge them; the reading of them, in my opinion,
is a thing that of all others we apply ourselves unto with the most
differing measure.  I have read a hundred things in Livy that another has
not, or not taken notice of at least; and Plutarch has read a hundred
more there than ever I could find, or than, peradventure, that author
ever wrote; to some it is merely a grammar study, to others the very
anatomy of philosophy, by which the most abstruse parts of our human
nature penetrate.  There are in Plutarch many long discourses very worthy
to be carefully read and observed, for he is, in my opinion, of all
others the greatest master in that kind of writing; but there are a
thousand others which he has only touched and glanced upon, where he only
points with his finger to direct us which way we may go if we will, and
contents himself sometimes with giving only one brisk hit in the nicest
article of the question, whence we are to grope out the rest.  As, for
example, where he says’--[In the Essay on False Shame.]--that the
inhabitants of Asia came to be vassals to one only, for not having been
able to pronounce one syllable, which is No.  Which saying of his gave
perhaps matter and occasion to La Boetie to write his “Voluntary
Servitude.”  Only to see him pick out a light action in a man’s life, or
a mere word that does not seem to amount even to that, is itself a whole
discourse.  ‘Tis to our prejudice that men of understanding should so
immoderately affect brevity; no doubt their reputation is the better by
it, but in the meantime we are the worse.  Plutarch had rather we should
applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge, and had rather leave us
with an appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have already
read.  He knew very well, that a man may say too much even upon the best
subjects, and that Alexandridas justly reproached him who made very good.
but too long speeches to the Ephori, when he said: “O stranger!  thou
speakest the things thou shouldst speak, but not as thou shouldst speak
them.”--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians.]--Such as have lean
and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are
defective in matter endeavour to make amends with words.

Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation
with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves,
and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.  One asking
Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but
of the world;--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 37; Plutarch, On Exile, c. 4.]--
he whose imagination was fuller and wider, embraced the whole world for
his country, and extended his society and friendship to all mankind;
not as we do, who look no further than our feet.  When the vines of my
village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes,
that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race, and
that the cannibals have already got the pip.  Who is it that, seeing the
havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of
the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand;
without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in
the meantime, people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the
earth for all this?  For my part, considering the licence and impunity
that always attend such commotions, I wonder they are so moderate, and
that there is no more mischief done.  To him who feels the hailstones
patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and
tempest; like the ridiculous Savoyard, who said very gravely, that if
that simple king of France could have managed his fortune as he should
have done, he might in time have come to have been steward of the
household to the duke his master: the fellow could not, in his shallow
imagination, conceive that there could be anything greater than a Duke of
Savoy.  And, in truth, we are all of us, insensibly, in this error, an
error of a very great weight and very pernicious consequence.  But
whoever shall represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image
of our mother nature, in her full majesty and lustre, whoever in her face
shall read so general and so constant a variety, whoever shall observe
himself in that figure, and not himself but a whole kingdom, no bigger
than the least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole,
that man alone is able to value things according to their true estimate
and grandeur.

This great world which some do yet multiply as several species under one
genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to
know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias.  In short, I would
have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most
attention.  So many humours, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions,
laws, and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our
understanding to discover its imperfection and natural infirmity, which
is no trivial speculation.  So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and
so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough
to make no great wonder of our own.  So many great names, so many famous
victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, render our
hopes ridiculous of eternising our names by the taking of half-a-score of
light horse, or a henroost, which only derives its memory from its ruin.
The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of
so many courts and grandeurs, accustom and fortify our sight without
closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of
men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good
company in the other world: and so of the rest Pythagoras was want to
say,--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v.  3.]--that our life resembles the great
and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the
body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring
merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of
the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and
consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the
lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their
own.

To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of
philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to
be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know--

                    “Quid fas optare: quid asper
          Utile nummus habet: patrix carisque propinquis
          Quantum elargiri deceat: quern te Deus esse
          Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
          Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimur.”

     [“Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined
     money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country
     and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to
     be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we
     are ant to what purpose engendered.”--Persius, iii. 69]

what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and
design of study; what valour, temperance, and justice are; the difference
betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and
liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far
death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended;

          “Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem.”

          [“And how you may shun or sustain every hardship.”
           --Virgil, AEneid, iii. 459.]

by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations
and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should
season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners
and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to dig
and well to live.  Amongst the liberal sciences, let us begin with that
which makes us free; not that they do not all serve in some measure to
the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also
do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves
to that end.  If we are once able to restrain the offices of human life
within their just and natural limits, we shall find that most of the
sciences in use are of no great use to us, and even in those that are,
that there are many very unnecessary cavities and dilatations which we
had better let alone, and, following Socrates’ direction, limit the
course of our studies to those things only where is a true and real
utility:

                              “Sapere aude;
               Incipe;  Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
               Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis; at ille
               Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis oevum.”

     [“Dare to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is
     like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but
     the river still flows, and will run on, with constant course, to
     ages without end.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]

‘Tis a great foolery to teach our children:

              “Quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis,
               Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricornus aqua,”

     [“What influence Pisces have, or the sign of angry Leo, or
     Capricorn, washed by the Hesperian wave.”--Propertius, iv. I, 89.]

the knowledge of the stars and the motion of the eighth sphere before
their own:

     [“What care I about the Pleiades or the stars of Taurus?”
      --Anacreon, Ode, xvii. 10.]

Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, “To what purpose,” said he, “should I
trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or
slavery continually before my eyes?” for the kings of Persia were at that
time preparing to invade his country.  Every one ought to say thus,
“Being assaulted, as I am by ambition, avarice, temerity, superstition,
and having within so many other enemies of life, shall I go ponder over
the world’s changes?”

After having taught him what will make him more wise and good, you may
then entertain him with the elements of logic, physics, geometry,
rhetoric, and the science which he shall then himself most incline to,
his judgment being beforehand formed and fit to choose, he will quickly
make his own.  The way of instructing him ought to be sometimes by
discourse, and sometimes by reading; sometimes his governor shall put the
author himself, which he shall think most proper for him, into his hands,
and sometimes only the marrow and substance of it; and if himself be not
conversant enough in books to turn to all the fine discourses the books
contain for his purpose, there may some man of learning be joined to him,
that upon every occasion shall supply him with what he stands in need of,
to furnish it to his pupil.  And who can doubt but that this way of
teaching is much more easy and natural than that of Gaza,--[Theodore
Gaza, rector of the Academy of Ferrara.]--in which the precepts are so
intricate, and so harsh, and the words so vain, lean; and insignificant,
that there is no hold to be taken of them, nothing that quickens and
elevates the wit and fancy, whereas here the mind has what to feed upon
and to digest.  This fruit, therefore, is not only without comparison,
much more fair and beautiful; but will also be much more early ripe.

‘Tis a thousand pities that matters should be at such a pass in this age
of ours, that philosophy, even with men of understanding, should be,
looked upon as a vain and fantastic name, a thing of no use, no value,
either in opinion or effect, of which I think those ergotisms and petty
sophistries, by prepossessing the avenues to it, are the cause.  And
people are much to blame to represent it to children for a thing of so
difficult access, and with such a frowning, grim, and formidable aspect.
Who is it that has disguised it thus, with this false, pale, and ghostly
countenance?  There is nothing more airy, more gay, more frolic, and I
had like to have said, more wanton.  She preaches nothing but feasting
and jollity; a melancholic anxious look shows that she does not inhabit
there.  Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot
of philosophers set chatting together, said to them,--[Plutarch, Treatise
on Oracles which have ceased]--“Either I am much deceived, or by your
cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no, very deep
discourse.”  To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied:
“Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of
the verb ------ is spelt with a double A, or that hunt after the
derivation of the comparatives ----- and -----, and the superlatives ----
and ------, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science: but
as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those
that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.”

              “Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro
               Corpore; deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque
               Inde habitum facies.”

     [“You may discern the torments of mind lurking in a sick body; you
     may discern its joys: either expression the face assumes from the
     mind.”--Juvenal, ix. 18]

The soul that lodges philosophy, ought to be of such a constitution of
health, as to render the body in like manner healthful too; she ought to
make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so as to appear without, and
her contentment ought to fashion the outward behaviour to her own mould,
and consequently to fortify it with a graceful confidence, an active and
joyous carriage, and a serene and contented countenance.  The most
manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like
that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
‘Tis Baroco and Baralipton--[Two terms of the ancient scholastic
logic.]--that render their disciples so dirty and ill-favoured, and not
she; they do not so much as know her but by hearsay.  What!  It is she
that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who
teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain
imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons.  She has virtue
for her end, which is not, as the schoolmen say, situate upon the summit
of a perpendicular, rugged, inaccessible precipice: such as have
approached her find her, quite on the contrary, to be seated in a fair,
fruitful, and flourishing plain, whence she easily discovers all things
below; to which place any one may, however, arrive, if he know but the
way, through shady, green, and sweetly-flourishing avenues, by a
pleasant, easy, and smooth descent, like that of the celestial vault.
‘Tis for not having frequented this supreme, this beautiful, triumphant,
and amiable, this equally delicious and courageous virtue, this so
professed and implacable enemy to anxiety, sorrow, fear, and constraint,
who, having nature for her guide, has fortune and pleasure for her
companions, that they have gone, according to their own weak imagination,
and created this ridiculous, this sorrowful, querulous, despiteful,
threatening, terrible image of it to themselves and others, and placed it
upon a rock apart, amongst thorns and brambles, and made of it a
hobgoblin to affright people.

But the governor that I would have, that is such a one as knows it to be
his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection than
reverence to virtue, will be able to inform him, that the poets have
evermore accommodated themselves to the public humour, and make him
sensible, that the gods have planted more toil and sweat in the avenues
of the cabinets of Venus than in those of Minerva.  And when he shall
once find him begin to apprehend, and shall represent to him a Bradamante
or an Angelica--[Heroines of Ariosto.]--for a mistress, a natural,
active, generous, and not a viragoish, but a manly beauty, in comparison
of a soft, delicate, artificial simpering, and affected form; the one in
the habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other
tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then look
upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall choose quite
contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia.

Such a tutor will make a pupil digest this new lesson, that the height
and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure
of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and
the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own; it is by
order, and not by force, that it is to be acquired.  Socrates, her first
minion, is so averse to all manner of violence, as totally to throw it
aside, to slip into the more natural facility of her own progress; ‘tis
the nursing mother of all human pleasures, who in rendering them just,
renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in
breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses,
whets our desire to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal
mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if
not to lassitude: unless we mean to say that the regimen which stops the
toper before he has drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten
to a surfeit, and the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to
pleasure.  If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms
another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other.  She
can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed
beds: she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and
peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good
things, and how to lose them without concern: an office much more noble
than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life is
unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that men may
justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices.

If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition, that he
had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of some noble
expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the beat of drum,
that excites the youthful ardour of his companions, leaves that to follow
another that calls to a morris or the bears; who would not wish, and find
it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat
victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize
of those exercises; I see no other remedy, but that he be bound prentice
in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of
a duke; according to Plato’s precept, that children are to be placed out
and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of
the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own
souls.

Since philosophy is that which instructs us to live, and that infancy has
there its lessons as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to
children betimes?

         “Udum et molle lutum est; nunc, nunc properandus, et acri
          Fingendus sine fine rota.”

     [“The clay is moist and soft: now, now make haste, and form the
     pitcher on the rapid wheel.”--Persius, iii. 23.]

They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living.
A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read
Aristotle’s lecture on temperance.  Cicero said, that though he should
live two men’s ages, he should never find leisure to study the lyric
poets; and I find these sophisters yet more deplorably unprofitable.
The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but
the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the
remainder is due to action.  Let us, therefore, employ that short time in
necessary instruction.  Away with the thorny subtleties of dialectics;
they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be amended: take the
plain philosophical discourses, learn how rightly to choose, and then
rightly to apply them; they are more easy to be understood than one of
Boccaccio’s novels; a child from nurse is much more capable of them, than
of learning to read or to write.  Philosophy has discourses proper for
childhood, as well as for the decrepit age of men.

I am of Plutarch’s mind, that Aristotle did not so much trouble his great
disciple with the knack of forming syllogisms, or with the elements of
geometry; as with infusing into him good precepts concerning valour,
prowess, magnanimity, temperance, and the contempt of fear; and with this
ammunition, sent him, whilst yet a boy, with no more than thirty thousand
foot, four thousand horse, and but forty-two thousand crowns, to
subjugate the empire of the whole earth.  For the other acts and
sciences, he says, Alexander highly indeed commended their excellence and
charm, and had them in very great honour and esteem, but not ravished
with them to that degree as to be tempted to affect the practice of them
In his own person:

              “Petite hinc, juvenesque senesque,
              Finem ammo certum, miserisque viatica canis.”

     [“Young men and old men, derive hence a certain end to the mind,
     and stores for miserable grey hairs.”--Persius, v. 64.]

Epicurus, in the beginning of his letter to Meniceus,--[Diogenes
Laertius, x. 122.]--says, “That neither the youngest should refuse to
philosophise, nor the oldest grow weary of it.”  Who does otherwise,
seems tacitly to imply, that either the time of living happily is
not yet come, or that it is already past.  And yet, a for all that, I
would not have this pupil of ours imprisoned and made a slave to his
book; nor would I have him given up to the morosity and melancholic
humour of a sour ill-natured pedant.

I would not have his spirit cowed and subdued, by applying him to the
rack, and tormenting him, as some do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day,
and so make a pack-horse of him.  Neither should I think it good, when,
by reason of a solitary and melancholic complexion, he is discovered to
be overmuch addicted to his book, to nourish that humour in him; for that
renders him unfit for civil conversation, and diverts him from better
employments.  And how many have I seen in my time totally brutified by an
immoderate thirst after knowledge?  Carneades was so besotted with it,
that he would not find time so much as to comb his head or to pare his
nails.  Neither would I have his generous manners spoiled and corrupted
by the incivility and barbarism of those of another.  The French wisdom
was anciently turned into proverb: “Early, but of no continuance.”  And,
in truth, we yet see, that nothing can be more ingenious and pleasing
than the children of France; but they ordinarily deceive the hope and
expectation that have been conceived of them; and grown up to be men,
have nothing extraordinary or worth taking notice of: I have heard men of
good understanding say, these colleges of ours to which we send our young
people (and of which we have but too many) make them such animals as they
are.--[Hobbes said that if he Had been at college as long as other people
he should have been as great a blockhead as they. W.C.H.] [And Bacon
before Hobbe’s time had discussed the “futility” of university teaching.
D.W.]

But to our little monsieur, a closet, a garden, the table, his bed,
solitude, and company, morning and evening, all hours shall be the same,
and all places to him a study; for philosophy, who, as the formatrix of
judgment and manners, shall be his principal lesson, has that privilege
to have a hand in everything.  The orator Isocrates, being at a feast
entreated to speak of his art, all the company were satisfied with and
commended his answer:  “It is not now a time,” said he, “to do what I can
do; and that which it is now time to do, I cannot do.”--[Plutarch,
Symp., i. I.]--For to make orations and rhetorical disputes in a company
met together to laugh and make good cheer, had been very unreasonable and
improper, and as much might have been said of all the other sciences.
But as to what concerns philosophy, that part of it at least that treats
of man, and of his offices and duties, it has been the common opinion of
all wise men, that, out of respect to the sweetness of her conversation,
she is ever to be admitted in all sports and entertainments.  And Plato,
having invited her to his feast, we see after how gentle and obliging a
manner, accommodated both to time and place, she entertained the company,
though in a discourse of the highest and most important nature:

              “Aeque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus aeque;
               Et, neglecta, aeque pueris senibusque nocebit.”

     [“It profits poor and rich alike, but, neglected, equally hurts old
     and young.”--Horace, Ep., i. 25.]

By this method of instruction, my young pupil will be much more and
better employed than his fellows of the college are.  But as the steps we
take in walking to and fro in a gallery, though three times as many, do
not tire a man so much as those we employ in a formal journey, so our
lesson, as it were accidentally occurring, without any set obligation of
time or place, and falling naturally into every action, will insensibly
insinuate itself.  By which means our very exercises and recreations,
running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, and fencing, will
prove to be a good part of our study.  I would have his outward fashion
and mien, and the disposition of his limbs, formed at the same time with
his mind.  ‘Tis not a soul, ‘tis not a body that we are training up, but
a man, and we ought not to divide him.  And, as Plato says, we are not to
fashion one without the other, but make them draw together like two
horses harnessed to a coach.  By which saying of his, does he not seem to
allow more time for, and to take more care of exercises for the body, and
to hold that the mind, in a good proportion, does her business at the
same time too?

As to the rest, this method of education ought to be carried on with a
severe sweetness, quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who,
instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle
ways, do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules,
horror and cruelty.  Away with this violence!  away with this compulsion!
than which, I certainly believe nothing more dulls and degenerates a
well-descended nature.  If you would have him apprehend shame and
chastisement, do not harden him to them: inure him to heat and cold, to
wind and sun, and to dangers that he ought to despise; wean him from all
effeminacy and delicacy in clothes and lodging, eating and drinking;
accustom him to everything, that he may not be a Sir Paris,
a carpet-knight, but a sinewy, hardy, and vigorous young man.  I have
ever from a child to the age wherein I now am, been of this opinion, and
am still constant to it.  But amongst other things, the strict
government of most of our colleges has evermore displeased me;
peradventure, they might have erred less perniciously on the indulgent
side.  ‘Tis a real house of correction of imprisoned youth.  They are
made debauched by being punished before they are so.  Do but come in
when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the
outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their
pedagogues drunk with fury. A very pretty way this, to tempt these
tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious
countenance, and a rod in hand!  A cursed and pernicious way of
proceeding!  Besides what Quintilian has very well observed, that this
imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences,
and particularly our way of chastising.  How much more decent would it
be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than
with the bloody stumps of birch and willows?  Were it left to my
ordering.  I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and
gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his.
Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too. Such
viands as are proper and wholesome for children, should be sweetened
with sugar, and such as are dangerous to them, embittered with gall.
‘Tis marvellous to see how solicitous Plato is in his Laws concerning
the gaiety and diversion of the youth of his city, and how much and
often he enlarges upon the races, sports, songs, leaps, and dances: of
which, he says, that antiquity has given the ordering and patronage
particularly to the gods themselves, to Apollo, Minerva, and the Muses.
He insists long upon, and is very particular in, giving innumerable
precepts for exercises; but as to the lettered sciences, says very
little, and only seems particularly to recommend poetry upon the account
of music.

All singularity in our manners and conditions is to be avoided, as
inconsistent with civil society.  Who would not be astonished at so
strange a constitution as that of Demophoon, steward to Alexander the
Great, who sweated in the shade and shivered in the sun?  I have seen
those who have run from the smell of a mellow apple with greater
precipitation than from a harquebuss-shot; others afraid of a mouse;
others vomit at the sight of cream; others ready to swoon at the making
of a feather bed; Germanicus could neither endure the sight nor the
crowing of a cock.  I will not deny, but that there may, peradventure,
be some occult cause and natural aversion in these cases; but, in my
opinion, a man might conquer it, if he took it in time.  Precept has in
this wrought so effectually upon me, though not without some pains on my
part, I confess, that beer excepted, my appetite accommodates itself
indifferently to all sorts of diet.  Young bodies are supple; one should,
therefore, in that age bend and ply them to all fashions and customs: and
provided a man can contain the appetite and the will within their due
limits, let a young man, in God’s name, be rendered fit for all nations
and all companies, even to debauchery and excess, if need be; that is,
where he shall do it out of complacency to the customs of the place.
Let him be able to do everything, but love to do nothing but what is
good.  The philosophers themselves do not justify Callisthenes for
forfeiting the favour of his master Alexander the Great, by refusing to
pledge him a cup of wine.  Let him laugh, play, wench with his prince:
nay, I would have him, even in his debauches, too hard for the rest of
the company, and to excel his companions in ability and vigour, and that
he may not give over doing it, either through defect of power or
knowledge how to do it, but for want of will.

     “Multum interest, utrum peccare ali quis nolit, an nesciat.”

     [“There is a vast difference betwixt forbearing to sin, and not
     knowing how to sin.”--Seneca, Ep., 90]

I thought I passed a compliment upon a lord, as free from those excesses
as any man in France, by asking him before a great deal of very good
company, how many times in his life he had been drunk in Germany, in the
time of his being there about his Majesty’s affairs; which he also took
as it was intended, and made answer, “Three times”; and withal told us
the whole story of his debauches.  I know some who, for want of this
faculty, have found a great inconvenience in negotiating with that
nation.  I have often with great admiration reflected upon the wonderful
constitution of Alcibiades, who so easily could transform himself to so
various fashions without any prejudice to his health; one while outdoing
the Persian pomp and luxury, and another, the Lacedaemonian austerity and
frugality; as reformed in Sparta, as voluptuous in Ionia:

          “Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res.”

     [“Every complexion of life, and station, and circumstance became
     Aristippus.”--Horace, Ep., xvii. 23.]

I would have my pupil to be such an one,

                    “Quem duplici panno patentia velat,
               Mirabor, vitae via si conversa decebit,
               Personamque feret non inconcinnus utramque.”

     [“I should admire him who with patience bearing a patched garment,
     bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well.”
      --Horace Ep., xvii. 25.]

These are my lessons, and he who puts them in practice shall reap more
advantage than he who has had them read to him only, and so only knows
them.  If you see him, you hear him; if you hear him, you see him.  God
forbid, says one in Plato, that to philosophise were only to read a great
many books, and to learn the arts.

          “Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam,
          vita magis quam literis, persequuti sunt.”

     [“They have proceeded to this discipline of living well, which of
     all arts is the greatest, by their lives, rather than by their
     reading.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 3.]

Leo, prince of the Phliasians, asking Heraclides Ponticus--[It was not
Heraclides of Pontus who made this answer, but Pythagoras.]--of what art
or science he made profession: “I know,” said he, “neither art nor
science, but I am a philosopher.”  One reproaching Diogenes that, being
ignorant, he should pretend to philosophy; “I therefore,” answered he,
“pretend to it with so much the more reason.”  Hegesias entreated that he
would read a certain book to him: “You are pleasant,” said he; “you
choose those figs that are true and natural, and not those that are
painted; why do you not also choose exercises which are naturally true,
rather than those written?”

The lad will not so much get his lesson by heart as he will practise it:
he will repeat it in his actions.  We shall discover if there be prudence
in his exercises, if there be sincerity and justice in his deportment, if
there be grace and judgment in his speaking; if there be constancy in his
sickness; if there be modesty in his mirth, temperance in his pleasures,
order in his domestic economy, indifference in palate, whether what he
eats or drinks be flesh or fish, wine or water:

     “Qui disciplinam suam non ostentationem scientiae, sed legem vitae
     putet: quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat.”

     [“Who considers his own discipline, not as a vain ostentation of
     science, but as a law and rule of life; and who obeys his own
     decrees, and the laws he has prescribed for himself.”
      --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 4.]

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.  Zeuxidamus,
to one who asked him, why the Lacedaemonians did not commit their
constitutions of chivalry to writing, and deliver them to their young men
to read, made answer, that it was because they would inure them to
action, and not amuse them with words.  With such a one, after fifteen or
sixteen years’ study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has
thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak.  The world is
nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather
prate too much, than speak too little.  And yet half of our age is
embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only,
and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into a
long discourse, divided into four or five parts; and other five years, at
least, to learn succinctly to mix and interweave them after a subtle and
intricate manner let us leave all this to those who make a profession of
it.

Going one day to Orleans, I met in that plain on this side Clery, two
pedants who were travelling towards Bordeaux, about fifty paces distant
from one another; and, a good way further behind them, I discovered a
troop of horse, with a gentleman at the head of them, who was the late
Monsieur le Comte de la Rochefoucauld.  One of my people inquired of the
foremost of these masters of arts, who that gentleman was that came after
him; he, having not seen the train that followed after, and thinking his
companion was meant, pleasantly answered, “He is not a gentleman; he is a
grammarian; and I am a logician.”  Now we who, quite contrary, do not
here pretend to breed a grammarian or a logician, but a gentleman, let us
leave them to abuse their leisure; our business lies elsewhere.  Let but
our pupil be well furnished with things, words will follow but too fast;
he will pull them after him if they do not voluntarily follow.  I have
observed some to make excuses, that they cannot express themselves, and
pretend to have their fancies full of a great many very fine things,
which yet, for want of eloquence, they cannot utter; ‘tis a mere shift,
and nothing else.  Will you know what I think of it?  I think they are
nothing but shadows of some imperfect images and conceptions that they
know not what to make of within, nor consequently bring out; they do not
yet themselves understand what they would be at, and if you but observe
how they haggle and stammer upon the point of parturition, you will soon
conclude, that their labour is not to delivery, but about conception, and
that they are but licking their formless embryo.  For my part, I hold,
and Socrates commands it, that whoever has in his mind a sprightly and
clear imagination, he will express it well enough in one kind of tongue
or another, and, if he be dumb, by signs--

               “Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur;”

     [“Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it
     soon present themselves.” (“The words will not reluctantly follow the
     thing preconceived.”)--Horace, De Arte Poetica. v. 311]

And as another as poetically says in his prose:

          “Quum res animum occupavere, verbs ambiunt,”

     [“When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves
     readily.”  (“When things have taken possession of the mind, the
     words trip.”)--Seneca, Controvers., iii.  proem.]

and this other.

                    “Ipsae res verbs rapiunt.”

     [“The things themselves force the words to express them.”
      --Cicero, De Finib., iii.  5.]

He knows nothing of ablative, conjunctive, substantive, or grammar, no
more than his lackey, or a fishwife of the Petit Pont; and yet these will
give you a bellyful of talk, if you will hear them, and peradventure
shall trip as little in their language as the best masters of art in
France.  He knows no rhetoric, nor how in a preface to bribe the
benevolence of the courteous reader; neither does he care to know it.
Indeed all this fine decoration of painting is easily effaced by the
lustre of a simple and blunt truth; these fine flourishes serve only to
amuse the vulgar, of themselves incapable of more solid and nutritive
diet, as Aper very evidently demonstrates in Tacitus.  The ambassadors
of Samos, prepared with a long and elegant oration, came to Cleomenes,
king of Sparta, to incite him to a war against the tyrant Polycrates;
who, after he had heard their harangue with great gravity and patience,
gave them this answer: “As to the exordium, I remember it not, nor
consequently the middle of your speech; and for what concerns your
conclusion, I will not do what you desire:”--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the
Lacedaemonians.]--a very pretty answer this, methinks, and a pack of
learned orators most sweetly gravelled.  And what did the other man say?
The Athenians were to choose one of two architects for a very great
building they had designed; of these, the first, a pert affected fellow,
offered his service in a long premeditated discourse upon the subject of
the work in hand, and by his oratory inclined the voices of the people in
his favour; but the other in three words: “O Athenians, what this man
says, I will do.”--[Plutarch, Instructions to Statesmen, c. 4.]--
When Cicero was in the height and heat of an eloquent harangue, many were
struck with admiration; but Cato only laughed, saying, “We have a
pleasant (mirth-making) consul.”  Let it go before, or come after, a good
sentence or a thing well said, is always in season; if it neither suit
well with what went before, nor has much coherence with what follows
after, it is good in itself.  I am none of those who think that good
rhyme makes a good poem.  Let him make short long, and long short if he
will, ‘tis no great matter; if there be invention, and that the wit and
judgment have well performed their offices, I will say, here’s a good
poet, but an ill rhymer.

               “Emunctae naris, durus componere versus.”

          [“Of delicate humour, but of rugged versification.”
           --Horace, Sat, iv. 8.]

Let a man, says Horace, divest his work of all method and measure,

         “Tempora certa modosque, et, quod prius ordine verbum est,
          Posterius facias, praeponens ultima primis
          Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetae.”

     [“Take away certain rhythms and measures, and make the word which
     was first in order come later, putting that which should be last
     first, you will still find the scattered remains of the poet.”
      --Horace, Sat., i. 4, 58.]

he will never the more lose himself for that; the very pieces will be
fine by themselves.  Menander’s answer had this meaning, who being
reproved by a friend, the time drawing on at which he had promised a
comedy, that he had not yet fallen in hand with it; “It is made, and
ready,” said he, “all but the verses.”--[Plutarch, Whether the Athenians
more excelled in Arms or in Letters.]--Having contrived the subject, and
disposed the scenes in his fancy, he took little care for the rest.
Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have given reputation to our French poesy,
every little dabbler, for aught I see, swells his words as high, and
makes his cadences very near as harmonious as they:

                    “Plus sonat, quam valet.”

               [“More sound than sense”--Seneca, Ep., 40.]

For the vulgar, there were never so many poetasters as now; but though
they find it no hard matter to imitate their rhyme, they yet fall
infinitely short of imitating the rich descriptions of the one, and the
delicate invention of the other of these masters.

But what will become of our young gentleman, if he be attacked with the
sophistic subtlety of some syllogism?  “A Westfalia ham makes a man
drink; drink quenches thirst: ergo a Westfalia ham quenches thirst.”
 Why, let him laugh at it; it will be more discretion to do so, than to go
about to answer it; or let him borrow this pleasant evasion from
Aristippus:  “Why should I trouble myself to untie that, which bound as
it is, gives me so much trouble?”--[Diogenes Laertius, ii. 70.]--
One offering at this dialectic juggling against Cleanthes, Chrysippus
took him short, saying, “Reserve these baubles to play with children,
and do not by such fooleries divert the serious thoughts of a man of
years.”  If these ridiculous subtleties,

               “Contorta et aculeata sophismata,”

as Cicero calls them, are designed to possess him with an untruth, they
are dangerous; but if they signify no more than only to make him laugh,
I do not see why a man need to be fortified against them.  There are some
so ridiculous, as to go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word:

          “Aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus
          arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant.”

     [“Who do not fit words to the subject, but seek out for things
     quite from the purpose to fit the words.”--Quintilian, viii. 3.]

And as another says,

          “Qui, alicujus verbi decore placentis, vocentur ad id,
          quod non proposuerant scribere.”

     [“Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word, are tempted to
     something they had no intention to treat of.”--Seneca, Ep., 59.]

I for my part rather bring in a fine sentence by head and shoulders to
fit my purpose, than divert my designs to hunt after a sentence.  On the
contrary, words are to serve, and to follow a man’s purpose; and let
Gascon come in play where French will not do.  I would have things so
excelling, and so wholly possessing the imagination of him that hears,
that he should have something else to do, than to think of words.  The
way of speaking that I love, is natural and plain, the same in writing as
in speaking, and a sinewy and muscular way of expressing a man’s self,
short and pithy, not so elegant and artificial as prompt and vehement;

               “Haec demum sapiet dictio, qux feriet;”

     [“That has most weight and wisdom which pierces the ear.” (“That
     utterance indeed will have a taste which shall strike the ear.”)
     --Epitaph on Lucan, in Fabricius, Biblioth.  Lat., ii. 10.]

rather hard than wearisome; free from affectation; irregular,
incontinuous, and bold; where every piece makes up an entire body; not
like a pedant, a preacher, or a pleader, but rather a soldier-like style,
as Suetonius calls that of Julius Caesar; and yet I see no reason why he
should call it so.  I have ever been ready to imitate the negligent garb,
which is yet observable amongst the young men of our time, to wear my
cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking in disorder, which
seems to express a kind of haughty disdain of these exotic ornaments, and
a contempt of the artificial; but I find this negligence of much better
use in the form of speaking.  All affectation, particularly in the French
gaiety and freedom, is ungraceful in a courtier, and in a monarchy every
gentleman ought to be fashioned according to the court model; for which
reason, an easy and natural negligence does well.  I no more like a web
where the knots and seams are to be seen, than a fine figure, so
delicate, that a man may tell all the bones and veins:

     “Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex.”

     [“Let the language that is dedicated to truth be plain and
     unaffected.--Seneca, Ep. 40.]

          “Quis accurat loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?”

     [“For who studies to speak accurately, that does not at the same
     time wish to perplex his auditory?”--Idem, Ep., 75.]

That eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance, that wholly
attracts us to itself.  And as in our outward habit, ‘tis a ridiculous
effeminacy to distinguish ourselves by a particular and unusual garb or
fashion; so in language, to study new phrases, and to affect words that
are not of current use, proceeds from a puerile and scholastic ambition.
May I be bound to speak no other language than what is spoken in the
market-places of Paris!  Aristophanes the grammarian was quite out, when
he reprehended Epicurus for his plain way of delivering himself, and the
design of his oratory, which was only perspicuity of speech.
The imitation of words, by its own facility, immediately disperses itself
through a whole people; but the imitation of inventing and fitly applying
those words is of a slower progress.  The generality of readers, for
having found a like robe, very mistakingly imagine they have the same
body and inside too, whereas force and sinews are never to be borrowed;
the gloss, and outward ornament, that is, words and elocution, may.  Most
of those I converse with, speak the same language I here write; but
whether they think the same thoughts I cannot say.  The Athenians, says
Plato, study fulness and elegancy of speaking; the Lacedaemonians affect
brevity, and those of Crete to aim more at the fecundity of conception
than the fertility of speech; and these are the best.  Zeno used to say
that he had two sorts of disciples, one that he called cy-----ous,
curious to learn things, and these were his favourites; the other,
aoy---ous, that cared for nothing but words.  Not that fine speaking is
not a very good and commendable quality; but not so excellent and so
necessary as some would make it; and I am scandalised that our whole life
should be spent in nothing else.  I would first understand my own
language, and that of my neighbours, with whom most of my business and
conversation lies.

No doubt but Greek and Latin are very great ornaments, and of very great
use, but we buy them too dear.  I will here discover one way, which has
been experimented in my own person, by which they are to be had better
cheap, and such may make use of it as will.  My late father having made
the most precise inquiry that any man could possibly make amongst men of
the greatest learning and judgment, of an exact method of education, was
by them cautioned of this inconvenience then in use, and made to believe,
that the tedious time we applied to the learning of the tongues of them
who had them for nothing, was the sole cause we could not arrive to the
grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge, of the ancient Greeks and
Romans.  I do not, however, believe that to be the only cause.  So it is,
that the expedient my father found out for this was, that in my infancy,
and before I began to speak, he committed me to the care of a German, who
since died a famous physician in France, totally ignorant of our
language, and very fluent and a great critic in Latin.  This man, whom he
had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained with a great
salary for this only one end, had me continually with him; he had with
him also joined two others, of inferior learning, to attend me, and to
relieve him; these spoke to me in no other language but Latin.  As to the
rest of his household, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself,
nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid, should speak anything in my
company, but such Latin words as each one had learned to gabble with me.
--[These passages are, the basis of a small volume by the Abbe Mangin:
“Education de Montaigne; ou, L’Art d’enseigner le Latin a l’instar des
meres latines.”]--It is not to be imagined how great an advantage this
proved to the whole family; my father and my mother by this means learned
Latin enough to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a
degree as was sufficient for any necessary use; as also those of the
servants did who were most frequently with me.  In short, we Latined it
at such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighbouring villages,
where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools.  As for what
concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood either
French or Perigordin, any more than Arabic; and without art, book,
grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense of a tear, I had, by that
time, learned to speak as pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no
means of mixing it up with any other.  If, for example, they were to give
me a theme after the college fashion, they gave it to others in French;
but to me they were to give it in bad Latin, to turn it into that which
was good.  And Nicolas Grouchy, who wrote a book De Comitiis Romanorum;
Guillaume Guerente, who wrote a comment upon Aristotle: George Buchanan,
that great Scottish poet: and Marc Antoine Muret (whom both France and
Italy have acknowledged for the best orator of his time), my domestic
tutors, have all of them often told me that I had in my infancy that
language so very fluent and ready, that they were afraid to enter into
discourse with me.  And particularly Buchanan, whom I since saw attending
the late Mareschal de Brissac, then told me, that he was about to write a
treatise of education, the example of which he intended to take from
mine; for he was then tutor to that Comte de Brissac who afterward proved
so valiant and so brave a gentleman.

As to Greek, of which I have but a mere smattering, my father also
designed to have it taught me by a device, but a new one, and by way of
sport; tossing our declensions to and fro, after the manner of those who,
by certain games of tables, learn geometry and arithmetic.  For he,
amongst other rules, had been advised to make me relish science and duty
by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion, and to educate my
soul in all liberty and delight, without any severity or constraint;
which he was an observer of to such a degree, even of superstition, if I
may say so, that some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the
brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch
them violently--and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more
profoundly involved than we), he caused me to be wakened by the sound of
some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that
purpose.  By this example you may judge of the rest, this alone being
sufficient to recommend both the prudence and the affection of so good a
father, who is not to be blamed if he did not reap fruits answerable to
so exquisite a culture.  Of this, two things were the cause: first, a
sterile and improper soil; for, though I was of a strong and healthful
constitution, and of a disposition tolerably sweet and tractable, yet I
was, withal, so heavy, idle, and indisposed, that they could not rouse me
from my sloth, not even to get me out to play.  What I saw, I saw clearly
enough, and under this heavy complexion nourished a bold imagination and
opinions above my age.  I had a slow wit that would go no faster than it
was led; a tardy understanding, a languishing invention, and above all,
incredible defect of memory; so that, it is no wonder, if from all these
nothing considerable could be extracted.  Secondly, like those who,
impatient of along and steady cure, submit to all sorts of prescriptions
and recipes, the good man being extremely timorous of any way failing in
a thing he had so wholly set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to
be overruled by the common opinions, which always follow their leader as
a flight of cranes, and complying with the method of the time, having no
more those persons he had brought out of Italy, and who had given him the
first model of education, about him, he sent me at six years of age to
the College of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in
France.  And there it was not possible to add anything to the care he had
to provide me the most able tutors, with all other circumstances of
education, reserving also several particular rules contrary to the
college practice; but so it was, that with all these precautions, it was
a college still.  My Latin immediately grew corrupt, of which also by
discontinuance I have since lost all manner of use; so that this new way
of education served me to no other end, than only at my first coming to
prefer me to the first forms; for at thirteen years old, that I came out
of the college, I had run through my whole course (as they call it), and,
in truth, without any manner of advantage, that I can honestly brag of,
in all this time.

The first taste which I had for books came to me from the pleasure in
reading the fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; for, being about seven or
eight years old, I gave up all other diversions to read them, both by
reason that this was my own natural language, the easiest book that I was
acquainted with, and for the subject, the most accommodated to the
capacity of my age: for as for the Lancelot of the Lake, the Amadis of
Gaul, the Huon of Bordeaux, and such farragos, by which children are most
delighted with, I had never so much as heard their names, no more than I
yet know what they contain; so exact was the discipline wherein I was
brought up.  But this was enough to make me neglect the other lessons
that were prescribed me; and here it was infinitely to my advantage,
to have to do with an understanding tutor, who very well knew discreetly
to connive at this and other truantries of the same nature; for by this
means I ran through Virgil’s AEneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus,
and then some Italian comedies, allured by the sweetness of the subject;
whereas had he been so foolish as to have taken me off this diversion,
I do really believe, I had brought away nothing from the college but a
hatred of books, as almost all our young gentlemen do.  But he carried
himself very discreetly in that business, seeming to take no notice, and
allowing me only such time as I could steal from my other regular
studies, which whetted my appetite to devour those books.  For the chief
things my father expected from their endeavours to whom he had delivered
me for education, were affability and good-humour; and, to say the truth,
my manners had no other vice but sloth and want of metal.  The fear was
not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing; nobody
prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless; they foresaw
idleness, but no malice; and I find it falls out accordingly:
The complaints I hear of myself are these: “He is idle, cold in the
offices of friendship and relation, and in those of the public, too
particular, too disdainful.”  But the most injurious do not say, “Why has
he taken such a thing?  Why has he not paid such an one?”  but, “Why does
he part with nothing?  Why does he not give?”  And I should take it for a
favour that men would expect from me no greater effects of supererogation
than these.  But they are unjust to exact from me what I do not owe, far
more rigorously than they require from others that which they do owe.
In condemning me to it, they efface the gratification of the action, and
deprive me of the gratitude that would be my due for it; whereas the
active well-doing ought to be of so much the greater value from my hands,
by how much I have never been passive that way at all.  I can the more
freely dispose of my fortune the more it is mine, and of myself the more
I am my own.  Nevertheless, if I were good at setting out my own actions,
I could, peradventure, very well repel these reproaches, and could give
some to understand, that they are not so much offended, that I do not
enough, as that I am able to do a great deal more than I do.

Yet for all this heavy disposition of mine, my mind, when retired into
itself, was not altogether without strong movements, solid and clear
judgments about those objects it could comprehend, and could also,
without any helps, digest them; but, amongst other things, I do really
believe, it had been totally impossible to have made it to submit by
violence and force.  Shall I here acquaint you with one faculty of my
youth?  I had great assurance of countenance, and flexibility of voice
and gesture, in applying myself to any part I undertook to act: for
before--

          “Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus,”

     [“I had just entered my twelfth year.”--Virgil, Bucol., 39.]

I played the chief parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente,
and Muret, that were presented in our College of Guienne with great
dignity: now Andreas Goveanus, our principal, as in all other parts of
his charge, was, without comparison, the best of that employment in
France; and I was looked upon as one of the best actors.  ‘Tis an
exercise that I do not disapprove in young people of condition; and I
have since seen our princes, after the example of some of the ancients,
in person handsomely and commendably perform these exercises; it was even
allowed to persons of quality to make a profession of it in Greece.

          “Aristoni tragico actori rem aperit: huic et genus et
          fortuna honesta erant: nec ars, quia nihil tale apud
          Graecos pudori est, ea deformabat.”

     [“He imparted this matter to Aristo the tragedian; a man of good
     family and fortune, which neither of them receive any blemish by
     that profession; nothing of this kind being reputed a disparagement
     in Greece.”--Livy, xxiv. 24.]

Nay, I have always taxed those with impertinence who condemn these
entertainments, and with injustice those who refuse to admit such
comedians as are worth seeing into our good towns, and grudge the people
that public diversion.  Well-governed corporations take care to assemble
their citizens, not only to the solemn duties of devotion, but also to
sports and spectacles.  They find society and friendship augmented by it;
and besides, can there possibly be allowed a more orderly and regular
diversion than what is performed m the sight of every one, and very often
in the presence of the supreme magistrate himself?  And I, for my part,
should think it reasonable, that the prince should sometimes gratify his
people at his own expense, out of paternal goodness and affection; and
that in populous cities there should be theatres erected for such
entertainments, if but to divert them from worse and private actions.

To return to my subject, there is nothing like alluring the appetite and
affections; otherwise you make nothing but so many asses laden with
books; by dint of the lash, you give them their pocketful of learning to
keep; whereas, to do well you should not only lodge it with them, but
make them espouse it.




CHAPTER XXVI

THAT IT IS FOLLY TO MEASURE TRUTH AND ERROR BY OUR OWN CAPACITY

‘Tis not, perhaps, without reason, that we attribute facility of belief
and easiness of persuasion to simplicity and ignorance: for I fancy I
have heard belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul,
which by how much softer and of less resistance it is, is the more easy
to be impressed upon.

         “Ut necesse est, lancem in Libra, ponderibus impositis,
          deprimi, sic animum perspicuis cedere.”

     [“As the scale of the balance must give way to the weight that
     presses it down, so the mind yields to demonstration.”
      --Cicero, Acad., ii. 12.]

By how much the soul is more empty and without counterpoise, with so much
greater facility it yields under the weight of the first persuasion.  And
this is the reason that children, the common people, women, and sick
folks, are most apt to be led by the ears.  But then, on the other hand,
‘tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for false
that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as
fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours.  I was myself once one of
those; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies,
enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story I had no mind to believe:

              “Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
               Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala,”

     [“Dreams, magic terrors, marvels, sorceries, Thessalian prodigies.”
      --Horace.  Ep. ii. 3, 208.]

I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies.
Whereas I now find, that I myself was to be pitied as much, at least,
as they; not that experience has taught me anything to alter my former
opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has
instructed me, that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and
impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the
will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my
own capacity, than which no folly can be greater.  If we give the names
of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how
many are continually presented before our eyes?  Let us but consider
through what clouds, and as it were groping in the dark, our teachers
lead us to the knowledge of most of the things about us; assuredly we
shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their
strangeness--

                    “Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi,
               Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;”

     [“Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven’s lucid
     temples.”--Lucretius, ii.  1037.  The text has ‘statiate videnai’]

and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think
them as incredible, if not more, than any others.

              “Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint
               Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente,
               Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,
               Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes.”

     [Lucretius, ii. 1032.  The sense of the passage is in the preceding
     sentence.]

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the
sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we
conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.

              “Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei’st
               Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
               Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
               Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit.”

     [“A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a
     mighty stream; and so with other things--a tree, a man--anything
     appears greatest to him that never knew a greater.”--Idem, vi. 674.]

         “Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur,
          neque requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident.”

     [“Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen; so that
     they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily
     see.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., lib. ii. 38.]

The novelty, rather than the greatness of things, tempts us to inquire
into their causes.  We are to judge with more reverence, and with greater
acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity, of the infinite power
of nature.  How many unlikely things are there testified by people worthy
of faith, which, if we cannot persuade ourselves absolutely to believe,
we ought at least to leave them in suspense; for, to condemn them as
impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost
bounds of possibility.  Did we rightly understand the difference betwixt
the impossible and the unusual, and betwixt that which is contrary to the
order and course of nature and contrary to the common opinion of men, in
not believing rashly, and on the other hand, in not being too
incredulous, we should observe the rule of ‘Ne quid nimis’ enjoined by
Chilo.

When we find in Froissart, that the Comte de Foix  knew in Bearn the
defeat of John, king of Castile, at Jubera the next day after it
happened, and the means by which he tells us he came to do so, we may be
allowed to be a little merry at it, as also at what our annals report,
that Pope Honorius, the same day that King Philip Augustus died at
Mantes, performed his public obsequies at Rome, and commanded the like
throughout Italy, the testimony of these authors not being, perhaps, of
authority enough to restrain us.  But what if Plutarch, besides several
examples that he produces out of antiquity, tells us, he knows of certain
knowledge, that in the time of Domitian, the news of the battle lost by
Antony in Germany was published at Rome, many days’ journey from thence,
and dispersed throughout the whole world, the same day it was fought;
and if Caesar was of opinion, that it has often happened, that the report
has preceded the incident, shall we not say, that these simple people
have suffered themselves to be deceived with the vulgar, for not having
been so clear-sighted as we?  Is there anything more delicate, more
clear, more sprightly; than Pliny’s judgment, when he is pleased to set
it to work?  Anything more remote from vanity?  Setting aside his
learning, of which I make less account, in which of these excellences do
any of us excel him?  And yet there is scarce a young schoolboy that does
not convict him of untruth, and that pretends not to instruct him in the
progress of the works of nature.  When we read in Bouchet the miracles of
St. Hilary’s relics, away with them: his authority is not sufficient to
deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him; but generally and offhand
to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular impudence.  That
great St. Augustin’ testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight
upon the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at Milan; a woman at
Carthage cured of a cancer, by the sign of the cross made upon her by a
woman newly baptized; Hesperius, a familiar friend of his, to have driven
away the spirits that haunted his house, with a little earth of the
sepulchre of our Lord; which earth, being also transported thence into
the church, a paralytic to have there been suddenly cured by it; a woman
in a procession, having touched St. Stephen’s shrine with a nosegay, and
rubbing her eyes with it, to have recovered her sight, lost many years
before; with several other miracles of which he professes himself to have
been an eyewitness: of what shall we excuse him and the two holy bishops,
Aurelius and Maximinus, both of whom he attests to the truth of these
things?  Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and facility; or of malice
and imposture?  Is any man now living so impudent as to think himself
comparable to them in virtue, piety, learning, judgment, or any kind of
perfection?

              “Qui, ut rationem nullam afferrent,
               ipsa auctoritate me frangerent.”


     [“Who, though they should adduce no reason, would convince me with
     their authority alone.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, i. 21.]

‘Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd
temerity it draws after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend.  For
after, according to your fine understanding, you have established the
limits of truth and error, and that, afterwards, there appears a
necessity upon you of believing stranger things than those you have
contradicted, you are already obliged to quit your limits.  Now, that
which seems to me so much to disorder our consciences in the commotions
we are now in concerning religion, is the Catholics dispensing so much
with their belief.  They fancy they appear moderate, and wise, when they
grant to their opponents some of the articles in question; but, besides
that they do not discern what advantage it is to those with whom we
contend, to begin to give ground and to retire, and how much this
animates our enemy to follow his blow: these articles which they select
as things indifferent, are sometimes of very great importance.  We are
either wholly and absolutely to submit ourselves to the authority of our
ecclesiastical polity, or totally throw off all obedience to it: ‘tis not
for us to determine what and how much obedience we owe to it.  And this I
can say, as having myself made trial of it, that having formerly taken
the liberty of my own swing and fancy, and omitted or neglected certain
rules of the discipline of our Church, which seemed to me vain and
strange coming afterwards to discourse of it with learned men, I have
found those same things to be built upon very good and solid ground and
strong foundation; and that nothing but stupidity and ignorance makes us
receive them with less reverence than the rest.  Why do we not consider
what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how many things were
yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables?
Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to
thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything
doubtful and undecided.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A child should not be brought up in his mother’s lap
     Acquiesce and submit to truth
     Affect words that are not of current use
     Anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater
     Appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have
     Applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge
     Attribute facility of belief to simplicity and ignorance
     Away with this violence!  away with this compulsion!
     Bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well
     Belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul
     cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking disordered
     College: a real house of correction of imprisoned youth
     Disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed
     Education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness
     Eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance
     Fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing
     Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul
     Hobbes said that if he had been at college as long as others--
     Inquisitive after everything
     Insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors
     It is no hard matter to get children
     Learn what it is right to wish
     Least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole
     Let him be satisfied with correcting himself
     Let him examine every man’s talent
     Light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years
     Living well, which of all arts is the greatest
     Lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust
     Man may say too much even upon the best subjects
     Miracle: everything our reason cannot comprehend
     Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant
     Mothers are too tender
     Negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men
     Nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless
     Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No!
     O Athenians, what this man says, I will do
     Obstinacy and contention are common qualities
     Occasion to La Boetie to write his “Voluntary Servitude”
      Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood
     Philosophy is that which instructs us to live
     Philosophy looked upon as a vain and fantastic name
     Preface to bribe the benevolence of the courteous reader
     Reading those books, converse with the great and heroic souls
     Silence, therefore, and modesty are very advantageous qualities
     So many trillions of men, buried before us
     Sparing and an husband of his knowledge
     The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine
     The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness
     Their labour is not to delivery, but about conception
     There is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections
     They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living
     Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen
     To condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption
     To contemn what we do not comprehend
     To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word
     To know by rote, is no knowledge
     Tongue will grow too stiff to bend
     Totally brutified by an immoderate thirst after knowledge
     Unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything
     Unjust to exact from me what I do not owe
     Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too
     Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 6.

XXVII.    Of friendship.
XXVIII.   Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de la Boetie.
XXIX.     Of moderation.
XXX.      Of cannibals.
XXXI.     That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances.
XXXII.    That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of life.
XXXIII.   That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of
          reason.
XXXIV.    Of one defect in our government.
XXXV.     Of the custom of wearing clothes.
XXXVI.    Of Cato the Younger.
XXXVII.   That we laugh and cry for the same thing.
XXXVIII.  Of solitude.




CHAPTER XXVII

OF FRIENDSHIP

Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a
mind to imitate his way.  He chooses the fairest place and middle of any
wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his
utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques,
which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive
from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes.  And in truth,
what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous
bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other
than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?

               “Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.”

          [“A fair woman in her upper form terminates in a fish.”
           --Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 4.]

In this second part I go hand in hand with my painter; but fall very
short of him in the first and the better, my power of handling not being
such, that I dare to offer at a rich piece, finely polished, and set off
according to art.  I have therefore thought fit to borrow one of Estienne
de la Boetie, and such a one as shall honour and adorn all the rest of my
work--namely, a discourse that he called ‘Voluntary Servitude’; but,
since, those who did not know him have properly enough called it “Le
contr Un.”  He wrote in his youth,--[“Not being as yet eighteen years
old.”--Edition of 1588.] by way of essay, in honour of liberty against
tyrants; and it has since run through the hands of men of great learning
and judgment, not without singular and merited commendation; for it is
finely written, and as full as anything can possibly be.  And yet one may
confidently say it is far short of what he was able to do; and if in that
more mature age, wherein I had the happiness to know him, he had taken a
design like this of mine, to commit his thoughts to writing, we should
have seen a great many rare things, and such as would have gone very near
to have rivalled the best writings of antiquity: for in natural parts
especially, I know no man comparable to him.  But he has left nothing
behind him, save this treatise only (and that too by chance, for I
believe he never saw it after it first went out of his hands), and some
observations upon that edict of January--[1562, which granted to the
Huguenots the public exercise of their religion.]--made famous by our
civil-wars, which also shall elsewhere, peradventure, find a place.
These were all I could recover of his remains, I to whom with so
affectionate a remembrance, upon his death-bed, he by his last will
bequeathed his library and papers, the little book of his works only
excepted, which I committed to the press.  And this particular obligation
I have to this treatise of his, that it was the occasion of my first
coming acquainted with him; for it was showed to me long before I had the
good fortune to know him; and the first knowledge of his name, proving
the first cause and foundation of a friendship, which we afterwards
improved and maintained, so long as God was pleased to continue us
together, so perfect, inviolate, and entire, that certainly the like is
hardly to be found in story, and amongst the men of this age, there is no
sign nor trace of any such thing in use; so much concurrence is required
to the building of such a one, that ‘tis much, if fortune bring it but
once to pass in three ages.

There is nothing to which nature seems so much to have inclined us, as to
society; and Aristotle , says that the good legislators had more respect
to friendship than to justice.  Now the most supreme point of its
perfection is this: for, generally, all those that pleasure, profit,
public or private interest create and nourish, are so much the less
beautiful and generous, and so much the less friendships, by how much
they mix another cause, and design, and fruit in friendship, than itself.
Neither do the four ancient kinds, natural, social, hospitable, venereal,
either separately or jointly, make up a true and perfect friendship.

That of children to parents is rather respect: friendship is nourished by
communication, which cannot by reason of the great disparity, be betwixt
these, but would rather perhaps offend the duties of nature; for neither
are all the secret thoughts of fathers fit to be communicated to
children, lest it beget an indecent familiarity betwixt them; nor can the
advices and reproofs, which is one of the principal offices of
friendship, be properly performed by the son to the father.  There are
some countries where ‘twas the custom for children to kill their fathers;
and others, where the fathers killed their children, to avoid their being
an impediment one to another in life; and naturally the expectations of
the one depend upon the ruin of the other.  There have been great
philosophers who have made nothing of this tie of nature, as Aristippus
for one, who being pressed home about the affection he owed to his
children, as being come out of him, presently fell to spit, saying, that
this also came out of him, and that we also breed worms and lice; and
that other, that Plutarch endeavoured to reconcile to his brother:
“I make never the more account of him,” said he, “for coming out of the
same hole.”  This name of brother does indeed carry with it a fine and
delectable sound, and for that reason, he and I called one another
brothers but the complication of interests, the division of estates, and
that the wealth of the one should be the property of the other, strangely
relax and weaken the fraternal tie: brothers pursuing their fortune and
advancement by the same path, ‘tis hardly possible but they must of
necessity often jostle and hinder one another.  Besides, why is it
necessary that the correspondence of manners, parts, and inclinations,
which begets the true and perfect friendships, should always meet in
these relations?  The father and the son may be of quite contrary
humours, and so of brothers: he is my son, he is my brother; but he is
passionate, ill-natured, or a fool.  And moreover, by how much these are
friendships that the law and natural obligation impose upon us, so much
less is there of our own choice and voluntary freedom; whereas that
voluntary liberty of ours has no production more promptly and; properly
its own than affection and friendship.  Not that I have not in my own
person experimented all that can possibly be expected of that kind,
having had the best and most indulgent father, even to his extreme old
age, that ever was, and who was himself descended from a family for many
generations famous and exemplary for brotherly concord:

                                   “Et ipse
                    Notus in fratres animi paterni.”

     [“And I myself, known for paternal love toward my brothers.”
      --Horace, Ode, ii. 2, 6.]

We are not here to bring the love we bear to women, though it be an act
of our own choice, into comparison, nor rank it with the others.  The
fire of this, I confess,

                   “Neque enim est dea nescia nostri
                    Qux dulcem curis miscet amaritiem,”

     [“Nor is the goddess unknown to me who mixes a sweet bitterness
     with my love.”---Catullus, lxviii. 17.]

is more active, more eager, and more sharp: but withal, ‘tis more
precipitant, fickle, moving, and inconstant; a fever subject to
intermissions and paroxysms, that has seized but on one part of us.
Whereas in friendship, ‘tis a general and universal fire, but temperate
and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without
poignancy or roughness.  Moreover, in love, ‘tis no other than frantic
desire for that which flies from us:

              “Come segue la lepre il cacciatore
               Al freddo, al caldo, alla montagna, al lito;
               Ne piu l’estima poi the presa vede;
               E sol dietro a chi fugge affretta il piede”

     [“As the hunter pursues the hare, in cold and heat, to the mountain,
     to the shore, nor cares for it farther when he sees it taken, and
     only delights in chasing that which flees from him.”--Aristo, x. 7.]

so soon as it enters unto the terms of friendship, that is to say, into a
concurrence of desires, it vanishes and is gone, fruition destroys it,
as having only a fleshly end, and such a one as is subject to satiety.
Friendship, on the contrary, is enjoyed proportionably as it is desired;
and only grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of
itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by practice.
Under this perfect friendship, the other fleeting affections have in my
younger years found some place in me, to say nothing of him, who himself
so confesses but too much in his verses; so that I had both these
passions, but always so, that I could myself well enough distinguish
them, and never in any degree of comparison with one another; the first
maintaining its flight in so lofty and so brave a place, as with disdain
to look down, and see the other flying at a far humbler pitch below.

As concerning marriage, besides that it is a covenant, the entrance into
which only is free, but the continuance in it forced and compulsory,
having another dependence than that of our own free will, and a bargain
commonly contracted to other ends, there almost always happens a thousand
intricacies in it to unravel, enough to break the thread and to divert
the current of a lively affection: whereas friendship has no manner of
business or traffic with aught but itself.  Moreover, to say truth, the
ordinary talent of women is not such as is sufficient to maintain the
conference and communication required to the support of this sacred tie;
nor do they appear to be endued with constancy of mind, to sustain the
pinch of so hard and durable a knot.  And doubtless, if without this,
there could be such a free and voluntary familiarity contracted, where
not only the souls might have this entire fruition, but the bodies also
might share in the alliance, and a man be engaged throughout, the
friendship would certainly be more full and perfect; but it is without
example that this sex has ever yet arrived at such perfection; and, by
the common consent of the ancient schools, it is wholly rejected from it.

That other Grecian licence is justly abhorred by our manners, which also,
from having, according to their practice, a so necessary disparity of age
and difference of offices betwixt the lovers, answered no more to the
perfect union and harmony that we here require than the other:

         “Quis est enim iste amor amicitiae? cur neque deformem
          adolescentem quisquam amat, neque formosum senem?”

     [“For what is that friendly love? why does no one love a deformed
     youth or a comely old man?”--Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., iv. 33.]

Neither will that very picture that the Academy presents of it, as I
conceive, contradict me, when I say, that this first fury inspired by the
son of Venus into the heart of the lover, upon sight of the flower and
prime of a springing and blossoming youth, to which they allow all the
insolent and passionate efforts that an immoderate ardour can produce,
was simply founded upon external beauty, the false image of corporal
generation; for it could not ground this love upon the soul, the sight of
which as yet lay concealed, was but now springing, and not of maturity to
blossom; that this fury, if it seized upon a low spirit, the means by
which it preferred its suit were rich presents, favour in advancement to
dignities, and such trumpery, which they by no means approve; if on a
more generous soul, the pursuit was suitably generous, by philosophical
instructions, precepts to revere religion, to obey the laws, to die for
the good of one’s country; by examples of valour, prudence, and justice,
the lover studying to render himself acceptable by the grace and beauty
of the soul, that of his body being long since faded and decayed, hoping
by this mental society to establish a more firm and lasting contract.
When this courtship came to effect in due season (for that which they do
not require in the lover, namely, leisure and discretion in his pursuit,
they strictly require in the person loved, forasmuch as he is to judge of
an internal beauty, of difficult knowledge and abstruse discovery), then
there sprung in the person loved the desire of a spiritual conception;
by the mediation of a spiritual beauty.  This was the principal; the
corporeal, an accidental and secondary matter; quite the contrary as to
the lover.  For this reason they prefer the person beloved, maintaining
that the gods in like manner preferred him too, and very much blame the
poet AEschylus for having, in the loves of Achilles and Patroclus, given
the lover’s part to Achilles, who was in the first and beardless flower
of his adolescence, and the handsomest of all the Greeks.  After this
general community, the sovereign, and most worthy part presiding and
governing, and performing its proper offices, they say, that thence great
utility was derived, both by private and public concerns; that it
constituted the force and power of the countries where it prevailed, and
the chiefest security of liberty and justice.  Of which the healthy loves
of Harmodius and Aristogiton are instances.  And therefore it is that
they called it sacred and divine, and conceive that nothing but the
violence of tyrants and the baseness of the common people are inimical to
it.  Finally, all that can be said in favour of the Academy is, that it
was a love which ended in friendship, which well enough agrees with the
Stoical definition of love:

              “Amorem conatum esse amicitiae faciendae
               ex pulchritudinis specie.”

     [“Love is a desire of contracting friendship arising from the beauty
     of the object.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., vi. 34.]

I return to my own more just and true description:

          “Omnino amicitiae, corroboratis jam confirmatisque,
          et ingeniis, et aetatibus, judicandae sunt.”

     [“Those are only to be reputed friendships that are fortified and
     confirmed by judgement and the length of time.”
      --Cicero, De Amicit., c. 20.]

For the rest, what we commonly call friends and friendships, are nothing
but acquaintance and familiarities, either occasionally contracted, or
upon some design, by means of which there happens some little intercourse
betwixt our souls.  But in the friendship I speak of, they mix and work
themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no
more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined.  If a man
should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no
otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because
it was I.  There is, beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what
inexplicable and fated power that brought on this union.  We sought one
another long before we met, and by the characters we heard of one
another, which wrought upon our affections more than, in reason, mere
reports should do; I think ‘twas by some secret appointment of heaven.
We embraced in our names; and at our first meeting, which was
accidentally at a great city entertainment, we found ourselves so
mutually taken with one another, so acquainted, and so endeared betwixt
ourselves, that from thenceforward nothing was so near to us as one
another.  He wrote an excellent Latin satire, since printed, wherein he
excuses the precipitation of our intelligence, so suddenly come to
perfection, saying, that destined to have so short a continuance, as
begun so late (for we were both full-grown men, and he some years the
older), there was no time to lose, nor were we tied to conform to the
example of those slow and regular friendships, that require so many
precautions of long preliminary conversation: This has no other idea than
that of itself, and can only refer to itself: this is no one special
consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; ‘tis I know
not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will,
carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his
whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge
and lose itself in mine.  I may truly say lose, reserving nothing to
ourselves that was either his or mine.--[All this relates to Estienne de
la Boetie.]

When Laelius,--[Cicero, De Amicit., c. II.]--in the presence of the
Roman consuls, who after thay had sentenced Tiberius Gracchus, prosecuted
all those who had had any familiarity with him also; came to ask Caius
Blosius, who was his chiefest friend, how much he would have done for
him, and that he made answer:  “All things.”--“How!  All things!”  said
Laelius.  “And what if he had commanded you to fire our temples?”--“He
would never have commanded me that,” replied Blosius.--“But what if he
had?” said Laelius.--“I would have obeyed him,” said the other.  If he
was so perfect a friend to Gracchus as the histories report him to have
been, there was yet no necessity of offending the consuls by such a bold
confession, though he might still have retained the assurance he had of
Gracchus’ disposition.  However, those who accuse this answer as
seditious, do not well understand the mystery; nor presuppose, as it was
true, that he had Gracchus’ will in his sleeve, both by the power of a
friend, and the perfect knowledge he had of the man: they were more
friends than citizens, more friends to one another than either enemies or
friends to their country, or than friends to ambition and innovation;
having absolutely given up themselves to one another, either held
absolutely the reins of the other’s inclination; and suppose all this
guided by virtue, and all this by the conduct of reason, which also
without these it had not been possible to do, Blosius’ answer was such as
it ought to be.  If any of their actions flew out of the handle, they
were neither (according to my measure of friendship) friends to one
another, nor to themselves.  As to the rest, this answer carries no worse
sound, than mine would do to one that should ask me: “If your will should
command you to kill your daughter, would you do it?” and that I should
make answer, that I would; for this expresses no consent to such an act,
forasmuch as I do not in the least suspect my own will, and as little
that of such a friend.  ‘Tis not in the power of all the eloquence in the
world, to dispossess me of the certainty I have of the intentions and
resolutions of my friend; nay, no one action of his, what face soever it
might bear, could be presented to me, of which I could not presently,
and at first sight, find out the moving cause.  Our souls had drawn so
unanimously together, they had considered each other with so ardent an
affection, and with the like affection laid open the very bottom of our
hearts to one another’s view, that I not only knew his as well as my own;
but should certainly in any concern of mine have trusted my interest much
more willingly with him, than with myself.

Let no one, therefore, rank other common friendships with such a one as
this.  I have had as much experience of these as another, and of the most
perfect of their kind: but I do not advise that any should confound the
rules of the one and the other, for they would find themselves much
deceived.  In those other ordinary friendships, you are to walk with
bridle in your hand, with prudence and circumspection, for in them the
knot is not so sure that a man may not half suspect it will slip.  “Love
him,” said Chilo,--[Aulus Gellius, i. 3.]--“so as if you were one day to
hate him; and hate him so as you were one day to love him.”  This
precept, though abominable in the sovereign and perfect friendship I
speak of, is nevertheless very sound as to the practice of the ordinary
and customary ones, and to which the saying that Aristotle had so
frequent in his mouth, “O my friends, there is no friend,” may very fitly
be applied.  In this noble commerce, good offices, presents, and
benefits, by which other friendships are supported and maintained, do not
deserve so much as to be mentioned; and the reason is the concurrence of
our wills; for, as the kindness I have for myself receives no increase,
for anything I relieve myself withal in time of need (whatever the Stoics
say), and as I do not find myself obliged to myself for any service I do
myself: so the union of such friends, being truly perfect, deprives them
of all idea of such duties, and makes them loathe and banish from their
conversation these words of division and distinction, benefits,
obligation, acknowledgment, entreaty, thanks, and the like.  All things,
wills, thoughts, opinions, goods, wives, children, honours, and lives,
being in effect common betwixt them, and that absolute concurrence of
affections being no other than one soul in two bodies (according to that
very proper definition of Aristotle), they can neither lend nor give
anything to one another.  This is the reason why the lawgivers, to honour
marriage with some resemblance of this divine alliance, interdict all
gifts betwixt man and wife; inferring by that, that all should belong to
each of them, and that they have nothing to divide or to give to each
other.

If, in the friendship of which I speak, one could give to the other, the
receiver of the benefit would be the man that obliged his friend; for
each of them contending and above all things studying how to be useful to
the other, he that administers the occasion is the liberal man, in giving
his friend the satisfaction of doing that towards him which above all
things he most desires.  When the philosopher Diogenes wanted money, he
used to say, that he redemanded it of his friends, not that he demanded
it.  And to let you see the practical working of this, I will here
produce an ancient and singular example.  Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had
two friends, Charixenus a Sicyonian and Areteus a Corinthian; this man
coming to die, being poor, and his two friends rich, he made his will
after this manner.  “I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother,
to support and provide for her in her old age; and to Charixenus I
bequeath the care of marrying my daughter, and to give her as good a
portion as he is able; and in case one of these chance to die, I hereby
substitute the survivor in his place.”  They who first saw this will made
themselves very merry at the contents: but the legatees, being made
acquainted with it, accepted it with very great content; and one of them,
Charixenus, dying within five days after, and by that means the charge of
both duties devolving solely on him, Areteus nurtured the old woman with
very great care and tenderness, and of five talents he had in estate, he
gave two and a half in marriage with an only daughter he had of his own,
and two and a half in marriage with the daughter of Eudamidas, and on one
and the same day solemnised both their nuptials.

This example is very full, if one thing were not to be objected, namely
the multitude of friends for the perfect friendship I speak of is
indivisible; each one gives himself so entirely to his friend, that he
has nothing left to distribute to others: on the contrary, is sorry that
he is not double, treble, or quadruple, and that he has not many souls
and many wills, to confer them all upon this one object.  Common
friendships will admit of division; one may love the beauty of this
person, the good-humour of that, the liberality of a third, the paternal
affection of a fourth, the fraternal love of a fifth, and so of the rest:
but this friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and
sways with an absolute sovereignty, cannot possibly admit of a rival.
If two at the same time should call to you for succour, to which of them
would you run?  Should they require of you contrary offices, how could
you serve them both?  Should one commit a thing to your silence that it
were of importance to the other to know, how would you disengage
yourself?  A unique and particular friendship dissolves all other
obligations whatsoever: the secret I have sworn not to reveal to any
other, I may without perjury communicate to him who is not another, but
myself.  ‘Tis miracle enough certainly, for a man to double himself, and
those that talk of tripling, talk they know not of what.  Nothing is
extreme, that has its like; and he who shall suppose, that of two, I love
one as much as the other, that they mutually love one another too, and
love me as much as I love them, multiplies into a confraternity the most
single of units, and whereof, moreover, one alone is the hardest thing in
the world to find.  The rest of this story suits very well with what I
was saying; for Eudamidas, as a bounty and favour, bequeaths to his
friends a legacy of employing themselves in his necessity; he leaves them
heirs to this liberality of his, which consists in giving them the
opportunity of conferring a benefit upon him; and doubtless, the force of
friendship is more eminently apparent in this act of his, than in that of
Areteus.  In short, these are effects not to be imagined nor comprehended
by such as have not experience of them, and which make me infinitely
honour and admire the answer of that young soldier to Cyrus, by whom
being asked how much he would take for a horse, with which he had won the
prize of a race, and whether he would exchange him for a kingdom?
--“No, truly, sir,” said he, “but I would give him with all my heart,
to get thereby a true friend, could I find out any man worthy of that
alliance.”--[Xenophon, Cyropadia, viii.  3.]--He did not say ill in
saying, “could I find”: for though one may almost everywhere meet with
men sufficiently qualified for a superficial acquaintance, yet in this,
where a man is to deal from the very bottom of his heart, without any
manner of reservation, it will be requisite that all the wards and
springs be truly wrought and perfectly sure.

In confederations that hold but by one end, we are only to provide
against the imperfections that particularly concern that end.  It can be
of no importance to me of what religion my physician or my lawyer is;
this consideration has nothing in common with the offices of friendship
which they owe me; and I am of the same indifference in the domestic
acquaintance my servants must necessarily contract with me.  I never
inquire, when I am to take a footman, if he be chaste, but if he be
diligent; and am not solicitous if my muleteer be given to gaming, as if
he be strong and able; or if my cook be a swearer, if he be a good cook.
I do not take upon me to direct what other men should do in the
government of their families, there are plenty that meddle enough with
that, but only give an account of my method in my own:

          “Mihi sic usus est: tibi, ut opus est facto, face.”

     [“This has been my way; as for you, do as you find needful.
     --“Terence, Heaut., i. I., 28.]

For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and
the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness; in common discourse the ablest
speaker, whether or no there be sincerity in the case.  And, as he that
was found astride upon a hobby-horse, playing with his children,
entreated the person who had surprised him in that posture to say nothing
of it till himself came to be a father,--[Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus,
c.  9.]--supposing that the fondness that would then possess his own
soul, would render him a fairer judge of such an action; so I, also,
could wish to speak to such as have had experience of what I say: though,
knowing how remote a thing such a friendship is from the common practice,
and how rarely it is to be found, I despair of meeting with any such
judge.  For even these discourses left us by antiquity upon this subject,
seem to me flat and poor, in comparison of the sense I have of it, and in
this particular, the effects surpass even the precepts of philosophy.

               “Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico.”

     [“While I have sense left to me, there will never be anything more
     acceptable to me than an agreeable friend.”
      --Horace, Sat., i. 5, 44.]

The ancient Menander declared him to be happy that had had the good
fortune to meet with but the shadow of a friend: and doubtless he had
good reason to say so, especially if he spoke by experience: for in good
earnest, if I compare all the rest of my life, though, thanks be to God,
I have passed my time pleasantly enough, and at my ease, and the loss of
such a friend excepted, free from any grievous affliction, and in great
tranquillity of mind, having been contented with my natural and original
commodities, without being solicitous after others; if I should compare
it all, I say, with the four years I had the happiness to enjoy the sweet
society of this excellent man, ‘tis nothing but smoke, an obscure and
tedious night.  From the day that I lost him:

                              “Quern semper acerbum,
               Semper honoratum (sic, di, voluistis) habebo,”

     [“A day for me ever sad, for ever sacred, so have you willed ye
     gods.”--AEneid, v. 49.]

I have only led a languishing life; and the very pleasures that present
themselves to me, instead of administering anything of consolation,
double my affliction for his loss.  We were halves throughout, and to
that degree, that methinks, by outliving him, I defraud him of his part.

              “Nec fas esse ulla me voluptate hic frui
               Decrevi, tantisper dum ille abest meus particeps.”

     [“I have determined that it will never be right for me to enjoy any
     pleasure, so long as he, with whom I shared all pleasures is away.”
      --Terence, Heaut., i. I. 97.]

I was so grown and accustomed to be always his double in all places and
in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself:

              “Illam meae si partem anima tulit
               Maturior vis, quid moror altera?
                    Nec carus aeque, nec superstes
                    Integer?  Ille dies utramque
               Duxit ruinam.”

     [“If that half of my soul were snatch away from me by an untimely
     stroke, why should the other stay?  That which remains will not be
     equally dear, will not be whole: the same day will involve the
     destruction of both.”]

     or:

     [“If a superior force has taken that part of my soul, why do I, the
     remaining one, linger behind?  What is left is not so dear, nor an
     entire thing: this day has wrought the destruction of both.”
      --Horace, Ode, ii. 17, 5.]

There is no action or imagination of mine wherein I do not miss him; as I
know that he would have missed me: for as he surpassed me by infinite
degrees in virtue and all other accomplishments, so he also did in the
duties of friendship:

              “Quis desiderio sit pudor, aut modus
               Tam cari capitis?”

     [“What shame can there, or measure, in lamenting so dear a friend?”
      --Horace, Ode, i. 24, I.]

              “O misero frater adempte mihi!
               Omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra,
               Quae tuus in vita dulcis alebat amor.
               Tu mea, tu moriens fregisti commoda, frater;
               Tecum una tota est nostra sepulta anima
               Cujus ego interitu tota de menthe fugavi
               Haec studia, atque omnes delicias animi.
               Alloquar?  audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem?
               Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior
               Aspiciam posthac; at certe semper amabo;”

     [“O brother, taken from me miserable!  with thee, all our joys have
     vanished, those joys which, in thy life, thy dear love nourished.
     Dying, thou, my brother, hast destroyed all my happiness.  My whole
     soul is buried with thee.  Through whose death I have banished from
     my mind these studies, and all the delights of the mind.  Shall I
     address thee?  I shall never hear thy voice.  Never shall I behold
     thee hereafter.  O brother, dearer to me than life.  Nought remains,
     but assuredly I shall ever love thee.”--Catullus, lxviii.  20; lxv.]

But let us hear a boy of sixteen speak:

     --[In Cotton’s translation the work referred to is “those Memoirs
     upon the famous edict of January,” of which mention has already been
     made in the present edition.  The edition of 1580, however, and the
     Variorum edition of 1872-1900, indicate no particular work; but the
     edition of 1580 has it “this boy of eighteen years” (which was the
     age at which La Boetie wrote his “Servitude Volontaire”), speaks of
     “a boy of sixteen” as occurring only in the common editions, and it
     would seem tolerably clear that this more important work was, in
     fact, the production to which Montaigne refers, and that the proper
     reading of the text should be “sixteen years.”  What “this boy
     spoke” is not given by Montaigne, for the reason stated in the next
     following paragraph.]

“Because I have found that that work has been since brought out, and with
a mischievous design, by those who aim at disturbing and changing the
condition of our government, without troubling themselves to think
whether they are likely to improve it: and because they have mixed up his
work with some of their own performance, I have refrained from inserting
it here.  But that the memory of the author may not be injured, nor
suffer with such as could not come near-hand to be acquainted with his
principles, I here give them to understand, that it was written by him in
his boyhood, and that by way of exercise only, as a common theme that has
been hackneyed by a thousand writers.  I make no question but that he
himself believed what he wrote, being so conscientious that he would not
so much as lie in jest: and I moreover know, that could it have been in
his own choice, he had rather have been born at Venice, than at Sarlac;
and with reason.  But he had another maxim sovereignty imprinted in his
soul, very religiously to obey and submit to the laws under which he was
born.  There never was a better citizen, more affectionate to his
country; nor a greater enemy to all the commotions and innovations of his
time: so that he would much rather have employed his talent to the
extinguishing of those civil flames, than have added any fuel to them;
he had a mind fashioned to the model of better ages.  Now, in exchange of
this serious piece, I will present you with another of a more gay and
frolic air, from the same hand, and written at the same age.”




CHAPTER XXVIII.

NINE AND TWENTY SONNETS OF ESTIENNE DE LA BOITIE

TO MADAME DE GRAMMONT, COMTESSE DE GUISSEN.

     [They scarce contain anything but amorous complaints, expressed in a
     very rough style, discovering the follies and outrages of a restless
     passion, overgorged, as it were, with jealousies, fears and
     suspicions.--Coste.]

     [These....contained in the edition of 1588 nine-and-twenty sonnets
     of La Boetie, accompanied by a dedicatory epistle to Madame de
     Grammont.  The former, which are referred to at the end of Chap.
     XXVIL, do not really belong to the book, and are of very slight
     interest at this time; the epistle is transferred to the
     Correspondence.  The sonnets, with the letter, were presumably sent
     some time after Letters V. et seq.  Montaigne seems to have had
     several copies written out to forward to friends or acquaintances.]




CHAPTER XXIX.

OF MODERATION

As if we had an infectious touch, we, by our manner of handling, corrupt
things that in themselves are laudable and good: we may grasp virtue so
that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it too stringently and with too
violent a desire.  Those who say, there is never any excess in virtue,
forasmuch as it is not virtue when it once becomes excess, only play upon
words:

              “Insani sapiens nomen ferat, aequus iniqui,
               Ultra quam satis est, virtutem si petat ipsam.”

     [“Let the wise man bear the name of a madman, the just one of an
     unjust, if he seek wisdom more than is sufficient.”
      --Horace, Ep., i. 6, 15.]

     [“The wise man is no longer wise, the just man no longer just, if he
     seek to carry his love for wisdom or virtue beyond that which is
     necessary.”]

This is a subtle consideration of philosophy.  A man may both be too much
in love with virtue, and be excessive in a just action.  Holy Writ agrees
with this, Be not wiser than you should, but be soberly wise.--[St.
Paul, Epistle to the Romans, xii. 3.]--I have known a great man,

     --[“It is likely that Montaigne meant Henry III., king of France.
     The Cardinal d’Ossat, writing to Louise, the queen-dowager, told
     her, in his frank manner, that he had lived as much or more like a
     monk than a monarch (Letter XXIII.) And Pope Sextus V., speaking of
     that prince one day to the Cardinal de Joyeuse, protector of the
     affairs of France, said to him pleasantly, ‘There is nothing that
     your king hath not done, and does not do so still, to be a monk, nor
     anything that I have not done, not to be a monk.’”--Coste.]

prejudice the opinion men had of his devotion, by pretending to be devout
beyond all examples of others of his condition.  I love temperate and
moderate natures.  An immoderate zeal, even to that which is good, even
though it does not offend, astonishes me, and puts me to study what name
to give it.  Neither the mother of Pausanias,

     --[“Montaigne would here give us to understand, upon the authority of
     Diodorus Siculus, that Pausanias’ mother gave the first hint of the
     punishment that was to be inflicted on her son.  ‘Pausanias,’ says
     this historian, ‘perceiving that the ephori, and some other
     Lacedoemonians, aimed at apprehending him, got the start of them,
     and went and took sanctuary m Minerva’s temple: and the
     Lacedaemonians, being doubtful whether they ought to take him from
     thence in violation of the franchise there, it is said that his own
     mother came herself to the temple but spoke nothing nor did anything
     more than lay a piece of brick, which she brought with her, on the
     threshold of the temple, which, when she had done, she returned
     home.  The Lacedaemonians, taking the hint from the mother, caused
     the gate of the temple to be walled up, and by this means starved
     Pausanias, so that he died with hunger, &c. (lib. xi. cap. 10., of
     Amyot’s translation).  The name of Pausanias’ mother was Alcithea,
     as we are informed by Thucydides’ scholiast, who only says that it
     was reported, that when they set about walling up the gates of the
     chapel in which Pausanias had taken refuge, his mother Alcithea laid
     the first stone.”--Coste.]

who was the first instructor of her son’s process, and threw the first
stone towards his death, nor Posthumius the dictator, who put his son to
death, whom the ardour of youth had successfully pushed upon the enemy a
little more advanced than the rest of his squadron, do appear to me so
much just as strange; and I should neither advise nor like to follow so
savage a virtue, and that costs so dear.

     --[“Opinions differ as to the truth of this fact.  Livy thinks he
     has good authority for rejecting it because it does not appear in
     history that Posthumious was branded with it, as Titus Manlius was,
     about 100 years after his time; for Manlius, having put his son to
     death for the like cause, obtained the odious name of Imperiosus,
     and since that time Manliana imperia has been used as a term to
     signify orders that are too severe; Manliana Imperia, says Livy,
     were not only horrible for the time present, but of a bad example to
     posterity.  And this historian makes no doubt but such commands
     would have been actually styled Posthumiana Imperia, if Posthumius
     had been the first who set so barbarous an example (Livy, lib. iv.
     cap. 29, and lib. viii. cap. 7).  But, however, Montaigne has Valer.
     Maximus on his side, who says expressly, that Posthumius caused his
     son to be put to death, and Diodorus of Sicily (lib.  xii.  cap.
     19).”--Coste.]

The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short, and
‘tis equally troublesome to my sight, to look up at a great light, and
to look down into a dark abyss.  Callicles in Plato says, that the
extremity of philosophy is hurtful, and advises not to dive into it
beyond the limits of profit; that, taken moderately, it is pleasant and
useful; but that in the end it renders a man brutish and vicious, a
contemner of religion and the common laws, an enemy to civil
conversation, and all human pleasures, incapable of all public
administration, unfit either to assist others or to relieve himself, and
a fit object for all sorts of injuries and affronts.  He says true; for
in its excess, it enslaves our natural freedom, and by an impertinent
subtlety, leads us out of the fair and beaten way that nature has traced
for us.

The love we bear to our wives is very lawful, and yet theology thinks fit
to curb and restrain it.  As I remember, I have read in one place of St.
Thomas Aquinas,--[Secunda Secundx, Quaest. 154, art. 9.]--where he
condemns marriages within any of the forbidden degrees, for this reason,
amongst others, that there is some danger, lest the friendship a man
bears to such a woman, should be immoderate; for if the conjugal
affection be full and perfect betwixt them, as it ought to be, and that
it be over and above surcharged with that of kindred too, there is no
doubt, but such an addition will carry the husband beyond the bounds of
reason.

Those sciences that regulate the manners of men, divinity and philosophy,
will have their say in everything; there is no action so private and
secret that can escape their inspection and jurisdiction.  They are best
taught who are best able to control and curb their own liberty; women
expose their nudities as much as you will upon the account of pleasure,
though in the necessities of physic they are altogether as shy.  I will,
therefore, in their behalf:

     --[Coste translates this: “on the part of philosophy and theology,”
      observing that but few wives would think themselves obliged to
     Montaigne for any such lesson to their husbands.]--

teach the husbands, that is, such as are too vehement in the exercise of
the matrimonial duty--if such there still be--this lesson, that the very
pleasures they enjoy in the society of their wives are reproachable if
immoderate, and that a licentious and riotous abuse of them is a fault as
reprovable here as in illicit connections.  Those immodest and debauched
tricks and postures, that the first ardour suggests to us in this affair,
are not only indecently but detrimentally practised upon our wives.  Let
them at least learn impudence from another hand; they are ever ready
enough for our business, and I for my part always went the plain way to
work.

Marriage is a solemn and religious tie, and therefore the pleasure we
extract from it should be a sober and serious delight, and mixed with a
certain kind of gravity; it should be a sort of discreet and
conscientious pleasure.  And seeing that the chief end of it is
generation, some make a question, whether when men are out of hopes as
when they are superannuated or already with child, it be lawful to
embrace our wives.  ‘Tis homicide, according to Plato.--[Laws, 8.]--
Certain nations (the Mohammedan, amongst others) abominate all conjunction
with women with child, others also, with those who are in their courses.
Zenobia would never admit her husband for more than one encounter, after
which she left him to his own swing for the whole time of her conception,
and not till after that would again receive him:--[Trebellius Pollio,
Triginta Tyran., c. 30.]--a brave and generous example of conjugal
continence.  It was doubtless from some lascivious poet,--[The lascivious
poet is Homer; see his Iliad, xiv.  294.]--and one that himself was in
great distress for a little of this sport, that Plato borrowed this
story; that Jupiter was one day so hot upon his wife, that not having so
much patience as till she could get to the couch, he threw her upon the
floor, where the vehemence of pleasure made him forget the great and
important resolutions he had but newly taken with the rest of the gods in
his celestial council, and to brag that he had had as good a bout, as
when he got her maidenhead, unknown to their parents.

The kings of Persia were wont to invite their wives to the beginning of
their festivals; but when the wine began to work in good earnest, and
that they were to give the reins to pleasure, they sent them back to
their private apartments, that they might not participate in their
immoderate lust, sending for other women in their stead, with whom they
were not obliged to so great a decorum of respect.--[Plutarch, Precepts
of Marriage, c.  14.]--All pleasures and all sorts of gratifications
are not properly and fitly conferred upon all sorts of persons.
Epaminondas had committed to prison a young man for certain debauches;
for whom Pelopidas mediated, that at his request he might be set at
liberty, which Epaminondas denied to him, but granted it at the first
word to a wench of his, that made the same intercession; saying, that it
was a gratification fit for such a one as she, but not for a captain.
Sophocles being joint praetor with Pericles, seeing accidentally a fine
boy pass by: “O what a charming boy is that!” said he.  “That might be
very well,” answered Pericles, “for any other than a praetor, who ought
not only to have his hands, but his eyes, too, chaste.”--[Cicero, De
Offic., i. 40.]  AElius Verus, the emperor, answered his wife, who
reproached him with his love to other women, that he did it upon a
conscientious account, forasmuch as marriage was a name of honour and
dignity, not of wanton and lascivious desire; and our ecclesiastical
history preserves the memory of that woman in great veneration, who
parted from her husband because she would not comply with his indecent
and inordinate desires.  In fine, there is no pleasure so just and
lawful, where intemperance and excess are not to be condemned.

But, to speak the truth, is not man a most miserable creature the while?
It is scarce, by his natural condition, in his power to taste one
pleasure pure and entire; and yet must he be contriving doctrines and
precepts to curtail that little he has; he is not yet wretched enough,
unless by art and study he augment his own misery:

               “Fortunae miseras auximus arte vias.”

     [“We artificially augment the wretchedness of fortune.”
      --Properitius, lib. iii. 7, 44.]

Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent, when she exercises it in
rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are
naturally our due, as she employs it favourably and well in artificially
disguising and tricking out the ills of life, to alleviate the sense of
them.  Had I ruled the roast, I should have taken another and more
natural course, which, to say the truth, is both commodious and holy, and
should, peradventure, have been able to have limited it too;
notwithstanding that both our spiritual and corporal physicians, as by
compact betwixt themselves, can find no other way to cure, nor other
remedy for the infirmities of the body and the soul, than by misery and
pain.  To this end, watchings, fastings, hair-shirts, remote and solitary
banishments, perpetual imprisonments, whips and other afflictions, have
been introduced amongst men: but so, that they should carry a sting with
them, and be real afflictions indeed; and not fall out as it once did to
one Gallio, who having been sent an exile into the isle of Lesbos, news
was not long after brought to Rome, that he there lived as merry as the
day was long; and that what had been enjoined him for a penance, turned
to his pleasure and satisfaction: whereupon the Senate thought fit to
recall him home to his wife and family, and confine him to his own house,
to accommodate their punishment to his feeling and apprehension.  For to
him whom fasting would make more healthful and more sprightly, and to him
to whose palate fish were more acceptable than flesh, the prescription of
these would have no curative effect; no more than in the other sort of
physic, where drugs have no effect upon him who swallows them with
appetite and pleasure: the bitterness of the potion and the abhorrence of
the patient are necessary circumstances to the operation.  The nature
that would eat rhubarb like buttered turnips, would frustrate the use and
virtue of it; it must be something to trouble and disturb the stomach,
that must purge and cure it; and here the common rule, that things are
cured by their contraries, fails; for in this one ill is cured by
another.

This belief a little resembles that other so ancient one, of thinking to
gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder: an opinion
universally once received in all religions.  And still, in these later
times wherein our fathers lived, Amurath at the taking of the Isthmus,
immolated six hundred young Greeks to his father’s soul, in the nature of
a propitiatory sacrifice for his sins.  And in those new countries
discovered in this age of ours, which are pure and virgin yet, in
comparison of ours, this practice is in some measure everywhere received:
all their idols reek with human blood, not without various examples of
horrid cruelty: some they burn alive, and take, half broiled, off the
coals to tear out their hearts and entrails; some, even women, they flay
alive, and with their bloody skins clothe and disguise others.  Neither
are we without great examples of constancy and resolution in this affair
the poor souls that are to be sacrificed, old men, women, and children,
themselves going about some days before to beg alms for the offering of
their sacrifice, presenting themselves to the slaughter, singing and
dancing with the spectators.

The ambassadors of the king of Mexico, setting out to Fernando Cortez the
power and greatness of their master, after having told him, that he had
thirty vassals, of whom each was able to raise an hundred thousand
fighting men, and that he kept his court in the fairest and best
fortified city under the sun, added at last, that he was obliged yearly
to offer to the gods fifty thousand men.  And it is affirmed, that he
maintained a continual war, with some potent neighbouring nations, not
only to keep the young men in exercise, but principally to have
wherewithal to furnish his sacrifices with his prisoners of war.  At a
certain town in another place, for the welcome of the said Cortez, they
sacrificed fifty men at once.  I will tell you this one tale more, and I
have done; some of these people being beaten by him, sent to acknowledge
him, and to treat with him of a peace, whose messengers carried him three
sorts of gifts, which they presented in these terms: “Behold, lord, here
are five slaves: if thou art a furious god that feedeth upon flesh and
blood, eat these, and we will bring thee more; if thou art an affable
god, behold here incense and feathers; but if thou art a man, take these
fowls and these fruits that we have brought thee.”




CHAPTER XXX

OF CANNIBALS

When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order
of the army the Romans sent out to meet him; “I know not,” said he,
“what kind of barbarians” (for so the Greeks called all other nations)
“these may be; but the disposition of this army that I see has nothing of
barbarism in it.”--[Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, c. 8.]--As much said the
Greeks of that which Flaminius brought into their country; and Philip,
beholding from an eminence the order and distribution of the Roman camp
formed in his kingdom by Publius Sulpicius Galba, spake to the same
effect.  By which it appears how cautious men ought to be of taking
things upon trust from vulgar opinion, and that we are to judge by the
eye of reason, and not from common report.

I long had a man in my house that lived ten or twelve years in the New
World, discovered in these latter days, and in that part of it where
Villegaignon landed,--[At Brazil, in 1557.]--which he called Antarctic
France.  This discovery of so vast a country seems to be of very great
consideration.  I cannot be sure, that hereafter there may not be
another, so many wiser men than we having been deceived in this.  I am
afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more
curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.

Plato brings in Solon,--[In Timaeus.]--telling a story that he had
heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt, that of old, and before the
Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly at the
mouth of the straits of Gibraltar, which contained more countries than
both Africa and Asia put together; and that the kings of that country,
who not only possessed that Isle, but extended their dominion so far into
the continent that they had a country of Africa as far as Egypt, and
extending in Europe to Tuscany, attempted to encroach even upon Asia, and
to subjugate all the nations that border upon the Mediterranean Sea, as
far as the Black Sea; and to that effect overran all Spain, the Gauls,
and Italy, so far as to penetrate into Greece, where the Athenians
stopped them: but that some time after, both the Athenians, and they and
their island, were swallowed by the Flood.

It is very likely that this extreme irruption and inundation of water
made wonderful changes and alterations in the habitations of the earth,
as ‘tis said that the sea then divided Sicily from Italy--

         “Haec loca, vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina,
          Dissiluisse ferunt, quum protenus utraque tellus
          Una foret”

     [“These lands, they say, formerly with violence and vast desolation
     convulsed, burst asunder, where erewhile were.”--AEneid, iii. 414.]

Cyprus from Syria, the isle of Negropont from the continent of Beeotia,
and elsewhere united lands that were separate before, by filling up the
channel betwixt them with sand and mud:

              “Sterilisque diu palus, aptaque remis,
               Vicinas urbes alit, et grave sentit aratrum.”

     [“That which was once a sterile marsh, and bore vessels on its
     bosom, now feeds neighbouring cities, and admits the plough.”
      --Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 65.]

But there is no great appearance that this isle was this New World so
lately discovered: for that almost touched upon Spain, and it were an
incredible effect of an inundation, to have tumbled back so prodigious a
mass, above twelve hundred leagues: besides that our modern navigators
have already almost discovered it to be no island, but terra firma, and
continent with the East Indies on the one side, and with the lands under
the two poles on the other side; or, if it be separate from them, it is
by so narrow a strait and channel, that it none the more deserves the
name of an island for that.

It should seem, that in this great body, there are two sorts of motions,
the one natural and the other febrific, as there are in ours.  When I
consider the impression that our river of Dordogne has made in my time on
the right bank of its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so
much, and undermined the foundations of so many houses, I perceive it to
be an extraordinary agitation: for had it always followed this course,
or were hereafter to do it, the aspect of the world would be totally
changed.  But rivers alter their course, sometimes beating against the
one side, and sometimes the other, and some times quietly keeping the
channel.  I do not speak of sudden inundations, the causes of which
everybody understands.  In Medoc, by the seashore, the Sieur d’Arsac, my
brother, sees an estate he had there, buried under the sands which the
sea vomits before it: where the tops of some houses are yet to be seen,
and where his rents and domains are converted into pitiful barren
pasturage.  The inhabitants of this place affirm, that of late years the
sea has driven so vehemently upon them, that they have lost above four
leagues of land.  These sands are her harbingers: and we now see great
heaps of moving sand, that march half a league before her, and occupy the
land.

The other testimony from antiquity, to which some would apply this
discovery of the New World, is in Aristotle; at least, if that little
book of Unheard of Miracles be his--[one of the spurious publications
brought out under his name--D.W.].  He there tells us, that certain
Carthaginians, having crossed the Atlantic Sea without the Straits of
Gibraltar, and sailed a very long time, discovered at last a great and
fruitful island, all covered over with wood, and watered with several
broad and deep rivers, far remote from all terra firma; and that they,
and others after them, allured by the goodness and fertility of the soil,
went thither with their wives and children, and began to plant a colony.
But the senate of Carthage perceiving their people by little and little
to diminish, issued out an express prohibition, that none, upon pain of
death, should transport themselves thither; and also drove out these new
inhabitants; fearing, ‘tis said, lest’ in process of time they should so
multiply as to supplant themselves and ruin their state.  But this
relation of Aristotle no more agrees with our new-found lands than the
other.

This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more
likely to tell truth: for your better-bred sort of men are much more
curious in their observation, ‘tis true, and discover a great deal more;
but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they
deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter
the story; they never represent things to you simply as they are, but
rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to
you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgment, and the better to
induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something
more than is really true, of their own invention.  Now in this case, we
should either have a man of irreproachable veracity, or so simple that he
has not wherewithal to contrive, and to give a colour of truth to false
relations, and who can have no ends in forging an untruth.  Such a one
was mine; and besides, he has at divers times brought to me several
seamen and merchants who at the same time went the same voyage.  I shall
therefore content myself with his information, without inquiring what the
cosmographers say to the business.  We should have topographers to trace
out to us the particular places where they have been; but for having had
this advantage over us, to have seen the Holy Land, they would have the
privilege, forsooth, to tell us stories of all the other parts of the
world beside.  I would have every one write what he knows, and as much as
he knows, but no more; and that not in this only but in all other
subjects; for such a person may have some particular knowledge and
experience of the nature of such a river, or such a fountain, who, as to
other things, knows no more than what everybody does, and yet to give a
currency to his little pittance of learning, will undertake to write the
whole body of physics: a vice from which great inconveniences derive
their original.

Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and
savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that
every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use
in his own country.  As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and
reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place
wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect
government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things.
They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which
nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in
truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed
by our artifice and diverted from the common order.  In those, the
genuine, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and
sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating
them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate.  And yet for all this,
our taste confesses a flavour and delicacy excellent even to emulation of
the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound
without art or culture.  Neither is it reasonable that art should gain
the pre-eminence of our great and powerful mother nature.  We have so
surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to
the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have
almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own
purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our
vain and frivolous attempts:

              “Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius;
               Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris;
               Et volucres nulls dulcius arte canunt.”

     [“The ivy grows best spontaneously, the arbutus best in shady caves;
     and the wild notes of birds are sweeter than art can teach.
     --“Propertius, i. 2, 10.]

Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of
the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much
as the web of a poor spider.

All things, says Plato,--[Laws, 10.]--are produced either by nature, by
fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the
other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the last.

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received
but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and
consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity.  The
laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with
any mixture of ours: but ‘tis in such purity, that I am sometimes
troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they
were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more
able to judge of them than we are.  I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato
had no knowledge of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in
those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the
poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a
happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire
of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by
experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination,
nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained
with so little artifice and human patchwork.  I should tell Plato that it
is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of
letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political
superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no
successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of
leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture,
no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying,
treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard
of.

     --[This is the famous passage which Shakespeare, through Florio’s
     version, 1603, or ed.  1613, p. 102, has employed in the “Tempest,”
      ii. 1.]

How much would he find his imaginary Republic short of his perfection?

                    “Viri a diis recentes.”

          [“Men fresh from the gods.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]

               “Hos natura modos primum dedit.”

          [“These were the manners first taught by nature.”
           --Virgil, Georgics, ii. 20.]

As to the rest, they live in a country very pleasant and temperate, so
that, as my witnesses inform me, ‘tis rare to hear of a sick person, and
they moreover assure me, that they never saw any of the natives, either
paralytic, bleareyed, toothless, or crooked with age.  The situation of
their country is along the sea-shore, enclosed on the other side towards
the land, with great and high mountains, having about a hundred leagues
in breadth between.  They have great store of fish and flesh, that have
no resemblance to those of ours: which they eat without any other
cookery, than plain boiling, roasting, and broiling.  The first that rode
a horse thither, though in several other voyages he had contracted an
acquaintance and familiarity with them, put them into so terrible a
fright, with his centaur appearance, that they killed him with their
arrows before they could come to discover who he was.  Their buildings
are very long, and of capacity to hold two or three hundred people, made
of the barks of tall trees, reared with one end upon the ground, and
leaning to and supporting one another at the top, like some of our barns,
of which the covering hangs down to the very ground, and serves for the
side walls. They have wood so hard, that they cut with it, and make their
swords of it, and their grills of it to broil their meat.  Their beds are
of cotton, hung swinging from the roof, like our seamen’s hammocks, every
man his own, for the wives lie apart from their husbands.  They rise with
the sun, and so soon as they are up, eat for all day, for they have no
more meals but that; they do not then drink, as Suidas reports of some
other people of the East that never drank at their meals; but drink very
often all day after, and sometimes to a rousing pitch.  Their drink is
made of a certain root, and is of the colour of our claret, and they
never drink it but lukewarm.  It will not keep above two or three days;
it has a somewhat sharp, brisk taste, is nothing heady, but very
comfortable to the stomach; laxative to strangers, but a very pleasant
beverage to such as are accustomed to it.  They make use, instead of
bread, of a certain white compound, like coriander seeds; I have tasted
of it; the taste is sweet and a little flat.  The whole day is spent in
dancing.  Their young men go a-hunting after wild beasts with bows and
arrows; one part of their women are employed in preparing their drink the
while, which is their chief employment.  One of their old men, in the
morning before they fall to eating, preaches to the whole family, walking
from the one end of the house to the other, and several times repeating
the same sentence, till he has finished the round, for their houses are
at least a hundred yards long.  Valour towards their enemies and love
towards their wives, are the two heads of his discourse, never failing in
the close, to put them in mind, that ‘tis their wives who provide them
their drink warm and well seasoned.  The fashion of their beds, ropes,
swords, and of the wooden bracelets they tie about their wrists, when
they go to fight, and of the great canes, bored hollow at one end, by the
sound of which they keep the cadence of their dances, are to be seen in
several places, and amongst others, at my house.  They shave all over,
and much more neatly than we, without other razor than one of wood or
stone.  They believe in the immortality of the soul, and that those who
have merited well of the gods are lodged in that part of heaven where the
sun rises, and the accursed in the west.

They have I know not what kind of priests and prophets, who very rarely
present themselves to the people, having their abode in the mountains.
At their arrival, there is a great feast, and solemn assembly of many
villages: each house, as I have described, makes a village, and they are
about a French league distant from one another.  This prophet declaims to
them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty: but all their
ethics are comprised in these two articles, resolution in war, and
affection to their wives.  He also prophesies to them events to come, and
the issues they are to expect from their enterprises, and prompts them to
or diverts them from war: but let him look to’t; for if he fail in his
divination, and anything happen otherwise than he has foretold, he is cut
into a thousand pieces, if he be caught, and condemned for a false
prophet: for that reason, if any of them has been mistaken, he is no more
heard of.

Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a
punishable imposture.  Amongst the Scythians, where their diviners failed
in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts
loaded with firs and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned
to death.--[Herodotus, iv.  69.]--Such as only meddle with things
subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best
they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances
of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to
be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and
for the temerity of their imposture?

They have continual war with the nations that live further within the
mainland, beyond their mountains, to which they go naked, and without
other arms than their bows and wooden swords, fashioned at one end like
the head of our javelins.  The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful,
and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running
away, they know not what it is.  Every one for a trophy brings home the
head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his
house.  After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and
given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner
belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends.  They being come, he
ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance,
out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend
he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being.
done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with
their swords.  After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send
some chops to their absent friends.  They do not do this, as some think,
for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation
of an extreme revenge; as will appear by this: that having observed the
Portuguese, who were in league with their enemies, to inflict another
sort of death upon any of them they took prisoners, which was to set them
up to the girdle in the earth, to shoot at the remaining part till it was
stuck full of arrows, and then to hang them, they thought those people of
the other world (as being men who had sown the knowledge of a great many
vices amongst their neighbours, and who were much greater masters in all
sorts of mischief than they) did not exercise this sort of revenge
without a meaning, and that it must needs be more painful than theirs,
they began to leave their old way, and to follow this.  I am not sorry
that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an
action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so
blind to our own.  I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man
alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks
and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in
causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not
only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies,
but among neighbours and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under
colour of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is
dead.

Chrysippus and Zeno, the two heads of the Stoic sect, were of opinion
that there was no hurt in making use of our dead carcasses, in what way
soever for our necessity, and in feeding upon them too;--[Diogenes
Laertius, vii.  188.]--as our own ancestors, who being besieged by
Caesar in the city Alexia, resolved to sustain the famine of the siege
with the bodies of their old men, women, and other persons who were
incapable of bearing arms.

              “Vascones, ut fama est, alimentis talibus usi
               Produxere animas.”

     [“‘Tis said the Gascons with such meats appeased their hunger.”
      --Juvenal, Sat., xv. 93.]

And the physicians make no bones of employing it to all sorts of use,
either to apply it outwardly; or to give it inwardly for the health of
the patient.  But there never was any opinion so irregular, as to excuse
treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our familiar
vices.  We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules
of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity
exceed them.  Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as
much excuse and fair pretence, as that human malady is capable of; having
with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valour.  Their
disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already
possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or
concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no
need to enlarge their borders.  And they are, moreover, happy in this,
that they only covet so much as their natural necessities require: all
beyond that is superfluous to them: men of the same age call one another
generally brothers, those who are younger, children; and the old men are
fathers to all.  These leave to their heirs in common the full possession
of goods, without any manner of division, or other title than what nature
bestows upon her creatures, in bringing them into the world.  If their
neighbours pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a victory,
all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having
proved themselves the better in valour and virtue: for they never meddle
with the goods of the conquered, but presently return into their own
country, where they have no want of anything necessary, nor of this
greatest of all goods, to know happily how to enjoy their condition and
to be content.  And those in turn do the same; they demand of their
prisoners no other ransom, than acknowledgment that they are overcome:
but there is not one found in an age, who will not rather choose to die
than make such a confession, or either by word or look recede from the
entire grandeur of an invincible courage.  There is not a man amongst
them who had not rather be killed and eaten, than so much as to open his
mouth to entreat he may not.  They use them with all liberality and
freedom, to the end their lives may be so much the dearer to them; but
frequently entertain them with menaces of their approaching death, of the
torments they are to suffer, of the preparations making in order to it,
of the mangling their limbs, and of the feast that is to be made, where
their carcass is to be the only dish.  All which they do, to no other
end, but only to extort some gentle or submissive word from them, or to
frighten them so as to make them run away, to obtain this advantage that
they were terrified, and that their constancy was shaken; and indeed, if
rightly taken, it is in this point only that a true victory consists:

                              “Victoria nulla est,
          Quam quae confessor animo quoque subjugat hostes.”

     [“No victory is complete, which the conquered do not admit to be
     so.--“Claudius, De Sexto Consulatu Honorii, v. 248.]

The Hungarians, a very warlike people, never pretend further than to
reduce the enemy to their discretion; for having forced this confession
from them, they let them go without injury or ransom, excepting, at the
most, to make them engage their word never to bear arms against them
again.  We have sufficient advantages over our enemies that are borrowed
and not truly our own; it is the quality of a porter, and no effect of
virtue, to have stronger arms and legs; it is a dead and corporeal
quality to set in array; ‘tis a turn of fortune to make our enemy
stumble, or to dazzle him with the light of the sun; ‘tis a trick of
science and art, and that may happen in a mean base fellow, to be a good
fencer.  The estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the
will: there his true honour lies.  Valour is stability, not of legs and
arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the goodness of
our horse or our arms but in our own.  He that falls obstinate in his
courage--

                    “Si succiderit, de genu pugnat”

          [“If his legs fail him, he fights on his knees.”
           --Seneca, De Providentia, c. 2.]

--he who, for any danger of imminent death, abates nothing of his
assurance; who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful
look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered;
the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate.  There are defeats
more triumphant than victories.  Never could those four sister victories,
the fairest the sun ever be held, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and
Sicily, venture to oppose all their united glories, to the single glory
of the discomfiture of King Leonidas and his men, at the pass of
Thermopylae.  Who ever ran with a more glorious desire and greater
ambition, to the winning, than Captain Iscolas to the certain loss of a
battle?--[Diodorus Siculus, xv.  64.]--Who could have found out a more
subtle invention to secure his safety, than he did to assure his
destruction?  He was set to defend a certain pass of Peloponnesus against
the Arcadians, which, considering the nature of the place and the
inequality of forces, finding it utterly impossible for him to do, and
seeing that all who were presented to the enemy, must certainly be left
upon the place; and on the other side, reputing it unworthy of his own
virtue and magnanimity and of the Lacedaemonian name to fail in any part
of his duty, he chose a mean betwixt these two extremes after this
manner; the youngest and most active of his men, he preserved for the
service and defence of their country, and sent them back; and with the
rest, whose loss would be of less consideration, he resolved to make good
the pass, and with the death of them, to make the enemy buy their entry
as dear as possibly he could; as it fell out, for being presently
environed on all sides by the Arcadians, after having made a great
slaughter of the enemy, he and his were all cut in pieces.  Is there any
trophy dedicated to the conquerors which was not much more due to these
who were overcome?  The part that true conquering is to play, lies in the
encounter, not in the coming off; and the honour of valour consists in
fighting, not in subduing.

But to return to my story: these prisoners are so far from discovering
the least weakness, for all the terrors that can be represented to them,
that, on the contrary, during the two or three months they are kept, they
always appear with a cheerful countenance; importune their masters to
make haste to bring them to the test, defy, rail at them, and reproach
them with cowardice, and the number of battles they have lost against
those of their country.  I have a song made by one of these prisoners,
wherein he bids them “come all, and dine upon him, and welcome, for they
shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has
served to feed and nourish him.  These muscles,” says he, “this flesh and
these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little think
that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is here yet; notice what you
eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh:” in which song
there is to be observed an invention that nothing relishes of the
barbarian.  Those that paint these people dying after this manner,
represent the prisoner spitting in the faces of his executioners and
making wry mouths at them.  And ‘tis most certain, that to the very last
gasp, they never cease to brave and defy them both in word and gesture.
In plain truth, these men are very savage in comparison of us; of
necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for
there is a vast difference betwixt their manners and ours.

The men there have several wives, and so much the greater number, by how
much they have the greater reputation for valour.  And it is one very
remarkable feature in their marriages, that the same jealousy our wives
have to hinder and divert us from the friendship and familiarity of other
women, those employ to promote their husbands’ desires, and to procure
them many spouses; for being above all things solicitous of their
husbands’ honour, ‘tis their chiefest care to seek out, and to bring in
the most companions they can, forasmuch as it is a testimony of the
husband’s virtue.  Most of our ladies will cry out, that ‘tis monstrous;
whereas in truth it is not so, but a truly matrimonial virtue, and of the
highest form.  In the Bible, Sarah, with Leah and Rachel, the two wives
of Jacob, gave the most beautiful of their handmaids to their husbands;
Livia preferred the passions of Augustus to her own interest;
--[Suetonius, Life of Augustus, c. 71.]--and the wife of King Deiotarus,
Stratonice, did not only give up a fair young maid that served her to her
husband’s embraces, but moreover carefully brought up the children he had
by her, and assisted them in the succession to their father’s crown.

And that it may not be supposed, that all this is done by a simple and
servile obligation to their common practice, or by any authoritative
impression of their ancient custom, without judgment or reasoning, and
from having a soul so stupid that it cannot contrive what else to do, I
must here give you some touches of their sufficiency in point of
understanding.  Besides what I repeated to you before, which was one of
their songs of war, I have another, a love-song, that begins thus:

     “Stay, adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the
     fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved,
     by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales
     shall for ever be preferred before all other serpents.”

Wherein the first couplet, “Stay, adder,” &c., makes the burden of the
song.  Now I have conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much that
not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover,
that it is perfectly Anacreontic.  To which it may be added, that their
language is soft, of a pleasing accent, and something bordering upon the
Greek termination.

Three of these people, not foreseeing how dear their knowledge of the
corruptions of this part of the world will one day cost their happiness
and repose, and that the effect of this commerce will be their ruin, as I
presuppose it is in a very fair way (miserable men to suffer themselves
to be deluded with desire of novelty and to have left the serenity of
their own heaven to come so far to gaze at ours!), were at Rouen at the
time that the late King Charles IX. was there.  The king himself talked
to them a good while, and they were made to see our fashions, our pomp,
and the form of a great city.  After which, some one asked their opinion,
and would know of them, what of all the things they had seen, they found
most to be admired?  To which they made answer, three things, of which I
have forgotten the third, and am troubled at it, but two I yet remember.
They said, that in the first place they thought it very strange that so
many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well armed, who were about the
king (‘tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should submit to obey
a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves
to command.  Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to
call men the half of one another), that they had observed that there were
amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst,
in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and
half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that
these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and
injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set
fire to their houses.

I talked to one of them a great while together, but I had so ill an
interpreter, and one who was so perplexed by his own ignorance to
apprehend my meaning, that I could get nothing out of him of any moment:
Asking him what advantage he reaped from the superiority he had amongst
his own people (for he was a captain, and our mariners called him king),
he told me, to march at the head of them to war.  Demanding of him
further how many men he had to follow him, he showed me a space of
ground, to signify as many as could march in such a compass, which might
be four or five thousand men; and putting the question to him whether or
no his authority expired with the war, he told me this remained: that
when he went to visit the villages of his dependence, they planed him
paths through the thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his
ease.  All this does not sound very ill, and the last was not at all
amiss, for they wear no breeches.




CHAPTER XXXI

THAT A MAN IS SOBERLY TO JUDGE OF THE DIVINE ORDINANCES

The true field and subject of imposture are things unknown, forasmuch as,
in the first place, their very strangeness lends them credit, and
moreover, by not being subjected to our ordinary reasons, they deprive us
of the means to question and dispute them: For which reason, says Plato,
--[In Critias.]--it is much more easy to satisfy the hearers, when
speaking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men, because the
ignorance of the auditory affords a fair and large career and all manner
of liberty in the handling of abstruse things.  Thence it comes to pass,
that nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people
so confident, as those who entertain us with fables, such as your
alchemists, judicial astrologers, fortune-tellers, and physicians,

                         “Id genus omne.”

          [“All that sort of people.”--Horace, Sat., i. 2, 2.]

To which I would willingly, if I durst, join a pack of people that take
upon them to interpret and control the designs of God Himself, pretending
to find out the cause of every accident, and to pry into the secrets of
the divine will, there to discover the incomprehensible motive, of His
works; and although the variety, and the continual discordance of events,
throw them from corner to corner, and toss them from east to west, yet do
they still persist in their vain inquisition, and with the same pencil to
paint black and white.

In a nation of the Indies, there is this commendable custom, that when
anything befalls them amiss in any encounter or battle, they publicly ask
pardon of the sun, who is their god, as having committed an unjust
action, always imputing their good or evil fortune to the divine justice,
and to that submitting their own judgment and reason.  ‘Tis enough for a
Christian to believe that all things come from God, to receive them with
acknowledgment of His divine and inscrutable wisdom, and also thankfully
to accept and receive them, with what face soever they may present
themselves.  But I do not approve of what I see in use, that is, to seek
to affirm and support our religion by the prosperity of our enterprises.
Our belief has other foundation enough, without going about to authorise
it by events: for the people being accustomed to such plausible arguments
as these and so proper to their taste, it is to be feared, lest when they
fail of success they should also stagger in their faith: as in the war
wherein we are now engaged upon the account of religion, those who had
the better in the business of Rochelabeille,--[May 1569.]--making great
brags of that success as an infallible approbation of their cause, when
they came afterwards to excuse their misfortunes of Moncontour and
Jarnac, by saying they were fatherly scourges and corrections that they
had not a people wholly at their mercy, they make it manifestly enough
appear, what it is to take two sorts of grist out of the same sack, and
with the same mouth to blow hot and cold.  It were better to possess the
vulgar with the solid and real foundations of truth.  ‘Twas a fine naval
battle that was gained under the command of Don John of Austria a few
months since--[That of Lepanto, October 7, 1571.]--against the Turks;
but it has also pleased God at other times to let us see as great
victories at our own expense.  In fine, ‘tis a hard matter to reduce
divine things to our balance, without waste and losing a great deal of
the weight.  And who would take upon him to give a reason that Arius and
his Pope Leo, the principal heads of the Arian heresy, should die, at
several times, of so like and strange deaths (for being withdrawn from
the disputation by a griping in the bowels, they both of them suddenly
gave up the ghost upon the stool), and would aggravate this divine
vengeance by the circumstances of the place, might as well add the death
of Heliogabalus, who was also slain in a house of office.  And, indeed,
Irenaeus was involved in the same fortune.  God, being pleased to show
us, that the good have something else to hope for and the wicked
something else to fear, than the fortunes or misfortunes of this world,
manages and applies these according to His own occult will and pleasure,
and deprives us of the means foolishly to make thereof our own profit.
And those people abuse themselves who will pretend to dive into these
mysteries by the strength of human reason.  They never give one hit that
they do not receive two for it; of which St. Augustine makes out a great
proof upon his adversaries.  ‘Tis a conflict that is more decided by
strength of memory than by the force of reason.  We are to content
ourselves with the light it pleases the sun to communicate to us, by
virtue of his rays; and who will lift up his eyes to take in a greater,
let him not think it strange, if for the reward of his presumption, he
there lose his sight.

               “Quis hominum potest scire consilium Dei?
               Aut quis poterit cogitare quid velit Dominus?”

     [“Who of men can know the counsel of God? or who can think what the
     will of the Lord is.”--Book of Wisdom, ix. 13.]




CHAPTER XXXII

THAT WE ARE TO AVOID PLEASURES, EVEN AT THE EXPENSE OF LIFE

I had long ago observed most of the opinions of the ancients to concur in
this, that it is high time to die when there is more ill than good in
living, and that to preserve life to our own torment and inconvenience is
contrary to the very rules of nature, as these old laws instruct us.

     [“Either tranquil life, or happy death.  It is well to die when life
     is wearisome.  It is better to die than to live miserable.”
      --Stobaeus, Serm. xx.]

But to push this contempt of death so far as to employ it to the removing
our thoughts from the honours, riches, dignities, and other favours and
goods, as we call them, of fortune, as if reason were not sufficient to
persuade us to avoid them, without adding this new injunction, I had
never seen it either commanded or practised, till this passage of Seneca
fell into my hands; who advising Lucilius, a man of great power and
authority about the emperor, to alter his voluptuous and magnificent way
of living, and to retire himself from this worldly vanity and ambition,
to some solitary, quiet, and philosophical life, and the other alleging
some difficulties: “I am of opinion,” says he, “either that thou leave
that life of thine, or life itself; I would, indeed, advise thee to the
gentle way, and to untie, rather than to break, the knot thou hast
indiscreetly knit, provided, that if it be not otherwise to be untied,
thou resolutely break it.  There is no man so great a coward, that had
not rather once fall than to be always falling.”  I should have found
this counsel conformable enough to the Stoical roughness: but it appears
the more strange, for being borrowed from Epicurus, who writes the same
thing upon the like occasion to Idomeneus.  And I think I have observed
something like it, but with Christian moderation, amongst our own people.

St. Hilary, Bishop of Poictiers, that famous enemy of the Arian heresy,
being in Syria, had intelligence thither sent him, that Abra, his only
daughter, whom he left at home under the eye and tuition of her mother,
was sought in marriage by the greatest noblemen of the country, as being
a virgin virtuously brought up, fair, rich, and in the flower of her age;
whereupon he wrote to her (as appears upon record), that she should
remove her affection from all the pleasures and advantages proposed to
her; for that he had in his travels found out a much greater and more
worthy fortune for her, a husband of much greater power and magnificence,
who would present her with robes and jewels of inestimable value; wherein
his design was to dispossess her of the appetite and use of worldly
delights, to join her wholly to God; but the nearest and most certain way
to this, being, as he conceived, the death of his daughter; he never
ceased, by vows, prayers, and orisons, to beg of the Almighty, that He
would please to call her out of this world, and to take her to Himself;
as accordingly it came to pass; for soon after his return, she died, at
which he expressed a singular joy.  This seems to outdo the other,
forasmuch as he applies himself to this means at the outset, which they
only take subsidiarily; and, besides, it was towards his only daughter.
But I will not omit the latter end of this story, though it be for my
purpose; St. Hilary’s wife, having understood from him how the death of
their daughter was brought about by his desire and design, and how much
happier she was to be removed out of this world than to have stayed in
it, conceived so vivid an apprehension of the eternal and heavenly
beatitude, that she begged of her husband, with the extremest
importunity, to do as much for her; and God, at their joint request,
shortly after calling her to Him, it was a death embraced with singular
and mutual content.




CHAPTER XXXIII

THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES OBSERVED TO ACT BY THE RULE OF REASON

The inconstancy and various motions of Fortune

     [The term Fortune, so often employed by Montaigne, and in passages
     where he might have used Providence, was censured by the doctors who
     examined his Essays when he was at Rome in 1581.  See his Travels,
     i. 35 and 76.]

may reasonably make us expect she should present us with all sorts of
faces.  Can there be a more express act of justice than this?  The Duc de
Valentinois,--[Caesar Borgia.]--having resolved to poison Adrian,
Cardinal of Corneto, with whom Pope Alexander VI., his father and
himself, were to sup in the Vatican, he sent before a bottle of poisoned
wine, and withal, strict order to the butler to keep it very safe.
The Pope being come before his son, and calling for drink, the butler
supposing this wine had not been so strictly recommended to his care,
but only upon the account of its excellency, presented it forthwith to
the Pope, and the duke himself coming in presently after, and being
confident they had not meddled with his bottle, took also his cup; so
that the father died immediately upon the spot--[Other historians assign
the Pope several days of misery prior to death.  D.W.]--, and the son,
after having been long tormented with sickness, was reserved to another
and a worse fortune.

Sometimes she seems to play upon us, just in the nick of an affair;
Monsieur d’Estrees, at that time ensign to Monsieur de Vendome, and
Monsieur de Licques, lieutenant in the company of the Duc d’Ascot, being
both pretenders to the Sieur de Fougueselles’ sister, though of several
parties (as it oft falls out amongst frontier neighbours), the Sieur de
Licques carried her; but on the same day he was married, and which was
worse, before he went to bed to his wife, the bridegroom having a mind to
break a lance in honour of his new bride, went out to skirmish near St.
Omer, where the Sieur d’Estrees proving the stronger, took him prisoner,
and the more to illustrate his victory, the lady was fain--

              “Conjugis ante coacta novi dimittere collum,
               Quam veniens una atque altera rursus hyems
               Noctibus in longis avidum saturasset amorem,”

     [“Compelled to abstain from embracing her new spouse in her arms
     before two winters pass in succession, during their long nights had
     satiated her eager love.”--Catullus, lxviii.  81.]

--to request him of courtesy, to deliver up his prisoner to her, as he
accordingly did, the gentlemen of France never denying anything to
ladies.

Does she not seem to be an artist here?  Constantine, son of Helena,
founded the empire of Constantinople, and so many ages after,
Constantine, the son of Helen, put an end to it.  Sometimes she is
pleased to emulate our miracles we are told, that King Clovis besieging
Angouleme, the walls fell down of themselves by divine favour and Bouchet
has it from some author, that King Robert having sat down before a city,
and being stolen away from the siege to go keep the feast of St. Aignan
at Orleans, as he was in devotion at a certain part of the Mass, the
walls of the beleaguered city, without any manner of violence, fell down
with a sudden ruin.  But she did quite contrary in our Milan wars; for,
le Capitaine Rense laying siege for us to the city Arona, and having
carried a mine under a great part of the wall, the mine being sprung, the
wall was lifted from its base, but dropped down again nevertheless, whole
and entire, and so exactly upon its foundation, that the besieged
suffered no inconvenience by that attempt.

Sometimes she plays the physician.  Jason of Pheres being given over by
the physicians, by reason of an imposthume in his breast, having a mind
to rid himself of his pain, by death at least, threw himself in a battle
desperately into the thickest of the enemy, where he was so fortunately
wounded quite through the body, that the imposthume broke, and he was
perfectly cured.  Did she not also excel the painter Protogenes in his
art? who having finished the picture of a dog quite tired and out of
breath, in all the other parts excellently well to his own liking, but
not being able to express, as he would, the slaver and foam that should
come out of its mouth, vexed and angry at his work, he took his sponge,
which by cleaning his pencils had imbibed several sorts of colours, and
threw it in a rage against the picture, with an intent utterly to deface
it; when fortune guiding the sponge to hit just upon the mouth of the
dog, it there performed what all his art was not able to do.  Does she
not sometimes direct our counsels and correct them?  Isabel, Queen of
England, having to sail from Zealand into her own kingdom,--[in 1326]--
with an army, in favour of her son against her husband, had been lost,
had she come into the port she intended, being there laid wait for by the
enemy; but fortune, against her will, threw her into another haven, where
she landed in safety.  And that man of old who, throwing a stone at a
dog, hit and killed his mother-in-law, had he not reason to pronounce
this verse:

          [“Fortune has more judgement than we.”--Menander]

Icetes had contracted with two soldiers to kill Timoleon at Adrana in
Sicily.--[Plutarch, Life of Timoleon, c. 7.]--They took their time to do
it when he was assisting at a sacrifice, and thrusting into the crowd,
as they were making signs to one another, that now was a fit time to do
their business, in steps a third, who, with a sword takes one of them
full drive over the pate, lays him dead upon the place and runs away,
which the others see, and concluding himself discovered and lost, runs to
the altar and begs for mercy, promising to discover the whole truth,
which as he was doing, and laying open the full conspiracy, behold the
third man, who being apprehended, was, as a murderer, thrust and hauled
by the people through the press, towards Timoleon, and the other most
eminent persons of the assembly, before whom being brought, he cries out
for pardon, pleading that he had justly slain his father’s murderer;
which he, also, proving upon the spot, by sufficient witnesses, whom his
good fortune very opportunely supplied him withal, that his father was
really killed in the city of Leontini, by that very man on whom he had
taken his revenge, he was presently awarded ten Attic minae, for having
had the good fortune, by designing to revenge the death of his father,
to preserve the life of the common father of Sicily.  Fortune, truly, in
her conduct surpasses all the rules of human prudence.

But to conclude: is there not a direct application of her favour, bounty,
and piety manifestly discovered in this action?  Ignatius the father and
Ignatius the son being proscribed by the triumvirs of Rome, resolved upon
this generous act of mutual kindness, to fall by the hands of one
another, and by that means to frustrate and defeat the cruelty of the
tyrants; and accordingly with their swords drawn, ran full drive upon one
another, where fortune so guided the points, that they made two equally
mortal wounds, affording withal so much honour to so brave a friendship,
as to leave them just strength enough to draw out their bloody swords,
that they might have liberty to embrace one another in this dying
condition, with so close and hearty an embrace, that the executioner cut
off both their heads at once, leaving the bodies still fast linked
together in this noble bond, and their wounds joined mouth to mouth,
affectionately sucking in the last blood and remainder of the lives of
each other.




CHAPTER XXXIV

OF ONE DEFECT IN OUR GOVERNMENT

My late father, a man that had no other advantages than experience and
his own natural parts, was nevertheless of a very clear judgment,
formerly told me that he once had thoughts of endeavouring to introduce
this practice; that there might be in every city a certain place assigned
to which such as stood in need of anything might repair, and have their
business entered by an officer appointed for that purpose.  As for
example: I want a chapman to buy my pearls; I want one that has pearls to
sell; such a one wants company to go to Paris; such a one seeks a servant
of such a quality; such a one a master; such a one such an artificer;
some inquiring for one thing, some for another, every one according to
what he wants.  And doubtless, these mutual advertisements would be of no
contemptible advantage to the public correspondence and intelligence: for
there are evermore conditions that hunt after one another, and for want
of knowing one another’s occasions leave men in very great necessity.

I have heard, to the great shame of the age we live in, that in our very
sight two most excellent men for learning died so poor that they had
scarce bread to put in their mouths: Lilius Gregorius Giraldus in Italy
and Sebastianus Castalio in Germany: and I believe there are a thousand
men would have invited them into their families, with very advantageous
conditions, or have relieved them where they were, had they known their
wants.  The world is not so generally corrupted, but that I know a man
that would heartily wish the estate his ancestors have left him might be
employed, so long as it shall please fortune to give him leave to enjoy
it, to secure rare and remarkable persons of any kind, whom misfortune
sometimes persecutes to the last degree, from the dangers of necessity;
and at least place them in such a condition that they must be very hard
to please, if they are not contented.

My father in his domestic economy had this rule (which I know how to
commend, but by no means to imitate), namely, that besides the day-book
or memorial of household affairs, where the small accounts, payments, and
disbursements, which do not require a secretary’s hand, were entered, and
which a steward always had in custody, he ordered him whom he employed to
write for him, to keep a journal, and in it to set down all the
remarkable occurrences, and daily memorials of the history of his house:
very pleasant to look over, when time begins to wear things out of
memory, and very useful sometimes to put us out of doubt when such a
thing was begun, when ended; what visitors came, and when they went; our
travels, absences, marriages, and deaths; the reception of good or ill
news; the change of principal servants, and the like.  An ancient custom,
which I think it would not be amiss for every one to revive in his own
house; and I find I did very foolishly in neglecting it.




CHAPTER XXXV

OF THE CUSTOM OF WEARING CLOTHES

Whatever I shall say upon this subject, I am of necessity to invade some
of the bounds of custom, so careful has she been to shut up all the
avenues.  I was disputing with myself in this shivering season, whether
the fashion of going naked in those nations lately discovered is imposed
upon them by the hot temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and
Moors, or whether it be the original fashion of mankind.  Men of
understanding, forasmuch as all things under the sun, as the Holy Writ
declares, are subject to the same laws, were wont in such considerations
as these, where we are to distinguish the natural laws from those which
have been imposed by man’s invention, to have recourse to the general
polity of the world, where there can be nothing counterfeit.  Now, all
other creatures being sufficiently furnished with all things necessary
for the support of their being--[Montaigne’s expression is, “with needle
and thread.”--W.C.H.]--it is not to be imagined that we only are brought
into the world in a defective and indigent condition, and in such a state
as cannot subsist without external aid.  Therefore it is that I believe,
that as plants, trees, and animals, and all things that have life, are
seen to be by nature sufficiently clothed and covered, to defend them
from the injuries of weather:

         “Proptereaque fere res omnes ant corio sunt,
          Aut seta, ant conchis, ant callo, ant cortice tectae,”

     [“And that for this reason nearly all things are clothed with skin,
     or hair, or shells, or bark, or some such thing.”
      --Lucretius, iv. 936.]

so were we: but as those who by artificial light put out that of day, so
we by borrowed forms and fashions have destroyed our own.  And ‘tis plain
enough to be seen, that ‘tis custom only which renders that impossible
that otherwise is nothing so; for of those nations who have no manner of
knowledge of clothing, some are situated under the same temperature that
we are, and some in much colder climates.  And besides, our most tender
parts are always exposed to the air, as the eyes, mouth, nose, and ears;
and our country labourers, like our ancestors in former times, go with
their breasts and bellies open.  Had we been born with a necessity upon
us of wearing petticoats and breeches, there is no doubt but nature would
have fortified those parts she intended should be exposed to the fury of
the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done the finger-ends and the
soles of the feet.  And why should this seem hard to believe?  I observe
much greater distance betwixt my habit and that of one of our country
boors, than betwixt his and that of a man who has no other covering but
his skin.  How many men, especially in Turkey, go naked upon the account
of devotion?  Some one asked a beggar, whom he saw in his shirt in the
depth of winter, as brisk and frolic as he who goes muffled up to the
ears in furs, how he was able to endure to go so?  “Why, sir,” he
answered, “you go with your face bare: I am all face.”  The Italians have
a story of the Duke of Florence’s fool, whom his master asking how, being
so thinly clad, he was able to support the cold, when he himself, warmly
wrapped up as he was, was hardly able to do it?  “Why,” replied the fool,
“use my receipt to put on all your clothes you have at once, and you’ll
feel no more cold than I.”  King Massinissa, to an extreme old age, could
never be prevailed upon to go with his head covered, how cold, stormy, or
rainy soever the weather might be; which also is reported of the Emperor
Severus.  Herodotus tells us, that in the battles fought betwixt the
Egyptians and the Persians, it was observed both by himself and by
others, that of those who were left dead upon the field, the heads of the
Egyptians were without comparison harder than those of the Persians, by
reason that the last had gone with their heads always covered from their
infancy, first with biggins, and then with turbans, and the others always
shaved and bare.  King Agesilaus continued to a decrepit age to wear
always the same clothes in winter that he did in summer.  Caesar, says
Suetonius, marched always at the head of his army, for the most part on
foot, with his head bare, whether it was rain or sunshine, and as much is
said of Hannibal:

                              “Tum vertice nudo,
               Excipere insanos imbres, coelique ruinam.”

     [“Bareheaded he marched in snow, exposed to pouring rain and the
     utmost rigour of the weather.”--Silius Italicus, i. 250.]

A Venetian who has long lived in Pegu, and has lately returned thence,
writes that the men and women of that kingdom, though they cover all
their other parts, go always barefoot and ride so too; and Plato very
earnestly advises for the health of the whole body, to give the head and
the feet no other clothing than what nature has bestowed.  He whom the
Poles have elected for their king,--[Stephen Bathory]--since ours came
thence, who is, indeed, one of the greatest princes of this age, never
wears any gloves, and in winter or whatever weather can come, never wears
other cap abroad than that he wears at home.  Whereas I cannot endure to
go unbuttoned or untied; my neighbouring labourers would think themselves
in chains, if they were so braced.  Varro is of opinion, that when it was
ordained we should be bare in the presence of the gods and before the
magistrate, it was so ordered rather upon the score of health, and to
inure us to the injuries of weather, than upon the account of reverence;
and since we are now talking of cold, and Frenchmen used to wear variety
of colours (not I myself, for I seldom wear other than black or white, in
imitation of my father), let us add another story out of Le Capitaine
Martin du Bellay, who affirms, that in the march to Luxembourg he saw so
great frost, that the munition-wine was cut with hatchets and wedges, and
delivered out to the soldiers by weight, and that they carried it away in
baskets: and Ovid,

              “Nudaque consistunt, formam servantia testae,
               Vina; nec hausta meri, sed data frusta, bibunt.”

     [“The wine when out of the cask retains the form of the cask;
     and is given out not in cups, but in bits.”
      --Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 23.]

At the mouth of Lake Maeotis the frosts are so very sharp, that in the
very same place where Mithridates’ lieutenant had fought the enemy
dryfoot and given them a notable defeat, the summer following he obtained
over them a naval victory.  The Romans fought at a very great
disadvantage, in the engagement they had with the Carthaginians near
Piacenza, by reason that they went to the charge with their blood
congealed and their limbs numbed with cold, whereas Hannibal had caused
great fires to be dispersed quite through his camp to warm his soldiers,
and oil to be distributed amongst them, to the end that anointing
themselves, they might render their nerves more supple and active, and
fortify the pores against the violence of the air and freezing wind,
which raged in that season.

The retreat the Greeks made from Babylon into their own country is famous
for the difficulties and calamities they had to overcome; of which this
was one, that being encountered in the mountains of Armenia with a
horrible storm of snow, they lost all knowledge of the country and of the
ways, and being driven up, were a day and a night without eating or
drinking; most of their cattle died, many of themselves were starved to
death, several struck blind with the force of the hail and the glare of
the snow, many of them maimed in their fingers and toes, and many stiff
and motionless with the extremity of the cold, who had yet their
understanding entire.

Alexander saw a nation, where they bury their fruit-trees in winter to
protect them from being destroyed by the frost, and we also may see the
same.

But, so far as clothes go, the King of Mexico changed four times a day
his apparel, and never put it on again, employing that he left off in his
continual liberalities and rewards; and neither pot, dish, nor other
utensil of his kitchen or table was ever served twice.




CHAPTER XXXVI

OF CATO THE YOUNGER

     [“I am not possessed with this common errour, to judge of others
     according to what I am my selfe.  I am easie to beleeve things
     differing from my selfe.  Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not
     tie the world unto it, as every man doth.  And I beleeve and
     conceive a thousand manners of life, contrary to the common sorte.”
      --Florio, ed. 1613, p. 113.]

I am not guilty of the common error of judging another by myself.  I
easily believe that in another’s humour which is contrary to my own; and
though I find myself engaged to one certain form, I do not oblige others
to it, as many do; but believe and apprehend a thousand ways of living;
and, contrary to most men, more easily admit of difference than
uniformity amongst us.  I as frankly as any one would have me, discharge
a man from my humours and principles, and consider him according to his
own particular model.  Though I am not continent myself, I nevertheless
sincerely approve the continence of the Feuillans and Capuchins, and
highly commend their way of living.  I insinuate myself by imagination
into their place, and love and honour them the more for being other than
I am.  I very much desire that we may be judged every man by himself, and
would not be drawn into the consequence of common examples.  My own
weakness nothing alters the esteem I ought to have for the force and
vigour of those who deserve it:

     “Sunt qui nihil suadent, quam quod se imitari posse confidunt.”

     [“There are who persuade nothing but what they believe they can
     imitate themselves.”--Cicero, De Orator., c. 7.]

Crawling upon the slime of the earth, I do not for all that cease to
observe up in the clouds the inimitable height of some heroic souls.
‘Tis a great deal for me to have my judgment regular and just, if the
effects cannot be so, and to maintain this sovereign part, at least, free
from corruption; ‘tis something to have my will right and good where my
legs fail me.  This age wherein we live, in our part of the world at
least, is grown so stupid, that not only the exercise, but the very
imagination of virtue is defective, and seems to be no other but college
jargon:

                        “Virtutem verba putant, ut
                 Lucum ligna:”

     [“They think words virtue, as they think mere wood a sacred grove.”
      --Horace, Ep., i. 6, 31.]

          “Quam vereri deberent, etiam si percipere non possent.”

     [“Which they ought to reverence, though they cannot comprehend.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quas., v. 2.]

‘Tis a gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue, as on the
tip of the ear, for ornament only.  There are no longer virtuous actions
extant; those actions that carry a show of virtue have yet nothing of its
essence; by reason that profit, glory, fear, custom, and other suchlike
foreign causes, put us on the way to produce them.  Our justice also,
valour, courtesy, may be called so too, in respect to others and
according to the face they appear with to the public; but in the doer it
can by no means be virtue, because there is another end proposed, another
moving cause.  Now virtue owns nothing to be hers, but what is done by
herself and for herself alone.

In that great battle of Plataea, that the Greeks under the command of
Pausanias gained against Mardonius and the Persians, the conquerors,
according to their custom, coming to divide amongst them the glory of the
exploit, attributed to the Spartan nation the pre-eminence of valour in
the engagement.  The Spartans, great judges of virtue, when they came to
determine to what particular man of their nation the honour was due of
having the best behaved himself upon this occasion, found that
Aristodemus had of all others hazarded his person with the greatest
bravery; but did not, however, allow him any prize, by reason that his
virtue had been incited by a desire to clear his reputation from the
reproach of his miscarriage at the business of Thermopylae, and to die
bravely to wipe off that former blemish.

Our judgments are yet sick, and obey the humour of our depraved manners.
I observe most of the wits of these times pretend to ingenuity, by
endeavouring to blemish and darken the glory of the bravest and most
generous actions of former ages, putting one vile interpretation or
another upon them, and forging and supposing vain causes and motives for
the noble things they did: a mighty subtlety indeed!  Give me the
greatest and most unblemished action that ever the day beheld, and I will
contrive a hundred plausible drifts and ends to obscure it.  God knows,
whoever will stretch them out to the full, what diversity of images our
internal wills suffer under.  They do not so maliciously play the
censurers, as they do it ignorantly and rudely in all their detractions.

The same pains and licence that others take to blemish and bespatter
these illustrious names, I would willingly undergo to lend them a
shoulder to raise them higher.  These rare forms, that are culled out by
the consent of the wisest men of all ages, for the world’s example,
I should not stick to augment in honour, as far as my invention would
permit, in all the circumstances of favourable interpretation; and we may
well believe that the force of our invention is infinitely short of their
merit.  ‘Tis the duty of good men to portray virtue as beautiful as they
can, and there would be nothing wrong should our passion a little
transport us in favour of so sacred a form.  What these people do, on the
contrary, they either do out of malice, or by the vice of confining their
belief to their own capacity; or, which I am more inclined to think, for
not having their sight strong, clear, and elevated enough to conceive the
splendour of virtue in her native purity: as Plutarch complains, that in
his time some attributed the cause of the younger Cato’s death to his
fear of Caesar, at which he seems very angry, and with good reason; and
by this a man may guess how much more he would have been offended with
those who have attributed it to ambition.  Senseless people!  He would
rather have performed a noble, just, and generous action, and to have had
ignominy for his reward, than for glory.  That man was in truth a pattern
that nature chose out to show to what height human virtue and constancy
could arrive.

But I am not capable of handling so rich an argument, and shall therefore
only set five Latin poets together, contending in the praise of Cato;
and, incidentally, for their own too.  Now, a well-educated child will
judge the two first, in comparison of the others, a little flat and
languid; the third more vigorous, but overthrown by the extravagance of
his own force; he will then think that there will be room for one or two
gradations of invention to come to the fourth, and, mounting to the pitch
of that, he will lift up his hands in admiration; coming to the last, the
first by some space’ (but a space that he will swear is not to be filled
up by any human wit), he will be astounded, he will not know where he is.

And here is a wonder: we have far more poets than judges and interpreters
of poetry; it is easier to write it than to understand it.  There is,
indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well
enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine
poesy is above all rules and reason.  And whoever discerns the beauty of
it with the most assured and most steady sight, sees no more than the
quick reflection of a flash of lightning: it does not exercise, but
ravishes and overwhelms our judgment.  The fury that possesses him who is
able to penetrate into it wounds yet a third man by hearing him repeat
it; like a loadstone that not only attracts the needle, but also infuses
into it the virtue to attract others.  And it is more evidently manifest
in our theatres, that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first
stirred up the poet to anger, sorrow, hatred, and out of himself, to
whatever they will, does moreover by the poet possess the actor, and by
the actor consecutively all the spectators.  So much do our passions hang
and depend upon one another.

Poetry has ever had that power over me from a child to transpierce and
transport me; but this vivid sentiment that is natural to me has been
variously handled by variety of forms, not so much higher or lower (for
they were ever the highest of every kind), as differing in colour.
First, a gay and sprightly fluency; afterwards, a lofty and penetrating
subtlety; and lastly, a mature and constant vigour.  Their names will
better express them: Ovid, Lucan, Virgil.

But our poets are beginning their career:

         “Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Caesare major,”

     [“Let Cato, whilst he live, be greater than Caesar.”
      --Martial, vi. 32]

says one.

               “Et invictum, devicta morte, Catonem,”

          [“And Cato invincible, death being overcome.”
           --Manilius, Astron., iv. 87.]

says the second.  And the third, speaking of the civil wars betwixt
Caesar and Pompey,

          “Victrix causa diis placuit, set victa Catoni.”

     [“The victorious cause blessed the gods, the defeated one Cato.
     --“Lucan, i. 128.]

And the fourth, upon the praises of Caesar:

              “Et cuncta terrarum subacta,
               Praeter atrocem animum Catonis.”

     [“And conquered all but the indomitable mind of Cato.”
      --Horace, Od., ii. 1, 23.]

And the master of the choir, after having set forth all the great names
of the greatest Romans, ends thus:

                    “His dantem jura Catonem.”

     [“Cato giving laws to all the rest.”--AEneid, viii. 670.]




CHAPTER XXXVII

THAT WE LAUGH AND CRY FOR THE SAME THING

When we read in history that Antigonus was very much displeased with his
son for presenting him the head of King Pyrrhus his enemy, but newly
slain fighting against him, and that seeing it, he wept; and that Rene,
Duke of Lorraine, also lamented the death of Charles, Duke of Burgundy,
whom he had himself defeated, and appeared in mourning at his funeral;
and that in the battle of D’Auray (which Count Montfort obtained over
Charles de Blois, his competitor for the duchy of Brittany), the
conqueror meeting the dead body of his enemy, was very much afflicted at
his death, we must not presently cry out:

              “E cosi avven, the l’animo ciascuna
               Sua passion sotto ‘l contrario manto,
               Ricopre, con la vista or’chiara, or’bruna.”

     [“And thus it happens that the mind of each veils its passion under
     a different appearance, and beneath a smiling visage, gay beneath a
     sombre air.”--Petrarch.]

When Pompey’s head was presented to Caesar, the histories tell us that he
turned away his face, as from a sad and unpleasing object.  There had
been so long an intelligence and society betwixt them in the management
of the public affairs, so great a community of fortunes, so many mutual
offices, and so near an alliance, that this countenance of his ought not
to suffer under any misinterpretation, or to be suspected for either
false or counterfeit, as this other seems to believe:

                             “Tutumque putavit
          Jam bonus esse socer; lacrymae non sponte cadentes,
          Effudit, gemitusque expressit pectore laeto;”

     [“And now he thought it safe to play the kind father-in-law,
     shedding forced tears, and from a joyful breast discharging sighs
     and groans.”--Lucan, ix. 1037.]

for though it be true that the greatest part of our actions are no other
than visor and disguise, and that it may sometimes be true that

               “Haeredis fletus sub persona rises est,”

          [“The heir’s tears behind the mask are smiles.”
           --Publius Syrus, apud Gellium, xvii. 14.]

yet, in judging of these accidents, we are to consider how much our souls
are oftentimes agitated with divers passions.  And as they say that in
our bodies there is a congregation of divers humours, of which that is
the sovereign which, according to the complexion we are of, is commonly
most predominant in us: so, though the soul have in it divers motions to
give it agitation, yet must there of necessity be one to overrule all the
rest, though not with so necessary and absolute a dominion but that
through the flexibility and inconstancy of the soul, those of less
authority may upon occasion reassume their place and make a little sally
in turn.  Thence it is, that we see not only children, who innocently
obey and follow nature, often laugh and cry at the same thing, but not
one of us can boast, what journey soever he may have in hand that he has
the most set his heart upon, but when he comes to part with his family
and friends, he will find something that troubles him within; and though
he refrain his tears yet he puts foot in the stirrup with a sad and
cloudy countenance.  And what gentle flame soever may warm the heart of
modest and wellborn virgins, yet are they fain to be forced from about
their mothers’ necks to be put to bed to their husbands, whatever this
boon companion is pleased to say:

         “Estne novis nuptis odio Venus?  anne parentum
          Frustrantur falsis gaudia lachrymulis,
          Ubertim thalami quasi intra limina fundunt?
          Non, ita me divi, vera gemunt, juverint.”

     [“Is Venus really so alarming to the new-made bride, or does she
     honestly oppose her parent’s rejoicing the tears she so abundantly
     sheds on entering the nuptial chamber?  No, by the Gods, these are
     no true tears.”--Catullus, lxvi. 15.]

     [“Is Venus really so repugnant to newly-married maids?  Do they meet
     the smiles of parents with feigned tears?  They weep copiously
     within the very threshold of the nuptial chamber.  No, so the gods
     help me, they do not truly grieve.”--Catullus, lxvi.  15.]--
     [A more literal translation.  D.W.]

Neither is it strange to lament a person dead whom a man would by no
means should be alive.  When I rattle my man, I do it with all the mettle
I have, and load him with no feigned, but downright real curses; but the
heat being over, if he should stand in need of me, I should be very ready
to do him good: for I instantly turn the leaf.  When I call him calf and
coxcomb, I do not pretend to entail those titles upon him for ever;
neither do I think I give myself the lie in calling him an honest fellow
presently after.  No one quality engrosses us purely and universally.
Were it not the sign of a fool to talk to one’s self, there would hardly
be a day or hour wherein I might not be heard to grumble and mutter to
myself and against myself, “Confound the fool!” and yet I do not think
that to be my definition.  Who for seeing me one while cold and presently
very fond towards my wife, believes the one or the other to be
counterfeited, is an ass.  Nero, taking leave of his mother whom he was
sending to be drowned, was nevertheless sensible of some emotion at this
farewell, and was struck with horror and pity.  ‘Tis said, that the light
of the sun is not one continuous thing, but that he darts new rays so
thick one upon another that we cannot perceive the intermission:

         “Largus enim liquidi fons luminis, aetherius sol,
          Irrigat assidue coelum candore recenti,
          Suppeditatque novo confestim lumine lumen.”

     [“So the wide fountain of liquid light, the ethereal sun, steadily
     fertilises the heavens with new heat, and supplies a continuous
     store of fresh light.”--Lucretius, v. 282.]

Just so the soul variously and imperceptibly darts out her passions.

Artabanus coming by surprise once upon his nephew Xerxes, chid him for
the sudden alteration of his countenance.  He was considering the
immeasurable greatness of his forces passing over the Hellespont for the
Grecian expedition: he was first seized with a palpitation of joy, to see
so many millions of men under his command, and this appeared in the
gaiety of his looks: but his thoughts at the same instant suggesting to
him that of so many lives, within a century at most, there would not be
one left, he presently knit his brows and grew sad, even to tears.

We have resolutely pursued the revenge of an injury received, and been
sensible of a singular contentment for the victory; but we shall weep
notwithstanding.  ‘Tis not for the victory, though, that we shall weep:
there is nothing altered in that but the soul looks upon things with
another eye and represents them to itself with another kind of face; for
everything has many faces and several aspects.

Relations, old acquaintances, and friendships, possess our imaginations
and make them tender for the time, according to their condition; but the
turn is so quick, that ‘tis gone in a moment:

              “Nil adeo fieri celeri ratione videtur,
               Quam si mens fieri proponit, et inchoat ipsa,
               Ocius ergo animus, quam res se perciet ulla,
               Ante oculos quorum in promptu natura videtur;”

     [“Nothing therefore seems to be done in so swift a manner than if
     the mind proposes it to be done, and itself begins.  It is more
     active than anything which we see in nature.”--Lucretius, iii. 183.]

and therefore, if we would make one continued thing of all this
succession of passions, we deceive ourselves.  When Timoleon laments the
murder he had committed upon so mature and generous deliberation, he does
not lament the liberty restored to his country, he does not lament the
tyrant; but he laments his brother: one part of his duty is performed;
let us give him leave to perform the other.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

OF SOLITUDE

Let us pretermit that long comparison betwixt the active and the solitary
life; and as for the fine sayings with which ambition and avarice
palliate their vices, that we are not born for ourselves but for the
public,--[This is the eulogium passed by Lucan on Cato of Utica, ii.
383.]--let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them
lay their hands upon their hearts, and then say whether, on the contrary,
they do not rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the
world to make their private advantage at the public expense.  The corrupt
ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their
ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be
very good.  Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a
taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?  What does
she so much seek as elbowroom?  A man many do well or ill everywhere; but
if what Bias says be true, that the greatest part is the worse part, or
what the Preacher says: there is not one good of a thousand:

              “Rari quippe boni: numero vix sunt totidem quot
               Thebarum portae, vel divitis ostia Nili,”

     [“Good men forsooth are scarce: there are hardly as many as there
     are gates of Thebes or mouths of the rich Nile.”
      --Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 26.]

the contagion is very dangerous in the crowd.  A man must either imitate
the vicious or hate them both are dangerous things, either to resemble
them because they are many or to hate many because they are unresembling
to ourselves.  Merchants who go to sea are in the right when they are
cautious that those who embark with them in the same bottom be neither
dissolute blasphemers nor vicious other ways, looking upon such society
as unfortunate.  And therefore it was that Bias pleasantly said to some,
who being with him in a dangerous storm implored the assistance of the
gods: “Peace, speak softly,” said he, “that they may not know you are
here in my company.”--[Diogenes Laertius]--And of more pressing
example, Albuquerque, viceroy in the Indies for Emmanuel, king of
Portugal, in an extreme peril of shipwreck, took a young boy upon his
shoulders, for this only end that, in the society of their common danger
his innocence might serve to protect him, and to recommend him to the
divine favour, that they might get safe to shore.  ‘Tis not that a wise
man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a
palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you
that he should fly the very sight of the crowd: he will endure it if need
be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone.  He cannot
think himself sufficiently rid of vice, if he must yet contend with it in
other men.  Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of
keeping ill company.  There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man,
the one by his vice, the other by his nature.  And Antisthenes, in my
opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with
frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough
amongst the sick, for if they contribute to the health of the sick, no
doubt but by the contagion, continual sight of, and familiarity with
diseases, they must of necessity impair their own.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one’s
ease: but men do not always take the right way.  They often think they
have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged
one employment for another: there is little less trouble in governing a
private family than a whole kingdom.  Wherever the mind is perplexed, it
is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less
troublesome for being less important.  Moreover, for having shaken off
the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal
vexations of life:

              “Ratio et prudentia curas,
               Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert;”

     [“Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the
     great ocean, banish care.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]

ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires, do not
leave us because we forsake our native country:

                                        “Et
                    Post equitem sedet atra cura;”

               [“Black care sits behind the horse man.”
                --Horace, Od., iii. 1, 40].

they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor
deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them:

                    “Haeret lateri lethalis arundo.”

          [“The fatal shaft adheres to the side.”--AEneid, iv. 73.]

One telling Socrates that such a one was nothing improved by his travels:
“I very well believe it,” said he, “for he took himself along with him”

                   “Quid terras alio calentes
                    Sole mutamus?  patriae quis exsul
                    Se quoque fugit?”

     [“Why do we seek climates warmed by another sun?  Who is the man
     that by fleeing from his country, can also flee from himself?”
      --Horace, Od., ii. 16, 18.]

If a man do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden
with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the
harder and sit the heavier, as the lading of a ship is of less
encumbrance when fast and bestowed in a settled posture.  You do a sick
man more harm than good in removing him from place to place; you fix and
establish the disease by motion, as stakes sink deeper and more firmly
into the earth by being moved up and down in the place where they are
designed to stand.  Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the
public; ‘tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the
popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must
sequester and come again to himself:

                         “Rupi jam vincula, dicas
               Nam luctata canis nodum arripit; attamen illi,
               Quum fugit, a collo trahitur pars longa catenae.”

     [“You say, perhaps, you have broken your chains: the dog who after
     long efforts has broken his chain, still in his flight drags a heavy
     portion of it after him.”--Persius, Sat., v. 158.]

We still carry our fetters along with us.  ‘Tis not an absolute liberty;
we yet cast back a look upon what we have left behind us; the fancy is
still full of it:

          “Nisi purgatum est pectus, quae praelia nobis
          Atque pericula tunc ingratis insinuandum?
          Quantae connscindunt hominem cupedinis acres
          Sollicitum curae? quantique perinde timores?
          Quidve superbia, spurcitia, ac petulantia, quantas
          Efficiunt clades? quid luxus desidiesque?”

     [“But unless the mind is purified, what internal combats and dangers
     must we incur in spite of all our efforts!  How many bitter
     anxieties, how many terrors, follow upon unregulated passion!
     What destruction befalls us from pride, lust, petulant anger!
     What evils arise from luxury and sloth!”--Lucretius, v. 4.]

Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself;

          “In culpa est animus, qui se non effugit unquam,”
           --Horace, Ep., i. 14, 13.

and therefore is to be called home and confined within itself: that is
the true solitude, and that may be enjoyed even in populous cities and
the courts of kings, though more commodiously apart.

Now, since we will attempt to live alone, and to waive all manner of
conversation amongst them, let us so order it that our content may depend
wholly upon ourselves; let us dissolve all obligations that ally us to
others; let us obtain this from ourselves, that we may live alone in good
earnest, and live at our ease too.

Stilpo having escaped from the burning of his town, where he lost wife,
children, and goods, Demetrius Poliorcetes seeing him, in so great a ruin
of his country, appear with an undisturbed countenance, asked him if he
had received no loss?  To which he made answer, No; and that, thank God,
nothing was lost of his.--[Seneca, Ep. 7.]--This also was the meaning of
the philosopher Antisthenes, when he pleasantly said, that “men should
furnish themselves with such things as would float, and might with the
owner escape the storm”;--[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 6.] and certainly a
wise man never loses anything if he have himself.  When the city of Nola
was ruined by the barbarians, Paulinus, who was bishop of that place,
having there lost all he had, himself a prisoner, prayed after this
manner: “O Lord, defend me from being sensible of this loss; for Thou
knowest they have yet touched nothing of that which is mine.”--[St.
Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. 10.]--The riches that made him rich and the
goods that made him good, were still kept entire.  This it is to make
choice of treasures that can secure themselves from plunder and violence,
and to hide them in such a place into which no one can enter and that is
not to be betrayed by any but ourselves.  Wives, children, and goods must
be had, and especially health, by him that can get it; but we are not so
to set our hearts upon them that our happiness must have its dependence
upon them; we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free,
wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.
And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves,
and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted
there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods,
train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we
must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them.
We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has
wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not
then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.

                    “In solis sis tibi turba locis.”

     [“In solitude, be company for thyself.”--Tibullus, vi. 13. 12.]

Virtue is satisfied with herself, without discipline, without words,
without effects.  In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand
that concerns ourselves.  He that thou seest scrambling up the ruins of
that wall, furious and transported, against whom so many harquebuss-shots
are levelled; and that other all over scars, pale, and fainting with
hunger, and yet resolved rather to die than to open the gates to him;
dost thou think that these men are there upon their own account?  No;
peradventure in the behalf of one whom they never saw and who never
concerns himself for their pains and danger, but lies wallowing the while
in sloth and pleasure: this other slavering, blear-eyed, slovenly fellow,
that thou seest come out of his study after midnight, dost thou think he
has been tumbling over books to learn how to become a better man, wiser,
and more content?  No such matter; he will there end his days, but he
will teach posterity the measure of Plautus’ verses and the true
orthography of a Latin word.  Who is it that does not voluntarily
exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and
glory, the most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current
amongst us?  Our own death does not sufficiently terrify and trouble us;
let us, moreover, charge ourselves with those of our wives, children, and
family: our own affairs do not afford us anxiety enough; let us undertake
those of our neighbours and friends, still more to break our brains and
torment us:

         “Vah! quemquamne hominem in animum instituere, aut
          Parare, quod sit carius, quam ipse est sibi?”

     [“Ah! can any man conceive in his mind or realise what is dearer
     than he is to himself?”--Terence, Adelph., i. I, 13.]

Solitude seems to me to wear the best favour in such as have already
employed their most active and flourishing age in the world’s service,
after the example of Thales.  We have lived enough for others; let us at
least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call
in our thoughts and intentions to ourselves, and to our own ease and
repose.  ‘Tis no light thing to make a sure retreat; it will be enough
for us to do without mixing other enterprises.  Since God gives us
leisure to order our removal, let us make ready, truss our baggage, take
leave betimes of the company, and disentangle ourselves from those
violent importunities that engage us elsewhere and separate us from
ourselves.

We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and
hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is
to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as
not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our
whole.  The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is
his own.  ‘Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer
add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid
himself to borrow.  Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and
concentrate them in and for ourselves.  He that can cast off within
himself and resolve the offices of friendship and company, let him do it.
In this decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome, and
importunate to others, let him take care not to be useless, burdensome,
and importunate to himself.  Let him soothe and caress himself, and above
all things be sure to govern himself with reverence to his reason and
conscience to that degree as to be ashamed to make a false step in their
presence:

               “Rarum est enim, ut satis se quisque vereatur.”

     [“For ‘tis rarely seen that men have respect and reverence enough
     for themselves.”--Quintilian, x. 7.]

Socrates says that boys are to cause themselves to be instructed, men to
exercise themselves in well-doing, and old men to retire from all civil
and military employments, living at their own discretion, without the
obligation to any office. There are some complexions more proper for
these precepts of retirement than others.  Such as are of a soft and dull
apprehension, and of a tender will and affection, not readily to be
subdued or employed, whereof I am one, both by natural condition and by
reflection, will sooner incline to this advice than active and busy
souls, which embrace: all, engage in all, are hot upon everything, which
offer, present, and give themselves up to every occasion.  We are to use
these accidental and extraneous commodities, so far as they are pleasant
to us, but by no means to lay our principal foundation there; ‘tis no
true one; neither nature nor reason allows it so to be.  Why therefore
should we, contrary to their laws, enslave our own contentment to the
power of another?  To anticipate also the accidents of fortune, to
deprive ourselves of the conveniences we have in our own power, as
several have done upon the account of devotion, and some philosophers by
reasoning; to be one’s own servant, to lie hard, to put out our own eyes,
to throw our wealth into the river, to go in search of grief; these, by
the misery of this life, aiming at bliss in another; those by laying
themselves low to avoid the danger of falling: all such are acts of an
excessive virtue.  The stoutest and most resolute natures render even
their seclusion glorious and exemplary:

                    “Tuta et parvula laudo,
          Quum res deficiunt, satis inter vilia fortis
          Verum, ubi quid melius contingit et unctius, idem
          Hos sapere et solos aio bene vivere, quorum
          Conspicitur nitidis fundata pecunia villis.”

     [“When means are deficient, I laud a safe and humble condition,
     content with little: but when things grow better and more easy, I
     all the same say that you alone are wise and live well, whose
     invested money is visible in beautiful villas.”
      --Horace, Ep., i. 15, 42.]

A great deal less would serve my turn well enough.  ‘Tis enough for me,
under fortune’s favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace, and, being at
my ease, to represent to myself, as far as my imagination can stretch,
the ill to come; as we do at jousts and tiltings, where we counterfeit
war in the greatest calm of peace.  I do not think Arcesilaus the
philosopher the less temperate and virtuous for knowing that he made use
of gold and silver vessels, when the condition of his fortune allowed him
so to do; I have indeed a better opinion of him than if he had denied
himself what he used with liberality and moderation.  I see the utmost
limits of natural necessity: and considering a poor man begging at my
door, ofttimes more jocund and more healthy than I myself am, I put
myself into his place, and attempt to dress my mind after his mode;
and running, in like manner, over other examples, though I fancy death,
poverty, contempt, and sickness treading on my heels, I easily resolve
not to be affrighted, forasmuch as a less than I takes them with so much
patience; and am not willing to believe that a less understanding can do
more than a greater, or that the effects of precept cannot arrive to as
great a height as those of custom.  And knowing of how uncertain duration
these accidental conveniences are, I never forget, in the height of all
my enjoyments, to make it my chiefest prayer to Almighty God, that He
will please to render me content with myself and the condition wherein I
am.  I see young men very gay and frolic, who nevertheless keep a mass of
pills in their trunk at home, to take when they’ve got a cold, which they
fear so much the less, because they think they have remedy at hand.
Every one should do in like manner, and, moreover, if they find
themselves subject to some more violent disease, should furnish
themselves with such medicines as may numb and stupefy the part.

The employment a man should choose for such a life ought neither to be a
laborious nor an unpleasing one; otherwise ‘tis to no purpose at all to
be retired.  And this depends upon every one’s liking and humour.  Mine
has no manner of complacency for husbandry, and such as love it ought to
apply themselves to it with moderation:

          [“Endeavour to make circumstances subject to me,
          and not me subject to circumstances.”
           --Horace, Ep., i. i, 19.]

Husbandry is otherwise a very servile employment, as Sallust calls it;
though some parts of it are more excusable than the rest, as the care of
gardens, which Xenophon attributes to Cyrus; and a mean may be found out
betwixt the sordid and low application, so full of perpetual solicitude,
which is seen in men who make it their entire business and study, and the
stupid and extreme negligence, letting all things go at random which we
see in others

                    “Democriti pecus edit agellos
          Cultaque, dum peregre est animus sine corpore velox.”

     [“Democritus’ cattle eat his corn and spoil his fields, whilst his
     soaring mind ranges abroad without the body.”
      --Horace, Ep., i, 12, 12.]

But let us hear what advice the younger Pliny gives his friend Caninius
Rufus upon the subject of solitude: “I advise thee, in the full and
plentiful retirement wherein thou art, to leave to thy hinds the care of
thy husbandry, and to addict thyself to the study of letters, to extract
from thence something that may be entirely and absolutely thine own.”  By
which he means reputation; like Cicero, who says that he would employ his
solitude and retirement from public affairs to acquire by his writings an
immortal life.

                              “Usque adeone
          Scire tuum, nihil est, nisi to scire hoc, sciat alter?”

          [“Is all that thy learning nothing, unless another knows
          that thou knowest?”--Persius, Sat., i. 23.]

It appears to be reason, when a man talks of retiring from the world,
that he should look quite out of [for] himself.  These do it but by
halves: they design well enough for themselves when they shall be no more
in it; but still they pretend to extract the fruits of that design from
the world, when absent from it, by a ridiculous contradiction.

The imagination of those who seek solitude upon the account of devotion,
filling their hopes and courage with certainty of divine promises in the
other life, is much more rationally founded.  They propose to themselves
God, an infinite object in goodness and power; the soul has there
wherewithal, at full liberty, to satiate her desires: afflictions and
sufferings turn to their advantage, being undergone for the acquisition
of eternal health and joy; death is to be wished and longed for, where it
is the passage to so perfect a condition; the asperity of the rules they
impose upon themselves is immediately softened by custom, and all their
carnal appetites baffled and subdued, by refusing to humour and feed
them, these being only supported by use and exercise.  This sole end of
another happily immortal life is that which really merits that we should
abandon the pleasures and conveniences of this; and he who can really and
constantly inflame his soul with the ardour of this vivid faith and hope,
erects for himself in solitude a more voluptuous and delicious life than
any other sort of existence.

Neither the end, then, nor the means of this advice pleases me, for we
often fall out of the frying-pan into the fire.--[or: we always relapse
ill from fever into fever.]--This  book-employment is as painful as any
other, and as great an enemy to health, which ought to be the first thing
considered; neither ought a man to be allured with the pleasure of it,
which is the same that destroys the frugal, the avaricious, the
voluptuous, and the ambitious man.

     [“This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other,
     and as great an enemie vnto health, which ought principally to be
     considered.  And a man should not suffer him selfe to be inveagled
     by the pleasure he takes in them.”--Florio, edit. 1613, p. 122.]

The sages give us caution enough to beware the treachery of our desires,
and to distinguish true and entire pleasures from such as are mixed and
complicated with greater pain.  For the most of our pleasures, say they,
wheedle and caress only to strangle us, like those thieves the Egyptians
called Philistae; if the headache should come before drunkenness, we
should have a care of drinking too much; but pleasure, to deceive us,
marches before and conceals her train.  Books are pleasant, but if, by
being over-studious, we impair our health and spoil our goodhumour, the
best pieces we have, let us give it over; I, for my part, am one of those
who think, that no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a
loss.  As men who have long felt themselves weakened by indisposition,
give themselves up at last to the mercy of medicine and submit to certain
rules of living, which they are for the future never to transgress; so he
who retires, weary of and disgusted with the common way of living, ought
to model this new one he enters into by the rules of reason, and to
institute and establish it by premeditation and reflection.  He ought to
have taken leave of all sorts of labour, what advantage soever it may
promise, and generally to have shaken off all those passions which
disturb the tranquillity of body and soul, and then choose the way that
best suits with his own humour:

               “Unusquisque sua noverit ire via.”

In husbandry, study, hunting, and all other exercises, men are to proceed
to the utmost limits of pleasure, but must take heed of engaging further,
where trouble begins to mix with it.  We are to reserve so much
employment only as is necessary to keep us in breath and to defend us
from the inconveniences that the other extreme of a dull and stupid
laziness brings along with it.  There are sterile knotty sciences,
chiefly hammered out for the crowd; let such be left to them who are
engaged in the world’s service.  I for my part care for no other books,
but either such as are pleasant and easy, to amuse me, or those that
comfort and instruct me how to regulate my life and death:

               “Tacitum sylvas inter reptare salubres,
               Curantem, quidquid dignum sapienti bonoque est.”

     [“Silently meditating in the healthy groves, whatever is worthy
     of a wise and good man.”--Horace, Ep., i. 4, 4.]

Wiser men, having great force and vigour of soul, may propose to
themselves a rest wholly spiritual but for me, who have a very ordinary
soul, it is very necessary to support myself with bodily conveniences;
and age having of late deprived me of those pleasures that were more
acceptable to me, I instruct and whet my appetite to those that remain,
more suitable to this other reason.  We ought to hold with all our force,
both of hands and teeth, the use of the pleasures of life that our years,
one after another, snatch away from us:

                         “Carpamus dulcia; nostrum est,
               Quod vivis; cinis, et manes, et fabula fies.”

     [“Let us pluck life’s sweets, ‘tis for them we live: by and by we
     shall be ashes, a ghost, a mere subject of talk.”
      --Persius, Sat., v. 151.]

Now, as to the end that Pliny and Cicero propose to us of glory, ‘tis
infinitely wide of my account.  Ambition is of all others the most
contrary humour to solitude; glory and repose are things that cannot
possibly inhabit in one and the same place.  For so much as I understand,
these have only their arms and legs disengaged from the crowd; their soul
and intention remain confined behind more than ever:

          “Tun’, vetule, auriculis alienis colligis escas?”

     [“Dost thou, then, old man, collect food for others’ ears?”
      --Persius, Sat., i. 22.]

they have only retired to take a better leap, and by a stronger motion to
give a brisker charge into the crowd.  Will you see how they shoot short?
Let us put into the counterpoise the advice of two philosophers, of two
very different sects, writing, the one to Idomeneus, the other to
Lucilius, their friends, to retire into solitude from worldly honours and
affairs.  “You have,” say they, “hitherto lived swimming and floating;
come now and die in the harbour: you have given the first part of your
life to the light, give what remains to the shade.  It is impossible to
give over business, if you do not also quit the fruit; therefore
disengage yourselves from all concern of name and glory; ‘tis to be
feared the lustre of your former actions will give you but too much
light, and follow you into your most private retreat.  Quit with other
pleasures that which proceeds from the approbation of another man: and as
to your knowledge and parts, never concern yourselves; they will not lose
their effect if yourselves be the better for them.  Remember him, who
being asked why he took so much pains in an art that could come to the
knowledge of but few persons?  ‘A few are enough for me,’ replied he;
‘I have enough with one; I have enough with never an one.’--[Seneca, Ep.,
7.]--He said true; you and a companion are theatre enough to one
another, or you to yourself.  Let the people be to you one, and be you
one to the whole people.  ‘Tis an unworthy ambition to think to derive
glory from a man’s sloth and privacy: you are to do like the beasts of
chase, who efface the track at the entrance into their den.  You are no
more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to
talk to yourself.  Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare
yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in
your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.  A man may miscarry alone
as well as in company.  Till you have rendered yourself one before whom
you dare not trip, and till you have a bashfulness and respect for
yourself,

               “Obversentur species honestae animo;”

          [“Let honest things be ever present to the mind”
           --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 22.]

present continually to your imagination Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in
whose presence the fools themselves will hide their faults, and make them
controllers of all your intentions; should these deviate from virtue,
your respect to those will set you right; they will keep you in this way
to be contented with yourself; to borrow nothing of any other but
yourself; to stay and fix your soul in certain and limited thoughts,
wherein she may please herself, and having understood the true and real
goods, which men the more enjoy the more they understand, to rest
satisfied, without desire of prolongation of life or name.”  This is the
precept of the true and natural philosophy, not of a boasting and prating
philosophy, such as that of the two former.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them
     Abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances
     Acquire by his writings an immortal life
     Addict thyself to the study of letters
     Always the perfect religion
     And hate him so as you were one day to love him
     Archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short
     Art that could come to the knowledge of but few persons
     Being over-studious, we impair our health and spoil our humour
     By the misery of this life, aiming at bliss in another
     Carnal appetites only supported by use and exercise
     Coming out of the same hole
     Common friendships will admit of division
     Dost thou, then, old man, collect food for others’ ears?
     Either tranquil life, or happy death
     Enslave our own contentment to the power of another?
     Entertain us with fables: astrologers and physicians
     Everything has many faces and several aspects
     Extremity of philosophy is hurtful
     Friendships that the law and natural obligation impose upon us
     Gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue
     Gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder
     He took himself along with him
     He will choose to be alone
     Headache should come before drunkenness
     High time to die when there is more ill than good in living
     Honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing
     How uncertain duration these accidental conveniences are
     I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother
     I for my part always went the plain way to work.
     I love temperate and moderate natures.
     Impostures: very strangeness lends them credit
     In solitude, be company for thyself.--Tibullus
     In the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors
     Interdict all gifts betwixt man and wife
     It is better to die than to live miserable
     Judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report
     Knot is not so sure that a man may not half suspect it will slip
     Lascivious poet: Homer
     Laying themselves low to avoid the danger of falling
     Leave society when we can no longer add anything to it
     Little less trouble in governing a private family than a kingdom
     Love we bear to our wives is very lawful
     Man (must) know that he is his own
     Marriage
     Men should furnish themselves with such things as would float
     Methinks I am no more than half of myself
     Must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves
     Never represent things to you simply as they are
     No effect of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs
     Not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow
     Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know
     O my friends, there is no friend: Aristotle
     Oftentimes agitated with divers passions
     Ordinary friendships, you are to walk with bridle in your hand
     Ought not only to have his hands, but his eyes, too, chaste
     Our judgments are yet sick
     Perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible
     Philosophy
     Phusicians cure by by misery and pain
     Prefer in bed, beauty before goodness
     Pretending to find out the cause of every accident
     Reputation: most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes
     Reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free
     Rest satisfied, without desire of prolongation of life or name
     Stilpo lost wife, children, and goods
     Stilpo: thank God, nothing was lost of his
     Take two sorts of grist out of the same sack
     Taking things upon trust from vulgar opinion
     Tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments
     The consequence of common examples
     There are defeats more triumphant than victories
     They can neither lend nor give anything to one another
     They have yet touched nothing of that which is mine
     They must be very hard to please, if they are not contented
     Things that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves
     This decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome
     This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other
     Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures
     Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not tie the world unto it
     Title of barbarism to everything that is not familiar
     To give a currency to his little pittance of learning
     To make their private advantage at the public expense
     Under fortune’s favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace
     Vice of confining their belief to their own capacity
     We have lived enough for others
     We have more curiosity than capacity
     We still carry our fetters along with us
     When time begins to wear things out of memory
     Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder
     Who can  flee from himself
     Wise man never loses anything if he have himself
     Wise whose invested money is visible in beautiful villas
     Write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more
     You and companion are theatre enough to one another






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 7.

XXXIX.    A consideration upon Cicero.
XL.       That the relish of good and evil depends in a great measure
          upon opinion.
XLI.      Not to communicate a man’s honour.
XLII.     Of the inequality amongst us.
XLIII.    Of sumptuary laws.
XLIV.     Of sleep.
XLV.      Of the battle of Dreux.
XLVI.     Of names.
XLVII.    Of the uncertainty of our judgment.



CHAPTER XXXIX

A CONSIDERATION UPON CICERO

One word more by way of comparison betwixt these two.  There are to be
gathered out of the writings of Cicero and the younger Pliny (but little,
in my opinion, resembling his uncle in his humours) infinite testimonies
of a beyond measure ambitious nature; and amongst others, this for one,
that they both, in the sight of all the world, solicit the historians of
their time not to forget them in their memoirs; and fortune, as if in
spite, has made the vanity of those requests live upon record down to
this age of ours, while she has long since consigned the histories
themselves to oblivion.  But this exceeds all meanness of spirit in
persons of such a quality as they were, to think to derive any great
renown from babbling and prating; even to the publishing of their private
letters to their friends, and so withal, that though some of them were
never sent, the opportunity being lost, they nevertheless presented them
to the light, with this worthy excuse that they were unwilling to lose
their labours and lucubrations.  Was it not very well becoming two
consuls of Rome, sovereign magistrates of the republic that commanded
the world, to spend their leisure in contriving quaint and elegant
missives, thence to gain the reputation of being versed in their own
mother-tongues?  What could a pitiful schoolmaster have done worse, whose
trade it was thereby to get his living?  If the acts of Xenophon and
Caesar had not far transcended their eloquence, I scarce believe they
would ever have taken the pains to have written them; they made it their
business to recommend not their speaking, but their doing.  And could the
perfection of eloquence have added a lustre suitable to a great
personage, certainly Scipio and Laelius had never resigned the honour of
their comedies, with all the luxuriances and elegances of the Latin
tongue, to an African slave; for that the work was theirs, its beauty and
excellence sufficiently declare; Terence himself confesses as much, and I
should take it ill from any one that would dispossess me of that belief.

‘Tis a kind of mockery and offence to extol a man for qualities
misbecoming his condition, though otherwise commendable in themselves,
but such as ought not, however, to be his chief talent; as if a man
should commend a king for being a good painter, a good architect, a good
marksman, or a good runner at the ring: commendations that add no honour,
unless mentioned altogether and in the train of those that are properly
applicable to him, namely, justice and the science of governing and
conducting his people both in peace and war.  At this rate, agriculture
was an honour to Cyrus, and eloquence and the knowledge of letters to
Charlemagne.  I have in my time known some, who by writing acquired both
their titles and fortune, disown their apprenticeship, corrupt their
style, and affect ignorance in so vulgar a quality (which also our nation
holds to be rarely seen in very learned hands), and to seek a reputation
by better qualities.  Demosthenes’ companions in the embassy to Philip,
extolling that prince as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker,
Demosthenes said that those were commendations more proper for a woman,
an advocate, or a sponge, than for a king’:

                    “Imperet bellante prior, jacentem
                    Lenis in hostem.”

     [“In the fight, overthrow your enemy, but be merciful to him when
     fallen.--“Horace, Carm. Saec., v. 51.]

‘Tis not his profession to know either how to hunt or to dance well;

               “Orabunt causas alii, coelique meatus
               Describent radio, et fulgentia sidera dicent;
               Hic regere imperio populos sciat.”

     [“Let others plead at the bar, or describe the spheres, and point
     out the glittering stars; let this man learn to rule the nations.”
      --AEneid, vi. 849.]

Plutarch says, moreover, that to appear so excellent in these less
necessary qualities is to produce witness against a man’s self, that he
has spent his time and applied his study ill, which ought to have been
employed in the acquisition of more necessary and more useful things.
So that Philip, king of Macedon, having heard that great Alexander his
son sing once at a feast to the wonder of the best musicians there: “Art
thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?” And to the same
Philip a musician, with whom he was disputing about some things
concerning his art: “Heaven forbid, sir,” said he, “that so great a
misfortune should ever befall you as to understand these things better
than I.”  A king should be able to answer as Iphicrates did the orator,
who pressed upon him in his invective after this manner: “And what art
thou that thou bravest it at this rate?  art thou a man at arms, art thou
an archer, art thou a pikeman?”--“I am none of all this; but I know how
to command all these.”  And Antisthenes took it for an argument of little
value in Ismenias that he was commended for playing excellently well upon
a flute.

I know very well, that when I hear any one dwell upon the language of my
essays, I had rather a great deal he would say nothing: ‘tis not so much
to elevate the style as to depress the sense, and so much the more
offensively as they do it obliquely; and yet I am much deceived if many
other writers deliver more worth noting as to the matter, and, how well
or ill soever, if any other writer has sown things much more materials or
at all events more downright, upon his paper than myself.  To bring the
more in, I only muster up the heads; should I annex the sequel, I should
trebly multiply the volume.  And how many stories have I scattered up and
down in this book that I only touch upon, which, should any one more
curiously search into, they would find matter enough to produce infinite
essays.  Neither those stories nor my quotations always serve simply for
example, authority, or ornament; I do not only regard them for the use I
make of them: they carry sometimes besides what I apply them to, the seed
of a more rich and a bolder matter, and sometimes, collaterally, a more
delicate sound both to myself who will say no more about it in this
place, and to others who shall be of my humour.

But returning to the speaking virtue: I find no great choice betwixt not
knowing to speak anything but ill, and not knowing to speak anything but
well.

               “Non est ornamentum virile concimitas.”

          [“A carefully arranged dress is no manly ornament.”
           --Seneca, Ep., 115.]

The sages tell us that, as to what concerns knowledge, ‘tis nothing but
philosophy; and as to what concerns effects, nothing but virtue, which is
generally proper to all degrees and to all orders.

There is something like this in these two other philosophers, for they
also promise eternity to the letters they write to their friends; but
‘tis after another manner, and by accommodating themselves, for a good
end, to the vanity of another; for they write to them that if the concern
of making themselves known to future ages, and the thirst of glory, do
yet detain them in the management of public affairs, and make them fear
the solitude and retirement to which they would persuade them, let them
never trouble themselves more about it, forasmuch as they shall have
credit enough with posterity to ensure them that were there nothing else
but the letters thus written to them, those letters will render their
names as known and famous as their own public actions could do.  And
besides this difference, these are not idle and empty letters, that
contain nothing but a fine jingle of well-chosen words and delicate
couched phrases, but rather replete and abounding with grand discourses
of reason, by which a man may render himself not more eloquent, but more
wise, and that instruct us not to speak, but to do well.  Away with that
eloquence that enchants us with itself, and not with actual things!
unless you will allow that of Cicero to be of so supreme a perfection as
to form a complete body of itself.

I shall farther add one story we read of him to this purpose, wherein his
nature will much more manifestly be laid open to us.  He was to make an
oration in public, and found himself a little straitened for time to make
himself ready at his ease; when Eros, one of his slaves, brought him word
that the audience was deferred till the next day, at which he was so
ravished with joy that he enfranchised him for the good news.

Upon this subject of letters, I will add this more to what has been
already said, that it is a kind of writing wherein my friends think I can
do something; and I am willing to confess I should rather have chosen to
publish my whimsies that way than any other, had I had to whom to write;
but I wanted such a settled intercourse, as I once had, to attract me to
it, to raise my fancy, and to support me.  For to traffic with the wind,
as some others have done, and to forge vain names to direct my letters
to, in a serious subject, I could never do it but in a dream, being a
sworn enemy to all manner of falsification.  I should have been more
diligent and more confident had I had a judicious and indulgent friend
whom to address, than thus to expose myself to the various judgments of a
whole people, and I am deceived if I had not succeeded better.  I have
naturally a humorous and familiar style; but it is a style of my own, not
proper for public business, but, like the language I speak, too compact,
irregular, abrupt, and singular; and as to letters of ceremony that have
no other substance than a fine contexture of courteous words, I am wholly
to seek.  I have neither faculty nor relish for those tedious tenders of
service and affection; I believe little in them from others, and I should
not forgive myself should I say to others more than I myself believe.
‘Tis, doubtless, very remote from the present practice; for there never
was so abject and servile prostitution of offers: life, soul, devotion,
adoration, vassal, slave, and I cannot tell what, as now; all which
expressions are so commonly and so indifferently posted to and fro by
every one and to every one, that when they would profess a greater and
more respectful inclination upon more just occasions, they have not
wherewithal to express it.  I mortally hate all air of flattery, which is
the cause that I naturally fall into a shy, rough, and crude way of
speaking, that, to such as do not know me, may seem a little to relish of
disdain.  I honour those most to whom I show the least honour, and where
my soul moves with the greatest cheerfulness, I easily forget the
ceremonies of look and gesture, and offer myself faintly and bluntly to
them to whom I am the most devoted: methinks they should read it in my
heart, and that the expression of my words does but injure the love I
have conceived within.  To welcome, take leave, give thanks, accost,
offer my service, and such verbal formalities as the ceremonious laws of
our modern civility enjoin, I know no man so stupidly unprovided of
language as myself; and I have never been employed in writing letters of
favour and recommendation, that he, in whose behalf it was written, did
not think my mediation cold and imperfect.  The Italians are great
printers of letters; I do believe I have at least an hundred several
volumes of them; of all which those of Annibale Caro seem to me to be the
best.  If all the paper I have scribbled to the ladies at the time when
my hand was really prompted by my passion, were now in being, there
might, peradventure, be found a page worthy to be communicated to our
young inamoratos, that are besotted with that fury.  I always write my
letters post-haste--so precipitately, that though I write intolerably
ill, I rather choose to do it myself, than to employ another; for I can
find none able to follow me: and I never transcribe any.  I have
accustomed the great ones who know me to endure my blots and dashes, and
upon paper without fold or margin.  Those that cost me the most pains,
are the worst; when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders,
‘tis a sign that I am not there.  I fall too without premeditation or
design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end of the
chapter.  The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces
than in matter.  Just as I had rather write two letters than close and
fold up one, and always assign that employment to some other, so, when
the real business of my letter is dispatched, I would with all my heart
transfer it to another hand to add those long harangues, offers, and
prayers, that we place at the bottom, and should be glad that some new
custom would discharge us of that trouble; as also of superscribing them
with a long legend of qualities and titles, which for fear of mistakes,
I have often not written at all, and especially to men of the long robe
and finance; there are so many new offices, such a dispensation and
ordering of titles of honour, that ‘tis hard to set them forth aright
yet, being so dearly bought, they are neither to be altered nor forgotten
without offence.  I find it equally in bad taste to encumber the fronts
and inscriptions of the books we commit to the press with such.




CHAPTER XL

THAT THE RELISH FOR GOOD AND EVIL DEPENDS IN GREAT MEASURE UPON THE
OPINION WE HAVE OF THEM

Men (says an ancient Greek sentence)--[Manual of Epictetus, c. 10.]--
are tormented with the opinions they have of things and not by the things
themselves.  It were a great victory obtained for the relief of our
miserable human condition, could this proposition be established for
certain and true throughout.  For if evils have no admission into us but
by the judgment we ourselves make of them, it should seem that it is,
then, in our own power to despise them or to turn them to good.  If
things surrender themselves to our mercy, why do we not convert and
accommodate them to our advantage?  If what we call evil and torment is
neither evil nor torment of itself, but only that our fancy gives it that
quality, it is in us to change it, and it being in our own choice, if
there be no constraint upon us, we must certainly be very strange fools
to take arms for that side which is most offensive to us, and to give
sickness, want, and contempt a bitter and nauseous taste, if it be in our
power to give them a pleasant relish, and if, fortune simply providing
the matter, ‘tis for us to give it the form.  Now, that what we call evil
is not so of itself, or at least to that degree that we make it, and that
it depends upon us to give it another taste and complexion (for all comes
to one), let us examine how that can be maintained.

If the original being of those things we fear had power to lodge itself
in us by its own authority, it would then lodge itself alike, and in like
manner, in all; for men are all of the same kind, and saving in greater
and less proportions, are all provided with the same utensils and
instruments to conceive and to judge; but the diversity of opinions we
have of those things clearly evidences that they only enter us by
composition; one person, peradventure, admits them in their true being,
but a thousand others give them a new and contrary being in them.  We
hold death, poverty, and pain for our principal enemies; now, this death,
which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not
know that others call it the only secure harbour from the storms and
tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of
liberty, and the common and prompt remedy of all evils?  And as the one
expect it with fear and trembling, the others support it with greater
ease than life.  That one complains of its facility:

          “Mors! utinam pavidos vitae subducere nolles.
          Sed virtus to sola daret!”

     [“O death! wouldst that thou might spare the coward, but that
     valour alone should pay thee tribute.”--Lucan, iv. 580.]

Now, let us leave these boastful courages.  Theodorus answered
Lysimachus, who threatened to kill him, “Thou wilt do a brave feat,” said
he, “to attain the force of a cantharides.”  The majority of philosophers
are observed to have either purposely anticipated, or hastened and
assisted their own death.  How many ordinary people do we see led to
execution, and that not to a simple death, but mixed with shame and
sometimes with grievous torments, appear with such assurance, whether
through firm courage or natural simplicity, that a man can discover no
change from their ordinary condition; settling their domestic affairs,
commending themselves to their friends, singing, preaching, and
addressing the people, nay, sometimes sallying into jests, and drinking
to their companions, quite as well as Socrates?

One that they were leading to the gallows told them they must not take
him through such a street, lest a merchant who lived there should arrest
him by the way for an old debt.  Another told the hangman he must not
touch his neck for fear of making him laugh, he was so ticklish.  Another
answered his confessor, who promised him he should that day sup with our
Lord, “Do you go then,” said he, “in my room [place]; for I for my part
keep fast to-day.”  Another having called for drink, and the hangman
having drunk first, said he would not drink after him, for fear of
catching some evil disease.  Everybody has heard the tale of the Picard,
to whom, being upon the ladder, they presented a common wench, telling
him (as our law does some times permit) that if he would marry her they
would save his life; he, having a while considered her and perceiving
that she halted: “Come, tie up, tie up,” said he, “she limps.”  And they
tell another story of the same kind of a fellow in Denmark, who being
condemned to lose his head, and the like condition being proposed to him
upon the scaffold, refused it, by reason the girl they offered him had
hollow cheeks and too sharp a nose.  A servant at Toulouse being accused
of heresy, for the sum of his belief referred himself to that of his
master, a young student, prisoner with him, choosing rather to die than
suffer himself to be persuaded that his master could err.  We read that
of the inhabitants of Arras, when Louis XI. took that city, a great many
let themselves be hanged rather than they would say, “God save the King.”
 And amongst that mean-souled race of men, the buffoons, there have been
some who would not leave their fooling at the very moment of death.  One
that the hang man was turning off the ladder cried:  “Launch the galley,”
 an ordinary saying of his.  Another, whom at the point of death his
friends had laid upon a bed of straw before the fire, the physician
asking him where his pain lay: “Betwixt the bench and the fire,” said he,
and the priest, to give him extreme unction, groping for his feet which
his pain had made him pull up to him: “You will find them,” said he, “at
the end of my legs.”  To one who being present exhorted him to recommend
himself to God: “Why, who goes thither?”  said he; and the other
replying: “It will presently be yourself, if it be His good pleasure.”
 “Shall I be sure to be there by to-morrow night?” said he.  “Do, but
recommend yourself to Him,” said the other, “and you will soon be there.”
 “I were best then,” said he, “to carry my recommendations myself.”

In the kingdom of Narsingah to this day the wives of their priests are
buried alive with the bodies of their husbands; all other wives are burnt
at their husbands’ funerals, which they not only firmly but cheerfully
undergo.  At the death of their king, his wives and concubines, his
favourites, all his officers, and domestic servants, who make up a whole
people, present themselves so gaily to the fire where his body is burnt,
that they seem to take it for a singular honour to accompany their master
in death.  During our late wars of Milan, where there happened so many
takings and retakings of towns, the people, impatient of so many changes
of fortune, took such a resolution to die, that I have heard my father
say he there saw a list taken of five-and-twenty masters of families who
made themselves away in one week’s time: an incident somewhat resembling
that of the Xanthians, who being besieged by Brutus, fell--men, women,
and children--into such a furious appetite of dying, that nothing can be
done to evade death which they did not to avoid life; insomuch that
Brutus had much difficulty in saving a very small number.--[“Only fifty
were saved.”--Plutarch, Life of Brutus, c. 8.]

Every opinion is of force enough to cause itself to be espoused at the
expense of life.  The first article of that valiant oath that Greece took
and observed in the Median war, was that every one should sooner exchange
life for death, than their own laws for those of Persia.  What a world of
people do we see in the wars betwixt the Turks and the Greeks, rather
embrace a cruel death than uncircumcise themselves to admit of baptism?
An example of which no sort of religion is incapable.

The kings of Castile having banished the Jews out of their dominions,
John, King of Portugal, in consideration of eight crowns a head, sold
them a retreat into his for a certain limited time, upon condition that
the time fixed coming to expire they should begone, and he to furnish
them with shipping to transport them into Africa.  The day comes, which
once lapsed they were given to understand that such as were afterward
found in the kingdom should remain slaves; vessels were very slenderly
provided; and those who embarked in them were rudely and villainously
used by the passengers, who, besides other indignities, kept them
cruising upon the sea, one while forwards and another backwards, till
they had spent all their provisions, and were constrained to buy of them
at so dear a rate and so long withal, that they set them not on shore
till they were all stripped to the very shirts.  The news of this inhuman
usage being brought to those who remained behind, the greater part of
them resolved upon slavery and some made a show of changing religion.
Emmanuel, the successor of John, being come to the crown, first set them
at liberty, and afterwards altering his mind, ordered them to depart his
country, assigning three ports for their passage.  He hoped, says Bishop
Osorius, no contemptible Latin historian of these later times, that the
favour of the liberty he had given them having failed of converting them
to Christianity, yet the difficulty of committing themselves to the mercy
of the mariners and of abandoning a country they were now habituated to
and were grown very rich in, to go and expose themselves in strange and
unknown regions, would certainly do it.  But finding himself deceived in
his expectation, and that they were all resolved upon the voyage, he cut
off two of the three ports he had promised them, to the end that the
length and incommodity of the passage might reduce some, or that he might
have opportunity, by crowding them all into one place, the more
conveniently to execute what he had designed, which was to force all the
children under fourteen years of age from the arms of their fathers and
mothers, to transport them from their sight and conversation, into a
place where they might be instructed and brought up in our religion.  He
says that this produced a most horrid spectacle the natural affection
betwixt the parents and their children, and moreover their zeal to their
ancient belief, contending against this violent decree, fathers and
mothers were commonly seen making themselves away, and by a yet much more
rigorous example, precipitating out of love and compassion their young
children into wells and pits, to avoid the severity of this law.  As to
the remainder of them, the time that had been prefixed being expired,
for want of means to transport them they again returned into slavery.
Some also turned Christians, upon whose faith, as also that of their
posterity, even to this day, which is a hundred years since, few
Portuguese can yet rely; though custom and length of time are much more
powerful counsellors in such changes than all other constraints whatever.
In the town of Castelnaudari, fifty heretic Albigeois at one time
suffered themselves to be burned alive in one fire rather than they would
renounce their opinions.

     “Quoties non modo ductores nostri, sed universi etiam exercitus,
     ad non dubiam mortem concurrerunt?”

     [“How often have not only our leaders, but whole armies, run to a
     certain and manifest death.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 37.]

I have seen an intimate friend of mine run headlong upon death with a
real affection, and that was rooted in his heart by divers plausible
arguments which he would never permit me to dispossess him of, and upon
the first honourable occasion that offered itself to him, precipitate
himself into it, without any manner of visible reason, with an obstinate
and ardent desire of dying.  We have several examples in our own times of
persons, even young children, who for fear of some little inconvenience
have despatched themselves.  And what shall we not fear, says one of the
ancients--[Seneca, Ep., 70.]--to this purpose, if we dread that which
cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge?

Should I here produce a long catalogue of those, of all sexes and
conditions and sects, even in the most happy ages, who have either with
great constancy looked death in the face, or voluntarily sought it, and
sought it not only to avoid the evils of this life, but some purely to
avoid the satiety of living, and others for the hope of a better
condition elsewhere, I should never have done.  Nay, the number is so
infinite that in truth I should have a better bargain on’t to reckon up
those who have feared it.  This one therefore shall serve for all:
Pyrrho the philosopher being one day in a boat in a very great tempest,
shewed to those he saw the most affrighted about him, and encouraged
them, by the example of a hog that was there, nothing at all concerned at
the storm.  Shall we then dare to say that this advantage of reason, of
which we so much boast, and upon the account of which we think ourselves
masters and emperors over the rest of all creation, was given us for a
torment?  To what end serves the knowledge of things if it renders us
more unmanly? if we thereby lose the tranquillity and repose we should
enjoy without it? and if it put us into a worse condition than Pyrrho’s
hog?  Shall we employ the understanding that was conferred upon us for
our greatest good to our own ruin; setting ourselves against the design
of nature and the universal order of things, which intend that every one
should make use of the faculties, members, and means he has to his own
best advantage?

But it may, peradventure, be objected against me: Your rule is true
enough as to what concerns death; but what will you say of indigence?
What will you, moreover, say of pain, which Aristippus, Hieronimus, and
most of the sages have reputed the worst of evils; and those who have
denied it by word of mouth have, however, confessed it in effect?
Posidonius being extremely tormented with a sharp and painful disease,
Pompeius came to visit him, excusing himself that he had taken so
unseasonable a time to come to hear him discourse of philosophy.
“The gods forbid,” said Posidonius to him, “that pain should ever have
the power to hinder me from talking,” and thereupon fell immediately upon
a discourse of the contempt of pain: but, in the meantime, his own
infirmity was playing his part, and plagued him to purpose; to which he
cried out, “Thou mayest work thy will, pain, and torment me with all the
power thou hast, but thou shalt never make me say that thou art an evil.”
 This story that they make such a clutter withal, what has it to do,
I fain would know, with the contempt of pain?  He only fights it with
words, and in the meantime, if the shootings and dolours he felt did not
move him, why did he interrupt his discourse?  Why did he fancy he did so
great a thing in forbearing to confess it an evil?  All does not here
consist in the imagination; our fancies may work upon other things: but
here is the certain science that is playing its part, of which our senses
themselves are judges:

          “Qui nisi sunt veri, ratio quoque falsa sit omnis.”

     [“Which, if they be not true, all reasoning may also be false.
     --“Lucretius, iv. 486.]

Shall we persuade our skins that the jerks of a whip agreeably tickle us,
or our taste that a potion of aloes is vin de Graves?  Pyrrho’s hog is
here in the same predicament with us; he is not afraid of death, ‘tis
true, but if you beat him he will cry out to some purpose.  Shall we
force the general law of nature, which in every living creature under
heaven is seen to tremble under pain?  The very trees seem to groan under
the blows they receive.  Death is only felt by reason, forasmuch as it is
the motion of an instant;

         “Aut fuit, aut veniet; nihil est praesentis in illa.”

     [“Death has been, or will come: there is nothing of the present in
     it.”--Estienne de la Boetie, Satires.]

          “Morsque minus poenae, quam mora mortis, habet;”

     [“The delay of death is more painful than death itself.”
      --Ovid, Ep. Ariadne to Theseus, v. 42.]

a thousand beasts, a thousand men, are sooner dead than threatened.  That
also which we principally pretend to fear in death is pain, its ordinary
forerunner: yet, if we may believe a holy father:

          “Malam mortem non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem.”

          [“That which follows death makes death bad.”
           --St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. ii.]

And I should yet say, more probably, that neither that which goes before
nor that which follows after is at all of the appurtenances of death.

We excuse ourselves falsely: and I find by experience that it is rather
the impatience of the imagination of death that makes us impatient of
pain, and that we find it doubly grievous as it threatens us with death.
But reason accusing our cowardice for fearing a thing so sudden, so
inevitable, and so insensible, we take the other as the more excusable
pretence.  All ills that carry no other danger along with them but simply
the evils themselves, we treat as things of no danger: the toothache or
the gout, painful as they are, yet being not reputed mortal, who reckons
them in the catalogue of diseases?

But let us presuppose that in death we principally regard the pain; as
also there is nothing to be feared in poverty but the miseries it brings
along with it of thirst, hunger, cold, heat, watching, and the other
inconveniences it makes us suffer, still we have nothing to do with
anything but pain.  I will grant, and very willingly, that it is the
worst incident of our being (for I am the man upon earth who the most
hates and avoids it, considering that hitherto, I thank God, I have had
so little traffic with it), but still it is in us, if not to annihilate,
at least to lessen it by patience; and though the body and the reason
should mutiny, to maintain the soul, nevertheless, in good condition.
Were it not so, who had ever given reputation to virtue; valour, force,
magnanimity, and resolution?  where were their parts to be played if
there were no pain to be defied?

               “Avida est periculi virtus.”

     [“Courage is greedy of danger.”--Seneca, De Providentia, c. 4]

Were there no lying upon the hard ground, no enduring, armed at all
points, the meridional heats, no feeding upon the flesh of horses and
asses, no seeing a man’s self hacked and hewed to pieces, no suffering a
bullet to be pulled out from amongst the shattered bones, no sewing up,
cauterising and searching of wounds, by what means were the advantage we
covet to have over the vulgar to be acquired?  ‘Tis far from flying evil
and pain, what the sages say, that of actions equally good, a man should
most covet to perform that wherein there is greater labour and pain.

          “Non est enim hilaritate, nec lascivia, nec risu, aut joco
          comite levitatis, sed saepe etiam tristes firmitate et
          constantia sunt beati.”

     [“For men are not only happy by mirth and wantonness, by laughter
     and jesting, the companion of levity, but ofttimes the serious sort
     reap felicity from their firmness and constancy.”
      --Cicero, De Finib. ii. 10.]

And for this reason it has ever been impossible to persuade our
forefathers but that the victories obtained by dint of force and the
hazard of war were not more honourable than those performed in great
security by stratagem or practice:

          “Laetius est, quoties magno sibi constat honestum.”

     [“A good deed is all the more a satisfaction by how much the more
     it has cost us”--Lucan, ix. 404.]

Besides, this ought to be our comfort, that naturally, if the pain be
violent, ‘tis but short; and if long, nothing violent:

                        “Si gravis, brevis;
                         Si longus, levis.”

Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much; it will either
put an end to itself or to thee; it comes to the same thing; if thou
canst not support it, it will export thee:

     [“Remember that the greatest pains are terminated by death; that
     slighter pains have long intermissions of repose, and that we are
     masters of the more moderate sort: so that, if they be tolerable,
     we bear them; if not, we can go out of life, as from a theatre, when
     it does not please us”--Cicero, De Finib. i. 15.]

That which makes us suffer pain with so much impatience is the not being
accustomed to repose our chiefest contentment in the soul; that we do not
enough rely upon her who is the sole and sovereign mistress of our
condition.  The body, saving in the greater or less proportion, has but
one and the same bent and bias; whereas the soul is variable into all
sorts of forms; and subject to herself and to her own empire, all things
whatsoever, both the senses of the body and all other accidents: and
therefore it is that we ought to study her, to inquire into her, and to
rouse up all her powerful faculties.  There is neither reason, force, nor
prescription that can anything prevail against her inclination and
choice.  Of so many thousands of biases that she has at her disposal, let
us give her one proper to our repose and conversation, and then we shall
not only be sheltered and secured from all manner of injury and offence,
but moreover gratified and obliged, if she will, with evils and offences.
She makes her profit indifferently of all things; error, dreams, serve
her to good use, as loyal matter to lodge us in safety and contentment.
‘Tis plain enough to be seen that ‘tis the sharpness of our mind that
gives the edge to our pains and pleasures: beasts that have no such
thing, leave to their bodies their own free and natural sentiments, and
consequently in every kind very near the same, as appears by the
resembling application of their motions.  If we would not disturb in our
members the jurisdiction that appertains to them in this, ‘tis to be
believed it would be the better for us, and that nature has given them a
just and moderate temper both to pleasure and pain; neither can it fail
of being just, being equal and common.  But seeing we have enfranchised
ourselves from her rules to give ourselves up to the rambling liberty of
our own fancies, let us at least help to incline them to the most
agreeable side.  Plato fears our too vehemently engaging ourselves with
pain and pleasure, forasmuch as these too much knit and ally the soul to
the body; whereas I rather, quite contrary, by reason it too much
separates and disunites them.  As an enemy is made more fierce by our
flight, so pain grows proud to see us truckle under her.  She will
surrender upon much better terms to them who make head against her: a man
must oppose and stoutly set himself against her.  In retiring and giving
ground, we invite and pull upon ourselves the ruin that threatens us.  As
the body is more firm in an encounter, the more stiffly and obstinately
it applies itself to it, so is it with the soul.

But let us come to examples, which are the proper game of folks of such
feeble force as myself; where we shall find that it is with pain as with
stones, that receive a brighter or a duller lustre according to the foil
they are set in, and that it has no more room in us than we are pleased
to allow it:

          “Tantum doluerunt, quantum doloribus se inseruerunt.”

     [“They suffered so much the more, by how much more they gave way to
     suffering.”--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. 10.]

We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon’s lancet than of
twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight.  The pains of
childbearing, said by the physicians and by God himself to be great, and
which we pass through with so many ceremonies--there are whole nations
that make nothing of them.  I set aside the Lacedaemonian women, but what
else do you find in the Swiss among our foot-soldiers, if not that, as
they trot after their husbands, you see them to-day carry the child at
their necks that they carried yesterday in their bellies?  The
counterfeit Egyptians we have amongst us go themselves to wash theirs,
so soon as they come into the world, and bathe in the first river they
meet.  Besides so many wenches as daily drop their children by stealth,
as they conceived them, that fair and noble wife of Sabinus, a patrician
of Rome, for another’s interest, endured alone, without help, without
crying out, or so much as a groan, the bearing of twins.--[Plutarch, On
Love, c.  34.]--A poor simple boy of Lacedaemon having stolen a fox (for
they more fear the shame of stupidity in stealing than we do the
punishment of the knavery), and having got it under his coat, rather
endured the tearing out of his bowels than he would discover his theft.
And another offering incense at a sacrifice, suffered himself to be
burned to the bone by a coal that fell into his sleeve, rather than
disturb the ceremony.  And there have been a great number, for a sole
trial of virtue, following their institutions, who have at seven years
old endured to be whipped to death without changing their countenance.
And Cicero has seen them fight in parties, with fists, feet, and teeth,
till they have fainted and sunk down, rather than confess themselves
overcome:

     [“Custom could never conquer nature; she is ever invincible; but we
     have infected the mind with shadows, delights, negligence, sloth;
     we have grown effeminate through opinions and corrupt morality.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 27.]

Every one knows the story of Scaevola, that having slipped into the
enemy’s camp to kill their general, and having missed his blow, to repair
his fault, by a more strange invention and to deliver his country, he
boldly confessed to Porsenna, who was the king he had a purpose to kill,
not only his design, but moreover added that there were then in the camp
a great number of Romans, his accomplices in the enterprise, as good men
as he; and to show what a one he himself was, having caused a pan of
burning coals to be brought, he saw and endured his arm to broil and
roast, till the king himself, conceiving horror at the sight, commanded
the pan to be taken away.  What would you say of him that would not
vouchsafe to respite his reading in a book whilst he was under incision?
And of the other that persisted to mock and laugh in contempt of the
pains inflicted upon him; so that the provoked cruelty of the
executioners that had him in handling, and all the inventions of tortures
redoubled upon him, one after another, spent in vain, gave him the
bucklers?  But he was a philosopher.  But what! a gladiator of Caesar’s
endured, laughing all the while, his wounds to be searched, lanced, and
laid open:

     [“What ordinary gladiator ever groaned?  Which of them ever changed
     countenance?  Which of them not only stood or fell indecorously?
     Which, when he had fallen and was commanded to receive the stroke of
     the sword, contracted his neck.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 17.]


Let us bring in the women too.  Who has not heard at Paris of her that
caused her face to be flayed only for the fresher complexion of a new
skin?  There are who have drawn good and sound teeth to make their voices
more soft and sweet, or to place the other teeth in better order.  How
many examples of the contempt of pain have we in that sex?  What can they
not do, what do they fear to do, for never so little hope of an addition
to their beauty?

               “Vallere queis cura est albos a stirpe capillos,
               Et faciem, dempta pelle, referre novam.”

     [“Who carefully pluck out their grey hairs by the roots, and renew
     their faces by peeling off the old skin.”--Tibullus, i. 8, 45.]

I have seen some of them swallow sand, ashes, and do their utmost to
destroy their stomachs to get pale complexions.  To make a fine Spanish
body, what racks will they not endure of girding and bracing, till they
have notches in their sides cut into the very quick, and sometimes to
death?

It is an ordinary thing with several nations at this day to wound
themselves in good earnest to gain credit to what they profess; of which
our king, relates notable examples of what he has seen in Poland and done
towards himself.--[Henry III.]--But besides this, which I know to have
been imitated by some in France, when I came from that famous assembly of
the Estates at Blois, I had a little before seen a maid in Picardy, who
to manifest the ardour of her promises, as also her constancy, give
herself, with a bodkin she wore in her hair, four or five good lusty
stabs in the arm, till the blood gushed out to some purpose.  The Turks
give themselves great scars in honour of their mistresses, and to the end
they may the longer remain, they presently clap fire to the wound, where
they hold it an incredible time to stop the blood and form the cicatrice;
people that have been eyewitnesses of it have both written and sworn it
to me.  But for ten aspers--[A Turkish coin worth about a penny]--there
are there every day fellows to be found that will give themselves a good
deep slash in the arms or thighs.  I am willing, however, to have the
testimonies nearest to us when we have most need of them; for Christendom
furnishes us with enough.  After the example of our blessed Guide there
have been many who have crucified themselves.  We learn by testimony very
worthy of belief, that King St. Louis wore a hair-shirt till in his old
age his confessor gave him a dispensation to leave it off; and that every
Friday he caused his shoulders to be drubbed by his priest with five
small chains of iron which were always carried about amongst his night
accoutrements for that purpose.

William, our last Duke of Guienne, the father of that Eleanor who
transmitted that duchy to the houses of France and England, continually
for the last ten or twelve years of his life wore a suit of armour under
a religious habit by way of penance.  Foulke, Count of Anjou, went as far
as Jerusalem, there to cause himself to be whipped by two of his
servants, with a rope about his neck, before the sepulchre of our Lord.
But do we not, moreover, every Good Friday, in various places, see great
numbers of men and women beat and whip themselves till they lacerate and
cut the flesh to the very bones?  I have often seen it, and ‘tis without
any enchantment; and it was said there were some amongst them (for they
go disguised) who for money undertook by this means to save harmless the
religion of others, by a contempt of pain, so much the greater, as the
incentives of devotion are more effectual than those of avarice.
Q. Maximus buried his son when he was a consul, and M. Cato his when
praetor elect, and L. Paulus both his, within a few days one after
another, with such a countenance as expressed no manner of grief.  I said
once merrily of a certain person, that he had disappointed the divine
justice; for the violent death of three grown-up children of his being
one day sent him, for a severe scourge, as it is to be supposed, he was
so far from being afflicted at the accident, that he rather took it for a
particular grace and favour of heaven.  I do not follow these monstrous
humours, though I lost two or three at nurse, if not without grief, at
least without repining, and yet there is hardly any accident that pierces
nearer to the quick.  I see a great many other occasions of sorrow, that
should they happen to me I should hardly feel; and have despised some,
when they have befallen me, to which the world has given so terrible a
figure that I should blush to boast of my constancy:

         “Ex quo intelligitur, non in natura, sed in opinione,
          esse aegritudinem.”

     [“By which one may understand that grief is not in nature, but in
     opinion.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iii. 28.]

Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure.  Who ever so
greedily hunted after security and repose as Alexander and Caesar did
after disturbance and difficulties?  Teres, the father of Sitalces, was
wont to say that “when he had no wars, he fancied there was no difference
betwixt him and his groom.”  Cato the consul, to secure some cities of
Spain from revolt, only interdicting the inhabitants from wearing arms, a
great many killed themselves:

          “Ferox gens, nullam vitam rati sine armis esse.”

     [“A fierce people, who thought there was no life without war.”
      --Livy, xxxiv. 17.]

How many do we know who have forsaken the calm and sweetness of a quiet
life at home amongst their acquaintance, to seek out the horror of
unhabitable deserts; and having precipitated themselves into so abject a
condition as to become the scorn and contempt of the world, have hugged
themselves with the conceit, even to affectation.  Cardinal Borromeo, who
died lately at Milan, amidst all the jollity that the air of Italy, his
youth, birth, and great riches, invited him to, kept himself in so
austere a way of living, that the same robe he wore in summer served him
for winter too; he had only straw for his bed, and his hours of leisure
from affairs he continually spent in study upon his knees, having a
little bread and a glass of water set by his book, which was all the
provision of his repast, and all the time he spent in eating.

I know some who consentingly have acquired both profit and advancement
from cuckoldom, of which the bare name only affrights so many people.

If the sight be not the most necessary of all our senses, ‘tis at least
the most pleasant; but the most pleasant and most useful of all our
members seem to be those of generation; and yet a great many have
conceived a mortal hatred against them only for this, that they were too
pleasant, and have deprived themselves of them only for their value:
as much thought he of his eyes that put them out.  The generality and
more solid sort of men look upon abundance of children as a great
blessing; I, and some others, think it as great a benefit to be without
them.  And when you ask Thales why he does not marry, he tells you,
because he has no mind to leave any posterity behind him.

That our opinion gives the value to things is very manifest in the great
number of those which we do, not so much prizing them, as ourselves, and
never considering either their virtues or their use, but only how dear
they cost us, as though that were a part of their substance; and we only
repute for value in them, not what they bring to us, but what we add to
them.  By which I understand that we are great economisers of our
expense: as it weighs, it serves for so much as it weighs.  Our opinion
will never suffer it to want of its value: the price gives value to the
diamond; difficulty to virtue; suffering to devotion; and griping to
physic.  A certain person, to be poor, threw his crowns into the same sea
to which so many come, in all parts of the world, to fish for riches.
Epicurus says  that to be rich is no relief, but only an alteration, of
affairs.  In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates
avarice.  I will deliver my own experience concerning this affair.

I have since my emergence from childhood lived in three sorts of
conditions.  The first, which continued for some twenty years, I passed
over without any other means but what were casual and depending upon the
allowance and assistance of others, without stint, but without certain
revenue.  I then spent my money so much the more cheerfully, and with so
much the less care how it went, as it wholly depended upon my
overconfidence of fortune.  I never lived more at my ease; I never had
the repulse of finding the purse of any of my friends shut against me,
having enjoined myself this necessity above all other necessities
whatever, by no means to fail of payment at the appointed time, which
also they have a thousand times respited, seeing how careful I was to
satisfy them; so that I practised at once a thrifty, and withal a kind of
alluring, honesty.  I naturally feel a kind of pleasure in paying, as if
I eased my shoulders of a troublesome weight and freed myself from an
image of slavery; as also that I find a ravishing kind of satisfaction in
pleasing another and doing a just action.  I except payments where the
trouble of bargaining and reckoning is required; and in such cases; where
I can meet with nobody to ease me of that charge, I delay them, how
scandalously and injuriously soever, all I possibly can, for fear of the
wranglings for which both my humour and way of speaking are so totally
improper and unfit.  There is nothing I hate so much as driving a
bargain; ‘tis a mere traffic of cozenage and impudence, where, after an
hour’s cheapening and hesitating, both parties abandon their word and
oath for five sols’ abatement.  Yet I always borrowed at great
disadvantage; for, wanting the confidence to speak to the person myself,
I committed my request to the persuasion of a letter, which usually is no
very successful advocate, and is of very great advantage to him who has a
mind to deny.  I, in those days, more jocundly and freely referred the
conduct of my affairs to the stars, than I have since done to my own
providence and judgment.  Most good managers look upon it as a horrible
thing to live always thus in uncertainty, and do not consider, in the
first place, that the greatest part of the world live so: how many worthy
men have wholly abandoned their own certainties, and yet daily do it, to
the winds, to trust to the inconstant favour of princes and of fortune?
Caesar ran above a million of gold, more than he was worth, in debt to
become Caesar; and how many merchants have begun their traffic by the
sale of their farms, which they sent into the Indies,

                    “Tot per impotentia freta.”

     [“Through so many ungovernable seas.”--Catullus, iv. 18.]

In so great a siccity of devotion as we see in these days, we have a
thousand and a thousand colleges that pass it over commodiously enough,
expecting every day their dinner from the liberality of Heaven.
Secondly, they do not take notice that this certitude upon which they so
much rely is not much less uncertain and hazardous than hazard itself.
I see misery as near beyond two thousand crowns a year as if it stood
close by me; for besides that it is in the power of chance to make a
hundred breaches to poverty through the greatest strength of our riches
--there being very often no mean betwixt the highest and the lowest
fortune:

          “Fortuna vitrea est: turn, quum splendet, frangitur,”

     [“Fortune is glass: in its greatest brightness it breaks.”
      --Ex Mim. P. Syrus.]

and to turn all our barricadoes and bulwarks topsy-turvy, I find that, by
divers causes, indigence is as frequently seen to inhabit with those who
have estates as with those that have none; and that, peradventure, it is
then far less grievous when alone than when accompanied with riches.
These flow more from good management than from revenue;

               “Faber est suae quisque fortunae”

          [“Every one is the maker of his own fortune.”
           --Sallust, De Repub.  Ord., i. I.]

and an uneasy, necessitous, busy, rich man seems to me more miserable
than he that is simply poor.

     “In divitiis mopes, quod genus egestatis gravissimum est.”

     [“Poor in the midst of riches, which is the sorest kind of poverty.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 74.]

The greatest and most wealthy princes are by poverty and want driven to
the most extreme necessity; for can there be any more extreme than to
become tyrants and unjust usurpers of their subjects’ goods and estates?

My second condition of life was to have money of my own, wherein I so
ordered the matter that I had soon laid up a very notable sum out of a
mean fortune, considering with myself that that only was to be reputed
having which a man reserves from his ordinary expense, and that a man
cannot absolutely rely upon revenue he hopes to receive, how clear soever
the hope may be.  For what, said I, if I should be surprised by such or
such an accident?  And after such-like vain and vicious imaginations,
would very learnedly, by this hoarding of money, provide against all
inconveniences; and could, moreover, answer such as objected to me that
the number of these was too infinite, that if I could not lay up for all,
I could, however, do it at least for some and for many.  Yet was not this
done without a great deal of solicitude and anxiety of mind; I kept it
very close, and though I dare talk so boldly of myself, never spoke of my
money, but falsely, as others do, who being rich, pretend to be poor, and
being poor, pretend to be rich, dispensing their consciences from ever
telling sincerely what they have: a ridiculous and shameful prudence.
Was I going a journey?  Methought I was never enough provided: and the
more I loaded myself with money, the more also was I loaded with fear,
one while of the danger of the roads, another of the fidelity of him who
had the charge of my baggage, of whom, as some others that I know, I was
never sufficiently secure if I had him not always in my eye.  If I
chanced to leave my cash-box behind me, O, what strange suspicions and
anxiety of mind did I enter into, and, which was worse, without daring to
acquaint anybody with it.  My mind was eternally taken up with such
things as these, so that, all things considered, there is more trouble in
keeping money than in getting it.  And if I did not altogether so much as
I say, or was not really so scandalously solicitous of my money as I have
made myself out to be, yet it cost me something at least to restrain
myself from being so.  I reaped little or no advantage by what I had, and
my expenses seemed nothing less to me for having the more to spend; for,
as Bion said, the hairy men are as angry as the bald to be pulled; and
after you are once accustomed to it and have once set your heart upon
your heap, it is no more at your service; you cannot find in your heart
to break it: ‘tis a building that you will fancy must of necessity all
tumble down to ruin if you stir but the least pebble; necessity must
first take you by the throat before you can prevail upon yourself to
touch it; and I would sooner have pawned anything I had, or sold a horse,
and with much less constraint upon myself, than have made the least
breach in that beloved purse I had so carefully laid by.  But the danger
was that a man cannot easily prescribe certain limits to this desire
(they are hard to find in things that a man conceives to be good), and to
stint this good husbandry so that it may not degenerate into avarice: men
still are intent upon adding to the heap and increasing the stock from
sum to sum, till at last they vilely deprive themselves of the enjoyment
of their own proper goods, and throw all into reserve, without making any
use of them at all.  According to this rule, they are the richest people
in the world who are set to guard the walls and gates of a wealthy city.
All moneyed men I conclude to be covetous.  Plato places corporal or
human goods in this order: health, beauty, strength, riches; and riches,
says he, are not blind, but very clear-sighted, when illuminated by
prudence.  Dionysius the son did a very handsome act upon this subject;
he was informed that one of the Syracusans had hid a treasure in the
earth, and thereupon sent to the man to bring it to him, which he
accordingly did, privately reserving a small part of it only to himself,
with which he went to another city, where being cured of his appetite of
hoarding, he began to live at a more liberal rate; which Dionysius
hearing, caused the rest of his treasure to be restored to him, saying,
that since he had learned to use it, he very willingly returned it back
to him.

I continued some years in this hoarding humour, when I know not what good
demon fortunately put me out of it, as he did the Syracusan, and made me
throw abroad all my reserve at random, the pleasure of a certain journey
I took at very great expense having made me spurn this fond love of money
underfoot; by which means I am now fallen into a third way of living (I
speak what I think of it), doubtless much more pleasant and regular,
which is, that I live at the height of my revenue; sometimes the one,
sometimes the other may perhaps exceed, but ‘tis very little and but
rarely that they differ.  I live from hand to mouth, and content myself
in having sufficient for my present and ordinary expense; for as to
extraordinary occasions, all the laying up in the world would never
suffice.  And ‘tis the greatest folly imaginable to expect that fortune
should ever sufficiently arm us against herself; ‘tis with our own arms
that we are to fight her; accidental ones will betray us in the pinch of
the business.  If I lay up, ‘tis for some near and contemplated purpose;
not to purchase lands, of which I have no need, but to purchase pleasure:

     “Non esse cupidum, pecunia est; non esse emacem, vertigal est.”

     [“Not to be covetous, is money; not to be acquisitive, is revenue.”
      --Cicero, Paradox., vi. 3.]

I neither am in any great apprehension of wanting, nor in desire of any
more:

     “Divinarum fructus est in copia; copiam declarat satietas.”

     [“The fruit of riches is in abundance; satiety declares abundance.”
      --Idem, ibid., vi. 2.]

And I am very well pleased that this reformation in me has fallen out in
an age naturally inclined to avarice, and that I see myself cleared of a
folly so common to old men, and the most ridiculous of all human follies.

Feraulez, a man that had run through both fortunes, and found that the
increase of substance was no increase of appetite either to eating or
drinking, sleeping or the enjoyment of his wife, and who on the other
side felt the care of his economics lie heavy upon his shoulders, as it
does on mine, was resolved to please a poor young man, his faithful
friend, who panted after riches, and made him a gift of all his, which
were excessively great, and, moreover, of all he was in the daily way of
getting by the liberality of Cyrus, his good master, and by the war;
conditionally that he should take care handsomely to maintain and
plentifully to entertain him as his guest and friend; which being
accordingly done, they afterwards lived very happily together, both of
them equally content with the change of their condition.  ‘Tis an example
that I could imitate with all my heart; and I very much approve the
fortune of the aged prelate whom I see to have so absolutely stripped
himself of his purse, his revenue, and care of his expense, committing
them one while to one trusty servant, and another while to another, that
he has spun out a long succession of years, as ignorant, by this means,
of his domestic affairs as a mere stranger.

The confidence in another man’s virtue is no light evidence of a man’s
own, and God willingly favours such a confidence.  As to what concerns
him of whom I am speaking, I see nowhere a better governed house, more
nobly and constantly maintained than his.  Happy to have regulated his
affairs to so just a proportion that his estate is sufficient to do it
without his care or trouble, and without any hindrance, either in the
spending or laying it up, to his other more quiet employments, and more
suitable both to his place and liking.

Plenty, then, and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of
them; and riches no more than glory or health have other beauty or
pleasure than he lends them by whom they are possessed.

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not
he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is
content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter
and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies
as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own
happy or unhappy condition.  All external accessions receive taste and
colour from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us, not with their
heat, but our own, which they are fit to cover and nourish; he who would
shield therewith a cold body, would do the same service for the cold, for
so snow and ice are preserved.  And, certes, after the same manner that
study is a torment to an idle man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard,
frugality to the spendthrift, and exercise to a lazy, tender-bred fellow,
so it is of all the rest.  The things are not so painful and difficult of
themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.  To judge of
great, and high matters requires a suitable soul; otherwise we attribute
the vice to them which is really our own.  A straight oar seems crooked
in the water it does not only import that we see the thing, but how and
after what manner we see it.

After all this, why, amongst so many discourses that by so many arguments
persuade men to despise death and to endure pain, can we not find out one
that helps us?  And of so many sorts of imaginations as have so prevailed
upon others as to persuade them to do so, why does not every one apply
some one to himself, the most suitable to his own humour?  If he cannot
digest a strong-working decoction to eradicate the evil, let him at least
take a lenitive to ease it:

     [“It is an effeminate and flimsy opinion, nor more so in pain than
     in pleasure, in which, while we are at our ease, we cannot bear
     without a cry the sting of a bee.  The whole business is to commend
     thyself.”--Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 22.]

As to the rest, a man does not transgress philosophy by permitting the
acrimony of pains and human frailty to prevail so much above measure; for
they constrain her to go back to her unanswerable replies: “If it be ill
to live in necessity, at least there is no necessity upon a man to live
in necessity”: “No man continues ill long but by his own fault.”  He who
has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither
resist nor fly, what can we do with him?




CHAPTER XLI

NOT TO COMMUNICATE A MAN’S HONOUR

Of all the follies of the world, that which is most universally received
is the solicitude of reputation and glory; which we are fond of to that
degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual
and substantial goods, to pursue this vain phantom and empty word, that
has neither body nor hold to be taken of it:

               La fama, ch’invaghisce a un dolce suono
               Gli superbi mortali, et par si bella,
               E un eco, un sogno, anzi d’un sogno un’ombra,
               Ch’ad ogni vento si dilegua a sgombra.”

     [“Fame, which with alluring sound charms proud mortals, and appears
     so fair, is but an echo, a dream, nay, the shadow of a dream, which
     at every breath vanishes and dissolves.”
      --Tasso, Gerus., xiv. 63.]

And of all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the
philosophers themselves are among the last and the most reluctant to
disengage themselves from this: ‘tis the most restive and obstinate of
all:

         “Quia etiam bene proficientes animos tentare non cessat.”

     [“Because it ceases not to assail even well-directed minds”
      --St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, v. 14.]

There is not any one of which reason so clearly accuses the vanity; but
it is so deeply rooted in us that I dare not determine whether any one
ever clearly discharged himself from it or no.  After you have said all
and believed all has been said to its prejudice, it produces so intestine
an inclination in opposition to your best arguments that you have little
power to resist it; for, as Cicero says,  even those who most controvert
it, would yet that the books they write about it should visit the light
under their own names, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise
it.  All other things are communicable and fall into commerce: we lend
our goods and stake our lives for the necessity and service of our
friends; but to communicate a man’s honour, and to robe another with a
man’s own glory, is very rarely seen.

And yet we have some examples of that kind.  Catulus Luctatius in the
Cimbrian war, having done all that in him lay to make his flying soldiers
face about upon the enemy, ran himself at last away with the rest, and
counterfeited the coward, to the end his men might rather seem to follow
their captain than to fly from the enemy; which was to abandon his own
reputation in order to cover the shame of others.  When Charles V. came
into Provence in the year 1537, ‘tis said that Antonio de Leva, seeing
the emperor positively resolved upon this expedition, and believing it
would redound very much to his honour, did, nevertheless, very stiffly
oppose it in the council, to the end that the entire glory of that
resolution should be attributed to his master, and that it might be said
his own wisdom and foresight had been such as that, contrary to the
opinion of all, he had brought about so great an enterprise; which was to
do him honour at his own expense.  The Thracian ambassadors coming to
comfort Archileonida, the mother of Brasidas, upon the death of her son,
and commending him to that height as to say he had not left his like
behind him, she rejected this private and particular commendation to
attribute it to the public: “Tell me not that,” said she; “I know the
city of Sparta has many citizens both greater and of greater worth than
he.”   In the battle of Crecy, the Prince of Wales, being then very
young, had the vanguard committed to him: the main stress of the battle
happened to be in that place, which made the lords who were with him,
finding themselves overmatched, send to King Edward to advance to their
relief.  He inquired of the condition his son was in, and being answered
that he was alive and on horseback: “I should, then, do him wrong,” said
the king, “now to go and deprive him of the honour of winning this battle
he has so long and so bravely sustained; what hazard soever he runs, that
shall be entirely his own”; and, accordingly, would neither go nor send,
knowing that if he went, it would be said all had been lost without his
succour, and that the honour of the victory would be wholly attributed to
him.

              “Semper enim quod postremum adjectum est,
               id rem totam videtur traxisse.”

     [“For always that which is last added, seems to have accomplished
     the whole affair.”--Livy, xxvii. 45.]

Many at Rome thought, and would usually say, that the greatest of
Scipio’s acts were in part due to Laelius, whose constant practice it was
still to advance and support Scipio’s grandeur and renown, without any
care of his own.  And Theopompus, king of Sparta, to him who told him the
republic could not miscarry since he knew so well how to command, “Tis
rather,” answered he, “because the people know so well how to obey.”
 As women succeeding to peerages had, notwithstanding their sex, the
privilege to attend and give their votes in the trials that appertained
to the jurisdiction of peers; so the ecclesiastical peers,
notwithstanding their profession, were obliged to attend our kings in
their wars, not only with their friends and servants, but in their own
persons.  As the Bishop of Beauvais did, who being with Philip Augustus
at the battle of Bouvines, had a notable share in that action; but he did
not think it fit for him to participate in the fruit and glory of that
violent and bloody trade.  He with his own hand reduced several of the
enemy that day to his mercy, whom he delivered to the first gentleman he
met either to kill or receive them to quarter, referring the whole
execution to this other hand; and he did this with regard to William,
Earl of Salisbury, whom he gave up to Messire Jehan de Nesle.  With a
like subtlety of conscience to that I have just named, he would kill but
not wound, and for that reason ever fought with a mace.  And a certain
person of my time, being reproached by the king that he had laid hands on
a priest, stiffly and positively denied he had done any such thing: the
meaning of which was, he had cudgelled and kicked him.




CHAPTER XLII

OF THE INEQUALITY AMOUNGST US.

Plutarch says somewhere that he does not find so great a difference
betwixt beast and beast as he does betwixt man and man; which he says in
reference to the internal qualities and perfections of the soul.  And, in
truth, I find so vast a distance betwixt Epaminondas, according to my
judgment of him, and some that I know, who are yet men of good sense,
that I could willingly enhance upon Plutarch, and say that there is more
difference betwixt such and such a man than there is betwixt such a man
and such a beast:

          [“Ah! how much may one man surpass another!”
           --Terence, Eunuchus, ii. 2.]

and that there are as many and innumerable degrees of mind as there are
cubits betwixt this and heaven.  But as touching the estimate of men,
‘tis strange that, ourselves excepted, no other creature is esteemed
beyond its proper qualities; we commend a horse for his strength and
sureness of foot,

                              “Volucrem
               Sic laudamus equum, facili cui plurima palma
               Fervet, et exsultat rauco victoria circo,”

     [“So we praise the swift horse, for whose easy mastery many a hand
     glows in applause, and victory exults in the hoarse circus.
     --“Juvenal, viii. 57.]

and not for his rich caparison; a greyhound for his speed of heels, not
for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her gesses and bells.
Why, in like manner, do we not value a man for what is properly his own?
He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many
thousand pounds a year: all these are about him, but not in him.  You
will not buy a pig in a poke: if you cheapen a horse, you will see him
stripped of his housing-cloths, you will see him naked and open to your
eye; or if he be clothed, as they anciently were wont to present them to
princes to sell, ‘tis only on the less important parts, that you may not
so much consider the beauty of his colour or the breadth of his crupper,
as principally to examine his legs, eyes, and feet, which are the members
of greatest use:

         “Regibus hic mos est: ubi equos mercantur, opertos
          Inspiciunt; ne, si facies, ut saepe, decora
          Molli fulta pede est, emptorem inducat hiantem”

     [“This is the custom of kings: when they buy horses, they have open
     inspection, lest, if a fair head, as often chances, is supported by
     a weak foot, it should tempt the gaping purchaser.”
      --Horace, Sat., i. 2, 86.]

why, in giving your estimate of a man, do you prize him wrapped and
muffled up in clothes?  He then discovers nothing to you but such parts
as are not in the least his own, and conceals those by which alone one
may rightly judge of his value.  ‘Tis the price of the blade that you
inquire into, not of the scabbard: you would not peradventure bid a
farthing for him, if you saw him stripped.  You are to judge him by
himself and not by what he wears; and, as one of the ancients very
pleasantly said: “Do you know why you repute him tall?  You reckon withal
the height of his pattens.”--[Seneca, Ep. 76.]--The pedestal is no part
of the statue.  Measure him without his stilts; let him lay aside his
revenues and his titles; let him present himself in his shirt. Then
examine if his body be sound and sprightly, active and disposed to
perform its functions.  What soul has he?  Is she beautiful, capable, and
happily provided of all her faculties?  Is she rich of what is her own,
or of what she has borrowed?  Has fortune no hand in the affair?  Can
she, without winking, stand the lightning of swords? is she indifferent
whether her life expire by the mouth or through the throat?  Is she
settled, even and content?  This is what is to be examined, and by that
you are to judge of the vast differences betwixt man and man.  Is he:

          “Sapiens, sibique imperiosus,
          Quern neque pauperies, neque mors, neque vincula terrent;
          Responsare cupidinibus, contemnere honores
          Fortis; et in seipso totus teres atque rotundus,
          Externi ne quid valeat per laeve morari;
          In quem manca ruit semper fortuna?”


     [“The wise man, self-governed, whom neither poverty, nor death,
     nor chains affright: who has the strength to resist his appetites
     and to contemn honours: who is wholly self-contained: whom no
     external objects affect: whom fortune assails in vain.”
      --Horace, Sat., ii. 7,]

such a man is five hundred cubits above kingdoms and duchies; he is an
absolute monarch in and to himself:

          “Sapiens, .  .  .  Pol!  ipse fingit fortunam sibi;”

          [“The wise man is the master of his own fortune,”
           --Plautus, Trin., ii. 2, 84.]

what remains for him to covet or desire?

                         “Nonne videmus,
          Nil aliud sibi naturam latrare, nisi ut, quoi
          Corpore sejunctus dolor absit, mente fruatur,
          Jucundo sensu, cura semotu’ metuque?”

     [“Do we not see that human nature asks no more for itself than
     that, free from bodily pain, it may exercise its mind agreeably,
     exempt from care and fear.”--Lucretius, ii. 16.]

Compare with such a one the common rabble of mankind, stupid and
mean-spirited, servile, instable, and continually floating with the
tempest of various passions, that tosses and tumbles them to and fro, and
all depending upon others, and you will find a greater distance than
betwixt heaven and earth; and yet the blindness of common usage is such
that we make little or no account of it; whereas if we consider a peasant
and a king, a nobleman and a vassal, a magistrate and a private man, a
rich man and a poor, there appears a vast disparity, though they differ
no more, as a man may say, than in their breeches.

In Thrace the king was distinguished from his people after a very
pleasant and especial manner; he had a religion by himself, a god all his
own, and which his subjects were not to presume to adore, which was
Mercury, whilst, on the other hand, he disdained to have anything to do
with theirs, Mars, Bacchus, and Diana.  And yet they are no other than
pictures that make no essential dissimilitude; for as you see actors in a
play representing the person of a duke or an emperor upon the stage, and
immediately after return to their true and original condition of valets
and porters, so the emperor, whose pomp and lustre so dazzle you in
public:

               “Scilicet grandes viridi cum luce smaragdi
               Auto includuntur, teriturque thalassina vestis
               Assidue, et Veneris sudorem exercita potat;”

     [“Because he wears great emeralds richly set in gold, darting green
     lustre; and the sea-blue silken robe, worn with pressure, and moist
     with illicit love (and absorbs the sweat of Venus).”
      --Lucretius, iv. 1123.]

do but peep behind the curtain, and you will see no thing more than an
ordinary man, and peradventure more contemptible than the meanest of his
subjects:

     “Ille beatus introrsum est, istius bracteata felicitas est;”

     [“The one is happy in himself; the happiness of the other is
     counterfeit.”--Seneca, Ep., 115.]

cowardice, irresolution, ambition, spite, and envy agitate him as much as
another:

              “Non enim gazae, neque consularis
               Submovet lictor miseros tumultus
               Mentis, et curas laqueata circum
               Tecta volantes.”

     [“For not treasures, nor the consular lictor, can remove the
     miserable tumults of the mind, nor cares that fly about panelled
     ceilings.”--Horace, Od., ii. 16, 9.]

Care and fear attack him even in the centre of his battalions:

               “Re veraque metus hominum curaeque sequaces
               Nec metuunt sonitus armorum, nee fera tela;
               Audacterque inter reges, rerumque potentes
               Versantur, neque fulgorem reverentur ab auro.”

     [“And in truth the fears and haunting cares of men fear not the
     clash of arms nor points of darts, and mingle boldly with great
     kings and men in authority, nor respect the glitter of gold.”
      --Lucretius, ii. 47.]

Do fevers, gout, and apoplexies spare him any more than one of us?  When
old age hangs heavy upon his shoulders, can the yeomen of his guard ease
him of the burden?  When he is astounded with the apprehension of death,
can the gentlemen of his bedchamber comfort and assure him?  When
jealousy or any other caprice swims in his brain, can our compliments and
ceremonies restore him to his good-humour?  The canopy embroidered with
pearl and gold he lies under has no virtue against a violent fit of the
colic:

               “Nee calidae citius decedunt corpore febres
               Textilibus si in picturis, ostroque rubenti
               Jactaris, quam si plebeia in veste cubandum est.”

     [“Nor do burning fevers quit you sooner if you are stretched on a
     couch of rich tapestry and in a vest of purple dye, than if you be
     in a coarse blanket.”--Idem, ii. 34.]

The flatterers of Alexander the Great possessed him that he was the son
of Jupiter; but being one day wounded, and observing the blood stream
from his wound: “What say you now, my masters,” said he, “is not this
blood of a crimson colour and purely human?  This is not of the
complexion of that which Homer makes to issue from the wounded gods.”
 The poet Hermodorus had written a poem in honour of Antigonus, wherein
he called him the son of the sun: “He who has the emptying of my
close-stool,” said Antigonus, “knows to the contrary.”  He is but a man
at best, and if he be deformed or ill-qualified from his birth, the
empire of the universe cannot set him to rights:

                                   “Puellae
          Hunc rapiant; quidquid calcaverit hic, rosa fiat,”

     [“Let girls carry him off; wherever he steps let there spring up a
     rose!”--Persius, Sat., ii. 38.]

what of all that, if he be a fool?  even pleasure and good fortune are
not relished without vigour and understanding:

          “Haec perinde sunt, ut ilius animus; qui ea possidet
          Qui uti scit, ei bona; illi, qui non uritur recte, mala.”

     [“Things are, as is the mind of their possessor; who knows how to
     use them, to him they are good; to him who abuses them, ill.”
      --Terence, Heart., i.  3, 21.]

Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate to relish
them.  ‘Tis fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy:

     [“‘Tis not lands, or a heap of brass and gold, that has removed
     fevers from the ailing body of the owner, or cares from his mind.
     The possessor must be healthy, if he thinks to make good use of his
     realised wealth.  To him who is covetous or timorous his house and
     estate are as a picture to a blind man, or a fomentation to a
     gouty.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 47.]

He is a sot, his taste is palled and flat; he no more enjoys what he has
than one that has a cold relishes the flavour of canary, or than a horse
is sensible of his rich caparison.  Plato is in the right when he tells
us that health, beauty, vigour, and riches, and all the other things
called goods, are equally evil to the unjust as good to the just, and the
evil on the contrary the same.  And therefore where the body and the mind
are in disorder, to what use serve these external conveniences:
considering that the least prick with a pin, or the least passion of the
soul, is sufficient to deprive one of the pleasure of being sole monarch
of the world.  At the first twitch of the gout it signifies much to be
called Sir and Your Majesty!

               “Totus et argento conflatus, totus et auro;”

     [“Wholly made up of silver and gold.”--Tibullus, i. 2, 70.]

does he not forget his palaces and girandeurs?  If he be angry, can his
being a prince keep him from looking red and looking pale, and grinding
his teeth like a madman?  Now, if he be a man of parts and of right
nature, royalty adds very little to his happiness;

          “Si ventri bene, si lateri est, pedibusque tuffs, nil
          Divitix poterunt regales addere majus;”

     [“If it is well with thy belly, thy side and thy feet, regal wealth
     will be able to add nothing.”--Horace, Ep., i. 12, 5.]

he discerns ‘tis nothing but counterfeit and gullery.  Nay, perhaps he
would be of King Seleucus’ opinion, that he who knew the weight of a
sceptre would not stoop to pick it up, if he saw it lying before him, so
great and painful are the duties incumbent upon a good king.--[Plutarch,
If a Sage should Meddle with Affairs of Stale, c. 12.]--Assuredly it can
be no easy task to rule others, when we find it so hard a matter to
govern ourselves; and as to dominion, that seems so charming, the frailty
of human judgment and the difficulty of choice in things that are new and
doubtful considered, I am very much of opinion that it is far more easy
and pleasant to follow than to lead; and that it is a great settlement
and satisfaction of mind to have only one path to walk in, and to have
none to answer for but a man’s self;

               “Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum,
               Quam regere imperio res velle.”

     [“‘Tis much better quietly to obey than wish to rule.”
      --Lucretius, V, 1126.]

To which we may add that saying of Cyrus, that no man was fit to rule but
he who in his own worth was of greater value than those he was to govern;
but King Hiero in Xenophon says further, that in the fruition even of
pleasure itself they are in a worse condition than private men; forasmuch
as the opportunities and facility they have of commanding those things at
will takes off from the delight that ordinary folks enjoy:

          “Pinguis amor, nimiumque patens, in taedia nobis
          Vertitur, et, stomacho dulcis ut esca, nocet.”

     [“Love in excess and too palpable turns to weariness, and, like
     sweetmeats to the stomach, is injurious.”--Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 25.]

Can we think that the singing boys of the choir take any great delight in
music?  the satiety rather renders it troublesome and tedious to them.
Feasts, balls, masquerades and tiltings delight such as but rarely see,
and desire to see, them; but having been frequently at such
entertainments, the relish of them grows flat and insipid.  Nor do women
so much delight those who make a common practice of the sport.  He who
will not give himself leisure to be thirsty can never find the true
pleasure of drinking.  Farces and tumbling tricks are pleasant to the
spectators, but a wearisome toil to those by whom they are performed.
And that this is so, we see that princes divert themselves sometimes in
disguising their quality, awhile to depose themselves, and to stoop to
the poor and ordinary way of living of the meanest of their people.

              “Plerumque gratae divitibus vices
               Mundaeque parvo sub lare pauperum
               Coenae, sine aulaeis et ostro,
               Soliicitam explicuere frontem.”

     [“The rich are often pleased with variety; and the plain supper in a
     poor cottage, without tapestry and purple, has relaxed the anxious
     brow.”--Horace, Od., iii.  29, 13.]

Nothing is so distasteful and clogging as abundance.  What appetite would
not be baffled to see three hundred women at its mercy, as the grand
signor has in his seraglio?  And, of his ancestors what fruition or taste
of sport did he reserve to himself, who never went hawking without seven
thousand falconers?  And besides all this, I fancy that this lustre of
grandeur brings with it no little disturbance and uneasiness upon the
enjoyment of the most tempting pleasures; the great are too conspicuous
and lie too open to every one’s view.  Neither do I know to what end a
man should more require of them to conceal their errors, since what is
only reputed indiscretion in us, the people in them brand with the names
of tyranny and contempt of the laws, and, besides their proclivity to
vice, are apt to hold that it is a heightening of pleasure to them, to
insult over and to trample upon public observances.  Plato, indeed, in
his Goygias, defines a tyrant to be one who in a city has licence to do
whatever his own will leads him to do; and by reason of this impunity,
the display and publication of their vices do ofttimes more mischief than
the vice itself.  Every one fears to be pried into and overlooked; but
princes are so, even to their very gestures, looks and thoughts, the
people conceiving they have right and title to be judges of them besides
that the blemishes of the great naturally appear greater by reason of the
eminence and lustre of the place where they are seated, and that a mole
or a wart appears greater in them than a wide gash in others.  And this
is the reason why the poets feign the amours of Jupiter to be performed
in the disguises of so many borrowed shapes, and that amongst the many
amorous practices they lay to his charge, there is only one, as I
remember, where he appears in his own majesty and grandeur.

But let us return to Hiero, who further complains of the inconveniences
he found in his royalty, in that he could not look abroad and travel the
world at liberty, being as it were a prisoner in the bounds and limits of
his own dominion, and that in all his actions he was evermore surrounded
with an importunate crowd.  And in truth, to see our kings sit all alone
at table, environed with so many people prating about them, and so many
strangers staring upon them, as they always are, I have often been moved
rather to pity than to envy their condition.  King Alfonso was wont to
say, that in this asses were in a better condition than kings, their
masters permitting them to feed at their own ease and pleasure, a favour
that kings cannot obtain of their servants.  And it has never come into
my fancy that it could be of any great benefit to the life of a man of
sense to have twenty people prating about him when he is at stool; or
that the services of a man of ten thousand livres a year, or that has
taken Casale or defended Siena, should be either more commodious or more
acceptable to him, than those of a good groom of the chamber who
understands his place.  The advantages of sovereignty are in a manner but
imaginary: every degree of fortune has in it some image of principality.
Caesar calls all the lords of France, having free franchise within their
own demesnes, roitelets or petty kings; and in truth, the name of sire
excepted, they go pretty far towards kingship; for do but look into the
provinces remote from court, as Brittany for example; take notice of the
train, the vassals, the officers, the employments, service, ceremony, and
state of a lord who lives retired from court in his own house, amongst
his own tenants and servants; and observe withal the flight of his
imagination; there is nothing more royal; he hears talk of his master
once a year, as of a king of Persia, without taking any further
recognition of him, than by some remote kindred his secretary keeps in
some register.  And, to speak the truth, our laws are easy enough, so
easy that a gentleman of France scarce feels the weight of sovereignty
pinch his shoulders above twice in his life.  Real and effectual
subjection only concerns such amongst us as voluntarily thrust their
necks under the yoke, and who design to get wealth and honours by such
services: for a man that loves his own fireside, and can govern his house
without falling by the ears with his neighbours or engaging in suits of
law, is as free as a Duke of Venice.

               “Paucos servitus, plures servitutem tenent.”

          [“Servitude enchains few, but many enchain themselves to
          servitude.”--Seneca, Ep., 22.]

But that which Hiero is most concerned at is, that he finds himself
stripped of all friendship, deprived of all mutual society, wherein the
true and most perfect fruition of human life consists.  For what
testimony of affection and goodwill can I extract from him that owes me,
whether he will or no, all that he is able to do?  Can I form any
assurance of his real respect to me, from his humble way of speaking and
submissive behaviour, when these are ceremonies it is not in his choice
to deny?  The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour;
those respects are due to royalty and not to me:

               “Maximum hoc regni bonum est
               Quod facta domini cogitur populus sui
               Quam ferre, tam laudare.”

     [“‘Tis the greatest benefit of a kingdom that the people is forced
     to commend, as well as to bear the acts of the ruler.”
      --Seneca, Thyestes, ii.  i, 30.]

Do I not see that the wicked and the good king, he that is hated and he
that is beloved, have the one as much reverence paid him as the other?
My predecessor was, and my successor shall be, served with the same
ceremony and state.  If my subjects do me no harm, ‘tis no evidence of
any good affection; why should I look upon it as such, seeing it is not
in their power to do it if they would?  No one follows me or obeys my
commands upon the account of any friendship, betwixt him and me; there
can be no contracting of friendship where there is so little relation and
correspondence: my own height has put me out of the familiarity of and
intelligence with men; there is too great disparity and disproportion
betwixt us.  They follow me either upon the account of decency and
custom; or rather my fortune, than me, to increase their own.  All they
say to me or do for me is but outward paint, appearance, their liberty
being on all parts restrained by the great power and authority I have
over them.  I see nothing about me but what is dissembled and disguised.

The Emperor Julian being one day applauded by his courtiers for his exact
justice: “I should be proud of these praises,” said he, “did they come
from persons that durst condemn or disapprove the contrary, in case I
should do it.”  All the real advantages of princes are common to them
with men of meaner condition (‘tis for the gods to mount winged horses
and feed upon ambrosia): they have no other sleep, nor other appetite
than we; the steel they arm themselves withal is of no better temper than
that we also use; their crowns neither defend them from the rain nor the
sun.

Diocletian, who wore a crown so fortunate and revered, resigned it to
retire to the felicity of a private life; and some time after the
necessity of public affairs requiring that he should reassume his charge,
he made answer to those who came to court him to it: “You would not
offer,” said he, “to persuade me to this, had you seen the fine order of
the trees I have planted in my orchard, and the fair melons I have sown
in my garden.”

In Anacharsis’ opinion, the happiest state of government would be where,
all other things being equal, precedence should be measured out by the
virtues, and repulses by the vices of men.

When King Pyrrhus prepared for his expedition into Italy, his wise
counsellor Cyneas, to make him sensible of the vanity of his ambition:
“Well, sir,” said he, “to what end do you make all this mighty
preparation?”--“To make myself master of Italy,” replied the king.
“And what after that  is done?” said Cyneas.  “I will pass over into Gaul
and Spain,” said the other.  “And what then?”--“I will then go to subdue
Africa; and lastly, when I have brought the whole world to my subjection,
I will sit down and rest content at my own ease.”

“For God sake, sir,” replied Cyneas, “tell me what hinders that you may
not, if you please, be now in the condition you speak of?  Why do you not
now at this instant settle yourself in the state you seem to aim at, and
spare all the labour and hazard you interpose?”

         “Nimirum, quia non cognovit, qux esset habendi
          Finis, et omnino quoad crescat vera voluptas.”

     [“Forsooth because he does not know what should be the limit of
     acquisition, and altogether how far real pleasure should increase.”
      --Lucretius, v. 1431]

I will conclude with an old versicle, that I think very apt to the
purpose:

               “Mores cuique sui fingunt fortunam.”

               [“Every man frames his own fortune.”
                --Cornelius Nepos, Life of Atticus]




CHAPTER XLIII

OF SUMPTUARY LAWS

The way by which our laws attempt to regulate idle and vain expenses in
meat and clothes, seems to be quite contrary to the end designed.  The
true way would be to beget in men a contempt of silks and gold, as vain,
frivolous, and useless; whereas we augment to them the honours, and
enhance the value of such things, which, sure, is a very improper way to
create a disgust.  For to enact that none but princes shall eat turbot,
shall wear velvet or gold lace, and interdict these things to the people,
what is it but to bring them into a greater esteem, and to set every one
more agog to eat and wear them?  Let kings leave off these ensigns of
grandeur; they have others enough besides; those excesses are more
excusable in any other than a prince.  We may learn by the example of
several nations better ways of exterior distinction of quality (which,
truly, I conceive to be very requisite in a state) enough, without
fostering to this purpose such corruption and manifest inconvenience.
‘Tis strange how suddenly and with how much ease custom in these
indifferent things establishes itself and becomes authority.  We had
scarce worn cloth a year, in compliance with the court, for the mourning
of Henry II., but that silks were already grown into such contempt with
every one, that a man so clad was presently concluded a citizen: silks
were divided betwixt the physicians and surgeons, and though all other
people almost went in the same habit, there was, notwithstanding, in one
thing or other, sufficient distinction of the several conditions of men.
How suddenly do greasy chamois and linen doublets become the fashion in
our armies, whilst all neatness and richness of habit fall into contempt?
Let kings but lead the dance and begin to leave off this expense, and in
a month the business will be done throughout the kingdom, without edict
or ordinance; we shall all follow.  It should be rather proclaimed, on
the contrary, that no one should wear scarlet or goldsmiths’ work but
courtesans and tumblers.

Zeleucus by the like invention reclaimed the corrupted manners of the
Locrians.  His laws were, that no free woman should be allowed any more
than one maid to follow her, unless she was drunk: nor was to stir out of
the city by night, wear jewels of gold about her, or go in an embroidered
robe, unless she was a professed and public prostitute; that, bravos
excepted, no man was to wear a gold ring, nor be seen in one of those
effeminate robes woven in the city of Miletus.  By which infamous
exceptions he discreetly diverted his citizens from superfluities and
pernicious pleasures, and it was a project of great utility to attract
then by honour and ambition to their duty and obedience.

Our kings can do what they please in such external reformations; their
own inclination stands in this case for a law:

          “Quicquid principes faciunt, praecipere videntur.”

     [“What princes themselves do, they seem to prescribe.”
      --Quintil., Declam., 3.]

Whatever is done at court passes for a rule through the rest of France.
Let the courtiers fall out with these abominable breeches, that discover
so much of those parts should be concealed; these great bellied doublets,
that make us look like I know not what, and are so unfit to admit of
arms; these long effeminate locks of hair; this foolish custom of kissing
what we present to our equals, and our hands in saluting them, a ceremony
in former times only due to princes.  Let them not permit that a
gentleman shall appear in place of respect without his sword, unbuttoned
and untrussed, as though he came from the house of office; and that,
contrary to the custom of our forefathers and the particular privilege of
the nobles of this kingdom, we stand a long time bare to them in what
place soever, and the same to a hundred others, so many tiercelets and
quartelets of kings we have got nowadays and other like vicious
innovations: they will see them all presently vanish and cried down.
These are, ‘tis true, but superficial errors; but they are of ill augury,
and enough to inform us that the whole fabric is crazy and tottering,
when we see the roughcast of our walls to cleave and split.

Plato in his Laws esteems nothing of more pestiferous consequence to his
city than to give young men the liberty of introducing any change in
their habits, gestures, dances, songs, and exercises, from one form to
another; shifting from this to that, hunting after novelties, and
applauding the inventors; by which means manners are corrupted and the
old institutions come to be nauseated and despised.  In all things,
saving only in those that are evil, a change is to be feared; even the
change of seasons, winds, viands, and humours.  And no laws are in their
true credit, but such to which God has given so long a continuance that
no one knows their beginning, or that there ever was any other.




CHAPTER XLIV

OF SLEEP

Reason directs that we should always go the same way, but not always at
the same pace.  And, consequently, though a wise man ought not so much to
give the reins to human passions as to let him deviate from the right
path, he may, notwithstanding, without prejudice to his duty, leave it to
them to hasten or to slacken his speed, and not fix himself like a
motionless and insensible Colossus.  Could virtue itself put on flesh and
blood, I believe the pulse would beat faster going on to assault than in
going to dinner: that is to say, there is a necessity she should heat and
be moved upon this account.  I have taken notice, as of an extraordinary
thing, of some great men, who in the highest enterprises and most
important affairs have kept themselves in so settled and serene a calm,
as not at all to break their sleep.  Alexander the Great, on the day
assigned for that furious battle betwixt him and Darius, slept so
profoundly and so long in the morning, that Parmenio was forced to enter
his chamber, and coming to his bedside, to call him several times by his
name, the time to go to fight compelling him so to do.  The Emperor Otho,
having put on a resolution to kill himself that night, after having
settled his domestic affairs, divided his money amongst his servants, and
set a good edge upon a sword he had made choice of for the purpose, and
now staying only to be satisfied whether all his friends had retired in
safety, he fell into so sound a sleep that the gentlemen of his chamber
heard him snore.  The death of this emperor has in it circumstances
paralleling that of the great Cato, and particularly this just related
for Cato being ready to despatch himself, whilst he only stayed his hand
in expectation of the return of a messenger he had sent to bring him news
whether the senators he had sent away were put out from the Port of
Utica, he fell into so sound a sleep, that they heard him snore in the
next room; and the man, whom he had sent to the port, having awakened him
to let him know that the tempestuous weather had hindered the senators
from putting to sea, he despatched away another messenger, and composing
again himself in the bed, settled to sleep, and slept till by the return
of the last messenger he had certain intelligence they were gone.  We may
here further compare him with Alexander in the great and dangerous storm
that threatened him by the sedition of the tribune Metellus, who,
attempting to publish a decree for the calling in of Pompey with his army
into the city at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy, was only and that
stoutly opposed by Cato, so that very sharp language and bitter menaces
passed betwixt them in the senate about that affair; but it was the next
day, in the forenoon, that the controversy was to be decided, where
Metellus, besides the favour of the people and of Caesar--at that time of
Pompey’s faction--was to appear accompanied with a rabble of slaves and
gladiators; and Cato only fortified with his own courage and constancy;
so that his relations, domestics, and many virtuous people of his friends
were in great apprehensions for him; and to that degree, that some there
were who passed over the whole night without sleep, eating, or drinking,
for the danger they saw him running into; his wife and sisters did
nothing but weep and torment themselves in his house; whereas, he, on the
contrary, comforted every one, and after having supped after his usual
manner, went to bed, and slept profoundly till morning, when one of his
fellow-tribunes roused him to go to the encounter.  The knowledge we have
of the greatness of this man’s courage by the rest of his life, may
warrant us certainly to judge that his indifference proceeded from a soul
so much elevated above such accidents, that he disdained to let it take
any more hold of his fancy than any ordinary incident.

In the naval engagement that Augustus won of Sextus Pompeius in Sicily,
just as they were to begin the fight, he was so fast asleep that his
friends were compelled to wake him to give the signal of battle: and this
was it that gave Mark Antony afterwards occasion to reproach him that he
had not the courage so much as with open eyes to behold the order of his
own squadrons, and not to have dared to present himself before the
soldiers, till first Agrippa had brought him news of the victory
obtained.  But as to the young Marius, who did much worse (for the day of
his last battle against Sylla, after he had marshalled his army and given
the word and signal of battle, he laid him down under the shade of a tree
to repose himself, and fell so fast asleep that the rout and flight of
his men could hardly waken him, he having seen nothing of the fight), he
is said to have been at that time so extremely spent and worn out with
labour and want of sleep, that nature could hold out no longer.  Now,
upon what has been said, the physicians may determine whether sleep be so
necessary that our lives depend upon it: for we read that King Perseus of
Macedon, being prisoner at Rome, was killed by being kept from sleep; but
Pliny instances such as have lived long without sleep.  Herodotus speaks
of nations where the men sleep and wake by half-years, and they who write
the life of the sage Epimenides affirm that he slept seven-and-fifty
years together.




CHAPTER XLV

OF THE BATTLE OF DREUX

     [December 19, 1562, in which the Catholics, under the command of the
     Duc de Guise and the Constable de Montmorenci, defeated the
     Protestants, commanded by the Prince de Conde.  See Sismondi, Hist.
     des Francais, vol.  xviii., p. 354.]

Our battle of Dreux is remarkable for several extraordinary incidents;
but such as have no great kindness for M. de Guise, nor much favour his
reputation, are willing to have him thought to blame, and that his making
a halt and delaying time with the forces he commanded, whilst the
Constable, who was general of the army, was racked through and through
with the enemy’s artillery, his battalion routed, and himself taken
prisoner, is not to be excused; and that he had much better have run the
hazard of charging the enemy in flank, than staying for the advantage of
falling in upon the rear, to suffer so great and so important a loss.
But, besides what the event demonstrated, he who will consider it without
passion or prejudice will easily be induced to confess that the aim and
design, not of a captain only, but of every private soldier, ought to
regard the victory in general, and that no particular occurrences, how
nearly soever they may concern his own interest, should divert him from
that pursuit.  Philopoemen,  in an encounter with Machanidas, having sent
before a good strong party of his archers and slingers to begin the
skirmish, and these being routed and hotly pursued by the enemy, who,
pushing on the fortune of their arms, and in that pursuit passing by the
battalion where Philopoemen was, though his soldiers were impatient to
fall on, he did not think fit to stir from his post nor to present
himself to the enemy to relieve his men, but having suffered these to be
chased and cut in pieces before his face, charged in upon the enemy’s
foot when he saw them left unprotected by the horse, and notwithstanding
that they were Lacedaemonians, yet taking them in the nick, when thinking
themselves secure of the victory, they began to disorder their ranks; he
did this business with great facility, and then put himself in pursuit of
Machanidas.  Which case is very like that of Monsieur de Guise.

In that bloody battle betwixt Agesilaus and the Boeotians, which
Xenophon, who was present at it, reports to be the sharpest that he had
ever seen, Agesilaus waived the advantage that fortune presented him, to
let the Boeotian battalions pass by and then to charge them in the rear,
how certain soever he might make himself of the victory, judging it would
rather be an effect of conduct than valour, to proceed that way; and
therefore, to show his prowess, rather chose with a marvellous ardour of
courage to charge them in the front; but he was well beaten and well
wounded for his pains, and constrained at last to disengage himself, and
to take the course he had at first neglected; opening his battalion to
give way to this torrent of Boeotians, and they being passed by, taking
notice that they marched in disorder, like men who thought themselves out
of danger, he pursued and charged them in flank; yet could not so prevail
as to bring it to so general a rout but that they leisurely retreated,
still facing about upon him till they had retired to safety.




CHAPTER XLVI

OF NAMES

What variety of herbs soever are shufed together in the dish, yet the
whole mass is swallowed up under one name of a sallet.  In like manner,
under the consideration of names, I will make a hodge-podge of divers
articles.

Every nation has certain names, that, I know not why, are taken in no
good sense, as with us, John, William, Benedict.  In the genealogy of
princes, also, there seem to be certain names fatally affected, as the
Ptolemies of Egypt, the Henries in England, the Charleses in France, the
Baldwins in Flanders, and the Williams of our ancient Aquitaine, from
whence, ‘tis said, the name of Guyenne has its derivation; which would
seem far fetched were there not as crude derivations in Plato himself.

Item, ‘tis a frivolous thing in itself, but nevertheless worthy to be
recorded for the strangeness of it, that is written by an eyewitness,
that Henry, Duke of Normandy, son of Henry II., king of England, making a
great feast in France, the concourse of nobility and gentry was so great,
that being, for sport’s sake, divided into troops, according to their
names, in the first troop, which consisted of Williams, there were found
an hundred and ten knights sitting at the table of that name, without
reckoning the ordinary gentlemen and servants.

It is as pleasant to distinguish the tables by the names of the guests as
it was in the Emperor Geta to distinguish the several courses of his meat
by the first letters of the meats themselves; so that those that began
with B were served up together, as brawn, beef, bream, bustards,
becca-ficos; and so of the others.  Item, there is a saying that it is a
good thing to have a good name, that is to say, credit and a good repute;
but besides this, it is really convenient to have a well-sounding name,
such as is easy of pronunciation and easy to be remembered, by reason
that kings and other great persons do by that means the more easily know
and the more hardly forget us; and indeed of our own servants we more
frequently call and employ those whose names are most ready upon the
tongue.  I myself have seen Henry II., when he could not for his heart
hit of a gentleman’s name of our country of Gascony, and moreover was
fain to call one of the queen’s maids of honour by the general name of
her race, her own family name being so difficult to pronounce or
remember; and Socrates thinks it worthy a father’s care to give fine
names to his children.

Item, ‘tis said that the foundation of Notre Dame la Grande at Poitiers
took its original from hence that a debauched young fellow formerly
living in that place, having got to him a wench, and, at her first coming
in, asking her name, and being answered that it was Mary, he felt himself
so suddenly pierced through with the awe of religion and the reverence to
that sacred name of the Blessed Virgin, that he not only immediately sent
the girl away, but became a reformed man and so continued the remainder
of his life; and that, in consideration of this miracle, there was
erected upon the place where this young man’s house stood, first a chapel
dedicated to our Lady and afterwards the church that we now see standing
there.  This vocal and auricular reproof wrought upon the conscience, and
that right into the soul; this that follows, insinuated itself merely by
the senses.  Pythagoras being in company with some wild young fellows,
and perceiving that, heated with the feast, they comploted to go violate
an honest house, commanded the singing wench to alter her wanton airs;
and by a solemn, grave, and spondaic music, gently enchanted and laid
asleep their ardour.

Item, will not posterity say that our modern reformation has been
wonderfully delicate and exact, in having not only combated errors and
vices, and filled the world with devotion, humility, obedience, peace,
and all sorts of virtue; but in having proceeded so far as to quarrel
with our ancient baptismal names of Charles, Louis, Francis, to fill the
world with Methuselahs, Ezekiels, and Malachis, names of a more spiritual
sound?  A gentleman, a neighbour of mine, a great admirer of antiquity,
and who was always extolling the excellences of former times in
comparison with this present age of ours, did not, amongst the rest,
forget to dwell upon the lofty and magnificent sound of the gentleman’s
names of those days, Don Grumedan, Quedregan, Agesilan, which, but to
hear named he conceived to denote other kind of men than Pierre, Guillot,
and Michel.

Item, I am mightily pleased with Jacques Amyot for leaving, throughout a
whole French oration, the Latin names entire, without varying and
garbling them to give them a French cadence.  It seemed a little harsh
and rough at first; but already custom, by the authority of his Plutarch,
has overcome that novelty.  I have often wished that such as write
histories in Latin would leave our names as they find them and as they
are; for in making Vaudemont into Vallemontanus, and metamorphosing names
to make them suit better with the Greek or Latin, we know not where we
are, and with the persons of the men lose the benefit of the story.

To conclude, ‘tis a scurvy custom and of very ill consequence that we
have in our kingdom of France to call every one by the name of his manor
or seigneury; ‘tis the thing in the world that the most prejudices and
confounds families and descents.  A younger brother of a good family,
having a manor left him by his father, by the name of which he has been
known and honoured, cannot handsomely leave it; ten years after his
decease it falls into the hand of a stranger, who does the same: do but
judge whereabouts we shall be concerning the knowledge of these men.  We
need look no further for examples than our own royal family, where every
partition creates a new surname, whilst, in the meantime, the original of
the family is totally lost.  There is so great liberty taken in these
mutations, that I have not in my time seen any one advanced by fortune to
any extraordinary condition who has not presently had genealogical titles
added to him, new and unknown to his father, and who has not been
inoculated into some illustrious stem by good luck; and the obscurest
families are the most apt for falsification.  How many gentlemen have we
in France who by their own account are of royal extraction? more, I
think, than who will confess they are not.  Was it not a pleasant passage
of a friend of mine?  There were, several gentlemen assembled together
about the dispute of one seigneur with another; which other had, in
truth, some preeminence of titles and alliances above the ordinary
gentry.  Upon the debate of this prerogative, every one, to make himself
equal to him, alleged, this one extraction, that another; this, the near
resemblance of name, that, of arms; another, an old worm-eaten patent;
the very least of them was great-grandchild to some foreign king.  When
they came to sit down, to dinner, my friend, instead of taking his place
amongst them, retiring with most profound conges, entreated the company
to excuse him for having hitherto lived with them at the saucy rate of a
companion; but being now better informed of their quality, he would begin
to pay them the respect due to their birth and grandeur, and that it
would ill become him to sit down among so many princes--ending this farce
with a thousand reproaches: “Let us, in God’s name, satisfy ourselves
with what our fathers were contented with, with what we are.  We are
great enough, if we rightly understand how to maintain it.  Let us not
disown the fortune and condition of our ancestors, and let us lay aside
these ridiculous pretences, that can never be wanting to any one that has
the impudence to allege them.”

Arms have no more security than surnames.  I bear azure powdered with
trefoils or, with a lion’s paw of the same armed gules in fesse.  What
privilege has this to continue particularly in my house?  A son-in-law
will transport it into another family, or some paltry purchaser will make
them his first arms.  There is nothing wherein there is more change and
confusion.

But this consideration leads me, perforce, into another subject.  Let us
pry a little narrowly into, and, in God’s name, examine upon what
foundation we erect this glory and reputation for which the world is
turned topsy-turvy: wherein do we place this renown that we hunt after
with so much pains?  It is, in the end, Peter or William that carries it,
takes it into his possession, and whom it only concerns.  O what a
valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes
nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its
master’s indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or
desire!  Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play
withal.  And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound, when all is
done? or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to be varied that I
would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many
victories, to Guesquin, to Glesquin, or to Gueaquin?  and yet there would
be something of greater moment in the case than in Lucian, that Sigma
should serve Tau with a process; for

                         “Non levia aut ludicra petuntur
                    Praemia;”

     [“They aim at no slight or jocular rewards.”--AEneid, xii. 764.]

the chase is there in very good earnest: the question is, which of these
letters is to be rewarded for so many sieges, battles, wounds,
imprisonments, and services done to the crown of France by this famous
constable?  Nicholas Denisot--[Painter and poet, born at Le Mans,1515.]--
never concerned himself further than the letters of his name, of which he
has altered the whole contexture to build up by anagram the Count
d’Alsinois, whom he has handsomely endowed with the glory of his poetry
and painting.  The historian Suetonius was satisfied with only the
meaning of his name, which made him cashier his father’s surname, Lenis,
to leave Tranquillus successor to the reputation of his writings.  Who
would believe that Captain Bayard should have no honour but what he
derives from the deeds of Peter Terrail; and that Antonio Iscalin should
suffer himself to his face to be robbed of the honour of so many
navigations and commands at sea and land by Captain Paulin and the Baron
de la Garde?  Secondly, these are dashes of the pen common to a thousand
people.  How many are there, in every family, of the same name and
surname? and how many more in several families, ages, and countries?
History tells us of three of the name of Socrates, of five Platos, of
eight Aristotles, of seven Xenophons, of twenty Demetrii, and of twenty
Theodores; and how many more she was not acquainted with we may imagine.
Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great?  But after
all, what virtue, what authority, or what secret springs are there that
fix upon my deceased groom, or the other Pompey, who had his head cut off
in Egypt, this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of
the pen, so as to be of any advantage to them?

          “Id cinerem et manes credis curare sepultos?”

     [“Do you believe the dead regard such things?”--AEneid, iv. 34.]

What sense have the two companions in greatest esteem amongst me,
Epaminondas, of this fine verse that has been so many ages current in his
praise,

          “Consiliis nostris laus est attrita Laconum;”

     [“The glory of the Spartans is extinguished by my plans.
     --“Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 17.]

or Africanus, of this other,

          “A sole exoriente supra Maeotis Paludes
          Nemo est qui factis me aequiparare queat.”

     [“From where the sun rises over the Palus Maeotis, to where it sets,
     there is no one whose acts can compare with mine”--Idem, ibid.]

Survivors indeed tickle themselves with these fine phrases, and by them
incited to jealousy and desire, inconsiderately and according to their
own fancy, attribute to the dead this their own feeling, vainly
flattering themselves that they shall one day in turn be capable of the
same character.  However:

                              “Ad haec se
          Romanus Graiusque, et Barbaras induperator
          Erexit; caucus discriminis atque laboris
          Inde habuit: tanto major famae sitis est, quam
          Virtutis.”

     [“For these the Roman, the Greek, and the Barbarian commander hath
     aroused himself; he has incurred thence causes of danger and toil:
     so much greater is the thirst for fame than for virtue.”
      --Juvenal, x. 137.]




CHAPTER XLVII

OF THE UNCERTAINTY OF OUR JUDGMENT

Well says this verse:

     [“There is everywhere much liberty of speech.”--Iliad, xx.  249.]

For example:

     [“Hannibal conquered, but knew not how to make the best use of his
     victorious venture.”--Petrarch, Son., 83.]

Such as would improve this argument, and condemn the oversight of our
leaders in not pushing home the victory at Moncontour, or accuse the King
of Spain of not knowing how to make the best use of the advantage he had
against us at St. Quentin, may conclude these oversights to proceed from
a soul already drunk with success, or from a spirit which, being full and
overgorged with this beginning of good fortune, had lost the appetite of
adding to it, already having enough to do to digest what it had taken in:
he has his arms full, and can embrace no more: unworthy of the benefit
fortune has conferred upon him and the advantage she had put into his
hands: for what utility does he reap from it, if, notwithstanding, he
give his enemy respite to rally and make head against him?  What hope is
there that he will dare at another time to attack an enemy reunited and
recomposed, and armed anew with anger and revenge, who did not dare to
pursue them when routed and unmanned by fear?

          “Dum fortuna calet, dum conficit omnia terror.”

     [“Whilst fortune is fresh, and terror finishes all.”
      --Lucan, vii. 734.]

But withal, what better opportunity can he expect than that he has lost?
‘Tis not here, as in fencing, where the most hits gain the prize; for so
long as the enemy is on foot, the game is new to begin, and that is not
to be called a victory that puts not an end to the war.  In the encounter
where Caesar had the worst, near the city of Oricum, he reproached
Pompey’s soldiers that he had been lost had their general known how to
overcome; and afterwards clawed him in a very different fashion when it
came to his turn.

But why may not a man also argue, on the contrary, that it is the effect
of a precipitous and insatiate spirit not to know how to bound and
restrain its coveting; that it is to abuse the favours of God to exceed
the measure He has prescribed them: and that again to throw a man’s self
into danger after a victory obtained is again to expose himself to the
mercy of fortune: that it is one of the greatest discretions in the rule
of war not to drive an enemy to despair?  Sylla and Marius in the social
war, having defeated the Marsians, seeing yet a body of reserve that,
prompted by despair, was coming on like enraged brutes to dash in upon
them, thought it not convenient to stand their charge.  Had not Monsieur
de Foix’s ardour transported him so furiously to pursue the remains of
the victory of Ravenna, he had not obscured it by his own death.  And yet
the recent memory of his example served to preserve Monsieur d’Anguien
from the same misfortune at the battle of Serisoles.  ‘Tis dangerous to
attack a man you have deprived of all means to escape but by his arms,
for necessity teaches violent resolutions:

          “Gravissimi sunt morsus irritatae necessitatis.”

     [“Irritated necessity bites deepest.”--Portius Latro., Declam.]

          “Vincitur haud gratis, jugulo qui provocat hostem.”

     [“He is not readily beaten who provokes the enemy by shewing
     his throat.”--or: “He who presents himself to his foe, sells his
     life dear.”--Lucan, iv. 275.]

This was it that made Pharax withhold the King of Lacedaemon, who had won
a battle against the Mantineans, from going to charge a thousand Argians,
who had escaped in an entire body from the defeat, but rather let them
steal off at liberty that he might not encounter valour whetted and
enraged by mischance.  Clodomir, king of Aquitaine, after his victory
pursuing Gondemar, king of Burgundy, beaten and making off as fast as he
could for safety, compelled him to face about and make head, wherein his
obstinacy deprived him of the fruit of his conquest, for he there lost
his life.

In like manner, if a man were to choose whether he would have his
soldiers richly and sumptuously accoutred or armed only for the necessity
of the matter in hand, this argument would step in to favour the first,
of which opinion was Sertorius, Philopcemen, Brutus, Caesar, and others,
that it is to a soldier an enflaming of courage and a spur himself in
brave attire; and withal a motive to be more obstinate in fight, having
his arms, which are in a manner his estate and whole inheritance to
defend; which is the reason, says Xenophon, why those of Asia carried
their wives and concubines, with their choicest jewels and greatest
wealth, along with them to the wars.  But then these arguments would be
as ready to stand up for the other side; that a general ought rather to
lessen in his men their solicitude of preserving themselves than to
increase it; that by such means they will be in a double fear of
hazarding their persons, as it will be a double temptation to the enemy
to fight with greater resolution where so great booty and so rich spoils
are to be obtained; and this very thing has been observed in former
times, notably to encourage the Romans against the Samnites.  Antiochus,
shewing Hannibal the army he had raised, wonderfully splendid and rich in
all sorts of equipage, asked him if the Romans would be satisfied with
that army?  “Satisfied,” replied the other, “yes, doubtless, were their
avarice never so great.”  Lycurgus not only forbad his soldiers all
manner of bravery in their equipage, but, moreover, to strip their
conquered enemies, because he would, as he said, that poverty and
frugality should shine with the rest of the battle.

At sieges and elsewhere, where occasion draws us near to the enemy, we
willingly suffer our men to brave, rate, and affront him with all sorts
of injurious language; and not without some colour of reason: for it is
of no little consequence to take from them all hopes of mercy and
composition, by representing to them that there is no fair quarter to be
expected from an enemy they have incensed to that degree, nor other
remedy remaining but in victory.  And yet Vitellius found himself
deceived in this way of proceeding; for having to do with Otho, weaker in
the valour of his soldiers, long unaccustomed to war and effeminated with
the delights of the city, he so nettled them at last with injurious
language, reproaching them with cowardice and regret for the mistresses
and entertainments they had left behind at Rome, that by this means he
inspired them with such resolution as no exhortation had had the power to
have done, and himself made them fall upon him, with whom their own
captains before could by no means prevail.  And, indeed, when they are
injuries that touch to the quick, it may very well fall out that he who
went but unwillingly to work in the behalf of his prince will fall to’t
with another sort of mettle when the quarrel is his own.

Considering of how great importance is the preservation of the general of
an army, and that the universal aim of an enemy is levelled directly at
the head, upon which all the others depend, the course seems to admit of
no dispute, which we know has been taken by so many great captains, of
changing their habit and disguising their persons upon the point of going
to engage.  Nevertheless, the inconvenience a man by so doing runs into
is not less than that he thinks to avoid; for the captain, by this means
being concealed from the knowledge of his own men, the courage they
should derive from his presence and example happens by degrees to cool
and to decay; and not seeing the wonted marks and ensigns of their
leader, they presently conclude him either dead, or that, despairing of
the business, he is gone to shift for himself.  And experience shows us
that both these ways have been successful and otherwise.  What befell
Pyrrhus in the battle he fought against the Consul Levinus in Italy will
serve us to both purposes; for though by shrouding his person under the
armour of Megacles and making him wear his own, he undoubtedly preserved
his own life, yet, by that very means, he was withal very near running
into the other mischief of losing the battle.  Alexander, Caesar, and
Lucullus loved to make themselves known in a battle by rich accoutrements
and armour of a particular lustre and colour: Agis, Agesilaus, and that
great Gilippus, on the contrary, used to fight obscurely armed, and
without any imperial attendance or distinction.

Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to receive the
enemy’s charge; by “reason that” (I shall here steal Plutarch’s own
words, which are better than mine) “he by so doing deprived himself of
the violent impression the motion of running adds to the first shock of
arms, and hindered that clashing of the combatants against one another
which is wont to give them greater impetuosity and fury; especially when
they come to rush in with their utmost vigour, their courages increasing
by the shouts and the career; ‘tis to render the soldiers’ ardour, as a
man may say, more reserved and cold.”  This is what he says.  But if
Caesar had come by the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by
another, that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of
fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm without motion; and
that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and reserving their
force within themselves for the push of the business, have a great
advantage against those who are disordered, and who have already spent
half their breath in running on precipitately to the charge?  Besides
that an army is a body made up of so many individual members, it is
impossible for it to move in this fury with so exact a motion as not to
break the order of battle, and that the best of them are not engaged
before their fellows can come on to help them.  In that unnatural battle
betwixt the two Persian brothers, the Lacedaemonian Clearchus, who
commanded the Greeks of Cyrus’ party, led them on softly and without
precipitation to the charge; but, coming within fifty paces, hurried them
on full speed, hoping in so short a career both to keep their order and
to husband their breath, and at the same time to give the advantage of
impetuosity and impression both to their persons and their missile arms.
Others have regulated this question as to their armies thus if your enemy
come full drive upon you, stand firm to receive him; if he stand to
receive you, run full drive upon him.

In the expedition of the Emperor Charles V. into Provence, King Francis
was put to choose either to go meet him in Italy or to await him in his
own dominions; wherein, though he very well considered of how great
advantage it was to preserve his own territory entire and clear from the
troubles of war, to the end that, being unexhausted of its stores, it
might continually supply men and money at need; that the necessity of war
requires at every turn to spoil and lay waste the country before us,
which cannot very well be done upon one’s own; to which may be added,
that the country people do not so easily digest such a havoc by those of
their own party as from an enemy, so that seditions and commotions might
by such means be kindled amongst us; that the licence of pillage and
plunder (which are not to be tolerated at home) is a great ease and
refreshment against the fatigues and sufferings of war; and that he who
has no other prospect of gain than his bare pay will hardly be kept from
running home, being but two steps from his wife and his own house; that
he who lays the cloth is ever at the charge of the feast; that there is
more alacrity in assaulting than defending; and that the shock of a
battle’s loss in our own bowels is so violent as to endanger the
disjointing of the whole body, there being no passion so contagious as
that of fear, that is so easily believed, or that so suddenly diffuses
itself; and that the cities that should hear the rattle of this tempest
at their gates, that should take in their captains and soldiers yet
trembling and out of breath, would be in danger in this heat and hurry to
precipitate themselves upon some untoward resolution: notwithstanding all
this, so it was that he chose to recall the forces he had beyond the
mountains and to suffer the enemy to come to him.  For he might, on the
other hand, imagine that, being at home and amongst his friends, he could
not fail of plenty of all manner of conveniences; the rivers and passes
he had at his devotion would bring him in both provisions and money in
all security, and without the trouble of convoy; that he should find his
subjects by so much the more affectionate to him, by how much their
danger was more near and pressing; that having so many cities and
barriers to secure him, it would be in his power to give the law of
battle at his own opportunity and advantage; and that, if it pleased him
to delay the time, under cover and at his ease he might see his enemy
founder and defeat himself with the difficulties he was certain to
encounter, being engaged in a hostile country, where before, behind, and
on every side war would be made upon him; no means to refresh himself or
to enlarge his quarters, should diseases infest them, or to lodge his
wounded men in safety; no money, no victuals, but at the point of the
lance; no leisure to repose and take breath; no knowledge of the ways or
country to secure him from ambushes and surprises; and in case of losing
a battle, no possible means of saving the remains.  Neither is there want
of example in both these cases.

Scipio thought it much better to go and attack his enemy’s territories in
Africa than to stay at home to defend his own and to fight him in Italy,
and it succeeded well with him.  But, on the contrary, Hannibal in the
same war ruined himself by abandoning the conquest of a foreign country
to go and defend his own.  The Athenians having left the enemy in their
own dominions to go over into Sicily, were not favoured by fortune in
their design; but Agathocles, king of Syracuse, found her favourable to
him when he went over into Africa and left the war at home.

By which examples we are wont to conclude, and with some reason, that
events, especially in war, for the most part depend upon fortune, who
will not be governed by nor submit unto human reasons and prudence,
according to the poet:

         “Et male consultis pretium est: prudentia fallit
          Nec fortune probat causas, sequiturque merentes,
          Sed vaga per cunctos nullo discrimine fertur.
          Scilicet est aliud, quod nos cogatque regatque
          Majus, et in proprias ducat mortalia leges.”

     [“And there is value in ill counsel: prudence deceives: nor does
     fortune inquire into causes, nor aid the most deserving, but turns
     hither and thither without discrimination.  Indeed there is a
     greater power which directs and rules us, and brings mortal affairs
     under its own laws.”--Manilius, iv. 95.]

But, to take the thing right, it should seem that our counsels and
deliberations depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do, and
that she engages also our arguments in her uncertainty and confusion.
“We argue rashly and adventurously,” says Timaeus in Plato, “by reason
that, as well as ourselves, our discourses have great participation in
the temerity of chance.”




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     “Art thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?”
      As great a benefit to be without (children)
     Away with that eloquence that enchants us with itself
     Because the people know so well how to obey
     Blemishes of the great naturally appear greater
     Change is to be feared
     Cicero: on fame
     Confidence in another man’s virtue
     Dangerous  man you have deprived of all means to escape
     Depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do
     Fame: an echo, a dream, nay, the shadow of a dream
     Far more easy and pleasant to follow than to lead
     He who lays the cloth is ever at the charge of the feast
     I honour those most to whom I show the least honour
     In war not to drive an enemy to despair
     My words does but injure the love I have conceived within.
     Neither the courage to die nor the heart to live
     Never spoke of my money, but falsely, as others do
     No great choice betwixt not knowing to speak anything but ill
     No man continues ill long but by his own fault
     No necessity upon a man to live in necessity
     No passion so contagious as that of fear
     Not a victory that puts not an end to the war
     Not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice
     Only secure harbour from the storms and tempests of life
     Opinions they have of things and not by the things themselves
     People conceiving they have right and title to be judges
     Pyrrho’s hog
     Repute for value in them, not what they bring to us
     Satisfaction of mind to have only one path to walk in
     That which cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge
     The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour
     The pedestal is no part of the statue
     There is more trouble in keeping money than in getting it.
     There is nothing I hate so much as driving a bargain
     Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much
     Tis the sharpnss of our mind that gives the edge to our pains
     Titles being so dearly bought
     Twenty people prating about him when he is at stool
     Valour whetted and enraged by mischance
     What can they not do; what do they fear to do (for beauty)






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 8.

XLVIII.   Of war-horses, or destriers.
XLIX.     Of ancient customs.
L.        Of Democritus and Heraclitus.
LI.       Of the vanity of words.
LII.      Of the parsimony of the Ancients.
LIII.     Of a saying of Caesar.
LIV.      Of vain subtleties.
LV.       Of smells.
LVI.      Of prayers.
LVII.     Of age.



CHAPTER XLVIII

OF WAR HORSES, OR DESTRIERS

I here have become a grammarian, I who never learned any language but by
rote, and who do not yet know adjective, conjunction, or ablative.  I
think I have read that the Romans had a sort of horses by them called
‘funales’ or ‘dextrarios’, which were either led horses, or horses laid
on at several stages to be taken fresh upon occasion, and thence it is
that we call our horses of service ‘destriers’; and our romances commonly
use the phrase of ‘adestrer’ for ‘accompagner’, to accompany.  They also
called those that were trained in such sort, that running full speed,
side by side, without bridle or saddle, the Roman gentlemen, armed at all
pieces, would shift and throw themselves from one to the other,
‘desultorios equos’.  The Numidian men-at-arms had always a led horse in
one hand, besides that they rode upon, to change in the heat of battle:

    “Quibus, desultorum in modum, binos trahentibus equos, inter
     acerrimam saepe pugnam, in recentem equum, ex fesso, armatis
     transultare mos erat: tanta velocitas ipsis, tamque docile
     equorum genus.”

     [“To whom it was a custom, leading along two horses, often in the
     hottest fight, to leap armed from a tired horse to a fresh one; so
     active were the men, and the horses so docile.”--Livy, xxiii. 29.]

There are many horses trained to help their riders so as to run upon any
one, that appears with a drawn sword, to fall both with mouth and heels
upon any that front or oppose them: but it often happens that they do
more harm to their friends than to their enemies; and, moreover, you
cannot loose them from their hold, to reduce them again into order, when
they are once engaged and grappled, by which means you remain at the
mercy of their quarrel.  It happened very ill to Artybius, general of the
Persian army, fighting, man to man, with Onesilus, king of Salamis, to be
mounted upon a horse trained after this manner, it being the occasion of
his death, the squire of Onesilus cleaving the horse down with a scythe
betwixt the shoulders as it was reared up upon his master.  And what the
Italians report, that in the battle of Fornova, the horse of Charles
VIII., with kicks and plunges, disengaged his master from the enemy that
pressed upon him, without which he had been slain, sounds like a very
great chance, if it be true.

     [In the narrative which Philip de Commines has given of this battle,
     in which he himself was present (lib. viii.  ch. 6), he tells us
     of wonderful performances by the horse on which the king was
     mounted.  The name of the horse was Savoy, and it was the most
     beautiful horse he had ever seen.  During the battle the king was
     personally attacked, when he had nobody near him but a valet de
     chambre, a little fellow, and not well armed.  “The king,” says
     Commines, “had the best horse under him in the world, and therefore
     he stood his ground bravely, till a number of his men, not a great
     way from him, arrived at the critical minute.”]

The Mamalukes make their boast that they have the most ready horses of
any cavalry in the world; that by nature and custom they were taught to
know and distinguish the enemy, and to fall foul upon them with mouth and
heels, according to a word or sign given; as also to gather up with their
teeth darts and lances scattered upon the field, and present them to
their riders, on the word of command.  ‘T is said, both of Caesar and
Pompey, that amongst their other excellent qualities they were both very
good horsemen, and particularly of Caesar, that in his youth, being
mounted on the bare back, without saddle or bridle, he could make the
horse run, stop, and turn, and perform all its airs, with his hands
behind him.  As nature designed to make of this person, and of Alexander,
two miracles of military art, so one would say she had done her utmost to
arm them after an extraordinary manner for every one knows that
Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus, had a head inclining to the shape of a
bull; that he would suffer himself to be mounted and governed by none but
his master, and that he was so honoured after his death as to have a city
erected to his name.  Caesar had also one which had forefeet like those
of a man, his hoofs being divided in the form of fingers, which likewise
was not to be ridden, by any but Caesar himself, who, after his death,
dedicated his statue to the goddess Venus.

I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback, for it is the
place where, whether well or sick, I find myself most at ease.  Plato
recommends it for health, as also Pliny says it is good for the stomach
and the joints.  Let us go further into this matter since here we are.

We read in Xenophon a law forbidding any one who was master of a horse to
travel on foot.  Trogus Pompeius and Justin say that the Parthians were
wont to perform all offices and ceremonies, not only in war but also all
affairs whether public or private, make bargains, confer, entertain, take
the air, and all on horseback; and that the greatest distinction betwixt
freemen and slaves amongst them was that the one rode on horseback and
the other went on foot, an institution of which King Cyrus was the
founder.

There are several examples in the Roman history (and Suetonius more
particularly observes it of Caesar) of captains who, on pressing
occasions, commanded their cavalry to alight, both by that means to take
from them all hopes of flight, as also for the advantage they hoped in
this sort of fight.

               “Quo baud dubie superat Romanus,”

     [“Wherein the Roman does questionless excel.”--Livy, ix. 22.]

says Livy.  And so the first thing they did to prevent the mutinies and
insurrections of nations of late conquest was to take from them their
arms and horses, and therefore it is that we so often meet in Caesar:

          “Arma proferri, jumenta produci, obsides dari jubet.”

     [“He commanded the arms to be produced, the horses brought out,
     hostages to be given.”--De Bello Gall., vii. II.]

The Grand Signior to this day suffers not a Christian or a Jew to keep a
horse of his own throughout his empire.

Our ancestors, and especially at the time they had war with the English,
in all their greatest engagements and pitched battles fought for the most
part on foot, that they might have nothing but their own force, courage,
and constancy to trust to in a quarrel of so great concern as life and
honour.  You stake (whatever Chrysanthes in Xenophon says to the
contrary) your valour and your fortune upon that of your horse; his
wounds or death bring your person into the same danger; his fear or fury
shall make you reputed rash or cowardly; if he have an ill mouth or will
not answer to the spur, your honour must answer for it.  And, therefore,
I do not think it strange that those battles were more firm and furious
than those that are fought on horseback:

               “Caedebant pariter, pariterque ruebant
          Victores victique; neque his fuga nota, neque illis.”

     [“They fought and fell pell-mell, victors and vanquished; nor was
     flight thought of by either.”--AEneid, x. 756.]

Their battles were much better disputed.  Nowadays there are nothing but
routs:

          “Primus clamor atque impetus rem decernit.”

     [“The first shout and charge decides the business.”--Livy, xxv. 41.]

And the means we choose to make use of in so great a hazard should be as
much as possible at our own command: wherefore I should advise to choose
weapons of the shortest sort, and such of which we are able to give the
best account.  A man may repose more confidence in a sword he holds in
his hand than in a bullet he discharges out of a pistol, wherein there
must be a concurrence of several circumstances to make it perform its
office, the powder, the stone, and the wheel: if any of which fail it
endangers your fortune.  A man himself strikes much surer than the air
can direct his blow:

          “Et, quo ferre velint, permittere vulnera ventis
          Ensis habet vires; et gens quaecumque virorum est,
          Bella gerit gladiis.”

     [“And so where they choose to carry [the arrows], the winds allow
     the wounds; the sword has strength of arm: and whatever nation of
     men there is, they wage war with swords.”--Lucan, viii. 384.]

But of that weapon I shall speak more fully when I come to compare the
arms of the ancients with those of modern use; only, by the way, the
astonishment of the ear abated, which every one grows familiar with in a
short time, I look upon it as a weapon of very little execution, and hope
we shall one day lay it aside.  That missile weapon which the Italians
formerly made use of both with fire and by sling was much more terrible:
they called a certain kind of javelin, armed at the point with an iron
three feet long, that it might pierce through and through an armed man,
Phalarica, which they sometimes in the field darted by hand, sometimes
from several sorts of engines for the defence of beleaguered places; the
shaft being rolled round with flax, wax, rosin, oil, and other
combustible matter, took fire in its flight, and lighting upon the body
of a man or his target, took away all the use of arms and limbs.  And
yet, coming to close fight, I should think they would also damage the
assailant, and that the camp being as it were planted with these flaming
truncheons, would produce a common inconvenience to the whole crowd:

          “Magnum stridens contorta Phalarica venit,
          Fulminis acta modo.”

     [“The Phalarica, launched like lightning, flies through
     the air with a loud rushing sound.”--AEneid, ix. 705.]

They had, moreover, other devices which custom made them perfect in
(which seem incredible to us who have not seen them), by which they
supplied the effects of our powder and shot.  They darted their spears
with so great force, as ofttimes to transfix two targets and two armed
men at once, and pin them together.  Neither was the effect of their
slings less certain of execution or of shorter carriage:

     [“Culling round stones from the beach for their slings; and with
     these practising over the waves, so as from a great distance to
     throw within a very small circuit, they became able not only to
     wound an enemy in the head, but hit any other part at pleasure.”
      --Livy, xxxviii. 29.]

Their pieces of battery had not only the execution but the thunder of our
cannon also:

          “Ad ictus moenium cum terribili sonitu editos,
          pavor et trepidatio cepit.”

     [“At the battery of the walls, performed with a terrible noise,
     the defenders began to fear and tremble.”--Idem, ibid., 5.]

The Gauls, our kinsmen in Asia, abominated these treacherous missile
arms, it being their use to fight, with greater bravery, hand to hand:

     [“They are not so much concerned about large gashes-the bigger and
     deeper the wound, the more glorious do they esteem the combat but
     when they find themselves tormented by some arrow-head or bullet
     lodged within, but presenting little outward show of wound,
     transported with shame and anger to perish by so imperceptible a
     destroyer, they fall to the ground.”---Livy, xxxviii.  21.]

A pretty description of something very like an arquebuse-shot.  The ten
thousand Greeks in their long and famous retreat met with a nation who
very much galled them with great and strong bows, carrying arrows so long
that, taking them up, one might return them back like a dart, and with
them pierce a buckler and an armed man through and through.  The engines,
that Dionysius invented at Syracuse to shoot vast massy darts and stones
of a prodigious greatness with so great impetuosity and at so great a
distance, came very near to our modern inventions.

But in this discourse of horses and horsemanship, we are not to forget
the pleasant posture of one Maistre Pierre Pol, a doctor of divinity,
upon his mule, whom Monstrelet reports always to have ridden sideways
through the streets of Paris like a woman.  He says also, elsewhere, that
the Gascons had terrible horses, that would wheel in their full speed,
which the French, Picards, Flemings, and Brabanters looked upon as a
miracle, “having never seen the like before,” which are his very words.

Caesar, speaking of the Suabians: “in the charges they make on
horseback,” says he, “they often throw themselves off to fight on foot,
having taught their horses not to stir in the meantime from the place,
to which they presently run again upon occasion; and according to their
custom, nothing is so unmanly and so base as to use saddles or pads, and
they despise such as make use of those conveniences: insomuch that, being
but a very few in number, they fear not to attack a great many.”  That
which I have formerly wondered at, to see a horse made to perform all his
airs with a switch only and the reins upon his neck, was common with the
Massilians, who rid their horses without saddle or bridle:

          “Et gens, quae nudo residens Massylia dorso,
          Ora levi flectit, fraenorum nescia, virga.”

     [“The Massylians, mounted on the bare backs of their horses,
     bridleless, guide them by a mere switch.”--Lucan, iv.  682.]

               “Et Numidae infraeni cingunt.”

     [“The Numidians guiding their horses without bridles.”
      --AEneid, iv.  41.]

          “Equi sine fraenis, deformis ipse cursus,
          rigida cervice et extento capite currentium.”

     [“The career of a horse without a bridle is ungraceful; the neck
     extended stiff, and the nose thrust out.”--Livy, xxxv. II.]

King Alfonso,--[Alfonso XI., king of Leon and Castile, died 1350.]--
he who first instituted the Order of the Band or Scarf in Spain, amongst
other rules of the order, gave them this, that they should never ride
mule or mulet, upon penalty of a mark of silver; this I had lately out of
Guevara’s Letters.  Whoever gave these the title of Golden Epistles had
another kind of opinion of them than I have.  The Courtier says, that
till his time it was a disgrace to a gentleman to ride on one of these
creatures: but the Abyssinians, on the contrary, the nearer they are to
the person of Prester John, love to be mounted upon large mules, for the
greatest dignity and grandeur.

Xenophon tells us, that the Assyrians were fain to keep their horses
fettered in the stable, they were so fierce and vicious; and that it
required so much time to loose and harness them, that to avoid any
disorder this tedious preparation might bring upon them in case of
surprise, they never sat down in their camp till it was first well
fortified with ditches and ramparts.  His Cyrus, who was so great a
master in all manner of horse service, kept his horses to their due work,
and never suffered them to have anything to eat till first they had
earned it by the sweat of some kind of exercise.  The Scythians when in
the field and in scarcity of provisions used to let their horses blood,
which they drank, and sustained themselves by that diet:

               “Venit et epoto Sarmata pastus equo.”

          [“The Scythian comes, who feeds on horse-flesh”
           --Martial, De Spectaculis Libey, Epigr. iii. 4.]

Those of Crete, being besieged by Metellus, were in so great necessity
for drink that they were fain to quench their thirst with their horses
urine.--[Val.  Max., vii. 6, ext. 1.]

To shew how much cheaper the Turkish armies support themselves than our
European forces, ‘tis said that besides the soldiers drink nothing but
water and eat nothing but rice and salt flesh pulverised (of which every
one may easily carry about with him a month’s provision), they know how
to feed upon the blood of their horses as well as the Muscovite and
Tartar, and salt it for their use.

These new-discovered people of the Indies [Mexico and Yucatan  D.W.],
when the Spaniards first landed amongst them, had so great an opinion
both of the men and horses, that they looked upon the first as gods and
the other as animals ennobled above their nature; insomuch that after
they were subdued, coming to the men to sue for peace and pardon, and to
bring them gold and provisions, they failed not to offer of the same to
the horses, with the same kind of harangue to them they had made to the
others: interpreting their neighing for a language of truce and
friendship.

In the other Indies, to ride upon an elephant was the first and royal
place of honour; the second to ride in a coach with four horses; the
third to ride upon a camel; and the last and least honour to be carried
or drawn by one horse only.  Some one of our late writers tells us that
he has been in countries in those parts where they ride upon oxen with
pads, stirrups, and bridles, and very much at their ease.

Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus, in a battle with the Samnites, seeing
his horse, after three or four charges, had failed of breaking into the
enemy’s battalion, took this course, to make them unbridle all their
horses and spur their hardest, so that having nothing to check their
career, they might through weapons and men open the way to his foot, who
by that means gave them a bloody defeat.  The same command was given by
Quintus Fulvius Flaccus against the Celtiberians:

     [“You will do your business with greater advantage of your horses’
     strength, if you send them unbridled upon the enemy, as it is
     recorded the Roman horse to their great glory have often done; their
     bits being taken off, they charged through and again back through
     the enemy’s ranks with great slaughter, breaking down all their
     spears.”--Idem, xl. 40.]

The Duke of Muscovy was anciently obliged to pay this reverence to the
Tartars, that when they sent an embassy to him he went out to meet them
on foot, and presented them with a goblet of mares’ milk (a beverage of
greatest esteem amongst them), and if, in drinking, a drop fell by chance
upon their horse’s mane, he was bound to lick it off with his tongue.
The army that Bajazet had sent into Russia was overwhelmed with so
dreadful a tempest of snow, that to shelter and preserve themselves from
the cold, many killed and embowelled their horses, to creep into their
bellies and enjoy the benefit of that vital heat.  Bajazet, after that
furious battle wherein he was overthrown by Tamerlane,  was in a hopeful
way of securing his own person by the fleetness of an Arabian mare he had
under him, had he not been constrained to let her drink her fill at the
ford of a river in his way, which rendered her so heavy and indisposed,
that he was afterwards easily overtaken by those that pursued him.  They
say, indeed, that to let a horse stale takes him off his mettle, but as
to drinking, I should rather have thought it would refresh him.

Croesus, marching his army through certain waste lands near Sardis, met
with an infinite number of serpents, which the horses devoured with great
appetite, and which Herodotus says was a prodigy of ominous portent to
his affairs.

We call a horse entire, that has his mane and ears so, and no other will
pass muster.  The Lacedaemonians, having defeated the Athenians in
Sicily, returning triumphant from the victory into the city of Syracuse,
amongst other insolences, caused all the horses they had taken to be
shorn and led in triumph.  Alexander fought with a nation called Dahas,
whose discipline it was to march two and two together armed on one horse,
to the war; and being in fight, one of them alighted, and so they fought
on horseback and on foot, one after another by turns.

I do not think that for graceful riding any nation in the world excels
the French.  A good horseman, according to our way of speaking, seems
rather to have respect to the courage of the man than address in riding.
Of all that ever I saw, the most knowing in that art, who had the best
seat and the best method in breaking horses, was Monsieur de Carnavalet,
who served our King Henry II.

I have seen a man ride with both his feet upon the saddle, take off his
saddle, and at his return take it up again and replace it, riding all the
while full speed; having galloped over a cap, make at it very good shots
backwards with his bow; take up anything from the ground, setting one
foot on the ground and the other in the stirrup: with twenty other ape’s
tricks, which he got his living by.

There has been seen in my time at Constantinople two men upon one horse,
who, in the height of its speed, would throw themselves off and into the
saddle again by turn; and one who bridled and saddled his horse with
nothing but his teeth; an other who betwixt two horses, one foot upon one
saddle and the other upon another, carrying the other man upon his
shoulders, would ride full career, the other standing bolt upright upon
and making very good shots with his bow; several who would ride full
speed with their heels upward, and their heads upon the saddle betwixt
several scimitars, with the points upwards, fixed in the harness.  When I
was a boy, the prince of Sulmona, riding an unbroken horse at Naples,
prone to all sorts of action, held reals--[A small coin of Spain, the
Two Sicilies, &c.]--under his knees and toes, as if they had been nailed
there, to shew the firmness of his seat.




CHAPTER XLIX

OF ANCIENT CUSTOMS

I should willingly pardon our people for admitting no other pattern or
rule of perfection than their own peculiar manners and customs; for ‘tis
a common vice, not of the vulgar only, but almost of all men, to walk in
the beaten road their ancestors have trod before them.  I am content,
when they see Fabricius or Laelius, that they look upon their countenance
and behaviour as barbarous, seeing they are neither clothed nor fashioned
according to our mode.  But I find fault with their singular indiscretion
in suffering themselves to be so blinded and imposed upon by the
authority of the present usage as every month to alter their opinion, if
custom so require, and that they should so vary their judgment in their
own particular concern.  When they wore the busk of their doublets up as
high as their breasts, they stiffly maintained that they were in their
proper place; some years after it was slipped down betwixt their thighs,
and then they could laugh at the former fashion as uneasy and
intolerable.  The fashion now in use makes them absolutely condemn the
other two with so great resolution and so universal consent, that a man
would think there was a certain kind of madness crept in amongst them,
that infatuates their understandings to this strange degree.  Now, seeing
that our change of fashions is so prompt and sudden, that the inventions
of all the tailors in the world cannot furnish out new whim-whams enow to
feed our vanity withal, there will often be a necessity that the despised
forms must again come in vogue, these immediately after fall into the
same contempt; and that the same judgment must, in the space of fifteen
or twenty years, take up half-a-dozen not only divers but contrary
opinions, with an incredible lightness and inconstancy; there is not any
of us so discreet, who suffers not himself to be gulled with this
contradiction, and both in external and internal sight to be insensibly
blinded.

I wish to muster up here some old customs that I have in memory, some of
them the same with ours, the others different, to the end that, bearing
in mind this continual variation of human things, we may have our
judgment more clearly and firmly settled.

The thing in use amongst us of fighting with rapier and cloak was in
practice amongst the Romans also:

          “Sinistras sagis involvunt, gladiosque distringunt,”

     [“They wrapt their cloaks upon the left arm, and drew their
     swords.”--De Bello Civili, i. 75.]

says Caesar; and he observes a vicious custom of our nation, that
continues yet amongst us, which is to stop passengers we meet upon the
road, to compel them to give an account who they are, and to take it for
an affront and just cause of quarrel if they refuse to do it.

At the Baths, which the ancients made use of every day before they went
to dinner, and as frequently as we wash our hands, they at first only
bathed their arms and legs; but afterwards, and by a custom that has
continued for many ages in most nations of the world, they bathed stark
naked in mixed and perfumed water, looking upon it as a great simplicity
to bathe in mere water.  The most delicate and affected perfumed
themselves all over three or four times a day.  They often caused their
hair to be pinched off, as the women of France have some time since taken
up a custom to do their foreheads,

          “Quod pectus, quod crura tibi, quod brachia veilis,”

     [“You pluck the hairs out of your breast, your arms, and thighs.”
      --Martial, ii.  62, i.]

though they had ointments proper for that purpose:

          “Psilotro nitet, aut acids latet oblita creta.”

     [“She shines with unguents, or with chalk dissolved in vinegar.”
      --Idem, vi.  93, 9.]

They delighted to lie soft, and alleged it as a great testimony of
hardiness to lie upon a mattress.  They ate lying upon beds, much after
the manner of the Turks in this age:

          “Inde thoro pater AEneas sic orsus ab alto.”

     [“Thus Father AEneas, from his high bed of state, spoke.”
      --AEneid, ii. 2.]

And ‘tis said of the younger Cato, that after the battle of Pharsalia,
being entered into a melancholy disposition at the ill posture of the
public affairs, he took his repasts always sitting, assuming a strict and
austere course of life.  It was also their custom to kiss the hands of
great persons; the more to honour and caress them.  And meeting with
friends, they always kissed in salutation, as do the Venetians:

          “Gratatusque darem cum dulcibus oscula verbis.”

          [“And kindest words I would mingle with kisses.”
           --Ovid, De Pont., iv. 9, 13]

In petitioning or saluting any great man, they used to lay their hands
upon his knees.  Pasicles the philosopher, brother of Crates, instead of
laying his hand upon the knee laid it upon the private parts, and being
roughly repulsed by him to whom he made that indecent compliment:
“What,” said he, “is not that part your own as well as the other?”
 --[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 89.]--They used to eat fruit, as we do, after
dinner.  They wiped their fundaments (let the ladies, if they please,
mince it smaller) with a sponge, which is the reason that ‘spongia’ is a
smutty word in Latin; which sponge was fastened to the end of a stick, as
appears by the story of him who, as he was led along to be thrown to the
wild beasts in the sight of the people, asking leave to do his business,
and having no other way to despatch himself, forced the sponge and stick
down his throat and choked himself.--[Seneca, Ep., 70.] They used to
wipe, after coition, with perfumed wool:

          “At tibi nil faciam; sed Iota mentula lana.”

They had in the streets of Rome vessels and little tubs for passengers to
urine in:

          “Pusi saepe lacum propter se, ac dolia curta.
          Somno devincti, credunt extollere vestem.”

     [“The little boys in their sleep often think they are near the
     public urinal, and raise their coats to make use of it.”
      --Lucretius, iv.]

They had collation betwixt meals, and had in summer cellars of snow to
cool their wine; and some there were who made use of snow in winter, not
thinking their wine cool enough, even at that cold season of the year.
The men of quality had their cupbearers and carvers, and their buffoons
to make them sport.  They had their meat served up in winter upon chafing
dishes, which were set upon the table, and had portable kitchens (of
which I myself have seen some) wherein all their service was carried
about with them:

               “Has vobis epulas habete, lauti
               Nos offendimur ambulante caena.”

     [“Do you, if you please, esteem these feasts: we do not like the
     ambulatory suppers.”--Martial, vii. 48, 4.]

In summer they had a contrivance to bring fresh and clear rills through
their lower rooms, wherein were great store of living fish, which the
guests took out with their own hands to be dressed every man according to
his own liking.  Fish has ever had this pre-eminence, and keeps it still,
that the grandees, as to them, all pretend to be cooks; and indeed the
taste is more delicate than that of flesh, at least to my fancy.  But in
all sorts of magnificence, debauchery, and voluptuous inventions of
effeminacy and expense, we do, in truth, all we can to parallel them;
for our wills are as corrupt as theirs: but we want ability to equal
them.  Our force is no more able to reach them in their vicious, than in
their virtuous, qualities, for both the one and the other proceeded from
a vigour of soul which was without comparison greater in them than in us;
and souls, by how much the weaker they are, by so much have they less
power to do either very well or very ill.

The highest place of honour amongst them was the middle.  The name going
before, or following after, either in writing or speaking, had no
signification of grandeur, as is evident by their writings; they will as
soon say Oppius and Caesar, as Caesar and Oppius; and me and thee, as
thee and me.  This is the reason that made me formerly take notice in the
life of Flaminius, in our French Plutarch, of one passage, where it seems
as if the author, speaking of the jealousy of honour betwixt the
AEtolians and Romans, about the winning of a battle they had with their
joined forces obtained, made it of some importance, that in the Greek
songs they had put the AEtolians before the Romans: if there be no
amphibology in the words of the French translation.

The ladies, in their baths, made no scruple of admitting men amongst
them, and moreover made use of their serving-men to rub and anoint them:

          “Inguina succinctus nigri tibi servus aluta
          Stat, quoties calidis nuda foveris aquis.”

     [“A slave--his middle girded with a black apron--stands before you,
     when, naked, you take a hot bath.”--Martial, vii. 35, i.]

They all powdered themselves with a certain powder, to moderate their
sweats.

The ancient Gauls, says Sidonius Apollinaris, wore their hair long before
and the hinder part of the head shaved, a fashion that begins to revive
in this vicious and effeminate age.

The Romans used to pay the watermen their fare at their first stepping
into the boat, which we never do till after landing:

               “Dum aes exigitur, dum mula ligatur,
               Tota abit hora.”

     [“Whilst the fare’s paying, and the mule is being harnessed, a whole
     hour’s time is past.”--Horace, Sat. i. 5, 13.]

The women used to lie on the side of the bed next the wall: and for that
reason they called Caesar,

                    “Spondam regis Nicomedis,”

     [“The bed of King Nicomedes.”--Suetonius, Life of Caesar, 49.]

They took breath in their drinking, and watered their wine

                   “Quis puer ocius
                    Restinguet ardentis Falerni
                    Pocula praetereunte lympha?”

     [“What boy will quickly come and cool the heat of the Falernian
     wine with clear water?”--Horace, Od., ii. z, 18.]

And the roguish looks and gestures of our lackeys were also in use
amongst them:

          “O Jane, a tergo quern nulls ciconia pinsit,
          Nec manus, auriculas imitari est mobilis albas,
          Nec lingua, quantum sitiat canis Appula, tantum.”

     [“O Janus, whom no crooked fingers, simulating a stork, peck at
     behind your back, whom no quick hands deride behind you, by
     imitating the motion of the white ears of the ass, against whom no
     mocking tongue is thrust out, as the tongue of the thirsty Apulian
     dog.”--Persius, i. 58.]

The Argian and Roman ladies mourned in white, as ours did formerly and
should do still, were I to govern in this point.  But there are whole
books on this subject.




CHAPTER L

OF DEMOCRITUS AND HERACLITUS

The judgment is an utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar
in everything: which is the reason, that in these Essays I take hold of
all occasions where, though it happen to be a subject I do not very well
understand, I try, however, sounding it at a distance, and finding it too
deep for my stature, I keep me on the shore; and this knowledge that a
man can proceed no further, is one effect of its virtue, yes, one of
those of which it is most proud.  One while in an idle and frivolous
subject, I try to find out matter whereof to compose a body, and then to
prop and support it; another while, I employ it in a noble subject, one
that has been tossed and tumbled by a thousand hands, wherein a man can
scarce possibly introduce anything of his own, the way being so beaten on
every side that he must of necessity walk in the steps of another: in
such a case, ‘tis the work of the judgment to take the way that seems
best, and of a thousand paths, to determine that this or that is the
best.  I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune, and take that she
first presents to me; they are all alike to me, I never design to go
through any of them; for I never see all of anything: neither do they who
so largely promise to show it others.  Of a hundred members and faces
that everything has, I take one, onewhile to look it over only, another
while to ripple up the skin, and sometimes to pinch it to the bones: I
give a stab, not so wide but as deep as I can, and am for the most part
tempted to take it in hand by some new light I discover in it.  Did I
know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to
the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here
one word and there another, patterns cut from several pieces and
scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not
responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without
varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and
uncertainty, and to my own governing method, ignorance.

All motion discovers us: the very same soul of Caesar, that made itself
so conspicuous in marshalling and commanding the battle of Pharsalia, was
also seen as solicitous and busy in the softer affairs of love and
leisure.  A man makes a judgment of a horse, not only by seeing him when
he is showing off his paces, but by his very walk, nay, and by seeing him
stand in the stable.

Amongst the functions of the soul, there are some of a lower and meaner
form; he who does not see her in those inferior offices as well as in
those of nobler note, never fully discovers her; and, peradventure, she
is best shown where she moves her simpler pace.  The winds of passions
take most hold of her in her highest flights; and the rather by reason
that she wholly applies herself to, and exercises her whole virtue upon,
every particular subject, and never handles more than one thing at a
time, and that not according to it, but according to herself.  Things in
respect to themselves have, peradventure, their weight, measures, and
conditions; but when we once take them into us, the soul forms them as
she pleases.  Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato, indifferent
to Socrates.  Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty,
and their contraries, all strip themselves at their entering into us, and
receive a new robe, and of another fashion, from the soul; and of what
colour, brown, bright, green, dark, and of what quality, sharp, sweet,
deep, or superficial, as best pleases each of them, for they are not
agreed upon any common standard of forms, rules, or proceedings; every
one is a queen in her own dominions.  Let us, therefore, no more excuse
ourselves upon the external qualities of things; it belongs to us to give
ourselves an account of them.  Our good or ill has no other dependence
but on ourselves.  ‘Tis there that our offerings and our vows are due,
and not to fortune she has no power over our manners; on the contrary,
they draw and make her follow in their train, and cast her in their own
mould.  Why should not I judge of Alexander at table, ranting and
drinking at the prodigious rate he sometimes used to do?

Or, if he played at chess?  what string of his soul was not touched by
this idle and childish game?  I hate and avoid it, because it is not play
enough, that it is too grave and serious a diversion, and I am ashamed to
lay out as much thought and study upon it as would serve to much better
uses.  He did not more pump his brains about his glorious expedition into
the Indies, nor than another in unravelling a passage upon which depends
the safety of mankind.  To what a degree does this ridiculous diversion
molest the soul, when all her faculties are summoned together upon this
trivial account! and how fair an opportunity she herein gives every one
to know and to make a right judgment of himself?  I do not more
thoroughly sift myself in any other posture than this: what passion are
we exempted from in it?  Anger, spite, malice, impatience, and a vehement
desire of getting the better in a concern wherein it were more excusable
to be ambitious of being overcome; for to be eminent, to excel above the
common rate in frivolous things, nowise befits a man of honour.  What I
say in this example may be said in all others.  Every particle, every
employment of man manifests him equally with any other.

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first,
finding human condition ridiculous and vain, never appeared abroad but
with a jeering and laughing countenance; whereas Heraclitus commiserating
that same condition of ours, appeared always with a sorrowful look, and
tears in his eyes:

               “Alter
               Ridebat, quoties a limine moverat unum
               Protuleratque pedem; flebat contrarius alter.”

     [“The one always, as often as he had stepped one pace from his
     threshold, laughed, the other always wept.”--Juvenal, Sat., x. 28.]

          [Or, as Voltaire: “Life is a comedy to those who think;
          a tragedy to those who feel.”  D.W.]

I am clearly for the first humour; not because it is more pleasant to
laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and
condemnation than the other, and I think we can never be despised
according to our full desert.  Compassion and bewailing seem to imply
some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we
laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment.  I do not think that
we are so unhappy as we are vain, or have in us so much malice as folly;
we are not so full of mischief as inanity; nor so miserable as we are
vile and mean.  And therefore Diogenes, who passed away his time in
rolling himself in his tub, and made nothing of the great Alexander,
esteeming us no better than flies or bladders puffed up with wind, was a
sharper and more penetrating, and, consequently in my opinion, a juster
judge than Timon, surnamed the Man-hater; for what a man hates he lays to
heart.  This last was an enemy to all mankind, who passionately desired
our ruin, and avoided our conversation as dangerous, proceeding from
wicked and depraved natures: the other valued us so little that we could
neither trouble nor infect him by our example; and left us to herd one
with another, not out of fear, but from contempt of our society:
concluding us as incapable of doing good as evil.

Of the same strain was Statilius’ answer, when Brutus courted him into
the conspiracy against Caesar; he was satisfied that the enterprise was
just, but he did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern’;
according to the doctrine of Hegesias, who said, that a wise man ought to
do nothing but for himself, forasmuch as he only was worthy of it: and to
the saying of Theodorus, that it was not reasonable a wise man should
hazard himself for his country, and endanger wisdom for a company of
fools.  Our condition is as ridiculous as risible.




CHAPTER LI

OF THE VANITY OF WORDS

A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great
was his profession.  This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for
a little foot.--[A saying of Agesilaus.]--They would in Sparta have
sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession of a tricky and
deceitful act; and I fancy that Archidamus, who was king of that country,
was a little surprised at the answer of Thucydides, when inquiring of
him, which was the better wrestler, Pericles, or he, he replied, that it
was hard to affirm; for when I have thrown him, said he, he always
persuades the spectators that he had no fall and carries away the prize.
--[Quintilian, ii.  15.]--The women who paint, pounce, and plaster up
their ruins, filling up their wrinkles and deformities, are less to
blame, because it is no great matter whether we see them in their natural
complexions; whereas these make it their business to deceive not our
sight only but our judgments, and to adulterate and corrupt the very
essence of things.  The republics that have maintained themselves in a
regular and well-modelled government, such as those of Lacedaemon and
Crete, had orators in no very great esteem.  Aristo wisely defined
rhetoric to be “a science to persuade the people;” Socrates and Plato
“an art to flatter and deceive.”  And those who deny it in the general
description, verify it throughout in their precepts.  The Mohammedans
will not suffer their children to be instructed in it, as being useless,
and the Athenians, perceiving of how pernicious consequence the practice
of it was, it being in their city of universal esteem, ordered the
principal part, which is to move the affections, with their exordiums and
perorations, to be taken away.  ‘Tis an engine invented to manage and
govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble, and that never is made use of,
but like physic to the sick, in a discomposed state.  In those where the
vulgar or the ignorant, or both together, have been all-powerful and able
to give the law, as in those of Athens, Rhodes, and Rome, and where the
public affairs have been in a continual tempest of commotion, to such
places have the orators always repaired.  And in truth, we shall find few
persons in those republics who have pushed their fortunes to any great
degree of eminence without the assistance of eloquence.

Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Lucullus, Lentulus, Metellus, thence took their
chiefest spring, to mount to that degree of authority at which they at
last arrived, making it of greater use to them than arms, contrary to the
opinion of better times; for, L. Volumnius speaking publicly in favour of
the election of Q. Fabius and Pub. Decius, to the consular dignity:
“These are men,” said he, “born for war and great in execution; in the
combat of the tongue altogether wanting; spirits truly consular.  The
subtle, eloquent, and learned are only good for the city, to make
praetors of, to administer justice.”--[Livy, x. 22.]

Eloquence most flourished at Rome when the public affairs were in the
worst condition and most disquieted with intestine commotions; as a free
and untilled soil bears the worst weeds.  By which it should seem that a
monarchical government has less need of it than any other: for the
stupidity and facility natural to the common people, and that render them
subject to be turned and twined and, led by the ears by this charming
harmony of words, without weighing or considering the truth and reality
of things by the force of reason: this facility, I say, is not easily
found in a single person, and it is also more easy by good education and
advice to secure him from the impression of this poison.  There was never
any famous orator known to come out of Persia or Macedon.

I have entered into this discourse upon the occasion of an Italian I
lately received into my service, and who was clerk of the kitchen to the
late Cardinal Caraffa till his death.  I put this fellow upon an account
of his office: when he fell to discourse of this palate-science, with
such a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, as if he had been
handling some profound point of divinity.  He made a learned distinction
of the several sorts of appetites; of that a man has before he begins to
eat, and of those after the second and third service; the means simply to
satisfy the first, and then to raise and actuate the other two; the
ordering of the sauces, first in general, and then proceeded to the
qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences of salads
according to their seasons, those which ought to be served up hot, and
which cold; the manner of their garnishment and decoration to render them
acceptable to the eye.  After which he entered upon the order of the
whole service, full of weighty and important considerations:

               “Nec minimo sane discrimine refert,
               Quo gestu lepores, et quo gallina secetur;”

     [“Nor with less discrimination observes how we should carve a hare,
     and how a hen.” or, (“Nor with the least discrimination relates how
     we should carve hares, and how cut up a hen.)”
      --Juvenal, Sat., v. 123.]

and all this set out with lofty and magnificent words, the very same we
make use of when we discourse of the government of an empire.  Which
learned lecture of my man brought this of Terence into my memory:

         “Hoc salsum est, hoc adustum est, hoc lautum est, parum:
          Illud recte: iterum sic memento: sedulo
          Moneo, qux possum, pro mea sapientia.
          Postremo, tanquam in speculum, in patinas,
          Demea, Inspicere jubeo, et moneo, quid facto usus sit.”

     [“This is too salt, that’s burnt, that’s not washed enough; that’s
     well; remember to do so another time.  Thus do I ever advise them to
     have things done properly, according to my capacity; and lastly,
     Demea, I command my cooks to look into every dish as if it were a
     mirror, and tell them what they should do.”
      --Terence, Adelph., iii. 3, 71.]

And yet even the Greeks themselves very much admired and highly applauded
the order and disposition that Paulus AEmilius observed in the feast he
gave them at his return from Macedon.  But I do not here speak of
effects, I speak of words only.

I do not know whether it may have the same operation upon other men that
it has upon me, but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast
words of pilasters, architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and
Doric orders, and suchlike jargon, my imagination is presently possessed
with the palace of Apollidon; when, after all, I find them but the paltry
pieces of my own kitchen door.

To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other
grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic
form of speaking?  And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble
of my chambermaid.

And this other is a gullery of the same stamp, to call the offices of our
kingdom by the lofty titles of the Romans, though they have no similitude
of function, and still less of authority and power.  And this also, which
I doubt will one day turn to the reproach of this age of ours, unworthily
and indifferently to confer upon any we think fit the most glorious
surnames with which antiquity honoured but one or two persons in several
ages.  Plato carried away the surname of Divine, by so universal a
consent that never any one repined at it, or attempted to take it from
him; and yet the Italians, who pretend, and with good reason, to more
sprightly wits and sounder sense than the other nations of their time,
have lately bestowed the same title upon Aretin, in whose writings, save
tumid phrases set out with smart periods, ingenious indeed but
far-fetched and fantastic, and the eloquence, be it what it may, I see
nothing in him above the ordinary writers of his time, so far is he from
approaching the ancient divinity.  And we make nothing of giving the
surname of great to princes who have nothing more than ordinary in them.




CHAPTER LII

OF THE PARSIMONY OF THE ANCIENTS

Attilius Regulus, general of the Roman army in Africa, in the height of
all his glory and victories over the Carthaginians, wrote to the Republic
to acquaint them that a certain hind he had left in trust with his
estate, which was in all but seven acres of land, had run away with all
his instruments of husbandry, and entreating therefore, that they would
please to call him home that he might take order in his own affairs, lest
his wife and children should suffer by this disaster.  Whereupon the
Senate appointed another to manage his business, caused his losses to be
made good, and ordered his family to be maintained at the public expense.

The elder Cato, returning consul from Spain, sold his warhorse to save
the money it would have cost in bringing it back by sea into Italy; and
being Governor of Sardinia, he made all his visits on foot, without other
train than one officer of the Republic who carried his robe and a censer
for sacrifices, and for the most part carried his trunk himself.  He
bragged that he had never worn a gown that cost above ten crowns, nor had
ever sent above tenpence to the market for one day’s provision; and that
as to his country houses, he had not one that was rough-cast on the
outside.

Scipio AEmilianus, after two triumphs and two consulships, went an
embassy with no more than seven servants in his train.  ‘Tis said that
Homer had never more than one, Plato three, and Zeno, founder of the sect
of Stoics, none at all.  Tiberius Gracchus was allowed but fivepence
halfpenny a day when employed as public minister about the public
affairs, and being at that time the greatest man of Rome.




CHAPTER LIII

OF A SAYING OF CAESAR

If we would sometimes bestow a little consideration upon ourselves, and
employ the time we spend in prying into other men’s actions, and
discovering things without us, in examining our own abilities we should
soon perceive of how infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
composed.  Is it not a singular testimony of imperfection that we cannot
establish our satisfaction in any one thing, and that even our own fancy
and desire should deprive us of the power to choose what is most proper
and useful for us?  A very good proof of this is the great dispute that
has ever been amongst the philosophers, of finding out man’s sovereign
good, that continues yet, and will eternally continue, without solution
or accord:

              “Dum abest quod avemus, id exsuperare videtur
               Caetera; post aliud, quum contigit illud, avemus,
               Et sitis aequa tenet.”

     [“While that which we desire is wanting, it seems to surpass all the
     rest; then, when we have got it, we want something else; ‘tis ever
     the same thirst”--Lucretius, iii. 1095.]

Whatever it is that falls into our knowledge and possession, we find that
it satisfies not, and we still pant after things to come and unknown,
inasmuch as those present do not suffice for us; not that, in my
judgment, they have not in them wherewith to do it, but because we seize
them with an unruly and immoderate haste:

         “Nam quum vidit hic, ad victum qux flagitat usus,
          Et per quae possent vitam consistere tutam,
          Omnia jam ferme mortalibus esse parata;
          Divitiis homines, et honore, et laude potentes
          Aflluere, atque bona natorum excellere fama;
          Nec minus esse domi cuiquam tamen anxia corda,
          Atque animi ingratis vitam vexare querelis
          Causam, quae infestis cogit saevire querelis,
          Intellegit ibi; vitium vas efficere ipsum,
          Omniaque, illius vitio, corrumpier intus,
          Qux collata foris et commoda quomque venirent.”

     [“For when he saw that almost all things necessarily required for
     subsistence, and which may render life comfortable, are already
     prepared to their hand, that men may abundantly attain wealth,
     honour, praise, may rejoice in the reputation of their children, yet
     that, notwithstanding, every one has none the less in his heart and
     home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints, he saw
     that the vessel itself was in fault, and that all good things which
     were brought into it from without were spoilt by its own
     imperfections.”--Lucretius, vi. 9.]

Our appetite is irresolute and fickle; it can neither keep nor enjoy
anything with a good grace: and man concluding it to be the fault of the
things he is possessed of, fills himself with and feeds upon the idea of
things he neither knows nor understands, to which he devotes his hopes
and his desires, paying them all reverence and honour, according to the
saying of Caesar:

          “Communi fit vitio naturae, ut invisis, latitantibus
          atque incognitis rebus magis confidamas,
          vehementiusque exterreamur.”

     [“‘Tis the common vice of nature, that we at once repose most
     confidence, and receive the greatest apprehensions, from things
     unseen, concealed, and unknown.”--De Bello Civil, xi. 4.]




CHAPTER LIV

OF VAIN SUBTLETIES

There are a sort of little knacks and frivolous subtleties from which men
sometimes expect to derive reputation and applause: as poets, who compose
whole poems with every line beginning with the same letter; we see the
shapes of eggs, globes, wings, and hatchets cut out by the ancient Greeks
by the measure of their verses, making them longer or shorter, to
represent such or such a figure.  Of this nature was his employment who
made it his business to compute into how many several orders the letters
of the alphabet might be transposed, and found out that incredible number
mentioned in Plutarch.  I am mightily pleased with the humour of him,

     [“Alexander, as may be seen in Quintil., Institut.  Orat., lib.
     ii., cap. 20, where he defines Maratarexvia to be a certain
     unnecessary imitation of art, which really does neither good nor
     harm, but is as unprofitable and ridiculous as was the labour of
     that man who had so perfectly learned to cast small peas through the
     eye of a needle at a good distance that he never missed one, and was
     justly rewarded for it, as is said, by Alexander, who saw the
     performance, with a bushel of peas.”--Coste.]

who having a man brought before him that had learned to throw a grain of
millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a
needle; and being afterwards entreated to give something for the reward
of so rare a performance, he pleasantly, and in my opinion justly,
ordered a certain number of bushels of the same grain to be delivered to
him, that he might not want wherewith to exercise so famous an art.  ‘Tis
a strong evidence of a weak judgment when men approve of things for their
being rare and new, or for their difficulty, where worth and usefulness
are not conjoined to recommend them.

I come just now from playing with my own family at who could find out the
most things that hold by their two extremities; as Sire, which is a title
given to the greatest person in the nation, the king, and also to the
vulgar, as merchants, but never to any degree of men between.  The women
of great quality are called Dames, inferior gentlewomen, Demoiselles, and
the meanest sort of women, Dames, as the first.  The cloth of state over
our tables is not permitted but in the palaces of princes and in taverns.
Democritus said, that gods and beasts had sharper sense than men, who are
of a middle form.  The Romans wore the same habit at funerals and feasts.
It is most certain that an extreme fear and an extreme ardour of courage
equally trouble and relax the belly.  The nickname of Trembling with
which they surnamed Sancho XII., king of Navarre, tells us that valour
will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear.  Those who were
arming that king, or some other person, who upon the like occasion was
wont to be in the same disorder, tried to compose him by representing the
danger less he was going to engage himself in: “You understand me ill,”
 said he, “for could my flesh know the danger my courage will presently
carry it into, it would sink down to the ground.”  The faintness that
surprises us from frigidity or dislike in the exercises of Venus are also
occasioned by a too violent desire and an immoderate heat.  Extreme
coldness and extreme heat boil and roast.  Aristotle says, that sows of
lead will melt and run with cold and the rigour of winter just as with a
vehement heat.  Desire and satiety fill all the gradations above and
below pleasure with pain.  Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre
of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.  The
wise control and triumph over ill, the others know it not: these last
are, as a man may say, on this side of accidents, the others are beyond
them, who after having well weighed and considered their qualities,
measured and judged them what they are, by virtue of a vigorous soul leap
out of their reach; they disdain and trample them underfoot, having a
solid and well-fortified soul, against which the darts of fortune, coming
to strike, must of necessity rebound and blunt themselves, meeting with a
body upon which they can fix no impression; the ordinary and middle
condition of men are lodged betwixt these two extremities, consisting of
such as perceive evils, feel them, and are not able to support them.
Infancy and decrepitude meet in the imbecility of the brain; avarice and
profusion in the same thirst and desire of getting.

A man may say with some colour of truth that there is an Abecedarian
ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes
after it: an ignorance that knowledge creates and begets, at the same
time that it despatches and destroys the first.  Of mean understandings,
little inquisitive, and little instructed, are made good Christians, who
by reverence and obedience simply believe and are constant in their
belief.  In the average understandings and the middle sort of capacities,
the error of opinion is begotten; they follow the appearance of the first
impression, and have some colour of reason on their side to impute our
walking on in the old beaten path to simplicity and stupidity, meaning us
who have not informed ourselves by study.  The higher and nobler souls,
more solid and clear-sighted, make up another sort of true believers, who
by a long and religious investigation of truth, have obtained a clearer
and more penetrating light into the Scriptures, and have discovered the
mysterious and divine secret of our ecclesiastical polity; and yet we see
some, who by the middle step, have arrived at that supreme degree with
marvellous fruit and confirmation, as to the utmost limit of Christian
intelligence, and enjoy their victory with great spiritual consolation,
humble acknowledgment of the divine favour, reformation of manners, and
singular modesty.  I do not intend with these to rank those others, who
to clear themselves from all suspicion of their former errors and to
satisfy us that they are sound and firm, render themselves extremely
indiscreet and unjust, in the carrying on our cause, and blemish it with
infinite reproaches of violence and oppression.  The simple peasants are
good people, and so are the philosophers, or whatever the present age
calls them, men of strong and clear reason, and whose souls are enriched
with an ample instruction of profitable sciences.  The mongrels who have
disdained the first form of the ignorance of letters, and have not been
able to attain to the other (sitting betwixt two stools, as I and a great
many more of us do), are dangerous, foolish, and importunate; these are
they that trouble the world.  And therefore it is that I, for my own
part, retreat as much as I can towards the first and natural station,
whence I so vainly attempted to advance.

Popular and purely natural poesy

     [“The term poesie populaire was employed, for the first time, in the
     French language on this occasion.  Montaigne created the expression,
     and indicated its nature.”--Ampere.]

has in it certain artless graces, by which she may come into comparison
with the greatest beauty of poetry perfected by art: as we see in our
Gascon villanels and the songs that are brought us from nations that have
no knowledge of any manner of science, nor so much as the use of writing.
The middle sort of poesy betwixt these two is despised, of no value,
honour, or esteem.

But seeing that the path once laid open to the fancy, I have found, as it
commonly falls out, that what we have taken for a difficult exercise and
a rare subject, prove to be nothing so, and that after the invention is
once warm, it finds out an infinite number of parallel examples.  I shall
only add this one--that, were these Essays of mine considerable enough to
deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fall out that they
would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very
acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not
understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in
the middle region.



CHAPTER LV

OF SMELLS

It has been reported of some, as of Alexander the Great, that their sweat
exhaled an odoriferous smell, occasioned by some rare and extraordinary
constitution, of which Plutarch and others have been inquisitive into the
cause.  But the ordinary constitution of human bodies is quite otherwise,
and their best and chiefest excellency is to be exempt from smell.  Nay,
the sweetness even of the purest breath has nothing in it of greater
perfection than to be without any offensive smell, like those of
healthful children, which made Plautus say of a woman:

               “Mulier tum bene olet, ubi nihil olet.”

          [“She smells sweetest, who smells not at all.”
           --Plautus, Mostel, i. 3, 116.]

And such as make use of fine exotic perfumes are with good reason to be
suspected of some natural imperfection which they endeavour by these
odours to conceal.  To smell, though well, is to stink:

              “Rides nos, Coracine, nil olentes
               Malo, quam bene olere, nil olere.”

     [“You laugh at us, Coracinus, because we are not scented; I would,
     rather than smell well, not smell at all.”--Martial, vi. 55, 4.]

And elsewhere:

          “Posthume, non bene olet, qui bene semper olet.”

     [“Posthumus, he who ever smells well does not smell well.”
      --Idem, ii. 12, 14.]

I am nevertheless a great lover of good smells, and as much abominate the
ill ones, which also I scent at a greater distance, I think, than other
men:

              “Namque sagacius unus odoror,
               Polypus, an gravis hirsutis cubet hircus in aliis
               Quam canis acer, ubi latest sus.”

     [“My nose is quicker to scent a fetid sore or a rank armpit, than a
     dog to smell out the hidden sow.”--Horace, Epod., xii.  4.]

Of smells, the simple and natural seem to me the most pleasing.  Let the
ladies look to that, for ‘tis chiefly their concern: amid the most
profound barbarism, the Scythian women, after bathing, were wont to
powder and crust their faces and all their bodies with a certain
odoriferous drug growing in their country, which being cleansed off, when
they came to have familiarity with men they were found perfumed and
sleek.  ‘Tis not to be believed how strangely all sorts of odours cleave
to me, and how apt my skin is to imbibe them.  He that complains of
nature that she has not furnished mankind with a vehicle to convey smells
to the nose had no reason; for they will do it themselves, especially to
me; my very mustachios, which are full, perform that office; for if I
stroke them but with my gloves or handkerchief, the smell will not out a
whole day; they manifest where I have been, and the close, luscious,
devouring, viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age left
a sweetness upon my lips for several hours after.  And yet I have ever
found myself little subject to epidemic diseases, that are caught, either
by conversing with the sick or bred by the contagion of the air, and have
escaped from those of my time, of which there have been several sorts in
our cities and armies.  We read of Socrates, that though he never
departed from Athens during the frequent plagues that infested the city,
he only was never infected.

Physicians might, I believe, extract greater utility from odours than
they do, for I have often observed that they cause an alteration in me
and work upon my spirits according to their several virtues; which makes
me approve of what is said, that the use of incense and perfumes in
churches, so ancient and so universally received in all nations and
religions, was intended to cheer us, and to rouse and purify the senses,
the better to fit us for contemplation.

I could have been glad, the better to judge of it, to have tasted the
culinary art of those cooks who had so rare a way of seasoning exotic
odours with the relish of meats; as it was particularly observed in the
service of the king of Tunis, who in our days--[Muley-Hassam, in 1543.]
--landed at Naples to have an interview with Charles the Emperor.  His
dishes were larded with odoriferous drugs, to that degree of expense that
the cookery of one peacock and two pheasants amounted to a hundred ducats
to dress them after their fashion; and when the carver came to cut them
up, not only the dining-room, but all the apartments of his palace and
the adjoining streets were filled with an aromatic vapour which did not
presently vanish.

My chiefest care in choosing my lodgings is always to avoid a thick and
stinking air; and those beautiful cities, Venice and Paris, very much
lessen the kindness I have for them, the one by the offensive smell of
her marshes, and the other of her dirt.




CHAPTER LVI

OF PRAYERS

I propose formless and undetermined fancies, like those who publish
doubtful questions, to be after a disputed upon in the schools, not to
establish truth but to seek it; and I submit them to the judgments of
those whose office it is to regulate, not my writings and actions only,
but moreover my very thoughts.  Let what I here set down meet with
correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me,
myself beforehand condemning as absurd and impious, if anything shall be
found, through ignorance or inadvertency, couched in this rhapsody,
contrary to the holy resolutions and prescriptions of the Catholic
Apostolic and Roman Church, into which I was born and in which I will
die.  And yet, always submitting to the authority of their censure, which
has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything, as in
treating upon this present subject.

I know not if or no I am wrong, but since, by a particular favour of the
divine bounty, a certain form of prayer has been prescribed and dictated
to us, word by word, from the mouth of God Himself, I have ever been of
opinion that we ought to have it in more frequent use than we yet have;
and if I were worthy to advise, at the sitting down to and rising from
our tables, at our rising from and going to bed, and in every particular
action wherein prayer is used, I would that Christians always make use of
the Lord’s Prayer, if not alone, yet at least always.  The Church may
lengthen and diversify prayers, according to the necessity of our
instruction, for I know very well that it is always the same in substance
and the same thing: but yet such a privilege ought to be given to that
prayer, that the people should have it continually in their mouths; for
it is most certain that all necessary petitions are comprehended in it,
and that it is infinitely proper for all occasions.  ‘Tis the only prayer
I use in all places and conditions, and which I still repeat instead of
changing; whence it also happens that I have no other so entirely by
heart as that.

It just now came into my mind, whence it is we should derive that error
of having recourse to God in all our designs and enterprises, to call Him
to our assistance in all sorts of affairs, and in all places where our
weakness stands in need of support, without considering whether the
occasion be just or otherwise; and to invoke His name and power, in what
state soever we are, or action we are engaged in, howsoever vicious.  He
is indeed, our sole and unique protector, and can do all things for us:
but though He is pleased to honour us with this sweet paternal alliance,
He is, notwithstanding, as just as He is good and mighty; and more often
exercises His justice than His power, and favours us according to that,
and not according to our petitions.

Plato in his Laws, makes three sorts of belief injurious to the gods;
“that there are none; that they concern not themselves about our affairs;
that they never refuse anything to our vows, offerings, and sacrifices.”
 The first of these errors (according to his opinion, never continued
rooted in any man from his infancy to his old age); the other two, he
confesses, men might be obstinate in.

God’s justice and His power are inseparable; ‘tis in vain we invoke His
power in an unjust cause.  We are to have our souls pure and clean, at
that moment at least wherein we pray to Him, and purified from all
vicious passions; otherwise we ourselves present Him the rods wherewith
to chastise us; instead of repairing anything we have done amiss, we
double the wickedness and the offence when we offer to Him, to whom we
are to sue for pardon, an affection full of irreverence and hatred.
Which makes me not very apt to applaud those whom I observe to be so
frequent on their knees, if the actions nearest to the prayer do not give
me some evidence of amendment and reformation:

              “Si, nocturnus adulter,
               Tempora Santonico velas adoperta cucullo.”

     [“If a night adulterer, thou coverest thy head with a Santonic
     cowl.”--Juvenal, Sat., viii.  144.--The Santones were the people
     who inhabited Saintonge in France, from whom the Romans derived the
     use of hoods or cowls covering the head and face.]

And the practice of a man who mixes devotion with an execrable life seems
in some sort more to be condemned than that of a man conformable to his
own propension and dissolute throughout; and for that reason it is that
our Church denies admittance to and communion with men obstinate and
incorrigible in any notorious wickedness.  We pray only by custom and for
fashion’s sake; or rather, we read or pronounce our prayers aloud, which
is no better than an hypocritical show of devotion; and I am scandalised
to see a man cross himself thrice at the Benedicite, and as often at
Grace (and the more, because it is a sign I have in great veneration and
continual use, even when I yawn), and to dedicate all the other hours of
the day to acts of malice, avarice, and injustice.  One hour to God, the
rest to the devil, as if by composition and compensation.  ‘Tis a wonder
to see actions so various in themselves succeed one another with such an
uniformity of method as not to interfere nor suffer any alteration, even
upon the very confines and passes from the one to the other.  What a
prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself
whilst it harbours under the same roof, with so agreeing and so calm a
society, both the crime and the judge?

A man whose whole meditation is continually working upon nothing but
impurity which he knows to be so odious to Almighty God, what can he say
when he comes to speak to Him?  He draws back, but immediately falls into
a relapse.  If the object of divine justice and the presence of his Maker
did, as he pretends, strike and chastise his soul, how short soever the
repentance might be, the very fear of offending the Infinite Majesty
would so often present itself to his imagination that he would soon see
himself master of those vices that are most natural and vehement in him.
But what shall we say of those who settle their whole course of life upon
the profit and emolument of sins, which they know to be mortal?  How many
trades and vocations have we admitted and countenanced amongst us, whose
very essence is vicious?  And he that, confessing himself to me,
voluntarily told me that he had all his lifetime professed and practised
a religion, in his opinion damnable and contrary to that he had in his
heart, only to preserve his credit and the honour of his employments, how
could his courage suffer so infamous a confession?  What can men say to
the divine justice upon this subject?

Their repentance consisting in a visible and manifest reparation, they
lose the colour of alleging it both to God and man.  Are they so impudent
as to sue for remission without satisfaction and without penitence?
I look upon these as in the same condition with the first: but the
obstinacy is not there so easy to be overcome.  This contrariety and
volubility of opinion so sudden, so violent, that they feign, are a kind
of miracle to me: they present us with the state of an indigestible agony
of mind.

It seemed to me a fantastic imagination in those who, these late years
past, were wont to reproach every man they knew to be of any
extraordinary parts, and made profession of the Catholic religion, that
it was but outwardly; maintaining, moreover, to do him honour forsooth,
that whatever he might pretend to the contrary he could not but in his
heart be of their reformed opinion.  An untoward disease, that a man
should be so riveted to his own belief as to fancy that others cannot
believe otherwise than as he does; and yet worse, that they should
entertain so vicious an opinion of such great parts as to think any man
so qualified, should prefer any present advantage of fortune to the
promises of eternal life and the menaces of eternal damnation.  They may
believe me: could anything have tempted my youth, the ambition of the
danger and difficulties in the late commotions had not been the least
motives.

It is not without very good reason, in my opinion, that the Church
interdicts the promiscuous, indiscreet, and irreverent use of the holy
and divine Psalms, with which the Holy Ghost inspired King David.  We
ought not to mix God in our actions, but with the highest reverence and
caution; that poesy is too holy to be put to no other use than to
exercise the lungs and to delight our ears; it ought to come from the
conscience, and not from the tongue.  It is not fit that a prentice in
his shop, amongst his vain and frivolous thoughts, should be permitted to
pass away his time and divert himself with such sacred things.  Neither
is it decent to see the Holy Book of the holy mysteries of our belief
tumbled up and down a hall or a kitchen they were formerly mysteries, but
are now become sports and recreations.  ‘Tis a book too serious and too
venerable to be cursorily or slightly turned over: the reading of the
scripture ought to be a temperate and premeditated act, and to which men
should always add this devout preface, ‘sursum corda’, preparing even the
body to so humble and composed a gesture and countenance as shall
evidence a particular veneration and attention.  Neither is it a book for
everyone to fist, but the study of select men set apart for that purpose,
and whom Almighty God has been pleased to call to that office and sacred
function: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it.  ‘Tis, not a story to
tell, but a history to revere, fear, and adore.  Are not they then
pleasant men who think they have rendered this fit for the people’s
handling by translating it into the vulgar tongue?  Does the
understanding of all therein contained only stick at words?  Shall I
venture to say further, that by coming so near to understand a little,
they are much wider of the whole scope than before.  A pure and simple
ignorance and wholly depending upon the exposition of qualified persons,
was far more learned and salutary than this vain and verbal knowledge,
which has only temerity and presumption.

And I do further believe that the liberty every one has taken to disperse
the sacred writ into so many idioms carries with it a great deal more of
danger than utility.  The Jews, Mohammedans, and almost all other
peoples, have reverentially espoused the language wherein their mysteries
were first conceived, and have expressly, and not without colour of
reason, forbidden the alteration of them into any other.  Are we assured
that in Biscay and in Brittany there are enough competent judges of this
affair to establish this translation into their own language?  The
universal Church has not a more difficult and solemn judgment to make.
In preaching and speaking the interpretation is vague, free, mutable, and
of a piece by itself; so ‘tis not the same thing.

One of our Greek historians age justly censures the he lived in, because
the secrets of the Christian religion were dispersed into the hands of
every mechanic, to expound and argue upon, according to his own fancy,
and that we ought to be much ashamed, we who by God’s especial favour
enjoy the pure mysteries of piety, to suffer them to be profaned by the
ignorant rabble; considering that the Gentiles expressly forbad Socrates,
Plato, and the other sages to inquire into or so much as mention the
things committed to the priests of Delphi; and he says, moreover, that
the factions of princes upon theological subjects are armed not with zeal
but fury; that zeal springs from the divine wisdom and justice, and
governs itself with prudence and moderation, but degenerates into hatred
and envy, producing tares and nettles instead of corn and wine when
conducted by human passions.  And it was truly said by another, who,
advising the Emperor Theodosius, told him that disputes did not so much
rock the schisms of the Church asleep, as it roused and animated
heresies; that, therefore, all contentions and dialectic disputations
were to be avoided, and men absolutely to acquiesce in the prescriptions
and formulas of faith established by the ancients.  And the Emperor
Andronicus having overheard some great men at high words in his palace
with Lapodius about a point of ours of great importance, gave them so
severe a check as to threaten to cause them to be thrown into the river
if they did not desist.  The very women and children nowadays take upon
them to lecture the oldest and most experienced men about the
ecclesiastical laws; whereas the first of those of Plato forbids them to
inquire so much as into the civil laws, which were to stand instead of
divine ordinances; and, allowing the old men to confer amongst themselves
or with the magistrate about those things, he adds, provided it be not in
the presence of young or profane persons.

A bishop has left in writing that at the other end of the world there is
an isle, by the ancients called Dioscorides, abundantly fertile in all
sorts of trees and fruits, and of an exceedingly healthful air; the
inhabitants of which are Christians, having churches and altars, only
adorned with crosses without any other images, great observers of fasts
and feasts, exact payers of their tithes to the priests, and so chaste,
that none of them is permitted to have to do with more than one woman in
his life--[What Osorius says is that these people only had one wife at a
time.]--as to the rest, so content with their condition, that environed
with the sea they know nothing of navigation, and so simple that they
understand not one syllable of the religion they profess and wherein they
are so devout: a thing incredible to such as do not know that the Pagans,
who are so zealous idolaters, know nothing more of their gods than their
bare names and their statues.  The ancient beginning of ‘Menalippus’, a
tragedy of Euripides, ran thus:

               “O Jupiter!  for that name alone
               Of what thou art to me is known.”

I have also known in my time some men’s writings found fault with for
being purely human and philosophical, without any mixture of theology;
and yet, with some show of reason, it might, on the contrary, be said
that the divine doctrine, as queen and regent of the rest, better keeps
her state apart, that she ought to be sovereign throughout, not
subsidiary and suffragan, and that, peradventure, grammatical,
rhetorical, logical examples may elsewhere be more suitably chosen, as
also the material for the stage, games, and public entertainments, than
from so sacred a matter; that divine reasons are considered with greater
veneration and attention by themselves, and in their own proper style,
than when mixed with and adapted to human discourse; that it is a fault
much more often observed that the divines write too humanly, than that
the humanists write not theologically enough.  Philosophy, says St.
Chrysostom, has long been banished the holy schools, as an handmaid
altogether useless and thought unworthy to look, so much as in passing
by the door, into the sanctuary of the holy treasures of the celestial
doctrine; that the human way of speaking is of a much lower form and
ought not to adopt for herself the dignity and majesty of divine
eloquence.  Let who will ‘verbis indisciplinatis’ talk of fortune,
destiny, accident, good and evil hap, and other suchlike phrases,
according to his own humour; I for my part propose fancies merely human
and merely my own, and that simply as human fancies, and separately
considered, not as determined by any decree from heaven, incapable of
doubt or dispute; matter of opinion, not matter of faith; things which I
discourse of according to my own notions, not as I believe, according to
God; after a laical, not clerical, and yet always after a very religious
manner, as children prepare their exercises, not to instruct but to be
instructed.

And might it not be said, that an edict enjoining all people but such as
are public professors of divinity, to be very reserved in writing of
religion, would carry with it a very good colour of utility and justice
--and to me, amongst the rest peradventure, to hold my prating?  I have
been told that even those who are not of our Church nevertheless amongst
themselves expressly forbid the name of God to be used in common
discourse, nor so much even by way of interjection, exclamation,
assertion of a truth, or comparison; and I think them in the right: upon
what occasion soever we call upon God to accompany and assist us, it
ought always to be done with the greatest reverence and devotion.

There is, as I remember, a passage in Xenophon where he tells us that we
ought so much the more seldom to call upon God, by how much it is hard to
compose our souls to such a degree of calmness, patience, and devotion as
it ought to be in at such a time; otherwise our prayers are not only vain
and fruitless, but vicious: “forgive us,” we say, “our trespasses, as we
forgive them that trespass against us”; what do we mean by this petition
but that we present to God a soul free from all rancour and revenge?  And
yet we make nothing of invoking God’s assistance in our vices, and
inviting Him into our unjust designs:

          “Quae, nisi seductis, nequeas committere divis”

     [“Which you can only impart to the gods, when you have gained them
     over.”--Persius, ii. 4.]

the covetous man prays for the conservation of his vain and superfluous
riches; the ambitious for victory and the good conduct of his fortune;
the thief calls Him to his assistance, to deliver him from the dangers
and difficulties that obstruct his wicked designs, or returns Him thanks
for the facility he has met with in cutting a man’s throat; at the door
of the house men are going to storm or break into by force of a petard,
they fall to prayers for success, their intentions and hopes of cruelty,
avarice, and lust.

         “Hoc igitur, quo to Jovis aurem impellere tentas,
          Dic agedum Staio: ‘proh Jupiter!  O bone, clamet,
          Jupiter!’  At sese non clamet Jupiter ipse.”

     [“This therefore, with which you seek to draw the ear of Jupiter,
     say to Staius.  ‘O Jupiter!  O good Jupiter!’ let him cry.  Think
     you Jupiter himself would not cry out upon it?”--Persius, ii. 21.]

Marguerite, Queen of Navarre,--[In the Heptameron.]--tells of a young
prince, who, though she does not name him, is easily enough by his great
qualities to be known, who going upon an amorous assignation to lie with
an advocate’s wife of Paris, his way thither being through a church, he
never passed that holy place going to or returning from his pious
exercise, but he always kneeled down to pray.  Wherein he would employ
the divine favour, his soul being full of such virtuous meditations,
I leave others to judge, which, nevertheless, she instances for a
testimony of singular devotion.  But this is not the only proof we have
that women are not very fit to treat of theological affairs.

A true prayer and religious reconciling of ourselves to Almighty God
cannot enter into an impure soul, subject at the very time to the
dominion of Satan.  He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course
of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or
like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie.

                         “Tacito mala vota susurro
                    Concipimus.”

          [“We whisper our guilty prayers.”---Lucan, v. 104.]

There are few men who durst publish to the world the prayers they make to
Almighty God:

         “Haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque, humilesque susurros
          Tollere de templis, et aperto vivere voto”

     [“‘Tis not convenient for every one to bring the prayers he mutters
     out of the temple, and to give his wishes to the public ear.
     --“Persius, ii. 6.]

and this is the reason why the Pythagoreans would have them always public
and heard by every one, to the end they might not prefer indecent or
unjust petitions as this man:

              “Clare quum dixit, Apollo!
               Labra movet, metuens audiri: Pulcra Laverna,
               Da mihi fallere, da justum sanctumque videri;
               Noctem peccatis, et fraudibus objice nubem.”

     [“When he has clearly said Apollo!  he moves his lips, fearful to be
     heard; he murmurs: O fair Laverna, grant me the talent to deceive;
     grant me to appear holy and just; shroud my sins with night, and
     cast a cloud over my frauds.”--Horace, Ep., i.  16, 59.--(Laverna
     was the goddess of thieves.)]

The gods severely punished the wicked prayers of OEdipus in granting
them: he had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine
the succession to his throne by arms, and was so miserable as to see
himself taken at his word.  We are not to pray that all things may go as
we would have them, but as most concurrent with prudence.

We seem, in truth, to make use of our prayers as of a kind of jargon, and
as those do who employ holy words about sorceries and magical operations;
and as if we reckoned the benefit we are to reap from them as depending
upon the contexture, sound, and jingle of words, or upon the grave
composing of the countenance.  For having the soul contaminated with
concupiscence, not touched with repentance, or comforted by any late
reconciliation with God, we go to present Him such words as the memory
suggests to the tongue, and hope from thence to obtain the remission of
our sins.  There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the
divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we
are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted
as we at present are, and are for the future to be.  But then, in return,
we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this
pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least,
wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the
ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us
to offend her; neither the gods nor good men (says Plato) will accept the
present of a wicked man:

                   “Immunis aram si terigit manus,
                    Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
                    Mollivit aversos Penates
                    Farre pio et saliente mica.”

     [“If a pure hand has touched the altar, the pious offering of a
     small cake and a few grains of salt will appease the offended gods
     more effectually than costly sacrifices.”
      --Horace, Od., iii. 23, 17.]




CHAPTER LVII

OF AGE

I cannot allow of the way in which we settle for ourselves the duration
of our life.  I see that the sages contract it very much in comparison of
the common opinion: “what,” said the younger Cato to those who would stay
his hand from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached that
I go out of the world too soon?”  And yet he was but eight-and-forty
years old.  He thought that to be a mature and advanced age, considering
how few arrive unto it.  And such as, soothing their thoughts with I know
not what course of nature, promise to themselves some years beyond it,
could they be privileged from the infinite number of accidents to which
we are by a natural subjection exposed, they might have some reason so to
do.  What am idle conceit is it to expect to die of a decay of strength,
which is the effect of extremest age, and to propose to ourselves no
shorter lease of life than that, considering it is a kind of death of all
others the most rare and very seldom seen?  We call that only a natural
death; as if it were contrary to nature to see a man break his neck with
a fall, be drowned in shipwreck, be snatched away with a pleurisy or the
plague, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to these
inconveniences.  Let us no longer flatter ourselves with these fine
words; we ought rather, peradventure, to call that natural which is
general, common, and universal.

To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, and,
therefore, so much less natural than the others; ‘tis the last and
extremest sort of dying: and the more remote, the less to be hoped for.
It is, indeed, the bourn beyond which we are not to pass, and which the
law of nature has set as a limit, not to be exceeded; but it is, withal,
a privilege she is rarely seen to give us to last till then.  ‘Tis a
lease she only signs by particular favour, and it may be to one only in
the space of two or three ages, and then with a pass to boot, to carry
him through all the traverses and difficulties she has strewed in the way
of this long career.  And therefore my opinion is, that when once forty
years we should consider it as an age to which very few arrive.  For
seeing that men do not usually proceed so far, it is a sign that we are
pretty well advanced; and since we have exceeded the ordinary bounds,
which is the just measure of life, we ought not to expect to go much
further; having escaped so many precipices of death, whereinto we have
seen so many other men fall, we should acknowledge that so extraordinary
a fortune as that which has hitherto rescued us from those eminent
perils, and kept us alive beyond the ordinary term of living, is not like
to continue long.

‘Tis a fault in our very laws to maintain this error: these say that a
man is not capable of managing his own estate till he be five-and-twenty
years old, whereas he will have much ado to manage his life so long.
Augustus cut off five years from the ancient Roman standard, and declared
that thirty years old was sufficient for a judge.  Servius Tullius
superseded the knights of above seven-and-forty years of age from the
fatigues of war; Augustus dismissed them at forty-five; though methinks
it seems a little unreasonable that men should be sent to the fireside
till five-and-fifty or sixty years of age.  I should be of opinion that
our vocation and employment should be as far as possible extended for the
public good: I find the fault on the other side, that they do not employ
us early enough.  This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at
nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to
determine a dispute about a gutter.

For my part, I believe our souls are adult at twenty as much as they are
ever like to be, and as capable then as ever.  A soul that has not by
that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after
come to proof.  The natural qualities and virtues produce what they have
of vigorous and fine, within that term or never,

                   “Si l’espine rion picque quand nai,
                    A pene que picque jamai,”

               [“If the thorn does not prick at its birth,
               ‘twill hardly ever prick at all.”]

as they say in Dauphin.

Of all the great human actions I ever heard or read of, of what sort
soever, I have observed, both in former ages and our own, more were
performed before the age of thirty than after; and this ofttimes in the
very lives of the same men.  May I not confidently instance in those of
Hannibal and his great rival Scipio?  The better half of their lives they
lived upon the glory they had acquired in their youth; great men after,
‘tis true, in comparison of others; but by no means in comparison of
themselves.  As to my own particular, I do certainly believe that since
that age, both my understanding and my constitution have rather decayed
than improved, and retired rather than advanced.  ‘Tis possible, that
with those who make the best use of their time, knowledge and experience
may increase with their years; but vivacity, promptitude, steadiness, and
other pieces of us, of much greater importance, and much more essentially
our own, languish and decay:

              “Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus aevi
               Corpus, et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus,
               Claudicat ingenium, delirat linguaque, mensque.”

          [“When once the body is shaken by the violence of time,
          blood and vigour ebbing away, the judgment halts,
          the tongue and the mind dote.”--Lucretius, iii. 452.]

Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind; and I have
seen enough who have got a weakness in their brains before either in
their legs or stomach; and by how much the more it is a disease of no
great pain to the sufferer, and of obscure symptoms, so much greater is
the danger.  For this reason it is that I complain of our laws, not that
they keep us too long to our work, but that they set us to work too late.
For the frailty of life considered, and to how many ordinary and natural
rocks it is exposed, one ought not to give up so large a portion of it to
childhood, idleness, and apprenticeship.

     [Which Cotton thus renders: “Birth though noble, ought not to share
     so large a vacancy, and so tedious a course of education.”  Florio
     (1613) makes the passage read as-follows: “Methinks that,
     considering the weakness of our life, and seeing the infinite number
     of ordinary rocks and natural dangers it is subject unto, we should
     not, so soon as we come into the world, allot so large a share
     thereof unto unprofitable wantonness in youth, ill-breeding
     idleness, and slow-learning prentisage.”]




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     Advise to choose weapons of the shortest sort
     An ignorance that knowledge creates and begets
     Ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon it
     Can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace
     Change of fashions
     Chess: this idle and childish game
     Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato
     Death of old age the most rare and very seldom seen
     Diogenes, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders
     Do not to pray that all things may go as we would have them
     Excel above the common rate in frivolous things
     Expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
     Fancy that others cannot believe otherwise than as he does
     Gradations above and below pleasure
     Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed
     He did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern
     Home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints
     How infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
     I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback
     Led by the ears by this charming harmony of words
     Little knacks  and frivolous subtleties
     Men approve of things for their being rare and new
     Must of necessity walk in the steps of another
     Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen
     Not to instruct but to be instructed.
     Present Him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue
     Psalms of King David: promiscuous, indiscreet
     Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive
     Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble
     Sitting betwixt two stools
     Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind
     Stupidity and facility natural to the common people
     The Bible: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it.
     The faintness that surprises in the exercises of Venus
     Thucydides: which was the better wrestler
     To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular
     To make little things appear great was his profession
     To smell, though well, is to stink
     Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear
     Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age
     We can never be despised according to our full desert
     When we have got it, we want something else
     Women who paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.

I.        Of the inconstancy of our actions.
II.       Of drunkenness.
III.      A custom of the Isle of Cea.
IV.       To-morrow’s a new day.
V.        Of conscience.
VI.       Use makes perfect.



ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

BOOK THE SECOND

CHAPTER I

OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS

Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
them into the world’s eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person.  We find the younger
Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus.  Pope Boniface
VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
“O that I had never been taught to write!” so much it went to his heart
to condemn a man to death.  All story is full of such examples, and every
man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:

          “Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest.”

          [“‘Tis evil counsel that will admit no change.”
           --Pub.  Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]

There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the most
usual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability of
our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a
little out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and
solid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according to
that interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to a
uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.
Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and
continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he
has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics.  I can
more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any other virtue, and believe
nothing sooner than the contrary.  He that would judge of a man in detail
and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth.  It
is a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who have
formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the
principal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says one
of the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,
“it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I will
not vouchsafe,” says he, “to add, provided the will be just, for if it be
not just, it is impossible it should be always one.”  I have indeed
formerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want of
measure, and therefore ‘tis impossible to fix constancy to it.  ‘Tis a
saying of.  Demosthenes, “that the beginning oh all virtue is
consultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy.”  If we
would resolve on any certain course by reason, we should pitch upon the
best, but nobody has thought on’t:

          “Quod petit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
          AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto.”

     [“That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
     again.  He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
     life.”--Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.]

Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be
it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted
by the breath of occasion.  We never meditate what we would have till the
instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature
which receives its colour from what it is laid upon.  What we but just
now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return
again to it; ‘tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:

               “Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum.”

     [“We are turned about like the top with the thong of others.”
      --Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]

We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then
with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:

                         “Nonne videmus,
          Quid sibi quisque velit, nescire, et quaerere semper
          Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?”

     [“Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking
     for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen.”
      --Lucretius, iii. 1070.]

Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.

         “Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
          Juppiter auctificas lustravit lumine terras.”

     [“Such are the minds of men, that they change as the light with
     which father Jupiter himself has illumined the increasing earth.”
      --Cicero, Frag.  Poet, lib. x.]

We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely,
nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.  In any one who had prescribed
and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own
conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an
infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his
whole life; Empedocles observed this discrepancy in the Agrigentines,
that they gave themselves up to delights, as if every day was their last,
and built as if they had been to live for ever.  The judgment would not
be hard to make, as is very evident in the younger Cato; he who therein
has found one step, it will lead him to all the rest; ‘tis a harmony of
very according sounds, that cannot jar.  But with us ‘t is quite
contrary; every particular action requires a particular judgment.  The
surest way to steer, in my opinion, would be to take our measures from
the nearest allied circumstances, without engaging in a longer
inquisition, or without concluding any other consequence.  I was told,
during the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, that a maid, hard by the
place where I then was, had thrown herself out of a window to avoid being
forced by a common soldier who was quartered in the house; she was not
killed by the fall, and therefore, repeating her attempt would have cut
her own throat, had she not been prevented; but having, nevertheless,
wounded herself to some show of danger, she voluntarily confessed that
the soldier had not as yet importuned her otherwise; than by courtship,
earnest solicitation, and presents; but that she was afraid that in the
end he would have proceeded to violence, all which she delivered with
such a countenance and accent, and withal embrued in her own blood, the
highest testimony of her virtue, that she appeared another Lucretia; and
yet I have since been very well assured that both before and after she
was not so difficult a piece.  And, according to my host’s tale in
Ariosto, be as handsome a man and as worthy a gentleman as you will, do
not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity for having
been repulsed; you do not know but she may have a better stomach to your
muleteer.

Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favour
and esteem for his valour, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him
of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished,
and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than
before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,”
 replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of
my life.”  Lucullus’s soldier having been rifled by the enemy, performed
upon them in revenge a brave exploit, by which having made himself a
gainer, Lucullus, who had conceived a good opinion of him from that
action, went about to engage him in some enterprise of very great danger,
with all the plausible persuasions and promises he could think of;

          “Verbis, quae timido quoque possent addere mentem”

          [“Words which might add courage to any timid man.”
           --Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 1, 2.]

“Pray employ,” answered he, “some miserable plundered soldier in that
affair”:

                         “Quantumvis rusticus, ibit,
               Ibit eo, quo vis, qui zonam perdidit, inquit;”

     [“Some poor fellow, who has lost his purse, will go whither you
     wish, said he.”--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 39.]

and flatly refused to go.  When we read that Mahomet having furiously
rated Chasan, Bassa of the Janissaries, because he had seen the
Hungarians break into his squadrons, and himself behave very ill in the
business, and that Chasan, instead of any other answer, rushed furiously
alone, scimitar in hand, into the first body of the enemy, where he was
presently cut to pieces, we are not to look upon that action,
peradventure, so much as vindication as a turn of mind, not so much
natural valour as a sudden despite.  The man you saw yesterday so
adventurous and brave, you must not think it strange to see him as great
a poltroon the next: anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of the
trumpet had roused his spirits; this is no valour formed and established
by reason, but accidentally created by such circumstances, and therefore
it is no wonder if by contrary circumstances it appear quite another
thing.

These supple variations and contradictions so manifest in us, have given
occasion to some to believe that man has two souls; other two distinct
powers that always accompany and incline us, the one towards good and the
other towards ill, according to their own nature and propension; so
abrupt a variety not being imaginable to flow from one and the same
source.

For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it
according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble
myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look
narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same
condition.  I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another,
according to the side I turn her to.  If I speak variously of myself, it
is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there
to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another:
bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant;
liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less,
according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the
bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this
volubility and discordance.  I have nothing to say of myself entirely,
simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion.  ‘Distinguo’ is the
most universal member of my logic.  Though I always intend to speak well
of good things, and rather to interpret such things as fall out in the
best sense than otherwise, yet such is the strangeness of our condition,
that we are often pushed on to do well even by vice itself, if well-doing
were not judged by the intention only.  One gallant action, therefore,
ought not to conclude a man valiant; if a man were brave indeed, he would
be always so, and upon all occasions.  If it were a habit of valour and
not a sally, it would render a man equally resolute in all accidents; the
same alone as in company; the same in lists as in a battle: for, let them
say what they will, there is not one valour for the pavement and another
for the field; he would bear a sickness in his bed as bravely as a wound
in the field, and no more fear death in his own house than at an assault.
We should not then see the same man charge into a breach with a brave
assurance, and afterwards torment himself like a woman for the loss of a
trial at law or the death of a child; when, being an infamous coward, he
is firm in the necessities of poverty; when he shrinks at the sight of a
barber’s razor, and rushes fearless upon the swords of the enemy, the
action is commendable, not the man.

Many of the Greeks, says Cicero,--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 27.]--
cannot endure the sight of an enemy, and yet are courageous in sickness;
the Cimbrians and Celtiberians quite contrary;

              “Nihil enim potest esse aequabile,
               quod non a certa ratione proficiscatur.”

     [“Nothing can be regular that does not proceed from a fixed ground
     of reason.”--Idem, ibid., c. 26.]

No valour can be more extreme in its kind than that of Alexander: but it
is of but one kind, nor full enough throughout, nor universal.
Incomparable as it is, it has yet some blemishes; of which his being so
often at his wits’ end upon every light suspicion of his captains
conspiring against his life, and the carrying himself in that inquisition
with so much vehemence and indiscreet injustice, and with a fear that
subverted his natural reason, is one pregnant instance.  The
superstition, also, with which he was so much tainted, carries along with
it some image of pusillanimity; and the excess of his penitence for the
murder of Clytus is also a testimony of the unevenness of his courage.
All we perform is no other than a cento, as a man may say, of several
pieces, and we would acquire honour by a false title.  Virtue cannot be
followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some
other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.  ‘Tis a vivid and
strong tincture which, when the soul has once thoroughly imbibed it, will
not out but with the piece.  And, therefore, to make a right judgment of
a man, we are long and very observingly to follow his trace: if constancy
does not there stand firm upon her own proper base,

               “Cui vivendi via considerata atque provisa est,”

     [“If the way of his life is thoroughly considered and traced out.”
      --Cicero, Paradox, v. 1.]

if the variety of occurrences makes him alter his pace (his path, I mean,
for the pace may be faster or slower) let him go; such an one runs before
the wind, “Avau le dent,” as the motto of our Talebot has it.

‘Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a
dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.  It is not possible for
any one who has not designed his life for some certain end, it is
impossible for any one to arrange the pieces, who has not the whole form
already contrived in his imagination.  Of what use are colours to him
that knows not what he is to paint?  No one lays down a certain design
for his life, and we only deliberate thereof by pieces.  The archer ought
first to know at what he is to aim, and then accommodate his arm, bow,
string, shaft, and motion to it; our counsels deviate and wander, because
not levelled to any determinate end.  No wind serves him who addresses
his voyage to no certain, port.  I cannot acquiesce in the judgment given
by one in the behalf of Sophocles,  who concluded him capable of the
management of domestic affairs, against the accusation of his son, from
having read one of his tragedies.

Neither do I allow of the conjecture of the Parians, sent to regulate the
Milesians sufficient for such a consequence as they from thence derived
coming to visit the island, they took notice of such grounds as were best
husbanded, and such country-houses as were best governed; and having
taken the names of the owners, when they had assembled the citizens, they
appointed these farmers for new governors and magistrates; concluding
that they, who had been so provident in their own private concerns, would
be so of the public too.  We are all lumps, and of so various and inform
a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and
there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and
others:

               “Magnam rem puta, unum hominem agere.”

     [“Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same
     man.”--Seneca, Ep., 150.]

Since ambition can teach man valour, temperance, and liberality, and even
justice too; seeing that avarice can inspire the courage of a shop-boy,
bred and nursed up in obscurity and ease, with the assurance to expose
himself so far from the fireside to the mercy of the waves and angry
Neptune in a frail boat; that she further teaches discretion and
prudence; and that even Venus can inflate boys under the discipline of
the rod with boldness and resolution, and infuse masculine courage into
the heart of tender virgins in their mothers’ arms:

         “Hac duce, custodes furtim transgressa jacentes,
          Ad juvenem tenebris sola puella venit:”

     [“She leading, the maiden, furtively passing by the recumbent
     guards, goes alone in the darkness to the youth.”
      --Tibullus, ii. 2, 75.]

‘tis not all the understanding has to do, simply to judge us by our
outward actions; it must penetrate the very soul, and there discover by
what springs the motion is guided.  But that being a high and hazardous
undertaking, I could wish that fewer would attempt it.




CHAPTER II

OF DRUNKENNESS

The world is nothing but variety and disemblance, vices are all alike, as
they are vices, and peradventure the Stoics understand them so; but
although they are equally vices, yet they are not all equal vices; and he
who has transgressed the ordinary bounds a hundred paces:

          “Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,”

          [“Beyond or within which the right cannot exist.”
           --Horace, Sat., i, 1, 107.]

should not be in a worse condition than he that has advanced but ten, is
not to be believed; or that sacrilege is not worse than stealing a
cabbage:

         “Nec vincet ratio hoc, tantumdem ut peccet, idemque,
          Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti,
          Et qui nocturnus divum sacra legerit.”

There is in this as great diversity as in anything whatever.  The
confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers,
traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they
should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle,
lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion.  Every one overrates the
offence of his companions, but extenuates his own.  Our very instructors
themselves rank them sometimes, in my opinion, very ill.  As Socrates
said that the principal office of wisdom was to distinguish good from
evil, we, the best of whom are vicious, ought also to say the same of the
science of distinguishing betwixt vice and vice, without which, and that
very exactly performed, the virtuous and the wicked will remain
confounded and unrecognised.

Now, amongst the rest, drunkenness seems to me to be a gross and brutish
vice.  The soul has greater part in the rest, and there are some vices
that have something, if a man may so say, of generous in them; there are
vices wherein there is a mixture of knowledge, diligence, valour,
prudence, dexterity, and address; this one is totally corporeal and
earthly.  And the rudest nation this day in Europe is that alone where it
is in fashion.  Other vices discompose the understanding: this totally
overthrows it and renders the body stupid:

              “Cum vini vis penetravit .  .  .
               Consequitur gravitas membrorum, praepediuntur
               Crura vacillanti, tardescit lingua, madet mens,
               Nant oculi; clamor, singultus, jurgia, gliscunt.”

     [“When the power of wine has penetrated us, a heaviness of the limbs
     follows, the legs of the tottering person are impeded; the tongue
     grows torpid, the mind is dimmed, the eyes swim; noise, hiccup, and
     quarrels arise.--“Lucretius, i. 3, 475.]

The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and
government of himself.  And ‘tis said amongst other things upon this
subject, that, as the must fermenting in a vessel, works up to the top
whatever it has in the bottom, so wine, in those who have drunk beyond
measure, vents the most inward secrets:

                   “Tu sapientum
                    Curas et arcanum jocoso
                    Consilium retegis Lyaeo.”

     [“Thou disclosest to the merry Lyacus the cares and secret
     counsel of the wise.”--Horace, Od., xxi. 1, 114.]

     [Lyacus, a name given to Bacchus.]

Josephus tells us that by giving an ambassador the enemy had sent to him
his full dose of liquor, he wormed out his secrets.  And yet, Augustus,
committing the most inward secrets of his affairs to Lucius Piso, who
conquered Thrace, never found him faulty in the least, no more than
Tiberias did Cossus, with whom he intrusted his whole counsels, though we
know they were both so given to drink that they have often been fain to
carry both the one and the other drunk out of the Senate:

          “Hesterno inflatum venas ut semper, Lyaeo.”

     [“Their veins full, as usual, of yesterday’s wine.”
      --Virgil, Egl., vi.  15.]

And the design of killing Caesar was as safely communicated to Cimber,
though he would often be drunk, as to Cassius, who drank nothing but
water.

     [As to which Cassius pleasantly said: “What, shall I bear
     a tyrant, I who cannot bear wine?”]

We see our Germans, when drunk as the devil, know their post, remember
the word, and keep to their ranks:

               “Nec facilis victoria de madidis, et
               Blaesis, atque mero titubantibus.”

     [“Nor is a victory easily obtained over men so drunk, they can
     scarce speak or stand.”--Juvenal, Sat., xv.  47.]

I could not have believed there had been so profound, senseless, and dead
a degree of drunkenness had I not read in history that Attalus having,
to put a notable affront upon him, invited to supper the same Pausanias,
who upon the very same occasion afterwards killed Philip of Macedon,
a king who by his excellent qualities gave sufficient testimony of his
education in the house and company of Epaminondas, made him drink to such
a pitch that he could after abandon his beauty, as of a hedge strumpet,
to the muleteers and servants of the basest office in the house.  And I
have been further told by a lady whom I highly honour and esteem, that
near Bordeaux and about Castres  where she lives, a country woman, a
widow of chaste repute, perceiving in herself the first symptoms of
breeding, innocently told her neighbours that if she had a husband she
should think herself with child; but the causes of suspicion every day
more and more increasing, and at last growing up to a manifest proof, the
poor woman was reduced to the necessity of causing it to be proclaimed in
her parish church, that whoever had done that deed and would frankly
confess it, she did not only promise to forgive, but moreover to marry
him, if he liked the motion; whereupon a young fellow that served her in
the quality of a labourer, encouraged by this proclamation, declared that
he had one holiday found her, having taken too much of the bottle, so
fast asleep by the chimney and in so indecent a posture, that he could
conveniently do his business without waking her; and they yet live
together man and wife.

It is true that antiquity has not much decried this vice; the writings
even of several philosophers speak very tenderly of it, and even amongst
the Stoics there are some who advise folks to give themselves sometimes
the liberty to drink, nay, to drunkenness, to refresh the soul:

          “Hoc quoque virtutum quondam certamine, magnum
          Socratem palmam promeruisse ferunt.”

     [“In this trial of power formerly they relate that the great
     Socrates deserved the palm.”--Cornet. Gallus, Ep., i. 47.]

That censor and reprover of others, Cato, was reproached that he was a
hard drinker:

                    “Narratur et prisci Catonis
                    Saepe mero caluisse virtus.”

     [“And of old Cato it is said, that his courage was often warmed with
     wine.”--Horace, Od., xxi. 3, 11.--Cato the Elder.]

Cyrus, that so renowned king, amongst the other qualities by which he
claimed to be preferred before his brother Artaxerxes, urged this
excellence, that he could drink a great deal more than he.  And in the
best governed nations this trial of skill in drinking is very much in
use.  I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that
lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not
amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest
they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the
Persians used to consult about their most important affairs after being
well warmed with wine.

My taste and constitution are greater enemies to this vice than my
discourse; for besides that I easily submit my belief to the authority of
ancient opinions, I look upon it indeed as an unmanly and stupid vice,
but less malicious and hurtful than the others, which, almost all, more
directly jostle public society.  And if we cannot please ourselves but it
must cost us something, as they hold, I find this vice costs a man’s
conscience less than the others, besides that it is of no difficult
preparation, nor hard to be found, a consideration not altogether to be
despised.  A man well advanced both in dignity and age, amongst three
principal commodities that he said remained to him of life, reckoned to
me this for one, and where would a man more justly find it than amongst
the natural conveniences?  But he did not take it right, for delicacy and
the curious choice of wines is therein to be avoided.  If you found your
pleasure upon drinking of the best, you condemn yourself to the penance
of drinking of the worst.  Your taste must be more indifferent and free;
so delicate a palate is not required to make a good toper.  The Germans
drink almost indifferently of all wines with delight; their business is
to pour down and not to taste; and it’s so much the better for them:
their pleasure is so much the more plentiful and nearer at hand.

Secondly, to drink, after the French fashion, but at two meals, and then
very moderately, is to be too sparing of the favours of the god.  There
is more time and constancy required than so.  The ancients spent whole
nights in this exercise, and ofttimes added the day following to eke it
out, and therefore we are to take greater liberty and stick closer to our
work.  I have seen a great lord of my time, a man of high enterprise and
famous success, that without setting himself to’t, and after his ordinary
rate of drinking at meals, drank not much less than five quarts of wine,
and at his going away appeared but too wise and discreet, to the
detriment of our affairs.  The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course
of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it;
we should, like shopboys and labourers, refuse no occasion nor omit any
opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.  Methinks we
every day abridge and curtail the use of wine, and that the after
breakfasts, dinner snatches, and collations I used to see in my father’s
house, when I was a boy, were more usual and frequent then than now.

Is it that we pretend to a reformation?  Truly, no: but it may be we are
more addicted to Venus than our fathers were.  They are two exercises
that thwart and hinder one another in their vigour.  Lechery weakens our
stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce
and amorous for the exercise of love.

‘Tis wonderful what strange stories I have heard my father tell of the
chastity of that age wherein he lived.  It was for him to say it, being
both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies.
He spoke well and little: ever mixing his language with some illustration
out of authors most in use, especially in Spanish, and among the Spanish
he whom they called Marcus Aurelius--[ Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus.]--was ordinarily in his mouth.  His behaviour was
gently grave, humble, and very modest; he was very solicitous of neatness
and propriety both in his person and clothes, whether on horseback or
afoot, he was monstrously punctual in his word; and of a conscience and
religion generally tending rather towards superstition than otherwise.
For a man of little stature, very strong, well proportioned, and well
knit; of a pleasing countenance inclining to brown, and very adroit in
all noble exercises.  I have yet in the house to be seen canes poured
full of lead, with which they say he exercised his arms for throwing the
bar or the stone, or in fencing; and shoes with leaden soles to make him
lighter for running or leaping.  Of his vaulting he has left little
miracles behind him: I have seen him when past three score laugh at our
exercises, and throw himself in his furred gown into the saddle, make the
tour of a table upon his thumbs and scarce ever mount the stairs into his
chamber without taking three or four steps at a time.  But as to what I
was speaking of before; he said there was scarce one woman of quality of
ill fame in the whole province: he would tell of strange confidences, and
some of them his own, with virtuous women, free from any manner of
suspicion of ill, and for his own part solemnly swore he was a virgin at
his marriage; and yet it was after a long practice of arms beyond the
mountains, of which wars he left us a journal under his own hand, wherein
he has given a precise account from point to point of all passages, both
relating to the public and to himself.  And he was, moreover, married at
a well advanced maturity, in the year 1528, the three-and-thirtieth year
of his age, upon his way home from Italy.  But let us return to our
bottles.

The incommodities of old age, that stand in need of some refreshment and
support, might with reason beget in me a desire of this faculty, it being
as it were the last pleasure the course of years deprives us of.  The
natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that
concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes
a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of
human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end,
like a vapour that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where
it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.  I do not,
nevertheless, understand how a man can extend the pleasure of drinking
beyond thirst, and forge in his imagination an appetite artificial and
against nature; my stomach would not proceed so far; it has enough to do
to deal with what it takes in for its necessity.  My constitution is not
to care for drink but as following eating and washing down my meat, and
for that reason my last draught is always the greatest.  And seeing that
in old age we have our palate furred with phlegms or depraved by some
other ill constitution, the wine tastes better to us as the pores are
cleaner washed and laid more open.  At least, I seldom taste the first
glass well.  Anacharsis wondered that the Greeks drank in greater glasses
towards the end of a meal than at the beginning; which was, I suppose,
for the same reason the Germans do the same, who then begin the battle of
drink.

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk
till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and
to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that
good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their
youth; who mollifies the passions of the soul, as iron is softened by
fire; and in his Lazes allows such merry meetings, provided they have a
discreet chief to govern and keep them in order, as good and of great
utility; drunkenness being, he says, a true and certain trial of every
one’s nature, and, withal, fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert
themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare
not attempt when sober.  He, moreover, says that wine is able to supply
the soul with temperance and the body with health.  Nevertheless, these
restrictions, in part borrowed from the Carthaginians, please him: that
men forbear excesses in the expeditions of war; that every judge and
magistrate abstain from it when about the administrations of his place or
the consultations of the public affairs; that the day is not to be
employed with it, that being a time due to other occupations, nor the
night on which a man intends to get children.

‘Tis said that the philosopher Stilpo, when oppressed with age, purposely
hastened his end by drinking pure wine.  The same thing, but not designed
by him, despatched also the philosopher Arcesilaus.

But ‘tis an old and pleasant question, whether the soul of a wise man can
be overcome by the strength of wine?

               “Si munitae adhibet vim sapientiae.”

To what vanity does the good opinion we have of ourselves push us?  The
most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to
keep itself upright, and from being overthrown by its own weakness.
There is not one of a thousand that is right and settled so much as one
minute in a whole life, and that may not very well doubt, whether
according to her natural condition she ever can be; but to join constancy
to it is her utmost perfection; I mean when nothing should jostle and
discompose her, which a thousand accidents may do.  ‘Tis to much purpose
that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy,
when, behold!  he goes mad with a love philtre.  Is it to be imagined
that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter?  Some men
have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight
wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy.  Let him be as wise
as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more
frail, more miserable, or more nothing?  Wisdom does not force our
natural dispositions,

               “Sudores itaque, et pallorem exsistere toto
               Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,
               Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,
               Demque concidere, ex animi terrore, videmus.”

     [“Sweat and paleness come over the whole body, the tongue is
     rendered powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened,
     there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the
     influence of fear.”--Lucretius, iii. 155.]

he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must
tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having
reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our
reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness;
he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if
not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice:

               “Humani a se nihil alienum putet.”

     [“Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
     men in general.”--Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]

The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their
greatest heroes of tears:

          “Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas.”

     [“Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet.”
      --Aeneid, vi. i.]

‘Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for
totally to suppress them is not in him to do.  Even our great Plutarch,
that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus
and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could
proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been
stimulated by some other passion.--[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c.  3.]
--All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister
interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is
above than with what is below it.

Let us leave that other sect, that sets up an express profession of
scornful superiority--[The Stoics.]--: but when even in that sect,
reputed the most quiet and gentle, we hear these rhodomontades of
Metrodorus:

          “Occupavi te, Fortuna, atque cepi: omnesque aditus tuos
          interclusi ut ad me aspirare non posses;”

     [“Fortune, I have got the better of thee, and have made all the
     avenues so sure thou canst not come at me.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 9.]

when Anaxarchus, by command of Nicocreon the tyrant of Cyprus, was put
into a stone mortar, and laid upon with mauls of iron, ceases not to say,
“Strike, batter, break; ‘tis not Anaxarchus, ‘tis but his sheath that you
pound and bray so”; when we hear our martyrs cry out to the tyrant from
the middle of the flame, “This side is roasted enough, fall to and eat,
it is enough done; fall to work with the other;” when we hear the child
in Josephus’ torn piece-meal with pincers, defying Antiochus, and crying
out with a constant and assured voice: “Tyrant, thou losest thy labour,
I am still at ease; where is the pain, where are the torments with which
thou didst so threaten me?  Is this all thou canst do?  My constancy
torments thee more than thy cruelty does me.  O pitiful coward, thou
faintest, and I grow stronger; make me complain, make me bend, make me
yield if thou canst; encourage thy guards, cheer up thy executioners;
see, see they faint, and can do no more; arm them, flesh them anew, spur
them up”; truly, a man must confess that there is some phrenzy, some
fury, how holy soever, that at that time possesses those souls.  When we
come to these Stoical sallies: “I had rather be mad than voluptuous,” a
saying of Antisthenes.  When Sextius tells us, “he had rather be fettered
with affliction than pleasure”: when Epicurus takes upon him to play with
his gout, and, refusing health and ease, defies all torments, and
despising the lesser pains, as disdaining to contend with them, he covets
and calls out for others sharper, more violent, and more worthy of him;

          “Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis
          Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem:”

     [“And instead of timid beasts, wishes the foaming boar or tawny lion
     would come from the mountain.”--AEneid, iv. 158.]

who but must conclude that these are wild sallies pushed on by a courage
that has broken loose from its place?  Our soul cannot from her own seat
reach so high; ‘tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and,
taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that he shall
afterwards himself be astonished at what he has done; as, in war, the
heat of battle impels generous soldiers to perform things of so infinite
danger, as afterwards, recollecting them, they themselves are the first
to wonder at; as it also fares with the poets, who are often rapt with
admiration of their own writings, and know not where again to find the
track through which they performed so fine a Career; which also is in
them called fury and rapture.  And as Plato says, ‘tis to no purpose for
a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy: so Aristotle says, that
no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness; and he has reason
to call all transports, how commendable soever, that surpass our own
judgment and understanding, madness; forasmuch as wisdom is a regular
government of the soul, which is carried on with measure and proportion,
and for which she is to herself responsible.  Plato argues thus, that the
faculty of prophesying is so far above us, that we must be out of
ourselves when we meddle with it, and our prudence must either be
obstructed by sleep or sickness, or lifted from her place by some
celestial rapture.




CHAPTER III

A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA

          [Cos.  Cea is the form of the name given by Pliny]

If to philosophise be, as ‘tis defined, to doubt, much more to write at
random and play the fool, as I do, ought to be reputed doubting, for it
is for novices and freshmen to inquire and to dispute, and for the
chairman to moderate and determine.

My moderator is the authority of the divine will, that governs us without
contradiction, and that is seated above these human and vain
contestations.

Philip having forcibly entered into Peloponnesus, and some one saying to
Damidas that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they
did not in time reconcile themselves to his favour:  “Why, you pitiful
fellow,” replied he, “what can they suffer who do not fear to die?”  It
being also asked of Agis, which way a man might live free?  “Why,” said
he, “by despising death.”  These, and a thousand other sayings to the
same purpose, distinctly sound of something more than the patient
attending the stroke of death when it shall come; for there are several
accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself.  Witness the
Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus, and sold for a slave, who being by
his master commanded to some base employment: “Thou shalt see,” says the
boy, “whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being
so near the reach of liberty,” and having so said, threw himself from the
top of the house.  Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians,
that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of
his: “If thou threatenest us with more than death,” replied they, “we
shall the more willingly die”; and to Philip, having written them word
that he would frustrate all their enterprises: “What, wilt thou also
hinder us from dying?”  This is the meaning of the sentence, “That the
wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the
most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all
colour of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own
custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a
hundred thousand ways out.  We may be straitened for earth to live upon,
but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus
answered the Romans.”--[Tacitus, Annal., xiii.  56.]--Why dost thou
complain of this world?  it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the
cause, if thou livest in pain.  There needs no more to die but to will to
die:

               “Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit deus.
               Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
               At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.”

     [“Death is everywhere: heaven has well provided for that.  Any one
     may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death.  To death
     there are a thousand avenues.”--Seneca, Theb:, i, I, 151.]

Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure
of all; ‘tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very
often to be sought.  It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his
end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before
his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it
comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s
the end of the clue.  The most voluntary death is the finest.  Life
depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.  We ought not to
accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this.
Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; ‘tis folly to be
concerned by any such apprehension. Living is slavery if the liberty of
dying be wanting.  The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the
expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and
amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one
step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually.  Why is not the
jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein?  For a desperate
disease a desperate cure.  Servius the grammarian, being tormented with
the gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his
legs, to deprive them of their sense; let them be gouty at their will, so
they were insensible of pain.  God gives us leave enough to go when He is
pleased to reduce us to such a condition that to live is far worse than
to die.  ‘Tis weakness to truckle under infirmities, but it’s madness to
nourish them.  The Stoics say, that it is living according to nature in a
wise man to, take his leave of life, even in the height of prosperity,
if he do it opportunely; and in a fool to prolong it, though he be
miserable, provided he be not indigent of those things which they repute
to be according to nature.  As I do not offend the law against thieves
when I embezzle my own money and cut my own purse; nor that against
incendiaries when I burn my own wood; so am I not under the lash of those
made against murderers for having deprived myself of my own life.
Hegesias said, that as the condition of life did, so the condition of
death ought to depend upon our own choice.  And Diogenes meeting the
philosopher Speusippus, so blown up with an inveterate dropsy that he was
fain to be carried in a litter, and by him saluted with the compliment,
“I wish you good health.”  “No health to thee,” replied the other,
“who art content to live in such a condition.”

And in fact, not long after, Speusippus, weary of so languishing a state
of life, found a means to die.

But this does not pass without admitting a dispute: for many are of
opinion that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the
express command of Him who has placed us in it; and that it appertains to
God who has placed us here, not for ourselves only but for His Glory and
the service of others, to dismiss us when it shall best please Him, and
not for us to depart without His licence: that we are not born for
ourselves only, but for our country also, the laws of which require an
account from us upon the score of their own interest, and have an action
of manslaughter good against us; and if these fail to take cognisance of
the fact, we are punished in the other world as deserters of our duty:

         “Proxima deinde tenent maesti loca, qui sibi letum
          Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi
          Proiecere animas.”

     [“Thence the sad ones occupy the next abodes, who, though free
     from guilt, were by their own hands slain, and, hating light,
     sought death.”--AEneid, vi. 434.]

There is more constancy in suffering the chain we are tied to than in
breaking it, and more pregnant evidence of fortitude in Regulus than in
Cato; ‘tis indiscretion and impatience that push us on to these
precipices: no accidents can make true virtue turn her back; she seeks
and requires evils, pains, and grief, as the things by which she is
nourished and supported; the menaces of tyrants, racks, and tortures
serve only to animate and rouse her:

              “Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
               Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido,
               Per damma, percmdes, ab ipso
               Ducit opes, animumque ferro.”

     [“As in Mount Algidus, the sturdy oak even from the axe itself
     derives new vigour and life.”--Horace, Od., iv. 4, 57.]

And as another says:

              “Non est, ut putas, virtus, pater,
               Timere vitam; sed malis ingentibus
               Obstare, nec se vertere, ac retro dare.”

     [“Father, ‘tis no virtue to fear life, but to withstand great
     misfortunes, nor turn back from them.”--Seneca, Theb., i. 190.]

Or as this:

          “Rebus in adversis facile est contemnere mortem
          Fortius ille facit, qui miser esse potest.”

     [“It is easy in adversity to despise death; but he acts more
     bravely, who can live wretched.”--Martial, xi. 56, 15.]

‘Tis cowardice, not virtue, to lie squat in a furrow, under a tomb, to
evade the blows of fortune; virtue never stops nor goes out of her path,
for the greatest storm that blows:

                    “Si fractus illabatur orbis,
                    Impavidum ferient ruinae.”

     [“Should the world’s axis crack, the ruins will but crush
      a fearless head.”--Horace, Od., iii. 3, 7.]

For the most part, the flying from other inconveniences brings us to
this; nay, endeavouring to evade death, we often run into its very mouth:

          “Hic, rogo, non furor est, ne moriare, mori?”

     [“Tell me, is it not madness, that one should die for fear
     of dying?”--Martial, ii. 80, 2.]

like those who, from fear of a precipice, throw themselves headlong into
it;

              “Multos in summa pericula misfit
               Venturi timor ipse mali: fortissimus ille est,
               Qui promptus metuenda pati, si cominus instent,
               Et differre potest.”

     [“The fear of future ills often makes men run into extreme danger;
     he is truly brave who boldly dares withstand the mischiefs he
     apprehends, when they confront him and can be deferred.”
      --Lucan, vii. 104.]

               “Usque adeo, mortis formidine, vitae
               Percipit humanos odium, lucisque videndae,
               Ut sibi consciscant moerenti pectore lethum
               Obliti fontem curarum hunc esse timorem.”

     [“Death to that degree so frightens some men, that causing them to
     hate both life and light, they kill themselves, miserably forgetting
     that this same fear is the fountain of their cares.”
      --Lucretius, iii. 79.]

Plato, in his Laws, assigns an ignominious sepulture to him who has
deprived his nearest and best friend, namely himself, of life and his
destined course, being neither compelled so to do by public judgment,
by any sad and inevitable accident of fortune, nor by any insupportable
disgrace, but merely pushed on by cowardice and the imbecility of a
timorous soul.  And the opinion that makes so little of life, is
ridiculous; for it is our being, ‘tis all we have.  Things of a nobler
and more elevated being may, indeed, reproach ours; but it is against
nature for us to contemn and make little account of ourselves; ‘tis a
disease particular to man, and not discerned in any other creatures, to
hate and despise itself.  And it is a vanity of the same stamp to desire
to be something else than what we are; the effect of such a desire does
not at all touch us, forasmuch as it is contradicted and hindered in
itself.  He that desires of a man to be made an angel, does nothing for
himself; he would be never the better for it; for, being no more, who
shall rejoice or be sensible of this benefit for him.

         “Debet enim, misere cui forti, aegreque futurum est,
          Ipse quoque esse in eo turn tempore, cum male possit
          Accidere.”

     [“For he to whom misery and pain are to be in the future, must
     himself then exist, when these ills befall him.”
      --Idem, ibid., 874.]

Security, indolence, impassability, the privation of the evils of this
life, which we pretend to purchase at the price of dying, are of no
manner of advantage to us: that man evades war to very little purpose who
can have no fruition of peace; and as little to the purpose does he avoid
trouble who cannot enjoy repose.

Amongst those of the first of these two opinions, there has been great
debate, what occasions are sufficient to justify the meditation of
self-murder, which they call “A reasonable exit.”--[ Diogenes Laertius,
Life of Zeno.]--For though they say that men must often die for trivial
causes, seeing those that detain us in life are of no very great weight,
yet there is to be some limit.  There are fantastic and senseless humours
that have prompted not only individual men, but whole nations to destroy
themselves, of which I have elsewhere given some examples; and we further
read of the Milesian virgins, that by a frantic compact they hanged
themselves one after another till the magistrate took order in it,
enacting that the bodies of such as should be found so hanged should be
drawn by the same halter stark naked through the city.  When Therykion
tried to persuade Cleomenes to despatch himself, by reason of the ill
posture of his affairs, and, having missed a death of more honour in the
battle he had lost, to accept of this the second in honour to it, and not
to give the conquerors leisure to make him undergo either an ignominious
death or an infamous life; Cleomenes, with a courage truly Stoic and
Lacedaemonian, rejected his counsel as unmanly and mean; “that,” said he,
“is a remedy that can never be wanting, but which a man is never to make
use of, whilst there is an inch of hope remaining”: telling him, “that
it was sometimes constancy and valour to live; that he would that even
his death should be of use to his country, and would make of it an act of
honour and virtue.”  Therykion, notwithstanding, thought himself in the
right, and did his own business; and Cleomenes afterwards did the same,
but not till he had first tried the utmost malevolence of fortune.  All
the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man
should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden
and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when
we are at the end of our hope:

              “Sperat et in saeva victus gladiator arena,
               Sit licet infesto pollice turba minax.”

     [“The gladiator conquered in the lists hopes on, though the
     menacing spectators, turning their thumb, order him to die.”
      --Pentadius, De Spe, ap. Virgilii Catadecta.]

All things, says an old adage, are to be hoped for by a man whilst he
lives; ay, but, replies Seneca, why should this rather be always running
in a man’s head that fortune can do all things for the living man, than
this, that fortune has no power over him that knows how to die?
Josephus, when engaged in so near and apparent danger, a whole people
being violently bent against him, that there was no visible means of
escape, nevertheless, being, as he himself says, in this extremity
counselled by one of his friends to despatch himself, it was well for him
that he yet maintained himself in hope, for fortune diverted the accident
beyond all human expectation, so that he saw himself delivered without
any manner of inconvenience.  Whereas Brutus and Cassius, on the
contrary, threw away the remains of the Roman liberty, of which they were
the sole protectors, by the precipitation and temerity wherewith they
killed themselves before the due time and a just occasion.  Monsieur
d’Anguien, at the battle of Serisolles, twice attempted to run himself
through, despairing of the fortune of the day, which went indeed very
untowardly on that side of the field where he was engaged, and by that
precipitation was very near depriving himself of the enjoyment of so
brave a victory.  I have seen a hundred hares escape out of the very
teeth of the greyhounds:

               “Aliquis carnifici suo superstes fuit.”

     [“Some have survived their executioners.”--Seneca, Ep., 13.]

              “Multa dies, variusque labor mutabilis nevi
               Rettulit in melius; multos alterna revisens
               Lusit, et in solido rursus fortuna locavit.”

     [“Length of days, and the various labour of changeful time, have
     brought things to a better state; fortune turning, shews a reverse
     face, and again restores men to prosperity.”--AEneid, xi. 425.]

Piny says there are but three sorts of diseases, to escape which a man
has good title to destroy himself; the worst of which is the stone in the
bladder, when the urine is suppressed.

     [“In the quarto edition of these essays, in 1588, Pliny is said to
     mention two more, viz., a pain in the stomach and a headache, which,
     he says (lib. xxv. c. 9.), were the only three distempers almost
     for which men killed themselves.”]

Seneca says those only which for a long time are discomposing the
functions of the soul.  And some there have been who, to avoid a worse
death, have chosen one to their own liking.  Democritus, general of the
AEtolians, being brought prisoner to Rome, found means to make his escape
by night: but close pursued by his keepers, rather than suffer himself to
be retaken, he fell upon his own sword and died.  Antinous and Theodotus,
their city of Epirus being reduced by the Romans to the last extremity,
gave the people counsel universally to kill themselves; but, these
preferring to give themselves up to the enemy, the two chiefs went to
seek the death they desired, rushing furiously upon the enemy, with
intention to strike home but not to ward a blow.  The Island of Gozzo
being taken some years ago by the Turks, a Sicilian, who had two
beautiful daughters marriageable, killed them both with his own hand, and
their mother, running in to save them, to boot, which having done,
sallying out of the house with a cross-bow and harquebus, with two shots
he killed two of the Turks nearest to his door, and drawing his sword,
charged furiously in amongst the rest, where he was suddenly enclosed and
cut to pieces, by that means delivering his family and himself from
slavery and dishonour.  The Jewish women, after having circumcised their
children, threw them and themselves down a precipice to avoid the cruelty
of Antigonus.  I have been told of a person of condition in one of our
prisons, that his friends, being informed that he would certainly be
condemned, to avoid the ignominy of such a death suborned a priest to
tell him that the only means of his deliverance was to recommend himself
to such a saint, under such and such vows, and to fast eight days
together without taking any manner of nourishment, what weakness or
faintness soever he might find in himself during the time; he followed
their advice, and by that means destroyed himself before he was aware,
not dreaming of death or any danger in the experiment.  Scribonia
advising her nephew Libo to kill himself rather than await the stroke of
justice, told him that it was to do other people’s business to preserve
his life to put it after into the hands of those who within three or four
days would fetch him to execution, and that it was to serve his enemies
to keep his blood to gratify their malice.

We read in the Bible that Nicanor, the persecutor of the law of God,
having sent his soldiers to seize upon the good old man Razis, surnamed
in honour of his virtue the father of the Jews: the good man, seeing no
other remedy, his gates burned down, and the enemies ready to seize him,
choosing rather to die nobly than to fall into the hands of his wicked
adversaries and suffer himself to be cruelly butchered by them, contrary
to the honour of his rank and quality, stabbed himself with his own
sword, but the blow, for haste, not having been given home, he ran and
threw himself from the top of a wall headlong among them, who separating
themselves and making room, he pitched directly upon his head;
notwithstanding which, feeling yet in himself some remains of life, he
renewed his courage, and starting up upon his feet all bloody and wounded
as he was, and making his way through the crowd to a precipitous rock,
there, through one of his wounds, drew out his bowels, which, tearing and
pulling to pieces with both his hands, he threw amongst his pursuers, all
the while attesting and invoking the Divine vengeance upon them for their
cruelty and injustice.

Of violences offered to the conscience, that against the chastity of
woman is, in my opinion, most to be avoided, forasmuch as there is a
certain pleasure naturally mixed with it, and for that reason the dissent
therein cannot be sufficiently perfect and entire, so that the violence
seems to be mixed with a little consent of the forced party.  The
ecclesiastical history has several examples of devout persons who have
embraced death to secure them from the outrages prepared by tyrants
against their religion and honour.  Pelagia and Sophronia, both
canonised, the first of these precipitated herself with her mother and
sisters into the river to avoid being forced by some soldiers, and the
last also killed herself to avoid being ravished by the Emperor
Maxentius.

It may, peradventure, be an honour to us in future ages, that a learned
author of this present time, and a Parisian, takes a great deal of pains
to persuade the ladies of our age rather to take any other course than to
enter into the horrid meditation of such a despair.  I am sorry he had
never heard, that he might have inserted it amongst his other stories,
the saying of a woman, which was told me at Toulouse, who had passed
through the handling of some soldiers: “God be praised,” said she, “that
once at least in my life I have had my fill without sin.”  In truth,
these cruelties are very unworthy the French good nature, and also, God
be thanked, our air is very well purged of them since this good advice:
‘tis enough that they say “no” in doing it, according to the rule of the
good Marot.

              “Un doulx nenny, avec un doulx sourire
               Est tant honneste.”--Marot.

History is everywhere full of those who by a thousand ways have exchanged
a painful and irksome life for death.  Lucius Aruntius killed himself, to
fly, he said, both the future and the past.  Granius Silvanus and Statius
Proximus, after having been pardoned by Nero, killed themselves; either
disdaining to live by the favour of so wicked a man, or that they might
not be troubled, at some other time, to obtain a second pardon,
considering the proclivity of his nature to suspect and credit
accusations against worthy men.  Spargapises, son of Queen Tomyris, being
a prisoner of war to Cyrus, made use of the first favour Cyrus shewed
him, in commanding him to be unbound, to kill himself, having pretended
to no other benefit of liberty, but only to be revenged of himself for
the disgrace of being taken.  Boges, governor in Eion for King Xerxes,
being besieged by the Athenian army under the conduct of Cimon, refused
the conditions offered, that he might safe return into Asia with all his
wealth, impatient to survive the loss of a place his master had given him
to keep; wherefore, having defended the city to the last extremity,
nothing being left to eat, he first threw all the gold and whatever else
the enemy could make booty of into the river Strymon, and then causing a
great pile to be set on fire, and the throats of all the women, children,
concubines, and servants to be cut, he threw their bodies into the fire,
and at last leaped into it himself.

Ninachetuen, an Indian lord, so soon as he heard the first whisper of the
Portuguese Viceroy’s determination to dispossess him, without any
apparent cause, of his command in Malacca, to transfer it to the King of
Campar, he took this resolution with himself: he caused a scaffold, more
long than broad, to be erected, supported by columns royally adorned with
tapestry and strewed with flowers and abundance of perfumes; all which
being prepared, in a robe of cloth of gold, set full of jewels of great
value, he came out into the street, and mounted the steps to the
scaffold, at one corner of which he had a pile lighted of aromatic wood.
Everybody ran to see to what end these unusual preparations were made;
when Ninachetuen, with a manly but displeased countenance, set forth how
much he had obliged the Portuguese nation, and with how unspotted
fidelity he had carried himself in his charge; that having so often,
sword in hand, manifested in the behalf of others, that honour was much
more dear to him than life, he was not to abandon the concern of it for
himself: that fortune denying him all means of opposing the affront
designed to be put upon him, his courage at least enjoined him to free
himself from the sense of it, and not to serve for a fable to the people,
nor for a triumph to men less deserving than himself; which having said
he leaped into the fire.

Sextilia, wife of Scaurus, and Paxaea, wife of Labeo, to encourage their
husbands to avoid the dangers that pressed upon them, wherein they had no
other share than conjugal affection, voluntarily sacrificed their own
lives to serve them in this extreme necessity for company and example.
What they did for their husbands, Cocceius Nerva did for his country,
with less utility though with equal affection: this great lawyer,
flourishing in health, riches, reputation, and favour with the Emperor,
had no other cause to kill himself but the sole compassion of the
miserable state of the Roman Republic.  Nothing can be added to the
beauty of the death of the wife of Fulvius, a familiar favourite of
Augustus: Augustus having discovered that he had vented an important
secret he had entrusted him withal, one morning that he came to make his
court, received him very coldly and looked frowningly upon him.  He
returned home, full of, despair, where he sorrowfully told his wife that,
having fallen into this misfortune, he was resolved to kill himself: to
which she roundly replied, “‘tis but reason you should, seeing that
having so often experienced the incontinence of my tongue, you could not
take warning: but let me kill myself first,” and without any more saying
ran herself through the body with a sword.  Vibius Virrius, despairing of
the safety of his city besieged by the Romans and of their mercy, in the
last deliberation of his city’s senate, after many arguments conducing to
that end, concluded that the most noble means to escape fortune was by
their own hands: telling them that the enemy would have them in honour,
and Hannibal would be sensible how many faithful friends he had
abandoned; inviting those who approved of his advice to come to a good
supper he had ready at home, where after they had eaten well, they would
drink together of what he had prepared; a beverage, said he, that will
deliver our bodies from torments, our souls from insult, and our eyes and
ears from the sense of so many hateful mischiefs, as the conquered suffer
from cruel and implacable conquerors.  I have, said he, taken order for
fit persons to throw our bodies into a funeral pile before my door so
soon as we are dead.  Many enough approved this high resolution, but few
imitated it; seven-and-twenty senators followed him, who, after having
tried to drown the thought of this fatal determination in wine, ended the
feast with the mortal mess; and embracing one another, after they had
jointly deplored the misfortune of their country, some retired home to
their own houses, others stayed to be burned with Vibius in his funeral
pyre; and were all of them so long in dying, the vapour of the wine
having prepossessed the veins, and by that means deferred the effect of
poison, that some of them were within an hour of seeing the enemy inside
the walls of Capua, which was taken the next morning, and of undergoing
the miseries they had at so dear a rate endeavoured to avoid.  Jubellius
Taurea, another citizen of the same country, the Consul Fulvius returning
from the shameful butchery he had made of two hundred and twenty-five
senators, called him back fiercely by name, and having made him stop:
“Give the word,” said he, “that somebody may dispatch me after the
massacre of so many others, that thou mayest boast to have killed a much
more valiant man than thyself.”  Fulvius, disdaining him as a man out of
his wits, and also having received letters from Rome censuring the
inhumanity of his execution which tied his hands, Jubellius proceeded:
“Since my country has been taken, my friends dead, and having with my own
hands slain my wife and children to rescue them from the desolation of
this ruin, I am denied to die the death of my fellow-citizens, let me
borrow from virtue vengeance on this hated life,” and therewithal drawing
a short sword he carried concealed about him, he ran it through his own
bosom, falling down backward, and expiring at the consul’s feet.

Alexander, laying siege to a city of the Indies, those within, finding
themselves very hardly set, put on a vigorous resolution to deprive him
of the pleasure of his victory, and accordingly burned themselves in
general, together with their city, in despite of his humanity: a new kind
of war, where the enemies sought to save them, and they to destroy
themselves, doing to make themselves sure of death, all that men do to
secure life.

Astapa, a city of Spain, finding itself weak in walls and defence to
withstand the Romans, the inhabitants made a heap of all their riches and
furniture in the public place; and, having ranged upon this heap all the
women and children, and piled them round with wood and other combustible
matter to take sudden fire, and left fifty of their young men for the
execution of that whereon they had resolved, they made a desperate sally,
where for want of power to overcome, they caused themselves to be every
man slain.  The fifty, after having massacred every living soul
throughout the whole city, and put fire to this pile, threw themselves
lastly into it, finishing their generous liberty, rather after an
insensible, than after a sorrowful and disgraceful manner, giving the
enemy to understand, that if fortune had been so pleased, they had as
well the courage to snatch from them victory as they had to frustrate and
render it dreadful, and even mortal to those who, allured by the
splendour of the gold melting in this flame, having approached it,
a great number were there suffocated and burned, being kept from retiring
by the crowd that followed after.

The Abydeans, being pressed by King Philip, put on the same resolution;
but, not having time, they could not put it ‘in effect.  The king, who
was struck with horror at the rash precipitation of this execution (the
treasure and movables that they had condemned to the flames being first
seized), drawing off his soldiers, granted them three days’ time to kill
themselves in, that they might do it with more order and at greater ease:
which time they filled with blood and slaughter beyond the utmost excess
of all hostile cruelty, so that not so much as any one soul was left
alive that had power to destroy itself.  There are infinite examples of
like popular resolutions which seem the more fierce and cruel in
proportion as the effect is more universal, and yet are really less so
than when singly executed; what arguments and persuasion cannot do with
individual men, they can do with all, the ardour of society ravishing
particular judgments.

The condemned who would live to be executed in the reign of Tiberius,
forfeited their goods and were denied the rites of sepulture; those who,
by killing themselves, anticipated it, were interred, and had liberty to
dispose of their estates by will.

But men sometimes covet death out of hope of a greater good.  “I desire,”
 says St. Paul, “to be with Christ,” and “who shall rid me of these
bands?”  Cleombrotus of Ambracia, having read Plato’s Pheedo, entered
into so great a desire of the life to come that, without any other
occasion, he threw himself into the sea.  By which it appears how
improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair, to which the
eagerness of hope often inclines us, and, often, a calm and temperate
desire proceeding from a mature and deliberate judgment.  Jacques du
Chastel, bishop of Soissons, in St. Louis’s foreign expedition, seeing
the king and whole army upon the point of returning into France, leaving
the affairs of religion imperfect, took a resolution rather to go into
Paradise; wherefore, having taken solemn leave of his friends, he charged
alone, in the sight of every one, into the enemy’s army, where he was
presently cut to pieces.  In a certain kingdom of the new discovered
world, upon a day of solemn procession, when the idol they adore is drawn
about in public upon a chariot of marvellous greatness; besides that many
are then seen cutting off pieces of their flesh to offer to him, there
are a number of others who prostrate themselves upon the place, causing
themselves to be crushed and broken to pieces under the weighty wheels,
to obtain the veneration of sanctity after death, which is accordingly
paid them.  The death of the bishop, sword in hand, has more of
magnanimity in it, and less of sentiment, the ardour of combat taking
away part of the latter.

There are some governments who have taken upon them to regulate the
justice and opportunity of voluntary death.  In former times there was
kept in our city of Marseilles a poison prepared out of hemlock, at the
public charge, for those who had a mind to hasten their end, having
first, before the six hundred, who were their senate, given account of
the reasons and motives of their design, and it was not otherwise lawful,
than by leave from the magistrate and upon just occasion to do violence
to themselves.--[Valerius Maximus, ii. 6, 7.]--The same law was also
in use in other places.

Sextus Pompeius, in his expedition into Asia, touched at the isle of Cea
in Negropont: it happened whilst he was there, as we have it from one
that was with him, that a woman of great quality, having given an account
to her citizens why she was resolved to put an end to her life, invited
Pompeius to her death, to render it the more honourable, an invitation
that he accepted; and having long tried in vain by the power of his
eloquence, which was very great, and persuasion, to divert her from that
design, he acquiesced in the end in her own will.  She had passed the age
of four score and ten in a very happy state, both of body and mind; being
then laid upon her bed, better dressed than ordinary and leaning upon her
elbow, “The gods,” said she, “O Sextus Pompeius, and rather those I leave
than those I go to seek, reward thee, for that thou hast not disdained to
be both the counsellor of my life and the witness of my death.  For my
part, having always experienced the smiles of fortune, for fear lest the
desire of living too long may make me see a contrary face, I am going, by
a happy end, to dismiss the remains of my soul, leaving behind two
daughters of my body and a legion of nephews”; which having said, with
some exhortations to her family to live in peace, she divided amongst
them her goods, and recommending her domestic gods to her eldest
daughter, she boldly took the bowl that contained the poison, and having
made her vows and prayers to Mercury to conduct her to some happy abode
in the other world, she roundly swallowed the mortal poison.  This being
done, she entertained the company with the progress of its operation, and
how the cold by degrees seized the several parts of her body one after
another, till having in the end told them it began to seize upon her
heart and bowels, she called her daughters to do the last office and
close her eyes.

Pliny tells us of a certain Hyperborean nation where, by reason of the
sweet temperature of the air, lives rarely ended but by the voluntary
surrender of the inhabitants, who, being weary of and satiated with
living, had the custom, at a very old age, after having made good cheer,
to precipitate themselves into the sea from the top of a certain rock,
assigned for that service.  Pain and the fear of a worse death seem to me
the most excusable incitements.




CHAPTER IV

TO-MORROW’S A NEW DAY

I give, as it seems to me, with good reason the palm to Jacques Amyot of
all our French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his
language, wherein he excels all others, nor for his constancy in going
through so long a work,  nor for the depth of his knowledge, having been
able so successfully to smooth and unravel so knotty and intricate an
author (for let people tell me what they will, I understand nothing of
Greek; but I meet with sense so well united and maintained throughout his
whole translation, that certainly he either knew the true fancy of the
author, or having, by being long conversant with him, imprinted a vivid
and general idea of that of Plutarch in his soul, he has delivered us
nothing that either derogates from or contradicts him), but above all, I
am the most taken with him for having made so discreet a choice of a book
so worthy and of so great utility wherewith to present his country.  We
ignorant fellows had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the
dirt; by this favour of his we dare now speak and write; the ladies are
able to read to schoolmasters; ‘tis our breviary.  If this good man be
yet living, I would recommend to him Xenophon, to do as much by that;
‘tis a much more easy task than the other, and consequently more proper
for his age.  And, besides, though I know not how, methinks he does
briskly--and clearly enough trip over steps another would have stumbled
at, yet nevertheless his style seems to be more his own where he does not
encounter those difficulties, and rolls away at his own ease.

I was just now reading this passage where Plutarch says of himself, that
Rusticus being present at a declamation of his at Rome, there received a
packet from the emperor, and deferred to open it till all was done: for
which, says he, all the company highly applauded the gravity of this
person.  ‘Tis true, that being upon the subject of curiosity and of that
eager passion for news, which makes us with so much indiscretion and
impatience leave all to entertain a newcomer, and without any manner of
respect or outcry, tear open on a sudden, in what company soever, the
letters that are delivered to us, he had reason to applaud the gravity of
Rusticus upon this occasion; and might moreover have added to it the
commendation of his civility and courtesy, that would not interrupt the
current of his declamation.  But I doubt whether any one can commend his
prudence; for receiving unexpected letters, and especially from an
emperor, it might have fallen out that the deferring to read them might
have been of great prejudice.  The vice opposite to curiosity is
negligence, to which I naturally incline, and wherein I have seen some
men so extreme that one might have found letters sent them three or four
days before, still sealed up in their pockets.

I never open any letters directed to another; not only those intrusted
with me, but even such as fortune has guided to my hand; and am angry
with myself if my eyes unawares steal any contents of letters of
importance he is reading when I stand near a great man.  Never was man
less inquisitive or less prying into other men’s affairs than I.

In our fathers’ days, Monsieur de Boutieres had like to have lost Turin
from having, while engaged in good company at supper, delayed to read
information that was sent him of the treason plotted against that city
where he commanded.  And this very Plutarch has given me to understand,
that Julius Caesar had preserved himself, if, going to the Senate the day
he was assassinated by the conspirators, he had read a note which was
presented to him by, the way.  He tells also the story of Archias, the
tyrant of Thebes, that the night before the execution of the design
Pelopidas had plotted to kill him to restore his country to liberty, he
had a full account sent him in writing by another Archias, an Athenian,
of the whole conspiracy, and that, this packet having been delivered to
him while he sat at supper, he deferred the opening of it, saying, which
afterwards turned to a proverb in Greece, “Business to-morrow.”

A wise man may, I think, out of respect to another, as not to disturb the
company, as Rusticus did, or not to break off another affair of
importance in hand, defer to read or hear any new thing that is brought
him; but for his own interest or particular pleasure, especially if he be
a public minister, that he will not interrupt his dinner or break his
sleep is inexcusable.  And there was anciently at Rome, the consular
place, as they called it, which was the most honourable at the table, as
being a place of most liberty, and of more convenient access to those who
came in to speak to the person seated there; by which it appears, that
being at meat, they did not totally abandon the concern of other affairs
and incidents.  But when all is said, it is very hard in human actions to
give so exact a rule upon moral reasons, that fortune will not therein
maintain her own right.




CHAPTER V

OF CONSCIENCE

The Sieur de la Brousse, my brother, and I, travelling one day together
during the time of our civil wars, met a gentleman of good sort.  He was
of the contrary party, though I did not know so much, for he pretended
otherwise: and the mischief on’t is, that in this sort of war the cards
are so shuffled, your enemy not being distinguished from yourself by any
apparent mark either of language or habit, and being nourished under the
same law, air, and manners, it is very hard to avoid disorder and
confusion.  This made me afraid myself of meeting any of our troops in a
place where I was not known, that I might not be in fear to tell my name,
and peradventure of something worse; as it had befallen me before, where,
by such a mistake, I lost both men and horses, and amongst others an
Italian gentleman my page, whom I bred with the greatest care and
affection, was miserably slain, in whom a youth of great promise and
expectation was extinguished.  But the gentleman my brother and I met
had so desperate, half-dead a fear upon him at meeting with any horse,
or passing by any of the towns that held for the King, that I at last
discovered it to be alarms of conscience.  It seemed to the poor man as
if through his visor and the crosses upon his cassock, one would have
penetrated into his bosom and read the most secret intentions of his
heart; so wonderful is the power of conscience.  It makes us betray,
accuse, and fight against ourselves, and for want of other witnesses, to
give evidence against ourselves:

               “Occultum quatiens animo tortore flagellum.”

     [“The torturer of the soul brandishing a sharp scourge within.”
      --Juvenal, iii. 195.]

This story is in every child’s mouth: Bessus the Paeonian, being
reproached for wantonly pulling down a nest of young sparrows and killing
them, replied, that he had reason to do so, seeing that those little
birds never ceased falsely to accuse him of the murder of his father.
This parricide had till then been concealed and unknown, but the
revenging fury of conscience caused it to be discovered by him himself,
who was to suffer for it.  Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that
punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same
time with it.  Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever
has deserved it expects it.  Wickedness contrives torments against
itself:

               “Malum consilium consultori pessimum.”

               [“Ill designs are worst to the contriver.”
                --Apud Aul. Gellium, iv. 5.]

as the wasp stings and hurts another, but most of all itself, for it
there loses its sting and its use for ever,

                    “Vitasque in vulnere ponunt.”

               [“And leave their own lives in the wound.”
                --Virgil, Geo., iv. 238.]

Cantharides have somewhere about them, by a contrariety of nature, a
counterpoison against their poison.  In like manner, at the same time
that men take delight in vice, there springs in the conscience a
displeasure that afflicts us sleeping and waking with various tormenting
imaginations:

              “Quippe ubi se multi, per somnia saepe loquentes,
               Aut morbo delirantes, protraxe ferantur,
               Et celata diu in medium peccata dedisse.”

     [“Surely where many, often talking in their sleep, or raving in
     disease, are said to have betrayed themselves, and to have given
     publicity to offences long concealed.”--Lucretius, v. 1157.]

Apollodorus dreamed that he saw himself flayed by the Scythians and
afterwards boiled in a cauldron, and that his heart muttered these words
“I am the cause of all these mischiefs that have befallen thee.”
 Epicurus said that no hiding-hole could conceal the wicked, since they
could never assure themselves of being hid whilst their conscience
discovered them to themselves.

                    “Prima est haec ultio, quod se
               Judice nemo nocens absohitur.”

     [“Tis the first punishment of sin that no man absolves himself.” or:
     “This is the highest revenge, that by its judgment no offender is
     absolved.”--Juvenal, xiii. 2.]

As an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater
confidence and assurance; and I can truly say that I have gone through
several hazards with a more steady pace in consideration of the secret
knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my intentions:

         “Conscia mens ut cuique sua est, ita concipit intra
          Pectora pro facto spemque metumque suo.”

     [“As a man’s conscience is, so within hope or fear prevails, suiting
     to his design.”--Ovid, Fast., i. 485.]

Of this are a thousand examples; but it will be enough to instance three
of one and the same person.  Scipio, being one day accused before the
people of Rome of some crimes of a very high nature, instead of excusing
himself or flattering his judges: “It will become you well,” said he,
“to sit in judgment upon a head, by whose means you have the power to
judge all the world.”  Another time, all the answer he gave to several
impeachments brought against him by a tribune of the people, instead of
making his defence: “Let us go, citizens,” said he, “let us go render
thanks to the gods for the victory they gave me over the Carthaginians as
this day,” and advancing himself before towards the Temple, he had
presently all the assembly and his very accuser himself following at his
heels.  And Petilius, having been set on by Cato to demand an account of
the money that had passed through his hands in the province of Antioch,
Scipio being come into the senate to that purpose, produced a book from
under his robe, wherein he told them was an exact account of his receipts
and disbursements; but being required to deliver it to the prothonotary
to be examined, he refused, saying, he would not do himself so great a
disgrace; and in the presence of the whole senate tore the book with his
own hands to pieces.  I do not believe that the most seared conscience
could have counterfeited so great an assurance.  He had naturally too
high a spirit and was accustomed to too high a fortune, says Titius
Livius, to know how to be criminal, and to lower himself to the meanness
of defending his innocence.  The putting men to the rack is a dangerous
invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.
Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who
has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than
force me to say what is not?  And, on the contrary, if he who is not
guilty of that whereof he is accused, has the courage to undergo those
torments, why should not he who is guilty have the same, so fair a reward
as life being in his prospect?  I believe the ground of this invention
proceeds from the consideration of the force of conscience: for, to the
guilty, it seems to assist the rack to make him confess his fault and to
shake his resolution; and, on the other side, that it fortifies the
innocent against the torture.  But when all is done, ‘tis, in plain
truth, a trial full of uncertainty and danger what would not a man say,
what would not a man do, to avoid so intolerable torments?

               “Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor.”

     [“Pain will make even the innocent lie.”--Publius Syrus, De Dolore.]

Whence it comes to pass, that him whom the judge has racked that he may
not die innocent, he makes him die both innocent and racked.  A thousand
and a thousand have charged their own heads by false confessions, amongst
whom I place Philotas, considering the circumstances of the trial
Alexander put upon him and the progress of his torture.  But so it is
that some say it is the least evil human weakness could invent; very
inhumanly, notwithstanding, and to very little purpose, in my opinion.

Many nations less barbarous in this than the Greeks and Romans who call
them so, repute it horrible and cruel to torment and pull a man to pieces
for a fault of which they are yet in doubt.  How can he help your
ignorance?  Are not you unjust, that, not to kill him without cause, do
worse than kill him?  And that this is so, do but observe how often men
prefer to die without reason than undergo this examination, more painful
than execution itself; and that oft-times by its extremity anticipates
execution, and perform it.  I know not where I had this story, but it
exactly matches the conscience of our justice in this particular.  A
country-woman, to a general of a very severe discipline, accused one of
his soldiers that he had taken from her children the little soup meat she
had left to nourish them withal, the army having consumed all the rest;
but of this proof there was none.  The general, after having cautioned
the woman to take good heed to what she said, for that she would make
herself guilty of a false accusation if she told a lie, and she
persisting, he presently caused the soldier’s belly to be ripped up to
clear the truth of the fact, and the woman was found to be right.  An
instructive sentence.




CHAPTER VI

USE MAKES PERFECT

‘Tis not to be expected that argument and instruction, though we never so
voluntarily surrender our belief to what is read to us, should be of
force to lead us on so far as to action, if we do not, over and above,
exercise and form the soul by experience to the course for which we
design it; it will, otherwise, doubtless find itself at a loss when it
comes to the pinch of the business.  This is the reason why those amongst
the philosophers who were ambitious to attain to a greater excellence,
were not contented to await the severities of fortune in the retirement
and repose of their own habitations, lest he should have surprised them
raw and inexpert in the combat, but sallied out to meet her, and
purposely threw themselves into the proof of difficulties.  Some of them
abandoned riches to exercise themselves in a voluntary poverty; others
sought out labour and an austerity of life, to inure them to hardships
and inconveniences; others have deprived themselves of their dearest
members, as of sight, and of the instruments of generation, lest their
too delightful and effeminate service should soften and debauch the
stability of their souls.

But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give
us no assistance at all.  A man may by custom fortify himself against
pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can
experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.
There have, anciently, been men so excellent managers of their time that
they have tried even in death itself to relish and taste it, and who have
bent their utmost faculties of mind to discover what this passage is, but
they are none of them come back to tell us the news:

               “Nemo expergitus exstat,
               Frigida quern semel est vitai pausa sequuta.”

     [“No one wakes who has once fallen into the cold sleep of death.”
      --Lucretius, iii. 942]

Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having
been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many
marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just
going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a
philosopher, a friend of his: “Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now?
what is she doing?  What are you thinking of?”--“I was thinking,” replied
the other, “to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full
settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I
could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and
whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come
again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it.”  This man philosophises
not unto death only, but in death itself.  What a strange assurance was
this, and what bravery of courage, to desire his death should be a lesson
to him, and to have leisure to think of other things in so great an
affair:

               “Jus hoc animi morientis habebat.”

     [“This mighty power of mind he had dying.”-Lucan, viii. 636.]

And yet I fancy, there is a certain way of making it familiar to us, and
in some sort of making trial what it is.  We may gain experience, if not
entire and perfect, yet such, at least, as shall not be totally useless
to us, and that may render us more confident and more assured.  If we
cannot overtake it, we may approach it and view it, and if we do not
advance so far as the fort, we may at least discover and make ourselves
acquainted with the avenues.  It is not without reason that we are taught
to consider sleep as a resemblance of death: with how great facility do
we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose
the knowledge of light and of ourselves.  Peradventure, the faculty of
sleeping would seem useless and contrary to nature, since it deprives us
of all action and sentiment, were it not that by it nature instructs us
that she has equally made us to die as to live; and in life presents to
us the eternal state she reserves for us after it, to accustom us to it
and to take from us the fear of it.  But such as have by violent accident
fallen into a swoon, and in it have lost all sense, these, methinks, have
been very near seeing the true and natural face of death; for as to the
moment of the passage, it is not to be feared that it brings with it any
pain or displeasure, forasmuch as we can have no feeling without leisure;
our sufferings require time, which in death is so short, and so
precipitous, that it must necessarily be insensible.  They are the
approaches that we are to fear, and these may fall within the limits of
experience.

Many things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect; I have
passed a good part of my life in a perfect and entire health; I say, not
only entire, but, moreover, sprightly and wanton.  This state, so full of
verdure, jollity, and vigour, made the consideration of sickness so
formidable to me, that when I came to experience it, I found the attacks
faint and easy in comparison with what I had apprehended.  Of this I have
daily experience; if I am under the shelter of a warm room, in a stormy
and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live abroad, and am
afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am there myself, I do
not wish to be anywhere else.  This one thing of being always shut up in
a chamber I fancied insupportable: but I was presently inured to be so
imprisoned a week, nay a month together, in a very weak, disordered, and
sad condition; and I have found that, in the time of my health, I much
more pitied the sick, than I think myself to be pitied when I am so, and
that the force of my imagination enhances near one-half of the essence
and reality of the thing.  I hope that when I come to die I shall find it
the same, and that, after all, it is not worth the pains I take, so much
preparation and so much assistance as I call in, to undergo the stroke.
But, at all events, we cannot give ourselves too much advantage.

In the time of our third or second troubles (I do not well remember
which), going one day abroad to take the air, about a league from my own
house, which is seated in the very centre of all the bustle and mischief
of the late civil wars in France; thinking myself in all security and so
near to my retreat that I stood in need of no better equipage, I had
taken a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong.
Being upon my return home, a sudden occasion falling out to make use of
this horse in a kind of service that he was not accustomed to, one of my
train, a lusty, tall fellow, mounted upon a strong German horse, that had
a very ill mouth, fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and set on ahead
of his fellows, comes thundering full speed in the very track where I
was, rushing like a Colossus upon the little man and the little horse,
with such a career of strength and weight, that he turned us both over
and over, topsy-turvy with our heels in the air: so that there lay the
horse overthrown and stunned with the fall, and I ten or twelve paces
from him stretched out at length, with my face all battered and broken,
my sword which I had had in my hand, above ten paces beyond that, and my
belt broken all to pieces, without motion or sense any more than a stock.
‘Twas the only swoon I was ever in till that hour in my life.  Those who
were with me, after having used all the means they could to bring me to
myself, concluding me dead, took me up in their arms, and carried me with
very much difficulty home to my house, which was about half a French
league from thence.  On the way, having been for more than two hours
given over for a dead man, I began to move and to fetch my breath; for so
great abundance of blood was fallen into my stomach, that nature had need
to rouse her forces to discharge it.  They then raised me upon my feet,
where I threw off a whole bucket of clots of blood, as this I did also
several times by the way.  This gave me so much ease, that I began to
recover a little life, but so leisurely and by so small advances, that my
first sentiments were much nearer the approaches of death than life:

               “Perche, dubbiosa ancor del suo ritorno,
               Non s’assicura attonita la mente.”

    [“For the soul, doubtful as to its return, could not compose itself”
      --Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., xii. 74.]

The remembrance of this accident, which is very well imprinted in my
memory, so naturally representing to me the image and idea of death, has
in some sort reconciled me to that untoward adventure.  When I first
began to open my eyes, it was with so perplexed, so weak and dead a
sight, that I could yet distinguish nothing but only discern the light:

               “Come quel ch’or apre, or’chiude
               Gli occhi, mezzo tra’l sonno e l’esser desto.”

     [“As a man that now opens, now shuts his eyes, between sleep
     and waking.”--Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., viii., 26.]

As to the functions of the soul, they advanced with the same pace and
measure with those of the body.  I saw myself all bloody, my doublet
being stained all over with the blood I had vomited.  The first thought
that came into my mind was that I had a harquebuss shot in my head, and
indeed, at the time there were a great many fired round about us.
Methought my life but just hung upon my, lips: and I shut my eyes, to
help, methought, to thrust it out, and took a pleasure in languishing and
letting myself go.  It was an imagination that only superficially floated
upon my soul, as tender and weak as all the rest, but really, not only
exempt from anything displeasing, but mixed with that sweetness that
people feel when they glide into a slumber.

I believe it is the very same condition those people are in, whom we see
swoon with weakness in the agony of death we pity them without cause,
supposing them agitated with grievous dolours, or that their souls suffer
under painful thoughts.  It has ever been my belief, contrary to the
opinion of many, and particularly of La Boetie, that those whom we see so
subdued and stupefied at the approaches of their end, or oppressed with
the length of the disease, or by accident of an apoplexy or falling
sickness,

         “Vi morbi saepe coactus
          Ante oculos aliquis nostros, ut fulminis ictu,
          Concidit, et spumas agit; ingemit, et tremit artus;
          Desipit, extentat nervos, torquetur, anhelat,
          Inconstanter, et in jactando membra fatigat;”

     [“Often, compelled by the force of disease, some one as
     thunderstruck falls under our eyes, and foams, groans, and trembles,
     stretches, twists, breathes irregularly, and in paroxysms wears out
     his strength.”--Lucretius, iii. 485.]

or hurt in the head, whom we hear to mutter, and by fits to utter
grievous groans; though we gather from these signs by which it seems as
if they had some remains of consciousness, and that there are movements
of the body; I have always believed, I say, both the body and the soul
benumbed and asleep,

               “Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae,”

               [“He lives, and does not know that he is alive.”
                --Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 12.]

and could not believe that in so great a stupefaction of the members and
so great a defection of the senses, the soul could maintain any force
within to take cognisance of herself, and that, therefore, they had no
tormenting reflections to make them consider and be sensible of the
misery of their condition, and consequently were not much to be pitied.

I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as
to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself; as
one should say of such as are sent to execution with their tongues first
cut out (were it not that in this kind of dying, the most silent seems to
me the most graceful, if accompanied with a grave and constant
countenance); or if those miserable prisoners, who fall into the hands of
the base hangman soldiers of this age, by whom they are tormented with
all sorts of inhuman usage to compel them to some excessive and
impossible ransom; kept, in the meantime, in such condition and place,
where they have no means of expressing or signifying their thoughts and
their misery.  The poets have feigned some gods who favour the
deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death:

                              “Hunc ego Diti
               Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo.”

     [“I bidden offer this sacred thing to Pluto, and from that body
     dismiss thee.”--AEneid, iv. 782.]

both the interrupted words, and the short and irregular answers one gets
from them sometimes, by bawling and keeping a clutter about them; or the
motions which seem to yield some consent to what we would have them do,
are no testimony, nevertheless, that they live, an entire life at least.
So it happens to us in the yawning of sleep, before it has fully
possessed us, to perceive, as in a dream, what is done about us, and to
follow the last things that are said with a perplexed and uncertain
hearing which seems but to touch upon the borders of the soul; and to
make answers to the last words that have been spoken to us, which have
more in them of chance than sense.

Now seeing I have in effect tried it, I have no doubt but I have hitherto
made a right judgment; for first, being in a swoon, I laboured to rip
open the buttons of my doublet with my nails, for my sword was gone; and
yet I felt nothing in my imagination that hurt me; for we have many
motions in us that do not proceed from our direction;

          “Semianimesque micant digiti, ferrumque retractant;”

     [“Half-dead fingers grope about, and grasp again the sword.”
      --AEneid, x. 396.]

so falling people extend their arms before them by a natural impulse,
which prompts our limbs to offices and motions without any commission
from our reason.

         “Falciferos memorant currus abscindere membra .  .  .
          Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
          Decidit abscissum; cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
          Mobilitate mali, non quit sentire dolorem.”

     [“They relate that scythe-bearing chariots mow off limbs, so that
     they quiver on the ground; and yet the mind of him from whom the
     limb is taken by the swiftness of the blow feels no pain.”
      --Lucretius, iii. 642.]

My stomach was so oppressed with the coagulated blood, that my hands
moved to that part, of their own voluntary motion, as they frequently do
to the part that itches, without being directed by our will.  There are
several animals, and even men, in whom one may perceive the muscles to
stir and tremble after they are dead.  Every one experimentally knows
that there are some members which grow stiff and flag without his leave.
Now, those passions which only touch the outward bark of us, cannot be
said to be ours: to make them so, there must be a concurrence of the
whole man; and the pains which are felt by the hand or the foot while
we are sleeping, are none of ours.

As I drew near my own house, where the alarm of my fall was already got
before me, and my family were come out to meet me, with the hubbub usual
in such cases, not only did I make some little answer to some questions
which were asked me; but they moreover tell me, that I was sufficiently
collected to order them to bring a horse to my wife whom on the road,
I saw struggling and tiring herself which is hilly and rugged.  This
should seem to proceed from a soul its functions; but it was nothing so
with me. I knew not what I said or did, and they were nothing but idle
thoughts in the clouds, that were stirred up by the senses of the eyes
and ears, and proceeded not from me.  I knew not for all that, whence I
came or whither I went, neither was I capable to weigh and consider what
was said to me: these were light effects, that the senses produced of
themselves as of custom; what the soul contributed was in a dream,
lightly touched, licked and bedewed by the soft impression of the senses.
Notwithstanding, my condition was, in truth, very easy and quiet; I had
no affliction upon me, either for others or myself; it was an extreme
languor and weakness, without any manner of pain.  I saw my own house,
but knew it not.  When they had put me to bed I found an inexpressible
sweetness in that repose; for I had been desperately tugged and lugged by
those poor people who had taken the pains to carry me upon their arms a
very great and a very rough way, and had in so doing all quite tired out
themselves, twice or thrice one after another.  They offered me several
remedies, but I would take none, certainly believing that I was mortally
wounded in the head.  And, in earnest, it had been a very happy death,
for the weakness of my understanding deprived me of the faculty of
discerning, and that of my body of the sense of feeling; I was suffering
myself to glide away so sweetly and after so soft and easy a manner, that
I scarce find any other action less troublesome than that was.  But when
I came again to myself and to resume my faculties:

               “Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei,”

          [“When at length my lost senses again returned.”
           --Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 14.]

which was two or three hours after, I felt myself on a sudden involved in
terrible pain, having my limbs battered and ground with my fall, and was.
so ill for two or three nights after, that I thought I was once more
dying again, but a more painful death, having concluded myself as good as
dead before, and to this hour am sensible of the bruises of that terrible
shock.  I will not here omit, that the last thing I could make them beat
into my head, was the memory of this accident, and I had it over and over
again repeated to me, whither I was going, from whence I came, and at
what time of the day this mischance befell me, before I could comprehend
it.  As to the manner of my fall, that was concealed from me in favour to
him who had been the occasion, and other flim-flams were invented.  But a
long time after, and the very next day that my memory began to return and
to represent to me the state wherein I was, at the instant that I
perceived this horse coming full drive upon me (for I had seen him at my
heels, and gave myself for gone, but this thought had been so sudden,
that fear had had no leisure to introduce itself) it seemed to me like a
flash of lightning that had pierced my soul, and that I came from the
other world.

This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it
not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really
find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to
approach it.  Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself,
provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand.  Here, this
is not my doctrine, ‘tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but
my own; and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that
which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another.  As
to the rest, I spoil nothing, I make use of nothing but my own; and if I
play the fool, ‘tis at my own expense, and nobody else is concerned in’t;
for ‘tis a folly that will die with me, and that no one is to inherit.
We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path,
and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them
but their names.  No one since has followed the track: ‘tis a rugged
road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,
as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate
internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
motions; ‘tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
from the common and most recommended employments of the world.  ‘Tis now
many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than
myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I
study any other thing, ‘tis to apply it to or rather in myself.  And yet
I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable
sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very
well pleased with my own progress.  There is no description so difficult,
nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man’s self: and withal, a
man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in
public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon
my own description.  Custom has made all speaking of a man’s self
vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that
seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves:

                    “In vitium ducit culpae fuga.”

     [“The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater.”
      Or: “The escape from a fault leads into a vice”
      --Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]

Instead of blowing the child’s nose, this is to take his nose off
altogether.  I think the remedy worse than the disease.  But, allowing it
to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people
with discourses of one’s self, I ought not, pursuing my general design,
to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal
the fault which I not only practise but profess.  Notwithstanding, to
speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine,
because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man
cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this
rule has only regard to the popular vice.  They are bits for calves, with
which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor
the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am
as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at
all events, when the occasions arise, they don’t hesitate to put
themselves on the public highway.  Of what does Socrates treat more
largely than of himself?  To what does he more direct and address the
discourses of his disciples, than to speak of themselves, not of the
lesson in their book, but of the essence and motion of their souls?  We
confess ourselves religiously to God and our confessor; as our
neighbours, do to all the people.  But some will answer that we there
speak nothing but accusation against ourselves; why then, we say all; for
our very virtue itself is faulty and penetrable.  My trade and art is to
live; he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience,
and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building
according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbour;
according to the knowledge of another, and not according to his own.  If
it be vainglory for a man to publish his own virtues, why does not Cicero
prefer the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?
Peradventure they mean that I should give testimony of myself by works
and effects, not barely by words.  I chiefly paint my thoughts, a subject
void of form and incapable of operative production; ‘tis all that I can
do to couch it in this airy body of the voice; the wisest and devoutest
men have lived in the greatest care to avoid all apparent effects.
Effects would more speak of fortune than of me; they manifest their own
office and not mine, but uncertainly and by conjecture; patterns of some
one particular virtue.  I expose myself entire; ‘tis a body where, at one
view, the veins, muscles, and tendons are apparent, every of them in its
proper place; here the effects of a cold; there of the heart beating,
very dubiously.  I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.

I am of opinion that a man must be very cautious how he values himself,
and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better or worse,
impartially.  If I thought myself perfectly good and wise, I would rattle
it out to some purpose.  To speak less of one’s self than what one really
is is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under
a man’s value is pusillanimity and cowardice, according to, Aristotle.
No virtue assists itself with falsehood; truth is never matter of error.
To speak more of one’s self than is really true is not always mere
presumption; ‘tis, moreover, very often folly; to, be immeasurably
pleased with what one is, and to fall into an indiscreet self-love, is in
my opinion the substance of this vice.  The most sovereign remedy to cure
it, is to do quite contrary to what these people direct who, in
forbidding men to speak of themselves, consequently, at the same time,
interdict thinking of themselves too.  Pride dwells in the thought; the
tongue can have but a very little share in it.

They fancy that to think of one’s self is to be delighted with one’s
self; to frequent and converse with one’s self, to be overindulgent; but
this excess springs only in those who take but a superficial view of
themselves, and dedicate their main inspection to their affairs; who call
it mere reverie and idleness to occupy one’s self with one’s self, and
the building one’s self up a mere building of castles in the air; who
look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger.  If any one be
in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let
him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be
abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him
under foot.  If he enter into a flattering presumption of his personal
valour, let him but recollect the lives of Scipio, Epaminondas; so many
armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them.  No
particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put
the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the
nothingness of human condition to make up the weight.  Because Socrates
had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, “to know himself,”
 and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought,
he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage.  Whosoever shall so know
himself, let him boldly speak it out.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     Addresses his voyage to no certain, port
     All apprentices when we come to it (death)
     Any one may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death
     Business to-morrow
     Condemning wine, because some people will be drunk
     Conscience makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves
     Curiosity and of that eager passion for news
     Delivered into our own custody the keys of life
     Drunkeness a true and certain trial of every one’s nature
     I can more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any virtue
     “I wish you good health.”  “No health to thee,” replied the other
     If to philosophise be, as ‘tis defined, to doubt
     Improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair
     It’s madness to nourish infirmity
     Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man
     Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.
     Look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger
     Lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence
     Much difference betwixt us and ourselves
     No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children
     No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness
     Not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity
     One door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out
     Ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life
     Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age
     Shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty
     Speak less of one’s self than what one really is is folly
     Taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death
     The action is commendable, not the man
     The most voluntary death is the finest
     The vice opposite to curiosity is negligence
     Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect
     Thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain
     Tis evil counsel that will admit no change
     Torture: rather a trial of patience than of truth
     We do not go, we are driven
     What can they suffer who do not fear to die?
     Whoever expects punishment already suffers it
     Wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 10.

VII.      Of recompenses of honour.
VIII.     Of the affection of fathers to their children.
IX.       Of the arms of the Parthians.
X.        Of books.
XI.       Of cruelty.
XII.      Apology for Raimond Sebond.



CHAPTER VII

OF RECOMPENSES OF HONOUR

They who write the life of Augustus Caesar,--[Suetonius, Life of
Augustus, c.  25.]--observe this in his military discipline, that he was
wonderfully liberal of gifts to men of merit, but that as to the true
recompenses of honour he was as sparing; yet he himself had been
gratified by his uncle with all the military recompenses before he had
ever been in the field.  It was a pretty invention, and received into
most governments of the world, to institute certain vain and in
themselves valueless distinctions to honour and recompense virtue, such
as the crowns of laurel, oak, and myrtle, the particular fashion of some
garment, the privilege to ride in a coach in the city, or at night with a
torch, some peculiar place assigned in public assemblies, the prerogative
of certain additional names and titles, certain distinctions in the
bearing of coats of arms, and the like, the use of which, according to
the several humours of nations, has been variously received, and yet
continues.

We in France, as also several of our neighbours, have orders of
knighthood that are instituted only for this end.  And ‘tis, in earnest,
a very good and profitable custom to find out an acknowledgment for the
worth of rare and excellent men, and to satisfy them with rewards that
are not at all chargeable either to prince or people.  And that which has
always been found by ancient experience, and which we have heretofore
observed among ourselves, that men of quality have ever been more jealous
of such recompenses than of those wherein there was gain and profit, is
not without very good ground and reason.  If with the reward, which ought
to be simply a recompense of honour, they should mix other commodities
and add riches, this mixture, instead of procuring an increase of
estimation, would debase and abate it.  The Order of St. Michael, which
has been so long in repute amongst us, had no greater commodity than that
it had no communication with any other commodity, which produced this
effect, that formerly there was no office or title whatever to which the
gentry pretended with so great desire and affection as they did to that;
no quality that carried with it more respect and grandeur, valour and
worth more willingly embracing and with greater ambition aspiring to a
recompense purely its own, and rather glorious than profitable.  For, in
truth, other gifts have not so great a dignity of usage, by reason they
are laid out upon all sorts of occasions; with money a man pays the wages
of a servant, the diligence of a courier, dancing, vaulting, speaking,
and the meanest offices we receive; nay, and reward vice with it too, as
flattery, treachery, and pimping; and therefore ‘tis no wonder if virtue
less desires and less willingly receives this common sort of payment,
than that which is proper and peculiar to her, throughout generous and
noble.  Augustus had reason to be more sparing of this than the other,
insomuch that honour is a privilege which derives its principal essence
from rarity; and so virtue itself:

          “Cui malus est nemo, quis bonus esse potest?”

     [“To whom no one is ill who can be good?”-Martial, xii. 82.]

We do not intend it for a commendation when we say that such a one is
careful in the education of his children, by reason it is a common act,
how just and well done soever; no more than we commend a great tree,
where the whole forest is the same.  I do not think that any citizen of
Sparta glorified himself much upon his valour, it being the universal
virtue of the whole nation; and as little upon his fidelity and contempt
of riches.  There is no recompense becomes virtue, how great soever, that
is once passed into a custom; and I know not withal whether we can ever
call it great, being common.

Seeing, then, that these remunerations of honour have no other value and
estimation but only this, that few people enjoy them, ‘tis but to be
liberal of them to bring them down to nothing.  And though there should
be now more men found than in former times worthy of our order, the
estimation of it nevertheless should not be abated, nor the honour made
cheap; and it may easily happen that more may merit it; for there is no
virtue that so easily spreads as that of military valour.  There is
another virtue, true, perfect, and philosophical, of which I do not
speak, and only make use of the word in our common acceptation, much
greater than this and more full, which is a force and assurance of the
soul, equally despising all sorts of adverse accidents, equable, uniform,
and constant, of which ours is no more than one little ray.  Use,
education, example, and custom can do all in all to the establishment of
that whereof I am speaking, and with great facility render it common, as
by the experience of our civil wars is manifest enough; and whoever could
at this time unite us all, Catholic and Huguenot, into one body, and set
us upon some brave common enterprise, we should again make our ancient
military reputation flourish.  It is most certain that in times past the
recompense of this order had not only a regard to valour, but had a
further prospect; it never was the reward of a valiant soldier but of a
great captain; the science of obeying was not reputed worthy of so
honourable a guerdon.  There was therein a more universal military
expertness required, and that comprehended the most and the greatest
qualities of a military man:

          “Neque enim eaedem militares et imperatorix artes sunt,”

     [“For the arts of soldiery and generalship are not the same.”
      --Livy, xxv. 19.]

as also, besides, a condition suitable to such a dignity.  But, I say,
though more men were worthy than formerly, yet ought it not to be more
liberally distributed, and it were better to fall short in not giving it
at all to whom it should be due, than for ever to lose, as we have lately
done, the fruit of so profitable an invention.  No man of spirit will
deign to advantage himself with what is in common with many; and such of
the present time as have least merited this recompense themselves make
the greater show of disdaining it, in order thereby to be ranked with
those to whom so much wrong has been done by the unworthy conferring and
debasing the distinction which was their particular right.

Now, to expect that in obliterating and abolishing this, suddenly to
create and bring into credit a like institution, is not a proper attempt
for so licentious and so sick a time as this wherein we now are; and it
will fall out that the last will from its birth incur the same
inconveniences that have ruined the other.--[Montaigne refers to the
Order of the Saint-Esprit, instituted by Henry III.  in 1578.]--The
rules for dispensing this new order had need to be extremely clipt and
bound under great restrictions, to give it authority; and this tumultuous
season is incapable of such a curb: besides that, before this can be
brought into repute, ‘tis necessary that the memory of the first, and of
the contempt into which it is fallen, be buried in oblivion.

This place might naturally enough admit of some discourse upon the
consideration of valour, and the difference of this virtue from others;
but, Plutarch having so often handled this subject, I should give myself
an unnecessary trouble to repeat what he has said.  But this is worth
considering: that our nation places valour, vaillance, in the highest
degree of virtue, as its very word evidences, being derived from valeur,
and that, according to our use, when we say a man of high worth a good
man, in our court style--‘tis to say a valiant man, after the Roman way;
for the general appellation of virtue with them takes etymology from vis,
force.  The proper, sole, and essential profession of, the French
noblesse is that of arms: and ‘tis likely that the first virtue that
discovered itself amongst men and has given to some advantage over
others, was that by which the strongest and most valiant have mastered
the weaker, and acquired a particular authority and reputation, whence
came to it that dignified appellation; or else, that these nations, being
very warlike, gave the pre-eminence to that of the virtues which was most
familiar to them; just as our passion and the feverish solicitude we have
of the chastity of women occasions that to say, a good woman, a woman of
worth, a woman of honour and virtue, signifies merely a chaste woman as
if, to oblige them to that one duty, we were indifferent as to all the
rest, and gave them the reins in all other faults whatever to compound
for that one of incontinence.




CHAPTER VIII

OF THE AFFECTION OF FATHERS TO THEIR CHILDREN

To Madame D’Estissac.

MADAM, if the strangeness and novelty of my subject, which are wont to
give value to things, do not save me, I shall never come off with honour
from this foolish attempt: but ‘tis so fantastic, and carries a face so
unlike the common use, that this, peradventure, may make it pass.  ‘Tis a
melancholic humour, and consequently a humour very much an enemy to my
natural complexion, engendered by the pensiveness of the solitude into
which for some years past I have retired myself, that first put into
my head this idle fancy of writing.  Wherein, finding myself totally
unprovided and empty of other matter, I presented myself to myself for
argument and subject.  ‘Tis the only book in the world of its kind, and
of a wild and extravagant design.  There is nothing worth remark in this
affair but that extravagancy: for in a subject so vain and frivolous, the
best workman in the world could not have given it a form fit to recommend
it to any manner of esteem.

Now, madam, having to draw my own picture to the life, I had omitted one
important feature, had I not therein represented the honour I have ever
had for you and your merits; which I have purposely chosen to say in the
beginning of this chapter, by reason that amongst the many other
excellent qualities you are mistress of, that of the tender love you have
manifested to your children, is seated in one of the highest places.
Whoever knows at what age Monsieur D’Estissac, your husband, left you a
widow, the great and honourable matches that have since been offered to
you, as many as to any lady of your condition in France, the constancy
and steadiness wherewith, for so many years, you have sustained so many
sharp difficulties, the burden and conduct of affairs, which have
persecuted you in every corner of the kingdom, and are not yet weary of
tormenting you, and the happy direction you have given to all these, by
your sole prudence or good fortune, will easily conclude with me that we
have not so vivid an example as yours of maternal affection in our times.
I praise God, madam, that it has been so well employed; for the great
hopes Monsieur D’Estissac, your son, gives of himself, render sufficient
assurance that when he comes of age you will reap from him all the
obedience and gratitude of a very good man.  But, forasmuch as by reason
of his tender years, he has not been capable of taking notice of those
offices of extremest value he has in so great number received from you,
I will, if these papers shall one day happen to fall into his hands, when
I shall neither have mouth nor speech left to deliver it to him, that he
shall receive from me a true account of those things, which shall be more
effectually manifested to him by their own effects, by which he will
understand that there is not a gentleman in France who stands more
indebted to a mother’s care; and that he cannot, in the future, give a
better nor more certain testimony of his own worth and virtue than by
acknowledging you for that excellent mother you are.

If there be any law truly natural, that is to say, any instinct that is
seen universally and perpetually imprinted in both beasts and men (which
is not without controversy), I can say, that in my opinion, next to the
care every animal has of its own preservation, and to avoid that which
may hurt him, the affection that the begetter bears to his offspring
holds the second place in this rank.  And seeing that nature appears to
have recommended it to us, having regard to the extension and progression
of the successive pieces of this machine of hers, ‘tis no wonder if, on
the contrary, that of children towards their parents is not so great.
To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who
confers a benefit on any one, loves him better than he is beloved by him
again: that he to whom is owing, loves better than he who owes; and that
every artificer is fonder of his work, than, if that work had sense, it
would be of him; by reason that it is dear to us to be, and to be
consists in movement and action; therefore every one has in some sort a
being in his work.  He who confers a benefit exercises a fine and honest
action; he who receives it exercises the useful only.  Now the useful is
much less lovable than the honest; the honest is stable and permanent,
supplying him who has done it with a continual gratification.  The useful
loses itself, easily slides away, and the memory of it is neither so
fresh nor so pleasing.  Those things are dearest to us that have cost us
most, and giving is more chargeable than receiving.

Since it has pleased God to endue us with some capacity of reason, to the
end we may not, like brutes, be servilely subject and enslaved to the
laws common to both, but that we should by judgment and a voluntary
liberty apply ourselves to them, we ought, indeed, something to yield to
the simple authority of nature, but not suffer ourselves to be
tyrannically hurried away and transported by her; reason alone should
have the conduct of our inclinations.  I, for my part, have a strange
disgust for those propensions that are started in us without the
mediation and direction of the judgment, as, upon the subject I am
speaking of, I cannot entertain that passion of dandling and caressing
infants scarcely born, having as yet neither motion of soul nor shape of
body distinguishable, by which they can render themselves amiable, and
have not willingly suffered them to be nursed near me.  A true and
regular affection ought to spring and increase with the knowledge they
give us of themselves, and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural
propension walking hand in hand with reason, to cherish them with a truly
paternal love; and so to judge, also, if they be otherwise, still
rendering ourselves to reason, notwithstanding the inclination of nature.
‘Tis oft-times quite otherwise; and, most commonly, we find ourselves
more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile
simplicities of our children, than we do, afterwards, with their most
complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys,
and not as men; and some there are, who are very liberal in buying them
balls to play withal, who are very close-handed for the least necessary
expense when they come to age.  Nay, it looks as if the jealousy of
seeing them appear in and enjoy the world when we are about to leave it,
rendered us more niggardly and stingy towards them; it vexes us that they
tread upon our heels, as if to solicit us to go out; if this were to be
feared, since the order of things will have it so that they cannot, to
speak the truth, be nor live, but at the expense of our being and life,
we should never meddle with being fathers at all.

For my part, I think it cruelty and injustice not to receive them into
the share and society of our goods, and not to make them partakers in the
intelligence of our domestic affairs when they are capable, and not to
lessen and contract our own expenses to make the more room for theirs,
seeing we beget them to that effect.  ‘Tis unjust that an old fellow,
broken and half dead, should alone, in a corner of the chimney, enjoy the
money that would suffice for the maintenance and advancement of many
children, and suffer them, in the meantime, to lose their’ best years for
want of means to advance themselves in the public service and the
knowledge of men.  A man by this course drives them to despair, and to
seek out by any means, how unjust or dishonourable soever, to provide for
their own support: as I have, in my time, seen several young men of good
extraction so addicted to stealing, that no correction could cure them of
it.  I know one of a very good family, to whom, at the request of a
brother of his, a very honest and brave gentleman, I once spoke on this
account, who made answer, and confessed to me roundly, that he had been
put upon this paltry practice by the severity and avarice of his father;
but that he was now so accustomed to it he could not leave it off.  And,
at that very time, he was trapped stealing a lady’s rings, having come
into her chamber, as she was dressing with several others.  He put me in
mind of a story I had heard of another gentleman, so perfect and
accomplished in this fine trade in his youth, that, after he came to his
estate and resolved to give it over, he could not hold his hands,
nevertheless, if he passed by a shop where he saw anything he liked, from
catching it up, though it put him to the shame of sending afterwards to
pay for it.  And I have myself seen several so habituated to this quality
that even amongst their comrades they could not forbear filching, though
with intent to restore what they had taken.  I am a Gascon, and yet there
is no vice I so little understand as that; I hate it something more by
disposition than I condemn it by reason; I do not so much as desire
anything of another man’s.  This province of ours is, in plain truth, a
little more decried than the other parts of the kingdom; and yet we have
several times seen, in our times, men of good families of other
provinces, in the hands of justice, convicted of abominable thefts.  I
fear this vice is, in some sort, to be attributed to the fore-mentioned
vice of the fathers.

And if a man should tell me, as a lord of very good understanding once
did, that “he hoarded up wealth, not to extract any other fruit and use
from his parsimony, but to make himself honoured and sought after by his
relations; and that age having deprived him of all other power, it was
the only remaining remedy to maintain his authority in his family, and to
keep him from being neglected and despised by all around,” in truth, not
only old age, but all other imbecility, according to Aristotle, is the
promoter of avarice; that is something, but it is physic for a disease
that a man should prevent the birth of.  A father is very miserable who
has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of
his assistance, if that can be called affection; he must render himself
worthy to be respected by his virtue and wisdom, and beloved by his
kindness and the sweetness of his manners; even the very ashes of a rich
matter have their value; and we are wont to have the bones and relics of
worthy men in regard and reverence.  No old age can be so decrepid in a
man who has passed his life in honour, but it must be venerable,
especially to his children, whose soul he must have trained up to their
duty by reason, not by necessity and the need they have of him, nor by
harshness and compulsion:

         “Et errat longe mea quidem sententia
          Qui imperium credat esse gravius, aut stabilius,
          Vi quod fit, quam illud, quod amicitia adjungitur.”

     [“He wanders far from the truth, in my opinion, who thinks that
     government more absolute and durable which is acquired by force than
     that which is attached to friendship.”--Terence, Adelph., i. I, 40.]

I condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul that is designed
for honour and liberty.  There is I know not what of servile in rigour
and constraint; and I am of opinion that what is not to be done by
reason, prudence, and address, is never to be affected by force.  I
myself was brought up after that manner; and they tell me that in all my
first age I never felt the rod but twice, and then very slightly.  I
practised the same method with my children, who all of them died at
nurse, except Leonora, my only daughter, and who arrived to the age of
five years and upward without other correction for her childish faults
(her mother’s indulgence easily concurring) than words only, and those
very gentle; in which kind of proceeding, though my end and expectation
should be both frustrated, there are other causes enough to lay the fault
on without blaming my discipline, which I know to be natural and just,
and I should, in this, have yet been more religious towards the males, as
less born to subjection and more free; and I should have made it my
business to fill their hearts with ingenuousness and freedom.  I have
never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more
cowardly, or more wilfully obstinate.

Do we desire to be beloved of our children?  Will we remove from them all
occasion of wishing our death though no occasion of so horrid a wish can
either be just or excusable?

                    “Nullum scelus rationem habet.”

               [“No wickedness has reason.”--Livy, xxviii. 28]

Let us reasonably accommodate their lives with what is in our power.  In
order to this, we should not marry so young that our age shall in a
manner be confounded with theirs; for this inconvenience plunges us into
many very great difficulties, and especially the gentry of the nation,
who are of a condition wherein they have little to do, and who live upon
their rents only: for elsewhere, with people who live by their labour,
the plurality and company of children is an increase to the common stock;
they are so many new tools and instruments wherewith to grow rich.

I married at three-and-thirty years of age, and concur in the opinion of
thirty-five, which is said to be that of Aristotle.   Plato will have
nobody marry before thirty; but he has reason to laugh at those who
undertook the work of marriage after five-and-fifty, and condemns their
offspring as unworthy of aliment and life.  Thales gave the truest
limits, who, young and being importuned by his mother to marry, answered,
“That it was too soon,” and, being grown into years and urged again,
“That it was too late.”  A man must deny opportunity to every inopportune
action.  The ancient Gauls’ looked upon it as a very horrid thing for a
man to have society with a woman before he was twenty years of age, and
strictly recommended to the men who designed themselves for war the
keeping their virginity till well grown in years, forasmuch as courage is
abated and diverted by intercourse with women:

              “Ma, or congiunto a giovinetta sposa,
               E lieto omai de’ figli, era invilito
               Negli affetti di padre et di marito.”

     [“Now, married to a young wife and happy in children, he was
     demoralised by his love as father and husband.”
      --Tasso, Gierus., x. 39.]

Muley Hassam, king of Tunis, he whom the Emperor Charles V. restored to
his kingdom, reproached the memory of his father Mahomet with the
frequentation of women, styling him loose, effeminate, and a getter of
children.--[Of whom he had thirty-four.]--The Greek history observes of
Iccus the Tarentine, of Chryso, Astyllus, Diopompos, and others, that to
keep their bodies in order for the Olympic games and such like exercises,
they denied themselves during that preparation all commerce with Venus.
In a certain country of the Spanish Indies men were not permitted to
marry till after forty age, and yet the girls were allowed at ten.
‘Tis not time for a gentleman of thirty years old to give place to his
son who is twenty; he is himself in a condition to serve both in the
expeditions of war and in the court of his prince; has need of all his
appurtenances; and yet, doubtless, he ought to surrender a share, but not
so great an one as to forget himself for others; and for such an one the
answer that fathers have ordinarily in their mouths, “I will not put off
my clothes, before I go to bed,” serves well.

But a father worn out with age and infirmities, and deprived by weakness
and want of health of the common society of men, wrongs himself and his
to amass a great heap of treasure.  He has lived long enough, if he be
wise, to have a mind to strip himself to go to bed, not to his very
shirt, I confess, but to that and a good, warm dressing-gown; the
remaining pomps, of which he has no further use, he ought voluntarily to
surrender to those, to whom by the order of nature they belong.  ‘Tis
reason he should refer the use of those things to them, seeing that
nature has reduced him to such a state that he cannot enjoy them himself;
otherwise there is doubtless malice and envy in the case.  The greatest
act of the Emperor Charles V. was that when, in imitation of some of the
ancients of his own quality, confessing it but reason to strip ourselves
when our clothes encumber and grow too heavy for us, and to lie down when
our legs begin to fail us, he resigned his possessions, grandeur, and
power to his son, when he found himself failing in vigour, and steadiness
for the conduct of his affairs suitable with the glory he had therein
acquired:

          “Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne
          Peccet ad extremum ridendus, et ilia ducat.”

     [“Dismiss the old horse in good time, lest, failing in the lists,
     the spectators laugh.”--Horace, Epist., i., I, 8.]

This fault of not perceiving betimes and of not being sensible of the
feebleness and extreme alteration that age naturally brings both upon
body and mind, which, in my opinion, is equal, if indeed the soul has not
more than half, has lost the reputation of most of the great men in the
world.  I have known in my time, and been intimately acquainted with
persons of great authority, whom one might easily discern marvellously
lapsed from the sufficiency I knew they were once endued with, by the
reputation they had acquired in their former years, whom I could
heartily, for their own sakes, have wished at home at their ease,
discharged of their public or military employments, which were now grown
too heavy for their shoulders.  I have formerly been very familiar in a
gentleman’s house, a widower and very old, though healthy and cheerful
enough: this gentleman had several daughters to marry and a son already
of ripe age, which brought upon him many visitors, and a great expense,
neither of which well pleased him, not only out of consideration of
frugality, but yet more for having, by reason of his age, entered into a
course of life far differing from ours.  I told him one day a little
boldly, as I used to do, that he would do better to give us younger folk
room, and to leave his principal house (for he had but that well placed
and furnished) to his son, and himself retire to an estate he had hard
by, where nobody would trouble his repose, seeing he could not otherwise
avoid being importuned by us, the condition of his children considered.
He took my advice afterwards, and found an advantage in so doing.

I do not mean that a man should so instal them as not to reserve to
himself a liberty to retract; I, who am now arrived to the age wherein
such things are fit to be done, would resign to them the enjoyment of my
house and goods, but with a power of revocation if they should give me
cause to alter my mind; I would leave to them the use, that being no
longer convenient for me; and, of the general authority and power over
all, would reserve as much as--I thought good to myself; having always
held that it must needs be a great satisfaction to an aged father himself
to put his children into the way of governing his affairs, and to have
power during his own life to control their behaviour, supplying them with
instruction and advice from his own experience, and himself to transfer
the ancient honour and order of his house into the hands of those who are
to succeed him, and by that means to satisfy himself as to the hopes he
may conceive of their future conduct.  And in order to this I would not
avoid their company; I would observe them near at hand, and partake,
according to the condition of my age, of their feasts and jollities.
If I did not live absolutely amongst them, which I could not do without
annoying them and their friends, by reason of the morosity of my age and
the restlessness of my infirmities, and without violating also the rules
and order of living I should then have set down to myself, I would, at
least, live near them in some retired part of my house, not the best in
show, but the most commodious.  Nor as I saw some years ago, a dean of
St. Hilary of Poitiers given up to such a solitude, that at the time I
came into his chamber it had been two and twenty years that he had not
stepped one foot out of it, and yet had all his motions free and easy,
and was in good health, saving a cold that fell upon his lungs; he would,
hardly once in a week, suffer any one to come in to see him; he always
kept himself shut up in his chamber alone, except that a servant brought
him, once a day, something to eat, and did then but just come in and go
out again.  His employment was to walk up and down, and read some book,
for he was a bit of a scholar; but, as to the rest, obstinately bent to
die in this retirement, as he soon after did.  I would endeavour by
pleasant conversation to create in my children a warm and unfeigned
friendship and good-will towards me, which in well-descended natures is
not hard to do; for if they be furious brutes, of which this age of ours
produces thousands, we are then to hate and avoid them as such.

I am angry at the custom of forbidding children to call their father by
the name of father, and to enjoin them another, as more full of respect
and reverence, as if nature had not sufficiently provided for our
authority.  We call Almighty God Father, and disdain to have our children
call us so; I have reformed this error in my family.--[As did Henry IV.
of France]--And ‘tis also folly and injustice to deprive children, when
grown up, of familiarity with their father, and to carry a scornful and
austere countenance toward them, thinking by that to keep them in awe and
obedience; for it is a very idle farce that, instead of producing the
effect designed, renders fathers distasteful, and, which is worse,
ridiculous to their own children.  They have youth and vigour in
possession, and consequently the breath and favour of the world; and
therefore receive these fierce and tyrannical looks--mere scarecrows--
of a man without blood, either in his heart or veins, with mockery and
contempt.  Though I could make myself feared, I had yet much rather make
myself beloved: there are so many sorts of defects in old age, so much
imbecility, and it is so liable to contempt, that the best acquisition a
man can make is the kindness and affection of his own family; command and
fear are no longer his weapons.  Such an one I have known who, having
been very imperious in his youth, when he came to be old, though he might
have lived at his full ease, would ever strike, rant, swear, and curse:
the most violent householder in France: fretting himself with unnecessary
suspicion and vigilance.  And all this rumble and clutter but to make his
family cheat him the more; of his barn, his kitchen, cellar, nay, and his
very purse too, others had the greatest use and share, whilst he keeps
his keys in his pocket much more carefully than his eyes.  Whilst he hugs
himself with the pitiful frugality of a niggard table, everything goes to
rack and ruin in every corner of his house, in play, drink, all sorts of
profusion, making sport in their junkets with his vain anger and
fruitless parsimony.  Every one is a sentinel against him, and if, by
accident, any wretched fellow that serves him is of another humour, and
will not join with the rest, he is presently rendered suspected to him,
a bait that old age very easily bites at of itself.  How often has this
gentleman boasted to me in how great awe he kept his family, and how
exact an obedience and reverence they paid him!  How clearly he saw into
his own affairs!

                    “Ille solos nescit omnia.”

          [“He alone is ignorant of all that is passing.”
           --Terence, Adelph., iv.  2, 9.]

I do not know any one that can muster more parts, both natural and
acquired, proper to maintain dominion, than he; yet he is fallen from it
like a child.  For this reason it is that I have picked out him, amongst
several others that I know of the same humour, for the greatest example.
It were matter for a question in the schools, whether he is better thus
or otherwise.  In his presence, all submit to and bow to him, and give so
much way to his vanity that nobody ever resists him; he has his fill of
assents, of seeming fear, submission, and respect.  Does he turn away a
servant? he packs up his bundle, and is gone; but ‘tis no further than
just out of his sight: the steps of old age are so slow, the senses so
troubled, that he will live and do his old office in the same house a
year together without being perceived.

And after a fit interval of time, letters are pretended to come from a
great way off; very humble, suppliant; and full of promises of amendment,
by virtue of which he is again received into favour.  Does Monsieur make
any bargain, or prepare any despatch that does not please? ‘tis
suppressed, and causes afterwards forged to excuse the want of execution
in the one or answer in the other.  No letters being first brought to
him, he never sees any but those that shall seem fit for his knowledge.
If by accident they fall first into his own hand, being used to trust
somebody to read them to him; he reads extempore what he thinks fit, and
often makes such a one ask him pardon who abuses and rails at him in his
letter.  In short, he sees nothing, but by an image prepared and designed
beforehand and the most satisfactory they can invent, not to rouse and
awaken his ill humour and choler.  I have seen, under various aspects,
enough of these modes of domestic government, long-enduring, constant, to
the like effect.

Women  are evermore addicted to cross their husbands: they lay hold with
both hands on all occasions to contradict and oppose them; the first
excuse serves for a plenary justification.  I have seen one who robbed
her husband wholesale, that, as she told her confessor, she might
distribute the more liberal alms.  Let who will trust to that religious
dispensation.  No management of affairs seems to them of sufficient
dignity, if proceeding from the husband’s assent; they must usurp it
either by insolence or cunning, and always injuriously, or else it has
not the grace and authority they desire.  When, as in the case I am
speaking of, ‘tis against a poor old man and for the children, then they
make use of this title to serve their passion with glory; and, as for a
common service, easily cabal, and combine against his government and
dominion.  If they be males grown up in full and flourishing health, they
presently corrupt, either by force or favour, steward, receivers, and all
the rout.  Such as have neither wife nor son do not so easily fall into
this misfortune; but withal more cruelly and unworthily.  Cato the elder
in his time said: So many servants, so many enemies; consider, then,
whether according to the vast difference between the purity of the age he
lived in and the corruption of this of ours, he does not seem to shew us
that wife, son, and servant, are so many enemies to us?  ‘Tis well for
old age that it is always accompanied by want of observation, ignorance,
and a proneness to being deceived. For should we see how we are used and
would not acquiesce, what would become of us?  especially in such an age
as this, where the very judges who are to determine our controversies are
usually partisans to the young, and interested in the cause. In case the
discovery of this cheating escape me, I cannot at least fail to discern
that I am very fit to be cheated.  And can a man ever enough exalt the
value of a friend, in comparison with these civil ties?  The very image
of it which I see in beasts, so pure and uncorrupted, how religiously do
I respect it!  If others deceive me, yet do I not, at least, deceive
myself in thinking I am able to defend myself from them, or in cudgelling
my brains to make myself so.  I protect myself from such treasons in my
own bosom, not by an unquiet and tumultuous curiosity, but rather by
diversion and resolution.  When I hear talk of any one’s condition, I
never trouble myself to think of him; I presently turn my eyes upon
myself to see in what condition I am; whatever concerns another relates
to me; the accident that has befallen him gives me caution, and rouses me
to turn my defence that way.  We every day and every hour say things of
another that we might properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our
observation to our own concerns, as well as extend it to others.  And
several authors have in this manner prejudiced their own cause by running
headlong upon those they attack, and darting those shafts against their
enemies, that are more properly, and with greater advantage, to be turned
upon themselves.

The late Mareschal de Montluc having lost his son, who died in the island
of Madeira, in truth a very worthy gentleman and of great expectation,
did to me, amongst his other regrets, very much insist upon what a sorrow
and heart-breaking it was that he had never made himself familiar with
him; and by that humour of paternal gravity and grimace to have lost the
opportunity of having an insight into and of well knowing, his son, as
also of letting him know the extreme affection he had for him, and the
worthy opinion he had of his virtue.  “That poor boy,” said he, “never
saw in me other than a stern and disdainful countenance, and is gone in a
belief that I neither knew how to love him nor esteem him according to
his desert.  For whom did I reserve the discovery of that singular
affection I had for him in my soul?  Was it not he himself, who ought to
have had all the pleasure of it, and all the obligation?  I constrained
and racked myself to put on, and maintain this vain disguise, and have by
that means deprived myself of the pleasure of his conversation, and, I
doubt, in some measure, his affection, which could not but be very cold
to me, having never other from me than austerity, nor felt other than a
tyrannical manner of proceeding.”

     [Madame de Sevigne tells us that she never read this passage without
     tears in her eyes.  “My God!” she exclaims, “how full is this book
     of good sense!”  Ed.]

I find this complaint to be rational and rightly apprehended: for, as I
myself know by too certain experience, there is no so sweet consolation
in the loss of friends as the conscience of having had no reserve or
secret for them, and to have had with them a perfect and entire
communication.  Oh my friend,--[La Boetie.] am I the better for being
sensible of this; or am I the worse?  I am, doubtless, much the better.
I am consoled and honoured, in the sorrow for his death.  Is it not a
pious and a pleasing office of my life to be always upon my friend’s
obsequies?  Can there be any joy equal to this privation?

I open myself to my family, as much as I can, and very willingly let them
know the state of my opinion and good will towards them, as I do to
everybody else: I make haste to bring out and present myself to them; for
I will not have them mistaken in me, in anything.  Amongst other
particular customs of our ancient Gauls, this, as Caesar reports,--[De
Bello Gall., vi.  r8.]--was one, that the sons never presented
themselves before their fathers, nor durst ever appear in their company
in public, till they began to bear arms; as if they would intimate by
this, that it was also time for their fathers to receive them into their
familiarity and acquaintance.

I have observed yet another sort of indiscretion in fathers of my time,
that, not contented with having deprived their children, during their own
long lives, of the share they naturally ought to have had in their
fortunes, they afterwards leave to their wives the same authority over
their estates, and liberty to dispose of them according to their own
fancy.  And I have known a certain lord, one of the principal officers of
the crown, who, having in reversion above fifty thousand crowns yearly
revenue, died necessitous and overwhelmed with debt at above fifty years
of age; his mother in her extremest decrepitude being yet in possession
of all his property by the will of his father, who had, for his part,
lived till near fourscore years old.  This appears to me by no means
reasonable.  And therefore I think it of very little advantage to a man,
whose affairs are well enough, to seek a wife who encumbers his estate
with a very great fortune; there is no sort of foreign debt that brings
more ruin to families than this: my predecessors have ever been aware of
that danger and provided against it, and so have I.  But those who
dissuade us from rich wives, for fear they should be less tractable and
kind, are out in their advice to make a man lose a real commodity for so
frivolous a conjecture.  It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass
over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are
most wrong.  Injustice allures them, as the honour of their virtuous
actions does the good; and the more riches they bring with them, they are
so much the more good-natured, as women, who are handsome, are all the
more inclined and proud to be chaste.

‘Tis reasonable to leave the administration of affairs to the mothers,
till the children are old enough, according to law, to manage them; but
the father has brought them, up very ill, if he cannot hope that, when
they come to maturity, they will have more wisdom and ability in the
management of affairs than his wife, considering the ordinary weakness of
the sex.  It were, notwithstanding, to say the truth, more against nature
to make the mothers depend upon the discretion of their children; they
ought to be plentifully provided for, to maintain themselves according to
their quality and age, by reason that necessity and indigence are much
more unbecoming and insupportable to them than to men; the son should
rather be cut short than the mother.

In general, the most judicious distribution of our goods, when we come to
die, is, in my opinion, to let them be distributed according to the
custom of the country; the laws have considered the matter better than we
know how to do, and ‘tis wiser to let them fail in their appointment,
than rashly to run the hazard of miscarrying in ours.  Nor are the goods
properly ours, since, by civil prescription and without us, they are all
destined to certain successors.  And although we have some liberty beyond
that, yet I think we ought not, without great and manifest cause, to take
away that from one which his fortune has allotted him, and to which the
public equity gives him title; and that it is against reason to abuse
this liberty, in making it serve our own frivolous and private fancies.
My destiny has been kind to me in not presenting me with occasions to
tempt me and divert my affection from the common and legitimate
institution.  I see many with whom ‘tis time lost to employ a long
exercise of good offices: a word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit;
he is happy who is in a position to oil their goodwill at this last
passage.  The last action carries it, not the best and most frequent
offices, but the most recent and present do the work.  These are people
that play with their wills as with apples or rods, to gratify or chastise
every action of those who pretend to an interest in their care.  ‘Tis a
thing of too great weight and consequence to be so tumbled and tossed and
altered every moment, and wherein the wise determine once for all, having
above all things regard to reason and the public observance.  We lay
these masculine substitutions too much to heart, proposing a ridiculous
eternity to our names.  We are, moreover, too superstitious in vain
conjectures as to the future, that we derive from the words and actions
of children.  Peradventure they might have done me an injustice, in
dispossessing me of my right, for having been the most dull and heavy,
the most slow and unwilling at my book, not of all my brothers only, but
of all the boys in the whole province: whether about learning my lesson,
or about any bodily exercise.  ‘Tis a folly to make an election out of
the ordinary course upon the credit of these divinations wherein we are
so often deceived.  If the ordinary rule of descent were to be violated,
and the destinies corrected in the choice they have made of our heirs,
one might more plausibly do it upon the account of some remarkable and
enormous personal deformity, a permanent and incorrigible defect, and in
the opinion of us French, who are great admirers of beauty, an important
prejudice.

The pleasant dialogue betwixt Plato’s legislator and his citizens will be
an ornament to this place, “What,” said they, feeling themselves about to
die, “may we not dispose of our own to whom we please?  God!  what
cruelty that it shall not be lawful for us, according as we have been
served and attended in our sickness, in our old age, in our affairs, to
give more or less to those whom we have found most diligent about us, at
our own fancy and discretion!”  To which the legislator answers thus:

“My friends, who are now, without question, very soon to die, it is hard
for you in the condition you are, either to know yourselves, or what is
yours, according to the delphic inscription.  I, who make the laws, am of
opinion, that you neither are yourselves your own, nor is that yours of
which you are possessed.  Both your goods and you belong to your
families, as well those past as those to come; but, further, both your
family and goods much more appertain to the public.  Wherefore, lest any
flatterer in your old age or in your sickness, or any passion of your
own, should unseasonably prevail with you to make an unjust will, I shall
take care to prevent that inconvenience; but, having respect both to the
universal interests of the city and that of your particular family, I
shall establish laws, and make it by good reasons appear, that private
convenience ought to give place to the common benefit.  Go then
cheerfully where human necessity calls you.  It is for me, who regard no
more the one thing than the other, and who, as much as in me lies, am
provident of the public interest, to have a care as to what you leave
behind you.”

To return to my subject: it appears to me that women are very rarely
born, to whom the prerogative over men, the maternal and natural
excepted, is in any sort due, unless it be for the punishment of such,
as in some amorous fever have voluntarily submitted themselves to them:
but that in no way concerns the old ones, of whom we are now speaking.
This consideration it is which has made us so willingly to enact and give
force to that law, which was never yet seen by any one, by which women
are excluded the succession to our crown: and there is hardly a
government in the world where it is not pleaded, as it is here, by the
probability of reason that authorises it, though fortune has given it
more credit in some places than in others.  ‘Tis dangerous to leave the
disposal of our succession to their judgment, according to the choice
they shall make of children, which is often fantastic and unjust; for the
irregular appetites and depraved tastes they have during the time of
their being with child, they have at all other times in the mind.  We
commonly see them fond of the most weak, ricketty, and deformed children;
or of those, if they have such, as are still hanging at the breast.  For,
not having sufficient force of reason to choose and embrace that which is
most worthy, they the more willingly suffer themselves to be carried
away, where the impressions of nature are most alone; like animals that
know their young no longer than they give them suck.  As to the rest, it
is easy by experience to be discerned that this natural affection to
which we give so great authority has but very weak roots.  For a very
little profit, we every day tear their own children out of the mothers’
arms, and make them take ours in their room: we make them abandon their
own to some pitiful nurse, to whom we disdain to commit ours, or to some
she-goat, forbidding them, not only to give them suck, what danger soever
they run thereby, but, moreover, to take any manner of care of them, that
they may wholly be occupied with the care of and attendance upon ours;
and we see in most of them an adulterate affection, more vehement than
the natural, begotten by custom toward the foster children, and a greater
solicitude for the preservation of those they have taken charge of, than
of their own.  And that which I was saying of goats was upon this
account; that it is ordinary all about where I live, to see the
countrywomen, when they want milk of their own for their children, to
call goats to their assistance; and I have at this hour two men-servants
that never sucked women’s milk more than eight days after they were born.
These goats are immediately taught to come to suckle the little children,
know their voices when they cry, and come running to them.  If any other
than this foster-child be presented to them, they refuse to let it suck;
and the child in like manner will refuse to suck another goat.  I saw one
the other day from whom they had taken away the goat that used to nourish
it, by reason the father had only borrowed it of a neighbour; the child
would not touch any other they could bring, and died, doubtless of
hunger.  Beasts as easily alter and corrupt their natural affection as
we: I believe that in what Herodotus relates of a certain district of
Lybia, there are many mistakes; he says that the women are there in
common; but that the child, so soon as it can go, finds him out in the
crowd for his father, to whom he is first led by his natural inclination.

Now, to consider this simple reason for loving our children, that we have
begot them, therefore calling them our second selves, it appears,
methinks, that there is another kind of production proceeding from us,
that is of no less recommendation: for that which we engender by the
soul, the issue of our understanding, courage, and abilities, springs
from nobler parts than those of the body, and that are much more our own:
we are both father and mother in this generation.  These cost us a great
deal more and bring us more honour, if they have anything of good in
them.  For the value of our other children is much more theirs than ours;
the share we have in them is very little; but of these all the beauty,
all the grace and value, are ours; and also they more vividly represent
us than the others.  Plato adds, that these are immortal children that
immortalise and deify their fathers, as Lycurgus, Solon, Minos.  Now,
histories being full of examples of the common affection of fathers to
their children, it seems not altogether improper to introduce some few of
this other kind.  Heliodorus, that good bishop of Trikka, rather chose to
lose the dignity, profit, and devotion of so venerable a prelacy, than to
lose his daughter; a daughter that continues to this day very graceful
and comely; but, peradventure, a little too curiously and wantonly
tricked, and too amorous for an ecclesiastical and sacerdotal daughter.
There was one Labienus at Rome, a man of great worth and authority, and
amongst other qualities excellent in all sorts of literature, who was, as
I take it, the son of that great Labienus, the chief of Caesar’s captains
in the wars of Gaul; and who, afterwards, siding with Pompey the great,
so valiantly maintained his cause, till he was by Caesar defeated in
Spain.  This Labienus, of whom I am now speaking, had several enemies,
envious of his good qualities, and, tis likely, the courtiers and minions
of the emperors of his time who were very angry at his freedom and the
paternal humour which he yet retained against tyranny, with which it is
to be supposed he had tinctured his books and writings.  His adversaries
prosecuted several pieces he had published before the magistrates at
Rome, and prevailed so far against him, as to have them condemned to the
fire.  It was in him that this new example of punishment was begun, which
was afterwards continued against others at Rome, to punish even writing
and studies with death.  There would not be means and matter enough of
cruelty, did we not mix with them things that nature has exempted from
all sense and suffering, as reputation and the products of the mind, and
did we not communicate corporal punishments to the teachings and
monuments of the Muses.  Now, Labienus could not suffer this loss, nor
survive these his so dear issue, and therefore caused himself to be
conveyed and shut up alive in the monument of his ancestors, where he
made shift to kill and bury himself at once.  ‘Tis hard to shew a more
vehement paternal affection than this.  Cassius Severus, a man of great
eloquence and his very intimate friend, seeing his books burned, cried
out that by the same sentence they should as well condemn him to the fire
too, seeing that he carried in his memory all that they contained.  The
like accident befel Cremutius Cordus, who being accused of having in his
books commended Brutus and Cassius, that dirty, servile, and corrupt
Senate, worthy a worse master than Tiberius, condemned his writings to
the flame.  He was willing to bear them company, and killed himself with
fasting.  The good Lucan, being condemned by that rascal Nero, at the
last gasp of his life, when the greater part of his blood was already
spent through the veins of his arms, which he had caused his physician to
open to make him die, and when the cold had seized upon all his
extremities, and began to approach his vital parts, the last thing he had
in his memory was some of the verses of his Battle of Phaysalia, which he
recited, dying with them in his mouth.  What was this, but taking a
tender and paternal leave of his children, in imitation of the
valedictions and embraces, wherewith we part from ours, when we come to
die, and an effect of that natural inclination, that suggests to our
remembrance in this extremity those things which were dearest to us
during the time of our life?

Can we believe that Epicurus who, as he says himself, dying of the
intolerable pain of the stone, had all his consolation in the beauty of
the doctrine he left behind him, could have received the same
satisfaction from many children, though never so well-conditioned and
brought up, had he had them, as he did from the production of so many
rich writings?  Or that, had it been in his choice to have left behind
him a deformed and untoward child or a foolish and ridiculous book, he,
or any other man of his understanding, would not rather have chosen to
have run the first misfortune than the other?  It had been, for example,
peradventure, an impiety in St. Augustin, if, on the one hand, it had
been proposed to him to bury his writings, from which religion has
received so great fruit, or on the other to bury his children, had he had
them, had he not rather chosen to bury his children.  And I know not
whether I had not much rather have begot a very beautiful one, through
society with the Muses, than by lying with my wife.  To this, such as it
is, what I give it I give absolutely and irrevocably, as men do to their
bodily children.  That little I have done for it, is no more at my own
disposal; it may know many things that are gone from me, and from me hold
that which I have not retained; and which, as well as a stranger, I
should borrow thence, should I stand in need.  If I am wiser than my
book, it is richer than I.  There are few men addicted to poetry, who
would not be much prouder to be the father to the AEneid than to the
handsomest youth of Rome; and who would not much better bear the loss of
the one than of the other.  For according to Aristotle, the poet, of all
artificers, is the fondest of his work.  ‘Tis hard to believe that
Epaminondas, who boasted that in lieu of all posterity he left two
daughters behind him that would one day do their father honour (meaning
the two victories he obtained over the Lacedaemonians), would willingly
have consented to exchange these for the most beautiful creatures of all
Greece; or that Alexander or Caesar ever wished to be deprived of the
grandeur of their glorious exploits in war, for the convenience of
children and heirs, how perfect and accomplished soever.  Nay, I make a
great question, whether Phidias or any other excellent sculptor would be
so solicitous of the preservation and continuance of his natural
children, as he would be of a rare statue, which with long labour and
study he had perfected according to art.  And to those furious and
irregular passions that have sometimes inflamed fathers towards their own
daughters, and mothers towards their own sons, the like is also found in
this other sort of parentage: witness what is related of Pygmalion who,
having made the statue of a woman of singular beauty, fell so
passionately in love with this work of his, that the gods in favour of
his passion inspired it with life.

              “Tentatum mollescit ebur, positoque rigore,
               Subsidit digitis.”

     [“The ivory grows soft under his touch and yields to his fingers.”
      --Ovid, Metam., x. 283.]




CHAPTER IX

OF THE ARMS OF THE PARTHIANS

‘Tis an ill custom and unmanly that the gentlemen of our time have got,
not to put on arms but just upon the point of the most extreme necessity,
and to lay them by again, so soon as ever there is any show of the danger
being over; hence many disorders arise; for every one bustling and
running to his arms just when he should go to charge, has his cuirass to
buckle on when his companions are already put to rout.  Our ancestors
were wont to give their head-piece, lance and gauntlets to be carried,
but never put off the other pieces so long as there was any work to be
done.  Our troops are now cumbered and rendered unsightly with the
clutter of baggage and servants who cannot be from their masters, by
reason they carry their arms.  Titus Livius speaking of our nation:

     “Intolerantissima laboris corpora vix arma humeris gerebant.”

     [“Bodies most impatient of labour could scarce endure to wear
     their arms on their shoulders.”--Livy, x. 28.]

Many nations do yet, and did anciently, go to war without defensive arms,
or with such, at least, as were of very little proof:

          “Tegmina queis capitum, raptus de subere cortex.”

     [“To whom the coverings of the heads were the bark of the
     cork-tree.”--AEneid, vii. 742.]

Alexander, the most adventurous captain that ever was, very seldom wore
armour, and such amongst us as slight it, do not by that much harm to the
main concern; for if we see some killed for want of it, there are few
less whom the lumber of arms helps to destroy, either by being
overburthened, crushed, and cramped with their weight, by a rude shock,
or otherwise.  For, in plain truth, to observe the weight and thickness
of the armour we have now in use, it seems as if we only sought to defend
ourselves, and are rather loaded than secured by it.  We have enough to
do to support its weight, being so manacled and immured, as if we were
only to contend with our own arms, and as if we had not the same
obligation to defend them, that they have to defend us.  Tacitus gives a
pleasant description of the men-at-arms among our ancient Gauls, who were
so armed as only to be able to stand, without power to harm or to be
harmed, or to rise again if once struck down.  Lucullus, seeing certain
soldiers of the Medes, who formed the van of Tigranes’ army, heavily
armed and very uneasy, as if in prisons of iron, thence conceived hopes
with great ease to defeat them, and by them began his charge and victory.
And now that our musketeers are in credit, I believe some invention will
be found out to immure us for our safety, and to draw us to the war in
castles, such as those the ancients loaded their elephants withal.

This humour is far differing from that of the younger Scipio, who sharply
reprehended his soldiers for having planted caltrops under water, in a
ditch by which those of the town he held besieged might sally out upon
him; saying, that those who assaulted should think of attacking, and not
to fear; suspecting, with good reason, that this stop they had put to the
enemies, would make themselves less vigilant upon their guard.  He said
also to a young man, who showed him a fine buckler he had, that he was
very proud of, “It is a very fine buckler indeed, but a Roman soldier
ought to repose greater confidence in his right hand than in his left.”

Now ‘tis nothing but the not being used to wear it that makes the weight
of our armour so intolerable:

         “L’usbergo in dosso haveano, et l’elmo in testa,
          Due di questi guerrier, de’ quali io canto;
          Ne notte o di, d’ appoi ch’ entraro in questa
          Stanza, gl’haveano mai messi da canto;
          Che facile a portar come la vesta
          Era lor, perche in uso l’havean tanto:”

     [“Two of the warriors, of whom I sing, had on their backs their
     cuirass and on their heads their casque, and never had night or day
     once laid them by, whilst here they were; those arms, by long
     practice, were grown as light to bear as a garment”
      --Ariosto, Cant., MI. 30.]

the Emperor Caracalla was wont to march on foot, completely armed, at the
head of his army.  The Roman infantry always carried not only a morion, a
sword, and a shield (for as to arms, says Cicero, they were so accustomed
to have them always on, that they were no more trouble to them than their
own limbs):

               “Arma enim membra militis esse dicunt.”

but, moreover, fifteen days’ provision, together with a certain number of
stakes, wherewith to fortify their camp, sixty pounds in weight.  And
Marius’ soldiers, laden at the same rate, were inured to march in order
of battle five leagues in five hours, and sometimes, upon any urgent
occasion, six.

Their military discipline was much ruder than ours, and accordingly
produced much greater effects.  The younger Scipio, reforming his army in
Spain, ordered his soldiers to eat standing, and nothing that was drest.
The jeer that was given a Lacedaemonian soldier is marvellously pat to
this purpose, who, in an expedition of war, was reproached for having
been seen under the roof of a house: they were so inured to hardship
that, let the weather be what it would, it was a shame to be seen under
any other cover than the roof of heaven.  We should not march our people
very far at that rate.

As to what remains, Marcellinus,  a man bred up in the Roman wars,
curiously observes the manner of the Parthians arming themselves, and the
rather, for being so different from that of the Romans.  “They had,” says
he, “armour so woven as to have all the scales fall over one another like
so many little feathers; which did nothing hinder the motion of the body,
and yet were of such resistance, that our darts hitting upon them, would
rebound” (these were the coats of mail our forefathers were so constantly
wont to use).  And in another place: “they had,” says he, “strong and
able horses, covered with thick tanned hides of leather, and were
themselves armed ‘cap-a-pie’ with great plates of iron, so artificially
ordered, that in all parts of the limbs, which required bending, they
lent themselves to the motion.  One would have said, that they had been
men of iron; having armour for the head so neatly fitted, and so
naturally representing the form of a face, that they were nowhere
vulnerable, save at two little round holes, that gave them a little
light, corresponding with their eyes, and certain small chinks about
their nostrils, through which they, with great difficulty, breathed,”

              “Flexilis inductis animatur lamina membris,
               Horribilis visu; credas simulacra moveri
               Ferrea, cognatoque viros spirare metallo.
               Par vestitus equis: ferrata fronte minantur,
               Ferratosque movent, securi vulneris, armos.”

     [“Plates of steel are placed over the body, so flexible that,
     dreadful to be seen, you would think these not living men, but
     moving images.  The horses are similarly armed, and, secured from
     wounds, move their iron shoulders.”--Claud, In Ruf., ii. 358.]

‘Tis a description drawing very near resembling the equipage of the
men-at-arms in France, with their barded horses.  Plutarch says, that
Demetrius caused two complete suits of armour to be made for himself and
for Alcimus, a captain of the greatest note and authority about him, of
six score pounds weight each, whereas the ordinary suits weighed but half
as much.




CHAPTER X

OF BOOKS

I make no doubt but that I often happen to speak of things that are much
better and more truly handled by those who are masters of the trade.  You
have here purely an essay of my natural parts, and not of those acquired:
and whoever shall catch me tripping in ignorance, will not in any sort
get the better of me; for I should be very unwilling to become
responsible to another for my writings, who am not so to myself, nor
satisfied with them.  Whoever goes in quest of knowledge, let him fish
for it where it is to be found; there is nothing I so little profess.
These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things
but to lay open myself; they may, peradventure, one day be known to me,
or have formerly been, according as fortune has been able to bring me in
place where they have been explained; but I have utterly forgotten it;
and if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I
can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the
knowledge I now have has risen.  Therefore, let none lay stress upon the
matter I write, but upon my method in writing it.  Let them observe, in
what I borrow, if I have known how to choose what is proper to raise or
help the invention, which is always my own.  For I make others say for
me, not before but after me, what, either for want of language or want of
sense, I cannot myself so well express.  I do not number my borrowings,
I weigh them; and had I designed to raise their value by number, I had
made them twice as many; they are all, or within a very few, so famed and
ancient authors, that they seem, methinks, themselves sufficiently to
tell who they are, without giving me the trouble.  In reasons,
comparisons, and arguments, if I transplant any into my own soil, and
confound them amongst my own, I purposely conceal the author, to awe the
temerity of those precipitate censors who fall upon all sorts of
writings, particularly the late ones, of men yet living; and in the
vulgar tongue which puts every one into a capacity of criticising and
which seem to convict the conception and design as vulgar also.  I will
have them give Plutarch a fillip on my nose, and rail against Seneca when
they think they rail at me.  I must shelter my own weakness under these
great reputations.  I shall love any one that can unplume me, that is,
by clearness of understanding and judgment, and by the sole distinction
of the force and beauty of the discourse.  For I who, for want of memory,
am at every turn at a loss to, pick them out of their national livery, am
yet wise enough to know, by the measure of my own abilities, that my soil
is incapable of producing any of those rich flowers that I there find
growing; and that all the fruits of my own growth are not worth any one
of them.  For this, indeed, I hold myself responsible; if I get in my own
way; if there be any vanity and defect in my writings which I do not of
myself perceive nor can discern, when pointed out to me by another; for
many faults escape our eye, but the infirmity of judgment consists in not
being able to discern them, when by another laid open to us.  Knowledge
and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them;
but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest
testimonies of judgment that I know.  I have no other officer to put my
writings in rank and file, but only fortune.  As things come into my
head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole
bodies, sometimes in single file.  I would that every one should see my
natural and ordinary pace, irregular as it is; I suffer myself to jog on
at my own rate.  Neither are these subjects which a man is not permitted
to be ignorant in, or casually and at a venture, to discourse of.  I
could wish to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I will not buy
it so dear as it costs.  My design is to pass over easily, and not
laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will
cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever.

I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest
diversion; or, if I study, ‘tis for no other science than what treats of
the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live
well.

               “Has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus.”

               [“My horse must work according to my step.”
                --Propertius, iv.]

I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading;
after a charge or two, I give them over.  Should I insist upon them, I
should both lose myself and time; for I have an impatient understanding,
that must be satisfied at first: what I do not discern at once is by
persistence rendered more obscure. I do nothing without gaiety;
continuation and a too obstinate endeavour, darkens, stupefies, and tires
my judgment.  My sight is confounded and dissipated with poring; I must
withdraw it, and refer my discovery to new attempts; just as, to judge
rightly of the lustre of scarlet, we are taught to pass the eye lightly
over it, and again to run it over at several sudden and reiterated
glances.  If one book do not please me, I take another; and I never
meddle with any, but at such times as I am weary of doing nothing.
I care not much for new ones, because the old seem fuller and stronger;
neither do I converse much with Greek authors, because my judgment cannot
do its work with imperfect intelligence of the material.

Amongst books that are simply pleasant, of the moderns, Boccaccio’s
Decameron, Rabelais, and the Basia of Johannes Secundus (if those may be
ranged under the title) are worth reading for amusement.  As to the
Amadis, and such kind of stuff, they had not the credit of arresting even
my childhood.  And I will, moreover, say, whether boldly or rashly, that
this old, heavy soul of mine is now no longer tickled with Ariosto, no,
nor with the worthy Ovid; his facility and inventions, with which I was
formerly so ravished, are now of no more relish, and I can hardly have
the patience to read them.  I speak my opinion freely of all things, even
of those that, perhaps, exceed my capacity, and that I do not conceive to
be, in any wise, under my jurisdiction.  And, accordingly, the judgment I
deliver, is to show the measure of my own sight, and not of the things I
make so bold to criticise.  When I find myself disgusted with Plato’s
‘Axiochus’, as with a work, with due respect to such an author be it
spoken, without force, my judgment does not believe itself: it is not so
arrogant as to oppose the authority of so many other famous judgments of
antiquity, which it considers as its tutors and masters, and with whom it
is rather content to err; in such a case, it condemns itself either to
stop at the outward bark, not being able to penetrate to the heart, or to
consider it by sortie false light.  It is content with only securing
itself from trouble and disorder; as to its own weakness, it frankly
acknowledges and confesses it.  It thinks it gives a just interpretation
to the appearances by its conceptions presented to it; but they are weak
and imperfect.  Most of the fables of AEsop have diverse senses and
meanings, of which the mythologists chose some one that quadrates well to
the fable; but, for the most part, ‘tis but the first face that presents
itself and is superficial only; there yet remain others more vivid,
essential, and profound, into which they have not been able to penetrate;
and just so ‘tis with me.

But, to pursue the business of this essay, I have always thought that, in
poesy, Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace by many degrees excel the
rest; and signally, Virgil in his Georgics, which I look upon as the most
accomplished piece in poetry; and in comparison of which a man may easily
discern that there are some places in his AEneids, to which the author
would have given a little more of the file, had he had leisure: and the
fifth book of his AEneids seems to me the most perfect.  I also love
Lucan, and willingly read him, not so much for his style, as for his own
worth, and the truth and solidity of his opinions and judgments.  As for
good Terence, the refined elegance and grace of the Latin tongue, I find
him admirable in his vivid representation of our manners and the
movements of the soul; our actions throw me at every turn upon him; and
I cannot read him so often that I do not still discover some new grace
and beauty.  Such as lived near Virgil’s time complained that some should
compare Lucretius to him.  I am of opinion that the comparison is, in
truth, very unequal: a belief that, nevertheless, I have much ado to
assure myself in, when I come upon some excellent passage in Lucretius.
But if they were so angry at this comparison, what would they say to the
brutish and barbarous stupidity of those who, nowadays, compare him with
Ariosto?  Would not Ariosto himself say?

               “O seclum insipiens et inficetum!”

          [“O stupid and tasteless age.”--Catullus, xliii. 8.]

I think the ancients had more reason to be angry with those who compared
Plautus with Terence, though much nearer the mark, than Lucretius with
Virgil.  It makes much for the estimation and preference of Terence, that
the father of Roman eloquence has him so often, and alone of his class,
in his mouth; and the opinion that the best judge of Roman poets
--[Horace, De Art.  Poetica, 279.]--has passed upon his companion.  I
have often observed that those of our times, who take upon them to write
comedies (in imitation of the Italians, who are happy enough in that way
of writing), take three or four plots of those of Plautus or Terence to
make one of their own, and , crowd five or six of Boccaccio’s novels into
one single comedy.  That which makes them so load themselves with matter
is the diffidence they have of being able to support themselves with
their own strength.  They must find out something to lean to; and not
having of their own stuff wherewith to entertain us, they bring in the
story to supply the defect of language.  It is quite otherwise with my
author; the elegance and perfection of his way of speaking makes us lose
the appetite of his plot; his refined grace and elegance of diction
everywhere occupy us: he is so pleasant throughout,

               “Liquidus, puroque simillimus amni,”

               [“Liquid, and likest the pure river.”
                --Horace, Ep., ii. s, 120.]

and so possesses the soul with his graces that we forget those of his
fable.  This same consideration carries me further:  I observe that the
best of the ancient poets have avoided affectation and the hunting after,
not only fantastic Spanish and Petrarchic elevations, but even the softer
and more gentle touches, which are the ornament of all succeeding poesy.
And yet there is no good judgment that will condemn this in the ancients,
and that does not incomparably more admire the equal polish, and that
perpetual sweetness and flourishing beauty of Catullus’s epigrams, than
all the stings with which Martial arms the tails of his.  This is by the
same reason that I gave before, and as Martial says of himself:

               “Minus illi ingenio laborandum fuit,
               in cujus locum materia successerat:”

     [“He had the less for his wit to do that the subject itself
     supplied what was necessary.”--Martial, praef.  ad lib. viii.]

The first, without being moved, or without getting angry, make themselves
sufficiently felt; they have matter enough of laughter throughout, they
need not tickle themselves; the others have need of foreign assistance;
as they have the less wit they must have the more body; they mount on
horseback, because they are not able to stand on their own legs.  As in
our balls, those mean fellows who teach to dance, not being able to
represent the presence and dignity of our noblesse, are fain to put
themselves forward with dangerous jumping, and other strange motions and
tumblers tricks; and the ladies are less put to it in dance; where there
are various coupees, changes, and quick motions of body, than in some
other of a more sedate kind, where they are only to move a natural pace,
and to represent their ordinary grace and presence.  And so I have seen
good drolls, when in their own everyday clothes, and with the same face
they always wear, give us all the pleasure of their art, when their
apprentices, not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection, are fain to
meal their faces, put themselves into ridiculous disguises, and make a
hundred grotesque faces to give us whereat to laugh.  This conception of
mine is nowhere more demonstrable than in comparing the AEneid with
Orlando Furioso; of which we see the first, by dint of wing, flying in a
brave and lofty place, and always following his point: the latter,
fluttering and hopping from tale to tale, as from branch to branch, not
daring to trust his wings but in very short flights, and perching at
every turn, lest his breath and strength should fail.

                    “Excursusque breves tentat.”

               [“And he attempts short excursions.”
                --Virgil, Georgics, iv.  194.]

These, then, as to this sort of subjects, are the authors that best
please me.

As to what concerns my other reading, that mixes a little more profit
with the pleasure, and whence I learn how to marshal my opinions and
conditions, the books that serve me to this purpose are Plutarch, since
he has been translated into French, and Seneca.  Both of these have this
notable convenience suited to my humour, that the knowledge I there seek
is discoursed in loose pieces, that do not require from me any trouble of
reading long, of which I am incapable.  Such are the minor works of the
first and the epistles of the latter, which are the best and most
profiting of all their writings.  ‘Tis no great attempt to take one of
them in hand, and I give over at pleasure; for they have no sequence or
dependence upon one another.  These authors, for the most part, concur in
useful and true opinions; and there is this parallel betwixt them, that
fortune brought them into the world about the same century: they were
both tutors to two Roman emperors: both sought out from foreign
countries: both rich and both great men.  Their instruction is the cream
of philosophy, and delivered after a plain and pertinent manner.
Plutarch is more uniform and constant; Seneca more various and waving:
the last toiled and bent his whole strength to fortify virtue against
weakness, fear, and vicious appetites; the other seems more to slight
their power, and to disdain to alter his pace and to stand upon his
guard.  Plutarch’s opinions are Platonic, gentle, and accommodated to
civil society; those of the other are Stoical and Epicurean, more remote
from the common use, but, in my opinion, more individually commodious and
more firm.  Seneca seems to lean a little to the tyranny of the emperors
of his time, and only seems; for I take it for certain that he speaks
against his judgment when he condemns the action of the generous
murderers of Caesar.  Plutarch is frank throughout: Seneca abounds with
brisk touches and sallies; Plutarch with things that warm and move you
more; this contents and pays you better: he guides us, the other pushes
us on.

As to Cicero, his works that are most useful to my design are they that
treat of manners and rules of our life.  But boldly to confess the truth
(for since one has passed the barriers of impudence, there is no bridle),
his way of writing appears to me negligent and uninviting: for his
prefaces, definitions, divisions, and etymologies take up the greatest
part of his work: whatever there is of life and marrow is smothered and
lost in the long preparation.  When I have spent an hour in reading him,
which is a great deal for me, and try to recollect what I have thence
extracted of juice and substance, for the most part I find nothing but
wind; for he is not yet come to the arguments that serve to his purpose,
and to the reasons that properly help to form the knot I seek.  For me,
who only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, these
logical and Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use.  I would
have a man begin with the main proposition.  I know well enough what
death and pleasure are; let no man give himself the trouble to anatomise
them to me.  I look for good and solid reasons, at the first dash, to
instruct me how to stand their shock, for which purpose neither
grammatical subtleties nor the quaint contexture of words and
argumentations are of any use at all.  I am for discourses that give the
first charge into the heart of the redoubt; his languish about the
subject; they are proper for the schools, for the bar, and for the
pulpit, where we have leisure to nod, and may awake, a quarter of an hour
after, time enough to find again the thread of the discourse.  It is
necessary to speak after this manner to judges, whom a man has a design
to gain over, right or wrong, to children and common people, to whom a
man must say all, and see what will come of it.  I would not have an
author make it his business to render me attentive: or that he should cry
out fifty times Oyez!  as the heralds do.  The Romans, in their religious
exercises, began with ‘Hoc age’ as we in ours do with ‘Sursum corda’;
these are so many words lost to me: I come already fully prepared from my
chamber.  I need no allurement, no invitation, no sauce; I eat the meat
raw, so that, instead of whetting my appetite by these preparatives, they
tire and pall it.  Will the licence of the time excuse my sacrilegious
boldness if I censure the dialogism of Plato himself as also dull and
heavy, too much stifling the matter, and lament so much time lost by a
man, who had so many better things to say, in so many long and needless
preliminary interlocutions?  My ignorance will better excuse me in that
I understand not Greek so well as to discern the beauty of his language.
I generally choose books that use sciences, not such as only lead to
them.  The two first, and Pliny, and their like, have nothing of this Hoc
age; they will have to do with men already instructed; or if they have,
‘tis a substantial Hoc age; and that has a body by itself.  I also
delight in reading the Epistles to Atticus, not only because they contain
a great deal of the history and affairs of his time, but much more
because I therein discover much of his own private humours; for I have a
singular curiosity, as I have said elsewhere, to pry into the souls and
the natural and true opinions of the authors, with whom I converse.  A
man may indeed judge of their parts, but not of their manners nor of
themselves, by the writings they exhibit upon the theatre of the world.
I have a thousand times lamented the loss of the treatise Brutus wrote
upon Virtue, for it is well to learn the theory from those who best know
the practice.

But seeing the matter preached and the preacher are different things,
I would as willingly see Brutus in Plutarch, as in a book of his own.
I would rather choose to be certainly informed of the conference he had
in his tent with some particular friends of his the night before a
battle, than of the harangue he made the next day to his army; and of
what he did in his closet and his chamber, than what he did in the public
square and in the senate.  As to Cicero, I am of the common opinion that,
learning excepted, he had no great natural excellence.  He was a good
citizen, of an affable nature, as all fat, heavy men, such as he was,
usually are; but given to ease, and had, in truth, a mighty share of
vanity and ambition.  Neither do I know how to excuse him for thinking
his poetry fit to be published; ‘tis no great imperfection to make ill
verses, but it is an imperfection not to be able to judge how unworthy
his verses were of the glory of his name.  For what concerns his
eloquence, that is totally out of all comparison, and I believe it will
never be equalled.  The younger Cicero, who resembled his father in
nothing but in name, whilst commanding in Asia, had several strangers one
day at his table, and, amongst the rest, Cestius seated at the lower end,
as men often intrude to the open tables of the great.  Cicero asked one
of his people who that man was, who presently told him his name; but he,
as one who had his thoughts taken up with something else, and who had
forgotten the answer made him, asking three or four times, over and over
again; the same question, the fellow, to deliver himself from so many
answers and to make him know him by some particular circumstance; “‘tis
that Cestius,” said he, “of whom it was told you, that he makes no great
account of your father’s eloquence in comparison of his own.”  At which
Cicero, being suddenly nettled, commanded poor Cestius presently to be
seized, and caused him to be very well whipped in his own presence; a
very discourteous entertainer!  Yet even amongst those, who, all things
considered, have reputed his, eloquence incomparable, there have been
some, who have not stuck to observe some faults in it: as that great
Brutus his friend, for example, who said ‘twas a broken and feeble
eloquence, ‘fyactam et elumbem’.  The orators also, nearest to the age
wherein he lived, reprehended in him the care he had of a certain long
cadence in his periods, and particularly took notice of these words,
‘esse videatur’, which he there so often makes use of.  For my part, I
more approve of a shorter style, and that comes more roundly off.  He
does, though, sometimes shuffle his parts more briskly together, but ‘tis
very seldom.  I have myself taken notice of this one passage:

              “Ego vero me minus diu senem mallem,
               quam esse senem, antequam essem.”

     [“I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age.
     --“Cicero, De Senect., c. 10.]

The historians are my right ball, for they are pleasant and easy, and
where man, in general, the knowledge of whom I hunt after, appears more
vividly and entire than anywhere else:

     [The easiest of my amusements, the right ball at tennis being that
     which coming to the player from the right hand, is much easier
     played with.--Coste.]

the variety and truth of his internal qualities, in gross and piecemeal,
the diversity of means by which he is united and knit, and the accidents
that threaten him.  Now those that write lives, by reason they insist
more upon counsels than events, more upon what sallies from within, than
upon what happens without, are the most proper for my reading; and,
therefore, above all others, Plutarch is the man for me.  I am very sorry
we have not a dozen Laertii,--[Diogenes Laertius, who wrote the Lives of
the Philosophers]--or that he was not further extended; for I am equally
curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the
world, as to know the diversities of their doctrines and opinions.  In
this kind of study of histories, a man must tumble over, without
distinction, all sorts of authors, old and new, French or foreign, there
to know the things of which they variously treat.  But Caesar, in my
opinion, particularly deserves to be studied, not for the knowledge of
the history only, but for himself, so great an excellence and perfection
he has above all the rest, though Sallust be one of the number.  In
earnest, I read this author with more reverence and respect than is
usually allowed to human writings; one while considering him in his
person, by his actions and miraculous greatness, and another in the
purity and inimitable polish of his language, wherein he not only excels
all other historians, as Cicero confesses,  but, peradventure, even
Cicero himself; speaking of his enemies with so much sincerity in his
judgment, that, the false colours with which he strives to palliate his
evil cause, and the ordure of his pestilent ambition excepted, I think
there is no fault to be objected against him, saving this, that he speaks
too sparingly of himself, seeing so many great things could not have been
performed under his conduct, but that his own personal acts must
necessarily have had a greater share in them than he attributes to them.

I love historians, whether of the simple sort, or of the higher order.
The simple, who have nothing of their own to mix with it, and who only
make it their business to collect all that comes to their knowledge, and
faithfully to record all things, without choice or discrimination, leave
to us the entire judgment of discerning the truth.  Such, for example,
amongst others, is honest Froissart, who has proceeded in his undertaking
with so frank a plainness that, having committed an error, he is not
ashamed to confess and correct it in the place where the finger has been
laid, and who represents to us even the variety of rumours that were then
spread abroad, and the different reports that were made to him; ‘tis the
naked and inform matter of history, and of which every one may make his
profit, according to his understanding.  The more excellent sort of
historians have judgment to pick out what is most worthy to be known;
and, of two reports, to examine which is the most likely to be true: from
the condition of princes and their humours, they conclude their counsels,
and attribute to them words proper for the occasion; such have title to
assume the authority of regulating our belief to what they themselves
believe; but certainly, this privilege belongs to very few.  For the
middle sort of historians, of which the most part are, they spoil all;
they will chew our meat for us; they take upon them to judge of, and
consequently, to incline the history to their own fancy; for if the
judgment lean to one side, a man cannot avoid wresting and writhing his
narrative to that bias; they undertake to select things worthy to be
known, and yet often conceal from us such a word, such a private action,
as would much better instruct us; omit, as incredible, such things as
they do not understand, and peradventure some, because they cannot
express good French or Latin.  Let them display their eloquence and
intelligence, and judge according to their own fancy: but let them,
withal, leave us something to judge of after them, and neither alter nor
disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice, anything of the
substance of the matter, but deliver it to us pure and entire in all its
dimensions.

For the most part, and especially in these latter ages, persons are
culled out for this work from amongst the common people, upon the sole
consideration of well-speaking, as if we were to learn grammar from them;
and the men so chosen have fair reason, being hired for no other end and
pretending to nothing but babble, not to be very solicitous of any part
but that, and so, with a fine jingle of words, prepare us a pretty
contexture of reports they pick up in the streets.  The only good
histories are those that have been written themselves who held command in
the affairs whereof they write, or who participated in the conduct of
them, or, at least, who have had the conduct of others of the same
nature.  Such are almost all the Greek and Roman histories: for, several
eye-witnesses having written of the same subject, in the time when
grandeur and learning commonly met in the same person, if there happen to
be an error, it must of necessity be a very slight one, and upon a very
doubtful incident.  What can a man expect from a physician who writes of
war, or from a mere scholar, treating of the designs of princes?  If we
could take notice how scrupulous the Romans were in this, there would
need but this example: Asinius Pollio found in the histories of Caesar
himself something misreported, a mistake occasioned; either by reason he
could not have his eye in all parts of his army at once and had given
credit to some individual persons who had not delivered him a very true
account; or else, for not having had too perfect notice given him by his
lieutenants of what they had done in his absence.--[Suetonius, Life of
Caesar, c. 56.]--By which we may see, whether the inquisition after
truth be not very delicate, when a man cannot believe the report of a
battle from the knowledge of him who there commanded, nor from the
soldiers who were engaged in it, unless, after the method of a judicial
inquiry, the witnesses be confronted and objections considered upon the
proof of the least detail of every incident.  In good earnest the
knowledge we have of our own affairs, is much more obscure: but that has
been sufficiently handled by Bodin, and according to my own sentiment
--[In the work by jean Bodin, entitled “Methodus ad facilem historiarum
cognitionem.”  1566.]--A little to aid the weakness of my memory (so
extreme that it has happened to me more than once, to take books again
into my hand as new and unseen, that I had carefully read over a few
years before, and scribbled with my notes) I have adopted a custom of
late, to note at the end of every book (that is, of those I never intend
to read again) the time when I made an end on’t, and the judgment I had
made of it, to the end that this might, at least, represent to me the
character and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it;
and I will here transcribe some of those annotations.

I wrote this, some ten years ago, in my Guicciardini (of what language
soever my books speak to me in, I always speak to them in my own): “He is
a diligent historiographer, from whom, in my opinion, a man may learn the
truth of the affairs of his time, as exactly as from any other; in the
most of which he was himself also a personal actor, and in honourable
command.  There is no appearance that he disguised anything, either upon
the account of hatred, favour, or vanity; of which the free censures he
passes upon the great ones, and particularly those by whom he was
advanced and employed in commands of great trust and honour, as Pope
Clement VII., give ample testimony.  As to that part which he thinks
himself the best at, namely, his digressions and discourses, he has
indeed some very good, and enriched with fine features; but he is too
fond of them: for, to leave nothing unsaid, having a subject so full,
ample, almost infinite, he degenerates into pedantry and smacks a little
of scholastic prattle.  I have also observed this in him, that of so many
souls and so many effects, so many motives and so many counsels as he
judges, he never attributes any one to virtue, religion, or conscience,
as if all these were utterly extinct in the world: and of all the
actions, how brave soever in outward show they appear in themselves, he
always refers the cause and motive to some vicious occasion or some
prospect of profit.  It is impossible to imagine but that, amongst such
an infinite number of actions as he makes mention of, there must be some
one produced by the way of honest reason.  No corruption could so
universally have infected men that some one would not escape the
contagion which makes me suspect that his own taste was vicious, whence
it might happen that he judged other men by himself.”

In my Philip de Commines there is this written: “You will here find the
language sweet and delightful, of a natural simplicity, the narration
pure, with the good faith of the author conspicuous therein; free from
vanity, when speaking of himself, and from affection or envy, when
speaking of others: his discourses and exhortations rather accompanied
with zeal and truth, than with any exquisite sufficiency; and,
throughout, authority and gravity, which bespeak him a man of good
extraction, and brought up in great affairs.”

Upon the Memoirs of Monsieur du Bellay I find this: “‘Tis always pleasant
to read things written by those that have experienced how they ought to
be carried on; but withal, it cannot be denied but there is a manifest
decadence in these two lords--[Martin du Bellay and Guillaume de Langey,
brothers, who jointly wrote the Memoirs.]--from the freedom and liberty
of writing that shine in the elder historians, such as the Sire de
Joinville, the familiar companion of St. Louis; Eginhard, chancellor to
Charlemagne; and of later date, Philip de Commines.  What we have here is
rather an apology for King Francis, against the Emperor Charles V., than
history.  I will not believe that they have falsified anything, as to
matter of fact; but they make a common practice of twisting the judgment
of events, very often contrary to reason, to our advantage, and of
omitting whatsoever is ticklish to be handled in the life of their
master; witness the proceedings of Messieurs de Montmorency and de Biron,
which are here omitted: nay, so much as the very name of Madame
d’Estampes is not here to be found.  Secret actions an historian may
conceal; but to pass over in silence what all the world knows and things
that have drawn after them public and such high consequences, is an
inexcusable defect.  In fine, whoever has a mind to have a perfect
knowledge of King Francis and the events of his reign, let him seek it
elsewhere, if my advice may prevail.  The only profit a man can reap from
these Memoirs is in the special narrative of battles and other exploits
of war wherein these gentlemen were personally engaged; in some words and
private actions of the princes of their time, and in the treaties and
negotiations carried on by the Seigneur de Langey, where there are
everywhere things worthy to be known, and discourses above the vulgar
strain.”




CHAPTER XI

OF CRUELTY

I fancy virtue to be something else, and something more noble, than good
nature, and the mere propension to goodness, that we are born into the
world withal.  Well-disposed and well-descended souls pursue, indeed, the
same methods, and represent in their actions the same face that virtue
itself does: but the word virtue imports, I know not what, more great and
active than merely for a man to suffer himself, by a happy disposition,
to be gently and quietly drawn to the rule of reason.  He who, by a
natural sweetness and facility, should despise injuries received, would
doubtless do a very fine and laudable thing; but he who, provoked and
nettled to the quick by an offence, should fortify himself with the arms
of reason against the furious appetite of revenge, and after a great
conflict, master his own passion, would certainly do a great deal more.
The first would do well; the latter virtuously: one action might be
called goodness, and the other virtue; for methinks, the very name of
virtue presupposes difficulty and contention, and cannot be exercised
without an opponent.  ‘Tis for this reason, perhaps, that we call God
good, mighty, liberal and just; but we do not call Him virtuous, being
that all His operations are natural and without endeavour.--[Rousseau,
in his Emile, book v., adopts this passage almost in the same words.]--
It has been the opinion of many philosophers, not only Stoics, but
Epicureans--and this addition--

     [“Montaigne stops here to make his excuse for thus naming the
     Epicureans with the Stoics, in conformity to the general opinion
     that the Epicureans were not so rigid in their morals as the Stoics,
     which is not true in the main, as he demonstrates at one view.  This
     involved Montaigne in a tedious parenthesis, during which it is
     proper that the reader be attentive, that he may not entirely lose
     the thread of the argument.  In some later editions of this author,
     it has been attempted to remedy this inconvenience, but without
     observing that Montaigne’s argument is rendered more feeble and
     obscure by such vain repetitions: it is a licence that ought not to
     be taken, because he who publishes the work of another, ought to
     give it as the other composed ft.  But, in Mr Cotton’s translation,
     he was so puzzled with this enormous parenthesis that he has quite
     left it out”--Coste.]

I borrow from the vulgar opinion, which is false, notwithstanding the
witty conceit of Arcesilaus in answer to one, who, being reproached that
many scholars went from his school to the Epicurean, but never any from
thence to his school, said in answer, “I believe it indeed; numbers of
capons being made out of cocks, but never any cocks out of capons.”
 --[Diogenes Laertius, Life of Archesilaus, lib.  iv., 43.]--For, in truth,
the Epicurean sect is not at all inferior to the Stoic in steadiness, and
the rigour of opinions and precepts.  And a certain Stoic, showing more
honesty than those disputants, who, in order to quarrel with Epicurus,
and to throw the game into their hands, make him say what he never
thought, putting a wrong construction upon his words, clothing his
sentences, by the strict rules of grammar, with another meaning, and a
different opinion from that which they knew he entertained in his mind
and in his morals, the Stoic, I say, declared that he abandoned the
Epicurean sect, upon this among other considerations, that he thought
their road too lofty and inaccessible;

     [“And those are called lovers of pleasure, being in effect
     lovers of honour and justice, who cultivate and observe all
     the virtues.”--Cicero, Ep.  Fam., xv. i, 19.]

These philosophers say that it is not enough to have the soul seated in
a good place, of a good temper, and well disposed to virtue; it is not
enough to have our resolutions and our reasoning fixed above all the
power of fortune, but that we are, moreover, to seek occasions wherein to
put them to the proof: they would seek pain, necessity, and contempt to
contend with them and to keep the soul in breath:

               “Multum sibi adjicit virtus lacessita.”

               [“Virtue is much strengthened by combats.”
                or:  “Virtue attacked adds to its own force.”
                --Seneca, Ep., 13.]

‘Tis one of the reasons why Epaminondas, who was yet of a third sect,
--[The Pythagorean.]--refused the riches fortune presented to him by
very lawful means; because, said he, I am to contend with poverty, in
which extreme he maintained himself to the last.  Socrates put himself,
methinks, upon a ruder trial, keeping for his exercise a confounded
scolding wife, which was fighting at sharps.  Metellus having, of all the
Roman senators, alone attempted, by the power of virtue, to withstand the
violence of Saturninus, tribune of the people at Rome, who would, by all
means, cause an unjust law to pass in favour of the commons, and, by so
doing, having incurred the capital penalties that Saturninus had
established against the dissentient, entertained those who, in this
extremity, led him to execution with words to this effect: That it was a
thing too easy and too base to do ill; and that to do well where there
was no danger was a common thing; but that to do well where there was
danger was the proper office of a man of virtue.  These words of Metellus
very clearly represent to us what I would make out, viz., that virtue
refuses facility for a companion; and that the easy, smooth, and
descending way by which the regular steps of a sweet disposition of
nature are conducted is not that of a true virtue; she requires a rough
and stormy passage; she will have either exotic difficulties to wrestle
with, like that of Metellus, by means whereof fortune delights to
interrupt the speed of her career, or internal difficulties, that the
inordinate appetites and imperfections of our condition introduce to
disturb her.

I am come thus far at my ease; but here it comes into my head that the
soul of Socrates, the most perfect that ever came to my knowledge, should
by this rule be of very little recommendation; for I cannot conceive in
that person any the least motion of a vicious inclination: I cannot
imagine there could be any difficulty or constraint in the course of his
virtue: I know his reason to be so powerful and sovereign over him that
she would never have suffered a vicious appetite so much as to spring in
him.  To a virtue so elevated as his, I have nothing to oppose.  Methinks
I see him march, with a victorious and triumphant pace, in pomp and at
his ease, without opposition or disturbance.  If virtue cannot shine
bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that
she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from
her that she derives her reputation and honour?  What then, also, would
become of that brave and generous Epicurean pleasure, which makes account
that it nourishes virtue tenderly in her lap, and there makes it play and
wanton, giving it for toys to play withal, shame, fevers, poverty, death,
and torments?  If I presuppose that a perfect virtue manifests itself in
contending, in patient enduring of pain, and undergoing the uttermost
extremity of the gout; without being moved in her seat; if I give her
troubles and difficulty for her necessary objects: what will become of a
virtue elevated to such a degree, as not only to despise pain, but,
moreover, to rejoice in it, and to be tickled with the throes of a sharp
colic, such as the Epicureans have established, and of which many of
them, by their actions, have given most manifest proofs?  As have several
others, who I find to have surpassed in effects even the very rules of
their discipline.  Witness the younger Cato: When I see him die, and
tearing out his own bowels, I am not satisfied simply to believe that he
had then his soul totally exempt from all trouble and horror: I cannot
think that he only maintained himself in the steadiness that the Stoical
rules prescribed him; temperate, without emotion, and imperturbed.  There
was, methinks, something in the virtue of this man too sprightly and
fresh to stop there; I believe that, without doubt, he felt a pleasure
and delight in so noble an action, and was more pleased in it than in any
other of his life:

     “Sic abiit a vita, ut causam moriendi nactum se esse gauderet.”

     [“He quitted life rejoicing that a reason for dying had arisen.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 30.]

I believe it so thoroughly that I question whether he would have been
content to have been deprived of the occasion of so brave an exploit; and
if the goodness that made him embrace the public concern more than his
own, withheld me not, I should easily fall into an opinion that he
thought himself obliged to fortune for having put his virtue upon so
brave a trial, and for having favoured that theif--[Caesar]--in treading
underfoot the ancient liberty of his country.  Methinks I read in this
action I know not what exaltation in his soul, and an extraordinary and
manly emotion of pleasure, when he looked upon the generosity and height
of his enterprise:

                    “Deliberate morte ferocior,”

          [“The more courageous from the deliberation to die.”
           --Horace, Od., i. 37, 29.]

not stimulated with any hope of glory, as the popular and effeminate
judgments of some have concluded (for that consideration was too mean and
low to possess so generous, so haughty, and so determined a heart as
his), but for the very beauty of the thing in itself, which he who had
the handling of the springs discerned more clearly and in its perfection
than we are able to do.  Philosophy has obliged me in determining that so
brave an action had been indecently placed in any other life than that of
Cato; and that it only appertained to his to end so; notwithstanding, and
according to reason, he commanded his son and the senators who
accompanied him to take another course in their affairs:

          “Catoni, quum incredibilem natura tribuisset gravitatem,
          eamque ipse perpetue constantia roboravisset, semperque
          in proposito consilio permansisset, moriendum potius,
          quam tyranni vultus aspiciendus, erat.”

     [“Cato, whom nature had given incredible dignity, which he had
     fortified by perpetual constancy, ever remaining of his
     predetermined opinion, preferred to die rather than to look
     on the countenance of a tyrant.”--Cicero, De Ofc., i. 31.]

Every death ought to hold proportion with the life before it; we do not
become others for dying.  I always interpret the death by the life
preceding; and if any one tell me of a death strong and constant in
appearance, annexed to a feeble life, I conclude it produced by some
feeble cause, and suitable to the life before.  The easiness then of his
death and the facility of dying he had acquired by the vigour of his
soul; shall we say that it ought to abate anything of the lustre of his
virtue?  And who, that has his brain never so little tinctured with the
true philosophy, can be content to imagine Socrates only free from fear
and passion in the accident of his prison, fetters, and condemnation?
and that will not discover in him not only firmness and constancy (which
was his ordinary condition), but, moreover, I know not what new
satisfaction, and a frolic cheerfulness in his last words and actions?
In the start he gave with the pleasure of scratching his leg when his
irons were taken off, does he not discover an equal serenity and joy in
his soul for being freed from past inconveniences, and at the same time
to enter into the knowledge of the things to come?  Cato shall pardon me,
if he please; his death indeed is more tragical and more lingering; but
yet this is, I know not how, methinks, finer.  Aristippus, to one that
was lamenting this death: “The gods grant me such an one,” said he.
A man discerns in the soul of these two great men and their imitators
(for I very much doubt whether there were ever their equals) so perfect a
habitude to virtue, that it was turned to a complexion.  It is no longer
a laborious virtue, nor the precepts of reason, to maintain which the
soul is so racked, but the very essence of their soul, its natural and
ordinary habit; they have rendered it such by a long practice of
philosophical precepts having lit upon a rich and fine nature; the
vicious passions that spring in us can find no entrance into them; the
force and vigour of their soul stifle and extinguish irregular desires,
so soon as they begin to move.

Now, that it is not more noble, by a high and divine resolution, to
hinder the birth of temptations, and to be so formed to virtue, that the
very seeds of vice are rooted out, than to hinder by main force their
progress; and, having suffered ourselves to be surprised with the first
motions of the passions, to arm ourselves and to stand firm to oppose
their progress, and overcome them; and that this second effect is not
also much more generous than to be simply endowed with a facile and
affable nature, of itself disaffected to debauchery and vice, I do not
think can be doubted; for this third and last sort of virtue seems to
render a man innocent, but not virtuous; free from doing ill, but not apt
enough to do well: considering also, that this condition is so near
neighbour to imperfection and cowardice, that I know not very well how to
separate the confines and distinguish them: the very names of goodness
and innocence are, for this reason, in some sort grown into contempt.
I very well know that several virtues, as chastity, sobriety, and
temperance, may come to a man through personal defects.  Constancy in
danger, if it must be so called, the contempt of death, and patience in
misfortunes, may ofttimes be found in men for want of well judging of
such accidents, and not apprehending them for such as they are.  Want of
apprehension and stupidity sometimes counterfeit virtuous effects as I
have often seen it happen, that men have been commended for what really
merited blame.  An Italian lord once said this, in my presence, to the
disadvantage of his own nation: that the subtlety of the Italians, and
the vivacity of their conceptions were so great, and they foresaw the
dangers and accidents that might befall them so far off, that it was not
to be thought strange, if they were often, in war, observed to provide
for their safety, even before they had discovered the peril; that we
French and the Spaniards, who were not so cunning, went on further, and
that we must be made to see and feel the danger before we would take the
alarm; but that even then we could not stick to it.  But the Germans and
Swiss, more gross and heavy, had not the sense to look about them, even
when the blows were falling about their ears.  Peradventure, he only
talked so for mirth’s sake; and yet it is most certain that in war raw
soldiers rush into dangers with more precipitancy than after they have
been cudgelled*--(The original has eschauldex--scalded)

         “Haud ignarus .  .  .  .  quantum nova gloria in armis,
          Et praedulce decus, primo certamine possit.”

     [“Not ignorant how much power the fresh glory of arms and sweetest
     honour possess in the first contest.”--AEneid, xi. 154]

For this reason it is that, when we judge of a particular action, we are
to consider the circumstances, and the whole man by whom it is performed,
before we give it a name.

To instance in myself: I have sometimes known my friends call that
prudence in me, which was merely fortune; and repute that courage and
patience, which was judgment and opinion; and attribute to me one title
for another, sometimes to my advantage and sometimes otherwise.  As to
the rest, I am so far from being arrived at the first and most perfect
degree of excellence, where virtue is turned into habit, that even of the
second I have made no great proofs.  I have not been very solicitous to
curb the desires by which I have been importuned.  My virtue is a virtue,
or rather an innocence, casual and accidental.  If I had been born of a
more irregular complexion, I am afraid I should have made scurvy work;
for I never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions,
if they were never so little vehement: I know not how to nourish quarrels
and debates in my own bosom, and, consequently, owe myself no great
thanks that I am free from several vices:

              “Si vitiis mediocribus et mea paucis
               Mendosa est natura, alioqui recta, velut si
               Egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore naevos:”

     [“If my nature be disfigured only with slight and few vices, and is
     otherwise just, it is as if you should blame moles on a fair body.”
      --Horatius, Sat., i. 6, 65.]

I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason.  She has caused me to be
descended of a race famous for integrity and of a very good father; I
know not whether or no he has infused into me part of his humours, or
whether domestic examples and the good education of my infancy have
insensibly assisted in the work, or, if I was otherwise born so:

                    “Seu Libra, seu me Scorpius adspicit
                    Formidolosus, pars violentior
                    Natalis hors, seu tyrannus
                    Hesperive Capricornus undae:”

     [“Whether the Balance or dread Scorpio, more potent over my natal
     hour, aspects me, or Capricorn, supreme over the Hesperian sea.”
      --Horace, Od., ii. 117.]

but so it is, that I have naturally a horror for most vices.  The answer
of Antisthenes to him who asked him, which was the best apprenticeship
“to unlearn evil,” seems to point at this.  I have them in horror, I say,
with a detestation so natural, and so much my own, that the same instinct
and impression I brought of them with me from my nurse, I yet retain, and
no temptation whatever has had the power to make me alter it.  Not so
much as my own discourses, which in some things lashing out of the common
road might seem easily to license me to actions that my natural
inclination makes me hate.  I will say a prodigious thing, but I will say
it, however: I find myself in many things more under reputation by my
manners than by my opinion, and my concupiscence less debauched than my
reason.  Aristippus instituted opinions so bold in favour of pleasure and
riches as set all the philosophers against him: but as to his manners,
Dionysius the tyrant, having presented three beautiful women before him,
to take his choice; he made answer, that he would choose them all, and
that Paris got himself into trouble for having preferred one before the
other two: but, having taken them home to his house, he sent them back
untouched.  His servant finding himself overladen upon the way, with the
money he carried after him, he ordered him to pour out and throw away
that which troubled him.  And Epicurus, whose doctrines were so
irreligious and effeminate, was in his life very laborious and devout;
he wrote to a friend of his that he lived only upon biscuit and water,
entreating him to send him a little cheese, to lie by him against he had
a mind to make a feast.  Must it be true, that to be a perfect good man,
we must be so by an occult, natural, and universal propriety, without
law, reason, or example?  The debauches wherein I have been engaged, have
not been, I thank God, of the worst sort, and I have condemned them in
myself, for my judgment was never infected by them; on the contrary,
I accuse them more severely in myself than in any other; but that is all,
for, as to the rest.  I oppose too little resistance and suffer myself to
incline too much to the other side of the balance, excepting that I
moderate them, and prevent them from mixing with other vices, which for
the most part will cling together, if a man have not a care.  I have
contracted and curtailed mine, to make them as single and as simple as I
can:

                              “Nec ultra
                    Errorem foveo.”

               [“Nor do I cherish error further.”
                or: “Nor carry wrong further.”
                --Juvenal, viii. 164.]

For as to the opinion of the Stoics, who say, “That the wise man when he
works, works by all the virtues together, though one be most apparent,
according to the nature of the action”; and herein the similitude of a
human body might serve them somewhat, for the action of anger cannot
work, unless all the humours assist it, though choler predominate;
--if they will thence draw a like consequence, that when the wicked man
does wickedly, he does it by all the vices together, I do not believe it
to be so, or else I understand them not, for I by effect find the
contrary.  These are sharp, unsubstantial subleties, with which
philosophy sometimes amuses itself.  I follow some vices, but I fly
others as much as a saint would do.  The Peripatetics also disown this
indissoluble connection; and Aristotle is of opinion that a prudent and
just man may be intemperate and inconsistent.  Socrates confessed to some
who had discovered a certain inclination to vice in his physiognomy, that
it was, in truth, his natural propension, but that he had by discipline
corrected it.  And such as were familiar with the philosopher Stilpo
said, that being born with addiction to wine and women, he had by study
rendered himself very abstinent both from the one and the other.

What I have in me of good, I have, quite contrary, by the chance of my
birth; and hold it not either by law, precept, or any other instruction;
the innocence that is in me is a simple one; little vigour and no art.
Amongst other vices, I mortally hate cruelty, both by nature and
judgment, as the very extreme of all vices: nay, with so much tenderness
that I cannot see a chicken’s neck pulled off without trouble, and cannot
without impatience endure the cry of a hare in my dog’s teeth, though the
chase be a violent pleasure.  Such as have sensuality to encounter,
freely make use of this argument, to shew that it is altogether “vicious
and unreasonable; that when it is at the height, it masters us to that
degree that a man’s reason can have no access,” and instance our own
experience in the act of love,

                    “Quum jam praesagit gaudia corpus,
                    Atque in eo est Venus,
                    ut muliebria conserat arva.”

     [None of the translators of the old editions used for this etext
     have been willing to translate this passage from Lucretius, iv.
     1099; they take a cop out by bashfully saying: “The sense is in the
     preceding passage of the text.”  D.W.]

wherein they conceive that the pleasure so transports us, that our reason
cannot perform its office, whilst we are in such ecstasy and rapture.  I
know very well it may be otherwise, and that a man may sometimes, if he
will, gain this point over himself to sway his soul, even in the critical
moment, to think of something else; but then he must ply it to that bent.
I know that a man may triumph over the utmost effort of this pleasure: I
have experienced it in myself, and have not found Venus so imperious a
goddess, as many, and much more virtuous men than I, declare.  I do not
consider it a miracle, as the Queen of Navarre does in one of the Tales
of her Heptameron--[“Vu gentil liure pour son estoffe.”]--(which is a
very pretty book of its kind), nor for a thing of extreme difficulty, to
pass whole nights, where a man has all the convenience and liberty he can
desire, with a long-coveted mistress, and yet be true to the pledge first
given to satisfy himself with kisses and suchlike endearments, without
pressing any further.  I conceive that the example of the pleasure of the
chase would be more proper; wherein though the pleasure be less, there is
the higher excitement of unexpected joy, giving no time for the reason,
taken by surprise, to prepare itself for the encounter, when after a long
quest the beast starts up on a sudden in a place where, peradventure, we
least expected it; the shock and the ardour of the shouts and cries of
the hunters so strike us, that it would be hard for those who love this
lesser chase, to turn their thoughts upon the instant another way; and
the poets make Diana triumph over the torch and shafts of Cupid:

              “Quis non malarum, quas amor curas habet,
               Haec inter obliviscitur?”

     [“Who, amongst such delights would not remove out of his thoughts
     the anxious cares of love.”--Horace, Epod., ii. 37.]

To return to what I was saying before, I am tenderly compassionate of
others’ afflictions, and should readily cry for company, if, upon any
occasion whatever, I could cry at all.  Nothing tempts my tears but
tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are,
feigned or painted.  I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them
rather; but I very much lament the dying.  The savages do not so much
offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who
torment and persecute the living.  Nay, I cannot look so much as upon the
ordinary executions of justice, how reasonable soever, with a steady eye.
Some one having to give testimony of Julius Caesar’s clemency; “he was,”
 says he, “mild in his revenges.  Having compelled the pirates to yield by
whom he had before been taken prisoner and put to ransom; forasmuch as he
had threatened them with the cross, he indeed condemned them to it, but
it was after they had been first strangled.  He punished his secretary
Philemon, who had attempted to poison him, with no greater severity than
mere death.”  Without naming that Latin author,--[Suetonius, Life of
Casay, c. 74.]--who thus dares to allege as a testimony of mercy the
killing only of those by whom we have been offended; it is easy to guess
that he was struck with the horrid and inhuman examples of cruelty
practised by the Roman tyrants.

For my part, even in justice itself, all that exceeds a simple death
appears to me pure cruelty; especially in us who ought, having regard to
their souls, to dismiss them in a good and calm condition; which cannot
be, when we have agitated them by insufferable torments.  Not long since,
a soldier who was a prisoner, perceiving from a tower where he was shut
up, that the people began to assemble to the place of execution, and that
the carpenters were busy erecting a scaffold, he presently concluded
that the preparation was for him, and therefore entered into a resolution
to kill himself, but could find no instrument to assist him in his design
except an old rusty cart-nail that fortune presented to him; with this he
first gave himself two great wounds about his throat, but finding these
would not do, he presently afterwards gave himself a third in the belly,
where he left the nail sticking up to the head.  The first of his keepers
who came in found him in this condition: yet alive, but sunk down and
exhausted by his wounds.  To make use of time, therefore, before he
should die, they made haste to read his sentence; which having done, and
he hearing that he was only condemned to be beheaded, he seemed to take
new courage, accepted wine which he had before refused, and thanked his
judges for the unhoped-for mildness of their sentence; saying, that he
had taken a resolution to despatch himself for fear of a more severe and
insupportable death, having entertained an opinion, by the preparations
he had seen in the place, that they were resolved to torment him with
some horrible execution, and seemed to be delivered from death in having
it changed from what he apprehended.

I should advise that those examples of severity by which ‘tis designed to
retain the people in their duty, might be exercised upon the dead bodies
of criminals; for to see them deprived of sepulture, to see them boiled
and divided into quarters, would almost work as much upon the vulgar, as
the pain they make the living endure; though that in effect be little or
nothing, as God himself says, “Who kill the body, and after that have no
more that they can do;”--[Luke, xii.  4.]--and the poets singularly
dwell upon the horrors of this picture, as something worse than death:

         “Heu! reliquias semiustas regis, denudatis ossibus,
          Per terram sanie delibutas foede divexarier.”

     [“Alas! that the half-burnt remains of the king, exposing his bones,
     should be foully dragged along the ground besmeared with gore.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 44.]

I happened to come by one day accidentally at Rome, just as they were
upon executing Catena, a notorious robber: he was strangled without any
emotion of the spectators, but when they came to cut him in quarters, the
hangman gave not a blow that the people did not follow with a doleful cry
and exclamation, as if every one had lent his sense of feeling to the
miserable carcase.  Those inhuman excesses ought to be exercised upon the
bark, and not upon the quick.  Artaxerxes, in almost a like case,
moderated the severity of the ancient laws of Persia, ordaining that the
nobility who had committed a fault, instead of being whipped, as they
were used to be, should be stripped only and their clothes whipped for
them; and that whereas they were wont to tear off their hair, they should
only take off their high-crowned tiara.’--[Plutarch, Notable Sayings of
the Ancient King.]--The so devout Egyptians thought they sufficiently
satisfied the divine justice by sacrificing hogs in effigy and
representation; a bold invention to pay God so essential a substance in
picture only and in show.

I live in a time wherein we abound in incredible examples of this vice,
through the licence of our civil wars; and we see nothing in ancient
histories more extreme than what we have proof of every day, but I
cannot, any the more, get used to it.  I could hardly persuade myself,
before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel
and fell, who, for the sole pleasure of murder, would commit it; would
hack and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent
unusual torments and new kinds of death, without hatred, without profit,
and for no other end but only to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the
gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries of a man dying in
anguish.  For this is the utmost point to which cruelty can arrive:

              “Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens,
               tantum spectaturus, occidat.”

     [“That a man should kill a man, not being angry, not in fear, only
     for the sake of the spectacle.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]

For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast
pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received
no offence at all; and that which frequently happens, that the stag we
hunt, finding himself weak and out of breath, and seeing no other remedy,
surrenders himself to us who pursue him, imploring mercy by his tears:

                        “Questuque cruentus,
                         Atque imploranti similis,”

          [“Who, bleeding, by his tears seems to crave mercy.”
           --AEnead, vii. 501.]

has ever been to me a very unpleasing sight; and I hardly ever take a
beast alive that I do not presently turn out again.  Pythagoras bought
them of fishermen and fowlers to do the same:

                    “Primoque a caede ferarum,
               Incaluisse puto maculatum sanguine ferrum.”


     [“I think ‘twas slaughter of wild beasts that first stained the
     steel of man with blood.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 106.]

Those natures that are sanguinary towards beasts discover a natural
proneness to cruelty.  After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to
spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the
slaughter of men, of gladiators.  Nature has herself, I fear, imprinted
in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity; nobody takes pleasure in seeing
beasts play with and caress one another, but every one is delighted with
seeing them dismember, and tear one another to pieces.  And that I may
not be laughed at for the sympathy I have with them, theology itself
enjoins us some favour in their behalf; and considering that one and the
same master has lodged us together in this palace for his service, and
that they, as well as we, are of his family, it has reason to enjoin us
some affection and regard to them.  Pythagoras borrowed the
metempsychosis from the Egyptians; but it has since been received by
several nations, and particularly by our Druids:

          “Morte carent animae; semperque, priore relicts
          Sede, novis domibus vivunt, habitantque receptae.”

     [“Souls never die, but, having left their former seat, live
     and are received into new homes.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 158.]

The religion of our ancient Gauls maintained that souls, being eternal,
never ceased to remove and shift their places from one body to another;
mixing moreover with this fancy some consideration of divine justice; for
according to the deportments of the soul, whilst it had been in
Alexander, they said that God assigned it another body to inhabit, more
or less painful, and proper for its condition:

                              “Muta ferarum
               Cogit vincla pati; truculentos ingerit ursis,
               Praedonesque lupis; fallaces vulpibus addit:
               Atque ubi per varios annos, per mille figuras

               Egit, Lethaeo purgatos flumine, tandem
               Rursus ad humanae revocat primordia formae:”

     [“He makes them wear the silent chains of brutes, the bloodthirsty
     souls he encloses in bears, the thieves in wolves, the deceivers in
     foxes; where, after successive years and a thousand forms, man had
     spent his life, and after purgation in Lethe’s flood, at last he
     restores them to the primordial human shapes.”
      --Claudian, In Ruf., ii. 482.]

If it had been valiant, he lodged it in the body of a lion; if
voluptuous, in that of a hog; if timorous, in that of a hart or hare; if
malicious, in that of a fox, and so of the rest, till having purified it
by this chastisement, it again entered into the body of some other man:

               “Ipse ego nam memini, Trojani, tempore belli
               Panthoides Euphorbus eram.”

     [“For I myself remember that, in the days of the Trojan war, I was
     Euphorbus, son of Pantheus.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 160; and see Diogenes
     Laertius, Life of Pythagoras.]

As to the relationship betwixt us and beasts, I do not much admit of it;
nor of that which several nations, and those among the most ancient and
most noble, have practised, who have not only received brutes into their
society and companionship, but have given them a rank infinitely above
themselves, esteeming them one while familiars and favourites of the
gods, and having them in more than human reverence and respect; others
acknowledged no other god or divinity than they:

          “Bellux a barbaris propter beneficium consecratae.”

     [“Beasts, out of opinion of some benefit received by them, were
     consecrated by barbarians”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 36.]


                              “Crocodilon adorat
               Pars haec; illa pavet saturam serpentibus ibin:
               Effigies sacri hic nitet aurea cercopitheci;
                              Hic piscem flumints, illic
               Oppida tota canem venerantur.”

     [“This place adores the crocodile; another dreads the ibis, feeder
     on serpents; here shines the golden image of the sacred ape; here
     men venerate the fish of the river; there whole towns worship a
     dog.”--Juvenal, xv. 2.]

And the very interpretation that Plutarch, gives to this error, which is
very well conceived, is advantageous to them: for he says that it was not
the cat or the ox, for example, that the Egyptians adored: but that they,
in those beasts, adored some image of the divine faculties; in this,
patience and utility: in that, vivacity, or, as with our neighbours the
Burgundians and all the Germans, impatience to see themselves shut up; by
which they represented liberty, which they loved and adored above all
other godlike attributes, and so of the rest.  But when, amongst the more
moderate opinions, I meet with arguments that endeavour to demonstrate
the near resemblance betwixt us and animals, how large a share they have
in our greatest privileges, and with how much probability they compare us
together, truly I abate a great deal of our presumption, and willingly
resign that imaginary sovereignty that is attributed to us over other
creatures.

But supposing all this were not true, there is nevertheless a certain
respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts that have life
and sense, but even to trees, and plants.  We owe justice to men, and
graciousness and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it;
there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.
Nor shall I be afraid to confess the tenderness of my nature so childish,
that I cannot well refuse to play with my dog, when he the most
unseasonably importunes me to do so.  The Turks have alms and hospitals
for beasts.  The Romans had public care to the nourishment of geese, by
whose vigilance their Capitol had been preserved.  The Athenians made a
decree that the mules and moyls which had served at the building of the
temple called Hecatompedon should be free and suffered to pasture at
their own choice, without hindrance.  The Agrigentines  had a common use
solemnly to inter the beasts they had a kindness for, as horses of some
rare quality, dogs, and useful birds, and even those that had only been
kept to divert their children; and the magnificence that was ordinary
with them in all other things, also particularly appeared in the
sumptuosity and numbers of monuments erected to this end, and which
remained in their beauty several ages after.  The Egyptians buried
wolves, bears, crocodiles, dogs, and cats in sacred places, embalmed
their bodies, and put on mourning at their death.  Cimon gave an
honourable sepulture to the mares with which he had three times gained
the prize of the course at the Olympic Games.  The ancient Xantippus
caused his dog to be interred on an eminence near the sea, which has ever
since retained the name, and Plutarch says, that he had a scruple about
selling for a small profit to the slaughterer an ox that had been long in
his service.



Chapter XII.  Apology For Raimond Sebond.

Learning is, indeed, a very great and a very material accomplishment;
and those who despise it sufficiently discover their own want of
understanding; but learning yet I do not prize it at the excessive rate
that some others do, as Herillus, the philosopher, for one, who therein
places the sovereign good, and maintained “That it was only in her to
render us wise and contented,” which I do not believe; no more than I
do what others have said, that learning is the mother of all virtue, and
that all vice proceeds from ignorance, which, if it be true, required
a very long interpretation. My house has long-been open to men of
knowledge, and is very well known to them; for my father, who governed
it fifty years and upwards, inflamed with the new ardour with which
Francis the First embraced letters, and brought them into esteem, with
great diligence and expense hunted after the acquaintance of learned
men, receiving them into his house as persons sacred, and that had some
particular inspiration of divine wisdom; collecting their sayings and
sentences as so many oracles, and with so much the greater reverence
and religion as he was the less able to judge of them; for he had no
knowledge of letters any more than his predecessors. For my part I love
them well, but I do not adore them. Amongst others, Peter Bunel, a man
of great reputation for knowledge in his time, having, with some others
of his sort, staid some days at Montaigne in my father’s company,
he presented him at his departure with a book, entitled _Theologia
naturalis; sive Liber Creaturarum, magistri Raimondi de Sebonde._ And as
the Italian and Spanish tongues were familiar to my father, and as this
book was written in a sort of jargon of Spanish with Latin terminations,
he hoped that, with a little help, he might be able to understand it,
and therefore recommended it to him for a very useful book, and proper
tor the time wherein he gave it to him; which was when the novel
doctrines of Luther began to be in vogue, and in many places to stagger
our ancient belief: wherein he was very well advised, wisely, in his own
reason, foreseeing that the beginning of this distemper would easily
run into an execrable atheism, for the vulgar, not having the faculty of
judging of things, suffering themselves to be carried away by chance and
appearance, after having once been inspired with the boldness to
despise and control those opinions which they had before had in extreme
reverence, such as those wherein their salvation is concerned, and
that some of the articles of their religion are brought into doubt and
dispute, they afterwards throw all other parts of their belief into the
same uncertainty, they having with them no other authority or foundation
than the others they had already discomposed; and shake off all the
impressions they had received from the authority of the laws, or the
reverence of the ancient customs, as a tyrannical yoke:


   Nam cupide eonculcatur nimis ante metutum;


   “For with most eagerness they spurn the law,
   By which they were before most kept in awe;”


resolving to admit nothing for the future to which they had not first
interposed their own decrees, and given their particular consent.

It happened that my father, a little before his death, having
accidentally found this book under a heap of other neglected papers,
commanded me to translate it for him into French. It is good too
translate such authors as this, where there is little but the matter
itself to express; but such wherein grace of language and elegance of
style are aimed at, are dangerous to attempt, especially when a man is
to turn them into a weaker idiom. It was a strange and a new undertaking
for me; but having by chance at that time nothing else to do, and not
being able to resist the command of the best father that ever was, I did
it as well as I could; and he was so well pleased with it as to order it
to be printed, which after his death was done.

I found the ideas of this author exceeding fine the contexture of his
work well followed, and his design full of piety; and because many
people take a delight to read it, and particularly the ladies, to whom
we owe the most service, I have often thought to assist them to clear
the book of two principal objections made to it. His design is bold and
daring, for he undertakes, by human and natural reasons, to establish
and make good, against the atheists, all the articles of the Christian
religion: wherein, to speak the truth, he is so firm and so successful
that I do not think it possible to do better upon that subject; nay, I
believe he has been equalled by none. This work seeming to me to be too
beautiful and too rich for an author whose name is so little known, and
of whom all that we know is that he was a Spaniard, practising physic at
Toulouse about two hundred years ago; I enquired of Adrian Turnebus, who
knew all things, what he thought of that book; who made answer, “That he
thought it was some abstract drawn from St. Thomas d’Aquin; for that, in
truth, his mind, so full of infinite erudition and admirable subtlety,
was alone capable of such thoughts.” Be this as it may, whoever was the
author and inventor (and ‘tis not reasonable, without greater certainty,
to deprive Sebond of that title), he was a man of great judgment and
most admirable parts.

The first thing they reprehend in his work is “That Christians are to
blame to repose their belief upon human reason, which is only conceived
by faith and the particular inspiration of divine grace.” In which
objection there appears to be something of zeal to piety, and therefore
we are to endeavour to satisfy those who put it forth with the greater
mildness and respect. This were a task more proper for a man well
read in divinity than for me, who know nothing of it; nevertheless, I
conceive that in a thing so divine, so high, and so far transcending
all human intelligence, as is that truth, with which it has pleased
the bounty of God to enlighten us, it is very necessary that he should
moreover lend us his assistance, as a very extraordinary favour and
privilege, to conceive and imprint it in our understanding. And I do
not believe that means purely human are in any sort capable of doing it:
for, if they were, so many rare and excellent souls, and so abundantly
furnished with natural force, in former ages, could not have failed,
by their reason, to arrive at this knowledge. ‘Tis faith alone that
livelily mind certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion;
but, withal, I do not say that it is not a worthy and very laudable
attempt to accommodate those natural and human utensils with which God
has endowed us to the service of our faith: it is not to be doubted but
that it is the most noble use we can put them to; and that there is not
a design in a Christian man more noble than to make it the aim and end
of all his studies to extend and amplify the truth of his belief. We do
not satisfy ourselves with serving God with our souls and understandings
only, we moreover owe and render him a corporal reverence, and apply our
limbs and motions, and external things to do him honour; we must here
do the same, and accompany our faith with all the reason we have, but
always with this reservation, not to fancy that it is upon us that
it depends, nor that our arguments and endeavours can arrive at so
supernatural and divine a knowledge. If it enters not into us by an
extraordinary infusion; if it enters not only by reason, but, moreover,
by human ways, it is not in us in its true dignity and splendour: and
yet, I am afraid, we only have it by this way.

If we hold upon God by the mediation of a lively faith; if we hold upon
God by him, and not by us; if we had a divine basis and foundation,
human occasions would not have the power to shake us as they do; our
fortress would not surrender to so weak a battery; the love of novelty,
the constraint of princes, the success of one party, and the rash and
fortuitous change of our opinions, would not have the power to stagger
and alter our belief: we should not then leave it to the mercy of every
new argument, nor abandon it to all the rhetoric in the world; we should
withstand the fury of these waves with an immovable and unyielding
constancy:


   As a great rock repels the rolling tides,

   That foam and bark about her marble sides,
   From its strong bulk


If we were but touched with this ray of divinity, it would appear
throughout; not only our words, but our works also, would carry
its brightness and lustre; whatever proceeded from us would be seen
illuminated with this noble light. We ought to be ashamed that, in all
the human sects, there never was any of the faction, that did not, in
some measure, conform his life and behaviour to it, whereas so divine
and heavenly an institution does only distinguish Christians by the
name! Will you see the proof of this? Compare our manners to those of a
Mahometan or Pagan, you will still find that we fall very

short; there, where, out of regard to the reputation and advantage of
our religion, we ought to shine in excellency at a vast distance beyond
all others: and that it should be said of us, “Are they so just, so
charitable, so good: Then they are Christians.” All other signs are
common to all religions; hope, trust, events, ceremonies, penance,

martyrs. The peculiar mark of our truth ought to be our virtue, as it
is also the most heavenly and difficult, and the most worthy product
of truth. For this our good St. Louis was in the right, who, when the
Tartar king, who was become Christian, designed to come to Lyons to kiss
the Pope’s feet, and there to be an eye-witness of the sanctity he hoped
to find in our manner, immediately diverted him from his purpose; for
fear lest our disorderly way of living should, on the contrary, put
him out of conceit with so holy a belief! And yet it happened quite
otherwise since to that other, who, going to Rome, to the same end, and
there seeing the dissoluteness of the prelates and people of that time,
settled himself so much the more firmly in our religion, considering
how great the force and divinity of it must necessarily be that could
maintain its dignity and splendour among so much corruption, and in so
vicious hands. If we had but one single grain of faith, we should remove
mountains from their places, saith the sacred Word; our actions, that
would then be directed and accompanied by the divinity, would not be
merely human, they would have in them something of miraculous, as well
as our belief: _Brevis est institutio vitæ honestæ beauæque, si
credos._ “Believe, and the way to happiness and virtue is a short one.”
 Some impose upon the world that they believe that which they do not;
others, more in number, make themselves believe that they believe, not
being able to penetrate into what it is to believe. We think it strange
if, in the civil war which, at this time, disorders our state, we see
events float and vary aller a common and ordinary manner; which is
because we bring nothing to it but our own. Justice, which is in one
party, is only there for ornament and palliation; it, is, indeed,
pretended, but ‘tis not there received, settled and espoused: it is
there, as in the mouth of an advocate, not as in the heart and affection
of the party. God owes his extraordinary assistance to faith and
religion; not to our passions. Men there are the conductors, and therein
serve themselves with religion, whereas it ought to be quite contrary.
Observe, if it be not by our own hands that we guide and train it, and
draw it like wax into so many contrary figures, from a rule in itself so
direct and firm. When and where was this more manifest than in France in
our days? They who have taken it on the left hand, they who have taken
it on the right; they who call it black, they who call it white, alike
employ it to their violent and ambitious designs, conduct it with
a progress, so conform in riot and injustice that they render the
diversity they pretended in their opinions, in a thing whereon the
conduct and rule of our life depends, doubtful and hard to believe. Did
one ever see, come from the same school and discipline, manners more
united, and more the same? Do but observe with what horrid impudence
we toss divine arguments to and fro, and how irreligiously we have both
rejected and retaken them, accord--as fortune has shifted our places in
these intestine storms.

This so solemn proposition, “Whether it be lawful for a subject to rebel
and take up arms against his prince for the defence of his religion,” do
you remember in whose mouths, the last year, the affirmative of it
was the prop of one party, and the negative the pillar of another? And
hearken now from what quarter comes the voice and instruction of the
one and the other, and if arms make less noise and rattle for this cause
than for that. We condemn those to the fire who say that truth must be
made to bear the yoke of our necessity; and how much worse does France
than say it? Let us confess the truth; whoever should draw out from the
army, even that raised by the king, those who take up arms out of pure
zeal to religion, and also those who only do it to protect the laws of
their country, or for the service of their prince, could hardly, out
of both these put together, make one complete company of gens-d’armes.
Whence does this proceed, that there are so few to be found who have
maintained the same will and the same progress in our civil commotions,
and that we see them one while move but a foot-pace, and another run
full speed? and the same men one while damage our affairs by their
violent heat and fierceness, and another by their coldness, gentleness,
and slowness; but that they are pushed on by particular and casual
considerations, according to the variety wherein they move?

I evidently perceive that we do not willingly afford devotion any other
offices but those that least suit with our own passions.

There hostility so admirable as the Christian. Our zeal performs
wonders, when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition,
avarice, detraction, and rebellion: but when it moves, against the hair,
towards bounty, benignity, and temperance, unless, by miracle, some
rare and virtuous disposition prompts us to it, we stir neither hand nor
toot. Our religion is intended to extirpate vices, whereas it screens,
nourishes, and incites them. We must not mock God. If we believed in
him, I do not say by faith, but with a simple belief, that is to say
(and I speak it to our great shame) if we believed in him and recognised
him as we do any other history, or as we would do one of our companions,
we should love him above all other things for the infinite bounty and
beauty that shines in him;--at least, he would go equal in our affection
with riches, pleasure, glory, and our friends. The best of us is not so
much afraid to outrage him as he is afraid to injure his neighbour, his
kinsman, or his master. Is there any understanding so weak that, having
on one side the object of one of our vicious pleasures, and on the other
(in equal knowledge and persuasion) the state of an immortal glory,
would change the first for the other? and yet we often renounce this out
of mere contempt: for what lust tempts us to blaspheme, if not, perhaps,
the very desire to offend. The philosopher Antisthenes, as he was being
initiated in the mysteries of Orpheus, the priest telling him, “That
those who professed themselves of that religion were certain to receive
perfect and eternal felicity after death,”--“If thou believest that,”
 answered he, “why dost thou not die thyself?” Diogenes, more rudely,
according to his manner, and more remote from our purpose, to the priest
that in like manner preached to him, “To become of his religion, that he
might obtain the happiness of the other world;--“What!” said he, “thou
wouldest have me to believe that Agesilaus and Epaminondas, who were so
great men, shall be miserable, and that thou, who art but a calf, and
canst do nothing to purpose, shalt be happy, because thou art a priest?”
 Did we receive these great promises of eternal beatitude with the same
reverence and respect that we do a philosophical discourse, we should
not have death in so great horror:


   Non jam se moriens dissolvi conqurreretur;
   Sed magis ire foras, stemque relinquere ut angais,
   Gauderet, prealonga senex aut cornua cervus.

   “We should not on a death bed grieve to be
   Dissolved, but rather launch out cheerfully
   From our old hut, and with the snake, be glad
   To cast off the corrupted slough we had;
   Or with th’ old stag rejoice to be now clear
   From the large horns, too ponderous grown to bear.”


“I desire to be dissolved,” we should say, “and to be with Jesus Christ”
 The force of Plato’s arguments concerning the immortality of the soul
set some of his disciples to seek a premature grave, that they might the
sooner enjoy the things he had made them hope for.

All this is a most evident sign that we only receive our religion
after our own fashion, by our own hands, and no otherwise than as other
religions are received. Either we are happened in the country where it
is in practice, or we reverence the antiquity of it, or the authority
of the men who have maintained it, or fear the menaces it fulminates
against misbelievers, or are allured by its promises. These
considerations ought, ‘tis true, to be applied to our belief but as
subsidiaries only, for they are human obligations. Another religion,
other witnesses, the like promises and threats, might, by the same way,
imprint a quite contrary belief. We are Christians by the same title
that we are Perigordians or Germans. And what Plato says, “That there
are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will
not reduce to an acknowledgment of the divine power,” does not concern
a true Christian: ‘tis for mortal and human religions to be received by
human recommendation. What kind of faith can that be that cowardice and
want of courage establish in us? A pleasant faith, that does not believe
what it believes but for want of courage to disbelieve it! Can a vicious
passion, such as inconstancy and astonishment, cause any regular product
in our souls? “They are confident in their judgment,” says he, “that
what is said of hell and future torments is all feigned: but an occasion
of making the expedient presenting itself, when old age or diseases
bring them to the brink of the grave, the terror of death, by the horror
of that future condition, inspires them with a new belief!” And by
reason that such impressions render them timorous, he forbids in his
_Laws_ all such threatening doctrines, and all persuasion that anything
of ill can befall a man from the gods, excepting for his great good when
they happen to him, and for a medicinal effect. They say of Bion that,
infected with the atheism of Theodoras, he had long had religious men in
great scorn and contempt, but that death surprising him, he gave
himself up to the most extreme superstition; as if the gods withdrew and
returned according to the necessities of Bion. Plato and these examples
would conclude that we are brought to a belief of God either by reason
or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous,
difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how
arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to
be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly
to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have,
nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet
will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give
them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness
has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will
easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled
to the public faith and examples. A doctrine seriously digested is one
thing, and those superficial impressions another; which springing from
the disorder of an unhinged understanding, float at random and great
uncertainty in the fancy. Miserable and senseless men, who strive to be
worse than they can!

The error of paganism and the ignorance of our sacred truth, let this
great soul of Plato, but great only in human greatness, fall also into
this other mistake, “That children and old men were most susceptible of
religion,” as if it sprung and derived its credit from our weakness.
The knot that ought to bind the judgment and the will, that ought to
restrain the soul and join it to our creator, should be a knot that
derives its foldings and strength not from our considerations, from our
reasons and passions, but from a divine and supernatural constraint,
having but one form, one face, and one lustre, which is the authority
of God and his divine grace. Now the heart and soul being governed and
commanded by faith, ‘tis but reason that they should muster all our
other faculties, according as they are able to perform to the service
and assistance of their design. Neither is it to be imagined that all
this machine has not some marks imprinted upon it by the hand of the
mighty architect, and that there is not in the things of this world
some image that in some measure resembles the workman who has built and
formed them. He has, in his stupendous works, left the character of his
divinity, and ‘tis our own weakness only that hinders us from discerning
it. ‘Tis what he himself is pleased to tell us, “That he manifests his
invisible operations to us by those that are visible.” Sebond applied
himself to this laudable and noble study, and demonstrates to us that
there is not any part or member of the world that disclaims or derogates
from its maker. It were to do wrong to the divine goodness, did not the
universe consent to our belief. The heavens, the earth, the elements,
our bodies and our souls,--all things concur to this; we have but to
find out the way to use them; they instruct us, if we are capable
of instruction. For this world is a sacred temple, into which man is
introduced, there to contemplate statues, not the works of a mortal
hand, but such as the divine purpose has made the objects of sense; the
sun, the stars, the water, and the earth, to represent those that are
intelligible to us. “The invisible tilings of God,” says St. Paul,
“appear by the creation of the world, his eternal wisdom and divinity
being considered by his works.”


   And God himself envies not men the grace
   Of seeing and admiring heaven’s face;
   But, rolling it about, he still anew
   Presents its varied splendour to our view,
   And on oar minds himself inculcates, so
   That we th’ Almighty mover well may know:
   Instructing us by seeing him the cause
   Of ill, to revcreoce and obey his laws.”


Now our prayers and human discourses are but as sterile and undigested
matter. The grace of God is the form; ‘tis that which gives fashion and
value to it. As the virtuous actions of Socrates and Cato remain vain
and fruitless, for not having had the love and obedience to the true
creator of all things, so is it with our imaginations and discourses;
they have a kind of body, but it is an inform mass, without fashion and
without light, if faith and grace be not added thereto. Faith coming to
tinct and illustrate Sehond’s arguments renders them firm and stolid;
and to that degree that they are capable of serving for directions, and
of being the first guides to an elementary Christian to put him into the
way of this knowledge. They in some measure form him to, and render him
capable of, the grace of God, by which means he afterwards completes and
perfects himself in the true belief. I know a man of authority, bred up
to letters, who has confessed to me to have been brought back from the
errors of unbelief by Sebond’s arguments. And should they be stripped of
this ornament, and of the assistance and approbation of the faith,
and be looked upon as mere fancies only, to contend with those who are
precipitated into the dreadful and horrible darkness of irréligion, they
will even there find them as solid and firm as any others of the same
quality that can be opposed against them; so that we shall be ready to
say to our opponents:


   Si melius quid habes, arcesse; vel imperium fer:

      “If you have arguments more fit.
   Produce them, or to these submit.”


let them admit the force of our reasons, or let them show us others,
and upon some other subject, better woven and of finer thread. I am,
unawares, half engaged in the second objection, to which I proposed to
make answer in the behalf of Sebond. Some say that his arguments are
weak, and unable to make good what he intends, and undertake with great
ease to confute them. These are to be a little more roughly handled, for
they are more dangerous and malicious than the first Men willingly wrest
the sayings of others to favour their own prejudicate opinions. To an
atheist all writings tend to atheisïm: he corrupts the most innocent
matter with his own venom. These have their judgments so prepossessed
that they cannot relish Sebond’s reasons. As to the rest, they think we
give them very fair play in putting them into the liberty of combatting
our religion with weapons merely human, whom, in her majesty, full of
authority and command, they durst not attack. The means that I shall
use, and that I think most proper to subdue this frenzy, is to crush and
spurn under foot pride and human arrogance; to make them sensible of
the inanity, vanity, and vileness of man; to wrest the wretched arms
of their reason out of their hands; to make them bow down and bite the
ground under the authority and reverence of the Divine Majesty. ‘Tis to
that alone that knowledge and wisdom appertain; that alone that can make
a true estimate of itself, and from which we purloin whatever we value
ourselves upon: [--Greek--] “God permits not any being but himself to be
truly wise.” Let us subdue this presumption, the first foundation of the
tyranny of the evil spirit _Deus superbis re-sistit, humilibus autem
dal gratiam._ “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
 “Understanding is in the gods,” says Plato, “and not at all, or very
little, in men.” Now it is in the mean time a great consolation to a
Christian man to see our frail and mortal parts so fitly suited to our
holy and divine faith that, when we employ them to the subjects of their
own mortal and frail nature they are not even there more unitedly or
more firmly adjusted. Let us see, then, if man has in his power other
more forcible and convincing reasons than those of Sebond; that is to
say, if it be in him to arrive at any certainty by argument and reason.
For St. Augustin, disputing against these people, has good cause to
reproach them with injustice, “In that they maintain the part of our
belief to be false that our reason cannot establish.” And to show that
a great many things may be, and have been, of which our nature could
not sound the reason and causes, he proposes to them certain known and
undoubted experiments, wherein men confess they see nothing; and this he
does, as all other things, with a curious and ingenious inquisition.
We must do more than this, and make them know that, to convince the
weakness of their reason, there is no necessity of culling out uncommon
examples: and that it is so defective and so blind that there is no
faculty clear enough for it; that to it the easy and the hard are all
one; that all subjects equally, and nature in general, disclaim its
authority and reject its mediation.

What does truth mean when she preaches to us to fly worldly philosophy,
when she so often inculcates to us, “That our wisdom is but folly in the
sight of God: that the vainest of all vanities is man: that the man who
presumes upon his wisdom does not yet know what wisdom is; and that man,
who is nothing, if he thinks himself to be anything, does seduce and
deceive himself.” These sentences of the Holy Spirit do so clearly and
vividly express that which I would maintain that I should need no other
proof against men who would with all humility and obedience submit to
his authority: but these will be whipped at their own expense, and will
not suffer a man to oppose their reason but by itself.

Let us then, for once, consider a man alone, without foreign assistance,
armed only with his own proper arms, and unfurnished of the divine grace
and wisdom, which is all his honour, strength, and the foundation of his
being. Let us see how he stands in this fine equipage. Let him make me
understand, by the force of his reason, upon what foundations he has
built those great advantages he thinks he has over other creatures. Who
has made him believe that this admirable motion of the celestial arch,
the eternal light of those luminaries that roll so high over his head,
the wondrous and fearful motions of that infinite ocean, should be
established and continue so many ages for his service and convenience?
Can any thing be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and
wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject
to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of
the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less
to command the whole? And the privilege which he attributes to himself
of being the only creature in this vast fabric who has the understanding
to discover the beauty and the paris of it; the only one who can
return thanks to the architect, and keep account of the revenues and
disbursements of the world; who, I wonder, sealed him this patent? Let
us see his commission for this great employment Was it granted in favour
of the wise only? Few people will be concerned in it. Are fools and
wicked persons worthy so extraordinary a favour, and, being the worst
part of the world, to be preferred before the rest? Shall we believe
this man?--“For whose sake shall we, therefore, conclude that the world
was made? For theirs who have the use of reason: these are gods and men,
than whom certainly nothing can be better:” we can never sufficiently
decry the impudence of this conjunction. But, wretched creature,
what has he in himself worthy of such an advantage? Considering the
incorruptible existence of the celestial bodies; beauty; magnitude, and
continual revolution by so exact a rule;


      Cum suspicimus mæni cælestia mundi
   Templa super, stellisque micantibus arthera fiium,
   El venit in mcntem lunæ solisque viarurn.

      “When we the heavenly arch above behold.
   And the vast sky adorned with stars of gold.
   And mark the r’eglar course? that the sun
   And moon in their alternate progress run.”


considering the dominion and influence those bodies have, not only over
our lives and fortunes;


   Facta etenim et vitas hominum suspendit ab aatris;

   “Men’s lives and actions on the stars depend.”


but even over our inclinations, our thoughts and wills, which they
govern, incite and agitate at the mercy of their influences, as our
reason teaches us;


      “Contemplating the stars he finds that they
   Rule by a secret and a silent sway;
   And that the enamell’d spheres which roll above
   Do ever by alternate causes move.
   And, studying these, he can also foresee,
   By certain signs, the turns of destiny;”


seeing that not only a man, not only kings, but that monarchies,
empires, and all this lower world follow the influence of the celestial
motions,


      “How great a change a little motion brings!
   So great this kingdom is that governs kings:”


if our virtue, our vices, our knowledge, and this very discourse we are
upon of the power of the stars, and the comparison we are making betwixt
them and us, proceed, as our reason supposes, from their favour;


      “One mad in love may cross the raging main,
   To level lofty Ilium with the plain;
   Another’s fate inclines him more by far
   To study laws and statutes for the bar.
   Sons kill their father, fathers kill their sons,
   And one arm’d brother ‘gainst another runs..
   This war’s not their’s, but fate’s, that spurs them on
   To shed the blood which, shed, they must bemoan;
   And I ascribe it to the will of fate
   That on this theme I now expatiate:”


if we derive this little portion of reason we have from the bounty of
heaven, how is it possible that reason should ever make us equal to it?
How subject its essence and condition to our knowledge? Whatever we see
in those bodies astonishes us: _Quæ molitio, qua ferramenta, qui vectes,
quæ machina, qui ministri tanti operis fuerunt?_ “What contrivance, what
tools, what materials, what engines, were employed about so stupendous
a work?” Why do we deprive them of soul, of life, and discourse? Have we
discovered in them any immoveable or insensible stupidity, we who
have no commerce with them but by obedience? Shall we say that we have
discovered in no other creature but man the use of a reasonable soul?
What! have we seen any thing like the sun? Does he cease to be, because
we have seen nothing like him? And do his motions cease, because there
are no other like them? If what we have not seen is not, our knowledge
is marvellously contracted: _Quæ sunt tantæ animi angustiæ!_ “How narrow
are our understandings!” Are they not dreams of human vanity, to make
the moon a celestial earth? there to fancy mountains and vales, as
Anaxagoras did? there to fix habitations and human abodes, and plant
colonies for our convenience, as Plato and Plutarch have done? And of
our earth to make a luminous and resplendent star? “Amongst the
other inconveniences of mortality this is one, that darkness of the
understanding which leads men astray, not so much from a necessity of
erring, but from a love of error. The corruptible body stupifies
the soul, and the earthly habitation dulls the faculties of the
imagination.”

Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and
frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and
sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and
rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest
story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals
of the worst condition of the three; and yet in his imagination will be
placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the heavens
under his feet. ‘Tis by the same vanity of imagination that he equals
himself to God, attributes to himself divine qualities, withdraws and
separates himself from the the crowd of other creatures, cuts out the
shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and distributes to
them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit How does
he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal
motions of animals?--from what comparison betwixt them and us does he
conclude the stupidity he attributes to them? When I play with my cat
who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We
mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin
or to refusç, she also has hers. Plato, in his picture of the golden age
under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had,
his communication with beasts, of whom, inquiring and informing himself,
he knew the true qualities and differences of them all, by which he
acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence, and led his life
more happily than we could do. Need we a better proof to condemn human
impudence in the concern of beasts? This great author was of opinion
that nature, for the most part in the corporal form she gave them, had
only regard to the use of prognostics that were derived thence in his
time. The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may
it not be in our part as well as theirs? ‘Tis yet to determine where the
fault lies that we understand not one another,--for we understand them
no more than they do us; and by the same reason they may think us to be
beasts as we think them. ‘Tis no great wonder if we understand not them,
when we do not understand a Basque or a Troglodyte. And yet some have
boasted that they understood them, as Apollonius Tyanaus, Melampus,
Tiresias, Thales, and others. And seeing, as cusmographers report, that
there are nations that have a dog for their king, they must of necessity
be able to interpret his voice and motions. We must observe the parity
betwixt us, have some tolerable apprehension of their meaning, and so
have beasts of ours,--much about the same. They caress us, threaten us,
and beg of us, and we do the same to them.

As to the rest, we manifestly discover that they have a full and
absolute communication amongst themselves, and that they perfectly
understand one another, not only those of the same, but of divers kinds:


      “The tamer herds, and wilder sort of brutes.
   Though we of higher race conclude them mutes.
   Yet utter dissonant and various notes,
   From gentler lungs or more distended throats,
   As fear, or grief, or anger, do them move,
   Or as they do approach the joys of love.”


In one kind of barking of a dog the horse knows there is anger, of
another sort of bark he is not afraid. Even in the very beasts that
have no voice at all, we easily conclude, from the society of offices
we observe amongst them, some other sort of communication: their very
motions discover it:


      “As infants who, for want of words, devise
   Expressive motions with their hands and eyes.”


And why not, as well as our dumb people, dispute, argue, and tell
stories by signs? Of whom I have seen some, by practice, so clever and
active that way that, in fact, they wanted nothing of the perfection
of making themselves understood. Lovers are angry, reconciled, intreat,
thank, appoint, and, in short, speak all things by their eyes:


      “Even silence in a lover
   Love and passion can discover.”


What with the hands? We require, promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray,
supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, number, confess, repent,
fear, express confusion, doubt, instruct, command, incite, encourage,
swear, testify, accuse, condemn, absolve, abuse, despise, defy, provoke,
flatter, applaud, bless, submit, mock, reconcile, recommend, exalt,
entertain, congratulate, complain, grieve, despair, wonder, exclaim, and
what not! And all this with a variety and multiplication, even emulating
speech. With the head we invite, remand, confess, deny, give the lie,
welcome, honour, reverence, disdain, demand, rejoice, lament, reject,
caress, rebuke, submit, huff, encourage, threaten, assure, and inquire.
What with the eyebrows?--what with the shoulders! There is not a motion
that does not speak, and in an intelligible language without discipline,
and a public language that every one understands: whence it should
follow, the variety and use distinguished from others considered, that
these should rather be judged the property of human nature. I omit
what necessity particularly does suddenly suggest to those who are in
need;--the alphabets upon the fingers, grammars in gesture, and the
sciences which are only by them exercised and expressed; and the nations
that Pliny reports have no other language. An ambassador of the city of
Abdera, after a long conference with Agis, King of Sparta, demanded of
him, “Well, sir, what answer must I return to my fellow-citizens?” “That
I have given thee leave,” said he, “to say what thou wouldest, and as
much as thou wouldest, without ever speaking a word.” is not this a
silent speaking, and very easy to be understood?

As to the rest, what is there in us that we do not see in the operations
of animals? Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better
distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that
of bees? Can we imagine that such, and so regular, a distribution of
employments can be carried on without reasoning and deliberation?


      “Hence to the bee some sages have assign’d
   Some portion of the god and heavenly wind.”


The swallows that we see at the return of the spring, searching all the
corners of our houses for the most commodious places wherein to build
their nest; do they seek without judgment, and amongst a thousand choose
out the most proper for their purpose, without discretion? And in that
elegant and admirable contexture of their buildings, can birds rather
make choice of a square figure than a round, of an obtuse than of a
right angle, without knowing their properties and effects? Do they bring
water, and then clay, without knowing that the hardness of the latter
grows softer by being wetted? Do they mat their palace with moss or down
without foreseeing that their tender young will lie more safe and easy?
Do they secure themselves from the wet and rainy winds, and place their
lodgings against the east, without knowing the different qualities of
the winds, and considering that one is more wholesome than another?
Why does the spider make her web tighter in one place, and slacker in
another; why now make one sort of knot, and then another, if she has not
deliberation, thought, and conclusion? We sufficiently discover in most
of their works how much animals excel us, and how unable our art is to
imitate them. We see, nevertheless, in our rougher performances, that we
employ all our faculties, and apply the utmost power of our souls; why
do we not conclude the same of them?

Why should we attribute to I know not what natural and servile
inclination the works that excel all we can do by nature and art?
wherein, without being aware, we give them a mighty advantage over us
in making nature, with maternal gentleness and love, accompany and learn
them, as it were, by the hand to all the actions and commodities of
their life, whilst she leaves us to chance and fortune, and to seek out
by art the things that are necessary to our conservation, at the same
time denying us the means of being able, by any instruction or effort of
understanding, to arrive at the natural sufficiency of beasts; so that
their brutish stupidity surpasses, in all conveniences, all that our
divine intelligence can do. Really, at this rate, we might with great
reason call her an unjust stepmother: but it is nothing so, our polity
is not so irregular and unformed.

Nature has universally cared for all her creatures, and there is not
one she has not amply furnished with all means necessary for the
conservation of its being. For the common complaints I hear men make (as
the license of their opinions one while lifts them up above the clouds,
and then again depresses them to the antipodes), that we are the only
animal abandoned naked upon the bare earth, tied and bound, not having
wherewithal to arm and clothe us but by the spoil of others; whereas
nature has covered all other creatures either with shells, husks,
bark, hair, wool, prickles, leather, down, feathers, scales, or silk,
according to the necessities of their being; has armed them with talons,
teeth, or horns, wherewith to assault and defend, and has herself taught
them that which is most proper for them, to swim, to run, to fly, and
sing, whereas man neither knows how to walk, speak, eat, or do any thing
but weep, without teaching;


      “Like to the wretched mariner, when toss’d
   By raging seas upon the desert coast,
   The tender babe lies naked on the earth,
   Of all supports of life stript by his birth;
   When nature first presents him to the day,
   Freed from the cell wherein before he lay,
   He fills the ambient air with doleful cries.
   Foretelling thus life’s future miseries;
   But beasts, both wild and tame, greater and less,
   Do of themselves in strength and bulk increase;
   They need no rattle, nor the broken chat,
   Ay which the nurse first teaches boys to prate
   They look not out for different robes to wear,
   According to the seasons of the year;
   And need no arms nor walls their goods to save,
   Since earth and liberal nature ever have,
   And will, in all abundance, still produce
   All things whereof they can have need or use:”


these complaints are false; there is in the polity of the world a
greater equality and more uniform relation. Our skins are as sufficient
to defend us from the injuries of the weather as theirs are; witness
several nations that yet know not the use of clothes. Our ancient Gauls
were but slenderly clad, any more than the Irish, our neighbours, though
in so cold a climate; but we may better judge of this by ourselves: for
all those parts that we are pleased to expose to the air are found very
able to endure it: the face, the feet, the hands, the arms, the head,
according to the various habit; if there be a tender part about us,
and that would seem to be in danger from cold, it should be the stomach
where the digestion is; and yet our forefathers were there always
open, and our ladies, as tender and delicate as they are, go sometimes
half-bare as low as the navel. Neither is the binding or swathing of
infants any more necessary; and the Lacedæmoman mothers brought theirs
in all liberty of motion of members, without any ligature at all. Our
crying is common with the greatest part of other animals, and there are
but few creatures that are not observed to groan, and bemoan themselves
a long time after they come into the world; forasmuch as it is a
behaviour suitable to the weakness wherein they find themselves. As
to the custom of eating, it is in us, as in them, natural, and without
instruction;


      “For every one soon finds his natural force.
   Which he, or better may employ, or worse.”


Who doubts but an infant, arrived to the strength of feeding himself,
may make shift to find something to eat And the earth produces and
offers him wherewithal to supply his necessity, without other culture
and artifice; and if not at all times, no more does she do it to beasts,
witness the provision we see ants and other creatures hoard up against
the dead seasons of the year. The late discovered nations, so abundantly
furnished with natural meat and drink, without care, or without cookery,
may give us to understand that bread is not our only food, and that,
without tillage, our mother nature has provided us sufficiently of all
we stand in need of: nay, it appears more fully and plentifully than she
does at present, now that we have added our own industry:


      “The earth did first spontaneously afford
   Choice fruits and wines to furnish out the board;
   With herbs and flow’rs unsown in verdant fields.
   But scarce by art so good a harvest yields;
   Though men and oxen mutually have strove,
   With all their utmost force the soil t’ improve,”


the debauchery and irregularity of our appetites outstrips all the
inventions we can contrive to satisfy it.

As to arms, we have more natural ones than than most other animals more
various motions of limbs, and naturally and without lesson extract more
service from them. Those that are trained to fight naked are seen
to throw themselves into the like hazards that we do. If some beasts
surpass us in this advantage, we surpass many others. And the industry
of fortifying the body, and covering it by acquired means, we have by
instinct and natural precept? That it is so, the elephant shows
who sharpen, and whets the teeth he makes use of in war (for he has
particular ones for that service, which he spares, and never employs
them at all to any other use); when bulls go to fight, they toss and
throw the dust about them; boars whet their tusks; and the ichneumon,
when he is about to engage with the crocodile, fortifies his body,
and covers and crusts it all over with close-wrought and well-tempered
slime, as with a cuirass. Why shall we not say that it is also natural
for us to arm ourselves with wood and iron?

As to speech, it is certain that if it be not natural it is not
necessary. Nevertheless I believe that a child which had been brought up
in an absolute solitude, remote from all society of men (which would
be an experiment very hard to make), would have some kind of speech to
express his meaning by. And ‘tis not to be supposed that nature should
have denied that to us which she has given to several other animals:
for what is this faculty we observe in them, of complaining, rejoicing,
calling to one another for succour, and inviting each other to love,
which they do with the voice, other than speech? And why should they
not speak to one another? They speak to us, and we to them. In how many
several sorts of ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer us?
We converse with them in another sort of language, and use other
appellations, than we do with birds, hogs, oxen, horses, and alter the
idiom according to the kind.


      “Thus from one swarm of ants some sally out.
   To spy another’s stock or mark its rout.”


Lactantius seems to attribute to beasts not only speech, but laughter
also. And the difference of language which is seen amongst us, according
to the difference of countries, is also observed in animals of the
same kind. Aristotle, in proof of this, instances the Various calls of
partridges, according to the situation of places:


      “And various birds do from their warbling throats
   At various times, utter quite different notes,
   And some their hoarse songs with the seasons change.”


But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and of
that what is said by guess has no great appearance. If a man will allege
to me, in opposition to this opinion, that those who are naturally deaf
speak not, I answer that this is not only because they could not receive
the instruction of speaking by ear, but rather because the sense of
hearing, of which they are deprived, relates to that of speaking, and
that these hold together by a natural and inseparable tie, in such
manner that what we speak we must first speak to ourselves within, and
make it sound in our own ears, before we can utter it to others.

All this I have said to prove the resemblance there is in human things,
and to bring us back and join us to the crowd. We are neither above nor
below the rest All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and
one fortune:


      “All things remain
   Bound and entangled in one fatal chain.”


There is, indeed, some difference,--there are several orders and
degrees; but it is under the aspect of one and the same nature:


      “All things by their own rites proceed, and draw
   Towards their ends, by nature’s certain law.”


Man must be compelled and restrained within the bounds of this polity.
Miserable creature! he is not in a condition really to step over the
rail. He is fettered and circumscribed, he is subjected to the same
necessity that the other creatures of his rank and order are, and of
a very mean condition, without any prerogative of true and real
pre-eminence. That which he attributes to himself, by vain fancy and
opinion, has neither body nor taste. And if it be so, that he only, of
all the animals, has this liberty of imagination and irregularity of
thoughts, representing to him that which is, that which is not, and that
he would have, the false and the true, ‘tis an advantage dearly bought,
and of which he has very little reason to be proud; for thence springs
the principal and original fountain of all the evils that befal
him,--sin, sickness, irresolution, affliction, despair. I say, then,
to return to my subject, that there is no appearance to induce a man to
believe that beasts should, by a natural and forced inclination, do the
same things that we do by our choice and industry. We ought from like
effects to conclude like faculties, and from greater effects greater
faculties; and consequently confess that the same reasoning, and the
same ways by which we operate, are common with them, or that they have
others that are better. Why should we imagine this natural constraint in
them, who experience no such effect in ourselves? added that it is more
honourable to be guided and obliged to act regularly by a natural and
inevitable condition, and nearer allied to the divinity, than to act
regularly by a temerarious and fortuitous liberty, and more safe to
entrust the reins of our conduct in the hands of nature than our
own. The vanity of our presumption makes us prefer rather to owe our
sufficiency to our own exertions than to her bounty, and to enrich the
other animals with natural goods, and abjure them in their favour,
in order to honour and ennoble ourselves with goods acquired, very
foolishly in my opinion; for I should as much value parts and virtues
naturally and purely my own as those I had begged and obtained from
education. It is not in our power to obtain a nobler reputation than to
be favoured of God and nature.

For instance, take the fox, the people of Thrace make use of when they
wish to pass over the ice of some frozen river, and turn him out before
them to that purpose; when we see him lay his ear upon the bank of
the river, down to the ice, to listen if from a more remote or nearer
distance he can hear the noise of the waters’ current, and, according as
he finds by that the ice to be of a less or greater thickness, to retire
or advance,--have we not reason to believe thence that the same rational
thoughts passed through his head that we should have upon the like
occasions; and that it is a ratiocination and consequence, drawn from
natural sense, that that which makes a noise runs, that which runs
is not frozen, what is not frozen is liquid, and that which is liquid
yields to impression! For to attribute this to a mere quickness of the
sense of hearing, without reason and consequence, is a chimæra that
cannot enter into the imagination. We are to suppose the same of
the many sorts of subtleties and inventions with which beasts secure
themselves from, and frustrate, the enterprizes we plot against them.

And if we will make an advantage even of this, that it is in our power
to seize them, to employ them in our service, and to use them at our
pleasure, ‘tis still but the same advantage we have over one another. We
have our slaves upon these terms: the Climacidæ, were they not women
in Syria who, squat on all fours, served for a ladder or footstool, by
which the ladies mounted their coaches? And the greatest part of free
persons surrender, for very trivial conveniences, their life and being
into the power of another. The wives and concubines of the Thracians
contended who should be chosen to be slain upon their husband’s tomb.
Have tyrants ever failed of finding men enough vowed to their devotion?
some of them moreover adding this necessity, of accompanying them in
death as well as life? Whole armies have bound themselves after this
manner to their captains. The form of the oath in the rude school of
gladiators was in these words: “We swear to suffer ourselves to be
chained, burnt, wounded, and killed with the sword, and to endure all
that true gladiators suffer from their master, religiously engaging both
body and soul in his service.”


      Uire meum, si vis, flamma caput, et pete ferro
   Corpus, et iutorto verbere terga seca.

      “Wound me with steel, or burn my head with fire.
   Or scourge my shoulders with well-twisted wire.”


This was an obligation indeed, and yet there, in one year, ten thousand
entered into it, to their destruction. When the Scythians interred their
king they strangled upon his body the most beloved of his concubines,
his cup-bearer, the master of his horse, his chamberlain, the usher of
his chamber, and his cook. And upon the anniversary thereof they killed
fifty horses, mounted by fifty pages, that they had impaled all up the
spine of the back to the throat, and there left them fixed in triumph
about his tomb. The men that serve us do it cheaper, and for a less
careful and favourable usage than what we treat our hawks, horses and
dogs withal. To what solicitude do we not submit for the conveniences of
these? I do not think that servants of the most abject condition would
willingly do that for their masters that princes think it an honour to
do for their beasts. Diogenes seeing his relations solicitous to redeem,
him from servitude: “They are fools,” said he; “‘tis he that keeps and
nourishes me that in reality serves me.” And they who entertain beasts
ought rather to be said to serve them, than to be served by them. And
withal in this these have something more generous in that one lion
never submitted to another lion, nor one horse to another, for want of
courage. As we go to the chase of beasts, so do tigers and lions to
the chase of men, and do the same execution upon one another; dogs upon
hares, pikes upon tench, swallows upon grass-hoppers, and sparrow-hawks
upon blackbirds and larks:


      “The stork with snakes and lizards from the wood
   And pathless wilds supports her callow brood,
   While Jove’s own eagle, bird of noble blood,
   Scours the wide country for undaunted food;
   Sweeps the swift hare or swifter fawn away,
   And feeds her nestlings with the generous prey.”


We divide the quarry, as well as the pains and labour of the chase, with
our hawks and hounds. And about Amphipolis, in Thrace, the hawkers and
wild falcons equally divide the prey in the half. As also along the lake
Mæotis, if the fisherman does not honestly leave the wolves an equal
share of what he has caught, they presently go and tear his nets in
pieces. And as we have a way of sporting that is carried on more by
subtlety than force, as springing hares, and angling with line and hook,
there is also the like amongst other animals. Aristotle says that the
cuttle-fish casts a gut out of her throat as long as a line, which she
extends and draws back at pleasure; and as she perceives some little
fish approach her she lets it nibble upon the end of this gut, lying
herself concealed in the sand or mud, and by little and little draws it
in, till the little fish is so near her that at one spring she may catch
it.

As to strength, there is no creature in the world exposed to so many
injuries as man. We need not a whale, elephant, or a crocodile, nor any
such-like animals, of which one alone is sufficient to dispatch a great
number of men, to do our business; lice are sufficient to vacate Sylla’s
dictatorship; and the heart and life of a great and triumphant emperor
is the breakfast of a little contemptible worm!

Why should we say that it is only for man, or knowledge built up by
art and meditation, to distinguish the things useful for his being, and
proper for the cure of his diseases, and those which are not; to know
the virtues of rhubarb and polypody. When we see the goats of Candia,
when wounded with an arrow, among a million of plants choose out
dittany for their cure; and the tortoise, when she has eaten a viper,
immediately go out to look for origanum to purge her; the dragon to rub
and clear his eyes with fennel; the storks to give themselves clysters
of sea-water; the elephants to draw not only out of their own bodies,
and those of their companions, but out of the bodies of their masters
too (witness the elephant of King Porus whom Alexander defeated), the
darts and javelins thrown at them in battle, and that so dexterously
that we ourselves could not do it with so little pain to the
patient;--why do we not say here also that this is knowledge and reason?
For to allege, to their disparagement, that ‘tis by the sole instruction
and dictate of nature that they know all this, is not to take from them
the dignity of knowledge and reason, but with greater force to attribute
it to them than to us, for the honour of so infallible a mistress.
Chrysippus, though in other things as scornful a judge of the condition
of animals as any other philosopher whatever, considering the motions of
a dog, who coming to a place where three ways met, either to hunt after
his master he has lost, or in pursuit of some game that flies before
him, goes snuffing first in one of the ways, and then in another, and,
after having made himself sure of two, without finding the trace of
what he seeks, dashes into the third without examination, is forced to
confess that this reasoning is in the dog: “I have traced my master to
this place; he must of necessity be gone one of these three ways; he is
not gone this way nor that, he must then infallibly be gone this other;”
 and that assuring himself by this conclusion, he makes no use of his
nose in the third way, nor ever lays it to the ground, but suffers
himself to be carried on there bv the force of reason. This sally,
purely logical, and this use of propositions divided and conjoined, and
the right enumeration of parts, is it not every whit as good that the
dog knows all this of himself as well as from Trapezuntius?

Animals are not incapable, however, of being instructed after our
method. We teach blackbirds, ravens, pies, and parrots, to speak: and
the facility wherewith we see they lend us their voices, and render both
them and their breath so supple and pliant, to be formed and confined
within a certain number of letters and syllables, does evince that they
have a reason within, which renders them so docile and willing to learn.
Everybody, I believe, is glutted with the several sorts of tricks that
tumblers teach their dogs; the dances, where they do not miss any one
cadence of the sound they hear; the several various motions and leaps
they make them perform by the command of a word. But I observe this
effect with the greatest admiration, which nevertheless is very common,
in the dogs that lead the blind, both in the country and in cities: I
have taken notice how they stop at certain doors, where they are wont
to receive alms; how they avoid the encounter of coaches and carts, even
there where they have sufficient room to pass; I have seen them, by the
trench of a town, forsake a plain and even path and take a worse, only
to keep their masters further from the ditch;--how could a man have
made this dog understand that it was his office to look to his master’s
safely only, and to despise his own conveniency to serve him? And how
had he the knowledge that a way was wide enough for him that was not so
for a blind man? Can all this be apprehended without ratiocination!

I must not omit what Plutarch says he saw of a dog at Rome with the
Emperor Vespasian, the father, at the theatre of Marcellus. This dog
served a player, that played a farce of several parts and personages,
and had therein his part. He had, amongst other things, to counterfeit
himself for some time dead, by reason of a certain drug he was supposed
to eat After he had swallowed a piece of bread, which passed for the
drug, he began after awhile to tremble and stagger, as if he was taken
giddy: at last, stretching himself out stiff, as if dead, he suffered
himself to be drawn and dragged from place to place, as it was his part
to do; and afterward, when he knew it to be time, he began first gently
to stir, as if awaking out of a profound sleep, and lifting up his head
looked about him after such a manner as astonished all the spectators.

The oxen that served in the royal gardens of Susa, to water them, and
turn certain great wheels to draw water for that purpose, to which
buckets were fastened (such as there are many in Languedoc), being
ordered every one to draw a hundred turns a day, they were so accustomed
to this number that it was impossible by any force to make them draw one
turn more; but, their task being performed, they would suddenly stop and
stand still. We are almost men before we can count a hundred, and have
lately discovered nations that have no knowledge of numbers at all.

There is more understanding required in the teaching of’ others than in
being taught. Now, setting aside what Democritus held and proved, “That
most of the arts we have were taught us by other animals,” as by the
spider to weave and sew; by the swallow to build; by the swan and
nightingale music; and by several animals to make medicines:--Aristotle
is of opinion “That the nightingales teach their young ones to sing, and
spend a great deal of time and care in it;” whence it happens that those
we bring up in cages, and which have not had the time to learn of their
parents, want much of the grace of their singing: we may judge by this
that they improve by discipline and study; and, even amongst the wild,
it is not all and every one alike--every one has learnt to do better
or worse, according to their capacity. And so jealous are they one of
another, whilst learning, that they contention with emulation, and by
so vigorous a contention that sometimes the vanquished fall dead upon the
place, the breath rather failing than the voice. The younger ruminate
pensively and begin to mutter some broken notes; the disciple listens
to the master’s lesson, and gives the best account he is able; they
are silent oy turns; one may hear faults corrected and observe some
reprehensions of the teacher. “Ï have formerly seen,” says Arrian, “an
elephant having a cymbal hung at each leg, and another fastened to his
trunk, at the sound of which all the others danced round about him,
rising and bending at certain cadences, as they were guided by
the instrument; and ‘twas delightful to hear this harmony.” In the
spectacles of Rome there were ordinarily seen elephants taught to move
and dance to the sound of the voice, dances wherein were several changes
and cadences very hard to learn. And some have been known so intent upon
their lesson as privately to practice it by themselves, that they might
not be chidden nor beaten by their masters.

But this other story of the pie, of which we have Plutarch himself for a
warrant, is very strange. She lived in a barber’s shop at Rome, and did
wonders in imitating with her voice whatever she heard. It happened one
day that certain trumpeters stood a good while sounding before the
shop. After that, and all the next day, the pie was pensive, dumb, and
melancholic; which every body wondered at, and thought the noise of the
trumpets had so stupified and astonished her that her voice was
gone with her hearing. But they found at last that it was a profound
meditation and a retiring into herself, her thoughts exercising and
preparing her voice to imitate the sound of those trumpets, so that the
first voice she uttered was perfectly to imitate their strains, stops,
and changes; having by this new lesson quitted and taken in disdain all
she had learned before.

I will not omit this other example of a dog, also, which the same
Plutarch (I am sadly confounding all order, but I do not propose
arrangement here any more than elsewhere throughout my book) which
Plutarch says he saw on board a ship. This dog being puzzled how to get
the oil that was in the bottom of a jar, which he could not reach with
his tongue by reason of the narrow mouth of the vessel, went and fetched
stones and let them fall into the jar till he made the oil rise so high
that he could reach it. What is this but an effect of a very subtle
capacity! ‘Tis said that the ravens of Barbary do the same, when the
water they would drink is too low. This action is somewhat akin to what
Juba, a king of their nation relates of the elephants: “That when, by
the craft of the hunter, one of them is trapped in certain deep pits
prepared for them, and covered over with brush to deceive them, all the
rest, in great diligence, bring a great many stones and logs of wood to
raise the bottom so that he may get out.” But this animal, in
several other effects, comes so near to human capacity that, should I
particularly relate all that experience hath delivered to us, I should
easily have what I usually maintain granted: namely, that there is more
difference betwixt such and such a man than betwixt such a beast and
such a man. The keeper of an elephant in a private house of Syria robbed
him every meal of the half of his allowance. One day his master would
himself feed him, and poured the full measure of barley he had ordered
for his allowance into his manger which the elephant, casting an angry
look at the keeper, with his trunk separated the one-half from the
other, and thrust it aside, by that declaring the wrong was done him.
And another, having a keeper that mixed stones with his corn to make
up the measure, came to the pot where he was boiling meat for his own
dinner, and filled it with ashes. These are particular effects: but that
which all the world has seen, and all the world knows, that in all the
armies of the Levant one of the greatest force consisted in elephants,
with whom they did, without comparison, much greater execution than we
now do with our artillery; which takes, pretty nearly, their place in
a day of battle (as may easily be supposed by such as are well read in
ancient history);


      “The sires of these huge animals were wont
   The Carthaginian Hannibal to mount;
   Our leaders also did these beasts bestride,
   And mounted thus Pyrrhus his foes defied;
   Nay, more, upon their backs they used to bear
   Castles with armed cohorts to the war.”


They must necessarily have very confidently relied upon the fidelity and
understanding of these beasts when they entrusted them with the vanguard
of a battle, where the least stop they should have made, by reason of
the bulk and heaviness of their bodies, and the least fright that should
have made them face about upon their own people, had been enough to
spoil all: and there are but few examples where it has happened that
they have fallen foul upon their own troops, whereas we ourselves break
into our own battalions and rout one another. They had the charge not of
one simple movement only, but of many several things to be performed in
the battle: as the Spaniards did to their dogs in their new conquest of
the Indies, to whom they gave pay and allowed them a share in the spoil;
and those animals showed as much dexterity and judgment in pursuing the
victory and stopping the pursuit; in charging and retiring, as occasion
required; and in distinguishing their friends from their enemies, as
they did ardour and fierceness.

We more admire and value things that are unusual and strange than those
of ordinary observation. I had not else so long insisted upon these
examples: for I believe whoever shall strictly observe what we
ordinarily see in those animals we have amongst us may there find as
wonderful effects as those we seek in remote countries and ages. ‘Tis
one and the same nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has
sufficiently considered the present state of things, might certainly
conclude as to both the future ana the past. I have formerly seen men,
brought hither by sea from very distant countries, whose language not
being understood by us, and moreover their mien, countenance, and habit,
being quite differing from ours; which of us did not repute them savages
and brutes! Who did not attribute it to stupidity and want of common
sense to see them mute, ignorant of the French tongue, ignorant of our
salutations and cringes, our port and behaviour, from which all human
nature must by all means take its pattern and example. All that seems
strange to us, and that we do not understand, we condemn. The same
thing happens also in the judgments we make of beasts. They have several
conditions like to ours; from those we may, by comparison, draw some
conjecture: but by those qualities that are particular to themselves,
what know we what to make of them! The horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, birds,
and most of the animals that live amongst us, know our voices, and
suffer themselves to be governed by them: so did Crassus’s lamprey, and
came when he called it; as also do the eels that are found in the Lake
Arethusa; and I have seen several ponds where the fishes come to eat at
a certain call of those who use to feed them.


      “They every one have names, and one and all
   Straightway appear at their own master’s call:”


We may judge of that. We may also say that the elephants have some
participation of religion forasmuch as after several washings and
purifications they are observed to lift up their trunk like arms,
and, fixing their eyes towards the rising of the sun, continue long in
meditation and contemplation, at certain hours of the days, of their
own motion; without instruction or precept But because we do not see any
such signs in other animals, we cannot for that conclude that they are
without religion, nor make any judgment of what is concealed from us. As
we discern something in this action which the philosopher Cleanthes
took notice of, because it something resembles our own. He saw, he says,
“Ants go from their ant-hill, carrying the dead body of an ant towards
another ant-hill, whence several other ants came out to meet them, as if
to speak with them; where, after having been a while together, the last
returned to consult, you may suppose, with their fellow-citizens, and so
made two or three journeys, by reason of the difficulty of capitulation.
In the conclusion, the last comers brought the first a worm out of their
burrow, as it were for the ransom of the defunct, which the first laid
upon their backs and carried home, leaving the dead body to the others.”
 This was the interpretation that Cleanthes gave of this transaction,
giving us by that to understand that those creatures that have no voice
are not, nevertheless, without intercourse and mutual communication,
whereof ‘tis through our own defect that we do not participate; and for
that reason foolishly take upon us to pass our censure. But they yet
produce either effects far beyond our capacity, to which we are so far
from being able to arrive by imitation that we cannot so much as by
imitation conceive it. Many are of opinion that in the great and last
naval engagement that Antony lost to Augustus, his admiral galley was
stayed in the middle of her course by the little fish the Latins call
_remora_, by reason of the property she has of staying all sorts of
vessels to which she fastens herself. And the Emperor Caligula, sailing
with a great navy upon the coast of Romania, his galley only was
suddenly stayed by the same fish, which, he caused to be taken, fastened
as it was to the keel of his ship, very angry that such a little animal
could resist both the sea, the wind, and the force of all his oars, by
being only fastened by the beak to his galley (for it is a shell-fish);
and was moreover, not without great reason, astonished that, being
brought to him in the vessel, it had no longer the strength it had
without. A citizen of Cyzicus formerly acquired the reputation of a good
mathematician for having learnt the quality of the hedge-hog: he has his
burrow open in divers places, and to several winds, and, foreseeing the
wind that is to come, stops the hole on that side, which that citizen
observing, gave the city certain predictions of the wind which was
presently to blow. The caméléon takes her colour from the place upon
which she is laid; but the polypus gives himself what colour he pleases,
according to occasion, either to conceal himself from what he fears, or
from what he has a design to seize: in the caméléon ‘tis a passive, but
in the polypus ‘tis an active, change. We have some changes of
colour, as in fear, anger, shame, and other passions, that alter our
complexions; but it is by the effect of suffering, as with the caméléon.
It is in the power of the jaundice, indeed, to make us turn yellow,
but ‘tis not in the power of our own will. Now these effects that we
discover in other animals, much greater than ours, seem to imply some
more excellent faculty in them unknown to us; as ‘tis to be presumed
there are several other qualities and abilities of theirs, of which no
appearances have arrived at us.

Amongst all the predictions of elder times, the most ancient and the
most certain were those taken from the flight of birds; we have nothing
certain like it, nor any thing to be so much admired. That rule and
order of the moving of the wing, whence they derived the consequences of
future things, must of necessity be guided by some excellent means to
so noble an operation: for to attribute this great effect to any natural
disposition, without the intelligence, consent, and meditation of him by
whom it is produced, is an opinion evidently false. That it is so, the
cramp-fish has this quality, not only to benumb all the members that
touch her, but even through the nets transmit a heavy dulness into the
hands of those that move and handle them; nay, it is further said that
if one pour water upon her, he will feel this numbness mount up the
water to the hand, and stupefy the feeling through the water. This is a
miraculous force; but ‘tis not useless to the cramp-fish; she knows it,
and makes use on’t; for, to catch the prey she desires, she will bury
herself in the mud, that other fishes swimming over her, struck and
benumbed with this coldness of hers, may fall into her power. Cranes,
swallows, and other birds of passage, by shifting their abode according
to the seasons, sufficiently manifest the knowledge they have of their
divining faculty, and put it in use. Huntsmen assure us that to cull out
from amongst a great many puppies that which ought to be preserved as
the best, the best way is to refer the choice to the mother; as thus,
take them and carry them out of the kennel, and the first she brings
back will certainly be the best; or if you make a show as if you would
environ the kennel with fire, that one she first catches up to save. By
which it appears they have a sort of prognostic which we have not; or
that they have some virtue in judging of their whelps other and more
certain than we have.

The manner of coming into the world, of engendering, nourishing, acting,
moving, living and dying of beasts, is so near to ours that whatever we
retrench from their moving causes, and add to our own condition above
theirs, can by no means proceed from any meditation of our own reason.
For the regimen of our health, physicians propose to us the example of
the beasts’ manners and way of living; for this saying (out of Plutarch)
has in all times been in the mouth of these people: “Keep warm thy feet
and head, as to the rest, live like a beast.”

The chief of all natural actions is generation; we have a certain
disposition of members which is the most proper for us to that end;
nevertheless, we are ordered by Lucretius to conform to the gesture and
posture of the brutes as the most effectual:--


      More ferarum,
   Quadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur
   Concipere uxores:
   Quia sic loca sumere possunt,
   Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis;


and the same authority condemns, as hurtful, those indiscreet and
impudent motions which the women have added of their own invention, to
whom it proposes the more temperate and modest pattern and practice of
the beasts of their own sex:--


      Nam mulier prohibet se concipere atque répugnât,
   Clunibus ipsa viri Venerem si læta retractet,
   Atque exossato ciet omni pectore fluctua.
   Ejicit enim sulci recta regione viaque
   Vomerem, atque locis avertit seminis ictum.


If it be justice to render to every one their due, the beasts that
serve, love, and defend their benefactors, and that pursue and fall upon
strangers and those who offend them, do in this represent a certain air
of our justice; as also in observing a very equitable equality in the
distribution of what they have to their young. And as to friendship,
they have it without comparison more lively and constant than men have.
King Lysimachus’s dog, Hyrcanus, master being dead, lay on his bed,
obstinately refusing either to eat or drink; and, the day that his
body was burnt, he took a run and leaped into the fire, where he was
consumed, As also did the dog of one Pyrrhus, for he would not stir from
off his master’s bed from the time he died; and when they carried him
away let himself be carried with him, and at last leaped into the pile
where they burnt his master’s body. There are inclinations of affection
which sometimes spring in us, without the consultation of reason; and by
a fortuitous temerity, which others call sympathy; of which beasts
are as capable as we. We see horses take such an acquaintance with
one another that we have much ado to make them eat or travel, when
separated; we observe them to fancy a particular colour in those of
their own kind, and, where they meet it, run to it with great joy and
demonstrations of good will, and have a dislike and hatred for some
other colour. Animals have choice, as well as we, in their amours, and
cull out their mistresses; neither are they exempt from our jealousies
and implacable malice.

Desires are either natural and necessary, as to eat and drink; or
natural and not necessary, as the coupling with females; or neither
natural nor necessary; of which last sort are almost all the desires of
men; they are all superfluous and artificial. For ‘tis marvellous how
little will satisfy nature, how little she has left us to desire; our
ragouts and kickshaws are not of her ordering. The Stoics say that a man
may live on an olive a day. The delicacy of our wines is no part of her
instruction, nor the refinements we introduce into the indulgence of our
amorous appetites:--


      Neque ilia
   Magno prognatum deposcit consule cunnum.

      “Nature, in her pursuit of love, disclaims
   The pride of titles, and the pomp of names.”


These irregular desires, that the ignorance of good and a false opinion
have infused into us, are so many that they almost exclude all the
natural; just as if there were so great a number of strangers in the
city as to thrust out the natural inhabitants, or, usurping upon their
ancient rights and privileges, should extinguish their authority and
introduce new laws and customs of their own. Animals are much more
regular than we, and keep themselves with greater moderation within the
limits nature has prescribed; but yet not so exactly that they have not
sometimes an analogy with our debauches. And as there have been furious
desires that have impelled men to the love of beasts, so there have been
examples of beasts that have fallen in love with us, and been seized
with monstrous affection betwixt kinds; witness the elephant who was
rival to Aristophanes the grammarian in the love of a young herb-wench
in the city of Alexandria, who was nothing behind him in all the offices
of a very passionate suitor; for going through the market where they
sold fruit, he would take some in his trunk and carry them to her.
He would as much as possible keep her always in his sight, and would
sometimes put his trunk under her handkerchief into her bosom, to feel
her breasts. They tell also of a dragon in love with a girl, and of a
goose enamoured of a child; of a ram that was suitor to the minstrelless
Glaucia, in the town of Asopus; and we see not unfrequently baboons
furiously in love with women. We see also certain male animals that
are fond of the males of their own kind. Oppian and others give us some
examples of the reverence that beasts have to their kindred in their
copulations; but experience often shows us the contrary:--


      Nec habetur turpe juvencæ
   Ferre patrem tergo; fit equo sua filia conjux;
   Quasque creavit, init pecudes caper; ipsaque cujus
   Semine concepta est, ex illo concipit ales.

      “The heifer thinks it not a shame to take
   Her lusty sire upon her willing back:
   The horse his daughter leaps, goats scruple not
   T’ increase the herd by those they have begot;
   And birds of all sorts do in common live,
   And by the seed they have conceived conceive.”


And for subtle cunning, can there be a more pregnant example than in the
philosopher Thales’s mule? who, fording a river, laden with salt, and
by accident stumbling there, so that the sacks he carried were all wet,
perceiving that by the melting of the salt his burden was something
lighter, he never failed, so oft as he came to any river, to lie down
with his load; till his master, discovering the knavery, ordered that he
should be laden with wood? wherein, finding himself mistaken, he ceased
to practise that device. There are several that very vividly represent
the true image of our avarice; for we see them infinitely solicitus to
get all they can, and hide it with that exceeding great care, though
they never make any use of it at all. As to thrift, they surpass us not
only in the foresight and laying up, and saving for the time to come,
but they have, moreover, a great deal of the science necessary thereto.
The ants bring abroad into the sun their grain and seed to air, refresh
and dry them when they perceive them to mould and grow musty, lest they
should decay and rot. But the caution and prevention they use in gnawing
their grains of wheat surpass all imagination of human prudence; for by
reason that the wheat does not always continue sound and dry, but grows
soft, thaws and dissolves as if it were steeped in milk, whilst hasting
to germination; for fear lest it should shoot and lose the nature and
property of a magazine for their subsistence, they nibble off the end by
which it should shoot and sprout.

As to what concerns war, which is the greatest and most magnificent of
human actions, I would very fain know whether we would use it for an
argument of some prerogative or, on contrary, for a testimony of our
weakness and imperfection; as, in truth, the science of undoing and
killing one another, and of ruining and destroying our own kind, has
nothing in it so tempting as to make it be coveted by beasts who have it
not.


      Quando leoni Fortior eripuit vitam leo? quo nemore unquam
   Expiravit aper majoris dentibus apri?

      “No lion drinks a weaker lion’s gore,
   No boar expires beneath a stronger boar.”


Yet are they not universally exempt; witness the furious encounters of
bees, and the enterprises of the princes of the contrary armies:--


      Sæpe duobus Regibus incessit magno discordia motu;
   Continuoque animos vulgi et trepidantia bello
   Gorda licet longé præsciscere.

      “But if contending factions arm the hive,
   When rival kings in doubtful battle strive,
   Tumultuous crowds the dread event prepare,
   And palpitating hearts that beat to war.”


I never read this divine description but that, methinks, I there see
human folly and vanity represented in their true and lively colours. For
these warlike movements, that so ravish us with their astounding noise
and horror, this rattle of guns, drums, and cries,


      Fulgur ibi ad coelum se tollit, totaque circum
   Ære renidescit tellus, subterque virûm vi
   Excitur pedibus sonitus, clamoreque montes
   Icti rejectant voces ad sidera mundi;

      “When burnish’d arms to heaven dart their rays,
   And many a steely beam i’ th’ sunlight plays,
   When trampled is the earth by horse and man,
   Until the very centre groans again,
   And that the rocks, struck by the various cries,
   Reverberate the sound unto the skies;”


in the dreadful embattling of so many thousands of armed men, and so
great fury, ardour, and courage, ‘tis pleasant to consider by what idle
occasions they are excited, and by how light ones appeased:--


      Paridis propter narratur amorem
   Greciæ Barbariæ diro collisa duello:

      “Of wanton Paris the illicit love
   Did Greece and Troy to ten years’ warfare move:”


all Asia was ruined and destroyed for the lust of Paris; the envy of
one single man, a despite, a pleasure, a domestic jealousy, causes that
ought not to set two oyster-wenches by the ears, is the mover of all
this mighty bustle. Shall we believe those very men who are themselves
the principal authors of these mischiefs? Let us then hear the greatest,
the most powerful, the most victorious emperor that ever was, turning
into a jest, very pleasantly and ingeniously, several battles fought
both by sea and land, the blood and lives of five hundred thousand men
that followed his fortune, and the strength and riches of two parts of
the world drained for the expense of his expeditions:--


      Quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam
   Fulvia constituit, se quoqne uti futuam.
   Fulviam ego ut futuam! quid, si me Manius oret
   Podicem, faciam? Non puto, si sapiam.
   Aut futue, aut pugnemus, ait
   Quid, si mihi vitii
   Charior est ipsâ mentula? Signa canant.

      Qui? moi, que je serve Fulvie!
   Sufflt-il quelle en ait envie?
   A ce compte, on verrait se retirer von moi
   Mille épouses mal satisfaites.
   Aime-moi, me dit elle, ou combattons. Mais quoi?
   Elle est bien laide! Allons, sonnes trompettes.

       ‘Cause Anthony is fired with Glaphire’s charms
   Fain would his Fulvia tempt me to her arms.
   If Anthony be false, what then? must I
   Be slave to Fulvia’s lustful tyranny?
   Then would a thousand wanton, waspish wives,


(I use my Latin with the liberty of conscience you are pleased to allow
me.) Now this great body, with so many fronts, and so many motions,
which seems to threaten heaven and earth:--


      Quam multi Lybico volvuntur marmore fluctus,
   Sævus ubi Orion hibemis conditur undis,
   Vel quam solo novo densæ torrentur Aristæ,
   Aut Hermi campo, aut Lyciæ flaventibus arvis;
   Scuta sonant, pulsuque pedum tremit excita tellus:

      “Not thicker billows beat the Lybian main,
   When pale Orion sits in wintry rain;
   Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise,
   Or Lycian fields, when Phobus burns the skies,
   Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around;
   Their trampling turns the turf and shakes the solid ground:”


this furious monster, with so many heads and arms, is yet man--feeble,
calamitous, and miserable man! ‘Tis but an ant-hill disturbed and
provoked:--


   It nigrum campis agmen:

   “The black troop marches to the field:”


a contrary blast, the croaking of a flight of ravens, the stumble of
a horse, the casual passage of an eagle, a dream, a voice, a sign, a
morning mist, are any one of them sufficient to beat down and overturn
him. Dart but a sunbeam in his face, he is melted and vanished. Blow
but a little dust in his eyes, as our poet says of the bees, and all our
ensigns and legions, with the great Pompey himself at the head of them,
are routed and crushed to pieces; for it was he, as I take it, that
Sertorious beat in Spain with those fine arms, which also served Eumenes
against Antigonus, and Surena against Crassus:--


      “Swarm to my bed like bees into their hives.
   Declare for love, or war, she said; and frown’d:
   No love I’ll grant: to arms bid trumpets sound.”


      Hi motus animorum, atque hoc certamina tanta,
   Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent.

      “Yet at thy will these dreadful conflicts cease,
   Throw but a little dust and all is peace.”


Let us but slip our flies after them, and they will have the force and
courage to defeat them. Of fresh memory, the Portuguese having besieged
the city of Tamly, in the territory of Xiatine, the inhabitants of the
place brought a great many hives, of which are great plenty in that
place, upon the wall; and with fire drove the bees so furiously upon the
enemy that they gave over the enterprise, not being able to stand their
attacks and endure their stings; and so the citizens, by this new sort
of relief, gained liberty and the victory with so wonderful a fortune,
that at the return of their defenders from the battle they found they
had not lost so much as one. The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast
in the same mould; the weight and importance of the actions of princes
considered, we persuade ourselves that they must be produced by some as
weighty and important causes; but we are deceived; for they are pushed
on, and pulled back in their motions, by the same springs that we are
in our little undertakings. The same reason that makes us wrangle with
a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes; the same reason that makes us
whip a lackey, falling into the hands of a king makes him ruin a whole
province. They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more.
In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.

As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man.
Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made
after the murderers of their masters. King Pyrrhus observing a dog that
watched a dead man’s body, and understanding that he had for three
days together performed that office, commanded that the body should be
buried, and took the dog along with him. One day, as he was at a general
muster of his army, this dog, seeing his master’s murderers, with great
barking and extreme signs of anger flew upon them, and by this first
accusation awakened the revenge of this murder, which was soon after
perfected by form of justice. As much was done by the dog of the wise
Hesiod, who convicted the sons of Ganictor of Naupactus of the murder
committed on the person of his master. Another dog being to guard a
temple at Athens, having spied a sacrilegious thief carrying away
the finest jewels, fell to barking at him with all his force, but the
warders not awaking at the noise, he followed him, and day being broke,
kept off at a little distance, without losing sight of him; if he
offered him any thing to eat he would not take it, but would wag his
tail at all the passengers he met, and took whatever they gave him; and
if the thief laid down to sleep, he likewise stayed upon the same place.
The news of this dog being come to the warders of the temple they put
themselves upon the pursuit, inquiring of the colour of the dog, and
at last found him in the city of Cromyon, and the thief also, whom they
brought back to Athens, where he got his reward; and the judges, in
consideration of this good office, ordered a certain measure of corn
for the dog’s daily sustenance, at the public charge, and the priests to
take care of it. Plutarch delivers this story for a certain truth, and
that it happened in the age wherein he lived.

As to gratitude (for I think we need bring this word into a little
repute), this one example, which Apion reports himself to have been an
eye-witness of, shall suffice.

“One day,” says he, “at Rome, they entertained the people with the sight
of the fighting of several strange beasts, and principally of lions
of an unusual size; there was one amongst the rest who, by his furious
deportment, by the strength and largeness of his limbs, and by his loud
and dreadful roaring, attracted the eyes of all the spectators. Amongst
other slaves that were presented to the people in this combat of beasts
there was one Androdus, of Dacia, belonging to a Roman lord of consular
dignity. This lion having seen him at a distance first made a sudden
stop, as it were in a wondering posture, and then softly approached
nearer in a gentle and peaceable manner, as if it were to enter into
acquaintance with him. This being done, and being now assured of what he
sought for, he began to wag his tail, as dogs do when they flatter their
masters, and to kiss and lick the hands and thighs of the poor wretch,
who was beside himself, and almost dead with fear. Androdus being by
this kindness of the lion a little come to himself, and having taken so
much heart as to consider and know him, it was a singular pleasure to
see the joy and caresses that passed betwixt them. At which the people
breaking into loud acclamations of joy, the emperor caused the slave
to be called, to know from him the cause of so strange an event; who
thereupon told him a new and a very strange story: “My master,” said
he, “being pro-consul in Africa, I was constrained, by his severity and
cruel usage, being daily beaten, to steal from him and run away; and,
to hide myself secretly from a person of so great authority in the
province, I thought it my best way to fly to the solitudes, sands, and
uninhabitable parts of that country, resolving that in case the means of
supporting life should chance to fail me, to make some shift or other
to kill myself. The sun being excessively hot at noon, and the heat
intolerable, I lit upon a private and almost inaccessible cave, and went
into it Soon after there came in to me this lion, with one foot wounded
and bloody, complaining and groaning with the pain he endured. At his
coming I was exceeding afraid; but he having spied me hid in the comer
of his den, came gently to me, holding out and showing me his wounded
foot, as if he demanded my assistance in his distress. I then drew out
a great splinter he had got there, and, growing a little more familiar
with him, squeezing the wound thrust out the matter, dirt, and gravel
which was got into it, and wiped and cleansed it the best I could. He,
finding himself something better, and much eased of his pain, laid him
down to rest, and presently fell asleep with his foot in my hand. From
that time forward he and I lived together in this cave three whole years
upon one and the same diet; for of the beasts that he killed in hunting
he always brought me the best pieces, which I roasted in the sun for
want of fire, and so ate it. At last, growing weary of this wild
and brutish life, the lion being one day gone abroad to hunt for our
ordinary provision, I departed thence, and the third day after was taken
by the soldiers, who brought me from Africa to this city to my master,
who presently condemned me to die, and to be thus exposed to the wild
beasts. Now, by what I see, this lion was also taken soon after, who has
now sought to recompense me for the benefit and cure that he received
at my hands.” This is the story that Androdus told the emperor, which he
also conveyed from hand to hand to the people; wherefore, at the general
request, he was absolved from his sentence and set at liberty, and the
lion was, by order of the people, presented to him. “We afterwards saw,”
 says Apion, “Androdus leading this lion, in nothing but a small leash,
from tavern to tavern at Rome, and receiving what money every body would
give him, the lion being so gentle as to suffer himself to be covered
with the flowers that the people threw upon him, every one that met him
saying, ‘There goes the lion that entertained the man; there goes the
man that cured the lion.’”

We often lament the loss of beasts we love, and so do they the loss of
us:--


      Post, bellator equus, positis insignibus, Æthon
   It lacrymans, guttisque humectât grandibus ora.

      “To close the pomp, Æthon, the steed of state.
   Is led, the fun’ral of his lord to wait.
   Stripped of his trappings, with a sullen pace
   He walks, and the big tears run rolling down his face.”


As some nations have their wives in common, and some others have every
one his own, is not the same seen among beasts, and marriages better
kept than ours? As to the society and confederation they make
amongst themselves, to league together and to give one another mutual
assistance, is it not known that oxen, hogs, and other animals, at the
cry of any of their kind that we offend, all the herd run to his aid
and embody for his defence? The fish Scarus, when he has swallowed the
angler’s hook, his fellows all crowd about him and gnaw the line in
pieces; and if, by chance, one be got into the bow net, the others
present him their tails on the outside, which he holding fast with his
teeth, they after that manner disengage and draw him out.

Mullets, when one of their companions is engaged, cross the line over
their back, and, with a fin they have there, indented like a saw, cut
and saw it asunder. As to the particular offices that we receive from
one another for the service of life, there are several like examples
amongst them. ‘Tis said that the whale never moves that she has not
always before her a little fish like the sea-gudgeon, for this reason
called the guide-fish, whom the whale follows, suffering himself to be
led and turned with as great facility as the rudder guides the ship; in
recompense of which service also, whereas all the other things, whether
beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s
mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, this little fish retires
into it in great security, and there sleeps, during which time the whale
never stirs; but so soon as ever it goes out he immediately follows
it; and if by accident he loses the sight of his little guide, he goes
wandering here and there, and strikes his sides against the rocks like a
ship that has lost her helm; which Plutarch affirms to have seen in
the island of Anticyra. There is a like society betwixt the little bird
called the wren and the crocodile. The wren serves for a sentinel over
this great animal; and if the ichneumon, his mortal enemy, approach
to fight him, this little bird, for fear lest he should surprise him
asleep, both with his voice and bill rouses him and gives him notice
of his danger. He feeds of this monster’s leavings, who receives him
familiarly into his mouth, suffering him to peck in his jaws and betwixt
his teeth, and thence to pick out the bits of flesh that remain; and
when he has a mind to shut his mouth, he first gives the bird warning to
go out by closing it by little and little, and without bruising or doing
it any harm at all. The shell-fish called the naker, lives in the same
intelligence with the shrimp, a little sort of animal of the lobster
kind, which serves him in the nature of a porter, sitting at the opening
of the shell, which the naker keeps always gaping and open till the
shrimp sees some little fish, proper for their prey, within the hollow
of the shell, where she enters too, and pinches the naker so to the
quick that she is forced to close her shell, where they two together
devour the prey they have trapped in their fort. In the manner of living
of the tunnies we observe a singular knowledge of the three parts of
mathematics. As to astrology, they teach it men, for they stay in the
place where they are surprised by the brumal solstice, and never
stir thence till the next equinox; for which reason Aristotle himself
attributes to them this science. As to geometry and arithmetic, they
always form their numbers in the figure of a cube, every way square, and
make up the body of a battalion, solid, close, and environed round
with six equal sides, and swim in this square order, as large behind
as before; so that whoever in seeing them can count one rank may
easily number the whole troop, by reason that the depth is equal to the
breadth, and the breadth to the length.

As to magnanimity, it will be hard to exhibit a better instance of it
than in the example of the great dog sent to Alexander the Great from
the Indies. They first brought him a stag to encounter, next a boar, and
after that a bear, all which he slighted, and disdained to stir from
his place; but when he saw a lion he then immediately roused himself,
evidently manifesting that he declared that alone worthy to enter the
lists with him. Touching repentance and the acknowledgment of faults,
‘tis reported of an elephant that, having in the impetuosity of his rage
killed his keeper, he fell into so extreme a sorrow that he would never
after eat, but starved himself to death. And as to clemency, ‘tis said
of a tiger, the most cruel of all beasts, that a kid having been put
in to him, he suffered a two days’ hunger rather than hurt it, and the
third broke the grate he was shut up in, to seek elsewhere for prey; so
unwilling he was to fall upon the kid, his familiar and his guest, And
as to the laws of familiarity and agreement, formed by conversation,
it ordinarily happens that we bring up cats, dogs, and hares, tame
together.

But that which seamen by experience know, and particularly in the
Sicilian Sea, of the quality of the halcyons, surpasses all human
thought of what kind of animal has nature even so much honoured the
birth? The poets indeed say that one only island, Delos, which was
before a floating island, was fixed for the service of Latona’s
lying-in; but God has ordered that the whole ocean should be stayed,
made stable and smooth, without waves, without winds or rain, whilst
the halcyon produces her young, which is just about the solstice, the
shortest day of the year; so that by her privilege we have seven days
and seven nights in the very heart of winter wherein we may sail without
danger. Their females never have to do with any other male but their
own, whom they serve and assist all their lives, without ever forsaking
him. If he becomes weak and broken with age, they take him upon their
shoulders and carry him from place to place, and serve him till death.
But the most inquisitive into the secrets of nature could never yet
arrive at the knowledge of the wonderful fabric wherewith the halcyon
builds her nest for her little ones, nor guess at the materials.
Plutarch, who has seen and handled many of them, thinks it is the bones
of some fish which she joins and binds together, interlacing them, some
lengthwise and others across, and adding ribs and hoops in such manner
that she forms at last a round vessel fit to launch; which being done,
and the building finished, she carries it to the beach, where the sea
beating gently against it shows where she is to mend what is not well
jointed and knit, and where better to fortify the seams that are leaky,
that open at the beating of the waves; and, on the contrary, what is
well built and has had the due finishing, the beating of the waves does
so close and bind together that it is not to be broken or cracked by
blows either of stone or iron without very much ado. And that which is
more to be admired is the proportion and figure of the cavity within,
which is composed and proportioned after such a manner as not to receive
or admit any other thing than the bird that built it; for to any thing
else it is so impenetrable, close, and shut, nothing can enter, not so
much as the water of the sea. This is a very dear description of this
building, and borrowed from a very good hand; and yet me-thinks it does
not give us sufficient light into the difficulty of this architecture.
Now from what vanity can it proceed to despise and look down upon,
and disdainfully to interpret, effects that we can neither imitate nor
comprehend?

To pursue a little further this equality and correspondence betwixt us
and beasts, the privilege our soul so much glorifies herself upon, of
things she conceives to her own law, of striping all things that come
to her of their mortal and corporeal qualities, of ordering and
placing things she conceives worthy her taking notice of, stripping and
divesting them of their corruptible qualities, and making them to
lay aside length, breadth, depth, weight, colour, smell, roughness,
smoothness, hardness, softness, and all sensible accidents, as mean
and superfluous vestments, to accommodate them to her own immortal and
spiritual condition; as Rome and Paris, for example, that I have in
my fancy, Paris that I imagine, I imagine and comprehend it without
greatness and without place, without stone, without plaster, and without
wood; this very same privilege, I say, seems evidently to be in beasts;
for a courser accustomed to trumpets, to musket-shots, and battles, whom
we see start and tremble in his sleep and stretched upon his litter,
as if he were in a fight; it is almost certain that he conceives in
his soul the beat of a drum without noise, and an army without arms and
without body:--


      Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt
   In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque sæpe,
   Et quasi de palmâ summas contendere vires:

      “You shall see maneg’d horses in their sleep
   Sweat, snort, start, tremble, and a clutter keep,
   As if with all their force they striving were
   The victor’s palm proudly away to bear:”


the hare, that a greyhound imagines in his sleep, after which we see
him pant so whilst he sleeps, stretch out his tail, shake his legs, and
perfectly represents all the motions of a course, is a hare without fur
and without bones:--


      Venantumque canes in molli sæpe quiete
   Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente
   Mittunt, et crebras reducunt naribus auras,
   Ut vestigia si teneant inventa ferarum:
   Expergefætique sequuntur inania sæpe
   Cervorum simulacra, fagæ quasi dedita cernant;
   Donee discussis redeant erroribus ad se:

      “And hounds stir often in their quiet rest,
   Spending their mouths, as if upon a quest,
   Snuff, and breathe quick and short, as if they went
   In a full chase upon a burning scent:
   Nay, being wak’d, imagin’d stags pursue,
   As if they had them in their real view,
   Till, having shook themselves more broad awake,
   They do at last discover the mistake:”


the watch-dogs, that we often observe to snarl in their dreams, and
afterwards bark out, and start up as if they perceived some stranger
at hand; the stranger that their soul discerns is a man spiritual and
imperceptible, without dimension, without colour, and without being:--


      Consueta domi catulorum blanda propago
   Degere, sæpe levem ex oculis volucremque soporem
   Discutere, et corpus de terra corripere instant,
   Proinde quasi ignotas facies atque ora tuantur.

      “The fawning whelps of household curs will rise,
   And, shaking the soft slumber from their eyes,
   Oft bark and stare at ev’ry one within,
   As upon faces they had never seen.”


to the beauty of the body, before I proceed any further I should know
whether or no we are agreed about the description. ‘Tis likely we do
not well know what beauty is in nature and in general, since to our
own human beauty we give so many divers forms, of which, were there any
natural rule and prescription, we should know it in common, as the heat
of the fire. But we fancy the forms according to our own appetite and
liking:--


   Turpis Romano Belgicus ore color:

   “A German hue ill suits, a Roman face.”


The Indians paint it black and tawny, with great swelled lips, wide flat
noses and load the cartilage betwixt the nostrils with great rings of
gold, to make it hang down to the mouth; as also the under lip with
great hoops, enriched with precious stones, that weigh them down to fall
upon the chin, it being with them a singular grace to show their teeth,
even below the roots. In Peru the greatest ears are the most beautiful,
which they stretch out as far as they can by art. And a man now living
says that he has seen in an eastern nation this care of enlarging them
in so great repute, and the ear loaded with so ponderous jewels, that he
did with great ease put his arm, sleeve and all, through the hole of
an ear. There are elsewhere nations that take great care to black their
teeth, and hate to see them white, whilst others paint them red. The
women are reputed more beautiful, not only in Biscay, but elsewhere,
for having their heads shaved; and, which is more, in certain frozen
countries, as Pliny reports. The Mexicans esteem a low forehead a great
beauty, and though they shave all other parts, they nourish hair on
the forehead and increase it by art, and have great breasts in so great
reputation that they affect to give their children suck over their
shoulders. We should paint deformity so. The Italians fashion it gross
and massy; the Spaniards gaunt and slender; and amongst us one has
it white, another brown; one soft and delicate, another strong and
vigorous; one will have his mistress soft and gentle, others haughty and
majestic. Just as the preference in beauty that Plato attributes to the
spherical figure the Epicureans gave rather to the pyramidal or square,
and cannot swallow a god in the form of a bowl. But, be it how it will,
nature has no more privileged us in this from her common laws than in
the rest And if we will judge ourselves aright, we shall find that, if
there be some animals less favoured in this than we, there are others,
and in greater number, that are more; _a multis animalibus decore
vincimur_ “Many animals surpass us in beauty,” even among the
terrestrial, our compatriots; for as to those of sea, setting the figure
aside, which cannot fall into any manner of proportion, being so much
another thing in colour, clearness, smoothness, and arrangement, we
sufficiently give place to them; and no less, in all qualities, to the
aerial. And this prerogative that the poets make such a mighty matter
of, our erect stature, looking towards heaven our original,


      Pronaque cum spectent animalia cætera terrain,
   Os homini sublime dédit, columque tueri
   Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus,

      “Whilst all the brutal creatures downward bend
   Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
   He set man’s face aloft, that, with his eyes
   Uplifted, he might view the starry skies,”


is truly poetical; for there are several little beasts who have their
sight absolutely turned towards heaven; and I find the gesture of camels
and ostriches much higher raised and more erect than ours. What animals
have not their faces above and not before, and do not look opposite,
as we do; and that do not in their natural posture discover as much of
heaven and earth as man? And what qualities of our bodily constitution,
in Plato and Cicero, may not indifferently serve a thousand sorts of
beasts? Those that most resemble us are the most despicable and deformed
of all the herd; for those, as to outward appearance and form of visage,
are baboons:--


      Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis?

      “How like to man, in visage and in shape,
   Is, of all beasts the most uncouth, the ape?”


as to the internal and vital parts, the hog. In earnest, when I consider
man stark naked, even in that sex which seems to have greatest share of
beauty, his defects, natural subjection, and imperfections, I find that
we have more reason than any other animal, to cover ourselves; and are
to be excused from borrowing of those to whom nature has in this been
kinder than to us, to trick ourselves out with their beauties, and hide
ourselves under their spoils, their wool, feathers, hair, and silk. Let
us observe, as to the rest, that man is the sole animal whose nudities
offend his own companions, and the only one who in his natural actions
withdraws and hides himself from his own kind. And really ‘tis also
an effect worth consideration, that they who are masters in the trade
prescribe, as a remedy for amorous passions, the full and free view of
the body a man desires; for that to cool the ardour there needs no more
but freely and fully to see what he loves:--


      Ille quod obscænas in aperto corpore partes
   Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, hæsit amor.

      “The love that’s tilting when those parts appear
   Open to view, flags in the hot career,”


And, although this receipt may peradventure proceed from a nice and cold
humour, it is notwithstanding a very great sign of our deficiencies
that use and acquaintance should make us disgust one another. It is
not modesty, so much as cunning and prudence, that makes our ladies so
circumspect to refuse us admittance into their cabinets before they are
painted and tricked up for the public view:--


      Nec Veneres nostras hoc fallit; quo magis ipsæ
   Omnia summopere hos vitæ postscenia celant,
   Quos retinere volunt, adstrictoque esse in amore:

      “Of this our ladies are full well aware,
   Which make them, with such privacy and care,
   Behind the scene all those defects remove,
   Likely to check the flame of those they love,”


whereas, in several animals there is nothing that we do not love, and
that does not please our senses; so that from their very excrements
we do not only extract wherewith to heighten our sauces, but also our
richest ornaments and perfumes. This discourse reflects upon none but
the ordinary sort of women, and is not so sacrilegious as to comprehend
those divine, supernatural, and extraordinary beauties, which we see
shine occasionally among us like stars under a corporeal and terrestrial
veil.

As to the rest, the very share that we allow to beasts of the bounty
of nature, by our own confession, is very much to their advantage. We
attribute to ourselves imaginary and fantastic good, future and absent
good, for which human capacity cannot of herself be responsible; or
good, that we falsely attribute to ourselves by the license of opinion,
as reason, knowledge, and honour, and leave to them for their dividend,
essential, durable, and palpable good, as peace, repose, security,
innocence, and health; health, I say, the fairest and richest present
that nature can make us. Insomuch that philosophy, even the Stoic, is so
bold as to say, “That Heraclitus and Pherecides, could they have trucked
their wisdom for health, and have delivered themselves, the one of his
dropsy, and the other of the lousy disease that tormented him, they had
done well.” By which they set a greater value upon wisdom, comparing and
putting it into the balance with health, than they do with this other
proposition, which is also theirs; they say that if Circe had presented
Ulysses with the two potions, the one to make a fool become a wise
man, and the other to make a wise man become a fool, that Ulysses ought
rather to have chosen the last, than consent to that by which Circe
changed his human figure into that of a beast; and say that wisdom
itself would have spoke to him after this manner: “Forsake me, let me
alone, rather than lodge me under the body and figure of an ass.” How!
the philosophers, then will abandon this great and divine wisdom for
this corporeal and terrestrial covering? It is then no more by reason,
by discourse, and by the soul, that we excel beasts; ‘tis by our beauty,
our fair complexion, and our fine symmetry of parts, for which we must
quit our intelligence, our prudence, and all the rest. Well, I accept
this open and free confession; certainly they knew that those parts,
upon which we so much value ourselves, are no other than vain fancy.
If beasts then had all the virtue, knowledge, wisdom, and stoical
perfection, they would still be beasts, and would not be comparable to
man, miserable, wicked, mad, man. For, in short, whatever is not as we
are is nothing worth; and God, to procure himself an esteem among us,
must put himself into that shape, as we shall show anon. By which it
appears that it is not upon any true ground of reason, but by a foolish
pride and vain opinion, that we prefer ourselves before other animals,
and separate ourselves from their society and condition.

But to return to what I was upon before; we have for our part
inconstancy, irresolution, incertitude, sorrow, superstition, solicitude
of things to come, even after we shall be no more, ambition, avarice,
jealousy, envy, irregular, frantic, and untamed appetites, war, lying,
disloyalty, detraction, and curiosity. Doubtless, we have strangely
overpaid this fine reason, upon which we so much glorify ourselves, and
this capacity of judging and knowing, if we have bought it at the price
of this infinite number of passions to which we are eternally subject.
Unless we shall also think fit, as even Socrates does, to add to the
counterpoise that notable prerogative above beasts, That whereas nature
has prescribed them certain seasons and limits for the delights of
Venus, she has given us the reins at all hours and all seasons.” _Ut
vinum ogrotis, quia prodest rarô, nocet sopissime, melius est non
adhibere omnino, quam, spe dubio salutis, in apertam per-niciem
incurrere; sic, haud scio an melius fuerit humano generi motum istum
celerem cogitationis, acumen, solertiam, quam rationem vocamus, quoniam
pestifera sint multis, ad-modum paucis saluiaria, non dari omnino,
quam tam muniice et tam large dari?_ As it falls out that wine often
hurting the sick, and very rarely doing them good, it is better not to
give them any at all than to run into an apparent danger out of hope of
an uncertain benefit, so I know not whether it had not been better for
mankind that this quick motion, this penetration, this subtlety that we
call reason, had not been given to man at all; considering how pestiferous
it is to many, and useful but to few, than to have been conferred in so
abundant manner, and with so liberal a hand.” Of what advantage can we
conceive the knowledge of so many things was to Yarro and Aristotle? Did
it exempt them from human inconveniences? Were they by it freed from
the accidents that lay heavy upon the shoulders of a porter? Did they
extract from their logic any consolation for the gout? Or, for knowing
how this humour is lodged in the joints, did they feel it the less?
Did they enter into composition with death by knowing that some nations
rejoice at his approach; or with cuckoldry, by knowing that in some
parts of the world wives are in common? On the contrary, having been
reputed the greatest men for knowledge, the one amongst the Romans
and the other amongst the Greeks, and in a time when learning did most
flourish, we have not heard, nevertheless, that they had any particular
excellence in their lives; nay, the Greek had enough to do to clear
himself from some notable blemishes in his. Have we observed that
pleasure and health have a better relish with him that understands
astrology and grammar than with others?


   Illiterati num minus nervi rigent?

   “Th’ illiterate ploughman is as fit
   For Venus’ service as the wit:”


or shame and poverty less troublesome to the first than to the last?


      Scilicet et morbis et debilitate carebis,
   Et luctum et curam effugies, et tempora vitæ
   Longa tibi post hæc fato meliore dabuntur.

      “Disease thy couch shall flee,
   And sorrow and care; yes, thou, be sure, wilt see
   Long years of happiness, till now unknown.”


I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser
and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much
rather have resembled. Learning, methinks, has its place amongst the
necessary, things of life, as glory, nobility, dignity, or at the most,
as beauty, riches, and such other qualities, which indeed are useful
to it, but remotely, and more by opinion than by nature. We stand
very little more in need of offices, rules, and laws of living in our
society, than cranes and ants do in theirs; and yet we see that these
carry themselves very regularly without erudition. If man was wise, he
would take the true value of every thing according as it was useful
and proper to his life. Whoever will number us by our actions and
deportments will find many more excellent men amongst the ignorant than
among the learned; aye, in all sorts of virtue. Old Rome seems to me
to have been of much greater value, both for peace and war, than that
learned Rome that ruined itself. And, though all the rest should be
equal, yet integrity and innocency would remain to the ancients, for
they cohabit singularly well with simplicity. But I will leave this
discourse, that would lead me farther than I am willing to follow; and
shall only say this further, ‘tis only humility and submission that can
make a complete good man. We are not to leave the knowledge of his duty
to every man’s own judgment; we are to prescribe it to him, and not
suffer him to choose it at his own discretion; otherwise, according to
the imbecility, and infinite variety of our reasons and opinions, we
should at large forge ourselves duties that would, as Epicurus says,
enjoin us to eat one another.

The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it
was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire
after, nor to dispute; forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a
rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor. From
obedience and submission spring all other virtues, as all sin does from
selfopinion. And, on the contrary, the first temptation that by the
devil was offered to human nature, its first poison insinuated itself
into us by the promise made us of knowledge and wisdom; _Eritis sicut
Dii, scientes bonum et malum._ “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil.” And the sirens, in Homer, to allure Ulysses, and draw him within
the danger of their snares, offered to give him knowledge. The plague of
man is the opinion of wisdom; and for this reason it is that ignorance
is so recommended to us, by our religion, as proper to faith and
obedience; _Cavete ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam et inanes
seductiones, secundum elementa mundi._ “Take heed, lest any man deceive
you by philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and the
rudiments of the world.” There is in this a general consent amongst
all sorts of philosophers, that the sovereign good consists in the
tranquillity of the soul and body; but where shall we find it?


      Ad summum, sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives,
   Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex deniqne regum;
   Præcipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est:

      “In short, the wise is only less than Jove,
   Rich, free, and handsome; nay, a king above
   All earthly kings; with health supremely blest,
   Excepting when a cold disturbs his rest!”


It seems, in truth, that nature, for the consolation of our miserable
and wretched state, has only given us presumption for our inheritance.
‘Tis as Epictetus says, that man has nothing properly his own, but the
use of his opinion; we have nothing but wind and smoke for our portion.
The gods have health in essence, says philosophy, and sickness in
intelligence. Man, on the contrary, possesses his goods by fancy, his
ills in essence. We have reason to magnify the power of our imagination;
for all our goods are only in dream. Hear this poor calamitous animal
huff! “There is nothing,” says Cicero, “so charming as the employment of
letters; of letters, I say, by means whereof the infinity of things, the
immense grandeur of nature, the heavens even in this world, the earth,
and the seas are discovered to us; ‘tis they that have taught us
religion, moderation, and the grandeur of courage, and that have rescued
our souls from darkness, to make her see all things, high, low, first,
last, and middling; ‘tis they that furnish us wherewith to live happily
and well, and conduct us to pass over our lives without displeasure, and
without offence.” Does not this man seem to speak of the condition of
the ever-living and almighty God? But as to effects, a thousand little
countrywomen have lived lives more equal, more sweet, and constant than
his.


      Deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi,
   Qui princeps vitæ rationem invenit earn, quæ
   Nunc appellatur sapientia; quique per artem
   Fluctibus è tantis vitam, tantisque tenebris,
   In tam tranquilla et tam clara luce locavit:

      “That god, great Memmus, was a god no doubt
   Who, prince of life, first found that reason out
   Now wisdom called; and by his art, who did
   That life in tempests tost, and darkness hid,
   Place in so great a calm, and clear a light:”


here are brave ranting words; but a very slight accident put this man’s
understanding in a worse condition than that of the meanest shepherd,
notwithstanding this instructing god, this divine wisdom. Of the same
stamp and impudence is the promise of Democritus’s book: “I am going to
speak of all things;” and that foolish title that Aristotle prefixes
to one of his, order only afforded him a few lucid intervals which
he employed in composing his book, and at last made him kill
himself,--Eusebius’s Chronicon.

Of the Mortal Gods; and the judgment of Chrysippus, that “Dion was as
virtuous as God;” and my Seneca himself says, that “God had given him
life; but that to live well was his own;” conformably to this other: _In
virtute vere gloriamur; quod non contingeret, si id donum à Deo, non à
nobis haberemus:_ “We truly glory in our virtue; which would not be,
if it was given us of God, and not by ourselves;” this is also Seneca’s
saying; “that the wise man hath fortitude equal with God, but that his
is in spite of human frailty, wherein therefore he more than equals
God.” There is nothing so ordinary as to meet with sallies of the like
temerity; there is none of us, who take so much offence to see himself
equalled with God, as he does to see himself undervalued by being ranked
with other creatures; so much more are we jealous of our own interest
than that of our Creator.

But we must trample under foot this foolish vanity, and briskly and
boldly shake the ridiculous foundation upon which these false opinions
are founded. So long as man shall believe he has any means and power of
himself, he will never acknowledge what he owes to his Maker; his eggs
shall always be chickens, as the saying is; we must therefore strip him
to his shirt. Let us see some notable examples of the effects of his
philosophy: Posidonius being tormented with a disease so painful as made
him writhe his arms and gnash his teeth, thought he sufficiently scorned
the dolour, by crying out against it: “Thou mayst do thy worst, I will
not confess that thou art an evil.” He was as sensible of the pain as
my footman, but he made a bravado of bridling his tongue, at least,
and restraining it within the laws of his sect: _Re succumbere non
oportebat, verbis gloriantem._ “It did not become him, that spoke so
big, to confess his frailty when he came to the test.” Arcesilas being
ill of the gout, and Car-neades, who had come to see him, going away
troubled at his condition, he called him back, and showing him his feet
and breast: “There is nothing comes thence hither,” said he. This has
something a better grace, for he feels himself in pain, and would be
disengaged from it; but his heart, notwithstanding, is not conquered nor
subdued by it. The other stands more obstinately to his point, but, I
fear, rather verbally than really. And Dionysius Heracleotes, afflicted
with a vehement smarting in his eyes, was reduced to quit these stoical
resolutions. But even though knowledge should, in effect, do as they
say, and could blunt the point, and dull the edge, of the misfortunes
that attend us, what does she, more than what ignorance does more purely
and evidently?--The philosopher Pyrrho, being at sea in very great
danger, by reason of a mighty storm, presented nothing to the imitation
of those who were with him, in that extremity, but a hog they had on
board, that was fearless and unconcerned at the tempest. Philosophy,
when she has said all she can, refers us at last to the example of a
gladiator, wrestler, or muleteer, in which sort of people we commonly
observe much less apprehension of death, sense of pain, and other
inconveniences, and more of endurance, than ever knowledge furnished
any one withal, that was not bom and bred to hardship. What is the cause
that we make incisions, and cut the tender limbs of an infant, and those
of a horse, more easily than our own--but ignorance only? How many has
mere force of imagination made sick? We often see men cause themselves
to be let blood, purged, and physicked, to be cured of diseases they
only feel in opinion.--When real infirmities fail us, knowledge lends us
her’s; that colour, that complexion, portend some catarrhous defluxion;
this hot season threatens us with a fever; this breach in the
life-line of your left hand gives you notice of some near and dangerous
indisposition; and at last she roundly attacks health itself; saying,
this sprightliness and vigour of youth cannot continue in this posture;
there must be blood taken, and the heat abated, lest it turn against
yourself. Compare the life of a man subjected to such imaginations,
to that of a labourer that suffers himself to be led by his natural
appetite, measuring things only by the present sense, without knowledge,
and without prognostic, that feels no pain or sickness, but when he is
really ill. Whereas the other has the stone in his soul, before he has
it in his bladder; as if it were not time enough to suffer the evil when
it shall come, he must anticipate it by fancy, and run to meet it.

What I say of physic may generally serve in example for all other
sciences. Thence is derived that ancient opinion of the philosophers
that placed the sovereign good in the discovery of the weakness of our
judgment My ignorance affords me as much occasion of hope as of fear;
and having no other rule for my health than that of the examples of
others, and of events I see elsewhere upon the like occasion, I find of
all sorts, and rely upon those which by comparison are most favourable
to me. I receive health with open arms, free, full, and entire, and
by so much the more whet my appetite to enjoy it, by how much it is
at present less ordinary and more rare; so far am I from troubling its
repose and sweetness with the bitterness of a new and constrained manner
of living. Beasts sufficiently show us how much the agitation of our
minds brings infirmities and diseases upon us. That which is told us of
those of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to
the serenity and tranquillity of the air they live in; but I rather
attribute it to the serenity and tranquillity of their souls, free from
all passion, thought, or employment, extended or unpleasing, a people
that pass over their lives in a wonderful simplicity and ignorance,
without letters, without law, without king, or any manner of religion.
And whence comes that, which we find by experience, that the heaviest
and dullest men are most able; and the most to be desired in amorous
performances; and that the love of a muleteer often renders itself more
acceptable than that of a gentleman, if it be not that the agitation
of the soul in the latter disturbs his physical ability, dissolves and
tires it, as it also ordinarily troubles and tires itself. What puts the
soul beside itself, and more usually throws it into madness, but her own
promptness, vigour, and agility, and, finally, her own proper force? Of
what is the most subtle folly made, but of the most subtle wisdom? As
great friendships spring from great enmities, and vigorous health from
mortal diseases, so from the rare and vivid agitations of our souls
proceed the most wonderful and most distracted frenzies; ‘tis but half
a turn of the toe from the one to the other. In the actions of madmen we
see how infinitely madness resembles the most vigorous operations of
the soul. Who does not know how indiscernible the difference is betwixt
folly and the sprightly elevations of a free soul, and the effects of a
supreme and extraordinary virtue? Plato says that melancholy persons are
the most capable of discipline, and the most excellent; and accordingly
in none is there so great a propension to madness. Great wits are ruined
by their own proper force and pliability; into what a condition, through
his own agitation and promptness of fancy, is one of the most judicious,
ingenious, and nearest formed, of any other Italian poet, to the air of
the ancient and true poesy, lately fallen! Has he not vast obligation
to this vivacity that has destroyed him? to this light that has blinded
him? to this exact and subtle apprehension of reason that has put him
beside his own? to this curious and laborious search after sciences,
that has reduced him to imbecility? and to this rare aptitude to the
exercises of the soul, that has rendered him without exercise and
without soul? I was more angry, if possible, than compassionate, to see
him at Ferrara in so pitiful a condition surviving himself, forgetting
both himself and his works, which, without his knowledge, though before
his face, have been published unformed and incorrect.

Would you have a man healthy, would you have him regular, and in a
steady and secure posture? Muffle him up in the shades of stupidity and
sloth. We must be made beasts to be made wise, and hoodwinked before we
are fit to be led. And if one shall tell me that the advantage of having
a cold and dull sense of pain and other evils, brings this disadvantage
along with it, to render us consequently less sensible also in the
fruition of good and pleasure, this is true; but the misery of our
condition is such that we have not so much to enjoy as to avoid, and
that the extremest pleasure does not affect us to the degree that a
light grief does: _Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt._ We are not
so sensible of the most perfect health as we are of the least sickness.


      Pungit
   In cute vix sum ma violatum plagula corpus;
   Quando valere nihil quemquam movet. Hoc juvat unum,
   Quod me non torquet latus, aut pes;
   Cætera quisquam Vix queat aut sanum sese, aut sentire valentem.

      “The body with a little sting is griev’d,
   When the most perfect health is not perceiv’d,
   This only pleases me, that spleen nor gout
   Neither offend my side nor wring my foot;
   Excepting these, scarce any one can tell,
   Or e’er observes, when he’s in health and well.”


Our well-being is nothing but the not being ill. Which is the reason why
that sect of philosophers, which sets the greatest value upon pleasure,
has yet fixed it chiefly in unconsciousness of pain. To be freed from
ill is the greatest good that man can hope for or desire; as Ennius
says,--


   Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali;


for that every tickling and sting which are in certain pleasures, and
that seem to raise us above simple health and passiveness, that active,
moving, and, I know not how, itching, and biting pleasure; even that
very pleasure itself aims at nothing but insensibility as its mark. The
appetite that carries us headlong to women’s embraces has no other end
but only to cure the torment of our ardent and furious desires, and only
requires to be glutted and laid at rest, and delivered from the fever.
And so of the rest. I say, then, that if simplicity conducts us to a
state free from evil, she leads us to a very happy one according to our
condition. And yet we are not to imagine it so stupid an insensibility
as to be totally without sense; for Crantor had very good reason to
controvert the insensibility of Epicurus, if founded so deep that the
very first attack and birth of evils were not to be perceived: “I do not
approve such an insensibility as is neither possible nor to be desired.
I am very well content not to be sick; but if I am, I would know that
I am so; and if a caustic be applied, or incisions made in any part, I
would feel them.” In truth, whoever would take away the knowledge and
sense of evil, would at the same time eradicate the sense of pleasure,
and finally annihilate man himself: _Istud nihil dolere, non sine magnâ
mercede contingit, immanitatis in animo, stuporis in corpore._ “An
insensibility that is not to be purchased but at the price of inhumanity
in the soul, and of stupidity of the body.” Evil appertains to man
of course. Neither is pain always to be avoided, nor pleasure always
pursued.

‘Tis a great advantage to the honour of ignorance that knowledge itself
throws us into its arms, when she finds herself puzzled to fortify
us against the weight of evil; she is constrained to come to this
composition, to give us the reins, and permit us to fly into the lap
of the other, and to shelter ourselves under her protection from the
strokes and injuries of fortune. For what else is her meaning when she
instructs us to divert our thoughts from the ills that press upon us,
and entertain them with the meditation of pleasures past and gone; to
comfort ourselves in present afflictions with the remembrance of fled
delights, and to call to our succour a vanished satisfaction, to oppose
it to the discomfort that lies heavy upon us? _Levationes ægritudinum
in avocatione a cogitandâ molestiâ, et revocation ad contemplandas
voluptates, ponit_; “He directs us to alleviate our grief and pains by
rejecting unpleasant thoughts, and recalling agreeable ideas;” if it be
not that where her power fails she would supply it with policy, and make
use of sleight of hand where force of limbs will not serve her turn? For
not only to a philosopher, but to any man in his right wits, when he has
upon him the thirst of a burning fever, what satisfaction can it be to
him to remember the pleasure he took in drinking Greek wine a month ago?
It would rather only make matters worse to him:--


   Che ricordarsi il ben doppia la noia.

   “The thinking of pleasure doubles trouble.”


Of the same stamp is this other counsel that philosophy gives, only to
remember the happiness that is past, and to forget the misadventures we
have undergone; as if we had the science of oblivion in our own power,
and counsel, wherein we are yet no more to seek.


   Suavis laborum est præteritorum ræmoria.

   “Sweet is the memory of by-gone pain.”


How does philosophy, that should arm me to contend with fortune, and
steel my courage to trample all human adversities under foot, arrive to
this degree of cowardice to make me hide my head at this rate, and save
myself by these pitiful and ridiculous shifts? For the memory represents
to us not what we choose, but what she pleases; nay, there is nothing
that so much imprints any thing in our memory as a desire to forget it.
And ‘tis a good way to retain and keep any thing safe in the soul to
solicit her to lose it. And this is false: _Est situm in nobis, ut
et adversa quasi perpetua oblivione obruamus, et secunda jucunde et
suaviter meminerimus;_ “it is in our power to bury, as it were, in a
perpetual oblivion, all adverse accidents, and to retain a pleasant and
delightful memory of our successes;” and this is true: _Memini etiam quo
nolo; oblivisci non possum quo volo._ “I do also remember what I would
not; but I cannot forget what I would.” And whose counsel is this? His,
_qui se unies sapiervtem profiteri sit ausus;_ “who alone durst profess
himself a wise man.”


      Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit, et omnes
   Præstinxit stellas, exortus uti æthereus Sol.

      “Who from mankind the prize of knowledge won,
   And put the stars out like the rising sun.”


To empty and disfurnish the memory, is not this the true way to
ignorance?


   Iners malorum remedium ignorantia est.

   “Ignorance is but a dull remedy for evils.”


We find several other like precepts, whereby we are permitted to borrow
frivolous appearances from the vulgar, where we find the strongest
reason will not answer the purpose, provided they administer
satisfaction and comfort Where they cannot cure the wound, they are
content to palliate and benumb it I believe they will not deny this,
that if they could add order and constancy in a state of life that could
maintain itself in ease and pleasure by some debility of judgment, they
would accept it:--


      Potare, et spargere flores
   Incipiam, patiarque vel inconsultus haberi.

      “Give me to drink, and, crown’d with flowers, despise
   The grave disgrace of being thought unwise.”


There would be a great many philosophers of Lycas’s mind this man, being
otherwise of very regular manners, living quietly and contentedly in his
family, and not failing in any office of his duty, either towards his
own or strangers, and very carefully preserving himself from hurtful
things, became, nevertheless, by some distemper in his brain, possessed
with a conceit that he was perpetually in the theatre, a spectator of
the finest sights and the best comedies in the world; and being cured by
the physicians of his frenzy, was hardly prevented from endeavouring by
suit to compel them to restore him again to his pleasing imagination:--


      Pol I me occidistis, amici,
   Non servastis, ait; cui sic extorta voluptas,
   Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error;

      “By heaven! you’ve killed me, friends, outright,
   And not preserved me; since my dear delight
   And pleasing error, by my better sense
   Unhappily return’d, is banished hence;”


with a madness like that of Thrasylaus the son of Pythodorus, who made
himself believe that all the ships that weighed anchor from the port of
Piræus, and that came into the haven, only made their voyages for
his profit; congratulating them upon their successful navigation, and
receiving them with the greatest joy; and when his brother Crito caused
him to be restored to his better understanding, he infinitely regretted
that sort of condition wherein he had lived with so much delight and
free from all anxiety of mind. ‘Tis according to the old Greek verse,
that “there is a great deal of convenience in not being over-wise.”

And Ecclesiastes, “In much wisdom there is much sorrow;” and “Who gets
wisdom gets labour and trouble.”

Even that to which philosophy consents in general, that last remedy
which she applies to all sorts of necessities, to put an end to the life
we are not able to endure. _Placet?--Pare. Non placet?--Quâcumque vis,
exi. Pungit dolor?--Vel fodiat sane. Si nudus es, da jugulum; sin tectus
armis Vulcaniis, id est fortitudine, résisté;_ “Does it please?--Obey
it. Not please?--Go where thou wilt. Does grief prick thee,--nay, stab
thee?--If thou art naked, present thy throat; if covered with the arms
of Vulcan, that is, fortitude, resist it.” And this word, so used in
the Greek festivals, _aut bibat, aut abeat,_ “either drink or go,” which
sounds better upon the tongue of a Gascon, who naturally changes the h
into v, than on that of Cicero:--


      Vivere si recte nescis, decede peritis.
   Lusisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti;
   Tempus abire tibi est, ne potum largius æquo
   Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius ætas.

      “If to live well and right thou dost not know,
   Give way, and leave thy place to those that do.
   Thou’st eaten, drunk, and play’d to thy content,
   ‘Tis time to make thy parting compliment,
   Lest youth, more decent in their follies, scoff
   The nauseous scene, and hiss thee reeling off;”


What is it other than a confession of his impotency, and a sending back
not only to ignorance, to be there in safety, but even to stupidity,
insensibility, and nonentity?


      Democritum postquam matura vetustas
   Admonuit memorem motus languescere mentis;
   Sponte sua letho caput obvius obtulit ipse.

      “Soon as, through age, Democritus did find
   A manifest decadence in his mind,
   He thought he now surviv’d to his own wrong,
   And went to meet his death, that stay’d too long.”


‘Tis what Antisthenes said, “That a man should either make provision
of sense to understand, or of a halter to hang himself;” and what
Chrysippus alleged upon this saying of the poet Tyrtæus:--


   “Or to arrive at virtue or at death;”


and Crates said, “That love would be cured by hunger, if not by time;
and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope.” That Sextius, of
whom both Seneca and Plutarch speak with so high an encomium, having
applied himself, all other things set aside, to the study of philosophy,
resolved to throw himself into the sea, seeing the progress of his
studies too tedious and slow. He ran to find death, since he could not
overtake knowledge. These are the words of the law upon the subject:
“If peradventure some great inconvenience happen, for which there is no
remedy, the haven is near, and a man may save himself by swimming out
of his body as out of a leaky skiff; for ‘tis the fear of dying, and not
the love of life, that ties the fool to his body.”

As life renders itself by simplicity more pleasant, so more innocent
and better, also it renders it as I was saying before: “The simple
and ignorant,” says St. Paul, “raise themselves up to heaven and take
possession of it; and we, with all our knowledge, plunge ourselves into
the infernal abyss.” I am neither swayed by Valentinian, a professed
enemy to all learning and letters, nor by Licinius, both Roman emperors,
who called them the poison and pest of all political government; nor by
Mahomet, who, as ‘tis said, interdicted all manner of learning to his
followers; but the example of the great Lycurgus, and his authority,
with the reverence of the divine Lacedemonian policy, so great, so
admirable, and so long flourishing in virtue and happiness, without any
institution or practice of letters, ought certainly to be of very great
weight. Such as return from the new world discovered by the Spaniards
in our fathers’ days, testify to us how much more honestly and regularly
those nations live, without magistrate and without law, than ours do,
where there are more officers and lawyers than there are of other sorts
of men and business:--


      Di cittatorie piene, e di libelli,
   D’esamine, e di carte di procure,
   Hanno le mani e il seno, e gran fastelli
   Di chioge, di consigli, et di letture:
   Per cui le faculta de* poverelli
   Non sono mai nelle città sicure;
   Hanno dietro e dinanzi, e d’ambi i lati,
   Notai, procuratori, ed avvocati.

      “Their bags were full of writs, and of citations,
   Of process, and of actions and arrests,
   Of bills, of answers, and of replications,
   In courts of delegates, and of requests,
   To grieve the simple sort with great vexations;
   They had resorting to them as their guests,
   Attending on their circuit, and their journeys,
   Scriv’ners, and clerks, and lawyers, and attorneys.”


It was what a Roman senator of the latter ages said, that their
predecessors’ breath stunk of garlic, but their stomachs were perfumed
with a good conscience; and that, on the contrary, those of his time
were all sweet odour without, but stunk within of all sorts of vices;
that is to say, as I interpret it, that they abounded with learning
and eloquence, but were very defective in moral honesty. Incivility,
ignorance, simplicity, roughness, are the natural companions of
innocence; curiosity, subtlety, knowledge, bring malice in their train;
humility, fear, obedience, and affability, which are the principal
things that support and maintain human society, require an empty and
docile soul, and little presuming upon itself.

Christians have a particular knowledge, how natural and original an evil
curiosity is in man; the thirst of knowledge, and the desire to
become more wise, was the first ruin of man, and the way by which he
precipitated himself into eternal damnation. Pride was his ruin and
corruption. ‘Tis pride that diverts him from the common path, and makes
him embrace novelties, and rather choose to be head of a troop, lost and
wandering in the path of error; to be a master and a teacher of lies,
than to be a disciple in the school of truth, suffering himself to be
led and guided by the hand of another, in the right and beaten
road. ‘Tis, peradventure, the meaning of this old Greek saying, that
superstition follows pride, and obeys it as if it were a father:
[--Greek--] Ah, presumption, how much dost thou hinder us?

After that Socrates was told that the god of wisdom had assigned to him
the title of sage, he was astonished at it, and, searching and examining
himself throughout, could find no foundation for this divine judgment.
He knew others as just, temperate, valiant, and learned, as himself; and
more eloquent, more handsome, and more profitable to their country than
he. At last he concluded that he was not distinguished from others, nor
wise, but only because he did not think himself so; and that his God
considered the opinion of knowledge and wisdom as a singular absurdity
in man; and that his best doctrine was the doctrine of ignorance, and
simplicity his best wisdom. The sacred word declares those miserable
among us who have an opinion of themselves: “Dust and ashes,” says it
to such, “what hast thou wherein to glorify thyself?” And, in another
place, “God has made man like unto a shadow,” of whom who can judge,
when by removing the light it shall be vanished! Man is a thing of
nothing.

Our force is so far from being able to comprehend the divine height,
that, of the works of our Creator, those best bear his mark, and are
with better title his, which we the least understand. To meet with an
incredible thing is an occasion to Christians to believe; and it is
so much the more according to reason, by how much it is against human
reason. If it were according to reason, it would be no more a miracle;
and if it were according to example, it would be no longer a singular
thing. _Melius scitur Deus nesdendo_: “God is better known by not
knowing him,” says St. Austin: and Tacitus, _Sanctius est ac reverentius
de actis Deorum credere, quam scire_; “it is more holy and reverent to
believe the works of God than to know them;” and Plato thinks there is
something of impiety in inquiring too curiously into God, the world,
and the first causes of things: _Atque illum quidem parentem hujus
universitaiis invenire, difficile; et, quum jam inveneris, indicare in
vulgtis, nefas_: “to find out the parent of the world is very difficult;
and when found out, to reveal him to the vulgar is sin,” says Cicero. We
talk indeed of power, truth, justice; which are words that signify some
great thing; but that thing we neither see nor conceive at all. We say
that God fears, that God is angry, that God loves,


   Immortalia mortali sermone notantes:

   “Giving to things immortal mortal names.”


These are all agitations and emotions that cannot be in God, according
to our form, nor can we imagine them, according to his. It only belongs
to God to know himself, and to interpret his own works; and he does it
in our language, going out of himself, to stoop to us who grovel upon
the earth. How can prudence, which is the choice between good and evil,
be properly attributed to him whom no evil can touch? How can reason
and intelligence, which we make use of, to arrive by obscure at apparent
things; seeing that nothing is obscure to him? How justice, which
distributes to every one what appertains to him, a thing begot by the
society and community of men, how is that in God? How temperance, which
is the moderation of corporal pleasures, that have no place in the
Divinity? Fortitude to support pain, labour, and dangers, as little
appertains to him as the rest; these three things have no access to
him. For which reason Aristotle holds him equally exempt from virtue
and vice: _Neque gratia, neque ira teneri potest; quod quo talia essent,
imbecilla essent omnia?_ “He can neither be affected with favour nor
indignation, because both these are the effects of frailty.”

The participation we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is,
is not acquired by our own force: God has sufficiently given us to
understand that, by the witnesses he has chosen out of the common
people, simple and ignorant men, that he has been pleased to employ
to instruct us in his admirable secrets. Our faith is not of our
own acquiring; ‘tis purely the gift of another’s bounty: ‘tis not by
meditation, or by virtue of our own understanding, that we have
acquired our religion, but by foreign authority and command wherein the
imbecility of our own judgment does more assist us than any force of it;
and our blindness more than our clearness of sight: ‘tis more by__ the
mediation of our ignorance than of our knowledge that we know any thing
of the divine wisdom. ‘Tis no wonder if our natural and earthly parts
cannot conceive that supernatural and heavenly knowledge: let us bring
nothing of our own, but obedience and subjection; for, as it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the
understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe?
Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the
wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world
knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save
them that believe.”

Finally, should I examine whether it be in the power of man to find out
that which he seeks and if that quest, wherein he has busied himself so
many ages, has enriched him with any new force, or any solid truth; I
believe he will confess, if he speaks from his conscience, that all
he has got by so long inquiry is only to have learned to know his
own weakness. We have only by a long study confirmed and verified the
natural ignorance we were in before. The same has fallen out to men
truly wise, which befalls the ears of corn; they shoot and raise their
heads high and pert, whilst empty; but when full and swelled with grain
in maturity, begin to flag and droop. So men, having tried and sounded
all things, and having found in that mass of knowledge, and provision of
so many various things, nothing solid and firm, and nothing but
vanity, have quitted their presumption, and acknowledged their natural
condition. ‘Tis what Velleius reproaches Cotta withal and Cicero, “that
they had learned of Philo, that they had learned nothing.” Pherecydes,
one of the seven sages, writing to Thales upon his death-bed; “I have,”
 said he, “given order to my people, after my interment, to carry my
writings to thee. If they please thee and the other sages, publish; if
not, suppress them. They contain no certainty with which I myself am
satisfied. Neither do I pretend to know the truth, or to attain to it.
I rather open than discover things.” The wisest man that ever was, being
asked what he knew, made answer, “He knew this, that he knew nothing.”
 By which he verified what has been said, that the greatest part of what
we know is the least of what we do not; that is to say, that even
what we think we know is but a piece, and a very little one, of our
ignorance. We know things in dreams, says Plato, and are ignorant of
them in truth. _Ormes pene veteres nihil cognosci, nihil percipi,
nihil sciri posse dixerunt; angustos sensus, imbecilles animos, brevia
curricula vito._ “Almost all the ancients have declared that there is
nothing to be known, nothing to be perceived or understood; the senses
are too limited, men’s minds too weak, and the course of life too short.”
 And of Cicero himself, who stood indebted to his learning for all he
was worth, Valerius says, “That he began to disrelish letters in his old
age; and when at his studies, it was with great independency upon any
one party; following what he thought probable, now in one sect, and
then in another, evermore wavering under the doubts of the academy.”
 _Dicendum est, sed ita ut nihil affirment, quceram omnia, dubitans
plerumque, et mihi diffidens._ “Something I must say, but so as to
affirm nothing; I inquire into all things, but for the most part in
doubt and distrust of myself.”

I should have too fair a game should I consider man in his common way of
living and in gross; yet I might do it by his own rule, who judges truth
not by weight, but by the number of votes. Let us set the people aside,


      Qui vigilans stertit,....
   Mortua cui vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti;

     “Half of his life by lazy sleep’s possess’d,
   And when awake his soul but nods at best;”


who neither feel nor judge, and let most of their natural faculties lie
idle; I will take man in his highest ground. Let us consider him in
that little number of men, excellent and culled out from the rest, who,
having been endowed with a remarkable and particular natural force, have
moreover hardened and whetted it by care, study, and art, and raised
it to the highest pitch of wisdom to which it can possibly arrive. They
have adjusted their souls to all ways and all biases; have propped and
supported them with all foreign helps proper for them, and enriched and
adorned them with all they could borrow for their advantage, both within
and without the world; ‘tis in these is placed the utmost and most
supreme height to which human nature can attain. They have regulated
the world with policies and laws. They have instructed it with arts and
sciences, and by the example of their admirable manners. I shall make
account of none but such men as these, their testimony and experience.
Let us examine how far they have proceeded, and where they stopped. The
errors and defects that we shall find amongst these men the world may
boldly avow as their own.

Whoever goes in search of any thing must come to this, either to say
that he has found it, or that it is not to be found, or that he is yet
upon the search. All philosophy is divided into these three kinds; her
design is to seek out truth, knowledge, and certainty. The Peripatetics,
Epicureans, Stoics, and others, have thought they have found it. These
established the sciences we have, and have treated of them as of certain
knowledge. Clitomachus, Carneades, and the Academics, have despaired
in their search, and concluded that truth could not be conceived by our
understandings. The result of these is weakness and human ignorance.
This sect has had the most and the most noble followers. Pyrrho, and
other skeptics or epechists, whose dogmas are held by many of the
ancients to be taken from Homer, the seven sages, and from Archilochus
and Euripides, and to whose number these are added, Zeno, Democritus,
and Xenophanes, say that they are yet upon the inquiry after truth.
These conclude that the others, who think they have found it out, are
infinitely deceived; and that it is too daring a vanity in the second
sort to determine that human reason is not able to attain unto it;
for this establishing a standard of our power, to know and judge the
difficulty of things, is a great and extreme knowledge, of which they
doubt whether man is capable:--


      Nil sciri quisquis putat, id quoque nescit,
   An sciri possit; quam se nil scire fatetur.

      “He that says nothing can be known, o’erthrows
   His own opinion, for he nothing knows,
   So knows not that.”


The ignorance that knows itself, judges and condemns itself, is not an
absolute ignorance; to be such, it must be ignorant of itself; so that
the profession of the Pyrrhonians is to waver, doubt, and inquire, not
to make themselves sure of, or responsible to themselves for any
thing. Of the three actions of the soul, imaginative, appetitive, and
consentive, they receive the two first; the last they kept ambiguous,
without inclination or approbation, either of one thing or another,
so light as it is. Zeno represented the motion of his imagination upon
these divisions of the faculties of the soul thus: “An open and expanded
hand signified appearance; a hand half shut, and the fingers a little
bending, consent; a clenched fist, comprehension; when with the left
he yet thrust the right fist closer, knowledge.” Now this situation of
their judgment upright and inflexible, receiving all objects without
application or consent, leads them to their ataraxy, which is a
peaceable condition of life, temperate, and exempt from the agitations
we receive by the impression of opinion and knowledge that we think we
have of things; whence spring fear, avarice, envy, immoderate desires,
ambition, pride, superstition, love of novelty, rebellion, disobedience,
obstinacy, and the greatest part of bodily ills; nay, and by that they
are exempt from the jealousy of their discipline; for they debate after
a very gentle manner; they fear no requital in their disputes; when they
affirm that heavy things descend they would be sorry to be believed,
and love tobe contradicted, to engender doubt and suspense of judgment,
which is their end. They only put forward their propositions to
contend with those they think we have in our belief. If you take their
arguments, they will as readily maintain the contrary; ‘tis all one to
them, they have no choice. If you maintain that snow is black, they will
argue on the contrary that it is white; if you say it is neither the
one nor the other, they will maintain that it is both. If you hold, of
certain judgment, that you know nothing, they will maintain that you do.
Yea, and if by an affirmative axiom you assure them that you doubt, they
will argue against you that you doubt not; or that you cannot judge and
determine that you doubt. And by this extremity of doubt, which jostles
itself, they separate and divide themselves from many opinions, even
of those they have several ways maintained, both concerning doubt and
ignorance. “Why shall not they be allowed to doubt,” say they, “as well
as the dogmatists, one of whom says green, another yellow? Can any thing
be proposed to us to grant, or deny, which it shall not be permitted to
consider as ambiguous?” And where others are carried away, either by
the custom of their country, or by the instruction of parents, or by
accident, as by a tempest, without judgment and without choice, nay,
and for the most part before the age of discretion, to such and such
an opinion, to the sect whether Stoic or Epicurean, with which they
are prepossessed, enslaved, and fast bound, as to a thing they cannot
forsake: _Ad quamcumque disciplinant, velut tempestate, delati, ad earn,
tanquam ad saxum, adhorescunt;_ “every one cleaves to the doctrine he
has happened upon, as to a rock against which he has been thrown by
tempest;” why shall not these likewise be permitted to maintain their
liberty, and consider things without obligation or slavery? _hoc
liberiores et solutiores, quod integra illis est judicandi potestas_:
“in this more unconstrained and free, because they have the greater
power of judging.” Is it not of some advantage to be disengaged from the
necessity that curbs others? Is it not better to remain in suspense than
to entangle one’s self in the innumerable errors that human fancy has
produced? Is it not much better to suspend one’s persuasion than to
intermeddle with these wrangling and seditious divisions: “What shall
I choose?” “What you please, provided you will choose.” A very foolish
answer; but such a one, nevertheless, as all dogmatism seems to point
at, and by which we are not permitted to be ignorant of what we are
ignorant of.

Take the most eminent side, that of the greatest reputation; it will
never be so sure that you shall not be forced to attack and contend with
a hundred and a hundred adversaries to defend it. Is it not better to
keep out of this hurly-burly? You are permitted to embrace Aristotle’s
opinions of the immortality of the soul with as much zeal as your honour
and life, and to give the lie to Plato thereupon, and shall they be
interdicted to doubt him? If it be lawful for Panætius to maintain
his opinion about augury, dreams, oracles, vaticinations, of which the
Stoics made no doubt at all; why may not a wise man dare to do the
same in all things that he dared to do in those he had learned of his
masters, established by the common consent of the school, whereof he
is a professor and a member? If it be a child that judges, he knows not
what it is; if a wise man, he is prepossessed. They have reserved for
themselves a marvellous advantage in battle, having eased themselves of
the care of defence. If you strike them, they care not, provided
they strike too, and they turn every thing to their own use. If they
overcome, your argument is lame; if you, theirs; if they fall short,
they verify ignorance; if you fall short, you do it; if they prove that
nothing is known, ‘tis well; if they cannot prove it, ‘tis also well:
_Ut quurn in eadem re paria contrariis in partibus momenta inveniuntur,
facilius ab utraque parte assertio sustineatur:_ “That when like
sentiments happen _pro_ and _con_ in the same thing, the assent may on
both sides be more easily suspended.” And they make account to find out,
with much greater facility, why a thing is false, than why ‘tis true;
that which is not, than that which is; and what they do not believe,
than what they do. Their way of speaking is: “I assert nothing; it is no
more so than so, or than neither one nor t’other; I understand it not.
Appearances are everywhere equal; the law of speaking, _pro_ or _con_,
is the same. Nothing seems true, that may not seem false.” Their
sacramental word is that is to say, “I hold, I stir not.” This is the
burden of their song, and others of like stuff. The effect of which is
a pure, entire, perfect, and absolute suspension of judgment. They make
use of their reason to inquire and debate, but not to fix and determine.
Whoever shall imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment
without bias, propension, or inclination, upon any occasion whatever,
conceives a true idea of Pyrrhonism. I express this fancy as well as
I can, by reason that many find it hard to conceive, and the authors
themselves represent it a little variously and obscurely.

As to what concerns the actions of life, they are in this of the
common fashion. They yield and give up themselves to their natural
inclinations, to the power and impulse of passions, to the constitution
of laws and customs, and to the tradition of arts; _Non enim nos Deus
ista scire, sed tantummodo uti, voluit._ “For God would not have us
know, but only use those things.” They suffer their ordinary actions to
be guided by those things, without any dispute or judgment. For
which reason I cannot consent to what is said of Pyrrho, by those
who represent him heavy and immovable, leading a kind of savage and
unsociable life, standing the jostle of carts, going upon the edge of
precipices, and refusing to accommodate himself to the laws. This is to
enhance upon his discipline; he would never make himself a stock or
a stone, he would show himself a living man, discoursing, reasoning,
enjoying all reasonable conveniences and pleasures, employing and making
use of all his corporal and spiritual faculties in rule and reason.
The fantastic, imaginary, and false privileges that man had usurped
of lording it, ordaining, and establishing, he has utterly quitted and
renounced. Yet there is no sect but is constrained to permit her sage to
follow several things not comprehended, perceived, or consented to, if
he means to live. And if he goes to sea, he follows that design, not
knowing whether his voyage shall be successful or no; and only insists
upon the tightness of the vessel, the experience of the pilot, and the
convenience of the season, and such probable circumstances; after which
he is bound to go, and suffer himself to be governed by appearances,
provided there be no express and manifest contrariety in them. He has a
body, he has a soul; the senses push them, the mind spurs them on. And
although he does not find in himself this proper and singular sign of
judging, and that he perceives that he ought not to engage his
consent, considering that there may be some false, equal to these true
appearances, yet does he not, for all that, fail of carrying on the
offices of his life with great liberty and convenience. How many arts
are there that profess to consist more in conjecture than knowledge;
that decide not on true and false, and only follow that which seems so!
There are, say they, true and false, and we have in us wherewith to seek
it; but not to make it stay when we touch it. We are much more prudent,
in letting ourselves be regulated by the order of the world, without
inquiry. A soul clear from prejudice has a marvellous advance towards
tranquillity and repose. Men that judge and control their judges, do
never duly submit to them.

How much more docile and easy to be governed, both by the laws of
religion and civil polity, are simple and incurious minds, than those
over-vigilant wits, that will still be prating of divine and human
causes! There is nothing in human invention that carries so great a show
of likelihood and utility as this; this presents man, naked and empty,
confessing his natural weakness, fit to receive some foreign force from
above, unfurnished of human, and therefore more apt to receive into him
the divine knowledge, making nought of his own judgment, to give more
room to faith; neither disbelieving nor establishing any dogma against
common observances; humble, obedient, disciplinable, and studious; a
sworn enemy of heresy; and consequently freeing himself from vain and
irreligious opinions, introduced by false sects. ‘Tis a blank paper
prepared to receive such forms from the finger of God as he shall please
to write upon it. The more we resign and commit ourselves to God, and
the more we renounce ourselves, of the greater value we are. “Take in
good part,” says Ecclesiastes, “the things that present themselves to
thee, as they seem and taste from hand to mouth; the rest is out of thy
knowledge.” _Dominus novit cogitationes hominum, quoniam vanæ sunt_:
“The Lord knoweth the hearts of men, that they are but vanity.”

Thus we see that of the three general sects of philosophy, two make open
profession of doubt and ignorance; and in that of the Dogmatists, which
is the third, it is easy to discover that the greatest part of them only
assume this face of confidence and assurance that

they may produce the better effect; they have not so much thought
to establish any certainty for us, as to show us how far they have
proceeded in their search of truth: _Quam docti jingunt magis quam
nôrunt_: “Which the learned rather feign than know.” Timæus, being
to instruct Socrates in what he knew of the gods, the world, and men,
proposes to speak to him as a man to a man; and that it is sufficient,
if his reasons are probable as those of another; for that exact
reasons were neither in his nor any other mortal hand; which one of
his followers has thus imitated: _Ut potero, explicabo: nec tamen, ut
Pythius Apollo, certa ut sint et fixa quæ dixero; sed, ut homunculus,
probabilia conjecturâ sequens:_ “I will, as well as I am able, explain;
affirming, yet not as the Pythian oracle, that what I say is fixed and
certain, but like a mere man, that follows probabilities by conjecture.”
 And this, upon the natural and common subject of the contempt of death;
he has elsewhere translated from the very words of Plato: _Si forte, de
Deorum naturâ ortuque mundi disserentes, minus id quod habemiis in animo
consequi-mur, haud erit mirum; oquum est enim meminisse, et me, qui
disseram, hominem esse, et vos, qui judicetis, ut, si probabilia
dicentur, nihil ultra requiratis?_ “If perchance, when we discourse
of the nature of God, and the world’s original, we cannot do it as we
desire, it will be no great wonder. For it is just you should remember
that both I who speak and you who are to judge, are men; so that if
probable things are delivered, you shall require and expect no more.”
 Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number of other men’s opinions and
beliefs, to compare them with his own, and to let us see how much he has
gone beyond them, and how much nearer he approaches to the likelihood of
truth; for truth is not to be judged by the authority and testimony
of others; which made Epicurus religiously avoid quoting them in his
writings. This is the prince of all dogmatists, and yet we are told by
him that the more we know the more we have room for doubt. In earnest,
we sometimes see him shroud and muffle up himself in so thick and so
inextricable an obscurity that we know not what to make of his advice;
it is, in effect, a Pyrrhonism under a resolutive form. Hear Cicero’s
protestation, who expounds to us another’s fancy by his own: _Qui
requirunt quid de quâque re ipsi sentiamus, curiosius id faciunt quam
necesse est,... Hoc in philosophiâ ratio, contra omnia disserendi,
nuttamque rem aperte judicandi, profecta a Socrate, repetita
ab Arcesila, conjirmata a Gameade, usquê ad nostram viget
cetatem..........Hi sumus, qui omnibus veris falsa quodam adjuncta esse
dicamus, tanta similitudine, ut in iis nulla insit certe judicandi et
assentiendi nota._ “They who desire to know what we think of every
thing are therein more inquisitive than is necessary. This practice
in philosophy of disputing against every thing, and of absolutely
concluding nothing, begun by Socrates, repeated by Arcesilaus, and
confirmed by Cameades, has continued in use even to our own times. We
are they who declare that there is so great a mixture of things false
amongst all that are true, and they so resemble one another, that there
can be in them no certain mark to direct us either to judge or assent.”
 Why hath not Aristotle only, but most of the philosophers, affected
difficulty, if not to set a greater value upon the vanity of the
subject, and amuse the curiosity of our minds by giving them this hollow
and fleshless bone to pick? Clitomachus affirmed “That he could never
discover by Carneades’s writings what opinion he was of.” This was it
that made Epicurus affect to be abstruse, and that procured Heraclitus
the epithet of [--Greek--] Difficulty is a coin the learned make use
of, like jugglers, to conceal the vanity of their art, and which human
sottishness easily takes for current pay.


      Claras, ob obscuram linguam, magis inter manes...
   Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque
   Inversis quæ sub verbis latitantia cemunt.

      “Bombast and riddle best do puppies please,
   For fools admire and love such things as these;
   And a dull quibble, wrapt in dubious phrase,
   Up to the height doth their wise wonder raise.”


Cicero reprehends some of his friends for giving more of their time
to the study of astrology, logic, and geometry, than they were really
worth; saying that they were by these diverted from the duties of life,
and more profitable and proper studies. The Cyrenaick philosophers, in
like manner, despised physics and logic. Zeno, in the very beginning of
the books of the commonwealth, declared all the liberal arts of no use.
Chrysippus said “That what Plato and Aristotle had writ, concerning
logic, they had only done in sport, and by way of exercise;” and could
not believe that they spoke in earnest of so vain a thing. Plutarch
says the same of metaphysics. And Epicurus would have said as much
of rhetoric, grammar, poetry, mathematics, and, natural philosophy
excepted, of all the sciences; and Socrates of them all, excepting that
which treats of manners and of life. Whatever any one required to be
instructed in, by him, he would ever, in the first place, demand
an account of the conditions of his life present and past, which he
examined and judged, esteeming all other learning subsequent to that
and supernumerary: _Parum mihi placeant eæ littero quo ad virtutem
doctoribus nihil pro-fuerunt._ “That learning is in small repute with me
which nothing profited the teachers themselves to virtue.” Most of the
arts have been in like manner decried by the same knowledge; but they
did not consider that it was from the purpose to exercise their wits in
those very matters wherein there was no solid advantage.

As to the rest, some have looked upon Plato as a dogmatist, others as a
doubter, others in some things the one, and in other things the other.
Socrates, the conductor of his dialogues, is eternally upon questions
and stirring up disputes, never determining, never satisfying, and
professes to have no other science but that of opposing himself. Homer,
their author, has equally laid the foundations of all the sects of
philosophy, to show how indifferent it was which way we should choose.
‘Tis said that ten several sects sprung from Plato; yet, in my opinion,
never did any instruction halt and stumble, if his does not.

Socrates said that midwives, in taking upon them the trade of helping
others to bring forth, left the trade of bringing forth themselves; and
that by the title of a wise man or sage, which the gods had conferred
upon him, he was disabled, in his virile and mental love, of the faculty
of bringing forth, contenting himself to help and assist those that
could; to open their nature, anoint the passes, and facilitate their
birth; to judge of the infant, baptize, nourish, fortify, swath, and
circumcise it, exercising and employing his understanding in the perils
and fortunes of others.

It is so with the most part of this third sort of authors, as the
ancients have observed in the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus,
Parmenides, Xenophanes, and others. They have a way of writing, doubtful
in substance and design, rather inquiring than teaching, though they mix
their style with some dogmatical periods. Is not the same thing seen in
Seneca and Plutarch? How many contradictions are there to be found if a
man pry narrowly into them! So many that the reconciling lawyers ought
first to reconcile them every one to themselves. Plato seems to have
affected this method of philosophizing in dialogues; to the end that he
might with greater decency, from several mouths, deliver the diversity
and variety of his own fancies. It is as well to treat variously of
things as to treat of them conformably, and better, that is to say, more
copiously and with greater profit. Let us take example from ourselves:
judgments are the utmost point of all dogmatical and determinative
speaking; and yet those _arrets_ that our parliaments give the people,
the most exemplary of them, and those most proper to nourish in them the
reverence due to that dignity, principally through the sufficiency of
the persons acting, derive their beauty not so much from the conclusion,
which with them is quotidian and common to every judge, as from the
dispute and heat of divers and contrary arguments that the matter of law
and equity will permit And the largest field for reprehension that
some philosophers have against others is drawn from the diversities and
contradictions wherein every one of them finds himself perplexed, either
on purpose to show the vacillation of the human mind concerning every
thing, or ignorantly compelled by the volubility and incomprehensibility
of all matter; which is the meaning of the maxim--“In a slippery and
sliding place let us suspend our belief;” for, as Euripides says,--


   “God’s various works perplex the thoughts of men.”


Like that which Empedocles, as if transported with a divine fury, and
compelled by truth, often strewed here and there in his writings: “No,
no, we feel nothing, we see nothing; all things are concealed from
us; there is not one thing of which we can positively say what it is;”
 according to the divine saying: _Cogitationes mortalium timidæ, et
incertæ adinventiones nostro et providentice._ “For the thoughts of
mortal men are doubtful; and our devices are but uncertain.” It is not
to be thought strange if men, despairing to overtake what they hunt
after, have not however lost the pleasure of the chase; study being
of itself so pleasant an employment; and so pleasant that amongst the
pleasures, the Stoics forbid that also which proceeds from the exercise
of the mind, will have it curbed, and find a kind of intemperance in too
much knowledge.

Democritus having eaten figs at his table that tasted of honey, fell
presently to considering with himself whence they should derive this
unusual sweetness; and to be satisfied in it, was about to rise from the
table to see the place whence the figs had been gathered; which his maid
observing, and having understood the cause, smilingly told him that “he
need not trouble himself about that, for she had put them into a vessel
in which there had been honey.” He was vexed at this discovery, and that
she had deprived him of the occasion of this inquiry, and robbed his
curiosity of matter to work upon: “Go thy way,” said he, “thou hast done
me an injury; but, for all that, I will seek out the cause as if it
were natural;” and would willingly have found out some true reason for a
false and imaginary effect. This story of a famous and great philosopher
very clearly represents to us that studious passion that puts us upon
the pursuit of things, of the acquisition of which we despair. Plutarch
gives a like example of some one who would not be satisfied in that
whereof he was in doubt, that he might not lose the pleasure of
inquiring into it; like the other who would not that his physician
should allay the thirst of his fever, that he might not lose the
pleasure of quenching it by drinking. _Satius est supervacua discere,
quam nihil._ “‘Tis better to learn more than necessary than nothing at
all.” As in all sorts of feeding, the pleasure of eating is very often
single and alone, and that what we take, which is acceptable to the
palate, is not always nourishing or wholesome; so that which our minds
extract from science does not cease to be pleasant, though there
be nothing in it either nutritive or healthful. Thus they say: “The
consideration of nature is a diet proper for our minds, it raises and
elevates us, makes us disdain low and terrestrial things, by comparing
them with those that are celestial and high. The mere inquisition into
great and occult things is very pleasant, even to those who acquire no
other benefit than the reverence and fear of judging it.” This is
what they profess. The vain image of this sickly curiosity is yet more
manifest in this other example which they so often urge. “Eudoxus wished
and begged of the gods that he might once see the sun near at hand, to
comprehend the form, greatness, and beauty of it; even though he should
thereby be immediately burned.” He would at the price of his life
purchase a knowledge, of which the use and possession should at the same
time be taken from him; and for this sudden and vanishing knowledge
lose all the other knowledge he had in present, or might afterwards have
acquired.

I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pytagoras,
have given us their atom, idea and numbers, for current pay. They were
too wise to establish their articles of faith upon things so disputable
and uncertain. But in that obscurity and ignorance in which the world
then was, every one of these great men endeavoured to present some kind
of image or reflection of light, and worked their brains for inventions
that might have a pleasant and subtle appearance; provided that, though
false, they might make good their ground against those that would oppose
them. _Unicuique ista pro ingenio finguntur, non ex scientiæ vi._ “These
things every one fancies according to his wit, and not by any power of
knowledge.”

One of the ancients, who was reproached, “That he professed philosophy,
of which he nevertheless in his own judgment made no great account,”
 made answer, “That this was truly to philosophize.”

They wished to consider all, to balance every thing, and found that an
employment well suited to our natural curiosity. Some things they wrote
for the benefit of public society, as their religions; and for that
consideration it was but reasonable that they should not examine public
opinions to the quick, that they might not disturb the common obedience
to the laws and customs of their country.

Plato treats of this mystery with a raillery manifest enough; for where
he writes according to his own method he gives no certain rule. When he
plays the legislator he borrows a magisterial and positive style, and
boldly there foists in his most fantastic inventions, as fit to persuade
the vulgar, as impossible to be believed by himself; knowing very well
how fit we are to receive all sorts of impressions, especially the most
immoderate and preposterous; and yet, in his _Laws_, he takes singular
care that nothing be sung in public but poetry, of which the fiction and
fabulous relations tend to some advantageous end; it being so easy to
imprint all sorts of phantasms in human minds, that it were injustice
not to feed them rather with profitable untruths than with untruths that
are unprofitable and hurtful. He says very roundly, in his _Republic,_
“That it is often necessary, for the benefit of men, to deceive them.”
 It is very easy to distinguish that some of the sects have more followed
truth, and the others utility, by which the last have gained their
reputation. ‘Tis the misery of our condition that often that which
presents itself to our imagination for the truest does not appear the
most useful to life. The boldest sects, as the Epicurean, Pyrrhonian,
and the new Academic, are yet constrained to submit to the civil law at
the end of the account.

There are other subjects that they have tumbled and tossed about, some
to the right and others to the left, every one endeavouring, right or
wrong, to give them some kind of colour; for, having found nothing so
abstruse that they would not venture to speak of, they are very
often forced to forge weak and ridiculous conjectures; not that they
themselves looked upon them as any foundation, or establishing any
certain truth, but merely for exercise. _Non tam id sensisse quod
dicerent, quam exercere ingénia materio difficultate videntur voluisse._
“They seem not so much themselves to have believed what they said, as to
have had a mind to exercise their wits in the difficulty of the
matter.” And if we did not take it thus, how should we palliate so
great inconstancy, variety, and vanity of opinions, as we see have been
produced by those excellent and admirable men? As, for example, what
can be more vain than to imagine, to guess at God, by our analogies and
conjectures? To direct and govern him and the world by our capacities
and our laws? And to serve ourselves, at the expense of the divinity,
with what small portion of capacity he has been pleased to impart to
our natural condition; and because we cannot extend our sight to his
glorious throne, to have brought him down to our corruption and our
miseries?

Of all human and ancient opinions concerning religion, that seems to
me the most likely and most excusable, that acknowledged God as an
incomprehensible power, the original and preserver of all things, all
goodness, all perfection, receiving and taking in good part the honour
and reverence that man paid him, under what method, name, or ceremonies
soever--


      Jupiter omnipotens, rerum, regumque, deûmque,
   Progenitor, genitrixque.

      “Jove, the almighty, author of all things,
   The father, mother, of both gods and kings.”


This zeal has universally been looked upon from heaven with a gracious
eye. All governments have reaped fruit from their devotion; impious
men and actions have everywhere had suitable events. Pagan histories
acknowledge dignity, order, justice, prodigies, and oracles, employed
for their profit and instruction in their fabulous religions; God,
through his mercy, vouchsafing, by these temporal benefits, to cherish
the tender principles of a kind of brutish knowledge that natural reason
gave them of him, through the deceiving images of their dreams. Not only
deceiving and false, but impious also and injurious, are those that man
has forged from his own invention: and of all the religions that St.
Paul found in repute at Athens, that which they had dedicated “to the
unknown God” seemed to him the most to be excused.

Pythagoras shadowed the truth a little more closely, judging that
the knowledge of this first cause and being of beings ought to be
indefinite, without limitation, without declaration; that it was nothing
else than the extreme effort of our imagination towards perfection,
every one amplifying the idea according to the talent of his capacity.
But if Numa attempted to conform the devotion of his people to this
project; to attach them to a religion purely mental, without any
prefixed object and material mixture, he undertook a thing of no use;
the human mind could never support itself floating in such an infinity
of inform thoughts; there is required some certain image to be presented
according to its own model. The divine majesty has thus, in some sort,
suffered himself to be circumscribed in corporal limits for our
advantage. His supernatural and celestial sacraments have signs of our
earthly condition; his adoration is by sensible offices and words; for
‘tis man that believes and prays. I shall omit the other arguments upon
this subject; but a man would have much ado to make me believe that the
sight of our crucifixes, that the picture of our Saviour’s passion, that
the ornaments and ceremonious motions of our churches, that the voices
accommodated to the devotion of our thoughts, and that emotion of the
senses, do not warm the souls of the people with a religious passion of
very advantageous effect.

Of those to whom they have given a body, as necessity required in that
universal blindness, I should, I fancy, most incline to those who adored
the sun:--


      La Lumière commune,
   L’oil du monde; et si Dieu au chef porte des yeux,
   Les rayons du soleil sont ses yeulx radieux,
   Qui donnent vie à touts, nous maintiennent et gardent,
   Et les faictsdes humains en ce monde regardent:
   Ce beau, ce grand soleil qui nous faict les saisons,
   Selon qu’il entre ou sort de ses douze maisons;
   Qui remplit l’univers de ses vertus cognues;
   Qui d’un traict de ses yeulx nous dissipe les nues;
   L’esprit, l’ame du monde, ardent et flamboyant,
   En la course d’un jour tout le Ciel tournoyant;
   Plein d’immense grandeur, rond, vagabond, et ferme;
   Lequel tient dessoubs luy tout le monde pour terme:
   En repos, sans repos; oysif, et sans séjour;
   Fils aisné de nature, et le père du jour:

      “The common light that equal shines on all,
   Diffused around the whole terrestrial ball;
   And, if the almighty Ruler of the skies
   Has eyes, the sunbeams are his radiant eyes,
   That life and safety give to young and old,
   And all men’s actions upon earth behold.
   This great, this beautiful, the glorious sun,
   Who makes their course the varied seasons run;
   That with his virtues fills the universe,
   And with one glance can sullen clouds disperse;
   Earth’s life and soul, that, flaming in his sphere,
   Surrounds the heavens in one day’s career;
   Immensely great, moving yet firm and round,
   Who the whole world below has made his bound;
   At rest, without rest, idle without stay,
   Nature’s first son, and father of the day:”


forasmuch as, beside this grandeur and beauty of his, ‘tis the only
piece of this machine that we discover at the remotest distance from us;
and by that means so little known that they were pardonable for entering
into so great admiration and reverence of it.

Thales, who first inquired into this sort of matter, believed God to be
a Spirit that made all things of water; Anaximander, that the gods
were always dying and entering into life again; and that there were an
infinite number of worlds; Anaximines, that the air was God, that he
was procreate and immense, always moving. Anaxagoras the first, was of
opinion that the description and manner of all things were conducted by
the power and reason of an infinite spirit. Alcmæon gave divinity to
the sun, moon, and stars, and to the soul. Pythagoras made God a spirit,
spread over the nature of all things, whence our souls are extracted;
Parmenides, a circle surrounding the heaven, and supporting the world by
the ardour of light. Empedocles pronounced the four elements, of which
all things are composed, to be gods; Protagoras had nothing to say,
whether they were or were not, or what they were; Democritus was one
while of opinion that the images and their circuitions were gods;
another while, the nature that darts out those images; and then,
our science and intelligence. Plato divides his belief into several
opinions; he says, in his _Timæus_, that the Father of the World cannot
be named; in his Laws, that men are not to inquire into his being; and
elsewhere, in the very same books, he makes the world, the heavens, the
stars, the earth, and our souls, gods; admitting, moreover, those which
have been received by ancient institution in every republic.

Xenophon reports a like perplexity in Socrates’s doctrine; one while
that men are not to inquire into the form of God, and presently makes
him maintain that the sun is God, and the soul God; that there is but
one God, and then that there are many. Speusippus, the nephew of Plato,
makes God a certain power governing all things, and that he has a soul.
Aristotle one while says it is the spirit, and another the world; one
while he gives the world another master, and another while makes God the
heat of heaven. Zenocrates makes eight, five named amongst the planets;
the sixth composed of all the fixed stars, as of so many members; the
seventh and eighth, the sun and moon. Heraclides Ponticus does nothing
but float in his opinion, and finally deprives God of sense, and makes
him shift from one form to another, and at last says that it is heaven
and earth. Theophrastus wanders in the same irresolution amongst his
fancies, attributing the superintendency of the world one while to the
understanding, another while to heaven, and then to the stars. Strato
says that ‘tis nature, she having the power of generation, augmentation,
and diminution, without form and sentiment Zeno says ‘tis the law of
nature, commanding good and prohibiting evil; which law is an animal;
and takes away the accustomed gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Vesta. Diogenes
Apolloniates, that ‘tis air. Zenophanes makes God round, seeing and
hearing, not breathing, and having nothing in common with human nature.
Aristo thinks the form of God to be incomprehensible, deprives him
of sense, and knows not whether he be an animal or something else;
Cleanthes, one while supposes it to be reason, another while the world,
another the soul of nature, and then the supreme heat rolling about, and
environing all. Perseus, Zeno’s disciple, was of opinion that men have
given the title of gods to such as have been useful, and have added
any notable advantage to human life, and even to profitable things
themselves. Chrysippus made a confused heap of all the preceding
theories, and reckons, amongst a thousand forms of gods that he makes,
the men also that have been deified. Diagoras and Theodoras flatly
denied that there were any gods at all. Epicurus makes the gods shining,
transparent, and perflable, lodged as betwixt two forts, betwixt two
worlds, secure from blows, clothed in a human figure, and with such
members as we have; which members are to them of no use:--


      Ego Deum genus esse semper duxi, et dicam colitum;
   Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus.

      “I ever thought that gods above there were,
   But do not think they care what men do here.”


Trust to your philosophy, my masters; and brag that you have found
the bean in the cake when you see what a rattle is here with so many
philosophical heads! The perplexity of so many worldly forms has gained
this over me, that manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much
displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me,
in comparing them. And all other choice than what comes from the express
and immediate hand of God seems to me a choice of very little privilege.
The policies of the world are no less opposite upon this subject than
the schools, by which we may understand that fortune itself is not more
variable and inconstant, nor more blind and inconsiderate, than our
reason. The things that are most unknown are most proper to be deified;
wherefore to make gods of ourselves, as the ancients did, exceeds the
extremest weakness of understanding. I would much rather have gone along
with those who adored the serpent, the dog, or the ox; forasmuch as
their nature and being is less known to us, and that we have more room
to imagine what we please of those beasts, and to attribute to them
extraordinary faculties. But to have made gods of our own condition, of
whom we ought to know the imperfections; and to have attributed to
them desire, anger, revenge, marriages, generation, alliances, love,
jealousy, our members and bones, our fevers and pleasures, our death and
obsequies; this must needs have proceeded from a marvellous inebriety of
the human understanding;


      Quæ procul usque adeo divino ab numine distant,
   Inque Deûm numéro quæ sint indigna videri;

      “From divine natures these so distant are,
   They are unworthy of that character.”


_Formo, otates, vestitus, omatus noti sunt; genera, conjugia,
cognationes, omniaque traducta ad similitudinem imbellitar tis
humano: nam et perturbatis animis inducuntur; accipimus enim deorurn
cupiditates, cegritudines, iracundias_; “Their forms, ages, clothes,
and ornaments are known: their descents, marriages, and kindred, and all
adapted to the similitude of human weakness; for they are represented to
us with anxious minds, and we read of the lusts, sickness, and anger
of the gods;” as having attributed divinity not only to faith,
virtue, honour, concord, liberty, victory, and piety; but also to
voluptuousness, fraud, death, envy, old age, misery; to fear, fever, ill
fortune, and other injuries of our frail and transitory life:--


      Quid juvat hoc, templis nostros inducere mores?
   O curvæ in terris animæ et colestium inanes!

      “O earth-born souls! by earth-born passions led,
   To every spark of heav’nly influence dead!
   Think ye that what man values will inspire
   In minds celestial the same base desire?”


The Egyptians, with an impudent prudence, interdicted, upon pain of
hanging, that any one should say that their gods, Serapis and Isis, had
formerly been men; and yet no one was ignorant that they had been
such; and their effigies, represented with the finger upon the mouth,
signified, says Varro, that mysterious decree to their priests, to
conceal their mortal original, as it must by necessary consequence
cancel all the veneration paid to them. Seeing that man so much desired
to equal himself to God, he had done better, says Cicero, to have
attracted those divine conditions to himself, and drawn them down hither
below, than to send his corruption and misery up on high; but, to take
it right, he has several ways done both the one and the other, with like
vanity of opinion.

When philosophers search narrowly into the hierarchy of their gods, and
make a great bustle about distinguishing their alliances, offices, and
power, I cannot believe they speak as they think. When Plato describes
Pluto’s orchard to us, and the bodily conveniences or pains that attend
us after the ruin and annihilation of our bodies, and accommodates them
to the feeling we have in this life:--


      Secreti celant calles, et myrtea circum
   Sylva tegit; curæ non ipsâ in morte relinquunt;

      “In secret vales and myrtle groves they lie,
   Nor do cares leave them even when they die.”


when Mahomet promises his followers a Paradise hung with tapestry,
gilded and enamelled with gold and precious stones, furnished with
wenches of excelling beauty, rare wines, and delicate dishes; it
is easily discerned that these are deceivers that accommodate their
promises to our sensuality, to attract and allure us by hopes and
opinions suitable to our mortal appetites. And yet some amongst us
are fallen into the like error, promising to themselves after the
resurrection a terrestrial and temporal life, accompanied with all sorts
of worldly conveniences and pleasures. Can we believe that Plato, he
who had such heavenly conceptions, and was so well acquainted with the
Divinity as thence to derive the name of the Divine Plato, ever thought
that the poor creature, man, had any thing in him applicable to that
incomprehensible power? and that he believed that the weak holds we are
able to take were capable, or the force of our understanding sufficient,
to participate of beatitude or eternal pains? We should then tell him
from human reason: “If the pleasures thou dost promise us in the other
life are of the same kind that I have enjoyed here below, this has
nothing in common with infinity; though all my five natural senses
should be even loaded with pleasure, and my soul full of all the
contentment it could hope or desire, we know what all this amounts to,
all this would be nothing; if there be any thing of mine there, there is
nothing divine; if this be no more than what may belong to our present
condition, it cannot be of any value. All contentment of mortals is
mortal. Even the knowledge of our parents, children, and friends,
if that can affect and delight us in the other world, if that still
continues a satisfaction to us there, we still remain in earthly and
finite conveniences. We cannot as we ought conceive the greatness of
these high and divine promises, if we could in any sort conceive them;
to have a worthy imagination of them we must imagine them unimaginable,
inexplicable, and incomprehensible, and absolutely another thing than
those of our miserable experience.” “Eye hath not seen,” saith St. Paul,
“nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things
that God hath prepared for them that love him.” And if, to render us
capable, our being were reformed and changed (as thou, Plato, sayest, by
thy purifications), it ought to be so extreme and total a change, that
by physical doctrine it be no more us;--


      Hector erat tunc cum bello certabat; at ille
   Tractus ab Æmonio non erat Hector eqao;

      He Hector was whilst he could fight, but when
   Dragg’d by Achilles’ steeds, no Hector then;


it must be something else that must receive these recompenses:--


      Quod mutatur... dissolvitur; interit ergo;
   Trajiciuntur enim partes, atque ordine migrant.

      “Things changed dissolved are, and therefore die;
   Their parts are mix’d, and from their order fly.”


For in Pythagoras’s metempsychosis, and the change of habitation that
he imagined in souls, can we believe that the lion, in whom the soul of
Cæsar is enclosed, does espouse Cæsar’s passions, or that the lion
is he? For if it was still Cæsar, they would be in the right who,
controverting this opinion with Plato, reproach him that the son
might be seen to ride his mother transformed into a mule, and the like
absurdities. And can we believe that in the mutations that are made of
the bodies of animals into others of the same kind, the new comers are
not other than their predecessors? From the ashes of a phoenix, a worm,
they say, is engendered, and from that another phoenix; who can
imagine that this second phoenix is no other than the first? We see our
silk-worms, as it were, die and wither; and from this withered body a
butterfly is produced; and from that another worm; how ridiculous would
it be to imagine that this was still the first! That which once has
ceased to be is no more:--


      Nec, si materiam nostram collegerit ætas
   Post obitum, rursumque redegerit, ut sita nunc est,
   Atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitæ,
   Pertineat quidquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum,
   Interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostra.

      “Neither tho’ time should gather and restore
   Our matter to the form it was before,
   And give again new light to see withal,
   Would that new figure us concern at all;
   Or we again ever the same be seen,
   Our being having interrupted been.”


And, Plato, when thou sayest in another place that it shall be the
spiritual part of man that will be concerned in the fruition of the
recompense of another life, thou tellest us a thing wherein there is as
little appearance of truth:--


      Scilicet, avolsis radicibus, ut nequit ullam
   Dispicere ipsa oculus rem, seorsum corpore toto;

      “No more than eyes once from their optics torn,
   Can ever after any thing discern;”


for, by this account, it would no more be man, nor consequently us,
who would be concerned in this enjoyment; for we are composed of two
principal essential parts, the separation of which is the death and ruin
of our being:--


      Inter enim jecta est vital pausa, vageque
   Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes;

      “When once that pause of life is come between,
   ‘Tis just the same as we had never been;”


we cannot say that the man suffers when the worms feed upon his members,
and that the earth consumes them:--


      Et nihil hoc ad nos, qui coltu conjugioque
   Corporis atque animæ consistimus uniter apti.

      “What’s that to us? for we are only we,
   While soul and body in one frame agree.”


Moreover, upon what foundation of their justice can the gods take notice
of or reward man after his death and virtuous actions, since it was
themselves that put them in the way and mind to do them? And why should
they be offended at or punish him for wicked ones, since themselves have
created in him so frail a condition, and when, with one glance of their
will, they might prevent him from falling? Might not Epicurus, with
great colour of human reason, object this to Plato, did he not often
save himself with this sentence: “That it is impossible to establish any
thing certain of the immortal nature by the mortal?” She does nothing
but err throughout, but especially when she meddles with divine things.
Who does more evidently perceive this than we? For although we have
given her certain and infallible principles; and though we have
enlightened her steps with the sacred lamp of truth that it has pleased
God to communicate to us; we daily see, nevertheless, that if she swerve
never so little from the ordinary path; and that she stray from, or
wander out of the way set out and beaten by the church, how soon she
loses, confounds and fetters herself, tumbling and floating in this
vast, turbulent, and waving sea of human opinions, without restraint,
and without any determinate end; so soon as she loses that great and
common road, she enters into a labyrinth of a thousand several paths.

Man cannot be any thing but what he is, nor imagine beyond the reach of
his capacity. “Tis a greater presumption,” says Plutarch, “in them who
are but men to attempt to speak and discourse of the gods and demi-gods
than it is in a man utterly ignorant of music to give an opinion of
singing; or in a man who never saw a camp to dispute about arms and
martial affairs, presuming by some light conjecture to understand the
effects of an art he is totally a stranger to.” Antiquity, I believe,
thought to put a compliment upon, and to add something to, the divine
grandeur in assimilating it to man, investing it with his faculties,
and adorning it with his ugly humours and most shameful necessities;
offering it our aliments to eat, presenting it with our dances,
mummeries, and farces, to divert it; with our vestments to cover it,
and our houses to inhabit, coaxing it with the odour of incense and the
sounds of music, with festoons and nosegays; and to accommodate it to
our vicious passions, flattering its justice with inhuman vengeance, and
with the ruin and dissipation of things by it created and preserved as
Tiberius Sempronius, who burnt the rich spoils and arms he had gained
from the enemy in Sardinia for a sacrifice to Vulcan; and Paulus
Æmilius, those of Macedonia, to Mars and Minerva; and Alexander,
arriving at the Indian Ocean, threw several great vessels of gold into
the sea, in honour of Thetes; and moreover loading her altars with
a slaughter not of innocent beasts only, but of men also, as several
nations, and ours among the rest, were commonly used to do; and I
believe there is no nation under the sun that has not done the same:--


      Sulmone creatos
   Quatuor hîc juvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens,
   Viventes rapit, inferias quos immolet umbris.

      “Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred,
   He took in flight, and living victims led,
   To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire
   In sacrifice before his fun’ral pyre.”


The Getæ hold themselves to be immortal, and that their death is nothing
but a journey to their god Zamolxis. Every five years they dispatch some
one among them to him, to entreat of him such necessaries as they stand
in need of. This envoy is chosen by lot, and the form of dispatching
him, after he has been instructed by word of mouth what he is to
deliver, is that of the assistants, three hold up as many javelins, upon
which the rest throw his body with all their force. If he happen to
be wounded in a mortal part, and that he immediately dies, ‘tis held a
certain argument of divine favour; but if he escapes, he is looked upon
as a wicked and execrable wretch, and another is dismissed after the
same manner in his stead. Amestris, the mother of Xerxes, being grown
old, caused at once fourteen young men, of the best families of Persia,
to be buried alive, according to the religion of the country, to gratify
some infernal deity. And even to this day the idols of Themixtitan
are cemented with the blood of little children, and they delight in no
sacrifice but of these pure and infantine souls; a justice thirsty of
innocent blood:--


   Tantum religio potuit suadere maloram.

   “Such impious use was of religion made,
   So many demon acts it could persuade.”


The Carthaginians immolated their own children to Saturn; and those who
had none of their own bought of others, the father and mother being in
the mean time obliged to assist at the ceremony with a gay and contented
countenance.

It was a strange fancy to think to gratify the divine bounty with our
afflictions; like the Lacedemonians, who regaled their Diana with the
tormenting of young boys, whom they caused to be whipped for her sake,
very often to death. It was a savage humour to imagine to gratify the
architect by the subversion of his building, and to think to take away
the punishment due to the guilty by punishing the innocent; and that
poor Iphigenia, at the port of Aulis, should by her death and immolation
acquit, towards God, the whole army of the Greeks from all the crimes
they had committed;


      Et casta inceste, nubendi tempore in ipso,
   Hostia concideret mactatu mosta parentis;

      “That the chaste virgin in her nuptial band
   Should die by an unnat’ral father’s hand;”


and that the two noble and generous souls of the two Decii, the father
and the son, to incline the favour of the gods to be propitious to the
affairs of Rome, should throw themselves headlong into the thickest of
the enemy: _Quo fuit tanta deorum iniquitas, ut placari populo Romano
non possent, nisi tales viri occidissent?_ “How great an injustice in
the gods was it that they could not be reconciled to the people of Rome
unless such men perished!” To which may be added, that it is not for the
criminal to cause himself to be scourged according to his own measure
nor at his own time, but that it purely belongs to the judge, who
considers nothing as chastisements but the penalty that he appoints, and
cannot call that punishment which proceeds from the consent of him that
suffers. The divine vengeance presupposes an absolute dissent in us,
both for its justice and for our own penalty. And therefore it was a
ridiculous humour of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, who, to interrupt the
continued course of his good fortune, and to balance it, went and threw
the dearest and most precious jewel he had into the sea, believing
that by this voluntary and antedated mishap he bribed and satisfied
the revolution and vicissitude of fortune; and she, to mock his folly,
ordered it so that the same jewel came again into his hands, found
in the belly of a fish. And then to what end were those tearings and
dismemberments of the Corybantes, the Menades, and, in our times, of the
Mahometans, who slash their faces, bosoms, and limbs, to gratify their
prophet; seeing that the offence lies in the will, not in the breast,
eyes, genitals, roundness of form, the shoulders, or the throat?
_Tantus est perturbâto mentis, et sedibus suis pilso, furor, ut sic dii
placentur, quemadmodum ne homines quidem soviunt._ “So great is the
fury and madness of troubled minds when once displaced from the seat of
reason, as if the gods should be appeased with what even men are not so
cruel as to approve.” The use of this natural contexture has not only
respect to us, but also to the service of God and other men; ‘tis as
unjust for us voluntarily to wound or hurt it as to kill ourselves upon
any pretence whatever; it seems to be great cowardice and treason to
exercise cruelty upon, and to destroy, the functions of the body that
are stupid and servile, to spare the soul the solicitude of governing
them according to reason: _Ubi iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios
habere merentur? In regiæ libidinis voluptatem castrati sunt quidam;
sed nemo sibi, ne vir esset, jubente domino, mantis intulit._ “Where are
they so afraid of the anger of the gods as to merit their favour at that
rate? Some, indeed, have been made eunuchs for the lust of princes: but
no man at his master’s command has put his own hand to unman himself.”
 So did they fill their religion with several ill effects:--


   Sæpius olim Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.

   “In elder times Religion did commit most fearful crimes.”


Now nothing of ours can in any sort be compared or likened unto
the divine nature, which will not blemish and stain it with much
imperfection.

How can that infinite beauty, power, and goodness, admit of any
correspondence or similitude to such abject things as we are, without
extreme wrong and manifest dishonour to his divine greatness? _Infirmum
dei fortius est hominibs; et stultum dei sapientius est hominibus._ “For
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men.” Stilpo, the philosopher, being asked, “Whether
the gods were delighted with our adorations and sacrifices?”--“You are
indiscreet,” answered he; “let us withdraw apart, if you would talk of
such things.” Nevertheless, we prescribe him bounds, we keep his power
besieged by our reasons (I call our ravings and dreams reason, with the
dispensation of philosophy, which says, “That the wicked man, and even
the fool, go mad by reason, but a particular form of reason”), we
would subject him to the vain and feeble appearances of our
understandings,--him who has made both us and our knowledge. Because
that nothing is made of nothing, God therefore could not make the world
without matter. What! has God put into our hands the keys and most
secret springs of his power? Is he obliged not to exceed the limits of
our knowledge? Put the case, O man! that thou hast been able here to
mark some footsteps of his effects; dost thou therefore think that he
has employed all he can, and has crowded all his forms and ideas in this
work? Thou seest nothing but the order and revolution of this little
cave in which thou art lodged, if, indeed, thou dost see so much;
whereas his divinity has an infinite jurisdiction beyond. This part is
nothing in comparison of the whole:--


      Omnia cum colo, terràque, manque,
   Nil sunt ad summam summal totius omnem.

      “The earth, the sea, and skies, from pole to pole,
   Are small, nay, nothing to the mighty whole.”


‘Tis a municipal law that thou allegest, thou knowest not what is
universal Tie thyself to that to which thou art subject, but not him; he
is not of thy brotherhood, thy fellow-citizen, or companion. If he has
in some sort communicated himself unto thee, ‘tis not to debase himself
unto thy littleness, nor to make thee comptroller of his power; the
human body cannot fly to the clouds; rules are for thee. The sun runs
every day his ordinary course; the bounds of the sea and the earth
cannot be confounded; the water is unstable and without firmness; a
wall, unless it be broken, is impenetrable to a solid body; a man cannot
preserve his life in the flames; he cannot be both in heaven and upon
earth, and corporally in a thousand places at once. ‘Tis for thee that
he has made these rules; ‘tis thee that they concern; he has manifested
to Christians that he has enfranchised himself from them all when it
pleased him. And, in truth, why, almighty as he is, should he have
limited his power within any certain bounds? In favour of whom should he
have renounced his privilege? Thy reason has in no other thing more of
likelihood and foundation than in that wherein it persuades thee that
there is a plurality of worlds:--


      Terramque et solem, lunam, mare, estera quo rant,
   Non esse unica, sed numéro magis innumerali.

      “That earth, sun, moon, sea, and the rest that are,
   Not single, but innumerable were.”


The most eminent minds of elder times believed it; and some of this
age of ours, compelled by the appearances of human reason, do the same;
forasmuch as in this fabric that we behold there is nothing single and
one,


      Cum in summà res nulla sit una,
   Unica quo gignatur, et unica solaque crescat;

      “Since nothing’s single in this mighty place,
   That can alone beget, alone increase;”


and that all the kinds are multiplied in some number; by which it seems
not to be likely that God should have made this work only without a
companion; and that the matter of this form should have been totally
drained in this individual.


      Quare etiam atque etiam tales fateare necesse est
   Esse alios alibi congressus materiali;
   Qualis hic est, avido complexu quem tenet æther.

      “Wherefore ‘tis necessary to confess
   That there must elsewhere be the like congress
   Of the like matter, which the airy space
   Holds fast within its infinite embrace.”


Especially if it be a living creature, which its motions render so
credible that Plato affirms it, and that many of our people do either
confirm, or dare not deny it; no more than that ancient opinion that
the heavens, the stars, and other members of the world, are creatures
composed of body and soul, mortal in respect of their composition,
but immortal by the determination of the Creator. Now if there be many
worlds, as Democritus, Epicurus, and almost all philosophy has believed,
what do we know that the principles and rules of this of ours in like
manner concern the rest? They may peradventure have another form and
another polity. Epicurus supposes them either like or unlike. We see
in this world an infinite difference and variety, only by distance of
places; neither com, wine, nor any of our animals are to be seen in that
new comer of the world discovered by our fathers; ‘tis all there another
thing; and in times past, do but consider in how many parts of the world
they had no knowledge either of Bacchus or Ceres. If Pliny and Herodotus
are to be believed, there are in certain places kinds of men very little
resembling us, mongrel and ambiguous forms, betwixt the human and brutal
natures; there are countries where men are bom without heads, having
their mouth and eyes in their breast; where they are all hermaphrodites;
where they go on all four; where they have but one eye in the forehead,
and a head more like a dog than like ours; where they are half fish the
lower part, and live in the water; where the women bear at five years
old, and live but eight; where the head and the skin of the forehead is
so hard that a sword will not touch it, but rebounds again; where men
have no beards; nations that know not the use of fire; others that eject
seed of a black colour. What shall we say of those that naturally change
themselves into wolves, colts, and then into men again? And if it be
true, as Plutarch says, that in some place of the Indies there are men
without mouths, who nourish themselves with the smell of certain odours,
how many of our descriptions are false? He is no longer risible, nor,
perhaps, capable of reason and society. The disposition and cause of our
internal composition would then for the most part be to no purpose, and
of no use.

Moreover, how many things are there in our own knowledge that oppose
those fine rules we have cut out for and prescribe to nature? And yet we
must undertake to circumscribe thereto God himself! How many things do
we call miraculous, and contrary to nature? This is done by every nation
and by every man, according to the proportion of his ignorance. How many
occult properties and quintessences do we daily discover? For, for us
to go “according to nature,” is no more but to go “according to our
understanding,” as far as that is able to follow, and as far as we
are able to see into it; all beyond that is, forsooth, monstrous and
irregular. Now, by this account, all things shall be monstrous to the
wisest and most understanding men; for human reason has persuaded them
that there was no manner of ground nor foundation, not so much as to be
assured that snow is white, and Anaxagoras affirmed it to be black; if
there be any thing, or if there be nothing; if there be knowledge
or ignorance, which Metrodorus of Chios denied that man was able to
determine; or whether we live, as Euripides doubts whether the life we
live is life, or whether that we call death be not life, [--Greek--]
and not without some appearance. For why do we derive the title of being
from this instant, which is but a flash in the infinite course of an
eternal night, and so short an interruption of our perpetual and natural
condition, death possessing all the before and after this moment, and
also a good part of the moment itself. Others swear there is no motion
at all, as followers of Melissus, and that nothing stirs. For if there
be but one, neither can that spherical motion be of any use to him,
nor motion from one place to another, as Plato proves: “That there is
neither generation nor corruption in nature.” Protagoras says that there
is nothing in nature but doubt; that a man may equally dispute of all
things; and even of this, whether a man can equally dispute of all
things; Nausiphanes, that of things which seem to be, nothing is
more than it is not; that there is nothing certain but uncertainty;
Parmenides, that of that which seems, there is no one thing in general;
that there is but one thing; Zeno, that one same is not, and that there
is nothing; if there were one thing, it would either be in another or in
itself; if it be in another, they are two; if it be in itself, they are
yet two; the comprehending, and the comprehended. According to these
doctrines the nature of things is no other than a shadow, either false
or vain.

This way of speaking in a Christian man has ever seemed to me very
indiscreet and irreverent. “God cannot die; God cannot contradict
himself; God cannot do this or that.” I do not like to have the divine
power so limited by the laws of men’s mouths; and the idea which
presents itself to us in those propositions ought to be more religiously
and reverently expressed.

Our speaking has its failings and defects, as well as all the rest. Most
of the occasions of disturbance in the world are grammatical ones; our
suits only spring from disputes as to the interpretation of laws; and
most wars proceed from the inability of ministers clearly to express the
conventions and treaties of amity of princes. How many quarrels, and
of how great importance, has the doubt of the meaning of this syllable,
_hoc_,* created in the world? Let us take the clearest conclusion that
logic itself


   * Montaigne here refers to the controversies between
     the Catholics and Protestants about transubstantiation.


presents us withal; if you say, “It is fine weather,” and that you
say true, it is then fine weather. Is not this a very certain form of
speaking? And yet it will deceive us; that it will do so, let us follow
the example: If you say, “I lie,” if you say true, you do lie. The art,
the reason, and force of the conclusion of this, are the same with the
other, and yet we are gravelled. The Pyrrhonian philosophers, I see,
cannot express their general conception in any kind of speaking; for
they would require a new language on purpose; ours is all formed of
affirmative propositions, which are totally antarctic to them; insomuch
that when they say “I doubt,” they are presently taken by the throat, to
make them confess that at least they know and are assured that they do
doubt. By which means they have been compelled to shelter themselves
under this medical comparison, without which their humour would be
inexplicable: when they pronounce, “I know not,” or, “I doubt,” they say
that this proposition carries off itself with the rest, no more nor less
than rhubarb, that drives out the ill humours, and carries itself
off with them. This fancy will be more certainly understood by
interrogation: “What do I know?” as I bear it with the emblem of a
balance.

See what use they make of this irreverent way of speaking; in the
present disputes about our religion, if you press its adversaries too
hard, they will roundly tell you, “that it is not in the power of God to
make it so, that his body should be in paradise and upon earth, and in
several places at once.” And see, too, what advantage the old scoffer
made of this. “At least,” says he, “it is no little consolation to man
to see that God cannot do all things; for he cannot kill himself, though
he would; which is the greatest privilege we have in our condition; he
cannot make mortal immortal, nor revive the dead; nor make it so, that
he who has lived has not; nor that he who has had honours has not had
them; having no other right to the past than that of oblivion.” And that
the comparison of man to God may yet be made out by jocose examples: “He
cannot order it so,” says he, “that twice ten shall not be twenty.”
 This is what he says, and what a Christian ought to take heed shall not
escape his lips. Whereas, on the contrary, it seems as if men studied
this foolish daring of language, to reduce God to their own measure:--


      Cras vel atrâ Nube polum, Pater, occupato,
   Vel sole puro; non tamen irritum
   Quodcumque retro est efficiet, neque
   Diffinget infectumque reddet
   Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.

      “To-morrow, let it shine or rain,
   Yet cannot this the past make vain:
   Nor uncreate and render void
   That which was yesterday enjoyed.”


When we say that the infinity of ages, as well past as to come, are but
one instant with God; that his goodness, wisdom, and power are the same
with his essence; our mouths speak it, but our understandings apprehend
it not; and yet, such is our vain opinion of ourselves, that we must
make the Divinity to pass through our sieve; and thence proceed all the
dreams and errors with which the world abounds, whilst we reduce and
weigh in our balance a thing so far above our poise. _Mirum quo procédat
improbitas cordis humani, parvulo aliquo intritata successu._ “‘Tis
wonderful to what the wickedness of man’s heart will proceed, if
elevated with the least success.” How magisterially and insolently does
Epicurus reprove the Stoics, for maintaining that the truly good and
happy being appertained only to God, and that the wise man had nothing
but a shadow and resemblance of it! How temerariously have they bound
God to destiny (a thing which, by my consent, none that bears the name
of a Christian shall ever do again)! and Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras
have enslaved him to necessity. This arrogance of attempting to discover
God with our eyes has been the cause that an eminent person among us has
attributed to the Divinity a corporal form; and is the reason of what
happens to us every day, of attributing to God important events, by a
particular assignment. Because they weigh with us, they conclude that
they also weigh with him, and that he has a more intent and vigilant
regard to them than to others of less moment to us or of ordinary
course: _Magna Dii curant, parva negligunt:_ “The gods are concerned at
great matters, but slight the small.” Listen to him; he will clear this
to you by his reason: _Nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant:_
“Neither indeed do kings in their administration take notice of all the
least concerns.” As if to that King of kings it were more or less
to subvert a kingdom, or to move the leaf of a tree; or as if his
providence acted after another manner in inclining the event of a battle
than in the leap of a flea. The hand of his government is laid upon
every thing after the same manner, with the same power and order; our
interest does nothing towards it; our inclinations and measures sway
nothing with him. _Deus ita artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit
in parvis:_ “God is so great an artificer in great things, that he is no
less in the least” Our arrogancy sets this blasphemous comparison
ever before us. Because our employments are a burden to us, Strato has
courteously been pleased to exempt the gods from all offices, as their
priests are; he makes nature produce and support all things; and
with her weights and motions make up the several parts of the world,
discharging human nature from the awe of divine judgments: _Quod beatum
æterumque sit, id nec habere negotii quicquam, nec exhibere alteri:_
“What is blessed and eternal has neither any business itself nor gives
any to another.” Nature will that in like things there should be a like
relation. The infinite number of mortals, therefore, concludes a
like number of immortals; the infinite things that kill and destroy
presupposes as many that preserve and profit. As the souls of the
gods, without tongue, eye, or ear, do every one of them feel amongst
themselves what the other feels, and judge our thoughts; so the souls of
men, when at liberty and loosed from the body, either by sleep or some
ecstacy, divine, foretell, and see things, which, whilst joined to the
body, they could not see. “Men,” says St. Paul, “professing themselves
to be wise, they become fools; and change the glory of the uncorruptible
God into an image made like corruptible man.” Do but take notice of the
juggling in the ancient deifications. After the great and stately pomp
of the funeral, so soon as the fire began to mount to the top of the
pyramid, and to catch hold of the couch where the body lay, they at the
same time turned out an eagle, which flying upward, signified that the
soul went into Paradise. We have a thousand medals, and particularly
of the worthy Faustina, where this eagle is represented carrying these
deified souls to heaven with their heels upwards. ‘Tis pity that we
should fool ourselves with our own fopperies and inventions,


   Quod finxere, timent,

   “They fear their own inventions,”


like children who are frighted with the same face of their playfellow,
that they themselves have smeared and smutted. _Quasi quicquam
infelicius sit homine, cui sua figmenta dominantur:_

“As if any thing could be more unhappy than man, who is insulted over by
his own imagination.” ‘Tis far from honouring him who made us, to honour
him that we have made. Augustus had more temples than Jupiter, served
with as much religion and belief of miracles. The Thracians, in return
of the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to bring him word
that they had canonized him: “Has your nation,” said he to them, “the
power to make gods of whom they please? Pray first deify some one
amongst yourselves, and when I shall see what advantage he has by it,
I will thank you for your offer.” Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot
make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. Hear Trismegistus
in praise of our sufficiency: “Of all the wonderful things, it surmounts
all wonder that man could find out the divine nature and make it.” And
take here the arguments of the school of philosophy itself:--


      Nosse cui divos et coli munina soli,
   Aut soli nescire, datum.

      “To whom to know the deities of heaven,
   Or know he knows them not, alone ‘tis given.”


“If there is a God, he is a living creature; if he be a living creature,
he has sense; and if he has sense, he is subject to corruption. If he
be without a body he is without a soul, and consequently without action;
and if he has a body, it is perishable.” Is not here a triumph? we
are incapable of having made the world; there must then be some more
excellent nature that has put a hand to the work. It were a foolish and
ridiculous arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect thing of the
universe. There must then be something that is better, and that must be
God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not
know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for
rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial
palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some
possessor, who is much greater than we? Is not the most supreme always
the most worthy? but we are in the lowest form. Nothing without a soul
and without reason can produce a living creature capable of reason. The
world produces us, the world then has soul and reason. Every part of us
is less than we. We are part of the world, the world therefore is endued
with wisdom and reason, and that more abundantly than we. ‘Tis a fine
thing to have a great government; the government of the world then
appertains to some happy nature. The stars do us no harm; they are then
full of goodness. We have need of nourishment; then so have the gods
also, and feed upon the vapours of the earth. Worldly goods are not
goods to God; therefore they are not goods to us; offending and being
offended are equally testimonies of imbecility; ‘tis therefore folly to
fear God. God is good by his nature; man by his industry, which is more.
The divine and human wisdom have no other distinction, but that the
first is eternal; but duration is no accession to wisdom, therefore we
are companions. We have life, reason, and liberty; we esteem goodness,
charity, and justice; these qualities are then in him. In conclusion,
building and destroying, the conditions of the Divinity, are forged by
man, according as they relate to himself. What a pattern, and what a
model! let us stretch, let us raise and swell human qualities as much as
we please; puff up thyself, poor man, yet more and more, and more:--


   Non, si tu ruperis, inquit.

   “Not if thou burst,” said he.


_Profecto non Deum, quern cogitare non possunt, sed semetip pro illo
cogitantes, non ilium, sed seipsos, non illi, sed sibi comparant?_
“Certainly they do not imagine God, whom they cannot imagine; but
they imagine themselves in his stead; they do not compare him, but
themselves, not to him, but to themselves.” In natural things the
effects do but half relate to their causes. What’s this to the purpose?
His condition is above the order of nature, too elevated, too remote,
and too mighty, to permit itself to be bound and fettered by our
conclusions. ‘Tis not through ourselves that we arrive at that place;
our ways lie too low. We are no nearer heaven on the top of Mount Cenis
than at the bottom of the sea; take the distance with your astrolabe.
They debase God even to the carnal knowledge of women, to so many times,
and so many generations. Paulina, the wife of Satuminus, a matron of
great reputation at Rome, thinking she lay with the god Serapis, found
herself in the arms of an amoroso of hers, through the panderism of the
priests of his temple. Varro, the most subtle and most learned of all
the Latin authors, in his book of theology, writes, that the sexton of
Hercules’s temple, throwing dice with one hand for himself, and with the
other for Hercules, played after that manner with him for a supper and
a wench; if he won, at the expense of the offerings; if he lost, at his
own. The sexton lost, and paid the supper and the wench. Her name was
Laurentina, who saw by night this god in her arms, who moreover told
her, that the first she met the next day, should give her a heavenly
reward; which proved to be Taruncius, a rich young man, who took her
home to his house, and in time left her his inheritrix. She, in her
turn, thinking to do a thing that would be pleasing to the god, left the
people of Rome heirs to her; and therefore had divine honours attributed
to her. As if it had not been sufficient that Plato was originally
descended from the gods by a double line, and that he had Neptune for
the common father of his race, it was certainly believed at Athens, that
Aristo, having a mind to enjoy the fair Perictione, could not, and
was warned by the god Apollo, in a dream, to leave her unpolluted and
untouched, till she should first be brought to bed. These were the
father and mother of Plato. How many ridiculous stories are there of
like cuckoldings, committed by the gods against poor mortal men! And how
many husbands injuriously scandaled in favour of the children! In the
Mahometan religion there are Merlins enough found by the belief of the
people; that is to say, children without fathers, spiritual, divinely
conceived in the wombs of virgins, and carry names that signify so much
in their language.

We are to observe that to every thing nothing is more dear and estimable
than its being (the lion, the eagle the dolphin, prize nothing above
their own kind); and that every thing assimilates the qualities of all
other things to its own proper qualities, which we may indeed extend
or contract, but that’s all; for beyond that relation and principle our
imagination cannot go, can guess at nothing else, nor possibly go out
thence, nor stretch beyond it; whence spring these ancient conclusions:
of all forms the most beautiful is that of man; therefore God must be
of that form. No one can be happy without virtue, nor virtue be without
reason, and reason cannot inhabit anywhere but in a human shape; God is
therefore clothed in a human figure. _Ita est informatum et anticipatum
mentibus nostris, ut homini, quum de Deo cogitet, forma occurrat
hu-mana._ “It is so imprinted in our minds, and the fancy is so
prepossessed with it, that when a man thinks of God, a human figure ever
presents itself to the imagination.” Therefore it was that Xenophanes
pleasantly said, “That if beasts frame any gods to themselves, as ‘tis
likely they do, they make them certainly such as themselves are, and
glorify themselves in it, as we do. For why may not a goose say thus;
“All the parts of the universe I have an interest in; the earth serves
me to walk upon; the sun to light me; the stars have their influence
upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters;
there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me;
I am the darling of nature! Is it not man that keeps, lodges, and serves
me? ‘Tis for me that he both sows and grinds; if he eats me he does the
same by his fellow-men, and so do I the worms that kill and devour him.”
 As much might be said by a crane, and with greater confidence, upon the
account of the liberty of his flight, and the possession of that high
and beautiful region. _Tam blanda conciliatrix, et tam sui est lena ipsa
natura._ “So flattering and wheedling a bawd is nature to herself.”

Now by the same consequence, the destinies are then for us; for us the
world; it shines it thunders for us; creator and creatures, all are for
us; ‘tis the mark and point to which the universality of things aims.
Look into the records that philosophy has kept for two thousand years
and more, of the affairs of heaven; the gods all that while have
neither acted nor spoken but for man. She does not allow them any other
consultation or occupation. See them here against us in war:--


      Domitosque Herculeâ manu
   Telluris juvenes, unde periculum
   Fulgens contre mu it domus
   Saturai veteris.

      “The brawny sons of earth, subdu’d by hand
   Of Hercules on the Phlegræan strand,
   Where the rude shock did such an uproar make,
   As made old Saturn’s sparkling palace shake.”


And here you shall see them participate of our troubles, to make a
return for our having so often shared in theirs:--


      Neptunus muros, magnoque emota tridenti
   Fundamenta quatit, totamque à sedibus urbem
   Emit: hie Juno Scæas sævissima portas Prima tenet.

      “Amidst that smother Neptune holds his place,
   Below the walls’ foundation drives his mace,
   And heaves the city from its solid base.
   See where in arms the cruel Juno stands,
   Full in the Scæan gate.”


The Caunians, jealous of the authority of their own proper gods, armed
themselves on the days of their devotion, and through the whole of their
precincts ran cutting and slashing the air with their swords, by that
means to drive away and banish all foreign gods out of their territory.
Their powers are limited according that the plague, that the scurf, that
the phthisic; one cures one sort of itch, another another: _Adeo minimis
etiam rebus prava religio inserit Deos?_ “At such a rate does false
religion create gods for the most contemptible uses.” This one makes
grapes grow, that onions; this has the presidence over lechery, that
over merchandise; for every sort of artisan a god; this has his province
and reputation in the east; that his in the west:--


     “Here lay her armour, here her chariot stood.”

     O sancte Apollo, qui umbilicum certum terrarum obtines!

     “O sacred Phoebus, who with glorious ray,
  From the earth’s centre, dost thy light display.”

     Pallada Cecropidæ, Minola Creta Dianam,
  Vulcanum tellus Hypsipylea colit,
  Junonem Sparte, Pelopeladesque Mycenæ;
  Pinigerum Fauni Mænalis ora caput;
  Mars Latio venerandus.

     “Th’ Athenians Pallas, Cynthia Crete adore,
  Vulcan is worshipped on the Lemnian shore.
  Proud Juno’s altars are by Spartans fed,
  Th’ Arcadians worship Faunus, and ‘tis said
  To Mars, by Italy, is homage paid.”


to our necessity; this cures horses, that men,


   Hic illius arma, Hic currus fuit.


This has only one town or family in his possession; that lives alone;
that in company, either voluntary or upon necessity:--


      Junctaque sunt magno templa nepotis avo.

      “And temples to the nephew joined are,
   To those were reared to the great-grandfather.”


In here are some so wretched and mean (for the number amounts to six and
thirty thousand) that they must pack five or six together, to produce
one ear of corn, and thence take their several names; three to a
door--that of the plank, that of the hinge, and that of the threshold.
Four to a child--protectors of his swathing-clouts, his drink, meat, and
sucking. Some certain, some uncertain and doubtful, and some that are
not yet entered Paradise:--


      Quos, quoniam coli nondum dignamur honore,
   Quas dedimus certè terras habitare sinanras:

      “Whom, since we yet not worthy think of heaven,
   We suffer to possess the earth we’ve given.”


There are amongst them physicians, poets, and civilians. Some of a
mean betwixt the divine and human nature; mediators betwixt God and us,
adorned with a certain second and diminutive sort of adoration; infinite
in titles and offices; some good; others ill; some old and decrepit,
and some that are mortal. For Chrysippus was of opinion that in the last
conflagration of the world all the gods were to die but Jupiter. Man
makes a thousand pretty societies betwixt God and him; is he not his
countryman?


   Jovis incunabula Creten.

   “Crete, the cradle of Jupiter.”


And this is the excuse that, upon consideration of this subject,
Scævola, a high priest, and Varro, a great theologian in their times,
make us: “That it is necessary that the people should be ignorant of
many things that are true, and believe many things that are false.”
 _Quum veritatem qua liberetur inquirat credatur ei expedire quod
fallitur._ “Seeing he inquires into the truth, by which he would be
made free, ‘tis fit he should be deceived.” Human eyes cannot perceive
things but by the forms they know; and we do not remember what a leap
miserable Phæton took for attempting to guide his father’s horses with
a mortal hand. The mind of man falls into as great a depth, and is after
the same manner bruised and shattered by his own rashness. If you ask of
philosophy of what matter the heavens and the sun are? what answer will
she return, if not that it is iron, or, with Anaxagoras, stone, or some
other matter that she makes use of? If a man inquire of Zeno what nature
is? “A fire,” says he, “an artisan, proper for generation, and regularly
proceeding.” Archimedes, master of that science which attributes to
itself the precedency before all others for truth and certainty;
“the sun,” says he, “is a god of red-hot iron.” Was not this a fine
imagination, extracted from the inevitable necessity of geometrical
demonstrations? Yet not so inevitable and useful but that Socrates
thought it was enough to know so much of geometry only as to measure the
land a man bought or sold; and that Polyænus, who had been a great
and famous doctor in it, despised it, as full of falsity and manifest
vanity, after he had once tasted the delicate fruits of the lozelly
gardens of Epicurus. Socrates in Xenophon, concerning this affair,
says of Anaxagoras, reputed by antiquity learned above all others in
celestial and divine matters, “That he had cracked his brain, as all
other men do who too immoderately search into knowledges which nothing
belong to them:” when he made the sun to be a burning stone, he did not
consider that a stone does not shine in the fire; and, which is worse,
that it will there consume; and in making the sun and fire one, that
fire does not turn the complexions black in shining upon them; that
we are able to look fixedly upon fire; and that fire kills herbs and
plants. ‘Tis Socrates’s opinion, and mine too, that the best judging
of heaven is not to judge of it at all. Plato having occasion, in his
_Timous_, to speak of the demons, “This undertaking,” says he, “exceeds
my ability.” We are therefore to believe those ancients who said they
were begotten by them; ‘tis against all reason to refuse a man’s faith
to the children of the gods, though what they say should not be proved
by any necessary or probable reasons; seeing they engage to speak of
domestic and familiar things.

Let us see if we have a little more light in the knowledge of human and
natural things. Is it not a ridiculous attempt for us to forge for those
to whom, by our own confession, our knowledge is not able to attain,
another body, and to lend a false form of our own invention; as is
manifest in this motion of the planets; to which, seeing our wits
cannot possibly arrive, nor conceive their natural conduct, we lend them
material, heavy, and substantial springs of our own by which to move:--


      Temo aureus, aurea summæ
   Curvatura rotæ, radiorum argenteus ordo.

      “Gold was the axle, and the beam was gold;
   The wheels with silver spokes on golden circles roll’d.”


You would say that we had had coachmakers, carpenters, and painters,
that went up on high to make engines of various motions, and to range
the wheelwork and interfacings of the heavenly bodies of differing
colours about the axis of necessity, according to Plato:--


      Mundus domus est maxima rerum,
   Quam quinque altitonæ fragmine zonæ
   Cingunt, per quam limbus pictus bis sex signis
   Stellimicantibus, altus in obliquo æthere, lunæ
   Bigas acceptat.

      “The world’s a mansion that doth all things hold,
   Which thundering zones, in number five, enfold,
   Through which a girdle, painted with twelve signs,
   And that with sparkling constellations, shines,
   In heaven’s arch marks the diurnal course
   For the sun’s chariot and his fiery horse.”


These are all dreams and fanatic follies. Why will not nature please for
once to lay open her bosom to us, and plainly discover to us the means
and conduct of her movements, and prepare our eyes to see them? Good
God, what abuse, what mistakes should we discover in our poor science!
I am mistaken if that weak knowledge of ours holds any one thing as it
really is, and I shall depart hence more ignorant of all other things
than my own ignorance.

Have I not read in Plato this divine saying, that “nature is nothing
but enigmatic poesy!” As if a man might perhaps see a veiled and shady
picture, breaking out here and there with an infinite variety of false
lights to puzzle our conjectures: _Latent ista omnia crassis occullata
et circumfusa tenebris; ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit, quæ
penetrare in coelum, terram intrare, possit._ “All those things lie
concealed and involved in so dark an obscurity that no point of human
wit can be so sharp as to pierce heaven or penetrate the earth.” And
certainly philosophy is no other than sophisticated poetry. Whence do
the ancient writers extract their authorities but from the poets? and
the first of them were poets themselves, and writ accordingly. Plato is
but a poet unripped. Timon calls him, insultingly, “a monstrous forger
of miracles.” All superhuman sciences make use of the poetic style. Just
as women make use of teeth of ivory where the natural are wanting, and
instead of their true complexion make one of some artificial matter; as
they stuff themselves out with cotton to appear plump, and in the sight
of every one do paint, patch, and trick up themselves with a false and
borrowed beauty; so does science (and even our law itself has, they say,
legitimate fictions, whereon it builds the truth of its justice);
she gives us in presupposition, and for current pay, things which she
herself informs us were invented; for these _epicycles, eccentrics, and
concentrics_, which astrology makes use of to carry on the motions of
the stars, she gives us for the best she could invent upon that subject;
as also, in all the rest, philosophy presents us not that which really
is, or what she really believes, but what she has contrived with the
greatest and most plausible likelihood of truth, and the quaintest
invention. Plato, upon the discourse of the state of human bodies and
those of beasts, says, “I should know that what I have said is truth,
had I the confirmation of an oracle; but this I will affirm, that what I
have said is the most likely to be true of any thing I could say.”

‘Tis not to heaven only that art sends her ropes, engines, and wheels;
let us consider a little what she says of us ourselves, and of our
contexture.

There is not more retrogradation, trepidation, accession, recession, and
astonishment, in the stars and celestial bodies, than they have found
out in this poor little human body. In earnest, they have good reason,
upon that very account, to call it the little world, so many tools and
parts have they employed to erect and build it. To assist the motions
they see in man, and the various functions that we find in ourselves, in
how many parts have they divided the soul, in how many places lodged it?
in how many orders have they divided, and to how many stories have they
raised this poor creature, man, besides those that are natural and to
be perceived? And how many offices and vocations have they assigned him?
They make it an imaginary public thing. ‘Tis a subject that they hold
and handle; and they have full power granted to them to rip, place,
displace, piece, and stuff it, every one according to his own fancy, and
yet they possess it not They cannot, not in reality only, but even in
dreams, so govern it that there will not be some cadence or sound that
will escape their architecture, as enormous as it is, and botched with
a thousand false and fantastic patches. And it is not reason to excuse
them; for though we are satisfied with painters when they paint heaven,
earth, seas, mountains, and remote islands, that they give us some
slight mark of them, and, as of things unknown, are content with a faint
and obscure description; yet when they come and draw us after life, or
any other creature which is known and familiar to us, we then require of
them a perfect and exact representation of lineaments and colours, and
despise them if they fail in it.

I am very well pleased with the Milesian girl, who observing the
philosopher Thales to be always contemplating the celestial arch, and
to have his eyes ever gazing upward, laid something in his way that he
might stumble over, to put him in mind that it would be time to take up
his thoughts about things that are in the clouds when he had provided
for those that were under his feet. Doubtless she advised him well,
rather to look to himself than to gaze at heaven; for, as Democritus
says, by the mouth of Cicero,--


   Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas.

      “No man regards what is under his feet;
   They are always prying towards heaven.”


But our condition will have it so, that the knowledge of what we have in
hand is as remote from us, and as much above the clouds, as that of the
stars. As Socrates says, in Plato, “That whoever meddles with philosophy
may be reproached as Thales was by the woman, that he sees nothing of
that which is before him. For every philosopher is ignorant of what his
neighbour does; aye, and of what he does himself, and is ignorant of
what they both are, whether beasts or men.”

Those people, who find Sebond’s arguments too weak, that are ignorant of
nothing, that govern the world, that know all,--


      Quæ mare compescant causæ; quid temperet annum;
   Stellæ sponte suâ, jussæve, vagentur et errent;
   Quid premat obscurum lunæ, quid proférât orbem;
   Quid velit et posait rerum concordia discors;

      “What governs ocean’s tides,
   And through the various year the seasons guides;
   Whether the stars by their own proper force,
   Or foreign power, pursue their wand’ring course;
   Why shadows darken the pale queen of night;
   Whence she renews her orb and spreads her light;--
   What nature’s jarring sympathy can mean;”


have they not sometimes in their writings sounded the difficulties they
have met with of knowing their own being? We see very well that the
finger moves, that the foot moves, that some parts assume a voluntary
motion of themselves without our consent, and that others work by our
direction; that one sort of apprehension occasions blushing; another
paleness; such an imagination works upon the spleen only, another upon
the brain; one occasions laughter, another tears; another stupefies and
astonishes all our senses, and arrests the motion of all our members;
at one object the stomach will rise, at another a member that lies
something lower; but how a spiritual impression should make such a
breach into a massy and solid subject, and the nature of the connection
and contexture of these admirable springs and movements, never yet
man knew: _Omnia incerta ratione, et in naturæ majestate abdita._ “All
uncertain in reason, and concealed in the majesty of nature,” says
Pliny. And St Augustin, _Modus quo corporibus adhorent spiritus....
omnino minis est, nec comprehendi ab homine potest; et hoc ipse
homo est,_ “The manner whereby souls adhere to bodies is altogether
wonderful, and cannot be conceived by man, and yet this is man.” And
yet it is not so much as doubted; for the opinions of men are received
according to the ancient belief, by authority and upon trust, as if
it were religion and law. ‘Tis received as gibberish which is commonly
spoken; this truth, with all its clutter of arguments and proofs, is
admitted as a firm and solid body, that is no more to be shaken, no more
to be judged of; on the contrary, every one, according to the best of
his talent, corroborates and fortifies this received belief with the
utmost power of his reason, which is a supple utensil, pliable, and to
be accommodated to any figure; and thus the world comes to be filled
with lies and fopperies. The reason that men doubt of divers things is
that they never examine common impressions; they do not dig to the root,
where the faults and defects lie; they only debate upon the branches;
they do not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it
has been so and so understood; it is not inquired into whether Galen has
said any thing to purpose, but whether he has said so or so. In truth it
was very good reason that this curb to the liberty of our judgments and
that tyranny over our opinions, should be extended to the schools and
arts. The god of scholastic knowledge is Aristotle; ‘tis irreligion to
question any of his decrees, as it was those of Lucurgus at Sparta;
his doctrine is a magisterial law, which, peradventure, is as false as
another. I do not know why I should not as willingly embrace either the
ideas of Plato, or the atoms of Epicurus, or the plenum or vacuum of
Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of Thales, or the infinity
of nature of Anaximander, or the air of Diogenes, or the numbers and
symmetry of Pythagoras, or the infinity of Parmenides, or the One of
Musæus, or the water and fire of Apollodorus, or the similar parts of
Anaxagoras, or the discord and friendship of Empedocles, or the fire of
Heraclitus, or any other opinion of that infinite confusion of opinions
and determinations, which this fine human reason produces by its
certitude and clearsightedness in every thing it meddles withal, as I
should the opinion of Aristotle upon this subject of the principles
of natural things; which principles he builds of three pieces--matter,
form, and privation. And what can be more vain than to make inanity
itself the cause of the production of things? Privation is a negative;
of what humour could he then make the cause and original of things that
are? And yet that were not to be controverted but for the exercise of
logic; there is nothing disputed therein to bring it into doubt, but to
defend the author of the school from foreign objections; his authority
is the non-ultra, beyond which it is not permitted to inquire.

It is very easy, upon approved foundations, to build whatever we please;
for, according to the law and ordering of this beginning, the other
parts of the structure are easily carried on without any failure. By
this way we find our reason well-grounded, and discourse at a venture;
for our masters prepossess and gain beforehand as much room in our
belief as is necessary towards concluding afterwards what they
please, as geometricians do by their granted demands, the consent and
approbation we allow them giving them wherewith to draw us to the right
and left, and to whirl us about at their pleasure. Whatever springs from
these presuppositions is our master and our God; he will take the level
of his foundations so ample and so easy that by them he may mount us
up to the clouds, if he so please. In this practice and negotiation
of science we have taken the saying of Pythagoras, “That every expert
person ought to be believed in his own art” for current pay. The
logician refers the signification of words to the grammarians; the
rhetorician borrows the state of arguments from the logician; the poet
his measure from the musician: the geometrician his proportions from
the arithmetician, and the metaphysicians take physical conjectures for
their foundations; for every science has its principle presupposed, by
which human judgment is everywhere kept in check. If you come to rush
against the bar where the principal error lies, they have presently this
sentence in their mouths, “That there is no disputing with persons who
deny principles.” Now men can have no principles if not revealed to them
by the divinity; of all the rest the beginning, the middle, and the
end, is nothing but dream and vapour. To those that contend upon
presupposition we must, on the contrary, presuppose to them the same
axiom upon which the dispute is. For every human presupposition and
declaration has as much authority one as another, if reason do not make
the difference. Wherefore they are all to be put into the balance, and
first the generals and those that tyrannize over us. The persuasion of
certainty is a certain testimony of folly and extreme incertainty;
and there are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that are less
philosophers, than the Philodoxes of Plato; we must inquire whether fire
be hot? whether snow be white? if there be any such things as hard or
soft within our knowledge?

And as to those answers of which they make old stories, as he that
doubted if there was any such thing as heat, whom they bid throw himself
into the fire; and he that denied the coldness of ice, whom they bid
to put ice into his bosom;--they are pitiful things, unworthy of the
profession of philosophy. If they had let us alone in our natural
being, to receive the appearance of things without us, according as they
present themselves to us by our senses, and had permitted us to follow
our own natural appetites, governed by the condition of our birth, they
might then have reason to talk at that rate; but ‘tis from them we have
learned to make ourselves judges of the world; ‘tis from them that we
derive this fancy, “That human reason is controller-general of all that
is without and within the roof of heaven; that comprehends every thing,
that can do every thing; by the means of which every thing is known and
understood.” This answer would be good among the cannibals, who enjoy
the happiness of a long, quiet, and peaceable life, without Aristotle’s
precepts, and without the knowledge of the name of physics; this answer
would perhaps be of more value and greater force than all those they
borrow from their reason and invention; of this all animals, and all
where the power of the law of nature is yet pure and simple, would be
as capable as we, but as for them they have renounced it. They need not
tell us, “It is true, for you see and feel it to be so;” they must tell
me whether I really feel what I think I do; and if I do feel it, they
must then tell me why I feel it, and how, and what; let them tell me the
name, original, the parts and junctures of heat and cold, the qualities
of the agent and patient; or let them give up their profession, which is
not to admit or approve of any thing but by the way of reason; that is
their test in all sorts of essays; but, certainly, ‘tis a test full of
falsity, error, weakness, and defect.

Which way can we better prove it than by itself? If we are not to
believe her when speaking of herself, she can hardly be thought fit to
judge of foreign things; if she know any thing, it must at least be her
own being and abode; she is in the soul, and either a part or an effect
of it; for true and essential reason, from which we by a false colour
borrow the name, is lodged in the bosom of the Almighty; there is her
habitation and recess; ‘tis thence that she imparts her rays, when God
is pleased to impart any beam of it to mankind, as Balias issued from
her father’s head, to communicate herself to the world.

Now let us see what human reason tells us of herself and of the soul,
not of the soul in general, of which almost all philosophy makes the
celestial and first bodies participants; nor of that which Thales
attributed to things which themselves are reputed inanimate, lead
thereto by the consideration of the loadstone; but of that which
appertains to us, and that we ought the best to know:--


      Ignoratur enim, quæ sit natura animai;
   Nata sit; an, contra, nascentibus insinuetur;
   Et simnl intereat nobiscum morte dirempta;
   An tenebras Orci visat, vastasque lacunas,
   An pecudes alias divinitns insinuet se.

      “For none the nature of the soul doth know,
   Whether that it be born with us, or no;
   Or be infused into us at our birth,
   And dies with us when we return to earth,
   Or then descends to the black shades below,
   Or into other animals does go.”


Crates and Dicæarchus were of opinion that there was no soul at all,
but that the body thus stirs by a natural motion; Plato, that it was a
substance moving of itself; Thales, a nature without repose; Aedepiades,
an exercising of the senses; Hesiod and Anaximander, a thing composed of
earth and water; Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of blood:--


   Sanguineam vomit ille animam;

   “He vomits up his bloody soul.”


Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Galen, that it was heat or a hot complexion--


   Igneus est ollis vigor, et colestis origo;

   “Their vigour of fire and of heavenly race.”


Hippocrates, a spirit diffused all over the body; Varro, that it was an
air received at the mouth, heated in the lungs, moistened in the heart,
and diffused throughout the whole body; Zeno, the quintessence of the
four elements; Heraclides Ponticus, that it was the light; Zenocrates
and the Egyptians, a mobile number; the Chaldeans, a virtue without any
determinate form:--


      Habitum quemdam vitalem corporis esse,
   Harmoniam Græci quam dicunt.

      “A certain vital habit in man’s frame,
   Which harmony the Grecian sages name.”


Let us not forget Aristotle, who held the soul to be that which
naturally causes the body to move, which he calls entelechia, with
as cold an invention as any of the rest; for he neither speaks of the
essence, nor of the original, nor of the nature of the soul, but
only takes notice of the effect Lactantius, Seneca, and most of the
Dogmatists, have confessed that it was a thing they did not understand;
after all this enumeration of opinions, _Harum sententiarum quo vera
sit, Deus aliquis viderit:_ “Of these opinions which is the true, let
some god determine,” says Cicero. “I know by myself,” says St Bernard,
“how incomprehensible God is, seeing I cannot comprehend the parts of my
own being.”

Heraclitus, who was of opinion that every being was full of souls and
demons, did nevertheless maintain that no one could advance so far
towards the knowledge of the soul as ever to arrive at it; so profound
was the essence of it.

Neither is there less controversy and debate about seating of it.
Hippocrates and Hierophilus place it in the ventricle of the brain;
Democritus and Aristotle throughout the whole body;--


      Ut bona sæpe valetudo cum dicitur esse
   Corporis, et non est tamen hæc pars ulla ralentis;

      “As when the body’s health they do it call,
   When of a sound man, that’s no part at all.”


Epicurus in the stomach;


      Hic exsultat enim pavor ac metus;
   Hæc loca circum Lætitiæ mulcent.

      “For this the seat of horror is and fear,
   And joys in turn do likewise triumph here.”


The Stoics, about and within the heart; Erasistratus, adjoining the
membrane of the epicranium; Empedocles, in the blood; as also Moses,
which was the reason why he interdicted eating the blood of beasts,
because the soul is there seated; Galen thought that every part of the
body had its soul; Strato has placed it betwixt the eyebrows; _Quâ facie
quidem sit animus, aut ubi habitet, ne quorendum quidem est:_ “What
figure the soul is of, or what part it inhabits, is not to be inquired
into,” says Cicero. I very willingly deliver this author to you in his
own words; for should I alter eloquence itself? Besides, it were but a
poor prize to steal the matter of his inventions; they are neither
very frequent, nor of any great weight, and sufficiently known. But the
reason why Chrysippus argues it to be about the heart, as all the rest
of that sect do, is not to be omitted; “It is,” says he, “because when
we would affirm any things we lay our hand upon our breasts; and when
we would pronounce èyù, which signifies I, we let the lower jaw fall
towards the stomach.” This place ought not to be passed over without
a remark upon the vanity of so great a man; for besides that these
considerations are infinitely light in themselves, the last is only a
proof to the Greeks that they have their souls lodged in that part. No
human judgment is so sprightly and vigilant that it does not sometimes
sleep. Why do we fear to say? The Stoics, the fathers of human prudence,
think that the soul of a man, crushed under a ruin, long labours
and strives to get out, like a mouse caught in a trap, before it can
disengage itself from the burden. Some hold that the world was made to
give bodies, by way of punishment, to the spirits fallen, by their own
fault, from the purity wherein they had been created, the first creation
having been incorporeal; and that, according as they are more or less
depraved from their spirituality, so are they more or less jocundly or
dully incorporated; and that thence proceeds all the variety of so much
created matter. But the spirit that for his punishment was invested
with the body of the sun must certainly have a very rare and particular
measure of change.

The extremities of our perquisition do all fall into astonishment
and blindness; as Plutarch says of the testimony of histories, that,
according to charts and maps, the utmost bounds of known r countries are
taken up with marshes, impenetrable forests, deserts, and uninhabitable
places; this is the reason why the most gross and childish ravings were
most found in those authors who treat of the most elevated subjects, and
proceed the furthest in them, losing themselves in their own curiosity
and presumption. The beginning and end of knowledge are equally foolish;
observe to what a pitch Plato flies in his poetic clouds; do but take
notice there of the gibberish of the gods; but what did he dream of when
he defined a man to be “a two-legged animal without feathers: giving
those who had a mind to deride him a pleasant occasion; for, having
pulled a capon alive, they went about calling it the man of Plato.”

And what did the Epicureans think of, out of what simplicity did they
first imagine that their _atoms_ that they said were bodies having some
weight, and a natural motion downwards, had made the world; till
they were put in mind, by their adversaries, that, according to this
description, it was impossible they should unite and join to one
another, their fall being so direct and perpendicular, and making so
many parallel lines throughout? Wherefore there was a necessity that
they should since add a fortuitous and sideways motion, and that they
should moreover accoutre their atoms with hooked tails, by which they
might unite and cling to one another. And even then do not those that
attack them upon this second consideration put them hardly to it? “If
the atoms have by chance formed so many sorts of figures, why did it
never fall out that they made a house or a shoe? Why at the same rate
should we not believe that an infinite number of Greek letters,
strewed all over a certain place, might fall into the contexture of the
_Iliad?_”--“Whatever is capable of reason,” says Zeno, “is better than
that which is not capable; there is nothing better than the world;
the world is therefore capable of reason.” Cotta, by this way of
argumentation, makes the world a mathematician; ‘and tis also made a
musician and an organist by this other argumentation of Zeno: “The
whole is more than a part; we are capable of wisdom, and are part of the
world; therefore the world is wise.” There are infinite like examples,
not only of arguments that are false in themselves, but silly ones, that
do not hold in themselves, and that accuse their authors not so much
of ignorance as imprudence, in the reproaches the philosophers dash one
another in the teeth withal, upon their dissensions in their sects and
opinions.

Whoever should bundle up a lusty faggot of the fooleries of human wisdom
would produce wonders. I willingly muster up these few for a pattern,
by a certain meaning not less profitable to consider than the most sound
and moderate instructions. Let us judge by these what opinion we are to
have of man, of his sense and reason, when in these great persons that
have raised human knowledge so high, so many gross mistakes and manifest
errors are to be found.

For my part, I am apt to believe that they have treated of knowledge
casually, and like a toy, with both hands; and have contended about
reason as of a vain and frivolous instrument, setting on foot all sorts
of fancies and inventions, sometimes more sinewy, and sometimes weaker.
This same Plato, who defines man as if he were a cock, says elsewhere,
after Socrates, “That he does not, in truth, know what man is, and that
he is a member of the world the hardest to understand.” By this variety
and instability of opinions, they tacitly lead us, as it were by the
hand, to this resolution of their irresolution. They profess not always
to deliver their opinions barefaced and apparent to us; they have one
while disguised them in the fabulous shadows of poetry, and at another
in some other vizor; for our imperfection carries this also along with
it, that crude meat is not always proper for our stomachs; we must dry,
alter, and mix it; they do the same; they sometimes conceal their real
opinions and judgments, and falsify them to accommodate themselves to
the public use. They will not make an open profession of ignorance, and
of the imbecility of human reason, that they may not fright children;
but they sufficiently discover it to us under the appearance of a
troubled and inconstant science.

I advised a person in Italy, who had a great mind to speak Italian, that
provided he only had a desire to make himself understood, without being
ambitious in any other respect to excel, that he should only make use
of the first word that came to the tongue’s end, whether Latin, French,
Spanish, or Gascon, and that, by adding the Italian termination, he
could not fail of hitting upon some idiom of the country, either Tuscan,
Roman, Venetian, Piedmontese, or Neapolitan, and so fall in with some
one of those many forms. I say the same of Philosophy; she has so many
faces, so much variety, and has said so many things, that all our dreams
and ravings are there to be found. Human fancy can conceive nothing
good or bad that is not there: _Nihil tam absurde did potest, quod non
dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum._ “Nothing can be said so absurd, that
has not been said before by some of the philosophers.” And I am the more
willing to expose my whimsies to the public; forasmuch as, though they
are spun out of myself, and without any pattern, I know they will be
found related to some ancient humour, and some will not stick to say,
“See whence he took it!” My manners are natural, I have not called in
the assistance of any discipline to erect them; but, weak as they are,
when it came into my head to lay them open to the world’s view, and that
to expose them to the light in a little more decent garb I went to adorn
them with reasons and examples, it was a wonder to myself accidentally
to find them conformable to so many philosophical discourses and
examples. I never knew what regimen my life was of till it was near
worn out and spent; a new figure--an unpremeditated and accidental
philosopher.

But to return to the soul. Inasmuch as Plato has placed reason in the
brain, anger in the heart, and concupiscence in the liver; ‘tis likely
that it was rather an interpretation of the movements of

the soul, than that he intended a division and separation of it, as of
a body, into several members. And the most likely of their opinions
is that ‘tis always a soul, that by its faculty, reasons, remembers,
comprehends, judges, desires, and exercises all its other operations by
divers instruments of the body; as the pilot guides his ship according
to his experience, one while straining or slacking the cordage, one
while hoisting the mainyard, or removing the rudder, by one and the same
power carrying on several effects; and that it is lodged in the brain;
which appears in that the wounds and accidents that touch that part do
immediately offend the faculties of the soul; and ‘tis not incongruous
that it should thence diffuse itself through the other parts of the body


      Medium non deserit unquam
   Coeli Phoebus iter; radiis tamen omnia lustrât.

      “Phoebus ne’er deviates from the zodiac’s way;
   Yet all things doth illustrate with his ray.”


As the sun sheds from heaven its light and influence, and fills the
world with them:--


      Cætera pars animas, per totum dissita corpus,
   Paret, et ad numen mentis momenque movetur.

      “The other part o’ th’ soul diffus’d all o’er
   The body, does obey the reason’s lore.”


Some have said that there was a general soul, as it were a great body,
whence all the particular souls were extracted, and thither again
return, always restoring themselves to that universal matter:--


      Deum namque ire per omnes
   Terrasque, tractusque maris, columque profundum;
   Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
   Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas:
   Scilicet hue reddi deinde, ac resoluta referri
   Omnia; nec morti esse locum:

      “For God goes forth, and spreads throughout the whole
   Heaven, earth, and sea, the universal soul;
   Each at its birth, from him all beings share,
   Both man and brute, the breath of vital air;
   To him return, and, loos’d from earthly chain,
   Fly whence they sprung, and rest in God again,
   Spurn at the grave, and, fearless of decay,
   Dwell in high heaven, and star th’ ethereal way.”


Others, that they only rejoined and reunited themselves to it; others,
that they were produced from the divine substance; others, by the angels
of fire and air; others, that they were from all antiquity; and some
that they were created at the very point of time the bodies wanted
them; others make them to descend from the orb of the moon, and return
thither; the generality of the ancients believed that they were begotten
from father to son, after a like manner, and produced with all other
natural things; taking their argument from the likeness of children to
their fathers;


      Instillata patris virtus tibi;
   Fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;

      “Thou hast thy father’s virtues with his blood:
   For still the brave spring from the brave and good;”


and that we see descend from fathers to their children not only
bodily marks, but moreover a resemblance of humours, complexions, and
inclinations of the soul:--


      Denique cur acris violentia triste leonum
   Seminium sequitur? dolus vulpibus, et fuga, cervis
   A patribus datur, et patrius pavor incitât artus?
   Si non certa suo quia semine seminioque
   Vis animi pariter crescit cum corpore toto.

      “For why should rage from the fierce lion’s seed,
   Or from the subtle fox’s craft, proceed;
   Or why the tim’rous and flying hart
   His fear and trembling to his race impart;
   But that a certain force of mind does grow,
   And still increases as the bodies do?”


That thereupon the divine justice is grounded, punishing in the children
the faults of their fathers; forasmuch as the contagion of paternal
vices is in some sort imprinted in the soul of children, and that the
ill government of their will extends to them; moreover, that if souls
had any other derivation than a natural consequence, and that they had
been some other thins out of the body, they would retain some memory
of their first being, the natural faculties that are proper to them of
discoursing, reasoning, and remembering, being considered:--


      Si in corpus nascentibus insinuatur,
   Cur super anteactam ætatem meminisse nequimus,
   Nec vestigia gestarum rerum ulla tenemus?

      “For at our birth if it infused be,
   Why do we then retain no memory
   Of our foregoing life, and why no more
   Remember any thing we did before?”


for, to make the condition of our souls such as we would have it to be,
we must suppose them all-knowing, even in their natural simplicity and
purity; by these means they had been such, being free from the prison of
the body, as well before they entered into it, as we hope they shall be
after they are gone out of it; and from this knowledge it should follow
that they should remember, being got in the body, as Plato said, “That
what we learn is no other than a remembrance of what we knew before;” a
thing which every one by experience may maintain to be false. Forasmuch,
in the first place, as that we do not justly remember any thing but
what we have been taught, and that if the memory did purely perform its
office it would at least suggest to us something more than what we have
learned. Secondly, that which she knew being in her purity, was a
true knowledge, knowing things as they are by her divine intelligence;
whereas here we make her receive falsehood and vice when we instruct
her; wherein she cannot employ her reminiscence, that image and
conception having never been planted in her. To say that the corporal
prison does in such sort suffocate her natural faculties, that they
are there utterly extinct, is first contrary to this other belief of
acknowledging her power to be so great, and the operations of it that
men sensibly perceive in this life so admirable, as to have thereby
concluded that divinity and eternity past, and the immortality to
come:--


      Nam si tantopere est anirai mutata potestas,
   Omnia ut actarum exciderit retinentia rerum,
   Non, ut opinor, ea ab letho jam longior errat.

      “For if the mind be changed to that degree
   As of past things to lose all memory,
   So great a change as that, I must confess,
   Appears to me than death but little less.”


Furthermore, ‘tis here with us, and not elsewhere, that the force
and effects of the soul ought to be considered; all the rest of her
perfections are vain and useless to her; ‘tis by her present condition
that all her immortality is to be rewarded and paid, and of the life of
man only that she is to render an account It had been injustice to have
stripped her of her means and powers; to have disarmed her in order, in
the time of her captivity and imprisonment in the flesh, of her weakness
and infirmity in the time wherein she was forced and compelled, to pass
an infinite and perpetual sentence and condemnation, and to insist upon
the consideration of so short a time, peradventure but an hour or two,
or at the most but a century, which has no more proportion with infinity
than an instant; in this momentary interval to ordain and definitively
to determine of her whole being; it were an unreasonable disproportion,
too, to assign an eternal recompense in consequence of so short a life.
Plato, to defend himself from this inconvenience, will have future
payments limited to the term of a hundred years, relatively to human
duration; and of us ourselves there are enough who have given them
temporal limits. By this they judged that the generation of the soul
followed the common condition of human things, as also her life,
according to the opinion of Epicurus and Democritus, which has been the
most received; in consequence of these fine appearances that they saw
it bom, and that, according as the body grew more capable, they saw it
increase in vigour as the other did; that its feebleness in infancy was
very manifest, and in time its better strength and maturity, and after
that its declension and old age, and at last its decrepitude:--


      Gigni pariter cum corpore, et una
   Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem.

      “Souls with the bodies to be born we may
   Discern, with them t’ increase, with them decay.”


They perceived it to be capable of divers passions, and agitated with
divers painful motions, whence it fell into lassitude and uneasiness;
capable of alteration and change, of cheerfulness, of stupidity and
languor, and subject to diseases and injuries, as the stomach or the
foot;


      Mentem sanari, corpus ut ægrum,
   Ceraimus, et flecti medicinâ posse videmus;

      “Sick minds, as well as bodies, we do see
   By Med’cine’s virtue oft restored to be;”


dazzled and intoxicated with the fumes of wine, jostled from her seat by
the vapours of a burning fever, laid asleep by the application of some
medicaments, and roused by others,--


      Corpoream naturam animi esse necesse est,
   Corporeis quoniam telis ictuque laborat;

      “There must be of necessity, we find,
   A nature that’s corporeal of the mind,
   Because we evidently see it smarts
   And wounded is with shafts the body darts;”


they saw it astonished and overthrown in all its faculties through the
mere bite of a mad dog, and in that condition to have no stability
of reason, no sufficiency, no virtue, no philosophical resolution, no
resistance that could exempt it from the subjection of such accidents;
the slaver of a contemptible cur shed upon the hand of Socrates, to
shake all his wisdom and all his great and regulated imaginations, and
so to annihilate them, ad that there remained no trace of his former
knowledge,--


      Vis.... animal Conturbatur, et.... divisa seorsum
   Disjectatur, eodem illo distracta veneno;

      “The power of the soul’s disturbed; and when
   That once is but sequestered from her, then
   By the same poison ‘tis dispersed abroad;”


and this poison to find no more resistance in that great soul than in an
infant of four years old; a poison sufficient to make all philosophy, if
it were incarnate, become furious and mad; insomuch that Cato, who
ever disdained death and fortune, could not endure the sight of a
looking-glass, or of water, overwhelmed with horror and affright at
the thought of falling, by the contagion of a mad dog, into the disease
called by physicians hydrophobia:--


      Vis morbi distracta per artus
   Turbat agens animam, spumantes æquore salso
   Ventorum ut validis fervescunt viribus undæ.

      “Throughout the limbs diffused, the fierce disease
   Disturbs the soul, as in the briny seas,
   The foaming waves to swell and boil we see,
   Stirred by the wind’s impetuosity.”


Now, as to this particular, philosophy has sufficiently armed man to
encounter all other accidents either with patience, or, if the search
of that costs too dear, by an infallible defeat, in totally depriving
himself of all sentiment; but these are expedients that are only of use
to a soul being itself, and in its full power, capable of reason and
deliberation; but not at all proper for this inconvenience, where, in
a philosopher, the soul becomes the soul of a madman, troubled,
overturned, and lost; which many occasions may produce, as a too
vehement agitation that any violent passion of the soul may beget in
itself; or a wound in a certain part of the person, or vapours from the
stomach, any of which may stupefy the understanding and turn the brain.


      Morbis in corporis avius errat
   Sæpe animus; dementit enim, deliraque fatur;
   Interdumque gravi lethargo fertur in altum
   Æternumque soporem, oculis mi tuque cadenti:

      “For when the body’s sick, and ill at ease,
   The mind doth often share in the disease;
   Wonders, grows wild, and raves, and sometimes by
   A heavy and a stupid lethargy,
   Is overcome and cast into a deep,
   A most profound and everlasting sleep.”


The philosophers, methinks, have not much touched this string, no more
than another of equal importance; they have this dilemma continually
in their mouths, to console our mortal condition: “The soul is either
mortal or immortal; if mortal, it will suffer no pain; if immortal, it
will change for the better.”--They never touch the other branch, “What
if she change for the worse?” and leave to the poets the menaces of
future torments. But thereby they make themselves a good game. These are
two omissions that I often meet with in their discourses. I return to
the first.

This soul loses the use of the sovereign stoical good, so constant and
so firm. Our fine human wisdom must here yield, and give up her arms. As
to the rest, they also considered, by the vanity of human reason, that
the mixture and association of two so contrary things as the mortal and
the immortal, was unimaginable:--


      Quippe etenim mortale æterao jungere, et una
   Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse,
   Desipere est. Quid enim diversius esse putandum est,
   Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque,
   Quam, mortale quod est, immortali atque perenni
   Junctum, in concilio, sævas tolerare procellas?

      “The mortal and th’ eternal, then, to blend,
   And think they can pursue one common end,
   Is madness: for what things more diff’rent are.
   Distinct in nature, and disposed to jar?
   How can it then be thought that these should bear,
   When thus conjoined, of harms an equal share?”


Moreover, they perceived the soul tending towards death as well as the
body:--


   Simul ovo fessa fatiscit:

   “Fatigued together with the weight of years:”


which, according to Zeno, the image of sleep does sufficiently
demonstrate to us; for he looks upon it “as a fainting and fall of the
soul, as well as of the body:” _Contrahi animum et quasi labi putat
atque decidere:_ and, what they perceived in some, that the soul
maintained its force and vigour to the last gasp of life, they
attributed to the variety of diseases, as it is observable in men at the
last extremity, that some retain one sense, and some another; one
the hearing, and another the smell, without any manner of defect or
alteration; and that there is not so universal a deprivation that some
parts do not remain vigorous and entire:--


      Non alio pacto, quam si, pes cum dolet ægri,
   In nullo caput interea sit forte dolore.

      “So, often of the gout a man complains,
   Whose head is, at the same time, free from pains.”


The sight of our judgment is, to truth, the same that the owl’s eyes
are to the splendour of the sun, says Aristotle. By what can we better
convince him, than by so gross blindness in so apparent a light? For the
contrary opinion of the immortality of the soul, which, Cicero says,
was first introduced, according to the testimony of books at least, by
Pherecydes

Syrius, in the time of King Tullus (though some attribute it to Thales,
and others to others), ‘tis the part of human science that is treated of
with the greatest doubt and

reservation. The most positive dogmatists are fain, in this point
principally, to fly to the refuge of the Academy. No one doubts what
Aristotle has established upon this subject, no more than all the
ancients in general, who handle it with a wavering belief: _Rem
gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium:_ “A thing more
acceptable in the promisors than the provers.” He conceals himself in
clouds of words of difficult, unintelligible sense, and has left to
those of his sect as great a dispute about his judgment as about the
matter itself.

Two things rendered this opinion plausible to them; one, that, without
the immortality of souls, there would be nothing whereon to ground the
vain hopes of glory, which is a consideration of wonderful

repute in the world; the other, that it is a very profitable impression,
as Plato says, that vices, when they escape the discovery and cognizance
of human justice, are still within the reach of the divine, which will
pursue them even after the death of the guilty. Man is excessively
solicitous to prolong his being, and has to the utmost of his power
provided for it; there are monuments for the conservation of the body,
and glory to preserve the name. He has employed all his wit and opinion
to the rebuilding of himself, impatient of his fortune, and to prop
himself by his inventions. The soul, by reason of its anxiety and
impotence, being unable to stand by itself, wanders up and down to seek
out consolations, hopes, and foundations, and alien circumstances, to
which she adheres and fixes; and how light or fantastic soever invention
delivers them to her, relies more willingly, and with greater assurance,
upon them than upon herself. But ‘tis wonderful to observe how the most
constant and obstinate maintainers of this just and clear persuasion
of the immortality of the soul fall short, and how weak their arguments
are, when they go about to prove it by human reason: _Somnia sunt non
docentis, sed optantis:_ “They are dreams, not of the teacher, but
wisher,” says one of the ancients. By which testimony man may know that
he owes the truth he himself finds out to fortune and accident; since
that even then, when it is fallen into his hand, he has not wherewith to
hold and maintain it, and that his reason has not force to make use of
it. All things produced by our own meditation and understanding, whether
true or false, are subject to incertitude and controversy. ‘Twas for
the chastisement of our pride, and for the instruction of our miserable
condition and incapacity, that God wrought the perplexity and confusion
of the tower of Babel. Whatever we undertake without his assistance,
whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but vanity and folly.
We corrupt the very essence of truth, which is uniform and constant,
by our weakness, when fortune puts it into our possession. What course
soever man takes of himself, God still permits it to come to the same
confusion, the image whereof he so lively represents to us in the just
chastisement wherewith he crushed Nimrod’s presumption, and frustrated
the vain attempt of his proud structure; _Perdam sapientiam sapientium,
et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo._ “I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” The
diversity of idioms and tongues, with which he disturbed this work,
what are they other than this infinite and perpetual alteration and
discordance of opinions and reasons, which accompany and confound the
vain building of human wisdom, and to very good effect too; for what
would hold us, if we had but the least grain of knowledge? This saint
has very much obliged me: _Ipsa veritatis occultatio ant humili-tatis
exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio_ “The very concealment of the
truth is either an exercise of humility or a quelling of presumption.”
 To what a pitch of presumption and insolence do we raise our blindness
and folly!

But to return to my subject. It was truly very good reason that we
should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the
truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive
the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal
beatitude. Let us ingenuously confess that God alone has dictated it
to us, and faith; for ‘tis no lesson of nature and our own reason.
And whoever will inquire into his own being and power, both within
and without, without this divine privilege; whoever shall consider
man impartially, and without flattery, will see in him no efficacy or
faculty that relishes of any thing but death and earth. The more we
give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater
Christianity. That which this Stoic philosopher says he holds from the
fortuitous consent of the popular voice; had it not been better that he
had held it from God? _Cum de animarum otemitate disserimus, non leve
momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos, aut
colentium. Utor hâc publicâ persuasione._ “When we discourse of the
immortality of souls, the consent of men that either fear or adore the
infernal powers, is of no small advantage. I make use of this public
persuasion.” Now the weakness of human arguments upon this subject
is particularly manifested by the fabulous circumstances they have
superadded as consequences of this opinion, to find out of what
condition this immortality of ours was. Let us omit the Stoics, (_usuram
nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus; diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper,
negant._ “They give us a long life, as also they do to crows; they say
our soul shall continue long, but that it shall continue always they
deny,”) who give to souls a life after this, but finite. The most
universal and received fancy, and that continues down to our times in
various places, is that of which they make Pythagoras the author; not
that he was the original inventor, but because it received a great deal
of weight and repute by the authority of his approbation: “That souls,
at their departure out of us, did nothing but shift from one body to
another, from a lion to a horse, from a horse to a king, continually
travelling at this rate from habitation to habitation;” and he himself
said that he remembered he had been Ætha-lides, since that Euphorbus,
afterwards Hermotimus, and, finally, from Pyrrhus was passed into
Pythagoras; having a memory of himself of two hundred and six years. And
some have added that these very souls sometimes mount up to heaven, and
come down again:--


      O pater, aime aliquas ad colum hinc ire putandum est
   Sublimes animas, iterumque ad tarda reverti
   Corpora? Quæ lucis miseris tam dira cupido?

      “O, father, is it then to be conceiv’d
   That any of these spirits, so sublime,
   Should hence to the celestial regions climb,
   And thence return to earth to reassume
   Their sluggish bodies rotting in a tomb?
   For wretched life whence does such fondness come?”


Origen makes them eternally to go and come from a better to a worse
estate. The opinion that Varro mentions is that, after four hundred and
forty years’ revolution, they should be reunited to their first bodies;
Chrysippus held that this would happen after a certain space of time
unknown and unlimited. Plato, who professes to have embraced this belief
from Pindar and the ancient poets, that we are to undergo infinite
vicissitudes of mutation, for which the soul is prepared, having neither
punishment nor reward in the other world but what is temporal, as its
life here is but temporal, concludes that it has a singular knowledge of
the affairs of heaven, of hell, of the world, through all which it has
passed, repassed, and made stay in several voyages, are matters for her
memory. Observe her progress elsewhere: “The soul that has lived well
is reunited to the stars to which it is assigned; that which has lived
ill removes into a woman, and if it do not there reform, is again
removed into a beast of condition suitable to its vicious manners, and
shall see no end of its punishments till it be returned to its natural
constitution, and that it has, by the force of reason, purged itself
from those gross, stupid, and elementary qualities it was polluted
with.” But I will not omit the objection the Epicureans make against
this transmigration from one body to another; ‘tis a pleasant one; they
ask what expedient would be found out if the number of the dying should
chance to be greater than that of those who are coming into the world.
For the souls, turned out of their old habitation, would scuffle and
crowd which should first get possession of their new lodging; and they
further demand how they shall pass away their time, whilst waiting
till new quarters are made ready for them? Or, on the contrary, if more
animals should be born than die, the body, they say, would be but in an
ill condition whilst waiting for a soul to be infused into it; and it
would fall out that some bodies would die before they had been alive.


      Denique comrabia ad Veneris, partusque ferarum
   Esse animas præsto, deridiculum esse videtur;
   Et spectare immortales mortalia membra
   Innumero numéro, certareque præproperanter
   Inter se, quæ prima potissimaqæ insinueter.

      “Absurd to think that whilst wild beasts beget,
   Or bear their young, a thousand souls do wait,
   Expect the falling body, fight and strive
   Which first shall enter in and make it live.”


Others have arrested the soul in the body of the deceased, with it to
animate serpents, worms, and other beasts, which are said to be bred
out of the corruption of our members, and even out of our ashes; others
divide them into two parts, the one mortal, the other immortal; others
make it corporeal, and nevertheless immortal. Some make it immortal,
without

sense or knowledge. There are others, even among ourselves, who have
believed that devils were made of the souls of the damned; as Plutarch
thinks that gods were made of those that were saved; for there are few
things which that author is so positive in as he is in this; maintaining
elsewhere a doubtful and ambiguous way of expression. “We are told,”
 says he, “and steadfastly should believe, that the souls of virtuous
men, both according to nature and the divine justice, become saints, and
from saints demigods, and from demigods, after they are perfectly, as in
sacrifices of purgation, cleansed and purified, being delivered from all
passibility and all mortality, they become, not by any civil decree, but
in real truth, and according to all probability of reason, entire and
perfect gods, in receiving a most happy and glorious end.” But who
desires to see him--him, who is yet the most sober and moderate of the
whole gang of philosophers, lay about him with greater boldness, and
relate his miracles upon this subject, I refer him to his treatise _of
the Moon,_ and _of the Demon of Socrates_, where he may, as evidently
as in any other place whatever, satisfy himself that the mysteries of
philosophy have many strange things in common with those of poetry;
human understanding losing itself in attempting to sound and search all
things to the bottom; even as we, tired and worn out with a long course
of life, return to infancy and dotage. See here the fine and certain
instructions which we extract from human knowledge concerning the soul.

Neither is there less temerity in what they teach us touching our
corporal parts. Let us choose out one or two examples; for otherwise we
should lose ourselves in this vast and troubled ocean of medical errors.
Let us first know whether, at least, they agree about the matter whereof
men produce one another; for as to their first production it is
no wonder if, in a thing so high and so long since past, human
understanding finds itself puzzled and perplexed. Archelaus, the
physician, whose disciple and favourite Socrates was, according to
Aristoxenus, said that both men and beasts were made of a lacteous
slime, expressed by the heat of the earth; Pythagoras says that our
seed is the foam or cream of our better blood; Plato, that it is the
distillation of the marrow of the backbone; raising his argument from
this, that that part is first sensible of being weary of the work;
Alcmeon, that it is part of the substance of the brain, and that it
is so, says he, is proved by the weakness of the eyes in those who
are immoderate in that exercise; Democritus, that it is a substance
extracted from the whole mass of the body; Epicurus, an extract from
soul and body; Aristotle, an excrement drawn from the aliment of the
blood, the last which is diffused over our members; others, that it is
a blood concocted and digested by the heat of the genitals, which they
judge, by reason that in excessive endeavours a man voids pure blood;
wherein there seems to be more likelihood, could a man extract any
appearance from so infinite a confusion. Now, to bring this seed to do
its work, how many contrary opinions do they set on foot? Aristotle
and Democritus are of opinion that women have no sperm, and that ‘tis
nothing but a sweat that they distil in the heat of pleasure and
motion, and that contributes nothing at all to generation. Galen, on
the contrary, and his followers, believe that without the concurrence
of seeds there can be no generation. Here are the physicians, the
philosophers, the lawyers, and divines, by the ears with our wives about
the dispute, “For what term women carry their fruit?” and I, for my
part, by the example of myself, stick with those that maintain a woman
goes eleven months with child. The world is built upon this experience;
there is no so commonplace a woman that cannot give her judgment in all
these controversies; and yet we cannot agree.

Here is enough to verify that man is no better instructed in the
knowledge of himself, in his corporal than in his spiritual part We have
proposed himself to himself, and his reason to his reason, to see what
she could say. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated how little
she understands herself in herself; and who understands not himself in
himself, in what can he? _Quasi vero mensuram ullius rei possit agere,
qui sui nesciat._ “As if he could understand the measure of any other
thing, that knows not his own.” In earnest, Protagoras told us a pretty
flam in making man the measure of all things, that never knew so much as
his own; and if it be not he, his dignity will not permit that any
other creature should have this advantage; now he being so contrary
in himself, and one judgment so incessantly subverting another, this
favourable proposition was but a mockery, which induced us necessarily
to conclude the nullity of the compass and the compasser. When Thales
reputes the knowledge of man very difficult for man to comprehend, he
at the same time gives him to understand that all other knowledge is
impossible.

You,* for whom I have taken the pains, contrary to my custom, to write
so long a discourse, will not refuse to support your Sebond by the
ordinary forms of arguing, wherewith you are every day instructed, and
in this will exercise both your wit and learning; for this last fencing
trick is never to be made use of but as an extreme remedy; ‘tis a
desperate thrust, wherein you are to quit your own arms to make your
adversary abandon his; and a secret sleight, which must be very rarely,
and then very reservedly, put in practice. ‘Tis great temerity to lose
yourself that you may destroy another; you must not die to be revenged,
as Gobrias did; for, being closely grappled in combat with a lord of
Persia, Darius coming in sword in hand, and fearing to strike lest he
should kill Gobrias, he called out to him boldly to fall on,


   * The author, as we have already mentioned, is addressing
     Margaret de Valois.


though he should run them both through at once. I have known desperate
weapons, and conditions of single combat, and wherein he that offered
them put himself and his adversary upon terms of inevitable death to
them both, censured for unjust. The Portuguese, in the Indian Sea, took
certain Turks prisoners, who, impatient of their captivity, resolved,
and it succeeded, by striking the nails of the ship one against another,
and making a spark to fall into the barrels of powder that were set in
the place where they were guarded, to blow up and reduce themselves,
their masters, and the vessel to ashes. We here touch the out-plate
and utmost limits of sciences, wherein the extremity is vicious, as
in virtue. Keep yourselves in the common road; it is not good to be so
subtle and cunning. Remember the Tuscan proverb:--


   Chi troppo s’assottiglia, si scavezza.

   “Who makes himself too wise, becomes a fool.”


I advise you that, in all your opinions and discourses, as well as
in your manners and all other things, you keep yourself moderate and
temperate, and avoid novelty; I am an enemy to all extravagant ways.
You, who by the authority of your grandeur, and yet more by the
advantages which those qualities give you that are more your own, may
with the twinkle of an eye command whom you please, ought to have given
this charge to some one who made profession of letters, who might after
a better manner have proved and illustrated these things to you. But
here is as much as you will stand in need of.

Epicurus said of the laws, “That the worst were so necessary for us that
without them men would devour one another.” And Plato affirms, “That
without laws we should live like beasts.” Our wit is a wandering,
dangerous, and temerarious utensil; it is hard to couple any order or
measure to it; in those of our own time, who are endued with any rare
excellence above others, or any extraordinary vivacity of understanding,
we see them almost all lash out into licentiousness of opinions and
manners; and ‘tis almost a miracle to find one temperate and sociable.
‘Tis all the reason in the world to limit human wit within the strictest
limits imaginable; in study, as in all the rest, we ought to have
its steps and advances numbered and fixed, and that the limits of its
inquisition be bounded by art. It is curbed and fettered by religions,
laws, customs, sciences, precepts, mortal and immortal penalties. And
yet we see that it escapes from all these bonds by its volubility and
dissolution; *tis a vain body which has nothing to lay hold on or to
seize; a various and difform body, incapable of being either bound
or held. In earnest, there are few souls so regular, firm, and well
descended, as are to be trusted with their own conduct, and that can
with moderation, and without temerity, sail in the liberty of their own
judgments, beyond the common and received opinions; *tis more expedient
to put them under pupilage. Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the
possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly; and there is not a
beast to whom a headboard is more justly to be given, to keep his looks
down and before his feet, and to hinder him from wandering here and
there out of the tracks which custom and the laws have laid before him.
And therefore it will be better for you to keep yourself in the beaten
path, let it be what it will, than to fly out at a venture with this
unbridled liberty. But if any of these new doctors will pretend to be
ingenious in your presence, at the expense both of your soul and his
own, to avoid this dangerous plague, which is every day laid in your
way to infect you, this preservative, in the extremest necessity,
will prevent the danger and hinder the contagion of this poison from
offending either you or your company.

The liberty, then, and frolic forwardness of these ancient wits produced
in philosophy and human sciences several sects of different opinions,
every one undertaking to judge and make choice of what he would stick
to and maintain. But now that men go all one way, _Qui certis quibusdam
destinatisque sententiis addicti et consecrati sunt, ut etiam, quæ non
probant, cogantur defendere,_ “Who are so tied and obliged to certain
opinions that they are bound to defend even those they do not approve,”
 and that we receive the arts by civil authority and decree, so that the
schools have but one pattern, and a like circumscribed institution and
discipline, we no more take notice what the coin weighs, and is really
worth, but every one receives it according to the estimate that common
approbation and use puts upon it; the alloy is not questioned, but how
much it is current for. In like manner all things pass; we take
physic as we do geometry; and tricks of hocus-pocus, enchantments,
and love-spells, the correspondence of the souls of the dead,
prognostications, domifications, and even this ridiculous pursuit of the
philosophers’ stone, all things pass for current pay, without any manner
of scruple or contradiction. We need to know no more but that Mars’
house is in the middle of the triangle of the hand, that of Venus in
the thumb, and that of Mercury in the little finger; that when the
table-line cuts the tubercle of the forefinger ‘tis a sign of cruelty,
that when it falls short of the middle finger, and that the natural
median-line makes an angle with the vital in the same side, ‘tis a sign
of a miserable death; that if in a woman the natural line be open, and
does not close the angle with the vital, this denotes that she shall not
be very chaste. I leave you to judge whether a man qualified with such
knowledge may not pass with reputation and esteem in all companies.

Theophrastus said that human knowledge, guided by the senses, might
judge of the causes of things to a certain degree; but that being
arrived to first and extreme causes, it must stop short and retire, by
reason either of its own infirmity or the difficulty of things. ‘Tis a
moderate and gentle opinion, that our own understandings may conduct
us to the knowledge of some things, and that it has certain measures
of power, beyond which ‘tis temerity to employ it; this opinion is
plausible, and introduced by men of well composed minds, but ‘tis hard
to limit our wit, which is curious and greedy, and will no more stop
at a thousand than at fifty paces; having experimentally found that,
wherein one has failed, the other has hit, and that what was unknown to
one age, the age following has explained; and that arts and sciences are
not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often
handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form;
what my force cannot discover, I do not yet desist to sound and to try;
and by handling and kneading this new matter over and over again, by
turning and heating it, I lay open to him that shall succeed me, a kind
of facility to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more maniable and
supple for him,


        Ut hymettia sole
     Cera remollescit, tractataque poll ice multas
     Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu;

        “As wax doth softer in the sun become,
     And, tempered ‘twixt the finger and the thumb,
     Will varions forms, and several shapes admit,
     Till for the present use ‘tis rendered fit;”


as much will the second do for the third; which is the cause that
the difficulty ought not to make me despair, and my own incapacity as
little; for ‘tis nothing but my own.

Man is as capable of all things as of some; and if he confesses, as
Theophrastus says, the ignorance of first causes, let him at once
surrender all the rest of his knowledge; if he is defective in
foundation, his reason is aground; disputation and inquiry have no other
aim nor stop but principles; if this aim do not stop his career, he
runs into an infinite irresolution. _Non potest aliud alio magis minusve
comprehendi, quoniam omnium rerum una est dejinitio comprehendendi:_

“One thing can no more or less be comprehended than another, because
the definition of comprehending all things is the same.” Now ‘tis very
likely that, if the soul knew any thing, it would in the first place
know itself; and if it knew any thing out of itself, it would be its own
body and case, before any thing else. If we see the gods of physic to
this very day debating about our anatomy,


   Mulciber in Trojam, pro Trojâ stabat Apollo;

   “Vulcan against, for Troy Apollo stood;”


when are we to expect that they will be agreed? We are nearer neighbours
to ourselves than whiteness to snow, or weight to stones. If man do not
know himself, how should he know his force and functions? It is not,
perhaps, that we have not some real knowledge in us; but ‘tis by chance;
forasmuch as errors are received into our soul by the same way, after
the same manner, and by the same conduct, it has not wherewithal to
distinguish them, nor wherewithal to choose the truth from falsehood.

The Academics admitted a certain partiality of judgment, and thought it
too crude to say that it was not more likely to say that snow was white
than black; and that we were no more assured of the motion of a stone,
thrown by the hand, than of that of the eighth sphere. And to avoid
this difficulty and strangeness, that can in truth hardly lodge in our
imagination, though they concluded that we were in no sort capable of
knowledge, and that truth is engulfed in so profound an abyss as is not
to be penetrated by human sight; yet they acknowledged some things to be
more likely than others, and received into their judgment this faculty,
that they had a power to incline to one appearance more than another,
they allowed him this propension, interdicting all resolution. The
Pyrrhonian opinion is more bold, and also somewhat more likely; for this
academic inclination, and this propension to one proposition rather than
another, what is it other than a recognition of some more apparent
truth in this than in that? If our understanding be capable of the form,
lineaments, port, and face of truth, it might as well see it entire as
by halves, springing and imperfect This appearance of likelihood,
which makes them rather take the left hand than the right, augments
it; multiply this ounce of verisimilitude that turns the scales to
a hundred, to a thousand, ounces; it will happen in the end that the
balance will itself end the controversy, and determine one choice, one
entire truth. But why do they suffer themselves to incline to and be
swayed by verisimilitude, if they know not the truth? How should they
know the similitude of that whereof they do not know the essence? Either
we can absolutely judge, or absolutely we cannot If our intellectual and
sensible faculties are without foot or foundation, if they only pull
and drive, ‘tis to no purpose that we suffer our judgments to be carried
away with any part of their operation, what appearance soever they
may seem to present us; and the surest and most happy seat of our
understanding would be that where it kept itself temperate, upright, and
inflexible, without tottering, or without agitation: _Inter visa, vera
aut falsa, ad animi assensum, nihil interest:_ “Amongst things that
seem, whether true or false, it signifies nothing to the assent of the
mind.” That things do not lodge in us in their form and essence, and
do not there make their entry by their own force and authority, we
sufficiently see; because, if it were so, we should receive them after
the same manner; wine would have the same relish with the sick as with
the healthful; he who has his finger chapt or benumbed would find the
same hardness in wood or iron that he handles that another does; foreign
subjects then surrender themselves to our mercy, and are seated in us as
we please. Now if on our part we received any thing without alteration,
if human grasp were capable and strong enough to seize on truth by our
own means, these means being common to all men, this truth would be
conveyed from hand to hand, from one to another; and at least there
would be some one thing to be found in the world, amongst so many as
there are, that would be believed by men with an universal consent;
but this, that there is no one proposition that is not debated and
controverted amongst us, or that may not be, makes it very manifest that
our natural judgment does not very clearly discern what it embraces; for
my judgment cannot make my companions approve of what it approves; which
is a sign that I seized it by some other means than by a natural power
that is in me and in all other men.

Let us lay aside this infinite confusion of opinions, which we see even
amongst the philosophers themselves, and this perpetual and universal
dispute about the knowledge of things; for this is truly presupposed,
that men, I mean the most knowing, the best bom, and of the best parts,
are not agreed about any one thing, not that heaven is over our heads;
for they that doubt of every thing, do also doubt of that; and they
who deny that we are able to comprehend any thing, say that we have not
comprehended that the heaven is over our heads, and these two opinions
are, without comparison, the stronger in number.

Besides this infinite diversity and division, through the trouble that
our judgment gives ourselves, and the incertainty that every one is
sensible of in himself, ‘tis easy to perceive that its seat is very
unstable and insecure. How variously do we judge of things?--How often
do we alter our opinions? What I hold and believe to-day I hold and
believe with my whole belief; all my instruments and engines seize and
take hold of this opinion, and become responsible to me for it, at least
as much as in them lies; I could not embrace nor conserve any truth
with greater confidence and assurance than I do this; I am wholly and
entirely possessed with it; but has it not befallen me, not only once,
but a hundred, a thousand times, every day, to have embraced some other
thing with all the same instruments, and in the same condition, which
I have since judged to be false? A man must at least become wise at his
own expense; if I have often found myself betrayed under this colour; if
my touch proves commonly false, and my balance unequal and unjust, what
assurance can I now have more than at other times? Is it not stupidity
and madness to suffer myself to be so often deceived by my guide?
Nevertheless, let fortune remove and shift us five hundred times from
place to place, let her do nothing but incessantly empty and fill into
our belief, as into a vessel, other and other opinions; yet still the
present and the last is the certain and infallible one; for this we must
abandon goods, honour, life, health, and all.


      Posterior.... res ilia reperta
   Perdit, et immutat sensus ad pristina qnæqne.

      “The last things we find out are always best,
   And make us to disrelish all the rest.”


Whatever is preached to us, and whatever we learn, we should still
remember that it is man that gives and man that receives; ‘tis a mortal
hand that presents it to us; ‘tis a mortal hand that accepts it The
things that come to us from heaven have the sole right and authority of
persuasion, the sole mark of truth; which also we do not see with our
own eyes, nor receive by our own means; that great and sacred image
could not abide in so wretched a habitation if God for this end did not
prepare it, if God did not by his particular and supernatural grace and
favour fortify and reform it. At least our frail and defective condition
ought to make us behave ourselves with more reservedness and moderation
in our innovations and changes; we ought to remember that, whatever we
receive into the understanding, we often receive things that are false,
and that it is by the same instruments that so often give themselves the
lie and are so often deceived.

Now it is no wonder they should so often contradict themselves, being
so easy to be turned and swayed by very light occurrences. It is certain
that our apprehensions, our judgment, and the faculties of the soul in
general, suffer according to the movements and alterations of the body,
which alterations are continual. Are not our minds more sprightly, ouï
memories more prompt and quick, and our thoughts more lively, in health
than in sickness? Do not joy and gayety make us receive subjects
that present themselves to our souls quite otherwise than care and
melancholy? Do you believe that Catullus’s verses, or those of Sappho,
please an old doting miser as they do a vigorous, amorous young man?
Cleomenes, the son of Anexandridas, being sick, his friends reproached
him that he had humours and whimsies that were new and unaccustomed;
“I believe it,” said he; “neither am I the same man now as when I am in
health; being now another person, my opinions and fancies are also other
than they were before.” In our courts of justice this word is much in
use, which is spoken of criminals when they find the judges in a good
humour, gentle, and mild, _Gaudeat de bonâ fortunâ _; “Let him rejoice
in his good fortune;” for it is most certain that men’s judgments are
sometimes more prone to condemnation, more sharp and severe, and at
others more facile, easy, and inclined to excuse; he that carries with
him from his house the pain of the gout, jealousy, or theft by his man,
having his whole soul possessed with anger, it is not to be doubted
but that his judgment will lean this way. That venerable senate of the
Areopagites used to hear and determine by night, for fear lest the sight
of the parties might corrupt their justice. The very air itself, and the
serenity of heaven, will cause some mutation in us, according to these
verses in Cicero:--


      Tales sunt hominnm mentes, quali pater ipse
   Jupiter auctiferâ lustravit lampade terras.

      “Men’s minds are influenc’d by th’ external air,
   Dark or serene, as days are foul or fair.”


‘Tis not only fevers, debauches, and great accidents, that overthrow our
judgments,--the least things in the world will do it; and we are not to
doubt, though we may not be sensible of it, that if a continued fever
can overwhelm the soul, a tertian will in some proportionate measure
alter it; if an apoplexy can stupefy and totally extinguish the sight of
our understanding, we are not to doubt but that a great cold will dazzle
it; and consequently there is hardly one single hour in a man’s whole
life wherein our judgment is in its due place and right condition, our
bodies being subject to so many continual mutations, and stuffed with so
many several sorts of springs, that I believe the physicians, that it is
hard but that there must be always some one or other out of order.

As to what remains, this malady does not very easily discover itself,
unless it be extreme and past remedy; forasmuch as reason goes always
lame, halting, and that too as well with falsehood as with truth; and
therefore ‘tis hard to discover her deviations and mistakes. I always
call that appearance of meditation which every one forges in himself
reason; this reason, of the condition of which there may be a hundred
contrary ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead
and of wax, ductile, pliable, and accommodate to all sorts of biases,
and to all measures; so that nothing remains but the art and skill how
to turn and mould it. How uprightly soever a judge may mean, if he
does not look well to himself, which few care to do, his inclination to
friendship, to relationship, to beauty or revenge, and not only things
of that weight, but even the fortuitous instinct that makes us favour
one thing more than another, and that, without reason’s permission, puts
the choice upon us in two equal subjects, or some shadow of like
vanity, may insensibly insinuate into his judgment the recommendation or
disfavour of a cause, and make the balance dip.

I, that watch myself as narrowly as I can, and that have my eyes
continually bent upon myself, like one that has no great business to do
elsewhere,


      Quis sub Arcto Rex gelidæ metuatur oræ,
   Quid Tyridatem terreat, unice Securus,

      “I care not whom the northern clime reveres,
   Or what’s the king that Tyridates fears,”


dare hardly tell the vanity and weakness I find in myself My foot is so
unstable and unsteady, I find myself so apt to totter and reel, and my
sight so disordered, that, fasting, I am quite another man than when
full; if health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very affable,
good-natured man; if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humour,
and not to be seen. The same pace of a horse seems to me one while
hard, and another easy; and the same way one while shorter, and another
longer; and the same form one while more, another less agreeable: I am
one while for doing every thing, and another for doing nothing at all;
and what pleases me now would be a trouble to me at another time. I
have a thousand senseless and casual actions within myself; either I
am possessed by melancholy or swayed by choler; now by its own private
authority sadness predominates in me, and by and by, I am as merry as
a cricket. When I take a book in hand I have then discovered admirable
graces in such and such passages, and such as have struck my soul; let
me light upon them at another time, I may turn and toss, tumble
and rattle the leaves to no purpose; ‘tis then to me an inform and
undiscovered mass. Even in my own writings I do not always find the air
of my first fancy; I know not what I would have said, and am often put
to it to correct and pump for a new sense, because I have lost the first
that was better. I do nothing but go and come; my judgment does not
always advance--it floats and roams:--


      Velut minuta magno
   Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento.

      “Like a small bark that’s tost upon the main.
   When winds tempestuous heave the liquid plain.”


Very often, as I am apt to do, having for exercise taken to maintain an
opinion contrary to my own, my mind, bending and applying itself that
way, does so engage me that way that I no more discern the reason of my
former belief, and forsake it I am, as it were, misled by the side to
which I incline, be it what it will, and carried away by my own weight.
Every one almost would say the same of himself, if he considered himself
as I do. Preachers very well know that the emotions which steal upon
them in speaking animate them towards belief; and that in passion we
are more warm in the defence of our proposition, take ourselves a deeper
impression of it, and embrace it with greater vehemence and approbation
than we do in our colder and more temperate state. You only give your
counsel a simple brief of your cause; he returns you a dubious and
uncertain answer, by which you find him indifferent which side he takes.
Have you feed him well that he may relish it the better, does he begin
to be really concerned, and do you find him interested and zealous in
your quarrel? his reason and learning will by degrees grow hot in your
cause; behold an apparent and undoubted truth presents itself to his
understanding; he discovers a new light in your business, and does in
good earnest believe and persuade himself that it is so. Nay, I do not
know whether the ardour that springs from spite and obstinacy, against
the power and violence of the magistrate and danger, or the interest of
reputation, may not have made some men, even at the stake, maintain the
opinion for which, at liberty, and amongst friends, they would not have
burned a finger. The shocks and jostles that the soul receives from the
body’s passions can do much in it, but its own can do a great deal more;
to which it is so subjected that perhaps it may be made good that it has
no other pace and motion but from the breath of those winds, without the
agitation of which it would be becalmed and without action, like a
ship in the middle of the sea, to which the winds hare denied
their assistance. And whoever should maintain this, siding with the
Peripatetics, would do us no great wrong, seeing it is very well known
that the greatest and most noble actions of the soul proceed from, and
stand in need of, this impulse of the passions. Valour, they say,
cannot be perfect without the assistance of anger; _Semper Ajax fortis,
fortissimus tamen in furore;_ “Ajax was always brave, but most when in
a fury:” neither do we encounter the wicked and the enemy vigorously
enough if we be not angry; nay, the advocate, it is said, is to inspire
the judges with indignation, to obtain justice.

Irregular desires moved Themistocles, and Demosthenes, and have pushed
on the philosophers to watching, fasting, and pilgrimages; and lead us
to honour, learning, and health, which are all very useful ends. And
this meanness of soul, in suffering anxiety and trouble, serves to breed
remorse and repentance in the conscience, and to make us sensible of
the scourge of God, and politic correction for the chastisement of
our offences; compassion is a spur to clemency; and the prudence of
preserving and governing ourselves is roused by our fear; and how many
brave actions by ambition! how many by presumption! In short, there is
no brave and spiritual virtue without some irregular agitation. May not
this be one of the reasons that moved the Epicureans to discharge God
from all care and solicitude of our affairs; because even the effects of
his goodness could not be exercised in our behalf without disturbing its
repose, by the means of passions which are so many spurs and instruments
pricking on the soul to virtuous actions; or have they thought
otherwise, and taken them for tempests, that shamefully hurry the soul
from her tranquillity? _Ut maris tranquillitas intettigitur, nullâ, ne
minima quidem, aura fluctus commovente: Sic animi quietus et placatus
status cemitur, quum perturbatis nulla est, qua moveri queat.._ “As it
is understood to be a calm sea when there is not the least breath of air
stirring; so the state of the soul is discerned to be quiet and appeased
when there is no perturbation to move it.”

What varieties of sense and reason, what contrariety of imaginations
does the diversity of our passions inspire us with! What assurance then
can we take of a thing so mobile and unstable, subject by its condition
to the dominion of trouble, and never going other than a forced and
borrowed pace? If our judgment be in the power even of sickness and
perturbation; if it be from folly and rashness that it is to receive the
impression of things, what security can we expect from it?

Is it not a great boldness in philosophy to believe that men perform the
greatest actions, and nearest approaching the Divinity, when they
are furious, mad, and beside themselves? We better ourselves by the
privation of our reason, and drilling it. The two natural ways to
enter into the cabinet of the gods, and there to foresee the course of
destiny, are fury and sleep.

This is pleasant to consider; by the dislocation that passions cause
in our reason, we become virtuous; by its extirpation, occasioned by
madness or the image of death, we become diviners and prophets. I was
never so willing to believe philosophy in any thing as this. ‘Tis a pure
enthusiasm wherewith sacred truth has inspired the spirit of philosophy,
which makes it confess, contrary to its own proposition, that the most
calm, composed, and healthful estate ef the soul that philosophy can
seat it in is not its best condition; our waking is more a sleep than
sleep itself, our wisdom less wise than folly; our dreams are worth more
than our meditation; and the worst place we can take is in ourselves.
But does not philosophy think that we are wise enough to consider
that the voice that the spirit utters, when dismissed from man, so
clear-sighted, so great, and so perfect, and whilst it is in man so
terrestrial, ignorant, and dark, is a voice proceeding from the spirit
of dark, terrestrial, and ignorant man, and for this reason a voice not
to be trusted and believed?

I, being of a soft and heavy complexion, have no great experience of
these vehement agitations, the most of which surprise the soul on a
sudden, without giving it leisure to recollect itself. But the passion
that is said to be produced by idleness in the hearts of young men,
though it proceed leisurely, and with a measured progress, does
evidently manifest, to those who have tried to oppose its power, the
violence our judgment suffers in this alteration and conversion. I have
formerly attempted to withstand and repel it; for I am so far from being
one of those that invite vices, that I do not so much as follow them, if
they do not haul me along; I perceived it to spring, grow, and increase,
in spite of my resistance; and at last, living and seeing as I was,
wholly to seize and possess me. So that, as if rousing from drunkenness,
the images of things began to appear to me quite other than they used
to be; I evidently saw the advantages of the object I desired, grow,
and increase, and expand by the influence of my imagination, and the
difficulties of my attempt to grow more easy and smooth; and both my
reason and conscience to be laid aside; but this fire being evaporated
in an instant, as from a flash of lightning, I was aware that my soul
resumed another kind of sight, another state, and another judgment;
the difficulties of retreat appeared great and invincible, and the same
things had quite another taste and aspect than the heat of desire had
presented them to me; which of the two most truly? Pyrrho knows nothing
about it. We are never without sickness. Agues have their hot and cold
fits; from the effects of an ardent passion we fall again to shivering;
as much as I had advanced, so much I retired:--


      Qualis ubi alterno procurrens gurgite pontus,
   Nunc ruit ad terras, scopulosque superjacit undam
   Spumeus, extremamque sinu perfundit arenam;
   Nunc rapidus retro, atque æstu revoluta resorbens
   Saxa, fugit, littusque vado labente relihquit.

      “So swelling surges, with a thundering roar,
   Driv’n on each others’ backs, insult the shore,
   Bound o’er the rocks, encroach upon the land,
   And far upon the beach heave up the sand;
   Then backward rapidly they take their way,
   Repulsed from upper ground, and seek the sea.”


Now, from the knowledge of this volubility of mine, I have accidentally
begot in myself a certain constancy of opinions, and have not much
altered those that were first and natural in me; for what appearance
soever there may be in novelty, I do not easily change, for fear of
losing by the bargain; and, as I am not capable of choosing, I take
other men’s choice, and keep myself in the station wherein God has
placed me; I could not otherwise keep myself from perpetual rolling.
Thus have I, by the grace of God, preserved myself entire, without
anxiety or trouble of conscience, in the ancient faith of our religion,
amidst so many sects and divisions as our age has produced. The writings
of the ancients, the best authors I mean, being full and solid, tempt
and carry me which way almost they will; he that I am reading seems
always to have the most force; and I find that every one in his turn is
in the right, though they contradict one another. The facility that good
wits have of rendering every thing likely they would recommend, and
that nothing is so strange to which they do not undertake to give colour
enough to deceive such simplicity as mine, this evidently shows the
weakness of their testimony. The heavens and the stars have been
three thousand years in motion; all the world were of that belief
till Cleanthes the Samian, or, according to Theophrastus, Nicetas of
Syracuse, took it into his head to maintain that it was the earth that
moved, turning about its axis by the oblique circle of the zodiac.
And Copernicus has in our times so grounded this doctrine that it very
regularly serves to all astrological consequences; what use can we
make of this, if not that we ought not much to care which is the true
opinion? And who knows but that a third, a thousand years hence, may
over throw the two former.


      Sic volvenda ætas commutât tempora rerum:
   Quod fuit in pretio, fit nullo denique honore;
   Porro aliud succedit, et e contemptibus exit,
   Inque dies magis appetitur, floretque repertum
   Laudibus, et miro est mortales inter honore.

      “Thus ev’ry thing is changed in course of time,
   What now is valued passes soon its prime;
   To which some other thing, despised before,
   Succeeds, and grows in vogue still more and more;
   And once received, too faint all praises seem,
   So highly it is rais’d in men’s esteem.”


So that when any new doctrine presents itself to us, we have great
reason to mistrust, and to consider that, before that was set on foot,
the contrary had been generally received; and that, as that has been
overthrown by this, a third invention, in time to come, may start
up which may damn the second. Before the principles that Aristotle
introduced were in reputation, other principles contented human reason,
as these satisfy us now. What patent have these people, what particular
privilege, that the career of our invention must be stopped by them, and
that the possession of our whole future belief should belong to them?
They are no more exempt from being thrust out of doors than their
predecessors were. When any one presses me with a new argument, I ought
to believe that what I cannot answer another can; for to believe all
likelihoods that a man cannot confute is great simplicity; it would
by that means come to pass that all the vulgar (and we are all of the
vulgar) would have their belief as tumable as a weathercock; for their
souls, being so easy to be imposed upon, and without any resistance,
must of force incessantly receive other and other impressions, the last
still effacing all footsteps of that which went before. He that finds
himself weak ought to answer, according to practice, that he will speak
with his counsel, or refer himself to the wiser, from whom he received
his instruction. How long is it that physic has been practised in the
world? ‘Tis said that a new comer, called Paracelsus, changes and
overthrows the whole order of ancient rules, and maintains that, till
now, it has been of no other use but to kill men. I believe he will
easily make this good, but I do not think it were wisdom to venture my
life in making trial of his own experience. We are not to believe every
one, says the precept, because every one can say all things. A man of
this profession of novelties and physical reformations not long since
told me that all the ancients were notoriously mistaken in the nature
and motions of the winds, which he would evidently demonstrate to me if
I would give him the hearing. After I had with some patience heard his
arguments, which were all full of likelihood of truth: “What, then,”
 said I, “did those that sailed according to Theophrastus make way
westward, when they had the prow towards the east? did they go sideward
or backward?” “That’s fortune,” answered he, “but so it is that they
were mistaken.” I replied that I had rather follow effects than reason.
Now these are things that often interfere with one another, and I have
been told that in geometry (which pretends to have gained the highest
point of certainty of all science) there are inevitable demonstrations
found which subvert the truth of all experience; as Jacques Pelletier
told me, at my own house, that he had found out two lines stretching
themselves one towards the other to meet, which nevertheless he
affirmed, though extended to infinity, could never arrive to touch one
another. And the Pyrrhonians make no other use of their arguments and
their reason than to ruin the appearance of experience; and ‘tis a
wonder how far the suppleness of our reason has followed them in this
design of controverting the evidence of effects; for they affirm that we
do not move, that we do not speak, and that there is neither weight nor
heat, with the same force of argument that we affirm the most likely
things. Ptolemy, who was a great man, had established the bounds of this
world of ours; all the ancient philosophers thought they had the measure
of it, excepting some remote isles that might escape their knowledge;
it had been Pyrrhonism, a thousand years ago, to doubt the science of
cosmography, and the opinions that every one had received from it; it
was heresy to admit the antipodes; and behold, in this age of ours,
there is an infinite extent of terra firma discovered, not an island or
single country, but a division of the world, nearly equal in greatness
to that we knew before. The geographers of our time stick not to assure
us that now all is found; all is seen:--


   Nam quod adest prosto, placet, et pollere videtur;

   “What’s present pleases, and appears the best;”


but it remains to be seen whether, as Ptolemy was therein formerly
deceived upon the foundation of his reason, it were not very foolish to
trust now in what these people say? And whether it is not more likely
that this great body, which we call the world, is not quite another
thing than what we imagine.

Plato says that it changes countenance in all respects; that the
heavens, the stars, and the sun, have all of them sometimes motions
retrograde to what we see, changing east into west The Egyptian priests
told Herodotus that from the time of their first king, which was eleven
thousand and odd years since (and they showed him the effigies of all
their kings in statues taken from the life), the sun had four times
altered his course; that the sea and the earth did alternately change
into one another; that the beginning of the world is undetermined;
Aristotle and Cicero both say the same; and some amongst us are of
opinion that it has been from all eternity, is mortal, and renewed again
by several vicissitudes; calling Solomon and Isaiah to witness; to evade
those oppositions, that God has once been a creator without a creature;
that he has had nothing to do, that he got rid of that idleness by
putting his hand to this work; and that consequently he is subject to
change. In the most famous of the Greek schools the world is taken for a
god, made by another god greater than he, and composed of a body, and a
soul fixed in his centre, and dilating himself by musical numbers to
his circumference; divine, infinitely happy, and infinitely great,
infinitely wise and eternal; in him are other gods, the sea, the earth,
the stars, who entertain one another with an harmonious and perpetual
agitation and divine dance, sometimes meeting, sometimes retiring from
one another; concealing and discovering themselves; changing their
order, one while before, and another behind. Heraclitus was positive
that the world was composed of fire; and, by the order of destiny,
was one day to be enflamed and consumed in fire, and then to be again
renewed. And Apuleius says of men: _Sigillatim mortales, cunctim
perpetui._ “That they are mortal in particular, and immortal in
general.” Alexander writ to his mother the narration of an Egyptian
priest, drawn from their monuments, testifying the antiquity of that
nation to be infinite, and comprising the birth and progress of other
countries. Cicero and Diodorus say that in their time the Chaldees kept
a register of four hundred thousand and odd years, Aristotle, Pliny,
and others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand years before Plato’s
time. Plato says that they of the city of Sais have records in writing
of eight thousand years; and that the city of Athens was built a
thousand years before the said city of Sais; Epicurus, that at the same
time things are here in the posture we see, they are alike and in the
same manner in several other worlds; which he would have delivered with
greater assurance, had he seen the similitude and concordance of the new
discovered world of the West Indies with ours, present and past, in so
many strange examples.

In earnest, considering what is come to our knowledge from the course
of this terrestrial polity, I have often wondered to see in so vast a
distance of places and times such a concurrence of so great a number of
popular and wild opinions, and of savage manners and beliefs, which by
no means seem to proceed from our natural meditation. The human mind is
a great worker of miracles! But this relation has, moreover, I know
not what of extraordinary in it; ‘tis found to be in names, also, and a
thousand other things; for they found nations there (that, for aught we
know, never heard of us) where circumcision was in use; where there were
states and great civil governments maintained by women only, without
men; where our fasts and Lent were represented, to which was added
abstinence from women; where our crosses were several ways in repute;
here they were made use of to honour and adorn their sepultures, there
they were erected, and particularly that of St Andrew, to protect
themselves from nocturnal visions, and to lay upon the cradles of
infants against enchantments; elsewhere there was found one of wood,
of very great height, which was adored for the god of rain, and this
a great way in the interior; there was seen an express image of our
penance priests, the use of mitres, the celibacy of priests, the art
of divination by the entrails of sacrificed beasts, abstinence from all
sorts of flesh and fish in their diet, the manner of priests officiating
in a particular and not a vulgar language; and this fancy, that the
first god was driven away by a second, his younger brother; that they
were created with all sorts of necessaries and conveniences, which have
since been in a degree taken from them for their sins, their territory
changed, and their natural condition made worse; that they were of
old overwhelmed by the inundation of water from heaven; that but few
families escaped, who retired into caves on high mountains, the mouths
of which they stopped so that the waters could not get in, having shut
up, together with themselves, several sorts of animals; that when they
perceived the rain to cease they sent out dogs, which returning clean
and wet, they judged that the water was not much abated; afterwards
sending out others, and seeing them return dirty, they issued out to
repeople the world, which they found only full of serpents. In one place
we met with the belief of a day of judgment; insomuch that they were
marvellously displeased at the Spaniards for discomposing the bones of
the dead, in rifling the sepultures for riches, saying that those bones
so disordered could not easily rejoin; the traffic by exchange, and no
other way; fairs and markets for that end; dwarfs and deformed people
for the ornament of the tables of princes; the use of falconry,
according to the nature of their hawks; tyrannical subsidies; nicety in
gardens; dancing, tumbling tricks, music of instruments, coats of arms,
tennis-courts, dice and lotteries, wherein they are sometimes so eager
and hot as to stake themselves and their liberty; physic, no otherwise
than by charms; the way of writing in cypher; the belief of only one
first man, the father of all nations; the adoration of one God, who
formerly lived a man in perfect virginity, fasting, and penitence,
preaching the laws of nature, and the ceremonies of religion, and that
vanished from the world without a natural death; the theory of giants;
the custom of making themselves drunk with their beverages, and drinking
to the utmost; religious ornaments painted with bones and dead men’s
skulls; surplices, holy water sprinkled; wives and servants, who present
themselves with emulation, burnt and interred with the dead husband or
master; a law by which the eldest succeeds to all the estate, no
part being left for the younger but obedience; the custom that, upon
promotion to a certain office of great authority, the promoted is to
take upon him a new name, and to leave that which he had before; another
to strew lime upon the knee of the new-born child, with these words:

“From dust thou earnest, and to dust thou must return;” as also the art
of augury. The vain shadows of our religion, which are observable in
some of these examples, are testimonies of its dignity and divinity. It
is not only in some sort insinuated into all the infidel nations on this
side of the world, by a certain imitation, but in these barbarians
also, as by a common and supernatural inspiration; for we find there the
belief of purgatory, but of a new form; that which we give to the fire
they give to the cold, and imagine that souls are purged and punished by
the rigour of an excessive coldness. And this example puts me in mind
of another pleasant diversity; for as there were there some people who
delighted to unmuffle the ends of their instruments, and clipped off
the prepuce after the Mahometan and Jewish manner; there were others who
made so great conscience of laying it bare, that they carefully pursed
it up with little strings to keep that end from peeping into the air;
and of this other diversity, that whereas we, to honour kings and
festivals, put on the best clothes we have; in some regions, to express
their disparity and submission to their king, his subjects present
themselves before him in their vilest habits, and entering his palace,
throw some old tattered garment over their better apparel, to the end
that all the lustre and ornament may solely be in him. But to proceed:--

If nature enclose within the bounds of her ordinary progress the
beliefs, judgments, and opinions of men, as well as all other things;
if they have their revolution, their season, their birth and death, like
cabbage plants; if the heavens agitate and rule them at their pleasure,
what magisterial and permanent authority do we attribute to them? If
we experimentally see that the form of our beings depends upon the air,
upon the climate, and upon the soil, where we are bom, and not only the
colour, the stature, the complexion, and the countenances, but moreover
the very faculties of the soul itself: Et plaga codi non solum ad robor
corporum, sed etiam anirum facit: “The climate is of great efficacy,
not only to the strength of bodies, but to that of souls also,” says
Vegetius; and that the goddess who founded the city of Athens chose
to situate it in a temperature of air fit to make men prudent, as
the Egyptian priests told Solon: _Athenis tenue colum; ex quo etiam
acutiores putantur Attici; crassum Thebis; itaque pingues Thebani,
et valentes:_ “The air of Athens is subtle and thin; whence also the
Athenians are reputed to be more acute; and at Thebes more gross and
thick; wherefore the Thebans are looked upon as more heavy-witted and
more strong.” In such sort that, as fruits and animals grow different,
men are also more or less warlike, just, temperate, and docile; here
given to wine, elsewhere to theft or uncleanness; here inclined to
superstition, elsewhere to unbelief; in one place to liberty, in another
to servitude; capable of one science or of one art, dull or ingenious,
obedient or mutinous, good or bad, according as the place where they
are seated inclines them; and assume a new complexion, if removed, like
trees, which was the reason why Cyrus would not grant the Persians
leave to quit their rough and craggy country to remove to another
more pleasant and even, saying, that fertile and tender soils made
men effeminate and soft. If we see one while one art and one belief
flourish, and another while another, through some celestial influence;
such an age to produce such natures, and to incline mankind to such and
such a propension, the spirits of men one while gay and another gray,
like our fields, what becomes of all those fine prerogatives we so
soothe ourselves withal? Seeing that a wise man may be mistaken, and a
hundred men and a hundred nations, nay, that even human nature
itself, as we believe, is many ages wide in one thing or another, what
assurances have we that she should cease to be mistaken, or that in this
very age of ours she is not so?

Methinks that amongst other testimonies of our imbecility, this ought
not to be forgotten, that man cannot, by his own wish and desire, find
out what he wants; that not in fruition only, but in imagination and
wish, we cannot agree about what we would have to satisfy and content
us. Let us leave it to our own thought to cut out and make up at
pleasure; it cannot so much as covet what is proper for it, and satisfy
itself:--


      Quid enim ratione timemus,
   Aut cupimus? Quid tain dextro pede concipis, ut te
   Conatus non poniteat, votique peracti?

      “For what, with reason, do we speak or shun,
   What plan, how happily soe’r begun,
   That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?”


And therefore it was that Socrates only begged of the gods that they
would give him what they knew to be best for him; and the private
and public prayer of the Lacedemonians was simply for good and useful
things, referring the choice and election of them to the discretion of
the Supreme Power:--


      Conjugium petimus, partumqué uxoris; at illis
   Notum, qui pueri, qualisque futura sit uxor:

      “We ask for Wives and children; they above
   Know only, when we have them, what they’ll prove;”


and Christians pray to God, “Thy will be done,” that they may not fall
into the inconvenience the poet feigns of King Midas. He prayed to
the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; his prayer was
heard; his wine was gold, his bread was gold, the feathers of his
bed, his shirt, his clothes, were all gold, so that he found himself
overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with an
intolerable benefit, and was fain to unpray his prayers.


      Attonitus novitate mali, divesque, miserque,
   Effugere optât opes, et, quæ modo voverat, odit.

      “Astonished at the strangeness of the ill,
   To be so rich, yet miserable still;
   He wishes now he could his wealth evade,
   And hates the thing for which before he prayed.”


To instance in myself: being young, I desired of fortune, above all
things, the order of St. Michael, which was then the utmost distinction
of honour amongst the French nobles, and very rare. She pleasantly
gratified my longing; instead of raising me, and lifting me up from my
own place to attain to it, she was much kinder to me; for she brought it
so low, and made it so cheap, that it stooped down to my shoulders, and
lower. Cleobis and Bito, Trophonius and Agamedes, having requested, the
first of their goddess, the last of their god, a recompense worthy of
their piety, had death for a reward; so differing from ours are heavenly
opinions concerning what is fit for us. God might grant us riches,
honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that
is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or
an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, _Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus
ipsa me consolata sunt._ “Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me,” he
does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly
discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it
in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand


      Si consilium vis:
   Permittee ipsis expendere numinibus, quid
   Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris...
   Carior est illis homo quam sibi;

      “If thou’lt be rul’d, to th’ gods thy fortunes trust,
   Their thoughts are wise, their dispensations just.
   What best may profit or delight they know,
   And real good, for fancied bliss, bestow;
   With eyes of pity, they our frailties scan,
   More dear to them, than to himself, is man;”


for to require of him honours and commands, is to require ‘that he may
throw you into a battle, set you upon a cast at dice, or something of
the like nature, whereof the issue is to you unknown, and the fruit
doubtful.

There is no dispute so sharp and violent amongst the philosophers,
as about the question of the sovereign good of man; whence, by the
calculation of Varro, rose two hundred and eighty-eight sects. _Qui
autem de summo bono dissentit, de totâ philosophies ratione disputât._
“For whoever enters into controversy concerning the supreme good,
disputes upon the whole matter of philosophy.”


      Très mihi convivæ prope dissentire videntur,
   Poscentes vario mul turn divers a palato;
   Quid dem? Quid non dem? Renuis tu quod jubet alter;
   Quod petis, id sane est invisum acidumque duobus;

      “I have three guests invited to a feast,
   And all appear to have a different taste;
   What shall I give them? What shall I refuse?
   What one dislikes the other two shall choose;
   And e’en the very dish you like the best
   Is acid or insipid to the rest:”


nature should say the same to their contests and debates. Some say that
our well-being lies in virtue, others in pleasure, others in submitting
to nature; one in knowledge, another in being exempt from pain, another
in not suffering ourselves to be carried away by appearances; and this
fancy seems to have some relation to that of the ancient Pythagoras,


      Nil admirari, prope res est una, Numici,
   Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum:

      “Not to admire’s the only art I know
   Can make us happy, and can keep us so;”


which is the drift of the Pyrrhonian sect; Aristotle attributes the
admiring nothing to magnanimity; and Arcesilaus said, that constancy and
a right inflexible state of judgment were the true good, and consent
and application the sin and evil; and there, it is true, in being thus
positive, and establishing a certain axiom, he quitted Pyrrhonism; for
the’ Pyrrhonians, when they say that ataraxy, which is the immobility
of judgment, is the sovereign good, do not design to speak it
affirmatively; but that the same motion of soul which makes them avoid
precipices, and take shelter from the cold, presents them such a fancy,
and makes them refuse another.

How much do I wish that, whilst I live, either some other or Justus
Lipsius, the most learned man now living, of a most polite and judicious
understanding, truly resembling my Turnebus, had both the will and
health, and leisure sufficient, carefully and conscientiously to collect
into a register, according to their divisions and classes, as many as
are to be found, of the opinions of the ancient philosophers, about the
subject of our being and manners, their controversies, the succession
and reputation of sects; with the application of the lives of the
authors and their disciples to their own precepts, in memorable
accidents, and upon exemplary occasions. What a beautiful and useful
work that would be!

As to what remains, if it be from ourselves that we are to extract the
rules of our manners, upon what a confusion do we throw ourselves! For
that which our reason advises us to, as the most likely, is generally
for every one to obey the laws of his country, as was the advice of
Socrates, inspired, as he says, by a divine counsel; and by that,
what would it say, but that our duty has no other rule but what is
accidental? Truth ought to have a like and universal visage; if man
could know equity and justice that had a body and a true being, he would
not fetter it to the conditions of this country or that; it would not be
from the whimsies of the Persians or Indians that virtue would receive
its form. There is nothing more subject to perpetual agitation than
the laws; since I was born, I have known those of the English, our
neighbours, three or four times changed, not only in matters of civil
regimen, which is the only thing wherein constancy may be dispensed
with, but in the most important subject that can be, namely, religion,
at which I am the more troubled and ashamed, because it is a nation with
whom those of my province have formerly had so great familiarity and
acquaintance, that there yet remains in my house some footsteps of our
ancient kindred; and here with us at home, I have known a thing that
was capital to become lawful; and we that hold of others are likewise,
according to the chance of war, in a possibility of being one day found
guilty of high-treason, both divine and human, should the justice of
our arms fall into the power of injustice, and, after a few years’
possession, take a quite contrary being. How could that ancient god more
clearly accuse the ignorance of human knowledge concerning the divine
Being, and give men to understand that their religion was but a thing of
their own contrivance, useful as a bond to their society, than declaring
as he did to those who came to his tripod for instruction, that every
one’s true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he
chanced to be? O God, what infinite obligation have we to the bounty
of our sovereign Creator, for having disabused our belief from these
wandering and arbitrary devotions, and for having seated it upon the
eternal foundation of his holy word? But what then will philosophers say
to us in this necessity? “That we follow the laws of our country;” that
is to say, this floating sea of the opinions of a republic, or a prince,
that will paint out justice for me in as many colours, and form it
as many ways as there are changes of passions in themselves; I cannot
suffer my judgment to be so flexible. What kind of virtue is that which
I see one day in repute, and that to-morrow shall be in none, and which
the crossing of a river makes a crime? What sort of truth can that
be, which these mountains limit to us, and make a lie to all the world
beyond them?

But they are pleasant, when, to give some certainty to the laws, they
say, that there are some firm, perpetual, and immovable, which they call
natural, that are imprinted in human kind by the condition of their own
proper being; and of these some reckon three, some four, some more, some
less; a sign that it is a mark as doubtful as the rest Now they are so
unfortunate, (for what can I call it else but misfortune that, of so
infinite a number of laws, there should not be found one at least
that fortune and the temerity of chance has suffered to be universally
received by the consent of all nations?) they are, I say, so miserable,
that of these three or four select laws, there is not so much as one
that is not contradicted and disowned, not only by one nation, but by
many. Now, the only likely sign, by which they can argue or infer some
natural laws, is the universality of approbation; for we should, without
doubt, follow with a common consent that which nature had truly ordained
us; and not only every nation, but every private man, would resent the
force and violence that any one should do him who would tempt him to
any thing contrary to this law. But let them produce me one of this
condition. Proctagoras and Aristo gave no other essence to the justice
of laws than the authority and opinion of the legislator; and that,
these laid aside, the honest and the good lost their qualities, and
remained empty names of indifferent things; Thrasymachus, in Plato,
is of opinion that there is no other right but the convenience of the
superior. There is not any thing wherein the world is so various as in
laws and customs; such a thing is abominable here which is elsewhere in
esteem, as in Lacedemon dexterity in stealing; marriages between near
relations, are capitally interdicted amongst us; they are elsewhere in
honour:--


      Gentes esse ferantur,
   In quibus et nato genitrix, et nata parenti
   Jungitur, et pietas geminato crescit amore;

      “There are some nations in the world, ‘tis said,
   Where fathers daughters, sons their mothers wed;
   And their affections thereby higher rise,
   More firm and constant by these double ties;”


the murder of infants, the murder of fathers, the community of wives,
traffic of robberies, license in all sorts of voluptuousness; in short,
there is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some
nation or other.

It is credible that there are natural laws for us, as we see them
in other creatures; but they are lost in us, this fine human reason
everywhere so insinuating itself to govern and command, as to shuffle
and confound the face of things, according to its own vanity and
inconstancy: _Nihil itaque amplius nostrum est; quod nostrum dico,
artis est:_ “Therefore nothing is any more truly ours; what we call ours
belongs to art.” Subjects have divers lustres and divers considerations,
and thence the diversity of opinions principally proceeds; one nation
considers a subject in one aspect, and stops there: another takes it in
a different point of view.

There is nothing of greater horror to be imagined than for a man to eat
his father; and yet the people, whose ancient custom it was so to do,
looked upon it as a testimony of piety and affection, seeking thereby to
give their progenitors the most worthy and honourable sepulture; storing
up in themselves, and as it were in their own marrow, the bodies
and relics of their fathers; and in some sort regenerating them by
transmutation into their living flesh, by means of nourishment and
digestion. It is easy to consider what a cruelty and abomination it
must have appeared to men possessed and imbued with this snperstition
to throw their fathers’ remains to the corruption of the earth, and the
nourishment of beasts and worms.

Lycurgus considered in theft the vivacity, diligence, boldness, and
dexterity of purloining any thing from our neighbours, and the benefit
that redounded to the public that every one should look more narrowly
to the conservation of what was his own; and believed that, from this
double institution of assaulting and defending, advantage was to be made
for military discipline (which was the principal science and virtue to
which he would inure that nation), of greater consideration than the
disorder and injustice of taking another man’s goods.

Dionysius, the tyrant, offered Plato a robe of the Persian fashion,
long, damasked, and perfumed; Plato refused it, saying, “That being
born a man, he would not willingly dress himself in women’s clothes;”
 but Aristippus accepted it with this answer, “That no accoutrement could
corrupt a chaste courage.” His friends reproaching him with meanness of
spirit, for laying it no more to heart that Dionysius had spit in his
face, “Fishermen,” said he, “suffer themselves to be drenched with the
waves of the sea from head to foot to catch a gudgeon.” Diogenes was
washing cabbages, and seeing him pass by, “If thou couldst live on
cabbage,” said he, “thou wouldst not fawn upon a tyrant;” to whom
Aristippus replied, “And if thou knewest how to live amongst men, thou
wouldst not be washing cabbages.” Thus reason finds appearances for
divers effects; ‘tis a pot with two ears that a man may take by the
right or left:--


      Bellum, o terra hospita, portas:
   Bello armantur eqni; bellum hæc armenta minantur.
   Sed tamen idem olim curru succedere sueti
   Quadrupedes, et frena jugo concordia ferre;
   Spes est pacis.

      “War, war is threatened from this foreign ground
   (My father cried), where warlike steeds are found.
   Yet, since reclaimed, to chariots they submit,
   And bend to stubborn yokes, and champ the bit,
   Peace may succeed to war.”


Solon, being lectured by his friends not to shed powerless and
unprofitable tears for the death of his son, “It is for that reason that
I the more justly shed them,” said he, “because they are powerless
and unprofitable.” Socrates’s wife exasperated her grief by this
circumstance: “Oh, how unjustly do these wicked judges put him to
death!” “Why,” replied he, “hadst thou rather they should execute me
justly?” We have our ears bored; the Greeks looked upon that as a mark
of slavery. We retire in private to enjoy our wives; the Indians do it
in public. The Scythians immolated strangers in their temples; elsewhere
temples were a refuge:--


      Inde furor vulgi, quod numina vicinorum
   Odit quisque locus, cum solos credat habendos
   Esse deos, quos ipse colit.

      “Thus ‘tis the popular fury that creates
   That all their neighbours’ gods each nation hates;
   Each thinks its own the genuine; in a word,
   The only deities to be adored.”


I have heard of a judge who, coming upon a sharp conflict betwixt
Bartolus and Aldus, and some point controverted with many contrarieties,
writ in the margin of his book, “a question for a friend;” that is to
say, that truth was there so controverted and disputed that in a like
cause he might favour which of the parties he thought fit ‘Twas only for
want of wit that he did not write “a question for a friend” throughout.
The advocates and judges of our times find bias enough in all causes
to accommodate them to what they themselves think fit. In so infinite
a science, depending upon the authority of so many opinions, and so
arbitrary a subject, it cannot be but that of necessity an extreme
confusion of judgments must arise; there is hardly any suit so clear
wherein opinions do not very much differ; what one court has determined
one way another determines quite contrary, and itself contrary to that
at another time. Of which we see very frequent examples, owing to that
practice admitted amongst us, and which is a marvellous blemish to the
ceremonious authority and lustre of our justice, of not abiding by one
sentence, but running from judge to judge, and court to court, to decide
one and the same cause.

As to the liberty of philosophical opinions concerning vice and virtue,
‘tis not necessary to be insisted upon; therein are found many opinions
that are better concealed than published to weak minds. Arcesilaus said,
“That in venery it was no matter where, or with whom, it was committed:”
 _Et obsccenas voluptates, si natura requirit, non genere, aut loco, aut
ordine, sed forma, otate, jigurâ, metiendas Epicurus putat.... ne amores
quidem sanctos a sapiente alienos esse arbitrantur.... Queeramus, ad
quam usque otatem juvenes amandi sint._ “And obscene pleasures, if
nature requires them,” Epicurus thinks, “are not to be measured either
by race, kind, place, or rank, but by age, shape, and beauty.... Neither
are sacred loves thought to be foreign to wise men;... we are to
inquire till what age young men are to be loved.” These last two stoical
quotations, and the reproach that Dicæarchus threw into the teeth of
Plato himself, upon this account, show how much the soundest philosophy
indulges licenses and excesses very remote from common custom.

Laws derive their authority from possession and custom. ‘Tis dangerous
to trace them back to their beginning; they grow great, and ennoble
themselves, like our rivers, by running on; but follow them upward to
their source, ‘tis but a little spring, scarce discernable,

that swells thus, and thus fortifies itself by growing old. Do but
consult the ancient considerations that gave the first motion to this
famous torrent, so full of dignity, awe, and reverence, you will find
them so light and weak that it is no wonder if these people, who weigh
and reduce every thing to reason, and who admit nothing by authority, or
upon trust, have their judgments often very remote, and differing from
those of the public. It is no wonder if people, who take their pattern
from the first image of nature, should in most of their opinions swerve
from the common path; as, for example, few amongst them would have
approved of the strict conditions of our marriages, and most of them
have been for having wives in common, and without obligation; they would
refuse our ceremonies. Chrysippus said, “That a philosopher would make
a dozen somersaults, aye, and without his breeches, for a dozen of
olives.” That philosopher would hardly have advised Clisthenes to have
refused Hippoclides the fair Agarista his daughter, for having seen him
stand on his head upon a table. Metrocles somewhat indiscreetly broke
wind backwards while in disputation, in the presence of a great auditory
in his school, and kept himself hid in his own house for shame, till
Crates coming to visit him, and adding to his consolations and reasons
the example of his own liberty, by falling to try with him who should
sound most, cured him of that scruple, and withal drew him to his own
stoical sect, more free than that more reserved one of the Peripatetics,
of which he had been till then. That which we call decency, not to dare
to do that in public which is decent enough to do in private, the Stoics
call foppery; and to mince it, and to be so modest as to conceal and
disown what nature, custom, and our desires publish and proclaim of our
actions, they reputed a vice. The other thought it was to undervalue the
mysteries of Venus to draw them out of the private oratory, to expose
them to the view of the people; and that to bring them out from behind
the curtain was to debase them. Modesty is a thing of weight; secrecy,
reservation, and circumspection, are parts of esteem. Pleasure did
very ingeniously when, under the mask of virtue, she sued not to be
prostituted in the open streets, trodden under foot, and exposed to
the public view, wanting the dignity and convenience of her private
cabinets. Hence some say that to put down public stews is not only to
disperse fornication into all places, that was confined to one, but
moreover, by the difficulty, to incite wild and idle people to this
vice:--


      Mochus es Aufidiæ, qui vir,
   Scævine, fuisti:
   Rivalis fuerat qui tuus, ille vir est.
   Cur aliéna placet tibi, quæ tua non placet uxor?
   Numquid securus non potes arrigere?


This experience diversifies itself in a thousand examples:--


      Nullus in urbe fuit totâ, qui tangere vellet
   Uxorem gratis, Cæciliane, tuam,
   Dum licuit: sed nunc, positis custodibus, ingens
   Turba fututorum est. Ingeniosus homo es.


A philosopher being taken in the very act, and asked what he was doing,
coldly replied, “I am planting man;” no more blushing to be so caught
than if they had found him planting garlic.

It is, I suppose, out of tenderness and respect to the natural modesty
of mankind that a great and religious author is of opinion that this act
is so necessarily obliged to privacy and shame that he cannot persuade
himself there could be any absolute performance in those impudent
embraces of the Cynics, but that they contented themselves to represent
lascivious gestures only, to maintain the impudence of their school’s
profession; and that, to eject what shame had withheld and restrained,
it was afterward necessary for them to withdraw into the shade. But he
had not thoroughly examined their debauches; for Diogenes, playing the
beast with himself in public, wished, in the presence of all that saw
him, that he could fill his belly by that exercise. To those who asked
him why he did not find out a more commodious place to eat in than
in the open street, he made answer, “Because I am hungry in the open
street.” The women philosophers who mixed with their sect, mixed also
with their persons, in all places, without reservation; and Hipparchia
was not received into Crates’s society, but upon condition that she
should, in all things, follow the practice and customs of his rule.
These philosophers set a great price upon virtue, and renounce all other
discipline but the moral; and yet, in all their actions, they attributed
the sovereign authority to the election of their sage, and above the
laws; and gave no other curb to voluptuousness but moderation only, and
the conservation of the liberty of others.

Heraclitus and Protagoras, forasmuch as wine seemed bitter to the sick,
and pleasant to the sound, the rudder crooked in the water, and straight
when out, and such like contrary appearances as are found in subjects,
argued thence that all subjects had, in themselves, the causes of these
appearances; and there was some bitterness in the wine which had some
sympathy with the sick man’s taste, and the rudder some bending quality
sympathizing with him that looks upon it in the water; and so of all
the rest; which is to say, that all is in all things, and, consequently,
nothing in any one; for, where all is, there is nothing.

This opinion put me in mind of the experience we have that there is
no sense or aspect of any thing, whether bitter or sweet, straight
or crooked, that the human mind does not find out in the writings it
undertakes to tumble over. Into the cleanest, purest, and most perfect
words that can possibly be, how many lies and falsities have we
suggested! What heresy has not there found ground and testimony
sufficient to make itself embraced and defended! ‘Tis for this that the
authors of such errors will never depart from proof of the testimony of
the interpretation of words. A person of dignity, who would approve to
me, by authority, the search of the philosopher’s stone, wherein he
was head over ears engaged, lately alleged to me at least five or six
passages of the Bible upon which, he said, he first founded his attempt,
for the discharge of his conscience (for he is a divine); and, in truth,
the idea was not only pleasant, but, moreover, very well accommodated to
the defence of this fine science.

By this way the reputation of divining fables is acquired. There is no
fortune-teller, if we have this authority, but, if a man will take the
pains to tumble and toss, and narrowly to peep into all the folds and
glosses of his words, he may make him, like the Sibyls, say what he
will. There are so many ways of interpretation that it will be hard but
that, either obliquely or in a direct line, an ingenious wit will
find out, in every subject, some air that will serve for his purpose;
therefore we find a cloudy and ambiguous style in so frequent and
ancient use. Let the author but make himself master of that, to busy
posterity about his predictions, which not only his own parts, but the
accidental favour of the matter itself, may do for him; and, as to
the rest, express himself, whether after a foolish or a subtle manner,
somewhat obscurely or contradictorily, ‘tis no matter;--a number of
wits, shaking and sifting him, will bring out a great many several
forms, either according to his meaning, or collateral, or contrary, to
it, which will all redound to his honour; he will see himself enriched
by the means of his disciples, like the regents of colleges by their
pupils yearly presents. This it is which has given reputation to many
things of no worth at all; that has brought several writings in vogue,
and given them the fame of containing all sorts of matter can be
desired; one and the same thing receiving a thousand and a thousand
images and various considerations; nay, as many as we please.

Is it possible that Homer could design to say all that we make him
say, and that he designed so many and so various figures, as that the
divines, law-givers, captains, philosophers, and all sorts of men
who treat of sciences, how variously and opposite soever, should
indifferently quote him, and support their arguments by his authority,
as the sovereign lord and master of all offices, works, and artisans,
and counsellor-general of all enterprises? Whoever has had occasion for
oracles and predictions has there found sufficient to serve his turn.
‘Tis a wonder how many and how admirable concurrences an intelligent
person, and a particular friend of mine, has there found out in favour
of our religion; and cannot easily be put out of the conceit that it was
Homer’s design; and yet he is as well acquainted with this author as
any man whatever of his time. And what he has found in favour of our
religion there, very many anciently have found in favour of theirs. Do
but observe how Plato is tumbled and tossed about; every one ennobling
his own opinions by applying him to himself, and making him take what
side they please. They draw him in, and engage him in all the new
opinions the world receives; and make him, according to the different
course of things, differ from himself; every one makes him disavow,
according to his own sense, the manners and customs lawful in his age,
because they are unlawful in ours; and all this with vivacity and power,
according to the force and sprightliness of the wit of the interpreter.
From the same foundation that Heraclitus and this sentence of his had,
“that all things had in them those forms that we discern,” Democritus
drew quite a contrary conclusion,--“that objects have in them nothing
that we discern in them;” and because honey is sweet to one and bitter
to another, he thence argued that it was neither sweet nor bitter. The
Pyrrhonians would say that they knew not whether it is sweet or bitter,
or whether the one or the other, or both; for these always gained
the highest point of dubitation. The Cyrenaics held that nothing was
perceptible from without, and that that only was perceptible that
inwardly touched us, as pain and pleasure; acknowledging neither sound
nor colour, but certain affections only that we receive from them; and
that man’s judgment had no other seat Protagoras believed that “what
seems true to every one, is true to every one.” The Epicureans lodged
all judgment in the senses, and in the knowledge of things, and in
pleasure. Plato would have the judgment of truth, and truth itself,
derived from opinions and the senses, to belong to the wit and
cogitation.

This discourse has put me upon the consideration of the senses, in which
lies the greatest foundation and Pro°f of our ignorance. Whatsoever is
known, is doubtless known by the faculty of the knower; for, seeing the
judgment proceeds from the operation of him that judges, ‘tis reason
that this operation be performed by his means and will, not by the
constraint of another; as it would happen if we knew things by the
power, and according to the law of their essence. Now all knowledge is
conveyed to us by the senses; they are our masters:--


      Via qua munita fidei
   Proxima fert humanum in pectus, templaque mentis;

      “It is the surest path that faith can find
   By which to enter human heart and mind.”


Science begins by them, and is resolved into them. After all, we should
know no more than a stone if we did not know there is sound, odour,
light, taste, measure, weight, softness, hardness, sharpness, colour,
smoothness, breadth, and depth; these are the platforms and principles
of the structure of all our knowledge; and, according to some, science
is nothing else but sense. He that could make me contradict the senses,
would have me by the throat; he could not make me go further back. The
senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge:--


      Invenies primis ab sensibns esse creatam
   Notitiam veil; neque sensus posse refelli....
   Quid majore fide porro, quam sensus, haberi Debet?

      “Of truth, whate’er discoveries are made,
   Are by the senses to us first conveyed;
   Nor will one sense be baffled; for on what
   Can we rely more safely than on that?”


Let us attribute to them the least we can, we must, however, of
necessity grant them this, that it is by their means and mediation that
all our instruction is directed. Cicero says, that Chrysippus having
attempted to extenuate the force and virtue of the senses, presented to
himself arguments and so vehement oppositions to the contrary that he
could not satisfy himself therein; whereupon Cameades, who maintained
the contrary side, boasted that he would make use of the very words and
arguments of Chrysippus to controvert and confute him, and therefore
thus cried out against him: “O miserable! thy force has destroyed thee.”
 There can be nothing absurd to a greater degree than to maintain that
fire does not warm, that light does not shine, and that there is no
weight nor solidity in iron, which are things conveyed to us by the
senses; neither is there belief nor knowledge in man that can be
compared to that for certainty.

The first consideration I have upon the subject of the senses is that I
make a doubt whether or no man be furnished with all natural senses. I
see several animals who live an entire and perfect life, some without
sight, others without hearing; who knows whether to us also one, two,
three, or many other senses may not be wanting? For if any one be
wanting, our examination cannot discover the defect. ‘Tis the privilege
of the senses to be the utmost limit of our discovery; there is nothing
beyond them that can assist us in exploration, not so much as one sense
in the discovery of another:--


      An poterunt oculos aures reprehendere? an aures
   Tactus an hunc porro tactum sapor argnet oris?
   An confutabunt nares, oculive revincent?

      “Can ears the eyes, the touch the ears, correct?
   Or is that touch by tasting to be check’d?
   Or th’ other senses, shall the nose or eyes
   Confute in their peculiar faculties?”


They all make the extremest limits of our ability:--


      Seorsum cuique potestas Divisa est, sua vis cuique est,

      “Each has its power distinctly and alone,
   And every sense’s power is its own.”


It is impossible to make a man naturally blind conceive that he does not
see; impossible to make him desire sight, or to regret his defect; for
which reason we ought not to derive any assurance from the soul’s being
contented and satisfied with those we have; considering that it cannot
be sensible herein of its infirmity and imperfection, if there be any
such thing. It is impossible to say any thing to this blind man, either
by reasoning, argument, or similitude, that can possess his imagination
with any apprehension of light, colour, or sight; there’s nothing
remains behind that can push on the senses to evidence. Those that
are born blind, whom we hear wish they could see, it is not that they
understand what they desire; they have learned from us that they want
something; that there is something to be desired that we have, which
they can name indeed and speak of its effect and consequences; but yet
they know not what it is, nor apprehend it at all.

I have seen a gentleman of a good family who was born blind, or at least
blind from such an age that he knows not what sight is; who is so little
sensible of his defect that he makes use as we do of words proper for
seeing, and applies them after a manner wholly particular and his own.
They brought him a child to which he was god-father, which, having taken
into his arms, “Good God,” said he, “what a fine child! How beautiful
to look upon! what a pretty face it has!” He will say, like one of us,
“This room has a very fine prospect;--it is clear weather;--the sun
shines bright.” And moreover, being that hunting, tennis, and butts are
our exercises, and he has heard so, he has taken a liking to them, will
ride a-hunting, and believes he has as good share of the sport as we
have; and will express himself as angry or pleased as the best of us
all, and yet knows nothing of it but by the ear. One cries out to him,
“Here’s a hare!” when he is upon some even plain where he may safely
ride; and afterwards, when they tell him, “The hare is killed,” he will
be as overjoyed and proud of it as he hears others say they are. He will
take a tennis-ball in his left hand and strike it away with the racket;
he will shoot with a harquebuss at random, and is contented with what
his people tell him, that he is over, or wide.

Who knows whether all human kind commit not the like absurdity, for want
of some sense, and that through this default the greatest part of
the face of things is concealed from us? What do we know but that the
difficulties which we find in several works of nature proceed hence;
and that several effects of animals, which exceed our capacity, are not
produced by faculty of some sense that we are defective in? and whether
some of them have not by this means a life more full and entire than
ours? We seize an apple with all our senses; we there find redness,
smoothness, odour, and sweetness; but it may have other virtues besides
these, as to heat or binding, which no sense of ours can have any
reference unto. Is it not likely that there are sensitive faculties in
nature that are fit to judge of and to discern those which we call the
occult properties in several things, as for the loadstone to attract
iron; and that the want of such faculties is the cause that we
are ignorant of the true essence of such things? ‘Tis perhaps some
particular sense that gives cocks to understand what hour it is at
midnight, and when it grows to be towards day, and that makes them crow
accordingly; that teaches chickens, before they have any experience of
the matter, to fear a sparrow-hawk, and not a goose or a peacock, though
birds of a much larger size; that cautions them against the hostile
quality the cat has against them, and makes them not to fear a dog; to
arm themselves against the mewing, a kind of flattering voice, of the
one, and not against the barking, a shrill and threatening voice, of the
other; that teaches wasps, ants, and rats, to fall upon the best pear
and the best cheese before they have tasted them, and inspires the stag,
elephant, and serpent, with the knowledge of a certain herb proper for
their cure. There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that
does not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If
we were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the
voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of our
science; for, besides what belongs to the proper effect of every sense,
how many arguments, consequences, and conclusions do we draw to other
things, by comparing one sense with another? Let an understanding man
imagine human nature originally produced without the sense of seeing,
and consider what ignorance and trouble such a defect would bring upon
him, what a darkness and blindness in the soul; he will then see by that
of how great importance to the knowledge of truth the privation of such
another sense, or of two or three, should we be so deprived, would be.
We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five
senses; but perhaps we should have the consent and contribution of eight
or ten to make a certain discovery of it in its essence.

The sects that controvert the knowledge of man do it principally by the
uncertainty and weakness of our senses; for since all knowledge is
by their means and mediation conveyed unto us, if they fail in their
report, if they corrupt or alter what they bring us from without, if the
light which by them creeps into the soul be obscured in the passage,
we have nothing else to hold by. From this extreme difficulty all these
fancies proceed: “That every subject has in itself all we there find.
That it has nothing in it of what we think we there find;” and that of
the Epicureans, “That the sun is no bigger than ‘tis judged by our sight
to be:--”


      Quidquid id est, nihilo fertur majore figura,
   Quam nostris oculis quam cemimus, esse videtur:

      “But be it what it will in our esteems,
   It is no bigger than to us it seems:”


that the appearances which represent a body great to him that is near,
and less to him that is more remote, are both true:--


      Nee tamen hic oculos falli concedimus hilum....
   Proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli:

      “Yet that the eye’s deluded we deny;
   Charge not the mind’s faults, therefore, on the eye:”


“and, resolutely, that there is no deceit in the senses; that we are to
lie at their mercy, and seek elsewhere reasons to excuse the difference
and contradictions we there find, even to the inventing of lies and
other flams, if it come to that, rather than accuse the senses.”
 Timagoras vowed that, by pressing or turning his eye, he could never
perceive the light of the candle to double, and that the seeming so
proceeded from the vice of opinion, and not from the instrument. The
most absurd of all absurdities, with the Epicureans, is to deny the
force and effect of the senses:--


      Proinde, quod in quoquo est his visum tempore, verum est
   Et, si non potuit ratio dissolvere causam,
   Cur ea, quæ fuerint juxtim quadrata, procul sint
   Visa rotunda; tamen præstat rationis egentem
   Beddere mendose causas utriusque figuræ,
   Quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quæquam,
   Et violare fidem primam, et convellere tota
   Fundamenta, quibus nixatur vita salusque:
   Non modo enim ratio ruat omnis, vita quoque ipsa
   Concidat extemplo, nisi credere sensibus ausis,
   Procipitesque locos vitare, et cætera, quæ sint
   In genere hoc fugienda.

      “That what we see exists I will maintain,
   And if our feeble reason can’t explain
   Why things seem square when they are very near,
   And at a greater distance round appear;
   ‘Tis better yet, for him that’s at a pause,
   ‘T’ assign to either figure a false cause,
   Than shock his faith, and the foundations rend
   On which our safety and our life depend:
   For reason not alone, but life and all,
   Together will with sudden ruin fall;
   Unless we trust our senses, nor despise
   To shun the various dangers that arise.”


This so desperate and unphilosophical advice expresses only this,--that
human knowledge cannot support itself but by reason unreasonable,
foolish, and mad; but that it is yet better that man, to set a greater
value upon himself, make use of any other remedy, how fantastic soever,
than to confess his necessary ignorance--a truth so disadvantageous to
him. He cannot avoid owning that the senses are the sovereign lords
of his knowledge; but they are uncertain, and falsifiable in all
circumstances; ‘tis there that he is to fight it out to the last; and
if his just forces fail him, as they do, to supply that defect with
obstinacy, temerity, and impudence. In case what the Epicureans say
be true, viz: “that we have no knowledge if the senses’ appearances
be false;” and if that also be true which the Stoics say, “that the
appearances of the senses are so false that they can furnish us with no
manner of knowledge,” we shall conclude, to the disadvantage of these
two great dogmatical sects, that there is no science at all.

As to the error and uncertainty of the operation of the senses, every
one may furnish himself with as many examples as he pleases; so ordinary
are the faults and tricks they put upon us. In the echo of a valley the
sound of a trumpet seems to meet us, which comes from a place behind:--


      Exstantesque procul medio de gurgite montes,
   Classibus inter qnos liber patet exitus, idem
   Apparent, et longe divolsi licet, ingens
   Insula conjunctis tamen ex his ana videtur...
   Et fugere ad puppim colies campique videntur,
   Qnos agimns proter navim, velisque volamus....
   Ubi in medio nobis equus acer obhæsit
   Flamine, equi corpus transversum ferre videtur
   Vis, et in adversum flumen contrudere raptim.

      “And rocks i’ th’ seas that proudly raise their head,
   Though far disjoined, though royal navies spread,
   Their sails between; yet if from distance shown,
   They seem an island all combin’d in one.
   Thus ships, though driven by a prosperous gale,
   Seem fix’d to sailors; those seem under sail
   That ride at anchor safe; and all admire,
   As they row by, to see the rocks retire.
   Thus, when in rapid streams my horse hath stood,
   And I look’d downward on the rolling flood;
   Though he stood still, I thought he did divide
   The headlong streams, and strive against the tide,
   And all things seem’d to move on every side.”


Take a musket-ball under the forefinger, the middle finger being lapped
over it, it feels so like two that a man will have much ado to persuade
himself there is but one; the end of the two fingers feeling each of
them one at the same time; for that the senses are very often masters of
our reason, and constrain it to receive impressions which it judges and
knows to be false, is frequently seen. I set aside the sense of feeling,
that has its functions nearer, more lively, and substantial, that so
often, by the effects of the pains it helps the body to, subverts and
overthrows all those fine Stoical resolutions, and compels him to cry
out of his belly, who has resolutely established this doctrine in his
soul--“That the colic, and all other pains and diseases, are indifferent
things, not having the power to abate any thing of the sovereign
felicity wherein the wise man is seated by his virtue.” There is no
heart so effeminate that the rattle and sound of our drums and trumpets
will not inflame with courage; nor so sullen that the harmony of our
music will not rouse and cheer; nor so stubborn a soul that will
not feel itself struck with some reverence in considering the gloomy
vastness of our churches, the variety of ornaments, and order of our
ceremonies; and in hearing the solemn music of our organs, and the grace
and devout harmony of our voices. Even those that come in with contempt
feel a certain shivering in their hearts, and something of dread that
makes them begin to doubt their opinions. For my part I do not think
myself strong enough to hear an ode of Horace or Catullus sung by a
beautiful young mouth without emotion; and Zeno had reason to say “that
the voice was the flower of beauty.” One would once make me believe that
a certain person, whom all we Frenchmen know, had imposed upon me in
repeating some verses that he had made; that they were not the same upon
paper that they were in the air; and that my eyes would make a contrary
judgment to my ears; so great a power has pronunciation to give fashion
and value to works that are left to the efficacy and modulation of the
voice. And therefore Philoxenus was not so much to blame, hearing
one giving an ill accent to some composition of his, in spurning and
breaking certain earthen vessels of his, saying, “I break what is thine,
because thou corruptest what is mine.” To what end did those men who
have, with a firm resolution, destroyed themselves, turn away their
faces that they might not see the blow that was by themselves appointed?
And that those who, for their health, desire and command incisions to
be made, and cauteries to be applied to them, cannot endure the sight of
the preparations, instruments, and operations of the surgeon, being that
the sight is not in any way to participate in the pain? Are not these
proper examples to verify the authority the senses have over the
imagination? ‘Tis to much purpose that we know these tresses were
borrowed from a page or a lackey; that this rouge came from Spain, and
this pearl-powder from the Ocean Sea. Our sight will, nevertheless,
compel us to confess their subject more agreeable and more lovely
against all reason; for in this there is nothing of its own:--


      Auferinrar cultu; gemmis, auroque teguntur
   Crimina; pars minima est ipsa puella sni.
   Sæpe, ubi sit quod ames, inter tarn multa requiras:
   Decipit hac oculos ægide dives Amor.

      “By dress we’re won; gold, gems, and rich brocades
   Make up the pageant that your heart invades;
   In all that glittering figure which you see,
   The far least part of her own self is she;
   In vain for her you love amidst such cost
   You search, the mistress in such dress is lost.”


What a strange power do the poets attribute to the senses, that make
Narcissus so desperately in love with his own shadow,


      Cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse;
   Se cupit imprudens, et, qui probat, ipse probatur;
   Dumque petit, petitur; pariterque accendit, et ardet:

      “Admireth all; for which to be admired;
   And inconsiderately himself desir’d.
   The praises which he gives his beauty claim’d,
   Who seeks is sought, th’ inflamer is inflam’d:”


and Pygmalion’s judgment so troubled by the impression of the sight
of his ivory statue that he loves and adores it as if it were a living
woman!


      Oscnla dat, reddique putat: sequi turque, tenetque,
   Et credit tactis digitos insidere membris;
   Et metuit, pressos veniat ne livor in artus.

      “He kisses, and believes he’s kissed again;
   Seizes, and ‘twixt his arms his love doth strain,
   And thinks the polish’d ivory thus held
   Doth to his fingers amorous pressure yield,
   And has a timorous fear, lest black and blue
   Should in the parts with ardour press’d ensue.”


Put a philosopher into a cage of small thin set bars of iron, hang him
on the top of the high tower of Notre Dame at Paris; he will see, by
manifest reason, that he cannot possibly fall, and yet he will find
(unless he has been used to the plumber’s trade) that he cannot help but
the sight of the excessive height will fright and astound him; for we
have enough to do to assure ourselves in the galleries of our steeples,
if they are made with open work, although they are of stone; and some
there are that cannot endure so much as to think of it. Let there be a
beam thrown over betwixt these two towers, of breadth sufficient to
walk upon, there is no philosophical wisdom so firm that can give us the
courage to walk over it as we should do upon the ground. I have often
tried this upon our mountains in these parts; and though I am one who am
not the most subject to be afraid, I was not able to endure to look into
that infinite depth without horror and trembling, though I stood above
my length from the edge of the precipice, and could not have fallen
unless I would. Where I also observed that, what height soever the
precipice was, provided there were some tree, or some jutting out of a
rock, a little to support and divide the sight, it a little eases our
fears, and gives greater assurance; as if they were things by which in
falling we might have some relief; but that direct precipices we are
not to look upon without being giddy; _Ut despici vine vertigine
timid ocvlorum animique non possit:_ “‘To that one cannot look without
dizziness;” which is a manifest imposture of the sight. And therefore
it was that that fine philosopher put out his own eyes, to free the soul
from being diverted by them, and that he might philosophize at greater
liberty; but, by the same rule, he should have dammed up his ears,
that Theophrastus says are the most dangerous instruments about us for
receiving violent impressions to alter and disturb us; and, finally,
should have deprived himself of all his other senses, that is to say, of
his life and being; for they have all the power to command our soul and
reason: _Fit etiam sope specie quâdam, sope vocum gravitate et cantibus,
ut pettantur animi vehementius; sope etiam cura et timoré,_ “For it
often falls out that the minds are more vehemently struck by some sight,
by the quality and sound of the voice, or by singing; and ofttimes also
by grief and fear.” Physicians hold that there are certain complexions
that are agitated by the same sounds and instruments even to fury. I
have seen some who could not hear a bone gnawed under the table without
impatience; and there is scarce any man who is not disturbed at the
sharp and shrill noise that the file makes in grating upon the iron;
as also to hear chewing near them, or to hear any one speak who has an
impediment in the throat or nose, will move some people even to anger
and hatred. Of what use was that piping prompter of Gracchus, who
softened, raised, and moved his master’s voice whilst he declaimed at
Rome, if the movements and quality of the sound had not the power to
move and alter the judgments of the auditory? In earnest, there is
wonderful reason to keep such a clutter about the firmness of this fine
piece, that suffers itself to be turned and twined by the motion and
accidents of so light a wind.

The same cheat that the senses put upon our understanding they have in
turn put upon them; the soul also some times has its revenge; they lie
and contend which should most deceive one another. What we see and hear
when we are transported with passion, we neither see nor hear as it
is:--


   Et solem geminum, et duplices se ostendere Thebas.

   “Thebes seems two cities, and the sun two suns.”


The object that we love appears to us more beautiful than it really is;


      Multimodis igitur pravas turpesque videmus
   Esse in deliciis, summoque in honore vigere;

      “Hence ‘tis that ugly things in fancied dress
   Seem gay, look fair to lovers’ eyes, and please;”


and that we hate more ugly; to a discontented and afflicted man the
light of the day seems dark and overcast. Our senses are not only
depraved, but very often stupefied by the passions of the soul; how many
things do we see that we do not take notice of, if the mind be occupied
with other thoughts?


      In rebus quoque apertis noscere possis,
   Si non advertas animum, proinde esse quasi omni
   Tempore semotæ fuerint, longeque remotæ:

      “Nay, even in plainest things, unless the mind
   Take heed, unless she sets herself to find,
   The thing no more is seen, no more belov’d,
   Than if the most obscure and most remov’d:”


it would appear that the soul retires within, and amuses the powers of
the senses. And so both the inside and the outside of man is full of
infirmity and falsehood.

They who have compared our lives to a dream were, perhaps, more in the
right than they were aware of. When we dream, the soul lives, works, and
exercises all its faculties, neither more nor less than when awake;
but more largely and obscurely, yet not so much, neither, that the
difference should be as great as betwixt night and the meridian
brightness of the sun, but as betwixt night and shade; there she sleeps,
here she slumbers; but, whether more or less, ‘tis still dark, and
Cimmerian darkness. We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so
clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear
enough and free from clouds; moreover, sleep, when it is profound,
sometimes rocks even dreams themselves asleep; but our waking is never
so sprightly that it rightly purges and dissipates those whimsies, which
are waking dreams, and worse than dreams. Our reason and soul receiving
those fancies and opinions that come in dreams, and authorizing the
actions of our dreams with the like approbation that they do those of
the day, wherefore do we not doubt whether our thought, our action, is
not another sort of dreaming, and our waking a certain kind of sleep?

If the senses be our first judges, it is not ours that we are alone to
consult; for, in this faculty, beasts have as great, or greater, than
we; it is certain that some of them have the sense of hearing more quick
than man; others that of seeing, others that of feeling, others that
of touch and taste. Democritus said, that the gods and brutes had the
sensitive faculties more perfect than man. But betwixt the effects of
their senses and ours the difference is extreme. Our spittle cleanses
and dries up our wounds; it kills the serpent:--


      Tantaque in his rebas distantia differitasque est,
   Ut quod aliis cibus est, aliis fuat acre venenum.
   Sæpe etenim serpens, hominis contacta salivà,
   Disperit, ac sese mandendo conficit ipsa:

      “And in those things the difference is so great
   That what’s one’s poison is another’s meat;
   For serpents often have been seen, ‘tis said,
   When touch’d with human spittle, to go mad,
   And bite themselves to death:”


what quality shall we attribute to our spittle? as it affects ourselves,
or as it affects the serpent? By which of the two senses shall we prove
the true essence that we seek for?

Pliny says there are certain sea-hares in the Indies that are poison to
us, and we to them; insomuch that, with the least touch, we kill
them. Which shall be truly poison, the man or the fish? Which shall we
believe, the fish of the man, or the man of the fish? One quality of the
air infects a man, that does the ox no harm; some other infects the ox,
but hurts not the man. Which of the two shall, in truth and nature, be
the pestilent quality? To them who have the jaundice, all things seem
yellow and paler than to us:--


      Lurida præterea fiunt, quæcunque tuentur Arquati.

      “Besides, whatever jaundic’d eyes do view
   Looks pale as well as those, and yellow too.”


They who are troubled with the disease that the physicians call
hyposphagma--which is a suffusion of blood under the skin--see all
things red and bloody. What do we know but that these humours, which
thus alter the operations of sight, predominate in beasts, and are usual
with them? for we see some whose eyes are yellow, like us who have the
jaundice; and others of a bloody colour; ‘tis likely that the colours
of objects seem other to them than to us. Which of the two shall make
a right judgment? for it is not said that the essence of things has a
relation to man only; hardness, whiteness, depth, and sharpness, have
reference to the service and knowledge of animals as well as to us, and
nature has equally designed them for their use. When we press down
the eye, the body that we look upon we perceive to be longer and more
extended;--many beasts have their eyes so pressed down; this length,
therefore, is perhaps the true form of that body, and not that which our
eyes give it in the usual state. If we close the lower part of the eye
things appear double to us:--


      Bina lucemarum fiorentia lumina flammis...
   Et duplices hominum faciès, et corpora bina.

      “One lamp seems double, and the men appear
   Each on two bodies double heads to bear.”


If our ears be hindered, or the passage stopped with any thing, we
receive the sound quite otherwise than we usually do; animals, likewise,
who have either the ears hairy, or but a very little hole instead of an
ear, do not, consequently, hear as we do, but receive another kind of
sound. We see at festivals and theatres that, opposing a painted glass
of a certain colour to the light of the flambeaux, all things in the
place appear to us green, yellow, or violet:--


      Et vulgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela,
   Et ferrugina, cum, magnis intenta theatris,
   Per malos vulgata trabesque, trementia pendent;
   Namque ibi consessum caveai subter, et omnem
   Scenai speciem, patrum, matrumque, deorumque
   Inficiunt, coguntque suo volitare colore:

      “Thus when pale curtains, or the deeper red,
   O’er all the spacious theatre are spread,
   Which mighty masts and sturdy pillars bear,
   And the loose curtains wanton in the air;
   Whole streams of colours from the summit flow,
   The rays divide them in their passage through,
   And stain the scenes, and men, and gods below:”


‘tis likely that the eyes of animals, which we see to be of divers
colours, produce the appearance of bodies the same with their eyes.

We should, therefore, to make a right judgment of the oppositions of
the senses, be first agreed with beasts, and secondly amongst ourselves;
which we by no means are, but enter into dispute every time that one
hears, sees, or tastes something otherwise than another does, and
contests, as much as upon any other thing, about the diversity of the
images that the senses represent to us. A child, by the ordinary rule of
nature, hears, sees, and talks otherwise than a man of thirty years old;
and he than one of threescore. The senses are, in some, more obscure and
dusky, and more open and quick in others. We receive things variously,
according as we are, and according as they appear to us. Those rings
which are cut out in the form of feathers, which are called _endless
feathers_, no eye can discern their size, or can keep itself from the
deception that on one side they enlarge, and on the other contract, and
come So a point, even when the ring is being turned round the finger;
yet, when you feel them, they seem all of an equal size. Now, our
perception being so uncertain and so controverted, it is no more a
wonder if we are told that we may declare that snow appears white to us;
but that to affirm that it is in its own essence really so is more
than we are able to justify; and, this foundation being shaken, all
the knowledge in the world must of necessity fall to ruin. What! do
our senses themselves hinder one another? A picture seems raised and
embossed to the sight; in the handling it seems flat to the touch.
Shall we say that musk, which delights the smell, and is offensive to
the taste, is agreeable or no? There are herbs and unguents proper for
one part o£ the body, that are hurtful to another; honey is pleasant to
the taste, but offensive to the sight. They who, to assist their lust,
used in ancient times to make use of magnifying-glasses to represent the
members they were to employ bigger, by that ocular tumidity to please
themselves the more; to which of their senses did they give the
prize,--whether to the sight, that represented the members as large and
great as they would desire, or to the feeling, which represented them
little and contemptible? Are they our senses that supply the subject
with these different conditions, and have the subjects themselves,
nevertheless, but one? As we see in the bread we eat, it is nothing but
bread, but, by being eaten, it becomes bones, blood, flesh, hair; and
nails:--


      Ut cibus in membra atque artus cum diditur omnes,
   Disperit,, atque aliam naturam sufficit ex se;

      “As meats, diffus’d through all the members, lose
   Their former state, and different things compose;”


the humidity sucked up by the root of a tree becomes trunk, leaf, and
fruit; and the air, being but one, is modulated, in a trumpet, to a
thousand sorts of sounds; are they our senses, I would fain know, that,
in like manner, form these subjects into so many divers qualities, or
have they them really such in themselves? And upon this doubt what can
we determine of their true essence? Moreover, since the accidents of
disease, of raving, or sleep, make things appear otherwise to us than
they do to the healthful, the wise, and those that are awake, is it
not likely that our right posture of health and understanding, and our
natural humours, have, also, wherewith to give a being to things
that have a relation to their own condition, and accommodate them to
themselves, as well as when they are disordered;--that health is as
capable of giving them an aspect as sickness? Why has not the temperate
a certain form of objects relative to it, as well as the intemperate?
and why may it not as well stamp it with its own character as the other?
He whose mouth is out of taste, says the wine is flat; the healthful man
commends its flavour, and the thirsty its briskness. Now, our condition
always accommodating things to itself, and transforming them according
to its own posture, we cannot know what things truly are in themselves,
seeing that nothing comes to us but what is falsified and altered by the
senses. Where the compass, the square, and the rule, are crooked, all
propositions drawn thence, and all buildings erected by those guides,
must, of necessity, be also defective; the uncertainty of our senses
renders every thing uncertain that they produce:--


      Denique ut in fabricâ, si prava est régula prima,
   Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit,
   Et libella aliquâ si ex parte claudicat hilum;
   Omnia mendose fieri, atque obstipa necessum est,
   Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona tecta;
   Jam ruere ut quædam videantux’velle, ruantque
   Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis;
   Sic igitur ratio tibi reram prava necesse est,
   Falsaque sit, falsis quæcunque ab sensibus orta est.

      “But lastly, as in building, if the line
   Be not exact and straight, the rule decline,
   Or level false, how vain is the design!
   Uneven, an ill-shap’d and tottering wall
   Must rise; this part must sink, that part must fall,
   Because the rules were false that fashion’d all;
   Thus reason’s rules are false if all commence
   And rise from failing and from erring sense.”


As to what remains, who can be fit to judge of and to determine those
differences? As we say in controversies of religion that we must have
a judge neither inclining to the one side nor the other, free from all
choice and affection, which cannot be amongst Christians, just so it
falls out in this; for if he be old he cannot judge of the sense of
old age, being himself a party in the case; if young, there is the same
exception; if healthful, sick, asleep, or awake, he is still the
same incompetent judge. We must have some one exempt from all these
propositions, as of things indifferent to him; and by this rule we must
have a judge that never was.

To judge of the appearances that we receive of subjects, we ought t
have a deciding instrument; to verify this instrument we must have
demonstration; to verify this demonstration an instrument; and here
we are round again upon the wheel, and no further advanced. Seeing
the senses cannot determine our dispute, being full of uncertainty
themselves, it must then be reason that must do it; but no reason can be
erected upon any other foundation than that of another reason; and so we
run back to all infinity. Our fancy does not apply itself to things that
are strange, but is conceived by the mediation of the senses; and the
senses do not comprehend a foreign subject, but only their own passions;
by which means fancy and appearance are no part of the subject, but only
of the passion and sufferance of sense; which passion and subject are
different things; wherefore whoever judges by appearances judges by
another thing than the subject. And to say that the passions of
the senses convey to the soul the quality of foreign subjects by
resemblance, how can the soul and understanding be assured of this
resemblance, having of itself no commerce with foreign subjects? As they
who never knew Socrates cannot, when they see his picture, say it is
like him. Now, whoever would, notwithstanding, judge by appearances, if
it be by all, it is impossible, because they hinder one another by their
contrarieties and discrepancies, as we by experience see: shall some
select appearances govern the rest? you must verify this select by
another select, the second by a third, and thus there will never be
any end to it. Finally, there is no constant existence, neither of the
objects’ being nor our own; both we, and our judgments, and all mortal
things, are evermore incessantly running and rolling; and consequently
nothing certain can be established from the one to the other, both the
judging and the judged being in a continual motion and mutation.

We have no communication with being, by reason that all human nature is
always in the middle, betwixt being bom and dying, giving but an obscure
appearance and shadow, a weak and uncertain opinion of itself; and if,
perhaps, you fix your thought to apprehend your being, it would be but
like grasping water; for the more you clutch your hand to squeeze and
hold what is in its own nature flowing, so much more you lose of what
you would grasp and hold. So, seeing that all things are subject to
pass from one change to another, reason, that there looks for a real
substance, finds itself deceived, not being able to apprehend any thing
that is subsistent and permanent, because that every thing is either
entering into being, and is not yet arrived at it, or begins to die
before it is bom. Plato said, that bodies had never any existence, but
only birth; conceiving that Homer had made the Ocean and Thetis father
and mother of the gods, to show us that all things are in a perpetual
fluctuation, motion, and variation; the opinion of all the philosophers,
as he says, before his time, Parmenides only excepted, who would not
allow things to have motion, on the power whereof he sets a mighty
value. Pythagoras was of opinion that all matter was flowing and
unstable; the Stoics, that there is no time present, and that what we
call so is nothing but the juncture and meeting of the future and the
past; Heraclitus, that never any man entered twice into the same river;
Epichar-mus, that he who borrowed money but an hour ago does not owe
it now; and that he who was invited over-night to come the next day to
dinner comes nevertheless uninvited, considering that they are no more
the same men, but are become others; and that there could not a mortal
substance be found twice in the same condition; for, by the suddenness
and quickness of the change, it one while disperses, and another
reunites; it comes and goes after such a manner that what begins to be
born never arrives to the perfection of being, forasmuch as that birth
is never finished and never stays, as being at an end, but from the seed
is evermore changing and shifting one to another; as human seed is first
in the mother’s womb made a formless embryo, after delivered thence a
sucking infant, afterwards it becomes a boy, then a youth, then a man,
and at last a decrepit old man; so that age and subsequent generation is
always destroying and spoiling that which went before:--


      Mutât enira mundi naturam totius ætas,
   Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet;
   Nec manet ulla sui similis res; omnia migrant,
   Omnia commutât natura, et vertere cogit.

      “For time the nature of the world translates,
   And from preceding gives all things new states;
   Nought like itself remains, but all do range,
   And nature forces every thing to change.”


“And yet we foolishly fear one kind of death, whereas we have already
passed, and do daily pass, so many others; for not only, as Heraclitus
said, the death of fire is generation of air, and the death of air
generation of water; but, moreover, we may more manifestly discern it in
ourselves; manhood dies, and passes away when age comes on; and youth is
terminated in the flower of age of a full-grown man, infancy in youth,
and the first age dies in infancy; yesterday died in to-day, and to-day
will die in to-morrow; and there is nothing that remains in the same
state, or that is always the same thing. And that it is so let this be
the proof; if we are always one and the same, how comes it to pass that
we are now pleased with one thing, and by and by with another? How
comes it to pass that we love or hate contrary things, that we praise
or condemn them? How comes it to pass that we have different affections,
and no more retain the same sentiment in the same thought? For it is not
likely that without mutation we should assume other passions; and, that
which suffers mutation does not remain the same, and if it be not the
same it is not at all; but the same that the being is does, like it,
unknowingly change and alter; becoming evermore another from another
thing; and consequently the natural senses abuse and deceive themselves,
taking that which seems for that which is, for want of well knowing
what that which is, is. But what is it then that truly is? That which is
eternal; that is to say, that never had beginning, nor never shall have
ending, and to which time can bring no mutation. For time is a mobile
thine, and that appears as in a shadow, with a matter evermore flowing
and running, without ever remaining stable and permanent; and to which
belong those words, _before and after, has been, or shall be:_ which at
the first sight, evidently show that it is not a thing that is; for it
were a great folly, and a manifest falsity, to say that that is which is
not ÿet being, or that has already ceased to be. And as to these words,
_present, instant, and now_, by which it seems that we principally
support and found the intelligence of time, reason, discovering, does
presently destroy it; for it immediately divides and splits it into the
_future and past_, being of necessity to consider it divided in two. The
same happens to nature, that is measured, as to time that measures it;
for she has nothing more subsisting and permanent than the other, but
all things are either born, bearing, or dying. So that it were sinful to
say of God, who is he only who _is, that he was, or that he shall be _;
for those are terms of declension, transmutation, and vicissitude, of
what cannot continue or remain in being; wherefore we are to conclude
that God alone is, not according to any measure of time, but according
to an immutable and an immovable eternity, not measured by time, nor
subject to any declension; before whom nothing was, and after whom
nothing shall be, either more new or more recent, but a real being, that
with one sole now fills the for ever, and that there is nothing that
truly is but he alone; without our being able to say, _he has been, or
shall be_; without beginning, and without end.” To this so religious
conclusion of a pagan I shall only add this testimony of one of the same
condition, for the close of this long and tedious discourse, which would
furnish me with endless matter: “What a vile and abject thing,” says he,
“is man, if he do not raise himself above humanity!” ‘Tis a good word
and a profitable desire, but withal absurd; for to make the handle
bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope
to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and
monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he
cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall
be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt
himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by
suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial.
It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to
pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A little cheese when a mind to make a feast
     A word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit
     Cato said: So many servants, so many enemies
     Cherish themselves most where they are most wrong
     Condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul
     Cruelty is the very extreme of all vices
     Disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice
     Epicurus
     Flatterer in your old age or in your sickness
     He felt a pleasure and delight in so noble an action
     He judged other men by himself
     I cannot well refuse to play with my dog
     I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather
     I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age
     I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason
     Incline the history to their own fancy
     It (my books) may know many things that are gone from me
     Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment
     Learn the theory from those who best know the practice
     Loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men
     Motive to some vicious occasion or some prospect of profit
     My books: from me hold that which I have not retained
     My dog unseasonably importunes me to play
     My innocence is a simple one; little vigour and no art.
     Never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions
     Nothing tempts my tears but tears
     Omit, as incredible, such things as they do not understand
     On all occasions to contradict and oppose
     Only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent
     Passion of dandling and caressing infants scarcely born
     Perfection: but I will not buy it so dear as it costs
     Plato will have nobody marry before thirty
     Prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent
     Puerile simplicities of our children
     Shelter my own weakness under these great reputations
     Socrates kept a confounded scolding wife
     The authors, with whom I converse
     There is no recompense becomes virtue
     To do well where there was danger was the proper office
     To whom no one is ill who can be good?
     Turks have alms and hospitals for beasts
     Vices will cling together, if a man have not a care
     Virtue is much strengthened by combats
     Virtue refuses facility for a companion






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 11.

XIII.     Of judging of the death of another.
XIV.      That the mind hinders itself.
XV.       That our desires are augmented by difficulty.
XVI.      Of glory.
XVII.     Of presumption.



CHAPTER XIII

OF JUDGING OF THE DEATH OF ANOTHER

When we judge of another’s assurance in death, which, without doubt, is
the most remarkable action of human life, we are to take heed of one
thing, which is that men very hardly believe themselves to have arrived
to that period.  Few men come to die in the opinion that it is their
latest hour; and there is nothing wherein the flattery of hope more
deludes us; It never ceases to whisper in our ears, “Others have been
much sicker without dying; your condition is not so desperate as ‘tis
thought; and, at the worst, God has done other miracles.”  Which happens
by reason that we set too much value upon ourselves; it seems as if the
universality of things were in some measure to suffer by our dissolution,
and that it commiserates our condition, forasmuch as our disturbed sight
represents things to itself erroneously, and that we are of opinion they
stand in as much need of us as we do of them, like people at sea, to whom
mountains, fields, cities, heaven and earth are tossed at the same rate
as they are:

          “Provehimur portu, terraeque urbesque recedunt:”

          [“We sail out of port, and cities and lands recede.”
           --AEneid, iii. 72.]

Whoever saw old age that did not applaud the past and condemn the present
time, laying the fault of his misery and discontent upon the world and
the manners of men?

          “Jamque caput quassans, grandis suspirat arator.
          Et cum tempora temporibus praesentia confert
          Praeteritis, laudat fortunas saepe parentis,
          Et crepat antiquum genus ut pietate repletum.”

     [“Now the old ploughman, shaking his head, sighs, and compares
     present times with past, often praises his parents’ happiness, and
     talks of the old race as full of piety.”--Lucretius, ii. 1165.]

We will make all things go along with us; whence it follows that we
consider our death as a very great thing, and that does not so easily
pass, nor without the solemn consultation of the stars:

               “Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes dens,”

               [“All the gods to agitation about one man.”
                --Seneca, Suasor, i. 4.]

and so much the more think it as we more value ourselves.  “What, shall
so much knowledge be lost, with so much damage to the world, without a
particular concern of the destinies?  Does so rare and exemplary a soul
cost no more the killing than one that is common and of no use to the
public?  This life, that protects so many others, upon which so many
other lives depend, that employs so vast a number of men in his service,
that fills so many places, shall it drop off like one that hangs but by
its own simple thread?   None of us lays it enough to heart that he is
but one: thence proceeded those words of Caesar to his pilot, more tumid
than the sea that threatened him:

              “Italiam si coelo auctore recusas,
               Me pete: sola tibi causa est haec justa timoris,
               Vectorem non nosce tuum; perrumpe procellas,
               Tutela secure mea.”

     [“If you decline to sail to Italy under the God’s protection, trust
     to mine; the only just cause you have to fear is, that you do not
     know your passenger; sail on, secure in my guardianship.”
      --Lucan, V. 579.]

And these:

              “Credit jam digna pericula Caesar
               Fatis esse suis; tantusne evertere, dixit,
               Me superis labor est, parva quern puppe sedentem,
               Tam magno petiere mari;”

     [“Caesar now deemed these dangers worthy of his destiny: ‘What!’
     said he, ‘is it for the gods so great a task to overthrow me, that
     they must be fain to assail me with great seas in a poor little
     bark.’”--Lucan, v. 653.]

and that idle fancy of the public, that the sun bore on his face mourning
for his death a whole year:

              “Ille etiam extincto miseratus Caesare Romam,
               Cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit:”

     [“Caesar being dead, the sun in mourning clouds, pitying Rome,
     clothed himself.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 466.]

and a thousand of the like, wherewith the world suffers itself to be so
easily imposed upon, believing that our interests affect the heavens, and
that their infinity is concerned at our ordinary actions:

          “Non tanta caelo societas nobiscum est, ut nostro
          fato mortalis sit ille quoque siderum fulgor.”

     [“There is no such alliance betwixt us and heaven, that the
     brightness of the stars should be made also mortal by our death.”
      --Pliny, Nat.  Hist., ii. 8.]

Now, to judge of constancy and resolution in a man who does not yet
believe himself to be certainly in danger, though he really is, is not
reason; and ‘tis not enough that he die in this posture, unless he
purposely put himself into it for this effect.  It commonly falls out in
most men that they set a good face upon the matter and speak with great
indifference, to acquire reputation, which they hope afterwards, living,
to enjoy.  Of all whom I have seen die, fortune has disposed their
countenances and no design of theirs; and even of those who in ancient
times have made away with themselves, there is much to be considered
whether it were a sudden or a lingering death.  That cruel Roman Emperor
would say of his prisoners, that he would make them feel death, and if
any one killed himself in prison, “That fellow has made an escape from
me”; he would prolong death and make it felt by torments:

              “Vidimus et toto quamvis in corpore caeso
               Nil anima lethale datum, moremque nefandae,
               Durum saevitix, pereuntis parcere morti.”

     [“We have seen in tortured bodies, amongst the wounds, none that
     have been mortal, inhuman mode of dire cruelty, that means to kill,
     but will not let men die.”--Lucan, iv. i. 78.]

In plain truth, it is no such great matter for a man in health and in a
temperate state of mind to resolve to kill himself; it is very easy to
play the villain before one comes to the point, insomuch that
Heliogabalus, the most effeminate man in the world, amongst his lowest
sensualities, could forecast to make himself die delicately, when he
should be forced thereto; and that his death might not give the lie to
the rest of his life, had purposely built a sumptuous tower, the front
and base of which were covered with planks enriched with gold and
precious stones, thence to precipitate himself; and also caused cords
twisted with gold and crimson silk to be made, wherewith to strangle
himself; and a sword with the blade of gold to be hammered out to fall
upon; and kept poison in vessels of emerald and topaz wherewith to poison
himself according as he should like to choose one of these ways of dying:

          “Impiger. . . ad letum et fortis virtute coacta.”

     [“Resolute and brave in the face of death by a forced courage.
     --“Lucan, iv. 798.]

Yet in respect of this person, the effeminacy of his preparations makes
it more likely that he would have thought better on’t, had he been put to
the test.  But in those who with greater resolution have determined to
despatch themselves, we must examine whether it were with one blow which
took away the leisure of feeling the effect for it is to be questioned
whether, perceiving life, by little and little, to steal away the
sentiment of the body mixing itself with that of the soul, and the means
of repenting being offered, whether, I say, constancy and obstinacy in so
dangerous an intention would have been found.

In the civil wars of Caesar, Lucius Domitius, being taken in the Abruzzi,
and thereupon poisoning himself, afterwards repented.  It has happened in
our time that a certain person, being resolved to die and not having gone
deep enough at the first thrust, the sensibility of the flesh opposing
his arm, gave himself two or three wounds more, but could never prevail
upon himself to thrust home.  Whilst Plautius Silvanus was upon his
trial, Urgulania, his grandmother, sent him a poniard with which, not
being able to kill himself, he made his servants cut his veins. Albucilla
in Tiberius time having, to kill himself, struck with too much
tenderness, gave his adversaries opportunity to imprison and put him to
death their own way.’ And that great leader, Demosthenes, after his rout
in Sicily, did the same; and C. Fimbria, having struck himself too
weakly, entreated his servant to despatch him.  On the contrary,
Ostorius, who could not make use of his own arm, disdained to employ that
of his servant to any other use but only to hold the poniard straight and
firm; and bringing his throat to it, thrust himself through.  ‘Tis, in
truth, a morsel that is to be swallowed without chewing, unless a man be
thoroughly resolved; and yet Adrian the emperor made his physician mark
and encircle on his pap the mortal place wherein he was to stab to whom
he had given orders to kill him.  For this reason it was that Caesar,
being asked what death he thought to be the most desired, made answer,
“The least premeditated and the shortest.”--[Tacitus, Annals, xvi. 15]--
If Caesar dared to say it, it is no cowardice in me to believe it.”
 A short death,” says Pliny, “is the sovereign good hap of human life.
“People do not much care to recognise it.  No one can say that he is
resolute for death who fears to deal with it and cannot undergo it with
his eyes open: they whom we see in criminal punishments run to their
death and hasten and press their execution, do it not out of resolution,
but because they will not give them selves leisure to consider it; it
does not trouble them to be dead, but to die:

          “Emodi nolo, sed me esse mortem nihil astigmia:”

     [“I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead.”
      --Epicharmus, apud Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., i. 8.]

‘tis a degree of constancy to which I have experimented, that I can
arrive, like those who plunge into dangers, as into the sea, with their
eyes shut.

There is nothing, in my opinion, more illustrious in the life of
Socrates, than that he had thirty whole days wherein to ruminate upon the
sentence of his death, to have digested it all that time with a most
assured hope, without care, and without alteration, and with a series of
words and actions rather careless and indifferent than any way stirred or
discomposed by the weight of such a thought.

That Pomponius Atticus, to whom Cicero writes so often, being sick,
caused Agrippa, his son-in-law, and two or three more of his friends, to
be called to him, and told them, that having found all means practised
upon him for his recovery to be in vain, and that all he did to prolong
his life also prolonged and augmented his pain, he was resolved to put an
end both to the one and the other, desiring them to approve of his
determination, or at least not to lose their labour in endeavouring to
dissuade him.  Now, having chosen to destroy himself by abstinence, his
disease was thereby cured: the remedy that he had made use of to kill
himself restored him to health.  His physicians and friends, rejoicing at
so happy an event, and coming to congratulate him, found themselves very
much deceived, it being impossible for them to make him alter his
purpose, he telling them, that as he must one day die, and was now so far
on his way, he would save himself the labour of beginning another time.
This man, having surveyed death at leisure, was not only not discouraged
at its approach, but eagerly sought it; for being content that he had
engaged in the combat, he made it a point of bravery to see the end; ‘tis
far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it.

The story of the philosopher Cleanthes is very like this: he had his gums
swollen and rotten; his physicians advised him to great abstinence:
having fasted two days, he was so much better that they pronounced him
cured, and permitted him to return to his ordinary course of diet; he, on
the contrary, already tasting some sweetness in this faintness of his,
would not be persuaded to go back, but resolved to proceed, and to finish
what he had so far advanced.

Tullius Marcellinus, a young man of Rome, having a mind to anticipate the
hour of his destiny, to be rid of a disease that was more trouble to him
than he was willing to endure, though his physicians assured him of a
certain, though not sudden, cure, called a council of his friends to
deliberate about it; of whom some, says Seneca, gave him the counsel that
out of unmanliness they would have taken themselves; others, out of
flattery, such as they thought he would best like; but a Stoic said this
to him: “Do not concern thyself, Marcellinus, as if thou didst deliberate
of a thing of importance; ‘tis no great matter to live; thy servants and
beasts live; but it is a great thing to die handsomely, wisely, and
firmly.  Do but think how long thou hast done the same things, eat,
drink, and sleep, drink, sleep, and eat: we incessantly wheel in the same
circle.  Not only ill and insupportable accidents, but even the satiety
of living, inclines a man to desire to die.”  Marcellinus did not stand
in need of a man to advise, but of a man to assist him; his servants were
afraid to meddle in the business, but this philosopher gave them to under
stand that domestics are suspected even when it is in doubt whether the
death of the master were voluntary or no; otherwise, that it would be of
as ill example to hinder him as to kill him, forasmuch as:

               “Invitum qui servat, idem facit occidenti.”

          [“He who makes a man live against his will, ‘tis as cruel
          as to kill him.”--Horat., De Arte Poet., 467]

He then told Marcellinus that it would not be unbecoming, as what is left
on the tables when we have eaten is given to the attendants, so, life
being ended, to distribute something to those who have been our servants.
Now Marcellinus was of a free and liberal spirit; he, therefore, divided
a certain sum of money amongst his servants, and consoled them.  As to
the rest, he had no need of steel nor of blood: he resolved to go out of
this life and not to run out of it; not to escape from death, but to
essay it.  And to give himself leisure to deal with it, having forsaken
all manner of nourishment, the third day following, after having caused
himself to be sprinkled with warm water, he fainted by degrees, and not
without some kind of pleasure, as he himself declared.

In fact, such as have been acquainted with these faintings, proceeding
from weakness, say that they are therein sensible of no manner of pain,
but rather feel a kind of delight, as in the passage to sleep and best.
These are studied and digested deaths.

But to the end that Cato only may furnish out the whole example of
virtue, it seems as if his good with which the leisure to confront and
struggle with death, reinforcing his destiny had put his ill one into the
hand he gave himself the blow, seeing he had courage in the danger,
instead of letting it go less.  And if I had had to represent him in his
supreme station, I should have done it in the posture of tearing out his
bloody bowels, rather than with his sword in his hand, as did the
statuaries of his time, for this second murder was much more furious than
the first.




CHAPTER XIV

THAT OUR MIND HINDERS ITSELF

‘Tis a pleasant imagination to fancy a mind exactly balanced betwixt two
equal desires: for, doubtless, it can never pitch upon either, forasmuch
as the choice and application would manifest an inequality of esteem;
and were we set betwixt the bottle and the ham, with an equal appetite to
drink and eat, there would doubtless be no remedy, but we must die of
thirst and hunger.  To provide against this inconvenience, the Stoics,
when they are asked whence the election in the soul of two indifferent
things proceeds, and that makes us, out of a great number of crowns,
rather take one than another, they being all alike, and there being no
reason to incline us to such a preference, make answer, that this
movement of the soul is extraordinary and irregular, entering into us
by a foreign, accidental, and fortuitous impulse.  It might rather,
methinks, he said, that nothing presents itself to us wherein there is
not some difference, how little soever; and that, either by the sight or
touch, there is always some choice that, though it be imperceptibly,
tempts and attracts us; so, whoever shall presuppose a packthread equally
strong throughout, it is utterly impossible it should break; for, where
will you have the breaking to begin? and that it should break altogether
is not in nature.  Whoever, also, should hereunto join the geometrical
propositions that, by the certainty of their demonstrations, conclude the
contained to be greater than the containing, the centre to be as great as
its circumference, and that find out two lines incessantly approaching
each other, which yet can never meet, and the philosopher’s stone, and
the quadrature of the circle, where the reason and the effect are so
opposite, might, peradventure, find some argument to second this bold
saying of Pliny:

                    “Solum certum nihil esse certi,
               et homine nihil miserius ant superbius.”

     [“It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing
     is more miserable or more proud than man.”--Nat. Hist., ii. 7.]




CHAPTER XV

THAT OUR DESIRES ARE AUGMENTED BY DIFFICULTY

There is no reason that has not its contrary, say the wisest of the
philosophers.  I was just now ruminating on the excellent saying one of
the ancients alleges for the contempt of life: “No good can bring
pleasure, unless it be that for the loss of which we are beforehand
prepared.”

          “In aequo est dolor amissae rei, et timor amittendae,”

          [“The grief of losing a thing, and the fear of losing it,
          are equal.”--Seneca, Ep., 98.]

meaning by this that the fruition of life cannot be truly pleasant to us
if we are in fear of losing it.  It might, however, be said, on the
contrary, that we hug and embrace this good so much the more earnestly,
and with so much greater affection, by how much we see it the less
assured and fear to have it taken from us: for it is evident, as fire
burns with greater fury when cold comes to mix with it, that our will is
more obstinate by being opposed:

               “Si nunquam Danaen habuisset ahenea turris,
               Non esses, Danae, de Jove facta parens;”

     [“If a brazen tower had not held Danae, you would not, Danae, have
     been made a mother by Jove.”--Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 27.]

and that there is nothing naturally so contrary to our taste as satiety
which proceeds from facility; nor anything that so much whets it as
rarity and difficulty:

     “Omnium rerum voluptas ipso, quo debet fugare, periculo crescit.”

     [“The pleasure of all things increases by the same danger that
     should deter it.”--Seneca, De Benef., vii. 9.]

          “Galla, nega; satiatur amor, nisi gaudia torquent.”

     [“Galla, refuse me; love is glutted with joys that are not attended
     with trouble.”--Martial, iv. 37.]

To keep love in breath, Lycurgus made a decree that the married people of
Lacedaemon should never enjoy one another but by stealth; and that it
should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing
with others.  The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, the
shame of the morning,

                    “Et languor, et silentium,
                    Et latere petitus imo Spiritus:”

     [“And languor, and silence, and sighs, coming from the innermost
     heart.”--Hor., Epod., xi. 9.]

these are what give the piquancy to the sauce.  How many very wantonly
pleasant sports spring from the most decent and modest language of the
works on love?  Pleasure itself seeks to be heightened with pain; it is
much sweeter when it smarts and has the skin rippled.  The courtesan
Flora said she never lay with Pompey but that she made him wear the
prints of her teeth.--[Plutarch, Life of Pompey, c. i.]

          “Quod petiere, premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem
          Corporis, et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis .  .  .
          Et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant laedere ad ipsum,
          Quodcunque est, rabies unde illae germina surgunt.”

     [“What they have sought they dress closely, and cause pain; on the
     lips fix the teeth, and every kiss indents: urged by latent stimulus
     the part to wound”--Lucretius, i. 4.]

And so it is in everything: difficulty gives all things their estimation;
the people of the march of Ancona more readily make their vows to St.
James, and those of Galicia to Our Lady of Loreto; they make wonderful
to-do at Liege about the baths of Lucca, and in Tuscany about those of
Aspa: there are few Romans seen in the fencing school of Rome, which is
full of French.  That great Cato also, as much as us, nauseated his wife
whilst she was his, and longed for her when in the possession of another.
I was fain to turn out into the paddock an old horse, as he was not to be
governed when he smelt a mare: the facility presently sated him as
towards his own, but towards strange mares, and the first that passed by
the pale of his pasture, he would again fall to his importunate neighings
and his furious heats as before.  Our appetite contemns and passes by
what it has in possession, to run after that it has not:

          “Transvolat in medio posita, et fugientia captat.”

     [“He slights her who is close at hand, and runs after her
     who flees from him.”--Horace, Sat., i. 2, 108.]

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t:

                         “Nisi to servare puellam
               Incipis, incipiet desinere esse mea:”

     [“Unless you begin to guard your mistress, she will soon begin
     to be no longer mine.”--Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 47.]

to give it wholly up to us is to beget in us contempt.  Want and
abundance fall into the same inconvenience:

               “Tibi quod superest, mihi quod desit, dolet.”

          [“Your superfluities trouble you, and what I want
          troubles me.--“Terence, Phoym., i. 3, 9.]

Desire and fruition equally afflict us.  The rigors of mistresses are
troublesome, but facility, to say truth, still more so; forasmuch as
discontent and anger spring from the esteem we have of the thing desired,
heat and actuate love, but satiety begets disgust; ‘tis a blunt, dull,
stupid, tired, and slothful passion:

          “Si qua volet regnare diu, contemnat amantem.”

     [“She who would long retain her power must use her lover ill.”
      --Ovid, Amor., ii. 19, 33]

                              “Contemnite, amantes:
               Sic hodie veniet, si qua negavit heri.”

     [“Slight your mistress; she will to-day come who denied you
     yesterday.--“Propertius, ii. 14, 19.]

Why did Poppea invent the use of a mask to hide the beauties of her face,
but to enhance it to her lovers?  Why have they veiled, even below the
heels, those beauties that every one desires to show, and that every one
desires to see?  Why do they cover with so many hindrances, one over
another, the parts where our desires and their own have their principal
seat?  And to what serve those great bastion farthingales, with which our
ladies fortify their haunches, but to allure our appetite and to draw us
on by removing them farther from us?

          “Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri.”

     [“She flies to the osiers, and desires beforehand to be seen going.”
      --Virgil, Eclog., iii. 65.]

               “Interdum tunica duxit operta moram.”

               [“The hidden robe has sometimes checked love.”
                --Propertius, ii. 15, 6.]

To what use serves the artifice of this virgin modesty, this grave
coldness, this severe countenance, this professing to be ignorant of
things that they know better than we who instruct them in them, but to
increase in us the desire to overcome, control, and trample underfoot at
pleasure all this ceremony and all these obstacles?  For there is not
only pleasure, but, moreover, glory, in conquering and debauching that
soft sweetness and that childish modesty, and to reduce a cold and
matronlike gravity to the mercy of our ardent desires: ‘tis a glory,
say they, to triumph over modesty, chastity, and temperance; and whoever
dissuades ladies from those qualities, betrays both them and himself.
We are to believe that their hearts tremble with affright, that the very
sound of our words offends the purity of their ears, that they hate us
for talking so, and only yield to our importunity by a compulsive force.
Beauty, all powerful as it is, has not wherewithal to make itself
relished without the mediation of these little arts.  Look into Italy,
where there is the most and the finest beauty to be sold, how it is
necessitated to have recourse to extrinsic means and other artifices to
render itself charming, and yet, in truth, whatever it may do, being
venal and public, it remains feeble and languishing.  Even so in virtue
itself, of two like effects, we notwithstanding look upon that as the
fairest and most worthy, wherein the most trouble and hazard are set
before us.

‘Tis an effect of the divine Providence to suffer the holy Church to be
afflicted, as we see it, with so many storms and troubles, by this
opposition to rouse pious souls, and to awaken them from that drowsy
lethargy wherein, by so long tranquillity, they had been immerged.
If we should lay the loss we have sustained in the number of those who
have gone astray, in the balance against the benefit we have had by being
again put in breath, and by having our zeal and strength revived by
reason of this opposition, I know not whether the utility would not
surmount the damage.

We have thought to tie the nuptial knot of our marriages more fast and
firm by having taken away all means of dissolving it, but the knot of the
will and affection is so much the more slackened and made loose, by how
much that of constraint is drawn closer; and, on the contrary, that which
kept the marriages at Rome so long in honour and inviolate, was the
liberty every one who so desired had to break them; they kept their wives
the better, because they might part with them, if they would; and, in the
full liberty of divorce, five hundred years and more passed away before
any one made use on’t.

     “Quod licet, ingratum est; quod non licet, acrius urit.”

     [“What you may, is displeasing; what is forbidden, whets the
     appetite.--“Ovid, Amor., ii. 19.]

We might here introduce the opinion of an ancient upon this occasion,
“that executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices: that they do
not beget the care of doing well, that being the work of reason and
discipline, but only a care not to be taken in doing ill:”

               “Latius excisae pestis contagia serpunt.”

     [“The plague-sore being lanced, the infection spreads all the more.”
      --Rutilius, Itinerar. 1, 397.]

I do not know that this is true; but I experimentally know, that never
civil government was by that means reformed; the order and regimen of
manners depend upon some other expedient.

The Greek histories make mention of the Argippians, neighbours to
Scythia, who live without either rod or stick for offence; where not only
no one attempts to attack them, but whoever can fly thither is safe, by
reason of their virtue and sanctity of life, and no one is so bold as to
lay hands upon them; and they have applications made to them to determine
the controversies that arise betwixt men of other countries.  There is a
certain nation, where the enclosures of gardens and fields they would
preserve, are made only of a string of cotton; and, so fenced, is more
firm and secure than by our hedges and ditches.

                    “Furem signata sollicitant .  .  .
                    aperta effractarius praeterit.”

          [“Things sealed, up invite a thief: the housebreaker
          passes by open doors.”--Seneca, Epist., 68.]

Peradventure, the facility of entering my house, amongst other things,
has been a means to preserve it from the violence of our civil wars:
defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy.  I enervated the
soldiers’ design by depriving the exploit of danger and all manner of
military glory, which is wont to serve them for pretence and excuse:
whatever is bravely, is ever honourably, done, at a time when justice is
dead.  I render them the conquest of my house cowardly and base; it is
never shut to any one that knocks; my gate has no other guard than a
porter, and he of ancient custom and ceremony; who does not so much serve
to defend it as to offer it with more decorum and grace; I have no other
guard nor sentinel than the stars.  A gentleman would play the fool to
make a show of defence, if he be not really in a condition to defend
himself.  He who lies open on one side, is everywhere so; our ancestors
did not think of building frontier garrisons.  The means of assaulting,
I mean without battery or army, and of surprising our houses, increases
every day more and more beyond the means to guard them; men’s wits are
generally bent that way; in invasion every one is concerned: none but the
rich in defence. Mine was strong for the time when it was built; I have
added nothing to it of that kind, and should fear that its strength might
turn against myself; to which we are to consider that a peaceable time
would require it should be dismantled.  There is danger never to be able
to regain it, and it would be very hard to keep; for in intestine
dissensions, your man may be of the party you fear; and where religion is
the pretext, even a man’s nearest relations become unreliable, with some
colour of justice. The public exchequer will not maintain our domestic
garrisons; they would exhaust it: we ourselves have not the means to do
it without ruin, or, which is more inconvenient and injurious, without
ruining the people.  The condition of my loss would be scarcely worse.
As to the rest, you there lose all; and even your friends will be more
ready to accuse your want of vigilance and your improvidence, and your
ignorance of and indifference to your own business, than to pity you.
That so many garrisoned houses have been undone whereas this of mine
remains, makes me apt to believe that they were only lost by being
guarded; this gives an enemy both an invitation and colour of reason; all
defence shows a face of war.  Let who will come to me in God’s name; but
I shall not invite them; ‘tis the retirement I have chosen for my repose
from war.  I endeavour to withdraw this corner from the public tempest,
as I also do another corner in my soul.  Our war may put on what forms it
will, multiply and diversify itself into new parties; for my part, I stir
not.  Amongst so many garrisoned houses, myself alone amongst those of my
rank, so far as I know, in France, have trusted purely to Heaven for the
protection of mine, and have never removed plate, deeds, or hangings.
I will neither fear nor save myself by halves.  If a full acknowledgment
acquires the Divine favour, it will stay with me to the end: if not, I
have still continued long enough to render my continuance remarkable and
fit to be recorded.  How?  Why, there are thirty years that I have thus
lived.




CHAPTER XVI

OF GLORY

There is the name and the thing: the name is a voice which denotes and
signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the
substance; ‘tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it.
God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection,
cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be
augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His
exterior works: which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him,
forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name,
which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us.  Thus is it that to
God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from
reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being
indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having
continual need of amelioration, ‘tis to that we ought to employ all our
endeavour.  We are all hollow and empty; ‘tis not with wind and voice
that we are to fill ourselves; we want a more solid substance to repair
us: a man starving with hunger would be very simple to seek rather to
provide himself with a gay garment than with a good meal: we are to look
after that whereof we have most need.  As we have it in our ordinary
prayers:

          “Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus.”

We are in want of beauty, health, wisdom, virtue, and such like essential
qualities: exterior ornaments should, be looked after when we have made
provision for necessary things.  Divinity treats amply and more
pertinently of this subject, but I am not much versed in it.

Chrysippus and Diogenes were the earliest and firmest advocates of the
contempt of glory; and maintained that, amongst all pleasures, there was
none more dangerous nor more to be avoided than that which proceeds from
the approbation of others. And, in truth, experience makes us sensible of
many very hurtful treasons in it.  There is nothing that so poisons
princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain
credit and favour with them; nor panderism so apt and so usually made use
of to corrupt the chastity of women as to wheedle and entertain them with
their own praises.  The first charm the Syrens made use of to allure
Ulysses is of this nature:

         “Deca vers nous, deca, o tres-louable Ulysse,
          Et le plus grand honneur don’t la Grece fleurisse.”

     [“Come hither to us, O admirable Ulysses, come hither, thou greatest
     ornament and pride of Greece.”--Homer, Odysseus, xii. 184.]

These philosophers said, that all the glory of the world was not worth an
understanding man’s holding out his finger to obtain it:

          “Gloria quantalibet quid erit, si gloria tantum est?”

     [“What is glory, be it as glorious as it may be, if it be no more
     than glory?”--Juvenal, Sat., vii. 81.]

I say for it alone; for it often brings several commodities along with
it, for which it may justly be desired: it acquires us good-will, and
renders us less subject and exposed to insult and offence from others,
and the like.  It was also one of the principal doctrines of Epicurus;
for this precept of his sect, Conceal thy life, that forbids men to
encumber themselves with public negotiations and offices, also
necessarily presupposes a contempt of glory, which is the world’s
approbation of those actions we produce in public.--[Plutarch, Whether
the saying, Conceal thy life, is well said.]--He that bids us conceal
ourselves, and to have no other concern but for ourselves, and who will
not have us known to others, would much less have us honoured and
glorified; and so advises Idomeneus not in any sort to regulate his
actions by the common reputation or opinion, except so as to avoid the
other accidental inconveniences that the contempt of men might bring upon
him.

These discourses are, in my opinion, very true and rational; but we are,
I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we
believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we
condemn.  Let us see the last and dying words of Epicurus; they are
grand, and worthy of such a philosopher, and yet they carry some touches
of the recommendation of his name and of that humour he had decried by
his precepts.  Here is a letter that he dictated a little before his last
gasp:

                     “EPICUYUS TO HEYMACHUS, health.

     “Whilst I was passing over the happy and last day of my life, I
     write this, but, at the same time, afflicted with such pain in my
     bladder and bowels that nothing can be greater, but it was
     recompensed with the pleasure the remembrance of my inventions and
     doctrines brought to my soul.  Now, as the affection thou hast ever
     from thy infancy borne towards me and philosophy requires, take upon
     thee the protection of Metrodorus’ children.”

This is the letter.  And that which makes me interpret that the pleasure
he says he had in his soul concerning his inventions, has some reference
to the reputation he hoped for thence after his death, is the manner of
his will, in which he gives order that Amynomachus and Timocrates, his
heirs, should, every January, defray the expense of the celebration of
his birthday as Hermachus should appoint; and also the expense that
should be made the twentieth of every moon in entertaining the
philosophers, his friends, who should assemble in honour of the memory of
him and of Metrodorus.--[Cicero, De Finibus, ii. 30.]

Carneades was head of the contrary opinion, and maintained that glory was
to be desired for itself, even as we embrace our posthumous issue for
themselves, having no knowledge nor enjoyment of them.  This opinion has
not failed to be the more universally followed, as those commonly are
that are most suitable to our inclinations.  Aristotle gives it the first
place amongst external goods; and avoids, as too extreme vices, the
immoderate either seeking or evading it.  I believe that, if we had the
books Cicero wrote upon this subject, we should there find pretty
stories; for he was so possessed with this passion, that, if he had
dared, I think he could willingly have fallen into the excess that others
did, that virtue itself was not to be coveted, but upon the account of
the honour that always attends it:

                   “Paulum sepultae distat inertiae
                    Celata virtus:”

          [“Virtue concealed little differs from dead sloth.”
           --Horace, Od., iv.  9, 29.]

which is an opinion so false, that I am vexed it could ever enter into
the understanding of a man that was honoured with the name of
philosopher.

If this were true, men need not be virtuous but in public; and we should
be no further concerned to keep the operations of the soul, which is the
true seat of virtue, regular and in order, than as they are to arrive at
the knowledge of others.  Is there no more in it, then, but only slily
and with circumspection to do ill?  “If thou knowest,” says Carneades,
“of a serpent lurking in a place where, without suspicion, a person is
going to sit down, by whose death thou expectest an advantage, thou dost
ill if thou dost not give him caution of his danger; and so much the more
because the action is to be known by none but thyself.”  If we do not
take up of ourselves the rule of well-doing, if impunity pass with us for
justice, to how many sorts of wickedness shall we every day abandon
ourselves?  I do not find what Sextus Peduceus did, in faithfully
restoring the treasure that C. Plotius had committed to his sole secrecy
and trust, a thing that I have often done myself, so commendable, as I
should think it an execrable baseness, had we done otherwise; and I think
it of good use in our days to recall the example of P. Sextilius Rufus,
whom Cicero accuses to have entered upon an inheritance contrary to his
conscience, not only not against law, but even by the determination of
the laws themselves; and M. Crassus and Hortensius, who, by reason of
their authority and power, having been called in by a stranger to share
in the succession of a forged will, that so he might secure his own part,
satisfied themselves with having no hand in the forgery, and refused not
to make their advantage and to come in for a share: secure enough, if
they could shroud themselves from accusations, witnesses, and the
cognisance of the laws:

          “Meminerint Deum se habere testem, id est (ut ego arbitror)
          mentem suam.”

     [“Let them consider they have God to witness, that is (as I
     interpret it), their own consciences.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 10.]

Virtue is a very vain and frivolous thing if it derive its recommendation
from glory; and ‘tis to no purpose that we endeavour to give it a station
by itself, and separate it from fortune; for what is more accidental than
reputation?

     “Profecto fortuna in omni re dominatur: ea res cunctas ex
     libidine magis, quhm ex vero, celebrat, obscuratque.”

     [“Fortune rules in all things; it advances and depresses things
     more out of its own will than of right and justice.”
      --Sallust, Catilina, c. 8.]

So to order it that actions may be known and seen is purely the work of
fortune; ‘tis chance that helps us to glory, according to its own
temerity.  I have often seen her go before merit, and often very much
outstrip it.  He who first likened glory to a shadow did better than he
was aware of; they are both of them things pre-eminently vain glory also,
like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length
infinitely exceeds it.  They who instruct gentlemen only to employ their
valour for the obtaining of honour:

          “Quasi non sit honestum, quod nobilitatum non sit;”

          [“As though it were not a virtue, unless celebrated”
           --Cicero De Offic. iii. 10.]

what do they intend by that but to instruct them never to hazard
themselves if they are not seen, and to observe well if there be
witnesses present who may carry news of their valour, whereas a thousand
occasions of well-doing present themselves which cannot be taken notice
of?  How many brave individual actions are buried in the crowd of a
battle?  Whoever shall take upon him to watch another’s behaviour in such
a confusion is not very busy himself, and the testimony he shall give of
his companions’ deportment will be evidence against himself:

          “Vera et sapiens animi magnitudo, honestum illud,
          quod maxime naturam sequitur, in factis positum,
          non in gloria, judicat.”

     [“The true and wise magnanimity judges that the bravery which most
     follows nature more consists in act than glory.”
      --Cicero, De Offic. i. 19.]

All the glory that I pretend to derive from my life is that I have lived
it in quiet; in quiet, not according to Metrodorus, or Arcesilaus, or
Aristippus, but according to myself.  For seeing philosophy has not been
able to find out any way to tranquillity that is good in common, let
every one seek it in particular.

To what do Caesar and Alexander owe the infinite grandeur of their renown
but to fortune?  How many men has she extinguished in the beginning of
their progress, of whom we have no knowledge, who brought as much courage
to the work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut them off in the
first sally of their arms?  Amongst so many and so great dangers I do not
remember I have anywhere read that Caesar was ever wounded; a thousand
have fallen in less dangers than the least of those he went through.  An
infinite number of brave actions must be performed without witness and
lost, before one turns to account.  A man is not always on the top of a
breach, or at the head of an army, in the sight of his general, as upon a
scaffold; a man is often surprised betwixt the hedge and the ditch; he
must run the hazard of his life against a henroost; he must dislodge four
rascally musketeers out of a barn; he must prick out single from his
party, and alone make some attempts, according as necessity will have it.
And whoever will observe will, I believe, find it experimentally true,
that occasions of the least lustre are ever the most dangerous; and that
in the wars of our own times there have more brave men been lost in
occasions of little moment, and in the dispute about some little paltry
fort, than in places of greatest importance, and where their valour might
have been more honourably employed.

Who thinks his death achieved to ill purpose if he do not fall on some
signal occasion, instead of illustrating his death, wilfully obscures his
life, suffering in the meantime many very just occasions of hazarding
himself to slip out of his hands; and every just one is illustrious
enough, every man’s conscience being a sufficient trumpet to him.

          “Gloria nostra est testimonium conscientiae nostrae.”

     [“For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience.”
      --Corinthians, i. I.]

He who is only a good man that men may know it, and that he may be the
better esteemed when ‘tis known; who will not do well but upon condition
that his virtue may be known to men: is one from whom much service is not
to be expected:

              “Credo ch ‘el reste di quel verno, cose
               Facesse degne di tener ne conto;
               Ma fur fin’ a quel tempo si nascose,
               Che non a colpa mia s’ hor ‘non le conto
               Perche Orlando a far l’opre virtuose
               Piu ch’a narrar le poi sempre era pronto;
               Ne mai fu alcun’ de’suoi fatti espresso,
               Se non quando ebbe i testimonii appresso.”

     [“The rest of the winter, I believe, was spent in actions worthy of
     narration, but they were done so secretly that if I do not tell them
     I am not to blame, for Orlando was more bent to do great acts than
     to boast of them, so that no deeds of his were ever known but those
     that had witnesses.”--Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, xi. 81.]

A man must go to the war upon the account of duty, and expect the
recompense that never fails brave and worthy actions, how private soever,
or even virtuous thoughts-the satisfaction that a well-disposed
conscience receives in itself in doing well.  A man must be valiant for
himself, and upon account of the advantage it is to him to have his
courage seated in a firm and secure place against the assaults of
fortune:

                   “Virtus, repulsaa nescia sordidx
                    Intaminatis fulget honoribus
                    Nec sumit, aut ponit secures
                    Arbitrio popularis aura.”

     [“Virtue, repudiating all base repulse, shines in taintless
     honours, nor takes nor leaves dignity at the mere will of the
     vulgar.”--Horace, Od., iii. 2, 17.]

It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part, but for
ourselves within, where no eyes can pierce but our own; there she defends
us from the fear of death, of pain, of shame itself: there she arms us
against the loss of our children, friends, and fortunes: and when
opportunity presents itself, she leads us on to the hazards of war:

          “Non emolumento aliquo, sed ipsius honestatis decore.”

     [“Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself.”
      --Cicero, De Finib., i. 10.]

This profit is of much greater advantage, and more worthy to be coveted
and hoped for, than, honour and glory, which are no other than a
favourable judgment given of us.

A dozen men must be called out of a whole nation to judge about an acre
of land; and the judgment of our inclinations and actions, the most
difficult and most important matter that is, we refer to the voice and
determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance, injustice, and
inconstancy.  Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should
depend upon the judgment of fools?

          “An quidquam stultius, quam, quos singulos contemnas,
          eos aliquid putare esse universes?”

     [“Can anything be more foolish than to think that those you despise
     singly, can be anything else in general.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 36.]

He that makes it his business to please them, will have enough to do and
never have done; ‘tis a mark that can never be aimed at or hit:

          “Nil tam inaestimabile est, quam animi multitudinis.”

     [“Nothing is to be so little understood as the minds of the
     multitude.”--Livy, xxxi. 34.]

Demetrius pleasantly said of the voice of the people, that he made no
more account of that which came from above than of that which came from
below.  He [Cicero] says more:

          “Ego hoc judico, si quando turpe non sit, tamen non
          esse non turpe, quum id a multitudine laudatur.”

     [“I am of opinion, that though a thing be not foul in itself,
     yet it cannot but become so when commended by the multitude.”
      --Cicero, De Finib., ii. 15.]

No art, no activity of wit, could conduct our steps so as to follow so
wandering and so irregular a guide; in this windy confusion of the noise
of vulgar reports and opinions that drive us on, no way worth anything
can be chosen.  Let us not propose to ourselves so floating and wavering
an end; let us follow constantly after reason; let the public approbation
follow us there, if it will; and as it wholly depends upon fortune, we
have no reason sooner to expect it by any other way than that.  Even
though I would not follow the right way because it is right, I should,
however, follow it as having experimentally found that, at the end of
the reckoning, ‘tis commonly the most happy and of greatest utility.

              “Dedit hoc providentia hominibus munus,
               ut honesta magis juvarent.”

     [“This gift Providence has given to men, that honest things should
     be the most agreeable.”--Quintilian, Inst. Orat., i. 12.]

The mariner of old said thus to Neptune, in a great tempest: “O God, thou
wilt save me if thou wilt, and if thou choosest, thou wilt destroy me;
but, however, I will hold my rudder straight.”--[Seneca, Ep., 85.]--
I have seen in my time a thousand men supple, halfbred, ambiguous, whom
no one doubted to be more worldly-wise than I, lose themselves, where I
have saved myself:

               “Risi successus posse carere dolos.”

          [“I have laughed to see cunning fail of success.”
           --Ovid, Heroid, i. 18.]

Paulus AEmilius, going on the glorious expedition of Macedonia, above all
things charged the people of Rome not to speak of his actions during his
absence.  Oh, the license of judgments is a great disturbance to great
affairs!  forasmuch as every one has not the firmness of Fabius against
common, adverse, and injurious tongues, who rather suffered his authority
to be dissected by the vain fancies of men, than to do less well in his
charge with a favourable reputation and the popular applause.

There is I know not what natural sweetness in hearing one’s self
commended; but we are a great deal too fond of it:

         “Laudari metuam, neque enim mihi cornea fibra est
          Sed recti finemque extremumque esse recuso
          Euge tuum, et belle.”

     [“I should fear to be praised, for my heart is not made of horn;
     but I deny that ‘excellent--admirably done,’ are the terms and
     final aim of virtue.”--Persius, i. 47.]

I care not so much what I am in the opinions of others, as what I am in
my own; I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing.  Strangers see
nothing but events and outward appearances; everybody can set a good face
on the matter, when they have trembling and terror within: they do not
see my heart, they see but my countenance.  One is right in decrying the
hypocrisy that is in war; for what is more easy to an old soldier than to
shift in a time of danger, and to counterfeit the brave when he has no
more heart than a chicken?  There are so many ways to avoid hazarding a
man’s own person, that we have deceived the world a thousand times before
we come to be engaged in a real danger: and even then, finding ourselves
in an inevitable necessity of doing something, we can make shift for that
time to conceal our apprehensions by setting a good face on the business,
though the heart beats within; and whoever had the use of the Platonic
ring, which renders those invisible that wear it, if turned inward
towards the palm of the hand, a great many would very often hide
themselves when they ought most to appear, and would repent being placed
in so honourable a post, where necessity must make them bold.

              “Falsus honor juvat, et mendax infamia terret
               Quem nisi mendosum et mendacem?”

          [“False honour pleases, and calumny affrights, the guilty
          and the sick.”--Horace, Ep., i. 16, 89.]

Thus we see how all the judgments that are founded upon external
appearances, are marvellously uncertain and doubtful; and that there is
no so certain testimony as every one is to himself.  In these, how many
soldiers’ boys are companions of our glory?  he who stands firm in an
open trench, what does he in that more than fifty poor pioneers who open
to him the way and cover it with their own bodies for fivepence a day
pay, do before him?

              “Non quicquid turbida Roma
               Elevet, accedas; examenque improbum in illa
               Castiges trutina: nec to quaesiveris extra.”

     [“Do not, if turbulent Rome disparage anything, accede; nor correct
     a false balance by that scale; nor seek anything beyond thyself.”
      --Persius, Sat., i. 5.]

The dispersing and scattering our names into many mouths, we call making
them more great; we will have them there well received, and that this
increase turn to their advantage, which is all that can be excusable in
this design.  But the excess of this disease proceeds so far that many
covet to have a name, be it what it will.  Trogus Pompeius says of
Herostratus, and Titus Livius of Manlius Capitolinus, that they were more
ambitious of a great reputation than of a good one.  This is very common;
we are more solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak; and it
is enough for us that our names are often mentioned, be it after what
manner it will.  It should seem that to be known, is in some sort to have
a man’s life and its duration in others’ keeping.  I, for my part, hold
that I am not, but in myself; and of that other life of mine which lies
in the knowledge of my friends, to consider it naked and simply in
itself, I know very well that I am sensible of no fruit nor enjoyment
from it but by the vanity of a fantastic opinion; and when I shall be
dead, I shall be still and much less sensible of it; and shall, withal,
absolutely lose the use of those real advantages that sometimes
accidentally follow it.

I shall have no more handle whereby to take hold of reputation, neither
shall it have any whereby to take hold of or to cleave to me; for to
expect that my name should be advanced by it, in the first place, I have
no name that is enough my own; of two that I have, one is common to all
my race, and indeed to others also; there are two families at Paris and
Montpellier, whose surname is Montaigne, another in Brittany, and one in
Xaintonge, De La Montaigne.  The transposition of one syllable only would
suffice so to ravel our affairs, that I shall share in their glory, and
they peradventure will partake of my discredit; and, moreover, my
ancestors have formerly been surnamed, Eyquem,--[Eyquem was the
patronymic.]--a name wherein a family well known in England is at this
day concerned.  As to my other name, every one may take it that will, and
so, perhaps, I may honour a porter in my own stead.  And besides, though
I had a particular distinction by myself, what can it distinguish, when I
am no more?  Can it point out and favour inanity?

              “Non levior cippus nunc imprimit ossa?
               Laudat posteritas!  Nunc non e manibus illis,
               Nunc non a tumulo fortunataque favilla,
               Nascentur violae?”

     [“Does the tomb press with less weight upon my bones?  Do comrades
     praise?  Not from my manes, not from the tomb, not from the ashes
     will violets grow.”--Persius, Sat., i. 37.]

but of this I have spoken elsewhere.  As to what remains, in a great
battle where ten thousand men are maimed or killed, there are not fifteen
who are taken notice of; it must be some very eminent greatness, or some
consequence of great importance that fortune has added to it, that
signalises a private action, not of a harquebuser only, but of a great
captain; for to kill a man, or two, or ten: to expose a man’s self
bravely to the utmost peril of death, is indeed something in every one of
us, because we there hazard all; but for the world’s concern, they are
things so ordinary, and so many of them are every day seen, and there
must of necessity be so many of the same kind to produce any notable
effect, that we cannot expect any particular renown from it:

              “Casus multis hic cognitus, ac jam
               Tritus, et a medio fortunae ductus acervo.”

     [“The accident is known to many, and now trite; and drawn from the
     midst of Fortune’s heap.”--Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 9.]

Of so many thousands of valiant men who have died within these fifteen
hundred years in France with their swords in their hands, not a hundred
have come to our knowledge.  The memory, not of the commanders only, but
of battles and victories, is buried and gone; the fortunes of above half
of the world, for want of a record, stir not from their place, and vanish
without duration.  If I had unknown events in my possession, I should
think with great ease to out-do those that are recorded, in all sorts of
examples.  Is it not strange that even of the Greeks and Romans, with so
many writers and witnesses, and so many rare and noble exploits, so few
are arrived at our knowledge:

               “Ad nos vix tenuis famx perlabitur aura.”

     [“An obscure rumour scarce is hither come.”--AEneid, vii. 646.]

It will be much if, a hundred years hence, it be remembered in general
that in our times there were civil wars in France.  The Lacedaemonians,
entering into battle, sacrificed to the Muses, to the end that their
actions might be well and worthily written, looking upon it as a divine
and no common favour, that brave acts should find witnesses that could
give them life and memory.  Do we expect that at every musket-shot we
receive, and at every hazard we run, there must be a register ready to
record it?  and, besides, a hundred registers may enrol them whose
commentaries will not last above three days, and will never come to the
sight of any one.  We have not the thousandth part of ancient writings;
‘tis fortune that gives them a shorter or longer life, according to her
favour; and ‘tis permissible to doubt whether those we have be not the
worst, not having seen the rest.  Men do not write histories of things of
so little moment: a man must have been general in the conquest of an
empire or a kingdom; he must have won two-and-fifty set battles, and
always the weaker in number, as Caesar did: ten thousand brave fellows
and many great captains lost their lives valiantly in his service, whose
names lasted no longer than their wives and children lived:

                    “Quos fama obscura recondit.”

     [“Whom an obscure reputation conceals.”--AEneid, v. 302.]

Even those whom we see behave themselves well, three months or three
years after they have departed hence, are no more mentioned than if they
had never been.  Whoever will justly consider, and with due proportion,
of what kind of men and of what sort of actions the glory sustains itself
in the records of history, will find that there are very few actions and
very few persons of our times who can there pretend any right.  How many
worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen
and suffered the honour and glory most justly acquired in their youth,
extinguished in their own presence?  And for three years of this
fantastic and imaginary life we must go and throw away our true and
essential life, and engage ourselves in a perpetual death!  The sages
propose to themselves a nobler and more just end in so important an
enterprise:

          “Recte facti, fecisse merces est: officii fructus,
          ipsum officium est.”

     [“The reward of a thing well done is to have done it; the fruit
     of a good service is the service itself.”--Seneca, Ep., 8.]

It were, peradventure, excusable in a painter or other artisan, or in a
rhetorician or a grammarian, to endeavour to raise himself a name by his
works; but the actions of virtue are too noble in themselves to seek any
other reward than from their own value, and especially to seek it in the
vanity of human judgments.

If this false opinion, nevertheless, be of such use to the public as to
keep men in their duty; if the people are thereby stirred up to virtue;
if princes are touched to see the world bless the memory of Trajan, and
abominate that of Nero; if it moves them to see the name of that great
beast, once so terrible and feared, so freely cursed and reviled by every
schoolboy, let it by all means increase, and be as much as possible
nursed up and cherished amongst us; and Plato, bending his whole
endeavour to make his citizens virtuous, also advises them not to despise
the good repute and esteem of the people; and says it falls out, by a
certain Divine inspiration, that even the wicked themselves oft-times, as
well by word as opinion, can rightly distinguish the virtuous from the
wicked.  This person and his tutor are both marvellous and bold
artificers everywhere to add divine operations and revelations where
human force is wanting:

          “Ut tragici poetae confugiunt ad deum,
          cum explicare argumenti exitum non possunt:”

     [“As tragic poets fly to some god when they cannot explain
     the issue of their argument.”--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., i. 20.]

and peradventure, for this reason it was that Timon, railing at him,
called him the great forger of miracles.  Seeing that men, by their
insufficiency, cannot pay themselves well enough with current money, let
the counterfeit be superadded.  ‘Tis a way that has been practised by all
the legislators: and there is no government that has not some mixture
either of ceremonial vanity or of false opinion, that serves for a curb
to keep the people in their duty.  ‘Tis for this that most of them have
their originals and beginnings fabulous, and enriched with supernatural
mysteries; ‘tis this that has given credit to bastard religions, and
caused them to be countenanced by men of understanding; and for this,
that Numa and Sertorius, to possess their men with a better opinion of
them, fed them with this foppery; one, that the nymph Egeria, the other
that his white hind, brought them all their counsels from the gods.
And the authority that Numa gave to his laws, under the title of the
patronage of this goddess, Zoroaster, legislator of the Bactrians and
Persians, gave to his under the name of the God Oromazis: Trismegistus,
legislator of the Egyptians, under that of Mercury; Xamolxis, legislator
of the Scythians, under that of Vesta; Charondas, legislator of the
Chalcidians, under that of Saturn; Minos, legislator of the Candiots,
under that of Jupiter; Lycurgus, legislator of the Lacedaemonians, under
that of Apollo; and Draco and Solon, legislators of the Athenians, under
that of Minerva.  And every government has a god at the head of it;
the others falsely, that truly, which Moses set over the Jews at their
departure out of Egypt.  The religion of the Bedouins, as the Sire de
Joinville reports, amongst other things, enjoined a belief that the soul
of him amongst them who died for his prince, went into another body more
happy, more beautiful, and more robust than the former; by which means
they much more willingly ventured their lives:

         “In ferrum mens prona viris, animaeque capaces
          Mortis, et ignavum est rediturae parcere vitae.”

     [“Men’s minds are prone to the sword, and their souls able to bear
     death; and it is base to spare a life that will be renewed.”
      --Lucan, i. 461.]

This is a very comfortable belief, however erroneous.  Every nation has
many such examples of its own; but this subject would require a treatise
by itself.

To add one word more to my former discourse, I would advise the ladies no
longer to call that honour which is but their duty:

          “Ut enim consuetudo loquitur, id solum dicitur
          honestum, quod est populari fama gloriosum;”

     [“As custom puts it, that only is called honest which is
     glorious by the public voice.”--Cicero, De Finibus, ii. 15.]

their duty is the mark, their honour but the outward rind.  Neither would
I advise them to give this excuse for payment of their denial: for I
presuppose that their intentions, their desire, and will, which are
things wherein their honour is not at all concerned, forasmuch as nothing
thereof appears without, are much better regulated than the effects:

          “Qux quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit:”

     [“She who only refuses, because ‘tis forbidden, consents.”
      --Ovid, Amor., ii. 4, 4.]

The offence, both towards God and in the conscience, would be as great to
desire as to do it; and, besides, they are actions so private and secret
of themselves, as would be easily enough kept from the knowledge of
others, wherein the honour consists, if they had not another respect to
their duty, and the affection they bear to chastity, for itself.  Every
woman of honour will much rather choose to lose her honour than to hurt
her conscience.




CHAPTER XVII

OF PRESUMPTION

There is another sort of glory, which is the having too good an opinion
of our own worth.  ‘Tis an inconsiderate affection with which we flatter
ourselves, and that represents us to ourselves other than we truly are:
like the passion of love, that lends beauties and graces to the object,
and makes those who are caught by it, with a depraved and corrupt
judgment, consider the thing which they love other and more perfect than
it is.

I would not, nevertheless, for fear of failing on this side, that a man
should not know himself aright, or think himself less than he is; the
judgment ought in all things to maintain its rights; ‘tis all the reason
in the world he should discern in himself, as well as in others, what
truth sets before him; if it be Caesar, let him boldly think himself the
greatest captain in the world.  We are nothing but ceremony: ceremony
carries us away, and we leave the substance of things: we hold by the
branches, and quit the trunk and the body; we have taught the ladies to
blush when they hear that but named which they are not at all afraid to
do: we dare not call our members by their right names, yet are not afraid
to employ them in all sorts of debauchery: ceremony forbids us to express
by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it: reason
forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it.  I find
myself here fettered by the laws of ceremony; for it neither permits a
man to speak well of himself, nor ill: we will leave her there for this
time.

They whom fortune (call it good or ill) has made to, pass their lives in
some eminent degree, may by their public actions manifest what they are;
but they whom she has only employed in the crowd, and of whom nobody will
say a word unless they speak themselves, are to be excused if they take
the boldness to speak of themselves to such as are interested to know
them; by the example of Lucilius:

              “Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
               Credebat libris, neque si male cesserat, usquam
               Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis,
               Votiva pateat veluri descripta tabella
               Vita senis;”

     [“He formerly confided his secret thoughts to his books, as to tried
     friends, and for good and evil, resorted not elsewhere: hence it
     came to pass, that the old man’s life is there all seen as on a
     votive tablet.”--Horace, Sat., ii. I, 30.]

he always committed to paper his actions and thoughts, and there
portrayed himself such as he found himself to be:

     “Nec id Rutilio et Scauro citra fidem; aut obtrectationi fuit.”

     [“Nor was this considered a breach of good faith or a disparagement
     to Rutilius or Scaurus.”--Tacitus, Agricola, c. I.]

I remember, then, that from my infancy there was observed in me I know
not what kind of carriage and behaviour, that seemed to relish of pride
and arrogance.  I will say this, by the way, that it is not unreasonable
to suppose that we have qualities and inclinations so much our own, and
so incorporate in us, that we have not the means to feel and recognise
them: and of such natural inclinations the body will retain a certain
bent, without our knowledge or consent.  It was an affectation
conformable with his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one
side, and caused Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Caesar scratched his head
with one finger,  which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome
thoughts; and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a
sign of a man given to scoffing; such motions as these may imperceptibly
happen in us.  There are other artificial ones which I meddle not with,
as salutations and congees, by which men acquire, for the most part
unjustly, the reputation of being humble and courteous: one may be humble
out of pride.  I am prodigal enough of my hat, especially in summer, and
never am so saluted but that I pay it again from persons of what quality
soever, unless they be in my own service.  I should make it my request to
some princes whom I know, that they would be more sparing of that
ceremony, and bestow that courtesy where it is more due; for being so
indiscreetly and indifferently conferred on all, it is thrown away to no
purpose; if it be without respect of persons, it loses its effect.
Amongst irregular deportment, let us not forget that haughty one of the
Emperor Constantius, who always in public held his head upright and
stiff, without bending or turning on either side, not so much as to look
upon those who saluted him on one side, planting his body in a rigid
immovable posture, without suffering it to yield to the motion of his
coach, not daring so much as to spit, blow his nose, or wipe his face
before people.  I know not whether the gestures that were observed in me
were of this first quality, and whether I had really any occult proneness
to this vice, as it might well be; and I cannot be responsible for the
motions of the body; but as to the motions of the soul, I must here
confess what I think of the matter.

This glory consists of two parts; the one in setting too great a value
upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others.
As to the one, methinks these considerations ought, in the first place,
to be of some force: I feel myself importuned by an error of the soul
that displeases me, both as it is unjust, and still more as it is
troublesome; I attempt to correct it, but I cannot root it out; and this
is, that I lessen the just value of things that I possess, and overvalue
things, because they are foreign, absent, and none of mine; this humour
spreads very far.  As the prerogative of the authority makes husbands
look upon their own wives with a vicious disdain, and many fathers their
children; so I, betwixt two equal merits, should always be swayed against
my own; not so much that the jealousy of my advancement and bettering
troubles my judgment, and hinders me from satisfying myself, as that of
itself possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules.  Foreign
governments, manners, and languages insinuate themselves into my esteem;
and I am sensible that Latin allures me by the favour of its dignity to
value it above its due, as it does with children, and the common sort of
people: the domestic government, house, horse, of my neighbour, though no
better than my own, I prize above my own, because they are not mine.
Besides that I am very ignorant in my own affairs, I am struck by the
assurance that every one has of himself: whereas there is scarcely
anything that I am sure I know, or that I dare be responsible to myself
that I can do: I have not my means of doing anything in condition and
ready, and am only instructed therein after the effect; as doubtful of my
own force as I am of another’s.  Whence it comes to pass that if I happen
to do anything commendable, I attribute it more to my fortune than
industry, forasmuch as I design everything by chance and in fear.  I have
this, also, in general, that of all the opinions antiquity has held of
men in gross, I most willingly embrace and adhere to those that most
contemn and undervalue us, and most push us to naught; methinks,
philosophy has never so fair a game to play as when it falls upon our
vanity and presumption; when it most lays open our irresolution,
weakness, and ignorance.  I look upon the too good opinion that man has
of himself to be the nursing mother of all the most false opinions, both
public and private.  Those people who ride astride upon the epicycle of
Mercury, who see so far into the heavens, are worse to me than a
tooth-drawer that comes to draw my teeth; for in my study, the subject of
which is man, finding so great a variety of judgments, so profound a
labyrinth of difficulties, one upon another, so great diversity and
uncertainty, even in the school of wisdom itself, you may judge, seeing
these people could not resolve upon the knowledge of themselves and their
own condition, which is continually before their eyes, and within them,
seeing they do not know how that moves which they themselves move, nor
how to give us a description of the springs they themselves govern and
make use of, how can I believe them about the ebbing and flowing of the
Nile?  The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a
scourge, says the Holy Scripture.

But to return to what concerns myself; I think it would be very difficult
for any other man to have a meaner opinion of himself; nay, for any other
to have a meaner opinion of me than of myself: I look upon myself as one
of the common sort, saving in this, that I have no better an opinion of
myself; guilty of the meanest and most popular defects, but not disowning
or excusing them; and I do not value myself upon any other account than
because I know my own value.  If there be any vanity in the case, ‘tis
superficially infused into me by the treachery of my complexion, and has
no body that my judgment can discern: I am sprinkled, but not dyed.  For
in truth, as to the effects of the mind, there is no part of me, be it
what it will, with which I am satisfied; and the approbation of others
makes me not think the better of myself.  My judgment is tender and nice,
especially in things that concern myself.

I ever repudiate myself, and feel myself float and waver by reason of my
weakness.  I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment.  My sight
is clear and regular enough, but, at working, it is apt to dazzle; as I
most manifestly find in poetry: I love it infinitely, and am able to give
a tolerable judgment of other men’s works; but, in good earnest, when I
apply myself to it, I play the child, and am not able to endure myself.
A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry;

                         “Mediocribus esse poetis
          Non dii, non homines, non concessere columnae.”

     [“Neither men, nor gods, nor the pillars (on which the poets
     offered their writings) permit mediocrity in poets.”
      --Horace, De Arte Poet., 372.]

I would to God this sentence was written over the doors of all our
printers, to forbid the entrance of so many rhymesters!

                    “Verum
                    Nihil securius est malo poetae.”

     [“The truth is, that nothing is more confident than a bad poet.”
      --Martial, xii. 63, 13.]

Why have not we such people?--[As those about to be mentioned.]--
Dionysius the father valued himself upon nothing so much as his poetry;
at the Olympic games, with chariots surpassing all the others in
magnificence, he sent also poets and musicians to present his verses,
with tent and pavilions royally gilt and hung with tapestry.  When his
verses came to be recited, the excellence of the delivery at first
attracted the attention of the people; but when they afterwards came to
poise the meanness of the composition, they first entered into disdain,
and continuing to nettle their judgments, presently proceeded to fury,
and ran to pull down and tear to pieces all his pavilions: and, that his
chariots neither performed anything to purpose in the race, and that the
ship which brought back his people failed of making Sicily, and was by
the tempest driven and wrecked upon the coast of Tarentum, they certainly
believed was through the anger of the gods, incensed, as they themselves
were, against the paltry Poem; and even the mariners who escaped from the
wreck seconded this opinion of the people: to which also the oracle that
foretold his death seemed to subscribe; which was, “that Dionysius should
be near his end, when he should have overcome those who were better than
himself,” which he interpreted of the Carthaginians, who surpassed him in
power; and having war with them, often declined the victory, not to incur
the sense of this prediction; but he understood it ill; for the god
indicated the time of the advantage, that by favour and injustice he
obtained at Athens over the tragic poets, better than himself, having
caused his own play called the Leneians to be acted in emulation;
presently after which victory he died, and partly of the excessive joy he
conceived at the success.

     [Diodorus Siculus, xv. 7.--The play, however, was called the
     “Ransom of Hector.”  It was the games at which it was acted that
     were called Leneian; they were one of the four Dionysiac festivals.]

What I find tolerable of mine, is not so really and in itself, but in
comparison of other worse things, that I see well enough received.  I
envy the happiness of those who can please and hug themselves in what
they do; for ‘tis an easy thing to be so pleased, because a man extracts
that pleasure from himself, especially if he be constant in his
self-conceit.  I know a poet, against whom the intelligent and the
ignorant, abroad and at home, both heaven and earth exclaim that he has
but very little notion of it; and yet, for all that, he has never a whit
the worse opinion of himself; but is always falling upon some new piece,
always contriving some new invention, and still persists in his opinion,
by so much the more obstinately, as it only concerns him to maintain it.

My works are so far from pleasing me, that as often as I review them,
they disgust me:

         “Cum relego, scripsisse pudet; quia plurima cerno,
          Me quoque, qui feci, judice, digna lini.”

     [“When I reperuse, I blush at what I have written; I ever see one
     passage after another that I, the author, being the judge, consider
     should be erased.”--Ovid, De Ponto, i. 5, 15.]

I have always an idea in my soul, and a sort of disturbed image which
presents me as in a dream with a better form than that I have made use
of; but I cannot catch it nor fit it to my purpose; and even that idea is
but of the meaner sort.  Hence I conclude that the productions of those
great and rich souls of former times are very much beyond the utmost
stretch of my imagination or my wish; their writings do not only satisfy
and fill me, but they astound me, and ravish me with admiration; I judge
of their beauty; I see it, if not to the utmost, yet so far at least as
‘tis possible for me to aspire.  Whatever I undertake, I owe a sacrifice
to the Graces, as Plutarch says of some one, to conciliate their favour:

                   “Si quid enim placet,
                    Si quid dulce horninum sensibus influit,
                    Debentur lepidis omnia Gratiis.”

     [“If anything please that I write, if it infuse delight into men’s
     minds, all is due to the charming Graces.”  The verses are probably
     by some modern poet.]

They abandon me throughout; all I write is rude; polish and beauty are
wanting: I cannot set things off to any advantage; my handling adds
nothing to the matter; for which reason I must have it forcible, very
full, and that has lustre of its own.  If I pitch upon subjects that are
popular and gay, ‘tis to follow my own inclination, who do not affect a
grave and ceremonious wisdom, as the world does; and to make myself more
sprightly, but not my style more wanton, which would rather have them
grave and severe; at least if I may call that a style which is an inform
and irregular way of speaking, a popular jargon, a proceeding without
definition, division, conclusion, perplexed like that Amafanius and
Rabirius.--[Cicero, Acad., i. 2.]--I can neither please nor delight,
nor even tickle my readers: the best story in the world is spoiled by my
handling, and becomes flat; I cannot speak but in rough earnest, and am
totally unprovided of that facility which I observe in many of my
acquaintance, of entertaining the first comers and keeping a whole
company in breath, or taking up the ear of a prince with all sorts of
discourse without wearying themselves: they never want matter by reason
of the faculty and grace they have in taking hold of the first thing that
starts up, and accommodating it to the humour and capacity of those with
whom they have to do.  Princes do not much affect solid discourses, nor I
to tell stories.  The first and easiest reasons, which are commonly the
best taken, I know not how to employ: I am an ill orator to the common
sort.  I am apt of everything to say the extremest that I know.  Cicero
is of opinion that in treatises of philosophy the exordium is the hardest
part; if this be true, I am wise in sticking to the conclusion.  And yet
we are to know how to wind the string to all notes, and the sharpest is
that which is the most seldom touched.  There is at least as much
perfection in elevating an empty as in supporting a weighty thing.  A man
must sometimes superficially handle things, and sometimes push them home.
I know very well that most men keep themselves in this lower form from
not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark; but I likewise
know that the greatest masters, and Xenophon and Plato are often seen to
stoop to this low and popular manner of speaking and treating of things,
but supporting it with graces which never fail them.

Farther, my language has nothing in it that is facile and polished; ‘tis
rough, free, and irregular, and as such pleases, if not my judgment, at
all events my inclination, but I very well perceive that I sometimes give
myself too much rein, and that by endeavouring to avoid art and
affectation I fall into the other inconvenience:

                        “Brevis esse laboro,
                         Obscurus fio.”

          [ Endeavouring to be brief, I become obscure.”
           --Hor., Art. Poet., 25.]

Plato says, that the long or the short are not properties, that either
take away or give value to language.  Should I attempt to follow the
other more moderate, united, and regular style, I should never attain to
it; and though the short round periods of Sallust best suit with my
humour, yet I find Caesar much grander and harder to imitate; and though
my inclination would rather prompt me to imitate Seneca’s way of writing,
yet I do nevertheless more esteem that of Plutarch.  Both in doing and
speaking I simply follow my own natural way; whence, peradventure, it
falls out that I am better at speaking than writing.  Motion and action
animate words, especially in those who lay about them briskly, as I do,
and grow hot.  The comportment, the countenance; the voice, the robe, the
place, will set off some things that of themselves would appear no better
than prating.  Messalla complains in Tacitus of the straitness of some
garments in his time, and of the fashion of the benches where the orators
were to declaim, that were a disadvantage to their eloquence.

My French tongue is corrupted, both in the pronunciation and otherwise,
by the barbarism of my country.  I never saw a man who was a native of
any of the provinces on this side of the kingdom who had not a twang of
his place of birth, and that was not offensive to ears that were purely
French.  And yet it is not that I am so perfect in my Perigordin: for I
can no more speak it than High Dutch, nor do I much care.  ‘Tis a
language (as the rest about me on every side, of Poitou, Xaintonge,
Angoumousin, Limousin, Auvergne), a poor, drawling, scurvy language.
There is, indeed, above us towards the mountains a sort of Gascon spoken,
that I am mightily taken with: blunt, brief, significant, and in truth a
more manly and military language than any other I am acquainted with, as
sinewy, powerful, and pertinent as the French is graceful, neat, and
luxuriant.

As to the Latin, which was given me for my mother tongue, I have by
discontinuance lost the use of speaking it, and, indeed, of writing it
too, wherein I formerly had a particular reputation, by which you may see
how inconsiderable I am on that side.

Beauty is a thing of great recommendation in the correspondence amongst
men; ‘tis the first means of acquiring the favour and good liking of one
another, and no man is so barbarous and morose as not to perceive himself
in some sort struck with its attraction.  The body has a great share in
our being, has an eminent place there, and therefore its structure and
composition are of very just consideration.  They who go about to
disunite and separate our two principal parts from one another are to
blame; we must, on the contrary, reunite and rejoin them.  We must
command the soul not to withdraw and entertain itself apart, not to
despise and abandon the body (neither can she do it but by some apish
counterfeit), but to unite herself close to it, to embrace, cherish,
assist, govern, and advise it, and to bring it back and set it into the
true way when it wanders; in sum, to espouse and be a husband to it, so
that their effects may not appear to be diverse and contrary, but uniform
and concurring.  Christians have a particular instruction concerning this
connection, for they know that the Divine justice embraces this society
and juncture of body and soul, even to the making the body capable of
eternal rewards; and that God has an eye to the whole man’s ways, and
wills that he receive entire chastisement or reward according to his
demerits or merits.  The sect of the Peripatetics, of all sects the most
sociable, attribute to wisdom this sole care equally to provide for the
good of these two associate parts: and the other sects, in not
sufficiently applying themselves to the consideration of this mixture,
show themselves to be divided, one for the body and the other for the
soul, with equal error, and to have lost sight of their subject, which is
Man, and their guide, which they generally confess to be Nature.  The
first distinction that ever was amongst men, and the first consideration
that gave some pre-eminence over others, ‘tis likely was the advantage of
beauty:

              “Agros divisere atque dedere
               Pro facie cujusque, et viribus ingenioque;
               Nam facies multum valuit, viresque vigebant.”

     [“They distributed and conferred the lands to every man according
     to his beauty and strength and understanding, for beauty was much
     esteemed and strength was in favour.”--Lucretius, V. 1109.]

Now I am of something lower than the middle stature, a defect that not
only borders upon deformity, but carries withal a great deal of
inconvenience along with it, especially for those who are in office and
command; for the authority which a graceful presence and a majestic mien
beget is wanting.  C. Marius did not willingly enlist any soldiers who
were not six feet high.  The Courtier has, indeed, reason to desire a
moderate stature in the gentlemen he is setting forth, rather than any
other, and to reject all strangeness that should make him be pointed at.
But if I were to choose whether this medium must be rather below than
above the common standard, I would not have it so in a soldier.  Little
men, says Aristotle, are pretty, but not handsome; and greatness of soul
is discovered in a great body, as beauty is in a conspicuous stature: the
Ethiopians and Indians, says he, in choosing their kings and magistrates,
had regard to the beauty and stature of their persons.  They had reason;
for it creates respect in those who follow them, and is a terror to the
enemy, to see a leader of a brave and goodly stature march at the head of
a battalion:

         “Ipse inter primos praestanti corpore Turnus
          Vertitur arma, tenens, et toto vertice supra est.”

     [“In the first rank marches Turnus, brandishing his weapon,
     taller by a head than all the rest.”--Virgil, AEneid, vii. 783.]

Our holy and heavenly king, of whom every circumstance is most carefully
and with the greatest religion and reverence to be observed, has not
himself rejected bodily recommendation,


               “Speciosus forma prae filiis hominum.”

          [“He is fairer than the children of men.”--Psalm xiv. 3.]

And Plato, together with temperance and fortitude, requires beauty in the
conservators of his republic.  It would vex you that a man should apply
himself to you amongst your servants to inquire where Monsieur is, and
that you should only have the remainder of the compliment of the hat that
is made to your barber or your secretary; as it happened to poor
Philopoemen, who arriving the first of all his company at an inn where he
was expected, the hostess, who knew him not, and saw him an unsightly
fellow, employed him to go help her maids a little to draw water, and
make a fire against Philopoemen’s coming; the gentlemen of his train
arriving presently after, and surprised to see him busy in this fine
employment, for he failed not to obey his landlady’s command, asked him
what he was doing there: “I am,” said he, “paying the penalty of my
ugliness.”  The other beauties belong to women; the beauty of stature is
the only beauty of men.  Where there is a contemptible stature, neither
the largeness and roundness of the forehead, nor the whiteness and
sweetness of the eyes, nor the moderate proportion of the nose, nor the
littleness of the ears and mouth, nor the evenness and whiteness of the
teeth, nor the thickness of a well-set brown beard, shining like the husk
of a chestnut, nor curled hair, nor the just proportion of the head, nor
a fresh complexion, nor a pleasing air of a face, nor a body without any
offensive scent, nor the just proportion of limbs, can make a handsome
man.  I am, as to the rest, strong and well knit; my face is not puffed,
but full, and my complexion betwixt jovial and melancholic, moderately
sanguine and hot,

          “Unde rigent setis mihi crura, et pectora villis;”

          [“Whence ‘tis my legs and breast bristle with hair.”
           --Martial, ii. 36, 5.]

my health vigorous and sprightly, even to a well advanced age, and rarely
troubled with sickness.  Such I was, for I do not now make any account of
myself, now that I am engaged in the avenues of old age, being already
past forty:

              “Minutatim vires et robur adultum
               Frangit, et in partem pejorem liquitur aetas:”

     [“Time by degrees breaks our strength and makes us grow feeble.
     --“Lucretius, ii.  1131.]

what shall be from this time forward, will be but a half-being, and no
more me: I every day escape and steal away from myself:

               “Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes.”

          [“Of the fleeting years each steals something from me.”
           --Horace, Ep., ii. 2.]

Agility and address I never had, and yet am the son of a very active and
sprightly father, who continued to be so to an extreme old age.  I have
scarce known any man of his condition, his equal in all bodily exercises,
as I have seldom met with any who have not excelled me, except in
running, at which I was pretty good.  In music or singing, for which I
have a very unfit voice, or to play on any sort of instrument, they could
never teach me anything.  In dancing, tennis, or wrestling, I could never
arrive to more than an ordinary pitch; in swimming, fencing, vaulting,
and leaping, to none at all.  My hands are so clumsy that I cannot even
write so as to read it myself, so that I had rather do what I have
scribbled over again, than take upon me the trouble to make it out.  I do
not read much better than I write, and feel that I weary my auditors
otherwise (I am) not a bad clerk.  I cannot decently fold up a letter,
nor could ever make a pen, or carve at table worth a pin, nor saddle a
horse, nor carry a hawk and fly her, nor hunt the dogs, nor lure a hawk,
nor speak to a horse.  In fine, my bodily qualities are very well suited
to those of my soul; there is nothing sprightly, only a full and firm
vigour: I am patient enough of labour and pains, but it is only when I go
voluntary to work, and only so long as my own desire prompts me to it:

          “Molliter austerum studio fallente laborem.”

          [“Study softly beguiling severe labour.”
           --Horace, Sat., ii. 2, 12.]

otherwise, if I am not allured with some pleasure, or have other guide
than my own pure and free inclination, I am good for nothing: for I am of
a humour that, life and health excepted, there is nothing for which I
will bite my nails, and that I will purchase at the price of torment of
mind and constraint:

                         “Tanti mihi non sit opaci
          Omnis arena Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum.”

     [“I would not buy rich Tagus sands so dear, nor all the gold that
     lies in the sea.”--Juvenal, Sat., iii. 54.]

Extremely idle, extremely given up to my own inclination both by nature
and art, I would as willingly lend a man my blood as my pains.  I have a
soul free and entirely its own, and accustomed to guide itself after its
own fashion; having hitherto never had either master or governor imposed
upon me: I have walked as far as I would, and at the pace that best
pleased myself; this is it that has rendered me unfit for the service of
others, and has made me of no use to any one but myself.

Nor was there any need of forcing my heavy and lazy disposition; for
being born to such a fortune as I had reason to be contented with (a
reason, nevertheless, that a thousand others of my acquaintance would
have rather made use of for a plank upon which to pass over in search of
higher fortune, to tumult and disquiet), and with as much intelligence as
I required, I sought for no more, and also got no more:

              “Non agimur tumidis velis Aquilone secundo,
               Non tamen adversis aetatem ducimus Austris
               Viribus, ingenio, specie, virtute, loco, re,
               Extremi primorum, extremis usque priores.”

     [“The northern wind does not agitate our sails; nor Auster trouble
     our course with storms.  In strength, talent, figure, virtue,
     honour, wealth, we are short of the foremost, but before the last.”
      --Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 201.]

I had only need of what was sufficient to content me: which nevertheless
is a government of soul, to take it right, equally difficult in all sorts
of conditions, and that, of custom, we see more easily found in want than
in abundance: forasmuch, peradventure, as according to the course of our
other passions, the desire of riches is more sharpened by their use than
by the need of them: and the virtue of moderation more rare than that of
patience; and I never had anything to desire, but happily to enjoy the
estate that God by His bounty had put into my hands.  I have never known
anything of trouble, and have had little to do in anything but the
management of my own affairs: or, if I have, it has been upon condition
to do it at my own leisure and after my own method; committed to my trust
by such as had a confidence in me, who did not importune me, and who knew
my humour; for good horsemen will make shift to get service out of a
rusty and broken-winded jade.

Even my infancy was trained up after a gentle and free manner, and exempt
from any rigorous subjection.  All this has helped me to a complexion
delicate and incapable of solicitude, even to that degree that I love to
have my losses and the disorders wherein I am concerned, concealed from
me.  In the account of my expenses, I put down what my negligence costs
me in feeding and maintaining it;

                              “Haec nempe supersunt,
               Quae dominum fallunt, quae prosunt furibus.”

               [“That overplus, which the owner knows not of,
               but which benefits the thieves”--Horace, Ep., i. 645]

I love not to know what I have, that I may be less sensible of my loss;
I entreat those who serve me, where affection and integrity are absent,
to deceive me with something like a decent appearance.  For want of
constancy enough to support the shock of adverse accidents to which we
are subject, and of patience seriously to apply myself to the management
of my affairs, I nourish as much as I can this in myself, wholly leaving
all to fortune “to take all things at the worst, and to resolve to bear
that worst with temper and patience”; that is the only thing I aim at,
and to which I apply my whole meditation.  In a danger, I do not so much
consider how I shall escape it, as of how little importance it is,
whether I escape it or no: should I be left dead upon the place, what
matter?  Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply
myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me.  I have no great
art to evade, escape from or force fortune, and by prudence to guide and
incline things to my own bias.  I have still less patience to undergo the
troublesome and painful care therein required; and the most uneasy
condition for me is to be suspended on urgent occasions, and to be
agitated betwixt hope and fear.

Deliberation, even in things of lightest moment, is very troublesome to
me; and I find my mind more put to it to undergo the various tumblings
and tossings of doubt and consultation, than to set up its rest and to
acquiesce in whatever shall happen after the die is thrown.  Few passions
break my sleep, but of deliberations, the least will do it.  As in roads,
I preferably avoid those that are sloping and slippery, and put myself
into the beaten track how dirty or deep soever, where I can fall no
lower, and there seek my safety: so I love misfortunes that are purely
so, that do not torment and tease me with the uncertainty of their
growing better; but that at the first push plunge me directly into the
worst that can be expected

                    “Dubia plus torquent mala.”

               [“Doubtful ills plague us worst.”
                --Seneca, Agamemnon, iii. 1, 29.]


In events I carry myself like a man; in conduct, like a child.  The fear
of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself.  The game is not worth
the candle.  The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor,
and the jealous man than the cuckold; and a man ofttimes loses more by
defending his vineyard than if he gave it up.  The lowest walk is the
safest; ‘tis the seat of constancy; you have there need of no one but
yourself; ‘tis there founded and wholly stands upon its own basis.  Has
not this example of a gentleman very well known, some air of philosophy
in it?  He married, being well advanced in years, having spent his youth
in good fellowship, a great talker and a great jeerer, calling to mind
how much the subject of cuckoldry had given him occasion to talk and
scoff at others.  To prevent them from paying him in his own coin, he
married a wife from a place where any one finds what he wants for his
money: “Good morrow, strumpet”; “Good morrow, cuckold”; and there was not
anything wherewith he more commonly and openly entertained those who came
to see him than with this design of his, by which he stopped the private
chattering of mockers, and blunted all the point from this reproach.

As to ambition, which is neighbour, or rather daughter, to presumption,
fortune, to advance me, must have come and taken me by the hand; for to
trouble myself for an uncertain hope, and to have submitted myself to all
the difficulties that accompany those who endeavour to bring themselves
into credit in the beginning of their progress, I could never have done
it:

                         “Spem pretio non emo.”

               [“I will not purchase hope with ready money,” (or),
               “I do not purchase hope at a price.”
                --Terence, Adelphi, ii. 3, 11.]

I apply myself to what I see and to what I have in my hand, and go not
very far from the shore,

               “Alter remus aquas, alter tibi radat arenas:”

     [“One oar plunging into the sea, the other raking the sands.”
      --Propertius, iii.  3, 23.]

and besides, a man rarely arrives at these advancements but in first
hazarding what he has of his own; and I am of opinion that if a man have
sufficient to maintain him in the condition wherein he was born and
brought up, ‘tis a great folly to hazard that upon the uncertainty of
augmenting it.  He to whom fortune has denied whereon to set his foot,
and to settle a quiet and composed way of living, is to be excused if he
venture what he has, because, happen what will, necessity puts him upon
shifting for himself:

               “Capienda rebus in malis praeceps via est:”

          [“A course is to be taken in bad cases.” (or),
          “A desperate case must have a desperate course.”
           ---Seneca, Agamemnon, ii. 1, 47.]

and I rather excuse a younger brother for exposing what his friends have
left him to the courtesy of fortune, than him with whom the honour of his
family is entrusted, who cannot be necessitous but by his own fault.
I have found a much shorter and more easy way, by the advice of the good
friends I had in my younger days, to free myself from any such ambition,
and to sit still:

          “Cui sit conditio dulcis sine pulvere palmae:”

     [“What condition can compare with that where one has gained the
     palm without the dust of the course.”--Horace,  Ep., i. I, 51.]

judging rightly enough of my own strength, that it was not capable of any
great matters; and calling to mind the saying of the late Chancellor
Olivier, that the French were like monkeys that swarm up a tree from
branch to branch, and never stop till they come to the highest, and there
shew their breech.

          “Turpe est, quod nequeas, capiti committere pondus,
          Et pressum inflexo mox dare terga genu.”

     [“It is a shame to load the head so that it cannot bear the
     burthen, and the knees give way.”--Propertius, iii. 9, 5.]

I should find the best qualities I have useless in this age; the facility
of my manners would have been called weakness and negligence; my faith
and conscience, scrupulosity and superstition; my liberty and freedom
would have been reputed troublesome, inconsiderate, and rash.  Ill luck
is good for something.  It is good to be born in a very depraved age; for
so, in comparison of others, you shall be reputed virtuous good cheap; he
who in our days is but a parricide and a sacrilegious person is an honest
man and a man of honour:

              “Nunc, si depositum non inficiatur amicus,
               Si reddat veterem cum tota aerugine follem,
               Prodigiosa fides, et Tuscis digna libellis,
               Quaeque coronata lustrari debeat agna:”

     [“Now, if a friend does not deny his trust, but restores the old
     purse with all its rust; ‘tis a prodigious faith, worthy to be
     enrolled in amongst the Tuscan annals, and a crowned lamb should be
     sacrificed to such exemplary integrity.”--Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 611.]

and never was time or place wherein princes might propose to themselves
more assured or greater rewards for virtue and justice.  The first who
shall make it his business to get himself into favour and esteem by those
ways, I am much deceived if he do not and by the best title outstrip his
competitors: force and violence can do something, but not always all.
We see merchants, country justices, and artisans go cheek by jowl with
the best gentry in valour and military knowledge: they perform honourable
actions, both in public engagements and private quarrels; they fight
duels, they defend towns in our present wars; a prince stifles his
special recommendation, renown, in this crowd; let him shine bright in
humanity, truth, loyalty, temperance, and especially injustice; marks
rare, unknown, and exiled; ‘tis by no other means but by the sole
goodwill of the people that he can do his business; and no other
qualities can attract their goodwill like those, as being of the greatest
utility to them:

               “Nil est tam populare, quam bonitas.”

     [“Nothing is so popular as an agreeable manner (goodness).”
      --Cicero, Pro Ligar., c. 12.]

By this standard I had been great and rare, just as I find myself now
pigmy and vulgar by the standard of some past ages, wherein, if no other
better qualities concurred, it was ordinary and common to see a man
moderate in his revenges, gentle in resenting injuries, religious of his
word, neither double nor supple, nor accommodating his faith to the will
of others, or the turns of the times: I would rather see all affairs go
to wreck and ruin than falsify my faith to secure them.  For as to this
new virtue of feigning and dissimulation, which is now in so great
credit, I mortally hate it; and of all vices find none that evidences so
much baseness and meanness of spirit.  ‘Tis a cowardly and servile humour
to hide and disguise a man’s self under a visor, and not to dare to show
himself what he is; ‘tis by this our servants are trained up to
treachery; being brought up to speak what is not true, they make no
conscience of a lie.  A generous heart ought not to belie its own
thoughts; it will make itself seen within; all there is good, or at least
human.  Aristotle  reputes it the office of magnanimity openly and
professedly to love and hate; to judge and speak with all freedom; and
not to value the approbation or dislike of others in comparison of truth.
Apollonius said it was for slaves to lie, and for freemen to speak truth:
‘tis the chief and fundamental part of virtue; we must love it for
itself.  He who speaks truth because he is obliged so to do, and because
it serves him, and who is not afraid to lie when it signifies nothing to
anybody, is not sufficiently true.  My soul naturally abominates lying,
and hates the very thought of it.  I have an inward shame and a sharp
remorse, if sometimes a lie escapes me: as sometimes it does, being
surprised by occasions that allow me no premeditation.  A man must not
always tell all, for that were folly: but what a man says should be what
he thinks, otherwise ‘tis knavery.  I do not know what advantage men
pretend to by eternally counterfeiting and dissembling, if not never to
be believed when they speak the truth; it may once or twice pass with
men; but to profess the concealing their thought, and to brag, as some of
our princes have done, that they would burn their shirts if they knew
their true intentions, which was a saying of the ancient Metellius of
Macedon; and that they who know not how to dissemble know not how to
rule, is to give warning to all who have anything to do with them, that
all they say is nothing but lying and deceit:

          “Quo quis versutior et callidior est, hoc invisior et
          suspectior, detracto opinione probitatis:”

     [“By how much any one is more subtle and cunning, by so much is he
     hated and suspected, the opinion of his integrity being withdrawn.”
      --Cicero, De Off., ii. 9.]

it were a great simplicity in any one to lay any stress either on the
countenance or word of a man who has put on a resolution to be always
another thing without than he is within, as Tiberius did; and I cannot
conceive what part such persons can have in conversation with men, seeing
they produce nothing that is received as true: whoever is disloyal to
truth is the same to falsehood also.

Those of our time who have considered in the establishment of the duty of
a prince the good of his affairs only, and have preferred that to the
care of his faith and conscience, might have something to say to a prince
whose affairs fortune had put into such a posture that he might for ever
establish them by only once breaking his word: but it will not go so;
they often buy in the same market; they make more than one peace and
enter into more than one treaty in their lives.  Gain tempts to the first
breach of faith, and almost always presents itself, as in all other ill
acts, sacrileges, murders, rebellions, treasons, as being undertaken for
some kind of advantage; but this first gain has infinite mischievous
consequences, throwing this prince out of all correspondence and
negotiation, by this example of infidelity.  Soliman, of the Ottoman
race, a race not very solicitous of keeping their words or compacts,
when, in my infancy, he made his army land at Otranto, being informed
that Mercurino de’ Gratinare and the inhabitants of Castro were detained
prisoners, after having surrendered the place, contrary to the articles
of their capitulation, sent orders to have them set at liberty, saying,
that having other great enterprises in hand in those parts, the
disloyalty, though it carried a show of present utility, would for the
future bring on him a disrepute and distrust of infinite prejudice.

Now, for my part, I had rather be troublesome and indiscreet than a
flatterer and a dissembler.  I confess that there may be some mixture of
pride and obstinacy in keeping myself so upright and open as I do,
without any consideration of others; and methinks I am a little too free,
where I ought least to be so, and that I grow hot by the opposition of
respect; and it may be also, that I suffer myself to follow the
propension of my own nature for want of art; using the same liberty,
speech, and countenance towards great persons, that I bring with me from
my own house: I am sensible how much it declines towards incivility and
indiscretion but, besides that I am so bred, I have not a wit supple
enough to evade a sudden question, and to escape by some evasion, nor to
feign a truth, nor memory enough to retain it so feigned; nor, truly,
assurance enough to maintain it, and so play the brave out of weakness.
And therefore it is that I abandon myself to candour, always to speak as
I think, both by complexion and design, leaving the event to fortune.
Aristippus was wont to say, that the principal benefit he had extracted
from philosophy was that he spoke freely and openly to all.

Memory is a faculty of wonderful use, and without which the judgment can
very hardly perform its office: for my part I have none at all.  What any
one will propound to me, he must do it piecemeal, for to answer a speech
consisting of several heads I am not able.  I could not receive a
commission by word of mouth without a note-book.  And when I have a
speech of consequence to make, if it be long, I am reduced to the
miserable necessity of getting by heart word for word, what I am to say;
I should otherwise have neither method nor assurance, being in fear that
my memory would play me a slippery trick.  But this way is no less
difficult to me than the other; I must have three hours to learn three
verses.  And besides, in a work of a man’s own, the liberty and authority
of altering the order, of changing a word, incessantly varying the
matter, makes it harder to stick in the memory of the author.  The more
I mistrust it the worse it is; it serves me best by chance; I must
solicit it negligently; for if I press it, ‘tis confused, and after it
once begins to stagger, the more I sound it, the more it is perplexed;
it serves me at its own hour, not at mine.

And the same defect I find in my memory, I find also in several other
parts.  I fly command, obligation, and constraint; that which I can
otherwise naturally and easily do, if I impose it upon myself by an
express and strict injunction, I cannot do it.  Even the members of my
body, which have a more particular jurisdiction of their own, sometimes
refuse to obey me, if I enjoin them a necessary service at a certain
hour.  This tyrannical and compulsive appointment baffles them; they
shrink up either through fear or spite, and fall into a trance.  Being
once in a place where it is looked upon as barbarous discourtesy not to
pledge those who drink to you, though I had there all liberty allowed me,
I tried to play the good fellow, out of respect to the ladies who were
there, according to the custom of the country; but there was sport enough
for this pressure and preparation, to force myself contrary to my custom
and inclination, so stopped my throat that I could not swallow one drop,
and was deprived of drinking so much as with my meat; I found myself
gorged, and my, thirst quenched by the quantity of drink that my
imagination had swallowed.  This effect is most manifest in such as have
the most vehement and powerful imagination: but it is natural,
notwithstanding, and there is no one who does not in some measure feel
it.  They offered an excellent archer, condemned to die, to save his
life, if he would show some notable proof of his art, but he refused to
try, fearing lest the too great contention of his will should make him
shoot wide, and that instead of saving his life, he should also lose the
reputation he had got of being a good marksman.  A man who thinks of
something else, will not fail to take over and over again the same number
and measure of steps, even to an inch, in the place where he walks; but
if he made it his business to measure and count them, he will find that
what he did by nature and accident, he cannot so exactly do by design.

My library, which is a fine one among those of the village type, is
situated in a corner of my house; if anything comes into my head that I
have a mind to search or to write, lest I should forget it in but going
across the court, I am fain to commit it to the memory of some other.
If I venture in speaking to digress never so little from my subject, I am
infallibly lost, which is the reason that I keep myself, in discourse,
strictly close.  I am forced to call the men who serve me either by the
names of their offices or their country; for names are very hard for me
to remember.  I can tell indeed that there are three syllables, that it
has a harsh sound, and that it begins or ends with such a letter; but
that’s all; and if I should live long, I do not doubt but I should forget
my own name, as some others have done.  Messala Corvinus was two years
without any trace of memory, which is also said of Georgius Trapezuntius.
For my own interest, I often meditate what a kind of life theirs was, and
if, without this faculty, I should have enough left to support me with
any manner of ease; and prying narrowly into it, I fear that this
privation, if absolute, destroys all the other functions of the soul:

          “Plenus rimarum sum, hac atque iliac perfluo.”

          [“I’m full of chinks, and leak out every way.”
           --Ter., Eunuchus, ii. 2, 23.]

It has befallen me more than once to forget the watchword I had three
hours before given or received, and to forget where I had hidden my
purse; whatever Cicero is pleased to say, I help myself to lose what I
have a particular care to lock safe up:

          “Memoria certe non modo Philosophiam sed omnis
          vitae usum, omnesque artes, una maxime continet.”

     [“It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy,
     but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.”
      --Cicero, Acad., ii. 7.]

Memory is the receptacle and case of science: and therefore mine being so
treacherous, if I know little, I cannot much complain.  I know, in
general, the names of the arts, and of what they treat, but nothing more.
I turn over books; I do not study them.  What I retain I no longer
recognise as another’s; ‘tis only what my judgment has made its advantage
of, the discourses and imaginations in which it has been instructed: the
author, place, words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget; and
I am so excellent at forgetting, that I no less forget my own writings
and compositions than the rest.  I am very often quoted to myself, and am
not aware of it.  Whoever should inquire of me where I had the verses and
examples, that I have here huddled together, would puzzle me to tell him,
and yet I have not borrowed them but from famous and known authors, not
contenting myself that they were rich, if I, moreover, had them not from
rich and honourable hands, where there is a concurrence of authority with
reason.  It is no great wonder if my book run the same fortune that other
books do, if my memory lose what I have written as well as what I have
read, and what I give, as well as what I receive.

Besides the defect of memory, I have others which very much contribute to
my ignorance; I have a slow and heavy wit, the least cloud stops its
progress, so that, for example, I never propose to it any never so easy a
riddle that it could find out; there is not the least idle subtlety that
will not gravel me; in games, where wit is required, as chess, draughts,
and the like, I understand no more than the common movements.  I have a
slow and perplexed apprehension, but what it once apprehends, it
apprehends well, for the time it retains it.  My sight is perfect,
entire, and discovers at a very great distance, but is soon weary and
heavy at work, which occasions that I cannot read long, but am forced to
have one to read to me.  The younger Pliny  can inform such as have not
experimented it themselves, how important an impediment this is to those
who devote themselves to this employment.

There is no so wretched and coarse a soul, wherein some particular
faculty is not seen to shine; no soul so buried in sloth and ignorance,
but it will sally at one end or another; and how it comes to pass that a
man blind and asleep to everything else, shall be found sprightly, clear,
and excellent in some one particular effect, we are to inquire of our
masters: but the beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and
ready for all things; if not instructed, at least capable of being so;
which I say to accuse my own; for whether it be through infirmity or
negligence (and to neglect that which lies at our feet, which we have in
our hands, and what nearest concerns the use of life, is far from my
doctrine) there is not a soul in the world so awkward as mine, and so
ignorant of many common things, and such as a man cannot without shame
fail to know.  I must give some examples.

I was born and bred up in the country, and amongst husbandmen; I have had
business and husbandry in my own hands ever since my predecessors, who
were lords of the estate I now enjoy, left me to succeed them; and yet I
can neither cast accounts, nor reckon my counters: most of our current
money I do not know, nor the difference betwixt one grain and another,
either growing or in the barn, if it be not too apparent, and scarcely
can distinguish between the cabbage and lettuce in my garden.  I do not
so much as understand the names of the chief instruments of husbandry,
nor the most ordinary elements of agriculture, which the very children
know: much less the mechanic arts, traffic, merchandise, the variety and
nature of fruits, wines, and viands, nor how to make a hawk fly, nor to
physic a horse or a dog.  And, since I must publish my whole shame, ‘tis
not above a month ago, that I was trapped in my ignorance of the use of
leaven to make bread, or to what end it was to keep wine in the vat.
They conjectured of old at Athens,  an aptitude for the mathematics in
him they saw ingeniously bavin up a burthen of brushwood.  In earnest,
they would draw a quite contrary conclusion from me, for give me the
whole provision and necessaries of a kitchen, I should starve.  By these
features of my confession men may imagine others to my prejudice: but
whatever I deliver myself to be, provided it be such as I really am,
I have my end; neither will I make any excuse for committing to paper
such mean and frivolous things as these: the meanness of the subject
compells me to it.  They may, if they please, accuse my project, but not
my progress: so it is, that without anybody’s needing to tell me, I
sufficiently see of how little weight and value all this is, and the
folly of my design: ‘tis enough that my judgment does not contradict
itself, of which these are the essays.

              “Nasutus sis usque licet, sis denique nasus,
               Quantum noluerit ferre rogatus Atlas;
               Et possis ipsum to deridere Latinum,
               Non potes in nugas dicere plura mess,
               Ipse ego quam dixi: quid dentem dente juvabit
               Rodere?  carne opus est, si satur esse velis.
               Ne perdas operam; qui se mirantur, in illos
               Virus habe; nos haec novimus esse nihil.”

     [“Let your nose be as keen as it will, be all nose, and even a nose
     so great that Atlas will refuse to bear it: if asked, Could you even
     excel Latinus in scoffing; against my trifles you could say no more
     than I myself have said: then to what end contend tooth against
     tooth?  You must have flesh, if you want to be full; lose not your
     labour then; cast your venom upon those that admire themselves; I
     know already that these things are worthless.”--Mart., xiii. 2.]

I am not obliged not to utter absurdities, provided I am not deceived in
them and know them to be such: and to trip knowingly, is so ordinary with
me, that I seldom do it otherwise, and rarely trip by chance.  ‘Tis no
great matter to add ridiculous actions to the temerity of my humour,
since I cannot ordinarily help supplying it with those that are vicious.

I was present one day at Barleduc,  when King Francis II., for a memorial
of Rene, king of Sicily, was presented with a portrait he had drawn of
himself: why is it not in like manner lawful for every one to draw
himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?  I will not, therefore, omit
this blemish though very unfit to be published, which is irresolution; a
very great effect and very incommodious in the negotiations of the
affairs of the world; in doubtful enterprises, I know not which to
choose:

               “Ne si, ne no, nel cor mi suona intero.”

     [“My heart does not tell me either yes or no.”--Petrarch.]

I can maintain an opinion, but I cannot choose one.  By reason that in
human things, to what sect soever we incline, many appearances present
themselves that confirm us in it; and the philosopher Chrysippus said,
that he would of Zeno and Cleanthes, his masters, learn their doctrines
only; for, as to proofs and reasons, he should find enough of his own.
Which way soever I turn, I still furnish myself with causes, and
likelihood enough to fix me there; which makes me detain doubt and the
liberty of choosing, till occasion presses; and then, to confess the
truth, I, for the most part, throw the feather into the wind, as the
saying is, and commit myself to the mercy of fortune; a very light
inclination and circumstance carries me along with it.

         “Dum in dubio est animus, paulo momento huc atque
          Illuc impellitur.”

     [“While the mind is in doubt, in a short time it is impelled this
     way and that.”--Terence, Andr., i. 6, 32.]

The uncertainty of my judgment is so equally balanced in most
occurrences, that I could willingly refer it to be decided by the chance
of a die: and I observe, with great consideration of our human infirmity,
the examples that the divine history itself has left us of this custom of
referring to fortune and chance the determination of election in doubtful
things:

                    “Sors cecidit super Matthiam.”

               [“The lot fell upon Matthew.”--Acts i. 26.]

Human reason is a two-edged and dangerous sword: observe in the hands of
Socrates, her most intimate and familiar friend, how many several points
it has.  I am thus good for nothing but to follow and suffer myself to be
easily carried away with the crowd; I have not confidence enough in my
own strength to take upon me to command and lead; I am very glad to find
the way beaten before me by others.  If I must run the hazard of an
uncertain choice, I am rather willing to have it under such a one as is
more confident in his opinions than I am in mine, whose ground and
foundation I find to be very slippery and unsure.

Yet I do not easily change, by reason that I discern the same weakness in
contrary opinions:

               “Ipsa consuetudo assentiendi periculosa
               esse videtur, et lubrica;”

          [“The very custom of assenting seems to be dangerous
          and slippery.”--Cicero, Acad., ii. 21.]

especially in political affairs, there is a large field open for changes
and contestation:

         “Justa pari premitur veluti cum pondere libra,
          Prona, nec hac plus pane sedet, nec surgit ab illa.”

     [“As a just balance, pressed with equal weight, neither dips
     nor rises on either side.”--Tibullus, iv. 41.]

Machiavelli’s writings, for example, were solid enough for the subject,
yet were they easy enough to be controverted; and they who have done so,
have left as great a facility of controverting theirs; there was never
wanting in that kind of argument replies and replies upon replies, and as
infinite a contexture of debates as our wrangling lawyers have extended
in favour of long suits:

          “Caedimur et totidem plagis consumimus hostem;”

     [“We are slain, and with as many blows kill the enemy” (or),
     “It is a fight wherein we exhaust each other by mutual wounds.”
      --Horace, Epist., ii. 2, 97.]

the reasons have little other foundation than experience, and the variety
of human events presenting us with infinite examples of all sorts of
forms.  An understanding person of our times says: That whoever would, in
contradiction to our almanacs, write cold where they say hot, and wet
where they say dry, and always put the contrary to what they foretell; if
he were to lay a wager, he would not care which side he took, excepting
where no uncertainty could fall out, as to promise excessive heats at
Christmas, or extremity of cold at Midsummer.  I have the same opinion of
these political controversies; be on which side you will, you have as
fair a game to play as your adversary, provided you do not proceed so far
as to shock principles that are broad and manifest.  And yet, in my
conceit, in public affairs, there is no government so ill, provided it be
ancient and has been constant, that is not better than change and
alteration.

Our manners are infinitely corrupt, and wonderfully incline to the worse;
of our laws and customs there are many that are barbarous and monstrous
nevertheless, by reason of the difficulty of reformation, and the danger
of stirring things, if I could put something under to stop the wheel, and
keep it where it is, I would do it with all my heart:

              “Numquam adeo foedis, adeoque pudendis
               Utimur exemplis, ut non pejora supersint.”

          [“The examples we use are not so shameful and foul
          but that worse remain behind.”--Juvenal, viii. 183.]

The worst thing I find in our state is instability, and that our laws,
no more than our clothes, cannot settle in any certain form.  It is very
easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are
full of it: it is very easy to beget in a people a contempt of ancient
observances; never any man undertook it but he did it; but to establish a
better regimen in the stead of that which a man has overthrown, many who
have attempted it have foundered.  I very little consult my prudence in
my conduct; I am willing to let it be guided by the public rule.  Happy
the people who do what they are commanded, better than they who command,
without tormenting themselves as to the causes; who suffer themselves
gently to roll after the celestial revolution!  Obedience is never pure
nor calm in him who reasons and disputes.

In fine, to return to myself: the only thing by which I something esteem
myself, is that wherein never any man thought himself to be defective; my
recommendation is vulgar, common, and popular; for who ever thought he
wanted sense?  It would be a proposition that would imply a contradiction
in itself; ‘tis a disease that never is where it is discerned; ‘tis
tenacious and strong, but what the first ray of the patient’s sight
nevertheless pierces through and disperses, as the beams of the sun do
thick and obscure mists; to accuse one’s self would be to excuse in this
case, and to condemn, to absolve.  There never was porter or the silliest
girl, that did not think they had sense enough to do their business.
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength,
experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield
to none; and the reasons that proceed simply from the natural conclusions
of others, we think, if we had but turned our thoughts that way, we
should ourselves have found out as well as they.  Knowledge, style, and
such parts as we see in others’ works, we are soon aware of, if they
excel our own: but for the simple products of the understanding, every
one thinks he could have found out the like in himself, and is hardly
sensible of the weight and difficulty, if not (and then with much ado) in
an extreme and incomparable distance.  And whoever should be able clearly
to discern the height of another’s judgment, would be also able to raise
his own to the same pitch.  So that it is a sort of exercise, from which
a man is to expect very little praise; a kind of composition of small
repute.  And, besides, for whom do you write?  The learned, to whom the
authority appertains of judging books, know no other value but that of
learning, and allow of no other proceeding of wit but that of erudition
and art: if you have mistaken one of the Scipios for another, what is all
the rest you have to say worth?  Whoever is ignorant of Aristotle,
according to their rule, is in some sort ignorant of himself; vulgar
souls cannot discern the grace and force of a lofty and delicate style.
Now these two sorts of men take up the world.  The third sort into whose
hands you fall, of souls that are regular and strong of themselves, is so
rare, that it justly has neither name nor place amongst us; and ‘tis so
much time lost to aspire unto it, or to endeavour to please it.

‘Tis commonly said that the justest portion Nature has given us of her
favours is that of sense; for there is no one who is not contented with
his share: is it not reason? whoever should see beyond that, would see
beyond his sight.  I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does
not think the same of his own?  One of the best proofs I have that mine
are so is the small esteem I have of myself; for had they not been very
well assured, they would easily have suffered themselves to have been
deceived by the peculiar affection I have to myself, as one that places
it almost wholly in myself, and do not let much run out.  All that others
distribute amongst an infinite number of friends and acquaintance, to
their glory and grandeur, I dedicate to the repose of my own mind and to
myself; that which escapes thence is not properly by my direction:

               “Mihi nempe valere et vivere doctus.”

               [“To live and to do well for myself.”
                --Lucretius, v. 959.]

Now I find my opinions very bold and constant in condemning my own
imperfection.  And, to say the truth, ‘tis a subject upon which I
exercise my judgment as much as upon any other.  The world looks always
opposite; I turn my sight inwards, and there fix and employ it.  I have
no other business but myself, I am eternally meditating upon myself,
considering and tasting myself.  Other men’s thoughts are ever wandering
abroad, if they will but see it; they are still going forward:

               “Nemo in sese tentat descendere;”

          [“No one thinks of descending into himself.”
           --Persius, iv. 23.]

for my part, I circulate in myself.  This capacity of trying the truth,
whatever it be, in myself, and this free humour of not over easily
subjecting my belief, I owe principally to myself; for the strongest and
most general imaginations I have are those that, as a man may say, were
born with me; they are natural and entirely my own.  I produced them
crude and simple, with a strong and bold production, but a little
troubled and imperfect; I have since established and fortified them with
the authority of others and the sound examples of the ancients, whom I
have found of the same judgment: they have given me faster hold, and a
more manifest fruition and possession of that I had before embraced.  The
reputation that every one pretends to of vivacity and promptness of wit,
I seek in regularity; the glory they pretend to from a striking and
signal action, or some particular excellence, I claim from order,
correspondence, and tranquillity of opinions and manners:

     “Omnino si quidquam est decorum, nihil est profecto magis, quam
     aequabilitas universae vitae, tum singularum actionum, quam
     conservare non possis, si, aliorum naturam imitans, omittas tuam.”

     [“If anything be entirely decorous, nothing certainly can be more so
     than an equability alike in the whole life and in every particular
     action; which thou canst not possibly observe if, imitating other
     men’s natures, thou layest aside thy own.”--Cicero, De Of., i. 31.]

Here, then, you see to what degree I find myself guilty of this first
part, that I said was the vice of presumption.  As to the second, which
consists in not having a sufficient esteem for others, I know not whether
or no I can so well excuse myself; but whatever comes on’t I am resolved
to speak the truth.  And whether, peradventure, it be that the continual
frequentation I have had with the humours of the ancients, and the idea
of those great souls of past ages, put me out of taste both with others
and myself, or that, in truth, the age we live in produces but very
indifferent things, yet so it is that I see nothing worthy of any great
admiration.  Neither, indeed, have I so great an intimacy with many men
as is requisite to make a right judgment of them; and those with whom my
condition makes me the most frequent, are, for the most part, men who
have little care of the culture of the soul, but that look upon honour as
the sum of all blessings, and valour as the height of all perfection.

What I see that is fine in others I very readily commend and esteem: nay,
I often say more in their commendation than I think they really deserve,
and give myself so far leave to lie, for I cannot invent a false subject:
my testimony is never wanting to my friends in what I conceive deserves
praise, and where a foot is due I am willing to give them a foot and a
half; but to attribute to them qualities that they have not, I cannot do
it, nor openly defend their imperfections.  Nay, I frankly give my very
enemies their due testimony of honour; my affection alters, my judgment
does not, and I never confound my animosity with other circumstances that
are foreign to it; and I am so jealous of the liberty of my judgment that
I can very hardly part with it for any passion whatever.  I do myself a
greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.  This
commendable and generous custom is observed of the Persian nation, that
they spoke of their mortal enemies and with whom they were at deadly war,
as honourably and justly as their virtues deserved.

I know men enough that have several fine parts; one wit, another courage,
another address, another conscience, another language: one science,
another, another; but a generally great man, and who has all these brave
parts together, or any one of them to such a degree of excellence that we
should admire him or compare him with those we honour of times past, my
fortune never brought me acquainted with; and the greatest I ever knew, I
mean for the natural parts of the soul, was Etienne De la Boetie; his was
a full soul indeed, and that had every way a beautiful aspect: a soul of
the old stamp, and that had produced great effects had his fortune been
so pleased, having added much to those great natural parts by learning
and study.

But how it comes to pass I know not, and yet it is certainly so, there is
as much vanity and weakness of judgment in those who profess the greatest
abilities, who take upon them learned callings and bookish employments as
in any other sort of men whatever; either because more is required and
expected from them, and that common defects are excusable in them, or
because the opinion they have of their own learning makes them more bold
to expose and lay themselves too open, by which they lose and betray
themselves.  As an artificer more manifests his want of skill in a rich
matter he has in hand, if he disgrace the work by ill handling and
contrary to the rules required, than in a matter of less value; and men
are more displeased at a disproportion in a statue of gold than in one of
plaster; so do these when they advance things that in themselves and in
their place would be good; for they make use of them without discretion,
honouring their memories at the expense of their understandings, and
making themselves ridiculous by honouring Cicero, Galen, Ulpian, and St.
Jerome alike.

I willingly fall again into the discourse of the vanity of our education,
the end of which is not to render us good and wise, but learned, and she
has obtained it.  She has not taught us to follow and embrace virtue and
prudence, but she has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology; we
know how to decline Virtue, if we know not how to love it; if we do not
know what prudence is really and in effect, and by experience, we have it
however by jargon and heart: we are not content to know the extraction,
kindred, and alliances of our neighbours; we desire, moreover, to have
them our friends and to establish a correspondence and intelligence with
them; but this education of ours has taught us definitions, divisions,
and partitions of virtue, as so many surnames and branches of a
genealogy, without any further care of establishing any familiarity or
intimacy betwixt her and us.  It has culled out for our initiatory
instruction not such books as contain the soundest and truest opinions,
but those that speak the best Greek and Latin, and by their fine words
has instilled into our fancy the vainest humours of antiquity.

A good education alters the judgment and manners; as it happened to
Polemon, a lewd and debauched young Greek, who going by chance to hear
one of Xenocrates’ lectures, did not only observe the eloquence and
learning of the reader, and not only brought away, the knowledge of some
fine matter, but a more manifest and more solid profit, which was the
sudden change and reformation of his former life.  Whoever found such an
effect of our discipline?

                              “Faciasne, quod olim
               Mutatus Polemon? ponas insignia morbi
               Fasciolas, cubital, focalia; potus ut ille
               Dicitur ex collo furtim carpsisse coronas,
               Postquam est impransi correptus voce magistri?”

     [“Will you do what reformed Polemon did of old? will you lay aside
     the joys of your disease, your garters, capuchin, muffler, as he in
     his cups is said to have secretly torn off his garlands from his
     neck when he heard what that temperate teacher said?”
      --Horace, Sat., ii. 3, 253]

That seems to me to be the least contemptible condition of men, which by
its plainness and simplicity is seated in the lowest degree, and invites
us to a more regular course.  I find the rude manners and language of
country people commonly better suited to the rule and prescription of
true philosophy, than those of our philosophers themselves:

     “Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit.”

     [“The vulgar are so much the wiser, because they only know what
     is needful for them to know.”--Lactantms, Instit. Div., iii. 5.]

The most remarkable men, as I have judged by outward appearance (for to
judge of them according to my own method, I must penetrate a great deal
deeper), for soldiers and military conduct, were the Duc de Guise, who
died at Orleans, and the late Marshal Strozzi; and for men of great
ability and no common virtue, Olivier and De l’Hospital, Chancellors of
France.  Poetry, too, in my opinion, has flourished in this age of ours;
we have abundance of very good artificers in the trade: D’Aurat, Beza,
Buchanan, L’Hospital, Montdore, Turnebus; as to the French poets, I
believe they raised their art to the highest pitch to which it can ever
arrive; and in those parts of it wherein Ronsard and Du Bellay excel, I
find them little inferior to the ancient perfection.  Adrian Turnebus
knew more, and what he did know, better than any man of his time, or long
before him.  The lives of the last Duke of Alva, and of our Constable de
Montmorency, were both of them great and noble, and that had many rare
resemblances of fortune; but the beauty and glory of the death of the
last, in the sight of Paris and of his king, in their service, against
his nearest relations, at the head of an army through his conduct
victorious, and by a sudden stroke, in so extreme old age, merits
methinks to be recorded amongst the most remarkable events of our times.
As also the constant goodness, sweetness of manners, and conscientious
facility of Monsieur de la Noue, in so great an injustice of armed
parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, and robbery), wherein he
always kept up the reputation of a great and experienced captain.

I have taken a delight to publish in several places the hopes I have of
Marie de Gournay le Jars,

     [She was adopted by him in 1588.  See Leon Feugere’s Mademoiselle
     de Gournay: ‘Etude sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages’.]

my adopted daughter; and certainly beloved by me more than paternally,
and enveloped in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of
my own being: I have no longer regard to anything in this world but her.
And if a man may presage from her youth, her soul will one day be capable
of very great things; and amongst others, of the perfection of that
sacred friendship, to which we do not read that any of her sex could ever
yet arrive; the sincerity and solidity of her manners are already
sufficient for it, and her affection towards me more than superabundant,
and such, in short, as that there is nothing more to be wished, if not
that the apprehension she has of my end, being now five-and-fifty years
old, might not so much afflict her.  The judgment she made of my first
Essays, being a woman, so young, and in this age, and alone in her own
country; and the famous vehemence wherewith she loved me, and desired my
acquaintance solely from the esteem she had thence of me, before she ever
saw my face, is an incident very worthy of consideration.

Other virtues have had little or no credit in this age; but valour is
become popular by our civil wars; and in this, we have souls brave even
to perfection, and in so great number that the choice is impossible to
make.

This is all of extraordinary and uncommon grandeur that has hitherto
arrived at my knowledge.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A generous heart ought not to belie its own thoughts
     A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry
     Against my trifles you could say no more than I myself have said
     Agitated betwixt hope and fear
     All defence shows a face of war
     Almanacs
     An advantage in judgment we yield to none
     Any old government better than change and alteration
     Anything becomes foul when commended by the multitude
     Appetite runs after that it has not
     Armed parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, robbery)
     Authority to be dissected by the vain fancies of men
     Authority which a graceful presence and a majestic mien beget
     Be on which side you will, you have as fair a game to play
     Beauty of stature is the only beauty of men
     Believing Heaven concerned at our ordinary actions
     Better at speaking than writing.  Motion and action animate word
     Caesar’s choice of death: “the shortest”
      Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful
     Content: more easily found in want than in abundance
     Curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge
     Defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy
     Desire of riches is more sharpened by their use than by the need
     Difficulty gives all things their estimation
     Doubt whether those (old writings) we have be not the worst
     Doubtful ills plague us worst
     Endeavouring to be brief, I become obscure
     Engaged in the avenues of old age, being already past forty
     Every government has a god at the head of it
     Executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices
     Fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself
     Folly to hazard that upon the uncertainty of augmenting it.
     For who ever thought he wanted sense?
     Fortune rules in all things
     Gentleman would play the fool to make a show of defence
     Happen to do anything commendable, I attribute it to fortune
     Having too good an opinion of our own worth
     He should discern in himself, as well as in others
     He who is only a good man that men may know it
     How many worthy men have we known to survive their reputation
     Humble out of pride
     I am very glad to find the way beaten before me by others
     I find myself here fettered by the laws of ceremony
     I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead
     I have not a wit supple enough to evade a sudden question
     I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment
     I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing
     Ill luck is good for something
     Imitating other men’s natures, thou layest aside thy own
     Immoderate either seeking or evading glory or reputation
     Impunity pass with us for justice
     It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part
     Knowledge of others, wherein the honour consists
     Lessen the just value of things that I possess
     License of judgments is a great disturbance to great affairs
     Lose what I have a particular care to lock safe up
     Loses more by defending his vineyard than if he gave it up.
     More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment
     More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak
     My affection alters, my judgment does not
     No way found  to tranquillity that is good in common
     Not being able to govern events, I govern myself
     Not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark
     Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself
     Nothing is more confident than a bad poet
     Nothing that so poisons as flattery
     Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who reasons and disputes
     Occasions of the least lustre are ever the most dangerous
     Of the fleeting years each steals something from me
     Office of magnanimity openly and professedly to love and hate
     Old age: applaud the past and condemn the present
     One may be humble out of pride
     Our will is more obstinate by being opposed
     Overvalue things, because they are foreign, absent
     Philopoemen: paying the penalty of my ugliness.
     Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit
     Poets
     Possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules
     Prolong his life also prolonged and augmented his pain
     Regret so honourable a post, where necessity must make them bold
     Sense: no one who is not contented with his share
     Setting too great a value upon ourselves
     Setting too little a value upon others
     She who only refuses, because ‘tis forbidden, consents
     Short of the foremost, but before the last
     Souls that are regular and strong of themselves are rare
     Suicide: a morsel that is to be swallowed without chewing
     Take all things at the worst, and to resolve to bear that worst
     The age we live in produces but very indifferent things
     The reward of a thing well done is to have done it
     The satiety of living, inclines a man to desire to die
     There is no reason that has not its contrary
     They do not see my heart, they see but my countenance
     Those who can please and hug themselves in what they do
     Tis far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it
     To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t
     Voice and determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance
     Vulgar reports and opinions that drive us on
     We believe we do not believe
     We consider our death as a very great thing
     We have not the thousandth part of ancient writings
     We have taught the ladies to blush
     We set too much value upon ourselves
     Were more ambitious of a great reputation than of a good one
     What a man says should be what he thinks
     What he did by nature and accident, he cannot do by design
     What is more accidental than reputation?
     What, shall so much knowledge be lost
     Wiser who only know what is needful for them to know






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 12.

XVIII.    Of giving the lie.
XIX.      Of liberty of conscience.
XX.       That we taste nothing pure.
XXI.      Against idleness.
XXII.     Of Posting.
XXIII.    Of ill means employed to a good end.
XXIV.     Of the Roman grandeur.
XXV.      Not to counterfeit being sick.
XXVI.     Of thumbs.
XXVII.    Cowardice the mother of cruelty.
XXVIII.   All things have their season.
XXIX.     Of virtue.
XXX.      Of a monstrous child.
XXXI.     Of anger.



CHAPTER XVIII

OF GIVING THE LIE

Well, but some one will say to me, this design of making a man’s self the
subject of his writing, were indeed excusable in rare and famous men, who
by their reputation had given others a curiosity to be fully informed of
them.  It is most true, I confess and know very well, that a mechanic
will scarce lift his eyes from his work to look at an ordinary man,
whereas a man will forsake his business and his shop to stare at an
eminent person when he comes into a town.  It misbecomes any other to
give his own character, but him who has qualities worthy of imitation,
and whose life and opinions may serve for example: Caesar and Xenophon
had a just and solid foundation whereon to found their narrations, the
greatness of their own performances; and were to be wished that we had
the journals of Alexander the Great, the commentaries that Augustus,
Cato, Sylla, Brutus, and others left of their actions; of such persons
men love and contemplate the very statues even in copper and marble.
This remonstrance is very true; but it very little concerns me:

         “Non recito cuiquam, nisi amicis, idque coactus;
          Non ubivis, coramve quibuslibet, in medio qui
          Scripta foro recitant, sunt multi, quique lavantes.”

     [“I repeat my poems only to my friends, and when bound to do so;
     not before every one and everywhere; there are plenty of reciters
     in the open market-place and at the baths.”--Horace, sat. i. 4, 73.]

I do not here form a statue to erect in the great square of a city, in a
church, or any public place:

         “Non equidem hoc studeo, bullatis ut mihi nugis,
          Pagina turgescat......
          Secreti loquimur:”

     [“I study not to make my pages swell with empty trifles;
     you and I are talking in private.”--Persius, Sat., v. 19.]

‘tis for some corner of a library, or to entertain a neighbour,
a kinsman, a friend, who has a mind to renew his acquaintance and
familiarity with me in this image of myself.  Others have been encouraged
to speak of themselves, because they found the subject worthy and rich;
I, on the contrary, am the bolder, by reason the subject is so poor and
sterile that I cannot be suspected of ostentation.  I judge freely of the
actions of others; I give little of my own to judge of, because they are
nothing: I do not find so much good in myself, that I cannot tell it
without blushing.

What contentment would it not be to me to hear any one thus relate to me
the manners, faces, countenances, the ordinary words and fortunes of my
ancestors? how attentively should I listen to it!  In earnest, it would
be evil nature to despise so much as the pictures of our friends and
predecessors, the fashion of their clothes and arms.  I preserve their
writing, seal, and a particular sword they wore, and have not thrown the
long staves my father used to carry in his hand, out of my closet.

          “Paterna vestis, et annulus, tanto charior est
          posteris, quanto erga parentes major affectus.”

     [“A father’s garment and ring is by so much dearer to his posterity,
     as there is the greater affection towards parents.”
      --St. Aug., De Civat. Dei, i. 13.]

If my posterity, nevertheless, shall be of another mind, I shall be
avenged on them; for they cannot care less for me than I shall then do
for them.  All the traffic that I have in this with the public is, that I
borrow their utensils of writing, which are more easy and most at hand;
and in recompense shall, peradventure, keep a pound of butter in the
market from melting in the sun:--[Montaigne semi-seriously speculates on
the possibility of his MS. being used to wrap up butter.]

              “Ne toga cordyllis, ne penula desit olivis;
               Et laxas scombris saepe dabo tunicas;”

     [“Let not wrappers be wanting to tunny-fish, nor olives;
     and I shall supply loose coverings to mackerel.”
      --Martial, xiii.  I, I.]

And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining
myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts?  In
moulding this figure upon myself, I have been so often constrained to
temper and compose myself in a right posture, that the copy is truly
taken, and has in some sort formed itself; painting myself for others,
I represent myself in a better colouring than my own natural complexion.
I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ‘tis a book
consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my
life, and whose business is not designed for others, as that of all other
books is.  In giving myself so continual and so exact an account of
myself, have I lost my time?  For they who sometimes cursorily survey
themselves only, do not so strictly examine themselves, nor penetrate so
deep, as he who makes it his business, his study, and his employment, who
intends a lasting record, with all his fidelity, and with all his force:
The most delicious pleasures digested within, avoid leaving any trace of
themselves, and avoid the sight not only of the people, but of any other
person.  How often has this work diverted me from troublesome thoughts?
and all that are frivolous should be reputed so.  Nature has presented us
with a large faculty of entertaining ourselves alone; and often calls us
to it, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but chiefly
and mostly to ourselves.  That I may habituate my fancy even to meditate
in some method and to some end, and to keep it from losing itself and
roving at random, ‘tis but to give to body and to record all the little
thoughts that present themselves to it.  I give ear to my whimsies,
because I am to record them.  It often falls out, that being displeased
at some action that civility and reason will not permit me openly to
reprove, I here disgorge myself, not without design of public
instruction: and also these poetical lashes,

                   “Zon zur l’oeil, ion sur le groin,
                    Zon zur le dos du Sagoin,”

     [“A slap on his eye, a slap on his snout, a slap on Sagoin’s
     back.”--Marot. Fripelippes, Valet de Marot a Sagoin.]


imprint themselves better upon paper than upon the flesh.  What if I
listen to books a little more attentively than ordinary, since I watch if
I can purloin anything that may adorn or support my own?  I have not at
all studied to make a book; but I have in some sort studied because I had
made it; if it be studying to scratch and pinch now one author, and then
another, either by the head or foot, not with any design to form opinions
from them, but to assist, second, and fortify those I already have
embraced. But whom shall we believe in the report he makes of himself in
so corrupt an age?  considering there are so few, if, any at all, whom we
can believe when speaking of others, where there is less interest to lie.
The first thing done in the corruption of manners is banishing truth;
for, as Pindar says, to be true is the beginning of a great virtue, and
the first article that Plato requires in the governor of his Republic.
The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man
persuades another man to believe; as we generally give the name of money
not only to pieces of the dust alloy, but even to the false also, if they
will pass.  Our nation has long been reproached with this vice; for
Salvianus of Marseilles, who lived in the time of the Emperor
Valentinian, says that lying and forswearing themselves is with the
French not a vice, but a way of speaking.  He who would enhance this
testimony, might say that it is now a virtue in them; men form and
fashion themselves to it as to an exercise of honour; for dissimulation
is one of the most notable qualities of this age.

I have often considered whence this custom that we so religiously observe
should spring, of being more highly offended with the reproach of a vice
so familiar to us than with any other, and that it should be the highest
insult that can in words be done us to reproach us with a lie.  Upon
examination, I find that it is natural most to defend the defects with
which we are most tainted.  It seems as if by resenting and being moved
at the accusation, we in some sort acquit ourselves of the fault; though
we have it in effect, we condemn it in outward appearance.  May it not
also be that this reproach seems to imply cowardice and feebleness of
heart? of which can there be a more manifest sign than to eat a man’s own
words--nay, to lie against a man’s own knowledge?  Lying is a base vice;
a vice that one of the ancients portrays in the most odious colours when
he says, “that it is to manifest a contempt of God, and withal a fear of
men.”  It is not possible more fully to represent the horror, baseness,
and irregularity of it; for what can a man imagine more hateful and
contemptible than to be a coward towards men, and valiant against his
Maker?  Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one
another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public
society.  ‘Tis the only way by which we communicate our thoughts and
wills; ‘tis the interpreter of the soul, and if it deceive us, we no
longer know nor have further tie upon one another; if that deceive us, it
breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government.
Certain nations of the newly discovered Indies (I need not give them
names, seeing they are no more; for, by wonderful and unheardof example,
the desolation of that conquest has extended to the utter abolition of
names and the ancient knowledge of places) offered to their gods human
blood, but only such as was drawn from the tongue and ears, to expiate
for the sin of lying, as well heard as pronounced.  That good fellow of
Greece--[Plutarch, Life of Lysander, c. 4.]--said that children are
amused with toys and men with words.

As to our diverse usages of giving the lie, and the laws of honour in
that case, and the alteration they have received, I defer saying what I
know of them to another time, and shall learn, if I can, in the
meanwhile, at what time the custom took beginning of so exactly weighing
and measuring words, and of making our honour interested in them; for it
is easy to judge that it was not anciently amongst the Romans and Greeks.
And it has often seemed to me strange to see them rail at and give one
another the lie without any quarrel.  Their laws of duty steered some
other course than ours.  Caesar is sometimes called thief, and sometimes
drunkard, to his teeth.  We see the liberty of invective they practised
upon one another, I mean the greatest chiefs of war of both nations,
where words are only revenged with words, and do not proceed any farther.




CHAPTER XIX

OF LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE

‘Tis usual to see good intentions, if carried on without moderation, push
men on to very vicious effects.  In this dispute which has at this time
engaged France in a civil war, the better and the soundest cause no doubt
is that which maintains the ancient religion and government of the
kingdom.  Nevertheless, amongst the good men of that party (for I do not
speak of those who only make a pretence of it, either to execute their
own particular revenges or to gratify their avarice, or to conciliate the
favour of princes, but of those who engage in the quarrel out of true
zeal to religion and a holy desire to maintain the peace and government
of their country), of these, I say, we see many whom passion transports
beyond the bounds of reason, and sometimes inspires with counsels that
are unjust and violent, and, moreover, rash.

It is certain that in those first times, when our religion began to gain
authority with the laws, zeal armed many against all sorts of pagan
books, by which the learned suffered an exceeding great loss, a disorder
that I conceive to have done more prejudice to letters than all the
flames of the barbarians.  Of this Cornelius Tacitus is a very good
testimony; for though the Emperor Tacitus, his kinsman, had, by express
order, furnished all the libraries in the world with it, nevertheless one
entire copy could not escape the curious examination of those who desired
to abolish it for only five or six idle clauses that were contrary to our
belief.

They had also the trick easily to lend undue praises to all the emperors
who made for us, and universally to condemn all the actions of those who
were adversaries, as is evidently manifest in the Emperor Julian,
surnamed the Apostate,

     [The character of the Emperor Julian was censured, when Montaigne
     was at Rome in 1581, by the Master of the Sacred Palace, who,
     however, as Montaigne tells us in his journal (ii.  35), referred it
     to his conscience to alter what he should think in bad taste.  This
     Montaigne did not do, and this chapter supplied Voltaire with the
     greater part of the praises he bestowed upon the Emperor.--Leclerc.]

who was, in truth, a very great and rare man, a man in whose soul
philosophy was imprinted in the best characters, by which he professed to
govern all his actions; and, in truth, there is no sort of virtue of
which he has not left behind him very notable examples: in chastity (of
which the whole of his life gave manifest proof) we read the same of him
that was said of Alexander and Scipio, that being in the flower of his
age, for he was slain by the Parthians at one-and-thirty, of a great many
very beautiful captives, he would not so much as look upon one.  As to
his justice, he took himself the pains to hear the parties, and although
he would out of curiosity inquire what religion they were of,
nevertheless, the antipathy he had to ours never gave any counterpoise to
the balance.  He made himself several good laws, and repealed a great
part of the subsidies and taxes levied by his predecessors.

We have two good historians who were eyewitnesses of his actions: one of
whom, Marcellinus, in several places of his history sharply reproves an
edict of his whereby he interdicted all Christian rhetoricians and
grammarians to keep school or to teach, and says he could wish that act
of his had been buried in silence: it is probable that had he done any
more severe thing against us, he, so affectionate as he was to our party,
would not have passed it over in silence.  He was indeed sharp against
us, but yet no cruel enemy; for our own people tell this story of him,
that one day, walking about the city of Chalcedon, Maris, bishop of the
place; was so bold as to tell him that he was impious, and an enemy to
Christ, at which, they say, he was no further moved than to reply,
“Go, poor wretch, and lament the loss of thy eyes,” to which the bishop
replied again, “I thank Jesus Christ for taking away my sight, that I may
not see thy impudent visage,” affecting in that, they say, a
philosophical patience.  But this action of his bears no comparison to
the cruelty that he is said to have exercised against us.  “He was,” says
Eutropius,  my other witness, “an enemy to Christianity,  but without
putting his hand to blood.”  And, to return to his justice, there is
nothing in that whereof he can be accused, the severity excepted he
practised in the beginning of his reign against those who had followed
the party of Constantius, his predecessor.  As to his sobriety, he lived
always a soldier-like life; and observed a diet and routine, like one
that prepared and inured himself to the austerities of war.  His
vigilance was such, that he divided the night into three or four parts,
of which the least was dedicated to sleep; the rest was spent either in
visiting the state of his army and guards in person, or in study; for
amongst other rare qualities, he was very excellent in all sorts of
learning.  ‘Tis said of Alexander the Great, that being in bed, for fear
lest sleep should divert him from his thoughts and studies, he had always
a basin set by his bedside, and held one of his hands out with a ball of
copper in it, to the end, that, beginning to fall asleep, and his fingers
leaving their hold, the ball by falling into the basin, might awake him.
But the other had his soul so bent upon what he had a mind to do, and so
little disturbed with fumes by reason of his singular abstinence, that he
had no need of any such invention.  As to his military experience, he was
excellent in all the qualities of a great captain, as it was likely he
should, being almost all his life in a continual exercise of war, and
most of that time with us in France, against the Germans and Franks: we
hardly read of any man who ever saw more dangers, or who made more
frequent proofs of his personal valour.

His death has something in it parallel with that of Epaminondas, for he
was wounded with an arrow, and tried to pull it out, and had done so, but
that, being edged, it cut and disabled his hand.  He incessantly called
out that they should carry him again into the heat of the battle, to
encourage his soldiers, who very bravely disputed the fight without him,
till night parted the armies.  He stood obliged to his philosophy for the
singular contempt he had for his life and all human things.  He had a
firm belief of the immortality of souls.

In matter of religion he was wrong throughout, and was surnamed the
Apostate for having relinquished ours: nevertheless, the opinion seems to
me more probable, that he had never thoroughly embraced it, but had
dissembled out of obedience to the laws, till he came to the empire.
He was in his own so superstitious, that he was laughed at for it by
those of his own time, of the same opinion, who jeeringly said, that had
he got the victory over the Parthians, he had destroyed the breed of oxen
in the world to supply his sacrifices.  He was, moreover, besotted with
the art of divination, and gave authority to all sorts of predictions.
He said, amongst other things at his death, that he was obliged to the
gods, and thanked them, in that they would not cut him off by surprise,
having long before advertised him of the place and hour of his death, nor
by a mean and unmanly death, more becoming lazy and delicate people; nor
by a death that was languishing, long, and painful; and that they had
thought him worthy to die after that noble manner, in the progress of his
victories, in the flower of his glory.  He had a vision like that of
Marcus Brutus, that first threatened him in Gaul, and afterward appeared
to him in Persia just before his death.  These words that some make him
say when he felt himself wounded: “Thou hast overcome, Nazarene”; or as
others, “Content thyself, Nazarene”; would hardly have been omitted, had
they been believed, by my witnesses, who, being present in the army, have
set down to the least motions and words of his end; no more than certain
other miracles that are reported about it.

And to return to my subject, he long nourished, says Marcellinus,
paganism in his heart; but all his army being Christians, he durst not
own it.  But in the end, seeing himself strong enough to dare to discover
himself, he caused the temples of the gods to be thrown open, and did his
uttermost to set on foot and to encourage idolatry.  Which the better to
effect, having at Constantinople found the people disunited, and also the
prelates of the church divided amongst themselves, having convened them
all before him, he earnestly admonished them to calm those civil
dissensions, and that every one might freely, and without fear, follow
his own religion.  Which he the more sedulously solicited, in hope that
this licence would augment the schisms and factions of their division,
and hinder the people from reuniting, and consequently fortifying
themselves against him by their unanimous intelligence and concord;
having experienced by the cruelty of some Christians, that there is no
beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man; these are very
nearly his words.

Wherein this is very worthy of consideration, that the Emperor Julian
made use of the same receipt of liberty of conscience to inflame the
civil dissensions that our kings do to extinguish them.  So that a man
may say on one side, that to give the people the reins to entertain every
man his own opinion, is to scatter and sow division, and, as it were, to
lend a hand to augment it, there being no legal impediment or restraint
to stop or hinder their career; but, on the other side, a man may also
say, that to give the people the reins to entertain every man his own
opinion, is to mollify and appease them by facility and toleration, and
to dull the point which is whetted and made sharper by singularity,
novelty, and difficulty: and I think it is better for the honour of the
devotion of our kings, that not having been able to do what they would,
they have made a show of being willing to do what they could.




CHAPTER XX

THAT WE TASTE NOTHING PURE

The feebleness of our condition is such that things cannot, in their
natural simplicity and purity, fall into our use; the elements that we
enjoy are changed, and so ‘tis with metals; and gold must be debased with
some other matter to fit it for our service.  Neither has virtue, so
simple as that which Aristo, Pyrrho, and also the Stoics, made the end of
life; nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture
useful to it.  Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one
exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience:

                         “Medio de fonte leporum,
          Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis fioribus angat.”

     [“From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is
     bitter, which even in flowers destroys.”--Lucretius, iv. 1130.]

Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it;
would you not say that it is dying of pain?  Nay, when we frame the image
of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful
epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness,
‘morbidezza’: a great testimony of their consanguinity and
consubstantiality.  The most profound joy has more of severity than
gaiety, in it.  The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the
grave than of the merry:

               “Ipsa felicitas, se nisi temperat, premit.”

          [“Even felicity, unless it moderate itself, oppresses?”
           --Seneca, Ep. 74.]

Pleasure chews and grinds us; according to the old Greek verse, which
says that the gods sell us all the goods they give us; that is to say,
that they give us nothing pure and perfect, and that we do not purchase
but at the price of some evil.

Labour and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless,
by I know not what natural conjunction.  Socrates says, that some god
tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being
able to do it; he bethought him at least to couple them by the tail.
Metrodorus said, that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure.  I
know not whether or no he intended anything else by that saying; but for
my part, I am of opinion that there is design, consent, and complacency
in giving a man’s self up to melancholy. I say, that besides ambition,
which may also have a stroke in the business, there is some shadow of
delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very
lap of melancholy.  Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?

                    “Est quaedam flere voluptas;”

               [“‘Tis a certain kind of pleasure to weep.”
                --Ovid, Trist., iv.  3, 27.]

and one Attalus in Seneca says, that the memory of our lost friends is as
grateful to us, as bitterness in wine, when too old, is to the palate:

                    “Minister vetuli, puer, Falerni
                    Inger’ mi calices amariores”--

     [“Boy, when you pour out old Falernian wine, the bitterest put
     into my bowl.”--Catullus, xxvii. I.]

and as apples that have a sweet tartness.

Nature discovers this confusion to us; painters hold that the same
motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for
laughter too; and indeed, before the one or the other be finished, do but
observe the painter’s manner of handling, and you will be in doubt to
which of the two the design tends; and the extreme of laughter does at
last bring tears:

               “Nullum sine auctoramento malum est.”

          [“No evil is without its compensation.”--Seneca, Ep., 69.]

When I imagine man abounding with all the conveniences that are to be
desired (let us put the case that all his members were always seized with
a pleasure like that of generation, in its most excessive height) I feel
him melting under the weight of his delight, and see him utterly unable
to support so pure, so continual, and so universal a pleasure.  Indeed,
he is running away whilst he is there, and naturally makes haste to
escape, as from a place where he cannot stand firm, and where he is
afraid of sinking.

When I religiously confess myself to myself, I find that the best virtue
I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that Plato, in
his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and loyal a lover of virtue of
that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear
close to himself and he did so no doubt--would have heard some jarring
note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself.  Man is
wholly and throughout but patch and motley.  Even the laws of justice
themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that
Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to
clear the law of all inconveniences:

          “Omne magnum exemplum habet aliquid ex iniquo,
          quod contra singulos utilitate publics rependitur,”

     [“Every great example has in it some mixture of injustice, which
     recompenses the wrong done to particular men by the public utility.”
      --Annals, xiv. 44.]

says Tacitus.

It is likewise true, that for the use of life and the service of public
commerce, there may be some excesses in the purity and perspicacity of
our minds; that penetrating light has in it too much of subtlety and
curiosity: we must a little stupefy and blunt them to render them more
obedient to example and practice, and a little veil and obscure them, the
better to proportion them to this dark and earthly life.  And therefore
common and less speculative souls are found to be more proper for and
more successful in the management of affairs, and the elevated and
exquisite opinions of philosophy unfit for business.  This sharp vivacity
of soul, and the supple and restless volubility attending it, disturb our
negotiations.  We are to manage human enterprises more superficially and
roughly, and leave a great part to fortune; it is not necessary to
examine affairs with so much subtlety and so deep: a man loses himself in
the consideration of many contrary lustres, and so many various forms:

     “Volutantibus res inter se pugnantes, obtorpuerunt.... animi.”

     [“Whilst they considered of things so indifferent in themselves,
     they were astonished, and knew not what to do.”--Livy, xxxii. 20.]

‘Tis what the ancients say of Simonides, that by reason his imagination
suggested to him, upon the question King Hiero had put to him--[What God
was.--Cicero, De Nat.  Deor., i.  22.]--(to answer which he had had many
days for thought), several sharp and subtle considerations, whilst he
doubted which was the most likely, he totally despaired of the truth.

He who dives into and in his inquisition comprehends all circumstances
and consequences, hinders his election: a little engine well handled is
sufficient for executions, whether of less or greater weight.  The best
managers are those who can worst give account how they are so; while the
greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose; I know one of
this sort of men, and a most excellent discourser upon all sorts of good
husbandry, who has miserably let a hundred thousand livres yearly revenue
slip through his hands; I know another who talks, who better advises than
any man of his counsel, and there is not in the world a fairer show of
soul and understanding than he has; nevertheless, when he comes to the
test, his servants find him quite another thing; not to make any mention
of his misfortunes.




CHAPTER XXI

AGAINST IDLENESS

The Emperor Vespasian, being sick of the disease whereof he died, did not
for all that neglect to inquire after the state of the empire, and even
in bed continually despatched very many affairs of great consequence; for
which, being reproved by his physician, as a thing prejudicial to his
health, “An emperor,” said he, “must die standing.”  A fine saying, in my
opinion, and worthy a great prince.  The Emperor Adrian since made use of
the same words, and kings should be often put in mind of them, to make
them know that the great office conferred upon them of the command of so
many men, is not an employment of ease; and that there is nothing can so
justly disgust a subject, and make him unwilling to expose himself to
labour and danger for the service of his prince, than to see him, in the
meantime, devoted to his ease and frivolous amusement, and to be
solicitous of his preservation who so much neglects that of his people.

Whoever will take upon him to maintain that ‘tis better for a prince to
carry on his wars by others, than in his own person, fortune will furnish
him with examples enough of those whose lieutenants have brought great
enterprises to a happy issue, and of those also whose presence has done
more hurt than good: but no virtuous and valiant prince can with patience
endure so dishonourable councils.  Under colour of saving his head, like
the statue of a saint, for the happiness of his kingdom, they degrade him
from and declare him incapable of his office, which is military
throughout: I know one--[Probably Henry IV.]--who had much rather be
beaten, than to sleep whilst another fights for him; and who never
without jealousy heard of any brave thing done even by his own officers
in his absence.  And Soliman I. said, with very good reason, in my
opinion, that victories obtained without the master were never complete.
Much more would he have said that that master ought to blush for shame,
to pretend to any share in the honour, having contributed nothing to the
work, but his voice and thought; nor even so much as these, considering
that in such work as that, the direction and command that deserve honour
are only such as are given upon the spot, and in the heat of the
business.  No pilot performs his office by standing still.  The princes
of the Ottoman family, the chiefest in the world in military fortune,
have warmly embraced this opinion, and Bajazet II., with his son, who
swerved from it, spending their time in science and other retired
employments, gave great blows to their empire; and Amurath III., now
reigning, following their example, begins to find the same.  Was it not
Edward III., King of England, who said this of our Charles V.: “There
never was king who so seldom put on his armour, and yet never king who
gave me so much to do.”  He had reason to think it strange, as an effect
of chance more than of reason.  And let those seek out some other to join
with them than me, who will reckon the Kings of Castile and Portugal
amongst the warlike and magnanimous conquerors, because at the distance
of twelve hundred leagues from their lazy abode, by the conduct of their
captains, they made themselves masters of both Indies; of which it has to
be known if they would have had even the courage to go and in person
enjoy them.

The Emperor Julian said yet further, that a philosopher and a brave man
ought not so much as to breathe; that is to say, not to allow any more to
bodily necessities than what we cannot refuse; keeping the soul and body
still intent and busy about honourable, great, and virtuous things.  He
was ashamed if any one in public saw him spit, or sweat (which is said by
some, also, of the Lacedaemonian young men, and which Xenophon says of
the Persian), forasmuch as he conceived that exercise, continual labour,
and sobriety, ought to have dried up all those superfluities.  What
Seneca says will not be unfit for this place; which is, that the ancient
Romans kept their youth always standing, and taught them nothing that
they were to learn sitting.

‘Tis a generous desire to wish to die usefully and like a man, but the
effect lies not so much in our resolution as in our good fortune; a
thousand have proposed to themselves in battle, either to overcome or to
die, who have failed both in the one and the other, wounds and
imprisonment crossing their design and compelling them to live against
their will.  There are diseases that overthrow even our desires, and our
knowledge.  Fortune ought not to second the vanity of the Roman legions,
who bound themselves by oath, either to overcome or die:

     “Victor, Marce Fabi, revertar ex acie: si fallo, Jovem patrem,
     Gradivumque Martem aliosque iratos invoco deos.”

     [“I will return, Marcus Fabius, a conqueror, from the fight:
     and if I fail, I invoke Father Jove, Mars Gradivus, and the
     other angry gods.”--Livy, ii. 45.]

The Portuguese say that in a certain place of their conquest of the
Indies, they met with soldiers who had condemned themselves, with
horrible execrations, to enter into no other composition but either to
cause themselves to be slain, or to remain victorious; and had their
heads and beards shaved in token of this vow.  ‘Tis to much purpose for
us to hazard ourselves and to be obstinate: it seems as if blows avoided
those who present themselves too briskly to them, and do not willingly
fall upon those who too willingly seek them, and so defeat them of their
design.  Such there have been, who, after having tried all ways, not
having been able with all their endeavour to obtain the favour of dying
by the hand of the enemy, have been constrained, to make good their
resolution of bringing home the honour of victory or of losing their
lives, to kill themselves even in the heat of battle.  Of which there are
other examples, but this is one: Philistus, general of the naval army of
Dionysius the younger against the Syracusans, presented them battle which
was sharply disputed, their forces being equal: in this engagement, he
had the better at the first, through his own valour: but the Syracusans
drawing about his gally to environ him, after having done great things in
his own person to disengage himself and hoping for no relief, with his
own hand he took away the life he had so liberally, and in vain, exposed
to the enemy.

Mule Moloch, king of Fez, who lately won against Sebastian, king of
Portugal, the battle so famous for the death of three kings, and for the
transmission of that great kingdom to the crown of Castile, was extremely
sick when the Portuguese entered in an hostile manner into his dominions;
and from that day forward grew worse and worse, still drawing nearer to
and foreseeing his end; yet never did man better employ his own
sufficiency more vigorously and bravely than he did upon this occasion.
He found himself too weak to undergo the pomp and ceremony of entering.
into his camp, which after their manner is very magnificent, and
therefore resigned that honour to his brother; but this was all of the
office of a general that he resigned; all the rest of greatest utility
and necessity he most, exactly and gloriously performed in his own
person; his body lying upon a couch, but his judgment and courage upright
and firm to his last gasp, and in some sort beyond it.  He might have
wasted his enemy, indiscreetly advanced into his dominions, without
striking a blow; and it was a very unhappy occurrence, that for want of a
little life or somebody to substitute in the conduct of this war and the
affairs of a troubled state, he was compelled to seek a doubtful and
bloody victory, having another by a better and surer way already in his
hands.  Notwithstanding, he wonderfully managed the continuance of his
sickness in consuming the enemy, and in drawing them far from the
assistance of the navy and the ports they had on the coast of Africa,
even till the last day of his life, which he designedly reserved for this
great battle.  He arranged his battalions in a circular form, environing
the Portuguese army on every side, which round circle coming to close in
and to draw up close together, not only hindered them in the conflict
(which was very sharp through the valour of the young invading king),
considering that they had every way to present a front, but prevented
their flight after the defeat, so that finding all passages possessed and
shut up by the enemy, they were constrained to close up together again:

          “Coacerventurque non solum caede, sed etiam fuga,”

          [“Piled up not only in slaughter but in flight.”]

and there they were slain in heaps upon one another, leaving to the
conqueror a very bloody and entire victory.  Dying, he caused himself to
be carried and hurried from place to place where most need was, and
passing along the files, encouraged the captains and soldiers one after
another; but a corner of his main battalions being broken, he was not to
be held from mounting on horseback with his sword in his hand; he did his
utmost to break from those about him, and to rush into the thickest of
the battle, they all the while withholding him, some by the bridle, some
by his robe, and others by his stirrups.  This last effort totally
overwhelmed the little life he had left; they again laid him upon his
bed; but coming to himself, and starting as it were out of his swoon, all
other faculties failing, to give his people notice that they were to
conceal his death the most necessary command he had then to give, that
his soldiers might not be discouraged (with the news) he expired with his
finger upon his mouth, the ordinary sign of keeping silence.  Who ever
lived so long and so far into death? whoever died so erect, or more like
a man?

The most extreme degree of courageously treating death, and the most
natural, is to look upon it not only without astonishment but without
care, continuing the wonted course of life even into it, as Cato did,
who entertained himself in study, and went to sleep, having a violent and
bloody death in his heart, and the weapon in his hand with which he was
resolved to despatch himself.




CHAPTER XXII

OF POSTING

I have been none of the least able in this exercise, which is proper for
men of my pitch, well-knit and short; but I give it over; it shakes us
too much to continue it long.  I was at this moment reading,  that King
Cyrus, the better to have news brought him from all parts of the empire,
which was of a vast extent, caused it to be tried how far a horse could
go in a day without baiting, and at that distance appointed men, whose
business it was to have horses always in readiness, to mount those who
were despatched to him; and some say, that this swift way of posting is
equal to that of the flight of cranes.

Caesar says, that Lucius Vibullius Rufus, being in great haste to carry
intelligence to Pompey, rode night and day, still taking fresh horses for
the greater diligence and speed; and he himself, as Suetonius reports,
travelled a hundred miles a day in a hired coach; but he was a furious
courier, for where the rivers stopped his way he passed them by swimming,
without turning out of his way to look for either bridge or ford.
Tiberius Nero, going to see his brother Drusus, who was sick in Germany,
travelled two hundred miles in four-and-twenty hours, having three
coaches.  In the war of the Romans against King Antiochus, T. Sempronius
Gracchus, says Livy:

         “Per dispositos equos prope incredibili celeritate
          ab Amphissa tertio die Pellam pervenit.”

     [“By pre-arranged relays of horses, he, with an almost incredible
     speed, rode in three days from Amphissa to Pella.”
      --Livy, xxxvii. 7.]

And it appears that they were established posts, and not horses purposely
laid in upon this occasion.

Cecina’s invention to send back news to his family was much more quick,
for he took swallows along with him from home, and turned them out
towards their nests when he would send back any news; setting a mark of
some colour upon them to signify his meaning, according to what he and
his people had before agreed upon.

At the theatre at Rome masters of families carried pigeons in their
bosoms to which they tied letters when they had a mind to send any orders
to their people at home; and the pigeons were trained up to bring back an
answer.  D. Brutus made use of the same device when besieged in Modena,
and others elsewhere have done the same.

In Peru they rode post upon men, who took them upon their shoulders in a
certain kind of litters made for that purpose, and ran with such agility
that, in their full speed, the first couriers transferred their load to
the second without making any stop.

I understand that the Wallachians, the grand Signior’s couriers, perform
wonderful journeys, by reason they have liberty to dismount the first
person they meet upon the road, giving him their own tired horses; and
that to preserve themselves from being weary, they gird themselves
straight about the middle with a broad girdle;  but I could never find
any benefit from this.




CHAPTER XXIII

OF ILL MEANS EMPLOYED TO A GOOD END

There is wonderful relation and correspondence in this universal
government of the works of nature, which very well makes it appear that
it is neither accidental nor carried on by divers masters.  The diseases
and conditions of our bodies are, in like manner, manifest in states and
governments; kingdoms and republics are founded, flourish, and decay with
age as we do.  We are subject to a repletion of humours, useless and
dangerous: whether of those that are good (for even those the physicians
are afraid of; and seeing we have nothing in us that is stable, they say
that a too brisk and vigorous perfection of health must be abated by art,
lest our nature, unable to rest in any certain condition, and not having
whither to rise to mend itself, make too sudden and too disorderly a
retreat; and therefore prescribe wrestlers to purge and bleed, to qualify
that superabundant health), or else a repletion of evil humours, which is
the ordinary cause of sickness.  States are very often sick of the like
repletion, and various sorts of purgations have commonly been applied.
Some times a great multitude of families are turned out to clear the
country, who seek out new abodes elsewhere and encroach upon others.
After this manner our ancient Franks came from the remotest part of
Germany to seize upon Gaul, and to drive thence the first inhabitants;
so was that infinite deluge of men made up who came into Italy under the
conduct of Brennus and others; so the Goths and Vandals, and also the
people who now possess Greece, left their native country to go settle
elsewhere, where they might have more room; and there are scarce two or
three little corners in the world that have not felt the effect of such
removals.  The Romans by this means erected their colonies; for,
perceiving their city to grow immeasurably populous, they eased it of the
most unnecessary people, and sent them to inhabit and cultivate the lands
conquered by them; sometimes also they purposely maintained wars with
some of their enemies, not only to keep their own men in action, for fear
lest idleness, the mother of corruption, should bring upon them some
worse inconvenience:

              “Et patimur longae pacis mala; saevior armis
               Luxuria incumbit.”

     [“And we suffer the ills of a long peace; luxury is more pernicious
     than war.”--Juvenal, vi. 291.]

but also to serve for a blood-letting to their Republic, and a little to
evaporate the too vehement heat of their youth, to prune and clear the
branches from the stock too luxuriant in wood; and to this end it was
that they maintained so long a war with Carthage.

In the treaty of Bretigny, Edward III., king of England, would not, in
the general peace he then made with our king, comprehend the controversy
about the Duchy of Brittany, that he might have a place wherein to
discharge himself of his soldiers, and that the vast number of English he
had brought over to serve him in his expedition here might not return
back into England.  And this also was one reason why our King Philip
consented to send his son John upon a foreign expedition, that he might
take along with him a great number of hot young men who were then in his
pay.

There--are many in our times who talk at this rate, wishing that
this hot emotion that is now amongst us might discharge itself in some
neighbouring war, for fear lest all the peccant humours that now reign in
this politic body of ours may diffuse themselves farther, keep the fever
still in the height, and at last cause our total ruin; and, in truth, a
foreign is much more supportable than a civil war, but I do not believe
that God will favour so unjust a design as to offend and quarrel with
others for our own advantage:

              “Nil mihi tam valde placeat, Rhamnusia virgo,
               Quod temere invitis suscipiatur heris.”

     [“Rhamnusian virgin, let nothing ever so greatly please me which is
     taken without justice from the unwilling owners”
      --Catullus, lxviii. 77.]

And yet the weakness of our condition often pushes us upon the necessity
of making use of ill means to a good end.  Lycurgus, the most perfect
legislator that ever was, virtuous and invented this very unjust practice
of making the helots, who were their slaves, drunk by force, to the end
that the Spartans, seeing them so lost and buried in wine, might abhor
the excess of this vice.  And yet those were still more to blame who of
old gave leave that criminals, to what sort of death soever condemned,
should be cut up alive by the physicians, that they might make a true
discovery of our inward parts, and build their art upon greater
certainty; for, if we must run into excesses, it is more excusable to do
it for the health of the soul than that of the body; as the Romans
trained up the people to valour and the contempt of dangers and death by
those furious spectacles of gladiators and fencers, who, having to fight
it out to the last, cut, mangled, and killed one another in their
presence:

         “Quid vesani aliud sibi vult ars impia ludi,
          Quid mortes juvenum, quid sanguine pasta voluptas?”

     [“What other end does the impious art of the gladiators propose to
     itself, what the slaughter of young men, what pleasure fed with
     blood.”--Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, ii. 643.]

and this custom continued till the Emperor Theodosius’ time:

         “Arripe dilatam tua, dux, in tempora famam,
          Quodque patris superest, successor laudis habeto
          Nullus in urbe cadat, cujus sit poena voluptas....
          Jam solis contenta feris, infamis arena
          Nulla cruentatis homicidia ludat in armis.”

     [“Prince, take the honours delayed for thy reign, and be successor
     to thy fathers; henceforth let none at Rome be slain for sport.  Let
     beasts’ blood stain the infamous arena, and no more homicides be
     there acted.”--Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, ii. 643.]

It was, in truth, a wonderful example, and of great advantage for the
training up the people, to see every day before their eyes a hundred; two
hundred, nay, a thousand couples of men armed against one another, cut
one another to pieces with so great a constancy of courage, that they
were never heard to utter so much as one syllable of weakness or
commiseration; never seen to turn their backs, nor so much as to make one
cowardly step to evade a blow, but rather exposed their necks to the
adversary’s sword and presented themselves to receive the stroke; and
many of them, when wounded to death, have sent to ask the spectators if
they were satisfied with their behaviour, before they lay down to die
upon the place.  It was not enough for them to fight and to die bravely,
but cheerfully too; insomuch that they were hissed and cursed if they
made any hesitation about receiving their death.  The very girls
themselves set them on:

              “Consurgit ad ictus,
               Et, quoties victor ferrum jugulo inserit, illa
               Delicias ait esse suas, pectusque jacentis
               Virgo modesta jubet converso pollice rumpi.”

     [“The modest virgin is so delighted with the sport, that she
     applauds the blow, and when the victor bathes his sword in his
     fellow’s throat, she says it is her pleasure, and with turned thumb
     orders him to rip up the bosom of the prostrate victim.”
      --Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, ii. 617.]

The first Romans only condemned criminals to this example: but they
afterwards employed innocent slaves in the work, and even freemen too,
who sold themselves to this purpose, nay, moreover, senators and knights
of Rome, and also women:

         “Nunc caput in mortem vendunt, et funus arena,
          Atque hostem sibi quisque parat, cum bella quiescunt.”

     [“They sell themselves to death and the circus, and, since the wars
     are ceased, each for himself a foe prepares.”
      --Manilius, Astron., iv. 225.]

              “Hos inter fremitus novosque lusus....
               Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri,
               Et pugnas capit improbus viriles;”


     [“Amidst these tumults and new sports, the tender sex, unskilled in
     arms, immodestly engaged in manly fights.”
      --Statius, Sylv., i. 6, 51.]

which I should think strange and incredible, if we were not accustomed
every day to see in our own wars many thousands of men of other nations,
for money to stake their blood and their lives in quarrels wherein they
have no manner of concern.




CHAPTER XXIV

OF THE ROMAN GRANDEUR

I will only say a word or two of this infinite argument, to show the
simplicity of those who compare the pitiful greatness of these times with
that of Rome.  In the seventh book of Cicero’s Familiar Epistles (and let
the grammarians put out that surname of familiar if they please, for in
truth it is not very suitable; and they who, instead of familiar, have
substituted “ad Familiares,” may gather something to justify them for so
doing out of what Suetonius says in the Life of Caesar, that there was a
volume of letters of his “ad Familiares “) there is one directed to
Caesar, then in Gaul, wherein Cicero repeats these words, which were in
the end of another letter that Caesar had written to him: “As to what
concerns Marcus Furius, whom you have recommended to me, I will make him
king of Gaul, and if you would have me advance any other friend of yours
send him to me.”  It was no new thing for a simple citizen of Rome, as
Caesar then was, to dispose of kingdoms, for he took away that of King
Deiotarus from him to give it to a gentleman of the city of Pergamus,
called Mithridates; and they who wrote his Life record several cities
sold by him; and Suetonius says, that he had once from King Ptolemy three
millions and six hundred thousand crowns, which was very like selling him
his own kingdom:

          “Tot Galatae, tot Pontus, tot Lydia, nummis.”

          [“So much for Galatia, so much for Pontus,
          so much for Lydia.”--Claudius in Eutrop., i. 203.]

Marcus Antonius said, that the greatness of the people of Rome was not
so much seen in what they took, as in what they gave; and, indeed, some
ages before Antonius, they had dethroned one amongst the rest with so
wonderful authority, that in all the Roman history I have not observed
anything that more denotes the height of their power.  Antiochus
possessed all Egypt, and was, moreover, ready to conquer Cyprus and other
appendages of that empire: when being upon the progress of his victories,
C. Popilius came to him from the Senate, and at their first meeting
refused to take him by the hand, till he had first read his letters,
which after the king had read, and told him he would consider of them,
Popilius made a circle about him with his cane, saying:--“Return me an
answer, that I may carry it back to the Senate, before thou stirrest out
of this circle.”   Antiochus, astonished at the roughness of so positive
a command, after a little pause, replied, “I will obey the Senate’s
command.”  Then Popilius saluted him as friend of the Roman people.
To have renounced claim to so great a monarchy, and a course of such
successful fortune, from the effects of three lines in writing!  Truly
he had reason, as he afterwards did, to send the Senate word by his
ambassadors, that he had received their order with the same respect as if
it had come from the immortal gods.

All the kingdoms that Augustus gained by the right of war, he either
restored to those who had lost them or presented them to strangers.  And
Tacitus, in reference to this, speaking of Cogidunus, king of England,
gives us, by a marvellous touch, an instance of that infinite power: the
Romans, says he, were from all antiquity accustomed to leave the kings
they had subdued in possession of their kingdoms under their authority.

          “Ut haberent instruments servitutis et reges.”

     [“That they might have even kings to be their slaves.”
      --Livy, xlv. 13.]

‘Tis probable that Solyman, whom we have seen make a gift of Hungary and
other principalities, had therein more respect to this consideration than
to that he was wont to allege, viz., that he was glutted and overcharged
with so many monarchies and so much dominion, as his own valour and that
of his ancestors had acquired.




CHAPTER XXV

NOT TO COUNTERFEIT BEING SICK

There is an epigram in Martial, and one of the very good ones--for he has
of all sorts--where he pleasantly tells the story of Caelius, who, to
avoid making his court to some great men of Rome, to wait their rising,
and to attend them abroad, pretended to have the gout; and the better to
colour this anointed his legs, and had them lapped up in a great many
swathings, and perfectly counterfeited both the gesture and countenance
of a gouty person; till in the end, Fortune did him the kindness to make
him one indeed:

              “Quantum curs potest et ars doloris
               Desiit fingere Caelius podagram.”

     [“How great is the power of counterfeiting pain: Caelius has ceased
     to feign the gout; he has got it.”--Martial, Ep., vii. 39, 8.]

I think I have read somewhere in Appian a story like this, of one who to
escape the proscriptions of the triumvirs of Rome, and the better to be
concealed from the discovery of those who pursued him, having hidden
himself in a disguise, would yet add this invention, to counterfeit
having but one eye; but when he came to have a little more liberty, and
went to take off the plaster he had a great while worn over his eye, he
found he had totally lost the sight of it indeed, and that it was
absolutely gone.  ‘Tis possible that the action of sight was dulled from
having been so long without exercise, and that the optic power was wholly
retired into the other eye: for we evidently perceive that the eye we
keep shut sends some part of its virtue to its fellow, so that it will
swell and grow bigger; and so inaction, with the heat of ligatures and,
plasters, might very well have brought some gouty humour upon the
counterfeiter in Martial.

Reading in Froissart the vow of a troop of young English gentlemen, to
keep their left eyes bound up till they had arrived in France and
performed some notable exploit upon us, I have often been tickled with
this thought, that it might have befallen them as it did those others,
and they might have returned with but an eye a-piece to their mistresses,
for whose sakes they had made this ridiculous vow.

Mothers have reason to rebuke their children when they counterfeit having
but one eye, squinting, lameness, or any other personal defect; for,
besides that their bodies being then so tender, may be subject to take an
ill bent, fortune, I know not how, sometimes seems to delight in taking
us at our word; and I have heard several examples related of people who
have become really sick, by only feigning to be so.  I have always used,
whether on horseback or on foot, to carry a stick in my hand, and even to
affect doing it with an elegant air; many have threatened that this fancy
would one day be turned into necessity: if so, I should be the first of
my family to have the gout.

But let us a little lengthen this chapter, and add another anecdote
concerning blindness.  Pliny reports of one who, dreaming he was blind,
found himself so indeed in the morning without any preceding infirmity in
his eyes.  The force of imagination might assist in this case, as I have
said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to be of the same opinion; but it is more
likely that the motions which the body felt within, of which physicians,
if they please, may find out the cause, taking away his sight, were the
occasion of his dream.

Let us add another story, not very improper for this subject, which
Seneca relates in one of his epistles: “You know,” says he, writing to
Lucilius, “that Harpaste, my wife’s fool, is thrown upon me as an
hereditary charge, for I have naturally an aversion to those monsters;
and if I have a mind to laugh at a fool, I need not seek him far; I can
laugh at myself.  This fool has suddenly lost her sight: I tell you a
strange, but a very true thing she is not sensible that she is blind, but
eternally importunes her keeper to take her abroad, because she says the
house is dark.  That what we laugh at in her, I pray you to believe,
happens to every one of us: no one knows himself to be avaricious or
grasping; and, again, the blind call for a guide, while we stray of our
own accord.  I am not ambitious, we say; but a man cannot live otherwise
at Rome; I am not wasteful, but the city requires a great outlay; ‘tis
not my fault if I am choleric--if I have not yet established any certain
course of life: ‘tis the fault of youth.  Let us not seek our disease out
of ourselves; ‘tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact
that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be
cured.  If we do not betimes begin to see to ourselves, when shall we
have provided for so many wounds and evils wherewith we abound?  And yet
we have a most sweet and charming medicine in philosophy; for of all the
rest we are sensible of no pleasure till after the cure: this pleases and
heals at once.”  This is what Seneca says, that has carried me from my
subject, but there is advantage in the change.




CHAPTER XXVI

OF THUMBS

Tacitus reports, that amongst certain barbarian kings their manner was,
when they would make a firm obligation, to join their right hands close
to one another, and intertwist their thumbs; and when, by force of
straining the blood, it appeared in the ends, they lightly pricked them
with some sharp instrument, and mutually sucked them.

Physicians say that the thumbs are the master fingers of the hand, and
that their Latin etymology is derived from “pollere.” The Greeks called
them ‘Avtixeip’, as who should say, another hand.  And it seems that the
Latins also sometimes take it in this sense for the whole hand:

              “Sed nec vocibus excitata blandis,
               Molli pollici nec rogata, surgit.”

          [“Neither to be excited by soft words or by the thumb.”
           --Mart., xii. 98, 8.]

It was at Rome a signification of favour to depress and turn in the
thumbs:

          “Fautor utroque tuum laudabit pollice ludum:”

          [“Thy patron will applaud thy sport with both thumbs”
           --Horace.]

and of disfavour to elevate and thrust them outward:

                         “Converso pollice vulgi,
                    Quemlibet occidunt populariter.”

          [“The populace, with inverted thumbs, kill all that
          come before them.”--Juvenal, iii. 36]

The Romans exempted from war all such as were maimed in the thumbs, as
having no more sufficient strength to hold their weapons.  Augustus
confiscated the estate of a Roman knight who had maliciously cut off the
thumbs of two young children he had, to excuse them from going into the
armies; and, before him, the Senate, in the time of the Italic war, had
condemned Caius Vatienus to perpetual imprisonment, and confiscated all
his goods, for having purposely cut off the thumb of his left hand, to
exempt himself from that expedition.  Some one, I have forgotten who,
having won a naval battle, cut off the thumbs of all his vanquished
enemies, to render them incapable of fighting and of handling the oar.
The Athenians also caused the thumbs of the AEginatans to be cut off,
to deprive them of the superiority in the art of navigation.

In Lacedaemon, pedagogues chastised their scholars by biting their
thumbs.




CHAPTER XXVII

COWARDICE THE MOTHER OF CRUELTY

I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty; and I
have found by experience that malicious and inhuman animosity and
fierceness are usually accompanied with feminine weakness.  I have seen
the most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry.
Alexander, the tyrant of Pheres, durst not be a spectator of tragedies in
the theatre, for fear lest his citizens should see him weep at the
misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache, who himself without pity caused so
many people every day to be murdered.  Is it not meanness of spirit that
renders them so pliable to all extremities?  Valour, whose effect is only
to be exercised against resistance--

          “Nec nisi bellantis gaudet cervice juvenci”--

          [“Nor delights in killing a bull unless he resists.”
           --Claudius, Ep. ad Hadrianum, v. 39.]

stops when it sees the enemy at its mercy; but pusillanimity, to say that
it was also in the game, not having dared to meddle in the first act of
danger, takes as its part the second, of blood and massacre.  The murders
in victories are commonly performed by the rascality and hangers-on of an
army, and that which causes so many unheard of cruelties in domestic wars
is, that this canaille makes war in imbruing itself up to the elbows in
blood, and ripping up a body that lies prostrate at its feet, having no
sense of any other valour:

         “Et lupus, et turpes instant morientibus ursi,
          Et quaecunque minor nobilitate fera est:”

     [“Wolves and the filthy bears, and all the baser beasts,
     fall upon the dying.”--Ovid, Trist., iii. 5, 35.]

like cowardly dogs, that in the house worry and tear the skins of wild
beasts, they durst not come near in the field.  What is it in these times
of ours that makes our quarrels mortal; and that, whereas our fathers had
some degrees of revenge, we now begin with the last in ours, and at the
first meeting nothing is to be said but, kill?  What is this but
cowardice?

Every one is sensible that there is more bravery and disdain in subduing
an enemy, than in cutting, his throat; and in making him yield, than in
putting him to the sword: besides that the appetite of revenge is better
satisfied and pleased because its only aim is to make itself felt: And
this is the reason why we do not fall upon a beast or a stone when they
hurt us, because they are not capable of being sensible of our revenge;
and to kill a man is to save him from the injury and offence we intend
him.  And as Bias cried out to a wicked fellow, “I know that sooner or
later thou wilt have thy reward, but I am afraid I shall not see it”;
--[Plutarch, on the Delay in Divine Justice, c. 2.]--and pitied the
Orchomenians that the penitence of Lyciscus for the treason committed
against them, came at a season when there was no one remaining alive of
those who had been interested in the offence, and whom the pleasure of
this penitence should affect: so revenge is to be pitied, when the person
on whom it is executed is deprived of means of suffering under it: for as
the avenger will look on to enjoy the pleasure of his revenge, so the
person on whom he takes revenge should be a spectator too, to be
afflicted and to repent.  “He will repent it,” we say, and because we
have given him a pistol-shot through the head, do we imagine he will
repent?  On the contrary, if we but observe, we shall find, that he makes
mouths at us in falling, and is so far from penitency, that he does not
so much as repine at us; and we do him the kindest office of life, which
is to make him die insensibly, and soon: we are afterwards to hide
ourselves, and to shift and fly from the officers of justice, who pursue
us, whilst he is at rest.  Killing is good to frustrate an offence to
come, not to revenge one that is already past; and more an act of fear
than of bravery; of precaution than of courage; of defence than of
enterprise.  It is manifest that by it we lose both the true end of
revenge and the care of our reputation; we are afraid, if he lives he
will do us another injury as great as the first; ‘tis not out of
animosity to him, but care of thyself, that thou gettest rid of him.

In the kingdom of Narsingah this expedient would be useless to us, where
not only soldiers, but tradesmen also, end their differences by the
sword.  The king never denies the field to any who wish to fight; and
when they are persons of quality; he looks on, rewarding the victor with
a chain of gold,--for which any one who pleases may fight with him again,
so that, by having come off from one combat, he has engaged himself in
many.

If we thought by virtue to be always masters of our enemies, and to
triumph over them at pleasure, we should be sorry they should escape from
us as they do, by dying: but we have a mind to conquer, more with safety
than honour, and, in our quarrel, more pursue the end than the glory.

Asnius Pollio, who, as being a worthy man, was the less to be excused,
committed a like, error, when, having written a libel against Plancus, he
forbore to publish it till he was dead; which is to bite one’s thumb at a
blind man, to rail at one who is deaf, to wound a man who has no feeling,
rather than to run the hazard of his resentment.  And it was also said of
him that it was only for hobgoblins to wrestle with the dead.

He who stays to see the author die, whose writings he intends to
question, what does he say but that he is weak in his aggressiveness?
It was told to Aristotle that some one had spoken ill of him: “Let him
do more,” said he; “let him whip me too, provided I am not there.”

Our fathers contented themselves with revenging an insult with the lie,
the lie with a box of the ear, and so forward; they were valiant enough
not to fear their adversaries, living and provoked we tremble for fear so
soon as we see them on foot.  And that this is so, does not our noble
practice of these days, equally to prosecute to death both him that has
offended us and him we have offended, make it out?  ‘Tis also a kind
of cowardice that has introduced the custom of having seconds, thirds,
and fourths in our duels; they were formerly duels; they are now
skirmishes, rencontres, and battles.  Solitude was, doubtless, terrible
to those who were the first inventors of this practice:

               “Quum in se cuique minimum fiduciae esset,”

for naturally any company whatever is consolatory in danger.  Third
persons were formerly called in to prevent disorder and foul play only,
and to be witness of the fortune of the combat; but now they have brought
it to this pass that the witnesses themselves engage; whoever is invited
cannot handsomely stand by as an idle spectator, for fear of being
suspected either of want of affection or of courage.  Besides the
injustice and unworthiness of such an action, of engaging other strength
and valour in the protection of your honour than your own, I conceive it
a disadvantage to a brave man, and who wholly relies upon himself, to
shuffle his fortune with that of a second; every one runs hazard enough
himself without hazarding for another, and has enough to do to assure
himself in his own valour for the defence of his life, without intrusting
a thing so dear in a third man’s hand.  For, if it be not expressly
agreed upon before to the contrary, ‘tis a combined party of all four,
and if your second be killed, you have two to deal withal, with good
reason; and to say that it is foul play, it is so indeed, as it is, well
armed, to attack a man who has but the hilt of a broken sword in his
hand, or, clear and untouched, a man who is desperately wounded: but if
these be advantages you have got by fighting, you may make use of them
without reproach.  The disparity and inequality are only weighed and
considered from the condition of the combatants when they began; as to
the rest, you must take your chance: and though you had, alone, three
enemies upon you at once, your two companions being killed, you have no
more wrong done you, than I should do in a battle, by running a man
through whom I should see engaged with one of our own men, with the like
advantage.  The nature of society will have it so that where there is
troop against troop, as where our Duke of Orleans challenged Henry, king
of England, a hundred against a hundred; three hundred against as many,
as the Argians against the Lacedaemonians; three to three, as the Horatii
against the Curiatii, the multitude on either side is considered but as
one single man: the hazard, wherever there is company, being confused and
mixed.

I have a domestic interest in this discourse; for my brother, the Sieur
de Mattecoulom, was at Rome asked by a gentleman with whom he had no
great acquaintance, and who was a defendant challenged by another, to be
his second; in this duel he found himself matched with a gentleman much
better known to him.  (I would fain have an explanation of these rules of
honour, which so often shock and confound those of reason.)  After having
despatched his man, seeing the two principals still on foot and sound, he
ran in to disengage his friend.  What could he do less? should he have
stood still, and if chance would have ordered it so, have seen him he was
come thither to defend killed before his face? what he had hitherto done
helped not the business; the quarrel was yet undecided.  The courtesy
that you can, and certainly ought to shew to your enemy, when you have
reduced him to an ill condition and have a great advantage over him, I do
not see how you can do it, where the interest of another is concerned,
where you are only called in as an assistant, and the quarrel is none of
yours: he could neither be just nor courteous, at the hazard of him he
was there to serve.  And he was therefore enlarged from the prisons of
Italy at the speedy and solemn request of our king.  Indiscreet nation!
we are not content to make our vices and follies known to the world by
report only, but we must go into foreign countries, there to show them
what fools we are.  Put three Frenchmen into the deserts of Libya, they
will not live a month together without fighting; so that you would say
this peregrination were a thing purposely designed to give foreigners the
pleasure of our tragedies, and, for the most part, to such as rejoice and
laugh at our miseries.  We go into Italy to learn to fence, and exercise
the art at the expense of our lives before we have learned it; and yet,
by the rule of discipline, we should put the theory before the practice.
We discover ourselves to be but learners:

              “Primitae juvenum miserae, bellique futuri
               Dura rudimenta.”

     [“Wretched the elementary trials of youth, and hard the
     rudiments of approaching war.”--Virgil, AEneid, xi. 156.]

I know that fencing is an art very useful to its end (in a duel betwixt
two princes, cousin-germans, in Spain, the elder, says Livy, by his skill
and dexterity in arms, easily overcoming the greater and more awkward
strength of the younger), and of which the knowledge, as I experimentally
know, has inspired some with courage above their natural measure; but
this is not properly valour, because it supports itself upon address, and
is founded upon something besides itself.  The honour of combat consists
in the jealousy of courage, and not of skill; and therefore I have known
a friend of mine, famed as a great master in this exercise, in his
quarrels make choice of such arms as might deprive him of this advantage
and that wholly depended upon fortune and assurance, that they might not
attribute his victory rather to his skill in fencing than his valour.
When I was young, gentlemen avoided the reputation of good fencers as
injurious to them, and learned to fence with all imaginable privacy as a
trade of subtlety, derogating from true and natural valour:

              “Non schivar non parar, non ritirarsi,
               Voglion costor, ne qui destrezza ha parte;
               Non danno i colpi or finti, or pieni, or scarsi!
               Toglie l’ira a il furor l’uso de l’arte.
               Odi le spade orribilmente utarsi
               A mezzo il ferro; il pie d’orma non parte,
               Sempre a il pie fermo, a la man sempre in moto;
               Ne scende taglio in van, ne punta a voto.”

          [“They neither shrank, nor vantage sought of ground,
          They travers’d not, nor skipt from part to part,
          Their blows were neither false, nor feigned found:
          In fight, their rage would let them use no art.
          Their swords together clash with dreadful sound,
          Their feet stand fast, and neither stir nor start,
          They move their hands, steadfast their feet remain.
          Nor blow nor foin they strook, or thrust in vain.”
           --Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., c. 12, st. 55, Fairfax’s translation.]

Butts, tilting, and barriers, the feint of warlike fights, were the
exercises of our forefathers: this other exercise is so much the less
noble, as it only respects a private end; that teaches us to destroy one
another against law and justice, and that every way always produces very
ill effects.  It is much more worthy and more becoming to exercise
ourselves in things that strengthen than that weaken our government and
that tend to the public safety and common glory.  The consul, Publius
Rutilius,  was the first who taught the soldiers to handle their arms
with skill, and joined art with valour, not for the rise of private
quarrel, but for war and the quarrels of the people of Rome; a popular
and civil defence.  And besides the example of Caesar,  who commanded his
men to shoot chiefly at the face of Pompey’s soldiers in the battle of
Pharsalia, a thousand other commanders have also bethought them to invent
new forms of weapons and new ways of striking and defending, according as
occasion should require.

But as Philopoemen condemned wrestling, wherein he excelled, because the
preparatives that were therein employed were differing from those that
appertain to military discipline, to which alone he conceived men of
honour ought wholly to apply themselves; so it seems to me that this
address to which we form our limbs, those writhings and motions young men
are taught in this new school, are not only of no use, but rather
contrary and hurtful to the practice of fight in battle; and also our
people commonly make use of particular weapons, and peculiarly designed
for duel; and I have seen, when it has been disapproved, that a gentleman
challenged to fight with rapier and poignard appeared in the array of a
man-at-arms, and that another should take his cloak instead of his
poignard.  It is worthy of consideration that Laches in Plato, speaking
of learning to fence after our manner, says that he never knew any great
soldier come out of that school, especially the masters of it: and,
indeed, as to them, our experience tells as much.  As to the rest, we may
at least conclude that they are qualities of no relation or
correspondence; and in the education of the children of his government,
Plato interdicts the art of boxing, introduced by Amycus and Epeius, and
that of wrestling, by Antaeus and Cercyo, because they have another end
than to render youth fit for the service of war and contribute nothing to
it.  But I see that I have somewhat strayed from my theme.

The Emperor Mauricius, being advertised by dreams and several
prognostics, that one Phocas, an obscure soldier, should kill him,
questioned his son-in-law, Philip, who this Phocas was, and what were his
nature, qualities, and manners; and so soon as Philip, amongst other
things, had told him that he was cowardly and timorous, the emperor
immediately concluded then that he was a murderer and cruel.  What is it
that makes tyrants so sanguinary?  ‘Tis only the solicitude for their own
safety, and that their faint hearts can furnish them with no other means
of securing themselves than in exterminating those who may hurt them,
even so much as women, for fear of a scratch:

               “Cuncta ferit, dum cuncta timer.”

               [“He strikes at all who fears all.”
                --Claudius, in Eutrop., i. 182.]

The first cruelties are exercised for themselves thence springs the fear
of a just revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties,
to obliterate one another.  Philip, king of Macedon, who had so much to
do with the people of Rome, agitated with the horror of so many murders
committed by his order, and doubting of being able to keep himself secure
from so many families, at divers times mortally injured and offended by
him, resolved to seize all the children of those he had caused to be
slain, to despatch them daily one after another, and so to establish his
own repose.

Fine matter is never impertinent, however placed; and therefore I, who
more consider the weight and utility of what I deliver than its order and
connection, need not fear in this place to bring in an excellent story,
though it be a little by-the-by; for when they are rich in their own
native beauty, and are able to justify themselves, the least end of a
hair will serve to draw them into my discourse.

Amongst others condemned by Philip, had been one Herodicus, prince of
Thessaly; he had, moreover, after him caused his two sons-in-law to be
put to death, each leaving a son very young behind him.  Theoxena and
Archo were their two widows.  Theoxena, though highly courted to it,
could not be persuaded to marry again: Archo married Poris, the greatest
man among the AEnians, and by him had a great many children, whom she,
dying, left at a very tender age.  Theoxena, moved with a maternal
charity towards her nephews, that she might have them under her own eyes
and in her own protection, married Poris: when presently comes a
proclamation of the king’s edict.  This brave-spirited mother, suspecting
the cruelty of Philip, and afraid of the insolence of the soldiers
towards these charming and tender children was so bold as to declare hat
she would rather kill them with her own hands than deliver them.  Poris,
startled at this protestation, promised her to steal them away, and to
transport them to Athens, and there commit them to the custody of some
faithful friends of his.  They took, therefore, the opportunity of an
annual feast which was celebrated at AEnia in honour of AEneas, and
thither they went.  Having appeared by day at the public ceremonies and
banquet, they stole the night following into a vessel laid ready for the
purpose, to escape away by sea.  The wind proved contrary, and finding
themselves in the morning within sight of the land whence they had
launched overnight, and being pursued by the guards of the port, Poris
perceiving this, laboured all he could to make the mariners do their
utmost to escape from the pursuers.  But Theoxena, frantic with affection
and revenge, in pursuance of her former resolution, prepared both weapons
and poison, and exposing them before them; “Go to, my children,” said
she, “death is now the only means of your defence and liberty, and shall
administer occasion to the gods to exercise their sacred justice: these
sharp swords, and these full cups, will open you the way into it;
courage, fear nothing!  And thou, my son, who art the eldest, take this
steel into thy hand, that thou mayest the more bravely die.”  The
children having on one side so powerful a counsellor, and the enemy at
their throats on the other, run all of them eagerly upon what was next to
hand; and, half dead, were thrown into the sea.  Theoxena, proud of
having so gloriously provided for the safety of her children, clasping
her arms with great affection about her husband’s neck.  “Let us, my
friend,” said she, “follow these boys, and enjoy the same sepulchre they
do”; and so, having embraced, they threw themselves headlong into the
sea; so that the ship was carried--back without the owners into the
harbour.

Tyrants, at once both to kill and to make their anger felt, have employed
their capacity to invent the most lingering deaths.  They will have their
enemies despatched, but not so fast that they may not have leisure to
taste their vengeance.  And therein they are mightily perplexed; for if
the torments they inflict are violent, they are short; if long, they are
not then so painful as they desire; and thus plague themselves in choice
of the greatest cruelty.  Of this we have a thousand examples in
antiquity, and I know not whether we, unawares, do not retain some traces
of this barbarity.

All that exceeds a simple death appears to me absolute cruelty.  Our
justice cannot expect that he, whom the fear of dying by being beheaded
or hanged will not restrain, should be any more awed by the imagination
of a languishing fire, pincers, or the wheel.  And I know not, in the
meantime, whether we do not throw them into despair; for in what
condition can be the soul of a man, expecting four-and-twenty hours
together to be broken upon a wheel, or after the old way, nailed to a
cross?  Josephus relates that in the time of the war the Romans made in
Judaea, happening to pass by where they had three days before crucified
certain Jews, he amongst them knew three of his own friends, and obtained
the favour of having them taken down, of whom two, he says, died; the
third lived a great while after.

Chalcondylas, a writer of good credit, in the records he has left behind
him of things that happened in his time, and near him, tells us, as of
the most excessive torment, of that the Emperor Mohammed very often
practised, of cutting off men in the middle by the diaphragm with one
blow of a scimitar, whence it followed that they died as it were two
deaths at once; and both the one part, says he, and the other, were seen
to stir and strive a great while after in very great torment.  I do not
think there was any great suffering in this motion the torments that are
the most dreadful to look on are not always the greatest to endure; and I
find those that other historians relate to have been practised by him
upon the Epirot lords, are more horrid and cruel, where they were
condemned to be flayed alive piecemeal, after so malicious a manner that
they continued fifteen days in that misery.

And these other two: Croesus, having caused a gentleman, the favourite of
his brother Pantaleon, to be seized, carried him into a fuller’s shop,
where he caused him to be scratched and carded with the cards and combs
belonging to that trade, till he died.  George Sechel, chief commander of
the peasants of Poland, who committed so many mischiefs under the title
of the Crusade, being defeated in battle and taken bu the Vayvode of
Transylvania, was three days bound naked upon the rack exposed to all
sorts of torments that any one could contrive against him: during which
time many other prisoners were kept fasting; in the end, he living and
looking on, they made his beloved brother Lucat, for whom alone he
entreated, taking on himself the blame of all their evil actions drink
his blood, and caused twenty of his most favoured captains to feed upon
him, tearing his flesh in pieces with their teeth, and swallowing the
morsels.  The remainder of his body and his bowels, so soon as he was
dead, were boiled, and others of his followers compelled to eat them.




CHAPTER XXVIII

ALL THINGS HAVE THEIR SEASON

Such as compare Cato the Censor with the younger Cato, who killed
himself, compare two beautiful natures, much resembling one another.
The first acquired his reputation several ways, and excels in military
exploits and the utility of his public employments; but the virtue of the
younger, besides that it were blasphemy to compare any to it in vigour,
was much more pure and unblemished.  For who could absolve that of the
Censor from envy and ambition, having dared to attack the honour of
Scipio, a man in goodness and all other excellent qualities infinitely
beyond him or any other of his time?

That which they, report of him, amongst other things, that in his extreme
old age he put himself upon learning the Greek tongue with so greedy an
appetite, as if to quench a long thirst, does not seem to me to make much
for his honour; it being properly what we call falling into second
childhood.  All things have their seasons, even good ones, and I may say
my Paternoster out of time; as they accused T. Quintus Flaminius, that
being general of an army, he was seen praying apart in the time of a
battle that he won.

          “Imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis.”

     [“The wise man limits even honest things.”--Juvenal, vi. 444]

Eudemonidas, seeing Xenocrates when very old, still very intent upon his
school lectures: “When will this man be wise,” said he, “if he is yet
learning?”  And Philopaemen, to those who extolled King Ptolemy for every
day inuring his person to the exercise of arms: “It is not,” said he,
“commendable in a king of his age to exercise himself in these things; he
ought now really to employ them.”  The young are to make their
preparations, the old to enjoy them, say the sages: and the greatest vice
they observe in us is that our desires incessantly grow young again; we
are always re-beginning to live.

Our studies and desires should sometime be sensible of age; yet we have
one foot in the grave and still our appetites and pursuits spring every
day anew within us:

                   “Tu secanda marmora
                    Locas sub ipsum funus, et, sepulcri
                    Immemor, struis domos.”

     [“You against the time of death have marble cut for use, and,
     forgetful of the tomb, build houses.”--Horace, Od., ii. 18, 17.]

The longest of my designs is not of above a year’s extent; I think of
nothing now but ending; rid myself of all new hopes and enterprises; take
my last leave of every place I depart from, and every day dispossess
myself of what I have.

          “Olim jam nec perit quicquam mihi, nec acquiritur....
          plus superest viatici quam viae.”

     [“Henceforward I will neither lose, nor expect to get: I have more
     wherewith to defray my journey, than I have way to go.”  (Or):
     “Hitherto nothing of me has been lost or gained; more remains to pay
     the way than there is way.”--Seneca, Ep., 77.  (The sense seems to
     be that so far he had met his expenses, but that for the future he
     was likely to have more than he required.)]

          “Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi.”

     [“I have lived and finished the career Fortune placed before me.”
      --AEneid, iv. 653.]

‘Tis indeed the only comfort I find in my old age, that it mortifies in
me several cares and desires wherewith my life has been disturbed; the
care how the world goes, the care of riches, of grandeur, of knowledge,
of health, of myself.  There are men who are learning to speak at a time
when they should learn to be silent for ever.  A man may always study,
but he must not always go to school what a contemptible thing is an old
Abecedarian!--[Seneca, Ep. 36]

              “Diversos diversa juvant; non omnibus annis
               Omnia conveniunt.”

          [“Various things delight various men; all things are not
          for all ages.”--Gall., Eleg., i. 104.]

If we must study, let us study what is suitable to our present condition,
that we may answer as he did, who being asked to what end he studied in
his decrepit age, “that I may go out better,” said he, “and at greater
ease.”  Such a study was that of the younger Cato, feeling his end
approach, and which he met with in Plato’s Discourse of the Eternity of
the Soul: not, as we are to believe, that he was not long before
furnished with all sorts of provision for such a departure; for of
assurance, an established will and instruction, he had more than Plato
had in all his writings; his knowledge and courage were in this respect
above philosophy; he applied himself to this study, not for the service
of his death; but, as a man whose sleeps were never disturbed in the
importance of such a deliberation, he also, without choice or change,
continued his studies with the other accustomary actions of his life.
The night that he was denied the praetorship he spent in play; that
wherein he was to die he spent in reading.  The loss either of life
or of office was all one to him.




CHAPTER XXIX

OF VIRTUE

I find by experience, that there is a good deal to be said betwixt the
flights and emotions of the soul or a resolute and constant habit; and
very well perceive that there is nothing we may not do, nay, even to the
surpassing the Divinity itself, says a certain person, forasmuch as it is
more to render a man’s self impassible by his own study and industry,
than to be so by his natural condition; and even to be able to conjoin to
man’s imbecility and frailty a God-like resolution and assurance; but it
is by fits and starts; and in the lives of those heroes of times past
there are sometimes miraculous impulses, and that seem infinitely to
exceed our natural force; but they are indeed only impulses: and ‘tis
hard to believe, that these so elevated qualities in a man can so
thoroughly tinct and imbue the soul that they should become ordinary,
and, as it were, natural in him.  It accidentally happens even to us,
who are but abortive births of men, sometimes to launch our souls, when
roused by the discourses or examples of others, much beyond their
ordinary stretch; but ‘tis a kind of passion which pushes and agitates
them, and in some sort ravishes them from themselves: but, this
perturbation once overcome, we see that they insensibly flag and slacken
of themselves, if not to the lowest degree, at least so as to be no more
the same; insomuch as that upon every trivial occasion, the losing of a
bird, or the breaking, of a glass, we suffer ourselves to be moved little
less than one of the common people.  I am of opinion, that order,
moderation, and constancy excepted, all things are to be done by a man
that is very imperfect and defective in general.  Therefore it is, say
the Sages, that to make a right judgment of a man, you are chiefly to pry
into his common actions, and surprise him in his everyday habit.

Pyrrho, he who erected so pleasant a knowledge upon ignorance,
endeavoured, as all the rest who were really philosophers did, to make
his life correspond with his doctrine.  And because he maintained the
imbecility of human judgment to be so extreme as to be incapable of any
choice or inclination, and would have it perpetually wavering and
suspended, considering and receiving all things as indifferent, ‘tis
said, that he always comforted himself after the same manner and
countenance: if he had begun a discourse, he would always end what he had
to say, though the person he was speaking to had gone away: if he walked,
he never stopped for any impediment that stood in his way, being
preserved from precipices, collision with carts, and other like
accidents, by the care of his friends: for, to fear or to avoid anything,
had been to shock his own propositions, which deprived the senses
themselves of all election and certainty.  Sometimes he suffered incision
and cauteries with so great constancy as never to be seen so much as to
wince.  ‘Tis something to bring the soul to these imaginations; ‘tis more
to join the effects, and yet not impossible; but to conjoin them with
such perseverance and constancy as to make them habitual, is certainly,
in attempts so remote from the common usage, almost incredible to be
done.  Therefore it was, that being sometime taken in his house sharply
scolding with his sister, and being reproached that he therein
transgressed his own rules of indifference: “What!” said he, “must this
bit of a woman also serve for a testimony to my rules?”  Another time,
being seen to defend himself against a dog: “It is,” said he, “very hard
totally to put off man; and we must endeavour and force ourselves to
resist and encounter things, first by effects, but at least by reason and
argument.”

About seven or eight years since, a husbandman yet living, but two
leagues from my house, having long been tormented with his wife’s
jealousy, coming one day home from his work, and she welcoming him with
her accustomed railing, entered into so great fury that with a sickle he
had yet in his hand, he totally cut off all those parts that she was
jealous of and threw them in her face.  And, ‘tis said that a young
gentleman of our nation, brisk and amorous, having by his perseverance at
last mollified the heart of a fair mistress, enraged, that upon the point
of fruition he found himself unable to perform, and that,

                         “Nec viriliter
          Iners senile penis extulit caput.”

     [(The 19th or 20th century translators leave this phrase
     untranslated and with no explanation. D.W.)
     --Tibullus, Priap.  Carm., 84.]

as soon as ever he came home he deprived himself of the rebellious
member, and sent it to his mistress, a cruel and bloody victim for the
expiation of his offence.  If this had been done upon mature
consideration, and upon the account of religion, as the priests of Cybele
did, what should we say of so high an action?

A few days since, at Bergerac, five leagues from my house, up the river
Dordogne, a woman having overnight been beaten and abused by her husband,
a choleric ill-conditioned fellow, resolved to escape from his ill-usage
at the price of her life; and going so soon as she was up the next
morning to visit her neighbours, as she was wont to do, and having let
some words fall in recommendation of her affairs, she took a sister of
hers by the hand, and led her to the bridge; whither being come, and
having taken leave of her, in jest as it were, without any manner of
alteration in her countenance, she threw herself headlong from the top
into the river, and was there drowned.  That which is the most remarkable
in this is, that this resolution was a whole night forming in her head.

It is quite another thing with the Indian women for it being the custom
there for the men to have many wives, and the best beloved of them to
kill herself at her husband’s decease, every one of them makes it the
business of her whole life to obtain this privilege and gain this
advantage over her companions; and the good offices they do their
husbands aim at no other recompense but to be preferred in accompanying
him in death:

              “Ubi mortifero jacta est fax ultima lecto,
               Uxorum fusis stat pia turba comis
               Et certamen habent lethi, quae viva sequatur
               Conjugium: pudor est non licuisse mori.
               Ardent victrices, et flammae pectora praebent,
               Imponuntque suis ora perusta viris.”

     [“For when they threw the torch on the funeral bed, the pious wives
     with hair dishevelled, stand around striving, which, living, shall
     accompany her spouse; and are ashamed that they may not die; they
     who are preferred expose their breasts to the flame, and they lay
     their scorched lips on those of their husbands.”
      --Propertius, iii. 13, 17.]

A certain author of our times reports that he has seen in those Oriental
nations this custom in practice, that not only the wives bury themselves
with their husbands, but even the slaves he has enjoyed also; which is
done after this manner: The husband being dead, the widow may if she will
(but few will) demand two or three months’ respite wherein to order her
affairs.  The day being come, she mounts on horseback, dressed as fine as
at her wedding, and with a cheerful countenance says she is going to
sleep with her spouse, holding a looking-glass in her left hand and an
arrow in the other.  Being thus conducted in pomp, accompanied with her
kindred and friends and a great concourse of people in great joy, she is
at last brought to the public place appointed for such spectacles: this
is a great space, in the midst of which is a pit full of wood, and
adjoining to it a mount raised four or five steps, upon which she is
brought and served with a magnificent repast; which being done, she falls
to dancing and singing, and gives order, when she thinks fit, to kindle
the fire.  This being done, she descends, and taking the nearest of her
husband’s relations by the hand, they walk to the river close by, where
she strips herself stark naked, and having distributed her clothes and
jewels to her friends, plunges herself into the water, as if there to
cleanse herself from her sins; coming out thence, she wraps herself in a
yellow linen of five-and-twenty ells long, and again giving her hand to
this kinsman of her husband’s, they return back to the mount, where she
makes a speech to the people, and recommends her children to them, if she
have any.  Betwixt the pit and the mount there is commonly a curtain
drawn to screen the burning furnace from their sight, which some of them,
to manifest the greater courage, forbid.  Having ended what she has to
say, a woman presents her with a vessel of oil, wherewith to anoint her
head and her whole body, which when done with she throws into the fire,
and in an instant precipitates herself after.  Immediately, the people
throw a good many billets and logs upon her that she may not be long in
dying, and convert all their joy into sorrow and mourning.  If they are
persons of meaner condition, the body of the defunct is carried to the
place of sepulture, and there placed sitting, the widow kneeling before
him, embracing the dead body; and they continue in this posture whilst
the people build a wall about them, which so soon as it is raised to the
height of the woman’s shoulders, one of her relations comes behind her,
and taking hold of her head, twists her neck; so soon as she is dead, the
wall is presently raised up, and closed, and there they remain entombed.

There was, in this same country, something like this in their
gymnosophists; for not by constraint of others nor by the impetuosity of
a sudden humour, but by the express profession of their order, their
custom was, as soon as they arrived at a certain age, or that they saw
themselves threatened by any disease, to cause a funeral pile to be
erected for them, and on the top a stately bed, where, after having
joyfully feasted their friends and acquaintance, they laid them down with
so great resolution, that fire being applied to it, they were never seen
to stir either hand or foot; and after this manner, one of them, Calanus
by name; expired in the presence of the whole army of Alexander the
Great.  And he was neither reputed holy nor happy amongst them who did
not thus destroy himself, dismissing his soul purged and purified by the
fire, after having consumed all that was earthly and mortal.  This
constant premeditation of the whole life is that which makes the wonder.

Amongst our other controversies, that of ‘Fatum’ has also crept in; and
to tie things to come, and even our own wills, to a certain and
inevitable necessity, we are yet upon this argument of time past:
“Since God foresees that all things shall so fall out, as doubtless He
does, it must then necessarily follow, that they must so fall out”: to
which our masters reply: “that the seeing anything come to pass, as we
do, and as God Himself also does (for all things being present with him,
He rather sees, than foresees), is not to compel an event: that is, we
see because things do fall out, but things do not fall out because we
see: events cause knowledge, but knowledge does not cause events.  That
which we see happen, does happen; but it might have happened otherwise:
and God, in the catalogue of the causes of events which He has in His
prescience, has also those which we call accidental and voluntary,
depending upon the liberty.  He has given our free will, and knows that
we do amiss because we would do so.”

I have seen a great many commanders encourage their soldiers with this
fatal necessity; for if our time be limited to a certain hour, neither
the enemies’ shot nor our own boldness, nor our flight and cowardice,
can either shorten or prolong our lives.  This is easily said, but see
who will be so easily persuaded; and if it be so that a strong and lively
faith draws along with it actions of the same kind, certainly this faith
we so much brag of, is very light in this age of ours, unless the
contempt it has of works makes it disdain their company.  So it is, that
to this very purpose the Sire de Joinville, as credible a witness as any
other whatever, tells us of the Bedouins, a nation amongst the Saracens,
with whom the king St. Louis had to do in the Holy Land, that they, in
their religion, so firmly believed the number of every man’s days to be
from all eternity prefixed and set down by an inevitable decree, that
they went naked to the wars, excepting a Turkish sword, and their bodies
only covered with a white linen cloth: and for the greatest curse they
could invent when they were angry, this was always in their mouths:
“Accursed be thou, as he that arms himself for fear of death.”  This is a
testimony of faith very much beyond ours.  And of this sort is that also
that two friars of Florence gave in our fathers’ days.  Being engaged in
some controversy of learning, they agreed to go both of them into the
fire in the sight of all the people, each for the verification of his
argument, and all things were already prepared, and the thing just upon
the point of execution, when it was interrupted by an unexpected
accident.--[7th April 1498.  Savonarola issued the challenge.  After many
delays from demands and counter-demands by each side as to the details of
the fire, both parties found that they had important business to transact
in another county--both just barely escaped assassination at the hands of
the disappointed spectators.  D.W.]

A young Turkish lord, having performed a notable exploit in his own
person in the sight of both armies, that of Amurath and that of Huniades,
ready to join battle, being asked by Amurath, what in such tender and
inexperienced years (for it was his first sally into arms) had inspired
him with so brave a courage, replied, that his chief tutor for valour was
a hare.  “For being,” said he, “one day a hunting, I found a hare
sitting, and though I had a brace of excellent greyhounds with me, yet
methought it would be best for sureness to make use of my bow; for she
sat very fair.  I then fell to letting fly my arrows, and shot forty that
I had in my quiver, not only without hurting, but without starting her
from her form.  At last I slipped my dogs after her, but to no more
purpose than I had shot: by which I understood that she had been secured
by her destiny; and, that neither darts nor swords can wound without the
permission of fate, which we can neither hasten nor defer.”  This story
may serve, by the way, to let us see how flexible our reason is to all
sorts of images.

A person of great years, name, dignity, and learning boasted to me that
he had been induced to a certain very important change in his faith by a
strange and whimsical incitation, and one otherwise so inadequate, that I
thought it much stronger, taken the contrary way: he called it a miracle,
and so I look upon it, but in a different sense.  The Turkish historians
say, that the persuasion those of their nation have imprinted in them of
the fatal and unalterable prescription of their days, manifestly conduces
to the giving them great assurance in dangers.  And I know a great prince
who makes very fortunate use of it, whether it be that he really believes
it, or that he makes it his excuse for so wonderfully hazarding himself:
let us hope Fortune may not be too soon weary of her favour to him.

There has not happened in our memory a more admirable effect of
resolution than in those two who conspired the death of the Prince of
Orange.

     [The first of these was Jehan de Jaureguy, who wounded the Prince
     18th March 1582; the second, by whom the Prince was killed 10th July
     1584., was Balthazar Gerard.]

‘Tis marvellous how the second who executed it, could ever be persuaded
into an attempt, wherein his companion, who had done his utmost, had had
so ill success; and after the same method, and with the same arms, to go
attack a lord, armed with so recent a late lesson of distrust, powerful
in followers and bodily strength, in his own hall, amidst his guards, and
in a city wholly at his devotion.  Assuredly, he employed a very resolute
arm and a courage enflamed with furious passion.  A poignard is surer for
striking home; but by reason that more motion and force of hand is
required than with a pistol, the blow is more subject to be put by or
hindered.  That this man did not run to a certain death, I make no great
doubt; for the hopes any one could flatter him withal, could not find
place in any sober understanding, and the conduct of his exploit
sufficiently manifests that he had no want of that, no more than of
courage.  The motives of so powerful a persuasion may be diverse, for our
fancy does what it will, both with itself and us.  The execution that was
done near Orleans--[The murder of the Duke of Guise by Poltrot.]--was
nothing like this; there was in this more of chance than vigour; the
wound was not mortal, if fortune had not made it so, and to attempt to
shoot on horseback, and at a great distance, by one whose body was in
motion from the motion of his horse, was the attempt of a man who had
rather miss his blow than fail of saving himself.  This was apparent from
what followed; for he was so astonished and stupefied with the thought of
so high an execution, that he totally lost his judgment both to find his
way to flight and to govern his tongue.  What needed he to have done more
than to fly back to his friends across the river?  ‘Tis what I have done
in less dangers, and that I think of very little hazard, how broad soever
the river may be, provided your horse have easy going in, and that you
see on the other side easy landing according to the stream.  The other,
--[Balthazar Gerard.]--when they pronounced his dreadful sentence,
“I was prepared for this,” said he, “beforehand, and I will make you
wonder at my patience.”

The Assassins, a nation bordering upon Phoenicia,

     [Or in Egypt, Syria, and Persia.  Derivation of ‘assassin’ is from
     Hassan-ben-Saba, one of their early leaders, and they had an
     existence for some centuries.  They are classed among the secret
     societies of the Middle Ages.  D.W.]

are reputed amongst the Mohammedans a people of very great devotion and
purity of manners.  They hold that the nearest way to gain Paradise is to
kill some one of a contrary religion; which is the reason they have often
been seen, being but one or two, and without armour, to attempt against
powerful enemies, at the price of a certain death and without any
consideration of their own danger.  So was our Raymond, Count of Tripoli,
assassinated (which word is derived from their name) in the heart of his
city,--[in 1151]--during our enterprises of the Holy War: and likewise
Conrad, Marquis of Monteferrat, the murderers at their execution bearing
themselves with great pride and glory that they had performed so brave an
exploit.




CHAPTER XXX.

OF A MONSTROUS CHILD

This story shall go by itself; for I will leave it to physicians to
discourse of.  Two days ago I saw a child that two men and a nurse, who
said they were the father, the uncle, and the aunt of it, carried about
to get money by showing it, by reason it was so strange a creature.  It
was, as to all the rest, of a common form, and could stand upon its feet;
could go and gabble much like other children of the same age; it had
never as yet taken any other nourishment but from the nurse’s breasts,
and what, in my presence, they tried to put into the mouth of it, it only
chewed a little and spat it out again without swallowing; the cry of it
seemed indeed a little odd and particular, and it was just fourteen
months old.  Under the breast it was joined to another child, but without
a head, and which had the spine of the back without motion, the rest
entire; for though it had one arm shorter than the other, it had been
broken by accident at their birth; they were joined breast to breast, and
as if a lesser child sought to throw its arms about the neck of one
something bigger.  The juncture and thickness of the place where they
were conjoined was not above four fingers, or thereabouts, so that if you
thrust up the imperfect child you might see the navel of the other below
it, and the joining was betwixt the paps and the navel.  The navel of the
imperfect child could not be seen, but all the rest of the belly, so that
all that was not joined of the imperfect one, as arms, buttocks, thighs,
and legs, hung dangling upon the other, and might reach to the mid-leg.
The nurse, moreover, told us that it urined at both bodies, and that the
members of the other were nourished, sensible, and in the same plight
with that she gave suck to, excepting that they were shorter and less.
This double body and several limbs relating to one head might be
interpreted a favourable prognostic to the king,--[Henry III.]--of
maintaining these various parts of our state under the union of his laws;
but lest the event should prove otherwise, ‘tis better to let it alone,
for in things already past there needs no divination,

          “Ut quum facts sunt, tum ad conjecturam
          aliqui interpretatione revocentur;”

     [“So as when they are come to pass, they may then by some
     interpretation be recalled to conjecture”
      --Cicero, De Divin., ii. 31.]

as ‘tis said of Epimenides, that he always prophesied backward.

I have just seen a herdsman in Medoc, of about thirty years of age, who
has no sign of any genital parts; he has three holes by which he
incessantly voids his water; he is bearded, has desire, and seeks contact
with women.

Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity
of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein; and it
is to be believed that this figure which astonishes us has relation to
some other figure of the same kind unknown to man.  From His all wisdom
nothing but good, common; and regular proceeds; but we do not discern the
disposition and relation:

          “Quod crebro videt, non miratur, etiamsi,
          cur fiat, nescit.  Quod ante non vidit, id,
          si evenerit, ostentum esse censet.”

     [“What he often sees he does not admire, though he be ignorant how
     it comes to pass.  When a thing happens he never saw before, he
     thinks that it is a portent.”--Cicero, De Divin., ii.  22.]

Whatever falls out contrary to custom we say is contrary to nature, but
nothing, whatever it be, is contrary to her.  Let, therefore, this
universal and natural reason expel the error and astonishment that
novelty brings along with it.




CHAPTER XXXI

OF ANGER

Plutarch is admirable throughout, but especially where he judges of human
actions.  What fine things does he say in the comparison of Lycurgus and
Numa upon the subject of our great folly in abandoning children to the
care and government of their fathers?  The most of our civil governments,
as Aristotle says, “leave, after the manner of the Cyclopes, to every one
the ordering of their wives and children, according to their own foolish
and indiscreet fancy; and the Lacedaemonian and Cretan are almost the
only governments that have committed the education of children to the
laws.  Who does not see that in a state all depends upon their nurture
and bringing up? and yet they are left to the mercy of parents, let them
be as foolish and ill-conditioned as they may, without any manner of
discretion.”

Amongst other things, how often have I, as I have passed along our
streets, had a good mind to get up a farce, to revenge the poor boys whom
I have seen hided, knocked down, and miserably beaten by some father or
mother, when in their fury and mad with rage?  You shall see them come
out with fire and fury sparkling in their eyes:

              “Rabie jecur incendente, feruntur,
               Praecipites; ut saxa jugis abrupta, quibus mons
               Subtrahitur, clivoque latus pendente recedit,”

     [“They are headlong borne with burning fury as great stones torn
     from the mountains, by which the steep sides are left naked and
     bare.”--Juvenal, Sat., vi. 647.]

(and according to Hippocrates, the most dangerous maladies are they that
disfigure the countenance), with a roaring and terrible voice, very often
against those that are but newly come from nurse, and there they are
lamed and spoiled with blows, whilst our justice takes no cognisance of
it, as if these maims and dislocations were not executed upon members of
our commonwealth:

         “Gratum est, quod patria; civem populoque dedisti,
          Si facis, ut patrix sit idoneus, utilis agris,
          Utilis et bellorum et pacis rebus agendis.”

     [“It is well when to thy country and the people thou hast given a
     citizen, provided thou make fit for his country’s service; useful to
     till the earth, useful in affairs of war and peace”
      --Juvenal, Sat., xiv. 70.]

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgment
as anger.  No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who
should condemn a criminal on the account of his own choler; why, then,
should fathers and pedagogues be any more allowed to whip and chastise
children in their anger?  ‘Tis then no longer correction, but revenge.
Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and would we endure a
physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?

We ourselves, to do well, should never lay a hand upon our servants
whilst our anger lasts.  When the pulse beats, and we feel emotion in
ourselves, let us defer the business; things will indeed appear otherwise
to us when we are calm and cool.  ‘Tis passion that then commands, ‘tis
passion that speaks, and not we.  Faults seen through passion appear much
greater to us than they really are, as bodies do when seen through a
mist.  He who is hungry uses meat; but he who will make use of
chastisement should have neither hunger nor thirst to it.  And, moreover,
chastisements that are inflicted with weight and discretion are much
better received and with greater benefit by him who suffers; otherwise,
he will not think himself justly condemned by a man transported with
anger and fury, and will allege his master’s excessive passion, his
inflamed countenance, his unwonted oaths, his emotion and precipitous
rashness, for his own justification:

              “Ora tument ira, nigrescunt sanguine venae,
               Lumina Gorgoneo saevius igne micant.”

     [“Their faces swell, their veins grow black with rage, and their
     eyes sparkle with Gorgonian fire.”--Ovid, De Art. Amandi, iii. 503.]

Suetonius reports that Caius Rabirius having been condemned by Caesar,
the thing that most prevailed upon the people (to whom he had appealed)
to determine the cause in his favour, was the animosity and vehemence
that Caesar had manifested in that sentence.

Saying is a different thing from doing; we are to consider the sermon
apart and the preacher apart.  These men lent themselves to a pretty
business who in our times have attempted to shake the truth of our Church
by the vices of her ministers; she extracts her testimony elsewhere; ‘tis
a foolish way of arguing and that would throw all things into confusion.
A man whose morals are good may have false opinions, and a wicked man may
preach truth, even though he believe it not himself.  ‘Tis doubtless a
fine harmony when doing and saying go together; and I will not deny but
that saying, when the actions follow, is not of greater authority and
efficacy, as Eudamidas said, hearing a philosopher talk of military
affairs: “These things are finely said, but he who speaks them is not to
be believed for his ears have never been used to the sound of the
trumpet.”  And Cleomenes, hearing an orator declaiming upon valour, burst
out into laughter, at which the other being angry; “I should,” said he to
him, “do the same if it were a swallow that spoke of this subject; but if
it were an eagle I should willingly hear him.”  I perceive, methinks, in
the writings of the ancients, that he who speaks what he thinks, strikes
much more home than he who only feigns.  Hear Cicero speak of the love of
liberty: hear Brutus speak of it, the mere written words of this man
sound as if he would purchase it at the price of his life.  Let Cicero,
the father of eloquence, treat of the contempt of death; let Seneca do
the same: the first languishingly drawls it out so you perceive he would
make you resolve upon a thing on which he is not resolved himself; he
inspires you not with courage, for he himself has none; the other
animates and inflames you.  I never read an author, even of those who
treat of virtue and of actions, that I do not curiously inquire what kind
of a man he was himself; for the Ephori at Sparta, seeing a dissolute
fellow propose a wholesome advice to the people, commanded him to hold
his peace, and entreated a virtuous man to attribute to himself the
invention, and to propose it.  Plutarch’s writings, if well understood,
sufficiently bespeak their author, and so that I think I know him even
into his soul; and yet I could wish that we had some fuller account of
his life.  And I am thus far wandered from my subject, upon the account
of the obligation I have to Aulus Gellius, for having left us in writing
this story of his manners, that brings me back to my subject of anger.
A slave of his, a vicious, ill-conditioned fellow, but who had the
precepts of philosophy often ringing in his ears, having for some offence
of his been stript by Plutarch’s command, whilst he was being whipped,
muttered at first, that it was without cause and that he had done nothing
to deserve it; but at last falling in good earnest to exclaim against and
rail at his master, he reproached him that he was no philosopher, as he
had boasted himself to be: that he had often heard him say it was
indecent to be angry, nay, had written a book to that purpose; and that
the causing him to be so cruelly beaten, in the height of his rage,
totally gave the lie to all his writings; to which Plutarch calmly and
coldly answered, “How, ruffian,” said he, “by what dost thou judge that
I am now angry?  Does either my face, my colour, or my voice give any
manifestation of my being moved?  I do not think my eyes look fierce,
that my countenance appears troubled, or that my voice is dreadful: am I
red, do I foam, does any word escape my lips I ought to repent?  Do I
start?  Do I tremble with fury?  For those, I tell thee, are the true
signs of anger.”  And so, turning to the fellow that was whipping him,
“Ply on thy work,” said he, “whilst this gentleman and I dispute.”  This
is his story.

Archytas Tarentinus, returning from a war wherein he had been
captain-general, found all things in his house in very great disorder,
and his lands quite out of tillage, through the ill husbandry of his
receiver, and having caused him to be called to him; “Go,” said he, “if I
were not in anger I would soundly drub your sides.”  Plato likewise,
being highly offended with one of his slaves, gave Speusippus order to
chastise him, excusing himself from doing it because he was in anger.
And Carillus, a Lacedaemonian, to a Helot, who carried himself insolently
towards him: “By the gods,” said he, “if I was not angry, I would
immediately cause thee to be put to death.”

‘Tis a passion that is pleased with and flatters itself.  How often,
being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good
defence and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth
and innocence itself?  In proof of which, I remember a marvellous example
of antiquity.

Piso, otherwise a man of very eminent virtue, being moved against a
soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no
account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he
had killed him, and presently condemned him to death.  He was no sooner
mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at
which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the
two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso’s
presence, all those present believing it would be a great pleasure even
to himself; but it proved quite contrary; for through shame and spite,
his fury, which was not yet cool, redoubled; and by a subtlety which his
passion suddenly suggested to him, he made three criminals for having
found one innocent, and caused them all to be despatched: the first
soldier, because sentence had passed upon him; the second, who had lost
his way, because he was the cause of his companion’s death; and the
hangman, for not having obeyed the order which had been given him.
Such as have had to do with testy and obstinate women, may have
experimented into what a rage it puts them to oppose silence and coldness
to their fury, and that a man disdains to nourish their anger.  The
orator Celius was wonderfully choleric by nature; and to one who supped
in his company, a man of a gentle and sweet conversation, and who, that
he might not move him, approved and consented to all he said; he,
impatient that his ill-humour should thus spend itself without aliment:
“For the love of the gods deny me something,” said he, “that we may be
two.”  Women, in like manner, are only angry that others may be angry
again, in imitation of the laws of love.  Phocion, to one who interrupted
his speaking by injurious and very opprobrious words, made no other
return than silence, and to give him full liberty and leisure to vent his
spleen; which he having accordingly done, and the storm blown over,
without any mention of this disturbance, he proceeded in his discourse
where he had left off before.  No answer can nettle a man like such a
contempt.

Of the most choleric man in France (anger is always an imperfection, but
more excusable in, a soldier, for in that trade it cannot sometimes be
avoided) I often say, that he is the most patient man that I know, and
the most discreet in bridling his passions; which rise in him with so
great violence and fury,

                    “Magno veluti cum flamma sonore
          Virgea suggeritur costis undantis ahem,
          Exsultantque aatu latices, furit intus aquae vis.
          Fumidus atque alte spumis exuberat amnis,
          Nec jam se capit unda; volat vapor ater ad auras;”

     [“When with loud crackling noise, a fire of sticks is applied to the
     boiling caldron’s side, by the heat in frisky bells the liquor
     dances; within the water rages, and high the smoky fluid in foam
     overflows.  Nor can the wave now contain itself; the black steam
     flies all abroad.”--AEneid, vii. 462.]


that he must of necessity cruelly constrain himself to moderate it.  And
for my part, I know no passion which I could with so much violence to
myself attempt to cover and conceal; I would not set wisdom at so high a
price; and do not so much consider what a man does, as how much it costs
him to do no worse.

Another boasted himself to me of the regularity and gentleness of his
manners, which are to truth very singular; to whom I replied, that it was
indeed something, especially m persons of so eminent a quality as
himself, upon whom every one had their eyes, to present himself always
well-tempered to the world; but that the principal thing was to make
provision for within and for himself; and that it was not in my opinion
very well to order his business outwardly well, and to grate himself
within, which I was afraid he did, in putting on and maintaining this
mask and external appearance.

A man incorporates anger by concealing it, as Diogenes told Demosthenes,
who, for fear of being seen in a tavern, withdrew himself the more
retiredly into it: “The more you retire backward, the farther you enter
in.”  I would rather advise that a man should give his servant a box of
the ear a little unseasonably, than rack his fancy to present this grave
and composed countenance; and had rather discover my passions than brood
over them at my own expense; they grow less inventing and manifesting
themselves; and ‘tis much better their point should wound others without,
than be turned towards ourselves within:

     “Omnia vitia in aperto leviora sunt: et tunc perniciosissima,
     quum simulata sanitate subsident.”

     [“All vices are less dangerous when open to be seen, and then most
     pernicious when they lurk under a dissembled good nature.”
      --Seneca, Ep. 56]

I admonish all those who have authority to be angry in my family, in the
first place to manage their anger and not to lavish it upon every
occasion, for that both lessens the value and hinders the effect: rash
and incessant scolding runs into custom, and renders itself despised; and
what you lay out upon a servant for a theft is not felt, because it is
the same he has seen you a hundred times employ against him for having
ill washed a glass, or set a stool out of place.  Secondly, that they be
not angry to no purpose, but make sure that their reprehension reach him
with whom they are offended; for, ordinarily, they rail and bawl before
he comes into their presence, and continue scolding an age after he is
gone:

               “Et secum petulans amentia certat:”

          [“And petulant madness contends with itself.”
           --Claudian in Eutrop., i. 237.]

they attack his shadow, and drive the storm in a place where no one is
either chastised or concerned, but in the clamour of their voice.
I likewise in quarrels condemn those who huff and vapour without an
enemy: those rhodomontades should be reserved to discharge upon the
offending party:

         “Mugitus veluti cum prima in praelia taurus
          Terrificos ciet, atque irasci in cornua tentat,
          Arboris obnixus trunco, ventospue lacessit
          Ictibus, et sparsa ad pugnum proludit arena.”

     [“As when a bull to usher in the fight, makes dreadful bellowings,
     and whets his horns against the trunk of a tree; with blows he beats
     the air, and rehearses the fight by scattering the sand.”
      --AEneid, xii. 103.]

When I am angry, my anger is very sharp but withal very short, and as
private as I can; I lose myself indeed in promptness and violence, but
not in trouble; so that I throw out all sorts of injurious words at
random, and without choice, and never consider pertinently to dart my
language where I think it will deepest wound, for I commonly make use of
no other weapon than my tongue.

My servants have a better bargain of me in great occasions than in
little; the little ones surprise me; and the misfortune is, that when you
are once upon the precipice, ‘tis no matter who gave you the push, you
always go to the bottom; the fall urges, moves, and makes haste of
itself.  In great occasions this satisfies me, that they are so just
every one expects a reasonable indignation, and then I glorify myself in
deceiving their expectation; against these, I fortify and prepare myself;
they disturb my head, and threaten to transport me very far, should I
follow them.  I can easily contain myself from entering into one of these
passions, and am strong enough, when I expect them, to repel their
violence, be the cause never so great; but if a passion once prepossess
and seize me, it carries me away, be the cause never so small.  I bargain
thus with those who may contend with me when you see me moved first, let
me alone, right or wrong; I’ll do the same for you.  The storm is only
begot by a concurrence of angers, which easily spring from one another,
and are not born together.  Let every one have his own way, and we shall
be always at peace.  A profitable advice, but hard to execute.  Sometimes
also it falls out that I put on a seeming anger, for the better governing
of my house, without any real emotion.  As age renders my humours more
sharp, I study to oppose them, and will, if I can, order it so, that for
the future I may be so much the less peevish and hard to please, as I
have more excuse and inclination to be so, although I have heretofore
been reckoned amongst those who have the greatest patience.

A word more to conclude this argument.  Aristotle says, that anger
sometimes serves for arms to virtue and valour.  That is probable;
nevertheless, they who contradict him  pleasantly answer, that ‘tis a
weapon of novel use, for we move all other arms, this moves us; our hand
guides it not, ‘tis it that guides our hand; it holds us, we hold not it.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A man may always study, but he must not always go to school
     Accursed be thou, as he that arms himself for fear of death
     All things have their seasons, even good ones
     All those who have authority to be angry in my family
     “An emperor,” said he, “must die standing”
      Ancient Romans kept their youth always standing at school
     And we suffer the ills of a long peace
     Be not angry to no purpose
     Best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice
     By resenting the lie we acquit ourselves of the fault
     “By the gods,” said he, “if I was not angry, I would execute you”
      Children are amused with toys and men with words
     Consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy
     Defend most the defects with which we are most tainted
     Emperor Julian, surnamed the Apostate
     Fortune sometimes seems to delight in taking us at our word
     Greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose
     Have more wherewith to defray my journey, than I have way to go
     Hearing a philosopher talk of military affairs
     How much it costs him to do no worse
     I need not seek a fool from afar; I can laugh at myself
     Idleness, the mother of corruption
     If a passion once prepossess and seize me, it carries me away
     In sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure
     Killing is good to frustrate an offence to come, not to revenge
     Laws cannot subsist without mixture of injustice
     Least end of a hair will serve to draw them into my discourse
     Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; ‘tis in us
     Look on death not only without astonishment but without care
     Melancholy: Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?
     Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry.
     No beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man
     Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning
     Our fancy does what it will, both with itself and us
     Owe ourselves chiefly and mostly to ourselves
     Petulant madness contends with itself
     Rage it puts them to oppose silence and coldness to their fury
     Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom
     Revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties
     See how flexible our reason is
     Seeming anger, for the better governing of my house
     Shake the truth of our Church by the vices of her ministers
     Take my last leave of every place I depart from
     The gods sell us all the goods they give us
     The storm is only begot by a concurrence of angers
     Though nobody should read me, have I wasted time
     Tis said of Epimenides, that he always prophesied backward
     Tis then no longer correction, but revenge
     Upon the precipice, ‘tis no matter who gave you the push
     “When will this man be wise,” said he, “if he is yet learning?”
      When you see me moved first, let me alone, right or wrong
     Young are to make their preparations, the old to enjoy them







ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 13.

XXXII.    Defence of Seneca and Plutarch.
XXXIII.   The story of Spurina.
XXXIV.    Means to carry on a war according to Julius Caesar.
XXXV.     Of three good women.
XXXVI.    Of the most excellent men.
XXXVII.   Of the resemblance of children to their fathers.



CHAPTER XXXII


DEFENCE OF SENECA AND PLUTARCH

The familiarity I have with these two authors, and the assistance they
have lent to my age and to my book, wholly compiled of what I have
borrowed from them, oblige me to stand up for their honour.

As to Seneca, amongst a million of little pamphlets that those of the
so-called reformed religion disperse abroad for the defence of their cause
(and which sometimes proceed from so good a hand, that ‘tis pity his pen
is not employed in a better subject), I have formerly seen one, that to
make up the parallel he would fain find out betwixt the government of our
late poor King Charles IX. and that of Nero, compares the late Cardinal
of Lorraine with Seneca; their fortunes, in having both of them been the
prime ministers in the government of their princes, and in their manners,
conditions, and deportments to have been very near alike.  Wherein, in my
opinion, he does the said cardinal a very great honour; for though I am
one of those who have a very high esteem for his wit, eloquence, and zeal
to religion and the service of his king, and his good fortune to have
lived in an age wherein it was so novel, so rare, and also so necessary
for the public good to have an ecclesiastical person of such high birth
and dignity, and so sufficient and capable of his place; yet, to confess
the truth, I do not think his capacity by many degrees near to the other,
nor his virtue either so clean, entire, or steady as that of Seneca.

Now the book whereof I speak, to bring about its design, gives a very
injurious description of Seneca, having borrowed its approaches from Dion
the historian, whose testimony I do not at all believe for besides that
he is inconsistent, that after having called Seneca one while very wise,
and again a mortal enemy to Nero’s vices, makes him elsewhere avaricious,
an usurer, ambitious, effeminate, voluptuous, and a false pretender to
philosophy, his virtue appears so vivid and vigorous in his writings, and
his vindication is so clear from any of these imputations, as of his
riches and extraordinarily expensive way of living, that I cannot believe
any testimony to the contrary.  And besides, it is much more reasonable
to believe the Roman historians in such things than Greeks and
foreigners.  Now Tacitus and the rest speak very honourably both of his
life and death; and represent him to us a very excellent and virtuous
person in all things; and I will allege no other reproach against Dion’s
report but this, which I cannot avoid, namely, that he has so weak a
judgment in the Roman affairs, that he dares to maintain Julius Caesar’s
cause against Pompey [And so does this editor.  D.W.], and that of Antony
against Cicero.

Let us now come to Plutarch: Jean Bodin is a good author of our times,
and a writer of much greater judgment than the rout of scribblers of his
age, and who deserves to be read and considered.  I find him, though, a
little bold in this passage of his Method of history, where he accuses
Plutarch not only of ignorance (wherein I would have let him alone: for
that is beyond my criticism), but that he “often writes things
incredible, and absolutely fabulous “: these are his own words.  If he
had simply said, that he had delivered things otherwise than they really
are, it had been no great reproach; for what we have not seen, we are
forced to receive from other hands, and take upon trust, and I see that
he purposely sometimes variously relates the same story; as the judgment
of the three best captains that ever were, given by Hannibal; ‘tis one
way in the Life of Flammius, and another in that of Pyrrhus.  But to
charge him with having taken incredible and impossible things for current
pay, is to accuse the most judicious author in the world of want of
judgment.  And this is his example; “as,” says he, “when he relates that
a Lacedaemonian boy suffered his bowels to be torn out by a fox-cub he
had stolen, and kept it still concealed under his coat till he fell down
dead, rather than he would discover his theft.”  I find, in the first
place, this example ill chosen, forasmuch as it is very hard to limit the
power of the faculties of--the soul, whereas we have better authority to
limit and know the force of the bodily limbs; and therefore, if I had
been he, I should rather have chosen an example of this second sort; and
there are some of these less credible: and amongst others, that which he
refates of Pyrrhus, that “all wounded as he was, he struck one of his
enemies, who was armed from head to foot, so great a blow with his sword,
that he clave him down from his crown to his seat, so that the body was
divided into two parts.”  In this example I find no great miracle, nor do
I admit the excuse with which he defends Plutarch, in having added these
words, “as ‘tis said,” to suspend our belief; for unless it be in things
received by authority, and the reverence to antiquity or religion, he
would never have himself admitted, or enjoined us to believe things
incredible in themselves; and that these words, “as ‘tis said,” are not
put in this place to that effect, is easy to be seen, because he
elsewhere relates to us, upon this subject, of the patience of the
Lacedaemonian children, examples happening in his time, more unlikely to
prevail upon our faith; as what Cicero has also testified before him, as
having, as he says, been upon the spot: that even to their times there
were children found who, in the trial of patience they were put to before
the altar of Diana, suffered themselves to be there whipped till the
blood ran down all over their bodies, not only without crying out, but
without so much as a groan, and some till they there voluntarily lost
their lives: and that which Plutarch also, amongst a hundred other
witnesses, relates, that at a sacrifice, a burning coal having fallen
into the sleeve of a Lacedaemonian boy, as he was censing, he suffered
his whole arm to be burned, till the smell of the broiling flesh was
perceived by those present.  There was nothing, according to their
custom, wherein their reputation was more concerned, nor for which they
were to undergo more blame and disgrace, than in being taken in theft.
I am so fully satisfied of the greatness of those people, that this story
does not only not appear to me, as to Bodin, incredible; but I do not
find it so much as rare and strange.  The Spartan history is full of a
thousand more cruel and rare examples; and is; indeed, all miracle in
this respect.

Marcellinus, concerning theft, reports that in his time there was no sort
of torments which could compel the Egyptians, when taken in this act,
though a people very much addicted to it, so much as to tell their name.

A Spanish peasant, being put to the rack as to the accomplices of the
murder of the Praetor Lucius Piso, cried out in the height of the
torment, “that his friends should not leave him, but look on in all
assurance, and that no pain had the power to force from him one word of
confession,” which was all they could get the first day.  The next day,
as they were leading him a second time to another trial, strongly
disengaging himself from the hands of his guards, he furiously ran his
head against a wall, and beat out his brains.

Epicharis, having tired and glutted the cruelty of Nero’s satellites, and
undergone their fire, their beating, their racks, a whole day together,
without one syllable of confession of her conspiracy; being the next day
brought again to the rack, with her limbs almost torn to pieces, conveyed
the lace of her robe with a running noose over one of the arms of her
chair, and suddenly slipping her head into it, with the weight of her own
body hanged herself.  Having the courage to die in that manner, is it not
to be presumed that she purposely lent her life to the trial of her
fortitude the day before, to mock the tyrant, and encourage others to the
like attempt?

And whoever will inquire of our troopers the experiences they have had in
our civil wars, will find effects of patience and obstinate resolution in
this miserable age of ours, and amongst this rabble even more effeminate
than the Egyptians, worthy to be compared with those we have just related
of the Spartan virtue.

I know there have been simple peasants amongst us who have endured the
soles of their feet to be broiled upon a gridiron, their finger-ends to
be crushed with the cock of a pistol, and their bloody eyes squeezed out
of their heads by force of a cord twisted about their brows, before they
would so much as consent to a ransom.  I have seen one left stark naked
for dead in a ditch, his neck black and swollen, with a halter yet about
it with which they had dragged him all night at a horse’s tail, his body
wounded in a hundred places, with stabs of daggers that had been given
him, not to kill him, but to put him to pain and to affright him, who had
endured all this, and even to being speechless and insensible, resolved,
as he himself told me, rather to die a thousand deaths (as indeed, as to
matter of suffering, he had borne one) before he would promise anything;
and yet he was one of the richest husbandmen of all the country.  How
many have been seen patiently to suffer themselves to be burnt and
roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others, and by them not at all
understood?  I have known a hundred and a hundred women (for Gascony has
a certain prerogative for obstinacy) whom you might sooner have made eat
fire than forsake an opinion they had conceived in anger.  They are all
the more exasperated by blows and constraint.  And he that made the story
of the woman who, in defiance of all correction, threats, and
bastinadoes, ceased not to call her husband lousy knave, and who being
plunged over head and ears in water, yet lifted her hands above her head
and made a sign of cracking lice, feigned a tale of which, in truth, we
every day see a manifest image in the obstinacy of women.  And obstinacy
is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability.

We are not to judge what is possible and what is not, according to what
is credible and incredible to our apprehension, as I have said elsewhere
and it is a great fault, and yet one that most men are guilty of, which,
nevertheless, I do not mention with any reflection upon Bodin, to make a
difficulty of believing that in another which they could not or would not
do themselves.  Every one thinks that the sovereign stamp of human nature
is imprinted in him, and that from it all others must take their rule;
and that all proceedings which are not like his are feigned and false.
Is anything of another’s actions or faculties proposed to him? the first
thing he calls to the consultation of his judgment is his own example;
and as matters go with him, so they must of necessity do with all the
world besides dangerous and intolerable folly!  For my part, I consider
some men as infinitely beyond me, especially amongst the ancients, and
yet, though I clearly discern my inability to come near them by a
thousand paces, I do not forbear to keep them in sight, and to judge of
what so elevates them, of which I perceive some seeds in myself, as I
also do of the extreme meanness of some other minds, which I neither am
astonished at nor yet misbelieve.  I  very well perceive the turns those
great souls take to raise  themselves to such a pitch, and admire their
grandeur; and those flights that I think the bravest I could be glad to
imitate; where, though I want wing, yet my judgment readily goes along
with them.  The other example he introduces of “things incredible and
wholly fabulous,” delivered by Plutarch, is, that “Agesilaus was fined by
the Ephori for having wholly engrossed the hearts and affections of his
citizens to himself alone.”  And herein I do not see what sign of falsity
is to be found: clearly Plutarch speaks of things that must needs be
better known to him than to us; and it was no new thing in Greece to see
men punished and exiled for this very thing, for being too acceptable to
the people; witness the Ostracism and Petalism.--[Ostracism at Athens
was banishment for ten years; petalism at Syracuse was banishment for
five years.]

There is yet in this place another accusation laid against Plutarch which
I cannot well digest, where Bodin says that he has sincerely paralleled
Romans with Romans, and Greeks amongst themselves, but not Romans with
Greeks; witness, says he, Demosthenes and Cicero, Cato and Aristides,
Sylla and Lysander, Marcellus and Pelopidas, Pompey and Agesilaus,
holding that he has favoured the Greeks in giving them so unequal
companions.  This is really to attack what in Plutarch is most excellent
and most to be commended; for in his parallels (which is the most
admirable part of all his works, and with which, in my opinion, he is
himself the most pleased) the fidelity and sincerity of his judgments
equal their depth and weight; he is a philosopher who teaches us virtue.
Let us see whether we cannot defend him from this reproach of falsity and
prevarication.  All that I can imagine could give occasion to this
censure is the great and shining lustre of the Roman names which we have
in our minds; it does not seem likely to us that Demosthenes could rival
the glory of a consul, proconsul, and proctor of that great Republic; but
if a man consider the truth of the thing, and the men in themselves,
which is Plutarch’s chiefest aim, and will rather balance their manners,
their natures, and parts, than their fortunes, I think, contrary to
Bodin, that Cicero and the elder Cato come far short of the men with whom
they are compared.  I should sooner, for his purpose, have chosen the
example of the younger Cato compared with Phocion, for in this couple
there would have been a more likely disparity, to the Roman’s advantage.
As to Marcellus, Sylla, and Pompey, I very well discern that their
exploits of war are greater and more full of pomp and glory than those of
the Greeks, whom Plutarch compares with them; but the bravest and most
virtuous actions any more in war than elsewhere, are not always the most
renowned.  I often see the names of captains obscured by the splendour of
other names of less desert; witness Labienus, Ventidius, Telesinus, and
several others.  And to take it by that, were I to complain on the behalf
of the Greeks, could I not say, that Camillus was much less comparable to
Themistocles, the Gracchi to Agis and Cleomenes, and Numa to Lycurgus?
But ‘tis folly to judge, at one view, of things that have so many
aspects.  When Plutarch compares them, he does not, for all that, make
them equal; who could more learnedly and sincerely have marked their
distinctions?  Does he parallel the victories, feats of arms, the force
of the armies conducted by Pompey, and his triumphs, with those of
Agesilaus?  “I do not believe,” says he, “that Xenophon himself, if he
were now living, though he were allowed to write whatever pleased him to
the advantage of Agesilaus, would dare to bring them into comparison.”
 Does he speak of paralleling Lysander to Sylla.  “There is,” says he,
“no comparison, either in the number of victories or in the hazard of
battles, for Lysander only gained two naval battles.”  This is not to
derogate from the Romans; for having only simply named them with the
Greeks, he can have done them no injury, what disparity soever there may
be betwixt them and Plutarch does not entirely oppose them to one
another; there is no preference in general; he only compares the pieces
and circumstances one after another, and gives of every one a particular
and separate judgment.  Wherefore, if any one could convict him of
partiality, he ought to pick out some one of those particular judgments,
or say, in general, that he was mistaken in comparing such a Greek to
such a Roman, when there were others more fit and better resembling to
parallel him to.




CHAPTER XXXIII

THE STORY OF SPURINA

Philosophy thinks she has not ill employed her talent when she has given
the sovereignty of the soul and the authority of restraining our
appetites to reason.  Amongst which, they who judge that there is none
more violent than those which spring from love, have this opinion also,
that they seize both body and soul, and possess the whole man, so that
even health itself depends upon them, and medicine is sometimes
constrained to pimp for them; but one might, on the contrary, also say,
that the mixture of the body brings an abatement and weakening; for such
desires are subject to satiety, and capable of material remedies.

Many, being determined to rid their soul from the continual alarms of
this appetite, have made use of incision and amputation of the rebelling
members; others have subdued their force and ardour by the frequent
application of cold things, as snow and vinegar.  The sackcloths of our
ancestors were for this purpose, which is cloth woven of horse hair, of
which some of them made shirts, and others girdles, to torture and
correct their reins.  A prince, not long ago, told me that in his youth
upon a solemn festival in the court of King Francis I., where everybody
was finely dressed, he would needs put on his father’s hair shirt, which
was still kept in the house; but how great soever his devotion was, he
had not patience to wear it till night, and was sick a long time after;
adding withal, that he did not think there could be any youthful heat so
fierce that the use of this recipe would not mortify, and yet perhaps he
never essayed the most violent; for experience shows us, that such
emotions are often seen under rude and slovenly clothes, and that a hair
shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it.

Xenocrates proceeded with greater rigour in this affair; for his
disciples, to make trial of his continency, having slipt Lais, that
beautiful and famous courtesan, into his bed, quite naked, excepting the
arms of her beauty and her wanton allurements, her philters, finding
that, in despite of his reason and philosophical rules, his unruly flesh
began to mutiny, he caused those members of his to be burned that he
found consenting to this rebellion.  Whereas the passions which wholly
reside in the soul, as ambition, avarice, and the rest, find the reason
much more to do, because it cannot there be helped but by its own means;
neither are those appetites capable of satiety, but grow sharper and
increase by fruition.

The sole example of Julius Caesar may suffice to demonstrate to us the
disparity of these appetites; for never was man more addicted to amorous
delights than he: of which one testimony is the peculiar care he had of
his person, to such a degree, as to make use of the most lascivious means
to that end then in use, as to have all the hairs of his body twitched
off, and to wipe all over with perfumes with the extremest nicety.
And he was a beautiful person in himself, of a fair complexion, tall,
and sprightly, full faced, with quick hazel eyes, if we may believe
Suetonius; for the statues of him that we see at Rome do not in all
points answer this description.  Besides his wives, whom he four times
changed, without reckoning the amours of his boyhood with Nicomedes, king
of Bithynia, he had the maidenhead of the renowned Cleopatra, queen of
Egypt; witness the little Caesario whom he had by her.  He also made love
to.  Eunoe, queen of Mauritania, and at Rome, to Posthumia, the wife of
Servius Sulpitius; to Lollia, the wife of Gabinius to Tertulla, the wife
of Crassus, and even to Mutia, wife to the great Pompey: which was the
reason, the Roman historians say, that she was repudiated by her husband,
which Plutarch confesses to be more than he knew; and the Curios, both
father and son, afterwards reproached Pompey, when he married Caesar’s
daughter, that he had made himself son-in-law to a man who had made him
cuckold, and one whom he himself was wont to call AEgisthus.  Besides all
these, he entertained Servilia, Cato’s sister and mother to Marcus
Brutus, whence, every one believes, proceeded the great affection he had
to Brutus, by reason that he was born at a time when it was likely he
might be his son.  So that I have reason, methinks, to take him for a man
extremely given to this debauch, and of very amorous constitution.  But
the other passion of ambition, with which he was infinitely smitten,
arising in him to contend with the former, it was boon compelled to give
way.

And here calling to mind Mohammed, who won Constantinople, and finally
exterminated the Grecian name, I do not know where these two were so
evenly balanced; equally an indefatigable lecher and soldier: but where
they both meet in his life and jostle one another, the quarrelling
passion always gets the better of the amorous one, and this though it was
out of its natural season never regained an absolute sovereignty over the
other till he had arrived at an extreme old age and unable to undergo the
fatigues of war.

What is related for a contrary example of Ladislaus, king of Naples, is
very remarkable; that being a great captain, valiant and ambitious, he
proposed to himself for the principal end of his ambition, the execution
of his pleasure and the enjoyment of some rare and excellent beauty.  His
death sealed up all the rest: for having by a close and tedious siege
reduced the city of Florence to so great distress that the inhabitants
were compelled to capitulate about surrender, he was content to let them
alone, provided they would deliver up to him a beautiful maid he had
heard of in their city; they were forced to yield to it, and by a private
injury to avert the public ruin.  She was the daughter of a famous
physician of his time, who, finding himself involved in so foul a
necessity, resolved upon a high attempt.  As every one was lending a hand
to trick up his daughter and to adorn her with ornaments and jewels to
render her more agreeable to this new lover, he also gave her a
handkerchief most richly wrought, and of an exquisite perfume, an
implement they never go without in those parts, which she was to make use
of at their first approaches.  This handkerchief, poisoned with his
greatest art, coming to be rubbed between the chafed flesh and open
pores, both of the one and the other, so suddenly infused the poison,
that immediately converting their warm into a cold sweat they presently
died in one another’s arms.

But I return to Caesar.  His pleasures never made him steal one minute of
an hour, nor go one step aside from occasions that might any way conduce
to his advancement.  This passion was so sovereign in him over all the
rest, and with so absolute authority possessed his soul, that it guided
him at pleasure.  In truth, this troubles me, when, as to everything
else, I consider the greatness of this man, and the wonderful parts
wherewith he was endued; learned to that degree in all sorts of knowledge
that there is hardly any one science of which he has not written; so
great an orator that many have preferred his eloquence to that of Cicero,
and he, I conceive, did not think himself inferior to him in that
particular, for his two anti-Catos were written to counterbalance the
elocution that Cicero had expended in his Cato.  As to the rest, was ever
soul so vigilant, so active, and so patient of labour as his? and,
doubtless, it was embellished with many rare seeds of virtue, lively,
natural, and not put on; he was singularly sober; so far from being
delicate in his diet, that Oppius relates, how that having one day at
table set before him medicated instead of common oil in some sauce, he
ate heartily of it, that he might not put his entertainer out of
countenance.  Another time he caused his baker to be whipped for serving
him with a finer than ordinary sort of bread.  Cato himself was wont to
say of him, that he was the first sober man who ever made it his business
to ruin his country.  And as to the same Cato’s calling, him one day
drunkard, it fell out thus being both of them in the Senate, at a time
when Catiline’s conspiracy was in question of which was Caesar was
suspected, one came and brought him a letter sealed up.  Cato believing
that it was something the conspirators gave him notice of, required him
to deliver into his hand, which Caesar  was constrained to do to avoid
further suspicion.  It was by chance a love-letter that Servilia, Cato’s
sister, had written to him, which Cato having read, he threw it back to
him saying, “There, drunkard.”  This, I say, was rather a word of disdain
and anger than an express reproach of this vice, as we often rate those
who anger us with the first injurious words that come into our mouths,
though nothing due to those we are offended at; to which may be added
that the vice with which Cato upbraided him is wonderfully near akin to
that wherein he had surprised Caesar; for Bacchus and Venus, according to
the proverb, very willingly agree; but to me Venus is much more sprightly
accompanied by sobriety.  The examples of his sweetness and clemency to
those by whom he had been offended are infinite; I mean, besides those he
gave during the time of the civil wars, which, as plainly enough appears
by his writings, he practised to cajole his enemies, and to make them
less afraid of his future dominion and victory.  But I must also say,
that if these examples are not sufficient proofs of his natural
sweetness, they, at least, manifest a marvellous confidence and grandeur
of courage in this person.  He has often been known to dismiss whole
armies, after having overcome them, to his enemies, without ransom, or
deigning so much as to bind them by oath, if not to favour him, at least
no more to bear arms against him; he has three or four times taken some
of Pompey’s captains prisoners, and as often set them at liberty.  Pompey
declared all those to be enemies who did not follow him to the war; he
proclaimed all those to be his friends who sat still and did not actually
take arms against him.  To such captains of his as ran away from him to
go over to the other side, he sent, moreover, their arms, horses, and
equipage: the cities he had taken by force he left at full liberty to
follow which side they pleased, imposing no other garrison upon them but
the memory of his gentleness and clemency.  He gave strict and express
charge, the day of his great battle of Pharsalia, that, without the
utmost necessity, no one should lay a hand upon the citizens of Rome.
These, in my opinion, were very hazardous proceedings, and ‘tis no wonder
if those in our civil war, who, like him, fight against the ancient
estate of their country, do not follow his example; they are
extraordinary means, and that only appertain to Caesar’s fortune, and to
his admirable foresight in the conduct of affairs.  When I consider the
incomparable grandeur of his soul, I excuse victory that it could not
disengage itself from him, even in so unjust and so wicked a cause.

To return to his clemency: we have many striking examples in the time of
his government, when, all things being reduced to his power, he had no
more written against him which he had as sharply answered: yet he did not
soon after forbear to use his interest to make him consul.  Caius Calvus,
who had composed several injurious epigrams against him, having employed
many of his friends to mediate a reconciliation with him, Caesar
voluntarily persuaded himself to write first to him.  And our good
Catullus, who had so rudely ruffled him under the name of Mamurra, coming
to offer his excuses to him, he made the same day sit at his table.
Having intelligence of some who spoke ill of him, he did no more, but
only by a public oration declare that he had notice of it.  He still less
feared his enemies than he hated them; some conspiracies and cabals that
were made against his life being discovered to him, he satisfied himself
in publishing by proclamation that they were known to him, without
further prosecuting the conspirators.

As to the respect he had for his friends: Caius Oppius, being with him
upon a journey, and finding himself ill, he left him the only lodging he
had for himself, and lay all night upon a hard ground in the open air.
As to what concerns his justice, he put a beloved servant of his to death
for lying with a noble Roman’s wife, though there was no complaint made.
Never had man more moderation in his victory, nor more resolution in his
adverse fortune.

But all these good inclinations were stifled and spoiled by his furious
ambition, by which he suffered himself to be so transported and misled
that one may easily maintain that this passion was the rudder of all his
actions; of a liberal man, it made him a public thief to supply this
bounty and profusion, and made him utter this vile and unjust saying,
“That if the most wicked and profligate persons in the world had been
faithful in serving him towards his advancement, he would cherish and
prefer them to the utmost of his power, as much as the best of men.”
 It intoxicated him with so excessive a vanity, as to dare to boast in the
presence of his fellow-citizens, that he had made the great commonwealth
of Rome a name without form and without body; and to say that his answers
for the future should stand for laws; and also to receive the body of the
Senate coming to him, sitting; to suffer himself to be adored, and to
have divine honours paid to him in his own presence.  To conclude, this
sole vice, in my opinion, spoiled in him the most rich and beautiful
nature that ever was, and has rendered his name abominable to all good
men, in that he would erect his glory upon the ruins of his country and
the subversion of the greatest and most flourishing republic the world
shall ever see.

There might, on the contrary, many examples be produced of great men whom
pleasures have made to neglect the conduct of their affairs, as Mark
Antony and others; but where love and ambition should be in equal
balance, and come to jostle with equal forces, I make no doubt but the
last would win the prize.

To return to my subject: ‘tis much to bridle our appetites by the
argument of reason, or, by violence, to contain our members within their
duty; but to lash ourselves for our neighbour’s interest, and not only to
divest ourselves of the charming passion that tickles us, of the pleasure
we feel in being agreeable to others, and courted and beloved of every
one, but also to conceive a hatred against the graces that produce that
effect, and to condemn our beauty because it inflames others; of this, I
confess, I have met with few examples.  But this is one.  Spurina, a
young man of Tuscany:

         “Qualis gemma micat, fulvum quae dividit aurum,
          Aut collo decus, aut cupiti: vel quale per artem
          Inclusum buxo aut Oricia terebintho
          Lucet ebur,”

     [“As a gem shines enchased in yellow gold, or an ornament on the
     neck or head, or as ivory has lustre, set by art in boxwood or
     Orician ebony.”--AEneid, x. 134.]

being endowed with a singular beauty, and so excessive, that the chastest
eyes could not chastely behold its rays; not contenting himself with
leaving so much flame and fever as he everywhere kindled without relief,
entered into a furious spite against himself and those great endowments
nature had so liberally conferred upon him, as if a man were responsible
to himself for the faults of others, and purposely slashed and
disfigured, with many wounds and scars, the perfect symmetry and
proportion that nature had so curiously imprinted in his face.  To give
my free opinion, I more admire than honour such actions: such excesses
are enemies to my rules.  The design was conscientious and good, but
certainly a little defective in prudence.  What if his deformity served
afterwards to make others guilty of the sin of hatred or contempt; or of
envy at the glory of so rare a recommendation; or of calumny,
interpreting this humour a mad ambition!  Is there any form from which
vice cannot, if it will, extract occasion to exercise itself, one way or
another?  It had been more just, and also more noble, to have made of
these gifts of God a subject of exemplary regularity and virtue.

They who retire themselves from the common offices, from that infinite
number of troublesome rules that fetter a man of exact honesty in civil
life, are in my opinion very discreet, what peculiar sharpness of
constraint soever they impose upon themselves in so doing.  ‘Tis in some
sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living well.  They may have
another reward; but the reward of difficulty I fancy they can never have;
nor, in uneasiness, that there can be anything more or better done than
the keeping oneself upright amid the waves of the world, truly and
exactly performing all parts of our duty.  ‘Tis, peradventure, more easy
to keep clear of the sex than to maintain one’s self aright in all points
in the society of a wife; and a man may with less trouble adapt himself
to entire abstinence than to the due dispensation of abundance.  Use,
carried on according to reason, has in it more of difficulty than
abstinence; moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering;
the well living of Scipio has a thousand fashions, that of Diogenes but
one; this as much excels the ordinary lives in innocence as the most
accomplished excel them in utility and force.




CHAPTER XXXIV

OBSERVATION ON THE MEANS TO CARRY ON A WAR ACCORDING TO JULIUS CAESAR

‘Tis related of many great leaders that they have had certain books in
particular esteem, as Alexander the Great, Homer; Scipio Africanus,
Xenophon; Marcus Brutus, Polybius; Charles V., Philip’de Comines; and
‘tis said that, in our times, Machiavelli is elsewhere still in repute;
but the late Marshal Strozzi, who had taken Caesar for his man, doubtless
made the best choice, seeing that it indeed ought to be the breviary of
every soldier, as being the true and sovereign pattern of the military
art.  And, moreover, God knows with that grace and beauty he has
embellished that rich matter, with so pure, delicate, and perfect
expression, that, in my opinion, there are no writings in the world
comparable to his, as to that business.

I will set down some rare and particular passages of his wars that remain
in my memory.

His army, being in some consternation upon the rumour that was spread of
the great forces that king Juba was leading against him, instead of
abating the apprehension which his soldiers had conceived at the news and
of lessening to them the forces of the enemy, having called them all
together to encourage and reassure them, he took a quite contrary way to
what we are used to do, for he told them that they need no more trouble
themselves with inquiring after the enemy’s forces, for that he was
certainly informed thereof, and then told them of a number much
surpassing both the truth and the report that was current in his army;
following the advice of Cyrus in Xenophon, forasmuch as the deception is
not of so great importance to find an enemy weaker than we expected, than
to find him really very strong, after having been made to believe that he
was weak.

It was always his use to accustom his soldiers simply to obey, without
taking upon them to control, or so much as to speak of their captain’s
designs, which he never communicated to them but upon the point of
execution; and he took a delight, if they discovered anything of what he
intended, immediately to change his orders to deceive them; and to that
purpose, would often, when he had assigned his quarters in a place, pass
forward and lengthen his day’s march, especially if it was foul and rainy
weather.

The Swiss, in the beginning of his wars in Gaul, having sent to him to
demand a free passage over the Roman territories, though resolved to
hinder them by force, he nevertheless spoke kindly to the messengers, and
took some respite to return an answer, to make use of that time for the
calling his army together.  These silly people did not know how good a
husband he was of his time: for he often repeats that it is the best part
of a captain to know how to make use of occasions, and his diligence in
his exploits is, in truth, unheard of and incredible.

If he was not very conscientious in taking advantage of an enemy under
colour of a treaty of agreement, he was as little so in this, that he
required no other virtue in a soldier but valour only, and seldom
punished any other faults but mutiny and disobedience.  He would often
after his victories turn them loose to all sorts of licence, dispensing
them for some time from the rules of military discipline, saying withal
that he had soldiers so well trained up that, powdered and perfumed, they
would run furiously to the fight.  In truth, he loved to have them richly
armed, and made them wear engraved, gilded, and damasked armour, to the
end that the care of saving it might engage them to a more obstinate
defence.  Speaking to them, he called them by the name of
fellow-soldiers, which we yet use; which his successor, Augustus,
reformed, supposing he had only done it upon necessity, and to cajole
those who merely followed him as volunteers:

                         “Rheni mihi Caesar in undis
          Dux erat; hic socius; facinus quos inquinat, aequat:”

     [“In the waters of the Rhine Caesar was my general; here at Rome he
     is my fellow.  Crime levels those whom it polluted.”
      --Lucan, v. 289.]

but that this carriage was too mean and low for the dignity of an emperor
and general of an army, and therefore brought up the custom of calling
them soldiers only.

With this courtesy Caesar mixed great severity to keep them in awe; the
ninth legion having mutinied near Placentia, he ignominiously cashiered
them, though Pompey was then yet on foot, and received them not again to
grace till after many supplications; he quieted them more by authority
and boldness than by gentle ways.

In that place where he speaks of his, passage over the Rhine to Germany,
he says that, thinking it unworthy of the honour of the Roman people to
waft over his army in vessels, he built a bridge that they might pass
over dry-foot.  There it was that he built that wonderful bridge of which
he gives so particular a description; for he nowhere so willingly dwells
upon his actions as in representing to us the subtlety of his inventions
in such kind of handiwork.

I have also observed this, that he set a great value upon his
exhortations to the soldiers before the fight; for where he would show
that he was either surprised or reduced to a necessity of fighting, he
always brings in this, that he had not so much as leisure to harangue his
army.  Before that great battle with those of Tournay, “Caesar,” says he,
“having given order for everything else, presently ran where fortune
carried him to encourage his people, and meeting with the tenth legion,
had no more time to say anything to them but this, that they should
remember their wonted valour; not to be astonished, but bravely sustain
the enemy’s encounter; and seeing the enemy had already approached within
a dart’s cast, he gave the signal for battle; and going suddenly thence
elsewhere, to encourage others, he found that they were already engaged.”
 Here is what he tells us in that place.  His tongue, indeed, did him
notable service upon several occasions, and his military eloquence was,
in his own time, so highly reputed, that many of his army wrote down his
harangues as he spoke them, by which means there were volumes of them
collected that existed a long time after him.  He had so particular a
grace in speaking, that his intimates, and Augustus amongst others,
hearing those orations read, could distinguish even to the phrases and
words that were not his.

The first time that he went out of Rome with any public command, he
arrived in eight days at the river Rhone, having with him in his coach a
secretary or two before him who were continually writing, and him who
carried his sword behind him.  And certainly, though a man did nothing
but go on, he could hardly attain that promptitude with which, having
been everywhere victorious in Gaul, he left it, and, following Pompey to
Brundusium, in eighteen days’ time he subdued all Italy; returned from
Brundusium to Rome; from Rome went into the very heart of Spain, where he
surmounted extreme difficulties in the war against Afranius and Petreius,
and in the long siege of Marseilles; thence he returned into Macedonia,
beat the Roman army at Pharsalia, passed thence in pursuit of Pompey into
Egypt, which he also subdued; from Egypt he went into Syria and the
territories of Pontus, where he fought Pharnaces; thence into Africa,
where he defeated Scipio and Juba; again returned through Italy, where he
defeated Pompey’s sons:

               “Ocyor et coeli fiammis, et tigride foeta.”

          [“Swifter than lightning, or the cub-bearing tigress.”
           --Lucan, v. 405]

              “Ac veluti montis saxum de, vertice praeceps
               Cum ruit avulsum vento, seu turbidus imber
               Proluit, aut annis solvit sublapsa vetustas,
               Fertur in abruptum magno mons improbus actu,
               Exultatque solo, silvas, armenta, virosque,
               Involvens secum.”

     [“And as a stone torn from the mountain’s top by the wind or rain
     torrents, or loosened by age, falls massive with mighty force,
     bounds here and there, in its course sweeps from the earth with it
     woods, herds, and men.”--AEneid, xii. 684.]

Speaking of the siege of Avaricum, he says, that it, was his custom to be
night and day with the pioneers.--[Engineers.  D.W.]--In all enterprises
of consequence he always reconnoitred in person, and never brought his
army into quarters till he had first viewed the place, and, if we may
believe Suetonius, when he resolved to pass over into England, he was the
first man that sounded the passage.

He was wont to say that he more valued a victory obtained by counsel than
by force, and in the war against Petreius and Afranius, fortune
presenting him with an occasion of manifest advantage, he declined it,
saying, that he hoped, with a little more time, but less hazard, to
overthrow his enemies.  He there also played a notable part in commanding
his whole army to pass the river by swimming, without any manner of
necessity:

                    “Rapuitque ruens in praelia miles,
          Quod fugiens timuisset, iter; mox uda receptis
          Membra fovent armis, gelidosque a gurgite, cursu
          Restituunt artus.”

     [“The soldier rushing through a way to fight which he would have
     been afraid to have taken in flight: then with their armour they
     cover wet limbs, and by running restore warmth to their numbed
     joints.”--Lucan, iv.  151.]

I find him a little more temperate and considerate in his enterprises
than Alexander, for this man seems to seek and run headlong upon dangers
like an impetuous torrent which attacks and rushes against everything it
meets, without choice or discretion;

                    “Sic tauriformis volvitur Aufidus;
                    Qui regna Dauni perfluit Appuli,
                    Dum saevit, horrendamque cultis
                    Diluviem meditatur agris;”

     [“So the biforked Aufidus, which flows through the realm of the
     Apulian Daunus, when raging, threatens a fearful deluge to the
     tilled ground.”--Horat., Od., iv. 14, 25.]

and, indeed, he was a general in the flower and first heat of his youth,
whereas Caesar took up the trade at a ripe and well advanced age; to
which may be added that Alexander was of a more sanguine, hot, and
choleric constitution, which he also inflamed with wine, from which
Caesar was very abstinent.

But where necessary occasion required, never did any man venture his
person more than he: so much so, that for my part, methinks I read in
many of his exploits a determinate resolution to throw himself away to
avoid the shame of being overcome.  In his great battle with those of
Tournay, he charged up to the head of the enemies without his shield,
just as he was seeing the van of his own army beginning to give ground’;
which also several other times befell him.  Hearing that his people were
besieged, he passed through the enemy’s army in disguise to go and
encourage them with his presence.  Having crossed over to Dyrrachium with
very slender forces, and seeing the remainder of his army which he had
left to Antony’s conduct slow in following him, he undertook alone to
repass the sea in a very great storms and privately stole away to fetch
the rest of his forces, the ports on the other side being seized by
Pompey, and the whole sea being in his possession.  And as to what he
performed by force of hand, there are many exploits that in hazard exceed
all the rules of war; for with how small means did he undertake to subdue
the kingdom of Egypt, and afterwards to attack the forces of Scipio and
Juba, ten times greater than his own?  These people had, I know not what,
more than human confidence in their fortune; and he was wont to say that
men must embark, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises.  After the
battle of Pharsalia, when he had sent his army away before him into Asia,
and was passing in one single vessel the strait of the Hellespont, he met
Lucius Cassius at sea with ten tall men-of-war, when he had the courage
not only to stay his coming, but to sail up to him and summon him to
yield, which he did.

Having undertaken that furious siege of Alexia, where there were
fourscore thousand men in garrison, all Gaul being in arms to raise the
siege and having set an army on foot of a hundred and nine thousand
horse, and of two hundred and forty thousand foot, what a boldness and
vehement confidence was it in him that he would not give over his
attempt, but resolved upon two so great difficulties--which nevertheless
he overcame; and, after having won that great battle against those
without, soon reduced those within to his mercy.  The same happened to
Lucullus at the siege of Tigranocerta against King Tigranes, but the
condition of the enemy was not the same, considering the effeminacy of
those with whom Lucullus had to deal.  I will here set down two rare and
extraordinary events concerning this siege of Alexia; one, that the Gauls
having drawn their powers together to encounter Caesar, after they had
made a general muster of all their forces, resolved in their council of
war to dismiss a good part of this great multitude, that they might not
fall into confusion.  This example of fearing to be too many is new; but,
to take it right, it stands to reason that the body of an army should be
of a moderate greatness, and regulated to certain bounds, both out of
respect to the difficulty of providing for them, and the difficulty of
governing and keeping them in order.  At least it is very easy to make it
appear by example that armies monstrous in number have seldom done
anything to purpose.  According to the saying of Cyrus in Xenophon,
“‘Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men, that gives the
advantage”: the remainder serving rather to trouble than assist.  And
Bajazet principally grounded his resolution of giving Tamerlane battle,
contrary to the opinion of all his captains, upon this, that his enemies
numberless number of men gave him assured hopes of confusion.
Scanderbeg, a very good and expert judge in such matters, was wont to say
that ten or twelve thousand reliable fighting men were sufficient to a
good leader to secure his regulation in all sorts of military occasions.
The other thing I will here record, which seems to be contrary both to
the custom and rules of war, is, that Vercingetorix, who was made general
of all the parts of the revolted Gaul, should go shut up himself in
Alexia: for he who has the command of a whole country ought never to shut
himself up but in case of such last extremity that the only place he has
left is in concern, and that the only hope he has left is in the defence
of that city; otherwise he ought to keep himself always at liberty, that
he may have the means to provide, in general, for all parts of his
government.

To return to Caesar.  He grew, in time, more slow and more considerate,
as his friend Oppius witnesses: conceiving that he ought not lightly to
hazard the glory of so many victories, which one blow of fortune might
deprive him of.  ‘Tis what the Italians say, when they would reproach the
rashness and foolhardiness of young people, calling them Bisognosi
d’onore, “necessitous of honour,” and that being in so great a want and
dearth of reputation, they have reason to seek it at what price soever,
which they ought not to do who have acquired enough already.  There may
reasonably be some moderation, some satiety, in this thirst and appetite
of glory, as well as in other things: and there are enough people who
practise it.

He was far remote from the religious scruples of the ancient Romans, who
would never prevail in their wars but by dint of pure and simple valour;
and yet he was more conscientious than we should be in these days, and
did not approve all sorts of means to obtain a victory.  In the war
against Ariovistus, whilst he was parleying with him, there happened some
commotion between the horsemen, which was occasioned by the fault of
Ariovistus’ light horse, wherein, though Caesar saw he had a very great
advantage of the enemy, he would make no use on’t, lest he should have
been reproached with a treacherous proceeding.

He was always wont to wear rich garments, and of a shining colour in
battle, that he might be the more remarkable and better observed.

He always carried a stricter and tighter hand over his soldiers when near
an enemy.  When the ancient Greeks would accuse any one of extreme
insufficiency, they would say, in common proverb, that he could neither
read nor swim; he was of the same opinion, that swimming was of great use
in war, and himself found it so; for when he had to use diligence, he
commonly swam over the rivers in his way; for he loved to march on foot,
as also did Alexander the Great.  Being in Egypt forced, to save himself,
to go into a little boat, and so many people leaping in with him that it
was in danger of sinking, he chose rather to commit himself to the sea,
and swam to his fleet, which lay two hundred paces off, holding in his
left hand his tablets, and drawing his coatarmour in his teeth, that it
might not fall into the enemy’s hand, and at this time he was of a pretty
advanced age.

Never had any general so much credit with his soldiers: in the beginning
of the civil wars, his centurions offered him to find every one a
man-at-arms at his own charge, and the foot soldiers to serve him at
their own expense; those who were most at their ease, moreover,
undertaking to defray the more necessitous.  The late Admiral Chastillon

     [Gaspard de Coligny, assassinated  in the St. Bartholomew
     massacre, 24th August 1572.]

showed us the like example in our civil wars; for the French of his army
provided money out of their own purses to pay the foreigners that were
with him.  There are but rarely found examples of so ardent and so ready
an affection amongst the soldiers of elder times, who kept themselves
strictly to their rules of war: passion has a more absolute command over
us than reason; and yet it happened in the war against Hannibal, that by
the example of the people of Rome in the city, the soldiers and captains
refused their pay in the army, and in Marcellus’ camp those were branded
with the name of Mercenaries who would receive any.  Having got the worst
of it near Dyrrachium, his soldiers came and offered themselves to be
chastised and punished, so that there was more need to comfort than
reprove them.  One single cohort of his withstood four of Pompey’s
legions above four hours together, till they were almost all killed with
arrows, so that there were a hundred and thirty thousand shafts found in
the trenches.  A soldier called Scaeva, who commanded at one of the
avenues, invincibly maintained his ground, having lost an eye, with one
shoulder and one thigh shot through, and his shield hit in two hundred
and thirty places. It happened that many of his soldiers being taken
prisoners, rather chose to die than promise to join the contrary side.
Granius Petronius was taken by Scipio in Africa: Scipio having put the
rest to death, sent him word that he gave him his life, for he was a man
of quality and quaestor, to whom Petronius sent answer back, that
Caesar’s soldiers were wont to give others their life, and not to receive
it; and immediately with his own hand killed himself.

Of their fidelity there are infinite examples amongst them, that which
was done by those who were besieged in Salona, a city that stood for
Caesar against Pompey, is not, for the rarity of an accident that there
happened, to be forgotten.  Marcus Octavius kept them close besieged;
they within being reduced to the extremest necessity of all things, so
that to supply the want of men, most of them being either slain or
wounded, they had manumitted all their slaves, and had been constrained
to cut off all the women’s hair to make ropes for their war engines,
besides a wonderful dearth of victuals, and yet continuing resolute never
to yield.  After having drawn the siege to a great length, by which
Octavius was grown more negligent and less attentive to his enterprise,
they made choice of one day about noon, and having first placed the women
and children upon the walls to make a show, sallied upon the besiegers
with such fury, that having routed the first, second, and third body, and
afterwards the fourth, and the rest, and beaten them all out of their
trenches, they pursued them even to their ships, and Octavius himself was
fain to fly to Dyrrachium, where Pompey lay.  I do not at present
remember that I have met with any other example where the besieged ever
gave the besieger a total defeat and won the field, nor that a sortie
ever achieved the result of a pure and entire victory.




CHAPTER XXXV

OF THREE GOOD WOMEN

They are not by the dozen, as every one knows, and especially in the
duties of marriage, for that is a bargain full of so many nice
circumstances that ‘tis hard a woman’s will should long endure such a
restraint; men, though their condition be something better under that
tie, have yet enough to do.  The true touch and test of a happy marriage
have respect to the time of the companionship, if it has been constantly
gentle, loyal, and agreeable.  In our age, women commonly reserve the
publication of their good offices, and their vehement affection towards
their husbands, until they have lost them, or at least, till then defer
the testimonies of their good will; a too slow testimony and
unseasonable. By it they rather manifest that they never loved them till
dead: their life is nothing but trouble; their death full of love and
courtesy.  As fathers conceal their affection from their children, women,
likewise, conceal theirs from their husbands, to maintain a modest
respect.  This mystery is not for my palate; ‘tis to much purpose that
they scratch themselves and tear their hair.  I whisper in a
waiting-woman’s or secretary’s ear: “How were they, how did they live
together?” I always have that good saying m my head:

               “Jactantius moerent, quae minus dolent.”

     [“They make the most ado who are least concerned.” (Or:)
     “They mourn the more ostentatiously, the less they grieve.”
      --Tacitus, Annal., ii. 77, writing of Germanicus.]

Their whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead.  We
should willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead, provided
they will smile upon us whilst we are alive.  Is it not enough to make a
man revive in pure spite, that she, who spat in my face whilst I was in
being, shall come to kiss my feet when I am no more?  If there be any
honour in lamenting a husband, it only appertains to those who smiled
upon them whilst they had them; let those who wept during their lives
laugh at their deaths, as well outwardly as within.  Therefore, never
regard those blubbered eyes and that pitiful voice; consider her
deportment, her complexion, the plumpness of her cheeks under all those
formal veils; ‘tis there she talks plain French.  There are few who do
not mend upon’t, and health is a quality that cannot lie.  That starched
and ceremonious countenance looks not so much back as forward, and is
rather intended to get a new husband than to lament the old.  When I was
a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady, who is yet living, the widow
of a prince, wore somewhat more ornament in her dress than our laws of
widowhood allow, and being reproached with it, she made answer that it
was because she was resolved to have no more love affairs, and would
never marry again.

I have here, not at all dissenting from our customs, made choice of three
women, who have also expressed the utmost of their goodness and affection
about their husbands’ deaths; yet are they examples of another kind than
are now m use, and so austere that they will hardly be drawn into
imitation.

The younger Pliny’ had near a house of his in Italy a neighbour who was
exceedingly tormented with certain ulcers in his private parts.  His wife
seeing him so long to languish, entreated that he would give her leave to
see and at leisure to consider of the condition of his disease, and that
she would freely tell him what she thought.  This permission being
obtained, and she having curiously examined the business, found it
impossible he could ever be cured, and that all he had to hope for or
expect was a great while to linger out a painful and miserable life, and
therefore, as the most sure and sovereign remedy, resolutely advised him
to kill himself.  But finding him a little tender and backward in so rude
an attempt: “Do not think, my friend,” said she, “that the torments I see
thee endure are not as sensible to me as to thyself, and that to deliver
myself from them, I will not myself make use of the same remedy I have
prescribed to thee.  I will accompany thee in the cure as I have done in
the disease; fear nothing, but believe that we shall have pleasure in
this passage that is to free us from so many miseries, and we will go
happily together.”  Which having said, and roused up her husband’s
courage, she resolved that they should throw themselves headlong into the
sea out of a window that overlooked it, and that she might maintain to
the last the loyal and vehement affection wherewith she had embraced him
during his life, she would also have him die in her arms; but lest they
should fail, and should quit their hold in the fall through fear, she
tied herself fast to him by the waist, and so gave up her own life to
procure her husband’s repose.  This was a woman of mean condition; and,
amongst that class of people, ‘tis no very new thing to see some examples
of rare virtue:

                         “Extrema per illos
               Justitia excedens terris vestigia fecit.”

          [“Justice, when she left the earth, took her last
          steps among them.”--Virgil, Georg., ii.  473.]

The other two were noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely
lodged.

Arria, the wife of Caecina Paetus, a consular person, was the mother of
another Arria, the wife of Thrasea Paetus, he whose virtue was so
renowned in the time of Nero, and by this son-in-law, the grandmother of
Fannia: for the resemblance of the names of these men and women, and
their fortunes, have led to several mistakes.  This first Arria, her
husband Caecina Paetus, having been taken prisoner by some of the Emperor
Claudius’ people, after Scribonianus’ defeat, whose party he had embraced
in the war, begged of those who were to carry him prisoner to Rome, that
they would take her into their ship, where she would be of much less
charge and trouble to them than a great many persons they must otherwise
have to attend her husband, and that she alone would undertake to serve
him in his chamber, his kitchen, and all other offices.  They refused,
whereupon she put herself into a fisher-boat she hired on the spot, and
in that manner followed him from Sclavonia.  When she had come to Rome,
Junia, the widow of Scribonianus, having one day, from the resemblance of
their fortune, accosted her in the Emperor’s presence; she rudely
repulsed her with these words, “I,” said she, “speak to thee, or give ear
to any thing thou sayest! to thee in whose lap Scribonianus was slain,
and thou art yet alive!”  These words, with several other signs, gave her
friends to understand that she would undoubtedly despatch herself,
impatient of supporting her husband’s misfortune.  And Thrasea, her
son-in-law, beseeching her not to throw away herself, and saying to her,
“What! if I should run the same fortune that Caecina has done, would you
that your daughter, my wife, should do the same?”--“Would I?”  replied
she, “yes, yes, I would: if she had lived as long, and in as good
understanding with thee as I have done, with my husband.”  These answers
made them more careful of her, and to have a more watchful eye to her
proceedings.  One day, having said to those who looked to her: “Tis to
much purpose that you take all this pains to prevent me; you may indeed
make me die an ill death, but to keep me from dying is not in your
power”; she in a sudden phrenzy started from a chair whereon she sat, and
with all her force dashed her head against the wall, by which blow being
laid flat in a swoon, and very much wounded, after they had again with
great ado brought her to herself: “I told you,” said she, “that if you
refused me some easy way of dying, I should find out another, how painful
soever.”  The conclusion of so admirable a virtue was this: her husband
Paetus, not having resolution enough of his own to despatch himself, as
he was by the emperor’s cruelty enjoined, one day, amongst others, after
having first employed all the reasons and exhortations which she thought
most prevalent to persuade him to it, she snatched the poignard he wore
from his side, and holding it ready in her hand, for the conclusion of
her admonitions; “Do thus, Paetus,” said she, and in the same instant
giving herself a mortal stab in the breast, and then drawing it out of
the wound, presented it to him, ending her life with this noble,
generous, and immortal saying, “Paete, non dolet”--having time to
pronounce no more but those three never-to-be-forgotten words: “Paetus,
it is not painful.”

              “Casta suo gladium cum traderet Arria Paeto,
               Quern de visceribus traxerat ipsa suis
               Si qua fides, vulnus quod feci non dolet, inquit,
               Sed quod to facies, id mihi, Paete, dolet.”

     [“When the chaste Arria gave to Poetus the reeking sword she had
     drawn from her breast, ‘If you believe me,’ she said, ‘Paetus, the
     wound I have made hurts not, but ‘tis that which thou wilt make that
     hurts me.’”---Martial, i. 14.]

The action was much more noble in itself, and of a braver sense than the
poet expressed it: for she was so far from being deterred by the thought
of her husband’s wound and death and her own, that she had been their
promotress and adviser: but having performed this high and courageous
enterprise for her husband’s only convenience, she had even in the last
gasp of her life no other concern but for him, and of dispossessing him
of the fear of dying with her.  Paetus presently struck himself to the
heart with the same weapon, ashamed, I suppose, to have stood in need of
so dear and precious an example.

Pompeia Paulina, a young and very noble Roman lady, had married Seneca in
his extreme old age.  Nero, his fine pupil, sent his guards to him to
denounce the sentence of death, which was performed after this manner:
When the Roman emperors of those times had condemned any man of quality,
they sent to him by their officers to choose what death he would, and to
execute it within such or such a time, which was limited, according to
the degree of their indignation, to a shorter or a longer respite, that
they might therein have better leisure to dispose their affairs, and
sometimes depriving them of the means of doing it by the shortness of the
time; and if the condemned seemed unwilling to submit to the order, they
had people ready at hand to execute it either by cutting the veins of the
arms and legs, or by compelling them by force to swallow a draught of
poison.  But persons of honour would not abide this necessity, but made
use of their own physicians and surgeons for this purpose.  Seneca, with
a calm and steady countenance, heard their charge, and presently called
for paper to write his will, which being by the captain refused, he
turned himself towards his friends, saying to them, “Since I cannot leave
you any other acknowledgment of the obligation I have to you, I leave you
at least the best thing I have, namely, the image of my life and manners,
which I entreat you to keep in memory of me, that by so doing you may
acquire the glory of sincere and real friends.”  And there withal, one
while appeasing the sorrow he saw in them with gentle words, and
presently raising his voice to reprove them: “What,” said he, “are become
of all our brave philosophical precepts? What are become of all the
provisions we have so many years laid up against the accidents of
fortune? Is Nero’s cruelty unknown to us?  What could we expect from him
who had murdered his mother and his brother, but that he should put his
tutor to death who had brought him up?”  After having spoken these words
in general, he turned himself towards his wife, and embracing her fast in
his arms, as, her heart and strength failing her, she was ready to sink
down with grief, he begged of her, for his sake, to bear this accident
with a little more patience, telling her, that now the hour was come
wherein he was to show, not by argument and discourse, but effect, the
fruit he had acquired by his studies, and that he really embraced his
death, not only without grief, but moreover with joy.  “Wherefore, my
dearest,” said he, “do not dishonour it with thy tears, that it may not
seem as if thou lovest thyself more than my reputation.  Moderate thy
grief, and comfort thyself in the knowledge thou hast had of me and my
actions, leading the remainder of thy life in the same virtuous manner
thou hast hitherto done.”  To which Paulina, having a little recovered
her spirits, and warmed the magnanimity of her courage with a most
generous affection, replied,--“No, Seneca,” said she, “I am not a woman
to suffer you to go alone in such a necessity: I will not have you think
that the virtuous examples of your life have not taught me how to die;
and when can I ever better or more fittingly do it, or more to my own
desire, than with you? and therefore assure yourself I will go along with
you.”  Then Seneca, taking this noble and generous resolution of his wife
m good part, and also willing to free himself from the fear of leaving
her exposed to the cruelty of his enemies after his death: “I have,
Paulina,” said he, “instructed thee in what would serve thee happily to
live; but thou more covetest, I see, the honour of dying: in truth,
I will not grudge it thee; the constancy and resolution in our common end
are the same, but the beauty and glory of thy part are much greater.”
 Which being said, the surgeons, at the same time, opened the veins of
both their arms, but as those of Seneca were more shrunk up, as well with
age as abstinence, made his blood flow too slowly, he moreover commanded
them to open the veins of his thighs; and lest the torments he endured
might pierce his wife’s heart, and also to free himself from the
affliction of seeing her in so sad a condition, after having taken a very
affectionate leave of her, he entreated she would suffer them to carry
her into her chamber, which they accordingly did.  But all these
incisions being not yet enough to make him die, he commanded Statius
Anneus, his physician, to give him a draught of poison, which had not
much better effect; for by reason of the weakness and coldness of his
limbs, it could not arrive at his heart.  Wherefore they were forced to
superadd a very hot bath, and then, feeling his end approach, whilst he
had breath he continued excellent discourses upon the subject of his
present condition, which the secretaries wrote down so long as they could
hear his voice, and his last words were long after in high honour and
esteem amongst men, and it is a great loss to us that they have not come
down to our times.  Then, feeling the last pangs of death, with the
bloody water of the bath he bathed his head, saying: “This water I
dedicate to Jupiter the deliverer.”  Nero, being presently informed of
all this, fearing lest the death of Paulina, who was one of the best-born
ladies of Rome, and against whom he had no particular unkindness, should
turn to his reproach, sent orders in all haste to bind up her wounds,
which her attendants did without her knowledge, she being already half
dead, and without all manner of sense.  Thus, though she lived contrary
to her own design, it was very honourably, and befitting her own virtue,
her pale complexion ever after manifesting how much life had run from her
veins.

These are my three very true stories, which I find as entertaining and as
tragic as any of those we make out of our own heads wherewith to amuse
the common people; and I wonder that they who are addicted to such
relations, do not rather cull out ten thousand very fine stories, which
are to be found in books, that would save them the trouble of invention,
and be more useful and diverting; and he who would make a whole and
connected body of them would need to add nothing of his own, but the
connection only, as it were the solder of another metal; and might by
this means embody a great many true events of all sorts, disposing and
diversifying them according as the beauty of the work should require,
after the same manner, almost, as Ovid has made up his Metamorphoses of
the infinite number of various fables.

In the last couple, this is, moreover, worthy of consideration, that
Paulina voluntarily offered to lose her life for the love of her husband,
and that her husband had formerly also forborne to die for the love of
her.  We may think there is no just counterpoise in this exchange; but,
according to his stoical humour, I fancy he thought he had done as much
for her, in prolonging his life upon her account, as if he had died for
her.  In one of his letters to Lucilius, after he has given him to
understand that, being seized with an ague in Rome, he presently took
coach to go to a house he had in the country, contrary to his wife’s
opinion, who would have him stay, and that he had told her that the ague
he was seized with was not a fever of the body but of the place, it
follows thus: “She let me go,” says he, “giving me a strict charge of my
health.  Now I, who know that her life is involved in mine, begin to make
much of myself, that I may preserve her.  And I lose the privilege my age
has given me, of being more constant and resolute in many things, when I
call to mind that in this old fellow there is a young girl who is
interested in his health.  And since I cannot persuade her to love me
more courageously, she makes me more solicitously love myself: for we
must allow something to honest affections, and, sometimes, though
occasions importune us to the contrary, we must call back life, even
though it be with torment: we must hold the soul fast in our teeth, since
the rule of living, amongst good men, is not so long as they please, but
as long as they ought.  He that loves not his wife nor his friend so well
as to prolong his life for them, but will obstinately die, is too
delicate and too effeminate: the soul must impose this upon itself, when
the utility of our friends so requires; we must sometimes lend ourselves
to our friends, and when we would die for ourselves must break that
resolution for them.  ‘Tis a testimony of grandeur of courage to return
to life for the consideration of another, as many excellent persons have
done: and ‘tis a mark of singular good nature to preserve old age (of
which the greatest convenience is the indifference as to its duration,
and a more stout and disdainful use of life), when a man perceives that
this office is pleasing, agreeable, and useful to some person by whom he
is very much beloved.  And a man reaps by it a very pleasing reward; for
what can be more delightful than to be so dear to his wife, as upon her
account he shall become dearer to himself?  Thus has my Paulina loaded me
not only with her fears, but my own; it has not been sufficient to
consider how resolutely I could die, but I have also considered how
irresolutely she would bear my death.  I am enforced to live, and
sometimes to live in magnanimity.”  These are his own words, as excellent
as they everywhere are.




CHAPTER XXXVI

OF THE MOST EXCELLENT MEN

If I should be asked my choice among all the men who have come to my
knowledge, I should make answer, that methinks I find three more
excellent than all the rest.

One of them Homer: not that Aristotle and Varro, for example, were not,
peradventure, as learned as he; nor that possibly Virgil was not equal to
him in his own art, which I leave to be determined by such as know them
both.  I who, for my part, understand but one of them, can only say this,
according to my poor talent, that I do not believe the Muses themselves
could ever go beyond the Roman:

              “Tale facit carmen docta testudine, quale
               Cynthius impositis temperat articulis:”

     [“He plays on his learned lute a verse such as Cynthian Apollo
     modulates with his imposed fingers.”--Propertius, ii. 34, 79.]

and yet in this judgment we are not to forget that it is chiefly from
Homer that Virgil derives his excellence, that he is guide and teacher;
and that one touch of the Iliad has supplied him with body and matter out
of which to compose his great and divine AEneid.  I do not reckon upon
that, but mix several other circumstances that render to me this poet
admirable, even as it were above human condition.  And, in truth, I often
wonder that he who has produced, and, by his authority, given reputation
in the world to so many deities, was not deified himself.  Being blind
and poor, living before the sciences were reduced into rule and certain
observation, he was so well acquainted with them, that all those who have
since taken upon them to establish governments, to carry on wars, and to
write either of religion or philosophy, of what sect soever, or of the
arts, have made use of him as of a most perfect instructor in the
knowledge of all things, and of his books as of a treasury of all sorts
of learning:

         “Qui, quid sit pulcrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
          Planius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit:”

     [“Who tells us what is good, what evil, what useful, what not, more
     clearly and better than Chrysippus and Crantor?”
      --Horace, Ep., i. 2, 3.]

and as this other says,

                   “A quo, ceu fonte perenni,
                    Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis”

     [“From which, as from a perennial spring, the lips of the poets
     are moistened by Pierian waters.”--Ovid, Amoy., iii. 9, 25.]

and the other,

              “Adde Heliconiadum comites, quorum unus Homerus
               Sceptra potitus;”

     [“Add the companions of the Muses, whose sceptre Homer has solely
     obtained.”--Lucretius, iii.  1050.]

and the other:

                         “Cujusque ex ore profusos
               Omnis posteritas latices in carmina duxit,
               Amnemque in tenues ausa est deducere rivos.
               Unius foecunda bonis.”

     [“From whose mouth all posterity has drawn out copious streams of
     verse, and has made bold to turn the mighty river into its little
     rivulets, fertile in the property of one man.”
      --Manilius, Astyon., ii. 8.]

‘Tis contrary to the order of nature that he has made the most excellent
production that can possibly be; for the ordinary birth of things is
imperfect; they thrive and gather strength by growing, whereas he
rendered the infancy of poesy and several other sciences mature, perfect,
and accomplished at first.  And for this reason he may be called the
first and the last of the poets, according to the fine testimony
antiquity has left us of him, “that as there was none before him whom he
could imitate, so there has been none since that could imitate him.”
 His words, according to Aristotle, are the only words that have motion
and action, the only substantial words.  Alexander the Great, having
found a rich cabinet amongst Darius’ spoils, gave order it should be
reserved for him to keep his Homer in, saying: that he was the best and
most faithful counsellor he had in his military affairs.  For the same
reason it was that Cleomenes, the son of Anaxandridas, said that he was
the poet of the Lacedaemonians, for that he was an excellent master for
the discipline of war.  This singular and particular commendation is also
left of him in the judgment of Plutarch, that he is the only author in
the world that never glutted nor disgusted his readers, presenting
himself always another thing, and always flourishing in some new grace.
That wanton Alcibiades, having asked one, who pretended to learning, for
a book of Homer, gave him a box of the ear because he had none,  which he
thought as scandalous as we should if we found one of our priests without
a Breviary.  Xenophanes complained one day to Hiero, the tyrant of
Syracuse, that he was so poor he had not wherewithal to maintain two
servants.  “What!” replied he, “Homer, who was much poorer than thou
art, keeps above ten thousand, though he is dead.”  What did Panaetius
leave unsaid when he called Plato the Homer of the philosophers?  Besides
what glory can be compared to his?  Nothing is so frequent in men’s
mouths as his name and works, nothing so known and received as Troy,
Helen, and the war about her, when perhaps there was never any such
thing.  Our children are still called by names that he invented above
three thousand years ago; who does not know Hector and Achilles?  Not
only some particular families, but most nations also seek their origin in
his inventions.  Mohammed, the second of that name, emperor of the Turks,
writing to our Pope Pius II., “I am astonished,” says he, “that the
Italians should appear against me, considering that we have our common
descent from the Trojans, and that it concerns me as well as it does them
to revenge the blood of Hector upon the Greeks, whom they countenance
against me.”  Is it not a noble farce wherein kings, republics, and
emperors have so many ages played their parts, and to which the vast
universe serves for a theatre?  Seven Grecian cities contended for his
birth, so much honour even his obscurity helped him to!

     “Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenm.”

The other is Alexander the Great.  For whoever will consider the age at
which he began his enterprises, the small means by which he effected so
glorious a design, the authority he obtained in such mere youth with the
greatest and most experienced captains of the world, by whom he was
followed, the extraordinary favour wherewith fortune embraced and
favoured so many hazardous, not to say rash, exploits,

               “Impellens quicquid sibi summa petenti
               Obstaret, gaudensque viam fecisse ruins;”

     [“Bearing down all who sought to withstand him, and pleased
     to force his way by ruin.”--Lucan, i. 149.]

that greatness, to have at the age of three-and-thirty years, passed
victorious through the whole habitable earth, and in half a life to have
attained to the utmost of what human nature can do; so that you cannot
imagine its just duration and the continuation of his increase in valour
and fortune, up to a due maturity of age, but that you must withal
imagine something more than man: to have made so many royal branches to
spring from his soldiers, leaving the world, at his death, divided
amongst four successors, simple captains of his army, whose posterity so
long continued and maintained that vast possession; so many excellent
virtues as he was master of, justice, temperance, liberality, truth in
his word, love towards his own people, and humanity towards those he
overcame; for his manners, in general, seem in truth incapable of any
manner of reproach, although some particular and extraordinary actions of
his may fall under censure.  But it is impossible to carry on such great
things as he did within the strict rules of justice; such as he are to be
judged in gross by the main end of their actions. The ruin of Thebes and
Persepolis, the murder of Menander and of Ephistion’s physician, the
massacre of so many Persian prisoners at one time, of a troop of Indian
soldiers not without prejudice to his word, and of the Cossians, so much
as to the very children, are indeed sallies that are not well to be
excused.  For, as to Clytus, the fault was more than redeemed; and that
very action, as much as any other whatever, manifests the goodness of his
nature, a nature most excellently formed to goodness; and it was
ingeniously said of him, that he had his virtues from Nature, his vices
from Fortune.  As to his being a little given to bragging, a little too
impatient of hearing himself ill-spoken of, and as to those mangers,
arms, and bits he caused to be strewed in the Indies, all those little
vanities, methinks, may very well be allowed to his youth, and the
prodigious prosperity of his fortune.  And who will consider withal his
so many military virtues, his diligence, foresight, patience, discipline,
subtlety, magnanimity, resolution, and good fortune, wherein (though we
had not had the authority of Hannibal to assure us) he was the first of
men, the admirable beauty and symmetry of his person, even to a miracle,
his majestic port and awful mien, in a face so young, ruddy, and radiant:

              “Qualis, ubi Oceani perfusus Lucifer unda,
               Quem Venus ante alios astrorum diligit ignes,
               Extulit os sacrum coelo, tenebrasque resolvit;”

     [“As when, bathed in the waves of Ocean, Lucifer, whom Venus loves
     beyond the other stars, has displayed his sacred countenance to the
     heaven, and disperses the darkness”--AEneid, iii. 589.]

the excellence of his knowledge and capacity; the duration and grandeur
of his glory, pure, clean, without spot or envy, and that long after his
death it was a religious belief that his very medals brought good fortune
to all who carried them about them; and that more kings and princes have
written his actions than other historians have written the actions of any
other king or prince whatever; and that to this very day the Mohammedans,
who despise all other histories, admit of and honour his alone, by a
special privilege: whoever, I say, will seriously consider these
particulars, will confess that, all these things put together, I had
reason to prefer him before Caesar himself, who alone could make me
doubtful in my choice: and it cannot be denied that there was more of his
own in his exploits, and more of fortune in those of Alexander.  They
were in many things equal, and peradventure Caesar had some greater
qualities they were two fires, or two torrents, overrunning the world by
several ways;

              “Ac velut immissi diversis partibus ignes
               Arentem in silvam, et virgulta sonantia lauro
               Aut ubi decursu rapido de montibus altis
               Dant sonitum spumosi amnes, et in aequora currunt,
               Quisque suum populatus iter:”

     [“And as fires applied in several parts to a dry wood and crackling
     shrubs of laurel, or as with impetuous fall from the steep
     mountains, foaming torrents pour down to the ocean, each clearing a
     destructive course.”--AEneid, xii. 521.]

but though Caesar’s ambition had been more moderate, it would still be so
unhappy, having the ruin of his country and universal mischief to the
world for its abominable object, that, all things raked together and put
into the balance, I must needs incline to Alexander’s side.

The third and in my opinion the most excellent, is Epaminondas.  Of glory
he has not near so much as the other two (which, for that matter, is but
a part of the substance of the thing): of valour and resolution, not of
that sort which is pushed on by ambition, but of that which wisdom and
reason can plant in a regular soul, he had all that could be imagined.
Of this virtue of his, he has, in my idea, given as ample proof as
Alexander himself or Caesar: for although his warlike exploits were
neither so frequent nor so full, they were yet, if duly considered in all
their circumstances, as important, as bravely fought, and carried with
them as manifest testimony of valour and military conduct, as those of
any whatever.  The Greeks have done him the honour, without
contradiction, to pronounce him the greatest man of their nation; and to
be the first of Greece, is easily to be the first of the world.  As to
his knowledge, we have this ancient judgment of him, “That never any man
knew so much, and spake so little as he”;--[Plutarch, On the Demon of
Socrates, c. 23.]--for he was of the Pythagorean sect; but when he did
speak, never any man spake better; an excellent orator, and of powerful
persuasion.  But as to his manners and conscience, he infinitely
surpassed all men who ever undertook the management of affairs; for in
this one thing, which ought chiefly to be considered, which alone truly
denotes us for what we are, and which alone I make counterbalance all the
rest put together, he comes not short of any philosopher whatever, not
even of Socrates himself.  Innocence, in this man, is a quality peculiar,
sovereign, constant, uniform, incorruptible, compared with which, it
appears in Alexander subject to something else subaltern, uncertain,
variable, effeminate, and fortuitous.

Antiquity has judged that in thoroughly sifting all the other great
captains, there is found in every one some peculiar quality that
illustrates his name: in this man only there is a full and equal virtue
throughout, that leaves nothing to be wished for in him, whether in
private or public employment, whether in peace or war; whether to live
gloriously and grandly, and to die: I do not know any form or fortune of
man that I so much honour and love.

‘Tis true that I look upon his obstinate poverty, as it is set out by his
best friends, as a little too scrupulous and nice; and this is the only
feature, though high in itself and well worthy of admiration, that I find
so rugged as not to desire to imitate, to the degree it was in him.

Scipio AEmilianus alone, could one attribute to him as brave and
magnificent an end, and as profound and universal a knowledge, might be
put into the other scale of the balance.  Oh, what an injury has time
done me to deprive me of the sight of two of the most noble lives which,
by the common consent of all the world, one of the greatest of the
Greeks, and the other of the Romans, were in all Plutarch.  What a
matter! what a workman!

For a man that was no saint, but, as we say, a gentleman, of civilian and
ordinary manners, and of a moderate ambition, the richest life that I
know, and full of the richest and most to be desired parts, all things
considered, is, in my opinion, that of Alcibiades.

But as to what concerns Epaminondas, I will here, for the example of an
excessive goodness, add some of his opinions: he declared, that the
greatest satisfaction he ever had in his whole life, was the contentment
he gave his father and mother by his victory at Leuctra; wherein his
deference is great, preferring their pleasure before his own, so dust and
so full of so glorious an action.  He did not think it lawful, even to
restore the liberty of his country, to kill a man without knowing a
cause: which made him so cold in the enterprise of his companion
Pelopidas for the relief of Thebes.  He was also of opinion that men in
battle ought to avoid the encounter of a friend who was on the contrary
side, and to spare him.  And his humanity, even towards his enemies
themselves, having rendered him suspected to the Boeotians, for that,
after he had miraculously forced the Lacedaemonians to open to him the
pass which they had undertaken to defend at the entrance into the Morea,
near Corinth, he contented himself with having charged through them,
without pursuing them to the utmost, he had his commission of general
taken from him, very honourably upon such an account, and for the shame
it was to them upon necessity afterwards to restore him to his command,
and so to manifest how much upon him depended their safety and honour;
victory like a shadow attending him wherever he went; and indeed the
prosperity of his country, as being from him derived, died with him.




CHAPTER XXXVII

OF THE RESEMBLANCE OF CHILDREN TO THEIR FATHERS

This faggoting up of so many divers pieces is so done that I never set
pen to paper but when I have too much idle time, and never anywhere but
at home; so that it is compiled after divers interruptions and intervals,
occasions keeping me sometimes many months elsewhere.  As to the rest,
I never correct my first by any second conceptions; I, peradventure, may
alter a word or so, but ‘tis only to vary the phrase, and not to destroy
my former meaning.  I have a mind to represent the progress of my
humours, and that every one may see each piece as it came from the forge.
I could wish I had begun sooner, and had taken more notice of the course
of my mutations.  A servant of mine whom I employed to transcribe for me,
thought he had got a prize by stealing several pieces from me, wherewith
he was best pleased; but it is my comfort that he will be no greater a
gainer than I shall be a loser by the theft.  I am grown older by seven
or eight years since I began; nor has it been without same new
acquisition: I have, in that time, by the liberality of years, been
acquainted with the stone: their commerce and long converse do not well
pass away without some such inconvenience.  I could have been glad that
of other infirmities age has to present long-lived men withal, it had
chosen some one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not
possibly have laid upon me a disease for which, even from my infancy, I
have had so great a horror; and it is, in truth, of all the accidents of
old age, that of which I have ever been most afraid.  I have often
thought with myself that I went on too far, and that in so long a voyage
I should at last run myself into some disadvantage; I perceived, and have
often enough declared, that it was time to depart, and that life should
be cut off in the sound and living part, according to the surgeon’s rule
in amputations; and that nature made him pay very strict usury who did
not in due time pay the principal.  And yet I was so far from being
ready, that in the eighteen months’ time or thereabout that I have been
in this uneasy condition, I have so inured myself to it as to be content
to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope:
so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no
condition so wretched they will not accept, provided they may live!  Hear
Maecenas:

                        “Debilem facito manu,
                         Debilem pede, coxa,
                         Lubricos quate dentes;
                         Vita dum superest, bene est.”

     [“Cripple my hand, foot, hip; shake out my loose teeth: while
     there’s life, ‘tis well.”--Apud Seneca, Ep., 101.]

And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty
he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he could hear of to death, to
deliver them, as he pretended, from the painful life they lived.  For
there was not one of them who would not rather have been thrice a leper
than be not.  And Antisthenes the Stoic, being very sick, and crying out,
“Who will deliver me from these evils?” Diogenes, who had come to visit
him, “This,” said he, presenting him a knife, “soon enough, if thou
wilt.”--“I do not mean from my life,” he replied, “but from my
sufferings.”  The sufferings that only attack the mind, I am not so
sensible of as most other men; and this partly out of judgment, for the
world looks upon several things as dreadful or to be avoided at the
expense of life, that are almost indifferent to me: partly, through a
dull and insensible complexion I have in accidents which do not
point-blank hit me; and that insensibility I look upon as one of the best
parts of my natural condition; but essential and corporeal pains I am
very sensible of.  And yet, having long since foreseen them, though with
a sight weak and delicate and softened with the long and happy health and
quiet that God has been pleased to give me the greatest part of my time,
I had in my imagination fancied them so insupportable, that, in truth, I
was more afraid than I have since found I had cause: by which I am still
more fortified in this belief, that most of the faculties of the soul, as
we employ them, more trouble the repose of life than they are any way
useful to it.

I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the
most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases; I have already
had the trial of five or six very long and very painful fits; and yet I
either flatter myself, or there is even in this state what is very well
to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death, and
of the menaces, conclusions, and consequences which physic is ever
thundering in our ears; but the effect even of pain itself is not so
sharp and intolerable as to put a man of understanding into rage and
despair.  I have at least this advantage by my stone, that what I could
not hitherto prevail upon myself to resolve upon, as to reconciling and
acquainting myself with death, it will perfect; for the more it presses
upon and importunes me, I shall be so much the less afraid to die.  I had
already gone so far as only to love life for life’s sake, but my pain
will dissolve this intelligence; and God grant that in the end, should
the sharpness of it be once greater than I shall be able to bear, it does
not throw me into the other no less vicious extreme to desire and wish to
die!

               “Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes:”

          [“Neither to wish, nor fear to die.”  (Or:)
          “Thou shouldest neither fear nor desire the last day.”
           --Martial, x. 7.]

they are two passions to be feared; but the one has its remedy much
nearer at hand than the other.

As to the rest, I have always found the precept that so rigorously
enjoins a resolute countenance and disdainful and indifferent comportment
in the toleration of infirmities to be ceremonial.  Why should
philosophy, which only has respect to life and effects, trouble itself
about these external appearances?  Let us leave that care to actors and
masters of rhetoric, who set so great a value upon our gestures.  Let her
allow this vocal frailty to disease, if it be neither cordial nor
stomachic, and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by sighs,
sobs, palpitations, and turning pale, that nature has put out of our
power; provided the courage be undaunted, and the tones not expressive
of despair, let her be satisfied.  What matter the wringing of our hands,
if we do not wring our thoughts?  She forms us for ourselves, not for
others; to be, not to seem; let her be satisfied with governing our
understanding, which she has taken upon her the care of instructing;
that, in the fury of the colic, she maintain the soul in a condition to
know itself, and to follow its accustomed way, contending with, and
enduring, not meanly truckling under pain; moved and heated, not subdued
and conquered, in the contention; capable of discourse and other things,
to a certain degree.  In such extreme accidents, ‘tis cruelty to require
so exact a composedness.  ‘Tis no great matter that we make a wry face,
if the mind plays its part well: if the body find itself relieved by
complaining let it complain: if agitation ease it, let it tumble and toss
at pleasure; if it seem to find the disease evaporate (as some physicians
hold that it helps women in delivery) in making loud outcries, or if this
do but divert its torments, let it roar as it will.  Let us not command
this voice to sally, but stop it not.  Epicurus, not only forgives his
sage for crying out in torments, but advises him to it:

          “Pugiles etiam, quum feriunt, in jactandis caestibus
          ingemiscunt, quia profundenda voce omne corpus intenditur,
          venitque plaga vehementior.”

     [“Boxers also, when they strike, groan in the act, because with the
     strength of voice the whole body is carried, and the blow comes with
     the greater vehemence.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 23.]

We have enough to do to deal with the disease, without troubling
ourselves with these superfluous rules.

Which I say in excuse of those whom we ordinarily see impatient in the
assaults of this malady; for as to what concerns myself, I have passed it
over hitherto with a little better countenance, and contented myself with
groaning without roaring out; not, nevertheless, that I put any great
constraint upon myself to maintain this exterior decorum, for I make
little account of such an advantage: I allow herein as much as the pain
requires; but either my pains are not so excessive, or I have more than
ordinary patience.  I complain, I confess, and am a little impatient in a
very sharp fit, but I do not arrive to such a degree of despair as he who
with:

               “Ejulatu, questu, gemitu, fremitibus
               Resonando, multum flebiles voces refert:”

     [“Howling, roaring, groaning with a thousand noises, expressing his
     torment in a dismal voice.” (Or:) “Wailing, complaining, groaning,
     murmuring much avail lugubrious sounds.”--Verses of Attius, in his
     Phaloctetes, quoted by Cicero, De Finib., ii.  29; Tusc.  Quaes.,
     ii. 14.]

I try myself in the depth of my suffering, and have always found that I
was in a capacity to speak, think, and give a rational answer as well as
at any other time, but not so firmly, being troubled and interrupted by
the pain.  When I am looked upon by my visitors to be in the greatest
torment, and that they therefore forbear to trouble me, I often essay my
own strength, and myself set some discourse on foot, the most remote I
can contrive from my present condition.  I can do anything upon a sudden
endeavour, but it must not continue long.  Oh, what pity ‘tis I have not
the faculty of that dreamer in Cicero, who dreaming he was lying with a
wench, found he had discharged his stone in the sheets.  My pains
strangely deaden my appetite that way.  In the intervals from this
excessive torment, when my ureters only languish without any great dolor,
I presently feel myself in my wonted state, forasmuch as my soul takes no
other alarm but what is sensible and corporal, which I certainly owe to
the care I have had of preparing myself by meditation against such
accidents:

                                   “Laborum,
               Nulla mihi nova nunc facies inopinave surgit;
               Omnia praecepi, atque animo mecum ante peregi.”

     [“No new shape of suffering can arise new or unexpected; I have
     anticipated all, and acted them over beforehand in my mind.”
      --AEneid, vi. 103.]

I am, however, a little roughly handled for an apprentice, and with a
sudden and sharp alteration, being fallen in an instant from a very easy
and happy condition of life into the most uneasy and painful that can be
imagined.  For besides that it is a disease very much to be feared in
itself, it begins with me after a more sharp and severe manner than it is
used to do with other men.  My fits come so thick upon me that I am
scarcely ever at ease; yet I have hitherto kept my mind so upright that,
provided I can still continue it, I find myself in a much better
condition of life than a thousand others, who have no fewer nor other
disease but what they create to themselves for want of meditation.

There is a certain sort of crafty humility that springs from presumption,
as this, for example, that we confess our ignorance in many things, and
are so courteous as to acknowledge that there are in the works of nature
some qualities and conditions that are imperceptible to us, and of which
our understanding cannot discover the means and causes; by this so honest
and conscientious declaration we hope to obtain that people shall also
believe us as to those that we say we do understand.  We need not trouble
ourselves to seek out foreign miracles and difficulties; methinks,
amongst the things that we ordinarily see, there are such
incomprehensible wonders as surpass all difficulties of miracles.  What a
wonderful thing it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced
should carry in itself the impression not only of the bodily form, but
even of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!  Where can that
drop of fluid matter contain that infinite number of forms? and how can
they carry on these resemblances with so precarious and irregular a
process that the son shall be like his great-grandfather, the nephew like
his uncle?  In the family of Lepidus at Rome there were three, not
successively but by intervals, who were born with the same eye covered
with a cartilage.  At Thebes there was a race that carried from their
mother’s womb the form of the head of a lance, and he who was not born so
was looked upon as illegitimate.  And Aristotle says that in a certain
nation, where the women were in common, they assigned the children to
their fathers by their resemblance.

‘Tis to be believed that I derive this infirmity from my father, for he
died wonderfully tormented with a great stone in his bladder; he was
never sensible of his disease till the sixty-seventh year of his age; and
before that had never felt any menace or symptoms of it, either in his
reins, sides, or any other part, and had lived, till then, in a happy,
vigorous state of health, little subject to infirmities, and he continued
seven years after in this disease, dragging on a very painful end of
life.  I was born about five-and-twenty years before his disease seized
him, and in the time of his most flourishing and healthful state of body,
his third child in order of birth: where could his propension to this
malady lie lurking all that while?  And he being then so far from the
infirmity, how could that small part of his substance wherewith he made
me, carry away so great an impression for its share?  and how so
concealed, that till five-and-forty years after, I did not begin to be
sensible of it?  being the only one to this hour, amongst so many
brothers and sisters, and all by one mother, that was ever troubled with
it.  He that can satisfy me in this point, I will believe him in as many
other miracles as he pleases; always provided that, as their manner is,
he do not give me a doctrine much more intricate and fantastic than the
thing itself for current pay.

Let the physicians a little excuse the liberty I take, for by this same
infusion and fatal insinuation it is that I have received a hatred and
contempt of their doctrine; the antipathy I have against their art is
hereditary.  My father lived three-score and fourteen years, my
grandfather sixty-nine, my great-grandfather almost fourscore years,
without ever tasting any sort of physic; and, with them, whatever was not
ordinary diet, was instead of a drug.  Physic is grounded upon experience
and examples: so is my opinion.  And is not this an express and very
advantageous experience.  I do not know that they can find me in all
their records three that were born, bred, and died under the same roof,
who have lived so long by their conduct.  They must here of necessity
confess, that if reason be not, fortune at least is on my side, and with
physicians fortune goes a great deal further than reason.  Let them not
take me now at a disadvantage; let them not threaten me in the subdued
condition wherein I now am; that were treachery.  In truth, I have enough
the better of them by these domestic examples, that they should rest
satisfied.  Human things are not usually so constant; it has been two
hundred years, save eighteen, that this trial has lasted, for the first
of them was born in the year 1402: ‘tis now, indeed, very good reason
that this experience should begin to fail us.  Let them not, therefore,
reproach me with the infirmities under which I now suffer; is it not
enough that I for my part have lived seven-and-forty years in good
health? though it should be the end of my career; ‘tis of the longer
sort.

My ancestors had an aversion to physic by some occult and natural
instinct; for the very sight of drugs was loathsome to my father.  The
Seigneur de Gaviac, my uncle by the father’s side, a churchman, and a
valetudinary from his birth, and yet who made that crazy life hold out to
sixty-seven years, being once fallen into a furious fever, it was ordered
by the physicians he should be plainly told that if he would not make use
of help (for so they call that which is very often an obstacle), he would
infallibly be a dead man.  That good man, though terrified with this
dreadful sentence, yet replied, “I am then a dead man.”  But God soon
after made the prognostic false.  The last of the brothers--there were
four of them--and by many years the last, the Sieur de Bussaguet, was the
only one of the family who made use of medicine, by reason, I suppose, of
the concern he had with the other arts, for he was a councillor in the
court of Parliament, and it succeeded so ill with him, that being in
outward appearance of the strongest constitution, he yet died long before
any of the rest, save the Sieur de Saint Michel.

‘Tis possible I may have derived this natural antipathy to physic from
them; but had there been no other consideration in the case, I would have
endeavoured to have overcome it; for all these conditions that spring in
us without reason, are vicious; ‘tis a kind of disease that we should
wrestle with.  It may be I had naturally this propension; but I have
supported and fortified it by arguments and reasons which have
established in me the opinion I am of.  For I also hate the consideration
of refusing physic for the nauseous taste.

I should hardly be of that humour who hold health to be worth purchasing
by all the most painful cauteries and incisions that can be applied.
And, with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided, if
greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted, that will
terminate in greater pleasures.  Health is a precious thing, and the only
one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out, not only his time,
sweat, labour, and goods, but also his life itself to obtain it;
forasmuch as, without it, life is wearisome and injurious to us:
pleasure, wisdom, learning, and virtue, without it, wither away and
vanish; and to the most laboured and solid discourses that philosophy
would imprint in us to the contrary, we need no more but oppose the image
of Plato being struck with an epilepsy or apoplexy; and, in this
presupposition, to defy him to call the rich faculties of his soul to his
assistance.  All means that conduce to health can neither be too painful
nor too dear to me.  But I have some other appearances that make me
strangely suspect all this merchandise.  I do not deny but that there may
be some art in it, that there are not amongst so many works of Nature,
things proper for the conservation of health: that is most certain: I
very well know there are some simples that moisten, and others that dry;
I experimentally know that radishes are windy, and senna-leaves purging;
and several other such experiences I have, as that mutton nourishes me,
and wine warms me: and Solon said “that eating was physic against the
malady hunger.”  I do not disapprove the use we make of things the earth
produces, nor doubt, in the least, of the power and fertility of Nature,
and of its application to our necessities: I very well see that pikes and
swallows live by her laws; but I mistrust the inventions of our mind, our
knowledge and art, to countenance which, we have abandoned Nature and her
rules, and wherein we keep no bounds nor moderation.  As we call the
piling up of the first laws that fall into our hands justice, and their
practice and dispensation very often foolish and very unjust; and as
those who scoff at and accuse it, do not, nevertheless, blame that noble
virtue itself, but only condemn the abuse and profanation of that sacred
title; so in physic I very much honour that glorious name, its
propositions, its promises, so useful for the service of mankind; but the
ordinances it foists upon us, betwixt ourselves, I neither honour nor
esteem.

In the first place, experience makes me dread it; for amongst all my
acquaintance, I see no people so soon sick, and so long before they are
well, as those who take much physic; their very health is altered and
corrupted by their frequent prescriptions.  Physicians are not content to
deal only with the sick, but they will moreover corrupt health itself,
for fear men should at any time escape their authority.  Do they not,
from a continual and perfect health, draw the argument of some great
sickness to ensue?  I have been sick often enough, and have always found
my sicknesses easy enough to be supported (though I have made trial of
almost all sorts), and as short as those of any other, without their
help, or without swallowing their ill-tasting doses.  The health I have
is full and free, without other rule or discipline than my own custom and
pleasure.  Every place serves me well enough to stay in, for I need no
other conveniences, when I am sick, than what I must have when I am well.
I never disturb myself that I have no physician, no apothecary, nor any
other assistance, which I see most other sick men more afflicted at than
they are with their disease.  What!  Do the doctors themselves show us
more felicity and duration in their own lives, that may manifest to us
some apparent effect of their skill?

There is not a nation in the world that has not been many ages without
physic; and these the first ages, that is to say, the best and most
happy; and the tenth part of the world knows nothing of it yet; many
nations are ignorant of it to this day, where men live more healthful and
longer than we do here, and even amongst us the common people live well
enough without it.  The Romans were six hundred years before they
received it; and after having made trial of it, banished it from the city
at the instance of Cato the Censor, who made it appear how easy it was to
live without it, having himself lived fourscore and five years, and kept
his wife alive to an extreme old age, not without physic, but without a
physician: for everything that we find to be healthful to life may be
called physic.  He kept his family in health, as Plutarch says if I
mistake not, with hare’s milk; as Pliny reports,  that the Arcadians
cured all manner of diseases with that of a cow; and Herodotus says, the
Lybians generally enjoy rare health, by a custom they have, after their
children are arrived to four years of age, to burn and cauterise the
veins of their head and temples, by which means they cut off all
defluxions of rheum for their whole lives.  And the country people of our
province make use of nothing, in all sorts of distempers, but the
strongest wine they can get, mixed with a great deal of saffron and
spice, and always with the same success.

And to say the truth, of all this diversity and confusion of
prescriptions, what other end and effect is there after all, but to purge
the belly?  which a thousand ordinary simples will do as well; and I do
not know whether such evacuations be so much to our advantage as they
pretend, and whether nature does not require a residence of her
excrements to a certain proportion, as wine does of its lees to keep it
alive: you often see healthful men fall into vomitings and fluxes of the
belly by some extrinsic accident, and make a great evacuation of
excrements, without any preceding need, or any following benefit, but
rather with hurt to their constitution.  ‘Tis from the great Plato, that
I lately learned, that of three sorts of motions which are natural to us,
purging is the worst, and that no man, unless he be a fool, ought to take
anything to that purpose but in the extremest necessity.  Men disturb and
irritate the disease by contrary oppositions; it must be the way of
living that must gently dissolve, and bring it to its end.  The violent
gripings and contest betwixt the drug and the disease are ever to our
loss, since the combat is fought within ourselves, and that the drug is
an assistant not to be trusted, being in its own nature an enemy to our
health, and by trouble having only access into our condition.  Let it
alone a little; the general order of things that takes care of fleas and
moles, also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that
fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.  ‘Tis to much purpose we cry
out “Bihore,”--[A term used by the Languedoc waggoners to hasten their
horses]--‘tis a way to make us hoarse, but not to hasten the matter.
‘Tis a proud and uncompassionate order: our fears, our despair displease
and stop it from, instead of inviting it to, our relief; it owes its
course to the disease, as well as to health; and will not suffer itself
to be corrupted in favour of the one to the prejudice of the other’s
right, for it would then fall into disorder.  Let us, in God’s name,
follow it; it leads those that follow, and those who will not follow, it
drags along, both their fury and physic together.  Order a purge for your
brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.

One asking a Lacedaemonian what had made him live so long, he made
answer, “the ignorance of physic”; and the Emperor Adrian continually
exclaimed as he was dying, that the crowd of physicians had killed him.
A bad wrestler turned physician: “Courage,” says Diogenes to him; “thou
hast done well, for now thou will throw those who have formerly thrown
thee.”  But they have this advantage, according to Nicocles, that the sun
gives light to their success and the earth covers their failures.  And,
besides, they have a very advantageous way of making use of all sorts of
events: for what fortune, nature, or any other cause (of which the number
is infinite), products of good and healthful in us, it is the privilege
of physic to attribute to itself; all the happy successes that happen to
the patient, must be thence derived; the accidents that have cured me,
and a thousand others, who do not employ physicians, physicians usurp to
themselves: and as to ill accidents, they either absolutely disown them,
in laying the fault upon the patient, by such frivolous reasons as they
are never at a loss for; as “he lay with his arms out of bed,” or “he was
disturbed with the rattling of a coach:”

                        “Rhedarum transitus arcto
                         Vicorum inflexu:”

               [“The passage of the wheels in the narrow
               turning of the street”--Juvenal, iii. 236.]

or “somebody had set open the casement,” or “he had lain upon his left
side,” or “he had some disagreeable fancies in his head”: in sum, a word,
a dream, or a look, seems to them excuse sufficient wherewith to palliate
their own errors: or, if they so please, they even make use of our
growing worse, and do their business in this way which can never fail
them: which is by buzzing us in the ear, when the disease is more
inflamed by their medicaments, that it had been much worse but for those
remedies; he, whom from an ordinary cold they have thrown into a double
tertian-ague, had but for them been in a continued fever.  They do not
much care what mischief they do, since it turns to their own profit.
In earnest, they have reason to require a very favourable belief from
their patients; and, indeed, it ought to be a very easy one, to swallow
things so hard to be believed.  Plato said very well, that physicians
were the only men who might lie at pleasure, since our health depends
upon the vanity and falsity of their promises.

AEsop, a most excellent author, and of whom few men discover all the
graces, pleasantly represents to us the tyrannical authority physicians
usurp over poor creatures, weakened and subdued by sickness and fear,
when he tells us, that a sick person, being asked by his physician what
operation he found of the potion he had given him: “I have sweated very
much,” says the sick man.  “That’s good,” says the physician.  Another
time, having asked how he felt himself after his physic: “I have been
very cold, and have had a great shivering upon me,” said he.  “That is
good,” replied the physician.  After the third potion, he asked him again
how he did: “Why, I find myself swollen and puffed up,” said he, “as if
I had a dropsy.”--“That is very well,” said the physician.  One of his
servants coming presently after to inquire how he felt himself, “Truly,
friend,” said he, “with being too well I am about to die.”

There was a more just law in Egypt, by which the physician, for the three
first days, was to take charge of his patient at the patient’s own risk
and cost; but, those three days being past, it was to be at his own.  For
what reason is it that their patron, AEsculapius, should be struck with
thunder for restoring Hippolitus from death to life:

         “Nam Pater omnipotens, aliquem indignatus ab umbris
          Mortalem infernis ad lumina surgere vitae,
          Ipse repertorem medicinae talis, et artis
          Fulmine Phoebigenam Stygias detrusit ad undas;”

     [“Then the Almighty Father, offended that any mortal should rise to
     the light of life from the infernal shades, struck the son of
     Phoebus with his forked lightning to the Stygian lake.”
      --AEneid, vii. 770.]

and his followers be pardoned, who send so many souls from life to death?
A physician, boasting to Nicocles that his art was of great authority:
“It is so, indeed,” said Nicocles, “that can with impunity kill so many
people.”

As to what remains, had I been of their counsel, I would have rendered my
discipline more sacred and mysterious; they begun well, but they have not
ended so.  It was a good beginning to make gods and demons the authors of
their science, and to have used a peculiar way of speaking and writing,
notwithstanding that philosophy concludes it folly to persuade a man to
his own good by an unintelligible way:  “Ut si quis medicus imperet, ut
sumat:”


     “Terrigenam, herbigradam, domiportam, sanguine cassam.”

     [“Describing it by the epithets of an animal trailing with its slime
     over the herbage, without blood or bones, and carrying its house
     upon its back, meaning simply a snail.”--Coste]

It was a good rule in their art, and that accompanies all other vain,
fantastic, and supernatural arts, that the patient’s belief should
prepossess them with good hope and assurance of their effects and
operation: a rule they hold to that degree, as to maintain that the most
inexpert and ignorant physician is more proper for a patient who has
confidence in him, than the most learned and experienced whom he is not
so acquainted with.  Nay, even the very choice of most of their drugs is
in some sort mysterious and divine; the left foot of a tortoise, the
urine of a lizard, the dung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood
drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon; and for us who have
the stone (so scornfully they use us in our miseries) the excrement of
rats beaten to powder, and such like trash and fooleries which rather
carry a face of magical enchantment than of any solid science.  I omit
the odd number of their pills, the destination of certain days and feasts
of the year, the superstition of gathering their simples at certain
hours, and that so austere and very wise countenance and carriage which
Pliny himself so much derides.  But they have, as I said, failed in that
they have not added to this fine beginning the making their meetings and
consultations more religious and secret, where no profane person should
have admission, no more than in the secret ceremonies of AEsculapius; for
by the reason of this it falls out that their irresolution, the weakness
of their arguments, divinations and foundations, the sharpness of their
disputes, full of hatred, jealousy, and self-consideration, coming to be
discovered by every one, a man must be marvellously blind not to see that
he runs a very great hazard in their hands.  Who ever saw one physician
approve of another’s prescription, without taking something away, or
adding something to it? by which they sufficiently betray their tricks,
and make it manifest to us that they therein more consider their own
reputation, and consequently their profit, than their patient’s interest.
He was a much wiser man of their tribe, who of old gave it as a rule,
that only one physician should undertake a sick person; for if he do
nothing to purpose, one single man’s default can bring no great scandal
upon the art of medicine; and, on the contrary, the glory will be great
if he happen to have success; whereas, when there are many, they at every
turn bring a disrepute upon their calling, forasmuch as they oftener do
hurt than good.  They ought to be satisfied with the perpetual
disagreement which is found in the opinions of the principal masters and
ancient authors of this science, which is only known to men well read,
without discovering to the vulgar the controversies and various judgments
which they still nourish and continue amongst themselves.

Will you have one example of the ancient controversy in physic?
Herophilus lodges the original cause of all diseases in the humours;
Erasistratus, in the blood of the arteries; Asclepiades, in the invisible
atoms of the pores; Alcmaeon, in the exuberance or defect of our bodily
strength; Diocles, in the inequality of the elements of which the body is
composed, and in the quality of the air we breathe; Strato, in the
abundance, crudity, and corruption of the nourishment we take; and
Hippocrates lodges it in the spirits.  There is a certain friend of
theirs,--[Celsus, Preface to the First Book.]--whom they know better
than I, who declares upon this subject, “that the most important science
in practice amongst us, as that which is intrusted with our health and
conservation, is, by ill luck, the most uncertain, the most perplexed,
and agitated with the greatest mutations.”  There is no great danger in
our mistaking the height of the sun, or the fraction of some astronomical
supputation; but here, where our whole being is concerned, ‘tis not
wisdom to abandon ourselves to the mercy of the agitation of so many
contrary winds.

Before the Peloponnesian war there was no great talk of this science.
Hippocrates brought it into repute; whatever he established, Chrysippus
overthrew; after that, Erasistratus, Aristotle’s grandson, overthrew what
Chrysippus had written; after these, the Empirics started up, who took a
quite contrary way to the ancients in the management of this art; when
the credit of these began a little to decay, Herophilus set another sort
of practice on foot, which Asclepiades in turn stood up against, and
overthrew; then, in their turn, the opinions first of Themiso, and then
of Musa, and after that those of Vectius Valens, a physician famous
through the intelligence he had with Messalina, came in vogue; the empire
of physic in Nero’s time was established in Thessalus, who abolished and
condemned all that had been held till his time; this man’s doctrine was
refuted by Crinas of Marseilles, who first brought all medicinal
operations under the Ephemerides and motions of the stars, and reduced
eating, sleeping, and drinking to hours that were most pleasing to
Mercury and the moon; his authority was soon after supplanted by
Charinus, a physician of the same city of Marseilles, a man who not only
controverted all the ancient methods of physic, but moreover the usage of
hot baths, that had been generally and for so many ages in common use; he
made men bathe in cold water, even in winter, and plunged his sick
patients in the natural waters of streams.  No Roman till Pliny’s time
had ever vouchsafed to practise physic; that office was only performed
by Greeks and foreigners, as ‘tis now amongst us French, by those who
sputter Latin; for, as a very great physician says, we do not easily
accept the medicine we understand, no more than we do the drugs we
ourselves gather.  If the nations whence we fetch our guaiacum,
sarsaparilla, and China wood, have physicians, how great a value must we
imagine, by the same recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear
purchase, do they set upon our cabbage and parsley?  for who would dare
to contemn things so far fetched, and sought out at the hazard of so long
and dangerous a voyage?

Since these ancient mutations in physic, there have been infinite others
down to our own times, and, for the most part, mutations entire and
universal, as those, for example, produced by Paracelsus, Fioravanti, and
Argentier; for they, as I am told, not only alter one recipe, but the
whole contexture and rules of the body of physic, accusing all others of
ignorance and imposition who have practised before them.  At this rate,
in what a condition the poor patient must be, I leave you to judge.

If we were even assured that, when they make a mistake, that mistake of
theirs would do us no harm, though it did us no good, it were a
reasonable bargain to venture the making ourselves better without any
danger of being made worse.  AEsop tells a story, that one who had bought
a Morisco slave, believing that his black complexion had arrived by
accident and the ill usage of his former master, caused him to enter with
great care into a course of baths and potions: it happened that the Moor
was nothing amended in his tawny complexion, but he wholly lost his
former health.  How often do we see physicians impute the death of their
patients to one another?  I remember that some years ago there was an
epidemical disease, very dangerous and for the most part mortal, that
raged in the towns about us: the storm being over which had swept away an
infinite number of men, one of the most famous physicians of all the
country, presently after published a book upon that subject, wherein,
upon better thoughts, he confesses that the letting blood in that disease
was the principal cause of so many mishaps.  Moreover, their authors hold
that there is no physic that has not something hurtful in it.  And if
even those of the best operation in some measure offend us, what must
those do that are totally misapplied?  For my own part, though there were
nothing else in the case, I am of opinion, that to those who loathe the
taste of physic, it must needs be a dangerous and prejudicial endeavour
to force it down at so incommodious a time, and with so much aversion,
and believe that it marvellously distempers a sick person at a time when
he has so much need of repose.  And more over, if we but consider the
occasions upon which they usually ground the cause of our diseases, they
are so light and nice, that I thence conclude a very little error in the
dispensation of their drugs may do a great deal of mischief.  Now, if the
mistake of a physician be so dangerous, we are in but a scurvy condition;
for it is almost impossible but he must often fall into those mistakes:
he had need of too many parts, considerations, and circumstances, rightly
to level his design: he must know the sick person’s complexion, his
temperament, his humours, inclinations, actions, nay, his very thoughts
and imaginations; he must be assured of the external circumstances, of
the nature of the place, the quality of the air and season, the situation
of the planets, and their influences: he must know in the disease, the
causes, prognostics, affections, and critical days; in the drugs, the
weight, the power of working, the country, figure, age, and dispensation,
and he must know how rightly to proportion and mix them together, to
beget a just and perfect symmetry; wherein if there be the least error,
if amongst so many springs there be but any one out of order, ‘tis enough
to destroy us.  God knows with how great difficulty most of these things
are to be understood: for (for example) how shall the physician find out
the true sign of the disease, every disease being capable of an infinite
number of indications?  How many doubts and controversies have they
amongst themselves upon the interpretation of urines? otherwise, whence
should the continual debates we see amongst them about the knowledge of
the disease proceed? how could we excuse the error they so oft fall into,
of taking fox for marten?  In the diseases I have had, though there were
ever so little difficulty in the case, I never found three of one
opinion: which I instance, because I love to introduce examples wherein I
am myself concerned.

A gentleman at Paris was lately cut for the stone by order of the
physicians, in whose bladder, being accordingly so cut, there was found
no more stone than in the palm of his hand; and in the same place a
bishop, who was my particular friend, having been earnestly pressed by
the majority of the physicians whom he consulted, to suffer himself to be
cut, to which also, upon their word, I used my interest to persuade him,
when he was dead and opened, it appeared that he had no malady but in the
kidneys.  They are least excusable for any error in this disease, by
reason that it is in some sort palpable; and ‘tis thence that I conclude
surgery to be much more certain, by reason that it sees and feels what it
does, and so goes less upon conjecture; whereas the physicians have no
‘speculum matricis’, by which to examine our brains, lungs, and liver.

Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves; for,
having to provide against divers and contrary accidents that often
afflict us at one and the same time, and that have almost a necessary
relation, as the heat of the liver and the coldness of the stomach, they
will needs persuade us, that of their ingredients one will heat the
stomach and the other will cool the liver: one has its commission to go
directly to the kidneys, nay, even to the bladder, without scattering its
operations by the way, and is to retain its power and virtue through all
those turns and meanders, even to the place to the service of which it is
designed, by its own occult property this will dry-the brain; that will
moisten the lungs.  Of all this bundle of things having mixed up a
potion, is it not a kind of madness to imagine or to hope that these
differing virtues should separate themselves from one another in this
mixture and confusion, to perform so many various errands?  I should very
much fear that they would either lose or change their tickets, and
disturb one another’s quarters.  And who can imagine but that, in this
liquid confusion, these faculties must corrupt, confound, and spoil one
another?  And is not the danger still more when the making up of this
medicine is entrusted to the skill and fidelity of still another, to
whose mercy we again abandon our lives?

As we have doublet and breeches-makers, distinct trades, to clothe us,
and are so much the better fitted, seeing that each of them meddles only
with his own business, and has less to trouble his head with than the
tailor who undertakes all; and as in matter of diet, great persons, for
their better convenience, and to the end they may be better served, have
cooks for the different offices, this for soups and potages, that for
roasting, instead of which if one cook should undertake the whole
service, he could not so well perform it; so also as to the cure of our
maladies.  The Egyptians had reason to reject this general trade of
physician, and to divide the profession: to each disease, to each part of
the body, its particular workman; for that part was more properly and
with less confusion cared for, seeing the person looked to nothing else.
Ours are not aware that he who provides for all, provides for nothing;
and that the entire government of this microcosm is more than they are
able to undertake.  Whilst they were afraid of stopping a dysentery, lest
they should put the patient into a fever, they killed me a friend,
--[Estienne de la Boetie.]--who was worth more than the whole of them.
They counterpoise their own divinations with the present evils; and
because they will not cure the brain to the prejudice of the stomach,
they injure both with their dissentient and tumultuary drugs.

As to the variety and weakness of the rationale of this art, they are
more manifest in it than in any other art; aperitive medicines are proper
for a man subject to the stone, by reason that opening and dilating the
passages they help forward the slimy matter whereof gravel and stone are
engendered, and convey that downward which begins to harden and gather in
the reins; aperitive things are dangerous for a man subject to the stone,
by reason that, opening and dilating the passages, they help forward the
matter proper to create the gravel toward the reins, which by their own
propension being apt to seize it, ‘tis not to be imagined but that a
great deal of what has been conveyed thither must remain behind;
moreover, if the medicine happen to meet with anything too large to be
carried through all the narrow passages it must pass to be expelled, that
obstruction, whatever it is, being stirred by these aperitive things and
thrown into those narrow passages, coming to stop them, will occasion a
certain and most painful death.  They have the like uniformity in the
counsels they give us for the regimen of life: it is good to make water
often; for we experimentally see that, in letting it lie long in the
bladder, we give it time to settle the sediment, which will concrete into
a stone; it is good not to make water often, for the heavy excrements it
carries along with it will not be voided without violence, as we see by
experience that a torrent that runs with force washes the ground it rolls
over much cleaner than the course of a slow and tardy stream; so, it is
good to have often to do with women, for that opens the passages and
helps to evacuate gravel; it is also very ill to have often to do with
women, because it heats, tires, and weakens the reins.  It is good to
bathe frequently in hot water, forasmuch as that relaxes and mollifies
the places where the gravel and stone lie; it is also ill by reason that
this application of external heat helps the reins to bake, harden, and
petrify the matter so disposed.  For those who are taking baths it is
most healthful.  To eat little at night, to the end that the waters they
are to drink the next morning may have a better operation upon an empty
stomach; on the other hand, it is better to eat little at dinner, that it
hinder not the operation of the waters, while it is not yet perfect, and
not to oppress the stomach so soon after the other labour, but leave the
office of digestion to the night, which will much better perform it than
the day, when the body and soul are in perpetual moving and action.  Thus
do they juggle and trifle in all their discourses at our expense; and
they could not give me one proposition against which I should not know
how to raise a contrary of equal force.  Let them, then, no longer
exclaim against those who in this trouble of sickness suffer themselves
to be gently guided by their own appetite and the advice of nature, and
commit themselves to the common fortune.

I have seen in my travels almost all the famous baths of Christendom, and
for some years past have begun to make use of them myself: for I look
upon bathing as generally wholesome, and believe that we suffer no little
inconveniences in our health by having left off the custom that was
generally observed, in former times, almost by all nations, and is yet in
many, of bathing every day; and I cannot imagine but that we are much the
worse by, having our limbs crusted and our pores stopped with dirt.  And
as to the drinking of them, fortune has in the first place rendered them
not at all unacceptable to my taste; and secondly, they are natural and
simple, which at least carry no danger with them, though they may do us
no good, of which the infinite crowd of people of all sorts and
complexions who repair thither I take to be a sufficient warranty; and
although I have not there observed any extraordinary and miraculous
effects, but that on the contrary, having more narrowly than ordinary
inquired into it, I have found all the reports of such operations that
have been spread abroad in those places ill-grounded and false, and those
that believe them (as people are willing to be gulled in what they
desire) deceived in them, yet I have seldom known any who have been made
worse by those waters, and a man cannot honestly deny but that they beget
a better appetite, help digestion, and do in some sort revive us, if we
do not go too late and in too weak a condition, which I would dissuade
every one from doing.  They have not the virtue to raise men from
desperate and inveterate diseases, but they may help some light
indisposition, or prevent some threatening alteration.  He who does not
bring along with him so much cheerfulness as to enjoy the pleasure of the
company he will there meet, and of the walks and exercises to which the
amenity of those places invite us, will doubtless lose the best and
surest part of their effect.  For this reason I have hitherto chosen to
go to those of the most pleasant situation, where there was the best
conveniency of lodging, provision, and company, as the baths of Bagneres
in France, those of Plombieres on the frontiers of Germany and Lorraine,
those of Baden in Switzerland, those of Lucca in Tuscany, and especially
those of Della Villa, which I have the most and at various seasons
frequented.

Every nation has particular opinions touching their use, and particular
rules and methods in using them; and all of them, according to what I
have seen, almost with like effect.  Drinking them is not at all received
in Germany; the Germans bathe for all diseases, and will lie dabbling in
the water almost from sun to sun; in Italy, where they drink nine days,
they bathe at least thirty, and commonly drink the water mixed with some
other drugs to make it work the better.  Here we are ordered to walk to
digest it; there we are kept in bed after taking it till it be wrought
off, our stomachs and feet having continually hot cloths applied to them
all the while; and as the Germans have a particular practice generally to
use cupping and scarification in the bath, so the Italians have their
‘doccie’, which are certain little streams of this hot water brought
through pipes, and with these bathe an hour in the morning, and as much
in the afternoon, for a month together, either the head, stomach, or any
other part where the evil lies.  There are infinite other varieties of
customs in every country, or rather there is no manner of resemblance to
one another.  By this you may see that this little part of physic to
which I have only submitted, though the least depending upon art of all
others, has yet a great share of the confusion and uncertainty everywhere
else manifest in the profession.

The poets put what they would say with greater emphasis and grace;
witness these two epigrams:

              “Alcon hesterno signum Jovis attigit: ille,
               Quamvis marmoreus, vim patitur medici.
               Ecce hodie, jussus transferri ex aeede vetusta,
               Effertur, quamvis sit Deus atque lapis.”

     [“Alcon yesterday touched Jove’s statue; he, although marble,
     suffers the force of the physician: to-day ordered to be transferred
     from the old temple, where it stood, it is carried out, although it
     be a god and a stone.”--Ausonius, Ep., 74.]


and the other:

              “Lotus nobiscum est, hilaris coenavit; et idem
               Inventus mane est mortuus Andragoras.
               Tam subitae mortis causam, Faustine, requiris?
               In somnis medicum viderat Hermocratem:”

     [“Andragoras bathed with us, supped gaily, and in the morning the
     same was found dead.  Dost thou ask, Faustinus, the cause of this so
     sudden death?  In his dreams he had seen the physician Hermocrates.”
      --Martial, vi. 53.]

upon which I will relate two stories.

The Baron de Caupene in Chalosse and I have betwixt us the advowson of a
benefice of great extent, at the foot of our mountains, called Lahontan.
It is with the inhabitants of this angle, as ‘tis said of those of the
Val d’Angrougne; they lived a peculiar sort of life, their fashions,
clothes, and manners distinct from other people; ruled and governed by
certain particular laws and usages, received from father to son, to which
they submitted, without other constraint than the reverence to custom.
This little state had continued from all antiquity in so happy a
condition, that no neighbouring judge was ever put to the trouble of
inquiring into their doings; no advocate was ever retained to give them
counsel, no stranger ever called in to compose their differences; nor was
ever any of them seen to go a-begging.  They avoided all alliances and
traffic with the outer world, that they might not corrupt the purity of
their own government; till, as they say, one of them, in the memory of
man, having a mind spurred on with a noble ambition, took it into his
head, to bring his name into credit and reputation, to make one of his
sons something more than ordinary, and having put him to learn to write
in a neighbouring town, made him at last a brave village notary.  This
fellow, having acquired such dignity, began to disdain their ancient
customs, and to buzz into the people’s ears the pomp of the other parts
of the nation; the first prank he played was to advise a friend of his,
whom somebody had offended by sawing off the horns of one of his goats,
to make his complaint to the royal judges thereabout, and so he went on
from one to another, till he had spoiled and confounded all.  In the tail
of this corruption, they say, there happened another, and of worse
consequence, by means of a physician, who, falling in love with one of
their daughters, had a mind to marry her and to live amongst them.  This
man first of all began to teach them the names of fevers, colds, and
imposthumes; the seat of the heart, liver, and intestines, a science till
then utterly unknown to them; and instead of garlic, with which they were
wont to cure all manner of diseases, how painful or extreme soever, he
taught them, though it were but for a cough or any little cold, to take
strange mixtures, and began to make a trade not only of their health, but
of their lives.  They swear till then they never perceived the evening
air to be offensive to the head; that to drink when they were hot was
hurtful, and that the winds of autumn were more unwholesome than those of
spring; that, since this use of physic, they find themselves oppressed
with a legion of unaccustomed diseases, and that they perceive a general
decay in their ancient vigour, and their lives are cut shorter by the
half.  This is the first of my stories.

The other is, that before I was afflicted with the stone, hearing that
the blood of a he-goat was with many in very great esteem, and looked
upon as a celestial manna rained down upon these latter ages for the good
and preservation of the lives of men, and having heard it spoken of by
men of understanding for an admirable drug, and of infallible operation;
I, who have ever thought myself subject to all the accidents that can
befall other men, had a mind, in my perfect health, to furnish myself
with this miracle, and therefore gave order to have a goat fed at home
according to the recipe: for he must be taken in the hottest month of all
summer, and must only have aperitive herbs given him to eat, and white
wine to drink.  I came home by chance the very day he was to be killed;
and some one came and told me that the cook had found two or three great
balls in his paunch, that rattled against one another amongst what he had
eaten.  I was curious to have all his entrails brought before me, where,
having caused the skin that enclosed them to be cut, there tumbled out
three great lumps, as light as sponges, so that they appeared to be
hollow, but as to the rest, hard and firm without, and spotted and mixed
all over with various dead colours; one was perfectly round, and of the
bigness of an ordinary ball; the other two something less, of an
imperfect roundness, as seeming not to be arrived at their, full growth.
I find, by inquiry of people accustomed to open these animals, that it is
a rare and unusual accident.  ‘Tis likely these are stones of the same
nature with ours and if so, it must needs be a very vain hope in
those who have the stone, to extract their cure from the blood of a beast
that was himself about to die of the same disease.  For to say that the
blood does not participate of this contagion, and does not thence alter
its wonted virtue, it is rather to be believed that nothing is engendered
in a body but by the conspiracy and communication of all the parts: the
whole mass works together, though one part contributes more to the work
than another, according to the diversity of operations; wherefore it is
very likely that there was some petrifying quality in all the parts of
this goat.  It was not so much for fear of the future, and for myself,
that I was curious in this experiment, but because it falls out in mine,
as it does in many other families, that the women store up such little
trumperies for the service of the people, using the same recipe in fifty
several diseases, and such a recipe as they will not take themselves, and
yet triumph when they happen to be successful.

As to what remains, I honour physicians, not according to the precept
for their necessity (for to this passage may be opposed another of the
prophet reproving King Asa for having recourse to a physician), but for
themselves, having known many very good men of that profession, and most
worthy to be beloved.  I do not attack them; ‘tis their art I inveigh
against, and do not much blame them for making their advantage of our
folly, for most men do the same.  Many callings, both of greater and of
less dignity than theirs, have no other foundation or support than public
abuse.  When I am sick I send for them if they be near, only to have
their company, and pay them as others do.  I give them leave to command
me to keep myself warm, because I naturally love to do it, and to appoint
leeks or lettuce for my broth; to order me white wine or claret; and so
as to all other things, which are indifferent to my palate and custom.
I know very well that I do nothing for them in so doing, because
sharpness and strangeness are incidents of the very essence of physic.
Lycurgus ordered wine for the sick Spartans.  Why?  because they
abominated the drinking it when they were well; as a gentleman, a
neighbour of mine, takes it as an excellent medicine in his fever,
because naturally he mortally hates the taste of it.  How many do we see
amongst them of my humour, who despise taking physic themselves, are men
of a liberal diet, and live a quite contrary sort of life to what they
prescribe others?  What is this but flatly to abuse our simplicity?  for
their own lives and health are no less dear to them than ours are to us,
and consequently they would accommodate their practice to their rules, if
they did not themselves know how false these are.

‘Tis the fear of death and of pain, impatience of disease, and a violent
and indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us: ‘tis pure
cowardice that makes our belief so pliable and easy to be imposed upon:
and yet most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit; for
I hear them find fault and complain as well as we; but they resolve at
last, “What should I do then?”  As if impatience were of itself a better
remedy than patience.  Is there any one of those who have suffered
themselves to be persuaded into this miserable subjection, who does not
equally surrender himself to all sorts of impostures?  who does not give
up himself to the mercy of whoever has the impudence to promise him a
cure?  The Babylonians carried their sick into the public square; the
physician was the people: every one who passed by being in humanity and
civility obliged to inquire of their condition, gave some advice
according to his own experience.  We do little better; there is not so
simple a woman, whose gossips and drenches we do not make use of: and
according to my humour, if I were to take physic, I would sooner choose
to take theirs than any other, because at least, if they do no good, they
will do no harm.  What Homer and Plato said of the Egyptians, that they
were all physicians, may be said of all nations; there is not a man
amongst any of them who does not boast of some rare recipe, and who will
not venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him.  I was the other
day in a company where one, I know not who, of my fraternity brought us
intelligence of a new sort of pills made up of a hundred and odd
ingredients: it made us very merry, and was a singular consolation, for
what rock could withstand so great a battery?  And yet I hear from those
who have made trial of it, that the least atom of gravel deigned not to
stir fort.

I cannot take my hand from the paper before I have added a word
concerning the assurance they give us of the certainty of their drugs,
from the experiments they have made.

The greatest part, I should say above two-thirds of the medicinal
virtues, consist in the quintessence or occult property of simples,
of which we can have no other instruction than use and custom; for
quintessence is no other than a quality of which we cannot by our reason
find out the cause.  In such proofs, those they pretend to have acquired
by the inspiration of some daemon, I am content to receive (for I meddle
not with miracles); and also the proofs which are drawn from things that,
upon some other account, often fall into use amongst us; as if in the
wool, wherewith we are wont to clothe ourselves, there has accidentally
some occult desiccative property been found out of curing kibed heels, or
as if in the radish we eat for food there has been found out some
aperitive operation.  Galen reports, that a man happened to be cured of a
leprosy by drinking wine out of a vessel into which a viper had crept by
chance.  In this example we find the means and a very likely guide and
conduct to this experience, as we also do in those that physicians
pretend to have been directed to by the example of some beasts.  But in
most of their other experiments wherein they affirm they have been
conducted by fortune, and to have had no other guide than chance, I find
the progress of this information incredible.  Suppose man looking round
about him upon the infinite number of things, plants, animals, metals;
I do not know where he would begin his trial; and though his first fancy
should fix him upon an elk’s horn, wherein there must be a very pliant
and easy belief, he will yet find himself as perplexed in his second
operation.  There are so many maladies and so many circumstances
presented to him, that before he can attain the certainty of the point to
which the perfection of his experience should arrive, human sense will be
at the end of its lesson: and before he can, amongst this infinity of
things, find out what this horn is; amongst so many diseases, what is
epilepsy; the many complexions in a melancholy person; the many seasons
in winter; the many nations in the French; the many ages in age; the many
celestial mutations in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many
parts in man’s body, nay, in a finger; and being, in all this, directed
neither by argument, conjecture, example, nor divine inspirations, but
merely by the sole motion of fortune, it must be by a perfectly
artificial, regular and methodical fortune.  And after the cure is
performed, how can he assure himself that it was not because the disease
had arrived at its period or an effect of chance?  or the operation of
something else that he had eaten, drunk, or touched that day? or by
virtue of his grandmother’s prayers?  And, moreover, had this experiment
been perfect, how many times was it repeated, and this long bead-roll of
haps, and concurrences strung anew by chance to conclude a certain rule?
And when the rule is concluded, by whom, I pray you?  Of so many
millions, there are but three men who take upon them to record their
experiments: must fortune needs just hit one of these?  What if another,
and a hundred others, have made contrary experiments?  We might,
peradventure, have some light in this, were all the judgments and
arguments of men known to us; but that three witnesses, three doctors,
should lord it over all mankind, is against reason: it were necessary
that human nature should have deputed and chosen them out, and that they
were declared our comptrollers by express procuration:


“TO MADAME DE DURAS.

     --[Marguerite de Grammont, widow of Jean de Durfort, Seigneur de
     Duras, who was killed near Leghorn, leaving no posterity.  Montaigne
     seems to have been on terms of considerable intimacy with her, and
     to have tendered her some very wholesome and frank advice in regard
     to her relations with Henry IV.]--

“MADAME,--The last time you honoured me with a visit, you found me at work
upon this chapter, and as these trifles may one day fall into your hands,
I would also that they testify in how great honour the author will take
any favour you shall please to show them.  You will there find the same
air and mien you have observed in his conversation; and though I could
have borrowed some better or more favourable garb than my own, I would
not have done it: for I require nothing more of these writings, but to
present me to your memory such as I naturally am.  The same conditions
and faculties you have been pleased to frequent and receive with much
more honour and courtesy than they deserve, I would put together (but
without alteration or change) in one solid body, that may peradventure
continue some years, or some days, after I am gone; where you may find
them again when you shall please to refresh your memory, without putting
you to any greater trouble; neither are they worth it.  I desire you
should continue the favour of your friendship to me, by the same
qualities by which it was acquired.

“I am not at all ambitious that any one should love and esteem me more
dead than living.  The humour of Tiberius is ridiculous, but yet common,
who was more solicitous to extend his renown to posterity than to render
himself acceptable to men of his own time.  If I were one of those to
whom the world could owe commendation, I would give out of it one-half to
have the other in hand; let their praises come quick and crowding about
me, more thick than long, more full than durable; and let them cease, in
God’s name, with my own knowledge of them, and when the sweet sound can
no longer pierce my ears.  It were an idle humour to essay, now that I am
about to forsake the commerce of men, to offer myself to them by a new
recommendation.  I make no account of the goods I could not employ in the
service of my life.  Such as I am, I will be elsewhere than in paper: my
art and industry have been ever directed to render myself good for
something; my studies, to teach me to do, and not to write.  I have made
it my whole business to frame my life: this has been my trade and my
work; I am less a writer of books than anything else.  I have coveted
understanding for the service of my present and real conveniences, and
not to lay up a stock for my posterity.  He who has anything of value in
him, let him make it appear in his conduct, in his ordinary discourses,
in his courtships, and his quarrels: in play, in bed, at table, in the
management of his affairs, in his economics.  Those whom I see make good
books in ill breeches, should first have mended their breeches, if they
would have been ruled by me.  Ask a Spartan whether he had rather be a
good orator or a good soldier: and if I was asked the same question, I
would rather choose to be a good cook, had I not one already to serve me.
My God!  Madame, how should I hate such a recommendation of being a
clever fellow at writing, and an ass and an inanity in everything else!
Yet I had rather be a fool both here and there than to have made so ill a
choice wherein to employ my talent.  And I am so far from expecting to
gain any new reputation by these follies, that I shall think I come off
pretty well if I lose nothing by them of that little I had before.  For
besides that this dead and mute painting will take from my natural being,
it has no resemblance to my better condition, but is much lapsed from my
former vigour and cheerfulness, growing faded and withered: I am towards
the bottom of the barrel, which begins to taste of the lees.

“As to the rest, Madame, I should not have dared to make so bold with the
mysteries of physic, considering the esteem that you and so many others
have of it, had I not had encouragement from their own authors.  I think
there are of these among the old Latin writers but two, Pliny and Celsus
if these ever fall into your hands, you will find that they speak much
more rudely of their art than I do; I but pinch it, they cut its throat.
Pliny, amongst other things, twits them with this, that when they are at
the end of their rope, they have a pretty device to save themselves, by
recommending their patients, whom they have teased and tormented with
their drugs and diets to no purpose, some to vows and miracles, others to
the hot baths.  (Be not angry, Madame; he speaks not of those in our
parts, which are under the protection of your house, and all Gramontins.)
They have a third way of saving their own credit, of ridding their hands
of us and securing themselves from the reproaches we might cast in their
teeth of our little amendment, when they have had us so long in their
hands that they have not one more invention left wherewith to amuse us,
which is to send us to the better air of some other country.  This,
Madame, is enough; I hope you will give me leave to return to my
discourse, from which I have so far digressed, the better to divert you.”

It was, I think, Pericles, who being asked how he did: “You may judge,”
 says he, “by these,” showing some little scrolls of parchment he had tied
about his neck and arms.  By which he would infer that he must needs be
very sick when he was reduced to a necessity of having recourse to such
idle and vain fopperies, and of suffering himself to be so equipped.
I dare not promise but that I may one day be so much a fool as to commit
my life and death to the mercy and government of physicians; I may fall
into such a frenzy; I dare not be responsible for my future constancy:
but then, if any one ask me how I do, I may also answer, as Pericles did,
“You may judge by this,” shewing my hand clutching six drachms of opium.
It will be a very evident sign of a violent sickness: my judgment will be
very much out of order; if once fear and impatience get such an advantage
over me, it may very well be concluded that there is a dreadful fever in
my mind.

I have taken the pains to plead this cause, which I understand
indifferently, a little to back and support the natural aversion to drugs
and the practice of physic I have derived from my ancestors, to the end
it may not be a mere stupid and inconsiderate aversion, but have a little
more form; and also, that they who shall see me so obstinate in my
resolution against all exhortations and menaces that shall be given me,
when my infirmity shall press hardest upon me, may not think ‘tis mere
obstinacy in me; or any one so ill-natured as to judge it to be any
motive of glory: for it would be a strange ambition to seek to gain
honour by an action my gardener or my groom can perform as well as I.
Certainly, I have not a heart so tumorous and windy, that I should
exchange so solid a pleasure as health for an airy and imaginary
pleasure: glory, even that of the Four Sons of Aymon, is too dear bought
by a man of my humour, if it cost him three swinging fits of the stone.
Give me health, in God’s name!  Such as love physic, may also have good,
great, and convincing considerations; I do not hate opinions contrary to
my own: I am so, far from being angry to see a discrepancy betwixt mine
and other men’s judgments, and from rendering myself unfit for the
society of men, from being of another sense and party than mine, that on
the contrary (the most general way that nature has followed being
variety, and more in souls than bodies, forasmuch as they are of a more
supple substance, and more susceptible of forms) I find it much more rare
to see our humours and designs jump and agree.  And there never were, in
the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains:
their most universal quality is diversity.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     I am towards the bottom of the barrel
     Accusing all others of ignorance and imposition
     Affection towards their husbands, (not) until they have lost them
     Anything of value in him, let him make it appear in his conduct
     As if impatience were of itself a better remedy than patience
     Assurance they give us of the certainty of their drugs
     At least, if they do no good, they will do no harm
     Attribute to itself; all the happy successes that happen
     Best part of a captain to know how to make use of occasions
     Burnt and roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others
     Commit themselves to the common fortune
     Crafty humility that springs from presumption
     Did not approve all sorts of means to obtain a victory
     Disease had arrived at its period or an effect of chance?
     Dissentient and tumultuary drugs
     Do not much blame them for making their advantage of our folly
     Doctors: more felicity and duration in their own lives?
     Doctrine much more intricate and fantastic than the thing itself
     Drugs being in its own nature an enemy to our health
     Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves
     Fathers conceal their affection from their children
     He who provides for all, provides for nothing
     Health depends upon the vanity and falsity of their promises
     Health is altered and corrupted by their frequent prescriptions
     Health to be worth purchasing by all the most painful cauteries
     Homer: The only words that have motion and action
     I dare not promise but that I may one day be so much a fool
     I see no people so soon sick as those who take physic
     Indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us
     Intended to get a new husband than to lament the old
     Let it alone a little
     Life should be cut off in the sound and living part
     Live a quite contrary sort of life to what they prescribe others
     Live, not so long as they please, but as long as they ought
     Llaying the fault upon the patient, by such frivolous reasons
     Long a voyage I should at last run myself into some disadvantage
     Making their advantage of our folly, for most men do the same
     Man may with less trouble adapt himself to entire abstinence
     Man runs a very great hazard in their hands (of physicians)
     Mark of singular good nature to preserve old age
     Men must embark, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises
     Mercenaries who would receive any (pay)
     Moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering
     More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force
     Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit
     Never any man knew so much, and spake so little
     No danger with them, though they may do us no good
     No other foundation or support than public abuse
     No physic that has not something hurtful in it
     Noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely lodged
     Obstinacy is the sister of constancy
     Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better
     Ordinances it (Medicine) foists upon us
     Passion has a more absolute command over us than reason
     Pay very strict usury who did not in due time pay the principal
     People are willing to be gulled in what they desire
     Physician’s “help”, which is very often an obstacle
     Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick
     Physicians fear men should at any time escape their authority
     Physicians were the only men who might lie at pleasure
     Physicians: earth covers their failures
     Plato said of the Egyptians, that they were all physicians
     Pure cowardice that makes our belief so pliable
     Recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear purchase
     Send us to the better air of some other country
     Should first have mended their breeches
     Smile upon us whilst we are alive
     So austere and very wise countenance and carriage (of physicians)
     So much are men enslaved to their miserable being
     Solon said that eating was physic against the malady hunger
     Strangely suspect all this merchandise: medical care
     Studies, to teach me to do, and not to write
     Such a recipe as they will not take themselves
     That he could neither read nor swim
     The Babylonians carried their sick into the public square
     They (good women) are not by the dozen, as every one knows
     They have not one more invention left wherewith to amuse us
     They juggle and trifle in all their discourses at our expense
     They never loved them till dead
     Tis in some sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living wel
     Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men
     Tis there she talks plain French
     To be, not to seem
     To keep me from dying is not in your power
     Two opinions alike, no more than two hairs
     Tyrannical authority physicians usurp over poor creatures
     Venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him
     Venture the making ourselves better without any danger
     We confess our ignorance in many things
     We do not easily accept the medicine we understand
     What are become of all our brave philosophical precepts?
     What we have not seen, we are forced to receive from other hands
     Whatever was not ordinary diet, was instead of a drug
     Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead
     Who does not boast of some rare recipe
     Who ever saw one physician approve of another’s prescription
     Willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead
     With being too well I am about to die
     Wont to give others their life, and not to receive it
     You may indeed make me die an ill death






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 14.

I.        Of Profit and Honesty.
II.       Of Repentance.
III.      Of Three Commerces.
IV.       Of Diversion.



ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

BOOK THE THIRD



CHAPTER I

OF PROFIT AND HONESTY

No man is free from speaking foolish things; but the worst on’t is, when
a man labours to play the fool:

               “Nae iste magno conatu magnas nugas dixerit.”

     [“Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle.”
      ---Terence, Heaut., act iii., s. 4.]

This does not concern me; mine slip from me with as little care as they
are of little value, and ‘tis the better for them.  I would presently
part with them for what they are worth, and neither buy nor sell them,
but as they weigh.  I speak on paper, as I do to the first person I meet;
and that this is true, observe what follows.

To whom ought not treachery to be hateful, when Tiberius refused it in a
thing of so great importance to him?  He had word sent him from Germany
that if he thought fit, they would rid him of Arminius by poison: this
was the most potent enemy the Romans had, who had defeated them so
ignominiously under Varus, and who alone prevented their aggrandisement
in those parts.

He returned answer, “that the people of Rome were wont to revenge
themselves of their enemies by open ways, and with their swords in their
hands, and not clandestinely and by fraud”: wherein he quitted the
profitable for the honest.  You will tell me that he was a braggadocio; I
believe so too: and ‘tis no great miracle in men of his profession.  But
the acknowledgment of virtue is not less valid in the mouth of him who
hates it, forasmuch as truth forces it from him, and if he will not
inwardly receive it, he at least puts it on for a decoration.

Our outward and inward structure is full of imperfection; but there is
nothing useless in nature, not even inutility itself; nothing has
insinuated itself into this universe that has not therein some fit and
proper place.  Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition,
jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, and despair have so natural a
possession in us, that its image is discerned in beasts; nay, and
cruelty, so unnatural a vice; for even in the midst of compassion we feel
within, I know not what tart-sweet titillation of ill-natured pleasure in
seeing others suffer; and the children feel it:

         “Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
          E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem:”

     [“It is sweet, when the winds disturb the waters of the vast sea, to
     witness from land the peril of other persons.”--Lucretius, ii. I.]

of the seeds of which qualities, whoever should divest man, would destroy
the fundamental conditions of human life.  Likewise, in all governments
there are necessary offices, not only abject, but vicious also.  Vices
there help to make up the seam in our piecing, as poisons are useful for
the conservation of health.  If they become excusable because they are of
use to us, and that the common necessity covers their true qualities, we
are to resign this part to the strongest and boldest citizens, who
sacrifice their honour and conscience, as others of old sacrificed their
lives, for the good of their country: we, who are weaker, take upon us
parts both that are more easy and less hazardous.  The public weal
requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre; let us leave this
commission to men who are more obedient and more supple.

In earnest, I have often been troubled to see judges, by fraud and false
hopes of favour or pardon, allure a criminal to confess his fact, and
therein to make use of cozenage and impudence.  It would become justice,
and Plato himself, who countenances this manner of proceeding, to furnish
me with other means more suitable to my own liking: this is a malicious
kind of justice, and I look upon it as no less wounded by itself than by
others.  I said not long since to some company in discourse, that I
should hardly be drawn to betray my prince for a particular man, who
should be much ashamed to betray any particular man for my prince; and I
do not only hate deceiving myself, but that any one should deceive
through me; I will neither afford matter nor occasion to any such thing.

In the little I have had to mediate betwixt our princes--[Between the
King of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV., and the Duc de Guise.  See De
Thou, De Vita Sua, iii. 9.]--in the divisions and subdivisions by which
we are at this time torn to pieces, I have been very careful that they
should neither be deceived in me nor deceive others by me.  People of
that kind of trading are very reserved, and pretend to be the most
moderate imaginable and nearest to the opinions of those with whom they
have to do; I expose myself in my stiff opinion, and after a method the
most my own; a tender negotiator, a novice, who had rather fail in the
affair than be wanting to myself.  And yet it has been hitherto with so
good luck (for fortune has doubtless the best share in it), that few
things have passed from hand to hand with less suspicion or more favour
and privacy.  I have a free and open way that easily insinuates itself
and obtains belief with those with whom I am to deal at the first
meeting.  Sincerity and pure truth, in what age soever, pass for current;
and besides, the liberty and freedom of a man who treats without any
interest of his own is never hateful or suspected, and he may very well
make use of the answer of Hyperides to the Athenians, who complained of
his blunt way of speaking: “Messieurs, do not consider whether or no I am
free, but whether I am so without a bribe, or without any advantage to my
own affairs.”  My liberty of speaking has also easily cleared me from all
suspicion of dissembling by its vehemency, leaving nothing unsaid, how
home and bitter soever (so that I could have said no worse behind their
backs), and in that it carried along with it a manifest show of
simplicity and indifference.  I pretend to no other fruit by acting than
to act, and add to it no long arguments or propositions; every action
plays its own game, win if it can.

As to the rest, I am not swayed by any passion, either of love or hatred,
towards the great, nor has my will captivated either by particular injury
or obligation.  I look upon our kings with an affection simply loyal and
respectful, neither prompted nor restrained by any private interest, and
I love myself for it.  Nor does the general and just cause attract me
otherwise than with moderation, and without heat.  I am not subject to
those penetrating and close compacts and engagements.  Anger and hatred
are beyond the duty of justice; and are passions only useful to those who
do not keep themselves strictly to their duty by simple reason:

          “Utatur motu animi, qui uti ratione non potest.”

     [“He may employ his passion, who can make no use of his reason.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 25.]

All legitimate intentions are temperate and equable of themselves; if
otherwise, they degenerate into seditious and unlawful.  This is it which
makes me walk everywhere with my head erect, my face and my heart open.
In truth, and I am not afraid to confess it, I should easily, in case of
need, hold up one candle to St. Michael and another to his dragon, like
the old woman; I will follow the right side even to the fire, but
exclusively, if I can.  Let Montaigne be overwhelmed in the public ruin
if need be; but if there be no need, I should think myself obliged to
fortune to save me, and I will make use of all the length of line my duty
allows for his preservation.  Was it not Atticus who, being of the just
but losing side, preserved himself by his moderation in that universal
shipwreck of the world, amongst so many mutations and diversities?  For
private man, as he was, it is more easy; and in such kind of work, I
think a man may justly not be ambitious to offer and insinuate himself.
For a man, indeed, to be wavering and irresolute, to keep his affection
unmoved and without inclination in the troubles of his country and public
divisions, I neither think it handsome nor honest:

          “Ea non media, sed nulla via est, velut eventum
          exspectantium, quo fortunae consilia sua applicent.”

     [“That is not a middle way, but no way, to await events, by which
     they refer their resolutions to fortune.”--Livy, xxxii. 21.]

This may be allowed in our neighbours’ affairs; and thus Gelo, the tyrant
of Syracuse, suspended his inclination in the war betwixt the Greeks and
barbarians, keeping a resident ambassador with presents at Delphos, to
watch and see which way fortune would incline, and then take fit occasion
to fall in with the victors.  It would be a kind of treason to proceed
after this manner in our own domestic affairs, wherein a man must of
necessity be of the one side or the other; though for a man who has no
office or express command to call him out, to sit still I hold it more
excusable (and yet I do not excuse myself upon these terms) than in
foreign expeditions, to which, however, according to our laws, no man is
pressed against his will.  And yet even those who wholly engage
themselves in such a war may behave themselves with such temper and
moderation, that the storm may fly over their heads without doing them
any harm.  Had we not reason to hope such an issue in the person of the
late Bishop of Orleans, the Sieur de Morvilliers?

     [An able negotiator, who, though protected by the Guises, and
     strongly supporting them, was yet very far from persecuting the
     Reformists.  He died 1577.]

And I know, amongst those who behave themselves most bravely in the
present war, some whose manners are so gentle, obliging, and just, that
they will certainly stand firm, whatever event Heaven is preparing for
us.  I am of opinion that it properly belongs to kings only to quarrel
with kings; and I laugh at those spirits who, out of lightness of heart,
lend themselves to so disproportioned disputes; for a man has never the
more particular quarrel with a prince, by marching openly and boldly
against him for his own honour and according to his duty; if he does not
love such a person, he does better, he esteems him.  And notably the
cause of the laws and of the ancient government of a kingdom, has this
always annexed to it, that even those who, for their own private
interest, invade them, excuse, if they do not honour, the defenders.

But we are not, as we nowadays do, to call peevishness and inward
discontent, that spring from private interest and passion, duty, nor a
treacherous and malicious conduct, courage; they call their proneness to
mischief and violence zeal; ‘tis not the cause, but their interest, that
inflames them; they kindle and begin a war, not because it is just, but
because it is war.

A man may very well behave himself commodiously and loyally too amongst
those of the adverse party; carry yourself, if not with the same equal
affection (for that is capable of different measure), at least with an
affection moderate, well tempered, and such as shall not so engage you to
one party, that it may demand all you are able to do for that side,
content yourself with a moderate proportion of their, favour and
goodwill; and to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.

The other way, of offering a man’s self and the utmost service he is able
to do, both to one party and the other, has still less of prudence in it
than conscience.  Does not he to whom you betray another, to whom you
were as welcome as to himself, know that you will at another time do as
much for him?  He holds you for a villain; and in the meantime hears what
you will say, gathers intelligence from you, and works his own ends out
of your disloyalty; double-dealing men are useful for bringing in, but we
must have a care they carry out as little as is possible.

I say nothing to one party that I may not, upon occasion, say to the
other, with a little alteration of accent; and report nothing but things
either indifferent or known, or what is of common consequence.  I cannot
permit myself, for any consideration, to tell them a lie.  What is
intrusted to my secrecy, I religiously conceal; but I take as few trusts
of that nature upon me as I can.  The secrets of princes are a
troublesome burthen to such as are not interested in them.  I very
willingly bargain that they trust me with little, but confidently rely
upon what I tell them.  I have ever known more than I desired.  One open
way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out
discoveries, like wine and love.  Philippides, in my opinion, answered
King Lysimachus very discreetly, who, asking him what of his estate he
should bestow upon him?  “What you will,” said he, “provided it be none
of your secrets.”  I see every one is displeased if the bottom of the
affair be concealed from him wherein he is employed, or that there be any
reservation in the thing; for my part, I am content to know no more of
the business than what they would have me employ myself in, nor desire
that my knowledge should exceed or restrict what I have to say.  If I
must serve for an instrument of deceit, let it be at least with a safe
conscience: I will not be reputed a servant either so affectionate or so
loyal as to be fit to betray any one: he who is unfaithful to himself, is
excusably so to his master.  But they are princes who do not accept men
by halves, and despise limited and conditional services: I cannot help
it: I frankly tell them how far I can go; for a slave I should not be,
but to reason, and I can hardly submit even to that.  And they also are
to blame to exact from a freeman the same subjection and obligation to
their service that they do from him they have made and bought, or whose
fortune particularly and expressly depends upon theirs.  The laws have
delivered me from a great anxiety; they have chosen a side for me, and
given me a master; all other superiority and obligation ought to be
relative to that, and cut, off from all other.  Yet this is not to say,
that if my affection should otherwise incline me, my hand should
presently obey it; the will and desire are a law to themselves; but
actions must receive commission from the public appointment.

All this proceeding of mine is a little dissonant from the ordinary
forms; it would produce no great effects, nor be of any long duration;
innocence itself could not, in this age of ours, either negotiate without
dissimulation, or traffic without lying; and, indeed, public employments
are by no means for my palate: what my profession requires, I perform
after the most private manner that I can.  Being young, I was engaged up
to the ears in business, and it succeeded well; but I disengaged myself
in good time.  I have often since avoided meddling in it, rarely
accepted, and never asked it; keeping my back still turned to ambition;
but if not like rowers who so advance backward, yet so, at the same time,
that I am less obliged to my resolution than to my good fortune, that I
was not wholly embarked in it.  For there are ways less displeasing to my
taste, and more suitable to my ability, by which, if she had formerly
called me to the public service, and my own advancement towards the
world’s opinion, I know I should, in spite of all my own arguments to the
contrary, have pursued them.  Such as commonly say, in opposition to what
I profess, that what I call freedom, simplicity, and plainness in my
manners, is art and subtlety, and rather prudence than goodness, industry
than nature, good sense than good luck, do me more honour than disgrace:
but, certainly, they make my subtlety too subtle; and whoever has
followed me close, and pryed narrowly into me, I will give him the
victory, if he does not confess that there is no rule in their school
that could match this natural motion, and maintain an appearance of
liberty and licence, so equal and inflexible, through so many various and
crooked paths, and that all their wit and endeavour could never have led
them through.  The way of truth is one and simple; that of particular
profit, and the commodity of affairs a man is entrusted with, is double,
unequal, and casual.  I have often seen these counterfeit and artificial
liberties practised, but, for the most part, without success; they relish
of AEsop’s ass who, in emulation of the dog, obligingly clapped his two
fore-feet upon his master’s shoulders; but as many caresses as the dog
had for such an expression of kindness, twice so many blows with a cudgel
had the poor ass for his compliment:

     “Id maxime quemque decet, quod est cujusque suum maxime.”

     [“That best becomes every man which belongs most to him;”
      --Cicero, De Offic., i. 31.]

I will not deprive deceit of its due; that were but ill to understand the
world: I know it has often been of great use, and that it maintains and
supplies most men’s employment.  There are vices that are lawful, as
there are many actions, either good or excusable, that are not lawful in
themselves.

The justice which in itself is natural and universal is otherwise and
more nobly ordered than that other justice which is special, national,
and constrained to the ends of government,

          “Veri juris germanaeque justitiae solidam et expressam
          effigiem nullam tenemus; umbra et imaginibus utimur;”

     [“We retain no solid and express portraiture of true right and
     germane justice; we have only the shadow and image of it.”
      --Cicero, De Offic., iii. 17.]

insomuch that the sage Dandamis, hearing the lives of Socrates,
Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, judged them to be great men every way,
excepting that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws,
which, to second and authorise, true virtue must abate very much of its
original vigour; many vicious actions are introduced, not only by their
permission, but by their advice:

     “Ex senatus consultis plebisquescitis scelera exercentur.”

     [“Crimes are committed by the decrees of the Senate and the
     popular assembly.”--Seneca, Ep., 95.]

I follow the common phrase that distinguishes betwixt profitable and
honest things, so as to call some natural actions, that are not only
profitable but necessary, dishonest and foul.

But let us proceed in our examples of treachery two pretenders to the
kingdom of Thrace--[Rhescuporis and Cotys. Tacitus, Annal., ii.  65]--
were fallen into dispute about their title; the emperor hindered them
from proceeding to blows: but one of them, under colour of bringing
things to a friendly issue by an interview, having invited his competitor
to an entertainment in his own house, imprisoned and killed him.  Justice
required that the Romans should have satisfaction for this offence; but
there was a difficulty in obtaining it by ordinary ways; what, therefore,
they could not do legitimately, without war and without danger, they
resolved to do by treachery; and what they could not honestly do, they
did profitably.  For which end, one Pomponius Flaccus was found to be a
fit instrument.  This man, by dissembled words and assurances, having
drawn the other into his toils, instead of the honour and favour he had
promised him, sent him bound hand and foot to Rome.  Here one traitor
betrayed another, contrary to common custom: for they are full of
mistrust, and ‘tis hard to overreach them in their own art: witness the
sad experience we have lately had.--[Montaigne here probably refers to
the feigned reconciliation between Catherine de Medici and Henri, Duc de
Guise, in 1588.]

Let who will be Pomponius Flaccus, and there are enough who would: for my
part, both my word and my faith are, like all the rest, parts of this
common body: their best effect is the public service; this I take for
presupposed.  But should one command me to take charge of the courts of
law and lawsuits, I should make answer, that I understood it not; or the
place of a leader of pioneers, I would say, that I was called to a more
honourable employment; so likewise, he that would employ me to lie,
betray, and forswear myself, though not to assassinate or to poison, for
some notable service, I should say, “If I have robbed or stolen anything
from any man, send me rather to the galleys.”  For it is permissible in a
man of honour to say, as the Lacedaemonians did,--[Plutarch, Difference
between a Flatterer and a Friend, c. 21.]--having been defeated by
Antipater, when just upon concluding an agreement: “You may impose as
heavy and ruinous taxes upon us as you please, but to command us to do
shameful and dishonest things, you will lose your time, for it is to no
purpose.”  Every one ought to make the same vow to himself that the kings
of Egypt made their judges solemnly swear, that they would not do
anything contrary to their consciences, though never so much commanded to
it by themselves.  In such commissions there is evident mark of ignominy
and condemnation; and he who gives it at the same time accuses you, and
gives it, if you understand it right, for a burden and a punishment.
As much as the public affairs are bettered by your exploit, so much are
your own the worse, and the better you behave yourself in it, ‘tis so
much the worse for yourself; and it will be no new thing, nor,
peradventure, without some colour of justice, if the same person ruin
you who set you on work.

If treachery can be in any case excusable, it must be only so when it is
practised to chastise and betray treachery.  There are examples enough of
treacheries, not only rejected, but chastised and punished by those in
favour of whom they were undertaken.  Who is ignorant of Fabricius
sentence against the physician of Pyrrhus?

But this we also find recorded, that some persons have commanded a thing,
who afterward have severely avenged the execution of it upon him they had
employed, rejecting the reputation of so unbridled an authority, and
disowning so abandoned and base a servitude and obedience.  Jaropelk,
Duke of Russia, tampered with a gentleman of Hungary to betray Boleslaus,
king of Poland, either by killing him, or by giving the Russians
opportunity to do him some notable mischief.  This worthy went ably to
work: he was more assiduous than before in the service of that king, so
that he obtained the honour to be of his council, and one of the chiefest
in his trust.  With these advantages, and taking an opportune occasion of
his master’s absence, he betrayed Vislicza, a great and rich city, to the
Russians, which was entirely sacked and burned, and not only all the
inhabitants of both sexes, young and old, put to the sword, but moreover
a great number of neighbouring gentry, whom he had drawn thither to that
end.  Jaropelk, his revenge being thus satisfied and his anger appeased,
which was not, indeed, without pretence (for Boleslaus had highly
offended him, and after the same manner), and sated with the fruit of
this treachery, coming to consider the fulness of it, with a sound
judgment and clear from passion, looked upon what had been done with so
much horror and remorse that he caused the eyes to be bored out and the
tongue and shameful parts to be cut off of him who had performed it.

Antigonus persuaded the Argyraspides to betray Eumenes, their general,
his adversary, into his hands; but after he had caused him, so delivered,
to be slain, he would himself be the commissioner of the divine justice
for the punishment of so detestable a crime, and committed them into the
hands of the governor of the province, with express command, by whatever
means, to destroy and bring them all to an evil end, so that of that
great number of men, not so much as one ever returned again into
Macedonia: the better he had been served, the more wickedly he judged it
to be, and meriting greater punishment.

The slave who betrayed the place where his master, P. Sulpicius, lay
concealed, was, according to the promise of Sylla’s proscription,
manumitted for his pains; but according to the promise of the public
justice, which was free from any such engagement, he was thrown headlong
from the Tarpeian rock.

Our King Clovis, instead of the arms of gold he had promised them, caused
three of Cararie’s servants to be hanged after they had betrayed their
master to him, though he had debauched them to it: he hanged them with
the purse of their reward about their necks; after having satisfied his
second and special faith, he satisfied the general and first.

Mohammed II.  having resolved to rid himself of his brother, out of
jealousy of state, according to the practice of the Ottoman family, he
employed one of his officers in the execution, who, pouring a quantity of
water too fast into him, choked him.  This being done, to expiate the
murder, he delivered the murderer into the hands of the mother of him he
had so caused to be put to death, for they were only brothers by the
father’s side; she, in his presence, ripped up the murderer’s bosom, and
with her own hands rifled his breast for his heart, tore it out, and
threw it to the dogs.  And even to the worst people it is the sweetest
thing imaginable, having once gained their end by a vicious action, to
foist, in all security, into it some show of virtue and justice, as by
way of compensation and conscientious correction; to which may be added,
that they look upon the ministers of such horrid crimes as upon men who
reproach them with them, and think by their deaths to erase the memory
and testimony of such proceedings.

Or if, perhaps, you are rewarded, not to frustrate the public necessity
for that extreme and desperate remedy, he who does it cannot for all
that, if he be not such himself, but look upon you as an accursed and
execrable fellow, and conclude you a greater traitor than he does,
against whom you are so: for he tries the malignity of your disposition
by your own hands, where he cannot possibly be deceived, you having no
object of preceding hatred to move you to such an act; but he employs you
as they do condemned malefactors in executions of justice, an office as
necessary as dishonourable.  Besides the baseness of such commissions,
there is, moreover, a prostitution of conscience.  Seeing that the
daughter of Sejanus could not be put to death by the law of Rome, because
she was a virgin, she was, to make it lawful, first ravished by the
hangman and then strangled: not only his hand but his soul is slave to
the public convenience.

When Amurath I., more grievously to punish his subjects who had taken
part in the parricide rebellion of his son, ordained that their nearest
kindred should assist in the execution, I find it very handsome in some
of them to have rather chosen to be unjustly thought guilty of the
parricide of another than to serve justice by a parricide of their own.
And where I have seen, at the taking of some little fort by assault in my
time, some rascals who, to save their own lives, would consent to hang
their friends and companions, I have looked upon them to be of worse
condition than those who were hanged.  ‘Tis said, that Witold, Prince of
Lithuania, introduced into the nation the practice that the criminal
condemned to death should with his own hand execute the sentence,
thinking it strange that a third person, innocent of the fault, should be
made guilty of homicide.

A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and
unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to
forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his
ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine
rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more
universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ‘tis a misfortune: so
that if any one should ask me what remedy?  “None,” say I, “if he were
really racked between these two extremes: ‘sed videat, ne quoeratur
latebya perjurio’, he must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it
did not weigh on him to do it, ‘tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry
condition.”  If there be a person to be found of so tender a conscience
as to think no cure whatever worth so important a remedy, I shall like
him never the worse; he could not more excusably or more decently perish.
We cannot do all we would, so that we must often, as the last anchorage,
commit the protection of our vessels to the simple conduct of heaven.
To what more just necessity does he reserve himself?  What is less
possible for him to do than what he cannot do but at the expense of his
faith and honour, things that, perhaps, ought to be dearer to him than
his own safety, or even the safety of his people.  Though he should, with
folded arms, only call God to his assistance, has he not reason to hope
that the divine goodness will not refuse the favour of an extraordinary
arm to just and pure hands?  These are dangerous examples, rare and
sickly exceptions to our natural rules: we must yield to them, but with
great moderation and circumspection: no private utility is of such
importance that we should upon that account strain our consciences to
such a degree: the public may be, when very manifest and of very great
concern.

Timoleon made a timely expiation for his strange exploit by the tears he
shed, calling to mind that it was with a fraternal hand that he had slain
the tyrant; and it justly pricked his conscience that he had been
necessitated to purchase the public utility at so great a price as the
violation of his private morality.  Even the Senate itself, by his means
delivered from slavery, durst not positively determine of so high a fact,
and divided into two so important and contrary aspects; but the
Syracusans,  sending at the same time to the Corinthians to solicit their
protection, and to require of them a captain fit to re-establish their
city in its former dignity and to clear Sicily of several little tyrants
by whom it was oppressed, they deputed Timoleon for that service, with
this cunning declaration; “that according as he should behave himself
well or ill in his employment, their sentence should incline either to
favour the deliverer of his country, or to disfavour the murderer of his
brother.”  This fantastic conclusion carries along with it some excuse,
by reason of the danger of the example, and the importance of so strange
an action: and they did well to discharge their own judgment of it, and
to refer it to others who were not so much concerned.  But Timoleon’s
comportment in this expedition soon made his cause more clear, so
worthily and virtuously he demeaned himself upon all occasions; and the
good fortune that accompanied him in the difficulties he had to overcome
in this noble employment, seemed to be strewed in his way by the gods,
favourably conspiring for his justification.

The end of this matter is excusable, if any can be so; but the profit of
the augmentation of the public revenue, that served the Roman Senate for
a pretence to the foul conclusion I am going to relate, is not sufficient
to warrant any such injustice.

Certain cities had redeemed themselves and their liberty by money, by the
order and consent of the Senate, out of the hands of L. Sylla: the
business coming again in question, the Senate condemned them to be
taxable as they were before, and that the money they had disbursed for
their redemption should be lost to them.  Civil war often produces such
villainous examples; that we punish private men for confiding in us when
we were public ministers: and the self-same magistrate makes another man
pay the penalty of his change that has nothing to do with it; the
pedagogue whips his scholar for his docility; and the guide beats the
blind man whom he leads by the hand; a horrid image of justice.

There are rules in philosophy that are both false and weak.  The example
that is proposed to us for preferring private utility before faith given,
has not weight enough by the circumstances they put to it; robbers have
seized you, and after having made you swear to pay them a certain sum of
money, dismiss you.  ‘Tis not well done to say, that an honest man can be
quit of his oath without payment, being out of their hands.  ‘Tis no such
thing: what fear has once made me willing to do, I am obliged to do it
when I am no longer in fear; and though that fear only prevailed with my
tongue without forcing my will, yet am I bound to keep my word.  For my
part, when my tongue has sometimes inconsiderately said something that I
did not think, I have made a conscience of disowning it: otherwise, by
degrees, we shall abolish all the right another derives from our promises
and oaths:

               “Quasi vero forti viro vis possit adhiberi.”

          [“As though a man of true courage could be compelled.”
           --Cicero, De Offic., iii. 30.]

And ‘tis only lawful, upon the account of private interest, to excuse
breach of promise, when we have promised something that is unlawful and
wicked in itself; for the right of virtue ought to take place of the
right of any obligation of ours.

I have formerly placed Epaminondas in the first rank of excellent men,
and do not repent it.  How high did he stretch the consideration of his
own particular duty? he who never killed a man whom he had overcome; who,
for the inestimable benefit of restoring the liberty of his country, made
conscience of killing a tyrant or his accomplices without due form of
justice: and who concluded him to be a wicked man, how good a citizen
soever otherwise, who amongst his enemies in battle spared not his friend
and his guest.  This was a soul of a rich composition: he married
goodness and humanity, nay, even the tenderest and most delicate in the
whole school of philosophy, to the roughest and most violent human
actions.  Was it nature or art that had intenerated that great courage of
his, so full, so obstinate against pain and death and poverty, to such an
extreme degree of sweetness and compassion?  Dreadful in arms and blood,
he overran and subdued a nation invincible by all others but by him
alone; and yet in the heat of an encounter, could turn aside from his
friend and guest.  Certainly he was fit to command in war who could so
rein himself with the curb of good nature, in the height and heat of his
fury, a fury inflamed and foaming with blood and slaughter.  ‘Tis a
miracle to be able to mix any image of justice with such violent actions:
and it was only possible for such a steadfastness of mind as that of
Epaminondas therein to mix sweetness and the facility of the gentlest
manners and purest innocence.  And whereas one told the Mamertini that
statutes were of no efficacy against armed men; and another told the
tribune of the people that the time of justice and of war were distinct
things; and a third said that the noise of arms deafened the voice of
laws, this man was not precluded from listening to the laws of civility
and pure courtesy.  Had he not borrowed from his enemies the custom of
sacrificing to the Muses when he went to war, that they might by their
sweetness and gaiety soften his martial and rigorous fury?  Let us not
fear, by the example of so great a master, to believe that there is
something unlawful, even against an enemy, and that the common concern
ought not to require all things of all men, against private interest:

          “Manente memoria, etiam in dissidio publicorum
          foederum, privati juris:”

          [“The memory of private right remaining even amid
          public dissensions.”--Livy, xxv. 18.]

              “Et nulla potentia vires
               Praestandi, ne quid peccet amicus, habet;”

     [“No power on earth can sanction treachery against a friend.”
      --Ovid, De Ponto, i. 7, 37.]

and that all things are not lawful to an honest man for the service of
his prince, the laws, or the general quarrel:

          “Non enim patria praestat omnibus officiis....
          et ipsi conducit pios habere cives in parentes.”

     [“The duty to one’s country does not supersede all other duties.
     The country itself requires that its citizens should act piously
     toward their parents.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 23.]

Tis an instruction proper for the time wherein we live: we need not
harden our courage with these arms of steel; ‘tis enough that our
shoulders are inured to them: ‘tis enough to dip our pens in ink without
dipping them in blood.  If it be grandeur of courage, and the effect of a
rare and singular virtue, to contemn friendship, private obligations, a
man’s word and relationship, for the common good and obedience to the
magistrate, ‘tis certainly sufficient to excuse us, that ‘tis a grandeur
that can have no place in the grandeur of Epaminondas’ courage.

I abominate those mad exhortations of this other discomposed soul,

              “Dum tela micant, non vos pietatis imago
               Ulla, nec adversa conspecti fronte parentes
               Commoveant; vultus gladio turbate verendos.”

     [“While swords glitter, let no idea of piety, nor the face even of a
     father presented to you, move you: mutilate with your sword those
     venerable features “--Lucan, vii. 320.]

Let us deprive wicked, bloody, and treacherous natures of such a pretence
of reason: let us set aside this guilty and extravagant justice, and
stick to more human imitations.  How great things can time and example
do!  In an encounter of the civil war against Cinna, one of Pompey’s
soldiers having unawares killed his brother, who was of the contrary
party, he immediately for shame and sorrow killed himself: and some years
after, in another civil war of the same people, a soldier demanded a
reward of his officer for having killed his brother.

A man but ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility:
and very erroneously concludes that every one is obliged to it, and that
it becomes every one to do it, if it be of utility:

               “Omnia non pariter rerum sunt omnibus apta.”


               [“All things are not equally fit for all men.”
                --Propertius, iii. 9, 7.]

Let us take that which is most necessary and profitable for human
society; it will be marriage; and yet the council of the saints find the
contrary much better, excluding from it the most venerable vocation of
man: as we design those horses for stallions of which we have the least
esteem.




CHAPTER II

OF REPENTANCE

Others form man; I only report him: and represent a particular one, ill
fashioned enough, and whom, if I had to model him anew, I should
certainly make something else than what he is but that’s past recalling.
Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, ‘tis not,
however, unlike: the world eternally turns round; all things therein are
incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of
Egypt, both by the public motion and their own.  Even constancy itself is
no other but a slower and more languishing motion.  I cannot fix my
object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness; I take
it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I
paint its passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the
people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute
to minute, I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently
change, not only by fortune, but also by intention.  ‘Tis a counterpart
of various and changeable accidents, and of irresolute imaginations, and,
as it falls out, sometimes contrary: whether it be that I am then another
self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations:
so it is that I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said,
I never contradict the truth.  Could my soul once take footing, I would
not essay but resolve: but it is always learning and making trial.

I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one; all moral
philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one
of richer composition: every man carries the entire form of human
condition.  Authors communicate themselves to the people by some especial
and extrinsic mark; I, the first of any, by my universal being; as Michel
de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer.  If the world
find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not
so much as think of themselves.  But is it reason that, being so
particular in my way of living, I should pretend to recommend myself to
the public knowledge?  And is it also reason that I should produce to the
world, where art and handling have so much credit and authority, crude
and simple effects of nature, and of a weak nature to boot?  Is it not to
build a wall without stone or brick, or some such thing, to write books
without learning and without art?  The fancies of music are carried on by
art; mine by chance.  I have this, at least, according to discipline,
that never any man treated of a subject he better understood and knew
than I what I have undertaken, and that in this I am the most
understanding man alive: secondly, that never any man penetrated farther
into his matter, nor better and more distinctly sifted the parts and
sequences of it, nor ever more exactly and fully arrived at the end he
proposed to himself.  To perfect it, I need bring nothing but fidelity to
the work; and that is there, and the most pure and sincere that is
anywhere to be found.  I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much
as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older; for, methinks,
custom allows to age more liberty of prating, and more indiscretion of
talking of a man’s self.  That cannot fall out here, which I often see
elsewhere, that the work and the artificer contradict one another:
“Can a man of such sober conversation have written so foolish a book?”
 Or “Do so learned writings proceed from a man of so weak conversation?”
 He who talks at a very ordinary rate, and writes rare matter, ‘tis to say
that his capacity is borrowed and not his own.  A learned man is not
learned in all things: but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout,
even to ignorance itself; here my book and I go hand in hand together.
Elsewhere men may commend or censure the work, without reference to the
workman; here they cannot: who touches the one, touches the other.  He
who shall judge of it without knowing him, will more wrong himself than
me; he who does know him, gives me all the satisfaction I desire.  I
shall be happy beyond my desert, if I can obtain only thus much from the
public approbation, as to make men of understanding perceive that I was
capable of profiting by knowledge, had I had it; and that I deserved to
have been assisted by a better memory.

Be pleased here to excuse what I often repeat, that I very rarely repent,
and that my conscience is satisfied with itself, not as the conscience of
an angel, or that of a horse, but as the conscience of a man; always
adding this clause, not one of ceremony, but a true and real submission,
that I speak inquiring and doubting, purely and simply referring myself
to the common and accepted beliefs for the resolution.  I do not teach; I
only relate.

There is no vice that is absolutely a vice which does not offend, and
that a sound judgment does not accuse; for there is in it so manifest a
deformity and inconvenience, that peradventure they are in the right who
say that it is chiefly begotten by stupidity and ignorance: so hard is it
to imagine that a man can know without abhorring it.  Malice sucks up the
greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.  Vice leaves
repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh, which is always
scratching and lacerating itself: for reason effaces all other grief and
sorrows, but it begets that of repentance, which is so much the more
grievous, by reason it springs within, as the cold and heat of fevers are
more sharp than those that only strike upon the outward skin.  I hold for
vices (but every one according to its proportion), not only those which
reason and nature condemn, but those also which the opinion of men,
though false and erroneous, have made such, if authorised by law and
custom.

There is likewise no virtue which does not rejoice a well-descended
nature: there is a kind of, I know not what, congratulation in well-doing
that gives us an inward satisfaction, and a generous boldness that
accompanies a good conscience: a soul daringly vicious may, peradventure,
arm itself with security, but it cannot supply itself with this
complacency and satisfaction.  ‘Tis no little satisfaction to feel a
man’s self preserved from the contagion of so depraved an age, and to say
to himself: “Whoever could penetrate into my soul would not there find me
guilty either of the affliction or ruin of any one, or of revenge or
envy, or any offence against the public laws, or of innovation or
disturbance, or failure of my word; and though the licence of the time
permits and teaches every one so to do, yet have I not plundered any
Frenchman’s goods, or taken his money, and have lived upon what is my
own, in war as well as in peace; neither have I set any man to work
without paying him his hire.”  These testimonies of a good conscience
please, and this natural rejoicing is very beneficial to us, and the only
reward that we can never fail of.

To ground the recompense of virtuous actions upon the approbation of
others is too uncertain and unsafe a foundation, especially in so corrupt
and ignorant an age as this, wherein the good opinion of the vulgar is
injurious: upon whom do you rely to show you what is recommendable?  God
defend me from being an honest man, according to the descriptions of
honour I daily see every one make of himself:

               “Quae fuerant vitia, mores sunt.”

     [“What before had been vices are now manners.”--Seneca, Ep., 39.]

Some of my friends have at times schooled and scolded me with great
sincerity and plainness, either of their own voluntary motion, or by me
entreated to it as to an office, which to a well-composed soul surpasses
not only in utility, but in kindness, all other offices of friendship: I
have always received them with the most open arms, both of courtesy and
acknowledgment; but to say the truth, I have often found so much false
measure, both in their reproaches and praises, that I had not done much
amiss, rather to have done ill, than to have done well according to their
notions.  We, who live private lives, not exposed to any other view than
our own, ought chiefly to have settled a pattern within ourselves by
which to try our actions: and according to that, sometimes to encourage
and sometimes to correct ourselves.  I have my laws and my judicature to
judge of myself, and apply myself more to these than to any other rules:
I do, indeed, restrain my actions according to others; but extend them
not by any other rule than my own.  You yourself only know if you are
cowardly and cruel, loyal and devout: others see you not, and only guess
at you by uncertain conjectures, and do not so much see your nature as
your art; rely not therefore upon their opinions, but stick to your own:

     “Tuo tibi judicio est utendum.... Virtutis et vitiorum grave ipsius
     conscientiae pondus est: qua sublata, jacent omnia.”

     [“Thou must employ thy own judgment upon thyself; great is the
     weight of thy own conscience in the discovery of virtues and vices:
     which taken away, all things are lost.”
      --Cicero, De Nat. Dei, iii.  35; Tusc. Quaes., i. 25.]

But the saying that repentance immediately follows the sin seems not to
have respect to sin in its high estate, which is lodged in us as in its
own proper habitation.  One may disown and retract the vices that
surprise us, and to which we are hurried by passions; but those which by
a long habit are rooted in a strong and vigorous will are not subject to
contradiction.  Repentance is no other but a recanting of the will and an
opposition to our fancies, which lead us which way they please.  It makes
this person disown his former virtue and continency:

         “Quae mens est hodie, cur eadem non puero fait?
          Vel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genae?”

     [“What my mind is, why was it not the same, when I was a boy?  or
     why do not the cheeks return to these feelings?”
      --Horace, Od., v. 10, 7.]

‘Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private.  Every
one may juggle his part, and represent an honest man upon the stage: but
within, and in his own bosom, where all may do as they list, where all is
concealed, to be regular, there’s the point.  The next degree is to be so
in his house, and in his ordinary actions, for which we are accountable
to none, and where there is no study nor artifice.  And therefore Bias,
setting forth the excellent state of a private family, says: “of which a
the master is the same within, by his own virtue and temper, that he is
abroad, for fear of the laws and report of men.”  And it was a worthy
saying of Julius Drusus, to the masons who offered him, for three
thousand crowns, to put his house in such a posture that his neighbours
should no longer have the same inspection into it as before; “I will give
you,” said he, “six thousand to make it so that everybody may see into
every room.”  ‘Tis honourably recorded of Agesilaus, that he used in his
journeys always to take up his lodgings in temples, to the end that the
people and the gods themselves might pry into his most private actions.
Such a one has been a miracle to the world, in whom neither his wife nor
servant has ever seen anything so much as remarkable; few men have been
admired by their own domestics; no one was ever a prophet, not merely in
his own house, but in his own country, says the experience of histories:
--[No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, said Marshal Catinat]--‘tis
the same in things of nought, and in this low example the image of a
greater is to be seen.  In my country of Gascony, they look upon it as a
drollery to see me in print; the further off I am read from my own home,
the better I am esteemed.  I purchase printers in Guienne; elsewhere they
purchase me.  Upon this it is that they lay their foundation who conceal
themselves present and living, to obtain a name when they are dead and
absent.  I had rather have a great deal less in hand, and do not expose
myself to the world upon any other account than my present share; when I
leave it I quit the rest.  See this functionary whom the people escort in
state, with wonder and applause, to his very door; he puts off the
pageant with his robe, and falls so much the lower by how much he was
higher exalted: in himself within, all is tumult and degraded.  And
though all should be regular there, it will require a vivid and
well-chosen judgment to perceive it in these low and private actions; to
which may be added, that order is a dull, sombre virtue.  To enter a
breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to
reprehend, laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse
with a man’s own family and with himself; not to relax, not to give a
man’s self the lie, is more rare and hard, and less remarkable.  By which
means, retired lives, whatever is said to the contrary, undergo duties of
as great or greater difficulty than the others do; and private men, says
Aristotle,’ serve virtue more painfully and highly than those in
authority do: we prepare ourselves for eminent occasions, more out of
glory than conscience.  The shortest way to arrive at glory, would be to
do that for conscience which we do for glory: and the virtue of Alexander
appears to me of much less vigour in his great theatre, than that of
Socrates in his mean and obscure employment.  I can easily conceive
Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates, I
cannot.  Who shall ask the one what he can do, he will answer, “Subdue
the world”: and who shall put the same question to the other, he will
say, “Carry on human life conformably with its natural condition”; a much
more general, weighty, and legitimate science than the other.--[Montaigne
added here, “To do for the world that for which he came into the world,”
 but he afterwards erased these words from the manuscript.--Naigeon.]

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking
orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in
mediocrity.  As they who judge and try us within, make no great account
of the lustre of our public actions, and see they are only streaks and
rays of clear water springing from a slimy and muddy bottom so, likewise,
they who judge of us by this gallant outward appearance, in like manner
conclude of our internal constitution; and cannot couple common
faculties, and like their own, with the other faculties that astonish
them, and are so far out of their sight.  Therefore it is that we give
such savage forms to demons: and who does not give Tamerlane great
eyebrows, wide nostrils, a dreadful visage, and a prodigious stature,
according to the imagination he has conceived by the report of his name?
Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus, I should hardly have believed
but that all was adage and apothegm he spoke to his man or his hostess.
We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool, or upon his
wife, than a great president venerable by his port and sufficiency: we
fancy that they, from their high tribunals, will not abase themselves so
much as to live.  As vicious souls are often incited by some foreign
impulse to do well, so are virtuous souls to do ill; they are therefore
to be judged by their settled state, when they are at home, whenever that
may be; and, at all events, when they are nearer repose, and in their
native station.

Natural inclinations are much assisted and fortified by education; but
they seldom alter and overcome their institution: a thousand natures of
my time have escaped towards virtue or vice, through a quite contrary
discipline:

              “Sic ubi, desuetae silvis, in carcere clausae
               Mansuevere ferx, et vultus posuere minaces,
               Atque hominem didicere pati, si torrida parvus
               Venit in ora cruor, redeunt rabiesque fororque,
               Admonitaeque tument gustato sanguine fauces
               Fervet, et a trepido vix abstinet ira magistro;”

     [“So savage beasts, when shut up in cages and grown unaccustomed to
     the woods, have become tame, and have laid aside their fierce looks,
     and submit to the rule of man; if again a slight taste of blood
     comes into their mouths, their rage and fury return, their jaws are
     erected by thirst of blood, and their anger scarcely abstains from
     their trembling masters.”--Lucan, iv. 237.]

these original qualities are not to be rooted out; they may be covered
and concealed.  The Latin tongue is as it were natural to me; I
understand it better than French; but I have not been used to speak it,
nor hardly to write it, these forty years.  Unless upon extreme and
sudden emotions which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and
once seeing my father in perfect health fall upon me in a swoon, I have
always uttered from the bottom of my heart my first words in Latin;
nature deafened, and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a
discontinuation; and this example is said of many others.

They who in my time have attempted to correct the manners of the world by
new opinions, reform seeming vices; but the essential vices they leave as
they were, if indeed they do not augment them, and augmentation is
therein to be feared; we defer all other well doing upon the account of
these external reformations, of less cost and greater show, and thereby
expiate good cheap, for the other natural, consubstantial, and intestine
vices.  Look a little into our experience: there is no man, if he listen
to himself, who does not in himself discover a particular and governing
form of his own, that jostles his education, and wrestles with the
tempest of passions that are contrary to it.  For my part, I seldom find
myself agitated with surprises; I always find myself in my place, as
heavy and unwieldy bodies do; if I am not at home, I am always near at
hand; my dissipations do not transport me very far; there is nothing
strange or extreme in the case; and yet I have sound and vigorous turns.

The true condemnation, and which touches the common practice of men, is
that their very retirement itself is full of filth and corruption; the
idea of their reformation composed, their repentance sick and faulty,
very nearly as much as their sin.  Some, either from having been linked
to vice by a natural propension or long practice, cannot see its
deformity.  Others (of which constitution I am) do indeed feel the weight
of vice, but they counterbalance it with pleasure, or some other
occasion; and suffer and lend themselves to it for a certain price, but
viciously and basely.  Yet there might, haply, be imagined so vast a
disproportion of measure, where with justice the pleasure might excuse
the sin, as we say of utility; not only if accidental and out of sin, as
in thefts, but in the very exercise of sin, or in the enjoyment of women,
where the temptation is violent, and, ‘tis said, sometimes not to be
overcome.

Being the other day at Armaignac, on the estate of a kinsman of mine, I
there saw a peasant who was by every one nicknamed the thief.  He thus
related the story of his life: that, being born a beggar, and finding
that he should not be able, so as to be clear of indigence, to get his
living by the sweat of his brow, he resolved to turn thief, and by means
of his strength of body had exercised this trade all the time of his
youth in great security; for he ever made his harvest and vintage in
other men’s grounds, but a great way off, and in so great quantities,
that it was not to be imagined one man could have carried away so much in
one night upon his shoulders; and, moreover, he was careful equally to
divide and distribute the mischief he did, that the loss was of less
importance to every particular man.  He is now grown old, and rich for a
man of his condition, thanks to his trade, which he openly confesses to
every one.  And to make his peace with God, he says, that he is daily
ready by good offices to make satisfaction to the successors of those he
has robbed, and if he do not finish (for to do it all at once he is not
able), he will then leave it in charge to his heirs to perform the rest,
proportionably to the wrong he himself only knows he has done to each.
By this description, true or false, this man looks upon theft as a
dishonest action, and hates it, but less than poverty, and simply
repents; but to the extent he has thus recompensed he repents not.  This
is not that habit which incorporates us into vice, and conforms even our
understanding itself to it; nor is it that impetuous whirlwind that by
gusts troubles and blinds our souls, and for the time precipitates us,
judgment and all, into the power of vice.

I customarily do what I do thoroughly and make but one step on’t; I have
rarely any movement that hides itself and steals away from my reason, and
that does not proceed in the matter by the consent of all my faculties,
without division or intestine sedition; my judgment is to have all the
blame or all the praise; and the blame it once has, it has always; for
almost from my infancy it has ever been one: the same inclination, the
same turn, the same force; and as to universal opinions, I fixed myself
from my childhood in the place where I resolved to stick.  There are some
sins that are impetuous, prompt, and sudden; let us set them aside: but
in these other sins so often repeated, deliberated, and contrived,
whether sins of complexion or sins of profession and vocation, I cannot
conceive that they should have so long been settled in the same
resolution, unless the reason and conscience of him who has them, be
constant to have them; and the repentance he boasts to be inspired with
on a sudden, is very hard for me to imagine or form.  I follow not the
opinion of the Pythagorean sect, “that men take up a new soul when they
repair to the images of the gods to receive their oracles,” unless he
mean that it must needs be extrinsic, new, and lent for the time; our own
showing so little sign of purification and cleanness, fit for such an
office.

They act quite contrary to the stoical precepts, who do indeed command us
to correct the imperfections and vices we know ourselves guilty of, but
forbid us therefore to disturb the repose of our souls: these make us
believe that they have great grief and remorse within: but of amendment,
correction, or interruption, they make nothing appear.  It cannot be a
cure if the malady be not wholly discharged; if repentance were laid upon
the scale of the balance, it would weigh down sin.  I find no quality so
easy to counterfeit as devotion, if men do not conform their manners and
life to the profession; its essence is abstruse and occult; the
appearance easy and ostentatious.

For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may
condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire
reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but
I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being
dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato.  My actions are regular,
and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better;
and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power;
sorrow does..  I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and
regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no
more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving
those of another to be so.  If to conceive and wish a nobler way of
acting than that we have should produce a repentance of our own, we must
then repent us of our most innocent actions, forasmuch as we may well
suppose that in a more excellent nature they would have been carried on
with greater dignity and perfection; and we would that ours were so.
When I reflect upon the deportment of my youth, with that of my old age,
I find that I have commonly behaved myself with equal order in both
according to what I understand: this is all that my resistance can do.
I do not flatter myself; in the same circumstances I should do the same
things.  It is not a patch, but rather an universal tincture, with which
I am stained.  I know no repentance, superficial, half-way, and
ceremonious; it must sting me all over before I can call it so, and must
prick my bowels as deeply and universally as God sees into me.

As to business, many excellent opportunities have escaped me for want of
good management; and yet my deliberations were sound enough, according to
the occurrences presented to me: ‘tis their way to choose always the
easiest and safest course.  I find that, in my former resolves, I have
proceeded with discretion, according to my own rule, and according to the
state of the subject proposed, and should do the same a thousand years
hence in like occasions; I do not consider what it is now, but what it
was then, when I deliberated on it: the force of all counsel consists in
the time; occasions and things eternally shift and change.  I have in my
life committed some important errors, not for want of good understanding,
but for want of good luck.  There are secret, and not to be foreseen,
parts in matters we have in hand, especially in the nature of men; mute
conditions, that make no show, unknown sometimes even to the possessors
themselves, that spring and start up by incidental occasions; if my
prudence could not penetrate into nor foresee them, I blame it not: ‘tis
commissioned no further than its own limits; if the event be too hard for
me, and take the side I have refused, there is no remedy; I do not blame
myself, I accuse my fortune, and not my work; this cannot be called
repentance.

Phocion, having given the Athenians an advice that was not followed, and
the affair nevertheless succeeding contrary to his opinion, some one said
to him, “Well, Phocion, art thou content that matters go so well?”--“I am
very well content,” replied he, “that this has happened so well, but I do
not repent that I counselled the other.”  When any of my friends address
themselves to me for advice, I give it candidly and clearly, without
sticking, as almost all other men do, at the hazard of the thing’s
falling out contrary to my opinion, and that I may be reproached for my
counsel; I am very indifferent as to that, for the fault will be theirs
for having consulted me, and I could not refuse them that office.
--[We may give advice to others, says Rochefoucauld, but we cannot
supply them with the wit to profit by it.]

I, for my own part, can rarely blame any one but myself for my oversights
and misfortunes, for indeed I seldom solicit the advice of another,
if not by honour of ceremony, or excepting where I stand in need of
information, special science, or as to matter of fact.  But in things
wherein I stand in need of nothing but judgment, other men’s reasons may
serve to fortify my own, but have little power to dissuade me; I hear
them all with civility and patience; but, to my recollection, I never
made use of any but my own.  With me, they are but flies and atoms, that
confound and distract my will; I lay no great stress upon my opinions;
but I lay as little upon those of others, and fortune rewards me
accordingly: if I receive but little advice, I also give but little.  I
am seldom consulted, and still more seldom believed, and know no concern,
either public or private, that has been mended or bettered by my advice.
Even they whom fortune had in some sort tied to my direction, have more
willingly suffered themselves to be governed by any other counsels than
mine.  And as a man who am as jealous of my repose as of my authority,
I am better pleased that it should be so; in leaving me there, they
humour what I profess, which is to settle and wholly contain myself
within myself.  I take a pleasure in being uninterested in other men’s
affairs, and disengaged from being their warranty, and responsible for
what they do.

In all affairs that are past, be it how it will, I have very little
regret; for this imagination puts me out of my pain, that they were so to
fall out they are in the great revolution of the world, and in the chain
of stoical ‘causes: your fancy cannot, by wish and imagination, move one
tittle, but that the great current of things will not reverse both the
past and the future.

As to the rest, I abominate that incidental repentance which old age
brings along with it.  He, who said of old, that he was obliged to his
age for having weaned him from pleasure, was of another opinion than I
am; I can never think myself beholden to impotency for any good it can do
to me:

     “Nec tam aversa unquam videbitur ab opere suo providentia,
     ut debilitas inter optima inventa sit.”

     [“Nor can Providence ever seem so averse to her own work, that
     debility should be found to be amongst the best things.”
      --Quintilian, Instit.  Orat., v. 12.]

Our appetites are rare in old age; a profound satiety seizes us after the
act; in this I see nothing of conscience; chagrin and weakness imprint in
us a drowsy and rheumatic virtue.  We must not suffer ourselves to be so
wholly carried away by natural alterations as to suffer our judgments to
be imposed upon by them.  Youth and pleasure have not formerly so far
prevailed with me, that I did not well enough discern the face of vice in
pleasure; neither does the distaste that years have brought me, so far
prevail with me now, that I cannot discern pleasure in vice.  Now that I
am no more in my flourishing age, I judge as well of these things as if I
were.

          [“Old though I am, for ladies’ love unfit,
          The power of beauty I remember yet.”--Chaucer.]

I, who narrowly and strictly examine it, find my reason the very same it
was in my most licentious age, except, perhaps, that ‘tis weaker and more
decayed by being grown older; and I find that the pleasure it refuses me
upon the account of my bodily health, it would no more refuse now, in
consideration of the health of my soul, than at any time heretofore.
I do not repute it the more valiant for not being able to combat; my
temptations are so broken and mortified, that they are not worth its
opposition; holding but out my hands, I repel them.  Should one present
the old concupiscence before it, I fear it would have less power to
resist it than heretofore; I do not discern that in itself it judges
anything otherwise now than it formerly did, nor that it has acquired any
new light: wherefore, if there be convalescence, ‘tis an enchanted one.
Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease!  Tis not
that our misfortune should perform this office, but the good fortune of
our judgment.  I am not to be made to do anything by persecutions and
afflictions, but to curse them: that is, for people who cannot be roused
but by a whip.  My reason is much more free in prosperity, and much more
distracted, and put to’t to digest pains than pleasures: I see best in a
clear sky; health admonishes me more cheerfully, and to better purpose,
than sickness.  I did all that in me lay to reform and regulate myself
from pleasures, at a time when I had health and vigour to enjoy them;
I should be ashamed and envious that the misery and misfortune of my old
age should have credit over my good healthful, sprightly, and vigorous
years, and that men should estimate me, not by what I have been, but by
what I have ceased to be.

In my opinion, ‘tis the happy living, and not (as Antisthenes’ said) the
happy dying, in which human felicity consists.  I have not made it my
business to make a monstrous addition of a philosopher’s tail to the head
and body of a libertine; nor would I have this wretched remainder give
the lie to the pleasant, sound, and long part of my life: I would present
myself uniformly throughout.  Were I to live my life over again, I should
live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I
fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that
I am without.  ‘Tis one main obligation I have to my fortune, that the
succession of my bodily estate has been carried on according to the
natural seasons; I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and
now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.  I bear the
infirmities I have the better, because they came not till I had reason to
expect them, and because also they make me with greater pleasure remember
that long felicity of my past life.  My wisdom may have been just the
same in both ages, but it was more active, and of better grace whilst
young and sprightly, than now it is when broken, peevish, and uneasy.
I repudiate, then, these casual and painful reformations.  God must touch
our hearts; our consciences must amend of themselves, by the aid of our
reason, and not by the decay of our appetites; pleasure is, in itself,
neither pale nor discoloured, to be discerned by dim and decayed eyes.

We ought to love temperance for itself, and because God has commanded
that and chastity; but that which we are reduced to by catarrhs, and for
which I am indebted to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance; a
man cannot boast that he despises and resists pleasure if he cannot see
it, if he knows not what it is, and cannot discern its graces, its force,
and most alluring beauties; I know both the one and the other, and may
therefore the better say it.  But; methinks, our souls in old age are
subject to more troublesome maladies and imperfections than in youth;
I said the same when young and when I was reproached with the want of a
beard; and I say so now that my grey hairs give me some authority.  We
call the difficulty of our humours and the disrelish of present things
wisdom; but, in truth, we do not so much forsake vices as we change them,
and in my opinion, for worse.  Besides a foolish and feeble pride, an
impertinent prating, froward and insociable humours, superstition, and a
ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them, I find
there more envy, injustice, and malice.  Age imprints more wrinkles in
the mind than it does on the face; and souls are never, or very rarely
seen, that, in growing old, do not smell sour and musty.  Man moves all
together, both towards his perfection and decay.  In observing the wisdom
of Socrates, and many circumstances of his condemnation, I should dare to
believe that he in some sort himself purposely, by collusion, contributed
to it, seeing that, at the age of seventy years, he might fear to suffer
the lofty motions of his mind to be cramped and his wonted lustre
obscured.  What strange metamorphoses do I see age every day make in many
of my acquaintance!  ‘Tis a potent malady, and that naturally and
imperceptibly steals into us; a vast provision of study and great
precaution are required to evade the imperfections it loads us with, or
at least to weaken their progress.  I find that, notwithstanding all my
entrenchments, it gets foot by foot upon me: I make the best resistance I
can, but I do not know to what at last it will reduce me.  But fall out
what will, I am content the world may know, when I am fallen, from what I
fell.




CHAPTER III

OF THREE COMMERCES

We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our
chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers
employments.  ‘Tis to be, but not to live, to keep a man’s self tied and
bound by necessity to one only course; those are the bravest souls that
have in them the most variety and pliancy.  Of this here is an honourable
testimony of the elder Cato:

          “Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit,
          ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret.”

     [“His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had
     been born only to that which he was doing.”--Livy, xxxix. 49.]

Had I liberty to set myself forth after my own mode, there is no so
graceful fashion to which I would be so fixed as not to be able to
disengage myself from it; life is an unequal, irregular and multiform
motion.  ‘Tis not to be a friend to one’s self, much less a master ‘tis
to be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self, and to be
so fixed in one’s previous inclinations, that one cannot turn aside nor
writhe one’s neck out of the collar.  I say this now in this part of my
life, wherein I find I cannot easily disengage myself from the
importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily amuse itself but in
things of limited range, nor employ itself otherwise than entirely and
with all its force; upon the lightest subject offered it expands and
stretches it to that degree as therein to employ its utmost power;
wherefore it is that idleness is to me a very painful labour, and very
prejudicial to my health.  Most men’s minds require foreign matter to
exercise and enliven them; mine has rather need of it to sit still and
repose itself,

               “Vitia otii negotio discutienda sunt,”

          [“The vices of sloth are to be shaken off by business.”
           --Seneca, Ep. 56.]

for its chiefest and hardest study is to study itself.  Books are to it
a sort of employment that debauch it from its study.  Upon the first
thoughts that possess it, it begins to bustle and make trial of its
vigour in all directions, exercises its power of handling, now making
trial of force, now fortifying, moderating, and ranging itself by the way
of grace and order.  It has of its own wherewith to rouse its faculties:
nature has given to it, as to all others, matter enough of its own to
make advantage of, and subjects proper enough where it may either invent
or judge.

Meditation is a powerful and full study to such as can effectually taste
and employ themselves; I had rather fashion my soul than furnish it.
There is no employment, either more weak or more strong, than that of
entertaining a man’s own thoughts, according as the soul is; the greatest
men make it their whole business,

                    “Quibus vivere est cogitare;”

     [“To whom to live is to think.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 28.]

nature has therefore favoured it with this privilege, that there is
nothing we can do so long, nor any action to which we more frequently and
with greater facility addict ourselves.  ‘Tis the business of the gods,
says Aristotle,’ and from which both their beatitude and ours proceed.

The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses
my reason, and employs my judgment, not my memory.  Few conversations
detain me without force and effort; it is true that beauty and elegance
of speech take as much or more with me than the weight and depth of the
subject; and forasmuch as I am apt to be sleepy in all other
communication, and give but the rind of my attention, it often falls out
that in such poor and pitiful discourses, mere chatter, I either make
drowsy, unmeaning answers, unbecoming a child, and ridiculous, or more
foolishly and rudely still, maintain an obstinate silence.  I have a
pensive way that withdraws me into myself, and, with that, a heavy and
childish ignorance of many very ordinary things, by which two qualities I
have earned this, that men may truly relate five or six as ridiculous
tales of me as of any other man whatever.

But, to proceed in my subject, this difficult complexion of mine renders
me very nice in my conversation with men, whom I must cull and pick out
for my purpose; and unfits me for common society.  We live and negotiate
with the people; if their conversation be troublesome to us, if we
disdain to apply ourselves to mean and vulgar souls (and the mean and
vulgar are often as regular as those of the finest thread, and all wisdom
is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance),
we must no more intermeddle either with other men’s affairs or our own;
for business, both public and private, has to do with these people.  The
least forced and most natural motions of the soul are the most beautiful;
the best employments, those that are least strained.  My God!  how good
an office does wisdom to those whose desires it limits to their power!
that is the most useful knowledge: “according to what a man can,” was the
favourite sentence and motto of Socrates.  A motto of great solidity.

We must moderate and adapt our desires to the nearest and easiest to be
acquired things.  Is it not a foolish humour of mine to separate myself
from a thousand to whom my fortune has conjoined me, and without whom I
cannot live, and cleave to one or two who are out of my intercourse; or
rather a fantastic desire of a thing I cannot obtain?  My gentle and easy
manners, enemies of all sourness and harshness, may easily enough have
secured me from envy and animosities; to be beloved, I do not say, but
never any man gave less occasion of being hated; but the coldness of my
conversation has, reasonably enough, deprived me of the goodwill of many,
who are to be excused if they interpret it in another and worse sense.

I am very capable of contracting and maintaining rare and exquisite
friendships; for by reason that I so greedily seize upon such
acquaintance as fit my liking, I throw myself with such violence upon
them that I hardly fail to stick, and to make an impression where I hit;
as I have often made happy proof.  In ordinary friendships I am somewhat
cold and shy, for my motion is not natural, if not with full sail:
besides which, my fortune having in my youth given me a relish for one
sole and perfect friendship, has, in truth, created in me a kind of
distaste to others, and too much imprinted in my fancy that it is a beast
of company, as the ancient said, but not of the herd.--[Plutarch, On the
Plurality of Friends, c.  2.]--And also I have a natural difficulty of
communicating myself by halves, with the modifications and the servile
and jealous prudence required in the conversation of numerous and
imperfect friendships: and we are principally enjoined to these in this
age of ours, when we cannot talk of the world but either with danger or
falsehood.

Yet do I very well discern that he who has the conveniences (I mean the
essential conveniences) of life for his end, as I have, ought to fly
these difficulties and delicacy of humour, as much as the plague.  I
should commend a soul of several stages, that knows both how to stretch
and to slacken itself; that finds itself at ease in all conditions
whither fortune leads it; that can discourse with a neighbour, of his
building, his hunting, his quarrels; that can chat with a carpenter or a
gardener with pleasure.  I envy those who can render themselves familiar
with the meanest of their followers, and talk with them in their own way;
and dislike the advice of Plato,  that men should always speak in a
magisterial tone to their servants, whether men or women, without being
sometimes facetious and familiar; for besides the reasons I have given,
‘tis inhuman and unjust to set so great a value upon this pitiful
prerogative of fortune, and the polities wherein less disparity is
permitted betwixt masters and servants seem to me the most equitable.
Others study how to raise and elevate their minds; I, how to humble mine
and to bring it low; ‘tis only vicious in extension:

                   “Narras et genus AEaci,
                    Et pugnata sacro bella sub Ilio
                    Quo Chium pretio cadum
                    Mercemur, quis aquam temperet ignibus,
                    Quo praebente domum, et quota,
                    Pelignis caream frigoribus, taces.”

     [“You tell us long stories about the race of AEacus, and the battles
     fought under sacred Ilium; but what to give for a cask of Chian
     wine, who shall prepare the warm bath, and in whose house, and when
     I may escape from the Pelignian cold, you do not tell us.”
      --Horace, Od., iii. 19, 3.]

Thus, as the Lacedaemonian valour stood in need of moderation, and of the
sweet and harmonious sound of flutes to soften it in battle, lest they
should precipitate themselves into temerity and fury, whereas all other
nations commonly make use of harsh and shrill sounds, and of loud and
imperious cries, to incite and heat the soldier’s courage to the last
degree; so, methinks, contrary to the usual method, in the practice of
our minds, we have for the most part more need of lead than of wings; of
temperance and composedness than of ardour and agitation.  But, above all
things, ‘tis in my opinion egregiously to play the fool, to put on the
grave airs of a man of lofty mind amongst those who are nothing of the
sort: ever to speak in print (by the book),

                    “Favellare in puma di forchetta.”

          [“To talk with the point of a fork,” (affectedly)]

You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse; and sometimes
affect ignorance: lay aside power and subtilty in common conversation; to
preserve decorum and order ‘tis enough-nay, crawl on the earth, if they
so desire it.

The learned often stumble at this stone; they will always be parading
their pedantic science, and strew their books everywhere; they have, in
these days, so filled the cabinets and ears of the ladies with them, that
if they have lost the substance, they at least retain the words; so as in
all discourse upon all sorts of subjects, how mean and common soever,
they speak and write after a new and learned way,

         “Hoc sermone pavent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas,
          Hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta; quid ultra?
          Concumbunt docte;”

     [“In this language do they express their fears, their anger, their
     joys, their cares; in this pour out all their secrets; what more?
     they lie with their lovers learnedly.”--Juvenal, vi. 189.]

and quote Plato and Aquinas in things the first man they meet could
determine as well; the learning that cannot penetrate their souls hangs
still upon the tongue. If people of quality will be persuaded by me, they
shall content themselves with setting out their proper and natural
treasures; they conceal and cover their beauties under others that are
none of theirs: ‘tis a great folly to put out their own light and shine
by a borrowed lustre: they are interred and buried under ‘de capsula
totae”--[Painted and perfumed from head to foot.” (Or:) “as if they were
things carefully deposited in a band-box.”--Seneca, Ep. 115]--It is
because they do not sufficiently know themselves or do themselves
justice: the world has nothing fairer than they; ‘tis for them to honour
the arts, and to paint painting.  What need have they of anything but to
live beloved and honoured?  They have and know but too much for this:
they need do no more but rouse and heat a little the faculties they have
of their own.  When I see them tampering with rhetoric, law, logic, and
other drugs, so improper and unnecessary for their business, I begin to
suspect that the men who inspire them with such fancies, do it that they
may govern them upon that account; for what other excuse can I contrive?
It is enough that they can, without our instruction, compose the graces
of their eyes to gaiety, severity, sweetness, and season a denial with
asperity, suspense, or favour:  they need not another to interpret what
we speak for their service; with this knowledge, they command with a
switch, and rule both the tutors and the schools.  But if, nevertheless,
it angers them to give place to us in anything whatever, and will, out of
curiosity, have their share in books, poetry is a diversion proper for
them; ‘tis a wanton, subtle, dissembling, and prating art, all pleasure
and all show, like themselves.  They may also abstract several
commodities from history.  In philosophy, out of the moral part of it,
they may select such instructions as will teach them to judge of our
humours and conditions, to defend themselves from our treacheries, to
regulate the ardour of their own desires, to manage their liberty, to
lengthen the pleasures of life, and gently to bear the inconstancy of a
lover, the rudeness of a husband; and the importunity of years, wrinkles,
and the like.  This is the utmost of what I would allow them in the
sciences.

There are some particular natures that are private and retired: my
natural way is proper for communication, and apt to lay me open; I am all
without and in sight, born for society and friendship.  The solitude that
I love myself and recommend to others, is chiefly no other than to
withdraw my thoughts and affections into myself; to restrain and check,
not my steps, but my own cares and desires, resigning all foreign
solicitude, and mortally avoiding servitude and obligation, and not so
much the crowd of men as the crowd of business.  Local solitude, to say
the truth, rather gives me more room and sets me more at large; I more
readily throw myself upon affairs of state and the world when I am alone.
At the Louvre and in the bustle of the court, I fold myself within my own
skin; the crowd thrusts me upon myself; and I never entertain myself so
wantonly, with so much licence, or so especially, as in places of respect
and ceremonious prudence: our follies do not make me laugh, it is our
wisdom which does.  I am naturally no enemy to a court, life; I have
therein passed a part of my own, and am of a humour cheerfully to
frequent great company, provided it be by intervals and at my own time:
but this softness of judgment whereof I speak ties me perforce to
solitude.  Even at home, amidst a numerous family, and in a house
sufficiently frequented, I see people enough, but rarely such with whom I
delight to converse; and I there reserve both for myself and others an
unusual liberty: there is in my house no such thing as ceremony,
ushering, or waiting upon people down to the coach, and such other
troublesome ceremonies as our courtesy enjoins (O the servile and
importunate custom!).  Every one there governs himself according to his
own method; let who will speak his thoughts, I sit mute, meditating and
shut up in my closet, without any offence to my guests.

The men whose society and familiarity I covet are those they call sincere
and able men; and the image of these makes me disrelish the rest.  It is,
if rightly taken, the rarest of our forms, and a form that we chiefly owe
to nature.  The end of this commerce is simply privacy, frequentation and
conference, the exercise of souls, without other fruit.  In our
discourse, all subjects are alike to me; let there be neither weight, nor
depth, ‘tis all one: there is yet grace and pertinency; all there is
tinted with a mature and constant judgment, and mixed with goodness,
freedom, gaiety, and friendship.  ‘Tis not only in talking of the affairs
of kings and state that our wits discover their force and beauty, but
every whit as much in private conferences.  I understand my men even by
their silence and smiles; and better discover them, perhaps, at table
than in the council.  Hippomachus said, very well, “that he could know
the good wrestlers by only seeing them walk in the street.”  If learning
please to step into our talk, it shall not be rejected, not magisterial,
imperious, and importunate, as-it commonly is, but suffragan and docile
itself; we there only seek to pass away our time; when we have a mind to
be instructed and preached to, we will go seek this in its throne; please
let it humble itself to us for the nonce; for, useful and profitable as
it is, I imagine that, at need, we may manage well enough without it, and
do our business without its assistance.  A well-descended soul, and
practised in the conversation of men, will of herself render herself
sufficiently agreeable; art is nothing but the counterpart and register
of what such souls produce.

The conversation also of beautiful and honourable women is for me a sweet
commerce:

               “Nam nos quoque oculos eruditos habemus.”

     [“For we also have eyes that are versed in the matter.”
      --Cicero, Paradox, v. 2.]

If the soul has not therein so much to enjoy, as in the first the bodily
senses, which participate more of this, bring it to a proportion next to,
though, in my opinion, not equal to the other.  But ‘tis a commerce
wherein a man must stand a little upon his guard, especially those, where
the body can do much, as in me.  I there scalded myself in my youth, and
suffered all the torments that poets say befall those who precipitate
themselves into love without order and judgment.  It is true that that
whipping has made me wiser since:

              “Quicumque Argolica de classe Capharea fugit,
               Semper ab Euboicis vela retorquet aquis.”

     [“Whoever of the Grecian fleet has escaped the Capharean rocks, ever
     takes care to steer from the Euboean sea.”--Ovid, Trist., i. i, 83.]

‘Tis folly to fix all a man’s thoughts upon it, and to engage in it with
a furious and indiscreet affection; but, on the other hand, to engage
there without love and without inclination, like comedians, to play a
common part, without putting anything to it of his own but words, is
indeed to provide for his safety, but, withal, after as cowardly a manner
as he who should abandon his honour, profit, or pleasure for fear of
danger.  For it is certain that from such a practice, they who set it on
foot can expect no fruit that can please or satisfy a noble soul.  A man
must have, in good earnest, desired that which he, in good earnest,
expects to have a pleasure in enjoying; I say, though fortune should
unjustly favour their dissimulation; which often falls out, because there
is none of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil, who does not think
herself well worthy to be beloved, and who does not prefer herself before
other women, either for her youth, the colour of her hair, or her
graceful motion (for there are no more women universally ugly, than there
are women universally beautiful, and such of the Brahmin virgins as have
nothing else to recommend them, the people being assembled by the common
crier to that effect, come out into the market-place to expose their
matrimonial parts to public view, to try if these at least are not of
temptation sufficient to get them a husband).  Consequently, there is not
one who does not easily suffer herself to be overcome by the first vow
that they make to serve her.  Now from this common and ordinary treachery
of the men of the present day, that must fall out which we already
experimentally see, either that they rally together, and separate
themselves by themselves to evade us, or else form their discipline by
the example we give them, play their parts of the farce as we do ours,
and give themselves up to the sport, without passion, care, or love;

          “Neque afl’ectui suo, aut alieno, obnoxiae;”

     [“Neither amenable to their own affections, nor those of others.”
      --Tacitus, Annal., xiii. 45.]

believing, according to the persuasion of Lysias in Plato, that they may
with more utility and convenience surrender themselves up to us the less
we love them; where it will fall out, as in comedies, that the people
will have as much pleasure or more than the comedians.  For my part,
I no more acknowledge a Venus without a Cupid than, a mother without
issue: they are things that mutully lend and owe their essence to one
another.  Thus this cheat recoils upon him who is guilty of it; it does
not cost him much, indeed, but he also gets little or nothing by it.
They who have made Venus a goddess have taken notice that her principal
beauty was incorporeal and spiritual; but the Venus whom these people
hunt after is not so much as human, nor indeed brutal; the very beasts
will not accept it so gross and so earthly; we see that imagination and
desire often heat and incite them before the body does; we see in both
the one sex and the other, they have in the herd choice and particular
election in their affections, and that they have amongst themselves a
long commerce of good will.  Even those to whom old age denies the
practice of their desire, still tremble, neigh, and twitter for love; we
see them, before the act, full of hope and ardour, and when the body has
played its game, yet please themselves with the sweet remembrance of the
past delight; some that swell with pride after they have performed, and
others who, tired and sated, still by vociferation express a triumphing
joy.  He who has nothing to do but only to discharge his body of a
natural necessity, need not trouble others with so curious preparations:
it is not meat for a gross, coarse appetite.

As one who does not desire that men should think me better than I am,
I will here say this as to the errors of my youth.  Not only from the
danger of impairing my health (and yet I could not be so careful but that
I had two light mischances), but moreover upon the account of contempt,
I have seldom given myself up to common and mercenary embraces: I would
heighten the pleasure by the difficulty, by desire, and a certain kind of
glory, and was of Tiberius’s mind, who in his amours was as much taken
with modesty and birth as any other quality, and of the courtesan Flora’s
humour, who never lent herself to less than a dictator, a consul, or a
censor, and took pleasure in the dignity of her lovers.  Doubtless pearls
and gold tissue, titles and train, add something to it.

As to the rest, I had a great esteem for wit, provided the person was not
exceptionable; for, to confess the truth, if the one or the other of
these two attractions must of necessity be wanting, I should rather have
quitted that of the understanding, that has its use in better things;
but in the subject of love, a subject principally relating to the senses
of seeing and touching, something may be done without the graces of the
mind: without the graces of the body, nothing.  Beauty is the true
prerogative of women, and so peculiarly their own, that ours, though
naturally requiring another sort of feature, is never in its lustre but
when youthful and beardless, a sort of confused image of theirs.  ‘Tis
said that such as serve the Grand Signior upon the account of beauty, who
are an infinite number, are, at the latest, dismissed at two-and-twenty
years of age.  Reason, prudence, and the offices of friendship are better
found amongst men, and therefore it is that they govern the affairs of
the world.

These two engagements are fortuitous, and depending upon others; the one
is troublesome by its rarity, the other withers with age, so that they
could never have been sufficient for the business of my life.  That of
books, which is the third, is much more certain, and much more our own.
It yields all other advantages to the two first, but has the constancy
and facility of its service for its own share.  It goes side by side with
me in my whole course, and everywhere is assisting me: it comforts me in
old age and solitude; it eases me of a troublesome weight of idleness,
and delivers me at all hours from company that I dislike: it blunts the
point of griefs, if they are not extreme, and have not got an entire
possession of my soul.  To divert myself from a troublesome fancy, ‘tis
but to run to my books; they presently fix me to them and drive the other
out of my thoughts, and do not mutiny at seeing that I have only recourse
to them for want of other more real, natural, and lively commodities;
they always receive me with the same kindness.  He may well go a foot,
they say, who leads his horse in his hand; and our James, King of Naples
and Sicily, who, handsome, young and healthful, caused himself to be
carried about on a barrow, extended upon a pitiful mattress in a poor
robe of grey cloth, and a cap of the same, yet attended withal by a royal
train, litters, led horses of all sorts, gentlemen and officers, did yet
herein represent a tender and unsteady authority: “The sick man has not
to complain who has his cure in his sleeve.”  In the experience and
practice of this maxim, which is a very true one, consists all the
benefit I reap from books.  As a matter of fact, I make no more use of
them, as it were, than those who know them not.  I enjoy them as misers
do their money, in knowing that I may enjoy them when I please: my mind
is satisfied with this right of possession.  I never travel without
books, either in peace or war; and yet sometimes I pass over several
days, and sometimes months, without looking on them.  I will read
by-and-by, say I to myself, or to-morrow, or when I please; and in the
interim, time steals away without any inconvenience.  For it is not to be
imagined to what degree I please myself and rest content in this
consideration, that I have them by me to divert myself with them when I
am so disposed, and to call to mind what a refreshment they are to my
life.  ‘Tis the best viaticum I have yet found out for this human
journey, and I very much pity those men of understanding who are
unprovided of it.  I the rather accept of any other sort of diversion,
how light soever, because this can never fail me.

When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at
once all the concerns of my family.  ‘Tis situated at the entrance into
my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and
almost all parts of the building.  There I turn over now one book, and
then another, on various subjects, without method or design.  One while
I meditate, another I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such
whimsies as these I present to you here.  ‘Tis in the third storey of a
tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber
with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more
retired; and above is a great wardrobe.  This formerly was the most
useless part of the house.  I there pass away both most of the days of my
life and most of the hours of those days.  In the night I am never there.
There is by the side of it a cabinet handsome enough, with a fireplace
very commodiously contrived, and plenty of light; and were I not more
afraid of the trouble than the expense--the trouble that frights me from
all business--I could very easily adjoin on either side, and on the same
floor, a gallery of an hundred paces long and twelve broad, having found
walls already raised for some other design to the requisite height.
Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit
still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all
those who study without a book are in the same condition.  The figure of
my study is round, and there is no more open wall than what is taken up
by my table and my chair, so that the remaining parts of the circle
present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of
shelves round about me.  It has three noble and free prospects, and is
sixteen paces in diameter.  I am not so continually there in winter; for
my house is built upon an eminence, as its name imports, and no part of
it is so much exposed to the wind and weather as this, which pleases me
the better, as being of more difficult access and a little remote, as
well upon the account of exercise, as also being there more retired from
the crowd.  ‘Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavour to
make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from
all society, conjugal, filial, and civil; elsewhere I have but verbal
authority only, and of a confused essence.  That man, in my opinion, is
very miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself, where to
entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others.  Ambition
sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping them always in show, like
the statue of a public, square:

                    “Magna servitus est magna fortuna.”

               [“A great fortune is a great slavery.”
                --Seneca, De Consol. ad.  Polyb., c.  26.]

They cannot so much as be private in the watercloset.  I have thought
nothing so severe in the austerity of life that our monks affect, as what
I have observed in some of their communities; namely, by rule, to have a
perpetual society of place, and numerous persons present in every action
whatever; and think it much more supportable to be always alone than
never to be so.

If any one shall tell me that it is to undervalue the Muses to make use
of them only for sport and to pass away the time, I shall tell him, that
he does not know so well as I the value of the sport, the pleasure, and
the pastime; I can hardly forbear to add that all other end is
ridiculous.  I live from day to day, and, with reverence be it spoken, I
only live for myself; there all my designs terminate.  I studied, when
young, for ostentation; since, to make myself a little wiser; and now for
my diversion, but never for any profit.  A vain and prodigal humour I had
after this sort of furniture, not only for the supplying my own need,
but, moreover, for ornament and outward show, I have since quite cured
myself of.

Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose them;
but every good has its ill; ‘tis a pleasure that is not pure and clean,
no more than others: it has its inconveniences, and great ones too.  The
soul indeed is exercised therein; but the body, the care of which I must
withal never neglect, remains in the meantime without action, and grows
heavy and sombre.  I know no excess more prejudicial to me, nor more to
be avoided in this my declining age.

These have been my three favourite and particular occupations; I speak
not of those I owe to the world by civil obligation.




CHAPTER IV.

OF DIVERSION

I was once employed in consoling a lady truly afflicted.  Most of their
mournings are artificial and ceremonious:

         “Uberibus semper lacrymis, semperque paratis,
          In statione subatque expectantibus illam,
          Quo jubeat manare modo.”

     [“A woman has ever a fountain of tears ready to gush up whenever
     she requires to make use of them.”--Juvenal, vi. 272.]

A man goes the wrong way to work when he opposes this passion; for
opposition does but irritate and make them more obstinate in sorrow; the
evil is exasperated by discussion.  We see, in common discourse, that
what I have indifferently let fall from me, if any one takes it up to
controvert it, I justify it with the best arguments I have; and much more
a thing wherein I had a real interest.  And besides, in so doing you
enter roughly upon your operation; whereas the first addresses of a
physician to his patient should be gracious, gay, and pleasing; never did
any ill-looking, morose physician do anything to purpose.  On the
contrary, then, a man should, at the first approaches, favour their grief
and express some approbation of their sorrow.  By this intelligence you
obtain credit to proceed further, and by a facile and insensible
gradation fall into discourses more solid and proper for their cure.
I, whose aim it was principally to gull the company who had their eyes
fixed upon me, took it into my head only to palliate the disease.  And
indeed I have found by experience that I have an unlucky hand in
persuading.  My arguments are either too sharp and dry, or pressed too
roughly, or not home enough.  After I had some time applied myself to her
grief, I did not attempt to cure her by strong and lively reasons, either
because I had them not at hand, or because I thought to do my business
better another way; neither did I make choice of any of those methods of
consolation which philosophy prescribes: that what we complain of is no
evil, according to Cleanthes; that it is a light evil, according to the
Peripatetics; that to bemoan one’s self is an action neither commendable
nor just, according to Chrysippus; nor this of Epicurus, more suitable to
my way, of shifting the thoughts from afflicting things to those that are
pleasing; nor making a bundle of all these together, to make use of upon
occasion, according to Cicero; but, gently bending my discourse, and by
little and little digressing, sometimes to subjects nearer, and sometimes
more remote from the purpose, according as she was more intent on what I
said, I imperceptibly led her from that sorrowful thought, and kept her
calm and in good-humour whilst I continued there.  I herein made use of
diversion.  They who succeeded me in the same service did not, for all
that, find any amendment in her, for I had not gone to the root.

I, peradventure, may elsewhere have glanced upon some sort of public
diversions; and the practice of military ones, which Pericles made use of
in the Peloponnesian war, and a thousand others in other places, to
withdraw the adverse forces from their own countries, is too frequent in
history.  It was an ingenious evasion whereby Monseigneur d’Hempricourt
saved both himself and others in the city of Liege, into which the Duke
of Burgundy, who kept it besieged, had made him enter to execute the
articles of their promised surrender; the people, being assembled by
night to consider of it, began to mutiny against the agreement, and
several of them resolved to fall upon the commissioners, whom they had in
their power; he, feeling the gusts of this first popular storm, who were
coming to rush into his lodgings, suddenly sent out to them two of the
inhabitants of the city (of whom he had some with him) with new and
milder terms to be proposed in their council, which he had then and there
contrived for his need: These two diverted the first tempest, carrying
back the enraged rabble to the town-hall to hear and consider of what
they had to say.  The deliberation was short; a second storm arose as
violent as the other, whereupon he despatched four new mediators of the
same quality to meet them, protesting that he had now better conditions
to present them with, and such as would give them absolute satisfaction,
by which means the tumult was once more appeased, and the people again
turned back to the conclave.  In fine, by this dispensation of
amusements, one after another, diverting their fury and dissipating it in
frivolous consultations, he laid it at last asleep till the day appeared,
which was his principal end.

This other story that follows is also of the same category.  Atalanta, a
virgin of excelling beauty and of wonderful disposition of body, to
disengage herself from the crowd of a thousand suitors who sought her in
marriage, made this proposition, that she would accept of him for her
husband who should equal her in running, upon condition that they who
failed should lose their lives.  There were enough who thought the prize
very well worth the hazard, and who suffered the cruel penalty of the
contract.  Hippomenes, about to make trial after the rest, made his
address to the goddess of love, imploring her assistance; and she,
granting his request, gave him three golden apples, and instructed him
how to use them.  The race beginning, as Hippomenes perceived his
mistress to press hard up to him; he, as it were by chance, let fall one
of these apples; the maid, taken with the beauty of it, failed not to
step out of her way to pick it up:

              “Obstupuit Virgo, nitidique cupidine pomi
               Declinat cursus, aurumque volubile tollit.”

     [“The virgin, astonished and attracted by the glittering apple,
     stops her career, and seizes the rolling gold.”
      --Ovid, Metam., x. 666.]

He did the same, when he saw his time, by the second and the third, till
by so diverting her, and making her lose so much ground, he won the race.
When physicians cannot stop a catarrh, they divert and turn it into some
other less dangerous part.  And I find also that this is the most
ordinary practice for the diseases of the mind:

          “Abducendus etiam nonnunquam animus est ad alia studia,
          sollicitudines, curas, negotia: loci denique mutatione,
          tanquam aegroti non convalescentes, saepe curandus est.”

     [“The mind is sometimes to be diverted to other studies, thoughts,
     cares, business: in fine, by change of place, as where sick persons
     do not become convalescent.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 35.]

‘Tis to little effect directly to jostle a man’s infirmities; we neither
make him sustain nor repel the attack; we only make him decline and evade
it.

This other lesson is too high and too difficult: ‘tis for men of the
first form of knowledge purely to insist upon the thing, to consider and
judge it; it appertains to one sole Socrates to meet death with an
ordinary countenance, to grow acquainted with it, and to sport with it;
he seeks no consolation out of the thing itself; dying appears to him a
natural and indifferent accident; ‘tis there that he fixes his sight and
resolution, without looking elsewhere.  The disciples of Hegesias, who
starved themselves to death, animated thereunto by his fine lectures, and
in such numbers that King Ptolemy ordered he should be forbidden to
entertain his followers with such homicidal doctrines, did not consider
death in itself, neither did they judge of it; it was not there they
fixed their thoughts; they ran towards and aimed at a new being.

The poor wretches whom we see brought upon the scaffold, full of ardent
devotion, and therein, as much as in them lies, employing all their
senses, their ears in hearing the instructions given them, their eyes and
hands lifted up towards heaven, their voices in loud prayers, with a
vehement and continual emotion, do doubtless things very commendable and
proper for such a necessity: we ought to commend them for their devotion,
but not properly for their constancy; they shun the encounter, they
divert their thoughts from the consideration of death, as children are
amused with some toy or other when the surgeon is going to give them a
prick with his lancet.  I have seen some, who, casting their eyes upon
the dreadful instruments of death round about, have fainted, and
furiously turned their thoughts another way; such as are to pass a
formidable precipice are advised either to shut their eyes or to look
another way.

Subrius Flavius, being by Nero’s command to be put to death, and by the
hand of Niger, both of them great captains, when they lead him to the
place appointed for his execution, seeing the grave that Niger had caused
to be hollowed to put him into ill-made: “Neither is this,” said he,
turning to the soldiers who guarded him, “according to military
discipline.”  And to Niger, who exhorted him to keep his head firm: “Do
but thou strike as firmly,” said he.  And he very well foresaw what would
follow when he said so; for Niger’s arm so trembled that he had several
blows at his head before he could cut it off.  This man seems to have had
his thoughts rightly fixed upon the subject.

He who dies in a battle, with his sword in his hand, does not then think
of death; he feels or considers it not; the ardour of the fight diverts
his thought another way.  A worthy man of my acquaintance, falling as he
was fighting a duel, and feeling himself nailed to the earth by nine or
ten thrusts of his enemy, every one present called to him to think of his
conscience; but he has since told me, that though he very well heard what
they said, it nothing moved him, and that he never thought of anything
but how to disengage and revenge himself.  He afterwards killed his man
in that very duel.  He who brought to L. Silanus the sentence of death,
did him a very great kindness, in that, having received his answer, that
he was well prepared to die, but not by base hands, he ran upon him with
his soldiers to force him, and as he, unarmed as he was, obstinately
defended himself with his fists and feet, he made him lose his life in
the contest, by that means dissipating and diverting in a sudden and
furious rage the painful apprehension of the lingering death to which he
was designed.

We always think of something else; either the hope of a better life
comforts and supports us, or the hope of our children’s worth, or the
future glory of our name, or the leaving behind the evils of this life,
or the vengeance that threatens those who are the causes of our death,
administers consolation to us:

         “Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
          Supplicia hausurum scopulis, et nomine Dido
          Saepe vocaturum .  .  .  .
          Audiam; et haec Manes veniet mihi fama sub imos.”

     [“I hope, however, if the pious gods have any power, thou wilt feel
     thy punishment amid the rocks, and will call on the name of Dido;
     I shall hear, and this report will come to me below.”--AEneid, iv.
     382, 387.]

Xenophon was sacrificing with a crown upon his head when one came to
bring him news of the death of his son Gryllus, slain in the battle of
Mantinea: at the first surprise of the news, he threw his crown to the
ground; but understanding by the sequel of the narrative the manner of a
most brave and valiant death, he took it up and replaced it upon his
head.  Epicurus himself, at his death, consoles himself upon the utility
and eternity of his writings:

          “Omnes clari et nobilitati labores fiunt tolerabiles;”

     [“All labours that are illustrious and famous become supportable.”
      --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 26.]

and the same wound, the same fatigue, is not, says Xenophon, so
intolerable to a general of an army as to a common soldier.  Epaminondas
took his death much more cheerfully, having been informed that the
victory remained to him:

          “Haec sunt solatia, haec fomenta summorum dolorum;”

     [“These are sedatives and alleviations to the greatest pains.”
      --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii.  23.]

and such like circumstances amuse, divert, and turn our thoughts from the
consideration of the thing in itself.  Even the arguments of philosophy
are always edging and glancing on the matter, so as scarce to rub its
crust; the greatest man of the first philosophical school, and
superintendent over all the rest, the great Zeno, forms this syllogism
against death: “No evil is honourable; but death is honourable; therefore
death is no evil”; against drunkenness this: “No one commits his secrets
to a drunkard; but every one commits his secrets to a wise man: therefore
a wise man is no drunkard.”  Is this to hit the white?  I love to see
that these great and leading souls cannot rid themselves of our company:
perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men.

Revenge is a sweet passion, of great and natural impression; I discern it
well enough, though I have no manner of experience of it.  From this not
long ago to divert a young prince, I did not tell him that he must, to
him that had struck him upon the one cheek, turn the other, upon account
of charity; nor go about to represent to him the tragical events that
poetry attributes to this passion.  I left that behind; and I busied
myself to make him relish the beauty of a contrary image: and, by
representing to him what honour, esteem, and goodwill he would acquire by
clemency and good nature, diverted him to ambition.  Thus a man is to
deal in such cases.

If your passion of love be too violent, disperse it, say they, and they
say true; for I have often tried it with advantage: break it into several
desires, of which let one be regent, if you will, over the rest; but,
lest it should tyrannise and domineer over you, weaken and protract, by
dividing and diverting it:

               “Cum morosa vago singultiet inguine vena,”

     [“When you are tormented with fierce desire, satisfy it with the
     first person that presents herself.”--Persius, Sat., vi. 73.]

          “Conjicito humorem collectum in corpora quaeque,”

          [Lucretius, vi. 1062, to the like effect.]

and provide for it in time, lest it prove troublesome to deal with, when
it has once seized you:

              “Si non prima novis conturbes vulnera plagis,
               Volgivagaque vagus venere ante recentia cures.”

          [“Unless you cure old wounds by new.”-Lucretius, iv. 1064.]

I was once wounded with a vehement displeasure, and withal, more just
than vehement; I might peradventure have lost myself in it, if I had
merely trusted to my own strength.  Having need of a powerful diversion
to disengage me, by art and study I became amorous, wherein I was
assisted by my youth: love relieved and rescued me from the evil wherein
friendship had engaged me.  ‘Tis in everything else the same; a violent
imagination hath seized me: I find it a nearer way to change than to
subdue it: I depute, if not one contrary, yet another at least, in its
place.  Variation ever relieves, dissolves, and dissipates.

If I am not able to contend with it, I escape from it; and in avoiding
it, slip out of the way, and make, my doubles; shifting place, business,
and company, I secure myself in the crowd of other thoughts and fancies,
where it loses my trace, and I escape.

After the same manner does nature proceed, by the benefit of inconstancy;
for time, which she has given us for the sovereign physician of our
passions, chiefly works by this, that supplying our imaginations with
other and new affairs, it loosens and dissolves the first apprehension,
how strong soever.  A wise man little less sees his friend dying at the
end of five-and-twenty years than on the first year; and according to
Epicurus, no less at all; for he did not attribute any alleviation of
afflictions, either to their foresight or their antiquity; but so many
other thoughts traverse this, that it languishes and tires at last.

Alcibiades, to divert the inclination of common rumours, cut off the ears
and tail of his beautiful dog, and turned him out into the public place,
to the end that, giving the people this occasion to prate, they might let
his other actions alone.  I have also seen, for this same end of
diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people and to stop their
mouths, some women conceal their real affections by those that were only
counterfeit; but I have also seen some of them, who in counterfeiting
have suffered themselves to be caught indeed, and who have quitted the
true and original affection for the feigned: and so have learned that
they who find their affections well placed are fools to consent to this
disguise: the public and favourable reception being only reserved for
this pretended lover, one may conclude him a fellow of very little
address and less wit, if he does not in the end put himself into your
place, and you into his; this is precisely to cut out and make up a shoe
for another to draw on.

A little thing will turn and divert us, because a little thing holds us.
We do not much consider subjects in gross and singly; they are little and
superficial circumstances, or images that touch us, and the outward
useless rinds that peel off from the subjects themselves:

         “Folliculos ut nunc teretes aestate cicadae
          Linquunt.”

     [“As husks we find grasshoppers leave behind them in summer.”
      --Lucretius, v. 801.]

Even Plutarch himself laments his daughter for the little apish tricks of
her infancy.--[Consolation to his Wife on the Death of their Daughter,
c. I.]--The remembrance of a farewell, of the particular grace of an
action, of a last recommendation, afflict us.  The sight of Caesar’s robe
troubled all Rome, which was more than his death had done.  Even the
sound of names ringing in our ears, as “my poor master,”--“my faithful
friend,”--“alas, my dear father,” or, “my sweet daughter,” afflict us.
When these repetitions annoy me, and that I examine it a little nearer,
I find ‘tis no other but a grammatical and word complaint; I am only
wounded with the word and tone, as the exclamations of preachers very
often work more upon their auditory than their reasons, and as the
pitiful eyes of a beast killed for our service; without my weighing or
penetrating meanwhile into the true and solid essence of my subject:

               “His se stimulis dolor ipse lacessit.”

          [“With these incitements grief provokes itself.”
           --Lucretius, ii. 42.]

These are the foundations of our mourning.

The obstinacy of my stone to all remedies especially those in my bladder,
has sometimes thrown me into so long suppressions of urine for three or
four days together, and so near death, that it had been folly to have
hoped to evade it, and it was much rather to have been desired,
considering the miseries I endure in those cruel fits.  Oh, that good
emperor,  who caused criminals to be tied that they might die for want of
urination, was a great master in the hangman’s’ science!  Finding myself
in this condition, I considered by how many light causes and objects
imagination nourished in me the regret of life; of what atoms the weight
and difficulty of this dislodging was composed in my soul; to how many
idle and frivolous thoughts we give way in so great an affair; a dog, a
horse, a book, a glass, and what not, were considered in my loss; to
others their ambitious hopes, their money, their knowledge, not less
foolish considerations in my opinion than mine.  I look upon death
carelessly when I look upon it universally as the end of life.  I insult
over it in gross, but in detail it domineers over me: the tears of a
footman, the disposing of my clothes, the touch of a friendly hand, a
common consolation, discourages and softens me.  So do the complaints in
tragedies agitate our souls with grief; and the regrets of Dido and
Ariadne, impassionate even those who believe them not in Virgil and
Catullus.  ‘Tis a symptom of an obstinate and obdurate nature to be
sensible of no emotion, as ‘tis reported for a miracle of Polemon; but
then he did not so much as alter his countenance at the biting of a mad
dog that tore away the calf of his leg; and no wisdom proceeds so far as
to conceive so vivid and entire a cause of sorrow, by judgment that it
does not suffer increase by its presence, when the eyes and ears have
their share; parts that are not to be moved but by vain accidents.

Is it reason that even the arts themselves should make an advantage of
our natural stupidity and weakness?  An orator, says rhetoric in the
farce of his pleading, shall be moved with the sound of his own voice and
feigned emotions, and suffer himself to be imposed upon by the passion he
represents; he will imprint in himself a true and real grief, by means of
the part he plays, to transmit it to the judges, who are yet less
concerned than he: as they do who are hired at funerals to assist in the
ceremony of sorrow, who sell their tears and mourning by weight and
measure; for although they act in a borrowed form, nevertheless, by
habituating and settling their countenances to the occasion, ‘tis most
certain they often are really affected with an actual sorrow.  I was one,
amongst several others of his friends, who conveyed the body of Monsieur
de Grammont to Spissons from the siege of La Fere, where he was slain;
I observed that in all places we passed through we filled the people we
met with lamentations and tears by the mere solemn pomp of our convoy,
for the name of the defunct was not there so much as known.  Quintilian
reports as to have seen comedians so deeply engaged in a mourning part,
that they still wept in the retiring room, and who, having taken upon
them to stir up passion in another, have themselves espoused it to that
degree as to find themselves infected with it, not only to tears, but,
moreover, with pallor and the comportment of men really overwhelmed with
grief.

In a country near our mountains the women play Priest Martin, for as they
augment the regret of the deceased husband by the remembrance of the good
and agreeable qualities he possessed, they also at the same time make a
register of and publish his imperfections; as if of themselves to enter
into some composition, and divert themselves from compassion to disdain.
Yet with much better grace than we, who, when we lose an acquaintance,
strive to give him new and false praises, and to make him quite another
thing when we have lost sight of him than he appeared to us when we did
see him; as if regret were an instructive thing, or as if tears, by
washing our understandings, cleared them.  For my part, I henceforth
renounce all favourable testimonies men would give of me, not because I
shall be worthy of them, but because I shall be dead.

Whoever shall ask a man, “What interest have you in this siege?”
 --“The interest of example,” he will say, “and of the common obedience to
my prince: I pretend to no profit by it; and for glory, I know how small
a part can affect a private man such as I: I have here neither passion
nor quarrel.”  And yet you shall see him the next day quite another man,
chafing and red with fury, ranged in battle for the assault; ‘tis the
glittering of so much steel, the fire and noise of our cannon and drums,
that have infused this new rigidity and fury into his veins.  A frivolous
cause, you will say.  How a cause?  There needs none to agitate the mind;
a mere whimsy without body and without subject will rule and agitate it.
Let me thing of building castles in Spain, my imagination suggests to me
conveniences and pleasures with which my soul is really tickled and
pleased.  How often do we torment our mind with anger or sorrow by such
shadows, and engage ourselves in fantastic passions that impair both soul
and body?  What astonished, fleeting, confused grimaces does this raving
put our faces into! what sallies and agitations both of members and
voices does it inspire us with!  Does it not seem that this individual
man has false visions amid the crowd of others with whom he has to do,
or that he is possessed with some internal demon that persecutes him?
Inquire of yourself where is the object of this mutation?  is there
anything but us in nature which inanity sustains, over which it has
power?  Cambyses, from having dreamt that his brother should be one day
king of Persia, put him to death: a beloved brother, and one in whom he
had always confided.  Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself
out of a fancy of ill omen, from I know not what howling of his dogs;
and King Midas did as much upon the account of some foolish dream he had
dreamed.  ‘Tis to prize life at its just value, to abandon it for a
dream.  And yet hear the soul triumph over the miseries and weakness of
the body, and that it is exposed to all attacks and alterations; truly,
it has reason so to speak!

              “O prima infelix finger ti terra Prometheo!
               Ille parum cauti pectoris egit opus
               Corpora disponens, mentem non vidit in arte;
               Recta animi primum debuit esse via.”

     [“O wretched clay, first formed by Prometheus.  In his attempt,
     what little wisdom did he shew!  In framing bodies, he did not
     apply his art to form the mind, which should have been his first
     care.”--Propertius, iii. 5, 7.]




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A little thing will turn and divert us
     Abominate that incidental repentance which old age brings
     Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face
     Always be parading their pedantic science
     Am as jealous of my repose as of my authority
     Anger and hatred are beyond the duty of justice
     Beast of company, as the ancient said, but not of the herd
     Books go side by side with me in my whole course
     Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose
     But ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility
     Childish ignorance of many very ordinary things
     Common consolation, discourages and softens me
     Consoles himself upon the utility and eternity of his writings
     Deceit maintains and supplies most men’s employment
     Diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people
     Dying appears to him a natural and indifferent accident
     Every place of retirement requires a walk
     Fault will be theirs for having consulted me
     Few men have been admired by their own domestics
     Follies do not make me laugh, it is our wisdom which does
     Folly to put out their own light and shine by a borrowed lustre
     For fear of the laws and report of men
     Gently to bear the inconstancy of a lover
     Give but the rind of my attention
     Grief provokes itself
     He may employ his passion, who can make no use of his reason
     He may well go a foot, they say, who leads his horse in his hand
     I do not consider what it is now, but what it was then
     I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion
     I lay no great stress upon my opinions; or of others
     I look upon death carelessly when I look upon it universally
     I receive but little advice, I also give but little
     I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare
     I understand my men even by their silence and smiles
     Idleness is to me a very painful labour
     Imagne the mighty will not abase themselves so much as to live
     In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy
     Leaving nothing unsaid, how home and bitter soever
     Library: Tis there that I am in my kingdom
     Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom
     Malicious kind of justice
     Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease!
     Miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself
     More supportable to be always alone than never to be so.
     My fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it
     My thoughts sleep if I sit still
     Nearest to the opinions of those with whom they have to do
     No evil is honourable; but death is honourable
     No man is free from speaking foolish things
     Noise of arms deafened the voice of laws
     None of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil thinks lovable
     Obliged to his age for having weaned him from pleasure
     Open speaking draws out discoveries, like wine and love
     Perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men.
     Preachers very often work more upon their auditory than  reasons
     Public weal requires that men should betray, and lie
     Ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them
     Rowers who so advance backward
     Season a denial with asperity, suspense, or favour
     So that I could have said no worse behind their backs
     Socrates: According to what a man can
     Studied, when young, for ostentation, now for diversion
     Swim in troubled waters without fishing in them
     Take a pleasure in being uninterested in other men’s affairs
     The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious
     The sick man has not to complain who has his cure in his sleeve
     The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high
     Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private
     Tis not the cause, but their interest, that inflames them
     Titillation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing others suffer
     To be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self
     Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle
     We do not so much forsake vices as we change them
     We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool
     What more?  they lie with their lovers learnedly
     What need have they of anything but to live beloved and honoured
     Wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common
     You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 15.

V.  Upon Some verses of Virgil.




CHAPTER V

UPON SOME VERSES OF VIRGIL



CHAPTER  V.

By how much profitable thoughts are more full and solid, by so much are
they also more cumbersome and heavy: vice, death, poverty, diseases, are
grave and grievous subjects.  A man should have his soul instructed in
the means to sustain and to contend with evils, and in the rules of
living and believing well: and often rouse it up, and exercise it in this
noble study; but in an ordinary soul it must be by intervals and with
moderation; it will otherwise grow besotted if continually intent upon
it.  I found it necessary, when I was young, to put myself in mind and
solicit myself to keep me to my duty; gaiety and health do not, they say,
so well agree with those grave and serious meditations: I am at present
in another state: the conditions of age but too much put me in mind, urge
me to wisdom, and preach to me.  From the excess of sprightliness I am
fallen into that of severity, which is much more troublesome; and for
that reason I now and then suffer myself purposely a little to run into
disorder, and occupy my mind in wanton and youthful thoughts, wherewith
it diverts itself.  I am of late but too reserved, too heavy, and too
ripe; years every day read to me lectures of coldness and temperance.
This body of mine avoids disorder and dreads it; ‘tis now my body’s turn
to guide my mind towards reformation; it governs, in turn, and more
rudely and imperiously than the other; it lets me not an hour alone,
sleeping or waking, but is always preaching to me death, patience, and
repentance.  I now defend myself from temperance, as I have formerly done
from pleasure; it draws me too much back, and even to stupidity.  Now I
will be master of myself, to all intents and purposes; wisdom has its
excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.  Therefore, lest
I should wither, dry up, and overcharge myself with prudence, in the
intervals and truces my infirmities allow me:

               “Mens intenta suis ne seit usque malis.”

     [“That my mind may not eternally be intent upon my ills.”
      --Ovid., Trist., iv. i, 4.]

I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy sky I
have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without fear, but not
without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the remembrance of my
better years:

                          “Animus quo perdidit, optat,
               Atque in praeterita se totus imagine versat.”

     [“The mind wishes to have what it has lost, and throws itself
     wholly into memories of the past.”--Petronius, c. 128.]

Let childhood look forward and age backward; was not this the
signification of Janus’ double face?  Let years draw me along if they
will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern the
pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that way; though
it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not, however, root the image
of it out of my memory:

                                        “Hoc est
                    Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui.”

     [“‘Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy one’s former life again.”
      --Martial, x. 23, 7.]

Plato ordains that old men should be present at the exercises, dances,
and sports of young people, that they may rejoice in others for the
activity and beauty of body which is no more in themselves, and call to
mind the grace and comeliness of that flourishing age; and wills that in
these recreations the honour of the prize should be given to that young
man who has most diverted the company.  I was formerly wont to mark
cloudy and gloomy days as extraordinary; these are now my ordinary days;
the extraordinary are the clear and bright; I am ready to leap for joy,
as for an unwonted favour, when nothing happens me.  Let me tickle
myself, I cannot force a poor smile from this wretched body of mine;
I am only merry in conceit and in dreaming, by artifice to divert the
melancholy of age; but, in faith, it requires another remedy than a
dream.  A weak contest of art against nature.  ‘Tis great folly to
lengthen and anticipate human incommodities, as every one does; I had
rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so.’ I seize on
even the least occasions of pleasure I can meet.  I know very well, by
hearsay, several sorts of prudent pleasures, effectually so, and glorious
to boot; but opinion has not power enough over me to give me an appetite
to them.  I covet not so much to have them magnanimous, magnificent, and
pompous, as I do to have them sweet, facile, and ready:

               “A natura discedimus; populo nos damus,
               nullius rei bono auctori.”

     [“We depart from nature and give ourselves to the people, who
     understand nothing.”--Seneca, Ep., 99.]

My philosophy is in action, in natural and present practice, very little
in fancy: what if I should take pleasure in playing at cob-nut or to whip
a top!

               “Non ponebat enim rumores ante salutem.”

     [“He did not sacrifice his health even to rumours.” Ennius, apud
     Cicero, De Offic., i. 24]

Pleasure is a quality of very little ambition; it thinks itself rich
enough of itself without any addition of repute; and is best pleased
where most retired.  A young man should be whipped who pretends to a
taste in wine and sauces; there was nothing which, at that age, I less
valued or knew: now I begin to learn; I am very much ashamed on’t; but
what should I do?  I am more ashamed and vexed at the occasions that put
me upon’t.  ‘Tis for us to dote and trifle away the time, and for young
men to stand upon their reputation and nice punctilios; they are going
towards the world and the world’s opinion; we are retiring from it:

     “Sibi arma, sibi equos, sibi hastas, sibi clavam, sibi pilam,
     sibi natationes, et cursus habeant: nobis senibus, ex lusionibus
     multis, talos relinquant et tesseras;”

     [“Let them reserve to themselves arms, horses, spears, clubs,
     tennis, swimming, and races; and of all the sports leave to us old
     men cards and dice.”--Cicero, De Senec., c. 16.]

the laws themselves send us home.  I can do no less in favour of this
wretched condition into which my age has thrown me than furnish it with
toys to play withal, as they do children; and, in truth, we become such.
Both wisdom and folly will have enough to do to support and relieve me by
alternate services in this calamity of age:

               “Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem.”

          [“Mingle with counsels a brief interval of folly.”
           --Horace, Od., iv. 12, 27.]

I accordingly avoid the lightest punctures; and those that formerly would
not have rippled the skin, now pierce me through and through: my habit of
body is now so naturally declining to ill:

          “In fragili corpore odiosa omnis offensio est;”

          [“In a fragile body every shock is obnoxious.”
           --Cicero, De Senec., c.  18.]

          “Mensque pati durum sustinet aegra nihil.”

     [“And the infirm mind can bear no difficult exertion.”
      --Ovid, De Ponto., i.  5, 18.]

I have ever been very susceptibly tender as to offences: I am much more
tender now, and open throughout.

               “Et minimae vires frangere quassa valent.”

     [“And little force suffices to break what was cracked before.”
      --Ovid, De Tris., iii. 11, 22.]

My judgment restrains me from kicking against and murmuring at the
inconveniences that nature orders me to endure, but it does not take away
my feeling them: I, who have no other thing in my aim but to live and be
merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one
good year of pleasant and jocund tranquillity.  A melancholic and dull
tranquillity may be enough for me, but it benumbs and stupefies me; I am
not contented with it.  If there be any person, any knot of good company
in country or city, in France or elsewhere, resident or in motion, who
can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but whistle
and I will run and furnish them with essays in flesh and bone:

Seeing it is the privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age, I
advise mine to it with all the power I have; let it meanwhile continue
green, and flourish if it can, like mistletoe upon a dead tree.  But I
fear ‘tis a traitor; it has contracted so strict a fraternity with the
body that it leaves me at every turn, to follow that in its need.  I
wheedle and deal with it apart in vain; I try in vain to wean it from
this correspondence, to no effect; quote to it Seneca and Catullus, and
ladies and royal masques; if its companion have the stone, it seems to
have it too; even the faculties that are most peculiarly and properly its
own cannot then perform their functions, but manifestly appear stupefied
and asleep; there is no sprightliness in its productions, if there be not
at the same time an equal proportion in the body too.

Our masters are to blame, that in searching out the causes of the
extraordinary emotions of the soul, besides attributing it to a divine
ecstasy, love, martial fierceness, poesy, wine, they have not also
attributed a part to health: a boiling, vigorous, full, and lazy health,
such as formerly the verdure of youth and security, by fits, supplied me
withal; that fire of sprightliness and gaiety darts into the mind flashes
that are lively and bright beyond our natural light, and of all
enthusiasms the most jovial, if not the most extravagant.

It is, then, no wonder if a contrary state stupefy and clog my spirit,
and produce a contrary effect:

          “Ad nullum consurgit opus, cum corpore languet;”

     [“When the mind is languishing, the body is good for nothing.”
      (Or:) “It rises to no effort; it languishes with the body.”
      --Pseudo Gallus, i. 125.]

and yet would have me obliged to it for giving, as it wants to make out,
much less consent to this stupidity than is the ordinary case with men of
my age.  Let us, at least, whilst we have truce, drive away incommodities
and difficulties from our commerce:

          “Dum licet, obducta solvatur fronte senectus:”

     [“Whilst we can, let us banish old age from the brow.”
      --Herod., Ep., xiii. 7.]

               “Tetrica sunt amcenanda jocularibus.”

     [“Sour things are to be sweetened with those that are pleasant.”
      --Sidonius Apollin., Ep., i. 9.]

I love a gay and civil wisdom, and fly from all sourness and austerity of
manners, all repellent, mien being suspected by me:

               “Tristemque vultus tetrici arrogantiam:”

          [“The arrogant sadness of a crabbed face.”--Auctor Incert.]

               “Et habet tristis quoque turba cinaedos.”

          [“And the dull crowd also has its voluptuaries.” (Or:)
          “An austere countenance sometimes covers a debauched mind.”
           --Idem.]

I am very much of Plato’s opinion, who says that facile or harsh humours
are great indications of the good or ill disposition of the mind.
Socrates had a constant countenance, but serene and smiling, not sourly
austere, like the elder Crassus, whom no one ever saw laugh.  Virtue is a
pleasant and gay quality.

I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings,
who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts:
I conform myself well enough to their inclinations, but I offend their
eyes.  ‘Tis a fine humour to strain the writings of Plato, to wrest his
pretended intercourses with Phaedo, Dion, Stella, and Archeanassa:

               “Non pudeat dicere, quod non pudet sentire.”

     [“Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think.”]

I hate a froward and dismal spirit, that slips over all the pleasures of
life and seizes and feeds upon misfortunes; like flies, that cannot stick
to a smooth and polished body, but fix and repose themselves upon craggy
and rough places, and like cupping-glasses, that only suck and attract
bad blood.

As to the rest, I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to
do; even thoughts that are not to be published, displease me; the worst
of my actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil as I find it evil
and base not to dare to own them.  Every one is wary and discreet in
confession, but men ought to be so in action; the boldness of doing ill
is in some sort compensated and restrained by the boldness of confessing
it.  Whoever will oblige himself to tell all, should oblige himself to do
nothing that he must be forced to conceal.  I wish that this excessive
licence of mine may draw men to freedom, above these timorous and mincing
virtues sprung from our imperfections, and that at the expense of my
immoderation I may reduce them to reason.  A man must see and study his
vice to correct it; they who conceal it from others, commonly conceal it
from themselves; and do not think it close enough, if they themselves see
it: they withdraw and disguise it from their own consciences:

     “Quare vitia sua nemo confitetur?  Quia etiam nunc in
     illia est; somnium narrare vigilantis est.”

     [“Why does no man confess his vices?  because he is yet in them;
     ‘tis for a waking man to tell his dream.”--Seneca, Ep., 53.]

The diseases of the body explain themselves by their increase; we find
that to be the gout which we called a rheum or a strain; the diseases of
the soul, the greater they are, keep, themselves the most obscure;
the most sick are the least sensible; therefore it is that with an
unrelenting hand they most often, in full day, be taken to task, opened,
and torn from the hollow of the heart.  As in doing well, so in doing
ill, the mere confession is sometimes satisfaction.  Is there any
deformity in doing amiss, that can excuse us from confessing ourselves?
It is so great a pain to me to dissemble, that I evade the trust of
another’s secrets, wanting the courage to disavow my knowledge.  I can
keep silent, but deny I cannot without the greatest trouble and violence
to myself imaginable to be very secret, a man must be so by nature, not
by obligation.  ‘Tis little worth, in the service of a prince, to be
secret, if a man be not a liar to boot.  If he who asked Thales the
Milesian whether he ought solemnly to deny that he had committed
adultery, had applied himself to me, I should have told him that he ought
not to do it; for I look upon lying as a worse fault than the other.
Thales advised him quite contrary, bidding him swear to shield the
greater fault by the less;

     [Montaigne’s memory here serves him ill, for the question being put
     to Thales, his answer was: “But is not perjury worse than
     adultery?”--Diogenes Laertius, in vita, i. 36.]

nevertheless, this counsel was not so much an election as a
multiplication of vice.  Upon which let us say this in passing, that we
deal liberally with a man of conscience when we propose to him some
difficulty in counterpoise of vice; but when we shut him up betwixt two
vices, he is put to a hard choice as Origen was either to idolatrise or
to suffer himself to be carnally abused by a great Ethiopian slave they
brought to him.  He submitted to the first condition, and wrongly, people
say.  Yet those women of our times are not much out, according to their
error, who protest they had rather burden their consciences with ten men
than one mass.

If it be indiscretion so to publish one’s errors, yet there is no great
danger that it pass into example and custom; for Ariston said,  that the
winds men most fear are those that lay them open.  We must tuck up this
ridiculous rag that hides our manners: they send their consciences to the
stews, and keep a starched countenance: even traitors and assassins
espouse the laws of ceremony, and there fix their duty.  So that neither
can injustice complain of incivility, nor malice of indiscretion.  ‘Tis
pity but a bad man should be a fool to boot, and that outward decency
should palliate his vice: this rough-cast only appertains to a good and
sound wall, that deserves to be preserved and whited.

In favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our auricular and private
confession, I confess myself in public, religiously and purely: St.
Augustin, Origeti, and Hippocrates have published the errors of their
opinions; I, moreover, of my manners.  I am greedy of making myself
known, and I care not to how many, provided it be truly; or to say
better, I hunger for nothing; but I mortally hate to be mistaken by those
who happen to learn my name.  He who does all things for honour and
glory, what can he think to gain by shewing himself to the world in a
vizor, and by concealing his true being from the people?  Praise a
humpback for his stature, he has reason to take it for an affront:
if you are a coward, and men commend you for your valour, is it of you
they speak?  They take you for another.  I should like him as well who
glorifies himself in the compliments and congees that are made him as if
he were master of the company, when he is one of the least of the train.
Archelaus, king of Macedon, walking along the street, somebody threw
water on his head, which they who were with him said he ought to punish:
“Aye, but,” said he, “whoever it was, he did not throw the water upon me,
but upon him whom he took me to be.”  Socrates being told that people
spoke ill of him, “Not at all,” said he, “there is nothing, in me of what
they say.”

For my part, if any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being
very modest or very chaste, I should owe him no thanks; and so, whoever
should call me traitor, robber, or drunkard, I should be as little
concerned.  They who do not rightly know themselves, may feed themselves
with false approbations; not I, who see myself, and who examine myself
even to my very bowels, and who very well know what is my due.  I am
content to be less commended, provided I am better known.  I may be
reputed a wise man in such a sort of wisdom as I take to be folly.
I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common piece of
furniture, and a piece for the hall; this chapter will make me part of
the water-closet.  I love to traffic with them a little in private;
public conversation is without favour and without savour.  In farewells,
we oftener than not heat our affections towards the things we take leave
of; I take my last leave of the pleasures of this world: these are our
last embraces.

But let us come to my subject: what has the act of generation, so
natural, so necessary, and so just, done to men, to be a thing not to
be spoken of without blushing, and to be excluded from all serious and
moderate discourse?   We boldly pronounce kill, rob, betray, and that we
dare only to do betwixt the teeth.  Is it to say, the less we expend in
words, we may pay so much the more in thinking?  For it is certain that
the words least in use, most seldom written, and best kept in, are the
best and most generally known: no age, no manners, are ignorant of them,
no more than the word bread they imprint themselves in every one without
being, expressed, without voice, and without figure; and the sex that
most practises it is bound to say least of it.  ‘Tis an act that we have
placed in the franchise of silence, from which to take it is a crime even
to accuse and judge it; neither dare we reprehend it but by periphrasis
and picture.  A great favour to a criminal to be so execrable that
justice thinks it unjust to touch and see him; free, and safe by the
benefit of the severity of his condemnation.  Is it not here as in matter
of books, that sell better and become more public for being suppressed?
For my part, I will take Aristotle at his word, who says, that
“bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.”  These
verses are preached in the ancient school, a school that I much more
adhere to than the modern: its virtues appear to me to be greater, and
the vices less:

              “Ceux qui par trop fuyant Venus estrivent,
               Faillent autant que ceulx qui trop la suyvent.”

     [“They err as much who too much forbear Venus, as they who are too
     frequent in her rites.”--A translation by Amyot from Plutarch, A
     philosopher should converse with princes.]

              “Tu, dea, rerum naturam sola gubernas,
               Nec sine to quicquam dias in luminis oras
               Exoritur, neque fit laetum, nec amabile quidquam.”

     [“Goddess, still thou alone governest nature, nor without thee
     anything comes into light; nothing is pleasant, nothing joyful.”
      --Lucretius, i. 22.]

I know not who could set Pallas and the Muses at variance with Venus, and
make them cold towards Love; but I see no deities so well met, or that
are more indebted to one another.  Who will deprive the Muses of amorous
imaginations, will rob them of the best entertainment they have, and of
the noblest matter of their work: and who will make Love lose the
communication and service of poesy, will disarm him of his best weapons:
by this means they charge the god of familiarity and good will, and the
protecting goddesses of humanity and justice, with the vice of
ingratitude and unthankfulness.  I have not been so long cashiered from
the state and service of this god, that my memory is not still perfect in
his force and value:

               “Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae;”

     [“I recognise vestiges of my old flame.”--AEneid., iv. 23.]

There are yet some remains of heat and emotion after the fever:

          “Nec mihi deficiat calor hic, hiemantibus annis!”

     [“Nor let this heat of youth fail me in my winter years.”]

Withered and drooping as I am, I feel yet some remains of the past
ardour:

              “Qual l’alto Egeo, per the Aquilone o Noto
               Cessi, the tutto prima il volse et scosse,
               Non ‘s accheta ei pero; ma’l suono e’l moto
               Ritien del l’onde anco agitate e grosse:”

          [“As Aegean seas, when storms be calmed again,
          That rolled their tumbling waves with troublous blasts,
          Do yet of tempests passed some show retain,
          And here and there their swelling billows cast.”--Fairfax.]

but from what I understand of it, the force and power of this god are
more lively and animated in the picture of poesy than in their own
essence:

                    “Et versus digitos habet:”

          [“Verse has fingers.”--Altered from Juvenal, iv. 196.]

it has I know not what kind of air, more amorous than love itself.  Venus
is not so beautiful, naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil:

         “Dixerat; et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis
          Cunctantem amplexu molli fovet.  Ille repente
          Accepit solitam flammam; notusque medullas
          Intravit calor, et labefacta per ossa cucurrit
          Non secus atque olim tonitru, cum rupta corusco
          Ignea rima micans percurrit lumine nimbos.
          . . . . . .  Ea verba loquutus,
          Optatos dedit amplexus; placidumque petivit
          Conjugis infusus gremio per membra soporem.”

     [“The goddess spoke, and throwing round him her snowy arms in soft
     embraces, caresses him hesitating.  Suddenly he caught the wonted
     flame, and the well-known warmth pierced his marrow, and ran
     thrilling through his shaken bones: just as when at times, with
     thunder, a stream of fire in lightning flashes shoots across the
     skies.  Having spoken these words, he gave her the wished embrace,
     and in the bosom of his spouse sought placid sleep.”
      --AEneid, viii.  387 and 392.]

All that I find fault with in considering it is, that he has represented
her a little too passionate for a married Venus; in this discreet kind of
coupling, the appetite is not usually so wanton, but more grave and dull.
Love hates that people should hold of any but itself, and goes but
faintly to work in familiarities derived from any other title, as
marriage is: alliance, dowry, therein sway by reason, as much or more
than grace and beauty.  Men do not marry for themselves, let them say
what they will; they marry as much or more for their posterity and
family; the custom and interest of marriage concern our race much more
than us; and therefore it is, that I like to have a match carried on by a
third hand rather than a man’s own, and by another man’s liking than that
of the party himself; and how much is all this opposite to the
conventions of love?  And also it is a kind of incest to employ in this
venerable and sacred alliance the heat and extravagance of amorous
licence, as I think I have said elsewhere.  A man, says Aristotle, must
approach his wife with prudence and temperance, lest in dealing too
lasciviously with her, the extreme pleasure make her exceed the bounds of
reason.  What he says upon the account of conscience, the physicians say
upon the account of health: “that a pleasure excessively lascivious,
voluptuous, and frequent, makes the seed too hot, and hinders
conception”: ‘tis said, elsewhere, that to a languishing intercourse, as
this naturally is, to supply it with a due and fruitful heat, a man must
do it but seldom and at appreciable intervals:

          “Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat.”

     [“But let him thirstily snatch the joys of love and enclose them in
     his bosom.”--Virg., Georg., iii. 137.]

I see no marriages where the conjugal compatibility sooner fails than
those that we contract upon the account of beauty and amorous desires;
there should be more solid and constant foundation, and they should
proceed with greater circumspection; this furious ardour is worth
nothing.

They who think they honour marriage by joining love to it, do, methinks,
like those who, to favour virtue, hold that nobility is nothing else but
virtue.  They are indeed things that have some relation to one another,
but there is a great deal of difference; we should not so mix their names
and titles; ‘tis a wrong to them both so to confound them.  Nobility is a
brave quality, and with good reason introduced; but forasmuch as ‘tis a
quality depending upon others, and may happen in a vicious person, in
himself nothing, ‘tis in estimate infinitely below virtue’;

     [“If nobility be virtue, it loses its quality in all things wherein
     not virtuous: and if it be not virtue, ‘tis a small matter.”
      --La Byuyere.]

‘tis a virtue, if it be one, that is artificial and apparent, depending
upon time and fortune: various in form, according to the country; living
and mortal; without birth, as the river Nile; genealogical and common;
of succession and similitude; drawn by consequence, and a very weak one.
Knowledge, strength, goodness, beauty, riches, and all other qualities,
fall into communication and commerce, but this is consummated in itself,
and of no use to the service of others.  There was proposed to one of our
kings the choice of two candidates for the same command, of whom one was
a gentleman, the other not; he ordered that, without respect to quality,
they should choose him who had the most merit; but where the worth of the
competitors should appear to be entirely equal, they should have respect
to birth: this was justly to give it its rank.  A young man unknown,
coming to Antigonus to make suit for his father’s command, a valiant man
lately dead: “Friend,” said he, “in such preferments as these, I have not
so much regard to the nobility of my soldiers as to their prowess.”
 And, indeed, it ought not to go as it did with the officers of the kings
of Sparta, trumpeters, fiddlers, cooks, the children of whom always
succeeded to their places, how ignorant soever, and were preferred before
the most experienced in the trade.  They of Calicut make of nobles a sort
of superhuman persons: they are interdicted marriage and all but warlike
employments: they may have of concubines their fill, and the women as
many lovers, without being jealous of one another; but ‘tis a capital and
irremissible crime to couple with a person of meaner conditions than
themselves; and they think themselves polluted, if they have but touched
one in walking along; and supposing their nobility to be marvellously
interested and injured in it, kill such as only approach a little too
near them: insomuch that the ignoble are obliged to cry out as they walk,
like the gondoliers of Venice, at the turnings of streets for fear of
jostling; and the nobles command them to step aside to what part they
please: by that means these avoid what they repute a perpetual ignominy,
those certain death.  No time, no favour of the prince, no office, or
virtue, or riches, can ever prevail to make a plebeian become noble: to
which this custom contributes, that marriages are interdicted betwixt
different trades; the daughter of one of the cordwainers’ gild is not
permitted to marry a carpenter; and parents are obliged to train up their
children precisely in their own callings, and not put them to any other
trade; by which means the distinction and continuance of their fortunes
are maintained.

A good marriage, if there be any such, rejects the company and conditions
of love, and tries to represent those of friendship.  ‘Tis a sweet
society of life, full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of
useful and solid services and mutual obligations; which any woman who has
a right taste:

                    “Optato quam junxit lumine taeda”--

     [“Whom the marriage torch has joined with the desired light.”
      --Catullus, lxiv. 79.]

would be loth to serve her husband in quality of a mistress.  If she be
lodged in his affection as a wife, she is more honourably and securely
placed.  When he purports to be in love with another, and works all he
can to obtain his desire, let any one but ask him, on which he had rather
a disgrace should fall, his wife or his mistress, which of their
misfortunes would most afflict him, and to which of them he wishes the
most grandeur, the answer to these questions is out of dispute in a sound
marriage.

And that so few are observed to be happy, is a token of its price and
value.  If well formed and rightly taken, ‘tis the best of all human
societies; we cannot live without it, and yet we do nothing but decry it.
It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in, and those
within despair of getting out.  Socrates being asked, whether it was more
commodious to take a wife or not, “Let a man take which course he will,”
 said he; “he will repent.”  ‘Tis a contract to which the common
saying:

                    “Homo homini aut deus aut lupus,”

          [“Man to man is either a god or a wolf.”--Erasmus, Adag.]

may very fitly be applied; there must be a concurrence of many qualities
in the construction.  It is found nowadays more convenient for simple and
plebeian souls, where delights, curiosity, and idleness do not so much
disturb it; but extravagant humours, such as mine, that hate all sorts of
obligation and restraint, are not so proper for it:

               “Et mihi dulce magis resoluto vivere collo.”

          [“And it is sweet to me to live with a loosened neck.”
           --Pseudo Gallus, i. 61.]

Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if
she would have had me.  But ‘tis to much purpose to evade it; the common
custom and usance of life will have it so.  The most of my actions are
guided by example, not by choice, and yet I did not go to it of my own
voluntary motion; I was led and drawn to it by extrinsic occasions; for
not only things that are incommodious in themselves, but also things
however ugly, vicious, and to be avoided, may be rendered acceptable by
some condition or accident; so unsteady and vain is all human resolution!
and I was persuaded to it, when worse prepared and less tractable than I
am at present, that I have tried what it is: and as great a libertine as
I am taken to be, I have in truth more strictly observed the laws of
marriage, than I either promised or expected.  ‘Tis in vain to kick, when
a man has once put on his fetters: a man must prudently manage his
liberty; but having once submitted to obligation, he must confine himself
within the laws of common duty, at least, do what he can towards it.
They who engage in this contract, with a design to carry themselves in it
with hatred and contempt, do an unjust and inconvenient thing; and the
fine rule that I hear pass from hand to hand amongst the women, as a
sacred oracle:

     [“Serve thy husband as thy master, but guard thyself against him as
     from a traitor.”]

which is to say, comport thyself towards him with a dissembled, inimical,
and distrustful reverence (a cry of war and defiance), is equally
injurious and hard.  I am too mild for such rugged designs: to say the
truth, I am not arrived to that perfection of ability and refinement of
wit, to confound reason with injustice, and to laugh at all rule and
order that does not please my palate; because I hate superstition, I do
not presently run into the contrary extreme of irreligion.

     (If a man hate superstition he cannot love religion.  D.W.)

If a man does not always perform his duty, he ought at least to love and
acknowledge it; ‘tis treachery to marry without espousing.

Let us proceed.

Our poet represents a marriage happy in a good accord wherein
nevertheless there is not much loyalty.  Does he mean, that it is not
impossible but a woman may give the reins to her own passion, and yield
to the importunities of love, and yet reserve some duty toward marriage,
and that it may be hurt, without being totally broken?  A serving man may
cheat his master, whom nevertheless he does not hate.  Beauty,
opportunity, and destiny (for destiny has also a hand in’t),

                         “Fatum est in partibus illis
          Quas sinus abscondit; nam, si tibi sidera cessent,
          Nil faciet longi mensura incognita nervi;”

     [“There is a fatality about the hidden parts: let nature have
     endowed you however liberally, ‘tis of no use, if your good star
     fails you in the nick of time.”--Juvenal, ix. 32.]

have attached her to a stranger; though not so wholly, peradventure, but
that she may have some remains of kindness for her husband.  They are two
designs, that have several paths leading to them, without being
confounded with one another; a woman may yield to a man she would by no
means have married, not only for the condition of his fortune, but for
those also of his person.  Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who
have not repented it.  And even in the other world, what an unhappy life
does Jupiter lead with his, whom he had first enjoyed as a mistress!
‘Tis, as the proverb runs, to befoul a basket and then put it upon one’s
head.  I have in my time, in a good family, seen love shamefully and
dishonestly cured by marriage: the considerations are widely different.
We love at once, without any tie, two things contrary in themselves.

Socrates was wont to say, that the city of Athens pleased, as ladies do
whom men court for love; every one loved to come thither to take a turn,
and pass away his time; but no one liked it so well as to espouse it,
that is, to inhabit there, and to make it his constant residence.  I have
been vexed to see husbands hate their wives only because they themselves
do them wrong; we should not, at all events, methinks, love them the less
for our own faults; they should at least, upon the account of repentance
and compassion, be dearer to us.

They are different ends, he says, and yet in some sort compatible;
marriage has utility, justice, honour, and constancy for its share;
a flat, but more universal pleasure: love founds itself wholly upon
pleasure, and, indeed, has it more full, lively, and sharp; a pleasure
inflamed by difficulty; there must be in it sting and smart: ‘tis no
longer love, if without darts and fire.  The bounty of ladies is too
profuse in marriage, and dulls the point of affection and desire: to
evade which inconvenience, do but observe what pains Lycurgus and Plato
take in their laws.

Women are not to blame at all, when they refuse the rules of life that
are introduced into the world, forasmuch as the men make them without
their help.  There is naturally contention and brawling betwixt them and
us; and the strictest friendship we have with them is yet mixed with
tumult and tempest.  In the opinion of our author, we deal
inconsiderately with them in this: after we have discovered that they
are, without comparison, more able and ardent in the practice of love
than we, and that the old priest testified as much, who had been one
while a man, and then a woman:

                    “Venus huic erat utraque nota:”

               [“Both aspects of love were known to him,”
                --Tiresias. Ovid.  Metam., iii. 323.]

and moreover, that we have learned from their own mouths the proof that,
in several ages, was made by an Emperor and Empress of Rome,--[Proclus.]
--both famous for ability in that affair!  for he in one night deflowered
ten Sarmatian virgins who were his captives: but she had five-and-twenty
bouts in one night, changing her man according to her need and liking;

                    “Adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine vulvae
               Et lassata viris, nondum satiata, recessit:”

          [“Ardent still, she retired, fatigued, but not satisfied.”
           --Juvenal, vi. 128.]

and that upon the dispute which happened in Cataluna, wherein a wife
complaining of her husband’s too frequent addresses to her, not so much,
as I conceive, that she was incommodated by it (for I believe no miracles
out of religion) as under this pretence, to curtail and curb in this,
which is the fundamental act of marriage, the authority of husbands over
their wives, and to shew that their frowardness and malignity go beyond
the nuptial bed, and spurn under foot even the graces and sweets of
Venus; the husband, a man truly brutish and unnatural, replied, that even
on fasting days he could not subsist with less than ten courses:
whereupon came out that notable sentence of the Queen of Arragon, by
which, after mature deliberation of her council, this good queen, to give
a rule and example to all succeeding ages of the moderation required in
a just marriage, set down six times a day as a legitimate and necessary
stint; surrendering and quitting a great deal of the needs and desires of
her sex, that she might, she said, establish an easy, and consequently, a
permanent and immutable rule.  Hereupon the doctors cry out: what must
the female appetite and concupiscence be, when their reason, their
reformation and virtue, are taxed at such a rate, considering the divers
judgments of our appetites?  for Solon, master of the law school, taxes
us but at three a month,--that men may not fail in point of conjugal
frequentation: after having, I say, believed and preached all this, we go
and enjoin them continency for their particular share, and upon the last
and extreme penalties.

There is no passion so hard to contend with as this, which we would have
them only resist, not simply as an ordinary vice, but as an execrable
abomination, worse than irreligion and parricide; whilst we, at the same
time, go to’t without offence or reproach.  Even those amongst us who
have tried the experiment have sufficiently confessed what difficulty, or
rather impossibility, they have found by material remedies to subdue,
weaken, and cool the body.  We, on the contrary, would have them at once
sound, vigorous plump, high-fed, and chaste; that is to say, both hot and
cold; for the marriage, which we tell them is to keep them from burning,
is but small refreshment to them, as we order the matter.  If they take
one whose vigorous age is yet boiling, he will be proud to make it known
elsewhere;

                   “Sit tandem pudor; aut eamus in jus;
                    Multis mentula millibus redempta,
                    Non est haec tua, Basse; vendidisti;”

     [“Let there be some shame, or we shall go to law: your vigour,
     bought by your wife with many thousands, is no longer yours: thou
     hast sold it.--“Martial, xii. 90.]

Polemon the philosopher was justly by his wife brought before the judge
for sowing in a barren field the seed that was due to one that was
fruitful:  if, on the other hand, they take a decayed fellow, they are in
a worse condition in marriage than either maids or widows.  We think them
well provided for, because they have a man to lie with, as the Romans
concluded Clodia Laeta, a vestal nun, violated, because Caligula had
approached her, though it was declared he did no more but approach her:
but, on the contrary, we by that increase their necessity, forasmuch as
the touch and company of any man whatever rouses their desires, that in
solitude would be more quiet.  And to the end, ‘tis likely, that they
might render their chastity more meritorious by this circumstance and
consideration, Boleslas and Kinge his wife, kings of Poland, vowed it by
mutual consent, being in bed together, on their very wedding day, and
kept their vow in spite of all matrimonial conveniences.

We train them up from their infancy to the traffic of love; their grace,
dressing, knowledge, language, and whole instruction tend that way: their
governesses imprint nothing in them but the idea of love, if for nothing
else but by continually representing it to them, to give them a distaste
for it.  My daughter, the only child I have, is now of an age that
forward young women are allowed to be married at; she is of a slow, thin,
and tender complexion, and has accordingly been brought up by her mother
after a retired and particular manner, so that she but now begins to be
weaned from her childish simplicity.  She was reading before me in a
French book where the word ‘fouteau’, the name of a tree very well known,
occurred;--[The beech-tree; the name resembles in sound an obscene
French word.]--the woman, to whose conduct she is committed, stopped her
short a little roughly, and made her skip over that dangerous step.  I
let her alone, not to trouble their rules, for I never concern myself in
that sort of government; feminine polity has a mysterious procedure; we
must leave it to them; but if I am not mistaken the commerce of twenty
lacquies could not, in six months’ time, have so imprinted in her memory
the meaning, usage, and all the consequence of the sound of these wicked
syllables, as this good old woman did by reprimand and interdiction.

                   “Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos
                    Matura virgo, et frangitur artibus;
                    Jam nunc et incestos amores
                    De tenero, meditatur ungui.”

     [“The maid ripe for marriage delights to learn Ionic dances, and to
     imitate those lascivious movements.  Nay, already from her infancy
     she meditates criminal amours.”--Horace, Od., iii.  6, 21., the text
     has ‘fingitur’.]

Let them but give themselves the rein a little, let them but enter into
liberty of discourse, we are but children to them in this science.  Hear
them but describe our pursuits and conversation, they will very well make
you understand that we bring them nothing they have not known before, and
digested without our help.

     [This sentence refers to a conversation between some young women in
     his immediate neighbourhood, which the Essayist just below informs
     us that he overheard, and which was too shocking for him to repeat.
     It must have been tolerably bad.--Remark by the editor of a later
     edition.]

Is it, perhaps, as Plato says, that they have formerly been debauched
young fellows?  I happened one day to be in a place where I could hear
some of their talk without suspicion; I am sorry I cannot repeat it.
By’rlady, said I, we had need go study the phrases of Amadis, and the
tales of Boccaccio and Aretin, to be able to discourse with them: we
employ our time to much purpose indeed.  There is neither word, example,
nor step they are not more perfect in than our books; ‘tis a discipline
that springs with their blood,

                    “Et mentem ipsa Venus dedit,”

               [“Venus herself made them what they are,”
                --Virg., Georg., iii. 267.]

which these good instructors, nature, youth, and health, are continually
inspiring them with; they need not learn, they breed it:

              “Nec tantum niveo gavisa est ulla columbo,
               Compar, vel si quid dicitur improbius,
               Oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro,
               Quantum praecipue multivola est mulier.”

     [“No milk-white dove, or if there be a thing more lascivious,
     takes so much delight in kissing as woman, wishful for every man
     she sees.”--Catullus, lxvi. 125.]

So that if the natural violence of their desire were not a little
restrained by fear and honour, which were wisely contrived for them, we
should be all shamed.  All the motions in the world resolve into and tend
to this conjunction; ‘tis a matter infused throughout: ‘tis a centre to
which all things are directed.  We yet see the edicts of the old and wise
Rome made for the service of love, and the precepts of Socrates for the
instruction of courtezans:

                   “Noncon libelli Stoici inter sericos
                    Jacere pulvillos amant:”

          [“There are writings of the Stoics which we find lying upon
          silken cushions.”--Horace, Epod., viii. 15.]

Zeno, amongst his laws, also regulated the motions to be observed in
getting a maidenhead.  What was the philosopher Strato’s book Of Carnal
Conjunction?--[ Diogenes Laertius, v.  59.]--And what did Theophrastus
treat of in those he intituled, the one ‘The Lover’, and the other ‘Of
Love?’  Of what Aristippus in his ‘Of Former Delights’?  What do the so
long and lively descriptions in Plato of the loves of his time pretend
to?  and the book called ‘The Lover’, of Demetrius Phalereus? and
‘Clinias’, or the ‘Ravished Lover’, of Heraclides; and that of
Antisthenes, ‘Of Getting Children’, or, ‘Of Weddings’, and the other,
‘Of the Master or the Lover’?  And that of Aristo: ‘Of Amorous Exercises’
What those of Cleanthes: one, ‘Of Love’, the other, ‘Of the Art of
Loving’?  The amorous dialogues of Sphaereus? and the fable of Jupiter
and Juno, of Chrysippus, impudent beyond all toleration?  And his fifty
so lascivious epistles?  I will let alone the writings of the
philosophers of the Epicurean sect, protectress of voluptuousness.  Fifty
deities were, in time past, assigned to this office; and there have been
nations where, to assuage the lust of those who came to their devotion,
they kept men and women in their temples for the worshippers to lie with;
and it was an act of ceremony to do this before they went to prayers:

     “Nimirum propter continentiam incontinentia necessaria est;
     incendium ignibus extinguitur.”

     [“Forsooth incontinency is necessary for continency’s sake; a
     conflagration is extinguished by fire.”]

In the greatest part of the world, that member of our body was deified;
in the same province, some flayed off the skin to offer and consecrate a
piece; others offered and consecrated their seed.  In another, the young
men publicly cut through betwixt the skin and the flesh of that part in
several places, and thrust pieces of wood into the openings as long and
thick as they would receive, and of these pieces of wood afterwards made
a fire as an offering to their gods; and were reputed neither vigorous
nor chaste, if by the force of that cruel pain they seemed to be at all
dismayed.  Elsewhere the most sacred magistrate was reverenced and
acknowledged by that member and in several ceremonies the effigy of it
was carried in pomp to the honour of various divinities.  The Egyptian
ladies, in their Bacchanalia, each carried one finely-carved of wood
about their necks, as large and heavy as she could so carry it; besides
which, the statue of their god presented one, which in greatness
surpassed all the rest of his body.--[Herodotus, ii.  48, says “nearly
as large as the body itself.”]--The married women, near the place where
I live, make of their kerchiefs the figure of one upon their foreheads,
to glorify themselves in the enjoyment they have of it; and coming to be
widows, they throw it behind, and cover it with their headcloths.  The
most modest matrons of Rome thought it an honour to offer flowers and
garlands to the god Priapus; and they made the virgins, at the time of
their espousals, sit upon his shameful parts.  And I know not whether I
have not in my time seen some air of like devotion.  What was the meaning
of that ridiculous piece of the chaussuye of our forefathers, and that is
still worn by our Swiss? [“Cod-pieces worn”--Cotton]--To what end do we
make a show of our implements in figure under our breeches, and often,
which is worse, above their natural size, by falsehood and imposture?
I have half a mind to believe that this sort of vestment was invented in
the better and more conscientious ages, that the world might not be
deceived, and that every one should give a public account of his
proportions: the simple nations wear them yet, and near about the real
size.  In those days, the tailor took measure of it, as the shoemaker
does now of a man’s foot.  That good man, who, when I was young, gelded
so many noble and ancient statues in his great city, that they might not
corrupt the sight of the ladies, according to the advice of this other
ancient worthy:

          “Flagitii principium est, nudare inter gives corpora,”

     [“‘Tis the beginning of wickedness to expose their persons among the
     citizens”--Ennius, ap. Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 33.]

should have called to mind, that, as in the mysteries of the Bona Dea,
all masculine appearance was excluded, he did nothing, if he did not geld
horses and asses, in short, all nature:

         “Omne adeo genus in terris, hominumque, ferarumque,
          Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,
          In furias ignemque ruunt.”

          [“So that all living things, men and animals, wild or tame,
          and fish and gaudy fowl, rush to this flame of love.”
           --Virgil, Georg., iii. 244.]

The gods, says Plato, have given us one disobedient and unruly member
that, like a furious animal, attempts, by the violence of its appetite,
to subject all things to it; and so they have given to women one like a
greedy and ravenous animal, which, if it be refused food in season, grows
wild, impatient of delay, and infusing its rage into their bodies, stops
the passages, and hinders respiration, causing a thousand ills, till,
having imbibed the fruit of the common thirst, it has plentifully bedewed
the bottom of their matrix.  Now my legislator--[The Pope who, as
Montaigne has told us, took it into his head to geld the statues.]--
should also have considered that, peradventure, it were a chaster and
more fruitful usage to let them know the fact as it is betimes, than
permit them to guess according to the liberty and heat of their own
fancy; instead of the real parts they substitute, through hope and
desire, others that are three times more extravagant; and a certain
friend of mine lost himself by producing his in place and time when the
opportunity was not present to put them to their more serious use.  What
mischief do not those pictures of prodigious dimension do that the boys
make upon the staircases and galleries of the royal houses? they give the
ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture.  And what do we know
but that Plato, after other well-instituted republics, ordered that the
men and women, old and young, should expose themselves naked to the view
of one another, in his gymnastic exercises, upon that very account?  The
Indian women who see the men in their natural state, have at least cooled
the sense of seeing.  And let the women of the kingdom of Pegu say what
they will, who below the waist have nothing to cover them but a cloth
slit before, and so strait, that what decency and modesty soever they
pretend by it, at every step all is to be seen, that it is an invention
to allure the men to them, and to divert them from boys, to whom that
nation is generally inclined; yet, peradventure they lose more by it than
they get, and one may venture to say, that an entire appetite is more
sharp than one already half-glutted by the eyes.  Livia was wont to say,
that to a virtuous woman a naked man was but a statue.  The Lacedaemonian
women, more virgins when wives than our daughters are, saw every day the
young men of their city stripped naked in their exercises, themselves
little heeding to cover their thighs in walking, believing themselves,
says Plato, sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe.
But those, of whom St. Augustin speaks, have given nudity a wonderful
power of temptation, who have made it a doubt, whether women at the day
of judgment shall rise again in their own sex, and not rather in ours,
for fear of tempting us again in that holy state.  In brief, we allure
and flesh them by all sorts of ways: we incessantly heat and stir up
their imagination, and then we find fault.  Let us confess the truth;
there is scarce one of us who does not more apprehend the shame that
accrues to him by the vices of his wife than by his own, and that is not
more solicitous (a wonderful charity) of the conscience of his virtuous
wife than of his own; who had not rather commit theft and sacrilege, and
that his wife was a murderess and a heretic, than that she should not be
more chaste than her husband: an unjust estimate of vices.  Both we and
they are capable of a thousand corruptions more prejudicial and unnatural
than lust: but we weigh vices, not according to nature, but according to
our interest; by which means they take so many unequal forms.

The austerity of our decrees renders the application of women to this
vice more violent and vicious than its own condition needs, and engages
it in consequences worse than their cause: they will readily offer to go
to the law courts to seek for gain, and to the wars to get reputation,
rather than in the midst of ease and delights, to have to keep so
difficult a guard.  Do not they very well see that there is neither
merchant nor soldier who will not leave his business to run after this
sport, or the porter or cobbler, toiled and tired out as they are with
labour and hunger?

                   “Num tu, qux tenuit dives Achaemenes,
                    Aut pinguis Phrygiae Mygdonias opes,
                    Permutare velis crine Licymnim?
                    Plenas aut Arabum domos,
                    Dum fragrantia detorquet ad oscula
                    Cervicem, aut facili sxvitia negat,
                    Quae poscente magis gaudeat eripi,
                    Interdum rapere occupet?”

     [“Wouldst thou not exchange all that the wealthy Arhaemenes had,
     or the Mygdonian riches of fertile Phrygia, for one ringlet of
     Licymnia’s hair?  or the treasures of the Arabians, when she turns
     her head to you for fragrant kisses, or with easily assuaged anger
     denies them, which she would rather by far you took by force, and
     sometimes herself snatches one!”--Horace, Od., ii. 12, 21.]

I do not know whether the exploits of Alexander and Caesar really surpass
the resolution of a beautiful young woman, bred up after our fashion, in
the light and commerce of the world, assailed by so many contrary
examples, and yet keeping herself entire in the midst of a thousand
continual and powerful solicitations.  There is no doing more difficult
than that not doing, nor more active:

I hold it more easy to carry a suit of armour all the days of one’s life
than a maidenhead; and the vow of virginity of all others is the most
noble, as being the hardest to keep:

               “Diaboli virtus in lumbis est,”

says St.  Jerome.  We have, doubtless, resigned to the ladies the most
difficult and most vigorous of all human endeavours, and let us resign to
them the glory too.  This ought to encourage them to be obstinate in it;
‘tis a brave thing for them to defy us, and to spurn under foot that vain
pre-eminence of valour and virtue that we pretend to have over them; they
will find if they do but observe it, that they will not only be much more
esteemed for it, but also much more beloved.  A gallant man does not give
over his pursuit for being refused, provided it be a refusal of chastity,
and not of choice; we may swear, threaten, and complain to much purpose;
we therein do but lie, for we love them all the better: there is no
allurement like modesty, if it be not rude and crabbed.  ‘Tis stupidity
and meanness to be obstinate against hatred and disdain; but against a
virtuous and constant resolution, mixed with goodwill, ‘tis the exercise
of a noble and generous soul.  They may acknowledge our service to a
certain degree, and give us civilly to understand that they disdain us
not; for the law that enjoins them to abominate us because we adore them,
and to hate us because we love them, is certainly very cruel, if but for
the difficulty of it.  Why should they not give ear to our offers and
requests, so long as they are kept within the bounds of modesty?
wherefore should we fancy them to have other thoughts within, and to be
worse than they seem?  A queen of our time said with spirit, “that to
refuse these courtesies is a testimony of weakness in women and a
self-accusation of facility, and that a lady could not boast of her
chastity who was never tempted.”

The limits of honour are not cut so short; they may give themselves a
little rein, and relax a little without being faulty: there lies on the
frontier some space free, indifferent, and neuter.  He that has beaten
and pursued her into her fort is a strange fellow if he be not satisfied
with his fortune: the price of the conquest is considered by the
difficulty.  Would you know what impression your service and merit have
made in her heart?  Judge of it by her behaviour.  Such an one may grant
more, who does not grant so much.  The obligation of a benefit wholly
relates to the good will of those who confer it: the other coincident
circumstances are dumb, dead, and casual; it costs her dearer to grant
you that little, than it would do her companion to grant all.  If in
anything rarity give estimation, it ought especially in this: do not
consider how little it is that is given, but how few have it to give;
the value of money alters according to the coinage and stamp of the
place.  Whatever the spite and indiscretion of some may make them say in
the excess of their discontent, virtue and truth will in time recover all
the advantage.  I have known some whose reputation has for a great while
suffered under slander, who have afterwards been restored to the world’s
universal approbation by their mere constancy without care or artifice;
every one repents, and gives himself the lie for what he has believed and
said; and from girls a little suspected they have been afterward advanced
to the first rank amongst the ladies of honour.  Somebody told Plato that
all the world spoke ill of him.  “Let them talk,” said he; “I will live
so as to make them change their note.”  Besides the fear of God, and the
value of so rare a glory, which ought to make them look to themselves,
the corruption of the age we live in compels them to it; and if I were
they, there is nothing I would not rather do than intrust my reputation
in so dangerous hands.  In my time the pleasure of telling (a pleasure
little inferior to that of doing) was not permitted but to those who had
some faithful and only friend; but now the ordinary discourse and common
table-talk is nothing but boasts of favours received and the secret
liberality of ladies.  In earnest, ‘tis too abject, too much meanness of
spirit, in men to suffer such ungrateful, indiscreet, and giddy-headed
people so to persecute, forage, and rifle those tender and charming
favours.

This our immoderate and illegitimate exasperation against this vice
springs from the most vain and turbulent disease that afflicts human
minds, which is jealousy:

              “Quis vetat apposito lumen de lumine sumi?
               Dent licet assidue, nil tamen inde perit;”

     [“Who says that one light should not be lighted from another light?
     Let them give ever so much, as much ever remains to lose.”--Ovid, De
     Arte Amandi, iii. 93.  The measure of the last line is not good;
     but the words are taken from the epigram in the Catalecta entitled
     Priapus.]

she, and envy, her sister, seem to me to be the most foolish of the whole
troop.  As to the last, I can say little about it; ‘tis a passion that,
though said to be so mighty and powerful, had never to do with me.  As to
the other, I know it by sight, and that’s all.  Beasts feel it; the
shepherd Cratis, having fallen in love with a she-goat, the he-goat, out
of jealousy, came, as he lay asleep, to butt the head of the female, and
crushed it.  We have raised this fever to a greater excess by the
examples of some barbarous nations; the best disciplined have been
touched with it, and ‘tis reason, but not transported:

              “Ense maritali nemo confossus adulter
               Purpureo Stygias sanguine tinxit aquas.”

               [“Never did adulterer slain by a husband
               stain with purple blood the Stygian waters.”]

Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato, and other brave men were
cuckolds, and knew it, without making any bustle about it; there was in
those days but one coxcomb, Lepidus, that died for grief that his wife
had used him so.

              “Ah! tum te miserum malique fati,
               Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta,
               Percurrent raphanique mugilesque:”

     [“Wretched man!  when, taken in the fact, thou wilt be
     dragged out of doors by the heels, and suffer the punishment
     of thy adultery.”--Catullus, xv. 17.]

and the god of our poet, when he surprised one of his companions with his
wife, satisfied himself by putting them to shame only,

               “Atque aliquis de dis non tristibus optat
               Sic fieri turpis:”

          [“And one of the merry gods wishes that he should himself
          like to be so disgraced.”--Ovid, Metam., iv. 187.]

and nevertheless took anger at the lukewarm embraces she gave him;
complaining that upon that account she was grown jealous of his
affection:

               “Quid causas petis ex alto? fiducia cessit
               Quo tibi, diva, mei?”

     [“Dost thou seek causes from above?  Why, goddess, has your
     confidence in me ceased?”--Virgil, AEneid, viii. 395.]

nay, she entreats arms for a bastard of hers,

                    “Arena rogo genitrix nato.”

          [“I, a mother, ask armour for a son.”--Idem, ibid., 383.]

which are freely granted; and Vulcan speaks honourably of AEneas,

                    “Arma acri facienda viro,”

     [“Arms are to be made for a valiant hero.”--AEneid, viii. 441.]

with, in truth, a more than human humanity.  And I am willing to leave
this excess of kindness to the gods:

               “Nec divis homines componier aequum est.”

          [“Nor is it fit to compare men with gods.”
           --Catullus, lxviii. 141.]

As to the confusion of children, besides that the gravest legislators
ordain and affect it in their republics, it touches not the women, where
this passion is, I know not how, much better seated:

               “Saepe etiam Juno, maxima coelicolam,
               Conjugis in culpa flagravit quotidiana.”

     [“Often was Juno, greatest of the heaven-dwellers, enraged by her
     husband’s daily infidelities.”--Idem, ibid.]

When jealousy seizes these poor souls, weak and incapable of resistance,
‘tis pity to see how miserably it torments and tyrannises over them; it
insinuates itself into them under the title of friendship, but after it
has once possessed them, the same causes that served for a foundation of
good-will serve them for a foundation of mortal hatred.  ‘Tis, of all the
diseases of the mind, that which the most things serve for aliment and
the fewest for remedy: the virtue, health, merit, reputation of the
husband are incendiaries of their fury and ill-will:

          “Nullae sunt inimicitiae, nisi amoris, acerbae.”

          [“No enmities are bitter, save that of love.”
           (Or:) “No hate is implacable except the hatred of love”
           --Propertius, ii. 8, 3.]

This fever defaces and corrupts all they have of beautiful and good
besides; and there is no action of a jealous woman, let her be how chaste
and how good a housewife soever, that does not relish of anger and
wrangling; ‘tis a furious agitation, that rebounds them to an extremity
quite contrary to its cause.  This held good with one Octavius at Rome.
Having lain with Pontia Posthumia, he augmented love with fruition, and
solicited with all importunity to marry her: unable to persuade her, this
excessive affection precipitated him to the effects of the most cruel and
mortal hatred: he killed her.  In like manner, the ordinary symptoms of
this other amorous disease are intestine hatreds, private conspiracies,
and cabals:

               “Notumque furens quid faemina possit,”

     [“And it is known what an angry woman is capable of doing.”
      --AEneid, V. 21.]

and a rage which so much the more frets itself, as it is compelled to
excuse itself by a pretence of good-will.

Now, the duty of chastity is of a vast extent; is it the will that we
would have them restrain?  This is a very supple and active thing; a
thing very nimble, to be stayed.  How? if dreams sometimes engage them so
far that they cannot deny them: it is not in them, nor, peradventure, in
chastity itself, seeing that is a female, to defend itself from lust and
desire.  If we are only to trust to their will, what a case are we in,
then?  Do but imagine what crowding there would be amongst men in
pursuance of the privilege to run full speed, without tongue or eyes,
into every woman’s arms who would accept them.  The Scythian women put
out the eyes of all their slaves and prisoners of war, that they might
have their pleasure of them, and they never the wiser.  O, the furious
advantage of opportunity!  Should any one ask me, what was the first
thing to be considered in love matters, I should answer that it was how
to take a fitting time; and so the second; and so the third--‘tis a point
that can do everything.  I have sometimes wanted fortune, but I have also
sometimes been wanting to myself in matters of attempt.  God help him,
who yet makes light of this!  There is greater temerity required in this
age of ours, which our young men excuse under the name of heat; but
should women examine it more strictly, they would find that it rather
proceeds from contempt.  I was always superstitiously afraid of giving
offence, and have ever had a great respect for her I loved: besides, he
who in this traffic takes away the reverence, defaces at the same time
the lustre.  I would in this affair have a man a little play the child,
the timorous, and the servant.  If not this, I have in other bashfulness
whereof altogether in things some air of the foolish Plutarch makes
mention; and the course of my life has been divers ways hurt and
blemished with it; a quality very ill suiting my universal form: and,
indeed, what are we but sedition and discrepancy?  I am as much out of
countenance to be denied as I am to deny; and it so much troubles me to
be troublesome to others that on occasion when duty compels me to try the
good-will of any one in a thing that is doubtful and that will be
chargeable to him, I do it very faintly, and very much against my will:
but if it be for my own particular (whatever Homer truly says, that
modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person), I commonly commit it
to a third person to blush for me, and deny those who employ me with the
same difficulty: so that it has sometimes befallen me to have had a mind
to deny, when I had not the power to do it.

‘Tis folly, then, to attempt to bridle in women a desire that is so
powerful in them, and so natural to them.  And when I hear them brag of
having so maidenly and so temperate a will, I laugh at them: they retire
too far back.  If it be an old toothless trot, or a young dry consumptive
thing, though it be not altogether to be believed, at least they say it
with more similitude of truth.  But they who still move and breathe, talk
at that ridiculous rate to their own prejudice, by reason that
inconsiderate excuses are a kind of self-accusation; like a gentleman, a
neighbour of mine, suspected to be insufficient:

              “Languidior tenera cui pendens sicula beta,
               Numquam se mediam sustulit ad tunicam,”

          [Catullus, lxvii. 2, i.--The sense is in the context.]

who three or four days after he was married, to justify himself, went
about boldly swearing that he had ridden twenty stages the night before:
an oath that was afterwards made use of to convict him of his ignorance
in that affair, and to divorce him from his wife.  Besides, it signifies
nothing, for there is neither continency nor virtue where there are no
opposing desires.  It is true, they may say, but we will not yield;
saints themselves speak after that manner.  I mean those who boast in
good gravity of their coldness and insensibility, and who expect to be
believed with a serious countenance; for when ‘tis spoken with an
affected look, when their eyes give the lie to their tongue, and when
they talk in the cant of their profession, which always goes against the
hair, ‘tis good sport.  I am a great servant of liberty and plainness;
but there is no remedy; if it be not wholly simple or childish, ‘tis
silly, and unbecoming ladies in this commerce, and presently runs into
impudence.  Their disguises and figures only serve to cosen fools; lying
is there in its seat of honour; ‘tis a by-way, that by a back-door leads
us to truth.  If we cannot curb their imagination, what would we have
from them.  Effects?  There are enough of them that evade all foreign
communication, by which chastity may be corrupted:

               “Illud saepe facit, quod sine teste facit;”

          [“He often does that which he does without a witness.”
           --Martial, vii. 62, 6.]

and those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be feared;
their sins that make the least noise are the worst:

               “Offendor maecha simpliciore minus.”

          [“I am less offended with a more professed strumpet.”
           --Idem, vi. 7,6.]

There are ways by which they may lose their virginity without
prostitution, and, which is more, without their knowledge:

     “Obsterix, virginis cujusdam integritatem manu velut explorans, sive
     malevolentia, sive inscitia, sive casu, dum inspicit, perdidit.”

     [“By malevolence, or unskilfulness, or accident, the midwife,
     seeking with the hand to test some maiden’s virginity, has sometimes
     destroyed it.”--St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, i. 18.]

Such a one, by seeking her maidenhead, has lost it; another by playing
with it has destroyed it.  We cannot precisely circumscribe the actions,
we interdict them; they must guess at our meaning under general and
doubtful terms; the very idea we invent for their chastity is ridiculous:
for, amongst the greatest patterns that I have is Fatua, the wife of
Faunus: who never, after her marriage, suffered herself to be seen by any
man whatever; and the wife of Hiero, who never perceived her husband’s
stinking breath, imagining that it was common to all men.  They must
become insensible and invisible to satisfy us.

Now let us confess that the knot of this judgment of duty principally
lies in the will; there have been husbands who have suffered cuckoldom,
not only without reproach or taking offence at their wives, but with
singular obligation to them and great commendation of their virtue.
Such a woman has been, who prized her honour above her life, and yet has
prostituted it to the furious lust of a mortal enemy, to save her
husband’s life, and who, in so doing, did that for him she would not have
done for herself!  This is not the place wherein we are to multiply these
examples; they are too high and rich to be set off with so poor a foil as
I can give them here; let us reserve them for a nobler place; but for
examples of ordinary lustre, do we not every day see women amongst us who
surrender themselves for their husbands sole benefit, and by their
express order and mediation? and, of old, Phaulius the Argian, who
offered his to King Philip out of ambition; as Galba did it out of
civility, who, having entertained Maecenas at supper, and observing that
his wife and he began to cast glances at one another and to make eyes and
signs, let himself sink down upon his cushion, like one in a profound
sleep, to give opportunity to their desires: which he handsomely
confessed, for thereupon a servant having made bold to lay hands on the
plate upon the table, he frankly cried, “What, you rogue? do you not see
that I only sleep for Maecenas?” Such there may be, whose manners may be
lewd enough, whose will may be more reformed than another, who outwardly
carries herself after a more regular manner.  As we see some who complain
of having vowed chastity before they knew what they did; and I have also
known others really, complain of having been given up to debauchery
before they were of the years of discretion.  The vice of the parents or
the impulse of nature, which is a rough counsellor, may be the cause.

In the East Indies, though chastity is of singular reputation, yet custom
permitted a married woman to prostitute herself to any one who presented
her with an elephant, and that with glory, to have been valued at so high
a rate.  Phaedo the philosopher, a man of birth, after the taking of his
country Elis, made it his trade to prostitute the beauty of his youth, so
long as it lasted, to any one that would, for money thereby to gain his
living: and Solon was the first in Greece, ‘tis said, who by his laws
gave liberty to women, at the expense of their chastity, to provide for
the necessities of life; a custom that Herodotus says had been received
in many governments before his time.  And besides, what fruit is there of
this painful solicitude?  For what justice soever there is in this
passion, we are yet to consider whether it turns to account or no: does
any one think to curb them, with all his industry?

         “Pone seram; cohibe: sed quis custodiet ipsos
          Custodes?  cauta est, et ab illis incipit uxor.”

     [“Put on a lock; shut them up under a guard; but who shall guard
     the guard?  she knows what she is about, and begins with them.”
      --Juvenal, vi. 346.]

What commodity will not serve their turn, in so knowing an age?

Curiosity is vicious throughout; but ‘tis pernicious here.  ‘Tis folly to
examine into a disease for which there is no physic that does not inflame
and make it worse; of which the shame grows still greater and more public
by jealousy, and of which the revenge more wounds our children than it
heals us.  You wither and die in the search of so obscure a proof.  How
miserably have they of my time arrived at that knowledge who have been so
unhappy as to have found it out?  If the informer does not at the same
time apply a remedy and bring relief, ‘tis an injurious information, and
that better deserves a stab than the lie.  We no less laugh at him who
takes pains to prevent it, than at him who is a cuckold and knows it not.
The character of cuckold is indelible: who once has it carries it to his
grave; the punishment proclaims it more than the fault.  It is to much
purpose to drag out of obscurity and doubt our private misfortunes,
thence to expose them on tragic scaffolds; and misfortunes that only hurt
us by being known; for we say a good wife or a happy marriage, not that
they are really so, but because no one says to the contrary.  Men should
be so discreet as to evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge:
and the Romans had a custom, when returning from any expedition, to send
home before to acquaint their wives with their coming, that they might
not surprise them; and to this purpose it is that a certain nation has
introduced a custom, that the priest shall on the wedding-day open the
way to the bride, to free the husband from the doubt and curiosity of
examining in the first assault, whether she comes a virgin to his bed, or
has been at the trade before.

But the world will be talking.  I know, a hundred honest men cuckolds,
honestly and not unbeseemingly; a worthy man is pitied, not disesteemed
for it.  Order it so that your virtue may conquer your misfortune; that
good men may curse the occasion, and that he who wrongs you may tremble
but to think on’t.  And, moreover, who escapes being talked of at the
same rate, from the least even to the greatest?

                    “Tot qui legionibus imperitivit
          Et melior quam to multis fuit, improbe, rebus.”

     [“Many who have commanded legions, many a man much better far than
     you, you rascal.”--Lucretius, iii. 1039, 1041.]

Seest thou how many honest men are reproached with this in thy presence;
believe that thou art no more spared elsewhere.  But, the very ladies
will be laughing too; and what are they so apt to laugh at in this
virtuous age of ours as at a peaceable and well-composed marriage?  Each
amongst you has made somebody cuckold; and nature runs much in parallel,
in compensation, and turn for turn.  The frequency of this accident ought
long since to have made it more easy; ‘tis now passed into custom.

Miserable passion! which has this also, that it is incommunicable,

          “Fors etiam nostris invidit questibus aures;”

          [“Fortune also refuses ear to our complaints.”
           --Catullus, lxvii.]

for to what friend dare you intrust your griefs, who, if he does not
laugh at them, will not make use of the occasion to get a share of the
quarry?  The sharps, as well as the sweets of marriage, are kept secret
by the wise; and amongst its other troublesome conditions this to a
prating fellow, as I am, is one of the chief, that custom has rendered it
indecent and prejudicial to communicate to any one all that a man knows
and all that a man feels.  To give women the same counsel against
jealousy would be so much time lost; their very being is so made up of
suspicion, vanity, and curiosity, that to cure them by any legitimate way
is not to be hoped.  They often recover of this infirmity by a form of
health much more to be feared than the disease itself; for as there are
enchantments that cannot take away the evil but by throwing it upon
another, they also willingly transfer this ever to their husbands, when
they shake it off themselves.  And yet I know not, to speak truth,
whether a man can suffer worse from them than their jealousy; ‘tis the
most dangerous of all their conditions, as the head is of all their
members.  Pittacus used to say,--[Plutarch, On Contentment, c. II.]--
that every one had his trouble, and that his was the jealous head of his
wife; but for which he should think himself perfectly happy.  A mighty
inconvenience, sure, which could poison the whole life of so just, so
wise, and so valiant a man; what must we other little fellows do?  The
senate of Marseilles had reason to grant him his request who begged leave
to kill himself that he might be delivered from the clamour of his wife;
for ‘tis a mischief that is never removed but by removing the whole
piece; and that has no remedy but flight or patience, though both of them
very hard.  He was, methinks, an understanding fellow who said, ‘twas a
happy marriage betwixt a blind wife and a deaf husband.

Let us also consider whether the great and violent severity of obligation
we enjoin them does not produce two effects contrary to our design
namely, whether it does not render the pursuants more eager to attack,
and the women more easy to yield.  For as to the first, by raising the
value of the place, we raise the value and the desire of the conquest.
Might it not be Venus herself, who so cunningly enhanced the price of her
merchandise, by making the laws her bawds; knowing how insipid a delight
it would be that was not heightened by fancy and hardness to achieve?
In short, ‘tis all swine’s flesh, varied by sauces, as Flaminius’ host
said.  Cupid is a roguish god, who makes it his sport to contend with
devotion and justice: ‘tis his glory that his power mates all powers, and
that all other rules give place to his:

               “Materiam culpae prosequiturque suae.”

               [“And seeks out a matter (motive) for his crimes.”
                --Ovid, Trist., iv. I. 34.]

As to the second point; should we not be less cuckolds, if we less feared
to be so? according to the humour of women whom interdiction incites, and
who are more eager, being forbidden:

              “Ubi velis, nolunt; ubi nolis, volunt ultro;
               Concessa pudet ire via.”

     [“Where thou wilt, they won’t; where thou wilt not, they
     spontaneously agree; they are ashamed to go in the permitted path.”
      --Terence, Eunuchus, act iv., sc. 8, v  43]

What better interpretation can we make of Messalina’s behaviour?  She,
at first, made her husband a cuckold in private, as is the common use;
but, bringing her business about with too much ease, by reason of her
husband’s stupidity, she soon scorned that way, and presently fell to
making open love, to own her lovers, and to favour and entertain them in
the sight of all: she would make him know and see how she used him.  This
animal, not to be roused with all this, and rendering her pleasures dull
and flat by his too stupid facility, by which he seemed to authorise and
make them lawful; what does she?  Being the wife of a living and
healthful emperor, and at Rome, the theatre of the world, in the face of
the sun, and with solemn ceremony, and to Silius, who had long before
enjoyed her, she publicly marries herself one day that her husband was
gone out of the city.  Does it not seem as if she was going to become
chaste by her husband’s negligence? or that she sought another husband
who might sharpen her appetite by his jealousy, and who by watching
should incite her?  But the first difficulty she met with was also the
last: this beast suddenly roused these sleepy, sluggish sort of men are
often the most dangerous: I have found by experience that this extreme
toleration, when it comes to dissolve, produces the most severe revenge;
for taking fire on a sudden, anger and fury being combined in one,
discharge their utmost force at the first onset,

               “Irarumque omnes effundit habenas:”

          [“He let loose his whole  fury.”--AEneid, xii. 499.]

he put her to death, and with her a great number of those with whom she
had intelligence, and even one of them who could not help it, and whom
she had caused to be forced to her bed with scourges.

What Virgil says of Venus and Vulcan, Lucretius had better expressed of a
stolen enjoyment betwixt her and Mars:

              “Belli fera moenera Mavors
               Armipotens regit, ingremium qui saepe tuum se
               Rejictt, aeterno devinctus vulnere amoris
                    ............................
               Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, Dea, visus,
               Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore
               Hunc tu, Diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto
               Circumfusa super, suaveis ex ore loquelas
               Funde.”

     [“Mars, the god of wars, who controls the cruel tasks of war, often
     reclines on thy bosom, and greedily drinks love at both his eyes,
     vanquished by the eternal wound of love: and his breath, as he
     reclines, hangs on thy lips; bending thy head over him as he lies
     upon thy sacred person, pour forth sweet and persuasive words.”
      --Lucretius, i. 23.]

When I consider this rejicit, fiascit, inhians, ynolli, fovet, medullas,
labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and that noble circumfusa, mother of the
pretty infuses; I disdain those little quibbles and verbal allusions that
have since sprung up.  Those worthy people stood in need of no subtlety
to disguise their meaning; their language is downright, and full of
natural and continued vigour; they are all epigram; not only the tail,
but the head, body, and feet.  There is nothing forced, nothing
languishing, but everything keeps the same pace:

     “Contextus totes virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.”

     [“The whole contexture is manly; they don’t occupy themselves with
     little flowers of rhetoric.”--Seneca, Ep., 33.]

‘Tis not a soft eloquence, and without offence only; ‘tis nervous and
solid, that does not so much please, as it fills and ravishes the
greatest minds.  When I see these brave forms of expression, so lively,
so profound, I do not say that ‘tis well said, but well thought.  ‘Tis
the sprightliness of the imagination that swells and elevates the words:

                    “Pectus est quod disertum Tacit.”

          [“The heart makes the man eloquent.”--Quintilian, x. 7.]

Our people call language, judgment, and fine words, full conceptions.
This painting is not so much carried on by dexterity of hand as by having
the object more vividly imprinted in the soul.  Gallus speaks simply
because he conceives simply: Horace does not content himself with a
superficial expression; that would betray him; he sees farther and more
clearly into things; his mind breaks into and rummages all the magazine
of words and figures wherewith to express himself, and he must have them
more than ordinary, because his conception is so.  Plutarch says’ that he
sees the Latin tongue by the things: ‘tis here the same: the sense
illuminates and produces the words, no more words of air, but of flesh
and bone; they signify more than they say.  Moreover, those who are not
well skilled in a language present some image of this; for in Italy I
said whatever I had a mind to in common discourse, but in more serious
talk, I durst not have trusted myself with an idiom that I could not wind
and turn out of its ordinary pace; I would have a power of introducing
something of my own.

The handling and utterance of fine wits is that which sets off language;
not so much by innovating it, as by putting it to more vigorous and
various services, and by straining, bending, and adapting it to them.
They do not create words, but they enrich their own, and give them weight
and signification by the uses they put them to, and teach them unwonted
motions, but withal ingeniously and discreetly.  And how little this
talent is given to all is manifest by the many French scribblers of this
age: they are bold and proud enough not to follow the common road, but
want of invention and discretion ruins them; there is nothing seen in
their writings but a wretched affectation of a strange new style, with
cold and absurd disguises, which, instead of elevating, depress the
matter: provided they can but trick themselves out with new words, they
care not what they signify; and to bring in a new word by the head and
shoulders, they leave the old one, very often more sinewy and significant
than the other.

There is stuff enough in our language, but there is a defect in cutting
out: for there is nothing that might not be made out of our terms of
hunting and war, which is a fruitful soil to borrow from; and forms of
speaking, like herbs, improve and grow stronger by being transplanted.
I find it sufficiently abundant, but not sufficiently pliable and
vigorous; it commonly quails under a powerful conception; if you would
maintain the dignity of your style, you will often perceive it to flag
and languish under you, and there Latin steps in to its relief, as Greek
does to others.  Of some of these words I have just picked out we do not
so easily discern the energy, by reason that the frequent use of them has
in some sort abased their beauty, and rendered it common; as in our
ordinary language there are many excellent phrases and metaphors to be
met with, of which the beauty is withered by age, and the colour is
sullied by too common handling; but that nothing lessens the relish to an
understanding man, nor does it derogate from the glory of those ancient
authors who, ‘tis likely, first brought those words into that lustre.

The sciences treat of things too refinedly, after an artificial, very
different from the common and natural, way.  My page makes love, and
understands it; but read to him Leo Hebraeus--[Leo the Jew, Ficinus,
Cardinal Bembo, and Mario Equicola all wrote Treatises on Love.]--
and Ficinus, where they speak of love, its thoughts and actions, he
understands it not.  I do not find in Aristotle most of my ordinary
motions; they are there covered and disguised in another robe for the use
of the schools.  Good speed them! were I of the trade, I would as much
naturalise art as they artificialise nature.  Let us let Bembo and
Equicola alone.

When I write, I can very well spare both the company and the remembrance
of books, lest they should interrupt my progress; and also, in truth, the
best authors too much humble and discourage me: I am very much of the
painter’s mind, who, having represented cocks most wretchedly ill,
charged all his boys not to suffer any natural cock to come into his
shop; and had rather need to give myself a little lustre, of the
invention of Antigenides the musician, who, when he was asked to sing or
play, took care beforehand that the auditory should, either before or
after, be satiated with some other ill musicians.  But I can hardly be
without Plutarch; he is so universal and so full, that upon all
occasions, and what extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will
still be at your elbow, and hold out to you a liberal and not to be
exhausted hand of riches and embellishments.  It vexes me that he is so
exposed to be the spoil of those who are conversant with him: I can
scarce cast an eye upon him but I purloin either a leg or a wing.

And also for this design of mine ‘tis convenient for me for me to write
at home, in a wild country, where I have nobody to assist or relieve me;
where I hardly see a man who understands the Latin of his Paternoster,
and of French a little less.  I might have made it better elsewhere, but
then the work would have been less my own; and its principal end and
perfection is to be exactly mine.  I readily correct an accidental error,
of which I am full, as I run carelessly on; but for my ordinary and
constant imperfections, it were a kind of treason to put them out.  When
another tells me, or that I say to myself, “Thou art too thick of
figures: this is a word of rough Gascon: that is a dangerous phrase (I do
not reject any of those that are used in the common streets of France;
they who would fight custom with grammar are triflers): this is an
ignorant discourse: this is a paradoxical discourse: that is going too
far: thou makest thyself too merry at times: men will think thou sayest a
thing in good earnest which thou only speakest in jest.”--“Yes, I know,
but I correct the faults of inadvertence, not those of custom.  Do I not
talk at the same rate throughout?  Do I not represent myself to the life?
‘Tis enough that I have done what I designed; all the world knows me in
my book, and my book in me.”

Now I have an apish, imitative quality: when I used to write verses (and
I never made any but Latin), they evidently discovered the poet I had
last read, and some of my first essays have a little exotic taste: I
speak something another kind of language at Paris than I do at Montaigne.
Whoever I steadfastly look upon easily leaves some impression of his upon
me; whatever I consider I usurp, whether a foolish countenance, a
disagreeable look, or a ridiculous way of speaking; and vices most of
all, because they seize and stick to me, and will not leave hold without
shaking.  I swear more by imitation than by complexion: a murderous
imitation, like that of the apes so terrible both in stature and
strength, that Alexander met with in a certain country of the Indies, and
which he would have had much ado any other way to have subdued; but they
afforded him the means by that inclination of theirs to imitate whatever
they saw done; for by that the hunters were taught to put on shoes in
their sight, and to tie them fast with many knots, and to muffle up their
heads in caps all composed of running nooses, and to seem to anoint their
eyes with glue; so did those poor beasts employ their imitation to their
own ruin they glued up their own eyes, haltered and bound themselves.
The other faculty of playing the mimic, and ingeniously acting the words
and gestures of another, purposely to make people merry and to raise
their admiration, is no more in me than in a stock.  When I swear my own
oath, ‘tis only, by God! of all oaths the most direct.  They say that
Socrates swore by the dog; Zeno had for his oath the same interjection at
this time in use amongst the Italians, Cappari!  Pythagoras swore By
water and air.  I am so apt, without thinking of it, to receive these
superficial impressions, that if I have Majesty or Highness in my mouth
three days together, they come out instead of Excellency and Lordship
eight days after; and what I say to-day in sport and fooling I shall say
the same to-morrow seriously.  Wherefore, in writing, I more unwillingly
undertake beaten arguments, lest I should handle them at another’s
expense.  Every subject is equally fertile to me: a fly will serve the
purpose, and ‘tis well if this I have in hand has not been undertaken at
the recommendation of as flighty a will.  I may begin, with that which
pleases me best, for the subjects are all linked to one another.

But my soul displeases me, in that it ordinarily produces its deepest and
most airy conceits and which please me best, when I least expect or study
for them, and which suddenly vanish, having at the instant, nothing to
apply them to; on horseback, at table, and in bed: but most on horseback,
where I am most given to think.  My speaking is a little nicely jealous
of silence and attention: if I am talking my best, whoever interrupts me,
stops me.  In travelling, the necessity of the way will often put a stop
to discourse; besides which I, for the most part, travel without company
fit for regular discourses, by which means I have all the leisure I would
to entertain myself.  It falls out as it does in my dreams; whilst
dreaming I recommend them to my memory (for I am apt to dream that I
dream), but, the next morning, I may represent to myself of what
complexion they were, whether gay, or sad, or strange, but what they
were, as to the rest, the more I endeavour to retrieve them, the deeper I
plunge them in oblivion.  So of thoughts that come accidentally into my
head, I have no more but a vain image remaining in my memory; only enough
to make me torment myself in their quest to no purpose.

Well, then, laying books aside, and more simply and materially speaking,
I find, after all, that Love is nothing else but the thirst of enjoying
the object desired, or Venus any other thing than the pleasure of
discharging one’s vessels, just as the pleasure nature gives in
discharging other parts, that either by immoderation or indiscretion
become vicious.  According to Socrates, love is the appetite of
generation by the mediation of beauty.  And when I consider the
ridiculous titillation of this pleasure, the absurd, crack-brained, wild
motions with which it inspires Zeno and Cratippus, the indiscreet rage,
the countenance inflamed with fury and cruelty in the sweetest effects of
love, and then that austere air, so grave, severe, ecstatic, in so wanton
an action; that our delights and our excrements are promiscuously
shuffled together; and that the supreme pleasure brings along with it, as
in pain, fainting and complaining; I believe it to be true, as Plato
says, that the gods made man for their sport:

                        “Quaenam ista jocandi
                         Saevitia!”

     [“With a sportive cruelty” (Or:) “What an unkindness there is in
     jesting!”--Claudian in Eutrop. i. 24.]

and that it was in mockery that nature has ordered the most agitative of
actions and the most common, to make us equal, and to put fools and wise
men, beasts and us, on a level.  Even the most contemplative and prudent
man, when I imagine him in this posture, I hold him an impudent fellow to
pretend to be prudent and contemplative; they are the peacocks’ feet that
abate his pride:

                         “Ridentem dicere verum
                         Quid vetat?”

          [“What prevents us from speaking truth with a smile?”
           --Horace, Sat., i. I, 24.]

They who banish serious imaginations from their sports, do, says one,
like him who dares not adore the statue of a saint, if not covered with a
veil.  We eat and drink, indeed, as beasts do; but these are not actions
that obstruct the functions of the soul, in these we maintain our
advantage over them; this other action subjects all other thought,
and by its imperious authority makes an ass of all Plato’s divinity and
philosophy; and yet there is no complaint of it.  In everything else a
man may keep some decorum, all other operations submit to the rules of
decency; this cannot so much as in imagination appear other than vicious
or ridiculous: find out, if you can, therein any serious and discreet
procedure.  Alexander said, that he chiefly knew himself to be mortal by
this act and sleeping; sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of
the soul; the familiarity with women likewise dissipates and exhausts
them: doubtless ‘tis a mark, not only of our original corruption, but
also of our vanity and deformity.

On the one side, nature pushes us on to it, having fixed the most noble,
useful, and pleasant of all her functions to this desire: and, on the
other side, leaves us to accuse and avoid it, as insolent and indecent,
to blush at it, and to recommend abstinence.  Are we not brutes to call
that work brutish which begets us?  People of so many differing religions
have concurred in several proprieties, as sacrifices, lamps, burning
incense, fasts, and offerings; and amongst others, in the condemning this
act: all opinions tend that way, besides the widespread custom of
circumcision, which may be regarded as a punishment.  We have,
peradventure, reason to blame ourselves for being guilty of so foolish
a production as man, and to call the act, and the parts that are employed
in the act, shameful (mine, truly, are now shameful and pitiful).  The
Essenians, of whom Pliny speaks, kept up their country for several ages
without either nurse or baby-clouts, by the arrival of strangers who,
following this pretty humour, came continually to them: a whole nation
being resolute, rather to hazard a total extermination, than to engage
themselves in female embraces, and rather to lose the succession of men,
than to beget one.  ‘Tis said, that Zeno never had to do with a woman but
once in his life, and then out of civility, that he might not seem too
obstinately to disdain the sex.

     [Diogenes Laertius, vii. 13.--What is there said, however, is that
     Zeno seldom had commerce with boys, lest he should be deemed a very
     misogynist.]

Every one avoids seeing a man born, every one runs to see him die; to
destroy him a spacious field is sought out in the face of the sun, but,
to make him, we creep into as dark and private a corner as we can: ‘tis a
man’s duty to withdraw himself bashfully from the light to create; but
‘tis glory and the fountain of many virtues to know how to destroy what
we have made: the one is injury, the other favour: for Aristotle says
that to do any one a kindness, in a certain phrase of his country, is to
kill him.  The Athenians, to couple the disgrace of these two actions,
having to purge the Isle of Delos, and to justify themselves to Apollo,
interdicted at once all births and burials in the precincts thereof:

                         “Nostri nosmet paenitet.”

          [“We are ashamed of ourselves.”--Terence, Phoymio, i. 3, 20.]

There are some nations that will not be seen to eat.  I know a lady, and
of the best quality, who has the same opinion, that chewing disfigures
the face, and takes away much from the ladies’ grace and beauty; and
therefore unwillingly appears at a public table with an appetite; and I
know a man also, who cannot endure to see another eat, nor himself to be
seen eating, and who is more shy of company when putting in than when
putting out.  In the Turkish empire, there are a great number of men who,
to excel others, never suffer themselves to be seen when they make their
repast: who never have any more than one a week; who cut and mangle their
faces and limbs; who never speak to any one: fanatic people who think to
honour their nature by disnaturing themselves; who value themselves upon
their contempt of themselves, and purport to grow better by being worse.
What monstrous animal is this, that is a horror to himself, to whom his
delights are grievous, and who weds himself to misfortune?  There are
people who conceal their life:

               “Exilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant,”

     [“And change for exile their homes and pleasant abodes.”
      --Virgil, Georg., ii. 511.]

and withdraw them from the sight of other men; who avoid health and
cheerfulness, as dangerous and prejudicial qualities.  Not only many
sects, but many peoples, curse their birth, and bless their death; and
there is a place where the sun is abominated and darkness adored.  We are
only ingenious in using ourselves ill: ‘tis the real quarry our
intellects fly at; and intellect, when misapplied, is a dangerous tool!

               “O miseri! quorum gaudia crimen habent!”

          [“O wretched men, whose pleasures are a crime!”
           --Pseudo Gallus, i. 180.]

Alas, poor man!  thou hast enough inconveniences that are inevitable,
without increasing them by throe own invention; and art miserable enough
by nature, without being so by art; thou hast real and essential
deformities enough, without forging those that are imaginary.  Dost thou
think thou art too much at ease unless half thy ease is uneasy?  dost
thou find that thou hast not performed all the necessary offices that
nature has enjoined thee, and that she is idle in thee, if thou dost not
oblige thyself to other and new offices?  Thou dost not stick to infringe
her universal and undoubted laws; but stickest to thy own special and
fantastic rules, and by how much more particular, uncertain, and
contradictory they are, by so much thou employest thy whole endeavour in
them: the laws of thy parish occupy and bind thee: those of God and the
world concern thee not.  Run but a little over the examples of this kind;
thy life is full of them.

Whilst the verses of these two poets, treat so reservedly and discreetly
of wantonness as they do, methinks they discover it much more openly.
Ladies cover their necks with network, priests cover several sacred
things, and painters shadow their pictures to give them greater lustre:
and ‘tis said that the sun and wind strike more violently by reflection
than in a direct line.  The Egyptian wisely answered him who asked him
what he had under his cloak, “It is hid under my cloak,” said he, “that
thou mayest not know what it is:” but there are certain other things that
people hide only to show them.  Hear that one, who speaks plainer,

               “Et nudum pressi corpus ad usque meum:”

          [“And pressed her naked body to mine” (Or:) “My body
          I applied even to her naked side”--Ovid, Amor., i. 5, 24.]

methinks that he emasculates me.  Let Martial turn up Venus as high as he
may, he cannot shew her so naked: he who says all that is to be said
gluts and disgusts us.  He who is afraid to express himself, draws us on
to guess at more than is meant; there is treachery in this sort of
modesty, and specially when they half open, as these do, so fair a path
to imagination.  Both the action and description should relish of theft.

The more respectful, more timorous, more coy, and secret love of the
Spaniards and Italians pleases me.  I know not who of old wished his
throat as long as that of a crane, that he might the longer taste what he
swallowed; it had been better wished as to this quick and precipitous
pleasure, especially in such natures as mine that have the fault of being
too prompt.  To stay its flight and delay it with preambles: all things
--a glance, a bow, a word, a sign, stand for favour and recompense betwixt
them.  Were it not an excellent piece of thrift in him who could dine on
the steam of the roast?  ‘Tis a passion that mixes with very little solid
essence, far more vanity and feverish raving; and we should serve and pay
it accordingly.  Let us teach the ladies to set a better value and esteem
upon themselves, to amuse and fool us: we give the last charge at the
first onset; the French impetuosity will still show itself; by spinning
out their favours, and exposing them in small parcels, even miserable old
age itself will find some little share of reward, according to its worth
and merit.  He who has no fruition but in fruition, who wins nothing
unless he sweeps the stakes, who takes no pleasure in the chase but in
the quarry, ought not to introduce himself in our school: the more steps
and degrees there are, so much higher and more honourable is the
uppermost seat: we should take a pleasure in being conducted to it, as in
magnificent palaces, by various porticoes and passages, long and pleasant
galleries, and many windings.  This disposition of things would turn to
our advantage; we should there longer stay and longer love; without hope
and without desire we proceed not worth a pin.  Our conquest and entire
possession is what they ought infinitely to dread: when they wholly
surrender themselves up to the mercy of our fidelity and constancy they
run a mighty hazard; they are virtues very rare and hard to be found; the
ladies are no sooner ours, than we are no more theirs:

              “Postquam cupidae mentis satiata libido est,
               Verba nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant;”

          [“When our desires are once satisfied, we care little
          for oaths and promises.”--Catullus, lxiv.  147.]

And Thrasonides, a young man of Greece, was so in love with his passion
that, having, gained a mistress’s consent, he refused to enjoy her, that
he might not by fruition quench and stupefy the unquiet ardour of which
he was so proud, and with which he so fed himself.  Dearness is a good
sauce to meat: do but observe how much the manner of salutation,
particular to our nation, has, by its facilities, made kisses, which
Socrates says are so powerful and dangerous for the stealing of hearts,
of no esteem.  It is a displeasing custom and injurious for the ladies,
that they must be obliged to lend their lips to every fellow who has
three footmen at his heels, however ill-favoured he may be in himself:

                   “Cujus livida naribus caninis
                    Dependet glacies, rigetque barba .  .  .
                    Centum occurrere malo culilingis:”
                     Martial, vii. 94.

and we ourselves barely gain by it; for as the world is divided, for
three beautiful women we must kiss fifty ugly ones; and to a tender
stomach, like those of my age, an ill kiss overpays a good one.

In Italy they passionately court even their common women who sell
themselves for money, and justify the doing so by saying, “that there are
degrees of fruition, and that by such service they would procure for
themselves that which is most entire; the women sell nothing but their
bodies; the will is too free and too much of its own to be exposed to
sale.”  So that these say, ‘tis the will they undertake and they have
reason.  ‘Tis indeed the will that we are to serve and gain by wooing.
I abhor to imagine mine, a body without affection: and this madness is,
methinks, cousin-german to that of the boy who would needs pollute the
beautiful statue of Venus made by Praxiteles; or that of the furious
Egyptian, who violated the dead carcase of a woman he was embalming:
which was the occasion of the law then made in Egypt, that the corpses of
beautiful young women, of those of good quality, should be kept three
days before they should be delivered to those whose office it was to take
care for the interment.  Periander did more wonderfully, who extended his
conjugal affection (more regular and legitimate) to the enjoyment of his
wife Melissa after she was dead.  Does it not seem a lunatic humour in
the Moon, seeing she could no otherwise enjoy her darling Endymion, to
lay-him for several months asleep, and to please herself with the
fruition of a boy who stirred not but in his sleep?  I likewise say that
we love a body without a soul or sentiment when we love a body without
its consent and desire.  All enjoyments are not alike: there are some
that are hectic and languishing: a thousand other causes besides
good-will may procure us this favour from the ladies; this is not a
sufficient testimony of affection: treachery may lurk there, as well as
elsewhere: they sometimes go to’t by halves:

              “Tanquam thura merumque parent
               Absentem marmoreamve putes:”

     [“As if they are preparing frankincense and wine .  .  . you might
     think her absent or marble.”--Martial, xi. 103, 12, and 59, 8.]

I know some who had rather lend that than their coach, and who only
impart themselves that way.  You are to examine whether your company
pleases them upon any other account, or, as some strong-chined groom,
for that only; in what degree of favour and esteem you are with them:

                              “Tibi si datur uni,
                    Quem lapide illa diem candidiore notat.”

     [“Wherefore that is enough, if that day alone is given us which she
     marks with a whiter stone.”--Catullus, lxviii. 147.]

What if they eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing
imagination.

               “Te tenet, absentes alios suspirat amores.”

               [“She has you in her arms; her thoughts are with
               other absent lovers.”--Tibullus, i. 6, 35.]

What? have we not seen one in these days of ours who made use of this act
for the purpose of a most horrid revenge, by that means to kill and
poison, as he did, a worthy lady?

Such as know Italy will not think it strange if, for this subject, I seek
not elsewhere for examples; for that nation may be called the regent of
the world in this.  They have more generally handsome and fewer ugly
women than we; but for rare and excellent beauties we have as many as
they.  I think the same of their intellects: of those of the common sort,
they have evidently far more brutishness is immeasurably rarer there;
but in individual characters of the highest form, we are nothing indebted
to them.  If I should carry on the comparison, I might say, as touching
valour, that, on the contrary, it is, to what it is with them, common and
natural with us; but sometimes we see them possessed of it to such a
degree as surpasses the greatest examples we can produce: The marriages
of that country are defective in this; their custom commonly imposes so
rude and so slavish a law upon the women, that the most distant
acquaintance with a stranger is as capital an offence as the most
intimate; so that all approaches being rendered necessarily substantial,
and seeing that all comes to one account, they have no hard choice to
make; and when they have broken down the fence, we may safely presume
they get on fire:

          “Luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia,
          irritata, deinde emissa.”

     [“Lust, like a wild beast, being more excited by being bound,
     breaks from his chains with greater wildness.”--Livy, xxxiv. 4.]

They must give them a little more rein:

         “Vidi ego nuper equum, contra sua frena tenacem,
          Ore reluctanti fulminis ire modo”:

     [“I saw, the other day, a horse struggling against his bit,
     rush like a thunderbolt.”--Ovid, Amor., iii. 4, 13.]

the desire of company is allayed by giving it a little liberty.  We are
pretty much in the same case they are extreme in constraint, we in
licence.  ‘Tis a good custom we have in France that our sons are received
into the best families, there to be entertained and bred up pages, as in
a school of nobility; and ‘tis looked upon as a discourtesy and an
affront to refuse this to a gentleman.  I have taken notice (for, so many
families, so many differing forms) that the ladies who have been
strictest with their maids have had no better luck than those who allowed
them a greater liberty.  There should be moderation in these things; one
must leave a great deal of their conduct to their own discretion; for,
when all comes to all, no discipline can curb them throughout.  But it is
true withal that she who comes off with flying colours from a school of
liberty, brings with her whereon to repose more confidence than she who
comes away sound from a severe and strict school.

Our fathers dressed up their daughters’ looks in bashfulness and fear
(their courage and desires being the same); we ours in confidence and
assurance; we understand nothing of the matter; we must leave it to the
Sarmatian women, who may not lie with a man till with their own hands
they have first killed another in battle.  For me, who have no other
title left me to these things but by the ears, ‘tis sufficient if,
according to the privilege of my age, they retain me for one of their
counsel. I advise them then, and us men too, to abstinence; but if the
age we live in will not endure it, at least modesty and discretion.  For,
as in the story of Aristippus, who, speaking to some young men who
blushed to see him go into a scandalous house, said “the vice is in not
coming out, not in going in,” let her who has no care of her conscience
have yet some regard to her reputation; and though she be rotten within,
let her carry a fair outside at least.

I commend a gradation and delay in bestowing their favours: Plato
‘declares that, in all sorts of love, facility and promptness are
forbidden to the defendant.  ‘Tis a sign of eagerness which they
ought to disguise with all the art they have, so rashly, wholly, and
hand-over-hand to surrender themselves.  In carrying themselves orderly
and measuredly in the granting their last favours, they much more allure
our desires and hide their own.  Let them still fly before us, even those
who have most mind to be overtaken: they better conquer us by flying, as
the Scythians did.  To say the truth, according to the law that nature
has imposed upon them, it is not properly for them either to will or
desire; their part is to suffer, obey, and consent and for this it is
that nature has given them a perpetual capacity, which in us is but at
times and uncertain; they are always fit for the encounter, that they may
be always ready when we are so “Pati natee.”-[“Born to suffer.”-Seneca,
Ep., 95.]--And whereas she has ordered that our appetites shall be
manifest by a prominent demonstration, she would have theirs to be hidden
and concealed within, and has furnished them with parts improper for
ostentation, and simply defensive.  Such proceedings as this that follows
must be left to the Amazonian licence: Alexander marching his army
through Hyrcania, Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons, came with three
hundred light horse of her own-sex, well mounted, and armed, having left
the remainder of a very great, army that followed her behind the
neighbouring mountains to give him a visit; where she publicly and in
plain terms told him that the fame of his valour and victories had
brought her thither to see him, and to make him an offer of her forces to
assist him in the pursuit of his enterprises; and that, finding him so
handsome, young, and vigorous, she, who was also perfect in all those
qualities, advised that they might lie together, to the end that from the
most valiant woman of the world and the bravest man then living, there
might spring some great and wonderful issue for the time to come.
Alexander returned her thanks for all the rest; but, to give leisure for
the accomplishment of her last demand, he detained her thirteen days in
that place, which were spent in royal feasting and jollity, for the
welcome of so courageous a princess.

We are, almost throughout, unjust judges of their actions, as they are of
ours.  I confess the truth when it makes against me, as well as when ‘tis
on my side.  ‘Tis an abominable intemperance that pushes them on so often
to change, and that will not let them limit their affection to any one
person whatever; as is evident in that goddess to whom are attributed so
many changes and so many lovers.  But ‘tis true withal that ‘tis contrary
to the nature of love if it be, not violent; and contrary to the nature
of violence if it be constant.  And they who wonder, exclaim, and keep
such a clutter to find out the causes of this frailty of theirs, as
unnatural and not to be believed, how comes it to pass they do not
discern how often they are themselves guilty of the same, without any
astonishment or miracle at all?  It would, peradventure, be more strange
to see the passion fixed; ‘tis not a simply corporeal passion.  If there
be no end to avarice and ambition, there is doubtless no more in desire;
it still lives after satiety; and ‘tis impossible to prescribe either
constant satisfaction or end; it ever goes beyond its possession.  And by
that means inconstancy, peradventure, is in some sort more pardonable in
them than in us: they may plead, as well as we, the inclination to
variety and novelty common to us both; and secondly, without us, that
they buy a cat in a sack: Joanna, queen of Naples, caused her first
husband, Andrews, to be hanged at the bars of her window in a halter of
gold and silk woven with her own hand, because in matrimonial
performances she neither found his parts nor abilities answer the
expectation she had conceived from his stature, beauty, youth, and
activity, by which she had been caught and deceived.  They may say there
is more pains required in doing than in suffering; and so they are on
their part always at least provided for necessity, whereas on our part it
may fall out otherwise.  For this reason it was, that Plato wisely made a
law that before marriage, to determine of the fitness of persons, the
judges should see the young men who pretended to it stripped stark naked,
and the women but to the girdle only.  When they come to try us they do
not, perhaps, find us worthy of their choice:

              “Experta latus, madidoque simillima loro
               Inguina, nec lassa stare coacta manu,
               Deserit imbelles thalamos.”

          [“After using every endeavour to arouse him to action,
          she quits the barren couch.”--Martial, vii. 58.]

‘Tis not enough that a man’s will be good; weakness and insufficiency
lawfully break a marriage,

               “Et quaerendum aliunde foret nervosius illud,
               Quod posset zonam solvere virgineam:”

     [“And seeks a more vigorous lover to undo her virgin zone.”
      --Catullus, lxvii. 27.]

why not?  and according to her own standard, an amorous intelligence,
more licentious and active,

               “Si blando nequeat superesse labori.”

          [“If his strength be unequal to the pleasant task.”
           --Virgil, Georg., iii. 127.]

But is it not great impudence to offer our imperfections and
imbecilities, where we desire to please and leave a good opinion and
esteem of ourselves?  For the little that I am able to do now:

                                   “Ad unum
                         Mollis opus.”

          [“Fit but for once.”--Horace, Epod., xii. 15.]

I would not trouble a woman, that I am to reverence and fear:

                              “Fuge suspicari,
                    Cujus undenum trepidavit aetas
                              Claudere lustrum.”

          [“Fear not him whose eleventh lustrum is closed.”
           --Horace, Od., ii. 4, 12, limits it to the eighth.]

Nature should satisfy herself in having rendered this age miserable,
without rendering it ridiculous too.  I hate to see it, for one poor inch
of pitiful vigour which comes upon it but thrice a week, to strut and set
itself out with as much eagerness as if it could do mighty feats; a true
flame of flax; and laugh to see it so boil and bubble and then in a
moment so congealed and extinguished. This appetite ought to appertain
only to the flower of beautiful youth: trust not to its seconding that
indefatigable, full, constant, magnanimous ardour you think in you, for
it will certainly leave you in a pretty corner; but rather transfer it to
some tender, bashful, and ignorant boy, who yet trembles at the rod, and
blushes:

              “Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro
               Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa
               Alba rosa.”

     [“As Indian ivory streaked with crimson, or white lilies mixed
     with the damask rose.”--AEneid, xii. 67.]

Who can stay till the morning without dying for shame to behold the
disdain of the fair eyes of her who knows so well his fumbling
impertinence,

               “Et taciti fecere tamen convicia vultus,”

          [“Though she nothing say, her looks betray her anger.”
           --Ovid, Amor., i. 7, 21.]

has never had the satisfaction and the glory of having cudgelled them
till they were weary, with the vigorous performance of one heroic night.
When I have observed any one to be vexed with me, I have not presently
accused her levity, but have been in doubt, if I had not reason rather to
complain of nature; she has doubtless used me very uncivilly and
unkindly:

         “Si non longa satis, si non bene mentula crassa
          Nimirum sapiunt, videntque parvam
          Matronae quoque mentulam illibenter:”

     [The first of these verses is the commencement of an epigram of the
     Veterum Poetayurra Catalecta, and the two others are from an epigram
     in the same collection (Ad Matrones).  They describe untranslatably
     Montaigne’s charge against nature, indicated in the previous
     passage.]

and done me a most enormous injury.  Every member I have, as much one as
another, is equally my own, and no other more properly makes me a man
than this.

I universally owe my entire picture to the public.  The wisdom of my
instruction consists in liberty, in truth, in essence: disdaining to
introduce those little, feigned, common, and provincial rules into the
catalogue of its real duties; all natural, general, and constant,
of which civility and ceremony are daughters indeed, but illegitimate.
We are sure to have the vices of appearance, when we shall have had those
of essence: when we have done with these, we run full drive upon the
others, if we find it must be so; for there is danger that we shall fancy
new offices, to excuse our negligence towards the natural ones, and to
confound them: and to manifest this, is it not seen that in places where
faults are crimes, crimes are but faults; that in nations where the laws
of decency are most rare and most remiss, the primitive laws of common
reason are better observed: the innumerable multitude of so many duties
stifling and dissipating our care.  The application of ourselves to light
and trivial things diverts us from those that are necessary and just.
Oh, how these superficial men take an easy and plausible way in
comparison of ours!  These are shadows wherewith we palliate and pay one
another; but we do not pay, but inflame the reckoning towards that great
judge, who tucks up our rags and tatters above our shameful parts, and
suckles not to view us all over, even to our inmost and most secret
ordures: it were a useful decency of our maidenly modesty, could it keep
him from this discovery.  In fine, whoever could reclaim man from so
scrupulous a verbal superstition, would do the world no great disservice.
Our life is divided betwixt folly and prudence: whoever will write of it
but what is reverend and canonical, will leave above the one-half behind.
I do not excuse myself to myself; and if I did, it should rather be for
my excuses that I would excuse myself than for any other fault; I excuse
myself of certain humours, which I think more strong in number than those
that are on my side.  In consideration of which, I will further say this
(for I desire to please every one, though it will be hard to do):

          “Esse unum hominem accommodatum ad tantam morum
          ac sermonum et voluntatum varietatem,”

     [“For a man to conform to such a variety of manners,
     discourses, and will.”--Q. Cicero, De Pet. Consul, c. 14.]

that they ought not to condemn me for what I make authorities, received
and approved by so many ages, to utter: and that there is no reason that
for want of rhyme they should refuse me the liberty they allow even to
churchmen of our nation and time, and these amongst the most notable, of
which here are two of their brisk verses:

          “Rimula, dispeream, ni monogramma tua est.”

          “Un vit d’amy la contente et bien traicte:”

     [St. Gelais, (Euvres Poetiques), p. 99, ed. of Lyons, 1574.]

besides how many others.  I love modesty; and ‘tis not out of judgment
that I have chosen this scandalous way of speaking; ‘tis nature that has
chosen it for me.  I commend it not, no more than other forms that are
contrary to common use: but I excuse it, and by circumstances both
general and particular, alleviate its accusation.

But to proceed.  Whence, too, can proceed that usurpation of sovereign
authority you take upon you over the women, who favour you at their own
expense,

               “Si furtiva dedit mira munuscula nocte,”

     [“If, in the stealthy night, she has made strange gifts.”
      --Catullus, lxviii. 145.]

so that you presently assume the interest, coldness, and authority of a
husband?  ‘Tis a free contract why do you not then keep to it, as you
would have them do?  there is no prescription upon voluntary things.
‘Tis against the form, but it is true withal, that I in my time have
conducted this bargain as much as the nature of it would permit, as
conscientiously and with as much colour of justice, as any other
contract; and that I never pretended other affection than what I really
had, and have truly acquainted them with its birth, vigour, and
declination, its fits and intermissions: a man does not always hold on
at the same rate.  I have been so sparing of my promises, that I think
I have been better than my word.  They have found me faithful even to
service of their inconstancy, a confessed and sometimes multiplied
inconstancy.  I never broke with them, whilst I had any hold at all, and
what occasion soever they have given me, never broke with them to hatred
or contempt; for such privacies, though obtained upon never so scandalous
terms, do yet oblige to some good will: I have sometimes, upon their
tricks and evasions, discovered a little indiscreet anger and impatience;
for I am naturally subject to rash emotions, which, though light and
short, often spoil my market.  At any time they have consulted my
judgment, I never stuck to give them sharp and paternal counsels, and to
pinch them to the quick.  If I have left them any cause to complain of
me, ‘tis rather to have found in me, in comparison of the modern use, a
love foolishly conscientious than anything else.  I have kept my, word in
things wherein I might easily have been dispensed; they sometimes
surrendered themselves with reputation, and upon articles that they were
willing enough should be broken by the conqueror: I have, more than once,
made pleasure in its greatest effort strike to the interest of their
honour; and where reason importuned me, have armed them against myself;
so that they ordered themselves more decorously and securely by my rules,
when they frankly referred themselves to them, than they would have done
by their own.  I have ever, as much as I could, wholly taken upon myself
alone the hazard of our assignations, to acquit them; and have always
contrived our meetings after the hardest and most unusual manner, as less
suspected, and, moreover, in my opinion, more accessible.  They are
chiefly more open, where they think they are most securely shut; things
least feared are least interdicted and observed; one may more boldly dare
what nobody thinks you dare, which by its difficulty becomes easy.  Never
had any man his approaches more impertinently generative; this way of
loving is more according to discipline but how ridiculous it is to our
people, and how ineffectual, who better knows than I? yet I shall not
repent me of it; I have nothing there more to lose:

                        “Me tabula sacer
                         Votiva paries, indicat uvida
                         Suspendisse potenti
                         Vestimenta maris deo:”

     [“The holy wall, by my votive table, shows that I have hanged up my
     wet clothes in honour of the powerful god of the sea.”
      --Horace, Od., i.  5, 13.]

‘tis now time to speak out.  But as I might, per adventure, say to
another, “Thou talkest idly, my friend; the love of thy time has little
commerce with faith and integrity;”

              “Haec si tu postules
               Ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas,
               Quam si des operam, ut cum ratione insanias:”

     [“If you seek to make these things certain by reason, you will do no
     more than if you should seek to be mad in your senses.”
      --Terence, Eun., act i., sc.  i, v. 16.]

on the contrary, also, if it were for me to begin again, certainly it
should be by the same method and the same progress, how fruitless soever
it might be to me; folly and insufficiency are commendable in an
incommendable action: the farther I go from their humour in this, I
approach so much nearer to my own.  As to the rest, in this traffic, I
did not suffer myself to be totally carried away; I pleased myself in it,
but did not forget myself.  I retained the little sense and discretion
that nature has given me, entire for their service and my own: a little
emotion, but no dotage.  My conscience, also, was engaged in it, even to
debauch and licentiousness; but, as to ingratitude, treachery, malice,
and cruelty, never.  I would not purchase the pleasure of this vice at
any price, but content myself with its proper and simple cost:

                    “Nullum intra se vitium est.”

          [“Nothing is a vice in itself.”--Seneca, Ep., 95.]

I almost equally hate a stupid and slothful laziness, as I do a toilsome
and painful employment; this pinches, the other lays me asleep.  I like
wounds as well as bruises, and cuts as well as dry blows.  I found in
this commerce, when I was the most able for it, a just moderation betwixt
these extremes.  Love is a sprightly, lively, and gay agitation; I was
neither troubled nor afflicted with it, but heated, and moreover,
disordered; a man must stop there; it hurts nobody but fools.  A young
man asked the philosopher Panetius if it were becoming a wise man to be
in love?  “Let the wise man look to that,” answered he, “but let not thou
and I, who are not so, engage ourselves in so stirring and violent an
affair, that enslaves us to others, and renders us contemptible to
ourselves.”  He said true that we are not to intrust a thing so
precipitous in itself to a soul that has not wherewithal to withstand its
assaults and disprove practically the saying of Agesilaus, that prudence
and love cannot live together.  ‘Tis a vain employment, ‘tis true,
unbecoming, shameful, and illegitimate; but carried on after this manner,
I look upon it as wholesome, and proper to enliven a drowsy soul and to
rouse up a heavy body; and, as an experienced physician, I would
prescribe it to a man of my form and condition, as soon as any other
recipe whatever, to rouse and keep him in vigour till well advanced in
years, and to defer the approaches of age.  Whilst we are but in the
suburbs, and that the pulse yet beats:

         “Dum nova canities, dum prima et recta senectus,
          Dum superest lachesi quod torqueat, et pedibus me
          Porto meis, nullo dextram subeunte bacillo,”

     [“Whilst the white hair is new, whilst old age is still straight
     shouldered, whilst there still remains something for Lachesis to
     spin, whilst I walk on my own legs, and need no staff to lean upon.”
      --Juvenal, iii. 26.]

we have need to be solicited and tickled by some such nipping incitation
as this.  Do but observe what youth, vigour, and gaiety it inspired the
good Anacreon withal: and Socrates, who was then older than I, speaking
of an amorous object:

“Leaning,” said he, “my shoulder to her shoulder, and my head to hers, as
we were reading together in a book, I felt, without dissembling, a sudden
sting in my shoulder like the biting of an insect, which I still felt
above five days after, and a continual itching crept into my heart.”  So
that merely the accidental touch, and of a shoulder, heated and altered a
soul cooled and enerved by age, and the strictest liver of all mankind.
And, pray, why not?  Socrates was a man, and would neither be, nor seem,
any other thing.  Philosophy does not contend against natural pleasures,
provided they be moderate, and only preaches moderation, not a total
abstinence; the power of its resistance is employed against those that
are adulterate and strange.  Philosophy says that the appetites of the
body ought not to be augmented by the mind, and ingeniously warns us not
to stir up hunger by saturity; not to stuff, instead of merely filling,
the belly; to avoid all enjoyments that may bring us to want; and all
meats and drinks that bring thirst and hunger: as, in the service of
love, she prescribes us to take such an object as may simply satisfy the
body’s need, and does not stir the soul, which ought only barely to
follow and assist the body, without mixing in the affair.  But have I not
reason to hold that these precepts, which, indeed, in my opinion, are
somewhat over strict, only concern a body in its best plight; and that in
a body broken with age, as in a weak stomach, ‘tis excusable to warm and
support it by art, and by the mediation of the fancy to restore the
appetite and cheerfulness it has lost of itself.

May we not say that there is nothing in us, during this earthly prison,
that is purely either corporeal or spiritual; and that we injuriously
break up a man alive; and that it seems but reasonable that we should
carry ourselves as favourably, at least, towards the use of pleasure as
we do towards that of pain!  Pain was (for example) vehement even to
perfection in the souls of the saints by penitence: the body had there
naturally a sham by the right of union, and yet might have but little
part in the cause; and yet are they not contented that it should barely
follow and assist the afflicted soul: they have afflicted itself with
grievous and special torments, to the end that by emulation of one
another the soul and body might plunge man into misery by so much more
salutiferous as it is more severe.  In like manner, is it not injustice,
in bodily pleasures, to subdue and keep under the soul, and say that it
must therein be dragged along as to some enforced and servile obligation
and necessity?  ‘Tis rather her part to hatch and cherish them, there to
present herself, and to invite them, the authority of ruling belonging to
her; as it is also her part, in my opinion, in pleasures that are proper
to her, to inspire and infuse into the body all the sentiment it is
capable of, and to study how to make them sweet and useful to it.  For it
is good reason, as they say, that the body should not pursue its
appetites to the prejudice of the mind; but why is it not also the reason
that the mind should not pursue hers to the prejudice of the body?

I have no other passion to keep me in breath.  What avarice, ambition,
quarrels, lawsuits do for others who, like me, have no particular
vocation, love would much more commodiously do; it would restore to me
vigilance, sobriety, grace, and the care of my person; it would reassure
my countenance, so that the grimaces of old age, those deformed and
dismal looks, might not come to disgrace it; would again put me upon
sound and wise studies, by which I might render myself more loved and
esteemed, clearing my mind of the despair of itself and of its use, and
redintegrating it to itself; would divert me from a thousand troublesome
thoughts, a thousand melancholic humours that idleness and the ill
posture of our health loads us withal at such an age; would warm again,
in dreams at least, the blood that nature is abandoning; would hold up
the chin, and a little stretch out the nerves, the vigour and gaiety of
life of that poor man who is going full drive towards his ruin.  But I
very well understand that it is a commodity hard to recover: by weakness
and long experience our taste is become more delicate and nice; we ask
most when we bring least, and are harder to choose when we least deserve
to be accepted: and knowing ourselves for what we are, we are less
confident and more distrustful; nothing can assure us of being beloved,
considering our condition and theirs.  I am out of countenance to see
myself in company with those young wanton creatures:

              “Cujus in indomito constantior inguine nervus,
               Quam nova collibus arbor inhaeret.”

     [“In whose unbridled reins the vigour is more inherent than in the
     young tree on the hills.”--Horace, Epod., xii. 19.]

To what end should we go insinuate our misery amid their gay and
sprightly humour?

                   “Possint ut juvenes visere fervidi.
                    Multo non sine risu,
                    Dilapsam in cineres facem.”

     [“As the fervid youths may behold, not without laughter, a burning
     torch worn to ashes.”--Horace, Od., iv.  13, 21.]

They have strength and reason on their side; let us give way; we have
nothing to do there: and these blossoms of springing beauty suffer not
themselves to be handled by such benumbed hands nor dealt with by mere
material means, for, as the old philosopher answered one who jeered him
because he could not gain the favour of a young girl he made love to:
“Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese.”  It is a commerce
that requires relation and correspondence: the other pleasures we receive
may be acknowledged by recompenses of another nature, but this is not to
be paid but with the same kind of coin.  In earnest, in this sport, the
pleasure I give more tickles my imagination than that they give me; now,
he has nothing of generosity in him who can receive pleasure where he
confers none--it must needs be a mean soul that will owe all, and can be
content to maintain relations with persons to whom he is a continual
charge; there is no beauty, grace, nor privacy so exquisite that a
gentleman ought to desire at this rate.  If they can only be kind to us
out of pity, I had much rather die than live upon charity.  I would have
right to ask, in the style wherein I heard them beg in Italy: “Fate ben
per voi,”--[“Do good for yourself.”]--or after the manner that Cyrus
exhorted his soldiers, “Who loves himself let him follow me.”--“Consort
yourself,” some one will say to me, “with women of your own condition,
whom like fortune will render more easy to your desire.”  O ridiculous
and insipid composition!

                                   “Nolo
                    Barbam vellere mortuo leoni.”

          [“I would not pluck the beard from a dead lion.”--Martial]

Xenophon lays it for an objection and an accusation against Menon, that
he never made love to any but old women.  For my part, I take more
pleasure in but seeing the just and sweet mixture of two young beauties,
or only in meditating on it in my fancy, than myself in acting second in
a pitiful and imperfect conjunction;

     [Which Cotton renders, “Than to be myself an actor in the second
     with a deformed creature.”]

I leave that fantastic appetite to the Emperor Galba, who was only for
old curried flesh: and to this poor wretch:

              “O ego Di faciant talem to cernere possim,
               Caraque mutatis oscula ferre comis,
               Amplectique meis corpus non pingue lacertis!”

     [Ovid, who (Ex.  Ponto, i. 4, 49) writes to his wife, “O would the
     gods arrange that such I might see thee, and bring dear kisses to
     thy changed locks, and embrace thy withered body with my arms”]

Amongst chief deformities I reckon forced and artificial beauties: Hemon,
a young boy of Chios, thinking by fine dressing to acquire the beauty
that nature had denied him, came to the philosopher Arcesilaus and asked
him if it was possible for a wise man to be in love--“Yes,” replied he,
“provided it be not with a farded and adulterated beauty like thine.”

     [Diogenes Laertius, iv.  36.  The question was whether a wise man
     could love him.  Cotton has “Emonez, a young courtezan of Chios.”]

Ugliness of a confessed antiquity is to me less old and less ugly than
another that is polished and plastered up.  Shall I speak it, without the
danger of having my throat cut? love, in my opinion, is not properly and
naturally in its season, but in the age next to childhood,

                   “Quem si puellarum insereres choro,
                    Mille sagaces falleret hospites,
                    Discrimen obscurum, solutis
                    Crinibus ambiguoque vultu:”

     [“Whom if thou shouldst place in a company of girls, it would
     require a thousand experts to distinguish him, with his loose locks
     and ambiguous countenance.”--Horace, Od., ii. 5, 21.]

nor beauty neither; for whereas Homer extends it so far as to the budding
of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare: and the reason why
the sophist Bion so pleasantly called the first appearing hairs of
adolescence ‘Aristogitons’ and ‘Harmodiuses’--[Plutarch, On Love, c.34.]--
is sufficiently known.  I find it in virility already in some sort a
little out of date, though not so much as in old age;

                   “Importunus enim transvolat aridas
                    Quercus.”

               [“For it uncivilly passes over withered oaks.”
                --Horace, Od., iv. 13, 9.]

and Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, like a woman, very far extends the
advantage of women, ordaining that it is time, at thirty years old, to
convert the title of fair into that of good.  The shorter authority we
give to love over our lives, ‘tis so much the better for us.  Do but
observe his port; ‘tis a beardless boy.  Who knows not how, in his school
they proceed contrary to all order; study, exercise, and usage are their
ways for insufficiency there novices rule:

                         “Amor ordinem nescit.”

          [“Love ignores rules.” (Or:) “Love knows no rule.”
           --St. Jerome, Letter to Chyomatius.]

Doubtless his conduct is much more graceful when mixed with inadvertency
and trouble; miscarriages and ill successes give him point and grace;
provided it be sharp and eager, ‘tis no great matter whether it be
prudent or no: do but observe how he goes reeling, tripping, and playing:
you put him in the stocks when you guide him by art and wisdom; and he is
restrained of his divine liberty when put into those hairy and callous
clutches.

As to the rest, I often hear the women set out this intelligence as
entirely spiritual, and disdain to put the interest the senses there have
into consideration; everything there serves; but I can say that I have
often seen that we have excused the weakness of their understandings in
favour of their outward beauty, but have never yet seen that in favour of
mind, how mature and full soever, any of them would hold out a hand to a
body that was never so little in decadence.  Why does not some one of
them take it into her head to make that noble Socratical bargain between
body and soul, purchasing a philosophical and spiritual intelligence and
generation at the price of her thighs, which is the highest price she can
get for them?  Plato ordains in his Laws that he who has performed any
signal and advantageous exploit in war may not be refused during the
whole expedition, his age or ugliness notwithstanding, a kiss or any
other amorous favour from any woman whatever.  What he thinks to be so
just in recommendation of military valour, why may it not be the same in
recommendation of any other good quality? and why does not some woman
take a fancy to possess over her companions the glory of this chaste
love?  I may well say chaste;

                    “Nam si quando ad praelia ventum est,
               Ut quondam in stipulis magnus sine viribus ignis,
               Incassum furit:”

     [“For when they sometimes engage in love’s battle,
     his sterile ardour lights up but as the flame of a straw.”
      --Virgil, Georg., iii.  98.]

the vices that are stifled in the thought are not the worst.

To conclude this notable commentary, which has escaped from me in a
torrent of babble, a torrent sometimes impetuous and hurtful,

              “Ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum
               Procurrit casto virginis a gremio,
               Quod miserae oblitae molli sub veste locatuat,
               Dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur,
               Atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu
               Huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor.”

     [“As when an apple, sent by a lover secretly to his mistress, falls
     from the chaste virgin’s bosom, where she had quite forgotten it;
     when, starting at her mother’s coming in, it is shaken out and rolls
     over the floor before her eyes, a conscious blush covers her face.”
      --Catullus, lxv. 19.]

I say that males and females are cast in the same mould, and that,
education and usage excepted, the difference is not great.  Plato
indifferently invites both the one and the other to the society of all
studies, exercises, and vocations, both military and civil, in his
Commonwealth; and the philosopher Antisthenes rejected all distinction
betwixt their virtue and ours.  It is much more easy to accuse one sex
than to excuse the other; ‘tis according to the saying,

               “Le fourgon se moque de la paele.”
                   [“The Pot and the Kettle.”]




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A gallant man does not give over his pursuit for being refused
     A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted
     Appetite is more sharp than one already half-glutted by the eyes
     Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age
     Certain other things that people hide only to show them
     Chiefly knew himself to be mortal by this act
     Dearness is a good sauce to meat
     Each amongst you has made somebody cuckold
     Eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing imagination
     Evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge
     Feminine polity has a mysterious procedure
     Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it
     First thing to be considered in love matters: a fitting time
     Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese.
     Give the ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture
     Guess at our meaning under general and doubtful terms
     Hate all sorts of obligation and restraint
     Have ever had a great respect for her I loved
     Have no other title left me to these things but by the ears
     Heat and stir up their imagination, and then we find fault
     Husbands hate their wives only because they themselves do wrong
     I am apt to dream that I dream
     I do not say that ‘tis well said, but well thought
     I had much rather die than live upon charity.
     I was always superstitiously afraid of giving offence
     If I am talking my best, whoever interrupts me, stops me
     If they can only be kind to us out of pity
     In everything else a man may keep some decorum
     In those days, the tailor took measure of it
     Inclination to variety and novelty common to us both
     Inconsiderate excuses are a kind of self-accusation
     Interdiction incites, and who are more eager, being forbidden
     It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in
     Jealousy: no remedy but flight or patience
     Judgment of duty principally lies in the will
     Ladies are no sooner ours, than we are no more theirs
     “Let a man take which course he will,” said he; “he will repent.”
      Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think
     Love is the appetite of generation by the mediation of beauty
     Love shamefully and dishonestly cured by marriage
     Love them the less for our own faults
     Love, full, lively, and sharp; a pleasure inflamed by difficulty
     Man must approach his wife with prudence and temperance
     Marriage rejects the company and conditions of love
     Men make them (the rules) without their (women’s) help
     Misfortunes that only hurt us by being known
     Modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person (Homer)
     Most of my actions are guided by example, not by choice
     Neither continency nor virtue where there are no opposing desire
     No doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active
     O wretched men, whose pleasures are a crime
     O, the furious advantage of opportunity!
     Observed the laws of marriage, than I either promised or expect
     One may more boldly dare what nobody thinks you dare
     Order it so that your virtue may conquer your misfortune
     Plato says, that the gods made man for their sport
     Pleasure of telling (a pleasure little inferior to that of doing)
     Priest shall on the wedding-day open the way to the bride
     Prudent man, when I imagine him in this posture
     Rage compelled to excuse itself by a pretence of good-will
     Rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so
     Represented her a little too passionate for a married Venus
     Revenge more wounds our children than it heals us
     Sex: To put fools and wise men, beasts and us, on a level
     Sharps and sweets of marriage, are kept secret by the wise
     Sins that make the least noise are the worst
     Sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of the soul
     Sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe
     The best authors too much humble and discourage me
     The impulse of nature, which is a rough counsellor
     The privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age
     Their disguises and figures only serve to cosen fools
     There is no allurement like modesty, if it be not rude
     These sleepy, sluggish sort of men are often the most dangerous
     They better conquer us by flying
     They buy a cat in a sack
     They err as much who too much forbear Venus
     They must become insensible and invisible to satisfy us
     They who would fight custom with grammar are triflers
     Those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be fear
     Those within (marriage) despair of getting out
     Tis all swine’s flesh, varied by sauces
     To what friend dare you intrust your griefs
     Twas a happy marriage betwixt a blind wife and a deaf husband
     Unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours
     Very idea we invent for their chastity is ridiculous
     Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality
     We ask most when we bring least
     We say a good marriage because no one says to the contrary.
     When jealousy seizes these poor souls
     When their eyes give the lie to their tongue
     Who escapes being talked of at the same rate
     Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation
     Would in this affair have a man a little play the servant






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 16.

VI.       Of Coaches.
VII.      Of the Inconvenience of Greatness.
VIII.     Of the Art of Conference.



CHAPTER VI

OF COACHES

It is very easy to verify, that great authors, when they write of causes,
not only make use of those they think to be the true causes, but also of
those they believe not to be so, provided they have in them some beauty
and invention: they speak true and usefully enough, if it be ingeniously.
We cannot make ourselves sure of the supreme cause, and therefore crowd a
great many together, to see if it may not accidentally be amongst them:

               “Namque unam dicere causam
          Non satis est, verum plures, unde una tamen sit.”

     [Lucretius, vi. 704.--The sense is in the preceding passage.]

Do you ask me, whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze?
We break wind three several ways; that which sallies from below is too
filthy; that which breaks out from the mouth carries with it some
reproach of gluttony; the third is sneezing, which, because it proceeds
from the head and is without offence, we give it this civil reception: do
not laugh at this distinction; they say ‘tis Aristotle’s.

I think I have seen in Plutarch’ (who of all the authors I know, is he
who has best mixed art with nature, and judgment with knowledge), his
giving as a reason for the, rising of the stomach in those who are at
sea, that it is occasioned by fear; having first found out some reason by
which he proves that fear may produce such an effect.  I, who am very
subject to it, know well that this cause concerns not me; and I know it,
not by argument, but by necessary experience.  Without instancing what
has been told me, that the same thing often happens in beasts, especially
hogs, who are out of all apprehension of danger; and what an acquaintance
of mine told me of himself, that though very subject to it, the
disposition to vomit has three or four times gone off him, being very
afraid in a violent storm, as it happened to that ancient:

          “Pejus vexabar, quam ut periculum mihi succurreret;”

          [“I was too ill to think of danger.” (Or the reverse:)
          “I was too frightened to be ill.”--Seneca, Ep., 53. 2]

I was never afraid upon the water, nor indeed in any other peril (and I
have had enough before my eyes that would have sufficed, if death be
one), so as to be astounded to lose my judgment.  Fear springs sometimes
as much from want of judgment as from want of courage.  All the dangers I
have been in I have looked upon without winking, with an open, sound, and
entire sight; and, indeed, a man must have courage to fear.  It formerly
served me better than other help, so to order and regulate my retreat,
that it was, if not without fear, nevertheless without affright and
astonishment; it was agitated, indeed, but not amazed or stupefied.
Great souls go yet much farther, and present to us flights, not only
steady and temperate, but moreover lofty.  Let us make a relation of that
which Alcibiades reports of Socrates, his fellow in arms: “I found him,”
 says he, “after the rout of our army, him and Lachez, last among those
who fled, and considered him at my leisure and in security, for I was
mounted on a good horse, and he on foot, as he had fought.  I took
notice, in the first place, how much judgment and resolution he showed,
in comparison of Lachez, and then the bravery of his march, nothing
different from his ordinary gait; his sight firm and regular, considering
and judging what passed about him, looking one while upon those, and then
upon others, friends and enemies, after such a manner as encouraged
those, and signified to the others that he would sell his life dear to
any one who should attempt to take it from him, and so they came off; for
people are not willing to attack such kind of men, but pursue those they
see are in a fright.”  That is the testimony of this great captain, which
teaches us, what we every day experience, that nothing so much throws us
into dangers as an inconsiderate eagerness of getting ourselves clear of
them:

     “Quo timoris minus est, eo minus ferme periculi est.”

     [“When there is least fear, there is for the most part least
     danger.”--Livy, xxii. 5.]

Our people are to blame who say that such an one is afraid of death, when
they would express that he thinks of it and foresees it: foresight is
equally convenient in what concerns us, whether good or ill.  To consider
and judge of danger is, in some sort, the reverse to being astounded.
I do not find myself strong enough to sustain the force and impetuosity
of this passion of fear, nor of any other vehement passion whatever: if I
was once conquered and beaten down by it, I should never rise again very
sound.  Whoever should once make my soul lose her footing, would never
set her upright again: she retastes and researches herself too
profoundly, and too much to the quick, and therefore would never let the
wound she had received heal and cicatrise.  It has been well for me that
no sickness has yet discomposed her: at every charge made upon me, I
preserve my utmost opposition and defence; by which means the first that
should rout me would keep me from ever rallying again.  I have no
after-game to play: on which side soever the inundation breaks my banks,
I lie open, and am drowned without remedy.  Epicurus says, that a wise
man can never become a fool; I have an opinion reverse to this sentence,
which is, that he who has once been a very fool, will never after be very
wise. God grants me cold according to my cloth, and passions
proportionable to the means I have to withstand them: nature having laid
me open on the one side, has covered me on the other; having disarmed me
of strength, she has armed me with insensibility and an apprehension that
is regular, or, if you will, dull.

I cannot now long endure (and when I was young could much less) either
coach, litter, or boat, and hate all other riding but on horseback, both
in town and country.  But I can bear a litter worse than a coach; and, by
the same reason, a rough agitation upon the water, whence fear is
produced, better than the motions of a calm.  At the little jerks of
oars, stealing the vessel from under us, I find, I know not how, both my
head and my stomach disordered; neither-can I endure to sit upon a
tottering chair.  When the sail or the current carries us equally, or
that we are towed, the equal agitation does not disturb me at all; ‘tis
an interrupted motion that offends me, and most of all when most slow: I
cannot otherwise express it.  The physicians have ordered me to squeeze
and gird myself about the bottom of the belly with a napkin to remedy
this evil; which however I have not tried, being accustomed to wrestle
with my own defects, and overcome them myself.

Would my memory serve me, I should not think my time ill spent in setting
down here the infinite variety that history presents us of the use of
chariots in the service of war: various, according to the nations and
according to the age; in my opinion, of great necessity and effect; so
that it is a wonder that we have lost all knowledge of them.  I will only
say this, that very lately, in our fathers’ time, the Hungarians made
very advantageous use of them against the Turks; having in every one of
them a targetter and a musketeer, and a number of harquebuses piled ready
and loaded, and all covered with a pavesade like a galliot--[Canvas
spread along the side of a ship of war, in action to screen the movements
of those on board.]--They formed the front of their battle with three
thousand such coaches, and after the cannon had played, made them all
pour in their shot upon the enemy, who had to swallow that volley before
they tasted of the rest, which was no little advance; and that done,
these chariots charged into their squadrons to break them and open a way
for the rest; besides the use they might make of them to flank the
soldiers in a place of danger when marching to the field, or to cover a
post, and fortify it in haste.  In my time, a gentleman on one of our
frontiers, unwieldy of body, and finding no horse able to carry his
weight, having a quarrel, rode through the country in a chariot of this
fashion, and found great convenience in it.  But let us leave these
chariots of war.

As if their effeminacy--[Which Cotton translates: “as if the
insignificancy of coaches.” ]--had not been sufficiently known by better
proofs, the last kings of our first race travelled in a chariot drawn by
four oxen.  Marc Antony was the first at Rome who caused himself to be
drawn in a coach by lions, and a singing wench with him.

     [Cytheris, the Roman courtezan.--Plutarch’s Life of Antony, c. 3.
     This, was the same person who is introduced by Gallus under the name
     of Lycoris.  Gallus doubtless knew her personally.]

Heliogabalus did since as much, calling himself Cybele, the mother of the
gods; and also drawn by tigers, taking upon him the person of the god
Bacchus; he also sometimes harnessed two stags to his coach, another time
four dogs, and another four naked wenches, causing himself to be drawn by
them in pomp, stark naked too.  The Emperor Firmus caused his chariot to
be drawn by ostriches of a prodigious size, so that it seemed rather to
fly than roll.

The strangeness of these inventions puts this other fancy in my head:
that it is a kind of pusillanimity in monarchs, and a testimony that they
do not sufficiently understand themselves what they are, when they study
to make themselves honoured and to appear great by excessive expense: it
were indeed excusable in a foreign country, but amongst their own
subjects, where they are in sovereign command, and may do what they
please, it derogates from their dignity the most supreme degree of honour
to which they can arrive: just as, methinks, it is superfluous in a
private gentleman to go finely dressed at home; his house, his
attendants, and his kitchen sufficiently answer for him.  The advice that
Isocrates gives his king seems to be grounded upon reason: that he should
be splendid in plate and furniture; forasmuch as it is an expense of
duration that devolves on his successors; and that he should avoid all
magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten.  I loved to go fine
when I was a younger brother, for want of other ornament; and it became
me well: there are some upon whom their rich clothes weep: We have
strange stories of the frugality of our kings about their own persons and
in their gifts: kings who were great in reputation, valour, and fortune.
Demosthenes vehemently opposes the law of his city that assigned the
public money for the pomp of their public plays and festivals: he would
that their greatness should be seen in numbers of ships well equipped,
and good armies well provided for; and there is good reason to condemn
Theophrastus, who, in his Book on Riches, establishes a contrary opinion,
and maintains that sort of expense to be the true fruit of abundance.
They are delights, says Aristotle, that a only please the baser sort of
the people, and that vanish from the memory as soon as the people are
sated with them, and for which no serious and judicious man can have any
esteem.  This money would, in my opinion, be much more royally, as more
profitably, justly, and durably, laid out in ports, havens, walls, and
fortifications; in sumptuous buildings, churches, hospitals, colleges,
the reforming of streets and highways: wherein Pope Gregory XIII.  will
leave a laudable memory to future times: and wherein our Queen Catherine
would to long posterity manifest her natural liberality and munificence,
did her means supply her affection.  Fortune has done me a great despite
in interrupting the noble structure of the Pont-Neuf of our great city,
and depriving me of the hope of seeing it finished before I die.

Moreover, it seems to subjects, who are spectators of these triumphs,
that their own riches are exposed before them, and that they are
entertained at their own expense: for the people are apt to presume of
kings, as we do of our servants, that they are to take care to provide us
all things necessary in abundance, but not touch it themselves; and
therefore the Emperor Galba, being pleased with a musician who played to
him at supper, called for his money-box, and gave him a handful of crowns
that he took out of it, with these words: “This is not the public money,
but my own.”  Yet it so falls out that the people, for the most part,
have reason on their side, and that the princes feed their eyes with what
they have need of to fill their bellies.

Liberality itself is not in its true lustre in a sovereign hand: private
men have therein the most right; for, to take it exactly, a king has
nothing properly his own; he owes himself to others: authority is not
given in favour of the magistrate, but of the people; a superior is never
made so for his own profit, but for the profit of the inferior, and a
physician for the sick person, and not for himself: all magistracy, as
well as all art, has its end out of itself wherefore the tutors of young
princes, who make it their business to imprint in them this virtue of
liberality, and preach to them to deny nothing and to think nothing so
well spent as what they give (a doctrine that I have known in great
credit in my time), either have more particular regard to their own
profit than to that of their master, or ill understand to whom they
speak.  It is too easy a thing to inculcate liberality on him who has as
much as he will to practise it with at the expense of others; and, the
estimate not being proportioned to the measure of the gift but to the
measure of the means of him who gives it, it comes to nothing in so
mighty hands; they find themselves prodigal before they can be reputed
liberal.  And it is but a little recommendation, in comparison with other
royal virtues: and the only one, as the tyrant Dionysius said, that suits
well with tyranny itself.  I should rather teach him this verse of the
ancient labourer:

     [“That whoever will have a good crop must sow with his hand, and not
     pour out of the sack.”--Plutarch, Apothegms,  Whether the Ancients
     were more excellent in Arms than in Learning.]

he must scatter it abroad, and not lay it on a heap in one place: and
that, seeing he is to give, or, to say better, to pay and restore to so
many people according as they have deserved, he ought to be a loyal and
discreet disposer.  If the liberality of a prince be without measure or
discretion, I had rather he were covetous.

Royal virtue seems most to consist in justice; and of all the parts of
justice that best denotes a king which accompanies liberality, for this
they have particularly reserved to be performed by themselves, whereas
all other sorts of justice they remit to the administration of others.
An immoderate bounty is a very weak means to acquire for them good will;
it checks more people than it allures:

          “Quo in plures usus sis, minus in multos uti possis....
          Quid autem est stultius, quam, quod libenter facias,
          curare ut id diutius facere non possis;”

     [“By how much more you use it to many, by so much less will you be
     in a capacity to use it to many more.  And what greater folly can
     there be than to order it so that what you would willingly do, you
     cannot do longer.”--Cicero, De Offic., ii. 15.]

and if it be conferred without due respect of merit, it puts him out of
countenance who receives it, and is received ungraciously.  Tyrants have
been sacrificed to the hatred of the people by the hands of those very
men they have unjustly advanced; such kind of men as buffoons, panders,
fiddlers, and such ragamuffins, thinking to assure to themselves the
possession of benefits unduly received, if they manifest to have him in
hatred and disdain of whom they hold them, and in this associate
themselves to the common judgment and opinion.

The subjects of a prince excessive in gifts grow excessive in asking,
and regulate their demands, not by reason, but by example.  We have,
seriously, very often reason to blush at our own impudence: we are
over-paid, according to justice, when the recompense equals our service;
for do we owe nothing of natural obligation to our princes?  If he bear
our charges, he does too much; ‘tis enough that he contribute to them:
the overplus is called benefit, which cannot be exacted: for the very
name Liberality sounds of Liberty.

In our fashion it is never done; we never reckon what we have received;
we are only for the future liberality; wherefore, the more a prince
exhausts himself in giving, the poorer he grows in friends.  How should
he satisfy immoderate desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled?
He who has his thoughts upon taking, never thinks of what he has taken;
covetousness has nothing so properly and so much its own as ingratitude.

The example of Cyrus will not do amiss in this place, to serve the kings
of these times for a touchstone to know whether their gifts are well or
ill bestowed, and to see how much better that emperor conferred them than
they do, by which means they are reduced to borrow of unknown subjects,
and rather of them whom they have wronged than of them on whom they have
conferred their benefits, and so receive aids wherein there is nothing of
gratuitous but the name.  Croesus reproached him with his bounty, and
cast up to how much his treasure would amount if he had been a little
closer-handed.  He had a mind to justify his liberality, and therefore
sent despatches into all parts to the grandees of his dominions whom he
had particularly advanced, entreating every one of them to supply him
with as much money as they could, for a pressing occasion, and to send
him particulars of what each could advance.  When all these answers were
brought to him, every one of his friends, not thinking it enough barely
to offer him so much as he had received from his bounty, and adding to it
a great deal of his own, it appeared that the sum amounted to a great
deal more than Croesus’ reckoning.  Whereupon Cyrus: “I am not,” said he,
“less in love with riches than other princes, but rather a better
husband; you see with how small a venture I have acquired the inestimable
treasure of so many friends, and how much more faithful treasurers they
are to me than mercenary men without obligation, without affection; and
my money better laid up than in chests, bringing upon me the hatred,
envy, and contempt of other princes.”

The emperors excused the superfluity of their plays and public spectacles
by reason that their authority in some sort (at least in outward
appearance) depended upon the will of the people of Rome, who, time out
of mind, had been accustomed to be entertained and caressed with such
shows and excesses.  But they were private citizens, who had nourished
this custom to gratify their fellow-citizens and companions (and chiefly
out of their own purses) by such profusion and magnificence it had quite
another taste when the masters came to imitate it:

          “Pecuniarum translatio a justis dominis ad alienos
          non debet liberalis videri.”

     [“The transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
     ought not to have the title of liberality.”
      --Cicero, De Offic., i. 14.]

Philip, seeing that his son went about by presents to gain the affection
of the Macedonians, reprimanded him in a letter after this manner: “What!
hast thou a mind that thy subjects shall look upon thee as their
cash-keeper and not as their king?  Wilt thou tamper with them to win
their affections?  Do it, then, by the benefits of thy virtue, and not by
those of thy chest.”  And yet it was, doubtless, a fine thing to bring
and plant within the amphitheatre a great number of vast trees, with all
their branches in their full verdure, representing a great shady forest,
disposed in excellent order; and, the first day, to throw into it a
thousand ostriches and a thousand stags, a thousand boars, and a thousand
fallow-deer, to be killed and disposed of by the people: the next day, to
cause a hundred great lions, a hundred leopards, and three hundred bears
to be killed in his presence; and for the third day, to make three
hundred pair of gladiators fight it out to the last, as the Emperor
Probus did.  It was also very fine to see those vast amphitheatres, all
faced with marble without, curiously wrought with figures and statues,
and within glittering with rare enrichments:

               “Baltheus en! gemmis, en illita porticus auro:”

     [“A belt glittering with jewels, and a portico overlaid with gold.”
      --Calpurnius, Eclog., vii. 47.  A baltheus was a shoulder-belt or
     baldric.]

all the sides of this vast space filled and environed, from the bottom to
the top, with three or four score rows of seats, all of marble also, and
covered with cushions:

                         “Exeat, inquit,
                    Si pudor est, et de pulvino surgat equestri,
                    Cujus res legi non sufficit;”

     [“Let him go out, he said, if he has any sense of shame, and rise
     from the equestrian cushion, whose estate does not satisfy the law.”
      --Juvenal, iii. 153.  The Equites were required to possess a fortune
     of 400 sestertia, and they sat on the first fourteen rows behind the
     orchestra.]

where a hundred thousand men might sit at their ease: and, the place
below, where the games were played, to make it, by art, first open and
cleave in chasms, representing caves that vomited out the beasts designed
for the spectacle; and then, secondly, to be overflowed by a deep sea,
full of sea monsters, and laden with ships of war, to represent a naval
battle; and, thirdly, to make it dry and even again for the combat of the
gladiators; and, for the fourth scene, to have it strown with vermilion
grain and storax,--[A resinous gum.]--instead of sand, there to make a
solemn feast for all that infinite number of people: the last act of one
only day:

              “Quoties nos descendentis arenae
               Vidimus in partes, ruptaque voragine terrae
               Emersisse feras, et eisdem saepe latebris
               Aurea cum croceo creverunt arbuta libro!....
               Nec solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra
               Contigit; aequoreos ego cum certantibus ursis
               Spectavi vitulos, et equorum nomine dignum,
               Sen deforme pecus, quod in illo nascitur amni....”

     [“How often have we seen the stage of the theatre descend and part
     asunder, and from a chasm in the earth wild beasts emerge, and then
     presently give birth to a grove of gilded trees, that put forth
     blossoms of enamelled flowers.  Nor yet of sylvan marvels alone had
     we sight: I saw sea-calves fight with bears, and a deformed sort of
     cattle, we might call sea-horses.”--Calpurnius, Eclog., vii. 64.]

Sometimes they made a high mountain advance itself, covered with
fruit-trees and other leafy trees, sending down rivulets of water from
the top, as from the mouth of a fountain: otherwhiles, a great ship was
seen to come rolling in, which opened and divided of itself, and after
having disgorged from the hold four or five hundred beasts for fight,
closed again, and vanished without help.  At other times, from the floor
of this place, they made spouts of perfumed water dart their streams
upward, and so high as to sprinkle all that infinite multitude.  To
defend themselves from the injuries of the weather, they had that vast
place one while covered over with purple curtains of needlework, and
by-and-by with silk of one or another colour, which they drew off or
on in a moment, as they had a mind:

              “Quamvis non modico caleant spectacula sole,
               Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes.”

     [“The curtains, though the sun should scorch the spectators, are
     drawn in, when Hermogenes appears.”-Martial, xii.  29, 15.  M.
     Tigellius Hermogenes, whom Horace and others have satirised.  One
     editor calls him “a noted thief,” another: “He was a literary
     amateur of no ability, who expressed his critical opinions with too
     great a freedom to please the poets of his day.”  D.W.]

The network also that was set before the people to defend them from the
violence of these turned-out beasts was woven of gold:

                   “Auro quoque torts refulgent
                    Retia.”

               [“The woven nets are refulgent with gold.”
                --Calpurnius, ubi supra.]

If there be anything excusable in such excesses as these, it is where the
novelty and invention create more wonder than the expense; even in these
vanities we discover how fertile those ages were in other kind of wits
than these of ours.  It is with this sort of fertility, as with all other
products of nature: not that she there and then employed her utmost
force: we do not go; we rather run up and down, and whirl this way and
that; we turn back the way we came.  I am afraid our knowledge is weak in
all senses; we neither see far forward nor far backward; our
understanding comprehends little, and lives but a little while; ‘tis
short both in extent of time and extent of matter:

                   “Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
                    Mufti, sed omnes illacrymabiles
                    Urgentur, ignotique longs
                    Nocte.”

     [ Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all are pressed by the
     long night unmourned and unknown.”--Horace, Od., iv. 9, 25.]

              “Et supra bellum Thebanum et funera Trojae
               Non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetae?”

     [“Why before the Theban war and the destruction of Troy, have not
     other poets sung other events?”--Lucretius, v. 327.  Montaigne here
     diverts himself m giving Lucretius’ words a construction directly
     contrary to what they bear in the poem.  Lucretius puts the
     question, Why if the earth had existed from all eternity, there had
     not been poets, before the Theban war, to sing men’s exploits.
     --Coste.]

And the narrative of Solon, of what he had learned from the Egyptian
priests, touching the long life of their state, and their manner of
learning and preserving foreign histories, is not, methinks, a testimony
to be refused in this consideration:

     “Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus et
     temporum, in quam se injiciens animus et intendens, ita late
     longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam oram ultimi videat, in qua possit
     insistere: in haec immensitate .  .  .  infinita vis innumerabilium
     appareret fomorum.”

     [“Could we see on all parts the unlimited magnitude of regions and
     of times, upon which the mind being intent, could wander so far and
     wide, that no limit is to be seen, in which it can bound its eye, we
     should, in that infinite immensity, discover an infinite force of
     innumerable atoms.”  Here also Montaigne puts a sense quite
     different from what the words bear in the original; but the
     application he makes of them is so happy that one would declare they
     were actually put together only to express his own sentiments.  “Et
     temporum” is an addition by Montaigne.--Coste.]

Though all that has arrived, by report, of our knowledge of times past
should be true, and known by some one person, it would be less than
nothing in comparison of what is unknown.  And of this same image of the
world, which glides away whilst we live upon it, how wretched and limited
is the knowledge of the most curious; not only of particular events,
which fortune often renders exemplary and of great concern, but of the
state of great governments and nations, a hundred more escape us than
ever come to our knowledge.  We make a mighty business of the invention
of artillery and printing, which other men at the other end of the world,
in China, had a thousand years ago.  Did we but see as much of the world
as we do not see, we should perceive, we may well believe, a perpetual
multiplication and vicissitude of forms.  There is nothing single and
rare in respect of nature, but in respect of our knowledge, which is a
wretched foundation whereon to ground our rules, and that represents to
us a very false image of things.  As we nowadays vainly conclude the
declension and decrepitude of the world, by the arguments we extract from
our own weakness and decay:

          “Jamque adeo est affecta aetas effoet aque tellus;”

          [“Our age is feeble, and the earth less fertile.”
           --Lucretius, ii. 1151.]

so did he vainly conclude as to its birth and youth, by the vigour he
observed in the wits of his time, abounding in novelties and the
invention of divers arts:

         “Verum, ut opinor, habet novitatem summa, recensque
          Natura est mundi, neque pridem exordia coepit
          Quare etiam quaedam nunc artes expoliuntur,
          Nunc etiam augescunt; nunc addita navigiis sunt
          Multa.”

     [“But, as I am of opinion, the whole of the world is of recent
     origin, nor had its commencement in remote times; wherefore it is
     that some arts are still being refined, and some just on the
     increase; at present many additions are being made to shipping.”
      --Lucretius, v. 331.]

Our world has lately discovered another (and who will assure us that it
is the last of its brothers, since the Daemons, the Sybils, and we
ourselves have been ignorant of this till now?), as large, well-peopled,
and fruitful as this whereon we live and yet so raw and childish, that we
are still teaching it it’s a B C: ‘tis not above fifty years since it
knew neither letters, weights, measures, vestments, corn, nor vines: it
was then quite naked in the mother’s lap, and only lived upon what she
gave it.  If we rightly conclude of our end, and this poet of the
youthfulness of that age of his, that other world will only enter into
the light when this of ours shall make its exit; the universe will fall
into paralysis; one member will be useless, the other in vigour.  I am
very much afraid that we have greatly precipitated its declension and
ruin by our contagion; and that we have sold it opinions and our arts at
a very dear rate.  It was an infant world, and yet we have not whipped
and subjected it to our discipline by the advantage of our natural worth
and force, neither have we won it by our justice and goodness, nor
subdued it by our magnanimity.  Most of their answers, and the
negotiations we have had with them, witness that they were nothing behind
us in pertinency and clearness of natural understanding.  The astonishing
magnificence of the cities of Cusco and Mexico, and, amongst many other
things, the garden of the king, where all the trees, fruits, and plants,
according to the order and stature they have in a garden, were
excellently formed in gold; as, in his cabinet, were all the animals bred
upon his territory and in its seas; and the beauty of their manufactures,
in jewels, feathers, cotton, and painting, gave ample proof that they
were as little inferior to us in industry.  But as to what concerns
devotion, observance of the laws, goodness, liberality, loyalty, and
plain dealing, it was of use to us that we had not so much as they; for
they have lost, sold, and betrayed themselves by this advantage over us.

As to boldness and courage, stability, constancy against pain, hunger,
and death, I should not fear to oppose the examples I find amongst them
to the most famous examples of elder times that we find in our records on
this side of the world.  Far as to those who subdued them, take but away
the tricks and artifices they practised to gull them, and the just
astonishment it was to those nations to see so sudden and unexpected an
arrival of men with beards, differing in language, religion, shape, and
countenance, from so remote a part of the world, and where they had never
heard there was any habitation, mounted upon great unknown monsters,
against those who had not only never seen a horse, but had never seen any
other beast trained up to carry a man or any other loading; shelled in a
hard and shining skin, with a cutting and glittering weapon in his hand,
against them, who, out of wonder at the brightness of a looking glass or
a knife, would exchange great treasures of gold and pearl; and who had
neither knowledge, nor matter with which, at leisure, they could
penetrate our steel: to which may be added the lightning and thunder of
our cannon and harquebuses, enough to frighten Caesar himself, if
surprised, with so little experience, against people naked, except where
the invention of a little quilted cotton was in use, without other arms,
at the most, than bows, stones, staves, and bucklers of wood; people
surprised under colour of friendship and good faith, by the curiosity of
seeing strange and unknown things; take but away, I say, this disparity
from the conquerors, and you take away all the occasion of so many
victories.  When I look upon that in vincible ardour wherewith so many
thousands of men, women, and children so often presented and threw
themselves into inevitable dangers for the defence of their gods and
liberties; that generous obstinacy to suffer all extremities and
difficulties, and death itself, rather than submit to the dominion of
those by whom they had been so shamefully abused; and some of them
choosing to die of hunger and fasting, being prisoners, rather than to
accept of nourishment from the hands of their so basely victorious
enemies: I see, that whoever would have attacked them upon equal terms of
arms, experience, and number, would have had a hard, and, peradventure,
a harder game to play than in any other war we have seen.

Why did not so noble a conquest fall under Alexander, or the ancient
Greeks and Romans; and so great a revolution and mutation of so many
empires and nations, fall into hands that would have gently levelled,
rooted up, and made plain and smooth whatever was rough and savage
amongst them, and that would have cherished and propagated the good seeds
that nature had there produced; mixing not only with the culture of land
and the ornament of cities, the arts of this part of the world, in what
was necessary, but also the Greek and Roman virtues, with those that were
original of the country?  What a reparation had it been to them, and what
a general good to the whole world, had our first examples and deportments
in those parts allured those people to the admiration and imitation of
virtue, and had begotten betwixt them and us a fraternal society and
intelligence?  How easy had it been to have made advantage of souls so
innocent, and so eager to learn, leaving, for the most part, naturally so
good inclinations before?  Whereas, on the contrary, we have taken
advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, with greater ease to
incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and towards all sorts of
inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners.  Who
ever enhanced the price of merchandise at such a rate?  So many cities
levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions
of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most
beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl
and pepper?  Mechanic victories!  Never did ambition, never did public
animosities, engage men against one another in such miserable
hostilities, in such miserable calamities.

Certain Spaniards, coasting the sea in quest of their mines, landed in a
fruitful and pleasant and very well peopled country, and there made to
the inhabitants their accustomed professions: “that they were peaceable
men, who were come from a very remote country, and sent on the behalf of
the King of Castile, the greatest prince of the habitable world, to whom
the Pope, God’s vicegerent upon earth, had given the principality of all
the Indies; that if they would become tributaries to him, they should be
very gently and courteously used”; at the same time requiring of them
victuals for their nourishment, and gold whereof to make some pretended
medicine; setting forth, moreover, the belief in one only God, and the
truth of our religion, which they advised them to embrace, whereunto they
also added some threats.  To which they received this answer: “That as to
their being peaceable, they did not seem to be such, if they were so.
As to their king, since he was fain to beg, he must be necessitous and
poor; and he who had made him this gift, must be a man who loved
dissension, to give that to another which was none of his own, to bring
it into dispute against the ancient possessors.  As to victuals, they
would supply them; that of gold they had little; it being a thing they
had in very small esteem, as of no use to the service of life, whereas
their only care was to pass it over happily and pleasantly: but that what
they could find excepting what was employed in the service of their gods,
they might freely take.  As to one only God, the proposition had pleased
them well; but that they would not change their religion, both because
they had so long and happily lived in it, and that they were not wont to
take advice of any but their friends, and those they knew: as to their
menaces, it was a sign of want of judgment to threaten those whose nature
and power were to them unknown; that, therefore, they were to make haste
to quit their coast, for they were not used to take the civilities and
professions of armed men and strangers in good part; otherwise they
should do by them as they had done by those others,” showing them the
heads of several executed men round the walls of their city.  A fair
example of the babble of these children.  But so it is, that the
Spaniards did not, either in this or in several other places, where they
did not find the merchandise they sought, make any stay or attempt,
whatever other conveniences were there to be had; witness my CANNIBALS.
--[Chapter XXX. of Book I.]

Of the two most puissant monarchs of that world, and, peradventure, of
this, kings of so many kings, and the last they turned out, he of Peru,
having been taken in a battle, and put to so excessive a ransom as
exceeds all belief, and it being faithfully paid, and he having, by his
conversation, given manifest signs of a frank, liberal, and constant
spirit, and of a clear and settled understanding, the conquerors had a
mind, after having exacted one million three hundred and twenty-five
thousand and five hundred weight of gold, besides silver, and other
things which amounted to no less (so that their horses were shod with
massy gold), still to see, at the price of what disloyalty and injustice
whatever, what the remainder of the treasures of this king might be, and
to possess themselves of that also.  To this end a false accusation was
preferred against him, and false witnesses brought to prove that he went
about to raise an insurrection in his provinces, to procure his own
liberty; whereupon, by the virtuous sentence of those very men who had by
this treachery conspired his ruin, he was condemned to be publicly hanged
and strangled, after having made him buy off the torment of being burnt
alive, by the baptism they gave him immediately before execution; a
horrid and unheard of barbarity, which, nevertheless, he underwent
without giving way either in word or look, with a truly grave and royal
behaviour.  After which, to calm and appease the people, aroused and
astounded at so strange a thing, they counterfeited great sorrow for his
death, and appointed most sumptuous funerals.

The other king of Mexico,--[Guatimosin]--having for a long time defended
his beleaguered city, and having in this siege manifested the utmost of
what suffering and perseverance can do, if ever prince and people did,
and his misfortune having delivered him alive into his enemies’ hands,
upon articles of being treated like a king, neither did he in his
captivity discover anything unworthy of that title.  His enemies, after
their victory, not finding so much gold as they expected, when they had
searched and rifled with their utmost diligence, they went about to
procure discoveries by the most cruel torments they could invent upon the
prisoners they had taken: but having profited nothing by these, their
courage being greater than their torments, they arrived at last to such a
degree of fury, as, contrary to their faith and the law of nations, to
condemn the king himself, and one of the principal noblemen of his court,
to the rack, in the presence of one another.  This lord, finding himself
overcome with pain, being environed with burning coals, pitifully turned
his dying eyes towards his master, as it were to ask him pardon that he
was able to endure no more; whereupon the king, darting at him a fierce
and severe look, as reproaching his cowardice and pusillanimity, with a
harsh and constant voice said to him thus only: “And what dost thou think
I suffer? am I in a bath? am I more at ease than thou?”  Whereupon the
other immediately quailed under the torment and died upon the spot.  The
king, half roasted, was carried thence; not so much out of pity (for what
compassion ever touched so barbarous souls, who, upon the doubtful
information of some vessel of gold to be made a prey of, caused not only
a man, but a king, so great in fortune and desert, to be broiled before
their eyes), but because his constancy rendered their cruelty still more
shameful.  They afterwards hanged him for having nobly attempted to
deliver himself by arms from so long a captivity and subjection, and he
died with a courage becoming so magnanimous a prince.

Another time, they burnt in the same fire four hundred and sixty men
alive at once, the four hundred of the common people, the sixty the
principal lords of a province, simply prisoners of war.  We have these
narratives from themselves for they not only own it, but boast of it and
publish it.  Could it be for a testimony of their justice or their zeal
to religion?  Doubtless these are ways too differing and contrary to so
holy an end.  Had they proposed to themselves to extend our faith, they
would have considered that it does not amplify in the possession of
territories, but in the gaining of men; and would have more than
satisfied themselves with the slaughters occasioned by the necessity of
war, without indifferently mixing a massacre, as upon wild beasts, as
universal as fire and sword could make it; having only, by intention,
saved so many as they meant to make miserable slaves of, for the work and
service of their mines; so that many of the captains were put to death
upon the place of conquest, by order of the kings of Castile, justly
offended with the horror of their deportment, and almost all of them
hated and disesteemed.  God meritoriously permitted that all this great
plunder should be swallowed up by the sea in transportation, or in the
civil wars wherewith they devoured one another; and most of the men
themselves were buried in a foreign land without any fruit of their
victory.

That the revenue from these countries, though in the hands of so
parsimonious and so prudent a prince,--[Phillip II.]--so little answers
the expectation given of it to his predecessors, and to that original
abundance of riches which was found at the first landing in those new
discovered countries (for though a great deal be fetched thence, yet we
see ‘tis nothing in comparison of that which might be expected), is that
the use of coin was there utterly unknown, and that consequently their
gold was found all hoarded together, being of no other use but for
ornament and show, as a furniture reserved from father to son by many
puissant kings, who were ever draining their mines to make this vast heap
of vessels and statues for the decoration of their palaces and temples;
whereas our gold is always in motion and traffic; we cut it into a
thousand small pieces, and cast it into a thousand forms, and scatter and
disperse it in a thousand ways.  But suppose our kings should thus hoard
up all the gold they could get in several ages and let it lie idle by
them.

Those of the kingdom of Mexico were in some sort more civilised and more
advanced in arts than the other nations about them.  Therefore did they
judge, as we do, that the world was near its period, and looked upon the
desolation we brought amongst them as a certain sign of it.  They
believed that the existence of the world was divided into five ages, and
in the life of five successive suns, of which four had already ended
their time, and that this which gave them light was the fifth.  The first
perished, with all other creatures, by an universal inundation of water;
the second by the heavens falling upon us and suffocating every living
thing to which age they assigned the giants, and showed bones to the
Spaniards, according to the proportion of which the stature of men
amounted to twenty feet; the third by fire, which burned and consumed
all; the fourth by an emotion of the air and wind, which came with such
violence as to beat down even many mountains, wherein the men died not,
but were turned into baboons.  What impressions will not the weakness of
human belief admit?  After the death of this fourth sun, the world was
twenty-five years in perpetual darkness: in the fifteenth of which a man
and a woman were created, who restored the human race: ten years after,
upon a certain day, the sun appeared newly created, and since the account
of their year takes beginning from that day: the third day after its
creation the ancient gods died, and the new ones were since born daily.
After what manner they think this last sun shall perish, my author knows
not; but their number of this fourth change agrees with the great
conjunction of stars which eight hundred and odd years ago, as
astrologers suppose, produced great alterations and novelties in the
world.

As to pomp and magnificence, upon the account of which I engaged in this
discourse, neither Greece, Rome, nor Egypt, whether for utility,
difficulty, or state, can compare any of their works with the highway to
be seen in Peru, made by the kings of the country, from the city of Quito
to that of Cusco (three hundred leagues), straight, even, five-and-twenty
paces wide, paved, and provided on both sides with high and beautiful
walls; and close by them, and all along on the inside, two perennial
streams, bordered with beautiful plants, which they call moly.  In this
work, where they met with rocks and mountains, they cut them through, and
made them even, and filled up pits and valleys with lime and stone to
make them level.  At the end of every day’s journey are beautiful
palaces, furnished with provisions, vestments, and arms, as well for
travellers as for the armies that are to pass that way.  In the estimate
of this work I have reckoned the difficulty which is especially
considerable in that place; they did not build with any stones less than
ten feet square, and had no other conveniency of carriage but by drawing
their load themselves by force of arm, and knew not so much as the art of
scaffolding, nor any other way of standing to their work, but by throwing
up earth against the building as it rose higher, taking it away again
when they had done.

Let us here return to our coaches.  Instead of these, and of all other
sorts of carriages, they caused themselves to be carried upon men’s
shoulders.  This last king of Peru, the day that he was taken, was thus
carried betwixt two upon staves of gold, and set in a chair of gold in
the middle of his army.  As many of these sedan-men as were killed to
make him fall (for they would take him alive), so many others (and they
contended for it) took the place of those who were slain, so that they
could never beat him down, what slaughter soever they made of these
people, till a horseman, seizing upon him, brought him to the ground.




CHAPTER VII

OF THE INCONVENIENCE OF GREATNESS

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge our selves by railing at
it; and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything to proclaim its
defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how
much to be coveted soever.  Greatness has, in general, this manifest
advantage, that it can lower itself when it pleases, and has, very near,
the choice of both the one and the other condition; for a man does not
fall from all heights; there are several from which one may descend
without falling down.  It does, indeed, appear to me that we value it at
too high a rate, and also overvalue the resolution of those whom we have
either seen or heard have contemned it, or displaced themselves of their
own accord: its essence is not so evidently commodious that a man may
not, with out a miracle, refuse it.  I find it a very hard thing to
undergo misfortunes, but to be content with a moderate measure of
fortune, and to avoid greatness, I think a very easy matter.  ‘Tis,
methinks, a virtue to which I, who am no conjuror, could without any
great endeavour arrive.  What, then, is to be expected from them that
would yet put into consideration the glory attending this refusal,
wherein there may lurk worse ambition than even in the desire itself,
and fruition of greatness?  Forasmuch as ambition never comports itself
better, according to itself, than when it proceeds by obscure and
unfrequented ways.

I incite my courage to patience, but I rein it as much as I can towards
desire.  I have as much to wish for as another, and allow my wishes as
much liberty and indiscretion; but yet it never befell me to wish for
either empire or royalty, or the eminency of those high and commanding
fortunes: I do not aim that way; I love myself too well.  When I think to
grow greater, ‘tis but very moderately, and by a compelled and timorous
advancement, such as is proper for me in resolution, in prudence, in
health, in beauty, and even in riches too; but this supreme reputation,
this mighty authority, oppress my imagination; and, quite contrary to
that other,--[Julius Caesar.]--I should, peradventure, rather choose to
be the second or third in Perigord than the first at Paris at least,
without lying, rather the third at Paris than the first.  I would neither
dispute with a porter, a miserable unknown, nor make crowds open in
adoration as I pass.  I am trained up to a moderate condition, as well by
my choice as fortune; and have made it appear, in the whole conduct of my
life and enterprises, that I have rather avoided than otherwise the
climbing above the degree of fortune wherein God has placed me by my
birth; all natural constitution is equally just and easy.  My soul is
such a poltroon, that I measure not good fortune by the height, but by
the facility.

But if my heart be not great enough, ‘tis open enough to make amends, at
any one’s request, freely to lay open its weakness.  Should any one put
me upon comparing the life of L. Thorius Balbus, a brave man, handsome,
learned, healthful, understanding, and abounding in all sorts of
conveniences and pleasures, leading a quiet life, and all his own, his
mind well prepared against death, superstition, pain, and other
incumbrances of human necessity, dying, at last, in battle, with his
sword in his hand, for the defence of his country, on the one part; and
on the other part, the life of M. Regulus, so great and high as is known
to every one, and his end admirable; the one without name and without
dignity, the other exemplary and glorious to a wonder.  I should
doubtless say, as Cicero did, could I speak as well as he.

     [Cicero, De Finibus, ii. 20, gives the preference to Regulus, and
     proclaims him the happier man.]

But if I was to compare them with my own, I should then also say that the
first is as much according to my capacity, and from desire, which I
conform to my capacity, as the second is far beyond it; that I could not
approach the last but with veneration, the other I could readily attain
by use.

Let us return to our temporal greatness, from which we are digressed.  I
disrelish all dominion, whether active or passive.  Otanes, one of the
seven who had right to pretend to the kingdom of Persia, did as I should
willingly have done, which was, that he gave up to his competitors his
right of being promoted to it, either by election or by lot, provided
that he and his might live in the empire out of all authority and
subjection, those of the ancient laws excepted, and might enjoy all
liberty that was not prejudicial to these, being as impatient of
commanding as of being commanded.

The most painful and difficult employment in the world, in my opinion, is
worthily to discharge the office of a king.  I excuse more of their
mistakes than men commonly do, in consideration of the intolerable weight
of their function, which astounds me.  ‘Tis hard to keep measure in so
immeasurable a power; yet so it is that it is, even to those who are not
of the best nature, a singular incitement to virtue to be seated in a
place where you cannot do the least good that shall not be put upon
record, and where the least benefit redounds to so many men, and where
your talent of administration, like that of preachers, principally
addresses itself to the people, no very exact judge, easy to deceive, and
easily content.  There are few things wherein we can give a sincere
judgment, by reason that there are few wherein we have not, in some sort,
a private interest.  Superiority and inferiority, dominion and subjection
are bound to a natural envy and contest, and must of necessity
perpetually intrench upon one another.  I believe neither the one nor the
other touching the rights of the other party; let reason therefore, which
is inflexible and without passion, determine when we can avail ourselves
of it.  ‘Tis not above a month ago that I read over, two Scottish authors
contending upon this subject, of whom he who stands for the people makes
the king to be in a worse condition than a carter; he who writes for
monarchy places him some degrees above God in power and sovereignty.

Now, the incommodity of greatness that I have taken to remark in this
place, upon some occasion that has lately put it into my head, is this:
there is not, peradventure, anything more pleasant in the commerce of
many than the trials that we make against one another, out of emulation
of honour and worth, whether in the exercises of the body or in those of
the mind, wherein sovereign greatness can have no true part.  And, in
earnest, I have often thought that by force of respect itself men use
princes disdainfully and injuriously in that particular; for the thing I
was infinitely offended at in my childhood, that they who exercised with
me forbore to do their best because they found me unworthy of their
utmost endeavour, is what we see happen to them daily, every one finding
himself unworthy to contend with them.  If we discover that they have the
least desire to get the better of us, there is no one who will not make
it his business to give it them, and who will not rather betray his own
glory than offend theirs; and will therein employ so much force only as
is necessary to save their honour.  What share have they, then, in the
engagement, where every one is on their side?  Methinks I see those
paladins of ancient times presenting themselves to jousts and battle with
enchanted arms and bodies.  Brisson,

     [Plutarch, On Satisfaction or Tranquillity of the Mind.  But in his
     essay, How a Man may Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend, he calls
     him Chriso.]

running against Alexander, purposely missed his blow, and made a fault in
his career; Alexander chid him for it, but he ought to have had him
whipped.  Upon this consideration Carneades said, that “the sons of
princes learned nothing right but to manage horses; by reason that, in
all their other exercises, every one bends and yields to them; but a
horse, that is neither a flatterer nor a courtier, throws the son of a
king with no more ceremony than he would throw that of a porter.”

Homer was fain to consent that Venus, so sweet and delicate a goddess as
she was, should be wounded at the battle of Troy, thereby to ascribe
courage and boldness to her qualities that cannot possibly be in those
who are exempt from danger.  The gods are made to be angry, to fear, to
run away, to be jealous, to grieve, to be transported with passions, to
honour them with the virtues that, amongst us, are built upon these
imperfections. Who does not participate in the hazard and difficulty, can
claim no interest in the honour and pleasure that are the consequents of
hazardous actions.  ‘Tis pity a man should be so potent that all things
must give way to him; fortune therein sets you too remote from society,
and places you in too great a solitude.  This easiness and mean facility
of making all things bow under you, is an enemy to all sorts of pleasure:
‘tis to slide, not to go; ‘tis to sleep, and not to live.  Conceive man
accompanied with omnipotence: you overwhelm him; he must beg disturbance
and opposition as an alms: his being and his good are in indigence. Evil
to man is in its turn good, and good evil. Neither is pain always to be
shunned, nor pleasure always to be pursued.

Their good qualities are dead and lost; for they can only be perceived by
comparison, and we put them out of this: they have little knowledge of
true praise, having their ears deafened with so continual and uniform an
approbation.  Have they to do with the stupidest of all their subjects?
they have no means to take any advantage of him; if he but say: “‘Tis
because he is my king,” he thinks he has said enough to express that he
therefore suffered himself to be overcome.  This quality stifles and
consumes the other true and essential qualities: they are sunk in the
royalty, and leave them nothing to recommend themselves with but actions
that directly concern and serve the function of their place; ‘tis so much
to be a king, that this alone remains to them.  The outer glare that
environs him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there
repelled and dissipated, being filled and stopped by this prevailing
light.  The senate awarded the prize of eloquence to Tiberius; he refused
it, esteeming that though it had been just, he could derive no advantage
from a judgment so partial, and that was so little free to judge.

As we give them all advantages of honour, so do we soothe and authorise
all their vices and defects, not only by approbation, but by imitation
also.  Every one of Alexander’s followers carried his head on one side,
as he did; and the flatterers of Dionysius ran against one another in his
presence, and stumbled at and overturned whatever was under foot, to shew
they were as purblind as he.  Hernia itself has also served to recommend
a man to favour; I have seen deafness affected; and because the master
hated his wife, Plutarch--[who, however, only gives one instance; and in
this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]--has seen his
courtiers repudiate theirs, whom they loved; and, which is yet more,
uncleanliness and all manner of dissoluteness have so been in fashion; as
also disloyalty, blasphemy, cruelty, heresy, superstition, irreligion,
effeminacy, and worse, if worse there be; and by an example yet more
dangerous than that of Mithridates’ flatterers, who, as their master
pretended to the honour of a good physician, came to him to have
incisions and cauteries made in their limbs; for these others suffered
the soul, a more delicate and noble part, to be cauterised.

But to end where I began: the Emperor Adrian, disputing with the
philosopher Favorinus about the interpretation of some word, Favorinus
soon yielded him the victory; for which his friends rebuking him, “You
talk simply,” said he; “would you not have him wiser than I, who commands
thirty legions?”  Augustus wrote verses against Asinius Pollio, and “I,”
 said Pollio, “say nothing, for it is not prudence to write in contest
with him who has power to proscribe.”  And they were right.  For
Dionysius, because he could not equal Philoxenus in poesy and Plato in
discourse, condemned the one to the quarries, and sent the other to be
sold for a slave into the island of AEgina.




CHAPTER VIII

OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE

‘Tis a custom of our justice to condemn some for a warning to others.  To
condemn them for having done amiss, were folly, as Plato says,

     [Diogenes Laertius, however, in his Life of Plato, iii. 181, says
     that Plato’s offence was the speaking too freely to the tyrant.]

for what is done can never be undone; but ‘tis to the end they may offend
no more, and that others may avoid the example of their offence: we do
not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.  I do the same; my
errors are sometimes natural, incorrigible, and irremediable: but the
good which virtuous men do to the public, in making themselves imitated,
I, peradventure, may do in making my manners avoided:

         “Nonne vides, Albi ut male vivat filius? utque
          Barrus inops?  magnum documentum, ne patriam rein
          Perdere guis velit;”

     [“Dost thou not see how ill the son of Albus lives?  and how the
     indigent Barrus? a great warning lest any one should incline to
     dissipate his patrimony.”--Horace, Sat., i. 4, 109.]

publishing and accusing my own imperfections, some one will learn to be
afraid of them.  The parts that I most esteem in myself, derive more
honour from decrying, than for commending myself which is the reason why
I so often fall into, and so much insist upon that strain.  But, when all
is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; a man’s
accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never: There may,
peradventure, be some of my own complexion who better instruct myself by
contrariety than by similitude, and by avoiding than by imitation.  The
elder Cato was regarding this sort of discipline, when he said, “that the
wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise”; and Pausanias
tells us of an ancient player upon the harp, who was wont to make his
scholars go to hear one who played very ill, who lived over against him,
that they might learn to hate his discords and false measures.  The
horror of cruelty more inclines me to clemency, than any example of
clemency could possibly do.  A good rider does not so much mend my seat,
as an awkward attorney or a Venetian, on horseback; and a clownish way of
speaking more reforms mine than the most correct.  The ridiculous and
simple look of another always warns and advises me; that which pricks,
rouses and incites much better than that which tickles.  The time is now
proper for us to reform backward; more by dissenting than by agreeing; by
differing more than by consent.  Profiting little by good examples, I
make use of those that are ill, which are everywhere to be found: I
endeavour to render myself as agreeable as I see others offensive; as
constant as I see others fickle; as affable as I see others rough; as
good as I see others evil: but I propose to myself impracticable
measures.

The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is
conversation; I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of
life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose,
I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and
speech.  The Athenians, and also the Romans, kept this exercise in great
honour in their academies; the Italians retain some traces of it to this
day, to their great advantage, as is manifest by the comparison of our
understandings with theirs.  The study of books is a languishing and
feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises
at once.  If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he
presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations
stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up
to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether
tedious in discourse.  But, as our mind fortifies itself by the
communication of vigorous and regular understandings, ‘tis not to be
expressed how much it loses and degenerates by the continual commerce and
familiarity we have with mean and weak spirits; there is no contagion
that spreads like that; I know sufficiently by experience what ‘tis worth
a yard.  I love to discourse and dispute, but it is with but few men, and
for myself; for to do it as a spectacle and entertainment to great
persons, and to make of a man’s wit and words competitive parade is, in
my opinion, very unbecoming a man of honour.

Folly is a bad quality; but not to be able to endure it, to fret and vex
at it, as I do, is another sort of disease little less troublesome than
folly itself; and is the thing that I will now accuse in myself.  I enter
into conference, and dispute with great liberty and facility, forasmuch
as opinion meets in me with a soil very unfit for penetration, and
wherein to take any deep root; no propositions astonish me, no belief
offends me, though never so contrary to my own; there is no so frivolous
and extravagant fancy that does not seem to me suitable to the production
of human wit.  We, who deprive our judgment of the right of determining,
look indifferently upon the diverse opinions, and if we incline not our
judgment to them, yet we easily give them the hearing: Where one scale is
totally empty, I let the other waver under an old wife’s dreams; and I
think myself excusable, if I prefer the odd number; Thursday rather than
Friday; if I had rather be the twelfth or fourteenth than the thirteenth
at table; if I had rather, on a journey, see a hare run by me than cross
my way, and rather give my man my left foot than my right, when he comes
to put on my stockings.  All such reveries as are in credit around us,
deserve at least a hearing: for my part, they only with me import
inanity, but they import that.  Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are
something more than nothing in nature; and he who will not suffer himself
to proceed so far, falls, peradventure, into the vice of obstinacy, to
avoid that of superstition.

The contradictions of judgments, then, neither offend nor alter, they
only rouse and exercise, me. We evade correction, whereas we ought to
offer and present ourselves to it, especially when it appears in the form
of conference, and not of authority.  At every opposition, we do not
consider whether or no it be dust, but, right or wrong, how to disengage
ourselves: instead of extending the arms, we thrust out our claws.  I
could suffer myself to be rudely handled by my friend, so much as to tell
me that I am a fool, and talk I know not of what.  I love stout
expressions amongst gentle men, and to have them speak as they think; we
must fortify and harden our hearing against this tenderness of the
ceremonious sound of words. I love a strong and manly familiarity and
conversation: a friendship that pleases itself in the sharpness and
vigour of its communication, like love in biting and scratching: it is
not vigorous and generous enough, if it be not quarrelsome, if it be
civilised and artificial, if it treads nicely and fears the shock:

       “Neque enim disputari sine reprehensione potest.”

     [“Neither can a man dispute, but he must contradict.”
      (Or:) “Nor can people dispute without reprehension.”
      --Cicero, De Finib., i. 8.]

When any one contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger: I
advance towards him who controverts, who instructs me; the cause of truth
ought to be the common cause both of the one and the other.  What will
the angry man answer?  Passion has already confounded his judgment;
agitation has usurped the place of reason.  It were not amiss that the
decision of our disputes should pass by wager: that there might be a
material mark of our losses, to the end we might the better remember
them; and that my man might tell me: “Your ignorance and obstinacy cost
you last year, at several times, a hundred crowns.”  I hail and caress
truth in what quarter soever I find it, and cheerfully surrender myself,
and open my conquered arms as far off as I can discover it; and, provided
it be not too imperiously, take a pleasure in being reproved, and
accommodate myself to my accusers, very often more by reason of civility
than amendment, loving to gratify and nourish the liberty of admonition
by my facility of submitting to it, and this even at my own expense.

Nevertheless, it is hard to bring the men of my time to it: they have not
the courage to correct, because they have not the courage to suffer
themselves to be corrected; and speak always with dissimulation in the
presence of one another: I take so great a pleasure in being judged and
known, that it is almost indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am
so: my imagination so often contradicts and condemns itself, that ‘tis
all one to me if another do it, especially considering that I give his
reprehension no greater authority than I choose; but I break with him,
who carries himself so high, as I know of one who repents his advice,
if not believed, and takes it for an affront if it be not immediately
followed.  That Socrates always received smilingly the contradictions
offered to his arguments, a man may say arose from his strength of
reason; and that, the advantage being certain to fall on his side, he
accepted them as a matter of new victory.  But we see, on the contrary,
that nothing in argument renders our sentiment so delicate, as the
opinion of pre-eminence, and disdain of the adversary; and that, in
reason, ‘tis rather for the weaker to take in good part the oppositions
that correct him and set him right.  In earnest, I rather choose the
company of those who ruffle me than of those who fear me; ‘tis a dull and
hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of
all we say.  Antisthenes commanded his children never to take it kindly
or for a favour, when any man commended them.  I find I am much prouder
of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardour of dispute,
I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased
with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.  In fine, I
receive and admit of all manner of attacks that are direct, how weak
soever; but I am too impatient of those that are made out of form.  I
care not what the subject is, the opinions are to me all one, and I am
almost indifferent whether I get the better or the worse.  I can
peaceably argue a whole day together, if the argument be carried on with
method; I do not so much require force and subtlety as order; I mean the
order which we every day observe in the wranglings of shepherds and
shop-boys, but never amongst us: if they start from their subject, ‘tis
out of incivility, and so ‘tis with us; but their tumult and impatience
never put them out of their theme; their argument still continues its
course; if they interrupt, and do not stay for one another, they at least
understand one another.  Any one answers too well for me, if he answers
what I say: when the dispute is irregular and disordered, I leave the
thing itself, and insist upon the form with anger and indiscretion;
falling into wilful, malicious, and imperious way of disputation, of
which I am afterwards ashamed.  ‘Tis impossible to deal fairly with a
fool: my judgment is not only corrupted under the hand of so impetuous a
master, but my conscience also.

Our disputes ought to be interdicted and punished as well as other verbal
crimes: what vice do they not raise and heap up, being always governed
and commanded by passion?  We first quarrel with their reasons, and then
with the men.  We only learn to dispute that we may contradict; and so,
every one contradicting and being contradicted, it falls out that the
fruit of disputation is to lose and annihilate truth.  Therefore it is
that Plato in his Republic prohibits this exercise to fools and ill-bred
people.  To what end do you go about to inquire of him, who knows nothing
to the purpose?  A man does no injury to the subject, when he leaves it
to seek how he may treat it; I do not mean by an artificial and
scholastic way, but by a natural one, with a sound understanding.  What
will it be in the end?  One flies to the east, the other to the west;
they lose the principal, dispersing it in the crowd of incidents after an
hour of tempest, they know not what they seek: one is low, the other
high, and a third wide.  One catches at a word and a simile; another is
no longer sensible of what is said in opposition to him, and thinks only
of going on at his own rate, not of answering you: another, finding
himself too weak to make good his rest, fears all, refuses all, at the
very beginning, confounds the subject; or, in the very height of the
dispute, stops short and is silent, by a peevish ignorance affecting a
proud contempt or a foolishly  modest avoidance of further debate:
provided this man strikes, he cares not how much he lays himself open;
the other counts his words, and weighs them for reasons; another only
brawls, and uses the advantage of his lungs.  Here’s one who learnedly
concludes against himself, and another who deafens you with prefaces and
senseless digressions: an other falls into downright railing, and seeks a
quarrel after the German fashion, to disengage himself from a wit that
presses too hard upon him: and a last man sees nothing into the reason of
the thing, but draws a line of circumvallation about you of dialectic
clauses, and the formulas of his art.

Now, who would not enter into distrust of sciences, and doubt whether he
can reap from them any solid fruit for the service of life, considering
the use we put them to?

                    “Nihil sanantibus litteris.”

          [“Letters which cure nothing.”--Seneca, Ep., 59.]

Who has got understanding by his logic?  Where are all her fair promises?

          “Nec ad melius vivendum, nec ad commodius disserendum.”

          [“It neither makes a man live better nor talk better.”
           --Cicero, De Fin., i. 19.]

Is there more noise or confusion in the scolding of herring-wives than in
the public disputes of men of this profession?  I had rather my son
should learn in a tap-house to speak, than in the schools to prate.  Take
a master of arts, and confer with him: why does he not make us sensible
of this artificial excellence? and why does he not captivate women and
ignoramuses, as we are, with admiration at the steadiness of his reasons
and the beauty of his order? why does he not sway and persuade us to what
he will? why does a man, who has so much advantage in matter and
treatment, mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations?
Strip him of his gown, his hood, and his Latin, let him not batter our
ears with Aristotle, pure and simple, you will take him for one of us,
or worse.  Whilst they torment us with this complication and confusion of
words, it fares with them, methinks, as with jugglers; their dexterity
imposes upon our senses, but does not at all work upon our belief this
legerdemain excepted, they perform nothing that is not very ordinary and
mean: for being the more learned, they are none the less fools.

     [So Hobbes said that if he had read as much as the academical
     pedants he should have known as little.]

I love and honour knowledge as much as they that have it, and in its true
use ‘tis the most noble and the greatest acquisition of men; but in such
as I speak of (and the number of them is infinite), who build their
fundamental sufficiency and value upon it, who appeal from their
understanding to their memory:

                    “Sub aliena umbra latentes,”

     [“Sheltering under the shadow of others.”--Seneca, Ep., 33.]

and who can do nothing but by book, I hate it, if I dare to say so, worse
than stupidity.  In my country, and in my time, learning improves
fortunes enough, but not minds; if it meet with those that are dull and
heavy, it overcharges and suffocates them, leaving them a crude and
undigested mass; if airy and fine, it purifies, clarifies, and subtilises
them, even to exinanition.  ‘Tis a thing of almost indifferent quality;
a very useful accession to a well-born soul, but hurtful and pernicious
to others; or rather a thing of very precious use, that will not suffer
itself to be purchased at an under rate; in the hand of some ‘tis a
sceptre, in that of others a fool’s bauble.

But let us proceed.  What greater victory do you expect than to make your
enemy see and know that he is not able to encounter you?  When you get
the better of your argument; ‘tis truth that wins; when you get the
advantage of form and method, ‘tis then you who win.  I am of opinion that
in, Plato and Xenophon Socrates disputes more in favour of the disputants
than in favour of the dispute, and more to instruct Euthydemus and
Protagoras in the, knowledge of their impertinence, than in the
impertinence of their art.  He takes hold of the first subject like one
who has a more profitable end than to explain it--namely, to clear the
understandings that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise.  To hunt
after truth is properly our business, and we are inexcusable if we carry
on the chase impertinently and ill; to fail of seizing it is another
thing, for we are born to inquire after truth: it belongs to a greater
power to possess it.  It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of
the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine
knowledge.  The world is but a school of inquisition: it is not who shall
enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.  He may as well play
the fool who speaks true, as he who speaks false, for we are upon the
manner, not the matter, of speaking.  ‘Tis my humour as much to regard
the form as the substance, and the advocate as much as the cause, as
Alcibiades ordered we should: and every day pass away my time in reading
authors without any consideration of their learning; their manner is what
I look after, not their subject: And just so do I hunt after the
conversation of any eminent wit, not that he may teach me, but that I may
know him, and that knowing him, if I think him worthy of imitation, I may
imitate him.  Every man may speak truly, but to speak methodically,
prudently, and fully, is a talent that few men have.  The falsity that
proceeds from ignorance does not offend me, but the foppery of it.  I
have broken off several treaties  that would have been of advantage to
me, by reason of the impertinent contestations of those with whom I
treated.  I am not moved once in a year at the faults of those over whom
I have authority, but upon the account of the ridiculous obstinacy of
their allegations, denials, excuses, we are every day going together by
the ears; they neither understand what is said, nor why, and answer
accordingly; ‘tis enough to drive a man mad.  I never feel any hurt upon
my head but when ‘tis knocked against another, and more easily forgive
the vices of my servants than their boldness, importunity, and folly; let
them do less, provided they understand what they do: you live in hope to
warm their affection to your service, but there is nothing to be had or
to be expected from a stock.

But what, if I take things otherwise than they are?  Perhaps I do; and
therefore it is that I accuse my own impatience, and hold, in the first
place, that it is equally vicious both in him that is in the right, and
in him that is in the wrong; for ‘tis always a tyrannic sourness not to
endure a form contrary to one’s own: and, besides, there cannot, in
truth, be a greater, more constant, nor more irregular folly than to be
moved and angry at the follies of the world, for it principally makes us
quarrel with ourselves; and the old philosopher never wanted an occasion
for his tears whilst he considered himself.  Miso, one of the seven
sages, of a Timonian and Democritic humour, being asked,  “what he
laughed at, being alone?”--“That I do laugh alone,” answered he.  How
many ridiculous things, in my own opinion, do I say and answer every day
that comes over my head?  and then how many more, according to the
opinion of others?  If I bite my own lips, what ought others to do?  In
fine, we must live amongst the living, and let the river run under the
bridge without our care, or, at least, without our interference.  In
truth, why do we meet a man with a hunch-back, or any other deformity,
without being moved, and cannot endure the encounter of a deformed mind
without being angry?  this vicious sourness sticks more to the judge than
to the crime.  Let us always have this saying of Plato in our mouths: “Do
not I think things unsound, because I am not sound in myself?  Am I not
myself in fault?  may not my observations reflect upon myself?”--a wise
and divine saying, that lashes the most universal and common error of
mankind.  Not only the reproaches that we throw in the face of one
another, but our reasons also, our arguments and controversies, are
reboundable upon us, and we wound ourselves with our own weapons: of
which antiquity has left me enough grave examples.  It was ingeniously
and home-said by him, who was the inventor of this sentence:

                    “Stercus cuique suum bene olet.”

          [“To every man his own excrements smell well.”--Erasmus]

We see nothing behind us; we mock ourselves an hundred times a day; when
we deride our neighbours; and we detest in others the defects which are
more manifest in us, and which we admire with marvellous inadvertency and
impudence.  It was but yesterday that I heard a man of understanding and
of good rank, as pleasantly as justly scoffing at the folly of another,
who did nothing but torment everybody with the catalogue of his genealogy
and alliances, above half of them false (for they are most apt to fall
into such ridiculous discourses, whose qualities are most dubious and
least sure), and yet, would he have looked into himself, he would have
discerned himself to be no less intemperate and wearisome in extolling
his wife’s pedigree.  O importunate presumption, with which the wife sees
herself armed by the hands of her own husband.  Did he understand Latin,
we should say to him:

          “Age, si hic non insanit satis sua sponte, instiga.”

     [“Come!  if of himself he is not mad enough, urge him on.”
      --Terence, And., iv. 2, 9.]

I do not say that no man should accuse another, who is not clean
himself,--for then no one would ever accuse,--clean from the same sort of
spot; but I mean that our judgment, falling upon another who is then in
question, should not, at the same time, spare ourselves, but sentence us
with an inward and severe authority.  ‘Tis an office of charity, that he
who cannot reclaim himself from a vice, should, nevertheless, endeavour
to remove it from another, in whom, peradventure, it may not have so deep
and so malignant a root; neither do him who reproves me for my fault that
he himself is guilty of the same.  What of that?  The reproof is,
notwithstanding, true and of very good use.  Had we a good nose, our own
ordure would stink worse to us, forasmuch as it is our own: and Socrates
is of opinion that whoever should find himself, his son, and a stranger
guilty of any violence and wrong, ought to begin with himself, present
himself first to the sentence of justice, and implore, to purge himself,
the assistance of the hand of the executioner; in the next place, he
should proceed to his son, and lastly, to the stranger.  If this precept
seem too severe, he ought at least to present himself the first, to the
punishment of his own conscience.

The senses are our first and proper judges, which perceive not things but
by external accidents; and ‘tis no wonder, if in all the parts of the
service of our society, there is so perpetual and universal a mixture of
ceremonies and superficial appearances; insomuch that the best and most
effectual part of our polities therein consist.  ‘Tis still man with whom
we have to do, of whom the condition is wonderfully corporal.  Let those
who, of these late years, would erect for us such a contemplative and
immaterial an exercise of religion, not wonder if there be some who think
it had vanished and melted through their fingers had it not more upheld
itself among us as a mark, title, and instrument of division and faction,
than by itself.  As in conference, the gravity, robe, and fortune of him
who speaks, ofttimes gives reputation to vain arguments and idle words,
it is not to be presumed but that a man, so attended and feared, has not
in him more than ordinary sufficiency; and that he to whom the king has
given so many offices and commissions and charges, he so supercilious and
proud, has not a great deal more in him, than another who salutes him at
so great a distance, and who has no employment at all.  Not only the
words, but the grimaces also of these people, are considered and put into
the account; every one making it his business to give them some fine and
solid interpretation.  If they stoop to the common conference, and that
you offer anything but approbation and reverence, they then knock you
down with the authority of their experience: they have heard, they have
seen, they have done so and so: you are crushed with examples.  I should
willingly tell them, that the fruit of a surgeon’s experience, is not the
history of his practice and his remembering that he has cured four people
of the plague and three of the gout, unless he knows how thence to
extract something whereon to form his judgment, and to make us sensible
that he has thence become more skillful in his art.  As in a concert of
instruments, we do not hear a lute, a harpsichord, or a flute alone, but
one entire harmony, the result of all together.  If travel and offices
have improved them, ‘tis a product of their understanding to make it
appear.  ‘Tis not enough to reckon experiences, they must weigh, sort and
distil them, to extract the reasons and conclusions they carry along with
them.  There were never so many historians: it is, indeed, good and of
use to read them, for they furnish us everywhere with excellent and
laudable instructions from the magazine of their memory, which,
doubtless, is of great concern to the help of life; but ‘tis not that we
seek for now: we examine whether these relaters and collectors of things
are commendable themselves.

I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed.  I am very ready to
oppose myself against those vain circumstances that delude our judgments
by the senses; and keeping my eye close upon those extraordinary
greatnesses, I find that at best they are men, as others are:

          “Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa
          Fortuna.”

     [“For in those high fortunes, common sense is generally rare.”
      --Juvenal, viii. 73.]

Peradventure, we esteem and look upon them for less than they are, by
reason they undertake more, and more expose themselves; they do not
answer to the charge they have undertaken.  There must be more vigour and
strength in the bearer than in the burden; he who has not lifted as much
as he can, leaves you to guess that he has still a strength beyond that,
and that he has not been tried to the utmost of what he is able to do; he
who sinks under his load, makes a discovery of his best, and the weakness
of his shoulders.  This is the reason that we see so many silly souls
amongst the learned, and more than those of the better sort: they would
have made good husbandmen, good merchants, and good artisans: their
natural vigour was cut out to that proportion.  Knowledge is a thing of
great weight, they faint under it: their understanding has neither vigour
nor dexterity enough to set forth and distribute, to employ or make use
of this rich and powerful matter; it has no prevailing virtue but in a
strong nature; and such natures are very rare--and the weak ones, says
Socrates, corrupt the dignity of philosophy in the handling, it appears
useless and vicious, when lodged in an ill-contrived mind.  They spoil
and make fools of themselves:

              “Humani qualis simulator simius oris,
               Quern puer arridens pretioso stamine serum
               Velavit, nudasque nates ac terga reliquit,
               Ludibrium mensis.”

     [“Just like an ape, simulator of the human face, whom a wanton boy
     has dizened up in rich silks above, but left the lower parts bare,
     for a laughing-stock for the tables.”
      --Claudian, in Eutrop., i 303.]

Neither is it enough for those who govern and command us, and have all
the world in their hands, to have a common understanding, and to be able
to do the same that we can; they are very much below us, if they be not
infinitely above us: as they promise more, so they are to perform more.

And yet silence is to them, not only a countenance of respect and
gravity, but very often of good advantage too: for Megabyzus, going ‘to
see Apelles in his painting-room, stood a great while without speaking a
word, and at last began to talk of his paintings, for which he received
this rude reproof: “Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some
great thing, by reason of thy chains and rich habit; but now that we have
heard thee speak, there is not the meanest boy in my workshop that does
not despise thee.”  Those princely ornaments, that mighty state, did not
permit him to be ignorant with a common ignorance, and to speak
impertinently of painting; he ought to have kept this external and
presumptive knowledge by silence.  To how many foolish fellows of my time
has a sullen and silent mien procured the credit of prudence and
capacity!

Dignities and offices are of necessity conferred more by fortune than
upon the account of merit; and we are often to blame, to condemn kings
when these are misplaced: on the contrary, ‘tis a wonder they should have
so good luck, where there is so little skill:

               “Principis est virtus maxima nosse suos;”

          [“‘Tis the chief virtue of a prince to know his people.”
           --Martial, viii. 15.]

for nature has not given them a sight that can extend to so many people,
to discern which excels the rest, nor to penetrate into our bosoms, where
the knowledge of our wills and best value lies they must choose us by
conjecture and by groping; by the family, wealth, learning, and the voice
of the people, which are all very feeble arguments.  Whoever could find
out a way by which they might judge by justice, and choose men by reason,
would, in this one thing, establish a perfect form of government.

“Ay, but he brought that great affair to a very good pass.”  This is,
indeed, to say something, but not to say enough: for this sentence is
justly received, “That we are not to judge of counsels by events.”
 The Carthaginians punished the ill counsels of their captains, though
they were rectified by a successful issue; and the Roman people often
denied a triumph for great and very advantageous victories because the
conduct of their general was not answerable to his good fortune.
We ordinarily see, in the actions of the world, that Fortune, to shew
us her power in all things, and who takes a pride in abating our
presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them
fortunate in emulation of virtue; and most favours those operations the
web of which is most purely her own; whence it is that the simplest
amongst us bring to pass great business, both public and private; and,
as Seiramnes, the Persian, answered those who wondered that his affairs
succeeded so ill, considering that his deliberations were so wise, “that
he was sole master of his designs, but that success was wholly in the
power of fortune”;  these may answer the same, but with a contrary turn.
Most worldly affairs are performed by themselves

                         “Fata viam inveniunt;”

          [“The destinies find the way.”--AEneid, iii. 395]

the event often justifies a very foolish conduct; our interposition is
little more than as it were a running on by rote, and more commonly a
consideration of custom and example, than of reason.  Being formerly
astonished at the greatness of some affair, I have been made acquainted
with their motives and address by those who had performed it, and have
found nothing in it but very ordinary counsels; and the most common and
usual are indeed, perhaps, the most sure and convenient for practice, if
not for show.  What if the plainest reasons are the best seated?  the
meanest, lowest, and most beaten more adapted to affairs?  To maintain
the authority of the counsels of kings, it needs not that profane persons
should participate of them, or see further into them than the outmost
barrier; he who will husband its reputation must be reverenced upon
credit and taken altogether.  My consultation somewhat rough-hews the
matter, and considers it lightly by the first face it presents: the
stress and main of the business I have been wont to refer to heaven;

                         “Permitte divis caetera.”

          [“Leave the rest to the gods.”--Horace, Od., i.  9, 9.]

Good and ill fortune are, in my opinion, two sovereign powers; ‘tis folly
to think that human prudence can play the part of Fortune; and vain is
his attempt who presumes to comprehend both causes and consequences, and
by the hand to conduct the progress of his design; and most especially
vain in the deliberations of war.  There was never greater circumspection
and military prudence than sometimes is seen amongst us: can it be that
men are afraid to lose themselves by the way, that they reserve
themselves to the end of the game?  I moreover affirm that our wisdom
itself and consultation, for the most part commit themselves to the
conduct of chance; my will and my reason are sometimes moved by one
breath, and sometimes by another; and many of these movements there are
that govern themselves without me: my reason has uncertain and casual
agitations and impulsions:

         “Vertuntur species animorum, et pectora motus
          Nunc alios, alios, dum nubila ventus agebat,
          Concipiunt.”

     [“The aspects of their minds change; and they conceive now such
     ideas, now such, just so long as the wind agitated the clouds.”
      --Virgil, Georg., i.  42.]

Let a man but observe who are of greatest authority in cities, and who
best do their own business; we shall find that they are commonly men of
the least parts: women, children, and madmen have had the fortune to
govern great kingdoms equally well with the wisest princes, and
Thucydides says, that the stupid more ordinarily do it than those of
better understandings; we attribute the effects of their good fortune to
their prudence:

                    “Ut quisque Fortuna utitur,
          Ita praecellet; atque exinde sapere illum omnes dicimus;”

     [“He makes his way who knows how to use Fortune, and thereupon we
     all call him wise.”--Plautus, Pseudol., ii. 3, 13.]

wherefore I say unreservedly, events are a very poor testimony of our
worth and parts.

Now, I was upon this point, that there needs no more but to see a man
promoted to dignity; though we knew him but three days before a man of
little regard, yet an image of grandeur of sufficiency insensibly steals
into our opinion, and we persuade ourselves that, being augmented in
reputation and train, he is also increased in merit; we judge of him, not
according to his worth, but as we do by counters, according to the
prerogative of his place.  If it happen so that he fall again, and be
mixed with the common crowd, every one inquires with amazement into the
cause of his having been raised so high.  “Is this he,” say they, “was he
no wiser when he was there?  Do princes satisfy themselves with so
little?  Truly, we were in good hands.”  This is a thing that I have
often seen in my time.  Nay, even the very disguise of grandeur
represented in our comedies in some sort moves and gulls us.  That which
I myself adore in kings is the crowd of their adorers; all reverence and
submission are due to them, except that of the understanding: my reason
is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are.  Melanthius being asked
what he thought of the tragedy of Dionysius, “I could not see it,” said
he, “it was so clouded with language”; so most of those who judge of the
discourses of great men ought to say, “I did not understand his words,
they were so clouded with gravity, grandeur, and majesty.”  Antisthenes
one day tried to persuade the Athenians to give order that their asses
might be employed in tilling the ground as well as the horses were; to
which it was answered that that animal was not destined for such a
service: “That’s all one,” replied he, “you have only to order it: for
the most ignorant and incapable men you employ in the commands of your
wars incontinently become worthy enough, because you employ them”; to
which the custom of so many people, who canonise the king they have
chosen out of their own body, and are not content only to honour, but
must adore them, comes very near.  Those of Mexico, after the ceremonies
of their king’s coronation are over, dare no more look him in the face;
but, as if they had deified him by his royalty.  Amongst the oaths they
make him take to maintain their religion, their laws, and liberties, to
be valiant, just, and mild, he moreover swears to make the sun run his
course in his wonted light, to drain the clouds at fit seasons, to make
rivers run their course, and to cause the earth to bear all things
necessary for his people.

I differ from this common fashion, and am more apt to suspect the
capacity when I see it accompanied with that grandeur of fortune and
public applause; we are to consider of what advantage it is to speak when
a man pleases, to choose his subject, to interrupt or change it, with a
magisterial authority; to protect himself from the oppositions of others
by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that
trembles with reverence and respect.  A man of a prodigious fortune
coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly
set on foot at his table, began in these words: “It can be no other but
a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so.”  Pursue this
philosophical point with a dagger in your hand.

There is another observation I have made, from which I draw great
advantage; which is, that in conferences and disputes, every word that
seems to be good, is not immediately to be accepted.  Most men are rich
in borrowed sufficiency: a man may say a good thing, give a good answer,
cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one
or the other.  That a man may not understand all he borrows, may perhaps
be verified in myself.  A man must not always presently yield, what truth
or beauty soever may seem to be in the opposite argument; either he must
stoutly meet it, or retire, under colour of not understanding it, to try,
on all parts, how it is lodged in the author.  It may happen that we
entangle ourselves, and help to strengthen the point itself.  I have
sometimes, in the necessity and heat of the combat, made answers that
have gone through and through, beyond my expectation or hope; I only gave
them in number, they were received in weight.  As, when I contend with a
vigorous man, I please myself with anticipating his conclusions, I ease
him of the trouble of explaining himself, I strive to forestall his
imagination whilst it is yet springing and imperfect; the order and
pertinency of his understanding warn and threaten me afar off: I deal
quite contrary with the others; I must understand, and presuppose nothing
but by them.  If they determine in general words, “this is good, that is
naught,” and that they happen to be in the right, see if it be not
fortune that hits it off for them: let them a little circumscribe and
limit their judgment; why, or how, it is so.  These universal judgments
that I see so common, signify nothing; these are men who salute a whole
people in a crowd together; they, who have a real acquaintance, take
notice of and salute them individually and by name.  But ‘tis a hazardous
attempt; and from which I have, more than every day, seen it fall out,
that weak understandings, having a mind to appear ingenious, in taking
notice, as they read a book, of what is best and most to be admired, fix
their admiration upon some thing so very ill chosen, that instead of
making us discern the excellence of the author; they make us very well
see their own ignorance.  This exclamation is safe, “That is fine,” after
having heard a whole page of Virgil;  by that the cunning sort save
themselves; but to undertake to follow him line by line, and, with an
expert and tried judgment, to observe where a good author excels himself,
weighing the words, phrases, inventions, and his various excellences, one
after another; keep aloof from that:

     “Videndum est, non modo quid quisque loquatur, sed etiam quid
     quisque sentiat, atque etiam qua de causa quisque sentiat.”

     [“A man is not only to examine what every one says, but also what
     every one thinks, and from what reason every one thinks.”
      --Cicero, De Offic:, i. 41.]

I every day hear fools say things that are not foolish: they say a good
thing; let us examine how far they understand it, whence they have it,
and what they mean by it.  We help them to make use of this fine
expression, of this fine sentence, which is none of theirs; they only
have it in keeping; they have bolted it out at a venture; we place it for
them in credit and esteem.  You lend them your hand.  To what purpose?
they do not think themselves obliged to you for it, and become more inept
still.  Don’t help them; let them alone; they will handle the matter like
people who are afraid of burning their fingers; they dare change neither
its seat nor light, nor break into it; shake it never so little, it slips
through their fingers; they give it up, be it never so strong or fair
they are fine weapons, but ill hafted: How many times have I seen the
experience of this?  Now, if you come to explain anything to them, and to
confirm them, they catch at it, and presently rob you of the advantage of
your interpretation; “It was what I was about to say; it was just my
idea; if I did not express it so, it was for want of language.”  Mere
wind!  Malice itself must be employed to correct this arrogant ignorance.
The dogma of Hegesias, “that we are neither to hate nor accuse, but
instruct,” is correct elsewhere; but here ‘tis injustice and inhumanity
to relieve and set him right who stands in no need on’t, and is the worse
for’t.  I love to let them step deeper into the mire; and so deep, that,
if it be possible, they may at last discern their error.

Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition; and what
Cyrus answered to him, who importuned him to harangue his army, upon the
point of battle, “that men do not become valiant and warlike upon a
sudden, by a fine oration, no more than a man becomes a good musician by
hearing a fine song,” may properly be said of such an admonition as this.
These are apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand, by a long and
continued education.  We owe this care and this assiduity of correction
and instruction to our own people; but to go preach to the first
passer-by, and to become tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we
meet, is a thing that I abhor.  I rarely do it, even in private
conversation, and rather give up the whole thing than proceed to these
initiatory and school instructions; my humour is unfit either to speak or
write for beginners; but for things that are said in common discourse, or
amongst other things, I never oppose them either by word or sign, how
false or absurd soever.

As to the rest, nothing vexes me so much in folly as that it is more
satisfied with itself than any reason can reasonably be.  ‘Tis
unfortunate that prudence forbids us to satisfy and trust ourselves,
and always dismisses us timorous and discontented; whereas obstinacy and
temerity fill those who are possessed with them with joy and assurance.
‘Tis for the most ignorant to look at other men over the shoulder, always
returning from the combat full of joy and triumph.  And moreover, for the
most part, this arrogance of speech and gaiety of countenance gives them
the better of it in the opinion of the audience, which is commonly weak
and incapable of well judging and discerning the real advantage.
Obstinacy of opinion and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly;
is there anything so assured, resolute, disdainful, contemplative,
serious and grave as the ass?

May we not include under the title of conference and communication the
quick and sharp repartees which mirth and familiarity introduce amongst
friends, pleasantly and wittily jesting and rallying with one another?
‘Tis an exercise for which my natural gaiety renders me fit enough, and
which, if it be not so tense and serious as the other I spoke of but now,
is, as Lycurgus thought, no less smart and ingenious, nor of less
utility.  For my part, I contribute to it more liberty than wit, and have
therein more of luck than invention; but I am perfect in suffering, for I
endure a retaliation that is not only tart, but indiscreet to boot,
without being moved at all; and whoever attacks me, if I have not a brisk
answer immediately ready, I do not study to pursue the point with a
tedious and impertinent contest, bordering upon obstinacy, but let it
pass, and hanging down cheerfully my ears, defer my revenge to another
and better time: there is no merchant that always gains: Most men change
their countenance and their voice where their wits fail, and by an
unseasonable anger, instead of revenging themselves, accuse at once their
own folly and impatience.  In this jollity, we sometimes pinch the secret
strings of our imperfections which, at another and graver time, we cannot
touch without offence, and so profitably give one another a hint of our
defects.  There are other jeux de main,--[practical jokes]--rude and
indiscreet, after the French manner, that I mortally hate; my skin is
very tender and sensible: I have in my time seen two princes of the blood
buried upon that very account.  ‘Tis unhandsome to fight in play.  As to
the rest, when I have a mind to judge of any one, I ask him how far he is
contented with himself; to what degree his speaking or his work pleases
him.  I will none of these fine excuses, “I did it only in sport,

               ‘Ablatum mediis opus est incudibus istud.’

          [“That work was taken from the anvil half finished.”
           --Ovid, Trist., i. 6, 29.]

I was not an hour about it: I have never looked at it since.”  Well,
then, say I, lay these aside, and give me a perfect one, such as you
would be measured by.  And then, what do you think is the best thing in
your work? is it this part or that? is it grace or the matter, the
invention, the judgment, or the learning?  For I find that men are,
commonly, as wide of the mark in judging of their own works, as of those
of others; not only by reason of the kindness they have for them, but for
want of capacity to know and distinguish them: the work, by its own force
and fortune, may second the workman, and sometimes outstrip him, beyond
his invention and knowledge.  For my part, I judge of the value of other
men’s works more obscurely than of my own; and place the Essays, now
high, or low, with great doubt and inconstancy.  There are several books
that are useful upon the account of their subjects, from which the author
derives no praise; and good books, as well as good works, that shame the
workman.  I may write the manner of our feasts, and the fashion of our
clothes, and may write them ill; I may publish the edicts of my time, and
the letters of princes that pass from hand to hand; I may make an
abridgment of a good book (and every abridgment of a good book is a
foolish abridgment), which book shall come to be lost; and so on:
posterity will derive a singular utility from such compositions: but what
honour shall I have unless by great good fortune?  Most part of the
famous books are of this condition.

When I read Philip de Commines, doubtless a very good author, several
years ago, I there took notice of this for no vulgar saying, “That a man
must have a care not to do his master so great service, that at last he
will not know how to give him his just reward”; but I ought to commend
the invention, not him, because I met with it in Tacitus, not long since:

         “Beneficia ea usque lxta sunt, dum videntur exsolvi posse;
          ubi multum antevenere, pro gratis odium redditur;”

     [“Benefits are so far acceptable as they appear to be capable of
     recompense; where they much exceed that point, hatred is returned
     instead of thanks.”--Tacitus, Annal., iv. 18.]

and Seneca vigorously says:

                    “Nam qui putat esse turpe non reddere,
                    non vult esse cui reddat:”

     [“For he who thinks it a shame not to requite, does not wish to
     have the man live to whom he owes return.”--Seneca, Ep., 81.]

Q. Cicero says with less directness.:

                   “Qui se non putat satisfacere,
                    amicus esse nullo modo potest.”

     [“Who thinks himself behind in obligation, can by no
     means be a friend.”--Q. Cicero, De Petitione Consul, c. 9.]

The subject, according to what it is, may make a man looked upon as
learned and of good memory; but to judge in him the parts that are most
his own and the most worthy, the vigour and beauty of his soul, one must
first know what is his own and what is not; and in that which is not his
own, how much we are obliged to him for the choice, disposition,
ornament, and language he has there presented us with.  What if he has
borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it often falls out?  We, who
are little read in books, are in this strait, that when we meet with a
high fancy in some new poet, or some strong argument in a preacher, we
dare not, nevertheless, commend it till we have first informed ourselves,
through some learned man, if it be the writer’s wit or borrowed from some
other; until that I always stand upon my guard.

I have lately been reading the history of Tacitus quite through, without
interrupting it with anything else (which but seldom happens with me, it
being twenty years since I have kept to any one book an hour together),
and I did it at the instance of a gentleman for whom France has a great
esteem, as well for his own particular worth, as upon the account of a
constant form of capacity and virtue which runs through a great many
brothers of them.  I do not know any author in a public narrative who
mixes so much consideration of manners and particular inclinations: and I
am of a quite contrary opinion to him, holding that, having especially to
follow the lives of the emperors of his time, so various and extreme in
all sorts of forms, so many notable actions as their cruelty especially
produced in their subjects, he had a stronger and more attractive matter
to treat of than if he had had to describe battles and universal
commotions; so that I often find him sterile, running over those brave
deaths as if he feared to trouble us with their multitude and length.
This form of history is by much the most useful; public movements depend
most upon the conduct of fortune, private ones upon our own.  ‘Tis rather
a judgment than a narration of history; there are in it more precepts
than stories: it is not a book to read, ‘tis a book to study and learn;
‘tis full of sententious opinions, right or wrong; ‘tis a nursery of
ethic and politic discourses, for the use and ornament of those who have
any place in the government of the world.  He always argues by strong and
solid reasons, after a pointed and subtle manner, according to the
affected style of that age, which was so in love with an inflated manner,
that where point and subtlety were wanting in things it supplied these
with lofty and swelling words.  ‘Tis not much unlike the style of Seneca:
I look upon Tacitus as more sinewy, and Seneca as more sharp.  His pen
seems most proper for a troubled and sick state, as ours at present is;
you would often say that he paints and pinches us.

They who doubt his good faith sufficiently accuse themselves of being his
enemy upon some other account.  His opinions are sound, and lean to the
right side in the Roman affairs.  And yet I am angry at him for judging
more severely of Pompey than consists with the opinion of those worthy
men who lived in the same time, and had dealings with him; and to have
reputed him on a par with Marius and Sylla, excepting that he was more
close.  Other writers have not acquitted his intention in the government
of affairs from ambition and revenge; and even his friends were afraid
that victory would have transported him beyond the bounds of reason, but
not to so immeasurable a degree as theirs; nothing in his life threatened
such express cruelty and tyranny.  Neither ought we to set suspicion
against evidence; and therefore I do not believe Plutarch in this matter.
That his narrations were genuine and straightforward may, perhaps, be
argued from this very thing, that they do not always apply to the
conclusions of his judgments, which he follows according to the bias he
has taken, very often beyond the matter he presents us withal, which he
has not deigned to alter in the least degree.  He needs no excuse for
having approved the religion of his time, according as the laws enjoined,
and to have been ignorant of the true; this was his misfortune, not his
fault.

I have principally considered his judgment, and am not very well
satisfied therewith throughout; as these words in the letter that
Tiberius, old and sick, sent to the senate. “What shall I write to you,
sirs, or how should I write to you, or what should I not write to you at
this time?  May the gods and goddesses lay a worse punishment upon me
than I am every day tormented with, if I know!”  I do not see why he
should so positively apply them to a sharp remorse that tormented the
conscience of Tiberius; at least, when I was in the same condition, I
perceived no such thing.

And this also seemed to me a little mean in him that, having to say that
he had borne an honourable office in Rome, he excuses himself that he
does not say it out of ostentation; this seems, I say, mean for such a
soul as his; for not to speak roundly of a man’s self implies some want
of courage; a man of solid and lofty judgment, who judges soundly and
surely, makes use of his own example upon all occasions, as well as those
of others; and gives evidence as freely of himself as of a third person.
We are to pass by these common rules of civility, in favour of truth and
liberty.  I dare not only speak of myself, but to speak only of myself:
when I write of anything else, I miss my way and wander from my subject.
I am not so indiscreetly enamoured of myself, so wholly mixed up with,
and bound to myself, that I cannot distinguish and consider myself apart,
as I do a neighbour or a tree: ‘tis equally a fault not to discern how
far a man’s worth extends, and to say more than a man discovers in
himself.  We owe more love to God than to ourselves, and know Him less;
and yet speak of Him as much as we will.

If the writings of Tacitus indicate anything true of his qualities, he
was a great personage, upright and bold, not of a superstitious but of a
philosophical and generous virtue.  One may think him bold in his
relations; as where he tells us, that a soldier carrying a burden of
wood, his hands were so frozen and so stuck to the load that they there
remained closed and dead, being severed from his arms.  I always in such
things bow to the authority of so great witnesses.

What also he says, that Vespasian, “by the favour of the god Serapis,
cured a blind woman at Alexandria by anointing her eyes with his spittle,
and I know not what other miracle,” he says by the example and duty of
all his good historians.  They record all events of importance; and
amongst public incidents are the popular rumours and opinions.  ‘Tis
their part to relate common beliefs, not to regulate them: that part
concerns divines and philosophers, directors of consciences; and
therefore it was that this companion of his, and a great man like
himself, very wisely said:

     “Equidem plura transcribo, quam credo: nam nec affirmare
     sustineo, de quibus dubito, nec subducere quae accepi;”

     [“Truly, I set down more things than I believe, for I can neither
     affirm things whereof I doubt, nor suppress what I have heard.”
      --Quintus Curtius, ix.]

and this other:

               “Haec neque affirmare neque refellere operae
               pretium est; famae rerum standum est.”

     [“‘Tis neither worth the while to affirm or to refute these things;
     we must stand to report”--Livy, i., Praef., and viii. 6.]

And writing in an age wherein the belief of prodigies began to decline,
he says he would not, nevertheless, forbear to insert in his Annals, and
to give a relation of things received by so many worthy men, and with so
great reverence of antiquity; ‘tis very well said.  Let them deliver to
us history, more as they receive it than as they believe it.  I, who am
monarch of the matter whereof I treat, and who am accountable to none, do
not, nevertheless, always believe myself; I often hazard sallies of my
own wit, wherein I very much suspect myself, and certain verbal quibbles,
at which I shake my ears; but I let them go at a venture.  I see that
others get reputation by such things: ‘tis not for me alone to judge.  I
present myself standing and lying, before and behind, my right side and
my left, and, in all my natural postures.  Wits, though equal in force,
are not always equal in taste and application.

This is what my memory presents to me in gross, and with uncertainty
enough; all judgments in gross are weak and imperfect.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A hundred more escape us than ever come to our knowledge
     A man must have courage to fear
     A man never speaks of himself without loss
     A man’s accusations of himself are always believed
     Agitation has usurped the place of reason
     All judgments in gross are weak and imperfect
     Any argument if it  be carried on with method
     Apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand
     Arrogant ignorance
     Avoid all magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten
     Being as impatient of commanding as of being commanded
     Defer my revenge to another and better time
     Desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled
     Detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us
     Disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass
     Do not, nevertheless, always believe myself
     Events are a very poor testimony of our worth and parts.
     Every abridgment of a good book is a foolish abridgment
     Fault not to discern how far a man’s worth extends
     Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition
     Folly satisfied with itself than any reason can reasonably be
     Folly than to be moved and angry at the follies of the world
     Give us history, more as they receive it than as they believe it
     I every day hear fools say things that are not foolish
     I hail and caress truth in what quarter soever I find it
     I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed
     I love stout expressions amongst gentle men
     I was too frightened to be ill
     If it be the writer’s wit or borrowed from some other
     Ignorance does not offend me, but the foppery of it.
     It is not a book to read, ‘tis a book to study and learn
     “It was what I was about to say; it was just my idea,”
      Judge by justice, and choose men by reason
     Knock you down with the authority of their experience
     Learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds
     Liberality at the expense of others
     Malice must be employed to correct this arrogant ignorance
     Man must have a care not to do his master so great service
     Mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations
     Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency
     My humour is unfit either to speak or write for beginners
     My reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are
     Never oppose them either by word or sign, how false or absurd
     New World: sold it opinions and our arts at a very dear rate
     Obstinancy and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly
     One must first know what is his own and what is not
     Our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation
     Passion has already confounded his judgment
     Pinch the secret strings of our imperfections
     Practical Jokes: Tis unhandsome to fight in play
     Presumptive knowledge by silence
     Silent mien procured the credit of prudence and capacity
     Spectators can claim no interest in the honour and pleasure
     Study of books is a languishing and feeble motion
     The cause of truth ought to be the common cause
     The event often justifies a very foolish conduct
     The ignorant return from the combat full of joy and triumph
     The very name Liberality sounds of Liberty.
     There are some upon whom their rich clothes weep
     There is no merchant that always gains
     There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature
     They have heard, they have seen, they have done so and so
     They have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected
     Tis impossible to deal fairly with a fool
     To fret and vex at folly, as I do, is folly itself
     Transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
     Tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we meet
     Tyrannic sourness not to endure a form contrary to one’s own
     Universal judgments that I see so common, signify nothing
     “What he laughed at, being alone?”--“That I do laugh alone,”
      We are not to judge of counsels by events
     We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him
     We neither see far forward nor far backward
     Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some great thing
     Who has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise
     Wide of the mark in judging of their own works
     Wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise







ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 17.

IX.   Of Vanity



CHAPTER IX

OF VANITY

There is, peradventure, no more manifest vanity than to write of it so
vainly.  That which divinity has so divinely expressed to us--[“Vanity
of vanities: all is vanity.”--Eccles., i. 2.]--ought to be carefully and
continually meditated by men of understanding.  Who does not see that I
have taken a road, in which, incessantly and without labour, I shall
proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world?  I can give
no account of my life by my actions; fortune has placed them too low: I
must do it by my fancies.  And yet I have seen a gentleman who only
communicated his life by the workings of his belly: you might see on his
premises a show of a row of basins of seven or eight days’ standing; it
was his study, his discourse; all other talk stank in his nostrils.
Here, but not so nauseous, are the excrements of an old mind, sometimes
thick, sometimes thin, and always indigested.  And when shall I have done
representing the continual agitation and mutation of my thoughts, as they
come into my head, seeing that Diomedes wrote six thousand books upon the
sole subject of grammar?

     [It was not Diomedes, but Didymus the grammarian, who, as Seneca
     (Ep., 88) tells us, wrote four not six thousand books on questions
     of vain literature, which was the principal study of the ancient
     grammarian.--Coste.  But the number is probably exaggerated, and for
     books we should doubtless read pamphlets or essays.]

What, then, ought prating to produce, since prattling and the first
beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of
volumes?  So many words for words only.  O Pythagoras, why didst not thou
allay this tempest?  They accused one Galba of old for living idly; he
made answer, “That every one ought to give account of his actions, but
not of his home.”  He was mistaken, for justice also takes cognisance of
those who glean after the reaper.

But there should be some restraint of law against foolish and impertinent
scribblers, as well as against vagabonds and idle persons; which if there
were, both I and a hundred others would be banished from the reach of our
people.  I do not speak this in jest: scribbling seems to be a symptom of
a disordered and licentious age.  When did we write so much as since our
troubles? when the Romans so much, as upon the point of ruin?  Besides
that, the refining of wits does not make people wiser in a government:
this idle employment springs from this, that every one applies himself
negligently to the duty of his vocation, and is easily debauched from it.
The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of
every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice,
irreligion, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power; the
weaker sort contribute folly, vanity, and idleness; of these I am one.
It seems as if it were the season for vain things, when the hurtful
oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do but what signifies
nothing is a kind of commendation.  ‘Tis my comfort, that I shall be one
of the last who shall be called in question; and whilst the greater
offenders are being brought to account, I shall have leisure to amend:
for it would, methinks, be against reason to punish little
inconveniences, whilst we are infested with the greater.  As the
physician Philotimus said to one who presented him his finger to dress,
and who he perceived, both by his complexion and his breath, had an ulcer
in his lungs: “Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails.”
 --[Plutarch, How we may distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend.]

And yet I saw, some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have in
very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there
was neither law nor justice, nor magistrate who performed his office, no
more than there is now, publish I know not what pitiful reformations
about cloths, cookery, and law chicanery.  Those are amusements wherewith
to feed a people that are ill-used, to show that they are not totally
forgotten.  Those others do the same, who insist upon prohibiting
particular ways of speaking, dances, and games, to a people totally
abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices.  ‘Tis no time to bathe and
cleanse one’s self, when one is seized by a violent fever; it was for the
Spartans alone to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they were
just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their
life.

For my part, I have that worse custom, that if my slipper go awry, I let
my shirt and my cloak do so too; I scorn to mend myself by halves.

When I am in a bad plight, I fasten upon the mischief; I abandon myself
through despair; I let myself go towards the precipice, and, as they say,
“throw the helve after the hatchet”; I am obstinate in growing worse, and
think myself no longer worth my own care; I am either well or ill
throughout.  ‘T is a favour to me, that the desolation of this kingdom
falls out in the desolation of my age: I better suffer that my ill be
multiplied, than if my well had been disturbed.--[That, being ill, I
should grow worse, than that, being well, I should grow ill.]--The words
I utter in mishap are words of anger: my courage sets up its bristles,
instead of letting them down; and, contrary to others, I am more devout
in good than in evil fortune, according to the precept of Xenophon, if
not according to his reason; and am more ready to turn up my eyes to
heaven to return thanks, than to crave.  I am more solicitous to improve
my health, when I am well, than to restore it when I am sick;
prosperities are the same discipline and instruction to me that
adversities and rods are to others.  As if good fortune were a thing
inconsistent with good conscience, men never grow good but in evil
fortune.  Good fortune is to me a singular spur to modesty and
moderation: an entreaty wins, a threat checks me; favour makes me bend,
fear stiffens me.

Amongst human conditions this is common enough: to be better pleased with
foreign things than with our own, and to love innovation and change:

              “Ipsa dies ideo nos grato perluit haustu,
               Quod permutatis hora recurrit equis:”

     [“The light of day itself shines more pleasantly upon us because it
     changes its horses every hour.”  Spoke of a water hour-glass,
     adds  Cotton.]

I have my share.  Those who follow the other extreme, of being quite
satisfied and pleased with and in themselves, of valuing what they have
above all the rest, and of concluding no beauty can be greater than what
they see, if they are not wiser than we, are really more happy; I do not
envy their wisdom, but their good fortune.

This greedy humour of new and unknown things helps to nourish in me the
desire of travel; but a great many more circumstances contribute to it;
I am very willing to quit the government of my house.  There is, I
confess, a kind of convenience in commanding, though it were but in a
barn, and in being obeyed by one’s people; but ‘tis too uniform and
languid a pleasure, and is, moreover, of necessity mixed with a thousand
vexatious thoughts: one while the poverty and the oppression of your
tenants: another, quarrels amongst neighbours: another, the trespasses
they make upon you afflict you;

                   “Aut verberatae grandine vineae,
                    Fundusque mendax, arbore nunc aquas
                    Culpante, nunc torrentia agros
                    Sidera, nunc hyemes iniquas.”

     [“Or hail-smitten vines and the deceptive farm; now trees damaged
     by the rains, or years of dearth, now summer’s heat burning up the
     petals, now destructive winters.”--Horatius, Od., iii. I, 29.]

and that God scarce in six months sends a season wherein your bailiff can
do his business as he should; but that if it serves the vines, it spoils
the meadows:

              “Aut nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol,
               Aut subiti perimunt imbres, gelidoeque pruinae,
               Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant;”

     [“Either the scorching sun burns up your fields, or sudden rains or
     frosts destroy your harvests, or a violent wind carries away all
     before it.”--Lucretius, V. 216.]

to which may be added the new and neat-made shoe of the man of old, that
hurts your foot,

     [Leclerc maliciously suggests that this is a sly hit at Montaigne’s
     wife, the man of old being the person mentioned in Plutarch’s Life
     of Paulus Emilius, c. 3, who, when his friends reproached him for
     repudiating his wife, whose various merits they extolled, pointed to
     his shoe, and said, “That looks a nice well-made shoe to you; but I
     alone know where it pinches.”]

and that a stranger does not understand how much it costs you, and what
you contribute to maintain that show of order that is seen in your
family, and that peradventure you buy too dear.

I came late to the government of a house: they whom nature sent into the
world before me long eased me of that trouble; so that I had already
taken another bent more suitable to my humour.  Yet, for so much as I
have seen, ‘tis an employment more troublesome than hard; whoever is
capable of anything else, will easily do this.  Had I a mind to be rich,
that way would seem too long; I had served my kings, a more profitable
traffic than any other.  Since I pretend to nothing but the reputation of
having got nothing or dissipated nothing, conformably to the rest of my
life, improper either to do good or ill of any moment, and that I only
desire to pass on, I can do it, thanks be to God, without any great
endeavour.  At the worst, evermore prevent poverty by lessening your
expense; ‘tis that which I make my great concern, and doubt not but to do
it before I shall be compelled.  As to the rest, I have sufficiently
settled my thoughts to live upon less than I have, and live contentedly:

          “Non aestimatione census, verum victu atque cultu,
          terminantur pecunix modus.”

     [“‘Tis not by the value of possessions, but by our daily subsistence
     and tillage, that our riches are truly estimated.”
      --Cicero, Paradox, vi. 3.]

My real need does not so wholly take up all I have, that Fortune has not
whereon to fasten her teeth without biting to the quick.  My presence,
heedless and ignorant as it is, does me great service in my domestic
affairs; I employ myself in them, but it goes against the hair, finding
that I have this in my house, that though I burn my candle at one end by
myself, the other is not spared.

Journeys do me no harm but only by their expense, which is great, and
more than I am well able to bear, being always wont to travel with not
only a necessary, but a handsome equipage; I must make them so much
shorter and fewer; I spend therein but the froth, and what I have
reserved for such uses, delaying and deferring my motion till that be
ready.  I will not that the pleasure of going abroad spoil the pleasure
of being retired at home; on the contrary, I intend they shall nourish
and favour one another.  Fortune has assisted me in this, that since my
principal profession in this life was to live at ease, and rather idly
than busily, she has deprived me of the necessity of growing rich to
provide for the multitude of my heirs.  If there be not enough for one,
of that whereof I had so plentifully enough, at his peril be it: his
imprudence will not deserve that I should wish him any more.  And every
one, according to the example of Phocion, provides sufficiently for his
children who so provides for them as to leave them as much as was left
him.  I should by no means like Crates’ way.  He left his money in the
hands of a banker with this condition--that if his children were fools,
he should then give it to them; if wise, he should then distribute it to
the most foolish of the people; as if fools, for being less capable of
living without riches, were more capable of using them.

At all events, the damage occasioned by my absence seems not to deserve,
so long as I am able to support it, that I should waive the occasions of
diverting myself by that troublesome assistance.

There is always something that goes amiss.  The affairs, one while of one
house, and then of another, tear you to pieces; you pry into everything
too near; your perspicacity hurts you here, as well as in other things.
I steal away from occasions of vexing myself, and turn from the knowledge
of things that go amiss; and yet I cannot so order it, but that every
hour I jostle against something or other that displeases me; and the
tricks that they most conceal from me, are those that I the soonest come
to know; some there are that, not to make matters worse, a man must
himself help to conceal.  Vain vexations; vain sometimes, but always
vexations.  The smallest and slightest impediments are the most piercing:
and as little letters most tire the eyes, so do little affairs most
disturb us.  The rout of little ills more offend than one, how great
soever.  By how much domestic thorns are numerous and slight, by so much
they prick deeper and without warning, easily surprising us when least we
suspect them.

     [Now Homer shews us clearly enough how surprise gives the advantage;
     who represents Ulysses weeping at the death of his dog; and not
     weeping at the tears of his mother; the first accident, trivial as
     it was, got the better of him, coming upon him quite unexpectedly;
     he sustained the second, though more potent, because he was prepared
     for it.  ‘Tis light occasions that humble our lives. ]

I am no philosopher; evils oppress me according to their weight, and they
weigh as much according to the form as the matter, and very often more.
If I have therein more perspicacity than the vulgar, I have also more
patience; in short, they weigh with me, if they do not hurt me.  Life is
a tender thing, and easily molested.  Since my age has made me grow more
pensive and morose,

          “Nemo enim resistit sibi, cum caeperit impelli,”

     [“For no man resists himself when he has begun to be driven
     forward.”--Seneca, Ep., 13.]

for the most trivial cause imaginable, I irritate that humour, which
afterwards nourishes and exasperates itself of its own motion; attracting
and heaping up matter upon matter whereon to feed:

               “Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat:”

     [“The ever falling drop hollows out a stone.”--Lucretius, i. 314.]

these continual tricklings consume and ulcerate me.  Ordinary
inconveniences are never light; they are continual and inseparable,
especially when they spring from the members of a family, continual and
inseparable.  When I consider my affairs at distance and in gross, I
find, because perhaps my memory is none of the best, that they have gone
on hitherto improving beyond my reason or expectation; my revenue seems
greater than it is; its prosperity betrays me: but when I pry more
narrowly into the business, and see how all things go:

               “Tum vero in curas animum diducimus omnes;”

          [“Indeed we lead the mind into all sorts of cares.”
           --AEneid, v. 720.]

I have a thousand things to desire and to fear.  To give them quite over,
is very easy for me to do: but to look after them without trouble, is
very hard.  ‘Tis a miserable thing to be in a place where everything you
see employs and concerns you; and I fancy that I more cheerfully enjoy
the pleasures of another man’s house, and with greater and a purer
relish, than those of my own.  Diogenes answered according to my humour
him who asked him what sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another,”
 said he.--[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 54.]

My father took a delight in building at Montaigne, where he was born; and
in all the government of domestic affairs I love to follow his example
and rules, and I shall engage those who are to succeed me, as much as in
me lies, to do the same.  Could I do better for him, I would; and am
proud that his will is still performing and acting by me.  God forbid
that in my hands I should ever suffer any image of life, that I am able
to render to so good a father, to fail.  And wherever I have taken in
hand to strengthen some old foundations of walls, and to repair some
ruinous buildings, in earnest I have done it more out of respect to his
design, than my own satisfaction; and am angry at myself that I have not
proceeded further to finish the beginnings he left in his house, and so
much the more because I am very likely to be the last possessor of my
race, and to give the last hand to it.  For, as to my own particular
application, neither the pleasure of building, which they say is so
bewitching, nor hunting, nor gardens, nor the other pleasures of a
retired life, can much amuse me.  And ‘tis what I am angry at myself for,
as I am for all other opinions that are incommodious to me; which I would
not so much care to have vigorous and learned, as I would have them easy
and convenient for life, they are true and sound enough, if they are
useful and pleasing.  Such as hear me declare my ignorance in husbandry,
whisper in my ear that it is disdain, and that I neglect to know its
instruments, its seasons, its order, how they dress my vines, how they
graft, and to know the names and forms of herbs and fruits, and the
preparing the meat on which I live, the names and prices of the stuffs I
wear, because, say they; I have set my heart upon some higher knowledge;
they kill me in saying so.  It is not disdain; it is folly, and rather
stupidity than glory; I had rather be a good horseman than a good
logician:

         “Quin to aliquid saltem potius, quorum indiget usus,
          Viminibus mollique paras detexere junco.”

     [“‘Dost thou not rather do something which is required, and make
     osier and reed basket.”--Virgil, Eclog., ii. 71.]

We occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal causes and
conducts, which will very well carry on themselves without our care; and
leave our own business at random, and Michael much more our concern than
man.  Now I am, indeed, for the most part at home; but I would be there
better pleased than anywhere else:

                   “Sit meae sedes utinam senectae,
                    Sit modus lasso maris, et viarum,
                    Militiaeque.”

     [“Let my old age have a fixed seat; let there be a limit to fatigues
     from the sea, journeys, warfare.”--Horace, Od., ii. 6, 6.]

I know not whether or no I shall bring it about.  I could wish that,
instead of some other member of his succession, my father had resigned to
me the passionate affection he had in his old age to his household
affairs; he was happy in that he could accommodate his desires to his
fortune, and satisfy himself with what he had; political philosophy may
to much purpose condemn the meanness and sterility of my employment, if I
can once come to relish it, as he did.  I am of opinion that the most
honourable calling is to serve the public, and to be useful to many,

     “Fructus enim ingenii et virtutis, omnisque praestantiae,
     tum maximus capitur, quum in proximum quemque confertur:”

     [“For the greatest enjoyment of evil and virtue, and of all
     excellence, is experienced when they are conferred on some one
     nearest.”--Cicero, De Amicil., c.]

for myself, I disclaim it; partly out of conscience (for where I see the
weight that lies upon such employments, I perceive also the little means
I have to supply it; and Plato, a master in all political government
himself, nevertheless took care to abstain from it), and partly out of
cowardice.  I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle;
only-to live an excusable life, and such as may neither be a burden to
myself nor to any other.

Never did any man more fully and feebly suffer himself to be governed by
a third person than I should do, had I any one to whom to entrust myself.
One of my wishes at this time should be, to have a son-in-law that knew
handsomely how to cherish my old age, and to rock it asleep; into whose
hands I might deposit, in full sovereignty, the management and use of all
my goods, that he might dispose of them as I do, and get by them what I
get, provided that he on his part were truly acknowledging, and a friend.
But we live in a world where loyalty of one’s own children is unknown.

He who has the charge of my purse in his travels, has it purely and
without control; he could cheat me thoroughly, if he came to reckoning;
and, if he is not a devil, I oblige him to deal faithfully with me by so
entire a trust:

          “Multi fallere do cuerunt, dum timent falli;
          et aliis jus peccandi suspicando fecerunt.”

     [“Many have taught others to deceive, while they fear to be
     deceived, and, by suspecting them, have given them a title to do
     ill.”--Seneca, Epist., 3.]

The most common security I take of my people is ignorance; I never
presume any to be vicious till I have first found them so; and repose the
most confidence in the younger sort, that I think are least spoiled by
ill example.  I had rather be told at two months’ end that I have spent
four hundred crowns, than to have my ears battered every night with
three, five, seven: and I have been, in this way, as little robbed as
another.  It is true, I am willing enough not to see it; I, in some sort,
purposely, harbour a kind of perplexed, uncertain knowledge of my money:
up to a certain point, I am content to doubt.  One must leave a little
room for the infidelity or indiscretion of a servant; if you have left
enough, in gross, to do your business, let the overplus of Fortune’s
liberality run a little more freely at her mercy; ‘tis the gleaner’s
portion.  After all, I do not so much value the fidelity of my people as
I contemn their injury.  What a mean and ridiculous thing it is for a man
to study his money, to delight in handling and telling it over and over
again!  ‘Tis by this avarice makes its approaches.

In eighteen years that I have had my estate in my, own hands, I could
never prevail with myself either to read over my deeds or examine my
principal affairs, which ought, of necessity, to pass under my knowledge
and inspection.  ‘Tis not a philosophical disdain of worldly and
transitory things; my taste is not purified to that degree, and I value
them at as great a rate, at least, as they are worth; but ‘tis, in truth,
an inexcusable and childish laziness and negligence.  What would I not
rather do than read a contract?  or than, as a slave to my own business,
tumble over those dusty writings?  or, which is worse, those of another
man, as so many do nowadays, to get money?  I grudge nothing but care and
trouble, and endeavour nothing so much, as to be careless and at ease.
I had been much fitter, I believe, could it have been without obligation
and servitude, to have lived upon another man’s fortune than my own: and,
indeed, I do not know, when I examine it nearer, whether, according to my
humour, what I have to suffer from my affairs and servants, has not in it
something more abject, troublesome, and tormenting than there would be in
serving a man better born than myself, who would govern me with a gentle
rein, and a little at my own case:

          “Servitus obedientia est fracti animi et abjecti,
          arbitrio carentis suo.”

     [“Servitude is the obedience of a subdued and abject mind, wanting
     its own free will.”--Cicero, Paradox, V. I.]

Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty, only to
rid himself of the inconveniences and cares of his house.  This is what I
would not do; I hate poverty equally with pain; but I could be content to
change the kind of life I live for another that was humbler and less
chargeable.

When absent from home, I divest myself of all these thoughts, and should
be less concerned for the ruin of a tower, than I am, when present, at
the fall of a tile.  My mind is easily composed at distance, but suffers
as much as that of the meanest peasant when I am at home; the reins of my
bridle being wrongly put on, or a strap flapping against my leg, will
keep me out of humour a day together.  I raise my courage, well enough
against inconveniences: lift up my eyes I cannot:

                    “Sensus, o superi, sensus.”

               [“The senses, O ye gods, the senses.”]

I am at home responsible for whatever goes amiss.  Few masters (I speak
of those of medium condition such as mine), and if there be any such,
they are more happy, can rely so much upon another, but that the greatest
part of the burden will lie upon their own shoulders.  This takes much
from my grace in entertaining visitors, so that I have, peradventure,
detained some rather out of expectation of a good dinner, than by my own
behaviour; and lose much of the pleasure I ought to reap at my own house
from the visitation and assembling of my friends.  The most ridiculous
carriage of a gentleman in his own house, is to see him bustling about
the business of the place, whispering one servant, and looking an angry
look at another: it ought insensibly to slide along, and to represent an
ordinary current; and I think it unhandsome to talk much to our guests of
their entertainment, whether by way of bragging or excuse.  I love order
and cleanliness--

                         “Et cantharus et lanx
                         Ostendunt mihi me”--

          [“The dishes and the glasses shew me my own reflection.”
           --Horace, Ep., i. 5, 23]

more than abundance; and at home have an exact regard to necessity,
little to outward show.  If a footman falls to cuffs at another man’s
house, or stumble and throw a dish before him as he is carrying it up,
you only laugh and make a jest on’t; you sleep whilst the master of the
house is arranging a bill of fare with his steward for your morrow’s
entertainment.  I speak according as I do myself; quite appreciating,
nevertheless, good husbandry in general, and how pleasant quiet and
prosperous household management, carried regularly on, is to some
natures; and not wishing to fasten my own errors and inconveniences to
the thing; nor to give Plato the lie, who looks upon it as the most
pleasant employment to every one to do his particular affairs without
wrong to another.

When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself, and the laying out
my money; which is disposed of by one single precept; too many things are
required to the raking it together; in that I understand nothing; in
spending, I understand a little, and how to give some show to my expense,
which is indeed its principal use; but I rely too ambitiously upon it,
which renders it unequal and difform, and, moreover, immoderate in both
the one and the other aspect; if it makes a show, if it serve the turn,
I indiscreetly let it run; and as indiscreetly tie up my purse-strings,
if it does not shine, and does not please me.  Whatever it be, whether
art or nature, that imprints in us the condition of living by reference
to others, it does us much more harm than good; we deprive ourselves of
our own utilities, to accommodate appearances to the common opinion:
we care not so much what our being is, as to us and in reality, as what
it is to the public observation.  Even the properties of the mind, and
wisdom itself, seem fruitless to us, if only enjoyed by ourselves, and if
it produce not itself to the view and approbation of others.  There is a
sort of men whose gold runs in streams underground imperceptibly; others
expose it all in plates and branches; so that to the one a liard is worth
a crown, and to the others the inverse: the world esteeming its use and
value, according to the show.  All over-nice solicitude about riches
smells of avarice: even the very disposing of it, with a too systematic
and artificial liberality, is not worth a painful superintendence and
solicitude: he, that will order his expense to just so much, makes it too
pinched and narrow.  The keeping or spending are, of themselves,
indifferent things, and receive no colour of good or ill, but according
to the application of the will.

The other cause that tempts me out to these journeys is, inaptitude for
the present manners in our state.  I could easily console myself for this
corruption in regard to the public interest:

              “Pejoraque saecula ferri
               Temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa
               Nomen, et a nullo posuit natura metallo;”

     [“And, worse than the iron ages, for whose crimes there is no
     similitude in any of Nature’s metals.”--Juvenal, xiii. 28.]

but not to my own.  I am, in particular, too much oppressed by them: for,
in my neighbourhood, we are, of late, by the long licence of our civil
wars, grown old in so riotous a form of state,

               “Quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas,”

          [“Where wrong and right have changed places.”
           --Virgil, Georg., i. 504.]

that in earnest, ‘tis a wonder how it can subsist:

          “Armati terram exercent, semperque recentes
          Convectare juvat praedas; et vivere rapto.”

     [“Men plough, girt with arms; ever delighting in fresh robberies,
     and living by rapine.”--AEneid, vii. 748.]

In fine, I see by our example, that the society of men is maintained and
held together, at what price soever; in what condition soever they are
placed, they still close and stick together, both moving and in heaps; as
ill united bodies, that, shuffled together without order, find of
themselves a means to unite and settle, often better than they could have
been disposed by art.  King Philip mustered up a rabble of the most
wicked and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them all
together into a city he had caused to be built for that purpose, which
bore their name: I believe that they, even from vices themselves, erected
a government amongst them, and a commodious and just society.  I see, not
one action, or three, or a hundred, but manners, in common and received
use, so ferocious, especially in inhumanity and treachery, which are to
me the worst of all vices, that I have not the heart to think of them
without horror; and almost as much admire as I detest them: the exercise
of these signal villainies carries with it as great signs of vigour and
force of soul, as of error and disorder.  Necessity reconciles and brings
men together; and this accidental connection afterwards forms itself into
laws: for there have been such, as savage as any human opinion could
conceive, who, nevertheless, have maintained their body with as much
health and length of life as any Plato or Aristotle could invent.  And
certainly, all these descriptions of polities, feigned by art, are found
to be ridiculous and unfit to be put in practice.

These great and tedious debates about the best form of society, and the
most commodious rules to bind us, are debates only proper for the
exercise of our wits; as in the arts there are several subjects which
have their being in agitation and controversy, and have no life but
there.  Such an idea of government might be of some value in a new world;
but we take a world already made, and formed to certain customs; we do
not beget it, as Pyrrha or Cadmus did.  By what means soever we may have
the privilege to redress and reform it anew, we can hardly writhe it from
its wonted bent, but we shall break all.  Solon being asked whether he
had established the best laws he could for the Athenians; “Yes,” said he,
“of those they would have received.”  Varro excuses himself after the
same manner: “that if he were to begin to write of religion, he would say
what he believed; but seeing it was already received, he would write
rather according to use than nature.”

Not according to opinion, but in truth and reality, the best and most
excellent government for every nation is that under which it is
maintained: its form and essential convenience depend upon custom.
We are apt to be displeased at the present condition; but I,
nevertheless, maintain that to desire command in a few--[an oligarchy.]--
in a republic, or another sort of government in monarchy than that
already established, is both vice and folly:

              “Ayme l’estat, tel que to le veois estre
               S’il est royal ayme la royaute;
               S’il est de peu, ou biers communaute,
               Ayme l’aussi; car Dieu t’y a faict naistre.”

     [“Love the government, such as you see it to be.  If it be royal,
     love royalty; if it is a republic of any sort, still love it; for
     God himself created thee therein.”]

So wrote the good Monsieur de Pibrac, whom we have lately lost, a man of
so excellent a wit, such sound opinions, and such gentle manners.  This
loss, and that at the same time we have had of Monsieur de Foix, are of
so great importance to the crown, that I do not know whether there is
another couple in France worthy to supply the places of these two Gascons
in sincerity and wisdom in the council of our kings.  They were both
variously great men, and certainly, according to the age, rare and great,
each of them in his kind: but what destiny was it that placed them in
these times, men so remote from and so disproportioned to our corruption
and intestine tumults?

Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation: change only gives
form to injustice and tyranny.  When any piece is loosened, it may be
proper to stay it; one may take care that the alteration and corruption
natural to all things do not carry us too far from our beginnings and
principles: but to undertake to found so great a mass anew, and to change
the foundations of so vast a building, is for them to do, who to make
clean, efface; who reform particular defects by an universal confusion,
and cure diseases by death:

      “Non tam commutandarum quam evertendarum rerum cupidi.”

     [“Not so desirous of changing as of overthrowing things.”
      --Cicero, De Offic., ii. i.]

The world is unapt to be cured; and so impatient of anything that presses
it, that it thinks of nothing but disengaging itself at what price
soever.  We see by a thousand examples, that it ordinarily cures itself
to its cost.  The discharge of a present evil is no cure, if there be not
a general amendment of condition.  The surgeon’s end is not only to cut
away the dead flesh; that is but the progress of his cure; he has a care,
over and above, to fill up the wound with better and more natural flesh,
and to restore the member to its due state.  Whoever only proposes to
himself to remove that which offends him, falls short: for good does not
necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it
happened to Caesar’s murderers, who brought the republic to such a pass,
that they had reason to repent the meddling with the matter.  The same
has since happened to several others, even down to our own times: the
French, my contemporaries, know it well enough.  All great mutations
shake and disorder a state.

Whoever would look direct at a cure, and well consider of it before he
began, would be very willing to withdraw his hands from meddling in it.
Pacuvius Calavius corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable
example.  His fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates;
he being a man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means one
day to shut up the Senators in the palace; and calling the people
together in the market-place, there told them that the day was now come
wherein at full liberty they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by
whom they had been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and
unarmed, at his mercy.  He then advised that they should call these out,
one by one, by lot, and should individually determine as to each, causing
whatever should be decreed to be immediately executed; with this proviso,
that they should, at the same time, depute some honest man in the place
of him who was condemned, to the end there might be no vacancy in the
Senate.  They had no sooner heard the name of one senator but a great cry
of universal dislike was raised up against him.  “I see,” says Pacuvius,
“that we must put him out; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good
one in his room.”  Immediately there was a profound silence, every one
being at a stand whom to choose.  But one, more impudent than the rest,
having named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against
him, an hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just
reasons why he should not stand.  These contradictory humours growing
hot, it fared worse with the second senator and the third, there being as
much disagreement in the election of the new, as consent in the putting
out of the old.  In the end, growing weary of this bustle to no purpose,
they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly:
every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest and
best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new and
untried.

Seeing how miserably we are agitated (for what have we not done!)

              “Eheu! cicatricum, et sceleris pudet,
               Fratrumque: quid nos dura refugimus
               AEtas?  quid intactum nefasti
               Liquimus?  Unde manus inventus
               Metu Deorum continuit?  quibus
               Pepercit aris.”

     [“Alas! our crimes and our fratricides are a shame to us!  What
     crime does this bad age shrink from?  What wickedness have we left
     undone?  What youth is restrained from evil by the fear of the gods?
     What altar is spared?”--Horace, Od., i.  33, 35]

I do not presently conclude,

                              “Ipsa si velit Salus,
               Servare prorsus non potest hanc familiam;”

     [“If the goddess Salus herself wish to save this family, she
     absolutely cannot”--Terence, Adelph., iv. 7, 43.]

we are not, peradventure, at our last gasp.  The conservation of states
is a thing that, in all likelihood, surpasses our understanding;--a civil
government is, as Plato says, a mighty and puissant thing, and hard to be
dissolved; it often continues against mortal and intestine diseases,
against the injury of unjust laws, against tyranny, the corruption and
ignorance of magistrates, the licence and sedition of the people.  In all
our fortunes, we compare ourselves to what is above us, and still look
towards those who are better: but let us measure ourselves with what is
below us: there is no condition so miserable wherein a man may not find a
thousand examples that will administer consolation.  ‘Tis our vice that
we more unwillingly look upon what is above, than willingly upon what is
below; and Solon was used to say, that “whoever would make a heap of all
the ills together, there is no one who would not rather choose to bear
away the ills he has than to come to an equal division with all other men
from that heap, and take his share.”  Our government is, indeed, very
sick, but there have been others more sick without dying.  The gods play
at ball with us and bandy us every way:

          “Enimvero Dii nos homines quasi pilas habent.”

The stars fatally destined the state of Rome for an example of what they
could do in this kind: in it are comprised all the forms and adventures
that concern a state: all that order or disorder, good or evil fortune,
can do.  Who, then, can despair of his condition, seeing the shocks and
commotions wherewith Rome was tumbled and tossed, and yet withstood them
all?  If the extent of dominion be the health of a state (which I by no
means think it is, and Isocrates pleases me when he instructs Nicocles
not to envy princes who have large dominions, but those who know how to
preserve those which have fallen into their hands), that of Rome was
never so sound, as when it was most sick.  The worst of her forms was the
most fortunate; one can hardly discern any image of government under the
first emperors; it is the most horrible and tumultuous confusion that can
be imagined; it endured it, notwithstanding, and therein continued,
preserving not a monarchy limited within its own bounds, but so many
nations so differing, so remote, so disaffected, so confusedly commanded,
and so unjustly conquered:

              “Nec gentibus ullis
               Commodat in populum, terra pelagique potentem,
               Invidiam fortuna suam.”

     [“Fortune never gave it to any nation to satisfy its hatred against
     the people, masters of the seas and of the earth.”--Lucan, i. 32.]

Everything that totters does not fall.  The contexture of so great a body
holds by more nails than one; it holds even by its antiquity, like old
buildings, from which the foundations are worn away by time, without
rough-cast or mortar, which yet live and support themselves by their own
weight:

                   “Nec jam validis radicibus haerens,
                    Pondere tuta suo est.”

Moreover, it is not rightly to go to work, to examine only the flank and
the foss, to judge of the security of a place; we must observe which way
approaches can be made to it, and in what condition the assailant is: few
vessels sink with their own weight, and without some exterior violence.
Now, let us everyway cast our eyes; everything about us totters; in all
the great states, both of Christendom and elsewhere, that are known to
us, if you will but look, you will there see evident menace of alteration
and ruin:

         “Et sua sunt illis incommoda; parque per omnes
          Tempestas.”

          [“They all share in the mischief; the tempest rages
          everywhere.”--AEneid, ii.]

Astrologers may very well, as they do, warn us of great revolutions and
imminent mutations: their prophecies are present and palpable, they need
not go to heaven to foretell this.  There is not only consolation to be
extracted from this universal combination of ills and menaces, but,
moreover, some hopes of the continuation of our state, forasmuch as,
naturally, nothing falls where all falls: universal sickness is
particular health: conformity is antagonistic to dissolution.  For my
part, I despair not, and fancy that I discover ways to save us:

                   “Deus haec fortasse benigna
                    Reducet in sedem vice.”

     [“The deity will perchance by a favourable turn restore us to our
     former position.”--Horace, Epod., xiii. 7.]

Who knows but that God will have it happen, as in human bodies that purge
and restore themselves to a better state by long and grievous maladies,
which render them more entire and perfect health than that they took from
them?  That which weighs the most with me is, that in reckoning the
symptoms of our ill, I see as many natural ones, and that Heaven sends
us, and properly its own, as of those that our disorder and human
imprudence contribute to it.  The very stars seem to declare that we have
already continued long enough, and beyond the ordinary term.  This also
afflicts me, that the mischief which nearest threatens us, is not an
alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and
divulsion, which is the most extreme of our fears.

I, moreover, fear, in these fantasies of mine, the treachery of my
memory, lest, by inadvertence, it should make me write the same thing
twice.  I hate to examine myself, and never review, but very unwillingly,
what has once escaped my pen.  I here set down nothing new.  These are
common thoughts, and having, peradventure, conceived them an hundred
times, I am afraid I have set them down somewhere else already.
Repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in Homer; but ‘tis
ruinous in things that have only a superficial and transitory show.  I do
not love over-insisting, even in the most profitable things, as in
Seneca; and the usage of his stoical school displeases me, to repeat,
upon every subject, at full length and width the principles and
presuppositions that serve in general, and always to realledge anew
common and universal reasons.

My memory grows cruelly worse every day:

                   “Pocula Lethaeos ut si ducentia somnos,
                    Arente fauce traxerim;”

     [“As if my dry throat had drunk seducing cups of Lethaean
     oblivion.”--Horace, Epod., xiv. 3.]

I must be fain for the time to come (for hitherto, thanks be to God,
nothing has happened much amiss), whereas others seek time and
opportunity to think of what they have to say, to avoid all preparation,
for fear of tying myself to some obligation upon which I must insist.  To
be tied and bound to a thing puts me quite out, and to depend upon so
weak an instrument as my memory.  I never read this following story that
I am not offended at it with a personal and natural resentment:
Lyncestes, accused of conspiracy against Alexander, the day that he was
brought out before the army, according to the custom, to be heard as to
what he could say for himself, had learned a studied speech, of which,
hesitating and stammering, he pronounced some words.  Whilst growing more
and more perplexed, whilst struggling with his memory, and trying to
recollect what he had to say, the soldiers nearest to him charged their
pikes against him and killed him, looking upon him as convict; his
confusion and silence served them for a confession; for having had so
much leisure to prepare himself in prison, they concluded that it was not
his memory that failed him, but that his conscience tied up his tongue
and stopped his mouth.  And, truly, well said; the place, the assembly,
the expectation, astound a man, even when he has but the ambition to
speak well; what can a man do when ‘tis an harangue upon which his life
depends?

For my part, the very being tied to what I am to say is enough to loose
me from it.  When I wholly commit and refer myself to my memory, I lay so
much stress upon it that it sinks under me: it grows dismayed with the
burden.  So much as I trust to it, so much do I put myself out of my own
power, even to the finding it difficult to keep my own countenance; and
have been sometimes very much put to it to conceal the slavery wherein I
was engaged; whereas my design is to manifest, in speaking, a perfect
calmness both of face and accent, and casual and unpremeditated motions,
as rising from present occasions, choosing rather to say nothing to
purpose than to show that I came prepared to speak well, a thing
especially unbecoming a man of my profession, and of too great obligation
on him who cannot retain much.  The preparation begets a great deal more
expectation than it will satisfy.  A man often strips himself to his
doublet to leap no farther than he would have done in his gown:

          “Nihil est his, qui placere volunt, turn adversarium,
          quam expectatio.”

     [“Nothing is so adverse to those who make it their business to
     please as expectation”--Cicero, Acad., ii. 4]

It is recorded of the orator Curio, that when he proposed the division of
his oration into three or four parts, or three or four arguments or
reasons, it often happened either that he forgot some one, or added one
or two more.  I have always avoided falling into this inconvenience,
having ever hated these promises and prescriptions, not only out of
distrust of my memory, but also because this method relishes too much of
the artist:

                    “Simpliciora militares decent.”

     [“Simplicity becomes warriors.”--Quintilian, Instit. Orat., xi. I.]

‘Tis enough that I have promised to myself never again to take upon me
to speak in a place of respect, for as to speaking, when a man reads his
speech, besides that it is very absurd, it is a mighty disadvantage to
those who naturally could give it a grace by action; and to rely upon the
mercy of my present invention, I would much less do it; ‘tis heavy and
perplexed, and such as would never furnish me in sudden and important
necessities.

Permit, reader, this essay its course also, and this third sitting to
finish the rest of my picture: I add, but I correct not.  First, because
I conceive that a man having once parted with his labours to the world,
he has no further right to them; let him do better if he can, in some new
undertaking, but not adulterate what he has already sold.  Of such
dealers nothing should be bought till after they are dead.  Let them well
consider what they do before they, produce it to the light who hastens
them?  My book is always the same, saving that upon every new edition
(that the buyer may not go away quite empty) I take the liberty to add
(as ‘tis but an ill jointed marqueterie) some supernumerary emblem; it is
but overweight, that does not disfigure the primitive form of the essays,
but, by a little artful subtlety, gives a kind of particular value to
every one of those that follow.  Thence, however, will easily happen some
transposition of chronology, my stories taking place according to their
opportuneness, not always according to their age.

Secondly, because as to what concerns myself, I fear to lose by change:
my understanding does not always go forward, it goes backward too.  I do
not much less suspect my fancies for being the second or the third, than
for being the first, or present, or past; we often correct ourselves as
foolishly as we do others.  I am grown older by a great many years since
my first publications, which were in the year 1580; but I very much doubt
whether I am grown an inch the wiser.  I now, and I anon, are two several
persons; but whether better, I cannot determine.  It were a fine thing to
be old, if we only travelled towards improvement; but ‘tis a drunken,
stumbling, reeling, infirm motion: like that of reeds, which the air
casually waves to and fro at pleasure.  Antiochus had in his youth
strongly written in favour of the Academy; in his old age he wrote as
much against it; would not, which of these two soever I should follow, be
still Antiochus?  After having established the uncertainty, to go about
to establish the certainty of human opinions, was it not to establish
doubt, and not certainty, and to promise, that had he had yet another age
to live, he would be always upon terms of altering his judgment, not so
much for the better, as for something else?

The public favour has given me a little more confidence than I expected;
but what I ‘most fear is, lest I should glut the world with my writings;
I had rather, of the two, pique my reader than tire him, as a learned man
of my time has done.  Praise is always pleasing, let it come from whom,
or upon what account it will; yet ought a man to understand why he is
commended, that he may know how to keep up the same reputation still:
imperfections themselves may get commendation.  The vulgar and common
estimation is seldom happy in hitting; and I am much mistaken if, amongst
the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained
the popular applause.  For my part, I return my thanks to those
good-natured men who are pleased to take my weak endeavours in good part;
the faults of the workmanship are nowhere so apparent as in a matter
which of itself has no recommendation.  Blame not me, reader, for those
that slip in here by the fancy or inadvertency of others; every hand,
every artisan, contribute their own materials; I neither concern myself
with orthography (and only care to have it after the old way) nor
pointing, being very inexpert both in the one and the other.  Where they
wholly break the sense, I am very little concerned, for they at least
discharge me; but where they substitute a false one, as they so often do,
and wrest me to their conception, they ruin me.  When the sentence,
nevertheless, is not strong enough for my proportion, a civil person
ought to reject it as spurious, and none of mine.  Whoever shall know how
lazy I am, and how indulgent to my own humour, will easily believe that I
had rather write as many more essays, than be tied to revise these over
again for so childish a correction.

I said elsewhere, that being planted in the very centre of this new
religion, I am not only deprived of any great familiarity with men of
other kind of manners than my own, and of other opinions, by which they
hold together, as by a tie that supersedes all other obligations; but
moreover I do not live without danger, amongst men to whom all things are
equally lawful, and of whom the most part cannot offend the laws more
than they have already done; from which the extremist degree of licence
proceeds.  All the particular being summed up together, I do not find one
man of my country, who pays so dear for the defence of our laws both in
loss and damages (as the lawyers say) as myself; and some there are who
vapour and brag of their zeal and constancy, that if things were justly
weighed, do much less than I.  My house, as one that has ever been open
and free to all comers, and civil to all (for I could never persuade
myself to make it a garrison of war, war being a thing that I prefer to
see as remote as may be), has sufficiently merited popular kindness, and
so that it would be a hard matter justly to insult over me upon my own
dunghill; and I look upon it as a wonderful and exemplary thing that it
yet continues a virgin from blood and plunder during so long a storm, and
so many neighbouring revolutions and tumults.  For to confess the truth,
it had been possible enough for a man of my complexion to have shaken
hands with any one constant and continued form whatever; but the contrary
invasions and incursions, alternations and vicissitudes of fortune round
about me, have hitherto more exasperated than calmed and mollified the
temper of the country, and involved me, over and over again, with
invincible difficulties and dangers.

I escape, ‘tis true, but am troubled that it is more by chance, and
something of my own prudence, than by justice; and am not satisfied to be
out of the protection of the laws, and under any other safeguard than
theirs.  As matters stand, I live, above one half, by the favour of
others, which is an untoward obligation.  I do not like to owe my safety
either to the generosity or affection of great persons, who allow me my
legality and my liberty, or to the obliging manners of my predecessors,
or my own: for what if I were another kind of man?  If my deportment, and
the frankness of my conversation or relationship, oblige my neighbours,
‘tis that that they should acquit themselves of obligation in only
permitting me to live, and they may say, “We allow him the free liberty
of having divine service read in his own private chapel, when it is
interdicted in all churches round about, and allow him the use of his
goods and his life, as one who protects our wives and cattle in time of
need.”  For my house has for many descents shared in the reputation of
Lycurgus the Athenian, who was the general depository and guardian of the
purses of his fellow-citizens.  Now I am clearly of opinion that a man
should live by right and by authority, and not either by recompense or
favour.  How many gallant men have rather chosen to lose their lives than
to be debtors for them?  I hate to subject myself to any sort of
obligation, but above all, to that which binds me by the duty of honour.
I think nothing so dear as what has been given me, and this because my
will lies at pawn under the title of gratitude, and more willingly accept
of services that are to be sold; I feel that for the last I give nothing
but money, but for the other I give myself.

The knot that binds me by the laws of courtesy binds me more than that of
civil constraint; I am much more at ease when bound by a scrivener, than
by myself.  Is it not reason that my conscience should be much more
engaged when men simply rely upon it?  In a bond, my faith owes nothing,
because it has nothing lent it; let them trust to the security they have
taken without me.  I had much rather break the wall of a prison and the
laws themselves than my own word.  I am nice, even to superstition, in
keeping my promises, and, therefore, upon all occasions have a care to
make them uncertain and conditional.  To those of no great moment, I add
the jealousy of my own rule, to make them weight; it wracks and oppresses
me with its own interest.  Even in actions wholly my own and free, if I
once say a thing, I conceive that I have bound myself, and that
delivering it to the knowledge of another, I have positively enjoined it
my own performance.  Methinks I promise it, if I but say it: and
therefore am not apt to say much of that kind.  The sentence that I pass
upon myself is more severe than that of a judge, who only considers the
common obligation; but my conscience looks upon it with a more severe and
penetrating eye.  I lag in those duties to which I should be compelled if
I did not go:

     “Hoc ipsum ita justum est, quod recte fit, si est voluntarium.”

     [“This itself is so far just, that it is rightly done, if it is
     voluntary.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 9.]

If the action has not some splendour of liberty, it has neither grace nor
honour:

          “Quod vos jus cogit, vix voluntate impetrent:”

     [“That which the laws compel us to do, we scarcely do with a will.”
      --Terence, Adelph., iii. 3, 44.]

where necessity draws me, I love to let my will take its own course:

          “Quia quicquid imperio cogitur, exigenti magis,
          quam praestanti, acceptum refertur.”

     [“For whatever is compelled by power, is more imputed to him that
     exacts than to him that performs.”--Valerius Maximus, ii. 2, 6.]

I know some who follow this rule, even to injustice; who will sooner give
than restore, sooner lend than pay, and will do them the least good to
whom they are most obliged.  I don’t go so far as that, but I’m not far
off.

I so much love to disengage and disobligate myself, that I have sometimes
looked upon ingratitudes, affronts, and indignities which I have received
from those to whom either by nature or accident I was bound in some way
of friendship, as an advantage to me; taking this occasion of their
ill-usage, for an acquaintance and discharge of so much of my debt.  And
though I still continue to pay them all the external offices of public
reason, I, notwithstanding, find a great saving in doing that upon the
account of justice which I did upon the score of affection, and am a
little eased of the attention and solicitude of my inward will:

     “Est prudentis sustinere, ut currum, sic impetum benevolentia;”

     [“‘Tis the part of a wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the
     impetus of friendship, as upon that of his horse.”
      --Cicero, De Amicit., c. 17.]

‘tis in me, too urging and pressing where I take; at least, for a man who
loves not to be strained at all.  And this husbanding my friendship
serves me for a sort of consolation in the imperfections of those in whom
I am concerned.  I am very sorry they are not such as I could wish they
were, but then I also am spared somewhat of my application and engagement
towards them.  I approve of a man who is the less fond of his child for
having a scald head, or for being crooked; and not only when he is
ill-conditioned, but also when he is of unhappy disposition, and imperfect
in his limbs (God himself has abated so much from his value and natural
estimation), provided he carry himself in this coldness of affection with
moderation and exact justice: proximity, with me, lessens not defects,
but rather aggravates them.

After all, according to what I understand in the science of benefit and
acknowledgment, which is a subtle science, and of great use, I know no
person whatever more free and less indebted than I am at this hour.  What
I do owe is simply to foreign obligations and benefits; as to anything
else, no man is more absolutely clear:

                   “Nec sunt mihi nota potentum
                    Munera.”

     [“The gifts of great men are unknown to me.”--AEneid, xii. 529.]

Princes give me a great deal if they take nothing from me; and do me good
enough if they do me no harm; that’s all I ask from them.  O how am I
obliged to God, that he has been pleased I should immediately receive
from his bounty all I have, and specially reserved all my obligation to
himself.  How earnestly do I beg of his holy compassion that I may never
owe essential thanks to any one.  O happy liberty wherein I have thus far
lived.  May it continue with me to the last.  I endeavour to have no
express need of any one:

                    “In me omnis spec est mihi.”

     [“All my hope is in myself.”--Terence, Adelph., iii. 5, 9.]

‘Tis what every one may do in himself, but more easily they whom God has
placed in a condition exempt from natural and urgent necessities.  It is
a wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others; we ourselves, in
whom is ever the most just and safest dependence, are not sufficiently
sure.

I have nothing mine but myself, and yet the possession is, in part,
defective and borrowed.  I fortify myself both in courage, which is the
strongest assistant, and also in fortune, therein wherewith to satisfy
myself, though everything else should forsake me.  Hippias of Elis not
only furnished himself with knowledge, that he might, at need, cheerfully
retire from all other company to enjoy the Muses: nor only with the
knowledge of philosophy, to teach his soul to be contented with itself,
and bravely to subsist without outward conveniences, when fate would have
it so; he was, moreover, so careful as to learn to cook, to shave
himself, to make his own clothes, his own shoes and drawers, to provide
for all his necessities in himself, and to wean himself from the
assistance of others.  A man more freely and cheerfully enjoys borrowed
conveniences, when it is not an enjoyment forced and constrained by need;
and when he has, in his own will and fortune, the means to live without
them.  I know myself very well; but ‘tis hard for me to imagine any so
pure liberality of any one towards me, any so frank and free hospitality,
that would not appear to me discreditable, tyrannical, and tainted with
reproach, if necessity had reduced me to it.  As giving is an ambitious
and authoritative quality, so is accepting a quality of submission;
witness the insulting and quarrelsome refusal that Bajazet made of the
presents that Tamerlane sent him; and those that were offered on the part
of the Emperor Solyman to the Emperor of Calicut, so angered him, that he
not only rudely rejected them, saying that neither he nor any of his
predecessors had ever been wont to take, and that it was their office to
give; but, moreover, caused the ambassadors sent with the gifts to be put
into a dungeon.  When Thetis, says Aristotle, flatters Jupiter, when the
Lacedaemonians flatter the Athenians, they do not put them in mind of the
good they have done them, which is always odious, but of the benefits
they have received from them.  Such as I see so frequently employ every
one in their affairs, and thrust themselves into so much obligation,
would never do it, did they but relish as I do the sweetness of a pure
liberty, and did they but weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of
obligation: ‘tis sometimes, peradventure, fully paid, but ‘tis never
dissolved.  ‘Tis a miserable slavery to a man who loves to be at full
liberty in all reapects.  Such as know me, both above and below me in
station, are able to say whether they have ever known a man less
importuning, soliciting, entreating, and pressing upon others than I.
If I am so, and a degree beyond all modern example, ‘tis no great wonder,
so many parts of my manners contributing to it: a little natural pride,
an impatience at being refused, the moderation of my desires and designs,
my incapacity for business, and my most beloved qualities, idleness and
freedom; by all these together I have conceived a mortal hatred to being
obliged to any other, or by any other than myself.  I leave no stone
unturned, to do without it, rather than employ the bounty of another in
any light or important occasion or necessity whatever.  My friends
strangely trouble me when they ask me to ask a third person; and I think
it costs me little less to disengage him who is indebted to me, by making
use of him, than to engage myself to him who owes me nothing.  These
conditions being removed, and provided they require of me nothing if any
great trouble or care (for I have declared mortal war against all care),
I am very ready to do every one the best service I can.  I have been very
willing to seek occasion to do people a good turn, and to attach them to
me; and methinks there is no more agreeable employment for our means.
But I have yet more avoided receiving than sought occasions of giving,
and moreover, according to Aristotle, it is more easy., My fortune has
allowed me but little to do others good withal, and the little it can
afford, is put into a pretty close hand.  Had I been born a great person,
I should have been ambitious to have made myself beloved, not to make
myself feared or admired: shall I more plainly express it?  I should more
have endeavoured to please than to profit others.  Cyrus very wisely, and
by the mouth of a great captain, and still greater philosopher, prefers
his bounty and benefits much before his valour and warlike conquests;
and the elder Scipio, wherever he would raise himself in esteem, sets a
higher value upon his affability and humanity, than on his prowess and
victories, and has always this glorious saying in his mouth: “That he has
given his enemies as much occasion to love him as his friends.”  I will
then say, that if a man must, of necessity, owe something, it ought to be
by a more legitimate title than that whereof I am speaking, to which the
necessity of this miserable war compels me; and not in so great a debt as
that of my total preservation both of life and fortune: it overwhelms me.

I have a thousand times gone to bed in my own house with an apprehension
that I should be betrayed and murdered that very night; compounding with
fortune, that it might be without terror and with quick despatch; and,
after my Paternoster, I have cried out,

          “Impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit!”

     [“Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?”
      --Virgil, Ecl., i. 71.]

What remedy?  ‘tis the place of my birth, and that of most of my
ancestors; they have here fixed their affection and name.  We inure
ourselves to whatever we are accustomed to; and in so miserable a
condition as ours is, custom is a great bounty of nature, which benumbs
out senses to the sufferance of many evils.  A civil war has this with it
worse than other wars have, to make us stand sentinels in our own houses.

              “Quam miserum, porta vitam muroque tueri,
               Vixque suae tutum viribus esse domus!”

     [“‘Tis miserable to protect one’s life by doors and walls, and to be
     scarcely safe in one’s own house.”--Ovid, Trist., iv. I, 69.]

‘Tis a grievous extremity for a man to be jostled even in his own house
and domestic repose.  The country where I live is always the first in
arms and the last that lays them down, and where there is never an
absolute peace:

         “Tunc quoque, cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli....
          Quoties Romam fortuna lacessit;
          Hac iter est bellis....  Melius, Fortuna, dedisses
          Orbe sub Eco sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto,
          Errantesque domos.”

     [“Even when there’s peace, there is here still the dear of war when
     Fortune troubles peace, this is ever the way by which war passes.”
      --Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 67.]

     [“We might have lived happier in the remote East or in the icy
     North, or among the wandering tribes.”--Lucan, i. 255.]

I sometimes extract the means to fortify myself against these
considerations from indifference and indolence, which, in some sort,
bring us on to resolution.  It often befalls me to imagine and expect
mortal dangers with a kind of delight: I stupidly plunge myself headlong
into death, without considering or taking a view of it, as into a deep
and obscure abyss which swallows me up at one leap, and involves me in an
instant in a profound sleep, without any sense of pain.  And in these
short and violent deaths, the consequence that I foresee administers more
consolation to me than the effect does fear.  They say, that as life is
not better for being long, so death is better for being not long.  I do
not so much evade being dead, as I enter into confidence with dying.  I
wrap and shroud myself into the storm that is to blind and carry me away
with the fury of a sudden and insensible attack.  Moreover, if it should
fall out that, as some gardeners say, roses and violets spring more
odoriferous near garlic and onions, by reason that the last suck and
imbibe all the ill odour of the earth; so, if these depraved natures
should also attract all the malignity of my air and climate, and render
it so much better and purer by their vicinity, I should not lose all.
That cannot be: but there may be something in this, that goodness is more
beautiful and attractive when it is rare; and that contrariety and
diversity fortify and consolidate well-doing within itself, and inflame
it by the jealousy of opposition and by glory.  Thieves and robbers, of
their special favour, have no particular spite at me; no more have I to
them: I should have my hands too full.  Like consciences are lodged under
several sorts of robes; like cruelty, disloyalty, rapine; and so much the
worse, and more falsely, when the more secure and concealed under colour
of the laws.  I less hate an open professed injury than one that is
treacherous; an enemy in arms, than an enemy in a gown.  Our fever has
seized upon a body that is not much the worse for it; there was fire
before, and now ‘tis broken out into a flame; the noise is greater, not
the evil.  I ordinarily answer such as ask me the reason of my travels,
“That I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.”  If they
tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and
that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is
hard to be believed;

                    “Tam multa: scelerum facies!”

     [“There are so many forms of crime.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 506.]

secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that
is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much
as our own.

I will not here omit, that I never mutiny so much against France, that I
am not perfectly friends with Paris; that city has ever had my heart from
my infancy, and it has fallen out, as of excellent things, that the more
beautiful cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this still
wins upon my affection.  I love her for herself, and more in her own
native being, than in all the pomp of foreign and acquired
embellishments.  I love her tenderly, even to her warts and blemishes.
I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great in
the felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable in
variety and diversity of commodities: the glory of France, and one of the
most noble ornaments of the world.  May God drive our divisions far from
her.  Entire and united, I think her sufficiently defended from all other
violences.  I give her caution that, of all sorts of people, those will
be the worst that shall set her in discord; I have no fear for her, but
of herself, and, certainly, I have as much fear for her as for any other
part of the kingdom.  Whilst she shall continue, I shall never want a
retreat, where I may stand at bay, sufficient to make me amends for
parting with any other retreat.

Not because Socrates has said so, but because it is in truth my own
humour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men as
my compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring the
universal and common tie to all national ties whatever.  I am not much
taken with the sweetness of a native air: acquaintance wholly new and
wholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common and
fortuitous ones with Four neighbours: friendships that are purely of our
own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication
of climate or of blood oblige us.  Nature has placed us in the world free
and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings of
Persia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of the
river Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all other
streams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the other
rivers of the world.  What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon a
sentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of death against him, I
shall, I think, never be either so decrepid or so strictly habituated to
my own country to be of that opinion.  These celestial lives have images
enough that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have some
also so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much as
by esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them.  That fancy was singular
in a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that he
disdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Attic
territories.  What say you to his complaint of the money his friends
offered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison by
the mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time when
they were otherwise so corrupt?  These examples are of the first kind for
me; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the same
person: many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, but
some of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment.

Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitable
exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and
unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school
wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity
of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a
perpetual variety of forms of human nature.  The body is, therein,
neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in
breath.  I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am,
without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together:

               “Vires ultra sorternque senectae.”

     [“Beyond the strength and lot of age.”--AEneid, vi. 114.]

No season is enemy to me but the parching heat of a scorching sun; for
the umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancient
Romans, more burden a man’s arm than they relieve his head.  I would fain
know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of
luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as
Xenophon reports they did.  I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as
well as ducks do.  The change of air and climate never touches me; every
sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed
within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel.  I am hard to be
got out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best.
I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous
to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as for
the longest voyage.  I have learned to travel after the Spanish fashion,
and to make but one stage of a great many miles; and in excessive heats
I always travel by night, from sun set to sunrise.  The other method of
baiting by the way, in haste and hurry to gobble up a dinner, is,
especially in short days, very inconvenient.  My horses perform the
better; never any horse tired under me that was able to hold out the
first day’s journey.  I water them at every brook I meet, and have only a
care they have so much way to go before I come to my inn, as will digest
the water in their bellies.  My unwillingness to rise in a morning gives
my servants leisure to dine at their ease before they set out; for my own
part, I never eat too late; my appetite comes to me in eating, and not
else; I am never hungry but at table.

Some of my friends blame me for continuing this travelling humour, being
married and old.  But they are out in’t; ‘tis the best time to leave a
man’s house, when he has put it into a way of continuing without him, and
settled such order as corresponds with its former government.  ‘Tis much
greater imprudence to abandon it to a less faithful housekeeper, and who
will be less solicitous to look after your affairs.

The most useful and honourable knowledge and employment for the mother of
a family is the science of good housewifery.  I see some that are
covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers.  ‘Tis the supreme
quality of a woman, which a man ought to seek before any other, as the
only dowry that must ruin or preserve our houses.  Let men say what they
will, according to the experience I have learned, I require in married
women the economical virtue above all other virtues; I put my wife to’t,
as a concern of her own, leaving her, by my absence, the whole government
of my affairs.  I see, and am vexed to see, in several families I know,
Monsieur about noon come home all jaded and ruffled about his affairs,
when Madame is still dressing her hair and tricking up herself, forsooth,
in her closet: this is for queens to do, and that’s a question, too: ‘tis
ridiculous and unjust that the laziness of our wives should be maintained
with our sweat and labour.  No man, so far as in me lie, shall have a
clearer, a more quiet and free fruition of his estate than I.  If the
husband bring matter, nature herself will that the wife find the form.

As to the duties of conjugal friendship, that some think to be impaired
by these absences, I am quite of another opinion.  It is, on the
contrary, an intelligence that easily cools by a too frequent and
assiduous companionship.  Every strange woman appears charming, and we
all find by experience that being continually together is not so pleasing
as to part for a time and meet again.  These interruptions fill me with
fresh affection towards my family, and render my house more pleasant to
me.  Change warms my appetite to the one and then to the other.  I know
that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of
the world to the other, and especially this, where there is a continual
communication of offices that rouse the obligation and remembrance.  The
Stoics say that there is so great connection and relation amongst the
sages, that he who dines in France nourishes his companion in Egypt; and
that whoever does but hold out his finger, in what part of the world
soever, all the sages upon the habitable earth feel themselves assisted
by it.  Fruition and possession principally appertain to the imagination;
it more fervently and constantly embraces what it is in quest of, than
what we hold in our arms.  Cast up your daily amusements; you will find
that you are most absent from your friend when he is present with you;
his presence relaxes your attention, and gives you liberty to absent
yourself at every turn and upon every occasion.  When I am away at Rome,
I keep and govern my house, and the conveniences I there left; see my
walls rise, my trees shoot, and my revenue increase or decrease, very
near as well as when I am there:

          “Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum.”

     [“My house and the forms of places float before my eyes”
      --Ovid, Trist, iii. 4, 57.]

If we enjoy nothing but what we touch, we may say farewell to the money
in our chests, and to our sons when they are gone a hunting.  We will
have them nearer to us: is the garden, or half a day’s journey from home,
far?  What is ten leagues: far or near?  If near, what is eleven, twelve,
or thirteen, and so by degrees.  In earnest, if there be a woman who can
tell her husband what step ends the near and what step begins the remote,
I would advise her to stop between;

              “Excludat jurgia finis .  .  .  .
               Utor permisso; caudaeque pilos ut equinae
               Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum
               Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi:”

     [“Let the end shut out all disputes .  .  .  .  I use what is
     permitted; I pluck out the hairs of the horse’s tail one by one;
     while I thus outwit my opponent.”--Horace, Ep., ii, I, 38, 45]

and let them boldly call philosophy to their assistance; in whose teeth
it may be cast that, seeing it neither discerns the one nor the other end
of the joint, betwixt the too much and the little, the long and the
short, the light and the heavy, the near and the remote; that seeing it
discovers neither the beginning nor the end, it must needs judge very
uncertainly of the middle:

          “Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium.”

     [“Nature has green to us no knowledge of the end of things.”
      --Cicero, Acad., ii. 29.]

Are they not still wives and friends to the dead who are not at the end
of this but in the other world?  We embrace not only the absent, but
those who have been, and those who are not yet.  We do not promise in
marriage to be continually twisted and linked together, like some little
animals that we see, or, like the bewitched folks of Karenty,--[Karantia,
a town in the isle of Rugen.  See Saxo-Grammaticus, Hist.  of Denmark,
book xiv.]--tied together like dogs; and a wife ought not to be so
greedily enamoured of her husband’s foreparts, that she cannot endure to
see him turn his back, if occasion be.  But may not this saying of that
excellent painter of woman’s humours be here introduced, to show the
reason of their complaints?

         “Uxor, si cesses, aut to amare cogitat,
          Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi;
          Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male;”

     [“Your wife, if you loiter, thinks that you love or are beloved; or
     that you are drinking or following your inclination; and that it is
     well for you when it is ill for her (all the pleasure is yours and
     hers all the care).”
      --Terence, Adelph., act i., sc. I, v.  7.]

or may it not be, that of itself opposition and contradiction entertain
and nourish them, and that they sufficiently accommodate themselves,
provided they incommodate you?

In true friendship, wherein I am perfect, I more give myself to my
friend, than I endeavour to attract him to me.  I am not only better
pleased in doing him service than if he conferred a benefit upon me,
but, moreover, had rather he should do himself good than me, and he most
obliges me when he does so; and if absence be either more pleasant or
convenient for him, ‘tis also more acceptable to me than his presence;
neither is it properly absence, when we can write to one another: I have
sometimes made good use of our separation from one another: we better
filled and further extended the possession of life in being parted.
He--[La Boetie.]--lived, enjoyed, and saw for me, and I for him, as
fully as if he had himself been there; one part of us remained idle, and
we were too much blended in one another when we were together; the
distance of place rendered the conjunction of our wills more rich.  This
insatiable desire of personal presence a little implies weakness in the
fruition of souls.

As to what concerns age, which is alleged against me, ‘tis quite
contrary; ‘tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions, and to
curb itself to please others; it has wherewithal to please both the
people and itself; we have but too much ado to please ourselves alone.
As natural conveniences fail, let us supply them with those that are
artificial.  ‘Tis injustice to excuse youth for pursuing its pleasures,
and to forbid old men to seek them.  When young, I concealed my wanton
passions with prudence; now I am old, I chase away melancholy by debauch.
And thus do the platonic laws forbid men to travel till forty or fifty
years old, so that travel might be more useful and instructive in so
mature an age.  I should sooner subscribe to the second article of the
same Laws, which forbids it after threescore.

“But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey.”
 What care I for that?  I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it
my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me;
I only walk for the walk’s sake.  They who run after a benefit or a hare,
run not; they only run who run at base, and to exercise their running.
My design is divisible throughout: it is not grounded upon any great
hopes: every day concludes my expectation: and the journey of my life is
carried on after the same manner.  And yet I have seen places enough a
great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed.  And why not,
if Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, Antipater, so many sages of the
sourest sect, readily abandoned their country, without occasion of
complaint, and only for the enjoyment of another air.  In earnest, that
which most displeases me in all my travels is, that I cannot resolve to
settle my abode where I should best like, but that I must always propose
to myself to return, to accommodate myself to the common humour.

If I feared to die in any other place than that of my birth; if I thought
I should die more uneasily remote from my own family, I should hardly go
out of France; I should not, without fear, step out of my parish; I feel
death always pinching me by the throat or by the back.  But I am
otherwise constituted; ‘tis in all places alike to me.  Yet, might I have
my choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in
bed; out of my own house, and far from my own people.  There is more
heartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one’s friends; I am
willing to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices of
friendship, is the only one that is unpleasant; and I could, with all my
heart, dispense with that great and eternal farewell.  If there be any
convenience in so many standers-by, it brings an hundred inconveniences
along with it.  I have seen many dying miserably surrounded with all this
train: ‘tis a crowd that chokes them.  ‘Tis against duty, and is a
testimony of little kindness and little care, to permit you to die in
repose; one torments your eyes, another your ears, another your tongue;
you have neither sense nor member that is not worried by them.  Your
heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and,
perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.
Who ever has been delicate and sensitive, when well, is much more so when
ill.  In such a necessity, a gentle hand is required, accommodated to his
sentiment, to scratch him just in the place where he itches, otherwise
scratch him not at all.  If we stand in need of a wise woman--[midwife,
Fr. ‘sage femme’.]--to bring us into the world, we have much more need
of a still wiser man to help us out of it.  Such a one, and a friend to
boot, a man ought to purchase at any cost for such an occasion.  I am not
yet arrived to that pitch of disdainful vigour that is fortified in
itself, that nothing can assist or disturb; I am of a lower form; I
endeavour to hide myself, and to escape from this passage, not by fear,
but by art.  I do not intend in this act of dying to make proof and show
of my constancy. For whom should I do it? all the right and interest I
have in reputation will then cease.  I content myself with a death
involved within itself, quiet, solitary, and all my own, suitable to my
retired and private life; quite contrary to the Roman superstition, where
a man was looked upon as unhappy who died without speaking, and who had
not his nearest relations to close his eyes.  I have enough to do to
comfort myself, without having to console others; thoughts enough in my
head, not to need that circumstances should possess me with new; and
matter enough to occupy me without borrowing.  This affair is out of the
part of society; ‘tis the act of one single person.  Let us live and be
merry amongst our friends; let us go repine and die amongst strangers; a
man may find those, for his money, who will shift his pillow and rub his
feet, and will trouble him no more than he would have them; who will
present to him an indifferent countenance, and suffer him to govern
himself, and to complain according to his own method.

I wean myself daily by my reason from this childish and inhuman humour,
of desiring by our sufferings to move the compassion and mourning of our
friends: we stretch our own incommodities beyond their just extent when
we extract tears from others; and the constancy which we commend in every
one in supporting his adverse fortune, we accuse and reproach in our
friends when the evil is our own; we are not satisfied that they should
be sensible of our condition only, unless they be, moreover, afflicted.
A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief.  He who
makes himself lamented without reason is a man not to be lamented when
there shall be real cause: to be always complaining is the way never to
be lamented; by making himself always in so pitiful a taking, he is never
commiserated by any.  He who makes himself out dead when he is alive, is
subject to be thought living when he is dying.  I have seen some who have
taken it ill when they have been told that they looked well, and that
their pulse was good; restrain their smiles, because they betrayed a
recovery, and be angry, at their health because it was not to be
lamented: and, which is a great deal more, these were not women.
I describe my infirmities, such as they really are, at most, and avoid
all expressions of evil prognostic and composed exclamations.  If not
mirth, at least a temperate countenance in the standers-by, is proper in
the presence of a wise sick man: he does not quarrel with health, for,
seeing himself in a contrary condition, he is pleased to contemplate it
sound and entire in others, and at least to enjoy it for company: he does
not, for feeling himself melt away, abandon all living thoughts, nor
avoid ordinary discourse.  I would study sickness whilst I am well; when
it has seized me, it will make its impression real enough, without the
help of my imagination.  We prepare ourselves beforehand for the journeys
we undertake, and resolve upon them; we leave the appointment of the hour
when to take horse to the company, and in their favour defer it.

I find this unexpected advantage in the publication of my manners, that
it in some sort serves me for a rule.  I have, at times, some
consideration of not betraying the history of my life: this public
declaration obliges me to keep my way, and not to give the lie to the
image I have drawn of my qualities, commonly less deformed and
contradictory than consists with the malignity and infirmity of the
judgments of this age.  The uniformity and simplicity of my manners
produce a face of easy interpretation; but because the fashion is a
little new and not in use, it gives too great opportunity to slander.
Yet so it is, that whoever would fairly assail me, I think I so
sufficiently assist his purpose in my known and avowed imperfections,
that he may that way satisfy his ill-nature without fighting with the
wind.  If I myself, to anticipate accusation and discovery, confess
enough to frustrate his malice, as he conceives, ‘tis but reason that he
make use of his right of amplification, and to wire-draw my vices as far
as he can; attack has its rights beyond justice; and let him make the
roots of those errors I have laid open to him shoot up into trees: let
him make his use, not only of those I am really affected with, but also
of those that only threaten me; injurious vices, both in quality and
number; let him cudgel me that way.  I should willingly follow the
example of the philosopher Bion: Antigonus being about to reproach him
with the meanness of his birth, he presently cut him short with this
declaration: “I am,” said he, “the son of a slave, a butcher, and
branded, and of a strumpet my father married in the lowest of his
fortune; both of them were whipped for offences they had committed.  An
orator bought me, when a child, and finding me a pretty and hopeful boy,
bred me up, and when he died left me all his estate, which I have
transported into this city of Athens, and here settled myself to the
study of philosophy.  Let the historians never trouble themselves with
inquiring about me: I will tell them about it.”  A free and generous
confession enervates reproach and disarms slander.  So it is that, one
thing with another, I fancy men as often commend as undervalue me beyond
reason; as, methinks also, from my childhood, in rank and degree of
honour, they have given me a place rather above than below my right.
I should find myself more at ease in a country where these degrees were
either regulated or not regarded.  Amongst men, when an altercation about
the precedence either of walking or sitting exceeds three replies, ‘tis
reputed uncivil.  I never stick at giving or taking place out of rule, to
avoid the trouble of such ceremony; and never any man had a mind to go
before me, but I permitted him to do it.

Besides this profit I make of writing of myself, I have also hoped for
this other advantage, that if it should fall out that my humour should
please or jump with those of some honest man before I die, he would then
desire and seek to be acquainted with me.  I have given him a great deal
of made-way; for all that he could have, in many years, acquired by close
familiarity, he has seen in three days in this memorial, and more surely
and exactly.  A pleasant fancy: many things that I would not confess to
any one in particular, I deliver to the public, and send my best friends
to a bookseller’s shop, there to inform themselves concerning my most
secret thoughts;

                    “Excutienda damus praecordia.”

     [“We give our hearts to be examined.”--Persius, V. 22.]

Did I, by good direction, know where to seek any one proper for my
conversation, I should certainly go a great way to find him out: for the
sweetness of suitable and agreeable company cannot; in my opinion, be
bought too dear.  O what a thing is a true friend!  how true is that old
saying, that the use of a friend is more pleasing and necessary than the
elements of water and fire!

To return to my subject: there is, then, no great harm in dying privately
and far from home; we conceive ourselves obliged to retire for natural
actions less unseemly and less terrible than this.  But, moreover, such
as are reduced to spin out a long languishing life, ought not, perhaps,
to wish to trouble a great family with their continual miseries;
therefore the Indians, in a certain province, thought it just to knock a
man on the head when reduced to such a necessity; and in another of their
provinces, they all forsook him to shift for himself as well as he could.
To whom do they not, at last, become tedious and insupportable? the
ordinary offices of fife do not go that length.  You teach your best
friends to be cruel perforce; hardening wife and children by long use
neither to regard nor to lament your sufferings.  The groans of the stone
are grown so familiar to my people, that nobody takes any notice of them.
And though we should extract some pleasure from their conversation (which
does not always happen, by reason of the disparity of conditions, which
easily begets contempt or envy toward any one whatever), is it not too
much to make abuse of this half a lifetime?  The more I should see them
constrain themselves out of affection to be serviceable to me, the more I
should be sorry for their pains.  We have liberty to lean, but not to lay
our whole weight upon others, so as to prop ourselves by their ruin; like
him who caused little children’s throats to be cut to make use of their
blood for the cure of a disease he had, or that other, who was
continually supplied with tender young girls to keep his old limbs warm
in the night, and to mix the sweetness of their breath with his, sour and
stinking.  I should readily advise Venice as a retreat in this decline of
life.  Decrepitude is a solitary quality.  I am sociable even to excess,
yet I think it reasonable that I should now withdraw my troubles from the
sight of the world and keep them to myself.  Let me shrink and draw up
myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without
hanging upon them.  I should endanger them in so slippery a passage: ‘tis
time to turn my back to company.

“But, in these travels, you will be taken ill in some wretched place,
where nothing can be had to relieve you.”  I always carry most things
necessary about me; and besides, we cannot evade Fortune if she once
resolves to attack us.  I need nothing extraordinary when I am sick.
I will not be beholden to my bolus to do that for me which nature cannot.
At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down,
whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile
myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by
so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much
the better of my disease.  And I have yet less need of a notary or
counsellor than of a physician.  What I have not settled of my affairs
when I was in health, let no one expect I should do it when I am sick.
What I will do for the service of death is always done; I durst not so
much as one day defer it; and if nothing be done, ‘tis as much as to say
either that doubt hindered my choice (and sometimes ‘tis well chosen not
to choose), or that I was positively resolved not to do anything at all.

I write my book for few men and for few years.  Had it been matter of
duration, I should have put it into firmer language.  According to the
continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who
can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence?
It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it is
altered above one-half.  We say that it is now perfect; and every age
says the same of its own.  I shall hardly trust to that, so long as it
varies and changes as it does.  ‘Tis for good and useful writings to
rivet it to them, and its reputation will go according to the fortune of
our state.  For which reason I am not afraid to insert in it several
private articles, which will spend their use amongst the men that are now
living, and that concern the particular knowledge of some who will see
further into them than every common reader.  I will not, after all, as I
often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me: “He judged, he
lived so and so; he would have done this or that; could he have spoken
when he was dying, he would have said so or so, and have given this thing
or t’other; I knew him better than any.”  Now, as much as decency
permits, I here discover my inclinations and affections; but I do more
willingly and freely by word of mouth to any one who desires to be
informed.  So it is that in these memoirs, if any one observe, he will
find that I have either told or designed to tell all; what I cannot
express, I point out with my finger:

              “Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci
               Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere caetera tute”

     [“By these footsteps a sagacious mind many easily find all other
     matters (are sufficient to enable one to learn the rest well.)”
      --Lucretius, i. 403.]

I leave nothing to be desired or to be guessed at concerning me.  If
people must be talking of me, I would have it to be justly and truly; I
would come again, with all my heart, from the other world to give any one
the lie who should report me other than I was, though he did it to honour
me.  I perceive that people represent, even living men, quite another
thing than what they really are; and had I not stoutly defended a friend
whom I have lost,--[De la Boetie.]--they would have torn him into a
thousand contrary pieces.

To conclude the account of my poor humours, I confess that in my travels
I seldom reach my inn but that it comes into my mind to consider whether
I could there be sick and dying at my ease.  I desire to be lodged in
some private part of the house, remote from all noise, ill scents, and
smoke.  I endeavour to flatter death by these frivolous circumstances;
or, to say better, to discharge myself from all other incumbrances, that
I may have nothing to do, nor be troubled with anything but that which
will lie heavy enough upon me without any other load.  I would have my
death share in the ease and conveniences of my life; ‘tis a great part of
it, and of great importance, and I hope it will not in the future
contradict the past.  Death has some forms that are more easy than
others, and receives divers qualities, according to every one’s fancy.
Amongst the natural deaths, that which proceeds from weakness and stupor
I think the most favourable; amongst those that are violent, I can worse
endure to think of a precipice than of the fall of a house that will
crush me in a moment, and of a wound with a sword than of a harquebus
shot; I should rather have chosen to poison myself with Socrates, than
stab myself with Cato.  And, though it, be all one, yet my imagination
makes as great a difference as betwixt death and life, betwixt throwing
myself into a burning furnace and plunging into the channel of a river:
so idly does our fear more concern itself in the means than the effect.
It is but an instant, ‘tis true, but withal an instant of such weight,
that I would willingly give a great many days of my life to pass it over
after my own fashion.  Since every one’s imagination renders it more or
less terrible, and since every one has some choice amongst the several
forms of dying, let us try a little further to find some one that is
wholly clear from all offence.  Might not one render it even voluptuous,
like the Commoyientes of Antony and Cleopatra?  I set aside the brave and
exemplary efforts produced by philosophy and religion; but, amongst men
of little mark there have been found some, such as Petronius and
Tigellinus at Rome, condemned to despatch themselves, who have, as it
were, rocked death asleep with the delicacy of their preparations; they
have made it slip and steal away in the height of their accustomed
diversions amongst girls and good fellows; not a word of consolation, no
mention of making a will, no ambitious affectation of constancy, no talk
of their future condition; amongst sports, feastings, wit, and mirth,
common and indifferent discourses, music, and amorous verses.  Were it
not possible for us to imitate this resolution after a more decent
manner?  Since there are deaths that are good for fools, deaths good for
the wise, let us find out such as are fit for those who are betwixt both.
My imagination suggests to me one that is easy, and, since we must die,
to be desired.  The Roman tyrants thought they did, in a manner, give a
criminal life when they gave him the choice of his death.  But was not
Theophrastus, that so delicate, so modest, and so wise a philosopher,
compelled by reason, when he durst say this verse, translated by Cicero:

               “Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia?”

               [“Fortune, not wisdom, sways human life.”
                --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., V. 31.]

Fortune assists the facility of the bargain of my life, having placed it
in such a condition that for the future it can be neither advantage nor
hindrance to those who are concerned in me; ‘tis a condition that I would
have accepted at any time of my life; but in this occasion of trussing up
my baggage, I am particularly pleased that in dying I shall neither do
them good nor harm.  She has so ordered it, by a cunning compensation,
that they who may pretend to any considerable advantage by my death will,
at the same time, sustain a material inconvenience.  Death sometimes is
more grievous to us, in that it is grievous to others, and interests us
in their interest as much as in our own, and sometimes more.

In this conveniency of lodging that I desire, I mix nothing of pomp and
amplitude--I hate it rather; but a certain plain neatness, which is
oftenest found in places where there is less of art, and that Nature has
adorned with some grace that is all her own:

               “Non ampliter, sea munditer convivium.”

     [“To eat not largely, but cleanly.”--Nepos, Life of Atticus, c. 13]

                    “Plus salis quam sumptus.”

     [“Rather enough than costly (More wit than cost)”--Nonius, xi. 19.]

And besides, ‘tis for those whose affairs compel them to travel in the
depth of winter through the Grisons country to be surprised upon the way
with great inconveniences.  I, who, for the most part, travel for my
pleasure, do not order my affairs so ill.  If the way be foul on my right
hand, I turn on my left; if I find myself unfit to ride, I stay where I
am; and, so doing, in earnest I see nothing that is not as pleasant and
commodious as my own house.  ‘Tis true that I always find superfluity
superfluous, and observe a kind of trouble even in abundance itself.
Have I left anything behind me unseen, I go back to see it; ‘tis still on
my way; I trace no certain line, either straight or crooked.--[Rousseau
has translated this passage in his Emile, book v.]--Do I not find in the
place to which I go what was reported to me--as it often falls out that
the judgments of others do not jump with mine, and that I have found
their reports for the most part false--I never complain of losing my
labour: I have, at least, informed myself that what was told me was not
true.

I have a constitution of body as free, and a palate as indifferent, as
any man living: the diversity of manners of several nations only affects
me in the pleasure of variety: every usage has its reason.  Let the plate
and dishes be pewter, wood, or earth; my meat be boiled or roasted; let
them give me butter or oil, of nuts or olives, hot or cold, ‘tis all one
to me; and so indifferent, that growing old, I accuse this generous
faculty, and would wish that delicacy and choice should correct the
indiscretion of my appetite, and sometimes soothe my stomach.  When I
have been abroad out of France and that people, out of courtesy, have
asked me if I would be served after the French manner, I laughed at the
question, and always frequented tables the most filled with foreigners.
I am ashamed to see our countrymen besotted with this foolish humour of
quarrelling with forms contrary to their own; they seem to be out of
their element when out of their own village: wherever they go, they keep
to their own fashions and abominate those of strangers.  Do they meet
with a compatriot in Hungary?  O the happy chance!  They are henceforward
inseparable; they cling together, and their whole discourse is to condemn
the barbarous manners they see about them.  Why barbarous, because they
are not French?  And those have made the best use of their travels who
have observed most to speak against.  Most of them go for no other end
but to come back again; they proceed in their travel with vast gravity
and circumspection, with a silent and incommunicable prudence, preserving
themselves from the contagion of an unknown air.  What I am saying of
them puts me in mind of something like it I have at times observed in
some of our young courtiers; they will not mix with any but men of their
own sort, and look upon us as men of another world, with disdain or pity.
Put them upon any discourse but the intrigues of the court, and they are
utterly at a loss; as very owls and novices to us as we are to them.
‘Tis truly said that a well-bred man is a compound man.  I, on the
contrary, travel very much sated with our own fashions; I do not look for
Gascons in Sicily; I have left enough of them at home; I rather seek for
Greeks and Persians; they are the men I endeavour to be acquainted with
and the men I study; ‘tis there that I bestow and employ myself.  And
which is more, I fancy that I have met but with few customs that are not
as good as our own; I have not, I confess, travelled very far; scarce out
of the sight of the vanes of my own house.

As to the rest, most of the accidental company a man falls into upon the
road beget him more trouble than pleasure; I waive them as much as I
civilly can, especially now that age seems in some sort to privilege and
sequester me from the common forms.  You suffer for others or others
suffer for you; both of them inconveniences of importance enough, but the
latter appears to me the greater.  ‘Tis a rare fortune, but of
inestimable solace; to have a worthy man, one of a sound judgment and of
manners conformable to your own, who takes a delight to bear you company.
I have been at an infinite loss for such upon my travels.  But such a
companion should be chosen and acquired from your first setting out.
There can be no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so
much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind, that it does not grieve
me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to communicate it to:

          “Si cum hac exceptione detur sapientia,
          ut illam inclusam teneam, nec enuntiem, rejiciam.”

     [“If wisdom be conferred with this reservation, that I must keep it
     to myself, and not communicate it to others, I would none of it.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 6.]

This other has strained it one note higher:

     “Si contigerit ea vita sapienti, ut ommum rerum afliuentibus copiis,
     quamvis omnia, quae cognitione digna sunt, summo otio secum ipse
     consideret et contempletur, tamen, si solitudo tanta sit, ut hominem
     videre non possit, excedat a vita.”

     [“If such a condition of life should happen to a wise man, that in
     the greatest plenty of all conveniences he might, at the most
     undisturbed leisure, consider and contemplate all things worth the
     knowing, yet if his solitude be such that he must not see a man, let
     him depart from life.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 43.]

Architas pleases me when he says, “that it would be unpleasant, even in
heaven itself, to wander in those great and divine celestial bodies
without a companion.  But yet ‘tis much better to be alone than in
foolish and troublesome company.  Aristippus loved to live as a stranger
in all places:

              “Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam
               Auspiciis,”

     [“If the fates would let me live in my own way.”--AEneid, iv. 340.]

I should choose to pass away the greatest part of my life on horseback:

                   “Visere gestiens,
                    Qua pane debacchentur ignes,
                    Qua nebula, pluviique rores.”

     [“Visit the regions where the sun burns, where are the thick
     rain-clouds and the frosts.”--Horace, Od., iii. 3, 54.]

“Have you not more easy diversions at home?  What do you there want?  Is
not your house situated in a sweet and healthful air, sufficiently
furnished, and more than sufficiently large?  Has not the royal majesty
been more than once there entertained with all its train?  Are there not
more below your family in good ease than there are above it in eminence?
Is there any local, extraordinary, indigestible thought that afflicts
you?”

          “Qua to nunc coquat, et vexet sub pectore fixa.”

     [“That may now worry you, and vex, fixed in your breast.”
      --Cicero, De Senect, c. 1, Ex Ennio.]

“Where do you think to live without disturbance?”

                   “Nunquam simpliciter Fortuna indulget.”

               [“Fortune is never simply complaisant (unmixed).”
                --Quintus Curtius, iv. 14]

You see, then, it is only you that trouble yourself; you will everywhere
follow yourself, and everywhere complain; for there is no satisfaction
here below, but either for brutish or for divine souls.  He who, on so
just an occasion, has no contentment, where will he think to find it?
How many thousands of men terminate their wishes in such a condition as
yours?  Do but reform yourself; for that is wholly in your own power!
whereas you have no other right but patience towards fortune:

          “Nulla placida quies est, nisi quam ratio composuit.”

     [“There is no tranquillity but that which reason has conferred.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 56.]

I see the reason of this advice, and see it perfectly well; but he might
sooner have done, and more pertinently, in bidding me in one word be
wise; that resolution is beyond wisdom; ‘tis her precise work and
product.  Thus the physician keeps preaching to a poor languishing
patient to “be cheerful”; but he would advise him a little more
discreetly in bidding him “be well.”  For my part, I am but a man of the
common sort.  ‘Tis a wholesome precept, certain and easy to be
understood, “Be content with what you have,” that is to say, with reason:
and yet to follow this advice is no more in the power of the wise men of
the world than in me.  ‘Tis a common saying, but of a terrible extent:
what does it not comprehend?  All things fall under discretion and
qualification.  I know very well that, to take it by the letter, this
pleasure of travelling is a testimony of uneasiness and irresolution,
and, in sooth, these two are our governing and predominating qualities.
Yes, I confess, I see nothing, not so much as in a dream, in a wish,
whereon I could set up my rest: variety only, and the possession of
diversity, can satisfy me; that is, if anything can.  In travelling, it
pleases me that I may stay where I like, without inconvenience, and that
I have a place wherein commodiously to divert myself.  I love a private
life, because ‘tis my own choice that I love it, not by any dissenting
from or dislike of public life, which, peradventure, is as much according
to my complexion.  I serve my prince more cheerfully because it is by the
free election of my own judgment and reason, without any particular
obligation; and that I am not reduced and constrained so to do for being
rejected or disliked by the other party; and so of all the rest.  I hate
the morsels that necessity carves me; any commodity upon which I had only
to depend would have me by the throat;

          “Alter remus aquas, alter mihi radat arenas;”

     [“Let me have one oar in the water, and with the other rake the
     shore.”--Propertius, iii. 3, 23.]

one cord will never hold me fast enough.  You will say, there is vanity
in this way of living.  But where is there not?  All these fine precepts
are vanity, and all wisdom is vanity:

     “Dominus novit cogitationes sapientum, quoniam vanae sunt.”

     [“The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.”
      --Ps. xciii. II; or I Cor. iii. 20.]

These exquisite subtleties are only fit for sermons; they are discourses
that will send us all saddled into the other world.  Life is a material
and corporal motion, an action imperfect and irregular of its own proper
essence; I make it my business to serve it according to itself:

                    “Quisque suos patimur manes.”

     [“We each of us suffer our own particular demon.”--AEneid, vi. 743.]

     “Sic est faciendum, ut contra naturam universam nihil contendamus;
     ea tamen conservata propriam sequamur.”

     [“We must so order it as by no means to contend against universal
     nature; but yet, that rule being observed, to follow our own.”
      --Cicero, De Offcc., i.  31.]

To what end are these elevated points of philosophy, upon which no human
being can rely? and those rules that exceed both our use and force?

I see often that we have theories of life set before us which neither the
proposer nor those who hear him have any hope, nor, which is more, any
inclination to follow.  Of the same sheet of paper whereon the judge has
but just written a sentence against an adulterer, he steals a piece
whereon to write a love-letter to his companion’s wife.  She whom you
have but just now illicitly embraced will presently, even in your
hearing, more loudly inveigh against the same fault in her companion than
a Portia would do;--[The chaste daughter of Cato of Utica.]--and men
there are who will condemn others to death for crimes that they
themselves do not repute so much as faults.  I have, in my youth, seen a
man of good rank with one hand present to the people verses that excelled
both in wit and debauchery, and with the other, at the same time, the
most ripe and pugnacious theological reformation that the world has been
treated withal these many years.  And so men proceed; we let the laws and
precepts follow their way; ourselves keep another course, not only from
debauchery of manners, but ofttimes by judgment and contrary opinion.  Do
but hear a philosophical lecture; the invention, eloquence, pertinency
immediately strike upon your mind and move you; there is nothing that
touches or stings your conscience; ‘tis not to this they address
themselves.  Is not this true?  It made Aristo say, that neither a bath
nor a lecture did aught unless it scoured and made men clean.  One may
stop at the skin; but it is after the marrow is picked out as, after we
have swallowed good wine out of a fine cup, we examine the designs and
workmanship.  In all the courts of ancient philosophy, this is to be
found, that the same teacher publishes rules of temperance and at the
same time lessons in love and wantonness; Xenophon, in the very bosom of
Clinias, wrote against the Aristippic virtue.  ‘Tis not that there is any
miraculous conversion in it that makes them thus wavering; ‘tis that
Solon represents himself, sometimes in his own person, and sometimes in
that of a legislator; one while he speaks for the crowd, and another for
himself; taking the free and natural rules for his own share, feeling
assured of a firm and entire health:

          “Curentur dubii medicis majoribus aegri.”

          [“Desperate maladies require the best doctors.”
           --Juvenal, xiii. 124.]

Antisthenes allows a sage to love, and to do whatever he thinks
convenient, without regard to the laws, forasmuch as he is better advised
than they, and has a greater knowledge of virtue.  His disciple Diogenes
said, that “men to perturbations were to oppose reason: to fortune,
courage: to the laws, nature.”  For tender stomachs, constrained and
artificial recipes must be prescribed: good and strong stomachs serve
themselves simply with the prescriptions of their own natural appetite;
after this manner do our physicians proceed, who eat melons and drink
iced wines, whilst they confine their patients to syrups and sops.
“I know not,” said the courtezan Lais, “what they may talk of books,
wisdom, and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any
others.”  At the same rate that our licence carries us beyond what is
lawful and allowed, men have, often beyond universal reason, stretched
the precepts and rules of our life:

          “Nemo satis credit tantum delinquere, quantum
          Permittas.”

     [“No one thinks he has done ill to the full extent of what he may.”
      --Juvenal, xiv. 233.]

It were to be wished that there was more proportion betwixt the command
and the obedience; and the mark seems to be unjust to which one cannot
attain.  There is no so good man, who so squares all his thoughts and
actions to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten
times in his life; and he may well be such a one, as it were great
injustice and great harm to punish and ruin:

                              “Ole, quid ad te
               De cute quid faciat ille vel ille sua?”

     [“Olus, what is it to thee what he or she does with their skin?”
      --Martial, vii. 9, I.]

and such an one there may be, who has no way offended the laws, who,
nevertheless, would not deserve the character of a virtuous man, and whom
philosophy would justly condemn to be whipped; so unequal and perplexed
is this relation.  We are so far from being good men, according to the
laws of God, that we cannot be so according to our own human wisdom never
yet arrived at the duties it had itself prescribed; and could it arrive
there, it would still prescribe to itself others beyond, to which it
would ever aspire and pretend; so great an enemy to consistency is our
human condition.  Man enjoins himself to be necessarily in fault: he is
not very discreet to cut out his own duty by the measure of another being
than his own.  To whom does he prescribe that which he does not expect
any one should perform? is he unjust in not doing what it is impossible
for him to do?  The laws which condemn us not to be able, condemn us for
not being able.

At the worst, this difform liberty of presenting ourselves two several
ways, the actions after one manner and the reasoning after another, may
be allowed to those who only speak of things; but it cannot be allowed to
those who speak of themselves, as I do: I must march my pen as I do my
feet.  Common life ought to have relation to the other lives: the virtue
of Cato was vigorous beyond the reason of the age he lived in; and for a
man who made it his business to govern others, a man dedicated to the
public service, it might be called a justice, if not unjust, at least
vain and out of season.  Even my own manners, which differ not above an
inch from those current amongst us, render me, nevertheless, a little
rough and unsociable at my age.  I know not whether it be without reason
that I am disgusted with the world I frequent; but I know very well that
it would be without reason, should I complain of its being disgusted with
me, seeing I am so with it.  The virtue that is assigned to the affairs
of the world is a virtue of many wavings, corners, and elbows, to join
and adapt itself to human frailty, mixed and artificial, not straight,
clear, constant, nor purely innocent.  Our annals to this very day
reproach one of our kings for suffering himself too simply to be carried
away by the conscientious persuasions of his confessor: affairs of state
have bolder precepts;

                                   “Exeat aula,
                         Qui vult esse pius.”

          [“Let him who will be pious retire from the court.”
           --Lucan, viii. 493]

I formerly tried to employ in the service of public affairs opinions and
rules of living, as rough, new, unpolished or unpolluted, as they were
either born with me, or brought away from my education, and wherewith I
serve my own turn, if not so commodiously, at least securely, in my own
particular concerns: a scholastic and novice virtue; but I have found
them unapt and dangerous.  He who goes into a crowd must now go one way
and then another, keep his elbows close, retire or advance, and quit the
straight way, according to what he encounters; and must live not so much
according to his own method as to that of others; not according to what
he proposes to himself, but according to what is proposed to him,
according to the time, according to the men, according to the occasions.
Plato says, that whoever escapes from the world’s handling with clean
breeches, escapes by miracle: and says withal, that when he appoints his
philosopher the head of a government, he does not mean a corrupt one like
that of Athens, and much less such a one as this of ours, wherein wisdom
itself would be to seek.  A good herb, transplanted into a soil contrary
to its own nature, much sooner conforms itself to the soil than it
reforms the soil to it.  I found that if I had wholly to apply myself to
such employments, it would require a great deal of change and new
modelling in me before I could be any way fit for it: And though I could
so far prevail upon myself (and why might I not with time and diligence
work such a feat), I would not do it.  The little trial I have had of
public employment has been so much disgust to me; I feel at times
temptations toward ambition rising in my soul, but I obstinately oppose
them:

               “At tu, Catulle, obstinatus obdura.”

     [“But thou, Catullus, be obstinately firm.”--Catullus, viii. 19.]

I am seldom called to it, and as seldom offer myself uncalled; liberty
and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me, are qualities
diametrically contrary to that trade.  We cannot well distinguish the
faculties of men; they have divisions and limits hard and delicate to
choose; to conclude from the discreet conduct of a private life a
capacity for the management of public affairs is to conclude ill; a man
may govern himself well who cannot govern others so, and compose Essays
who could not work effects: men there may be who can order a siege well,
who would ill marshal a battle; who can speak well in private, who would
ill harangue a people or a prince; nay, ‘tis peradventure rather a
testimony in him who can do the one that he cannot do the other, than
otherwise.  I find that elevated souls are not much more proper for mean
things than mean souls are for high ones.  Could it be imagined that
Socrates should have administered occasion of laughter, at the expense of
his own reputation, to the Athenians for: having never been able to sum
up the votes of his tribe, to deliver it to the council?  Truly, the
veneration I have for the perfections of this great man deserves that his
fortune should furnish, for the excuse of my principal imperfections, so
magnificent an example.  Our sufficiency is cut out into small parcels;
mine has no latitude, and is also very contemptible in number.
Saturninus, to those who had conferred upon him the command in chief:
“Companions,” said he, “you have lost a good captain, to make of him a
bad general.”

Whoever boasts, in so sick a time as this, to employ a true and sincere
virtue in the world’s service, either knows not what it is, opinions
growing corrupt with manners (and, in truth, to hear them describe it, to
hear the most of them glorify themselves in their deportments, and lay
down their rules; instead of painting virtue, they paint pure vice and
injustice, and so represent it false in the education of princes); or if
he does know it, boasts unjustly and let him say what he will, does a
thousand things of which his own conscience must necessarily accuse him.
I should willingly take Seneca’s word on the experience he made upon the
like occasion, provided he would deal sincerely with me.  The most
honourable mark of goodness in such a necessity is freely to confess both
one’s own faults and those of others; with the power of its virtue to
stay one’s inclination towards evil; unwillingly to follow this
propension; to hope better, to desire better.  I perceive that in these
divisions wherein we are involved in France, every one labours to defend
his cause; but even the very best of them with dissimulation and
disguise: he who would write roundly of the true state of the quarrel,
would write rashly and wrongly.  The most just party is at best but a
member of a decayed and worm-eaten body; but of such a body, the member
that is least affected calls itself sound, and with good reason,
forasmuch as our qualities have no title but in comparison; civil
innocence is measured according to times and places.  Imagine this in
Xenophon, related as a fine commendation of Agesilaus: that, being
entreated by a neighbouring prince with whom he had formerly had war, to
permit him to pass through his country, he granted his request, giving
him free passage through Peloponnesus; and not only did not imprison or
poison him, being at his mercy, but courteously received him according to
the obligation of his promise, without doing him the least injury or
offence.  To such ideas as theirs this were an act of no especial note;
elsewhere and in another age, the frankness and unanimity of such an
action would be thought wonderful; our monkeyish capets

     [Capets, so called from their short capes, were the students of
     Montaigne College at Paris, and were held in great contempt.]

would have laughed at it, so little does the Spartan innocence resemble
that of France.  We are not without virtuous men, but ‘tis according to
our notions of virtue.  Whoever has his manners established in regularity
above the standard of the age he lives in, let him either wrest or blunt
his rules, or, which I would rather advise him to, let him retire, and
not meddle with us at all.  What will he get by it?

              “Egregium sanctumque virum si cerno, bimembri
               Hoc monstrum puero, et miranti jam sub aratro
               Piscibus inventis, et foetae comparo mulae.”

     [“If I see an exemplary and good man, I liken it to a two-headed
     boy, or a fish turned up by the plough, or a teeming mule.”
      --Juvenal, xiii. 64.]

One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present; we may wish
for other magistrates, but we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have;
and, peradventure, ‘tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good.  So
long as the image of the ancient and received laws of this monarchy shall
shine in any corner of the kingdom, there will I be.  If they
unfortunately happen to thwart and contradict one another, so as to
produce two parts, of doubtful and difficult choice, I will willingly
choose to withdraw and escape the tempest; in the meantime nature or the
hazards of war may lend me a helping hand.  Betwixt Caesar and Pompey,
I should frankly have declared myself; but, as amongst the three robbers
who came after,--[Octavius, Mark Antony, and Lepidus.]--a man must have
been necessitated either to hide himself, or have gone along with the
current of the time, which I think one may fairly do when reason no
longer guides:

                         “Quo diversus abis?”

          [“Whither dost thou run wandering?”--AEneid, v. 166.]

This medley is a little from my theme; I go out of my way; but ‘tis
rather by licence than oversight; my fancies follow one another, but
sometimes at a great distance, and look towards one another, but ‘tis
with an oblique glance.  I have read a dialogue of Plato,--[The
Phaedrus.]--of the like motley and fantastic composition, the beginning
about love, and all the rest to the end about rhetoric; they fear not
these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves be
carried away at the pleasure of the wind, or at least to seem as if they
were.  The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole
matter; they often denote it by some mark only, as these others, Andria,
Eunuchus; or these, Sylla, Cicero, Toyquatus.  I love a poetic progress,
by leaps and skips; ‘tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble, demoniac.
There are pieces in Plutarch where he forgets his theme; where the
proposition of his argument is only found by incidence, stuffed and half
stifled in foreign matter.  Observe his footsteps in the Daemon of
Socrates.  O God!  how beautiful are these frolicsome sallies, those
variations and digressions, and all the more when they seem most
fortuitous and careless.  ‘Tis the indiligent reader who loses my
subject, and not I; there will always be found some word or other in a
corner that is to the purpose, though it lie very close.  I ramble
indiscreetly and tumultuously; my style and my wit wander at the same
rate.  He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool,
say both the precepts, and, still more, the examples of our masters.  A
thousand poets flag and languish after a prosaic manner; but the best old
prose (and I strew it here up and down indifferently for verse) shines
throughout with the lustre, vigour, and boldness of poetry, and not
without some air of its fury.  And certainly prose ought to have the
pre-eminence in speaking.  The poet, says Plato, seated upon the muses
tripod, pours out with fury whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe
of a fountain, without considering and weighing it; and things escape him
of various colours, of contrary substance, and with an irregular torrent.
Plato himself is throughout poetical; and the old theology, as the
learned tell us, is all poetry; and the first philosophy is the original
language of the gods.  I would have my matter distinguish itself; it
sufficiently shows where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins,
and where it rejoins, without interlacing it with words of connection
introduced for the relief of weak or negligent ears, and without
explaining myself.  Who is he that had not rather not be read at all than
after a drowsy or cursory manner?

             “Nihil est tam utile, quod intransitu prosit.”

          [“Nothing is so useful as that which is cursorily so.”
           --Seneca, Ep., 2.]

If to take books in hand were to learn them: to look upon them were to
consider them: and to run these slightly over were to grasp them, I were
then to blame to make myself out so ignorant as I say I am.  Seeing I
cannot fix the attention of my reader by the weight of what I write,
‘manco male’, if I should chance to do it by my intricacies.  “Nay, but
he will afterwards repent that he ever perplexed himself about it.”
 ‘Tis very true, but he will yet be there perplexed.  And, besides, there
are some humours in which comprehension produces disdain; who will think
better of me for not understanding what I say, and will conclude the
depth of my sense by its obscurity; which, to speak in good sooth, I
mortally hate, and would avoid it if I could.  Aristotle boasts somewhere
in his writings that he affected it: a vicious affectation.  The frequent
breaks into chapters that I made my method in the beginning of my book,
having since seemed to me to dissolve the attention before it was raised,
as making it disdain to settle itself to so little, I, upon that account,
have made them longer, such as require proposition and assigned leisure.
In such an employment, to whom you will not give an hour you give
nothing; and you do nothing for him for whom you only do it whilst you
are doing something else.  To which may be added that I have,
peradventure, some particular obligation to speak only by halves, to
speak confusedly and discordantly.  I am therefore angry at this
trouble-feast reason, and its extravagant projects that worry one’s life,
and its opinions, so fine and subtle, though they be all true, I think
too dear bought and too inconvenient.  On the contrary, I make it my
business to bring vanity itself in repute, and folly too, if it produce
me any pleasure; and let myself follow my own natural inclinations,
without carrying too strict a hand upon them.

I have seen elsewhere houses in ruins, and statues both of gods and men:
these are men still.  ‘Tis all true; and yet, for all that, I cannot so
often revisit the tomb of that so great and so puissant city,--[Rome]--
that I do not admire and reverence it.  The care of the dead is
recommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with these
dead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of
those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the
Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine.  The qualities and
fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio have ever run more in my head
than those of any of my own country; they are all dead; so is my father
as absolutely dead as they, and is removed as far from me and life in
eighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred: whose memory,
nevertheless, friendship and society, I do not cease to embrace and
utilise with a perfect and lively union.  Nay, of my own inclination, I
pay more service to the dead; they can no longer help themselves, and
therefore, methinks, the more require my assistance: ‘tis there that
gratitude appears in its full lustre.  The benefit is not so generously
bestowed, where there is retrogradation and reflection.  Arcesilaus,
going to visit Ctesibius, who was sick, and finding him in a very poor
condition, very finely conveyed some money under his pillow, and, by
concealing it from him, acquitted him, moreover, from the acknowledgment
due to such a benefit.  Such as have merited from me friendship and
gratitude have never lost these by being no more; I have better and more
carefully paid them when gone and ignorant of what I did; I speak most
affectionately of my friends when they can no longer know it.  I have had
a hundred quarrels in defending Pompey and for the cause of Brutus; this
acquaintance yet continues betwixt us; we have no other hold even on
present things but by fancy.  Finding myself of no use to this age, I
throw myself back upon that other, and am so enamoured of it, that the
free, just, and flourishing state of that ancient Rome (for I neither
love it in its birth nor its old age) interests and impassionates me;
and therefore I cannot so often revisit the sites of their streets and
houses, and those ruins profound even to the Antipodes, that I am not
interested in them.  Is it by nature, or through error of fancy, that the
sight of places which we know to have been frequented and inhabited by
persons whose memories are recommended in story, moves us in some sort
more than to hear a recital of their--acts or to read their writings?

     “Tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis....Et id quidem in hac urbe
     infinitum; quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliquam historiam vestigium
     ponimus.”

     [“So great a power of reminiscence resides in places; and that truly
     in this city infinite, for which way soever we go, we find the
     traces of some story.”--Cicero, De Fin., v. I, 2.]

It pleases me to consider their face, bearing, and vestments: I pronounce
those great names betwixt my teeth, and make them ring in my ears:

     “Ego illos veneror, et tantis nominibus semper assurgo.”

     [“I reverence them, and always rise to so great names.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 64.]

Of things that are in some part great and admirable, I admire even the
common parts: I could wish to see them in familiar relations, walk, and
sup.  It were ingratitude to contemn the relics and images of so many
worthy and valiant men as I have seen live and die, and who, by their
example, give us so many good instructions, knew we how to follow them.

And, moreover, this very Rome that we now see, deserves to be beloved, so
long and by so many titles allied to our crown; the only common and
universal city; the sovereign magistrate that commands there is equally
acknowledged elsewhere ‘tis the metropolitan city of all the Christian
nations the Spaniard and Frenchman is there at home: to be a prince of
that state, there needs no more but to be of Christendom wheresoever.
There is no place upon earth that heaven has embraced with such an
influence and constancy of favour; her very ruins are grand and glorious,

                “Laudandis pretiosior ruinis.”

          [“More precious from her glorious ruins.”
           --Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm., xxiii.; Narba, v. 62.]

she yet in her very tomb retains the marks and images of empire:

          “Ut palam sit, uno in loco gaudentis opus esse naturx.”

     [“That it may be manifest that there is in one place the work of
     rejoicing nature.”--Pliny, Nat. Hist., iii. 5.]

Some would blame and be angry at themselves to perceive themselves
tickled with so vain a pleasure our humours are never too vain that are
pleasant let them be what they may, if they constantly content a man of
common understanding, I could not have the heart to blame him.

I am very much obliged to Fortune, in that, to this very hour, she has
offered me no outrage beyond what I was well able to bear.  Is it not her
custom to let those live in quiet by whom she is not importuned?

                   “Quanto quisque sibi plum negaverit,
                    A diis plum feret: nil cupientium
                    Nudus castra peto .  .  .  .
                    Multa petentibus
                    Desunt multa.”

     [“The more each man denies himself, the more the gods give him.
     Poor as I am, I seek the company of those who ask nothing; they who
     desire much will be deficient in much.”
      --Horace, Od., iii. 16,21,42.]

If she continue her favour, she will dismiss me very well satisfied:

                                   “Nihil supra
                         Deos lacesso.”

     [“I trouble the gods no farther.”--Horace, Od., ii. 18, 11.]

But beware a shock: there are a thousand who perish in the port.
I easily comfort myself for what shall here happen when I shall be gone,
present things trouble me enough:

                       “Fortunae caetera mando.”

          [“I leave the rest to fortune.”--Ovid, Metam., ii. 140.]

Besides, I have not that strong obligation that they say ties men to the
future, by the issue that succeeds to their name and honour; and
peradventure, ought less to covet them, if they are to be so much
desired.  I am but too much tied to the world, and to this life, of
myself: I am content to be in Fortune’s power by circumstances properly
necessary to my being, without otherwise enlarging her jurisdiction over
me; and have never thought that to be without children was a defect that
ought to render life less complete or less contented: a sterile vocation
has its conveniences too.  Children are of the number of things that are
not so much to be desired, especially now that it would be so hard to
make them good:

      “Bona jam nec nasci licet, ita corrupta Bunt semina;”

     [“Nothing good can be born now, the seed is so corrupt.”
      --Tertullian, De Pudicita.]

and yet they are justly to be lamented by such as lose them when they
have them.

He who left me my house in charge, foretold that I was like to ruin it,
considering my humour so little inclined to look after household affairs.
But he was mistaken; for I am in the same condition now as when I first
entered into it, or rather somewhat better; and yet without office or any
place of profit.

As to the rest, if Fortune has never done me any violent or extraordinary
injury, neither has she done me any particular favour; whatever we derive
from her bounty, was there above a hundred years before my time: I have,
as to my own particular, no essential and solid good, that I stand
indebted for to her liberality.  She has, indeed, done me some airy
favours, honorary and titular favours, without substance, and those in
truth she has not granted, but offered me, who, God knows, am all
material, and who take nothing but what is real, and indeed massive too,
for current pay: and who, if I durst confess so much, should not think
avarice much less excusable than ambition: nor pain less to be avoided
than shame; nor health less to be coveted than learning, or riches than
nobility.

Amongst those empty favours of hers, there is none that so much pleases
vain humour natural to my country, as an authentic bull of a Roman
burgess-ship, that was granted me when I was last there, glorious in
seals and gilded letters, and granted with all gracious liberality.  And
because ‘tis couched in a mixt style, more or less favourable, and that I
could have been glad to have seen a copy of it before it had passed the
seal.

Being before burgess of no city at all, I am glad to be created one of
the most noble that ever was or ever shall be.  If other men would
consider themselves at the rate I do, they would, as I do, discover
themselves to be full of inanity and foppery; to rid myself of it, I
cannot, without making myself away.  We are all steeped in it, as well
one as another; but they who are not aware on’t, have somewhat the better
bargain; and yet I know not whether they have or no.

This opinion and common usage to observe others more than ourselves has
very much relieved us that way: ‘tis a very displeasing object: we can
there see nothing but misery and vanity: nature, that we may not be
dejected with the sight of our own deformities, has wisely thrust the
action of seeing outward.  We go forward with the current, but to turn
back towards ourselves is a painful motion; so is the sea moved and
troubled when the waves rush against one another.  Observe, says every
one, the motions of the heavens, of public affairs; observe the quarrel
of such a person, take notice of such a one’s pulse, of such another’s
last will and testament; in sum, be always looking high or low, on one
side, before or behind you.  It was a paradoxical command anciently given
us by that god of Delphos: “Look into yourself; discover yourself; keep
close to yourself; call back your mind and will, that elsewhere consume
themselves into yourself; you run out, you spill yourself; carry a more
steady hand: men betray you, men spill you, men steal you from yourself.
Dost thou not see that this world we live in keeps all its sight confined
within, and its eyes open to contemplate itself?  ‘Tis always vanity for
thee, both within and without; but ‘tis less vanity when less extended.
Excepting thee, O man, said that god, everything studies itself first,
and has bounds to its labours and desires, according to its need.  There
is nothing so empty and necessitous as thou, who embracest the universe;
thou art the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without
jurisdiction, and, after all, the fool of the farce.”




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A man may govern himself well who cannot govern others so
     A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief
     A well-bred man is a compound man
     All over-nice solicitude about riches smells of avarice
     Always complaining is the way never to be lamented
     Appetite comes to me in eating
     Better to be alone than in foolish and troublesome company
     By suspecting them, have given them a title to do ill
     Change only gives form to injustice and tyranny
     Civil innocence is measured according to times and places
     Conclude the depth of my sense by its obscurity
     Concluding no beauty can be greater than what they see
     Confession enervates reproach and disarms slander
     Counterfeit condolings of pretenders
     Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty
     Desire of travel
     Enough to do to comfort myself, without having to console others
     Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails
     Gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain
     Giving is an ambitious and authoritative quality
     Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed
     Greedy humour of new and unknown things
     He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool
     I always find superfluity superfluous
     I am disgusted with the world I frequent
     I am hard to be got out, but being once upon the road
     I am very willing to quit the government of my house
     I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle
     I enter into confidence with dying
     I grudge nothing but care and trouble
     I hate poverty equally with pain
     I scorn to mend myself by halves
     I write my book for few men and for few years
     Justice als takes cognisance of those who glean after the reaper
     Known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new
     Laws (of Plato on travel), which forbids it after threescore.
     Liberty and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me
     Liberty of poverty
     Liberty to lean, but not to lay our whole weight upon others
     Little affairs most disturb us
     Men as often commend as undervalue me beyond reason
     Methinks I promise it, if I but say it
     My mind is easily composed at distance
     Neither be a burden to myself nor to any other
     No use to this age, I throw myself back upon that other
     Nothing falls where all falls
     Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation
     Obstinate in growing worse
     Occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal cause
     One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present
     Opposition and contradiction entertain and nourish them
     Our qualities have no title but in comparison
     Preferring the universal and common tie to all national ties
     Proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world
     Satisfied and pleased with and in themselves
     Settled my thoughts to live upon less than I have
     Some wives covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers
     That looks a nice well-made shoe to you
     There can be no pleasure to me without communication
     Think myself no longer worth my own care
     Tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions
     Tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good
     Titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter
     Travel with not only a necessary, but a handsome equipage
     Turn up my eyes to heaven to return thanks, than to crave
     Weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of obligation
     What sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another,”
      What step ends the near and what step begins the remote
     When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself
     Wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the impetus of friendship
     World where loyalty of one’s own children is unknown
     Wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others
     You have lost a good captain, to make of him a bad general






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 18.

X.        Of Managing the Will.
XI.       Of Cripples.
XII.      Of Physiognomy.



CHAPTER X

OF MANAGING THE WILL

Few things, in comparison of what commonly affect other men, move, or, to
say better, possess me: for ‘tis but reason they should concern a man,
provided they do not possess him.  I am very solicitous, both by study
and argument, to enlarge this privilege of insensibility, which is in me
naturally raised to a pretty degree, so that consequently I espouse and
am very much moved with very few things.  I have a clear sight enough,
but I fix it upon very few objects; I have a sense delicate and tender
enough; but an apprehension and application hard and negligent.  I am
very unwilling to engage myself; as much as in me lies, I employ myself
wholly on myself, and even in that subject should rather choose to curb
and restrain my affection from plunging itself over head and ears into
it, it being a subject that I possess at the mercy of others, and over
which fortune has more right than I; so that even as to health, which I
so much value, ‘tis all the more necessary for me not so passionately to
covet and heed it, than to find diseases so insupportable.  A man ought
to moderate himself betwixt the hatred of pain and the love of pleasure:
and Plato sets down a middle path of life betwixt the two.  But against
such affections as wholly carry me away from myself and fix me elsewhere,
against those, I say, I oppose myself with my utmost power.  ‘Tis my
opinion that a man should lend himself to others, and only give himself
to himself.  Were my will easy to lend itself out and to be swayed, I
should not stick there; I am too tender both by nature and use:

            “Fugax rerum, securaque in otia natus.”

          [“Avoiding affairs and born to secure ease.”
           --Ovid, De Trist., iii. 2, 9.]

Hot and obstinate disputes, wherein my adversary would at last have the
better, the issue that would render my heat and obstinacy disgraceful
would peradventure vex me to the last degree.  Should I set myself to it
at the rate that others do, my soul would never have the force to bear
the emotion and alarms of those who grasp at so much; it would
immediately be disordered by this inward agitation.  If, sometimes, I
have been put upon the management of other men’s affairs, I have promised
to take them in hand, but not into my lungs and liver; to take them upon
me, not to incorporate them; to take pains, yes: to be impassioned about
it, by no means; I have a care of them, but I will not sit upon them.
I have enough to do to order and govern the domestic throng of those that
I have in my own veins and bowels, without introducing a crowd of other
men’s affairs; and am sufficiently concerned about my own proper and
natural business, without meddling with the concerns of others.  Such as
know how much they owe to themselves, and how many offices they are bound
to of their own, find that nature has cut them out work enough of their
own to keep them from being idle.  “Thou hast business enough at home:
look to that.”

Men let themselves out to hire; their faculties are not for themselves,
but for those to whom they have enslaved themselves; ‘tis their tenants
occupy them, not themselves.  This common humour pleases not me.  We must
be thrifty of the liberty of our souls, and never let it out but upon
just occasions, which are very few, if we judge aright.  Do but observe
such as have accustomed themselves to be at every one’s call: they do it
indifferently upon all, as well little as great, occasions; in that which
nothing concerns them; as much as in what imports them most.  They thrust
themselves in indifferently wherever there is work to do and obligation,
and are without life when not in tumultuous bustle:

                    “In negotiis sunt, negotii cause,”

     [“They are in business for business’ sake.”--Seneca, Ep., 22.]

It is not so much that they will go, as it is that they cannot stand
still: like a rolling stone that cannot stop till it can go no further.
Occupation, with a certain sort of men, is a mark of understanding and
dignity: their souls seek repose in agitation, as children do by being
rocked in a cradle; they may pronounce themselves as serviceable to their
friends, as they are troublesome to themselves.  No one distributes his
money to others, but every one distributes his time and his life: there
is nothing of which we are so prodigal as of these two things, of which
to be thrifty would be both commendable and useful.  I am of a quite
contrary humour; I look to myself, and commonly covet with no great
ardour what I do desire, and desire little; and I employ and busy myself
at the same rate, rarely and temperately.  Whatever they take in hand,
they do it with their utmost will and vehemence.  There are so many
dangerous steps, that, for the more safety, we must a little lightly and
superficially glide over the world, and not rush through it.  Pleasure
itself is painful in profundity:

                              “Incedis per ignes,
                    Suppositos cineri doloso.”

          [“You tread on fire, hidden under deceitful ashes.”
           --Horace, Od., ii. i, 7.]

The Parliament of Bordeaux chose me mayor of their city at a time when I
was at a distance from France,--[At Bagno Della Villa, near Lucca,
September 1581]--and still more remote from any such thought.
I entreated to be excused, but I was told by my friends that I had
committed an error in so doing, and the greater because the king had,
moreover, interposed his command in that affair.  ‘Tis an office that
ought to be looked upon so much more honourable, as it has no other
salary nor advantage than the bare honour of its execution.  It continues
two years, but may be extended by a second election, which very rarely
happens; it was to me, and had never been so but twice before: some years
ago to Monsieur de Lansac, and lately to Monsieur de Biron, Marshal of
France, in whose place I succeeded; and, I left mine to Monsieur de
Matignon, Marshal of France also: proud of so noble a fraternity--

               “Uterque bonus pacis bellique minister.”

          [“Either one a good minister in peace and war.”
           --AEneid, xi. 658.]

Fortune would have a hand in my promotion, by this particular
circumstance which she put in of her own, not altogether vain; for
Alexander disdained the ambassadors of Corinth, who came to offer him a
burgess-ship of their city; but when they proceeded to lay before him
that Bacchus and Hercules were also in the register, he graciously
thanked them.

At my arrival, I faithfully and conscientiously represented myself to
them for such as I find myself to be--a man without memory, without
vigilance, without experience, and without vigour; but withal, without
hatred, without ambition, without avarice, and without violence; that
they might be informed of my qualities, and know what they were to expect
from my service.  And whereas the knowledge they had had of my late
father, and the honour they had for his memory, had alone incited them to
confer this favour upon me, I plainly told them that I should be very
sorry anything should make so great an impression upon me as their
affairs and the concerns of their city had made upon him, whilst he held
the government to which they had preferred me.  I remembered, when a boy,
to have seen him in his old age cruelly tormented with these public
affairs, neglecting the soft repose of his own house, to which the
declension of his age had reduced him for several years before, the
management of his own affairs, and his health; and certainly despising
his own life, which was in great danger of being lost, by being engaged
in long and painful journeys on their behalf.  Such was he; and this
humour of his proceeded from a marvellous good nature; never was there a
more charitable and popular soul.  Yet this proceeding which I commend in
others, I do not love to follow myself, and am not without excuse.

He had learned that a man must forget himself for his neighbour, and that
the particular was of no manner of consideration in comparison with the
general.  Most of the rules and precepts of the world run this way; to
drive us out of ourselves into the street for the benefit of public
society; they thought to do a great feat to divert and remove us from
ourselves, assuming we were but too much fixed there, and by a too
natural inclination; and have said all they could to that purpose: for
‘tis no new thing for the sages to preach things as they serve, not as
they are.  Truth has its obstructions, inconveniences, and
incompatibilities with us; we must often deceive that we may not deceive
ourselves; and shut our eyes and our understandings to redress and amend
them:

          “Imperiti enim judicant, et qui frequenter
          in hoc ipsum fallendi sunt, ne errent.”

     [“For the ignorant judge, and therefore are oft to be deceived,
     less they should err.”--Quintil., Inst. Orat., xi. 17.]

When they order us to love three, four, or fifty degrees of things above
ourselves,  they do like archers, who, to hit the white, take their aim a
great deal higher than the butt; to make a crooked stick straight, we
bend it the contrary way.

I believe that in the Temple of Pallas, as we see in all other religions,
there were apparent mysteries to be exposed to the people; and others,
more secret and high, that were only to be shown to such as were
professed; ‘tis likely that in these the true point of friendship that
every one owes to himself is to be found; not a false friendship, that
makes us embrace glory, knowledge, riches, and the like, with a principal
and immoderate affection, as members of our being; nor an indiscreet and
effeminate friendship, wherein it happens, as with ivy, that it decays
and ruins the walls it embraces; but a sound and regular friendship,
equally useful and pleasant.  He who knows the duties of this friendship
and practises them is truly of the cabinet of the Muses, and has attained
to the height of human wisdom and of our happiness, such an one, exactly
knowing what he owes to himself, will on his part find that he ought to
apply to himself the use of the world and of other men; and to do this,
to contribute to public society the duties and offices appertaining to
him.  He who does not in some sort live for others, does not live much
for himself:

     “Qui sibi amicus est, scito hunc amicum omnibus esse.”

     [“He who is his own friend, is a friend to everybody else.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 6.]

The principal charge we have is, to every one his own conduct; and ‘tis
for this only that we here are.  As he who should forget to live a
virtuous and holy life, and should think he acquitted himself of his duty
in instructing and training others up to it, would be a fool; even so he
who abandons his own particular healthful and pleasant living to serve
others therewith, takes, in my opinion, a wrong and unnatural course.

I would not that men should refuse, in the employments they take upon
them, their attention, pains, eloquence, sweat, and blood if need be:

                         “Non ipse pro caris amicis
                    Aut patria, timidus perire:”

     [“Himself not afraid to die for beloved friends, or for his
     country.”--Horace, Od., iv. 9, 51.]

but ‘tis only borrowed, and accidentally; his mind being always in repose
and in health; not without action, but without vexation, without passion.
To be simply acting costs him so little, that he acts even sleeping;
but it must be set on going with discretion; for the body receives the
offices imposed upon it just according to what they are; the mind often
extends and makes them heavier at its own expense, giving them what
measure it pleases.  Men perform like things with several sorts of
endeavour, and different contention of will; the one does well enough
without the other; for how many people hazard themselves every day in war
without any concern which way it goes; and thrust themselves into the
dangers of battles, the loss of which will not break their next night’s
sleep? and such a man may be at home, out of the danger which he durst
not have looked upon, who is more passionately concerned for the issue of
this war, and whose soul is more anxious about events than the soldier
who therein stakes his blood and his life.  I could have engaged myself
in public employments without quitting my own matters a nail’s breadth,
and have given myself to others without abandoning myself.  This
sharpness and violence of desires more hinder than they advance the
execution of what we undertake; fill us with impatience against slow or
contrary events, and with heat and suspicion against those with whom we
have to do.  We never carry on that thing well by which we are
prepossessed and led:

                         “Male cuncta ministrat
                         Impetus.”

     [“Impulse manages all things ill.”--Statius, Thebaid, x. 704.]

He who therein employs only his judgment and address proceeds more
cheerfully: he counterfeits, he gives way, he defers quite at his ease,
according to the necessities of occasions; he fails in his attempt
without trouble and affliction, ready and entire for a new enterprise;
he always marches with the bridle in his hand.  In him who is intoxicated
with this violent and tyrannical intention, we discover, of necessity,
much imprudence and injustice; the impetuosity of his desire carries him
away; these are rash motions, and, if fortune do not very much assist,
of very little fruit.  Philosophy directs that, in the revenge of
injuries received, we should strip ourselves of choler; not that the
chastisement should be less, but, on the contrary, that the revenge may
be the better and more heavily laid on, which, it conceives, will be by
this impetuosity hindered.  For anger not only disturbs, but, of itself,
also wearies the arms of those who chastise; this fire benumbs and wastes
their force; as in precipitation, “festinatio tarda est,”--haste trips
up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself:

               “Ipsa se velocitas implicat.”--Seneca, Ep. 44

For example, according to what I commonly see, avarice has no greater
impediment than itself; the more bent and vigorous it is, the less it
rakes together, and commonly sooner grows rich when disguised in a visor
of liberality.

A very excellent gentleman, and a friend of mine, ran a risk of impairing
his faculties by a too passionate attention and affection to the affairs
of a certain prince his master;--[Probably the King of Navarre, afterward
Henry IV.]--which master has thus portrayed himself to me; “that he
foresees the weight of accidents as well as another, but that in those
for which there is no remedy, he presently resolves upon suffering; in
others, having taken all the necessary precautions which by the vivacity
of his understanding he can presently do, he quietly awaits what may
follow.”  And, in truth, I have accordingly seen him maintain a great
indifferency and liberty of actions and serenity of countenance in very
great and difficult affairs: I find him much greater, and of greater
capacity in adverse than in prosperous fortune; his defeats are to him
more glorious than his victories, and his mourning than his triumph.

Consider, that even in vain and frivolous actions, as at chess, tennis,
and the like, this eager and ardent engaging with an impetuous desire,
immediately throws the mind and members into indiscretion and disorder: a
man astounds and hinders himself; he who carries himself more moderately,
both towards gain and loss, has always his wits about him; the less
peevish and passionate he is at play, he plays much more advantageously
and surely.

As to the rest, we hinder the mind’s grasp and hold, in giving it so many
things to seize upon; some things we should only offer to it; tie it to
others, and with others incorporate it.  It can feel and discern all
things, but ought to feed upon nothing but itself; and should be
instructed in what properly concerns itself, and that is properly of its
own having and substance.  The laws of nature teach us what justly we
need.  After the sages have told us that no one is indigent according to
nature, and that every one is so according to opinion, they very subtly
distinguish betwixt the desires that proceed from her, and those that
proceed from the disorder of our own fancy: those of which we can see the
end are hers; those that fly before us, and of which we can see no end,
are our own: the poverty of goods is easily cured; the poverty of the
soul is irreparable:

         “Nam si, quod satis est homini, id satis esse potesset
          Hoc sat erat: nunc, quum hoc non est, qui credimus porro
          Divitias ullas animum mi explere potesse?”

     [“For if what is for man enough, could be enough, it were enough;
     but since it is not so, how can I believe that any wealth can give
     my mind content.”--Lucilius aped Nonium Marcellinum, V. sec. 98.]

Socrates, seeing a great quantity of riches, jewels, and furniture
carried in pomp through his city:  “How many things,” said he, “I do not
desire!”--[Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., V. 32.]--Metrodorus lived on twelve
ounces a day, Epicurus upon less; Metrocles slept in winter abroad
amongst sheep, in summer in the cloisters of churches:

               “Sufficit ad id natura, quod poscit.”

          [“Nature suffices for what he requires.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]

Cleanthes lived by the labour of his own hands, and boasted that
Cleanthes, if he would, could yet maintain another Cleanthes.

If that which nature exactly and originally requires of us for the
conservation of our being be too little (as in truth what it is, and how
good cheap life may be maintained, cannot be better expressed than by
this consideration, that it is so little that by its littleness it
escapes the gripe and shock of fortune), let us allow ourselves a little
more; let us call every one of our habits and conditions nature; let us
rate and treat ourselves by this measure; let us stretch our
appurtenances and accounts so far; for so far, I fancy, we have some
excuse.  Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful.  What is
wanting to my custom, I reckon is wanting to me; and I should be almost
as well content that they took away my life as cut me short in the way
wherein I have so long lived.  I am no longer in condition for any great
change, nor to put myself into a new and unwonted course, not even to
augmentation.  ‘Tis past the time for me to become other than what I am;
and as I should complain of any great good hap that should now befall me,
that it came not in time to be enjoyed:

               “Quo mihi fortunas, si non conceditur uti?”

     [“What is the good fortune to me, if it is not granted to me
     to use it.”--Horace, Ep., i. 5, 12.]

so should I complain of any inward acquisition.  It were almost better
never, than so late, to become an honest man, and well fit to live, when
one has no longer to live.  I, who am about to make my exit out of the
world, would easily resign to any newcomer, who should desire it, all the
prudence I am now acquiring in the world’s commerce; after meat, mustard.
I have no need of goods of which I can make no use; of what use is
knowledge to him who has lost his head?  ‘Tis an injury and unkindness in
fortune to tender us presents that will only inspire us with a just
despite that we had them not in their due season.  Guide me no more; I
can no longer go.  Of so many parts as make up a sufficiency, patience is
the most sufficient.  Give the capacity of an excellent treble to the
chorister who has rotten lungs, and eloquence to a hermit exiled into the
deserts of Arabia.  There needs no art to help a fall; the end finds
itself of itself at the conclusion of every affair.  My world is at an
end, my form expired; I am totally of the past, and am bound to authorise
it, and to conform my outgoing to it.  I will here declare, by way of
example, that the Pope’s late ten days’ diminution

     [Gregory XIII., in 1582, reformed the Calendar, and, in consequence,
     in France they all at once passed from the 9th to the 20th
     December.]

has taken me so aback that I cannot well reconcile myself to it; I belong
to the years wherein we kept another kind of account.  So ancient and so
long a custom challenges my adherence to it, so that I am constrained to
be somewhat heretical on that point incapable of any, though corrective,
innovation.  My imagination, in spite of my teeth, always pushes me ten
days forward or backward, and is ever murmuring in my ears: “This rule
concerns those who are to begin to be.”  If health itself, sweet as it
is, returns to me by fits, ‘tis rather to give me cause of regret than
possession of it; I have no place left to keep it in.  Time leaves me;
without which nothing can be possessed.  Oh, what little account should I
make of those great elective dignities that I see in such esteem in the
world, that are never conferred but upon men who are taking leave of it;
wherein they do not so much regard how well the man will discharge his
trust, as how short his administration will be: from the very entry they
look at the exit.  In short, I am about finishing this man, and not
rebuilding another.  By long use, this form is in me turned into
substance, and fortune into nature.

I say, therefore, that every one of us feeble creatures is excusable in
thinking that to be his own which is comprised under this measure; but
withal, beyond these limits, ‘tis nothing but confusion; ‘tis the largest
extent we can grant to our own claims.  The more we amplify our need and
our possession, so much the more do we expose ourselves to the blows of
Fortune and adversities.  The career of our desires ought to be
circumscribed and restrained to a short limit of the nearest and most
contiguous commodities; and their course ought, moreover, to be performed
not in a right line, that ends elsewhere, but in a circle, of which the
two points, by a short wheel, meet and terminate in ourselves.  Actions
that are carried on without this reflection--a near and essential
reflection, I mean--such as those of ambitious and avaricious men, and so
many more as run point-blank, and to whose career always carries them
before themselves, such actions, I say; are erroneous and sickly.

Most of our business is farce:

               “Mundus universus exercet histrioniam.”
                --[Petronius Arbiter, iii. 8.]

We must play our part properly, but withal as a part of a borrowed
personage; we must not make real essence of a mask and outward
appearance; nor of a strange person, our own; we cannot distinguish the
skin from the shirt: ‘tis enough to meal the face, without mealing the
breast.  I see some who transform and transubstantiate themselves into as
many new shapes and new beings as they undertake new employments; and who
strut and fume even to the heart and liver, and carry their state along
with them even to the close-stool: I cannot make them distinguish the
salutations made to themselves from those made to their commission, their
train, or their mule:

     “Tantum se fortunx permittunt, etiam ut naturam dediscant.”

     [“They so much give themselves up to fortune, as even to unlearn
     nature.”--Quintus Curtius, iii. 2.]

They swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking,
according to the height of their magisterial place.  The Mayor of
Bordeaux and Montaigne have ever been two by very manifest separation.
Because one is an advocate or a financier, he must not ignore the knavery
there is in such callings; an honest man is not accountable for the vice
or absurdity of his employment, and ought not on that account refuse to
take the calling upon him: ‘tis the usage of his country, and there is
money to be got by it; a man must live by the world; and make his best of
it, such as it is.  But the judgment of an emperor ought to be above his
empire, and see and consider it as a foreign accident; and he ought to
know how to enjoy himself apart from it, and to communicate himself as
James and Peter, to himself, at all events.

I cannot engage myself so deep and so entire; when my will gives me to
anything, ‘tis not with so violent an obligation that my judgment is
infected with it.  In the present broils of this kingdom, my own interest
has not made me blind to the laudable qualities of our adversaries, nor
to those that are reproachable in those men of our party.  Others adore
all of their own side; for my part, I do not so much as excuse most
things in those of mine: a good work has never the worst grace with me
for being made against me.  The knot of the controversy excepted, I have
always kept myself in equanimity and pure indifference:

     “Neque extra necessitates belli praecipuum odium gero;”

     [“Nor bear particular hatred beyond the necessities of war.”]

for which I am pleased with myself; and the more because I see others
commonly fail in the contrary direction.  Such as extend their anger and
hatred beyond the dispute in question, as most men do, show that they
spring from some other occasion and private cause; like one who, being
cured of an ulcer, has yet a fever remaining, by which it appears that
the ulcer had another more concealed beginning.  The reason is that they
are not concerned in the common cause, because it is wounding to the
state and general interest; but are only nettled by reason of their
particular concern.  This is why they are so especially animated, and to
a degree so far beyond justice and public reason:

          “Non tam omnia universi, quam ea, quae ad quemque pertinent,
          singuli carpebant.”

     [“Every one was not so much angry against things in general, as
     against those that particularly concern himself.”
      --Livy, xxxiv. 36.]

I would have the advantage on our side; but if it be not, I shall not run
mad.  I am heartily for the right party; but I do not want to be taken
notice of as an especial enemy to others, and beyond the general quarrel.
I marvellously challenge this vicious form of opinion: “He is of the
League because he admires the graciousness of Monsieur de Guise; he is
astonished at the King of Navarre’s energy, therefore he is a Huguenot;
he finds this to say of the manners of the king, he is therefore
seditious in his heart.”  And I did not grant to the magistrate himself
that he did well in condemning a book because it had placed a heretic
--[Theodore de Beza.]--amongst the best poets of the time.  Shall we not
dare to say of a thief that he has a handsome leg?  If a woman be a
strumpet, must it needs follow that she has a foul smell?  Did they in
the wisest ages revoke the proud title of Capitolinus they had before
conferred on Marcus Manlius as conservator of religion and the public
liberty, and stifle the memory of his liberality, his feats of arms, and
military recompenses granted to his valour, because he, afterwards
aspired to the sovereignty, to the prejudice of the laws of his country?
If we take a hatred against an advocate, he will not be allowed the next
day to be eloquent.  I have elsewhere spoken of the zeal that pushed on
worthy men to the like faults.  For my part, I can say, “Such an one does
this thing ill, and another thing virtuously and well.”  So in the
prognostication or sinister events of affairs they would have every one
in his party blind or a blockhead, and that our persuasion and judgment
should subserve not truth, but to the project of our desires.  I should
rather incline towards the other extreme; so much I fear being suborned
by my desire; to which may be added that I am a little tenderly
distrustful of things that I wish.

I have in my time seen wonders in the indiscreet and prodigious facility
of people in suffering their hopes and belief to be led and governed,
which way best pleased and served their leaders, despite a hundred
mistakes one upon another, despite mere dreams and phantasms.  I no more
wonder at those who have been blinded and seduced by the fooleries of
Apollonius and Mahomet.  Their sense and understanding are absolutely
taken away by their passion; their discretion has no more any other
choice than that which smiles upon them and encourages their cause.
I had principally observed this in the beginning of our intestine
distempers; that other, which has sprung up since, in imitating, has
surpassed it; by which I am satisfied that it is a quality inseparable
from popular errors; after the first, that rolls, opinions drive on one
another like waves with the wind: a man is not a member of the body, if
it be in his power to forsake it, and if he do not roll the common way.
But, doubtless, they wrong the just side when they go about to assist it
with fraud; I have ever been against that practice: ‘tis only fit to work
upon weak heads; for the sound, there are surer and more honest ways to
keep up their courage and to excuse adverse accidents.

Heaven never saw a greater animosity than that betwixt Caesar and Pompey,
nor ever shall; and yet I observe, methinks, in those brave souls,
a great moderation towards one another: it was a jealousy of honour and
command, which did not transport them to a furious and indiscreet hatred,
and was without malignity and detraction: in their hottest exploits upon
one another, I discover some remains of respect and good-will: and am
therefore of opinion that, had, it been possible, each of them would
rather have done his business without the ruin of the other than with it.
Take notice how much otherwise matters went with Marius and Sylla.

We must not precipitate ourselves so headlong after our affections and
interests.  As, when I was young, I opposed myself to the progress of
love which I perceived to advance too fast upon me, and had a care lest
it should at last become so pleasing as to force, captivate, and wholly
reduce me to its mercy: so I do the same upon all other occasions where
my will is running on with too warm an appetite.  I lean opposite to the
side it inclines to; as I find it going to plunge and make itself drunk
with its own wine; I evade nourishing its pleasure so far, that I cannot
recover it without infinite loss.  Souls that, through their own
stupidity, only discern things by halves, have this happiness, that they
smart less with hurtful things: ‘tis a spiritual leprosy that has some
show of health, and such a health as philosophy does not altogether
contemn; but yet we have no reason to call it wisdom, as we often do.
And after this manner some one anciently mocked Diogeries, who, in the
depth of winter and quite naked, went embracing an image of snow for a
trial of his endurance: the other seeing him in this position, “Art thou
now very cold?”  said he.  “Not at all,” replied Diogenes.  “Why, then,”
 pursued the other, “what difficult and exemplary thing dost thou think
thou doest in embracing that snow?”  To take a true measure of constancy,
one must necessarily know what the suffering is.

But souls that are to meet with adverse events and the injuries of
fortune, in their depth and sharpness, that are to weigh and taste them
according to their natural weight and bitterness, let such show their
skill in avoiding the causes and diverting the blow.  What did King Cotys
do?  He paid liberally for the rich and beautiful vessel that had been
presented to him, but, seeing it was exceedingly brittle, he immediately
broke it betimes, to prevent so easy a matter of displeasure against his
servants. In like manner, I have willingly avoided all confusion in my
affairs, and never coveted to have my estate contiguous to those of my
relations, and such with whom I coveted a strict friendship; for thence
matter of unkindness and falling out often proceeds.  I formerly loved
hazardous games of cards and dice; but have long since left them off,
only for this reason that, with whatever good air I carried my losses,
I could not help feeling vexed within.  A man of honour, who ought to be
touchily sensible of the lie or of an insult, and who is not to take a
scurvy excuse for satisfaction, should avoid occasions of dispute.
I shun melancholy, crabbed men, as I would the plague; and in matters I
cannot talk of without emotion and concern I never meddle, if not
compelled by my duty:

               “Melius non incipient, quam desinent.”

     [“They had better never to begin than to have to desist.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 72.]

The surest way, therefore, is to prepare one’s self beforehand for
occasions.

I know very well that some wise men have taken another way, and have not
feared to grapple and engage to the utmost upon several subjects these
are confident of their own strength, under which they protect themselves
in all ill successes, making their patience wrestle and contend with
disaster:

               “Velut rupes, vastum quae prodit in aequor,
               Obvia ventorum furiis, expostaque ponto,
               Vim cunctam atque minas perfert coelique marisque;
               Ipsa immota manens.”

     [“As a rock, which projects into the vast ocean, exposed to the
     furious winds and the raging sea, defies the force and menaces of
     sky and sea, itself unshaken.”--Virgil, AEneid, x. 693.]

Let us not attempt these examples; we shall never come up to them.  They
set themselves resolutely, and without agitation, to behold the ruin of
their country, which possessed and commanded all their will: this is too
much, and too hard a task for our commoner souls.  Cato gave up the
noblest life that ever was upon this account; we meaner spirits must fly
from the storm as far as we can; we must provide for sentiment, and not
for patience, and evade the blows we cannot meet.  Zeno, seeing
Chremonides, a young man whom he loved, draw near to sit down by him,
suddenly started up; and Cleanthes demanding of him the reason why he did
so, “I hear,” said he, “that physicians especially order repose, and
forbid emotion in all tumours.”  Socrates does not say: “Do not surrender
to the charms of beauty; stand your ground, and do your utmost to oppose
it.”  “Fly it,” says he; “shun the fight and encounter of it, as of a
powerful poison that darts and wounds at a distance.”  And his good
disciple, feigning or reciting, but, in my opinion, rather reciting than
feigning, the rare perfections of the great Cyrus, makes him distrustful
of his own strength to resist the charms of the divine beauty of that
illustrous Panthea, his captive, and committing the visiting and keeping
her to another, who could not have so much liberty as himself.  And the
Holy Ghost in like manner:

                    “Ne nos inducas in tentationem.”

          [“Lead us not into temptation.”--St. Matthew, vi. 13.]

We do not pray that our reason may not be combated and overcome by
concupiscence, but that it should not be so much as tried by it; that we
should not be brought into a state wherein we are so much as to suffer
the approaches, solicitations, and temptations of sin: and we beg of
Almighty God to keep our consciences quiet, fully and perfectly delivered
from all commerce of evil.

Such as say that they have reason for their revenging passion, or any
other sort of troublesome agitation of mind, often say true, as things
now are, but not as they were: they speak to us when the causes of their
error are by themselves nourished and advanced; but look backward--recall
these causes to their beginning--and there you will put them to a
nonplus.  Will they have their faults less, for being of longer
continuance; and that of an unjust beginning, the sequel can be just?
Whoever shall desire the good of his country, as I do, without fretting
or pining himself, will be troubled, but will not swoon to see it
threatening either its own ruin, or a no less ruinous continuance; poor
vessel, that the waves, the winds, and the pilot toss and steer to so
contrary designs!

                        “In tam diversa magister
                         Ventus et unda trahunt.”

He who does not gape after the favour of princes, as after a thing he
cannot live without, does not much concern himself at the coldness of
their reception and countenance, nor at the inconstancy of their wills.
He who does not brood over his children or his honours with a slavish
propension, ceases not to live commodiously enough after their loss.  He
who does good principally for his own satisfaction will not be much
troubled to see men judge of his actions contrary to his merit.  A
quarter of an ounce of patience will provide sufficiently against such
inconveniences.  I find ease in this receipt, redeeming myself in the
beginning as good cheap as I can; and find that by this means I have
escaped much trouble and many difficulties.  With very little ado I stop
the first sally of my emotions, and leave the subject that begins to be
troublesome before it transports me.  He who stops not the start will
never be able to stop the course; he who cannot keep them out will never,
get them out when they are once got in; and he who cannot arrive at the
beginning will never arrive at the end of all.  Nor will he bear the fall
who cannot sustain the shock:

     “Etenim ipsae se impellunt, ubi semel a ratione discessum est;
     ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget, in altumque provehitur
     imprudens, nec reperit locum consistendi.”

     [“For they throw themselves headlong when once they lose their
     reason; and infirmity so far indulges itself, and from want of
     prudence is carried out into deep water, nor finds a place to
     shelter it.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 18.]

I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to sing and
whistle within, forerunners of the storm:

                              “Ceu flamina prima
               Cum deprensa fremunt sylvis et caeca volutant
               Murmura, venturos nautis prodentia ventos.”

     [“As the breezes, pent in the woods, first send out dull murmurs,
     announcing the approach of winds to mariners.”--AEneid, x. 97.]

How often have I done myself a manifest injustice to avoid the hazard of
having yet a worse done me by the judges, after an age of vexations,
dirty and vile practices, more enemies to my nature than fire or the
rack?

     “Convenit a litibus, quantum licet, et nescio an paulo plus etiam
     quam licet, abhorrentem esse: est enim non modo liberale, paululum
     nonnunquam de suo jure decedere, sed interdum etiam fructuosum.”

     [“A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may, and I know not
     whether not something more; for ‘tis not only liberal, but sometimes
     also advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right.
     --“Cicero, De Offic., ii. 18.]

Were we wise, we ought to rejoice and boast, as I one day heard a young
gentleman of a good family very innocently do, that his mother had lost
her cause, as if it had been a cough, a fever, or something very
troublesome to keep.  Even the favours that fortune might have given me
through relationship or acquaintance with those who have sovereign
authority in those affairs, I have very conscientiously and very
carefully avoided employing them to the prejudice of others, and of
advancing my pretensions above their true right.  In fine, I have so much
prevailed by my endeavours (and happily I may say it) that I am to this
day a virgin from all suits in law; though I have had very fair offers
made me, and with very just title, would I have hearkened to them, and a
virgin from quarrels too.  I have almost passed over a long life without
any offence of moment, either active or passive, or without ever hearing
a worse word than my own name: a rare favour of Heaven.

Our greatest agitations have ridiculous springs and causes: what ruin did
our last Duke of Burgundy run into about a cartload of sheepskins!
And was not the graving of a seal the first and principal cause of the
greatest commotion that this machine of the world ever underwent?
--[The civil war between Marius and Sylla; see Plutarch’s Life of Marius,
c. 3.]--for Pompey and Caesar were but the offsets and continuation of
the two others: and I have in my time seen the wisest heads in this
kingdom assembled with great ceremony, and at the public expense, about
treaties and agreements, of which the true decision, in the meantime,
absolutely depended upon the ladies’ cabinet council, and the inclination
of some bit of a woman.

The poets very well understood this when they put all Greece and Asia to
fire and sword about an apple.  Look why that man hazards his life and
honour upon the fortune of his rapier and dagger; let him acquaint you
with the occasion of the quarrel; he cannot do it without blushing: the
occasion is so idle and frivolous.

A little thing will engage you in it; but being once embarked, all the
cords draw; great provisions are then required, more hard and more
important.  How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out?
Now we should proceed contrary to the reed, which, at its first
springing, produces a long and straight shoot, but afterwards, as if
tired and out of breath, it runs into thick and frequent joints and
knots, as so many pauses which demonstrate that it has no more its first
vigour and firmness; ‘twere better to begin gently and coldly, and to
keep one’s breath and vigorous efforts for the height and stress of the
business.  We guide affairs in their beginnings, and have them in our own
power; but afterwards, when they are once at work, ‘tis they that guide
and govern us, and we are to follow them.

Yet do I not mean to say that this counsel has discharged me of all
difficulty, and that I have not often had enough to do to curb and
restrain my passions; they are not always to be governed according to the
measure of occasions, and often have their entries very sharp and
violent.  But still good fruit and profit may thence be reaped; except
for those who in well-doing are not satisfied with any benefit, if
reputation be wanting; for, in truth, such an effect is not valued but by
every one to himself; you are better contented, but not more esteemed,
seeing you reformed yourself before you got into the whirl of the dance,
or that the provocative matter was in sight.  Yet not in this only, but
in all other duties of life also, the way of those who aim at honour is
very different from that they proceed by, who propose to themselves order
and reason.  I find some who rashly and furiously rush into the lists and
cool in the course.  As Plutarch says, that those who, through false
shame, are soft and facile to grant whatever is desired of them, are
afterwards as facile to break their word and to recant; so he who enters
lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it.  The same
difficulty that keeps me from entering into it, would, when once hot and
engaged in quarrel, incite me to maintain it with great obstinacy and
resolution.  ‘Tis the tyranny of custom; when a man is once engaged; he
must go through with it, or die.  “Undertake coolly,” said Bias,
“but pursue with ardour.”  For want of prudence, men fall into want of
courage, which is still more intolerable.

Most accommodations of the quarrels of these days of ours are shameful
and false; we only seek to save appearances, and in the meantime betray
and disavow our true intentions; we salve over the fact.  We know very
well how we said the thing, and in what sense we spoke it, and the
company know it, and our friends whom we have wished to make sensible of
our advantage, understand it well enough too: ‘tis at the expense of our
frankness and of the honour of our courage, that we disown our thoughts,
and seek refuge in falsities, to make matters up.  We give ourselves the
lie, to excuse the lie we have given to another.  You are not to consider
if your word or action may admit of another interpretation; ‘tis your own
true and sincere interpretation, your real meaning in what you said or
did, that you are thenceforward to maintain, whatever it cost you.  Men
speak to your virtue and conscience, which are not things to be put under
a mask; let us leave these pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of
the law.  The excuses and reparations that I see every day made and given
to repair indiscretion, seem to me more scandalous than the indiscretion
itself.  It were better to affront your adversary a second time than to
offend yourself by giving him so unmanly a satisfaction.  You have braved
him in your heat and anger, and you would flatter and appease him in your
cooler and better sense; and by that means lay yourself lower and at his
feet, whom before you pretended to overtop.  I do not find anything a
gentleman can say so vicious in him as unsaying what he has said is
infamous, when to unsay it is authoritatively extracted from him;
forasmuch as obstinacy is more excusable in a man of honour than
pusillanimity.  Passions are as easy for me to evade, as they are hard
for me to moderate:

          “Exscinduntur facilius ammo, quam temperantur.”

     [“They are more easily to be eradicated than governed.”]

He who cannot attain the noble Stoical impassibility, let him secure
himself in the bosom of this popular stolidity of mine; what they
performed by virtue, I inure myself to do by temperament.  The middle
region harbours storms and tempests; the two extremes, of philosophers
and peasants, concur in tranquillity and happiness:

               “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
               Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
               Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari!
               Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes,
               Panaque, Sylvanumque senem, Nymphasque sorores!”

     [“Happy is he who could discover the causes of things, and place
     under his feet all fears and inexorable fate, and the sound of
     rapacious Acheron: he is blest who knows the country gods, and Pan,
     and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs.”--Virgil, Georg., ii. 490.]

The births of all things are weak and tender; and therefore we should
have our eyes intent on beginnings; for as when, in its infancy, the
danger is not perceived, so when it is grown up, the remedy is as little
to be found.  I had every day encountered a million of crosses, harder to
digest in the progress of ambition, than it has been hard for me to curb
the natural propension that inclined me to it:

                    “Jure perhorrui
                    Lath conspicuum tollere verticem.”

          [“I ever justly feared to raise my head too high.”
           --Horace, Od.,iii. 16, 18.]

All public actions are subject to uncertain and various interpretations;
for too many heads judge of them.  Some say of this civic employment of
mine (and I am willing to say a word or two about it, not that it is
worth so much, but to give an account of my manners in such things), that
I have behaved myself in it as a man who is too supine and of a languid
temperament; and they have some colour for what they say.  I endeavoured
to keep my mind and my thoughts in repose;

          “Cum semper natura, tum etiam aetate jam quietus;”

          [“As being always quiet by nature, so also now by age.”
           --Cicero, De Petit. Consul., c. 2.]

and if they sometimes lash out upon some rude and sensible impression,
‘tis in truth without my advice.  Yet from this natural heaviness of
mine, men ought not to conclude a total inability in me (for want of care
and want of sense are two very different things), and much less any
unkindness or ingratitude towards that corporation who employed the
utmost means they had in their power to oblige me, both before they knew
me and after; and they did much more for me in choosing me anew than in
conferring that honour upon me at first.  I wish them all imaginable
good; and assuredly had occasion been, there is nothing I would have
spared for their service; I did for them as I would have done for myself.
‘Tis a good, warlike, and generous people, but capable of obedience and
discipline, and of whom the best use may be made, if well guided.  They
say also that my administration passed over without leaving any mark or
trace.  Good!  They moreover accuse my cessation in a time when everybody
almost was convicted of doing too much.  I am impatient to be doing where
my will spurs me on; but this itself is an enemy to perseverance.  Let
him who will make use of me according to my own way, employ me in affairs
where vigour and liberty are required, where a direct, short, and,
moreover, a hazardous conduct are necessary; I may do something; but if
it must be long, subtle, laborious, artificial and intricate, he had
better call in somebody else.  All important offices are not necessarily
difficult: I came prepared to do somewhat rougher work, had there been
great occasion; for it is in my power to do something more than I do, or
than I love to do.  I did not, to my knowledge, omit anything that my
duty really required.  I easily forgot those offices that ambition mixes
with duty and palliates with its title; these are they that, for the most
part, fill the eyes and ears, and give men the most satisfaction; not the
thing but the appearance contents them; if they hear no noise, they think
men sleep.  My humour is no friend to tumult; I could appease a commotion
without commotion, and chastise a disorder without being myself
disorderly; if I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it,
and put it on.  My manners are languid, rather faint than sharp.  I do
not condemn a magistrate who sleeps, provided the people under his charge
sleep as well as he: the laws in that case sleep too.  For my part, I
commend a gliding, staid, and silent life:

          “Neque submissam et abjectam, neque se efferentem;”

          [“Neither subject and abject, nor obtrusive.”
           --Cicero, De Offic., i. 34]

my fortune will have it so.  I am descended from a family that has lived
without lustre or tumult, and, time out of mind, particularly ambitious
of a character for probity.

Our people nowadays are so bred up to bustle and ostentation, that good
nature, moderation, equability, constancy, and such like quiet and
obscure qualities, are no more thought on or regarded.  Rough bodies make
themselves felt; the smooth are imperceptibly handled: sickness is felt,
health little or not at all; no more than the oils that foment us, in
comparison of the pains for which we are fomented.  ‘Tis acting for one’s
particular reputation and profit, not for the public good, to refer that
to be done in the public squares which one may do in the council chamber;
and to noon day what might have been done the night before; and to be
jealous to do that himself which his colleague can do as well as he; so
were some surgeons of Greece wont to perform their operations upon
scaffolds in the sight of the people, to draw more practice and profit.
They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of
trumpet.  Ambition is not a vice of little people, nor of such modest
means as ours.  One said to Alexander: “Your father will leave you a
great dominion, easy and pacific”; this youth was emulous of his father’s
victories and of the justice of his government; he would not have enjoyed
the empire of the world in ease and peace.  Alcibiades, in Plato, had
rather die young, beautiful, rich, noble, and learned, and all this in
full excellence, than to stop short of such condition; this disease is,
peradventure, excusable in so strong and so full a soul.  When wretched
and dwarfish little souls cajole and deceive themselves, and think to
spread their fame for having given right judgment in an affair, or
maintained the discipline of the guard of a gate of their city, the more
they think to exalt their heads the more they show their tails.  This
little well-doing has neither body nor life; it vanishes in the first
mouth, and goes no further than from one street to another.  Talk of it
by all means to your son or your servant, like that old fellow who,
having no other auditor of his praises nor approver of his valour,
boasted to his chambermaid, crying, “O Perrete, what a brave, clever man
hast thou for thy master!”  At the worst, talk of it to yourself, like a
councillor of my acquaintance, who, having disgorged a whole cartful of
law jargon with great heat and as great folly, coming out of the council
chamber to make water, was heard very complacently to mutter betwixt his
teeth:

          “Non nobis, domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.”

     [“Not unto us, O Lord, not to us: but unto Thy name be the glory.”
      --Psalm cxiii. I.]

He who gets it of nobody else, let him pay himself out of his own purse.

Fame is not prostituted at so cheap a rate: rare and exemplary actions,
to which it is due, would not endure the company of this prodigious crowd
of petty daily performances.  Marble may exalt your titles, as much as
you please, for having repaired a rod of wall or cleansed a public sewer;
but not men of sense.  Renown does not follow all good deeds, if novelty
and difficulty be not conjoined; nay, so much as mere esteem, according
to the Stoics, is not due to every action that proceeds from virtue; nor
will they allow him bare thanks who, out of temperance, abstains from an
old blear-eyed crone.  Those who have known the admirable qualities of
Scipio Africanus, deny him the glory that Panaetius attributes to him, of
being abstinent from gifts, as a glory not so much his as that of his
age.  We have pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of
grandeur: our own are more natural, and by so much more solid and sure,
as they are lower.  If not for that of conscience, yet at least for
ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition; let us disdain that thirst of
honour and renown, so low and mendicant, that it makes us beg it of all
sorts of people:

          “Quae est ista laus quae: possit e macello peti?”

     [“What praise is that which is to be got in the market-place (meat
     market)?”  Cicero, De Fin., ii. 15.]

by abject means, and at what cheap rate soever: ‘tis dishonour to be so
honoured.  Let us learn to be no more greedy, than we are capable, of
glory.  To be puffed up with every action that is innocent or of use, is
only for those with whom such things are extraordinary and rare: they
will value it as it costs them.  The more a good effect makes a noise,
the more do I abate of its goodness as I suspect that it was more
performed for the noise, than upon account of the goodness: exposed upon
the stall, ‘tis half sold.  Those actions have much more grace and
lustre, that slip from the hand of him that does them, negligently and
without noise, and that some honest man thereafter finds out and raises
from the shade, to produce it to the light upon its own account,

          “Mihi quidem laudabiliora videntur omnia, quae sine
          venditatione, et sine populo teste fiunt,”

     [“All things truly seem more laudable to me that are performed
     without ostentation, and without the testimony of the people.”
      --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 26.]

says the most ostentatious man that ever lived.

I had but to conserve and to continue, which are silent and insensible
effects: innovation is of great lustre; but ‘tis interdicted in this age,
when we are pressed upon and have nothing to defend ourselves from but
novelties.  To forbear doing is often as generous as to do; but ‘tis less
in the light, and the little good I have in me is of this kind.  In fine,
occasions in this employment of mine have been confederate with my
humour, and I heartily thank them for it.  Is there any who desires to be
sick, that he may see his physician at work? and would not the physician
deserve to be whipped who should wish the plague amongst us, that he
might put his art in practice?  I have never been of that wicked humour,
and common enough, to desire that troubles and disorders in this city
should elevate and honour my government; I have ever heartily contributed
all I could to their tranquillity and ease.

He who will not thank me for the order, the sweet and silent calm that
has accompanied my administration, cannot, however, deprive me of the
share that belongs to me by title of my good fortune.  And I am of such a
composition, that I would as willingly be lucky as wise, and had rather
owe my successes purely to the favour of Almighty God, than to any
operation of my own.  I had sufficiently published to the world my
unfitness for such public offices; but I have something in me yet worse
than incapacity itself; which is, that I am not much displeased at it,
and that I do not much go about to cure it, considering the course of
life that I have proposed to myself.

Neither have I satisfied myself in this employment; but I have very near
arrived at what I expected from my own performance, and have much
surpassed what I promised them with whom I had to do: for I am apt to
promise something less than what I am able to do, and than what I hope to
make good.  I assure myself that I have left no offence or hatred behind
me; to leave regret or desire for me amongst them, I at least know very
well that I never much aimed at it:

              “Mene huic confidere monstro!
               Mene salis placidi vultum, fluctusque quietos
               Ignorare?”

     [“Should I place confidence in this monster?  Should I be ignorant
     of the dangers of that seeming placid sea, those now quiet waves?”
      --Virgil, Aeneid, V. 849.]




CHAPTER XI

OF CRIPPLES

‘Tis now two or three years ago that they made the year ten days shorter
in France.--[By the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.]--How many
changes may we expect should follow this reformation! it was really
moving heaven and earth at once.  Yet nothing for all that stirs from its
place my neighbours still find their seasons of sowing and reaping, the
opportunities of doing their business, the hurtful and propitious days,
dust at the same time where they had, time out of mind, assigned them;
there was no more error perceived in our old use, than there is amendment
found in the alteration; so great an uncertainty there is throughout; so
gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception.  ‘Tis said that this
regulation might have been carried on with less inconvenience, by
subtracting for some years, according to the example of Augustus, the
Bissextile, which is in some sort a day of impediment and trouble, till
we had exactly satisfied this debt, the which itself is not done by this
correction, and we yet remain some days in arrear: and yet, by this
means, such order might be taken for the future, arranging that after the
revolution of such or such a number of years, the supernumerary day might
be always thrown out, so that we could not, henceforward, err above
four-and-twenty hours in our computation.  We have no other account of
time but years; the world has for many ages made use of that only; and
yet it is a measure that to this day we are not agreed upon, and one that
we still doubt what form other nations have variously given to it, and
what was the true use of it.  What does this saying of some mean, that
the heavens in growing old bow themselves down nearer towards us, and put
us into an uncertainty even of hours and days? and that which Plutarch
says of the months, that astrology had not in his time determined as to
the motion of the moon; what a fine condition are we in to keep records
of things past.

I was just now ruminating, as I often do, what a free and roving thing
human reason is.  I ordinarily see that men, in things propounded to
them, more willingly study to find out reasons than to ascertain truth:
they slip over presuppositions, but are curious in examination of
consequences; they leave the things, and fly to the causes.  Pleasant
talkers!  The knowledge of causes only concerns him who has the conduct
of things; not us, who are merely to undergo them, and who have perfectly
full and accomplished use of them, according to our need, without
penetrating into the original and essence; wine is none the more pleasant
to him who knows its first faculties.  On the contrary, both the body and
the soul interrupt and weaken the right they have of the use of the world
and of themselves, by mixing with it the opinion of learning; effects
concern us, but the means not at all.  To determine and to distribute
appertain to superiority and command; as it does to subjection to accept.
Let me reprehend our custom.  They commonly begin thus: “How is such a
thing done?”  Whereas they should say, “Is such a thing done?”  Our
reason is able to create a hundred other worlds, and to find out the
beginnings and contexture; it needs neither matter nor foundation: let it
but run on, it builds as well in the air as on the earth, and with
inanity as well as with matter:

                    “Dare pondus idonea fumo.”

          [“Able to give weight to smoke.”--Persius, v. 20.]

I find that almost throughout we should say, “there is no such thing,”
 and should myself often make use of this answer, but I dare not: for they
cry that it is an evasion produced from ignorance and weakness of
understanding; and I am fain, for the most part, to juggle for company,
and prate of frivolous subjects and tales that I believe not a word of;
besides that, in truth, ‘tis a little rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny
a stated fact; and few people but will affirm, especially in things hard
to be believed, that they have seen them, or at least will name witnesses
whose authority will stop our mouths from contradiction.  In this way, we
know the foundations and means of things that never were; and the world
scuffles about a thousand questions, of which both the Pro and the Con
are false.

          “Ita finitima sunt falsa veris, ut in praecipitem
          locum non debeat se sapiens committere.”

     [“False things are so near the true, that a wise man should not
     trust himself in a precipitous place”--Cicero, Acad., ii.  21.]

Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are
the same, and we look upon them with the same eye.  I find that we are
not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and
offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as
a thing conformable to our being.

I have seen the birth of many miracles in my time; which, although they
were abortive, yet have we not failed to foresee what they would have
come to, had they lived their full age.  ‘Tis but finding the end of the
clew, and a man may wind off as much as he will; and there is a greater
distance betwixt nothing and the least thing in the world than there is
betwixt this and the greatest.  Now the first that are imbued with this
beginning of novelty, when they set out with their tale, find, by the
oppositions they meet with, where the difficulty of persuasion lies, and
so caulk up that place with some false piece;

     [Voltaire says of this passage, “He who would learn to doubt should
     read this whole chapter of Montaigne, the least methodical of all
     philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable.”
      --Melanges Historiques, xvii.  694, ed. of Lefevre.]

besides that:

     “Insita hominibus libido alendi de industria rumores,”

          [“Men having a natural desire to nourish reports.”
           --Livy, xxviii. 24.]

we naturally make a conscience of restoring what has been lent us,
without some usury and accession of our own.  The particular error first
makes the public error, and afterwards, in turn, the public error makes
the particular one; and thus all this vast fabric goes forming and piling
itself up from hand to hand, so that the remotest witness knows more
about it than those who were nearest, and the last informed is better
persuaded than the first.

‘Tis a natural progress; for whoever believes anything, thinks it a work
of charity to persuade another into the same opinion; which the better to
do, he will make no difficulty of adding as much of his own invention as
he conceives necessary to his tale to encounter the resistance or want of
conception he meets with in others.  I myself, who make a great
conscience of lying, and am not very solicitous of giving credit and
authority to what I say, yet find that in the arguments I have in hand,
being heated with the opposition of another, or by the proper warmth of
my own narration, I swell and puff up my subject by voice, motion,
vigour, and force of words, and moreover, by extension and amplification,
not without some prejudice to the naked truth; but I do it conditionally
withal, that to the first who brings me to myself, and who asks me the
plain and bare truth, I presently surrender my passion, and deliver the
matter to him without exaggeration, without emphasis, or any painting of
my own.  A quick and earnest way of speaking, as mine is, is apt to run
into hyperbole.  There is nothing to which men commonly are more inclined
than to make way for their own opinions; where the ordinary means fail
us, we add command, force, fire, and sword.  ‘Tis a misfortune to be at
such a pass, that the best test of truth is the multitude of believers in
a crowd, where the number of fools so much exceeds the wise:

     “Quasi vero quidquam sit tam valde, quam nil sapere, vulgare.”

          [“As if anything were so common as ignorance.”
           --Cicero, De Divin., ii.]

          “Sanitatis patrocinium est, insanientium turba.”

     [“The multitude of fools is a protection to the wise.”
      --St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, vi. 10.]

‘Tis hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions: the
first persuasion, taken from the very subject itself, possesses the
simple, and from them diffuses itself to the wise, under the authority of
the number and antiquity of the witnesses.  For my part, what I should
not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred and one: and I
do not judge opinions by years.

‘Tis not long since one of our princes, in whom the gout had spoiled an
excellent nature and sprightly disposition, suffered himself to be so far
persuaded with the report made to him of the marvellous operations of a
certain priest who by words and gestures cured all sorts of diseases,
as to go a long journey to seek him out, and by the force of his mere
imagination, for some hours so persuaded and laid his legs asleep, as to
obtain that service from them they had long time forgotten.  Had fortune
heaped up five or six such-like incidents, it had been enough to have
brought this miracle into nature.  There was afterwards discovered so
much simplicity and so little art in the author of these performances,
that he was thought too contemptible to be punished, as would be thought
of most such things, were they well examined:

               “Miramur ex intervallo fallentia.”

     [“We admire after an interval (or at a distance) things that
     deceive.”--Seneca, Ep., 118, 2.]

So does our sight often represent to us strange images at a distance that
vanish on approaching near:

               “Nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur.”

               [“Report is never fully substantiated.”
                --Quintus Curtius, ix. 2.]

‘Tis wonderful from how many idle beginnings and frivolous causes such
famous impressions commonly, proceed.  This it is that obstructs
information; for whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends,
worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight
by their littleness.  And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle
inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not
prepossessed.  To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events
have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or
miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange
things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know
myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand
myself.

The principal right of advancing and producing such accidents is reserved
to fortune.  Passing the day before yesterday through a village two
leagues from my house, I found the place yet warm with a miracle that had
lately failed of success there, where with first the neighbourhood had
been several months amused; then the neighbouring provinces began to take
it up, and to run thither in great companies of all sorts of people.
A young fellow of the place had one night in sport counterfeited the
voice of a spirit in his own house, without any other design at present,
but only for sport; but this having succeeded with him better than he
expected, to extend his farce with more actors he associated with him a
stupid silly country girl, and at last there were three of them of the
same age and understanding, who from domestic, proceeded to public,
preachings, hiding themselves under the altar of the church, never
speaking but by night, and forbidding any light to be brought.  From
words which tended to the conversion of the world, and threats of the day
of judgment (for these are subjects under the authority and reverence of
which imposture most securely lurks), they proceeded to visions and
gesticulations so simple and ridiculous that--nothing could hardly be so
gross in the sports of little children.  Yet had fortune never so little
favoured the design, who knows to what height this juggling might have at
last arrived?  These poor devils are at present in prison, and are like
shortly to pay for the common folly; and I know not whether some judge
will not also make them smart for his.  We see clearly into this, which
is discovered; but in many things of the like nature that exceed our
knowledge, I am of opinion that we ought to suspend our judgment, whether
as to rejection or as to reception.

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the
abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of
professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we
are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions.
The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having
seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain
knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.”  They
make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me
as infallible.  I love these words which mollify and moderate the
temerity of our propositions: “peradventure; in some sort; some; ‘tis
said, I think,” and the like: and had I been set to train up children I
had put this way of answering into their mouths, inquiring and not
resolving: “What does this mean?  I understand it not; it may be: is it
true?” so that they should rather have retained the form of pupils at
threescore years old than to go out doctors, as they do, at ten.  Whoever
will be cured of ignorance must confess it.

Iris is the daughter of Thaumas;

     [“That is, of Admiration.  She (Iris, the rainbow) is beautiful, and
     for that reason, because she has a face to be admired, she is said
     to have been the daughter of Thamus.”
      --Cicero, De Nat. Deor., iii. 20.]

admiration is the foundation of all philosophy, inquisition the progress,
ignorance the end.  But there is a sort of ignorance, strong and
generous, that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an
ignorance which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive
knowledge itself.  I read in my younger years a trial that Corras,

     [A celebrated Calvinist lawyer, born at Toulouse; 1513, and
     assassinated there, 4th October 1572.]

a councillor of Toulouse, printed, of a strange incident, of two men who
presented themselves the one for the other.  I remember (and I hardly
remember anything else) that he seemed to have rendered the imposture of
him whom he judged to be guilty, so wonderful and so far exceeding both
our knowledge and his own, who was the judge, that I thought it a very
bold sentence that condemned him to be hanged.  Let us have some form of
decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter” more
freely and ingenuously than the Areopagites did, who, finding themselves
perplexed with a cause they could not unravel, ordered the parties to
appear again after a hundred years.

The witches of my neighbourhood run the hazard of their lives upon the
report of every new author who seeks to give body to their dreams.  To
accommodate the examples that Holy Writ gives us of such things, most
certain and irrefragable examples, and to tie them to our modern events,
seeing that we neither see the causes nor the means, will require another
sort-of wit than ours.  It, peradventure, only appertains to that sole
all-potent testimony to tell us.  “This is, and that is, and not that
other.”  God ought to be believed; and certainly with very good reason;
but not one amongst us for all that who is astonished at his own
narration (and he must of necessity be astonished if he be not out of his
wits), whether he employ it about other men’s affairs or against himself.

I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable, avoiding
those ancient reproaches:

          “Majorem fidem homines adhibent iis, quae non intelligunt;
          --Cupidine humani ingenii libentius obscura creduntur.”

     [“Men are most apt to believe what they least understand: and from
     the acquisitiveness of the human intellect, obscure things are more
     easily credited.” The second sentence is from Tacitus, Hist. 1. 22.]

I see very well that men get angry, and that I am forbidden to doubt upon
pain of execrable injuries; a new way of persuading!  Thank God, I am not
to be cuffed into belief.  Let them be angry with those who accuse their
opinion of falsity; I only accuse it of difficulty and boldness, and
condemn the opposite affirmation equally, if not so imperiously, with
them.  He who will establish this proposition by authority and huffing
discovers his reason to be very weak.  For a verbal and scholastic
altercation let them have as much appearance as their contradictors;

               “Videantur sane, non affirmentur modo;”

     [“They may indeed appear to be; let them not be affirmed (Let them
     state the probabilities, but not affirm.)”
      --Cicero, Acad., n. 27.]

but in the real consequence they draw from it these have much the
advantage.  To kill men, a clear and strong light is required, and our
life is too real and essential to warrant these supernatural and
fantastic accidents.

As to drugs and poisons, I throw them out of my count, as being the worst
sort of homicides: yet even in this, ‘tis said, that men are not always
to rely upon the personal confessions of these people; for they have
sometimes been known to accuse themselves of the murder of persons who
have afterwards been found living and well.  In these other extravagant
accusations, I should be apt to say, that it is sufficient a man, what
recommendation soever he may have, be believed as to human things; but of
what is beyond his conception, and of supernatural effect, he ought then
only to be believed when authorised by a supernatural approbation.  The
privilege it has pleased Almighty God to give to some of our witnesses,
ought not to be lightly communicated and made cheap.  I have my ears
battered with a thousand such tales as these: “Three persons saw him such
a day in the east three, the next day in the west: at such an hour, in
such a place, and in such habit”; assuredly I should not believe it
myself.  How much more natural and likely do I find it that two men
should lie than that one man in twelve hours’ time should fly with the
wind from east to west?  How much more natural that our understanding
should be carried from its place by the volubility of our disordered
minds, than that one of us should be carried by a strange spirit upon a
broomstaff, flesh and bones as we are, up the shaft of a chimney?  Let
not us seek illusions from without and unknown, we who are perpetually
agitated with illusions domestic and our own.  Methinks one is pardonable
in disbelieving a miracle, at least, at all events where one can elude
its verification as such, by means not miraculous; and I am of St.
Augustine’s opinion, that, “‘tis better to lean towards doubt than
assurance, in things hard to prove and dangerous to believe.”

‘Tis now some years ago that I travelled through the territories of a
sovereign prince, who, in my favour, and to abate my incredulity, did me
the honour to let me see, in his own presence, and in a private place,
ten or twelve prisoners of this kind, and amongst others, an old woman,
a real witch in foulness and deformity, who long had been famous in that
profession.  I saw both proofs and free confessions, and I know not what
insensible mark upon the miserable creature: I examined and talked with
her and the rest as much and as long as I would, and gave the best and
soundest attention I could, and I am not a man to suffer my judgment to
be made captive by prepossession.  In the end, and in all conscience, I
should rather have prescribed them hellebore than hemlock;

     “Captisque res magis mentibus, quam consceleratis similis visa;”

     [“The thing was rather to be attributed to madness, than malice.”
      (“The thing seemed to resemble minds possessed rather than guilty.”)
     --Livy, viii, 18.]

justice has its corrections proper for such maladies.  As to the
oppositions and arguments that worthy men have made to me, both there,
and often in other places, I have met with none that have convinced me,
and that have not admitted a more likely solution than their conclusions.
It is true, indeed, that the proofs and reasons that are founded upon
experience and fact, I do not go about to untie, neither have they any
end; I often cut them, as Alexander did the Gordian knot.  After all,
‘tis setting a man’s conjectures at a very high price upon them to cause
a man to be roasted alive.

We are told by several examples, as Praestantius of his father, that
being more profoundly, asleep than men usually are, he fancied himself
to be a mare, and that he served the soldiers for a sumpter; and what
he fancied himself to be, he really proved.  If sorcerers dream so
materially; if dreams can sometimes so incorporate themselves with
effects, still I cannot believe that therefore our will should be
accountable to justice; which I say as one who am neither judge nor privy
councillor, and who think myself by many degrees unworthy so to be, but a
man of the common sort, born and avowed to the obedience of the public
reason, both in its words and acts.  He who should record my idle talk as
being to the prejudice of the pettiest law, opinion, or custom of his
parish, would do himself a great deal of wrong, and me much more; for, in
what I say, I warrant no other certainty, but that ‘tis what I had then
in my thought, a tumultuous and wavering thought.  All I say is by way of
discourse, and nothing by way of advice:

          “Nec me pudet, ut istos fateri nescire, quod nesciam;”

     [“Neither am I ashamed, as they are, to confess my ignorance of what
     I do not know.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 25.]

I should not speak so boldly, if it were my due to be believed; and so I
told a great man, who complained of the tartness and contentiousness of
my exhortations.  Perceiving you to be ready and prepared on one part, I
propose to you the other, with all the diligence and care I can, to clear
your judgment, not to compel it.  God has your hearts in His hands, and
will furnish you with the means of choice.  I am not so presumptuous even
as to desire that my opinions should bias you--in a thing of so great
importance: my fortune has not trained them up to so potent and elevated
conclusions.  Truly, I have not only a great many humours, but also a
great many opinions, that I would endeavour to make my son dislike, if I
had one.  What, if the truest are not always the most commodious to man,
being of so wild a composition?

Whether it be to the purpose or not, tis no great matter: ‘tis a common
proverb in Italy, that he knows not Venus in her perfect sweetness who
has never lain with a lame mistress.  Fortune, or some particular
incident, long ago put this saying into the mouths of the people; and the
same is said of men as well as of women; for the queen of the Amazons
answered the Scythian who courted her to love, “Lame men perform best.”
 In this feminine republic, to evade the dominion of the males, they
lamed them in their infancy--arms, legs, and other members that gave them
advantage over them, and only made use of them in that wherein we, in
these parts of the world, make use of them.  I should have been apt to
think; that the shuffling pace of the lame mistress added some new
pleasure to the work, and some extraordinary titillation to those who
were at the sport; but I have lately learnt that ancient philosophy has
itself determined it, which says that the legs and thighs of lame women,
not receiving, by reason of their imperfection, their due aliment, it
falls out that the genital parts above are fuller and better supplied and
much more vigorous; or else that this defect, hindering exercise, they
who are troubled with it less dissipate their strength, and come more
entire to the sports of Venus; which also is the reason why the Greeks
decried the women-weavers as being more hot than other women by reason of
their sedentary trade, which they carry on without any great exercise of
the body.  What is it we may not reason of at this rate?  I might also
say of these, that the jaggling about whilst so sitting at work, rouses
and provokes their desire, as the swinging and jolting of coaches does
that of our ladies.

Do not these examples serve to make good what I said at first: that our
reasons often anticipate the effect, and have so infinite an extent of
jurisdiction that they judge and exercise themselves even on inanity
itself and non-existency?  Besides the flexibility of our invention to
forge reasons of all sorts of dreams, our imagination is equally facile
to receive impressions of falsity by very frivolous appearances; for, by
the sole authority of the ancient and common use of this proverb, I have
formerly made myself believe that I have had more pleasure in a woman by
reason she was not straight, and accordingly reckoned that deformity
amongst her graces.

Torquato Tasso, in the comparison he makes betwixt France and Italy,
says that he has observed that our legs are generally smaller than those
of the Italian gentlemen, and attributes the cause of it to our being
continually on horseback; which is the very same cause from which
Suetonius draws a quite opposite conclusion; for he says, on the
contrary, that Germanicus had made his legs bigger by the continuation of
the same exercise.

Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of
Theramenes, fit for all feet.  It is double and diverse, and the matters
are double and diverse too.  “Give me a drachm of silver,” said a Cynic
philosopher to Antigonus.  “That is not a present befitting a king,”
 replied he.  “Give me then a talent,” said the other.  “That is not a
present befitting a Cynic.”

              “Seu plures calor ille vias et caeca relaxat
               Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in herbas
               Seu durat magis, et venas astringit hiantes;
               Ne tenues pluviae, rapidive potentia colic
               Acrior, aut Boreae penetrabile frigus adurat.”

     [“Whether the heat opens more passages and secret pores through
     which the sap may be derived into the new-born herbs; or whether it
     rather hardens and binds the gaping veins that the small showers and
     keen influence of the violent sun or penetrating cold of Boreas may
     not hurt them.”--Virg., Georg., i. 89.]

                    “Ogni medaglia ha il suo rovescio.”

          [“Every medal has its reverse.”--Italian Proverb.]

This is the reason why Clitomachus said of old that Carneades had outdone
the labours of Hercules, in having eradicated consent from men, that is
to say, opinion and the courage of judging.  This so vigorous fancy of
Carneades sprang, in my opinion, anciently from the impudence of those
who made profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit.
AEsop was set to sale with two other slaves; the buyer asked the first of
these what he could do; he, to enhance his own value, promised mountains
and marvels, saying he could do this and that, and I know not what; the
second said as much of himself or more: when it came to AEsop’s turn, and
that he was also asked what he could do; “Nothing,” said he, “for these
two have taken up all before me; they know everything.”  So has it
happened in the school of philosophy: the pride of those who attributed
the capacity of all things to the human mind created in others, out of
despite and emulation, this opinion, that it is capable of nothing: the
one maintain the same extreme in ignorance that the others do in
knowledge; to make it undeniably manifest that man is immoderate
throughout, and can never stop but of necessity and the want of ability
to proceed further.




CHAPTER XII

OF PHYSIOGNOMY

Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and trust; and
‘tis not amiss; we could not choose worse than by ourselves in so weak an
age.  That image of Socrates’ discourses, which his friends have
transmitted to us, we approve upon no other account than a reverence to
public sanction: ‘tis not according to our own knowledge; they are not
after our way; if anything of the kind should spring up now, few men
would value them.  We discern no graces that are not pointed and puffed
out and inflated by art; such as glide on in their own purity and
simplicity easily escape so gross a sight as ours; they have a delicate
and concealed beauty, such as requires a clear and purified sight to
discover its secret light.  Is not simplicity, as we take it,
cousin-german to folly and a quality of reproach?  Socrates makes his
soul move a natural and common motion: a peasant said this; a woman said
that; he has never anybody in his mouth but carters, joiners, cobblers,
and masons; his are inductions and similitudes drawn from the most common
and known actions of men; every one understands him.  We should never
have recognised the nobility and splendour of his admirable conceptions
under so mean a form; we, who think all things low and flat that are not
elevated, by learned doctrine, and who discern no riches but in pomp and
show.  This world of ours is only formed for ostentation: men are only
puffed up with wind, and are bandied to and fro like tennis-balls.  He
proposed to himself no vain and idle fancies; his design was to furnish
us with precepts and things that more really and fitly serve to the use
of life;

                       “Servare modum, finemque tenere,
                    Naturamque sequi.”

               [“To keep a just mean, to observe a just limit,
               and to follow Nature.”--Lucan, ii. 381.]

He was also always one and the same, and raised himself, not by starts
but by complexion, to the highest pitch of vigour; or, to say better,
mounted not at all, but rather brought down, reduced, and subjected all
asperities and difficulties to his original and natural condition; for in
Cato ‘tis most manifest that ‘tis a procedure extended far beyond the
common ways of men: in the brave exploits of his life, and in his death,
we find him always mounted upon the great horse; whereas the other ever
creeps upon the ground, and with a gentle and ordinary pace, treats of
the most useful matters, and bears himself, both at his death and in the
rudest difficulties that could present themselves, in the ordinary way of
human life.

It has fallen out well that the man most worthy to be known and to be
presented to the world for example should be he of whom we have the most
certain knowledge; he has been pried into by the most clear-sighted men
that ever were; the testimonies we have of him are admirable both in
fidelity and fulness.  ‘Tis a great thing that he was able so to order
the pure imaginations of a child, that, without altering or wresting
them, he thereby produced the most beautiful effects of our soul: he
presents it neither elevated nor rich; he only represents it sound, but
assuredly with a brisk and full health.  By these common and natural
springs, by these ordinary and popular fancies, without being moved or
put out, he set up not only the most regular, but the most high and
vigorous beliefs, actions, and manners that ever were.  ‘Tis he who
brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to
restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies.
See him plead before his judges; observe by what reasons he rouses his
courage to the hazards of war; with what arguments he fortifies his
patience against calumny, tyranny, death, and the perverseness of his
wife: you will find nothing in all this borrowed from arts and sciences:
the simplest may there discover their own means and strength; ‘tis not
possible more to retire or to creep more low.  He has done human nature a
great kindness in showing it how much it can do of itself.

We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow
and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another’s than of
our own.  Man can in nothing fix himself to his actual necessity: of
pleasure, wealth, and power, he grasps at more than he can hold; his
greediness is incapable of moderation.  And I find that in curiosity of
knowing he is the same; he cuts himself out more work than he can do, and
more than he needs to do: extending the utility of knowledge to the full
of its matter:

     “Ut omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque, intemperantia laboramus.”

     [“We carry intemperance into the study of literature, as well as
     into everything else.”--Seneca, Ep., 106.]

And Tacitus had reason to commend the mother of Agricola for having
restrained her son in his too violent appetite for learning.

Tis a good, if duly considered, which has in it, as the other goods of
men have, a great deal of vanity and weakness, proper and natural to
itself, and that costs very dear.  Its acquisition is far more hazardous
than that of all other meat or drink; for, as to other things, what we
have bought we carry home in some vessel, and there have full leisure to
examine our purchase, how much we shall eat or drink of it, and when: but
sciences we can, at the very first, stow into no other vessel than the
soul; we swallow them in buying, and return from the market, either
already infected or amended: there are some that only burden and
overcharge the stomach, instead of nourishing; and, moreover, some that,
under colour of curing, poison us.  I have been pleased, in places where
I have been, to see men in devotion vow ignorance as well as chastity,
poverty, and penitence: ‘tis also a gelding of our unruly appetites, to
blunt this cupidity that spurs us on to the study of books, and to
deprive the soul of this voluptuous complacency that tickles us with the
opinion of knowledge: and ‘tis plenarily to accomplish the vow of
poverty, to add unto it that of the mind.  We need little doctrine to
live at our ease; and Socrates teaches us that this is in us, and the way
how to find it, and the manner how to use it: All our sufficiency which
exceeds the natural is well-nigh superfluous and vain: ‘tis much if it
does not rather burden and cumber us than do us good:

               “Paucis opus est literis ad mentem bonam:”

          [“Little learning is needed to form a sound mind.”
           --Seneca, Ep., 106.]

‘tis a feverish excess of the mind; a tempestuous and unquiet instrument.
Do but recollect yourself, and you will find in yourself natural
arguments against death, true, and the fittest to serve you in time of
necessity: ‘tis they that make a peasant, and whole nations, die with as
much firmness as a philosopher.  Should I have died less cheerfully
before I had read Cicero’s Tusculan Quastiones?  I believe not; and when
I find myself at the best, I perceive that my tongue is enriched indeed,
but my courage little or nothing elevated by them; that is just as nature
framed it at first, and defends itself against the conflict only after a
natural and ordinary way.  Books have not so much served me for
instruction as exercise.  What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new
defences against natural inconveniences, has more imprinted in our
fancies their weight and greatness, than her reasons and subtleties to
secure us from them?  They are subtleties, indeed, with which she often
alarms us to little purpose.  Do but observe how many slight and
frivolous, and, if nearly examined, incorporeal arguments, the closest
and wisest authors scatter about one good one: they are but verbal quirks
and fallacies to amuse and gull us: but forasmuch as it may be with some
profit, I will sift them no further; many of that sort are here and there
dispersed up and down this book, either borrowed or by imitation.
Therefore one ought to take a little heed not to call that force which is
only a pretty knack of writing, and that solid which is only sharp, or
that good which is only fine:

               “Quae magis gustata quam potata, delectant,”

          [“Which more delight in the tasting than in being drunk.”
           --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 5.]

everything that pleases does not nourish:

               “Ubi non ingenii, sed animi negotium agitur.”

     [“Where the question is not about the wit, but about the soul.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 75.]

To see the trouble that Seneca gives himself to fortify himself against
death; to see him so sweat and pant to harden and encourage himself, and
bustle so long upon this perch, would have lessened his reputation with
me, had he not very bravely held himself at the last.  His so ardent and
frequent agitations discover that he was in himself impetuous and
passionate,

          “Magnus animus remissius loquitur, et securius .  .  .
          non est alius ingenio, alius ammo color;”

     [“A great courage speaks more calmly and more securely.  There is
     not one complexion for the wit and another for the mind.”
      --Seneca, Ep. 114, 115]

he must be convinced at his own expense; and he in some sort discovers
that he was hard pressed by his enemy.  Plutarch’s way, by how much it is
more disdainful and farther stretched, is, in my opinion, so much more
manly and persuasive: and I am apt to believe that his soul had more
assured and more regular motions.  The one more sharp, pricks and makes
us start, and more touches the soul; the other more constantly solid,
forms, establishes, and supports us, and more touches the understanding.
That ravishes the judgment, this wins it.  I have likewise seen other
writings, yet more reverenced than these, that in the representation of
the conflict they maintain against the temptations of the flesh, paint
them, so sharp, so powerful and invincible, that we ourselves, who are of
the common herd, are as much to wonder at the strangeness and unknown
force of their temptation, as at the resisting it.

To what end do we so arm ourselves with this harness of science?  Let us
look down upon the poor people that we see scattered upon the face of the
earth, prone and intent upon their business, that neither know Aristotle
nor Cato, example nor precept; from these nature every day extracts
effects of constancy and patience, more pure and manly than those we so
inquisitively study in the schools: how many do I ordinarily see who
slight poverty?  how many who desire to die, or who die without alarm or
regret?  He who is now digging in my garden, has this morning buried his
father or his son.  The very names by which they call diseases sweeten
and mollify the sharpness of them: the phthisic is with them no more than
a cough, dysentery but a looseness, the pleurisy but a stitch; and, as
they gently name them, so they patiently endure them; they are very great
and grievous indeed when they hinder their ordinary labour; they never
keep their beds but to die:

          “Simplex illa et aperta virtus in obscuram et solertem
          scientiam versa est.”

     [“That overt and simple virtue is converted into an obscure and
     subtle science.”--Seneca, Ep., 95.]

I was writing this about the time when a great load of our intestine
troubles for several months lay with all its weight upon me; I had the
enemy at my door on one side, and the freebooters, worse enemies, on the
other,

               “Non armis, sed vitiis, certatur;”

     [“The fight is not with arms, but with vices.”--Seneca, Ep. 95.]

and underwent all sorts of military injuries at once:

         “Hostis adest dextra laevaque a parte timendus.
          Vicinoque malo terret utrumque latus.”

     [“Right and left a formidable enemy is to be feared, and threatens
     me on both sides with impending danger.”--Ovid, De Ponto, i. 3, 57.]

A monstrous war!  Other wars are bent against strangers, this against
itself, destroying itself with its own poison.  It is of so malignant and
ruinous a nature, that it ruins itself with the rest; and with its own
rage mangles and tears itself to pieces.  We more often see it dissolve
of itself than through scarcity of any necessary thing or by force of the
enemy.  All discipline evades it; it comes to compose sedition, and is
itself full of it; would chastise disobedience, and itself is the
example; and, employed for the defence of the laws, rebels against its
own.  What a condition are we in!  Our physic makes us sick!

                    “Nostre mal s’empoisonne
                    Du secours qu’on luy donne.”

               “Exuperat magis, aegrescitque medendo.”

     [“Our disease is poisoned with its very remedies”--AEnead, xii. 46.]

               “Omnia fanda, nefanda, malo permista furore,
               Justificam nobis mentem avertere deorum.”

     [“Right and wrong, all shuffled together in this wicked fury, have
     deprived us of the gods’ protection.”
      --Catullus, De Nuptiis Pelei et Thetidos, V. 405.]

In the beginning of these popular maladies, one may distinguish the sound
from the sick; but when they come to continue, as ours have done, the
whole body is then infected from head to foot; no part is free from
corruption, for there is no air that men so greedily draw in that
diffuses itself so soon and that penetrates so deep as that of licence.
Our armies only subsist and are kept together by the cement of
foreigners; for of Frenchmen there is now no constant and regular army to
be made.  What a shame it is! there is no longer any discipline but what
we see in the mercenary soldiers.  As to ourselves, our conduct is at
discretion, and that not of the chief, but every one at his own.  The
general has a harder game to play within than he has without; he it is
who has to follow, to court the soldiers, to give way to them; he alone
has to obey: all the rest if disolution and free licence.  It pleases me
to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by
how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but it displeases
me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice,
every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion.
Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation.  We had
ill-formed souls enough, without spoiling those that were generous and
good; so that, if we hold on, there will scarcely remain any with whom to
intrust the health of this State of ours, in case fortune chance to
restore it:

              “Hunc saltem everso juvenem succurrere seclo,
               Ne prohibete.”

     [“Forbid not, at least, that this young man repair this ruined age.”
      --Virgil, Georg., i.  500.  Montaigne probably refers to Henry, king
     of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV.]

What has become of the old precept, “That soldiers ought more to fear
their chief than the enemy”?--[Valerius Maximus, Ext. 2.]--and of that
wonderful example, that an orchard being enclosed within the precincts of
a camp of the Roman army, was seen at their dislodgment the next day in
the same condition, not an apple, though ripe and delicious, being pulled
off, but all left to the possessor?  I could wish that our youth, instead
of the time they spend in less fruitful travels and less honourable
employments, would bestow one half of that time in being an eye-witness
of naval exploits, under some good captain of Rhodes, and the other half
in observing the discipline of the Turkish armies; for they have many
differences and advantages over ours; one of these is, that our soldiers
become more licentious in expeditions, theirs more temperate and
circumspect; for the thefts and insolencies committed upon the common
people, which are only punished with a cudgel in peace, are capital in
war; for an egg taken by a Turkish soldier without paying for it, fifty
blows with a stick is the fixed rate; for anything else, of what sort or
how trivial soever, not necessary to nourishment, they are presently
impaled or beheaded without mercy.  I am astonished, in the history of
Selim, the most cruel conqueror that ever was, to see that when he
subdued Egypt, the beautiful gardens about Damascus being all open, and
in a conquered land, and his army encamped upon the very place, should be
left untouched by the hands of the soldiers, by reason they had not
received the signal of pillage.

But is there any disease in a government that it is worth while to physic
with such a mortal drug?--[i.e.  as civil war.]--No, said Favonius, not
even the tyrannical usurpation of a Commonwealth.  Plato, likewise, will
not consent that a man should violate the peace of his country in order
to cure it, and by no means approves of a reformation that disturbs and
hazards all, and that is to be purchased at the price of the citizens’
blood and ruin; determining it to be the duty of a good patriot in such a
case to let it alone, and only to pray to God for his extraordinary
assistance: and he seems to be angry with his great friend Dion, for
having proceeded somewhat after another manner.  I was a Platonist in
this point before I knew there had ever been such a man as Plato in the
world.  And if this person ought absolutely to be rejected from our
society (he who by the sincerity of his conscience merited from the
divine favour to penetrate so far into the Christian light, through the
universal darkness wherein the world was involved in his time), I do not
think it becomes us to suffer ourselves to be instructed by a heathen,
how great an impiety it is not to expect from God any relief simply his
own and without our co-operation.  I often doubt, whether amongst so many
men as meddle in such affairs, there is not to be found some one of so
weak understanding as to have been really persuaded that he went towards
reformation by the worst of deformations; and advanced towards salvation
by the most express causes that we have of most assured damnation; that
by overthrowing government, the magistracy, and the laws, in whose
protection God has placed him, by dismembering his good mother, and
giving her limbs to be mangled by her old enemies, filling fraternal
hearts with parricidal hatreds, calling devils and furies to his aid, he
can assist the most holy sweetness and justice of the divine law.
Ambition, avarice, cruelty, and revenge have not sufficient natural
impetuosity of their own; let us bait them with the glorious titles of
justice and devotion.  There cannot a worse state of things be imagined
than where wickedness comes to be legitimate, and assumes, with the
magistrates’ permission, the cloak of virtue:

          “Nihil in speciem fallacius, quam prava religio,
          ubi deorum numen prxtenditur sceleribus.”

     [“Nothing has a more deceiving face than false religion, where the
     divinity of the gods is obscured by crimes.”--Livy, xxxix. 16.]

The extremest sort of injustice, according to Plato,  is where that which
is unjust should be reputed for just.

The common people then suffered very much, and not present damage only:

                              “Undique totis
                    Usque adeo turbatur agris,”

          [“Such great disorders overtake our fields on every side.”
           --Virgil, Eclog., i. II.]

but future too; the living were to suffer, and so were they who were yet
unborn; they stript them, and consequently myself, even of hope, taking
from them all they had laid up in store to live on for many years:

         “Quae nequeunt secum ferre aut abducere, perdunt;
          Et cremat insontes turba scelesta casas .  .  .
          Muris nulla fides, squalent populatibus agri.”

     [“What they cannot bear away, they spoil; and the wicked mob burn
     harmless houses; walls cannot secure their masters, and the fields
     are squalid with devastation.”
      --Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 35; Claudianus, In Eutyop., i. 244.]

Besides this shock, I suffered others: I underwent the inconveniences
that moderation brings along with it in such a disease: I was robbed on
all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a
Ghibelline; one of my poets expresses this very well, but I know not
where it is.

     [“So Tories called me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.”--Pope, after Horace.]

The situation of my house, and my friendliness with my neighbours,
presented me with one face; my life and my actions with another.  They
did not lay formal accusations to my charge, for they had no foundation
for so doing; I never hide my head from the laws, and whoever would have
questioned me, would have done himself a greater prejudice than me; they
were only mute suspicions that were whispered about, which never want
appearance in so confused a mixture, no more than envious or idle heads.
I commonly myself lend a hand to injurious presumptions that fortune
scatters abroad against me, by a way I have ever had of evading to
justify, excuse, or explain myself; conceiving that it were to compromise
my conscience to plead in its behalf:

               “Perspicuitas enim argumentatione elevatur;”

     [“For perspicuity is lessened by argument.”
      (“The clearness of a cause is clouded by argumentation.”)
     --Cicero, De Nat.  Deor., iii.  4.]

and, as if every one saw as clearly into me as I do myself, instead of
retiring from an accusation, I step up to meet it, and rather give it
some kind of colour by an ironical and scoffing confession, if I do not
sit totally mute, as of a thing not worth my answer.  But such as look
upon this kind of behaviour of mine as too haughty a confidence, have as
little kindness for me as they who interpret the weakness of an
indefensible cause; namely, the great folks, towards whom want of
submission is the great fault, harsh towards all justice that knows and
feels itself, and is not submissive humble, and suppliant; I have often
knocked my head against this pillar.  So it is that at what then befell
me, an ambitious man would have hanged himself, and a covetous man would
have done the same.  I have no manner of care of getting;

         “Si mihi, quod nunc est, etiam minus; et mihi vivam
          Quod superest aevi, si quid superesse volent dii:”

     [“If I may have what I now own, or even less, and may live for
     myself what of life remains, if the gods grant me remaining years.”
      --Horace, Ep., i. 18, 107.]

but the losses that befall me by the injury of others, whether by theft
or violence, go almost as near my heart as they would to that of the most
avaricious man.  The offence troubles me, without comparison, more than
the loss.  A thousand several sorts of mischiefs fell upon me in the neck
of one another; I could more cheerfully have borne them all at once.

I was already considering to whom, amongst my friends, I might commit a
necessitous and discredited old age; and having turned my eyes quite
round, I found myself bare.  To let one’s self fall plump down, and from
so great a height, it ought to be in the arms of a solid, vigorous, and
fortunate friendship: these are very rare, if there be any.  At last, I
saw that it was safest for me to trust to myself in my necessity; and if
it should so fall out, that I should be but upon cold terms in Fortune’s
favour, I should so much the more pressingly recommend me to my own, and
attach myself and look to myself all the more closely.  Men on all
occasions throw themselves upon foreign assistance to spare their own,
which is alone certain and sufficient to him who knows how therewith to
arm himself.  Every one runs elsewhere, and to the future, forasmuch as
no one is arrived at himself.  And I was satisfied that they were
profitable inconveniences; forasmuch as, first, ill scholars are to be
admonished with the rod, when reason will not do, as a crooked piece of
wood is by fire and straining reduced to straightness.  I have a great
while preached to myself to stick close to my own concerns, and separate
myself from the affairs of others; yet I am still turning my eyes aside.
A bow, a favourable word, a kind look from a great person tempts me; of
which God knows if there is scarcity in these days, and what they
signify.  I, moreover, without wrinkling my forehead, hearken to the
persuasions offered me, to draw me into the marketplace, and so gently
refuse, as if I were half willing to be overcome.  Now for so indocile a
spirit blows are required; this vessel which thus chops and cleaves, and
is ready to fall one piece from another, must have the hoops forced down
with good sound strokes of a mallet.  Secondly, that this accident served
me for exercise to prepare me for worse, if I, who both by the benefit of
fortune, and by the condition of my manners, hoped to be among the last,
should happen to be one of the first assailed by this storm; instructing
myself betimes to constrain my life, and fit it for a new state.  The
true liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself:

          “Potentissimus est, qui se habet in potestate.”

     [“He is most potent who is master of himself.”--Seneca, Ep., 94.]

In an ordinary and quiet time, a man prepares himself for moderate and
common accidents; but in the confusion wherein we have been for these
thirty years, every Frenchman, whether personal or in general, sees
himself every hour upon the point of the total ruin and overthrow of his
fortune: by so much the more ought he to have his courage supplied with
the strongest and most vigorous provisions.  Let us thank fortune, that
has not made us live in an effeminate, idle, and languishing age; some
who could never have been so by other means will be made famous by their
misfortunes.  As I seldom read in histories the confusions of other
states without regret that I was not present, the better to consider
them, so does my curiosity make me in some sort please myself in seeing
with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its form and
symptoms; and since I cannot hinder it, I am content to have been
destined to be present therein, and thereby to instruct myself.  So do
we eagerly covet to see, though but in shadow and the fables of theatres,
the pomp of tragic representations of human fortune; ‘tis not without
compassion at what we hear, but we please ourselves in rousing our
displeasure, by the rarity of these pitiable events.  Nothing tickles
that does not pinch.  And good historians skip over, as stagnant water
and dead sea, calm narrations, to return to seditions, to wars, to which
they know that we invite them.

I question whether I can decently confess with how small a sacrifice of
its repose and tranquillity I have passed over above the one half of my
life amid the ruin of my country.  I lend myself my patience somewhat too
cheap, in accidents that do not privately assail me; and do not so much
regard what they take from me, as what remains safe, both within and
without.  There is comfort in evading, one while this, another while
that, of the evils that are levelled at ourselves too, at last, but at
present hurt others only about us; as also, that in matters of public
interest, the more universally my affection is dispersed, the weaker it
is: to which may be added, that it is half true:

               “Tantum ex publicis malis sentimus,
               quantum ad privatas res pertinet;”

     [“We are only so far sensible of public evils as they respect our
     private affairs.”--Livy, xxx. 44.]

and that the health from which we fell was so ill, that itself relieves
the regret we should have for it.  It was health, but only in comparison
with the sickness that has succeeded it: we are not fallen from any great
height; the corruption and brigandage which are in dignity and office
seem to me the least supportable: we are less injuriously rifled in a
wood than in a place of security.  It was an universal juncture of
particular members, each corrupted by emulation of the others, and most
of them with old ulcers, that neither received nor required any cure.
This convulsion, therefore, really more animated than pressed me, by the
assistance of my conscience, which was not only at peace within itself,
but elevated, and I did not find any reason to complain of myself.  Also,
as God never sends evils, any more than goods, absolutely pure to men,
my health continued at that time more than usually good; and, as I can
do nothing without it, there are few things that I cannot do with it.
It afforded me means to rouse up all my faculties, and to lay my hand
before the wound that would else, peradventure, have gone farther; and I
experienced, in my patience, that I had some stand against fortune, and
that it must be a great shock could throw me out of the saddle.  I do not
say this to provoke her to give me a more vigorous charge: I am her
humble servant, and submit to her pleasure: let her be content, in God’s
name.  Am I sensible of her assaults?  Yes, I am. But, as those who are
possessed and oppressed with sorrow sometimes suffer themselves,
nevertheless, by intervals to taste a little pleasure, and are sometimes
surprised with a smile, so have I so much power over myself, as to make
my ordinary condition quiet and free from disturbing thoughts; yet I
suffer myself, withal, by fits to be surprised with the stings of those
unpleasing imaginations that assault me, whilst I am arming myself to
drive them away, or at least to wrestle with them.

But behold another aggravation of the evil which befell me in the tail of
the rest: both without doors and within I was assailed with a most
violent plague, violent in comparison of all others; for as sound bodies
are subject to more grievous maladies, forasmuch as they, are not to be
forced but by such, so my very healthful air, where no contagion, however
near, in the memory of man, ever took footing, coming to be corrupted,
produced strange effects:

         “Mista senum et juvenum densentur funera; nullum
          Saeva caput Proserpina fugit;”

     [“Old and young die in mixed heaps.  Cruel Proserpine forbears
     none.”--Horace, Od., i. 28, 19.]

I had to suffer this pleasant condition, that the sight of my house, was
frightful to me; whatever I had there was without guard, and left to the
mercy of any one who wished to take it.  I myself, who am so hospitable,
was in very great distress for a retreat for my family; a distracted
family, frightful both to its friends and itself, and filling every place
with horror where it attempted to settle, having to shift its abode so
soon as any one’s finger began but to ache; all diseases are then
concluded to be the plague, and people do not stay to examine whether
they are so or no.  And the mischief on’t is that, according to the rules
of art, in every danger that a man comes near, he must undergo a
quarantine in fear of the evil, your imagination all the while tormenting
you at pleasure, and turning even your health itself into a fever.  Yet
all this would have much less affected me had I not withal been compelled
to be sensible of the sufferings of others, and miserably to serve six
months together for a guide to this caravan; for I carry my own antidotes
within myself, which are resolution and patience.  Apprehension, which is
particularly feared in this disease, does not much trouble me; and, if
being alone, I should have been taken, it had been a less cheerless and
more remote departure; ‘tis a kind of death that I do not think of the
worst sort; ‘tis commonly short, stupid, without pain, and consoled by
the public condition; without ceremony, without mourning, without a
crowd.  But as to the people about us, the hundredth part of them could
not be saved:

              “Videas desertaque regna
               Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes.”

     [“You would see shepherds’ haunts deserted, and far and wide empty
     pastures.”--Virgil, Georg., iii. 476.]

In this place my largest revenue is manual: what an hundred men ploughed
for me, lay a long time fallow.

But then, what example of resolution did we not see in the simplicity of
all this people?  Generally, every one renounced all care of life; the
grapes, the principal wealth of the country, remained untouched upon the
vines; every man indifferently prepared for and expected death, either
to-night or to-morrow, with a countenance and voice so far from fear,
as if they had come to terms with this necessity, and that it was an
universal and inevitable sentence.  ‘Tis always such; but how slender
hold has the resolution of dying?  The distance and difference of a few
hours, the sole consideration of company, renders its apprehension
various to us.  Observe these people; by reason that they die in the same
month, children, young people, and old, they are no longer astonished at
it; they no longer lament.  I saw some who were afraid of staying behind,
as in a dreadful solitude; and I did not commonly observe any other
solicitude amongst them than that of sepulture; they were troubled to see
the dead bodies scattered about the fields, at the mercy of the wild
beasts that presently flocked thither.  How differing are the fancies of
men; the Neorites, a nation subjected by Alexander, threw the bodies of
their dead into the deepest and less frequented part of their woods, on
purpose to have them there eaten; the only sepulture reputed happy
amongst them.  Some, who were yet in health, dug their own graves; others
laid themselves down in them whilst alive; and a labourer of mine, in
dying, with his hands and feet pulled the earth upon him.  Was not this
to nestle and settle himself to sleep at greater ease?  A bravery in some
sort like that of the Roman soldiers who, after the battle of Cannae,
were found with their heads thrust into holes in the earth, which they
had made, and in suffocating themselves, with their own hands pulled the
earth about their ears.  In short, a whole province was, by the common
usage, at once brought to a course nothing inferior in undauntedness to
the most studied and premeditated resolution.

Most of the instructions of science to encourage us herein have in them
more of show than of force, and more of ornament than of effect.  We have
abandoned Nature, and will teach her what to do; teach her who so happily
and so securely conducted us; and in the meantime, from the footsteps of
her instruction, and that little which, by the benefit of ignorance,
remains of her image imprinted in the life of this rustic rout of
unpolished men, science is constrained every day to borrow patterns for
her disciples of constancy, tranquillity, and innocence.  It is pretty to
see that these persons, full of so much fine knowledge, have to imitate
this foolish simplicity, and this in the primary actions of virtue; and
that our wisdom must learn even from beasts the most profitable
instructions in the greatest and most necessary concerns of our life;
as, how we are to live and die, manage our property, love and bring up
our children, maintain justice: a singular testimony of human infirmity;
and that this reason we so handle at our pleasure, finding evermore some
diversity and novelty, leaves in us no apparent trace of nature.  Men
have done with nature as perfumers with oils; they have sophisticated her
with so many argumentations and far-fetched discourses, that she is
become variable and particular to each, and has lost her proper,
constant, and universal face; so that we must seek testimony from beasts,
not subject to favour, corruption, or diversity of opinions.  It is,
indeed, true that even these themselves do not always go exactly in the
path of nature, but wherein they swerve, it is so little that you may
always see the track; as horses that are led make many bounds and
curvets, but ‘tis always at the length of the halter, and still follow
him that leads them; and as a young hawk takes its flight, but still
under the restraint of its tether:

          “Exsilia, torments, bells, morbos, naufragia meditare .  .  .
          ut nullo sis malo tiro.”

     [“To meditate upon banishments, tortures, wars, diseases, and
     shipwrecks, that thou mayest not be a novice in any disaster.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 91, 107.]

What good will this curiosity do us, to anticipate all the inconveniences
of human nature, and to prepare ourselves with so much trouble against
things which, peradventure, will never befall us?

          “Parem passis tristitiam facit, pati posse;”

          [“It troubles men as much that they may possibly suffer,
          as if they really did suffer.”--Idem, ibid., 74.]

not only the blow, but the wind of the blow strikes us: or, like
phrenetic people--for certainly it is a phrensy--to go immediately and
whip yourself, because it may so fall out that Fortune may one day make
you undergo it; and to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you
will stand in need of it at Christmas!  Throw yourselves, say they, into
the experience of all the evils, the most extreme evils that can possibly
befall you, and so be assured of them.  On the contrary, the most easy
and most natural way would be to banish even the thoughts of them; they
will not come soon enough; their true being will not continue with us
long enough; our mind must lengthen and extend them; we must incorporate
them in us beforehand, and there entertain them, as if they would not
otherwise sufficiently press upon our senses.  “We shall find them heavy
enough when they come,” says one of our masters, of none of the tender
sects, but of the most severe; “in the meantime, favour thyself; believe
what pleases thee best; what good will it do thee to anticipate thy ill
fortune, to lose the present for fear of the future: and to make thyself
miserable now, because thou art to be so in time?”  These are his words.
Science, indeed, does us one good office in instructing us exactly as to
the dimensions of evils,

                    “Curis acuens mortalia corda!”

     [“Probing mortal hearts with cares.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 23.]

‘Twere pity that any part of their greatness should escape our sense and
knowledge.

‘Tis certain that for the most part the preparation for death has
administered more torment than the thing itself.  It was of old truly
said, and by a very judicious author:

          “Minus afficit sensus fatigatio, quam cogitatio.”

     [“Suffering itself less afflicts the senses than the apprehension
     of suffering.”--Quintilian, Inst. Orat., i. 12.]

The sentiment of present death sometimes, of itself, animates us with a
prompt resolution not to avoid a thing that is utterly inevitable: many
gladiators have been seen in the olden time, who, after having fought
timorously and ill, have courageously entertained death, offering their
throats to the enemies’ sword and bidding them despatch.  The sight of
future death requires a courage that is slow, and consequently hard to be
got.  If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at
the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you: she will exactly do that
business for you; take you no care--

              “Incertam frustra, mortales, funeris horam,
               Quaeritis et qua sit mors aditura via....
               Poena minor certam subito perferre ruinam;
               Quod timeas, gravius sustinuisse diu.”

     [“Mortals, in vain you seek to know the uncertain hour of death,
     and by what channel it will come upon you.”--Propertius, ii. 27, 1.
     “‘Tis less painful to undergo sudden destruction; ‘tis hard to bear
     that which you long fear.”--Incert. Auct.]

We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life: the
one torments, the other frights us.  It is not against death that we
prepare, that is too momentary a thing; a quarter of an hour’s suffering,
without consequence and without damage, does not deserve especial
precepts: to say the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations
of death.  Philosophy ordains that we should always have death before our
eyes, to see and consider it before the time, and then gives us rules and
precautions to provide that this foresight and thought do us no harm;
just so do physicians, who throw us into diseases, to the end they may
have whereon to employ their drugs and their art.  If we have not known
how to live, ‘tis injustice to teach us how to die, and make the end
difform from all the rest; if we have known how to live firmly and
quietly, we shall know how to die so too.  They may boast as much as they
please:

          “Tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est;”

     [“The whole life of philosophers is the meditation of death.”
      --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 30.]

but I fancy that, though it be the end, it is not the aim of life; ‘tis
its end, its extremity, but not, nevertheless, its object; it ought
itself to be its own aim and design; its true study is to order, govern,
and suffer itself.  In the number of several other offices, that the
general and principal chapter of Knowing how to live comprehends, is this
article of Knowing how to die; and, did not our fears give it weight,
one of the lightest too.

To judge of them by utility and by the naked truth, the lessons of
simplicity are not much inferior to those which learning teaches us: nay,
quite the contrary.  Men differ in sentiment and force; we must lead them
to their own good according to their capacities and by various ways:

          “Quo me comque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.”

     [“Wherever the season takes me,(where the tempest drives me)
     there I am carried as a guest.”--Horace, Ep., i. i, 15.]

I never saw any peasant among my neighbours cogitate with what
countenance and assurance he should pass over his last hour; nature
teaches him not to think of death till he is dying; and then he does it
with a better grace than Aristotle, upon whom death presses with a double
weight, both of itself and from so long a premeditation; and, therefore,
it was the opinion of Caesar, that the least premeditated death was the
easiest and the most happy:

     “Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet, quam necesse est.”

     [“He grieves more than is necessary, who grieves before it is
     necessary.”--Seneca, Ep., 98.]

The sharpness of this imagination springs from our curiosity: ‘tis thus
we ever impede ourselves, desiring to anticipate and regulate natural
prescripts.  It is only for the doctors to dine worse for it, when in the
best health, and to frown at the image of death; the common sort stand in
need of no remedy or consolation, but just in the shock, and when the
blow comes; and consider on’t no more than just what they endure.  Is it
not then, as we say, that the stolidity and want of apprehension in the
vulgar give them that patience m present evils, and that profound
carelessness of future sinister accidents?  That their souls, in being
more gross and dull, are less penetrable and not so easily moved?  If it
be so, let us henceforth, in God’s name, teach nothing but ignorance;
‘tis the utmost fruit the sciences promise us, to which this stolidity so
gently leads its disciples.

We have no want of good masters, interpreters of natural simplicity.
Socrates shall be one; for, as I remember, he speaks something to this
purpose to the judges who sat upon his life and death.

     [That which follows is taken from the Apology of Socrates in Plato,
     chap.  17, &c.]

“I am afraid, my masters, that if I entreat you not to put me to death, I
shall confirm the charge of my accusers, which is, that I pretend to be
wiser than others, as having some more secret knowledge of things that
are above and below us.  I have neither frequented nor known death, nor
have ever seen any person that has tried its qualities, from whom to
inform myself.  Such as fear it, presuppose they know it; as for my part,
I neither know what it is, nor what they do in the other world.  Death
is, peradventure, an indifferent thing; peradventure, a thing to be
desired.  ‘Tis nevertheless to be believed, if it be a transmigration
from one place to another, that it is a bettering of one’s condition to
go and live with so many great persons deceased, and to be exempt from
having any more to do with unjust and corrupt judges; if it be an
annihilation of our being, ‘tis yet a bettering of one’s condition to
enter into a long and peaceable night; we find nothing more sweet in life
than quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams.  The things that
I know to be evil, as to injure one’s neighbour and to disobey one’s
superior, whether it be God or man, I carefully avoid; such as I do not
know whether they be good or evil, I cannot fear them.  If I am to die
and leave you alive, the gods alone only know whether it will go better
with you or with me.  Wherefore, as to what concerns me, you may do as
you shall think fit.  But according to my method of advising just and
profitable things, I say that you will do your consciences more right to
set me at liberty, unless you see further into my cause than I do; and,
judging according to my past actions, both public and private, according
to my intentions, and according to the profit that so many of our
citizens, both young and old, daily extract from my conversation, and the
fruit that you all reap from me, you cannot more duly acquit yourselves
towards my merit than in ordering that, my poverty considered, I should
be maintained at the Prytanaeum, at the public expense, a thing that I
have often known you, with less reason, grant to others.  Do not impute
it to obstinacy or disdain that I do not, according to the custom,
supplicate and go about to move you to commiseration.  I have both
friends and kindred, not being, as Homer says, begotten of wood or of
stone, no more than others, who might well present themselves before you
with tears and mourning, and I have three desolate children with whom to
move you to compassion; but I should do a shame to our city at the age I
am, and in the reputation of wisdom which is now charged against me, to
appear in such an abject form.  What would men say of the other
Athenians?  I have always admonished those who have frequented my
lectures, not to redeem their lives by an unbecoming action; and in the
wars of my country, at Amphipolis, Potidea, Delia, and other expeditions
where I have been, I have effectually manifested how far I was from
securing my safety by my shame.  I should, moreover, compromise your
duty, and should invite you to unbecoming things; for ‘tis not for my
prayers to persuade you, but for the pure and solid reasons of justice.
You have sworn to the gods to keep yourselves upright; and it would seem
as if I suspected you, or would recriminate upon you that I do not
believe that you are so; and I should testify against myself, not to
believe them as I ought, mistrusting their conduct, and not purely
committing my affair into their hands.  I wholly rely upon them; and hold
myself assured they will do in this what shall be most fit both for you
and for me: good men, whether living or dead, have no reason to fear the
gods.”

Is not this an innocent child’s pleading of an unimaginable loftiness,
true, frank, and just, unexampled?--and in what a necessity employed!
Truly, he had very good reason to prefer it before that which the great
orator Lysias had penned for him: admirably couched, indeed, in the
judiciary style, but unworthy of so noble a criminal.  Had a suppliant
voice been heard out of the mouth of Socrates, that lofty virtue had
struck sail in the height of its glory; and ought his rich and powerful
nature to have committed her defence to art, and, in her highest proof,
have renounced truth and simplicity, the ornaments of his speaking, to
adorn and deck herself with the embellishments of figures and the
flourishes of a premeditated speech?  He did very wisely, and like
himself, not to corrupt the tenor of an incorrupt life, and so sacred an
image of the human form, to spin out his decrepitude another year, and to
betray the immortal memory of that glorious end.  He owed his life not to
himself, but to the example of the world; had it not been a public
damage, that he should have concluded it after a lazy and obscure manner?
Assuredly, that careless and indifferent consideration of his death
deserved that posterity should consider it so much the more, as indeed
they did; and there is nothing so just in justice than that which fortune
ordained for his recommendation; for the Athenians abominated all those
who had been causers of his death to such a degree, that they avoided
them as excommunicated persons, and looked upon everything as polluted
that had been touched by them; no one would wash with them in the public
baths, none would salute or own acquaintance with them: so that, at last,
unable longer to support this public hatred, they hanged themselves.

If any one shall think that, amongst so many other examples that I had to
choose out of in the sayings of Socrates for my present purpose, I have
made an ill choice of this, and shall judge this discourse of his
elevated above common conceptions, I must tell them that I have properly
selected it; for I am of another opinion, and hold it to be a discourse,
in rank and simplicity, much below and behind common conceptions.  He
represents, in an inartificial boldness and infantine security, the pure
and first impression and ignorance of nature; for it is to be believed
that we have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death, by reason of
itself; ‘tis a part of our being, and no less essential than living.

To what end should nature have begotten in us a hatred to it and a horror
of it, considering that it is of so great utility to her in maintaining
the succession and vicissitude of her works? and that in this universal
republic, it conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss or
ruin?

                  “Sic rerum summa novatur.”

               “Mille animas una necata dedit.”

“The failing of one life is the passage to a thousand other lives.”

Nature has imprinted in beasts the care of themselves and of their
conservation; they proceed so far as hitting or hurting to be timorous of
being worse, of themselves, of our haltering and beating them, accidents
subject to their sense and experience; but that we should kill them, they
cannot fear, nor have they the faculty to imagine and conclude such a
thing as death; it is said, indeed, that we see them not only cheerfully
undergo it, horses for the most part neighing and swans singing when they
die, but, moreover, seek it at need, of which elephants have given many
examples.

Besides, the method of arguing, of which Socrates here makes use, is it
not equally admirable both in simplicity and vehemence?  Truly it is much
more easy to speak like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to speak
and live as Socrates did; there lies the extreme degree of perfection and
difficulty; art cannot reach it.  Now, our faculties are not so trained
up; we do not try, we do not know them; we invest ourselves with those of
others, and let our own lie idle; as some one may say of me, that I have
here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of
my own but the thread to tie them.

Certainly I have so far yielded to public opinion, that those borrowed
ornaments accompany me; but I do not mean that they shall cover me and
hide me; that is quite contrary to my design, who desire to make a show
of nothing but what is my own, and what is my own by nature; and had I
taken my own advice, I had at all hazards spoken purely alone, I more and
more load myself every day,

     [In fact, the first edition of the Essays (Bordeaux, 1580) has very
     few quotations.  These became more numerous in the edition of 1588;
     but the multitude of classical texts which at times encumber
     Montaigne’s text, only dates from the posthumous edition of 1595, he
     had made these collections in the four last years of his life, as an
     amusement of his “idleness.”--Le Clerc.  They grow, however, more
     sparing in the Third Book.]

beyond my purpose and first method, upon the account of idleness and the
humour of the age.  If it misbecome me, as I believe it does, ‘tis no
matter; it may be of use to some others.  Such there are who quote Plato
and Homer, who never saw either of them; and I also have taken things out
of places far enough distant from their source.  Without pains and
without learning, having a thousand volumes about me in the place where I
write, I can presently borrow, if I please, from a dozen such
scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith
to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy; there needs no more but a
preliminary epistle of a German to stuff me with quotations.  And so it
is we go in quest of a tickling story to cheat the foolish world.  These
lumber pies of commonplaces, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are
of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not
to direct us: a ridiculous fruit of learning, that Socrates so pleasantly
discusses against Euthydemus.  I have seen books made of things that were
never either studied or understood; the author committing to several of
his learned friends the examination of this and t’other matter to compile
it, contenting himself, for his share, with having projected the design,
and by his industry to have tied together this faggot of unknown
provisions; the ink and paper, at least, are his.  This is to buy or
borrow a book, and not to make one; ‘tis to show men not that he can make
a book, but that, whereof they may be in doubt, he cannot make one.
A president, where I was, boasted that he had amassed together two
hundred and odd commonplaces in one of his judgments; in telling which,
he deprived himself of the glory he had got by it: in my opinion, a
pusillanimous and absurd vanity for such a subject and such a person.
I do the contrary; and amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can
steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service; at the hazard
of having it said that ‘tis for want of understanding its natural use;
I give it some particular touch of my own hand, to the end it may not be
so absolutely foreign.  These set their thefts in show and value
themselves upon them, and so have more credit with the laws than I have:
we naturalists I think that there is a great and incomparable preference
in the honour of invention over that of allegation.

If I would have spoken by learning, I had spoken sooner; I had written of
the time nearer to my studies, when I had more wit and better memory, and
should sooner have trusted to the vigour of that age than of this, would
I have made a business of writing.  And what if this gracious favour
--[His acquaintance with Mademoiselle de Gournay.]--which Fortune has
lately offered me upon the account of this work, had befallen me in that
time of my life, instead of this, wherein ‘tis equally desirable to
possess, soon to be lost!  Two of my acquaintance, great men in this
faculty, have, in my opinion, lost half, in refusing to publish at forty
years old, that they might stay till threescore.  Maturity has its
defects as well as green years, and worse; and old age is as unfit for
this kind of business as any other.  He who commits his decrepitude to
the press plays the fool if he think to squeeze anything out thence that
does not relish of dreaming, dotage, and drivelling; the mind grows
costive and thick in growing old.  I deliver my ignorance in pomp and
state, and my learning meagrely and poorly; this accidentally and
accessorily, that principally and expressly; and write specifically of
nothing but nothing, nor of any science but of that inscience.  I have
chosen a time when my life, which I am to give an account of, lies wholly
before me; what remains has more to do with death; and of my death
itself, should I find it a prating death, as others do, I would willingly
give an account at my departure.

Socrates was a perfect exemplar in all great qualities, and I am vexed
that he had so deformed a face and body as is said, and so unsuitable to
the beauty of his soul, himself being so amorous and such an admirer of
beauty: Nature did him wrong.  There is nothing more probable than the
conformity and relation of the body to the soul:

     “Ipsi animi magni refert, quali in corpore locati sint: multo enim a
     corpore existunt, qux acuant mentem: multa qua obtundant;”

     [“It is of great consequence in what bodies minds are placed, for
     many things spring from the body that may sharpen the mind, and many
     that may blunt it.”--Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., i. 33.]

this refers to an unnatural ugliness and deformity of limbs; but we call
ugliness also an unseemliness at first sight, which is principally lodged
in the face, and disgusts us on very slight grounds: by the complexion, a
spot, a rugged countenance, for some reasons often wholly inexplicable,
in members nevertheless of good symmetry and perfect.  The deformity,
that clothed a very beautiful soul in La Boetie, was of this predicament:
that superficial ugliness, which nevertheless is always the most
imperious, is of least prejudice to the state of the mind, and of little
certainty in the opinion of men.  The other, which is never properly
called deformity, being more substantial, strikes deeper in.  Not every
shoe of smooth shining leather, but every shoe well-made, shews the shape
of the foot within.  As Socrates said of his, it betrayed equal ugliness
in his soul, had he not corrected it by education; but in saying so, I
hold he was in jest, as his custom was; never so excellent a soul formed
itself.

I cannot often enough repeat how great an esteem I have for beauty, that
potent and advantageous quality; he (La Boetie) called it “a short
tyranny,” and Plato, “the privilege of nature.”  We have nothing that
excels it in reputation; it has the first place in the commerce of men;
it presents itself in the front; seduces and prepossesses our judgments
with great authority and wonderful impression.  Phryne had lost her cause
in the hands of an excellent advocate, if, opening her robe, she had not
corrupted her judges by the lustre of her beauty.  And I find that Cyrus,
Alexander, and Caesar, the three masters of the world, never neglected
beauty in their greatest affairs; no more did the first Scipio.  The same
word in Greek signifies both fair and good; and the Holy Word often says
good when it means fair: I should willingly maintain the priority in good
things, according to the song that Plato calls an idle thing, taken out
of some ancient poet: “health, beauty, riches.”  Aristotle says that the
right of command appertains to the beautiful; and that, when there is a
person whose beauty comes near the images of the gods, veneration is
equally due to him.  To him who asked why people oftener and longer
frequent the company of handsome persons: “That question,” said he, “is
only to be asked by the blind.”  Most of the philosophers, and the
greatest, paid for their schooling, and acquired wisdom by the favour and
mediation of their beauty.  Not only in the men that serve me, but also
in the beasts, I consider it within two fingers’ breadth of goodness.

And yet I fancy that those features and moulds of face, and those
lineaments, by which men guess at our internal complexions and our
fortunes to come, is a thing that does not very directly and simply lie
under the chapter of beauty and deformity, no more than every good odour
and serenity of air promises health, nor all fog and stink infection in a
time of pestilence.  Such as accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty
by their manners, do not always hit right; for, in a face which is none
of the best, there may dwell some air of probity and trust; as, on the
contrary, I have read, betwixt two beautiful eyes, menaces of a dangerous
and malignant nature.  There are favourable physiognomies, so that in a
crowd of victorious enemies, you shall presently choose, amongst men you
never saw before, one rather than another to whom to surrender, and with
whom to intrust your life; and yet not properly upon the consideration of
beauty.

A person’s look is but a feeble warranty; and yet it is something
considerable too; and if I had to lash them, I would most severely
scourge the wicked ones who belie and betray the promises that nature has
planted in their foreheads; I should with greater severity punish malice
under a mild and gentle aspect.  It seems as if there were some lucky and
some unlucky faces; and I believe there is some art in distinguishing
affable from merely simple faces, severe from rugged, malicious from
pensive, scornful from melancholic, and such other bordering qualities.
There are beauties which are not only haughty, but sour, and others that
are not only gentle, but more than that, insipid; to prognosticate from
them future events is a matter that I shall leave undecided.

I have, as I have said elsewhere as to my own concern, simply and
implicitly embraced this ancient rule, “That we cannot fail in following
Nature,” and that the sovereign precept is to conform ourselves to her.
I have not, as Socrates did, corrected my natural composition by the
force of reason, and have not in the least disturbed my inclination by
art; I have let myself go as I came: I contend not; my two principal
parts live, of their own accord, in peace and good intelligence, but my
nurse’s milk, thank God, was tolerably wholesome and good.  Shall I say
this by the way, that I see in greater esteem than ‘tis worth, and in use
solely among ourselves, a certain image of scholastic probity, a slave to
precepts, and fettered with hope and fear?  I would have it such as that
laws and religions should not make, but perfect and authorise it; that
finds it has wherewithal to support itself without help, born and rooted
in us from the seed of universal reason, imprinted in every man by
nature.  That reason which strengthens Socrates from his vicious bend
renders him obedient to the gods and men of authority in his city:
courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal, but because he is
mortal.  ‘Tis a doctrine ruinous to all government, and much more hurtful
than ingenious and subtle, which persuades the people that a religious
belief is alone sufficient, and without conduct, to satisfy the divine
justice.  Use demonstrates to us a vast distinction betwixt devotion and
conscience.

I have a favourable aspect, both in form and in interpretation:

               “Quid dixi, habere me? imo habui, Chreme.”

          [“What did I say?  that I have?  no, Chremes, I had.”
           --Terence, Heaut., act i., sec. 2, v. 42.]

               “Heu!  tantum attriti corporis ossa vides;”

          [“Alas! of a worn body thou seest only the bones”]

and that makes a quite contrary show to that of Socrates.  It has often
befallen me, that upon the mere credit of my presence and air, persons
who had no manner of knowledge of me have put a very great confidence in
me, whether in their own affairs or mine; and I have in foreign parts
thence obtained singular and rare favours.  But the two following
examples are, peradventure, worth particular relation.  A certain person
planned to surprise my house and me in it; his scheme was to come to my
gates alone, and to be importunate to be let in.  I knew him by name,
and had fair reason to repose confidence in him, as being my neighbour
and something related to me.  I caused the gates to be opened to him,
as I do to every one.  There I found him, with every appearance of alarm,
his horse panting and very tired.  He entertained me with this story:
“That, about half a league off, he had met with a certain enemy of his,
whom I also knew, and had heard of their quarrel; that his enemy had
given him a very brisk chase, and that having been surprised in disorder,
and his party being too weak, he had fled to my gates for refuge;
and that he was in great trouble for his followers, whom (he said) he
concluded to be all either dead or taken.”  I innocently did my best to
comfort, assure, and refresh him.  Shortly after came four or five of his
soldiers, who presented themselves in the same countenance and affright,
to get in too; and after them more, and still more, very well mounted and
armed, to the number of five-and-twenty or thirty, pretending that they
had the enemy at their heels.  This mystery began a little to awaken my
suspicion; I was not ignorant what an age I lived in, how much my house
might be envied, and I had several examples of others of my acquaintance
to whom a mishap of this sort had happened.  But thinking there was
nothing to be got by having begun to do a courtesy, unless I went through
with it, and that I could not disengage myself from them without spoiling
all, I let myself go the most natural and simple way, as I always do, and
invited them all to come in. And in truth I am naturally very little
inclined to suspicion and distrust; I willingly incline towards excuse
and the gentlest interpretation; I take men according to the common
order, and do not more believe in those perverse and unnatural
inclinations, unless convinced by manifest evidence, than I do in
monsters and miracles; and I am, moreover, a man who willingly commit
myself to Fortune, and throw myself headlong into her arms; and I have
hitherto found more reason to applaud than to blame myself for so doing,
having ever found her more discreet about, and a greater friend to, my
affairs than I am myself.  There are some actions in my life whereof the
conduct may justly be called difficult, or, if you please, prudent; of
these, supposing the third part to have been my own, doubtless the other
two-thirds were absolutely hers.  We make, methinks, a mistake in that we
do not enough trust Heaven with our affairs, and pretend to more from our
own conduct than appertains to us; and therefore it is that our designs
so often miscarry. Heaven is jealous of the extent that we attribute to
the right of human prudence above its own, and cuts it all the shorter by
how much the more we amplify it.  The last comers remained on horseback
in my courtyard, whilst their leader, who was with me in the parlour,
would not have his horse put up in the stable, saying he should
immediately retire, so soon as he had news of his men.  He saw himself
master of his enterprise, and nothing now remained but its execution.
He has since several times said (for he was not ashamed to tell the story
himself) that my countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out
of his hands.  He again mounted his horse; his followers, who had their
eyes intent upon him, to see when he would give the signal, being very
much astonished to find him come away and leave his prey behind him.

Another time, relying upon some truce just published in the army, I took
a journey through a very ticklish country.  I had not ridden far, but I
was discovered, and two or three parties of horse, from various places,
were sent out to seize me; one of them overtook me on the third day, and
I was attacked by fifteen or twenty gentlemen in vizors, followed at a
distance by a band of foot-soldiers.  I was taken, withdrawn into the
thick of a neighbouring forest, dismounted, robbed, my trunks rifled, my
money-box taken, and my horses and equipage divided amongst new masters.
We had, in this copse, a very long contest about my ransom, which they
set so high, that it was manifest that I was not known to them.  They
were, moreover, in a very great debate about my life; and, in truth,
there were various circumstances that clearly showed the danger I was in:

          “Tunc animis opus, AEnea, tunc pectore firmo.”

     [“Then, AEneas, there is need of courage, of a firm heart.”
      --AEneid, vi. 261.]

I still insisted upon the truce, too willing they should have the gain of
what they had already taken from me, which was not to be despised,
without promise of any other ransom.  After two or three hours that we
had been in this place, and that they had mounted me upon a horse that
was not likely to run from them, and committed me to the guard of fifteen
or twenty harquebusiers, and dispersed my servants to others, having
given order that they should carry us away prisoners several ways, and I
being already got some two or three musket-shots from the place,

          “Jam prece Pollucis, jam Castoris, implorata,”

          [“By a prayer addressed now to Pollux, now to Castor.”
           --Catullus, lxvi. 65.]

behold a sudden and unexpected alteration; I saw the chief return to me
with gentler language, making search amongst the troopers for my
scattered property, and causing as much as could be recovered to be
restored to me, even to my money-box; but the best present they made was
my liberty, for the rest did not much concern me at that time.  The true
cause of so sudden a change, and of this reconsideration, without any
apparent impulse, and of so miraculous a repentance, in such a time, in a
planned and deliberate enterprise, and become just by usage (for, at the
first dash, I plainly confessed to them of what party I was, and whither
I was going), truly, I do not yet rightly understand.  The most prominent
amongst them, who pulled off his vizor and told me his name, repeatedly
told me at the time, over and over again, that I owed my deliverance to
my countenance, and the liberty and boldness of my speech, that rendered
me unworthy of such a misadventure, and should secure me from its
repetition.  ‘Tis possible that the Divine goodness willed to make use of
this vain instrument for my preservation; and it, moreover, defended me
the next day from other and worse ambushes, of which these my assailants
had given me warning.  The last of these two gentlemen is yet living
himself to tell the story; the first was killed not long ago.

If my face did not answer for me, if men did not read in my eyes and in
my voice the innocence of intention, I had not lived so long without
quarrels and without giving offence, seeing the indiscreet whatever comes
into my head, and to judge so rashly of things.  This way may, with
reason, appear uncivil, and ill adapted to our way of conversation; but
I have never met with any who judged it outrageous or malicious, or that
took offence at my liberty, if he had it from my own mouth; words
repeated have another kind of sound and sense.  Nor do I hate any person;
and I am so slow to offend, that I cannot do it, even upon the account of
reason itself; and when occasion has required me to sentence criminals,
I have rather chosen to fail in point of justice than to do it:

               “Ut magis peccari nolim, quam satis animi
               ad vindicanda peccata habeam.”

     [“So that I had rather men should not commit faults than that I
     should have sufficient courage to condemn them.”---Livy, xxxix. 21.]

Aristotle, ‘tis said, was reproached for having been too merciful to a
wicked man: “I was indeed,” said he, “merciful to the man, but not to his
wickedness.”  Ordinary judgments exasperate themselves to punishment by
the horror of the fact: but it cools mine; the horror of the first murder
makes me fear a second; and the deformity of the first cruelty makes me
abhor all imitation of it.’ That may be applied to me, who am but a
Squire of Clubs, which was said of Charillus, king of Sparta: “He cannot
be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked.”  Or thus--for
Plutarch delivers it both these ways, as he does a thousand other things,
variously and contradictorily--“He must needs be good, because he is so
even to the wicked.”  Even as in lawful actions I dislike to employ
myself when for such as are displeased at it; so, to say the truth, in
unlawful things I do not make conscience enough of employing myself when
it is for such as are willing.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may
     A person’s look is but a feeble warranty
     Accept all things we are not able to refute
     Admiration is the foundation of all philosophy
     Advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right
     All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice
     Apt to promise something less than what I am able to do
     As if anything were so common as ignorance
     Authority of the number and antiquity of the witnesses
     Best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd
     Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise
     Books of things that were never either studied or understood
     Condemn the opposite affirmation equally
     Courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal--Socrates
     Death conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss
     Decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter”
      Deformity of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation
     Enters lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it
     Establish this proposition by authority and huffing
     Extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question
     Fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand
     Fortune heaped up five or six such-like incidents
     Hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions
     Haste trips up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself
     He cannot be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked
     He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course
     “How many things,” said he, “I do not desire!”
      How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out
     I am a little tenderly distrustful of things that I wish
     I am no longer in condition for any great change
     I am not to be cuffed into belief
     I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable
     I do not judge opinions by years
     I ever justly feared to raise my head too high
     I would as willingly be lucky as wise
     If I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it
     If they hear no noise, they think men sleep
     Impose them upon me as infallible
     Inconveniences that moderation brings (in civil war)
     Lend himself to others, and only give himself to himself
     Let not us seek illusions from without and unknown
     “Little learning is needed to form a sound mind.”--Seneca
     Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation
     Men are not always to rely upon the personal confessions
     Merciful to the man, but not to his wickedness--Aristotle
     Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me
     My humour is no friend to tumult
     Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own
     Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred
     Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding
     Number of fools so much exceeds the wise
     Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust
     Others adore all of their own side
     Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law
     Prepare ourselves against the preparations of death
     Profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit
     Quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams
     Reasons often anticipate the effect
     Refusin  to justify, excuse, or explain myself
     Remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest
     Restoring what has been lent us, wit  usury and accession
     Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow
     Right of command appertains to the beautiful-Aristotle
     Rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact
     Suffer my judgment to be made captive by prepossession
     Swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking
     Taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance
     The last informed is better persuaded than the first
     The mind grows costive and thick in growing old
     The particular error first makes the public error
     Their souls seek repose in agitation
     They gently name them, so they patiently endure them (diseases)
     Those oppressed with sorrow sometimes surprised by a smile
     Threats of the day of judgment
     Tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance--Augustine
     Tis no matter; it may be of use to some others
     To forbear doing is often as generous as to do
     To kill men, a clear and strong light is required
     Too contemptible to be punished
     True liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself
     Vast distinction betwixt devotion and conscience
     We have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death
     What did I say?  that I have?  no, Chremes, I had
     Who discern no riches but in pomp and show
     Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it
     Would have every one in his party blind or a blockhead
     Wrong the just side when they go about to assist it with fraud
     Yet at least for ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition






ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 19.

XIII.  Of Experience.



CHAPTER XIII

OF EXPERIENCE

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.  We try all ways
that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ
experience,

              “Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,
               Exemplo monstrante viam,”

     [“By various trials experience created art, example shewing the
     way.”--Manilius, i. 59.]

which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing
that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.
Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience
has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events
is unsure, by reason they are always unlike.  There is no quality so
universal in this image of things as diversity and variety.  Both the
Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude,
employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at
Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well
that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell
which had laid it.

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive
at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully
polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not
distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another.  Resemblance
does not so much make one as difference makes another.  Nature has
obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the
multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for them
their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and
latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but
fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling
us to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find
the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than
to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in
commentary than in invention.  We see how much he was mistaken, for we
have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and
more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds of
Epicurus:

          “Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus.”

     [“As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by
     laws.”--Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]

and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our judges
that there never was so full a liberty or so full a license.  What have
our legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particular
cases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws?  This number
holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human
actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the
variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will
still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that,
in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall
so tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with
it that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will
require a diverse judgment.  There is little relation betwixt our
actions, which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws;
the most to be desired are those that are the most rare, the most simple
and general; and I am even of opinion that we had better have none at all
than to have them in so prodigious a number as we have.

Nature always gives them better and happier than those we make ourselves;
witness the picture of the Golden Age of the Poets and the state wherein
we see nations live who have no other.  Some there are, who for their
only judge take the first passer-by that travels along their mountains,
to determine their cause; and others who, on their market day, choose out
some one amongst them upon the spot to decide their controversies.  What
danger would there be that the wisest amongst us should so determine
ours, according to occurrences and at sight, without obligation of
example and consequence?  For every foot its own shoe.  King Ferdinand,
sending colonies to the Indies, wisely provided that they should not
carry along with them any students of jurisprudence, for fear lest suits
should get footing in that new world, as being a science in its own
nature, breeder of altercation and division; judging with Plato, “that
lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country.”

Whence does it come to pass that our common language, so easy for all
other uses, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts?
and that he who so clearly expresses himself in whatever else he speaks
or writes, cannot find in these any way of declaring himself that does
not fall into doubt and contradiction? if it be not that the princes of
that art, applying themselves with a peculiar attention to cull out
portentous words and to contrive artificial sentences, have so weighed
every syllable, and so thoroughly sifted every sort of quirking
connection that they are now confounded and entangled in the infinity of
figures and minute divisions, and can no more fall within any rule or
prescription, nor any certain intelligence:

          “Confusum est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est.”

     [“Whatever is beaten into powder is undistinguishable (confused).”
      --Seneca, Ep., 89.]

As you see children trying to bring a mass of quicksilver to a certain
number of parts, the more they press and work it and endeavour to reduce
it to their own will, the more they irritate the liberty of this generous
metal; it evades their endeavour and sprinkles itself into so many
separate bodies as frustrate all reckoning; so is it here, for in
subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doubts; they
put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties, and
lengthen and disperse them.  In sowing and retailing questions they make
the world fructify and increase in uncertainties and disputes, as the
earth is made fertile by being crumbled and dug deep.

                    “Difficultatem facit doctrina.”

               [“Learning (Doctrine) begets difficulty.”
                --Quintilian, Insat. Orat., x. 3.]

We doubted of Ulpian, and are still now more perplexed with Bartolus and
Baldus.  We should efface the trace of this innumerable diversity of
opinions; not adorn ourselves with it, and fill posterity with crotchets.
I know not what to say to it; but experience makes it manifest, that so
many interpretations dissipate truth and break it.  Aristotle wrote to be
understood; if he could not do this, much less will another that is not
so good at it; and a third than he, who expressed his own thoughts.  We
open the matter, and spill it in pouring out: of one subject we make a
thousand, and in multiplying and subdividing them, fall again into the
infinity of atoms of Epicurus.  Never did two men make the same judgment
of the same thing; and ‘tis impossible to find two opinions exactly
alike, not only in several men, but in the same man, at diverse hours.
I often find matter of doubt in things of which the commentary has
disdained to take notice; I am most apt to stumble in an even country,
like some horses that I have known, that make most trips in the smoothest
way.

Who will not say that glosses augment doubts and ignorance, since there’s
no book to be found, either human or divine, which the world busies
itself about, whereof the difficulties are cleared by interpretation.
The hundredth commentator passes it on to the next, still more knotty and
perplexed than he found it.  When were we ever agreed amongst ourselves:
“This book has enough; there is now no more to be said about it”?  This
is most apparent in the law; we give the authority of law to infinite
doctors, infinite decrees, and as many interpretations; yet do we find
any end of the need of interpretating?  is there, for all that, any
progress or advancement towards peace, or do we stand in need of any
fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was yet in
its first infancy?  On the contrary, we darken and bury intelligence; we
can no longer discover it, but at the mercy of so many fences and
barriers.  Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does
nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and
perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;
“Mus in pice.”--[“A mouse in a pitch barrel.”]--It thinks it discovers
at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary
truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and
new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with
the motion: not much unlike AEsop’s dogs, that seeing something like a
dead body floating in the sea, and not being able to approach it, set to
work to drink the water and lay the passage dry, and so choked
themselves.  To which what one Crates’ said of the writings of Heraclitus
falls pat enough, “that they required a reader who could swim well,” so
that the depth and weight of his learning might not overwhelm and stifle
him.  ‘Tis nothing but particular weakness that makes us content with
what others or ourselves have found out in this chase after knowledge:
one of better understanding will not rest so content; there is always
room for one to follow, nay, even for ourselves; and another road; there
is no end of our inquisitions; our end is in the other world.  ‘Tis a
sign either that the mind has grown shortsighted when it is satisfied, or
that it has got weary.  No generous mind can stop in itself; it will
still tend further and beyond its power; it has sallies beyond its
effects; if it do not advance and press forward, and retire, and rush and
wheel about, ‘tis but half alive; its pursuits are without bound or
method; its aliment is admiration, the chase, ambiguity, which Apollo
sufficiently declared in always speaking to us in a double, obscure, and
oblique sense: not feeding, but amusing and puzzling us.  ‘Tis an
irregular and perpetual motion, without model and without aim; its
inventions heat, pursue, and interproduce one another:

Estienne de la Boetie; thus translated by Cotton:

         “So in a running stream one wave we see
          After another roll incessantly,
          And as they glide, each does successively
          Pursue the other, each the other fly
          By this that’s evermore pushed on, and this
          By that continually preceded is:
          The water still does into water swill,
          Still the same brook, but different water still.”

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things,
and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but
comment upon one another.  Every place swarms with commentaries; of
authors there is great scarcity.  Is it not the principal and most
reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned?  Is it not
the common and final end of all studies?  Our opinions are grafted upon
one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the
third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it
comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than
merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but
one.

How often, and, peradventure, how foolishly, have I extended my book to
make it speak of itself; foolishly, if for no other reason but this, that
it should remind me of what I say of others who do the same: that the
frequent amorous glances they cast upon their work witness that their
hearts pant with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity
wherewith they scourge them are but the dandlings and caressings of
maternal love; as Aristotle, whose valuing and undervaluing himself often
spring from the same air of arrogance.  My own excuse is, that I ought in
this to have more liberty than others, forasmuch as I write specifically
of myself and of my writings, as I do of my other actions; that my theme
turns upon itself; but I know not whether others will accept this excuse.

I observed in Germany that Luther has left as many divisions and disputes
about the doubt of his opinions, and more, than he himself raised upon
the Holy Scriptures.  Our contest is verbal: I ask what nature is, what
pleasure, circle, and substitution are?  the question is about words, and
is answered accordingly.  A stone is a body; but if a man should further
urge: “And what is a body?”--“Substance”; “And what is substance?”  and
so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his Calepin.

     [Calepin (Ambrogio da Calepio), a famous lexicographer of the
     fifteenth century.  His Polyglot Dictionary became so famous, that
     Calepin became a common appellation for a lexicon]

We exchange one word for another, and often for one less understood.
I better know what man is than I know what Animal is, or Mortal, or
Rational.  To satisfy one doubt, they give me three; ‘tis the Hydra’s
head.  Socrates asked Menon, “What virtue was.”  “There is,” says Menon,
“the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private
person, of an old man and of a child.”  “Very fine,” cried Socrates,
“we were in quest of one virtue, and thou hast  brought us a whole
swarm.”  We put one question, and they return us a whole hive.  As no
event, no face, entirely resembles another, so do they not entirely
differ: an ingenious mixture of nature.  If our faces were not alike, we
could not distinguish man from beast; if they were not unlike, we could
not distinguish one man from another; all things hold by some similitude;
every example halts, and the relation which is drawn from experience is
always faulty and imperfect.  Comparisons are ever-coupled at one end or
other: so do the laws serve, and are fitted to every one of our affairs,
by some wrested, biassed, and forced interpretation.

Since the ethic laws, that concern the particular duty of every one in
himself, are so hard to be framed, as we see they are, ‘tis no wonder if
those which govern so many particulars are much more so.  Do but consider
the form of this justice that governs us; ‘tis a true testimony of human
weakness, so full is it of error and contradiction.  What we find to be
favour and severity in justice--and we find so much of them both, that I
know not whether the medium is as often met with are sickly and unjust
members of the very body and essence of justice.  Some country people
have just brought me news in great haste, that they presently left in a
forest of mine a man with a hundred wounds upon him, who was yet
breathing, and begged of them water for pity’s sake, and help to carry
him to some place of relief; they tell me they durst not go near him, but
have run away, lest the officers of justice should catch them there; and
as happens to those who are found near a murdered person, they should be
called in question about this accident, to their utter ruin, having
neither money nor friends to defend their innocence.  What could I have
said to these people?  ‘Tis certain that this office of humanity would
have brought them into trouble.

How many innocent people have we known that have been punished, and this
without the judge’s fault; and how many that have not arrived at our
knowledge?  This happened in my time: certain men were condemned to die
for a murder committed; their sentence, if not pronounced, at least
determined and concluded on.  The judges, just in the nick, are informed
by the officers of an inferior court hard by, that they have some men in
custody, who have directly confessed the murder, and made an indubitable
discovery of all the particulars of the fact.  Yet it was gravely
deliberated whether or not they ought to suspend the execution of the
sentence already passed upon the first accused: they considered the
novelty of the example judicially, and the consequence of reversing
judgments; that the sentence was passed, and the judges deprived of
repentance; and in the result, these poor devils were sacrificed by the
forms of justice.  Philip, or some other,  provided against a like
inconvenience after this manner.  He had condemned a man in a great fine
towards another by an absolute judgment.  The truth some time after being
discovered, he found that he had passed an unjust sentence.  On one side
was the reason of the cause; on the other side, the reason of the
judicial forms: he in some sort satisfied both, leaving the sentence in
the state it was, and out of his own purse recompensing the condemned
party.  But he had to do with a reparable affair; my men were irreparably
hanged.  How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
themselves?

All which makes me remember the ancient opinions, “That ‘tis of necessity
a man must do wrong by retail who will do right in gross; and injustice
in little things, who would come to do justice in great: that human
justice is formed after the model of physic, according to which, all that
is useful is also just and honest: and of what is held by the Stoics,
that Nature herself proceeds contrary to justice in most of her works:
and of what is received by the Cyrenaics, that there is nothing just of
itself, but that customs and laws make justice: and what the Theodorians
held that theft, sacrilege, and all sorts of uncleanness, are just in a
sage, if he knows them to be profitable to him.”  There is no remedy: I
am in the same case that Alcibiades was, that I will never, if I can help
it, put myself into the hands of a man who may determine as to my head,
where my life and honour shall more depend upon the skill and diligence
of my attorney than on my own innocence.  I would venture myself with
such justice as would take notice of my good deeds, as well as my ill;
where I had as much to hope as to fear: indemnity is not sufficient pay
to a man who does better than not to do amiss.  Our justice presents to
us but one hand, and that the left hand, too; let him be who he may, he
shall be sure to come off with loss.

In China, of which kingdom the government and arts, without commerce with
or knowledge of ours, surpass our examples in several excellent features,
and of which the history teaches me how much greater and more various the
world is than either the ancients or we have been able to penetrate, the
officers deputed by the prince to visit the state of his provinces, as
they punish those who behave themselves ill in their charge, so do they
liberally reward those who have conducted themselves better than the
common sort, and beyond the necessity of their duty; these there present
themselves, not only to be approved but to get; not simply to be paid,
but to have a present made to them.

No judge, thank God, has ever yet spoken to me in the quality of a judge,
upon any account whatever, whether my own or that of a third party,
whether criminal or civil; nor no prison has ever received me, not even
to walk there.  Imagination renders the very outside of a jail
displeasing to me; I am so enamoured of liberty, that should I be
interdicted the access to some corner of the Indies, I should live a
little less at my ease; and whilst I can find earth or air open
elsewhere, I shall never lurk in any place where I must hide myself.
My God!  how ill should I endure the condition wherein I see so many
people, nailed to a corner of the kingdom, deprived of the right to enter
the principal cities and courts, and the liberty of the public roads,
for having quarrelled with our laws.  If those under which I live should
shake a finger at me by way of menace, I would immediately go seek out
others, let them be where they would.  All my little prudence in the
civil wars wherein we are now engaged is employed that they may not
hinder my liberty of going and coming.

Now, the laws keep up their credit, not for being just, but because they
are laws; ‘tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no
other, and it well answers their purpose.  They are often made by fools,
still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but
always by men, vain and irresolute authors.  There is nothing so much,
nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws.  Whoever obeys
them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought.  Our
French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, lend, in some sort, a
helping hand to the disorder and corruption that all manifest in their
dispensation and execution: the command is so perplexed and inconstant,
that it in some sort excuses alike disobedience and defect in the
interpretation, the administration and the observation of it.  What fruit
then soever we may extract from experience, that will little advantage
our institution, which we draw from foreign examples, if we make so
little profit of that we have of our own, which is more familiar to us,
and, doubtless, sufficient to instruct us in that whereof we have need.
I study myself more than any other subject; ‘tis my metaphysic, my
physic:

              “Quis deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum:
               Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit: unde coactis
               Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit
               Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet
               Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua;
               Sit ventura dies mundi quae subruat arces....”


     [“What god may govern with skill this dwelling of the world?  whence
     rises the monthly moon, whither wanes she?  how is it that her horns
     are contracted and reopen?  whence do winds prevail on the main?
     what does the east wind court with its blasts?  and whence are the
     clouds perpetually supplied with water?  is a day to come which may
     undermine the world?”--Propertius, iii. 5, 26.]

               “Quaerite, quos agitat mundi labor.”

     [“Ask whom the cares of the world trouble”--Lucan, i. 417.]

In this universality, I suffer myself to be ignorantly and negligently
led by the general law of the world: I shall know it well enough when I
feel it; my learning cannot make it alter its course; it will not change
itself for me; ‘tis folly to hope it, and a greater folly to concern
one’s self about it, seeing it is necessarily alike public and common.
The goodness and capacity of the governor ought absolutely to discharge
us of all care of the government: philosophical inquisitions and
contemplations serve for no other use but to increase our curiosity.
The philosophers; with great reason, send us back to the rules of nature;
but they have nothing to do with so sublime a knowledge; they falsify
them, and present us her face painted with too high and too adulterate a
complexion, whence spring so many different pictures of so uniform a
subject.  As she has given us feet to walk with, so has she given us
prudence to guide us in life: not so ingenious, robust, and pompous a
prudence as that of their invention; but yet one that is easy, quiet, and
salutary, and that very well performs what the other promises, in him who
has the good luck to know how to employ it sincerely and regularly, that
is to say, according to nature.  The most simply to commit one’s self to
nature is to do it most wisely.  Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome
pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered
head!

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero.  Of the
experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but
a good scholar: whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger,
and to what a degree that fever transported him, will see the deformity
of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceive a more just hatred
against it; whoever will remember the ills he has undergone, those that
have threatened him, and the light occasions that have removed him from
one state to another, will by that prepare himself for future changes,
and the knowledge of his condition.  The life of Caesar has no greater
example for us than our own: though popular and of command, ‘tis still a
life subject to all human accidents.  Let us but listen to it; we apply
to ourselves all whereof we have principal need; whoever shall call to
memory how many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment,
is he not a great fool if he does not ever after suspect it?  When I find
myself convinced, by the reason of another, of a false opinion, I do not
so much learn what he has said to me that is new and the particular
ignorance--that would be no great acquisition--as, in general, I learn my
own debility and the treachery of my understanding, whence I extract the
reformation of the whole mass.  In all my other errors I do the same, and
find from this rule great utility to life; I regard not the species and
individual as a stone that I have stumbled at; I learn to suspect my
steps throughout, and am careful to place them right.  To learn that a
man has said or done a foolish thing is nothing: a man must learn that he
is nothing but a fool, a much more ample, and important instruction.  The
false steps that my memory has so often made, even then when it was most
secure and confident of itself, are not idly thrown away; it vainly
swears and assures me I shake my ears; the first opposition that is made
to its testimony puts me into suspense, and I durst not rely upon it in
anything of moment, nor warrant it in another person’s concerns: and were
it not that what I do for want of memory, others do more often for want
of good faith, I should always, in matter of fact, rather choose to take
the truth from another’s mouth than from my own.  If every one would pry
into the effects and circumstances of the passions that sway him, as I
have done into those which I am most subject to, he would see them
coming, and would a little break their impetuosity and career; they do
not always seize us on a sudden; there is threatening and degrees

              “Fluctus uti primo coepit cum albescere vento,
               Paulatim sese tollit mare, et altius undas
               Erigit, inde imo consurgit ad aethera fundo.”

     [“As with the first wind the sea begins to foam, and swells, thence
     higher swells, and higher raises the waves, till the ocean rises
     from its depths to the sky.”--AEneid, vii. 528.]

Judgment holds in me a magisterial seat; at least it carefully endeavours
to make it so: it leaves my appetites to take their own course, hatred
and friendship, nay, even that I bear to myself, without change or
corruption; if it cannot reform the other parts according to its own
model, at least it suffers not itself to be corrupted by them, but plays
its game apart.

The advice to every one, “to know themselves,” should be of important
effect, since that god of wisdom and light’ caused it to be written on
the front of his temple,--[At Delphi]--as comprehending all he had to
advise us.  Plato says also, that prudence is no other thing than the
execution of this ordinance; and Socrates minutely verifies it in
Xenophon.  The difficulties and obscurity are not discerned in any
science but by those who are got into it; for a certain degree of
intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not, and we
must push against a door to know whether it be bolted against us or no:
whence this Platonic subtlety springs, that “neither they who know are to
enquire, forasmuch as they know; nor they who do not know, forasmuch as
to inquire they must know what they inquire of.”  So in this, “of knowing
a man’s self,” that every man is seen so resolved and satisfied with
himself, that every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent,
signifies that every one knows nothing about the matter; as Socrates
gives Euthydemus to understand.  I, who profess nothing else, therein
find so infinite a depth and variety, that all the fruit I have reaped
from my learning serves only to make me sensible how much I have to
learn.  To my weakness, so often confessed, I owe the propension I have
to modesty, to the obedience of belief prescribed me, to a constant
coldness and moderation of opinions, and a hatred of that troublesome and
wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself, the capital
enemy of discipline and truth.  Do but hear them domineer; the first
fopperies they utter, ‘tis in the style wherewith men establish religions
and laws:

          “Nihil est turpius, quam cognitioni et perceptions
          assertionem approbationemque praecurrere.”

     [“Nothing is worse than that assertion and decision should precede
     knowledge and perception.”--Cicero, Acad., i. 13.]

Aristarchus said that anciently there were scarce seven sages to be found
in the world, and in his time scarce so many fools: have not we more
reason than he to say so in this age of ours?  Affirmation and obstinacy
are express signs of want of wit.  This fellow may have knocked his nose
against the ground a hundred times in a day, yet he will be at his Ergo’s
as resolute and sturdy as before.  You would say he had had some new soul
and vigour of understanding infused into him since, and that it happened
to him, as to that ancient son of the earth, who took fresh courage and
vigour by his fall;

                      “Cui cum tetigere parentem,
            jam defecta vigent renovata robore membra:”

     [“Whose broken limbs, when they touched his mother earth,
     immediately new force acquired.”--Lucan, iv. 599.]

does not this incorrigible coxcomb think that he assumes a new
understanding by undertaking a new dispute?  ‘Tis by my own experience
that I accuse human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the surest part
of the world’s school.  Such as will not conclude it in themselves, by so
vain an example as mine, or their own, let them believe it from Socrates,
the master of masters; for the philosopher Antisthenes said to his
disciples, “Let us go and hear Socrates; there I will be a pupil with you”;
and, maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, “that virtue was
sufficient to make a life completely happy, having no need of any other
thing whatever”; except of the force of Socrates, added he.

That long attention that I employ in considering myself, also fits rile
to judge tolerably enough of others; and there are few things whereof I
speak better and with better excuse.  I happen very often more exactly to
see and distinguish the qualities of my friends than they do themselves:
I have astonished some with the pertinence of my description, and have
given them warning of themselves.  By having from my infancy been
accustomed to contemplate my own life in those of others, I have acquired
a complexion studious in that particular; and when I am once interit upon
it, I let few things about me, whether countenances, humours,
or discourses, that serve to that purpose, escape me.  I study all,
both what I am to avoid and what I am to follow.  Also in my friends,
I discover by their productions their inward inclinations; not by
arranging this infinite variety of so diverse and unconnected actions
into certain species and chapters, and distinctly distributing my parcels
and divisions under known heads and classes;

          “Sed neque quam multae species, nec nomina quae sint,
          Est numerus.”

     [“But neither can we enumerate how many kinds there what are their
     names.”--Virgil, Georg., ii. 103.]

The wise speak and deliver their fancies more specifically, and piece by
piece; I, who see no further into things than as use informs me, present
mine generally without rule and experimentally: I pronounce my opinion by
disjointed articles, as a thing that cannot be spoken at once and in
gross; relation and conformity are not to be found in such low and common
souls as ours.  Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every
piece keeps its place and bears its mark:

               “Sola sapientia in se tota conversa est.”

     [“Wisdom only is wholly within itself”--Cicero, De Fin., iii. 7.]

I leave it to artists, and I know not whether or no they will be able to
bring it about, in so perplexed, minute, and fortuitous a thing, to
marshal into distinct bodies this infinite diversity of faces, to settle
our inconstancy, and set it in order.  I do not only find it hard to
piece our actions to one another, but I moreover find it hard properly to
design each by itself by any principal quality, so ambiguous and variform
they are with diverse lights.  That which is remarked for rare in
Perseus, king of Macedon, “that his mind, fixing itself to no one
condition, wandered in all sorts of living, and represented manners so
wild and erratic that it was neither known to himself or any other what
kind of man he was,” seems almost to fit all the world; and, especially,
I have seen another of his make, to whom I think this conclusion might
more properly be applied; no moderate settledness, still running headlong
from one extreme to another, upon occasions not to be guessed at; no line
of path without traverse and wonderful contrariety: no one quality simple
and unmixed; so that the best guess men can one day make will be, that he
affected and studied to make himself known by being not to be known.  A
man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as
there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who
hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship;
for ‘tis to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for
our own good.  I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are
more than his good ones: Plato requires three things in him who will
examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, boldness.

I was sometimes asked, what I should have thought myself fit for, had any
one designed to make use of me, while I was of suitable years:

         “Dum melior vires sanguis dabat, aemula necdum
          Temporibus geminis canebat sparsa senectus:”

     [“Whilst better blood gave me vigour, and before envious old age
     whitened and thinned my temples.”--AEneid, V. 415.]

“for nothing,” said I; and I willingly excuse myself from knowing
anything which enslaves me to others.  But I had told the truth to my
master,--[Was this Henri VI.?  D.W.]--and had regulated his manners, if
he had so pleased, not in gross, by scholastic lessons, which I
understand not, and from which I see no true reformation spring in those
that do; but by observing them by leisure, at all opportunities, and
simply and naturally judging them as an eye-witness, distinctly one by
one; giving him to understand upon what terms he was in the common
opinion, in opposition to his flatterers.  There is none of us who would
not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with
that sort of canaille.  How, if Alexander, that great king and
philosopher, cannot defend himself from them!

I should have had fidelity, judgment, and freedom enough for that
purpose.  It would be a nameless office, otherwise it would lose its
grace and its effect; and ‘tis a part that is not indifferently fit for
all men; for truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
and indiscriminately; its use, noble as it is, has its circumspections
and limits.  It often falls out, as the world goes, that a man lets it
slip into the ear of a prince, not only to no purpose, but moreover
injuriously and unjustly; and no man shall make me believe that a
virtuous remonstrance may not be viciously applied, and that the interest
of the substance is not often to give way to that of the form.

For such a purpose, I would  have a man who is content with his own
fortune:

               “Quod sit, esse velit, nihilque malit,”

          [“Who is pleased with what he is and desires nothing further.”
           --Martial, x. ii, 18.]

and of moderate station; forasmuch as, on the one hand, he would not be
afraid to touch his master’s heart to the quick, for fear by that means
of losing his preferment: and, on the other hand, being of no high
quality, he would have more easy communication with all sorts of people.
I would have this office limited to only one person; for to allow the
privilege of his liberty and privacy to many, would beget an inconvenient
irreverence; and of that one, I would above all things require the
fidelity of silence.

A king is not to be believed when he brags of his constancy in standing
the shock of the enemy for his glory, if for his profit and amendment he
cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice, which has no other power
but to pinch his ear, the remainder of its effect being still in his own
hands.  Now, there is no condition of men whatever who stand in so great
need of true and free advice and warning, as they do: they sustain a
public life, and have to satisfy the opinion of so many spectators, that,
as those about them conceal from them whatever should divert them from
their own way, they insensibly find themselves involved in the hatred and
detestation of their people, often upon occasions which they might have
avoided without any prejudice even of their pleasures themselves, had
they been advised and set right in time.  Their favourites commonly have
more regard to themselves than to their master; and indeed it answers
with them, forasmuch as, in truth, most offices of real friendship, when
applied to the sovereign, are under a rude and dangerous hazard, so that
therein there is great need, not only of very great affection and
freedom, but of courage too.

In fine, all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a
register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness,
is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain; but as to
bodily health, no man can furnish out more profitable experience than I,
who present it pure, and no way corrupted and changed by art or opinion.
Experience is properly upon its own dunghill in the subject of physic,
where reason wholly gives it place: Tiberius said that whoever had lived
twenty years ought to be responsible to himself for all things that were
hurtful or wholesome to him, and know how to order himself without
physic;

     [All that Suetonius says in his Life of Tiberius is that this
     emperor, after he was thirty years old, governed his health without
     the aid of physicians; and what Plutarch tells us, in his essay on
     the Rules and Precepts of Health, is that Tiberius said that the man
     who, having attained sixty years, held out his pulse to a physician
     was a fool.]

and he might have learned it of Socrates, who, advising his disciples to
be solicitous of their health as a chief study, added that it was hard if
a man of sense, having a care to his exercise and diet, did not better
know than any physician what was good or ill for him.  And physic itself
professes always to have experience for the test of its operations: so
Plato had reason to say that, to be a right physician, it would be
necessary that he who would become such, should first himself have passed
through all the diseases he pretends to cure, and through all the
accidents and circumstances whereof he is to judge.  ‘Tis but reason they
should get the pox, if they will know how to cure it; for my part,
I should put myself into such hands; the others but guide us, like him
who paints seas and rocks and ports sitting at table, and there makes the
model of a ship sailing in all security; but put him to the work itself,
he knows not at which end to begin.  They make such a description of our
maladies as a town crier does of a lost horse or dog--such a color, such
a height, such an ear--but bring it to him and he knows it not, for all
that.  If physic should one day give me some good and visible relief,
then truly I will cry out in good earnest:

               “Tandem effcaci do manus scientiae.”

     [“Show me and efficacious science, and I will take it by the hand.”
      --Horace, xvii. I.]

The arts that promise to keep our bodies and souls in health promise a
great deal; but, withal, there are none that less keep their promise.
And, in our time, those who make profession of these arts amongst us,
less manifest the effects than any other sort of men; one may say of
them, at the most, that they sell medicinal drugs; but that they are
physicians, a man cannot say.

     [The edition of 1588 adds: “Judging by themselves, and those
     who are ruled by them.”]

I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that
has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster,
I have made the experiment.  Here are some of the articles, as my memory
shall supply me with them; I have no custom that has not varied according
to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best
acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of
me.

My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the
same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both
conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or
less, according to my strength and appetite.  My health is to maintain my
wonted state without disturbance.  I see that sickness puts me off it on
one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off
on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way.
I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the
use of things to which I have been so long accustomed.  ‘Tis for custom
to give a form to a man’s life, such as it pleases him; she is all in all
in that: ‘tis the potion of Circe, that varies our nature as she best
pleases.  How many nations, and but three steps from us, think the fear
of the night-dew, that so manifestly is hurtful to us, a ridiculous
fancy; and our own watermen and peasants laugh at it.  You make a German
sick if you lay him upon a mattress, as you do an Italian if you lay him
on a feather-bed, and a Frenchman, if without curtains or fire. A Spanish
stomach cannot hold out to eat as we can, nor ours to drink like the
Swiss.  A German made me very merry at Augsburg, by finding fault with
our hearths, by the same arguments which we commonly make use of in
decrying their stoves: for, to say the truth, the smothered heat, and
then the smell of that heated matter of which the fire is composed, very
much offend such as are not used to them; not me; and, indeed, the heat
being always equal, constant, and universal, without flame, without
smoke, and without the wind that comes down our chimneys, they may many
ways sustain comparison with ours.  Why do we not imitate the Roman
architecture? for they say that anciently fires were not made in the
houses, but on the outside, and at the foot of them, whence the heat was
conveyed to the whole fabric by pipes contrived in the wall, which were
drawn twining about the rooms that were to be warmed: which I have seen
plainly described somewhere in Seneca.  This German hearing me commend
the conveniences and beauties of his city, which truly deserves it, began
to compassionate me that I had to leave it; and the first inconvenience
he alleged to me was, the heaviness of head that the chimneys elsewhere
would bring upon me.  He had heard some one make this complaint, and
fixed it upon us, being by custom deprived of the means of perceiving it
at home.  All heat that comes from the fire weakens and dulls me.  Evenus
said that fire was the best condiment of life: I rather choose any other
way of making myself warm.

We are afraid to drink our wines, when toward the bottom of the cask; in
Portugal those fumes are reputed delicious, and it is the beverage of
princes.  In short, every nation has many customs and usages that are not
only unknown to other nations, but savage and miraculous in their sight.
What should we do with those people who admit of no evidence that is not
in print, who believe not men if they are not in a book, nor truth if it
be not of competent age? we dignify our fopperies when we commit them to
the press: ‘tis of a great deal more weight to say, “I have read such a
thing,” than if you only say, “I have heard such a thing.”  But I, who no
more disbelieve a man’s mouth than his pen, and who know that men write
as indiscreetly as they speak, and who look upon this age as one that is
past, as soon quote a friend as Aulus Gelliusor Macrobius; and what I
have seen, as what they have written.  And, as ‘tis held of virtue, that
it is not greater for having continued longer, so do I hold of truth,
that for being older it is none the wiser.  I often say, that it is mere
folly that makes us run after foreign and scholastic examples; their
fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato.
But is it not that we seek more honour from the quotation, than from the
truth of the matter in hand?  As if it were more to the purpose to borrow
our proofs from the shops of Vascosan or Plantin, than from what is to be
seen in our own village; or else, indeed, that we have not the wit to
cull out and make useful what we see before us, and to judge of it
clearly enough to draw it into example: for if we say that we want
authority to give faith to our testimony, we speak from the purpose;
forasmuch as, in my opinion, of the most ordinary, common, and known
things, could we but find out their light, the greatest miracles of
nature might be formed, and the most wonderful examples, especially upon
the subject of human actions.

Now, upon this subject, setting aside the examples I have gathered from
books, and what Aristotle says of Andron the Argian, that he travelled
over the arid sands of Lybia without drinking: a gentleman, who has very
well behaved himself in several employments, said, in a place where I
was, that he had ridden from Madrid to Lisbon, in the heat of summer,
without any drink at all.  He is very healthful and vigorous for his age,
and has nothing extraordinary in the use of his life, but this, to live
sometimes two or three months, nay, a whole year, as he has told me,
without drinking.  He is sometimes thirsty, but he lets it pass over,
and he holds that it is an appetite which easily goes off of itself;
and he drinks more out of caprice than either for need or pleasure.

Here is another example: ‘tis not long ago that I found one of the
learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune,
studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with
tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence.  He
told me, and Seneca almost says the same of himself,  he made an
advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much
the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation,
and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself.
Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the
rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed
himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of
his studies.  Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he
could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, “Why,” said he, “as
those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing
water.”  I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily
discomposed; when ‘tis bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly
murders it.

Seneca in his youth having warmly espoused the example of Sextius, of
eating nothing that had died, for a whole year dispensed with such food,
and, as he said, with pleasure, and discontinued it that he might not be
suspected of taking up this rule from some new religion by which it was
prescribed: he adopted, in like manner, from the precepts of Attalus a
custom not to lie upon any sort of bedding that gave way under his
weight, and, even to his old age, made use of such as would not yield to
any pressure.  What the usage of his time made him account roughness,
that of ours makes us look upon as effeminacy.

Do but observe the difference betwixt the way of living of my labourers
and my own; the Scythians and Indians have nothing more remote both from
my capacity and my form.  I have picked up charity  boys to serve me: who
soon after have quitted both my kitchen and livery, only that they might
return to their former course of life; and I found one afterwards,
picking mussels out of the sewer for his dinner, whom I could neither by
entreaties nor threats reclaim from the sweetness he found in indigence.
Beggars have their magnificences and delights, as well as the rich, and,
‘tis said, their dignities and polities.  These are the effects of
custom; she can mould us, not only into what form she pleases (the sages
say we ought to apply ourselves to the best, which she will soon make
easy to us), but also to change and variation, which is the most noble
and most useful instruction of all she teaches us.  The best of my bodily
conditions is that I am flexible and not very obstinate: I have
inclinations more my own and ordinary, and more agreeable than others;
but I am diverted from them with very little ado, and easily slip into a
contrary course.  A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awaken his
vigour and to keep it from growing faint and rusty; and there is no
course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule
and discipline;

         “Ad primum lapidem vectari quum placet, hora
          Sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli
          Angulus, inspecta genesi, collyria quaerit;”

     [“When he is pleased to have himself carried to the first milestone,
     the hour is chosen from the almanac; if he but rub the corner of his
     eye, his horoscope having been examined, he seeks the aid of
     salves.”---Juvenal, vi. 576.]

he shall often throw himself even into excesses, if he will take my
advice; otherwise the least debauch will destroy him, and render him
troublesome and disagreeable in company.  The worst quality in a
well-bred man is over-fastidiousness, and an obligation to a certain
particular way; and it is particular, if not pliable and supple.  It is a
kind of reproach, not to be able, or not to dare, to do what we see those
about us do; let such as these stop at home.  It is in every man
unbecoming, but in a soldier vicious and intolerable: who, as Philopcemen
said, ought to accustom himself to every variety and inequality of life.

Though I have been brought up, as much as was possible, to liberty and
independence, yet so it is that, growing old, and having by indifference
more settled upon certain forms (my age is now past instruction, and has
henceforward nothing to do but to keep itself up as well as it can),
custom has already, ere I was aware, so imprinted its character in me in
certain things, that I look upon it as a kind of excess to leave them
off; and, without a force upon myself, cannot sleep in the daytime, nor
eat between meals, nor breakfast, nor go to bed, without a great interval
betwixt eating and sleeping,--[Gastroesophogeal Reflux. D.W.]--as of
three hours after supper; nor get children but before I sleep, nor get
them standing; nor endure my own sweat; nor quench my thirst either with
pure water or pure wine; nor keep my head long bare, nor cut my hair
after dinner; and I should be as uneasy without my gloves as without my
shirt, or without washing when I rise from table or out of my bed; and I
could not lie without a canopy and curtains, as if they were essential
things.  I could dine without a tablecloth, but without a clean napkin,
after the German fashion, very incommodiously; I foul them more than the
Germans or Italians do, and make but little use either of spoon or fork.
I complain that they did not keep up the fashion, begun after the example
of kings, to change our napkin at every service, as they do our plate.
We are told of that laborious soldier Marius that, growing old, he became
nice in his drink, and never drank but out of a particular cup of his own
I, in like manner, have suffered myself to fancy a certain form of
glasses, and not willingly to drink in common glasses, no more than from
a strange common hand: all metal offends me in comparison of a clear and
transparent matter: let my eyes taste, too, according to their capacity.
I owe several other such niceties to custom.  Nature has also, on the
other side, helped me to some of hers: as not to be able to endure more
than two full meals in one day, without overcharging my stomach, nor a
total abstinence from one of those meals without filling myself with
wind, drying up my mouth, and dulling my appetite; the finding great
inconvenience from overmuch evening air; for of late years, in night
marches, which often happen to be all night long, after five or six hours
my stomach begins to be queasy, with a violent pain in my head, so that I
always vomit before the day can break.  When the others go to breakfast,
I go to sleep; and when I rise, I am as brisk and gay as before.  I had
always been told that the night dew never rises but in the beginning of
the night; but for some years past, long and familiar intercourse with
a lord, possessed with the opinion that the night dew is more sharp and
dangerous about the declining of the sun, an hour or two before it sets,
which he carefully avoids, and despises that of the night, he almost
impressed upon me, not so much his reasoning as his experiences.  What,
shall mere doubt and inquiry strike our imagination, so as to change us?
Such as absolutely and on a sudden give way to these propensions, draw
total destruction upon themselves. I am sorry for several gentlemen who,
through the folly of their physicians, have in their youth and health
wholly shut themselves up: it were better to endure a cough, than, by
disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so
great utility.  Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant
hours of the day!  Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most
part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his
constitution, as Caesar did the falling sickness, by dint of contempt.
A man should addict himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to
them, except to such, if there be any such, where obligation and
servitude are of profit.

Both kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too; public lives are
bound to ceremony; mine, that is obscure and private, enjoys all natural
dispensation; soldier and Gascon are also qualities a little subject to
indiscretion; wherefore I shall say of this act of relieving nature, that
it is desirable to refer it to certain prescribed and nocturnal hours,
and compel one’s self to this by custom, as I have done; but not to
subject one’s self, as I have done in my declining years, to a particular
convenience of place and seat for that purpose, and make it troublesome
by long sitting; and yet, in the fouler offices, is it not in some
measure excusable to require more care and cleanliness?

          “Naturt homo mundum et elegans animal est.”

     [“Man is by nature a clean and delicate creature.”--Seneca, Ep., 92.]

Of all the actions of nature, I am the most impatient of being
interrupted in that.  I have seen many soldiers troubled with the
unruliness of their bellies; whereas mine and I never fail of our
punctual assignation, which is at leaping out of bed, if some
indispensable business or sickness does not molest us.

I think then, as I said before, that sick men cannot better place
themselves anywhere in more safety, than in sitting still in that course
of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it
will, distempers and puts one out.  Do you believe that chestnuts can
hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people?
We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change
that the healthful cannot endure.  Prescribe water to a Breton of
threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman
to walk: you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and
light:

              “An vivere tanti est?
               Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,
               Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus.  .
               Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer
               Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis.”

     [“Is life worth so much?  We are compelled to withhold the mind
     from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we
     cease to live .  .  .  .  Do I conceive that they still live, to
     whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are
     governed, is rendered oppressive?”
      --Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]

If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare
patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting
off the use of life.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the
appetites that pressed upon me.  I give great rein to my desires and
propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another; I hate
remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself.  To be
subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two
evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the
remedy on the other.  Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us
rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure.  The
world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is
not painful; it has great suspicion of facility.  My appetite, in various
things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the
health of my stomach.  Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me
when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently
followed.  Wine is hurtful to sick people, and ‘tis the first thing that
my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike.
Whatever I take against my liking does me harm; and nothing hurts me that
I eat with appetite and delight.  I never received harm by any action
that was very pleasant to me; and accordingly have made all medicinal
conclusions largely give way to my pleasure; and I have, when I was
young,

         “Quem circumcursans huc atque huc saepe Cupido
          Fulgebat crocink splendidus in tunic.”

     [“When Cupid, fluttering round me here and there, shone in his rich
     purple mantle.”--Catullus, lxvi. 133.]

given myself the rein as licentiously and inconsiderately to the desire
that was predominant in me, as any other whomsoever:

                    “Et militavi non sine gloria;”

          [“And I have played the soldier not ingloriously.”
           --Horace, Od., iii.  26, 2.]

yet more in continuation and holding out, than in sally:

               “Sex me vix memini sustinuisse vices.”

          [“I can scarcely remember six bouts in one night”
           --Ovid, Amor., iii. 7, 26.]

‘Tis certainly a misfortune and a miracle at once to confess at what a
tender age I first came under the subjection of love: it was, indeed, by
chance; for it was long before the years of choice or knowledge; I do not
remember myself so far back; and my fortune may well be coupled with that
of Quartilla, who could not remember when she was a maid:

         “Inde tragus, celeresque pili, mirandaque matri
          Barba meae.”

     [“Thence the odour of the arm-pits, the precocious hair, and the
     beard which astonished my mother.”--Martial, xi. 22, 7.]

Physicians modify their rules according to the violent longings that
happen to sick persons, ordinarily with good success; this great desire
cannot be imagined so strange and vicious, but that nature must have a
hand in it.  And then how easy a thing is it to satisfy the fancy?  In my
opinion; this part wholly carries it, at least, above all the rest.  The
most grievous and ordinary evils are those that fancy loads us with; this
Spanish saying pleases me in several aspects:

                  “Defenda me Dios de me.”

               [“God defend me from myself.”]

I am sorry when I am sick, that I have not some longing that might give
me the pleasure of satisfying it; all the rules of physic would hardly be
able to divert me from it.  I do the same when I am well; I can see very
little more to be hoped or wished for.  ‘Twere pity a man should be so
weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him.

The art of physic is not so fixed, that we need be without authority for
whatever we do; it changes according to climates and moons, according to
Fernel and to Scaliger.--[Physicians to Henry II.]--If your physician
does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such
and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that
shall not be of his opinion; the diversity of medical arguments and
opinions embraces all sorts and forms.  I saw a miserable sick person
panting and burning for thirst, that he might be cured, who was
afterwards laughed at for his pains by another physician, who condemned
that advice as prejudicial to him: had he not tormented himself to good
purpose?  There lately died of the stone a man of that profession, who
had made use of extreme abstinence to contend with his disease: his
fellow-physicians say that, on the contrary, this abstinence had dried
him up and baked the gravel in his kidneys.

I have observed, that both in wounds and sicknesses, speaking discomposes
and hurts me, as much as any irregularity I can commit.  My voice pains
and tires me, for ‘tis loud and forced; so that when I have gone to a
whisper some great persons about affairs of consequence, they have often
desired me to moderate my voice.

This story is worth a diversion.  Some one in a certain Greek school
speaking loud as I do, the master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak
softly: “Tell him, then, he must send me,” replied the other, “the tone
he would have me speak in.”  To which the other replied, “That he should
take the tone from the ears of him to whom he spake.”  It was well said,
if it is to be understood: “Speak according to the affair you are
speaking about to your auditor,” for if it mean, “‘tis sufficient that he
hear you, or govern yourself by him,” I do not find it to be reason.  The
tone and motion of my voice carries with it a great deal of the
expression and signification of my meaning, and ‘tis I who am to govern
it, to make myself understood: there is a voice to instruct, a voice to
flatter, and a voice to reprehend.  I will not only that my voice reach
him, but, peradventure, that it strike and pierce him.  When I rate my
valet with sharp and bitter language, it would be very pretty for him to
say; “Pray, master, speak lower; I hear you very well”:

               “Est quaedam vox ad auditum accommodata,
               non magnitudine, sed proprietate.”

     [“There is a certain voice accommodated to the hearing, not by its
     loudness, but by its propriety.”--Quintilian, xi. 3.]

Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter
ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with
tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according
as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke
itself.

Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by
impatience.  Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their
recovery.

The constitution of maladies is formed by the pattern of the constitution
of animals; they have their fortune and their days limited from their
birth; he who attempts imperiously to cut them short by force in the
middle of their course, lengthens and multiplies them, and incenses
instead of appeasing them.  I am of Crantor’s opinion, that we are
neither obstinately and deafly to oppose evils, nor succumb to them from
want of courage; but that we are naturally to give way to them, according
to their condition and our own.  We ought to grant free passage to
diseases; I find they stay less with me, who let them alone; and I have
lost some, reputed the most tenacious and obstinate, by their own decay,
without help and without art, and contrary to its rules.  Let us a little
permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs
than we.  But such an one died of it; and so shall you: if not of that
disease, of another.  And how many have not escaped dying, who have had
three physicians at their tails?  Example is a vague and universal
mirror, and of various reflections.  If it be a delicious medicine, take
it: ‘tis always so much present good.  I will never stick at the name nor
the colour, if it be pleasant and grateful to the palate: pleasure is one
of the chiefest kinds of profit.  I have suffered colds, gouty
defluxions, relaxations, palpitations of the heart, megrims, and other
accidents, to grow old and die in time a natural death.  I have so lost
them when I was half fit to keep them: they are sooner prevailed upon by
courtesy than huffing.  We must patiently suffer the laws of our
condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in
despite of all medicine.  ‘Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their
children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them: “Thou art
come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing.”
 ‘Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall
every one:

     “Indignare, si quid in to inique proprio constitutum est.”

     [“Then be angry, when there is anything unjustly decreed against
     thee alone.”--Seneca, Ep., 91.]

See an old man who begs of God that he will maintain his health vigorous
and entire; that is to say, that he restore him to youth:

          “Stulte, quid haec frustra votis puerilibus optas?”

          [“Fool!  why do you vainly form these puerile wishes?”
           --Ovid., Trist., 111. 8, II.]

is it not folly?  his condition is not capable of it.  The gout, the
stone, and indigestion are symptoms of long years; as heat, rains, and
winds are of long journeys.  Plato does not believe that AEsculapius
troubled himself to provide by regimen to prolong life in a weak and
wasted body, useless to his country and to his profession, or to beget
healthful and robust children; and does not think this care suitable to
the Divine justice and prudence, which is to direct all things to
utility.  My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you;
they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by
that means prolong your misery an hour or two:

              “Non secus instantem cupiens fulcire ruinam,
               Diversis contra nititur obiicibus;
               Donec certa dies, omni compage soluta,
               Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium.”

     [“Like one who, desiring to stay an impending ruin, places various
     props against it, till, in a short time, the house, the props, and
     all, giving way, fall together.”--Pseudo-Gallus, i. 171.]

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony
of the world, is composed of contrary things--of diverse tones, sweet and
harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only
affect some of these, what would he be able to do?  he must know how to
make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods
and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot
subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it
than the other.  To attempt to combat natural necessity, is to represent
the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to kick with his mule.--[Plutarch,
How to restrain Anger, c. 8.]

I consult little about the alterations I feel: for these doctors take
advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they surfeit your ears with
their prognostics; and formerly surprising me, weakened with sickness,
injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies--one
while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death.
Hereby I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my
place; and though my judgment was neither altered nor distracted, yet it
was at least disturbed: ‘tis always agitation and combat.

Now, I use my imagination as gently as I can, and would discharge it, if
I could, of all trouble and contest; a man must assist, flatter, and
deceive it, if he can; my mind is fit for that office; it needs no
appearances throughout: could it persuade as it preaches, it would
successfully relieve me.  Will you have an example?  It tells me: “that
‘tis for my good to have the stone: that the structure of my age must
naturally suffer some decay, and it is now time it should begin to
disjoin and to confess a breach; ‘tis a common necessity, and there is
nothing in it either miraculous or new; I therein pay what is due to old
age, and I cannot expect a better bargain; that society ought to comfort
me, being fallen into the most common infirmity of my age; I see
everywhere men tormented with the same disease, and am honoured by the
fellowship, forasmuch as men of the best quality are most frequently
afflicted with it: ‘tis a noble and dignified disease: that of such as
are struck with it, few have it to a less degree of pain; that these are
put to the trouble of a strict diet and the daily taking of nauseous
potions, whereas I owe my better state purely to my good fortune; for
some ordinary broths of eringo or burst-wort that I have twice or thrice
taken to oblige the ladies, who, with greater kindness than my pain was
sharp, would needs present me half of theirs, seemed to me equally easy
to take and fruitless in operation, the others have to pay a thousand
vows to AEsculapius, and as many crowns to their physicians, for the
voiding a little gravel, which I often do by the aid of nature: even the
decorum of my countenance is not disturbed in company; and I can hold my
water ten hours, and as long as any man in health.  The fear of this
disease,” says my mind, “formerly affrighted thee, when it was unknown to
thee; the cries and despairing groans of those who make it worse by their
impatience, begot a horror in thee.  ‘Tis an infirmity that punishes the
members by which thou hast most offended.  Thou art a conscientious
fellow;”

               “Quae venit indigne poena, dolenda venit:”

     [“We are entitled to complain of a punishment that we have not
     deserved.”--Ovid, Heroid., v. 8.]

“consider this chastisement: ‘tis very easy in comparison of others, and
inflicted with a paternal tenderness: do but observe how late it comes;
it only seizes on and incommodes that part of thy life which is, one way
and another, sterile and lost; having, as it were by composition, given
time for the licence and pleasures of thy youth.  The fear and the
compassion that the people have of this disease serve thee for matter of
glory; a quality whereof if thou bast thy judgment purified, and that thy
reason has somewhat cured it, thy friends notwithstanding, discern some
tincture in thy complexion.  ‘Tis a pleasure to hear it said of oneself
what strength of mind, what patience!  Thou art seen to sweat with pain,
to turn pale and red, to tremble, to vomit blood, to suffer strange
contractions and convulsions, at times to let great tears drop from thine
eyes, to urine thick, black, and dreadful water, or to have it suppressed
by some sharp and craggy stone, that cruelly pricks and tears the neck of
the bladder, whilst all the while thou entertainest the company with an
ordinary countenance; droning by fits with thy people; making one in a
continuous discourse, now and then making excuse for thy pain, and
representing thy suffering less than it is.  Dost thou call to mind the
men of past times, who so greedily sought diseases to keep their virtue
in breath and exercise?  Put the case that nature sets thee on and impels
thee to this glorious school, into which thou wouldst never have entered
of thy own free will.  If thou tellest me that it is a dangerous and
mortal disease, what others are not so?  for ‘tis a physical cheat to
expect any that they say do not go direct to death: what matters if they
go thither by accident, or if they easily slide and slip into the path
that leads us to it?  But thou dost not die because thou art sick; thou
diest because thou art living: death kills thee without the help of
sickness: and sickness has deferred death in some, who have lived longer
by reason that they thought themselves always dying; to which may be
added, that as in wounds, so in diseases, some are medicinal and
wholesome.  The stone is often no less long-lived than you; we see men
with whom it has continued from their infancy even to their extreme old
age; and if they had not broken company, it would have been with them
longer still; you more often kill it than it kills you.  And though it
should present to you the image of approaching death, were it not a good
office to a man of such an age, to put him in mind of his end?  And,
which is worse, thou hast no longer anything that should make thee desire
to be cured.  Whether or no, common necessity will soon call thee away.
Do but consider how skilfully and gently she puts thee out of concern
with life, and weans thee from the world; not forcing thee with a
tyrannical subjection, like so many other infirmities which thou seest
old men afflicted withal, that hold them in continual torment, and keep
them in perpetual and unintermitted weakness and pains, but by warnings
and instructions at intervals, intermixing long pauses of repose, as it
were to give thee opportunity to meditate and ruminate upon thy lesson,
at thy own ease and leisure.  To give thee means to judge aright, and to
assume the resolution of a man of courage, it presents to thee the state
of thy entire condition, both in good and evil; and one while a very
cheerful and another an insupportable life, in one and the same day.  If
thou embracest not death, at least thou shakest hands with it once a
month; whence thou hast more cause to hope that it will one day surprise
thee without menace; and that being so often conducted to the water-side,
but still thinking thyself to be upon the accustomed terms, thou and thy
confidence will at one time or another be unexpectedly wafted over.  A
man cannot reasonably complain of diseases that fairly divide the time
with health.”

I am obliged to Fortune for having so often assaulted me with the same
sort of weapons: she forms and fashions me by use, hardens and habituates
me, so that I can know within a little for how much I shall be quit.  For
want of natural memory, I make one of paper; and as any new symptom
happens in my disease, I set it down, whence it falls out that, having
now almost passed through all sorts of examples, if anything striking
threatens me, turning over these little loose notes, as the Sybilline
leaves, I never fail of finding matter of consolation from some
favourable prognostic in my past experience.  Custom also makes me hope
better for the time to come; for, the conduct of this clearing out having
so long continued, ‘tis to be believed that nature will not alter her
course, and that no other worse accident will happen than what I already
feel.  And besides, the condition of this disease is not unsuitable to my
prompt and sudden complexion: when it assaults me gently, I am afraid,
for ‘tis then for a great while; but it has, naturally, brisk and
vigorous excesses; it claws me to purpose for a day or two.  My kidneys
held out an age without alteration; and I have almost now lived another,
since they changed their state; evils have their periods, as well as
benefits: peradventure, the infirmity draws towards an end.  Age weakens
the heat of my stomach, and, its digestion being less perfect, sends this
crude matter to my kidneys; why, at a certain revolution, may not the
heat of my kidneys be also abated, so that they can no more petrify my
phlegm, and nature find out some other way of purgation.  Years have
evidently helped me to drain certain rheums; and why not these excrements
which furnish matter for gravel?  But is there anything delightful in
comparison of this sudden change, when from an excessive pain, I come, by
the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the
beautiful light of health, so free and full, as it happens in our sudden
and sharpest colics?  Is there anything in the pain suffered, that one
can counterpoise to the pleasure of so sudden an amendment?  Oh, how much
does health seem the more pleasant to me, after a sickness so near and so
contiguous, that I can distinguish them in the presence of one another,
in their greatest show; when they appear in emulation, as if to make head
against and dispute it with one another!  As the Stoics say that vices
are profitably introduced to give value to and to set off virtue, we can,
with better reason and less temerity of conjecture, say that nature has
given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence.  When
Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that
itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to
consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are
linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow
and mutually beget one another; and cried out to good AEsop, that he
ought out of this consideration to have taken matter for a fine fable.

The worst that I see in other diseases is, that they are not so grievous
in their effect as they are in their issue: a man is a whole year in
recovering, and all the while full of weakness and fear.  There is so
much hazard, and so many steps to arrive at safety, that there is no end
on’t before they have unmuffled you of a kerchief, and then of a cap,
before they allow you to walk abroad and take the air, to drink wine, to
lie with your wife, to eat melons, ‘tis odds you relapse into some new
distemper.  The stone has this privilege, that it carries itself clean
off: whereas the other maladies always leave behind them some impression
and alteration that render the body subject to a new disease, and lend a
hand to one another.  Those are excusable that content themselves with
possessing us, without extending farther and introducing their followers;
but courteous and kind are those whose passage brings us any profitable
issue.  Since I have been troubled with the stone, I find myself freed
from all other accidents, much more, methinks, than I was before, and
have never had any fever since; I argue that the extreme and frequent
vomitings that I am subject to purge me: and, on the other hand, my
distastes for this and that, and the strange fasts I am forced to keep,
digest my peccant humours, and nature, with those stones, voids whatever
there is in me superfluous and hurtful.  Let them never tell me that it
is a medicine too dear bought: for what avail so many stinking draughts,
so many caustics, incisions, sweats, setons, diets, and so many other
methods of cure, which often, by reason we are not able to undergo their
violence and importunity, bring us to our graves?  So that when I have
the stone, I look upon it as physic; when free from it, as an absolute
deliverance.

And here is another particular benefit of my disease; which is, that it
almost plays its game by itself, and lets ‘me play mine, if I have only
courage to do it; for, in its greatest fury, I have endured it ten hours
together on horseback.  Do but endure only; you need no other regimen
play, run, dine, do this and t’other, if you can; your debauch will do
you more good than harm; say as much to one that has the pox, the gout,
or hernia!  The other diseases have more universal obligations; rack our
actions after another kind of manner, disturb our whole order, and to
their consideration engage the whole state of life: this only pinches the
skin; it leaves the understanding and the will wholly at our own
disposal, and the tongue, the hands, and the feet; it rather awakens than
stupefies you.  The soul is struck with the ardour of a fever,
overwhelmed with an epilepsy, and displaced by a sharp megrim, and, in
short, astounded by all the diseases that hurt the whole mass and the
most noble parts; this never meddles with the soul; if anything goes
amiss with her, ‘tis her own fault; she betrays, dismounts, and abandons
herself.  There are none but fools who suffer themselves to be persuaded
that this hard and massive body which is baked in our kidneys is to be
dissolved by drinks; wherefore, when it is once stirred, there is nothing
to be done but to give it passage; and, for that matter, it will itself
make one.

I moreover observe this particular convenience in it, that it is a
disease wherein we have little to guess at: we are dispensed from the
trouble into which other diseases throw us by the uncertainty of their
causes, conditions, and progress; a trouble that is infinitely painful:
we have no need of consultations and doctoral interpretations; the senses
well enough inform us both what it is and where it is.

By suchlike arguments, weak and strong, as Cicero with the disease of his
old age, I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its
wounds.  If I find them worse tomorrow, I will provide new stratagems.
That this is true: I am come to that pass of late, that the least motion
forces pure blood out of my kidneys: what of that?  I move about,
nevertheless, as before, and ride after my hounds with a juvenile and
insolent ardour; and hold that I have very good satisfaction for an
accident of that importance, when it costs me no more but a dull
heaviness and uneasiness in that part; ‘tis some great stone that wastes
and consumes the substance of my kidneys and my life, which I by little
and little evacuate, not without some natural pleasure, as an excrement
henceforward superfluous and troublesome.  Now if I feel anything
stirring, do not fancy that I trouble myself to consult my pulse or my
urine, thereby to put myself upon some annoying prevention; I shall soon
enough feel the pain, without making it more and longer by the disease of
fear.  He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.  To
which may be added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon
them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and
the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand
that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great
uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or
threatens.  Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the
approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs of the future,
whereon we may ground our divination.  I only judge of myself by actual
sensation, not by reasoning: to what end, since I am resolved to bring
nothing to it but expectation and patience?  Will you know how much I get
by this? observe those who do otherwise, and who rely upon so many
diverse persuasions and counsels; how often the imagination presses upon
them without any bodily pain.  I have many times amused myself, being
well and in safety, and quite free from these dangerous attacks in
communicating them to the physicians as then beginning to discover
themselves in me; I underwent the decree of their dreadful conclusions,
being all the while quite at my ease, and so much the more obliged to the
favour of God and better satisfied of the vanity of this art.

There is nothing that ought so much to be recommended to youth as
activity and vigilance our life is nothing but movement.  I bestir myself
with great difficulty, and am slow in everything, whether in rising,
going to bed, or eating: seven of the clock in the morning is early for
me, and where I rule, I never dine before eleven, nor sup till after six.
I formerly attributed the cause of the fevers and other diseases I fell
into to the heaviness that long sleeping had brought upon me, and have
ever repented going to sleep again in the morning.  Plato is more angry
at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking.  I love to lie hard and
alone, even without my wife, as kings do; pretty well covered with
clothes.  They never warm my bed, but since I have grown old they give me
at need cloths to lay to my feet and stomach.  They found fault with the
great Scipio that he was a great sleeper; not, in my opinion, for any
other reason than that men were displeased that he alone should have
nothing in him to be found fault with.  If I am anything fastidious in my
way of living ‘tis rather in my lying than anything else; but generally
I give way and accommodate myself as well as any one to necessity.
Sleeping has taken up a great part of my life, and I yet continue, at the
age I now am, to sleep eight or nine hours at one breath.  I wean myself
with utility from this proneness to sloth, and am evidently the better
for so doing.  I find the change a little hard indeed, but in three days
‘tis over; and I see but few who live with less sleep, when need
requires, and who more constantly exercise themselves, or to whom long
journeys are less troublesome.  My body is capable of a firm, but not of
a violent or sudden agitation.  I escape of late from violent exercises,
and such as make me sweat: my limbs grow weary before they are warm.
I can stand a whole day together, and am never weary of walking; but from
my youth I have ever preferred to ride upon paved roads; on foot, I get
up to the haunches in dirt, and little fellows as I am are subject in the
streets to be elbowed and jostled for want of presence; I have ever loved
to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or
higher than my seat.

There is no profession as pleasant as the military, a profession both
noble in its execution (for valour is the stoutest, proudest, and most
generous of all virtues), and noble in its cause: there is no utility
either more universal or more just than the protection of the peace and
greatness of one’s country.  The company of so many noble, young, and
active men delights you; the ordinary sight of so many tragic spectacles;
the freedom of the conversation, without art; a masculine and
unceremonious way of living, please you; the variety of a thousand
several actions; the encouraging harmony of martial music that ravishes
and inflames both your ears and souls; the honour of this occupation,
nay, even its hardships and difficulties, which Plato holds so light that
in his Republic he makes women and children share in them, are delightful
to you.  You put yourself voluntarily upon particular exploits and
hazards, according as you judge of their lustre and importance; and, a
volunteer, find even life itself excusably employed:

               “Pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.”

          [“‘Tis fine to die sword in hand.” (“And he remembers that it
          is honourable to die in arms.”)--AEneid, ii. 317.]


To fear common dangers that concern so great a multitude of men; not to
dare to do what so many sorts of souls, what a whole people dare, is for
a heart that is poor and mean beyond all measure: company encourages even
children.  If others excel you in knowledge, in gracefulness, in
strength, or fortune, you have alternative resources at your disposal;
but to give place to them in stability of mind, you can blame no one for
that but yourself. Death is more abject, more languishing and
troublesome, in bed than in a fight: fevers and catarrhs as painful and
mortal as a musket-shot.  Whoever has fortified himself valiantly to bear
the accidents of common life need not raise his courage to be a soldier:

                    “Vivere, mi Lucili, militare est.”

          [“To live, my Lucilius, is (to make war) to be a soldier.”
           --Seneca, Ep., 96.]

I do not remember that I ever had the itch, and yet scratching is one of
nature’s sweetest gratifications, and so much at hand; but repentance
follows too near.  I use it most in my ears, which are at intervals apt
to itch.

I came into the world with all my senses entire, even to perfection.  My
stomach is commodiously good, as also is my head and my breath; and, for
the most part, uphold themselves so in the height of fevers.  I have
passed the age to which some nations, not without reason, have prescribed
so just a term of life that they would not suffer men to exceed it; and
yet I have some intermissions, though short and inconstant, so clean and
sound as to be little inferior to the health and pleasantness of my
youth.  I do not speak of vigour and sprightliness; ‘tis not reason they
should follow me beyond their limits:

               “Non hoc amplius est liminis, aut aquae
               Coelestis, patiens latus.”

     [“I am no longer able to stand waiting at a door in the rain.”
      --Horace, Od., iii. 10, 9.]

My face and eyes presently discover my condition; all my alterations
begin there, and appear somewhat worse than they really are; my friends
often pity me before I feel the cause in myself.  My looking-glass does
not frighten me; for even in my youth it has befallen me more than once
to have a scurvy complexion and of ill augury, without any great
consequence, so that the physicians, not finding any cause within
answerable to that outward alteration, attributed it to the mind and to
some secret passion that tormented me within; but they were deceived.
If my body would govern itself as well, according to my rule, as my mind
does, we should move a little more at our ease.  My mind was then not
only free from trouble, but, moreover, full of joy and satisfaction,
as it commonly is, half by its complexion, half by its design:

               “Nec vitiant artus aegrae contagia mentis.”

          [“Nor do the troubles of the body ever affect my mind.”
           --Ovid, Trist., iii. 8, 25.]

I am of the opinion that this temperature of my soul has often raised my
body from its lapses; this is often depressed; if the other be not brisk
and gay, ‘tis at least tranquil and at rest.  I had a quartan ague four
or five months, that made me look miserably ill; my mind was always, if
not calm, yet pleasant.  If the pain be without me, the weakness and
languor do not much afflict me; I see various corporal faintings, that
beget a horror in me but to name, which yet I should less fear than a
thousand passions and agitations of the mind that I see about me.  I make
up my mind no more to run; ‘tis enough that I can crawl along; nor do I
more complain of the natural decadence that I feel in myself:

               “Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?”

          [“Who is surprised to see a swollen goitre in the Alps?”
           --Juvenal, xiii. 162.]

than I regret that my duration shall not be as long and entire as that of
an oak.

I have no reason to complain of my imagination; I have had few thoughts
in my life that have so much as broken my sleep, except those of desire,
which have awakened without afflicting me.  I dream but seldom, and then
of chimaeras and fantastic things, commonly produced from pleasant
thoughts, and rather ridiculous than sad; and I believe it to be true
that dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is
art required to sort and understand them

    “Res, quae in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident,
     Quaeque agunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt,
     Minus mirandum est.”

     [“‘Tis less wonder, what men practise, think, care for, see, and do
     when waking, (should also run in their heads and disturb them when
     they are asleep) and which affect their feelings, if they happen to
     any in sleep.”--Attius, cited in Cicero, De Divin., i. 22.]

Plato, moreover, says, that ‘tis the office of prudence to draw
instructions of divination of future things from dreams: I don’t know
about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates,
Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate.
Historians say that the Atlantes never dream; who also never eat any
animal food, which I add, forasmuch as it is, peradventure, the reason
why they never dream, for Pythagoras ordered a certain preparation of
diet to beget appropriate dreams.  Mine are very gentle, without any
agitation of body or expression of voice.  I have seen several of my time
wonderfully disturbed by them.  Theon the philosopher walked in his
sleep, and so did Pericles servant, and that upon the tiles and top of
the house.

I hardly ever choose my dish at table, but take the next at hand, and
unwillingly change it for another.  A confusion of meats and a clatter of
dishes displease me as much as any other confusion: I am easily satisfied
with few dishes: and am an enemy to the opinion of Favorinus, that in a
feast they should snatch from you the meat you like, and set a plate of
another sort before you; and that ‘tis a pitiful supper, if you do not
sate your guests with the rumps of various fowls, the beccafico only
deserving to be all eaten.  I usually eat salt meats, yet I prefer bread
that has no salt in it; and my baker never sends up other to my table,
contrary to the custom of the country.  In my infancy, what they had most
to correct in me was the refusal of things that children commonly best
love, as sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes.  My tutor contended with
this aversion to delicate things, as a kind of over-nicety; and indeed
‘tis nothing else but a difficulty of taste, in anything it applies
itself to.  Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread,
bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate.  There are some
who affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst
the partridges; ‘tis all very fine; this is the delicacy of the delicate;
‘tis the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes ordinary and
accustomed things.

               “Per qux luxuria divitiarum taedio ludit.”

     [“By which the luxury of wealth causes tedium.”--Seneca, Ep., 18.]

Not to make good cheer with what another is enjoying, and to be curious
in what a man eats, is the essence of this vice:

               “Si modica coenare times olus omne patella.”

     [“If you can’t be content with herbs in a small dish for supper.”
      --Horace, Ep., i. 5, 2.]

There is indeed this difference, that ‘tis better to oblige one’s
appetite to things that are most easy to be had; but ‘tis always vice to
oblige one’s self.  I formerly said a kinsman of mine was overnice, who,
by being in our galleys, had unlearned the use of beds and to undress
when he went to sleep.

If I had any sons, I should willingly wish them my fortune.  The good
father that God gave me (who has nothing of me but the acknowledgment of
his goodness, but truly ‘tis a very hearty one) sent me from my cradle to
be brought up in a poor village of his, and there continued me all the
while I was at nurse, and still longer, bringing me up to the meanest and
most common way of living:

          “Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter.”

          [“A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty.”
           --Seneca,Ep., 123.]

Never take upon yourselves, and much less give up to your wives, the care
of their nurture; leave the formation to fortune, under popular and
natural laws; leave it to custom to train them up to frugality and
hardship, that they may rather descend from rigour than mount up to it.
This humour of his yet aimed at another end, to make me familiar with the
people and the condition of men who most need our assistance; considering
that I should rather regard them who extend their arms to me, than those
who turn their backs upon me; and for this reason it was that he provided
to hold me at the font persons of the meanest fortune, to oblige and
attach me to them.

Nor has his design succeeded altogether ill; for, whether upon the
account of the more honour in such a condescension, or out of a natural
compassion that has a very great power over me, I have an inclination
towards the meaner sort of people.  The faction which I should condemn in
our wars, I should more sharply condemn, flourishing and successful; it
will somewhat reconcile me to it, when I shall see it miserable and
overwhelmed.  How willingly do I admire the fine humour of Cheilonis,
daughter and wife to kings of Sparta.  Whilst her husband Cleombrotus, in
the commotion of her city, had the advantage over Leonidas her father,
she, like a good daughter, stuck close to her father in all his misery
and exile, in opposition to the conqueror.  But so soon as the chance of
war turned, she changed her will with the change of fortune, and bravely
turned to her husband’s side, whom she accompanied throughout, where his
ruin carried him: admitting, as it appears to me, no other choice than to
cleave to the side that stood most in need of her, and where she could
best manifest her compassion.  I am naturally more apt to follow the
example of Flaminius, who rather gave his assistance to those who had
most need of him than to those who had power to do him good, than I do to
that of Pyrrhus, who was of an humour to truckle under the great and to
domineer over the poor.

Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm; for, be it that I
was so accustomed when a child, I eat all the while I sit.  Therefore it
is that at my own house, though the meals there are of the shortest, I
usually sit down a little while after the rest, after the manner of
Augustus, but I do not imitate him in rising also before the rest; on the
contrary, I love to sit still a long time after, and to hear them talk,
provided I am none of the talkers: for I tire and hurt myself with
speaking upon a full stomach, as much as I find it very wholesome and
pleasant to argue and to strain my voice before dinner.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had more reason than we in setting apart
for eating, which is a principal action of life, if they were not
prevented by other extraordinary business, many hours and the greatest
part of the night; eating and drinking more deliberately than we do, who
perform all our actions post-haste; and in extending this natural
pleasure to more leisure and better use, intermixing with profitable
conversation.

They whose concern it is to have a care of me, may very easily hinder me
from eating anything they think will do me harm; for in such matters I
never covet nor miss anything I do not see; but withal, if it once comes
in my sight, ‘tis in vain to persuade me to forbear; so that when I
design to fast I must be kept apart from the suppers, and must have only
so much given me as is required for a prescribed collation; for if to
table, I forget my resolution.  When I order my cook to alter the manner
of dressing any dish, all my family know what it means, that my stomach
is out of order, and that I shall not touch it.

I love to have all meats, that will endure it, very little boiled or
roasted, and prefer them very high, and even, as to several, quite gone.
Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as
patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to
the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both
too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good,
even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have
always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and
after dinner.  God is favourable to those whom He makes to die by
degrees; ‘tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much
the less painful; it will kill but a half or a quarter of a man.  There
is one tooth lately fallen out without drawing and without pain; it was
the natural term of its duration; in that part of my being and several
others, are already dead, others half dead, of those that were most
active and in the first rank during my vigorous years; ‘tis so I melt and
steal away from myself.  What a folly it would be in my understanding to
apprehend the height of this fall, already so much advanced, as if it
were from the very top!  I hope I shall not.  I, in truth, receive a
principal consolation in meditating my death, that it will be just and
natural, and that henceforward I cannot herein either require or hope
from Destiny any other but unlawful favour.  Men make themselves believe
that we formerly had longer lives as well as greater stature.  But they
deceive themselves; and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the
duration of life to threescore and ten years. I, who have so much and so
universally adored that “The mean is best,” of the passed time, and who
have concluded the most moderate measures to be the most perfect, shall
I pretend to an immeasurable and prodigious old age?  Whatever happens
contrary to the course of nature may be troublesome; but what comes
according to her should always be pleasant:

     “Omnia, quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis.”

     [“All things that are done according to nature
     are to be accounted good.”--Cicero, De Senect., c. 19.]

And so, says Plato, the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases
is violent; but that which comes upon us, old age conducting us to it, is
of all others the most easy, and in some sort delicious:

          “Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas.”

     [“Young men are taken away by violence, old men by maturity.”
      --Cicero, ubi sup.]

Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life; decay anticipates
its hour, and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance.
I have portraits of myself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty
years of age.  I compare them with that lately drawn: how many times is
it no longer me; how much more is my present image unlike the former,
than unlike my dying one?  It is too much to abuse nature, to make her
trot so far that she must be forced to leave us, and abandon our conduct,
our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign and
haggard countenance, and to resign us into the hands of art, being weary
of following us herself.

I am not excessively fond either of salads or fruits, except melons.  My
father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all.  Eating too much hurts
me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know
that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that
either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon
me.  We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example,
I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and
now again grateful.  In several other things, I find my stomach and
appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from
white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.

I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and
feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of
digestion than flesh.  As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon
fish-days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh;
the difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.

From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to
sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and
made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance,
I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more
cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for
the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the
other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all
things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a
goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his
liquor--[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]--
or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the
same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as
with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at
Periander’s feast till he was first informed who were to be the other
guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as
that which is extracted from society.  I think it more wholesome to eat
more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite
and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or
four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who
will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall
have the same at supper?  But we old fellows especially, let us take the
first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and
prognostics.  The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold
of the present and known.  I avoid the invariable in these laws of
fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the
continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied
and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured
to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing
otherwise but to your prejudice.

I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one
simple pair of silk stockings is all.  I have suffered myself, for the
relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account
of my colic: my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and
disdained my ordinary provisions: we soon get from a coif to a kerchief
over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet
must not merely serve for ornament: there must be added a hare’s skin or
a vulture’s skin, and a cap under the hat: follow this gradation, and you
will go a very fine way to work.  I will do nothing of the sort, and
would willingly leave off what I have begun.  If you fall into any new
inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek
out some other.  Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be
pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add
something more, and something more after that; there is no end on’t.

For what concerns our affairs and pleasures, it is much more commodious,
as the ancients did, to lose one’s dinner, and defer making good cheer
till the hour of retirement and repose, without breaking up a day; and so
was I formerly used to do.  As to health, I since by experience find, on
the contrary, that it is better to dine, and that the digestion is better
while awake.  I am not very used to be thirsty, either well or sick; my
mouth is, indeed, apt to be dry, but without thirst; and commonly I never
drink but with thirst that is created by eating, and far on in the meal;
I drink pretty well for a man of my pitch: in summer, and at a relishing
meal, I do not only exceed the limits of Augustus, who drank but thrice
precisely; but not to offend Democritus rule, who forbade that men should
stop at four times as an unlucky number, I proceed at need to the fifth
glass, about three half-pints; for the little glasses are my favourites,
and I like to drink them off, which other people avoid as an unbecoming
thing.  I mix my wine sometimes with half, sometimes with the third part
water; and when I am at home, by an ancient custom that my father’s
physician prescribed both to him and himself, they mix that which is
designed for me in the buttery, two or three hours before ‘tis brought
in.  ‘Tis said that Cranabs, king of Attica, was the inventor of this
custom of diluting wine; whether useful or no, I have heard disputed.
I think it more decent and wholesome for children to drink no wine till
after sixteen or eighteen years of age.  The most usual and common method
of living is the most becoming; all particularity, in my opinion, is to
be avoided; and I should as much hate a German who mixed water with his
wine, as I should a Frenchman who drank it pure.  Public usage gives the
law in these things.

I fear a mist, and fly from smoke as from the plague: the first repairs I
fell upon in my own house were the chimneys and houses of office, the
common and insupportable defects of all old buildings; and amongst the
difficulties of war I reckon the choking dust they made us ride in a
whole day together.  I have a free and easy respiration, and my colds for
the most part go off without offence to the lungs and without a cough.

The heat of summer is more an enemy to me than the cold of winter; for,
besides the incommodity of heat, less remediable than cold, and besides
the force of the sunbeams that strike upon the head, all glittering light
offends my eyes, so that I could not now sit at dinner over against a
flaming fire.

To dull the whiteness of paper, in those times when I was more wont to
read, I laid a piece of glass upon my book, and found my eyes much
relieved by it.  I am to this hour--to the age of fifty-four--Ignorant of
the use of spectacles; and I can see as far as ever I did, or any other.
‘Tis true that in the evening I begin to find a little disturbance and
weakness in my sight if I read, an exercise I have always found
troublesome, especially by night.  Here is one step back, and a very
manifest one; I shall retire another: from the second to the third, and
so to the fourth, so gently, that I shall be stark blind before I shall
be sensible of the age and decay of my sight: so artificially do the
Fatal Sisters untwist our lives.  And so I doubt whether my hearing
begins to grow thick; and you will see I shall have half lost it, when I
shall still lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.  A man
must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs
away.

My walking is quick and firm; and I know not which of the two, my mind or
my body, I have most to do to keep in the same state.  That preacher is
very much my friend who can fix my attention a whole sermon through: in
places of ceremony, where every one’s countenance is so starched, where I
have seen the ladies keep even their eyes so fixed, I could never order
it so, that some part or other of me did not lash out; so that though I
was seated, I was never settled; and as to gesticulation, I am never
without a switch in my hand, walking or riding.  As the philosopher
Chrysippus’ maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs,
for it was his custom to be always kicking them about in what place
soever he sat; and she said it when, the wine having made all his
companions drunk, he found no alteration in himself at all; it may have
been said of me from my infancy, that I had either folly or quicksilver
in my feet, so much stirring and unsettledness there is in them, wherever
they are placed.

‘Tis indecent, besides the hurt it does to one’s health, and even to the
pleasure of eating, to eat greedily as I do; I often bite my tongue, and
sometimes my fingers, in my haste.  Diogenes, meeting a boy eating after
that manner, gave his tutor a box on the ear!  There were men at Rome
that taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace.  I
lose thereby the leisure of speaking, which gives great relish to the
table, provided the discourse be suitable, that is, pleasant and short.

There is jealousy and envy amongst our pleasures; they cross and hinder
one another.  Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good
cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the
entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, “that it
is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to
feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of
understanding know how to entertain one another.”  Varro requires all
this in entertainments: “Persons of graceful presence and agreeable
conversation, who are neither silent nor garrulous; neatness and
delicacy, both of meat and place; and fair weather.”  The art of dining
well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the
greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or
science of eating well.  My imagination has delivered three repasts to
the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me,
upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state
excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind
wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular
grace and savour.  I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman
wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I
look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be
too much in love with them.  Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with
all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others;
but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that
nature has provided for him.  A man should neither pursue nor avoid them,
but receive them.  I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and
kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions.  We
have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us
sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that
puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and
all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:

         “Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit.”

          [“Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
          you put into it.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]

I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
little more than wind.  But what?  We are all wind throughout; and,
moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.

The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
Critolaiis.  ‘Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
and, peradventure, to be desired.  But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures
of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly
intellectual.  The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal
pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as
more just.  There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind
of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the
same.  Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing?  why do they not
live of their own?  why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and
costs them neither invention nor exertion?  Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury
afford them their light by which to see, instead of Venus, Ceres, and
Bacchus.  These boastful humours may counterfeit some content, for what
will not fancy do?  But as to wisdom, there is no touch of it.  Will they
not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives?  I hate
that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our
bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow
there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down.
Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno
comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily.
Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation,
Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt
the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking.  The true
temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than
Pythagoric, and it becomes him better.  When I dance, I dance; when I
sleep, I sleep.  Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my
thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences,
I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard,
to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.

Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined
us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us; and she invites us
to them, not only by reason, but also by appetite, and ‘tis injustice to
infringe her laws.  When I see alike Caesar and Alexander, in the midst
of his greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, I
do not say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by
vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious
thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last
was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation.  We are great
fools.  “He has passed his life in idleness,” say we: “I have done
nothing to-day.”  What? have you not lived?  that is not only the
fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations.  “Had I been
put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I
could do.”  “Have you known how to meditate and manage your life?  you
have performed the greatest work of all.”  In order to shew and develop
herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all
stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one.  Have you known how
to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
than he who has taken empires and cities.

The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things:
to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and
props.  I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a
breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at
dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends.  And Brutus, when heaven
and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some
hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all
security.  ‘Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not
from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to
lay them aside and take them up again:

                   “O fortes, pejoraque passi
                    Mecum saepe viri!  nunc vino pellite curas
                    Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.”

     [“O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink
     cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea.”
      --Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]

Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical
wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable
they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have
profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their
schools.  The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the
just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table.  The sages lived after that
manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both
in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even
to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the
human condition, of Venus and Bacchus; according to the precepts of their
sect, that require the perfect sage to be as expert and intelligent in
the use of natural pleasures as in all other duties of life:

               “Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus.”

Relaxation and facility, methinks, wonderfully honour and best become a
strong and generous soul.  Epaminondas did not think that to take part,
and that heartily, in songs and sports and dances with the young men of
his city, were things that in any way derogated from the honour of his
glorious victories and the perfect purity of manners that was in him.
And amongst so many admirable actions of Scipio the grandfather, a person
worthy to be reputed of a heavenly extraction, there is nothing that
gives him a greater grace than to see him carelessly and childishly
trifling at gathering and selecting cockle shells, and playing at quoits,

     [This game, as the “Dictionnaire de Trevoux” describes it, is one
     wherein two persons contend which of them shall soonest pick up some
     object.]

amusing and tickling himself in representing by writing in comedies the
meanest and most popular actions of men.  And his head full of that
wonderful enterprise of Hannibal and Africa, visiting the schools in
Sicily, and attending philosophical lectures, to the extent of arming the
blind envy of his enemies at Rome.  Nor is there anything more remarkable
in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to make himself
taught dancing and playing upon instruments, and thought it time well
spent.  This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a
whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army,
surprised and absorbed by some profound thought.  He was the first,
amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of
Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body,
and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms.  It was he
who, in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his
horse; and who, amongst all the people of Athens, enraged as he was at so
unworthy a spectacle, first presented himself to rescue Theramenes, whom
the thirty tyrants were leading to execution by their satellites, and
desisted not from his bold enterprise but at the remonstrance of
Theramenes himself, though he was only followed by two more in all.  He
was seen, when courted by a beauty with whom he was in love, to maintain
at need a severe abstinence.  He was seen ever to go to the wars, and
walk upon ice, with bare feet; to wear the same robe, winter and summer;
to surpass all his companions in patience of bearing hardships, and to
eat no more at a feast than at his own private dinner.  He was seen, for
seven-and-twenty years together, to endure hunger, poverty, the
indocility of his children, and the nails of his wife, with the same
countenance.  And, in the end, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters,
and poison.  But was this man obliged to drink full bumpers by any rule
of civility?  he was also the man of the whole army with whom the
advantage in drinking, remained.  And he never refused to play at
noisettes, nor to ride the hobby-horse with children, and it became him
well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour
a wise man.  We have enough wherewithal to do it, and we ought never to
be weary of presenting the image of this great man in all the patterns
and forms of perfection.  There are very few examples of life, full and
pure; and we wrong our teaching every day, to propose to ourselves those
that are weak and imperfect, scarce good for any one service, and rather
pull us back; corrupters rather than correctors of manners.  The people
deceive themselves; a man goes much more easily indeed by the ends, where
the extremity serves for a bound, a stop, and guide, than by the middle
way, large and open; and according to art, more than according to nature:
but withal much less nobly and commendably.

Greatness of soul consists not so much in mounting and in pressing
forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself; it takes
everything for great, that is enough, and demonstrates itself in
preferring moderate to eminent things.  There is nothing so fine and
legitimate as well and duly to play the man; nor science so arduous as
well and naturally to know how to live this life; and of all the
infirmities we have, ‘tis the most barbarous to despise our being.

Whoever has a mind to isolate his spirit, when the body is ill at ease,
to preserve it from the contagion, let him by all means do it if he can:
but otherwise let him on the contrary favour and assist it, and not
refuse to participate of its natural pleasures with a conjugal
complacency, bringing to it, if it be the wiser, moderation, lest by
indiscretion they should get confounded with displeasure.  Intemperance
is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather
its seasoning.  Euxodus, who therein established the sovereign good, and
his companions, who set so high a value upon it, tasted it in its most
charming sweetness, by the means of temperance, which in them was
singular and exemplary.

I enjoin my soul to look upon pain and pleasure with an eye equally
regulated:

          “Eodem enim vitio est effusio animi in laetitia
          quo in dolore contractio,”

     [“For from the same imperfection arises the expansion of the
     mind in pleasure and its contraction in sorrow.”
      --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., iv. 31.]

and equally firm; but the one gaily and the other severely, and so far as
it is able, to be careful to extinguish the one as to extend the other.
The judging rightly of good brings along with it the judging soundly of
evil: pain has something of the inevitable in its tender beginnings, and
pleasure something of the evitable in its excessive end.  Plato couples
them together, and wills that it should be equally the office of
fortitude to fight against pain, and against the immoderate and charming
blandishments of pleasure: they are two fountains, from which whoever
draws, when and as much as he needs, whether city, man, or beast, is very
fortunate.  The first is to be taken medicinally and upon necessity, and
more scantily; the other for thirst, but not to, drunkenness.  Pain,
pleasure, love and hatred are the first things that a child is sensible
of: if, when reason comes, they apply it to themselves, that is virtue.

I have a special vocabulary of my own; I “pass away time,” when it is ill
and uneasy, but when ‘tis good I do not pass it away: “I taste it over
again and adhere to it”; one must run over the ill and settle upon the
good.  This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing away the time,
represents the usage of those wise sort of people who think they cannot
do better with their lives than to let them run out and slide away, pass
them over, and baulk them, and, as much as they can, ignore them and shun
them as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality: but I know it to
be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious, even
in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it; and nature has delivered it
into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we have only
ourselves to blame if it be troublesome to us, or escapes us
unprofitably:

     “Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur.”

     [“The life of a fool is thankless, timorous, and wholly bent upon
     the future.”--Seneca, Ep:, 15.]

Nevertheless I compose myself to lose mine without regret; but withal as
a thing that is perishable by its condition, not that it molests or
annoys me.  Nor does it properly well become any not to be displeased
when they die, excepting such as are pleased to live.  There is good
husbandry in enjoying it: I enjoy it double to what others do; for the
measure of its fruition depends upon our more or less application to it.
Chiefly that I perceive mine to be so short in time, I desire to extend
it in weight; I will stop the promptitude of its flight by the
promptitude of my grasp; and by the vigour of using it compensate the
speed of its running away.  In proportion as the possession of life is
more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.

Others feel the pleasure of content and prosperity; I feel it too, as
well as they, but not as it passes and slips by; one should study, taste,
and ruminate upon it to render condign thanks to Him who grants it to us.
They enjoy the other pleasures as they do that of sleep, without knowing
it.  To the end that even sleep itself should not so stupidly escape from
me, I have formerly caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I
might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it.  I ponder with
myself of content; I do not skim over, but sound it; and I bend my
reason, now grown perverse and peevish, to entertain it.  Do I find
myself in any calm composedness?  is there any pleasure that tickles me?
I do not suffer it to dally with my senses only; I associate my soul to
it too: not there to engage itself, but therein to take delight; not
there to lose itself, but to be present there; and I employ it, on its
part, to view itself in this prosperous state, to weigh and appreciate
its happiness and to amplify it.  It reckons how much it stands indebted
to God that its conscience and the intestine passions are in repose; that
it has the body in its natural disposition, orderly and competently
enjoying the soft and soothing functions by which He, of His grace is
pleased to compensate the sufferings wherewith His justice at His good
pleasure chastises us.  It reflects how great a benefit it is to be so
protected, that which way soever it turns its eye the heavens are calm
around it.  No desire, no fear, no doubt, troubles the air; no
difficulty, past, present, or to, come, that its imagination may not pass
over without offence.  This consideration takes great lustre from the
comparison of different conditions.  So it is that I present to my
thought, in a thousand aspects, those whom fortune or their own error
carries away and torments.  And, again, those who, more like to me, so
negligently and incuriously receive their good fortune.  Those are folks
who spend their time indeed; they pass over the present and that which
they possess, to wait on hope, and for shadows and vain images which
fancy puts before them:

         “Morte obita quales fama est volitare figuras,
          Aut quae sopitos deludunt somnia sensus:”

     [“Such forms as those which after death are reputed to hover about,
     or dreams which delude the senses in sleep.”--AEneid, x. 641.]

which hasten and prolong their flight, according as they are pursued.
The fruit and end of their pursuit is to pursue; as Alexander said, that
the end of his labour was to labour:

          “Nil actum credens, cum quid superesset agendum.”

     [“Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done.
     --“Lucan, ii. 657.]

For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased
God to bestow it upon us.  I do not desire it should be without the
necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less
excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long;

     “Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus:”

     [“A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches.”
      --Seneca, Ep., 119.]

nor that we should support ourselves by putting only a little of that
drug into our mouths, by which Epimenides took away his appetite and kept
himself alive; nor that we should stupidly beget children with our
fingers or heels, but rather; with reverence be it spoken, that we might
voluptuously beget them with our fingers and heels; nor that the body
should be without desire and without titillation.  These are ungrateful
and wicked complaints.  I accept kindly, and with gratitude, what nature
has done for me; am well pleased with it, and proud of it.  A man does
wrong to that great and omnipotent giver to refuse, annul, or disfigure
his gift: all goodness himself, he has made everything good:

     “Omnia quae secundum naturam sunt, aestimatione digna sunt.”

     [“All things that are according to nature are worthy of esteem.”
      --Cicero, De Fin., iii. 6.]

Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most
solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is,
suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my
thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that ‘tis a
barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable
with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the
dishonest.  That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by
a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a
fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action
according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey.
Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in
getting their wives’ maidenheads than in its lesson.

This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as
he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more
force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity.  This, according to
him, goes by no means alone--he is not so fantastic--but only it goes
first; temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary of
pleasure.  Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than
prudent and just.

          “Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus,
          quid ea postulet, pervidendum.”

     [“A man must search into the nature of things, and fully examine
     what she requires.”--Cicero, De Fin., V. 16.]

I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial
traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is “to live
according to it,” becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and
that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is “to consent to nature.”
 Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are
necessary?  And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not
a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says
an ancient, the gods always conspire.  To what end do we dismember by
divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence?
Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse
and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the
levity of the soul:

     “Qui, velut summum bonum, laudat animac naturam, et, tanquam malum,
     naturam carnis accusat, profectd et animam carnatiter appetit, et
     carnem carnaliter fugit; quoniam id vanitate sentit humans, non
     veritate divina.”

     [“He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and
     condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally
     desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels
     thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.”
      --St. Augustin, De Civit.  Dei, xiv.  5.]

In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care;
we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to
man, to conduct man according to his condition; ‘tis express, plain, and
the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly
prescribed it to us.  Authority has power only to work in regard to
matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language;
therefore let us again charge at it in this place:

     “Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter
     facere, quae facienda sunt; et alio corpus impellere, alio animum;
     distrahique inter diversissimos motus?”

     [“Who will not say, that it is the property of folly, slothfully and
     contumaciously to perform what is to be done, and to bend the body
     one way and the mind another, and to be distracted betwixt wholly
     different motions?”--Seneca, Ep., 74.]

To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what whimsies
and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of which he
diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the time he spends in
eating; you will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes at
your table as this wise meditation of his (for the most part we had
better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake); and that his discourses
and notions are not worth the worst mess there.  Though they were the
ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what then?  I do not here speak of, nor
mix with the rabble of us ordinary men, and the vanity of the thoughts
and desires that divert us, those venerable souls, elevated by the ardour
of devotion and religion, to a constant and conscientious meditation of
divine things, who, by the energy of vivid and vehement hope,
prepossessing the use of the eternal nourishment, the final aim and last
step of Christian desires, the sole constant, and incorruptible pleasure,
disdain to apply themselves to our necessitous, fluid, and ambiguous
conveniences, and easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual
and temporal pasture; ‘tis a privileged study.  Between ourselves, I have
ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of
singular accord.

AEsop, that great man, saw his master piss as he walked: “What then,”
 said he, “must we drop as we run?”  Let us manage our time; there yet
remains a great deal idle and ill employed.  The mind has not willingly
other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating
itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its
necessity.  They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from
being men.  It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels,
they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay
themselves lower.  These transcendental humours affright me, like high
and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life
of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so
human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of
our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are
highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of
Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation.  Philotas pleasantly
quipped him in his answer; he congratulated him by letter concerning the
oracle of Jupiter Ammon, which had placed him amongst the gods: “Upon thy
account I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live
with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the
measure of a man:”

               “Diis to minorem quod geris, imperas.”

     [“Because thou carriest thyself lower than the gods, thou rulest.”
      --Horace, Od., iii. 6, 5.]

The pretty inscription wherewith the Athenians honoured the entry of
Pompey into their city is conformable to my sense: “By so much thou art
a god, as thou confessest thee a man.”  ‘Tis an absolute and, as it were,
a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being.
We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our
own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside.
‘Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must
yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in
the world, we are but seated upon our breech.  The fairest lives, in my
opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common
and human model without miracle, without extravagance.  Old age stands a
little in need of a more gentle treatment.  Let us recommend that to God,
the protector of health and wisdom, but let it be gay and sociable:

                   “Frui paratis et valido mihi
                    Latoe, dones, et precor, integra
                    Cum mente; nec turpem senectam
                    Degere, nec Cithara carentem.”

     [“Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy my possessions in good
     health; let me be sound in mind; let me not lead a dishonourable
     old age, nor want the cittern.”--Horace, Od., i. 31, 17.]

Or:

     [“Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy what I have in good
     health; let me be sound in body and mind; let me live in honour when
     old, nor let music be wanting.”]




APOLOGY:
[In fact, the first edition of the Essays (Bordeaux, 1580) has very few
quotations.  These became more numerous in the edition of 1588; but the
multitude of classical texts which at times encumber Montaigne’s text,
only dates from the posthumous edition of 1595] he had made these
collections in the four last years of his life, as an amusement of his
“idleness.”--Le Clerc.  They grow, however, more sparing in the Third
Book.




     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

     A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty
     Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit
     Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour
     All actions equally become and equally honour a wise man
     As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law
     At the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little
     better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a num
     Both kings and philosophers go to stool
     Cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice
     Cleave to the side that stood most in need of her
     Condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
     Customs and laws make justice
     Dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press
     Diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all
     Every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent
     Excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others
     First informed who were to be the other guests
     Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside
     Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one
     Hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself
     He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears
     How many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment
     “I have done nothing to-day.”--“What? have you not lived?”
      If it be a delicious medicine, take it
     Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not
     Intemperance is the pest of pleasure
     Language: obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts
     Last death will kill but a half or a quarter of a man
     Law: breeder of altercation and division
     Laws keep up their credit, not for being just--but as laws
     Lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.
     Learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding
     Life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own
     Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm
     Made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure
     Man after  who held out his pulse to a physician was a fool
     Man must learn that he is nothing but a fool
     More ado to interpret interpretations
     More books upon books than upon any other subject
     Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing
     None that less keep their promise (than physicians)
     Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing
     Nothing so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws
     Our justice presents to us but one hand
     Perpetual scolding of his wife (of Socrates)
     Physician: pass through all the diseases he pretends to cure
     Plato angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking
     Plato: lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country
     Prolong your misery an hour or two
     Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties
     Resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience
     Scratching is one of nature’s sweetest gratifications
     Seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives
     So weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him
     Soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity
     Study makes me sensible how much I have to learn
     Style wherewith men establish religions and laws
     Subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doub
     That we may live, we cease to live
     The mean is best
     There is none of us who would not be worse than kings
     Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done
     Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful
     Thou diest because thou art living
     Tis so I melt and steal away from myself
     Truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
     Truth, that for being older it is none the wiser
     We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade
     We ought to grant free passage to diseases
     Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger
     Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture?
     Wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself
     Yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating?







     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE EDITION:

     A child should not be brought up in his mother’s lap
     A gallant man does not give over his pursuit for being refused
     A generous heart ought not to belie its own thoughts
     A hundred more escape us than ever come to our knowledge
     A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted
     A little cheese when a mind to make a feast
     A little thing will turn and divert us
     A man may always study, but he must not always go to school
     A man may govern himself well who cannot govern others so
     A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry
     A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them
     A man must have courage to fear
     A man never speaks of himself without loss
     A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may
     A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief
     A man’s accusations of himself are always believed
     A parrot would say as much as that
     A person’s look is but a feeble warranty
     A well-bred man is a compound man
     A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty
     A word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit
     Abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances
     Abominate that incidental repentance which old age brings
     Accept all things we are not able to refute
     Accommodated my subject to my strength
     Accursed be thou, as he that arms himself for fear of death
     Accusing all others of ignorance and imposition
     Acquiesce and submit to truth
     Acquire by his writings an immortal life
     Addict thyself to the study of letters
     Addresses his voyage to no certain, port
     Admiration is the foundation of all philosophy
     Advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right
     Advise to choose weapons of the shortest sort
     Affect words that are not of current use
     Affection towards their husbands, (not) until they have lost them
     Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit
     Affright people with the very mention of death
     Against my trifles you could say no more than I myself have said
     Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face
     Agesilaus, what he thought most proper for boys to learn?
     Agitated betwixt hope and fear
     Agitation has usurped the place of reason
     Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour
     All actions equally become and equally honour a wise man
     All apprentices when we come to it (death)
     All defence shows a face of war
     All I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease
     All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice
     All judgments in gross are weak and imperfect
     All over-nice solicitude about riches smells of avarice
     All things have their seasons, even good ones
     All think he has yet twenty good years to come
     All those who have authority to be angry in my family
     Almanacs
     Always be parading their pedantic science
     Always complaining is the way never to be lamented
     Always the perfect religion
     Am as jealous of my repose as of my authority
     An advantage in judgment we yield to none
     “An emperor,” said he, “must die standing”
      An ignorance that knowledge creates and begets
     Ancient Romans kept their youth always standing at school
     And hate him so as you were one day to love him
     And we suffer the ills of a long peace
     Anger and hatred are beyond the duty of justice
     Any argument if it  be carried on with method
     Any old government better than change and alteration
     Any one may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death
     Anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater
     Anything becomes foul when commended by the multitude
     Anything of value in him, let him make it appear in his conduct
     Appetite comes to me in eating
     Appetite is more sharp than one already half-glutted by the eyes
     Appetite runs after that it has not
     Appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have
     Applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge
     Apprenticeship and a resemblance of death
     Apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand
     Apt to promise something less than what I am able to do
     Archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short
     Armed parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity,  robbery)
     Arrogant ignorance
     Art that could come to the knowledge of but few persons
     “Art thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?”
      Arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds
     As great a benefit to be without (children)
     As if anything were so common as ignorance
     As if impatience were of itself a better remedy than patience
     As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law
     Ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon it
     Assurance they give us of the certainty of their drugs
     At least, if they do no good, they will do no harm
     At the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little
     Attribute facility of belief to simplicity and ignorance
     Attribute to itself; all the happy successes that happen
     Authority of the number and antiquity of the witnesses
     Authority to be dissected by the vain fancies of men
     Authority which a graceful presence and a majestic mien beget
     Avoid all magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten
     Away with that eloquence that enchants us with itself
     Away with this violence!  away with this compulsion!
     Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age
     Be not angry to no purpose
     Be on which side you will, you have as fair a game to play
     Bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well
     Beast of company, as the ancient said, but not of the herd
     Beauty of stature is the only beauty of men
     Because the people know so well how to obey
     Become a fool by too much wisdom
     Being as impatient of commanding as of being commanded
     Being dead they were then by one day happier than he
     Being over-studious, we impair our health and spoil our humour
     Belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul
     Believing Heaven concerned at our ordinary actions
     Best part of a captain to know how to make use of occasions
     Best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd
     Best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice
     Better at speaking than writing--Motion and action animate word
     better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a num
     Better to be alone than in foolish and troublesome company
     Blemishes of the great naturally appear greater
     Books go side by side with me in my whole course
     Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose
     Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise
     Books I read over again, still smile upon me with  fresh novelty
     Books of things that were never either studied or understood
     Both himself and his posterity declared ignoble, taxable
     Both kings and philosophers go to stool
     Burnt and roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others
     Business to-morrow
     But ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility
     But it is not enough that our education does not spoil us
     By resenting the lie we acquit ourselves of the fault
     By suspecting them, have given them a title to do ill
     “By the gods,” said he, “if I was not angry, I would execute you”
      By the misery of this life, aiming at bliss in another
     Caesar: he would be thought an excellent engineer to boot
     Caesar’s choice of death: “the shortest”
      Can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace
     Cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice
     Carnal appetites only supported by use and exercise
     Cato said: So many servants, so many enemies
     Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful
     Certain other things that people hide only to show them
     Change is to be feared
     Change of fashions
     Change only gives form to injustice and tyranny
     Cherish themselves most where they are most wrong
     Chess: this idle and childish game
     Chiefly knew himself to be mortal by this act
     Childish ignorance of many very ordinary things
     Children are amused with toys and men with words
     Cicero: on fame
     Civil innocence is measured according to times and places
     Cleave to the side that stood most in need of her
     cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking disordered
     College: a real house of correction of imprisoned youth
     Coming out of the same hole
     Commit themselves to the common fortune
     Common consolation, discourages and softens me
     Common friendships will admit of division
     Conclude the depth of my sense by its obscurity
     Concluding no beauty can be greater than what they see
     Condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul
     Condemn the opposite affirmation equally
     Condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
     Condemning wine, because some people will be drunk
     Confession enervates reproach and disarms slander
     Confidence in another man’s virtue
     Conscience makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves
     Conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature
     Consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy
     Consoles himself upon the utility and eternity of his writings
     Content: more easily found in want than in abundance
     Counterfeit condolings of pretenders
     Courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal--Socrates
     Courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study
     Crafty humility that springs from presumption
     Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty
     Cruelty is the very extreme of all vices
     Culling out of several books the sentences that best please me
     Curiosity and of that eager passion for news
     Curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge
     “Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing”
      Customs and laws make justice
     Dangerous  man you have deprived of all means to escape
     Dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end
     Dearness is a good sauce to meat
     Death can, whenever we please, cut short inconveniences
     Death conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss
     Death discharges us of all our obligations
     Death has us every moment by the throat
     Death is a part of you
     Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato
     Death of old age the most rare and very seldom seen
     Deceit maintains and supplies most men’s employment
     Decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter”
      Defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy
     Defend most the defects with which we are most tainted
     Defer my revenge to another and better time
     Deformity of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation
     Delivered into our own custody the keys of life
     Denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind
     Depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do
     Desire of riches is more sharpened by their use than by the need
     Desire of travel
     Desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled
     Detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us
     Did my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart
     Did not approve all sorts of means to obtain a victory
     Die well--that is, patiently and tranquilly
     Difference betwixt memory and understanding
     Difficulty gives all things their estimation
     Dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press
     Diogenes, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders
     Discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the po
     Disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass
     Disease had arrived at its period or an effect of chance?
     Disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed
     Disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice
     Dissentient and tumultuary drugs
     Diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all
     Diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people
     Do not much blame them for making their advantage of our folly
     Do not to pray that all things may go as we would have them
     Do not, nevertheless, always believe myself
     Do thine own work, and know thyself
     Doctors: more felicity and duration in their own lives?
     Doctrine much more intricate and fantastic than the thing itself
     Dost thou, then, old man, collect food for others’ ears?
     Doubt whether those (old writings) we have be not the worst
     Doubtful ills plague us worst
     Downright and sincere obedience
     Drugs being in its own nature an enemy to our health
     Drunkeness a true and certain trial of every one’s nature
     Dying appears to him a natural and indifferent accident
     Each amongst you has made somebody cuckold
     Eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing imagination
     Education
     Education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness
     Effect and performance are not at all in our power
     Either tranquil life, or happy death
     Eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance
     Emperor Julian, surnamed the Apostate
     Endeavouring to be brief, I become obscure
     Engaged in the avenues of old age, being already past forty
     Enough to do to comfort myself, without having to console others
     Enslave our own contentment to the power of another?
     Enters lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it
     Entertain us with fables: astrologers and physicians
     Epicurus
     Establish this proposition by authority and huffing
     Evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge
     Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves
     Events are a very poor testimony of our worth and parts
     Every abridgment of a good book is a foolish abridgment
     Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it
     Every government has a god at the head of it
     Every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent
     Every place of retirement requires a walk
     Everything has many faces and several aspects
     Examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned
     Excel above the common rate in frivolous things
     Excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others
     Executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices
     Expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
     Extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question
     Extremity of philosophy is hurtful
     Fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand
     Fame: an echo, a dream, nay, the shadow of a dream
     Fancy that others cannot believe otherwise than as he does
     Fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting
     Far more easy and pleasant to follow than to lead
     Fathers conceal their affection from their children
     Fault not to discern how far a man’s worth extends
     Fault will be theirs for having consulted me
     Fear and distrust invite and draw on offence
     Fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself
     Fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself
     Fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
     Fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing
     Fear: begets a terrible astonishment and confusion
     Feared, lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate
     Feminine polity has a mysterious procedure
     Few men have been admired by their own domestics
     Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it
     First informed who were to be the other guests
     First thing to be considered in love matters: a fitting time
     Flatterer in your old age or in your sickness
     Follies do not make me laugh, it is our wisdom which does
     Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition
     Folly of gaping after future things
     Folly satisfied with itself than any reason can reasonably be
     Folly than to be moved and angry at the follies of the world
     Folly to hazard that upon the uncertainty of augmenting it
     Folly to put out their own light and shine by a borrowed lustre
     For fear of the laws and report of men
     For who ever thought he wanted sense?
     Fortune heaped up five or six such-like incidents
     Fortune rules in all things
     Fortune sometimes seems to delight in taking us at our word
     Fortune will still be mistress of events
     Fox, who found fault with what he could not obtain
     Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails
     Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese
     Friendships that the law and natural obligation impose upon us
     Fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed
     Gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain
     Gave them new and more plausible names for their excuse
     Gentleman would play the fool to make a show of defence
     Gently to bear the inconstancy of a lover
     Gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue
     Give but the rind of my attention
     Give me time to recover my strength and health
     Give the ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture
     Give these young wenches the things they long for
     Give us history, more as they receive it than as they believe it
     Giving is an ambitious and authoritative quality
     Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul
     Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside
     Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed
     Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain
     Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one
     Gradations above and below pleasure
     Gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder
     Great presumption to be so fond of one’s own opinions
     Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed
     Greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose
     Greedy humour of new and unknown things
     Grief provokes itself
     Gross impostures of religions
     Guess at our meaning under general and doubtful terms
     Happen to do anything commendable, I attribute it to fortune
     Hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions
     Haste trips up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself
     Hate all sorts of obligation and restraint
     Hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself
     Have ever had a great respect for her I loved
     Have more wherewith to defray my journey, than I have way to go
     Have no other title left me to these things but by the ears
     Have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying?
     Having too good an opinion of our own worth
     He cannot be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked
     He did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern
     He felt a pleasure and delight in so noble an action
     He judged other men by himself
     He may employ his passion, who can make no use of his reason
     He may well go a foot, they say, who leads his horse in his hand
     He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool
     He should discern in himself, as well as in others
     He took himself along with him
     He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears
     He who is only a good man that men may know it
     He who lays the cloth is ever at the charge of the feast
     He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere
     He who provides for all, provides for nothing
     He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course
     He will choose to be alone
     Headache should come before drunkenness
     Health depends upon the vanity and falsity of their promises
     Health is altered and corrupted by their frequent prescriptions
     Health to be worth purchasing by all the most painful cauteries
     Hearing a philosopher talk of military affairs
     Heat and stir up their imagination, and then we find fault
     Help: no other effect than that of lengthening my suffering
     High time to die when there is more ill than good in living
     Hoary head and rivelled face of ancient usage
     Hobbes said that if he Had been at college as long as others--
     Hold a stiff rein upon suspicion
     Home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints
     Homer: The only words that have motion and action
     Honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing
     How infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
     How many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment
     How many more have died before they arrived at thy age
     How many several ways has death to surprise us?
     “How many things,” said he, “I do not desire!”
      How many worthy men have we known to survive their reputation
     How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out
     How much it costs him to do no worse
     How much more insupportable and painful an immortal life
     How uncertain duration these accidental conveniences are
     Humble out of pride
     Husbands hate their wives only because they themselves do wrong
     I always find superfluity superfluous
     I am a little tenderly distrustful of things that I wish
     I am apt to dream that I dream
     I am disgusted with the world I frequent
     I am hard to be got out, but being once upon the road
     I am no longer in condition for any great change
     I am not to be cuffed into belief
     I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable
     I am very glad to find the way beaten before me by others
     I am very willing to quit the government of my house
     I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother
     I can more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any virtue
     I cannot well refuse to play with my dog
     I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle
     I dare not promise but that I may one day be so much a fool
     I do not consider what it is now, but what it was then
     I do not judge opinions by years
     I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather
     I do not say that ‘tis well said, but well thought
     I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback
     I enter into confidence with dying
     I ever justly feared to raise my head too high
     I every day hear fools say things that are not foolish
     I find myself here fettered by the laws of ceremony
     I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion
     I for my part always went the plain way to work
     I grudge nothing but care and trouble
     I had much rather die than live upon charity
     I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age
     I hail and caress truth in what quarter soever I find it
     I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed
     I hate poverty equally with pain
     I have a great aversion from a novelty
     “I have done nothing to-day”--“What? have you not lived?”
      I have lived longer by this one day than I should have done
     I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead
     I have not a wit supple enough to evade a sudden question
     I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment
     I honour those most to whom I show the least honour
     I lay no great stress upon my opinions; or of others
     I look upon death carelessly when I look upon it universally
     I love stout expressions amongst gentle men
     I love temperate and moderate natures
     I need not seek a fool from afar; I can laugh at myself
     I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason
     I receive but little advice, I also give but little
     I scorn to mend myself by halves
     I see no people so soon sick as those who take physic
     I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare
     I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will
     I understand my men even by their silence and smiles
     I was always superstitiously afraid of giving offence
     I was too frightened to be ill
     “I wish you good health”--“No health to thee” replied the other
     I would as willingly be lucky as wise
     I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing
     I write my book for few men and for few years
     Idleness is to me a very painful labour
     Idleness, the mother of corruption
     If a passion once prepossess and seize me, it carries me away
     If I am talking my best, whoever interrupts me, stops me
     If I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it
     If it be a delicious medicine, take it
     If it be the writer’s wit or borrowed from some other
     If nature do not help a little, it is very hard
     If they can only be kind to us out of pity
     If they chop upon one truth, that carries a mighty report
     If they hear no noise, they think men sleep
     If to philosophise be, as ‘tis defined, to doubt
     Ignorance does not offend me, but the foppery of it
     Impotencies that so unseasonably surprise the lover
     Ill luck is good for something
     Imagne the mighty will not abase themselves so much as to live
     Imitating other men’s natures, thou layest aside thy own
     Immoderate either seeking or evading glory or reputation
     Impose them upon me as infallible
     Impostures: very strangeness lends them credit
     Improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair
     Impunity pass with us for justice
     In everything else a man may keep some decorum
     In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy
     In solitude, be company for thyself--Tibullus
     In sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure
     In the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors
     In this last scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting
     In those days, the tailor took measure of it
     In war not to drive an enemy to despair
     Inclination to love one another at the first sight
     Inclination to variety and novelty common to us both
     Incline the history to their own fancy
     Inconsiderate excuses are a kind of self-accusation
     Inconveniences that moderation brings (in civil war)
     Indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us
     Indocile liberty of this member
     Inquisitive after everything
     Insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us
     Insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors
     Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not
     Intemperance is the pest of pleasure
     Intended to get a new husband than to lament the old
     Interdict all gifts betwixt man and wife
     Interdiction incites, and who are more eager, being forbidden
     It (my books) may know many things that are gone from me
     It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in
     It is better to die than to live miserable
     It is no hard matter to get children
     It is not a book to read, ‘tis a book to study and learn
     It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part
     It’s madness to nourish infirmity
     Jealousy: no remedy but flight or patience
     Judge by justice, and choose men by reason
     Judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report
     Judgment of duty principally lies in the will
     Judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser thing
     Justice als takes cognisance of those who glean after the reaper
     Killing is good to frustrate an offence to come, not to revenge
     Knock you down with the authority of their experience
     Knot is not so sure that a man may not half suspect it will slip
     Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment
     Knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as judgment
     Knowledge of others, wherein the honour consists
     Known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new
     Ladies are no sooner ours, than we are no more theirs
     Language: obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts
     Lascivious poet: Homer
     Last death will kill but a half or a quarter of a man
     Law: breeder of altercation and division
     Laws (of Plato on travel), which forbids it after threescore
     Laws cannot subsist without mixture of injustice
     Laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would
     Laws keep up their credit, not for being just--but as laws
     Lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me
     Laying themselves low to avoid the danger of falling
     Learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding
     Learn the theory from those who best know the practice
     Learn what it is right to wish
     Learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds
     Least end of a hair will serve to draw them into my discourse
     Least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole
     Leave society when we can no longer add anything to it
     Leaving nothing unsaid, how home and bitter soever
     Led by the ears by this charming harmony of words
     Lend himself to others, and only give himself to himself
     Lessen the just value of things that I possess
     “Let a man take which course he will,” said he; “he will repent”
      Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man
     Let him be satisfied with correcting himself
     Let him examine every man’s talent
     Let it alone a little
     Let it be permitted to the timid to hope
     Let not us seek illusions from without and unknown
     Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think
     Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; ‘tis in us
     Liberality at the expense of others
     Liberty and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me
     Liberty of poverty
     Liberty to lean, but not to lay our whole weight upon others
     Library: Tis there that I am in my kingdom
     License of judgments is a great disturbance to great affairs
     Life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own
     Life should be cut off in the sound and living part
     Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb
     Light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years
     Little affairs most disturb us
     Little knacks  and frivolous subtleties
     Little learning is needed to form a sound mind--Seneca
     Little less trouble in governing a private family than a kingdom
     Live a quite contrary sort of life to what they prescribe others
     Live at the expense of life itself
     Live, not so long as they please, but as long as they ought
     Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting
     Living well, which of all arts is the greatest
     Llaying the fault upon the patient, by such frivolous reasons
     Lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust
     Long a voyage I should at last run myself into some disadvantage
     Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm
     Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation
     Look on death not only without astonishment but without care
     Look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger
     Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things
     Lose what I have a particular care to lock safe up
     Loses more by defending his vineyard than if he gave it up
     Love is the appetite of generation by the mediation of beauty
     Love shamefully and dishonestly cured by marriage
     Love them the less for our own faults
     Love we bear to our wives is very lawful
     Love, full, lively, and sharp; a pleasure inflamed by difficulty
     Loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men
     Lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence
     Made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure
     Making their advantage of our folly, for most men do the same
     Malice must be employed to correct this arrogant ignorance
     Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom
     Malicious kind of justice
     Man (must)  know that he is his own
     Man after  who held out his pulse to a physician was a fool
     Man can never be wise but by his own wisdom
     Man may say too much even upon the best subjects
     Man may with less trouble adapt himself to entire abstinence
     Man must approach his wife with prudence and temperance
     Man must have a care not to do his master so great service
     Man must learn that he is nothing but a fool
     Man runs a very great hazard in their hands (of physicians)
     Mark of singular good nature to preserve old age
     Marriage
     Marriage rejects the company and conditions of love
     Melancholy: Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?
     Memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
     Men approve of things for their being rare and new
     Men are not always to rely upon the personal confessions
     Men as often commend as undervalue me beyond reason
     Men make them (the rules) without their (women’s) help
     Men must embark, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises
     Men should furnish themselves with such things as would float
     Mercenaries who would receive any (pay)
     Merciful to the man, but not to his wickedness--Aristotle
     Methinks I am no more than half of myself
     Methinks I promise it, if I but say it
     Miracle: everything our reason cannot comprehend
     Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me
     Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature
     Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease!
     Miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself
     Misfortunes that only hurt us by being known
     Mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations
     Moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering
     Modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person (Homer)
     More ado to interpret interpretations
     More books upon books than upon any other subject
     More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment
     More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak
     More supportable to be always alone than never to be so
     More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force
     Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant
     Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry
     Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency
     Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit
     Most of my actions are guided by example, not by choice
     Mothers are too tender
     Motive to some vicious occasion or some prospect of profit
     Much better to offend him once than myself every day
     Much difference betwixt us and ourselves
     Must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves
     Must of necessity walk in the steps of another
     My affection alters, my judgment does not
     My books: from me hold that which I have not retained
     My dog unseasonably importunes me to play
     My fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it
     My humour is no friend to tumult
     My humour is unfit either to speak or write for beginners
     My innocence is a simple one; little vigour and no art
     My mind is easily composed at distance
     My reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are
     My thoughts sleep if I sit still
     My words does but injure the love I have conceived within
     Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen
     Nature of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow
     Nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and sudden
     Nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection
     Nearest to the opinions of those with whom they have to do
     Negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men
     Neither be a burden to myself nor to any other
     Neither continency nor virtue where there are no opposing desire
     Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell
     Neither the courage to die nor the heart to live
     Never any man knew so much, and spake so little
     Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing
     Never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions
     Never oppose them either by word or sign, how false or absurd
     Never represent things to you simply as they are
     Never spoke of my money, but falsely, as others do
     New World: sold it opinions and our arts at a very dear rate
     Nnone that less keep their promise(than physicians)
     No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children
     No beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man
     No danger with them, though they may do us no good
     No doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active
     No effect of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs
     No evil is honourable; but death is honourable
     No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness
     No great choice betwixt not knowing to speak anything but ill--
     No man continues ill long but by his own fault
     No man is free from speaking foolish things
     No man more certain than another of to-morrow--Seneca
     No necessity upon a man to live in necessity
     No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried
     No other foundation or support than public abuse
     No passion so contagious as that of fear
     No physic that has not something hurtful in it
     No use to this age, I throw myself back upon that other
     No way found  to tranquillity that is good in common
     Noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely lodged
     Nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless
     Noise of arms deafened the voice of laws
     None of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil thinks lovable
     Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing
     Nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word
     Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own
     Not a victory that puts not an end to the war
     Not being able to govern events, I govern myself
     Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred
     Not certain to live till I came home
     Not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark
     Not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity
     Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself
     Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No!
     Not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow
     Not melancholic, but meditative
     Not to instruct but to be instructed
     Not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice
     Nothing can be a grievance that is but once
     Nothing falls where all falls
     Nothing is more confident than a bad poet
     Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know
     Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding
     Nothing noble can be performed without danger
     Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation
     Nothing so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws
     Nothing tempts my tears but tears
     Nothing that so poisons as flattery
     Number of fools so much exceeds the wise
     O Athenians, what this man says, I will do
     O my friends, there is no friend: Aristotle
     O wretched men, whose pleasures are a crime
     O, the furious advantage of opportunity!
     Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who reasons and disputes
     Obliged to his age for having weaned him from pleasure
     Observed the laws of marriage, than I either promised or expect
     Obstinacy and contention are common qualities
     Obstinacy is the sister of constancy
     Obstinancy and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly
     Obstinate in growing worse
     Occasion to La Boetie to write his “Voluntary Servitude”
      Occasions of the least lustre are ever the most dangerous
     Occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal cause
     Of the fleeting years each steals something from me
     Office of magnanimity openly and professedly to love and hate
     Oftentimes agitated with divers passions
     Old age: applaud the past and condemn the present
     Old men who retain the memory of things past
     Omit, as incredible, such things as they do not understand
     On all occasions to contradict and oppose
     One door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out
     One may be humble out of pride
     One may more boldly dare what nobody thinks you dare
     One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present
     One must first know what is his own and what is not
     Only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent
     Only secure harbour from the storms and tempests of life
     Only set the humours they would purge more violently in work
     Open speaking draws out discoveries, like wine and love
     Opinions they have of things and not by the things themselves
     Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust
     Opposition and contradiction entertain and nourish them
     Option now of continuing in life or of completing the voyage
     Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better
     Order it so that your virtue may conquer your misfortune
     Ordinances it (Medicine) foists upon us
     Ordinary friendships, you are to walk with bridle in your hand
     Ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life
     Others adore all of their own side
     Ought not only to have his hands, but his eyes, too, chaste
     Ought not to expect much either from his vigilance or power
     Ought to withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd
     Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning
     Our fancy does what it will, both with itself and us
     Our judgments are yet sick
     Our justice presents to us but one hand
     Our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation
     Our qualities have no title but in comparison
     Our will is more obstinate by being opposed
     Over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy
     Overvalue things, because they are foreign, absent
     Owe ourselves chiefly and mostly to ourselves
     Passion has a more absolute command over us than reason
     Passion has already confounded his judgment
     Passion of dandling and caressing infants scarcely born
     Pay very strict usury who did not in due time pay the principal
     People are willing to be gulled in what they desire
     People conceiving they have right and title to be judges
     Perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible
     Perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men
     Perfection: but I will not buy it so dear as it costs
     Perpetual scolding of his wife (of Socrates)
     Petulant madness contends with itself
     Philopoemen: paying the penalty of my ugliness
     Philosophy
     Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood
     Philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
     Philosophy is that which instructs us to live
     Philosophy looked upon as a vain and fantastic name
     Phusicians cure by by misery and pain
     Physic
     Physician worse physicked
     Physician: pass through all the diseases he pretends to cure
     Physician’s “help”, which is very often an obstacle
     Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick
     Physicians fear men should at any time escape their authority
     Physicians were the only men who might lie at pleasure
     Physicians: earth covers their failures
     Pinch the secret strings of our imperfections
     Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law
     Pity is reputed a vice amongst the Stoics
     Plato angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking
     Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age
     Plato said of the Egyptians, that they were all physicians
     Plato says, that the gods made man for their sport
     Plato will have nobody marry before thirty
     Plato: lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country
     Plays of children are not performed in play
     Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit
     Pleasure of telling (a pleasure little inferior to that of doing
     Possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules
     Practical Jokes: Tis unhandsome to fight in play
     Preachers very often work more upon their auditory than  reasons
     Preface to bribe the benevolence of the courteous reader
     Prefer in bed, beauty before goodness
     Preferring the universal and common tie to all national ties
     Premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty
     Prepare ourselves against the preparations of death
     Present Him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue
     Present himself with a halter about his neck to the people
     Presumptive knowledge by silence
     Pretending to find out the cause of every accident
     Priest shall on the wedding-day open the way to the bride
     Proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world
     Profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit
     Profit made only at the expense of another
     Prolong his life also prolonged and augmented his pain
     Prolong your misery an hour or two
     Prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent
     Prudent man, when I imagine him in this posture
     Psalms of King David: promiscuous, indiscreet
     Public weal requires that men should betray, and lie
     Puerile simplicities of our children
     Pure cowardice that makes our belief so pliable
     Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties
     Pyrrho’s hog
     Quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams
     Rage compelled to excuse itself by a pretence of good-will
     Rage it puts them to oppose silence and coldness to their fury
     Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom
     Rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so
     Rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory
     Rather prating of another man’s province than his own
     Reading those books, converse with the great and heroic souls
     Reasons often anticipate the effect
     Recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear purchase
     Refusin  to justify, excuse, or explain myself
     Regret so honourable a post, where necessity must make them bold
     Remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest
     Represented her a little too passionate for a married Venus
     Reputation: most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes
     Repute for value in them, not what they bring to us
     Reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free
     Resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience
     Rest satisfied, without desire of prolongation of life or name
     Restoring what has been lent us, wit  usury and accession
     Revenge more wounds our children than it heals us
     Revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties
     Reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms
     Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive
     Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble
     Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow
     Ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them
     Right of command appertains to the beautiful-Aristotle
     Rome was more valiant before she grew so learned
     Rowers who so advance backward
     Rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact
     Same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago
     Satisfaction of mind to have only one path to walk in
     Satisfied and pleased with and in themselves
     Say of some compositions that they stink of oil and of the lamp
     Scratching is one of nature’s sweetest gratifications
     Season a denial with asperity, suspense, or favour
     See how flexible our reason is
     Seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives
     Seeming anger, for the better governing of my house
     Send us to the better air of some other country
     Sense: no one who is not contented with his share
     Setting too great a value upon ourselves
     Setting too little a value upon others
     Settled my thoughts to live upon less than I have
     Sex: To put fools and wise men, beasts and us, on a level
     Shake the truth of our Church by the vices of her ministers
     Shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty
     Sharps and sweets of marriage, are kept secret by the wise
     She who only refuses, because ‘tis forbidden, consents
     Shelter my own weakness under these great reputations
     Short of the foremost, but before the last
     Should first have mended their breeches
     Silence, therefore, and modesty are very advantageous qualities
     Silent mien procured the credit of prudence and capacity
     Sins that make the least noise are the worst
     Sitting betwixt two stools
     Slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk
     Sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of the soul
     Smile upon us whilst we are alive
     So austere and very wise countenance and carriage--of physicians
     So many trillions of men, buried before us
     So much are men enslaved to their miserable being
     So that I could have said no worse behind their backs
     So weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him
     Socrates kept a confounded scolding wife
     Socrates: According to what a man can
     Soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity
     Solon said that eating was physic against the malady hunger
     Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is dead
     some people rude, by being overcivil  in their courtesy
     Some wives covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers
     Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind
     Souls that are regular and strong of themselves are rare
     Sparing and an husband of his knowledge
     Speak less of one’s self than what one really is is folly
     Spectators can claim no interest in the honour and pleasure
     Stilpo lost wife, children, and goods
     Stilpo: thank God, nothing was lost of his
     Strangely suspect all this merchandise: medical care
     Strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment
     Studied, when young, for ostentation, now for diversion
     Studies, to teach me to do, and not to write
     Study makes me sensible how much I have to learn
     Study of books is a languishing and feeble motion
     Study to declare what is justice, but never took care to do it
     Stumble upon a truth amongst an infinite number of lies
     Stupidity and facility natural to the common people
     Style wherewith men establish religions and laws
     Subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doub
     Such a recipe as they will not take themselves
     Suffer my judgment to be made captive by prepossession
     Suffer those inconveniences which are not possibly to be avoided
     Sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe
     Suicide: a morsel that is to be swallowed without chewing
     Superstitiously to seek out in the stars the ancient causes
     Swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking
     Swim in troubled waters without fishing in them
     Take a pleasure in being uninterested in other men’s affairs
     Take all things at the worst, and to resolve to bear that worst
     Take my last leave of every place I depart from
     Take two sorts of grist out of the same sack
     Taking things upon trust from vulgar opinion
     Taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance
     Taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death
     Tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments
     Testimony of the truth from minds prepossessed by custom?
     That he could neither read nor swim
     That looks a nice well-made shoe to you
     That we may live, we cease to live
     That which cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge
     The action is commendable, not the man
     The age we live in produces but very indifferent things
     The authors, with whom I converse
     The Babylonians carried their sick into the public square
     The best authors too much humble and discourage me
     The Bible: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it
     The cause of truth ought to be the common cause
     The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine
     The consequence of common examples
     The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave
     The deadest deaths are the best
     The event often justifies a very foolish conduct
     The faintness that surprises in the exercises of Venus
     The gods sell us all the goods they give us
     The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious
     The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour
     The ignorant return from the combat full of joy and triumph
     The impulse of nature, which is a rough counsellor
     The last informed is better persuaded than the first
     The mean is best
     The mind grows costive and thick in growing old
     The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness
     The most voluntary death is the finest
     The particular error first makes the public error
     The pedestal is no part of the statue
     The privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age
     The reward of a thing well done is to have done it
     The satiety of living, inclines a man to desire to die
     The sick man has not to complain who has his cure in his sleeve
     The storm is only begot by a concurrence of angers
     The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear
     The very name Liberality sounds of Liberty
     The vice opposite to curiosity is negligence
     The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high
     Their disguises and figures only serve to cosen fools
     Their labour is not to delivery, but about conception
     Their pictures are not here who were cast away
     Their souls seek repose in agitation
     There are defeats more triumphant than victories
     There are some upon whom their rich clothes weep
     There can be no pleasure to me without communication
     There is more trouble in keeping money than in getting it
     There is no allurement like modesty, if it be not rude
     There is no long, nor short, to things that are no more
     There is no merchant that always gains
     There is no reason that has not its contrary
     There is no recompense becomes virtue
     There is none of us who would not be worse than kings
     There is nothing I hate so much as driving a bargain
     There is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections
     There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature
     These sleepy, sluggish sort of men are often the most dangerous
     They (good women) are not by the dozen, as every one knows
     They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living
     They better conquer us by flying
     They buy a cat in a sack
     They can neither lend nor give anything to one another
     They do not see my heart, they see but my countenance
     They err as much who too much forbear Venus
     They gently name them, so they patiently endure them (diseases)
     They have heard, they have seen, they have done so and so
     They have not one more invention left wherewith to amuse us
     They have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected
     They have yet touched nothing of that which is mine
     They juggle and trifle in all their discourses at our expense
     They must be very hard to please, if they are not contented
     They must become insensible and invisible to satisfy us
     They neither instruct us to think well nor to do well
     They never loved them till dead
     They who would fight custom with grammar are triflers
     Thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure
     Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen
     Things I say are better than those I write
     Things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand
     Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect
     Things that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves
     Think myself no longer worth my own care
     Think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have me
     Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done
     Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful
     This decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome
     This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other
     Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures
     Those oppressed with sorrow sometimes surprised by a smile
     Those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be fear
     Those who can please and hug themselves in what they do
     Those within (marriage) despair of getting out
     Thou diest because thou art living
     Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much
     Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not tie the world unto it
     Though nobody should read me, have I wasted time
     Threats of the day of judgment
     Thucydides: which was the better wrestler
     Thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain
     Tis all swine’s flesh, varied by sauces
     Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private
     Tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance--Augustine
     Tis evil counsel that will admit no change
     Tis far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it
     Tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions
     Tis impossible to deal fairly with a fool
     Tis in some sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living well
     Tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good
     Tis no matter; it may be of use to some others
     Tis not the cause, but their interest, that inflames them
     Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men
     Tis said of Epimenides, that he always prophesied backward
     Tis so I melt and steal away from myself
     Tis the sharpnss of our mind that gives the edge to our pains
     Tis then no longer correction, but revenge
     Tis there she talks plain French
     Titillation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing others suffer
     Title of barbarism to everything that is not familiar
     Titles being so dearly bought
     Titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter
     To be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self
     To be, not to seem
     To condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption
     To contemn what we do not comprehend
     To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular
     To do well where there was danger was the proper office
     To forbear doing is often as generous as to do
     To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t
     To fret and vex at folly, as I do, is folly itself
     To give a currency to his little pittance of learning
     To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word
     To keep me from dying is not in your power
     To kill men, a clear and strong light is required
     To know by rote, is no knowledge
     To make little things appear great was his profession
     To make their private advantage at the public expense
     To smell, though well, is to stink
     To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
     To what friend dare you intrust your griefs
     To whom no one is ill who can be good?
     Tongue will grow too stiff to bend
     Too contemptible to be punished
     Torture: rather a trial of patience than of truth
     Totally brutified by an immoderate thirst after knowledge
     Transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
     Travel with not only a necessary, but a handsome equipage
     True liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself
     Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle
     Truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
     Truth, that for being older it is none the wiser
     Turks have alms and hospitals for beasts
     Turn up my eyes to heaven to return thanks, than to crave
     Tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we meet
     Twas a happy marriage betwixt a blind wife and a deaf husband
     Twenty people prating about him when he is at stool
     Two opinions alike, no more than two hairs
     Two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment
     Tyrannic sourness not to endure a form contrary to one’s own
     Tyrannical authority physicians usurp over poor creatures
     Unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything
     Under fortune’s favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace
     Universal judgments that I see so common, signify nothing
     Unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours
     Unjust to exact from me what I do not owe
     Upon the precipice, ‘tis no matter who gave you the push
     Use veils from us the true aspect of things
     Utility of living consists not in the length of days
     Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues
     Valour whetted and enraged by mischance
     Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear
     Valuing the interest of discipline
     Vast distinction betwixt devotion and conscience
     Venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him
     venture the making ourselves better without any danger
     Very idea we invent for their chastity is ridiculous
     Vice of confining their belief to their own capacity
     Vices will cling together, if a man have not a care
     Victorious envied the conquered
     Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together
     Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality
     Virtue is much strengthened by combats
     Virtue refuses facility for a companion
     Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age
     Voice and determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance
     Vulgar reports and opinions that drive us on
     We are masters of nothing but the will
     We are not to judge of counsels by events
     We ask most when we bring least
     We believe we do not believe
     We can never be despised according to our full desert
     We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform
     We confess our ignorance in many things
     We consider our death as a very great thing
     We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him
     We do not easily accept the medicine we understand
     We do not go, we are driven
     We do not so much forsake vices as we change them
     We have lived enough for others
     We have more curiosity than capacity
     We have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death
     We have not the thousandth part of ancient writings
     We have taught the ladies to blush
     We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool
     We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade
     We neither see far forward nor far backward
     We only labour to stuff the memory
     We ought to grant free passage to diseases
     We say a good marriage because no one says to the contrary
     We set too much value upon ourselves
     We still carry our fetters along with us
     We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust
     Weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy
     Weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of obligation
     Well, and what if it had been death itself?
     Were more ambitious of a great reputation than of a good one
     What a man says should be what he thinks
     What are become of all our brave philosophical precepts?
     What can they not do, what do they fear to do (for beauty)
     What can they suffer who do not fear to die?
     What did I say?  that I have?  no, Chremes, I had
     What he did by nature and accident, he cannot do by design
     What is more accidental than reputation?
     What may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day
     What more?  they lie with their lovers learnedly
     What need have they of anything but to live beloved and honoured
     What sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another”
      What step ends the near and what step begins the remote
     What they ought to do when they come to be men
     What we have not seen, we are forced to receive from other hands
     What, shall so much knowledge be lost
     Whatever was not ordinary diet, was instead of a drug
     When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself
     When jealousy seizes these poor souls
     When their eyes give the lie to their tongue
     When time begins to wear things out of memory
     When we have got it, we want something else
     “When will this man be wise,” said he, “if he is yet learning?”
      When you see me moved first, let me alone, right or wrong
     Where the lion’s skin is too short
     Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too
     Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder
     Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some great thing
     Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead
     Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word
     Who can  flee from himself
     Who discern no riches but in pomp and show
     Who does not boast of some rare recipe
     Who escapes being talked of at the same rate
     Who ever saw one physician approve of another’s prescription
     Who has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise
     Who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his end
     Whoever expects punishment already suffers it
     Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it
     Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger
     Whosoever despises his own life, is always master
     Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture?
     Wide of the mark in judging of their own works
     Willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead
     Willingly slip the collar of command upon any pretence whatever
     Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation
     Wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common
     Wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can
     Wise man never loses anything if he have himself
     Wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the impetus of friendship
     Wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise
     Wise whose invested money is visible in beautiful villas
     Wiser who only know what is needful for them to know
     With being too well I am about to die
     Woman who goes to bed to a man, must put off her modesty
     Women who paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins
     Wont to give others their life, and not to receive it
     World where loyalty of one’s own children is unknown
     Worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind
     Would have every one in his party blind or a blockhead
     Would in this affair have a man a little play the servant
     Wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself
     Wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others
     Write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more
     Wrong the just side when they go about to assist it with fraud
     Yet at least for ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition
     Yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating?
     You and companion are theatre enough to one another
     You have lost a good captain, to make of him a bad general
     You may indeed make me die an ill death
     You must first see us die
     You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse
     Young and old die upon the same terms
     Young are to make their preparations, the old to enjoy them





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Turn of the Screw

Author: Henry James

Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #209]
Release Date: February, 1995
Last Updated: September 18, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURN OF THE SCREW ***




Produced by Judith Boss





THE TURN OF THE SCREW

by Henry James


[The text is take from the first American appearance of this book.]





THE TURN OF THE SCREW


The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but
except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve
in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no
comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case
he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I
may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had
gathered us for the occasion--an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a
little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the
terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to
sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded
in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation
that drew from Douglas--not immediately, but later in the evening--a
reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention.
Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was
not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to
produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two
nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out
what was in his mind.

“I quite agree--in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was--that
its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a
particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming
kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect
another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children--?”

“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they give two turns! Also
that we want to hear about them.”

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to
present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in
his pockets. “Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite too
horrible.” This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the
thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his
triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s
beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss
how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little
wincing grimace. “For dreadful--dreadfulness!”

“Oh, how delicious!” cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me,
he saw what he spoke of. “For general uncanny ugliness and horror and
pain.”

“Well then,” I said, “just sit right down and begin.”

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an
instant. Then as he faced us again: “I can’t begin. I shall have to send
to town.” There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after
which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. “The story’s written. It’s
in a locked drawer--it has not been out for years. I could write to my
man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it.”
 It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this--appeared
almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness
of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long
silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples
that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree
with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in
question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. “Oh, thank
God, no!”

“And is the record yours? You took the thing down?”

“Nothing but the impression. I took that HERE”--he tapped his heart.
“I’ve never lost it.”

“Then your manuscript--?”

“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.” He hung fire
again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the
pages in question before she died.” They were all listening now, and
of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the
inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also
without irritation. “She was a most charming person, but she was ten
years older than I. She was my sister’s governess,” he quietly said.
“She was the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position;
she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this
episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on
my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year--it was a
beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in
the garden--talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh
yes; don’t grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think
she liked me, too. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had
never told anyone. It wasn’t simply that she said so, but that I knew
she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll easily judge why when you
hear.”

“Because the thing had been such a scare?”

He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated: “YOU will.”

I fixed him, too. “I see. She was in love.”

He laughed for the first time. “You ARE acute. Yes, she was in love.
That is, she had been. That came out--she couldn’t tell her story
without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of
us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place--the corner of the
lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon.
It wasn’t a scene for a shudder; but oh--!” He quitted the fire and
dropped back into his chair.

“You’ll receive the packet Thursday morning?” I inquired.

“Probably not till the second post.”

“Well then; after dinner--”

“You’ll all meet me here?” He looked us round again. “Isn’t anybody
going?” It was almost the tone of hope.

“Everybody will stay!”

“_I_ will”--and “_I_ will!” cried the ladies whose departure had been
fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more
light. “Who was it she was in love with?”

“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.

“Oh, I can’t wait for the story!”

“The story WON’T tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.”

“More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”

“Won’t YOU tell, Douglas?” somebody else inquired.

He sprang to his feet again. “Yes--tomorrow. Now I must go to bed.
Good night.” And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly
bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on
the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. “Well, if I don’t know who she
was in love with, I know who HE was.”

“She was ten years older,” said her husband.

“Raison de plus--at that age! But it’s rather nice, his long reticence.”

“Forty years!” Griffin put in.

“With this outbreak at last.”

“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday
night;” and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost
all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete
and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
“candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed.

I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of--or perhaps
just on account of--the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and
indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again
before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the
previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read
us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue.
Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative,
from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death--when it was in
sight--committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began
to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn’t, of course, thank
heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several
daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking
service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already
placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person
proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley
Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing--this prospective patron
proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as
had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered,
anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type;
it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant,
offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and
splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she
afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of
favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him
as rich, but as fearfully extravagant--saw him all in a glow of high
fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with
women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the
spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his
country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her
immediately to proceed.

He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to
a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military
brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the
strangest of chances for a man in his position--a lone man without the
right sort of experience or a grain of patience--very heavily on his
hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a
series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done
all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the
proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there,
from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them,
parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down
himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward
thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his
own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly,
which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little
establishment--but below stairs only--an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose,
whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid
to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time
as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of her
own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were plenty of people
to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess
would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to look
after the small boy, who had been for a term at school--young as he was
to be sent, but what else could be done?--and who, as the holidays were
about to begin, would be back from one day to the other. There had
been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the
misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully--she was a
most respectable person--till her death, the great awkwardness of which
had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles.
Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as
she could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a
dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise
thoroughly respectable.

So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question.
“And what did the former governess die of?--of so much respectability?”

Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t
anticipate.”

“Excuse me--I thought that was just what you ARE doing.”

“In her successor’s place,” I suggested, “I should have wished to learn
if the office brought with it--”

“Necessary danger to life?” Douglas completed my thought. “She did wish
to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned.
Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was
young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated--took a couple of
days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded
her modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she
engaged.” And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of
the company, moved me to throw in--

“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the
splendid young man. She succumbed to it.”

He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave
a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us.
“She saw him only twice.”

“Yes, but that’s just the beauty of her passion.”

A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. “It WAS
the beauty of it. There were others,” he went on, “who hadn’t succumbed.
He told her frankly all his difficulty--that for several applicants the
conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It
sounded dull--it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his
main condition.”

“Which was--?”

“That she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appeal
nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let
him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when,
for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for
the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded.”

“But was that all her reward?” one of the ladies asked.

“She never saw him again.”

“Oh!” said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was
the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the
next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened
the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole
thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the
same lady put another question. “What is your title?”

“I haven’t one.”

“Oh, _I_ have!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to
read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the
beauty of his author’s hand.




I


I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a
little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town,
to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days--found
myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this
state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that
carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle
from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and
I found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in
waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country
to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome, my
fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue, encountered
a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had
sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so melancholy
that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a most pleasant
impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains
and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright
flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered
treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The
scene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scant
home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in
her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had
been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley
Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made
me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I
was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise.

I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the
spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to
do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I
afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I slept
little that night--I was too much excited; and this astonished me, too,
I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with
which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best in
the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured
draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see
myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the extraordinary charm of
my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as
well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in
a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather
brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might have
made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being so glad
to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so glad--stout,
simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman--as to be positively on her guard
against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she
should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with suspicion,
might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the
vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to
do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times
rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect;
to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such
portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen,
while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the
possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without,
but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I
believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been
another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage,
before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked
enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom,
I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come
back to me. To watch, teach, “form” little Flora would too evidently
be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us
downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter
of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to that
end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and
she had remained, just this last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect
of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural
timidity. In spite of this timidity--which the child herself, in the
oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about,
allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the
deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael’s holy infants, to be
discussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us--I feel quite sure
she would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs.
Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration
and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil,
in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread
and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora’s presence could
pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and
roundabout allusions.

“And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?”

One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, MOST remarkable. If you think
well of this one!”--and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.

“Yes; if I do--?”

“You WILL be carried away by the little gentleman!”

“Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I’m
afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m rather
easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”

I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “In Harley
Street?”

“In Harley Street.”

“Well, miss, you’re not the first--and you won’t be the last.”

“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being the only one. My
other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow--Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under
care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took
her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank
heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the
scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new
circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had
not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly,
a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this agitation,
certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first duty was, by
the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of
knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her,
to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might
show me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room and
secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and
with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends.
Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little tour, with
her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dull
corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the
summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her
morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she
asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left
it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now
appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with her
hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and
pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited
by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the
young idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn’t it
just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a
big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of
a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I had
the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a
great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!




II


This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for
an incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply
disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have
expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension.
The postbag, that evening--it came late--contained a letter for me,
which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be composed but
of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a seal
still unbroken. “This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the
headmaster’s an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind
you don’t report. Not a word. I’m off!” I broke the seal with a great
effort--so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took the
unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just before
going to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me
a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next day, I
was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me that I
determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.

“What does it mean? The child’s dismissed his school.”

She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t they all--?”

“Sent home--yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at
all.”

Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. “They won’t take him?”

“They absolutely decline.”

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
fill with good tears. “What has he done?”

I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter--which,
however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her
hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. “Such things are not for me,
miss.”

My counselor couldn’t read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated
as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then,
faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my
pocket. “Is he really BAD?”

The tears were still in her eyes. “Do the gentlemen say so?”

“They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning.”
 Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what
this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some
coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went
on: “That he’s an injury to the others.”

At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed
up. “Master Miles! HIM an injury?”

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea.
I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot,
sarcastically. “To his poor little innocent mates!”

“It’s too dreadful,” cried Mrs. Grose, “to say such cruel things! Why,
he’s scarce ten years old.”

“Yes, yes; it would be incredible.”

She was evidently grateful for such a profession. “See him, miss, first.
THEN believe it!” I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was
the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen
almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had
produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. “You might as
well believe it of the little lady. Bless her,” she added the next
moment--“LOOK at her!”

I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established
in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy of
nice “round o’s,” now presented herself to view at the open door.
She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from
disagreeable duties, looking to me, however, with a great childish
light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had
conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she should
follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of
Mrs. Grose’s comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her
with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.

Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to
approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy
she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the
staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her,
holding her there with a hand on her arm. “I take what you said to me at
noon as a declaration that YOU’VE never known him to be bad.”

She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very
honestly, adopted an attitude. “Oh, never known him--I don’t pretend
THAT!”

I was upset again. “Then you HAVE known him--?”

“Yes indeed, miss, thank God!”

On reflection I accepted this. “You mean that a boy who never is--?”

“Is no boy for ME!”

I held her tighter. “You like them with the spirit to be naughty?” Then,
keeping pace with her answer, “So do I!” I eagerly brought out. “But not
to the degree to contaminate--”

“To contaminate?”--my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. “To
corrupt.”

She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh.
“Are you afraid he’ll corrupt YOU?” She put the question with such a
fine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match
her own, I gave way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.

But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in
another place. “What was the lady who was here before?”

“The last governess? She was also young and pretty--almost as young and
almost as pretty, miss, even as you.”

“Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!” I recollect
throwing off. “He seems to like us young and pretty!”

“Oh, he DID,” Mrs. Grose assented: “it was the way he liked everyone!”
 She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. “I mean
that’s HIS way--the master’s.”

I was struck. “But of whom did you speak first?”

She looked blank, but she colored. “Why, of HIM.”

“Of the master?”

“Of who else?”

There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my
impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I
merely asked what I wanted to know. “Did SHE see anything in the boy--?”

“That wasn’t right? She never told me.”

I had a scruple, but I overcame it. “Was she careful--particular?”

Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. “About some
things--yes.”

“But not about all?”

Again she considered. “Well, miss--she’s gone. I won’t tell tales.”

“I quite understand your feeling,” I hastened to reply; but I thought
it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: “Did she
die here?”

“No--she went off.”

I don’t know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose’s that struck
me as ambiguous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose looked straight out of
the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what
young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. “She was taken ill,
you mean, and went home?”

“She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it,
at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday,
to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We
had then a young woman--a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good
girl and clever; and SHE took the children altogether for the interval.
But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I was
expecting her I heard from the master that she was dead.”

I turned this over. “But of what?”

“He never told me! But please, miss,” said Mrs. Grose, “I must get to my
work.”




III


Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem.
We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever
on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I
then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to
me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and
I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the
inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the
instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same
positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment,
seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had
put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for
him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to
my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same
degree in any child--his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in
the world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name
with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to
Bly with him I remained merely bewildered--so far, that is, as I was not
outraged--by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in
a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I
declared to her that it was grotesque.

She promptly understood me. “You mean the cruel charge--?”

“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!”

She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. “I assure
you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?” she immediately
added.

“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind. “Nothing.”

“And to his uncle?”

I was incisive. “Nothing.”

“And to the boy himself?”

I was wonderful. “Nothing.”

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. “Then I’ll stand by
you. We’ll see it out.”

“We’ll see it out!” I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a
vow.

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. “Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom--”

“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall
the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a
little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I
accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the
far and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a
great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance,
my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with
a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of beginning.
I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I framed for the
end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies. Lessons with me,
indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that he was to have;
but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my
own. I learned something--at first, certainly--that had not been one
of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and
even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in
a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music
of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was
consideration--and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap--not
designed, but deep--to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my
vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture
it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little
trouble--they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to
speculate--but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how the
rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might
bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as
if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the
blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and
protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take
for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden
and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke
into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness--that hush in
which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the
spring of a beast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final
retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this
hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all
when, as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day lingered and
the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the
old trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with
a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity
of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself
tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my
discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving
pleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the person to whose pressure
I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and
directly asked of me, and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even a
greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short,
a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would
more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front
to the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children
were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts
that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me
in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story
suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a
path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more
than that--I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure
he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome
face. That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the face
was--when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June
day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming
into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot--and with a shock
much greater than any vision had allowed for--was the sense that my
imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!--but high
up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that
first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of
a pair--square, incongruous, crenelated structures--that were
distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference,
as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were
probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by
not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in
their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a
respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could
all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk,
by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an
elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person
I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of
vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can
hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object
of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me
was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I knew as
it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in
Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the
strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of
its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement
here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole
feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in--what I did
take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can
hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening
dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly
hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change
in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger
sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air,
and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a
picture in a frame. That’s how I thought, with extraordinary quickness,
of each person that he might have been and that he was not. We were
confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself
with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability
to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard
to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well,
this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at
a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better,
that I could see, in there having been in the house--and for how long,
above all?--a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I
just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there
should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this
visitant, at all events--and there was a touch of the strange freedom,
as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat--seemed
to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too
far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at
shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have
been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the
angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and
with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I
form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the
spectacle, he slowly changed his place--passed, looking at me hard
all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the
sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me,
and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from
one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but
less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned
away; that was all I knew.




IV


It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly--a mystery
of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in
a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my
collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had
quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and
driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three
miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this
mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular
part of it, in fact--singular as the rest had been--was the part I
became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes
back to me in the general train--the impression, as I received it on my
return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and
with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of
my friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to
me straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere
relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could
bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected
in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow
measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself
hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to
me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I
may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot,
accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for
a reason that I couldn’t then have phrased, achieved an inward
resolution--offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea
of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as
soon as possible to my room.

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
affair enough. There were hours, from day to day--or at least there were
moments, snatched even from clear duties--when I had to shut myself up
to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could
bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the truth
I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I could
arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been so
inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned. It
took little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry
and without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had
suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of
three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not
been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any “game.”
 Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing was known around me. There was
but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That
was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say
to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some
unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way in
unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then
stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that
was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that
we should surely see no more of him.

This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming
work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and
through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throw
myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a
constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original
fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray
prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no
long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself as
daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of
the schoolroom. I don’t mean by this, of course, that we studied
only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sort
of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except by
saying that instead of growing used to them--and it’s a marvel for a
governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!--I made constant fresh
discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these
discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the
boy’s conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted,
to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the
truth to say that--without a word--he himself had cleared it up. He had
made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the
real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the
little horrid, unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it. I
reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities
of quality, always, on the part of the majority--which could include
even stupid, sordid headmasters--turn infallibly to the vindictive.

Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it
never made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I express it?--almost
impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs
of the anecdote, who had--morally, at any rate--nothing to whack! I
remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no
history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in
this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet
extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have
seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a second
suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really been
chastised. If he had been wicked he would have “caught” it, and I should
have caught it by the rebound--I should have found the trace. I found
nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of his
school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was
quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under the
spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly
knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any
pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of
disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But with
my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the question
I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by their
loveliness.

There was a Sunday--to get on--when it rained with such force and for so
many hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequence
of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that,
should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the late
service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which,
through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a matter
of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall,
I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that
had received them--with a publicity perhaps not edifying--while I sat
with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that
cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the “grown-up” dining room.
The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them.
The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it
enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair
near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become
aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight
in. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous;
it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had
already appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won’t say
greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that
represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met
him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same,
and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the
window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down
to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass,
yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how
intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enough
to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been
looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however,
happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face,
through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but
it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it
fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the
added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He
had come for someone else.

The flash of this knowledge--for it was knowledge in the midst of
dread--produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stood
there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because
I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the
door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the
drive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned
a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now--my
visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief
of this; but I took in the whole scene--I gave him time to reappear. I
call it time, but how long was it? I can’t speak to the purpose today
of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me:
they couldn’t have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. The
terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I
could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were
shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt
that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not
there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively,
instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was
confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had
stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had
looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what
his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before,
came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of
what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she
pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that
I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had
blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just MY lines,
and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I
should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited
I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to
mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.




V


Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she
loomed again into view. “What in the name of goodness is the matter--?”
 She was now flushed and out of breath.

I said nothing till she came quite near. “With me?” I must have made a
wonderful face. “Do I show it?”

“You’re as white as a sheet. You look awful.”

I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My
need to respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose’s had dropped, without a rustle,
from my shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what
I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard
a little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in
the shy heave of her surprise. “You came for me for church, of course,
but I can’t go.”

“Has anything happened?”

“Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?”

“Through this window? Dreadful!”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve been frightened.” Mrs. Grose’s eyes expressed
plainly that SHE had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her
place not to be ready to share with me any marked inconvenience. Oh,
it was quite settled that she MUST share! “Just what you saw from the
dining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What _I_ saw--just
before--was much worse.”

Her hand tightened. “What was it?”

“An extraordinary man. Looking in.”

“What extraordinary man?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. “Then where is he gone?”

“I know still less.”

“Have you seen him before?”

“Yes--once. On the old tower.”

She could only look at me harder. “Do you mean he’s a stranger?”

“Oh, very much!”

“Yet you didn’t tell me?”

“No--for reasons. But now that you’ve guessed--”

Mrs. Grose’s round eyes encountered this charge. “Ah, I haven’t
guessed!” she said very simply. “How can I if YOU don’t imagine?”

“I don’t in the very least.”

“You’ve seen him nowhere but on the tower?”

“And on this spot just now.”

Mrs. Grose looked round again. “What was he doing on the tower?”

“Only standing there and looking down at me.”

She thought a minute. “Was he a gentleman?”

I found I had no need to think. “No.” She gazed in deeper wonder. “No.”

“Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?”

“Nobody--nobody. I didn’t tell you, but I made sure.”

She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It
only went indeed a little way. “But if he isn’t a gentleman--”

“What IS he? He’s a horror.”

“A horror?”

“He’s--God help me if I know WHAT he is!”

Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier
distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt
inconsequence. “It’s time we should be at church.”

“Oh, I’m not fit for church!”

“Won’t it do you good?”

“It won’t do THEM--! I nodded at the house.

“The children?”

“I can’t leave them now.”

“You’re afraid--?”

I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of HIM.”

Mrs. Grose’s large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the
faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out
in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that
was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought
instantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to be
connected with the desire she presently showed to know more. “When was
it--on the tower?”

“About the middle of the month. At this same hour.”

“Almost at dark,” said Mrs. Grose.

“Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you.”

“Then how did he get in?”

“And how did he get out?” I laughed. “I had no opportunity to ask him!
This evening, you see,” I pursued, “he has not been able to get in.”

“He only peeps?”

“I hope it will be confined to that!” She had now let go my hand; she
turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: “Go to
church. Goodbye. I must watch.”

Slowly she faced me again. “Do you fear for them?”

We met in another long look. “Don’t YOU?” Instead of answering she came
nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the glass.
“You see how he could see,” I meanwhile went on.

She didn’t move. “How long was he here?”

“Till I came out. I came to meet him.”

Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face.
“_I_ couldn’t have come out.”

“Neither could I!” I laughed again. “But I did come. I have my duty.”

“So have I mine,” she replied; after which she added: “What is he like?”

“I’ve been dying to tell you. But he’s like nobody.”

“Nobody?” she echoed.

“He has no hat.” Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with
a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to
stroke. “He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long
in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers
that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they
look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes
are sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather
small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and
except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a
sort of sense of looking like an actor.”

“An actor!” It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs.
Grose at that moment.

“I’ve never seen one, but so I suppose them. He’s tall, active, erect,”
 I continued, “but never--no, never!--a gentleman.”

My companion’s face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started
and her mild mouth gaped. “A gentleman?” she gasped, confounded,
stupefied: “a gentleman HE?”

“You know him then?”

She visibly tried to hold herself. “But he IS handsome?”

I saw the way to help her. “Remarkably!”

“And dressed--?”

“In somebody’s clothes.” “They’re smart, but they’re not his own.”

She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: “They’re the master’s!”

I caught it up. “You DO know him?”

She faltered but a second. “Quint!” she cried.

“Quint?”

“Peter Quint--his own man, his valet, when he was here!”

“When the master was?”

Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. “He never wore
his hat, but he did wear--well, there were waistcoats missed. They were
both here--last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone.”

I followed, but halting a little. “Alone?”

“Alone with US.” Then, as from a deeper depth, “In charge,” she added.

“And what became of him?”

She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. “He went, too,”
 she brought out at last.

“Went where?”

Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. “God knows where! He
died.”

“Died?” I almost shrieked.

She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter
the wonder of it. “Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.”




VI


It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together
in presence of what we had now to live with as we could--my dreadful
liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my
companion’s knowledge, henceforth--a knowledge half consternation and
half compassion--of that liability. There had been, this evening, after
the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate--there had been, for
either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears
and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual
challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating
together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have
everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to
reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself had
seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but
the governess was in the governess’s plight; yet she accepted without
directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by
showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression
of the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of which the very
breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we
thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that,
in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I
knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable
of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly
sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so
compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer as
the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see
how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good
fortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led
me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could
take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me.
Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to me before
we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of
what I had seen.

“He was looking for someone else, you say--someone who was not you?”

“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous clearness now possessed
me. “THAT’S whom he was looking for.”

“But how do you know?”

“I know, I know, I know!” My exaltation grew. “And YOU know, my dear!”

She didn’t deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling
as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: “What if HE should see
him?”

“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”

She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”

“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM.” That he might was
an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which,
moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically
proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I
had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself
bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by
inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim
and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial,
I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last
things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.

“It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned--”

She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. “His having been here and
the time they were with him?”

“The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history,
in any way.”

“Oh, the little lady doesn’t remember. She never heard or knew.”

“The circumstances of his death?” I thought with some intensity.
“Perhaps not. But Miles would remember--Miles would know.”

“Ah, don’t try him!” broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I continued
to think. “It IS rather odd.”

“That he has never spoken of him?”

“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were ‘great
friends’?”

“Oh, it wasn’t HIM!” Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. “It was Quint’s
own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him.” She paused a moment;
then she added: “Quint was much too free.”

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--SUCH a face!--a
sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with MY boy?”

“Too free with everyone!”

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by
the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of
the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our
small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the
lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,
had ever, within anyone’s memory attached to the kind old place. It had
neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only
desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very
last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her
hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. “I have it from you then--for
it’s of great importance--that he was definitely and admittedly bad?”

“Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn’t.”

“And you never told him?”

“Well, he didn’t like tale-bearing--he hated complaints. He was terribly
short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM--”

“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enough with my
impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I
pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you _I_ would have told!”

She felt my discrimination. “I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep.”

I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. “You weren’t afraid
of anything else? Not of his effect--?”

“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
faltered.

“On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.”

“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned.
“The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed
not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything
to say. Yes”--she let me have it--“even about THEM.”

“Them--that creature?” I had to smother a kind of howl. “And you could
bear it!”

“No. I couldn’t--and I can’t now!” And the poor woman burst into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;
yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together
to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in
the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether I
slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me.
I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept
back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure
of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me
indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow’s sun was high I had
restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were
to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me
above all was just the sinister figure of the living man--the dead one
would keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly,
which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time
had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint
was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road
from the village: a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a
visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and
as, on the final evidence, HAD been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and
after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong
path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in
the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils, secret
disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted for a
good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh, in
the right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl might
have failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather applaud
myself as I look back!--that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.
I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the
most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had
suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one’s own
committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in
our danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I had THEM. It was
in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an
image richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The
more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled
suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too
long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now
see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as
suspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from
the moment I really took hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the
grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors,
on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a
book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young
man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His
sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with
her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the
day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of
how, like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing in both
children--to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany
me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet
never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them
amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked
in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever to draw
upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some
remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and that
was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly
distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion;
I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet and
that Flora was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and,
as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the
strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something
or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet
without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but
it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There
was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction
I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should
see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising
my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I
was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move
them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my
mind what to do. There was an alien object in view--a figure whose right
of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting
over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more
natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the
place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman’s boy, from the
village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude
as I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon the
character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than
that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were
not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as
soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right
second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I
transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was
about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the
wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I
held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is something
more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I was
determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also
within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.
This was her attitude when I at last looked at her--looked with the
confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal
notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to
have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea
of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make
the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was
very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My
apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some
seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes--I
faced what I had to face.




VII


I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give
no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still
hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: “They KNOW--it’s
too monstrous: they know, they know!”

“And what on earth--?” I felt her incredulity as she held me.

“Why, all that WE know--and heaven knows what else besides!” Then, as
she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with
full coherency even to myself. “Two hours ago, in the garden”--I could
scarce articulate--“Flora SAW!”

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. “She
has told you?” she panted.

“Not a word--that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
eight, THAT child!” Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of
it.

Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. “Then how do you
know?”

“I was there--I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware.”

“Do you mean aware of HIM?”

“No--of HER.” I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious
things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion’s face.
“Another person--this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror
and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful--with such an air also,
and such a face!--on the other side of the lake. I was there with the
child--quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came.”

“Came how--from where?”

“From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there--but not
so near.”

“And without coming nearer?”

“Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as
you!”

My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. “Was she someone
you’ve never seen?”

“Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have.” Then, to show how I
had thought it all out: “My predecessor--the one who died.”

“Miss Jessel?”

“Miss Jessel. You don’t believe me?” I pressed.

She turned right and left in her distress. “How can you be sure?”

This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience.
“Then ask Flora--SHE’S sure!” But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
myself up. “No, for God’s sake, DON’T! She’ll say she isn’t--she’ll
lie!”

Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. “Ah, how CAN
you?”

“Because I’m clear. Flora doesn’t want me to know.”

“It’s only then to spare you.”

“No, no--there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see
in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I
DON’T see--what I DON’T fear!”

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. “You mean you’re afraid of seeing
her again?”

“Oh, no; that’s nothing--now!” Then I explained. “It’s of NOT seeing
her.”

But my companion only looked wan. “I don’t understand you.”

“Why, it’s that the child may keep it up--and that the child assuredly
WILL--without my knowing it.”

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force
of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to
give way to. “Dear, dear--we must keep our heads! And after all, if she
doesn’t mind it--!” She even tried a grim joke. “Perhaps she likes it!”

“Likes SUCH things--a scrap of an infant!”

“Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed innocence?” my friend bravely
inquired.

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. “Oh, we must clutch at
THAT--we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what you say, it’s a
proof of--God knows what! For the woman’s a horror of horrors.”

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
raising them, “Tell me how you know,” she said.

“Then you admit it’s what she was?” I cried.

“Tell me how you know,” my friend simply repeated.

“Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked.”

“At you, do you mean--so wickedly?”

“Dear me, no--I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She
only fixed the child.”

Mrs. Grose tried to see it. “Fixed her?”

“Ah, with such awful eyes!”

She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. “Do you
mean of dislike?”

“God help us, no. Of something much worse.”

“Worse than dislike?”--this left her indeed at a loss.

“With a determination--indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention.”

I made her turn pale. “Intention?”

“To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose--her eyes just lingering on mine--gave
a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking
out I completed my statement. “THAT’S what Flora knows.”

After a little she turned round. “The person was in black, you say?”

“In mourning--rather poor, almost shabby. But--yes--with extraordinary
beauty.” I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke,
brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed
this. “Oh, handsome--very, very,” I insisted; “wonderfully handsome. But
infamous.”

She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel--WAS infamous.” She once more
took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me
against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. “They
were both infamous,” she finally said.

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely
a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. “I appreciate,” I said,
“the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has
certainly come to give me the whole thing.” She appeared to assent to
this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: “I must have it
now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them.”

“There was everything.”

“In spite of the difference--?”

“Oh, of their rank, their condition”--she brought it woefully out. “SHE
was a lady.”

I turned it over; I again saw. “Yes--she was a lady.”

“And he so dreadfully below,” said Mrs. Grose.

I felt that I doubtless needn’t press too hard, in such company, on the
place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an
acceptance of my companion’s own measure of my predecessor’s abasement.
There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for
my full vision--on the evidence--of our employer’s late clever,
good-looking “own” man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. “The
fellow was a hound.”

Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense
of shades. “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.”

“With HER?”

“With them all.”

It was as if now in my friend’s own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared.
I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her
as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with
decision: “It must have been also what SHE wished!”

Mrs. Grose’s face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the
same time: “Poor woman--she paid for it!”

“Then you do know what she died of?” I asked.

“No--I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn’t;
and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!”

“Yet you had, then, your idea--”

“Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes--as to that. She couldn’t have
stayed. Fancy it here--for a governess! And afterward I imagined--and I
still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.”

“Not so dreadful as what _I_ do,” I replied; on which I must have shown
her--as I was indeed but too conscious--a front of miserable defeat. It
brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of
her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other
time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast,
and my lamentation overflowed. “I don’t do it!” I sobbed in despair; “I
don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than I dreamed--they’re lost!”




VIII


What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a
common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were
to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed as
that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was
least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had
another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its
being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her
perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if
I had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the persons
appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their
special marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly
recognized and named them. She wished of course--small blame to her!--to
sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own
interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way
to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that
with recurrence--for recurrence we took for granted--I should get
used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had
suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion
that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours
of the day had brought a little ease.

On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
words, plunged afresh into Flora’s special society and there become
aware--it was almost a luxury!--that she could put her little conscious
hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having “cried.” I had
supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally--for
the time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that
they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of
the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature
cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I
naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my
agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours--that
with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart, and their
fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell to the ground but
their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to
settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of
subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my
show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as
a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a
matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had
to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion,
so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I
actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as
she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time,
without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!
It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little
activity by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible
increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the
gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to the
good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been
prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind--I scarce know what
to call it--to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring
from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by
bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong
side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat;
and I remember how on this occasion--for the sleeping house and the
concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help--I felt
the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t
believe anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it
definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s
a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit
more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get out of you. What was it you had in
mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from
his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend for
him that he had not literally EVER been ‘bad’? He has NOT literally
‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely
watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful,
lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for
him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was
your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him
did you refer?”

It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got
my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the
purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for
a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of
so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this,
directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I
pressed, was that SHE liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
station.

I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that Quint was
only a base menial?”

“As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad.”

“And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated your words to Quint?”

“No, not that. It’s just what he WOULDN’T!” she could still impress upon
me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that he didn’t. But he denied
certain occasions.”

“What occasions?”

“When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor--and
a very grand one--and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had
gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him.”

“He then prevaricated about it--he said he hadn’t?” Her assent was clear
enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I see. He lied.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn’t matter;
which indeed she backed up by a further remark. “You see, after all,
Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She didn’t forbid him.”

I considered. “Did he put that to you as a justification?”

At this she dropped again. “No, he never spoke of it.”

“Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”

She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. “Well, he didn’t show
anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”

Lord, how I pressed her now! “So that you could see he knew what was
between the two wretches?”

“I don’t know--I don’t know!” the poor woman groaned.

“You do know, you dear thing,” I replied; “only you haven’t my dreadful
boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and
delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without
my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable.
But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that
suggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and concealed their
relation.”

“Oh, he couldn’t prevent--”

“Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens,” I fell, with
vehemence, athinking, “what it shows that they must, to that extent,
have succeeded in making of him!”

“Ah, nothing that’s not nice NOW!” Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.

“I don’t wonder you looked queer,” I persisted, “when I mentioned to you
the letter from his school!”

“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with homely force.
“And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel
now?”

“Yes, indeed--and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,”
 I said in my torment, “you must put it to me again, but I shall not be
able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!” I cried in a
way that made my friend stare. “There are directions in which I must
not for the present let myself go.” Meanwhile I returned to her first
example--the one to which she had just previously referred--of the boy’s
happy capacity for an occasional slip. “If Quint--on your remonstrance
at the time you speak of--was a base menial, one of the things Miles
said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again
her admission was so adequate that I continued: “And you forgave him
that?”

“Wouldn’t YOU?”

“Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all events, while he was with the
man--”

“Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!”

It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited
exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding
myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression
of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than
may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose.
“His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging
specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of
the little natural man. Still,” I mused, “They must do, for they make me
feel more than ever that I must watch.”

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how much
more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as
presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out
when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t accuse
HIM--”

“Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody.” Then, before
shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, “I must
just wait,” I wound up.




IX


I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if
I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it
would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they WERE so
immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
only be--blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I
found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as
I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that?
Doesn’t it betray too much?” It would have been easy to get into a sad,
wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel,
of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate
charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the
shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me
that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my
sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn’t see
a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me;
which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response
in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they
were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if
I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a
purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for
their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their lessons better and
better, which was naturally what would please her most--in the way of
diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling
her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as
animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the
“pieces” they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I
should never get to the bottom--were I to let myself go even now--of the
prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction,
with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown
me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which,
taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little
tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of
the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not
only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans,
astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had
presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day,
I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural
composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember
is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that
contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking
show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a
parson’s daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest
thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I
might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some
influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous
incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
“kicked out” by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me
add that in their company now--and I was careful almost never to be out
of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music
and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each
of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a
marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano
broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were
confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in
the highest spirits in order to “come in” as something new. I had had
brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could
be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that
there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age,
sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily
at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained is
to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness.
Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across
traces of little understandings between them by which one of them should
keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side,
I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was
surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter
that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on
with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the
most liberal faith--for which I little care; but--and this is another
matter--I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it
to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the
affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least
reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to
advance. One evening--with nothing to lead up or to prepare it--I felt
the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of
my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should
probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been
less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of
candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly--last-century fiction,
some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown,
but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the
sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I
remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding’s Amelia; also that
I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it
was horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch. I
figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those
days, the head of Flora’s little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself
long before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that,
though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn
of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from
him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which
I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of
there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft
breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with
all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had
there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet,
and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the
passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed
and locked the door.

I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went
straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within
sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the
staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three
things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of
succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived,
by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning
rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there
was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse
of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The
apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the
spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and
fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden.
He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight,
with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the
oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was
absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.
But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for
quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably
quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn’t meet and
measure him.

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had,
thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not--I found myself at the end
of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of
confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--for
the time, at least--to have him to reckon with; and during the minute,
accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in
the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer,
some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close
quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of
the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an
hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed,
in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to
make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can’t express what followed it
save by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in a manner
an attestation of my strength--became the element into which I saw the
figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have
seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an
order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could
have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness
in which the next bend was lost.




X


I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently
of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I
returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the
candle I had left burning was that Flora’s little bed was empty; and on
this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before,
I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her
lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were
disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward;
then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I
perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down,
emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of
her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and
the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had
never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill
of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that
she addressed me with a reproach. “You naughty: where HAVE you
been?”--instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself
arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with
the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay
there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back
into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had
pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herself
to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful little
face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my eyes an
instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of something
beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. “You were looking for
me out of the window?” I said. “You thought I might be walking in the
grounds?”

“Well, you know, I thought someone was”--she never blanched as she
smiled out that at me.

Oh, how I looked at her now! “And did you see anyone?”

“Ah, NO!” she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish
inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little
drawl of the negative.

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she
lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the
three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of these,
for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand
it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully,
she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out
at her on the spot and have it all over?--give it to her straight in her
lovely little lighted face? “You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and
that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly
confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and
learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what
it means?” This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could
immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared myself--well,
you’ll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet,
looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. “Why did you pull the
curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?”

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
“Because I don’t like to frighten you!”

“But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?”

She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame
of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as
impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,” she
quite adequately answered, “that you might come back, you dear, and that
you HAVE!” And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a
long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I
recognized the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.
I repeatedly sat up till I didn’t know when; I selected moments when my
roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in
the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But
I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no
other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase,
on the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I
once recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps
with her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and her head, in an
attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant, however,
when she vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless,
exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if
instead of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going
up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to
be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest
encounter with that gentleman--they were all numbered now--I had an
alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular
quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was
precisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching,
I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself down at my
old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till about one
o’clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely roused
as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now
out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it.
This brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness, to her bed,
which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me
further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.

The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and had
again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind
the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--as she
had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved to me by
the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the
haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected,
absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--the casement opened
forward--and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help her,
and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face
with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate
with it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to
care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some
other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing
me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for
some sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her
brother’s door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably,
produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke
of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS
window?--what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of
my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter
of my boldness?

This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and
pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might
portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were
secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which
my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was
hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds--a figure
prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it
was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but
on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice.
There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing
the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the
lower one--though high above the gardens--in the solid corner of the
house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square
chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of
which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by
Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and
I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first
chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I
could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the
glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the
darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded
the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the
night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person,
diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated,
looking up to where I had appeared--looking, that is, not so much
straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was
clearly another person above me--there was a person on the tower; but
the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and
had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sick
as I made it out--was poor little Miles himself.




XI


It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with
which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet
her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not
provoking--on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the
children--any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of
mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere
smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others
my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she
hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I couldn’t have
borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the
blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little
charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and
cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my
trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would
doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them;
as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them,
with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her
look, thank the Lord’s mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would
still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady
fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the
development of the conviction that--as time went on without a public
accident--our young things could, after all, look out for themselves,
she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their
instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could
engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would
have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself
anxious about hers.

At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the
terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now
agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance,
but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one
of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us,
over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and
passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose
watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed
intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me
a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of
lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority--my
accomplishments and my function--in her patience under my pain. She
offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch’s
broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large
clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time
that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point of
what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous
hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone
down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated
need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more
resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of
representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the
real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him
into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I
appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight
as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him,
through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily
hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and
so to his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--oh,
HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious
thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn’t
play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an
equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was confronted at
last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my
own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little
chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,
uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no
need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon
the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he
really, as they say, “had” me. He could do what he liked, with all his
cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the
old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
minister to superstitions and fears. He “had” me indeed, and in a cleft
stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go
unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to
introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it
was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely
less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in
the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly
kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders
hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the
bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form
at least, to put it to him.

“You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
were you doing there?”

I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If I
tell you why, will you understand?” My heart, at this, leaped into my
mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed
that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to
tell me? “Well,” he said at last, “just exactly in order that you should
do this.”

“Do what?”

“Think me--for a change--BAD!” I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.
I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say--

“Then you didn’t undress at all?”

He fairly glittered in the gloom. “Not at all. I sat up and read.”

“And when did you go down?”

“At midnight. When I’m bad I AM bad!”

“I see, I see--it’s charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?”

“Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a readiness!
“She was to get up and look out.”

“Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!

“So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked--you saw.”

“While you,” I concurred, “caught your death in the night air!”

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
to assent. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he asked.
Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon.




XII


The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light,
I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. “It all lies in half a dozen words,” I said to her,
“words that really settle the matter. ‘Think, you know, what I MIGHT
do!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to
the ground what he ‘might’ do. That’s what he gave them a taste of at
school.”

“Lord, you do change!” cried my friend.

“I don’t change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I’ve watched
and waited the more I’ve felt that if there were nothing else to make it
sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a
slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old
friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes,
we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to
their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale
they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He’s not reading
to her,” I declared; “they’re talking of THEM--they’re talking horrors!
I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonder I’m not. What
I’ve seen would have made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid,
made me get hold of still other things.”

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness,
gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held
as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still
with her eyes. “Of what other things have you got hold?”

“Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more
than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a game,”
 I went on; “it’s a policy and a fraud!”

“On the part of little darlings--?”

“As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of
bringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and piece
it all together. “They haven’t been good--they’ve only been absent. It
has been easy to live with them, because they’re simply leading a
life of their own. They’re not mine--they’re not ours. They’re his and
they’re hers!”

“Quint’s and that woman’s?”

“Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! “But for
what?”

“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put
into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of
demons, is what brings the others back.”

“Laws!” said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but
it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad
time--for there had been a worse even than this!--must have occurred.
There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent
of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in
our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she
brought out after a moment: “They WERE rascals! But what can they now
do?” she pursued.

“Do?” I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. “Don’t
they do enough?” I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having
smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We
were held by it a minute; then I answered: “They can destroy them!” At
this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent
one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. “They don’t know,
as yet, quite how--but they’re trying hard. They’re seen only across,
as it were, and beyond--in strange places and on high places, the top of
towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge
of pools; but there’s a deep design, on either side, to shorten the
distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is
only a question of time. They’ve only to keep to their suggestions of
danger.”

“For the children to come?”

“And perish in the attempt!” Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
scrupulously added: “Unless, of course, we can prevent!”

Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things
over. “Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away.”

“And who’s to make him?”

She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. “You, miss.”

“By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
niece mad?”

“But if they ARE, miss?”

“And if I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent him by a
governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.”

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. “Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason--”

“Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference
must have been awful. As I’m not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn’t take
him in.”

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. “Make him at any rate come to you.”

I stared. “To ME?” I had a sudden fear of what she might do. “‘Him’?”

“He ought to BE here--he ought to help.”

I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
ever yet. “You see me asking him for a visit?” No, with her eyes on
my face she evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even--as a woman reads
another--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,
his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and
for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to
my slighted charms. She didn’t know--no one knew--how proud I had been
to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the
measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. “If you should so lose
your head as to appeal to him for me--”

She was really frightened. “Yes, miss?”

“I would leave, on the spot, both him and you.”




XIII


It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters,
difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part
of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere
infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware
of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for
a long time, the air in which we moved. I don’t mean that they had their
tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one
of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the
unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and
that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected
without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we
were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop
short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind,
closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like
all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we
had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times
when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or
subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was
the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in
especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had
lost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with
a small invisible nudge, said to the other: “She thinks she’ll do it
this time--but she WON’T!” To “do it” would have been to indulge for
instance--and for once in a way--in some direct reference to the lady
who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless
appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and
again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had
ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my
smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the
cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric
nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and
of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things
enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast
and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their
own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps,
when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion
of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MY
past, and MY friends alone that we could take anything like our ease--a
state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence
to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no visible
connection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebrated mot or to
confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the
vicarage pony.

It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I
have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for
me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done
something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second
night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of
the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one
had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected
to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way,
would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned,
the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out
half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands,
its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after
the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly
states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable
impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me,
long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June
evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which,
too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the
window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized
the signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the spot. But they
remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if
unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the
most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my
talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora’s by the lake--and
had perplexed her by so saying--that it would from that moment distress
me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what
was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really
saw or not--since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved--I greatly
preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready
to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly
glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were
most opened. Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present--a
consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There
was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked him with all
my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the
secret of my pupils.

How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they
had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I
not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove
greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken
out. “They’re here, they’re here, you little wretches,” I would have
cried, “and you can’t deny it now!” The little wretches denied it with
all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just
the crystal depths of which--like the flash of a fish in a stream--the
mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into
me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either
Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over
whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him--had
straightway, there, turned it on me--the lovely upward look with which,
from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had
played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion
had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves
produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me so
that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearse--it
was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair--the manner in
which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the
other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down
in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I
said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something
infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little
case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever
known. When I said to myself: “THEY have the manners to be silent, and
you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!” I felt myself crimson
and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I
chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our
prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--I can call them nothing else--the
strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause
of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at
the moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear through
any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the
piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though
they were not angels, they “passed,” as the French say, causing me,
while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their
younger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than
they had thought good enough for myself.

What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE--things terrible and
unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the
past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill
which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with
repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time,
almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through the
very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events,
to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to
fail--one or the other--of the precious question that had helped us
through many a peril. “When do you think he WILL come? Don’t you think
we OUGHT to write?”--there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by
experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. “He” of course was their
uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he
might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to
have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but
if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have
deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to
them--that may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of
his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to
a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the
sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of
the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand
that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were
too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of
my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among
us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than
anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as
I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact
that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience
with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I
didn’t in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief
had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters,
for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that
a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of
suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.




XIV


Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my
side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in
sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time;
the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright
and sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of
thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly
and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why
did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or
other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to
my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me,
I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I
was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all
this belonged--I mean their magnificent little surrender--just to the
special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday
by his uncle’s tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of
pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles’s whole title to
independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon
him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing
to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet
him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution
because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the
last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated.
“Look here, my dear, you know,” he charmingly said, “when in the world,
please, am I going back to school?”

Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly
as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off
intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in
them that always made one “catch,” and I caught, at any rate, now so
effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the
park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though,
to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and
charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at
first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I
was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute,
to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: “You know, my
dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS--!” His “my dear” was
constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the
exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils
than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.

But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I
remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in
the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked.
“And always with the same lady?” I returned.

He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out
between us. “Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but, after
all, I’m a fellow, don’t you see? that’s--well, getting on.”

I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. “Yes, you’re
getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!

I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed
to know that and to play with it. “And you can’t say I’ve not been
awfully good, can you?”

I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say
that, Miles.”

“Except just that one night, you know--!”

“That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.

“Why, when I went down--went out of the house.”

“Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”

“You forget?”--he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!”

“Oh, yes, you could.”

“And I can again.”

I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits
about me. “Certainly. But you won’t.”

“No, not THAT again. It was nothing.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “But we must go on.”

He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. “Then when AM
I going back?”

I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very
happy at school?”

He just considered. “Oh, I’m happy enough anywhere!”

“Well, then,” I quavered, “if you’re just as happy here--!”

“Ah, but that isn’t everything! Of course YOU know a lot--”

“But you hint that you know almost as much?” I risked as he paused.

“Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But it isn’t so much
that.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well--I want to see more life.”

“I see; I see.” We had arrived within sight of the church and of various
persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it
and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step;
I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much
further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have
to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew
and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend
my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion
to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first
when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out--

“I want my own sort!”

It literally made me bound forward. “There are not many of your own
sort, Miles!” I laughed. “Unless perhaps dear little Flora!”

“You really compare me to a baby girl?”

This found me singularly weak. “Don’t you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?”

“If I didn’t--and you, too; if I didn’t--!” he repeated as if retreating
for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had
come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure
of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into
the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the
minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path
from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.

“Yes, if you didn’t--?”

He looked, while I waited, at the graves. “Well, you know what!” But
he didn’t move, and he presently produced something that made me drop
straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. “Does my uncle
think what YOU think?”

I markedly rested. “How do you know what I think?”

“Ah, well, of course I don’t; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I
mean does HE know?”

“Know what, Miles?”

“Why, the way I’m going on.”

I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer
that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it
appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make
that venial. “I don’t think your uncle much cares.”

Miles, on this, stood looking at me. “Then don’t you think he can be
made to?”

“In what way?”

“Why, by his coming down.”

“But who’ll get him to come down?”

“_I_ will!” the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He
gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off
alone into church.




XV


The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this
had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read
into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning;
by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for
absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest
of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself
above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof
of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out
of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should
probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose,
more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable
question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was
really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle
should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that,
strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I
could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply
procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep
discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say
to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you
a life that’s so unnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for the
particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a
consciousness and a plan.

That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked
round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already,
with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing,
and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he
would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make
me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary
on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away
from him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the
sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me,
I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might
easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here
was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing
up--turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again,
for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of
so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one,
in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What
was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in
a couple of hours, at the end of which--I had the acute prevision--my
little pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in
their train.

“What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us
so--and take our thoughts off, too, don’t you know?--did you desert us
at the very door?” I couldn’t meet such questions nor, as they asked
them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I
should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last
let myself go.

I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came
straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps
through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house
I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the
approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited
me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I
should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have
to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the
great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties
and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the
staircase--suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a
revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before,
in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had
seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able
to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my
bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to
me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a
flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight
back upon my resistance.

Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush
for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place
and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the
schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the
considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort
in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands with
evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this in
I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude
strangely persisted. Then it was--with the very act of its announcing
itself--that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose,
not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy
of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood
there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before
me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image
passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and
her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say
that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers.
While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of
feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest
against it that, actually addressing her--“You terrible, miserable
woman!”--I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang
through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if
she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was
nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I
must stay.




XVI


I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked
by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into
account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily
denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed
them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said
nothing, to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. I did this to such purpose that
I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence that,
however, I would engage to break down on the first private opportunity.
This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes with her in the
housekeeper’s room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked
bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting
in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her
best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining
room, a large clean image of the “put away”--of drawers closed and
locked and rest without a remedy.

“Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them--so long as
they were there--of course I promised. But what had happened to you?”

“I only went with you for the walk,” I said. “I had then to come back to
meet a friend.”

She showed her surprise. “A friend--YOU?”

“Oh, yes, I have a couple!” I laughed. “But did the children give you a
reason?”

“For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it
better. Do you like it better?”

My face had made her rueful. “No, I like it worse!” But after an instant
I added: “Did they say why I should like it better?”

“No; Master Miles only said, ‘We must do nothing but what she likes!’”

“I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?”

“Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, ‘Oh, of course, of course!’--and I
said the same.”

I thought a moment. “You were too sweet, too--I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”

“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, miss?”

“Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. I came home, my
dear,” I went on, “for a talk with Miss Jessel.”

I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well
in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as
she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her
comparatively firm. “A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”

“It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.”

“And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the candor
of her stupefaction.

“That she suffers the torments--!”

It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “--of the lost?”

“Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them-” I faltered
myself with the horror of it.

But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To share them--?”

“She wants Flora.” Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to
show I was. “As I’ve told you, however, it doesn’t matter.”

“Because you’ve made up your mind? But to what?”

“To everything.”

“And what do you call ‘everything’?”

“Why, sending for their uncle.”

“Oh, miss, in pity do,” my friend broke out. “ah, but I will, I WILL! I
see it’s the only way. What’s ‘out,’ as I told you, with Miles is that
if he thinks I’m afraid to--and has ideas of what he gains by that--he
shall see he’s mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me
on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I’m to be
reproached with having done nothing again about more school--”

“Yes, miss--” my companion pressed me.

“Well, there’s that awful reason.”

There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. “But--a--which?”

“Why, the letter from his old place.”

“You’ll show it to the master?”

“I ought to have done so on the instant.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Grose with decision.

“I’ll put it before him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t undertake
to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled--”

“For we’ve never in the least known what!” Mrs. Grose declared.

“For wickedness. For what else--when he’s so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured?
He’s exquisite--so it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole
thing. After all,” I said, “it’s their uncle’s fault. If he left here
such people--!”

“He didn’t really in the least know them. The fault’s mine.” She had
turned quite pale.

“Well, you shan’t suffer,” I answered.

“The children shan’t!” she emphatically returned.

I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. “Then what am I to tell
him?”

“You needn’t tell him anything. _I_‘ll tell him.”

I measured this. “Do you mean you’ll write--?” Remembering she couldn’t,
I caught myself up. “How do you communicate?”

“I tell the bailiff. HE writes.”

“And should you like him to write our story?”

My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and
it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were
again in her eyes. “Ah, miss, YOU write!”

“Well--tonight,” I at last answered; and on this we separated.




XVII


I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had
changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room,
with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank
sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of
the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage
and listened a minute at Miles’s door. What, under my endless obsession,
I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at
rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected.
His voice tinkled out. “I say, you there--come in.” It was a gaiety in
the gloom!

I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very
much at his ease. “Well, what are YOU up to?” he asked with a grace of
sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been
present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was “out.”

I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I was there?”

“Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You’re
like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed.

“Then you weren’t asleep?”

“Not much! I lie awake and think.”

I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held
out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed.
“What is it,” I asked, “that you think of?”

“What in the world, my dear, but YOU?”

“Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn’t insist on that! I had
so far rather you slept.”

“Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours.”

I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. “Of what queer business,
Miles?”

“Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!”

I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper
there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow.
“What do you mean by all the rest?”

“Oh, you know, you know!”

I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and
our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting
his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at
that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. “Certainly you shall go
back to school,” I said, “if it be that that troubles you. But not to
the old place--we must find another, a better. How could I know it did
trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it
at all?” His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made
him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children’s
hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I
possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who
might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might
help! “Do you know you’ve never said a word to me about your school--I
mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?”

He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. “Haven’t I?” It wasn’t
for ME to help him--it was for the thing I had met!

Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from
him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known;
so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his
little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part
of innocence and consistency. “No, never--from the hour you came back.
You’ve never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades,
nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never,
little Miles--no, never--have you given me an inkling of anything that
MAY have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I’m in the
dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the
first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your
previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present.” It was
extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or
whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half
to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble,
appear as accessible as an older person--imposed him almost as an
intellectual equal. “I thought you wanted to go on as you are.”

It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate,
like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. “I
don’t--I don’t. I want to get away.”

“You’re tired of Bly?”

“Oh, no, I like Bly.”

“Well, then--?”

“Oh, YOU know what a boy wants!”

I felt that I didn’t know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge.
“You want to go to your uncle?”

Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the
pillow. “Ah, you can’t get off with that!”

I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color.
“My dear, I don’t want to get off!”

“You can’t, even if you do. You can’t, you can’t!”--he lay beautifully
staring. “My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle
things.”

“If we do,” I returned with some spirit, “you may be sure it will be to
take you quite away.”

“Well, don’t you understand that that’s exactly what I’m working for?
You’ll have to tell him--about the way you’ve let it all drop: you’ll
have to tell him a tremendous lot!”

The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the
instant, to meet him rather more. “And how much will YOU, Miles, have to
tell him? There are things he’ll ask you!”

He turned it over. “Very likely. But what things?”

“The things you’ve never told me. To make up his mind what to do with
you. He can’t send you back--”

“Oh, I don’t want to go back!” he broke in. “I want a new field.”

He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable
gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the
poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance
at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more
dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear
that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the
tenderness of my pity I embraced him. “Dear little Miles, dear little
Miles--!”

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with
indulgent good humor. “Well, old lady?”

“Is there nothing--nothing at all that you want to tell me?”

He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his
hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. “I’ve told you--I
told you this morning.”

Oh, I was sorry for him! “That you just want me not to worry you?”

He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him;
then ever so gently, “To let me alone,” he replied.

There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me
release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows
I never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn
my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him.
“I’ve just begun a letter to your uncle,” I said.

“Well, then, finish it!”

I waited a minute. “What happened before?”

He gazed up at me again. “Before what?”

“Before you came back. And before you went away.”

For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. “What
happened?”

It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that
I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting
consciousness--it made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize
once more the chance of possessing him. “Dear little Miles, dear little
Miles, if you KNEW how I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing
but that, and I’d rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong--I’d
rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles”--oh, I brought it
out now even if I SHOULD go too far--“I just want you to help me to save
you!” But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The
answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an
extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the
room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The
boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of
sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him,
a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and
was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared
about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window
tight. “Why, the candle’s out!” I then cried.

“It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.




XVIII


The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
quietly: “Have you written, miss?”

“Yes--I’ve written.” But I didn’t add--for the hour--that my letter,
sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough
to send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile
there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more
exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to
gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats
of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated,
in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was
conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to
show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really
lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate;
there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never
was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and
freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had
perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my
initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged
sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of
what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty.
Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD
been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof
that it could ever have flowered into an act.

He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after
our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if
I shouldn’t like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing
to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was
literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite
tantamount to his saying outright: “The true knights we love to read
about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you
mean that--to be let alone yourself and not followed up--you’ll cease to
worry and spy upon me, won’t keep me so close to you, will let me go
and come. Well, I ‘come,’ you see--but I don’t go! There’ll be plenty of
time for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only want to
show you that I contended for a principle.” It may be imagined whether I
resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to
the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never
played; and if there are those who think he had better have been kicking
a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the
end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I
started up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It
was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn’t
really, in the least, slept: I had only done something much worse--I had
forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to
Miles, he played on a minute before answering and then could only say:
“Why, my dear, how do _I_ know?”--breaking moreover into a happy laugh
which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he
prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song.

I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before
going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere
about she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that
theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had
found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank,
scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had
carried off both the children; as to which she was quite in her right,
for it was the very first time I had allowed the little girl out of my
sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might be
with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her without
an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but when, ten
minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall,
it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we
had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from
observation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high
interest my friend returned me all those I had from the first given her.

“She’ll be above,” she presently said--“in one of the rooms you haven’t
searched.”

“No; she’s at a distance.” I had made up my mind. “She has gone out.”

Mrs. Grose stared. “Without a hat?”

I naturally also looked volumes. “Isn’t that woman always without one?”

“She’s with HER?”

“She’s with HER!” I declared. “We must find them.”

My hand was on my friend’s arm, but she failed for the moment,
confronted with such an account of the matter, to respond to my
pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her
uneasiness. “And where’s Master Miles?”

“Oh, HE’S with Quint. They’re in the schoolroom.”

“Lord, miss!” My view, I was myself aware--and therefore I suppose my
tone--had never yet reached so calm an assurance.

“The trick’s played,” I went on; “they’ve successfully worked their
plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she
went off.”

“‘Divine’?” Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.

“Infernal, then!” I almost cheerfully rejoined. “He has provided for
himself as well. But come!”

She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. “You leave him--?”

“So long with Quint? Yes--I don’t mind that now.”

She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand,
and in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping
an instant at my sudden resignation, “Because of your letter?” she
eagerly brought out.

I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it
up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table.
“Luke will take it,” I said as I came back. I reached the house door and
opened it; I was already on the steps.

My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early
morning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to
the drive while she stood in the doorway. “You go with nothing on?”

“What do I care when the child has nothing? I can’t wait to dress,” I
cried, “and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself,
upstairs.”

“With THEM?” Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!




XIX


We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay
rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet
of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My
acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all
events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of
my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored
there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its
agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the
house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might
be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any small
adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared
with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to
which she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose’s
steps so marked a direction--a direction that made her, when she
perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly
mystified. “You’re going to the water, Miss?--you think she’s IN--?”

“She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
what I judge most likely is that she’s on the spot from which, the other
day, we saw together what I told you.”

“When she pretended not to see--?”

“With that astounding self-possession? I’ve always been sure she wanted
to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her.”

Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. “You suppose they really
TALK of them?”

“I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard
them, would simply appall us.”

“And if she IS there--”

“Yes?”

“Then Miss Jessel is?”

“Beyond a doubt. You shall see.”

“Oh, thank you!” my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I
went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however,
she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension,
might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least
danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the
greater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was no
trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my observation of
her had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, save
for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water.
The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant compared to its length
that, with its ends out of view, it might have been taken for a scant
river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestion
of my friend’s eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negative
headshake.

“No, no; wait! She has taken the boat.”

My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across
the lake. “Then where is it?”

“Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go
over, and then has managed to hide it.”

“All alone--that child?”

“She’s not alone, and at such times she’s not a child: she’s an old,
old woman.” I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again,
into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of submission;
then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a small refuge
formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for
the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees
growing close to the water.

“But if the boat’s there, where on earth’s SHE?” my colleague anxiously
asked.

“That’s exactly what we must learn.” And I started to walk further.

“By going all the way round?”

“Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it’s
far enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight
over.”

“Laws!” cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too
much for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got
halfway round--a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by
a path choked with overgrowth--I paused to give her breath. I sustained
her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and
this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we
reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposed
it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of sight and
was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down to
the brink and that had been an assistance to disembarking. I recognized,
as I looked at the pair of short, thick oars, quite safely drawn up, the
prodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I had lived, by
this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many livelier
measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and
that brought us, after a trifling interval, more into the open. Then,
“There she is!” we both exclaimed at once.

Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if
her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was
to stoop straight down and pluck--quite as if it were all she was there
for--a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she
had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a
step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently
approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done
in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first
to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the
child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender,
yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch
it--which I did the more intently when I saw Flora’s face peep at me
over our companion’s shoulder. It was serious now--the flicker had left
it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs.
Grose the simplicity of HER relation. Still, all this while, nothing
more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again
drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was
that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept
the child’s hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singular
reticence of our communion was even more marked in the frank look she
launched me. “I’ll be hanged,” it said, “if _I_‘ll speak!”

It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first.
She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. “Why, where are your things?”

“Where yours are, my dear!” I promptly returned.

She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
answer quite sufficient. “And where’s Miles?” she went on.

There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me:
these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn
blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had
held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt
overflow in a deluge. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell ME--” I heard myself
say, then heard the tremor in which it broke.

“Well, what?”

Mrs. Grose’s suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I
brought the thing out handsomely. “Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?”




XX


Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much
as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us,
been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child’s face now
received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a
pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence--the
shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a
few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my colleague’s
arm. “She’s there, she’s there!”

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had
stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling
now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She
was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel
nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so
extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with
the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and
understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on
the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all
the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This
first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
during which Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to where I pointed struck
me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my
own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner
in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it
would have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay
was of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our
pursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and I
was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the particular
one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a convulsion of
her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the
prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at ME an expression
of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented
and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me--this was a stroke
that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence
that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that
she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the
immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness.
“She’s there, you little unhappy thing--there, there, THERE, and you see
her as well as you see me!” I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose
that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that
description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in
the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without
a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and
deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this
time--if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled at
what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was
simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose
also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next
moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and
her loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. “What a dreadful
turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?”

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already
lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,
quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my
pointing hand. “You don’t see her exactly as WE see?--you mean to say
you don’t now--NOW? She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest
woman, LOOK--!” She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep
groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the mixture with her pity of
her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching to me even then, that she
would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for
with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed
I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt--I saw--my livid
predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious,
more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal with in
the astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose
immediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there pierced
through my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathless
reassurance.

“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there--and you never see
nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel--when poor Miss Jessel’s
dead and buried? WE know, don’t we, love?”--and she appealed, blundering
in, to the child. “It’s all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke--and
we’ll go home as fast as we can!”

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of
propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as
it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with
her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to
forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight
to our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly
failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already--she was literally,
she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. “I don’t
know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think
you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” Then, after this deliverance, which
might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she
hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful
little face. In this position she produced an almost furious wail. “Take
me away, take me away--oh, take me away from HER!”

“From ME?” I panted.

“From you--from you!” she cried.

Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to
do but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank,
without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the
interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was not
there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she
had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words, and
I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadly
shake my head at her. “If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at
present have gone. I’ve been living with the miserable truth, and now
it has only too much closed round me. Of course I’ve lost you: I’ve
interfered, and you’ve seen--under HER dictation”--with which I faced,
over the pool again, our infernal witness--“the easy and perfect way to
meet it. I’ve done my best, but I’ve lost you. Goodbye.” For Mrs.
Grose I had an imperative, an almost frantic “Go, go!” before which, in
infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly
convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred
and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as
fast as she could move.

Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory.
I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an
odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had
made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the
ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long
and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done.
I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and
its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary
and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the fence the boat,
to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh reflection to make on
Flora’s extraordinary command of the situation. She passed that night,
by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word so grotesque a
false note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw
neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous
compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw--I can use no other
phrase--so much of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever
been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of
this one; in spite of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths of
consternation that had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, in
the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the
house I had never so much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone
straight to my room to change what I was wearing and to take in, at
a glance, much material testimony to Flora’s rupture. Her little
belongings had all been removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I
was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my
other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now--he might
have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted--in part at
least--of his coming in at about eight o’clock and sitting down with me
in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candles
and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt
as if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting
in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if to
look at me; then--as if to share them--came to the other side of the
hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he
wanted, I felt, to be with me.




XXI


Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs.
Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly
feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of
extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had for their
subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess.
It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene
that she protested--it was conspicuously and passionately against mine.
I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask;
the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me
once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of
her sense of the child’s sincerity as against my own. “She persists in
denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?”

My visitor’s trouble, truly, was great. “Ah, miss, it isn’t a matter
on which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either, I must say, as if I much
needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”

“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like
some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and,
as it were, her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed--SHE!’ Ah, she’s
‘respectable,’ the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was,
I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the
others. I DID put my foot in it! She’ll never speak to me again.”

Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
behind it. “I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand
manner about it!”

“And that manner”--I summed it up--“is practically what’s the matter
with her now!”

Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor’s face, and not a little else
besides! “She asks me every three minutes if I think you’re coming in.”

“I see--I see.” I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
out. “Has she said to you since yesterday--except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful--a single other word about Miss
Jessel?”

“Not one, miss. And of course you know,” my friend added, “I took it
from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS
nobody.”

“Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still.”

“I don’t contradict her. What else can I do?”

“Nothing in the world! You’ve the cleverest little person to deal with.
They’ve made them--their two friends, I mean--still cleverer even than
nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has now her
grievance, and she’ll work it to the end.”

“Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?”

“Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She’ll make me out to him
the lowest creature--!”

I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose’s face; she looked
for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. “And him who thinks so
well of you!”

“He has an odd way--it comes over me now,” I laughed,”--of proving it!
But that doesn’t matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of
me.”

My companion bravely concurred. “Never again to so much as look at you.”

“So that what you’ve come to me now for,” I asked, “is to speed me on my
way?” Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. “I’ve a
better idea--the result of my reflections. My going WOULD seem the right
thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won’t do. It’s YOU
who must go. You must take Flora.”

My visitor, at this, did speculate. “But where in the world--?”

“Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now, from me.
Straight to her uncle.”

“Only to tell on you--?”

“No, not ‘only’! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy.”

She was still vague. “And what IS your remedy?”

“Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles’s.”

She looked at me hard. “Do you think he--?”

“Won’t, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think
it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
possible and leave me with him alone.” I was amazed, myself, at the
spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it,
she hesitated. “There’s one thing, of course,” I went on: “they mustn’t,
before she goes, see each other for three seconds.” Then it came over me
that, in spite of Flora’s presumable sequestration from the instant of
her return from the pool, it might already be too late. “Do you mean,” I
anxiously asked, “that they HAVE met?”

At this she quite flushed. “Ah, miss, I’m not such a fool as that! If
I’ve been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each
time with one of the maids, and at present, though she’s alone, she’s
locked in safe. And yet--and yet!” There were too many things.

“And yet what?”

“Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?”

“I’m not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening, a new
hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that--poor
little exquisite wretch!--he wants to speak. Last evening, in the
firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were
just coming.”

Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day.
“And did it come?”

“No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn’t, and it was without
a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister’s
condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All the
same,” I continued, “I can’t, if her uncle sees her, consent to his
seeing her brother without my having given the boy--and most of all
because things have got so bad--a little more time.”

My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite
understand. “What do you mean by more time?”

“Well, a day or two--really to bring it out. He’ll then be on MY
side--of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only
fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your
arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible.” So I put it
before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed
that I came again to her aid. “Unless, indeed,” I wound up, “you really
want NOT to go.”

I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand
to me as a pledge. “I’ll go--I’ll go. I’ll go this morning.”

I wanted to be very just. “If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I would
engage she shouldn’t see me.”

“No, no: it’s the place itself. She must leave it.” She held me a moment
with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. “Your idea’s the right one.
I myself, miss--”

“Well?”

“I can’t stay.”

The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. “You mean
that, since yesterday, you HAVE seen--?”

She shook her head with dignity. “I’ve HEARD--!”

“Heard?”

“From that child--horrors! There!” she sighed with tragic relief. “On my
honor, miss, she says things--!” But at this evocation she broke down;
she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do
before, gave way to all the grief of it.

It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. “Oh,
thank God!”

She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. “‘Thank
God’?”

“It so justifies me!”

“It does that, miss!”

I couldn’t have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. “She’s so
horrible?”

I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. “Really shocking.”

“And about me?”

“About you, miss--since you must have it. It’s beyond everything, for a
young lady; and I can’t think wherever she must have picked up--”

“The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!” I broke in with
a laugh that was doubtless significant enough.

It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. “Well, perhaps I
ought to also--since I’ve heard some of it before! Yet I can’t bear it,”
 the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my
dressing table, at the face of my watch. “But I must go back.”

I kept her, however. “Ah, if you can’t bear it--!”

“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just FOR that: to get her away.
Far from this,” she pursued, “far from THEM-”

“She may be different? She may be free?” I seized her almost with joy.
“Then, in spite of yesterday, you BELIEVE--”

“In such doings?” Her simple description of them required, in the light
of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole
thing as she had never done. “I believe.”

Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might
continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My
support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been
in my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my
honesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave
of her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. “There’s one
thing, of course--it occurs to me--to remember. My letter, giving the
alarm, will have reached town before you.”

I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and
how weary at last it had made her. “Your letter won’t have got there.
Your letter never went.”

“What then became of it?”

“Goodness knows! Master Miles--”

“Do you mean HE took it?” I gasped.

She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. “I mean that I saw
yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn’t where you
had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and
he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it.” We could only
exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs.
Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated “You see!”

“Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
and destroyed it.”

“And don’t you see anything else?”

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It strikes me that by this time
your eyes are open even wider than mine.”

They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show
it. “I make out now what he must have done at school.” And she gave, in
her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. “He stole!”

I turned it over--I tried to be more judicial. “Well--perhaps.”

She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. “He stole LETTERS!”

She couldn’t know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so
I showed them off as I might. “I hope then it was to more purpose than
in this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday,”
 I pursued, “will have given him so scant an advantage--for it contained
only the bare demand for an interview--that he is already much ashamed
of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mind
last evening was precisely the need of confession.” I seemed to myself,
for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. “Leave us, leave
us”--I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. “I’ll get it out of
him. He’ll meet me--he’ll confess. If he confesses, he’s saved. And if
he’s saved--”

“Then YOU are?” The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her
farewell. “I’ll save you without him!” she cried as she went.




XXII


Yet it was when she had got off--and I missed her on the spot--that the
great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to
find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it
would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed
with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage
containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the
gates. Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements, and
for much of the rest of the day, while I fought my weakness, I could
consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still
than I had yet turned round in; all the more that, for the first time,
I could see in the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis.
What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there was too
little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness
of my colleague’s act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect
of which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of
making it a positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching
the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up
at all, I became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the
consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be
known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I
wandered with that manner, for the next hour or two, all over the place
and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for
the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart.

The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner,
little Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no
glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change
taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the
piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora’s interest, so beguiled and
befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by her
confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered in
by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He had
already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and
I learned below that he had breakfasted--in the presence of a couple of
the maids--with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he
said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have
expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What
he would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled:
there was a queer relief, at all events--I mean for myself in
especial--in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung
to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had
perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction
that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that,
by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the
care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining
to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any rate
his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown,
moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night,
I had uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither
challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas.
Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the
accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the
beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the
eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.

To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my
meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so
that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside
of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared
Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light.
Here at present I felt afresh--for I had felt it again and again--how my
equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut
my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with
was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking
“nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous
ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but
demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw
of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require
more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, ALL the nature.
How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of
reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make
reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort
of answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as
that I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare
in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found even now--as he
had so often found at lessons--still some other delicate way to ease me
off. Wasn’t there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude,
broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?--the fact
that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it
would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one
might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been
given him for but to save him? Mightn’t one, to reach his mind, risk the
stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were
face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown me the way.
The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance.
Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets
and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some
humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: “I say, my dear,
is she really very awfully ill?”

“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better. London
will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take
your mutton.”

He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,
when he was established, went on. “Did Bly disagree with her so terribly
suddenly?”

“Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on.”

“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”

“Before what?”

“Before she became too ill to travel.”

I found myself prompt. “She’s NOT too ill to travel: she only might
have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The
journey will dissipate the influence”--oh, I was grand!--“and carry it
off.”

“I see, I see”--Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to
his repast with the charming little “table manner” that, from the day of
his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever
he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He
was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more
conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things
than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into
peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the
briefest--mine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediately
removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his
little pockets and his back to me--stood and looked out of the wide
window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We
continued silent while the maid was with us--as silent, it whimsically
occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at
the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only
when the waiter had left us. “Well--so we’re alone!”




XXIII


“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We
shouldn’t like that!” I went on.

“No--I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.”

“We have the others--we have indeed the others,” I concurred.

“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in
his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count, do
they?”

I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call
‘much’!”

“Yes”--with all accommodation--“everything depends!” On this, however,
he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague,
restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead
against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of “work,” behind
which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had
repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as the
moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which
I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the
worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a
meaning from the boy’s embarrassed back--none other than the impression
that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to sharp
intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was
positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a
kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at
any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I
took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted
pane, for something he couldn’t see?--and wasn’t it the first time in
the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very
first: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he
watched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in his
usual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small
strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet
me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. “Well, I think I’m
glad Bly agrees with ME!”

“You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope,” I went on bravely,
“that you’ve been enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been ever so far; all round about--miles and miles away.
I’ve never been so free.”

He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. “Well, do you like it?”

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--“Do
YOU?”--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.
Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could
be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we’re alone
together now it’s you that are alone most. But I hope,” he threw in,
“you don’t particularly mind!”

“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your company--you’re so
beyond me--I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?”

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. “You stay
on just for THAT?”

“Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest
I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
your while. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I felt
it impossible to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I told you,
when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was
nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”

“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!”

“It was partly to get you to do something,” I conceded. “But, you know,
you didn’t do it.”

“Oh, yes,” he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, “you wanted
me to tell you something.”

“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know.”

“Ah, then, is THAT what you’ve stayed over for?”

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express the
effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as
if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. “Well,
yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for
that.”

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said
was: “Do you mean now--here?”

“There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked round him
uneasily, and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the very
first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear.
It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me--which struck me indeed as
perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”

“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery
of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that
gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of
what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what
did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt
on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the
possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn’t it base to create for a
being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into
our situation a clearness it couldn’t have had at the time, for I seem
to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision
of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors and
scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other
we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. “I’ll
tell you everything,” Miles said--“I mean I’ll tell you anything you
like. You’ll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILL
tell you--I WILL. But not now.”

“Why not now?”

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop.
Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside,
someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. “I have to see
Luke.”

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. “Well, then,
go to Luke, and I’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for
that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request.”

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
little to bargain. “Very much smaller--?”

“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”--oh, my work preoccupied
me, and I was offhand!--“if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the
hall, you took, you know, my letter.”




XXIV


My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention--a stroke
that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind
movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just
fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively
keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon us
that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into view
like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, from
outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the
glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his
white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time
recovered her grasp of the ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the
immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw
and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration--I can
call it by no other name--was that I felt how voluntarily, how
transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for a
human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human
soul--held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm’s length--had a
perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was
close to mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it
presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.

“Yes--I took it.”

At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while
I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather
the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, was
such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it were,
my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window, the
scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that
I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time,
of the child’s unconsciousness, that made me go on. “What did you take
it for?”

“To see what you said about me.”

“You opened the letter?”

“I opened it.”

My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles’s own face,
in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage
of uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his
sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in
presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and
that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes
went back to the window only to see that the air was clear again and--by
my personal triumph--the influence quenched? There was nothing there. I
felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. “And you
found nothing!”--I let my elation out.

He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing!” I almost shouted in my joy.

“Nothing, nothing,” he sadly repeated.

I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. “So what have you done with it?”

“I’ve burned it.”

“Burned it?” It was now or never. “Is that what you did at school?”

Oh, what this brought up! “At school?”

“Did you take letters?--or other things?”

“Other things?” He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and
that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did
reach him. “Did I STEAL?”

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it
were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him
take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the
world. “Was it for that you mightn’t go back?”

The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. “Did you
know I mightn’t go back?”

“I know everything.”

He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. “Everything?”

“Everything. Therefore DID you--?” But I couldn’t say it again.

Miles could, very simply. “No. I didn’t steal.”

My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands--but it
was for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all
for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. “What then did
you do?”

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his
breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have
been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
faint green twilight. “Well--I said things.”

“Only that?”

“They thought it was enough!”

“To turn you out for?”

Never, truly, had a person “turned out” shown so little to explain it
as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner
quite detached and almost helpless. “Well, I suppose I oughtn’t.”

“But to whom did you say them?”

He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped--he had lost it. “I don’t
know!”

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was
indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left
it there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though even
then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
already that of added separation. “Was it to everyone?” I asked.

“No; it was only to--” But he gave a sick little headshake. “I don’t
remember their names.”

“Were they then so many?”

“No--only a few. Those I liked.”

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity
the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the
instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then
on earth was _I_? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he
turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window,
I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. “And
did they repeat what you said?” I went on after a moment.

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again
with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against
his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim
day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an
unspeakable anxiety. “Oh, yes,” he nevertheless replied--“they must have
repeated them. To those THEY liked,” he added.

There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it
over. “And these things came round--?”

“To the masters? Oh, yes!” he answered very simply. “But I didn’t know
they’d tell.”

“The masters? They didn’t--they’ve never told. That’s why I ask you.”

He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. “Yes, it was
too bad.”

“Too bad?”

“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”

I can’t name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such
a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard
myself throw off with homely force: “Stuff and nonsense!” But the next
after that I must have sounded stern enough. “What WERE these things?”

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him
avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and
an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against
the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the
hideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation. I felt a sick
swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that
the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I
saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the
perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still
to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax
of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. “No more, no
more, no more!” I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my
visitant.

“Is she HERE?” Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the
direction of my words. Then as his strange “she” staggered me and, with
a gasp, I echoed it, “Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!” he with a sudden fury
gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to
Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still
than that. “It’s not Miss Jessel! But it’s at the window--straight
before us. It’s THERE--the coward horror, there for the last time!”

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light,
he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place
and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the
taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. “It’s HE?”

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to
challenge him. “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?”

“Peter Quint--you devil!” His face gave again, round the room, its
convulsed supplication. “WHERE?”

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his
tribute to my devotion. “What does he matter now, my own?--what will he
EVER matter? _I_ have you,” I launched at the beast, “but he has lost
you forever!” Then, for the demonstration of my work, “There, THERE!” I
said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and
seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he
uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with
which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.
I caught him, yes, I held him--it may be imagined with what a passion;
but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that
I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart,
dispossessed, had stopped.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pastime of Pleasure, by Stephen Hawes

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license


Title: The Pastime of Pleasure
       An allegorical poem

Author: Stephen Hawes

Release Date: October 5, 2018 [EBook #58037]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PASTIME OF PLEASURE ***




Produced by Mark C. Orton, Stephen Hutcheson, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This book was produced from scanned images of public
domain material from the Google Books project.)






                            _Percy Society._


                         EARLY ENGLISH POETRY,
                                BALLADS,
                         AND POPULAR LITERATURE
                          OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
                    EDITED FROM ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS
                        AND SCARCE PUBLICATIONS.


                              VOL. XVIII.


                                LONDON.
                     PRINTED FOR THE PERCY SOCIETY,
                   BY T. RICHARDS, ST. MARTIN’S LANE.

                              M.DCCC.XLVI.


                        CONTENTS OF VOL. XVIII.


                        THE PASTIME OF PLEASURE.
                           BY STEPHEN HAWES.




                                  THE
                          PASTIME OF PLEASURE:


                         _An Allegorical Poem,_

                                   BY
                             STEPHEN HAWES.


                  REPRINTED FROM THE EDITION OF 1555.


                                LONDON:
                     PRINTED FOR THE PERCY SOCIETY,
                BY T. RICHARDS, 100, ST. MARTIN’S LANE.
                              M.DCCC.XLV.




                           _Council_, 1845-6.


                              _President_,
  The Rt. Hon. LORD BRAYBROOKE, F.S.A.

  THOMAS AMYOT, Esq. F.R.S. Treas. S.A.
  WILLIAM HENRY BLACK, Esq.
  WILLIAM CHAPPELL, Esq. F.S.A.
  J. PAYNE COLLIER, Esq. F.S.A.
  BOLTON CORNEY, Esq.
  T. CROFTON CROKER, Esq. F.R.S., M.R.I.A.
  JAMES HENRY DIXON, Esq.
  FREDERICK W. FAIRHOLT, Esq. F.R.S., F.S.A.
  J. O. HALLIWELL, Esq. F.R.S., F.S.A.
  WILLIAM JERDAN, Esq. F.S.A., M.R.S.L.
  CAPTAIN JOHNS, R.M.
  T. J. PETTIGREW, Esq. F.R.S., F.S.A.
  WILLIAM SANDYS, Esq. F.S.A.
  W. J. THOMS, Esq. F.S.A.
  THOMAS WRIGHT, Esq. M.A., F.S.A., _Secretary and Treasurer_.




                                PREFACE.


Stephen Hawes, the author of the following poem, was, according to the
information gathered by Warton, a native of Suffolk, and studied in the
University of Oxford, after which he travelled much in France, and
“became a complete master of the French and Italian poetry.” He
subsequently obtained the favour of King Henry VII, who made him groom
of his privy chamber. To Warton’s information, we are at present able
only to add, that it appears from a book of the expenses of the 12th
Henry VIII, among the records in the Rolls House, that the following
payment was made to our author on the 6th of January in that year: the
play referred to is now perhaps lost.

    “Item, to Mr. Hawse, for his play, vj^li. xiij^s. iiij^d.”

Hawes was the author of several other works besides the one here
printed, for an account of which we refer the reader to “Warton’s
History of English Poetry.” They are in general of very little
importance. “The Pastime of Pleasure,” which Warton characterises as his
“capital work,” is one of those allegorical writings which were popular
with our forefathers, but which can now only be looked upon as monuments
of the bad taste of a bad age. It is however a monument; and being one
of the most remarkable productions between the age of Lydgate and that
of Wyatt and Surrey, it deserves to be reprinted as one of the links in
the history of English poetry, without which that history would be
incomplete. The old editions of this poem are very rare.

The present edition is a reprint of that of 1555, of which there is a
copy in the British Museum. In two passages the language is so gross in
the original, that it has been considered necessary to omit a few lines.
These relate chiefly to the _dénouement_ of a tale which was extremely
popular in the Middle Ages, and which will be found told with somewhat
more decency in the common chap-book story of the enchanter Virgil. It
has been thought sufficient to print the simple text of this poem,
without illustrative notes. From the nature of the work, the choice lay
between giving a large mass of explanatory matter, or none at all, and
the circumstances under which it has been published placed the former
alternative entirely out of the question.

                                                                   T. W.




                             The History of
                    GRAUND AMOURE and LA BEL PUCELL,


                                 CALLED
                        THE PASTIME OF PLEASURE,

        Conteynyng the Knowledge of the Seven Sciences, and the
                  Course of Mans Life in this Worlde.


                       Invented by STEPHEN HAWES,
              Grome of Kyng Henry the Seventh his chamber.


                              Anno Domini
                                 1555.




                               CONTENTS.


  CAP.                                                              PAGE
  1. Howe Graunde Amoure walked in a medowe, and met with Fame
          envyroned with tongues of fyre                               4
  2. Of the swete report of Fame of the fayre lady La Bell Pucell,
          in the tower of Musike                                      11
  3. Howe Fame departed from Graunde Amoure, and left him
          Governaunce and Grace, and how he went to the tower of
          Doctrine                                                    14
  4. Howe he was let in by Countenaunce, the portresse, and of the
          marveylous buildyng of the same tower                       16
  5. How Science sent him first to Gramer, where he was receyved
          by dame Congruitie                                          21
  6. Howe he was receyved of Logyke                                   25
  7. Howe he was receyved of Rethoryke, and what rethoryke is         27
  8. Of the first part, called Invencion, and a commendacion of
          poetes                                                      29
  9. A replication against ignoraunt persones                         32
  10. Of Disposition, the ii. parte of rethoryke                      34
  11. Of Elocution, the thirde part of rethoryke, with colouryng
          of sentences                                                37
  12. Of Pronunciation, the iiii. part of rethoryke                   47
  13. Of Memory, the v. part of rethorike                             50
  14. A commendation of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate                   52
  15. Of Arsmetrike                                                   56
  16. Of Musike: mundain, humayn, and instrumental                    58
  17. Howe Graunde Amoure was enamoured of La Bell Pucell in the
          tower of Musike, and met with Counsayle in a temple         64
  18. Of the dolorous and lowly disputacion betwene La Bell Pucell
          and Graunde Amoure                                          77
  19. Howe La Bell Pucell graunted Graunde Amoure love, and of her
          dispiteous departage                                        87
  20. Of the great sorowe that Graunde Amour made after her
          departyng, and of the wordes of Counsayl                    93
  21. Howe Graunde Amoure went to Geometry, and what geometry is      99
  22. Of dame Astronomie                                             103
  23. Of the direct operation of nature                              106
  24. Of the fyve internall wyttes                                   108
  25. Of the hye influences of the supernall bodies                  112
  26. Howe Graunde Amoure departed from the tower of Science, and
          went to the tower of Chivalry, where he was let in by
          Fortytude                                                  114
  27. Of the marveylous argument betwene Mars and Fortune            117
  28. Howe Minerve ledde Graunde Amoure to kyng Melyzyus, whiche
          made hym knyght                                            127
  29. Howe he departed from kynge Melyzyus, with his grayhoundes
          and Attendaunce his varlet, and met with False Reporte,
          that chaunged his name to Godfrey Gobilyve                 134
  30. Howe Graund Amoure in the temple of Venus made his
          supplication                                               144
  31. The copy of a letter that Venus sent to La Bell Pucell         150
  32. Howe Godfrey Gobilive was taken of Correction and punyshed     156
  33. Howe Graunde Amoure disconfited the gyant with thre heads,
          and was received bi iii. ladies                            161
  34. Howe he met with Perceveraunce, and reposed hym in the
          manour place of dame Comfort                               170
  35. Howe he vainquyshed a gyaunt with seven heades, and was
          received of vi. ladyes                                     178
  36. How he made oblacyon to the godes Pallas and sayled over the
          tempestuous flode                                          185
  37. How he dyscomfited the wonderfull monstre of the vii.
          mettalles made by enchauntment                             191
  38. How he was received of La Bell Pucell                          195
  39. The mariage of Graund Amour and La Bell Pucell                 200
  40. How whan Graunde Amoure had lived longe wyth La Bell Pucell,
          he was arrested by Aege, that brought unto him Polycy
          and Avaryce                                                202
  41. Howe he was arested by Death                                   203
  42. Howe Remembraunce made his epytaphy on his grave               205
  43. Howe Fame came into the temple wyth burnyng tongues and
          other prayse                                               208
  44. Howe Tyme came into the temple in marvaylous semilitude, and
          of his replycation                                         212
  45. Howe Eternyte came into the temple, and of her vertuous
          Exhortacyon                                                218
  46. The excusation of the auctour                                  220


  ¶ This boke, called the Pastime of Pleasure, was made and compyled by
Stephen Hawes, one of the gromes of the most honorable chambre of our
soverayne lorde Kynge Henry the Seventh, the xxi. yere of his most noble
reyne; chapitred and marked after the table here before sette.




                                  THE
                          PASTIME OF PLEASURE.


  Ryght myghty prynce and redoubted soverayne,
  Saylinge forth well in the shyppe of grace,
  Over the waves of this lyfe uncertayne
  Ryght towarde heven to have dwellyng place,
  Grace dothe you guyde in every doubtfull cace.
  Your governaunce dothe evermore eschewe
  The synne of slouthe, enemy to vertewe.

  Grace stereth well, the grace of God is grete,
  Whyche you hath brought to your ryall se,
  And in your ryght it hath you surely sette
  Above us all to have the soverayntie;
  Whose worthy power and regall dygnite,
  All our rancour and our debate gan ceace,
  Hath to us brought bothe welthe, reste and peace.

  Frome whome descendeth by the ryghtfull lyne
  Noble prynce Henry, to succede the crowne;
  That in his youth doth so clerely shyne,
  In every vertue castinge the vyce adowne.
  He shall of fame attaine the hye renowne;
  No doubte but grace shal him well enclose,
  Whiche by true right sprange of the reed rose.

  Your noble grace and excellent highnes
  For to accepte I beseche right humbly
  Thys lytle boke, opprest wyth rudenes,
  Without rethorycke or coloure crafty;
  Nothinge I am experte in poetry,
  As the monke of Bury, floure of eloquence,
  Whiche was in the time of great excellence

  Of your predecessour, the v. kyng Henry,
  Unto whose grace he did present
  Ryght famous bokes of parfit memory,
  Of hys faynyng with termes eloquent;
  Whose fatall fictions are yet permanent,
  Grounded on reason, with cloudy fygures
  He cloked the trouth of all his scryptures.

  The lyght of trouth I lacke cunnying to cloke,
  To drawe a curtayne I dare not to presume,
  Nor hyde my matter with a misty smoke,
  My rudenes cunnying doth so sore consume:
  Yet as I may I shall blowe out a fume
  To hyde my mynde underneth a fable,
  By covert coloure well and probable.

  Besechying your grace to pardon myne ignoraunce,
  Whiche this fayned fable, to eschue idlenes,
  Have so compyled nowe without doubtance,
  For to present to your hye worthynes,
  To folowe the trace and all the perfitenes
  Of my maister Lydgate with due exercise,
  Suche fayned tales I do fynde and devyse.

  For under a coloure a truthe may aryse,
  As was the guyse in olde antiquitie,
  Of the poetes olde, a tale to surmyse,
  To cloke the truthe of their infirmitie,
  Or yet on joye to have mortalitie.
  I me excuse if by neglygence
  That I do offende for lacke of science.




                                CAP. I.
  HOWE GRAUNDE AMOURE WALKED IN A MEDOWE, AND MET WYTH FAME ENVYRONED
                         WITH TONGUES OF FYRE.


  When Phebus entred was in Geminy,
  Shynyng above in his fayre golden spere,
  And horned Dyane then but one degre
  In the Crabbe had entred fayre and cleare;
  When that Aurora did well appeare
  In the depured ayre and cruddy firmament,
  Forth then I walked without impediment

  Into a medowe both gaye and glorious,
  Whiche Flora depainted with many a colour,
  Lyke a place of pleasure moste solacious,
  Encensyng out the aromatike odoure
  Of Zepherus breath, whiche that every floure
  Through his fume doth alwaye engender.
  So as I went among the flowres tender,

  By sodayne chaunce a fayre path I founde,
  On whiche I loked and ryght oft I mused,
  And then all about I behelde the grounde
  With the fayre path whiche I sawe so used.
  My chaunce or fortune I nothyng refused;
  But in the path forth I went apace,
  To knowe whether and unto what place

  It woulde me bryng by any similitude.
  So forth I went, were it ryght or wrong,
  Tyll that I sawe of royall pulchritude
  Before my face an ymage fayre and strong,
  With two fayre handes stretched out along
  Unto two hye wayes there in particion,
  And in the ryght hande was this description:

  This is the strayght waye of contemplacion.
  Unto the joyfull tower perdurable:
  Who that will unto that mancion,
  He must forsake all thinges variable,
  With the vayne glory so muche deceivable,
  And though the way be hard and daungerous,
  The last ende therof shal be ryght precious.

  And in the other hande ryght fayre wrytten was,
  This is the way of worldly dignitie;
  Of the active life who wyll in it passe
  Unto the tower of fayre dame Beautye,
  Fame shall tell hym of the way of certaintie
  Unto La Bell Pucell, the fayre lady excellent,
  Above all other in cleare beauty splendent.

  I behelde ryght well bothe the wayes twayne,
  And mused oft whiche was best to take;
  The one was sharpe, the other was more playne;
  And unto my selfe I began to make
  A sodayne argument, for I myght not slake
  Of my great musyng of this royall ymage,
  And of these two wayes so muche in usage;

  For this goodly picture was in altitude
  Nyne fote and more, of fayre marble stone,
  Ryght well favoured and of great altitude,
  Though it were made full many yeres agone.
  Thus stode I musynge my selfe all alone
  By right long tyme; at the last I went
  The active waye with all my whole entent.

  Thus all alone I began to travayle
  Forthe on my waye by long continuaunce;
  But often tymes I had great marvayle
  Of the by pathes so full of pleasaunce,
  Whiche for to take I had great doubtaunce;
  But evermore, as nere as I myght
  I toke the waye whiche went before me ryght.

  And at the last, when Phebus in the west
  Gan to avayle with all his beames mery,
  When cleare Dyana in the fayre south est
  Gan for to ryse, lightyng our emispery
  With clowdes cleare without the stormy pery,
  Me thought afarre I had a vysyon
  Of a picture of marveylous facion:

  To whiche I went without lenger delaye,
  Beholdyng well the ryght faire portrayture
  Made of fyne copper, shydyng faire and gaye,
  Full well truely accordyng to measure,
  And, as I thought, nyne fote of stature,
  Yet in the brest with letters fayre and blewe
  Was wrytten a sentence olde and true:

  This is the waye and the sytuacion
  Unto the toure of famous doctrine:
  Who that wil learne must be ruled by reason
  And with all his diligence he must enclyne
  Slouthe to eschue and for to determine,
  And set his hert to be intelligible;
  To a willyng harte is nought impossible.

  Besyde the ymage I adowne me sette,
  After my laboure my selfe to repose,
  Tyll at the last with a gaspyng nette
  Slouth my head caught with his whole purpose.
  It vayled not the bodye for to dispose
  Against the head, when it is applyed,
  The head must rule, it cannot be denied.

  Thus as I satte in a deadly slomber,
  Of a great horne I harde a royal blast,
  With which I awoke, and had a great wonder
  From whence it came: it made me sore agast.
  I loked about; the nyght was wel nere past,
  And fayre golden Phebus in the morow graye
  With cloudes redde began to breake the daye.

  I sawe come ryding in a valey farre
  A goodly ladye, envyroned about
  With tongues of fyre as bright as any starre,
  That fyry flambes ensensed alway out,
  Whiche I behelde and was in great doubte;
  Her palfrey swyft renning as the winde,
  With two white grayhoundes that were not behynde.

  When that these grayhoundes had me so espied,
  With faunyng chere of great humilitie
  In goodly haste they fast unto me hyed;
  I mused why and wherfore it should be,
  But I welcomed them in every degre.
  They leaped oft and were of me ryght fayne;
  I suffred them, and cheryshed them agayne.

  Their collers were of golde and of tyssue fine,
  Wherin their names appeared by scripture
  Of dyamondes that clerely do shyne:
  The letters were graven fayre and pure.
  To reade their names I did my busy cure;
  The one was Governaunce, the other named Grace;
  Then was I glad of all this sodayne cace.

  And then the lady, with fiery flambe
  Of brennying tongues, was in my presence
  Upon her palfrey, whiche had unto name
  Pegase the swyfte, so fayre in excellence,
  Whiche sometime longed with his preminence
  To kyng Percius the sonne of Jubiter,
  On whome he rode by the worlde so farre.

  To me she sayde, she marvelled muche why
  That her grayhoundes shewed me that favoure.
  What was my name she asked me truly?
  To whome I sayde it was La Graunde Amoure,
  Besechyng you to be to me succoure
  To the tower of Doctrine, and also me tell
  Your proper name and where you do dwell?

  My name, quod she, in all the worlde is knowen,
  I-clipped Fame in every region,
  For I my horne in sundry wyse have blowen
  After the death of many a champion,
  And with my tongues have made aye mencion
  Of their great actes agayne to revive,
  In flaming tongues for to abyde on lyve.

  It was the custome of an olde antiquitie,
  When the golden worlde had dominacion,
  And nature, hyghe in her aucthoritie,
  More stronger had her operacion
  Then she had nowe in her digression,
  The people then dyd all their busye payne
  After their death in fame to lyve agayne.

  Recorde of Saturne, the first kyng of Crete,
  Whiche in his youth through his diligence
  Founde first plowyng of the landes swete;
  And after this, by his great sapience,
  For the comen profite and benevolence
  Of all metalles he made division
  One from another by good provision.

  And then also, as some poetes fayne,
  He found shotyng and drawyng of the bowe,
  Yet as of that I am nothyng certayne;
  But for his cunnynge, of hye degre and lowe
  He was well beloved, as I do well knowe;
  Through whose laboure and aye busy cure
  His fame shall lyve and shall ryght long endure.

  In whose tyme reigned also in Thessayle,
  (A parte of Grece) the kyng Melizyus,
  That was ryght strong and fierce in battaile;
  By whose laboure, as the story sheweth us,
  He brake first horses wilde and rigorious,
  Teaching his men on them ryght well to ryde,
  And he hym selfe did fyrst the horse bestryde.

  Also Mynerve, the ryght hardy goddese
  In the same time of so hyghe renowne,
  Vainquished Pallas by her great worthynes,
  And first made harneys, to laye his pryde adowne:
  Whose great defence in every realme and towne
  Was spredde about for her hye chyvalrye,
  Whiche by her harneys wanne the victorye.

  Doth not remayne yet in remembraunce
  The famous actes of the noble Hercules,
  That so many monsters put to utteraunce
  By his great wisdome and hye prowes?
  As the recule of Troye beareth good witnes;
  That in his time he would no battayle take
  But for the wealth of the commens sake.

  Thus the whole myndes were ever fixt and set
  Of noble men in olde tyme to devyse
  Suche thynges as were to the comeyn proffet;
  For in that tyme suche was their goodly guyse,
  That after dethe theyr fame should aryse,
  For to endure and abyde in mynde,
  As yet in bokes we may them wrytten fynde.

  O ye estates surmountynge in noblenesse,
  Remember well the noble paynyms all,
  How by theyr labour they wanne the hyenesse
  Of worthy fame to raygne memoryall,
  And them applyed ever, in specyall,
  Thynges to practyse whiche should profyte be
  To the comyn welthe and their heyres in fee.




                                CAP. II.
  OF THE SWETE REPORTE OF FAME OF THE FAYRE LADY LA BELL PUCELL IN THE
                           TOURE OF MUSYCKE.


  And after thys, Fame gan to expresse
  Of jeoperdous way to the toure peryllous,
  And of the beaute and the semelynesse
  Of La Bel Pucell; so gaye and gloryous,
  That dwelled in the toure so marveylous;
  Unto whyche might come no maner of creature,
  But by great laboure and harde adventure.

  For by the way theyr lye in wayte
  Gyauntes great, dysfigured of nature,
  That all devoureth by theyr yll conceyte;
  Agaynst whose streingth there may no man endure,
  They are so huge and stroonge out of measure;
  Wyth many serpentes foule and odyous,
  In sundry lykenesse blacke and tedyous.

  But behynde them a great see there is,
  Beyonde whyche see there is a goodly lande
  Most full of fruyte replete wyth joye and blysse.
  Of ryght fyne golde appereth all the sande
  In this fayre realme, where the tower doth stand,
  Made all of golde, enameled aboute
  Wyth noble storyes whyche do appere wythout.

  In whyche dwelleth by great aucthorytie
  Of La Bell Pucell, whyche is so fayre and bryght,
  To whome in beaute no pere I can se;
  For lyke as Phebus above all sterres in lyght,
  Whan that he is in his spere aryght,
  Dothe excede wyth his beames cleare,
  So dothe her beaute above other appeare.

  She is bothe good, ay wyse and vertuous,
  And also dyscended of a noble lyne;
  Ryche, comly, ryght meke, and bounteous;
  All maner vertues in her clerely shyne:
  No vyce of her may ryght longe domine.
  And I, dame Fame, in every nacyon
  Of her do make the same relacyon.

  Her swete reporte so my hert set on fyre
  Wyth brennyng love moost hot and fervent,
  That her to se I had greate desyre;
  Sayenge to Fame; O lady excellent,
  I have determyned in my judgement,
  For La Bell Pucell the most fayre lady
  To passe the waye of so greate jeopardy.

  You shall, quod Fame, obtayne the vyctory,
  If you wyl do as I shall you saye,
  And all my lesson retayne in memory.
  To the toure of Doctryne ye shall take your waye.
  You are now wythin a dayes journeye;
  Bothe these greyhoundes shal kepe you company:
  Loke that you cheryshe them full gentely.

  And Countenance, the goodly portres,
  Shall let you in ful well and nobly,
  And also shewe you of the parfytenes
  Of all the seven scyences ryght notably.
  There in your mynde you may ententyfly
  Unto dame Doctryne gyve parfyte audyence,
  Whyche shall enforme you in every scyence.

  Farewell, she sayde, I maye not now abyde;
  Walke on your waye, wyth all your hole delyght,
  To the toure of Doctrine at thys morowe tyde,
  Ye shall to morowe of it have a syght.
  Kepe on your waye now before you right,
  For I must hence to specyfy the dedes
  Of theyr worthynesse accordynge to theyr medes.

  And wyth that she dyd from me depart,
  Upon her stede swyfter than the wynde.
  Whan she was gone, full wofull was my herte;
  Wyth inward trouble oppressed was my mynde.
  Yet were the greyhoundes left wyth me behynde,
  Whyche did me comforte in my great vyage
  To the toure of Doctryne, with their fawnynge courage.

  So forthe I went, tossynge on my brayne,
  Greatly musyng, over hyll and vale.
  The way was troublous, and ey nothing playne;
  Tyll at the laste I came to a dale,
  Beholdyng Phebus declinyng lowe and pale;
  With my grayhoundes, in the fayre twylight,
  I sate me downe for to rest me all nyght.

  Slouthe upon me so fast began to crepe,
  That of fyne force I downe me layed
  Upon an hyll with my greyhoundes to slepe.
  When I was downe, I thought me well apayed,
  And to my selfe these wordes then I sayde:
  Who will attaine sone to his journeys ende,
  To nouryshe slouthe he may not condiscende.




                               CAP. III.
 HOWE FAME DEPARTED FROM GRAUNDE AMOURE, AND LEFT WITH HYM GOUVERNAUNCE
         AND GRACE, AND HOWE HE WENT TO THE TOWER OF DOCTRINE.


  Thus then I slept, tyl that Auroras bemes
  Gan for to spreade about the firmament,
  And the clere sunne with his golden stremes
  Began for to ryse fayre in the orient,
  Without Saturnus blacke encombrement,
  And the litle byrdes makyng melodye
  Did me awake wyth their swete armony.

  I loked about, and sawe a craggy roche
  Farre in the west, neare to the element;
  And as I dyd then unto it approche,
  Upon the toppe I sawe refulgent
  The royall tower of Morall Document,
  Made of fine copper, with turrettes fayre and hye,
  Which against Phebus shone so marveylously;

  That for the very perfect bryghtnes,
  What of the tower and of the cleare sunne,
  I coulde nothyng beholde the goodlines
  Of that palaice where as Doctrine did wonne;
  Tyll at the last, with mysty wyndes donne,
  The radiant bryghtnes of golden Phebus
  Auster gan cover with clowde tenebrus.

  Then to the tower I drewe nere and nere,
  And often mused of the great hyghnes
  Of the craggy rocke, whiche quadrant did appeare;
  But the fayre tower so muche of ryches
  Was all about sexangled doubtles,
  Gargeyld with grayhoundes and with many lyons,
  Made of fyne golde, with divers sundry dragons.

  The little turrets with ymages of golde
  About was set, whiche with the wynde aye moved.
  Wyth propre vices that I did well beholde,
  About the towers in sundry wyse they hoved,
  Wyth goodly pypes in their mouthes i-tuned,
  That with the wynde they pyped a daunce,
  I-clipped Amour de la hault plesaunce.




                                CAP. IV.
 HOWE HE WAS LET IN BY COUNTENAUNCE THE PORTERES, AND OF THE MARVELOUS
                      BUILDYNG OF THE SAME TOWER.


  The toure was great, and of marvelous wydnes,
  To whyche there was no way to passe but one,
  Into the toure for to have an intres;
  A grece there was, y-chesyled all of stone
  Out of the rocke, on whiche men dyd gone
  Up to the toure; and in lykewise did I,
  Wyth bothe the greyhoundes in my company.

  Tyll that I came to a ryall gate,
  Where I sawe stondynge the goodly portres,
  Whiche axed me from whence I came alate?
  To whome I gan in every thynge expresse
  All myne adventure, chaunce, and busynesse,
  And eke my name I tolde her every dell.
  When she herde this, she lyked me ryght well.

  Her name, she sayd, was called Countenaunce:
  Into the besy courte she dyd me then lede,
  Where was a fountayne depured of pleasance,
  A noble sprynge, a ryall conduyte hede,
  Made of fyne golde enameled with reed,
  And on the toppe foure dragons blewe, and stoute
  Thys dulcet water in foure partyes dyd spout.

  Of whyche there flowed foure ryvers ryght clere,
  Sweter than Nysus or Ganges was theyr odoure,
  Tygrys or Eufrates unto them no pere.
  I dyd than taste the aromatyke lycoure,
  Fragraunt of fume, swete as any floure.
  And in my mouthe it had a marveylous cent
  Of divers spyces; I knewe not what it ment.

  And after thys farther forth me brought
  Dame Countenaunce into a goodly hall:
  Of jasper stones it was wonderly wrought
  The wyndowes cleare, depured all of crystall,
  And in the roufe on hye over all
  Of golde was made a ryght crafty vyne;
  In stede of grapes the rubies there did shyne.

  The flore was paved with berall clarified,
  With pillers made of stones precious,
  Like a place of pleasure so gayely glorified,
  It might be called a palaice glorious,
  So muche delectable and solacious.
  The hall was hanged, hye and circuler,
  With cloth of arras in the rychest maner,

  That treated well of a ful noble story,
  Of the doubty waye to the tower perillous;
  Howe a noble knyght should wynne the victory
  Of many a serpente fowle and odious:
  And the first matter then appeared thus;
  Howe at a venture and by sodayne chaunce
  He met with Fame by fortunes purveyaunce.

  Whiche did hym shewe of the famous pulcritude
  Of La Bell Pucell so cleare in beauty,
  Excellyng all other in every similitude;
  Nature her favoured so muche in degree.
  When he heard this, with fervent amytie,
  Accompanied with Grace and Governaunce,
  He toke his waye without encombraunce

  Unto the ryght famous tower of learnyng,
  And so from thence unto the tower of chyvalry,
  Where he was made knight the noble kyng
  Called Melizeus, well and worthely;
  And furthermore it sheweth full notably
  Upon the arras imbrodred all of blewe,
  What was his name with letters all of Grewe.

  Thus with his verlet he toke on his waye
  To the perillous tower and sytuation,
  Metyng Folye, as he rode on his journey,
  Ryding on a mare by great illusion;
  After whom ensued fast Correction,
  And in her hande a strong knotted whippe;
  At every yarke she made hym for to skyppe.

  And then Correction brought La Graund Amour
  Unto the tower, whereas he myght well se
  Divers men makyng ryght great dolour,
  That defrauded women by their duplicitie;
  Yet before this in perfite certaintie,
  As the arras well did make relacion,
  In Venus temple be made his oblacion.

  After whiche he mette an hydeous gyaunt
  Havyng thre heades of marveylous kynde;
  With his great strokes he did hym daunt,
  Castyng hym downe under the lynde,
  With force and myght he did hym bynde,
  Strikyng of his heades then everychone,
  That of all thre heades he left not one.

  This terryble gyant yet had a brother,
  Whiche Graunde Amoure destroyed also,
  Having foure heades more then the other,
  That unto hym wrought mikel wo;
  But he slewe sone his mortall foe,
  Whiche was a great gyaunt with heades seven.
  To marveylous nowe for me to neven.

  Yet moreover he put to utteraunce
  A venemous beast of sundry likenes,
  Of divers beastes of ryght great mischaunce
  Wherof the picture bare good wytnes;
  For by his power and his hye worthynes
  He did discomfyte the wonderous serpente
  Of the seven metals, made by enchauntment.

  And eke the clothe made demonstration
  Howe he wedded the great lady beauteous,
  La Bell Pucell, in her owne dominacion,
  After his labour and passage daungerous,
  With solemne joye and myrthe melodious.
  This famous storye well pictured was
  In the fayre hall upon the arras.

  The marshall ycclipped was dame Reason,
  And the yewres also Observaunce,
  The panter Plesaunce at every season;
  The good butler Curteis Continuaunce
  And the chefe coke was called Temperaunce,
  The lydy chamberlayne named Fidelitie,
  And the hye stewarde Liberalitie.

  There sate dame Doctrine, that lady gent,
  Whiche called me unto her presence,
  For to knowe al the whole entent
  Of my comyng unto her excellence.
  Madame, I sayde, to learn your science
  I am comen nowe me to applye,
  With all my cure and perfect study.

  And yet, also, I unto her then shewed
  My name and purpose wythout doublenes.
  For very greate joye than were endued
  Her crystall eyes full of lowlenes,
  Whan that she knewe of very sykernesse,
  That I was he that should so attayne
  La Bell Pucell wyth my busy payne.

  And after thys I had ryght good chere;
  Of meate and drynke there was great plenty.
  Nothynge I wanted, were it chepe or dere.
  Thus was I served wyth dylycate dysshes deyntie;
  And after thys wyth all humylite
  I went to Doctryne, prayenge her good grace,
  For to assygne me my fyrst lernynge place.

  Seven doughters, moost expert in connynge,
  Wythouten foly she had well engendred;
  As the seven Scyences in vertue so shynynge,
  At whose encreace there is great thankes rendred
  Unto the mother, as nothynge surrendred
  Her good name and her dulcet sounde,
  Whych did engendre theyr orygynall grounde.

  And fyrst to Grammer she forthe me sent,
  To whose request I dyd well obay;
  Wyth delygence forth on my way I went,
  Up to a chamber depaynted fayre and gay;
  And at the chambre in ryght ryche araye
  We were let in, by hygh auctoryte
  Of the ryght noble dame Congruyte.




                                CAP. V.
  HOW SCIENCE SENT HIM FYRST TO GRAMER, WHERE HE WAS RECEIVED BY DAME
                               CONGRUYTE.


  The lady Gramer, in all humbly wyse,
  Dyd me receyve into her goodly scoole;
  To whose doctrine I dyd me advertise
  For to attayne, in her artyke poole,
  Her gylted dewe, for to oppresse my doole;
  To whom I sayde that I wold gladly lerne
  Her noble connynge, so that I myght descerne

  What that it is, and why that it was made?
  To whych she answered than, in speciall,
  By cause that connynge shoulde not pale ne fade,
  Of every scyence it is originall,
  Whych doth us tech ever in generall
  In all good ordre to speke directly,
  And for to wryte by true ortografy.

  Somtyme in Egypt reygned a noble kyng,
  Iclyped Evander, whych dyd well abounde
  In many vertues, especially in lernyng;
  Whych had a doughter, that by her study found
  To wryte true Latyn the fyrst parfyt ground.
  Whose goodly name, as her story sayes,
  Was called Carmentis in her livyng dayes.

  Thus in the tyme of olde antiquytie,
  The noble phylosophers, wyth theyr whole delyghte,
  For the comon prouffyte of all humanite,
  Of the seven sciences for to knowe the ryght,
  They studied many a long wynters nyght,
  Eche after other theyr partes to expresse,
  Thys was theyr guyse to eschewe ydelnesse.

  The pomped carkes wyth foode dilicious
  They dyd not feed, but to theyr sustinaunce;
  They folowed not theyr fleshe so vycious,
  But ruled it by prudent governaunce;
  They were content alway wyth suffisaunce,
  They coveyted not no worldly treasure,
  For they knewe that it myght not endure.

  But nowe a dayes the contrary is used:
  To wynne the mony theyr studyes be all set.
  The commen profyt is often refused,
  For well is he that may the money get
  From his neyghbour wythout any let.
  They thynke nothynge they shall from it pas,
  Whan all that is shall be tourned to was.

  The bryttel fleshe, nourisher of vyces,
  Under the shadowe of evyll slogardy,
  Must need haunte the carnall delices;
  Whan that the brayne, by corrupt glotony,
  Up so downe is tourned than contrary.
  Frayle is the bodye to grete unhappynes,
  Whan that the head is full of dronkennes.

  So doo they now; for they nothyng prepence
  Howe cruell deth doth them sore ensue.
  They are so blynded in worldly necligence,
  That to theyr merite they wyll nothyng renewe
  The seven scyences, theyr slouth to eschewe;
  To an others profyt they take now no keepe,
  But to theyr owne, for to eate, drynke, and sleepe.

  And all thys dame Gramer told me every dele,
  To whom I herkened wyth all my diligence;
  And after thys she taught me ryght well
  Fyrst my Donet and then my accidence.
  I set my mynde wyth percyng influence
  To lerne her scyence, the fyrst famous arte,
  Eschewyng ydlenes and layeng all aparte.

  Madame, quod I, for as much as there be
  Eight partes of speche, I would knowe ryght fayne,
  What a noune substantive is in hys degre,
  And wherefore it is so called certayne?
  To whom she answered ryght gentely agayne,
  Sayeng alway that a nowne substantyve
  Might stand wythout helpe of an adjectyve.

  The Latyn worde whyche that is referred
  Unto a thynge whych is subtancyall,
  For a nowne substantyve is wel averred,
  And wyth a gender is declynall;
  So all the eyght partes in generall
  Are Laten wordes, annexed properly
  To every speche, for to speke formally.

  And gramer is the fyrst foundement
  Of every science to have construccyon:
  Who knewe gramer wythout impediment
  Shoulde perfytely have intelleccion
  Of a lytterall cense and moralyzacion.
  To construe every thynge ententifly,
  The worde is gramer wel and ordinatly.

  By worde the world was made orygynally,
  The hye Kynge sayde, it was made incontinent;
  He dyd commaunde, al was made shortly.
  To the world the worde is sentencious judgemente.
  I marked well dame Gramers sentement,
  And of her than I dyd take my lycence,
  Goynge to Logyke wyth all my dylygence.




                                CAP. VI.
                    HOW HE WAS RECEYVED OF LOGYCKE.


  So up I went unto a chambre bryghte,
  Where was wonte to be a ryght fayre lady,
  Before whome than, it was my hole delyght,
  I kneeled adowne ful well and mekely,
  Besechynge her to enstructe me shortely
  In her noble science, which is expedient
  For man to knowe in many an argument.

  You shall, quod she, my scyence wel lerne,
  In tyme and space, to your gret utilite;
  So that in lokynge you shal than decerne
  A frende from fo, and good from iniquyte:
  Ryght from wronge ye shall know in certainte.
  My scyence is all the yll to eschewe,
  And for to knowe the false from the trewe.

  Who wyll take payne to folowe the trace,
  In this wrecched world, of trouth and ryghtwysenes,
  In heven above he shal have dwellynge place.
  And who that walketh the waye of derkenes,
  Spendyng his tyme in worldly wretchednes,
  Amyddes the erth, in hel most horrible,
  He shall have payne nothyng extinguyssible.

  So by logyke is good perceyveraunce
  To devyde the good and the evyll asondre:
  It is alwaye at mannes pleasaunce
  To take the good and caste the evyll under.
  If God made hell, it is thereof no wonder,
  For to punyshe man that hadde intelligence,
  To knowe goode from yll by trewe experience.

  Logyke alwaye doth make probacion,
  Provyng the pro well from the contrary,
  In sondry wyse by argumentacion,
  Grounded on reason well and wonderly.
  Who understod all Logyke truely,
  Nothynge by reason myght be in pledynge,
  But he the trouth should have in knowlegyng.

  Her wyse doctryne I marked in memory,
  And toke my leve of her hye person,
  Because that I myght no lenger tary.
  The yere was spent, and so ferre than gon,
  And of my lady yet syght had I none,
  Whych was abydyng in the toure of Musyke:
  Wherfore anone I went to Rethoryke.




                               CAP. VII.
        HOW HE WAS RECEYVED OF RETHORYKE, AND WHAT RETHORYKE IS.


  Than above Logyke up we went a stayre,
  Into a chambre gayly glorified,
  Strowed wyth floures of all goodly ayre;
  Where sate a lady gretly magnified,
  And her true vesture clerely purified,
  And over her head, that was bryght and shene,
  She had a garlande of the laurell grene.

  Her goodly chambre was set all about
  With depured myrrours of speculacion;
  The fragraunt fumes dyd well encense out
  All misty vapours of perturbacion.
  More lyker was her habitacyon
  Unto a place which is celestiall,
  Than to a certayne mancion fatall.

  Before whom, than, I dyd knele adowne,
  Sayeng: O sterre of famous eloquence,
  O gylted goddesse of hyghe renowne,
  Enspyred wyth the hevenly influence
  Of the doulcet well of complacence,
  Upon my mynd, wyth dewe aromatyke,
  Distyll adowne thy lusty rethoryke.

  And depaynt my tong wyth thy ryall floures
  Of delicate odoures, that I may ensue
  In my purpose to glad myne audytours,
  And wyth thy power that thou me endue
  To moralise thy lytterall censes trewe,
  And clense away the myst of ygnoraunce
  With depured beames of goodly ordinaunce.

  With humble eres of perfyt audience,
  To my request she dyd than enclyne;
  Sayeng she wolde in her goodly scyence
  In short space me so well indoctryne,
  That my dull mynde it shoulde enlumyne
  With golden beames, for ever to oppresse
  My rude language and all my semplenesse.

  I thanked her of her great gentylnes,
  And axed her, after, this question:
  Madame, I sayde, I wolde knowe doubtles
  What rethoryke is, without abusion.
  Rethoryke, she sayde, was founde by reason,
  Man for to governe wel and prudently;
  His wordes to ordre, his speche to purify.

  Fyve partes hath Rethoryke, for to werke trewe,
  Without whiche fyve there can be no sentence.
  For these fyve do well evermore renue
  The matter parfyte with good intellygence.
  Who that will se them with all his dyligence,
  Here foloweng I shall them specify,
  Accordyng well all unto myne ordynary.




                               CAP. VIII.
      OF THE FIRST, CALLED INVENCYON, AND A COMMENDACION OF POETS.


  The fyrste of them is called Invencion,
  Whiche surdeth of the most noble werke
  Of v. inward wittes with hole affeccion,
  As writeth right many a noble-clerke,
  Wyth mysty colour of cloudes derke,
  How comyn wytte doothe full well electe
  What it shoulde take, and what it shall abjecte.

  And secondly, by ymaginacyon
  To drawe a matter full facundious,
  Full mervaylus is the operacion,
  To make of nought, reason sentencious,
  Clokynge a trouthe wyth colour tenebrous;
  For often under a fayre fayned fable
  A trouthe appereth gretely profitable.

  It was the guyse in old antiquyte,
  Of famous poets ryght ymaginatife,
  Fables to fayne by good auctorite;
  They were so wyse and so inventife,
  Theyr obscure reason, fayre and sugratife,
  Pronounced trouthe under cloudy figures,
  By the inventyon of theyr fatall scriptures.

  And thyrdly, they hadde suche a fantasy,
  In this hyghe arte to be intelligible,
  Theyr fame encresynge evermore truely,
  To slouth ever they were invincible:
  To theyr wofull hertes was nought impossible;
  Wyth brennynge love of insaciate fyre
  Newe thynges to fynde they set theyr desyre.

  For though a man of his proper mynde
  Be inventife, and he do not apply
  His fantasye unto the besy kynde,
  Of hys connynge it maye not ratifye;
  For fantasye must nedes exemplify
  Hys new invencion, and cause hym to entende
  Wyth hole desyre to brynge it to an ende.

  And fourtely, by good estimacion
  He must nombre al the hole cyrcumstaunce
  Of thys mater wyth brevyacion,
  That he walke not by longe continaunce
  The perambulat waye, full of all variaunce.
  By estimacion is made annunciate
  Whether the mater be long or brevyate.

  For to invention it is equipolent,
  The mater founde ryght well to comprehende
  In suche a space as is convenient;
  For properly it doth ever pretende
  Of all the purpose the length to extende:
  So estimacion maye ryght well conclude
  The parfyte nombre of every similitude.

  And yet, than, the retentyfe memory,
  Whyche is the fifte, must ever agregate
  All maters thought to retayne inwardly,
  Tyll reason therof hath made a brobate,
  And by scripture wyll make demonstrate
  Outwardly accordynge to the thought,
  To prove a reason upon a thyng of nought.

  Thus, whan the fourth hath wrought full wonderly,
  Then must the mynde werke upon them all,
  By cours ingenious to rynne dyrectly
  After theyr thoughtes, than in generall
  The mynde must cause them to be memoriall;
  As after this shall appere more openly,
  All hole exprest by dame Phylosophy.

  O thrust of vertue and of ryall pleasure
  Of famous poetes many yeres ago!
  O insaciate covetyse of the speciall treasure
  Of new invencion, of ydelnes the foo!
  We may you laude, and often prayse also,
  And specially for worthy causes thre,
  Whiche to thys daye we may both here and se.

  As to the fyrst, your hole desyre was set
  Fables to fayne to eschewe ydlenes,
  Wyth amplyacion more connyng to get,
  By the laboure of inventyfe busynes,
  Touchynge the trouthe by covert lykenes
  To dysnull vyce and the vycious to blame;
  Your dedes therto exemplifyde the same.

  And secondly, ryght well you dyd endyte
  Of the worthy actes of many a conquerour;
  Through whych labour that you dyd so wryte
  Unto this day reygneth the honour
  Of every noble and myghty warriour,
  And for your labour and your busy payne
  Your fame yet lyveth, and shall endure certayne.

  And eke to prayse you we are gretely bounde,
  Because our connyng from you so procedeth,
  For you therof were fyrst originall ground,
  And upon your scripture our science ensueth.
  Your splendent verses our lyghtnes renueth;
  And so we ought to laude and magnify
  Your excellent springes of famous poetry.




                                CAP. IX.
               A REPLICATION AGAINST IGNORAUNT PERSONES.


  But rude people, opprest with blyndnes,
  Agaynst your fables wyll often solisgyse,
  Suche is theyr mynde, such is theyr folyshnes;
  For they beleve in no maner of wyse
  That under a colour a trouth may aryse.
  For folysh people, blynded in a matter,
  Will often erre whan they of it do clatter.

  O all ye cursed and such evyll fooes,
  Whose syghtes be blynded over all wyth foly,
  Open your eyes in the pleasaunt schooles
  Of perfit connyng, or that you reply
  Agaynst fables for to be contrary;
  For lacke of connyng no mervayle though you erre,
  In suche science, whych is from you so fer.

  For now the people, whych is dull and rude,
  If that you rede a fatall scripture,
  And can not moralyse the semilitude
  Whych to theyr wyttes is so hard and obscure,
  Than wyll they say that it is sene in ure
  That nought do poetes but depaynt and lye,
  Deceyvyng them by tongues of flatery.

  But what for that? they can not defame
  The poetes actes, whych are in effecte;
  Unto them selfe remayneth the shame
  To dysprayse that whych they can not correcte;
  And yf that they had in it inspecte,
  Than they would it prayse, and often elevate
  For it should be to them so delicate.




                                CAP. X.
              OF DISPOSITION, THE II. PARTE OF RETHORYKE.


  The second parte of crafty Rethoryke
  Maye well be called Disposicion,
  That doth so hyghe mater aromatyke
  Adowne dystyll by consolacion;
  As olde poetes make demonstracion
  That Mercury, through his preeminence,
  Hys natives endeth wyth famous eloquence.

  By veray reason it maye ryght well appere,
  That divers persons in sundry wyse delyght;
  Theyr consolacions doth contrary so steere
  That many myndes maye not agree aryght.
  Such is the planettes of theyr course and myght.
  But what for that? be it good or yll,
  Them for to folowe it is at mannes fre wyl.

  And dysposicion, the true seconde parte
  Of rethorike, doth evermore dyrecte
  The maters founde of this noble arte,
  Gyvyng them place after the aspect,
  And of tyme it hath the inspect,
  As from a fayre parfit narracion,
  Or els by stedfast argumentacion.

  The whych was constitute by begynnyng,
  As on the reason, and if apparaunce
  Of the cause than by outwarde semyng
  Be hard and difficulte in the utteraunce,
  So as the mynde have no perceyveraunce,
  Nor of the beginnyng can have audience,
  Than must narracion begynne the sentence.

  And if it be a lytle probable,
  From any maner stedfast argument,
  We ordre it for to be ryght stable,
  And than we never begyn our sentement,
  Recityng letters not convenient,
  But thys commutacion shoulde be refused,
  Wythout cause or thynge make it be used.

  Thys that I wryte is harde and covert
  To them that have nothynge intelligence;
  Up so downe they make oft transvert,
  Or that they can knowe, they experience
  Of thys craft and facundious science,
  By dysposicion the rethorician
  To make lawes ordinatly began.

  Wythout disposicion none ordre gan be,
  For the disposicion ordreth every matter,
  And gyveth the place after the degre:
  Wythout ordre, wythout reason we clatter,
  Where is no reason it vayleth not to chatter.
  Disposicion ordreth a tale directly,
  In a perfit reason, to conclude truely.

  The fatall problemes of olde antiquyte,
  Cloked wyth myst and wyth cloudes derke,
  Ordred wyth reason and hye auctorite,
  The trouth dyd shewe of all theyr covert werke.
  Thus have they made many a noble clerke.
  To dysnull myschefe and inconvenyence,
  They made our lawes wyth grete diligence.

  Before the lawe, in a tumblyng barge
  The people sayled, wythout parfitnes,
  Throughe the worlde all about at large;
  They hadde none ordre nor no stedfastnes,
  Tyll rethoricians founde justyce doubtles,
  Ordeynyng kynges, of ryght hye dygnite,
  Of all comyns to have the soverainte;

  The barge to stere, wyth lawe and justice,
  Over the waves of thys lyfe transitory,
  To direct wronges, and also prejudice.
  And tho that wyl resyst a contrarye
  Agaynst theyr kynge, by justice openly,
  For theyr rebellion and evyll treason,
  Shall suffer death by ryght and reason.

  O what laude, glory, and greate honoure,
  Unto these poetes shall be notefyed,
  The whiche dystylled aromatyke lycoure
  Clensynge our syght wyth ordre puryfyed;
  Whose famous draughtes so exemplyfyed
  Set us in ordre, grace, and governaunce,
  To lyve dyrectly, without encombraunce.

  But many one, the whiche is rude and dull,
  Wyll dyspice theyr warke for lacke of connynge:
  All in vaine they do so hayle and pull,
  Whan they therof lacke understandinge,
  They grope over where is no felynge;
  So dull they are, that they can not fynde
  This ryall arte for to perceyve in mynde.




                                CAP. XI.
     OF ELOCUTION, THE THIRDE PARTE OF RETHORYKE, WITH COLOURYNG OF
                               SENTENCES.


  And than the iii. parte is Elocusyon,
  Whan Invencion hath the purpose wrought,
  And set it in ordre by Disposicion.
  Without this thyrde parte it vayleth ryght nought,
  Though it be founde and in ordre brought,
  Yet Elocusion with the powre of Mercury,
  The mater exorneth right well facundyously

  In fewe wordes, swete and sentencious,
  Depaynted with golde harde in construction,
  To the artyke eres swete and dylycious
  The golden rethoryke is good refeccion,
  And to the reder ryght consolacion;
  As we do golde frome copper purifye
  So that Elocucyon doth ryght well claryfy.

  The dulcet speche from the langage rude,
  Tellynge the tale in termes eloquent,
  The barbary tongue it doth ferre exclude,
  Electynge wordes whiche are expedyent,
  In Latyn or in Englyshe, after the entent
  Encensyng out the aromatyke fume,
  Our langage rude to exyle and consume.

  But what avayleth evermore to sowe
  The precyous stones amonge gruntynge hogges?
  Draffe unto them is more meter I trowe.
  Let an hare and swyne be amonge curre dogges;
  Though to the hares were tyed grete clogges,
  The gentyll beast they wyll regarde nothyng,
  But to the swyne take course of rennyng.

  To cloke the sentence under mysty figures,
  By many colours as I make relacyon,
  As the olde poetes covered theyr scryptures,
  Of which the fyrste is dystrybucyon;
  That to the evyll, for theyr abusyon,
  Doth gyve payne, and, to the worthy,
  Laude and prayse, them for to magnyfy.

  Of beste or byrd they take a symylytude
  Of the condycyon lyke to the party,
  Feble, fayre, or yet of fortytude;
  And under colour of this beste, pryvely
  The morall sense they cloke full subtyly,
  In prayse or dysprayse, as it is reasonable:
  Of whose faynyng fyrst rose the fable.

  Concludyng reason gretely profitable;
  Who that theyr fables can well moralyse,
  The fruytfull sentences are delectable,
  Though that the ficcion they doo so devyse
  Under the colour the trouth doth aryse,
  Concludyng reason, rychesse, and connyng,
  Pleasure, example, and also lernyng.

  They fayned no fable without reason,
  For reasonable is al theyr moralitie,
  And upon reason was theyr conclusion,
  That the comon wyt, by possibilitie,
  Maye well a judge the perfyt veritie
  Of theyr sentence for reason openly
  To the comon wyt it doth so notify.


                               Rychesse.

  Theyr fruitfull sentence was grete rychesse,
  The whych ryght surely they myght well domyne,
  For lordshyp, welth, and also noblesse,
  The chaunce of fortune can some determyne.
  But what for this? she can not declyne
  The noble science, whiche, after poverte,
  Maye bryng a man agayne to dignitie.


                                Scyence.

  Theyr sentence is connyng, as appereth well,
  For by conning theyr arte doth engendre,
  And wythout connyng we knowe never a dele,
  Of theyr sentence, but may sone surrendre
  A true tale, that myght to us rendre
  Grete pleasure, if we were intelligible
  Of theyr connyng nothyng impossible.


                               Pleasure.

  O what pleasure to the intelligent
  It is to knowe and have perceyveraunce
  Of theyr connyng, so much expedient,
  And therof to have good utteraunce!
  Redyng newe thynges of so grete pleasaunce,
  Fedyng the mynd wyth foode insaciate,
  The tales newe they are so delicate.


                                Example.

  In an example, with a mysty cloud
  Of covert lykenesse, the poetes do wryte;
  And underneth the trouth doth so shroude,
  Both good and yll, as they lyst acquyte,
  With similitude they dyd so well endyte,
  As I here after shall the trouth sone shew,
  Of all theyr mysty and theyr fatall dewe.

  The poetes fayne how that kyng Athlas
  Heaven should bere upon his shoulders hye;
  Because in connyng he dyd all other pas,
  Especially in the hygh astronomye:
  Of the vi. planettes he knewe so perfytly
  The operacions, how they were domified;
  For whych poetes hym so exemplyfied.

  And in lyke wyse, unto the Sagittary
  They feyne the Centures to be of lykenesse,
  As halfe man and halfe horse truely;
  Because Mylyzyus wyth hys worthynesse
  Dyd fyrst attame and breke the wyldenes
  Of the riall stedes, and ryght swyftly
  Hys men and he rode on them surely.

  And also Pluto, somtyme kynge of hell;
  A cyte of Grece, standyng in Thessayle,
  Betwene grete rockes, as the boke doth tell,
  Wherin were people wythout any fayle,
  Huge, fyerse, and strong in battayle,
  Tyrauntes, theves, replete with treason;
  Wherfore poetes, by true comparison,

  Unto the devylles, blacke and tedious,
  Dyd them resemble, in terrible fygure,
  For theyr mysselyvyng so foule and vycyous,
  As to thys daye it doth appere in ure
  Of Cerebus the defloured pycture,
  The porter of hell, wyth thre heades ugly,
  Lyke an horrible gyaunt fyrce and wonderly:

  Because alway hys customed tyranny
  Was elevate in herte by hygh presumpcion,
  Thynkyng hym selfe most strong and myghty;
  And secondly, he was destruction
  Of many ladies by yll compulcion;
  And thyrdly, his desyre insaciable
  Was to get ryches full innumerable.

  Thus, for these thre vyces abhominable
  They made hym wyth thre hedes serpentyne,
  And like a feend his body semblable,
  For his pryde, avaryce, and also rapyne.
  The morall cense can soone enlumyne
  The fatall pycture to be exuberaunt,
  And to our syght clere, and not variaunte.

  Also rehersed the cronicles of Spayne,
  How redoubted Hercules by puyssaunce
  Fought with an ydre, ryght grete certayne,
  Having seven heades of full grete myschaunce;
  For whan that he wyth all hys valiaunce
  Had stryken of an head, ryght shortly,
  Another anon arose ryght sodaynly.

  Seven sophyms full hard and fallacyous
  Thys ydre used in preposicion
  Unto the people, and was full rigorious
  To devoure them, where lacked responsion;
  And whan one reason had conclusion,
  Another reason than incontinent
  Began agayne wyth subtyll argument.

  For whych cause the poetes covertly
  With vii. heades doth thys ydre depaynt,
  For these vii. sophyms full ryght closely;
  But of rude people the wyttes are so faynt,
  That wyth theyr connyng they can not acquaynt,
  But who that lyst theyr scyence to lerne,
  Their obscure fygures he shall well decerne.

  O redolent well of famous poetry,
  O clere fountayne replete wyth swetenes,
  Reflerynge out the dulcet delicacy
  Of iiii. ryvers in mervaylous wydenesse,
  Fayrer than Tygrys or yet Eufrates;
  For the fyrst ryver is Understandyng;
  The seconde ryver Close-concluding;

  The thyrd ryver is called Novelry;
  The fourth ryver is called Carbuncles,
  Amyddes of whom the toure is so goodly
  Of Vyrgyll standeth, most solacious,
  Where he is entered in stones precious;
  By thys fayre toure, in a goodly grene,
  Thys well doth spryng both bryght and sheen.

  To understandyng these iiii. accident:
  Doctryne, perceyveraunce, and exercyse,
  And also therto is equypolent
  Evermore the perfyt practyse,
  For fyrst doctryne in all goodly wyse
  The perceyveraunt trowthe in hys bote of wyll
  In understandyng for to knowe good from yll.

  So famous poetes did us endoctrine
  Of the ryght way for to be intellectyfe;
  Theyr fables they dyd ryght so ymagyne,
  That by example we may voyde the stryfe,
  And wythout myschefe for to lede our lyfe,
  By the advertence of theyr storyes olde,
  The fruit wherof we may full well beholde

  Depaynted on aras, how in antiquitie,
  Dystroyed was the grete citie of Troye,
  For a lytell cause, grounded on vanitie,
  To mortall ruyn they tourned theyr joye.
  Theyr understandyng they dyd than occupy,
  Nothyng prepensyng how they dyd prepare
  To scourge them selfe and bryng them in a snare.

  Who is opprest with a lytell wrong,
  Revengyng it he may it soone encrease;
  For better it is for to suffer among
  An injury, as for to keepe the peace,
  Than to begyne whych he shall never cease.
  Warre ones begon, it is hard to know
  Who shall abyde and who shall overthrowe.

  The hygh power, honour, and noblenes,
  Of the myghty Romaynes, to whose excellence
  All the wyde worlde so muche of gretenes
  Unto theyr empyre was in obedience,
  Suche was theyr famous porte and preemynence,
  Tyll within themselfe there was a contraversy
  Makyng them lese theyr worthy sygneoury.

  It is ever the grounde of sapience,
  Before that thou accomplysh outwardly,
  For to revolve understandyng and prepence
  All in thy selfe full often inwardly,
  The begynnyng and the myddle certaynly
  Wyth the ende, or thou put it in ure,
  And werke wyth councell that thou mayst be sure.

  And who that so doth shall never repent,
  For his dede is founded on a perfyt grounde,
  And for to fall it hath none impediment,
  Wyth surenes it is so hygh-walled rounde.
  In welth and ryches it must needes habound,
  On every syde it hath suche ordinaunce
  That nothynge can do it anoyaunce.

  Thus the poetes conclude full closely
  Their fruitfull problemes for reformacion,
  To make us lerne to lyve directly,
  Theyr good entent and true construccion,
  Shewyng to us the whole affeccion
  Of the way of vertue, welth, and stablenes,
  And to shut the gate of myschevous entres.

  And evermore they are ymaginatyfe,
  Tales newe from daye to daye to fayne,
  The erryng people, that are retractif,
  As to the ryght way to bryng them agayne:
  And who that lyst their sentence retayne,
  It shall hym prouffyt yf he wyll apply
  To doo therafter ful conveniently.

  Carbuncles in the most derke nyght
  Dothe shyne fayre wyth clere radiant beames,
  Exylyng derkenes wyth his rayes lyght;
  And so these poetes, with theyr golden streames,
  Devoyde our rudenes wyth grete fyry lemes;
  Theyr centencious verses are refulgent
  Encensyng out the odour redolent.

  And is theyr worke also extynguyshible?
  Nay, truely, for it doth shyne ryght cleere
  Thrugh cloudes derke unto the odyble,
  To whom truely it may nothyng appeere
  Where connyng fayleth, the scyence so deere
  Ignoraunce hateth wyth fervent envy,
  And unto connyng is mortall ennemy.

  O ygnoraunce, wyth slouth so opprest,
  Open thy curtayne, so ryght dymme and derke,
  And evermore remembre the behest
  Of thy labour to understande thy werke,
  Of many a noble and ryght famous clerke.
  Fy upon slouth, the nourysher of vyce,
  Whych unto youth doth often prejudice.

  Who in youth lyst nothyng to lerne,
  He wyl repent hym often in hys age,
  That he the connynge can nothynge decerne;
  Therfore now youth, with lusty courage,
  Rule thy fleshe and thy slouth aswage,
  And in thy youth the scyence engender
  That in thyne age it may the worship render.

  Connyng is lyght and also pleasaunt,
  A gentyll burden wythout grevousnes,
  Unto hym that is ryght well applyaunt
  For to bere it wyth al his besenes;
  He shal attaste the well of frutefulnes,
  Which Vyrgyl claryfied, and also Tullyus,
  Wyth Latyn pure, swete, and delicyous.

  From whense my mayster Lydgate veryfyde
  The depured rethoryke in Englysh language;
  To make our tongue so clerely puryfyed,
  That the vyle termes should nothing arage
  As like a pye to chatter in a cage,
  But for to speke wyth rethoryke formally,
  In the good order, wythouten vylany.

  And who his bokes lyst to here or se,
  In them he shall fynd elocucyon,
  With as good order as any may be,
  Kepyng ful close the moralyzacyon
  Of the trouth of his great intencyon,
  Whose name is regestred in remembraunce
  For to endure by longe contynuaunce.

  Nowe after this, for to make relacyon
  Of famous rethoryke so in this party,
  As to the fourth part, Pronouncyacyon,
  I shal it shew anone ryght openly,
  Wyth many braunches of it sykerly;
  And how it taketh the hole effect
  In every place, degre, and aspecte.




                               CAP. XII.
              OF PRONUNCIATION, THE IV. PART OF RETHORIKE.


  Whan the matter is founde by invencyon,
  Be it mery or yet of grete sadnes,
  Sette in a place by the disposycyon,
  And by elocucyons famous clerenes
  Exornate well and redy to expres,
  Then pronouncyacyon, wyth chere and countenance,
  Convenyently must make the utteraunce.

  Wyth humble voyce and also moderate,
  Accordynge as by hym is audyence,
  And if there be a ryght hye estate,
  Then under honour and obedyence
  Reasonably done unto his excellence,
  Pronouncyng his matter so facundious,
  In all due maner to be centencyous.

  For though a matter be never so good,
  Yf it be tolde wyth tongue of barbary,
  In rude maner wythout the discrete mode,
  It is distourbance to a hole company
  For to se them so rude and boystously
  Demeane them selfe, utterynge the sentence
  Wythout good maner or yet intellygence.

  It is a thinge ryght greatly convenable
  To pronounce the matter as it is convenient,
  And to the herers ryght delectable,
  Whan the utterer, wythout impediment,
  Wyth ryght good maner, countenaunce, and entent
  Dothe his tale unto them tretably,
  Kepynge his maner and voyce full moderately.

  This is the costome that the poetes use,
  To tel theyr tale with al due circumstance,
  The vylayne courage they do much refuse
  That is boystous and rude of governaunce,
  And evermore they do to them avaunce
  Nurture, maner, and al gentylnes.
  In their behavyng wyth all semelynes.

  And thus the gentyl rethoricyan,
  Through the labour of his ryal clergy,
  The famous nurture originally began
  Oppressynge our rudenes and our foly,
  And for to governe us ryght prudently,
  The good maner encreaseth dignitie,
  And the rudenes also iniquitie.

  The famous poete who so lyst to here,
  To tell this tale it is solacyous,
  Beholdyng hys maners and also hys chere
  After the maner be it sad or joyous.
  Yf it be sad, his chere is dolorus,
  As in bewaylyng a woful tragedy
  That worthy is to be in memory.

  And if the matter be joyfull and glad,
  Lyke countenaunce outwardly they make;
  But moderacyon in theyr myndes is had,
  So that outrage may them not overtake.
  I can not wryte to muche for theyr sake,
  Them to laude, for my tyme is shorte
  And the matter longe which I must reporte.




                               CAP. XIII.
                  OF MEMORY, THE V. PART OF RETHORYKE.


  And the v. parte is than memoratyfe,
  The whiche the perfyte mynystracyon
  Ordinately causeth to be retentyfe,
  Dryving the tale to good conclusyon;
  For it behoveth to have respeccyon
  Unto the tale, and the veray grounde
  And on what ymage he his matter found.

  If to the oratour many a sundry tale,
  One after other, treatably be tolde,
  Than sundry ymages in his closed male
  Eche for a mater he doth than well holde,
  Lyke to the tale he doth than so beholde,
  And inwarde a recapitulacyon,
  Of eche ymage the moralazacyon.

  Whiche be the tales he grounded pryvely
  Upon these ymages significacyon,
  And whan tyme is for him to specify
  All his tales by demonstracion,
  In due order, maner and reason,
  Than eche ymage inwarde dyrectly
  The oratour doth take full properly.

  So is enprynted in his propre mynde
  Every tale wyth hole resemblaunce.
  By this ymage he doth his mater fynde,
  Eche after other wythouten varyaunce.
  Who to this arte wyl gyve attendaunce,
  As therof to knowe the perfytenes,
  In the poetes scole he must have intres.

  Than shal he knowe, by perfyte study,
  The memorial arte of rethoryke defuse,
  It shal to him so wel exemplefy,
  If that him lyst, the scyence to use;
  Though at the fyrste it be to hym obtuse,
  With exercyse he shal it well augment,
  Under cloudes derke and termes eloquent.

  But nowadayes the synne of avaryce
  Exyleth the mynde and the hole delyght,
  To coveyt connyng, which is gret prejudice,
  For insacyatly so blynded is theyr syght
  Wyth the sylver and the golde so bryght,
  They nothing thynke on fortune varable,
  Whyche al theyr ryches shal make transmutable.

  The olde sawes they ryght clene abject,
  Whych for our lernyng the poetes dyd wryte;
  With avaryce they arose so sore infect,
  They take no hede nothyng they wryte,
  Whyche morally dyd so nobly endyte,
  Reprovyng vyce, praysyng the vertue,
  Whiche idelnes dyd evermore eschewe.

  Nowe wyl I cease of lusty rethoryke;
  I may not tary, for my tyme is short;
  For I must procede, and shew of Arismetrik
  With divers nombres which I must reporte.
  Hope inwardly doth me wel comforte,
  To brynge my boke unto a fynyshment,
  Of al my matter and my true entent.




                               CAP. XIV.
             A COMMENDATION OF GOWER, CHAUCER, AND LYDGATE.


  O thoughtful herte, tombled all aboute
  Upon the se of stormy ignoraunce,
  For to sayle forthe thou arte in grete doute,
  Over the waves of grete encombraunce;
  Wythout ony comforte, saufe of esperaunce,
  Whiche the exhorteth hardely to sayle
  Unto thy purpose wyth diligent travayle.

  Afrycus, Auster bloweth frowardly,
  Towarde the lande and habitacyon
  Of thy wel faverde and moost fayre lady,
  For whose sake and delectacyon
  Thou hast take this occupacyon,
  Principally ryght well to attayne
  Her swete rewarde for thy besy payne.

  O pensyfe herte, in the stormy pery
  Mercury northwest thou mayst se appere,
  After tempest to glad thyne emespery;
  Hoyse up thy sayle, for thou must drawe nere
  Towarde the ende of thy purpose so clere,
  Remembre the of the trace and daunce
  Of poetes olde wyth all the purveyaunce.

  As morall Gower, whose sentencyous dewe
  Adowne reflayreth with fayre golden bemes,
  And after Chaucers all abrode doth shewe,
  Our vyces to clense; his depared stremes
  Kyndlynge our hertes wyth the fyry lemes
  Of moral vertue, as is probable
  In all hys bokes so swete and profytable.

  The boke of fame, which is sentencyous,
  He drewe hym selfe on hys own invencyon;
  And than the tragidyes so pytous
  Of the xix. ladyes, was his translacyon;
  And upon hys ymaginacyon
  He made also the tales of Caunterbury;
  Some vertuous, and some glad and mery.

  And of Troylus the pytous dolour
  For his lady Cresyde, full of doublenes,
  He did bewayle ful well the langoure,
  Of all hys love and grete unhappines.
  And many other bokes doubtles
  He dyd compyle, whose godly name
  In printed bokes doth remayne in fame.

  And, after him, my mayster Lydgate,
  The monke of Bury, dyd hym wel apply
  Both to contryve and eke to translate;
  And of vertue ever in especyally,
  For he dyd compyle than full ryally
  Of our blessed lady the conversacion,
  Saint Edmunde’s life martred with treson.

  Of the fall of prynces, ryght wofully
  He did endyte in all piteous wyse,
  Folowynge his auctoure Bocas rufully;
  A ryght greate boke he did truly compryse,
  A good ensample for us to dispyse
  This worlde, so ful of mutabilyte,
  In whiche no man can have a certente.

  And thre reasons ryght greatly profytable
  Under coloure he cloked craftely;
  And of the chorle he made the fable
  That shutte the byrde in a cage so closely,
  The pamflete sheweth it expressely;
  He fayned also the courte of Sapyence,
  And translated wyth al his dylygence

  The grete boke of the last destruccyon
  Of the cyte of Troye, whylome so famous,
  How for woman was the confusyon;
  And betwene vertue and the lyfe vycyous
  Of goddes and goddes, a boke solacyous
  He did compyle, and the tyme to passe,
  Of love he made the bryght temple of glasse.

  Were not these thre gretly to commende,
  Whyche them applyed such bokes to contryve,
  Whose famous draughtes no man can amende?
  The synne of slouth they dyd from them dryve,
  After theyr death for to abyde on lyve
  In worthy fame by many a nacyon,
  Their bokes theyr actes do make relacyon.

  O mayster Lydgate, the most dulcet sprynge
  Of famous rethoryke, wyth balade ryall,
  The chefe orygynal of my lernyng,
  What vayleth it on you for to call
  Me for to ayde, now in especiall;
  Sythen your body is now wrapte in chest,
  I pray God to gyve your soule good rest.

  O what losse is it of suche a one!
  It is to grete truely me for to tell;
  Sythen the tyme that his lyfe was gone,
  In al this realme his pere did not dwell;
  Above al other he did so excell,
  None sith his time in arte wolde succede,
  After their death to have fame for their mede.

  But many a one is ryght well experte
  In this connyng, but upon auctoryte,
  They fayne no fables pleasaunt and covert,
  But spende theyr time in vaynful vanyte,
  Makynge balades of fervent amyte.
  As gestes and tryfles wythout frutefulnes;
  Thus al in vayne they spende their besynes.

  I, lytell or nought expert in poetry,
  Of my mayster Lydgate wyll folowe the trace,
  As evermore so his name to magnyfy
  Wyth suche lytle bokes, by Goddes grace,
  If in this worlde I may have the space;
  The lytell connyng that his grace me sente
  In tyme amonge in suche wyse shall be spente.

  And yet nothinge upon presumpcyon
  My mayster Lydgate I wyll not envy,
  But all onely is mine entencyon
  With suche labour my selfe to occupy;
  As whyte by blacke doth shyne more clerely,
  So shal theyr matters appeare more pleasaunt
  Besyde my draughtes rude and ignoraunt.




                                CAP. XV.
                             OF ARSMETRIKE.


  Now in my boke ferder to procede;
  To a chambre I went, replete wyth rychesse,
  Where sat Arysmatryke in a golden wede,
  Lyke a lady pure and of great worthynes.
  The walles about dyd full well expres,
  With golde depaynted, every perfyte nombre,
  To adde, detraye, and to devyde asonder.

  The rofe was paynted with golden beames,
  The wyndowes cristall clerely claryfyde,
  The golden rayes and depured streames
  Of radyant Phebus that was puryfyde
  Right in the Bull, that tyme so domysyde,
  Through windowes was resplendyshaunt
  About the chambre fayre and radyaunt.

  I kneled downe right soone on my kne,
  And to her I sayd: O lady marveylous,
  I right humbly beseche your majeste
  Your arte to shewe me so facundyous,
  Whyche is defuse and right fallacyous;
  But I shall so apply myne exercyse,
  That the vary trouth I shall well devyse.

  My scyence, said she, is right necessary,
  And in the myddes of the scyences all
  It is now sette right well and parfytely;
  For unto them it is so specyall,
  Nombrynge so theyr werkes in generall,
  Wythout me they had no parfytenes,
  I must them nombre alwayes doubteles.

  Without nombre is no maner of thynge,
  That in our sight we may well se;
  For God made all the begynnynge
  In nombre perfyte well in certaynte,
  Who knewe arsmetryke in every degre,
  All maner nombre in his minde were had,
  Bothe to detraye and to devyde and adde.

  But who wyl knowe all the experience,
  It behoveth hym to have great lernynge
  In many thinges, wyth true intelligence,
  Or that he can have perfyte rekenynge
  In every nombre by expert connynge.
  To reherse in Englysshe more of this science,
  It were foly and the great neclygence.

  I thought full longe, till I had a syght
  Of La Bell Pucell, the most fayre ladye;
  My minde upon her was bothe day and nyght,
  The fervent love so perst me inwardly,
  Wherfore I went anone right shortly
  Unto the toure swete and melodyous,
  Of dame Musyke so gaye and gloryous.




                               CAP. XVI.
             OF MUSIKE: MUNDAIN, HUMAYN, AND INSTRUMENTAL.


  Whan splendent Phebus, in his midday spere,
  Was hyght in Gemine in the fresshe season
  Of lusty Maye, with golden beames clere,
  And derke Diane made declynacion;
  Whan Flora florisshed in this nacion,
  I called to mynde right inwardly
  The reporte of Fame so muche ententifly

  Of La Bell Pucell in the toure musycall,
  And ryght anone unto the toure I went;
  Where I sawe a temple made of christal,
  In whiche Musyke, the lady excellent,
  Played on base organs expedient,
  Accordyng well unto dyopason,
  Dyapenthe, and eke dyetesseron.

  In this temple was great solempnyte,
  And of muche people there was great prease;
  I loked about whether I coude se
  La Bell Pucell, my langour to cease;
  I coude not se her; my payne dyd encrease,
  Tyl that I spyed her above, in a vaute,
  Whiche to my hert did make so sore assaute,

  Wyth her beaute clere and swete countenaunce,
  The stroke of love I coulde nothynge resyste:
  And anone, wythout lenger cyrcumstaunce,
  To her I wente, or that her person wyste;
  Her thought I knewe not, she thought as she lyst;
  By her I stode, with herte sore and faynte,
  And dyd my selfe wyth her sone acquaynt.

  The comyn wyt dyd full lytell regarde
  Of dame Musyke the dulcet armony;
  The eres herde not, for the mynde inwarde
  Venus had rapte and taken fervently:
  Imaginacion wrought full prively.
  The fantasy gave perfyte jugement
  Alway to her for to be obedyent.

  By estymacion muche doubtfully I cast
  Whether I should by long tyme and space
  Atteyne her, or els to love in wast.
  My herte sobbed and quaked in this case;
  I stode by her ryght nere in the place,
  Wyth many other fayre ladyes also,
  But so fayre as she I never sawe no mo.

  The feste done, dame Musyke dyd go;
  She folowed after, and she wolde not tary.
  Fare well, she sayde, for I must parte you fro.
  Alas! thought I, that fortune doth so vary;
  My sadde body my hevy hert did cary;
  I coude not speke, my herte was nere broken,
  But wyth my head I made her a token.

  Whan she was gone, inwardly than wrought
  Upon her beaute my mynde retentyfe;
  Her goodly fygure I graved in my thought;
  Except her selfe all were expulcyfe;
  My mynde to her was so ententyfe,
  That I folowed her into a temple ferre,
  Replete wyth joy, as bryght as any sterre;

  Where dulcet Flora her aromatyke dewe
  In the fayre temple adowne dyd dystyll,
  All abrode the fayre dropes dyd shewe,
  Encensynge out all the vapours yll;
  With suche a swetenes Flora dyd fulfyll
  All the temple, that my gowne well shewed
  The lycoure swete of the droppes endewed.

  And so to a chambre full solacyous
  Dame Musyke wente wyth La Bell Pucell;
  All of jasper, wyth stones precyous,
  The rofe was wrought, curyously and well;
  The wyndowes glased marvaylously to tell.
  With cloth of tyssue in the rychest maner
  The walles were hanged hye and cyrculer.

  There sat dame Musyke, with all her mynstrasy;
  As tabours, trumpettes, with pipes melodious,
  Sakbuttes, organs, and the recorder swetely,
  Harpes, lutes, and crouddes ryght delycyous;
  Cymphans, doussemers, wyth claricimbales glorious.
  Rebeckes, clarycordes, eche in theyr degre,
  Dyd sytte aboute theyr ladyes mageste.

  Before dame Musike I dyd knele adowne,
  Saying to her: O fayre lady plesaunt,
  Your prudence reyneth most hye in renowne,
  For you be ever ryght concordant
  With perfyte reason, whiche is not variaunt;
  I beseche your grace, with all my diligence,
  To instructe me in your noble science.

  It is, she sayde, right gretely proffitable;
  For musike doth sette in all unyte
  The discorde thynges whiche are variable
  And devoydeth myschiefe and greate iniquite.
  Where lacketh musyke there is no pleynte;
  For musyke is concorde and also peace,
  Nothyng without musyke may well encreace.

  The vii. scyences in one monacorde,
  Eche upon other do full well depende;
  Musyke hath them so set in concorde,
  That all in one may right well extende.
  All perfite reason they do so comprehende,
  That theyr waye and perfite doctryne
  To the joye above, whiche is celestine.

  And yet also the perfite physyke,
  Which appertayneth well to the body,
  Doth well resemble unto the musyke,
  Whan the inwarde intrayles tourneth contrary,
  That nature can not worke dyrectly;
  Then doth physike the partes interiall
  In ordre set to their originall.

  But yet physyke can not be lyberall
  As the vii. science by good auctorite,
  Which ledeth the soule the way in specyall
  By good doctrine to dame Eternite;
  Onely of phisike it is the properte
  To ayde the body in every sekenes,
  That is right frayle and full of bryttilnes.

  And because phisyke is appendaunt
  Unto the body by helpe of medecyne,
  And to the soule nothing approtenaunt,
  To cause the body for to enclyne
  In eternal helth so the soule to domyne,
  For to the body the science seven
  Doth teche to lede the soule to heven.

  And musike selfe is melodious
  To rejoyce the yeres and comfort the brayne,
  Sharping the wittes with sounde solacious,
  Devoydyng bad thoughtes whiche dyd remayne,
  It gladdeth the herte also well certayne;
  Lengthe the lyfe with dulcet armony,
  As is good recreacion after study.

  She commaunded her mynstrelles right anone to play
  Mamours the swete and the gentill daunce;
  With La Bell Pucell, that was fayre and gaye,
  She me recommaunded, with all pleasaunce,
  To daunce true mesures without varyaunce.
  O Lorde God! how glad than was I,
  So for to daunce with my swete lady.

  By her propre hande, soft as any sylke,
  With due obeysaunce I dyd her then take;
  Her skynne was white as whales bone or mylke.
  My thought was ravysshed, I might not aslake
  My brennynge hert, she the fyre dyd make;
  These daunces truely musyke hath me tought
  To lute or daunce, but it avayleth nought:

  For the fyre kyndled, and waxed more and more,
  The dauncynge blewe it, wyth her beaute clere,
  My hert sekened and began to waxe sore;
  A mynute vi. houres, and vi. houres a yere
  I thought it was, so hevy was my chere;
  But yet for cover my great love aryght,
  The outwarde countenaunce I made glad and light.




                               CAP. XVII.
  HOWE GRAUNDE AMOURE WAS ENAMOURED OF LA BELL PUCELL IN THE TOWER OF
               MUSIKE, AND MET WITH COUNSAYLE IN A TEMPLE


  And for fere myne eyes should my hert bewray,
  I toke my leve and to a temple wente,
  And all alone I to my selfe dyd saye:
  Alas! what fortune hath me hyther sente,
  To devoyde my joye and my hert torment;
  No man can tell howe great payne it is,
  But yf he wyll fele it, as I do ywys.

  Alas! O lady, how cruell arte thou,
  Of pyteous doloure for to buylde a nest
  In my true hert, as thou dost ryght nowe!
  Yet of all ladyes I must love the best;
  Thy beaute therto dyd me sure arest.
  Alas, wyth love, whan that it doth the please,
  Thou mayest cease my care and my payne sone ease.

  Alas! how sore maye I nowe bewayle
  The pyteous chaunce whyche did me happe;
  My ladyes lokes dyd me so assayle,
  That sodaynly my herte was in a trap
  By Venus caught, and wyth so sore a clap,
  That through the greate stroke did perse:
  Alas for wo I could not reverse!

  Farewel all joye and al perfyte pleasure!
  Fare wel my luste and my lykynge!
  For wo is comen wyth me to endure;
  Now must I lede my lyfe in mornynge;
  I may not lute, or yet daunce or synge!
  O! La Bel Pucel, my lady glorious;
  You are the cause that I am so dolorous.

  Alas! fayre lady, and myne owne swete herte,
  Wyth my servyce I yelde me to your wyll,
  You have me fettered; I may not asterte;
  At your pleasure ye may me save or kyll;
  Bicause I love you, wyl you me spyl?
  Alas! it were a pyteous case in dede,
  That you wyth deth should rewarde my mede.

  A, a! that I am ryght wo bygone,
  For I of love dare not to you speke,
  For feare of nay, that may encrease my mone;
  A nay of you myght cause my herte to breke.
  Alas! I wretche and yet unhappy peke
  Into suche trouble, misery, and thought:
  With sight of you I am into it brought.

  And to my selfe as I made complainte,
  I espyed a man ryght nere me beforne,
  Whyche right anone dyd wyth me acquaynt.
  Me thynke, he sayde, that ye are nere forlorne,
  Wyth inwarde payne that your heart hath borne.
  Be not to pensyfe; call to mynde agayne
  How of one sorowe ye do now make twayne.

  Myne inwarde sorowe ye begyn to double;
  Go your waye, quod I, for ye can not me ayde.
  Tell me, he sayde, the cause of my trouble,
  And of my wo be nothynge afrayde.
  Me thynke that sorowe hath you overlayde:
  Dryve of no lenger, but tell me your mynde,
  It may me happe a remedy to fynde.

  A, a! quod I, it vayleth not your speche,
  I wyll wyth you never have medlynge.
  Let me alone, the most unhappy wretche
  Of all the wretches that is yet lyvynge.
  Suche is the chaunce of my bewaylyng;
  Go on your waye, you are nothyng the better
  To me to speke to make the sorowe gretur.

  Forsoth, he sayd, remembre thynges thre;
  The fyrst is, that ye may sorowe longe
  Unto your selfe or that ye ayeded be:
  And secondly, in great paynes stronge,
  To muse alone it myght turne you to wronge:
  The thyrde is, it myght you wel ease truely
  To tel your mynde to a frende ryght trusty.

  It is a jewel of a frende of trust,
  As at your nede to tell your secretenes
  Of all your payne and fervent lust.
  His counseyle soone may helpe and redres
  Your payneful wo and mortall heavynes;
  Alone is nought for to thynke and muse,
  Therfore, good sonne, do me not refuse.

  And syth that you are plunged all in thought,
  Beware the pyt of dolorus dispayre;
  So to complayne it vayleth you ryght nought.
  It may so fortune ye love a lady fayre,
  Whych to love you wyl nothyng repayre;
  Or els ye have lost great londe or substaunce,
  By fatall chaunge of fortunes ordinaunce.

  Tell me the cause, though that it be so,
  In cause you love I knowe it by experience,
  It is a payne engendryng great wo,
  And hard it is for to make resystence
  Agaynst suche love of fervent vyolence.
  The love is dredefull, but nevertheles
  There is no sore nor yet no sykenes,

  But there is a salve and remedy therfore;
  So for your payne and your sorowe great
  Councell is medicine, which may you restore
  Unto your desyre wythout any let,
  Yf ye wyll tell me where your herte is set.
  In the chayre of sorowe no great doubt it is
  To fynde a remedy for your payne, ywys.

  A physycyen, truely, can lyttel descerne
  Ony maner sekenes wythout syght of uryne;
  No more can I by good councell you lerne
  All suche wofull trouble for to determyne.
  But yf you mekely wyl to me enclyne,
  To tell the cause of your great hevynesse,
  Of your inwarde trouble and woful sadnes.

  Than I began with all my diligence
  To here him speke so grounded on reason,
  And in my minde did make advertence.
  Howe it was holsome, in tribulation,
  To save a good and a trewe companion;
  For to know my sorow and woful grefe,
  It myght me comforte and ryght wel relefe.

  And of him, than, I asked this question:
  What was his name I prayd him to tel?
  Counseyl, quod he; the which solucion
  In my woful mynde whiche I like ryght wel.
  And pryvely I did his lesson spel,
  Sayeng to him, my chance and desteny
  Of al other is the moste unhappy.

  Why so? quod he; though fortune be straunge,
  To you a whyle turnyng of her face,
  Her louring chere she may ryght sone chaunge,
  And you excepte and cal unto her grace.
  Dyspayre you not, for in good tyme and space
  Nothynge there is but wysdom may it wynne,
  To tell your mynde I praye you to begynne.

  Unto you, quod I, wyth al my hole assent
  I wyl tell you trouth, and you wyl not bewray
  Unto none other my mater and entent.
  Nay, nay, quod he, you shall not se that day;
  Your hole affyaunce and trust ye well ye may
  Into me put, for I shall not vary,
  But kepe your counsell as a secretary.

  And than to hym, in the maner folowynge,
  I did complayne, wyth syghing teres depe:
  Alas! quod I, you shall have knowledgyng
  Of my hevy chaunce that causeth me to wepe;
  So wo I am, that I can never slepe,
  But walowe and tumble in the trappe of care;
  My heart was caught or that I was ware.

  It happened so that in a temple olde,
  By the toure of Musyke at great solemnyte,
  La Bell Pucell I dyd ryght well beholde,
  Whose beaute clere and great humilite
  To my heart dyd cast the darte of amyte;
  After whyche stroke so harde and farvent,
  To her excellence I came incontinent.

  Beholdyng her chere and lovely countenaunce,
  Her garmentes ryche and her propre stature,
  I regestered well in my remembraunce
  That I never sawe so fayre a creature,
  So well favoured create by nature;
  That harde it is for to wryte wyth yncke
  All the beaute, or any hert to thynke.

  Fayrer she was than was quene Elyne,
  Proserpyne, Cresyde, or yet Ypolyte,
  Medea, Dydo, or yonge Polexyne,
  Alcumena, or quene Menelape;
  Or yet dame Rosamunde; in certaynte,
  None of all these can have the premynence.

  Durynge the feest I stode her nere by,
  But than hir beaute encreased my payne;
  I coude nothyng resyst the contrary;
  She wrapt my herte in a brennyng chayne.
  To the musycall toure she went than agayne;
  I wente after, I roude not behynde.
  The chayne she haled whych my heart dyd bynde,

  Tyl that we came into a chamber gaye,
  Where that Musyke, wyth all her minstralsy,
  Dyvers base daunces moost swetely dyd playe,
  That them to here it was great melody;
  And dame Musyke commaunded curteysly
  La Bell Pucell wyth me than to daunce,
  Whome that I toke wyth all my pleasaunce

  By her swete honde, begynnyng the trace,
  And longe dyd daunce tyl that I myght not hyde
  The paynfull love whyche dyd my heart embrace;
  Bycause wherof I toke my leve that tyde,
  And to thys temple where I do abyde
  Forthe than I went, alone to bewayle
  My mortall sorowe wythout any fayle.

  Now have I tolde you all the veray trouthe
  Of my wofull chaunce and great unhappynesse.
  I praye you nothyng wyth me to be wrothe,
  Whyche am drouned in carefull wrethchednesse,
  By fortune plunged ful of doublenes.
  A, a! said Counseyle, doubte ye never a dele,
  But your disease I shal by wysdome hele.

  Remember yet, that never yet was he,
  That in this worlde dyd lede all his lyfe
  In joye and pleasure, wythout adversyte;
  No worldely thyng can be wythout stryfe,
  For unto pleasure payne is affyrmatyfe.
  Who wyll have pleasure he must fyrst apply
  To take the payne wyth hys cure besely.

  To serve the joye whych after death ensue,
  Rewardyng payne for the great businesse,
  No doubte your lady wyl upon you rue,
  Seing you apply all your gentylnes
  To do her pleasure and servyce doubtles.
  Harde is the heart that no love hath felt.
  Nor for to love wyl than encline and melt.

  Remember ye that in olde antiquyte
  Howe worthy Troylus, that mighty champion,
  What paine he suffered by great extremyte
  Of fervent love, by a great longe ceason,
  For his lady Cresyde, by great tribulacyon.
  After his sorowe had not he great joye
  Of hys lady, the fayrest of all Troye?

  And the famous knyght yclepped Ponthus,
  Whych loved Sydoyne so muche entyerly,
  What payne had he and what care dolorus
  For his lady wyth love so marvaylously,
  Was not her heart wounded ryght wofully?
  After hys payne his ladie dyd her cure,
  To do him joye, honoure, and pleasure.

  Who was wyth love more wofully arayed,
  Than were these twayne, and many other mo?
  The power of love hath them so asayde,
  That, and I lyst, I coude now reherse also
  To whom true love hath wrought mykel wo,
  And at the ende have had their desyre,
  Of al their sorow for to quenche the fyre.

  Languysshe no more, but plucke up thyne herte,
  Exyle dyspayre, and live a whyle in hope;
  And kepe your love all close and coverte;
  It may so fortune that your lady grope
  Somwhat of love for to drynke a slope;
  Though outwardly she dare not let you know,
  But at the last, as I beleve and trowe,

  She can not kepe it so prively and close,
  But that somwhat to you it shal appere,
  By countenaunce, how that her love arose.
  If that she love you, the love is so dere,
  Whan you come to her she wyl make you chere
  With countenaunce, accordyng unto love,
  Full pryvely for to come to her above.

  Sendyng of love the messanger before,
  Which is her eyes, with lovely lokes swete,
  For to beholde you than ever more and more,
  After the tyme that you together mete.
  With lovyng wordes she wyl you than grete.
  Sorow no more, for I thynke in my mynde
  That at the last she wyl be good and kynd.

  Alas! quod I, she is of hye degre,
  Borne to great land, treasure, and substaunce:
  I fere to sore I shal disdayned be,
  The whych wyl trouble al my grevaunce.
  Her beaute is the cause of my penaunce:
  I have no great lande, treasure, nor ryches,
  To wynne the favour of her noblenes.

  What thoughe? quod he, draw you not abacke,
  For she hath inough in her possession
  For you both; for you shal never lacke
  If that ye order it by good reason;
  And so, in perfite consyderacyon,
  She wyll wyth love her grene flouryng age
  Passe forth in joye, pleasure, and courage.

  Youth is alway of the course ryght lyght,
  Hote, and moyste, and full of lustines,
  Moost of the ayre it is ruled by ryght,
  And her complexion hath chefe intres
  Upon sanguyn, the ayres holsomnes.
  She is not yet in al above xviii. yere;
  Of tender age, to pleasure most dere.

  Golde, or sylver, in any maner of wyse,
  For sanguyne youth it is al contrary;
  So for to coveyte for it, doth aryse
  Onely engendred upon the melancoly,
  Whych is drye, colde, and also erthely,
  In which the golde is truely nutryfyde,
  Ferre frome the ayre so clerely purifyed.

  Thus covetyse shal nothyng surmount
  Your yonge ladyes herte; but onely nature
  Shal in her mynde make her to account
  The great losse of youth, her specyal treasure.
  She knoweth she is a ryght fayre creature,
  No doubte it is but ye pryvely amonge,
  So hye is nature wyth his werkes stronge.

  That she of force the mannes company
  Must well conveyte; for she may not resyste
  Dame natures werke, which is so secretely.
  Thoughe she be mayde, let her say what she lyst,
  She wolde have man, though do man it wyst
  To make her joye whan nature doth agre,
  Her thought is hers, it is unto her fre.

  Who spareth to speke he spareth to spede;
  I shall provyde for you convenyent
  A gentyl tyme for to attayne your mede,
  That you shall go to your lady excellent;
  And ryght before take good advysement
  Of all the matter that ye wyl her shewe,
  Upon good reason and in wordes fewe.

  Thus past we tyme in communicacyon,
  The after none wyth many a sentement,
  And what for love was best conclusyon
  We demed oft and gave judgement;
  Tyll that in the even was refulgent
  Fayre golden Mercury, wyth hys bemes bryght,
  About the ayre castinge his pured lyght.

  Then to a chambre swete and precyous,
  Councell me ledde, for to take my reste.
  The night was wete, and also tenebrous;
  But I my selfe, with sorowe opprest,
  Dyd often muse what was for me best
  Unto my fayre lady for to tell or saye,
  And all my drede was for fere of a naye.

  Though that my bedde was easy and softe,
  Yet dyd I tomble, I myght not lye styll;
  On every syde I tourned me ful ofte,
  Upon the love I had so set my wyll,
  Longynge ryght sore my mynde to fulfyll,
  I called Counseyle, and prayed hym to awake
  To gyve me counseyle what were best to take.

  Ha, ha! quod he, love doth you so prycke,
  That yet your heart will nothynge be eased,
  But evermore be feble and sycke,
  Tyll that your lady hath it well appesed;
  Thoughe ye thynke longe, yet ye shall be plesed.
  I wolde, quod I, that it were as ye say.
  Fye, fye, quod he, dryve suche dyspayre away,

  And lyve in hope, whych shall do you good.
  Joy cometh after, whan the payne is past.
  Be ye pacyent and sobre in mode;
  To wepe and wayle all is for you in wast:
  Was never payne, but it had joye at last.
  In the fayre morrow, ryse and make you redy,
  At ix. at the clocke, the time is necessary

  For us to walke unto your lady gent;
  The bodyes above be than well domysyde
  To helpe us forwarde without ympediment.
  Loke what ye saye; loke it be deryfyde
  Frome perfyt reason well exemplyfyde;
  Forsake her not, thoughe that she say naye,
  A womans guyse is evermore to delaye.

  No castell can be of so great a strength,
  If that there be a sure syege to it layde,
  It must yelde up or els be wonne at length,
  Though that tofore it hath bene longe delayde.
  So continuance may you ryght wel ayde.
  Some womans herte can not so harded be,
  But besy labour may make it agre.

  Labour and dylygence is full mervaylus,
  Whych bryngeth a lover to his promocyon.
  Nothyng to love, is more desyrous
  Than instant labour and delectacyon:
  The harded harte it geveth occasyon
  For to consider how that her servaunt
  To obtayne her love is so attendaunt.

  Thus al in comonyng we the nyght did passe,
  Tyll in the ayre wyth clowdes fayre and red
  Rysyn was Phebus, shynyng in the glasse,
  In the chamber his golden rayes were spred,
  And Dyane derlyng pale as any leade,
  Whan the lytle byrdes swetely dyd syng
  With tunes musicall in the fayre mornyng.




                              CAP. XVIII.
    OF THE DOLOROUS AND LOWLY DISPUTACION BETWENE LA BEL PUCELL AND
                             GRAUNDAMOURE.


  Councell and I than rose ful quickely
  And made us redy on her way to walke,
  In our clenly wede apparayled properly.
  What I wolde saye I dyd unto hym talke,
  Tyl on his boke he began to calke
  How the sonne entred was in Gemyne;
  And eke Dyane, ful of mutabilite,

  Entred the Crab, her propre mancyon,
  Than ryght amyddes of the Dragons hed;
  And Venus and she made conjuncyon.
  Frome the combust way she had her so sped,
  She had no let that was to be dredde,
  The assured ayre was depaynted clere
  With golden beames of fayre Phebus spere.

  Than forth so went good Counsell and I,
  At vi. a clocke, unto a garden fayre;
  By Musykes toure walked most goodly,
  Where La Bell Pucell used to repayre
  In the swete mornyng for to take the ayre
  Among the floures of aromatyke fume,
  The mysty ayre to exyle and consume.

  And at the gate we met the portresse,
  That was right gentill, and called Curteysy,
  Whych salved us wyth wordes of mekenesse,
  And axed us the veraye cause and why
  Of our comynge to the gardeine sothel?
  Truly, saide we, for nothyng but well,
  A lytel to speke with La Bell Pucell.

  Truly, quod she, in the garden grene
  Of many a swete and sundry floure
  She maketh a garlonde that is veray shene;
  Wyth true loves wrought in many a coloure,
  Replete with swetenes and dulcet odoure;
  And all alone, wythout company,
  Amyddes an herber she sitteth plesauntly.

  Nowe stande you styl for a lytle space,
  I wyll let her of you have knowledgynge.
  And ryght anone she went to her grace,
  Tellyng her than how we were comynge,
  To speke wyth her gretly desyrynge.
  Truly, she sayd, I am right well content
  Of theyr comyng to know the hole entent.

  Then good Curteysy, wythout taryenge,
  Came unto us wyth all her diligence,
  Prayeng us to take our entryng
  And come unto the ladies precence,
  To tell your erande to her excellence.
  Than in we wente to the garden gloryous,
  Lyke to a place of pleasure most solacyous.

  Wyth Flora paynted and wrought curyously,
  In divers knottes of marvaylous gretenes;
  Rampande lyons stode up wondersly,
  Made all of herbes with dulcet swetenes,
  Wyth many dragons of marvaylos likenes,
  Of dyvers floures made ful craftely,
  By Flora couloured wyth colours sundry.

  Amiddes the garden so moche delectable
  There was an herber fayre and quadrante,
  To paradyse right well comparable,
  Set all about with flours fragraunt;
  And in the myddle there was resplendyshaunte
  A dulcet spring and marvaylous fountaine,
  Of golde and asure made all certaine.

  In wonderfull and curious similitude
  There stode a dragon, of fyne golde so pure,
  Upon his tayle of myghty fortitude,
  Wretched and skaled al wyth asure,
  Havyng thre hedes divers in fygure,
  Whych in a bathe of the sylver grette
  Spouted the water that was so dulcette.

  Besyde whiche fountayne, the moost fayre lady
  La Bel Pucel was gayly syttyng;
  Of many floures fayre and ryally
  A goodly chaplet she was in makynge.
  Her heer was downe so clerely shynynge,
  Lyke to the golde late purifyed with fyre,
  Her heer was bryght as the drawne wyre.

  Lyke to a lady for to be moost trewe,
  She ware a fayre and goodly garment,
  Of most fyne velvet, al of Indy blewe,
  Wyth armynes powdred bordred at the vent.
  On her fayre handes, as was convenient,
  A payre of gloves ryght sclender and softe.
  In approchyng nere I did beholde her oft.

  And whan that I came before her presence,
  Unto the ground I dyd knele adowne;
  Sayeng: O lady! moost fayre of excellence,
  O stere so clere of vertuous renowne!
  Whose beaute fayre in every realme and towne,
  Indued wyth grace and also wyth goodnes,
  Dame Fame the her selfe doth evermore expresse.


                                Amoure.

  Please it your grace for to gyve audyence
  Unto my wofull and pitous complaynte;
  How fervent love, wythout resystence,
  My careful herte hath made low and faynte,
  And you therof are the hole constraynt;
  Your beauty truly hath me fettered faste,
  Wythout your helpe my life is nere hand paste.


                                Pucell.

  Stande up, quod she; I marvayle of this cace,
  What sodayne love hath you so arayde
  Wyth so great payne your heart to embrace?
  And why for me ye should be so dismayde?
  As of your lyfe ye nede not to be afrayde.
  For ye of me now have no greater awe,
  But whan ye lyst ye may your love wythdraw.


                                Amoure.

  Than stode I up, and right so did she,
  Alas! I sayd than, my heart is so set,
  That it is yours, it may none other be;
  Your selfe hath caught it in so sure a net,
  That if that I may not your favour get,
  No doubt it is, the great payne of love
  May not aswage tyl death it remove.


                                Pucell.

  Truely, quod she, I am obedient
  Unto my frendes whych do me so guyde;
  They shal me rule as is convenient,
  In the snare of love I wyl nothyng slyde,
  My chaunce or fortune I wyl yet abide.
  I thanke you for your love right humbly,
  But I your cause can nothing remedy.


                                Amoure.

  Alas! madame, yf I have enterprysed
  A thyng to hye truly for my degre,
  All that causes whych I have commysed
  Hath ben on fortunes gentyl unyte,
  Trustyng truely that she wold favour me.
  In this case wherfore now excuse
  Your humble servaunte, and not me refuse.


                                Pucell.

  Ha, ha! what vayleth all your flattery?
  Your fayned wordes shall not me appese
  To make myne herte to enclyne inwardly;
  For I my selfe nowe do nothynge suppose
  But for to prove me you flatter and glose.
  You shall not dye as longe as you speke,
  There is no love can cause your herte to breke.


                                Amoure.

  I wolde, madame, ye hadde prerogatyve
  To knowe the prevyte of my perfyte mynde,
  How all in payne I lede my wofull lyfe;
  Than, as I trowe, ye wolde not be unkynde,
  But that some grace I myght in you fynde,
  To cause myne herte, whyche you fetred sure
  Wyth brenninge cheynes, suche wo to endure.


                                Pucell.

  By veraye reason I may give judgement,
  That it is guyse of you everychone
  To fayne you sicke wyth subtyll argument,
  Whan to your lady ye list to make your mone:
  But of you true is there fewe or none.
  For all your payne and wordes eloquent,
  Wyth dame Repentaunce I will not be shent.


                                Amoure.

  O swete madame! now all my desteny
  Unhap and happy, upon you doth growe:
  Yf that you call me unto your mercy
  Of all happy the most happy, I trow,
  Than shall I be, of hye degre or lowe;
  And yf ye lyste so me than to forsake,
  Of all unhappy none shal be my make.


                                Pucell.

  Your fortune on me is not more applyed,
  Than upon other, for my minde is fre;
  I have your purpose oft ynoughe denyed,
  You knowe your answere now certayne;
  What nede your wordes of curyosyte?
  Wo we here no more, for thou shalt not spede;
  Go love another where ye may have mede.


                                Amoure.

  That shall I not; though that I contynewe
  All my lyfe in payne and hevynes,
  I shall not chaunge you for none other new;
  You are my lady, you are my masteres,
  Whome I shall serve with all my gentylnes.
  Exyle him never from your hert so dere,
  Whyche unto hys hath sette you most nere.


                                Pucell.

  The minde of men chaungeth as the mone.
  If you mete one whyche is fayre and bryght,
  Ye love her best tyll ye se, right soone,
  An other fayrer unto your owne syght.
  Unto her than your minde is tourned ryght,
  Truely your love, though ye make it straunge,
  I knowe full well ye wyl often chaunge.


                                Amoure.

  Alas! madame, nowe the bright lodes sterre
  Of my true herte, where ever I go or ryde,
  Thoughe that my body be from you aferre,
  Yet my herte onely shall wyth you abyde,
  Whan than you lyst ye may for me provyde.


                                Pucell.

  Nay, truly, it can nothyng be myne,
  For I therof take no possessyon;
  Your heart is your by substancyall lyne,
  It is not in my domynacyon.
  Love where ye list; at every season
  Your heart is fre, I do not it accept:
  It is your owne, I have it never kept.


                                Amoure.

  Alas! madame, ye may say as ye liste,
  With your beaute ye toke mine hert in snare;
  Your lovely lokes I coude not resyst,
  Your vertuous maner encreaseth my care,
  That of all joye I am devoyde and bare.
  I se you ryght often when I am aslepe,
  And whan I wake do sygh with teres depe.


                                Pucell.

  So great deceyt amonge men there is,
  That harde it is to finde one full stable;
  Ye are so subtil and so false, ywis:
  Your great deceyte is nothing commendable.
  In storyes olde it is well provable
  How many ladyes hath bene right falsely
  Wyth men deceyved yll and subtylly.


                                Amoure.

  O goodd madame! though that they abused
  Them to theyr ladyes in theyr great deceyte,
  Yet am I true; let me not be refused:
  Ye have me taken wyth so fayre a bayte,
  That ye shall never out of my conceyte.
  I can not wrynche by no wyle nor croke,
  My heart is fast upon so sure a hoke.


                                Pucell.

  Ye, so sayd they, tyll that they had their wyll;
  Theyr wyll accomplysshed, they dyd fle at large;
  For men say wel, but they thinke full yll.
  Though outwarde swetenes your tonge doth enlarge,
  Yet of your heart I never can have charge;
  For men do love, as I am right sure,
  Nowe one, now other, after theyr pleasure.


                                Amoure.

  All that, madame, I knew ryght perfetly,
  Some men there be of that condicyon;
  That them delyte often in novelty,
  And many also love perfeccyon.
  I cast all suche noveltes in objection;
  My love is set upon a perfet grounde,
  No falshed in me truly shal be founde.


                                Pucell.

  Ye saye full well, yf ye meane the same;
  But I in you can have no confydence;
  I thinke right well that it is no game
  To love unloved wyth percynge influence.
  You shall in me fynde no suche neclygence
  To grante you love, for ye are unthryfty,
  As two or thre to me doth specify.


                                Amoure.

  Was never lover without enemies thre,
  As Envy, Malyce, and Perturbaunce?
  Theyr tongues are poyson unto amyte;
  What man on live can use suche governaunce
  To attayne the favoure withouten varyaunce
  Of every persone, but right pryvely
  Behinde his backe some sayth unhappely?


                                Pucell.

  Trouthe it is; but yet, in this cace,
  Your love and myne is full ferre asunder:
  But thoughe that I do your herte so race
  Yf I drede you it is therof no wonder;
  Wyth my frendes I am so sore kepte under,
  I dare not love but as they accorde,
  They thynke to wedde me to a myghty lorde.


                                Amoure.

  I knowe, madame, that your frendes all
  Unto me sure wyll be contraryous;
  But what for that? your selfe in speciall
  Remembre there is no love so joyous
  As is your owne to you most precyous;
  Wyll you gyve your youthe and your flourynge aege
  To them agaynst your mynde in maryage?


                                Pucell.

  Agaynst my mynde, of that were I lothe,
  To wed for fere, as them to obey;
  Yet had I lever they were somwhat wrothe,
  For I my selfe do here the locke and kaye
  Yet of my mynde, and wyll do many a daye.
  Myne owne I am, what that I lyste to do
  I stand untyed, there is no joye therto.


                                Amoure.

  O swete lady! the good perfyte sterre
  Of my true herte, take ye now pyte;
  Thynke on my payne whiche am tofore you here,
  Wyth your swete eyes beholde you and se,
  How thought and wo, by great extremyte,
  Hath chaunged my hue into pale and wanne:
  It was not so whan I to love began.


                                Pucell.

  So, me thynke, it doth right well appere
  By your coloure that love hath done you wo;
  Your hevy countenaunce and your dolefull chere;
  Hath love suche myght for to aray you so
  In so short a space? I marvayle moche also
  That ye wolde love me so sure in certayne,
  Before ye knewe that I wolde love agayne?


                                Amoure.

  My good dere herte! it is no mervayle why;
  Your beaute cleare and lovely lokes swete
  My herte dyde perce with love so sodaynly
  At the fyrste tyme that I dyde you mete;
  In the olde temple whan I dyde you grete,
  Your beaute my herte so surely assayde,
  That syth that tyme it hath to you obayde.




                               CAP. XIX.
       HOW LA BELL PUCELL GRAUNTED GRAUND AMOURE LOVE, AND OF HER
                         DISPITEOUS DEPARTAGE.


  Your wo and payne, and all your languishynge
  Continually ye shall not spende in vayne,
  Sythen I am cause of your great mornynge,
  Nothynge exyle you shall I by dysdayne;
  Youre hert and myne shall never parte in twayne:
  Though at the fyrste I wolde not condescende,
  It was for fere ye dyde some yll entende.


                                Amoure.

  With thought of yll my mynde was never myxte,
  To you, madame, but alway clene and pure,
  Bothe daye and nyght upon you hole perfyxte.
  But I my mynde yet durst nothynge discure,
  How for your sake I dyd suche wo endure,
  Tyll now this houre with dredfull hert so faynt
  To you, swete herte, I have made my complaynt.


                                Pucell.

  I demed ofte you loved me before,
  By your demenour I dyde it aspye,
  And in my mynde I juged evermore
  That at the laste ye wolde full secretly
  Tell me your mynde of love right gentilly;
  As ye have done, so my mercy to crave,
  In all worshyppe you shal my true love have.


                                Amoure.

  O Lorde God than! how joyfull was I!
  She loked on me wyth lovely countenaunce;
  I kyst her ones or twise right swetely;
  Her depured vysage, replete with pleasaunce,
  Rejoyced my heart with amerous purveaunce.
  O lady clere! that perste me at the rote,
  O floure of comforte, all my hele and bote!

  O gemme of vertue, and lady excellent!
  Above all other in beauteous goodlynesse!
  O eyen bright as sterre refulgent,
  O profounde cause of all my sekenesse,
  Now all my joye and all my gladnes,
  Wolde God that we were joyned in one,
  In maryage, before this day were gone.


                                Pucell.

  A, a! sayd she, ye must take a payne a whyle;
  I must depart, by the compulcyon
  Of my frendes, I wyl not you begyle,
  Though they me led to a ferre nacion,
  My heart shall be without variacion
  Wyth you present, in perfite sykernes,
  As true and stable without doublenes.

  To me to come is harde and daungerous,
  When I am there; for gyauntes ugly,
  Wyth two monstres also, blacke and tedyous,
  That by the waye awayte full cruelly
  For to distroye you yll and utterly,
  Whan you that way do take the passage,
  To attayne my love by hye advauntage.


                                Amoure.

  All that, madame, was to me certyfyde
  By good dame Fame, at the begynnynge,
  Whan she to me of you well notyfide,
  As she came frome the toure of Lernynge,
  Of all such enemyes the myght excludynge.
  I promyse unto you here, full faythfully,
  Whan I departe frome dame Astronomy,

  That I wyll to the toure of Chyvalry,
  And for your sake become adventurous
  To subdue all enemyes to me contrary;
  That I may after be ryght joyous
  Wyth you, my lady, most swete and precyous.
  Wo worth the cause of your departynge,
  Which all my sorowes is in renuynge!

  Alas! what pleasure, and eke wythout disporte,
  Shall I now have, whan that ye be gone?
  Ha, ha! truly now wythout good conforte,
  My dolorous herte shall be left alone,
  Wythout your presence to me is none;
  For every houre I shall thynke a yere,
  Tyll fortune brynge me unto you more nere.

  Yet after you I wyll not be ryght longe,
  But hast me after as faste as I maye;
  In the toure of Chyvalry I shall make me stronge,
  And after that passe shortly on my way,
  Wyth diligent laboure on my journay.
  Spyte of your enemyes, I shal me so spede,
  That in short tyme ye may rewarde my mede.

  I thanke you, quod she, with my hert entere;
  But yet with me ye shall make covenaunt,
  As I to you am ryght lefe and dere,
  Unto no persone ye shall so advaunte
  That I to love you am so attendaunte,
  For any thynge your councell not bewraye,
  For that full soone might us bothe betraye.

  And to tell me I pray you hertely;
  Yonder is Counseyle, how were ye acquaynted?
  He is bothe honest and true certaynly:
  Doth he not knowe how your hert is faynted,
  Wyth fervent love so surely attaynted?
  Yf ye so do, yet I nothyng repent,
  He is so secrete and true of entent.

  Truely, madame, because ye are content
  I shall you tell how the matter was;
  Whan that your beaute, clerely splendent,
  Into my herte full wonderly dyd passe,
  Lyke as fayre Phebus dothe shyne in the glas,
  All alone, wyth inwarde care so rent,
  Into a temple forth on my way I went.

  Where that I walked, plunged in the pytte
  Of great dispayre; and he than me mette.
  Alas! he sayde, me thinke ye lose your wytte;
  Tell me the trouth now, wythout any lete,
  Why ye demeane suche mortall sorow great.
  A voyde! quod I, you shall nothing it knowe,
  You can not helpe in the case I trow.

  But he suche reason and fruytfull sentence
  Dyd for him laye, that I tolde hym all.
  Whan he it knewe with all my diligence,
  He dyd me conforte than in specyall:
  Unto my minde he bad me to call,
  Who spareth to speke he to spede doth spare;
  Go tell your lady the cause of your care.

  By whose counseyle grounded in wysdome,
  To the entent I should spede the better,
  And ryght shortly I dyd than to you come,
  But drede alway made my sorowe greatter;
  After great payne the joyes is the sweter.
  For who that tasteth paynfull bytternes,
  The joye to him is double swetenes.

  And, therwythall, I did unto her brynge
  Councell my frende, and full right meke
  Dyd him receive as he was comynge;
  And of all thynges she did hym beseke,
  After her departinge, the same weke,
  To hast me forwarde to my journeyes ende.
  Therto, quod I, I do well condyscende.

  Fare well, quod she, I may no longer tary;
  My frendes wyll come; of that were I lothe:
  I shall retayne you in my memory,
  And they it knewe they wolde with me be wrothe.
  To love you best I promise you my trouthe!
  And than mine eyen great sorowe shewed,
  Wyth teres salte my chekes were endewed.

  Her eyes graye began to loke right reed,
  Her gaye whyte coloure began for to pale,
  Upon her chekes so the droppes were sprede
  Whiche from her eyen began to advale;
  Frome her swete herte she dyd the syghes hale;
  Never before, as I trowe and wene,
  Was suche departyng true lovers betwene.

  We wyped our chekes our sorowe to cloke,
  Outwardly faynyng us to be glad and mery,
  That the people should not perceyve the smoke
  Of our hote fyre to lyght the emyspery:
  Thoughe inwardly wyth a stormy pery
  The fyre was blowen, yet we dyd it cover,
  Bycause abrode it should nothyng perceyver.

  Out of the garden to an haven syde
  Forth he went, where as a shyppe ryght large
  That taryed there after the floynge tyde,
  And so than dyd there many a bote and barge.
  The shyp was great, fyve c. tonne to charge.
  La Bell Pucell ryght anone me tolde:
  In yondre shyp, whyche that ye beholde,

  Forthe must I sayle wythout longer delaye;
  It is full see; my frendes wyll come soone;
  Therfore I pray you to go hence your waye,
  It draweth fast now towarde the none.
  Madame, quod I, your pleasure shal be done.
  Wyth wofull herte and great syghes, ofte
  I kyssed her lyppes, that were swete and softe.

  She unto me nor I unto her colde speke,
  And as of that it was no great wondre,
  Our hertes swelled as that they should breke;
  The fyre of love was so sore kept under.
  Whan I from her should depart asundre,
  Wyth her fayre head she dyd lowe enclyne,
  And in lykewyse so dyd I wyth myne.




                                CAP. XX.
    OF THE GREAT SOROWE THAT GRAUNDE AMOUR MADE AFTER THE DEPARTYNGE
                    AND OF THE WORDES OF COUNCEYLE.


  Her frendes and she on theyr waye they sayled
  Alonge the haven, God them save, and bryng
  Unto the londe! I herd whan that they hayled,
  Wyth a great peale of gunnes, at theyr departyng,
  The marvaylous toure of famous cunnynge;
  No gunne was shotte, but my herte dyd wepe
  For her departynge wyth wofull teres depe.

  Councell me comforted as ever he myght,
  Wyth many storyes of olde antyquyte.
  Remembre, he saide, that never yet was wyght
  That lyved alway in great tranquylyte,
  But that him happed some adversyte;
  Than after that, whan the payne was paste,
  The double joye dyd comfort them at laste.

  Ye nede nothynge for to make great dolour,
  Fortune to you hath bene ryght favourable,
  Makyng you to attayne the good favour
  Of your lady so swete and amyable.
  No doubte it is she is true and stable;
  And demeane you so that in no wyse
  No man perceyve of your love surmyse.

  Be hardy, fyers, and also coragyous,
  In all your batayles without feblenes,
  For ye shall be ryght well vyctoryous
  Of all your enemyes so full of subtylnes.
  Arme you wyth wysdome for more surenes,
  Let wysdome werke, for she can stedfastly
  In tyme of nede resyste the contrary.

  Was never man yet surely at the bayte
  Wyth Sapyence, but that he dyd repent;
  Who that is ruled by her higher estate,
  Of hys after wytte shall never be shent;
  She is to man ryght benyvolent;
  Wyth walles sure she doth hym fortyfye,
  Whan it is nede to resyste a contrary.

  Was never place where as she did guyde
  Wyth enemyes brought to destruccyon;
  A remedy she can so well provyde;
  To her hygh werke is no comparison,
  It hath so stronge and sure foundacyon:
  Nothyng there is that can it molyfy,
  So sure it is agaynst a contrary.

  Of her alwayes it is the parfyte guyse
  To begynne nothyng of mutabylyte,
  As is the warre which may sone aryse
  And wyl not downe, it may so stourdy be,
  The begynner oft hath the iniquite.
  Whan he began, wysdome did reply,
  In his grete nede to resyst the contrary.

  The myghty Pryant, somtyme kynge of Troye,
  Wyth all his cyte so well fortyfyed,
  Lytle regarded all his welth or joye,
  Wythout wysdome truely exemplyfied,
  His propre death him selfe he nutrifyed;
  Agaynst his warre wysdome did reply,
  At his grete nede to resyst the contrary.

  And where that wysdome ruleth hardynes,
  Hardynes than is ever invincyble,
  There may nothinge it vanquishe or oppres;
  For prudence is so well intellygyble,
  To her there is nothing impossible;
  Her grounded werke is made so perfytely,
  That it must nedes resyst the contrary.

  To wofull creatures she is goodly leche,
  Wyth her good syster called Pacyence,
  To the toure of joye she doth them tell weche,
  In the way of hope wythout resystence;
  Who to her lyst to applye hys dylygence,
  She wyll hym brynge to worshyppe shortly
  That he shall well resyst the contrary.

  Ryght so let wysdome your sorowe surrendre,
  And hye you fast unto dame Geometry,
  And let no thought in your herte engendre,
  But after thys speke to Astronomye;
  And so frome thence to the toure of Chyvalry,
  Wher of the worthy kynge Melyzyus
  You shall be made soone knyght adventurous.

  And fare you well, for I must frome you go,
  To other lovers whyche are in dyspayre,
  As I dyd you, to confort them also:
  It is great nede that I to them repayre,
  Habundant teres theyr hertes do refleyre.
  Farewell! quod I, my good frende so true,
  I wolde wyth me ye might alwaye ensue!

  Then agayne I went to the toure melodyous
  Of good dame Musyke, my leve for to take;
  And pryvely wyth these wordes dolorous
  I sayd: O toure! thou mayst well aslake
  Suche melody now in the more to make
  The gemme is gone of all famous porte,
  That was chefe cause of the great comforte.

  Whylome thou was the fayre toure of lyght,
  But now thou arte replete with darkenes;
  She is now gone that shone in the so bryght;
  Thou was some time the toure of gladnes,
  Now mayst thou be the toure of hevynes,
  For the chefe is gone of all thy melody,
  Whose beauty clere made moost swete armony.

  The fayre carbuncle, so ful of clerenes,
  That in thee truely dyd moost purely shyne,
  The perle of pyte replete with swetenes,
  The gentyll gyllofer, the goodly columbyne,
  The redolente plant of the dulcet vyne,
  The dede aromatyke may no more ensence,
  For she is so ferre out of thy presence.

  A, a! truly in the tyme so past,
  Myne erande was the often for to se;
  Now for to entre I may be agast,
  When thou art hens, the sterre of beaute,
  For all my delyte was to beholde the!
  A! toure, toure! all my joye is gone,
  In the to entre comfort is there none!

  So then inwardly my selfe bewaylynge,
  In the toure I went, into the habytacle
  Of dame Musyke, where she was syngynge
  The ballades swete in her fayre tabernacle.
  Alas! thought I, this is no spectacle
  To fede myn eyne, whiche ar now all blynde;
  She is not here that I was wonte to fynde.

  Than of dame Musyke, with all lowlines
  I dyde take my leve, withouten itarenge.
  She thanked me with all here mekenes;
  And all alone fourth I went musynge.
  A, a! quod I, my love and lykinge
  Is nowe ferre hence, on whome my hole delyght
  Dayly was sette, upon her to have sight.

  Fare well, swete herte! farwell, farewell, farewell!
  Adieu, adieu! I wold I were you by!
  God gyve me grace with you sone to dwell,
  Lyke as I dyd for to se you dayly.
  Your lowly chere and gentyll company
  Rejoysed my herte with fode most delycate,
  Myne eyen to se you were insaciate.

  Now, good swete herte! my lady and maystresse,
  I recommende me unto your pyte;
  Besechyng you wyth all my gentylnes,
  Yet other whyle to thynke upon me;
  What payne I suffer by great extremyte,
  And to pardon me of my rude wrytyng,
  For with woful herte was myne endytynge!




                               CAP. XXI.
      HOWE GRAUNDE AMOURE WENT TO GEOMETRY, AND WHAT GEOMETRY IS.


  So forth I went, upon a craggy roche,
  Upon the toure moost wonderfully wrought
  Of Geometry; and as I did approche
  The altitude all in my mynd I sought.
  Sixe hundreth fote, as by my nomber thought;
  Quadrant it was, and did here and sette
  At every storme whan the wind was great.

  Thus at the last I came into an hall,
  Hanged with arres riche and precious,
  And every window glased with cristall,
  Lyke a place of plesure much solacious.
  With knottes sixeangled, gay and glorious,
  The rofe did hange, right high and pleasauntly,
  By Geometry made right well and craftely.

  In this marveylous hall, replete with richesse,
  At the hye ende she sat full worthely.
  I came anone unto her great noblenesse,
  And kneled adowne before her mekely.
  Madame, I sayd, ye werke full ryally;
  I beseche you, with all my diligence,
  To instructe me in your wonderfull science.

  My science, she sayd, it is moost profitable
  Unto Astronomy, for I do it mesure
  In every thing as it is probable;
  For I my selfe can ryght well discure
  Of every sterre, which is sene in ure,
  The mervaylous gretnes by my mesuring;
  For God made all at the begynnyng.

  By good mesuryng both the heyght and depnes
  Of every thing, as I understand,
  The length and brede with al the greatnes,
  Of the firmament so compassing the land;
  And who my cunning list to take in hand,
  In his emyspery of hye or low degre
  Nothing there is but it may measure be.

  Though that it be from us hye and farre,
  If ony thing fall we may it truely se,
  As the sonne or moone or any other sterre,
  We may therof know well the quantite.
  Who of this science dooth know the certaynte,
  All maysteries might measure perfytely;
  For geometry doth shew it openly.

  Where that is mesure there is no lacking;
  Where that is mesure hole is the body;
  Where that is mesure good is the living;
  Where that is mesure wisdome is truely;
  Where that is mesure werke is directly;
  Where that is mesure, natures working
  Nature increaseth by right good knowledging.

  Where lacketh mesure there is no plente;
  Where lacketh mesure seke is the courage;
  Where lacketh mesure there is iniquite;
  Where lacketh mesure there is great outrage;
  Where lacketh mesure is none advauntage;
  Where lacketh mesure there is great glotony;
  Where lacketh mesure is moost unhappy.

  For there is no hye nor great estate,
  Without mesure can kepe his dignite;
  It doth preserve him both early and late,
  Keping him from the pytte of poverte.
  Mesure is moderate to all bounte,
  Gretely nedeful for to take the charge
  Man for to rule, that he go not at large.

  Who loveth mesure can not do amys,
  So perfitely is the high operacion
  Among all thynges; so wonderfull it is,
  That it is full of all delectacion,
  And to vertue hath inclynacion.
  Mesure also doth well exemplefy,
  The hasty dome to swage and modefy.

  Without mesure wo worth the jugement;
  Without mesure wo worth the temperaunce;
  Without mesure wo worth the punishmeut;
  Without mesure wo worth the purveyaunce;
  Without mesure wo worth the sustenaunce;
  Without mesure wo worth the sadnes;
  And without mesure wo worth the gladnes.

  Mesure mesuring mesurably taketh;
  Mesure mesuring mesuratly dooth all;
  Mesure mesuring mesuratly maketh;
  Mesure mesuring mesuratly guyde shall;
  Mesure mesuring mesuratly doth call;
  Mesure mesuryng to right hye preemynence,
  For alway mesure is grounde of excellence.

  Mesure mesureth mesure in effecte;
  Mesure mesureth every quantyte;
  Mesure mesureth all waye the aspecte;
  Mesure mesureth all in certayne;
  Mesure mesureth in the stabilitie;
  Mesure mesuryth in every doutful case;
  And mesure is the lodesterre of all grace.

  Affycte of mesure is long continuaunce,
  Quantite without mesure is nought;
  Aspect of mesure devoydeth repentaunce;
  Certayne wold weye all thinges thought;
  Stabilitie upon a perfite grounde is wrought;
  Cace doubtfull may yet a whyle abyde;
  Grace may in space a remedy provyde.

  Countenaunce causeth the promocyon;
  Nought avayleth service without attendaunce,
  Repentaunce is after all abusion;
  Thought afore wolde have had perseveraunce;
  Wrought how should be bydede the mischaunce;
  Abyde nothing tyll thou do the dede;
  Provyde in mynde how thou mayst have mede.

  Promocion groweth after good governaunce;
  Attendaunce doth attayne good favour;
  Abusyon is causer of all variaunce;
  Perceyveraunce causeth great honour;
  Mischaunce alway is roote of dolour;
  Dede done can not be called agayne;
  Mede well rewarded both with joye and payne.

  Than I toke my leve, and went from Geometry
  Toward Astronomy as fast as I myght:
  For all my mynde was set right inwardly
  Upon my lady that was fayre and bryght.
  My herte with her was bothe day and night:
  She had it locked with a locke so sure,
  It was her owne, she had therof the cure.




                               CAP. XXII.
                           OF DAME ASTRONOMY.


  Than forth I wente into a medow grene,
  With Flora paynted in many a sundry colour,
  Lyke a gay goddesse of all floures the quene,
  She encenced out her aromatyke odour.
  The brethe of Zepherus encreased the floure.
  Amiddes the medow fayre replendishaunt,
  Was a pavilyon right hye and quadraunt,

  Of grene sarcenet bordered with golde,
  Wherein dede hange a fayre astrology.
  Which oft Astronomy did full well beholde;
  Unto whome than I came full shortly,
  And kneled adowne before her mekely,
  Beseching her of her great gentylnes
  Of her scyence to shew the perfitenes.

  My scyence, sayd she, it is ryght resonable,
  And is the last of the sciences seven;
  Unto man it is also ryght profitable,
  Shewing the course above of the heaven;
  Right merveylous for any man to neven.
  Who knew astronomy at every maner ceason,
  Might set in ordre every thing by reason.

  Also the other vi. sciences liberall
  By astronomy principally were found;
  And one were lost they were vanished all,
  Eche upon other had so sure a ground.
  In all the world, that is so wide and round,
  Is none so wise that can then multiply,
  Nor know them all right well and surely.

  The hye astronomier, that is God omnipotent,
  That the first day devided all the lyght
  Frome the derkenes with his wyll prepotent;
  And the second day, with his excellent might,
  The waters above he did devide aryght,
  From the erthely waters which are inferiall;
  The third daye herbes and fruytes in speciall

  In erthe he planted for to have their life
  By divers vertues and sundry growing,
  So to continue and be vegitative;
  And the third day he sette in werking
  The bodies above to have their moving,
  In the xii. signes them selfe to domify,
  Some rethrogarde, and some dyrectly.

  The fyfth day he dyd fysshes make;
  In the see the great stormy flode,
  To and fro theyr courses for to take
  And in the water for to have theyr fode,
  Lyke to the same colde alway theyr blode;
  The vi. day, bestes, wyth foules sensatyve,
  And man also, with soule intellectyve.

  The sevent day he restes of hys werke,
  Nothynge constrayned as of werynes,
  As wryteth many a ryght famous clerke;
  But that he had accomplysshe doutles
  Her purpensed purpose by infynite prowes,
  As to us doth moost playnely discure
  The perfyte grounde of holy Scrypture.

  Thus God hym selfe is chyef astronomyer,
  That made all thyng according to his wyll;
  The sunne, the mone, and every lytle sterre,
  To a good entent and for no maner of yll.
  Wythouten vayne he dyd all thyng fulfyll,
  As astronomy doth make apparaunce,
  By reason he weyed all thynges in balauns.




                              CAP. XXIII.
                   OF THE DIRECT OPERATION OF NATURE.


  And forasmuche that he made nature
  Fyrst of all to have domynacyon,
  The power of her I shall anone dyscure,
  How that she taketh her operacyon,
  And whereupon is her fundacyon,
  In symple and rude, opprest wyth neclygence,
  Shall discryve the myght of her preemynence.

  For though that aungell be invysyble,
  Inpalpable, and also celestiall,
  Wythouten substaunce as incencyble,
  Yet have they nature whych is angelycall;
  For nature naturynge nature made all,
  Heven and earth and the bodyes above,
  By cours of nature for to werke and move.

  On man or beest, wythouten ony mys,
  She werketh directly after the aspecte
  Of the mater, be it more or lesse, ywys,
  And doth therof the hole fourme dyrecte,
  After the qualyte it doth take effecte;
  Yf there be more than may one suffyse,
  A bye membre she wyll than more devyse.

  As that in ure ye may it dayly se,
  Upon one hande some hath thombes twayne;
  And other also somtyme armes thre;
  The superfluite is cause therof certayne;
  Whyche that dame Nature dooth constrayne
  So for to do, for she lesed noughte
  Of the mater, but hath it hooly wroughte.

  And in like wyse, where is not suffycyent
  Of the mater for the hole reformacion,
  There lacketh a membre by great impediment,
  So that there can be no perfyte facyon;
  As may be judged by perfyte reason,
  After the qualyte of thy matter lackynge,
  So lacketh the of natures fourmynge.

  Some lacketh a legge, some an arme also,
  Some a fynger, and some more or lesse;
  All these causes, wyth many other mo,
  Nature werketh so dyrectly doutles
  Upon the mater, as I do expresse,
  After the qualyte in many a sundry wyse,
  The kynde of her we ought nothyng to despyse.

  Some be fayre and replete with grace;
  Some be fayre and yet right unhappy;
  Some be foule and can sone purchace
  Landes and possessyons to them shortely;
  Some be fooles and some be ryght wytty;
  Whereupon I shall shewe a dyfference
  Of the v. wyttes by good experyence.




                               CAP. XXIV.
                     OF THE FIVE INTERNALL WITTES.


  The eyen, the eres, and also the nose,
  The mouth, and handes, inwarde wyttes are none;
  But outwarde offyces, as ye may suppose,
  To the inwarde wyttes, whiche do judge alone;
  For unto them all thinges have gone,
  But these outwarde gates to have the knowledginge,
  By the inwarde wyttes to have decernynge.

  These are the v. wyttes remeuing inwardly:
  Fyrst, commyn wytte, and than ymaginacyon,
  Fantasy, and estymacyon truely,
  And memory, as I make narracyon;
  Eche upon other hath occupacyon.
  Fyrst, the comyn wytte unto the front aplyde,
  Doth thynke, decerne, it may not be denyde.

  Of the eyen the offyce only is the syght,
  To se the fayre, the lowe, or altytude,
  The whyte, or blacke, the hevy, or the lyght,
  The lytle or great, the weyke or fortytude,
  The ugly favour, or yet the pulcrytude;
  This is the use of the eyene intere,
  To se all thynges whiche may well appere.

  But of themselfe they can decerne nothynge
  One frome an other; but the comyn wytte
  Decerneth colours by spyrytuall connynge,
  To the fyve inwarde wittes it is so well knytte,
  Nothynge is sene but it doth judge it:
  It doth decerne the good from badnes,
  The hye, the lowe, the foule, the fayrenes.

  The nose, also, every ayre doth smel,
  But yet it hath nothynge auctoryte
  Yf it be swete for to judge and tell;
  But the comyn wyt doth it in certaynte,
  Decernynge favours in every degre,
  Knowynge the swete ayre from the stynkinge,
  Whan that the nose therof hath smellinge.

  The eres, also, right well gyve audyence
  Unto a tale, herynge it perfytely;
  But they can not decerne the sentence
  To knowe whereupon it doth so ratyfy,
  Upon great wysedome or elles upon foly:
  Thus, whether the tale be ryght good or bad
  By the comyn wytte the knowledge is had.

  Foly hath eres as well as sapience,
  But he can not determyne by his herynge
  What tale it is, for lacke of intelligence;
  For the comyn wytte is all understandynge,
  And that he lacketh to gyve hym knowynge.
  Wherfore the eres are but an intres
  To commyn wytte that sheweth the perfytnes.

  The mouth tasteth both swete and bytternes,
  But the comyn wyt decerneth proprely
  Yf it be soure or replete wyth swetenes;
  Nor yet the handes fele nothyng certaynly,
  But the comyn wytte decerneth subtylly
  Whether it be harde, moyst, or drynes,
  Hote, hevy, softe, or yet colde, doutles.

  Thus comyn wytte worketh wonderly,
  Upon the v. gates whyche are receptatyve
  Of every thynge for to take inwardly,
  By the comyn wytte to be affyrmatyve
  Or by decernynge to be negatyve;
  The comyn wytte, the fyrst of wyttes all,
  Is to decerne all thinges in generall.

  And than, secondly, ymagynacyon;
  Whan the comyn wytte hath the thinge electe,
  It werketh by all due inclynacyon
  For to brynge the mater to the hole effecte;
  And fantasy than hath the hole aspecte,
  The ymagyned matter to bring to finysshement,
  Wyth good desyre and inwarde judgement.

  And estymacion doth well comprehende
  The space, the place, and all the purveyaunce
  At what time the power might entende
  To brynge the cause unto perfyte utteraunce.
  Often it weyeth the cause in balaunce,
  By estymacyon ony thinge is nombred,
  By length or shortnes how it is accombred.

  Fyftly, the mynde, whan the fourth have wrought,
  Retayned all tyll the minde have made
  An outwarde knowlege to the mater thought,
  Bycause nothynge shall declyne and fade,
  It kepeth the mater nothynge rethrogarde,
  But dyrectly, tyll the minde have proved
  All suche maters whyche the iiij. have moved.

  Plauto, the connynge and famous clerke,
  That well expert was in phylosophy,
  Doth right reherse upon natures werke,
  How that she werketh upon all wonderly,
  Bothe for to minysshe and to multeply,
  In sondry wyse by great dyreccyon
  After the maner with all the hole affeccyon.

  In my natyf language I wyl not opres,
  More of her werke, for it is obscure;
  Who wyl therof knowe all the perfeytnes
  In phylosophy he shall fynde it ryght sure,
  Whyche all the trouth can to hym discure.
  No man can attayne perfecte connynge
  But by longe stody and diligent lernynge.




                               CAP. XXXV.
             OF THE HYE INFLUENCES OF THE SUPERNALL BODIES.


  The ryght hygh power natures naturyng,
  Nature made the bodyes above,
  In sundry wyse to take theyr workynge,
  That aboute the worlde naturallye do move,
  As by good reason the phylosophres prove,
  That the planettes and sterres instrumentes be
  To natures werkynge in every degre.

  God gave great vertue to the planettes all,
  And specially unto depured Phebus,
  To enlumyne the worlde ever in specyall;
  And than the mone, of her selfe tenebrus,
  Made lyght wyth the beames gaye and gorgyous
  Of the sunne, is fayre replendysshaunte,
  In the longe nyght wyth rayes radyaunte.

  By these twayne every thyng hath growynge;
  Bothe vegitatyfe and censatyve also,
  And also intellectyve wythout lesynge:
  No erthly thyng may have lyfe and go,
  But by the planettes that move to and fro;
  Whan that God set them in operacyon,
  He gave them vertue in dyvers facyon.

  Some hote and moyst, and some colde and dry;
  Some hote and drye, moyst and colde;
  Thus every one hath vertues sundry,
  As is made mencyon in the bokes olde.
  They shewe theyr power and werke many a folde;
  Man upon them hath his dysposycyon,
  By the naturate power of constellacyon.

  What shoulde I wryte more in thys matter hye,
  In my maternall tonge opprest wyth ignoraunce?
  For who that lyst to lerne astronomye,
  He shall fynde all fruytfull pleasaunce
  In the Latyn tonge by goodly ordenaunce;
  Wherfore of it I wyll no lenger tary,
  For fere from trouthe that I happen to vary.

  Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence
  For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry;
  For al my minde, wyth percyng influence,
  Was sette upon the most fayre lady
  La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly,
  That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene,
  Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.

  To you experte in the seven scyence,
  Now al my maysters, I do me excuse
  If I offended by my great neclygence.
  This lytel werke yet do ye not refuse;
  I am but yonge, it is to me obtuse
  Of these maters to presume to endyte,
  But for my lernyng that I lyst to wryte.

  Under obedyence and the true correctyon
  Of you my maysters experte in conninge,
  I me submytte now wyth hole affeccyon
  Unto your perfyte understandynge;
  As evermore mekely to you inclynyng,
  With diligent labour now without doutaunce
  To detraye or adde all at your plesaunce.




                               CAP. XXVI.
           HOW GRAUNDE AMOURE CAME TO THE TOURE OF CHYVALRY.


  When clene Aurora, with her golden bemes,
  Gan to enlumyne the derke cloudy ayre,
  And combust Dyane her gret fyry lemes
  Amyddes of the Bull began to reflayre;
  Than on my jorney, my selfe to repayre,
  Wyth my verlet called Attendaunce,
  Forthe on I rode by longe contynuaunce:

  Wyth my grayhoundes, both Grace and Governaunce,
  Over an hyll and so downe in a valley,
  Amonge the thornes of great encumbraunce,
  The goodli greyhounds caught me on mi wey.
  So foorth I passed my troublous journey,
  Tyll that I came unto a ryall playne,
  With Flora paynted in many a sundry vayne.

  Wyth purple colour the floures enhewed,
  In dyvers knottes wyth many one ful blue,
  The gentyll gelofer his odoure renued
  Wyth sundry herbes replete wyth vertue:
  Amonge these floures as I dyd ensue,
  Castynge my syght sodaynly so ferre,
  Over a toure I sawe a flambynge sterre.

  Towarde this toure as I rode nere and nere,
  I behelde the rocke of merveylous altytude,
  On whych it stode that quadrante did appere,
  Made all of stele wonderous fortytude,
  Gargeylde wyth beestes in sundry symylytude;
  And many turrettes above the toures hye,
  With ymages was set full marveylously.

  Towarde thys toure forth on my way I wente,
  Tyll that I came to a myghty fortresse,
  Where I saw hange a merveylous instrumente,
  Wyth a shelde and helmet before the entres:
  I knewe nothynge therof the perfytnes,
  But at aventure the instrument I toke,
  And blewe so loude that all the toure I shoke.

  Whan the porter herde the hedyous sounde
  Of my ryght lusty and stormy blast,
  That made the walles therof to redounde,
  Full lyke a knyght that was nothinge agast,
  Towarde the gate gave hym selfe to hast,
  And opened it, and asked my name,
  And fro whence I came, to certyfy the same.

  My name, quod I, is Graunde Amoure;
  Of late I came fro the toure of Doctryne,
  Where I attayned all the hygh honoure
  Of the seven scyences, me to enlumyne;
  And frome thence I dyd determyne
  Forthe to travayle to thys toure of Chyvalry,
  Where I have blowen thys blast so sodeynly.

  Whan he herd thys, ryght gentylly he sayd:
  Unto thys toure ye must resorte by ryght
  For to renue that hath be longe decayd,
  The flour of Chyvalry, with your hole delyght.
  Come on your way, it draweth toward nyghte.
  And therwith all he ledde me to his warde,
  Me to repose in pleasaunt due saufgard.

  After the travayle my selfe for to ease,
  I did there reste in all goodly wyse,
  And slept right well without any disease,
  Till on the morow the sonne did aryse;
  Than up I rose, as was my perfyte guyse,
  And made me redy into the courte to go,
  With my verlet and greyhoundes also.

  The gentil porter, named Stedfastnes,
  Into the basse courte on my way he brought,
  Where stode a toure of mervaylous highnes,
  That al of jasper ful wonderly wrought,
  As ony man can printe in his thought;
  And foure ymages above the toure there were,
  On horsebacke, armed, and every one a spere.

  These ymages were made ful curiously,
  Wyth theyr horses of the stele so fyne,
  And eche of them, in theyr places sundry,
  About were sette that clerely dyd shyne,
  Lyke Dyane clere in her spere celestyne;
  And under eche horse there was, ful pryvely,
  A great whele made by craftly Geometry,

  Wyth many cogges, unto whiche were tyed
  Dyvers cordes that in the horses holowe
  To every joynte full wonderly applyed;
  Whan the wheles wente the horses dyd folowe,
  To trotte and galop both even and morowe,
  Brekynge theyr speres and coude them dyscharge,
  Partynge asonder for to turney at large.




                              CAP. XXVII.
          OF THE MARVEYLOUS ARGUMENT BETWENE MARS AND FORTUNE.


  Besyde this toure of olde foundacion
  There was a temple strongly edefyed;
  To the high honoure and reputacyon
  Of the mighty Mars it was so fortefyed:
  And for to know what it signifyed
  I entred in, and sawe of golde so pure
  Of worthy Mars the mervaylous pycture.

  There was depaynted all about the wall
  The grete destruccion of the cite of Troye;
  And the noble actes do reygne memoryall
  Of the worthy Hector that was all theyr joye.
  His dolorus death was herde to occoye;
  And so whan Hector was cast all downe,
  The hardy Troylus was moost hyghe of renowne.

  And as I cast my syght so asyde,
  Beholdynge Mars how wonderly he stode,
  On a whele top with a lady of pryde
  Haunced aboute, I thought nothing but good,
  But that she had two faces in one hode;
  Yet I kneled adowne and made mine oryson,
  To doughty Mars, wyth grete devocyon.

  Sayenge: O Mars! O god of the warre!
  The gentyll lodesterre of an hardy herte,
  Dystyll adowne thy grace from so farre
  To cause all fere from me to astert:
  That in the felde I may ryght well subverte
  The hedyus monsters, and winne the victory
  Of the sturdy giauntes with famous chyvalry.

  O prynce of honour and of worthy fame!
  O noble knightes of olde antiquite!
  O redouted courage, the cause of theyr name,
  Whose worthy actes fame caused to be
  In bokes wrytten, as ye maye well se!
  So gyve me grace ryght well to secure
  The power of fame that shall long endure.

  I thought me past al chyldly ygnoraunce,
  The xxxi. yere of my yonge flourynge aege;
  I thought that Venus might nothyng avaunce
  Her strength against me with her lusty courage;
  My wytte I thought had suche avauntage,
  That it should rule both Venus and Cupyde:
  But, alas for wo! for all my sodayne pryde!

  Whan that Phebus entred was in Gemine,
  Toward the Crab takynge ascencyon,
  At the tyme of the great solempnite
  From heven above of Goddes descencyon;
  In a grete temple with hole entencyon
  As I went walkyng my selfe to and fro,
  Full sodaynly Venus wrought me such wo.

  For as I cast than my syght all alofte,
  I sawe Venus in beaute so clere,
  Which caused Cupide wyth his darte so softe,
  To wounde my herte wyth fervent love so dere;
  Her lovynge countenaunce so hyghe dyd appere,
  That it me ravyshed wyth a sodayne thought,
  Alas for wo! it vayled me ryght nought.

  To gyve audyence unto the melody
  Of waytes and organs that were at the fest,
  Love had me wounded so sore inwardly,
  What was to do I knewe not the best.
  Replete wyth sorowe and devoyde of rest,
  Sythen the tyme that she my hert soo wounded,
  My joy and pryde she hath full lowe confounded.




                              CAP. XXVII.
  HOWE MINERVE LEDDE GRAUNDE AMOURE TO KYNG MELYZYUS, WHICHE MADE HYM
                                 KNYGHT


  And so nowe, for to attayne her grace,
  As thou doost knowe become adventurous,
  Besechinge the in thys peryllous case,
  O Mars! me succoure in tyme tempestyous,
  That I may passe the passage daungerous,
  And to thy laude, honoure, and glorye,
  I shal a temple ryght strongly edefy.

  Well than, sayd Mars, I shall the fortefye
  In all thy warre as fast as I can.
  But for thy payne I knowe no remedy,
  For Venus reyned whan that thou began,
  Fyrst for to love making the pale and wanne;
  And of the trouthe to make relacyon
  Thou was borne under her consolacion.

  Wherefore thou must, of veray perfyte ryght,
  Unto her sue by the disposicion
  Whyche the constreyneth wyth hole delyght
  For to love ladies by true affeccion.
  Suche is her course and operacion.
  Wherfore whan thou hast lerned perfytely
  The for to governe by prudent chyvalry,

  Than, to fulfyll the ryght hye enterpryse,
  Forth on thy waye thou shalt thy jorney take,
  Unto a temple in all humble wyse
  Before dame Venus thine oblacion to make,
  Whiche all thy payne may sone redresse and slake;
  For at that tyme she holdeth a parlemente,
  To redress lovers of theyr impedimente.

  A, ha! quod Fortune, with the faces twayne,
  Behynde syr Mars; I have a grete mervayle
  That thou dost promyse him that he shal attayne
  Unto his purpose with al diligent travayle,
  Through thyne ayd, eke strength and counsayl;
  Sythens dependeth in myn ordenaunce,
  Hym to promote or brynge to myschaunce.

  My power, estate, and ryall dygnyte,
  Doth torne the whele of worthely glorye
  Often up so downe by mutabilyte.
  Have not I promoted full nobly
  Many a lowe degre to reigne full ryally?
  And often have made a transmutacion
  Of worldly welthe into tribulacion?

  Thus can I make an alteracion
  Of worthely honoure, whiche doth depende
  All onely in my dominacion;
  Through the worlde my whele doth extende,
  As reason doth ryght well comprehende;
  Of my great chaunces whiche are unsure,
  As dayly doth appere well in ure.

  If I should worke with perfite stedfastnes,
  And to exalte some to be honourable,
  And that they knewe by perfyte sykernes,
  That it should dure and not be variable,
  It were a thyng unto me culpable;
  For great orguell pryde should them so blynde,
  To knowe them selfe they should lose their mynde.

  Thus whan that they should them selfe forgete,
  And in no wyse their owne persone knowe,
  Full lytell than they would by me sette,
  That them exalted to hye degre from lowe;
  And by my chaunce could nought them overthrowe;
  Thus should they do and drede me nothyng,
  Wherfore my whele is evermore tournyng.

  And where that I shoulde turne my face,
  Castinge some in pytte of poverte,
  They were condampned without ony grace
  As for to attayne any prosperite;
  Whiche were a cause of greate iniquite:
  For riche mennes goodes I must ofte translate,
  Unto the poore, them for to elevate.

  And thyrdely; I shoulde lese my name,
  For this worde fortune is well derifyde
  Of an accydent chaunge, both good or shame,
  Whan that the deade is so exemplifyde;
  Wherfore by reason I must be duplifyde;
  And nothing stable in myne hye werke,
  As wryteth many a ryght noble clerke.

  Therfore by reason I must be mutable,
  And turne my whele right ofte up so downe,
  Labouringe in werkes whiche are unstable,
  On some to laughe and on some I must frowne;
  Thus all aboute in every realme and towne,
  I shew my power in every sundry wyse,
  Some to descende and on some to aryse.

  Wherfore my power doth ryght well excell
  Above the, Mars, in thine house enclosed;
  For to rule man thou hast power never a dele,
  Save after the somwhat he is disposed:
  Thy consolacion hath him so apposed
  Who under the taketh his nativitie,
  Yet God hath gyven him power to rule the.

  Wherfore I am of a ferre hyer power
  Than thou arte; for there is no defence
  Agaynst my wyll at any time or houre;
  And in my name there is a difference,
  For in these wordes in my magnifycence
  Predestinate, and also desteny,
  As I shall shew anone more formably.

  Predestinate doth right well signify
  A thing to come, whiche is prepared:
  None but God doth know it openly,
  Tyl that the dede caused to be declared;
  For many one, whan they well fared,
  Full lytell thought that tribulacion
  To them was ordeyned by predestinacion.

  The desteny is a thyng accydent,
  And by the werke doth take the effecte;
  Tyll it be done it is ay precedent,
  And man from it can him selfe abject.
  Thus every chaunce doth Fortune derecte.
  Wherfore, by reason, La Graunde Amoure
  Must sue unto me to do him socour.

  Aha! quod Mars, suche a one as thou
  I never knew before this ceason;
  For thou thy selfe doost so much enprou
  Above the havens by exaltacion;
  But what for all thy commendacion?
  Arte thou now any thing substanciall,
  Spirituall, or els yet terrestryall?

  How can a werke perfitely be grounded
  But in these two? and thou arte of those:
  Wherfore for nought thou mayst be confounded;
  For nought in substaunce can nothing transpose;
  Of none effecte thou canst thy selfe disclose;
  How hast thou power, in any maner of case,
  In heven or earth without a dwellyng place?

  But that poetes hath made a figure
  Of the, for the great sygnification
  The chaunge of man so for to discure,
  Accordyng to a moralyzacion;
  And of the trouth to make relacion,
  The man is fortune in the propre dede,
  And not thou that causeth hym to spede.

  What nedeth him unto his selfe to sue,
  Sythen thou art the dedes of his chaunce;
  Thou to rule man, it is a thynge not true,
  Nowe wherupon doth hange this ordenaunce,
  But accedent upon the governaunce
  Of the hye bodis, whiche doth man dispose
  The dede to do as hym lyst purpose.

  To here of Mars the marveylous argument,
  And of Fortune, I was sore amased;
  Tyll that I sawe a lady excellent,
  Clerely armed, upon whome I gased,
  And her armes ful prevely I blased:
  The shelde of golde, as I well understande,
  With a lyon of asure through passande.

  To me she came, with lowely countenaunce,
  And bad me welcome unto that mancion,
  Ledyng me forth wyth joy and pleasaunce
  Into an hall of mervaylous facion,
  Right strongly fortyfyde of olde foundacion,
  The pillers of yvery garnished with golde,
  With perles sette and broudred many a folde.

  The flore was paved with stones precious,
  And the rofe was braunched curiously
  Of the beten golde both gaye and glorious,
  Knotted with pomaunders right swetely,
  Encencing out the yll odours misty;
  And on the walles right well did appere
  The sege of Thebes depaynted fayre and clere.

  There were knightes playeng at the chesse,
  Which saw Minerve lede me in the hall;
  They lefte their play and all theyr besines,
  And welcomed me right gentely withall,
  With sir Nurture than moost in speciall,
  Accompanied of his brother Curtesy;
  They made me chere than full effectuall.

  And after that they brought me up a stayre,
  Into a chambre gayly glorified;
  And at the dore there stode a knight right fayre,
  Ye cleped Trouth, right clerely purified;
  His countenaunce was right well modified;
  To me he sayde that, before mine entres,
  Him for to love I should him promes.

  Of ryght, he sayde, I have in custody
  This chambre dore of king Melezius,
  That no man enter into it wrongfully,
  Without me, Trouthe, for to be chivalrous;
  Here knightes be made to be victorious.
  I shall you promise, quoth I, faythfully,
  You for to love and serve prudently.

  Abyde, quod he, I wyll speke with the kynge;
  Tell me your name and habitation,
  And the chefe cause now of your coming,
  That I to him may make relacion,
  To knowe his minde without variacion.
  La Graund Amour my name is, sayd I;
  The cause of my coming, intentifly,

  Is for bicause that I have enterprised,
  Now for the sake of fayre La Bell Pucell,
  To passe the passage that I her promised
  That is so daungerous with serpentes cruell;
  And for as much as I know never a dell
  The festes of armes to attayne honoure,
  I am come to lerne with diligent labour.

  Then forth he went unto the mageste
  Of king Melizius the mighty conquerour,
  Sayeng: O power so hye in dignitie!
  O prynce victorious and famous emperour!
  Of justynge truely the originall floure;
  One Graunde Amoure wolde be acceptable,
  In your hye courte for to be tendable.

  With all my herte I wyll, quod he, accepte
  Hym to my servyce, for he is right worthy:
  For unto Doctryne the hye way he kept,
  And so from thens to the toure of Chyvalry.
  He shall attayne great actes wonderly.
  Go on your way, and bryng him fast to me,
  For I thinke long him to beholde and se.

  And than the good knight Trouth incontinent
  Into the chambre so pure soone me lede,
  Where sate the king so much benevolent,
  In purple clothed, set full of rubyes rede;
  And all the flore on which we did tread
  Was crystall clere, and the rofe at night
  With carbuncles did geve a merveylous lyght.

  The walles were hanged with cloth of tyssue,
  Broudred with perles and rubies rubicond,
  Mixte with emerauds so full of vertue
  And brodred above with many a diamonde.
  An hevy herte it wolde make jocunde
  For to behold the merveylous riches,
  The lordship, welth, and the great worthines.

  There sate Melezius, in his hye estate,
  And over his head was a payre of balaunce;
  With his crowne and septer, after the true rate
  Of another wordly king for to have governaunce,
  In his hand a ball of right great cyrcumstaunce.
  Before whome than I did knele adowne,
  Sayeng: O Emperour! moost hye of renowne,

  I the beseche, of thine haboundaunt grace,
  Me to accepte in this courte the for to serve,
  So to contynue by longe time and space,
  Of chivalry that I may now deserve
  The order right, and well it to observe;
  For to attayne the high advauntage
  Of the enterpryse of my dougty vyage.

  Welcome, he sayd, to this court ryal!
  Mynerve shall arme you with grete dylygence.
  And teche you the feates of armes all;
  For she them knoweth by good experyence,
  In the olde tyme it was her scyence.
  And I my selfe shall gyve you a worthy stede,
  Called Galantyse, to helpe you in your nede.

  I humbly thanked his grete hyenes;
  And so to Mynerve I dyd than applye,
  Whiche dyd me teche with syker perfytnes
  For to haunt armes ryght well and nobly.
  Sapyence me ruled well and prudently;
  Thus amonge knyghtes for to just and tourney,
  Mynerve me taught in sundry wyse all day.

  It was a joyfull and a knyghtly syght,
  For to beholde so fayre and good a sorte
  Of goodly knyghtes armed clere and bryght,
  That I sawe there, whiche dyd me well exorte
  Armes to haunte with coragyous comforte:
  Mynerve me taught my strokes and defence,
  That in short space was no resystence

  Agaynst my powre and myghty puyssaunce;
  To my wylfull herte was nought impossyble,
  I bare my selfe so without doubtaunce
  My herte made my courage invyncible,
  Of whiche the trouthe was soone intellygyble,
  With my behavynge before the preemynence
  Of kynge Melezius famous excellence.

  Which right anone for dame Minerve sent,
  And me also, with sir Trouth to obey.
  We thought full litell what the mater ment,
  But unto him we toke anone the way,
  Entring the chambre so fayre, clere, and gay.
  The king us called unto his person,
  Sayeng: I wyll Graund Amoure anone

  Truly make knight; for the time approcheth
  That he must haunt and seke adventure
  For La Belle Pucell, as true love requireth.
  And first of all began to me discure
  The highe order how I shoulde take in cure;
  And than anone he gan to expresse
  What knighthode was to perfite sekernesse.

  Knighthode, he sayd, was first established
  The comenwelth in right to defende,
  That by the wrong it be not minished;
  So every knight did truely condiscende,
  For the comynwelth his power to entende
  Ageynst all suche rebelles contrarious,
  Them to subdue with power victorious!

  For knighthode is not in the feates of warre,
  As for to fight in quarell right or wronge,
  But in a cause which trouth can not defarre;
  He ought him selfe for to make sure and stronge
  Justice to kepe mixt with mercy amonge;
  And no quarell a knight ought to take,
  But for a trouth or for the comins sake.

  For fyrst, good hope his legge harneys sholde be;
  His habergion of perfyte ryghtwysenes;
  Gyrde faste wyth the gyrdle of chastite,
  His riche placarde should be good besines,
  Brandred with almes so full of larges;
  The helmet mekenes, and the shelde good fayth;
  His swerde Goddes worde, as saynt Poule sayth.

  Also true wyddowes he ought to restore
  Unto their right for to attayne theyr dower,
  And to upholde and mainteyne evermore
  The welth of maydens with his myghty power.
  And to his soverayne, at every maner hower,
  To be redy, true, and eke obeysaunt,
  In stable love fixt and not variaunt.

  Thus, after this noble and solempne doctryne,
  He made me knight, and gave me in charge
  Unto these poyntes right low to enclyne,
  And to stere well the frayle tombling barge
  Over vayne glory whan I sayle at large.
  Whan the winde is right, the barge can not fayle,
  Unto his purpose so with hardines to sayle.

  I dyd well register in my remembraunce
  Every thing which he hath to me tolde,
  And right anone in good resemblaunce
  The kyng I thanked, with courage right bolde,
  Of his great grace and giftes many a folde,
  Which unto me right openly he shewed,
  With golden droppes so lyberally indewed.

  I toke my leve of his right hye estate;
  And than Mynerve into the hall me brought,
  Accompanied by Trouth, my faythfull mate.
  Us for to solace ther lacced right nought,
  That ony man can printe in his thought;
  The knightes all unto their armes went,
  To bryng me forward with a true entent.

  And Mynerve armed me as she coude devyse,
  And brought unto me my fayre barbed stede,
  On whome I mounted in all goodly guyse,
  With shelde and spere, as nothing to drede
  In right to fyght for to attayne my mede.
  So with me wente both my greyhoundes twayne,
  And good Attendaunce, my verlet certayne.

  The good knight Trouth brought me on the way,
  Accompanied then of syr Fidelitie,
  Wyth haute courage betrapped fayre and gaye
  Wyth shyning trappers of curiositie;
  And then also there rode forth wyth me
  The sturdy knight well named Fortitude,
  With the noble veterane syr Consuetude.

  And eke syr Justice and syr Mysericorde,
  Syr Sapience, with good syr Curteysy;
  Wyth famous Nurture, and than syr Concorde
  Accompanied me full ryght gentylly
  Oute of the castell, ryding ryally;
  And dame Minerve, the chevalryous goddes,
  Dyd me endue then with harty hardynes.

  And whan we came into a goodly playne,
  Right of them all I toke my lycence;
  Me thought it time that they tourne agayne
  Unto the king with all their diligence.
  I made mine othe with percing influence,
  Unto them all for to remayne full true
  In stedfast love, all treason to eschue.

  Full loth they were fro me to departe,
  Every one of them, as ye may understande;
  With salt teres full wofull was my herte,
  Whan all on rowe they toke me by the hande.
  Adew! they sayd, and grace with you stand,
  You for to ayde whan that you do fyght!
  And so they turned unto the castell ryght.

  And good dame Mynerve unto me then sayd:
  Be not adredde of your hye enterpryse;
  Be bolde and hardy and nothing afrayde;
  And rather deye in ony maner of wyse,
  To attayne honour and the lyfe dyspyse,
  Than for to lyve and remayne in shame;
  For to dye with honour it is a good name.

  Fare well! she sayd, and be of good chere;
  I must departe, I may no lenger tary;
  Ryde on your way, the weder is full clere;
  Seke your adventure, and loke you not vary
  Frome your hye order by ony contrary.
  And therwithall forth on her way she rode,
  Ryght so did I, which no longer abode,

  With both my greyhoundes and my varlet,
  Through the playne and into wyldernes,
  And so alofte amonge the hylles greate,
  Tyll it was nyght so thicke of darkenes
  That of constraynt of very werynes
  We lyght adowne, under an hyll syde,
  Unto the day to rest us there that tyde.

  And whan my page my helmet unlaced,
  He layde it downe underneth my hede,
  And to his legge he my stede enbraced
  To grase about while on the grase he fed;
  And than also his horse in lyke stede
  With both our greyhoundes lyeng us nere by;
  And slouthe our hedes had caught so sodaynly,

  That all the nyght we slepte in good reste,
  Tyll agaynst day began to nese and cry
  My stede Galantyse with a roryng breste,
  And eke began to stampe full marveylously;
  Whose hye courage awaked us wonderly,
  And ryght anone we kast up our eyes,
  Beholdyng above the fayre crystall skyes.

  Seynge the cloudes rayed fayre and rede
  Of Phebus rysinge in the orient,
  And Aurora her golden bemes sprede
  About the ayre clerely refulgent,
  Withouten mysty blacke encombremente,
  Up I arose and also my page,
  Makyng us redy for to take our vyage.




                               CAP. XXIX.
     HOWE HE DEPARTED FROM KYNGE MELYZYUS, WITH HIS GRAYHOUNDES AND
   ATTENDAUNCE, HIS VARLET, AND MET WITH FALSE REPORTE, THAT CHAUNGED
                     HIS NAME TO GODFREY GOBILYVE.


  And so forth we rode, tyll we sawe aferre
  To us came rydyng, on a lytell nagge,
  A folysshe dwarfe, nothynge for the warre,
  With a hood, a bell, a foxtayle, and a bagge;
  In a pyed cote he rode brygge a bragge;
  And whan that he unto us drewe nye,
  I behelde his body and his visnamy.

  His head was greate, beteled was his browes,
  Hys eyen holow, and his nose croked;
  His bryes brystled truely lyke a sowes;
  His chekes here, and God wote he loked
  Full lyke an ape, here and there he toted
  With a pyed berde and hangyng lyppes grete,
  And every tothe as blacke as ony gete.

  His necke shorte, his sholders stode awry,
  His breste fatte and bolne in the wast;
  His armes great, with fyngers crokedly;
  His legges kewed; he rode to me fast,
  Full lyke a patron to be shaped in hast.
  Good even, he sayd, and have good day,
  If that it lyke you for to ryde merely.

  Welcome, I sayde; I praye the now tell
  Me what thou arte and where thou dost dwell?
  Sothelyche, quod he, whan Icham in Kent
  At home Icham; though I be hether sente,
  Icham a gentylman of much noble kynne,
  Though Iche be clad in a knaves skynne.
  For there was one called Peter Pratefast,
  That in all hys lyfe spake no worde in waste;
  He wedde a wyfe that was called Maude.
  I trowe, quod I, she was a gorgious baude.
  Thou lyest, quod he, she was gentyl and good,
  She gave her husbande many a furde hode,
  And at his melys, without any mys,
  She wolde him serve in clenly wyse ywys.
  God love her soule as she loved clennes,
  And kepe her dysshes from al foulnes.
  Whan she lacketh cloutes, without any fayle
  She wyped her disshes wyth her dogges tayle.
  And they had yssue Sym Sadle-gander,
  That for a wyfe in all the worlde did wander,
  Tyll at the last, in the wynters nyght,
  By Temmes he sayled, aryved by ryght
  Amonge the nunnes of the grene cote.
  He wente to lande out of his prety bote,
  And wedde there one that was comen anewe:
  He thought her stable, and fayfthfull, and trewe.
  Her name was Betres, that so clenly was,
  That no fylthe by her in any wyse shoulde passe.

                               * * * * *

                                * * * *
  And betwene them bothe they did get a sonne,
  Whiche was my father, that in Kente did wonne.
  His name was Davy Dronken-nole,
  He never dranke but in a fayre blacke boule.
  He toke a wyfe that was very fayre,
  And gate me on her for to be his ayre.
  Her name was Alyson, she loved nought elles
  But ever more to rynge her blacke belles.
  Now are they deade all, so mote I well thryve,
  Excepte my selfe Godfray Gobelive,
  Whiche rode about a wyfe me to seke,
  But I can finde none that is good and meke;
  For all are shrewes in the world aboute,
  I coude never mete with none other route;
  For some develles wyll their husbandes bete,
  And tho that can not, they wyll never let
  Their tongues cease, but gyve thre wordes for one,
  Fy on them all! I wyll of them have none:
  Who loveth any for to make hym sadde,
  I wene that he become worse than madde.
  They are not stedfast nothyng in their mynde,
  But alway tornyng lyke a blaste of wynde.
  For let a man love them never so wele,
  They will hym love agayne never a dele.
  For though a man all his lyfe certayne
  Unto her sue to have release of payne,
  And at the last she on hym do rewe,
  If by fortune there come another newe,
  The first shall be clene out of her favoure.
  Recorde of Creseyd and of Troylus the doloure.
  They are so subtyll and so false of kynde,
  There can no man wade beyonde their mynde.
  Was not Aristotle for all his clergy,
  For a woman rapt in love so marveylously,
  That all his connyng he had sone forgotten.
  This unhap love had his mynde so broken,
  That evermore the salte teres downe hayled
  Whan the chaunce of love he hymselfe bewayled.
  Aferde he was of the true love to breke,
  For sayng nay whan he therof should speke;
  Tyll of constraynt of wofull hevynes,
  For to have remedy of his sore sekenes,
  Whan he her spyed ryght secrete alone,
  Unto her he wente and made all his mone.
  Alas! he sayd, the cause of my wo,
  Myne only lady and maystres also,
  Whose goodly beaute hath my harte enrached,
  With fervent love and fyry lemes entached,
  Wherfore take pyte of the paynfull sorowe
  Of me your servaunt both even and morowe.
  She stode ryght styll, and hearde what he sayde:
  Alas! quod she, be ye no more dismayed,
  For I am content to fulfill your will
  In every maner, be it good or ill,
  Of this condicion; that ye shall release
  Me first of my wo and great distresse;
  For I my selfe have thought many a daye
  To you to speake, but for feare of a nay
  I durst never of the matter meve
  Unto your person, lest it should you greve.
  Nay, nay, quod he, with all my whole entente,
  I shall obeye to your commaundement.
  Well then, quod she, I shall you nowe tell
  Howe the case standeth, truely, every dele:
  For you knowe well that some women do long
  After nyce thynges, be it ryght or wrong.
  Ryght so must I upon your backe nowe ryde,
  In your mouthe also a brydle you to guyde.
  And so a brydle she put in his mouthe,
  Upon his backe she rode both north and south,
  About a chamber as some clarkes wene,
  Of many persones it was openly sene!
  Lo! what is love, that can so sore blynde
  A philosopher to bryng hym out of kynde?
  For love doth passe any maner of thyng,
  It is harde and privy in workyng.
  So on the grounde Aristotle crept,
  And in his teeth she long the brydle kept,
  Till she therof had inough her fyll;
  And yet for this he never had his wyll.
  She dyd nothing but for to mocke and scorne
  This true lover whiche was for love forlorne:
  But when he knewe the poynt of the case,
  The fyry angre dyde hys herte enbrace,
  That he him selfe dyd anone well knowe,
  His angre dyd his love so overthrowe,
  And ryght anone, as some poets wryte,
  He the gret mockage dyd her well acquyte.
  Dyd not a woman the famouse Vyrgyle
  By her greate fraude full craftely begyle?
  For on a day, for hys owne dysporte,
  To the court of Rome he gan to resorte,
  Amonge the ladyes the tyme for to passe;
  Tyl at the last, lyke Phebus in the glasse,
  So dyd a lady wyth her beaute clere
  Shyne throughe his hert wyth suche love so dere,
  That of great force he must nedes obey,
  She of his mynde bare bothe the locke and the kay:
  So was his hart set upon a fyre
  Wyth fervent love to attayne hys desyre.
  She had him caught in suche a wyly snare,
  Great was his payne and muche more his care,
  To fynde a tyme whan it should be meved
  To her of love and he nothynge repreved.
  Thus every day, by ymagynacyon,
  In his mynde was suche perturbacyon,
  And at the last he had found a tyme
  Hym thought to speke, and unto hym no cryme.
  Mercy! lady, nowe, in all humble wyse,
  To her he sayd: for yf ye me dyspyse
  So hath your beaute my true hart aryed,
  It is no mervayle thoughe I be afrayde
  To you to speake it, that you deny
  My purpose truely I am marde utterly.
  So do I love now wyth all my heart entere,
  Wyth inwarde care I by your beauty dere,
  I must abyde wyth all my hole entente
  Of lyfe or death your onely judgement.
  Wyth fayned eares of perfyte audyence
  She did him here, gyvyng this sentence:
  Vyrgyl, she sayd, I wolde fayne you ease
  Of your trouble, and of your great disease;
  But I wote not howe that it should be,
  Without tournynge us to great dyshoneste;
  If it be knowen, than bothe you and I
  Shall be reheited at full shamefully.
  But what for that? I have me bethought
  A praty craft by me shalbe wrought.
  Ye knowe my chambre joyneth to a wall,
  Beynge right hyghe and a wyndowe wythall.
  Soone at nyght, when all folke be at reast.
  I shall take a basket as me thynketh beast,
  And therto I shall a longe corde well tye,
  And from the wyndowe let it downe pryvely.
  Right so, whan it is downe on the grounde,
  Ye may well entre in it, both hole and sound,
  And my two maydens the whiche secrete be
  Shall anone helpe to hale you up with me.
  Lo! in this wyse you may have ryght well
  Your owne desyre in short space every deel.
  At xi. of the clocke, in the nyght so darke,
  They did appoynt for to fulfyll this worke.
  He often thanked her gentlines,
  And so departed with great gladnes;
  And so he went unto his study,
  Passyng the tyme himselfe full merely,
  Tyll that the clocke did strike aleven,
  Then to the wall he went full even,
  And founde the basket at the grounde already,
  And entred into it full sodaynly,
  Waggyng the rope, which the lady espied,
  Whiche to the wyndowe ryght anone her hyed.
  With her two maydens she did him up wynde,
  Amiddes the wall, and left hym there behynde,
  That was fyve fadom and more from the grounde.
  When him selfe in suche a case he founde,
  Alas! he sayde, myne owne lady, save
  Myne honestye, and what ye list to have,
  Ye shall have it at your owne desire.
  Nowe wynde me up, my hart is on fyre.
  Thou shalt, quod she, in that place abyde,
  That all the cytie so ryght long and wyde
  May the beholde and the matter knowe,
  For myne honestie, and thy shame, I trowe.
  So there he hong tyll noone of the daye,
  That every persone whiche went by the waye
  Myght hym well se and also beholde,
  And unto them the very cause she tolde.
  Lo, howe with shame she her love rewarded.
  His payne and sorowe she nothyng regarded;
  Thus at the last he adowne was brought,
  Replete with shame, it vayleth hym ryght nought.
  Thus with great anger he his love confounded,
  Healyng the stroke whiche that she hath wounded.
  And by his craft he in Rome did drenche
  Every fyre for he left none to quenche,
  And towarde Rome a great circuite aboute,
  There was no fyre that was un-put-out.
      * * * * * *
          * * * * *
      * * * * * *
          * * * * *
      * * * * * *
          * * * * *
  Thus all the cytie upon her did wonder,
  For perfite sorowe her harte was nere asunder;
  And thus Vyrgyle, with crafty subtilnes,
  Rewarded her falshode and doublenes.
  All this I tell though that I be a fole,
  To the, yong knight, for thou maist go to schole,
  In tyme commyng of true love to learne.
  Beware of that for thou canst not decerne
  Thy ladies mynde: though that she speake the fayre,
  Her harte is false, she wyll no truthe repayre.
  Nay, quod I, they are not all disposed
  So for to do as ye have here disclosed.
  Aha! quod he, I trowe well ye be
  A true lover: so mote I thrive and the,
  Let not thy lady of thy harte be rother;
  When thou art gone, she wyll sone have another.
  Thus forth we rode tyll we sawe afarre
  A royall tower as bryght as any starre,
  To whiche we rode as fast as we myght.
  When we came there, adowne my stede I lyght,
  So dyd this Godfrey Gobilive also;
  Into the temple after me gan go.
  There sate dame Venus and Cupide her sonne,
  Whiche had their parliament ryght newly begone.
  To redresse lovers of their payne and wo,
  Whiche in the temple did walke to and fro.
  And every one his byll did present
  Before Venus in her hyghe parliament.
  The temple of her royall consistory
  Was walled all about with yvory,
  All of golde, like a place solacious,
  The roufe was made of knottes curious.
  I can nothing extende the goodlines
  Of her temple, so much of ryches.
  This Godfrey Gobilyve went lightly
  Unto dame Sapience, the secretary,
  That did him make this supplication
  To the goddesse Venus with brevacion:
  Redresse my payne of mortall heavines;
  I did once woe an olde mayden ryche
  A foule thefe, an olde wydred wiche.
  Fayre mayde, I sayd, will ye me have?
  Nay sir, so God me kepe and save!
  For you are evill favoured and also ugly,
  I am the worse to se your visnamy;
  Yet was she fouler many an hundred folde
  Then I my selfe, as ye may well beholde.
  And therewithall he caused to depaynte
  His face and hers, all under his complaynte.
  And to Venus he made deliveraunce
  Of his complaint by a short circumstaunce;
  Whiche ryght anone, when she had it sene,
  Began to laughe with all the courte I wene.
  Lo here the fygures of them both certayne,
  Judge whiche is best favoured of them twayne.
  Thus Godfrey Gobilyve did make such a sporte,
  That many lovers to hym did resorte;
  When I sawe tyme I went to Sapience,
  Shewyng to her with all my diligence
  Howe that my hart by Venus was trapt,
  With a snare of love so prively bewrapt;
  And in her tower to have a dwellyng place,
  I seke adventures to attayne her grace.
  Her name, quod I, La Bell Pucell is,
  Both east and west she is well knowen ywys:
  And my name, La Graunde Amoure is called,
  Whose harte with payne she all about hath walled
  With her beautie, whiche dame Nature create,
  Above all other in most hygh estate.
  Well, sayde Sapience, I thinke in my mynde
  Her love and favoure you shall attayne by kynde;
  And I wyll drawe to you incontinent.
  All your complaynt, as is convenient
  Unto dame Venus, to se directly
  For your payne and sorowe sone a remedy.
  She drewe my pyteous lamentacion,
  Accordyng to this supplication:




                               CAP. XXX.
                           THE SUPPLICATION.


  O, Venus! lady, and excellent goddesse,
  O celestiall starre! havyng the soverayntie
  Above all other starres as lady and princes,
  As is according unto your deitie;
  Pleaseth it nowe your great benignitie
  Unto my complaynt for to geve audience,
  Whiche burne in love with pearcyng vyolence.

  For so it happened that the lady Fame
  Did with me mete, and gan to expresse
  Of a fayre lady whiche had unto name
  La Bell Pucel, come of hye noblesse;
  Whose beautie cleare and comely goodlines
  From day to day doth ryght well reuenue,
  With grace brydled and with great vertue.

  She tolde me of her fayre habitation,
  And of the wayes therto full daungerous;
  Her swete report gave me exhortation
  Unto my herte for to be courigious,
  To passe the passage harde and troublous;
  And to bring me out of great encumbraunce,
  She me delyvered both Grace and Governaunce.

  So forth we went to the toure of Science,
  For to attayne in every artike poole.
  And first Doctryne by good experience
  Unto dame Grammer did sette me to scoole,
  Of mysty ignoraunce to oppres the dole;
  And so I ascended unto dame Logyke,
  And after her unto lusty Rethorike.

  Tyll at the last, at a feast solemply
  To a temple I went, dame Musike to heare
  Play on her organs with swete armony;
  But than on lofte I saw to me appeare
  The floure of comforte, the sterre of vertue clere,
  Whose beaute bright into my herte did passe,
  Lyke as fayre Phebus doth shyne in the glasse.

  So was my herte by the stroke of love
  With sorow prest, and with mortall payne;
  That unneth I myght from the place remove,
  Where as I stode I was so take certayne,
  Yet up I loked to se her agayne,
  And at aventure with a sory moode,
  Up than I went where as her person stode.

  And first of all my herte gan to lerne
  Right well to register in remembraunce,
  How that her beautie I might than decerne,
  From top to to endued with pleasaunce,
  Which I shall shew withouten variaunce;
  Her shining here so properly she dresses
  Alofe her forehed with fayre golden tresses.

  Her forehead stepe, with fayre browes ybent,
  Her eyen gray, her nose streyght and fayre,
  In her whyte chekes the fayre bloud it went
  As among the whyte the rede to repayre:
  Her mouth right small, her breth swete of ayre,
  Her lyppes softe and ruddy as a rose,
  No hert on lyve but it wold him appose.

  Wyth a lyttle pytte in her well-favored chynne;
  Her necke longe as whyte as ony lylly,
  With vaynes blew in which the blode ran inne;
  Her paypes round and therto right prety;
  Her armes sclender and of goodly body;
  Her fingers small and therto right longe,
  White as the milke, with blew vaynes among.

  Her fete proper, she gartered well her hose,
  I never saw so swete a creature;
  Nothing she lacketh as I do suppose,
  That is longing to fayre dame Nature;
  Yet more over her countenaunce so pure,
  So swete, so lovely, wold my hert inspyre,
  Wyth fervent love to attayne his desyre.

  But what for her maners passeth all,
  She is both gentyll, good, and vertuous;
  Alas! what fortune did me to her call
  Without that she be to me piteous?
  With her so fettered in paynes dolorous,
  Alas! shall pite be from her exyled,
  Which all vertues hath so undefiled?

  Thus in my mynde whan I had engraved
  Her goodly countenaunce and fayre figure,
  It was no wonder that I was amased,
  My herte and minde she had so tane in cure.
  Nothing of love I durst to her discure;
  Yet for bicause I was in her presence,
  I toke acquaintaunce of her excellence.

  My herte was drenched in great sorow depe,
  Though outwardly my countenaunce was lyght;
  The inward wo into my hert did crepe,
  To hide my payne it was great force and myght.
  Thus her swete beaute with a soden sight
  My hert hath wounded, which much nedes obey
  Unto such a sorow, alas, welawaye!

  For she is gone, and departed right ferre,
  In her countre where she doth abyde;
  She is now gone, the fayre shining sterre!
  O lady Venus! I pray the provide
  That I may after at the morow tide,
  And by the way, with hert rigorious,
  To subdue mine enemies contrarious.

  And yet thy grace moost humbly I pray,
  To send thy sonne lytle Cupide before,
  With loving letters as fast as thou may,
  That she may know somwhat of my paynes sore,
  Which for her sake I suffer evermore.
  Now, lady Venus, with my hole intent
  Of lyfe or death I byde the judgement.

  Well than, sayd Venus, I have perseveraunce
  That you know somwhat of mighty power
  Which to my court sue for my quayntaunce,
  To have release of your great paynes sower.
  Abyde a whyle, ye must tary the hower;
  The time renneth toward right fast:
  Joy cometh after whan the sorow is past.

  Alas! I sayd, who is fettered in chaynes
  He thinketh long after delyveracion
  Of his great wo and eke mortall paynes;
  For who abideth paynfull penaunce
  Thinketh a short whyle a longe contynuaunce;
  Who may not speke with her he loveth best,
  It is no wonder though he take no rest.

  Abyde, quod she; you must a whyle yet tary,
  Though to have comfort ye right long do thinke:
  I shall provide for you a lectuary,
  Which after sorow into your herte shall sinke.
  Though you be brought now unto dethes drynke,
  Yet drede exile and lyve in hope and trust,
  For at the last you shall attayne your lust.

  And specially I gyve to you a charge
  To fyxe your love, for to be true and stable
  Upon your lady, and not to fle at large
  As in sundry wise for to be variable,
  In corrupt thoughtes vyle and culpable;
  Prepence nothing unto her dishonesty,
  For love dishonest hath no certaynte.

  And sithen that I was cause you be gone
  Fyrst for to love, I shall a letter make
  Unto your lady, and send it by my sonne,
  Lytle Cupyde, that shall it to her take,
  That she your sorow may detray or slake.
  Her harded herte it shall well revolve,
  Wyth pyteous wordes that shall it dissolve.

  And right anon, as the mater foloweth,
  She caused Sapyence a letter to wryte;
  Lo! what her favour unto me avayleth
  Whan for my selfe she did so well indite,
  As I shall shew in a short respyte
  The gentyll fourme and tenour of her letter,
  To spede my cause for to attayne the better.




                               CAP. XXXI.
       THE COPY OF THE LETTER THAT VENUS SENT TO LA BELL PUCELL.


  Right gentyll herte of grene flouring age,
  The sterre of beute and of famous porte,
  Consyder well that your lusty courage
  Age of his cours must at the last transporte:
  Now trouth of his right dooth our selfe exhorte
  That you your youth in ydelnes wyll spende,
  Wythouten pleasure to bryng it to an ende.

  What was the cause of your creacion,
  But man to love, the world to multeply?
  As to sow the sede of generacion,
  Wyth fervent love so well conveniently,
  The cause of love engendreth perfytely,
  Upon an entent of dame Nature,
  Which you have made so fayre a creature.

  Than of dame Nature what is the entent
  But to accomplyshe her fayre sede to sow?
  In such a place as is convenient,
  To Gods pleasure, for to increase and grow.
  The kinde of her ye may not overthrow:
  Say what ye lyst, ye can nothing deny,
  But otherwhyle ye thinke full prively

  What the man is, and what he can do
  Of chambre werke, as nature can agre,
  Though by experience ye know nothing therto,
  Yet oft ye muse, and thinke what it may be.
  Nature provoketh of her strong degre,
  You so to as hath bene her olde guyse;
  Why wyll you than the true love dispyse?

  In our court there is a byll presented
  By Graund Amour, whose hert in dures
  You fast have fettered, not to be absented
  Frome your person with mortall hevynes:
  His hert and service, with all gentylnes,
  He to you oweth, as to be obedient
  For to fulfyll your swete commaundement.

  What you avayleth your beaute so fayre,
  Your lusty youth and your gentill countenaunce,
  Without that you in your minde will repayre
  It for to spend in joye and plesaunce?
  To folow the trace of dame Natures daunce;
  And thus in doing you shall your servaunt hele,
  Of his disease and hurte you never a dele.

  One must you love, it can not be denied,
  For harde it is to voyde you of the chaunce
  Than to love him best that you have so arayed
  Wyth fyry chaynes fettered in penaunce;
  For he is redy without doubtaunce
  In every thing for to fulfyll your wyll,
  And as ye lyst ye may him save or spyll.

  Alas! what payne and mortall wo
  Were it to you and you were in lyke cace,
  Wyth him dismayde which you have rayed so;
  Wold you not than thinke it a longe space
  In his swete herte to have a dwellyng place?
  Than in your minde you may revolve that he
  Moost longe do thinke that joyfull day to se.

  Is not he yonge, both wyse and lusty,
  And eke descended of the gentyll lyne?
  What wyll you have more of him truely,
  Than you to serve as true love wyll inclyne?
  But, as I thinke, you do now determine
  To fyxe your minde for worldly treasure,
  Though in your youth ye lese your pleasure.

  Alas! remember first your beaute,
  Your youth, your courage, and your tender herte;
  What payne hereafter it may to you be
  Whan you lacke that which is true lovers deserte;
  I tell you this your selfe to converte,
  For lytle know ye of this payne ywys,
  To lyve with him in whome no pleasure is.

  Where that is love, there can be no lacke;
  Fye on that love for the land or substaunce,
  For it must nedes right soone abacke
  Whan that youth hath no joye nor pleasaunce
  In the party with natures suffisaunce;
  Than wyll you, for the sinne of averiche,
  Unto your youth do such a prejudice?

  Thus, sithen Nature hath you well indued
  With so much beaute; and dame Grace also
  Your vertuous maner hath so well renued;
  Exyle Disdayne and let her from you go,
  And also Straungenes, and to love the fo;
  And let no covetous your true herte subdue,
  But that in joye you may your youth ensue.

  For of I love the goddes dame Venus,
  Right well to know that in the world is none
  That unto you shall be more joyous
  Than Graund Amour, that loveth you alone;
  Sith he so did, it is many dayes agone.
  Who ever saw a fayre yong hart so harde,
  Which for her sake wolde se her true love mard?

  And so shall he, without ye take good hede,
  If it so be ye be cause of the same,
  For love with deth wyll ye reward his mede?
  And if ye do ye be to muche to blame.
  To love unloved ye know it is no game:
  Wherfore, me thinke, ye can do no lesse
  But with your love his paynes to redres.

  If ye do not, this may be his songe;
  Wo worth the time that ever he you met;
  Wo worth your hert so doing him wrong;
  Wo worth the houre that his true herte was set;
  Wo worth dysdayne that wold his purpose let;
  Wo worth the flour that can do no bote;
  Wo worth you that perst him at the route.

  Wo worth my love, the cause of my sorow;
  Wo worth my lady that wyll not it releace;
  Wo worth fortune both even and morow;
  Wo worth trouble that shall have no peace;
  Wo worth cruelte that may never cease;
  Wo worth youth that wyll not pitie have;
  Wo worth her that wyll not her love save;

  Wo worth the trust without assuraunce;
  Wo worth love rewarded with hate;
  Wo worth love replete with variaunce;
  Wo worth love without a frendly mate;
  Wo worth the herte with love at debate;
  Wo worth the beaute which toke me in snare;
  Wo worth the hert that wyll not cease my care;

  Wo worth her maners and her goodlynes;
  Wo worth her eyes so clere and amyable;
  Wo worth such cause of my great sicknes;
  Wo worth pite on her not tendable;
  Wo worth her minde in disdayne so stable;
  Wo worth her that hath me fettered fast;
  And wo worth love that I do spend in wast.

  Wherefore of right I pray you to remembre
  All that I wryte unto you right now:
  How your true love is of age but tendre,
  His umble service we pray you alow:
  And he him selfe evermore emprowe,
  You for to please and give the soveraynte,
  How can you have a more true love than he?

  And fare ye well: there is no more to say;
  Under our signet, in our court ryall,
  Of September the two and twenty day.
  She closed the letter, and to her did call
  Cupyde her sonne, so dere and speciall,
  Commaunding him, as fast as he myght,
  To La Belle Pucell for to take his flyght.

  So did Cupyde with the letter flye
  Unto La Belle Pucelles dominacion,
  There that he spedde full well and wonderly,
  As I shall after make relacion.
  But to my matter with brevyacion:
  A turtle I offred for to magnefy
  Dame Venus hye estate to glorify.

  She me exhorted for to be right hardy,
  Forth on travayle, and to drede nothing;
  I toke my leve of her full humbly,
  And on my way as I was riding
  This Godfrey Gobelyve came rennyng,
  Wyth his little nagge, and cryed: tary! tary!
  For I wyll come and bere you company.




                              CAP. XXXII.
      HOW GODFREY GOBELIVE WAS TAKEN OF CORRECTION, AND PUNYSHED.


  And for because that I was than full sadde
  And by the way he made me good game;
  To have his company I was somwhat gladde.
  I was not proude, I toke of him no shame:
  He came to me and sayd: Ye are to blame
  So to ryde louring for a womans sake,
  Unto the devyll I do them all betake.

  They be not stedfast, but chaunge as the mone;
  Whan one is gone, they love another sone.
  Who that is single and wyll have a wyfe,
  Right out of joy he shall be brought in stryfe.
  Thus whan Godfrey did so mery make,
  There did a lady us sone overtake,
  And in her hand she had a knotted whyp;
  At every yerte she made Godfrey to skyppe.
  Alas! he sayd, that ever I was borne;
  Now am I take for all my mocke and scorne!
  I loked about whan that I herde hym crye,
  Seing this lady on her palfray ryde hye:
  Madame, I sayde, I pray you me tell
  Your proper name, and where that you dwell?
  My name, quod she, is called Correccion;
  And the toure of Chastite is my mancyon.
  This strong thefe, called False Reporte,
  Wyth Vylayne Courage, and an other sorte
  And vyle perlers False Conjecture,
  All these I had in pryson full sure.
  But this False Reporte hath broken pryson,
  With his subtyl crafte and evyl treason,
  And this journey prively to spede
  He hath clad him in this fooles wede.
  Now have I answered you your question,
  And I pray you of a lyke solucion;
  You seme, me thinke, for to be a knight;
  I pray you first to tell me your name aryght.
  My name, quod I, is La Graund Amour.
  A! well, quod she, you are the perfite floure
  Of al true lovers, as I do wel know;
  You shall attayne La Belle Pucell, I trow.
  I know right well ye are adventurous,
  Onward your way to the toure peryllous;
  And for as much as the night is nere,
  I humbly pray you for to take the chere
  That I may make you in my toure this night:
  It is here by, you shall of it have a sight.
  And I pray you to helpe me to bynde
  This False Reporte, as you should do by kynde.
  What! Godfrey, quod I, wyll you chaunge your name?
  Nay, nay, quod he, it was for no shame;
  But, alas! for wo, that she hath me taken!
  I must obey, it can not be forsaken.
  His fete were fettered underneth his nagge,
  And bound his handes behinde to his bagge;
  Thus Correction, with her whyp did dryve
  The litle nagge wyth Godfrey Gobelyve
  Tyll at the last we gan to approche
  Her riall tour upon a craggy roche.
  The night was come, for it was right late;
  Yet right anone we came unto the gate,
  Where we were let in by dame Measure,
  That was a fayre and a goodly creature.
  And so Correccion brought me to the hall,
  Of gete well wrought, glased with cristall;
  The rofe was golde, and amiddes was set
  A carbuncle that was large and great,
  Whose vertue clere in the hall so bryght
  About did cast a great mervaylous lyght.
  So forth we went unto a chamber fayre,
  Where many ladies did them selfe repayre,
  And at our coming than incontinent
  They welcomed us as was convenient.
  But of Correccyon they were very glad,
  Which False Reporte agayne take had.
  There was quene Phantasyle with Penalape,
  Quene Helayne and quene Menelape,
  Quene Ythesile and quene Prosperine,
  The lady Meduse and yong Polixine;
  With many mo that I do not rehearse:
  My time is short, I must from them reverse.
  And dame Correccion into a chambre ledde
  Me right anone, for to go to my bedde.
  What nede I shew of my great chere and rest?
  I wanted nought, but had all of the best.
  And so I slept tyll that Aurora clere
  Began to shyne amiddes the golden spere.
  Than up I rose, and my verlet also,
  Which made me redy, and to my stede did go;
  And dame Correccion, at the morow tyde,
  Did me entreat a while to abyde;
  And right anone my breakfast was brought,
  To make me chere there wanted right nought.
  And after this, dame Correccion
  Did lede me to a mervaylous dongen:
  And first she led me to the upper ward,
  Where Shamefastnes did us well regarde,
  For he was gayler, and had at his charge
  Every rebell not for to go at large.
  In the first ward there wente to and fro
  Both men and women might no ferther go,
  But yet they hoped for to have releve
  Of theyr imprison which did them so greve.
  These prisoners, whan true love was meved,
  They wold dryve of and release the greved;
  And for this cause, by egal jugement,
  Lyke as they did, here hath they punishment.
  And Shamefastnes lower did us bring
  Where we saw men in great tormenting,
  With many ladies, that their mouthes gagged;
  And Fales Reporte on me his head wagged.
  Than right anone a lady gan to scrape
  His furred tonge, that he cryed lyke an ape;
  And, vyle peller, in lykewyse also,
  His tonge was scraped that he suffered wo;
  And yet we went into a depe vale,
  Where I saw men that were in great bale,
  In holly bushes they did hange aloft,
  Theyr hedes downeward for to fall unsofte;
  And two ladyes dyde theyr bodyes bete,
  With knotted whyppes in the flesshe to frete,
  That the desyre it sholde sone aswage
  And specyally of the Vylayne Courage.
  These men, with sugred mouthes so eloquente,
  A maydens herte coude ryght sone relente,
  And these yonge madens for to take in snare
  They fayne greate wo and for to suffer care:
  The folyshe maydens dyd byleve they smarted,
  That to theyr wyll the men them converted:
  Thus whan that they had them so begyled,
  And with theyr fraude these maydens defyled,
  They cast them of; they toke no lenger kepe;
  Go where ye lyst, though they crye and wepe;
  Therfore these ladyes, wyth theyr whyppes harde,
  Theyr bodyes bete that theyr bodyes had marde.
  And every man as he hath deserved
  A payne there is whiche is for hym observed.
  Thus whan I had all the pryson sene,
  With the tourmente of many a one I wene,
  And forthe we wente agayne to the hall;
  My stede was redy and brought to the wall,
  And of the ladyes clere in excellence
  I toke my leve, with all due reverence,
  And thanked Correccyon, with my herte entere,
  Of my repose and of her lovynge chere.
  To me she sayd: Remembre you well
  Of the swete beaute of La Belle Pucell;
  Whan you her herte in fetters have chayned,
  Let her have yours in lykewyse retayned;
  Loke that your herte, your worde, and countenaunce,
  Agre all in one without varyaunce.
  Yf she for pyte do release your payne,
  Consyder it and love her best agayne.
  Be true and secrete, and make none advaunte
  Whan you of love have a perfyte graunte.
  And if ye wyll come unto your wyll,
  Both here and se and than holde you styll.
  Drede you nothing, but take a good herte,
  For right sone after you from hens departe
  Right high adventures unto you shall fall.
  In tyme of fight unto your mind than call,
  If you prevayle you shall attayne the fame
  Of hye honour to certify the same.
  And therwith I lyght upon my stede.
  Madame, I sayd, I pray God do you mede!
  Farewell! she sayd, for you must now hens,
  Adue, quod I, with all my diligens.




                              CAP. XXXIII.
  HOW GRAUNDE AMOURE DYSCOMFYTED THE GIAUNTE WITH THRE HEDES, AND WAS
                     RECEIVED OF THRE FAYRE LADIES.


  Whan golden Phebus in the Capricorne
  Gan to ascend fast unto Aquary,
  And Janus Bifrus the crowne had wone
  With his frosty berd in January;
  Whan clere Diana joyned with Mercury,
  The cristall ayre and assured firmanent
  Were all depured without encumbrement.

  Forth than I rode, at myne owne adventure,
  Over the mountaynes and the craggy roche;
  To beholde the countrees I had great pleasure,
  Where corall growed by right hye flackes;
  And the popyngayes in the tre toppes;
  Than as I rode I sawe me beforne
  Besyde a welle hange both a shelde and horne.

  Whan I came there, adowne my stede I lyght,
  And the fayre bugle I right well behelde;
  Blasynge the armes as well as I myghte
  That was so graven upon the goodly shelde;
  Fyrst all of sylver dyd appere the felde,
  With a rampynge lyon of fyne golde so pure,
  And under the shelde there was this scrypture:

  Yf ony knyght that is adventurous
  Of his great pride dare the bugle blowe,
  There is a gyaunte bothe fyerce and rygorous
  That wyth his might shall hym soune overthrowe.
  This is the waye as ye shall nowe knowe
  To La Belle Pucell, but withouten fayle
  The sturdy gyaunte wyll geve you batayle.

  Whan I the scripture ones or twyes hadde redde,
  And knewe therof all the hole effecte,
  I blewe the horne without any drede,
  And toke good herte all fare to abjecte,
  Makynge me redy, for I dyde suspecte
  That the great gyaunte unto me wolde hast
  Whan he had herde me blowe so loude a blast.

  I alyght anone upon my gentyll stede,
  Aboute the well then I rode to and fro,
  And thought ryght well upon the joyfull mede
  That I shoulde have after my payne and wo;
  And on my lady I dyd thynke also:
  Tyll at the last my varlet dyd me tell,
  Take hede, quod he, here is a fende of hell!

  My greyhoundes leped and my stede did sterte,
  My spere I toke and did loke aboute;
  Wyth hardy courage I did arme me herte;
  At last I saw a sturdy giaunt stoute,
  Twelve fote of length to fere a great route,
  Thre hedes he had, and he armed was
  Both hedes and body all about with bras.

  Upon his first head in his helmet crest
  There stode a fane of the silke so fyne,
  Where was wrytten, with letters of the best,
  My name is Falshed, I shall cause enclyne
  My neyghbours goods for to make them myne:
  Alway I get theyr lande or substaunce,
  With subtyll fraude, deceyte, or variaunce.

  And whan a knyght with noble chyvalry
  Of La Bell Pucell should attayne the grace,
  Wyth my great falshed I werke so subtylly
  That in her herte he hath no place:
  Thus of his purpose I do let the cace.
  This is I my power and my condicion,
  Love to remove by great illusion.

  And of the second head, in a silken tassell,
  There I saw wrytten: Ymaginacion;
  My crafty wytte is withouten fayle
  Love for to bring in perturbacion;
  Where La Bell Pucell wold have affeccion
  To Graund Amour, I shall a tale devyse
  To make her hate him and him to dispyse.

  By my false wytte so muche imaginative
  The trouth full ofte I bring in disease;
  Whereas was peace I cause to be stryfe;
  I wyll suffer no man for to lyve in ease;
  For if by fortune he wyll be displease,
  I shall of him ymagin such a tale,
  That out of joy it shall turne into bale.

  And on the thirde hede, in a stremer grene,
  There was written: My name is Perjury;
  In many a towne I am knowen as I wene,
  Where as I lyst I do great injury,
  And do forswere my selfe full wrongfully:
  Of all thinges I do hate conscience.
  But I love lucre with all diligence.

  Betwene two lovers I do make debate;
  I will so swere, that they thinke I am true;
  For ever falshed with his owne estate
  To a lady cometh, and sayeth to eschew
  An inconvenience that ye do not rue;
  Your love is nought ymaginacion knoweth;
  I swere in lykewise and anon she troweth.

  That we have sayd is of very trouth,
  Her love she casteth right clene out of minde;
  That with her love she is wonderly wroth;
  With fayned kindnes we do her so blynde,
  Than to her lover she is full unkinde.
  Thus our thre powers were joyned in one,
  In this mighty giaunt many dayes agone.

  And whan that I had sene every thinge,
  My spere I charged that was very great,
  And to this giaunt so fyersly coming
  I toke my course, that I with him mette,
  Broking my spere upon his first helmet.
  And right anone adowne my stede I lyght,
  Drawing my swerde that was fayre and bryght,

  Iclyped Clara Prudence, that was fayre and sure.
  At the giaunt I stroke with all my vyolence,
  But he my strokes might right well endure
  He was so great and huge of puysaunce;
  His glave he did agaynst me advaunce,
  Whiche was foure fote and more of cuttyng;
  And as he was his stroke dischargyng,

  Because his stroke wys hevy to beare
  I lept asyde from hym full quickly,
  And to him I ran without any feare.
  Whan he had discharged agayne full lightly,
  He rored loude, and sware I should abye,
  But what for that? I stroke at him fast,
  And he at me, but I was not agast.

  But as he faught he had a vauntage,
  He was right hye and I under him low;
  Tyll at the last, with lusty courage
  Upon the side I gave him such a blow
  That I right nere did him overthrow,
  But right anone he did his might enlarge,
  That upon me he did such a stroke discharge,

  That unneth I might make resistaunce
  Agayng his power, for he was so stronge.
  I dyd defend me agaynst his vyolence,
  And thus the battayll dured right longe;
  Yet evermore I did thinke amonge
  Of La Belle Pucell, whom I shold attayne
  After my battayles, to release my payne.

  And as I loked I saw than overale
  Fayre golden Phebus with his beames read,
  Than up my courage I began to hale,
  Which nigh before was agone and dead.
  My swerde so entred that the giaunt blede,
  And with my strokes I cut of anone
  One of his legges amiddes the thye bone.

  Than to the ground he adowne did fall,
  And upon me he gan to loure and glum,
  Enforcing him so for to ryse withall,
  But that I shortly unto hem did cum,
  With his thre hedes he spytte all his venum,
  And I with my swerde, as fast a coude be,
  With all my force cut of his hedes thre.

  Whan I had so obteyned the victory,
  Unto me than my verlet well sayd:
  You have demaunded well and worthely:
  My greyhoundes lepte and my stede than brayde,
  And than from ferre I saw, well arayed,
  To me come ryding thre ladyes swete;
  Forth than I rode and did wyth them mete.

  The fyrst of them was called Veryte,
  And the second Good Operacion,
  The thirde and cleped Fydelyte:
  All they at ones wyth good opinion
  Did geve to me great laudacion,
  And me beseched with her hert entere
  Wyth them to rest and to make good chere.

  I graunted them, and than backeward we rode
  The mighty giaunt to se and behold,
  Whose huge body was more than five carte lode,
  Which lay there bleding that was almost colde;
  They for his death did thanke me many a fold,
  For he to them was enmy mortall,
  Wherfore his thre hedes they toke in special.

  And than Verite, on the first fane,
  Did sette aloft of Falshoed the hede,
  And Good Operacion in lykewise had tane
  Of Ymaginacion that full sore than bledde
  His hede alofte upon his baner rede.
  And in likewise Fydelite had served
  Perjuries hede, as he had well deserved.

  And with swete songes and swete armony
  Before me they rode to their fayre castell;
  So forth I rode, with great joy and glory,
  Unto the place where these ladies did dwell,
  Sette on a rocke beside a spryng or a well,
  And fayre Observaunce, the goodly portres,
  Did us receyve with solempe gladnes.

  Than to the chambre, that was very bryght,
  They did me lede for to take myne ease,
  After my trouble and my great sturdy fight;
  But thre woundes I had, causing my disease:
  My pane and wo they did sone appease,
  And heled my woundes with salves aromatyke,
  Telling me of a great giaunt lunatyke,

  Whose name truely was called Variaunce,
  Whome I should mete after my departyng.
  These ladies unto me did great pleasaunce;
  And in meane while as we were talking
  For me my suppour was in ordeyning;
  Thus whan by Temperaunce it was prepared,
  And than to it we went and right well fared.

  Tell me, quod Veritie, if you be content,
  What is your name so hye adventurous,
  And who that you into this cost hath sent?
  Madame, I sayd, I was so amarous
  Of La Belle Pucell so fayre and beauteous,
  La Graunde Amoure truely is my name,
  Which seke adventures to attayne the same.

  A, ha! quod she, I thought as much before,
  That you were he, for your great hardines.
  La Bell Pucell must love you evermore,
  Which for her sake, in your hye nobles,
  Doth such actes by chyvalrous exces:
  Her gentyl hert may nothing deny
  To rewarde your mede with love full fervently.

  Thus did we passe time in all maner of joye,
  I lacketh nothyng that might make me solace,
  But evermore, as noble Troyelus of Troy,
  Full ofte I thought on my fayre ladyes face,
  And her to se a muche longer space.
  When time was come, to rest I was brought,
  All to me longyng there lacked right nought.

  What should I wade by perambulucion?
  My tyme is shorte and I have farre to sayle
  Unto the lande of my conclusion.
  The wynde is east, ryght slowe without fayle,
  To blowe my shyppe of diligent travayle
  To the last ende of my matter troublous,
  With waves enclosed so tempestuous.

  Ryght in the morowe, when Aurora clere
  Her radiaunt beames began for to spreade,
  And splendent Phebus, in his golden spere,
  The cristalle ayr did make fayre and redde,
  Darke Dyane declining pale as any ledde,
  When the lytle byrdes swetely dyd syng
  Laudes to their maker early in the mornyng.




                              CAP. XXXIV.
   HOW HE MET WITH PERCEVERAUNCE, AND REPOSED HYM IN THE MANOUR PLACE
                            OF DAME COMFORT.


  Up I rose, and did make me ready,
  For I thought long unto my journeys ende:
  My grahoundes lept on me ryght merely,
  To cheare me forwarde they condescende;
  And the thre ladies, my cheare to amende,
  A good breakefast did for me ordayne;
  They were ryght gladde the gyaunt was slayne.

  I toke my leave and on my way I ryde,
  Through the woodes and on rockes hye.
  I loked about, and on the hyll abode.
  Till in the vale I sawe full hastely
  To me come ryding a lady sikerly:
  I well behelde the hye waye so used,
  But of this lady ryght often I mused:

  Till at the last we did mete together.
  Madame, I sayde, the hye God you save!
  She thanked me, and did aske me whether
  That I so rode, and what I would have?
  Truely, quod I, nothyng els I crave
  Of the hye God, but to be so fortunate,
  La Bell Pucell to have to my mate.

  What is your name? then sayde she.
  La Graunde Amoure, forsothe, madame, quod I.
  Then was she glad as any one myght be,
  And sayde she was sent fro myne owne lady.
  Tidynges, I sayde, I praye you hartely!
  Your lady, quod she, is in perfect health,
  And would be glad to heare of your wealth.

  She promised you in a garden grene
  To love you best of any creature;
  So doth she yet, as I thynke and wene,
  Though that Disdayne brought her to her lure:
  But of her harte nowe you shall be sure.
  Be of good chere, and for nothyng dismaye,
  I spake with her but nowe this other daye,

  And she my selfe unto you hath sent;
  My name is called dame Perceveraunce.
  A little before that I from her went,
  To her came Cupide, with great circumstaunce,
  And brought a letter of Venus ordinaunce,
  Whiche unto her he did anone present.
  When she it reade and knewe the entent,

  All inwardly full wondersly dismayed,
  Withouten worde she did stande right well,
  Her harded harte was full well delayed,
  What for to do she knewe not good or yll.
  You for to helpe or let you so spyll.
  Disdayne and Strangenes did stande then therby;
  Seing her countenaunce they gan to drawe nye.

  Madame, quod they, why are ye so sadde?
  Alas! quod she, it is no marvayle why.
  Ryght nowe of Cupide a letter I had,
  Sent from Venus, full ryght marveylously,
  By whiche I have perceyved utterly
  That a yong knyght called Graunde Amoure
  Doth for my sake suffer suche doloure,

  That of constraynte of wofull hevines
  He is nere dead all onely for my sake;
  Shall he nowe dye, or shall I him relese
  Of his great wo and to my mercy take?
  Abyde, quod Strangenes, and your sorowe slake:
  Have you hym sene in any time before?
  Yes, yes, quod she; that doth my wo restore.

  At Penticost, nowe many dayes agone,
  Musike to heare at great solemnitie,
  To and fro he walked him selfe all alone
  In a great temple of olde antiquitie;
  Tyll that by fortune he had espied me;
  And ryght anone, or that I was ware,
  To me he came: I knewe nought of his care.

  He semeth gentle, his maners ryght good,
  I behelde ryght well all his condicion:
  Humble of chere and of goodly mode;
  But I thought nothyng of his affliction;
  But his behavour sheweth the occasion
  Of fervent love, as then in myne entent
  I oft dyd deme, and geve a judgement.

  So after this I dyd then sone departe
  Home to my countrey where I dyd abyde;
  When I was gone full heavy was his harte.
  As Cupide sayeth, I must for hym provyde
  A gentle remedy at this sodayne tyde;
  And for my sake he is adventurous
  To subdue mine enemies to me contrarious.

  A! quod Disdayne, knowe ye his substaunce?
  Why wyll you love suche a one as he?
  Though he seme gentle and of good governaunce,
  You shall have one of farre hyer degre.
  He is nothyng mete, as it semeth me,
  To be your fere your favour to attayne.
  What is it to you though he suffer payne?

  Coulde your selfe let his eyen to have a syght
  Of your beauty or his harte to be set,
  What skilleth you though that he dye this nyght?
  You called hym not when he with you mette;
  And he will love you, you can not hym let.
  Be as be may, ye shall have myne assent
  Him for to forsake as is moste expedient.

  Alas! madame, then saide dame Strangenes,
  When he cometh hether your courage abate;
  Loke hye upon hym; beware of mekenes;
  And thinke that you shall have an hie estate.
  Let not Graunde Amour saye to you checkmate.
  Be straunge unto hym, as ye knowe nothyng
  The perfite cause of his true commyng.

  And in meane whyle came to her presence
  Dame Peace and Mercie, and to her they sayde:
  Alas! madame, consyder your excellence,
  And howe your beauty hath hym so arayed:
  If you have hym ye may be well apayed.
  And doubt you not if that ye love for love,
  God will sende ryches to come to you above.

  Will you for love let hym dye or peryshe,
  Whiche loveth you so with fervent desyre?
  And you your selfe may his sorowe minishe,
  That with your beauty set his harte a fyre.
  Your swete lokes did his harte enspire,
  That of fyne force he must to you obeye,
  To live or dye there is no more to saye.

  Alas! quod Peace, wyll ye let him endure
  In mortal payne withouten remedy?
  Sithen his harte you have so tane in cure,
  Your hasty dome loke that ye modefy.
  Exile Disdayne and Strangenes shortly,
  And sende Perceverance as fast as ye may
  To comfort hym in his troublous journey.

  Then in her mynde she gan to revolve
  The lovyng wordes of Mercy and Peace;
  Her hardy harte she gan for to dissolve,
  And inwardly she did to me release
  Her perfite love your great payne to cease;
  And did exile then from her to wyldernes
  Bothe dame Disdayne and eke dame Strangenes.

  And did me sende to you incontinent,
  With this goodly shelde, that ye should it were,
  For her swete sake as is convenient.
  It is sure; ye shall not nede to feare
  The stroke of swerde or yet the grate of spere.
  She prayeth you to be of good chere;
  Above all men ye are to her moste deare.

  Nowe, sayde Perceverance, I pray you repose
  This long nyght with my cosen Comfort,
  A gentle lady as any may suppose;
  She can you tell and also well exhort
  Of La Bell Pucell with a true report.
  I thanke her of her great goodnes,
  And so we rode with joye and gladnes,

  Tyll that we came unto a manour place,
  Moted about under a woode syde.
  Alyght, she sayde, for by ryght long space.
  I payne and wo you did ever abyde.
  After an ebbe there commeth a flowyng tyde.
  So downe I lyght from my goodly stede,
  After my payne to have rest for my mede.

  Then dame Perceverance on the way me ledde
  Into the place, where did us gentilly mete
  The Lady Comfort without any dredde,
  With countenaunce that was demure and swete;
  In goodly maner she dyd us then grete,
  Leadyng us to a chamber precious,
  Dulcet of odoure and most solacious.

  And pryvely she asked a question,
  Of Perceverance, what I called was?
  La Graunde Amoure, without abusion,
  Cosen, quod she: he doth all lovers passe;
  Like as dothe Phebus in the pure glasse,
  So doth his dedes extolle the soverayntie
  Of the darke gyauntes by highe aucthoritie.

  When she it knewe, she was of me ryght fayne;
  Nothyng I lacked that was to my plesaunce,
  After my travayle and my wofull payne:
  Good meate and drynke I had to sustenaunce;
  We sate together by long continaunce,
  But evermore Comfort gave exhortation
  To me of pacience in tribulacion.

  Thinke well, quod she, that in the worlde is none
  Whiche can have pleasure without wo and care;
  Joye cometh after, when the payne is gone:
  Was never man that was devoyde or bare
  Alway of joye after his wofull snare;
  Who knoweth payne and hath bene in trouble,
  After his wo his joye is to him double.

  It may so fortune that La Bell Pucell
  Hath divers frendes, that be not content
  That her favoure ye should attayne so well;
  For you of them she may often be shent,
  But what for that? she shall not her repent,
  And if her frendes be with you angry,
  Suffer their wordes and take it paciently.

  Agaynst their yll do unto them good,
  Them for to please be alwaye diligent;
  So shall you swage the tempesteous floode
  Of their stormy myndes so impacient,
  And inwardly they shall them selves repent
  That they to you have bene contrarious,
  In suche fyry anger hote and furious.

  Thus by your wisdome ye shall them so wynne
  Unto your frendes that dyd you so hate;
  For it is reason you should obeye your kynne,
  As by obedience both early and late
  Make them your frendes without the debate;
  For evermore the spirite of pacience
  Doth overcome the angry violence.

  Be hardy, bolde, and couragious;
  For after that ye be gone from hence,
  You shall mete with a gyaunt rigorious,
  Havyng seven heades of yll experience.
  You shall subdue him with your prudence;
  And other adventures shall unto you fall,
  Whiche Fame shall cause to be memoriall.

  When it was tyme, I was brought to bedde,
  So all the long nyght I endured in rest;
  With suche a slouth i-taken was my heade,
  That my soft pyllowe founde a good gest.
  For long before I was so opprest
  With inwarde trouble that I myght not slepe,
  But oft wake and syghe with teares depe.




                               CAP. XXXV.
  HOWE HE VAINQUYSHED A GYAUNT WITH SEVEN HEADES, AND WAS RECEIVED OF
                              VI. LADYES.


  When mornyng came, up anone I rose,
  And armed me as fast as I myght,
  Forth for to travaile unto my purpose.
  I toke my leave and on my stede I lyght;
  Thankyng dame Comforte of her chere that nyght;
  So, with Perceveraunce, in my company,
  Forth on the way we rode full merely

  Over the hethe, tyll we sawe from farre
  A royall castell ryght strongly fortified,
  Bulwarkes about accustomed for warre;
  On a craggy roche it was so edified,
  Walled with gate so clerely purified,
  To whiche we rode, and drewe nere and nere,
  Till in our syght did openly appeare

  A myghty gyaunt, xv. fote of length,
  With heades seven, and armed full sure;
  He semed well to be a man of strength.
  Then quod Perceveraunce: Ye must put in ure
  This daye your power, in honour to endure,
  Against this gyaunt your mortall enemy.
  Be of good cheare, you shall have victory.

  Besydes this gyaunt, upon every tree
  I did se hang many a goodly shelde
  Of noble knyghtes, that were of hye degre,
  Whiche he had slayne and murdred in the fielde.
  From farre this gyaunt I ryght well behelde;
  And towarde hym as I rode my waye,
  On his first head I sawe a banner gay,

  Wherin was written Dissimulation,
  Whose nature false is full of flatery,
  That, onder a fayned commendacion,
  Can cloke a mocke and fraude full subtilly;
  So doth he love deceyve oft pryvely,
  For the blinde love doth perceyve ryght nought
  That under hony the poyson is wrought.

  And on the seconde heade was a banner blewe,
  In whiche was written, in letters ryght white,
  Delay my name is, that can long eschue
  As true lover with my fatall respite,
  That love for love shall not him acquite;
  For evermore I lye oft in a wayte,
  Love to delay and cast hym from consayte.

  On the thirde head, in a banner square,
  All of reade was wrytten Discomfort,
  Causyng a lover for to drowne in care,
  That he of love shall have no report,
  But loke hye his hart to transport,
  And I my selfe shall him so assayle
  That he in love shall nothyng prevayle.

  On the fourth head, on the helmet crest
  There was a stremer ryght white, large and long,
  Wheron was written with vyse of the best,
  My name is Variaunce, that ever among
  The mynde of love doth chaunge with great wrong,
  That a true lover can not be certayne
  Love for his mede right stedfast to retayne.

  And yet aloft on the fift helmet
  In a blacke banner was written Envy,
  Whose hart ever inwardly is fret
  When Graund Amour should attayne his lady.
  He museth oft in hym selfe inwardly,
  To let the lady for to set her harte
  On Graund Amour for to release his smarte.

  In a russet banner on the sixt heade
  There was wrytten this worde, Detraction,
  That can open in a covert stede
  His subtile male replete with treason,
  To cause a lady to have suspection
  Unto her true lover wyth his bytter tale,
  That she her love from him than dyd hale.

  On the vii. hede, in a baner of ryches,
  Was wrytten, with letters all of Grewe,
  My name truly is called Doublenes,
  Whyche I do owe unto all ladyes true,
  At a tyme unware my dette shal be dewe,
  To Graunde Amoure for to make him repente,
  That he his love on La Bell Pucell spente.

  Whan in my minde I had well agregate
  Every thinge that I in hym had sene,
  Bothe of his head and of his hye estate,
  I called for helpe unto the heaven quene.
  The day was fayre, the sunne was bright and shene;
  Besyde a ryver and a craggy roche
  This gyaunt was whyche spyed me approche.

  He hurtled aboute, and kest his shelde afore,
  And toke his axe of myghty fortytude,
  That was of length xx. fote and more,
  Whiche he had used by longe consuetude
  To daunte true lovers and theyr power exclude.
  I toke my spere and did it well charge,
  And with hardines I made my force enlarge.

  I toke my course and to the gyaunt ranne,
  On his seconde head brekyng than asunder
  My mighty spere, that he to rore began
  Wyth so base a crye that I had great wonder;
  His seven heades so rored lyke the thunder.
  Ryght frome my stede I light to the grounde,
  And drewe Clara Prudence, that was hole and sounde.

  The mighty gyaunte his axe did up lyfte,
  Upon my head that the stroke should fall.
  But I of him was ful ware, and swyfte;
  I lept asyde, so that the stroke wythall
  In the grounde lyghted besyde a stone wall,
  Thre fote and more, and anone than I
  Dyd lepe unto hym, strykinge full quyckly.

  But above me he had suche altytude
  That I at him coulde have no ful stroke.
  He stroke at me with many strokes rude,
  And called me boye, and gave me many a mocke.
  At the last he sayd: I shall geve the a knocke
  That wyth thy braynes I shall the trees depaynte.
  Abyde, quod I, thou shalt be fyrst ful faynte.

  And right anone I bye me spyed
  On the rockes syde xii. steppes ful sure,
  And than right fast I uppon theim hyed
  That we were bothe about one stature:
  My strength I doubled, and put so in ure
  The great strokes, that I cut of anone
  Syxe of his heades, levynge him but one.

  Whan he felt him selfe hurt so grevously,
  He stretched hym up and lyft his axe a lofte,
  Strikinge at me with strokes wondersly;
  But I ful swyftly dyd geve backe ful oft.
  For to devoyde his great strokes unsoft.
  When he sawe thys, he thought him forlore;
  Wyth a hedious voyce he began to rore.

  The battayle dured betwene us right long,
  Tyll I sawe Phebus declinyng full lowe.
  I avaunced my swerde that was sure and strong,
  And with my myght I gave hym suche a blowe
  On his seventh heade, that he dyd overthrowe.
  When he was downe he gan to crye and yell,
  Ful lyke a serpent or a fende of hell.

  When I sawe this, as fast as myght be
  Adowne I came, and did then unlace
  His seventh helmet, ryght ryche for to see,
  And hym beheaded in a ryght shorte space.
  And then full soone there came to the place
  Perceveraunce and my verlet also;
  Alas! they sayde, we were for you ryght wo.

  But we were glad when ye had forsaken
  The lowe vale, and up the craggy fayre
  For your advauntage the hye waye had taken.
  Thus as we talked we did se ladies fayre,
  Seven in number, that were debonayre,
  Upon white palfreys eche of them dyd ryde,
  For us ryght gentylly from the castell syde.

  The first of them was named Stedfastnes;
  And the seconde Amerous Purveyaunce;
  The thirde was Joye after great heavines;
  The fourth of them was dame Continuaunce;
  And the fift of them called dame Plesaunce;
  The syxte was called Report Famous;
  The seventh, Amitie to lovers dolorous.

  And ryght anone, with all humilitie,
  They lyght adowne, and then incontinent
  Eche after other they came unto me;
  I kyssed them with all my whole entente.
  Hayle, knyght! they sayde, so clere and excellent,
  Whiche of this gyaunt, our hydeous enemy,
  So worthely hath wonne the victory.

  Ladies, he sayde, I am muche unworthy
  So to accept your great prayse and fame.
  They prayed me to kepe them company:
  I will, quod I, or elles I were to blame.
  They prayed me to shewe them my name.
  La Graunde Amoure it is, I sayde, in dede;
  And then sayde they, No wonder though ye spede.

  No doubte it is but ye shall obtayne
  La Bell Pucell so ryght fayre and clere;
  We were with her exiled by Disdayne,
  And then besyeged in this castell here,
  With this great gyaunt, more then a whole yeare;
  And you this nyght, if it do you please,
  In this pore castell shall take your ease.

  I thanked them, and so I rode anone
  Into the castell of olde foundacion,
  Walled about with the blacke touche stone.
  I toke there then my recreacion,
  Among these ladies with commendacion;
  And when tyme came that they thought best,
  To a royall bedde I was brought to rest.

  After my wery and troublous travayle
  I toke my ease tyll that it was day;
  Then up arose without any fayle,
  And made me ready for to ride my waye.
  But then anone into the chamber gaye
  The seven ladies came with Perceveraunce,
  Saiyng they would geve me attendaunce,

  And bryng me to La Bell Pucell,
  Where that she is in her court royall;
  And lykewyse as Phebus doth hye excell
  In bryghtnes truely the fayre starres all,
  So in beauty and vertue speciall
  She doth excede any earthly creature,
  That is nowe made by fayre dame Nature.

  We brake our fast, and we made us ready
  To La Bell Pucell on our way to ryde;
  My stede was brought, I lept up shortly,
  So did the ladies, they would nothyng abyde.
  Thus forth we rode at the morowe tyde
  Out of the castell with all joye and pleasure,
  Forth on our way at all adventure.




                              CAP. XXXVI.
     HOW HE MADE OBLACYON TO THE GODES PALLAS, AND SAYLED OVER THE
                           TEMPESTUOUS FLODE.


  So long we rode over hill and valey,
  Tyll that we came into a wyldernes,
  On every syde there wylde beastes laye,
  Ryght straunge and fierce in sundry likenes;
  It was a place of dissolute darkenes.
  The ladies and I were in feare and doubt,
  Tyll at the last that we were gotten out

  Of the great woode upon a craggy roche,
  When cleare Dyana in the Scorpion
  Agaynst fayre Phebus began to approche,
  For to be at her whole opposition,
  We sawe from farre a goodly region,
  Where stode a palayce hye and precious,
  Beyonde an haven full tempestuous.

  Then sayd Perceveraunce; Beholde ye and se,
  Yonder is the palays gay and glorious
  Of La Bell Pucelles great humilitie;
  A place of pleasure most solacious.
  But then we spied a fende fallicious,
  Beyond the haven at sure entres
  Blowyng out fyre by marveilous wydnes.

  The fyre was great, it made the ylande lyght,
  He rored loude, it semeth lyke the thonder;
  But, as me thought, he was of great myght,
  To knowe his likenes we were farre asonder;
  But of the fyre we did often wonder;
  We asked Perceveraunce what that it myght be.
  Alas! quod she, with fraude and subtiltie

  Of dame Strangenes and of dame Disdayne
  When La Bell Pucell did them so abjecte,
  Because that they myght not revert agayne,
  With mortall Envie they did then conjecte
  To make a fende in lykewyse to directe
  Syr Graunde Amoure, with the fervent fyre
  Of evill treason to let his desyre.

  For dame Disdayne, the crafty sorceres,
  With arte magyke hath wrought full craftely
  Of the vii. metalles a dragon doubtles,
  And dame Strangenes, by her nygromancy,
  Hath closed therin a fende ryght subtilly,
  That the fyre encenseth by great outrage.
  But Graunde Amoure shall it well asswage.

  Benethe this roche there is well fortified
  An olde temple, to the laude and glory
  Of wyse dame Pallas it was so edified;
  We will ryde unto it full lyghtly,
  And do oblacion unto her truely;
  She wyll us tell by good experience
  Howe we may scape the brennynge vyolence.

  So to the temple of dame Pallas
  Anone we rode, and did lyght adowne.
  Of depured cristall her whole ymage was,
  The temple walles were ryght olde and browne;
  And then ryght sone before her hyghe renowne
  Prostrate we fell mekely to the grounde,
  And sodaynly we were cast in a sounde.

  Thus as we laye in a deadly chaunce,
  We thought to her we made peticion,
  And all in Englyshe with long circumstaunce
  She shewed us all the whole condicion
  Of the marveylous serpentes operacion,
  And did shewe us a perfyte remedy
  To withstande all the crafte of sorcery.

  And in lykewyse as the maner foloweth,
  In depured verses of crafty eloquence,
  Every thyng unto us she sheweth;
  And first of all with all our diligence
  These verses we sayed unto her excellence,
  But she with crafty verses eloquent
  Gave us an aunswere full expedient.

  When golden Phebus in the first houre
  Of his owne daye began to domine,
  The sorceresse, the false roote of doloure,
  All of golde that was so pure and fyne,
  Of the best made the head serpentyne,
  And eke therof she dyd make his face;
  Full lyke a mayde it was, a wonders case!

  And every houre, as the planettes raygned,
  She made the serpent of the metalles seven;
  Till she her purpose had fully attayned,
  And when fyve bodies above on the heaven
  Wente retrogarde, marveylously to neven,
  With divers quartils and the more combust,
  In the dragons tayle, to let a lovers lust.

  These cursed witches, Disdayne and Straungenes,
  Made the monster of a subtile kynde,
  To let my purpose and all my gladnes,
  But that dame Pallas of her gentle mynde
  Of marveylous herbes a remedy did fynde;
  And anone a boxe of marveylous oyntment
  She toke to me to withstande the serpent.

  Thus al esmarveyled we dyd then awake,
  And in my hande I had the oyntment,
  Closed in a boxe, of whiche I should take
  To anoynt my harneis for the serpent,
  Whiche shall devoyde his fyre so fervent,
  And my swerde also to cause to departe
  Astrothe the fende, so set with magykes arte.

  Then when the sunne with his beames mery
  Began to ryse in the fayre morowe gray,
  All about lightyng our emispery,
  Exiling mistes and darke clowdes away,
  And when we sawe that it was bryght daye,
  Nere by the ryvage at the last we spied
  A goodly shyppe whiche unto us fast hied.

  And ryght by anone the rivage syde,
  She cast an anker and did us than hayle
  With a peale of gunnes, at the morowe tyde
  Her bonet she vayled, and gan to stryke sayle.
  She was right large, of thre toppes without fayle;
  Her boate she made out, and sent to the lande,
  What that we were to knowe and understande,

  That so did walke by the ryver coast.
  And with two ladyes we sodaynly mette;
  So when that they were come to us almoste,
  From their shyppe boate curiously counterfayte,
  Hayle, knyght! they sayde, nowe from a lady great,
  Called dame Pacience, we are hether sent,
  To knowe your name and all the whole entent

  What you make here, and the ladies all?
  Truely, quod I, over this stormy flowde
  We woulde have passage nowe in speciall.
  Tary, she sayde, it were to you not good:
  There is a serpent evill, ryght fierce and woode,
  On the other syde, whiche will you devoure.
  Nay then, quod I, my name is Graunde Amoure:

  I have disconfited the giauntes terrible,
  For La Bell Pucell the most fayre ladye;
  And for her sake shalbe invincible
  Of this great monster to have the victory.
  You have, quod they, demeaned you nobly,
  And we anone to our lady Pacience
  Will geve of you perfyte intelligence.

  Thus they departed, and to their boate they went,
  And the royall shyppe, yclipped Perfitenes,
  They dyd aborde and then incontinent
  Unto dame Pacience they gan to expresse
  Myne name, mine actes, and all my prowes.
  Ha, ha! quod she, howe glad may I nowe be,
  Whiche in this place may him both heare and se.

  And in great haste she made them rowe agayne
  Towarde the lande, with all due reverence
  For to receyve me and the ladies certayne.
  And so we then, with all our diligence,
  Entred the boate without resistence,
  And did aborde then perfitenes so sure,
  Whiche the great waves might ryght well endure.

  And Pacience, with great solemnitie,
  Did me receyve, and the ladies also.
  Welcome! she sayd, by hye aucthoritie,
  I am ryght gladde that it hath happened so,
  That La Bell Pucell must redresse your wo,
  And on your selfe, with your worthy dedes,
  Of fame and her hath wonne ryght hie medes.

  And then their anker they weyed in haste,
  And hoyst their sayle, when many a clarion
  Began to blowe; the mornyng was past,
  But Afrycus Auster made surreccion,
  Blowyng his bellowes by great occasion;
  So forthe we sayled right playne southwest,
  On the other syde where the serpent did rest.




                              CAP. XXXVII.
  HOWE GRAUNDE AMOURE DISCOMFITED THE WONDERFULL MONSTER OF THE SEVEN
                    METALLES, MADE BY ENCHAUNTMENT.


  And at the lande we aryved than,
  With all the ladies in my company,
  Whiche for to pray for me sodaynly began
  To the God Mars, lodestarre of chyvalrye.
  I toke my leave of them full gentylly,
  And ryght anone to fynde out my fo,
  This mortall dragon, I went to and fro.

  Tyll at the last, beside a craggy roche,
  I sawe the dragon whiche did me espie,
  And nere and nere, as I gan to approche,
  I behelde his head with his great body,
  Which was mishaped ful right wonderly;
  Of gold so shene was both his head and face;
  Full lyke a mayden; it was a mervaylous cace!

  His necke silver, and thicke as a bull;
  His breste stele, and like an olyphant;
  His forelegges latyn, and of fethers full;
  Ryght lyke a grype was every tallaunt;
  And as of strength he nothing did want,
  His backe afore, lyke brystles of a swyne,
  Of the fine copper did moost clerely shyne.

  His hinder legges was like to a catte,
  All of tynne, and like a scorpion;
  He had a tayle wyth a head therat,
  All of leade, of plyaunt facion;
  His herte stele, without menission.
  Toward me he came, roring like the thonder,
  Spyttyng out fyre, for to se greate wonder.

  In his forehead, with letters of Grewe,
  Was wrytten: My name is Malyce prevy,
  That olde debate can full sone renewe
  Betwene true lovers wyth colour crafty.
  Agaynst Graund Amoure I shall so fortefy
  My evell subtell power, and cursed courage,
  To let hym trulye of his hye passage.

  I toke my boxe, as Pallas commaunded,
  And my sworde and sheld, with al my armure,
  In every place I right well anoynted,
  To hardines she toke my herte in cure;
  Makinge me redy, and whan I thought me sure,
  I toke my swerde, and with an hardy herte
  Towarde the dragon I began to sterte.

  And as I gan my grete stroke to charge,
  He blew out so much fyre innumerable,
  That on the ground I did my might discharge;
  The smoke was derke, full gretely domageable,
  And the hote fyre was so intollerable,
  Above me fleying, that unneth I might
  Through my visure cast abrode my sight.

  But the swete oyntmente had suche a vertue,
  That the wilde fyre might nothing endomage
  Me through hete, for it did extue
  The magikkes arte with greate advantage,
  Causing the fyre right wel to asswage;
  And wyth my swerde, as nothing agast,
  Upon the serpente I did stryke full fast.

  His body was great as any tunne,
  The devyll about did his body beare;
  He was as egre as grype or lyon,
  So was his tallantes he did my herneys tere,
  That ofte he put me in a mortall fere.
  Tyll at the last I did his body perce
  With my good swerde, he might it not reverce.

  Ryght ther wythall the dragon to-brast,
  And out there flew, ryght blacke and tedyous,
  A foule Ethyope, which such smoke did cast,
  That all the ylond was full tenebrous;
  It thondred loude wyth clappes tempestious.
  Then all the ladyes were full sore adred,
  They thought none other but that I was ded.

  The spiryte vanished, the ayre wexed clere;
  Then did I loke and beholde aboute
  Wher was the toure of my lady so dere;
  Tyll at the last I had espyed it oute,
  Set on a rocke right hie, without doubte,
  And all the ladies, wyth Perseveraunce,
  To me did come with joye and pleausaunce.

  Forsoth, quod they, you are muche fortunate,
  So to subdue the serpent venimous,
  Which by sorcery was surely ordinate
  You for to sle with fyre so vicious.
  Blessed be Pallas, the goddes glorious,
  Which that thou taught a perfyte remedy,
  For to devoyde the crafte of sorcery.

  It was no wonder though that I was glad,
  After the payne and tribulacion
  That in many places I right often had,
  For to attayne the hye promocion
  Of La Bell Pucelles dominacion;
  Considering in my passage daungerous
  All I subdued to me contrarious.

  And than right sone, with great solempnite,
  So forth we rode to the solempne mancion
  Of La Belle Pucelles worthy dignite;
  Whiche was a toure of mervaylous facion,
  Replete with joy without suggestion,
  Walled with sylver, and many a story
  Upon the wall enameled ryally.

  So at the last we came unto the gate,
  Whiche all of sylver was knotted proprely;
  Where was a lady of ryght hye estate,
  Whiche us receyved well and nobly.
  And than Perceveraunce went full shortly
  To La Belle Pucell, shewynge every thynge
  Of myne adventure and sodayne comynge.




                             CAP. XXXVIII.
          HOW GRAUNDE AMOURE WAS RECEYVED OF LA BELLE PUCELL.


  Whan she it knewe, than right incontynente
  She called to her Peace and dame Mercy,
  With Justice, and Reason the lady excellent,
  Pleasaunce, Grace, wyth good dame Memory,
  To wayte upon her full ententyfely;
  Me to receyve wyth all solempne joye,
  Adowne her chamber she went on her waye.

  And in the meane while the gentle porteres,
  Called Countenaunce, on my way then me lede,
  Into the basse courte of greate wydenes,
  Where all of golde there was a conduyte hede,
  With many dragons enameled with reed,
  Whiche dyde spoute oute the dulcet lycoure,
  Lyke cristall clere, with aromatyke odoure.

  Alofte the basse toure foure ymages stode,
  Whiche blewe the clarions well and wonderly.
  Alofte the toures the golden fanes goode
  Dyde with the wynde make full swete armony,
  Them for to here it was great melody.
  The golden toures with cristall clarefied
  About were glased moost clerely purefyed.

  And the gravell whereupon we wente,
  Ful lyke the gold that is moost pure and fyne,
  Withouten spotte of blacke encombremente
  Aboute oure fete it dyde ryghte clerely shyne;
  It semed more lyke a place celestyne,
  Than an erthly mansion, whiche shall away
  By longe tyme and proces an other day.

  And towarde me I dyde se than comynge
  La Belle Pucell, the moost fayre creature
  Of ony fayre erthely person lyvyng,
  Whiche with me mette with chere so demure.
  Of the shynynge golde was all her vesture;
  I dyd my duty, and ones or twyse ywys
  Her lyppes soft I did full swetely kys.

  Aha! quod she, that I am very fayne
  That you are come, for I have thought long
  Sithen the time that we parted in twayne,
  And for my sake you have had often wronge;
  But your courage so hardy and strong,
  Hath caused you for to be victorious
  Of your enmyes so much contrarious.

  Wyth her fayre hand, white as ony lilly,
  She dyd me lede into a ryall hall,
  With knottes kerved full right craftely,
  The windowes fayre glased with crystall,
  And all about, upon the golden wall,
  There was enameled, with figures curious,
  The syege of Troye so hard and dolorous.

  The flore was paved with precious stones,
  And the rofe of mervaylous geometry,
  Of the swete sypres wrought for the nones,
  Encencing out the yll odours mysty;
  Amyddes the rofe there shone full wonderly
  A poynted dyamonde of mervaylous bygnes,
  With many other greate stones of ryches.

  So up we wente, to a chambre fayre,
  A place of pleasure and delectacyon,
  Strowed with floures flagraunte of ayre,
  Without ony spotte of perturbacyon.
  I behelde ryght well the operacyon
  Of the mervaylous rofe set full of rubyes,
  And tynst with saphers and many turkeys.

  The walles were hanged with golden aras,
  Whiche treated well of the syege of Thebes.
  And yet all about us depured was
  The cristallyne wyndowes of great bryghtnes.
  I can nothynge extende the goodlynes
  Of this palays, for it is impossyble
  To shewe all that unto me vysyble.

  But La Belle Pucell full ryght gentylly
  Dyde sytte adowne by a wyndowes syde,
  And caused me also full swetely
  By her to sytte at that gentyll tyde.
  Whelcome! she sayd, ye shall with me abyde,
  After your sorowe to lyve in joye and blysse;
  You shall have that ye have deserved ywys.

  Her redolente wordes of swete influence
  Degouted vapoure moost aromatyke,
  And made conversyon of complacence;
  Her depured and her lusty rethoryke
  My courage reformed, that was so lunatyke;
  My sorowe defeted, and my mynde dyde modefy,
  And my dolorous herte began to pacyfy.

  All thus my love we gan to devyse,
  For eche of other were ryght joyous.
  Than at the last in a mervaylous wyse
  Full sodaynly there came unto us
  Lyteil Cupyde with his mother Venus,
  Which was well cladde in a fayre mantyll blewe,
  With golden hertes that were perst anewe.

  And rounde about us she her mantyll cast,
  Sayeng that she and her sone Cupyde
  Wolde us conjoyne in mariage in hast;
  And to lete knowe all youre courte soo wyde,
  Sende you Perseveraunce before to provyde,
  To warne your ladyes for to be redy,
  To morowe betyme ryght well and solemply.

  We answered bothe our hertes were in one,
  Sayeng that we dyde ryght well agre,
  For all our foes were added and gone.
  Ryght gladde I was that joyfull day to se;
  And than anone, with grete humylytie,
  La Bell Pucell to a fayre chambre bryght,
  Dyde me than brynge for to rest all nyght.

  And she toke her leve, I kyst her lovely.
  I wente to bedde, but I coude not slepe,
  For I thought so moche upon her inwardly,
  Her moost swete lokes in to my herte dyde crepe,
  Percynge it through with a wounde so depe;
  For Nature thought every houre a daye
  Tyll to my lady I sholde my dette well paye.




                              CAP. XXXIX.
    OF THE GRETE MARIAGE BETWENE GRAUNDE AMOURE AND LA BELLE PUCELL.


  Than Perceveraunce, in all goodly hast,
  Unto the steward called Liberalite
  Gave warning for to make redy fast
  Agaynst this time of great solemnitie,
  That on the morow halowed should be:
  She warned the cooke called Temperaunce,
  And after that the ewres Observaunce.

  With Pleasaunce the paynter and dame Curtesy,
  The gentyll butler with the ladies all,
  Eche in her ofice was prepared shortly
  Agaynst this feast so much tryumphall.
  And La Belle Pucell then in speciall
  Was up betime in the morow gray,
  Right so was I, whan I sawe the daye.

  And ryght anone La Belle Pucell me sente,
  Agaynst my wedding, of the satyn fyne,
  Whyte as the milke, a goodly garment,
  Branded with perle that clerely did shyne;
  And so the mariage for to determyne
  Venus me brought to a ryall chappell,
  Which of fyne golde was wrought every dele.

  And after that the gay and glorious
  La Belle Pucell to the chappell was ledde,
  In a white vesture fayre and precious,
  Wyth a golden chaplet on her yalow hede;
  And Lex Ecclesie did me to her wedde;
  After which wedding there was a great feast,
  Nothing we lacked, but had of the best.

  What should I tary by longe continuaunce
  Of the fest, for of my joye and pleasure
  Wysdom can judge withouten variaunce,
  That nought I lacked as ye may well be sure,
  Payeng the swete due det of nature;
  Thus with my lady was so fayre and clere,
  In joy I lived full right many a yere.

  O, lusty youth and yong tender herte!
  The true company of my lady bryght,
  God let us never from other asterte,
  But all in joy to lyve both day and nyght!
  Thus after sorow joy aryveth aright:
  After my payne I had sporte and play;
  Full lytell thought I that it should decaye.

  Tyll that dame Nature naturing had made
  All thinge to grow to theyr fortitude,
  And nature naturing waxte retrogarde,
  By strength my youth so far to exclude,
  As was ever her olde consuetude;
  First to augment, and then to abate,
  This is the custome of her hye estate.




                                CAP. XL.
   HOW WHAN GRAUNDE AMOURE HAD LIVED LONGE WYTH LA BEL PUCELL, HE WAS
      ARRESTED BY AEGE, THAT BROUGHT UNTO HIM POLYCY AND AVARYCE.


  Thus as I lived in such pleasure gladde,
  Into the chamber came full prively
  A fayre olde man, and in his hand he hadde
  A croked staffe; he wente full wekely:
  Unto me than he came full softely,
  And with his staffe he toke me on the brest,
  Obey! he sayd, I must you nedes areste.

  My name is Age, which have often sene
  The lusty youth perysh unhappely,
  Through the desert of the selfe I wene;
  And evermore I do thinke inwardly,
  That my dedes of you they were of great foly,
  And thou thy selfe right joyous may be
  To lyve so longe to be lyke to me.

  Happy is they that may well overpasse
  The narrow bridge over fragilite
  Of his wanton youth, brytle as the glasse;
  For the youth is open to all fraylte,
  Redy to fall to great iniquite;
  Full well is he that is brydeled fast
  With fayre dame Reason tyll his youth be past.

  I obeyed his rest; there was no remedy;
  My youth was past, and all my lustynes;
  And right anone to us came Polizy,
  With Avaryce bringing great riches;
  My hole pleasure and delyte doubtles
  Was set upon treasure insaciate,
  It to beholde and for to aggregate.

  The fleshly pleasure I had cast asyde,
  Lytle I loved for to playe or daunce;
  But ever I thought how I might provyde
  To spare my treasure, land or substaunce.
  This was my minde, and all my purveyaunce,
  As upon deth I thought lytle or never,
  But gadred riches as I should lyve ever.




                               CAP. XLI.
                     HOWE HE WAS ARESTED BY DEATH.


  But whan I thought longest to endure,
  Deth with his darte arest me sodenly;
  Obey! he sayd, as ye may be sure.
  You can resist nothing the contrary
  But that you must obey me naturally.
  What you avayleth such treasure to take,
  Sithens by force ye must it now forsake?

  Alas! quod I, nothing can me ayde,
  This worldly treasure I must leve behinde,
  For erth of erth wyll have his dette now payde;
  What is this world but a blast of wynde.
  I must nedes dye, it is my native kinde.
  And as I was at his last conclusyon,
  To me did come dame Confession,

  With dame Contricion, which gan to bewayle
  My synnes great with hole repentaunce,
  And Satisfaccion without any fayle,
  Wyth dame Conscience, did wey in balaunce
  How that they might than without doutaunce
  My treasure and good so gotten wrongfully
  To restore agayne to the rightfull party.

  Of holy church with all humilite
  My rightes I toke, and than incontinent
  Nature avayled in so lowe degre
  That deth was come, and all my lyfe was spent.
  Out of my body my soule than it wente
  To Purgatory, for to be purifyed,
  That after that it might be glorified.




                               CAP. XLII.
           HOWE REMEMBRAUNCE MADE HIS EPYTAPHY ON HIS GRAVE.


  The good dame Mercy, with dame Charite,
  My body buried full right humbly,
  In a fayre temple of olde antiquite:
  There was for me a dirige devoutly,
  And with many a masse full right solemynely;
  And over my grave to be in memory
  Remembraunce made this lytle epetaphy:

  O erth! on erth, it is a wonders case,
  That thou art blynde and wyll not the know,
  Though upon erth thou hast thy dwellyng place;
  Yet erth at last must nedes the overthrow.
  Thou thinkest thou do be no erth I trow,
  For if thou diddest thou woldest than apply
  To forsake pleasure and to lerne to dye.


                                 Pryde.

  O earth! of earth why art thou so proud?
  Now what thou art call to remembraunce;
  Open thine eares unto my song aloude;
  Is not thy beaute, strength, and puyssaunce,
  Though becladde with cloth of pleasaunce,
  Very erth, and also wormes fode,
  When erth to erth shall turne to the blode?


                                 Wrath.

  And, erth, with erth why art thou so wroth?
  Remembre the that it vayleth right nought,
  For thou mayst thinke, of a perfyte trothe,
  If with the erth thou hast a quarell sought,
  Amyddes the erth there is a place ywrought,
  Whan erth to erth is torned properly,
  The for thy synne to perrysh wonderly.


                                 Envy.

  And, erth, for erth why hast thou envy?
  And the erth upon erth to be more prosperous
  Than thou thy selfe fretting the inwardly?
  It is a sinne right foule and vicious,
  And unto God also full odious.
  Thou thinkest, I trow, there is no punishment
  Ordeyned for sinne by egall judgement.


                                Slouth.

  Toward heven to folow on the way
  Thou arte full slow, and thinkest nothing
  That thy nature doth full sore decaye
  And deth right fast is to the comyng.
  God graunt the mercy, but no tyme enlongyng;
  Whan thou hast time, take tyme and space,
  Whan time is past, lost is the tyme of grace.


                               Covetyse.

  And whan erth to erth is nexte to reverte,
  And nature low in the last age,
  Of erthly treasure erth doth sette his herte
  Insaciately upon covetyse to rage;
  He thynketh not his lyfe shall asswage,
  His good is his God, with his great ryches,
  He thinketh not for to leve it doutles.


                                Glotony.

  The pomped clerkes with foles delicious
  Erth often fedeth with corrupt glotony;
  And nothing with werkes vertuous
  The soule doth fede ryght well ententifly,
  But without mesure full inordinatly
  The body lyveth, and wyll not remember
  Howe erth to erth must his strength surrender.


                                Lechery.

  The vyle carkes set upon a fyre
  Doth often haunte the syne of lechery,
  Fulfyllyng the foule carnall desyre:
  Thus erth with erth is corrupt mervaylously,
  And erth on erth wyll nothing purify,
  Till erth to erth be nere subverted,
  For erth with erth is so perverted.

  O mortall folke! you may beholde and se
  Howe I lye here, sometime a myghty knyght;
  The end of joye and all prosperite
  Is deth at last, through his course and myght;
  After the day there cometh the derke night;
  For though the day be never so longe,
  At last the belles ringeth to evensonge.

  And my selfe called La Graunde Amoure,
  Seking adventure in the worldly glory,
  For to attayne the riches and honour,
  Did thinke full lytle that I should here lye,
  Tyll deth dyde marke me full ryght pryvely.
  Lo what I am! and wherto you must!
  Lyke as I am so shall you be all dust.

  Than in your mynde inwardly despyse
  The bryttle worlde, so full of doublenes,
  With the vyle flesshe, and ryght sone aryse
  Out of your slepe of mortall hevynes;
  Subdue the devill with grace and mekenes,
  That after your lyfe frayle and transitory,
  You may than live in joye perdurably.




                              CAP. XLIII.
 HOWE FAME CAME INTO THE TEMPLE WYTH BURNYNG TONGUES AND OTHER PRAYSE.


  And as Remembraunce myne epytaphy set
  Over my grave, in came dame Fame,
  With brennyng tongues, without any let,
  Sayeng that she would spreade about my name
  To live in honoure without any shame:
  Though that deade were my erthly body,
  Yet my renowne shoulde raigne eternally.

  The power, estate, and royall dignitie
  Of dame Fame in every region
  Is for to spreade by hye aucthoritie
  The noble dedes of many a champion,
  As they are worthy in mine opinion;
  For thoughe his body be dead and mortall,
  His fame shall endure and be memoriall.

  Did not Graunde Amoure with his royall dedes
  Winne La Bell Pucell the most fayre lady?
  And of hye honour attayned the medes,
  In the demeanyng him so worthely,
  Sleyng the great terrible giauntes ugly,
  And also the fyry monster vyolent,
  Of the seven metalles made by enchauntment.

  About the worlde in every nacion,
  That evermore he shall abyde alyve,
  Of his great actes to make relacion,
  In bokes many I shall of him contrive,
  From one to other I shall his name so drive,
  That evermore, without extinguyshment,
  In burnyng tongues he shall be permanent.


                            Hector of Troy.

  Unto this day reygneth the hye renowne
  Of the worthy Hector, prynce victorious:
  About is spredde in every region and towne
  His noble actes and courage chyvalrous,
  In full many bokes ryght delicious,
  Unto the reders howe lyst to geve audience,
  To here reporte of his great excellence.


                                 Josue.

  And in lyke wyse duke Josue the gente,
  Whiche was ryght strong and fyerce in battayle,
  Whose noble feates hyghe and excellent
  I have caused, wyth diligente travayle,
  To abyde in bokes without ony fayle:
  Who lyst his story for to se or here,
  In the Byble it doth right well appere.


                            Judas Machabeus.

  Also the noble and hardy feates of warre
  Of Judas Machabeus I about have cast,
  In every nacion for to reygne aferre;
  Thoughe that his life out of this worlde be past,
  His fame shal prospere and shall never wast;
  Thus, wyth my power, of every worthy
  I spred his dedes in tonges of memory.


                                 Davyd.

  Dyd not kyng Davyd a lyons jawe tere
  In his tendre youth, he so hardy was?
  The lyons cruelte myght nothinge him fere;
  And after that he slewe great Golyas.
  All in his time he dyd in honoure pas,
  And I, dame Fame, wythout any doute,
  Have spredde his name in all the worlde aboute.


                               Alexander.

  Also kinge Alexander, the noble conquerour,
  Whose great power in all the worlde was knowen,
  Of me, dame Fame, he wanne the honoure,
  As I my trompe after his death have blowen;
  Whose sounde aloude can not be overthrowen.
  Thus in flamynge tonges all aboute I flye
  Throughe the worlde wyth my winges swyftly.


                             Julius Sezar.

  And of the worthy Sezar Julyus,
  All about wyth golden beames bryght,
  His name shall dure and be full gloryous;
  In all the worlde wyth ardaunt tongues lyght
  His fame shall reigne, he hath it wonne by ryght,
  For to abyde and ever to augment
  Wythouten lette or yet ympediment.


                                Arthur.

  Also yet Arthur, the good kinge of Brittayne,
  Wyth all his knightes of the rounde table,
  I nowe, dame Fame, shall make to remayne
  Their worthy actes highe and honourable,
  Perpetually for to be commendable;
  In ryall bokes and jestes hystoryall,
  Theyr fame is knowen right hyghe tryumphall.


                                Charles.

  And than Charles the great kynge of Fraunce,
  Wyth all his noble douseperes also,
  As Rowland, and Olyver, of hys alyaunce,
  With all the resydue and many other mo,
  Theyr fame encreaseth rennyng to and fro;
  The hardy dedes did them magnyfy,
  Unto me, Fame, their names to notyfy.


                           Godfrey of Boleyn.

  And Godfrey of Boleine, of hardy courage,
  That of the paynyms wanne the vyctory,
  His worthy actes did their strength aswage,
  Whose fame renowmed is ful openly
  About the worlde reygnynge so ryally,
  In flamynge tongues to be intellygyble,
  His most his actes so moche invyncible.

  And in like wise without abatement,
  I shall cause for to be memoriall
  The famus actes so hyghe benevolent
  Of Graunde Amoure, my knight in speciall;
  His name shall dure and be eternall;
  For though his body be wrapt in claye,
  Yet his good fame shall remayne alway.

  And ryght anone she called Remembraunce,
  Commaundyng her ryght truely for to wryte
  Both of myne actes and my governaunce,
  Which than ryght sone began to endite
  Of my feates of armes in a short respite,
  Whose goodly stories in tongues severall
  About were sent for to be perpetuall.

  And thus I, Fame, am ever magnified
  When earth in earth hath tane his estate;
  Thus after death I am all glorified.
  What is he nowe that can my power abate?
  Infinite I am, nothing can me mate;
  The spryng of honour and of famous clarkes,
  My selfe I am to renowne their workes.




                               CAP. XLIV.
 HOWE TYME CAME INTO THE TEMPLE IN A MARVAYLOUS SEMILITUDE, AND OF HIS
                              REPLYCATION.


  And as dame Fame was in laudation,
  Into the temple with marveilous lykenes
  Sodainly came Time in breviacion,
  Whose similitude I shall anone expresse;
  Aged he was, with a bearde doubtles,
  Of swalowes feaders his wynges were long,
  His body federed; he was hye and strong.

  In his left hande he had an horology,
  And in his ryght hande a fyre brennyng,
  A swerde about hym gyrte full surely,
  His legges armed clerely shynyng;
  And on his noddle darkely flamyng
  Was set Saturne, pale as any ledde,
  And Jupiter amiddes his foreheade.

  In the mouthe Mars; and in his ryght wynge
  Was splendent Phebus with his golden beames;
  And in his breast there was replendishyng
  The shinyng Venus, with depured streames,
  That all about did cast her fyry leames;
  In his left wynge Mercury; and above his waste
  Was horned Dyane, her opposition past.

  My name, quod he, is in division;
  As tyme was, tyme is, and the tyme future:
  I marveyle muche of the presumption
  Of the dame Fame so puttyng in ure
  Thy great prayse, saiyng it shall endure
  For to be infinite evermore in prease,
  Seyng that I shall al thy honoure cease.

  Shall not I, Tyme, destroye both sea and lande?
  The sunne and mone, and the starres all,
  By very reason thou shalt understande,
  At last shall lese their course in generall.
  On tyme past it vayleth not to call:
  Nowe by this horologe it doth well appeare,
  That my last name dothe evermore drawe neare.

  In my ryght hande the great fire so fervent
  Shall burne the tyme, and also minyshe
  The fatall tongues, for it is accident
  Unto me, Time, all thinges to peryshe,
  When my laste ende I shall accomplyshe;
  And thus in vaine thou hast thy laboure spent,
  When by me, Tyme, thou shalt be so brent.

  In eternitie, before the creation
  Of aungell and man, all thyng was visible
  In Goddes syght, as due probation
  Of his Godheade, whiche is intellygyble,
  To whome nothyng can be impossible.
  For in my selfe a hye and sufficient
  Before all thynges he was refulgent.

  Unto whome onely is apparaunce
  Of my last ende, as myne originall
  Was in his syght without doubtaunce;
  For onely of hym it is especiall,
  The hye power and godheade in finall,
  The future tence to knowe directly,
  Unto whome it appeareth openly.

  I am the lodestarre to dame Eternitie;
  When man of earth hath his creation,
  After the minute of his nativitie,
  He taketh then his operacion
  Upon me, Tyme, at every season.
  In the same houre the worlde was create,
  Originally I toke myne estate.

  Coulde the nyne worthies so victorious,
  Do all their actes without tyme or space?
  Tyme is a thyng both gay and glorious,
  When it passeth with vertue and grace.
  Man in this worlde hath a dwellyng place,
  Eyther hell or heaven, wythout lesynge,
  Alway he getteth in his tyme spendynge.

  Withouten tyme is no erthly thynge,
  Nature, fortune, or yet dame Sapyence,
  Hardines, clergy, or yet lernynge,
  Past, future, or yet in presence;
  Wherfore I am of more hye preeminence,
  As cause of fame, honoure, and clergy,
  They can nothynge wythout hym magnyfy.

  Do not I, Tyme, cause nature to augment?
  Do not I, Tyme, cause nature to decay?
  Do not I, Tyme, cause man to be presente?
  Do not I, Tyme, take his lyfe away?
  Do not I, Tyme, cause death take his say?
  Do not I, Tyme, passe his youth and age?
  Do not I, Tyme, every thynge asswage?

  In tyme Troye the cyte was edyfied;
  By tyme also was the destruccyon;
  Nothinge without tyme can be fortified;
  No erthly joye nor tribulacion,
  Wythout time, is for to suffre passyon;
  The tyme of erthe was our dystruccyon,
  And the time of erthe was our redempcion.

  Adam of erthe, sone of virginite,
  And Eve by God of Adam create,
  These two the worlde dampned in certaynete,
  By disobedience so foule and vycyate;
  And all other than frome them generate,
  Tyll peace and mercy made right to enclyne
  Out of the Lyon to enter the Vyrgyne.

  Lyke as the worlde was distroyed totally
  By the virgins sone, so it semed well
  A virgins sone to redeme it pyteously,
  Whose hye Godheed in the chosen vessell
  Forty wekes naturally did dwell.
  Nature wekes naturally dyd good of kynde,
  In the vyrgyn he dyd suche nature fynde.

  Thus wythout nature nature wonderly
  In a vyrgyn pure openly hath wrought;
  To the God of nature nothynge truely
  Impossyble is, for he made of nought
  Nature fyrst; whyche naturynge hath tought
  Naturately right naturate to make;
  Why may not he than the pure nature take

  By his Godheed of the vyrgin Mary?
  His elect mother and arke of testament,
  Of holy chyrche the blessyd lumynary,
  After the byrthe of her sone excellent,
  Virgyn she was, yet alway permanent,
  Dysnullynge the sectes of false idolatry,
  And castynge downe the fatall heresy.

  Thus whan I, Tyme, in every nacyon
  Reygne in rest and also in peace;
  And Octavyan, in hys dominacyon,
  Throughe the worlde and the peopled preace
  Letters had sent, his honoure to encreace;
  Of all the numbre for to be certayne
  For to abey hym as theyr soverayne:

  In whose tyme God toke his nativitie,
  For to redeme us with his precious bloud,
  From the devils bonde of great iniquitie:
  His hart was perst hangyng on the rode;
  Was not this tyme unto man ryght good?
  Shall not I, Tyme, evermore abyde,
  Tyll that in Libra at the dreadfull tyde

  Of the daye of dome then in the balaunce,
  Almyghty God shall be just and egall
  To every persone withouten doubtaunce,
  Eche as they dyd deserve in generall,
  Some to have joye, and some payne eternall,
  Then I am past, I may no longer be,
  And after me is dame Eternitie.




                               CAP. XLV.
  HOWE ETERNYTE CAME INTO THE TEMPLE, AND OF HER VERTUOUS EXHORTACYON.


  And thus, as Tyme made his conclusion,
  Eternitie, in a fayre white vesture
  To the temple came, with whole affection,
  And on her head a diademe ryght pure,
  With thre crownes of precious treasure;
  Eternitie, she sayde, I am nowe doubtles,
  Of heaven quene and of hell empresse.

  First God made heaven his propre habitacle,
  Though that his power be in every place,
  In eterne heaven is his tabernacle;
  Time is there in no maner of case;
  Time renneth alway his ende to embrace;
  Nowe I my selfe shall have no endyng,
  And my maker had no begynnyng.

  In heaven and hell I am continually
  Withouten ende to be inextinguissible,
  As evermore to reygne full royally,
  Of every thyng I am invincible:
  Man of my power shall be intelligible.
  When the soule shall ryse against the body,
  To have judgement to live eternally

  In heaven or hell as he doth deserve:
  Who that loveth God above every thyng
  All his commaundementes he will then observe,
  And spende his tyme in vertuous livyng;
  Idlenes will evermore be escheuyng;
  Eternall joye he shall then attayne,
  After his laboure and his busy payne.

  O mortall folke! revolve in your mynde
  That worldly joye and frayle prosperitie
  What is it lyke, but a blast of wynde?
  For you therof can have no certaintie:
  It is nowe so full of mutabilitie;
  Set not your mynde upon worldly wealth,
  But evermore regarde your soules health.

  When earth in earth hath tane his corrupt taste,
  Then to repent it is for you to late;
  When you save tyme, spende it nothing in waste;
  Tyme past with vertue must enter the gate
  Of joye and blysse, with myne hye estate,
  Without tyme for to be everlastyng,
  Whiche God graunt us at our last endyng.

  Nowe, blessed lady of the health eternall,
  The quene of comfort and of heavenly glory,
  Praye to thy swete sonne whiche is infinall,
  To geve me grace to wynne the victory
  Of the devill, the worlde, and of my body,
  And that I may my selfe well apply
  Thy sonne and the to laude and magnifie.


                 _Here endeth the Pastime of Pleasure._




                     THE EXCUSATION OF THE AUCTOUR.


  Unto all Poetes I do me excuse,
  If that I offende for lacke of science;
  This lyttle boke yet do ye not refuse,
  Though it be devoyde of famous eloquence;
  Adde or detra by your hye sapience;
  And pardon me of my hye enterpryse,
  Whiche of late this fable dyd fayne and devise.

  Go, little boke! I praye God the save
  From misse metryng by wrong impression;
  And who that ever list the for to have,
  That he perceyve well thyne intencion,
  For to be grounded without presumption,
  As for to eschue the synne of ydlenes;
  To make suche bokes I apply my busines.

  Besechyng God for to geve me grace
  Bokes to compyle of moral vertue;
  Of my maister Lidgate to folowe the trace,
  His noble fame for laude and renue,
  Whiche in his lyfe the slouthe did eschue;
  Makyng great bokes to be in memory,
  On whose soule I pray God have mercy.


                                 FINIS.


       ¶ Imprinted at London in Fletestreate, at the signe of the
                 Hande and Starre, by Rychard Tottell.
                             Anno M.D.L.V.




                          Transcriber’s Notes


--Provided an original book-cover image, free for use with this e-text.

--Preserved copyright notice in printed copy, although the e-text is
  public domain in the country of publication.

--Silently corrected one word (“re_n_enue” to “re_u_enue”) based on the
  apparatus of a critical edition of the text

--Silently corrected “punishme_u_t” to “punishme_n_t” on page 101.

--Comparing Table of Contents with section headings, fixed
  inconsistencies by adding chapter headings XVII and XXVII in the
  approximate location.







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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Leaves of Grass

Author: Walt Whitman

Posting Date: August 24, 2008 [EBook #1322]
Release Date: May, 1998

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEAVES OF GRASS ***




Produced by G. Fuhrman





LEAVES OF GRASS

By Walt Whitman



     Come, said my soul,
     Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
     That should I after return,
     Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
     There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
     (Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
     Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on,
     Ever and ever yet the verses owning--as, first, I here and now
     Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,

     Walt Whitman





BOOK I.  INSCRIPTIONS




One's-Self I Sing

  One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,
  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

  Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
  Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say
      the Form complete is worthier far,
  The Female equally with the Male I sing.

  Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
  Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
  The Modern Man I sing.




As I Ponder'd in Silence

  As I ponder'd in silence,
  Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
  A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
  Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
  The genius of poets of old lands,
  As to me directing like flame its eyes,
  With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
  And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
  Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
  And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
  The making of perfect soldiers.

  Be it so, then I answer'd,
  I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
  Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance
      and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,
  (Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the
      field the world,
  For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
  Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
  I above all promote brave soldiers.




In Cabin'd Ships at Sea

  In cabin'd ships at sea,
  The boundless blue on every side expanding,
  With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
  Or some lone bark buoy'd on the dense marine,
  Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,
  She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under
      many a star at night,
  By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
  In full rapport at last.

  Here are our thoughts, voyagers' thoughts,
  Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
  The sky o'erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
  We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
  The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
      briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
  The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
  The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
  And this is ocean's poem.

  Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,
  You not a reminiscence of the land alone,
  You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos'd I know not
      whither, yet ever full of faith,
  Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!
  Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it
      here in every leaf;)
  Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the
      imperious waves,
  Chant on, sail on, bear o'er the boundless blue from me to every sea,
  This song for mariners and all their ships.




To Foreign Lands

  I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
  And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
  Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.




To a Historian

  You who celebrate bygones,
  Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life
      that has exhibited itself,
  Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates,
      rulers and priests,
  I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself
      in his own rights,
  Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself,
      (the great pride of man in himself,)
  Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
  I project the history of the future.




To Thee Old Cause

  To thee old cause!
  Thou peerless, passionate, good cause,
  Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea,
  Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands,
  After a strange sad war, great war for thee,
  (I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be
      really fought, for thee,)
  These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee.

  (A war O soldiers not for itself alone,
  Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.)

  Thou orb of many orbs!
  Thou seething principle! thou well-kept, latent germ! thou centre!
  Around the idea of thee the war revolving,
  With all its angry and vehement play of causes,
  (With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,)
  These recitatives for thee,--my book and the war are one,
  Merged in its spirit I and mine, as the contest hinged on thee,
  As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to itself,
  Around the idea of thee.




Eidolons

       I met a seer,
  Passing the hues and objects of the world,
  The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,
       To glean eidolons.

       Put in thy chants said he,
  No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in,
  Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,
       That of eidolons.

       Ever the dim beginning,
  Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,
  Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)
       Eidolons! eidolons!

       Ever the mutable,
  Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,
  Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,
       Issuing eidolons.

       Lo, I or you,
  Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
  We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
       But really build eidolons.

       The ostent evanescent,
  The substance of an artist's mood or savan's studies long,
  Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils,
       To fashion his eidolon.

       Of every human life,
  (The units gather'd, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,)
  The whole or large or small summ'd, added up,
       In its eidolon.

       The old, old urge,
  Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles,
  From science and the modern still impell'd,
       The old, old urge, eidolons.

       The present now and here,
  America's busy, teeming, intricate whirl,
  Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing,
       To-day's eidolons.

       These with the past,
  Of vanish'd lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea,
  Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors' voyages,
       Joining eidolons.

       Densities, growth, facades,
  Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,
  Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,
       Eidolons everlasting.

       Exalte, rapt, ecstatic,
  The visible but their womb of birth,
  Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape,
       The mighty earth-eidolon.

       All space, all time,
  (The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,
  Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)
       Fill'd with eidolons only.

       The noiseless myriads,
  The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,
  The separate countless free identities, like eyesight,
       The true realities, eidolons.

       Not this the world,
  Nor these the universes, they the universes,
  Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,
       Eidolons, eidolons.

       Beyond thy lectures learn'd professor,
  Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics,
  Beyond the doctor's surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry,
       The entities of entities, eidolons.

       Unfix'd yet fix'd,
  Ever shall be, ever have been and are,
  Sweeping the present to the infinite future,
       Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.

       The prophet and the bard,
  Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet,
  Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,
       God and eidolons.

       And thee my soul,
  Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,
  Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,
       Thy mates, eidolons.

       Thy body permanent,
  The body lurking there within thy body,
  The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,
       An image, an eidolon.

       Thy very songs not in thy songs,
  No special strains to sing, none for itself,
  But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating,
       A round full-orb'd eidolon.




For Him I Sing

  For him I sing,
  I raise the present on the past,
  (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,)
  With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,
  To make himself by them the law unto himself.




When I Read the Book

  When I read the book, the biography famous,
  And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
  And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
  (As if any man really knew aught of my life,
  Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
  Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
  I seek for my own use to trace out here.)




Beginning My Studies

  Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
  The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
  The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
  The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
  I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
  But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.




Beginners

  How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals,)
  How dear and dreadful they are to the earth,
  How they inure to themselves as much as to any--what a paradox
      appears their age,
  How people respond to them, yet know them not,
  How there is something relentless in their fate all times,
  How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
  And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same
      great purchase.




To the States

  To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
      much, obey little,
  Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
  Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
      afterward resumes its liberty.




On Journeys Through the States

  On journeys through the States we start,
  (Ay through the world, urged by these songs,
  Sailing henceforth to every land, to every sea,)
  We willing learners of all, teachers of all, and lovers of all.

  We have watch'd the seasons dispensing themselves and passing on,
  And have said, Why should not a man or woman do as much as the
      seasons, and effuse as much?

  We dwell a while in every city and town,
  We pass through Kanada, the North-east, the vast valley of the
      Mississippi, and the Southern States,
  We confer on equal terms with each of the States,
  We make trial of ourselves and invite men and women to hear,
  We say to ourselves, Remember, fear not, be candid, promulge the
      body and the soul,
  Dwell a while and pass on, be copious, temperate, chaste, magnetic,
  And what you effuse may then return as the seasons return,
  And may be just as much as the seasons.




To a Certain Cantatrice

  Here, take this gift,
  I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or general,
  One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the
      progress and freedom of the race,
  Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;
  But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.




Me Imperturbe

  Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
  Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things,
  Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
  Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less
      important than I thought,
  Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee,
      or far north or inland,
  A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of these
      States or of the coast, or the lakes or Kanada,
  Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
  To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as
      the trees and animals do.




Savantism

  Thither as I look I see each result and glory retracing itself and
      nestling close, always obligated,
  Thither hours, months, years--thither trades, compacts,
      establishments, even the most minute,
  Thither every-day life, speech, utensils, politics, persons, estates;
  Thither we also, I with my leaves and songs, trustful, admirant,
  As a father to his father going takes his children along with him.




The Ship Starting

  Lo, the unbounded sea,
  On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even
      her moonsails.
  The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately--
      below emulous waves press forward,
  They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam.




I Hear America Singing

  I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
  Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
  The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
  The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
  The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
      singing on the steamboat deck,
  The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as
      he stands,
  The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning,
      or at noon intermission or at sundown,
  The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
      or of the girl sewing or washing,
  Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
  The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young
      fellows, robust, friendly,
  Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.




What Place Is Besieged?

  What place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the siege?
  Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave, immortal,
  And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery,
  And artillery-men, the deadliest that ever fired gun.




Still Though the One I Sing

  Still though the one I sing,
  (One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to Nationality,
  I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O
      quenchless, indispensable fire!)




Shut Not Your Doors

  Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
  For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet
      needed most, I bring,
  Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
  The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
  A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
  But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.




Poets to Come

  Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
  Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
  But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than
      before known,
  Arouse! for you must justify me.

  I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
  I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

  I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a
      casual look upon you and then averts his face,
  Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
  Expecting the main things from you.




To You

  Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
      should you not speak to me?
  And why should I not speak to you?




Thou Reader

  Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
  Therefore for thee the following chants.




BOOK II


Starting from Paumanok

       1
  Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
  Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother,
  After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,
  Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas,
  Or a soldier camp'd or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner
      in California,
  Or rude in my home in Dakota's woods, my diet meat, my drink from
      the spring,
  Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
  Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy,
  Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of
      mighty Niagara,
  Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and
      strong-breasted bull,
  Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow,
      my amaze,
  Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the
      mountain-hawk,
  And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush from the
      swamp-cedars,
  Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

       2
  Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
  The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
  Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
  This then is life,
  Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

  How curious! how real!
  Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

  See revolving the globe,
  The ancestor-continents away group'd together,
  The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus
      between.

  See, vast trackless spaces,
  As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,
  Countless masses debouch upon them,
  They are now cover'd with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.

  See, projected through time,
  For me an audience interminable.

  With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop,
  Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,
  One generation playing its part and passing on,
  Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,
  With faces turn'd sideways or backward towards me to listen,
  With eyes retrospective towards me.

       3
  Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian!
  Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
  For you a programme of chants.

  Chants of the prairies,
  Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea,
  Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota,
  Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and thence equidistant,
  Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.

       4
  Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,
  Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring,
  Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,
  And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect
      lovingly with you.

  I conn'd old times,
  I sat studying at the feet of the great masters,
  Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.

  In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique?
  Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.

       5
  Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
  Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
  Language-shapers on other shores,
  Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
  I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left
      wafted hither,
  I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)
  Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more
      than it deserves,
  Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
  I stand in my place with my own day here.

  Here lands female and male,
  Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of
      materials,
  Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow'd,
  The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms,
  The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing,
  Yes here comes my mistress the soul.

       6
  The soul,
  Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer
      than water ebbs and flows.
  I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
      most spiritual poems,
  And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
  For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and
      of immortality.

  I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any
      circumstances be subjected to another State,
  And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by
      night between all the States, and between any two of them,
  And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of
      weapons with menacing points,
  And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces;
  And a song make I of the One form'd out of all,
  The fang'd and glittering One whose head is over all,
  Resolute warlike One including and over all,
  (However high the head of any else that head is over all.)

  I will acknowledge contemporary lands,
  I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously
      every city large and small,
  And employments! I will put in my poems that with you is heroism
      upon land and sea,
  And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.

  I will sing the song of companionship,
  I will show what alone must finally compact these,
  I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love,
      indicating it in me,
  I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were
      threatening to consume me,
  I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires,
  I will give them complete abandonment,
  I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
  For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy?
  And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

       7
  I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,
  I advance from the people in their own spirit,
  Here is what sings unrestricted faith.

  Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may,
  I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also,
  I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is--and I say
      there is in fact no evil,
  (Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land or
      to me, as any thing else.)

  I too, following many and follow'd by many, inaugurate a religion, I
      descend into the arena,
  (It may be I am destin'd to utter the loudest cries there, the
      winner's pealing shouts,
  Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above every thing.)

  Each is not for its own sake,
  I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.

  I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
  None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
  None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain
      the future is.

  I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be
      their religion,
  Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur;
  (Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,
  Nor land nor man or woman without religion.)

       8
  What are you doing young man?
  Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
  These ostensible realities, politics, points?
  Your ambition or business whatever it may be?

  It is well--against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,
  But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's sake,
  For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential
      life of the earth,
  Any more than such are to religion.

       9
  What do you seek so pensive and silent?
  What do you need camerado?
  Dear son do you think it is love?

  Listen dear son--listen America, daughter or son,
  It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it
      satisfies, it is great,
  But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
  It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and
      provides for all.

       10
  Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,
  The following chants each for its kind I sing.

  My comrade!
  For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising
      inclusive and more resplendent,
  The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.

  Melange mine own, the unseen and the seen,
  Mysterious ocean where the streams empty,
  Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me,
  Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we
      know not of,
  Contact daily and hourly that will not release me,
  These selecting, these in hints demanded of me.

  Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me,
  Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,
  Any more than I am held to the heavens and all the spiritual world,
  After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.

  O such themes--equalities! O divine average!
  Warblings under the sun, usher'd as now, or at noon, or setting,
  Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither,
  I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and
      cheerfully pass them forward.

       11
  As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk,
  I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest in
      the briers hatching her brood.

  I have seen the he-bird also,
  I have paus'd to hear him near at hand inflating his throat and
      joyfully singing.

  And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really sang for was
      not there only,
  Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,
  But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
  A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.

       12
  Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and
      joyfully singing.

  Ma femme! for the brood beyond us and of us,
  For those who belong here and those to come,
  I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols stronger
      and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.

  I will make the songs of passion to give them their way,
  And your songs outlaw'd offenders, for I scan you with kindred eyes,
      and carry you with me the same as any.

  I will make the true poem of riches,
  To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward
      and is not dropt by death;
  I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the
      bard of personality,
  And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of
      the other,
  And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin'd
      to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,
  And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and
      can be none in the future,
  And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to
      beautiful results,
  And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
  And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
      compact,
  And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each
      as profound as any.

  I will not make poems with reference to parts,
  But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
  And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to
      all days,
  And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has
      reference to the soul,
  Because having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there
      is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.

       13
  Was somebody asking to see the soul?
  See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts,
      the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.

  All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
  How can the real body ever die and be buried?

  Of your real body and any man's or woman's real body,
  Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners and
      pass to fitting spheres,
  Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the
      moment of death.

  Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the
      meaning, the main concern,
  Any more than a man's substance and life or a woman's substance and
      life return in the body and the soul,
  Indifferently before death and after death.

  Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern and
      includes and is the soul;
  Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part
      of it!

       14
  Whoever you are, to you endless announcements!

  Daughter of the lands did you wait for your poet?
  Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand?
  Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,
  Exulting words, words to Democracy's lands.

  Interlink'd, food-yielding lands!
  Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!
  Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple
      and the grape!
  Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of
      those sweet-air'd interminable plateaus!
  Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
  Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west
      Colorado winds!
  Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware!
  Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
  Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and
      Connecticut!
  Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks!
  Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen's land!
  Inextricable lands! the clutch'd together! the passionate ones!
  The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb'd!
  The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and
      the inexperienced sisters!
  Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! the diverse! the
      compact!
  The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!
  O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any
      rate include you all with perfect love!
  I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any sooner than another!
  O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this hour with
      irrepressible love,
  Walking New England, a friend, a traveler,
  Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on
      Paumanok's sands,
  Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwelling in every town,
  Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
  Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls,
  Of and through the States as during life, each man and woman my neighbor,
  The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,
  The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet with any of them,
  Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my house of adobie,
  Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in Maryland,
  Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and ice welcome to me,
  Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the
      Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,
  Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every
      new brother,
  Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they
      unite with the old ones,
  Coming among the new ones myself to be their companion and equal,
      coming personally to you now,
  Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

       15
  With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on.
  For your life adhere to me,
  (I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give
      myself really to you, but what of that?
  Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

  No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
  Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
  To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
  For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

       16
  On my way a moment I pause,
  Here for you! and here for America!
  Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States I
      harbinge glad and sublime,
  And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

  The red aborigines,
  Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds
      and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,
  Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee,
      Kaqueta, Oronoco,
  Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,
  Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the
      water and the land with names.

       17
  Expanding and swift, henceforth,
  Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious,
  A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,
  A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests,
  New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

  These, my voice announcing--I will sleep no more but arise,
  You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you,
      fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

       18
  See, steamers steaming through my poems,
  See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing,
  See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat,
      the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village,
  See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea,
      how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores,
  See, pastures and forests in my poems--see, animals wild and tame--see,
      beyond the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo feeding on short curly grass,
  See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets,
      with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,
  See, the many-cylinder'd steam printing-press--see, the electric
      telegraph stretching across the continent,
  See, through Atlantica's depths pulses American Europe reaching,
      pulses of Europe duly return'd,
  See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing
      the steam-whistle,
  See, ploughmen ploughing farms--see, miners digging mines--see,
      the numberless factories,
  See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools--see from among them
      superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, drest in
      working dresses,
  See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me
      well-belov'd, close-held by day and night,
  Hear the loud echoes of my songs there--read the hints come at last.

       19
  O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
  O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
  O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
  O now I triumph--and you shall also;
  O hand in hand--O wholesome pleasure--O one more desirer and lover!
  O to haste firm holding--to haste, haste on with me.




BOOK III


Song of Myself

       1
  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
  And what I assume you shall assume,
  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loafe and invite my soul,
  I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

  My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
  Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
      parents the same,
  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
  Hoping to cease not till death.

  Creeds and schools in abeyance,
  Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
  I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
  Nature without check with original energy.

       2
  Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
      perfumes,
  I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
  The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

  The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
      distillation, it is odorless,
  It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
  I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
  I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

  The smoke of my own breath,
  Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
  My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
      of blood and air through my lungs,
  The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
      dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

  The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of
      the wind,
  A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
  The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
  The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
      and hill-sides,
  The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
      from bed and meeting the sun.

  Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
  Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
  Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

  Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
      all poems,
  You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
      of suns left,)
  You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
      the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
  You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
  You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

       3
  I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
      beginning and the end,
  But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

  There was never any more inception than there is now,
  Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

  Urge and urge and urge,
  Always the procreant urge of the world.

  Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and
      increase, always sex,
  Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
  To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

  Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
      entretied, braced in the beams,
  Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
  I and this mystery here we stand.

  Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

  Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
  Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

  Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
  Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
      discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

  Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
  Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
      less familiar than the rest.

  I am satisfied--I see, dance, laugh, sing;
  As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night,
      and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
  Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with
      their plenty,
  Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
  That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
  And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
  Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?

       4
  Trippers and askers surround me,
  People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and
      city I live in, or the nation,
  The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
  My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
  The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
  The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
      or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
  Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
      the fitful events;
  These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
  But they are not the Me myself.

  Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
  Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
  Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
  Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
  Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

  Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
      linguists and contenders,
  I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

       5
  I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
  And you must not be abased to the other.

  Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
  Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
      even the best,
  Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

  I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
  How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
      to my bare-stript heart,
  And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
      all the argument of the earth,
  And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
  And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
  And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
      my sisters and lovers,
  And that a kelson of the creation is love,
  And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
  And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
  And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and
      poke-weed.

       6
  A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
  How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
      stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
  A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
  Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
      and remark, and say Whose?

  Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
  Growing among black folks as among white,
  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
      receive them the same.

  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
  It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
      of their mothers' laps,
  And here you are the mothers' laps.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
  And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
      soon out of their laps.

  What do you think has become of the young and old men?
  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere,
  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
  And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
      end to arrest it,
  And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

  All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

       7
  Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
  I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

  I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and
      am not contain'd between my hat and boots,
  And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
  The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

  I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
  I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
      fathomless as myself,
  (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

  Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
  For me those that have been boys and that love women,
  For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
  For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the
      mothers of mothers,
  For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
  For me children and the begetters of children.

  Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
  I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
  And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

       8
  The little one sleeps in its cradle,
  I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies
      with my hand.

  The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
  I peeringly view them from the top.

  The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
  I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol
      has fallen.

  The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of
      the promenaders,
  The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the
      clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
  The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
  The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
  The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
  The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
  The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his
      passage to the centre of the crowd,
  The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
  What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits,
  What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and
      give birth to babes,
  What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls
      restrain'd by decorum,
  Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
      rejections with convex lips,
  I mind them or the show or resonance of them--I come and I depart.

       9
  The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
  The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
  The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
  The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow.

  I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load,
  I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
  I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
  And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.

       10
  Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
  Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
  In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
  Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill'd game,
  Falling asleep on the gather'd leaves with my dog and gun by my side.

  The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,
  My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.

  The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
  I tuck'd my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
  You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

  I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
      the bride was a red girl,
  Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking,
      they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets
      hanging from their shoulders,
  On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant
      beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,
  She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks
      descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to her feet.

  The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
  I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
  Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
  And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
  And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd feet,
  And gave him a room that enter'd from my own, and gave him some
      coarse clean clothes,
  And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
  And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
  He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd north,
  I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner.

       11
  Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
  Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
  Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

  She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
  She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

  Which of the young men does she like the best?
  Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

  Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
  You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

  Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
  The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

  The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,
  Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.

  An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
  It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

  The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
      sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
  They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
  They do not think whom they souse with spray.

       12
  The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife
      at the stall in the market,
  I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.

  Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
  Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in
      the fire.

  From the cinder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,
  The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
  Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
  They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

       13
  The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags
      underneath on its tied-over chain,
  The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and
      tall he stands pois'd on one leg on the string-piece,
  His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over
      his hip-band,
  His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat
      away from his forehead,
  The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of
      his polish'd and perfect limbs.

  I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,
  I go with the team also.

  In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as
      forward sluing,
  To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,
  Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

  Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what
      is that you express in your eyes?
  It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

  My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and
      day-long ramble,
  They rise together, they slowly circle around.

  I believe in those wing'd purposes,
  And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
  And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
  And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
  And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
  And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

       14
  The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
  Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
  The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
  Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

  The sharp-hoof'd moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the
      chickadee, the prairie-dog,
  The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
  The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,
  I see in them and myself the same old law.

  The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
  They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

  I am enamour'd of growing out-doors,
  Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
  Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and
      mauls, and the drivers of horses,
  I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

  What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
  Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
  Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
  Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
  Scattering it freely forever.

       15
  The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
  The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane
      whistles its wild ascending lisp,
  The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
  The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
  The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
  The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
  The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
  The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
  The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and
      looks at the oats and rye,
  The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
  (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
      bed-room;)
  The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
  He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
  The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,
  What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
  The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by
      the bar-room stove,
  The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat,
      the gate-keeper marks who pass,
  The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do
      not know him;)
  The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
  The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their
      rifles, some sit on logs,
  Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;
  The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
  As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them
      from his saddle,
  The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their
      partners, the dancers bow to each other,
  The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the
      musical rain,
  The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
  The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm'd cloth is offering moccasins and
      bead-bags for sale,
  The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut
      eyes bent sideways,
  As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for
      the shore-going passengers,
  The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it
      off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,
  The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne
      her first child,
  The clean-hair'd Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the
      factory or mill,
  The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter's lead
      flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering
      with blue and gold,
  The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his
      desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,
  The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,
  The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
  The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white
      sails sparkle!)
  The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,
  The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling
      about the odd cent;)
  The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock
      moves slowly,
  The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open'd lips,
  The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and
      pimpled neck,
  The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to
      each other,
  (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
  The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great
      Secretaries,
  On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,
  The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,
  The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,
  As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the
      jingling of loose change,
  The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the
      roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
  In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
  Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather'd, it
      is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
  Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows,
      and the winter-grain falls in the ground;
  Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in
      the frozen surface,
  The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep
      with his axe,
  Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,
  Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through
      those drain'd by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
  Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
  Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons
      around them,
  In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after
      their day's sport,
  The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
  The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
  The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
  And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
  And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
  And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

       16
  I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
  Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
  Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
  Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff
      that is fine,
  One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the
      largest the same,
  A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and
      hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
  A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest
      joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
  A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin
      leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
  A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
  At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen
      off Newfoundland,
  At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
  At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the
      Texan ranch,
  Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving
      their big proportions,)
  Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands
      and welcome to drink and meat,
  A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
  A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
  Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
  A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
  Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

  I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
  Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
  And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

  (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
  The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
  The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

       17
  These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
      are not original with me,
  If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
  If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
  If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

  This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
  This the common air that bathes the globe.

       18
  With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
  I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for
      conquer'd and slain persons.

  Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
  I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit
      in which they are won.

  I beat and pound for the dead,
  I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.

  Vivas to those who have fail'd!
  And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
  And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
  And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
  And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

       19
  This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
  It is for the wicked just same as the righteous, I make appointments
      with all,
  I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
  The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
  The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
  There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

  This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
  This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
  This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
  This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

  Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
  Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the
      side of a rock has.

  Do you take it I would astonish?
  Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering
      through the woods?
  Do I astonish more than they?

  This hour I tell things in confidence,
  I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

       20
  Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
  How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

  What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

  All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
  Else it were time lost listening to me.

  I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
  That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

  Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity
      goes to the fourth-remov'd,
  I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

  Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

  Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel'd with
      doctors and calculated close,
  I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

  In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
  And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

  I know I am solid and sound,
  To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
  All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

  I know I am deathless,
  I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass,
  I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt
      stick at night.

  I know I am august,
  I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
  I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
  (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
      after all.)

  I exist as I am, that is enough,
  If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
  And if each and all be aware I sit content.

  One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
  And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten
      million years,
  I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

  My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
  I laugh at what you call dissolution,
  And I know the amplitude of time.

       21
  I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
  The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
  The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
      into new tongue.

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

  I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
  We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
  I show that size is only development.

  Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
  It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and
      still pass on.

  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
  I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

  Press close bare-bosom'd night--press close magnetic nourishing night!
  Night of south winds--night of the large few stars!
  Still nodding night--mad naked summer night.

  Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
  Earth of departed sunset--earth of the mountains misty-topt!
  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
  Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
  Far-swooping elbow'd earth--rich apple-blossom'd earth!
  Smile, for your lover comes.

  Prodigal, you have given me love--therefore I to you give love!
  O unspeakable passionate love.

  Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight!
  We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.

       22
  You sea! I resign myself to you also--I guess what you mean,
  I behold from the beach your crooked fingers,
  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
  We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
  Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

  Sea of stretch'd ground-swells,
  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
  Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd yet always-ready graves,
  Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
  I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

  Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
  Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others' arms.

  I am he attesting sympathy,
  (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that
      supports them?)

  I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet
      of wickedness also.

  What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
  Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
  My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
  I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

  Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
  Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work'd over and rectified?

  I find one side a balance and the antipedal side a balance,
  Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
  Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

  This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
  There is no better than it and now.

  What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such wonder,
  The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

       23
  Endless unfolding of words of ages!
  And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

  A word of the faith that never balks,
  Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

  It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
  That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.

  I accept Reality and dare not question it,
  Materialism first and last imbuing.

  Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
  Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
  This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of
      the old cartouches,
  These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.
  This is the geologist, this works with the scalper, and this is a
      mathematician.

  Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
  Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
  I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

  Less the reminders of properties told my words,
  And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,
  And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and
      women fully equipt,
  And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that
      plot and conspire.

       24
  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
  No more modest than immodest.

  Unscrew the locks from the doors!
  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,
  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current
      and index.

  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
      counterpart of on the same terms.

  Through me many long dumb voices,
  Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
  Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
  Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
  And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
      father-stuff,
  And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
  Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
  Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

  Through me forbidden voices,
  Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.

  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
  Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
      is a miracle.

  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
      touch'd from,
  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of
      my own body, or any part of it,
  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
  Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
  Root of wash'd sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded
      duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
  Mix'd tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
  Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
  Sun so generous it shall be you!
  Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
  You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
  Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
  Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my
      winding paths, it shall be you!
  Hands I have taken, face I have kiss'd, mortal I have ever touch'd,
      it shall be you.

  I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
  Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
  I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
  Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the
      friendship I take again.

  That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
  A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics
      of books.

  To behold the day-break!
  The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
  The air tastes good to my palate.

  Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising
      freshly exuding,
  Scooting obliquely high and low.

  Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
  Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

  The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
  The heav'd challenge from the east that moment over my head,
  The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

       25
  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

  We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
  We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

  My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
  With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

  Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
  It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
  Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

  Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of
      articulation,
  Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
  Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
  The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
  I underlying causes to balance them at last,
  My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
  Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search
      of this day.)

  My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
  Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
  I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

  Writing and talk do not prove me,
  I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
  With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

       26
  Now I will do nothing but listen,
  To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

  I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,
      clack of sticks cooking my meals,
  I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
  I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
  Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
  Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
      work-people at their meals,
  The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
  The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
      a death-sentence,
  The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
      refrain of the anchor-lifters,
  The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking
      engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights,
  The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
  The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two,
  (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

  I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
  I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
  It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

  I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
  Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.

  A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
  The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

  I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
  The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
  It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
  It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent waves,
  I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
  Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
  At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
  And that we call Being.

       27
  To be in any form, what is that?
  (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
  If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

  Mine is no callous shell,
  I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
  They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

  I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
  To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand.

       28
  Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
  Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
  Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
  My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly
      different from myself,
  On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
  Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
  Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
  Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
  Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
  Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
  Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
  They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,
  No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
  Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
  Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

  The sentries desert every other part of me,
  They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
  They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

  I am given up by traitors,
  I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the
      greatest traitor,
  I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

  You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
  Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

       29
  Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch!
  Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

  Parting track'd by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
  Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

  Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
  Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

       30
  All truths wait in all things,
  They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
  They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
  The insignificant is as big to me as any,
  (What is less or more than a touch?)

  Logic and sermons never convince,
  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

  (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
  Only what nobody denies is so.)

  A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
  I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
  And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
  And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
  And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
      becomes omnific,
  And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

       31
  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
  And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
      of the wren,
  And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
  And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
  And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
  And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
  And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

  I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
      grains, esculent roots,
  And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
  But call any thing back again when I desire it.

  In vain the speeding or shyness,
  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
  In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
  In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
  In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
  In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
  In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
  In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
  I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

       32
  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
      self-contain'd,
  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
      owning things,
  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
      years ago,
  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
  They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their
      possession.

  I wonder where they get those tokens,
  Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

  Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
  Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
  Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
  Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
  Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.

  A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
  Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
  Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
  Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

  His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
  His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.

  I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
  Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
  Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

       33
  Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at,
  What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass,
  What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed,
  And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

  My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
  I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
  I am afoot with my vision.

  By the city's quadrangular houses--in log huts, camping with lumber-men,
  Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,
  Weeding my onion-patch or hosing rows of carrots and parsnips,
      crossing savannas, trailing in forests,
  Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,
  Scorch'd ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the
      shallow river,
  Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the
      buck turns furiously at the hunter,
  Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the
      otter is feeding on fish,
  Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
  Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the
      beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tall;
  Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower'd cotton plant, over
      the rice in its low moist field,
  Over the sharp-peak'd farm house, with its scallop'd scum and
      slender shoots from the gutters,
  Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav'd corn, over the
      delicate blue-flower flax,
  Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with
      the rest,
  Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;
  Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low
      scragged limbs,
  Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,
  Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,
  Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great
      goldbug drops through the dark,
  Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to
      the meadow,
  Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous
      shuddering of their hides,
  Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle
      the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;
  Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,
  Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,
  Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it
      myself and looking composedly down,)
  Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat
      hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,
  Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,
  Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,
  Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,
  Where the half-burn'd brig is riding on unknown currents,
  Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;
  Where the dense-starr'd flag is borne at the head of the regiments,
  Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,
  Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,
  Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,
  Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of
      base-ball,
  At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license,
      bull-dances, drinking, laughter,
  At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the
      juice through a straw,
  At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,
  At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;
  Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles,
      screams, weeps,
  Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are
      scatter'd, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,
  Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to
      the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,
  Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,
  Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
  Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
      far and near,
  Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived
      swan is curving and winding,
  Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her
      near-human laugh,
  Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the
      high weeds,
  Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with
      their heads out,
  Where burial coaches enter the arch'd gates of a cemetery,
  Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,
  Where the yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at
      night and feeds upon small crabs,
  Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,
  Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over
      the well,
  Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
  Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,
  Through the gymnasium, through the curtain'd saloon, through the
      office or public hall;
  Pleas'd with the native and pleas'd with the foreign, pleas'd with
      the new and old,
  Pleas'd with the homely woman as well as the handsome,
  Pleas'd with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,
  Pleas'd with the tune of the choir of the whitewash'd church,
  Pleas'd with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher,
      impress'd seriously at the camp-meeting;
  Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon,
      flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,
  Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn'd up to the clouds,
      or down a lane or along the beach,
  My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;
  Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek'd bush-boy, (behind me
      he rides at the drape of the day,)
  Far from the settlements studying the print of animals' feet, or the
      moccasin print,
  By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
  Nigh the coffin'd corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;
  Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,
  Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,
  Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,
  Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,
  Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side,
  Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
  Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the
      diameter of eighty thousand miles,
  Speeding with tail'd meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,
  Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,
  Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
  Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
  I tread day and night such roads.

  I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,
  And look at quintillions ripen'd and look at quintillions green.

  I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,
  My course runs below the soundings of plummets.

  I help myself to material and immaterial,
  No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.

  I anchor my ship for a little while only,
  My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.

  I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a
      pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.

  I ascend to the foretruck,
  I take my place late at night in the crow's-nest,
  We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,
  Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,
  The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is
      plain in all directions,
  The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my
      fancies toward them,
  We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to
      be engaged,
  We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still
      feet and caution,
  Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin'd city,
  The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities
      of the globe.

  I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,
  I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
  I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

  My voice is the wife's voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
  They fetch my man's body up dripping and drown'd.

  I understand the large hearts of heroes,
  The courage of present times and all times,
  How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the
      steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,
  How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of
      days and faithful of nights,
  And chalk'd in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will
      not desert you;
  How he follow'd with them and tack'd with them three days and
      would not give it up,
  How he saved the drifting company at last,
  How the lank loose-gown'd women look'd when boated from the
      side of their prepared graves,
  How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the
      sharp-lipp'd unshaved men;
  All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
  I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

  The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
  The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her
      children gazing on,
  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,
      blowing, cover'd with sweat,
  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous
      buckshot and the bullets,
  All these I feel or am.

  I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
  Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
  I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the
      ooze of my skin,
  I fall on the weeds and stones,
  The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
  Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

  Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
  I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the
      wounded person,
  My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

  I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken,
  Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
  Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
  I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
  They have clear'd the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

  I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,
  Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
  White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared
      of their fire-caps,
  The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

  Distant and dead resuscitate,
  They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.

  I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort's bombardment,
  I am there again.

  Again the long roll of the drummers,
  Again the attacking cannon, mortars,
  Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.

  I take part, I see and hear the whole,
  The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim'd shots,
  The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,
  Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,
  The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,
  The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.

  Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves
      with his hand,
  He gasps through the clot Mind not me--mind--the entrenchments.

       34
  Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,
  (I tell not the fall of Alamo,
  Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
  The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)
  'Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve
      young men.

  Retreating they had form'd in a hollow square with their baggage for
      breastworks,
  Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemies, nine times their
      number, was the price they took in advance,
  Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
  They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv'd writing and
      seal, gave up their arms and march'd back prisoners of war.

  They were the glory of the race of rangers,
  Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
  Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
  Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
  Not a single one over thirty years of age.

  The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and
      massacred, it was beautiful early summer,
  The work commenced about five o'clock and was over by eight.

  None obey'd the command to kneel,
  Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,
  A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead
      lay together,
  The maim'd and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,
  Some half-kill'd attempted to crawl away,
  These were despatch'd with bayonets or batter'd with the blunts of muskets,
  A youth not seventeen years old seiz'd his assassin till two more
      came to release him,
  The three were all torn and cover'd with the boy's blood.

  At eleven o'clock began the burning of the bodies;
  That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.

       35
  Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
  Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
  List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me.

  Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
  His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer,
      and never was, and never will be;
  Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us.

  We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch'd,
  My captain lash'd fast with his own hands.

  We had receiv'd some eighteen pound shots under the water,
  On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire,
      killing all around and blowing up overhead.

  Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,
  Ten o'clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain,
      and five feet of water reported,
  The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold
      to give them a chance for themselves.

  The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,
  They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.

  Our frigate takes fire,
  The other asks if we demand quarter?
  If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

  Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
  We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part
      of the fighting.

  Only three guns are in use,
  One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy's main-mast,
  Two well serv'd with grape and canister silence his musketry and
      clear his decks.

  The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially
      the main-top,
  They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.

  Not a moment's cease,
  The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.

  One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.

  Serene stands the little captain,
  He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
  His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

  Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.

       36
  Stretch'd and still lies the midnight,
  Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
  Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the
      one we have conquer'd,
  The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a
      countenance white as a sheet,
  Near by the corpse of the child that serv'd in the cabin,
  The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully
      curl'd whiskers,
  The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
  The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
  Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh
      upon the masts and spars,
  Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
  Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
  A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
  Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by
      the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
  The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
  Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long,
      dull, tapering groan,
  These so, these irretrievable.

       37
  You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
  In at the conquer'd doors they crowd! I am possess'd!
  Embody all presences outlaw'd or suffering,
  See myself in prison shaped like another man,
  And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

  For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
  It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.

  Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him
      and walk by his side,
  (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat
      on my twitching lips.)

  Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried
      and sentenced.

  Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
  My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

  Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
  I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

       38
  Enough! enough! enough!
  Somehow I have been stunn'd. Stand back!
  Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,
  I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

  That I could forget the mockers and insults!
  That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
      bludgeons and hammers!
  That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
      bloody crowning.

  I remember now,
  I resume the overstaid fraction,
  The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
  Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

  I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average
      unending procession,
  Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
  Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
  The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.

  Eleves, I salute you! come forward!
  Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.

       39
  The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
  Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?

  Is he some Southwesterner rais'd out-doors? is he Kanadian?
  Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?
  The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?

  Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
  They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.

  Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb'd
      head, laughter, and naivete,
  Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,
  They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,
  They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of
      the glance of his eyes.

       40
  Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask--lie over!
  You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.

  Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,
  Say, old top-knot, what do you want?

  Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,
  And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,
  And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.

  Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
  When I give I give myself.

  You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
  Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you,
  Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,
  I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,
  And any thing I have I bestow.

  I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,
  You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

  To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,
  On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
  And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

  On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.
  (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)

  To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.
  Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
  Let the physician and the priest go home.

  I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
  O despairer, here is my neck,
  By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

  I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
  Every room of the house do I fill with an arm'd force,
  Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.

  Sleep--I and they keep guard all night,
  Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
  I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
  And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.

       41
  I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
  And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.

  I heard what was said of the universe,
  Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;
  It is middling well as far as it goes--but is that all?

  Magnifying and applying come I,
  Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
  Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
  Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,
  Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
  In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix
      engraved,
  With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,
  Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,
  Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,
  (They bore mites as for unfledg'd birds who have now to rise and fly
      and sing for themselves,)
  Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself,
      bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,
  Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,
  Putting higher claims for him there with his roll'd-up sleeves
      driving the mallet and chisel,
  Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or
      a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
  Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me
      than the gods of the antique wars,
  Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
  Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr'd laths, their white
      foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
  By the mechanic's wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for
      every person born,
  Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels
      with shirts bagg'd out at their waists,
  The snag-tooth'd hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,
  Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his
      brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
  What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and
      not filling the square rod then,
  The bull and the bug never worshipp'd half enough,
  Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream'd,
  The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of
      the supremes,
  The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the
      best, and be as prodigious;
  By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
  Putting myself here and now to the ambush'd womb of the shadows.


      42
  A call in the midst of the crowd,
  My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

  Come my children,
  Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,
  Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass'd his prelude on
      the reeds within.

  Easily written loose-finger'd chords--I feel the thrum of your
      climax and close.

  My head slues round on my neck,
  Music rolls, but not from the organ,
  Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.

  Ever the hard unsunk ground,
  Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever
      the air and the ceaseless tides,
  Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,
  Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn'd thumb, that
      breath of itches and thirsts,
  Ever the vexer's hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides
      and bring him forth,
  Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
  Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

  Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
  To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
  Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
  Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment
      receiving,
  A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

  This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
  Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets,
      newspapers, schools,
  The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories,
      stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.

  The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail'd coats
  I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)
  I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest
      is deathless with me,
  What I do and say the same waits for them,
  Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.

  I know perfectly well my own egotism,
  Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
  And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

  Not words of routine this song of mine,
  But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
  This printed and bound book--but the printer and the
      printing-office boy?
  The well-taken photographs--but your wife or friend close and solid
      in your arms?
  The black ship mail'd with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets--but
      the pluck of the captain and engineers?
  In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture--but the host and
      hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
  The sky up there--yet here or next door, or across the way?
  The saints and sages in history--but you yourself?
  Sermons, creeds, theology--but the fathomless human brain,
  And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?

       43
  I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
  My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
  Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,
  Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,
  Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,
  Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in
      the circle of obis,
  Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
  Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and
      austere in the woods a gymnosophist,
  Drinking mead from the skull-cap, to Shastas and Vedas admirant,
      minding the Koran,
  Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife,
      beating the serpent-skin drum,
  Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing
      assuredly that he is divine,
  To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting
      patiently in a pew,
  Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till
      my spirit arouses me,
  Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,
  Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.

  One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like
      man leaving charges before a journey.

  Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
  Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical,
  I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair
      and unbelief.

  How the flukes splash!
  How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!

  Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
  I take my place among you as much as among any,
  The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
  And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely
      the same.

  I do not know what is untried and afterward,
  But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

  Each who passes is consider'd, each who stops is consider'd, not
      single one can it fall.

  It cannot fall the young man who died and was buried,
  Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
  Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew back
      and was never seen again,
  Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with
      bitterness worse than gall,
  Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,
  Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd, nor the brutish koboo
      call'd the ordure of humanity,
  Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,
  Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,
  Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads
      that inhabit them,
  Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.

       44
  It is time to explain myself--let us stand up.

  What is known I strip away,
  I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

  The clock indicates the moment--but what does eternity indicate?

  We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
  There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

  Births have brought us richness and variety,
  And other births will bring us richness and variety.

  I do not call one greater and one smaller,
  That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

  Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
  I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
  All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
  (What have I to do with lamentation?)

  I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be.

  My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
  On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
  All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.

  Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
  I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
  And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

  Long I was hugg'd close--long and long.

  Immense have been the preparations for me,
  Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.

  Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
  For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
  They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

  Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
  My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

  For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
  The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
  Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
  Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it
      with care.

  All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me,
  Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.


      45
  O span of youth! ever-push'd elasticity!
  O manhood, balanced, florid and full.

  My lovers suffocate me,
  Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
  Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
  Crying by day, Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and
      chirping over my head,
  Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
  Lighting on every moment of my life,
  Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
  Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.

  Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!

  Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows
      after and out of itself,
  And the dark hush promulges as much as any.

  I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
  And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of
      the farther systems.

  Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
  Outward and outward and forever outward.

  My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
  He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
  And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

  There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
  If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
      were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would
      not avail the long run,
  We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
  And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

  A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do
      not hazard the span or make it impatient,
  They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

  See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
  Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

  My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
  The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
  The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

       46
  I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and
      never will be measured.

  I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
  My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
  No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
  I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
  I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
  But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
  My left hand hooking you round the waist,
  My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

  Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
  You must travel it for yourself.

  It is not far, it is within reach,
  Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
  Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

  Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
  Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

  If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand
      on my hip,
  And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
  For after we start we never lie by again.

  This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven,
  And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
      and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we
      be fill'd and satisfied then?
  And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

  You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
  I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

  Sit a while dear son,
  Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
  But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you
      with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

  Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
  Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
  You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every
      moment of your life.

  Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
  Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
  To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
      and laughingly dash with your hair.

       47
  I am the teacher of athletes,
  He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
  He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

  The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power,
      but in his own right,
  Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
  Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
  Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
  First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's eye, to sail a
      skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,
  Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over
      all latherers,
  And those well-tann'd to those that keep out of the sun.

  I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
  I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
  My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

  I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while
      I wait for a boat,
  (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
  Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd.)

  I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
  And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her
      who privately stays with me in the open air.

  If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
  The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves key,
  The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.

  No shutter'd room or school can commune with me,
  But roughs and little children better than they.

  The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,
  The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with
      him all day,
  The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,
  In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen
      and love them.

  The soldier camp'd or upon the march is mine,
  On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,
  On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.
  My face rubs to the hunter's face when he lies down alone in his blanket,
  The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,
  The young mother and old mother comprehend me,
  The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,
  They and all would resume what I have told them.

       48
  I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
  And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
  And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
  And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
      funeral drest in his shroud,
  And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
  And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the
      learning of all times,
  And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it
      may become a hero,
  And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe,
  And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed
      before a million universes.

  And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
  For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
  (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
      about death.)

  I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
  Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

  Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
  I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
  I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
      by God's name,
  And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
  Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

       49
  And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to
      try to alarm me.

  To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
  I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
  I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
  And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

  And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not
      offend me,
  I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
  I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons.

  And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
  (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

  I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
  O suns--O grass of graves--O perpetual transfers and promotions,
  If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?

  Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
  Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,
  Toss, sparkles of day and dusk--toss on the black stems that decay
      in the muck,
  Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.

  I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
  I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
  And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.

       50
  There is that in me--I do not know what it is--but I know it is in me.

  Wrench'd and sweaty--calm and cool then my body becomes,
  I sleep--I sleep long.

  I do not know it--it is without name--it is a word unsaid,
  It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

  Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
  To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

  Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.

  Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
  It is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--it is eternal
      life--it is Happiness.

       51
  The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them.
  And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

  Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
  Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
  (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

  Do I contradict myself?
  Very well then I contradict myself,
  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

  Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
  Who wishes to walk with me?

  Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

       52
  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
      and my loitering.

  I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  The last scud of day holds back for me,
  It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
  It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

  I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
  I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

  I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
  If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
  And filter and fibre your blood.

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
  Missing me one place search another,
  I stop somewhere waiting for you.




BOOK IV.  CHILDREN OF ADAM


To the Garden the World

  To the garden the world anew ascending,
  Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
  The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
  Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
  The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
  Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
  My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for
      reasons, most wondrous,
  Existing I peer and penetrate still,
  Content with the present, content with the past,
  By my side or back of me Eve following,
  Or in front, and I following her just the same.




From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

  From pent-up aching rivers,
  From that of myself without which I were nothing,
  From what I am determin'd to make illustrious, even if I stand sole
      among men,
  From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus,
  Singing the song of procreation,
  Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people,
  Singing the muscular urge and the blending,
  Singing the bedfellow's song, (O resistless yearning!
  O for any and each the body correlative attracting!
  O for you whoever you are your correlative body! O it, more than all
      else, you delighting!)
  From the hungry gnaw that eats me night and day,
  From native moments, from bashful pains, singing them,
  Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it
      many a long year,
  Singing the true song of the soul fitful at random,
  Renascent with grossest Nature or among animals,
  Of that, of them and what goes with them my poems informing,
  Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
  Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves,
  Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land, I them chanting,
  The overture lightly sounding, the strain anticipating,
  The welcome nearness, the sight of the perfect body,
  The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back
      lying and floating,
  The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching,
  The divine list for myself or you or for any one making,
  The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot, and what it arouses,
  The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment,
  (Hark close and still what I now whisper to you,
  I love you, O you entirely possess me,
  O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless,
  Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more
      lawless than we;)
  The furious storm through me careering, I passionately trembling.
  The oath of the inseparableness of two together, of the woman that
      loves me and whom I love more than my life, that oath swearing,
  (O I willingly stake all for you,
  O let me be lost if it must be so!
  O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think?
  What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust
      each other if it must be so;)
  From the master, the pilot I yield the vessel to,
  The general commanding me, commanding all, from him permission taking,
  From time the programme hastening, (I have loiter'd too long as it is,)
  From sex, from the warp and from the woof,
  From privacy, from frequent repinings alone,
  From plenty of persons near and yet the right person not near,
  From the soft sliding of hands over me and thrusting of fingers
      through my hair and beard,
  From the long sustain'd kiss upon the mouth or bosom,
  From the close pressure that makes me or any man drunk, fainting
      with excess,
  From what the divine husband knows, from the work of fatherhood,
  From exultation, victory and relief, from the bedfellow's embrace in
      the night,
  From the act-poems of eyes, hands, hips and bosoms,
  From the cling of the trembling arm,
  From the bending curve and the clinch,
  From side by side the pliant coverlet off-throwing,
  From the one so unwilling to have me leave, and me just as unwilling
      to leave,
  (Yet a moment O tender waiter, and I return,)
  From the hour of shining stars and dropping dews,
  From the night a moment I emerging flitting out,
  Celebrate you act divine and you children prepared for,
  And you stalwart loins.




I Sing the Body Electric

       1
  I sing the body electric,
  The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
  They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
  And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

  Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
  And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
  And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
  And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

       2
  The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
      balks account,
  That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

  The expression of the face balks account,
  But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
  It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of
      his hips and wrists,
  It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
      and knees, dress does not hide him,
  The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
  To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
  You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

  The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the
      folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the
      contour of their shape downwards,
  The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through
      the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls
      silently to and from the heave of the water,
  The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the
      horse-man in his saddle,
  Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
  The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open
      dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,
  The female soothing a child, the farmer's daughter in the garden or
      cow-yard,
  The young fellow hosing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six
      horses through the crowd,
  The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty,
      good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work,
  The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
  The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
  The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine
      muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,
  The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes
      suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
  The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd
      neck and the counting;
  Such-like I love--I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's
      breast with the little child,
  Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with
      the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

       3
  I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
  And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

  This man was a wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
  The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and
      beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness
      and breadth of his manners,
  These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,
  He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were
      massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
  They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
  They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,
  He drank water only, the blood show'd like scarlet through the
      clear-brown skin of his face,
  He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail'd his boat himself, he
      had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had
      fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,
  When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish,
      you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,
  You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit
      by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

       4
  I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,
  To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
  To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
  To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
      round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
  I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

  There is something in staying close to men and women and looking
      on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
  All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

       5
  This is the female form,
  A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
  It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
  I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
      all falls aside but myself and it,
  Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what
      was expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, are now consumed,
  Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response
      likewise ungovernable,
  Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all
      diffused, mine too diffused,
  Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
      and deliciously aching,
  Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
      love, white-blow and delirious nice,
  Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
  Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
  Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

  This the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
  This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the
      outlet again.

  Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the
      exit of the rest,
  You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

  The female contains all qualities and tempers them,
  She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
  She is all things duly veil'd, she is both passive and active,
  She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

  As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
  As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness,
      sanity, beauty,
  See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

       6
  The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,
  He too is all qualities, he is action and power,
  The flush of the known universe is in him,
  Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well,
  The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is
      utmost become him well, pride is for him,
  The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,
  Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to
      the test of himself,
  Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes
      soundings at last only here,
  (Where else does he strike soundings except here?)

  The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred,
  No matter who it is, it is sacred--is it the meanest one in the
      laborers' gang?
  Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
  Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as
      much as you,
  Each has his or her place in the procession.

  (All is a procession,
  The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

  Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
  Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has
      no right to a sight?
  Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and
      the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,
  For you only, and not for him and her?

       7
  A man's body at auction,
  (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
  I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

  Gentlemen look on this wonder,
  Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
  For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one
      animal or plant,
  For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll'd.

  In this head the all-baffling brain,
  In it and below it the makings of heroes.

  Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in
      tendon and nerve,
  They shall be stript that you may see them.

  Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
  Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,
      good-sized arms and legs,
  And wonders within there yet.

  Within there runs blood,
  The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
  There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires,
      reachings, aspirations,
  (Do you think they are not there because they are not express'd in
      parlors and lecture-rooms?)

  This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be
      fathers in their turns,
  In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
  Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

  How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring
      through the centuries?
  (Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace
      back through the centuries?)

       8
  A woman's body at auction,
  She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
  She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

  Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
  Have you ever loved the body of a man?
  Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations
      and times all over the earth?

  If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,
  And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
  And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more
      beautiful than the most beautiful face.

  Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool
      that corrupted her own live body?
  For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

       9
  O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
      women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
  I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of
      the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
  I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
      that they are my poems,
  Man's, woman's, child, youth's, wife's, husband's, mother's,
      father's, young man's, young woman's poems,
  Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
  Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or
      sleeping of the lids,
  Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
  Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
  Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
  Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the
      ample side-round of the chest,
  Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
  Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger,
      finger-joints, finger-nails,
  Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
  Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
  Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round,
      man-balls, man-root,
  Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
  Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
  Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
  All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your
      body or of any one's body, male or female,
  The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
  The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
  Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
  Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
  The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,
      love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
  The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
  Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
  Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
  The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
  The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
  The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked
      meat of the body,
  The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
  The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
      toward the knees,
  The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
      marrow in the bones,
  The exquisite realization of health;
  O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
  O I say now these are the soul!




A Woman Waits for Me

  A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,
  Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the
      right man were lacking.

  Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
  Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
  Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,
  All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves,
      beauties, delights of the earth,
  All the governments, judges, gods, follow'd persons of the earth,
  These are contain'd in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

  Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,
  Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

  Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,
  I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with those women that
      are warm-blooded and sufficient for me,
  I see that they understand me and do not deny me,
  I see that they are worthy of me, I will be the robust husband of
      those women.

  They are not one jot less than I am,
  They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
  Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
  They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
      retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
  They are ultimate in their own right--they are calm, clear,
      well-possess'd of themselves.

  I draw you close to me, you women,
  I cannot let you go, I would do you good,
  I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for
      others' sakes,
  Envelop'd in you sleep greater heroes and bards,
  They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.

  It is I, you women, I make my way,
  I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,
  I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,
  I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I
      press with slow rude muscle,
  I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
  I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.

  Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,
  In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
  On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,
  The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls,
      new artists, musicians, and singers,
  The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,
  I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,
  I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you
      inter-penetrate now,
  I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I
      count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,
  I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death,
      immortality, I plant so lovingly now.




Spontaneous Me

  Spontaneous me, Nature,
  The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
  The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,
  The hillside whiten'd with blossoms of the mountain ash,
  The same late in autumn, the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and
      light and dark green,
  The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private
      untrimm'd bank, the primitive apples, the pebble-stones,
  Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after
      another as I happen to call them to me or think of them,
  The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
  The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
  This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all
      men carry,
  (Know once for all, avow'd on purpose, wherever are men like me, are
      our lusty lurking masculine poems,)
  Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers,
      and the climbing sap,
  Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts
      of love, bellies press'd and glued together with love,
  Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love,
  The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the
      man, the body of the earth,
  Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,
  The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down, that gripes the
      full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes
      his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is
      satisfied;
  The wet of woods through the early hours,
  Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with
      an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other,
  The smell of apples, aromas from crush'd sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,
  The boy's longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what
      he was dreaming,
  The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and
      content to the ground,
  The no-form'd stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,
  The hubb'd sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any
      one,
  The sensitive, orbic, underlapp'd brothers, that only privileged
      feelers may be intimate where they are,
  The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body, the bashful
      withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and
      edge themselves,
  The limpid liquid within the young man,
  The vex'd corrosion so pensive and so painful,
  The torment, the irritable tide that will not be at rest,
  The like of the same I feel, the like of the same in others,
  The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that
      flushes and flushes,
  The young man that wakes deep at night, the hot hand seeking to
      repress what would master him,
  The mystic amorous night, the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
  The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers,
      the young man all color'd, red, ashamed, angry;
  The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,
  The merriment of the twin babes that crawl over the grass in the
      sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them,
  The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen'd
      long-round walnuts,
  The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,
  The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent,
      while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent,
  The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,
  The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters,
  The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate
      what shall produce boys to fill my place when I am through,
  The wholesome relief, repose, content,
  And this bunch pluck'd at random from myself,
  It has done its work--I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.




One Hour to Madness and Joy

  One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
  (What is this that frees me so in storms?
  What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
  O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
  O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
  I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

  O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
      in defiance of the world!
  O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
  O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
      a determin'd man.

  O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
      untied and illumin'd!
  O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
  To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
      you from yours!
  To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
  To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
  To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

  O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
  To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
  To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
  To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
  To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
  To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
  To be lost if it must be so!
  To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
  With one brief hour of madness and joy.




Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd

  Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
  Whispering I love you, before long I die,
  I have travel'd a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
  For I could not die till I once look'd on you,
  For I fear'd I might afterward lose you.

  Now we have met, we have look'd, we are safe,
  Return in peace to the ocean my love,
  I too am part of that ocean my love, we are not so much separated,
  Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!
  But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,
  As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;
  Be not impatient--a little space--know you I salute the air, the
      ocean and the land,
  Every day at sundown for your dear sake my love.




Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals

  Ages and ages returning at intervals,
  Undestroy'd, wandering immortal,
  Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet,
  I, chanter of Adamic songs,
  Through the new garden the West, the great cities calling,
  Deliriate, thus prelude what is generated, offering these, offering myself,
  Bathing myself, bathing my songs in Sex,
  Offspring of my loins.




We Two, How Long We Were Fool'd

  We two, how long we were fool'd,
  Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
  We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
  We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
  We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
  We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
  We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
  We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
  We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings
      and evenings,
  We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
  We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
  We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic
      and stellar, we are as two comets,
  We prowl fang'd and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
  We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
  We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling
      over each other and interwetting each other,
  We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
  We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence
      of the globe,
  We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
  We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.




O Hymen! O Hymenee!

  O hymen! O hymenee! why do you tantalize me thus?
  O why sting me for a swift moment only?
  Why can you not continue? O why do you now cease?
  Is it because if you continued beyond the swift moment you would
      soon certainly kill me?




I Am He That Aches with Love

  I am he that aches with amorous love;
  Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
  So the body of me to all I meet or know.




Native Moments

  Native moments--when you come upon me--ah you are here now,
  Give me now libidinous joys only,
  Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank,
  To-day I go consort with Nature's darlings, to-night too,
  I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight
      orgies of young men,
  I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers,
  The echoes ring with our indecent calls, I pick out some low person
      for my dearest friend,
  He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be one condemn'd by
      others for deeds done,
  I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?
  O you shunn'd persons, I at least do not shun you,
  I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet,
  I will be more to you than to any of the rest.




Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City

  Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future
      use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
  Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met
      there who detain'd me for love of me,
  Day by day and night by night we were together--all else has long
      been forgotten by me,
  I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
  Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
  Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
  I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.




I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ

  I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn I
      pass'd the church,
  Winds of autumn, as I walk'd the woods at dusk I heard your long-
      stretch'd sighs up above so mournful,
  I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the
      soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
  Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of the
      wrists around my head,
  Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells last
      night under my ear.




Facing West from California's Shores

  Facing west from California's shores,
  Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
  I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,
      the land of migrations, look afar,
  Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
  For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
  From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
  From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
  Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,
  Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,
  (But where is what I started for so long ago?
  And why is it yet unfound?)




As Adam Early in the Morning

  As Adam early in the morning,
  Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep,
  Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
  Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
  Be not afraid of my body.




BOOK V.  CALAMUS


In Paths Untrodden

  In paths untrodden,
  In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
  Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
  From all the standards hitherto publish'd, from the pleasures,
      profits, conformities,
  Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
  Clear to me now standards not yet publish'd, clear to me that my soul,
  That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades,
  Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
  Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic,
  No longer abash'd, (for in this secluded spot I can respond as I
      would not dare elsewhere,)
  Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains
      all the rest,
  Resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,
  Projecting them along that substantial life,
  Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,
  Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first year,
  I proceed for all who are or have been young men,
  To tell the secret my nights and days,
  To celebrate the need of comrades.




Scented Herbage of My Breast

  Scented herbage of my breast,
  Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards,
  Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death,
  Perennial roots, tall leaves, O the winter shall not freeze you
      delicate leaves,
  Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you
      shall emerge again;
  O I do not know whether many passing by will discover you or inhale
      your faint odor, but I believe a few will;
  O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell in
      your own way of the heart that is under you,
  O I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves, you are
      not happiness,
  You are often more bitter than I can bear, you burn and sting me,
  Yet you are beautiful to me you faint tinged roots, you make me
      think of death,
  Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful
      except death and love?)
  O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers,
      I think it must be for death,
  For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,
  Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer,
  (I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most,)
  Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as
      you mean,
  Grow up taller sweet leaves that I may see! grow up out of my breast!
  Spring away from the conceal'd heart there!
  Do not fold yourself so in your pink-tinged roots timid leaves!
  Do not remain down there so ashamed, herbage of my breast!
  Come I am determin'd to unbare this broad breast of mine, I have
      long enough stifled and choked;
  Emblematic and capricious blades I leave you, now you serve me not,
  I will say what I have to say by itself,
  I will sound myself and comrades only, I will never again utter a
      call only their call,
  I will raise with it immortal reverberations through the States,
  I will give an example to lovers to take permanent shape and will
      through the States,
  Through me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating,
  Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it,
  Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and
      are folded inseparably together, you love and death are,
  Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life,
  For now it is convey'd to me that you are the purports essential,
  That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons, and that
      they are mainly for you,
  That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality,
  That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long,
  That you will one day perhaps take control of all,
  That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance,
  That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not last so very long,
  But you will last very long.




Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand

  Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
  Without one thing all will be useless,
  I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
  I am not what you supposed, but far different.

  Who is he that would become my follower?
  Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

  The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
  You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your
      sole and exclusive standard,
  Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
  The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives
      around you would have to be abandon'd,
  Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let
      go your hand from my shoulders,
  Put me down and depart on your way.

  Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
  Or back of a rock in the open air,
  (For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
  And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
  But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any
      person for miles around approach unawares,
  Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or
      some quiet island,
  Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
  With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,
  For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

  Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
  Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
  Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
  For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
  And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

  But these leaves conning you con at peril,
  For these leaves and me you will not understand,
  They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will
      certainly elude you.
  Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
  Already you see I have escaped from you.

  For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
  Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
  Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
  Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few)
      prove victorious,
  Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil,
      perhaps more,
  For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times
      and not hit, that which I hinted at;
  Therefore release me and depart on your way.




For You, O Democracy

  Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
  I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
  I will make divine magnetic lands,
       With the love of comrades,
         With the life-long love of comrades.

  I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
      and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
  I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
       By the love of comrades,
         By the manly love of comrades.

  For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
  For you, for you I am trilling these songs.




These I Singing in Spring

  These I singing in spring collect for lovers,
  (For who but I should understand lovers and all their sorrow and joy?
  And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
  Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I pass the gates,
  Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
  Now by the post-and-rail fences where the old stones thrown there,
      pick'd from the fields, have accumulated,
  (Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones and
      partly cover them, beyond these I pass,)
  Far, far in the forest, or sauntering later in summer, before I
      think where I go,
  Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,
  Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
  Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
  They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a
      great crowd, and I in the middle,
  Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them,
  Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever is near me,
  Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,
  Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a live-oak in
      Florida as it hung trailing down,
  Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
  And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pondside,
  (O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again
      never to separate from me,
  And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this
      calamus-root shall,
  Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!)
  And twigs of maple and a bunch of wild orange and chestnut,
  And stems of currants and plum-blows, and the aromatic cedar,
  These I compass'd around by a thick cloud of spirits,
  Wandering, point to or touch as I pass, or throw them loosely from me,
  Indicating to each one what he shall have, giving something to each;
  But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that I reserve,
  I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself am capable
      of loving.




Not Heaving from My Ribb'd Breast Only

  Not heaving from my ribb'd breast only,
  Not in sighs at night in rage dissatisfied with myself,
  Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs,
  Not in many an oath and promise broken,
  Not in my wilful and savage soul's volition,
  Not in the subtle nourishment of the air,
  Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists,
  Not in the curious systole and diastole within which will one day cease,
  Not in many a hungry wish told to the skies only,
  Not in cries, laughter, defiancies, thrown from me when alone far in
      the wilds,
  Not in husky pantings through clinch'd teeth,
  Not in sounded and resounded words, chattering words, echoes, dead words,
  Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,
  Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day,
  Nor in the limbs and senses of my body that take you and dismiss you
      continually--not there,
  Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!
  Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.




Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

  Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
  Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
  That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
  That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
  May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,
      shining and flowing waters,
  The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these
      are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real
      something has yet to be known,
  (How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
  How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
  May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem)
      as from my present point of view, and might prove (as of course they
      would) nought of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely
      changed points of view;
  To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my
      lovers, my dear friends,
  When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me
      by the hand,
  When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason
      hold not, surround us and pervade us,
  Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I
      require nothing further,
  I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity
      beyond the grave,
  But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
  He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.




The Base of All Metaphysics

  And now gentlemen,
  A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
  As base and finale too for all metaphysics.

  (So to the students the old professor,
  At the close of his crowded course.)

  Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
  Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
  Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
  And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having
      studied long,
  I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
  See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
  Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
  The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
  Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
  Of city for city and land for land.




Recorders Ages Hence

  Recorders ages hence,
  Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I
      will tell you what to say of me,
  Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
  The friend the lover's portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest,
  Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love
      within him, and freely pour'd it forth,
  Who often walk'd lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
  Who pensive away from one he lov'd often lay sleepless and
      dissatisfied at night,
  Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov'd might
      secretly be indifferent to him,
  Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills,
      he and another wandering hand in hand, they twain apart from other men,
  Who oft as he saunter'd the streets curv'd with his arm the shoulder
      of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon him also.




When I Heard at the Close of the Day

  When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd
      with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for
      me that follow'd,
  And else when I carous'd, or when my plans were accomplish'd, still
      I was not happy,
  But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
      refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
  When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the
      morning light,
  When I wander'd alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,
      laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
  And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way
      coming, O then I was happy,
  O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
      nourish'd me more, and the beautiful day pass'd well,
  And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came
      my friend,
  And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly
      continually up the shores,
  I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me
      whispering to congratulate me,
  For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in
      the cool night,
  In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
  And his arm lay lightly around my breast--and that night I was happy.




Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?

  Are you the new person drawn toward me?
  To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
  Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
  Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
  Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
  Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
  Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant
      manner of me?
  Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
  Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?




Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone

  Roots and leaves themselves alone are these,
  Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and pond-side,
  Breast-sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter
      than vines,
  Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the
      sun is risen,
  Breezes of land and love set from living shores to you on the living
      sea, to you O sailors!
  Frost-mellow'd berries and Third-month twigs offer'd fresh to young
      persons wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,
  Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,
  Buds to be unfolded on the old terms,
  If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and bring
      form, color, perfume, to you,
  If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers,
      fruits, tall branches and trees.




Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes

  Not heat flames up and consumes,
  Not sea-waves hurry in and out,
  Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, bears lightly
      along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,
  Waited, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may;
  Not these, O none of these more than the flames of me, consuming,
      burning for his love whom I love,
  O none more than I hurrying in and out;
  Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? O I the same,
  O nor down-balls nor perfumes, nor the high rain-emitting clouds,
      are borne through the open air,
  Any more than my soul is borne through the open air,
  Wafted in all directions O love, for friendship, for you.




Trickle Drops

  Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
  O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
  Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
  From wounds made to free you whence you were prison'd,
  From my face, from my forehead and lips,
  From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red
      drops, confession drops,
  Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,
  Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
  Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
  Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
  Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.




City of Orgies

  City of orgies, walks and joys,
  City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make
  Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your
      spectacles, repay me,
  Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the wharves,
  Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with
      goods in them,
  Nor to converse with learn'd persons, or bear my share in the soiree
      or feast;
  Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash
      of eyes offering me love,
  Offering response to my own--these repay me,
  Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.




Behold This Swarthy Face

  Behold this swarthy face, these gray eyes,
  This beard, the white wool unclipt upon my neck,
  My brown hands and the silent manner of me without charm;
  Yet comes one a Manhattanese and ever at parting kisses me lightly
      on the lips with robust love,
  And I on the crossing of the street or on the ship's deck give a
      kiss in return,
  We observe that salute of American comrades land and sea,
  We are those two natural and nonchalant persons.




I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

  I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
  All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
  Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
  And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
  But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
      without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
  And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
      twined around it a little moss,
  And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
  It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
  (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
  Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
  For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
      solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
  Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
  I know very well I could not.




To a Stranger

  Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
  You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me
      as of a dream,)
  I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
  All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
      chaste, matured,
  You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
  I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours
      only nor left my body mine only,
  You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
      take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
  I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
      wake at night alone,
  I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
  I am to see to it that I do not lose you.




This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful

  This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,
  It seems to me there are other men in other lands yearning and thoughtful,
  It seems to me I can look over and behold them in Germany, Italy,
      France, Spain,
  Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or talking other dialects,
  And it seems to me if I could know those men I should become
      attached to them as I do to men in my own lands,
  O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
  I know I should be happy with them.




I Hear It Was Charged Against Me

  I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
  But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
  (What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the
      destruction of them?)
  Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these
      States inland and seaboard,
  And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large
      that dents the water,
  Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
  The institution of the dear love of comrades.




The Prairie-Grass Dividing

  The prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing,
  I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,
  Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
  Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
  Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
  Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and
      command, leading not following,
  Those with a never-quell'd audacity, those with sweet and lusty
      flesh clear of taint,
  Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors,
      as to say Who are you?
  Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd, never obedient,
  Those of inland America.




When I Peruse the Conquer'd Fame

  When I peruse the conquer'd fame of heroes and the victories of
      mighty generals, I do not envy the generals,
  Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house,
  But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them,
  How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long
      and long,
  Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how
      affectionate and faithful they were,
  Then I am pensive--I hastily walk away fill'd with the bitterest envy.




We Two Boys Together Clinging

  We two boys together clinging,
  One the other never leaving,
  Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
  Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
  Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
  No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,
      threatening,
  Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on
      the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
  Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
  Fulfilling our foray.




A Promise to California

  A promise to California,
  Or inland to the great pastoral Plains, and on to Puget sound and Oregon;
  Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain,
      to teach robust American love,
  For I know very well that I and robust love belong among you,
      inland, and along the Western sea;
  For these States tend inland and toward the Western sea, and I will also.




Here the Frailest Leaves of Me

  Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
  Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
  And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.




No Labor-Saving Machine

  No labor-saving machine,
  Nor discovery have I made,
  Nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found
      hospital or library,
  Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage for America,
  Nor literary success nor intellect; nor book for the book-shelf,
  But a few carols vibrating through the air I leave,
  For comrades and lovers.




A Glimpse

  A glimpse through an interstice caught,
  Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove
      late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,
  Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and
      seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
  A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
      oath and smutty jest,
  There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
      perhaps not a word.




A Leaf for Hand in Hand

  A leaf for hand in hand;
  You natural persons old and young!
  You on the Mississippi and on all the branches and bayous of
      the Mississippi!
  You friendly boatmen and mechanics! you roughs!
  You twain! and all processions moving along the streets!
  I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to
      walk hand in hand.




Earth, My Likeness

  Earth, my likeness,
  Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,
  I now suspect that is not all;
  I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible to burst forth,
  For an athlete is enamour'd of me, and I of him,
  But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible
      to burst forth,
  I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.




I Dream'd in a Dream

  I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
      whole of the rest of the earth,
  I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,
  Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
  It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
  And in all their looks and words.




What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?

  What think you I take my pen in hand to record?
  The battle-ship, perfect-model'd, majestic, that I saw pass the
      offing to-day under full sail?
  The splendors of the past day? or the splendor of the night that
      envelops me?
  Or the vaunted glory and growth of the great city spread around me? --no;
  But merely of two simple men I saw to-day on the pier in the midst
      of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends,
  The one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kiss'd him,
  While the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.




To the East and to the West

  To the East and to the West,
  To the man of the Seaside State and of Pennsylvania,
  To the Kanadian of the north, to the Southerner I love,
  These with perfect trust to depict you as myself, the germs are in all men,
  I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb
      friendship, exalte, previously unknown,
  Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men.




Sometimes with One I Love

  Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
      unreturn'd love,
  But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one
      way or another,
  (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,
  Yet out of that I have written these songs.)




To a Western Boy

  Many things to absorb I teach to help you become eleve of mine;
  Yet if blood like mine circle not in your veins,
  If you be not silently selected by lovers and do not silently select lovers,
  Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?




Fast Anchor'd Eternal O Love!

  Fast-anchor'd eternal O love! O woman I love!
  O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you!
  Then separate, as disembodied or another born,
  Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
  I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man,
  O sharer of my roving life.




Among the Multitude

  Among the men and women the multitude,
  I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
  Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
      any nearer than I am,
  Some are baffled, but that one is not--that one knows me.

  Ah lover and perfect equal,
  I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
  And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.




O You Whom I Often and Silently Come

  O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,
  As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
  Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is
      playing within me.




That Shadow My Likeness

  That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood,
      chattering, chaffering,
  How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,
  How often I question and doubt whether that is really me;
  But among my lovers and caroling these songs,
  O I never doubt whether that is really me.




Full of Life Now

  Full of life now, compact, visible,
  I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
  To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
  To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

  When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
  Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
  Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
  Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)




BOOK VI


Salut au Monde!

       1
  O take my hand Walt Whitman!
  Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
  Such join'd unended links, each hook'd to the next,
  Each answering all, each sharing the earth with all.

  What widens within you Walt Whitman?
  What waves and soils exuding?
  What climes? what persons and cities are here?
  Who are the infants, some playing, some slumbering?
  Who are the girls? who are the married women?
  Who are the groups of old men going slowly with their arms about
      each other's necks?
  What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these?
  What are the mountains call'd that rise so high in the mists?
  What myriads of dwellings are they fill'd with dwellers?

       2
  Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens,
  Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east--America is provided for in the west,
  Banding the bulge of the earth winds the hot equator,
  Curiously north and south turn the axis-ends,
  Within me is the longest day, the sun wheels in slanting rings, it
      does not set for months,
  Stretch'd in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above
      the horizon and sinks again,
  Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups,
  Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands.

       3
  What do you hear Walt Whitman?

  I hear the workman singing and the farmer's wife singing,
  I hear in the distance the sounds of children and of animals early
      in the day,
  I hear emulous shouts of Australians pursuing the wild horse,
  I hear the Spanish dance with castanets in the chestnut shade, to
      the rebeck and guitar,
  I hear continual echoes from the Thames,
  I hear fierce French liberty songs,
  I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems,
  I hear the locusts in Syria as they strike the grain and grass with
      the showers of their terrible clouds,
  I hear the Coptic refrain toward sundown, pensively falling on the
      breast of the black venerable vast mother the Nile,
  I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule,
  I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque,
  I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear
      the responsive base and soprano,
  I hear the cry of the Cossack, and the sailor's voice putting to sea
      at Okotsk,
  I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle as the slaves march on, as the
      husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fasten'd together
      with wrist-chains and ankle-chains,
  I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms,
  I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of
      the Romans,
  I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful
      God the Christ,
  I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars,
      adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three
      thousand years ago.

       4
  What do you see Walt Whitman?
  Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute you?
  I see a great round wonder rolling through space,
  I see diminute farms, hamlets, ruins, graveyards, jails, factories,
      palaces, hovels, huts of barbarians, tents of nomads upon the surface,
  I see the shaded part on one side where the sleepers are sleeping,
      and the sunlit part on the other side,
  I see the curious rapid change of the light and shade,
  I see distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants of them as
      my land is to me.

  I see plenteous waters,
  I see mountain peaks, I see the sierras of Andes where they range,
  I see plainly the Himalayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, Ghauts,
  I see the giant pinnacles of Elbruz, Kazbek, Bazardjusi,
  I see the Styrian Alps, and the Karnac Alps,
  I see the Pyrenees, Balks, Carpathians, and to the north the
      Dofrafields, and off at sea mount Hecla,
  I see Vesuvius and Etna, the mountains of the Moon, and the Red
      mountains of Madagascar,
  I see the Lybian, Arabian, and Asiatic deserts,
  I see huge dreadful Arctic and Antarctic icebergs,
  I see the superior oceans and the inferior ones, the Atlantic and
      Pacific, the sea of Mexico, the Brazilian sea, and the sea of Peru,
  The waters of Hindustan, the China sea, and the gulf of Guinea,
  The Japan waters, the beautiful bay of Nagasaki land-lock'd in its
      mountains,
  The spread of the Baltic, Caspian, Bothnia, the British shores, and
      the bay of Biscay,
  The clear-sunn'd Mediterranean, and from one to another of its islands,
  The White sea, and the sea around Greenland.

  I behold the mariners of the world,
  Some are in storms, some in the night with the watch on the lookout,
  Some drifting helplessly, some with contagious diseases.

  I behold the sail and steamships of the world, some in clusters in
      port, some on their voyages,
  Some double the cape of Storms, some cape Verde, others capes
      Guardafui, Bon, or Bajadore,
  Others Dondra head, others pass the straits of Sunda, others cape
      Lopatka, others Behring's straits,
  Others cape Horn, others sail the gulf of Mexico or along Cuba or
      Hayti, others Hudson's bay or Baffin's bay,
  Others pass the straits of Dover, others enter the Wash, others the
      firth of Solway, others round cape Clear, others the Land's End,
  Others traverse the Zuyder Zee or the Scheld,
  Others as comers and goers at Gibraltar or the Dardanelles,
  Others sternly push their way through the northern winter-packs,
  Others descend or ascend the Obi or the Lena,
  Others the Niger or the Congo, others the Indus, the Burampooter
      and Cambodia,
  Others wait steam'd up ready to start in the ports of Australia,
  Wait at Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin, Marseilles, Lisbon, Naples,
  Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux, the Hague, Copenhagen,
  Wait at Valparaiso, Rio Janeiro, Panama.

       5
  I see the tracks of the railroads of the earth,
  I see them in Great Britain, I see them in Europe,
  I see them in Asia and in Africa.

  I see the electric telegraphs of the earth,
  I see the filaments of the news of the wars, deaths, losses, gains,
      passions, of my race.

  I see the long river-stripes of the earth,
  I see the Amazon and the Paraguay,
  I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River,
      the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl,
  I see where the Seine flows, and where the Danube, the Loire, the
      Rhone, and the Guadalquiver flow,
  I see the windings of the Volga, the Dnieper, the Oder,
  I see the Tuscan going down the Arno, and the Venetian along the Po,
  I see the Greek seaman sailing out of Egina bay.

       6
  I see the site of the old empire of Assyria, and that of Persia, and
      that of India,
  I see the falling of the Ganges over the high rim of Saukara.

  I see the place of the idea of the Deity incarnated by avatars in
      human forms,
  I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth, oracles,
      sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, llamas, monks, muftis, exhorters,
  I see where druids walk'd the groves of Mona, I see the mistletoe
      and vervain,
  I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of Gods, I see the old
      signifiers.

  I see Christ eating the bread of his last supper in the midst of
      youths and old persons,
  I see where the strong divine young man the Hercules toil'd
      faithfully and long and then died,
  I see the place of the innocent rich life and hapless fate of the
      beautiful nocturnal son, the full-limb'd Bacchus,
  I see Kneph, blooming, drest in blue, with the crown of feathers on
      his head,
  I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-belov'd, saying to the people
      Do not weep for me,
  This is not my true country, I have lived banish'd from my true
      country, I now go back there,
  I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn.

       7
  I see the battle-fields of the earth, grass grows upon them and
      blossoms and corn,
  I see the tracks of ancient and modern expeditions.

  I see the nameless masonries, venerable messages of the unknown
      events, heroes, records of the earth.

  I see the places of the sagas,
  I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts,
  I see granite bowlders and cliffs, I see green meadows and lakes,
  I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors,
  I see them raised high with stones by the marge of restless oceans,
      that the dead men's spirits when they wearied of their quiet
      graves might rise up through the mounds and gaze on the tossing
      billows, and be refresh'd by storms, immensity, liberty, action.

  I see the steppes of Asia,
  I see the tumuli of Mongolia, I see the tents of Kalmucks and Baskirs,
  I see the nomadic tribes with herds of oxen and cows,
  I see the table-lands notch'd with ravines, I see the jungles and deserts,
  I see the camel, the wild steed, the bustard, the fat-tail'd sheep,
      the antelope, and the burrowing wolf

  I see the highlands of Abyssinia,
  I see flocks of goats feeding, and see the fig-tree, tamarind, date,
  And see fields of teff-wheat and places of verdure and gold.

  I see the Brazilian vaquero,
  I see the Bolivian ascending mount Sorata,
  I see the Wacho crossing the plains, I see the incomparable rider of
      horses with his lasso on his arm,
  I see over the pampas the pursuit of wild cattle for their hides.

       8
  I see the regions of snow and ice,
  I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn,
  I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance,
  I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs,
  I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south
      Pacific and the north Atlantic,
  I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland--I
      mark the long winters and the isolation.

  I see the cities of the earth and make myself at random a part of them,
  I am a real Parisian,
  I am a habitan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Constantinople,
  I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne,
  I am of London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick,
  I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons, Brussels, Berne,
      Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin, Florence,
  I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw, or northward in Christiania or
      Stockholm, or in Siberian Irkutsk, or in some street in Iceland,
  I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them again.

       10
  I see vapors exhaling from unexplored countries,
  I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poison'd splint, the
      fetich, and the obi.
  I see African and Asiatic towns,
  I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Monrovia,
  I see the swarms of Pekin, Canton, Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, Tokio,
  I see the Kruman in his hut, and the Dahoman and Ashantee-man in their huts,
  I see the Turk smoking opium in Aleppo,
  I see the picturesque crowds at the fairs of Khiva and those of Herat,
  I see Teheran, I see Muscat and Medina and the intervening sands,
      see the caravans toiling onward,
  I see Egypt and the Egyptians, I see the pyramids and obelisks.
  I look on chisell'd histories, records of conquering kings,
      dynasties, cut in slabs of sand-stone, or on granite-blocks,
  I see at Memphis mummy-pits containing mummies embalm'd,
      swathed in linen cloth, lying there many centuries,
  I look on the fall'n Theban, the large-ball'd eyes, the
      side-drooping neck, the hands folded across the breast.

  I see all the menials of the earth, laboring,
  I see all the prisoners in the prisons,
  I see the defective human bodies of the earth,
  The blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics,
  The pirates, thieves, betrayers, murderers, slave-makers of the earth,
  The helpless infants, and the helpless old men and women.

  I see male and female everywhere,
  I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs,
  I see the constructiveness of my race,
  I see the results of the perseverance and industry of my race,
  I see ranks, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, I go among them, I
      mix indiscriminately,
  And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.

       11
  You whoever you are!
  You daughter or son of England!
  You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ in Russia!
  You dim-descended, black, divine-soul'd African, large, fine-headed,
      nobly-form'd, superbly destin'd, on equal terms with me!
  You Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you Prussian!
  You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese!
  You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France!
  You Belge! you liberty-lover of the Netherlands! (you stock whence I
      myself have descended;)
  You sturdy Austrian! you Lombard! Hun! Bohemian! farmer of Styria!
  You neighbor of the Danube!
  You working-man of the Rhine, the Elbe, or the Weser! you working-woman too!
  You Sardinian! you Bavarian! Swabian! Saxon! Wallachian! Bulgarian!
  You Roman! Neapolitan! you Greek!
  You lithe matador in the arena at Seville!
  You mountaineer living lawlessly on the Taurus or Caucasus!
  You Bokh horse-herd watching your mares and stallions feeding!
  You beautiful-bodied Persian at full speed in the saddle shooting
      arrows to the mark!
  You Chinaman and Chinawoman of China! you Tartar of Tartary!
  You women of the earth subordinated at your tasks!
  You Jew journeying in your old age through every risk to stand once
      on Syrian ground!
  You other Jews waiting in all lands for your Messiah!
  You thoughtful Armenian pondering by some stream of the Euphrates!
      you peering amid the ruins of Nineveh! you ascending mount Ararat!
  You foot-worn pilgrim welcoming the far-away sparkle of the minarets
      of Mecca!
  You sheiks along the stretch from Suez to Bab-el-mandeb ruling your
      families and tribes!
  You olive-grower tending your fruit on fields of Nazareth, Damascus,
      or lake Tiberias!
  You Thibet trader on the wide inland or bargaining in the shops of Lassa!
  You Japanese man or woman! you liver in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Borneo!
  All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent
      of place!
  All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea!
  And you of centuries hence when you listen to me!
  And you each and everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the same!
  Health to you! good will to you all, from me and America sent!

  Each of us inevitable,
  Each of us limitless--each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
  Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth,
  Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

       12
  You Hottentot with clicking palate! you woolly-hair'd hordes!
  You own'd persons dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!
  You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!
  You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon for all
      your glimmering language and spirituality!
  You dwarf'd Kamtschatkan, Greenlander, Lapp!
  You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive lip,
      groveling, seeking your food!
  You Caffre, Berber, Soudanese!
  You haggard, uncouth, untutor'd Bedowee!
  You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kaubul, Cairo!
  You benighted roamer of Amazonia! you Patagonian! you Feejeeman!
  I do not prefer others so very much before you either,
  I do not say one word against you, away back there where you stand,
  (You will come forward in due time to my side.)

       13
  My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth,
  I have look'd for equals and lovers and found them ready for me in
      all lands,
  I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

  You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
      continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
  I think I have blown with you you winds;
  You waters I have finger'd every shore with you,
  I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
  I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
      embedded rocks, to cry thence:

  What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself,
  All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.

  Toward you all, in America's name,
  I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal,
  To remain after me in sight forever,
  For all the haunts and homes of men.




BOOK VII


Song of the Open Road

       1
  Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
  Healthy, free, the world before me,
  The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

  Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
  Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
  Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
  Strong and content I travel the open road.

  The earth, that is sufficient,
  I do not want the constellations any nearer,
  I know they are very well where they are,
  I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

  (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
  I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
  I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
  I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

       2
  You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all
      that is here,
  I believe that much unseen is also here.

  Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,
  The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas'd, the
      illiterate person, are not denied;
  The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar's tramp, the
      drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
  The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,
  The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the
      town, the return back from the town,
  They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted,
  None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

       3
  You air that serves me with breath to speak!
  You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
  You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
  You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
  I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

  You flagg'd walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
  You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined
      side! you distant ships!
  You rows of houses! you window-pierc'd facades! you roofs!
  You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
  You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
  You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
  You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
  From all that has touch'd you I believe you have imparted to
      yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,
  From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces,
      and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

       4
  The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
  The picture alive, every part in its best light,
  The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is
      not wanted,
  The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.

  O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
  Do you say Venture not--if you leave me you are lost?
  Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied,
      adhere to me?

  O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
  You express me better than I can express myself,
  You shall be more to me than my poem.

  I think heroic deeds were all conceiv'd in the open air, and all
      free poems also,
  I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
  I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever
      beholds me shall like me,
  I think whoever I see must be happy.

       5
  From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
  Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
  Listening to others, considering well what they say,
  Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
  Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
      would hold me.

  I inhale great draughts of space,
  The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

  I am larger, better than I thought,
  I did not know I held so much goodness.

  All seems beautiful to me,
  can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me
      I would do the same to you,
  I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
  I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
  I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
  Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
  Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

       6
  Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
  Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear'd it would not
      astonish me.

  Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
  It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

  Here a great personal deed has room,
  (Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
  Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all
      authority and all argument against it.)

  Here is the test of wisdom,
  Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
  Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it,
  Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
  Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
  Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the
      excellence of things;
  Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes
      it out of the soul.

  Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
  They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the
      spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

  Here is realization,
  Here is a man tallied--he realizes here what he has in him,
  The past, the future, majesty, love--if they are vacant of you, you
      are vacant of them.

  Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
  Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
  Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

  Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion'd, it is apropos;
  Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?
  Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?

       7
  Here is the efflux of the soul,
  The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower'd gates,
      ever provoking questions,
  These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?
  Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight
      expands my blood?
  Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
  Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious
      thoughts descend upon me?
  (I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always
      drop fruit as I pass;)
  What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?
  What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side?
  What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by
      and pause?
  What gives me to be free to a woman's and man's good-will? what
      gives them to be free to mine?

       8
  The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,
  I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
  Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

  Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
  The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of
      man and woman,
  (The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day
      out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet
      continually out of itself.)

  Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the
      love of young and old,
  From it falls distill'd the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,
  Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.

       9
  Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
  Traveling with me you find what never tires.

  The earth never tires,
  The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude
      and incomprehensible at first,
  Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd,
  I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

  Allons! we must not stop here,
  However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling
      we cannot remain here,
  However shelter'd this port and however calm these waters we must
      not anchor here,
  However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted
      to receive it but a little while.

       10
  Allons! the inducements shall be greater,
  We will sail pathless and wild seas,
  We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper
      speeds by under full sail.

  Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,
  Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;
  Allons! from all formules!
  From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.

  The stale cadaver blocks up the passage--the burial waits no longer.

  Allons! yet take warning!
  He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,
  None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,
  Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself,
  Only those may come who come in sweet and determin'd bodies,
  No diseas'd person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.

  (I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
  We convince by our presence.)

       11
  Listen! I will be honest with you,
  I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
  These are the days that must happen to you:
  You shall not heap up what is call'd riches,
  You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
  You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd, you hardly
      settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call'd by an
      irresistible call to depart,
  You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those
      who remain behind you,
  What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with
      passionate kisses of parting,
  You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach'd hands
      toward you.

       12
  Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!
  They too are on the road--they are the swift and majestic men--they
      are the greatest women,
  Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,
  Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
  Habitues of many distant countries, habitues of far-distant dwellings,
  Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
  Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
  Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of
      children, bearers of children,
  Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins,
  Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious
      years each emerging from that which preceded it,
  Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,
  Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days,
  Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded
      and well-grain'd manhood,
  Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass'd, content,
  Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood,
  Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,
  Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

       13
  Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,
  To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
  To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights
      they tend to,
  Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys,
  To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
  To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
  To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you,
      however long but it stretches and waits for you,
  To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither,
  To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without
      labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one
      particle of it,
  To take the best of the farmer's farm and the rich man's elegant
      villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and
      the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
  To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
  To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go,
  To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter
      them, to gather the love out of their hearts,
  To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave
      them behind you,
  To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for
      traveling souls.

  All parts away for the progress of souls,
  All religion, all solid things, arts, governments--all that was or is
      apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners
      before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

  Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of
      the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.

  Forever alive, forever forward,
  Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble,
      dissatisfied,
  Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
  They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go,
  But I know that they go toward the best--toward something great.

  Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
  You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though
      you built it, or though it has been built for you.

  Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!
  It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.

  Behold through you as bad as the rest,
  Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,
  Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash'd and trimm'd faces,
  Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.

  No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
  Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
  Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and
      bland in the parlors,
  In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,
  Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom,
      everywhere,
  Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the
      breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,
  Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers,
  Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
  Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.

       14
  Allons! through struggles and wars!
  The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.

  Have the past struggles succeeded?
  What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?
  Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that
      from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth
      something to make a greater struggle necessary.

  My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
  He going with me must go well arm'd,
  He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies,
      desertions.

       15
  Allons! the road is before us!
  It is safe--I have tried it--my own feet have tried it well--be not
      detain'd!
  Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the
      shelf unopen'd!
  Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn'd!
  Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
  Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the
      court, and the judge expound the law.

  Camerado, I give you my hand!
  I give you my love more precious than money,
  I give you myself before preaching or law;
  Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
  Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?




BOOK VIII


Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

       1
  Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
  Clouds of the west--sun there half an hour high--I see you also face
      to face.

  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious
      you are to me!
  On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
      home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
  And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more
      to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

       2
  The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
  The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated, every
      one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
  The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
  The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on
      the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
  The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
  The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
  The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

  Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
  Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
  Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the
      heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
  Others will see the islands large and small;
  Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half
      an hour high,
  A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others
      will see them,
  Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the
      falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

       3
  It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,
  I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
      generations hence,
  Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
  Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
  Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
      bright flow, I was refresh'd,
  Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
      current, I stood yet was hurried,
  Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
      thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.

  I too many and many a time cross'd the river of old,
  Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air
      floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
  Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left
      the rest in strong shadow,
  Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
  Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
  Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
  Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my
      head in the sunlit water,
  Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
  Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
  Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
  Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
  Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
  The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
  The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender
      serpentine pennants,
  The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,
  The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
  The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
  The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the
      frolic-some crests and glistening,
  The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the
      granite storehouses by the docks,
  On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on
      each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
  On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning
      high and glaringly into the night,
  Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow
      light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

       4
  These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
  I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
  The men and women I saw were all near to me,
  Others the same--others who look back on me because I look'd forward
      to them,
  (The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

       5
  What is it then between us?
  What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

  Whatever it is, it avails not--distance avails not, and place avails not,
  I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
  I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the
      waters around it,
  I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
  In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
  In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
  I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
  I too had receiv'd identity by my body,
  That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I
      should be of my body.

       6
  It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
  The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
  The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
  My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
  Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
  I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
  I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
  Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
  Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
  Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
  The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
  The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

  Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
  Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
  Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as
      they saw me approaching or passing,
  Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of
      their flesh against me as I sat,
  Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet
      never told them a word,
  Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
  Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
  The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
  Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

       7
  Closer yet I approach you,
  What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you--I laid in my
      stores in advance,
  I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.

  Who was to know what should come home to me?
  Who knows but I am enjoying this?
  Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you
      now, for all you cannot see me?

       8
  Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than
      mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
  River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
  The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the
      twilight, and the belated lighter?
  What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I
      love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
  What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that
      looks in my face?
  Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

  We understand then do we not?
  What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
  What the study could not teach--what the preaching could not
      accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

       9
  Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
  Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves!
  Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the
      men and women generations after me!
  Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
  Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
  Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
  Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
  Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
  Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my
      nighest name!
  Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
  Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one
      makes it!
  Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be
      looking upon you;
  Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet
      haste with the hasting current;
  Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
  Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all
      downcast eyes have time to take it from you!
  Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any
      one's head, in the sunlit water!
  Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail'd
      schooners, sloops, lighters!
  Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower'd at sunset!
  Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
      nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!
  Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
  You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
  About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,
  Thrive, cities--bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and
      sufficient rivers,
  Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,
  Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

  You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
  We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
  Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
  We use you, and do not cast you aside--we plant you permanently within us,
  We fathom you not--we love you--there is perfection in you also,
  You furnish your parts toward eternity,
  Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.




BOOK IX


Song of the Answerer

       1
  Now list to my morning's romanza, I tell the signs of the Answerer,
  To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me.

  A young man comes to me bearing a message from his brother,
  How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother?
  Tell him to send me the signs. And I stand before the young man
      face to face, and take his right hand in my left hand and his
      left hand in my right hand,
  And I answer for his brother and for men, and I answer for him that
      answers for all, and send these signs.

  Him all wait for, him all yield up to, his word is decisive and final,
  Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves as amid light,
  Him they immerse and he immerses them.

  Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape,
      people, animals,
  The profound earth and its attributes and the unquiet ocean, (so
      tell I my morning's romanza,)
  All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy,
  The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably reaps,
  The noblest and costliest cities, others grading and building and he
      domiciles there,
  Nothing for any one but what is for him, near and far are for him,
      the ships in the offing,
  The perpetual shows and marches on land are for him if they are for anybody.

  He puts things in their attitudes,
  He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love,
  He places his own times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and
      sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest
      never shame them afterward, nor assume to command them.

  He is the Answerer,
  What can be answer'd he answers, and what cannot be answer'd he
      shows how it cannot be answer'd.

  A man is a summons and challenge,
  (It is vain to skulk--do you hear that mocking and laughter? do you
      hear the ironical echoes?)

  Books, friendships, philosophers, priests, action, pleasure, pride,
      beat up and down seeking to give satisfaction,
  He indicates the satisfaction, and indicates them that beat up and
      down also.

  Whichever the sex, whatever the season or place, he may go freshly
      and gently and safely by day or by night,
  He has the pass-key of hearts, to him the response of the prying of
      hands on the knobs.

  His welcome is universal, the flow of beauty is not more welcome or
      universal than he is,
  The person he favors by day or sleeps with at night is blessed.

  Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,
  He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and
      any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
  One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees
      how they join.

  He says indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President
      at his levee,
  And he says Good-day my brother, to Cudge that hoes in the sugar-field,
  And both understand him and know that his speech is right.

  He walks with perfect ease in the capitol,
  He walks among the Congress, and one Representative says to another,
      Here is our equal appearing and new.

  Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic,
  And the soldiers suppose him to be a soldier, and the sailors that
      he has follow'd the sea,
  And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist,
  And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them,
  No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has
      follow'd it,
  No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and
      sisters there.

  The English believe he comes of their English stock,
  A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near,
      removed from none.

  Whoever he looks at in the traveler's coffee-house claims him,
  The Italian or Frenchman is sure, the German is sure, the Spaniard
      is sure, and the island Cuban is sure,
  The engineer, the deck-hand on the great lakes, or on the Mississippi
      or St. Lawrence or Sacramento, or Hudson or Paumanok sound, claims him.

  The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood,
  The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see
      themselves in the ways of him, he strangely transmutes them,
  They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown.

       2
  The indications and tally of time,
  Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs,
  Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts,
  What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company
      of singers, and their words,
  The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark,
      but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark,
  The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,
  His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
  He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.

  The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets,
  The singers are welcom'd, understood, appear often enough, but rare
      has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker
      of poems, the Answerer,
  (Not every century nor every five centuries has contain'd such a
      day, for all its names.)

  The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible
      names, but the name of each of them is one of the singers,
  The name of each is, eye-singer, ear-singer, head-singer,
      sweet-singer, night-singer, parlor-singer, love-singer,
      weird-singer, or something else.

  All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems,
  The words of true poems do not merely please,
  The true poets are not followers of beauty but the august masters of beauty;
  The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers
      and fathers,
  The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

  Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health,
      rudeness of body, withdrawnness,
  Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems.

  The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer,
  The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all
      these underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer.

  The words of the true poems give you more than poems,
  They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war,
      peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else,
  They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,
  They do not seek beauty, they are sought,
  Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing,
      fain, love-sick.

  They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,
  They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,
  Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to
      learn one of the meanings,
  To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless
      rings and never be quiet again.




BOOK X


Our Old Feuillage

  Always our old feuillage!
  Always Florida's green peninsula--always the priceless delta of
      Louisiana--always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas,
  Always California's golden hills and hollows, and the silver
      mountains of New Mexico--always soft-breath'd Cuba,
  Always the vast slope drain'd by the Southern sea, inseparable with
      the slopes drain'd by the Eastern and Western seas,
  The area the eighty-third year of these States, the three and a half
      millions of square miles,
  The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main,
      the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
  The seven millions of distinct families and the same number of dwellings--
      always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches,
  Always the free range and diversity--always the continent of Democracy;
  Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers,
      Kanada, the snows;
  Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing
      the huge oval lakes;
  Always the West with strong native persons, the increasing density there,
      the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
  All sights, South, North, East--all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
  All characters, movements, growths, a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,
  Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering,
  On interior rivers by night in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
      wooding up,
  Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys
      of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke
      and Delaware,
  In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the
      hills, or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink,
  In a lonesome inlet a sheldrake lost from the flock, sitting on the
      water rocking silently,
  In farmers' barns oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done, they
      rest standing, they are too tired,
  Afar on arctic ice the she-walrus lying drowsily while her cubs play around,
  The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail'd, the farthest polar
      sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes,
  White drift spooning ahead where the ship in the tempest dashes,
  On solid land what is done in cities as the bells strike midnight together,
  In primitive woods the sounds there also sounding, the howl of the
      wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk,
  In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead lake, in summer
      visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming,
  In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black
      buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops,
  Below, the red cedar festoon'd with tylandria, the pines and
      cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat,
  Rude boats descending the big Pedee, climbing plants, parasites with
      color'd flowers and berries enveloping huge trees,
  The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low,
      noiselessly waved by the wind,
  The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and
      the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
  Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding
      from troughs,
  The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees,
      the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising;
  Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North
      Carolina's coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the
      large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work'd by horses, the
      clearing, curing, and packing-houses;
  Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the
      incisions in the trees, there are the turpentine works,
  There are the negroes at work in good health, the ground in all
      directions is cover'd with pine straw;
  In Tennessee and Kentucky slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge,
      by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking,
  In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence,
      joyfully welcom'd and kiss'd by the aged mulatto nurse,
  On rivers boatmen safely moor'd at nightfall in their boats under
      shelter of high banks,
  Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle,
      others sit on the gunwale smoking and talking;
  Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing
      in the Great Dismal Swamp,
  There are the greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous
      moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree;
  Northward, young men of Mannahatta, the target company from an
      excursion returning home at evening, the musket-muzzles all
      bear bunches of flowers presented by women;
  Children at play, or on his father's lap a young boy fallen asleep,
      (how his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!)
  The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the
      Mississippi, he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eyes around;
  California life, the miner, bearded, dress'd in his rude costume,
      the stanch California friendship, the sweet air, the graves one
      in passing meets solitary just aside the horse-path;
  Down in Texas the cotton-field, the negro-cabins, drivers driving
      mules or oxen before rude carts, cotton bales piled on banks
      and wharves;
  Encircling all, vast-darting up and wide, the American Soul, with
      equal hemispheres, one Love, one Dilation or Pride;
  In arriere the peace-talk with the Iroquois the aborigines, the
      calumet, the pipe of good-will, arbitration, and indorsement,
  The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward
      the earth,
  The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural
      exclamations,
  The setting out of the war-party, the long and stealthy march,
  The single file, the swinging hatchets, the surprise and slaughter
      of enemies;
  All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of these States,
      reminiscences, institutions,
  All these States compact, every square mile of these States without
      excepting a particle;
  Me pleas'd, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok's fields,
  Observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies
      shuffling between each other, ascending high in the air,
  The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects, the fall traveler
      southward but returning northward early in the spring,
  The country boy at the close of the day driving the herd of cows and
      shouting to them as they loiter to browse by the roadside,
  The city wharf, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New
      Orleans, San Francisco,
  The departing ships when the sailors heave at the capstan;
  Evening--me in my room--the setting sun,
  The setting summer sun shining in my open window, showing the
      swarm of flies, suspended, balancing in the air in the centre
      of the room, darting athwart, up and down, casting swift
      shadows in specks on the opposite wall where the shine is;
  The athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners,
  Males, females, immigrants, combinations, the copiousness, the
      individuality of the States, each for itself--the moneymakers,
  Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces, the windlass, lever,
      pulley, all certainties,
  The certainty of space, increase, freedom, futurity,
  In space the sporades, the scatter'd islands, the stars--on the firm
      earth, the lands, my lands,
  O lands! all so dear to me--what you are, (whatever it is,) I putting it
      at random in these songs, become a part of that, whatever it is,
  Southward there, I screaming, with wings slow flapping, with the
      myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida,
  Otherways there atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the Rio Grande,
      the Nueces, the Brazos, the Tombigbee, the Red River, the
      Saskatchawan or the Osage, I with the spring waters laughing
      and skipping and running,
  Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Paumanok, I with
      parties of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and
      aquatic plants,
  Retreating, triumphantly twittering, the king-bird, from piercing
      the crow with its bill, for amusement--and I triumphantly twittering,
  The migrating flock of wild geese alighting in autumn to refresh
      themselves, the body of the flock feed, the sentinels outside
      move around with erect heads watching, and are from time to time
      reliev'd by other sentinels--and I feeding and taking turns
      with the rest,
  In Kanadian forests the moose, large as an ox, corner'd by hunters,
      rising desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with his
      fore-feet, the hoofs as sharp as knives--and I, plunging at the
      hunters, corner'd and desperate,
  In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, store-houses, and the
      countless workmen working in the shops,
  And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof--and no less in myself
      than the whole of the Mannahatta in itself,
  Singing the song of These, my ever-united lands--my body no more
      inevitably united, part to part, and made out of a thousand
      diverse contributions one identity, any more than my lands
      are inevitably united and made ONE IDENTITY;
  Nativities, climates, the grass of the great pastoral Plains,
  Cities, labors, death, animals, products, war, good and evil--these me,
  These affording, in all their particulars, the old feuillage to me
      and to America, how can I do less than pass the clew of the union
      of them, to afford the like to you?
  Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you
      also be eligible as I am?
  How can I but as here chanting, invite you for yourself to collect
      bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States?




BOOK XI


A Song of Joys

  O to make the most jubilant song!
  Full of music--full of manhood, womanhood, infancy!
  Full of common employments--full of grain and trees.

  O for the voices of animals--O for the swiftness and balance of fishes!
  O for the dropping of raindrops in a song!
  O for the sunshine and motion of waves in a song!

  O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning!
  It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,
  I will have thousands of globes and all time.

  O the engineer's joys! to go with a locomotive!
  To hear the hiss of steam, the merry shriek, the steam-whistle, the
      laughing locomotive!
  To push with resistless way and speed off in the distance.

  O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides!
  The leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds, the moist fresh
      stillness of the woods,
  The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak, and all through the forenoon.

  O the horseman's and horsewoman's joys!
  The saddle, the gallop, the pressure upon the seat, the cool
      gurgling by the ears and hair.

  O the fireman's joys!
  I hear the alarm at dead of night,
  I hear bells, shouts! I pass the crowd, I run!
  The sight of the flames maddens me with pleasure.

  O the joy of the strong-brawn'd fighter, towering in the arena in
      perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent.

  O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is
      capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods.

  O the mother's joys!
  The watching, the endurance, the precious love, the anguish, the
      patiently yielded life.

  O the of increase, growth, recuperation,
  The joy of soothing and pacifying, the joy of concord and harmony.

  O to go back to the place where I was born,
  To hear the birds sing once more,
  To ramble about the house and barn and over the fields once more,
  And through the orchard and along the old lanes once more.

  O to have been brought up on bays, lagoons, creeks, or along the coast,
  To continue and be employ'd there all my life,
  The briny and damp smell, the shore, the salt weeds exposed at low water,
  The work of fishermen, the work of the eel-fisher and clam-fisher;
  I come with my clam-rake and spade, I come with my eel-spear,
  Is the tide out? I Join the group of clam-diggers on the flats,
  I laugh and work with them, I joke at my work like a mettlesome young man;
  In winter I take my eel-basket and eel-spear and travel out on foot
      on the ice--I have a small axe to cut holes in the ice,
  Behold me well-clothed going gayly or returning in the afternoon,
      my brood of tough boys accompanying me,
  My brood of grown and part-grown boys, who love to be with no
      one else so well as they love to be with me,
  By day to work with me, and by night to sleep with me.

  Another time in warm weather out in a boat, to lift the lobster-pots
      where they are sunk with heavy stones, (I know the buoys,)
  O the sweetness of the Fifth-month morning upon the water as I row
      just before sunrise toward the buoys,
  I pull the wicker pots up slantingly, the dark green lobsters are
      desperate with their claws as I take them out, I insert
      wooden pegs in the 'oints of their pincers,

  I go to all the places one after another, and then row back to the shore,
  There in a huge kettle of boiling water the lobsters shall be boil'd
      till their color becomes scarlet.

  Another time mackerel-taking,
  Voracious, mad for the hook, near the surface, they seem to fill the
      water for miles;
  Another time fishing for rock-fish in Chesapeake bay, I one of the
      brown-faced crew;
  Another time trailing for blue-fish off Paumanok, I stand with braced body,
  My left foot is on the gunwale, my right arm throws far out the
      coils of slender rope,
  In sight around me the quick veering and darting of fifty skiffs, my
      companions.

  O boating on the rivers,
  The voyage down the St. Lawrence, the superb scenery, the steamers,
  The ships sailing, the Thousand Islands, the occasional timber-raft
      and the raftsmen with long-reaching sweep-oars,
  The little huts on the rafts, and the stream of smoke when they cook
      supper at evening.

  (O something pernicious and dread!
  Something far away from a puny and pious life!
  Something unproved! something in a trance!
  Something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.)

  O to work in mines, or forging iron,
  Foundry casting, the foundry itself, the rude high roof, the ample
      and shadow'd space,
  The furnace, the hot liquid pour'd out and running.

  O to resume the joys of the soldier!
  To feel the presence of a brave commanding officer--to feel his sympathy!
  To behold his calmness--to be warm'd in the rays of his smile!
  To go to battle--to hear the bugles play and the drums beat!
  To hear the crash of artillery--to see the glittering of the bayonets
      and musket-barrels in the sun!

  To see men fall and die and not complain!
  To taste the savage taste of blood--to be so devilish!
  To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.

  O the whaleman's joys! O I cruise my old cruise again!
  I feel the ship's motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me,
  I hear the cry again sent down from the mast-head, There--she blows!
  Again I spring up the rigging to look with the rest--we descend,
      wild with excitement,
  I leap in the lower'd boat, we row toward our prey where he lies,
  We approach stealthy and silent, I see the mountainous mass,
      lethargic, basking,
  I see the harpooneer standing up, I see the weapon dart from his
      vigorous arm;
  O swift again far out in the ocean the wounded whale, settling,
      running to windward, tows me,
  Again I see him rise to breathe, we row close again,
  I see a lance driven through his side, press'd deep, turn'd in the wound,
  Again we back off, I see him settle again, the life is leaving him fast,
  As he rises he spouts blood, I see him swim in circles narrower and
      narrower, swiftly cutting the water--I see him die,
  He gives one convulsive leap in the centre of the circle, and then
      falls flat and still in the bloody foam.

  O the old manhood of me, my noblest joy of all!
  My children and grand-children, my white hair and beard,
  My largeness, calmness, majesty, out of the long stretch of my life.

  O ripen'd joy of womanhood! O happiness at last!
  I am more than eighty years of age, I am the most venerable mother,
  How clear is my mind--how all people draw nigh to me!
  What attractions are these beyond any before? what bloom more
      than the bloom of youth?
  What beauty is this that descends upon me and rises out of me?

  O the orator's joys!
  To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the
      ribs and throat,
  To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,
  To lead America--to quell America with a great tongue.

  O the joy of my soul leaning pois'd on itself, receiving identity through
      materials and loving them, observing characters and absorbing them,
  My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch,
      reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like,
  The real life of my senses and flesh transcending my senses and flesh,
  My body done with materials, my sight done with my material eyes,
  Proved to me this day beyond cavil that it is not my material eyes
      which finally see,
  Nor my material body which finally loves, walks, laughs, shouts,
      embraces, procreates.

  O the farmer's joys!
  Ohioan's, Illinoisian's, Wisconsinese', Kanadian's, Iowan's,
      Kansian's, Missourian's, Oregonese' joys!
  To rise at peep of day and pass forth nimbly to work,
  To plough land in the fall for winter-sown crops,
  To plough land in the spring for maize,
  To train orchards, to graft the trees, to gather apples in the fall.

  O to bathe in the swimming-bath, or in a good place along shore,
  To splash the water! to walk ankle-deep, or race naked along the shore.

  O to realize space!
  The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
  To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
      clouds, as one with them.

  O the joy a manly self-hood!
  To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,
  To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic,
  To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye,
  To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,
  To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.

  Knowist thou the excellent joys of youth?
  Joys of the dear companions and of the merry word and laughing face?
  Joy of the glad light-beaming day, joy of the wide-breath'd games?
  Joy of sweet music, joy of the lighted ball-room and the dancers?
  Joy of the plenteous dinner, strong carouse and drinking?

  Yet O my soul supreme!
  Knowist thou the joys of pensive thought?
  Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?
  Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow'd yet proud, the suffering
      and the struggle?
  The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day
      or night?
  Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space?
  Prophetic joys of better, loftier love's ideals, the divine wife,
      the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade?
  Joys all thine own undying one, joys worthy thee O soul.

  O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
  To meet life as a powerful conqueror,
  No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
  To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving
      my interior soul impregnable,
  And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

  For not life's joys alone I sing, repeating--the joy of death!
  The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments,
      for reasons,
  Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn'd, or render'd
      to powder, or buried,
  My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
  My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications,
      further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

  O to attract by more than attraction!
  How it is I know not--yet behold! the something which obeys none
      of the rest,
  It is offensive, never defensive--yet how magnetic it draws.

  O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
  To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!
  To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
  To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with
      perfect nonchalance!
  To be indeed a God!

  O to sail to sea in a ship!
  To leave this steady unendurable land,
  To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the
      houses,
  To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,
  To sail and sail and sail!

  O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
  To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
  To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
  A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)
  A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.




BOOK XII


Song of the Broad-Axe

       1
  Weapon shapely, naked, wan,
  Head from the mother's bowels drawn,
  Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,
  Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,
  Resting the grass amid and upon,
  To be lean'd and to lean on.

  Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades,
      sights and sounds.
  Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music,
  Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ.

       2
  Welcome are all earth's lands, each for its kind,
  Welcome are lands of pine and oak,
  Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,
  Welcome are lands of gold,
  Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the grape,
  Welcome are lands of sugar and rice,
  Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato and
      sweet potato,
  Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies,
  Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings,
  Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming soil of
      orchards, flax, honey, hemp;
  Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,
  Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,
  Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores,
  Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc,
  Lands of iron--lands of the make of the axe.

       3
  The log at the wood-pile, the axe supported by it,
  The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space clear'd for garden,
  The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is lull'd,
  The walling and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,
  The thought of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam ends,
      and the cutting away of masts,
  The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion'd houses and barns,
  The remember'd print or narrative, the voyage at a venture of men,
      families, goods,
  The disembarkation, the founding of a new city,
  The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it, the outset
      anywhere,
  The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa, Willamette,
  The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddle-bags;
  The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons,
  The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men with their clear untrimm'd faces,
  The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves,
  The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the boundless
      impatience of restraint,
  The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types, the
      solidification;
  The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard schooners and
      sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,
  Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods, stripes of
      snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,
  The glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song, the natural
      life of the woods, the strong day's work,
  The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the
      bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-skin;
  The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,
  The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,
  The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them
      regular,
  Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they
      were prepared,
  The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their
      curv'd limbs,
  Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on by
      posts and braces,
  The hook'd arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,
  The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail'd,
  Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,
  The echoes resounding through the vacant building:
  The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,
  The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully
      bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam,
  The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands rapidly
      laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear,
  The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the
      trowels striking the bricks,
  The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its place,
      and set with a knock of the trowel-handle,
  The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the
      steady replenishing by the hod-men;
  Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices,
  The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log shaping it toward
      the shape of a mast,
  The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
  The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,
  The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes,
  The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats,
      stays against the sea;
  The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the
      close-pack'd square,
  The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring,
  The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line,
      the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,
  The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets, the bringing to bear of the
      hooks and ladders and their execution,
  The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors
      if the fire smoulders under them,
  The crowd with their lit faces watching, the glare and dense shadows;
  The forger at his forge-furnace and the user of iron after him,
  The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and temperer,
  The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel and trying the
      edge with his thumb,
  The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in the socket;
  The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,
  The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,
  The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice,
  The Roman lictors preceding the consuls,
  The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,
  The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted head,
  The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and foe
      thither,
  The siege of revolted lieges determin'd for liberty,
  The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce
      and parley,
  The sack of an old city in its time,
  The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,
  Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,
  Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the
      gripe of brigands,
  Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despairing,
  The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,
  The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust,
  The power of personality just or unjust.

       4
  Muscle and pluck forever!
  What invigorates life invigorates death,
  And the dead advance as much as the living advance,
  And the future is no more uncertain than the present,
  For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the
      delicatesse of the earth and of man,
  And nothing endures but personal qualities.

  What do you think endures?
  Do you think a great city endures?
  Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the
      best built steamships?
  Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d'oeuvres of engineering,
      forts, armaments?

  Away! these are not to be cherish'd for themselves,
  They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,
  The show passes, all does well enough of course,
  All does very well till one flash of defiance.

  A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
  If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the
      whole world.

       5
  The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd
      wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,
  Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the
      anchor-lifters of the departing,
  Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops
      selling goods from the rest of the earth,
  Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where
      money is plentiest,
  Nor the place of the most numerous population.

  Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
  Where the city stands that is belov'd by these, and loves them in
      return and understands them,
  Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,
  Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,
  Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
  Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,
  Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of
      elected persons,
  Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of
      death pours its sweeping and unript waves,
  Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside
      authority,
  Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President,
      Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay,
  Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on
      themselves,
  Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,
  Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,
  Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,
  Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;
  Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,
  Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
  Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
  Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
  There the great city stands.

       6
  How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!
  How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a
      man's or woman's look!

  All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears;
  A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe,
  When he or she appears materials are overaw'd,
  The dispute on the soul stops,
  The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn'd back, or laid away.

  What is your money-making now? what can it do now?
  What is your respectability now?
  What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now?
  Where are your jibes of being now?
  Where are your cavils about the soul now?

       7
  A sterile landscape covers the ore, there is as good as the best for
      all the forbidding appearance,
  There is the mine, there are the miners,
  The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplish'd, the hammersmen
      are at hand with their tongs and hammers,
  What always served and always serves is at hand.

  Than this nothing has better served, it has served all,
  Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and long ere the Greek,
  Served in building the buildings that last longer than any,
  Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient Hindustanee,
  Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi, served those whose
      relics remain in Central America,
  Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn pillars and
      the druids,
  Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the
      snow-cover'd hills of Scandinavia,
  Served those who time out of mind made on the granite walls rough
      sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean waves,
  Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths, served the pastoral
      tribes and nomads,
  Served the long distant Kelt, served the hardy pirates of the Baltic,
  Served before any of those the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,
  Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure and the
      making of those for war,
  Served all great works on land and all great works on the sea,
  For the mediaeval ages and before the mediaeval ages,
  Served not the living only then as now, but served the dead.

       8
  I see the European headsman,
  He stands mask'd, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong naked arms,
  And leans on a ponderous axe.

  (Whom have you slaughter'd lately European headsman?
  Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?)

  I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs,
  I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,
  Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown'd ladies, impeach'd ministers, rejected kings,
  Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the rest.

  I see those who in any land have died for the good cause,
  The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run out,
  (Mind you O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never run out.)

  I see the blood wash'd entirely away from the axe,
  Both blade and helve are clean,
  They spirt no more the blood of European nobles, they clasp no more
      the necks of queens.

  I see the headsman withdraw and become useless,
  I see the scaffold untrodden and mouldy, I see no longer any axe upon it,

  I see the mighty and friendly emblem of the power of my own race,
      the newest, largest race.

       9
  (America! I do not vaunt my love for you,
  I have what I have.)

  The axe leaps!
  The solid forest gives fluid utterances,
  They tumble forth, they rise and form,
  Hut, tent, landing, survey,
  Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade,
  Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, lamb, lath, panel, gable,
  Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house, library,
  Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, turret, porch,
  Hoe, rake, pitchfork, pencil, wagon, staff, saw, jack-plane, mallet,
      wedge, rounce,
  Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor,
  Work-box, chest, string'd instrument, boat, frame, and what not,
  Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States,
  Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans or for the poor or sick,
  Manhattan steamboats and clippers taking the measure of all seas.

  The shapes arise!
  Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users and all that
      neighbors them,
  Cutters down of wood and haulers of it to the Penobscot or Kenebec,
  Dwellers in cabins among the Californian mountains or by the little
      lakes, or on the Columbia,
  Dwellers south on the banks of the Gila or Rio Grande, friendly
      gatherings, the characters and fun,
  Dwellers along the St. Lawrence, or north in Kanada, or down by the
      Yellowstone, dwellers on coasts and off coasts,
  Seal-fishers, whalers, arctic seamen breaking passages through the ice.

  The shapes arise!
  Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets,
  Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads,
  Shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches,
  Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows, lake and canal craft, river craft,
  Ship-yards and dry-docks along the Eastern and Western seas, and in
      many a bay and by-place,
  The live-oak kelsons, the pine planks, the spars, the
      hackmatack-roots for knees,
  The ships themselves on their ways, the tiers of scaffolds, the
      workmen busy outside and inside,
  The tools lying around, the great auger and little auger, the adze,
      bolt, line, square, gouge, and bead-plane.

       10
  The shapes arise!
  The shape measur'd, saw'd, jack'd, join'd, stain'd,
  The coffin-shape for the dead to lie within in his shroud,
  The shape got out in posts, in the bedstead posts, in the posts of
      the bride's bed,
  The shape of the little trough, the shape of the rockers beneath,
      the shape of the babe's cradle,
  The shape of the floor-planks, the floor-planks for dancers' feet,
  The shape of the planks of the family home, the home of the friendly
      parents and children,
  The shape of the roof of the home of the happy young man and
      woman, the roof over the well-married young man and woman,
  The roof over the supper joyously cook'd by the chaste wife, and joyously
      eaten by the chaste husband, content after his day's work.

  The shapes arise!
  The shape of the prisoner's place in the court-room, and of him or
      her seated in the place,
  The shape of the liquor-bar lean'd against by the young rum-drinker
      and the old rum-drinker,
  The shape of the shamed and angry stairs trod by sneaking foot- steps,
  The shape of the sly settee, and the adulterous unwholesome couple,
  The shape of the gambling-board with its devilish winnings and losings,
  The shape of the step-ladder for the convicted and sentenced
      murderer, the murderer with haggard face and pinion'd arms,
  The sheriff at hand with his deputies, the silent and white-lipp'd
      crowd, the dangling of the rope.

  The shapes arise!
  Shapes of doors giving many exits and entrances,
  The door passing the dissever'd friend flush'd and in haste,
  The door that admits good news and bad news,
  The door whence the son left home confident and puff'd up,
  The door he enter'd again from a long and scandalous absence,
      diseas'd, broken down, without innocence, without means.

       11
  Her shape arises,
  She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever,
  The gross and soil'd she moves among do not make her gross and soil'd,
  She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is conceal'd from her,
  She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor,
  She is the best belov'd, it is without exception, she has no reason
      to fear and she does not fear,
  Oaths, quarrels, hiccupp'd songs, smutty expressions, are idle to
      her as she passes,
  She is silent, she is possess'd of herself, they do not offend her,
  She receives them as the laws of Nature receive them, she is strong,
  She too is a law of Nature--there is no law stronger than she is.

       12
  The main shapes arise!
  Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries,
  Shapes ever projecting other shapes,
  Shapes of turbulent manly cities,
  Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
  Shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.




BOOK XIII


Song of the Exposition

       1
  (Ah little recks the laborer,
  How near his work is holding him to God,
  The loving Laborer through space and time.)

  After all not to create only, or found only,
  But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
  To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,
  To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,
  Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,
  To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,
  These also are the lessons of our New World;
  While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

  Long and long has the grass been growing,
  Long and long has the rain been falling,
  Long has the globe been rolling round.

       2
  Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
  Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
  That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and AEneas', Odysseus' wanderings,
  Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
  Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on jaffa's gate and on
      Mount Moriah,
  The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles,
      and Italian collections,
  For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain
      awaits, demands you.

       3
  Responsive to our summons,
  Or rather to her long-nurs'd inclination,
  Join'd with an irresistible, natural gravitation,
  She comes! I hear the rustling of her gown,
  I scent the odor of her breath's delicious fragrance,
  I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling,
  Upon this very scene.

  The dame of dames! can I believe then,
  Those ancient temples, sculptures classic, could none of them retain her?
  Nor shades of Virgil and Dante, nor myriad memories, poems, old
      associations, magnetize and hold on to her?
  But that she's left them all--and here?

  Yes, if you will allow me to say so,
  I, my friends, if you do not, can plainly see her,
  The same undying soul of earth's, activity's, beauty's, heroism's
      expression,
  Out from her evolutions hither come, ended the strata of her former themes,
  Hidden and cover'd by to-day's, foundation of to-day's,
  Ended, deceas'd through time, her voice by Castaly's fountain,
  Silent the broken-lipp'd Sphynx in Egypt, silent all those century-
      baffling tombs,
  Ended for aye the epics of Asia's, Europe's helmeted warriors, ended
      the primitive call of the muses,
  Calliope's call forever closed, Clio, Melpomene, Thalia dead,
  Ended the stately rhythmus of Una and Oriana, ended the quest of the
      holy Graal,
  Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind, extinct,
  The Crusaders' streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise,
  Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,
  Palmerin, ogre, departed, vanish'd the turrets that Usk from its
      waters reflected,
  Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and
      Galahad, all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation;
  Pass'd! pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world,
      now void, inanimate, phantom world,
  Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths,
  Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and
      courtly dames,
  Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on,
  Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page,
  And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme.

  I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious emigre, (having it
      is true in her day, although the same, changed, journey'd considerable,)
  Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for
      herself, striding through the confusion,
  By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay'd,
  Bluff'd not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
  Smiling and pleas'd with palpable intent to stay,
  She's here, install'd amid the kitchen ware!

       4
  But hold--don't I forget my manners?
  To introduce the stranger, (what else indeed do I live to chant
      for?) to thee Columbia;
  In liberty's name welcome immortal! clasp hands,
  And ever henceforth sisters dear be both.

  Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,
  I candidly confess a queer, queer race, of novel fashion,
  And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,
  Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearnings the same,
  The same old love, beauty and use the same.

       5
  We do not blame thee elder World, nor really separate ourselves from thee,
  (Would the son separate himself from the father?)
  Looking back on thee, seeing thee to thy duties, grandeurs, through
      past ages bending, building,
  We build to ours to-day.

  Mightier than Egypt's tombs,
  Fairer than Grecia's, Roma's temples,
  Prouder than Milan's statued, spired cathedral,
  More picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps,
  We plan even now to raise, beyond them all,
  Thy great cathedral sacred industry, no tomb,
  A keep for life for practical invention.

  As in a waking vision,
  E'en while I chant I see it rise, I scan and prophesy outside and in,
  Its manifold ensemble.

  Around a palace, loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet,
  Earth's modern wonder, history's seven outstripping,
  High rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades,
  Gladdening the sun and sky, enhued in cheerfulest hues,
  Bronze, lilac, robin's-egg, marine and crimson,
  Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner Freedom,
  The banners of the States and flags of every land,
  A brood of lofty, fair, but lesser palaces shall cluster.

  Somewhere within their walls shall all that forwards perfect human
      life be started,
  Tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited.

  Not only all the world of works, trade, products,
  But all the workmen of the world here to be represented.

  Here shall you trace in flowing operation,
  In every state of practical, busy movement, the rills of civilization,
  Materials here under your eye shall change their shape as if by magic,
  The cotton shall be pick'd almost in the very field,
  Shall be dried, clean'd, ginn'd, baled, spun into thread and cloth
      before you,
  You shall see hands at work at all the old processes and all the new ones,
  You shall see the various grains and how flour is made and then
      bread baked by the bakers,
  You shall see the crude ores of California and Nevada passing on and
      on till they become bullion,
  You shall watch how the printer sets type, and learn what a
      composing-stick is,
  You shall mark in amazement the Hoe press whirling its cylinders,
      shedding the printed leaves steady and fast,
  The photograph, model, watch, pin, nail, shall be created before you.

  In large calm halls, a stately museum shall teach you the infinite
      lessons of minerals,
  In another, woods, plants, vegetation shall be illustrated--in
      another animals, animal life and development.

  One stately house shall be the music house,
  Others for other arts--learning, the sciences, shall all be here,
  None shall be slighted, none but shall here be honor'd, help'd, exampled.

       6
  (This, this and these, America, shall be your pyramids and obelisks,
  Your Alexandrian Pharos, gardens of Babylon,
  Your temple at Olympia.)

  The male and female many laboring not,
  Shall ever here confront the laboring many,
  With precious benefits to both, glory to all,
  To thee America, and thee eternal Muse.

  And here shall ye inhabit powerful Matrons!
  In your vast state vaster than all the old,
  Echoed through long, long centuries to come,
  To sound of different, prouder songs, with stronger themes,
  Practical, peaceful life, the people's life, the People themselves,
  Lifted, illumin'd, bathed in peace--elate, secure in peace.

       7
  Away with themes of war! away with war itself!
  Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of
      blacken'd, mutilated corpses!
  That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for
      lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men,
  And in its stead speed industry's campaigns,
  With thy undaunted armies, engineering,
  Thy pennants labor, loosen'd to the breeze,
  Thy bugles sounding loud and clear.

  Away with old romance!
  Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts,
  Away with love-verses sugar'd in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers,
  Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide,
  The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few,
  With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers.

  To you ye reverent sane sisters,
  I raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for art,
  To exalt the present and the real,
  To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade,
  To sing in songs how exercise and chemical life are never to be baffled,
  To manual work for each and all, to plough, hoe, dig,
  To plant and tend the tree, the berry, vegetables, flowers,
  For every man to see to it that he really do something, for every woman too;
  To use the hammer and the saw, (rip, or cross-cut,)
  To cultivate a turn for carpentering, plastering, painting,
  To work as tailor, tailoress, nurse, hostler, porter,
  To invent a little, something ingenious, to aid the washing, cooking,
      cleaning,
  And hold it no disgrace to take a hand at them themselves.

  I say I bring thee Muse to-day and here,
  All occupations, duties broad and close,
  Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation,
  The old, old practical burdens, interests, joys,
  The family, parentage, childhood, husband and wife,
  The house-comforts, the house itself and all its belongings,
  Food and its preservation, chemistry applied to it,
  Whatever forms the average, strong, complete, sweet-blooded man or
      woman, the perfect longeve personality,
  And helps its present life to health and happiness, and shapes its soul,
  For the eternal real life to come.

  With latest connections, works, the inter-transportation of the world,
  Steam-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum,
  These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic's delicate cable,
  The Pacific railroad, the Suez canal, the Mont Cenis and Gothard and
      Hoosac tunnels, the Brooklyn bridge,
  This earth all spann'd with iron rails, with lines of steamships
      threading in every sea,
  Our own rondure, the current globe I bring.

       8
  And thou America,
  Thy offspring towering e'er so high, yet higher Thee above all towering,
  With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law;
  Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all,
  Thee, ever thee, I sing.

  Thou, also thou, a World,
  With all thy wide geographies, manifold, different, distant,
  Rounded by thee in one--one common orbic language,
  One common indivisible destiny for All.

  And by the spells which ye vouchsafe to those your ministers in earnest,
  I here personify and call my themes, to make them pass before ye.

  Behold, America! (and thou, ineffable guest and sister!)
  For thee come trooping up thy waters and thy lands;
  Behold! thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains,
  As in procession coming.

  Behold, the sea itself,
  And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships;
  See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the
      green and blue,
  See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port,
  See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke.

  Behold, in Oregon, far in the north and west,
  Or in Maine, far in the north and east, thy cheerful axemen,
  Wielding all day their axes.

  Behold, on the lakes, thy pilots at their wheels, thy oarsmen,
  How the ash writhes under those muscular arms!

  There by the furnace, and there by the anvil,
  Behold thy sturdy blacksmiths swinging their sledges,
  Overhand so steady, overhand they turn and fall with joyous clank,
  Like a tumult of laughter.

  Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents,
  Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising,
  See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.

  Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South,
  Thy wealthy daughter-states, Eastern and Western,
  The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas,
      and the rest,
  Thy limitless crops, grass, wheat, sugar, oil, corn, rice, hemp, hops,
  Thy barns all fill'd, the endless freight-train and the bulging store-house,
  The grapes that ripen on thy vines, the apples in thy orchards,
  Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes, thy coal, thy gold
      and silver,
  The inexhaustible iron in thy mines.

  All thine O sacred Union!
  Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines,
  City and State, North, South, item and aggregate,
  We dedicate, dread Mother, all to thee!

  Protectress absolute, thou! bulwark of all!
  For well we know that while thou givest each and all, (generous as God,)
  Without thee neither all nor each, nor land, home,
  Nor ship, nor mine, nor any here this day secure,
  Nor aught, nor any day secure.

       9
  And thou, the Emblem waving over all!
  Delicate beauty, a word to thee, (it may be salutary,)
  Remember thou hast not always been as here to-day so comfortably
      ensovereign'd,
  In other scenes than these have I observ'd thee flag,
  Not quite so trim and whole and freshly blooming in folds of
      stainless silk,
  But I have seen thee bunting, to tatters torn upon thy splinter'd staff,
  Or clutch'd to some young color-bearer's breast with desperate hands,
  Savagely struggled for, for life or death, fought over long,
  'Mid cannons' thunder-crash and many a curse and groan and yell, and
      rifle-volleys cracking sharp,
  And moving masses as wild demons surging, and lives as nothing risk'd,
  For thy mere remnant grimed with dirt and smoke and sopp'd in blood,
  For sake of that, my beauty, and that thou might'st dally as now
      secure up there,
  Many a good man have I seen go under.

  Now here and these and hence in peace, all thine O Flag!
  And here and hence for thee, O universal Muse! and thou for them!
  And here and hence O Union, all the work and workmen thine!
  None separate from thee--henceforth One only, we and thou,
  (For the blood of the children, what is it, only the blood maternal?
  And lives and works, what are they all at last, except the roads to
      faith and death?)

  While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for thee, dear Mother,
  We own it all and several to-day indissoluble in thee;
  Think not our chant, our show, merely for products gross or lucre--
      it is for thee, the soul in thee, electric, spiritual!
  Our farms, inventions, crops, we own in thee! cities and States in thee!
  Our freedom all in thee! our very lives in thee!




BOOK XIV


Song of the Redwood-Tree

       1
  A California song,
  A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air,
  A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing,
  A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
  Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.

  Farewell my brethren,
  Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,
  My time has ended, my term has come.

  Along the northern coast,
  Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,
  In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,
  With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
  With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
  Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood
      forest dense,
  I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting.

  The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not,
  The quick-ear'd teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,
  As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to
      join the refrain,
  But in my soul I plainly heard.

  Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
  Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high,
  Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,
  That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but
      the future.

  You untold life of me,
  And all you venerable and innocent joys,
  Perennial hardy life of me with joys 'mid rain and many a summer sun,
  And the white snows and night and the wild winds;
  O the great patient rugged joys, my soul's strong joys unreck'd by man,
  (For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,
  And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,)
  Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
  Our time, our term has come.

  Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,
  We who have grandly fill'd our time,
  With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight,
  We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
  And leave the field for them.

  For them predicted long,
  For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time,
  For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings.'
  In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks, Shasta, Nevadas,
  These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys, far Yosemite,
  To be in them absorb'd, assimilated.

  Then to a loftier strain,
  Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant,
  As if the heirs, the deities of the West,
  Joining with master-tongue bore part.

  Not wan from Asia's fetiches,
  Nor red from Europe's old dynastic slaughter-house,
  (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and
      scaffolds everywhere,
  But come from Nature's long and harmless throes, peacefully builded thence,
  These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore,
  To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new,
  You promis'd long, we pledge, we dedicate.

  You occult deep volitions,
  You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois'd on yourself,
      giving not taking law,
  You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and
      love and aught that comes from life and love,
  You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, age
      upon age working in death the same as life,)
  You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould
      the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space,
  You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal'd but ever alert,
  You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued, may-be
      unconscious of yourselves,
  Unswerv'd by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface;
  You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts,
      statutes, literatures,
  Here build your homes for good, establish here, these areas entire,
      lands of the Western shore,
  We pledge, we dedicate to you.

  For man of you, your characteristic race,
  Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature,
  Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck'd by wall or roof,
  Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently inure,
  Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others' formulas heed,)
  here fill his time,
  To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last,
  To disappear, to serve.

  Thus on the northern coast,
  In the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains, and the
      music of choppers' axes,
  The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan,
  Such words combined from the redwood-tree, as of voices ecstatic,
      ancient and rustling,
  The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing,
  All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving,
  From the Cascade range to the Wahsatch, or Idaho far, or Utah,
  To the deities of the modern henceforth yielding,
  The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity, the
      settlements, features all,
  In the Mendocino woods I caught.

       2
  The flashing and golden pageant of California,
  The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands,
  The long and varied stretch from Puget sound to Colorado south,
  Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air, valleys and mountain cliffs,
  The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow, the silent, cyclic chemistry,
  The slow and steady ages plodding, the unoccupied surface ripening,
      the rich ores forming beneath;
  At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,
  A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere,
  Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the
      whole world,
  To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises
      of the Pacific,
  Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers,
      the railroads, with many a thrifty farm, with machinery,
  And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.

       3
  But more in you than these, lands of the Western shore,
  (These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,)
  I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years,
      till now deferr'd,
  Promis'd to be fulfill'd, our common kind, the race.

  The new society at last, proportionate to Nature,
  In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial,
  In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air.

  Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared,
  I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
  Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of
      the past so grand,
  To build a grander future.




BOOK XV


A Song for Occupations

       1
  A song for occupations!
  In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find
      the developments,
  And find the eternal meanings.

  Workmen and Workwomen!
  Were all educations practical and ornamental well display'd out of
      me, what would it amount to?
  Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise statesman,
      what would it amount to?
  Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you?

  The learn'd, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual terms,
  A man like me and never the usual terms.

  Neither a servant nor a master I,
  I take no sooner a large price than a small price, I will have my
      own whoever enjoys me,
  I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.

  If you stand at work in a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in the
      same shop,
  If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as
      good as your brother or dearest friend,
  If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be
      personally as welcome,
  If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake,
  If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I
      cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds?
  If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the table,
  If you meet some stranger in the streets and love him or her, why
      I often meet strangers in the street and love them.

  Why what have you thought of yourself?
  Is it you then that thought yourself less?
  Is it you that thought the President greater than you?
  Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

  (Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk, or a thief,
  Or that you are diseas'd, or rheumatic, or a prostitute,
  Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar and never
      saw your name in print,
  Do you give in that you are any less immortal?)

       2
  Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard,
      untouchable and untouching,
  It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether
      you are alive or no,
  I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns.

  Grown, half-grown and babe, of this country and every country,
      in-doors and out-doors, one just as much as the other, I see,
  And all else behind or through them.

  The wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband,
  The daughter, and she is just as good as the son,
  The mother, and she is every bit as much as the father.

  Offspring of ignorant and poor, boys apprenticed to trades,
  Young fellows working on farms and old fellows working on farms,
  Sailor-men, merchant-men, coasters, immigrants,
  All these I see, but nigher and farther the same I see,
  None shall escape me and none shall wish to escape me.

  I bring what you much need yet always have,
  Not money, amours, dress, eating, erudition, but as good,
  I send no agent or medium, offer no representative of value, but
      offer the value itself.

  There is something that comes to one now and perpetually,
  It is not what is printed, preach'd, discussed, it eludes discussion
      and print,
  It is not to be put in a book, it is not in this book,
  It is for you whoever you are, it is no farther from you than your
      hearing and sight are from you,
  It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest, it is ever provoked by them.

  You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it,
  You may read the President's message and read nothing about it there,
  Nothing in the reports from the State department or Treasury
      department, or in the daily papers or weekly papers,
  Or in the census or revenue returns, prices current, or any accounts
      of stock.

       3
  The sun and stars that float in the open air,
  The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is
      something grand,
  I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,
  And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation or
      bon-mot or reconnoissance,
  And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us,
      and without luck must be a failure for us,
  And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

  The light and shade, the curious sense of body and identity, the
      greed that with perfect complaisance devours all things,
  The endless pride and outstretching of man, unspeakable joys and sorrows,
  The wonder every one sees in every one else he sees, and the wonders
      that fill each minute of time forever,
  What have you reckon'd them for, camerado?
  Have you reckon'd them for your trade or farm-work? or for the
      profits of your store?
  Or to achieve yourself a position? or to fill a gentleman's leisure,
      or a lady's leisure?

  Have you reckon'd that the landscape took substance and form that it
      might be painted in a picture?
  Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?
  Or the attraction of gravity, and the great laws and harmonious combinations
      and the fluids of the air, as subjects for the savans?
  Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?
  Or the stars to be put in constellations and named fancy names?
  Or that the growth of seeds is for agricultural tables, or
      agriculture itself?

  Old institutions, these arts, libraries, legends, collections, and
      the practice handed along in manufactures, will we rate them so high?
  Will we rate our cash and business high? I have no objection,
  I rate them as high as the highest--then a child born of a woman and
      man I rate beyond all rate.

  We thought our Union grand, and our Constitution grand,
  I do not say they are not grand and good, for they are,
  I am this day just as much in love with them as you,
  Then I am in love with You, and with all my fellows upon the earth.

  We consider bibles and religions divine--I do not say they are not divine,
  I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
  It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
  Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth,
      than they are shed out of you.

       4
  The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are,
  The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who
      are here for him,
  The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,
  The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,
  Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the
      going and coming of commerce and malls, are all for you.

  List close my scholars dear,
  Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,
  Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you,
  The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
      reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,
  If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?
  The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would
      be vacuums.

  All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
  (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
      the arches and cornices?)

  All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,
  It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the
      beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his
      sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the
      women's chorus,
  It is nearer and farther than they.

       5
  Will the whole come back then?
  Can each see signs of the best by a look in the looking-glass? is
      there nothing greater or more?
  Does all sit there with you, with the mystic unseen soul?

  Strange and hard that paradox true I give,
  Objects gross and the unseen soul are one.

  House-building, measuring, sawing the boards,
  Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing,
      shingle-dressing,
  Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of sidewalks by flaggers,
  The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brickkiln,
  Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness,
      echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts
      looking through smutch'd faces,
  Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains or by river-banks, men
      around feeling the melt with huge crowbars, lumps of ore, the
      due combining of ore, limestone, coal,
  The blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the
      bottom of the melt at last, the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars
      of pig-iron, the strong clean-shaped Trail for railroads,
  Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house,
      steam-saws, the great mills and factories,
  Stone-cutting, shapely trimmings for facades or window or door-lintels,
      the mallet, the tooth-chisel, the jib to protect the thumb,
  The calking-iron, the kettle of boiling vault-cement, and the fire
      under the kettle,
  The cotton-bale, the stevedore's hook, the saw and buck of the
      sawyer, the mould of the moulder, the working-knife of the
      butcher, the ice-saw, and all the work with ice,
  The work and tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker,
  Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colors, brushes, brush-making,
      glazier's implements,
  The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner's ornaments, the decanter
      and glasses, the shears and flat-iron,
  The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the
      counter and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal, the making
      of all sorts of edged tools,
  The brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, every thing that is done
      by brewers, wine-makers, vinegar-makers,
  Leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope-twisting,
      distilling, sign-painting, lime-burning, cotton-picking,
      electroplating, electrotyping, stereotyping,
  Stave-machines, planing-machines, reaping-machines,
      ploughing-machines, thrashing-machines, steam wagons,
  The cart of the carman, the omnibus, the ponderous dray,
  Pyrotechny, letting off color'd fireworks at night, fancy figures and jets;
  Beef on the butcher's stall, the slaughter-house of the butcher, the
      butcher in his killing-clothes,
  The pens of live pork, the killing-hammer, the hog-hook, the
      scalder's tub, gutting, the cutter's cleaver, the packer's maul,
      and the plenteous winterwork of pork-packing,
  Flour-works, grinding of wheat, rye, maize, rice, the barrels and
      the half and quarter barrels, the loaded barges, the high piles
      on wharves and levees,
  The men and the work of the men on ferries, railroads, coasters,
      fish-boats, canals;
  The hourly routine of your own or any man's life, the shop, yard,
      store, or factory,
  These shows all near you by day and night--workman! whoever you
      are, your daily life!

  In that and them the heft of the heaviest--in that and them far more
      than you estimated, (and far less also,)
  In them realities for you and me, in them poems for you and me,
  In them, not yourself-you and your soul enclose all things,
      regardless of estimation,
  In them the development good--in them all themes, hints, possibilities.

  I do not affirm that what you see beyond is futile, I do not advise
      you to stop,
  I do not say leadings you thought great are not great,
  But I say that none lead to greater than these lead to.

       6
  Will you seek afar off? you surely come back at last,
  In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the best,
  In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
  Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for
      another hour but this hour,
  Man in the first you see or touch, always in friend, brother,
      nighest neighbor--woman in mother, sister, wife,
  The popular tastes and employments taking precedence in poems or anywhere,
  You workwomen and workmen of these States having your own divine
      and strong life,
  And all else giving place to men and women like you.
  When the psalm sings instead of the singer,

  When the script preaches instead of the preacher,
  When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that carved
      the supporting desk,
  When I can touch the body of books by night or by day, and when they
      touch my body back again,
  When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and child
      convince,
  When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman's daughter,
  When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly
      companions,
  I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do
      of men and women like you.




BOOK XVI


A Song of the Rolling Earth

       1
  A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
  Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
      those curves, angles, dots?
  No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
      and sea,
  They are in the air, they are in you.

  Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds
      out of your friends' mouths?
  No, the real words are more delicious than they.

  Human bodies are words, myriads of words,
  (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's,
      well-shaped, natural, gay,
  Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)

  Air, soil, water, fire--those are words,
  I myself am a word with them--my qualities interpenetrate with
      theirs--my name is nothing to them,
  Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would
      air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?

  A healthy presence, a friendly or commanding gesture, are words,
      sayings, meanings,
  The charms that go with the mere looks of some men and women,
      are sayings and meanings also.

  The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,
  The masters know the earth's words and use them more than audible words.

  Amelioration is one of the earth's words,
  The earth neither lags nor hastens,
  It has all attributes, growths, effects, latent in itself from the jump,
  It is not half beautiful only, defects and excrescences show just as
      much as perfections show.

  The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
  The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal'd either,
  They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
  They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly,
  Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter and utter,
  I speak not, yet if you hear me not of what avail am I to you?
  To bear, to better, lacking these of what avail am I?

  (Accouche! accouchez!
  Will you rot your own fruit in yourself there?
  Will you squat and stifle there?)

  The earth does not argue,
  Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
  Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
  Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
  Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
  Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

  The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself,
      possesses still underneath,
  Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the
      wail of slaves,
  Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young
      people, accents of bargainers,
  Underneath these possessing words that never fall.

  To her children the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail,
  The true words do not fail, for motion does not fail and reflection
      does not fall,
  Also the day and night do not fall, and the voyage we pursue does not fall.

  Of the interminable sisters,
  Of the ceaseless cotillons of sisters,
  Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters,
  The beautiful sister we know dances on with the rest.

  With her ample back towards every beholder,
  With the fascinations of youth and the equal fascinations of age,
  Sits she whom I too love like the rest, sits undisturb'd,
  Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her
      eyes glance back from it,
  Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none,
  Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face.

  Seen at hand or seen at a distance,
  Duly the twenty-four appear in public every day,
  Duly approach and pass with their companions or a companion,
  Looking from no countenances of their own, but from the countenances
      of those who are with them,
  From the countenances of children or women or the manly countenance,
  From the open countenances of animals or from inanimate things,
  From the landscape or waters or from the exquisite apparition of the sky,
  From our countenances, mine and yours, faithfully returning them,
  Every day in public appearing without fall, but never twice with the
      same companions.

  Embracing man, embracing all, proceed the three hundred and
      sixty-five resistlessly round the sun;
  Embracing all, soothing, supporting, follow close three hundred and
      sixty-five offsets of the first, sure and necessary as they.

  Tumbling on steadily, nothing dreading,
  Sunshine, storm, cold, heat, forever withstanding, passing, carrying,
  The soul's realization and determination still inheriting,
  The fluid vacuum around and ahead still entering and dividing,
  No balk retarding, no anchor anchoring, on no rock striking,
  Swift, glad, content, unbereav'd, nothing losing,
  Of all able and ready at any time to give strict account,
  The divine ship sails the divine sea.

       2
  Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,
  The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.

  Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid,
  You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
  For none more than you are the present and the past,
  For none more than you is immortality.

  Each man to himself and each woman to herself, is the word of the
      past and present, and the true word of immortality;
  No one can acquire for another--not one,
  Not one can grow for another--not one.

  The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
  The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
  The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
  The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
  The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
  The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail,
  The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress
      not to the audience,
  And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or
      the indication of his own.

       3
  I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall
      be complete,
  The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains
      jagged and broken.

  I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
      of the earth,
  There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the
      theory of the earth,
  No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
      unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
  Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of
      the earth.

  I swear I begin to see love with sweeter spasms than that which
      responds love,
  It is that which contains itself, which never invites and never refuses.

  I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
  All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,
  Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth,
  Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch.

  I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,
  It is always to leave the best untold.

  When I undertake to tell the best I find I cannot,
  My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots,
  My breath will not be obedient to its organs,
  I become a dumb man.

  The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best,
  It is not what you anticipated, it is cheaper, easier, nearer,
  Things are not dismiss'd from the places they held before,
  The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before,
  Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as before,
  But the soul is also real, it too is positive and direct,
  No reasoning, no proof has establish'd it,
  Undeniable growth has establish'd it.

       4
  These to echo the tones of souls and the phrases of souls,
  (If they did not echo the phrases of souls what were they then?
  If they had not reference to you in especial what were they then?)

  I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells
      the best,
  I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.

  Say on, sayers! sing on, singers!
  Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
  Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,
  It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use,
  When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.

  I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall,
  I swear to you they will understand you and justify you,
  The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses
      all and is faithful to all,
  He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you
      are not an iota less than they,
  You shall be fully glorified in them.




Youth, Day, Old Age and Night

  Youth, large, lusty, loving--youth full of grace, force, fascination,
  Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
      force, fascination?

  Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action,
      ambition, laughter,
  The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
      restoring darkness.




BOOK XVII.  BIRDS OF PASSAGE


Song of the Universal

       1
  Come said the Muse,
  Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
  Sing me the universal.

  In this broad earth of ours,
  Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
  Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
  Nestles the seed perfection.

  By every life a share or more or less,
  None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the seed is waiting.

       2
  Lo! keen-eyed towering science,
  As from tall peaks the modern overlooking,
  Successive absolute fiats issuing.

  Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science,
  For it has history gather'd like husks around the globe,
  For it the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.

  In spiral routes by long detours,
  (As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
  For it the partial to the permanent flowing,
  For it the real to the ideal tends.

  For it the mystic evolution,
  Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified.

  Forth from their masks, no matter what,
  From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears,
  Health to emerge and joy, joy universal.

  Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
  Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men and states,
  Electric, antiseptic yet, cleaving, suffusing all,
  Only the good is universal.

       3
  Over the mountain-growths disease and sorrow,
  An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,
  High in the purer, happier air.

  From imperfection's murkiest cloud,
  Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
  One flash of heaven's glory.

  To fashion's, custom's discord,
  To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies,
  Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard,
  From some far shore the final chorus sounding.

  O the blest eyes, the happy hearts,
  That see, that know the guiding thread so fine,
  Along the mighty labyrinth.

       4
  And thou America,
  For the scheme's culmination, its thought and its reality,
  For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived.

  Thou too surroundest all,
  Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad and new,
  To the ideal tendest.

  The measure'd faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past,
  Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own,
  Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,
  All eligible to all.

  All, all for immortality,
  Love like the light silently wrapping all,
  Nature's amelioration blessing all,
  The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain,
  Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.

  Give me O God to sing that thought,
  Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
  In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,
  Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space,
  Health, peace, salvation universal.

  Is it a dream?
  Nay but the lack of it the dream,
  And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream,
  And all the world a dream.




Pioneers! O Pioneers!

       Come my tan-faced children,
  Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
  Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       For we cannot tarry here,
  We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
  We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       O you youths, Western youths,
  So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
  Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Have the elder races halted?
  Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
  We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       All the past we leave behind,
  We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
  Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       We detachments steady throwing,
  Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
  Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       We primeval forests felling,
  We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
  We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Colorado men are we,
  From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
  From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
  Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
       blood intervein'd,
  All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       O resistless restless race!
  O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
  O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Raise the mighty mother mistress,
  Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
       (bend your heads all,)
  Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       See my children, resolute children,
  By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
  Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       On and on the compact ranks,
  With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
  Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       O to die advancing on!
  Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
  Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       All the pulses of the world,
  Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
  Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
  All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
  All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      All the hapless silent lovers,
  All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
  All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      I too with my soul and body,
  We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
  Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      Lo, the darting bowling orb!
  Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
  All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      These are of us, they are with us,
  All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
  We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

  O you daughters of the West!
  O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
  Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Minstrels latent on the prairies!
  (Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
  Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Not for delectations sweet,
  Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
  Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
  Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?
  Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Has the night descended?
  Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
       on our way?
  Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Till with sound of trumpet,
  Far, far off the daybreak call--hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
  Swift! to the head of the army!--swift! spring to your places,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!




To You

  Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
  I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
  Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,
      troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
  Your true soul and body appear before me.
  They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work,
      farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking,
      suffering, dying.

  Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
  I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
  I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

  O I have been dilatory and dumb,
  I should have made my way straight to you long ago,
  I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing
      but you.

  I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
  None has understood you, but I understand you,
  None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,
  None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
  None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent
      to subordinate you,
  I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God,
      beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

  Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,
  From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color'd light,
  But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus
      of gold-color'd light,
  From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams,
      effulgently flowing forever.

  O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
  You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself
      all your life,
  Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,
  What you have done returns already in mockeries,
  (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in
      mockeries, what is their return?)

  The mockeries are not you,
  Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,
  I pursue you where none else has pursued you,
  Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the
      accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or from
      yourself, they do not conceal you from me,
  The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these
      balk others they do not balk me,
  The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed,
      premature death, all these I part aside.

  There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,
  There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you,
  No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,
  No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

  As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully
      to you,
  I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing
      the songs of the glory of you.

  Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
  These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,
  These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense
      and interminable as they,
  These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent
      dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
  Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain,
      passion, dissolution.

  The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,
  Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest,
      whatever you are promulges itself,
  Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing
      is scanted,
  Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are
      picks its way.




France [the 18th Year of these States

  A great year and place
  A harsh discordant natal scream out-sounding, to touch the mother's
      heart closer than any yet.

  I walk'd the shores of my Eastern sea,
  Heard over the waves the little voice,
  Saw the divine infant where she woke mournfully wailing, amid the
      roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of falling buildings,
  Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running, nor from the single
      corpses, nor those in heaps, nor those borne away in the tumbrils,
  Was not so desperate at the battues of death--was not so shock'd at
      the repeated fusillades of the guns.

  Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?
  Could I wish humanity different?
  Could I wish the people made of wood and stone?
  Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?

  O Liberty! O mate for me!
  Here too the blaze, the grape-shot and the axe, in reserve, to fetch
      them out in case of need,
  Here too, though long represt, can never be destroy'd,
  Here too could rise at last murdering and ecstatic,
  Here too demanding full arrears of vengeance.

  Hence I sign this salute over the sea,
  And I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism,
  But remember the little voice that I heard wailing, and wait with
      perfect trust, no matter how long,
  And from to-day sad and cogent I maintain the bequeath'd cause, as
      for all lands,
  And I send these words to Paris with my love,
  And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them,
  For I guess there is latent music yet in France, floods of it,
  O I hear already the bustle of instruments, they will soon be
      drowning all that would interrupt them,
  O I think the east wind brings a triumphal and free march,
  It reaches hither, it swells me to Joyful madness,
  I will run transpose it in words, to justify
  I will yet sing a song for you ma femme.




Myself and Mine

  Myself and mine gymnastic ever,
  To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a
      boat, to manage horses, to beget superb children,
  To speak readily and clearly, to feel at home among common people,
  And to hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea.

  Not for an embroiderer,
  (There will always be plenty of embroiderers, I welcome them also,)
  But for the fibre of things and for inherent men and women.

  Not to chisel ornaments,
  But to chisel with free stroke the heads and limbs of plenteous
      supreme Gods, that the States may realize them walking and talking.

  Let me have my own way,
  Let others promulge the laws, I will make no account of the laws,
  Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace, I hold up agitation
      and conflict,
  I praise no eminent man, I rebuke to his face the one that was
      thought most worthy.

  (Who are you? and what are you secretly guilty of all your life?
  Will you turn aside all your life? will you grub and chatter all
      your life?
  And who are you, blabbing by rote, years, pages, languages, reminiscences,
  Unwitting to-day that you do not know how to speak properly a single word?)

  Let others finish specimens, I never finish specimens,
  I start them by exhaustless laws as Nature does, fresh and modern
      continually.

  I give nothing as duties,
  What others give as duties I give as living impulses,
  (Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)

  Let others dispose of questions, I dispose of nothing, I arouse
      unanswerable questions,
  Who are they I see and touch, and what about them?
  What about these likes of myself that draw me so close by tender
      directions and indirections?

  I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but
      listen to my enemies, as I myself do,
  I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot
      expound myself,
  I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,
  I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.

  After me, vista!
  O I see life is not short, but immeasurably long,
  I henceforth tread the world chaste, temperate, an early riser, a
      steady grower,
  Every hour the semen of centuries, and still of centuries.

  I must follow up these continual lessons of the air, water, earth,
  I perceive I have no time to lose.




Year of Meteors [1859-60

  Year of meteors! brooding year!
  I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs,
  I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad,
  I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the
      scaffold in Virginia,
  (I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch'd,
  I stood very near you old man when cool and indifferent, but trembling
      with age and your unheal'd wounds you mounted the scaffold;)
  I would sing in my copious song your census returns of the States,
  The tables of population and products, I would sing of your ships
      and their cargoes,
  The proud black ships of Manhattan arriving, some fill'd with
      immigrants, some from the isthmus with cargoes of gold,
  Songs thereof would I sing, to all that hitherward comes would welcome give,
  And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, young
      prince of England!
  (Remember you surging Manhattan's crowds as you pass'd with your
      cortege of nobles?
  There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;)
  Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,
  Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was
      600 feet long,
  Her moving swiftly surrounded by myriads of small craft I forget not
      to sing;
  Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven,
  Nor the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting
      over our heads,
  (A moment, a moment long it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over
      our heads,
  Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
  Of such, and fitful as they, I sing--with gleams from them would
      gleam and patch these chants,
  Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good--year of forebodings!
  Year of comets and meteors transient and strange--lo! even here one
      equally transient and strange!
  As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant,
  What am I myself but one of your meteors?




With Antecedents

       1
  With antecedents,
  With my fathers and mothers and the accumulations of past ages,
  With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am,
  With Egypt, India, Phenicia, Greece and Rome,
  With the Kelt, the Scandinavian, the Alb and the Saxon,
  With antique maritime ventures, laws, artisanship, wars and journeys,
  With the poet, the skald, the saga, the myth, and the oracle,
  With the sale of slaves, with enthusiasts, with the troubadour, the
      crusader, and the monk,
  With those old continents whence we have come to this new continent,
  With the fading kingdoms and kings over there,
  With the fading religions and priests,
  With the small shores we look back to from our own large and present shores,
  With countless years drawing themselves onward and arrived at these years,
  You and me arrived--America arrived and making this year,
  This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come.

       2
  O but it is not the years--it is I, it is You,
  We touch all laws and tally all antecedents,
  We are the skald, the oracle, the monk and the knight, we easily
      include them and more,
  We stand amid time beginningless and endless, we stand amid evil and good,
  All swings around us, there is as much darkness as light,
  The very sun swings itself and its system of planets around us,
  Its sun, and its again, all swing around us.

  As for me, (torn, stormy, amid these vehement days,)
  I have the idea of all, and am all and believe in all,
  I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true, I reject no part.

  (Have I forgotten any part? any thing in the past?
  Come to me whoever and whatever, till I give you recognition.)

  I respect Assyria, China, Teutonia, and the Hebrews,
  I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demigod,
  I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without
      exception,
  I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
  And that they could no-how have been better than they were,
  And that to-day is what it must be, and that America is,
  And that to-day and America could no-how be better than they are.

       3
  In the name of these States and in your and my name, the Past,
  And in the name of these States and in your and my name, the Present time.

  I know that the past was great and the future will be great,
  And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,
  (For the sake of him I typify, for the common average man's sake,
      your sake if you are he,)
  And that where I am or you are this present day, there is the centre
      of all days, all races,
  And there is the meaning to us of all that has ever come of races
      and days, or ever will come.




BOOK XVIII


A Broadway Pageant

       1
  Over the Western sea hither from Niphon come,
  Courteous, the swart-cheek'd two-sworded envoys,
  Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive,
  Ride to-day through Manhattan.

  Libertad! I do not know whether others behold what I behold,
  In the procession along with the nobles of Niphon, the errand-bearers,
  Bringing up the rear, hovering above, around, or in the ranks marching,
  But I will sing you a song of what I behold Libertad.

  When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements,
  When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the proud roar love,
  When the round-mouth'd guns out of the smoke and smell I love
      spit their salutes,
  When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me, and
      heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin haze,
  When gorgeous the countless straight stems, the forests at the
      wharves, thicken with colors,
  When every ship richly drest carries her flag at the peak,
  When pennants trail and street-festoons hang from the windows,
  When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and
      foot-standers, when the mass is densest,
  When the facades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes
      gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time,
  When the guests from the islands advance, when the pageant moves
      forward visible,
  When the summons is made, when the answer that waited thousands
      of years answers,
  I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the
      crowd, and gaze with them.

       2
  Superb-faced Manhattan!
  Comrade Americanos! to us, then at last the Orient comes.
  To us, my city,
  Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite
      sides, to walk in the space between,
  To-day our Antipodes comes.

  The Originatress comes,
  The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of eld,
  Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with passion,
  Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
  With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering eyes,
  The race of Brahma comes.

  See my cantabile! these and more are flashing to us from the procession,
  As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine it moves changing before us.


  For not the envoys nor the tann'd Japanee from his island only,
  Lithe and silent the Hindoo appears, the Asiatic continent itself
      appears, the past, the dead,
  The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable,
  The envelop'd mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,
  The north, the sweltering south, eastern Assyria, the Hebrews, the
      ancient of ancients,
  Vast desolated cities, the gliding present, all of these and more
      are in the pageant-procession.

  Geography, the world, is in it,
  The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond,
  The coast you henceforth are facing--you Libertad! from your Western
      golden shores,
  The countries there with their populations, the millions en-masse
      are curiously here,
  The swarming market-places, the temples with idols ranged along the
      sides or at the end, bonze, brahmin, and llama,
  Mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman,
  The singing-girl and the dancing-girl, the ecstatic persons, the
      secluded emperors,
  Confucius himself, the great poets and heroes, the warriors, the castes,
      all,
  Trooping up, crowding from all directions, from the Altay mountains,
  From Thibet, from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China,
  From the southern peninsulas and the demi-continental islands, from
      Malaysia,
  These and whatever belongs to them palpable show forth to me, and
      are seiz'd by me,
  And I am seiz'd by them, and friendlily held by them,
  Till as here them all I chant, Libertad! for themselves and for you.

  For I too raising my voice join the ranks of this pageant,
  I am the chanter, I chant aloud over the pageant,
  I chant the world on my Western sea,
  I chant copious the islands beyond, thick as stars in the sky,
  I chant the new empire grander than any before, as in a vision it
      comes to me,
  I chant America the mistress, I chant a greater supremacy,
  I chant projected a thousand blooming cities yet in time on those
      groups of sea-islands,
  My sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archipelagoes,
  My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind,
  Commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work, races
      reborn, refresh'd,
  Lives, works resumed--the object I know not--but the old, the Asiatic
      renew'd as it must be,
  Commencing from this day surrounded by the world.

       3
  And you Libertad of the world!
  You shall sit in the middle well-pois'd thousands and thousands of years,
  As to-day from one side the nobles of Asia come to you,
  As to-morrow from the other side the queen of England sends her
      eldest son to you.

  The sign is reversing, the orb is enclosed,
  The ring is circled, the journey is done,
  The box-lid is but perceptibly open'd, nevertheless the perfume
      pours copiously out of the whole box.

  Young Libertad! with the venerable Asia, the all-mother,
  Be considerate with her now and ever hot Libertad, for you are all,
  Bend your proud neck to the long-off mother now sending messages
      over the archipelagoes to you,
  Bend your proud neck low for once, young Libertad.

  Here the children straying westward so long? so wide the tramping?
  Were the precedent dim ages debouching westward from Paradise so long?
  Were the centuries steadily footing it that way, all the while
      unknown, for you, for reasons?

  They are justified, they are accomplish'd, they shall now be turn'd
      the other way also, to travel toward you thence,
  They shall now also march obediently eastward for your sake Libertad.




BOOK XIX.  SEA-DRIFT


Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

  Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
  Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
  Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
  Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
      leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
  Down from the shower'd halo,
  Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they
      were alive,
  Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
  From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
  From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
  From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
  From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
  From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
  From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
  From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
  From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
  As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
  Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
  A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
  Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
  I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
  Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
  A reminiscence sing.

  Once Paumanok,
  When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
  Up this seashore in some briers,
  Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,
  And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
  And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
  And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
  And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
  them,
  Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

  Shine! shine! shine!
  Pour down your warmth, great sun.'
  While we bask, we two together.

  Two together!
  Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
  Day come white, or night come black,
  Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
  Singing all time, minding no time,
  While we two keep together.

  Till of a sudden,
  May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate,
  One forenoon the she-bird crouch'd not on the nest,
  Nor return'd that afternoon, nor the next,
  Nor ever appear'd again.

  And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
  And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
  Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
  Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
  I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
  The solitary guest from Alabama.

  Blow! blow! blow!
  Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore;
  I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

  Yes, when the stars glisten'd,
  All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake,
  Down almost amid the slapping waves,
  Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

  He call'd on his mate,
  He pour'd forth the meanings which I of all men know.

  Yes my brother I know,
  The rest might not, but I have treasur'd every note,
  For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
  Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
  Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights
      after their sorts,
  The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
  I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
  Listen'd long and long.

  Listen'd to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
  Following you my brother.

  Soothe! soothe! soothe!
  Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
  And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
  But my love soothes not me, not me.

  Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
  It is lagging--O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

  O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
  With love, with love.

  O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?
  What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

  Loud! loud! loud!
  Loud I call to you, my love!
  High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
  Surely you must know who is here, is here,
  You must know who I am, my love.

  Low-hanging moon!
  What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
  O it is the shape, the shape of my mate.'
  O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

  Land! land! O land!
  Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again
      if you only would,
  For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

  O rising stars!
  Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

  O throat! O trembling throat!
  Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
  Pierce the woods, the earth,
  Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

  Shake out carols!
  Solitary here, the night's carols!
  Carols of lonesome love! death's carols!
  Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
  O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!
  O reckless despairing carols.

  But soft! sink low!
  Soft! let me just murmur,
  And do you wait a moment you husky-nois'd sea,
  For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
  So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,
  But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

  Hither my love!
  Here I am! here!
  With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you,
  This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

  Do not be decoy'd elsewhere,
  That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,
  That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,
  Those are the shadows of leaves.

  O darkness! O in vain!
  O I am very sick and sorrowful

  O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
  O troubled reflection in the sea!
  O throat! O throbbing heart!
  And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

  O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
  In the air, in the woods, over fields,
  Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
  But my mate no more, no more with me!
  We two together no more.

  The aria sinking,
  All else continuing, the stars shining,
  The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
  With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
  On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling,
  The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of
      the sea almost touching,
  The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the
      atmosphere dallying,
  The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously
      bursting,
  The aria's meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
  The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
  The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
  The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
  To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret hissing,
  To the outsetting bard.

  Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
  Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
  For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you,
  Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
  And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
      and more sorrowful than yours,
  A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

  O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
  O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
  Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
  Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
  Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
      there in the night,
  By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
  The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
  The unknown want, the destiny of me.

  O give me the clue! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
  O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

  A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
  The word final, superior to all,
  Subtle, sent up--what is it?--I listen;
  Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
  Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

  Whereto answering, the sea,
  Delaying not, hurrying not,
  Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
  Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
  And again death, death, death, death
  Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
  But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
  Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
  Death, death, death, death, death.

  Which I do not forget.
  But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
  That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray beach,
  With the thousand responsive songs at random,
  My own songs awaked from that hour,
  And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
  The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
  That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
  (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
      garments, bending aside,)
  The sea whisper'd me.




As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life

       1
  As I ebb'd with the ocean of life,
  As I wended the shores I know,
  As I walk'd where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,
  Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,
  Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
  I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
  Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,
  Was seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
  The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land
      of the globe.

  Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those
      slender windrows,
  Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
  Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
  Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
  Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,
  These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,
  As I wended the shores I know,
  As I walk'd with that electric self seeking types.

       2
  As I wend to the shores I know not,
  As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
  As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
  As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
  I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
  A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
  Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

  O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
  Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
  Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have
      not once had the least idea who or what I am,
  But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
      untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
  Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
  With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
  Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

  I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
      object, and that no man ever can,
  Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon
      me and sting me,
  Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

       3
  You oceans both, I close with you,
  We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,
  These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.

  You friable shore with trails of debris,
  You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,
  What is yours is mine my father.

  I too Paumanok,
  I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been
      wash'd on your shores,
  I too am but a trail of drift and debris,
  I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.

  I throw myself upon your breast my father,
  I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,
  I hold you so firm till you answer me something.

  Kiss me my father,
  Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,
  Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.

       4
  Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)
  Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,
  Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,
  Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or
      gather from you.

  I mean tenderly by you and all,
  I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead,
      and following me and mine.

  Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
  Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
  (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
  See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
  Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
  Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
  From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
  Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
  Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
  A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating,
      drifted at random,
  Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
  Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
  We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
  You up there walking or sitting,
  Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.




Tears

  Tears! tears! tears!
  In the night, in solitude, tears,
  On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand,
  Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
  Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
  O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
  What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand?
  Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
  O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!
  O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and desperate!
  O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and
      regulated pace,
  But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the unloosen'd ocean,
  Of tears! tears! tears!




To the Man-of-War-Bird

  Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
  Waking renew'd on thy prodigious pinions,
  (Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended'st,
  And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)
  Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating,
  As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee,
  (Myself a speck, a point on the world's floating vast.)

  Far, far at sea,
  After the night's fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks,
  With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene,
  The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun,
  The limpid spread of air cerulean,
  Thou also re-appearest.

  Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)
  To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,
  Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,
  Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
  At dusk that lookist on Senegal, at morn America,
  That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
  In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
  What joys! what joys were thine!




Aboard at a Ship's Helm

  Aboard at a ship's helm,
  A young steersman steering with care.

  Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
  An ocean-bell--O a warning bell, rock'd by the waves.

  O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
  Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

  For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
  The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,
  The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds
      away gayly and safe.

  But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
  Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.




On the Beach at Night

  On the beach at night,
  Stands a child with her father,
  Watching the east, the autumn sky.

  Up through the darkness,
  While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
  Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
  Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
  Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
  And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
  Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

  From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
  Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
  Watching, silently weeps.

  Weep not, child,
  Weep not, my darling,
  With these kisses let me remove your tears,
  The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
  They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in
      apparition,
  Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the
      Pleiades shall emerge,
  They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall
      shine out again,
  The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
  The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall
      again shine.

  Then dearest child mournest thou only for jupiter?
  Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

  Something there is,
  (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
  I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
  Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
  (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
  Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
  Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
  Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.




The World below the Brine

  The world below the brine,
  Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
  Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick
      tangle openings, and pink turf,
  Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the
      play of light through the water,
  Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes,
      and the aliment of the swimmers,
  Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling
      close to the bottom,
  The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting
      with his flukes,
  The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy
      sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
  Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,
      breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
  The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed
      by beings like us who walk this sphere,
  The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.




On the Beach at Night Alone

  On the beach at night alone,
  As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
  As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef
      of the universes and of the future.

  A vast similitude interlocks all,
  All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
  All distances of place however wide,
  All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
  All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in
      different worlds,
  All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
  All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
  All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
  All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
  This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,
  And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.




Song for All Seas, All Ships

       1
  To-day a rude brief recitative,
  Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,
  Of unnamed heroes in the ships--of waves spreading and spreading
      far as the eye can reach,
  Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,
  And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations,
  Fitful, like a surge.

  Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid sailors,
  Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate can never surprise nor
      death dismay.
  Pick'd sparingly without noise by thee old ocean, chosen by thee,
  Thou sea that pickest and cullest the race in time, and unitest nations,
  Suckled by thee, old husky nurse, embodying thee,
  Indomitable, untamed as thee.

  (Ever the heroes on water or on land, by ones or twos appearing,
  Ever the stock preserv'd and never lost, though rare, enough for
      seed preserv'd.)

       2
  Flaunt out O sea your separate flags of nations!
  Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals!
  But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of man
      one flag above all the rest,
  A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death,
  Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates,
  And all that went down doing their duty,
  Reminiscent of them, twined from all intrepid captains young or old,
  A pennant universal, subtly waving all time, o'er all brave sailors,
  All seas, all ships.




Patroling Barnegat

  Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running,
  Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,
  Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,
  Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,
  Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,
  On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,
  Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,
  Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,
  (That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)
  Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
  Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,
  Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
  A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
  That savage trinity warily watching.




After the Sea-Ship

  After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
  After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes,
  Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,
  Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,
  Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
  Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
  Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
  Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface,
  Larger and smaller waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully flowing,
  The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing and frolicsome
      under the sun,
  A motley procession with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,
  Following the stately and rapid ship, in the wake following.




BOOK XX.  BY THE ROADSIDE


A Boston Ballad [1854]

  To get betimes in Boston town I rose this morning early,
  Here's a good place at the corner, I must stand and see the show.

  Clear the way there Jonathan!
  Way for the President's marshal--way for the government cannon!
  Way for the Federal foot and dragoons, (and the apparitions
      copiously tumbling.)

  I love to look on the Stars and Stripes, I hope the fifes will play
      Yankee Doodle.
  How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops!
  Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town.

  A fog follows, antiques of the same come limping,
  Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless.

  Why this is indeed a show--it has called the dead out of the earth!
  The old graveyards of the hills have hurried to see!
  Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear!
  Cock'd hats of mothy mould--crutches made of mist!
  Arms in slings--old men leaning on young men's shoulders.

  What troubles you Yankee phantoms? what is all this chattering of
      bare gums?
  Does the ague convulse your limbs? do you mistake your crutches for
      firelocks and level them?

  If you blind your eyes with tears you will not see the President's marshal,
  If you groan such groans you might balk the government cannon.

  For shame old maniacs--bring down those toss'd arms, and let your
      white hair be,
  Here gape your great grandsons, their wives gaze at them from the windows,
  See how well dress'd, see how orderly they conduct themselves.

  Worse and worse--can't you stand it? are you retreating?
  Is this hour with the living too dead for you?

  Retreat then--pell-mell!
  To your graves--back--back to the hills old limpers!
  I do not think you belong here anyhow.

  But there is one thing that belongs here--shall I tell you what it
      is, gentlemen of Boston?

  I will whisper it to the Mayor, he shall send a committee to England,
  They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart to the
      royal vault,
  Dig out King George's coffin, unwrap him quick from the
      graveclothes, box up his bones for a journey,
  Find a swift Yankee clipper--here is freight for you, black-bellied clipper,
  Up with your anchor--shake out your sails--steer straight toward
      Boston bay.

  Now call for the President's marshal again, bring out the government cannon,
  Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another procession,
      guard it with foot and dragoons.

  This centre-piece for them;
  Look, all orderly citizens--look from the windows, women!

  The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that
      will not stay,
  Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the skull.
  You have got your revenge, old buster--the crown is come to its own,
      and more than its own.

  Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan--you are a made man from
      this day,
  You are mighty cute--and here is one of your bargains.




Europe [The 72d and 73d Years of These States]

  Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
  Like lightning it le'pt forth half startled at itself,
  Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats
      of kings.

  O hope and faith!
  O aching close of exiled patriots' lives!
  O many a sicken'd heart!
  Turn back unto this day and make yourselves afresh.

  And you, paid to defile the People--you liars, mark!
  Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
  For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his
      simplicity the poor man's wages,
  For many a promise sworn by royal lips and broken and laugh'd at in
      the breaking,

  Then in their power not for all these did the blows strike revenge,
      or the heads of the nobles fall;
  The People scorn'd the ferocity of kings.

  But the sweetness of mercy brew'd bitter destruction, and the
      frighten'd monarchs come back,
  Each comes in state with his train, hangman, priest, tax-gatherer,
  Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.

  Yet behind all lowering stealing, lo, a shape,
  Vague as the night, draped interminably, head, front and form, in
      scarlet folds,
  Whose face and eyes none may see,
  Out of its robes only this, the red robes lifted by the arm,
  One finger crook'd pointed high over the top, like the head of a
      snake appears.

  Meanwhile corpses lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men,
  The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are
      flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud,
  And all these things bear fruits, and they are good.

  Those corpses of young men,
  Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets, those hearts pierc'd by
      the gray lead,
  Cold and motionless as they seem live elsewhere with unslaughter'd vitality.

  They live in other young men O kings!
  They live in brothers again ready to defy you,
  They were purified by death, they were taught and exalted.

  Not a grave of the murder'd for freedom but grows seed for freedom,
      in its turn to bear seed,
  Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.

  Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,
  But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering, counseling, cautioning.
  Liberty, let others despair of you--I never despair of you.

  Is the house shut? is the master away?
  Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching,
  He will soon return, his messengers come anon.




A Hand-Mirror

  Hold it up sternly--see this it sends back, (who is it? is it you?)
  Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth,
  No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice or springy step,
  Now some slave's eye, voice, hands, step,
  A drunkard's breath, unwholesome eater's face, venerealee's flesh,
  Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous,
  Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
  Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,
  Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
  No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex;
  Such from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence,
  Such a result so soon--and from such a beginning!




Gods

  Lover divine and perfect Comrade,
  Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,
  Be thou my God.

  Thou, thou, the Ideal Man,
  Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,
  Complete in body and dilate in spirit,
  Be thou my God.

  O Death, (for Life has served its turn,)
  Opener and usher to the heavenly mansion,
  Be thou my God.

  Aught, aught of mightiest, best I see, conceive, or know,
  (To break the stagnant tie--thee, thee to free, O soul,)
  Be thou my God.

  All great ideas, the races' aspirations,
  All heroisms, deeds of rapt enthusiasts,
  Be ye my Gods.

  Or Time and Space,
  Or shape of Earth divine and wondrous,
  Or some fair shape I viewing, worship,
  Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night,
  Be ye my Gods.




Germs

  Forms, qualities, lives, humanity, language, thoughts,
  The ones known, and the ones unknown, the ones on the stars,
  The stars themselves, some shaped, others unshaped,
  Wonders as of those countries, the soil, trees, cities, inhabitants,
      whatever they may be,
  Splendid suns, the moons and rings, the countless combinations and effects,
  Such-like, and as good as such-like, visible here or anywhere, stand
      provided for a handful of space, which I extend my arm and
      half enclose with my hand,
  That containing the start of each and all, the virtue, the germs of all.




Thoughts

  Of ownership--as if one fit to own things could not at pleasure enter
      upon all, and incorporate them into himself or herself;
  Of vista--suppose some sight in arriere through the formative chaos,
      presuming the growth, fulness, life, now attain'd on the journey,
  (But I see the road continued, and the journey ever continued;)
  Of what was once lacking on earth, and in due time has become
      supplied--and of what will yet be supplied,
  Because all I see and know I believe to have its main purport in
      what will yet be supplied.



When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

  When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
  When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
  When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
  When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
      applause in the lecture-room,
  How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
  Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
  In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
  Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.




Perfections

  Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves,
  As souls only understand souls.




O Me! O Life!

  O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
  Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
  Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
      and who more faithless?)
  Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
      struggle ever renew'd,
  Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see
      around me,
  Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
  The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?

       Answer.
  That you are here--that life exists and identity,
  That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.




To a President

  All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,
  You have not learn'd of Nature--of the politics of Nature you have
      not learn'd the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality,
  You have not seen that only such as they are for these States,
  And that what is less than they must sooner or later lift off from
      these States.




I Sit and Look Out

  I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
      oppression and shame,
  I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with
      themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
  I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying,
      neglected, gaunt, desperate,
  I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer
      of young women,
  I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be
      hid, I see these sights on the earth,
  I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and
      prisoners,
  I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who
      shall be kill'd to preserve the lives of the rest,
  I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
      laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
  All these--all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
  See, hear, and am silent.




To Rich Givers

  What you give me I cheerfully accept,
  A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money, as I
      rendezvous with my poems,
  A traveler's lodging and breakfast as journey through the States,--
      why should I be ashamed to own such gifts? why to advertise for them?
  For I myself am not one who bestows nothing upon man and woman,
  For I bestow upon any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of
      the universe.




The Dalliance of the Eagles

  Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
  Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
  The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
  The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
  Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
  In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
  Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
  A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
  Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
  She hers, he his, pursuing.




Roaming in Thought [After reading Hegel]

  Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good
      steadily hastening towards immortality,
  And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself
      and become lost and dead.




A Farm Picture

  Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
  A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
  And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.




A Child's Amaze

  Silent and amazed even when a little boy,
  I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,
  As contending against some being or influence.




The Runner

  On a flat road runs the well-train'd runner,
  He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
  He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
  With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd.




Beautiful Women

  Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,
  The young are beautiful--but the old are more beautiful than the young.




Mother and Babe

  I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,
  The sleeping mother and babe--hush'd, I study them long and long.




Thought

  Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;
  As I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly
      affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who
      do not believe in men.




Visor'd

  A mask, a perpetual natural disguiser of herself,
  Concealing her face, concealing her form,
  Changes and transformations every hour, every moment,
  Falling upon her even when she sleeps.




Thought

  Of justice--as If could be any thing but the same ample law,
      expounded by natural judges and saviors,
  As if it might be this thing or that thing, according to decisions.




Gliding O'er all

  Gliding o'er all, through all,
  Through Nature, Time, and Space,
  As a ship on the waters advancing,
  The voyage of the soul--not life alone,
  Death, many deaths I'll sing.




Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour

  Hast never come to thee an hour,
  A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles,
      fashions, wealth?
  These eager business aims--books, politics, art, amours,
  To utter nothingness?




Thought

  Of Equality--as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and
      rights as myself--as if it were not indispensable to my own
      rights that others possess the same.




To Old Age

  I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as
      it pours in the great sea.




Locations and Times

  Locations and times--what is it in me that meets them all, whenever
      and wherever, and makes me at home?
  Forms, colors, densities, odors--what is it in me that corresponds
      with them?




Offerings

  A thousand perfect men and women appear,
  Around each gathers a cluster of friends, and gay children and
      youths, with offerings.




To The States [To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad]

  Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?
  What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters,
  Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
  What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North,
      your arctic freezings!)
  Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that
      the President?
  Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for
      reasons;
  (With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we
      all duly awake,
  South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)




BOOK XXI.  DRUM-TAPS


First O Songs for a Prelude

  First O songs for a prelude,
  Lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum pride and joy in my city,
  How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,
  How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,
  (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!
  O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)
  How you sprang--how you threw off the costumes of peace with
      indifferent hand,
  How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard
      in their stead,
  How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of
      soldiers,)
  How Manhattan drum-taps led.

  Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading,
  Forty years as a pageant, till unawares the lady of this teeming and
      turbulent city,
  Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,
  With her million children around her, suddenly,
  At dead of night, at news from the south,
  Incens'd struck with clinch'd hand the pavement.

  A shock electric, the night sustain'd it,
  Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour'd out its myriads.

  From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,
  Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.

  To the drum-taps prompt,
  The young men falling in and arming,
  The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith's
      hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)
  The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the court,
  The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing
      the reins abruptly down on the horses' backs,
  The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all leaving;
  Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm,
  The new recruits, even boys, the old men show them how to wear their
      accoutrements, they buckle the straps carefully,
  Outdoors arming, indoors arming, the flash of the musket-barrels,
  The white tents cluster in camps, the arm'd sentries around, the
      sunrise cannon and again at sunset,
  Arm'd regiments arrive every day, pass through the city, and embark
      from the wharves,
  (How good they look as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with
      their guns on their shoulders!
  How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces and
      their clothes and knapsacks cover'd with dust!)
  The blood of the city up-arm'd! arm'd! the cry everywhere,
  The flags flung out from the steeples of churches and from all the
      public buildings and stores,
  The tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son kisses his mother,
  (Loth is the mother to part, yet not a word does she speak to detain him,)
  The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the way,
  The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their favorites,
  The artillery, the silent cannons bright as gold, drawn along,
      rumble lightly over the stones,
  (Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence,
  Soon unlimber'd to begin the red business;)
  All the mutter of preparation, all the determin'd arming,
  The hospital service, the lint, bandages and medicines,
  The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in earnest, no
      mere parade now;
  War! an arm'd race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away!
  War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm'd race is advancing to
      welcome it.

  Mannahatta a-march--and it's O to sing it well!
  It's O for a manly life in the camp.

  And the sturdy artillery,
  The guns bright as gold, the work for giants, to serve well the guns,
  Unlimber them! (no more as the past forty years for salutes for
      courtesies merely,
  Put in something now besides powder and wadding.)

  And you lady of ships, you Mannahatta,
  Old matron of this proud, friendly, turbulent city,
  Often in peace and wealth you were pensive or covertly frown'd amid
      all your children,
  But now you smile with joy exulting old Mannahatta.




Eighteen Sixty-One

  Arm'd year--year of the struggle,
  No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year,
  Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,
  But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing,
      carrying rifle on your shoulder,
  With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in
      the belt at your side,
  As I heard you shouting loud, your sonorous voice ringing across the
      continent,
  Your masculine voice O year, as rising amid the great cities,
  Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you as one of the workmen, the
      dwellers in Manhattan,
  Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and Indiana,
  Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait and descending the Allghanies,
  Or down from the great lakes or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along
      the Ohio river,
  Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at
      Chattanooga on the mountain top,
  Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs clothed in blue, bearing
      weapons, robust year,
  Heard your determin'd voice launch'd forth again and again,
  Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannon,
  I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.




Beat! Beat! Drums!

  Beat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!
  Through the windows--through doors--burst like a ruthless force,
  Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
  Into the school where the scholar is studying;
  Leave not the bridegroom quiet--no happiness must he have now with
      his bride,
  Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering
      his grain,
  So fierce you whirr and pound you drums--so shrill you bugles blow.

  Beat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!
  Over the traffic of cities--over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
  Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers
      must sleep in those beds,
  No bargainers' bargains by day--no brokers or speculators--would
      they continue?
  Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
  Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
  Then rattle quicker, heavier drums--you bugles wilder blow.

  Beat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!
  Make no parley--stop for no expostulation,
  Mind not the timid--mind not the weeper or prayer,
  Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
  Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
  Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the
      hearses,
  So strong you thump O terrible drums--so loud you bugles blow.




From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird

  From Paumanok starting I fly like a bird,
  Around and around to soar to sing the idea of all,
  To the north betaking myself to sing there arctic songs,
  To Kanada till I absorb Kanada in myself, to Michigan then,
  To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs, (they are inimitable;)
  Then to Ohio and Indiana to sing theirs, to Missouri and Kansas and
      Arkansas to sing theirs,
  To Tennessee and Kentucky, to the Carolinas and Georgia to sing theirs,
  To Texas and so along up toward California, to roam accepted everywhere;
  To sing first, (to the tap of the war-drum if need be,)
  The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable,
  And then the song of each member of these States.




Song of the Banner at Daybreak

       Poet:
  O A new song, a free song,
  Flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, by sounds, by voices clearer,
  By the wind's voice and that of the drum,
  By the banner's voice and child's voice and sea's voice and father's voice,
  Low on the ground and high in the air,
  On the ground where father and child stand,
  In the upward air where their eyes turn,
  Where the banner at daybreak is flapping.

  Words! book-words! what are you?
  Words no more, for hearken and see,
  My song is there in the open air, and I must sing,
  With the banner and pennant a-flapping.

  I'll weave the chord and twine in,
  Man's desire and babe's desire, I'll twine them in, I'll put in life,
  I'll put the bayonet's flashing point, I'll let bullets and slugs whizz,
  (As one carrying a symbol and menace far into the future,
  Crying with trumpet voice, Arouse and beware! Beware and arouse!)
  I'll pour the verse with streams of blood, full of volition, full of joy,
  Then loosen, launch forth, to go and compete,
  With the banner and pennant a-flapping.

       Pennant:
  Come up here, bard, bard,
  Come up here, soul, soul,
  Come up here, dear little child,
  To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light.

       Child:
  Father what is that in the sky beckoning to me with long finger?
  And what does it say to me all the while?

       Father:
  Nothing my babe you see in the sky,
  And nothing at all to you it says--but look you my babe,
  Look at these dazzling things in the houses, and see you the money-
      shops opening,
  And see you the vehicles preparing to crawl along the streets with goods;
  These, ah these, how valued and toil'd for these!
  How envied by all the earth.

       Poet:
  Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high,
  On floats the sea in distant blue careering through its channels,
  On floats the wind over the breast of the sea setting in toward land,
  The great steady wind from west or west-by-south,
  Floating so buoyant with milk-white foam on the waters.

  But I am not the sea nor the red sun,
  I am not the wind with girlish laughter,
  Not the immense wind which strengthens, not the wind which lashes,
  Not the spirit that ever lashes its own body to terror and death,
  But I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings,
  Which babbles in brooks and scoots in showers on the land,
  Which the birds know in the woods mornings and evenings,
  And the shore-sands know and the hissing wave, and that banner and pennant,
  Aloft there flapping and flapping.

       Child:
  O father it is alive--it is full of people--it has children,
  O now it seems to me it is talking to its children,
  I hear it--it talks to me--O it is wonderful!
  O it stretches--it spreads and runs so fast--O my father,
  It is so broad it covers the whole sky.

       Father:
  Cease, cease, my foolish babe,
  What you are saying is sorrowful to me, much 't displeases me;
  Behold with the rest again I say, behold not banners and pennants aloft,
  But the well-prepared pavements behold, and mark the solid-wall'd houses.

       Banner and Pennant:
  Speak to the child O bard out of Manhattan,
  To our children all, or north or south of Manhattan,
  Point this day, leaving all the rest, to us over all--and yet we know
      not why,
  For what are we, mere strips of cloth profiting nothing,
  Only flapping in the wind?


      Poet:
  I hear and see not strips of cloth alone,
  I hear the tramp of armies, I hear the challenging sentry,
  I hear the jubilant shouts of millions of men, I hear Liberty!
  I hear the drums beat and the trumpets blowing,
  I myself move abroad swift-rising flying then,
  I use the wings of the land-bird and use the wings of the sea-bird,
      and look down as from a height,
  I do not deny the precious results of peace, I see populous cities
      with wealth incalculable,
  I see numberless farms, I see the farmers working in their fields or barns,
  I see mechanics working, I see buildings everywhere founded, going
      up, or finish'd,
  I see trains of cars swiftly speeding along railroad tracks drawn by
      the locomotives,
  I see the stores, depots, of Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans,
  I see far in the West the immense area of grain, I dwell awhile hovering,
  I pass to the lumber forests of the North, and again to the Southern
      plantation, and again to California;
  Sweeping the whole I see the countless profit, the busy gatherings,
      earn'd wages,
  See the Identity formed out of thirty-eight spacious and haughty
      States, (and many more to come,)
  See forts on the shores of harbors, see ships sailing in and out;
  Then over all, (aye! aye!) my little and lengthen'd pennant shaped
      like a sword,
  Runs swiftly up indicating war and defiance--and now the halyards
      have rais'd it,
  Side of my banner broad and blue, side of my starry banner,
  Discarding peace over all the sea and land.

       Banner and Pennant:
  Yet louder, higher, stronger, bard! yet farther, wider cleave!
  No longer let our children deem us riches and peace alone,
  We may be terror and carnage, and are so now,
  Not now are we any one of these spacious and haughty States, (nor
      any five, nor ten,)
  Nor market nor depot we, nor money-bank in the city,
  But these and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines
      below, are ours,
  And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small,
  And the fields they moisten, and the crops and the fruits are ours,
  Bays and channels and ships sailing in and out are ours--while we over all,
  Over the area spread below, the three or four millions of square
      miles, the capitals,
  The forty millions of people,--O bard! in life and death supreme,
  We, even we, henceforth flaunt out masterful, high up above,
  Not for the present alone, for a thousand years chanting through you,
  This song to the soul of one poor little child.

       Child:
  O my father I like not the houses,
  They will never to me be any thing, nor do I like money,
  But to mount up there I would like, O father dear, that banner I like,
  That pennant I would be and must be.

       Father:
  Child of mine you fill me with anguish,
  To be that pennant would be too fearful,
  Little you know what it is this day, and after this day, forever,
  It is to gain nothing, but risk and defy every thing,
  Forward to stand in front of wars--and O, such wars!--what have you
      to do with them?
  With passions of demons, slaughter, premature death?

       Banner:
  Demons and death then I sing,
  Put in all, aye all will I, sword-shaped pennant for war,
  And a pleasure new and ecstatic, and the prattled yearning of children,
  Blent with the sounds of the peaceful land and the liquid wash of the sea,
  And the black ships fighting on the sea envelop'd in smoke,
  And the icy cool of the far, far north, with rustling cedars and pines,
  And the whirr of drums and the sound of soldiers marching, and the
      hot sun shining south,
  And the beach-waves combing over the beach on my Eastern shore,
      and my Western shore the same,
  And all between those shores, and my ever running Mississippi with
      bends and chutes,
  And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of Missouri,
  The Continent, devoting the whole identity without reserving an atom,
  Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all and the yield of all,
  Fusing and holding, claiming, devouring the whole,
  No more with tender lip, nor musical labial sound,
  But out of the night emerging for good, our voice persuasive no more,
  Croaking like crows here in the wind.

       Poet:
  My limbs, my veins dilate, my theme is clear at last,
  Banner so broad advancing out of the night, I sing you haughty and resolute,
  I burst through where I waited long, too long, deafen'd and blinded,
  My hearing and tongue are come to me, (a little child taught me,)
  I hear from above O pennant of war your ironical call and demand,
  Insensate! insensate! (yet I at any rate chant you,) O banner!
  Not houses of peace indeed are you, nor any nor all their
      prosperity, (if need be, you shall again have every one of those
      houses to destroy them,
  You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast,
      full of comfort, built with money,
  May they stand fast, then? not an hour except you above them and all
      stand fast;)
  O banner, not money so precious are you, not farm produce you, nor
      the material good nutriment,
  Nor excellent stores, nor landed on wharves from the ships,
  Not the superb ships with sail-power or steam-power, fetching and
      carrying cargoes,
  Nor machinery, vehicles, trade, nor revenues--but you as henceforth
      I see you,
  Running up out of the night, bringing your cluster of stars,
      (ever-enlarging stars,)
  Divider of daybreak you, cutting the air, touch'd by the sun,
      measuring the sky,
  (Passionately seen and yearn'd for by one poor little child,
  While others remain busy or smartly talking, forever teaching
      thrift, thrift;)
  O you up there! O pennant! where you undulate like a snake hissing
      so curious,
  Out of reach, an idea only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody
      death, loved by me,
  So loved--O you banner leading the day with stars brought from the night!
  Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all--(absolute
      owner of all)--O banner and pennant!
  I too leave the rest--great as it is, it is nothing--houses, machines
      are nothing--I see them not,
  I see but you, O warlike pennant! O banner so broad, with stripes,
      sing you only,
  Flapping up there in the wind.




Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps

       1
  Rise O days from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer sweep,
  Long for my soul hungering gymnastic I devour'd what the earth gave me,
  Long I roam'd amid the woods of the north, long I watch'd Niagara pouring,
  I travel'd the prairies over and slept on their breast, I cross'd
      the Nevadas, I cross'd the plateaus,
  I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail'd out to sea,
  I sail'd through the storm, I was refresh'd by the storm,
  I watch'd with joy the threatening maws of the waves,

  I mark'd the white combs where they career'd so high, curling over,
  I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds,
  Saw from below what arose and mounted, (O superb! O wild as my
      heart, and powerful!)
  Heard the continuous thunder as it bellow'd after the lightning,
  Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning as sudden and
      fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky;
  These, and such as these, I, elate, saw--saw with wonder, yet pensive
      and masterful,
  All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me,
  Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious.

       2
  'Twas well, O soul--'twas a good preparation you gave me,
  Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill,
  Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us,
  Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities,
  Something for us is pouring now more than Niagara pouring,
  Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the Northwest are you indeed
      inexhaustible?)
  What, to pavements and homesteads here, what were those storms of
      the mountains and sea?
  What, to passions I witness around me to-day? was the sea risen?
  Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?
  Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage,
  Manhattan rising, advancing with menacing front--Cincinnati, Chicago,
      unchain'd;
  What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here,
  How it climbs with daring feet and hands--how it dashes!
  How the true thunder bellows after the lightning--how bright the
      flashes of lightning!
  How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on, shown
      through the dark by those flashes of lightning!
  (Yet a mournful wall and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,
  In a lull of the deafening confusion.)

       3
  Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! strike with vengeful stroke!
  And do you rise higher than ever yet O days, O cities!
  Crash heavier, heavier yet O storms! you have done me good,
  My soul prepared in the mountains absorbs your immortal strong nutriment,
  Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads through farms, only
      half satisfied,
  One doubt nauseous undulating like a snake, crawl'd on the ground before me,
  Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low;
  The cities I loved so well I abandon'd and left, I sped to the
      certainties suitable to me,
  Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature's
      dauntlessness,
  I refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only,
  I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire--on the water and air
      waited long;
  But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted,
  I have witness'd the true lightning, I have witness'd my cities electric,
  I have lived to behold man burst forth and warlike America rise,
  Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds,
  No more the mountains roam or sail the stormy sea.




Virginia--The West

  The noble sire fallen on evil days,
  I saw with hand uplifted, menacing, brandishing,
  (Memories of old in abeyance, love and faith in abeyance,)
  The insane knife toward the Mother of All.

  The noble son on sinewy feet advancing,
  I saw, out of the land of prairies, land of Ohio's waters and of Indiana,
  To the rescue the stalwart giant hurry his plenteous offspring,
  Drest in blue, bearing their trusty rifles on their shoulders.

  Then the Mother of All with calm voice speaking,
  As to you Rebellious, (I seemed to hear her say,) why strive against
      me, and why seek my life?
  When you yourself forever provide to defend me?
  For you provided me Washington--and now these also.




City of Ships

  City of ships!
  (O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
  O the beautiful sharp-bow'd steam-ships and sail-ships!)
  City of the world! (for all races are here,
  All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
  City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
  City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and
      out with eddies and foam!
  City of wharves and stores--city of tall facades of marble and iron!
  Proud and passionate city--mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
  Spring up O city--not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
  Fear not--submit to no models but your own O city!
  Behold me--incarnate me as I have incarnated you!
  I have rejected nothing you offer'd me--whom you adopted I have adopted,
  Good or bad I never question you--I love all--I do not condemn any thing,
  I chant and celebrate all that is yours--yet peace no more,
  In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine,
  War, red war is my song through your streets, O city!




The Centenarian's Story

       [Volunteer of 1861-2, at Washington Park, Brooklyn, assisting
       the Centenarian.]
  Give me your hand old Revolutionary,
  The hill-top is nigh, but a few steps, (make room gentlemen,)
  Up the path you have follow'd me well, spite of your hundred and
      extra years,
  You can walk old man, though your eyes are almost done,
  Your faculties serve you, and presently I must have them serve me.

  Rest, while I tell what the crowd around us means,
  On the plain below recruits are drilling and exercising,
  There is the camp, one regiment departs to-morrow,
  Do you hear the officers giving their orders?
  Do you hear the clank of the muskets?
  Why what comes over you now old man?
  Why do you tremble and clutch my hand so convulsively?
  The troops are but drilling, they are yet surrounded with smiles,
  Around them at hand the well-drest friends and the women,
  While splendid and warm the afternoon sun shines down,
  Green the midsummer verdure and fresh blows the dallying breeze,
  O'er proud and peaceful cities and arm of the sea between.

  But drill and parade are over, they march back to quarters,
  Only hear that approval of hands! hear what a clapping!

  As wending the crowds now part and disperse--but we old man,
  Not for nothing have I brought you hither--we must remain,
  You to speak in your turn, and I to listen and tell.

       [The Centenarian]
  When I clutch'd your hand it was not with terror,
  But suddenly pouring about me here on every side,
  And below there where the boys were drilling, and up the slopes they ran,
  And where tents are pitch'd, and wherever you see south and south-
      east and south-west,
  Over hills, across lowlands, and in the skirts of woods,
  And along the shores, in mire (now fill'd over) came again and
      suddenly raged,
  As eighty-five years agone no mere parade receiv'd with applause of friends,
  But a battle which I took part in myself--aye, long ago as it is, I
      took part in it,
  Walking then this hilltop, this same ground.

  Aye, this is the ground,
  My blind eyes even as I speak behold it re-peopled from graves,
  The years recede, pavements and stately houses disappear,
  Rude forts appear again, the old hoop'd guns are mounted,
  I see the lines of rais'd earth stretching from river to bay,
  I mark the vista of waters, I mark the uplands and slopes;
  Here we lay encamp'd, it was this time in summer also.

  As I talk I remember all, I remember the Declaration,
  It was read here, the whole army paraded, it was read to us here,
  By his staff surrounded the General stood in the middle, he held up
      his unsheath'd sword,
  It glitter'd in the sun in full sight of the army.

  Twas a bold act then--the English war-ships had just arrived,
  We could watch down the lower bay where they lay at anchor,
  And the transports swarming with soldiers.

  A few days more and they landed, and then the battle.

  Twenty thousand were brought against us,
  A veteran force furnish'd with good artillery.

  I tell not now the whole of the battle,
  But one brigade early in the forenoon order'd forward to engage the
      red-coats,
  Of that brigade I tell, and how steadily it march'd,
  And how long and well it stood confronting death.

  Who do you think that was marching steadily sternly confronting death?
  It was the brigade of the youngest men, two thousand strong,
  Rais'd in Virginia and Maryland, and most of them known personally
      to the General.

  Jauntily forward they went with quick step toward Gowanus' waters,
  Till of a sudden unlook'd for by defiles through the woods, gain'd at night,
  The British advancing, rounding in from the east, fiercely playing
      their guns,
  That brigade of the youngest was cut off and at the enemy's mercy.

  The General watch'd them from this hill,
  They made repeated desperate attempts to burst their environment,
  Then drew close together, very compact, their flag flying in the middle,
  But O from the hills how the cannon were thinning and thinning them!

  It sickens me yet, that slaughter!
  I saw the moisture gather in drops on the face of the General.
  I saw how he wrung his hands in anguish.

  Meanwhile the British manoeuvr'd to draw us out for a pitch'd battle,
  But we dared not trust the chances of a pitch'd battle.

  We fought the fight in detachments,
  Sallying forth we fought at several points, but in each the luck was
      against us,
  Our foe advancing, steadily getting the best of it, push'd us back
      to the works on this hill,
  Till we turn'd menacing here, and then he left us.

  That was the going out of the brigade of the youngest men, two thousand
      strong,
  Few return'd, nearly all remain in Brooklyn.

  That and here my General's first battle,
  No women looking on nor sunshine to bask in, it did not conclude
      with applause,
  Nobody clapp'd hands here then.

  But in darkness in mist on the ground under a chill rain,
  Wearied that night we lay foil'd and sullen,
  While scornfully laugh'd many an arrogant lord off against us encamp'd,
  Quite within hearing, feasting, clinking wineglasses together over
      their victory.

  So dull and damp and another day,
  But the night of that, mist lifting, rain ceasing,
  Silent as a ghost while they thought they were sure of him, my
      General retreated.

  I saw him at the river-side,
  Down by the ferry lit by torches, hastening the embarcation;
  My General waited till the soldiers and wounded were all pass'd over,
  And then, (it was just ere sunrise,) these eyes rested on him for
      the last time.

  Every one else seem'd fill'd with gloom,
  Many no doubt thought of capitulation.

  But when my General pass'd me,
  As he stood in his boat and look'd toward the coming sun,
  I saw something different from capitulation.

       [Terminus]
  Enough, the Centenarian's story ends,
  The two, the past and present, have interchanged,
  I myself as connecter, as chansonnier of a great future, am now speaking.

  And is this the ground Washington trod?
  And these waters I listlessly daily cross, are these the waters he cross'd,
  As resolute in defeat as other generals in their proudest triumphs?

  I must copy the story, and send it eastward and westward,
  I must preserve that look as it beam'd on you rivers of Brooklyn.

  See--as the annual round returns the phantoms return,
  It is the 27th of August and the British have landed,
  The battle begins and goes against us, behold through the smoke
      Washington's face,
  The brigade of Virginia and Maryland have march'd forth to intercept
      the enemy,
  They are cut off, murderous artillery from the hills plays upon them,
  Rank after rank falls, while over them silently droops the flag,
  Baptized that day in many a young man's bloody wounds.
  In death, defeat, and sisters', mothers' tears.

  Ah, hills and slopes of Brooklyn! I perceive you are more valuable
      than your owners supposed;
  In the midst of you stands an encampment very old,
  Stands forever the camp of that dead brigade.




Cavalry Crossing a Ford

  A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
  They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun--hark to
      the musical clank,
  Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop
      to drink,
  Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the
      negligent rest on the saddles,
  Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford--while,
  Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
  The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.




Bivouac on a Mountain Side

  I see before me now a traveling army halting,
  Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
  Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
  Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
  The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the
      mountain,
  The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,
  And over all the sky--the sky! far, far out of reach, studded,
      breaking out, the eternal stars.




An Army Corps on the March

  With its cloud of skirmishers in advance,
  With now the sound of a single shot snapping like a whip, and now an
      irregular volley,
  The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense brigades press on,
  Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun--the dust-cover'd men,
  In columns rise and fall to the undulations of the ground,
  With artillery interspers'd--the wheels rumble, the horses sweat,
  As the army corps advances.




By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame

  By the bivouac's fitful flame,
  A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow--but
      first I note,
  The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline,
  The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
  Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
  The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily
      watching me,)
  While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
  Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that
      are far away;
  A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
  By the bivouac's fitful flame.




Come Up from the Fields Father

  Come up from the fields father, here's a letter from our Pete,
  And come to the front door mother, here's a letter from thy dear son.

  Lo, 'tis autumn,
  Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
  Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages with leaves fluttering in the
      moderate wind,
  Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis'd vines,
  (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
  Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

  Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and
      with wondrous clouds,
  Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

  Down in the fields all prospers well,
  But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter's call.
  And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

  Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
  She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

  Open the envelope quickly,
  O this is not our son's writing, yet his name is sign'd,
  O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother's soul!
  All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main
      words only,
  Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish,
      taken to hospital,
  At present low, but will soon be better.

  Ah now the single figure to me,
  Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
  Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
  By the jamb of a door leans.

  Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through
      her sobs,
  The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay'd,)
  See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

  Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be
      better, that brave and simple soul,)
  While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
  The only son is dead.

  But the mother needs to be better,
  She with thin form presently drest in black,
  By day her meals untouch'd, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
  In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
  O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
  To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.




Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

  Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;
  When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
  One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I
      shall never forget,
  One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach'd up as you lay on the ground,
  Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
  Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I made my way,
  Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of
      responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
  Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the
      moderate night-wind,
  Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the
      battlefield spreading,
  Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
  But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,
  Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my
      chin in my hands,
  Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest
      comrade--not a tear, not a word,
  Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
  As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
  Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
  I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall
      surely meet again,)
  Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear'd,
  My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well his form,
  Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and
      carefully under feet,
  And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his
      grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
  Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
  Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
  Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day
      brighten'd,
  I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
  And buried him where he fell.




A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown

  A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
  A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
  Our army foil'd with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
  Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
  We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,
  'Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital,
  Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and
      poems ever made,
  Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,
  And by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and
      clouds of smoke,
  By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some
      in the pews laid down,
  At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of
      bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)
  I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster's face is white as a lily,)
  Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o'er the scene fain to absorb it all,
  Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity,
      some of them dead,
  Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether,
      odor of blood,
  The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill'd,
  Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the
      death-spasm sweating,
  An occasional scream or cry, the doctor's shouted orders or calls,
  The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of
      the torches,
  These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,
  Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;
  But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,
  Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,
  Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,
  The unknown road still marching.




A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

  A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
  As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
  As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,
  Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,
  Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
  Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

  Curious I halt and silent stand,
  Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first
      just lift the blanket;
  Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair,
      and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
  Who are you my dear comrade?
  Then to the second I step--and who are you my child and darling?
  Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
  Then to the third--a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of
      beautiful yellow-white ivory;
  Young man I think I know you--I think this face is the face of the
      Christ himself,
  Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.




As Toilsome I Wander'd Virginia's Woods

  As toilsome I wander'd Virginia's woods,
  To the music of rustling leaves kick'd by my feet, (for 'twas autumn,)
  I mark'd at the foot of a tree the grave of a soldier;
  Mortally wounded he and buried on the retreat, (easily all could
      understand,)
  The halt of a mid-day hour, when up! no time to lose--yet this sign left,
  On a tablet scrawl'd and nail'd on the tree by the grave,
  Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade.

  Long, long I muse, then on my way go wandering,
  Many a changeful season to follow, and many a scene of life,
  Yet at times through changeful season and scene, abrupt, alone, or
      in the crowded street,
  Comes before me the unknown soldier's grave, comes the inscription
      rude in Virginia's woods,
  Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade.




Not the Pilot

  Not the pilot has charged himself to bring his ship into port,
      though beaten back and many times baffled;
  Not the pathfinder penetrating inland weary and long,
  By deserts parch'd, snows chill'd, rivers wet, perseveres till he
      reaches his destination,
  More than I have charged myself, heeded or unheeded, to compose
      march for these States,
  For a battle-call, rousing to arms if need be, years, centuries hence.




Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

  Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
  Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
  A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me,
  Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
  Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
  And sullen hymns of defeat?




The Wound-Dresser

       1
  An old man bending I come among new faces,
  Years looking backward resuming in answer to children,
  Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me,
  (Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
  But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd and I resign'd myself,
  To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;)
  Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances,
  Of unsurpass'd heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)
  Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth,
  Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?
  What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
  Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

       2
  O maidens and young men I love and that love me,
  What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls,
  Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover'd with sweat and dust,
  In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the
      rush of successful charge,
  Enter the captur'd works--yet lo, like a swift-running river they fade,
  Pass and are gone they fade--I dwell not on soldiers' perils or
      soldiers' joys,
  (Both I remember well--many the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)

  But in silence, in dreams' projections,
  While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
  So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,
  With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,
  Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)

  Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
  Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
  Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
  Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
  Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital,
  To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
  To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
  An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
  Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.

  I onward go, I stop,
  With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
  I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
  One turns to me his appealing eyes--poor boy! I never knew you,
  Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
      would save you.

       3
  On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
  The crush'd head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
  The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through examine,
  Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
      struggles hard,
  (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
  In mercy come quickly.)

  From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
  I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
  Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
  His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
      bloody stump,
  And has not yet look'd on it.

  I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
  But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
  And the yellow-blue countenance see.

  I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
  Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening,
      so offensive,
  While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

  I am faithful, I do not give out,
  The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
  These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast
      a fire, a burning flame.)

       4
  Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
  Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
  The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
  I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
  Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
  (Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested,
  Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)




Long, Too Long America

  Long, too long America,
  Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and
      prosperity only,
  But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing,
      grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
  And now to conceive and show to the world what your children
      en-masse really are,
  (For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse
      really are?)




Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

       1
  Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
  Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
  Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows,
  Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape,
  Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching
      content,
  Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the
      Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,
  Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can
      walk undisturb'd,
  Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire,
  Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the
      world a rural domestic life,
  Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only,
  Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal
      sanities!

  These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and
      rack'd by the war-strife,)
  These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,
  While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,
  Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,
  Where you hold me enchain'd a certain time refusing to give me up,
  Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich'd of soul, you give me forever faces;
  (O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,
  see my own soul trampling down what it ask'd for.)

       2
  Keep your splendid silent sun,
  Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
  Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,
  Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
  Give me faces and streets--give me these phantoms incessant and
      endless along the trottoirs!
  Give me interminable eyes--give me women--give me comrades and
      lovers by the thousand!
  Let me see new ones every day--let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
  Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
  Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching--give me the sound of
      the trumpets and drums!
  (The soldiers in companies or regiments--some starting away, flush'd
      and reckless,
  Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very
      old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
  Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
  O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
  The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
  The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
      torchlight procession!
  The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
      following;
  People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
  Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
  The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
      the sight of the wounded,)
  Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
  Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.




Dirge for Two Veterans

       The last sunbeam
  Lightly falls from the finish'd Sabbath,
  On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
       Down a new-made double grave.

       Lo, the moon ascending,
  Up from the east the silvery round moon,
  Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
       Immense and silent moon.

       I see a sad procession,
  And I hear the sound of coming full-key'd bugles,
  All the channels of the city streets they're flooding,
       As with voices and with tears.

       I hear the great drums pounding,
  And the small drums steady whirring,
  And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
       Strikes me through and through.

       For the son is brought with the father,
  (In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
  Two veterans son and father dropt together,
       And the double grave awaits them.)

       Now nearer blow the bugles,
  And the drums strike more convulsive,
  And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
       And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

       In the eastern sky up-buoying,
  The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin'd,
  ('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
       In heaven brighter growing.)

       O strong dead-march you please me!
  O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
  O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
       What I have I also give you.

       The moon gives you light,
  And the bugles and the drums give you music,
  And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
       My heart gives you love.




Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice

  Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
  Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
  Those who love each other shall become invincible,
  They shall yet make Columbia victorious.

  Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious,
  You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.

  No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers,
  If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.

  One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian's comrade,
  From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another an Oregonese, shall
      be friends triune,
  More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.

  To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,
  Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.

  It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection,
  The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly,
  The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,
  The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.

  These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron,
  I, ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you.

  (Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
  Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
  Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)




I Saw Old General at Bay

  I saw old General at bay,
  (Old as he was, his gray eyes yet shone out in battle like stars,)
  His small force was now completely hemm'd in, in his works,
  He call'd for volunteers to run the enemy's lines, a desperate emergency,
  I saw a hundred and more step forth from the ranks, but two or three
      were selected,
  I saw them receive their orders aside, they listen'd with care, the
      adjutant was very grave,
  I saw them depart with cheerfulness, freely risking their lives.




The Artilleryman's Vision

  While my wife at my side lies slumbering, and the wars are over long,
  And my head on the pillow rests at home, and the vacant midnight passes,
  And through the stillness, through the dark, I hear, just hear, the
      breath of my infant,
  There in the room as I wake from sleep this vision presses upon me;
  The engagement opens there and then in fantasy unreal,
  The skirmishers begin, they crawl cautiously ahead, I hear the
      irregular snap! snap!
  I hear the sounds of the different missiles, the short t-h-t! t-h-t!
      of the rifle-balls,
  I see the shells exploding leaving small white clouds, I hear the
      great shells shrieking as they pass,
  The grape like the hum and whirr of wind through the trees,
      (tumultuous now the contest rages,)
  All the scenes at the batteries rise in detail before me again,
  The crashing and smoking, the pride of the men in their pieces,
  The chief-gunner ranges and sights his piece and selects a fuse of
      the right time,
  After firing I see him lean aside and look eagerly off to note the effect;
  Elsewhere I hear the cry of a regiment charging, (the young colonel
      leads himself this time with brandish'd sword,)
  I see the gaps cut by the enemy's volleys, (quickly fill'd up, no delay,)
  I breathe the suffocating smoke, then the flat clouds hover low
      concealing all;
  Now a strange lull for a few seconds, not a shot fired on either side,
  Then resumed the chaos louder than ever, with eager calls and
      orders of officers,
  While from some distant part of the field the wind wafts to my ears
      a shout of applause, (some special success,)
  And ever the sound of the cannon far or near, (rousing even in
      dreams a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy in the
      depths of my soul,)
  And ever the hastening of infantry shifting positions, batteries,
      cavalry, moving hither and thither,
  (The falling, dying, I heed not, the wounded dripping and red
      heed not, some to the rear are hobbling,)
  Grime, heat, rush, aide-de-camps galloping by or on a full run,
  With the patter of small arms, the warning s-s-t of the rifles,
      (these in my vision I hear or see,)
  And bombs bursting in air, and at night the vari-color'd rockets.




Ethiopia Saluting the Colors

  Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,
  With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare bony feet?
  Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

  ('Tis while our army lines Carolina's sands and pines,
  Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com'st to me,
  As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)

  Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder'd,
  A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,
  Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.

  No further does she say, but lingering all the day,
  Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
  And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

  What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?
  Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green?
  Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?




Not Youth Pertains to Me

  Not youth pertains to me,
  Nor delicatesse, I cannot beguile the time with talk,
  Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant,
  In the learn'd coterie sitting constrain'd and still, for learning
      inures not to me,
  Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me--yet there are two or three things
      inure to me,
  I have nourish'd the wounded and sooth'd many a dying soldier,
  And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp,
  Composed these songs.




Race of Veterans

  Race of veterans--race of victors!
  Race of the soil, ready for conflict--race of the conquering march!
  (No more credulity's race, abiding-temper'd race,)
  Race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself,
  Race of passion and the storm.




World Take Good Notice

  World take good notice, silver stars fading,
  Milky hue ript, wet of white detaching,
  Coals thirty-eight, baleful and burning,
  Scarlet, significant, hands off warning,
  Now and henceforth flaunt from these shores.




O Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy

  O tan-faced prairie-boy,
  Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift,
  Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among
      the recruits,
  You came, taciturn, with nothing to give--we but look'd on each other,
  When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me.




Look Down Fair Moon

  Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
  Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
  On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
  Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.




Reconciliation

  Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
  Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
      utterly lost,
  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly
      wash again, and ever again, this solid world;
  For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
  I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near,
  Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.




How Solemn As One by One [Washington City, 1865]

  How solemn as one by one,
  As the ranks returning worn and sweaty, as the men file by where stand,
  As the faces the masks appear, as I glance at the faces studying the masks,
  (As I glance upward out of this page studying you, dear friend,
      whoever you are,)
  How solemn the thought of my whispering soul to each in the ranks,
      and to you,
  I see behind each mask that wonder a kindred soul,
  O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
  Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;
  The soul! yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,
  Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,
  Nor the bayonet stab O friend.




As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado

  As I lay with my head in your lap camerado,
  The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the open air
      I resume,
  I know I am restless and make others so,
  I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,
  For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to
      unsettle them,
  I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have
      been had all accepted me,
  I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions,
      majorities, nor ridicule,
  And the threat of what is call'd hell is little or nothing to me,
  And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing to me;
  Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still
      urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
  Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and defeated.




Delicate Cluster

  Delicate cluster! flag of teeming life!
  Covering all my lands--all my seashores lining!
  Flag of death! (how I watch'd you through the smoke of battle pressing!
  How I heard you flap and rustle, cloth defiant!)
  Flag cerulean--sunny flag, with the orbs of night dappled!
  Ah my silvery beauty--ah my woolly white and crimson!
  Ah to sing the song of you, my matron mighty!
  My sacred one, my mother.




To a Certain Civilian

  Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
  Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes?
  Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow?
  Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand--nor
      am I now;
  (I have been born of the same as the war was born,
  The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the
      martial dirge,
  With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral;)
  What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
  And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
  For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.




Lo, Victress on the Peaks

  Lo, Victress on the peaks,
  Where thou with mighty brow regarding the world,
  (The world O Libertad, that vainly conspired against thee,)
  Out of its countless beleaguering toils, after thwarting them all,
  Dominant, with the dazzling sun around thee,
  Flauntest now unharm'd in immortal soundness and bloom--lo, in
      these hours supreme,
  No poem proud, I chanting bring to thee, nor mastery's rapturous verse,
  But a cluster containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds,
  And psalms of the dead.




Spirit Whose Work Is Done [Washington City, 1865]

  Spirit whose work is done--spirit of dreadful hours!
  Ere departing fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets;
  Spirit of gloomiest fears and doubts, (yet onward ever unfaltering
      pressing,)
  Spirit of many a solemn day and many a savage scene--electric spirit,
  That with muttering voice through the war now closed, like a
      tireless phantom flitted,
  Rousing the land with breath of flame, while you beat and beat the drum,
  Now as the sound of the drum, hollow and harsh to the last,
      reverberates round me,
  As your ranks, your immortal ranks, return, return from the battles,
  As the muskets of the young men yet lean over their shoulders,
  As I look on the bayonets bristling over their shoulders,
  As those slanted bayonets, whole forests of them appearing in the
      distance, approach and pass on, returning homeward,
  Moving with steady motion, swaying to and fro to the right and left,
  Evenly lightly rising and falling while the steps keep time;
  Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day,
  Touch my mouth ere you depart, press my lips close,
  Leave me your pulses of rage--bequeath them to me--fill me with
      currents convulsive,
  Let them scorch and blister out of my chants when you are gone,
  Let them identify you to the future in these songs.




Adieu to a Soldier

  Adieu O soldier,
  You of the rude campaigning, (which we shared,)
  The rapid march, the life of the camp,
  The hot contention of opposing fronts, the long manoeuvre,
  Red battles with their slaughter, the stimulus, the strong terrific game,
  Spell of all brave and manly hearts, the trains of time through you
      and like of you all fill'd,
  With war and war's expression.

  Adieu dear comrade,
  Your mission is fulfill'd--but I, more warlike,
  Myself and this contentious soul of mine,
  Still on our own campaigning bound,
  Through untried roads with ambushes opponents lined,
  Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis, often baffled,
  Here marching, ever marching on, a war fight out--aye here,
  To fiercer, weightier battles give expression.




Turn O Libertad

  Turn O Libertad, for the war is over,
  From it and all henceforth expanding, doubting no more, resolute,
      sweeping the world,
  Turn from lands retrospective recording proofs of the past,
  From the singers that sing the trailing glories of the past,
  From the chants of the feudal world, the triumphs of kings, slavery, caste,
  Turn to the world, the triumphs reserv'd and to come--give up that
      backward world,
  Leave to the singers of hitherto, give them the trailing past,
  But what remains remains for singers for you--wars to come are for you,
  (Lo, how the wars of the past have duly inured to you, and the wars
      of the present also inure;)
  Then turn, and be not alarm'd O Libertad--turn your undying face,
  To where the future, greater than all the past,
  Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.




To the Leaven'd Soil They Trod

  To the leaven'd soil they trod calling I sing for the last,
  (Forth from my tent emerging for good, loosing, untying the tent-ropes,)
  In the freshness the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits
      and vistas again to peace restored,
  To the fiery fields emanative and the endless vistas beyond, to the
      South and the North,
  To the leaven'd soil of the general Western world to attest my songs,
  To the Alleghanian hills and the tireless Mississippi,
  To the rocks I calling sing, and all the trees in the woods,
  To the plains of the poems of heroes, to the prairies spreading wide,
  To the far-off sea and the unseen winds, and the sane impalpable air;
  And responding they answer all, (but not in words,)
  The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely,
  The prairie draws me close, as the father to bosom broad the son,
  The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end,
  But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs.




BOOK XXII.  MEMORIES OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN


When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

       1
  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
  And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
  I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

  Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
  Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
  And thought of him I love.

       2
  O powerful western fallen star!
  O shades of night--O moody, tearful night!
  O great star disappear'd--O the black murk that hides the star!
  O cruel hands that hold me powerless--O helpless soul of me!
  O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.


      3
  In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings,
  Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
  With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
  With every leaf a miracle--and from this bush in the dooryard,
  With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
  A sprig with its flower I break.

       4
  In the swamp in secluded recesses,
  A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

  Solitary the thrush,
  The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
  Sings by himself a song.

  Song of the bleeding throat,
  Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
  If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die.)

       5
  Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
  Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep'd
      from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
  Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the
      endless grass,
  Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain from its shroud in the
      dark-brown fields uprisen,
  Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
  Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
  Night and day journeys a coffin.

       6
  Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
  Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
  With the pomp of the inloop'd flags with the cities draped in black,
  With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil'd women standing,
  With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
  With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the
      unbared heads,
  With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
  With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong
      and solemn,
  With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour'd around the coffin,
  The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs--where amid these
      you journey,
  With the tolling tolling bells' perpetual clang,
  Here, coffin that slowly passes,
  I give you my sprig of lilac.

       7
  (Nor for you, for one alone,
  Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
  For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane
      and sacred death.

  All over bouquets of roses,
  O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
  But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
  Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
  With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
  For you and the coffins all of you O death.)

       8
  O western orb sailing the heaven,
  Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk'd,
  As I walk'd in silence the transparent shadowy night,
  As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
  As you droop'd from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the
      other stars all look'd on,)
  As we wander'd together the solemn night, (for something I know not
      what kept me from sleep,)
  As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you
      were of woe,
  As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
  As I watch'd where you pass'd and was lost in the netherward black
      of the night,
  As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
  Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

       9
  Sing on there in the swamp,
  O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
  I hear, I come presently, I understand you,
  But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain'd me,
  The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.

       10
  O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
  And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
  And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

  Sea-winds blown from east and west,
  Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till
      there on the prairies meeting,
  These and with these and the breath of my chant,
  I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

       11
  O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
  And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
  To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
  Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
  With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
  With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking
      sun, burning, expanding the air,
  With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves
      of the trees prolific,
  In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a
      wind-dapple here and there,
  With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky,
      and shadows,
  And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
  And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen
      homeward returning.

       12
  Lo, body and soul--this land,
  My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides,
      and the ships,
  The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light,
      Ohio's shores and flashing Missouri,
  And ever the far-spreading prairies cover'd with grass and corn.

  Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
  The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
  The gentle soft-born measureless light,
  The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill'd noon,
  The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
  Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

       13
  Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
  Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
  Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

  Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
  Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

  O liquid and free and tender!
  O wild and loose to my soul--O wondrous singer!
  You only I hear--yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
  Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.

       14
  Now while I sat in the day and look'd forth,
  In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and
      the farmers preparing their crops,
  In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,
  In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb'd winds and the storms,)
  Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the
      voices of children and women,
  The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail'd,
  And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy
      with labor,
  And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with
      its meals and minutia of daily usages,
  And the streets how their throbbings throbb'd, and the cities pent--
      lo, then and there,
  Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
  Appear'd the cloud, appear'd the long black trail,
  And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

  Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
  And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
  And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of
      companions,
  I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
  Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
  To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

  And the singer so shy to the rest receiv'd me,
  The gray-brown bird I know receiv'd us comrades three,
  And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

  From deep secluded recesses,
  From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
  Came the carol of the bird.

  And the charm of the carol rapt me,
  As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
  And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

  Come lovely and soothing death,
  Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
  In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
  Sooner or later delicate death.

  Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
  For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
  And for love, sweet love--but praise! praise! praise!
  For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

  Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
  Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
  Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
  I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

  Approach strong deliveress,
  When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
  Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
  Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

  From me to thee glad serenades,
  Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
  And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread shy are fitting,
  And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

  The night in silence under many a star,
  The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
  And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd death,
  And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

  Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
  Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
      prairies wide,
  Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
  I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

       15
  To the tally of my soul,
  Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
  With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

  Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
  Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
  And I with my comrades there in the night.

  While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
  As to long panoramas of visions.

  And I saw askant the armies,
  I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
  Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw them,
  And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
  And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
  And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
  And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
  I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
  But I saw they were not as was thought,
  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
  The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
  And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
  And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

       16
  Passing the visions, passing the night,
  Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades' hands,
  Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
  Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
  As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
      flooding the night,
  Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again
      bursting with joy,
  Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
  As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
  Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
  I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

  I cease from my song for thee,
  From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
  O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

  Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
  The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
  And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,
  With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
  With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
  Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for
      the dead I loved so well,
  For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands--and this for
      his dear sake,
  Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
  There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.




O Captain! My Captain!

  O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
  The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
  While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
      But O heart! heart! heart!
       O the bleeding drops of red,
         Where on the deck my Captain lies,
           Fallen cold and dead.

  O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
  Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
  For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,
  For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
      Here Captain! dear father!
       This arm beneath your head!
         It is some dream that on the deck,
           You've fallen cold and dead.

  My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
  My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
  The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
  From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
       Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
         But I with mournful tread,
           Walk the deck my Captain lies,
             Fallen cold and dead.




Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day [May 4, 1865

  Hush'd be the camps to-day,
  And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
  And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
  Our dear commander's death.

  No more for him life's stormy conflicts,
  Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events,
  Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
  But sing poet in our name,

  Sing of the love we bore him--because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.

  As they invault the coffin there,
  Sing--as they close the doors of earth upon him--one verse,
  For the heavy hearts of soldiers.




This Dust Was Once the Man

  This dust was once the man,
  Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
  Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
  Was saved the Union of these States.




BOOK XXIII


By Blue Ontario's Shore

  By blue Ontario's shore,
  As I mused of these warlike days and of peace return'd, and the
      dead that return no more,
  A Phantom gigantic superb, with stern visage accosted me,
  Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America,
      chant me the carol of victory,
  And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet,
  And sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy.

  (Democracy, the destin'd conqueror, yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
  And death and infidelity at every step.)

       2
  A Nation announcing itself,
  I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,
  I reject none, accept all, then reproduce all in my own forms.

  A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,
  What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,
  We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,
  We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,
  We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety of
      ourselves,
  We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves,
  We stand self-pois'd in the middle, branching thence over the world,
  From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.

  Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
  Whatever appears, whatever does not appear, we are beautiful or
      sinful in ourselves only.

  (O Mother--O Sisters dear!
  If we are lost, no victor else has destroy'd us,
  It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)

       3
  Have you thought there could be but a single supreme?
  There can be any number of supremes--one does not countervail
      another any more than one eyesight countervails another, or
      one life countervails another.

  All is eligible to all,
  All is for individuals, all is for you,
  No condition is prohibited, not God's or any.

  All comes by the body, only health puts you rapport with the universe.

  Produce great Persons, the rest follows.

       4
  Piety and conformity to them that like,
  Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like,
  I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,
  Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!

  I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning every
      one I meet,
  Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
  Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

  (With pangs and cries as thine own O bearer of many children,
  These clamors wild to a race of pride I give.)

  O lands, would you be freer than all that has ever been before?
  If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen to me.

  Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
  Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey--juice,
  Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,
  Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men.

       5
  Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials,
  America brings builders, and brings its own styles.

  The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and
      pass'd to other spheres,
  A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

  America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all
      hazards,
  Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
      of precedents,
  Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under
      their forms,
  Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne
      from the house,
  Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was
      fittest for its days,
  That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who
      approaches,
  And that he shall be fittest for his days.

  Any period one nation must lead,
  One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

  These States are the amplest poem,
  Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
  Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the
      day and night,
  Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
  Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves,
  Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the
      soul loves.

       6
  Land of lands and bards to corroborate!
  Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face,
  To him the hereditary countenance bequeath'd both mother's and father's,
  His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
  Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,
  Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
  Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with
      incomparable love,
  Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
  Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,
  Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
  Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,
      Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,
  If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he
      stretching with them North or South,
  Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between them,
  Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock,
      live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,
  Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,
  He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with
      northern transparent ice,
  Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
  Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the
      fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,
  His spirit surrounding his country's spirit, unclosed to good and evil,
  Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times,
  Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,
  Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle,
  The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of
      the Constitution,
  The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,
  The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable,
  The unsurvey'd interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,
      hunters, trappers,
  Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the
      gestation of new States,
  Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming
      up from the uttermost parts,
  Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially
      the young men,
  Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they
      have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the
      presence of superiors,
  The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and
      decision of their phrenology,
  The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when wrong'd,
  The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,
      good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,
  The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,
  The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement
      of the population,
  The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,
  Wharf-hemm'd cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points,
  Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,
      Northwest, Southwest,
  Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
  Slavery--the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the
      ruins of all the rest,
  On and on to the grapple with it--Assassin! then your life or ours
      be the stake, and respite no more.

       7
  (Lo, high toward heaven, this day,
  Libertad, from the conqueress' field return'd,
  I mark the new aureola around your head,
  No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,
  With war's flames and the lambent lightnings playing,
  And your port immovable where you stand,
  With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch'd and lifted fist,
  And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly
      crush'd beneath you,
  The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his
      senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,
  The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much,
  To-day a carrion dead and damn'd, the despised of all the earth,
  An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn'd.)

       8
  Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever
      keeps vista,
  Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,
  O days of the future I believe in you--I isolate myself for your sake,
  O America because you build for mankind I build for you,
  O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision
      and science,
  Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.
  (Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!
  But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain,
      pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)

       9
  I listened to the Phantom by Ontario's shore,
  I heard the voice arising demanding bards,
  By them all native and grand, by them alone can these States be
      fused into the compact organism of a Nation.

  To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,
  That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle,
      as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants.

  Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most
      need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest,
  Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their
      poets shall.

  (Soul of love and tongue of fire!
  Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world!
  Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?)

       10
  Of these States the poet is the equable man,
  Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of
      their full returns,
  Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,
  He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither
      more nor less,
  He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
  He is the equalizer of his age and land,
  He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,
  In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich,
      thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,
      commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,
      immortality, government,
  In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as
      good as the engineer's, he can make every word he speaks draw blood,
  The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith,
  He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,)
  He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun failing round
      helpless thing,
  As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
  His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
  In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
  He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,
  He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women
      as dreams or dots.

  For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,
  For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
  The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.

  Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,
  They live in the feelings of young men and the best women,
  (Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been always
      ready to fall for Liberty.)

       11
  For the great Idea,
  That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.

  Songs of stern defiance ever ready,
  Songs of the rapid arming and the march,
  The flag of peace quick-folded, and instead the flag we know,
  Warlike flag of the great Idea.

  (Angry cloth I saw there leaping!
  I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,
  I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight--O the
      hard-contested fight!
  The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles--the hurtled balls scream,
  The battle-front forms amid the smoke--the volleys pour incessant
      from the line,
  Hark, the ringing word Charge!--now the tussle and the furious
      maddening yells,
  Now the corpses tumble curl'd upon the ground,
  Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,
  Angry cloth I saw there leaping.)

       12
  Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in
      the States?
  The place is august, the terms obdurate.

  Who would assume to teach here may well prepare himself body and mind,
  He may well survey, ponder, arm, fortify, harden, make lithe himself,
  He shall surely be question'd beforehand by me with many and stern questions.

  Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
  Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
  Have you learn'd the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,
      pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
  Have you consider'd the organic compact of the first day of the
      first year of Independence, sign'd by the Commissioners, ratified
      by the States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?
  Have you possess'd yourself of the Federal Constitution?
  Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them,
      and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?
  Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea, the
      bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?
  Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?
  Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,
      fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the
      whole People?
  Are you not of some coterie? some school or mere religion?
  Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to
      life itself?
  Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?
  Have you too the old ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?
  Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the
      last-born? little and big? and for the errant?

  What is this you bring my America?
  Is it uniform with my country?
  Is it not something that has been better told or done before?
  Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
  Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?--Is the good old cause in it?
  Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
      literats, of enemies' lands?
  Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
  Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
  Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union in
      that secession war?
  Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
  Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
      strength, gait, face?
  Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere
      amanuenses?
  Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face?
  What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities? Chicago,
      Kanada, Arkansas?
  Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians
      standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese, Western
      men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy, and in the
      promptness of their love?
  Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen,
      each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist,
      infidel, who has ever ask'd any thing of America?
  What mocking and scornful negligence?
  The track strew'd with the dust of skeletons,
  By the roadside others disdainfully toss'd.

       13
  Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill'd from poems pass away,
  The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
  Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature,
  America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it
      or conceal from it, it is impassive enough,
  Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
  If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there
      is no fear of mistake,
  (The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country
      absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it.)

  He masters whose spirit masters, he tastes sweetest who results
      sweetest in the long run,
  The blood of the brawn beloved of time is unconstraint;
  In the need of songs, philosophy, an appropriate native grand-opera,
      shipcraft, any craft,
  He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original
      practical example.

  Already a nonchalant breed, silently emerging, appears on the streets,
  People's lips salute only doers, lovers, satisfiers, positive knowers,
  There will shortly be no more priests, I say their work is done,
  Death is without emergencies here, but life is perpetual emergencies here,
  Are your body, days, manners, superb? after death you shall be superb,
  Justice, health, self-esteem, clear the way with irresistible power;
  How dare you place any thing before a man?

       14
  Fall behind me States!
  A man before all--myself, typical, before all.

  Give me the pay I have served for,
  Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest,
  I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches,
  I have given aims to every one that ask'd, stood up for the stupid
      and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others,
  Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence
      toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown,
  Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young,
      and with the mothers of families,
  Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees,
      stars, rivers,
  Dismiss'd whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body,
  Claim'd nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim'd for
      others on the same terms,
  Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every State,
  (Upon this breast has many a dying soldier lean'd to breathe his last,
  This arm, this hand, this voice, have nourish'd, rais'd, restored,
  To life recalling many a prostrate form;)
  I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself,
  Rejecting none, permitting all.

  (Say O Mother, have I not to your thought been faithful?
  Have I not through life kept you and yours before me?)

       15
  I swear I begin to see the meaning of these things,
  It is not the earth, it is not America who is so great,
  It is I who am great or to be great, it is You up there, or any one,
  It is to walk rapidly through civilizations, governments, theories,
  Through poems, pageants, shows, to form individuals.

  Underneath all, individuals,
  I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
  The American compact is altogether with individuals,
  The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,
  The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one
      single individual--namely to You.

  (Mother! with subtle sense severe, with the naked sword in your hand,
  I saw you at last refuse to treat but directly with individuals.)

       16
  Underneath all, Nativity,
  I swear I will stand by my own nativity, pious or impious so be it;
  I swear I am charm'd with nothing except nativity,
  Men, women, cities, nations, are only beautiful from nativity.

  Underneath all is the Expression of love for men and women,
  (I swear I have seen enough of mean and impotent modes of expressing
      love for men and women,
  After this day I take my own modes of expressing love for men and
      women.) in myself,

  I swear I will have each quality of my race in myself,
  (Talk as you like, he only suits these States whose manners favor
      the audacity and sublime turbulence of the States.)

  Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
      ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
  Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself, (the same
      monotonous old song.)

       17
  O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
  Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
  Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me,
  Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships,
      are you and me,
  Its endless gestations of new States are you and me,
  The war, (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth
      forget), was you and me,
  Natural and artificial are you and me,
  Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
  Past, present, future, are you and me.

  I dare not shirk any part of myself,
  Not any part of America good or bad,
  Not to build for that which builds for mankind,
  Not to balance ranks, complexions, creeds, and the sexes,
  Not to justify science nor the march of equality,
  Nor to feed the arrogant blood of the brawn belov'd of time.

  I am for those that have never been master'd,
  For men and women whose tempers have never been master'd,
  For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master.

  I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth,
  Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all.

  I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
  I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me,
  I will make cities and civilizations defer to me,
  This is what I have learnt from America--it is the amount, and it I
      teach again.

  (Democracy, while weapons were everywhere aim'd at your breast,
  I saw you serenely give birth to immortal children, saw in dreams
      your dilating form,
  Saw you with spreading mantle covering the world.)

       18
  I will confront these shows of the day and night,
  I will know if I am to be less than they,
  I will see if I am not as majestic as they,
  I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they,
  I will see if I am to be less generous than they,
  I will see if I have no meaning, while the houses and ships have meaning,
  I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for themselves,
      and I am not to be enough for myself.

  I match my spirit against yours you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes,
  Copious as you are I absorb you all in myself, and become the master myself,
  America isolated yet embodying all, what is it finally except myself?
  These States, what are they except myself?

  I know now why the earth is gross, tantalizing, wicked, it is for my sake,
  I take you specially to be mine, you terrible, rude forms.


  (Mother, bend down, bend close to me your face,
  I know not what these plots and wars and deferments are for,
  I know not fruition's success, but I know that through war and crime
      your work goes on, and must yet go on.)

       19
  Thus by blue Ontario's shore,
  While the winds fann'd me and the waves came trooping toward me,
  I thrill'd with the power's pulsations, and the charm of my theme
      was upon me,
  Till the tissues that held me parted their ties upon me.

  And I saw the free souls of poets,
  The loftiest bards of past ages strode before me,
  Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me.

       20
  O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!
  Not for the bards of the past, not to invoke them have I launch'd
      you forth,
  Not to call even those lofty bards here by Ontario's shores,
  Have I sung so capricious and loud my savage song.

  Bards for my own land only I invoke,
  (For the war the war is over, the field is clear'd,)
  Till they strike up marches henceforth triumphant and onward,
  To cheer O Mother your boundless expectant soul.

  Bards of the great Idea! bards of the peaceful inventions! (for the
      war, the war is over!)
  Yet bards of latent armies, a million soldiers waiting ever-ready,
  Bards with songs as from burning coals or the lightning's fork'd stripes!
  Ample Ohio's, Kanada's bards--bards of California! inland bards--
      bards of the war!
  You by my charm I invoke.




Reversals

  Let that which stood in front go behind,
  Let that which was behind advance to the front,
  Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions,
  Let the old propositions be postponed,
  Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself,
  Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself




BOOK XXIV.  AUTUMN RIVULETS


As Consequent, Etc.

  As consequent from store of summer rains,
  Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
  Or many a herb-lined brook's reticulations,
  Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
  Songs of continued years I sing.

  Life's ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend,
  With the old streams of death.)

  Some threading Ohio's farm-fields or the woods,
  Some down Colorado's canons from sources of perpetual snow,
  Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,
  Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa,
  Some to Atlantica's bays, and so to the great salt brine.

  In you whoe'er you are my book perusing,
  In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,
  All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

  Currents for starting a continent new,
  Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,
  Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves,
  (Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous'd and ominous too,
  Out of the depths the storm's abysmic waves, who knows whence?
  Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter'd sail.)

  Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring,
  A windrow-drift of weeds and shells.

  O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless,
  Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held,
  Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity's music faint and far,
  Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim, strains for the soul of
      the prairies,
  Whisper'd reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously sounding,
  Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable,
  Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,
  (For not my life and years alone I give--all, all I give,)
  These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry,
  Wash'd on America's shores?




The Return of the Heroes

       1
  For the lands and for these passionate days and for myself,
  Now I awhile retire to thee O soil of autumn fields,
  Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee,
  Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,
  Turning a verse for thee.

  O earth that hast no voice, confide to me a voice,
  O harvest of my lands--O boundless summer growths,
  O lavish brown parturient earth--O infinite teeming womb,
  A song to narrate thee.

       2
  Ever upon this stage,
  Is acted God's calm annual drama,
  Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,
  Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,
  The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves,
  The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,
  The liliput countless armies of the grass,
  The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages,
  The scenery of the snows, the winds' free orchestra,
  The stretching light-hung roof of clouds, the clear cerulean and the
      silvery fringes,
  The high-dilating stars, the placid beckoning stars,
  The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows,
  The shows of all the varied lands and all the growths and products.

       3
  Fecund America--today,
  Thou art all over set in births and joys!
  Thou groan'st with riches, thy wealth clothes thee as a swathing-garment,
  Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions,
  A myriad-twining life like interlacing vines binds all thy vast demesne,
  As some huge ship freighted to water's edge thou ridest into port,
  As rain falls from the heaven and vapors rise from earth, so have
      the precious values fallen upon thee and risen out of thee;
  Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle!
  Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty,
  Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,
  Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle and lookest out upon
      thy world, and lookest East and lookest West,
  Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles, a million
      farms, and missest nothing,
  Thou all-acceptress--thou hospitable, (thou only art hospitable as
      God is hospitable.)

       4
  When late I sang sad was my voice,
  Sad were the shows around me with deafening noises of hatred and
      smoke of war;
  In the midst of the conflict, the heroes, I stood,
  Or pass'd with slow step through the wounded and dying.

  But now I sing not war,
  Nor the measur'd march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps,
  Nor the regiments hastily coming up deploying in line of battle;
  No more the sad, unnatural shows of war.

  Ask'd room those flush'd immortal ranks, the first forth-stepping armies?
  Ask room alas the ghastly ranks, the armies dread that follow'd.

  (Pass, pass, ye proud brigades, with your tramping sinewy legs,
  With your shoulders young and strong, with your knapsacks and your muskets;
  How elate I stood and watch'd you, where starting off you march'd.

  Pass--then rattle drums again,
  For an army heaves in sight, O another gathering army,
  Swarming, trailing on the rear, O you dread accruing army,
  O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea, with your fever,
  O my land's maim'd darlings, with the plenteous bloody bandage and
      the crutch,
  Lo, your pallid army follows.)

       5
  But on these days of brightness,
  On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes the
      high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and barns,
  Should the dead intrude?

  Ah the dead to me mar not, they fit well in Nature,
  They fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass,
  And along the edge of the sky in the horizon's far margin.

  Nor do I forget you Departed,
  Nor in winter or summer my lost ones,
  But most in the open air as now when my soul is rapt and at peace,
      like pleasing phantoms,
  Your memories rising glide silently by me.

       6
  I saw the day the return of the heroes,
  (Yet the heroes never surpass'd shall never return,
  Them that day I saw not.)

  I saw the interminable corps, I saw the processions of armies,
  I saw them approaching, defiling by with divisions,
  Streaming northward, their work done, camping awhile in clusters of
      mighty camps.

  No holiday soldiers--youthful, yet veterans,
  Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and workshop,
  Harden'd of many a long campaign and sweaty march,
  Inured on many a hard-fought bloody field.

  A pause--the armies wait,
  A million flush'd embattled conquerors wait,
  The world too waits, then soft as breaking night and sure as dawn,
  They melt, they disappear.

  Exult O lands! victorious lands!
  Not there your victory on those red shuddering fields,
  But here and hence your victory.

  Melt, melt away ye armies--disperse ye blue-clad soldiers,
  Resolve ye back again, give up for good your deadly arms,
  Other the arms the fields henceforth for you, or South or North,
  With saner wars, sweet wars, life-giving wars.

       7
  Loud O my throat, and clear O soul!
  The season of thanks and the voice of full-yielding,
  The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.

  All till'd and untill'd fields expand before me,
  I see the true arenas of my race, or first or last,
  Man's innocent and strong arenas.

  I see the heroes at other toils,
  I see well-wielded in their hands the better weapons.

  I see where the Mother of All,
  With full-spanning eye gazes forth, dwells long,
  And counts the varied gathering of the products.

  Busy the far, the sunlit panorama,
  Prairie, orchard, and yellow grain of the North,
  Cotton and rice of the South and Louisianian cane,
  Open unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy,
  Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine,
  And many a stately river flowing and many a jocund brook,
  And healthy uplands with herby-perfumed breezes,
  And the good green grass, that delicate miracle the ever-recurring grass.

       8
  Toil on heroes! harvest the products!
  Not alone on those warlike fields the Mother of All,
  With dilated form and lambent eyes watch'd you.

  Toil on heroes! toil well! handle the weapons well!
  The Mother of All, yet here as ever she watches you.

  Well-pleased America thou beholdest,
  Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters,
  The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements;
  Beholdest moving in every direction imbued as with life the
      revolving hay-rakes,
  The steam-power reaping-machines and the horse-power machines
  The engines, thrashers of grain and cleaners of grain, well
      separating the straw, the nimble work of the patent pitchfork,
  Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin, and the
      rice-cleanser.

  Beneath thy look O Maternal,
  With these and else and with their own strong hands the heroes harvest.

  All gather and all harvest,
  Yet but for thee O Powerful, not a scythe might swing as now in security,
  Not a maize-stalk dangle as now its silken tassels in peace.

  Under thee only they harvest, even but a wisp of hay under thy great
      face only,
  Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every barbed spear
      under thee,
  Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, each ear in its
      light-green sheath,
  Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil barns,
  Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, to theirs;
  Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama, dig and hoard the
      golden the sweet potato of Georgia and the Carolinas,
  Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania,
  Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp or tobacco in the Borders,
  Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees or bunches
      of grapes from the vines,
  Or aught that ripens in all these States or North or South,
  Under the beaming sun and under thee.




There Was a Child Went Forth

  There was a child went forth every day,
  And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,
  And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
  Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

  The early lilacs became part of this child,
  And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
      clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
  And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the
      mare's foal and the cow's calf,
  And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side,
  And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the
      beautiful curious liquid,
  And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him.

  The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him,
  Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn, and the
      esculent roots of the garden,
  And the apple-trees cover'd with blossoms and the fruit afterward,
      and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road,
  And the old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the
      tavern whence he had lately risen,
  And the schoolmistress that pass'd on her way to the school,
  And the friendly boys that pass'd, and the quarrelsome boys,
  And the tidy and fresh-cheek'd girls, and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
  And all the changes of city and country wherever he went.

  His own parents, he that had father'd him and she that had conceiv'd
      him in her womb and birth'd him,
  They gave this child more of themselves than that,
  They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.

  The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table,
  The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome
      odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by,
  The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust,
  The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
  The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the
      yearning and swelling heart,
  Affection that will not be gainsay'd, the sense of what is real, the
      thought if after all it should prove unreal,
  The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious
      whether and how,
  Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
  Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes
      and specks what are they?
  The streets themselves and the facades of houses, and goods in the windows,
  Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank'd wharves, the huge crossing at
      the ferries,
  The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river between,
  Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of
      white or brown two miles off,
  The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little
      boat slack-tow'd astern,
  The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
  The strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away
      solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
  The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh
      and shore mud,
  These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who
      now goes, and will always go forth every day.




Old Ireland

  Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
  Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother,
  Once a queen, now lean and tatter'd seated on the ground,
  Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders,
  At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,
  Long silent, she too long silent, mourning her shrouded hope and heir,
  Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love.

  Yet a word ancient mother,
  You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with forehead
      between your knees,
  O you need not sit there veil'd in your old white hair so dishevel'd,
  For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave,
  It was an illusion, the son you love was not really dead,
  The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another country,
  Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave,
  What you wept for was translated, pass'd from the grave,
  The winds favor'd and the sea sail'd it,
  And now with rosy and new blood,
  Moves to-day in a new country.




The City Dead-House

  By the city dead-house by the gate,
  As idly sauntering wending my way from the clangor,
  I curious pause, for lo, an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought,
  Her corpse they deposit unclaim'd, it lies on the damp brick pavement,
  The divine woman, her body, I see the body, I look on it alone,
  That house once full of passion and beauty, all else I notice not,
  Nor stillness so cold, nor running water from faucet, nor odors
      morbific impress me,
  But the house alone--that wondrous house--that delicate fair house
      --that ruin!
  That immortal house more than all the rows of dwellings ever built!
  Or white-domed capitol with majestic figure surmounted, or all the
      old high-spired cathedrals,
  That little house alone more than them all--poor, desperate house!
  Fair, fearful wreck--tenement of a soul--itself a soul,
  Unclaim'd, avoided house--take one breath from my tremulous lips,
  Take one tear dropt aside as I go for thought of you,
  Dead house of love--house of madness and sin, crumbled, crush'd,
  House of life, erewhile talking and laughing--but ah, poor house,
      dead even then,
  Months, years, an echoing, garnish'd house--but dead, dead, dead.




This Compost

       1
  Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
  I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
  I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
  I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
  I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

  O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
  How can you be alive you growths of spring?
  How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
  Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
  Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

  Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
  Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
  Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
  I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
  I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through
      the sod and turn it up underneath,
  I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

       2
  Behold this compost! behold it well!
  Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person--yet behold!
  The grass of spring covers the prairies,
  The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
  The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
  The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
  The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
  The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
  The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on
      their nests,
  The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
  The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the
      colt from the mare,
  Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
  Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in
      the dooryards,
  The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
      of sour dead.

  What chemistry!
  That the winds are really not infectious,
  That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which
      is so amorous after me,
  That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
  That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited
      themselves in it,
  That all is clean forever and forever,
  That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
  That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
  That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that
      melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
  That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
  Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once
      catching disease.

  Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
  It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
  It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
      successions of diseas'd corpses,
  It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
  It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
  It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
      from them at last.




To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire

  Courage yet, my brother or my sister!
  Keep on--Liberty is to be subserv'd whatever occurs;
  That is nothing that is quell'd by one or two failures, or any
      number of failures,
  Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any
      unfaithfulness,
  Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.

  What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,
  Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is
      positive and composed, knows no discouragement,
  Waiting patiently, waiting its time.

  (Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
  But songs of insurrection also,
  For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over,
  And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
  And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.)

  The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat,
  The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
  The prison, scaffold, garrote, handcuffs, iron necklace and
      leadballs do their work,
  The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
  The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands,
  The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their own blood,
  The young men droop their eyelashes toward the ground when they meet;
  But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the
      infidel enter'd into full possession.

  When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the
      second or third to go,
  It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

  When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,
  And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged
      from any part of the earth,
  Then only shall liberty or the idea of liberty be discharged from
      that part of the earth,
  And the infidel come into full possession.

  Then courage European revolter, revoltress!
  For till all ceases neither must you cease.

  I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself,
      nor what any thing is for,)
  But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd,
  In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment--for they too are great.

  Did we think victory great?
  So it is--but now it seems to me, when it cannot be help'd, that
      defeat is great,
  And that death and dismay are great.




Unnamed Land

  Nations ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten
      thousand years before these States,
  Garner'd clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and
      travel'd their course and pass'd on,
  What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes
      and nomads,
  What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,
  What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,
  What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology,
  What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death
      and the soul,
  Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and
      undevelop'd,
  Not a mark, not a record remains--and yet all remains.

  O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more
      than we are for nothing,
  I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much
      as we now belong to it.

  Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,
  Some with oval countenances learn'd and calm,
  Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects,
  Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
  Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,
      laboring, reaping, filling barns,
  Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
      libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.
  Are those billions of men really gone?
  Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
  Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?
  Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves?

  I believe of all those men and women that fill'd the unnamed lands,
      every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible to us.
  In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out of
      what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn'd, in life.

  I believe that was not the end of those nations or any person of
      them, any more than this shall be the end of my nation, or of me;
  Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products,
      games, wars, manners, crimes, prisons, slaves, heroes, poets,
  I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen world,
      counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world,
  I suspect I shall meet them there,
  I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed lands.




Song of Prudence

  Manhattan's streets I saunter'd pondering,
  On Time, Space, Reality--on such as these, and abreast with them Prudence.

  The last explanation always remains to be made about prudence,
  Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that
      suits immortality.

  The soul is of itself,
  All verges to it, all has reference to what ensues,
  All that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence,
  Not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in a day,
      month, any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of death,
  But the same affects him or her onward afterward through the
      indirect lifetime.

  The indirect is just as much as the direct,
  The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the
      body, if not more.

  Not one word or deed, not venereal sore, discoloration, privacy of
      the onanist,
  Putridity of gluttons or rum-drinkers, peculation, cunning,
      betrayal, murder, seduction, prostitution,
  But has results beyond death as really as before death.

  Charity and personal force are the only investments worth any thing.

  No specification is necessary, all that a male or female does, that
      is vigorous, benevolent, clean, is so much profit to him or her,
  In the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope
      of it forever.

  Who has been wise receives interest,
  Savage, felon, President, judge, farmer, sailor, mechanic, literat,
      young, old, it is the same,
  The interest will come round--all will come round.

  Singly, wholly, to affect now, affected their time, will forever affect,
      all of the past and all of the present and all of the future,
  All the brave actions of war and peace,
  All help given to relatives, strangers, the poor, old, sorrowful,
      young children, widows, the sick, and to shunn'd persons,
  All self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw
      others fill the seats of the boats,
  All offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a
      friend's sake, or opinion's sake,
  All pains of enthusiasts scoff'd at by their neighbors,
  All the limitless sweet love and precious suffering of mothers,
  All honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded,
  All the grandeur and good of ancient nations whose fragments we inherit,
  All the good of the dozens of ancient nations unknown to us by name,
      date, location,
  All that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no,
  All suggestions of the divine mind of man or the divinity of his
      mouth, or the shaping of his great hands,
  All that is well thought or said this day on any part of the globe,
      or on any of the wandering stars, or on any of the fix'd stars,
      by those there as we are here,
  All that is henceforth to be thought or done by you whoever you are,
      or by any one,
  These inure, have inured, shall inure, to the identities from which
      they sprang, or shall spring.

  Did you guess any thing lived only its moment?
  The world does not so exist, no parts palpable or impalpable so exist,
  No consummation exists without being from some long previous
      consummation, and that from some other,
  Without the farthest conceivable one coming a bit nearer the
      beginning than any.

  Whatever satisfies souls is true;
  Prudence entirely satisfies the craving and glut of souls,
  Itself only finally satisfies the soul,
  The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson
      but its own.

  Now I breathe the word of the prudence that walks abreast with time,
      space, reality,
  That answers the pride which refuses every lesson but its own.

  What is prudence is indivisible,
  Declines to separate one part of life from every part,
  Divides not the righteous from the unrighteous or the living from the dead,
  Matches every thought or act by its correlative,
  Knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement,
  Knows that the young man who composedly peril'd his life and lost it
      has done exceedingly well for himself without doubt,
  That he who never peril'd his life, but retains it to old age in
      riches and ease, has probably achiev'd nothing for himself worth
      mentioning,
  Knows that only that person has really learn'd who has learn'd to
      prefer results,
  Who favors body and soul the same,
  Who perceives the indirect assuredly following the direct,
  Who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries nor
      avoids death.




The Singer in the Prison

          O sight of pity, shame and dole!
          O fearful thought--a convict soul.

       1
  Rang the refrain along the hall, the prison,
  Rose to the roof, the vaults of heaven above,
  Pouring in floods of melody in tones so pensive sweet and strong the
      like whereof was never heard,
  Reaching the far-off sentry and the armed guards, who ceas'd their pacing,
  Making the hearer's pulses stop for ecstasy and awe.

       2
  The sun was low in the west one winter day,
  When down a narrow aisle amid the thieves and outlaws of the land,
  (There by the hundreds seated, sear-faced murderers, wily counterfeiters,
  Gather'd to Sunday church in prison walls, the keepers round,
  Plenteous, well-armed, watching with vigilant eyes,)
  Calmly a lady walk'd holding a little innocent child by either hand,
  Whom seating on their stools beside her on the platform,
  She, first preluding with the instrument a low and musical prelude,
  In voice surpassing all, sang forth a quaint old hymn.

       A soul confined by bars and bands,
       Cries, help! O help! and wrings her hands,
       Blinded her eyes, bleeding her breast,
       Nor pardon finds, nor balm of rest.

       Ceaseless she paces to and fro,
       O heart-sick days! O nights of woe!
       Nor hand of friend, nor loving face,
       Nor favor comes, nor word of grace.

       It was not I that sinn'd the sin,
       The ruthless body dragg'd me in;
       Though long I strove courageously,
       The body was too much for me.

       Dear prison'd soul bear up a space,
       For soon or late the certain grace;
       To set thee free and bear thee home,
       The heavenly pardoner death shall come.

          Convict no more, nor shame, nor dole!
          Depart--a God-enfranchis'd soul!

       3
  The singer ceas'd,
  One glance swept from her clear calm eyes o'er all those upturn'd faces,
  Strange sea of prison faces, a thousand varied, crafty, brutal,
      seam'd and beauteous faces,
  Then rising, passing back along the narrow aisle between them,
  While her gown touch'd them rustling in the silence,
  She vanish'd with her children in the dusk.

  While upon all, convicts and armed keepers ere they stirr'd,
  (Convict forgetting prison, keeper his loaded pistol,)
  A hush and pause fell down a wondrous minute,
  With deep half-stifled sobs and sound of bad men bow'd and moved to weeping,
  And youth's convulsive breathings, memories of home,
  The mother's voice in lullaby, the sister's care, the happy childhood,
  The long-pent spirit rous'd to reminiscence;
  A wondrous minute then--but after in the solitary night, to many,
      many there,
  Years after, even in the hour of death, the sad refrain, the tune,
      the voice, the words,
  Resumed, the large calm lady walks the narrow aisle,
  The wailing melody again, the singer in the prison sings,

       O sight of pity, shame and dole!
       O fearful thought--a convict soul.




Warble for Lilac-Time

  Warble me now for joy of lilac-time, (returning in reminiscence,)
  Sort me O tongue and lips for Nature's sake, souvenirs of earliest summer,
  Gather the welcome signs, (as children with pebbles or stringing shells,)
  Put in April and May, the hylas croaking in the ponds, the elastic air,
  Bees, butterflies, the sparrow with its simple notes,
  Blue-bird and darting swallow, nor forget the high-hole flashing his
      golden wings,
  The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor,
  Shimmer of waters with fish in them, the cerulean above,
  All that is jocund and sparkling, the brooks running,
  The maple woods, the crisp February days and the sugar-making,
  The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted,
  With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,
  Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building the nest
      of his mate,
  The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its yellow-green sprouts,
  For spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is this in it
      and from it?
  Thou, soul, unloosen'd--the restlessness after I know not what;
  Come, let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away!
  O if one could but fly like a bird!
  O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship!
  To glide with thee O soul, o'er all, in all, as a ship o'er the waters;
  Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the grass, the
      morning drops of dew,
  The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves,
  Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called innocence,
  Samples and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their atmosphere,
  To grace the bush I love--to sing with the birds,
  A warble for joy of returning in reminiscence.




Outlines for a Tomb [G. P., Buried 1870]

       1
  What may we chant, O thou within this tomb?
  What tablets, outlines, hang for thee, O millionnaire?
  The life thou lived'st we know not,
  But that thou walk'dst thy years in barter, 'mid the haunts of
      brokers,
  Nor heroism thine, nor war, nor glory.

       2
  Silent, my soul,
  With drooping lids, as waiting, ponder'd,
  Turning from all the samples, monuments of heroes.

  While through the interior vistas,
  Noiseless uprose, phantasmic, (as by night Auroras of the north,)
  Lambent tableaus, prophetic, bodiless scenes,
  Spiritual projections.

  In one, among the city streets a laborer's home appear'd,
  After his day's work done, cleanly, sweet-air'd, the gaslight burning,
  The carpet swept and a fire in the cheerful stove.

  In one, the sacred parturition scene,
  A happy painless mother birth'd a perfect child.

  In one, at a bounteous morning meal,
  Sat peaceful parents with contented sons.

  In one, by twos and threes, young people,
  Hundreds concentring, walk'd the paths and streets and roads,
  Toward a tall-domed school.

  In one a trio beautiful,
  Grandmother, loving daughter, loving daughter's daughter, sat,
  Chatting and sewing.

  In one, along a suite of noble rooms,
  'Mid plenteous books and journals, paintings on the walls, fine statuettes,
  Were groups of friendly journeymen, mechanics young and old,
  Reading, conversing.

  All, all the shows of laboring life,
  City and country, women's, men's and children's,
  Their wants provided for, hued in the sun and tinged for once with joy,
  Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-room,
  Labor and toll, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college,
  The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught,
  The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father'd and mother'd,
  The hungry fed, the houseless housed;
  (The intentions perfect and divine,
  The workings, details, haply human.)

       3
  O thou within this tomb,
  From thee such scenes, thou stintless, lavish giver,
  Tallying the gifts of earth, large as the earth,
  Thy name an earth, with mountains, fields and tides.

  Nor by your streams alone, you rivers,
  By you, your banks Connecticut,
  By you and all your teeming life old Thames,
  By you Potomac laving the ground Washington trod, by you Patapsco,
  You Hudson, you endless Mississippi--nor you alone,
  But to the high seas launch, my thought, his memory.




Out from Behind This Mask [To Confront a Portrait]

       1
  Out from behind this bending rough-cut mask,
  These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,
  This common curtain of the face contain'd in me for me, in you for
      you, in each for each,
  (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears--0 heaven!
  The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)
  This glaze of God's serenest purest sky,
  This film of Satan's seething pit,
  This heart's geography's map, this limitless small continent, this
      soundless sea;
  Out from the convolutions of this globe,
  This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus, Mars,
  This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe,
  Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;)
  These burin'd eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time,
  To launch and spin through space revolving sideling, from these to emanate,
  To you whoe'er you are--a look.

       2
  A traveler of thoughts and years, of peace and war,
  Of youth long sped and middle age declining,
  (As the first volume of a tale perused and laid away, and this the second,
  Songs, ventures, speculations, presently to close,)
  Lingering a moment here and now, to you I opposite turn,
  As on the road or at some crevice door by chance, or open'd window,
  Pausing, inclining, baring my head, you specially I greet,
  To draw and clinch your soul for once inseparably with mine,
  Then travel travel on.




Vocalism

       1
  Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine
      power to speak words;
  Are you full-lung'd and limber-lipp'd from long trial? from vigorous
      practice? from physique?
  Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?
  Come duly to the divine power to speak words?
  For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship,
      procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
  After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
  After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,
      after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
  After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing
      obstructions,
  After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man,
      woman, the divine power to speak words;
  Then toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten all--none
      refuse, all attend,
  Armies, ships, antiquities, libraries, paintings, machines, cities,
      hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form in
      close ranks,
  They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the
      mouth of that man or that woman.

       2
  O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?
  Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow,
  As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere
      around the globe.

  All waits for the right voices;
  Where is the practis'd and perfect organ? where is the develop'd soul?
  For I see every word utter'd thence has deeper, sweeter, new sounds,
      impossible on less terms.

  I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples unstruck,
  Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose,
  Until that comes which has the quality to bring forth what lies
      slumbering forever ready in all words.




To Him That Was Crucified

  My spirit to yours dear brother,
  Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you,
  I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
  I specify you with joy O my comrade to salute you, and to salute
      those who are with you, before and since, and those to come also,
  That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession,
  We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
  We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,
  Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
  We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the
      disputers nor any thing that is asserted,
  We hear the bawling and din, we are reach'd at by divisions,
      jealousies, recriminations on every side,
  They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade,
  Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and
      down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,
  Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races,
      ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.




You Felons on Trial in Courts

  You felons on trial in courts,
  You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain'd and
      handcuff'd with iron,
  Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison?
  Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain'd with
      iron, or my ankles with iron?

  You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs or obscene in your rooms,
  Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself?

  O culpable! I acknowledge--I expose!
  (O admirers, praise not me--compliment not me--you make me wince,
  I see what you do not--I know what you do not.)

  Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch'd and choked,
  Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell's tides continually run,
  Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,
  I walk with delinquents with passionate love,
  I feel I am of them--I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself,
  And henceforth I will not deny them--for how can I deny myself?




Laws for Creations

  Laws for creations,
  For strong artists and leaders, for fresh broods of teachers and
      perfect literats for America,
  For noble savans and coming musicians.
  All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
      compact truth of the world,
  There shall be no subject too pronounced--all works shall illustrate
      the divine law of indirections.

  What do you suppose creation is?
  What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and
      own no superior?
  What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but
      that man or woman is as good as God?
  And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
  And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
  And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?




To a Common Prostitute

  Be composed--be at ease with me--I am Walt Whitman, liberal and
      lusty as Nature,
  Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
  Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to
      rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

  My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you
      make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
  And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

  Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.




I Was Looking a Long While

  I was looking a long while for Intentions,
  For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for these
      chants--and now I have found it,
  It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither
      accept nor reject,)
  It is no more in the legends than in all else,
  It is in the present--it is this earth to-day,
  It is in Democracy--(the purport and aim of all the past,)
  It is the life of one man or one woman to-day--the average man of to-day,
  It is in languages, social customs, literatures, arts,
  It is in the broad show of artificial things, ships, machinery,
      politics, creeds, modern improvements, and the interchange of nations,
  All for the modern--all for the average man of to-day.




Thought

  Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth,
      scholarships, and the like;
  (To me all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
      except as it results to their bodies and souls,
  So that often to me they appear gaunt and naked,
  And often to me each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself,
  And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the
      rotten excrement of maggots,
  And often to me those men and women pass unwittingly the true
      realities of life, and go toward false realities,
  And often to me they are alive after what custom has served them,
      but nothing more,
  And often to me they are sad, hasty, unwaked sonnambules walking the dusk.)




Miracles

  Why, who makes much of a miracle?
  As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
  Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
  Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
  Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
  Or stand under trees in the woods,
  Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
      with any one I love,
  Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
  Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
  Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
  Or animals feeding in the fields,
  Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
  Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
      and bright,
  Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
  These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
  The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

  To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
  Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
  Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
  Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
  To me the sea is a continual miracle,
  The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the
      ships with men in them,
  What stranger miracles are there?




Sparkles from the Wheel

  Where the city's ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day,
  Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with them.

  By the curb toward the edge of the flagging,
  A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife,
  Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee,
  With measur'd tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but
      firm hand,
  Forth issue then in copious golden jets,
  Sparkles from the wheel.

  The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,
  The sad sharp-chinn'd old man with worn clothes and broad
      shoulder-band of leather,
  Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here
      absorb'd and arrested,
  The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,)
  The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets,
  The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press'd blade,
  Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
  Sparkles from the wheel.




To a Pupil

  Is reform needed? is it through you?
  The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you need
      to accomplish it.

  You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood,
      complexion, clean and sweet?
  Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and soul that
      when you enter the crowd an atmosphere of desire and command
      enters with you, and every one is impress'd with your Personality?

  O the magnet! the flesh over and over!
  Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to
      inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,
      elevatedness,
  Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.




Unfolded out of the Folds

  Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded, and is
      always to come unfolded,
  Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to come the
      superbest man of the earth,
  Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest man,
  Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be
      form'd of perfect body,
  Unfolded only out of the inimitable poems of woman can come the
      poems of man, (only thence have my poems come;)
  Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only thence
      can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,
  Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman
      love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man,
  Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain come all the folds
      of the man's brain, duly obedient,
  Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded,
  Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;
  A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity, but
      every of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman;
  First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.




What Am I After All

  What am I after all but a child, pleas'd with the sound of my own
      name? repeating it over and over;
  I stand apart to hear--it never tires me.

  To you your name also;
  Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in
      the sound of your name?




Kosmos

  Who includes diversity and is Nature,
  Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of
      the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,
  Who has not look'd forth from the windows the eyes for nothing,
      or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,
  Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover,
  Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,
      spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual,
  Who having consider'd the body finds all its organs and parts good,
  Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body
      understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
  The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;
  Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in
      other globes with their suns and moons,
  Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day
      but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
  The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.




Others May Praise What They Like

  Others may praise what they like;
  But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing in art
      or aught else,
  Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river, also the
      western prairie-scent,
  And exudes it all again.




Who Learns My Lesson Complete?

  Who learns my lesson complete?
  Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist,
  The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and offspring, merchant,
      clerk, porter and customer,
  Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy--draw nigh and commence;
  It is no lesson--it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
  And that to another, and every one to another still.

  The great laws take and effuse without argument,
  I am of the same style, for I am their friend,
  I love them quits and quits, I do not halt and make salaams.

  I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and the reasons
      of things,
  They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.

  I cannot say to any person what I hear--I cannot say it to myself--
      it is very wonderful.

  It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe moving so
      exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt or
      the untruth of a single second,
  I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years,
      nor ten billions of years,
  Nor plann'd and built one thing after another as an architect plans
      and builds a house.

  I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,
  Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,
  Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

  Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal;
  I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and
      how I was conceived in my mother's womb is equally wonderful,
  And pass'd from a babe in the creeping trance of a couple of
      summers and winters to articulate and walk--all this is
      equally wonderful.

  And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other
      without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see
      each other, is every bit as wonderful.

  And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as wonderful,
  And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them to
      be true, is just as wonderful.

  And that the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth, is
      equally wonderful,
  And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally
      wonderful.




Tests

  All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable to
      analysis in the soul,
  Not traditions, not the outer authorities are the judges,
  They are the judges of outer authorities and of all traditions,
  They corroborate as they go only whatever corroborates themselves,
      and touches themselves;
  For all that, they have it forever in themselves to corroborate far
      and near without one exception.




The Torch

  On my Northwest coast in the midst of the night a fishermen's group
      stands watching,
  Out on the lake that expands before them, others are spearing salmon,
  The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water,
  Bearing a torch ablaze at the prow.




O Star of France [1870-71]

  O star of France,
  The brightness of thy hope and strength and fame,
  Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long,
  Beseems to-day a wreck driven by the gale, a mastless hulk,
  And 'mid its teeming madden'd half-drown'd crowds,
  Nor helm nor helmsman.

  Dim smitten star,
  Orb not of France alone, pale symbol of my soul, its dearest hopes,
  The struggle and the daring, rage divine for liberty,
  Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast's dreams of brotherhood,
  Of terror to the tyrant and the priest.

  Star crucified--by traitors sold,
  Star panting o'er a land of death, heroic land,
  Strange, passionate, mocking, frivolous land.

  Miserable! yet for thy errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke thee,
  Thy unexampled woes and pangs have quell'd them all,
  And left thee sacred.

  In that amid thy many faults thou ever aimedst highly,
  In that thou wouldst not really sell thyself however great the price,
  In that thou surely wakedst weeping from thy drugg'd sleep,
  In that alone among thy sisters thou, giantess, didst rend the ones
      that shamed thee,
  In that thou couldst not, wouldst not, wear the usual chains,
  This cross, thy livid face, thy pierced hands and feet,
  The spear thrust in thy side.

  O star! O ship of France, beat back and baffled long!
  Bear up O smitten orb! O ship continue on!

  Sure as the ship of all, the Earth itself,
  Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos,
  Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons,
  Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty,
  Onward beneath the sun following its course,
  So thee O ship of France!

  Finish'd the days, the clouds dispel'd
  The travail o'er, the long-sought extrication,
  When lo! reborn, high o'er the European world,
  (In gladness answering thence, as face afar to face, reflecting ours
      Columbia,)
  Again thy star O France, fair lustrous star,
  In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever,
  Shall beam immortal.




The Ox-Tamer

  In a far-away northern county in the placid pastoral region,
  Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous tamer of oxen,
  There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to
      break them,
  He will take the wildest steer in the world and break him and tame him,
  He will go fearless without any whip where the young bullock
      chafes up and down the yard,
  The bullock's head tosses restless high in the air with raging eyes,
  Yet see you! how soon his rage subsides--how soon this tamer tames him;
  See you! on the farms hereabout a hundred oxen young and old,
      and he is the man who has tamed them,
  They all know him, all are affectionate to him;
  See you! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking;
  Some are buff-color'd, some mottled, one has a white line running
      along his back, some are brindled,
  Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)--see you! the bright hides,
  See, the two with stars on their foreheads--see, the round bodies
      and broad backs,
  How straight and square they stand on their legs--what fine sagacious eyes!
  How straight they watch their tamer--they wish him near them--how
      they turn to look after him!
  What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves away from them;
  Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,
      poems, depart--all else departs,)
  I confess I envy only his fascination--my silent, illiterate friend,
  Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
  In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.




An Old Man's Thought of School
  [For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874]

  An old man's thought of school,
  An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot.

  Now only do I know you,
  O fair auroral skies--O morning dew upon the grass!

  And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
  These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
  Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
  Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
  On the soul's voyage.

  Only a lot of boys and girls?
  Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
  Only a public school?

  Ah more, infinitely more;
  (As George Fox rais'd his warning cry, "Is it this pile of brick and
      mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the church?
  Why this is not the church at all--the church is living, ever living
      souls.")

  And you America,
  Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
  The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?
  To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.




Wandering at Morn

  Wandering at morn,
  Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
  Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!
  Thee coil'd in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
      with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
  This common marvel I beheld--the parent thrush I watch'd feeding its young,
  The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
  Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

  There ponder'd, felt I,
  If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn'd,
  If vermin so transposed, so used and bless'd may be,
  Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
  Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?
  From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
  Destin'd to fill the world.




Italian Music in Dakota
  ["The Seventeenth--the finest Regimental Band I ever heard."]

  Through the soft evening air enwinding all,
  Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
  In dulcet streams, in flutes' and cornets' notes,
  Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
  (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,
  Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
  Not to the city's fresco'd rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,
  Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
  Sonnambula's innocent love, trios with Norma's anguish,
  And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)
  Ray'd in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
  Music, Italian music in Dakota.

  While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl'd realm,
  Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
  Acknowledging rapport however far remov'd,
  (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
  Listens well pleas'd.




With All Thy Gifts

  With all thy gifts America,
  Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,
  Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee--with these and like of
      these vouchsafed to thee,
  What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)
  The gift of perfect women fit for thee--what if that gift of gifts
      thou lackest?
  The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?
  The mothers fit for thee?




My Picture-Gallery

  In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix'd house,
  It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;
  Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories!
  Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;
  Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,
  With finger rais'd he points to the prodigal pictures.




The Prairie States

  A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude,
  Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,
  With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,
  By all the world contributed--freedom's and law's and thrift's society,
  The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time's accumulations,
  To justify the past.




BOOK XXV


Proud Music of the Storm

       1
  Proud music of the storm,
  Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
  Strong hum of forest tree-tops--wind of the mountains,
  Personified dim shapes--you hidden orchestras,
  You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,
  Blending with Nature's rhythmus all the tongues of nations;
  You chords left as by vast composers--you choruses,
  You formless, free, religious dances--you from the Orient,
  You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts,
  You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry,
  Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls,
  Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless,
  Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz'd me?


      2
  Come forward O my soul, and let the rest retire,
  Listen, lose not, it is toward thee they tend,
  Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber,
  For thee they sing and dance O soul.

  A festival song,
  The duet of the bridegroom and the bride, a marriage-march,
  With lips of love, and hearts of lovers fill'd to the brim with love,
  The red-flush'd cheeks and perfumes, the cortege swarming full of
      friendly faces young and old,
  To flutes' clear notes and sounding harps' cantabile.

  Now loud approaching drums,
  Victoria! seest thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying?
      the rout of the baffled?
  Hearest those shouts of a conquering army?

  (Ah soul, the sobs of women, the wounded groaning in agony,
  The hiss and crackle of flames, the blacken'd ruins, the embers of cities,
  The dirge and desolation of mankind.)

  Now airs antique and mediaeval fill me,
  I see and hear old harpers with their harps at Welsh festivals,
  I hear the minnesingers singing their lays of love,
  I hear the minstrels, gleemen, troubadours, of the middle ages.

  Now the great organ sounds,
  Tremulous, while underneath, (as the hid footholds of the earth,
  On which arising rest, and leaping forth depend,
  All shapes of beauty, grace and strength, all hues we know,
  Green blades of grass and warbling birds, children that gambol and
      play, the clouds of heaven above,)
  The strong base stands, and its pulsations intermits not,
  Bathing, supporting, merging all the rest, maternity of all the rest,
  And with it every instrument in multitudes,
  The players playing, all the world's musicians,
  The solemn hymns and masses rousing adoration,
  All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals,
  The measureless sweet vocalists of ages,
  And for their solvent setting earth's own diapason,
  Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves,
  A new composite orchestra, binder of years and climes, ten-fold renewer,
  As of the far-back days the poets tell, the Paradiso,
  The straying thence, the separation long, but now the wandering done,
  The journey done, the journeyman come home,
  And man and art with Nature fused again.

  Tutti! for earth and heaven;
  (The Almighty leader now for once has signal'd with his wand.)

  The manly strophe of the husbands of the world,
  And all the wives responding.

  The tongues of violins,
  (I think O tongues ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself,
  This brooding yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.)

       3
  Ah from a little child,
  Thou knowest soul how to me all sounds became music,
  My mother's voice in lullaby or hymn,
  (The voice, O tender voices, memory's loving voices,
  Last miracle of all, O dearest mother's, sister's, voices;)
  The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav'd corn,
  The measur'd sea-surf beating on the sand,
  The twittering bird, the hawk's sharp scream,
  The wild-fowl's notes at night as flying low migrating north or south,
  The psalm in the country church or mid the clustering trees, the
      open air camp-meeting,
  The fiddler in the tavern, the glee, the long-strung sailor-song,
  The lowing cattle, bleating sheep, the crowing cock at dawn.

  All songs of current lands come sounding round me,
  The German airs of friendship, wine and love,
  Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances, English warbles,
  Chansons of France, Scotch tunes, and o'er the rest,
  Italia's peerless compositions.

  Across the stage with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion,
  Stalks Norma brandishing the dagger in her hand.

  I see poor crazed Lucia's eyes' unnatural gleam,
  Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevel'd.

  I see where Ernani walking the bridal garden,
  Amid the scent of night-roses, radiant, holding his bride by the hand,
  Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn.

  To crossing swords and gray hairs bared to heaven,
  The clear electric base and baritone of the world,
  The trombone duo, Libertad forever!
  From Spanish chestnut trees' dense shade,
  By old and heavy convent walls a wailing song,
  Song of lost love, the torch of youth and life quench'd in despair,
  Song of the dying swan, Fernando's heart is breaking.

  Awaking from her woes at last retriev'd Amina sings,
  Copious as stars and glad as morning light the torrents of her joy.

  (The teeming lady comes,
  The lustrious orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother,
  Sister of loftiest gods, Alboni's self I hear.)

       4
  I hear those odes, symphonies, operas,
  I hear in the William Tell the music of an arous'd and angry people,
  I hear Meyerbeer's Huguenots, the Prophet, or Robert,
  Gounod's Faust, or Mozart's Don Juan.

  I hear the dance-music of all nations,
  The waltz, some delicious measure, lapsing, bathing me in bliss,
  The bolero to tinkling guitars and clattering castanets.

  I see religious dances old and new,
  I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre,
  I see the crusaders marching bearing the cross on high, to the
      martial clang of cymbals,
  I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers'd with frantic
      shouts, as they spin around turning always towards Mecca,
  I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs,
  Again, at Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing,
  I hear them clapping their hands as they bend their bodies,
  I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet.

  I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding
      each other,
  I see the Roman youth to the shrill sound of flageolets throwing and
      catching their weapons,
  As they fall on their knees and rise again.

  I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling,
  I see the worshippers within, nor form nor sermon, argument nor word,
  But silent, strange, devout, rais'd, glowing heads, ecstatic faces.

  I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings,
  The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen,
  The sacred imperial hymns of China,
  To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone,)
  Or to Hindu flutes and the fretting twang of the vina,
  A band of bayaderes.

       5
  Now Asia, Africa leave me, Europe seizing inflates me,
  To organs huge and bands I hear as from vast concourses of voices,
  Luther's strong hymn Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott,
  Rossini's Stabat Mater dolorosa,
  Or floating in some high cathedral dim with gorgeous color'd windows,
  The passionate Agnus Dei or Gloria in Excelsis.

  Composers! mighty maestros!
  And you, sweet singers of old lands, soprani, tenori, bassi!
  To you a new bard caroling in the West,
  Obeisant sends his love.

  (Such led to thee O soul,
  All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee,
  But now it seems to me sound leads o'er all the rest.)

  I hear the annual singing of the children in St. Paul's cathedral,
  Or, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the symphonies,
      oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn,
  The Creation in billows of godhood laves me.

  Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)
  Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
  Endow me with their throbbings, Nature's also,
  The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,
  Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!

       6
  Then I woke softly,
  And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
  And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
  And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
  And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,
  And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
  And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
  I said to my silent curious soul out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
  Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
  Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
  Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
  Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

  And I said, moreover,
  Haply what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
  Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk's flapping wings nor harsh scream,
  Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
  Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers
      of harmonies,
  Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
  Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-calls of camps,
  But to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
  Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night
      air, uncaught, unwritten,
  Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.




BOOK XXVI


Passage to India

       1
  Singing my days,
  Singing the great achievements of the present,
  Singing the strong light works of engineers,
  Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
  In the Old World the east the Suez canal,
  The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,
  The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;
  Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,
  The Past! the Past! the Past!

  The Past--the dark unfathom'd retrospect!
  The teeming gulf--the sleepers and the shadows!
  The past--the infinite greatness of the past!
  For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
  (As a projectile form'd, impell'd, passing a certain line, still keeps on,
  So the present, utterly form'd, impell'd by the past.)

       2
  Passage O soul to India!
  Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.

  Not you alone proud truths of the world,
  Nor you alone ye facts of modern science,
  But myths and fables of eld, Asia's, Africa's fables,
  The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos'd dreams,
  The deep diving bibles and legends,
  The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;
  O you temples fairer than lilies pour'd over by the rising sun!
  O you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known,
      mounting to heaven!
  You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish'd
      with gold!
  Towers of fables immortal fashion'd from mortal dreams!
  You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest!
  You too with joy I sing.

  Passage to India!
  Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
  The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,
  The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
  The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,
  The lands to be welded together.

  A worship new I sing,
  You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
  You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,
  You, not for trade or transportation only,
  But in God's name, and for thy sake O soul.

       3
  Passage to India!
  Lo soul for thee of tableaus twain,
  I see in one the Suez canal initiated, open'd,
  I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Engenie's leading the van,
  I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level
      sand in the distance,
  I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather'd,
  The gigantic dredging machines.

  In one again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,)
  I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier,
  I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying
      freight and passengers,
  I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
  I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,
  I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes,
      the buttes,
  I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless,
      sage-deserts,
  I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great
      mountains, I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch mountains,
  I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle's Nest, I pass the
      Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas,
  I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,
  I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,
  I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines,
  Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold
      enchanting mirages of waters and meadows,
  Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines,
  Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
  Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
  The road between Europe and Asia.

  (Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream!
  Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,
  The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.)

       4
  Passage to India!
  Struggles of many a captain, tales of many a sailor dead,
  Over my mood stealing and spreading they come,
  Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach'd sky.

  Along all history, down the slopes,
  As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the surface rising,
  A ceaseless thought, a varied train--lo, soul, to thee, thy sight,
      they rise,
  The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions;
  Again Vasco de Gama sails forth,
  Again the knowledge gain'd, the mariner's compass,
  Lands found and nations born, thou born America,
  For purpose vast, man's long probation fill'd,
  Thou rondure of the world at last accomplish'd.

       5
  O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
  Cover'd all over with visible power and beauty,
  Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
  Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
  Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,
  With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
  Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.

  Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,
  Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
  Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
  With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
  With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and
      Whither O mocking life?

  Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
  Who Justify these restless explorations?
  Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
  Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
  What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a
      throb to answer ours,
  Cold earth, the place of graves.)

  Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,
  Perhaps even now the time has arrived.

  After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)
  After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,
  After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the
      geologist, ethnologist,
  Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
  The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

  Then not your deeds only O voyagers, O scientists and inventors,
      shall be justified,
  All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth'd,
  All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,
  All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook'd and
      link'd together,
  The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be
      completely Justified,
  Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish'd and compacted by
      the true son of God, the poet,
  (He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains,
  He shall double the cape of Good Hope to some purpose,)
  Nature and Man shall be disjoin'd and diffused no more,
  The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

       6
  Year at whose wide-flung door I sing!
  Year of the purpose accomplish'd!
  Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans!
  (No mere doge of Venice now wedding the Adriatic,)
  I see O year in you the vast terraqueous globe given and giving all,
  Europe to Asia, Africa join'd, and they to the New World,
  The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festival garland,
  As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand.

  Passage to India!
  Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man,
  The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again.

  Lo soul, the retrospect brought forward,
  The old, most populous, wealthiest of earth's lands,
  The streams of the Indus and the Ganges and their many affluents,
  (I my shores of America walking to-day behold, resuming all,)
  The tale of Alexander on his warlike marches suddenly dying,
  On one side China and on the other side Persia and Arabia,
  To the south the great seas and the bay of Bengal,
  The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes,
  Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and junior Buddha,
  Central and southern empires and all their belongings, possessors,
  The wars of Tamerlane,the reign of Aurungzebe,
  The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the
      Arabs, Portuguese,
  The first travelers famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor,
  Doubts to be solv'd, the map incognita, blanks to be fill'd,
  The foot of man unstay'd, the hands never at rest,
  Thyself O soul that will not brook a challenge.

  The mediaeval navigators rise before me,
  The world of 1492, with its awaken'd enterprise,
  Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the earth in spring,
  The sunset splendor of chivalry declining.

  And who art thou sad shade?
  Gigantic, visionary, thyself a visionary,
  With majestic limbs and pious beaming eyes,
  Spreading around with every look of thine a golden world,
  Enhuing it with gorgeous hues.

  As the chief histrion,
  Down to the footlights walks in some great scena,
  Dominating the rest I see the Admiral himself,
  (History's type of courage, action, faith,)
  Behold him sail from Palos leading his little fleet,
  His voyage behold, his return, his great fame,
  His misfortunes, calumniators, behold him a prisoner, chain'd,
  Behold his dejection, poverty, death.

  (Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
  Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
  Lies the seed unreck'd for centuries in the ground? lo, to God's due
      occasion,
  Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,
  And fills the earth with use and beauty.)

       7
  Passage indeed O soul to primal thought,
  Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness,
  The young maturity of brood and bloom,
  To realms of budding bibles.

  O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,
  Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,
  Of man, the voyage of his mind's return,
  To reason's early paradise,
  Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions,
  Again with fair creation.

       8
  O we can wait no longer,
  We too take ship O soul,
  Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
  Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
  Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)
  Caroling free, singing our song of God,
  Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.

  With laugh and many a kiss,
  (Let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse, humiliation,)
  O soul thou pleasest me, I thee.

  Ah more than any priest O soul we too believe in God,
  But with the mystery of God we dare not dally.

  O soul thou pleasest me, I thee,
  Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night,
  Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like waters flowing,
  Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite,
  Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over,
  Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,
  I and my soul to range in range of thee.

  O Thou transcendent,
  Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
  Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
  Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,
  Thou moral, spiritual fountain--affection's source--thou reservoir,
  (O pensive soul of me--O thirst unsatisfied--waitest not there?
  Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?)
  Thou pulse--thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
  That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
  Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
  How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out
      of myself,
  I could not launch, to those, superior universes?

  Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
  At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
  But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
  And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
  Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
  And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.

  Greater than stars or suns,
  Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;
  What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?
  What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours O soul?
  What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?
  What cheerful willingness for others' sake to give up all?
  For others' sake to suffer all?

  Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev'd,
  The seas all cross'd, weather'd the capes, the voyage done,
  Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain'd,
  As fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
  The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

       9
  Passage to more than India!
  Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
  O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?
  Disportest thou on waters such as those?
  Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?
  Then have thy bent unleash'd.

  Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!
  Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!
  You, strew'd with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach'd you.

  Passage to more than India!
  O secret of the earth and sky!
  Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
  Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!
  Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!
  O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!
  O day and night, passage to you!


  O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
  Passage to you!

  Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
  Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

  Cut the hawsers--haul out--shake out every sail!
  Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
  Have we not grovel'd here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
  Have we not darken'd and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

  Sail forth--steer for the deep waters only,
  Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
  For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
  And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

  O my brave soul!
  O farther farther sail!
  O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
  O farther, farther, farther sail!




BOOK XXVII


Prayer of Columbus

  A batter'd, wreck'd old man,
  Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,
  Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,
  Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken'd and nigh to death,
  I take my way along the island's edge,
  Venting a heavy heart.

  I am too full of woe!
  Haply I may not live another day;
  I cannot rest O God, I cannot eat or drink or sleep,
  Till I put forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee,
  Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee, commune with Thee,
  Report myself once more to Thee.

  Thou knowest my years entire, my life,
  My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely;
  Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth,
  Thou knowest my manhood's solemn and visionary meditations,
  Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all to come to Thee,
  Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and strictly kept them,
  Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee,
  In shackles, prison'd, in disgrace, repining not,
  Accepting all from Thee, as duly come from Thee.

  All my emprises have been fill'd with Thee,
  My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,
  Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee;
  Intentions, purports, aspirations mine, leaving results to Thee.

  O I am sure they really came from Thee,
  The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,
  The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,
  A message from the Heavens whispering to me even in sleep,
  These sped me on.

  By me and these the work so far accomplish'd,
  By me earth's elder cloy'd and stifled lands uncloy'd, unloos'd,
  By me the hemispheres rounded and tied, the unknown to the known.

  The end I know not, it is all in Thee,
  Or small or great I know not--haply what broad fields, what lands,
  Haply the brutish measureless human undergrowth I know,
  Transplanted there may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee,
  Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn'd to reaping-tools,
  Haply the lifeless cross I know, Europe's dead cross, may bud and
      blossom there.

  One effort more, my altar this bleak sand;
  That Thou O God my life hast lighted,
  With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,
  Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,
  Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages;
  For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees,
  Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee.

  My terminus near,
  The clouds already closing in upon me,
  The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost,
  I yield my ships to Thee.

  My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
  My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd,
  Let the old timbers part, I will not part,
  I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,
  Thee, Thee at least I know.

  Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving?
  What do I know of life? what of myself?
  I know not even my own work past or present,
  Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
  Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
  Mocking, perplexing me.

  And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
  As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal'd my eyes,
  Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
  And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
  And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.




BOOK XXVIII


The Sleepers

       1
  I wander all night in my vision,
  Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
  Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,
  Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,
  Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

  How solemn they look there, stretch'd and still,
  How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles.

  The wretched features of ennuyes, the white features of corpses, the
      livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists,
  The gash'd bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their
      strong-door'd rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging
      from gates, and the dying emerging from gates,
  The night pervades them and infolds them.

  The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on
      the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of the husband,
  The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,
  The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,
  And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt.

  The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
  The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps,
  The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?
  And the murder'd person, how does he sleep?

  The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
  And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
  The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
  And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.

  I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and
      the most restless,
  I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them,
  The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep.

  Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear,
  The earth recedes from me into the night,
  I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is
      beautiful.

  I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers
      each in turn,
  I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
  And I become the other dreamers.

  I am a dance--play up there! the fit is whirling me fast!

  I am the ever-laughing--it is new moon and twilight,
  I see the hiding of douceurs, I see nimble ghosts whichever way look,
  Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and where it is
      neither ground nor sea.

  Well do they do their jobs those journeymen divine,
  Only from me can they hide nothing, and would not if they could,
  I reckon I am their boss and they make me a pet besides,
  And surround me and lead me and run ahead when I walk,
  To lift their cunning covers to signify me with stretch'd arms, and
      resume the way;
  Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards! with mirth-shouting
      music and wild-flapping pennants of joy!

  I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician,
  The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box,
  He who has been famous and he who shall be famous after to-day,
  The stammerer, the well-form'd person, the wasted or feeble person.

  I am she who adorn'd herself and folded her hair expectantly,
  My truant lover has come, and it is dark.

  Double yourself and receive me darkness,
  Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him.

  I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk.

  He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,
  He rises with me silently from the bed.

  Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was sweaty and panting,
  I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.

  My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,
  I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.

  Be careful darkness! already what was it touch'd me?
  I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,
  I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.

       2
  I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid,
  Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.

  It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman's,
  I sit low in a straw-bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson's
      stockings.

  It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight,
  I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

  A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin,
  It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is
      blank here, for reasons.

  (It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
  Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)

       3
  I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies
      of the sea,
  His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with
      courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,
  I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,
  I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on
      the rocks.

  What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
  Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime
      of his middle age?

  Steady and long he struggles,
  He is baffled, bang'd, bruis'd, he holds out while his strength
      holds out,
  The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away,
      they roll him, swing him, turn him,
  His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is
      continually bruis'd on rocks,
  Swiftly and ought of sight is borne the brave corpse.

       4
  I turn but do not extricate myself,
  Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet.

  The beach is cut by the razory ice-wind, the wreck-guns sound,
  The tempest lulls, the moon comes floundering through the drifts.

  I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as
      she strikes, I hear the howls of dismay, they grow fainter and fainter.

  I cannot aid with my wringing fingers,
  I can but rush to the surf and let it drench me and freeze upon me.

  I search with the crowd, not one of the company is wash'd to us alive,
  In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in a barn.

       5
  Now of the older war-days, the defeat at Brooklyn,
  Washington stands inside the lines, he stands on the intrench'd
      hills amid a crowd of officers.
  His face is cold and damp, he cannot repress the weeping drops,
  He lifts the glass perpetually to his eyes, the color is blanch'd
      from his cheeks,
  He sees the slaughter of the southern braves confided to him by
      their parents.

  The same at last and at last when peace is declared,
  He stands in the room of the old tavern, the well-belov'd soldiers
      all pass through,
  The officers speechless and slow draw near in their turns,
  The chief encircles their necks with his arm and kisses them on the cheek,
  He kisses lightly the wet cheeks one after another, he shakes hands
      and bids good-by to the army.

       6
  Now what my mother told me one day as we sat at dinner together,
  Of when she was a nearly grown girl living home with her parents on
      the old homestead.

  A red squaw came one breakfast-time to the old homestead,
  On her back she carried a bundle of rushes for rush-bottoming chairs,
  Her hair, straight, shiny, coarse, black, profuse, half-envelop'd
      her face,
  Her step was free and elastic, and her voice sounded exquisitely as
      she spoke.

  My mother look'd in delight and amazement at the stranger,
  She look'd at the freshness of her tall-borne face and full and
      pliant limbs,
  The more she look'd upon her she loved her,
  Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity,
  She made her sit on a bench by the jamb of the fireplace, she cook'd
      food for her,
  She had no work to give her, but she gave her remembrance and fondness.

  The red squaw staid all the forenoon, and toward the middle of the
      afternoon she went away,
  O my mother was loth to have her go away,
  All the week she thought of her, she watch'd for her many a month,
  She remember'd her many a winter and many a summer,
  But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there again.

       7
  A show of the summer softness--a contact of something unseen--an
      amour of the light and air,
  I am jealous and overwhelm'd with friendliness,
  And will go gallivant with the light and air myself.

  O love and summer, you are in the dreams and in me,
  Autumn and winter are in the dreams, the farmer goes with his thrift,
  The droves and crops increase, the barns are well-fill'd.

  Elements merge in the night, ships make tacks in the dreams,
  The sailor sails, the exile returns home,
  The fugitive returns unharm'd, the immigrant is back beyond months
      and years,
  The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood with
      the well known neighbors and faces,
  They warmly welcome him, he is barefoot again, he forgets he is well off,
  The Dutchman voyages home, and the Scotchman and Welshman voyage
      home, and the native of the Mediterranean voyages home,
  To every port of England, France, Spain, enter well-fill'd ships,
  The Swiss foots it toward his hills, the Prussian goes his way, the
      Hungarian his way, and the Pole his way,
  The Swede returns, and the Dane and Norwegian return.

  The homeward bound and the outward bound,
  The beautiful lost swimmer, the ennuye, the onanist, the female that
      loves unrequited, the money-maker,
  The actor and actress, those through with their parts and those
      waiting to commence,
  The affectionate boy, the husband and wife, the voter, the nominee
      that is chosen and the nominee that has fail'd,
  The great already known and the great any time after to-day,
  The stammerer, the sick, the perfect-form'd, the homely,
  The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and sentenced
      him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience,
  The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow, the red squaw,
  The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wrong'd,
  The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark,
  I swear they are averaged now--one is no better than the other,
  The night and sleep have liken'd them and restored them.

  I swear they are all beautiful,
  Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is
      beautiful,
  The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

  Peace is always beautiful,
  The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.

  The myth of heaven indicates the soul,
  The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it
      comes or it lags behind,
  It comes from its embower'd garden and looks pleasantly on itself
      and encloses the world,
  Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting,and perfect and
      clean the womb cohering,
  The head well-grown proportion'd and plumb, and the bowels and
      joints proportion'd and plumb.

  The soul is always beautiful,
  The universe is duly in order, every thing is in its place,
  What has arrived is in its place and what waits shall be in its place,
  The twisted skull waits, the watery or rotten blood waits,
  The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the child of
      the drunkard waits long, and the drunkard himself waits long,
  The sleepers that lived and died wait, the far advanced are to go on
      in their turns, and the far behind are to come on in their turns,
  The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite--
      they unite now.

       8
  The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
  They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as
      they lie unclothed,
  The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and American
      are hand in hand,
  Learn'd and unlearn'd are hand in hand, and male and female are hand
      in hand,
  The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover, they
      press close without lust, his lips press her neck,
  The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with
      measureless love, and the son holds the father in his arms with
      measureless love,
  The white hair of the mother shines on the white wrist of the daughter,
  The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man, friend is
      inarm'd by friend,
  The scholar kisses the teacher and the teacher kisses the scholar,
      the wrong 'd made right,
  The call of the slave is one with the master's call, and the master
      salutes the slave,
  The felon steps forth from the prison, the insane becomes sane, the
      suffering of sick persons is reliev'd,
  The sweatings and fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is sound,
      the lungs of the consumptive are resumed, the poor distress'd
      head is free,
  The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and smoother
      than ever,
  Stiflings and passages open, the paralyzed become supple,
  The swell'd and convuls'd and congested awake to themselves in condition,
  They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the
      night, and awake.

  I too pass from the night,
  I stay a while away O night, but I return to you again and love you.

  Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
  I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you,
  I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long,
  I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you, but
      I know I came well and shall go well.

  I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes,
  I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you.




Transpositions

  Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever
      bawling--let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands;
  Let judges and criminals be transposed--let the prison-keepers be
      put in prison--let those that were prisoners take the keys;
  Let them that distrust birth and death lead the rest.




BOOK XXIX


To Think of Time

      1
  To think of time--of all that retrospection,
  To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward.

  Have you guess'd you yourself would not continue?
  Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
  Have you fear'd the future would be nothing to you?

  Is to-day nothing? is the beginningless past nothing?
  If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.

  To think that the sun rose in the east--that men and women were
      flexible, real, alive--that every thing was alive,
  To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part,
  To think that we are now here and bear our part.

       2
  Not a day passes, not a minute or second without an accouchement,
  Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse.

  The dull nights go over and the dull days also,
  The soreness of lying so much in bed goes over,
  The physician after long putting off gives the silent and terrible
      look for an answer,
  The children come hurried and weeping, and the brothers and sisters
      are sent for,
  Medicines stand unused on the shelf, (the camphor-smell has long
      pervaded the rooms,)
  The faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the dying,
  The twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,
  The breath ceases and the pulse of the heart ceases,
  The corpse stretches on the bed and the living look upon it,
  It is palpable as the living are palpable.

  The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,
  But without eyesight lingers a different living and looks curiously
      on the corpse.

       3
  To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,
  To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking
      great interest in them, and we taking no interest in them.

  To think how eager we are in building our houses,
  To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent.

  (I see one building the house that serves him a few years, or
      seventy or eighty years at most,
  I see one building the house that serves him longer than that.)

  Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth--they never
      cease--they are the burial lines,
  He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall
      surely be buried.


      4
  A reminiscence of the vulgar fate,
  A frequent sample of the life and death of workmen,
  Each after his kind.

  Cold dash of waves at the ferry-wharf, posh and ice in the river,
      half-frozen mud in the streets,
  A gray discouraged sky overhead, the short last daylight of December,
  A hearse and stages, the funeral of an old Broadway stage-driver,
      the cortege mostly drivers.

  Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell,
  The gate is pass'd, the new-dug grave is halted at, the living
      alight, the hearse uncloses,
  The coffin is pass'd out, lower'd and settled, the whip is laid on
      the coffin, the earth is swiftly shovel'd in,
  The mound above is flatted with the spades--silence,
  A minute--no one moves or speaks--it is done,
  He is decently put away--is there any thing more?

  He was a good fellow, free-mouth'd, quick-temper'd, not bad-looking,
  Ready with life or death for a friend, fond of women, gambled, ate
      hearty, drank hearty,
  Had known what it was to be flush, grew low-spirited toward the
      last, sicken'd, was help'd by a contribution,
  Died, aged forty-one years--and that was his funeral.

  Thumb extended, finger uplifted, apron, cape, gloves, strap,
      wet-weather clothes, whip carefully chosen,
  Boss, spotter, starter, hostler, somebody loafing on you, you
      loafing on somebody, headway, man before and man behind,
  Good day's work, bad day's work, pet stock, mean stock, first out,
      last out, turning-in at night,
  To think that these are so much and so nigh to other drivers, and he
      there takes no interest in them.

       5
  The markets, the government, the working-man's wages, to think what
      account they are through our nights and days,
  To think that other working-men will make just as great account of
      them, yet we make little or no account.

  The vulgar and the refined, what you call sin and what you call
      goodness, to think how wide a difference,
  To think the difference will still continue to others, yet we lie
      beyond the difference.

  To think how much pleasure there is,
  Do you enjoy yourself in the city? or engaged in business? or
      planning a nomination and election? or with your wife and family?
  Or with your mother and sisters? or in womanly housework? or the
      beautiful maternal cares?
  These also flow onward to others, you and I flow onward,
  But in due time you and I shall take less interest in them.

  Your farm, profits, crops--to think how engross'd you are,
  To think there will still be farms, profits, crops, yet for you of
      what avail?

       6
  What will be will be well, for what is is well,
  To take interest is well, and not to take interest shall be well.

  The domestic joys, the dally housework or business, the building of
      houses, are not phantasms, they have weight, form, location,
  Farms, profits, crops, markets, wages, government, are none of them
      phantasms,
  The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion,
  The earth is not an echo, man and his life and all the things of his
      life are well-consider'd.

  You are not thrown to the winds, you gather certainly and safely
      around yourself,
  Yourself! yourself!. yourself, for ever and ever!

       7
  It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and
      father, it is to identify you,
  It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided,
  Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form'd in you,
  You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

  The threads that were spun are gather'd, the wet crosses the warp,
      the pattern is systematic.

  The preparations have every one been justified,
  The orchestra have sufficiently tuned their instruments, the baton
      has given the signal.

  The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now housed,
  He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those
      that to look upon and be with is enough.

  The law of the past cannot be eluded,
  The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,
  The law of the living cannot be eluded, it is eternal,
  The law of promotion and transformation cannot be eluded,
  The law of heroes and good-doers cannot be eluded,
  The law of drunkards, informers, mean persons, not one iota thereof
      can be eluded.

       8
  Slow moving and black lines go ceaselessly over the earth,
  Northerner goes carried and Southerner goes carried, and they on the
      Atlantic side and they on the Pacific,
  And they between, and all through the Mississippi country, and all
      over the earth.

  The great masters and kosmos are well as they go, the heroes and
      good-doers are well,
  The known leaders and inventors and the rich owners and pious and
      distinguish'd may be well,
  But there is more account than that, there is strict account of all.

  The interminable hordes of the ignorant and wicked are not nothing,
  The barbarians of Africa and Asia are not nothing,
  The perpetual successions of shallow people are not nothing as they go.

  Of and in all these things,
  I have dream'd that we are not to be changed so much, nor the law of
      us changed,
  I have dream'd that heroes and good-doers shall be under the present
      and past law,
  And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the present and
      past law,
  For I have dream'd that the law they are under now is enough.

  And I have dream'd that the purpose and essence of the known life,
      the transient,
  Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the permanent.

  If all came but to ashes of dung,
  If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! for we are betray'd,
  Then indeed suspicion of death.

  Do you suspect death? if I were to suspect death I should die now,
  Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation?

  Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
  Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
  The whole universe indicates that it is good,
  The past and the present indicate that it is good.

  How beautiful and perfect are the animals!
  How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!
  What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect,
  The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable
      fluids perfect;
  Slowly and surely they have pass'd on to this, and slowly and surely
      they yet pass on.

       9
  I swear I think now that every thing without exception has an eternal soul!
  The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the
      animals!

  I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
  That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for
      it, and the cohering is for it!
  And all preparation is for it--and identity is for it--and life and
      materials are altogether for it!




BOOK XXX.  WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH


Darest Thou Now O Soul

  Darest thou now O soul,
  Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
  Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

  No map there, nor guide,
  Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
  Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

  I know it not O soul,
  Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
  All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.

  Till when the ties loosen,
  All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
  Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

  Then we burst forth, we float,
  In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
  Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.




Whispers of Heavenly Death

  Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
  Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
  Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,
  Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,
  (Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

  I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
  Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
  With at times a half-dimm'd sadden'd far-off star,
  Appearing and disappearing.

  (Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
  On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
  Some soul is passing over.)




Chanting the Square Deific

       1
  Chanting the square deific, out of the One advancing, out of the sides,
  Out of the old and new, out of the square entirely divine,
  Solid, four-sided, (all the sides needed,) from this side Jehovah am I,
  Old Brahm I, and I Saturnius am;
  Not Time affects me--I am Time, old, modern as any,
  Unpersuadable, relentless, executing righteous judgments,
  As the Earth, the Father, the brown old Kronos, with laws,
  Aged beyond computation, yet never new, ever with those mighty laws rolling,
  Relentless I forgive no man--whoever sins dies--I will have that man's life;
  Therefore let none expect mercy--have the seasons, gravitation, the
      appointed days, mercy? no more have I,
  But as the seasons and gravitation, and as all the appointed days
      that forgive not,
  I dispense from this side judgments inexorable without the least remorse.

       2
  Consolator most mild, the promis'd one advancing,
  With gentle hand extended, the mightier God am I,
  Foretold by prophets and poets in their most rapt prophecies and poems,
  From this side, lo! the Lord Christ gazes--lo! Hermes I--lo! mine is
      Hercules' face,
  All sorrow, labor, suffering, I, tallying it, absorb in myself,
  Many times have I been rejected, taunted, put in prison, and
      crucified, and many times shall be again,
  All the world have I given up for my dear brothers' and sisters'
      sake, for the soul's sake,
  Wanding my way through the homes of men, rich or poor, with the kiss
      of affection,
  For I am affection, I am the cheer-bringing God, with hope and
      all-enclosing charity,
  With indulgent words as to children, with fresh and sane words, mine only,
  Young and strong I pass knowing well I am destin'd myself to an
      early death;
  But my charity has no death--my wisdom dies not, neither early nor late,
  And my sweet love bequeath'd here and elsewhere never dies.

       3
  Aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt,
  Comrade of criminals, brother of slaves,
  Crafty, despised, a drudge, ignorant,
  With sudra face and worn brow, black, but in the depths of my heart,
      proud as any,
  Lifted now and always against whoever scorning assumes to rule me,
  Morose, full of guile, full of reminiscences, brooding, with many wiles,
  (Though it was thought I was baffled, and dispel'd, and my wiles
      done, but that will never be,)
  Defiant, I, Satan, still live, still utter words, in new lands duly
      appearing, (and old ones also,)
  Permanent here from my side, warlike, equal with any, real as any,
  Nor time nor change shall ever change me or my words.

       4
  Santa Spirita, breather, life,
  Beyond the light, lighter than light,
  Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell,
  Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume,
  Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including
      Saviour and Satan,
  Ethereal, pervading all, (for without me what were all? what were God?)
  Essence of forms, life of the real identities, permanent, positive,
      (namely the unseen,)
  Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the
      general soul,
  Here the square finishing, the solid, I the most solid,
  Breathe my breath also through these songs.




Of Him I Love Day and Night

  Of him I love day and night I dream'd I heard he was dead,
  And I dream'd I went where they had buried him I love, but he was
      not in that place,
  And I dream'd I wander'd searching among burial-places to find him,
  And I found that every place was a burial-place;
  The houses full of life were equally full of death, (this house is now,)
  The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago,
      Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta, were as full of the dead as
      of the living,
  And fuller, O vastly fuller of the dead than of the living;
  And what I dream'd I will henceforth tell to every person and age,
  And I stand henceforth bound to what I dream'd,
  And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with them,
  And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere,
      even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be satisfied,
  And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly
      render'd to powder and pour'd in the sea, I shall be satisfied,
  Or if it be distributed to the winds I shall be satisfied.




Yet, Yet, Ye Downcast Hours

  Yet, yet, ye downcast hours, I know ye also,
  Weights of lead, how ye clog and cling at my ankles,
  Earth to a chamber of mourning turns--I hear the o'erweening, mocking
      voice,
  Matter is conqueror--matter, triumphant only, continues onward.

  Despairing cries float ceaselessly toward me,
  The call of my nearest lover, putting forth, alarm'd, uncertain,
  The sea I am quickly to sail, come tell me,
  Come tell me where I am speeding, tell me my destination.

  I understand your anguish, but I cannot help you,
  I approach, hear, behold, the sad mouth, the look out of the eyes,
      your mute inquiry,
  Whither I go from the bed I recline on, come tell me,--
  Old age, alarm'd, uncertain--a young woman's voice, appealing to
      me for comfort;
  A young man's voice, Shall I not escape?




As If a Phantom Caress'd Me

  As if a phantom caress'd me,
  I thought I was not alone walking here by the shore;
  But the one I thought was with me as now I walk by the shore, the
      one I loved that caress'd me,
  As I lean and look through the glimmering light, that one has
      utterly disappear'd.
  And those appear that are hateful to me and mock me.




Assurances

  I need no assurances, I am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul;
  I do not doubt that from under the feet and beside the hands and
      face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant
      of, calm and actual faces,
  I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in
      any iota of the world,
  I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless,
      in vain I try to think how limitless,
  I do not doubt that the orbs and the systems of orbs play their
      swift sports through the air on purpose, and that I shall one day
      be eligible to do as much as they, and more than they,
  I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and on millions of years,
  I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have
      their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight, and
      the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice,
  I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are
      provided for, and that the deaths of young women and the
      deaths of little children are provided for,
  (Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Death, the purport
      of all Life, is not well provided for?)
  I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of
      them, no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has
      gone down, are provided for, to the minutest points,
  I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any
      time, is provided for in the inherences of things,
  I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I
      believe Heavenly Death provides for all.




Quicksand Years

  Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
  Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me,
  Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess'd soul, eludes not,
  One's-self must never give way--that is the final substance--that
      out of all is sure,
  Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
  When shows break up what but One's-Self is sure?




That Music Always Round Me

  That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long
      untaught I did not hear,
  But now the chorus I hear and am elated,
  A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of
      daybreak I hear,
  A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,
  A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,
  The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and
      violins, all these I fill myself with,
  I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite
      meanings,
  I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving,
      contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;
  I do not think the performers know themselves--but now I think
      begin to know them.




What Ship Puzzled at Sea

  What ship puzzled at sea, cons for the true reckoning?
  Or coming in, to avoid the bars and follow the channel a perfect
      pilot needs?
  Here, sailor! here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot,
  Whom, in a little boat, putting off and rowing, I hailing you offer.




A Noiseless Patient Spider

  A noiseless patient spider,
  I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
  Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
  It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
  Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

  And you O my soul where you stand,
  Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
      connect them,
  Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
  Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.




O Living Always, Always Dying

  O living always, always dying!
  O the burials of me past and present,
  O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
  O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
  O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and
      look at where I cast them,
  To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.




To One Shortly to Die

  From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
  You are to die--let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate,
  I am exact and merciless, but I love you--there is no escape for you.

  Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you 'ust feel it,
  I do not argue, I bend my head close and half envelop it,
  I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
  I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
  I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is
      eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
  The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

  The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
  Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
  You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
  You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
      I am with you,
  I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
  I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.




Night on the Prairies

  Night on the prairies,
  The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,
  The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;
  I walk by myself--I stand and look at the stars, which I think now
      never realized before.

  Now I absorb immortality and peace,
  I admire death and test propositions.

  How plenteous! how spiritual! how resume!
  The same old man and soul--the same old aspirations, and the same content.

  I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
  I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless
      around me myriads of other globes.

  Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will
      measure myself by them,
  And now touch'd with the lives of other globes arrived as far along
      as those of the earth,
  Or waiting to arrive, or pass'd on farther than those of the earth,
  I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
  Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.

  O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
  I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.




Thought

  As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing,
  To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a
      wreck at sea,
  Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and
      wafted kisses, and that is the last of them,
  Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President,
  Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder'd
      off the Northeast coast and going down--of the steamship Arctic
      going down,
  Of the veil'd tableau-women gather'd together on deck, pale, heroic,
      waiting the moment that draws so close--O the moment!

  A huge sob--a few bubbles--the white foam spirting up--and then the
      women gone,
  Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on--and I now
      pondering, Are those women indeed gone?
  Are souls drown'd and destroy'd so?
  Is only matter triumphant?




The Last Invocation

  At the last, tenderly,
  From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house,
  From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
  Let me be wafted.

  Let me glide noiselessly forth;
  With the key of softness unlock the locks--with a whisper,
  Set ope the doors O soul.

  Tenderly--be not impatient,
  (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
  Strong is your hold O love.)




As I Watch the Ploughman Ploughing

  As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing,
  Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,
  I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;
  (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)




Pensive and Faltering

  Pensive and faltering,
  The words the Dead I write,
  For living are the Dead,
  (Haply the only living, only real,
  And I the apparition, I the spectre.)




BOOK XXXI


Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood

       1
  Thou Mother with thy equal brood,
  Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity only,
  A special song before I go I'd sing o'er all the rest,
  For thee, the future.

  I'd sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality,
  I'd fashion thy ensemble including body and soul,
  I'd show away ahead thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish'd.

  The paths to the house I seek to make,
  But leave to those to come the house itself.

  Belief I sing, and preparation;
  As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the present only,
  But greater still from what is yet to come,
  Out of that formula for thee I sing.

       2
  As a strong bird on pinions free,
  Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,
  Such be the thought I'd think of thee America,
  Such be the recitative I'd bring for thee.

  The conceits of the poets of other lands I'd bring thee not,
  Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long,
  Nor rhyme, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign court or indoor
      library;
  But an odor I'd bring as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of
      an Illinois prairie,
  With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas
      uplands, or Florida's glades,
  Or the Saguenay's black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron,
  With presentment of Yellowstone's scenes, or Yosemite,
  And murmuring under, pervading all, I'd bring the rustling sea-sound,
  That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world.

  And for thy subtler sense subtler refrains dread Mother,
  Preludes of intellect tallying these and thee, mind-formulas fitted
      for thee, real and sane and large as these and thee,
  Thou! mounting higher, diving deeper than we knew, thou
      transcendental Union!
  By thee fact to be justified, blended with thought,
  Thought of man justified, blended with God,
  Through thy idea, lo, the immortal reality!
  Through thy reality, lo, the immortal idea!

       3
  Brain of the New World, what a task is thine,
  To formulate the Modern--out of the peerless grandeur of the modern,
  Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches, art,
  (Recast, may-be discard them, end them--maybe their work is done,
      who knows?)
  By vision, hand, conception, on the background of the mighty past, the dead,
  To limn with absolute faith the mighty living present.

  And yet thou living present brain, heir of the dead, the Old World brain,
  Thou that lay folded like an unborn babe within its folds so long,
  Thou carefully prepared by it so long--haply thou but unfoldest it,
      only maturest it,
  It to eventuate in thee--the essence of the by-gone time contain'd in thee,
  Its poems, churches, arts, unwitting to themselves, destined with
      reference to thee;
  Thou but the apples, long, long, long a-growing,
  The fruit of all the Old ripening to-day in thee.

       4
  Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy,
  Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only,
  The Past is also stored in thee,
  Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western
      continent alone,
  Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel O ship, is steadied by thy spars,
  With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or
      swim with thee,
  With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou
      bear'st the other continents,
  Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant;
  Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye O helmsman, thou
      carriest great companions,
  Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee,
  And royal feudal Europe sails with thee.

       5
  Beautiful world of new superber birth that rises to my eyes,
  Like a limitless golden cloud filling the westernr sky,
  Emblem of general maternity lifted above all,
  Sacred shape of the bearer of daughters and sons,
  Out of thy teeming womb thy giant babes in ceaseless procession issuing,
  Acceding from such gestation, taking and giving continual strength
      and life,
  World of the real--world of the twain in one,
  World of the soul, born by the world of the real alone, led to
      identity, body, by it alone,
  Yet in beginning only, incalculable masses of composite precious materials,
  By history's cycles forwarded, by every nation, language, hither sent,
  Ready, collected here, a freer, vast, electric world, to be
      constructed here,
  (The true New World, the world of orbic science, morals, literatures
      to come,)
  Thou wonder world yet undefined, unform'd, neither do I define thee,
  How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?
  I feel thy ominous greatness evil as well as good,
  I watch thee advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past,
  I see thy light lighting, and thy shadow shadowing, as if the entire globe,
  But I do not undertake to define thee, hardly to comprehend thee,
  I but thee name, thee prophesy, as now,
  I merely thee ejaculate!

  Thee in thy future,
  Thee in thy only permanent life, career, thy own unloosen'd mind,
      thy soaring spirit,
  Thee as another equally needed sun, radiant, ablaze, swift-moving,
      fructifying all,
  Thee risen in potent cheerfulness and joy, in endless great hilarity,
  Scattering for good the cloud that hung so long, that weigh'd so
      long upon the mind of man,
  The doubt, suspicion, dread, of gradual, certain decadence of man;
  Thee in thy larger, saner brood of female, male--thee in thy
      athletes, moral, spiritual, South, North, West, East,
  (To thy immortal breasts, Mother of All, thy every daughter, son,
      endear'd alike, forever equal,)
  Thee in thy own musicians, singers, artists, unborn yet, but certain,
  Thee in thy moral wealth and civilization, (until which thy proudest
      material civilization must remain in vain,)
  Thee in thy all-supplying, all-enclosing worship--thee in no single
      bible, saviour, merely,
  Thy saviours countless, latent within thyself, thy bibles incessant
      within thyself, equal to any, divine as any,
  (Thy soaring course thee formulating, not in thy two great wars, nor
      in thy century's visible growth,
  But far more in these leaves and chants, thy chants, great Mother!)
  Thee in an education grown of thee, in teachers, studies, students,
      born of thee,
  Thee in thy democratic fetes en-masse, thy high original festivals,
      operas, lecturers, preachers,
  Thee in thy ultimate, (the preparations only now completed, the
      edifice on sure foundations tied,)
  Thee in thy pinnacles, intellect, thought, thy topmost rational
      joys, thy love and godlike aspiration,
  In thy resplendent coming literati, thy full-lung'd orators, thy
      sacerdotal bards, kosmic savans,
  These! these in thee, (certain to come,) to-day I prophesy.

       6
  Land tolerating all, accepting all, not for the good alone, all good
      for thee,
  Land in the realms of God to be a realm unto thyself,
  Under the rule of God to be a rule unto thyself.

  (Lo, where arise three peerless stars,
  To be thy natal stars my country, Ensemble, Evolution, Freedom,
  Set in the sky of Law.)

  Land of unprecedented faith, God's faith,
  Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav'd,
  The general inner earth so long so sedulously draped over, now hence
      for what it is boldly laid bare,
  Open'd by thee to heaven's light for benefit or bale.

  Not for success alone,
  Not to fair-sail unintermitted always,
  The storm shall dash thy face, the murk of war and worse than war
      shall cover thee all over,
  (Wert capable of war, its tug and trials? be capable of peace, its trials,
  For the tug and mortal strain of nations come at last in prosperous
      peace, not war;)
  In many a smiling mask death shall approach beguiling thee, thou in
      disease shalt swelter,
  The livid cancer spread its hideous claws, clinging upon thy
      breasts, seeking to strike thee deep within,
  Consumption of the worst, moral consumption, shall rouge thy face
      with hectic,
  But thou shalt face thy fortunes, thy diseases, and surmount them all,
  Whatever they are to-day and whatever through time they may be,
  They each and all shall lift and pass away and cease from thee,
  While thou, Time's spirals rounding, out of thyself, thyself still
      extricating, fusing,
  Equable, natural, mystical Union thou, (the mortal with immortal blent,)
  Shalt soar toward the fulfilment of the future, the spirit of the
      body and the mind,
  The soul, its destinies.

  The soul, its destinies, the real real,
  (Purport of all these apparitions of the real;)
  In thee America, the soul, its destinies,
  Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous!
  By many a throe of heat and cold convuls'd, (by these thyself solidifying,)
  Thou mental, moral orb--thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World!
  The Present holds thee not--for such vast growth as thine,
  For such unparallel'd flight as thine, such brood as thine,
  The FUTURE only holds thee and can hold thee.




A Paumanok Picture

  Two boats with nets lying off the sea-beach, quite still,
  Ten fishermen waiting--they discover a thick school of mossbonkers
      --they drop the join'd seine-ends in the water,
  The boats separate and row off, each on its rounding course to the
      beach, enclosing the mossbonkers,
  The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop ashore,
  Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats, others stand
      ankle-deep in the water, pois'd on strong legs,
  The boats partly drawn up, the water slapping against them,
  Strew'd on the sand in heaps and windrows, well out from the water,
      the green-back'd spotted mossbonkers.




BOOK XXXII.  FROM NOON TO STARRY NIGHT


Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling

  Thou orb aloft full-dazzling! thou hot October noon!
  Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand,
  The sibilant near sea with vistas far and foam,
  And tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue;
  O sun of noon refulgent! my special word to thee.

  Hear me illustrious!
  Thy lover me, for always I have loved thee,
  Even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by some wood edge, thy
      touching-distant beams enough,
  Or man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I launch my invocation.

  (Thou canst not with thy dumbness me deceive,
  I know before the fitting man all Nature yields,
  Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice--and
      thou O sun,
  As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of
      flame gigantic,
  I understand them, I know those flames, those perturbations well.)

  Thou that with fructifying heat and light,
  O'er myriad farms, o'er lands and waters North and South,
  O'er Mississippi's endless course, o'er Texas' grassy plains,
      Kanada's woods,
  O'er all the globe that turns its face to thee shining in space,
  Thou that impartially enfoldest all, not only continents, seas,
  Thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally,
  Shed, shed thyself on mine and me, with but a fleeting ray out of
      thy million millions,
  Strike through these chants.

  Nor only launch thy subtle dazzle and thy strength for these,
  Prepare the later afternoon of me myself--prepare my lengthening shadows,
  Prepare my starry nights.




Faces

       1
  Sauntering the pavement or riding the country by-road, faces!
  Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality,
  The spiritual-prescient face, the always welcome common benevolent face,
  The face of the singing of music, the grand faces of natural lawyers
      and judges broad at the back-top,
  The faces of hunters and fishers bulged at the brows, the shaved
      blanch'd faces of orthodox citizens,
  The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist's face,
  The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the handsome detested or
      despised face,
  The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of
      many children,
  The face of an amour, the face of veneration,
  The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock,
  The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face,
  A wild hawk, his wings clipp'd by the clipper,
  A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder.

  Sauntering the pavement thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry, faces
      and faces and faces,
  I see them and complain not, and am content with all.

       2
  Do you suppose I could be content with all if I thought them their
      own finale?

  This now is too lamentable a face for a man,
  Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for it,
  Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it wrig to its hole.

  This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage,
  Snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat.

  This face is a haze more chill than the arctic sea,
  Its sleepy and wobbling icebergs crunch as they go.

  This is a face of bitter herbs, this an emetic, they need no label,
  And more of the drug-shelf, laudanum, caoutchouc, or hog's-lard.

  This face is an epilepsy, its wordless tongue gives out the unearthly cry,
  Its veins down the neck distend, its eyes roll till they show
      nothing but their whites,
  Its teeth grit, the palms of the hands are cut by the turn'd-in nails,
  The man falls struggling and foaming to the ground, while he
      speculates well.

  This face is bitten by vermin and worms,
  And this is some murderer's knife with a half-pull'd scabbard.

  This face owes to the sexton his dismalest fee,
  An unceasing death-bell tolls there.

       3
  Features of my equals would you trick me with your creas'd and
      cadaverous march?
  Well, you cannot trick me.

  I see your rounded never-erased flow,
  I see 'neath the rims of your haggard and mean disguises.

  Splay and twist as you like, poke with the tangling fores of fishes or rats,
  You'll be unmuzzled, you certainly will.

  I saw the face of the most smear'd and slobbering idiot they had at
      the asylum,
  And I knew for my consolation what they knew not,
  I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother,
  The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen tenement,
  And I shall look again in a score or two of ages,
  And I shall meet the real landlord perfect and unharm'd, every inch
      as good as myself.

       4
  The Lord advances, and yet advances,
  Always the shadow in front, always the reach'd hand bringing up the
      laggards.

  Out of this face emerge banners and horses--O superb! I see what is coming,
  I see the high pioneer-caps, see staves of runners clearing the way,
  I hear victorious drums.

  This face is a life-boat,
  This is the face commanding and bearded, it asks no odds of the rest,
  This face is flavor'd fruit ready for eating,
  This face of a healthy honest boy is the programme of all good.

  These faces bear testimony slumbering or awake,
  They show their descent from the Master himself.

  Off the word I have spoken I except not one--red, white, black, are
      all deific,
  In each house is the ovum, it comes forth after a thousand years.

  Spots or cracks at the windows do not disturb me,
  Tall and sufficient stand behind and make signs to me,
  I read the promise and patiently wait.

  This is a full-grown lily's face,
  She speaks to the limber-hipp'd man near the garden pickets,
  Come here she blushingly cries, Come nigh to me limber-hipp'd man,
  Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon you,
  Fill me with albescent honey, bend down to me,
  Rub to me with your chafing beard, rub to my breast and shoulders.

       5
  The old face of the mother of many children,
  Whist! I am fully content.

  Lull'd and late is the smoke of the First-day morning,
  It hangs low over the rows of trees by the fences,
  It hangs thin by the sassafras and wild-cherry and cat-brier under them.

  I saw the rich ladies in full dress at the soiree,
  I heard what the singers were singing so long,
  Heard who sprang in crimson youth from the white froth and the water-blue.

  Behold a woman!
  She looks out from her quaker cap, her face is clearer and more
      beautiful than the sky.

  She sits in an armchair under the shaded porch of the farmhouse,
  The sun just shines on her old white head.

  Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen,
  Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters spun it with
      the distaff and the wheel.

  The melodious character of the earth,
  The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go,
  The justified mother of men.




The Mystic Trumpeter

       1
  Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician,
  Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night.

  I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes,
  Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me,
  Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost.

       2
  Come nearer bodiless one, haply in thee resounds
  Some dead composer, haply thy pensive life
  Was fill'd with aspirations high, unform'd ideals,
  Waves, oceans musical, chaotically surging,
  That now ecstatic ghost, close to me bending, thy cornet echoing, pealing,
  Gives out to no one's ears but mine, but freely gives to mine,
  That I may thee translate.

       3
  Blow trumpeter free and clear, I follow thee,
  While at thy liquid prelude, glad, serene,
  The fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day withdraw,
  A holy calm descends like dew upon me,
  I walk in cool refreshing night the walks of Paradise,
  I scent the grass, the moist air and the roses;
  Thy song expands my numb'd imbonded spirit, thou freest, launchest me,
  Floating and basking upon heaven's lake.

       4
  Blow again trumpeter! and for my sensuous eyes,
  Bring the old pageants, show the feudal world.

  What charm thy music works! thou makest pass before me,
  Ladies and cavaliers long dead, barons are in their castle halls,
      the troubadours are singing,
  Arm'd knights go forth to redress wrongs, some in quest of the holy Graal;
  I see the tournament, I see the contestants incased in heavy armor
      seated on stately champing horses,
  I hear the shouts, the sounds of blows and smiting steel;
  I see the Crusaders' tumultuous armies--hark, how the cymbals clang,
  Lo, where the monks walk in advance, bearing the cross on high.

       5
  Blow again trumpeter! and for thy theme,
  Take now the enclosing theme of all, the solvent and the setting,
  Love, that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang,
  The heart of man and woman all for love,
  No other theme but love--knitting, enclosing, all-diffusing love.

  O how the immortal phantoms crowd around me!
  I see the vast alembic ever working, I see and know the flames that
      heat the world,
  The glow, the blush, the beating hearts of lovers,
  So blissful happy some, and some so silent, dark, and nigh to death;
  Love, that is all the earth to lovers--love, that mocks time and space,
  Love, that is day and night--love, that is sun and moon and stars,
  Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume,
  No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.

       6
  Blow again trumpeter--conjure war's alarums.

  Swift to thy spell a shuddering hum like distant thunder rolls,
  Lo, where the arm'd men hasten--lo, mid the clouds of dust the glint
      of bayonets,
  I see the grime-faced cannoneers, I mark the rosy flash amid the
      smoke, I hear the cracking of the guns;
  Nor war alone--thy fearful music-song, wild player, brings every
      sight of fear,
  The deeds of ruthless brigands, rapine, murder--I hear the cries for help!
  I see ships foundering at sea, I behold on deck and below deck the
      terrible tableaus.

       7
  O trumpeter, methinks I am myself the instrument thou playest,
  Thou melt'st my heart, my brain--thou movest, drawest, changest
      them at will;
  And now thy sullen notes send darkness through me,
  Thou takest away all cheering light, all hope,
  I see the enslaved, the overthrown, the hurt, the opprest of the
      whole earth,
  I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race, it becomes
      all mine,
  Mine too the revenges of humanity, the wrongs of ages, baffled feuds
      and hatreds,
  Utter defeat upon me weighs--all lost--the foe victorious,
  (Yet 'mid the ruins Pride colossal stands unshaken to the last,
  Endurance, resolution to the last.)


      8
  Now trumpeter for thy close,
  Vouchsafe a higher strain than any yet,
  Sing to my soul, renew its languishing faith and hope,
  Rouse up my slow belief, give me some vision of the future,
  Give me for once its prophecy and joy.

  O glad, exulting, culminating song!
  A vigor more than earth's is in thy notes,
  Marches of victory--man disenthral'd--the conqueror at last,
  Hymns to the universal God from universal man--all joy!
  A reborn race appears--a perfect world, all joy!
  Women and men in wisdom innocence and health--all joy!
  Riotous laughing bacchanals fill'd with joy!
  War, sorrow, suffering gone--the rank earth purged--nothing but joy left!
  The ocean fill'd with joy--the atmosphere all joy!
  Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!
  Enough to merely be! enough to breathe!
  Joy! joy! all over joy!




To a Locomotive in Winter

  Thee for my recitative,
  Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
  Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
  Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
  Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,
      shuttling at thy sides,
  Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
  Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front,
  Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
  The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
  Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of
      thy wheels,
  Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
  Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
  Type of the modern--emblem of motion and power--pulse of the continent,
  For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
  With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
  By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
  By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

  Fierce-throated beauty!
  Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps
      at night,
  Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,
      rousing all,
  Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
  (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
  Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd,
  Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
  To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.




O Magnet-South

  O magnet-south! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
  O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all
      dear to me!
  O dear to me my birth-things--all moving things and the trees where
      I was born--the grains, plants, rivers,
  Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,
      over flats of slivery sands or through swamps,
  Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the
      Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,
  O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their
      banks again,
  Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the
      Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings
      or dense forests,
  I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the
      blossoming titi;
  Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast
      up the Carolinas,
  I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,
      the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the
      graceful palmetto,
  I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet,
      and dart my vision inland;
  O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
  The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,
  The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged
      with mistletoe and trailing moss,
  The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in
      these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the
      fugitive has his conceal'd hut;)
  O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable
      swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the
      alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and
      the whirr of the rattlesnake,
  The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,
      singing through the moon-lit night,
  The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
  A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav'd corn,
      slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful
      ears each well-sheath'd in its husk;
  O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart;
  O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
  O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and
      never wander more.




Mannahatta

  I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
  Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

  Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,
      musical, self-sufficient,
  I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
  Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,
  Rich, hemm'd thick all around with sailships and steamships, an
      island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
  Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong,
      light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,
  Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
  The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining
      islands, the heights, the villas,
  The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the
      ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model'd,
  The down-town streets, the jobbers' houses of business, the houses
      of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the river-streets,
  Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
  The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the
      brown-faced sailors,
  The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,
  The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river,
      passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
  The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd,
      beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
  Trottoirs throng'd, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
  A million people--manners free and superb--open voices--hospitality--
      the most courageous and friendly young men,
  City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
  City nested in bays! my city!




All Is Truth

  O me, man of slack faith so long,
  Standing aloof, denying portions so long,
  Only aware to-day of compact all-diffused truth,
  Discovering to-day there is no lie or form of lie, and can be none,
      but grows as inevitably upon itself as the truth does upon itself,
  Or as any law of the earth or any natural production of the earth does.

  (This is curious and may not be realized immediately, but it must be
      realized,
  I feel in myself that I represent falsehoods equally with the rest,
  And that the universe does.)

  Where has fail'd a perfect return indifferent of lies or the truth?
  Is it upon the ground, or in water or fire? or in the spirit of man?
      or in the meat and blood?

  Meditating among liars and retreating sternly into myself, I see
      that there are really no liars or lies after all,
  And that nothing fails its perfect return, and that what are called
      lies are perfect returns,
  And that each thing exactly represents itself and what has preceded it,
  And that the truth includes all, and is compact just as much as
      space is compact,
  And that there is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth--but
      that all is truth without exception;
  And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am,
  And sing and laugh and deny nothing.




A Riddle Song

  That which eludes this verse and any verse,
  Unheard by sharpest ear, unform'd in clearest eye or cunningest mind,
  Nor lore nor fame, nor happiness nor wealth,
  And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the world incessantly,
  Which you and I and all pursuing ever ever miss,
  Open but still a secret, the real of the real, an illusion,
  Costless, vouchsafed to each, yet never man the owner,
  Which poets vainly seek to put in rhyme, historians in prose,
  Which sculptor never chisel'd yet, nor painter painted,
  Which vocalist never sung, nor orator nor actor ever utter'd,
  Invoking here and now I challenge for my song.

  Indifferently, 'mid public, private haunts, in solitude,
  Behind the mountain and the wood,
  Companion of the city's busiest streets, through the assemblage,
  It and its radiations constantly glide.

  In looks of fair unconscious babes,
  Or strangely in the coffin'd dead,
  Or show of breaking dawn or stars by night,
  As some dissolving delicate film of dreams,
  Hiding yet lingering.

  Two little breaths of words comprising it,
  Two words, yet all from first to last comprised in it.

  How ardently for it!
  How many ships have sail'd and sunk for it!

  How many travelers started from their homes and neer return'd!
  How much of genius boldly staked and lost for it!
  What countless stores of beauty, love, ventur'd for it!
  How all superbest deeds since Time began are traceable to it--and
      shall be to the end!
  How all heroic martyrdoms to it!
  How, justified by it, the horrors, evils, battles of the earth!
  How the bright fascinating lambent flames of it, in every age and
      land, have drawn men's eyes,
  Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the islands, and the cliffs,
  Or midnight's silent glowing northern lights unreachable.

  Haply God's riddle it, so vague and yet so certain,
  The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it,
  And heaven at last for it.




Excelsior

  Who has gone farthest? for I would go farther,
  And who has been just? for I would be the most just person of the earth,
  And who most cautious? for I would be more cautious,
  And who has been happiest? O I think it is I--I think no one was
      ever happier than I,
  And who has lavish'd all? for I lavish constantly the best I have,
  And who proudest? for I think I have reason to be the proudest son
      alive--for I am the son of the brawny and tall-topt city,
  And who has been bold and true? for I would be the boldest and
      truest being of the universe,
  And who benevolent? for I would show more benevolence than all the rest,
  And who has receiv'd the love of the most friends? for I know what
      it is to receive the passionate love of many friends,
  And who possesses a perfect and enamour'd body? for I do not believe
      any one possesses a more perfect or enamour'd body than mine,
  And who thinks the amplest thoughts? for I would surround those thoughts,
  And who has made hymns fit for the earth? for I am mad with
      devouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth.




Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats

  Ah poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
  Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
  (For what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes, the
      old, the incessant war?)
  You degradations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
  You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah wounds the sharpest of all!)
  You toil of painful and choked articulations, you meannesses,
  You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of any;)
  You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother'd ennuis!
  Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth,
  It shall yet march forth o'ermastering, till all lies beneath me,
  It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.




Thoughts

  Of public opinion,
  Of a calm and cool fiat sooner or later, (how impassive! how certain
      and final!)
  Of the President with pale face asking secretly to himself, What
      will the people say at last?
  Of the frivolous Judge--of the corrupt Congressman, Governor,
      Mayor--of such as these standing helpless and exposed,
  Of the mumbling and screaming priest, (soon, soon deserted,)
  Of the lessening year by year of venerableness, and of the dicta of
      officers, statutes, pulpits, schools,
  Of the rising forever taller and stronger and broader of the
      intuitions of men and women, and of Self-esteem and Personality;
  Of the true New World--of the Democracies resplendent en-masse,
  Of the conformity of politics, armies, navies, to them,
  Of the shining sun by them--of the inherent light, greater than the rest,
  Of the envelopment of all by them, and the effusion of all from them.




Mediums

  They shall arise in the States,
  They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness,
  They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos,
  They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive,
  They shall be complete women and men, their pose brawny and supple,
      their drink water, their blood clean and clear,
  They shall fully enjoy materialism and the sight of products, they
      shall enjoy the sight of the beef, lumber, bread-stuffs, of
      Chicago the great city.
  They shall train themselves to go in public to become orators and
      oratresses,
  Strong and sweet shall their tongues be, poems and materials of
      poems shall come from their lives, they shall be makers and finders,
  Of them and of their works shall emerge divine conveyers, to convey gospels,
  Characters, events, retrospections, shall be convey'd in gospels,
      trees, animals, waters, shall be convey'd,
  Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be convey'd.




Weave in, My Hardy Life

  Weave in, weave in, my hardy life,
  Weave yet a soldier strong and full for great campaigns to come,
  Weave in red blood, weave sinews in like ropes, the senses, sight weave in,
  Weave lasting sure, weave day and night the wet, the warp, incessant
      weave, tire not,
  (We know not what the use O life, nor know the aim, the end, nor
      really aught we know,
  But know the work, the need goes on and shall go on, the
      death-envelop'd march of peace as well as war goes on,)
  For great campaigns of peace the same the wiry threads to weave,
  We know not why or what, yet weave, forever weave.




Spain, 1873-74

  Out of the murk of heaviest clouds,
  Out of the feudal wrecks and heap'd-up skeletons of kings,
  Out of that old entire European debris, the shatter'd mummeries,
  Ruin'd cathedrals, crumble of palaces, tombs of priests,
  Lo, Freedom's features fresh undimm'd look forth--the same immortal
      face looks forth;
  (A glimpse as of thy Mother's face Columbia,
  A flash significant as of a sword,
  Beaming towards thee.)

  Nor think we forget thee maternal;
  Lag'd'st thou so long? shall the clouds close again upon thee?
  Ah, but thou hast thyself now appear'd to us--we know thee,
  Thou hast given us a sure proof, the glimpse of thyself,
  Thou waitest there as everywhere thy time.




By Broad Potomac's Shore

  By broad Potomac's shore, again old tongue,
  (Still uttering, still ejaculating, canst never cease this babble?)
  Again old heart so gay, again to you, your sense, the full flush
      spring returning,
  Again the freshness and the odors, again Virginia's summer sky,
      pellucid blue and silver,
  Again the forenoon purple of the hills,
  Again the deathless grass, so noiseless soft and green,
  Again the blood-red roses blooming.

  Perfume this book of mine O blood-red roses!
  Lave subtly with your waters every line Potomac!
  Give me of you O spring, before I close, to put between its pages!
  O forenoon purple of the hills, before I close, of you!
  O deathless grass, of you!




From Far Dakota's Canyons  [June 25, 1876]

  From far Dakota's canyons,
  Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the
      silence,
  Haply to-day a mournful wall, haply a trumpet-note for heroes.

  The battle-bulletin,
  The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,
  The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism,
  In the midst of their little circle, with their slaughter'd horses
      for breastworks,
  The fall of Custer and all his officers and men.

  Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,
  The loftiest of life upheld by death,
  The ancient banner perfectly maintain'd,
  O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!

  As sitting in dark days,
  Lone, sulky, through the time's thick murk looking in vain for
      light, for hope,
  From unsuspected parts a fierce and momentary proof,
  (The sun there at the centre though conceal'd,
  Electric life forever at the centre,)
  Breaks forth a lightning flash.

  Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle,
  I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a
      bright sword in thy hand,
  Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds,
  (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,)
  Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious,
  After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color,
  Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,
  Thou yieldest up thyself.




Old War-Dreams

  In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
  Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look,)
  Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
       I dream, I dream, I dream.

  Of scenes of Nature, fields and mountains,
  Of skies so beauteous after a storm, and at night the moon so
      unearthly bright,
  Shining sweetly, shining down, where we dig the trenches and
      gather the heaps,
       I dream, I dream, I dream.

  Long have they pass'd, faces and trenches and fields,
  Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away
      from the fallen,
  Onward I sped at the time--but now of their forms at night,
       I dream, I dream, I dream.




Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

  Thick-sprinkled bunting! flag of stars!
  Long yet your road, fateful flag--long yet your road, and lined with
      bloody death,
  For the prize I see at issue at last is the world,
  All its ships and shores I see interwoven with your threads greedy banner;
  Dream'd again the flags of kings, highest borne to flaunt unrival'd?
  O hasten flag of man--O with sure and steady step, passing highest
      flags of kings,
  Walk supreme to the heavens mighty symbol--run up above them all,
  Flag of stars! thick-sprinkled bunting!




What Best I See in Thee
  [To U. S. G. return'd from his World's Tour]

  What best I see in thee,
  Is not that where thou mov'st down history's great highways,
  Ever undimm'd by time shoots warlike victory's dazzle,
  Or that thou sat'st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace,
  Or thou the man whom feudal Europe feted, venerable Asia swarm'd upon,
  Who walk'd with kings with even pace the round world's promenade;
  But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
  Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
  Ohio's, Indiana's millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,
  Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
      world's promenade,
  Were all so justified.




Spirit That Form'd This Scene
  [Written in Platte Canyon, Colorado]

  Spirit that form'd this scene,
  These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
  These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
  These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
  These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
  I know thee, savage spirit--we have communed together,
  Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
  Wast charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
  To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
  The lyrist's measur'd beat, the wrought-out temple's grace--column
      and polish'd arch forgot?
  But thou that revelest here--spirit that form'd this scene,
  They have remember'd thee.




As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

  As I walk these broad majestic days of peace,
  (For the war, the struggle of blood finish'd, wherein, O terrific Ideal,
  Against vast odds erewhile having gloriously won,
  Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps in time toward denser wars,
  Perhaps to engage in time in still more dreadful contests, dangers,
  Longer campaigns and crises, labors beyond all others,)
  Around me I hear that eclat of the world, politics, produce,
  The announcements of recognized things, science,
  The approved growth of cities and the spread of inventions.

  I see the ships, (they will last a few years,)
  The vast factories with their foremen and workmen,
  And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object to it.

  But I too announce solid things,
  Science, ships, politics, cities, factories, are not nothing,
  Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring,
      triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight,
  They stand for realities--all is as it should be.

  Then my realities;
  What else is so real as mine?
  Libertad and the divine average, freedom to every slave on the face
      of the earth,
  The rapt promises and lumine of seers, the spiritual world, these
      centuries-lasting songs,
  And our visions, the visions of poets, the most solid announcements
      of any.




A Clear Midnight

  This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
  Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
  Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
      lovest best,
  Night, sleep, death and the stars.




BOOK XXXIII.  SONGS OF PARTING


As the Time Draws Nigh

  As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud,
  A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me.

  I shall go forth,
  I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long,
  Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will
      suddenly cease.

  O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this?
  Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us? --and yet it is
      enough, O soul;
  O soul, we have positively appear'd--that is enough.




Years of the Modern

  Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd!
  Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas,
  I see not America only, not only Liberty's nation but other nations
      preparing,
  I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity
      of races,
  I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's stage,
  (Have the old forces, the old wars, played their parts? are the acts
      suitable to them closed?)
  I see Freedom, completely arm'd and victorious and very haughty,
      with Law on one side and Peace on the other,
  A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste;
  What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?
  I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions,
  I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken,
  I see the landmarks of European kings removed,
  I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way;)
  Never were such sharp questions ask'd as this day,
  Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God,
  Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!
  His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the
      Pacific, the archipelagoes,
  With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the
      wholesale engines of war,
  With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all
      geography, all lands;
  What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under
      the seas?
  Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?
  Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim,
  The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,
  No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights;
  Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to
      pierce it, is full of phantoms,
  Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,
  This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams
      O years!
  Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not
      whether I sleep or wake;)
  The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,
  The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.




Ashes of Soldiers

  Ashes of soldiers South or North,
  As I muse retrospective murmuring a chant in thought,
  The war resumes, again to my sense your shapes,
  And again the advance of the armies.

  Noiseless as mists and vapors,
  From their graves in the trenches ascending,
  From cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee,
  From every point of the compass out of the countless graves,
  In wafted clouds, in myriads large, or squads of twos or threes or
      single ones they come,
  And silently gather round me.

  Now sound no note O trumpeters,
  Not at the head of my cavalry parading on spirited horses,
  With sabres drawn and glistening, and carbines by their thighs, (ah
      my brave horsemen!
  My handsome tan-faced horsemen! what life, what joy and pride,
  With all the perils were yours.)

  Nor you drummers, neither at reveille at dawn,
  Nor the long roll alarming the camp, nor even the muffled beat for burial,
  Nothing from you this time O drummers bearing my warlike drums.

  But aside from these and the marts of wealth and the crowded promenade,
  Admitting around me comrades close unseen by the rest and voiceless,
  The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive,
  I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers.

  Faces so pale with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet,
  Draw close, but speak not.

  Phantoms of countless lost,
  Invisible to the rest henceforth become my companions,
  Follow me ever--desert me not while I live.

  Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living--sweet are the musical
      voices sounding,
  But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead with their silent eyes.

  Dearest comrades, all is over and long gone,
  But love is not over--and what love, O comrades!
  Perfume from battle-fields rising, up from the foetor arising.

  Perfume therefore my chant, O love, immortal love,
  Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers,
  Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride.

  Perfume all--make all wholesome,
  Make these ashes to nourish and blossom,
  O love, solve all, fructify all with the last chemistry.

  Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,
  That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,
  For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.




Thoughts

       1
  Of these years I sing,
  How they pass and have pass'd through convuls'd pains, as through
      parturitions,
  How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure
      fulfilment, the absolute success, despite of people--illustrates
      evil as well as good,
  The vehement struggle so fierce for unity in one's-self,
  How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths,
      obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity,
  How few see the arrived models, the athletes, the Western States, or
      see freedom or spirituality, or hold any faith in results,
  (But I see the athletes, and I see the results of the war glorious
      and inevitable, and they again leading to other results.)

  How the great cities appear--how the Democratic masses, turbulent,
      willful, as I love them,
  How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the
      sounding and resounding, keep on and on,
  How society waits unform'd, and is for a while between things ended
      and things begun,
  How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of
      freedom and of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society, and
      of all that is begun,
  And how the States are complete in themselves--and how all triumphs
      and glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward,
  And how these of mine and of the States will in their turn be
      convuls'd, and serve other parturitions and transitions,
  And how all people, sights, combinations, the democratic masses too,
      serve--and how every fact, and war itself, with all its horrors,
      serves,
  And how now or at any time each serves the exquisite transition of death.

       2
  Of seeds dropping into the ground, of births,
  Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to
      impregnable and swarming places,
  Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, and the rest, are to be,
  Of what a few years will show there in Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada,
      and the rest,
  (Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska,)
  Of what the feuillage of America is the preparation for--and of what
      all sights, North, South, East and West, are,
  Of this Union welded in blood, of the solemn price paid, of the
      unnamed lost ever present in my mind;
  Of the temporary use of materials for identity's sake,
  Of the present, passing, departing--of the growth of completer men
      than any yet,
  Of all sloping down there where the fresh free giver the mother, the
      Mississippi flows,
  Of mighty inland cities yet unsurvey'd and unsuspected,
  Of the new and good names, of the modern developments, of
      inalienable homesteads,
  Of a free and original life there, of simple diet and clean and
      sweet blood,
  Of litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there,
  Of immense spiritual results future years far West, each side of the
      Anahuacs,
  Of these songs, well understood there, (being made for that area,)
  Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there,
  (O it lurks in me night and day--what is gain after all to savageness
      and freedom?)




Song at Sunset

  Splendor of ended day floating and filling me,
  Hour prophetic, hour resuming the past,
  Inflating my throat, you divine average,
  You earth and life till the last ray gleams I sing.

  Open mouth of my soul uttering gladness,
  Eyes of my soul seeing perfection,
  Natural life of me faithfully praising things,
  Corroborating forever the triumph of things.

  Illustrious every one!
  Illustrious what we name space, sphere of unnumber'd spirits,
  Illustrious the mystery of motion in all beings, even the tiniest insect,
  Illustrious the attribute of speech, the senses, the body,
  Illustrious the passing light--illustrious the pale reflection on
      the new moon in the western sky,
  Illustrious whatever I see or hear or touch, to the last.

  Good in all,
  In the satisfaction and aplomb of animals,
  In the annual return of the seasons,
  In the hilarity of youth,
  In the strength and flush of manhood,
  In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,
  In the superb vistas of death.

  Wonderful to depart!
  Wonderful to be here!
  The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
  To breathe the air, how delicious!
  To speak--to walk--to seize something by the hand!
  To prepare for sleep, for bed, to look on my rose-color'd flesh!
  To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large!
  To be this incredible God I am!
  To have gone forth among other Gods, these men and women I love.

  Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself
  How my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around!
  How the clouds pass silently overhead!
  How the earth darts on and on! and how the sun, moon, stars, dart on and on!
  How the water sports and sings! (surely it is alive!)
  How the trees rise and stand up, with strong trunks, with branches
      and leaves!
  (Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul.)

  O amazement of things--even the least particle!
  O spirituality of things!
  O strain musical flowing through ages and continents, now reaching
      me and America!
  I take your strong chords, intersperse them, and cheerfully pass
      them forward.

  I too carol the sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting,
  I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the
      growths of the earth,
  I too have felt the resistless call of myself.

  As I steam'd down the Mississippi,
  As I wander'd over the prairies,
  As I have lived, as I have look'd through my windows my eyes,
  As I went forth in the morning, as I beheld the light breaking in the east,
  As I bathed on the beach of the Eastern Sea, and again on the beach
      of the Western Sea,
  As I roam'd the streets of inland Chicago, whatever streets I have roam'd,
  Or cities or silent woods, or even amid the sights of war,
  Wherever I have been I have charged myself with contentment and triumph.

  I sing to the last the equalities modern or old,
  I sing the endless finales of things,
  I say Nature continues, glory continues,
  I praise with electric voice,
  For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
  And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.

  O setting sun! though the time has come,
  I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.




As at Thy Portals Also Death

  As at thy portals also death,
  Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,
  To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
  To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
  (I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,
  I sit by the form in the coffin,
  I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks,
      the closed eyes in the coffin;)
  To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth,
      life, love, to me the best,
  I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
  And set a tombstone here.




My Legacy

  The business man the acquirer vast,
  After assiduous years surveying results, preparing for departure,
  Devises houses and lands to his children, bequeaths stocks, goods,
      funds for a school or hospital,
  Leaves money to certain companions to buy tokens, souvenirs of gems
      and gold.

  But I, my life surveying, closing,
  With nothing to show to devise from its idle years,
  Nor houses nor lands, nor tokens of gems or gold for my friends,
  Yet certain remembrances of the war for you, and after you,
  And little souvenirs of camps and soldiers, with my love,
  I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs.




Pensive on Her Dead Gazing

  Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,
  Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields gazing,
  (As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger'd,)
  As she call'd to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk'd,
  Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my
      sons, lose not an atom,
  And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,
  And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,
  And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers' depths,
  And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children's
      blood trickling redden'd,
  And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,
  My dead absorb or South or North--my young men's bodies absorb,
      and their precious precious blood,
  Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a
      year hence,
  In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
  In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give
      my immortal heroes,
  Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an
      atom be lost,
  O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
  Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.




Camps of Green

  Nor alone those camps of white, old comrades of the wars,
  When as order'd forward, after a long march,
  Footsore and weary, soon as the light lessens we halt for the night,
  Some of us so fatigued carrying the gun and knapsack, dropping
      asleep in our tracks,
  Others pitching the little tents, and the fires lit up begin to sparkle,
  Outposts of pickets posted surrounding alert through the dark,
  And a word provided for countersign, careful for safety,
  Till to the call of the drummers at daybreak loudly beating the drums,
  We rise up refresh'd, the night and sleep pass'd over, and resume our
      journey,
  Or proceed to battle.

  Lo, the camps of the tents of green,
  Which the days of peace keep filling, and the days of war keep filling,
  With a mystic army, (is it too order'd forward? is it too only
      halting awhile,
  Till night and sleep pass over?)

  Now in those camps of green, in their tents dotting the world,
  In the parents, children, husbands, wives, in them, in the old and young,
  Sleeping under the sunlight, sleeping under the moonlight, content
      and silent there at last,
  Behold the mighty bivouac-field and waiting-camp of all,
  Of the corps and generals all, and the President over the corps and
      generals all,
  And of each of us O soldiers, and of each and all in the ranks we fought,
  (There without hatred we all, all meet.)

  For presently O soldiers, we too camp in our place in the
      bivouac-camps of green,
  But we need not provide for outposts, nor word for the countersign,
  Nor drummer to beat the morning drum.




The Sobbing of the Bells [Midnight, Sept. 19-20, 1881]

  The sobbing of the bells, the sudden death-news everywhere,
  The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People,
  (Full well they know that message in the darkness,
  Full well return, respond within their breasts, their brains, the
      sad reverberations,)
  The passionate toll and clang--city to city, joining, sounding, passing,
  Those heart-beats of a Nation in the night.




As They Draw to a Close

  As they draw to a close,
  Of what underlies the precedent songs--of my aims in them,
  Of the seed I have sought to plant in them,
  Of joy, sweet joy, through many a year, in them,
  (For them, for them have I lived, in them my work is done,)
  Of many an aspiration fond, of many a dream and plan;
  Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the flowing eternal identity,
  To Nature encompassing these, encompassing God--to the joyous,
      electric all,
  To the sense of Death, and accepting exulting in Death in its turn
      the same as life,
  The entrance of man to sing;
  To compact you, ye parted, diverse lives,
  To put rapport the mountains and rocks and streams,
  And the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and pine,
  With you O soul.




Joy, Shipmate, Joy!

  Joy, shipmate, Joy!
  (Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry,)
  Our life is closed, our life begins,
  The long, long anchorage we leave,
  The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
  She swiftly courses from the shore,
  Joy, shipmate, joy.




The Untold Want

  The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
  Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.




Portals

  What are those of the known but to ascend and enter the Unknown?
  And what are those of life but for Death?




These Carols

  These carols sung to cheer my passage through the world I see,
  For completion I dedicate to the Invisible World.




Now Finale to the Shore

  Now finale to the shore,
  Now land and life finale and farewell,
  Now Voyager depart, (much, much for thee is yet in store,)
  Often enough hast thou adventur'd o'er the seas,
  Cautiously cruising, studying the charts,
  Duly again to port and hawser's tie returning;
  But now obey thy cherish'd secret wish,
  Embrace thy friends, leave all in order,
  To port and hawser's tie no more returning,
  Depart upon thy endless cruise old Sailor.




So Long!

  To conclude, I announce what comes after me.

  I remember I said before my leaves sprang at all,
  I would raise my voice jocund and strong with reference to consummations.

  When America does what was promis'd,
  When through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons,
  When the rest part away for superb persons and contribute to them,
  When breeds of the most perfect mothers denote America,
  Then to me and mine our due fruition.

  I have press'd through in my own right,
  I have sung the body and the soul, war and peace have I sung, and
      the songs of life and death,
  And the songs of birth, and shown that there are many births.

  I have offer'd my style to every one, I have journey'd with confident step;
  While my pleasure is yet at the full I whisper So long!
  And take the young woman's hand and the young man's hand for the last time.

  I announce natural persons to arise,
  I announce justice triumphant,
  I announce uncompromising liberty and equality,
  I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride.

  I announce that the identity of these States is a single identity only,
  I announce the Union more and more compact, indissoluble,
  I announce splendors and majesties to make all the previous politics
      of the earth insignificant.

  I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless, unloosen'd,
  I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.

  I announce a man or woman coming, perhaps you are the one, (So long!)
  I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste,
      affectionate, compassionate, fully arm'd.

  I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,
  I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.

  I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded,
  I announce a race of splendid and savage old men.

  O thicker and faster--(So long!)
  O crowding too close upon me,
  I foresee too much, it means more than I thought,
  It appears to me I am dying.

  Hasten throat and sound your last,
  Salute me--salute the days once more. Peal the old cry once more.

  Screaming electric, the atmosphere using,
  At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing,
  Swiftly on, but a little while alighting,
  Curious envelop'd messages delivering,
  Sparkles hot, seed ethereal down in the dirt dropping,
  Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring,
  To ages and ages yet the growth of the seed leaving,
  To troops out of the war arising, they the tasks I have set
  promulging,
  To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing, their affection
      me more clearly explaining,
  To young men my problems offering--no dallier I--I the muscle of
      their brains trying,
  So I pass, a little time vocal, visible, contrary,
  Afterward a melodious echo, passionately bent for, (death making
      me really undying,)
  The best of me then when no longer visible, for toward that I have
      been incessantly preparing.

  What is there more, that I lag and pause and crouch extended with
      unshut mouth?
  Is there a single final farewell?
  My songs cease, I abandon them,
  From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you.

  Camerado, this is no book,
  Who touches this touches a man,
  (Is it night? are we here together alone?)
  It is I you hold and who holds you,
  I spring from the pages into your arms--decease calls me forth.

  O how your fingers drowse me,
  Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans
      of my ears,
  I feel immerged from head to foot,
  Delicious, enough.

  Enough O deed impromptu and secret,
  Enough O gliding present--enough O summ'd-up past.

  Dear friend whoever you are take this kiss,
  I give it especially to you, do not forget me,
  I feel like one who has done work for the day to retire awhile,
  I receive now again of my many translations, from my avataras
      ascending, while others doubtless await me,
  An unknown sphere more real than I dream'd, more direct, darts
      awakening rays about me, So long!
  Remember my words, I may again return,
  I love you, I depart from materials,
  I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.




BOOK XXXIV.  SANDS AT SEVENTY


Mannahatta

  My city's fit and noble name resumed,
  Choice aboriginal name, with marvellous beauty, meaning,
  A rocky founded island--shores where ever gayly dash the coming,
      going, hurrying sea waves.




Paumanok

  Sea-beauty! stretch'd and basking!
  One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious commerce,
      steamers, sails,
  And one the Atlantic's wind caressing, fierce or gentle--mighty hulls
      dark-gliding in the distance.
  Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water--healthy air and soil!
  Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!




From Montauk Point

  I stand as on some mighty eagle's beak,
  Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,)
  The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance,
  The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps--that inbound urge and urge
      of waves,
  Seeking the shores forever.




To Those Who've Fail'd

  To those who've fail'd, in aspiration vast,
  To unnam'd soldiers fallen in front on the lead,
  To calm, devoted engineers--to over-ardent travelers--to pilots on
      their ships,
  To many a lofty song and picture without recognition--I'd rear
      laurel-cover'd monument,
  High, high above the rest--To all cut off before their time,
  Possess'd by some strange spirit of fire,
  Quench'd by an early death.




A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine

  A carol closing sixty-nine--a resume--a repetition,
  My lines in joy and hope continuing on the same,
  Of ye, O God, Life, Nature, Freedom, Poetry;
  Of you, my Land--your rivers, prairies, States--you, mottled Flag I love,
  Your aggregate retain'd entire--Of north, south, east and west, your
      items all;
  Of me myself--the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,
  The body wreck'd, old, poor and paralyzed--the strange inertia
      falling pall-like round me,
  The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,
  The undiminish'd faith--the groups of loving friends.




The Bravest Soldiers

  Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who lived through
      the fight;
  But the bravest press'd to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown.




A Font of Type

  This latent mine--these unlaunch'd voices--passionate powers,
  Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout,
  (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,)
  These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death,
  Or sooth'd to ease and sheeny sun and sleep,
  Within the pallid slivers slumbering.




As I Sit Writing Here

  As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
  Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,
  Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,
  May filter in my dally songs.




My Canary Bird

  Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
  Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
  But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
  Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
  Is it not just as great, O soul?




Queries to My Seventieth Year

  Approaching, nearing, curious,
  Thou dim, uncertain spectre--bringest thou life or death?
  Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?
  Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
  Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
  Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack'd voice harping, screeching?




The Wallabout Martyrs

  Greater than memory of Achilles or Ulysses,
  More, more by far to thee than tomb of Alexander,
  Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,
  Once living men--once resolute courage, aspiration, strength,
  The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.




The First Dandelion

  Simple and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging,
  As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
  Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass--innocent, golden, calm
      as the dawn,
  The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.




America

  Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
  All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
  Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
  Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
  A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
  Chair'd in the adamant of Time.




Memories

  How sweet the silent backward tracings!
  The wanderings as in dreams--the meditation of old times resumed
      --their loves, joys, persons, voyages.




To-Day and Thee

  The appointed winners in a long-stretch'd game;
  The course of Time and nations--Egypt, India, Greece and Rome;
  The past entire, with all its heroes, histories, arts, experiments,
  Its store of songs, inventions, voyages, teachers, books,
  Garner'd for now and thee--To think of it!
  The heirdom all converged in thee!




After the Dazzle of Day

  After the dazzle of day is gone,
  Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
  After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
  Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.




Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809

  To-day, from each and all, a breath of prayer--a pulse of thought,
  To memory of Him--to birth of Him.




Out of May's Shows Selected

  Apple orchards, the trees all cover'd with blossoms;
  Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green;
  The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning;
  The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun;
  The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers.




Halcyon Days

  Not from successful love alone,
  Nor wealth, nor honor'd middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
  But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
  As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
  As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
  As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
      really finish'd and indolent-ripe on the tree,
  Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
  The brooding and blissful halcyon days!



FANCIES AT NAVESINK

   [I]  The Pilot in the Mist

  Steaming the northern rapids--(an old St. Lawrence reminiscence,
  A sudden memory-flash comes back, I know not why,
  Here waiting for the sunrise, gazing from this hill;)
  Again 'tis just at morning--a heavy haze contends with daybreak,
  Again the trembling, laboring vessel veers me--I press through
      foam-dash'd rocks that almost touch me,
  Again I mark where aft the small thin Indian helmsman
  Looms in the mist, with brow elate and governing hand.



  [II]  Had I the Choice

  Had I the choice to tally greatest bards,
  To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will,
  Homer with all his wars and warriors--Hector, Achilles, Ajax,
  Or Shakspere's woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello--Tennyson's fair ladies,
  Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme,
      delight of singers;
  These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter,
  Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer,
  Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse,
  And leave its odor there.



  [III]  You Tides with Ceaseless Swell

  You tides with ceaseless swell! you power that does this work!
  You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space's spread,
  Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations,
  What are the messages by you from distant stars to us? what Sirius'?
      what Capella's?
  What central heart--and you the pulse--vivifies all? what boundless
      aggregate of all?
  What subtle indirection and significance in you? what clue to all in
      you? what fluid, vast identity,
  Holding the universe with all its parts as one--as sailing in a ship?



  [IV]  Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning

  Last of ebb, and daylight waning,
  Scented sea-cool landward making, smells of sedge and salt incoming,
  With many a half-caught voice sent up from the eddies,
  Many a muffled confession--many a sob and whisper'd word,
  As of speakers far or hid.

  How they sweep down and out! how they mutter!
  Poets unnamed--artists greatest of any, with cherish'd lost designs,
  Love's unresponse--a chorus of age's complaints--hope's last words,
  Some suicide's despairing cry, Away to the boundless waste, and
      never again return.

  On to oblivion then!
  On, on, and do your part, ye burying, ebbing tide!
  On for your time, ye furious debouche!



  [V]  And Yet Not You Alone

  And yet not you alone, twilight and burying ebb,
  Nor you, ye lost designs alone--nor failures, aspirations;
  I know, divine deceitful ones, your glamour's seeming;
  Duly by you, from you, the tide and light again--duly the hinges turning,
  Duly the needed discord-parts offsetting, blending,
  Weaving from you, from Sleep, Night, Death itself,
  The rhythmus of Birth eternal.



  [VI]  Proudly the Flood Comes In

  Proudly the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, advancing,
  Long it holds at the high, with bosom broad outswelling,
  All throbs, dilates--the farms, woods, streets of cities--workmen at work,
  Mainsails, topsails, jibs, appear in the offing--steamers' pennants
      of smoke--and under the forenoon sun,
  Freighted with human lives, gaily the outward bound, gaily the
      inward bound,
  Flaunting from many a spar the flag I love.



  [VII]  By That Long Scan of Waves

  By that long scan of waves, myself call'd back, resumed upon myself,
  In every crest some undulating light or shade--some retrospect,
  Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas--scenes ephemeral,
  The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the wounded and the dead,
  Myself through every by-gone phase--my idle youth--old age at hand,
  My three-score years of life summ'd up, and more, and past,
  By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing,
  And haply yet some drop within God's scheme's ensemble--some
      wave, or part of wave,
  Like one of yours, ye multitudinous ocean.



  [VIII]  Then Last Of All

  Then last of all, caught from these shores, this hill,
  Of you O tides, the mystic human meaning:
  Only by law of you, your swell and ebb, enclosing me the same,
  The brain that shapes, the voice that chants this song.




Election Day, November, 1884

  If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
  'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless prairies--nor
      your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
  Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
      geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
  Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes--nor
      Mississippi's stream:
  --This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name--the still
      small voice vibrating--America's choosing day,
  (The heart of it not in the chosen--the act itself the main, the
      quadriennial choosing,)
  The stretch of North and South arous'd--sea-board and inland--
      Texas to Maine--the Prairie States--Vermont, Virginia, California,
  The final ballot-shower from East to West--the paradox and conflict,
  The countless snow-flakes falling--(a swordless conflict,
  Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the
      peaceful choice of all,
  Or good or ill humanity--welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
  --Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify--while the heart
      pants, life glows:
  These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
  Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.




With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

  With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
  Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
  Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
  (I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
  Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
  Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
  Thy brooding scowl and murk--thy unloos'd hurricanes,
  Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
  Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears--a lack from all
      eternity in thy content,
  (Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee
      greatest--no less could make thee,)
  Thy lonely state--something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet
      never gain'st,
  Surely some right withheld--some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of
      freedom-lover pent,
  Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those breakers,
  By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
  And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
  And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
  And undertones of distant lion roar,
  (Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear--but now, rapport for once,
  A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
  The first and last confession of the globe,
  Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms,
  The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
  Thou tellest to a kindred soul.




Death of General Grant

  As one by one withdraw the lofty actors,
  From that great play on history's stage eterne,
  That lurid, partial act of war and peace--of old and new contending,
  Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense;
  All past--and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing,
  Victor's and vanquish'd--Lincoln's and Lee's--now thou with them,
  Man of the mighty days--and equal to the days!
  Thou from the prairies!--tangled and many-vein'd and hard has been thy part,
  To admiration has it been enacted!




Red Jacket (From Aloft)

  Upon this scene, this show,
  Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
  (Nor in caprice alone--some grains of deepest meaning,)
  Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds' blended shapes,
  As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill'd with its soul,
  Product of Nature's sun, stars, earth direct--a towering human form,
  In hunting-shirt of film, arm'd with the rifle, a half-ironical
      smile curving its phantom lips,
  Like one of Ossian's ghosts looks down.




Washington's Monument February, 1885

  Ah, not this marble, dead and cold:
  Far from its base and shaft expanding--the round zones circling,
      comprehending,
  Thou, Washington, art all the world's, the continents' entire--not
      yours alone, America,
  Europe's as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer's cot,
  Or frozen North, or sultry South--the African's--the Arab's in his tent,
  Old Asia's there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;
  (Greets the antique the hero new? 'tis but the same--the heir
      legitimate, continued ever,
  The indomitable heart and arm--proofs of the never-broken line,
  Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same--e'en in defeat
      defeated not, the same:)
  Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night,
  Through teeming cities' streets, indoors or out, factories or farms,
  Now, or to come, or past--where patriot wills existed or exist,
  Wherever Freedom, pois'd by Toleration, sway'd by Law,
  Stands or is rising thy true monument.




Of That Blithe Throat of Thine

  Of that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank,
  I'll mind the lesson, solitary bird--let me too welcome chilling drifts,
  E'en the profoundest chill, as now--a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv'd,
  Old age land-lock'd within its winter bay--(cold, cold, O cold!)
  These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet,
  For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last;
  Not summer's zones alone--not chants of youth, or south's warm tides alone,
  But held by sluggish floes, pack'd in the northern ice, the cumulus
      of years,
  These with gay heart I also sing.




Broadway

  What hurrying human tides, or day or night!
  What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!
  What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee!
  What curious questioning glances--glints of love!
  Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration!
  Thou portal--thou arena--thou of the myriad long-drawn lines and groups!
  (Could but thy flagstones, curbs, facades, tell their inimitable tales;
  Thy windows rich, and huge hotels--thy side-walks wide;)
  Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
  Thou, like the parti-colored world itself--like infinite, teeming,
      mocking life!
  Thou visor'd, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!




To Get the Final Lilt of Songs

  To get the final lilt of songs,
  To penetrate the inmost lore of poets--to know the mighty ones,
  Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson;
  To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt--
      to truly understand,
  To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,
  Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.




Old Salt Kossabone

  Far back, related on my mother's side,
  Old Salt Kossabone, I'll tell you how he died:
  (Had been a sailor all his life--was nearly 90--lived with his
      married grandchild, Jenny;
  House on a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and
      stretch to open sea;)
  The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his
      regular custom,
  In his great arm chair by the window seated,
  (Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)
  Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself--
      And now the close of all:
  One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long--cross-tides
      and much wrong going,
  At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering,
  And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering,
      cleaving, as he watches,
  "She's free--she's on her destination"--these the last words--when
      Jenny came, he sat there dead,
  Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother's side, far back.




The Dead Tenor

  As down the stage again,
  With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable,
  Back from the fading lessons of the past, I'd call, I'd tell and own,
  How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee!
  (So firm--so liquid-soft--again that tremulous, manly timbre!
  The perfect singing voice--deepest of all to me the lesson--trial
      and test of all:)
  How through those strains distill'd--how the rapt ears, the soul of
      me, absorbing
  Fernando's heart, Manrico's passionate call, Ernani's, sweet Gennaro's,
  I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants transmuting,
  Freedom's and Love's and Faith's unloos'd cantabile,
  (As perfume's, color's, sunlight's correlation:)
  From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor,
  A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel'd earth,
  To memory of thee.




Continuities

  Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
  No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
  Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
  Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
  Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
  The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
  The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
  The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
  To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
  With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.




Yonnondio

  A song, a poem of itself--the word itself a dirge,
  Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,
  To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;
  Yonnondio--I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine, with
      plains and mountains dark,
  I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,
  As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
      twilight,
  (Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!
  No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
  Yonnondio! Yonnondio!--unlimn'd they disappear;
  To-day gives place, and fades--the cities, farms, factories fade;
  A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air
      for a moment,
  Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.




Life

  Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man;
  (Have former armies fail'd? then we send fresh armies--and fresh again;)
  Ever the grappled mystery of all earth's ages old or new;
  Ever the eager eyes, hurrahs, the welcome-clapping hands, the loud
      applause;
  Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;
  Struggling to-day the same--battling the same.




"Going Somewhere"

  My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend,
  (Now buried in an English grave--and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake,)
  Ended our talk--"The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern
      learning, intuitions deep,
  "Of all Geologies--Histories--of all Astronomy--of Evolution,
      Metaphysics all,
  "Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering,
  "Life, life an endless march, an endless army, (no halt, but it is
      duly over,)
  "The world, the race, the soul--in space and time the universes,
  "All bound as is befitting each--all surely going somewhere."




Small the Theme of My Chant

  Small the theme of my Chant, yet the greatest--namely, One's-Self--
      a simple, separate person. That, for the use of the New World, I sing.
  Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not physiognomy alone,
      nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse;--I say the Form complete
      is worthier far. The Female equally with the Male, I sing.
  Nor cease at the theme of One's-Self. I speak the word of the
      modern, the word En-Masse.
  My Days I sing, and the Lands--with interstice I knew of hapless War.
  (O friend, whoe'er you are, at last arriving hither to commence, I
      feel through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I return.
  And thus upon our journey, footing the road, and more than once, and
      link'd together let us go.)




True Conquerors

  Old farmers, travelers, workmen (no matter how crippled or bent,)
  Old sailors, out of many a perilous voyage, storm and wreck,
  Old soldiers from campaigns, with all their wounds, defeats and scars;
  Enough that they've survived at all--long life's unflinching ones!
  Forth from their struggles, trials, fights, to have emerged at all--
      in that alone,
  True conquerors o'er all the rest.




The United States to Old World Critics

  Here first the duties of to-day, the lessons of the concrete,
  Wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty;
  As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice,
  Whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps,
  The solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars.




The Calming Thought of All

  That coursing on, whate'er men's speculations,
  Amid the changing schools, theologies, philosophies,
  Amid the bawling presentations new and old,
  The round earth's silent vital laws, facts, modes continue.




Thanks in Old Age

  Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go,
  For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life,
  For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear--you,
      father--you, brothers, sisters, friends,)
  For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the same,
  For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,
  For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation,
  (You distant, dim unknown--or young or old--countless, unspecified,
      readers belov'd,
  We never met, and neer shall meet--and yet our souls embrace, long,
      close and long;)
  For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books--for colors, forms,
  For all the brave strong men--devoted, hardy men--who've forward
      sprung in freedom's help, all years, all lands
  For braver, stronger, more devoted men--(a special laurel ere I go,
      to life's war's chosen ones,
  The cannoneers of song and thought--the great artillerists--the
      foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)
  As soldier from an ended war return'd--As traveler out of myriads,
      to the long procession retrospective,
  Thanks--joyful thanks!--a soldier's, traveler's thanks.




Life and Death

  The two old, simple problems ever intertwined,
  Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled.
  By each successive age insoluble, pass'd on,
  To ours to-day--and we pass on the same.




The Voice of the Rain

  And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
  Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
  I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
  Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
  Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed, and
      yet the same,
  I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
  And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
  And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,
      and make pure and beautify it;
  (For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
  Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)




Soon Shall the Winter's Foil Be Here

  Soon shall the winter's foil be here;
  Soon shall these icy ligatures unbind and melt--A little while,
  And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and
      growth--a thousand forms shall rise
  From these dead clods and chills as from low burial graves.

  Thine eyes, ears--all thy best attributes--all that takes cognizance
      of natural beauty,
  Shall wake and fill. Thou shalt perceive the simple shows, the
      delicate miracles of earth,
  Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers,
  The arbutus under foot, the willow's yellow-green, the blossoming
      plum and cherry;
  With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their songs--the
      flitting bluebird;
  For such the scenes the annual play brings on.




While Not the Past Forgetting

  While not the past forgetting,
  To-day, at least, contention sunk entire--peace, brotherhood uprisen;
  For sign reciprocal our Northern, Southern hands,
  Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers, North or South,
  (Nor for the past alone--for meanings to the future,)
  Wreaths of roses and branches of palm.




The Dying Veteran

  Amid these days of order, ease, prosperity,
  Amid the current songs of beauty, peace, decorum,
  I cast a reminiscence--(likely 'twill offend you,
  I heard it in my boyhood;)--More than a generation since,
  A queer old savage man, a fighter under Washington himself,
  (Large, brave, cleanly, hot-blooded, no talker, rather spiritualistic,
  Had fought in the ranks--fought well--had been all through the
      Revolutionary war,)
  Lay dying--sons, daughters, church-deacons, lovingly tending him,
  Sharping their sense, their ears, towards his murmuring, half-caught words:
  "Let me return again to my war-days,
  To the sights and scenes--to forming the line of battle,
  To the scouts ahead reconnoitering,
  To the cannons, the grim artillery,
  To the galloping aides, carrying orders,
  To the wounded, the fallen, the heat, the suspense,
  The perfume strong, the smoke, the deafening noise;
  Away with your life of peace!--your joys of peace!
  Give me my old wild battle-life again!"




Stronger Lessons

  Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you, and were
      tender with you, and stood aside for you?
  Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject you, and
      brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt,
      or dispute the passage with you?




A Prairie Sunset

  Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,
  The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's multiform power consign'd
      for once to colors;
  The light, the general air possess'd by them--colors till now unknown,
  No limit, confine--not the Western sky alone--the high meridian--
      North, South, all,
  Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.




Twenty Years

  Down on the ancient wharf, the sand, I sit, with a new-comer chatting:
  He shipp'd as green-hand boy, and sail'd away, (took some sudden,
      vehement notion;)
  Since, twenty years and more have circled round and round,
  While he the globe was circling round and round, --and now returns:
  How changed the place--all the old land-marks gone--the parents dead;
  (Yes, he comes back to lay in port for good--to settle--has a
      well-fill'd purse--no spot will do but this;)
  The little boat that scull'd him from the sloop, now held in leash I see,
  I hear the slapping waves, the restless keel, the rocking in the sand,
  I see the sailor kit, the canvas bag, the great box bound with brass,
  I scan the face all berry-brown and bearded--the stout-strong frame,
  Dress'd in its russet suit of good Scotch cloth:
  (Then what the told-out story of those twenty years? What of the future?)




Orange Buds by Mail from Florida

  A lesser proof than old Voltaire's, yet greater,
  Proof of this present time, and thee, thy broad expanse, America,
  To my plain Northern hut, in outside clouds and snow,
  Brought safely for a thousand miles o'er land and tide,
  Some three days since on their own soil live-sprouting,
  Now here their sweetness through my room unfolding,
  A bunch of orange buds by mall from Florida.




Twilight

  The soft voluptuous opiate shades,
  The sun just gone, the eager light dispell'd--(I too will soon be
      gone, dispell'd,)
  A haze--nirwana--rest and night--oblivion.




You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me

  You lingering sparse leaves of me on winter-nearing boughs,
  And I some well-shorn tree of field or orchard-row;
  You tokens diminute and lorn--(not now the flush of May, or July
      clover-bloom--no grain of August now;)
  You pallid banner-staves--you pennants valueless--you overstay'd of time,
  Yet my soul-dearest leaves confirming all the rest,
  The faithfulest--hardiest--last.




Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone

  Not meagre, latent boughs alone, O songs! (scaly and bare, like
      eagles' talons,)
  But haply for some sunny day (who knows?) some future spring, some
      summer--bursting forth,
  To verdant leaves, or sheltering shade--to nourishing fruit,
  Apples and grapes--the stalwart limbs of trees emerging--the fresh,
      free, open air,
  And love and faith, like scented roses blooming.




The Dead Emperor

  To-day, with bending head and eyes, thou, too, Columbia,
  Less for the mighty crown laid low in sorrow--less for the Emperor,
  Thy true condolence breathest, sendest out o'er many a salt sea mile,
  Mourning a good old man--a faithful shepherd, patriot.




As the Greek's Signal Flame

  As the Greek's signal flame, by antique records told,
  Rose from the hill-top, like applause and glory,
  Welcoming in fame some special veteran, hero,
  With rosy tinge reddening the land he'd served,
  So I aloft from Mannahatta's ship-fringed shore,
  Lift high a kindled brand for thee, Old Poet.




The Dismantled Ship

  In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
  On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor'd near the shore,
  An old, dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled, done,
  After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up at last and
      hawser'd tight,
  Lies rusting, mouldering.




Now Precedent Songs, Farewell

  Now precedent songs, farewell--by every name farewell,
  (Trains of a staggering line in many a strange procession, waggons,
  From ups and downs--with intervals--from elder years, mid-age, or youth,)
  "In Cabin'd Ships, or Thee Old Cause or Poets to Come
  Or Paumanok, Song of Myself, Calamus, or Adam,
  Or Beat! Beat! Drums! or To the Leaven'd Soil they Trod,
  Or Captain! My Captain! Kosmos, Quicksand Years, or Thoughts,
  Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood," and many, many more unspecified,
  From fibre heart of mine--from throat and tongue--(My life's hot
      pulsing blood,
  The personal urge and form for me--not merely paper, automatic type
      and ink,)
  Each song of mine--each utterance in the past--having its long, long
      history,
  Of life or death, or soldier's wound, of country's loss or safety,
  (O heaven! what flash and started endless train of all! compared
      indeed to that!
  What wretched shred e'en at the best of all!)




An Evening Lull

  After a week of physical anguish,
  Unrest and pain, and feverish heat,
  Toward the ending day a calm and lull comes on,
  Three hours of peace and soothing rest of brain.




Old Age's Lambent Peaks

  The touch of flame--the illuminating fire--the loftiest look at last,
  O'er city, passion, sea--o'er prairie, mountain, wood--the earth itself,
  The airy, different, changing hues of all, in failing twilight,
  Objects and groups, bearings, faces, reminiscences;
  The calmer sight--the golden setting, clear and broad:
  So much i' the atmosphere, the points of view, the situations whence
      we scan,
  Bro't out by them alone--so much (perhaps the best) unreck'd before;
  The lights indeed from them--old age's lambent peaks.




After the Supper and Talk

  After the supper and talk--after the day is done,
  As a friend from friends his final withdrawal prolonging,
  Good-bye and Good-bye with emotional lips repeating,
  (So hard for his hand to release those hands--no more will they meet,
  No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young,
  A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more,)
  Shunning, postponing severance--seeking to ward off the last word
      ever so little,
  E'en at the exit-door turning--charges superfluous calling back--
      e'en as he descends the steps,
  Something to eke out a minute additional--shadows of nightfall deepening,
  Farewells, messages lessening--dimmer the forthgoer's visage and form,
  Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness--loth, O so loth to depart!
  Garrulous to the very last.




BOOKXXXV.  GOOD-BYE MY FANCY


Sail out for Good, Eidolon Yacht!

  Heave the anchor short!
  Raise main-sail and jib--steer forth,
  O little white-hull'd sloop, now speed on really deep waters,
  (I will not call it our concluding voyage,
  But outset and sure entrance to the truest, best, maturest;)
  Depart, depart from solid earth--no more returning to these shores,
  Now on for aye our infinite free venture wending,
  Spurning all yet tried ports, seas, hawsers, densities, gravitation,
  Sail out for good, eidolon yacht of me!




Lingering Last Drops

  And whence and why come you?

  We know not whence, (was the answer,)
  We only know that we drift here with the rest,
  That we linger'd and lagg'd--but were wafted at last, and are now here,
  To make the passing shower's concluding drops.




Good-Bye My Fancy

  Good-bye my fancy--(I had a word to say,
  But 'tis not quite the time--The best of any man's word or say,
  Is when its proper place arrives--and for its meaning,
  I keep mine till the last.)




On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!

  On, on the same, ye jocund twain!
  My life and recitative, containing birth, youth, mid-age years,
  Fitful as motley-tongues of flame, inseparably twined and merged in
      one--combining all,
  My single soul--aims, confirmations, failures, joys--Nor single soul alone,
  I chant my nation's crucial stage, (America's, haply humanity's)--
      the trial great, the victory great,
  A strange eclaircissement of all the masses past, the eastern world,
      the ancient, medieval,
  Here, here from wanderings, strayings, lessons, wars, defeats--here
      at the west a voice triumphant--justifying all,
  A gladsome pealing cry--a song for once of utmost pride and satisfaction;
  I chant from it the common bulk, the general average horde, (the
      best sooner than the worst)--And now I chant old age,
  (My verses, written first for forenoon life, and for the summer's,
      autumn's spread,
  I pass to snow-white hairs the same, and give to pulses
      winter-cool'd the same;)
  As here in careless trill, I and my recitatives, with faith and love,
  wafting to other work, to unknown songs, conditions,
  On, on ye jocund twain! continue on the same!




MY 71st Year

  After surmounting three-score and ten,
  With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows,
  My parents' deaths, the vagaries of my life, the many tearing
      passions of me, the war of '63 and '4,
  As some old broken soldier, after a long, hot, wearying march, or
      haply after battle,
  To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call, Here,
      with vital voice,
  Reporting yet, saluting yet the Officer over all.




Apparitions

  A vague mist hanging 'round half the pages:
  (Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul,
  That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts,
      non-realities.)




The Pallid Wreath

  Somehow I cannot let it go yet, funeral though it is,
  Let it remain back there on its nail suspended,
  With pink, blue, yellow, all blanch'd, and the white now gray and ashy,
  One wither'd rose put years ago for thee, dear friend;
  But I do not forget thee. Hast thou then faded?
  Is the odor exhaled? Are the colors, vitalities, dead?
  No, while memories subtly play--the past vivid as ever;
  For but last night I woke, and in that spectral ring saw thee,
  Thy smile, eyes, face, calm, silent, loving as ever:
  So let the wreath hang still awhile within my eye-reach,
  It is not yet dead to me, nor even pallid.




An Ended Day

  The soothing sanity and blitheness of completion,
  The pomp and hurried contest-glare and rush are done;
  Now triumph! transformation! jubilate!




Old Age's Ship & Crafty Death's

  From east and west across the horizon's edge,
  Two mighty masterful vessels sailers steal upon us:
  But we'll make race a-time upon the seas--a battle-contest yet! bear
      lively there!
  (Our joys of strife and derring-do to the last!)
  Put on the old ship all her power to-day!
  Crowd top-sail, top-gallant and royal studding-sails,
  Out challenge and defiance--flags and flaunting pennants added,
  As we take to the open--take to the deepest, freest waters.




To the Pending Year

  Have I no weapon-word for thee--some message brief and fierce?
  (Have I fought out and done indeed the battle?) Is there no shot left,
  For all thy affectations, lisps, scorns, manifold silliness?
  Nor for myself--my own rebellious self in thee?

  Down, down, proud gorge!--though choking thee;
  Thy bearded throat and high-borne forehead to the gutter;
  Crouch low thy neck to eleemosynary gifts.




Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher

  I doubt it not--then more, far more;
  In each old song bequeath'd--in every noble page or text,
  (Different--something unreck'd before--some unsuspected author,)
  In every object, mountain, tree, and star--in every birth and life,
  As part of each--evolv'd from each--meaning, behind the ostent,
  A mystic cipher waits infolded.




Long, Long Hence

  After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials,
  Accumulations, rous'd love and joy and thought,
  Hopes, wishes, aspirations, ponderings, victories, myriads of readers,
  Coating, compassing, covering--after ages' and ages' encrustations,
  Then only may these songs reach fruition.




Bravo, Paris Exposition!

  Add to your show, before you close it, France,
  With all the rest, visible, concrete, temples, towers, goods,
      machines and ores,
  Our sentiment wafted from many million heart-throbs, ethereal but solid,
  (We grand-sons and great-grandsons do not forget your grandsires,)
  From fifty Nations and nebulous Nations, compacted, sent oversea to-day,
  America's applause, love, memories and good-will.




Interpolation Sounds

  Over and through the burial chant,
  Organ and solemn service, sermon, bending priests,
  To me come interpolation sounds not in the show--plainly to me,
      crowding up the aisle and from the window,
  Of sudden battle's hurry and harsh noises--war's grim game to sight
      and ear in earnest;
  The scout call'd up and forward--the general mounted and his aides
      around him--the new-brought word--the instantaneous order issued;
  The rifle crack--the cannon thud--the rushing forth of men from their
      tents;
  The clank of cavalry--the strange celerity of forming ranks--the
      slender bugle note;
  The sound of horses' hoofs departing--saddles, arms, accoutrements.




To the Sun-Set Breeze

  Ah, whispering, something again, unseen,
  Where late this heated day thou enterest at my window, door,
  Thou, laving, tempering all, cool-freshing, gently vitalizing
  Me, old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat;
  Thou, nestling, folding close and firm yet soft, companion better
      than talk, book, art,
  (Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the
      rest--and this is of them,)
  So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within--thy soothing fingers
      my face and hands,
  Thou, messenger--magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me,
  (Distances balk'd--occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot,)
  I feel the sky, the prairies vast--I feel the mighty northern lakes,
  I feel the ocean and the forest--somehow I feel the globe itself
      swift-swimming in space;
  Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone--haply from endless store,
      God-sent,
  (For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense,)
  Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and
      cannot tell,
  Art thou not universal concrete's distillation? Law's, all
      Astronomy's last refinement?
  Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?




Old Chants

  An ancient song, reciting, ending,
  Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All,
  Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee,
  Accept me, thou saidst, the elder ballads,
  And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.

  (Of many debts incalculable,
  Haply our New World's chieftest debt is to old poems.)

  Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
  Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
  The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
  The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
  The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
  Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
  The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
  The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
  Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
  The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays,
  Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,
  As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,
  The great shadowy groups gathering around,
  Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,
  Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand
      and word, ascending,
  Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent
      with their music,
  Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,
  Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.




A Christmas Greeting

  Welcome, Brazilian brother--thy ample place is ready;
  A loving hand--a smile from the north--a sunny instant hall!
  (Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,
      impedimentas,
  Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the acceptance and
      the faith;)
  To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck--to thee from us
      the expectant eye,
  Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning well,
  The true lesson of a nation's light in the sky,
  (More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,)
  The height to be superb humanity.




Sounds of the Winter

  Sounds of the winter too,
  Sunshine upon the mountains--many a distant strain
  From cheery railroad train--from nearer field, barn, house,
  The whispering air--even the mute crops, garner'd apples, corn,
  Children's and women's tones--rhythm of many a farmer and of flail,
  An old man's garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out yet,
  Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.




A Twilight Song

  As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame,
  Musing on long-pass'd war-scenes--of the countless buried unknown
      soldiers,
  Of the vacant names, as unindented air's and sea's--the unreturn'd,
  The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the
      deep-fill'd trenches
  Of gather'd from dead all America, North, South, East, West, whence
      they came up,
  From wooded Maine, New-England's farms, from fertile Pennsylvania,
      Illinois, Ohio,
  From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the Carolinas, Texas,
  (Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights in the noiseless
      flickering flames,
  Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising--I hear the
      rhythmic tramp of the armies;)
  You million unwrit names all, all--you dark bequest from all the war,
  A special verse for you--a flash of duty long neglected--your mystic
      roll strangely gather'd here,
  Each name recall'd by me from out the darkness and death's ashes,
  Henceforth to be, deep, deep within my heart recording, for many
      future year,
  Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or South,
  Embalm'd with love in this twilight song.




When the Full-Grown Poet Came

  When the full-grown poet came,
  Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its
      shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;
  But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled,
      Nay he is mine alone;
  --Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each
      by the hand;
  And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,
  Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,
  And wholly and joyously blends them.




Osceola

  When his hour for death had come,
  He slowly rais'd himself from the bed on the floor,
  Drew on his war-dress, shirt, leggings, and girdled the belt around
      his waist,
  Call'd for vermilion paint (his looking-glass was held before him,)
  Painted half his face and neck, his wrists, and back-hands.
  Put the scalp-knife carefully in his belt--then lying down, resting
      moment,
  Rose again, half sitting, smiled, gave in silence his extended hand
      to each and all,
  Sank faintly low to the floor (tightly grasping the tomahawk handle,)
  Fix'd his look on wife and little children--the last:

  (And here a line in memory of his name and death.)




A Voice from Death

  A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power,
  With sudden, indescribable blow--towns drown'd--humanity by
      thousands slain,
  The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron bridge,
  Dash'd pell-mell by the blow--yet usher'd life continuing on,
  (Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling, wild debris,
  A suffering woman saved--a baby safely born!)

  Although I come and unannounc'd, in horror and in pang,
  In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale elemental crash, (this
      voice so solemn, strange,)
  I too a minister of Deity.

  Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
  We mourn the old, the young untimely drawn to thee,
  The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
  The household wreck'd, the husband and the wife, the engulfed forger
      in his forge,
  The corpses in the whelming waters and the mud,
  The gather'd thousands to their funeral mounds, and thousands never
      found or gather'd.

  Then after burying, mourning the dead,
  (Faithful to them found or unfound, forgetting not, bearing the
      past, here new musing,)
  A day--a passing moment or an hour--America itself bends low,
  Silent, resign'd, submissive.

  War, death, cataclysm like this, America,
  Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart.

  E'en as I chant, lo! out of death, and out of ooze and slime,
  The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy, help, love,
  From West and East, from South and North and over sea,
  Its hot-spurr'd hearts and hands humanity to human aid moves on;
  And from within a thought and lesson yet.

  Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air!
  Thou waters that encompass us!
  Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep!
  Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
  Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all, incessant!
  Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm,
  Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
  How ill to e'er forget thee!

  For I too have forgotten,
  (Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
      wealth, inventions, civilization,)
  Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
      mighty, elemental throes,
  In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy'd.




A Persian Lesson

  For his o'erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi,
  In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
  On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
  Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
  Spoke to the young priests and students.

  "Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,
  Allah is all, all, all--immanent in every life and object,
  May-be at many and many-a-more removes--yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.

  "Has the estray wander'd far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?
  Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
  Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life;
  The something never still'd--never entirely gone? the invisible need
      of every seed?

  "It is the central urge in every atom,
  (Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
  To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
  Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception."




The Commonplace

  The commonplace I sing;
  How cheap is health! how cheap nobility!
  Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;
  The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,
  (Take here the mainest lesson--less from books--less from the schools,)
  The common day and night--the common earth and waters,
  Your farm--your work, trade, occupation,
  The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all.




"The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete"

  The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas'd,
  The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage,
  The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant,
  Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the dissolute;
  (What is the part the wicked and the loathesome bear within earth's
      orbic scheme?)
  Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
  The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot.




Mirages

  More experiences and sights, stranger, than you'd think for;
  Times again, now mostly just after sunrise or before sunset,
  Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear weather, in
      plain sight,
  Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the shopfronts,
  (Account for it or not--credit or not--it is all true,
  And my mate there could tell you the like--we have often confab'd
      about it,)
  People and scenes, animals, trees, colors and lines, plain as could be,
  Farms and dooryards of home, paths border'd with box, lilacs in corners,
  Weddings in churches, thanksgiving dinners, returns of long-absent sons,
  Glum funerals, the crape-veil'd mother and the daughters,
  Trials in courts, jury and judge, the accused in the box,
  Contestants, battles, crowds, bridges, wharves,
  Now and then mark'd faces of sorrow or joy,
  (I could pick them out this moment if I saw them again,)
  Show'd to me--just to the right in the sky-edge,
  Or plainly there to the left on the hill-tops.




L. of G.'s Purport

  Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable
      masses (even to expose them,)
  But add, fuse, complete, extend--and celebrate the immortal and the good.
  Haughty this song, its words and scope,
  To span vast realms of space and time,
  Evolution--the cumulative--growths and generations.

  Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued,
  Wandering, peering, dallying with all--war, peace, day and night
      absorbing,
  Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,
  I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.

  I sing of life, yet mind me well of death:
  To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has for years--
  Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.




The Unexpress'd

  How dare one say it?
  After the cycles, poems, singers, plays,
  Vaunted Ionia's, India's--Homer, Shakspere--the long, long times'
      thick dotted roads, areas,
  The shining clusters and the Milky Ways of stars--Nature's pulses reap'd,
  All retrospective passions, heroes, war, love, adoration,
  All ages' plummets dropt to their utmost depths,
  All human lives, throats, wishes, brains--all experiences' utterance;
  After the countless songs, or long or short, all tongues, all lands,
  Still something not yet told in poesy's voice or print--something lacking,
  (Who knows? the best yet unexpress'd and lacking.)




Grand Is the Seen

  Grand is the seen, the light, to me--grand are the sky and stars,
  Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space,
  And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary;
  But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those,
  Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing
      the sea,
  (What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what
      amount without thee?)
  More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul!
  More multiform far--more lasting thou than they.




Unseen Buds

  Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well,
  Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch,
  Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn,
  Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping;
  Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting,
  (On earth and in the sea--the universe--the stars there in the
      heavens,)
  Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless,
  And waiting ever more, forever more behind.




Good-Bye My Fancy!

  Good-bye my Fancy!
  Farewell dear mate, dear love!
  I'm going away, I know not where,
  Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
  So Good-bye my Fancy.

  Now for my last--let me look back a moment;
  The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
  Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

  Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;
  Delightful!--now separation--Good-bye my Fancy.

  Yet let me not be too hasty,
  Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended
      into one;
  Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
  If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
  May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,
  May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
      knows?)
  May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning--so now finally,
  Good-bye--and hail! my Fancy.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
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Title: Les Misérables
       Complete in Five Volumes

Author: Victor Hugo

Translator: Isabel F. Hapgood

Release Date: June 22, 2008 [EBook #135]
Last Updated: January 18, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISÉRABLES ***



Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger



LES MISÉRABLES

By Victor Hugo

Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood


Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. No. 13, Astor Place New York

Copyright 1887



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Contents



LES MISÉRABLES

VOLUME I.--FANTINE.

PREFACE

  BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN
  CHAPTER I--M. MYRIEL
  CHAPTER II--M. MYRIEL BECOMES M. WELCOME
  CHAPTER III--A HARD BISHOPRIC FOR A GOOD BISHOP
  CHAPTER IV--WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS
  CHAPTER V--MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG
  CHAPTER VI--WHO GUARDED HIS HOUSE FOR HIM
  CHAPTER VII--CRAVATTE
  CHAPTER VIII--PHILOSOPHY AFTER DRINKING
  CHAPTER IX--THE BROTHER AS DEPICTED BY THE SISTER
  CHAPTER X--THE BISHOP IN THE PRESENCE OF AN UNKNOWN LIGHT
  CHAPTER XI--A RESTRICTION
  CHAPTER XII--THE SOLITUDE OF MONSEIGNEUR WELCOME
  CHAPTER XIII--WHAT HE BELIEVED
  CHAPTER XIV--WHAT HE THOUGHT

  BOOK SECOND--THE FALL
  CHAPTER I--THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING
  CHAPTER II--PRUDENCE COUNSELLED TO WISDOM.
  CHAPTER III--THE HEROISM OF PASSIVE OBEDIENCE.
  CHAPTER IV--DETAILS CONCERNING THE CHEESE-DAIRIES OF PONTARLIER.
  CHAPTER V--TRANQUILLITY
  CHAPTER VI--JEAN VALJEAN
  CHAPTER VII--THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR
  CHAPTER VIII--BILLOWS AND SHADOWS
  CHAPTER IX--NEW TROUBLES
  CHAPTER X--THE MAN AROUSED
  CHAPTER XI--WHAT HE DOES
  CHAPTER XII--THE BISHOP WORKS
  CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GERVAIS

  BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817
  CHAPTER I--THE YEAR 1817
  CHAPTER II--A DOUBLE QUARTETTE
  CHAPTER III--FOUR AND FOUR
  CHAPTER IV--THOLOMYÈS IS SO MERRY THAT HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY
  CHAPTER V--AT BOMBARDA'S
  CHAPTER VI--A CHAPTER IN WHICH THEY ADORE EACH OTHER
  CHAPTER VII--THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYÈS
  CHAPTER VIII--THE DEATH OF A HORSE
  CHAPTER IX--A MERRY END TO MIRTH

  BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER
  CHAPTER I--ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER MOTHER
  CHAPTER II--FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES
  CHAPTER III--THE LARK

  BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT.
  CHAPTER I--THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS
  CHAPTER II--MADELEINE
  CHAPTER III--SUMS DEPOSITED WITH LAFFITTE
  CHAPTER IV--M. MADELEINE IN MOURNING
  CHAPTER V--VAGUE FLASHES ON THE HORIZON
  CHAPTER VI--FATHER FAUCHELEVENT
  CHAPTER VII--FAUCHELEVENT BECOMES A GARDENER IN PARIS
  CHAPTER VIII--MADAME VICTURNIEN EXPENDS THIRTY FRANCS ON MORALITY
  CHAPTER IX--MADAME VICTURNIEN'S SUCCESS
  CHAPTER X--RESULT OF THE SUCCESS
  CHAPTER XI--CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT
  CHAPTER XII--M. BAMATABOIS'S INACTIVITY
  CHAPTER XIII--THE SOLUTION OF SOME QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE MUNICIPAL POLICE

  BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT
  CHAPTER I--THE BEGINNING OF REPOSE
  CHAPTER II--HOW JEAN MAY BECOME CHAMP

  BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
  CHAPTER I--SISTER SIMPLICE
  CHAPTER II--THE PERSPICACITY OF MASTER SCAUFFLAIRE
  CHAPTER III--A TEMPEST IN A SKULL
  CHAPTER IV--FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP
  CHAPTER V--HINDRANCES
  CHAPTER VI--SISTER SIMPLICE PUT TO THE PROOF
  CHAPTER VII--THE TRAVELLER ON HIS ARRIVAL TAKES PRECAUTIONS FOR DEPARTURE
  CHAPTER VIII--AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR
  CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
  CHAPTER X--THE SYSTEM OF DENIALS
  CHAPTER XI--CHAMPMATHIEU MORE AND MORE ASTONISHED

  BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW
  CHAPTER I--IN WHAT MIRROR M. MADELEINE CONTEMPLATES HIS HAIR
  CHAPTER II--FANTINE HAPPY
  CHAPTER III--JAVERT SATISFIED
  CHAPTER IV--AUTHORITY REASSERTS ITS RIGHTS
  CHAPTER V--A SUITABLE TOMB



  VOLUME II.--COSETTE

  BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO
  CHAPTER I--WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES
  CHAPTER II--HOUGOMONT
  CHAPTER III--THE EIGHTEENTH OF JUNE, 1815
  CHAPTER IV--A
  CHAPTER V--THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES
  CHAPTER VI--FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
  CHAPTER VII--NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
  CHAPTER VIII--THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE
  CHAPTER IX--THE UNEXPECTED
  CHAPTER X--THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN
  CHAPTER XI--A BAD GUIDE TO NAPOLEON; A GOOD GUIDE TO BULOW
  CHAPTER XII--THE GUARD
  CHAPTER XIII--THE CATASTROPHE
  CHAPTER XIV--THE LAST SQUARE
  CHAPTER XV--CAMBRONNE
  CHAPTER XVI--QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?
  CHAPTER XVII--IS WATERLOO TO BE CONSIDERED GOOD?
  CHAPTER XVIII--A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT
  CHAPTER XIX--THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT


  BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION
  CHAPTER I--NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430
  CHAPTER II--IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE OF THE
       DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY
  CHAPTER III--THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN PREPARATORY
       MANIPULATION TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A BLOW FROM A HAMMER

  BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN
  CHAPTER I--THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL
  CHAPTER II--TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS
  CHAPTER III--MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER
  CHAPTER IV--ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL
  CHAPTER V--THE LITTLE ONE ALL ALONE
  CHAPTER VI--WHICH POSSIBLY PROVES BOULATRUELLE'S INTELLIGENCE
  CHAPTER VII--COSETTE SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE STRANGER IN THE DARK
  CHAPTER VIII--THE UNPLEASANTNESS OF RECEIVING INTO ONE'S HOUSE A POOR MAN
       WHO MAY BE A RICH MAN
  CHAPTER IX--THÉNARDIER AND HIS MANOUVRES
  CHAPTER X--HE WHO SEEKS TO BETTER HIMSELF MAY RENDER HIS SITUATION WORSE
  CHAPTER XI--NUMBER 9,430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY

  BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL
  CHAPTER I--MASTER GORBEAU
  CHAPTER II--A NEST FOR OWL AND A WARBLER
  CHAPTER III--TWO MISFORTUNES MAKE ONE PIECE OF GOOD FORTUNE
  CHAPTER IV--THE REMARKS OF THE PRINCIPAL TENANT
  CHAPTER V--A FIVE-FRANC PIECE FALLS ON THE GROUND AND PRODUCES A TUMULT

  BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK
  CHAPTER I--THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY
  CHAPTER II--IT IS LUCKY THAT THE PONT D'AUSTERLITZ BEARS CARRIAGES
  CHAPTER III--TO WIT, THE PLAN OF PARIS IN 1727
  CHAPTER IV--THE GROPINGS OF FLIGHT
  CHAPTER V--WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GAS LANTERNS
  CHAPTER VI--THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA
  CHAPTER VII--CONTINUATION OF THE ENIGMA
  CHAPTER VIII--THE ENIGMA BECOMES DOUBLY MYSTERIOUS
  CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL
  CHAPTER X--WHICH EXPLAINS HOW JAVERT GOT ON THE SCENT

  BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS
  CHAPTER I--NUMBER 62 RUE PETIT-PICPUS
  CHAPTER II--THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA
  CHAPTER III--AUSTERITIES
  CHAPTER IV--GAYETIES
  CHAPTER V--DISTRACTIONS
  CHAPTER VI--THE LITTLE CONVENT
  CHAPTER VII--SOME SILHOUETTES OF THIS DARKNESS
  CHAPTER VIII--POST CORDA LAPIDES
  CHAPTER IX--A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE
  CHAPTER X--ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
  CHAPTER XI--END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS

  BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS
  CHAPTER I--THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA
  CHAPTER II--THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
  CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST
  CHAPTER IV--THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES
  CHAPTER V--PRAYER
  CHAPTER VI--THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER
  CHAPTER VII--PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED IN BLAME
  CHAPTER VIII--FAITH, LAW

  BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM
  CHAPTER I--WHICH TREATS OF THE MANNER OF ENTERING A CONVENT
  CHAPTER II--FAUCHELEVENT IN THE PRESENCE OF A DIFFICULTY
  CHAPTER III--MOTHER INNOCENTE
  CHAPTER IV--IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN HAS QUITE THE AIR OF HAVING READ AUSTIN CASTILLEJO
  CHAPTER V--IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE DRUNK IN ORDER TO BE IMMORTAL
  CHAPTER VI--BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS
  CHAPTER VII--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON'T LOSE THE CARD
  CHAPTER VIII--A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY
  CHAPTER IX--CLOISTERED



  VOLUME III--MARIUS.

  BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM
  CHAPTER I--PARVULUS
  CHAPTER II--SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS
  CHAPTER III--HE IS AGREEABLE
  CHAPTER IV--HE MAY BE OF USE
  CHAPTER V--HIS FRONTIERS
  CHAPTER VI--A BIT OF HISTORY
  CHAPTER VII--THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF INDIA
  CHAPTER VIII--IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE LAST KING
  CHAPTER IX--THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL
  CHAPTER X--ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO
  CHAPTER XI--TO SCOFF, TO REIGN
  CHAPTER XII--THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE
  CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GAVROCHE

  BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS
  CHAPTER I--NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH
  CHAPTER II--LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE
  CHAPTER III--LUC-ESPRIT
  CHAPTER IV--A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT
  CHAPTER V--BASQUE AND NICOLETTE
  CHAPTER VI--IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN
  CHAPTER VII--RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING
  CHAPTER VIII--TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

  BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON
  CHAPTER I--AN ANCIENT SALON
  CHAPTER II--ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH
  CHAPTER III--REQUIESCANT
  CHAPTER IV--END OF THE BRIGAND
  CHAPTER V--THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, IN ORDER TO BECOME A REVOLUTIONIST
  CHAPTER VI--THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN
  CHAPTER VII--SOME PETTICOAT
  CHAPTER VIII--MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE

  BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C
  CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC
  CHAPTER II--BLONDEAU'S FUNERAL ORATION BY BOSSUET
  CHAPTER III--MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS
  CHAPTER IV--THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFÉ MUSAIN
  CHAPTER V--ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON
  CHAPTER VI--RES ANGUSTA

  BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE
  CHAPTER I--MARIUS INDIGENT
  CHAPTER II--MARIUS POOR
  CHAPTER III--MARIUS GROWN UP
  CHAPTER IV--M. MABEUF
  CHAPTER V--POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY
  CHAPTER VI--THE SUBSTITUTE

  BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS
  CHAPTER I--THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES
  CHAPTER II--LUX FACTA EST
  CHAPTER III--EFFECT OF THE SPRING
  CHAPTER IV--BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY
  CHAPTER V--DIVERS CLAPS OF THUNDER FALL ON MA'AM BOUGON
  CHAPTER VI--TAKEN PRISONER
  CHAPTER VII--ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U DELIVERED OVER TO CONJECTURES
  CHAPTER VIII--THE VETERANS THEMSELVES CAN BE HAPPY
  CHAPTER IX--ECLIPSE

  BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE
  CHAPTER I--MINES AND MINERS
  CHAPTER II--THE LOWEST DEPTHS
  CHAPTER III--BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE
  CHAPTER IV--COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE

  BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN
  CHAPTER I--MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN IN A CAP
  CHAPTER II--TREASURE TROVE
  CHAPTER III--QUADRIFRONS
  CHAPTER IV--A ROSE IN MISERY
  CHAPTER V--A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE
  CHAPTER VI--THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR
  CHAPTER VII--STRATEGY AND TACTICS
  CHAPTER VIII--THE RAY OF LIGHT IN THE HOVEL
  CHAPTER IX--JONDRETTE COMES NEAR WEEPING
  CHAPTER X--TARIFF OF LICENSED CABS: TWO FRANCS AN HOUR
  CHAPTER XI--OFFERS OF SERVICE FROM MISERY TO WRETCHEDNESS
  CHAPTER XII--THE USE MADE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE
  CHAPTER XIII--SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABUNTUR ORARE PATER NOSTER
  CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH A POLICE AGENT BESTOWS TWO FISTFULS ON A LAWYER
  CHAPTER XV--JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASES
  CHAPTER XVI--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE WORDS TO AN ENGLISH AIR WHICH
       WAS IN FASHION IN 1832
  CHAPTER XVII--THE USE MADE OF MARIUS' FIVE-FRANC PIECE
  CHAPTER XVIII--MARIUS' TWO CHAIRS FORM A VIS-A-VIS
  CHAPTER XIX--OCCUPYING ONE'S SELF WITH OBSCURE DEPTHS
  CHAPTER XX--THE TRAP
  CHAPTER XXI--ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS
  CHAPTER XXII--THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO



  VOLUME IV.--SAINT-DENIS.

  BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
  CHAPTER I--WELL CUT
  CHAPTER II--BADLY SEWED
  CHAPTER III--LOUIS PHILIPPE
  CHAPTER IV--CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION
  CHAPTER V--FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES
  CHAPTER VI--ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS

  BOOK SECOND.--ÉPONINE
  CHAPTER I--THE LARK'S MEADOW
  CHAPTER II--EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS
  CHAPTER III--APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF
  CHAPTER IV--AN APPARITION TO MARIUS

  BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET
  CHAPTER I--THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET
  CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD
  CHAPTER III--FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS
  CHAPTER IV--CHANGE OF GATE
  CHAPTER V--THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR
  CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN
  CHAPTER VII--TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF
  CHAPTER VIII--THE CHAIN-GANG

  BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH
  CHAPTER I--A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN
  CHAPTER II--MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A PHENOMENON

  BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING
  CHAPTER I--SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED
  CHAPTER II--COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS
  CHAPTER III--ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT
  CHAPTER IV--A HEART BENEATH A STONE
  CHAPTER V--COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER
  CHAPTER VI--OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY

  BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE
  CHAPTER I--THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND
  CHAPTER II--IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE GREAT
  CHAPTER III--THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT

  BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG
  CHAPTER I--ORIGIN
  CHAPTER II--ROOTS
  CHAPTER III--SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS
  CHAPTER IV--THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

  BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS
  CHAPTER I--FULL LIGHT
  CHAPTER II--THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS
  CHAPTER III--THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW
  CHAPTER IV--A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG
  CHAPTER V--THINGS OF THE NIGHT
  CHAPTER VI--MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING
       COSETTE HIS ADDRESS
  CHAPTER VII--THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH OTHER

  BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?
  CHAPTER I--JEAN VALJEAN
  CHAPTER II--MARIUS
  CHAPTER III--M. MABEUF

  BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832
  CHAPTER I--THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION
  CHAPTER II--THE ROOT OF THE MATTER
  CHAPTER III--A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN
  CHAPTER IV--THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS
  CHAPTER V--ORIGINALITY OF PARIS

  BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE
  CHAPTER I--SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S POETRY.
  CHAPTER II--GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH
  CHAPTER III--JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER
  CHAPTER IV--THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN
  CHAPTER V--THE OLD MAN
  CHAPTER VI--RECRUITS

  BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE
  CHAPTER I--HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION
  CHAPTER II--PRELIMINARY GAYETIES
  CHAPTER III--NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE
  CHAPTER IV--AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP
  CHAPTER V--PREPARATIONS
  CHAPTER VI--WAITING
  CHAPTER VII--THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES
  CHAPTER VIII--MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE CABUC

  BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW
  CHAPTER I--FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS
  CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS
  CHAPTER III--THE EXTREME EDGE

  BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR
  CHAPTER I--THE FLAG: ACT FIRST
  CHAPTER II--THE FLAG: ACT SECOND
  CHAPTER III--GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE
  CHAPTER IV--THE BARREL OF POWDER
  CHAPTER V--END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE
  CHAPTER VI--THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE
  CHAPTER VII--GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES

  BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARMÉ
  CHAPTER I--A DRINKER IS A BABBLER
  CHAPTER II--THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT
  CHAPTER III--WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP
  CHAPTER IV--GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL



  VOLUME V--JEAN VALJEAN

  BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS
  CHAPTER I--THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA
  CHAPTER II--WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE
  CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW
  CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE
  CHAPTER V--THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE
  CHAPTER VI--MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC
  CHAPTER VII--THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED
  CHAPTER VIII--THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY
  CHAPTER IX--EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT INFALLIBLE
       MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796
  CHAPTER X--DAWN
  CHAPTER XI--THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE
  CHAPTER XII--DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER
  CHAPTER XIII--PASSING GLEAMS
  CHAPTER XIV--WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS
  CHAPTER XV--GAVROCHE OUTSIDE
  CHAPTER XVI--HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER
  CHAPTER XVII--MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT
  CHAPTER XVIII--THE VULTURE BECOME PREY
  CHAPTER XIX--JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE
  CHAPTER XX--THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE WRONG
  CHAPTER XXI--THE HEROES
  CHAPTER XXII--FOOT TO FOOT
  CHAPTER XXIII--ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK
  CHAPTER XXIV--PRISONER

  BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN
  CHAPTER I--THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
  CHAPTER II--ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER
  CHAPTER III--BRUNESEAU
  CHAPTER IV
  CHAPTER V--PRESENT PROGRESS
  CHAPTER VI--FUTURE PROGRESS

  BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL
  CHAPTER I--THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
  CHAPTER II--EXPLANATION
  CHAPTER III--THE "SPUN" MAN
  CHAPTER IV--HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS
  CHAPTER V--IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS
       WHICH IS TREACHEROUS
  CHAPTER VI--THE FONTIS
  CHAPTER VII--ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS DISEMBARKING
  CHAPTER VIII--THE TORN COAT-TAIL
  CHAPTER IX--MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER, THE EFFECT OF BEING DEAD
  CHAPTER X--RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE
  CHAPTER XI--CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE
  CHAPTER XII--THE GRANDFATHER

  BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED
  CHAPTER I

  BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
  CHAPTER I--IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN
  CHAPTER II--MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC WAR
  CHAPTER III--MARIUS ATTACKED
  CHAPTER IV--MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A BAD
       THING THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER HIS ARM
  CHAPTER V--DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
  CHAPTER VI--THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN FASHION,
       TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
  CHAPTER VII--THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS
  CHAPTER VIII--TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND

  BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
  CHAPTER I--THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833
  CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING
  CHAPTER III--THE INSEPARABLE
  CHAPTER IV--THE IMMORTAL LIVER

  BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP
  CHAPTER I--THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN
  CHAPTER II--THE OBSCURITIES WHICH A REVELATION CAN CONTAIN

  BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT
  CHAPTER I--THE LOWER CHAMBER
  CHAPTER II--ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS
  CHAPTER III--THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET
  CHAPTER IV--ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION

  BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN
  CHAPTER I--PITY FOR THE UNHAPPY, BUT INDULGENCE FOR THE HAPPY
  CHAPTER II--LAST FLICKERINGS OF A LAMP WITHOUT OIL
  CHAPTER III--A PEN IS HEAVY TO THE MAN WHO LIFTED THE FAUCHELEVENT'S CART
  CHAPTER IV--A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY SUCCEEDED IN WHITENING
  CHAPTER V--A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY
  CHAPTER VI--THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES

  LETTER TO M. DAELLI

  FOOTNOTES:



List of Illustrations


Bookshelf

Bookcover

Frontpapers

Frontispiece Volume One

Titlepage Volume One

Titlepage Verso

The Comfortor

The Fall

Awakened

Cossette Sweeping

Candlesticks Into the Fire

Father Champmathieu on Trial

Frontispiece Volume Two

Titlepage Volume Two

The Ship Orion, an Accident

The Gorbeau Hovel

The Black Hunt

Javert on the Hunt

The Resurrection

Royalist Bank-note



Frontispiece Volume Three

Titlepage Volume Three

Little Gavroche

Friends of the A B C

Excellence of Misfortune

Rose in Misery

Red Hot Chisel

Snatched up a Paving Stone

Frontispiece Volume Four

Titlepage Volume Four

A Street Orator

Code Table

Succor from Below

Cosette With Letter

Slang

The Grandeurs of Despair

Frontispiece Volume Five

Titlepage Volume Five

Last Drop from the Cup

The Twilight Decline

Darkness



LES MISÉRABLES



VOLUME I.--FANTINE.



PREFACE

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of
damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the
civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine
destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century--the
degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through
hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light--are unsolved;
so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;--in
other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance
and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot
fail to be of use.

HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.



FANTINE



BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN



CHAPTER I--M. MYRIEL

In 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D---- He was
an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see
of D---- since 1806.

Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance
of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely
for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various
rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very
moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said
of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all
in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a
councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility
of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of
his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty,
in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in
parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said
that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed,
though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the
whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and
to gallantry.

The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the
parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed.
M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the
Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she
had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate
of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall
of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps,
even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance,
with the magnifying powers of terror,--did these cause the ideas of
renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of
these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly
smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes
overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes
would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one
could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from
Italy he was a priest.

In 1804, M. Myriel was the Curé of B---- [Brignolles]. He was already
advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.

About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with
his curacy--just what, is not precisely known--took him to Paris.
Among other powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his
parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor
had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Curé, who was waiting in the
anteroom, found himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon,
on finding himself observed with a certain curiosity by this old man,
turned round and said abruptly:--

"Who is this good man who is staring at me?"

"Sire," said M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great
man. Each of us can profit by it."

That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Curé,
and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that
he had been appointed Bishop of D----

What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as
to the early portion of M. Myriel's life? No one knew. Very few families
had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the Revolution.

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town,
where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because
he was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name
was connected were rumors only,--noise, sayings, words; less than
words--_palabres_, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.

However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of
residence in D----, all the stories and subjects of conversation which
engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into
profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one would
have dared to recall them.

M. Myriel had arrived at D---- accompanied by an elderly spinster,
Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years his junior.

Their only domestic was a female servant of the same age as Mademoiselle
Baptistine, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having been _the
servant of M. le Curé_, now assumed the double title of maid to
Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.

Mademoiselle Baptistine was a long, pale, thin, gentle creature; she
realized the ideal expressed by the word "respectable"; for it seems
that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. She
had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a
succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of
pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in years she had acquired
what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been leanness in
her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity
allowed the angel to be seen. She was a soul rather than a virgin. Her
person seemed made of a shadow; there was hardly sufficient body to
provide for sex; a little matter enclosing a light; large eyes forever
drooping;--a mere pretext for a soul's remaining on the earth.

Madame Magloire was a little, fat, white old woman, corpulent and
bustling; always out of breath,--in the first place, because of her
activity, and in the next, because of her asthma.

On his arrival, M. Myriel was installed in the episcopal palace with
the honors required by the Imperial decrees, which class a bishop
immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the president paid the
first call on him, and he, in turn, paid the first call on the general
and the prefect.

The installation over, the town waited to see its bishop at work.



CHAPTER II--M. MYRIEL BECOMES M. WELCOME

The episcopal palace of D---- adjoins the hospital.

The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at
the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology
of the Faculty of Paris, Abbé of Simore, who had been Bishop of D---- in
1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about
it had a grand air,--the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms,
the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks
encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens
planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb
gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the
gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My
Lords Charles Brûlart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun; Antoine
de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendôme, Grand
Prior of France, Abbé of Saint Honoré de Lérins; François de Berton de
Crillon, bishop, Baron de Vence; César de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop,
Seignor of Glandève; and Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in
ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of Senez. The portraits of these
seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and this memorable
date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a
table of white marble.

The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a
small garden.

Three days after his arrival, the Bishop visited the hospital. The visit
ended, he had the director requested to be so good as to come to his
house.

"Monsieur the director of the hospital," said he to him, "how many sick
people have you at the present moment?"

"Twenty-six, Monseigneur."

"That was the number which I counted," said the Bishop.

"The beds," pursued the director, "are very much crowded against each
other."

"That is what I observed."

"The halls are nothing but rooms, and it is with difficulty that the air
can be changed in them."

"So it seems to me."

"And then, when there is a ray of sun, the garden is very small for the
convalescents."

"That was what I said to myself."

"In case of epidemics,--we have had the typhus fever this year; we
had the sweating sickness two years ago, and a hundred patients at
times,--we know not what to do."

"That is the thought which occurred to me."

"What would you have, Monseigneur?" said the director. "One must resign
one's self."

This conversation took place in the gallery dining-room on the
ground-floor.

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the
director of the hospital.

"Monsieur," said he, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would
hold?"

"Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed the stupefied director.

The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking
measures and calculations with his eyes.

"It would hold full twenty beds," said he, as though speaking to
himself. Then, raising his voice:--

"Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something.
There is evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five
or six small rooms. There are three of us here, and we have room for
sixty. There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have
yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here."

On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the
Bishop's palace, and the Bishop was settled in the hospital.

M. Myriel had no property, his family having been ruined by the
Revolution. His sister was in receipt of a yearly income of five hundred
francs, which sufficed for her personal wants at the vicarage. M. Myriel
received from the State, in his quality of bishop, a salary of fifteen
thousand francs. On the very day when he took up his abode in the
hospital, M. Myriel settled on the disposition of this sum once for
all, in the following manner. We transcribe here a note made by his own
hand:--

NOTE ON THE REGULATION OF MY HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES.


  For the little seminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1,500 livres
  Society of the  mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      100   "
  For the Lazarists of Montdidier . . . . . . . . . .      100   "
  Seminary for foreign missions in Paris  . . . . . .      200   "
  Congregation of the Holy Spirit . . . . . . . . . .      150   "
  Religious establishments of the Holy Land . . . . .      100   "
  Charitable maternity societies  . . . . . . . . . .      300   "
  Extra, for that of Arles  . . . . . . . . . . . . .       50   "
  Work for the amelioration of prisons  . . . . . . .      400   "
  Work for the relief and delivery of prisoners . . .      500   "
  To liberate fathers of families incarcerated for debt  1,000   "
  Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the
       diocese  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    2,000   "
  Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes  . . . . . . . .      100   "
  Congregation of the ladies of D----, of Manosque, and of
       Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor
       girls  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1,500   "
  For the poor  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    6,000   "
  My personal expenses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1,000   "
                                                        ------
       Total  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   15,000   "

M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period
that he occupied the see of D---- As has been seen, he called it
_regulating his household expenses_.

This arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mademoiselle
Baptistine. This holy woman regarded Monseigneur of D---- as at one and
the same time her brother and her bishop, her friend according to the
flesh and her superior according to the Church. She simply loved and
venerated him. When he spoke, she bowed; when he acted, she yielded her
adherence. Their only servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a little. It
will be observed that Monsieur the Bishop had reserved for himself
only one thousand livres, which, added to the pension of Mademoiselle
Baptistine, made fifteen hundred francs a year. On these fifteen hundred
francs these two old women and the old man subsisted.

And when a village curate came to D----, the Bishop still found means to
entertain him, thanks to the severe economy of Madame Magloire, and to
the intelligent administration of Mademoiselle Baptistine.

One day, after he had been in D---- about three months, the Bishop
said:--

"And still I am quite cramped with it all!"

"I should think so!" exclaimed Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur has not
even claimed the allowance which the department owes him for the expense
of his carriage in town, and for his journeys about the diocese. It was
customary for bishops in former days."

"Hold!" cried the Bishop, "you are quite right, Madame Magloire."

And he made his demand.

Some time afterwards the General Council took this demand under
consideration, and voted him an annual sum of three thousand francs,
under this heading: _Allowance to M. the Bishop for expenses of
carriage, expenses of posting, and expenses of pastoral visits._

This provoked a great outcry among the local burgesses; and a senator
of the Empire, a former member of the Council of the Five Hundred
which favored the 18 Brumaire, and who was provided with a magnificent
senatorial office in the vicinity of the town of D----, wrote to M.
Bigot de Préameneu, the minister of public worship, a very angry and
confidential note on the subject, from which we extract these authentic
lines:--

"Expenses of carriage? What can be done with it in a town of less than
four thousand inhabitants? Expenses of journeys? What is the use
of these trips, in the first place? Next, how can the posting be
accomplished in these mountainous parts? There are no roads. No one
travels otherwise than on horseback. Even the bridge between Durance and
Château-Arnoux can barely support ox-teams. These priests are all thus,
greedy and avaricious. This man played the good priest when he
first came. Now he does like the rest; he must have a carriage and a
posting-chaise, he must have luxuries, like the bishops of the olden
days. Oh, all this priesthood! Things will not go well, M. le Comte,
until the Emperor has freed us from these black-capped rascals. Down
with the Pope! [Matters were getting embroiled with Rome.] For my part,
I am for Cæsar alone." Etc., etc.

On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame
Magloire. "Good," said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; "Monseigneur
began with other people, but he has had to wind up with himself, after
all. He has regulated all his charities. Now here are three thousand
francs for us! At last!"

That same evening the Bishop wrote out and handed to his sister a
memorandum conceived in the following terms:--

EXPENSES OF CARRIAGE AND CIRCUIT.


  For furnishing meat soup to the patients in the hospital. 1,500 livres
  For the maternity charitable society of Aix . . . . . . .   250   "
  For the maternity charitable society of Draguignan  . . .   250   "
  For foundlings  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   500   "
  For orphans   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   500   "
                                                            -----
       Total  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000   "

Such was M. Myriel's budget.

As for the chance episcopal perquisites, the fees for marriage bans,
dispensations, private baptisms, sermons, benedictions, of churches or
chapels, marriages, etc., the Bishop levied them on the wealthy with all
the more asperity, since he bestowed them on the needy.

After a time, offerings of money flowed in. Those who had and those who
lacked knocked at M. Myriel's door,--the latter in search of the alms
which the former came to deposit. In less than a year the Bishop had
become the treasurer of all benevolence and the cashier of all those
in distress. Considerable sums of money passed through his hands, but
nothing could induce him to make any change whatever in his mode of
life, or add anything superfluous to his bare necessities.

Far from it. As there is always more wretchedness below than there
is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was
received. It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he
received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.

The usage being that bishops shall announce their baptismal names at the
head of their charges and their pastoral letters, the poor people of the
country-side had selected, with a sort of affectionate instinct, among
the names and prenomens of their bishop, that which had a meaning for
them; and they never called him anything except Monseigneur Bienvenu
[Welcome]. We will follow their example, and will also call him thus
when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased
him.

"I like that name," said he. "Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur."

We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we
confine ourselves to stating that it resembles the original.



CHAPTER III--A HARD BISHOPRIC FOR A GOOD BISHOP

The Bishop did not omit his pastoral visits because he had converted his
carriage into alms. The diocese of D---- is a fatiguing one. There are
very few plains and a great many mountains; hardly any roads, as we have
just seen; thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarships, and two hundred
and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. To visit all these is quite a task.

The Bishop managed to do it. He went on foot when it was in the
neighborhood, in a tilted spring-cart when it was on the plain, and on
a donkey in the mountains. The two old women accompanied him. When the
trip was too hard for them, he went alone.

One day he arrived at Senez, which is an ancient episcopal city. He was
mounted on an ass. His purse, which was very dry at that moment, did not
permit him any other equipage. The mayor of the town came to receive
him at the gate of the town, and watched him dismount from his ass,
with scandalized eyes. Some of the citizens were laughing around him.
"Monsieur the Mayor," said the Bishop, "and Messieurs Citizens, I
perceive that I shock you. You think it very arrogant in a poor priest
to ride an animal which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done so from
necessity, I assure you, and not from vanity."

In the course of these trips he was kind and indulgent, and talked
rather than preached. He never went far in search of his arguments and
his examples. He quoted to the inhabitants of one district the example
of a neighboring district. In the cantons where they were harsh to the
poor, he said: "Look at the people of Briançon! They have conferred on
the poor, on widows and orphans, the right to have their meadows mown
three days in advance of every one else. They rebuild their houses for
them gratuitously when they are ruined. Therefore it is a country which
is blessed by God. For a whole century, there has not been a single
murderer among them."

In villages which were greedy for profit and harvest, he said: "Look at
the people of Embrun! If, at the harvest season, the father of a family
has his son away on service in the army, and his daughters at service in
the town, and if he is ill and incapacitated, the curé recommends him to
the prayers of the congregation; and on Sunday, after the mass, all the
inhabitants of the village--men, women, and children--go to the poor
man's field and do his harvesting for him, and carry his straw and his
grain to his granary." To families divided by questions of money and
inheritance he said: "Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so
wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years.
Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their
fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find
husbands." To the cantons which had a taste for lawsuits, and where the
farmers ruined themselves in stamped paper, he said: "Look at those good
peasants in the valley of Queyras! There are three thousand souls of
them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic. Neither judge nor bailiff
is known there. The mayor does everything. He allots the imposts,
taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides
inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he
is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men." To villages where
he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more the people of Queyras: "Do
you know how they manage?" he said. "Since a little country of a
dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have
schoolmasters who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round
of the villages, spending a week in this one, ten days in that, and
instruct them. These teachers go to the fairs. I have seen them there.
They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the cord
of their hat. Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach
reading and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning,
and Latin have three pens. But what a disgrace to be ignorant! Do like
the people of Queyras!"

Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he
invented parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and
many images, which characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus
Christ. And being convinced himself, he was persuasive.



CHAPTER IV--WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS

His conversation was gay and affable. He put himself on a level with the
two old women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed,
it was the laugh of a schoolboy. Madame Magloire liked to call him Your
Grace [_Votre Grandeur_]. One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went
to his library in search of a book. This book was on one of the upper
shelves. As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not
reach it. "Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair. My greatness
[_grandeur_] does not reach as far as that shelf."

One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lô, rarely allowed
an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she
designated as "the expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous
relatives, who were very old and near to death, and of whom her sons
were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three was to receive from a
grandaunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the
heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to
succeed to the peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to
listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On
one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual,
while Madame de Lô was relating once again the details of all these
inheritances and all these "expectations." She interrupted herself
impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin! What are you thinking about?" "I am
thinking," replied the Bishop, "of a singular remark, which is to be
found, I believe, in St. Augustine,--'Place your hopes in the man from
whom you do not inherit.'"

At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a
gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the
dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his
relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back Death has!"
he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed
on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb
into the service of vanity!"

He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always
concealed a serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar
came to D----, and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent.
The subject of his sermon was charity. He urged the rich to give to the
poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted in the most frightful
manner of which he was capable, and to win paradise, which he
represented as charming and desirable. Among the audience there was
a wealthy retired merchant, who was somewhat of a usurer, named M.
Géborand, who had amassed two millions in the manufacture of coarse
cloth, serges, and woollen galloons. Never in his whole life had M.
Géborand bestowed alms on any poor wretch. After the delivery of that
sermon, it was observed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old
beggar-women at the door of the cathedral. There were six of them to
share it. One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing
this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "There is M.
Géborand purchasing paradise for a sou."

When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by
a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which
induced reflection. Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room
of the town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy
and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time,
an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has
actually existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, _"You
must give me something, M. le Marquis."_ The Marquis turned round and
answered dryly, _"I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur." "Give them
to me,"_ replied the Bishop.

One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:--

"My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen hundred
and twenty thousand peasants' dwellings in France which have but three
openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand hovels which have but
two openings, the door and one window; and three hundred and forty-six
thousand cabins besides which have but one opening, the door. And this
arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and windows. Just
put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings,
and behold the fevers and maladies which result! Alas! God gives air to
men; the law sells it to them. I do not blame the law, but I bless God.
In the department of the Isère, in the Var, in the two departments
of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not even
wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of men; they have
no candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and bits of rope dipped in
pitch. That is the state of affairs throughout the whole of the hilly
country of Dauphiné. They make bread for six months at one time; they
bake it with dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this bread up with
an axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render it
eatable. My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides of
you!"

Born a Provençal, he easily familiarized himself with the dialect of
the south. He said, _"En bé! moussu, sés sagé?"_ as in lower Languedoc;
_"Onté anaras passa?"_ as in the Basses-Alpes; _"Puerte un bouen moutu
embe un bouen fromage grase,"_ as in upper Dauphiné. This pleased the
people extremely, and contributed not a little to win him access to all
spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the
mountains. He understood how to say the grandest things in the most
vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.

Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and towards
the lower classes. He condemned nothing in haste and without taking
circumstances into account. He said, "Examine the road over which the
fault has passed."

Being, as he described himself with a smile, an _ex-sinner_, he had none
of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal
of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a
doctrine which may be summed up as follows:--

"Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his
temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it,
check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may
be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is
venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in
prayer.

"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err,
fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

"The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream
of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a
gravitation."

When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very
quickly, "Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to all appearance, this is
a great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies
which have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put
themselves under shelter."

He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of
human society rest. He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the
feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands,
the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise."

He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as
possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction
gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul
is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the
person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the
shadow."

It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging
things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.

One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation and on the
point of trial, discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched man, being at
the end of his resources, had coined counterfeit money, out of love for
a woman, and for the child which he had had by her. Counterfeiting was
still punishable with death at that epoch. The woman had been arrested
in the act of passing the first false piece made by the man. She was
held, but there were no proofs except against her. She alone could
accuse her lover, and destroy him by her confession. She denied; they
insisted. She persisted in her denial. Thereupon an idea occurred to
the attorney for the crown. He invented an infidelity on the part of
the lover, and succeeded, by means of fragments of letters cunningly
presented, in persuading the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and
that the man was deceiving her. Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she
denounced her lover, confessed all, proved all.

The man was ruined. He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his
accomplice. They were relating the matter, and each one was expressing
enthusiasm over the cleverness of the magistrate. By bringing jealousy
into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth in wrath, he had
educed the justice of revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in
silence. When they had finished, he inquired,--

"Where are this man and woman to be tried?"

"At the Court of Assizes."

He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?"

A tragic event occurred at D---- A man was condemned to death for
murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly
ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the
public. The town took a great interest in the trial. On the eve of the
day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain of the
prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his
last moments. They sent for the curé. It seems that he refused to come,
saying, "That is no affair of mine. I have nothing to do with that
unpleasant task, and with that mountebank: I, too, am ill; and besides,
it is not my place." This reply was reported to the Bishop, who said,
_"Monsieur le Curé is right: it is not his place; it is mine."_

He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the
"mountebank," called him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to
him. He passed the entire day with him, forgetful of food and sleep,
praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, and praying the
condemned man for his own. He told him the best truths, which are also
the most simple. He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to
bless. He taught him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The man
was on the point of dying in despair. Death was an abyss to him. As he
stood trembling on its mournful brink, he recoiled with horror. He
was not sufficiently ignorant to be absolutely indifferent. His
condemnation, which had been a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken
through, here and there, that wall which separates us from the mystery
of things, and which we call life. He gazed incessantly beyond this
world through these fatal breaches, and beheld only darkness. The Bishop
made him see light.

On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the
Bishop was still there. He followed him, and exhibited himself to the
eyes of the crowd in his purple camail and with his episcopal cross upon
his neck, side by side with the criminal bound with cords.

He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The
sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was
radiant. He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God. The
Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall,
he said to him: "God raises from the dead him whom man slays; he whom
his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray, believe,
enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the
scaffold, there was something in his look which made the people draw
aside to let him pass. They did not know which was most worthy of
admiration, his pallor or his serenity. On his return to the humble
dwelling, which he designated, with a smile, as _his palace_, he said to
his sister, _"I have just officiated pontifically."_

Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least
understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on
this conduct of the Bishop, _"It is affectation."_

This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms.
The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched, and
admired him.

As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine,
and it was a long time before he recovered from it.

In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has
something about it which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain
indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon
it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with
one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent;
one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire
it, like de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine
is the concretion of the law; it is called _vindicate_; it is not
neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it
shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect
their interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a
vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not
a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of
wood, iron and cords.

It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre
initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter's work saw, that
this machine heard, that this mechanism understood, that this wood,
this iron, and these cords were possessed of will. In the frightful
meditation into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears
in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The
scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats
flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated
by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a
horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.

Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the day
following the execution, and on many succeeding days, the Bishop
appeared to be crushed. The almost violent serenity of the funereal
moment had disappeared; the phantom of social justice tormented him. He,
who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant satisfaction,
seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked to himself, and
stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice. This is one which his
sister overheard one evening and preserved: "I did not think that it was
so monstrous. It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a
degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what
right do men touch that unknown thing?"

In course of time these impressions weakened and probably vanished.
Nevertheless, it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth avoided
passing the place of execution.

M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and
dying. He did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty and
his greatest labor. Widowed and orphaned families had no need to summon
him; he came of his own accord. He understood how to sit down and hold
his peace for long hours beside the man who had lost the wife of his
love, of the mother who had lost her child. As he knew the moment for
silence he knew also the moment for speech. Oh, admirable consoler! He
sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify
it by hope. He said:--

"Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think
not of that which perishes. Gaze steadily. You will perceive the living
light of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven." He knew that
faith is wholesome. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing man, by
pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which
gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon a
star.



CHAPTER V--MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG

The private life of M. Myriel was filled with the same thoughts as his
public life. The voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D---- lived,
would have been a solemn and charming sight for any one who could have
viewed it close at hand.

Like all old men, and like the majority of thinkers, he slept little.
This brief slumber was profound. In the morning he meditated for an
hour, then he said his mass, either at the cathedral or in his own
house. His mass said, he broke his fast on rye bread dipped in the milk
of his own cows. Then he set to work.

A Bishop is a very busy man: he must every day receive the secretary
of the bishopric, who is generally a canon, and nearly every day his
vicars-general. He has congregations to reprove, privileges to grant,
a whole ecclesiastical library to examine,--prayer-books, diocesan
catechisms, books of hours, etc.,--charges to write, sermons to
authorize, curés and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an
administrative correspondence; on one side the State, on the other the
Holy See; and a thousand matters of business.

What time was left to him, after these thousand details of business, and
his offices and his breviary, he bestowed first on the necessitous,
the sick, and the afflicted; the time which was left to him from the
afflicted, the sick, and the necessitous, he devoted to work. Sometimes
he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word for
both these kinds of toil; he called them _gardening_. "The mind is a
garden," said he.

Towards mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went forth and took a
stroll in the country or in town, often entering lowly dwellings. He
was seen walking alone, buried in his own thoughts, his eyes cast down,
supporting himself on his long cane, clad in his wadded purple garment
of silk, which was very warm, wearing purple stockings inside his coarse
shoes, and surmounted by a flat hat which allowed three golden tassels
of large bullion to droop from its three points.

It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that
his presence had something warming and luminous about it. The children
and the old people came out to the doorsteps for the Bishop as for the
sun. He bestowed his blessing, and they blessed him. They pointed out
his house to any one who was in need of anything.

Enlarge


Here and there he halted, accosted the little boys and girls, and smiled
upon the mothers. He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when
he no longer had any, he visited the rich.

As he made his cassocks last a long while, and did not wish to have it
noticed, he never went out in the town without his wadded purple cloak.
This inconvenienced him somewhat in summer.

On his return, he dined. The dinner resembled his breakfast.

At half-past eight in the evening he supped with his sister, Madame
Magloire standing behind them and serving them at table. Nothing could
be more frugal than this repast. If, however, the Bishop had one of his
curés to supper, Madame Magloire took advantage of the opportunity to
serve Monseigneur with some excellent fish from the lake, or with some
fine game from the mountains. Every curé furnished the pretext for
a good meal: the Bishop did not interfere. With that exception, his
ordinary diet consisted only of vegetables boiled in water, and oil
soup. Thus it was said in the town, _when the Bishop does not indulge in
the cheer of a curé, he indulges in the cheer of a trappist_.

After supper he conversed for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine
and Madame Magloire; then he retired to his own room and set to writing,
sometimes on loose sheets, and again on the margin of some folio. He was
a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six
very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in
Genesis, _In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters_.
With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says,
_The winds of God blew;_ Flavius Josephus who says, _A wind from above
was precipitated upon the earth;_ and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase
of Onkelos, which renders it, _A wind coming from God blew upon the face
of the waters_. In another dissertation, he examines the theological
works of Hugo, Bishop of Ptolemaïs, great-grand-uncle to the writer
of this book, and establishes the fact, that to this bishop must be
attributed the divers little works published during the last century,
under the pseudonym of Barleycourt.

Sometimes, in the midst of his reading, no matter what the book might
be which he had in his hand, he would suddenly fall into a profound
meditation, whence he only emerged to write a few lines on the pages of
the volume itself. These lines have often no connection whatever with
the book which contains them. We now have under our eyes a note written
by him on the margin of a quarto entitled _Correspondence of Lord
Germain with Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, and the Admirals on the
American station. Versailles, Poinçot, book-seller; and Paris, Pissot,
bookseller, Quai des Augustins._

Here is the note:--

"Oh, you who are!

"Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the
Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls
you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you
Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence;
Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man
calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most
beautiful of all your names."

Toward nine o'clock in the evening the two women retired and betook
themselves to their chambers on the first floor, leaving him alone until
morning on the ground floor.

It is necessary that we should, in this place, give an exact idea of the
dwelling of the Bishop of D----



CHAPTER VI--WHO GUARDED HIS HOUSE FOR HIM

The house in which he lived consisted, as we have said, of a ground
floor, and one story above; three rooms on the ground floor, three
chambers on the first, and an attic above. Behind the house was a
garden, a quarter of an acre in extent. The two women occupied the
first floor; the Bishop was lodged below. The first room, opening on the
street, served him as dining-room, the second was his bedroom, and the
third his oratory. There was no exit possible from this oratory, except
by passing through the bedroom, nor from the bedroom, without passing
through the dining-room. At the end of the suite, in the oratory, there
was a detached alcove with a bed, for use in cases of hospitality.
The Bishop offered this bed to country curates whom business or the
requirements of their parishes brought to D----

The pharmacy of the hospital, a small building which had been added
to the house, and abutted on the garden, had been transformed into
a kitchen and cellar. In addition to this, there was in the garden a
stable, which had formerly been the kitchen of the hospital, and in
which the Bishop kept two cows. No matter what the quantity of milk they
gave, he invariably sent half of it every morning to the sick people in
the hospital.

_"I am paying my tithes,"_ he said.

His bedroom was tolerably large, and rather difficult to warm in bad
weather. As wood is extremely dear at D----, he hit upon the idea of
having a compartment of boards constructed in the cow-shed. Here he
passed his evenings during seasons of severe cold: he called it his
_winter salon_.

In this winter salon, as in the dining-room, there was no other
furniture than a square table in white wood, and four straw-seated
chairs. In addition to this the dining-room was ornamented with an
antique sideboard, painted pink, in water colors. Out of a similar
sideboard, properly draped with white napery and imitation lace, the
Bishop had constructed the altar which decorated his oratory.

His wealthy penitents and the sainted women of D---- had more than once
assessed themselves to raise the money for a new altar for Monseigneur's
oratory; on each occasion he had taken the money and had given it to
the poor. "The most beautiful of altars," he said, "is the soul of an
unhappy creature consoled and thanking God."

In his oratory there were two straw prie-Dieu, and there was an
arm-chair, also in straw, in his bedroom. When, by chance, he received
seven or eight persons at one time, the prefect, or the general, or the
staff of the regiment in garrison, or several pupils from the little
seminary, the chairs had to be fetched from the winter salon in the
stable, the prie-Dieu from the oratory, and the arm-chair from the
bedroom: in this way as many as eleven chairs could be collected for the
visitors. A room was dismantled for each new guest.

It sometimes happened that there were twelve in the party; the Bishop
then relieved the embarrassment of the situation by standing in front
of the chimney if it was winter, or by strolling in the garden if it was
summer.

There was still another chair in the detached alcove, but the straw was
half gone from it, and it had but three legs, so that it was of service
only when propped against the wall. Mademoiselle Baptistine had also in
her own room a very large easy-chair of wood, which had formerly been
gilded, and which was covered with flowered pekin; but they had been
obliged to hoist this bergère up to the first story through the window,
as the staircase was too narrow; it could not, therefore, be reckoned
among the possibilities in the way of furniture.

Mademoiselle Baptistine's ambition had been to be able to purchase a set
of drawing-room furniture in yellow Utrecht velvet, stamped with a rose
pattern, and with mahogany in swan's neck style, with a sofa. But this
would have cost five hundred francs at least, and in view of the fact
that she had only been able to lay by forty-two francs and ten sous for
this purpose in the course of five years, she had ended by renouncing
the idea. However, who is there who has attained his ideal?

Nothing is more easy to present to the imagination than the Bishop's
bedchamber. A glazed door opened on the garden; opposite this was the
bed,--a hospital bed of iron, with a canopy of green serge; in the
shadow of the bed, behind a curtain, were the utensils of the toilet,
which still betrayed the elegant habits of the man of the world: there
were two doors, one near the chimney, opening into the oratory; the
other near the bookcase, opening into the dining-room. The bookcase was
a large cupboard with glass doors filled with books; the chimney was of
wood painted to represent marble, and habitually without fire. In the
chimney stood a pair of firedogs of iron, ornamented above with two
garlanded vases, and flutings which had formerly been silvered
with silver leaf, which was a sort of episcopal luxury; above the
chimney-piece hung a crucifix of copper, with the silver worn off, fixed
on a background of threadbare velvet in a wooden frame from which the
gilding had fallen; near the glass door a large table with an inkstand,
loaded with a confusion of papers and with huge volumes; before the
table an arm-chair of straw; in front of the bed a prie-Dieu, borrowed
from the oratory.

Two portraits in oval frames were fastened to the wall on each side of
the bed. Small gilt inscriptions on the plain surface of the cloth at
the side of these figures indicated that the portraits represented,
one the Abbé of Chaliot, bishop of Saint Claude; the other, the Abbé
Tourteau, vicar-general of Agde, abbé of Grand-Champ, order of Cîteaux,
diocese of Chartres. When the Bishop succeeded to this apartment, after
the hospital patients, he had found these portraits there, and had left
them. They were priests, and probably donors--two reasons for respecting
them. All that he knew about these two persons was, that they had
been appointed by the king, the one to his bishopric, the other to his
benefice, on the same day, the 27th of April, 1785. Madame Magloire
having taken the pictures down to dust, the Bishop had discovered these
particulars written in whitish ink on a little square of paper, yellowed
by time, and attached to the back of the portrait of the Abbé of
Grand-Champ with four wafers.

At his window he had an antique curtain of a coarse woollen stuff, which
finally became so old, that, in order to avoid the expense of a new one,
Madame Magloire was forced to take a large seam in the very middle
of it. This seam took the form of a cross. The Bishop often called
attention to it: "How delightful that is!" he said.

All the rooms in the house, without exception, those on the ground
floor as well as those on the first floor, were white-washed, which is a
fashion in barracks and hospitals.

However, in their latter years, Madame Magloire discovered beneath the
paper which had been washed over, paintings, ornamenting the apartment
of Mademoiselle Baptistine, as we shall see further on. Before becoming
a hospital, this house had been the ancient parliament house of the
Bourgeois. Hence this decoration. The chambers were paved in red bricks,
which were washed every week, with straw mats in front of all the beds.
Altogether, this dwelling, which was attended to by the two women, was
exquisitely clean from top to bottom. This was the sole luxury which the
Bishop permitted. He said, _"That takes nothing from the poor."_

It must be confessed, however, that he still retained from his former
possessions six silver knives and forks and a soup-ladle, which
Madame Magloire contemplated every day with delight, as they glistened
splendidly upon the coarse linen cloth. And since we are now painting
the Bishop of D---- as he was in reality, we must add that he had said
more than once, "I find it difficult to renounce eating from silver
dishes."

To this silverware must be added two large candlesticks of massive
silver, which he had inherited from a great-aunt. These candlesticks
held two wax candles, and usually figured on the Bishop's chimney-piece.
When he had any one to dinner, Madame Magloire lighted the two candles
and set the candlesticks on the table.

In the Bishop's own chamber, at the head of his bed, there was a small
cupboard, in which Madame Magloire locked up the six silver knives and
forks and the big spoon every night. But it is necessary to add, that
the key was never removed.

The garden, which had been rather spoiled by the ugly buildings which
we have mentioned, was composed of four alleys in cross-form, radiating
from a tank. Another walk made the circuit of the garden, and skirted
the white wall which enclosed it. These alleys left behind them four
square plots rimmed with box. In three of these, Madame Magloire
cultivated vegetables; in the fourth, the Bishop had planted some
flowers; here and there stood a few fruit-trees. Madame Magloire had
once remarked, with a sort of gentle malice: "Monseigneur, you who turn
everything to account, have, nevertheless, one useless plot. It would be
better to grow salads there than bouquets." "Madame Magloire," retorted
the Bishop, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the
useful." He added after a pause, "More so, perhaps."

This plot, consisting of three or four beds, occupied the Bishop
almost as much as did his books. He liked to pass an hour or two there,
trimming, hoeing, and making holes here and there in the earth, into
which he dropped seeds. He was not as hostile to insects as a gardener
could have wished to see him. Moreover, he made no pretensions to
botany; he ignored groups and consistency; he made not the slightest
effort to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took part
neither with the buds against the cotyledons, nor with Jussieu against
Linnæus. He did not study plants; he loved flowers. He respected learned
men greatly; he respected the ignorant still more; and, without ever
failing in these two respects, he watered his flower-beds every summer
evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.

The house had not a single door which could be locked. The door of the
dining-room, which, as we have said, opened directly on the cathedral
square, had formerly been ornamented with locks and bolts like the door
of a prison. The Bishop had had all this ironwork removed, and this door
was never fastened, either by night or by day, with anything except the
latch. All that the first passer-by had to do at any hour, was to give
it a push. At first, the two women had been very much tried by this
door, which was never fastened, but Monsieur de D---- had said to them,
"Have bolts put on your rooms, if that will please you." They had ended
by sharing his confidence, or by at least acting as though they shared
it. Madame Magloire alone had frights from time to time. As for the
Bishop, his thought can be found explained, or at least indicated, in
the three lines which he wrote on the margin of a Bible, "This is the
shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the
door of the priest should always be open."

On another book, entitled _Philosophy of the Medical Science_, he had
written this other note: "Am not I a physician like them? I also have my
patients, and then, too, I have some whom I call my unfortunates."

Again he wrote: "Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of
you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs
shelter."

It chanced that a worthy curé, I know not whether it was the curé of
Couloubroux or the curé of Pompierry, took it into his head to ask
him one day, probably at the instigation of Madame Magloire, whether
Monsieur was sure that he was not committing an indiscretion, to a
certain extent, in leaving his door unfastened day and night, at the
mercy of any one who should choose to enter, and whether, in short,
he did not fear lest some misfortune might occur in a house so little
guarded. The Bishop touched his shoulder, with gentle gravity, and
said to him, _"Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui
custodiunt eam," Unless the Lord guard the house, in vain do they watch
who guard it._

Then he spoke of something else.

He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as
the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be
tranquil."



CHAPTER VII--CRAVATTE

It is here that a fact falls naturally into place, which we must not
omit, because it is one of the sort which show us best what sort of a
man the Bishop of D---- was.

After the destruction of the band of Gaspard Bès, who had infested the
gorges of Ollioules, one of his lieutenants, Cravatte, took refuge in
the mountains. He concealed himself for some time with his bandits, the
remnant of Gaspard Bès's troop, in the county of Nice; then he made his
way to Piédmont, and suddenly reappeared in France, in the vicinity
of Barcelonette. He was first seen at Jauziers, then at Tuiles. He hid
himself in the caverns of the Joug-de-l'Aigle, and thence he descended
towards the hamlets and villages through the ravines of Ubaye and
Ubayette.

He even pushed as far as Embrun, entered the cathedral one night,
and despoiled the sacristy. His highway robberies laid waste the
country-side. The gendarmes were set on his track, but in vain. He
always escaped; sometimes he resisted by main force. He was a bold
wretch. In the midst of all this terror the Bishop arrived. He was
making his circuit to Chastelar. The mayor came to meet him, and urged
him to retrace his steps. Cravatte was in possession of the mountains
as far as Arche, and beyond; there was danger even with an escort; it
merely exposed three or four unfortunate gendarmes to no purpose.

"Therefore," said the Bishop, "I intend to go without escort."

"You do not really mean that, Monseigneur!" exclaimed the mayor.

"I do mean it so thoroughly that I absolutely refuse any gendarmes, and
shall set out in an hour."

"Set out?"

"Set out."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

"Monseigneur, you will not do that!"

"There exists yonder in the mountains," said the Bishop, "a tiny
community no bigger than that, which I have not seen for three years.
They are my good friends, those gentle and honest shepherds. They own
one goat out of every thirty that they tend. They make very pretty
woollen cords of various colors, and they play the mountain airs on
little flutes with six holes. They need to be told of the good God now
and then. What would they say to a bishop who was afraid? What would
they say if I did not go?"

"But the brigands, Monseigneur?"

"Hold," said the Bishop, "I must think of that. You are right. I may
meet them. They, too, need to be told of the good God."

"But, Monseigneur, there is a band of them! A flock of wolves!"

"Monsieur le maire, it may be that it is of this very flock of wolves
that Jesus has constituted me the shepherd. Who knows the ways of
Providence?"

"They will rob you, Monseigneur."

"I have nothing."

"They will kill you."

"An old goodman of a priest, who passes along mumbling his prayers? Bah!
To what purpose?"

"Oh, mon Dieu! what if you should meet them!"

"I should beg alms of them for my poor."

"Do not go, Monseigneur. In the name of Heaven! You are risking your
life!"

"Monsieur le maire," said the Bishop, "is that really all? I am not in
the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls."

They had to allow him to do as he pleased. He set out, accompanied only
by a child who offered to serve as a guide. His obstinacy was bruited
about the country-side, and caused great consternation.

He would take neither his sister nor Madame Magloire. He traversed the
mountain on mule-back, encountered no one, and arrived safe and sound
at the residence of his "good friends," the shepherds. He remained
there for a fortnight, preaching, administering the sacrament, teaching,
exhorting. When the time of his departure approached, he resolved to
chant a _Te Deum_ pontifically. He mentioned it to the curé. But what
was to be done? There were no episcopal ornaments. They could only
place at his disposal a wretched village sacristy, with a few ancient
chasubles of threadbare damask adorned with imitation lace.

"Bah!" said the Bishop. "Let us announce our _Te Deum_ from the pulpit,
nevertheless, Monsieur le Curé. Things will arrange themselves."

They instituted a search in the churches of the neighborhood. All the
magnificence of these humble parishes combined would not have sufficed
to clothe the chorister of a cathedral properly.

While they were thus embarrassed, a large chest was brought and
deposited in the presbytery for the Bishop, by two unknown horsemen, who
departed on the instant. The chest was opened; it contained a cope of
cloth of gold, a mitre ornamented with diamonds, an archbishop's cross,
a magnificent crosier,--all the pontifical vestments which had been
stolen a month previously from the treasury of Notre Dame d'Embrun.
In the chest was a paper, on which these words were written, _"From
Cravatte to Monseigneur Bienvenu."_

"Did not I say that things would come right of themselves?" said the
Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, "To him who contents himself with
the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop."

"Monseigneur," murmured the curé, throwing back his head with a smile.
"God--or the Devil."

The Bishop looked steadily at the curé, and repeated with authority,
"God!"

When he returned to Chastelar, the people came out to stare at him as at
a curiosity, all along the road. At the priest's house in Chastelar he
rejoined Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire, who were waiting
for him, and he said to his sister: "Well! was I in the right? The poor
priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty hands, and he returns
from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in God; I
have brought back the treasure of a cathedral."

That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear
robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers.
Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the
real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it
what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which
threatens our soul."

Then, turning to his sister: "Sister, never a precaution on the part
of the priest, against his fellow-man. That which his fellow does, God
permits. Let us confine ourselves to prayer, when we think that a danger
is approaching us. Let us pray, not for ourselves, but that our brother
may not fall into sin on our account."

However, such incidents were rare in his life. We relate those of which
we know; but generally he passed his life in doing the same things at
the same moment. One month of his year resembled one hour of his day.

As to what became of "the treasure" of the cathedral of Embrun, we
should be embarrassed by any inquiry in that direction. It consisted of
very handsome things, very tempting things, and things which were very
well adapted to be stolen for the benefit of the unfortunate. Stolen
they had already been elsewhere. Half of the adventure was completed; it
only remained to impart a new direction to the theft, and to cause it
to take a short trip in the direction of the poor. However, we make no
assertions on this point. Only, a rather obscure note was found among
the Bishop's papers, which may bear some relation to this matter, and
which is couched in these terms, _"The question is, to decide whether
this should be turned over to the cathedral or to the hospital."_



CHAPTER VIII--PHILOSOPHY AFTER DRINKING

The senator above mentioned was a clever man, who had made his own way,
heedless of those things which present obstacles, and which are called
conscience, sworn faith, justice, duty: he had marched straight to his
goal, without once flinching in the line of his advancement and his
interest. He was an old attorney, softened by success; not a bad man by
any means, who rendered all the small services in his power to his sons,
his sons-in-law, his relations, and even to his friends, having wisely
seized upon, in life, good sides, good opportunities, good windfalls.
Everything else seemed to him very stupid. He was intelligent, and just
sufficiently educated to think himself a disciple of Epicurus; while he
was, in reality, only a product of Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed willingly
and pleasantly over infinite and eternal things, and at the "crotchets
of that good old fellow the Bishop." He even sometimes laughed at him
with an amiable authority in the presence of M. Myriel himself, who
listened to him.

On some semi-official occasion or other, I do not recollect what,
Count*** [this senator] and M. Myriel were to dine with the prefect.
At dessert, the senator, who was slightly exhilarated, though still
perfectly dignified, exclaimed:--

"Egad, Bishop, let's have a discussion. It is hard for a senator and a
bishop to look at each other without winking. We are two augurs. I am
going to make a confession to you. I have a philosophy of my own."

"And you are right," replied the Bishop. "As one makes one's philosophy,
so one lies on it. You are on the bed of purple, senator."

The senator was encouraged, and went on:--

"Let us be good fellows."

"Good devils even," said the Bishop.

"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens,
Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the
philosophers in my library gilded on the edges."

"Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop.

The senator resumed:--

"I hate Diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist,
a believer in God at bottom, and more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire
made sport of Needham, and he was wrong, for Needham's eels prove that
God is useless. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of flour paste supplies
the _fiat lux_. Suppose the drop to be larger and the spoonful bigger;
you have the world. Man is the eel. Then what is the good of the Eternal
Father? The Jehovah hypothesis tires me, Bishop. It is good for nothing
but to produce shallow people, whose reasoning is hollow. Down with that
great All, which torments me! Hurrah for Zero which leaves me in peace!
Between you and me, and in order to empty my sack, and make confession
to my pastor, as it behooves me to do, I will admit to you that I
have good sense. I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who preaches
renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an
avaricious man to beggars. Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end?
I do not see one wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another
wolf. Let us stick to nature, then. We are at the top; let us have a
superior philosophy. What is the advantage of being at the top, if
one sees no further than the end of other people's noses? Let us live
merrily. Life is all. That man has another future elsewhere, on high,
below, anywhere, I don't believe; not one single word of it. Ah!
sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to me; I must take heed to
everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil, over the
just and the unjust, over the _fas_ and the _nefas_. Why? Because I
shall have to render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a
fine dream! After my death it will be a very clever person who can catch
me. Have a handful of dust seized by a shadow-hand, if you can. Let us
tell the truth, we who are initiated, and who have raised the veil
of Isis: there is no such thing as either good or evil; there is
vegetation. Let us seek the real. Let us get to the bottom of it. Let us
go into it thoroughly. What the deuce! let us go to the bottom of it! We
must scent out the truth; dig in the earth for it, and seize it. Then
it gives you exquisite joys. Then you grow strong, and you laugh. I am
square on the bottom, I am. Immortality, Bishop, is a chance, a waiting
for dead men's shoes. Ah! what a charming promise! trust to it, if you
like! What a fine lot Adam has! We are souls, and we shall be angels,
with blue wings on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it
not Tertullian who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star?
Very well. We shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides,
we shall see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God
is a nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the _Moniteur_, egad!
but I may whisper it among friends. _Inter pocula_. To sacrifice the
world to paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe of
the infinite! I'm not such a fool. I am a nought. I call myself Monsieur
le Comte Nought, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist
after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What
am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy.
Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have
suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall
have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I
shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my
wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger is
there; the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End.
_Finis_. Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death,
believe me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything
to tell me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children;
Jehovah for men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there
is nothing but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have
been Vincent de Paul--it makes no difference. That is the truth. Then
live your life, above all things. Make use of your _I_ while you have
it. In truth, Bishop, I tell you that I have a philosophy of my own,
and I have my philosophers. I don't let myself be taken in with
that nonsense. Of course, there must be something for those who are
down,--for the barefooted beggars, knife-grinders, and miserable
wretches. Legends, chimæras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars,
are provided for them to swallow. They gobble it down. They spread it on
their dry bread. He who has nothing else has the good God. That is the
least he can have. I oppose no objection to that; but I reserve Monsieur
Naigeon for myself. The good God is good for the populace."

The Bishop clapped his hands.

"That's talking!" he exclaimed. "What an excellent and really marvellous
thing is this materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah!
when one does have it, one is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly
allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor
burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring
this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves
irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without
uneasiness,--places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or
ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory
capitulations of conscience,--and that they shall enter the tomb with
their digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say that
with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me
to refrain from congratulating you. You great lords have, so you say, a
philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined,
accessible to the rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons
the voluptuousness of life admirably. This philosophy has been
extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers. But you are
good-natured princes, and you do not think it a bad thing that belief in
the good God should constitute the philosophy of the people, very much
as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor."



CHAPTER IX--THE BROTHER AS DEPICTED BY THE SISTER

In order to furnish an idea of the private establishment of the
Bishop of D----, and of the manner in which those two sainted women
subordinated their actions, their thoughts, their feminine instincts
even, which are easily alarmed, to the habits and purposes of the
Bishop, without his even taking the trouble of speaking in order to
explain them, we cannot do better than transcribe in this place a letter
from Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame the Vicomtess de Boischevron, the
friend of her childhood. This letter is in our possession.


                                        D----, Dec. 16, 18--.
MY GOOD MADAM: Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is our
established custom; but there is another reason besides. Just imagine,
while washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, Madam Magloire has
made some discoveries; now our two chambers hung with antique paper
whitewashed over, would not discredit a château in the style of yours.
Madam Magloire has pulled off all the paper. There were things beneath.
My drawing-room, which contains no furniture, and which we use for
spreading out the linen after washing, is fifteen feet in height,
eighteen square, with a ceiling which was formerly painted and gilded,
and with beams, as in yours. This was covered with a cloth while this
was the hospital. And the woodwork was of the era of our grandmothers.
But my room is the one you ought to see. Madam Magloire has discovered,
under at least ten thicknesses of paper pasted on top, some paintings,
which without being good are very tolerable. The subject is Telemachus
being knighted by Minerva in some gardens, the name of which escapes
me. In short, where the Roman ladies repaired on one single night. What
shall I say to you? I have Romans, and Roman ladies [here occurs an
illegible word], and the whole train. Madam Magloire has cleaned it all
off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired, and
the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She has
also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient
fashion. They asked us two crowns of six francs each to regild them, but
it is much better to give the money to the poor; and they are very ugly
besides, and I should much prefer a round table of mahogany.

I am always very happy. My brother is so good. He gives all he has to
the poor and sick. We are very much cramped. The country is trying in
the winter, and we really must do something for those who are in need.
We are almost comfortably lighted and warmed. You see that these are
great treats.

My brother has ways of his own. When he talks, he says that a bishop
ought to be so. Just imagine! the door of our house is never fastened.
Whoever chooses to enter finds himself at once in my brother's room. He
fears nothing, even at night. That is his sort of bravery, he says.

He does not wish me or Madame Magloire feel any fear for him. He exposes
himself to all sorts of dangers, and he does not like to have us even
seem to notice it. One must know how to understand him.

He goes out in the rain, he walks in the water, he travels in winter. He
fears neither suspicious roads nor dangerous encounters, nor night.

Last year he went quite alone into a country of robbers. He would
not take us. He was absent for a fortnight. On his return nothing had
happened to him; he was thought to be dead, but was perfectly well, and
said, "This is the way I have been robbed!" And then he opened a trunk
full of jewels, all the jewels of the cathedral of Embrun, which the
thieves had given him.

When he returned on that occasion, I could not refrain from scolding him
a little, taking care, however, not to speak except when the carriage
was making a noise, so that no one might hear me.

At first I used to say to myself, "There are no dangers which will stop
him; he is terrible." Now I have ended by getting used to it. I make a
sign to Madam Magloire that she is not to oppose him. He risks himself
as he sees fit. I carry off Madam Magloire, I enter my chamber, I pray
for him and fall asleep. I am at ease, because I know that if anything
were to happen to him, it would be the end of me. I should go to the
good God with my brother and my bishop. It has cost Madam Magloire
more trouble than it did me to accustom herself to what she terms his
imprudences. But now the habit has been acquired. We pray together, we
tremble together, and we fall asleep. If the devil were to enter this
house, he would be allowed to do so. After all, what is there for us
to fear in this house? There is always some one with us who is stronger
than we. The devil may pass through it, but the good God dwells here.

This suffices me. My brother has no longer any need of saying a word to
me. I understand him without his speaking, and we abandon ourselves to
the care of Providence. That is the way one has to do with a man who
possesses grandeur of soul.

I have interrogated my brother with regard to the information which you
desire on the subject of the Faux family. You are aware that he knows
everything, and that he has memories, because he is still a very
good royalist. They really are a very ancient Norman family of the
generalship of Caen. Five hundred years ago there was a Raoul de Faux, a
Jean de Faux, and a Thomas de Faux, who were gentlemen, and one of whom
was a seigneur de Rochefort. The last was Guy-Étienne-Alexandre, and was
commander of a regiment, and something in the light horse of Bretagne.
His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles de Gramont, son of
the Duke Louis de Gramont, peer of France, colonel of the French guards,
and lieutenant-general of the army. It is written Faux, Fauq, and
Faoucq.

Good Madame, recommend us to the prayers of your sainted relative,
Monsieur the Cardinal. As for your dear Sylvanie, she has done well in
not wasting the few moments which she passes with you in writing to me.
She is well, works as you would wish, and loves me.

That is all that I desire. The souvenir which she sent through you
reached me safely, and it makes me very happy. My health is not so very
bad, and yet I grow thinner every day. Farewell; my paper is at an end,
and this forces me to leave you. A thousand good wishes.

BAPTISTINE.

P.S. Your grand nephew is charming. Do you know that he will soon be
five years old? Yesterday he saw some one riding by on horseback who
had on knee-caps, and he said, "What has he got on his knees?" He is a
charming child! His little brother is dragging an old broom about the
room, like a carriage, and saying, "Hu!"

As will be perceived from this letter, these two women understood how to
mould themselves to the Bishop's ways with that special feminine genius
which comprehends the man better than he comprehends himself. The Bishop
of D----, in spite of the gentle and candid air which never deserted
him, sometimes did things that were grand, bold, and magnificent,
without seeming to have even a suspicion of the fact. They trembled, but
they let him alone. Sometimes Madame Magloire essayed a remonstrance in
advance, but never at the time, nor afterwards. They never interfered
with him by so much as a word or sign, in any action once entered upon.
At certain moments, without his having occasion to mention it, when he
was not even conscious of it himself in all probability, so perfect was
his simplicity, they vaguely felt that he was acting as a bishop; then
they were nothing more than two shadows in the house. They served him
passively; and if obedience consisted in disappearing, they disappeared.
They understood, with an admirable delicacy of instinct, that certain
cares may be put under constraint. Thus, even when believing him to be
in peril, they understood, I will not say his thought, but his nature,
to such a degree that they no longer watched over him. They confided him
to God.

Moreover, Baptistine said, as we have just read, that her brother's end
would prove her own. Madame Magloire did not say this, but she knew it.



CHAPTER X--THE BISHOP IN THE PRESENCE OF AN UNKNOWN LIGHT

At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the
preceding pages, he did a thing which, if the whole town was to be
believed, was even more hazardous than his trip across the mountains
infested with bandits.

In the country near D---- a man lived quite alone. This man, we will
state at once, was a former member of the Convention. His name was G----

Member of the Convention, G---- was mentioned with a sort of horror in
the little world of D---- A member of the Convention--can you imagine
such a thing? That existed from the time when people called each other
_thou_, and when they said "citizen." This man was almost a monster.
He had not voted for the death of the king, but almost. He was a
quasi-regicide. He had been a terrible man. How did it happen that such
a man had not been brought before a provost's court, on the return of
the legitimate princes? They need not have cut off his head, if you
please; clemency must be exercised, agreed; but a good banishment for
life. An example, in short, etc. Besides, he was an atheist, like all
the rest of those people. Gossip of the geese about the vulture.

Was G---- a vulture after all? Yes; if he were to be judged by the
element of ferocity in this solitude of his. As he had not voted for the
death of the king, he had not been included in the decrees of exile, and
had been able to remain in France.

He dwelt at a distance of three-quarters of an hour from the city, far
from any hamlet, far from any road, in some hidden turn of a very wild
valley, no one knew exactly where. He had there, it was said, a sort
of field, a hole, a lair. There were no neighbors, not even passers-by.
Since he had dwelt in that valley, the path which led thither had
disappeared under a growth of grass. The locality was spoken of as
though it had been the dwelling of a hangman.

Nevertheless, the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time
he gazed at the horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the
valley of the former member of the Convention, and he said, "There is a
soul yonder which is lonely."

And he added, deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."

But, let us avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush,
appeared to him after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and
almost repulsive. For, at bottom, he shared the general impression, and
the old member of the Convention inspired him, without his being clearly
conscious of the fact himself, with that sentiment which borders on
hate, and which is so well expressed by the word estrangement.

Still, should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No.
But what a sheep!

The good Bishop was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction;
then he returned.

Finally, the rumor one day spread through the town that a sort of young
shepherd, who served the member of the Convention in his hovel, had come
in quest of a doctor; that the old wretch was dying, that paralysis was
gaining on him, and that he would not live over night.--"Thank God!"
some added.

The Bishop took his staff, put on his cloak, on account of his too
threadbare cassock, as we have mentioned, and because of the evening
breeze which was sure to rise soon, and set out.

The sun was setting, and had almost touched the horizon when the Bishop
arrived at the excommunicated spot. With a certain beating of the heart,
he recognized the fact that he was near the lair. He strode over a
ditch, leaped a hedge, made his way through a fence of dead boughs,
entered a neglected paddock, took a few steps with a good deal of
boldness, and suddenly, at the extremity of the waste land, and behind
lofty brambles, he caught sight of the cavern.

It was a very low hut, poor, small, and clean, with a vine nailed
against the outside.

Near the door, in an old wheel-chair, the arm-chair of the peasants,
there was a white-haired man, smiling at the sun.

Near the seated man stood a young boy, the shepherd lad. He was offering
the old man a jar of milk.

While the Bishop was watching him, the old man spoke: "Thank you," he
said, "I need nothing." And his smile quitted the sun to rest upon the
child.

The Bishop stepped forward. At the sound which he made in walking, the
old man turned his head, and his face expressed the sum total of the
surprise which a man can still feel after a long life.

"This is the first time since I have been here," said he, "that any one
has entered here. Who are you, sir?"

The Bishop answered:--

"My name is Bienvenu Myriel."

"Bienvenu Myriel? I have heard that name. Are you the man whom the
people call Monseigneur Welcome?"

"I am."

The old man resumed with a half-smile

"In that case, you are my bishop?"

"Something of that sort."

"Enter, sir."

The member of the Convention extended his hand to the Bishop, but the
Bishop did not take it. The Bishop confined himself to the remark:--

"I am pleased to see that I have been misinformed. You certainly do not
seem to me to be ill."

"Monsieur," replied the old man, "I am going to recover."

He paused, and then said:--

"I shall die three hours hence."

Then he continued:--

"I am something of a doctor; I know in what fashion the last hour draws
on. Yesterday, only my feet were cold; to-day, the chill has ascended to
my knees; now I feel it mounting to my waist; when it reaches the heart,
I shall stop. The sun is beautiful, is it not? I had myself wheeled
out here to take a last look at things. You can talk to me; it does not
fatigue me. You have done well to come and look at a man who is on
the point of death. It is well that there should be witnesses at that
moment. One has one's caprices; I should have liked to last until the
dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours. It will be night
then. What does it matter, after all? Dying is a simple affair. One has
no need of the light for that. So be it. I shall die by starlight."

The old man turned to the shepherd lad:--

"Go to thy bed; thou wert awake all last night; thou art tired."

The child entered the hut.

The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking to
himself:--

"I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors."

The Bishop was not touched as it seems that he should have been. He
did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the
whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated
like the rest: he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at "His
Grace," was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and he
was almost tempted to retort "citizen." He was assailed by a fancy for
peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but which
was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of the
Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the
powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably,
the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe.

Meanwhile, the member of the Convention had been surveying him with a
modest cordiality, in which one could have distinguished, possibly, that
humility which is so fitting when one is on the verge of returning to
dust.

The Bishop, on his side, although he generally restrained his curiosity,
which, in his opinion, bordered on a fault, could not refrain from
examining the member of the Convention with an attention which, as it
did not have its course in sympathy, would have served his conscience as
a matter of reproach, in connection with any other man. A member of the
Convention produced on him somewhat the effect of being outside the pale
of the law, even of the law of charity. G----, calm, his body almost
upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those octogenarians who form
the subject of astonishment to the physiologist. The Revolution had
many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In this old man one was
conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so near to his end, he
preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm
tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something
calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the
sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken
the door. G---- seemed to be dying because he willed it so. There was
freedom in his agony. His legs alone were motionless. It was there that
the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and dead, but his head
survived with all the power of life, and seemed full of light. G----,
at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale of the Orient who
was flesh above and marble below.

There was a stone there. The Bishop sat down. The exordium was abrupt.

"I congratulate you," said he, in the tone which one uses for a
reprimand. "You did not vote for the death of the king, after all."

The old member of the Convention did not appear to notice the bitter
meaning underlying the words "after all." He replied. The smile had
quite disappeared from his face.

"Do not congratulate me too much, sir. I did vote for the death of the
tyrant."

It was the tone of austerity answering the tone of severity.

"What do you mean to say?" resumed the Bishop.

"I mean to say that man has a tyrant,--ignorance. I voted for the death
of that tyrant. That tyrant engendered royalty, which is authority
falsely understood, while science is authority rightly understood. Man
should be governed only by science."

"And conscience," added the Bishop.

"It is the same thing. Conscience is the quantity of innate science
which we have within us."

Monseigneur Bienvenu listened in some astonishment to this language,
which was very new to him.

The member of the Convention resumed:--

"So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said 'no.' I did not think that I
had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil.
I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution
for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child.
In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity,
concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and
errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We
have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of
miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn
of joy."

"Mixed joy," said the Bishop.

"You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the
past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work
was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we
were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not
sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the
wind is still there."

"You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a
demolition complicated with wrath."

"Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of
progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French
Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent
of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the
unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased,
enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the
earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of
humanity."

The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:--

"Yes? '93!"

The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with
an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is
capable of exclamation:--

"Ah, there you go; '93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been
forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen
hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial."

The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within
him had suffered extinction. Nevertheless, he put a good face on the
matter. He replied:--

"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name
of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. A thunderbolt should
commit no error." And he added, regarding the member of the Convention
steadily the while, "Louis XVII.?"

The conventionary stretched forth his hand and grasped the Bishop's arm.

"Louis XVII.! let us see. For whom do you mourn? is it for the innocent
child? very good; in that case I mourn with you. Is it for the royal
child? I demand time for reflection. To me, the brother of Cartouche,
an innocent child who was hung up by the armpits in the Place de Grève,
until death ensued, for the sole crime of having been the brother
of Cartouche, is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV., an
innocent child, martyred in the tower of the Temple, for the sole crime
of having been grandson of Louis XV."

"Monsieur," said the Bishop, "I like not this conjunction of names."

"Cartouche? Louis XV.? To which of the two do you object?"

A momentary silence ensued. The Bishop almost regretted having come, and
yet he felt vaguely and strangely shaken.

The conventionary resumed:--

"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ
loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge,
full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried,
_'Sinite parvulos,'_ he made no distinction between the little children.
It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of
Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own
crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags
as in fleurs de lys."

"That is true," said the Bishop in a low voice.

"I persist," continued the conventionary G---- "You have mentioned Louis
XVII. to me. Let us come to an understanding. Shall we weep for all the
innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted?
I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back
further than '93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will
weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep
with me over the children of the people."

"I weep for all," said the Bishop.

"Equally!" exclaimed conventionary G----; "and if the balance must
incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering
longer."

Another silence ensued. The conventionary was the first to break it. He
raised himself on one elbow, took a bit of his cheek between his thumb
and his forefinger, as one does mechanically when one interrogates and
judges, and appealed to the Bishop with a gaze full of all the forces of
the death agony. It was almost an explosion.

"Yes, sir, the people have been suffering a long while. And hold! that
is not all, either; why have you just questioned me and talked to me
about Louis XVII.? I know you not. Ever since I have been in these parts
I have dwelt in this enclosure alone, never setting foot outside, and
seeing no one but that child who helps me. Your name has reached me in
a confused manner, it is true, and very badly pronounced, I must admit;
but that signifies nothing: clever men have so many ways of imposing on
that honest goodman, the people. By the way, I did not hear the sound of
your carriage; you have left it yonder, behind the coppice at the fork
of the roads, no doubt. I do not know you, I tell you. You have told me
that you are the Bishop; but that affords me no information as to your
moral personality. In short, I repeat my question. Who are you? You are
a bishop; that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded
men with heraldic bearings and revenues, who have vast prebends,--the
bishopric of D---- fifteen thousand francs settled income, ten thousand
in perquisites; total, twenty-five thousand francs,--who have kitchens,
who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who
strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and
who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus
Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate,--revenues, palace, horses,
servants, good table, all the sensualities of life; you have this like
the rest, and like the rest, you enjoy it; it is well; but this says
either too much or too little; this does not enlighten me upon the
intrinsic and essential value of the man who comes with the probable
intention of bringing wisdom to me. To whom do I speak? Who are you?"

The Bishop hung his head and replied, _"Vermis sum_--I am a worm."

"A worm of the earth in a carriage?" growled the conventionary.

It was the conventionary's turn to be arrogant, and the Bishop's to be
humble.

The Bishop resumed mildly:--

"So be it, sir. But explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces
off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which I
eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my palace
and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that '93 was not
inexorable."

The conventionary passed his hand across his brow, as though to sweep
away a cloud.

"Before replying to you," he said, "I beseech you to pardon me. I have
just committed a wrong, sir. You are at my house, you are my guest, I
owe you courtesy. You discuss my ideas, and it becomes me to confine
myself to combating your arguments. Your riches and your pleasures are
advantages which I hold over you in the debate; but good taste dictates
that I shall not make use of them. I promise you to make no use of them
in the future."

"I thank you," said the Bishop.

G---- resumed.

"Let us return to the explanation which you have asked of me. Where were
we? What were you saying to me? That '93 was inexorable?"

"Inexorable; yes," said the Bishop. "What think you of Marat clapping
his hands at the guillotine?"

"What think you of Bossuet chanting the _Te Deum_ over the dragonnades?"

The retort was a harsh one, but it attained its mark with the directness
of a point of steel. The Bishop quivered under it; no reply occurred to
him; but he was offended by this mode of alluding to Bossuet. The best
of minds will have their fetiches, and they sometimes feel vaguely
wounded by the want of respect of logic.

The conventionary began to pant; the asthma of the agony which is
mingled with the last breaths interrupted his voice; still, there was a
perfect lucidity of soul in his eyes. He went on:--

"Let me say a few words more in this and that direction; I am willing.
Apart from the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense human
affirmation, '93 is, alas! a rejoinder. You think it inexorable, sir;
but what of the whole monarchy, sir? Carrier is a bandit; but what name
do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what
is your opinion as to Lamoignon-Bâville? Maillard is terrible; but
Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchêne senior is ferocious; but what
epithet will you allow me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tetê
is a monster; but not so great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois. Sir,
sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am
also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the
Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist,
to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with
milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld
that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a
mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of
her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture
of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the
French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be
absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its
most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I
abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage; moreover, I am dying."

And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary concluded his
thoughts in these tranquil words:--

"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are
over, this fact is recognized,--that the human race has been treated
harshly, but that it has progressed."

The conventionary doubted not that he had successively conquered all the
inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One remained, however, and from this
intrenchment, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu's resistance,
came forth this reply, wherein appeared nearly all the harshness of the
beginning:--

"Progress should believe in God. Good cannot have an impious servitor.
He who is an atheist is but a bad leader for the human race."

The former representative of the people made no reply. He was seized
with a fit of trembling. He looked towards heaven, and in his glance a
tear gathered slowly. When the eyelid was full, the tear trickled down
his livid cheek, and he said, almost in a stammer, quite low, and to
himself, while his eyes were plunged in the depths:--

"O thou! O ideal! Thou alone existest!"

The Bishop experienced an indescribable shock.

After a pause, the old man raised a finger heavenward and said:--

"The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person
would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it
would not exist. There is, then, an _I_. That _I_ of the infinite is
God."

The dying man had pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with
the shiver of ecstasy, as though he beheld some one. When he had spoken,
his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he
had just lived through in a moment the few hours which had been left to
him. That which he had said brought him nearer to him who is in death.
The supreme moment was approaching.

The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he had
come: from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion;
he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and ice-cold
hand in his, and bent over the dying man.

"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think that it would be
regrettable if we had met in vain?"

The conventionary opened his eyes again. A gravity mingled with gloom
was imprinted on his countenance.

"Bishop," said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his
dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, "I have passed my
life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of age
when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with its
affairs. I obeyed. Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies existed,
I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed and
confessed them. Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France was
menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I have been one
of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were encumbered
with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up the walls,
which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of gold and
silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I have succored
the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the cloth from
the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of my country. I
have always upheld the march forward of the human race, forward towards
the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress without pity. I have,
when the occasion offered, protected my own adversaries, men of your
profession. And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot
where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of
Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in
1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good
that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted,
blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed. For many years past,
I with my white hair have been conscious that many people think they
have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I present the
visage of one damned. And I accept this isolation of hatred, without
hating any one myself. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am on the point
of death. What is it that you have come to ask of me?"

_"Your blessing,"_ said the Bishop.

And he knelt down.

When the Bishop raised his head again, the face of the conventionary had
become august. He had just expired.

The Bishop returned home, deeply absorbed in thoughts which cannot
be known to us. He passed the whole night in prayer. On the following
morning some bold and curious persons attempted to speak to him about
member of the Convention G----; he contented himself with pointing
heavenward.

From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly feeling
towards all children and sufferers.

Any allusion to "that old wretch of a G----" caused him to fall into a
singular preoccupation. No one could say that the passage of that soul
before his, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his, did
not count for something in his approach to perfection.

This "pastoral visit" naturally furnished an occasion for a murmur of
comment in all the little local coteries.

"Was the bedside of such a dying man as that the proper place for a
bishop? There was evidently no conversion to be expected. All those
revolutionists are backsliders. Then why go there? What was there to be
seen there? He must have been very curious indeed to see a soul carried
off by the devil."

One day a dowager of the impertinent variety who thinks herself
spiritual, addressed this sally to him, "Monseigneur, people are
inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!"--"Oh! oh!
that's a coarse color," replied the Bishop. "It is lucky that those who
despise it in a cap revere it in a hat."



CHAPTER XI--A RESTRICTION

We should incur a great risk of deceiving ourselves, were we to conclude
from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a philosophical bishop," or a
"patriotic curé." His meeting, which may almost be designated as his
union, with conventionary G----, left behind it in his mind a sort of
astonishment, which rendered him still more gentle. That is all.

Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician, this is,
perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his attitude was in the
events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur Bienvenu ever dreamed
of having an attitude.

Let us, then, go back a few years.

Some time after the elevation of M. Myriel to the episcopate, the
Emperor had made him a baron of the Empire, in company with many other
bishops. The arrest of the Pope took place, as every one knows, on the
night of the 5th to the 6th of July, 1809; on this occasion, M. Myriel
was summoned by Napoleon to the synod of the bishops of France and Italy
convened at Paris. This synod was held at Notre-Dame, and assembled
for the first time on the 15th of June, 1811, under the presidency
of Cardinal Fesch. M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who
attended it. But he was present only at one sitting and at three or four
private conferences. Bishop of a mountain diocese, living so very close
to nature, in rusticity and deprivation, it appeared that he imported
among these eminent personages, ideas which altered the temperature of
the assembly. He very soon returned to D---- He was interrogated as to
this speedy return, and he replied: _"I embarrassed them. The outside
air penetrated to them through me. I produced on them the effect of an
open door."_

On another occasion he said, _"What would you have? Those gentlemen are
princes. I am only a poor peasant bishop."_

The fact is that he displeased them. Among other strange things, it is
said that he chanced to remark one evening, when he found himself at
the house of one of his most notable colleagues: "What beautiful clocks!
What beautiful carpets! What beautiful liveries! They must be a great
trouble. I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly
in my ears: 'There are people who are hungry! There are people who are
cold! There are poor people! There are poor people!'"

Let us remark, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not an
intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.
Nevertheless, in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with
representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have
very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a
contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come
in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these
misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a
little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine
a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is
working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened
nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first
proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.

This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.

It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call the "ideas
of the century" on certain delicate points. He took very little part
in the theological quarrels of the moment, and maintained silence on
questions in which Church and State were implicated; but if he had
been strongly pressed, it seems that he would have been found to be an
ultramontane rather than a gallican. Since we are making a portrait, and
since we do not wish to conceal anything, we are forced to add that he
was glacial towards Napoleon in his decline. Beginning with 1813, he
gave in his adherence to or applauded all hostile manifestations. He
refused to see him, as he passed through on his return from the island
of Elba, and he abstained from ordering public prayers for the Emperor
in his diocese during the Hundred Days.

Besides his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers, one a
general, the other a prefect. He wrote to both with tolerable frequency.
He was harsh for a time towards the former, because, holding a command
in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation at Cannes, the general
had put himself at the head of twelve hundred men and had pursued the
Emperor as though the latter had been a person whom one is desirous
of allowing to escape. His correspondence with the other brother, the
ex-prefect, a fine, worthy man who lived in retirement at Paris, Rue
Cassette, remained more affectionate.

Thus Monseigneur Bienvenu also had his hour of party spirit, his hour
of bitterness, his cloud. The shadow of the passions of the moment
traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.
Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any
political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are
not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand
aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic,
humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous
intellect. Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly
connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this: It
would have been well if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a Royalist,
and if his glance had never been, for a single instant, turned away from
that serene contemplation in which is distinctly discernible, above the
fictions and the hatreds of this world, above the stormy vicissitudes of
human things, the beaming of those three pure radiances, truth, justice,
and charity.

While admitting that it was not for a political office that God created
Monseigneur Welcome, we should have understood and admired his protest
in the name of right and liberty, his proud opposition, his just but
perilous resistance to the all-powerful Napoleon. But that which pleases
us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who
are falling. We only love the fray so long as there is danger, and in
any case, the combatants of the first hour have alone the right to be
the exterminators of the last. He who has not been a stubborn accuser in
prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin. The denunciator of
success is the only legitimate executioner of the fall. As for us, when
Providence intervenes and strikes, we let it work. 1812 commenced to
disarm us. In 1813 the cowardly breach of silence of that taciturn
legislative body, emboldened by catastrophe, possessed only traits which
aroused indignation. And it was a crime to applaud, in 1814, in the
presence of those marshals who betrayed; in the presence of that senate
which passed from one dunghill to another, insulting after having
deified; in the presence of that idolatry which was loosing its footing
and spitting on its idol,--it was a duty to turn aside the head. In
1815, when the supreme disasters filled the air, when France was seized
with a shiver at their sinister approach, when Waterloo could be dimly
discerned opening before Napoleon, the mournful acclamation of the army
and the people to the condemned of destiny had nothing laughable in it,
and, after making all allowance for the despot, a heart like that of
the Bishop of D----, ought not perhaps to have failed to recognize the
august and touching features presented by the embrace of a great nation
and a great man on the brink of the abyss.

With this exception, he was in all things just, true, equitable,
intelligent, humble and dignified, beneficent and kindly, which is only
another sort of benevolence. He was a priest, a sage, and a man. It must
be admitted, that even in the political views with which we have just
reproached him, and which we are disposed to judge almost with severity,
he was tolerant and easy, more so, perhaps, than we who are speaking
here. The porter of the town-hall had been placed there by the Emperor.
He was an old non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a member of the
Legion of Honor at Austerlitz, as much of a Bonapartist as the eagle.
This poor fellow occasionally let slip inconsiderate remarks, which the
law then stigmatized as _seditious speeches_. After the imperial profile
disappeared from the Legion of Honor, he never dressed himself in his
regimentals, as he said, so that he should not be obliged to wear his
cross. He had himself devoutly removed the imperial effigy from the
cross which Napoleon had given him; this made a hole, and he would not
put anything in its place. _"I will die,"_ he said, _"rather than wear
the three frogs upon my heart!"_ He liked to scoff aloud at Louis XVIII.
"The gouty old creature in English gaiters!" he said; _"let him take
himself off to Prussia with that queue of his."_ He was happy to combine
in the same imprecation the two things which he most detested, Prussia
and England. He did it so often that he lost his place. There he was,
turned out of the house, with his wife and children, and without bread.
The Bishop sent for him, reproved him gently, and appointed him beadle
in the cathedral.

In the course of nine years Monseigneur Bienvenu had, by dint of holy
deeds and gentle manners, filled the town of D----with a sort of
tender and filial reverence. Even his conduct towards Napoleon had been
accepted and tacitly pardoned, as it were, by the people, the good and
weakly flock who adored their emperor, but loved their bishop.



CHAPTER XII--THE SOLITUDE OF MONSEIGNEUR WELCOME

A bishop is almost always surrounded by a full squadron of little abbés,
just as a general is by a covey of young officers. This is what
that charming Saint François de Sales calls somewhere "les prêtres
blancs-becs," callow priests. Every career has its aspirants, who form
a train for those who have attained eminence in it. There is no power
which has not its dependents. There is no fortune which has not its
court. The seekers of the future eddy around the splendid present. Every
metropolis has its staff of officials. Every bishop who possesses the
least influence has about him his patrol of cherubim from the seminary,
which goes the round, and maintains good order in the episcopal palace,
and mounts guard over monseigneur's smile. To please a bishop is
equivalent to getting one's foot in the stirrup for a sub-diaconate.
It is necessary to walk one's path discreetly; the apostleship does not
disdain the canonship.

Just as there are bigwigs elsewhere, there are big mitres in the Church.
These are the bishops who stand well at Court, who are rich, well
endowed, skilful, accepted by the world, who know how to pray, no doubt,
but who know also how to beg, who feel little scruple at making a whole
diocese dance attendance in their person, who are connecting links
between the sacristy and diplomacy, who are abbés rather than priests,
prelates rather than bishops. Happy those who approach them! Being
persons of influence, they create a shower about them, upon the
assiduous and the favored, and upon all the young men who understand
the art of pleasing, of large parishes, prebends, archidiaconates,
chaplaincies, and cathedral posts, while awaiting episcopal honors. As
they advance themselves, they cause their satellites to progress also;
it is a whole solar system on the march. Their radiance casts a gleam
of purple over their suite. Their prosperity is crumbled up behind
the scenes, into nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the
patron, the fatter the curacy for the favorite. And then, there is Rome.
A bishop who understands how to become an archbishop, an archbishop who
knows how to become a cardinal, carries you with him as conclavist;
you enter a court of papal jurisdiction, you receive the pallium, and
behold! you are an auditor, then a papal chamberlain, then monsignor,
and from a Grace to an Eminence is only a step, and between the Eminence
and the Holiness there is but the smoke of a ballot. Every skull-cap may
dream of the tiara. The priest is nowadays the only man who can become a
king in a regular manner; and what a king! the supreme king. Then what a
nursery of aspirations is a seminary! How many blushing choristers,
how many youthful abbés bear on their heads Perrette's pot of milk!
Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation? in good
faith, perchance, and deceiving itself, devotee that it is.

Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not accounted among
the big mitres. This was plain from the complete absence of young
priests about him. We have seen that he "did not take" in Paris. Not a
single future dreamed of engrafting itself on this solitary old man.
Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth its
foliage in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars were good old men,
rather vulgar like himself, walled up like him in this diocese, without
exit to a cardinalship, and who resembled their bishop, with this
difference, that they were finished and he was completed. The
impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well
understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the
seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix
or of Auch, and went off in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it,
men wish to be pushed. A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation
is a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by contagion,
an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints, which are useful in
advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and
this infectious virtue is avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur
Bienvenu. We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the
lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.

Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false
resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost
the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menæchmus of talent, has
one dupe,--history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our
day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its
service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its
antechamber. Succeed: theory. Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the
lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated.
Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be
lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think
you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose
the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but
short-sightedness. Gilding is gold. It does no harm to be the first
arrival by pure chance, so long as you do arrive. The common herd is an
old Narcissus who adores himself, and who applauds the vulgar herd.
That enormous ability by virtue of which one is Moses, Æschylus, Dante,
Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude awards on the spot, and by
acclamation, to whomsoever attains his object, in whatsoever it may
consist. Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false
Corneille compose _Tiridate;_ let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let
a military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch;
let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the
Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold
as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer
espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of
which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preacher
become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward of a fine
family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister
of finances,--and men call that Genius, just as they call the face
of Mousqueton _Beauty_, and the mien of Claude _Majesty_. With the
constellations of space they confound the stars of the abyss which are
made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet of ducks.



CHAPTER XIII--WHAT HE BELIEVED

We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of D---- on the score of
orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood
but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his
word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible
development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs
from our own.

What did he think of this dogma, or of that mystery? These secrets of
the inner tribunal of the conscience are known only to the tomb, where
souls enter naked. The point on which we are certain is, that the
difficulties of faith never resolved themselves into hypocrisy in his
case. No decay is possible to the diamond. He believed to the extent of
his powers. _"Credo in Patrem,"_ he often exclaimed. Moreover, he
drew from good works that amount of satisfaction which suffices to the
conscience, and which whispers to a man, "Thou art with God!"

The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and
beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. It
was in that quarter, _quia multum amavit_,--because he loved much--that
he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and
"reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism
takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love?
It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already
pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived
without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man,
even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves
for animals. The Bishop of D---- had none of that harshness, which is
peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the
Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who
knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect,
deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his
indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as
though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which
is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He
seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined
without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a
palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This
revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in
his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind
him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the
ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard
him say:--

"Poor beast! It is not its fault!"

Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness?
Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to
Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his
ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an ant. Thus lived this just
man. Sometimes he fell asleep in his garden, and then there was nothing
more venerable possible.

Monseigneur Bienvenu had formerly been, if the stories anent his youth,
and even in regard to his manhood, were to be believed, a passionate,
and, possibly, a violent man. His universal suavity was less an instinct
of nature than the result of a grand conviction which had filtered into
his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there slowly,
thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist
apertures made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these
formations are indestructible.

In 1815, as we think we have already said, he reached his seventy-fifth
birthday, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall;
he was rather plump; and, in order to combat this tendency, he was fond
of taking long strolls on foot; his step was firm, and his form was
but slightly bent, a detail from which we do not pretend to draw any
conclusion. Gregory XVI., at the age of eighty, held himself erect and
smiling, which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur
Welcome had what the people term a "fine head," but so amiable was he
that they forgot that it was fine.

When he conversed with that infantile gayety which was one of his
charms, and of which we have already spoken, people felt at their ease
with him, and joy seemed to radiate from his whole person. His fresh and
ruddy complexion, his very white teeth, all of which he had preserved,
and which were displayed by his smile, gave him that open and easy air
which cause the remark to be made of a man, "He's a good fellow"; and
of an old man, "He is a fine man." That, it will be recalled, was the
effect which he produced upon Napoleon. On the first encounter, and to
one who saw him for the first time, he was nothing, in fact, but a fine
man. But if one remained near him for a few hours, and beheld him in the
least degree pensive, the fine man became gradually transfigured, and
took on some imposing quality, I know not what; his broad and serious
brow, rendered august by his white locks, became august also by virtue
of meditation; majesty radiated from his goodness, though his goodness
ceased not to be radiant; one experienced something of the emotion which
one would feel on beholding a smiling angel slowly unfold his wings,
without ceasing to smile. Respect, an unutterable respect, penetrated
you by degrees and mounted to your heart, and one felt that one had
before him one of those strong, thoroughly tried, and indulgent souls
where thought is so grand that it can no longer be anything but gentle.

As we have seen, prayer, the celebration of the offices of religion,
alms-giving, the consolation of the afflicted, the cultivation of a bit
of land, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, renunciation, confidence,
study, work, filled every day of his life. _Filled_ is exactly the word;
certainly the Bishop's day was quite full to the brim, of good words and
good deeds. Nevertheless, it was not complete if cold or rainy weather
prevented his passing an hour or two in his garden before going to bed,
and after the two women had retired. It seemed to be a sort of rite with
him, to prepare himself for slumber by meditation in the presence of
the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens. Sometimes, if the two old
women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at
a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with
himself, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the
serenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor
of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his
heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments,
while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer
their perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he
poured himself out in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of
creation, he could not have told himself, probably, what was passing in
his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and something
descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with
the abysses of the universe!

He thought of the grandeur and presence of God; of the future eternity,
that strange mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more
strange; of all the infinities, which pierced their way into all
his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to comprehend the
incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled
by him. He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which
communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create
individualities in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the
infinite, and, through light, produce beauty. These conjunctions are
formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life and death.

He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit
vine; he gazed at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes
of his fruit-trees. This quarter of an acre, so poorly planted, so
encumbered with mean buildings and sheds, was dear to him, and satisfied
his wants.

What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his
life, where there was so little leisure, between gardening in the
daytime and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with
the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his
most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and
what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to
walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be
cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate
upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.



CHAPTER XIV--WHAT HE THOUGHT

One last word.

Since this sort of details might, particularly at the present moment,
and to use an expression now in fashion, give to the Bishop of D---- a
certain "pantheistical" physiognomy, and induce the belief, either
to his credit or discredit, that he entertained one of those personal
philosophies which are peculiar to our century, which sometimes spring
up in solitary spirits, and there take on a form and grow until they
usurp the place of religion, we insist upon it, that not one of
those persons who knew Monseigneur Welcome would have thought himself
authorized to think anything of the sort. That which enlightened this
man was his heart. His wisdom was made of the light which comes from
there.

No systems; many works. Abstruse speculations contain vertigo; no,
there is nothing to indicate that he risked his mind in apocalypses. The
apostle may be daring, but the bishop must be timid. He would probably
have felt a scruple at sounding too far in advance certain problems
which are, in a manner, reserved for terrible great minds. There is a
sacred horror beneath the porches of the enigma; those gloomy openings
stand yawning there, but something tells you, you, a passer-by in life,
that you must not enter. Woe to him who penetrates thither!

Geniuses in the impenetrable depths of abstraction and pure speculation,
situated, so to speak, above all dogmas, propose their ideas to
God. Their prayer audaciously offers discussion. Their adoration
interrogates. This is direct religion, which is full of anxiety and
responsibility for him who attempts its steep cliffs.

Human meditation has no limits. At his own risk and peril, it analyzes
and digs deep into its own bedazzlement. One might almost say, that by
a sort of splendid reaction, it with it dazzles nature; the mysterious
world which surrounds us renders back what it has received; it is
probable that the contemplators are contemplated. However that may be,
there are on earth men who--are they men?--perceive distinctly at the
verge of the horizons of revery the heights of the absolute, and who
have the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Welcome
was one of these men; Monseigneur Welcome was not a genius. He would
have feared those sublimities whence some very great men even, like
Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these
powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous paths
one approaches to ideal perfection. As for him, he took the path which
shortens,--the Gospel's.

He did not attempt to impart to his chasuble the folds of Elijah's
mantle; he projected no ray of future upon the dark groundswell of
events; he did not see to condense in flame the light of things; he
had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician about him. This
humble soul loved, and that was all.

That he carried prayer to the pitch of a superhuman aspiration is
probable: but one can no more pray too much than one can love too much;
and if it is a heresy to pray beyond the texts, Saint Theresa and Saint
Jerome would be heretics.

He inclined towards all that groans and all that expiates. The universe
appeared to him like an immense malady; everywhere he felt fever,
everywhere he heard the sound of suffering, and, without seeking to
solve the enigma, he strove to dress the wound. The terrible spectacle
of created things developed tenderness in him; he was occupied only
in finding for himself, and in inspiring others with the best way to
compassionate and relieve. That which exists was for this good and rare
priest a permanent subject of sadness which sought consolation.

There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction
of pity. Universal misery was his mine. The sadness which reigned
everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. _Love each other;_
he declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was
the whole of his doctrine. One day, that man who believed himself to be
a "philosopher," the senator who has already been alluded to, said to
the Bishop: "Just survey the spectacle of the world: all war against
all; the strongest has the most wit. Your _love each other_ is
nonsense."--_"Well,"_ replied Monseigneur Welcome, without contesting
the point, _"if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as
the pearl in the oyster."_ Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he
was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious
questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of
abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics--all those profundities
which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness;
destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience
of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation
in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the
incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent _I_,
the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature,
liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where
lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses,
which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes
flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to
cause stars to blaze forth there.

Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of
mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling
his own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave
respect for darkness.



BOOK SECOND--THE FALL



CHAPTER I--THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING

Early in the month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a
man who was travelling on foot entered the little town of D----The few
inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the
moment stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was
difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was
a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life.
He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a
drooping leather visor partly concealed his face, burned and tanned by
sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow
linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view
of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of
blue drilling, worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the
other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with
a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier
knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous,
knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a
shaved head and a long beard.

The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not
what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was closely cut,
yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem to
have been cut for some time.

No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came
he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance
into D---- by the same street which, seven months previously, had
witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes
to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. He seemed very much
fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is situated below
the city had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi,
and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He
must have been very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him
stop again for a drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in
the market-place.

On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left,
and directed his steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out
a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated near the door, on the
stone bench which General Drouot had mounted on the 4th of March to read
to the frightened throng of the inhabitants of D----the proclamation
of the Gulf Juan. The man pulled off his cap and humbly saluted the
gendarme.

The gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him,
followed him for a while with his eyes, and then entered the town-hall.

There then existed at D---- a fine inn at the sign of the _Cross of
Colbas_. This inn had for a landlord a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man
of consideration in the town on account of his relationship to another
Labarre, who kept the inn of the _Three Dauphins_ in Grenoble, and had
served in the Guides. At the time of the Emperor's landing, many rumors
had circulated throughout the country with regard to this inn of the
_Three Dauphins_. It was said that General Bertrand, disguised as a
carter, had made frequent trips thither in the month of January, and
that he had distributed crosses of honor to the soldiers and handfuls
of gold to the citizens. The truth is, that when the Emperor entered
Grenoble he had refused to install himself at the hotel of the
prefecture; he had thanked the mayor, saying, _"I am going to the house
of a brave man of my acquaintance";_ and he had betaken himself to the
_Three Dauphins_. This glory of the Labarre of the _Three Dauphins_ was
reflected upon the Labarre of the _Cross of Colbas_, at a distance of
five and twenty leagues. It was said of him in the town, _"That is the
cousin of the man of Grenoble."_

The man bent his steps towards this inn, which was the best in the
country-side. He entered the kitchen, which opened on a level with the
street. All the stoves were lighted; a huge fire blazed gayly in the
fireplace. The host, who was also the chief cook, was going from one
stew-pan to another, very busily superintending an excellent dinner
designed for the wagoners, whose loud talking, conversation, and
laughter were audible from an adjoining apartment. Any one who has
travelled knows that there is no one who indulges in better cheer than
wagoners. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and heather-cocks,
was turning on a long spit before the fire; on the stove, two huge carps
from Lake Lauzet and a trout from Lake Alloz were cooking.

The host, hearing the door open and seeing a newcomer enter, said,
without raising his eyes from his stoves:--

"What do you wish, sir?"

"Food and lodging," said the man.

"Nothing easier," replied the host. At that moment he turned his head,
took in the traveller's appearance with a single glance, and added, "By
paying for it."

The man drew a large leather purse from the pocket of his blouse, and
answered, "I have money."

"In that case, we are at your service," said the host.

The man put his purse back in his pocket, removed his knapsack from
his back, put it on the ground near the door, retained his stick in his
hand, and seated himself on a low stool close to the fire. D---- is in
the mountains. The evenings are cold there in October.

But as the host went back and forth, he scrutinized the traveller.

"Will dinner be ready soon?" said the man.

"Immediately," replied the landlord.

While the newcomer was warming himself before the fire, with his back
turned, the worthy host, Jacquin Labarre, drew a pencil from his pocket,
then tore off the corner of an old newspaper which was lying on a small
table near the window. On the white margin he wrote a line or two,
folded it without sealing, and then intrusted this scrap of paper to
a child who seemed to serve him in the capacity both of scullion and
lackey. The landlord whispered a word in the scullion's ear, and the
child set off on a run in the direction of the town-hall.

The traveller saw nothing of all this.

Once more he inquired, "Will dinner be ready soon?"

"Immediately," responded the host.

The child returned. He brought back the paper. The host unfolded it
eagerly, like a person who is expecting a reply. He seemed to read it
attentively, then tossed his head, and remained thoughtful for a moment.
Then he took a step in the direction of the traveller, who appeared to
be immersed in reflections which were not very serene.

"I cannot receive you, sir," said he.

The man half rose.

"What! Are you afraid that I will not pay you? Do you want me to pay you
in advance? I have money, I tell you."

"It is not that."

"What then?"

"You have money--"

"Yes," said the man.

"And I," said the host, "have no room."

The man resumed tranquilly, "Put me in the stable."

"I cannot."

"Why?"

"The horses take up all the space."

"Very well!" retorted the man; "a corner of the loft then, a truss of
straw. We will see about that after dinner."

"I cannot give you any dinner."

This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, struck the stranger
as grave. He rose.

"Ah! bah! But I am dying of hunger. I have been walking since sunrise. I
have travelled twelve leagues. I pay. I wish to eat."

"I have nothing," said the landlord.

The man burst out laughing, and turned towards the fireplace and the
stoves: "Nothing! and all that?"

"All that is engaged."

"By whom?"

"By messieurs the wagoners."

"How many are there of them?"

"Twelve."

"There is enough food there for twenty."

"They have engaged the whole of it and paid for it in advance."

The man seated himself again, and said, without raising his voice, "I am
at an inn; I am hungry, and I shall remain."

Then the host bent down to his ear, and said in a tone which made him
start, "Go away!"

At that moment the traveller was bending forward and thrusting some
brands into the fire with the iron-shod tip of his staff; he turned
quickly round, and as he opened his mouth to reply, the host gazed
steadily at him and added, still in a low voice: "Stop! there's enough
of that sort of talk. Do you want me to tell you your name? Your name is
Jean Valjean. Now do you want me to tell you who you are? When I saw you
come in I suspected something; I sent to the town-hall, and this was the
reply that was sent to me. Can you read?"

So saying, he held out to the stranger, fully unfolded, the paper which
had just travelled from the inn to the town-hall, and from the town-hall
to the inn. The man cast a glance upon it. The landlord resumed after a
pause.

"I am in the habit of being polite to every one. Go away!"

The man dropped his head, picked up the knapsack which he had deposited
on the ground, and took his departure.

He chose the principal street. He walked straight on at a venture,
keeping close to the houses like a sad and humiliated man. He did not
turn round a single time. Had he done so, he would have seen the host of
the _Cross of Colbas_ standing on his threshold, surrounded by all
the guests of his inn, and all the passers-by in the street, talking
vivaciously, and pointing him out with his finger; and, from the glances
of terror and distrust cast by the group, he might have divined that his
arrival would speedily become an event for the whole town.

He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind
them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

Thus he proceeded for some time, walking on without ceasing, traversing
at random streets of which he knew nothing, forgetful of his fatigue,
as is often the case when a man is sad. All at once he felt the pangs
of hunger sharply. Night was drawing near. He glanced about him, to see
whether he could not discover some shelter.

The fine hostelry was closed to him; he was seeking some very humble
public house, some hovel, however lowly.

Just then a light flashed up at the end of the streets; a pine branch
suspended from a cross-beam of iron was outlined against the white sky
of the twilight. He proceeded thither.

It proved to be, in fact, a public house. The public house which is in
the Rue de Chaffaut.

The wayfarer halted for a moment, and peeped through the window into the
interior of the low-studded room of the public house, illuminated by a
small lamp on a table and by a large fire on the hearth. Some men were
engaged in drinking there. The landlord was warming himself. An iron
pot, suspended from a crane, bubbled over the flame.

The entrance to this public house, which is also a sort of an inn, is by
two doors. One opens on the street, the other upon a small yard filled
with manure. The traveller dare not enter by the street door. He slipped
into the yard, halted again, then raised the latch timidly and opened
the door.

"Who goes there?" said the master.

"Some one who wants supper and bed."

"Good. We furnish supper and bed here."

He entered. All the men who were drinking turned round. The lamp
illuminated him on one side, the firelight on the other. They examined
him for some time while he was taking off his knapsack.

The host said to him, "There is the fire. The supper is cooking in the
pot. Come and warm yourself, comrade."

He approached and seated himself near the hearth. He stretched out his
feet, which were exhausted with fatigue, to the fire; a fine odor was
emitted by the pot. All that could be distinguished of his face, beneath
his cap, which was well pulled down, assumed a vague appearance
of comfort, mingled with that other poignant aspect which habitual
suffering bestows.

It was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and melancholy profile. This
physiognomy was strangely composed; it began by seeming humble, and
ended by seeming severe. The eye shone beneath its lashes like a fire
beneath brushwood.

One of the men seated at the table, however, was a fishmonger who,
before entering the public house of the Rue de Chaffaut, had been to
stable his horse at Labarre's. It chanced that he had that very morning
encountered this unprepossessing stranger on the road between Bras
d'Asse and--I have forgotten the name. I think it was Escoublon. Now,
when he met him, the man, who then seemed already extremely weary, had
requested him to take him on his crupper; to which the fishmonger had
made no reply except by redoubling his gait. This fishmonger had been
a member half an hour previously of the group which surrounded Jacquin
Labarre, and had himself related his disagreeable encounter of the
morning to the people at the _Cross of Colbas_. From where he sat he
made an imperceptible sign to the tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper went
to him. They exchanged a few words in a low tone. The man had again
become absorbed in his reflections.

The tavern-keeper returned to the fireplace, laid his hand abruptly on
the shoulder of the man, and said to him:--

"You are going to get out of here."

The stranger turned round and replied gently, "Ah! You know?--"

"Yes."

"I was sent away from the other inn."

"And you are to be turned out of this one."

"Where would you have me go?"

"Elsewhere."

The man took his stick and his knapsack and departed.

As he went out, some children who had followed him from the _Cross of
Colbas_, and who seemed to be lying in wait for him, threw stones at
him. He retraced his steps in anger, and threatened them with his stick:
the children dispersed like a flock of birds.

He passed before the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to
a bell. He rang.

The wicket opened.

"Turnkey," said he, removing his cap politely, "will you have the
kindness to admit me, and give me a lodging for the night?"

A voice replied:--

"The prison is not an inn. Get yourself arrested, and you will be
admitted."

The wicket closed again.

He entered a little street in which there were many gardens. Some of
them are enclosed only by hedges, which lends a cheerful aspect to the
street. In the midst of these gardens and hedges he caught sight of a
small house of a single story, the window of which was lighted up. He
peered through the pane as he had done at the public house. Within was a
large whitewashed room, with a bed draped in printed cotton stuff, and
a cradle in one corner, a few wooden chairs, and a double-barrelled gun
hanging on the wall. A table was spread in the centre of the room. A
copper lamp illuminated the tablecloth of coarse white linen, the pewter
jug shining like silver, and filled with wine, and the brown, smoking
soup-tureen. At this table sat a man of about forty, with a merry and
open countenance, who was dandling a little child on his knees. Close by
a very young woman was nursing another child. The father was laughing,
the child was laughing, the mother was smiling.

The stranger paused a moment in revery before this tender and calming
spectacle. What was taking place within him? He alone could have
told. It is probable that he thought that this joyous house would be
hospitable, and that, in a place where he beheld so much happiness, he
would find perhaps a little pity.

He tapped on the pane with a very small and feeble knock.

They did not hear him.

He tapped again.

He heard the woman say, "It seems to me, husband, that some one is
knocking."

"No," replied the husband.

He tapped a third time.

The husband rose, took the lamp, and went to the door, which he opened.

He was a man of lofty stature, half peasant, half artisan. He wore a
huge leather apron, which reached to his left shoulder, and which a
hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder-horn, and all sorts of objects
which were upheld by the girdle, as in a pocket, caused to bulge out. He
carried his head thrown backwards; his shirt, widely opened and turned
back, displayed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick eyelashes,
enormous black whiskers, prominent eyes, the lower part of his face
like a snout; and besides all this, that air of being on his own ground,
which is indescribable.

"Pardon me, sir," said the wayfarer, "Could you, in consideration of
payment, give me a plate of soup and a corner of that shed yonder in the
garden, in which to sleep? Tell me; can you? For money?"

"Who are you?" demanded the master of the house.

The man replied: "I have just come from Puy-Moisson. I have walked all
day long. I have travelled twelve leagues. Can you?--if I pay?"

"I would not refuse," said the peasant, "to lodge any respectable man
who would pay me. But why do you not go to the inn?"

"There is no room."

"Bah! Impossible. This is neither a fair nor a market day. Have you been
to Labarre?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

The traveller replied with embarrassment: "I do not know. He did not
receive me."

"Have you been to What's-his-name's, in the Rue Chaffaut?"

The stranger's embarrassment increased; he stammered, "He did not
receive me either."

The peasant's countenance assumed an expression of distrust; he surveyed
the newcomer from head to feet, and suddenly exclaimed, with a sort of
shudder:--

"Are you the man?--"

He cast a fresh glance upon the stranger, took three steps backwards,
placed the lamp on the table, and took his gun down from the wall.

Meanwhile, at the words, _Are you the man?_ the woman had risen, had
clasped her two children in her arms, and had taken refuge precipitately
behind her husband, staring in terror at the stranger, with her bosom
uncovered, and with frightened eyes, as she murmured in a low tone,
_"Tso-maraude."_1

All this took place in less time than it requires to picture it to
one's self. After having scrutinized the man for several moments, as one
scrutinizes a viper, the master of the house returned to the door and
said:--

"Clear out!"

"For pity's sake, a glass of water," said the man.

"A shot from my gun!" said the peasant.

Then he closed the door violently, and the man heard him shoot two large
bolts. A moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a
bar of iron which was placed against it was audible outside.

Night continued to fall. A cold wind from the Alps was blowing. By the
light of the expiring day the stranger perceived, in one of the gardens
which bordered the street, a sort of hut, which seemed to him to be
built of sods. He climbed over the wooden fence resolutely, and found
himself in the garden. He approached the hut; its door consisted of a
very low and narrow aperture, and it resembled those buildings which
road-laborers construct for themselves along the roads. He thought
without doubt, that it was, in fact, the dwelling of a road-laborer; he
was suffering from cold and hunger, but this was, at least, a shelter
from the cold. This sort of dwelling is not usually occupied at night.
He threw himself flat on his face, and crawled into the hut. It was warm
there, and he found a tolerably good bed of straw. He lay, for a moment,
stretched out on this bed, without the power to make a movement, so
fatigued was he. Then, as the knapsack on his back was in his way, and
as it furnished, moreover, a pillow ready to his hand, he set about
unbuckling one of the straps. At that moment, a ferocious growl became
audible. He raised his eyes. The head of an enormous dog was outlined in
the darkness at the entrance of the hut.

It was a dog's kennel.

He was himself vigorous and formidable; he armed himself with his staff,
made a shield of his knapsack, and made his way out of the kennel in the
best way he could, not without enlarging the rents in his rags.

He left the garden in the same manner, but backwards, being obliged, in
order to keep the dog respectful, to have recourse to that manouvre with
his stick which masters in that sort of fencing designate as _la rose
couverte_.

When he had, not without difficulty, repassed the fence, and found
himself once more in the street, alone, without refuge, without shelter,
without a roof over his head, chased even from that bed of straw and
from that miserable kennel, he dropped rather than seated himself on a
stone, and it appears that a passer-by heard him exclaim, "I am not even
a dog!"

He soon rose again and resumed his march. He went out of the town,
hoping to find some tree or haystack in the fields which would afford
him shelter.

He walked thus for some time, with his head still drooping. When he felt
himself far from every human habitation, he raised his eyes and gazed
searchingly about him. He was in a field. Before him was one of those
low hills covered with close-cut stubble, which, after the harvest,
resemble shaved heads.

The horizon was perfectly black. This was not alone the obscurity of
night; it was caused by very low-hanging clouds which seemed to rest
upon the hill itself, and which were mounting and filling the whole
sky. Meanwhile, as the moon was about to rise, and as there was still
floating in the zenith a remnant of the brightness of twilight, these
clouds formed at the summit of the sky a sort of whitish arch, whence a
gleam of light fell upon the earth.

The earth was thus better lighted than the sky, which produces a
particularly sinister effect, and the hill, whose contour was poor and
mean, was outlined vague and wan against the gloomy horizon. The whole
effect was hideous, petty, lugubrious, and narrow.

There was nothing in the field or on the hill except a deformed tree,
which writhed and shivered a few paces distant from the wayfarer.

This man was evidently very far from having those delicate habits of
intelligence and spirit which render one sensible to the mysterious
aspects of things; nevertheless, there was something in that sky,
in that hill, in that plain, in that tree, which was so profoundly
desolate, that after a moment of immobility and revery he turned back
abruptly. There are instants when nature seems hostile.

He retraced his steps; the gates of D---- were closed. D----, which had
sustained sieges during the wars of religion, was still surrounded
in 1815 by ancient walls flanked by square towers which have been
demolished since. He passed through a breach and entered the town again.

It might have been eight o'clock in the evening. As he was not
acquainted with the streets, he recommenced his walk at random.

In this way he came to the prefecture, then to the seminary. As he
passed through the Cathedral Square, he shook his fist at the church.

At the corner of this square there is a printing establishment. It is
there that the proclamations of the Emperor and of the Imperial Guard
to the army, brought from the Island of Elba and dictated by Napoleon
himself, were printed for the first time.

Worn out with fatigue, and no longer entertaining any hope, he lay down
on a stone bench which stands at the doorway of this printing office.

At that moment an old woman came out of the church. She saw the man
stretched out in the shadow. "What are you doing there, my friend?" said
she.

He answered harshly and angrily: "As you see, my good woman, I am
sleeping." The good woman, who was well worthy the name, in fact, was
the Marquise de R----

"On this bench?" she went on.

"I have had a mattress of wood for nineteen years," said the man;
"to-day I have a mattress of stone."

"You have been a soldier?"

"Yes, my good woman, a soldier."

"Why do you not go to the inn?"

"Because I have no money."

"Alas!" said Madame de R----, "I have only four sous in my purse."

"Give it to me all the same."

The man took the four sous. Madame de R---- continued: "You cannot
obtain lodgings in an inn for so small a sum. But have you tried? It is
impossible for you to pass the night thus. You are cold and hungry, no
doubt. Some one might have given you a lodging out of charity."

"I have knocked at all doors."

"Well?"

"I have been driven away everywhere."

The "good woman" touched the man's arm, and pointed out to him on the
other side of the street a small, low house, which stood beside the
Bishop's palace.

"You have knocked at all doors?"

"Yes."

"Have you knocked at that one?"

"No."

"Knock there."



CHAPTER II--PRUDENCE COUNSELLED TO WISDOM.

That evening, the Bishop of D----, after his promenade through the town,
remained shut up rather late in his room. He was busy over a great work
on _Duties_, which was never completed, unfortunately. He was carefully
compiling everything that the Fathers and the doctors have said on this
important subject. His book was divided into two parts: firstly, the
duties of all; secondly, the duties of each individual, according to the
class to which he belongs. The duties of all are the great duties. There
are four of these. Saint Matthew points them out: duties towards God
(_Matt._ vi.); duties towards one's self (_Matt._ v. 29, 30); duties
towards one's neighbor (_Matt._ vii. 12); duties towards animals
(_Matt._ vi. 20, 25). As for the other duties the Bishop found them
pointed out and prescribed elsewhere: to sovereigns and subjects, in the
Epistle to the Romans; to magistrates, to wives, to mothers, to young
men, by Saint Peter; to husbands, fathers, children and servants, in
the Epistle to the Ephesians; to the faithful, in the Epistle to the
Hebrews; to virgins, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Out of these
precepts he was laboriously constructing a harmonious whole, which he
desired to present to souls.

At eight o'clock he was still at work, writing with a good deal of
inconvenience upon little squares of paper, with a big book open on his
knees, when Madame Magloire entered, according to her wont, to get the
silver-ware from the cupboard near his bed. A moment later, the Bishop,
knowing that the table was set, and that his sister was probably
waiting for him, shut his book, rose from his table, and entered the
dining-room.

The dining-room was an oblong apartment, with a fireplace, which had a
door opening on the street (as we have said), and a window opening on
the garden.

Madame Magloire was, in fact, just putting the last touches to the
table.

As she performed this service, she was conversing with Mademoiselle
Baptistine.

A lamp stood on the table; the table was near the fireplace. A wood fire
was burning there.

One can easily picture to one's self these two women, both of whom
were over sixty years of age. Madame Magloire small, plump, vivacious;
Mademoiselle Baptistine gentle, slender, frail, somewhat taller than her
brother, dressed in a gown of puce-colored silk, of the fashion of 1806,
which she had purchased at that date in Paris, and which had lasted
ever since. To borrow vulgar phrases, which possess the merit of giving
utterance in a single word to an idea which a whole page would hardly
suffice to express, Madame Magloire had the air of a _peasant_, and
Mademoiselle Baptistine that of a _lady_. Madame Magloire wore a white
quilted cap, a gold Jeannette cross on a velvet ribbon upon her neck,
the only bit of feminine jewelry that there was in the house, a very
white fichu puffing out from a gown of coarse black woollen stuff, with
large, short sleeves, an apron of cotton cloth in red and green checks,
knotted round the waist with a green ribbon, with a stomacher of the
same attached by two pins at the upper corners, coarse shoes on her
feet, and yellow stockings, like the women of Marseilles. Mademoiselle
Baptistine's gown was cut on the patterns of 1806, with a short waist,
a narrow, sheath-like skirt, puffed sleeves, with flaps and buttons.
She concealed her gray hair under a frizzed wig known as the _baby_ wig.
Madame Magloire had an intelligent, vivacious, and kindly air; the two
corners of her mouth unequally raised, and her upper lip, which was
larger than the lower, imparted to her a rather crabbed and imperious
look. So long as Monseigneur held his peace, she talked to him
resolutely with a mixture of respect and freedom; but as soon as
Monseigneur began to speak, as we have seen, she obeyed passively like
her mistress. Mademoiselle Baptistine did not even speak. She confined
herself to obeying and pleasing him. She had never been pretty, even
when she was young; she had large, blue, prominent eyes, and a long
arched nose; but her whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an
ineffable goodness, as we stated in the beginning. She had always been
predestined to gentleness; but faith, charity, hope, those three virtues
which mildly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness to
sanctity. Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel.
Poor sainted virgin! Sweet memory which has vanished!

Mademoiselle Baptistine has so often narrated what passed at the
episcopal residence that evening, that there are many people now living
who still recall the most minute details.

At the moment when the Bishop entered, Madame Magloire was talking with
considerable vivacity. She was haranguing Mademoiselle Baptistine on
a subject which was familiar to her and to which the Bishop was also
accustomed. The question concerned the lock upon the entrance door.

It appears that while procuring some provisions for supper, Madame
Magloire had heard things in divers places. People had spoken of a
prowler of evil appearance; a suspicious vagabond had arrived who must
be somewhere about the town, and those who should take it into their
heads to return home late that night might be subjected to unpleasant
encounters. The police was very badly organized, moreover, because there
was no love lost between the Prefect and the Mayor, who sought to injure
each other by making things happen. It behooved wise people to play the
part of their own police, and to guard themselves well, and care must be
taken to duly close, bar and barricade their houses, and to _fasten the
doors well_.

Madame Magloire emphasized these last words; but the Bishop had just
come from his room, where it was rather cold. He seated himself in front
of the fire, and warmed himself, and then fell to thinking of other
things. He did not take up the remark dropped with design by Madame
Magloire. She repeated it. Then Mademoiselle Baptistine, desirous of
satisfying Madame Magloire without displeasing her brother, ventured to
say timidly:--

"Did you hear what Madame Magloire is saying, brother?"

"I have heard something of it in a vague way," replied the Bishop. Then
half-turning in his chair, placing his hands on his knees, and raising
towards the old servant woman his cordial face, which so easily grew
joyous, and which was illuminated from below by the firelight,--"Come,
what is the matter? What is the matter? Are we in any great danger?"

Then Madame Magloire began the whole story afresh, exaggerating it a
little without being aware of the fact. It appeared that a Bohemian, a
bare-footed vagabond, a sort of dangerous mendicant, was at that moment
in the town. He had presented himself at Jacquin Labarre's to obtain
lodgings, but the latter had not been willing to take him in. He had
been seen to arrive by the way of the boulevard Gassendi and roam about
the streets in the gloaming. A gallows-bird with a terrible face.

"Really!" said the Bishop.

This willingness to interrogate encouraged Madame Magloire; it seemed
to her to indicate that the Bishop was on the point of becoming alarmed;
she pursued triumphantly:--

"Yes, Monseigneur. That is how it is. There will be some sort of
catastrophe in this town to-night. Every one says so. And withal, the
police is so badly regulated" (a useful repetition). "The idea of living
in a mountainous country, and not even having lights in the streets at
night! One goes out. Black as ovens, indeed! And I say, Monseigneur, and
Mademoiselle there says with me--"

"I," interrupted his sister, "say nothing. What my brother does is well
done."

Madame Magloire continued as though there had been no protest:--

"We say that this house is not safe at all; that if Monseigneur will
permit, I will go and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and
replace the ancient locks on the doors; we have them, and it is only the
work of a moment; for I say that nothing is more terrible than a
door which can be opened from the outside with a latch by the first
passer-by; and I say that we need bolts, Monseigneur, if only for this
night; moreover, Monseigneur has the habit of always saying 'come in';
and besides, even in the middle of the night, O mon Dieu! there is no
need to ask permission."

At that moment there came a tolerably violent knock on the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.



CHAPTER III--THE HEROISM OF PASSIVE OBEDIENCE.

The door opened.

It opened wide with a rapid movement, as though some one had given it an
energetic and resolute push.

A man entered.

We already know the man. It was the wayfarer whom we have seen wandering
about in search of shelter.

He entered, advanced a step, and halted, leaving the door open behind
him. He had his knapsack on his shoulders, his cudgel in his hand, a
rough, audacious, weary, and violent expression in his eyes. The fire on
the hearth lighted him up. He was hideous. It was a sinister apparition.

Madame Magloire had not even the strength to utter a cry. She trembled,
and stood with her mouth wide open.

Mademoiselle Baptistine turned round, beheld the man entering, and half
started up in terror; then, turning her head by degrees towards the
fireplace again, she began to observe her brother, and her face became
once more profoundly calm and serene.

The Bishop fixed a tranquil eye on the man.

As he opened his mouth, doubtless to ask the new-comer what he desired,
the man rested both hands on his staff, directed his gaze at the old man
and the two women, and without waiting for the Bishop to speak, he said,
in a loud voice:--

"See here. My name is Jean Valjean. I am a convict from the galleys.
I have passed nineteen years in the galleys. I was liberated four days
ago, and am on my way to Pontarlier, which is my destination. I have
been walking for four days since I left Toulon. I have travelled a dozen
leagues to-day on foot. This evening, when I arrived in these parts, I
went to an inn, and they turned me out, because of my yellow passport,
which I had shown at the town-hall. I had to do it. I went to an inn.
They said to me, 'Be off,' at both places. No one would take me. I
went to the prison; the jailer would not admit me. I went into a dog's
kennel; the dog bit me and chased me off, as though he had been a man.
One would have said that he knew who I was. I went into the fields,
intending to sleep in the open air, beneath the stars. There were no
stars. I thought it was going to rain, and I re-entered the town, to
seek the recess of a doorway. Yonder, in the square, I meant to sleep
on a stone bench. A good woman pointed out your house to me, and said
to me, 'Knock there!' I have knocked. What is this place? Do you keep
an inn? I have money--savings. One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous,
which I earned in the galleys by my labor, in the course of nineteen
years. I will pay. What is that to me? I have money. I am very weary;
twelve leagues on foot; I am very hungry. Are you willing that I should
remain?"

"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will set another place."

The man advanced three paces, and approached the lamp which was on
the table. "Stop," he resumed, as though he had not quite understood;
"that's not it. Did you hear? I am a galley-slave; a convict. I come
from the galleys." He drew from his pocket a large sheet of yellow
paper, which he unfolded. "Here's my passport. Yellow, as you see. This
serves to expel me from every place where I go. Will you read it? I know
how to read. I learned in the galleys. There is a school there for those
who choose to learn. Hold, this is what they put on this passport: 'Jean
Valjean, discharged convict, native of'--that is nothing to you--'has
been nineteen years in the galleys: five years for house-breaking
and burglary; fourteen years for having attempted to escape on four
occasions. He is a very dangerous man.' There! Every one has cast me
out. Are you willing to receive me? Is this an inn? Will you give me
something to eat and a bed? Have you a stable?"

"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will put white sheets on the
bed in the alcove." We have already explained the character of the two
women's obedience.

Madame Magloire retired to execute these orders.

The Bishop turned to the man.

"Sit down, sir, and warm yourself. We are going to sup in a few moments,
and your bed will be prepared while you are supping."

At this point the man suddenly comprehended. The expression of his face,
up to that time sombre and harsh, bore the imprint of stupefaction,
of doubt, of joy, and became extraordinary. He began stammering like a
crazy man:--

"Really? What! You will keep me? You do not drive me forth? A convict!
You call me _sir!_ You do not address me as _thou?_ 'Get out of here,
you dog!' is what people always say to me. I felt sure that you would
expel me, so I told you at once who I am. Oh, what a good woman that
was who directed me hither! I am going to sup! A bed with a mattress and
sheets, like the rest of the world! a bed! It is nineteen years since
I have slept in a bed! You actually do not want me to go! You are good
people. Besides, I have money. I will pay well. Pardon me, monsieur the
inn-keeper, but what is your name? I will pay anything you ask. You are
a fine man. You are an inn-keeper, are you not?"

"I am," replied the Bishop, "a priest who lives here."

"A priest!" said the man. "Oh, what a fine priest! Then you are not
going to demand any money of me? You are the curé, are you not? the curé
of this big church? Well! I am a fool, truly! I had not perceived your
skull-cap."

As he spoke, he deposited his knapsack and his cudgel in a corner,
replaced his passport in his pocket, and seated himself. Mademoiselle
Baptistine gazed mildly at him. He continued:

"You are humane, Monsieur le Curé; you have not scorned me. A good
priest is a very good thing. Then you do not require me to pay?"

"No," said the Bishop; "keep your money. How much have you? Did you not
tell me one hundred and nine francs?"

"And fifteen sous," added the man.

"One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous. And how long did it take you
to earn that?"

"Nineteen years."

"Nineteen years!"

The Bishop sighed deeply.

The man continued: "I have still the whole of my money. In four days I
have spent only twenty-five sous, which I earned by helping unload some
wagons at Grasse. Since you are an abbé, I will tell you that we had a
chaplain in the galleys. And one day I saw a bishop there. Monseigneur
is what they call him. He was the Bishop of Majore at Marseilles. He is
the curé who rules over the other curés, you understand. Pardon me,
I say that very badly; but it is such a far-off thing to me! You
understand what we are! He said mass in the middle of the galleys, on an
altar. He had a pointed thing, made of gold, on his head; it glittered
in the bright light of midday. We were all ranged in lines on the three
sides, with cannons with lighted matches facing us. We could not see
very well. He spoke; but he was too far off, and we did not hear. That
is what a bishop is like."

While he was speaking, the Bishop had gone and shut the door, which had
remained wide open.

Madame Magloire returned. She brought a silver fork and spoon, which she
placed on the table.

"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "place those things as near the fire
as possible." And turning to his guest: "The night wind is harsh on the
Alps. You must be cold, sir."

Each time that he uttered the word _sir_, in his voice which was so
gently grave and polished, the man's face lighted up. _Monsieur_ to
a convict is like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the
_Medusa_. Ignominy thirsts for consideration.

"This lamp gives a very bad light," said the Bishop.

Madame Magloire understood him, and went to get the two silver
candlesticks from the chimney-piece in Monseigneur's bed-chamber, and
placed them, lighted, on the table.

"Monsieur le Curé," said the man, "you are good; you do not despise me.
You receive me into your house. You light your candles for me. Yet I
have not concealed from you whence I come and that I am an unfortunate
man."

The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. "You
could not help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is
the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters
whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are
hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say
that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man
who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much
more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need
have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me you had one which
I knew."

The man opened his eyes in astonishment.

"Really? You knew what I was called?"

"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my brother."

"Stop, Monsieur le Curé," exclaimed the man. "I was very hungry when
I entered here; but you are so good, that I no longer know what has
happened to me."

The Bishop looked at him, and said,--

"You have suffered much?"

"Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat,
cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing,
the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain! Dogs, dogs
are happier! Nineteen years! I am forty-six. Now there is the yellow
passport. That is what it is like."

"Yes," resumed the Bishop, "you have come from a very sad place.
Listen. There will be more joy in heaven over the tear-bathed face of a
repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men. If you
emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against
mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts of
good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us."

In the meantime, Madame Magloire had served supper: soup, made with
water, oil, bread, and salt; a little bacon, a bit of mutton, figs, a
fresh cheese, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had, of her own accord,
added to the Bishop's ordinary fare a bottle of his old Mauves wine.

The Bishop's face at once assumed that expression of gayety which is
peculiar to hospitable natures. "To table!" he cried vivaciously. As was
his custom when a stranger supped with him, he made the man sit on his
right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly peaceable and natural, took
her seat at his left.

The Bishop asked a blessing; then helped the soup himself, according to
his custom. The man began to eat with avidity.

All at once the Bishop said: "It strikes me there is something missing
on this table."

Madame Magloire had, in fact, only placed the three sets of forks and
spoons which were absolutely necessary. Now, it was the usage of the
house, when the Bishop had any one to supper, to lay out the whole
six sets of silver on the table-cloth--an innocent ostentation. This
graceful semblance of luxury was a kind of child's play, which was full
of charm in that gentle and severe household, which raised poverty into
dignity.

Madame Magloire understood the remark, went out without saying a word,
and a moment later the three sets of silver forks and spoons demanded by
the Bishop were glittering upon the cloth, symmetrically arranged before
the three persons seated at the table.



CHAPTER IV--DETAILS CONCERNING THE CHEESE-DAIRIES OF PONTARLIER.

Now, in order to convey an idea of what passed at that table, we cannot
do better than to transcribe here a passage from one of Mademoiselle
Baptistine's letters to Madame Boischevron, wherein the conversation
between the convict and the Bishop is described with ingenious
minuteness.

". . . This man paid no attention to any one. He ate with the voracity
of a starving man. However, after supper he said:

"'Monsieur le Curé of the good God, all this is far too good for me; but
I must say that the carters who would not allow me to eat with them keep
a better table than you do.'

"Between ourselves, the remark rather shocked me. My brother replied:--

"'They are more fatigued than I.'

"'No,' returned the man, 'they have more money. You are poor; I see that
plainly. You cannot be even a curate. Are you really a curé? Ah, if the
good God were but just, you certainly ought to be a curé!'

"'The good God is more than just,' said my brother.

"A moment later he added:--

"'Monsieur Jean Valjean, is it to Pontarlier that you are going?'

"'With my road marked out for me.'

"I think that is what the man said. Then he went on:--

"'I must be on my way by daybreak to-morrow. Travelling is hard. If the
nights are cold, the days are hot.'

"'You are going to a good country,' said my brother. 'During the
Revolution my family was ruined. I took refuge in Franche-Comté at
first, and there I lived for some time by the toil of my hands. My will
was good. I found plenty to occupy me. One has only to choose. There are
paper mills, tanneries, distilleries, oil factories, watch factories
on a large scale, steel mills, copper works, twenty iron foundries at
least, four of which, situated at Lods, at Châtillon, at Audincourt, and
at Beure, are tolerably large.'

"I think I am not mistaken in saying that those are the names which my
brother mentioned. Then he interrupted himself and addressed me:--

"'Have we not some relatives in those parts, my dear sister?'

"I replied,--

"'We did have some; among others, M. de Lucenet, who was captain of the
gates at Pontarlier under the old régime.'

"'Yes,' resumed my brother; 'but in '93, one had no longer any
relatives, one had only one's arms. I worked. They have, in the
country of Pontarlier, whither you are going, Monsieur Valjean, a
truly patriarchal and truly charming industry, my sister. It is their
cheese-dairies, which they call _fruitières_.'

"Then my brother, while urging the man to eat, explained to him, with
great minuteness, what these _fruitières_ of Pontarlier were; that they
were divided into two classes: the _big barns_ which belong to the rich,
and where there are forty or fifty cows which produce from seven to
eight thousand cheeses each summer, and the _associated fruitières_,
which belong to the poor; these are the peasants of mid-mountain, who
hold their cows in common, and share the proceeds. 'They engage the
services of a cheese-maker, whom they call the _grurin_; the _grurin_
receives the milk of the associates three times a day, and marks the
quantity on a double tally. It is towards the end of April that the work
of the cheese-dairies begins; it is towards the middle of June that the
cheese-makers drive their cows to the mountains.'

"The man recovered his animation as he ate. My brother made him drink
that good Mauves wine, which he does not drink himself, because he says
that wine is expensive. My brother imparted all these details with that
easy gayety of his with which you are acquainted, interspersing his
words with graceful attentions to me. He recurred frequently to
that comfortable trade of _grurin_, as though he wished the man to
understand, without advising him directly and harshly, that this would
afford him a refuge. One thing struck me. This man was what I have told
you. Well, neither during supper, nor during the entire evening, did
my brother utter a single word, with the exception of a few words about
Jesus when he entered, which could remind the man of what he was, nor
of what my brother was. To all appearances, it was an occasion for
preaching him a little sermon, and of impressing the Bishop on the
convict, so that a mark of the passage might remain behind. This might
have appeared to any one else who had this, unfortunate man in his
hands to afford a chance to nourish his soul as well as his body, and to
bestow upon him some reproach, seasoned with moralizing and advice, or
a little commiseration, with an exhortation to conduct himself better in
the future. My brother did not even ask him from what country he came,
nor what was his history. For in his history there is a fault, and my
brother seemed to avoid everything which could remind him of it. To such
a point did he carry it, that at one time, when my brother was speaking
of the mountaineers of Pontarlier, _who exercise a gentle labor near
heaven, and who_, he added, _are happy because they are innocent_, he
stopped short, fearing lest in this remark there might have escaped him
something which might wound the man. By dint of reflection, I think
I have comprehended what was passing in my brother's heart. He was
thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, had his
misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing
was to divert him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily,
that he was a person like any other, by treating him just in his
ordinary way. Is not this indeed, to understand charity well? Is there
not, dear Madame, something truly evangelical in this delicacy which
abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? and is not the
truest pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? It has
seemed to me that this might have been my brother's private thought. In
any case, what I can say is that, if he entertained all these ideas, he
gave no sign of them; from beginning to end, even to me he was the same
as he is every evening, and he supped with this Jean Valjean with the
same air and in the same manner in which he would have supped with M.
Gédéon le Prévost, or with the curate of the parish.

"Towards the end, when he had reached the figs, there came a knock at
the door. It was Mother Gerbaud, with her little one in her arms. My
brother kissed the child on the brow, and borrowed fifteen sous which I
had about me to give to Mother Gerbaud. The man was not paying much
heed to anything then. He was no longer talking, and he seemed very much
fatigued. After poor old Gerbaud had taken her departure, my brother
said grace; then he turned to the man and said to him, 'You must be
in great need of your bed.' Madame Magloire cleared the table very
promptly. I understood that we must retire, in order to allow this
traveller to go to sleep, and we both went upstairs. Nevertheless, I
sent Madame Magloire down a moment later, to carry to the man's bed a
goat skin from the Black Forest, which was in my room. The nights are
frigid, and that keeps one warm. It is a pity that this skin is old; all
the hair is falling out. My brother bought it while he was in Germany,
at Tottlingen, near the sources of the Danube, as well as the little
ivory-handled knife which I use at table.

"Madame Magloire returned immediately. We said our prayers in the
drawing-room, where we hang up the linen, and then we each retired to
our own chambers, without saying a word to each other."



CHAPTER V--TRANQUILLITY

After bidding his sister good night, Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of
the two silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his
guest, and said to him,--

"Monsieur, I will conduct you to your room."

The man followed him.

As might have been observed from what has been said above, the house was
so arranged that in order to pass into the oratory where the alcove was
situated, or to get out of it, it was necessary to traverse the Bishop's
bedroom.

At the moment when he was crossing this apartment, Madame Magloire was
putting away the silverware in the cupboard near the head of the bed.
This was her last care every evening before she went to bed.

The Bishop installed his guest in the alcove. A fresh white bed had been
prepared there. The man set the candle down on a small table.

"Well," said the Bishop, "may you pass a good night. To-morrow morning,
before you set out, you shall drink a cup of warm milk from our cows."

"Thanks, Monsieur l' Abbé," said the man.

Hardly had he pronounced these words full of peace, when all of a
sudden, and without transition, he made a strange movement, which would
have frozen the two sainted women with horror, had they witnessed it.
Even at this day it is difficult for us to explain what inspired him at
that moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or to throw out a menace?
Was he simply obeying a sort of instinctive impulse which was obscure
even to himself? He turned abruptly to the old man, folded his arms, and
bending upon his host a savage gaze, he exclaimed in a hoarse voice:--

"Ah! really! You lodge me in your house, close to yourself like this?"

He broke off, and added with a laugh in which there lurked something
monstrous:--

"Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I have not been an
assassin?"

The Bishop replied:--

"That is the concern of the good God."

Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying or talking
to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand and bestowed his
benediction on the man, who did not bow, and without turning his head or
looking behind him, he returned to his bedroom.

When the alcove was in use, a large serge curtain drawn from wall to
wall concealed the altar. The Bishop knelt before this curtain as he
passed and said a brief prayer. A moment later he was in his garden,
walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed
in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to the
eyes which remain open.

As for the man, he was actually so fatigued that he did not even profit
by the nice white sheets. Snuffing out his candle with his nostrils
after the manner of convicts, he dropped, all dressed as he was, upon
the bed, where he immediately fell into a profound sleep.

Midnight struck as the Bishop returned from his garden to his apartment.

A few minutes later all were asleep in the little house.



CHAPTER VI--JEAN VALJEAN

Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.

Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned
to read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became a
tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his
father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a
contraction of _voilà_ Jean, "here's Jean."

Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which
constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole,
however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about
Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother
at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not
been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had
been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean
was a sister older than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys and
girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a
husband she lodged and fed her young brother.

The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old.
The youngest, one.

Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the
father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought
him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly
on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and
ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native
parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.

He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.
His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from
his bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the
heart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children. As he went on
eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his
long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air
of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not
far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane,
a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually
famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in
their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley
corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little
girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother
had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents
severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for
the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not
punished.

In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as
a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did
whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with
seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was
being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.
The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at
Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on
the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed
through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the
glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran
out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran
after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his
arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals
of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at
night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world,
he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a
legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,
smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark
cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the
hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the
smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious
men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest,
make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without
destroying the humane side.

Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit.
There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when
the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in
which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment
of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the
galleys.

On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the
general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory
to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floréal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte,
was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaves
was put in chains at Bicêtre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.
An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, still
recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of
the fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard. He was seated on
the ground like the others. He did not seem to comprehend his position,
except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also, was
disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of
everything, something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was
being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept,
his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed to
say from time to time, "I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then still
sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times,
as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,
and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done,
whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing
seven little children.

He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven
days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in
the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name,
was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.
What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who
troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from
the young tree which is sawed off at the root?

It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures
of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge,
wandered away at random,--who even knows?--each in his own direction
perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which
engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in
succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.
They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their village
forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them;
after a few years' residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot
them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.
That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,
did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towards
the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what
channels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in their
own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poor
street near Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her only
one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six? Perhaps
she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing office,
No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged
to be there at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight in
winter. In the same building with the printing office there was a
school, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years
old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only
opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school
to open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air! They
would not allow the child to come into the printing office, because he
was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in the morning, they
beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement, overcome with
drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and
doubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress,
took pity on him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, a
spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in a
corner, pressing himself close to the cat that he might suffer less from
cold. At seven o'clock the school opened, and he entered. That is what
was told to Jean Valjean.

They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash,
as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those
things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing more
forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheld
them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournful
history they will not be met with any more.

Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape
arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.
He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being
at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at
the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a smoking roof,
of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking
clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot
see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening
of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for
thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime,
to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years.
In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself
of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at
roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him
hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he
resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This
case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of
five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the
tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he
succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.
Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last
attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four
hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In
October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having
broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.

Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his
studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of
this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of
departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf;
Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that
four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.

Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged
impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.

What had taken place in that soul?



CHAPTER VII--THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR

Let us try to say it.

It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is
itself which creates them.

He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The
light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a
clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylight
which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in
the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the
plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and
meditated.

He constituted himself the tribunal.

He began by putting himself on trial.

He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly
punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy
act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to
him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better to
wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that
it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is
hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die of
hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man
is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and
physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have
patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little
children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that
is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through
which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.

Then he asked himself--

Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether
it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an
industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault once
committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious and
disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part of
the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part
of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an
excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which contains
expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalent
to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the
situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of the
repression, of converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor
into the creditor, and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the
man who had violated it.

Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society against
the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every day, a
crime which had lasted nineteen years.

He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force its
members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack
of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and to
seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default of
work and an excess of punishment.

Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those
of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods
made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.

These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.

He condemned it to his hatred.

He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said
to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call
it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium
between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being done
to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment was
not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.

Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;
one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's side
at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.

And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never
seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and
which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to
bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since
his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever
encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to
suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a
war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon
than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it away
with him when he departed.

There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin
friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the
unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had
a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read,
to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to
fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can
serve to eke out evil.

This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had
caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,
and he condemned it also.

Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted and
at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness on the
other.

Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still good
when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and felt
that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and was
conscious that he was becoming impious.

It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.

Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the
man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be
completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can
the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and
infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness,
as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every
human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a
first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in
the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with
splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?

Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, had
he beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for Jean
Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with folded
arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust into
his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and thoughtful,
a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath, condemned by
civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.

Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--the
observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he
would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making; but
he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned aside
his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse within
this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have effaced
from this existence the word which the finger of God has, nevertheless,
inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.

Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as
perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for
those who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after their
formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of their
formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had
this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of
the succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and
descended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years, formed
the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that passed
within him, and of all that was working there? That is something
which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even
believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his
misfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At
times he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in
the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one
might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habitually
in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at
intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an
access of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which
illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all around
him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light, the hideous
precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.

The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no
longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which
that which is pitiless--that is to say, that which is
brutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by
a sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a
ferocious beast.

Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone
suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.
Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and
foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,
without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences
which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the wolf
who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have
said, "Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason
vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When
he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served to
render him still more wild.

One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical
strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of the
galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan, Jean
Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained enormous
weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he replaced
that implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly called
_orgueil_ [pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived the
name of the Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris. His
comrades had nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they were
repairing the balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those admirable
caryatids of Puget, which support the balcony, became loosened, and was
on the point of falling. Jean Valjean, who was present, supported the
caryatid with his shoulder, and gave the workmen time to arrive.

His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were
forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of force
and skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire system of
mysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who are forever
envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical surface, and to find
points of support where hardly a projection was visible, was play to
Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of his
back and legs, with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevenness
of the stone, he raised himself as if by magic to the third story. He
sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the galley prison.

He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was
required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh
of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To all
appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation of
something terrible.

He was absorbed, in fact.

Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed
intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was
resting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,
each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance,
he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightful
accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the
range of his vision,--laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,--whose outlines
escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than
that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,
here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now
afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,
vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the
gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,
like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him
that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, rendered
it more funereal and more black. All this--laws, prejudices, deeds, men,
things--went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the
complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,
walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness
in its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which have
fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the
lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the reproved of
the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable for
him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon
their heads.

In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature
of his meditation?

If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,
doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.

All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of
realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state which
is almost indescribable.

At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His
reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,
rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to him
absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He said
to himself, "It is a dream." He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing a
few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of
a sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.

Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say
that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,
nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-hole
daylight habitually illumined his soul.

To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated
into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will
confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen
years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the
formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner
in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:
firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,
entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which
he had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,
consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which
such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through
three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone
traverse,--reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his
habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities
suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the
just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point
of arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred
which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential
incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then
the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which
manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to
some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was not
without reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as _a very
dangerous man_.

From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal
sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from
the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.



CHAPTER VIII--BILLOWS AND SHADOWS

A man overboard!

What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre
ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.

The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the
surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The
vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own
workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;
his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He
gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is
that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats,
it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just now, he was
one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the rest, he had
his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what has
taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.

He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees
and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him
hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of
water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused
openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses
of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize
him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is
becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him
from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly ocean
attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony.
It seems as though all that water were hate.

Nevertheless, he struggles.

He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes
an effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,
combats the inexhaustible.

Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of
the horizon.

The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes
and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid his
death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this
madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond
the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region
beyond.

There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human
distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,
and he, he rattles in the death agony.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,
at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is
exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has
vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he
stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous
billows of the invisible; he shouts.

There are no more men. Where is God?

He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.

He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are
deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the
infinite.

Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,
the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.
Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy
adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold
paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp
nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is
to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the
alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons
his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths
of engulfment.

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of
souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!
Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!

The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling
their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.

The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall
resuscitate it?



CHAPTER IX--NEW TROUBLES

When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when
Jean Valjean heard in his ear the strange words, _Thou art free!_ the
moment seemed improbable and unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray
of the true light of the living, suddenly penetrated within him. But it
was not long before this ray paled. Jean Valjean had been dazzled by
the idea of liberty. He had believed in a new life. He very speedily
perceived what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is
provided.

And this was encompassed with much bitterness. He had calculated that
his earnings, during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to
a hundred and seventy-one francs. It is but just to add that he had
forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose of Sundays
and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution
of about eighty francs. At all events, his hoard had been reduced by
various local levies to the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen
sous, which had been counted out to him on his departure. He had
understood nothing of this, and had thought himself wronged. Let us say
the word--robbed.

On the day following his liberation, he saw, at Grasse, in front of
an orange-flower distillery, some men engaged in unloading bales. He
offered his services. Business was pressing; they were accepted. He set
to work. He was intelligent, robust, adroit; he did his best; the master
seemed pleased. While he was at work, a gendarme passed, observed
him, and demanded his papers. It was necessary to show him the yellow
passport. That done, Jean Valjean resumed his labor. A little while
before he had questioned one of the workmen as to the amount which they
earned each day at this occupation; he had been told _thirty sous_. When
evening arrived, as he was forced to set out again on the following day,
he presented himself to the owner of the distillery and requested to be
paid. The owner did not utter a word, but handed him fifteen sous. He
objected. He was told, _"That is enough for thee."_ He persisted. The
master looked him straight between the eyes, and said to him _"Beware of
the prison."_

There, again, he considered that he had been robbed.

Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale.
Now it was the individual who was robbing him at retail.

Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not
from the sentence.

That is what happened to him at Grasse. We have seen in what manner he
was received at D----



CHAPTER X--THE MAN AROUSED

As the Cathedral clock struck two in the morning, Jean Valjean awoke.

What woke him was that his bed was too good. It was nearly twenty years
since he had slept in a bed, and, although he had not undressed, the
sensation was too novel not to disturb his slumbers.

He had slept more than four hours. His fatigue had passed away. He was
accustomed not to devote many hours to repose.

He opened his eyes and stared into the gloom which surrounded him; then
he closed them again, with the intention of going to sleep once more.

When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters
preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time.
Sleep comes more easily than it returns. This is what happened to Jean
Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.

He was at one of those moments when the thoughts which one has in one's
mind are troubled. There was a sort of dark confusion in his brain. His
memories of the olden time and of the immediate present floated there
pell-mell and mingled confusedly, losing their proper forms, becoming
disproportionately large, then suddenly disappearing, as in a muddy and
perturbed pool. Many thoughts occurred to him; but there was one which
kept constantly presenting itself afresh, and which drove away all
others. We will mention this thought at once: he had observed the six
sets of silver forks and spoons and the ladle which Madame Magloire had
placed on the table.

Those six sets of silver haunted him.--They were there.--A few paces
distant.--Just as he was traversing the adjoining room to reach the
one in which he then was, the old servant-woman had been in the act
of placing them in a little cupboard near the head of the bed.--He had
taken careful note of this cupboard.--On the right, as you entered from
the dining-room.--They were solid.--And old silver.--From the ladle one
could get at least two hundred francs.--Double what he had earned in
nineteen years.--It is true that he would have earned more if "the
_administration_ had not _robbed him_."

His mind wavered for a whole hour in fluctuations with which there was
certainly mingled some struggle. Three o'clock struck. He opened his
eyes again, drew himself up abruptly into a sitting posture, stretched
out his arm and felt of his knapsack, which he had thrown down on a
corner of the alcove; then he hung his legs over the edge of the bed,
and placed his feet on the floor, and thus found himself, almost without
knowing it, seated on his bed.

He remained for a time thoughtfully in this attitude, which would have
been suggestive of something sinister for any one who had seen him
thus in the dark, the only person awake in that house where all were
sleeping. All of a sudden he stooped down, removed his shoes and placed
them softly on the mat beside the bed; then he resumed his thoughtful
attitude, and became motionless once more.

Throughout this hideous meditation, the thoughts which we have above
indicated moved incessantly through his brain; entered, withdrew,
re-entered, and in a manner oppressed him; and then he thought, also,
without knowing why, and with the mechanical persistence of revery, of
a convict named Brevet, whom he had known in the galleys, and whose
trousers had been upheld by a single suspender of knitted cotton. The
checkered pattern of that suspender recurred incessantly to his mind.

He remained in this situation, and would have so remained indefinitely,
even until daybreak, had not the clock struck one--the half or quarter
hour. It seemed to him that that stroke said to him, "Come on!"

He rose to his feet, hesitated still another moment, and listened; all
was quiet in the house; then he walked straight ahead, with short steps,
to the window, of which he caught a glimpse. The night was not very
dark; there was a full moon, across which coursed large clouds driven by
the wind. This created, outdoors, alternate shadow and gleams of light,
eclipses, then bright openings of the clouds; and indoors a sort of
twilight. This twilight, sufficient to enable a person to see his way,
intermittent on account of the clouds, resembled the sort of livid light
which falls through an air-hole in a cellar, before which the passers-by
come and go. On arriving at the window, Jean Valjean examined it. It had
no grating; it opened in the garden and was fastened, according to the
fashion of the country, only by a small pin. He opened it; but as a
rush of cold and piercing air penetrated the room abruptly, he closed
it again immediately. He scrutinized the garden with that attentive gaze
which studies rather than looks. The garden was enclosed by a tolerably
low white wall, easy to climb. Far away, at the extremity, he perceived
tops of trees, spaced at regular intervals, which indicated that the
wall separated the garden from an avenue or lane planted with trees.

Having taken this survey, he executed a movement like that of a man who
has made up his mind, strode to his alcove, grasped his knapsack, opened
it, fumbled in it, pulled out of it something which he placed on the
bed, put his shoes into one of his pockets, shut the whole thing up
again, threw the knapsack on his shoulders, put on his cap, drew the
visor down over his eyes, felt for his cudgel, went and placed it in the
angle of the window; then returned to the bed, and resolutely seized the
object which he had deposited there. It resembled a short bar of
iron, pointed like a pike at one end. It would have been difficult to
distinguish in that darkness for what employment that bit of iron could
have been designed. Perhaps it was a lever; possibly it was a club.

In the daytime it would have been possible to recognize it as nothing
more than a miner's candlestick. Convicts were, at that period,
sometimes employed in quarrying stone from the lofty hills which environ
Toulon, and it was not rare for them to have miners' tools at their
command. These miners' candlesticks are of massive iron, terminated at
the lower extremity by a point, by means of which they are stuck into
the rock.

He took the candlestick in his right hand; holding his breath and trying
to deaden the sound of his tread, he directed his steps to the door of
the adjoining room, occupied by the Bishop, as we already know.

On arriving at this door, he found it ajar. The Bishop had not closed
it.



CHAPTER XI--WHAT HE DOES

Jean Valjean listened. Not a sound.

He gave the door a push.

He pushed it gently with the tip of his finger, lightly, with the
furtive and uneasy gentleness of a cat which is desirous of entering.

The door yielded to this pressure, and made an imperceptible and silent
movement, which enlarged the opening a little.

He waited a moment; then gave the door a second and a bolder push.

It continued to yield in silence. The opening was now large enough to
allow him to pass. But near the door there stood a little table, which
formed an embarrassing angle with it, and barred the entrance.

Jean Valjean recognized the difficulty. It was necessary, at any cost,
to enlarge the aperture still further.

He decided on his course of action, and gave the door a third push, more
energetic than the two preceding. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly
emitted amid the silence a hoarse and prolonged cry.

Jean Valjean shuddered. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with
something of the piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day
of Judgment.

In the fantastic exaggerations of the first moment he almost imagined
that that hinge had just become animated, and had suddenly assumed a
terrible life, and that it was barking like a dog to arouse every one,
and warn and to wake those who were asleep. He halted, shuddering,
bewildered, and fell back from the tips of his toes upon his heels. He
heard the arteries in his temples beating like two forge hammers, and
it seemed to him that his breath issued from his breast with the roar
of the wind issuing from a cavern. It seemed impossible to him that the
horrible clamor of that irritated hinge should not have disturbed the
entire household, like the shock of an earthquake; the door, pushed by
him, had taken the alarm, and had shouted; the old man would rise at
once; the two old women would shriek out; people would come to their
assistance; in less than a quarter of an hour the town would be in an
uproar, and the gendarmerie on hand. For a moment he thought himself
lost.

He remained where he was, petrified like the statue of salt, not daring
to make a movement. Several minutes elapsed. The door had fallen wide
open. He ventured to peep into the next room. Nothing had stirred there.
He lent an ear. Nothing was moving in the house. The noise made by the
rusty hinge had not awakened any one.

This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult
within him. Nevertheless, he did not retreat. Even when he had thought
himself lost, he had not drawn back. His only thought now was to finish
as soon as possible. He took a step and entered the room.

This room was in a state of perfect calm. Here and there vague and
confused forms were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers
scattered on a table, open folios, volumes piled upon a stool, an
arm-chair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which at that hour
were only shadowy corners and whitish spots. Jean Valjean advanced with
precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture. He could
hear, at the extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of
the sleeping Bishop.

He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there
sooner than he had thought for.

Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions
with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to
make us reflect. For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the
heavens. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed,
this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing
the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop's pale face. He was
sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on
account of the cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool,
which covered his arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the
pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the
pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and so many
holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed. His whole face
was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of
felicity. It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon
his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible.
The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.

It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was
within him. That heaven was his conscience.

Enlarge


At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak,
upon that inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory. It
remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That
moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver,
that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added
some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this man,
and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white
hair, those closed eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was
confidence, that head of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.

There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august,
without being himself aware of it.

Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron
candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had
he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him. The
moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and
uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,
contemplating the slumber of the just.

That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had
about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously
conscious.

No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. In
order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the
most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle. Even on
his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with
certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at it, and
that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible to
divine it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded. But
what was the nature of this emotion?

His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly
to be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange
indecision. One would have said that he was hesitating between the two
abysses,--the one in which one loses one's self and that in which one
saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that
hand.

At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards
his brow, and he took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same
deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell to meditating once more, his cap in
his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair bristling all over
his savage head.

The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying
gaze.

The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the
chimney-piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them,
with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.

Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly
past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard,
which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to
force the lock; the key was there; he opened it; the first thing which
presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he seized it,
traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any precautions
and without troubling himself about the noise, gained the door,
re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his cudgel, bestrode
the window-sill of the ground-floor, put the silver into his knapsack,
threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over the wall like a
tiger, and fled.



CHAPTER XII--THE BISHOP WORKS

The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his
garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.

"Monseigneur, Monseigneur!" she exclaimed, "does your Grace know where
the basket of silver is?"

"Yes," replied the Bishop.

"Jesus the Lord be blessed!" she resumed; "I did not know what had
become of it."

The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented
it to Madame Magloire.

"Here it is."

"Well!" said she. "Nothing in it! And the silver?"

"Ah," returned the Bishop, "so it is the silver which troubles you? I
don't know where it is."

"Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has
stolen it."

In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame
Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned
to the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he
examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had broken
as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire's cry.

"Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!"

As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the
garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The
coping of the wall had been torn away.

"Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane.
Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!"

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes,
and said gently to Madame Magloire:--

"And, in the first place, was that silver ours?"

Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop
went on:--

"Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver
wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man,
evidently."

"Alas! Jesus!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not for my sake, nor for
Mademoiselle's. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of
Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?"

The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.

"Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?"

Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.

"Pewter has an odor."

"Iron forks and spoons, then."

Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.

"Iron has a taste."

"Very well," said the Bishop; "wooden ones then."

A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which
Jean Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast,
Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and
to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really
does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit
of bread in a cup of milk.

"A pretty idea, truly," said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and
came, "to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one's self!
And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes
one shudder to think of it!"

As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came
a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.

The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the
threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three
men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.

A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was
standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a
military salute.

"Monseigneur--" said he.

At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed,
raised his head with an air of stupefaction.

"Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the curé?"

"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."

In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his
great age permitted.

"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to
see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which
are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two
hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
spoons?"

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said
is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
silver--"

"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been
given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed
the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back
here? It is a mistake."

"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"

"Certainly," replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost
inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the
gendarmes.

"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your
candlesticks. Take them."

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
anything but a latch, either by day or by night."

Then, turning to the gendarmes:--

"You may retire, gentlemen."

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:--

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
in becoming an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered
them. He resumed with solemnity:--

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It
is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and
the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."



CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GERVAIS

Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out
at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths
presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was incessantly
retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning, without having
eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the prey of a throng
of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not
know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was
touched or humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion
which he resisted and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during
the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him.
He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the
injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within
him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have
actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things
should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less.
Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still a few
late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor as he passed
through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood.
These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they
had recurred to him.

Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.

As the sun declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the
soil from every pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a large
ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the
horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village. Jean
Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D---- A path which
intersected the plain passed a few paces from the bush.

In the middle of this meditation, which would have contributed not
a little to render his rags terrifying to any one who might have
encountered him, a joyous sound became audible.

He turned his head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age,
coming up the path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his
marmot-box on his back.

One of those gay and gentle children, who go from land to land affording
a view of their knees through the holes in their trousers.

Without stopping his song, the lad halted in his march from time to
time, and played at knuckle-bones with some coins which he had in his
hand--his whole fortune, probably.

Among this money there was one forty-sou piece.

The child halted beside the bush, without perceiving Jean Valjean, and
tossed up his handful of sous, which, up to that time, he had caught
with a good deal of adroitness on the back of his hand.

This time the forty-sou piece escaped him, and went rolling towards the
brushwood until it reached Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean set his foot upon it.

In the meantime, the child had looked after his coin and had caught
sight of him.

He showed no astonishment, but walked straight up to the man.

The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was
not a person on the plain or on the path. The only sound was the tiny,
feeble cries of a flock of birds of passage, which was traversing the
heavens at an immense height. The child was standing with his back to
the sun, which cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled with its
blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.

"Sir," said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is
composed of ignorance and innocence, "my money."

"What is your name?" said Jean Valjean.

"Little Gervais, sir."

"Go away," said Jean Valjean.

"Sir," resumed the child, "give me back my money."

Jean Valjean dropped his head, and made no reply.

The child began again, "My money, sir."

Jean Valjean's eyes remained fixed on the earth.

"My piece of money!" cried the child, "my white piece! my silver!"

It seemed as though Jean Valjean did not hear him. The child grasped him
by the collar of his blouse and shook him. At the same time he made an
effort to displace the big iron-shod shoe which rested on his treasure.

"I want my piece of money! my piece of forty sous!"

The child wept. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still remained seated.
His eyes were troubled. He gazed at the child, in a sort of amazement,
then he stretched out his hand towards his cudgel and cried in a
terrible voice, "Who's there?"

"I, sir," replied the child. "Little Gervais! I! Give me back my forty
sous, if you please! Take your foot away, sir, if you please!"

Then irritated, though he was so small, and becoming almost menacing:--

"Come now, will you take your foot away? Take your foot away, or we'll
see!"

"Ah! It's still you!" said Jean Valjean, and rising abruptly to his
feet, his foot still resting on the silver piece, he added:--

"Will you take yourself off!"

The frightened child looked at him, then began to tremble from head to
foot, and after a few moments of stupor he set out, running at the top
of his speed, without daring to turn his neck or to utter a cry.

Nevertheless, lack of breath forced him to halt after a certain
distance, and Jean Valjean heard him sobbing, in the midst of his own
revery.

At the end of a few moments the child had disappeared.

The sun had set.

The shadows were descending around Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing
all day; it is probable that he was feverish.

He had remained standing and had not changed his attitude after the
child's flight. The breath heaved his chest at long and irregular
intervals. His gaze, fixed ten or twelve paces in front of him, seemed
to be scrutinizing with profound attention the shape of an ancient
fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. All at once
he shivered; he had just begun to feel the chill of evening.

He settled his cap more firmly on his brow, sought mechanically to
cross and button his blouse, advanced a step and stopped to pick up his
cudgel.

At that moment he caught sight of the forty-sou piece, which his foot
had half ground into the earth, and which was shining among the pebbles.
It was as though he had received a galvanic shock. "What is this?"
he muttered between his teeth. He recoiled three paces, then halted,
without being able to detach his gaze from the spot which his foot had
trodden but an instant before, as though the thing which lay glittering
there in the gloom had been an open eye riveted upon him.

At the expiration of a few moments he darted convulsively towards the
silver coin, seized it, and straightened himself up again and began to
gaze afar off over the plain, at the same time casting his eyes towards
all points of the horizon, as he stood there erect and shivering, like a
terrified wild animal which is seeking refuge.

He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and vague, great
banks of violet haze were rising in the gleam of the twilight.

He said, "Ah!" and set out rapidly in the direction in which the child
had disappeared. After about thirty paces he paused, looked about him
and saw nothing.

Then he shouted with all his might:--

"Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"

He paused and waited.

There was no reply.

The landscape was gloomy and deserted. He was encompassed by space.
There was nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was
lost, and a silence which engulfed his voice.

An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things around him a
sort of lugubrious life. The bushes shook their thin little arms with
incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and
pursuing some one.

He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to
time he halted and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was
the most formidable and the most disconsolate that it was possible to
hear, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"

Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have been alarmed and
would have taken good care not to show himself. But the child was no
doubt already far away.

He encountered a priest on horseback. He stepped up to him and said:--

"Monsieur le Curé, have you seen a child pass?"

"No," said the priest.

"One named Little Gervais?"

"I have seen no one."

He drew two five-franc pieces from his money-bag and handed them to the
priest.

"Monsieur le Curé, this is for your poor people. Monsieur le Curé, he
was a little lad, about ten years old, with a marmot, I think, and a
hurdy-gurdy. One of those Savoyards, you know?"

"I have not seen him."

"Little Gervais? There are no villages here? Can you tell me?"

"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such
persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them."

Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence,
and gave them to the priest.

"For your poor," he said.

Then he added, wildly:--

"Monsieur l'Abbé, have me arrested. I am a thief."

The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.

Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first
taken.

In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling,
shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain
towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being
reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood
or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where
three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He
sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little
Gervais! Little Gervais! Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the
mist, without even awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little
Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last
effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible
power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil
conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in
his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"

Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time that he
had wept in nineteen years.

When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen,
quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He
could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him. He
hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the
old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man. I buy your soul.
I take it away from the spirit of perversity; I give it to the good
God."

This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness
he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us. He was
indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest
assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his
obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he
yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the
actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and
which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be
conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been
begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.

In the presence of these lights, he proceeded like a man who is
intoxicated. As he walked thus with haggard eyes, did he have a distinct
perception of what might result to him from his adventure at D----? Did
he understand all those mysterious murmurs which warn or importune the
spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that
he had just passed the solemn hour of his destiny; that there no longer
remained a middle course for him; that if he were not henceforth the
best of men, he would be the worst; that it behooved him now, so to
speak, to mount higher than the Bishop, or fall lower than the convict;
that if he wished to become good be must become an angel; that if he
wished to remain evil, he must become a monster?

Here, again, some questions must be put, which we have already put
to ourselves elsewhere: did he catch some shadow of all this in his
thought, in a confused way? Misfortune certainly, as we have said, does
form the education of the intelligence; nevertheless, it is doubtful
whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle all that we have
here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught glimpses
of, rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into
an unutterable and almost painful state of emotion. On emerging from
that black and deformed thing which is called the galleys, the Bishop
had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on
emerging from the dark. The future life, the possible life which offered
itself to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors
and anxiety. He no longer knew where he really was. Like an owl, who
should suddenly see the sun rise, the convict had been dazzled and
blinded, as it were, by virtue.

That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no
longer the same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was
no longer in his power to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to
him and had not touched him.

In this state of mind he had encountered little Gervais, and had robbed
him of his forty sous. Why? He certainly could not have explained it;
was this the last effect and the supreme effort, as it were, of the
evil thoughts which he had brought away from the galleys,--a remnant of
impulse, a result of what is called in statics, _acquired force?_ It
was that, and it was also, perhaps, even less than that. Let us say it
simply, it was not he who stole; it was not the man; it was the beast,
who, by habit and instinct, had simply placed his foot upon that money,
while the intelligence was struggling amid so many novel and hitherto
unheard-of thoughts besetting it.

When intelligence re-awakened and beheld that action of the brute, Jean
Valjean recoiled with anguish and uttered a cry of terror.

Enlarge


It was because,--strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only
in the situation in which he found himself,--in stealing the money from
that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.

However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on
him; it abruptly traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and
dispersed it, placed on one side the thick obscurity, and on the other
the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it then was, as
certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating
one element and clarifying the other.

First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all
bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the
child in order to return his money to him; then, when he recognized the
fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the moment when
he exclaimed "I am a wretch!" he had just perceived what he was, and he
was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to
himself to be no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had,
there before him, in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean
Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled
with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage,
with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.

Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort
a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw
that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached
the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by
him.

His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm
moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality. One no
longer beholds the object which one has before one, and one sees, as
though apart from one's self, the figures which one has in one's own
mind.

Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the same
time, athwart this hallucination, he perceived in a mysterious depth a
sort of light which he at first took for a torch. On scrutinizing
this light which appeared to his conscience with more attention, he
recognized the fact that it possessed a human form and that this torch
was the Bishop.

His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,--the
Bishop and Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was required to
soften the second. By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar
to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his revery continued, as the
Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow
less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything more
than a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained; he
filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.

Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed with
more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.

As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an
extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past
life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness, his
internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold plans
of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing
that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the
more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come after the
Bishop's pardon,--all this recurred to his mind and appeared clearly
to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto witnessed.
He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it
seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this
life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light
of Paradise.

How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept?
Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be
authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at
that epoch, and who arrived at D---- about three o'clock in the morning,
saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was
situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in
the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.



BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817



CHAPTER I--THE YEAR 1817

 1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign. It is the year in which M. Bruguière de Sorsum was celebrated. All the hairdressers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird, were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It was the candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as church-warden in the church-warden's pew of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in his costume of a peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose and the majesty of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a brilliant action. The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this: being mayor of Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered the city a little too promptly to M. the Duke d'Angoulême. Hence his peerage. In 1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six years of age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling Esquimaux mitres. The French army was dressed in white, after the mode of the Austrian; the regiments were called legions; instead of numbers they bore the names of departments; Napoleon was at St. Helena; and since England refused him green cloth, he was having his old coats turned. In 1817 Pelligrini sang; Mademoiselle Bigottini danced; Potier reigned; Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui had succeeded to Forioso. There were still Prussians in France. M. Delalot was a personage. Legitimacy had just asserted itself by cutting off the hand, then the head, of Pleignier, of Carbonneau, and of Tolleron. The Prince de Talleyrand, grand chamberlain, and the Abbé Louis, appointed minister of finance, laughed as they looked at each other, with the laugh of the two augurs; both of them had celebrated, on the 14th of July, 1790, the mass of federation in the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand had said it as bishop, Louis had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the side-alleys of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood might have been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted blue, with traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was falling. These were the columns which two years before had upheld the Emperor's platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and there with the scorches of the bivouac of Austrians encamped near Gros-Caillou. Two or three of these columns had disappeared in these bivouac fires, and had warmed the large hands of the Imperial troops. The Field of May had this remarkable point: that it had been held in the month of June and in the Field of March (Mars). In this year, 1817, two things were popular: the Voltaire-Touquet and the snuff-box _à la Charter_. The most recent Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun, who had thrown his brother's head into the fountain of the Flower-Market.

They had begun to feel anxious at the Naval Department, on account
of the lack of news from that fatal frigate, _The Medusa_, which was
destined to cover Chaumareix with infamy and Géricault with glory.
Colonel Selves was going to Egypt to become Soliman-Pasha. The palace of
Thermes, in the Rue de La Harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. On the
platform of the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little shed
of boards, which had served as an observatory to Messier, the naval
astronomer under Louis XVI., was still to be seen. The Duchesse de Duras
read to three or four friends her unpublished _Ourika_, in her boudoir
furnished by X. in sky-blue satin. The N's were scratched off the
Louvre. The bridge of Austerlitz had abdicated, and was entitled the
bridge of the King's Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma, which
disguised the bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at one
stroke. Louis XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with the
corner of his finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and makers
of wooden shoes who have become dauphins, had two anxieties,--Napoleon
and Mathurin Bruneau. The French Academy had given for its prize
subject, _The Happiness procured through Study_. M. Bellart was
officially eloquent. In his shadow could be seen germinating that
future advocate-general of Broë, dedicated to the sarcasms of Paul-Louis
Courier. There was a false Chateaubriand, named Marchangy, in the
interim, until there should be a false Marchangy, named d'Arlincourt.
_Claire d'Albe_ and _Malek-Adel_ were masterpieces; Madame Cottin
was proclaimed the chief writer of the epoch. The Institute had the
academician, Napoleon Bonaparte, stricken from its list of members.
A royal ordinance erected Angoulême into a naval school; for the Duc
d'Angoulême, being lord high admiral, it was evident that the city of
Angoulême had all the qualities of a seaport; otherwise the monarchical
principle would have received a wound. In the Council of Ministers
the question was agitated whether vignettes representing slack-rope
performances, which adorned Franconi's advertising posters, and which
attracted throngs of street urchins, should be tolerated. M. Paër, the
author of _Agnese_, a good sort of fellow, with a square face and a wart
on his cheek, directed the little private concerts of the Marquise de
Sasenaye in the Rue Ville l'Évêque. All the young girls were singing
the _Hermit of Saint-Avelle_, with words by Edmond Géraud. _The Yellow
Dwarf_ was transferred into _Mirror_. The Café Lemblin stood up for the
Emperor, against the Café Valois, which upheld the Bourbons. The Duc de
Berri, already surveyed from the shadow by Louvel, had just been married
to a princess of Sicily. Madame de Staël had died a year previously. The
body-guard hissed Mademoiselle Mars. The grand newspapers were all
very small. Their form was restricted, but their liberty was great. The
_Constitutionnel_ was constitutional. _La Minerve_ called Chateaubriand
_Chateaubriant_. That _t_ made the good middle-class people laugh
heartily at the expense of the great writer. In journals which sold
themselves, prostituted journalists, insulted the exiles of 1815. David
had no longer any talent, Arnault had no longer any wit, Carnot was no
longer honest, Soult had won no battles; it is true that Napoleon had no
longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the fact that letters sent to
an exile by post very rarely reached him, as the police made it their
religious duty to intercept them. This is no new fact; Descartes
complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in a Belgian
publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters which had
been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as amusing; and
they derided the prescribed man well on this occasion. What separated
two men more than an abyss was to say, the _regicides_, or to say
the _voters_; to say the _enemies_, or to say the _allies_; to say
_Napoleon_, or to say _Buonaparte_. All sensible people were agreed
that the era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII.,
surnamed "The Immortal Author of the Charter." On the platform of the
Pont-Neuf, the word _Redivivus_ was carved on the pedestal that awaited
the statue of Henry IV. M. Piet, in the Rue Thérèse, No. 4, was making
the rough draft of his privy assembly to consolidate the monarchy.
The leaders of the Right said at grave conjunctures, "We must write to
Bacot." MM. Canuel, O'Mahoney, and De Chappedelaine were preparing the
sketch, to some extent with Monsieur's approval, of what was to become
later on "The Conspiracy of the Bord de l'Eau"--of the waterside.
L'Épingle Noire was already plotting in his own quarter. Delaverderie
was conferring with Trogoff. M. Decazes, who was liberal to a degree,
reigned. Chateaubriand stood every morning at his window at No. 27 Rue
Saint-Dominique, clad in footed trousers, and slippers, with a madras
kerchief knotted over his gray hair, with his eyes fixed on a mirror,
a complete set of dentist's instruments spread out before him, cleaning
his teeth, which were charming, while he dictated _The Monarchy
according to the Charter_ to M. Pilorge, his secretary. Criticism,
assuming an authoritative tone, preferred Lafon to Talma. M. de Féletez
signed himself A.; M. Hoffmann signed himself Z. Charles Nodier wrote
_Thérèse Aubert_. Divorce was abolished. Lyceums called themselves
colleges. The collegians, decorated on the collar with a golden
fleur-de-lys, fought each other _apropos_ of the King of Rome. The
counter-police of the château had denounced to her Royal Highness
Madame, the portrait, everywhere exhibited, of M. the Duc d'Orléans, who
made a better appearance in his uniform of a colonel-general of
hussars than M. the Duc de Berri, in his uniform of colonel-general of
dragoons--a serious inconvenience. The city of Paris was having the
dome of the Invalides regilded at its own expense. Serious men asked
themselves what M. de Trinquelague would do on such or such an occasion;
M. Clausel de Montals differed on divers points from M. Clausel de
Coussergues; M. de Salaberry was not satisfied. The comedian Picard, who
belonged to the Academy, which the comedian Molière had not been able
to do, had _The Two Philiberts_ played at the Odéon, upon whose pediment
the removal of the letters still allowed THEATRE OF THE EMPRESS to
be plainly read. People took part for or against Cugnet de Montarlot.
Fabvier was factious; Bavoux was revolutionary. The Liberal, Pélicier,
published an edition of Voltaire, with the following title: _Works of
Voltaire_, of the French Academy. "That will attract purchasers," said
the ingenious editor. The general opinion was that M. Charles Loyson
would be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to gnaw at him--a
sign of glory; and this verse was composed on him:--


     "Even when Loyson steals, one feels that he has paws."

As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie,
administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes
was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain,
afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his
sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science,
whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier,
whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark;
a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms:
_a certain Lord Baron_. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The
Abbé Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of
seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest,
named Félicité-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing
which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog
went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal
to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not
good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden
inventor; an utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at
this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by
a coup d'état, the distinguished author of numerous academicians,
ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could
not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the
pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on
account of his piety. Dupuytren and Récamier entered into a quarrel in
the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other
with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier,
with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted
reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons
flatter Moses.

M. François de Neufchâteau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory
of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have _pomme de terre_ [potato]
pronounced _parmentière_, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbé
Grégoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the
royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Grégoire." The locution of
which we have made use--_passed to the state of_--has been condemned
as a neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont
de Jéna, the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining
aperture made by Blücher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was
still recognizable on account of its whiteness. Justice summoned to its
bar a man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said
aloud: _"Sapristi! I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma
enter the Bel Sauvage, arm in arm."_ A seditious utterance. Six months
in prison. Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over
to the enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense,
and strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches
and dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness
of their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy
in the most barefaced manner.

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is
now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot
do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these
details, which are wrongly called trivial,--there are no trivial facts
in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,--are useful. It is of
the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is
composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine
farce."



CHAPTER II--A DOUBLE QUARTETTE

These Parisians came, one from Toulouse, another from Limoges, the third
from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students; and
when one says student, one says Parisian: to study in Paris is to be
born in Paris.

These young men were insignificant; every one has seen such faces; four
specimens of humanity taken at random; neither good nor bad, neither
wise nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor fools; handsome, with that
charming April which is called twenty years. They were four Oscars; for,
at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist. _Burn for him the perfumes of
Araby!_ exclaimed romance. _Oscar advances. Oscar, I shall behold him!_
People had just emerged from Ossian; elegance was Scandinavian and
Caledonian; the pure English style was only to prevail later, and
the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the battle of
Waterloo.

These Oscars bore the names, one of Félix Tholomyès, of Toulouse; the
second, Listolier, of Cahors; the next, Fameuil, of Limoges; the last,
Blachevelle, of Montauban. Naturally, each of them had his mistress.
Blachevelle loved Favourite, so named because she had been in England;
Listolier adored Dahlia, who had taken for her nickname the name of a
flower; Fameuil idolized Zéphine, an abridgment of Joséphine; Tholomyès
had Fantine, called the Blonde, because of her beautiful, sunny hair.

Favourite, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women,
perfumed and radiant, still a little like working-women, and not yet
entirely divorced from their needles; somewhat disturbed by intrigues,
but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil,
and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall
in woman. One of the four was called the young, because she was
the youngest of them, and one was called the old; the old one was
twenty-three. Not to conceal anything, the three first were more
experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life
than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.

Dahlia, Zéphine, and especially Favourite, could not have said as much.
There had already been more than one episode in their romance, though
hardly begun; and the lover who had borne the name of Adolph in the
first chapter had turned out to be Alphonse in the second, and Gustave
in the third. Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds
and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have
both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side. These badly
guarded souls listen. Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the
stones which are thrown at them. They are overwhelmed with splendor of
all that is immaculate and inaccessible. Alas! what if the Jungfrau were
hungry?

Favourite having been in England, was admired by Dahlia and Zéphine. She
had had an establishment of her own very early in life. Her father was
an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart,
who went out to give lessons in spite of his age. This professor, when
he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on
a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident. The
result had been Favourite. She met her father from time to time, and he
bowed to her. One morning an old woman with the air of a devotee,
had entered her apartments, and had said to her, "You do not know me,
Mamemoiselle?" "No." "I am your mother." Then the old woman opened the
sideboard, and ate and drank, had a mattress which she owned brought in,
and installed herself. This cross and pious old mother never spoke to
Favourite, remained hours without uttering a word, breakfasted, dined,
and supped for four, and went down to the porter's quarters for company,
where she spoke ill of her daughter.

It was having rosy nails that were too pretty which had drawn Dahlia to
Listolier, to others perhaps, to idleness. How could she make such nails
work? She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands.
As for Zéphine, she had conquered Fameuil by her roguish and caressing
little way of saying "Yes, sir."

The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends. Such loves
are always accompanied by such friendships.

Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this
is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular
households, Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia were philosophical young
women, while Fantine was a good girl.

Good! some one will exclaim; and Tholomyès? Solomon would reply that
love forms a part of wisdom. We will confine ourselves to saying that
the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.

She alone, of all the four, was not called "thou" by a single one of
them.

Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs
of the people. Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths
of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the
unknown. She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had
never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She
had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory
still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal
name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased
the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small
child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she
received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was
called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature
had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted
the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At
fifteen she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful,
and remained pure as long as she could. She was a lovely blonde, with
fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on
her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.

She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,--for
the heart, also, has its hunger,--she loved.

She loved Tholomyès.

An amour for him; passion for her. The streets of the Latin quarter,
filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of
their dream. Fantine had long evaded Tholomyès in the mazes of the hill
of the Pantheon, where so many adventurers twine and untwine, but in
such a way as constantly to encounter him again. There is a way of
avoiding which resembles seeking. In short, the eclogue took place.

Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group of which
Tholomyès was the head. It was he who possessed the wit.

Tholomyès was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of
four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on
Mount Sainte-Geneviève. Tholomyès was a fast man of thirty, and badly
preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a
bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, _the skull at thirty,
the knee at forty_. His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked
by a watering in one eye. But in proportion as his youth disappeared,
gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair
with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly.
He was dilapidated but still in flower. His youth, which was packing
up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order,
bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire. He had had a
piece rejected at the Vaudeville. He made a few verses now and then. In
addition to this he doubted everything to the last degree, which is a
vast force in the eyes of the weak. Being thus ironical and bald, he
was the leader. _Iron_ is an English word. Is it possible that irony is
derived from it?

One day Tholomyès took the three others aside, with the gesture of an
oracle, and said to them:--

"Fantine, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Favourite have been teasing us for nearly
a year to give them a surprise. We have promised them solemnly that we
would. They are forever talking about it to us, to me in particular,
just as the old women in Naples cry to Saint Januarius, '_Faccia
gialluta, fa o miracolo_, Yellow face, perform thy miracle,' so our
beauties say to me incessantly, 'Tholomyès, when will you bring forth
your surprise?' At the same time our parents keep writing to us.
Pressure on both sides. The moment has arrived, it seems to me; let us
discuss the question."

Thereupon, Tholomyès lowered his voice and articulated something so
mirthful, that a vast and enthusiastic grin broke out upon the four
mouths simultaneously, and Blachevelle exclaimed, "That is an idea."

A smoky tap-room presented itself; they entered, and the remainder of
their confidential colloquy was lost in shadow.

The result of these shades was a dazzling pleasure party which took
place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four
young girls.



CHAPTER III--FOUR AND FOUR

It is hard nowadays to picture to one's self what a pleasure-trip of
students and grisettes to the country was like, forty-five years ago.
The suburbs of Paris are no longer the same; the physiognomy of what
may be called circumparisian life has changed completely in the last
half-century; where there was the cuckoo, there is the railway car;
where there was a tender-boat, there is now the steamboat; people speak
of Fécamp nowadays as they spoke of Saint-Cloud in those days. The Paris
of 1862 is a city which has France for its outskirts.

The four couples conscientiously went through with all the country
follies possible at that time. The vacation was beginning, and it was a
warm, bright, summer day. On the preceding day, Favourite, the only one
who knew how to write, had written the following to Tholomyès in the
name of the four: "It is a good hour to emerge from happiness." That
is why they rose at five o'clock in the morning. Then they went to
Saint-Cloud by the coach, looked at the dry cascade and exclaimed, "This
must be very beautiful when there is water!" They breakfasted at the
_Tête-Noir_, where Castaing had not yet been; they treated themselves
to a game of ring-throwing under the quincunx of trees of the grand
fountain; they ascended Diogenes' lantern, they gambled for macaroons
at the roulette establishment of the Pont de Sèvres, picked bouquets at
Pateaux, bought reed-pipes at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and
were perfectly happy.

The young girls rustled and chatted like warblers escaped from their
cage. It was a perfect delirium. From time to time they bestowed little
taps on the young men. Matutinal intoxication of life! adorable years!
the wings of the dragonfly quiver. Oh, whoever you may be, do you not
remember? Have you rambled through the brushwood, holding aside the
branches, on account of the charming head which is coming on behind you?
Have you slid, laughing, down a slope all wet with rain, with a beloved
woman holding your hand, and crying, "Ah, my new boots! what a state
they are in!"

Let us say at once that that merry obstacle, a shower, was lacking in
the case of this good-humored party, although Favourite had said as they
set out, with a magisterial and maternal tone, _"The slugs are crawling
in the paths,--a sign of rain, children."_

All four were madly pretty. A good old classic poet, then famous, a good
fellow who had an Éléonore, M. le Chevalier de Labouisse, as he strolled
that day beneath the chestnut-trees of Saint-Cloud, saw them pass about
ten o'clock in the morning, and exclaimed, "There is one too many of
them," as he thought of the Graces. Favourite, Blachevelle's friend, the
one aged three and twenty, the old one, ran on in front under the great
green boughs, jumped the ditches, stalked distractedly over bushes, and
presided over this merry-making with the spirit of a young female faun.
Zéphine and Dahlia, whom chance had made beautiful in such a way that
they set each off when they were together, and completed each other,
never left each other, more from an instinct of coquetry than from
friendship, and clinging to each other, they assumed English poses; the
first _keepsakes_ had just made their appearance, melancholy was dawning
for women, as later on, Byronism dawned for men; and the hair of the
tender sex began to droop dolefully. Zéphine and Dahlia had their hair
dressed in rolls. Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing
their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed
between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

Blachevelle seemed to have been created expressly to carry Favourite's
single-bordered, imitation India shawl of Ternaux's manufacture, on his
arm on Sundays.

Tholomyès followed, dominating the group. He was very gay, but one felt
the force of government in him; there was dictation in his joviality;
his principal ornament was a pair of trousers of elephant-leg pattern of
nankeen, with straps of braided copper wire; he carried a stout rattan
worth two hundred francs in his hand, and, as he treated himself to
everything, a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth. Nothing was
sacred to him; he smoked.

"That Tholomyès is astounding!" said the others, with veneration. "What
trousers! What energy!"

As for Fantine, she was a joy to behold. Her splendid teeth had
evidently received an office from God,--laughter. She preferred to carry
her little hat of sewed straw, with its long white strings, in her hand
rather than on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to
wave, and which easily uncoiled, and which it was necessary to fasten
up incessantly, seemed made for the flight of Galatea under the
willows. Her rosy lips babbled enchantingly. The corners of her mouth
voluptuously turned up, as in the antique masks of Erigone, had an
air of encouraging the audacious; but her long, shadowy lashes drooped
discreetly over the jollity of the lower part of the face as though to
call a halt. There was something indescribably harmonious and striking
about her entire dress. She wore a gown of mauve barège, little reddish
brown buskins, whose ribbons traced an X on her fine, white, open-worked
stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a Marseilles invention,
whose name, _canezou_, a corruption of the words _quinze août_,
pronounced after the fashion of the Canebière, signifies fine weather,
heat, and midday. The three others, less timid, as we have already
said, wore low-necked dresses without disguise, which in summer, beneath
flower-adorned hats, are very graceful and enticing; but by the side
of these audacious outfits, blond Fantine's _canezou_, with its
transparencies, its indiscretion, and its reticence, concealing and
displaying at one and the same time, seemed an alluring godsend of
decency, and the famous Court of Love, presided over by the Vicomtesse
de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, would, perhaps, have awarded the
prize for coquetry to this _canezou_, in the contest for the prize of
modesty. The most ingenious is, at times, the wisest. This does happen.

Brilliant of face, delicate of profile, with eyes of a deep blue, heavy
lids, feet arched and small, wrists and ankles admirably formed, a white
skin which, here and there allowed the azure branching of the veins to
be seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh, the robust throat of the
Juno of Ægina, a strong and supple nape of the neck, shoulders modelled
as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the middle, visible
through the muslin; a gayety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and
exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and
these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.

Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare
dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently confront
everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse in this little
working-woman, through the transparency of her Parisian grace, of the
ancient sacred euphony. This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred.
She was beautiful in the two ways--style and rhythm. Style is the form
of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.

We have said that Fantine was joy; she was also modesty.

To an observer who studied her attentively, that which breathed from
her athwart all the intoxication of her age, the season, and her
love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and modesty. She
remained a little astonished. This chaste astonishment is the shade
of difference which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long,
white, fine fingers of the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the
sacred fire with a golden pin. Although she would have refused nothing
to Tholomyès, as we shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her
face in repose was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and almost
austere dignity suddenly overwhelmed her at certain times, and there
was nothing more singular and disturbing than to see gayety become so
suddenly extinct there, and meditation succeed to cheerfulness without
any transition state. This sudden and sometimes severely accentuated
gravity resembled the disdain of a goddess. Her brow, her nose, her
chin, presented that equilibrium of outline which is quite distinct
from equilibrium of proportion, and from which harmony of countenance
results; in the very characteristic interval which separates the base
of the nose from the upper lip, she had that imperceptible and charming
fold, a mysterious sign of chastity, which makes Barberousse fall in
love with a Diana found in the treasures of Iconia.

Love is a fault; so be it. Fantine was innocence floating high over
fault.



CHAPTER IV--THOLOMYÈS IS SO MERRY THAT HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY

That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other. All nature
seemed to be having a holiday, and to be laughing. The flower-beds of
Saint-Cloud perfumed the air; the breath of the Seine rustled the
leaves vaguely; the branches gesticulated in the wind, bees pillaged the
jasmines; a whole bohemia of butterflies swooped down upon the yarrow,
the clover, and the sterile oats; in the august park of the King of
France there was a pack of vagabonds, the birds.

The four merry couples, mingled with the sun, the fields, the flowers,
the trees, were resplendent.

And in this community of Paradise, talking, singing, running, dancing,
chasing butterflies, plucking convolvulus, wetting their pink, open-work
stockings in the tall grass, fresh, wild, without malice, all received,
to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine,
who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of
dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. "You always have a queer
look about you," said Favourite to her.

Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples are a profound
appeal to life and nature, and make a caress and light spring forth from
everything. There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests
expressly for those in love,--in that eternal hedge-school of lovers,
which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there
are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers.
The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb
of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden
times, all are subjects of this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there
is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis--what a transfiguration
effected by love! Notaries' clerks are gods. And the little cries,
the pursuits through the grass, the waists embraced on the fly, those
jargons which are melodies, those adorations which burst forth in the
manner of pronouncing a syllable, those cherries torn from one mouth by
another,--all this blazes forth and takes its place among the celestial
glories. Beautiful women waste themselves sweetly. They think that this
will never come to an end. Philosophers, poets, painters, observe these
ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so greatly are they dazzled
by it. The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter
of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the
azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and
d'Urfé mingles druids with them.

After breakfast the four couples went to what was then called the King's
Square to see a newly arrived plant from India, whose name escapes our
memory at this moment, and which, at that epoch, was attracting all
Paris to Saint-Cloud. It was an odd and charming shrub with a long stem,
whose numerous branches, bristling and leafless and as fine as threads,
were covered with a million tiny white rosettes; this gave the shrub the
air of a head of hair studded with flowers. There was always an admiring
crowd about it.

After viewing the shrub, Tholomyès exclaimed, "I offer you asses!" and
having agreed upon a price with the owner of the asses, they returned
by way of Vanvres and Issy. At Issy an incident occurred. The truly
national park, at that time owned by Bourguin the contractor, happened
to be wide open. They passed the gates, visited the manikin anchorite in
his grotto, tried the mysterious little effects of the famous cabinet
of mirrors, the wanton trap worthy of a satyr become a millionaire or of
Turcaret metamorphosed into a Priapus. They had stoutly shaken the swing
attached to the two chestnut-trees celebrated by the Abbé de Bernis.
As he swung these beauties, one after the other, producing folds in the
fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals
of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyès, who was somewhat of a Spaniard,
Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the
old ballad _gallega_, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in
full flight upon a rope between two trees:--


      "Soy de Badajoz,        "Badajoz is my home,
       Amor me llama,          And Love is my name;
       Toda mi alma,             To my eyes in flame,
       Es en mi ojos,              All my soul doth come;
       Porque enseñas,         For instruction meet
       A tuas piernas.            I receive at thy feet"

Fantine alone refused to swing.

"I don't like to have people put on airs like that," muttered Favourite,
with a good deal of acrimony.

After leaving the asses there was a fresh delight; they crossed the
Seine in a boat, and proceeding from Passy on foot they reached the
barrier of l'Étoile. They had been up since five o'clock that morning,
as the reader will remember; but _bah! there is no such thing as fatigue
on Sunday_, said Favourite; _on Sunday fatigue does not work_.

About three o'clock the four couples, frightened at their happiness,
were sliding down the Russian mountains, a singular edifice which then
occupied the heights of Beaujon, and whose undulating line was visible
above the trees of the Champs-Élysées.

From time to time Favourite exclaimed:--

"And the surprise? I claim the surprise."

"Patience," replied Tholomyès.



CHAPTER V--AT BOMBARDA'S

The Russian mountains having been exhausted, they began to think about
dinner; and the radiant party of eight, somewhat weary at last, became
stranded in Bombarda's public house, a branch establishment which had
been set up in the Champs-Élysées by that famous restaurant-keeper,
Bombarda, whose sign could then be seen in the Rue de Rivoli, near
Delorme Alley.

A large but ugly room, with an alcove and a bed at the end (they had
been obliged to put up with this accommodation in view of the Sunday
crowd); two windows whence they could survey beyond the elms, the quay
and the river; a magnificent August sunlight lightly touching the panes;
two tables; upon one of them a triumphant mountain of bouquets, mingled
with the hats of men and women; at the other the four couples seated
round a merry confusion of platters, dishes, glasses, and bottles; jugs
of beer mingled with flasks of wine; very little order on the table,
some disorder beneath it;


               "They made beneath the table
     A noise, a clatter of the feet that was abominable,"

says Molière.

This was the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in
the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon. The sun was
setting; their appetites were satisfied.

The Champs-Élysées, filled with sunshine and with people, were nothing
but light and dust, the two things of which glory is composed. The
horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud
of gold. Carriages were going and coming. A squadron of magnificent
body-guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the
Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting
sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde,
which had become the Place Louis XV. once more, was choked with happy
promenaders. Many wore the silver fleur-de-lys suspended from the
white-watered ribbon, which had not yet wholly disappeared from
button-holes in the year 1817. Here and there choruses of little girls
threw to the winds, amid the passers-by, who formed into circles and
applauded, the then celebrated Bourbon air, which was destined to strike
the Hundred Days with lightning, and which had for its refrain:--


               "Rendez-nous notre père de Gand,
                    Rendez-nous notre père."

               "Give us back our father from Ghent,
                    Give us back our father."

Groups of dwellers in the suburbs, in Sunday array, sometimes even
decorated with the fleur-de-lys, like the bourgeois, scattered over the
large square and the Marigny square, were playing at rings and revolving
on the wooden horses; others were engaged in drinking; some journeyman
printers had on paper caps; their laughter was audible. Everything
was radiant. It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist
security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief
of Police Anglès to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris,
terminated with these lines:--

"Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be
feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats.
The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. These are
very pretty men, Sire. It would take all of two of them to make one
of your grenadiers. There is nothing to be feared on the part of the
populace of Paris the capital. It is remarkable that the stature of
this population should have diminished in the last fifty years; and
the populace of the suburbs is still more puny than at the time of the
Revolution. It is not dangerous. In short, it is an amiable rabble."

Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform
itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the
miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. Moreover, the cat so despised
by Count Anglès possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their
eyes it was liberty incarnate; and as though to serve as pendant to
the Minerva Aptera of the Piræus, there stood on the public square in
Corinth the colossal bronze figure of a cat. The ingenuous police of the
Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too "rose-colored" a light;
it is not so much of "an amiable rabble" as it is thought. The Parisian
is to the Frenchman what the Athenian was to the Greek: no one sleeps
more soundly than he, no one is more frankly frivolous and lazy than
he, no one can better assume the air of forgetfulness; let him not be
trusted nevertheless; he is ready for any sort of cool deed; but when
there is glory at the end of it, he is worthy of admiration in every
sort of fury. Give him a pike, he will produce the 10th of August; give
him a gun, you will have Austerlitz. He is Napoleon's stay and Danton's
resource. Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of
liberty, he tears up the pavements. Beware! his hair filled with wrath,
is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys. Take
care! he will make of the first Rue Grenétat which comes to hand Caudine
Forks. When the hour strikes, this man of the faubourgs will grow in
stature; this little man will arise, and his gaze will be terrible, and
his breath will become a tempest, and there will issue forth from that
slender chest enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps. It is,
thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with
arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song
to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing
but _la Carmagnole_, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the
_Marseillaise_, and he will free the world.

This note jotted down on the margin of Anglès' report, we will return to
our four couples. The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.



CHAPTER VI--A CHAPTER IN WHICH THEY ADORE EACH OTHER

Chat at table, the chat of love; it is as impossible to reproduce one as
the other; the chat of love is a cloud; the chat at table is smoke.

Fameuil and Dahlia were humming. Tholomyès was drinking. Zéphine was
laughing, Fantine smiling, Listolier blowing a wooden trumpet which he
had purchased at Saint-Cloud.

Favourite gazed tenderly at Blachevelle and said:--

"Blachevelle, I adore you."

This called forth a question from Blachevelle:--

"What would you do, Favourite, if I were to cease to love you?"

"I!" cried Favourite. "Ah! Do not say that even in jest! If you were
to cease to love me, I would spring after you, I would scratch you,
I should rend you, I would throw you into the water, I would have you
arrested."

Blachevelle smiled with the voluptuous self-conceit of a man who is
tickled in his self-love. Favourite resumed:--

"Yes, I would scream to the police! Ah! I should not restrain myself,
not at all! Rabble!"

Blachevelle threw himself back in his chair, in an ecstasy, and closed
both eyes proudly.

Dahlia, as she ate, said in a low voice to Favourite, amid the uproar:--

"So you really idolize him deeply, that Blachevelle of yours?"

"I? I detest him," replied Favourite in the same tone, seizing her fork
again. "He is avaricious. I love the little fellow opposite me in my
house. He is very nice, that young man; do you know him? One can see
that he is an actor by profession. I love actors. As soon as he comes
in, his mother says to him: 'Ah! mon Dieu! my peace of mind is gone.
There he goes with his shouting. But, my dear, you are splitting my
head!' So he goes up to rat-ridden garrets, to black holes, as high as
he can mount, and there he sets to singing, declaiming, how do I know
what? so that he can be heard down stairs! He earns twenty sous a day at
an attorney's by penning quibbles. He is the son of a former precentor
of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Ah! he is very nice. He idolizes me so,
that one day when he saw me making batter for some pancakes, he said to
me: _'Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters, and I will eat them.'_
It is only artists who can say such things as that. Ah! he is very nice.
I am in a fair way to go out of my head over that little fellow. Never
mind; I tell Blachevelle that I adore him--how I lie! Hey! How I do
lie!"

Favourite paused, and then went on:--

"I am sad, you see, Dahlia. It has done nothing but rain all summer; the
wind irritates me; the wind does not abate. Blachevelle is very stingy;
there are hardly any green peas in the market; one does not know what to
eat. I have the spleen, as the English say, butter is so dear! and then
you see it is horrible, here we are dining in a room with a bed in it,
and that disgusts me with life."



CHAPTER VII--THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYÈS

In the meantime, while some sang, the rest talked together tumultuously
all at once; it was no longer anything but noise. Tholomyès intervened.

"Let us not talk at random nor too fast," he exclaimed. "Let us reflect,
if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in
a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen. Let us
mingle majesty with the feast. Let us eat with meditation; let us make
haste slowly. Let us not hurry. Consider the springtime; if it makes
haste, it is done for; that is to say, it gets frozen. Excess of zeal
ruins peach-trees and apricot-trees. Excess of zeal kills the grace and
the mirth of good dinners. No zeal, gentlemen! Grimod de la Reynière
agrees with Talleyrand."

A hollow sound of rebellion rumbled through the group.

"Leave us in peace, Tholomyès," said Blachevelle.

"Down with the tyrant!" said Fameuil.

"Bombarda, Bombance, and Bambochel!" cried Listolier.

"Sunday exists," resumed Fameuil.

"We are sober," added Listolier.

"Tholomyès," remarked Blachevelle, "contemplate my calmness [_mon
calme_]."

"You are the Marquis of that," retorted Tholomyès.

This mediocre play upon words produced the effect of a stone in a pool.
The Marquis de Montcalm was at that time a celebrated royalist. All the
frogs held their peace.

"Friends," cried Tholomyès, with the accent of a man who had recovered
his empire, "Come to yourselves. This pun which has fallen from the
skies must not be received with too much stupor. Everything which falls
in that way is not necessarily worthy of enthusiasm and respect. The pun
is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where;
and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure
depths. A whitish speck flattened against the rock does not prevent the
condor from soaring aloft. Far be it from me to insult the pun! I honor
it in proportion to its merits; nothing more. All the most august, the
most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of
humanity, have made puns. Jesus Christ made a pun on St. Peter, Moses
on Isaac, Æschylus on Polynices, Cleopatra on Octavius. And observe that
Cleopatra's pun preceded the battle of Actium, and that had it not been
for it, no one would have remembered the city of Toryne, a Greek name
which signifies a ladle. That once conceded, I return to my exhortation.
I repeat, brothers, I repeat, no zeal, no hubbub, no excess; even in
witticisms, gayety, jollities, or plays on words. Listen to me. I have
the prudence of Amphiaraüs and the baldness of Cæsar. There must be a
limit, even to rebuses. _Est modus in rebus_.

"There must be a limit, even to dinners. You are fond of apple
turnovers, ladies; do not indulge in them to excess. Even in the matter
of turnovers, good sense and art are requisite. Gluttony chastises the
glutton, _Gula punit Gulax_. Indigestion is charged by the good God
with preaching morality to stomachs. And remember this: each one of our
passions, even love, has a stomach which must not be filled too full. In
all things the word _finis_ must be written in good season; self-control
must be exercised when the matter becomes urgent; the bolt must be drawn
on appetite; one must set one's own fantasy to the violin, and carry
one's self to the post. The sage is the man who knows how, at a given
moment, to effect his own arrest. Have some confidence in me, for I
have succeeded to some extent in my study of the law, according to
the verdict of my examinations, for I know the difference between the
question put and the question pending, for I have sustained a thesis in
Latin upon the manner in which torture was administered at Rome at the
epoch when Munatius Demens was quæstor of the Parricide; because I
am going to be a doctor, apparently it does not follow that it is
absolutely necessary that I should be an imbecile. I recommend you to
moderation in your desires. It is true that my name is Félix Tholomyès;
I speak well. Happy is he who, when the hour strikes, takes a heroic
resolve, and abdicates like Sylla or Origenes."

Favourite listened with profound attention.

"Félix," said she, "what a pretty word! I love that name. It is Latin;
it means prosper."

Tholomyès went on:--

"Quirites, gentlemen, caballeros, my friends. Do you wish never to feel
the prick, to do without the nuptial bed, and to brave love? Nothing
more simple. Here is the receipt: lemonade, excessive exercise, hard
labor; work yourself to death, drag blocks, sleep not, hold vigil,
gorge yourself with nitrous beverages, and potions of nymphæas; drink
emulsions of poppies and agnus castus; season this with a strict diet,
starve yourself, and add thereto cold baths, girdles of herbs, the
application of a plate of lead, lotions made with the subacetate of
lead, and fomentations of oxycrat."

"I prefer a woman," said Listolier.

"Woman," resumed Tholomyès; "distrust her. Woe to him who yields himself
to the unstable heart of woman! Woman is perfidious and disingenuous.
She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the
shop over the way."

"Tholomyès!" cried Blachevelle, "you are drunk!"

"Pardieu," said Tholomyès.

"Then be gay," resumed Blachevelle.

"I agree to that," responded Tholomyès.

And, refilling his glass, he rose.

"Glory to wine! _Nunc te, Bacche, canam!_ Pardon me ladies; that is
Spanish. And the proof of it, señoras, is this: like people, like cask.
The arrobe of Castille contains sixteen litres; the cantaro of Alicante,
twelve; the almude of the Canaries, twenty-five; the cuartin of the
Balearic Isles, twenty-six; the boot of Tzar Peter, thirty. Long
live that Tzar who was great, and long live his boot, which was still
greater! Ladies, take the advice of a friend; make a mistake in your
neighbor if you see fit. The property of love is to err. A love
affair is not made to crouch down and brutalize itself like an English
serving-maid who has callouses on her knees from scrubbing. It is not
made for that; it errs gayly, our gentle love. It has been said, error
is human; I say, error is love. Ladies, I idolize you all. O Zéphine, O
Joséphine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not
all askew. You have the air of a pretty face upon which some one has
sat down by mistake. As for Favourite, O nymphs and muses! one day
when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guérin-Boisseau,
he espied a beautiful girl with white stockings well drawn up, which
displayed her legs. This prologue pleased him, and Blachevelle fell
in love. The one he loved was Favourite. O Favourite, thou hast Ionian
lips. There was a Greek painter named Euphorion, who was surnamed the
painter of the lips. That Greek alone would have been worthy to paint
thy mouth. Listen! before thee, there was never a creature worthy of the
name. Thou wert made to receive the apple like Venus, or to eat it like
Eve; beauty begins with thee. I have just referred to Eve; it is thou
who hast created her. Thou deservest the letters-patent of the beautiful
woman. O Favourite, I cease to address you as 'thou,' because I pass
from poetry to prose. You were speaking of my name a little while ago.
That touched me; but let us, whoever we may be, distrust names. They may
delude us. I am called Félix, and I am not happy. Words are liars. Let
us not blindly accept the indications which they afford us. It would
be a mistake to write to Liège 2 for corks, and to Pau for gloves. Miss
Dahlia, were I in your place, I would call myself Rosa. A flower should
smell sweet, and woman should have wit. I say nothing of Fantine; she
is a dreamer, a musing, thoughtful, pensive person; she is a phantom
possessed of the form of a nymph and the modesty of a nun, who has
strayed into the life of a grisette, but who takes refuge in illusions,
and who sings and prays and gazes into the azure without very well
knowing what she sees or what she is doing, and who, with her eyes fixed
on heaven, wanders in a garden where there are more birds than are in
existence. O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyès, I am an illusion; but
she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras! as for the rest,
everything about her is freshness, suavity, youth, sweet morning light.
O Fantine, maid worthy of being called Marguerite or Pearl, you are a
woman from the beauteous Orient. Ladies, a second piece of advice: do
not marry; marriage is a graft; it takes well or ill; avoid that risk.
But bah! what am I saying? I am wasting my words. Girls are incurable
on the subject of marriage, and all that we wise men can say will not
prevent the waistcoat-makers and the shoe-stitchers from dreaming
of husbands studded with diamonds. Well, so be it; but, my beauties,
remember this, you eat too much sugar. You have but one fault, O woman,
and that is nibbling sugar. O nibbling sex, your pretty little white
teeth adore sugar. Now, heed me well, sugar is a salt. All salts are
withering. Sugar is the most desiccating of all salts; it sucks the
liquids of the blood through the veins; hence the coagulation, and then
the solidification of the blood; hence tubercles in the lungs, hence
death. That is why diabetes borders on consumption. Then, do not crunch
sugar, and you will live. I turn to the men: gentlemen, make conquest,
rob each other of your well-beloved without remorse. Chassez across.
In love there are no friends. Everywhere where there is a pretty woman
hostility is open. No quarter, war to the death! a pretty woman is a
_casus belli_; a pretty woman is flagrant misdemeanor. All the invasions
of history have been determined by petticoats. Woman is man's right.
Romulus carried off the Sabines; William carried off the Saxon women;
Cæsar carried off the Roman women. The man who is not loved soars like
a vulture over the mistresses of other men; and for my own part, to all
those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation
of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: "Soldiers, you are in need of
everything; the enemy has it."

Tholomyès paused.

"Take breath, Tholomyès," said Blachevelle.

At the same moment Blachevelle, supported by Listolier and Fameuil,
struck up to a plaintive air, one of those studio songs composed of
the first words which come to hand, rhymed richly and not at all, as
destitute of sense as the gesture of the tree and the sound of the wind,
which have their birth in the vapor of pipes, and are dissipated and
take their flight with them. This is the couplet by which the group
replied to Tholomyès' harangue:--


           "The father turkey-cocks so grave
            Some money to an agent gave,
            That master good Clermont-Tonnerre
            Might be made pope on Saint Johns' day fair.
            But this good Clermont could not be
            Made pope, because no priest was he;
            And then their agent, whose wrath burned,
            With all their money back returned."

This was not calculated to calm Tholomyès' improvisation; he emptied his
glass, filled, refilled it, and began again:--

"Down with wisdom! Forget all that I have said. Let us be neither prudes
nor prudent men nor prudhommes. I propose a toast to mirth; be merry.
Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and
the digest. Let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy in
the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy.
The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale
is a gratuitous Elleviou. Summer, I salute thee! O Luxembourg! O
Georgics of the Rue Madame, and of the Allée de l'Observatoire! O
pensive infantry soldiers! O all those charming nurses who, while they
guard the children, amuse themselves! The pampas of America would please
me if I had not the arcades of the Odéon. My soul flits away into the
virgin forests and to the savannas. All is beautiful. The flies buzz in
the sun. The sun has sneezed out the humming bird. Embrace me, Fantine!"

He made a mistake and embraced Favourite.



CHAPTER VIII--THE DEATH OF A HORSE

"The dinners are better at Édon's than at Bombarda's," exclaimed
Zéphine.

"I prefer Bombarda to Édon," declared Blachevelle. "There is more
luxury. It is more Asiatic. Look at the room downstairs; there are
mirrors [_glaces_] on the walls."

"I prefer them [_glaces_, ices] on my plate," said Favourite.

Blachevelle persisted:--

"Look at the knives. The handles are of silver at Bombarda's and of bone
at Édon's. Now, silver is more valuable than bone."

"Except for those who have a silver chin," observed Tholomyès.

He was looking at the dome of the Invalides, which was visible from
Bombarda's windows.

A pause ensued.

"Tholomyès," exclaimed Fameuil, "Listolier and I were having a
discussion just now."

"A discussion is a good thing," replied Tholomyès; "a quarrel is
better."

"We were disputing about philosophy."

"Well?"

"Which do you prefer, Descartes or Spinoza?"

"Désaugiers," said Tholomyès.

This decree pronounced, he took a drink, and went on:--

"I consent to live. All is not at an end on earth since we can still
talk nonsense. For that I return thanks to the immortal gods. We lie.
One lies, but one laughs. One affirms, but one doubts. The unexpected
bursts forth from the syllogism. That is fine. There are still human
beings here below who know how to open and close the surprise box of the
paradox merrily. This, ladies, which you are drinking with so tranquil
an air is Madeira wine, you must know, from the vineyard of Coural das
Freiras, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above the level of
the sea. Attention while you drink! three hundred and seventeen fathoms!
and Monsieur Bombarda, the magnificent eating-house keeper, gives you
those three hundred and seventeen fathoms for four francs and fifty
centimes."

Again Fameuil interrupted him:--

"Tholomyès, your opinions fix the law. Who is your favorite author?"

"Ber--"

"Quin?"

"No; Choux."

And Tholomyès continued:--

"Honor to Bombarda! He would equal Munophis of Elephanta if he could
but get me an Indian dancing-girl, and Thygelion of Chæronea if he could
bring me a Greek courtesan; for, oh, ladies! there were Bombardas in
Greece and in Egypt. Apuleius tells us of them. Alas! always the same,
and nothing new; nothing more unpublished by the creator in creation!
_Nil sub sole novum_, says Solomon; _amor omnibus idem_, says Virgil;
and Carabine mounts with Carabin into the bark at Saint-Cloud, as
Aspasia embarked with Pericles upon the fleet at Samos. One last word.
Do you know what Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived at an epoch
when women had, as yet, no soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rosy and
purple hue, more ardent hued than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia
was a creature in whom two extremes of womanhood met; she was the
goddess prostitute; Socrates plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in
case a mistress should be needed for Prometheus."

Tholomyès, once started, would have found some difficulty in stopping,
had not a horse fallen down upon the quay just at that moment. The
shock caused the cart and the orator to come to a dead halt. It was a
Beauceron mare, old and thin, and one fit for the knacker, which was
dragging a very heavy cart. On arriving in front of Bombarda's, the
worn-out, exhausted beast had refused to proceed any further. This
incident attracted a crowd. Hardly had the cursing and indignant carter
had time to utter with proper energy the sacramental word, _Mâtin_ (the
jade), backed up with a pitiless cut of the whip, when the jade fell,
never to rise again. On hearing the hubbub made by the passers-by,
Tholomyès' merry auditors turned their heads, and Tholomyès took
advantage of the opportunity to bring his allocution to a close with
this melancholy strophe:--


      "Elle était de ce monde ou coucous et carrosses
          Ont le même destin;
      Et, rosse, elle a vécu ce que vivant les rosses,
          L'espace d'un mâtin!" <a href="#linknote-3"
      name="linknoteref-3" id="linknoteref-3">3</a>

"Poor horse!" sighed Fantine.

And Dahlia exclaimed:--

"There is Fantine on the point of crying over horses. How can one be
such a pitiful fool as that!"

At that moment Favourite, folding her arms and throwing her head back,
looked resolutely at Tholomyès and said:--

"Come, now! the surprise?"

"Exactly. The moment has arrived," replied Tholomyès. "Gentlemen,
the hour for giving these ladies a surprise has struck. Wait for us a
moment, ladies."

"It begins with a kiss," said Blachevelle.

"On the brow," added Tholomyès.

Each gravely bestowed a kiss on his mistress's brow; then all four filed
out through the door, with their fingers on their lips.

Favourite clapped her hands on their departure.

"It is beginning to be amusing already," said she.

"Don't be too long," murmured Fantine; "we are waiting for you."



CHAPTER IX--A MERRY END TO MIRTH

When the young girls were left alone, they leaned two by two on the
window-sills, chatting, craning out their heads, and talking from one
window to the other.

They saw the young men emerge from the Café Bombarda arm in arm. The
latter turned round, made signs to them, smiled, and disappeared in
that dusty Sunday throng which makes a weekly invasion into the
Champs-Élysées.

"Don't be long!" cried Fantine.

"What are they going to bring us?" said Zéphine.

"It will certainly be something pretty," said Dahlia.

"For my part," said Favourite, "I want it to be of gold."

Their attention was soon distracted by the movements on the shore of the
lake, which they could see through the branches of the large trees, and
which diverted them greatly.

It was the hour for the departure of the mail-coaches and diligences.
Nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the
Champs-Élysées. The majority followed the quay and went through the
Passy Barrier. From moment to moment, some huge vehicle, painted yellow
and black, heavily loaded, noisily harnessed, rendered shapeless
by trunks, tarpaulins, and valises, full of heads which immediately
disappeared, rushed through the crowd with all the sparks of a forge,
with dust for smoke, and an air of fury, grinding the pavements,
changing all the paving-stones into steels. This uproar delighted the
young girls. Favourite exclaimed:--

"What a row! One would say that it was a pile of chains flying away."

It chanced that one of these vehicles, which they could only see with
difficulty through the thick elms, halted for a moment, then set out
again at a gallop. This surprised Fantine.

"That's odd!" said she. "I thought the diligence never stopped."

Favourite shrugged her shoulders.

"This Fantine is surprising. I am coming to take a look at her out of
curiosity. She is dazzled by the simplest things. Suppose a case: I am
a traveller; I say to the diligence, 'I will go on in advance; you shall
pick me up on the quay as you pass.' The diligence passes, sees me,
halts, and takes me. That is done every day. You do not know life, my
dear."

In this manner a certain time elapsed. All at once Favourite made a
movement, like a person who is just waking up.

"Well," said she, "and the surprise?"

"Yes, by the way," joined in Dahlia, "the famous surprise?"

"They are a very long time about it!" said Fantine.

As Fantine concluded this sigh, the waiter who had served them at dinner
entered. He held in his hand something which resembled a letter.

"What is that?" demanded Favourite.

The waiter replied:--

"It is a paper that those gentlemen left for these ladies."

"Why did you not bring it at once?"

"Because," said the waiter, "the gentlemen ordered me not to deliver it
to the ladies for an hour."

Favourite snatched the paper from the waiter's hand. It was, in fact, a
letter.

"Stop!" said she; "there is no address; but this is what is written on
it--"


                 "THIS IS THE SURPRISE."

She tore the letter open hastily, opened it, and read [she knew how to
read]:--

"OUR BELOVED:--

"You must know that we have parents. Parents--you do not know much about
such things. They are called fathers and mothers by the civil code,
which is puerile and honest. Now, these parents groan, these old folks
implore us, these good men and these good women call us prodigal sons;
they desire our return, and offer to kill calves for us. Being virtuous,
we obey them. At the hour when you read this, five fiery horses will
be bearing us to our papas and mammas. We are pulling up our stakes, as
Bossuet says. We are going; we are gone. We flee in the arms of Lafitte
and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse diligence tears us from
the abyss, and the abyss is you, O our little beauties! We return to
society, to duty, to respectability, at full trot, at the rate of three
leagues an hour. It is necessary for the good of the country that we
should be, like the rest of the world, prefects, fathers of families,
rural police, and councillors of state. Venerate us. We are sacrificing
ourselves. Mourn for us in haste, and replace us with speed. If this
letter lacerates you, do the same by it. Adieu.


"For the space of nearly two years we have made you happy. We bear you
no grudge for that. "Signed:                                            BLACHEVELLE.
                                            FAMUEIL.
                                            LISTOLIER.
                                            FÉLIX THOLOMYÈS.

"_Postscriptum_. The dinner is paid for."

The four young women looked at each other.

Favourite was the first to break the silence.

"Well!" she exclaimed, "it's a very pretty farce, all the same."

"It is very droll," said Zéphine.

"That must have been Blachevelle's idea," resumed Favourite. "It makes
me in love with him. No sooner is he gone than he is loved. This is an
adventure, indeed."

"No," said Dahlia; "it was one of Tholomyès' ideas. That is evident.

"In that case," retorted Favourite, "death to Blachevelle, and long live
Tholomyès!"

"Long live Tholomyès!" exclaimed Dahlia and Zéphine.

And they burst out laughing.

Fantine laughed with the rest.

An hour later, when she had returned to her room, she wept. It was
her first love affair, as we have said; she had given herself to this
Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.



BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER



CHAPTER I--ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER MOTHER

There was, at Montfermeil, near Paris, during the first quarter of this
century, a sort of cook-shop which no longer exists. This cook-shop was
kept by some people named Thénardier, husband and wife. It was situated
in Boulanger Lane. Over the door there was a board nailed flat against
the wall. Upon this board was painted something which resembled a
man carrying another man on his back, the latter wearing the big gilt
epaulettes of a general, with large silver stars; red spots represented
blood; the rest of the picture consisted of smoke, and probably
represented a battle. Below ran this inscription: AT THE SIGN OF
SERGEANT OF WATERLOO (_Au Sargent de Waterloo_).

Nothing is more common than a cart or a truck at the door of a hostelry.
Nevertheless, the vehicle, or, to speak more accurately, the fragment of
a vehicle, which encumbered the street in front of the cook-shop of
the _Sergeant of Waterloo_, one evening in the spring of 1818, would
certainly have attracted, by its mass, the attention of any painter who
had passed that way.

It was the fore-carriage of one of those trucks which are used in wooded
tracts of country, and which serve to transport thick planks and the
trunks of trees. This fore-carriage was composed of a massive iron
axle-tree with a pivot, into which was fitted a heavy shaft, and
which was supported by two huge wheels. The whole thing was compact,
overwhelming, and misshapen. It seemed like the gun-carriage of an
enormous cannon. The ruts of the road had bestowed on the wheels, the
fellies, the hub, the axle, and the shaft, a layer of mud, a hideous
yellowish daubing hue, tolerably like that with which people are fond
of ornamenting cathedrals. The wood was disappearing under mud, and the
iron beneath rust. Under the axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain,
worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the
beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and
mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the
galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have
been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with
it, and Shakespeare, Caliban.

Why was that fore-carriage of a truck in that place in the street? In
the first place, to encumber the street; next, in order that it might
finish the process of rusting. There is a throng of institutions in the
old social order, which one comes across in this fashion as one walks
about outdoors, and which have no other reasons for existence than the
above.

The centre of the chain swung very near the ground in the middle, and in
the loop, as in the rope of a swing, there were seated and grouped, on
that particular evening, in exquisite interlacement, two little girls;
one about two years and a half old, the other, eighteen months; the
younger in the arms of the other. A handkerchief, cleverly knotted about
them, prevented their falling out. A mother had caught sight of that
frightful chain, and had said, "Come! there's a plaything for my
children."

The two children, who were dressed prettily and with some elegance, were
radiant with pleasure; one would have said that they were two roses amid
old iron; their eyes were a triumph; their fresh cheeks were full of
laughter. One had chestnut hair; the other, brown. Their innocent faces
were two delighted surprises; a blossoming shrub which grew near wafted
to the passers-by perfumes which seemed to emanate from them; the child
of eighteen months displayed her pretty little bare stomach with the
chaste indecency of childhood. Above and around these two delicate
heads, all made of happiness and steeped in light, the gigantic
fore-carriage, black with rust, almost terrible, all entangled in curves
and wild angles, rose in a vault, like the entrance of a cavern. A few
paces apart, crouching down upon the threshold of the hostelry, the
mother, not a very prepossessing woman, by the way, though touching
at that moment, was swinging the two children by means of a long cord,
watching them carefully, for fear of accidents, with that animal and
celestial expression which is peculiar to maternity. At every backward
and forward swing the hideous links emitted a strident sound, which
resembled a cry of rage; the little girls were in ecstasies; the setting
sun mingled in this joy, and nothing could be more charming than this
caprice of chance which had made of a chain of Titans the swing of
cherubim.

As she rocked her little ones, the mother hummed in a discordant voice a
romance then celebrated:--


                 "It must be, said a warrior."

Her song, and the contemplation of her daughters, prevented her hearing
and seeing what was going on in the street.

In the meantime, some one had approached her, as she was beginning the
first couplet of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying very
near her ear:--

"You have two beautiful children there, Madame."


                 "To the fair and tender Imogene--"

replied the mother, continuing her romance; then she turned her head.

A woman stood before her, a few paces distant. This woman also had a
child, which she carried in her arms.

She was carrying, in addition, a large carpet-bag, which seemed very
heavy.

This woman's child was one of the most divine creatures that it is
possible to behold. It was a girl, two or three years of age. She could
have entered into competition with the two other little ones, so far as
the coquetry of her dress was concerned; she wore a cap of fine linen,
ribbons on her bodice, and Valenciennes lace on her cap. The folds of
her skirt were raised so as to permit a view of her white, firm, and
dimpled leg. She was admirably rosy and healthy. The little beauty
inspired a desire to take a bite from the apples of her cheeks. Of her
eyes nothing could be known, except that they must be very large, and
that they had magnificent lashes. She was asleep.

She slept with that slumber of absolute confidence peculiar to her
age. The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep
profoundly.

As for the mother, her appearance was sad and poverty-stricken. She
was dressed like a working-woman who is inclined to turn into a peasant
again. She was young. Was she handsome? Perhaps; but in that attire it
was not apparent. Her hair, a golden lock of which had escaped, seemed
very thick, but was severely concealed beneath an ugly, tight, close,
nun-like cap, tied under the chin. A smile displays beautiful teeth when
one has them; but she did not smile. Her eyes did not seem to have been
dry for a very long time. She was pale; she had a very weary and rather
sickly appearance. She gazed upon her daughter asleep in her arms with
the air peculiar to a mother who has nursed her own child. A large blue
handkerchief, such as the Invalides use, was folded into a fichu, and
concealed her figure clumsily. Her hands were sunburnt and all dotted
with freckles, her forefinger was hardened and lacerated with the
needle; she wore a cloak of coarse brown woollen stuff, a linen gown,
and coarse shoes. It was Fantine.

It was Fantine, but difficult to recognize. Nevertheless, on
scrutinizing her attentively, it was evident that she still retained
her beauty. A melancholy fold, which resembled the beginning of irony,
wrinkled her right cheek. As for her toilette, that aerial toilette of
muslin and ribbons, which seemed made of mirth, of folly, and of music,
full of bells, and perfumed with lilacs had vanished like that beautiful
and dazzling hoar-frost which is mistaken for diamonds in the sunlight;
it melts and leaves the branch quite black.

Ten months had elapsed since the "pretty farce."

What had taken place during those ten months? It can be divined.

After abandonment, straightened circumstances. Fantine had immediately
lost sight of Favourite, Zéphine and Dahlia; the bond once broken on the
side of the men, it was loosed between the women; they would have been
greatly astonished had any one told them a fortnight later, that they
had been friends; there no longer existed any reason for such a thing.
Fantine had remained alone. The father of her child gone,--alas! such
ruptures are irrevocable,--she found herself absolutely isolated, minus
the habit of work and plus the taste for pleasure. Drawn away by her
_liaison_ with Tholomyès to disdain the pretty trade which she knew, she
had neglected to keep her market open; it was now closed to her. She had
no resource. Fantine barely knew how to read, and did not know how to
write; in her childhood she had only been taught to sign her name;
she had a public letter-writer indite an epistle to Tholomyès, then a
second, then a third. Tholomyès replied to none of them. Fantine heard
the gossips say, as they looked at her child: "Who takes those children
seriously! One only shrugs one's shoulders over such children!" Then she
thought of Tholomyès, who had shrugged his shoulders over his child,
and who did not take that innocent being seriously; and her heart grew
gloomy toward that man. But what was she to do? She no longer knew to
whom to apply. She had committed a fault, but the foundation of her
nature, as will be remembered, was modesty and virtue. She was vaguely
conscious that she was on the verge of falling into distress, and of
gliding into a worse state. Courage was necessary; she possessed it, and
held herself firm. The idea of returning to her native town of M. sur
M. occurred to her. There, some one might possibly know her and give her
work; yes, but it would be necessary to conceal her fault. In a confused
way she perceived the necessity of a separation which would be more
painful than the first one. Her heart contracted, but she took her
resolution. Fantine, as we shall see, had the fierce bravery of life.
She had already valiantly renounced finery, had dressed herself in
linen, and had put all her silks, all her ornaments, all her ribbons,
and all her laces on her daughter, the only vanity which was left to
her, and a holy one it was. She sold all that she had, which produced
for her two hundred francs; her little debts paid, she had only about
eighty francs left. At the age of twenty-two, on a beautiful spring
morning, she quitted Paris, bearing her child on her back. Any one who
had seen these two pass would have had pity on them. This woman had,
in all the world, nothing but her child, and the child had, in all the
world, no one but this woman. Fantine had nursed her child, and this had
tired her chest, and she coughed a little.

We shall have no further occasion to speak of M. Félix Tholomyès. Let us
confine ourselves to saying, that, twenty years later, under King Louis
Philippe, he was a great provincial lawyer, wealthy and influential, a
wise elector, and a very severe juryman; he was still a man of pleasure.

Towards the middle of the day, after having, from time to time, for the
sake of resting herself, travelled, for three or four sous a league, in
what was then known as the _Petites Voitures des Environs de Paris_, the
"little suburban coach service," Fantine found herself at Montfermeil,
in the alley Boulanger.

As she passed the Thénardier hostelry, the two little girls, blissful
in the monster swing, had dazzled her in a manner, and she had halted in
front of that vision of joy.

Charms exist. These two little girls were a charm to this mother.

She gazed at them in much emotion. The presence of angels is an
announcement of Paradise. She thought that, above this inn, she beheld
the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were
evidently happy. She gazed at them, she admired them, in such emotion
that at the moment when their mother was recovering her breath between
two couplets of her song, she could not refrain from addressing to her
the remark which we have just read:--

"You have two pretty children, Madame."

The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their
young.

The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer
sit down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the
threshold. The two women began to chat.

"My name is Madame Thénardier," said the mother of the two little girls.
"We keep this inn."

Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between
her teeth:--


                 "It must be so; I am a knight,
                  And I am off to Palestine."

This Madame Thénardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and
angular--the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and
what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal
of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances
produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop
woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching
woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a
perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the
traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what
caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead
of standing erect--destinies hang upon such a thing as that.

The traveller told her story, with slight modifications.

That she was a working-woman; that her husband was dead; that her
work in Paris had failed her, and that she was on her way to seek it
elsewhere, in her own native parts; that she had left Paris that morning
on foot; that, as she was carrying her child, and felt fatigued, she had
got into the Villemomble coach when she met it; that from Villemomble
she had come to Montfermeil on foot; that the little one had walked a
little, but not much, because she was so young, and that she had been
obliged to take her up, and the jewel had fallen asleep.

At this word she bestowed on her daughter a passionate kiss, which woke
her. The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother's, and
looked at--what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of
little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in
the presence of our twilight of virtue. One would say that they feel
themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men. Then the child
began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she slipped to
the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being which wished
to run. All at once she caught sight of the two others in the swing,
stopped short, and put out her tongue, in sign of admiration.

Mother Thénardier released her daughters, made them descend from the
swing, and said:--

"Now amuse yourselves, all three of you."

Children become acquainted quickly at that age, and at the expiration
of a minute the little Thénardiers were playing with the new-comer at
making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure.

The new-comer was very gay; the goodness of the mother is written in the
gayety of the child; she had seized a scrap of wood which served her
for a shovel, and energetically dug a cavity big enough for a fly. The
grave-digger's business becomes a subject for laughter when performed by
a child.

The two women pursued their chat.

"What is your little one's name?"

"Cosette."

For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The child's name was Euphrasie. But out
of Euphrasie the mother had made Cosette by that sweet and graceful
instinct of mothers and of the populace which changes Josepha into
Pepita, and Françoise into Sillette. It is a sort of derivative which
disarranges and disconcerts the whole science of etymologists. We have
known a grandmother who succeeded in turning Theodore into Gnon.

"How old is she?"

"She is going on three."

"That is the age of my eldest."

In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of
profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm
had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in
ecstasies over it.

Their radiant brows touched each other; one would have said that there
were three heads in one aureole.

"How easily children get acquainted at once!" exclaimed Mother
Thénardier; "one would swear that they were three sisters!"

This remark was probably the spark which the other mother had been
waiting for. She seized the Thénardier's hand, looked at her fixedly,
and said:--

"Will you keep my child for me?"

The Thénardier made one of those movements of surprise which signify
neither assent nor refusal.

Cosette's mother continued:--

"You see, I cannot take my daughter to the country. My work will not
permit it. With a child one can find no situation. People are ridiculous
in the country. It was the good God who caused me to pass your inn. When
I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean, and so happy,
it overwhelmed me. I said: 'Here is a good mother. That is just the
thing; that will make three sisters.' And then, it will not be long
before I return. Will you keep my child for me?"

"I must see about it," replied the Thénardier.

"I will give you six francs a month."

Here a man's voice called from the depths of the cook-shop:--

"Not for less than seven francs. And six months paid in advance."

"Six times seven makes forty-two," said the Thénardier.

"I will give it," said the mother.

"And fifteen francs in addition for preliminary expenses," added the
man's voice.

"Total, fifty-seven francs," said Madame Thénardier. And she hummed
vaguely, with these figures:--


                 "It must be, said a warrior."

"I will pay it," said the mother. "I have eighty francs. I shall have
enough left to reach the country, by travelling on foot. I shall
earn money there, and as soon as I have a little I will return for my
darling."

The man's voice resumed:--

"The little one has an outfit?"

"That is my husband," said the Thénardier.

"Of course she has an outfit, the poor treasure.--I understood perfectly
that it was your husband.--And a beautiful outfit, too! a senseless
outfit, everything by the dozen, and silk gowns like a lady. It is here,
in my carpet-bag."

"You must hand it over," struck in the man's voice again.

"Of course I shall give it to you," said the mother. "It would be very
queer if I were to leave my daughter quite naked!"

The master's face appeared.

"That's good," said he.

The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave
up her money and left her child, fastened her carpet-bag once more, now
reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth
and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon. People
arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs!

A neighbor of the Thénardiers met this mother as she was setting out,
and came back with the remark:--

"I have just seen a woman crying in the street so that it was enough to
rend your heart."

When Cosette's mother had taken her departure, the man said to the
woman:--

"That will serve to pay my note for one hundred and ten francs which
falls due to-morrow; I lacked fifty francs. Do you know that I should
have had a bailiff and a protest after me? You played the mouse-trap
nicely with your young ones."

"Without suspecting it," said the woman.



CHAPTER II--FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES

The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat
rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Who were these Thénardiers?

Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later
on.

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people
who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended
in the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the class
denominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of the
second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing
the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the
bourgeois.

They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm
them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum
of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were
susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress
which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like
souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,
retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to
augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more
and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and
woman possessed such souls.

Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can
only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are
dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening
in front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more
answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow
which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing them
utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse of
sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their future.

This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier--a
sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,
and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We
shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his
hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it
himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after
having been _Clélie_, was no longer anything but _Lodoïska_, still
noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle
de Scudéri to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to
Madame Barthélemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses
of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame
Thénardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She
lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had
given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive
attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian
lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the
same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the
perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said
in his jargon--a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or
fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged
in a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magæra
began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thénardier was nothing
but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now,
one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest
daughter was named Éponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing
came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected
by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore
the name of Azelma.

However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and
superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which
may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of
this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social
symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the name
of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte--if there are
still any vicomtes--to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This
displacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and the
rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality.
The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as
everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a
profound thing,--the French Revolution.



CHAPTER III--THE LARK

It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The
cook-shop was in a bad way.

Thanks to the traveller's fifty-seven francs, Thénardier had been able
to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month
they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette's outfit to
Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon
as that sum was spent, the Thénardiers grew accustomed to look on the
little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity;
and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they
dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thénardier
brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest
had left--a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat.
Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions;
Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to
theirs.

The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at M.
sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter every
month, that she might have news of her child. The Thénardiers replied
invariably, "Cosette is doing wonderfully well."

At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs
for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable
regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when
Thénardier said: "A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she
expect us to do with her seven francs?" and he wrote to demand twelve
francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her
child was happy, "and was coming on well," submitted, and forwarded the
twelve francs.

Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other.
Mother Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her
to hate the stranger.

It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous
aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to
her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child
diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many
women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and
injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain
that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole
of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to
herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette could not
make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of
violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble being, who
should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly
punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little
creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!

Madame Thénardier was vicious with Cosette. Éponine and Azelma were
vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size
is smaller; that is all.

A year passed; then another.

People in the village said:--

"Those Thénardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are
bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"

They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her.

In the meanwhile, Thénardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by
what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the
mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying
that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send
her away. "Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat
right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase." The
mother paid the fifteen francs.

From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.

As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other
children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,
before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the
household.

Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is
true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the
trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the
age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world,
"worked for his living and stole"?

Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,
the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thénardiers
considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,
since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in
her payments. Some months she was in arrears.

If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three
years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and
rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an
indescribably uneasy look. "The sly creature," said the Thénardiers.

Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing
remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because,
large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still
larger amount of sadness.

It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years
old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes,
sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny
red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.

Enlarge


She was called the _Lark_ in the neighborhood. The populace, who are
fond of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name
on this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger
than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the
house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before
daybreak.

Only the little lark never sang.



BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT.



CHAPTER I--THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS

And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to
the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was
she? What was she doing?

After leaving her little Cosette with the Thénardiers, she had continued
her journey, and had reached M. sur M.

This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.

Fantine had quitted her province ten years before. M. sur M. had changed
its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness
to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.

About two years previously one of those industrial facts which are the
grand events of small districts had taken place.

This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop it at
length; we should almost say, to underline it.

From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the
imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This
industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw
material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine
returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place
in the production of "black goods." Towards the close of 1815 a man,
a stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired
with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin,
and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid
together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron.

This very small change had effected a revolution.

This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of
the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to
raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second
place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the
third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which
was a benefit to the manufacturer.

Thus three results ensued from one idea.

In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich,
which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better.
He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known;
of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had
come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.

It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an
ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his
own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside.

On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance,
and the language of a workingman.

It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into
the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening,
knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out
in the town-hall. This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the
risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the
gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his passport.
Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father Madeleine.



CHAPTER II--MADELEINE

He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and
who was good. That was all that could be said about him.

Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably
re-constructed, M. sur M. had become a rather important centre of trade.
Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases
there each year. M. sur M. almost rivalled London and Berlin in this
branch of commerce. Father Madeleine's profits were such, that at the
end of the second year he was able to erect a large factory, in which
there were two vast workrooms, one for the men, and the other for women.
Any one who was hungry could present himself there, and was sure of
finding employment and bread. Father Madeleine required of the men good
will, of the women pure morals, and of all, probity. He had separated
the work-rooms in order to separate the sexes, and so that the women and
girls might remain discreet. On this point he was inflexible. It was the
only thing in which he was in a manner intolerant. He was all the more
firmly set on this severity, since M. sur M., being a garrison town,
opportunities for corruption abounded. However, his coming had been a
boon, and his presence was a godsend. Before Father Madeleine's arrival,
everything had languished in the country; now everything lived with
a healthy life of toil. A strong circulation warmed everything and
penetrated everywhere. Slack seasons and wretchedness were unknown.
There was no pocket so obscure that it had not a little money in it; no
dwelling so lowly that there was not some little joy within it.

Father Madeleine gave employment to every one. He exacted but one thing:
Be an honest man. Be an honest woman.

As we have said, in the midst of this activity of which he was the cause
and the pivot, Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular thing
in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were his
chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of
himself. In 1820 he was known to have a sum of six hundred and thirty
thousand francs lodged in his name with Laffitte; but before reserving
these six hundred and thirty thousand francs, he had spent more than a
million for the town and its poor.

The hospital was badly endowed; he founded six beds there. M. sur M. is
divided into the upper and the lower town. The lower town, in which he
lived, had but one school, a miserable hovel, which was falling to ruin:
he constructed two, one for girls, the other for boys. He allotted a
salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as
large as their meagre official salary, and one day he said to some one
who expressed surprise, "The two prime functionaries of the state are
the nurse and the schoolmaster." He created at his own expense an infant
school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding old
and infirm workmen. As his factory was a centre, a new quarter, in which
there were a good many indigent families, rose rapidly around him; he
established there a free dispensary.

At first, when they watched his beginnings, the good souls said, "He's
a jolly fellow who means to get rich." When they saw him enriching
the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, "He is
an ambitious man." This seemed all the more probable since the man was
religious, and even practised his religion to a certain degree, a thing
which was very favorably viewed at that epoch. He went regularly to
low mass every Sunday. The local deputy, who nosed out all rivalry
everywhere, soon began to grow uneasy over this religion. This deputy
had been a member of the legislative body of the Empire, and shared the
religious ideas of a father of the Oratoire, known under the name
of Fouché, Duc d'Otrante, whose creature and friend he had been. He
indulged in gentle raillery at God with closed doors. But when he beheld
the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going to low mass at seven o'clock,
he perceived in him a possible candidate, and resolved to outdo him; he
took a Jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and to vespers. Ambition
was at that time, in the direct acceptation of the word, a race to the
steeple. The poor profited by this terror as well as the good God, for
the honorable deputy also founded two beds in the hospital, which made
twelve.

Nevertheless, in 1819 a rumor one morning circulated through the town
to the effect that, on the representations of the prefect and in
consideration of the services rendered by him to the country, Father
Madeleine was to be appointed by the King, mayor of M. sur M. Those who
had pronounced this new-comer to be "an ambitious fellow," seized with
delight on this opportunity which all men desire, to exclaim, "There!
what did we say!" All M. sur M. was in an uproar. The rumor was well
founded. Several days later the appointment appeared in the _Moniteur_.
On the following day Father Madeleine refused.

In this same year of 1819 the products of the new process invented by
Madeleine figured in the industrial exhibition; when the jury made their
report, the King appointed the inventor a chevalier of the Legion of
Honor. A fresh excitement in the little town. Well, so it was the cross
that he wanted! Father Madeleine refused the cross.

Decidedly this man was an enigma. The good souls got out of their
predicament by saying, "After all, he is some sort of an adventurer."

We have seen that the country owed much to him; the poor owed him
everything; he was so useful and he was so gentle that people had been
obliged to honor and respect him. His workmen, in particular, adored
him, and he endured this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity.
When he was known to be rich, "people in society" bowed to him, and
he received invitations in the town; he was called, in town, Monsieur
Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father
Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In
proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him.
"Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on
M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan,
opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made
a thousand advances to him. He refused.

This time the good gossips had no trouble. "He is an ignorant man, of
no education. No one knows where he came from. He would not know how to
behave in society. It has not been absolutely proved that he knows how
to read."

When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business."
When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an
ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is
an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a
brute."

In 1820, five years after his arrival in M. sur M., the services which
he had rendered to the district were so dazzling, the opinion of
the whole country round about was so unanimous, that the King again
appointed him mayor of the town. He again declined; but the prefect
resisted his refusal, all the notabilities of the place came to implore
him, the people in the street besought him; the urging was so vigorous
that he ended by accepting. It was noticed that the thing which seemed
chiefly to bring him to a decision was the almost irritated apostrophe
addressed to him by an old woman of the people, who called to him from
her threshold, in an angry way: _"A good mayor is a useful thing. Is he
drawing back before the good which he can do?"_

This was the third phase of his ascent. Father Madeleine had become
Monsieur Madeleine. Monsieur Madeleine became Monsieur le Maire.



CHAPTER III--SUMS DEPOSITED WITH LAFFITTE

On the other hand, he remained as simple as on the first day. He had
gray hair, a serious eye, the sunburned complexion of a laborer, the
thoughtful visage of a philosopher. He habitually wore a hat with a
wide brim, and a long coat of coarse cloth, buttoned to the chin. He
fulfilled his duties as mayor; but, with that exception, he lived in
solitude. He spoke to but few people. He avoided polite attentions;
he escaped quickly; he smiled to relieve himself of the necessity of
talking; he gave, in order to get rid of the necessity for smiling. The
women said of him, "What a good-natured bear!" His pleasure consisted in
strolling in the fields.

He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he
read. He had a well-selected little library. He loved books; books
are cold but safe friends. In proportion as leisure came to him with
fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind. It had
been observed that, ever since his arrival at M. sur M., his language
had grown more polished, more choice, and more gentle with every passing
year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his strolls, but he rarely
made use of it. When he did happen to do so, his shooting was something
so infallible as to inspire terror. He never killed an inoffensive
animal. He never shot at a little bird.

Although he was no longer young, it was thought that he was still
prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance to any one who was in
need of it, lifted a horse, released a wheel clogged in the mud, or
stopped a runaway bull by the horns. He always had his pockets full
of money when he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he
passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after him, and
surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.

It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life,
since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the
peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it
and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution
of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in
bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in
the houses.

He had "recipes" for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail,
and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit
warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed
in it.

One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles;
he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said:
"They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to
make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent
vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and
flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are
good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of
the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the
root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter.
Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is
required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the
seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That
is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made
useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How
many men resemble the nettle!" He added, after a pause: "Remember this,
my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are
only bad cultivators."

The children loved him because he knew how to make charming little
trifles of straw and cocoanuts.

When he saw the door of a church hung in black, he entered: he sought
out funerals as other men seek christenings. Widowhood and the grief of
others attracted him, because of his great gentleness; he mingled with
the friends clad in mourning, with families dressed in black, with
the priests groaning around a coffin. He seemed to like to give to his
thoughts for text these funereal psalmodies filled with the vision of
the other world. With his eyes fixed on heaven, he listened with a
sort of aspiration towards all the mysteries of the infinite, those sad
voices which sing on the verge of the obscure abyss of death.

He performed a multitude of good actions, concealing his agency in them
as a man conceals himself because of evil actions. He penetrated houses
privately, at night; he ascended staircases furtively. A poor wretch
on returning to his attic would find that his door had been opened,
sometimes even forced, during his absence. The poor man made a clamor
over it: some malefactor had been there! He entered, and the first
thing he beheld was a piece of gold lying forgotten on some piece of
furniture. The "malefactor" who had been there was Father Madeleine.

He was affable and sad. The people said: "There is a rich man who has
not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air."

Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no
one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite's cell,
furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and
skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant
and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked:
"Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a
grotto." He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this "grotto."
They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply
furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of
that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see nothing
remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern which
stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, "for they were
hall-marked," an observation full of the type of wit of petty towns.

Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the
room, and that it was a hermit's cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a
tomb.

It was also whispered about that he had "immense" sums deposited with
Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his
immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his
appearance at Laffitte's any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his
two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, "these two or three
millions" were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or
forty thousand francs.



CHAPTER IV--M. MADELEINE IN MOURNING

At the beginning of 1820 the newspapers announced the death of M.
Myriel, Bishop of D----, surnamed "Monseigneur Bienvenu," who had died
in the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.

The Bishop of D---- to supply here a detail which the papers
omitted--had been blind for many years before his death, and content to
be blind, as his sister was beside him.

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact,
one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth,
where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a
daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her
and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable
to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure
one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us,
and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time
to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her
thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one
being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown
as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return,
sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this
speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel
one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become
in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which
this angel gravitates,--few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness
of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for
one's own sake--let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this
conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be
caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when
one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There
is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly,
and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand
sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her
mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything
of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that
sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to
touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in
one's arms,--God made tangible,--what bliss! The heart, that obscure,
celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would not
exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there,
uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she
vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth
approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with
gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are
a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The
most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and
supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul.
One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of
shadows.

It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the
other.

The announcement of his death was reprinted by the local journal of M.
sur M. On the following day, M. Madeleine appeared clad wholly in black,
and with crape on his hat.

This mourning was noticed in the town, and commented on. It seemed
to throw a light on M. Madeleine's origin. It was concluded that some
relationship existed between him and the venerable Bishop. _"He has gone
into mourning for the Bishop of D----"_ said the drawing-rooms; this
raised M. Madeleine's credit greatly, and procured for him, instantly
and at one blow, a certain consideration in the noble world of M. sur
M. The microscopic Faubourg Saint-Germain of the place meditated raising
the quarantine against M. Madeleine, the probable relative of a bishop.
M. Madeleine perceived the advancement which he had obtained, by the
more numerous courtesies of the old women and the more plentiful smiles
of the young ones. One evening, a ruler in that petty great world, who
was curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask him, "M. le Maire is
doubtless a cousin of the late Bishop of D----?"

He said, "No, Madame."

"But," resumed the dowager, "you are wearing mourning for him."

He replied, "It is because I was a servant in his family in my youth."

Another thing which was remarked, was, that every time that he
encountered in the town a young Savoyard who was roaming about the
country and seeking chimneys to sweep, the mayor had him summoned,
inquired his name, and gave him money. The little Savoyards told each
other about it: a great many of them passed that way.



CHAPTER V--VAGUE FLASHES ON THE HORIZON

Little by little, and in the course of time, all this opposition
subsided. There had at first been exercised against M. Madeleine,
in virtue of a sort of law which all those who rise must submit to,
blackening and calumnies; then they grew to be nothing more than
ill-nature, then merely malicious remarks, then even this entirely
disappeared; respect became complete, unanimous, cordial, and towards
1821 the moment arrived when the word "Monsieur le Maire" was pronounced
at M. sur M. with almost the same accent as "Monseigneur the Bishop"
had been pronounced in D---- in 1815. People came from a distance of ten
leagues around to consult M. Madeleine. He put an end to differences,
he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. Every one took him for the
judge, and with good reason. It seemed as though he had for a soul the
book of the natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in
the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole
district.

One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped
this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his
opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct
kept him on the alert and uneasy. It seems, in fact, as though there
existed in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and
upright, like all instincts, which creates antipathies and sympathies,
which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not
hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace,
and which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible,
imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence
and to all the dissolvents of reason, and which, in whatever manner
destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of
the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.

It frequently happened that when M. Madeleine was passing along a
street, calm, affectionate, surrounded by the blessings of all, a man of
lofty stature, clad in an iron-gray frock-coat, armed with a heavy
cane, and wearing a battered hat, turned round abruptly behind him, and
followed him with his eyes until he disappeared, with folded arms and
a slow shake of the head, and his upper lip raised in company with
his lower to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be
translated by: "What is that man, after all? I certainly have seen him
somewhere. In any case, I am not his dupe."

This person, grave with a gravity which was almost menacing, was one
of those men who, even when only seen by a rapid glimpse, arrest the
spectator's attention.

His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.

At M. sur M. he exercised the unpleasant but useful functions of an
inspector. He had not seen Madeleine's beginnings. Javert owed the post
which he occupied to the protection of M. Chabouillet, the secretary of
the Minister of State, Comte Anglès, then prefect of police at Paris.
When Javert arrived at M. sur M. the fortune of the great manufacturer
was already made, and Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.

Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is
complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority.
Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should
be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual
of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal
creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived
by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the
tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man.
Sometimes even several of them at a time.

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices,
straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows
them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere
shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense
of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being realities
and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on
them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of whatever sort
it may be, the utility which it contains.

This, be it said, is of course from the restricted point of view of the
terrestrial life which is apparent, and without prejudging the profound
question of the anterior or ulterior personality of the beings which are
not man. The visible _I_ in nowise authorizes the thinker to deny the
latent _I_. Having made this reservation, let us pass on.

Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man
there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us
to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.

The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves
there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as
he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.

Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be
Javert.

Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was
in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale
of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that
society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack
it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these
two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable
foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an
inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He
entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an
inspector.

During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of
the South.

Before proceeding further, let us come to an understanding as to the
words, "human face," which we have just applied to Javert.

The human face of Javert consisted of a flat nose, with two deep
nostrils, towards which enormous whiskers ascended on his cheeks. One
felt ill at ease when he saw these two forests and these two caverns
for the first time. When Javert laughed,--and his laugh was rare and
terrible,--his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth,
but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage
fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast. Javert, serious, was a watchdog;
when he laughed, he was a tiger. As for the rest, he had very little
skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and
fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central
frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed
up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.

This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments,
comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating
them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes,
murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion. He enveloped
in a blind and profound faith every one who had a function in the state,
from the prime minister to the rural policeman. He covered with scorn,
aversion, and disgust every one who had once crossed the legal threshold
of evil. He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand,
he said, "The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate is never
the wrong." On the other hand, he said, "These men are irremediably
lost. Nothing good can come from them." He fully shared the opinion of
those extreme minds which attribute to human law I know not what power
of making, or, if the reader will have it so, of authenticating, demons,
and who place a Styx at the base of society. He was stoical, serious,
austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics. His
glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing. His whole life hung on
these two words: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a
straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world;
he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his
functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe to the man
who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father, if
the latter had escaped from the galleys, and would have denounced his
mother, if she had broken her ban. And he would have done it with that
sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue. And, withal,
a life of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never
a diversion. It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the
Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious
honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.

Javert's whole person was expressive of the man who spies and who
withdraws himself from observation. The mystical school of Joseph de
Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned with lofty cosmogony those things
which were called the ultra newspapers, would not have failed to declare
that Javert was a symbol. His brow was not visible; it disappeared
beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under
his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his
cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves:
and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat. But when the
occasion presented itself, there was suddenly seen to emerge from all
this shadow, as from an ambuscade, a narrow and angular forehead, a
baleful glance, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous
cudgel.

In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although
he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate. This could
be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.

As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself,
he permitted himself a pinch of snuff. Therein lay his connection with
humanity.

The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the
terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry
of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert
routed them by its mere utterance; the face of Javert petrified them at
sight.

Such was this formidable man.

Javert was like an eye constantly fixed on M. Madeleine. An eye full of
suspicion and conjecture. M. Madeleine had finally perceived the fact;
but it seemed to be of no importance to him. He did not even put a
question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that
embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it.
He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the
world.

It was divined, from some words which escaped Javert, that he had
secretly investigated, with that curiosity which belongs to the race,
and into which there enters as much instinct as will, all the anterior
traces which Father Madeleine might have left elsewhere. He seemed to
know, and he sometimes said in covert words, that some one had gleaned
certain information in a certain district about a family which had
disappeared. Once he chanced to say, as he was talking to himself, "I
think I have him!" Then he remained pensive for three days, and uttered
not a word. It seemed that the thread which he thought he held had
broken.

Moreover, and this furnishes the necessary corrective for the too
absolute sense which certain words might present, there can be nothing
really infallible in a human creature, and the peculiarity of instinct
is that it can become confused, thrown off the track, and defeated.
Otherwise, it would be superior to intelligence, and the beast would be
found to be provided with a better light than man.

Javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by the perfect naturalness
and tranquillity of M. Madeleine.

One day, nevertheless, his strange manner appeared to produce an
impression on M. Madeleine. It was on the following occasion.



CHAPTER VI--FATHER FAUCHELEVENT

One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley of M. sur
M.; he heard a noise, and saw a group some distance away. He approached.
An old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart,
his horse having tumbled down.

This Fauchelevent was one of the few enemies whom M. Madeleine had at
that time. When Madeleine arrived in the neighborhood, Fauchelevent, an
ex-notary and a peasant who was almost educated, had a business which
was beginning to be in a bad way. Fauchelevent had seen this simple
workman grow rich, while he, a lawyer, was being ruined. This had filled
him with jealousy, and he had done all he could, on every occasion,
to injure Madeleine. Then bankruptcy had come; and as the old man had
nothing left but a cart and a horse, and neither family nor children, he
had turned carter.

The horse had two broken legs and could not rise. The old man was caught
in the wheels. The fall had been so unlucky that the whole weight of the
vehicle rested on his breast. The cart was quite heavily laden. Father
Fauchelevent was rattling in the throat in the most lamentable manner.
They had tried, but in vain, to drag him out. An unmethodical effort,
aid awkwardly given, a wrong shake, might kill him. It was impossible to
disengage him otherwise than by lifting the vehicle off of him.
Javert, who had come up at the moment of the accident, had sent for a
jack-screw.

M. Madeleine arrived. People stood aside respectfully.

"Help!" cried old Fauchelevent. "Who will be good and save the old man?"

M. Madeleine turned towards those present:--

"Is there a jack-screw to be had?"

"One has been sent for," answered the peasant.

"How long will it take to get it?"

"They have gone for the nearest, to Flachot's place, where there is a
farrier; but it makes no difference; it will take a good quarter of an
hour."

"A quarter of an hour!" exclaimed Madeleine.

It had rained on the preceding night; the soil was soaked.

The cart was sinking deeper into the earth every moment, and crushing
the old carter's breast more and more. It was evident that his ribs
would be broken in five minutes more.

"It is impossible to wait another quarter of an hour," said Madeleine to
the peasants, who were staring at him.

"We must!"

"But it will be too late then! Don't you see that the cart is sinking?"

"Well!"

"Listen," resumed Madeleine; "there is still room enough under the cart
to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back. Only half
a minute, and the poor man can be taken out. Is there any one here who
has stout loins and heart? There are five louis d'or to be earned!"

Not a man in the group stirred.

"Ten louis," said Madeleine.

The persons present dropped their eyes. One of them muttered: "A man
would need to be devilish strong. And then he runs the risk of getting
crushed!"

"Come," began Madeleine again, "twenty louis."

The same silence.

"It is not the will which is lacking," said a voice.

M. Madeleine turned round, and recognized Javert. He had not noticed him
on his arrival.

Javert went on:--

"It is strength. One would have to be a terrible man to do such a thing
as lift a cart like that on his back."

Then, gazing fixedly at M. Madeleine, he went on, emphasizing every word
that he uttered:--

"Monsieur Madeleine, I have never known but one man capable of doing
what you ask."

Madeleine shuddered.

Javert added, with an air of indifference, but without removing his eyes
from Madeleine:--

"He was a convict."

"Ah!" said Madeleine.

"In the galleys at Toulon."

Madeleine turned pale.

Meanwhile, the cart continued to sink slowly. Father Fauchelevent
rattled in the throat, and shrieked:--

"I am strangling! My ribs are breaking! a screw! something! Ah!"

Madeleine glanced about him.

"Is there, then, no one who wishes to earn twenty louis and save the
life of this poor old man?"

No one stirred. Javert resumed:--

"I have never known but one man who could take the place of a screw, and
he was that convict."

"Ah! It is crushing me!" cried the old man.

Madeleine raised his head, met Javert's falcon eye still fixed upon
him, looked at the motionless peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without
saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had
time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.

A terrible moment of expectation and silence ensued.

They beheld Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrible
weight, make two vain efforts to bring his knees and his elbows
together. They shouted to him, "Father Madeleine, come out!" Old
Fauchelevent himself said to him, "Monsieur Madeleine, go away! You see
that I am fated to die! Leave me! You will get yourself crushed also!"
Madeleine made no reply.

All the spectators were panting. The wheels had continued to sink, and
it had become almost impossible for Madeleine to make his way from under
the vehicle.

Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the
wheels half emerged from the ruts. They heard a stifled voice crying,
"Make haste! Help!" It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort.

They rushed forwards. The devotion of a single man had given force and
courage to all. The cart was raised by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was
saved.

Madeleine rose. He was pale, though dripping with perspiration. His
clothes were torn and covered with mud. All wept. The old man kissed
his knees and called him the good God. As for him, he bore upon
his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial
suffering, and he fixed his tranquil eye on Javert, who was still
staring at him.



CHAPTER VII--FAUCHELEVENT BECOMES A GARDENER IN PARIS

Fauchelevent had dislocated his kneepan in his fall. Father Madeleine
had him conveyed to an infirmary which he had established for his
workmen in the factory building itself, and which was served by two
sisters of charity. On the following morning the old man found a
thousand-franc bank-note on his night-stand, with these words in Father
Madeleine's writing: _"I purchase your horse and cart."_ The cart was
broken, and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered, but his knee
remained stiff. M. Madeleine, on the recommendation of the sisters of
charity and of his priest, got the good man a place as gardener in a
female convent in the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris.

Some time afterwards, M. Madeleine was appointed mayor. The first time
that Javert beheld M. Madeleine clothed in the scarf which gave him
authority over the town, he felt the sort of shudder which a watch-dog
might experience on smelling a wolf in his master's clothes. From
that time forth he avoided him as much as he possibly could. When the
requirements of the service imperatively demanded it, and he could
not do otherwise than meet the mayor, he addressed him with profound
respect.

This prosperity created at M. sur M. by Father Madeleine had, besides
the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was
none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives.
When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no
commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and
oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in
the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when
the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the
state nothing. It may be said, that there is one infallible thermometer
of the public misery and riches,--the cost of collecting the taxes.
In the course of seven years the expense of collecting the taxes had
diminished three-fourths in the arrondissement of M. sur M., and this
led to this arrondissement being frequently cited from all the rest by
M. de Villèle, then Minister of Finance.

Such was the condition of the country when Fantine returned thither. No
one remembered her. Fortunately, the door of M. Madeleine's factory was
like the face of a friend. She presented herself there, and was admitted
to the women's workroom. The trade was entirely new to Fantine; she
could not be very skilful at it, and she therefore earned but little by
her day's work; but it was sufficient; the problem was solved; she was
earning her living.



CHAPTER VIII--MADAME VICTURNIEN EXPENDS THIRTY FRANCS ON MORALITY

When Fantine saw that she was making her living, she felt joyful for a
moment. To live honestly by her own labor, what mercy from heaven! The
taste for work had really returned to her. She bought a looking-glass,
took pleasure in surveying in it her youth, her beautiful hair, her fine
teeth; she forgot many things; she thought only of Cosette and of the
possible future, and was almost happy. She hired a little room and
furnished on credit on the strength of her future work--a lingering
trace of her improvident ways. As she was not able to say that she was
married she took good care, as we have seen, not to mention her little
girl.

At first, as the reader has seen, she paid the Thénardiers promptly. As
she only knew how to sign her name, she was obliged to write through a
public letter-writer.

She wrote often, and this was noticed. It began to be said in an
undertone, in the women's workroom, that Fantine "wrote letters" and
that "she had ways about her."

There is no one for spying on people's actions like those who are
not concerned in them. Why does that gentleman never come except at
nightfall? Why does Mr. So-and-So never hang his key on its nail on
Tuesday? Why does he always take the narrow streets? Why does Madame
always descend from her hackney-coach before reaching her house? Why
does she send out to purchase six sheets of note paper, when she has a
"whole stationer's shop full of it?" etc. There exist beings who, for
the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of
no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time,
take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and
that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other
payment for their curiosity than curiosity. They will follow up such and
such a man or woman for whole days; they will do sentry duty for hours
at a time on the corners of the streets, under alley-way doors at night,
in cold and rain; they will bribe errand-porters, they will make the
drivers of hackney-coaches and lackeys tipsy, buy a waiting-maid, suborn
a porter. Why? For no reason. A pure passion for seeing, knowing,
and penetrating into things. A pure itch for talking. And often
these secrets once known, these mysteries made public, these enigmas
illuminated by the light of day, bring on catastrophies, duels,
failures, the ruin of families, and broken lives, to the great joy
of those who have "found out everything," without any interest in the
matter, and by pure instinct. A sad thing.

Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking.
Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the
anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need
a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by
their neighbors.

So Fantine was watched.

In addition, many a one was jealous of her golden hair and of her white
teeth.

It was remarked that in the workroom she often turned aside, in the
midst of the rest, to wipe away a tear. These were the moments when she
was thinking of her child; perhaps, also, of the man whom she had loved.

Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.

It was observed that she wrote twice a month at least, and that she
paid the carriage on the letter. They managed to obtain the address:
_Monsieur, Monsieur Thénardier, inn-keeper at Montfermeil_. The public
writer, a good old man who could not fill his stomach with red wine
without emptying his pocket of secrets, was made to talk in the
wine-shop. In short, it was discovered that Fantine had a child. "She
must be a pretty sort of a woman." An old gossip was found, who made the
trip to Montfermeil, talked to the Thénardiers, and said on her return:
"For my five and thirty francs I have freed my mind. I have seen the
child."

The gossip who did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the
guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was
fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age.
A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been
young--astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a
monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from
the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, sharp,
captious, almost venomous; all this in memory of her monk, whose widow
she was, and who had ruled over her masterfully and bent her to his
will. She was a nettle in which the rustle of the cassock was visible.
At the Restoration she had turned bigot, and that with so much energy
that the priests had forgiven her her monk. She had a small property,
which she bequeathed with much ostentation to a religious community.
She was in high favor at the episcopal palace of Arras. So this Madame
Victurnien went to Montfermeil, and returned with the remark, "I have
seen the child."

All this took time. Fantine had been at the factory for more than a
year, when, one morning, the superintendent of the workroom handed her
fifty francs from the mayor, told her that she was no longer employed
in the shop, and requested her, in the mayor's name, to leave the
neighborhood.

This was the very month when the Thénardiers, after having demanded
twelve francs instead of six, had just exacted fifteen francs instead of
twelve.

Fantine was overwhelmed. She could not leave the neighborhood; she was
in debt for her rent and furniture. Fifty francs was not sufficient
to cancel this debt. She stammered a few supplicating words. The
superintendent ordered her to leave the shop on the instant. Besides,
Fantine was only a moderately good workwoman. Overcome with shame, even
more than with despair, she quitted the shop, and returned to her room.
So her fault was now known to every one.

She no longer felt strong enough to say a word. She was advised to
see the mayor; she did not dare. The mayor had given her fifty francs
because he was good, and had dismissed her because he was just. She
bowed before the decision.



CHAPTER IX--MADAME VICTURNIEN'S SUCCESS

So the monk's widow was good for something.

But M. Madeleine had heard nothing of all this. Life is full of just
such combinations of events. M. Madeleine was in the habit of almost
never entering the women's workroom.

At the head of this room he had placed an elderly spinster, whom
the priest had provided for him, and he had full confidence in this
superintendent,--a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright,
full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same
degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving.
M. Madeleine relied wholly on her. The best men are often obliged
to delegate their authority. It was with this full power, and the
conviction that she was doing right, that the superintendent had
instituted the suit, judged, condemned, and executed Fantine.

As regards the fifty francs, she had given them from a fund which M.
Madeleine had intrusted to her for charitable purposes, and for giving
assistance to the workwomen, and of which she rendered no account.

Fantine tried to obtain a situation as a servant in the neighborhood;
she went from house to house. No one would have her. She could not
leave town. The second-hand dealer, to whom she was in debt for her
furniture--and what furniture!--said to her, "If you leave, I will have
you arrested as a thief." The householder, whom she owed for her rent,
said to her, "You are young and pretty; you can pay." She divided the
fifty francs between the landlord and the furniture-dealer, returned to
the latter three-quarters of his goods, kept only necessaries, and found
herself without work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and
still about fifty francs in debt.

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned
twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that
she began to pay the Thénardiers irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned
at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on
little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the
first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to
give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every
two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of
one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by
the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble
creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of
a sou. It ends by being a talent. Fantine acquired this sublime talent,
and regained a little courage.

At this epoch she said to a neighbor, "Bah! I say to myself, by only
sleeping five hours, and working all the rest of the time at my sewing,
I shall always manage to nearly earn my bread. And, then, when one is
sad, one eats less. Well, sufferings, uneasiness, a little bread on one
hand, trouble on the other,--all this will support me."

It would have been a great happiness to have her little girl with her in
this distress. She thought of having her come. But what then! Make her
share her own destitution! And then, she was in debt to the Thénardiers!
How could she pay them? And the journey! How pay for that?

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life
of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious
with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even
towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself
Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

There are many such virtuous people in this lower world; some day they
will be in the world above. This life has a morrow.

At first, Fantine had been so ashamed that she had not dared to go out.

When she was in the street, she divined that people turned round behind
her, and pointed at her; every one stared at her and no one greeted her;
the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh
and soul like a north wind.

It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the
sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns. In Paris, at least, no
one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment. Oh! how she would have
liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!

She was obliged to accustom herself to disrepute, as she had accustomed
herself to indigence. Gradually she decided on her course. At the
expiration of two or three months she shook off her shame, and began to
go about as though there were nothing the matter. "It is all the same to
me," she said.

She went and came, bearing her head well up, with a bitter smile, and
was conscious that she was becoming brazen-faced.

Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed
the distress of "that creature" who, "thanks to her," had been "put back
in her proper place," and congratulated herself. The happiness of the
evil-minded is black.

Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which troubled
her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite, "Just
feel how hot my hands are!"

Nevertheless, when she combed her beautiful hair in the morning with
an old broken comb, and it flowed about her like floss silk, she
experienced a moment of happy coquetry.



CHAPTER X--RESULT OF THE SUCCESS

She had been dismissed towards the end of the winter; the summer passed,
but winter came again. Short days, less work. Winter: no warmth,
no light, no noonday, the evening joining on to the morning, fogs,
twilight; the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at it. The
sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. The sun has the air
of a beggar. A frightful season! Winter changes the water of heaven and
the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harrassed her.

Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thénardiers, who
were not promptly paid, wrote to her constantly letters whose contents
drove her to despair, and whose carriage ruined her. One day they wrote
to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather,
that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least
ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her
hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber's shop at the
corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair
fell to her knees.

"What splendid hair!" exclaimed the barber.

"How much will you give me for it?" said she.

"Ten francs."

"Cut it off."

She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Thénardiers. This
petticoat made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money that they
wanted. They gave the petticoat to Éponine. The poor Lark continued to
shiver.

Fantine thought: "My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my
hair." She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head, and
in which she was still pretty.

Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine's heart.

When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate
every one about her. She had long shared the universal veneration for
Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he
who had discharged her, that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she
came to hate him also, and most of all. When she passed the factory in
working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to
laugh and sing.

An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion
said, "There's a girl who will come to a bad end."

She took a lover, the first who offered, a man whom she did not love,
out of bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a miserable scamp,
a sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who
abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.

She adored her child.

The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more
radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart. She said,
"When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;" and she laughed. Her
cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.

One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter couched in the
following terms: "Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the rounds
of the neighborhood. A miliary fever, they call it. Expensive drugs are
required. This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. If you
do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the little one will
be dead."

She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: "Ah! they are
good! Forty francs! the idea! That makes two napoleons! Where do they
think I am to get them? These peasants are stupid, truly."

Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the
letter once more. Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running and
leaping and still laughing.

Some one met her and said to her, "What makes you so gay?"

She replied: "A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have
written to me. They demand forty francs of me. So much for you, you
peasants!"

As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around
a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed
in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds,
who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and
elixirs.

Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at
the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for
respectable people. The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl,
and suddenly exclaimed: "You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who
are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a
gold napoleon apiece for them."

"What are my palettes?" asked Fantine.

"The palettes," replied the dental professor, "are the front teeth, the
two upper ones."

"How horrible!" exclaimed Fantine.

"Two napoleons!" grumbled a toothless old woman who was present. "Here's
a lucky girl!"

Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse
voice of the man shouting to her: "Reflect, my beauty! two napoleons;
they may prove of service. If your heart bids you, come this evening to
the inn of the _Tillac d'Argent_; you will find me there."

Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to
her good neighbor Marguerite: "Can you understand such a thing? Is he
not an abominable man? How can they allow such people to go about the
country! Pull out my two front teeth! Why, I should be horrible! My hair
will grow again, but my teeth! Ah! what a monster of a man! I should
prefer to throw myself head first on the pavement from the fifth story!
He told me that he should be at the _Tillac d'Argent_ this evening."

"And what did he offer?" asked Marguerite.

"Two napoleons."

"That makes forty francs."

"Yes," said Fantine; "that makes forty francs."

She remained thoughtful, and began her work. At the expiration of a
quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to read the Thénardiers'
letter once more on the staircase.

On her return, she said to Marguerite, who was at work beside her:--

"What is a miliary fever? Do you know?"

"Yes," answered the old spinster; "it is a disease."

"Does it require many drugs?"

"Oh! terrible drugs."

"How does one get it?"

"It is a malady that one gets without knowing how."

"Then it attacks children?"

"Children in particular."

"Do people die of it?"

"They may," said Marguerite.

Fantine left the room and went to read her letter once more on the
staircase.

That evening she went out, and was seen to turn her steps in the
direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are situated.

The next morning, when Marguerite entered Fantine's room before
daylight,--for they always worked together, and in this manner used only
one candle for the two,--she found Fantine seated on her bed, pale and
frozen. She had not lain down. Her cap had fallen on her knees.
Her candle had burned all night, and was almost entirely consumed.
Marguerite halted on the threshold, petrified at this tremendous
wastefulness, and exclaimed:--

"Lord! the candle is all burned out! Something has happened."

Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her her head bereft of its
hair.

Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.

"Jesus!" said Marguerite, "what is the matter with you, Fantine?"

"Nothing," replied Fantine. "Quite the contrary. My child will not die
of that frightful malady, for lack of succor. I am content."

So saying, she pointed out to the spinster two napoleons which were
glittering on the table.

"Ah! Jesus God!" cried Marguerite. "Why, it is a fortune! Where did you
get those louis d'or?"

"I got them," replied Fantine.

At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance. It
was a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips, and
she had a black hole in her mouth.

The two teeth had been extracted.

She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.

After all it was a ruse of the Thénardiers to obtain money. Cosette was
not ill.

Fantine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since quitted
her cell on the second floor for an attic with only a latch to fasten
it, next the roof; one of those attics whose extremity forms an angle
with the floor, and knocks you on the head every instant. The poor
occupant can reach the end of his chamber as he can the end of his
destiny, only by bending over more and more.

She had no longer a bed; a rag which she called her coverlet, a mattress
on the floor, and a seatless chair still remained. A little rosebush
which she had, had dried up, forgotten, in one corner. In the other
corner was a butter-pot to hold water, which froze in winter, and in
which the various levels of the water remained long marked by these
circles of ice. She had lost her shame; she lost her coquetry. A final
sign. She went out, with dirty caps. Whether from lack of time or from
indifference, she no longer mended her linen. As the heels wore out,
she dragged her stockings down into her shoes. This was evident from the
perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her bodice, which was old and worn
out, with scraps of calico which tore at the slightest movement. The
people to whom she was indebted made "scenes" and gave her no peace.
She found them in the street, she found them again on her staircase. She
passed many a night weeping and thinking. Her eyes were very bright,
and she felt a steady pain in her shoulder towards the top of the
left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. She deeply hated Father
Madeleine, but made no complaint. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but
a contractor for the work of prisons, who made the prisoners work at a
discount, suddenly made prices fall, which reduced the daily earnings
of working-women to nine sous. Seventeen hours of toil, and nine sous a
day! Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The second-hand dealer,
who had taken back nearly all his furniture, said to her incessantly,
"When will you pay me, you hussy?" What did they want of her, good God!
She felt that she was being hunted, and something of the wild beast
developed in her. About the same time, Thénardier wrote to her that he
had waited with decidedly too much amiability and that he must have a
hundred francs at once; otherwise he would turn little Cosette out of
doors, convalescent as she was from her heavy illness, into the cold and
the streets, and that she might do what she liked with herself, and die
if she chose. "A hundred francs," thought Fantine. "But in what trade
can one earn a hundred sous a day?"

"Come!" said she, "let us sell what is left."

The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.



CHAPTER XI--CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave.

From whom? From misery.

From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul
for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.

The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does
not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from
European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs
only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution.

It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty,
maternity. This is not one of the least of man's disgraces.

At the point in this melancholy drama which we have now reached, nothing
is left to Fantine of that which she had formerly been.

She has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold.
She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and
dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word
for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has
felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered
everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with
that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep.
She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all
the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that
is soaked.

At least, she believes it to be so; but it is an error to imagine that
fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything
whatever.

Alas! What are all these fates, driven on pell-mell? Whither are they
going? Why are they thus?

He who knows that sees the whole of the shadow.

He is alone. His name is God.



CHAPTER XII--M. BAMATABOIS'S INACTIVITY

There is in all small towns, and there was at M. sur M. in particular,
a class of young men who nibble away an income of fifteen hundred
francs with the same air with which their prototypes devour two hundred
thousand francs a year in Paris. These are beings of the great neuter
species: impotent men, parasites, cyphers, who have a little land, a
little folly, a little wit; who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and
who think themselves gentlemen in the dram-shop; who say, "My fields,
my peasants, my woods"; who hiss actresses at the theatre to prove that
they are persons of taste; quarrel with the officers of the garrison
to prove that they are men of war; hunt, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of
tobacco, play billiards, stare at travellers as they descend from the
diligence, live at the café, dine at the inn, have a dog which eats the
bones under the table, and a mistress who eats the dishes on the table;
who stick at a sou, exaggerate the fashions, admire tragedy, despise
women, wear out their old boots, copy London through Paris, and Paris
through the medium of Pont-à-Mousson, grow old as dullards, never work,
serve no use, and do no great harm.

M. Félix Tholomyès, had he remained in his own province and never beheld
Paris, would have been one of these men.

If they were richer, one would say, "They are dandies;" if they were
poorer, one would say, "They are idlers." They are simply men without
employment. Among these unemployed there are bores, the bored, dreamers,
and some knaves.

At that period a dandy was composed of a tall collar, a big cravat, a
watch with trinkets, three vests of different colors, worn one on top of
the other--the red and blue inside; of a short-waisted olive coat, with
a codfish tail, a double row of silver buttons set close to each other
and running up to the shoulder; and a pair of trousers of a lighter
shade of olive, ornamented on the two seams with an indefinite, but
always uneven, number of lines, varying from one to eleven--a limit
which was never exceeded. Add to this, high shoes with little irons
on the heels, a tall hat with a narrow brim, hair worn in a tuft, an
enormous cane, and conversation set off by puns of Potier. Over all,
spurs and a mustache. At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois,
and spurs the pedestrian.

The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of
mustaches.

It was the period of the conflict of the republics of South America with
the King of Spain, of Bolivar against Morillo. Narrow-brimmed hats
were royalist, and were called _morillos_; liberals wore hats with wide
brims, which were called _bolivars_.

Eight or ten months, then, after that which is related in the preceding
pages, towards the first of January, 1823, on a snowy evening, one of
these dandies, one of these unemployed, a "right thinker," for he wore
a morillo, and was, moreover, warmly enveloped in one of those large
cloaks which completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was
amusing himself by tormenting a creature who was prowling about in a
ball-dress, with neck uncovered and flowers in her hair, in front of
the officers' café. This dandy was smoking, for he was decidedly
fashionable.

Each time that the woman passed in front of him, he bestowed on her,
together with a puff from his cigar, some apostrophe which he considered
witty and mirthful, such as, "How ugly you are!--Will you get out of my
sight?--You have no teeth!" etc., etc. This gentleman was known as M.
Bamatabois. The woman, a melancholy, decorated spectre which went and
came through the snow, made him no reply, did not even glance at him,
and nevertheless continued her promenade in silence, and with a sombre
regularity, which brought her every five minutes within reach of this
sarcasm, like the condemned soldier who returns under the rods. The
small effect which he produced no doubt piqued the lounger; and taking
advantage of a moment when her back was turned, he crept up behind her
with the gait of a wolf, and stifling his laugh, bent down, picked up a
handful of snow from the pavement, and thrust it abruptly into her back,
between her bare shoulders. The woman uttered a roar, whirled round,
gave a leap like a panther, and hurled herself upon the man, burying her
nails in his face, with the most frightful words which could fall from
the guard-room into the gutter. These insults, poured forth in a voice
roughened by brandy, did, indeed, proceed in hideous wise from a mouth
which lacked its two front teeth. It was Fantine.

At the noise thus produced, the officers ran out in throngs from the
café, passers-by collected, and a large and merry circle, hooting and
applauding, was formed around this whirlwind composed of two beings,
whom there was some difficulty in recognizing as a man and a woman: the
man struggling, his hat on the ground; the woman striking out with feet
and fists, bareheaded, howling, minus hair and teeth, livid with wrath,
horrible.

Suddenly a man of lofty stature emerged vivaciously from the crowd,
seized the woman by her satin bodice, which was covered with mud, and
said to her, "Follow me!"

The woman raised her head; her furious voice suddenly died away. Her
eyes were glassy; she turned pale instead of livid, and she trembled
with a quiver of terror. She had recognized Javert.

The dandy took advantage of the incident to make his escape.



CHAPTER XIII--THE SOLUTION OF SOME QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE
MUNICIPAL POLICE

Javert thrust aside the spectators, broke the circle, and set out
with long strides towards the police station, which is situated at the
extremity of the square, dragging the wretched woman after him. She
yielded mechanically. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The cloud of
spectators followed, jesting, in a paroxysm of delight. Supreme misery
an occasion for obscenity.

On arriving at the police station, which was a low room, warmed by a
stove, with a glazed and grated door opening on the street, and guarded
by a detachment, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and shut
the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who
raised themselves on tiptoe, and craned their necks in front of the
thick glass of the station-house, in their effort to see. Curiosity is a
sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.

On entering, Fantine fell down in a corner, motionless and mute,
crouching down like a terrified dog.

The sergeant of the guard brought a lighted candle to the table. Javert
seated himself, drew a sheet of stamped paper from his pocket, and began
to write.

This class of women is consigned by our laws entirely to the discretion
of the police. The latter do what they please, punish them, as seems
good to them, and confiscate at their will those two sorry things which
they entitle their industry and their liberty. Javert was impassive; his
grave face betrayed no emotion whatever. Nevertheless, he was seriously
and deeply preoccupied. It was one of those moments when he was
exercising without control, but subject to all the scruples of a severe
conscience, his redoubtable discretionary power. At that moment he was
conscious that his police agent's stool was a tribunal. He was entering
judgment. He judged and condemned. He summoned all the ideas which could
possibly exist in his mind, around the great thing which he was doing.
The more he examined the deed of this woman, the more shocked he felt.
It was evident that he had just witnessed the commission of a crime.
He had just beheld, yonder, in the street, society, in the person of a
freeholder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature who was
outside all pales. A prostitute had made an attempt on the life of a
citizen. He had seen that, he, Javert. He wrote in silence.

When he had finished he signed the paper, folded it, and said to the
sergeant of the guard, as he handed it to him, "Take three men and
conduct this creature to jail."

Then, turning to Fantine, "You are to have six months of it." The
unhappy woman shuddered.

"Six months! six months of prison!" she exclaimed. "Six months in which
to earn seven sous a day! But what will become of Cosette? My daughter!
my daughter! But I still owe the Thénardiers over a hundred francs; do
you know that, Monsieur Inspector?"

She dragged herself across the damp floor, among the muddy boots of all
those men, without rising, with clasped hands, and taking great strides
on her knees.

"Monsieur Javert," said she, "I beseech your mercy. I assure you that
I was not in the wrong. If you had seen the beginning, you would have
seen. I swear to you by the good God that I was not to blame! That
gentleman, the bourgeois, whom I do not know, put snow in my back. Has
any one the right to put snow down our backs when we are walking along
peaceably, and doing no harm to any one? I am rather ill, as you see.
And then, he had been saying impertinent things to me for a long time:
'You are ugly! you have no teeth!' I know well that I have no longer
those teeth. I did nothing; I said to myself, 'The gentleman is amusing
himself.' I was honest with him; I did not speak to him. It was at that
moment that he put the snow down my back. Monsieur Javert, good Monsieur
Inspector! is there not some person here who saw it and can tell you
that this is quite true? Perhaps I did wrong to get angry. You know that
one is not master of one's self at the first moment. One gives way to
vivacity; and then, when some one puts something cold down your
back just when you are not expecting it! I did wrong to spoil that
gentleman's hat. Why did he go away? I would ask his pardon. Oh, my God!
It makes no difference to me whether I ask his pardon. Do me the favor
to-day, for this once, Monsieur Javert. Hold! you do not know that in
prison one can earn only seven sous a day; it is not the government's
fault, but seven sous is one's earnings; and just fancy, I must pay
one hundred francs, or my little girl will be sent to me. Oh, my God!
I cannot have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette! Oh, my
little angel of the Holy Virgin! what will become of her, poor creature?
I will tell you: it is the Thénardiers, inn-keepers, peasants; and such
people are unreasonable. They want money. Don't put me in prison! You
see, there is a little girl who will be turned out into the street to
get along as best she may, in the very heart of the winter; and you must
have pity on such a being, my good Monsieur Javert. If she were older,
she might earn her living; but it cannot be done at that age. I am not a
bad woman at bottom. It is not cowardliness and gluttony that have made
me what I am. If I have drunk brandy, it was out of misery. I do not
love it; but it benumbs the senses. When I was happy, it was only
necessary to glance into my closets, and it would have been evident that
I was not a coquettish and untidy woman. I had linen, a great deal of
linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!"

She spoke thus, rent in twain, shaken with sobs, blinded with tears,
her neck bare, wringing her hands, and coughing with a dry, short cough,
stammering softly with a voice of agony. Great sorrow is a divine and
terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy. At that moment Fantine had
become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly
kissed the police agent's coat. She would have softened a heart of
granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened.

"Come!" said Javert, "I have heard you out. Have you entirely finished?
You will get six months. Now march! The Eternal Father in person could
do nothing more."

At these solemn words, _"the Eternal Father in person could do nothing
more,"_ she understood that her fate was sealed. She sank down,
murmuring, "Mercy!"

Javert turned his back.

The soldiers seized her by the arms.

A few moments earlier a man had entered, but no one had paid any heed
to him. He shut the door, leaned his back against it, and listened to
Fantine's despairing supplications.

At the instant when the soldiers laid their hands upon the unfortunate
woman, who would not rise, he emerged from the shadow, and said:--

"One moment, if you please."

Javert raised his eyes and recognized M. Madeleine. He removed his hat,
and, saluting him with a sort of aggrieved awkwardness:--

"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor--"

The words "Mr. Mayor" produced a curious effect upon Fantine. She rose
to her feet with one bound, like a spectre springing from the earth,
thrust aside the soldiers with both arms, walked straight up to M.
Madeleine before any one could prevent her, and gazing intently at him,
with a bewildered air, she cried:--

"Ah! so it is you who are M. le Maire!"

Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face.

M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said:--

"Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty."

Javert felt that he was on the verge of going mad. He experienced at
that moment, blow upon blow and almost simultaneously, the most violent
emotions which he had ever undergone in all his life. To see a woman of
the town spit in the mayor's face was a thing so monstrous that, in his
most daring flights of fancy, he would have regarded it as a sacrilege
to believe it possible. On the other hand, at the very bottom of his
thought, he made a hideous comparison as to what this woman was, and as
to what this mayor might be; and then he, with horror, caught a glimpse
of I know not what simple explanation of this prodigious attack. But
when he beheld that mayor, that magistrate, calmly wipe his face and
say, _"Set this woman at liberty,"_ he underwent a sort of intoxication
of amazement; thought and word failed him equally; the sum total of
possible astonishment had been exceeded in his case. He remained mute.

The words had produced no less strange an effect on Fantine. She raised
her bare arm, and clung to the damper of the stove, like a person who
is reeling. Nevertheless, she glanced about her, and began to speak in a
low voice, as though talking to herself:--

"At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six
months! Who said that? It is not possible that any one could have said
that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a
mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be
set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me
go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the
cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! all
because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that
is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her
work honestly! Then I could no longer earn enough, and all this misery
followed. In the first place, there is one improvement which these
gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison
contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you
see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to
nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become
whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually
forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that
blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief. After that I stamped on
that gentleman's hat in front of the officers' café; but he had spoiled
my whole dress with snow. We women have but one silk dress for evening
wear. You see that I did not do wrong deliberately--truly, Monsieur
Javert; and everywhere I behold women who are far more wicked than I,
and who are much happier. O Monsieur Javert! it was you who gave orders
that I am to be set free, was it not? Make inquiries, speak to my
landlord; I am paying my rent now; they will tell you that I am
perfectly honest. Ah! my God! I beg your pardon; I have unintentionally
touched the damper of the stove, and it has made it smoke."

M. Madeleine listened to her with profound attention. While she was
speaking, he fumbled in his waistcoat, drew out his purse and opened
it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine, "How
much did you say that you owed?"

Fantine, who was looking at Javert only, turned towards him:--

"Was I speaking to you?"

Then, addressing the soldiers:--

"Say, you fellows, did you see how I spit in his face? Ah! you old
wretch of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I'm not afraid of
you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert. I am afraid of my good Monsieur
Javert!"

So saying, she turned to the inspector again:--

"And yet, you see, Mr. Inspector, it is necessary to be just. I
understand that you are just, Mr. Inspector; in fact, it is perfectly
simple: a man amuses himself by putting snow down a woman's back, and
that makes the officers laugh; one must divert themselves in some way;
and we--well, we are here for them to amuse themselves with, of course!
And then, you, you come; you are certainly obliged to preserve order,
you lead off the woman who is in the wrong; but on reflection, since you
are a good man, you say that I am to be set at liberty; it is for
the sake of the little one, for six months in prison would prevent my
supporting my child. 'Only, don't do it again, you hussy!' Oh! I won't
do it again, Monsieur Javert! They may do whatever they please to me
now; I will not stir. But to-day, you see, I cried because it hurt me.
I was not expecting that snow from the gentleman at all; and then as I
told you, I am not well; I have a cough; I seem to have a burning ball
in my stomach, and the doctor tells me, 'Take care of yourself.' Here,
feel, give me your hand; don't be afraid--it is here."

She no longer wept, her voice was caressing; she placed Javert's coarse
hand on her delicate, white throat and looked smilingly at him.

All at once she rapidly adjusted her disordered garments, dropped the
folds of her skirt, which had been pushed up as she dragged herself
along, almost to the height of her knee, and stepped towards the door,
saying to the soldiers in a low voice, and with a friendly nod:--

"Children, Monsieur l'Inspecteur has said that I am to be released, and
I am going."

She laid her hand on the latch of the door. One step more and she would
be in the street.

Javert up to that moment had remained erect, motionless, with his eyes
fixed on the ground, cast athwart this scene like some displaced statue,
which is waiting to be put away somewhere.

The sound of the latch roused him. He raised his head with an expression
of sovereign authority, an expression all the more alarming in
proportion as the authority rests on a low level, ferocious in the wild
beast, atrocious in the man of no estate.

"Sergeant!" he cried, "don't you see that that jade is walking off! Who
bade you let her go?"

"I," said Madeleine.

Fantine trembled at the sound of Javert's voice, and let go of the latch
as a thief relinquishes the article which he has stolen. At the sound
of Madeleine's voice she turned around, and from that moment forth she
uttered no word, nor dared so much as to breathe freely, but her glance
strayed from Madeleine to Javert, and from Javert to Madeleine in turn,
according to which was speaking.

It was evident that Javert must have been exasperated beyond measure
before he would permit himself to apostrophize the sergeant as he
had done, after the mayor's suggestion that Fantine should be set at
liberty. Had he reached the point of forgetting the mayor's presence?
Had he finally declared to himself that it was impossible that any
"authority" should have given such an order, and that the mayor must
certainly have said one thing by mistake for another, without intending
it? Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the
past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to
supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should
be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a
magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and
that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government,
society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?

However that may be, when M. Madeleine uttered that word, _I_, as we
have just heard, Police Inspector Javert was seen to turn toward the
mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, and a look of despair, his whole body
agitated by an imperceptible quiver and an unprecedented occurrence, and
say to him, with downcast eyes but a firm voice:--

"Mr. Mayor, that cannot be."

"Why not?" said M. Madeleine.

"This miserable woman has insulted a citizen."

"Inspector Javert," replied the mayor, in a calm and conciliating tone,
"listen. You are an honest man, and I feel no hesitation in explaining
matters to you. Here is the true state of the case: I was passing
through the square just as you were leading this woman away; there were
still groups of people standing about, and I made inquiries and learned
everything; it was the townsman who was in the wrong and who should have
been arrested by properly conducted police."

Javert retorted:--

"This wretch has just insulted Monsieur le Maire."

"That concerns me," said M. Madeleine. "My own insult belongs to me, I
think. I can do what I please about it."

"I beg Monsieur le Maire's pardon. The insult is not to him but to the
law."

"Inspector Javert," replied M. Madeleine, "the highest law is
conscience. I have heard this woman; I know what I am doing."

"And I, Mr. Mayor, do not know what I see."

"Then content yourself with obeying."

"I am obeying my duty. My duty demands that this woman shall serve six
months in prison."

M. Madeleine replied gently:--

"Heed this well; she will not serve a single day."

At this decisive word, Javert ventured to fix a searching look on the
mayor and to say, but in a tone of voice that was still profoundly
respectful:--

"I am sorry to oppose Monsieur le Maire; it is for the first time in my
life, but he will permit me to remark that I am within the bounds of my
authority. I confine myself, since Monsieur le Maire desires it, to the
question of the gentleman. I was present. This woman flung herself
on Monsieur Bamatabnois, who is an elector and the proprietor of that
handsome house with a balcony, which forms the corner of the esplanade,
three stories high and entirely of cut stone. Such things as there are
in the world! In any case, Monsieur le Maire, this is a question of
police regulations in the streets, and concerns me, and I shall detain
this woman Fantine."

Then M. Madeleine folded his arms, and said in a severe voice which no
one in the town had heard hitherto:--

"The matter to which you refer is one connected with the municipal
police. According to the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and
sixty-six of the code of criminal examination, I am the judge. I order
that this woman shall be set at liberty."

Javert ventured to make a final effort.

"But, Mr. Mayor--"

"I refer you to article eighty-one of the law of the 13th of December,
1799, in regard to arbitrary detention."

"Monsieur le Maire, permit me--"

"Not another word."

"But--"

"Leave the room," said M. Madeleine.

Javert received the blow erect, full in the face, in his breast, like
a Russian soldier. He bowed to the very earth before the mayor and left
the room.

Fantine stood aside from the door and stared at him in amazement as he
passed.

Nevertheless, she also was the prey to a strange confusion. She had just
seen herself a subject of dispute between two opposing powers. She had
seen two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul,
her child, in combat before her very eyes; one of these men was drawing
her towards darkness, the other was leading her back towards the light.
In this conflict, viewed through the exaggerations of terror, these two
men had appeared to her like two giants; the one spoke like her demon,
the other like her good angel. The angel had conquered the demon, and,
strange to say, that which made her shudder from head to foot was
the fact that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she
abhorred, that mayor whom she had so long regarded as the author of all
her woes, that Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had insulted
him in so hideous a fashion, he had saved her! Had she, then, been
mistaken? Must she change her whole soul? She did not know; she
trembled. She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and
at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of
hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable,
indescribable, which was both joy, confidence and love, dawn in her
heart.

When Javert had taken his departure, M. Madeleine turned to her and said
to her in a deliberate voice, like a serious man who does not wish to
weep and who finds some difficulty in speaking:--

"I have heard you. I knew nothing about what you have mentioned. I
believe that it is true, and I feel that it is true. I was even ignorant
of the fact that you had left my shop. Why did you not apply to me? But
here; I will pay your debts, I will send for your child, or you shall go
to her. You shall live here, in Paris, or where you please. I undertake
the care of your child and yourself. You shall not work any longer if
you do not like. I will give all the money you require. You shall be
honest and happy once more. And listen! I declare to you that if all
is as you say,--and I do not doubt it,--you have never ceased to be
virtuous and holy in the sight of God. Oh! poor woman."

This was more than Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To leave this
life of infamy. To live free, rich, happy, respectable with Cosette; to
see all these realities of paradise blossom of a sudden in the midst of
her misery. She stared stupidly at this man who was talking to her, and
could only give vent to two or three sobs, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"

Her limbs gave way beneath her, she knelt in front of M. Madeleine, and
before he could prevent her he felt her grasp his hand and press her
lips to it.

Then she fainted.



BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT



CHAPTER I--THE BEGINNING OF REPOSE

M. Madeleine had Fantine removed to that infirmary which he had
established in his own house. He confided her to the sisters, who put
her to bed. A burning fever had come on. She passed a part of the night
in delirium and raving. At length, however, she fell asleep.

On the morrow, towards midday, Fantine awoke. She heard some one
breathing close to her bed; she drew aside the curtain and saw M.
Madeleine standing there and looking at something over her head. His
gaze was full of pity, anguish, and supplication. She followed its
direction, and saw that it was fixed on a crucifix which was nailed to
the wall.

Thenceforth, M. Madeleine was transfigured in Fantine's eyes. He seemed
to her to be clothed in light. He was absorbed in a sort of prayer. She
gazed at him for a long time without daring to interrupt him. At last
she said timidly:--

"What are you doing?"

M. Madeleine had been there for an hour. He had been waiting for Fantine
to awake. He took her hand, felt of her pulse, and replied:--

"How do you feel?"

"Well, I have slept," she replied; "I think that I am better. It is
nothing."

He answered, responding to the first question which she had put to him
as though he had just heard it:--

"I was praying to the martyr there on high."

And he added in his own mind, "For the martyr here below."

M. Madeleine had passed the night and the morning in making inquiries.
He knew all now. He knew Fantine's history in all its heart-rending
details. He went on:--

"You have suffered much, poor mother. Oh! do not complain; you now have
the dowry of the elect. It is thus that men are transformed into angels.
It is not their fault they do not know how to go to work otherwise.
You see this hell from which you have just emerged is the first form of
heaven. It was necessary to begin there."

He sighed deeply. But she smiled on him with that sublime smile in which
two teeth were lacking.

That same night, Javert wrote a letter. The next morning be posted it
himself at the office of M. sur M. It was addressed to Paris, and the
superscription ran: _To Monsieur Chabouillet, Secretary of Monsieur le
Préfet of Police_. As the affair in the station-house had been bruited
about, the post-mistress and some other persons who saw the letter
before it was sent off, and who recognized Javert's handwriting on the
cover, thought that he was sending in his resignation.

M. Madeleine made haste to write to the Thénardiers. Fantine owed
them one hundred and twenty francs. He sent them three hundred francs,
telling them to pay themselves from that sum, and to fetch the child
instantly to M. sur M., where her sick mother required her presence.

This dazzled Thénardier. "The devil!" said the man to his wife; "don't
let's allow the child to go. This lark is going to turn into a milch
cow. I see through it. Some ninny has taken a fancy to the mother."

He replied with a very well drawn-up bill for five hundred and some odd
francs. In this memorandum two indisputable items figured up over three
hundred francs,--one for the doctor, the other for the apothecary
who had attended and physicked Éponine and Azelma through two long
illnesses. Cosette, as we have already said, had not been ill. It was
only a question of a trifling substitution of names. At the foot of
the memorandum Thénardier wrote, _Received on account, three hundred
francs_.

M. Madeleine immediately sent three hundred francs more, and wrote,
"Make haste to bring Cosette."

"Christi!" said Thénardier, "let's not give up the child."

In the meantime, Fantine did not recover. She still remained in the
infirmary.

The sisters had at first only received and nursed "that woman" with
repugnance. Those who have seen the bas-reliefs of Rheims will recall
the inflation of the lower lip of the wise virgins as they survey the
foolish virgins. The ancient scorn of the vestals for the ambubajæ is
one of the most profound instincts of feminine dignity; the sisters
felt it with the double force contributed by religion. But in a few days
Fantine disarmed them. She said all kinds of humble and gentle things,
and the mother in her provoked tenderness. One day the sisters heard
her say amid her fever: "I have been a sinner; but when I have my child
beside me, it will be a sign that God has pardoned me. While I was
leading a bad life, I should not have liked to have my Cosette with me;
I could not have borne her sad, astonished eyes. It was for her sake
that I did evil, and that is why God pardons me. I shall feel the
benediction of the good God when Cosette is here. I shall gaze at her;
it will do me good to see that innocent creature. She knows nothing at
all. She is an angel, you see, my sisters. At that age the wings have
not fallen off."

M. Madeleine went to see her twice a day, and each time she asked him:--

"Shall I see my Cosette soon?"

He answered:--

"To-morrow, perhaps. She may arrive at any moment. I am expecting her."

And the mother's pale face grew radiant.

"Oh!" she said, "how happy I am going to be!"

We have just said that she did not recover her health. On the contrary,
her condition seemed to become more grave from week to week. That
handful of snow applied to her bare skin between her shoulder-blades had
brought about a sudden suppression of perspiration, as a consequence of
which the malady which had been smouldering within her for many years
was violently developed at last. At that time people were beginning to
follow the fine Laënnec's fine suggestions in the study and treatment of
chest maladies. The doctor sounded Fantine's chest and shook his head.

M. Madeleine said to the doctor:--

"Well?"

"Has she not a child which she desires to see?" said the doctor.

"Yes."

"Well! Make haste and get it here!"

M. Madeleine shuddered.

Fantine inquired:--

"What did the doctor say?"

M. Madeleine forced himself to smile.

"He said that your child was to be brought speedily. That that would
restore your health."

"Oh!" she rejoined, "he is right! But what do those Thénardiers mean
by keeping my Cosette from me! Oh! she is coming. At last I behold
happiness close beside me!"

In the meantime Thénardier did not "let go of the child," and gave a
hundred insufficient reasons for it. Cosette was not quite well enough
to take a journey in the winter. And then, there still remained some
petty but pressing debts in the neighborhood, and they were collecting
the bills for them, etc., etc.

"I shall send some one to fetch Cosette!" said Father Madeleine. "If
necessary, I will go myself."

He wrote the following letter to Fantine's dictation, and made her sign
it:--


"MONSIEUR THÉNARDIER:--          You will deliver Cosette to this person.
          You will be paid for all the little things.
          I have the honor to salute you with respect.
                                                  "FANTINE."

In the meantime a serious incident occurred. Carve as we will the
mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny
constantly reappears in it.



CHAPTER II--HOW JEAN MAY BECOME CHAMP

One morning M. Madeleine was in his study, occupied in arranging in
advance some pressing matters connected with the mayor's office, in case
he should decide to take the trip to Montfermeil, when he was informed
that Police Inspector Javert was desirous of speaking with him.
Madeleine could not refrain from a disagreeable impression on hearing
this name. Javert had avoided him more than ever since the affair of the
police-station, and M. Madeleine had not seen him.

"Admit him," he said.

Javert entered.

M. Madeleine had retained his seat near the fire, pen in hand, his eyes
fixed on the docket which he was turning over and annotating, and which
contained the trials of the commission on highways for the infraction of
police regulations. He did not disturb himself on Javert's account. He
could not help thinking of poor Fantine, and it suited him to be glacial
in his manner.

Javert bestowed a respectful salute on the mayor, whose back was turned
to him. The mayor did not look at him, but went on annotating this
docket.

Javert advanced two or three paces into the study, and halted, without
breaking the silence.

If any physiognomist who had been familiar with Javert, and who had
made a lengthy study of this savage in the service of civilization,
this singular composite of the Roman, the Spartan, the monk, and the
corporal, this spy who was incapable of a lie, this unspotted police
agent--if any physiognomist had known his secret and long-cherished
aversion for M. Madeleine, his conflict with the mayor on the subject of
Fantine, and had examined Javert at that moment, he would have said to
himself, "What has taken place?" It was evident to any one acquainted
with that clear, upright, sincere, honest, austere, and ferocious
conscience, that Javert had but just gone through some great interior
struggle. Javert had nothing in his soul which he had not also in his
countenance. Like violent people in general, he was subject to abrupt
changes of opinion. His physiognomy had never been more peculiar and
startling. On entering he bowed to M. Madeleine with a look in which
there was neither rancor, anger, nor distrust; he halted a few paces in
the rear of the mayor's arm-chair, and there he stood, perfectly erect,
in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness
of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he
waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine
humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with
eyes cast down, and an expression which was half-way between that of a
soldier in the presence of his officer and a criminal in the presence
of his judge, until it should please the mayor to turn round. All the
sentiments as well as all the memories which one might have attributed
to him had disappeared. That face, as impenetrable and simple as
granite, no longer bore any trace of anything but a melancholy
depression. His whole person breathed lowliness and firmness and an
indescribable courageous despondency.

At last the mayor laid down his pen and turned half round.

"Well! What is it? What is the matter, Javert?"

Javert remained silent for an instant as though collecting his ideas,
then raised his voice with a sort of sad solemnity, which did not,
however, preclude simplicity.

"This is the matter, Mr. Mayor; a culpable act has been committed."

"What act?"

"An inferior agent of the authorities has failed in respect, and in the
gravest manner, towards a magistrate. I have come to bring the fact to
your knowledge, as it is my duty to do."

"Who is the agent?" asked M. Madeleine.

"I," said Javert.

"You?"

"I."

"And who is the magistrate who has reason to complain of the agent?"

"You, Mr. Mayor."

M. Madeleine sat erect in his arm-chair. Javert went on, with a severe
air and his eyes still cast down.

"Mr. Mayor, I have come to request you to instigate the authorities to
dismiss me."

M. Madeleine opened his mouth in amazement. Javert interrupted him:--

"You will say that I might have handed in my resignation, but that does
not suffice. Handing in one's resignation is honorable. I have failed in
my duty; I ought to be punished; I must be turned out."

And after a pause he added:--

"Mr. Mayor, you were severe with me the other day, and unjustly. Be so
to-day, with justice."

"Come, now! Why?" exclaimed M. Madeleine. "What nonsense is this?
What is the meaning of this? What culpable act have you been guilty of
towards me? What have you done to me? What are your wrongs with regard
to me? You accuse yourself; you wish to be superseded--"

"Turned out," said Javert.

"Turned out; so it be, then. That is well. I do not understand."

"You shall understand, Mr. Mayor."

Javert sighed from the very bottom of his chest, and resumed, still
coldly and sadly:--

"Mr. Mayor, six weeks ago, in consequence of the scene over that woman,
I was furious, and I informed against you."

"Informed against me!"

"At the Prefecture of Police in Paris."

M. Madeleine, who was not in the habit of laughing much oftener than
Javert himself, burst out laughing now:--

"As a mayor who had encroached on the province of the police?"

"As an ex-convict."

The mayor turned livid.

Javert, who had not raised his eyes, went on:--

"I thought it was so. I had had an idea for a long time; a resemblance;
inquiries which you had caused to be made at Faverolles; the strength
of your loins; the adventure with old Fauchelevant; your skill in
marksmanship; your leg, which you drag a little;--I hardly know what
all,--absurdities! But, at all events, I took you for a certain Jean
Valjean."

"A certain--What did you say the name was?"

"Jean Valjean. He was a convict whom I was in the habit of seeing twenty
years ago, when I was adjutant-guard of convicts at Toulon. On leaving
the galleys, this Jean Valjean, as it appears, robbed a bishop; then he
committed another theft, accompanied with violence, on a public highway
on the person of a little Savoyard. He disappeared eight years ago, no
one knows how, and he has been sought, I fancied. In short, I did this
thing! Wrath impelled me; I denounced you at the Prefecture!"

M. Madeleine, who had taken up the docket again several moments before
this, resumed with an air of perfect indifference:--

"And what reply did you receive?"

"That I was mad."

"Well?"

"Well, they were right."

"It is lucky that you recognize the fact."

"I am forced to do so, since the real Jean Valjean has been found."

The sheet of paper which M. Madeleine was holding dropped from his
hand; he raised his head, gazed fixedly at Javert, and said with his
indescribable accent:--

"Ah!"

Javert continued:--

"This is the way it is, Mr. Mayor. It seems that there was in the
neighborhood near Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher an old fellow who was called
Father Champmathieu. He was a very wretched creature. No one paid any
attention to him. No one knows what such people subsist on. Lately, last
autumn, Father Champmathieu was arrested for the theft of some cider
apples from--Well, no matter, a theft had been committed, a wall scaled,
branches of trees broken. My Champmathieu was arrested. He still had
the branch of apple-tree in his hand. The scamp is locked up. Up to
this point it was merely an affair of a misdemeanor. But here is where
Providence intervened.

"The jail being in a bad condition, the examining magistrate finds it
convenient to transfer Champmathieu to Arras, where the departmental
prison is situated. In this prison at Arras there is an ex-convict named
Brevet, who is detained for I know not what, and who has been appointed
turnkey of the house, because of good behavior. Mr. Mayor, no sooner had
Champmathieu arrived than Brevet exclaims: 'Eh! Why, I know that man!
He is a _fagot!_4 Take a good look at me, my good man! You are Jean
Valjean!' 'Jean Valjean! who's Jean Valjean?' Champmathieu feigns
astonishment. 'Don't play the innocent dodge,' says Brevet. 'You are
Jean Valjean! You have been in the galleys of Toulon; it was twenty
years ago; we were there together.' Champmathieu denies it. Parbleu! You
understand. The case is investigated. The thing was well ventilated for
me. This is what they discovered: This Champmathieu had been, thirty
years ago, a pruner of trees in various localities, notably at
Faverolles. There all trace of him was lost. A long time afterwards he
was seen again in Auvergne; then in Paris, where he is said to have been
a wheelwright, and to have had a daughter, who was a laundress; but that
has not been proved. Now, before going to the galleys for theft, what
was Jean Valjean? A pruner of trees. Where? At Faverolles. Another fact.
This Valjean's Christian name was Jean, and his mother's surname was
Mathieu. What more natural to suppose than that, on emerging from the
galleys, he should have taken his mother's name for the purpose of
concealing himself, and have called himself Jean Mathieu? He goes to
Auvergne. The local pronunciation turns _Jean_ into _Chan_--he is called
Chan Mathieu. Our man offers no opposition, and behold him transformed
into Champmathieu. You follow me, do you not? Inquiries were made at
Faverolles. The family of Jean Valjean is no longer there. It is not
known where they have gone. You know that among those classes a family
often disappears. Search was made, and nothing was found. When such
people are not mud, they are dust. And then, as the beginning of the
story dates thirty years back, there is no longer any one at Faverolles
who knew Jean Valjean. Inquiries were made at Toulon. Besides Brevet,
there are only two convicts in existence who have seen Jean Valjean;
they are Cochepaille and Chenildieu, and are sentenced for life.
They are taken from the galleys and confronted with the pretended
Champmathieu. They do not hesitate; he is Jean Valjean for them as well
as for Brevet. The same age,--he is fifty-four,--the same height, the
same air, the same man; in short, it is he. It was precisely at this
moment that I forwarded my denunciation to the Prefecture in Paris. I
was told that I had lost my reason, and that Jean Valjean is at Arras,
in the power of the authorities. You can imagine whether this surprised
me, when I thought that I had that same Jean Valjean here. I write to
the examining judge; he sends for me; Champmathieu is conducted to me--"

"Well?" interposed M. Madeleine.

Javert replied, his face incorruptible, and as melancholy as ever:--

"Mr. Mayor, the truth is the truth. I am sorry; but that man is Jean
Valjean. I recognized him also."

M. Madeleine resumed in, a very low voice:--

"You are sure?"

Javert began to laugh, with that mournful laugh which comes from
profound conviction.

"O! Sure!"

He stood there thoughtfully for a moment, mechanically taking pinches of
powdered wood for blotting ink from the wooden bowl which stood on the
table, and he added:--

"And even now that I have seen the real Jean Valjean, I do not see how I
could have thought otherwise. I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor."

Javert, as he addressed these grave and supplicating words to the man,
who six weeks before had humiliated him in the presence of the whole
station-house, and bade him "leave the room,"--Javert, that haughty man,
was unconsciously full of simplicity and dignity,--M. Madeleine made no
other reply to his prayer than the abrupt question:--

"And what does this man say?"

"Ah! Indeed, Mr. Mayor, it's a bad business. If he is Jean Valjean, he
has his previous conviction against him. To climb a wall, to break a
branch, to purloin apples, is a mischievous trick in a child; for a
man it is a misdemeanor; for a convict it is a crime. Robbing
and housebreaking--it is all there. It is no longer a question of
correctional police; it is a matter for the Court of Assizes. It is no
longer a matter of a few days in prison; it is the galleys for life. And
then, there is the affair with the little Savoyard, who will return, I
hope. The deuce! there is plenty to dispute in the matter, is there not?
Yes, for any one but Jean Valjean. But Jean Valjean is a sly dog. That
is the way I recognized him. Any other man would have felt that things
were getting hot for him; he would struggle, he would cry out--the
kettle sings before the fire; he would not be Jean Valjean, _et
cetera_. But he has not the appearance of understanding; he says, 'I am
Champmathieu, and I won't depart from that!' He has an astonished air,
he pretends to be stupid; it is far better. Oh! the rogue is clever! But
it makes no difference. The proofs are there. He has been recognized by
four persons; the old scamp will be condemned. The case has been taken
to the Assizes at Arras. I shall go there to give my testimony. I have
been summoned."

M. Madeleine had turned to his desk again, and taken up his docket, and
was turning over the leaves tranquilly, reading and writing by turns,
like a busy man. He turned to Javert:--

"That will do, Javert. In truth, all these details interest me but
little. We are wasting our time, and we have pressing business on hand.
Javert, you will betake yourself at once to the house of the woman
Buseaupied, who sells herbs at the corner of the Rue Saint-Saulve. You
will tell her that she must enter her complaint against carter Pierre
Chesnelong. The man is a brute, who came near crushing this woman and
her child. He must be punished. You will then go to M. Charcellay,
Rue Montre-de-Champigny. He complained that there is a gutter on the
adjoining house which discharges rain-water on his premises, and is
undermining the foundations of his house. After that, you will verify
the infractions of police regulations which have been reported to me in
the Rue Guibourg, at Widow Doris's, and Rue du Garraud-Blanc, at Madame
Renée le Bossé's, and you will prepare documents. But I am giving you a
great deal of work. Are you not to be absent? Did you not tell me that
you were going to Arras on that matter in a week or ten days?"

"Sooner than that, Mr. Mayor."

"On what day, then?"

"Why, I thought that I had said to Monsieur le Maire that the case was
to be tried to-morrow, and that I am to set out by diligence to-night."

M. Madeleine made an imperceptible movement.

"And how long will the case last?"

"One day, at the most. The judgment will be pronounced to-morrow evening
at latest. But I shall not wait for the sentence, which is certain; I
shall return here as soon as my deposition has been taken."

"That is well," said M. Madeleine.

And he dismissed Javert with a wave of the hand.

Javert did not withdraw.

"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor," said he.

"What is it now?" demanded M. Madeleine.

"Mr. Mayor, there is still something of which I must remind you."

"What is it?"

"That I must be dismissed."

M. Madeleine rose.

"Javert, you are a man of honor, and I esteem you. You exaggerate your
fault. Moreover, this is an offence which concerns me. Javert, you
deserve promotion instead of degradation. I wish you to retain your
post."

Javert gazed at M. Madeleine with his candid eyes, in whose depths his
not very enlightened but pure and rigid conscience seemed visible, and
said in a tranquil voice:--

"Mr. Mayor, I cannot grant you that."

"I repeat," replied M. Madeleine, "that the matter concerns me."

But Javert, heeding his own thought only, continued:--

"So far as exaggeration is concerned, I am not exaggerating. This is the
way I reason: I have suspected you unjustly. That is nothing. It is our
right to cherish suspicion, although suspicion directed above ourselves
is an abuse. But without proofs, in a fit of rage, with the object
of wreaking my vengeance, I have denounced you as a convict, you, a
respectable man, a mayor, a magistrate! That is serious, very serious. I
have insulted authority in your person, I, an agent of the authorities!
If one of my subordinates had done what I have done, I should have
declared him unworthy of the service, and have expelled him. Well? Stop,
Mr. Mayor; one word more. I have often been severe in the course of my
life towards others. That is just. I have done well. Now, if I were not
severe towards myself, all the justice that I have done would become
injustice. Ought I to spare myself more than others? No! What! I should
be good for nothing but to chastise others, and not myself! Why, I
should be a blackguard! Those who say, 'That blackguard of a Javert!'
would be in the right. Mr. Mayor, I do not desire that you should treat
me kindly; your kindness roused sufficient bad blood in me when it was
directed to others. I want none of it for myself. The kindness which
consists in upholding a woman of the town against a citizen, the police
agent against the mayor, the man who is down against the man who is
up in the world, is what I call false kindness. That is the sort of
kindness which disorganizes society. Good God! it is very easy to be
kind; the difficulty lies in being just. Come! if you had been what I
thought you, I should not have been kind to you, not I! You would have
seen! Mr. Mayor, I must treat myself as I would treat any other man.
When I have subdued malefactors, when I have proceeded with vigor
against rascals, I have often said to myself, 'If you flinch, if I ever
catch you in fault, you may rest at your ease!' I have flinched, I
have caught myself in a fault. So much the worse! Come, discharged,
cashiered, expelled! That is well. I have arms. I will till the soil; it
makes no difference to me. Mr. Mayor, the good of the service demands an
example. I simply require the discharge of Inspector Javert."

All this was uttered in a proud, humble, despairing, yet convinced tone,
which lent indescribable grandeur to this singular, honest man.

"We shall see," said M. Madeleine.

And he offered him his hand.

Javert recoiled, and said in a wild voice:--

"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, but this must not be. A mayor does not offer his
hand to a police spy."

He added between his teeth:--

"A police spy, yes; from the moment when I have misused the police. I am
no more than a police spy."

Then he bowed profoundly, and directed his steps towards the door.

There he wheeled round, and with eyes still downcast:--

"Mr. Mayor," he said, "I shall continue to serve until I am superseded."

He withdrew. M. Madeleine remained thoughtfully listening to the firm,
sure step, which died away on the pavement of the corridor.



BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR



CHAPTER I--SISTER SIMPLICE

The incidents the reader is about to peruse were not all known at M. sur
M. But the small portion of them which became known left such a memory
in that town that a serious gap would exist in this book if we did
not narrate them in their most minute details. Among these details the
reader will encounter two or three improbable circumstances, which we
preserve out of respect for the truth.

On the afternoon following the visit of Javert, M. Madeleine went to see
Fantine according to his wont.

Before entering Fantine's room, he had Sister Simplice summoned.

The two nuns who performed the services of nurse in the infirmary,
Lazariste ladies, like all sisters of charity, bore the names of Sister
Perpétue and Sister Simplice.

Sister Perpétue was an ordinary villager, a sister of charity in a
coarse style, who had entered the service of God as one enters any other
service. She was a nun as other women are cooks. This type is not
so very rare. The monastic orders gladly accept this heavy peasant
earthenware, which is easily fashioned into a Capuchin or an Ursuline.
These rustics are utilized for the rough work of devotion. The
transition from a drover to a Carmelite is not in the least violent;
the one turns into the other without much effort; the fund of ignorance
common to the village and the cloister is a preparation ready at hand,
and places the boor at once on the same footing as the monk: a little
more amplitude in the smock, and it becomes a frock. Sister Perpétue
was a robust nun from Marines near Pontoise, who chattered her patois,
droned, grumbled, sugared the potion according to the bigotry or the
hypocrisy of the invalid, treated her patients abruptly, roughly, was
crabbed with the dying, almost flung God in their faces, stoned their
death agony with prayers mumbled in a rage; was bold, honest, and ruddy.

Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside Sister Perpétue,
she was the taper beside the candle. Vincent de Paul has divinely traced
the features of the Sister of Charity in these admirable words, in which
he mingles as much freedom as servitude: "They shall have for their
convent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room; for
chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the streets of the
town and the wards of the hospitals; for enclosure only obedience; for
gratings only the fear of God; for veil only modesty." This ideal was
realized in the living person of Sister Simplice: she had never been
young, and it seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could
have told Sister Simplice's age. She was a person--we dare not say a
woman--who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold, and who had never lied.
She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than
granite. She touched the unhappy with fingers that were charmingly pure
and fine. There was, so to speak, silence in her speech; she said just
what was necessary, and she possessed a tone of voice which would
have equally edified a confessional or enchanted a drawing-room. This
delicacy accommodated itself to the serge gown, finding in this harsh
contact a continual reminder of heaven and of God. Let us emphasize
one detail. Never to have lied, never to have said, for any interest
whatever, even in indifference, any single thing which was not the
truth, the sacred truth, was Sister Simplice's distinctive trait; it was
the accent of her virtue. She was almost renowned in the congregation
for this imperturbable veracity. The Abbé Sicard speaks of Sister
Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu. However pure and sincere
we may be, we all bear upon our candor the crack of the little, innocent
lie. She did not. Little lie, innocent lie--does such a thing exist? To
lie is the absolute form of evil. To lie a little is not possible: he
who lies, lies the whole lie. To lie is the very face of the demon.
Satan has two names; he is called Satan and Lying. That is what she
thought; and as she thought, so she did. The result was the whiteness
which we have mentioned--a whiteness which covered even her lips and her
eyes with radiance. Her smile was white, her glance was white. There was
not a single spider's web, not a grain of dust, on the glass window of
that conscience. On entering the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had
taken the name of Simplice by special choice. Simplice of Sicily, as we
know, is the saint who preferred to allow both her breasts to be torn
off rather than to say that she had been born at Segesta when she had
been born at Syracuse--a lie which would have saved her. This patron
saint suited this soul.

Sister Simplice, on her entrance into the order, had had two faults
which she had gradually corrected: she had a taste for dainties, and she
liked to receive letters. She never read anything but a book of prayers
printed in Latin, in coarse type. She did not understand Latin, but she
understood the book.

This pious woman had conceived an affection for Fantine, probably
feeling a latent virtue there, and she had devoted herself almost
exclusively to her care.

M. Madeleine took Sister Simplice apart and recommended Fantine to her
in a singular tone, which the sister recalled later on.

On leaving the sister, he approached Fantine.

Fantine awaited M. Madeleine's appearance every day as one awaits a ray
of warmth and joy. She said to the sisters, "I only live when Monsieur
le Maire is here."

She had a great deal of fever that day. As soon as she saw M. Madeleine
she asked him:--

"And Cosette?"

He replied with a smile:--

"Soon."

M. Madeleine was the same as usual with Fantine. Only he remained an
hour instead of half an hour, to Fantine's great delight. He urged every
one repeatedly not to allow the invalid to want for anything. It was
noticed that there was a moment when his countenance became very sombre.
But this was explained when it became known that the doctor had bent
down to his ear and said to him, "She is losing ground fast."

Then he returned to the town-hall, and the clerk observed him
attentively examining a road map of France which hung in his study. He
wrote a few figures on a bit of paper with a pencil.



CHAPTER II--THE PERSPICACITY OF MASTER SCAUFFLAIRE

From the town-hall he betook himself to the extremity of the town, to a
Fleming named Master Scaufflaer, French Scaufflaire, who let out "horses
and cabriolets as desired."

In order to reach this Scaufflaire, the shortest way was to take the
little-frequented street in which was situated the parsonage of the
parish in which M. Madeleine resided. The curé was, it was said, a
worthy, respectable, and sensible man. At the moment when M. Madeleine
arrived in front of the parsonage there was but one passer-by in the
street, and this person noticed this: After the mayor had passed the
priest's house he halted, stood motionless, then turned about, and
retraced his steps to the door of the parsonage, which had an iron
knocker. He laid his hand quickly on the knocker and lifted it; then
he paused again and stopped short, as though in thought, and after
the lapse of a few seconds, instead of allowing the knocker to fall
abruptly, he placed it gently, and resumed his way with a sort of haste
which had not been apparent previously.

M. Madeleine found Master Scaufflaire at home, engaged in stitching a
harness over.

"Master Scaufflaire," he inquired, "have you a good horse?"

"Mr. Mayor," said the Fleming, "all my horses are good. What do you mean
by a good horse?"

"I mean a horse which can travel twenty leagues in a day."

"The deuce!" said the Fleming. "Twenty leagues!"

"Yes."

"Hitched to a cabriolet?"

"Yes."

"And how long can he rest at the end of his journey?"

"He must be able to set out again on the next day if necessary."

"To traverse the same road?"

"Yes."

"The deuce! the deuce! And it is twenty leagues?"

M. Madeleine drew from his pocket the paper on which he had pencilled
some figures. He showed it to the Fleming. The figures were 5, 6, 8½.

"You see," he said, "total, nineteen and a half; as well say twenty
leagues."

"Mr. Mayor," returned the Fleming, "I have just what you want. My little
white horse--you may have seen him pass occasionally; he is a small
beast from Lower Boulonnais. He is full of fire. They wanted to make
a saddle-horse of him at first. Bah! He reared, he kicked, he laid
everybody flat on the ground. He was thought to be vicious, and no one
knew what to do with him. I bought him. I harnessed him to a carriage.
That is what he wanted, sir; he is as gentle as a girl; he goes like the
wind. Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to
be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.'
We must suppose that is what he said to himself."

"And he will accomplish the trip?"

"Your twenty leagues all at a full trot, and in less than eight hours.
But here are the conditions."

"State them."

"In the first place, you will give him half an hour's breathing spell
midway of the road; he will eat; and some one must be by while he is
eating to prevent the stable boy of the inn from stealing his oats; for
I have noticed that in inns the oats are more often drunk by the stable
men than eaten by the horses."

"Some one will be by."

"In the second place--is the cabriolet for Monsieur le Maire?"

"Yes."

"Does Monsieur le Maire know how to drive?"

"Yes."

"Well, Monsieur le Maire will travel alone and without baggage, in order
not to overload the horse?"

"Agreed."

"But as Monsieur le Maire will have no one with him, he will be obliged
to take the trouble himself of seeing that the oats are not stolen."

"That is understood."

"I am to have thirty francs a day. The days of rest to be paid for
also--not a farthing less; and the beast's food to be at Monsieur le
Maire's expense."

M. Madeleine drew three napoleons from his purse and laid them on the
table.

"Here is the pay for two days in advance."

"Fourthly, for such a journey a cabriolet would be too heavy, and would
fatigue the horse. Monsieur le Maire must consent to travel in a little
tilbury that I own."

"I consent to that."

"It is light, but it has no cover."

"That makes no difference to me."

"Has Monsieur le Maire reflected that we are in the middle of winter?"

M. Madeleine did not reply. The Fleming resumed:--

"That it is very cold?"

M. Madeleine preserved silence.

Master Scaufflaire continued:--

"That it may rain?"

M. Madeleine raised his head and said:--

"The tilbury and the horse will be in front of my door to-morrow morning
at half-past four o'clock."

"Of course, Monsieur le Maire," replied Scaufflaire; then, scratching a
speck in the wood of the table with his thumb-nail, he resumed with that
careless air which the Flemings understand so well how to mingle with
their shrewdness:--

"But this is what I am thinking of now: Monsieur le Maire has not told
me where he is going. Where is Monsieur le Maire going?"

He had been thinking of nothing else since the beginning of the
conversation, but he did not know why he had not dared to put the
question.

"Are your horse's forelegs good?" said M. Madeleine.

"Yes, Monsieur le Maire. You must hold him in a little when going down
hill. Are there many descends between here and the place whither you are
going?"

"Do not forget to be at my door at precisely half-past four o'clock
to-morrow morning," replied M. Madeleine; and he took his departure.

The Fleming remained "utterly stupid," as he himself said some time
afterwards.

The mayor had been gone two or three minutes when the door opened again;
it was the mayor once more.

He still wore the same impassive and preoccupied air.

"Monsieur Scaufflaire," said he, "at what sum do you estimate the value
of the horse and tilbury which you are to let to me,--the one bearing
the other?"

"The one dragging the other, Monsieur le Maire," said the Fleming, with
a broad smile.

"So be it. Well?"

"Does Monsieur le Maire wish to purchase them or me?"

"No; but I wish to guarantee you in any case. You shall give me back
the sum at my return. At what value do you estimate your horse and
cabriolet?"

"Five hundred francs, Monsieur le Maire."

"Here it is."

M. Madeleine laid a bank-bill on the table, then left the room; and this
time he did not return.

Master Scaufflaire experienced a frightful regret that he had not said a
thousand francs. Besides the horse and tilbury together were worth but a
hundred crowns.

The Fleming called his wife, and related the affair to her. "Where the
devil could Monsieur le Maire be going?" They held counsel together.
"He is going to Paris," said the wife. "I don't believe it," said the
husband.

M. Madeleine had forgotten the paper with the figures on it, and it lay
on the chimney-piece. The Fleming picked it up and studied it. "Five,
six, eight and a half? That must designate the posting relays." He
turned to his wife:--

"I have found out."

"What?"

"It is five leagues from here to Hesdin, six from Hesdin to Saint-Pol,
eight and a half from Saint-Pol to Arras. He is going to Arras."

Meanwhile, M. Madeleine had returned home. He had taken the longest way
to return from Master Scaufflaire's, as though the parsonage door had
been a temptation for him, and he had wished to avoid it. He ascended
to his room, and there he shut himself up, which was a very simple act,
since he liked to go to bed early. Nevertheless, the portress of the
factory, who was, at the same time, M. Madeleine's only servant, noticed
that the latter's light was extinguished at half-past eight, and she
mentioned it to the cashier when he came home, adding:--

"Is Monsieur le Maire ill? I thought he had a rather singular air."

This cashier occupied a room situated directly under M. Madeleine's
chamber. He paid no heed to the portress's words, but went to bed and
to sleep. Towards midnight he woke up with a start; in his sleep he had
heard a noise above his head. He listened; it was a footstep pacing back
and forth, as though some one were walking in the room above him. He
listened more attentively, and recognized M. Madeleine's step. This
struck him as strange; usually, there was no noise in M. Madeleine's
chamber until he rose in the morning. A moment later the cashier heard
a noise which resembled that of a cupboard being opened, and then shut
again; then a piece of furniture was disarranged; then a pause ensued;
then the step began again. The cashier sat up in bed, quite awake now,
and staring; and through his window-panes he saw the reddish gleam of a
lighted window reflected on the opposite wall; from the direction of the
rays, it could only come from the window of M. Madeleine's chamber. The
reflection wavered, as though it came rather from a fire which had
been lighted than from a candle. The shadow of the window-frame was not
shown, which indicated that the window was wide open. The fact that this
window was open in such cold weather was surprising. The cashier fell
asleep again. An hour or two later he waked again. The same step was
still passing slowly and regularly back and forth overhead.

The reflection was still visible on the wall, but now it was pale and
peaceful, like the reflection of a lamp or of a candle. The window was
still open.

This is what had taken place in M. Madeleine's room.



CHAPTER III--A TEMPEST IN A SKULL

The reader has, no doubt, already divined that M. Madeleine is no other
than Jean Valjean.

We have already gazed into the depths of this conscience; the moment has
now come when we must take another look into it. We do so not without
emotion and trepidation. There is nothing more terrible in existence
than this sort of contemplation. The eye of the spirit can nowhere find
more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself
on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more
mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the
sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is
the inmost recesses of the soul.

To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to
a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would
be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience
is the chaos of chimæras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of
dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium
of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at
certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged
in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that
obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants,
like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and
hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in
Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within
him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his
brain and the actions of his life!

Alighieri one day met with a sinister-looking door, before which he
hesitated. Here is one before us, upon whose threshold we hesitate. Let
us enter, nevertheless.

We have but little to add to what the reader already knows of what had
happened to Jean Valjean after the adventure with Little Gervais. From
that moment forth he was, as we have seen, a totally different man. What
the Bishop had wished to make of him, that he carried out. It was more
than a transformation; it was a transfiguration.

He succeeded in disappearing, sold the Bishop's silver, reserving only
the candlesticks as a souvenir, crept from town to town, traversed
France, came to M. sur M., conceived the idea which we have mentioned,
accomplished what we have related, succeeded in rendering himself safe
from seizure and inaccessible, and, thenceforth, established at M. sur
M., happy in feeling his conscience saddened by the past and the first
half of his existence belied by the last, he lived in peace, reassured
and hopeful, having henceforth only two thoughts,--to conceal his name
and to sanctify his life; to escape men and to return to God.

These two thoughts were so closely intertwined in his mind that
they formed but a single one there; both were equally absorbing and
imperative and ruled his slightest actions. In general, they conspired
to regulate the conduct of his life; they turned him towards the gloom;
they rendered him kindly and simple; they counselled him to the same
things. Sometimes, however, they conflicted. In that case, as the reader
will remember, the man whom all the country of M. sur M. called M.
Madeleine did not hesitate to sacrifice the first to the second--his
security to his virtue. Thus, in spite of all his reserve and all his
prudence, he had preserved the Bishop's candlesticks, worn mourning for
him, summoned and interrogated all the little Savoyards who passed that
way, collected information regarding the families at Faverolles, and
saved old Fauchelevent's life, despite the disquieting insinuations of
Javert. It seemed, as we have already remarked, as though he thought,
following the example of all those who have been wise, holy, and just,
that his first duty was not towards himself.

At the same time, it must be confessed, nothing just like this had yet
presented itself.

Never had the two ideas which governed the unhappy man whose sufferings
we are narrating, engaged in so serious a struggle. He understood this
confusedly but profoundly at the very first words pronounced by Javert,
when the latter entered his study. At the moment when that name, which
he had buried beneath so many layers, was so strangely articulated,
he was struck with stupor, and as though intoxicated with the sinister
eccentricity of his destiny; and through this stupor he felt that
shudder which precedes great shocks. He bent like an oak at the approach
of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt
shadows filled with thunders and lightnings descending upon his head.
As he listened to Javert, the first thought which occurred to him was to
go, to run and denounce himself, to take that Champmathieu out of prison
and place himself there; this was as painful and as poignant as an
incision in the living flesh. Then it passed away, and he said to
himself, "We will see! We will see!" He repressed this first, generous
instinct, and recoiled before heroism.

It would be beautiful, no doubt, after the Bishop's holy words, after
so many years of repentance and abnegation, in the midst of a penitence
admirably begun, if this man had not flinched for an instant, even in
the presence of so terrible a conjecture, but had continued to walk with
the same step towards this yawning precipice, at the bottom of which
lay heaven; that would have been beautiful; but it was not thus. We must
render an account of the things which went on in this soul, and we can
only tell what there was there. He was carried away, at first, by
the instinct of self-preservation; he rallied all his ideas in haste,
stifled his emotions, took into consideration Javert's presence, that
great danger, postponed all decision with the firmness of terror, shook
off thought as to what he had to do, and resumed his calmness as a
warrior picks up his buckler.

He remained in this state during the rest of the day, a whirlwind
within, a profound tranquillity without. He took no "preservative
measures," as they may be called. Everything was still confused, and
jostling together in his brain. His trouble was so great that he could
not perceive the form of a single idea distinctly, and he could have
told nothing about himself, except that he had received a great blow.

He repaired to Fantine's bed of suffering, as usual, and prolonged his
visit, through a kindly instinct, telling himself that he must behave
thus, and recommend her well to the sisters, in case he should be
obliged to be absent himself. He had a vague feeling that he might be
obliged to go to Arras; and without having the least in the world made
up his mind to this trip, he said to himself that being, as he was,
beyond the shadow of any suspicion, there could be nothing out of the
way in being a witness to what was to take place, and he engaged the
tilbury from Scaufflaire in order to be prepared in any event.

He dined with a good deal of appetite.

On returning to his room, he communed with himself.

He examined the situation, and found it unprecedented; so unprecedented
that in the midst of his revery he rose from his chair, moved by some
inexplicable impulse of anxiety, and bolted his door. He feared
lest something more should enter. He was barricading himself against
possibilities.

A moment later he extinguished his light; it embarrassed him.

It seemed to him as though he might be seen.

By whom?

Alas! That on which he desired to close the door had already entered;
that which he desired to blind was staring him in the face,--his
conscience.

His conscience; that is to say, God.

Nevertheless, he deluded himself at first; he had a feeling of security
and of solitude; the bolt once drawn, he thought himself impregnable;
the candle extinguished, he felt himself invisible. Then he took
possession of himself: he set his elbows on the table, leaned his head
on his hand, and began to meditate in the dark.

"Where do I stand? Am not I dreaming? What have I heard? Is it really
true that I have seen that Javert, and that he spoke to me in that
manner? Who can that Champmathieu be? So he resembles me! Is it
possible? When I reflect that yesterday I was so tranquil, and so far
from suspecting anything! What was I doing yesterday at this hour? What
is there in this incident? What will the end be? What is to be done?"

This was the torment in which he found himself. His brain had lost its
power of retaining ideas; they passed like waves, and he clutched his
brow in both hands to arrest them.

Nothing but anguish extricated itself from this tumult which overwhelmed
his will and his reason, and from which he sought to draw proof and
resolution.

His head was burning. He went to the window and threw it wide open.
There were no stars in the sky. He returned and seated himself at the
table.

The first hour passed in this manner.

Gradually, however, vague outlines began to take form and to fix
themselves in his meditation, and he was able to catch a glimpse with
precision of the reality,--not the whole situation, but some of
the details. He began by recognizing the fact that, critical and
extraordinary as was this situation, he was completely master of it.

This only caused an increase of his stupor.

Independently of the severe and religious aim which he had assigned to
his actions, all that he had made up to that day had been nothing but a
hole in which to bury his name. That which he had always feared most of
all in his hours of self-communion, during his sleepless nights, was to
ever hear that name pronounced; he had said to himself, that that would
be the end of all things for him; that on the day when that name made
its reappearance it would cause his new life to vanish from about
him, and--who knows?--perhaps even his new soul within him, also. He
shuddered at the very thought that this was possible. Assuredly, if any
one had said to him at such moments that the hour would come when that
name would ring in his ears, when the hideous words, Jean Valjean, would
suddenly emerge from the darkness and rise in front of him, when that
formidable light, capable of dissipating the mystery in which he had
enveloped himself, would suddenly blaze forth above his head, and that
that name would not menace him, that that light would but produce
an obscurity more dense, that this rent veil would but increase the
mystery, that this earthquake would solidify his edifice, that this
prodigious incident would have no other result, so far as he was
concerned, if so it seemed good to him, than that of rendering his
existence at once clearer and more impenetrable, and that, out of his
confrontation with the phantom of Jean Valjean, the good and worthy
citizen Monsieur Madeleine would emerge more honored, more peaceful, and
more respected than ever--if any one had told him that, he would have
tossed his head and regarded the words as those of a madman. Well, all
this was precisely what had just come to pass; all that accumulation of
impossibilities was a fact, and God had permitted these wild fancies to
become real things!

His revery continued to grow clearer. He came more and more to an
understanding of his position.

It seemed to him that he had but just waked up from some inexplicable
dream, and that he found himself slipping down a declivity in the middle
of the night, erect, shivering, holding back all in vain, on the very
brink of the abyss. He distinctly perceived in the darkness a stranger,
a man unknown to him, whom destiny had mistaken for him, and whom she
was thrusting into the gulf in his stead; in order that the gulf might
close once more, it was necessary that some one, himself or that other
man, should fall into it: he had only let things take their course.

The light became complete, and he acknowledged this to himself: That
his place was empty in the galleys; that do what he would, it was still
awaiting him; that the theft from little Gervais had led him back to it;
that this vacant place would await him, and draw him on until he filled
it; that this was inevitable and fatal; and then he said to himself,
"that, at this moment, he had a substitute; that it appeared that a
certain Champmathieu had that ill luck, and that, as regards himself,
being present in the galleys in the person of that Champmathieu, present
in society under the name of M. Madeleine, he had nothing more to fear,
provided that he did not prevent men from sealing over the head of
that Champmathieu this stone of infamy which, like the stone of the
sepulchre, falls once, never to rise again."

All this was so strange and so violent, that there suddenly took place
in him that indescribable movement, which no man feels more than two
or three times in the course of his life, a sort of convulsion of the
conscience which stirs up all that there is doubtful in the heart, which
is composed of irony, of joy, and of despair, and which may be called an
outburst of inward laughter.

He hastily relighted his candle.

"Well, what then?" he said to himself; "what am I afraid of? What is
there in all that for me to think about? I am safe; all is over. I had
but one partly open door through which my past might invade my life,
and behold that door is walled up forever! That Javert, who has been
annoying me so long; that terrible instinct which seemed to have divined
me, which had divined me--good God! and which followed me everywhere;
that frightful hunting-dog, always making a point at me, is thrown
off the scent, engaged elsewhere, absolutely turned from the trail:
henceforth he is satisfied; he will leave me in peace; he has his Jean
Valjean. Who knows? it is even probable that he will wish to leave town!
And all this has been brought about without any aid from me, and I count
for nothing in it! Ah! but where is the misfortune in this? Upon my
honor, people would think, to see me, that some catastrophe had happened
to me! After all, if it does bring harm to some one, that is not my
fault in the least: it is Providence which has done it all; it is
because it wishes it so to be, evidently. Have I the right to disarrange
what it has arranged? What do I ask now? Why should I meddle? It does
not concern me; what! I am not satisfied: but what more do I want? The
goal to which I have aspired for so many years, the dream of my nights,
the object of my prayers to Heaven,--security,--I have now attained; it
is God who wills it; I can do nothing against the will of God, and why
does God will it? In order that I may continue what I have begun, that I
may do good, that I may one day be a grand and encouraging example, that
it may be said at last, that a little happiness has been attached to
the penance which I have undergone, and to that virtue to which I have
returned. Really, I do not understand why I was afraid, a little while
ago, to enter the house of that good curé, and to ask his advice; this
is evidently what he would have said to me: It is settled; let things
take their course; let the good God do as he likes!"

Thus did he address himself in the depths of his own conscience, bending
over what may be called his own abyss; he rose from his chair, and began
to pace the room: "Come," said he, "let us think no more about it; my
resolve is taken!" but he felt no joy.

Quite the reverse.

One can no more prevent thought from recurring to an idea than one can
the sea from returning to the shore: the sailor calls it the tide; the
guilty man calls it remorse; God upheaves the soul as he does the ocean.

After the expiration of a few moments, do what he would, he resumed the
gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying
that which he would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which
he would have preferred not to hear, yielding to that mysterious power
which said to him: "Think!" as it said to another condemned man, two
thousand years ago, "March on!"

Before proceeding further, and in order to make ourselves fully
understood, let us insist upon one necessary observation.

It is certain that people do talk to themselves; there is no living
being who has not done it. It may even be said that the word is never
a more magnificent mystery than when it goes from thought to conscience
within a man, and when it returns from conscience to thought; it is in
this sense only that the words so often employed in this chapter, _he
said, he exclaimed_, must be understood; one speaks to one's self, talks
to one's self, exclaims to one's self without breaking the external
silence; there is a great tumult; everything about us talks except the
mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less realities because
they are not visible and palpable.

So he asked himself where he stood. He interrogated himself upon that
"settled resolve." He confessed to himself that all that he had just
arranged in his mind was monstrous, that "to let things take their
course, to let the good God do as he liked," was simply horrible; to
allow this error of fate and of men to be carried out, not to hinder it,
to lend himself to it through his silence, to do nothing, in short,
was to do everything! that this was hypocritical baseness in the last
degree! that it was a base, cowardly, sneaking, abject, hideous crime!

For the first time in eight years, the wretched man had just tasted the
bitter savor of an evil thought and of an evil action.

He spit it out with disgust.

He continued to question himself. He asked himself severely what he had
meant by this, "My object is attained!" He declared to himself that
his life really had an object; but what object? To conceal his name?
To deceive the police? Was it for so petty a thing that he had done all
that he had done? Had he not another and a grand object, which was the
true one--to save, not his person, but his soul; to become honest and
good once more; to be a just man? Was it not that above all, that alone,
which he had always desired, which the Bishop had enjoined upon him--to
shut the door on his past? But he was not shutting it! great God! he was
re-opening it by committing an infamous action! He was becoming a thief
once more, and the most odious of thieves! He was robbing another of
his existence, his life, his peace, his place in the sunshine. He was
becoming an assassin. He was murdering, morally murdering, a wretched
man. He was inflicting on him that frightful living death, that death
beneath the open sky, which is called the galleys. On the other hand,
to surrender himself to save that man, struck down with so melancholy
an error, to resume his own name, to become once more, out of duty, the
convict Jean Valjean, that was, in truth, to achieve his resurrection,
and to close forever that hell whence he had just emerged; to fall back
there in appearance was to escape from it in reality. This must be
done! He had done nothing if he did not do all this; his whole life was
useless; all his penitence was wasted. There was no longer any need of
saying, "What is the use?" He felt that the Bishop was there, that the
Bishop was present all the more because he was dead, that the Bishop
was gazing fixedly at him, that henceforth Mayor Madeleine, with all his
virtues, would be abominable to him, and that the convict Jean Valjean
would be pure and admirable in his sight; that men beheld his mask, but
that the Bishop saw his face; that men saw his life, but that the Bishop
beheld his conscience. So he must go to Arras, deliver the false Jean
Valjean, and denounce the real one. Alas! that was the greatest of
sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the last step to take; but
it must be done. Sad fate! he would enter into sanctity only in the eyes
of God when he returned to infamy in the eyes of men.

"Well," said he, "let us decide upon this; let us do our duty; let us
save this man." He uttered these words aloud, without perceiving that he
was speaking aloud.

He took his books, verified them, and put them in order. He flung in
the fire a bundle of bills which he had against petty and embarrassed
tradesmen. He wrote and sealed a letter, and on the envelope it might
have been read, had there been any one in his chamber at the moment,
_To Monsieur Laffitte, Banker, Rue d'Artois, Paris_. He drew from his
secretary a pocket-book which contained several bank-notes and the
passport of which he had made use that same year when he went to the
elections.

Any one who had seen him during the execution of these various acts,
into which there entered such grave thought, would have had no suspicion
of what was going on within him. Only occasionally did his lips move; at
other times he raised his head and fixed his gaze upon some point of the
wall, as though there existed at that point something which he wished to
elucidate or interrogate.

When he had finished the letter to M. Laffitte, he put it into his
pocket, together with the pocket-book, and began his walk once more.

His revery had not swerved from its course. He continued to see his duty
clearly, written in luminous letters, which flamed before his eyes and
changed its place as he altered the direction of his glance:--

_"Go! Tell your name! Denounce yourself!"_

In the same way he beheld, as though they had passed before him in
visible forms, the two ideas which had, up to that time, formed
the double rule of his soul,--the concealment of his name, the
sanctification of his life. For the first time they appeared to him as
absolutely distinct, and he perceived the distance which separated them.
He recognized the fact that one of these ideas was, necessarily, good,
while the other might become bad; that the first was self-devotion, and
that the other was personality; that the one said, _my neighbour_, and
that the other said, _myself_; that one emanated from the light, and the
other from darkness.

They were antagonistic. He saw them in conflict. In proportion as
he meditated, they grew before the eyes of his spirit. They had now
attained colossal statures, and it seemed to him that he beheld within
himself, in that infinity of which we were recently speaking, in the
midst of the darkness and the lights, a goddess and a giant contending.

He was filled with terror; but it seemed to him that the good thought
was getting the upper hand.

He felt that he was on the brink of the second decisive crisis of his
conscience and of his destiny; that the Bishop had marked the first
phase of his new life, and that Champmathieu marked the second. After
the grand crisis, the grand test.

But the fever, allayed for an instant, gradually resumed possession
of him. A thousand thoughts traversed his mind, but they continued to
fortify him in his resolution.

One moment he said to himself that he was, perhaps, taking the matter
too keenly; that, after all, this Champmathieu was not interesting, and
that he had actually been guilty of theft.

He answered himself: "If this man has, indeed, stolen a few apples, that
means a month in prison. It is a long way from that to the galleys. And
who knows? Did he steal? Has it been proved? The name of Jean Valjean
overwhelms him, and seems to dispense with proofs. Do not the attorneys
for the Crown always proceed in this manner? He is supposed to be a
thief because he is known to be a convict."

In another instant the thought had occurred to him that, when he
denounced himself, the heroism of his deed might, perhaps, be taken into
consideration, and his honest life for the last seven years, and what he
had done for the district, and that they would have mercy on him.

But this supposition vanished very quickly, and he smiled bitterly as he
remembered that the theft of the forty sous from little Gervais put him
in the position of a man guilty of a second offence after conviction,
that this affair would certainly come up, and, according to the precise
terms of the law, would render him liable to penal servitude for life.

He turned aside from all illusions, detached himself more and more from
earth, and sought strength and consolation elsewhere. He told himself
that he must do his duty; that perhaps he should not be more unhappy
after doing his duty than after having avoided it; that if he _allowed
things to take their own course_, if he remained at M. sur M., his
consideration, his good name, his good works, the deference and
veneration paid to him, his charity, his wealth, his popularity, his
virtue, would be seasoned with a crime. And what would be the taste of
all these holy things when bound up with this hideous thing? while, if
he accomplished his sacrifice, a celestial idea would be mingled with
the galleys, the post, the iron necklet, the green cap, unceasing toil,
and pitiless shame.

At length he told himself that it must be so, that his destiny was thus
allotted, that he had not authority to alter the arrangements made on
high, that, in any case, he must make his choice: virtue without and
abomination within, or holiness within and infamy without.

The stirring up of these lugubrious ideas did not cause his courage to
fail, but his brain grow weary. He began to think of other things, of
indifferent matters, in spite of himself.

The veins in his temples throbbed violently; he still paced to and fro;
midnight sounded first from the parish church, then from the town-hall;
he counted the twelve strokes of the two clocks, and compared the sounds
of the two bells; he recalled in this connection the fact that, a few
days previously, he had seen in an ironmonger's shop an ancient
clock for sale, upon which was written the name, _Antoine-Albin de
Romainville_.

He was cold; he lighted a small fire; it did not occur to him to close
the window.

In the meantime he had relapsed into his stupor; he was obliged to make
a tolerably vigorous effort to recall what had been the subject of his
thoughts before midnight had struck; he finally succeeded in doing this.

"Ah! yes," he said to himself, "I had resolved to inform against
myself."

And then, all of a sudden, he thought of Fantine.

"Hold!" said he, "and what about that poor woman?"

Here a fresh crisis declared itself.

Fantine, by appearing thus abruptly in his revery, produced the effect
of an unexpected ray of light; it seemed to him as though everything
about him were undergoing a change of aspect: he exclaimed:--

"Ah! but I have hitherto considered no one but myself; it is proper for
me to hold my tongue or to denounce myself, to conceal my person or
to save my soul, to be a despicable and respected magistrate, or an
infamous and venerable convict; it is I, it is always I and nothing
but I: but, good God! all this is egotism; these are diverse forms
of egotism, but it is egotism all the same. What if I were to think a
little about others? The highest holiness is to think of others; come,
let us examine the matter. The _I_ excepted, the _I_ effaced, the _I_
forgotten, what would be the result of all this? What if I denounce
myself? I am arrested; this Champmathieu is released; I am put back in
the galleys; that is well--and what then? What is going on here? Ah!
here is a country, a town, here are factories, an industry, workers,
both men and women, aged grandsires, children, poor people! All this I
have created; all these I provide with their living; everywhere where
there is a smoking chimney, it is I who have placed the brand on the
hearth and meat in the pot; I have created ease, circulation, credit;
before me there was nothing; I have elevated, vivified, informed with
life, fecundated, stimulated, enriched the whole country-side; lacking
me, the soul is lacking; I take myself off, everything dies: and this
woman, who has suffered so much, who possesses so many merits in spite
of her fall; the cause of all whose misery I have unwittingly been! And
that child whom I meant to go in search of, whom I have promised to her
mother; do I not also owe something to this woman, in reparation for
the evil which I have done her? If I disappear, what happens? The mother
dies; the child becomes what it can; that is what will take place, if
I denounce myself. If I do not denounce myself? come, let us see how it
will be if I do not denounce myself."

After putting this question to himself, he paused; he seemed to undergo
a momentary hesitation and trepidation; but it did not last long, and he
answered himself calmly:--

"Well, this man is going to the galleys; it is true, but what the deuce!
he has stolen! There is no use in my saying that he has not been guilty
of theft, for he has! I remain here; I go on: in ten years I shall have
made ten millions; I scatter them over the country; I have nothing of
my own; what is that to me? It is not for myself that I am doing it;
the prosperity of all goes on augmenting; industries are aroused and
animated; factories and shops are multiplied; families, a hundred
families, a thousand families, are happy; the district becomes
populated; villages spring up where there were only farms before;
farms rise where there was nothing; wretchedness disappears, and
with wretchedness debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder; all vices
disappear, all crimes: and this poor mother rears her child; and behold
a whole country rich and honest! Ah! I was a fool! I was absurd!
what was that I was saying about denouncing myself? I really must pay
attention and not be precipitate about anything. What! because it would
have pleased me to play the grand and generous; this is melodrama, after
all; because I should have thought of no one but myself, the idea! for
the sake of saving from a punishment, a trifle exaggerated, perhaps,
but just at bottom, no one knows whom, a thief, a good-for-nothing,
evidently, a whole country-side must perish! a poor woman must die in
the hospital! a poor little girl must die in the street! like dogs; ah,
this is abominable! And without the mother even having seen her child
once more, almost without the child's having known her mother; and
all that for the sake of an old wretch of an apple-thief who, most
assuredly, has deserved the galleys for something else, if not for
that; fine scruples, indeed, which save a guilty man and sacrifice the
innocent, which save an old vagabond who has only a few years to live at
most, and who will not be more unhappy in the galleys than in his hovel,
and which sacrifice a whole population, mothers, wives, children. This
poor little Cosette who has no one in the world but me, and who is, no
doubt, blue with cold at this moment in the den of those Thénardiers;
those peoples are rascals; and I was going to neglect my duty towards
all these poor creatures; and I was going off to denounce myself; and I
was about to commit that unspeakable folly! Let us put it at the worst:
suppose that there is a wrong action on my part in this, and that my
conscience will reproach me for it some day, to accept, for the good of
others, these reproaches which weigh only on myself; this evil action
which compromises my soul alone; in that lies self-sacrifice; in that
alone there is virtue."

He rose and resumed his march; this time, he seemed to be content.

Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are
found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him, that, after
having descended into these depths, after having long groped among the
darkest of these shadows, he had at last found one of these diamonds,
one of these truths, and that he now held it in his hand, and he was
dazzled as he gazed upon it.

"Yes," he thought, "this is right; I am on the right road; I have the
solution; I must end by holding fast to something; my resolve is taken;
let things take their course; let us no longer vacillate; let us no
longer hang back; this is for the interest of all, not for my own; I am
Madeleine, and Madeleine I remain. Woe to the man who is Jean Valjean!
I am no longer he; I do not know that man; I no longer know anything; it
turns out that some one is Jean Valjean at the present moment; let him
look out for himself; that does not concern me; it is a fatal name which
was floating abroad in the night; if it halts and descends on a head, so
much the worse for that head."

He looked into the little mirror which hung above his chimney-piece, and
said:--

"Hold! it has relieved me to come to a decision; I am quite another man
now."

He proceeded a few paces further, then he stopped short.

"Come!" he said, "I must not flinch before any of the consequences of
the resolution which I have once adopted; there are still threads which
attach me to that Jean Valjean; they must be broken; in this very room
there are objects which would betray me, dumb things which would bear
witness against me; it is settled; all these things must disappear."

He fumbled in his pocket, drew out his purse, opened it, and took out a
small key; he inserted the key in a lock whose aperture could hardly
be seen, so hidden was it in the most sombre tones of the design which
covered the wall-paper; a secret receptacle opened, a sort of
false cupboard constructed in the angle between the wall and the
chimney-piece; in this hiding-place there were some rags--a blue linen
blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old knapsack, and a huge thorn
cudgel shod with iron at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean at
the epoch when he passed through D----in October, 1815, could easily
have recognized all the pieces of this miserable outfit.

He had preserved them as he had preserved the silver candlesticks, in
order to remind himself continually of his starting-point, but he
had concealed all that came from the galleys, and he had allowed the
candlesticks which came from the Bishop to be seen.

He cast a furtive glance towards the door, as though he feared that it
would open in spite of the bolt which fastened it; then, with a quick
and abrupt movement, he took the whole in his arms at once, without
bestowing so much as a glance on the things which he had so religiously
and so perilously preserved for so many years, and flung them all, rags,
cudgel, knapsack, into the fire.

Enlarge


He closed the false cupboard again, and with redoubled precautions,
henceforth unnecessary, since it was now empty, he concealed the door
behind a heavy piece of furniture, which he pushed in front of it.

After the lapse of a few seconds, the room and the opposite wall were
lighted up with a fierce, red, tremulous glow. Everything was on fire;
the thorn cudgel snapped and threw out sparks to the middle of the
chamber.

As the knapsack was consumed, together with the hideous rags which it
contained, it revealed something which sparkled in the ashes. By bending
over, one could have readily recognized a coin,--no doubt the forty-sou
piece stolen from the little Savoyard.

He did not look at the fire, but paced back and forth with the same
step.

All at once his eye fell on the two silver candlesticks, which shone
vaguely on the chimney-piece, through the glow.

"Hold!" he thought; "the whole of Jean Valjean is still in them. They
must be destroyed also."

He seized the two candlesticks.

There was still fire enough to allow of their being put out of shape,
and converted into a sort of unrecognizable bar of metal.

He bent over the hearth and warmed himself for a moment. He felt a sense
of real comfort. "How good warmth is!" said he.

He stirred the live coals with one of the candlesticks.

A minute more, and they were both in the fire.

At that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice within him
shouting: "Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!"

His hair rose upright: he became like a man who is listening to some
terrible thing.

"Yes, that's it! finish!" said the voice. "Complete what you are about!
Destroy these candlesticks! Annihilate this souvenir! Forget the Bishop!
Forget everything! Destroy this Champmathieu, do! That is right! Applaud
yourself! So it is settled, resolved, fixed, agreed: here is an old man
who does not know what is wanted of him, who has, perhaps, done nothing,
an innocent man, whose whole misfortune lies in your name, upon whom
your name weighs like a crime, who is about to be taken for you, who
will be condemned, who will finish his days in abjectness and horror.
That is good! Be an honest man yourself; remain Monsieur le Maire;
remain honorable and honored; enrich the town; nourish the indigent;
rear the orphan; live happy, virtuous, and admired; and, during this
time, while you are here in the midst of joy and light, there will be a
man who will wear your red blouse, who will bear your name in ignominy,
and who will drag your chain in the galleys. Yes, it is well arranged
thus. Ah, wretch!"

The perspiration streamed from his brow. He fixed a haggard eye on the
candlesticks. But that within him which had spoken had not finished. The
voice continued:--

"Jean Valjean, there will be around you many voices, which will make a
great noise, which will talk very loud, and which will bless you, and
only one which no one will hear, and which will curse you in the dark.
Well! listen, infamous man! All those benedictions will fall back before
they reach heaven, and only the malediction will ascend to God."

This voice, feeble at first, and which had proceeded from the most
obscure depths of his conscience, had gradually become startling and
formidable, and he now heard it in his very ear. It seemed to him that
it had detached itself from him, and that it was now speaking outside
of him. He thought that he heard the last words so distinctly, that he
glanced around the room in a sort of terror.

"Is there any one here?" he demanded aloud, in utter bewilderment.

Then he resumed, with a laugh which resembled that of an idiot:--

"How stupid I am! There can be no one!"

There was some one; but the person who was there was of those whom the
human eye cannot see.

He placed the candlesticks on the chimney-piece.

Then he resumed his monotonous and lugubrious tramp, which troubled the
dreams of the sleeping man beneath him, and awoke him with a start.

This tramping to and fro soothed and at the same time intoxicated him.
It sometimes seems, on supreme occasions, as though people moved about
for the purpose of asking advice of everything that they may encounter
by change of place. After the lapse of a few minutes he no longer knew
his position.

He now recoiled in equal terror before both the resolutions at which he
had arrived in turn. The two ideas which counselled him appeared to him
equally fatal. What a fatality! What conjunction that that Champmathieu
should have been taken for him; to be overwhelmed by precisely the means
which Providence seemed to have employed, at first, to strengthen his
position!

There was a moment when he reflected on the future. Denounce himself,
great God! Deliver himself up! With immense despair he faced all that
he should be obliged to leave, all that he should be obliged to take up
once more. He should have to bid farewell to that existence which was so
good, so pure, so radiant, to the respect of all, to honor, to liberty.
He should never more stroll in the fields; he should never more hear the
birds sing in the month of May; he should never more bestow alms on the
little children; he should never more experience the sweetness of having
glances of gratitude and love fixed upon him; he should quit that house
which he had built, that little chamber! Everything seemed charming to
him at that moment. Never again should he read those books; never more
should he write on that little table of white wood; his old portress,
the only servant whom he kept, would never more bring him his coffee
in the morning. Great God! instead of that, the convict gang, the iron
necklet, the red waistcoat, the chain on his ankle, fatigue, the cell,
the camp bed all those horrors which he knew so well! At his age,
after having been what he was! If he were only young again! but to
be addressed in his old age as "thou" by any one who pleased; to
be searched by the convict-guard; to receive the galley-sergeant's
cudgellings; to wear iron-bound shoes on his bare feet; to have to
stretch out his leg night and morning to the hammer of the roundsman who
visits the gang; to submit to the curiosity of strangers, who would be
told: "That man yonder is the famous Jean Valjean, who was mayor of
M. sur M."; and at night, dripping with perspiration, overwhelmed with
lassitude, their green caps drawn over their eyes, to remount, two by
two, the ladder staircase of the galleys beneath the sergeant's whip.
Oh, what misery! Can destiny, then, be as malicious as an intelligent
being, and become as monstrous as the human heart?

And do what he would, he always fell back upon the heartrending dilemma
which lay at the foundation of his revery: "Should he remain in paradise
and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?"

What was to be done? Great God! what was to be done?

The torment from which he had escaped with so much difficulty was
unchained afresh within him. His ideas began to grow confused once
more; they assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is
peculiar to despair. The name of Romainville recurred incessantly to his
mind, with the two verses of a song which he had heard in the past.
He thought that Romainville was a little grove near Paris, where young
lovers go to pluck lilacs in the month of April.

He wavered outwardly as well as inwardly. He walked like a little child
who is permitted to toddle alone.

At intervals, as he combated his lassitude, he made an effort to recover
the mastery of his mind. He tried to put to himself, for the last time,
and definitely, the problem over which he had, in a manner, fallen
prostrate with fatigue: Ought he to denounce himself? Ought he to hold
his peace? He could not manage to see anything distinctly. The vague
aspects of all the courses of reasoning which had been sketched out by
his meditations quivered and vanished, one after the other, into smoke.
He only felt that, to whatever course of action he made up his mind,
something in him must die, and that of necessity, and without his being
able to escape the fact; that he was entering a sepulchre on the
right hand as much as on the left; that he was passing through a death
agony,--the agony of his happiness, or the agony of his virtue.

Alas! all his resolution had again taken possession of him. He was no
further advanced than at the beginning.

Thus did this unhappy soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred
years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being in whom are
summed up all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity had also
long thrust aside with his hand, while the olive-trees quivered in
the wild wind of the infinite, the terrible cup which appeared to Him
dripping with darkness and overflowing with shadows in the depths all
studded with stars.



CHAPTER IV--FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP

Three o'clock in the morning had just struck, and he had been walking
thus for five hours, almost uninterruptedly, when he at length allowed
himself to drop into his chair.

There he fell asleep and had a dream.

This dream, like the majority of dreams, bore no relation to the
situation, except by its painful and heart-rending character, but it
made an impression on him. This nightmare struck him so forcibly that he
wrote it down later on. It is one of the papers in his own handwriting
which he has bequeathed to us. We think that we have here reproduced the
thing in strict accordance with the text.

Of whatever nature this dream may be, the history of this night would
be incomplete if we were to omit it: it is the gloomy adventure of an
ailing soul.

Here it is. On the envelope we find this line inscribed, "The Dream I
had that Night."

"I was in a plain; a vast, gloomy plain, where there was no grass. It
did not seem to me to be daylight nor yet night.

"I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childish years,
the brother of whom, I must say, I never think, and whom I now hardly
remember.

"We were conversing and we met some passers-by. We were talking of a
neighbor of ours in former days, who had always worked with her window
open from the time when she came to live on the street. As we talked we
felt cold because of that open window.

"There were no trees in the plain. We saw a man passing close to us. He
was entirely nude, of the hue of ashes, and mounted on a horse which was
earth color. The man had no hair; we could see his skull and the veins
on it. In his hand he held a switch which was as supple as a vine-shoot
and as heavy as iron. This horseman passed and said nothing to us.

"My brother said to me, 'Let us take to the hollow road.'

"There existed a hollow way wherein one saw neither a single shrub nor
a spear of moss. Everything was dirt-colored, even the sky. After
proceeding a few paces, I received no reply when I spoke: I perceived
that my brother was no longer with me.

"I entered a village which I espied. I reflected that it must be
Romainville. (Why Romainville?)5

"The first street that I entered was deserted. I entered a second
street. Behind the angle formed by the two streets, a man was standing
erect against the wall. I said to this man:--

"'What country is this? Where am I?' The man made no reply. I saw the
door of a house open, and I entered.

"The first chamber was deserted. I entered the second. Behind the door
of this chamber a man was standing erect against the wall. I inquired of
this man, 'Whose house is this? Where am I?' The man replied not.

"The house had a garden. I quitted the house and entered the garden.
The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree I found a man standing
upright. I said to this man, 'What garden is this? Where am I?' The man
did not answer.

"I strolled into the village, and perceived that it was a town. All
the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. Not a single living
being was passing in the streets, walking through the chambers or
strolling in the gardens. But behind each angle of the walls, behind
each door, behind each tree, stood a silent man. Only one was to be seen
at a time. These men watched me pass.

"I left the town and began to ramble about the fields.

"After the lapse of some time I turned back and saw a great crowd coming
up behind me. I recognized all the men whom I had seen in that town.
They had strange heads. They did not seem to be in a hurry, yet they
walked faster than I did. They made no noise as they walked. In an
instant this crowd had overtaken and surrounded me. The faces of these
men were earthen in hue.

"Then the first one whom I had seen and questioned on entering the town
said to me:--

"'Whither are you going! Do you not know that you have been dead this
long time?'

"I opened my mouth to reply, and I perceived that there was no one near
me."

He woke. He was icy cold. A wind which was chill like the breeze of dawn
was rattling the leaves of the window, which had been left open on their
hinges. The fire was out. The candle was nearing its end. It was still
black night.

He rose, he went to the window. There were no stars in the sky even yet.

From his window the yard of the house and the street were visible. A
sharp, harsh noise, which made him drop his eyes, resounded from the
earth.

Below him he perceived two red stars, whose rays lengthened and
shortened in a singular manner through the darkness.

As his thoughts were still half immersed in the mists of sleep, "Hold!"
said he, "there are no stars in the sky. They are on earth now."

But this confusion vanished; a second sound similar to the first roused
him thoroughly; he looked and recognized the fact that these two stars
were the lanterns of a carriage. By the light which they cast he was
able to distinguish the form of this vehicle. It was a tilbury harnessed
to a small white horse. The noise which he had heard was the trampling
of the horse's hoofs on the pavement.

"What vehicle is this?" he said to himself. "Who is coming here so early
in the morning?"

At that moment there came a light tap on the door of his chamber.

He shuddered from head to foot, and cried in a terrible voice:--

"Who is there?"

Some one said:--

"I, Monsieur le Maire."

He recognized the voice of the old woman who was his portress.

"Well!" he replied, "what is it?"

"Monsieur le Maire, it is just five o'clock in the morning."

"What is that to me?"

"The cabriolet is here, Monsieur le Maire."

"What cabriolet?"

"The tilbury."

"What tilbury?"

"Did not Monsieur le Maire order a tilbury?"

"No," said he.

"The coachman says that he has come for Monsieur le Maire."

"What coachman?"

"M. Scaufflaire's coachman."

"M. Scaufflaire?"

That name sent a shudder over him, as though a flash of lightning had
passed in front of his face.

"Ah! yes," he resumed; "M. Scaufflaire!"

If the old woman could have seen him at that moment, she would have been
frightened.

A tolerably long silence ensued. He examined the flame of the candle
with a stupid air, and from around the wick he took some of the burning
wax, which he rolled between his fingers. The old woman waited for him.
She even ventured to uplift her voice once more:--

"What am I to say, Monsieur le Maire?"

"Say that it is well, and that I am coming down."



CHAPTER V--HINDRANCES

The posting service from Arras to M. sur M. was still operated at this
period by small mail-wagons of the time of the Empire. These mail-wagons
were two-wheeled cabriolets, upholstered inside with fawn-colored
leather, hung on springs, and having but two seats, one for the postboy,
the other for the traveller. The wheels were armed with those long,
offensive axles which keep other vehicles at a distance, and which
may still be seen on the road in Germany. The despatch box, an immense
oblong coffer, was placed behind the vehicle and formed a part of it.
This coffer was painted black, and the cabriolet yellow.

These vehicles, which have no counterparts nowadays, had something
distorted and hunchbacked about them; and when one saw them passing in
the distance, and climbing up some road to the horizon, they resembled
the insects which are called, I think, termites, and which, though with
but little corselet, drag a great train behind them. But they travelled
at a very rapid rate. The post-wagon which set out from Arras at one
o'clock every night, after the mail from Paris had passed, arrived at M.
sur M. a little before five o'clock in the morning.

That night the wagon which was descending to M. sur M. by the Hesdin
road, collided at the corner of a street, just as it was entering the
town, with a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, which was going
in the opposite direction, and in which there was but one person, a man
enveloped in a mantle. The wheel of the tilbury received quite a violent
shock. The postman shouted to the man to stop, but the traveller paid no
heed and pursued his road at full gallop.

"That man is in a devilish hurry!" said the postman.

The man thus hastening on was the one whom we have just seen struggling
in convulsions which are certainly deserving of pity.

Whither was he going? He could not have told. Why was he hastening?
He did not know. He was driving at random, straight ahead. Whither?
To Arras, no doubt; but he might have been going elsewhere as well.
At times he was conscious of it, and he shuddered. He plunged into the
night as into a gulf. Something urged him forward; something drew him
on. No one could have told what was taking place within him; every one
will understand it. What man is there who has not entered, at least once
in his life, into that obscure cavern of the unknown?

However, he had resolved on nothing, decided nothing, formed no plan,
done nothing. None of the actions of his conscience had been decisive.
He was, more than ever, as he had been at the first moment.

Why was he going to Arras?

He repeated what he had already said to himself when he had hired
Scaufflaire's cabriolet: that, whatever the result was to be, there was
no reason why he should not see with his own eyes, and judge of matters
for himself; that this was even prudent; that he must know what took
place; that no decision could be arrived at without having observed and
scrutinized; that one made mountains out of everything from a distance;
that, at any rate, when he should have seen that Champmathieu, some
wretch, his conscience would probably be greatly relieved to allow him
to go to the galleys in his stead; that Javert would indeed be there;
and that Brevet, that Chenildieu, that Cochepaille, old convicts who
had known him; but they certainly would not recognize him;--bah! what an
idea! that Javert was a hundred leagues from suspecting the truth; that
all conjectures and all suppositions were fixed on Champmathieu, and
that there is nothing so headstrong as suppositions and conjectures;
that accordingly there was no danger.

That it was, no doubt, a dark moment, but that he should emerge from it;
that, after all, he held his destiny, however bad it might be, in his
own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to this thought.

At bottom, to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to
Arras.

Nevertheless, he was going thither.

As he meditated, he whipped up his horse, which was proceeding at that
fine, regular, and even trot which accomplishes two leagues and a half
an hour.

In proportion as the cabriolet advanced, he felt something within him
draw back.

At daybreak he was in the open country; the town of M. sur M. lay far
behind him. He watched the horizon grow white; he stared at all the
chilly figures of a winter's dawn as they passed before his eyes,
but without seeing them. The morning has its spectres as well as the
evening. He did not see them; but without his being aware of it, and by
means of a sort of penetration which was almost physical, these black
silhouettes of trees and of hills added some gloomy and sinister quality
to the violent state of his soul.

Each time that he passed one of those isolated dwellings which sometimes
border on the highway, he said to himself, "And yet there are people
there within who are sleeping!"

The trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the road,
produced a gentle, monotonous noise. These things are charming when one
is joyous, and lugubrious when one is sad.

It was broad daylight when he arrived at Hesdin. He halted in front of
the inn, to allow the horse a breathing spell, and to have him given
some oats.

The horse belonged, as Scaufflaire had said, to that small race of the
Boulonnais, which has too much head, too much belly, and not enough neck
and shoulders, but which has a broad chest, a large crupper, thin, fine
legs, and solid hoofs--a homely, but a robust and healthy race. The
excellent beast had travelled five leagues in two hours, and had not a
drop of sweat on his loins.

He did not get out of the tilbury. The stableman who brought the oats
suddenly bent down and examined the left wheel.

"Are you going far in this condition?" said the man.

He replied, with an air of not having roused himself from his revery:--

"Why?"

"Have you come from a great distance?" went on the man.

"Five leagues."

"Ah!"

"Why do you say, 'Ah?'"

The man bent down once more, was silent for a moment, with his eyes
fixed on the wheel; then he rose erect and said:--

"Because, though this wheel has travelled five leagues, it certainly
will not travel another quarter of a league."

He sprang out of the tilbury.

"What is that you say, my friend?"

"I say that it is a miracle that you should have travelled five leagues
without you and your horse rolling into some ditch on the highway. Just
see here!"

The wheel really had suffered serious damage. The shock administered by
the mail-wagon had split two spokes and strained the hub, so that the
nut no longer held firm.

"My friend," he said to the stableman, "is there a wheelwright here?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Do me the service to go and fetch him."

"He is only a step from here. Hey! Master Bourgaillard!"

Master Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing on his own threshold.
He came, examined the wheel and made a grimace like a surgeon when the
latter thinks a limb is broken.

"Can you repair this wheel immediately?"

"Yes, sir."

"When can I set out again?"

"To-morrow."

"To-morrow!"

"There is a long day's work on it. Are you in a hurry, sir?"

"In a very great hurry. I must set out again in an hour at the latest."

"Impossible, sir."

"I will pay whatever you ask."

"Impossible."

"Well, in two hours, then."

"Impossible to-day. Two new spokes and a hub must be made. Monsieur will
not be able to start before to-morrow morning."

"The matter cannot wait until to-morrow. What if you were to replace
this wheel instead of repairing it?"

"How so?"

"You are a wheelwright?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Have you not a wheel that you can sell me? Then I could start again at
once."

"A spare wheel?"

"Yes."

"I have no wheel on hand that would fit your cabriolet. Two wheels make
a pair. Two wheels cannot be put together hap-hazard."

"In that case, sell me a pair of wheels."

"Not all wheels fit all axles, sir."

"Try, nevertheless."

"It is useless, sir. I have nothing to sell but cart-wheels. We are but
a poor country here."

"Have you a cabriolet that you can let me have?"

The wheelwright had seen at the first glance that the tilbury was a
hired vehicle. He shrugged his shoulders.

"You treat the cabriolets that people let you so well! If I had one, I
would not let it to you!"

"Well, sell it to me, then."

"I have none."

"What! not even a spring-cart? I am not hard to please, as you see."

"We live in a poor country. There is, in truth," added the wheelwright,
"an old calash under the shed yonder, which belongs to a bourgeois of
the town, who gave it to me to take care of, and who only uses it on the
thirty-sixth of the month--never, that is to say. I might let that
to you, for what matters it to me? But the bourgeois must not see it
pass--and then, it is a calash; it would require two horses."

"I will take two post-horses."

"Where is Monsieur going?"

"To Arras."

"And Monsieur wishes to reach there to-day?"

"Yes, of course."

"By taking two post-horses?"

"Why not?"

"Does it make any difference whether Monsieur arrives at four o'clock
to-morrow morning?"

"Certainly not."

"There is one thing to be said about that, you see, by taking
post-horses--Monsieur has his passport?"

"Yes."

"Well, by taking post-horses, Monsieur cannot reach Arras before
to-morrow. We are on a cross-road. The relays are badly served, the
horses are in the fields. The season for ploughing is just beginning;
heavy teams are required, and horses are seized upon everywhere, from
the post as well as elsewhere. Monsieur will have to wait three or four
hours at the least at every relay. And, then, they drive at a walk.
There are many hills to ascend."

"Come then, I will go on horseback. Unharness the cabriolet. Some one
can surely sell me a saddle in the neighborhood."

"Without doubt. But will this horse bear the saddle?"

"That is true; you remind me of that; he will not bear it."

"Then--"

"But I can surely hire a horse in the village?"

"A horse to travel to Arras at one stretch?"

"Yes."

"That would require such a horse as does not exist in these parts. You
would have to buy it to begin with, because no one knows you. But you
will not find one for sale nor to let, for five hundred francs, or for a
thousand."

"What am I to do?"

"The best thing is to let me repair the wheel like an honest man, and
set out on your journey to-morrow."

"To-morrow will be too late."

"The deuce!"

"Is there not a mail-wagon which runs to Arras? When will it pass?"

"To-night. Both the posts pass at night; the one going as well as the
one coming."

"What! It will take you a day to mend this wheel?"

"A day, and a good long one."

"If you set two men to work?"

"If I set ten men to work."

"What if the spokes were to be tied together with ropes?"

"That could be done with the spokes, not with the hub; and the felly is
in a bad state, too."

"Is there any one in this village who lets out teams?"

"No."

"Is there another wheelwright?"

The stableman and the wheelwright replied in concert, with a toss of the
head.

"No."

He felt an immense joy.

It was evident that Providence was intervening. That it was it who had
broken the wheel of the tilbury and who was stopping him on the road.
He had not yielded to this sort of first summons; he had just made every
possible effort to continue the journey; he had loyally and scrupulously
exhausted all means; he had been deterred neither by the season, nor
fatigue, nor by the expense; he had nothing with which to reproach
himself. If he went no further, that was no fault of his. It did not
concern him further. It was no longer his fault. It was not the act of
his own conscience, but the act of Providence.

He breathed again. He breathed freely and to the full extent of his
lungs for the first time since Javert's visit. It seemed to him that the
hand of iron which had held his heart in its grasp for the last twenty
hours had just released him.

It seemed to him that God was for him now, and was manifesting Himself.

He said himself that he had done all he could, and that now he had
nothing to do but retrace his steps quietly.

If his conversation with the wheelwright had taken place in a chamber
of the inn, it would have had no witnesses, no one would have heard him,
things would have rested there, and it is probable that we should not
have had to relate any of the occurrences which the reader is about
to peruse; but this conversation had taken place in the street. Any
colloquy in the street inevitably attracts a crowd. There are always
people who ask nothing better than to become spectators. While he was
questioning the wheelwright, some people who were passing back and forth
halted around them. After listening for a few minutes, a young lad, to
whom no one had paid any heed, detached himself from the group and ran
off.

At the moment when the traveller, after the inward deliberation which we
have just described, resolved to retrace his steps, this child returned.
He was accompanied by an old woman.

"Monsieur," said the woman, "my boy tells me that you wish to hire a
cabriolet."

These simple words uttered by an old woman led by a child made the
perspiration trickle down his limbs. He thought that he beheld the hand
which had relaxed its grasp reappear in the darkness behind him, ready
to seize him once more.

He answered:--

"Yes, my good woman; I am in search of a cabriolet which I can hire."

And he hastened to add:--

"But there is none in the place."

"Certainly there is," said the old woman.

"Where?" interpolated the wheelwright.

"At my house," replied the old woman.

He shuddered. The fatal hand had grasped him again.

The old woman really had in her shed a sort of basket spring-cart.
The wheelwright and the stable-man, in despair at the prospect of the
traveller escaping their clutches, interfered.

"It was a frightful old trap; it rests flat on the axle; it is an actual
fact that the seats were suspended inside it by leather thongs; the rain
came into it; the wheels were rusted and eaten with moisture; it
would not go much further than the tilbury; a regular ramshackle old
stage-wagon; the gentleman would make a great mistake if he trusted
himself to it," etc., etc.

All this was true; but this trap, this ramshackle old vehicle, this
thing, whatever it was, ran on its two wheels and could go to Arras.

He paid what was asked, left the tilbury with the wheelwright to be
repaired, intending to reclaim it on his return, had the white horse
put to the cart, climbed into it, and resumed the road which he had been
travelling since morning.

At the moment when the cart moved off, he admitted that he had felt, a
moment previously, a certain joy in the thought that he should not
go whither he was now proceeding. He examined this joy with a sort of
wrath, and found it absurd. Why should he feel joy at turning back?
After all, he was taking this trip of his own free will. No one was
forcing him to it.

And assuredly nothing would happen except what he should choose.

As he left Hesdin, he heard a voice shouting to him: "Stop! Stop!" He
halted the cart with a vigorous movement which contained a feverish and
convulsive element resembling hope.

It was the old woman's little boy.

"Monsieur," said the latter, "it was I who got the cart for you."

"Well?"

"You have not given me anything."

He who gave to all so readily thought this demand exorbitant and almost
odious.

"Ah! it's you, you scamp?" said he; "you shall have nothing."

He whipped up his horse and set off at full speed.

He had lost a great deal of time at Hesdin. He wanted to make it good.
The little horse was courageous, and pulled for two; but it was the
month of February, there had been rain; the roads were bad. And then,
it was no longer the tilbury. The cart was very heavy, and in addition,
there were many ascents.

He took nearly four hours to go from Hesdin to Saint-Pol; four hours for
five leagues.

At Saint-Pol he had the horse unharnessed at the first inn he came to
and led to the stable; as he had promised Scaufflaire, he stood beside
the manger while the horse was eating; he thought of sad and confusing
things.

The inn-keeper's wife came to the stable.

"Does not Monsieur wish to breakfast?"

"Come, that is true; I even have a good appetite."

He followed the woman, who had a rosy, cheerful face; she led him to the
public room where there were tables covered with waxed cloth.

"Make haste!" said he; "I must start again; I am in a hurry."

A big Flemish servant-maid placed his knife and fork in all haste; he
looked at the girl with a sensation of comfort.

"That is what ailed me," he thought; "I had not breakfasted."

His breakfast was served; he seized the bread, took a mouthful, and then
slowly replaced it on the table, and did not touch it again.

A carter was eating at another table; he said to this man:--

"Why is their bread so bitter here?"

The carter was a German and did not understand him.

He returned to the stable and remained near the horse.

An hour later he had quitted Saint-Pol and was directing his course
towards Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras.

What did he do during this journey? Of what was he thinking? As in the
morning, he watched the trees, the thatched roofs, the tilled fields
pass by, and the way in which the landscape, broken at every turn of the
road, vanished; this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes
suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought. What is more
melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the
first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every
instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make
comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all
the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and
bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse;
we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing;
each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel
a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy
horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and
unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows.

Twilight was falling when the children who were coming out of school
beheld this traveller enter Tinques; it is true that the days were still
short; he did not halt at Tinques; as he emerged from the village, a
laborer, who was mending the road with stones, raised his head and said
to him:--

"That horse is very much fatigued."

The poor beast was, in fact, going at a walk.

"Are you going to Arras?" added the road-mender.

"Yes."

"If you go on at that rate you will not arrive very early."

He stopped his horse, and asked the laborer:--

"How far is it from here to Arras?"

"Nearly seven good leagues."

"How is that? the posting guide only says five leagues and a quarter."

"Ah!" returned the road-mender, "so you don't know that the road is
under repair? You will find it barred a quarter of an hour further on;
there is no way to proceed further."

"Really?"

"You will take the road on the left, leading to Carency; you will cross
the river; when you reach Camblin, you will turn to the right; that is
the road to Mont-Saint-Éloy which leads to Arras."

"But it is night, and I shall lose my way."

"You do not belong in these parts?"

"No."

"And, besides, it is all cross-roads; stop! sir," resumed the
road-mender; "shall I give you a piece of advice? your horse is tired;
return to Tinques; there is a good inn there; sleep there; you can reach
Arras to-morrow."

"I must be there this evening."

"That is different; but go to the inn all the same, and get an extra
horse; the stable-boy will guide you through the cross-roads."

He followed the road-mender's advice, retraced his steps, and, half an
hour later, he passed the same spot again, but this time at full speed,
with a good horse to aid; a stable-boy, who called himself a postilion,
was seated on the shaft of the cariole.

Still, he felt that he had lost time.

Night had fully come.

They turned into the cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the
cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to the postilion:--

"Keep at a trot, and you shall have a double fee."

In one of the jolts, the whiffle-tree broke.

"There's the whiffle-tree broken, sir," said the postilion; "I don't
know how to harness my horse now; this road is very bad at night; if
you wish to return and sleep at Tinques, we could be in Arras early
to-morrow morning."

He replied, "Have you a bit of rope and a knife?"

"Yes, sir."

He cut a branch from a tree and made a whiffle-tree of it.

This caused another loss of twenty minutes; but they set out again at a
gallop.

The plain was gloomy; low-hanging, black, crisp fogs crept over the
hills and wrenched themselves away like smoke: there were whitish gleams
in the clouds; a strong breeze which blew in from the sea produced a
sound in all quarters of the horizon, as of some one moving furniture;
everything that could be seen assumed attitudes of terror. How many
things shiver beneath these vast breaths of the night!

He was stiff with cold; he had eaten nothing since the night before;
he vaguely recalled his other nocturnal trip in the vast plain in
the neighborhood of D----, eight years previously, and it seemed but
yesterday.

The hour struck from a distant tower; he asked the boy:--

"What time is it?"

"Seven o'clock, sir; we shall reach Arras at eight; we have but three
leagues still to go."

At that moment, he for the first time indulged in this reflection,
thinking it odd the while that it had not occurred to him sooner: that
all this trouble which he was taking was, perhaps, useless; that he did
not know so much as the hour of the trial; that he should, at least,
have informed himself of that; that he was foolish to go thus straight
ahead without knowing whether he would be of any service or not; then
he sketched out some calculations in his mind: that, ordinarily, the
sittings of the Court of Assizes began at nine o'clock in the morning;
that it could not be a long affair; that the theft of the apples would
be very brief; that there would then remain only a question of identity,
four or five depositions, and very little for the lawyers to say; that
he should arrive after all was over.

The postilion whipped up the horses; they had crossed the river and left
Mont-Saint-Éloy behind them.

The night grew more profound.



CHAPTER VI--SISTER SIMPLICE PUT TO THE PROOF

But at that moment Fantine was joyous.

She had passed a very bad night; her cough was frightful; her fever
had doubled in intensity; she had had dreams: in the morning, when the
doctor paid his visit, she was delirious; he assumed an alarmed look,
and ordered that he should be informed as soon as M. Madeleine arrived.

All the morning she was melancholy, said but little, and laid plaits
in her sheets, murmuring the while, in a low voice, calculations
which seemed to be calculations of distances. Her eyes were hollow and
staring. They seemed almost extinguished at intervals, then lighted up
again and shone like stars. It seems as though, at the approach of a
certain dark hour, the light of heaven fills those who are quitting the
light of earth.

Each time that Sister Simplice asked her how she felt, she replied
invariably, "Well. I should like to see M. Madeleine."

Some months before this, at the moment when Fantine had just lost her
last modesty, her last shame, and her last joy, she was the shadow of
herself; now she was the spectre of herself. Physical suffering had
completed the work of moral suffering. This creature of five and twenty
had a wrinkled brow, flabby cheeks, pinched nostrils, teeth from which
the gums had receded, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, prominent
shoulder-blades, frail limbs, a clayey skin, and her golden hair was
growing out sprinkled with gray. Alas! how illness improvises old-age!

At mid-day the physician returned, gave some directions, inquired
whether the mayor had made his appearance at the infirmary, and shook
his head.

M. Madeleine usually came to see the invalid at three o'clock. As
exactness is kindness, he was exact.

About half-past two, Fantine began to be restless. In the course of
twenty minutes, she asked the nun more than ten times, "What time is it,
sister?"

Three o'clock struck. At the third stroke, Fantine sat up in bed; she
who could, in general, hardly turn over, joined her yellow, fleshless
hands in a sort of convulsive clasp, and the nun heard her utter one
of those profound sighs which seem to throw off dejection. Then Fantine
turned and looked at the door.

No one entered; the door did not open.

She remained thus for a quarter of an hour, her eyes riveted on the
door, motionless and apparently holding her breath. The sister dared not
speak to her. The clock struck a quarter past three. Fantine fell back
on her pillow.

She said nothing, but began to plait the sheets once more.

Half an hour passed, then an hour, no one came; every time the clock
struck, Fantine started up and looked towards the door, then fell back
again.

Her thought was clearly perceptible, but she uttered no name, she made
no complaint, she blamed no one. But she coughed in a melancholy way.
One would have said that something dark was descending upon her. She was
livid and her lips were blue. She smiled now and then.

Five o'clock struck. Then the sister heard her say, very low and gently,
"He is wrong not to come to-day, since I am going away to-morrow."

Sister Simplice herself was surprised at M. Madeleine's delay.

In the meantime, Fantine was staring at the tester of her bed. She
seemed to be endeavoring to recall something. All at once she began to
sing in a voice as feeble as a breath. The nun listened. This is what
Fantine was singing:--


          "Lovely things we will buy
           As we stroll the faubourgs through.
           Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,
           I love my love, corn-flowers are blue.

"Yestere'en the Virgin Mary came near my stove, in a broidered mantle
clad, and said to me, 'Here, hide 'neath my veil the child whom you
one day begged from me. Haste to the city, buy linen, buy a needle, buy
thread.'


          "Lovely things we will buy
           As we stroll the faubourgs through.

"Dear Holy Virgin, beside my stove I have set a cradle with ribbons
decked. God may give me his loveliest star; I prefer the child thou hast
granted me. 'Madame, what shall I do with this linen fine?'--'Make of it
clothes for thy new-born babe.'


          "Roses are pink and corn-flowers are blue,
           I love my love, and corn-flowers are blue.

"'Wash this linen.'--'Where?'--'In the stream. Make of it, soiling
not, spoiling not, a petticoat fair with its bodice fine, which I will
embroider and fill with flowers.'--'Madame, the child is no longer here;
what is to be done?'--'Then make of it a winding-sheet in which to bury
me.'


          "Lovely things we will buy
           As we stroll the faubourgs through,
           Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,
           I love my love, corn-flowers are blue."

This song was an old cradle romance with which she had, in former days,
lulled her little Cosette to sleep, and which had never recurred to her
mind in all the five years during which she had been parted from her
child. She sang it in so sad a voice, and to so sweet an air, that it
was enough to make any one, even a nun, weep. The sister, accustomed as
she was to austerities, felt a tear spring to her eyes.

The clock struck six. Fantine did not seem to hear it. She no longer
seemed to pay attention to anything about her.

Sister Simplice sent a serving-maid to inquire of the portress of the
factory, whether the mayor had returned, and if he would not come to the
infirmary soon. The girl returned in a few minutes.

Fantine was still motionless and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

The servant informed Sister Simplice in a very low tone, that the
mayor had set out that morning before six o'clock, in a little tilbury
harnessed to a white horse, cold as the weather was; that he had gone
alone, without even a driver; that no one knew what road he had taken;
that people said he had been seen to turn into the road to Arras; that
others asserted that they had met him on the road to Paris. That when he
went away he had been very gentle, as usual, and that he had merely told
the portress not to expect him that night.

While the two women were whispering together, with their backs turned
to Fantine's bed, the sister interrogating, the servant conjecturing,
Fantine, with the feverish vivacity of certain organic maladies, which
unite the free movements of health with the frightful emaciation of
death, had raised herself to her knees in bed, with her shrivelled hands
resting on the bolster, and her head thrust through the opening of the
curtains, and was listening. All at once she cried:--

"You are speaking of M. Madeleine! Why are you talking so low? What is
he doing? Why does he not come?"

Her voice was so abrupt and hoarse that the two women thought they heard
the voice of a man; they wheeled round in affright.

"Answer me!" cried Fantine.

The servant stammered:--

"The portress told me that he could not come to-day."

"Be calm, my child," said the sister; "lie down again."

Fantine, without changing her attitude, continued in a loud voice, and
with an accent that was both imperious and heart-rending:--

"He cannot come? Why not? You know the reason. You are whispering it to
each other there. I want to know it."

The servant-maid hastened to say in the nun's ear, "Say that he is busy
with the city council."

Sister Simplice blushed faintly, for it was a lie that the maid had
proposed to her.

On the other hand, it seemed to her that the mere communication of the
truth to the invalid would, without doubt, deal her a terrible blow, and
that this was a serious matter in Fantine's present state. Her flush
did not last long; the sister raised her calm, sad eyes to Fantine, and
said, "Monsieur le Maire has gone away."

Fantine raised herself and crouched on her heels in the bed: her eyes
sparkled; indescribable joy beamed from that melancholy face.

"Gone!" she cried; "he has gone to get Cosette."

Then she raised her arms to heaven, and her white face became ineffable;
her lips moved; she was praying in a low voice.

When her prayer was finished, "Sister," she said, "I am willing to lie
down again; I will do anything you wish; I was naughty just now; I beg
your pardon for having spoken so loud; it is very wrong to talk loudly;
I know that well, my good sister, but, you see, I am very happy: the
good God is good; M. Madeleine is good; just think! he has gone to
Montfermeil to get my little Cosette."

She lay down again, with the nun's assistance, helped the nun to arrange
her pillow, and kissed the little silver cross which she wore on her
neck, and which Sister Simplice had given her.

"My child," said the sister, "try to rest now, and do not talk any
more."

Fantine took the sister's hand in her moist hands, and the latter was
pained to feel that perspiration.

"He set out this morning for Paris; in fact, he need not even go through
Paris; Montfermeil is a little to the left as you come thence. Do you
remember how he said to me yesterday, when I spoke to him of Cosette,
_Soon, soon?_ He wants to give me a surprise, you know! he made me sign
a letter so that she could be taken from the Thénardiers; they cannot
say anything, can they? they will give back Cosette, for they have been
paid; the authorities will not allow them to keep the child since they
have received their pay. Do not make signs to me that I must not talk,
sister! I am extremely happy; I am doing well; I am not ill at all any
more; I am going to see Cosette again; I am even quite hungry; it is
nearly five years since I saw her last; you cannot imagine how much
attached one gets to children, and then, she will be so pretty; you will
see! If you only knew what pretty little rosy fingers she had! In the
first place, she will have very beautiful hands; she had ridiculous
hands when she was only a year old; like this! she must be a big girl
now; she is seven years old; she is quite a young lady; I call her
Cosette, but her name is really Euphrasie. Stop! this morning I was
looking at the dust on the chimney-piece, and I had a sort of idea come
across me, like that, that I should see Cosette again soon. Mon Dieu!
how wrong it is not to see one's children for years! One ought to
reflect that life is not eternal. Oh, how good M. le Maire is to go! it
is very cold! it is true; he had on his cloak, at least? he will be
here to-morrow, will he not? to-morrow will be a festival day; to-morrow
morning, sister, you must remind me to put on my little cap that has
lace on it. What a place that Montfermeil is! I took that journey on
foot once; it was very long for me, but the diligences go very quickly!
he will be here to-morrow with Cosette: how far is it from here to
Montfermeil?"

The sister, who had no idea of distances, replied, "Oh, I think that he
will be here to-morrow."

"To-morrow! to-morrow!" said Fantine, "I shall see Cosette to-morrow!
you see, good sister of the good God, that I am no longer ill; I am mad;
I could dance if any one wished it."

A person who had seen her a quarter of an hour previously would not have
understood the change; she was all rosy now; she spoke in a lively and
natural voice; her whole face was one smile; now and then she talked,
she laughed softly; the joy of a mother is almost infantile.

"Well," resumed the nun, "now that you are happy, mind me, and do not
talk any more."

Fantine laid her head on her pillow and said in a low voice: "Yes,
lie down again; be good, for you are going to have your child; Sister
Simplice is right; every one here is right."

And then, without stirring, without even moving her head, she began to
stare all about her with wide-open eyes and a joyous air, and she said
nothing more.

The sister drew the curtains together again, hoping that she would
fall into a doze. Between seven and eight o'clock the doctor came; not
hearing any sound, he thought Fantine was asleep, entered softly, and
approached the bed on tiptoe; he opened the curtains a little, and, by
the light of the taper, he saw Fantine's big eyes gazing at him.

She said to him, "She will be allowed to sleep beside me in a little
bed, will she not, sir?"

The doctor thought that she was delirious. She added:--

"See! there is just room."

The doctor took Sister Simplice aside, and she explained matters to him;
that M. Madeleine was absent for a day or two, and that in their doubt
they had not thought it well to undeceive the invalid, who believed that
the mayor had gone to Montfermeil; that it was possible, after all, that
her guess was correct: the doctor approved.

He returned to Fantine's bed, and she went on:--

"You see, when she wakes up in the morning, I shall be able to say good
morning to her, poor kitten, and when I cannot sleep at night, I can
hear her asleep; her little gentle breathing will do me good."

"Give me your hand," said the doctor.

She stretched out her arm, and exclaimed with a laugh:--

"Ah, hold! in truth, you did not know it; I am cured; Cosette will
arrive to-morrow."

The doctor was surprised; she was better; the pressure on her chest
had decreased; her pulse had regained its strength; a sort of life had
suddenly supervened and reanimated this poor, worn-out creature.

"Doctor," she went on, "did the sister tell you that M. le Maire has
gone to get that mite of a child?"

The doctor recommended silence, and that all painful emotions should be
avoided; he prescribed an infusion of pure chinchona, and, in case the
fever should increase again during the night, a calming potion. As he
took his departure, he said to the sister:--

"She is doing better; if good luck willed that the mayor should
actually arrive to-morrow with the child, who knows? there are crises
so astounding; great joy has been known to arrest maladies; I know well
that this is an organic disease, and in an advanced state, but all those
things are such mysteries: we may be able to save her."



CHAPTER VII--THE TRAVELLER ON HIS ARRIVAL TAKES PRECAUTIONS FOR
DEPARTURE

It was nearly eight o'clock in the evening when the cart, which we
left on the road, entered the porte-cochère of the Hotel de la Poste in
Arras; the man whom we have been following up to this moment alighted
from it, responded with an abstracted air to the attentions of the
people of the inn, sent back the extra horse, and with his own hands
led the little white horse to the stable; then he opened the door of a
billiard-room which was situated on the ground floor, sat down there,
and leaned his elbows on a table; he had taken fourteen hours for
the journey which he had counted on making in six; he did himself the
justice to acknowledge that it was not his fault, but at bottom, he was
not sorry.

The landlady of the hotel entered.

"Does Monsieur wish a bed? Does Monsieur require supper?"

He made a sign of the head in the negative.

"The stableman says that Monsieur's horse is extremely fatigued."

Here he broke his silence.

"Will not the horse be in a condition to set out again to-morrow
morning?"

"Oh, Monsieur! he must rest for two days at least."

He inquired:--

"Is not the posting-station located here?"

"Yes, sir."

The hostess conducted him to the office; he showed his passport, and
inquired whether there was any way of returning that same night to M.
sur M. by the mail-wagon; the seat beside the post-boy chanced to be
vacant; he engaged it and paid for it. "Monsieur," said the clerk,
"do not fail to be here ready to start at precisely one o'clock in the
morning."

This done, he left the hotel and began to wander about the town.

He was not acquainted with Arras; the streets were dark, and he
walked on at random; but he seemed bent upon not asking the way of the
passers-by. He crossed the little river Crinchon, and found himself in a
labyrinth of narrow alleys where he lost his way. A citizen was passing
along with a lantern. After some hesitation, he decided to apply to this
man, not without having first glanced behind and in front of him, as
though he feared lest some one should hear the question which he was
about to put.

"Monsieur," said he, "where is the court-house, if you please."

"You do not belong in town, sir?" replied the bourgeois, who was an
oldish man; "well, follow me. I happen to be going in the direction of
the court-house, that is to say, in the direction of the hotel of the
prefecture; for the court-house is undergoing repairs just at this
moment, and the courts are holding their sittings provisionally in the
prefecture."

"Is it there that the Assizes are held?" he asked.

"Certainly, sir; you see, the prefecture of to-day was the bishop's
palace before the Revolution. M. de Conzié, who was bishop in '82, built
a grand hall there. It is in this grand hall that the court is held."

On the way, the bourgeois said to him:--

"If Monsieur desires to witness a case, it is rather late. The sittings
generally close at six o'clock."

When they arrived on the grand square, however, the man pointed out to
him four long windows all lighted up, in the front of a vast and gloomy
building.

"Upon my word, sir, you are in luck; you have arrived in season. Do you
see those four windows? That is the Court of Assizes. There is light
there, so they are not through. The matter must have been greatly
protracted, and they are holding an evening session. Do you take an
interest in this affair? Is it a criminal case? Are you a witness?"

He replied:--

"I have not come on any business; I only wish to speak to one of the
lawyers."

"That is different," said the bourgeois. "Stop, sir; here is the door
where the sentry stands. You have only to ascend the grand staircase."

He conformed to the bourgeois's directions, and a few minutes later he
was in a hall containing many people, and where groups, intermingled
with lawyers in their gowns, were whispering together here and there.

It is always a heart-breaking thing to see these congregations of men
robed in black, murmuring together in low voices, on the threshold of
the halls of justice. It is rare that charity and pity are the outcome
of these words. Condemnations pronounced in advance are more likely
to be the result. All these groups seem to the passing and thoughtful
observer so many sombre hives where buzzing spirits construct in concert
all sorts of dark edifices.

This spacious hall, illuminated by a single lamp, was the old hall of
the episcopal palace, and served as the large hall of the palace
of justice. A double-leaved door, which was closed at that moment,
separated it from the large apartment where the court was sitting.

The obscurity was such that he did not fear to accost the first lawyer
whom he met.

"What stage have they reached, sir?" he asked.

"It is finished," said the lawyer.

"Finished!"

This word was repeated in such accents that the lawyer turned round.

"Excuse me sir; perhaps you are a relative?"

"No; I know no one here. Has judgment been pronounced?"

"Of course. Nothing else was possible."

"To penal servitude?"

"For life."

He continued, in a voice so weak that it was barely audible:--

"Then his identity was established?"

"What identity?" replied the lawyer. "There was no identity to be
established. The matter was very simple. The woman had murdered her
child; the infanticide was proved; the jury threw out the question of
premeditation, and she was condemned for life."

"So it was a woman?" said he.

"Why, certainly. The Limosin woman. Of what are you speaking?"

"Nothing. But since it is all over, how comes it that the hall is still
lighted?"

"For another case, which was begun about two hours ago."

"What other case?"

"Oh! this one is a clear case also. It is about a sort of blackguard;
a man arrested for a second offence; a convict who has been guilty of
theft. I don't know his name exactly. There's a bandit's phiz for you!
I'd send him to the galleys on the strength of his face alone."

"Is there any way of getting into the court-room, sir?" said he.

"I really think that there is not. There is a great crowd. However,
the hearing has been suspended. Some people have gone out, and when the
hearing is resumed, you might make an effort."

"Where is the entrance?"

"Through yonder large door."

The lawyer left him. In the course of a few moments he had experienced,
almost simultaneously, almost intermingled with each other, all possible
emotions. The words of this indifferent spectator had, in turn, pierced
his heart like needles of ice and like blades of fire. When he saw that
nothing was settled, he breathed freely once more; but he could not have
told whether what he felt was pain or pleasure.

He drew near to many groups and listened to what they were saying. The
docket of the session was very heavy; the president had appointed
for the same day two short and simple cases. They had begun with the
infanticide, and now they had reached the convict, the old offender, the
"return horse." This man had stolen apples, but that did not appear to
be entirely proved; what had been proved was, that he had already been
in the galleys at Toulon. It was that which lent a bad aspect to
his case. However, the man's examination and the depositions of the
witnesses had been completed, but the lawyer's plea, and the speech
of the public prosecutor were still to come; it could not be
finished before midnight. The man would probably be condemned; the
attorney-general was very clever, and never _missed_ his culprits; he
was a brilliant fellow who wrote verses.

An usher stood at the door communicating with the hall of the Assizes.
He inquired of this usher:--

"Will the door be opened soon, sir?"

"It will not be opened at all," replied the usher.

"What! It will not be opened when the hearing is resumed? Is not the
hearing suspended?"

"The hearing has just been begun again," replied the usher, "but the
door will not be opened again."

"Why?"

"Because the hall is full."

"What! There is not room for one more?"

"Not another one. The door is closed. No one can enter now."

The usher added after a pause: "There are, to tell the truth, two
or three extra places behind Monsieur le Président, but Monsieur le
Président only admits public functionaries to them."

So saying, the usher turned his back.

He retired with bowed head, traversed the antechamber, and slowly
descended the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is probable
that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent conflict which had
been going on within him since the preceding evening was not yet ended;
and every moment he encountered some new phase of it. On reaching the
landing-place, he leaned his back against the balusters and folded his
arms. All at once he opened his coat, drew out his pocket-book, took
from it a pencil, tore out a leaf, and upon that leaf he wrote rapidly,
by the light of the street lantern, this line: _M. Madeleine, Mayor of
M. sur M._; then he ascended the stairs once more with great strides,
made his way through the crowd, walked straight up to the usher, handed
him the paper, and said in an authoritative manner:--

"Take this to Monsieur le Président."

The usher took the paper, cast a glance upon it, and obeyed.



CHAPTER VIII--AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR

Although he did not suspect the fact, the mayor of M. sur M. enjoyed
a sort of celebrity. For the space of seven years his reputation for
virtue had filled the whole of Bas Boulonnais; it had eventually passed
the confines of a small district and had been spread abroad through
two or three neighboring departments. Besides the service which he had
rendered to the chief town by resuscitating the black jet industry,
there was not one out of the hundred and forty communes of the
arrondissement of M. sur M. which was not indebted to him for some
benefit. He had even at need contrived to aid and multiply the
industries of other arrondissements. It was thus that he had, when
occasion offered, supported with his credit and his funds the linen
factory at Boulogne, the flax-spinning industry at Frévent, and the
hydraulic manufacture of cloth at Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the
name of M. Madeleine was pronounced with veneration. Arras and Douai
envied the happy little town of M. sur M. its mayor.

The Councillor of the Royal Court of Douai, who was presiding over this
session of the Assizes at Arras, was acquainted, in common with the rest
of the world, with this name which was so profoundly and universally
honored. When the usher, discreetly opening the door which connected
the council-chamber with the court-room, bent over the back of the
President's arm-chair and handed him the paper on which was inscribed
the line which we have just perused, adding: "The gentleman desires to
be present at the trial," the President, with a quick and deferential
movement, seized a pen and wrote a few words at the bottom of the paper
and returned it to the usher, saying, "Admit him."

The unhappy man whose history we are relating had remained near the door
of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude in which the usher
had left him. In the midst of his revery he heard some one saying to
him, "Will Monsieur do me the honor to follow me?" It was the same usher
who had turned his back upon him but a moment previously, and who was
now bowing to the earth before him. At the same time, the usher handed
him the paper. He unfolded it, and as he chanced to be near the light,
he could read it.

"The President of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to M.
Madeleine."

He crushed the paper in his hand as though those words contained for him
a strange and bitter aftertaste.

He followed the usher.

A few minutes later he found himself alone in a sort of wainscoted
cabinet of severe aspect, lighted by two wax candles, placed upon a
table with a green cloth. The last words of the usher who had just
quitted him still rang in his ears: "Monsieur, you are now in the
council-chamber; you have only to turn the copper handle of yonder door,
and you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the President's
chair." These words were mingled in his thoughts with a vague memory of
narrow corridors and dark staircases which he had recently traversed.

The usher had left him alone. The supreme moment had arrived. He sought
to collect his faculties, but could not. It is chiefly at the moment
when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful
realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain. He
was in the very place where the judges deliberated and condemned. With
stupid tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible apartment,
where so many lives had been broken, which was soon to ring with his
name, and which his fate was at that moment traversing. He stared at
the wall, then he looked at himself, wondering that it should be that
chamber and that it should be he.

He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was worn out by the
jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of it. It seemed to him that
he felt nothing.

He approached a black frame which was suspended on the wall, and which
contained, under glass, an ancient autograph letter of Jean Nicolas
Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, and dated, through an error, no
doubt, the _9th of June_, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded
to the commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest by
them. Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that moment, and who
had watched him, would have imagined, doubtless, that this letter struck
him as very curious, for he did not take his eyes from it, and he read
it two or three times. He read it without paying any attention to it,
and unconsciously. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.

As he dreamed, he turned round, and his eyes fell upon the brass knob
of the door which separated him from the Court of Assizes. He had almost
forgotten that door. His glance, calm at first, paused there, remained
fixed on that brass handle, then grew terrified, and little by little
became impregnated with fear. Beads of perspiration burst forth among
his hair and trickled down upon his temples.

At a certain moment he made that indescribable gesture of a sort of
authority mingled with rebellion, which is intended to convey, and
which does so well convey, _"Pardieu! who compels me to this?"_ Then
he wheeled briskly round, caught sight of the door through which he had
entered in front of him, went to it, opened it, and passed out. He was
no longer in that chamber; he was outside in a corridor, a long, narrow
corridor, broken by steps and gratings, making all sorts of angles,
lighted here and there by lanterns similar to the night taper of
invalids, the corridor through which he had approached. He breathed, he
listened; not a sound in front, not a sound behind him, and he fled as
though pursued.

When he had turned many angles in this corridor, he still listened. The
same silence reigned, and there was the same darkness around him. He was
out of breath; he staggered; he leaned against the wall. The stone was
cold; the perspiration lay ice-cold on his brow; he straightened himself
up with a shiver.

Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with
something else, too, perchance, he meditated.

He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard
within him but one voice, which said, "Alas!"

A quarter of an hour passed thus. At length he bowed his head, sighed
with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly,
and as though crushed. It seemed as though some one had overtaken him in
his flight and was leading him back.

He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of
was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished
brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb
might gaze into the eye of a tiger.

He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a step
and approached the door.

Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall
like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not
hear.

Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself near
the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.

He was in the court-room.



CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION

He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and
remained standing, contemplating what he saw.

It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full
of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty
and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of
development.

At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with
abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or
closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in
all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,
spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was
yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room
lamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in
the wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,
ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere and
august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which is
called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.

No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were
directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small
door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left; on this bench,
illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.

This man was _the_ man.

He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as
though they had known beforehand where that figure was.

He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the same
in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with his
bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse, just as
it was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred, concealing
his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he had spent
nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.

He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become like that
again?"

This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something
indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.

At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make
way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that
the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had
bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M.
sur M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,
recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived it; he was
the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.

Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all these
he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;
he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they
moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage
of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real
crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the
monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him,
with all that there is formidable in reality.

All this was yawning before him.

He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in the deepest
recesses of his soul, "Never!"

And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas tremble, and
rendered him nearly mad, it was another self of his that was there! all
called that man who was being tried Jean Valjean.

Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representation
of the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by his spectre.

Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour of the night,
the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators; all were the
same, only above the President's head there hung a crucifix, something
which the courts had lacked at the time of his condemnation: God had
been absent when he had been judged.

There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at the
thought that he might be seen; when he was seated, he took advantage of
a pile of cardboard boxes, which stood on the judge's desk, to conceal
his face from the whole room; he could now see without being seen; he
had fully regained consciousness of the reality of things; gradually he
recovered; he attained that phase of composure where it is possible to
listen.

M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.

He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the witnesses was
hidden from him by the clerk's table, and then, as we have just said,
the hall was sparely lighted.

At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had just finished
his plea.

The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the affair had
lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd had been watching a
strange man, a miserable specimen of humanity, either profoundly stupid
or profoundly subtle, gradually bending beneath the weight of a terrible
likeness. This man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who had
been found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe apples, broken
in the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pierron orchard. Who was this
man? an examination had been made; witnesses had been heard, and they
were unanimous; light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the
accusation said: "We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer
of fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who
has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous
description, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long been
in search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleys
at Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence, on the
person of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime provided
for by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for which
we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judicially
established. He has just committed a fresh theft; it is a case of a
second offence; condemn him for the fresh deed; later on he will be
judged for the old crime." In the face of this accusation, in the face
of the unanimity of the witnesses, the accused appeared to be astonished
more than anything else; he made signs and gestures which were meant to
convey No, or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty,
replied with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot, was
a denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds ranged in
order of battle around him, and like a stranger in the midst of this
society which was seizing fast upon him; nevertheless, it was a question
of the most menacing future for him; the likeness increased every
moment, and the entire crowd surveyed, with more anxiety than he did
himself, that sentence freighted with calamity, which descended
ever closer over his head; there was even a glimpse of a possibility
afforded; besides the galleys, a possible death penalty, in case his
identity were established, and the affair of Little Gervais were to end
thereafter in condemnation. Who was this man? what was the nature of his
apathy? was it imbecility or craft? Did he understand too well, or did
he not understand at all? these were questions which divided the crowd,
and seemed to divide the jury; there was something both terrible and
puzzling in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was also
obscure.

The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in that
provincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence of the bar,
and which was formerly employed by all advocates, at Paris as well as at
Romorantin or at Montbrison, and which to-day, having become classic, is
no longer spoken except by the official orators of magistracy, to whom
it is suited on account of its grave sonorousness and its majestic
stride; a tongue in which a husband is called _a consort_, and a woman
_a spouse_; Paris, _the centre of art and civilization_; the king,
_the monarch_; Monseigneur the Bishop, _a sainted pontiff_; the
district-attorney, _the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution_;
the arguments, _the accents which we have just listened to_; the age of
Louis XIV., _the grand age_; a theatre, _the temple of Melpomene_; the
reigning family, _the august blood of our kings_; a concert, _a musical
solemnity_; the General Commandant of the province, _the illustrious
warrior, who, etc._; the pupils in the seminary, _these tender
levities_; errors imputed to newspapers, _the imposture which distills
its venom through the columns of those organs_; etc. The lawyer
had, accordingly, begun with an explanation as to the theft of the
apples,--an awkward matter couched in fine style; but Bénigne Bossuet
himself was obliged to allude to a chicken in the midst of a funeral
oration, and he extricated himself from the situation in stately
fashion. The lawyer established the fact that the theft of the apples
had not been circumstantially proved. His client, whom he, in his
character of counsel, persisted in calling Champmathieu, had not been
seen scaling that wall nor breaking that branch by any one. He had been
taken with that branch (which the lawyer preferred to call a _bough_) in
his possession; but he said that he had found it broken off and lying
on the ground, and had picked it up. Where was there any proof to the
contrary? No doubt that branch had been broken off and concealed after
the scaling of the wall, then thrown away by the alarmed marauder; there
was no doubt that there had been a thief in the case. But what proof
was there that that thief had been Champmathieu? One thing only. His
character as an ex-convict. The lawyer did not deny that that character
appeared to be, unhappily, well attested; the accused had resided at
Faverolles; the accused had exercised the calling of a tree-pruner
there; the name of Champmathieu might well have had its origin in
Jean Mathieu; all that was true,--in short, four witnesses recognize
Champmathieu, positively and without hesitation, as that convict, Jean
Valjean; to these signs, to this testimony, the counsel could oppose
nothing but the denial of his client, the denial of an interested party;
but supposing that he was the convict Jean Valjean, did that prove that
he was the thief of the apples? that was a presumption at the most, not
a proof. The prisoner, it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith,"
was obliged to admit it, had adopted "a bad system of defence." He
obstinately denied everything, the theft and his character of convict.
An admission upon this last point would certainly have been better, and
would have won for him the indulgence of his judges; the counsel
had advised him to do this; but the accused had obstinately refused,
thinking, no doubt, that he would save everything by admitting nothing.
It was an error; but ought not the paucity of this intelligence to be
taken into consideration? This man was visibly stupid. Long-continued
wretchedness in the galleys, long misery outside the galleys, had
brutalized him, etc. He defended himself badly; was that a reason for
condemning him? As for the affair with Little Gervais, the counsel need
not discuss it; it did not enter into the case. The lawyer wound up
by beseeching the jury and the court, if the identity of Jean Valjean
appeared to them to be evident, to apply to him the police penalties
which are provided for a criminal who has broken his ban, and not the
frightful chastisement which descends upon the convict guilty of a
second offence.

The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence. He was
violent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.

He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty," and
skilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached the accused through
all the concessions made by his lawyer. The advocate had seemed to admit
that the prisoner was Jean Valjean. He took note of this. So this man
was Jean Valjean. This point had been conceded to the accusation and
could no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a clever
autonomasia which went back to the sources and causes of crime, the
district-attorney thundered against the immorality of the romantic
school, then dawning under the name of _the Satanic school_, which
had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the _Quotidienne_ and
the _Oriflamme_; he attributed, not without some probability, to the
influence of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu, or
rather, to speak more correctly, of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted these
considerations, he passed on to Jean Valjean himself. Who was this Jean
Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster spewed forth, etc.
The model for this sort of description is contained in the tale of
Théramène, which is not useful to tragedy, but which every day renders
great services to judicial eloquence. The audience and the jury
"shuddered." The description finished, the district-attorney resumed
with an oratorical turn calculated to raise the enthusiasm of the
journal of the prefecture to the highest pitch on the following day: And
it is such a man, etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without means of
existence, etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable deeds, and
but little reformed by his sojourn in the galleys, as was proved by the
crime committed against Little Gervais, etc., etc.; it is such a man,
caught upon the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces from a
wall that had been scaled, still holding in his hand the object
stolen, who denies the crime, the theft, the climbing the wall; denies
everything; denies even his own identity! In addition to a hundred
other proofs, to which we will not recur, four witnesses recognize
him--Javert, the upright inspector of police; Javert, and three of
his former companions in infamy, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and
Cochepaille. What does he offer in opposition to this overwhelming
unanimity? His denial. What obduracy! You will do justice, gentlemen
of the jury, etc., etc. While the district-attorney was speaking, the
accused listened to him open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in which
some admiration was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised that
a man could talk like that. From time to time, at those "energetic"
moments of the prosecutor's speech, when eloquence which cannot contain
itself overflows in a flood of withering epithets and envelops the
accused like a storm, he moved his head slowly from right to left and
from left to right in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with which
he had contented himself since the beginning of the argument. Two or
three times the spectators who were nearest to him heard him say in
a low voice, "That is what comes of not having asked M. Baloup." The
district-attorney directed the attention of the jury to this stupid
attitude, evidently deliberate, which denoted not imbecility, but craft,
skill, a habit of deceiving justice, and which set forth in all its
nakedness the "profound perversity" of this man. He ended by making
his reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and demanding a severe
sentence.

At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal servitude for
life.

The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting Monsieur
l'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then replied as best he
could; but he weakened; the ground was evidently slipping away from
under his feet.



CHAPTER X--THE SYSTEM OF DENIALS

The moment for closing the debate had arrived. The President had the
accused stand up, and addressed to him the customary question, "Have you
anything to add to your defence?"

The man did not appear to understand, as he stood there, twisting in his
hands a terrible cap which he had.

The President repeated the question.

This time the man heard it. He seemed to understand. He made a motion
like a man who is just waking up, cast his eyes about him, stared at
the audience, the gendarmes, his counsel, the jury, the court, laid
his monstrous fist on the rim of woodwork in front of his bench,
took another look, and all at once, fixing his glance upon the
district-attorney, he began to speak. It was like an eruption.
It seemed, from the manner in which the words escaped from his
mouth,--incoherent, impetuous, pell-mell, tumbling over each other,--as
though they were all pressing forward to issue forth at once. He said:--

"This is what I have to say. That I have been a wheelwright in Paris,
and that it was with Monsieur Baloup. It is a hard trade. In the
wheelwright's trade one works always in the open air, in courtyards,
under sheds when the masters are good, never in closed workshops,
because space is required, you see. In winter one gets so cold that one
beats one's arms together to warm one's self; but the masters don't like
it; they say it wastes time. Handling iron when there is ice between
the paving-stones is hard work. That wears a man out quickly. One is old
while he is still quite young in that trade. At forty a man is done for.
I was fifty-three. I was in a bad state. And then, workmen are so mean!
When a man is no longer young, they call him nothing but an old bird,
old beast! I was not earning more than thirty sous a day. They paid me
as little as possible. The masters took advantage of my age--and then I
had my daughter, who was a laundress at the river. She earned a little
also. It sufficed for us two. She had trouble, also; all day long up to
her waist in a tub, in rain, in snow. When the wind cuts your face, when
it freezes, it is all the same; you must still wash. There are people
who have not much linen, and wait until late; if you do not wash, you
lose your custom. The planks are badly joined, and water drops on you
from everywhere; you have your petticoats all damp above and below. That
penetrates. She has also worked at the laundry of the Enfants-Rouges,
where the water comes through faucets. You are not in the tub there; you
wash at the faucet in front of you, and rinse in a basin behind you. As
it is enclosed, you are not so cold; but there is that hot steam, which
is terrible, and which ruins your eyes. She came home at seven o'clock
in the evening, and went to bed at once, she was so tired. Her husband
beat her. She is dead. We have not been very happy. She was a good girl,
who did not go to the ball, and who was very peaceable. I remember
one Shrove-Tuesday when she went to bed at eight o'clock. There, I am
telling the truth; you have only to ask. Ah, yes! how stupid I am! Paris
is a gulf. Who knows Father Champmathieu there? But M. Baloup does, I
tell you. Go see at M. Baloup's; and after all, I don't know what is
wanted of me."

The man ceased speaking, and remained standing. He had said these things
in a loud, rapid, hoarse voice, with a sort of irritated and savage
ingenuousness. Once he paused to salute some one in the crowd. The sort
of affirmations which he seemed to fling out before him at random came
like hiccoughs, and to each he added the gesture of a wood-cutter who is
splitting wood. When he had finished, the audience burst into a laugh.
He stared at the public, and, perceiving that they were laughing, and
not understanding why, he began to laugh himself.

It was inauspicious.

The President, an attentive and benevolent man, raised his voice.

He reminded "the gentlemen of the jury" that "the sieur Baloup, formerly
a master-wheelwright, with whom the accused stated that he had served,
had been summoned in vain. He had become bankrupt, and was not to be
found." Then turning to the accused, he enjoined him to listen to what
he was about to say, and added: "You are in a position where reflection
is necessary. The gravest presumptions rest upon you, and may induce
vital results. Prisoner, in your own interests, I summon you for the
last time to explain yourself clearly on two points. In the first place,
did you or did you not climb the wall of the Pierron orchard, break
the branch, and steal the apples; that is to say, commit the crime
of breaking in and theft? In the second place, are you the discharged
convict, Jean Valjean--yes or no?"

The prisoner shook his head with a capable air, like a man who has
thoroughly understood, and who knows what answer he is going to make. He
opened his mouth, turned towards the President, and said:--

"In the first place--"

Then he stared at his cap, stared at the ceiling, and held his peace.

"Prisoner," said the district-attorney, in a severe voice; "pay
attention. You are not answering anything that has been asked of you.
Your embarrassment condemns you. It is evident that your name is not
Champmathieu; that you are the convict, Jean Valjean, concealed first
under the name of Jean Mathieu, which was the name of his mother; that
you went to Auvergne; that you were born at Faverolles, where you were
a pruner of trees. It is evident that you have been guilty of entering,
and of the theft of ripe apples from the Pierron orchard. The gentlemen
of the jury will form their own opinion."

Enlarge


The prisoner had finally resumed his seat; he arose abruptly when the
district-attorney had finished, and exclaimed:--

"You are very wicked; that you are! This what I wanted to say; I could
not find words for it at first. I have stolen nothing. I am a man who
does not have something to eat every day. I was coming from Ailly; I
was walking through the country after a shower, which had made the whole
country yellow: even the ponds were overflowed, and nothing sprang from
the sand any more but the little blades of grass at the wayside. I
found a broken branch with apples on the ground; I picked up the branch
without knowing that it would get me into trouble. I have been in
prison, and they have been dragging me about for the last three months;
more than that I cannot say; people talk against me, they tell me,
'Answer!' The gendarme, who is a good fellow, nudges my elbow, and says
to me in a low voice, 'Come, answer!' I don't know how to explain; I
have no education; I am a poor man; that is where they wrong me, because
they do not see this. I have not stolen; I picked up from the ground
things that were lying there. You say, Jean Valjean, Jean Mathieu! I
don't know those persons; they are villagers. I worked for M. Baloup,
Boulevard de l'Hôpital; my name is Champmathieu. You are very clever to
tell me where I was born; I don't know myself: it's not everybody
who has a house in which to come into the world; that would be too
convenient. I think that my father and mother were people who strolled
along the highways; I know nothing different. When I was a child, they
called me _young fellow_; now they call me _old Fellow_; those are my
baptismal names; take that as you like. I have been in Auvergne; I have
been at Faverolles. Pardi. Well! can't a man have been in Auvergne, or
at Faverolles, without having been in the galleys? I tell you that I
have not stolen, and that I am Father Champmathieu; I have been with M.
Baloup; I have had a settled residence. You worry me with your nonsense,
there! Why is everybody pursuing me so furiously?"

The district-attorney had remained standing; he addressed the
President:--

"Monsieur le Président, in view of the confused but exceedingly clever
denials of the prisoner, who would like to pass himself off as an idiot,
but who will not succeed in so doing,--we shall attend to that,--we
demand that it shall please you and that it shall please the court to
summon once more into this place the convicts Brevet, Cochepaille, and
Chenildieu, and Police-Inspector Javert, and question them for the last
time as to the identity of the prisoner with the convict Jean Valjean."

"I would remind the district-attorney," said the President, "that
Police-Inspector Javert, recalled by his duties to the capital of a
neighboring arrondissement, left the court-room and the town as soon as
he had made his deposition; we have accorded him permission, with the
consent of the district-attorney and of the counsel for the prisoner."

"That is true, Mr. President," responded the district-attorney. "In the
absence of sieur Javert, I think it my duty to remind the gentlemen of
the jury of what he said here a few hours ago. Javert is an estimable
man, who does honor by his rigorous and strict probity to inferior but
important functions. These are the terms of his deposition: 'I do not
even stand in need of circumstantial proofs and moral presumptions to
give the lie to the prisoner's denial. I recognize him perfectly. The
name of this man is not Champmathieu; he is an ex-convict named Jean
Valjean, and is very vicious and much to be feared. It is only with
extreme regret that he was released at the expiration of his term. He
underwent nineteen years of penal servitude for theft. He made five or
six attempts to escape. Besides the theft from Little Gervais, and from
the Pierron orchard, I suspect him of a theft committed in the house of
His Grace the late Bishop of D---- I often saw him at the time when I
was adjutant of the galley-guard at the prison in Toulon. I repeat that
I recognize him perfectly.'"

This extremely precise statement appeared to produce a vivid impression
on the public and on the jury. The district-attorney concluded by
insisting, that in default of Javert, the three witnesses Brevet,
Chenildieu, and Cochepaille should be heard once more and solemnly
interrogated.

The President transmitted the order to an usher, and, a moment later,
the door of the witnesses' room opened. The usher, accompanied by a
gendarme ready to lend him armed assistance, introduced the convict
Brevet. The audience was in suspense; and all breasts heaved as though
they had contained but one soul.

The ex-convict Brevet wore the black and gray waistcoat of the central
prisons. Brevet was a person sixty years of age, who had a sort of
business man's face, and the air of a rascal. The two sometimes go
together. In prison, whither fresh misdeeds had led him, he had become
something in the nature of a turnkey. He was a man of whom his superiors
said, "He tries to make himself of use." The chaplains bore good
testimony as to his religious habits. It must not be forgotten that this
passed under the Restoration.

"Brevet," said the President, "you have undergone an ignominious
sentence, and you cannot take an oath."

Brevet dropped his eyes.

"Nevertheless," continued the President, "even in the man whom the law
has degraded, there may remain, when the divine mercy permits it, a
sentiment of honor and of equity. It is to this sentiment that I
appeal at this decisive hour. If it still exists in you,--and I hope
it does,--reflect before replying to me: consider on the one hand, this
man, whom a word from you may ruin; on the other hand, justice, which a
word from you may enlighten. The instant is solemn; there is still time
to retract if you think you have been mistaken. Rise, prisoner. Brevet,
take a good look at the accused, recall your souvenirs, and tell us on
your soul and conscience, if you persist in recognizing this man as your
former companion in the galleys, Jean Valjean?"

Brevet looked at the prisoner, then turned towards the court.

"Yes, Mr. President, I was the first to recognize him, and I stick to
it; that man is Jean Valjean, who entered at Toulon in 1796, and left in
1815. I left a year later. He has the air of a brute now; but it must be
because age has brutalized him; he was sly at the galleys: I recognize
him positively."

"Take your seat," said the President. "Prisoner, remain standing."

Chenildieu was brought in, a prisoner for life, as was indicated by his
red cassock and his green cap. He was serving out his sentence at the
galleys of Toulon, whence he had been brought for this case. He was a
small man of about fifty, brisk, wrinkled, frail, yellow, brazen-faced,
feverish, who had a sort of sickly feebleness about all his limbs and
his whole person, and an immense force in his glance. His companions in
the galleys had nicknamed him _I-deny-God_ (_Je-nie Dieu_, Chenildieu).

The President addressed him in nearly the same words which he had
used to Brevet. At the moment when he reminded him of his infamy which
deprived him of the right to take an oath, Chenildieu raised his
head and looked the crowd in the face. The President invited him to
reflection, and asked him as he had asked Brevet, if he persisted in
recognition of the prisoner.

Chenildieu burst out laughing.

"Pardieu, as if I didn't recognize him! We were attached to the same
chain for five years. So you are sulking, old fellow?"

"Go take your seat," said the President.

The usher brought in Cochepaille. He was another convict for life, who
had come from the galleys, and was dressed in red, like Chenildieu, was
a peasant from Lourdes, and a half-bear of the Pyrenees. He had guarded
the flocks among the mountains, and from a shepherd he had slipped into
a brigand. Cochepaille was no less savage and seemed even more stupid
than the prisoner. He was one of those wretched men whom nature has
sketched out for wild beasts, and on whom society puts the finishing
touches as convicts in the galleys.

The President tried to touch him with some grave and pathetic words,
and asked him, as he had asked the other two, if he persisted, without
hesitation or trouble, in recognizing the man who was standing before
him.

"He is Jean Valjean," said Cochepaille. "He was even called
Jean-the-Screw, because he was so strong."

Each of these affirmations from these three men, evidently sincere and
in good faith, had raised in the audience a murmur of bad augury for the
prisoner,--a murmur which increased and lasted longer each time that a
fresh declaration was added to the proceeding.

The prisoner had listened to them, with that astounded face which was,
according to the accusation, his principal means of defence; at the
first, the gendarmes, his neighbors, had heard him mutter between his
teeth: "Ah, well, he's a nice one!" after the second, he said, a little
louder, with an air that was almost that of satisfaction, "Good!" at the
third, he cried, "Famous!"

The President addressed him:--

"Have you heard, prisoner? What have you to say?"

He replied:--

"I say, 'Famous!'"

An uproar broke out among the audience, and was communicated to the
jury; it was evident that the man was lost.

"Ushers," said the President, "enforce silence! I am going to sum up the
arguments."

At that moment there was a movement just beside the President; a voice
was heard crying:--

"Brevet! Chenildieu! Cochepaille! look here!"

All who heard that voice were chilled, so lamentable and terrible was
it; all eyes were turned to the point whence it had proceeded. A man,
placed among the privileged spectators who were seated behind the
court, had just risen, had pushed open the half-door which separated the
tribunal from the audience, and was standing in the middle of the hall;
the President, the district-attorney, M. Bamatabois, twenty persons,
recognized him, and exclaimed in concert:--

"M. Madeleine!"



CHAPTER XI--CHAMPMATHIEU MORE AND MORE ASTONISHED

It was he, in fact. The clerk's lamp illumined his countenance. He held
his hat in his hand; there was no disorder in his clothing; his coat
was carefully buttoned; he was very pale, and he trembled slightly;
his hair, which had still been gray on his arrival in Arras, was now
entirely white: it had turned white during the hour he had sat there.

All heads were raised: the sensation was indescribable; there was
a momentary hesitation in the audience, the voice had been so
heart-rending; the man who stood there appeared so calm that they did
not understand at first. They asked themselves whether he had indeed
uttered that cry; they could not believe that that tranquil man had been
the one to give that terrible outcry.

This indecision only lasted a few seconds. Even before the President
and the district-attorney could utter a word, before the ushers and the
gendarmes could make a gesture, the man whom all still called, at that
moment, M. Madeleine, had advanced towards the witnesses Cochepaille,
Brevet, and Chenildieu.

"Do you not recognize me?" said he.

All three remained speechless, and indicated by a sign of the head that
they did not know him. Cochepaille, who was intimidated, made a military
salute. M. Madeleine turned towards the jury and the court, and said in
a gentle voice:--

"Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released! Mr.
President, have me arrested. He is not the man whom you are in search
of; it is I: I am Jean Valjean."

Not a mouth breathed; the first commotion of astonishment had been
followed by a silence like that of the grave; those within the hall
experienced that sort of religious terror which seizes the masses when
something grand has been done.

In the meantime, the face of the President was stamped with sympathy and
sadness; he had exchanged a rapid sign with the district-attorney and a
few low-toned words with the assistant judges; he addressed the public,
and asked in accents which all understood:--

"Is there a physician present?"

The district-attorney took the word:--

"Gentlemen of the jury, the very strange and unexpected incident
which disturbs the audience inspires us, like yourselves, only with a
sentiment which it is unnecessary for us to express. You all know, by
reputation at least, the honorable M. Madeleine, mayor of M. sur M.;
if there is a physician in the audience, we join the President in
requesting him to attend to M. Madeleine, and to conduct him to his
home."

M. Madeleine did not allow the district-attorney to finish; he
interrupted him in accents full of suavity and authority. These are the
words which he uttered; here they are literally, as they were written
down, immediately after the trial by one of the witnesses to this scene,
and as they now ring in the ears of those who heard them nearly forty
years ago:--

"I thank you, Mr. District-Attorney, but I am not mad; you shall see;
you were on the point of committing a great error; release this man! I
am fulfilling a duty; I am that miserable criminal. I am the only one
here who sees the matter clearly, and I am telling you the truth. God,
who is on high, looks down on what I am doing at this moment, and that
suffices. You can take me, for here I am: but I have done my best; I
concealed myself under another name; I have become rich; I have become
a mayor; I have tried to re-enter the ranks of the honest. It seems that
that is not to be done. In short, there are many things which I cannot
tell. I will not narrate the story of my life to you; you will hear it
one of these days. I robbed Monseigneur the Bishop, it is true; it is
true that I robbed Little Gervais; they were right in telling you that
Jean Valjean was a very vicious wretch. Perhaps it was not altogether
his fault. Listen, honorable judges! a man who has been so greatly
humbled as I have has neither any remonstrances to make to Providence,
nor any advice to give to society; but, you see, the infamy from which I
have tried to escape is an injurious thing; the galleys make the convict
what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the
galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort
of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became
vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand. Later on,
indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me. But, pardon
me, you cannot understand what I am saying. You will find at my house,
among the ashes in the fireplace, the forty-sou piece which I stole,
seven years ago, from little Gervais. I have nothing farther to add;
take me. Good God! the district-attorney shakes his head; you say, 'M.
Madeleine has gone mad!' you do not believe me! that is distressing. Do
not, at least, condemn this man! What! these men do not recognize me! I
wish Javert were here; he would recognize me."

Nothing can reproduce the sombre and kindly melancholy of tone which
accompanied these words.

He turned to the three convicts, and said:--

"Well, I recognize you; do you remember, Brevet?"

He paused, hesitated for an instant, and said:--

"Do you remember the knitted suspenders with a checked pattern which you
wore in the galleys?"

Brevet gave a start of surprise, and surveyed him from head to foot with
a frightened air. He continued:--

"Chenildieu, you who conferred on yourself the name of 'Jenie-Dieu,'
your whole right shoulder bears a deep burn, because you one day laid
your shoulder against the chafing-dish full of coals, in order to efface
the three letters T. F. P., which are still visible, nevertheless;
answer, is this true?"

"It is true," said Chenildieu.

He addressed himself to Cochepaille:--

"Cochepaille, you have, near the bend in your left arm, a date stamped
in blue letters with burnt powder; the date is that of the landing of
the Emperor at Cannes, March 1, 1815; pull up your sleeve!"

Cochepaille pushed up his sleeve; all eyes were focused on him and on
his bare arm.

A gendarme held a light close to it; there was the date.

The unhappy man turned to the spectators and the judges with a smile
which still rends the hearts of all who saw it whenever they think of
it. It was a smile of triumph; it was also a smile of despair.

"You see plainly," he said, "that I am Jean Valjean."

In that chamber there were no longer either judges, accusers, nor
gendarmes; there was nothing but staring eyes and sympathizing hearts.
No one recalled any longer the part that each might be called upon
to play; the district-attorney forgot he was there for the purpose of
prosecuting, the President that he was there to preside, the counsel for
the defence that he was there to defend. It was a striking circumstance
that no question was put, that no authority intervened. The peculiarity
of sublime spectacles is, that they capture all souls and turn witnesses
into spectators. No one, probably, could have explained what he felt;
no one, probably, said to himself that he was witnessing the splendid
outburst of a grand light: all felt themselves inwardly dazzled.

It was evident that they had Jean Valjean before their eyes. That was
clear. The appearance of this man had sufficed to suffuse with light
that matter which had been so obscure but a moment previously, without
any further explanation: the whole crowd, as by a sort of electric
revelation, understood instantly and at a single glance the simple
and magnificent history of a man who was delivering himself up so
that another man might not be condemned in his stead. The details, the
hesitations, little possible oppositions, were swallowed up in that vast
and luminous fact.

It was an impression which vanished speedily, but which was irresistible
at the moment.

"I do not wish to disturb the court further," resumed Jean Valjean. "I
shall withdraw, since you do not arrest me. I have many things to do.
The district-attorney knows who I am; he knows whither I am going; he
can have me arrested when he likes."

He directed his steps towards the door. Not a voice was raised, not an
arm extended to hinder him. All stood aside. At that moment there was
about him that divine something which causes multitudes to stand aside
and make way for a man. He traversed the crowd slowly. It was never
known who opened the door, but it is certain that he found the door open
when he reached it. On arriving there he turned round and said:--

"I am at your command, Mr. District-Attorney."

Then he addressed the audience:--

"All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do you
not? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I
consider that I am to be envied. Nevertheless, I should have preferred
not to have had this occur."

He withdrew, and the door closed behind him as it had opened, for those
who do certain sovereign things are always sure of being served by some
one in the crowd.

Less than an hour after this, the verdict of the jury freed the said
Champmathieu from all accusations; and Champmathieu, being at once
released, went off in a state of stupefaction, thinking that all men
were fools, and comprehending nothing of this vision.



BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW



CHAPTER I--IN WHAT MIRROR M. MADELEINE CONTEMPLATES HIS HAIR

The day had begun to dawn. Fantine had passed a sleepless and feverish
night, filled with happy visions; at daybreak she fell asleep. Sister
Simplice, who had been watching with her, availed herself of this
slumber to go and prepare a new potion of chinchona. The worthy sister
had been in the laboratory of the infirmary but a few moments, bending
over her drugs and phials, and scrutinizing things very closely, on
account of the dimness which the half-light of dawn spreads over all
objects. Suddenly she raised her head and uttered a faint shriek. M.
Madeleine stood before her; he had just entered silently.

"Is it you, Mr. Mayor?" she exclaimed.

He replied in a low voice:--

"How is that poor woman?"

"Not so bad just now; but we have been very uneasy."

She explained to him what had passed: that Fantine had been very ill the
day before, and that she was better now, because she thought that the
mayor had gone to Montfermeil to get her child. The sister dared not
question the mayor; but she perceived plainly from his air that he had
not come from there.

"All that is good," said he; "you were right not to undeceive her."

"Yes," responded the sister; "but now, Mr. Mayor, she will see you and
will not see her child. What shall we say to her?"

He reflected for a moment.

"God will inspire us," said he.

"But we cannot tell a lie," murmured the sister, half aloud.

It was broad daylight in the room. The light fell full on M. Madeleine's
face. The sister chanced to raise her eyes to it.

"Good God, sir!" she exclaimed; "what has happened to you? Your hair is
perfectly white!"

"White!" said he.

Sister Simplice had no mirror. She rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out
the little glass which the doctor of the infirmary used to see whether
a patient was dead and whether he no longer breathed. M. Madeleine took
the mirror, looked at his hair, and said:--

"Well!"

He uttered the word indifferently, and as though his mind were on
something else.

The sister felt chilled by something strange of which she caught a
glimpse in all this.

He inquired:--

"Can I see her?"

"Is not Monsieur le Maire going to have her child brought back to her?"
said the sister, hardly venturing to put the question.

"Of course; but it will take two or three days at least."

"If she were not to see Monsieur le Maire until that time," went on
the sister, timidly, "she would not know that Monsieur le Maire had
returned, and it would be easy to inspire her with patience; and when
the child arrived, she would naturally think Monsieur le Maire had just
come with the child. We should not have to enact a lie."

M. Madeleine seemed to reflect for a few moments; then he said with his
calm gravity:--

"No, sister, I must see her. I may, perhaps, be in haste."

The nun did not appear to notice this word "perhaps," which communicated
an obscure and singular sense to the words of the mayor's speech. She
replied, lowering her eyes and her voice respectfully:--

"In that case, she is asleep; but Monsieur le Maire may enter."

He made some remarks about a door which shut badly, and the noise of
which might awaken the sick woman; then he entered Fantine's chamber,
approached the bed and drew aside the curtains. She was asleep. Her
breath issued from her breast with that tragic sound which is peculiar
to those maladies, and which breaks the hearts of mothers when they are
watching through the night beside their sleeping child who is condemned
to death. But this painful respiration hardly troubled a sort of
ineffable serenity which overspread her countenance, and which
transfigured her in her sleep. Her pallor had become whiteness; her
cheeks were crimson; her long golden lashes, the only beauty of her
youth and her virginity which remained to her, palpitated, though they
remained closed and drooping. Her whole person was trembling with an
indescribable unfolding of wings, all ready to open wide and bear her
away, which could be felt as they rustled, though they could not be
seen. To see her thus, one would never have dreamed that she was
an invalid whose life was almost despaired of. She resembled rather
something on the point of soaring away than something on the point of
dying.

The branch trembles when a hand approaches it to pluck a flower, and
seems to both withdraw and to offer itself at one and the same time.
The human body has something of this tremor when the instant arrives in
which the mysterious fingers of Death are about to pluck the soul.

M. Madeleine remained for some time motionless beside that bed, gazing
in turn upon the sick woman and the crucifix, as he had done two months
before, on the day when he had come for the first time to see her
in that asylum. They were both still there in the same attitude--she
sleeping, he praying; only now, after the lapse of two months, her hair
was gray and his was white.

The sister had not entered with him. He stood beside the bed, with his
finger on his lips, as though there were some one in the chamber whom he
must enjoin to silence.

She opened her eyes, saw him, and said quietly, with a smile:--

"And Cosette?"



CHAPTER II--FANTINE HAPPY

She made no movement of either surprise or of joy; she was joy itself.
That simple question, "And Cosette?" was put with so profound a faith,
with so much certainty, with such a complete absence of disquiet and of
doubt, that he found not a word of reply. She continued:--

"I knew that you were there. I was asleep, but I saw you. I have seen
you for a long, long time. I have been following you with my eyes all
night long. You were in a glory, and you had around you all sorts of
celestial forms."

He raised his glance to the crucifix.

"But," she resumed, "tell me where Cosette is. Why did not you place her
on my bed against the moment of my waking?"

He made some mechanical reply which he was never afterwards able to
recall.

Fortunately, the doctor had been warned, and he now made his appearance.
He came to the aid of M. Madeleine.

"Calm yourself, my child," said the doctor; "your child is here."

Fantine's eyes beamed and filled her whole face with light. She clasped
her hands with an expression which contained all that is possible to
prayer in the way of violence and tenderness.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "bring her to me!"

Touching illusion of a mother! Cosette was, for her, still the little
child who is carried.

"Not yet," said the doctor, "not just now. You still have some fever.
The sight of your child would agitate you and do you harm. You must be
cured first."

She interrupted him impetuously:--

"But I am cured! Oh, I tell you that I am cured! What an ass that doctor
is! The idea! I want to see my child!"

"You see," said the doctor, "how excited you become. So long as you are
in this state I shall oppose your having your child. It is not enough
to see her; it is necessary that you should live for her. When you are
reasonable, I will bring her to you myself."

The poor mother bowed her head.

"I beg your pardon, doctor, I really beg your pardon. Formerly I should
never have spoken as I have just done; so many misfortunes have happened
to me, that I sometimes do not know what I am saying. I understand you;
you fear the emotion. I will wait as long as you like, but I swear to
you that it would not have harmed me to see my daughter. I have been
seeing her; I have not taken my eyes from her since yesterday evening.
Do you know? If she were brought to me now, I should talk to her very
gently. That is all. Is it not quite natural that I should desire to see
my daughter, who has been brought to me expressly from Montfermeil? I
am not angry. I know well that I am about to be happy. All night long I
have seen white things, and persons who smiled at me. When Monsieur le
Docteur pleases, he shall bring me Cosette. I have no longer any fever;
I am well. I am perfectly conscious that there is nothing the matter
with me any more; but I am going to behave as though I were ill, and not
stir, to please these ladies here. When it is seen that I am very calm,
they will say, 'She must have her child.'"

M. Madeleine was sitting on a chair beside the bed. She turned towards
him; she was making a visible effort to be calm and "very good," as she
expressed it in the feebleness of illness which resembles infancy, in
order that, seeing her so peaceable, they might make no difficulty about
bringing Cosette to her. But while she controlled herself she could not
refrain from questioning M. Madeleine.

"Did you have a pleasant trip, Monsieur le Maire? Oh! how good you were
to go and get her for me! Only tell me how she is. Did she stand the
journey well? Alas! she will not recognize me. She must have forgotten
me by this time, poor darling! Children have no memories. They are like
birds. A child sees one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, and
thinks of nothing any longer. And did she have white linen? Did those
Thénardiers keep her clean? How have they fed her? Oh! if you only knew
how I have suffered, putting such questions as that to myself during all
the time of my wretchedness. Now, it is all past. I am happy. Oh, how I
should like to see her! Do you think her pretty, Monsieur le Maire?
Is not my daughter beautiful? You must have been very cold in that
diligence! Could she not be brought for just one little instant? She
might be taken away directly afterwards. Tell me; you are the master; it
could be so if you chose!"

He took her hand. "Cosette is beautiful," he said, "Cosette is well.
You shall see her soon; but calm yourself; you are talking with too much
vivacity, and you are throwing your arms out from under the clothes, and
that makes you cough."

In fact, fits of coughing interrupted Fantine at nearly every word.

Fantine did not murmur; she feared that she had injured by her too
passionate lamentations the confidence which she was desirous of
inspiring, and she began to talk of indifferent things.

"Montfermeil is quite pretty, is it not? People go there on pleasure
parties in summer. Are the Thénardiers prosperous? There are not many
travellers in their parts. That inn of theirs is a sort of a cook-shop."

M. Madeleine was still holding her hand, and gazing at her with anxiety;
it was evident that he had come to tell her things before which his mind
now hesitated. The doctor, having finished his visit, retired. Sister
Simplice remained alone with them.

But in the midst of this pause Fantine exclaimed:--

"I hear her! mon Dieu, I hear her!"

She stretched out her arm to enjoin silence about her, held her breath,
and began to listen with rapture.

There was a child playing in the yard--the child of the portress or
of some work-woman. It was one of those accidents which are always
occurring, and which seem to form a part of the mysterious stage-setting
of mournful scenes. The child--a little girl--was going and coming,
running to warm herself, laughing, singing at the top of her voice.
Alas! in what are the plays of children not intermingled. It was this
little girl whom Fantine heard singing.

"Oh!" she resumed, "it is my Cosette! I recognize her voice."

The child retreated as it had come; the voice died away. Fantine
listened for a while longer, then her face clouded over, and M.
Madeleine heard her say, in a low voice: "How wicked that doctor is not
to allow me to see my daughter! That man has an evil countenance, that
he has."

But the smiling background of her thoughts came to the front again. She
continued to talk to herself, with her head resting on the pillow: "How
happy we are going to be! We shall have a little garden the very first
thing; M. Madeleine has promised it to me. My daughter will play in the
garden. She must know her letters by this time. I will make her spell.
She will run over the grass after butterflies. I will watch her. Then
she will take her first communion. Ah! when will she take her first
communion?"

She began to reckon on her fingers.

"One, two, three, four--she is seven years old. In five years she will
have a white veil, and openwork stockings; she will look like a little
woman. O my good sister, you do not know how foolish I become when I
think of my daughter's first communion!"

She began to laugh.

He had released Fantine's hand. He listened to her words as one listens
to the sighing of the breeze, with his eyes on the ground, his mind
absorbed in reflection which had no bottom. All at once she ceased
speaking, and this caused him to raise his head mechanically. Fantine
had become terrible.

She no longer spoke, she no longer breathed; she had raised herself to
a sitting posture, her thin shoulder emerged from her chemise; her face,
which had been radiant but a moment before, was ghastly, and she
seemed to have fixed her eyes, rendered large with terror, on something
alarming at the other extremity of the room.

"Good God!" he exclaimed; "what ails you, Fantine?"

She made no reply; she did not remove her eyes from the object which
she seemed to see. She removed one hand from his arm, and with the other
made him a sign to look behind him.

He turned, and beheld Javert.



CHAPTER III--JAVERT SATISFIED

This is what had taken place.

The half-hour after midnight had just struck when M. Madeleine quitted
the Hall of Assizes in Arras. He regained his inn just in time to set
out again by the mail-wagon, in which he had engaged his place. A little
before six o'clock in the morning he had arrived at M. sur M., and his
first care had been to post a letter to M. Laffitte, then to enter the
infirmary and see Fantine.

However, he had hardly quitted the audience hall of the Court of
Assizes, when the district-attorney, recovering from his first shock,
had taken the word to deplore the mad deed of the honorable mayor of
M. sur M., to declare that his convictions had not been in the least
modified by that curious incident, which would be explained thereafter,
and to demand, in the meantime, the condemnation of that Champmathieu,
who was evidently the real Jean Valjean. The district-attorney's
persistence was visibly at variance with the sentiments of every one, of
the public, of the court, and of the jury. The counsel for the defence
had some difficulty in refuting this harangue and in establishing that,
in consequence of the revelations of M. Madeleine, that is to say, of
the real Jean Valjean, the aspect of the matter had been thoroughly
altered, and that the jury had before their eyes now only an innocent
man. Thence the lawyer had drawn some epiphonemas, not very fresh,
unfortunately, upon judicial errors, etc., etc.; the President, in his
summing up, had joined the counsel for the defence, and in a few minutes
the jury had thrown Champmathieu out of the case.

Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean;
and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeleine.

Immediately after Champmathieu had been set at liberty, the
district-attorney shut himself up with the President. They conferred "as
to the necessity of seizing the person of M. le Maire of M. sur M."
This phrase, in which there was a great deal of _of_, is the
district-attorney's, written with his own hand, on the minutes of his
report to the attorney-general. His first emotion having passed off, the
President did not offer many objections. Justice must, after all, take
its course. And then, when all was said, although the President was
a kindly and a tolerably intelligent man, he was, at the same time, a
devoted and almost an ardent royalist, and he had been shocked to hear
the Mayor of M. sur M. say the _Emperor_, and not _Bonaparte_, when
alluding to the landing at Cannes.

The order for his arrest was accordingly despatched. The
district-attorney forwarded it to M. sur M. by a special messenger, at
full speed, and entrusted its execution to Police Inspector Javert.

The reader knows that Javert had returned to M. sur M. immediately after
having given his deposition.

Javert was just getting out of bed when the messenger handed him the
order of arrest and the command to produce the prisoner.

The messenger himself was a very clever member of the police, who, in
two words, informed Javert of what had taken place at Arras. The order
of arrest, signed by the district-attorney, was couched in these words:
"Inspector Javert will apprehend the body of the Sieur Madeleine, mayor
of M. sur M., who, in this day's session of the court, was recognized as
the liberated convict, Jean Valjean."

Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the
moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have
divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air
the most ordinary in the world. He was cool, calm, grave, his gray
hair was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted
the stairs with his habitual deliberation. Any one who was thoroughly
acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment,
would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under his
left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted
agitation.

Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or
in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of
his coat.

That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was
indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those
emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.

He had come in a simple way, had made a requisition on the neighboring
post for a corporal and four soldiers, had left the soldiers in the
courtyard, had had Fantine's room pointed out to him by the portress,
who was utterly unsuspicious, accustomed as she was to seeing armed men
inquiring for the mayor.

On arriving at Fantine's chamber, Javert turned the handle, pushed
the door open with the gentleness of a sick-nurse or a police spy, and
entered.

Properly speaking, he did not enter. He stood erect in the half-open
door, his hat on his head and his left hand thrust into his coat, which
was buttoned up to the chin. In the bend of his elbow the leaden head of
his enormous cane, which was hidden behind him, could be seen.

Thus he remained for nearly a minute, without his presence being
perceived. All at once Fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and made M.
Madeleine turn round.

The instant that Madeleine's glance encountered Javert's glance, Javert,
without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him,
became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.

It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.

The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all that
was in his soul to appear in his countenance. The depths having been
stirred up, mounted to the surface. The humiliation of having, in
some slight degree, lost the scent, and of having indulged, for a few
moments, in an error with regard to Champmathieu, was effaced by pride
at having so well and accurately divined in the first place, and of
having for so long cherished a just instinct. Javert's content shone
forth in his sovereign attitude. The deformity of triumph overspread
that narrow brow. All the demonstrations of horror which a satisfied
face can afford were there.

Javert was in heaven at that moment. Without putting the thing clearly
to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his
presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and
truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil. Behind him and
around him, at an infinite distance, he had authority, reason, the case
judged, the legal conscience, the public prosecution, all the stars; he
was protecting order, he was causing the law to yield up its thunders,
he was avenging society, he was lending a helping hand to the absolute,
he was standing erect in the midst of a glory. There existed in his
victory a remnant of defiance and of combat. Erect, haughty, brilliant,
he flaunted abroad in open day the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious
archangel. The terrible shadow of the action which he was accomplishing
caused the vague flash of the social sword to be visible in his clenched
fist; happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime, vice, rebellion,
perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there
was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint Michael.

Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him.

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things
which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when
hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human
conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues
which have one vice,--error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic
in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously
venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his
formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who
triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face,
wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the
good.



CHAPTER IV--AUTHORITY REASSERTS ITS RIGHTS

Fantine had not seen Javert since the day on which the mayor had torn
her from the man. Her ailing brain comprehended nothing, but the only
thing which she did not doubt was that he had come to get her. She could
not endure that terrible face; she felt her life quitting her; she hid
her face in both hands, and shrieked in her anguish:--

"Monsieur Madeleine, save me!"

Jean Valjean--we shall henceforth not speak of him otherwise--had risen.
He said to Fantine in the gentlest and calmest of voices:--

"Be at ease; it is not for you that he is come."

Then he addressed Javert, and said:--

"I know what you want."

Javert replied:--

"Be quick about it!"

There lay in the inflection of voice which accompanied these words
something indescribably fierce and frenzied. Javert did not say, "Be
quick about it!" he said "Bequiabouit."

No orthography can do justice to the accent with which it was uttered:
it was no longer a human word: it was a roar.

He did not proceed according to his custom, he did not enter into the
matter, he exhibited no warrant of arrest. In his eyes, Jean Valjean
was a sort of mysterious combatant, who was not to be laid hands upon,
a wrestler in the dark whom he had had in his grasp for the last five
years, without being able to throw him. This arrest was not a beginning,
but an end. He confined himself to saying, "Be quick about it!"

As he spoke thus, he did not advance a single step; he hurled at Jean
Valjean a glance which he threw out like a grappling-hook, and with
which he was accustomed to draw wretches violently to him.

It was this glance which Fantine had felt penetrating to the very marrow
of her bones two months previously.

At Javert's exclamation, Fantine opened her eyes once more. But the
mayor was there; what had she to fear?

Javert advanced to the middle of the room, and cried:--

"See here now! Art thou coming?"

The unhappy woman glanced about her. No one was present excepting the
nun and the mayor. To whom could that abject use of "thou" be addressed?
To her only. She shuddered.

Then she beheld a most unprecedented thing, a thing so unprecedented
that nothing equal to it had appeared to her even in the blackest
deliriums of fever.

She beheld Javert, the police spy, seize the mayor by the collar; she
saw the mayor bow his head. It seemed to her that the world was coming
to an end.

Javert had, in fact, grasped Jean Valjean by the collar.

"Monsieur le Maire!" shrieked Fantine.

Javert burst out laughing with that frightful laugh which displayed all
his gums.

"There is no longer any Monsieur le Maire here!"

Jean Valjean made no attempt to disengage the hand which grasped the
collar of his coat. He said:--

"Javert--"

Javert interrupted him: "Call me Mr. Inspector."

"Monsieur," said Jean Valjean, "I should like to say a word to you in
private."

"Aloud! Say it aloud!" replied Javert; "people are in the habit of
talking aloud to me."

Jean Valjean went on in a lower tone:--

"I have a request to make of you--"

"I tell you to speak loud."

"But you alone should hear it--"

"What difference does that make to me? I shall not listen."

Jean Valjean turned towards him and said very rapidly and in a very low
voice:--

"Grant me three days' grace! three days in which to go and fetch the
child of this unhappy woman. I will pay whatever is necessary. You shall
accompany me if you choose."

"You are making sport of me!" cried Javert. "Come now, I did not think
you such a fool! You ask me to give you three days in which to run away!
You say that it is for the purpose of fetching that creature's child!
Ah! Ah! That's good! That's really capital!"

Fantine was seized with a fit of trembling.

"My child!" she cried, "to go and fetch my child! She is not here,
then! Answer me, sister; where is Cosette? I want my child! Monsieur
Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire!"

Javert stamped his foot.

"And now there's the other one! Will you hold your tongue, you hussy?
It's a pretty sort of a place where convicts are magistrates, and where
women of the town are cared for like countesses! Ah! But we are going to
change all that; it is high time!"

He stared intently at Fantine, and added, once more taking into his
grasp Jean Valjean's cravat, shirt and collar:--

"I tell you that there is no Monsieur Madeleine and that there is no
Monsieur le Maire. There is a thief, a brigand, a convict named Jean
Valjean! And I have him in my grasp! That's what there is!"

Fantine raised herself in bed with a bound, supporting herself on her
stiffened arms and on both hands: she gazed at Jean Valjean, she gazed
at Javert, she gazed at the nun, she opened her mouth as though to
speak; a rattle proceeded from the depths of her throat, her teeth
chattered; she stretched out her arms in her agony, opening her hands
convulsively, and fumbling about her like a drowning person; then
suddenly fell back on her pillow.

Her head struck the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her
breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes.

She was dead.

Jean Valjean laid his hand upon the detaining hand of Javert, and opened
it as he would have opened the hand of a baby; then he said to Javert:--

"You have murdered that woman."

"Let's have an end of this!" shouted Javert, in a fury; "I am not here
to listen to argument. Let us economize all that; the guard is below;
march on instantly, or you'll get the thumb-screws!"

In the corner of the room stood an old iron bedstead, which was in a
decidedly decrepit state, and which served the sisters as a camp-bed
when they were watching with the sick. Jean Valjean stepped up to this
bed, in a twinkling wrenched off the head-piece, which was already in a
dilapidated condition, an easy matter to muscles like his, grasped the
principal rod like a bludgeon, and glanced at Javert. Javert retreated
towards the door. Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked
slowly up to Fantine's couch. When he arrived there he turned and said
to Javert, in a voice that was barely audible:--

"I advise you not to disturb me at this moment."

One thing is certain, and that is, that Javert trembled.

It did occur to him to summon the guard, but Jean Valjean might avail
himself of that moment to effect his escape; so he remained, grasped
his cane by the small end, and leaned against the door-post, without
removing his eyes from Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean rested his elbow on the knob at the head of the bed, and
his brow on his hand, and began to contemplate the motionless body of
Fantine, which lay extended there. He remained thus, mute, absorbed,
evidently with no further thought of anything connected with this life.
Upon his face and in his attitude there was nothing but inexpressible
pity. After a few moments of this meditation he bent towards Fantine,
and spoke to her in a low voice.

What did he say to her? What could this man, who was reproved, say to
that woman, who was dead? What words were those? No one on earth heard
them. Did the dead woman hear them? There are some touching illusions
which are, perhaps, sublime realities. The point as to which there
exists no doubt is, that Sister Simplice, the sole witness of the
incident, often said that at the moment that Jean Valjean whispered in
Fantine's ear, she distinctly beheld an ineffable smile dawn on those
pale lips, and in those dim eyes, filled with the amazement of the tomb.

Jean Valjean took Fantine's head in both his hands, and arranged it on
the pillow as a mother might have done for her child; then he tied the
string of her chemise, and smoothed her hair back under her cap. That
done, he closed her eyes.

Fantine's face seemed strangely illuminated at that moment.

Death, that signifies entrance into the great light.

Fantine's hand was hanging over the side of the bed. Jean Valjean knelt
down before that hand, lifted it gently, and kissed it.

Then he rose, and turned to Javert.

"Now," said he, "I am at your disposal."



CHAPTER V--A SUITABLE TOMB

Javert deposited Jean Valjean in the city prison.

The arrest of M. Madeleine occasioned a sensation, or rather, an
extraordinary commotion in M. sur M. We are sorry that we cannot conceal
the fact, that at the single word, "He was a convict," nearly every one
deserted him. In less than two hours all the good that he had done had
been forgotten, and he was nothing but a "convict from the galleys." It
is just to add that the details of what had taken place at Arras were
not yet known. All day long conversations like the following were to be
heard in all quarters of the town:--

"You don't know? He was a liberated convict!" "Who?" "The mayor." "Bah!
M. Madeleine?" "Yes." "Really?" "His name was not Madeleine at all; he
had a frightful name, Béjean, Bojean, Boujean." "Ah! Good God!" "He
has been arrested." "Arrested!" "In prison, in the city prison, while
waiting to be transferred." "Until he is transferred!" "He is to be
transferred!" "Where is he to be taken?" "He will be tried at the
Assizes for a highway robbery which he committed long ago." "Well! I
suspected as much. That man was too good, too perfect, too affected.
He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came
across. I always thought there was some evil history back of all that."

The "drawing-rooms" particularly abounded in remarks of this nature.

One old lady, a subscriber to the _Drapeau Blanc_, made the following
remark, the depth of which it is impossible to fathom:--

"I am not sorry. It will be a lesson to the Bonapartists!"

It was thus that the phantom which had been called M. Madeleine vanished
from M. sur M. Only three or four persons in all the town remained
faithful to his memory. The old portress who had served him was among
the number.

On the evening of that day the worthy old woman was sitting in her
lodge, still in a thorough fright, and absorbed in sad reflections.
The factory had been closed all day, the carriage gate was bolted, the
street was deserted. There was no one in the house but the two nuns,
Sister Perpétue and Sister Simplice, who were watching beside the body
of Fantine.

Towards the hour when M. Madeleine was accustomed to return home,
the good portress rose mechanically, took from a drawer the key of
M. Madeleine's chamber, and the flat candlestick which he used every
evening to go up to his quarters; then she hung the key on the nail
whence he was accustomed to take it, and set the candlestick on one
side, as though she was expecting him. Then she sat down again on her
chair, and became absorbed in thought once more. The poor, good old
woman had done all this without being conscious of it.

It was only at the expiration of two hours that she roused herself from
her revery, and exclaimed, "Hold! My good God Jesus! And I hung his key
on the nail!"

At that moment the small window in the lodge opened, a hand passed
through, seized the key and the candlestick, and lighted the taper at
the candle which was burning there.

The portress raised her eyes, and stood there with gaping mouth, and a
shriek which she confined to her throat.

She knew that hand, that arm, the sleeve of that coat.

It was M. Madeleine.

It was several seconds before she could speak; she had a _seizure_, as
she said herself, when she related the adventure afterwards.

"Good God, Monsieur le Maire," she cried at last, "I thought you were--"

She stopped; the conclusion of her sentence would have been lacking in
respect towards the beginning. Jean Valjean was still Monsieur le Maire
to her.

He finished her thought.

"In prison," said he. "I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows;
I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am. I am going up
to my room; go and find Sister Simplice for me. She is with that poor
woman, no doubt."

The old woman obeyed in all haste.

He gave her no orders; he was quite sure that she would guard him better
than he should guard himself.

No one ever found out how he had managed to get into the courtyard
without opening the big gates. He had, and always carried about him,
a pass-key which opened a little side-door; but he must have been
searched, and his latch-key must have been taken from him. This point
was never explained.

He ascended the staircase leading to his chamber. On arriving at the
top, he left his candle on the top step of his stairs, opened his door
with very little noise, went and closed his window and his shutters by
feeling, then returned for his candle and re-entered his room.

It was a useful precaution; it will be recollected that his window could
be seen from the street.

He cast a glance about him, at his table, at his chair, at his bed which
had not been disturbed for three days. No trace of the disorder of the
night before last remained. The portress had "done up" his room; only
she had picked out of the ashes and placed neatly on the table the two
iron ends of the cudgel and the forty-sou piece which had been blackened
by the fire.

He took a sheet of paper, on which he wrote: "These are the two tips of
my iron-shod cudgel and the forty-sou piece stolen from Little Gervais,
which I mentioned at the Court of Assizes," and he arranged this piece
of paper, the bits of iron, and the coin in such a way that they were
the first things to be seen on entering the room. From a cupboard he
pulled out one of his old shirts, which he tore in pieces. In the
strips of linen thus prepared he wrapped the two silver candlesticks. He
betrayed neither haste nor agitation; and while he was wrapping up the
Bishop's candlesticks, he nibbled at a piece of black bread. It was
probably the prison-bread which he had carried with him in his flight.

This was proved by the crumbs which were found on the floor of the room
when the authorities made an examination later on.

There came two taps at the door.

"Come in," said he.

It was Sister Simplice.

She was pale; her eyes were red; the candle which she carried trembled
in her hand. The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that
however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our
very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface. The emotions of
that day had turned the nun into a woman once more. She had wept, and
she was trembling.

Jean Valjean had just finished writing a few lines on a paper, which he
handed to the nun, saying, "Sister, you will give this to Monsieur le
Curé."

The paper was not folded. She cast a glance upon it.

"You can read it," said he.

She read:--

"I beg Monsieur le Curé to keep an eye on all that I leave behind me. He
will be so good as to pay out of it the expenses of my trial, and of the
funeral of the woman who died yesterday. The rest is for the poor."

The sister tried to speak, but she only managed to stammer a few
inarticulate sounds. She succeeded in saying, however:--

"Does not Monsieur le Maire desire to take a last look at that poor,
unhappy woman?"

"No," said he; "I am pursued; it would only end in their arresting me in
that room, and that would disturb her."

He had hardly finished when a loud noise became audible on the
staircase. They heard a tumult of ascending footsteps, and the old
portress saying in her loudest and most piercing tones:--

"My good sir, I swear to you by the good God, that not a soul has
entered this house all day, nor all the evening, and that I have not
even left the door."

A man responded:--

"But there is a light in that room, nevertheless."

They recognized Javert's voice.

The chamber was so arranged that the door in opening masked the corner
of the wall on the right. Jean Valjean blew out the light and placed
himself in this angle. Sister Simplice fell on her knees near the table.

The door opened.

Javert entered.

The whispers of many men and the protestations of the portress were
audible in the corridor.

The nun did not raise her eyes. She was praying.

The candle was on the chimney-piece, and gave but very little light.

Javert caught sight of the nun and halted in amazement.

It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element,
the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority. This was
impregnable, and admitted of neither objection nor restriction. In his
eyes, of course, the ecclesiastical authority was the chief of all; he
was religious, superficial and correct on this point as on all others.
In his eyes, a priest was a mind, who never makes a mistake; a nun was a
creature who never sins; they were souls walled in from this world,
with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass
through.

On perceiving the sister, his first movement was to retire.

But there was also another duty which bound him and impelled him
imperiously in the opposite direction. His second movement was to remain
and to venture on at least one question.

This was Sister Simplice, who had never told a lie in her life. Javert
knew it, and held her in special veneration in consequence.

"Sister," said he, "are you alone in this room?"

A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though
she should faint.

The sister raised her eyes and answered:--

"Yes."

"Then," resumed Javert, "you will excuse me if I persist; it is my duty;
you have not seen a certain person--a man--this evening? He has escaped;
we are in search of him--that Jean Valjean; you have not seen him?"

The sister replied:--

"No."

She lied. She had lied twice in succession, one after the other, without
hesitation, promptly, as a person does when sacrificing herself.

"Pardon me," said Javert, and he retired with a deep bow.

O sainted maid! you left this world many years ago; you have rejoined
your sisters, the virgins, and your brothers, the angels, in the light;
may this lie be counted to your credit in paradise!

The sister's affirmation was for Javert so decisive a thing that he did
not even observe the singularity of that candle which had but just been
extinguished, and which was still smoking on the table.

An hour later, a man, marching amid trees and mists, was rapidly
departing from M. sur M. in the direction of Paris. That man was Jean
Valjean. It has been established by the testimony of two or three
carters who met him, that he was carrying a bundle; that he was dressed
in a blouse. Where had he obtained that blouse? No one ever found out.
But an aged workman had died in the infirmary of the factory a few days
before, leaving behind him nothing but his blouse. Perhaps that was the
one.

One last word about Fantine.

We all have a mother,--the earth. Fantine was given back to that mother.

The curé thought that he was doing right, and perhaps he really was, in
reserving as much money as possible from what Jean Valjean had left for
the poor. Who was concerned, after all? A convict and a woman of the
town. That is why he had a very simple funeral for Fantine, and reduced
it to that strictly necessary form known as the pauper's grave.

So Fantine was buried in the free corner of the cemetery which belongs
to anybody and everybody, and where the poor are lost. Fortunately, God
knows where to find the soul again. Fantine was laid in the shade,
among the first bones that came to hand; she was subjected to the
promiscuousness of ashes. She was thrown into the public grave. Her
grave resembled her bed.

[THE END OF VOLUME I. "FANTINE"] Enlarge


Enlarge



VOLUME II.--COSETTE



BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO



CHAPTER I--WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES

Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person
who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and directing his
course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved
road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which
succeed each other, raise the road and let it fall again, and produce
something in the nature of enormous waves.

He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived
the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l'Alleud, which has the form of a
reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and
at the angle of the cross-road, by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet
bearing the inscription _Ancient Barrier No. 4_, a public house,
bearing on its front this sign: _At the Four Winds_ (Aux Quatre Vents).
_Échabeau, Private Café_.

A quarter of a league further on, he arrived at the bottom of a little
valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through
the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very green
trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is dispersed over
the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully and as in order in
the direction of Braine-l'Alleud.

On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheeled cart
at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried
brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and
a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A young
girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably of
some outside spectacle, such as a parish festival, was fluttering in
the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla
of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes. The
wayfarer struck into this.

After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth
century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he
found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear
impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat
medallions. A severe façade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular
to the façade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt
right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through
which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed.
The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old
rusty knocker.

The sun was charming; the branches had that soft shivering of May,
which seems to proceed rather from the nests than from the wind. A brave
little bird, probably a lover, was carolling in a distracted manner in a
large tree.

The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation,
resembling the hollow of a sphere, in the stone on the left, at the foot
of the pier of the door.

At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman
emerged.

She saw the wayfarer, and perceived what he was looking at.

"It was a French cannon-ball which made that," she said to him. And she
added:--

"That which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the
hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce
the wood."

"What is the name of this place?" inquired the wayfarer.

"Hougomont," said the peasant woman.

The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and
went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through the
trees, he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this elevation
something which at that distance resembled a lion.

He was on the battle-field of Waterloo.



CHAPTER II--HOUGOMONT

Hougomont,--this was a funereal spot, the beginning of the obstacle,
the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called
Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the blows of his
axe.

It was a château; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the
antiquary, Hougomont is _Hugomons_. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire
of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of
Villiers.

The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash under the
porch, and entered the courtyard.

The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the
sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else
having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its
birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of
the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;
beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some
carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken
jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small
bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained in espalier against the
wall of the chapel--behold the court, the conquest of which was one of
Napoleon's dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized
it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise. Chickens are
scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is a
huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.

The English behaved admirably there. Cooke's four companies of guards
there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.

Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings
and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of
which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern
door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away.
Hougomont has two doors,--the southern door, that of the château; and
the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent his brother
Jérôme against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy, Guilleminot, and Bachelu
hurled themselves against it; nearly the entire corps of Reille was
employed against it, and miscarried; Kellermann's balls were exhausted
on this heroic section of wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong enough
to force Hougomont on the north, and the brigade of Soye could not do
more than effect the beginning of a breach on the south, but without
taking it.

The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the north
door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It consists of
four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars of the attack
are visible.

The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had
a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands
half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall,
built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on
the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms,
with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows.
The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts
of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there
that Bauduin was killed.

The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is
visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives
and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death
agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds;
the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.

This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings
which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.

The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,
but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the
château, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises in
a crumbling state,--disembowelled, one might say. The château served
for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated each
other. The French, fired on from every point,--from behind the walls,
from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through
all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every crack in the
stones,--fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the reply to the
grape-shot was a conflagration.

In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the
dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible; the
English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral of the
staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears
like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories; the
English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had
cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs of blue stone,
which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still
cling to the wall; on the first is cut the figure of a trident. These
inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a
jaw which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there:
one is dead; the other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with
verdure in April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the
staircase.

A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered
its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the
carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there--an altar of
unpolished wood, placed against a background of roughhewn stone. Four
whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows;
over the door a large wooden crucifix, below the crucifix a square
air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay; on the ground, in one corner,
an old window-frame with the glass all broken to pieces--such is the
chapel. Near the altar there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint Anne,
of the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus has been carried
off by a large ball. The French, who were masters of the chapel for a
moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled this
building; it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned, the floor was
burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his
feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it
stopped,--a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the
neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate than the
Christ.

The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this
name is to be read: _Henquinez_. Then these others: _Conde de Rio Maior
Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana)_. There are French names with
exclamation points,--a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed
in 1849. The nations insulted each other there.

It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up which
held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.

On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are
two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket and pulley
to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not
drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.

The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume van
Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener there.
On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed themselves in
the woods.

The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these unfortunate
people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and nights. There
are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old boles of burned
trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs trembling in the
depths of the thickets.

Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, "to guard the château," and
concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there.
They tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this
frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of
their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It
was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught.
This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself.

After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into
it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they
were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble
voices were heard calling from the well.

This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded like
the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side is
open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has
a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell. This
little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The iron
supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over, the
eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up
mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed
in a growth of nettles.

This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty
and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either
pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which served
the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to time a
bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then flies
away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The
door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed
slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped
this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
off his hand with an axe.

The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van
Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said
to us: "I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,
was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there
in my mother's arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated
the cannon, and went _boum! boum!_"

A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so
we were told. The orchard is terrible.

It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts. The first
part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood. These
three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the
buildings of the château and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the
right, a wall; and at the end, a wall. The wall on the right is of
brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first.
It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a
wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut
stone, with balustrade with a double curve.

It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le
Nôtre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by
globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone. Forty-three balusters can
still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.
Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken baluster is placed on
the pediment like a fractured leg.

It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six
light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being
unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens,
accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was
armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired
from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two
hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a
quarter of an hour to die.

One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard,
properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few square fathoms,
fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready
to renew the combat. Thirty-eight loopholes, pierced by the English at
irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth are placed two
English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in the south wall, as
the principal attack came from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the
outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to
deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle
and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight
loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's
brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.

Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French
scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees.
All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, seven
hundred strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against
which Kellermann's two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.

This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its
buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses
browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the
spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one
walks over this uncultivated land, and one's foot dives into mole-holes.
In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies
there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath
a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat,
descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side,
its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam. Nearly all
the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not had
its bullet or its biscayan.6 The skeletons of dead trees abound in this
orchard. Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is a
wood full of violets.

Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a
rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled
in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the
regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the
English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty
from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of
Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their
throats cut,--and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the
traveller: _Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will
explain to you the affair of Waterloo!_



CHAPTER III--THE EIGHTEENTH OF JUNE, 1815

Let us turn back,--that is one of the story-teller's rights,--and put
ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than
the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took
place.

If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of
June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops
of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that
Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz
was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season
sufficed to make a world crumble.

The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half-past eleven
o'clock, and that gave Blücher time to come up. Why? Because the ground
was wet. The artillery had to wait until it became a little firmer
before they could manouvre.

Napoleon was an artillery officer, and felt the effects of this. The
foundation of this wonderful captain was the man who, in the report
to the Directory on Aboukir, said: _Such a one of our balls killed six
men_. All his plans of battle were arranged for projectiles. The key to
his victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated
the strategy of the hostile general like a citadel, and made a breach
in it. He overwhelmed the weak point with grape-shot; he joined and
dissolved battles with cannon. There was something of the sharpshooter
in his genius. To beat in squares, to pulverize regiments, to break
lines, to crush and disperse masses,--for him everything lay in this, to
strike, strike, strike incessantly,--and he intrusted this task to the
cannon-ball. A redoubtable method, and one which, united with genius,
rendered this gloomy athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for the
space of fifteen years.

On the 18th of June, 1815, he relied all the more on his artillery,
because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and
fifty-nine mouths of fire; Napoleon had two hundred and forty.

Suppose the soil dry, and the artillery capable of moving, the action
would have begun at six o'clock in the morning. The battle would have
been won and ended at two o'clock, three hours before the change of
fortune in favor of the Prussians. What amount of blame attaches to
Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck due to the pilot?

Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this
epoch by an inward diminution of force? Had the twenty years of war worn
out the blade as it had worn the scabbard, the soul as well as the body?
Did the veteran make himself disastrously felt in the leader? In a word,
was this genius, as many historians of note have thought, suffering from
an eclipse? Did he go into a frenzy in order to disguise his weakened
powers from himself? Did he begin to waver under the delusion of
a breath of adventure? Had he become--a grave matter in a
general--unconscious of peril? Is there an age, in this class of
material great men, who may be called the giants of action, when genius
grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal;
for the Dantes and Michael Angelos to grow old is to grow in greatness;
is it to grow less for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes? Had Napoleon
lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he
could no longer recognize the reef, could no longer divine the snare, no
longer discern the crumbling brink of abysses? Had he lost his power of
scenting out catastrophes? He who had in former days known all the
roads to triumph, and who, from the summit of his chariot of lightning,
pointed them out with a sovereign finger, had he now reached that
state of sinister amazement when he could lead his tumultuous legions
harnessed to it, to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of forty-six
with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of destiny no longer
anything more than an immense dare-devil?

We do not think so.

His plan of battle was, by the confession of all, a masterpiece. To
go straight to the centre of the Allies' line, to make a breach in the
enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal,
and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of
Wellington and Blücher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels,
to hurl the German into the Rhine, and the Englishman into the sea. All
this was contained in that battle, according to Napoleon. Afterwards
people would see.

Of course, we do not here pretend to furnish a history of the battle of
Waterloo; one of the scenes of the foundation of the story which we
are relating is connected with this battle, but this history is not our
subject; this history, moreover, has been finished, and finished in a
masterly manner, from one point of view by Napoleon, and from another
point of view by a whole pleiad of historians.7

As for us, we leave the historians at loggerheads; we are but a distant
witness, a passer-by on the plain, a seeker bending over that soil all
made of human flesh, taking appearances for realities, perchance; we
have no right to oppose, in the name of science, a collection of facts
which contain illusions, no doubt; we possess neither military practice
nor strategic ability which authorize a system; in our opinion, a chain
of accidents dominated the two leaders at Waterloo; and when it becomes
a question of destiny, that mysterious culprit, we judge like that
ingenious judge, the populace.



CHAPTER IV--A

Those persons who wish to gain a clear idea of the battle of Waterloo
have only to place, mentally, on the ground, a capital A. The left limb
of the A is the road to Nivelles, the right limb is the road to Genappe,
the tie of the A is the hollow road to Ohain from Braine-l'Alleud. The
top of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington is; the lower left tip
is Hougomont, where Reille is stationed with Jérôme Bonaparte; the right
tip is the Belle-Alliance, where Napoleon was. At the centre of this
chord is the precise point where the final word of the battle was
pronounced. It was there that the lion has been placed, the involuntary
symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard.

The triangle included in the top of the A, between the two limbs and the
tie, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this plateau
constituted the whole battle. The wings of the two armies extended to
the right and left of the two roads to Genappe and Nivelles; d'Erlon
facing Picton, Reille facing Hill.

Behind the tip of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the
forest of Soignes.

As for the plain itself, let the reader picture to himself a vast
undulating sweep of ground; each rise commands the next rise, and all
the undulations mount towards Mont-Saint-Jean, and there end in the
forest.

Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a
question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip
up the other. They clutch at everything: a bush is a point of support;
an angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder; for the lack
of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its
ground; an unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape, a
cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a ravine, can
stay the heel of that colossus which is called an army, and prevent its
retreat. He who quits the field is beaten; hence the necessity devolving
on the responsible leader, of examining the most insignificant clump of
trees, and of studying deeply the slightest relief in the ground.

The two generals had attentively studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean,
now called the plain of Waterloo. In the preceding year, Wellington,
with the sagacity of foresight, had examined it as the possible seat of
a great battle. Upon this spot, and for this duel, on the 18th of June,
Wellington had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English army
was stationed above, the French army below.

It is almost superfluous here to sketch the appearance of Napoleon on
horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of Rossomme, at daybreak, on
June 18, 1815. All the world has seen him before we can show him.
That calm profile under the little three-cornered hat of the school of
Brienne, that green uniform, the white revers concealing the star of the
Legion of Honor, his great coat hiding his epaulets, the corner of red
ribbon peeping from beneath his vest, his leather trousers, the white
horse with the saddle-cloth of purple velvet bearing on the corners
crowned N's and eagles, Hessian boots over silk stockings, silver spurs,
the sword of Marengo,--that whole figure of the last of the Cæsars is
present to all imaginations, saluted with acclamations by some, severely
regarded by others.

That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from
a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which
always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history
and daylight have arrived.

That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and
divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it
is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had
hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different
phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and
the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader.
Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations.
Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Cæsar,
Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a
misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.



CHAPTER V--THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES

Every one is acquainted with the first phase of this battle; a beginning
which was troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both armies, but
still more so for the English than for the French.

It had rained all night, the earth had been cut up by the downpour, the
water had accumulated here and there in the hollows of the plain as if
in casks; at some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried
up to the axles, the circingles of the horses were dripping with liquid
mud. If the wheat and rye trampled down by this cohort of transports
on the march had not filled in the ruts and strewn a litter beneath the
wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys, in the direction of
Papelotte would have been impossible.

The affair began late. Napoleon, as we have already explained, was in
the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand, like a pistol,
aiming it now at one point, now at another, of the battle; and it had
been his wish to wait until the horse batteries could move and gallop
freely. In order to do that it was necessary that the sun should come
out and dry the soil. But the sun did not make its appearance. It was
no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first cannon was fired,
the English general, Colville, looked at his watch, and noted that it
was thirty-five minutes past eleven.

The action was begun furiously, with more fury, perhaps, than the
Emperor would have wished, by the left wing of the French resting on
Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling
Quiot's brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed forward the right
wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested on
Papelotte.

The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint; the plan was to draw
Wellington thither, and to make him swerve to the left. This plan would
have succeeded if the four companies of the English guards and the brave
Belgians of Perponcher's division had not held the position solidly, and
Wellington, instead of massing his troops there, could confine himself
to despatching thither, as reinforcements, only four more companies of
guards and one battalion from Brunswick.

The attack of the right wing of the French on Papelotte was calculated,
in fact, to overthrow the English left, to cut off the road to Brussels,
to bar the passage against possible Prussians, to force Mont-Saint-Jean,
to turn Wellington back on Hougomont, thence on Braine-l'Alleud, thence
on Hal; nothing easier. With the exception of a few incidents this
attack succeeded Papelotte was taken; La Haie-Sainte was carried.

A detail to be noted. There was in the English infantry, particularly
in Kempt's brigade, a great many raw recruits. These young soldiers were
valiant in the presence of our redoubtable infantry; their inexperience
extricated them intrepidly from the dilemma; they performed particularly
excellent service as skirmishers: the soldier skirmisher, left somewhat
to himself, becomes, so to speak, his own general. These recruits
displayed some of the French ingenuity and fury. This novice of an
infantry had dash. This displeased Wellington.

After the taking of La Haie-Sainte the battle wavered.

There is in this day an obscure interval, from mid-day to four o'clock;
the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates
in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it.
We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia
of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches,
cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots
with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades, the
almost black infantry of Brunswick mingled with the scarlet infantry
of England, the English soldiers with great, white circular pads on the
slopes of their shoulders for epaulets, the Hanoverian light-horse with
their oblong casques of leather, with brass hands and red horse-tails,
the Scotch with their bare knees and plaids, the great white gaiters
of our grenadiers; pictures, not strategic lines--what Salvator Rosa
requires, not what is suited to the needs of Gribeauval.

A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. _Quid
obscurum, quid divinum_. Each historian traces, to some extent, the
particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell. Whatever may
be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has an
incalculable ebb. During the action the plans of the two leaders enter
into each other and become mutually thrown out of shape. Such a point of
the field of battle devours more combatants than such another, just as
more or less spongy soils soak up more or less quickly the water which
is poured on them. It becomes necessary to pour out more soldiers than
one would like; a series of expenditures which are the unforeseen. The
line of battle waves and undulates like a thread, the trails of blood
gush illogically, the fronts of the armies waver, the regiments
form capes and gulfs as they enter and withdraw; all these reefs are
continually moving in front of each other. Where the infantry stood the
artillery arrives, the cavalry rushes in where the artillery was, the
battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has
disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and
retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back,
distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an
oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute,
not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those
powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better
than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o'clock.
Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy. That is what
confers on Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add, that
there is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat,
becomes specialized, and disperses into innumerable detailed feats,
which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, "belong rather to
the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army." The
historian has, in this case, the evident right to sum up the whole. He
cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle, and
it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be,
to fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is called a
battle.

This, which is true of all great armed encounters, is particularly
applicable to Waterloo.

Nevertheless, at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a
point.



CHAPTER VI--FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. The
Prince of Orange was in command of the centre, Hill of the right wing,
Picton of the left wing. The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid,
shouted to the Hollando-Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!"
Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of Wellington;
Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English had captured from
the French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed the
English general, Picton, with a bullet through the head. The battle
had, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte;
Hougomont still held out, but was on fire; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of
the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived; all
the officers, except five, were either dead or captured. Three thousand
combatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the English
Guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by his
companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy. Baring
had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword. Many flags had been lost,
one from Alten's division, and one from the battalion of Lunenburg,
carried by a prince of the house of Deux-Ponts. The Scotch Grays no
longer existed; Ponsonby's great dragoons had been hacked to pieces.
That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and beneath
the cuirassiers of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, six
hundred remained; out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the
earth,--Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by
seven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the
fifth and the sixth, had been annihilated.

Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed but one
rallying-point, the centre. That point still held firm. Wellington
reinforced it. He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; he
summoned Chassé, who was at Braine-l'Alleud.

The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense, and
very compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it the
slope, which was tolerably steep then. It rested on that stout stone
dwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelles, and
which marks the intersection of the roads--a pile of the sixteenth
century, and so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded from it without
injuring it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here
and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat of
a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery was
ambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably authorized
by war, which permits traps, was so well done, that Haxo, who had been
despatched by the Emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reconnoitre
the enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returned
and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the two
barricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe. It was
at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of the plateau a
battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with carabines, was
concealed in the tall wheat.

Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was well
posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes,
then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of
Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither without
dissolving; the regiments would have broken up immediately there.
The artillery would have been lost among the morasses. The retreat,
according to many a man versed in the art,--though it is disputed by
others,--would have been a disorganized flight.

To this centre, Wellington added one of Chassé's brigades taken from the
right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plus
Clinton's division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to
the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as
reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent,
Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. This placed twenty-six
battalions under his hand. _The right wing_, as Charras says, _was
thrown back on the centre_. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of
earth at the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum of
Waterloo." Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground,
Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the
remaining half of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby
destroyed, Somerset remained.

The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was
ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags
of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished; there
had been no time to make a palisade for it.

Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained
the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill
of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which
an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two
hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic.
The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his
side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: "My
lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?" "To do like me,"
replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, "To hold this spot
to the last man." The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellington
shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca:
"Boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England!"

Towards four o'clock, the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing
was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the
sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared: the regiments, dislodged by
the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now
intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a
retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellington
drew back. "The beginning of retreat!" cried Napoleon.



CHAPTER VII--NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR

The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble,
had never been in a better humor than on that day. His impenetrability
had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that
profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had been
gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of
destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme
smile is God's alone.

_Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix
Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is
certain that Cæsar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o'clock
on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the
communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the
long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon from
Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to
whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to
the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time
motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder;
and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious
saying, "We are in accord." Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer
in accord.

He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked
by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,
halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near
the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he
thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
He said: "It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the
purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English who
have just arrived at Ostend." He conversed expansively; he regained the
animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when
he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf
Juan, and cried, "Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!" On
the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. "That
little Englishman needs a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in
violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.

At half-past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;
officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that
the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a
bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The
silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens.
At four o'clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this
peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
Vivian's brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the
village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o'clock, two Belgian
deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,
and that the English army was ready for battle. "So much the better!"
exclaimed Napoleon. "I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive
them back."

In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an
angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant's
chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a
truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart
of the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, "A pretty
checker-board."

In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of
provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by
morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This
did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, "We have
ninety chances out of a hundred." At eight o'clock the Emperor's
breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During
breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights
before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond's; and Soult, a rough
man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, "The ball takes place
to-day." The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, "Wellington will not be
so simple as to wait for Your Majesty." That was his way, however. "He
was fond of jesting," says Fleury de Chaboulon. "A merry humor was
at the foundation of his character," says Gourgaud. "He abounded in
pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin
Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was
he who called his grenadiers "his grumblers"; he pinched their ears; he
pulled their mustaches. "The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,"
is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the island
of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the French
brig of war, _Le Zéphyr_, having encountered the brig _L'Inconstant_, on
which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon from
_L'Inconstant_, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and
amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle of
Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself,
"The Emperor is well." A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms
with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the
breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an
hour; then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in
hand and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them
the order of battle.

At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in echelons
and set in motion in five columns, had deployed--the divisions in two
lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head; as
they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets,
mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets on
the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, "Magnificent!
Magnificent!"

Between nine o'clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it
may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,
forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's."
A few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of
that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm,
which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, as
he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his orders
from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin the
action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection
of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, "There are four
and twenty handsome maids, General."

Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before
him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed
to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.
All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty
pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large
tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing
themselves, he said, "It is a pity."

Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for
his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of
the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during
the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the
evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the
guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls
rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at
Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the
heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless
projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his
horse' feet stood. _Scabra rubigine_. A few years ago, a shell of sixty
pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb,
was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his
guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the
saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister
and tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll get
yourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines has
himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over
the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the
oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which
parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.

Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the
plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place,
are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this
mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief
has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her
bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying
it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,
exclaimed, "They have altered my field of battle!" Where the great
pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a
hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but
which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.
The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of
the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from
Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,
the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole
of that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon
thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and
fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau
of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of
battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and
difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English
cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,
which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains
had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated the
problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck fast
in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench whose
presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.

What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l'Alleud is a Belgian
village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in
curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a
half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,
and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which
makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present
day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between
the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level
with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been
appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is,
a trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,
sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,
crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving
rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the
Braine-l'Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is
proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives
the name of the dead, _Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels_,
and the date of the accident, _February, 1637_.8 It was so deep on
the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise,
was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on
another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of
clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on
the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and
the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.

On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way
indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the
summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;
that is to say, terrible.



CHAPTER VIII--THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE

So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.

He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen,
really admirable.

The battle once begun, its very various changes,--the resistance of
Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the
disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was
shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard
nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted
pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the
bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in
the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud,
so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of Piré's
demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons,
almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the
left wing badly cut into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of
echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to
grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage
of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the
cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly
unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised;
Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the
Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an
axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English
barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels;
Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot
down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put
to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince
of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both
Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the
45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the
flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre
and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners;
Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont
in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter
time about La Haie-Sainte,--all these stormy incidents passing like the
clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and
had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was
accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending
details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that
they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings
did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor
at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the
question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate,
Thou wilt not dare.

Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself
protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had,
a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his favor,
which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.

Nevertheless, when one has Bérésina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind
one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown
becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.

At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly
beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of the
English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor
half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his
eyes.

Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and
destroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it was
Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo
was wiping out Agincourt.

So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his
glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His
guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below
with a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the
declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the
path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness
at the English barricades of the two highways,--two large abatis of
trees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two
cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded
the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles
where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé's brigade. Near this
barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l'Alleud; he
bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made
a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.

The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.

Wellington had drawn back.

All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.

Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to
Paris to announce that the battle was won.

Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.

He had just found his clap of thunder.

He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land of
Mont-Saint-Jean.



CHAPTER IX--THE UNEXPECTED

There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a
quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses.
There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them to
support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes's division,--the one hundred and six
picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred and
ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and
eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses
of beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long
sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at
nine o'clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing "Let us
watch o'er the Safety of the Empire," they had come in a solid column,
with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and
deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont,
and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line,
so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left
Kellermann's cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers,
had, so to speak, two wings of iron.

Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders. Ney drew his
sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set
in motion.

Then a formidable spectacle was seen.

All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to
the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous
movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram
which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into
the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared
there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the
other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at
a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them,
the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They
ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between
the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible.
Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division
held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though
two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest
of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.

Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of
the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was
again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and
had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a
polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy
heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of
trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses
like the scales on the hydra.

These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to
this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told
of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human
heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,
invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.

Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet
twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of
the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares,
two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first
line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders,
taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm,
mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers
did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They
heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and
symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the
cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage
breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once,
a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the
crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads
with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry
debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an
earthquake.

All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the
head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On
arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly
given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and
cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,--a trench
between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.

It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,
directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double
slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed
on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming
the riders; and there being no means of retreat,--the whole column being
no longer anything more than a projectile,--the force which had been
acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine
could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell,
grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when
this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and
passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.

This began the loss of the battle.

A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two
thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road
of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which
were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.

Let us note in passing that it was Dubois's sorely tried brigade which,
an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag
of the Lunenburg battalion.

Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud's
cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see
that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of
the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little
white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles
highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an
obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might
almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that sign of a
peasant's head.

Other fatalities were destined to arise.

Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No.
Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.

Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the
nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which
there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had
declared itself long before.

It was time that this vast man should fall.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance.
This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These
plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world
mounting to the brain of one man,--this would be mortal to civilization
were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and
supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the
elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the
material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled
cemeteries, mothers in tears,--these are formidable pleaders. When
the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious
groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.

Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been
decided on.

He embarrassed God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the
Universe.



CHAPTER X--THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN

The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.

Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on
the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute to
the English battery.

The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the
squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a
halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not discouraged
them. They belonged to that class of men who, when diminished in number,
increase in courage.

Wathier's column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort's column,
which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of
an ambush, had arrived whole.

The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.

At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth, pistols in
fist,--such was the attack.

There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until
the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns into
granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not stir.

Then it was terrible.

All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied
whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first
rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second
ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged
their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of
an eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied
by crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,
leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four
living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;
the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,
ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies
of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably
never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,
closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of
grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants' midst. The form
of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions,
they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were
a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended
with lightning.

The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the
air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed
of the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre
dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the
forests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being
exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under
his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben
Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,
which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to
the song by killing the singer.

The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished
by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army
against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them
was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.
Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at
that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.
This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.

All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found
themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before
them two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred
dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the
German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;
the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the
rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it
to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable.

In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still
thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never
have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on
the shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,9 is in the collection of the
Waterloo Museum.

For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It
was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy
transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an
instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.
Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up with
the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The plateau
of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The
cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put
it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other
without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.

There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half
the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two hours.

The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had they
not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the hollow
road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and decided the
victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen
Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admired
heroically. He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"

The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or
spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments
six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore
to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.

Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a
duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and
still resisting, is expending all his blood.

Which of the two will be the first to fall?

The conflict on the plateau continued.

What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing
is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his
horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at
Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,
Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This
horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the
body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteen
years old at that time.

Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.

The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken
through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,
and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English. Wellington
held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and
the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.

But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding
of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded
reinforcements. "There are none," replied Wellington; "he must let
himself be killed!" Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence
which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry
from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does he expect
me to get it? Does he think I can make it?"

Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The
furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and
breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men clustered
round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a battalion
was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten's division,
already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed;
the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade strewed the rye-fields
all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those Dutch
grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811,
fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the
English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was
considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following
day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle
of the cuirassiers, Delort, l'Héritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and
Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten
wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda
killed, the whole of Wellington's staff decimated, and England had the
worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards
had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;
the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200
soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers
killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of Cumberland, a
whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was destined to be
tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the presence of the
fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing defeat all the way
to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the baggage-wagons, the
wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the French were gaining
ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch,
mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, "Alarm!" From Vert-Coucou to
Groentendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the direction
of Brussels, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses who are still
alive, the roads were encumbered with fugitives. This panic was such
that it attacked the Prince de Condé at Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at
Ghent. With the exception of the feeble reserve echelonned behind the
ambulance established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian's
and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left wing, Wellington had
no cavalry left. A number of batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are
attested by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far
as to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand
men. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the
Austrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present
at the battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five
o'clock Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these
sinister words, "Blücher, or night!"

It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on
the heights in the direction of Frischemont.

Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.



CHAPTER XI--A BAD GUIDE TO NAPOLEON; A GOOD GUIDE TO BULOW

The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known. Grouchy hoped for,
Blücher arriving. Death instead of life.

Fate has these turns; the throne of the world was expected; it was Saint
Helena that was seen.

If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bülow, Blücher's
lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above
Frischemont, instead of below Plancenoit, the form of the nineteenth
century might, perhaps, have been different. Napoleon would have won the
battle of Waterloo. By any other route than that below Plancenoit,
the Prussian army would have come out upon a ravine impassable for
artillery, and Bülow would not have arrived.

Now the Prussian general, Muffling, declares that one hour's delay, and
Blücher would not have found Wellington on his feet. "The battle was
lost."

It was time that Bülow should arrive, as will be seen. He had, moreover,
been very much delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont, and had set
out at daybreak; but the roads were impassable, and his divisions stuck
fast in the mire. The ruts were up to the hubs of the cannons. Moreover,
he had been obliged to pass the Dyle on the narrow bridge of Wavre;
the street leading to the bridge had been fired by the French, so
the caissons and ammunition-wagons could not pass between two rows of
burning houses, and had been obliged to wait until the conflagration was
extinguished. It was mid-day before Bülow's vanguard had been able to
reach Chapelle-Saint-Lambert.

Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over
at four o'clock, and Blücher would have fallen on the battle won by
Napoleon. Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite which
we cannot comprehend.

The Emperor had been the first, as early as mid-day, to descry with his
field-glass, on the extreme horizon, something which had attracted his
attention. He had said, "I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be
troops." Then he asked the Duc de Dalmatie, "Soult, what do you see in
the direction of Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?" The marshal, levelling his
glass, answered, "Four or five thousand men, Sire; evidently Grouchy."
But it remained motionless in the mist. All the glasses of the staff
had studied "the cloud" pointed out by the Emperor. Some said: "It is
trees." The truth is, that the cloud did not move. The Emperor detached
Domon's division of light cavalry to reconnoitre in that quarter.

Bülow had not moved, in fact. His vanguard was very feeble, and could
accomplish nothing. He was obliged to wait for the body of the army
corps, and he had received orders to concentrate his forces before
entering into line; but at five o'clock, perceiving Wellington's peril,
Blücher ordered Bülow to attack, and uttered these remarkable words: "We
must give air to the English army."

A little later, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel
deployed before Lobau's corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia
debouched from the forest of Paris, Plancenoit was in flames, and the
Prussian cannon-balls began to rain even upon the ranks of the guard in
reserve behind Napoleon.



CHAPTER XII--THE GUARD

Every one knows the rest,--the irruption of a third army; the battle
broken to pieces; eighty-six mouths of fire thundering simultaneously;
Pirch the first coming up with Bülow; Zieten's cavalry led by Blücher
in person, the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of
Ohain; Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot retreating;
Lobau caught on the flank; a fresh battle precipitating itself on our
dismantled regiments at nightfall; the whole English line resuming the
offensive and thrust forward; the gigantic breach made in the French
army; the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each
other; the extermination; disaster in front; disaster on the flank; the
Guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all
things.

Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, "Vive l'Empereur!"
History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in
acclamations.

The sky had been overcast all day long. All of a sudden, at that very
moment,--it was eight o'clock in the evening--the clouds on the horizon
parted, and allowed the grand and sinister glow of the setting sun to
pass through, athwart the elms on the Nivelles road. They had seen it
rise at Austerlitz.

Each battalion of the Guard was commanded by a general for this final
catastrophe. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan,
were there. When the tall caps of the grenadiers of the Guard, with
their large plaques bearing the eagle appeared, symmetrical, in line,
tranquil, in the midst of that combat, the enemy felt a respect for
France; they thought they beheld twenty victories entering the field
of battle, with wings outspread, and those who were the conquerors,
believing themselves to be vanquished, retreated; but Wellington
shouted, "Up, Guards, and aim straight!" The red regiment of English
guards, lying flat behind the hedges, sprang up, a cloud of grape-shot
riddled the tricolored flag and whistled round our eagles; all hurled
themselves forwards, and the final carnage began. In the darkness, the
Imperial Guard felt the army losing ground around it, and in the vast
shock of the rout it heard the desperate flight which had taken the
place of the "Vive l'Empereur!" and, with flight behind it, it continued
to advance, more crushed, losing more men at every step that it took.
There were none who hesitated, no timid men in its ranks. The soldier in
that troop was as much of a hero as the general. Not a man was missing
in that suicide.

Ney, bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered
himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed
under him there. Perspiring, his eyes aflame, foaming at the mouth, with
uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half cut off by a sword-stroke
from a horseguard, his plaque with the great eagle dented by a bullet;
bleeding, bemired, magnificent, a broken sword in his hand, he said,
"Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of battle!" But
in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At Drouet d'Erlon he
hurled this question, "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" In
the midst of all that artillery engaged in crushing a handful of men,
he shouted: "So there is nothing for me! Oh! I should like to have all
these English bullets enter my bowels!" Unhappy man, thou wert reserved
for French bullets!



CHAPTER XIII--THE CATASTROPHE

The rout behind the Guard was melancholy.

The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once,--Hougomont, La
Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. The cry "Treachery!" was followed by
a cry of "Save yourselves who can!" An army which is disbanding is
like a thaw. All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles,
hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney
borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword,
places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and
French. He strives to detain the army, he recalls it to its duty, he
insults it, he clings to the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly
from him, shouting, "Long live Marshal Ney!" Two of Durutte's regiments
go and come in affright as though tossed back and forth between the
swords of the Uhlans and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best,
Pack, and Rylandt; the worst of hand-to-hand conflicts is the defeat;
friends kill each other in order to escape; squadrons and battalions
break and disperse against each other, like the tremendous foam of
battle. Lobau at one extremity, and Reille at the other, are drawn into
the tide. In vain does Napoleon erect walls from what is left to him of
his Guard; in vain does he expend in a last effort his last serviceable
squadrons. Quiot retreats before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur,
Lobau before Bülow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before
Prince William of Prussia; Guyot, who led the Emperor's squadrons to the
charge, falls beneath the feet of the English dragoons. Napoleon gallops
past the line of fugitives, harangues, urges, threatens, entreats
them. All the mouths which in the morning had shouted, "Long live
the Emperor!" remain gaping; they hardly recognize him. The Prussian
cavalry, newly arrived, dashes forwards, flies, hews, slashes, kills,
exterminates. Horses lash out, the cannons flee; the soldiers of the
artillery-train unharness the caissons and use the horses to make their
escape; transports overturned, with all four wheels in the air, clog the
road and occasion massacres. Men are crushed, trampled down, others walk
over the dead and the living. Arms are lost. A dizzy multitude fills the
roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys,
the woods, encumbered by this invasion of forty thousand men. Shouts
despair, knapsacks and guns flung among the rye, passages forced at
the point of the sword, no more comrades, no more officers, no more
generals, an inexpressible terror. Zieten putting France to the sword at
its leisure. Lions converted into goats. Such was the flight.

At Genappe, an effort was made to wheel about, to present a battle
front, to draw up in line. Lobau rallied three hundred men. The entrance
to the village was barricaded, but at the first volley of Prussian
canister, all took to flight again, and Lobau was taken. That volley of
grape-shot can be seen to-day imprinted on the ancient gable of a brick
building on the right of the road at a few minutes' distance before you
enter Genappe. The Prussians threw themselves into Genappe, furious, no
doubt, that they were not more entirely the conquerors. The pursuit was
stupendous. Blücher ordered extermination. Roguet had set the lugubrious
example of threatening with death any French grenadier who should bring
him a Prussian prisoner. Blücher outdid Roguet. Duhesme, the general
of the Young Guard, hemmed in at the doorway of an inn at Genappe,
surrendered his sword to a huzzar of death, who took the sword and slew
the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of the
vanquished. Let us inflict punishment, since we are history: old
Blücher disgraced himself. This ferocity put the finishing touch to the
disaster. The desperate route traversed Genappe, traversed Quatre-Bras,
traversed Gosselies, traversed Frasnes, traversed Charleroi, traversed
Thuin, and only halted at the frontier. Alas! and who, then, was fleeing
in that manner? The Grand Army.

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest
bravery which ever astounded history,--is that causeless? No. The shadow
of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of
destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence
the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls
surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen
prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the
present shadow of a terrible presence. _Hoc erat in fatis_. That day the
perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the
hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was
necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom
one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes
can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than
a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.

At nightfall, in a meadow near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by
the skirt of his coat and detained a man, haggard, pensive, sinister,
gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the rout, had just
dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with
wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense
somnambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once more to
advance.



CHAPTER XIV--THE LAST SQUARE

Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the defeat,
as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night came,
death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible, allowed
themselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated from the
rest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every part,
died alone. They had taken up position for this final action, some on
the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There,
abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares endured their
death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died
with them.

At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was left
at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley,
at the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now
inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging fires
of the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of
projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure
officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and
replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually
contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for a
moment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy and
ever-decreasing thunder.

When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no
longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the
group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those men
dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,
taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite. These
combatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm of
spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon,
the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossal
death's-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the
depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the
shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matches
all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle round
their heads; all the lintstocks of the English batteries approached the
cannons, and then, with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspended
above these men, an English general, Colville according to some,
Maitland according to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, brave
Frenchmen!" Cambronne replied, "----."

{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word "Merde!"
in lieu of the ---- above.}



CHAPTER XV--CAMBRONNE

If any French reader object to having his susceptibilities offended, one
would have to refrain from repeating in his presence what is perhaps
the finest reply that a Frenchman ever made. This would enjoin us from
consigning something sublime to History.

At our own risk and peril, let us violate this injunction.

Now, then, among those giants there was one Titan,--Cambronne.

To make that reply and then perish, what could be grander? For being
willing to die is the same as to die; and it was not this man's fault if
he survived after he was shot.

The winner of the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, who was put to
flight; nor Wellington, giving way at four o'clock, in despair at five;
nor Blücher, who took no part in the engagement. The winner of Waterloo
was Cambronne.

To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is
to conquer!

Thus to answer the Catastrophe, thus to speak to Fate, to give this
pedestal to the future lion, to hurl such a challenge to the midnight
rainstorm, to the treacherous wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of
Ohain, to Grouchy's delay, to Blücher's arrival, to be Irony itself in
the tomb, to act so as to stand upright though fallen, to drown in
two syllables the European coalition, to offer kings privies which
the Cæsars once knew, to make the lowest of words the most lofty by
entwining with it the glory of France, insolently to end Waterloo with
Mardigras, to finish Leonidas with Rabellais, to set the crown on this
victory by a word impossible to speak, to lose the field and preserve
history, to have the laugh on your side after such a carnage,--this is
immense!

It was an insult such as a thunder-cloud might hurl! It reaches the
grandeur of Æschylus!

Cambronne's reply produces the effect of a violent break. 'Tis like the
breaking of a heart under a weight of scorn. 'Tis the overflow of agony
bursting forth. Who conquered? Wellington? No! Had it not been for
Blücher, he was lost. Was it Blücher? No! If Wellington had not begun,
Blücher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man spending his
last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes
that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly
agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of
it, he is offered this mockery,--life! How could he restrain himself?
Yonder are all the kings of Europe, the general's flushed with victory,
the Jupiter's darting thunderbolts; they have a hundred thousand
victorious soldiers, and back of the hundred thousand a million; their
cannon stand with yawning mouths, the match is lighted; they grind down
under their heels the Imperial guards, and the grand army; they have
just crushed Napoleon, and only Cambronne remains,--only this earthworm
is left to protest. He will protest. Then he seeks for the appropriate
word as one seeks for a sword. His mouth froths, and the froth is the
word. In face of this mean and mighty victory, in face of this victory
which counts none victorious, this desperate soldier stands erect. He
grants its overwhelming immensity, but he establishes its triviality;
and he does more than spit upon it. Borne down by numbers, by
superior force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression:
_"Excrément!"_ We repeat it,--to use that word, to do thus, to invent
such an expression, is to be the conqueror!

The spirit of mighty days at that portentous moment made its descent
on that unknown man. Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget
invents the "Marseillaise," under the visitation of a breath from on
high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes
sweeping over these men, and they shake, and one of them sings the song
supreme, and the other utters the frightful cry.

This challenge of titanic scorn Cambronne hurls not only at Europe in
the name of the Empire,--that would be a trifle: he hurls it at the past
in the name of the Revolution. It is heard, and Cambronne is recognized
as possessed by the ancient spirit of the Titans. Danton seems to be
speaking! Kléber seems to be bellowing!

At that word from Cambronne, the English voice responded, "Fire!"
The batteries flamed, the hill trembled, from all those brazen mouths
belched a last terrible gush of grape-shot; a vast volume of smoke,
vaguely white in the light of the rising moon, rolled out, and when the
smoke dispersed, there was no longer anything there. That formidable
remnant had been annihilated; the Guard was dead. The four walls of the
living redoubt lay prone, and hardly was there discernible, here and
there, even a quiver in the bodies; it was thus that the French legions,
greater than the Roman legions, expired on Mont-Saint-Jean, on the soil
watered with rain and blood, amid the gloomy grain, on the spot where
nowadays Joseph, who drives the post-wagon from Nivelles, passes
whistling, and cheerfully whipping up his horse at four o'clock in the
morning.



CHAPTER XVI--QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?

The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won
it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;10 Blücher sees
nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard to
it. Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries
involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of
Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;
Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,
seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that
catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the
other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this dazzled
state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy; in fact,
a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast stupefaction of
kings, drew all the kingdoms after it--the fall of force, the defeat of
war.

In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by men
amounts to nothing.

If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, do we thereby deprive
England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England
nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank
Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of
the sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in
a scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,
above Blücher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has
Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in
that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They
are majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they
contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from
themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have
brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is
only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That is
the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized people,
especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the good or
bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human species
results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank God! their
dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers which those
gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles.
Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory
and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word. It is
a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo
coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which is due
to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is Waterloo? A
victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.

The quine 11 won by Europe, paid by France.

It was not worth while to place a lion there.

Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage
of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military
oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries
of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the plain, the
forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot
going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in
a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it.
Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and
on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides
some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded.
Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected
Blücher; he came.

Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his dawning,
had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old owl had
fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only struck
as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of six and twenty?
What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with everything against
him, nothing in his favor, without provisions, without ammunition,
without cannon, without shoes, almost without an army, with a mere
handful of men against masses, hurled himself on Europe combined,
and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence had issued that
fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath, and with the same
set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the other, the five
armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on Alvinzi, Wurmser
on Beaulieu, Mélas on Wurmser, Mack on Mélas? Who was this novice in
war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical military school
excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence, the implacable
rancor of the old Cæsarism against the new; of the regular sword against
the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against genius. On the 18th of
June, 1815, that rancor had the last word, and beneath Lodi, Montebello,
Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote: Waterloo. A triumph of the
mediocres which is sweet to the majority. Destiny consented to this
irony. In his decline, Napoleon found Wurmser, the younger, again in
front of him.

In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.

Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second.

That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the
English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb
thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not
her captain; it was her army.

Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a
"detestable army." What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried
beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?

England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make
Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but
a hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those
regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,
that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the
pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,
those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket
holding their own against Essling's and Rivoli's old troops,--that is
what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we
are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of
his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth
as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the
English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy
there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of
Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it bore
on high the statue of a people.

But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She
still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.
She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none
in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people. And
as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for its
head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier, it
allows itself to be flogged.

It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who
had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,
as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the
grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.

That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of
Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the
wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,
Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bülow's guide enlightening him,--the
whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.

On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of a
battle at Waterloo.

Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest front
for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a league;
Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side.
From this denseness the carnage arose.

The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion
established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,
thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,
thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,
French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,
forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;
sixty thousand dead.

To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,
the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.

At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a
traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams
like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the
catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives
again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in
air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate
over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened
dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare of
bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,
the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the battle
phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are cuirassiers;
that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington; all this no
longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats still; and the
ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there is fury even in
the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible heights, Hougomont,
Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, appear confusedly
crowned with whirlwinds of spectres engaged in exterminating each other.



CHAPTER XVII--IS WATERLOO TO BE CONSIDERED GOOD?

There exists a very respectable liberal school which does not hate
Waterloo. We do not belong to it. To us, Waterloo is but the stupefied
date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is
certainly unexpected.

If one places one's self at the culminating point of view of the
question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It
is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against
Paris; it is the _statu quo_ against the initiative; it is the 14th
of July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March, 1815; it is the
monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to the indomitable French
rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in
eruption for twenty-six years--such was the dream. The solidarity of the
Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs
with the Bourbons. Waterloo bears divine right on its crupper. It is
true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom by the natural
reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a constitutional
order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great regret of the
conquerors. It is because revolution cannot be really conquered, and
that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is always cropping
up afresh: before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing the old thrones;
after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and conforming to the charter.
Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant
on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality;
Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights
of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it
Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress,
call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work irresistibly, and it is
already fulfilling it to-day. It always reaches its goal strangely. It
employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator.
Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune. Thus does
progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman.
It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to its divine work the
man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old tottering invalid
of Father Élysée. It makes use of the gouty man as well as of the
conqueror; of the conqueror without, of the gouty man within. Waterloo,
by cutting short the demolition of European thrones by the sword, had
no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work to be continued in
another direction. The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the
thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued
its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.

In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo; that
which smiled in Wellington's rear; that which brought him all the
marshals' staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the staff of a
marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the barrows full of
bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which triumphantly inscribed
on that pedestal the date "_June_ 18, 1815"; that which encouraged
Blücher, as he put the flying army to the sword; that which, from the
heights of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over
its prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution
which murmured that infamous word "dismemberment." On arriving in Paris,
it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which scorched
its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the stammer of a
charter.

Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo. Of intentional
liberty there is none. The counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal,
in the same manner as, by a corresponding phenomenon, Napoleon was
involuntarily revolutionary. On the 18th of June, 1815, the mounted
Robespierre was hurled from his saddle.



CHAPTER XVIII--A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT

End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.

The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as
it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the barbarians;
only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet name of the
counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to panting, and
halted short. The Empire was bewept,--let us acknowledge the fact,--and
bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword converted into a
sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had diffused over the
earth all the light which tyranny can give a sombre light. We will say
more; an obscure light. Compared to the true daylight, it is night. This
disappearance of night produces the effect of an eclipse.

Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July
effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the
antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was
white. The exile reigned. Hartwell's pine table took its place in front
of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy
were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding
day, Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne
fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the health
of society in the nineteenth century was established over France, and
over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade. Trestaillon was
celebrated. The device _non pluribus impar_ re-appeared on the stone
rays representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on the Quai
d'Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now a red
house. The Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne victories,
thrown out of its element among these novelties, a little ashamed, it
may be, of Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its predicament
with the statue of the Duc d'Angoulême. The cemetery of the Madeleine,
a terrible pauper's grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble,
since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.

In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the very
month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on the
fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there was
a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King of
Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones,
and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became
the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth
changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a
shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"

This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was the
serpent's change of skin.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
he doing? "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
and Waterloo. "He dead!" cried the soldier; "you don't know him."
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous remained
long empty through Napoleon's disappearance.

The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by
it to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; _Belle-Alliance_,
Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.

In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the
features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the
Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,
Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.
Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with
the future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the
vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon
erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by
Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him "my
sleeplessness." This terror was the result of the quantity of
revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and excuses
Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble.
The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of Saint Helena
on the horizon.

While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the
sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly
rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.
The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called this
the Restoration.

This is what Waterloo was.

But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a
moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from
one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to
belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.



CHAPTER XIX--THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT

Let us return--it is a necessity in this book--to that fatal
battle-field.

On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blücher's
ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, delivered
up that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided the
massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes during
catastrophes.

After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean
remained deserted.

The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual sign
of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established their
bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the retreating
rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of Waterloo to draw
up his report to Lord Bathurst.

If ever the _sic vos non vobis_ was applicable, it certainly is to that
village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league from
the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was
burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,
Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the two
conquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked not
in the battle, bears off all the honor.

We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion
presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beauties
which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous
features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the
bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle
always rises on naked corpses.

Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand is
that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets
are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Some
philosophers--Voltaire among the number--affirm that it is precisely
those persons have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; there
is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are prone
on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One has
assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is the
author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so; it seems
to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin the
shoes from a dead man.

One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors follow
thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporary
soldier, out of the question.

Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.
Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of
vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of
uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;
formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts,
sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they
sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers'
servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,--we are not
speaking of the present,--dragged all this behind them, so that in the
special language they are called "stragglers." No army, no nation,
was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and followed the
Germans, then spoke French and followed the English. It was by one of
these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French, that the Marquis
of Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon, and taking him for one
of our own men, was traitorously slain and robbed on the battle-field
itself, in the course of the night which followed the victory of
Cerisoles. The rascal sprang from this marauding. The detestable maxim,
_Live on the enemy!_ produced this leprosy, which a strict discipline
alone could heal. There are reputations which are deceptive; one does
not always know why certain generals, great in other directions, have
been so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated
pillage; evil permitted constitutes part of goodness. Turenne was so
good that he allowed the Palatinate to be delivered over to fire and
blood. The marauders in the train of an army were more or less in
number, according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche and
Marceau had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we do him the justice
to mention it.

Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June, the dead
were robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any one caught in
the act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious. The marauders stole in
one corner of the battlefield while others were being shot in another.

The moon was sinister over this plain.

Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the
direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of
those whom we have just described,--neither English nor French, neither
peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent
of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle
Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat;
he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him.
Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. He
had no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From
time to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to
see whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something
silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His sliding
motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused him
to resemble those twilight larvæ which haunt ruins, and which ancient
Norman legends call the Alleurs.

Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among the
marshes.

A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have perceived
at some distance a sort of little sutler's wagon with a fluted wicker
hood, harnessed to a famished nag which was cropping the grass across
its bit as it halted, hidden, as it were, behind the hovel which adjoins
the highway to Nivelles, at the angle of the road from Mont-Saint-Jean
to Braine l'Alleud; and in the wagon, a sort of woman seated on coffers
and packages. Perhaps there was some connection between that wagon and
that prowler.

The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it if
the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of
the sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot, but not
fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night.
A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers which
resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.

In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general rounds
of the English camp were audible.

Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in the
west, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined by the
cordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace of rubies
with two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended in an immense
semicircle over the hills along the horizon.

We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart is
terrified at the thought of what that death must have been to so many
brave men.

If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which surpasses
dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full possession
of virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh valiantly; to rush
towards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of one; to feel in
one's breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats, a will which
reasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother, to have a wife,
to have children; to have the light--and all at once, in the space of a
shout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss; to fall, to
roll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat, flowers, leaves,
branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything; to feel one's sword
useless, men beneath one, horses on top of one; to struggle in vain,
since one's bones have been broken by some kick in the darkness; to feel
a heel which makes one's eyes start from their sockets; to bite horses'
shoes in one's rage; to stifle, to yell, to writhe; to be beneath, and
to say to one's self, "But just a little while ago I was a living man!"

There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle,
all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered with
horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! There
was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with the
plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. A
heap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower
part--such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. The
blood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a large
pool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spot
which is still pointed out.

It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point, in the
direction of the Genappe road, that the destruction of the cuirassiers
had taken place. The thickness of the layer of bodies was proportioned
to the depth of the hollow road. Towards the middle, at the point
where it became level, where Delort's division had passed, the layer of
corpses was thinner.

The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was going
in that direction. He was searching that vast tomb. He gazed about. He
passed the dead in some sort of hideous review. He walked with his feet
in the blood.

All at once he paused.

A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point where
the pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by the moon,
projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand had on its finger
something sparkling, which was a ring of gold.

The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment, and
when he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.

He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and frightened
attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the horizon
on his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body supported on his
two forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his head peering above
the edge of the hollow road. The jackal's four paws suit some actions.

Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.

At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch him
from behind.

He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had seized
the skirt of his coat.

An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.

"Come," said he, "it's only a dead body. I prefer a spook to a
gendarme."

But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in
the grave.

"Well now," said the prowler, "is that dead fellow alive? Let's see."

He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything that
was in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head, pulled
out the body, and a few moments later he was dragging the lifeless, or
at least the unconscious, man, through the shadows of hollow road. He
was a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer of considerable rank;
a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath the cuirass; this officer
no longer possessed a helmet. A furious sword-cut had scarred his face,
where nothing was discernible but blood.

However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some happy
chance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaulted
above him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed. His
eyes were still closed.

On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.

The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one of the gulfs
which he had beneath his great coat.

Then he felt of the officer's fob, discovered a watch there, and took
possession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat, found a purse and
pocketed it.

When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administering
to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.

"Thanks," he said feebly.

The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him, the
freshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely, had roused
him from his lethargy.

The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps was
audible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.

The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:--

"Who won the battle?"

"The English," answered the prowler.

The officer went on:--

"Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them."

It was already done.

The prowler executed the required feint, and said:--

"There is nothing there."

"I have been robbed," said the officer; "I am sorry for that. You should
have had them."

The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.

"Some one is coming," said the prowler, with the movement of a man who
is taking his departure.

The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.

"You have saved my life. Who are you?"

The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:--

"Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you. If they
were to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life. Now get
out of the scrape yourself."

"What is your rank?"

"Sergeant."

"What is your name?"

"Thénardier."

"I shall not forget that name," said the officer; "and do you remember
mine. My name is Pontmercy."



BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION



CHAPTER I--NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430

Jean Valjean had been recaptured.

The reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over the sad
details. We will confine ourselves to transcribing two paragraphs
published by the journals of that day, a few months after the surprising
events which had taken place at M. sur M.

These articles are rather summary. It must be remembered, that at that
epoch the _Gazette des Tribunaux_ was not yet in existence.

We borrow the first from the _Drapeau Blanc_. It bears the date of July
25, 1823.

An arrondissement of the Pas de Calais has just been the theatre of an
event quite out of the ordinary course. A man, who was a stranger in the
Department, and who bore the name of M. Madeleine, had, thanks to the
new methods, resuscitated some years ago an ancient local industry, the
manufacture of jet and of black glass trinkets. He had made his fortune
in the business, and that of the arrondissement as well, we will admit.
He had been appointed mayor, in recognition of his services. The police
discovered that M. Madeleine was no other than an ex-convict who had
broken his ban, condemned in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean has been recommitted to prison. It appears that previous
to his arrest he had succeeded in withdrawing from the hands of M.
Laffitte, a sum of over half a million which he had lodged there, and
which he had, moreover, and by perfectly legitimate means, acquired in
his business. No one has been able to discover where Jean Valjean has
concealed this money since his return to prison at Toulon.

The second article, which enters a little more into detail, is an
extract from the _Journal de Paris_, of the same date.

A former convict, who had been liberated, named Jean Valjean, has just
appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Var, under circumstances
calculated to attract attention. This wretch had succeeded in escaping
the vigilance of the police, he had changed his name, and had succeeded
in getting himself appointed mayor of one of our small northern towns;
in this town he had established a considerable commerce. He has at last
been unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the
public prosecutor. He had for his concubine a woman of the town, who
died of a shock at the moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is
endowed with Herculean strength, found means to escape; but three or
four days after his flight the police laid their hands on him once more,
in Paris itself, at the very moment when he was entering one of those
little vehicles which run between the capital and the village of
Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). He is said to have profited by this
interval of three or four days of liberty, to withdraw a considerable
sum deposited by him with one of our leading bankers. This sum has been
estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. If the indictment is
to be trusted, he has hidden it in some place known to himself alone,
and it has not been possible to lay hands on it. However that may be,
the said Jean Valjean has just been brought before the Assizes of the
Department of the Var as accused of highway robbery accompanied with
violence, about eight years ago, on the person of one of those honest
children who, as the patriarch of Ferney has said, in immortal verse,


          ". . . Arrive from Savoy every year,
           And who, with gentle hands, do clear
           Those long canals choked up with soot."

This bandit refused to defend himself. It was proved by the skilful and
eloquent representative of the public prosecutor, that the theft was
committed in complicity with others, and that Jean Valjean was a member
of a band of robbers in the south. Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty
and was condemned to the death penalty in consequence. This criminal
refused to lodge an appeal. The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has
deigned to commute his penalty to that of penal servitude for life. Jean
Valjean was immediately taken to the prison at Toulon.

The reader has not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious habits at
M. sur M. Some papers, among others the _Constitutional_, presented this
commutation as a triumph of the priestly party.

Jean Valjean changed his number in the galleys. He was called 9,430.

However, and we will mention it at once in order that we may not be
obliged to recur to the subject, the prosperity of M. sur M. vanished
with M. Madeleine; all that he had foreseen during his night of fever
and hesitation was realized; lacking him, there actually was _a
soul lacking_. After this fall, there took place at M. sur M. that
egotistical division of great existences which have fallen, that fatal
dismemberment of flourishing things which is accomplished every day,
obscurely, in the human community, and which history has noted only
once, because it occurred after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants
are crowned kings; superintendents improvise manufacturers out of
themselves. Envious rivalries arose. M. Madeleine's vast workshops were
shut; his buildings fell to ruin, his workmen were scattered. Some
of them quitted the country, others abandoned the trade. Thenceforth,
everything was done on a small scale, instead of on a grand scale;
for lucre instead of the general good. There was no longer a centre;
everywhere there was competition and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned
over all and directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled
things to himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of
organization, bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the
benevolence of the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine
had set were tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the
products were debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished,
for lack of orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still,
bankruptcy arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All
had vanished.

The state itself perceived that some one had been crushed somewhere.
Less than four years after the judgment of the Court of Assizes
establishing the identity of Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine, for the
benefit of the galleys, the cost of collecting taxes had doubled in the
arrondissement of M. sur M.; and M. de Villèle called attention to the
fact in the rostrum, in the month of February, 1827.



CHAPTER II--IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE OF THE
DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY

Before proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to narrate in some
detail, a singular occurrence which took place at about the same epoch,
in Montfermeil, and which is not lacking in coincidence with certain
conjectures of the indictment.

There exists in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition,
which is all the more curious and all the more precious, because
a popular superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe in
Siberia. We are among those who respect everything which is in the
nature of a rare plant. Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil:
it is thought that the devil, from time immemorial, has selected the
forest as a hiding-place for his treasures. Goodwives affirm that it is
no rarity to encounter at nightfall, in secluded nooks of the forest,
a black man with the air of a carter or a wood-chopper, wearing wooden
shoes, clad in trousers and a blouse of linen, and recognizable by the
fact, that, instead of a cap or hat, he has two immense horns on his
head. This ought, in fact, to render him recognizable. This man is
habitually engaged in digging a hole. There are three ways of profiting
by such an encounter. The first is to approach the man and speak to him.
Then it is seen that the man is simply a peasant, that he appears black
because it is nightfall; that he is not digging any hole whatever, but
is cutting grass for his cows, and that what had been taken for horns
is nothing but a dung-fork which he is carrying on his back, and whose
teeth, thanks to the perspective of evening, seemed to spring from his
head. The man returns home and dies within the week. The second way is
to watch him, to wait until he has dug his hole, until he has filled it
and has gone away; then to run with great speed to the trench, to
open it once more and to seize the "treasure" which the black man
has necessarily placed there. In this case one dies within the month.
Finally, the last method is not to speak to the black man, not to look
at him, and to flee at the best speed of one's legs. One then dies
within the year.

As all three methods are attended with their special inconveniences, the
second, which at all events, presents some advantages, among others that
of possessing a treasure, if only for a month, is the one most generally
adopted. So bold men, who are tempted by every chance, have quite
frequently, as we are assured, opened the holes excavated by the black
man, and tried to rob the devil. The success of the operation appears
to be but moderate. At least, if the tradition is to be believed, and in
particular the two enigmatical lines in barbarous Latin, which an
evil Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, named Tryphon has left on
this subject. This Tryphon is buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de
Bocherville, near Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave.

Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are ordinarily
extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night--for it must be done
at night; he wets his shirt, burns out his candle, breaks his mattock,
and when he arrives at the bottom of the hole, when he lays his hand on
the "treasure," what does he find? What is the devil's treasure? A sou,
sometimes a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body, sometimes
a spectre folded in four like a sheet of paper in a portfolio,
sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon's verses seem to announce to the
indiscreet and curious:--


          "Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,
           As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."

It seems that in our day there is sometimes found a powder-horn with
bullets, sometimes an old pack of cards greasy and worn, which has
evidently served the devil. Tryphon does not record these two finds,
since Tryphon lived in the twelfth century, and since the devil does not
appear to have had the wit to invent powder before Roger Bacon's time,
and cards before the time of Charles VI.

Moreover, if one plays at cards, one is sure to lose all that one
possesses! and as for the powder in the horn, it possesses the property
of making your gun burst in your face.

Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to the prosecuting
attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean during his flight of
several days had been prowling around Montfermeil, it was remarked in
that village that a certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle, had
"peculiar ways" in the forest. People thereabouts thought they knew that
this Boulatruelle had been in the galleys. He was subjected to
certain police supervision, and, as he could find work nowhere, the
administration employed him at reduced rates as a road-mender on the
cross-road from Gagny to Lagny.

This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor by the
inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in
removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence
of the gendarmes,--probably affiliated to robber bands, they said;
suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only
thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.

This is what people thought they had noticed:--

Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of stone-breaking
and care of the road at a very early hour, and to betaking himself to
the forest with his pickaxe. He was encountered towards evening in
the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets; and he had the
appearance of being in search of something, and sometimes he was digging
holes. The goodwives who passed took him at first for Beelzebub; then
they recognized Boulatruelle, and were not in the least reassured
thereby. These encounters seemed to cause Boulatruelle a lively
displeasure. It was evident that he sought to hide, and that there was
some mystery in what he was doing.

It was said in the village: "It is clear that the devil has appeared.
Boulatruelle has seen him, and is on the search. In sooth, he is cunning
enough to pocket Lucifer's hoard."

The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil, or will the
devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made a great many signs of the
cross.

In the meantime, Boulatruelle's manouvres in the forest ceased; and he
resumed his regular occupation of roadmending; and people gossiped of
something else.

Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in all this
there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends, but some
fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than the devil's
bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered the secret. The
most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thénardier, the proprietor of
the tavern, who was everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally
himself with Boulatruelle.

"He has been in the galleys," said Thénardier. "Eh! Good God! no one
knows who has been there or will be there."

One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times the law would
have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in the forest,
and that the latter would have been forced to speak, and that he would
have been put to the torture in case of need, and that Boulatruelle
would not have resisted the water test, for example. "Let us put him to
the wine test," said Thénardier.

They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking.
Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very little. He combined
with admirable art, and in masterly proportions, the thirst of a
gormandizer with the discretion of a judge. Nevertheless, by dint of
returning to the charge and of comparing and putting together the few
obscure words which he did allow to escape him, this is what Thénardier
and the schoolmaster imagined that they had made out:--

One morning, when Boulatruelle was on his way to his work, at daybreak,
he had been surprised to see, at a nook of the forest in the underbrush,
a shovel and a pickaxe, _concealed, as one might say_.

However, he might have supposed that they were probably the shovel and
pick of Father Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and would have thought no
more about it. But, on the evening of that day, he saw, without being
seen himself, as he was hidden by a large tree, "a person who did not
belong in those parts, and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew well," directing
his steps towards the densest part of the wood. Translation by
Thénardier: _A comrade of the galleys_. Boulatruelle obstinately refused
to reveal his name. This person carried a package--something square,
like a large box or a small trunk. Surprise on the part of Boulatruelle.
However, it was only after the expiration of seven or eight minutes that
the idea of following that "person" had occurred to him. But it was too
late; the person was already in the thicket, night had descended, and
Boulatruelle had not been able to catch up with him. Then he had
adopted the course of watching for him at the edge of the woods. "It was
moonlight." Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle had seen this person
emerge from the brushwood, carrying no longer the coffer, but a shovel
and pick. Boulatruelle had allowed the person to pass, and had not
dreamed of accosting him, because he said to himself that the other man
was three times as strong as he was, and armed with a pickaxe, and that
he would probably knock him over the head on recognizing him, and on
perceiving that he was recognized. Touching effusion of two old comrades
on meeting again. But the shovel and pick had served as a ray of light
to Boulatruelle; he had hastened to the thicket in the morning, and had
found neither shovel nor pick. From this he had drawn the inference that
this person, once in the forest, had dug a hole with his pick, buried
the coffer, and reclosed the hole with his shovel. Now, the coffer was
too small to contain a body; therefore it contained money. Hence his
researches. Boulatruelle had explored, sounded, searched the entire
forest and the thicket, and had dug wherever the earth appeared to him
to have been recently turned up. In vain.

He had "ferreted out" nothing. No one in Montfermeil thought any more
about it. There were only a few brave gossips, who said, "You may be
certain that the mender on the Gagny road did not take all that trouble
for nothing; he was sure that the devil had come."



CHAPTER III--THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN PREPARATORY
MANIPULATION TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A BLOW FROM A HAMMER

Towards the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of
Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after heavy weather, and for
the purpose of repairing some damages, of the ship _Orion_, which was
employed later at Brest as a school-ship, and which then formed a part
of the Mediterranean squadron.

This vessel, battered as it was,--for the sea had handled it
roughly,--produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It flew some
colors which procured for it the regulation salute of eleven guns, which
it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two. It has been calculated
that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses, courteous
exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and
citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and
all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized
world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty
hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs the
shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred
millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this
time the poor were dying of hunger.

The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish
war."

This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of peculiarities.
A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon; the branch of France
succoring and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say,
performing an act devolving on the elder; an apparent return to our
national traditions, complicated by servitude and by subjection to the
cabinets of the North; M. le Duc d'Angoulême, surnamed by the liberal
sheets _the hero of Andujar_, compressing in a triumphal attitude that
was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient and very
powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the chimerical
terrorism of the liberals; the _sansculottes_ resuscitated, to the great
terror of dowagers, under the name of _descamisados_; monarchy opposing
an obstacle to progress described as anarchy; the theories of '89
roughly interrupted in the sap; a European halt, called to the French
idea, which was making the tour of the world; beside the son of France
as generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert,
enrolling himself in that crusade of kings against people as a
volunteer, with grenadier epaulets of red worsted; the soldiers of the
Empire setting out on a fresh campaign, but aged, saddened, after eight
years of repose, and under the white cockade; the tricolored standard
waved abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white standard had
been thirty years earlier at Coblentz; monks mingled with our troops;
the spirit of liberty and of novelty brought to its senses by bayonets;
principles slaughtered by cannonades; France undoing by her arms that
which she had done by her mind; in addition to this, hostile leaders
sold, soldiers hesitating, cities besieged by millions; no military
perils, and yet possible explosions, as in every mine which is surprised
and invaded; but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for some,
glory for no one. Such was this war, made by the princes descended from
Louis XIV., and conducted by generals who had been under Napoleon. Its
sad fate was to recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.

Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadéro, among
others, was a fine military action; but after all, we repeat, the
trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound, the whole effect was
suspicious; history approves of France for making a difficulty about
accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident that certain Spanish
officers charged with resistance yielded too easily; the idea of
corruption was connected with the victory; it appears as though generals
and not battles had been won, and the conquering soldier returned
humiliated. A debasing war, in short, in which the _Bank of France_
could be read in the folds of the flag.

Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in formidable
ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels, and began to
regret Palafox. It is the nature of France to prefer to have Rostopchine
rather than Ballesteros in front of her.

From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also proper
to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military spirit
of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise of
inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier, the
son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous
contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations, not to
stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are the French
Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a solar fact. Blind
is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.

The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish nation, was then,
at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution. It was France
who committed this monstrous violence; by foul means, for, with the
exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul
means. The words _passive obedience_ indicate this. An army is a strange
masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum
of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity against humanity, despite
humanity, explained.

As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it for
a success. They did not perceive the danger that lies in having an idea
slain to order. They went astray, in their innocence, to such a degree
that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a crime into their
establishment as an element of strength. The spirit of the ambush
entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823. The Spanish
campaign became in their counsels an argument for force and for
adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established _el rey netto_
in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king at home. They
fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience of the soldier for
the consent of the nation. Such confidence is the ruin of thrones. It is
not permitted to fall asleep, either in the shadow of a machineel tree,
nor in the shadow of an army.

Let us return to the ship _Orion_.

During the operations of the army commanded by the prince generalissimo,
a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just stated
that the _Orion_ belonged to this fleet, and that accidents of the sea
had brought it into port at Toulon.

The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it which
attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it is great, and the crowd
loves what is great.

A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations of the
genius of man with the powers of nature.

A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest and
the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same time
with three forms of substance,--solid, liquid, and fluid,--and it must
do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of iron with which to
seize the granite on the bottom of the sea, and more wings and more
antennæ than winged insects, to catch the wind in the clouds. Its breath
pours out through its hundred and twenty cannons as through enormous
trumpets, and replies proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks to lead it
astray in the alarming sameness of its billows, but the vessel has its
soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it the north. In
the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of the stars. Thus,
against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas; against the water,
wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead; against the shadows,
its light; against immensity, a needle.

If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,
taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to enter
one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports of Brest
or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are under a bell-glass
there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard; that great column of
wood which stretches out on the earth as far as the eye can reach is
the main-mast. Taking it from its root in the stocks to its tip in the
clouds, it is sixty fathoms long, and its diameter at its base is
three feet. The English main-mast rises to a height of two hundred and
seventeen feet above the water-line. The navy of our fathers employed
cables, ours employs chains. The simple pile of chains on a ship of a
hundred guns is four feet high, twenty feet in breadth, and eight
feet in depth. And how much wood is required to make this ship? Three
thousand cubic metres. It is a floating forest.

And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question here of
the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple sailing-vessel;
steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to that prodigy
which is called a war vessel. At the present time, for example, the
mixed vessel with a screw is a surprising machine, propelled by three
thousand square metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five
hundred horse-power.

Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher
Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man. It is as
inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales; it stores up
the wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense vagueness of the
billows, it floats, and it reigns.

There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot
yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall,
when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the jaws
of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the jaws of a pike, when those
monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars, which the hurricane
bears forth into the void and into night, when all that power and all
that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which are superior.

Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate in an immense
feebleness it affords men food for thought. Hence in the ports curious
people abound around these marvellous machines of war and of navigation,
without being able to explain perfectly to themselves why. Every day,
accordingly, from morning until night, the quays, sluices, and the
jetties of the port of Toulon were covered with a multitude of idlers
and loungers, as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in staring
at the _Orion_.

The _Orion_ was a ship that had been ailing for a long time; in the
course of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles had collected
on its keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half its speed; it
had gone into the dry dock the year before this, in order to have the
barnacles scraped off, then it had put to sea again; but this cleaning
had affected the bolts of the keel: in the neighborhood of the Balearic
Isles the sides had been strained and had opened; and, as the plating
in those days was not of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak.
A violent equinoctial gale had come up, which had first staved in
a grating and a porthole on the larboard side, and damaged the
foretop-gallant-shrouds; in consequence of these injuries, the _Orion_
had run back to Toulon.

It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs were
begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard, but some of the
planks had been unnailed here and there, according to custom, to permit
of air entering the hold.

One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.

Enlarge


The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to take the
upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard, lost his balance;
he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging the Arsenal quay uttered a
cry; the man's head overbalanced his body; the man fell around the yard,
with his hands outstretched towards the abyss; on his way he seized the
footrope, first with one hand, then with the other, and remained hanging
from it: the sea lay below him at a dizzy depth; the shock of his fall
had imparted to the foot-rope a violent swinging motion; the man swayed
back and forth at the end of that rope, like a stone in a sling.

It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one
of the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the
service, dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman
was losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his face,
but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted
in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascend served
but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout, for
fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute when he
should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant to instant, heads
were turned aside that his fall might not be seen. There are moments
when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and
it is a terrible thing to see a living being detach himself from it and
fall like a ripe fruit.

All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility
of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore a
green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level with the top, a
gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed a perfectly white head to
be seen: he was not a young man.

A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had, in
fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of the watch,
and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation of the crew,
while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back, he had asked
the officer's permission to risk his life to save the topman; at an
affirmative sign from the officer he had broken the chain riveted to his
ankle with one blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and had
dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease
that chain had been broken; it was only later on that the incident was
recalled.

In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds and
appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds, during which
the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity of a thread, seemed
centuries to those who were looking on. At last, the convict raised his
eyes to heaven and advanced a step: the crowd drew a long breath. He was
seen to run out along the yard: on arriving at the point, he fastened
the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end to hang
down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,--and
the anguish was indescribable,--instead of one man suspended over the
gulf, there were two.

One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly, only here the
spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances were fastened on
this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every
brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the
slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.

In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself to a
position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more, and the
exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself to fall into
the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with the cord to which
he clung with one hand, while he was working with the other. At last, he
was seen to climb back on the yard, and to drag the sailor up after him;
he held him there a moment to allow him to recover his strength, then he
grasped him in his arms and carried him, walking on the yard himself to
the cap, and from there to the main-top, where he left him in the hands
of his comrades.

At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants
among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay, and all
voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage, "Pardon for that
man!"

He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent to rejoin
his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily, he dropped
into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards; all eyes were
following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them; whether it was
that he was fatigued, or that his head turned, they thought they saw him
hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd uttered a loud shout: the
convict had fallen into the sea.

The fall was perilous. The frigate _Algésiras_ was anchored alongside
the _Orion_, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels: it
was to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them. Four
men flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered them on;
anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not risen to
the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple, as
though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they dived. In
vain. The search was continued until the evening: they did not even find
the body.

On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:--

"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on
board of the _Orion_, on his return from rendering assistance to a
sailor, fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been
found; it is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the
Arsenal point: this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his
name was Jean Valjean."



BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN



CHAPTER I--THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL

Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At
the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In
1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so
many well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some
pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be
sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in
twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts
of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but
Montfermeil was none the less a village. Retired cloth-merchants and
rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful
and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people
lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and
so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the
plateau.

It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of
the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds
which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the
church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water
only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to
Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.

Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The
large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thénardier tavern formed a
part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of
it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of supplying
Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until seven
o'clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night once
come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had no
water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.

This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has
probably not forgotten,--little Cosette. It will be remembered that
Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they made the mother
pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased
to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding
chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant
in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when
it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of
going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never be
lacking in the house.

Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street of
the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of the
same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will
perhaps remember, the Thénardiers' hostelry was situated. These people
filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of
a faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities
displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful
clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to
the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian
vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and which
have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists call
this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the Apicides,
and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers,
who had retired to the village, went to see this creature with great
devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a
unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.

On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were
seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in
the public room of Thénardier's hostelry. This room resembled all
drinking-shop rooms,--tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;
but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823
was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable
in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin.
The female Thénardier was attending to the supper, which was roasting in
front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his customers and
talking politics.

Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d'Angoulême, strictly local parentheses,
like the following, were audible amid the uproar:--

"About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When
ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a
great deal of juice under the press." "But the grapes cannot be ripe?"
"In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as
soon as spring comes." "Then it is very thin wine?" "There are wines
poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green." Etc.

Or a miller would call out:--

"Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a quantity
of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are obliged to send
through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel, vetches, hempseed,
fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention pebbles, which
abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I am not fond of
grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like to saw beams with
nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And
then people complain of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is
no fault of ours."

In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a
landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be
performed in the spring, was saying:--

"It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good
thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young
and very hard to cut still. It's terribly tender. It yields before the
iron." Etc.

Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen
stockings destined for the young Thénardiers. A very young kitten was
playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in
the adjoining room, from two fresh children's voices: it was Éponine and
Azelma.

In the chimney-corner a cat-o'-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.

At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the
house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy
who had been born to the Thénardiers during one of the preceding
winters,--"she did not know why," she said, "the result of the
cold,"--and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had
nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the
brat became too annoying, "Your son is squalling," Thénardier would
say; "do go and see what he wants." "Bah!" the mother would reply, "he
bothers me." And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.



CHAPTER II--TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS

So far in this book the Thénardiers have been viewed only in profile;
the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and
considering it under all its aspects.

Thénardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thénardier was
approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so
that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.

Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this Thénardier
woman, ever since her first appearance,--tall, blond, red, fat, angular,
square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have said, to the
race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves at fairs with
paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything about the
house,--made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything
else. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an
elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,--window panes,
furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches,
presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal
market-porter dressed in woman's clothes. She swore splendidly; she
boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist. Except
for the romances which she had read, and which made the affected lady
peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea would
never have occurred to any one to say of her, "That is a woman."
This Thénardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a
fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, "That is a gendarme"; when
one saw her drink, one said, "That is a carter"; when one saw her handle
Cosette, one said, "That is the hangman." One of her teeth projected
when her face was in repose.

Thénardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had
a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;
he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to
everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had
the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He greatly
resembled the portraits of the Abbé Delille. His coquetry consisted in
drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in rendering him
drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an
old black coat. He made pretensions to literature and to materialism.
There were certain names which he often pronounced to support whatever
things he might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly
enough, Saint Augustine. He declared that he had "a system." In
addition, he was a great swindler. A _filousophe_ [philosophe], a
scientific thief. The species does exist. It will be remembered that he
pretended to have served in the army; he was in the habit of relating
with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th light
something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the presence of a
squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved
from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, "a general, who had been
dangerously wounded." Thence arose for his wall the flaring sign, and
for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of "the cabaret
of the Sergeant of Waterloo." He was a liberal, a classic, and a
Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d'Asile. It was said in the
village that he had studied for the priesthood.

We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper. This
rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming from
Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels, being
comfortably astride of both frontiers. As for his prowess at Waterloo,
the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be perceived that
he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was
the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary
life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thénardier
belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken,
beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and
travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety
cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always
attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and
having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up
an inn there.

This _quibus_, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver
crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did
not amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned
eating-house-keeper very far.

Thénardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures
which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign
of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be
thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had
noticed that he pronounced improperly.12

He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner, but
practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thénardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not disdain
his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This giantess
was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow little man must
be an object coveted by all.

Thénardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man, was a
scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters
into it.

It is not that Thénardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath to
quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at such
times, since he was enraged with the human race in general, as he bore
within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those
people who are continually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything
that passes before them of everything which has befallen them, and who
are always ready to cast upon the first person who comes to hand, as a
legitimate grievance, the sum total of the deceptions, the bankruptcies,
and the calamities of their lives,--when all this leaven was stirred up
in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible. Woe to
the person who came under his wrath at such a time!

In addition to his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and
penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and always
highly intelligent. He had something of the look of sailors, who are
accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.
Thénardier was a statesman.

Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame
Thénardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake. She was not
even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked;
he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant
magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the
mastodon obeyed. Thénardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in
Madame Thénardier's eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.
She was possessed of virtues after her own kind; if she had ever had a
disagreement as to any detail with "Monsieur Thénardier,"--which was
an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,--she would not have blamed
her husband in public on any subject whatever. She would never have
committed "before strangers" that mistake so often committed by women,
and which is called in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."
Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was
contemplation in Madame Thénardier's submission to her husband. That
mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger of that
frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side, this was that
grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by matter; for certain
ugly features have a cause in the very depths of eternal beauty. There
was an unknown quantity about Thénardier; hence the absolute empire
of the man over that woman. At certain moments she beheld him like a
lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.

This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her
children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a
mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short with
her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had
but one thought,--how to enrich himself.

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was
lacking. Thénardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is
possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp
would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse where
fate has hitched him.

It will be understood that the word _inn-keeper_ is here employed in a
restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

In this same year, 1823, Thénardier was burdened with about fifteen
hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.

Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case,
Thénardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most
profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue
among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized
peoples,--hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted
for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh,
which was particularly dangerous.

His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.
He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife's mind.
"The duty of the inn-keeper," he said to her one day, violently, and in
a low voice, "is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light, fire,
dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by, to empty
small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter travelling
families respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick
the child clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the
chimney-corner, the arm-chair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the
feather-bed, the mattress and the truss of straw; to know how much
the shadow uses up the mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five
hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even
for the flies which his dog eats!"

This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded--a hideous and
terrible team.

While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thénardier thought not
of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow, and
lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.

Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to their
double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being ground up
in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man and the woman each
had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with blows--this was the
woman's; she went barefooted in winter--that was the man's doing.

Cosette ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,
fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was,
did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and
venomous master. The Thénardier hostelry was like a spider's web, in
which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal
of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something
like the fly serving the spiders.

The poor child passively held her peace.

What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God,
find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the
midst of men all naked!



CHAPTER III--MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER

Four new travellers had arrived.

Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years
old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the
lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a
blow from Madame Thénardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark
from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"

Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and
caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have
been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.

She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thénardier
establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking there;
but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather than to
the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among all those
glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. But there
came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thénardier raised the
cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass
and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child
had raised her head and was following all the woman's movements. A thin
stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half filled the glass.
"Well," said she, "there is no more water!" A momentary silence ensued.
The child did not breathe.

"Bah!" resumed Madame Thénardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this
will be enough."

Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an
hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.

She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were
the next morning.

From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and
exclaimed, "It's as black as an oven!" or, "One must needs be a cat
to go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!" And Cosette
trembled.

All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and
said in a harsh voice:--

"My horse has not been watered."

"Yes, it has," said Madame Thénardier.

"I tell you that it has not," retorted the pedler.

Cosette had emerged from under the table.

"Oh, yes, sir!" said she, "the horse has had a drink; he drank out of a
bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water to him, and I
spoke to him."

It was not true; Cosette lied.

"There's a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,"
exclaimed the pedler. "I tell you that he has not been watered, you
little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water, which I
know well."

Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,
and which was hardly audible:--

"And he drank heartily."

"Come," said the pedler, in a rage, "this won't do at all, let my horse
be watered, and let that be the end of it!"

Cosette crept under the table again.

"In truth, that is fair!" said Madame Thénardier, "if the beast has not
been watered, it must be."

Then glancing about her:--

"Well, now! Where's that other beast?"

She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end of the
table, almost under the drinkers' feet.

"Are you coming?" shrieked Madame Thénardier.

Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden herself.
The Thénardier resumed:--

"Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse."

"But, Madame," said Cosette, feebly, "there is no water."

The Thénardier threw the street door wide open:--

"Well, go and get some, then!"

Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood near
the chimney-corner.

This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set down
in it at her ease.

The Thénardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was in the
stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:--

"There's plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious creature
as that. I think I should have done better to strain my onions."

Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and
shallots.

"See here, Mam'selle Toad," she added, "on your way back, you will get a
big loaf from the baker. Here's a fifteen-sou piece."

Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took the coin
without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.

Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her. She
seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.

"Get along with you!" screamed the Thénardier.

Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.



CHAPTER IV--ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL

The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the
reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thénardiers. These
booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would soon pass on
their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning in paper funnels,
which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the table at the Thénardiers'
observed, produced "a magical effect." In compensation, not a star was
visible in the sky.

The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the
Thénardiers' door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass,
and magnificent objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the
merchant had placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll,
nearly two feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with gold
wheat-ears on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All that
day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all passers-by
under ten years of age, without a mother being found in Montfermeil
sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to her child.
Éponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and Cosette
herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is true.

At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and
overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to that
wonderful doll, towards _the lady_, as she called it. The poor child
paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to. The
whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a
vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in
a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly
engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity
of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from
that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a
princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink
dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll
must be!" She could not take her eyes from that fantastic stall. The
more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She thought she was gazing
at paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one, which seemed
to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant, who was pacing back and
forth in front of his shop, produced on her somewhat the effect of being
the Eternal Father.

In this adoration she forgot everything, even the errand with which she
was charged.

All at once the Thénardier's coarse voice recalled her to reality:
"What, you silly jade! you have not gone? Wait! I'll give it to you! I
want to know what you are doing there! Get along, you little monster!"

The Thénardier had cast a glance into the street, and had caught sight
of Cosette in her ecstasy.

Cosette fled, dragging her pail, and taking the longest strides of which
she was capable.



CHAPTER V--THE LITTLE ONE ALL ALONE

As the Thénardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is
near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of
Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.

She did not glance at the display of a single other merchant. So long
as she was in Boulanger Lane and in the neighborhood of the church, the
lighted stalls illuminated the road; but soon the last light from the
last stall vanished. The poor child found herself in the dark. She
plunged into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her, she made as
much motion as possible with the handle of the bucket as she walked
along. This made a noise which afforded her company.

The further she went, the denser the darkness became. There was no one
in the streets. However, she did encounter a woman, who turned around
on seeing her, and stood still, muttering between her teeth: "Where can
that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?" Then the woman recognized
Cosette. "Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"

In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and deserted
streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil on the side of
Chelles. So long as she had the houses or even the walls only on both
sides of her path, she proceeded with tolerable boldness. From time
to time she caught the flicker of a candle through the crack of a
shutter--this was light and life; there were people there, and it
reassured her. But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened
mechanically, as it were. When she had passed the corner of the last
house, Cosette paused. It had been hard to advance further than the last
stall; it became impossible to proceed further than the last house. She
set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair, and
began slowly to scratch her head,--a gesture peculiar to children when
terrified and undecided what to do. It was no longer Montfermeil; it
was the open fields. Black and desert space was before her. She gazed in
despair at that darkness, where there was no longer any one, where there
were beasts, where there were spectres, possibly. She took a good
look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she distinctly saw
spectres moving in the trees. Then she seized her bucket again; fear had
lent her audacity. "Bah!" said she; "I will tell him that there was no
more water!" And she resolutely re-entered Montfermeil.

Hardly had she gone a hundred paces when she paused and began to scratch
her head again. Now it was the Thénardier who appeared to her, with her
hideous, hyena mouth, and wrath flashing in her eyes. The child cast a
melancholy glance before her and behind her. What was she to do? What
was to become of her? Where was she to go? In front of her was the
spectre of the Thénardier; behind her all the phantoms of the night
and of the forest. It was before the Thénardier that she recoiled. She
resumed her path to the spring, and began to run. She emerged from
the village, she entered the forest at a run, no longer looking at or
listening to anything. She only paused in her course when her breath
failed her; but she did not halt in her advance. She went straight
before her in desperation.

As she ran she felt like crying.

The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.

She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immensity of night was
facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an
atom.

It was only seven or eight minutes' walk from the edge of the woods to
the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many times
in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of instinct
guided her vaguely. But she did not turn her eyes either to right or to
left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and in the brushwood. In
this manner she reached the spring.

It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a clayey
soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with those tall,
crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.'s frills, and paved with
several large stones. A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little
noise.

Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was in
the habit of coming to this spring. She felt with her left hand in the
dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring, and which usually
served to support her, found one of its branches, clung to it, bent
down, and plunged the bucket in the water. She was in a state of such
violent excitement that her strength was trebled. While thus bent over,
she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into
the spring. The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water. Cosette neither
saw nor heard it fall. She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it
on the grass.

That done, she perceived that she was worn out with fatigue. She would
have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill the
bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step. She
was forced to sit down. She dropped on the grass, and remained crouching
there.

She shut her eyes; then she opened them again, without knowing why, but
because she could not do otherwise. The agitated water in the bucket
beside her was describing circles which resembled tin serpents.

Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like
masses of smoke. The tragic mask of shadow seemed to bend vaguely over
the child.

Jupiter was setting in the depths.

The child stared with bewildered eyes at this great star, with which she
was unfamiliar, and which terrified her. The planet was, in fact, very
near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer of mist which imparted
to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the
star. One would have called it a luminous wound.

A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark, not a leaf
was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams of summertide.
Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise. Slender and
misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings. The tall grasses undulated
like eels under the north wind. The nettles seemed to twist long arms
furnished with claws in search of prey. Some bits of dry heather, tossed
by the breeze, flew rapidly by, and had the air of fleeing in terror
before something which was coming after. On all sides there were
lugubrious stretches.

The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries himself
in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye sees
black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty
opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one walks
alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and trees--two
formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct
depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with
a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one's
own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the
dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon.
One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One is afraid to
glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities of night,
things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances,
obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious
reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, unknown
but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches, alarming torsos of
trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,--against all this one has no
protection. There is no hardihood which does not shudder and which does
not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is conscious of something hideous,
as though one's soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness. This
penetration of the shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a
child.

Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul
produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.

Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was
seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror
alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more
terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express
the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of
her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not
be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on the morrow.

Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three,
four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state
which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she had
finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception of
the things about her. Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water,
felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror, had
returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed through
the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows, to the
lighted candles. Her glance fell upon the water which stood before her;
such was the fright which the Thénardier inspired in her, that she dared
not flee without that bucket of water: she seized the handle with both
hands; she could hardly lift the pail.

In this manner she advanced a dozen paces, but the bucket was full; it
was heavy; she was forced to set it on the ground once more. She took
breath for an instant, then lifted the handle of the bucket again, and
resumed her march, proceeding a little further this time, but again she
was obliged to pause. After some seconds of repose she set out again.
She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the
weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms. The iron
handle completed the benumbing and freezing of her wet and tiny hands;
she was forced to halt from time to time, and each time that she did so,
the cold water which splashed from the pail fell on her bare legs. This
took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all
human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing
at the moment.

And her mother, no doubt, alas!

For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.

She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat,
but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thénardier, even at a
distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thénardier always present.

However, she could not make much headway in that manner, and she went
on very slowly. In spite of diminishing the length of her stops, and
of walking as long as possible between them, she reflected with anguish
that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfermeil in
this manner, and that the Thénardier would beat her. This anguish was
mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was
worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest. On
arriving near an old chestnut-tree with which she was acquainted, made
a last halt, longer than the rest, in order that she might get well
rested; then she summoned up all her strength, picked up her bucket
again, and courageously resumed her march, but the poor little desperate
creature could not refrain from crying, "O my God! my God!"

At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer
weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just
seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A
large black form, straight and erect, was walking beside her through the
darkness; it was a man who had come up behind her, and whose approach
she had not heard. This man, without uttering a word, had seized the
handle of the bucket which she was carrying.

There are instincts for all the encounters of life.

The child was not afraid.



CHAPTER VI--WHICH POSSIBLY PROVES BOULATRUELLE'S INTELLIGENCE

On the afternoon of that same Christmas Day, 1823, a man had walked
for rather a long time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de
l'Hôpital in Paris. This man had the air of a person who is seeking
lodgings, and he seemed to halt, by preference, at the most modest
houses on that dilapidated border of the faubourg Saint-Marceau.

We shall see further on that this man had, in fact, hired a chamber in
that isolated quarter.

This man, in his attire, as in all his person, realized the type of what
may be called the well-bred mendicant,--extreme wretchedness combined
with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare mixture which inspires
intelligent hearts with that double respect which one feels for the man
who is very poor, and for the man who is very worthy. He wore a very
old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat, worn perfectly
threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was not in the least
eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with pockets of a venerable
cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee, stockings of black worsted;
and thick shoes with copper buckles. He would have been pronounced a
preceptor in some good family, returned from the emigration. He would
have been taken for more than sixty years of age, from his perfectly
white hair, his wrinkled brow, his livid lips, and his countenance,
where everything breathed depression and weariness of life. Judging from
his firm tread, from the singular vigor which stamped all his movements,
he would have hardly been thought fifty. The wrinkles on his brow were
well placed, and would have disposed in his favor any one who observed
him attentively. His lip contracted with a strange fold which seemed
severe, and which was humble. There was in the depth of his glance an
indescribable melancholy serenity. In his left hand he carried a little
bundle tied up in a handkerchief; in his right he leaned on a sort of a
cudgel, cut from some hedge. This stick had been carefully trimmed, and
had an air that was not too threatening; the most had been made of its
knots, and it had received a coral-like head, made from red wax: it was
a cudgel, and it seemed to be a cane.

There are but few passers-by on that boulevard, particularly in the
winter. The man seemed to avoid them rather than to seek them, but this
without any affectation.

At that epoch, King Louis XVIII. went nearly every day to Choisy-le-Roi:
it was one of his favorite excursions. Towards two o'clock, almost
invariably, the royal carriage and cavalcade was seen to pass at full
speed along the Boulevard de l'Hôpital.

This served in lieu of a watch or clock to the poor women of the quarter
who said, "It is two o'clock; there he is returning to the Tuileries."

And some rushed forward, and others drew up in line, for a passing king
always creates a tumult; besides, the appearance and disappearance of
Louis XVIII. produced a certain effect in the streets of Paris. It was
rapid but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for a fast gallop;
as he was not able to walk, he wished to run: that cripple would gladly
have had himself drawn by the lightning. He passed, pacific and severe,
in the midst of naked swords. His massive couch, all covered with
gilding, with great branches of lilies painted on the panels, thundered
noisily along. There was hardly time to cast a glance upon it. In the
rear angle on the right there was visible on tufted cushions of white
satin a large, firm, and ruddy face, a brow freshly powdered _à l'oiseau
royal_, a proud, hard, crafty eye, the smile of an educated man, two
great epaulets with bullion fringe floating over a bourgeois coat, the
Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint Louis, the cross of the Legion of
Honor, the silver plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly, and a wide
blue ribbon: it was the king. Outside of Paris, he held his hat decked
with white ostrich plumes on his knees enwrapped in high English
gaiters; when he re-entered the city, he put on his hat and saluted
rarely; he stared coldly at the people, and they returned it in kind.
When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter,
the whole success which he produced is contained in this remark of an
inhabitant of the faubourg to his comrade, "That big fellow yonder is
the government."

This infallible passage of the king at the same hour was, therefore, the
daily event of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital.

The promenader in the yellow coat evidently did not belong in the
quarter, and probably did not belong in Paris, for he was ignorant as to
this detail. When, at two o'clock, the royal carriage, surrounded by a
squadron of the body-guard all covered with silver lace, debouched
on the boulevard, after having made the turn of the Salpêtrière, he
appeared surprised and almost alarmed. There was no one but himself in
this cross-lane. He drew up hastily behind the corner of the wall of an
enclosure, though this did not prevent M. le Duc de Havré from spying
him out.

M. le Duc de Havré, as captain of the guard on duty that day, was seated
in the carriage, opposite the king. He said to his Majesty, "Yonder
is an evil-looking man." Members of the police, who were clearing the
king's route, took equal note of him: one of them received an order to
follow him. But the man plunged into the deserted little streets of the
faubourg, and as twilight was beginning to fall, the agent lost trace of
him, as is stated in a report addressed that same evening to M. le Comte
d'Anglès, Minister of State, Prefect of Police.

When the man in the yellow coat had thrown the agent off his track,
he redoubled his pace, not without turning round many a time to assure
himself that he was not being followed. At a quarter-past four, that is
to say, when night was fully come, he passed in front of the theatre of
the Porte Saint-Martin, where _The Two Convicts_ was being played that
day. This poster, illuminated by the theatre lanterns, struck him; for,
although he was walking rapidly, he halted to read it. An instant later
he was in the blind alley of La Planchette, and he entered the _Plat
d'Etain_ [the Pewter Platter], where the office of the coach for Lagny
was then situated. This coach set out at half-past four. The horses were
harnessed, and the travellers, summoned by the coachman, were hastily
climbing the lofty iron ladder of the vehicle.

The man inquired:--

"Have you a place?"

"Only one--beside me on the box," said the coachman.

"I will take it."

"Climb up."

Nevertheless, before setting out, the coachman cast a glance at the
traveller's shabby dress, at the diminutive size of his bundle, and made
him pay his fare.

"Are you going as far as Lagny?" demanded the coachman.

"Yes," said the man.

The traveller paid to Lagny.

They started. When they had passed the barrier, the coachman tried
to enter into conversation, but the traveller only replied in
monosyllables. The coachman took to whistling and swearing at his
horses.

The coachman wrapped himself up in his cloak. It was cold. The man
did not appear to be thinking of that. Thus they passed Gournay and
Neuilly-sur-Marne.

Towards six o'clock in the evening they reached Chelles. The coachman
drew up in front of the carters' inn installed in the ancient buildings
of the Royal Abbey, to give his horses a breathing spell.

"I get down here," said the man.

He took his bundle and his cudgel and jumped down from the vehicle.

An instant later he had disappeared.

He did not enter the inn.

When the coach set out for Lagny a few minutes later, it did not
encounter him in the principal street of Chelles.

The coachman turned to the inside travellers.

"There," said he, "is a man who does not belong here, for I do not know
him. He had not the air of owning a sou, but he does not consider money;
he pays to Lagny, and he goes only as far as Chelles. It is night; all
the houses are shut; he does not enter the inn, and he is not to be
found. So he has dived through the earth."

The man had not plunged into the earth, but he had gone with great
strides through the dark, down the principal street of Chelles, then he
had turned to the right before reaching the church, into the cross-road
leading to Montfermeil, like a person who was acquainted with the
country and had been there before.

He followed this road rapidly. At the spot where it is intersected by
the ancient tree-bordered road which runs from Gagny to Lagny, he heard
people coming. He concealed himself precipitately in a ditch, and there
waited until the passers-by were at a distance. The precaution was
nearly superfluous, however; for, as we have already said, it was a very
dark December night. Not more than two or three stars were visible in
the sky.

It is at this point that the ascent of the hill begins. The man did not
return to the road to Montfermeil; he struck across the fields to the
right, and entered the forest with long strides.

Once in the forest he slackened his pace, and began a careful
examination of all the trees, advancing, step by step, as though seeking
and following a mysterious road known to himself alone. There came a
moment when he appeared to lose himself, and he paused in indecision. At
last he arrived, by dint of feeling his way inch by inch, at a clearing
where there was a great heap of whitish stones. He stepped up briskly to
these stones, and examined them attentively through the mists of night,
as though he were passing them in review. A large tree, covered with
those excrescences which are the warts of vegetation, stood a few paces
distant from the pile of stones. He went up to this tree and passed
his hand over the bark of the trunk, as though seeking to recognize and
count all the warts.

Opposite this tree, which was an ash, there was a chestnut-tree,
suffering from a peeling of the bark, to which a band of zinc had been
nailed by way of dressing. He raised himself on tiptoe and touched this
band of zinc.

Then he trod about for awhile on the ground comprised in the space
between the tree and the heap of stones, like a person who is trying to
assure himself that the soil has not recently been disturbed.

That done, he took his bearings, and resumed his march through the
forest.

It was the man who had just met Cosette.

As he walked through the thicket in the direction of Montfermeil, he had
espied that tiny shadow moving with a groan, depositing a burden on
the ground, then taking it up and setting out again. He drew near, and
perceived that it was a very young child, laden with an enormous bucket
of water. Then he approached the child, and silently grasped the handle
of the bucket.



CHAPTER VII--COSETTE SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE STRANGER IN THE DARK

Cosette, as we have said, was not frightened.

The man accosted her. He spoke in a voice that was grave and almost
bass.

"My child, what you are carrying is very heavy for you."

Cosette raised her head and replied:--

"Yes, sir."

"Give it to me," said the man; "I will carry it for you."

Cosette let go of the bucket-handle. The man walked along beside her.

"It really is very heavy," he muttered between his teeth. Then he
added:--

"How old are you, little one?"

"Eight, sir."

"And have you come from far like this?"

"From the spring in the forest."

"Are you going far?"

"A good quarter of an hour's walk from here."

The man said nothing for a moment; then he remarked abruptly:--

"So you have no mother."

"I don't know," answered the child.

Before the man had time to speak again, she added:--

"I don't think so. Other people have mothers. I have none."

And after a silence she went on:--

"I think that I never had any."

The man halted; he set the bucket on the ground, bent down and placed
both hands on the child's shoulders, making an effort to look at her and
to see her face in the dark.

Cosette's thin and sickly face was vaguely outlined by the livid light
in the sky.

"What is your name?" said the man.

"Cosette."

The man seemed to have received an electric shock. He looked at her once
more; then he removed his hands from Cosette's shoulders, seized the
bucket, and set out again.

After a moment he inquired:--

"Where do you live, little one?"

"At Montfermeil, if you know where that is."

"That is where we are going?"

"Yes, sir."

He paused; then began again:--

"Who sent you at such an hour to get water in the forest?"

"It was Madame Thénardier."

The man resumed, in a voice which he strove to render indifferent, but
in which there was, nevertheless, a singular tremor:--

"What does your Madame Thénardier do?"

"She is my mistress," said the child. "She keeps the inn."

"The inn?" said the man. "Well, I am going to lodge there to-night. Show
me the way."

"We are on the way there," said the child.

The man walked tolerably fast. Cosette followed him without difficulty.
She no longer felt any fatigue. From time to time she raised her eyes
towards the man, with a sort of tranquillity and an indescribable
confidence. She had never been taught to turn to Providence and to pray;
nevertheless, she felt within her something which resembled hope and
joy, and which mounted towards heaven.

Several minutes elapsed. The man resumed:--

"Is there no servant in Madame Thénardier's house?"

"No, sir."

"Are you alone there?"

"Yes, sir."

Another pause ensued. Cosette lifted up her voice:--

"That is to say, there are two little girls."

"What little girls?"

"Ponine and Zelma."

This was the way the child simplified the romantic names so dear to the
female Thénardier.

"Who are Ponine and Zelma?"

"They are Madame Thénardier's young ladies; her daughters, as you would
say."

"And what do those girls do?"

"Oh!" said the child, "they have beautiful dolls; things with gold in
them, all full of affairs. They play; they amuse themselves."

"All day long?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you?"

"I? I work."

"All day long?"

The child raised her great eyes, in which hung a tear, which was not
visible because of the darkness, and replied gently:--

"Yes, sir."

After an interval of silence she went on:--

"Sometimes, when I have finished my work and they let me, I amuse
myself, too."

"How do you amuse yourself?"

"In the best way I can. They let me alone; but I have not many
playthings. Ponine and Zelma will not let me play with their dolls. I
have only a little lead sword, no longer than that."

The child held up her tiny finger.

"And it will not cut?"

"Yes, sir," said the child; "it cuts salad and the heads of flies."

They reached the village. Cosette guided the stranger through the
streets. They passed the bakeshop, but Cosette did not think of the
bread which she had been ordered to fetch. The man had ceased to ply her
with questions, and now preserved a gloomy silence.

When they had left the church behind them, the man, on perceiving all
the open-air booths, asked Cosette:--

"So there is a fair going on here?"

"No, sir; it is Christmas."

As they approached the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm:--

"Monsieur?"

"What, my child?"

"We are quite near the house."

"Well?"

"Will you let me take my bucket now?"

"Why?"

"If Madame sees that some one has carried it for me, she will beat me."

The man handed her the bucket. An instant later they were at the tavern
door.



CHAPTER VIII--THE UNPLEASANTNESS OF RECEIVING INTO ONE'S HOUSE A POOR
MAN WHO MAY BE A RICH MAN

Cosette could not refrain from casting a sidelong glance at the big
doll, which was still displayed at the toy-merchant's; then she knocked.
The door opened. The Thénardier appeared with a candle in her hand.

"Ah! so it's you, you little wretch! good mercy, but you've taken your
time! The hussy has been amusing herself!"

"Madame," said Cosette, trembling all over, "here's a gentleman who
wants a lodging."

The Thénardier speedily replaced her gruff air by her amiable grimace,
a change of aspect common to tavern-keepers, and eagerly sought the
new-comer with her eyes.

"This is the gentleman?" said she.

"Yes, Madame," replied the man, raising his hand to his hat.

Wealthy travellers are not so polite. This gesture, and an inspection
of the stranger's costume and baggage, which the Thénardier passed in
review with one glance, caused the amiable grimace to vanish, and the
gruff mien to reappear. She resumed dryly:--

"Enter, my good man."

The "good man" entered. The Thénardier cast a second glance at him, paid
particular attention to his frock-coat, which was absolutely threadbare,
and to his hat, which was a little battered, and, tossing her head,
wrinkling her nose, and screwing up her eyes, she consulted her husband,
who was still drinking with the carters. The husband replied by that
imperceptible movement of the forefinger, which, backed up by an
inflation of the lips, signifies in such cases: A regular beggar.
Thereupon, the Thénardier exclaimed:--

"Ah! see here, my good man; I am very sorry, but I have no room left."

"Put me where you like," said the man; "in the attic, in the stable. I
will pay as though I occupied a room."

"Forty sous."

"Forty sous; agreed."

"Very well, then!"

"Forty sous!" said a carter, in a low tone, to the Thénardier woman;
"why, the charge is only twenty sous!"

"It is forty in his case," retorted the Thénardier, in the same tone. "I
don't lodge poor folks for less."

"That's true," added her husband, gently; "it ruins a house to have such
people in it."

In the meantime, the man, laying his bundle and his cudgel on a bench,
had seated himself at a table, on which Cosette made haste to place a
bottle of wine and a glass. The merchant who had demanded the bucket of
water took it to his horse himself. Cosette resumed her place under the
kitchen table, and her knitting.

The man, who had barely moistened his lips in the wine which he had
poured out for himself, observed the child with peculiar attention.

Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. We
have already given a sketch of that sombre little figure. Cosette was
thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be
hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost put
out with weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual
anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people.
Her hands were, as her mother had divined, "ruined with chilblains." The
fire which illuminated her at that moment brought into relief all the
angles of her bones, and rendered her thinness frightfully apparent.
As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of pressing her
knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a rag which
would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter.
All she had on was hole-ridden linen, not a scrap of woollen. Her skin
was visible here and there and everywhere black and blue spots could be
descried, which marked the places where the Thénardier woman had touched
her. Her naked legs were thin and red. The hollows in her neck were
enough to make one weep. This child's whole person, her mien, her
attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals which she allowed to
elapse between one word and the next, her glance, her silence, her
slightest gesture, expressed and betrayed one sole idea,--fear.

Fear was diffused all over her; she was covered with it, so to speak;
fear drew her elbows close to her hips, withdrew her heels under her
petticoat, made her occupy as little space as possible, allowed her only
the breath that was absolutely necessary, and had become what might be
called the habit of her body, admitting of no possible variation except
an increase. In the depths of her eyes there was an astonished nook
where terror lurked.

Her fear was such, that on her arrival, wet as she was, Cosette did not
dare to approach the fire and dry herself, but sat silently down to her
work again.

The expression in the glance of that child of eight years was habitually
so gloomy, and at times so tragic, that it seemed at certain moments as
though she were on the verge of becoming an idiot or a demon.

As we have stated, she had never known what it is to pray; she had never
set foot in a church. "Have I the time?" said the Thénardier.

The man in the yellow coat never took his eyes from Cosette.

All at once, the Thénardier exclaimed:--

"By the way, where's that bread?"

Cosette, according to her custom whenever the Thénardier uplifted her
voice, emerged with great haste from beneath the table.

She had completely forgotten the bread. She had recourse to the
expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear. She lied.

"Madame, the baker's shop was shut."

"You should have knocked."

"I did knock, Madame."

"Well?"

"He did not open the door."

"I'll find out to-morrow whether that is true," said the Thénardier;
"and if you are telling me a lie, I'll lead you a pretty dance. In the
meantime, give me back my fifteen-sou piece."

Cosette plunged her hand into the pocket of her apron, and turned green.
The fifteen-sou piece was not there.

"Ah, come now," said Madame Thénardier, "did you hear me?"

Cosette turned her pocket inside out; there was nothing in it. What
could have become of that money? The unhappy little creature could not
find a word to say. She was petrified.

"Have you lost that fifteen-sou piece?" screamed the Thénardier,
hoarsely, "or do you want to rob me of it?"

At the same time, she stretched out her arm towards the
cat-o'-nine-tails which hung on a nail in the chimney-corner.

This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to
shriek:--

"Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!"

The Thénardier took down the whip.

In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the fob
of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements. Besides,
the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were not paying
attention to anything.

Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle
of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude
limbs. The Thénardier raised her arm.

"Pardon me, Madame," said the man, "but just now I caught sight of
something which had fallen from this little one's apron pocket, and
rolled aside. Perhaps this is it."

At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor
for a moment.

"Exactly; here it is," he went on, straightening himself up.

And he held out a silver coin to the Thénardier.

"Yes, that's it," said she.

It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thénardier found
it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined
herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the
remark, "Don't let this ever happen again!"

Cosette returned to what the Thénardier called "her kennel," and her
large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an
expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an
innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with
it.

"By the way, would you like some supper?" the Thénardier inquired of the
traveller.

He made no reply. He appeared to be absorbed in thought.

"What sort of a man is that?" she muttered between her teeth. "He's some
frightfully poor wretch. He hasn't a sou to pay for a supper. Will he
even pay me for his lodging? It's very lucky, all the same, that it did
not occur to him to steal the money that was on the floor."

In the meantime, a door had opened, and Éponine and Azelma entered.

They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant
in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses,
the other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious,
neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye. They were
warmly clad, but with so much maternal art that the thickness of the
stuffs did not detract from the coquetry of arrangement. There was a
hint of winter, though the springtime was not wholly effaced. Light
emanated from these two little beings. Besides this, they were on the
throne. In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they
made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thénardier said to
them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, "Ah! there you
are, you children!"

Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their
hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with
that gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she
exclaimed, "What frights they are!"

They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll,
which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous
chatter. From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting,
and watched their play with a melancholy air.

Éponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog
to them. These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty
years between them, but they already represented the whole society of
man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.

The doll of the Thénardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and
much broken; but it seemed none the less admirable to Cosette, who
had never had a doll in her life, _a real doll_, to make use of the
expression which all children will understand.

All at once, the Thénardier, who had been going back and forth in the
room, perceived that Cosette's mind was distracted, and that, instead of
working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.

"Ah! I've caught you at it!" she cried. "So that's the way you work!
I'll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will."

The stranger turned to the Thénardier, without quitting his chair.

"Bah, Madame," he said, with an almost timid air, "let her play!"

Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton and
had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had not
the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an
order. But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a
desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a
will, was something which Madame Thénardier did not intend to tolerate.
She retorted with acrimony:--

"She must work, since she eats. I don't feed her to do nothing."

"What is she making?" went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which
contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter's
shoulders.

The Thénardier deigned to reply:--

"Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls, who have none,
so to speak, and who are absolutely barefoot just now."

The man looked at Cosette's poor little red feet, and continued:--

"When will she have finished this pair of stockings?"

"She has at least three or four good days' work on them still, the lazy
creature!"

"And how much will that pair of stockings be worth when she has finished
them?"

The Thénardier cast a glance of disdain on him.

"Thirty sous at least."

"Will you sell them for five francs?" went on the man.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed a carter who was listening, with a loud laugh;
"five francs! the deuce, I should think so! five balls!"

Thénardier thought it time to strike in.

"Yes, sir; if such is your fancy, you will be allowed to have that pair
of stockings for five francs. We can refuse nothing to travellers."

"You must pay on the spot," said the Thénardier, in her curt and
peremptory fashion.

"I will buy that pair of stockings," replied the man, "and," he added,
drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it on the table,
"I will pay for them."

Then he turned to Cosette.

"Now I own your work; play, my child."

The carter was so much touched by the five-franc piece, that he
abandoned his glass and hastened up.

"But it's true!" he cried, examining it. "A real hind wheel! and not
counterfeit!"

Thénardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket.

The Thénardier had no reply to make. She bit her lips, and her face
assumed an expression of hatred.

In the meantime, Cosette was trembling. She ventured to ask:--

"Is it true, Madame? May I play?"

"Play!" said the Thénardier, in a terrible voice.

"Thanks, Madame," said Cosette.

And while her mouth thanked the Thénardier, her whole little soul
thanked the traveller.

Thénardier had resumed his drinking; his wife whispered in his ear:--

"Who can this yellow man be?"

"I have seen millionaires with coats like that," replied Thénardier, in
a sovereign manner.

Cosette had dropped her knitting, but had not left her seat. Cosette
always moved as little as possible. She picked up some old rags and her
little lead sword from a box behind her.

Éponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had just
executed a very important operation; they had just got hold of the
cat. They had thrown their doll on the ground, and Éponine, who was
the elder, was swathing the little cat, in spite of its mewing and its
contortions, in a quantity of clothes and red and blue scraps. While
performing this serious and difficult work she was saying to her sister
in that sweet and adorable language of children, whose grace, like the
splendor of the butterfly's wing, vanishes when one essays to fix it
fast.

"You see, sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. She twists,
she cries, she is warm. See, sister, let us play with her. She shall be
my little girl. I will be a lady. I will come to see you, and you shall
look at her. Gradually, you will perceive her whiskers, and that will
surprise you. And then you will see her ears, and then you will see her
tail and it will amaze you. And you will say to me, 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' and
I will say to you: 'Yes, Madame, it is my little girl. Little girls are
made like that just at present.'"

Azelma listened admiringly to Éponine.

In the meantime, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song, and
to laugh at it until the ceiling shook. Thénardier accompanied and
encouraged them.

As birds make nests out of everything, so children make a doll out of
anything which comes to hand. While Éponine and Azelma were bundling up
the cat, Cosette, on her side, had dressed up her sword. That done, she
laid it in her arms, and sang to it softly, to lull it to sleep.

The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one
of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to
clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a
little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something
is some one,--therein lies the whole woman's future. While dreaming and
chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little
gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the
young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman. The first child
is the continuation of the last doll.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as
impossible, as a woman without children.

So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.

Madame Thénardier approached _the yellow man_; "My husband is right,"
she thought; "perhaps it is M. Laffitte; there are such queer rich men!"

She came and set her elbows on the table.

"Monsieur," said she. At this word, _Monsieur_, the man turned; up to
that time, the Thénardier had addressed him only as _brave home_ or
_bonhomme_.

"You see, sir," she pursued, assuming a sweetish air that was even more
repulsive to behold than her fierce mien, "I am willing that the child
should play; I do not oppose it, but it is good for once, because you
are generous. You see, she has nothing; she must needs work."

"Then this child is not yours?" demanded the man.

"Oh! mon Dieu! no, sir! she is a little beggar whom we have taken in
through charity; a sort of imbecile child. She must have water on the
brain; she has a large head, as you see. We do what we can for her, for
we are not rich; we have written in vain to her native place, and have
received no reply these six months. It must be that her mother is dead."

"Ah!" said the man, and fell into his revery once more.

"Her mother didn't amount to much," added the Thénardier; "she abandoned
her child."

During the whole of this conversation Cosette, as though warned by some
instinct that she was under discussion, had not taken her eyes from the
Thénardier's face; she listened vaguely; she caught a few words here and
there.

Meanwhile, the drinkers, all three-quarters intoxicated, were repeating
their unclean refrain with redoubled gayety; it was a highly spiced and
wanton song, in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were introduced.
The Thénardier went off to take part in the shouts of laughter. Cosette,
from her post under the table, gazed at the fire, which was reflected
from her fixed eyes. She had begun to rock the sort of baby which she
had made, and, as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice, "My mother is
dead! my mother is dead! my mother is dead!"

On being urged afresh by the hostess, the yellow man, "the millionaire,"
consented at last to take supper.

"What does Monsieur wish?"

"Bread and cheese," said the man.

"Decidedly, he is a beggar" thought Madame Thénardier.

The drunken men were still singing their song, and the child under the
table was singing hers.

All at once, Cosette paused; she had just turned round and caught sight
of the little Thénardiers' doll, which they had abandoned for the cat
and had left on the floor a few paces from the kitchen table.

Then she dropped the swaddled sword, which only half met her needs, and
cast her eyes slowly round the room. Madame Thénardier was whispering to
her husband and counting over some money; Ponine and Zelma were playing
with the cat; the travellers were eating or drinking or singing; not
a glance was fixed on her. She had not a moment to lose; she crept out
from under the table on her hands and knees, made sure once more that no
one was watching her; then she slipped quickly up to the doll and seized
it. An instant later she was in her place again, seated motionless, and
only turned so as to cast a shadow on the doll which she held in her
arms. The happiness of playing with a doll was so rare for her that it
contained all the violence of voluptuousness.

No one had seen her, except the traveller, who was slowly devouring his
meagre supper.

This joy lasted about a quarter of an hour.

But with all the precautions that Cosette had taken she did not perceive
that one of the doll's legs stuck out and that the fire on the hearth
lighted it up very vividly. That pink and shining foot, projecting from
the shadow, suddenly struck the eye of Azelma, who said to Éponine,
"Look! sister."

The two little girls paused in stupefaction; Cosette had dared to take
their doll!

Éponine rose, and, without releasing the cat, she ran to her mother, and
began to tug at her skirt.

"Let me alone!" said her mother; "what do you want?"

"Mother," said the child, "look there!"

And she pointed to Cosette.

Cosette, absorbed in the ecstasies of possession, no longer saw or heard
anything.

Madame Thénardier's countenance assumed that peculiar expression which
is composed of the terrible mingled with the trifles of life, and which
has caused this style of woman to be named _megaeras_.

On this occasion, wounded pride exasperated her wrath still further.
Cosette had overstepped all bounds; Cosette had laid violent hands on
the doll belonging to "these young ladies." A czarina who should see
a muzhik trying on her imperial son's blue ribbon would wear no other
face.

She shrieked in a voice rendered hoarse with indignation:--

"Cosette!"

Cosette started as though the earth had trembled beneath her; she turned
round.

"Cosette!" repeated the Thénardier.

Cosette took the doll and laid it gently on the floor with a sort of
veneration, mingled with despair; then, without taking her eyes from
it, she clasped her hands, and, what is terrible to relate of a child
of that age, she wrung them; then--not one of the emotions of the day,
neither the trip to the forest, nor the weight of the bucket of water,
nor the loss of the money, nor the sight of the whip, nor even the sad
words which she had heard Madame Thénardier utter had been able to wring
this from her--she wept; she burst out sobbing.

Meanwhile, the traveller had risen to his feet.

"What is the matter?" he said to the Thénardier.

"Don't you see?" said the Thénardier, pointing to the _corpus delicti_
which lay at Cosette's feet.

"Well, what of it?" resumed the man.

"That beggar," replied the Thénardier, "has permitted herself to touch
the children's doll!"

"All this noise for that!" said the man; "well, what if she did play
with that doll?"

"She touched it with her dirty hands!" pursued the Thénardier, "with her
frightful hands!"

Here Cosette redoubled her sobs.

"Will you stop your noise?" screamed the Thénardier.

The man went straight to the street door, opened it, and stepped out.

As soon as he had gone, the Thénardier profited by his absence to give
Cosette a hearty kick under the table, which made the child utter loud
cries.

The door opened again, the man re-appeared; he carried in both hands the
fabulous doll which we have mentioned, and which all the village brats
had been staring at ever since the morning, and he set it upright in
front of Cosette, saying:--

"Here; this is for you."

It must be supposed that in the course of the hour and more which he had
spent there he had taken confused notice through his revery of that
toy shop, lighted up by fire-pots and candles so splendidly that it was
visible like an illumination through the window of the drinking-shop.

Cosette raised her eyes; she gazed at the man approaching her with that
doll as she might have gazed at the sun; she heard the unprecedented
words, "It is for you"; she stared at him; she stared at the doll; then
she slowly retreated, and hid herself at the extreme end, under the
table in a corner of the wall.

She no longer cried; she no longer wept; she had the appearance of no
longer daring to breathe.

The Thénardier, Éponine, and Azelma were like statues also; the very
drinkers had paused; a solemn silence reigned through the whole room.

Madame Thénardier, petrified and mute, recommenced her conjectures: "Who
is that old fellow? Is he a poor man? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he is
both; that is to say, a thief."

The face of the male Thénardier presented that expressive fold which
accentuates the human countenance whenever the dominant instinct appears
there in all its bestial force. The tavern-keeper stared alternately at
the doll and at the traveller; he seemed to be scenting out the man, as
he would have scented out a bag of money. This did not last longer than
the space of a flash of lightning. He stepped up to his wife and said to
her in a low voice:--

"That machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Down on your
belly before that man!"

Gross natures have this in common with _naïve_ natures, that they
possess no transition state.

"Well, Cosette," said the Thénardier, in a voice that strove to be
sweet, and which was composed of the bitter honey of malicious women,
"aren't you going to take your doll?"

Cosette ventured to emerge from her hole.

"The gentleman has given you a doll, my little Cosette," said
Thénardier, with a caressing air. "Take it; it is yours."

Cosette gazed at the marvellous doll in a sort of terror. Her face was
still flooded with tears, but her eyes began to fill, like the sky at
daybreak, with strange beams of joy. What she felt at that moment was
a little like what she would have felt if she had been abruptly told,
"Little one, you are the Queen of France."

It seemed to her that if she touched that doll, lightning would dart
from it.

This was true, up to a certain point, for she said to herself that the
Thénardier would scold and beat her.

Nevertheless, the attraction carried the day. She ended by drawing near
and murmuring timidly as she turned towards Madame Thénardier:--

"May I, Madame?"

No words can render that air, at once despairing, terrified, and
ecstatic.

"Pardi!" cried the Thénardier, "it is yours. The gentleman has given it
to you."

"Truly, sir?" said Cosette. "Is it true? Is the 'lady' mine?"

The stranger's eyes seemed to be full of tears. He appeared to have
reached that point of emotion where a man does not speak for fear lest
he should weep. He nodded to Cosette, and placed the "lady's" hand in
her tiny hand.

Cosette hastily withdrew her hand, as though that of the "lady" scorched
her, and began to stare at the floor. We are forced to add that at that
moment she stuck out her tongue immoderately. All at once she wheeled
round and seized the doll in a transport.

"I shall call her Catherine," she said.

It was an odd moment when Cosette's rags met and clasped the ribbons and
fresh pink muslins of the doll.

"Madame," she resumed, "may I put her on a chair?"

"Yes, my child," replied the Thénardier.

It was now the turn of Éponine and Azelma to gaze at Cosette with envy.

Cosette placed Catherine on a chair, then seated herself on the floor
in front of her, and remained motionless, without uttering a word, in an
attitude of contemplation.

"Play, Cosette," said the stranger.

"Oh! I am playing," returned the child.

This stranger, this unknown individual, who had the air of a visit which
Providence was making on Cosette, was the person whom the Thénardier
hated worse than any one in the world at that moment. However, it was
necessary to control herself. Habituated as she was to dissimulation
through endeavoring to copy her husband in all his actions, these
emotions were more than she could endure. She made haste to send her
daughters to bed, then she asked the man's _permission_ to send Cosette
off also; "for she has worked hard all day," she added with a maternal
air. Cosette went off to bed, carrying Catherine in her arms.

From time to time the Thénardier went to the other end of the room where
her husband was, to _relieve her soul_, as she said. She exchanged with
her husband words which were all the more furious because she dared not
utter them aloud.

"Old beast! What has he got in his belly, to come and upset us in this
manner! To want that little monster to play! to give away forty-franc
dolls to a jade that I would sell for forty sous, so I would! A little
more and he will be saying _Your Majesty_ to her, as though to the
Duchess de Berry! Is there any sense in it? Is he mad, then, that
mysterious old fellow?"

"Why! it is perfectly simple," replied Thénardier, "if that amuses him!
It amuses you to have the little one work; it amuses him to have her
play. He's all right. A traveller can do what he pleases when he pays
for it. If the old fellow is a philanthropist, what is that to you? If
he is an imbecile, it does not concern you. What are you worrying for,
so long as he has money?"

The language of a master, and the reasoning of an innkeeper, neither of
which admitted of any reply.

The man had placed his elbows on the table, and resumed his thoughtful
attitude. All the other travellers, both pedlers and carters, had
withdrawn a little, and had ceased singing. They were staring at him
from a distance, with a sort of respectful awe. This poorly dressed
man, who drew "hind-wheels" from his pocket with so much ease, and
who lavished gigantic dolls on dirty little brats in wooden shoes, was
certainly a magnificent fellow, and one to be feared.

Many hours passed. The midnight mass was over, the chimes had ceased,
the drinkers had taken their departure, the drinking-shop was closed,
the public room was deserted, the fire extinct, the stranger still
remained in the same place and the same attitude. From time to time he
changed the elbow on which he leaned. That was all; but he had not said
a word since Cosette had left the room.

The Thénardiers alone, out of politeness and curiosity, had remained in
the room.

"Is he going to pass the night in that fashion?" grumbled the
Thénardier. When two o'clock in the morning struck, she declared herself
vanquished, and said to her husband, "I'm going to bed. Do as you like."
Her husband seated himself at a table in the corner, lighted a candle,
and began to read the _Courrier Français_.

A good hour passed thus. The worthy inn-keeper had perused the _Courrier
Français_ at least three times, from the date of the number to the
printer's name. The stranger did not stir.

Thénardier fidgeted, coughed, spit, blew his nose, and creaked his
chair. Not a movement on the man's part. "Is he asleep?" thought
Thénardier. The man was not asleep, but nothing could arouse him.

At last Thénardier took off his cap, stepped gently up to him, and
ventured to say:--

"Is not Monsieur going to his repose?"

_Not going to bed_ would have seemed to him excessive and familiar.
_To repose_ smacked of luxury and respect. These words possess the
mysterious and admirable property of swelling the bill on the following
day. A chamber where one _sleeps_ costs twenty sous; a chamber in which
one _reposes_ costs twenty francs.

"Well!" said the stranger, "you are right. Where is your stable?"

"Sir!" exclaimed Thénardier, with a smile, "I will conduct you, sir."

He took the candle; the man picked up his bundle and cudgel, and
Thénardier conducted him to a chamber on the first floor, which was of
rare splendor, all furnished in mahogany, with a low bedstead, curtained
with red calico.

"What is this?" said the traveller.

"It is really our bridal chamber," said the tavern-keeper. "My wife and
I occupy another. This is only entered three or four times a year."

"I should have liked the stable quite as well," said the man, abruptly.

Thénardier pretended not to hear this unamiable remark.

He lighted two perfectly fresh wax candles which figured on the
chimney-piece. A very good fire was flickering on the hearth.

On the chimney-piece, under a glass globe, stood a woman's head-dress in
silver wire and orange flowers.

"And what is this?" resumed the stranger.

"That, sir," said Thénardier, "is my wife's wedding bonnet."

The traveller surveyed the object with a glance which seemed to say,
"There really was a time, then, when that monster was a maiden?"

Thénardier lied, however. When he had leased this paltry building for
the purpose of converting it into a tavern, he had found this chamber
decorated in just this manner, and had purchased the furniture and
obtained the orange flowers at second hand, with the idea that this
would cast a graceful shadow on "his spouse," and would result in what
the English call respectability for his house.

When the traveller turned round, the host had disappeared. Thénardier
had withdrawn discreetly, without venturing to wish him a good night,
as he did not wish to treat with disrespectful cordiality a man whom he
proposed to fleece royally the following morning.

The inn-keeper retired to his room. His wife was in bed, but she was not
asleep. When she heard her husband's step she turned over and said to
him:--

"Do you know, I'm going to turn Cosette out of doors to-morrow."

Thénardier replied coldly:--

"How you do go on!"

They exchanged no further words, and a few moments later their candle
was extinguished.

As for the traveller, he had deposited his cudgel and his bundle in a
corner. The landlord once gone, he threw himself into an arm-chair and
remained for some time buried in thought. Then he removed his shoes,
took one of the two candles, blew out the other, opened the door, and
quitted the room, gazing about him like a person who is in search of
something. He traversed a corridor and came upon a staircase. There he
heard a very faint and gentle sound like the breathing of a child. He
followed this sound, and came to a sort of triangular recess built under
the staircase, or rather formed by the staircase itself. This recess was
nothing else than the space under the steps. There, in the midst of all
sorts of old papers and potsherds, among dust and spiders' webs, was a
bed--if one can call by the name of bed a straw pallet so full of holes
as to display the straw, and a coverlet so tattered as to show the
pallet. No sheets. This was placed on the floor.

In this bed Cosette was sleeping.

The man approached and gazed down upon her.

Cosette was in a profound sleep; she was fully dressed. In the winter
she did not undress, in order that she might not be so cold.

Against her breast was pressed the doll, whose large eyes, wide open,
glittered in the dark. From time to time she gave vent to a deep sigh as
though she were on the point of waking, and she strained the doll almost
convulsively in her arms. Beside her bed there was only one of her
wooden shoes.

A door which stood open near Cosette's pallet permitted a view of a
rather large, dark room. The stranger stepped into it. At the further
extremity, through a glass door, he saw two small, very white beds.
They belonged to Éponine and Azelma. Behind these beds, and half hidden,
stood an uncurtained wicker cradle, in which the little boy who had
cried all the evening lay asleep.

The stranger conjectured that this chamber connected with that of the
Thénardier pair. He was on the point of retreating when his eye fell
upon the fireplace--one of those vast tavern chimneys where there is
always so little fire when there is any fire at all, and which are
so cold to look at. There was no fire in this one, there was not even
ashes; but there was something which attracted the stranger's gaze,
nevertheless. It was two tiny children's shoes, coquettish in shape
and unequal in size. The traveller recalled the graceful and immemorial
custom in accordance with which children place their shoes in the
chimney on Christmas eve, there to await in the darkness some sparkling
gift from their good fairy. Éponine and Azelma had taken care not to
omit this, and each of them had set one of her shoes on the hearth.

The traveller bent over them.

The fairy, that is to say, their mother, had already paid her visit, and
in each he saw a brand-new and shining ten-sou piece.

The man straightened himself up, and was on the point of withdrawing,
when far in, in the darkest corner of the hearth, he caught sight
of another object. He looked at it, and recognized a wooden shoe, a
frightful shoe of the coarsest description, half dilapidated and all
covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette's sabot. Cosette, with
that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet never
discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearth-stone also.

Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and
touching thing.

There was nothing in this wooden shoe.

The stranger fumbled in his waistcoat, bent over and placed a louis d'or
in Cosette's shoe.

Then he regained his own chamber with the stealthy tread of a wolf.



CHAPTER IX-- THÉNARDIER AND HIS MANOUVRES

On the following morning, two hours at least before day-break,
Thénardier, seated beside a candle in the public room of the tavern, pen
in hand, was making out the bill for the traveller with the yellow coat.

His wife, standing beside him, and half bent over him, was following
him with her eyes. They exchanged not a word. On the one hand, there was
profound meditation, on the other, the religious admiration with which
one watches the birth and development of a marvel of the human mind. A
noise was audible in the house; it was the Lark sweeping the stairs.

After the lapse of a good quarter of an hour, and some erasures,
Thénardier produced the following masterpiece:--


          BILL OF THE GENTLEMAN IN No. 1.

  Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     3 francs.
  Chamber  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    10   "
  Candle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     5   "
  Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     4   "
  Service  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     1   "
                                          ----------
                     Total . . . . . .    23 francs.

Service was written _servisse_.

"Twenty-three francs!" cried the woman, with an enthusiasm which was
mingled with some hesitation.

Like all great artists, Thénardier was dissatisfied.

"Peuh!" he exclaimed.

It was the accent of Castlereagh auditing France's bill at the Congress
of Vienna.

"Monsieur Thénardier, you are right; he certainly owes that," murmured
the wife, who was thinking of the doll bestowed on Cosette in the
presence of her daughters. "It is just, but it is too much. He will not
pay it."

Thénardier laughed coldly, as usual, and said:--

"He will pay."

This laugh was the supreme assertion of certainty and authority. That
which was asserted in this manner must needs be so. His wife did not
insist.

She set about arranging the table; her husband paced the room. A moment
later he added:--

"I owe full fifteen hundred francs!"

He went and seated himself in the chimney-corner, meditating, with his
feet among the warm ashes.

"Ah! by the way," resumed his wife, "you don't forget that I'm going to
turn Cosette out of doors to-day? The monster! She breaks my heart with
that doll of hers! I'd rather marry Louis XVIII. than keep her another
day in the house!"

Thénardier lighted his pipe, and replied between two puffs:--

"You will hand that bill to the man."

Then he went out.

Hardly had he left the room when the traveller entered.

Thénardier instantly reappeared behind him and remained motionless in
the half-open door, visible only to his wife.

The yellow man carried his bundle and his cudgel in his hand.

"Up so early?" said Madame Thénardier; "is Monsieur leaving us already?"

As she spoke thus, she was twisting the bill about in her hands with an
embarrassed air, and making creases in it with her nails. Her hard
face presented a shade which was not habitual with it,--timidity and
scruples.

To present such a bill to a man who had so completely the air "of a poor
wretch" seemed difficult to her.

The traveller appeared to be preoccupied and absent-minded. He
replied:--

"Yes, Madame, I am going."

"So Monsieur has no business in Montfermeil?"

"No, I was passing through. That is all. What do I owe you, Madame," he
added.

The Thénardier silently handed him the folded bill.

The man unfolded the paper and glanced at it; but his thoughts were
evidently elsewhere.

"Madame," he resumed, "is business good here in Montfermeil?"

"So so, Monsieur," replied the Thénardier, stupefied at not witnessing
another sort of explosion.

She continued, in a dreary and lamentable tone:--

"Oh! Monsieur, times are so hard! and then, we have so few bourgeois in
the neighborhood! All the people are poor, you see. If we had not, now
and then, some rich and generous travellers like Monsieur, we should
not get along at all. We have so many expenses. Just see, that child is
costing us our very eyes."

"What child?"

"Why, the little one, you know! Cosette--the Lark, as she is called
hereabouts!"

"Ah!" said the man.

She went on:--

"How stupid these peasants are with their nicknames! She has more the
air of a bat than of a lark. You see, sir, we do not ask charity, and we
cannot bestow it. We earn nothing and we have to pay out a great deal.
The license, the imposts, the door and window tax, the hundredths!
Monsieur is aware that the government demands a terrible deal of money.
And then, I have my daughters. I have no need to bring up other people's
children."

The man resumed, in that voice which he strove to render indifferent,
and in which there lingered a tremor:--

"What if one were to rid you of her?"

"Who? Cosette?"

"Yes."

The landlady's red and violent face brightened up hideously.

"Ah! sir, my dear sir, take her, keep her, lead her off, carry her
away, sugar her, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and the
blessings of the good holy Virgin and of all the saints of paradise be
upon you!"

"Agreed."

"Really! You will take her away?"

"I will take her away."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately. Call the child."

"Cosette!" screamed the Thénardier.

"In the meantime," pursued the man, "I will pay you what I owe you. How
much is it?"

He cast a glance on the bill, and could not restrain a start of
surprise:--

"Twenty-three francs!"

He looked at the landlady, and repeated:--

"Twenty-three francs?"

There was in the enunciation of these words, thus repeated, an accent
between an exclamation and an interrogation point.

The Thénardier had had time to prepare herself for the shock. She
replied, with assurance:--

"Good gracious, yes, sir, it is twenty-three francs."

The stranger laid five five-franc pieces on the table.

"Go and get the child," said he.

At that moment Thénardier advanced to the middle of the room, and
said:--

"Monsieur owes twenty-six sous."

"Twenty-six sous!" exclaimed his wife.

"Twenty sous for the chamber," resumed Thénardier, coldly, "and six sous
for his supper. As for the child, I must discuss that matter a little
with the gentleman. Leave us, wife."

Madame Thénardier was dazzled as with the shock caused by unexpected
lightning flashes of talent. She was conscious that a great actor was
making his entrance on the stage, uttered not a word in reply, and left
the room.

As soon as they were alone, Thénardier offered the traveller a chair.
The traveller seated himself; Thénardier remained standing, and his face
assumed a singular expression of good-fellowship and simplicity.

"Sir," said he, "what I have to say to you is this, that I adore that
child."

The stranger gazed intently at him.

"What child?"

Thénardier continued:--

"How strange it is, one grows attached. What money is that? Take back
your hundred-sou piece. I adore the child."

"Whom do you mean?" demanded the stranger.

"Eh! our little Cosette! Are you not intending to take her away from
us? Well, I speak frankly; as true as you are an honest man, I will not
consent to it. I shall miss that child. I saw her first when she was a
tiny thing. It is true that she costs us money; it is true that she has
her faults; it is true that we are not rich; it is true that I have paid
out over four hundred francs for drugs for just one of her illnesses!
But one must do something for the good God's sake. She has neither
father nor mother. I have brought her up. I have bread enough for
her and for myself. In truth, I think a great deal of that child. You
understand, one conceives an affection for a person; I am a good sort
of a beast, I am; I do not reason; I love that little girl; my wife is
quick-tempered, but she loves her also. You see, she is just the same as
our own child. I want to keep her to babble about the house."

The stranger kept his eye intently fixed on Thénardier. The latter
continued:--

"Excuse me, sir, but one does not give away one's child to a passer-by,
like that. I am right, am I not? Still, I don't say--you are rich; you
have the air of a very good man,--if it were for her happiness. But one
must find out that. You understand: suppose that I were to let her go
and to sacrifice myself, I should like to know what becomes of her; I
should not wish to lose sight of her; I should like to know with whom
she is living, so that I could go to see her from time to time; so that
she may know that her good foster-father is alive, that he is watching
over her. In short, there are things which are not possible. I do not
even know your name. If you were to take her away, I should say: 'Well,
and the Lark, what has become of her?' One must, at least, see some
petty scrap of paper, some trifle in the way of a passport, you know!"

The stranger, still surveying him with that gaze which penetrates, as
the saying goes, to the very depths of the conscience, replied in a
grave, firm voice:--

"Monsieur Thénardier, one does not require a passport to travel five
leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette away, I shall take her away, and
that is the end of the matter. You will not know my name, you will not
know my residence, you will not know where she is; and my intention is
that she shall never set eyes on you again so long as she lives. I break
the thread which binds her foot, and she departs. Does that suit you?
Yes or no?"

Since geniuses, like demons, recognize the presence of a superior God by
certain signs, Thénardier comprehended that he had to deal with a very
strong person. It was like an intuition; he comprehended it with his
clear and sagacious promptitude. While drinking with the carters,
smoking, and singing coarse songs on the preceding evening, he had
devoted the whole of the time to observing the stranger, watching him
like a cat, and studying him like a mathematician. He had watched him,
both on his own account, for the pleasure of the thing, and through
instinct, and had spied upon him as though he had been paid for so
doing. Not a movement, not a gesture, on the part of the man in the
yellow great-coat had escaped him. Even before the stranger had so
clearly manifested his interest in Cosette, Thénardier had divined his
purpose. He had caught the old man's deep glances returning constantly
to the child. Who was this man? Why this interest? Why this hideous
costume, when he had so much money in his purse? Questions which he put
to himself without being able to solve them, and which irritated him. He
had pondered it all night long. He could not be Cosette's father. Was he
her grandfather? Then why not make himself known at once? When one has
a right, one asserts it. This man evidently had no right over Cosette.
What was it, then? Thénardier lost himself in conjectures. He caught
glimpses of everything, but he saw nothing. Be that as it may, on
entering into conversation with the man, sure that there was some secret
in the case, that the latter had some interest in remaining in the
shadow, he felt himself strong; when he perceived from the stranger's
clear and firm retort, that this mysterious personage was mysterious in
so simple a way, he became conscious that he was weak. He had expected
nothing of the sort. His conjectures were put to the rout. He rallied
his ideas. He weighed everything in the space of a second. Thénardier
was one of those men who take in a situation at a glance. He decided
that the moment had arrived for proceeding straightforward, and quickly
at that. He did as great leaders do at the decisive moment, which they
know that they alone recognize; he abruptly unmasked his batteries.

"Sir," said he, "I am in need of fifteen hundred francs."

The stranger took from his side pocket an old pocketbook of black
leather, opened it, drew out three bank-bills, which he laid on the
table. Then he placed his large thumb on the notes and said to the
inn-keeper:--

"Go and fetch Cosette."

While this was taking place, what had Cosette been doing?

On waking up, Cosette had run to get her shoe. In it she had found the
gold piece. It was not a Napoleon; it was one of those perfectly new
twenty-franc pieces of the Restoration, on whose effigy the little
Prussian queue had replaced the laurel wreath. Cosette was dazzled. Her
destiny began to intoxicate her. She did not know what a gold piece was;
she had never seen one; she hid it quickly in her pocket, as though
she had stolen it. Still, she felt that it really was hers; she guessed
whence her gift had come, but the joy which she experienced was full of
fear. She was happy; above all she was stupefied. Such magnificent and
beautiful things did not appear real. The doll frightened her, the
gold piece frightened her. She trembled vaguely in the presence of this
magnificence. The stranger alone did not frighten her. On the contrary,
he reassured her. Ever since the preceding evening, amid all her
amazement, even in her sleep, she had been thinking in her little
childish mind of that man who seemed to be so poor and so sad, and who
was so rich and so kind. Everything had changed for her since she had
met that good man in the forest. Cosette, less happy than the most
insignificant swallow of heaven, had never known what it was to take
refuge under a mother's shadow and under a wing. For the last five
years, that is to say, as far back as her memory ran, the poor child had
shivered and trembled. She had always been exposed completely naked
to the sharp wind of adversity; now it seemed to her she was clothed.
Formerly her soul had seemed cold, now it was warm. Cosette was no
longer afraid of the Thénardier. She was no longer alone; there was some
one there.

She hastily set about her regular morning duties. That louis, which she
had about her, in the very apron pocket whence the fifteen-sou piece had
fallen on the night before, distracted her thoughts. She dared not touch
it, but she spent five minutes in gazing at it, with her tongue hanging
out, if the truth must be told. As she swept the staircase, she paused,
remained standing there motionless, forgetful of her broom and of the
entire universe, occupied in gazing at that star which was blazing at
the bottom of her pocket.

It was during one of these periods of contemplation that the Thénardier
joined her. She had gone in search of Cosette at her husband's orders.
What was quite unprecedented, she neither struck her nor said an
insulting word to her.

"Cosette," she said, almost gently, "come immediately."

An instant later Cosette entered the public room.

The stranger took up the bundle which he had brought and untied it. This
bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian bodice, a
kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes--a complete outfit for a
girl of seven years. All was black.

"My child," said the man, "take these, and go and dress yourself
quickly."

Daylight was appearing when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who
had begun to open their doors beheld a poorly clad old man leading a
little girl dressed in mourning, and carrying a pink doll in her arms,
pass along the road to Paris. They were going in the direction of Livry.

It was our man and Cosette.

No one knew the man; as Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not
recognize her. Cosette was going away. With whom? She did not know.
Whither? She knew not. All that she understood was that she was leaving
the Thénardier tavern behind her. No one had thought of bidding her
farewell, nor had she thought of taking leave of any one. She was
leaving that hated and hating house.

Poor, gentle creature, whose heart had been repressed up to that hour!

Cosette walked along gravely, with her large eyes wide open, and gazing
at the sky. She had put her louis in the pocket of her new apron. From
time to time, she bent down and glanced at it; then she looked at the
good man. She felt something as though she were beside the good God.



CHAPTER X--HE WHO SEEKS TO BETTER HIMSELF MAY RENDER HIS SITUATION WORSE

Madame Thénardier had allowed her husband to have his own way, as was
her wont. She had expected great results. When the man and Cosette had
taken their departure, Thénardier allowed a full quarter of an hour
to elapse; then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred
francs.

"Is that all?" said she.

It was the first time since they had set up housekeeping that she had
dared to criticise one of the master's acts.

The blow told.

"You are right, in sooth," said he; "I am a fool. Give me my hat."

He folded up the three bank-bills, thrust them into his pocket, and ran
out in all haste; but he made a mistake and turned to the right first.
Some neighbors, of whom he made inquiries, put him on the track again;
the Lark and the man had been seen going in the direction of Livry. He
followed these hints, walking with great strides, and talking to himself
the while:--

"That man is evidently a million dressed in yellow, and I am an animal.
First he gave twenty sous, then five francs, then fifty francs, then
fifteen hundred francs, all with equal readiness. He would have given
fifteen thousand francs. But I shall overtake him."

And then, that bundle of clothes prepared beforehand for the child; all
that was singular; many mysteries lay concealed under it. One does not
let mysteries out of one's hand when one has once grasped them. The
secrets of the wealthy are sponges of gold; one must know how to subject
them to pressure. All these thoughts whirled through his brain. "I am an
animal," said he.

When one leaves Montfermeil and reaches the turn which the road takes
that runs to Livry, it can be seen stretching out before one to a great
distance across the plateau. On arriving there, he calculated that he
ought to be able to see the old man and the child. He looked as far as
his vision reached, and saw nothing. He made fresh inquiries, but he had
wasted time. Some passers-by informed him that the man and child of whom
he was in search had gone towards the forest in the direction of Gagny.
He hastened in that direction.

They were far in advance of him; but a child walks slowly, and he walked
fast; and then, he was well acquainted with the country.

All at once he paused and dealt himself a blow on his forehead like a
man who has forgotten some essential point and who is ready to retrace
his steps.

"I ought to have taken my gun," said he to himself.

Thénardier was one of those double natures which sometimes pass through
our midst without our being aware of the fact, and who disappear without
our finding them out, because destiny has only exhibited one side of
them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a
calm and even situation, Thénardier possessed all that is required to
make--we will not say to be--what people have agreed to call an honest
trader, a good bourgeois. At the same time certain circumstances being
given, certain shocks arriving to bring his under-nature to the surface,
he had all the requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in
whom there was some taint of the monster. Satan must have occasionally
crouched down in some corner of the hovel in which Thénardier dwelt, and
have fallen a-dreaming in the presence of this hideous masterpiece.

After a momentary hesitation:--

"Bah!" he thought; "they will have time to make their escape."

And he pursued his road, walking rapidly straight ahead, and with almost
an air of certainty, with the sagacity of a fox scenting a covey of
partridges.

In truth, when he had passed the ponds and had traversed in an oblique
direction the large clearing which lies on the right of the Avenue de
Bellevue, and reached that turf alley which nearly makes the circuit of
the hill, and covers the arch of the ancient aqueduct of the Abbey of
Chelles, he caught sight, over the top of the brushwood, of the hat on
which he had already erected so many conjectures; it was that man's hat.
The brushwood was not high. Thénardier recognized the fact that the man
and Cosette were sitting there. The child could not be seen on account
of her small size, but the head of her doll was visible.

Thénardier was not mistaken. The man was sitting there, and letting
Cosette get somewhat rested. The inn-keeper walked round the brushwood
and presented himself abruptly to the eyes of those whom he was in
search of.

"Pardon, excuse me, sir," he said, quite breathless, "but here are your
fifteen hundred francs."

So saying, he handed the stranger the three bank-bills.

The man raised his eyes.

"What is the meaning of this?"

Thénardier replied respectfully:--

"It means, sir, that I shall take back Cosette."

Cosette shuddered, and pressed close to the old man.

He replied, gazing to the very bottom of Thénardier's eyes the while,
and enunciating every syllable distinctly:--

"You are go-ing to take back Co-sette?"

"Yes, sir, I am. I will tell you; I have considered the matter. In fact,
I have not the right to give her to you. I am an honest man, you see;
this child does not belong to me; she belongs to her mother. It was her
mother who confided her to me; I can only resign her to her mother. You
will say to me, 'But her mother is dead.' Good; in that case I can only
give the child up to the person who shall bring me a writing, signed by
her mother, to the effect that I am to hand the child over to the person
therein mentioned; that is clear."

The man, without making any reply, fumbled in his pocket, and Thénardier
beheld the pocket-book of bank-bills make its appearance once more.

The tavern-keeper shivered with joy.

"Good!" thought he; "let us hold firm; he is going to bribe me!"

Before opening the pocket-book, the traveller cast a glance about him:
the spot was absolutely deserted; there was not a soul either in the
woods or in the valley. The man opened his pocket-book once more and
drew from it, not the handful of bills which Thénardier expected, but a
simple little paper, which he unfolded and presented fully open to the
inn-keeper, saying:--

"You are right; read!"

Thénardier took the paper and read:--


                              "M. SUR M., March 25, 1823.

"MONSIEUR THÉNARDIER:--

               You will deliver Cosette to this person.
               You will be paid for all the little things.
               I have the honor to salute you with respect,
                                                  FANTINE."

"You know that signature?" resumed the man.

It certainly was Fantine's signature; Thénardier recognized it.

There was no reply to make; he experienced two violent vexations, the
vexation of renouncing the bribery which he had hoped for, and the
vexation of being beaten; the man added:--

"You may keep this paper as your receipt."

Thénardier retreated in tolerably good order.

"This signature is fairly well imitated," he growled between his teeth;
"however, let it go!"

Then he essayed a desperate effort.

"It is well, sir," he said, "since you are the person, but I must be
paid for all those little things. A great deal is owing to me."

The man rose to his feet, filliping the dust from his threadbare
sleeve:--

"Monsieur Thénardier, in January last, the mother reckoned that she owed
you one hundred and twenty francs. In February, you sent her a bill of
five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the end of
February, and three hundred francs at the beginning of March. Since then
nine months have elapsed, at fifteen francs a month, the price agreed
upon, which makes one hundred and thirty-five francs. You had received
one hundred francs too much; that makes thirty-five still owing you. I
have just given you fifteen hundred francs."

Thénardier's sensations were those of the wolf at the moment when he
feels himself nipped and seized by the steel jaw of the trap.

"Who is this devil of a man?" he thought.

He did what the wolf does: he shook himself. Audacity had succeeded with
him once.

"Monsieur-I-don't-know-your-name," he said resolutely, and this time
casting aside all respectful ceremony, "I shall take back Cosette if you
do not give me a thousand crowns."

The stranger said tranquilly:--

"Come, Cosette."

He took Cosette by his left hand, and with his right he picked up his
cudgel, which was lying on the ground.

Thénardier noted the enormous size of the cudgel and the solitude of the
spot.

The man plunged into the forest with the child, leaving the inn-keeper
motionless and speechless.

While they were walking away, Thénardier scrutinized his huge shoulders,
which were a little rounded, and his great fists.

Then, bringing his eyes back to his own person, they fell upon his
feeble arms and his thin hands. "I really must have been exceedingly
stupid not to have thought to bring my gun," he said to himself, "since
I was going hunting!"

However, the inn-keeper did not give up.

"I want to know where he is going," said he, and he set out to follow
them at a distance. Two things were left on his hands, an irony in the
shape of the paper signed _Fantine_, and a consolation, the fifteen
hundred francs.

The man led Cosette off in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked
slowly, with drooping head, in an attitude of reflection and sadness.
The winter had thinned out the forest, so that Thénardier did not lose
them from sight, although he kept at a good distance. The man turned
round from time to time, and looked to see if he was being followed.
All at once he caught sight of Thénardier. He plunged suddenly into
the brushwood with Cosette, where they could both hide themselves. "The
deuce!" said Thénardier, and he redoubled his pace.

The thickness of the undergrowth forced him to draw nearer to them. When
the man had reached the densest part of the thicket, he wheeled
round. It was in vain that Thénardier sought to conceal himself in the
branches; he could not prevent the man seeing him. The man cast upon him
an uneasy glance, then elevated his head and continued his course. The
inn-keeper set out again in pursuit. Thus they continued for two or
three hundred paces. All at once the man turned round once more; he saw
the inn-keeper. This time he gazed at him with so sombre an air that
Thénardier decided that it was "useless" to proceed further. Thénardier
retraced his steps.



CHAPTER XI--NUMBER 9,430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY

Jean Valjean was not dead.

When he fell into the sea, or rather, when he threw himself into it, he
was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a
vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding
himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and
reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun. There, as he did not lack
money, he procured clothing. A small country-house in the neighborhood
of Balaguier was at that time the dressing-room of escaped convicts,--a
lucrative specialty. Then Jean Valjean, like all the sorry fugitives
who are seeking to evade the vigilance of the law and social fatality,
pursued an obscure and undulating itinerary. He found his first
refuge at Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he directed his course towards
Grand-Villard, near Briançon, in the Hautes-Alpes. It was a fumbling and
uneasy flight,--a mole's track, whose branchings are untraceable. Later
on, some trace of his passage into Ain, in the territory of Civrieux,
was discovered; in the Pyrenees, at Accons; at the spot called
Grange-de-Doumec, near the market of Chavailles, and in the environs of
Perigueux at Brunies, canton of La Chapelle-Gonaguet. He reached Paris.
We have just seen him at Montfermeil.

His first care on arriving in Paris had been to buy mourning clothes
for a little girl of from seven to eight years of age; then to procure
a lodging. That done, he had betaken himself to Montfermeil. It will
be remembered that already, during his preceding escape, he had made a
mysterious trip thither, or somewhere in that neighborhood, of which the
law had gathered an inkling.

However, he was thought to be dead, and this still further increased the
obscurity which had gathered about him. At Paris, one of the journals
which chronicled the fact fell into his hands. He felt reassured and
almost at peace, as though he had really been dead.

On the evening of the day when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from the
claws of the Thénardiers, he returned to Paris. He re-entered it at
nightfall, with the child, by way of the Barrier Monceaux. There
he entered a cabriolet, which took him to the esplanade of the
Observatoire. There he got out, paid the coachman, took Cosette by
the hand, and together they directed their steps through the
darkness,--through the deserted streets which adjoin the Ourcine and the
Glacière, towards the Boulevard de l'Hôpital.

The day had been strange and filled with emotions for Cosette. They
had eaten some bread and cheese purchased in isolated taverns, behind
hedges; they had changed carriages frequently; they had travelled short
distances on foot. She made no complaint, but she was weary, and Jean
Valjean perceived it by the way she dragged more and more on his hand
as she walked. He took her on his back. Cosette, without letting go
of Catherine, laid her head on Jean Valjean's shoulder, and there fell
asleep.



BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL

Enlarge



CHAPTER I--MASTER GORBEAU

Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country of
the Salpêtrière, and who had mounted to the Barrière d'Italie by way
of the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Paris
disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it
was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the
city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in
them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it,
then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert
place where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a
street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day
than a cemetery.

It was the old quarter of the Marché-aux-Chevaux.

The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of
this Marché-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue du
Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high
walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver
huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps,
sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long,
low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning,
laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then,
in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which
ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,--this daring
rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the
Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory, and between two
garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building,
which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, and
which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It presented its side
and gable to the public road; hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly
the whole of the house was hidden. Only the door and one window could be
seen.

This hovel was only one story high.

The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could never
have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if it
had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough masonry,
might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.

The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound
together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It
opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky,
plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which
could be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder and
disappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top of the shapeless
bay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow scantling in the
centre of which a triangular hole had been sawed, which served both as
wicket and air-hole when the door was closed. On the inside of the
door the figures 52 had been traced with a couple of strokes of a brush
dipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand had daubed the
number 50, so that one hesitated. Where was one? Above the door it said,
"Number 50"; the inside replied, "no, Number 52." No one knows what
dust-colored figures were suspended like draperies from the triangular
opening.

The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with Venetian
blinds, and with a frame in large square panes; only these large panes
were suffering from various wounds, which were both concealed and
betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. And the blinds, dislocated and
unpasted, threatened passers-by rather than screened the occupants.
The horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been naïvely
replaced with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began as
a blind ended as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this window
with an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house,
produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side,
with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having always been a
mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.

The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed which
had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinal
tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts of
compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stress
of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These chambers
received their light from the vague waste grounds in the neighborhood.

All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral; traversed
according as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door, by cold rays
or by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this sort
of dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.

To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about the
height of a man from the ground, a small window which had been walled up
formed a square niche full of stones which the children had thrown there
as they passed by.

A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what still
remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days.
As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is
youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging
partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.

The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known in the
neighborhood as the Gorbeau house.

Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.

Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, and
prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that there
was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at the
Châtelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The two
names had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too fine
for the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediately
put in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses that
limped a little:--



         Maître Corbeau, sur un dossier perché,
              Tenait dans son bec une saisie exécutoire;
         Maître Renard, par l'odeur alléché,
              Lui fit à peu près cette histoire:
                   Hé! bonjour.  Etc.<a href="#linknote-13"
      name="linknoteref-13" id="linknoteref-13">13</a>


The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding the
bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter which
followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon the
expedient of applying to the king.

Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when the
Papal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on the
other, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on, in his
Majesty's presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who
had just got out of bed. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh,
passed gayly from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and bestowed on
these limbs of the law their former names, or nearly so. By the kings
command, Maître Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his initial
letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maître Renard was less lucky; all he
obtained was leave to place a P in front of his R, and to call himself
Prenard; so that the second name bore almost as much resemblance as the
first.

Now, according to local tradition, this Maître Gorbeau had been the
proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital.
He was even the author of the monumental window.

Hence the edifice bore the name of the Gorbeau house.

Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm
which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue
de la Barrière des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved,
planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the
season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor
of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.

The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still in
existence.

This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was the
road to Bicêtre. It was through it that, under the Empire and the
Restoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the day
of their execution. It was there, that, about 1829, was committed that
mysterious assassination, called "The assassination of the Fontainebleau
barrier," whose authors justice was never able to discover; a melancholy
problem which has never been elucidated, a frightful enigma which has
never been unriddled. Take a few steps, and you come upon that fatal Rue
Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of
thunder, as in the melodramas. A few paces more, and you arrive at the
abominable pollarded elms of the Barrière Saint-Jacques, that expedient
of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and
shameful Place de Grève of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which
recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with
grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.

Leaving aside this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were,
predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the most
mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago,
was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive, where stood the
building Number 50-52.

Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.
The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which
assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpêtrière,
a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicêtre, whose outskirts one
was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women and
the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive
nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few
factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood
hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white
walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings
erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the
melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground, not
a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The _ensemble_ was glacial,
regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is
because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.
Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers
may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell
existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital might have formed the
entrance to it.

Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight is
vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze
tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deep
and starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in the
clouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenly
becomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in the
shades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain from
recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected
with the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have
been committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had a
presentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused
forms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square, of
which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day it
was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.

In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seated
at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old
women were fond of begging.

However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antique
air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any one
who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail of
the whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the station
of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted
it, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of a
capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a
city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements of
a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf the
ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at the
rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous
horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old houses
crumble and new ones rise.

Since the Orleans railway has invaded the region of the Salpêtrière,
the ancient, narrow streets which adjoin the moats Saint-Victor and the
Jardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed three or
four times each day by those currents of coach fiacres and omnibuses
which, in a given time, crowd back the houses to the right and the left;
for there are things which are odd when said that are rigorously exact;
and just as it is true to say that in large cities the sun makes the
southern fronts of houses to vegetate and grow, it is certain that the
frequent passage of vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a new
life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks,
the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to grow
longer, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,--a
memorable morning in July, 1845,--black pots of bitumen were seen
smoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization had
arrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb
of Saint-Marceau.



CHAPTER II--A NEST FOR OWL AND A WARBLER

It was in front of this Gorbeau house that Jean Valjean halted. Like
wild birds, he had chosen this desert place to construct his nest.

He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a sort of a pass-key,
opened the door, entered, closed it again carefully, and ascended the
staircase, still carrying Cosette.

At the top of the stairs he drew from his pocket another key, with
which he opened another door. The chamber which he entered, and which
he closed again instantly, was a kind of moderately spacious attic,
furnished with a mattress laid on the floor, a table, and several
chairs; a stove in which a fire was burning, and whose embers were
visible, stood in one corner. A lantern on the boulevard cast a vague
light into this poor room. At the extreme end there was a dressing-room
with a folding bed; Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and laid
her down there without waking her.

He struck a match and lighted a candle. All this was prepared beforehand
on the table, and, as he had done on the previous evening, he began
to scrutinize Cosette's face with a gaze full of ecstasy, in which the
expression of kindness and tenderness almost amounted to aberration. The
little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme
strength and extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with
whom she was, and continued to sleep without knowing where she was.

Jean Valjean bent down and kissed that child's hand.

Nine months before he had kissed the hand of the mother, who had also
just fallen asleep.

The same sad, piercing, religious sentiment filled his heart.

He knelt beside Cosette's bed.

lt was broad daylight, and the child still slept. A wan ray of the
December sun penetrated the window of the attic and lay upon the
ceiling in long threads of light and shade. All at once a heavily laden
carrier's cart, which was passing along the boulevard, shook the frail
bed, like a clap of thunder, and made it quiver from top to bottom.

"Yes, madame!" cried Cosette, waking with a start, "here I am! here I
am!"

And she sprang out of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness
of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner of the wall.

"Ah! mon Dieu, my broom!" said she.

She opened her eyes wide now, and beheld the smiling countenance of Jean
Valjean.

"Ah! so it is true!" said the child. "Good morning, Monsieur."

Children accept joy and happiness instantly and familiarly, being
themselves by nature joy and happiness.

Cosette caught sight of Catherine at the foot of her bed, and took
possession of her, and, as she played, she put a hundred questions to
Jean Valjean. Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame Thénardier
very far away? Was she to go back? etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed,
"How pretty it is here!"

It was a frightful hole, but she felt free.

"Must I sweep?" she resumed at last.

"Play!" said Jean Valjean.

The day passed thus. Cosette, without troubling herself to understand
anything, was inexpressibly happy with that doll and that kind man.



CHAPTER III--TWO MISFORTUNES MAKE ONE PIECE OF GOOD FORTUNE

On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by
Cosette's bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to wake.

Some new thing had come into his soul.

Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been
alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In
the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy.
The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister and his
sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which
had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to
find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them.
Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he
had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.

When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her
off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.

All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that
child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with
joy. He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it
meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to
love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.

Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!

Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that
might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together
into a sort of ineffable light.

It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop
had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the
dawn of love to rise.

The early days passed in this dazzled state.

Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become another
being, poor little thing! She was so little when her mother left her,
that she no longer remembered her. Like all children, who resemble young
shoots of the vine, which cling to everything, she had tried to love;
she had not succeeded. All had repulsed her,--the Thénardiers, their
children, other children. She had loved the dog, and he had died, after
which nothing and nobody would have anything to do with her. It is a sad
thing to say, and we have already intimated it, that, at eight years of
age, her heart was cold. It was not her fault; it was not the faculty
of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility. Thus, from the
very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind
man. She felt that which she had never felt before--a sensation of
expansion.

The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old or poor; she
thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought the hovel pretty.

These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy. The novelty of
the earth and of life counts for something here. Nothing is so charming
as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret. We all have in our
past a delightful garret.

Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between
Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly
united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted
existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed
the other. Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's
instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other. At the
mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were welded together.
When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as
necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.

Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, we
may say that, separated from every one by the walls of the tomb, Jean
Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the orphan: this situation
caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette's father after a celestial
fashion.

And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the
depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping
hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality. The entrance of
that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.

Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well. There he seemed
perfectly secure.

The chamber with a dressing-room, which he occupied with Cosette, was
the one whose window opened on the boulevard. This being the only window
in the house, no neighbors' glances were to be feared from across the
way or at the side.

The ground-floor of Number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated penthouse,
served as a wagon-house for market-gardeners, and no communication
existed between it and the first story. It was separated by the
flooring, which had neither traps nor stairs, and which formed the
diaphragm of the building, as it were. The first story contained, as we
have said, numerous chambers and several attics, only one of which
was occupied by the old woman who took charge of Jean Valjean's
housekeeping; all the rest was uninhabited.

It was this old woman, ornamented with the name of the _principal
lodger_, and in reality intrusted with the functions of portress, who
had let him the lodging on Christmas eve. He had represented himself to
her as a gentleman of means who had been ruined by Spanish bonds, who
was coming there to live with his little daughter. He had paid her six
months in advance, and had commissioned the old woman to furnish the
chamber and dressing-room, as we have seen. It was this good woman
who had lighted the fire in the stove, and prepared everything on the
evening of their arrival.

Week followed week; these two beings led a happy life in that hovel.

Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang from daybreak. Children have their
morning song as well as birds.

It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean clasped her tiny red hand, all
cracked with chilblains, and kissed it. The poor child, who was used
to being beaten, did not know the meaning of this, and ran away in
confusion.

At times she became serious and stared at her little black gown. Cosette
was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She had emerged from misery,
and she was entering into life.

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made
the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil
that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a
child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the
angels.

He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who
was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their
abysses as well as evil ones.

To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted nearly
the whole of Jean Valjean's existence. And then he talked of her mother,
and he made her pray.

She called him _father_, and knew no other name for him.

He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her doll, and in
listening to her prattle. Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be full
of interest; men seemed to him good and just; he no longer reproached
any one in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live to be a very
old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future stretching
out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a charming light. The best
of us are not exempt from egotistical thoughts. At times, he reflected
with a sort of joy that she would be ugly.

This is only a personal opinion; but, to utter our whole thought, at the
point where Jean Valjean had arrived when he began to love Cosette, it
is by no means clear to us that he did not need this encouragement in
order that he might persevere in well-doing. He had just viewed the
malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect--incomplete
aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth,
the fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as
personified in Javert. He had returned to prison, this time for having
done right; he had quaffed fresh bitterness; disgust and lassitude were
overpowering him; even the memory of the Bishop probably suffered
a temporary eclipse, though sure to reappear later on luminous and
triumphant; but, after all, that sacred memory was growing dim.
Who knows whether Jean Valjean had not been on the eve of growing
discouraged and of falling once more? He loved and grew strong again.
Alas! he walked with no less indecision than Cosette. He protected her,
and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could walk through life;
thanks to her, he could continue in virtue. He was that child's stay,
and she was his prop. Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the
balances of destiny!



CHAPTER IV--THE REMARKS OF THE PRINCIPAL TENANT

Jean Valjean was prudent enough never to go out by day. Every evening,
at twilight, he walked for an hour or two, sometimes alone, often with
Cosette, seeking the most deserted side alleys of the boulevard, and
entering churches at nightfall. He liked to go to Saint-Médard, which is
the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette with him, she remained
with the old woman; but the child's delight was to go out with the good
man. She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous _tête-à-têtes_
with Catherine. He held her hand as they walked, and said sweet things
to her.

It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.

The old woman attended to the housekeeping and cooking and went to
market.

They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like people in
very moderate circumstances. Jean Valjean had made no alterations in
the furniture as it was the first day; he had merely had the glass door
leading to Cosette's dressing-room replaced by a solid door.

He still wore his yellow coat, his black breeches, and his old hat.
In the street, he was taken for a poor man. It sometimes happened that
kind-hearted women turned back to bestow a sou on him. Jean Valjean
accepted the sou with a deep bow. It also happened occasionally that he
encountered some poor wretch asking alms; then he looked behind him
to make sure that no one was observing him, stealthily approached the
unfortunate man, put a piece of money into his hand, often a silver
coin, and walked rapidly away. This had its disadvantages. He began to
be known in the neighborhood under the name of _the beggar who gives
alms_.

The old _principal lodger_, a cross-looking creature, who was
thoroughly permeated, so far as her neighbors were concerned, with the
inquisitiveness peculiar to envious persons, scrutinized Jean Valjean
a great deal, without his suspecting the fact. She was a little deaf,
which rendered her talkative. There remained to her from her past, two
teeth,--one above, the other below,--which she was continually knocking
against each other. She had questioned Cosette, who had not been able
to tell her anything, since she knew nothing herself except that she had
come from Montfermeil. One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with
an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the
uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step
of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through a
crack in the door, which was directly opposite him. Jean Valjean had his
back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no doubt. The
old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a case, scissors,
and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of the skirts of his
coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish paper, which he
unfolded. The old woman recognized, with terror, the fact that it was
a bank-bill for a thousand francs. It was the second or third only that
she had seen in the course of her existence. She fled in alarm.

A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her, and asked her to go and
get this thousand-franc bill changed for him, adding that it was his
quarterly income, which he had received the day before. "Where?" thought
the old woman. "He did not go out until six o'clock in the evening, and
the government bank certainly is not open at that hour." The old
woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises. That
thousand-franc note, commented on and multiplied, produced a vast
amount of terrified discussion among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes
Saint-Marcel.

A few days later, it chanced that Jean Valjean was sawing some wood, in
his shirt-sleeves, in the corridor. The old woman was in the chamber,
putting things in order. She was alone. Cosette was occupied in admiring
the wood as it was sawed. The old woman caught sight of the coat hanging
on a nail, and examined it. The lining had been sewed up again. The good
woman felt of it carefully, and thought she observed in the skirts and
revers thicknesses of paper. More thousand-franc bank-bills, no doubt!

She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets.
Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big
pocket-book, a very large knife, and--a suspicious circumstance--several
wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this coat had the air of being in
a manner provided against unexpected accidents.

Thus the inhabitants of the house reached the last days of winter.



CHAPTER V--A FIVE-FRANC PIECE FALLS ON THE GROUND AND PRODUCES A TUMULT

Near Saint-Médard's church there was a poor man who was in the habit of
crouching on the brink of a public well which had been condemned, and
on whom Jean Valjean was fond of bestowing charity. He never passed this
man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who
envied this mendicant said that he belonged to the police. He was an
ex-beadle of seventy-five, who was constantly mumbling his prayers.

One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing by, when he had not Cosette
with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place, beneath the lantern
which had just been lighted. The man seemed engaged in prayer, according
to his custom, and was much bent over. Jean Valjean stepped up to him
and placed his customary alms in his hand. The mendicant raised his
eyes suddenly, stared intently at Jean Valjean, then dropped his head
quickly. This movement was like a flash of lightning. Jean Valjean was
seized with a shudder. It seemed to him that he had just caught sight,
by the light of the street lantern, not of the placid and beaming
visage of the old beadle, but of a well-known and startling face. He
experienced the same impression that one would have on finding one's
self, all of a sudden, face to face, in the dark, with a tiger. He
recoiled, terrified, petrified, daring neither to breathe, to speak,
to remain, nor to flee, staring at the beggar who had dropped his head,
which was enveloped in a rag, and no longer appeared to know that he
was there. At this strange moment, an instinct--possibly the mysterious
instinct of self-preservation,--restrained Jean Valjean from uttering a
word. The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same appearance
as he had every day. "Bah!" said Jean Valjean, "I am mad! I am dreaming!
Impossible!" And he returned profoundly troubled.

He hardly dared to confess, even to himself, that the face which he
thought he had seen was the face of Javert.

That night, on thinking the matter over, he regretted not having
questioned the man, in order to force him to raise his head a second
time.

On the following day, at nightfall, he went back. The beggar was at his
post. "Good day, my good man," said Jean Valjean, resolutely, handing
him a sou. The beggar raised his head, and replied in a whining voice,
"Thanks, my good sir." It was unmistakably the ex-beadle.

Jean Valjean felt completely reassured. He began to laugh. "How the
deuce could I have thought that I saw Javert there?" he thought. "Am I
going to lose my eyesight now?" And he thought no more about it.

A few days afterwards,--it might have been at eight o'clock in the
evening,--he was in his room, and engaged in making Cosette spell aloud,
when he heard the house door open and then shut again. This struck him
as singular. The old woman, who was the only inhabitant of the house
except himself, always went to bed at nightfall, so that she might not
burn out her candles. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be quiet.
He heard some one ascending the stairs. It might possibly be the old
woman, who might have fallen ill and have been out to the apothecary's.
Jean Valjean listened.

The step was heavy, and sounded like that of a man; but the old woman
wore stout shoes, and there is nothing which so strongly resembles the
step of a man as that of an old woman. Nevertheless, Jean Valjean blew
out his candle.

He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice, "Get into bed
very softly"; and as he kissed her brow, the steps paused.

Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, with his back towards the
door, seated on the chair from which he had not stirred, and holding his
breath in the dark.

After the expiration of a rather long interval, he turned round, as he
heard nothing more, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his
chamber, he saw a light through the keyhole. This light formed a sort
of sinister star in the blackness of the door and the wall. There was
evidently some one there, who was holding a candle in his hand and
listening.

Several minutes elapsed thus, and the light retreated. But he heard no
sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the person who had
been listening at the door had removed his shoes.

Jean Valjean threw himself, all dressed as he was, on his bed, and could
not close his eyes all night.

At daybreak, just as he was falling into a doze through fatigue, he was
awakened by the creaking of a door which opened on some attic at the
end of the corridor, then he heard the same masculine footstep which had
ascended the stairs on the preceding evening. The step was approaching.
He sprang off the bed and applied his eye to the keyhole, which was
tolerably large, hoping to see the person who had made his way by night
into the house and had listened at his door, as he passed. It was a
man, in fact, who passed, this time without pausing, in front of Jean
Valjean's chamber. The corridor was too dark to allow of the person's
face being distinguished; but when the man reached the staircase, a
ray of light from without made it stand out like a silhouette, and Jean
Valjean had a complete view of his back. The man was of lofty stature,
clad in a long frock-coat, with a cudgel under his arm. The formidable
neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.

Jean Valjean might have attempted to catch another glimpse of him
through his window opening on the boulevard, but he would have been
obliged to open the window: he dared not.

It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and like himself.
Who had given him that key? What was the meaning of this?

When the old woman came to do the work, at seven o'clock in the morning,
Jean Valjean cast a penetrating glance on her, but he did not question
her. The good woman appeared as usual.

As she swept up she remarked to him:--

"Possibly Monsieur may have heard some one come in last night?"

At that age, and on that boulevard, eight o'clock in the evening was the
dead of the night.

"That is true, by the way," he replied, in the most natural tone
possible. "Who was it?"

"It was a new lodger who has come into the house," said the old woman.

"And what is his name?"

"I don't know exactly; Dumont, or Daumont, or some name of that sort."

"And who is this Monsieur Dumont?"

The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered:--

"A gentleman of property, like yourself."

Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning. Jean Valjean thought he perceived
one.

When the old woman had taken her departure, he did up a hundred francs
which he had in a cupboard, into a roll, and put it in his pocket. In
spite of all the precautions which he took in this operation so that he
might not be heard rattling silver, a hundred-sou piece escaped from his
hands and rolled noisily on the floor.

When darkness came on, he descended and carefully scrutinized both sides
of the boulevard. He saw no one. The boulevard appeared to be absolutely
deserted. It is true that a person can conceal himself behind trees.

He went upstairs again.

"Come." he said to Cosette.

He took her by the hand, and they both went out.



BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK



CHAPTER I--THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY

An observation here becomes necessary, in view of the pages which the
reader is about to peruse, and of others which will be met with further
on.

The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning
himself, has been absent from Paris for many years. Paris has been
transformed since he quitted it. A new city has arisen, which is, after
a fashion, unknown to him. There is no need for him to say that he loves
Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city. In consequence of demolitions and
reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris which he bore away
religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of days gone by. He must
be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is
possible that when the author conducts his readers to a spot and says,
"In such a street there stands such and such a house," neither street
nor house will any longer exist in that locality. Readers may verify
the facts if they care to take the trouble. For his own part, he is
unacquainted with the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before
his eyes in an illusion which is precious to him. It is a delight to him
to dream that there still lingers behind him something of that which he
beheld when he was in his own country, and that all has not vanished.
So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those
streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows,
those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are
strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered
haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to
you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on,
when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to
you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are
necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered
those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left
a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements.
All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never
behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on
a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an
apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak,
the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they
are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no
change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the
face of your mother.

May we, then, be permitted to speak of the past in the present? That
said, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we continue.

Jean Valjean instantly quitted the boulevard and plunged into the
streets, taking the most intricate lines which he could devise,
returning on his track at times, to make sure that he was not being
followed.

Enlarge


This manouvre is peculiar to the hunted stag. On soil where an
imprint of the track may be left, this manouvre possesses, among other
advantages, that of deceiving the huntsmen and the dogs, by throwing
them on the wrong scent. In venery this is called _false re-imbushment_.

The moon was full that night. Jean Valjean was not sorry for this. The
moon, still very close to the horizon, cast great masses of light and
shadow in the streets. Jean Valjean could glide along close to the
houses on the dark side, and yet keep watch on the light side. He did
not, perhaps, take sufficiently into consideration the fact that the
dark side escaped him. Still, in the deserted lanes which lie near the
Rue Poliveau, he thought he felt certain that no one was following him.

Cosette walked on without asking any questions. The sufferings of the
first six years of her life had instilled something passive into her
nature. Moreover,--and this is a remark to which we shall frequently
have occasion to recur,--she had grown used, without being herself
aware of it, to the peculiarities of this good man and to the freaks of
destiny. And then she was with him, and she felt safe.

Jean Valjean knew no more where he was going than did Cosette. He
trusted in God, as she trusted in him. It seemed as though he also were
clinging to the hand of some one greater than himself; he thought he
felt a being leading him, though invisible. However, he had no settled
idea, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was
Javert, and then it might have been Javert, without Javert knowing that
he was Jean Valjean. Was not he disguised? Was not he believed to be
dead? Still, queer things had been going on for several days. He wanted
no more of them. He was determined not to return to the Gorbeau house.
Like the wild animal chased from its lair, he was seeking a hole in
which he might hide until he could find one where he might dwell.

Jean Valjean described many and varied labyrinths in the Mouffetard
quarter, which was already asleep, as though the discipline of the
Middle Ages and the yoke of the curfew still existed; he combined in
various manners, with cunning strategy, the Rue Censier and the Rue
Copeau, the Rue du Battoir-Saint-Victor and the Rue du Puits l'Ermite.
There are lodging houses in this locality, but he did not even enter
one, finding nothing which suited him. He had no doubt that if any one
had chanced to be upon his track, they would have lost it.

As eleven o'clock struck from Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, he was traversing
the Rue de Pontoise, in front of the office of the commissary of police,
situated at No. 14. A few moments later, the instinct of which we have
spoken above made him turn round. At that moment he saw distinctly,
thanks to the commissary's lantern, which betrayed them, three men
who were following him closely, pass, one after the other, under that
lantern, on the dark side of the street. One of the three entered the
alley leading to the commissary's house. The one who marched at their
head struck him as decidedly suspicious.

"Come, child," he said to Cosette; and he made haste to quit the Rue
Pontoise.

He took a circuit, turned into the Passage des Patriarches, which was
closed on account of the hour, strode along the Rue de l'Épée-de-Bois
and the Rue de l'Arbalète, and plunged into the Rue des Postes.

At that time there was a square formed by the intersection of
streets, where the College Rollin stands to-day, and where the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève turns off.

It is understood, of course, that the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève is an
old street, and that a posting-chaise does not pass through the Rue des
Postes once in ten years. In the thirteenth century this Rue des Postes
was inhabited by potters, and its real name is Rue des Pots.

The moon cast a livid light into this open space. Jean Valjean went into
ambush in a doorway, calculating that if the men were still following
him, he could not fail to get a good look at them, as they traversed
this illuminated space.

In point of fact, three minutes had not elapsed when the men made their
appearance. There were four of them now. All were tall, dressed in long,
brown coats, with round hats, and huge cudgels in their hands. Their
great stature and their vast fists rendered them no less alarming
than did their sinister stride through the darkness. One would have
pronounced them four spectres disguised as bourgeois.

They halted in the middle of the space and formed a group, like men in
consultation. They had an air of indecision. The one who appeared to be
their leader turned round and pointed hastily with his right hand in the
direction which Jean Valjean had taken; another seemed to indicate the
contrary direction with considerable obstinacy. At the moment when the
first man wheeled round, the moon fell full in his face. Jean Valjean
recognized Javert perfectly.



CHAPTER II--IT IS LUCKY THAT THE PONT D'AUSTERLITZ BEARS CARRIAGES

Uncertainty was at an end for Jean Valjean: fortunately it still lasted
for the men. He took advantage of their hesitation. It was time lost for
them, but gained for him. He slipped from under the gate where he had
concealed himself, and went down the Rue des Postes, towards the region
of the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette was beginning to be tired. He took
her in his arms and carried her. There were no passers-by, and the
street lanterns had not been lighted on account of there being a moon.

He redoubled his pace.

In a few strides he had reached the Goblet potteries, on the front
of which the moonlight rendered distinctly legible the ancient
inscription:--


              De Goblet fils c'est ici la fabrique;
              Venez choisir des cruches et des brocs,
              Des pots à fleurs, des tuyaux, de la brique.
              A tout venant le Cour vend des Carreaux.<a href="#linknote-14"
      name="linknoteref-14" id="linknoteref-14">14</a>


He left behind him the Rue de la Clef, then the Fountain Saint-Victor,
skirted the Jardin des Plantes by the lower streets, and reached the
quay. There he turned round. The quay was deserted. The streets were
deserted. There was no one behind him. He drew a long breath.

He gained the Pont d'Austerlitz.

Tolls were still collected there at that epoch.

He presented himself at the toll office and handed over a sou.

"It is two sous," said the old soldier in charge of the bridge. "You are
carrying a child who can walk. Pay for two."

He paid, vexed that his passage should have aroused remark. Every flight
should be an imperceptible slipping away.

A heavy cart was crossing the Seine at the same time as himself, and on
its way, like him, to the right bank. This was of use to him. He could
traverse the bridge in the shadow of the cart.

Towards the middle of the Bridge, Cosette, whose feet were benumbed,
wanted to walk. He set her on the ground and took her hand again.

The bridge once crossed, he perceived some timber-yards on his right. He
directed his course thither. In order to reach them, it was necessary to
risk himself in a tolerably large unsheltered and illuminated space.
He did not hesitate. Those who were on his track had evidently lost the
scent, and Jean Valjean believed himself to be out of danger. Hunted,
yes; followed, no.

A little street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened out
between two timber-yards enclosed in walls. This street was dark and
narrow and seemed made expressly for him. Before entering it he cast a
glance behind him.

From the point where he stood he could see the whole extent of the Pont
d'Austerlitz.

Four shadows were just entering on the bridge.

These shadows had their backs turned to the Jardin des Plantes and were
on their way to the right bank.

These four shadows were the four men.

Jean Valjean shuddered like the wild beast which is recaptured.

One hope remained to him; it was, that the men had not, perhaps, stepped
on the bridge, and had not caught sight of him while he was crossing the
large illuminated space, holding Cosette by the hand.

In that case, by plunging into the little street before him, he
might escape, if he could reach the timber-yards, the marshes, the
market-gardens, the uninhabited ground which was not built upon.

It seemed to him that he might commit himself to that silent little
street. He entered it.



CHAPTER III--TO WIT, THE PLAN OF PARIS IN 1727

Three hundred paces further on, he arrived at a point where the street
forked. It separated into two streets, which ran in a slanting line, one
to the right, and the other to the left.

Jean Valjean had before him what resembled the two branches of a Y.
Which should he choose? He did not hesitate, but took the one on the
right.

Why?

Because that to the left ran towards a suburb, that is to say, towards
inhabited regions, and the right branch towards the open country, that
is to say, towards deserted regions.

However, they no longer walked very fast. Cosette's pace retarded Jean
Valjean's.

He took her up and carried her again. Cosette laid her head on the
shoulder of the good man and said not a word.

He turned round from time to time and looked behind him. He took care to
keep always on the dark side of the street. The street was straight
in his rear. The first two or three times that he turned round he saw
nothing; the silence was profound, and he continued his march somewhat
reassured. All at once, on turning round, he thought he perceived in the
portion of the street which he had just passed through, far off in the
obscurity, something which was moving.

He rushed forward precipitately rather than walked, hoping to find some
side-street, to make his escape through it, and thus to break his scent
once more.

He arrived at a wall.

This wall, however, did not absolutely prevent further progress; it was
a wall which bordered a transverse street, in which the one he had taken
ended.

Here again, he was obliged to come to a decision; should he go to the
right or to the left.

He glanced to the right. The fragmentary lane was prolonged between
buildings which were either sheds or barns, then ended at a blind alley.
The extremity of the cul-de-sac was distinctly visible,--a lofty white
wall.

He glanced to the left. On that side the lane was open, and about
two hundred paces further on, ran into a street of which it was the
affluent. On that side lay safety.

At the moment when Jean Valjean was meditating a turn to the left, in
an effort to reach the street which he saw at the end of the lane, he
perceived a sort of motionless, black statue at the corner of the lane
and the street towards which he was on the point of directing his steps.

It was some one, a man, who had evidently just been posted there, and
who was barring the passage and waiting.

Jean Valjean recoiled.

The point of Paris where Jean Valjean found himself, situated between
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and la Râpée, is one of those which recent
improvements have transformed from top to bottom,--resulting in
disfigurement according to some, and in a transfiguration according to
others. The market-gardens, the timber-yards, and the old buildings
have been effaced. To-day, there are brand-new, wide streets, arenas,
circuses, hippodromes, railway stations, and a prison, Mazas, there;
progress, as the reader sees, with its antidote.

Half a century ago, in that ordinary, popular tongue, which is all
compounded of traditions, which persists in calling the Institut _les
Quatre-Nations_, and the Opera-Comique _Feydeau_, the precise spot
whither Jean Valjean had arrived was called _le Petit Picpus_. The
Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Paris, the Barrière des Sergents, the
Porcherons, la Galiote, les Célestins, les Capucins, le Mail, la Bourbe,
l'Arbre de Cracovie, la Petite-Pologne--these are the names of old Paris
which survive amid the new. The memory of the populace hovers over these
relics of the past.

Le Petit-Picpus, which, moreover, hardly ever had any existence, and
never was more than the outline of a quarter, had nearly the monkish
aspect of a Spanish town. The roads were not much paved; the streets
were not much built up. With the exception of the two or three streets,
of which we shall presently speak, all was wall and solitude there. Not
a shop, not a vehicle, hardly a candle lighted here and there in the
windows; all lights extinguished after ten o'clock. Gardens, convents,
timber-yards, marshes; occasional lowly dwellings and great walls as
high as the houses.

Such was this quarter in the last century. The Revolution snubbed
it soundly. The republican government demolished and cut through it.
Rubbish shoots were established there. Thirty years ago, this quarter
was disappearing under the erasing process of new buildings. To-day,
it has been utterly blotted out. The Petit-Picpus, of which no existing
plan has preserved a trace, is indicated with sufficient clearness
in the plan of 1727, published at Paris by Denis Thierry, Rue
Saint-Jacques, opposite the Rue du Plâtre; and at Lyons, by Jean Girin,
Rue Mercière, at the sign of Prudence. Petit-Picpus had, as we have
just mentioned, a Y of streets, formed by the Rue du
Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which spread out in two branches, taking on
the left the name of Little Picpus Street, and on the right the name of
the Rue Polonceau. The two limbs of the Y were connected at the apex
as by a bar; this bar was called Rue Droit-Mur. The Rue Polonceau ended
there; Rue Petit-Picpus passed on, and ascended towards the Lenoir
market. A person coming from the Seine reached the extremity of the Rue
Polonceau, and had on his right the Rue Droit-Mur, turning abruptly at a
right angle, in front of him the wall of that street, and on his right a
truncated prolongation of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had no issue and was
called the Cul-de-Sac Genrot.

It was here that Jean Valjean stood.

As we have just said, on catching sight of that black silhouette
standing on guard at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur and the Rue
Petit-Picpus, he recoiled. There could be no doubt of it. That phantom
was lying in wait for him.

What was he to do?

The time for retreating was passed. That which he had perceived in
movement an instant before, in the distant darkness, was Javert and his
squad without a doubt. Javert was probably already at the commencement
of the street at whose end Jean Valjean stood. Javert, to all
appearances, was acquainted with this little labyrinth, and had taken
his precautions by sending one of his men to guard the exit. These
surmises, which so closely resembled proofs, whirled suddenly, like a
handful of dust caught up by an unexpected gust of wind, through Jean
Valjean's mournful brain. He examined the Cul-de-Sac Genrot; there he
was cut off. He examined the Rue Petit-Picpus; there stood a sentinel.
He saw that black form standing out in relief against the white
pavement, illuminated by the moon; to advance was to fall into this
man's hands; to retreat was to fling himself into Javert's arms. Jean
Valjean felt himself caught, as in a net, which was slowly contracting;
he gazed heavenward in despair.



CHAPTER IV--THE GROPINGS OF FLIGHT

In order to understand what follows, it is requisite to form an exact
idea of the Droit-Mur lane, and, in particular, of the angle which one
leaves on the left when one emerges from the Rue Polonceau into this
lane. Droit-Mur lane was almost entirely bordered on the right, as far
as the Rue Petit-Picpus, by houses of mean aspect; on the left by a
solitary building of severe outlines, composed of numerous parts which
grew gradually higher by a story or two as they approached the Rue
Petit-Picpus side; so that this building, which was very lofty on the
Rue Petit-Picpus side, was tolerably low on the side adjoining the Rue
Polonceau. There, at the angle of which we have spoken, it descended to
such a degree that it consisted of merely a wall. This wall did not abut
directly on the street; it formed a deeply retreating niche, concealed
by its two corners from two observers who might have been, one in the
Rue Polonceau, the other in the Rue Droit-Mur.

Beginning with these angles of the niche, the wall extended along the
Rue Polonceau as far as a house which bore the number 49, and along the
Rue Droit-Mur, where the fragment was much shorter, as far as the gloomy
building which we have mentioned and whose gable it intersected, thus
forming another retreating angle in the street. This gable was sombre
of aspect; only one window was visible, or, to speak more correctly, two
shutters covered with a sheet of zinc and kept constantly closed.

The state of the places of which we are here giving a description is
rigorously exact, and will certainly awaken a very precise memory in the
mind of old inhabitants of the quarter.

The niche was entirely filled by a thing which resembled a colossal
and wretched door; it was a vast, formless assemblage of perpendicular
planks, the upper ones being broader than the lower, bound together by
long transverse strips of iron. At one side there was a carriage gate of
the ordinary dimensions, and which had evidently not been cut more than
fifty years previously.

A linden-tree showed its crest above the niche, and the wall was covered
with ivy on the side of the Rue Polonceau.

In the imminent peril in which Jean Valjean found himself, this sombre
building had about it a solitary and uninhabited look which tempted him.
He ran his eyes rapidly over it; he said to himself, that if he could
contrive to get inside it, he might save himself. First he conceived an
idea, then a hope.

In the central portion of the front of this building, on the Rue
Droit-Mur side, there were at all the windows of the different stories
ancient cistern pipes of lead. The various branches of the pipes which
led from one central pipe to all these little basins sketched out a sort
of tree on the front. These ramifications of pipes with their hundred
elbows imitated those old leafless vine-stocks which writhe over the
fronts of old farm-houses.

This odd espalier, with its branches of lead and iron, was the first
thing that struck Jean Valjean. He seated Cosette with her back against
a stone post, with an injunction to be silent, and ran to the spot where
the conduit touched the pavement. Perhaps there was some way of climbing
up by it and entering the house. But the pipe was dilapidated and past
service, and hardly hung to its fastenings. Moreover, all the windows
of this silent dwelling were grated with heavy iron bars, even the attic
windows in the roof. And then, the moon fell full upon that façade, and
the man who was watching at the corner of the street would have seen
Jean Valjean in the act of climbing. And finally, what was to be done
with Cosette? How was she to be drawn up to the top of a three-story
house?

He gave up all idea of climbing by means of the drain-pipe, and crawled
along the wall to get back into the Rue Polonceau.

When he reached the slant of the wall where he had left Cosette, he
noticed that no one could see him there. As we have just explained, he
was concealed from all eyes, no matter from which direction they were
approaching; besides this, he was in the shadow. Finally, there were
two doors; perhaps they might be forced. The wall above which he saw the
linden-tree and the ivy evidently abutted on a garden where he could, at
least, hide himself, although there were as yet no leaves on the trees,
and spend the remainder of the night.

Time was passing; he must act quickly.

He felt over the carriage door, and immediately recognized the fact that
it was impracticable outside and in.

He approached the other door with more hope; it was frightfully
decrepit; its very immensity rendered it less solid; the planks were
rotten; the iron bands--there were only three of them--were rusted. It
seemed as though it might be possible to pierce this worm-eaten barrier.

On examining it he found that the door was not a door; it had neither
hinges, cross-bars, lock, nor fissure in the middle; the iron bands
traversed it from side to side without any break. Through the crevices
in the planks he caught a view of unhewn slabs and blocks of stone
roughly cemented together, which passers-by might still have seen there
ten years ago. He was forced to acknowledge with consternation that this
apparent door was simply the wooden decoration of a building against
which it was placed. It was easy to tear off a plank; but then, one
found one's self face to face with a wall.



CHAPTER V--WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GAS LANTERNS

At that moment a heavy and measured sound began to be audible at some
distance. Jean Valjean risked a glance round the corner of the street.
Seven or eight soldiers, drawn up in a platoon, had just debouched
into the Rue Polonceau. He saw the gleam of their bayonets. They were
advancing towards him; these soldiers, at whose head he distinguished
Javert's tall figure, advanced slowly and cautiously. They halted
frequently; it was plain that they were searching all the nooks of the
walls and all the embrasures of the doors and alleys.

This was some patrol that Javert had encountered--there could be no
mistake as to this surmise--and whose aid he had demanded.

Javert's two acolytes were marching in their ranks.

At the rate at which they were marching, and in consideration of the
halts which they were making, it would take them about a quarter of
an hour to reach the spot where Jean Valjean stood. It was a frightful
moment. A few minutes only separated Jean Valjean from that terrible
precipice which yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys
now meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him forever; that is
to say, a life resembling the interior of a tomb.

There was but one thing which was possible.

Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say,
two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other
the redoubtable talents of a convict. He rummaged in the one or the
other, according to circumstances.

Among his other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes from the
prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a past master in the
incredible art of crawling up without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer
muscular force, by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his
hips, and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of the
stone, in the right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need
be; an art which has rendered so celebrated and so alarming that corner
of the wall of the Conciergerie of Paris by which Battemolle, condemned
to death, made his escape twenty years ago.

Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he espied the
linden; it was about eighteen feet in height. The angle which it formed
with the gable of the large building was filled, at its lower extremity,
by a mass of masonry of a triangular shape, probably intended to
preserve that too convenient corner from the rubbish of those dirty
creatures called the passers-by. This practice of filling up corners of
the wall is much in use in Paris.

This mass was about five feet in height; the space above the summit of
this mass which it was necessary to climb was not more than fourteen
feet.

The wall was surmounted by a flat stone without a coping.

Cosette was the difficulty, for she did not know how to climb a wall.
Should he abandon her? Jean Valjean did not once think of that. It
was impossible to carry her. A man's whole strength is required to
successfully carry out these singular ascents. The least burden would
disturb his centre of gravity and pull him downwards.

A rope would have been required; Jean Valjean had none. Where was he to
get a rope at midnight, in the Rue Polonceau? Certainly, if Jean Valjean
had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope at that moment.

All extreme situations have their lightning flashes which sometimes
dazzle, sometimes illuminate us.

Jean Valjean's despairing glance fell on the street lantern-post of the
blind alley Genrot.

At that epoch there were no gas-jets in the streets of Paris. At
nightfall lanterns placed at regular distances were lighted; they were
ascended and descended by means of a rope, which traversed the street
from side to side, and was adjusted in a groove of the post. The pulley
over which this rope ran was fastened underneath the lantern in a little
iron box, the key to which was kept by the lamp-lighter, and the rope
itself was protected by a metal case.

Jean Valjean, with the energy of a supreme struggle, crossed the street
at one bound, entered the blind alley, broke the latch of the little box
with the point of his knife, and an instant later he was beside Cosette
once more. He had a rope. These gloomy inventors of expedients work
rapidly when they are fighting against fatality.

We have already explained that the lanterns had not been lighted that
night. The lantern in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot was thus naturally extinct,
like the rest; and one could pass directly under it without even
noticing that it was no longer in its place.

Nevertheless, the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean's
absorption, his singular gestures, his goings and comings, all had begun
to render Cosette uneasy. Any other child than she would have given vent
to loud shrieks long before. She contented herself with plucking Jean
Valjean by the skirt of his coat. They could hear the sound of the
patrol's approach ever more and more distinctly.

"Father," said she, in a very low voice, "I am afraid. Who is coming
yonder?"

"Hush!" replied the unhappy man; "it is Madame Thénardier."

Cosette shuddered. He added:--

"Say nothing. Don't interfere with me. If you cry out, if you weep, the
Thénardier is lying in wait for you. She is coming to take you back."

Then, without haste, but without making a useless movement, with firm
and curt precision, the more remarkable at a moment when the patrol and
Javert might come upon him at any moment, he undid his cravat, passed it
round Cosette's body under the armpits, taking care that it should not
hurt the child, fastened this cravat to one end of the rope, by means of
that knot which seafaring men call a "swallow knot," took the other end
of the rope in his teeth, pulled off his shoes and stockings, which
he threw over the wall, stepped upon the mass of masonry, and began
to raise himself in the angle of the wall and the gable with as much
solidity and certainty as though he had the rounds of a ladder under his
feet and elbows. Half a minute had not elapsed when he was resting on
his knees on the wall.

Cosette gazed at him in stupid amazement, without uttering a word. Jean
Valjean's injunction, and the name of Madame Thénardier, had chilled her
blood.

All at once she heard Jean Valjean's voice crying to her, though in a
very low tone:--

"Put your back against the wall."

She obeyed.

"Don't say a word, and don't be alarmed," went on Jean Valjean.

And she felt herself lifted from the ground.

Before she had time to recover herself, she was on the top of the wall.

Jean Valjean grasped her, put her on his back, took her two tiny hands
in his large left hand, lay down flat on his stomach and crawled along
on top of the wall as far as the cant. As he had guessed, there stood
a building whose roof started from the top of the wooden barricade and
descended to within a very short distance of the ground, with a gentle
slope which grazed the linden-tree. A lucky circumstance, for the wall
was much higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean could
only see the ground at a great depth below him.

He had just reached the slope of the roof, and had not yet left the
crest of the wall, when a violent uproar announced the arrival of the
patrol. The thundering voice of Javert was audible:--

"Search the blind alley! The Rue Droit-Mur is guarded! so is the Rue
Petit-Picpus. I'll answer for it that he is in the blind alley."

The soldiers rushed into the Genrot alley.

Jean Valjean allowed himself to slide down the roof, still holding fast
to Cosette, reached the linden-tree, and leaped to the ground. Whether
from terror or courage, Cosette had not breathed a sound, though her
hands were a little abraded.



CHAPTER VI--THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA

Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden which was very vast and
of singular aspect; one of those melancholy gardens which seem made to
be looked at in winter and at night. This garden was oblong in shape,
with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest
trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could
be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled
and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose
glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well. Here and
there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss. The alleys were
bordered with gloomy and very erect little shrubs. The grass had half
taken possession of them, and a green mould covered the rest.

Jean Valjean had beside him the building whose roof had served him as
a means of descent, a pile of fagots, and, behind the fagots, directly
against the wall, a stone statue, whose mutilated face was no longer
anything more than a shapeless mask which loomed vaguely through the
gloom.

The building was a sort of ruin, where dismantled chambers were
distinguishable, one of which, much encumbered, seemed to serve as a
shed.

The large building of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had a wing on the Rue
Petit-Picpus, turned two façades, at right angles, towards this garden.
These interior façades were even more tragic than the exterior. All
the windows were grated. Not a gleam of light was visible at any one of
them. The upper story had scuttles like prisons. One of those façades
cast its shadow on the other, which fell over the garden like an immense
black pall.

No other house was visible. The bottom of the garden was lost in mist
and darkness. Nevertheless, walls could be confusedly made out, which
intersected as though there were more cultivated land beyond, and the
low roofs of the Rue Polonceau.

Nothing more wild and solitary than this garden could be imagined. There
was no one in it, which was quite natural in view of the hour; but it
did not seem as though this spot were made for any one to walk in, even
in broad daylight.

Jean Valjean's first care had been to get hold of his shoes and put them
on again, then to step under the shed with Cosette. A man who is fleeing
never thinks himself sufficiently hidden. The child, whose thoughts were
still on the Thénardier, shared his instinct for withdrawing from sight
as much as possible.

Cosette trembled and pressed close to him. They heard the tumultuous
noise of the patrol searching the blind alley and the streets; the blows
of their gun-stocks against the stones; Javert's appeals to the police
spies whom he had posted, and his imprecations mingled with words which
could not be distinguished.

At the expiration of a quarter of an hour it seemed as though that
species of stormy roar were becoming more distant. Jean Valjean held his
breath.

He had laid his hand lightly on Cosette's mouth.

However, the solitude in which he stood was so strangely calm, that this
frightful uproar, close and furious as it was, did not disturb him by so
much as the shadow of a misgiving. It seemed as though those walls had
been built of the deaf stones of which the Scriptures speak.

All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a
sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been
horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst
of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night;
women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure
accents of virgins and the innocent accents of children,--voices which
are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant
still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded
from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment
when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of
angels was approaching through the gloom.

Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.

They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of
them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that
they must kneel.

These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent
the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in
an uninhabited house.

While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no
longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he
felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.

The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could
not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.

All fell silent again. There was no longer anything in the street;
there was nothing in the garden. That which had menaced, that which had
reassured him,--all had vanished. The breeze swayed a few dry weeds
on the crest of the wall, and they gave out a faint, sweet, melancholy
sound.



CHAPTER VII--CONTINUATION OF THE ENIGMA

The night wind had risen, which indicated that it must be between one
and two o'clock in the morning. Poor Cosette said nothing. As she had
seated herself beside him and leaned her head against him, Jean Valjean
had fancied that she was asleep. He bent down and looked at her.
Cosette's eyes were wide open, and her thoughtful air pained Jean
Valjean.

She was still trembling.

"Are you sleepy?" said Jean Valjean.

"I am very cold," she replied.

A moment later she resumed:--

"Is she still there?"

"Who?" said Jean Valjean.

"Madame Thénardier."

Jean Valjean had already forgotten the means which he had employed to
make Cosette keep silent.

"Ah!" said he, "she is gone. You need fear nothing further."

The child sighed as though a load had been lifted from her breast.

The ground was damp, the shed open on all sides, the breeze grew more
keen every instant. The goodman took off his coat and wrapped it round
Cosette.

"Are you less cold now?" said he.

"Oh, yes, father."

"Well, wait for me a moment. I will soon be back."

He quitted the ruin and crept along the large building, seeking a better
shelter. He came across doors, but they were closed. There were bars at
all the windows of the ground floor.

Just after he had turned the inner angle of the edifice, he observed
that he was coming to some arched windows, where he perceived a light.
He stood on tiptoe and peeped through one of these windows. They all
opened on a tolerably vast hall, paved with large flagstones, cut up
by arcades and pillars, where only a tiny light and great shadows were
visible. The light came from a taper which was burning in one
corner. The apartment was deserted, and nothing was stirring in it.
Nevertheless, by dint of gazing intently he thought he perceived on the
ground something which appeared to be covered with a winding-sheet, and
which resembled a human form. This form was lying face downward, flat
on the pavement, with the arms extended in the form of a cross, in the
immobility of death. One would have said, judging from a sort of serpent
which undulated over the floor, that this sinister form had a rope round
its neck.

The whole chamber was bathed in that mist of places which are sparely
illuminated, which adds to horror.

Jean Valjean often said afterwards, that, although many funereal
spectres had crossed his path in life, he had never beheld anything more
blood-curdling and terrible than that enigmatical form accomplishing
some inexplicable mystery in that gloomy place, and beheld thus at
night. It was alarming to suppose that that thing was perhaps dead; and
still more alarming to think that it was perhaps alive.

He had the courage to plaster his face to the glass, and to watch
whether the thing would move. In spite of his remaining thus what seemed
to him a very long time, the outstretched form made no movement. All
at once he felt himself overpowered by an inexpressible terror, and he
fled. He began to run towards the shed, not daring to look behind him.
It seemed to him, that if he turned his head, he should see that form
following him with great strides and waving its arms.

He reached the ruin all out of breath. His knees were giving way beneath
him; the perspiration was pouring from him.

Where was he? Who could ever have imagined anything like that sort of
sepulchre in the midst of Paris! What was this strange house? An edifice
full of nocturnal mystery, calling to souls through the darkness with
the voice of angels, and when they came, offering them abruptly that
terrible vision; promising to open the radiant portals of heaven, and
then opening the horrible gates of the tomb! And it actually was an
edifice, a house, which bore a number on the street! It was not a dream!
He had to touch the stones to convince himself that such was the fact.

Cold, anxiety, uneasiness, the emotions of the night, had given him a
genuine fever, and all these ideas were clashing together in his brain.

He stepped up to Cosette. She was asleep.



CHAPTER VIII--THE ENIGMA BECOMES DOUBLY MYSTERIOUS

The child had laid her head on a stone and fallen asleep.

He sat down beside her and began to think. Little by little, as he gazed
at her, he grew calm and regained possession of his freedom of mind.

He clearly perceived this truth, the foundation of his life henceforth,
that so long as she was there, so long as he had her near him, he should
need nothing except for her, he should fear nothing except for her. He
was not even conscious that he was very cold, since he had taken off his
coat to cover her.

Nevertheless, athwart this revery into which he had fallen he had heard
for some time a peculiar noise. It was like the tinkling of a bell. This
sound proceeded from the garden. It could be heard distinctly though
faintly. It resembled the faint, vague music produced by the bells of
cattle at night in the pastures.

This noise made Valjean turn round.

He looked and saw that there was some one in the garden.

A being resembling a man was walking amid the bell-glasses of the melon
beds, rising, stooping, halting, with regular movements, as though he
were dragging or spreading out something on the ground. This person
appeared to limp.

Jean Valjean shuddered with the continual tremor of the unhappy. For
them everything is hostile and suspicious. They distrust the day
because it enables people to see them, and the night because it aids
in surprising them. A little while before he had shivered because the
garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there was some one
there.

He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said to himself
that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken their departure; that
they had, no doubt, left people on the watch in the street; that if this
man should discover him in the garden, he would cry out for help against
thieves and deliver him up. He took the sleeping Cosette gently in his
arms and carried her behind a heap of old furniture, which was out of
use, in the most remote corner of the shed. Cosette did not stir.

From that point he scrutinized the appearance of the being in the
melon patch. The strange thing about it was, that the sound of the bell
followed each of this man's movements. When the man approached, the
sound approached; when the man retreated, the sound retreated; if he
made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied the gesture; when he
halted, the sound ceased. It appeared evident that the bell was attached
to that man; but what could that signify? Who was this man who had a
bell suspended about him like a ram or an ox?

As he put these questions to himself, he touched Cosette's hands. They
were icy cold.

"Ah! good God!" he cried.

He spoke to her in a low voice:--

"Cosette!"

She did not open her eyes.

He shook her vigorously.

She did not wake.

"Is she dead?" he said to himself, and sprang to his feet, quivering
from head to foot.

The most frightful thoughts rushed pell-mell through his mind. There
are moments when hideous surmises assail us like a cohort of furies, and
violently force the partitions of our brains. When those we love are in
question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. He remembered that
sleep in the open air on a cold night may be fatal.

Cosette was pale, and had fallen at full length on the ground at his
feet, without a movement.

He listened to her breathing: she still breathed, but with a respiration
which seemed to him weak and on the point of extinction.

How was he to warm her back to life? How was he to rouse her? All that
was not connected with this vanished from his thoughts. He rushed wildly
from the ruin.

It was absolutely necessary that Cosette should be in bed and beside a
fire in less than a quarter of an hour.



CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL

He walked straight up to the man whom he saw in the garden. He had taken
in his hand the roll of silver which was in the pocket of his waistcoat.

The man's head was bent down, and he did not see him approaching. In a
few strides Jean Valjean stood beside him.

Jean Valjean accosted him with the cry:--

"One hundred francs!"

The man gave a start and raised his eyes.

"You can earn a hundred francs," went on Jean Valjean, "if you will
grant me shelter for this night."

The moon shone full upon Jean Valjean's terrified countenance.

"What! so it is you, Father Madeleine!" said the man.

That name, thus pronounced, at that obscure hour, in that unknown spot,
by that strange man, made Jean Valjean start back.

He had expected anything but that. The person who thus addressed him was
a bent and lame old man, dressed almost like a peasant, who wore on his
left knee a leather knee-cap, whence hung a moderately large bell. His
face, which was in the shadow, was not distinguishable.

However, the goodman had removed his cap, and exclaimed, trembling all
over:--

"Ah, good God! How come you here, Father Madeleine? Where did you enter?
Dieu-Jésus! Did you fall from heaven? There is no trouble about that:
if ever you do fall, it will be from there. And what a state you are in!
You have no cravat; you have no hat; you have no coat! Do you know, you
would have frightened any one who did not know you? No coat! Lord God!
Are the saints going mad nowadays? But how did you get in here?"

His words tumbled over each other. The goodman talked with a rustic
volubility, in which there was nothing alarming. All this was uttered
with a mixture of stupefaction and _naïve_ kindliness.

"Who are you? and what house is this?" demanded Jean Valjean.

"Ah! pardieu, this is too much!" exclaimed the old man. "I am the person
for whom you got the place here, and this house is the one where you had
me placed. What! You don't recognize me?"

"No," said Jean Valjean; "and how happens it that you know me?"

"You saved my life," said the man.

He turned. A ray of moonlight outlined his profile, and Jean Valjean
recognized old Fauchelevent.

"Ah!" said Jean Valjean, "so it is you? Yes, I recollect you."

"That is very lucky," said the old man, in a reproachful tone.

"And what are you doing here?" resumed Jean Valjean.

"Why, I am covering my melons, of course!"

In fact, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, old Fauchelevent
held in his hand the end of a straw mat which he was occupied in
spreading over the melon bed. During the hour or thereabouts that he had
been in the garden he had already spread out a number of them. It was
this operation which had caused him to execute the peculiar movements
observed from the shed by Jean Valjean.

He continued:--

"I said to myself, 'The moon is bright: it is going to freeze. What if I
were to put my melons into their greatcoats?' And," he added, looking at
Jean Valjean with a broad smile,--"pardieu! you ought to have done the
same! But how do you come here?"

Jean Valjean, finding himself known to this man, at least only under the
name of Madeleine, thenceforth advanced only with caution. He multiplied
his questions. Strange to say, their rôles seemed to be reversed. It was
he, the intruder, who interrogated.

"And what is this bell which you wear on your knee?"

"This," replied Fauchelevent, "is so that I may be avoided."

"What! so that you may be avoided?"

Old Fauchelevent winked with an indescribable air.

"Ah, goodness! there are only women in this house--many young girls. It
appears that I should be a dangerous person to meet. The bell gives them
warning. When I come, they go."

"What house is this?"

"Come, you know well enough."

"But I do not."

"Not when you got me the place here as gardener?"

"Answer me as though I knew nothing."

"Well, then, this is the Petit-Picpus convent."

Memories recurred to Jean Valjean. Chance, that is to say, Providence,
had cast him into precisely that convent in the Quartier Saint-Antoine
where old Fauchelevent, crippled by the fall from his cart, had been
admitted on his recommendation two years previously. He repeated, as
though talking to himself:--

"The Petit-Picpus convent."

"Exactly," returned old Fauchelevent. "But to come to the point, how the
deuce did you manage to get in here, you, Father Madeleine? No matter if
you are a saint; you are a man as well, and no man enters here."

"You certainly are here."

"There is no one but me."

"Still," said Jean Valjean, "I must stay here."

"Ah, good God!" cried Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean drew near to the old man, and said to him in a grave
voice:--

"Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life."

"I was the first to recall it," returned Fauchelevent.

"Well, you can do to-day for me that which I did for you in the olden
days."

Fauchelevent took in his aged, trembling, and wrinkled hands Jean
Valjean's two robust hands, and stood for several minutes as though
incapable of speaking. At length he exclaimed:--

"Oh! that would be a blessing from the good God, if I could make you
some little return for that! Save your life! Monsieur le Maire, dispose
of the old man!"

A wonderful joy had transfigured this old man. His countenance seemed to
emit a ray of light.

"What do you wish me to do?" he resumed.

"That I will explain to you. You have a chamber?"

"I have an isolated hovel yonder, behind the ruins of the old convent,
in a corner which no one ever looks into. There are three rooms in it."

The hut was, in fact, so well hidden behind the ruins, and so cleverly
arranged to prevent it being seen, that Jean Valjean had not perceived
it.

"Good," said Jean Valjean. "Now I am going to ask two things of you."

"What are they, Mr. Mayor?"

"In the first place, you are not to tell any one what you know about me.
In the second, you are not to try to find out anything more."

"As you please. I know that you can do nothing that is not honest,
that you have always been a man after the good God's heart. And then,
moreover, you it was who placed me here. That concerns you. I am at your
service."

"That is settled then. Now, come with me. We will go and get the child."

"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "so there is a child?"

He added not a word further, and followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows
his master.

Less than half an hour afterwards Cosette, who had grown rosy again
before the flame of a good fire, was lying asleep in the old gardener's
bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat once more; his hat,
which he had flung over the wall, had been found and picked up. While
Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had removed the
bell and kneecap, which now hung on a nail beside a vintage basket that
adorned the wall. The two men were warming themselves with their elbows
resting on a table upon which Fauchelevent had placed a bit of cheese,
black bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man was
saying to Jean Valjean, as he laid his hand on the latter's knee:
"Ah! Father Madeleine! You did not recognize me immediately; you save
people's lives, and then you forget them! That is bad! But they remember
you! You are an ingrate!"



CHAPTER X--WHICH EXPLAINS HOW JAVERT GOT ON THE SCENT

The events of which we have just beheld the reverse side, so to speak,
had come about in the simplest possible manner.

When Jean Valjean, on the evening of the very day when Javert had
arrested him beside Fantine's death-bed, had escaped from the town jail
of M. sur M., the police had supposed that he had betaken himself to
Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything
disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea. No
forest hides a man as does that crowd. Fugitives of every sort know
this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save. The
police know it also, and it is in Paris that they seek what they
have lost elsewhere. They sought the ex-mayor of M. sur M. Javert was
summoned to Paris to throw light on their researches. Javert had, in
fact, rendered powerful assistance in the recapture of Jean Valjean.
Javert's zeal and intelligence on that occasion had been remarked by
M. Chabouillet, secretary of the Prefecture under Comte Anglès. M.
Chabouillet, who had, moreover, already been Javert's patron, had the
inspector of M. sur M. attached to the police force of Paris. There
Javert rendered himself useful in divers and, though the word may seem
strange for such services, honorable manners.

He no longer thought of Jean Valjean,--the wolf of to-day causes these
dogs who are always on the chase to forget the wolf of yesterday,--when,
in December, 1823, he read a newspaper, he who never read newspapers;
but Javert, a monarchical man, had a desire to know the particulars of
the triumphal entry of the "Prince Generalissimo" into Bayonne. Just as
he was finishing the article, which interested him; a name, the name of
Jean Valjean, attracted his attention at the bottom of a page. The paper
announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead, and published the fact
in such formal terms that Javert did not doubt it. He confined himself
to the remark, "That's a good entry." Then he threw aside the paper, and
thought no more about it.

Some time afterwards, it chanced that a police report was transmitted
from the prefecture of the Seine-et-Oise to the prefecture of police in
Paris, concerning the abduction of a child, which had taken place, under
peculiar circumstances, as it was said, in the commune of Montfermeil.
A little girl of seven or eight years of age, the report said, who had
been intrusted by her mother to an inn-keeper of that neighborhood, had
been stolen by a stranger; this child answered to the name of Cosette,
and was the daughter of a girl named Fantine, who had died in the
hospital, it was not known where or when.

This report came under Javert's eye and set him to thinking.

The name of Fantine was well known to him. He remembered that Jean
Valjean had made him, Javert, burst into laughter, by asking him for a
respite of three days, for the purpose of going to fetch that creature's
child. He recalled the fact that Jean Valjean had been arrested in Paris
at the very moment when he was stepping into the coach for Montfermeil.
Some signs had made him suspect at the time that this was the second
occasion of his entering that coach, and that he had already, on the
previous day, made an excursion to the neighborhood of that village, for
he had not been seen in the village itself. What had he been intending
to do in that region of Montfermeil? It could not even be surmised.
Javert understood it now. Fantine's daughter was there. Jean Valjean was
going there in search of her. And now this child had been stolen by a
stranger! Who could that stranger be? Could it be Jean Valjean? But Jean
Valjean was dead. Javert, without saying anything to anybody, took the
coach from the _Pewter Platter_, Cul-de-Sac de la Planchette, and made a
trip to Montfermeil.

He expected to find a great deal of light on the subject there; he found
a great deal of obscurity.

For the first few days the Thénardiers had chattered in their rage. The
disappearance of the Lark had created a sensation in the village. He
immediately obtained numerous versions of the story, which ended in the
abduction of a child. Hence the police report. But their first vexation
having passed off, Thénardier, with his wonderful instinct, had
very quickly comprehended that it is never advisable to stir up the
prosecutor of the Crown, and that his complaints with regard to the
_abduction_ of Cosette would have as their first result to fix upon
himself, and upon many dark affairs which he had on hand, the glittering
eye of justice. The last thing that owls desire is to have a candle
brought to them. And in the first place, how explain the fifteen hundred
francs which he had received? He turned squarely round, put a gag on
his wife's mouth, and feigned astonishment when the _stolen child_
was mentioned to him. He understood nothing about it; no doubt he had
grumbled for awhile at having that dear little creature "taken from him"
so hastily; he should have liked to keep her two or three days longer,
out of tenderness; but her "grandfather" had come for her in the most
natural way in the world. He added the "grandfather," which produced a
good effect. This was the story that Javert hit upon when he arrived at
Montfermeil. The grandfather caused Jean Valjean to vanish.

Nevertheless, Javert dropped a few questions, like plummets, into
Thénardier's history. "Who was that grandfather? and what was his name?"
Thénardier replied with simplicity: "He is a wealthy farmer. I saw his
passport. I think his name was M. Guillaume Lambert."

Lambert is a respectable and extremely reassuring name. Thereupon Javert
returned to Paris.

"Jean Valjean is certainly dead," said he, "and I am a ninny."

He had again begun to forget this history, when, in the course of
March, 1824, he heard of a singular personage who dwelt in the parish of
Saint-Médard and who had been surnamed "the mendicant who gives alms."
This person, the story ran, was a man of means, whose name no one knew
exactly, and who lived alone with a little girl of eight years, who
knew nothing about herself, save that she had come from Montfermeil.
Montfermeil! that name was always coming up, and it made Javert prick
up his ears. An old beggar police spy, an ex-beadle, to whom this person
had given alms, added a few more details. This gentleman of property was
very shy,--never coming out except in the evening, speaking to no one,
except, occasionally to the poor, and never allowing any one to approach
him. He wore a horrible old yellow frock-coat, which was worth many
millions, being all wadded with bank-bills. This piqued Javert's
curiosity in a decided manner. In order to get a close look at this
fantastic gentleman without alarming him, he borrowed the beadle's
outfit for a day, and the place where the old spy was in the habit of
crouching every evening, whining orisons through his nose, and playing
the spy under cover of prayer.

"The suspected individual" did indeed approach Javert thus disguised,
and bestow alms on him. At that moment Javert raised his head, and the
shock which Jean Valjean received on recognizing Javert was equal to the
one received by Javert when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean.

However, the darkness might have misled him; Jean Valjean's death was
official; Javert cherished very grave doubts; and when in doubt, Javert,
the man of scruples, never laid a finger on any one's collar.

He followed his man to the Gorbeau house, and got "the old woman" to
talking, which was no difficult matter. The old woman confirmed the fact
regarding the coat lined with millions, and narrated to him the episode
of the thousand-franc bill. She had seen it! She had handled it! Javert
hired a room; that evening he installed himself in it. He came and
listened at the mysterious lodger's door, hoping to catch the sound of
his voice, but Jean Valjean saw his candle through the key-hole, and
foiled the spy by keeping silent.

On the following day Jean Valjean decamped; but the noise made by the
fall of the five-franc piece was noticed by the old woman, who, hearing
the rattling of coin, suspected that he might be intending to leave, and
made haste to warn Javert. At night, when Jean Valjean came out, Javert
was waiting for him behind the trees of the boulevard with two men.

Javert had demanded assistance at the Prefecture, but he had not
mentioned the name of the individual whom he hoped to seize; that was
his secret, and he had kept it for three reasons: in the first place,
because the slightest indiscretion might put Jean Valjean on the alert;
next, because, to lay hands on an ex-convict who had made his escape
and was reputed dead, on a criminal whom justice had formerly classed
forever as _among malefactors of the most dangerous sort_, was a
magnificent success which the old members of the Parisian police would
assuredly not leave to a new-comer like Javert, and he was afraid of
being deprived of his convict; and lastly, because Javert, being an
artist, had a taste for the unforeseen. He hated those well-heralded
successes which are talked of long in advance and have had the bloom
brushed off. He preferred to elaborate his masterpieces in the dark and
to unveil them suddenly at the last.

Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then from corner
to corner of the street, and had not lost sight of him for a single
instant; even at the moments when Jean Valjean believed himself to
be the most secure Javert's eye had been on him. Why had not Javert
arrested Jean Valjean? Because he was still in doubt.

It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely
at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests
denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and
had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty
was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake;
the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal. The
reader can imagine the effect which this brief paragraph, reproduced
by twenty newspapers, would have caused in Paris: "Yesterday, an aged
grandfather, with white hair, a respectable and well-to-do gentleman,
who was walking with his grandchild, aged eight, was arrested and
conducted to the agency of the Prefecture as an escaped convict!"

Let us repeat in addition that Javert had scruples of his own;
injunctions of his conscience were added to the injunctions of the
prefect. He was really in doubt.

Jean Valjean turned his back on him and walked in the dark.

Sadness, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, this fresh misfortune of being
forced to flee by night, to seek a chance refuge in Paris for Cosette
and himself, the necessity of regulating his pace to the pace of
the child--all this, without his being aware of it, had altered Jean
Valjean's walk, and impressed on his bearing such senility, that the
police themselves, incarnate in the person of Javert, might, and did in
fact, make a mistake. The impossibility of approaching too close, his
costume of an _émigré_ preceptor, the declaration of Thénardier which
made a grandfather of him, and, finally, the belief in his death in
prison, added still further to the uncertainty which gathered thick in
Javert's mind.

For an instant it occurred to him to make an abrupt demand for his
papers; but if the man was not Jean Valjean, and if this man was not a
good, honest old fellow living on his income, he was probably some merry
blade deeply and cunningly implicated in the obscure web of Parisian
misdeeds, some chief of a dangerous band, who gave alms to conceal
his other talents, which was an old dodge. He had trusty fellows,
accomplices' retreats in case of emergencies, in which he would, no
doubt, take refuge. All these turns which he was making through the
streets seemed to indicate that he was not a simple and honest man. To
arrest him too hastily would be "to kill the hen that laid the golden
eggs." Where was the inconvenience in waiting? Javert was very sure that
he would not escape.

Thus he proceeded in a tolerably perplexed state of mind, putting to
himself a hundred questions about this enigmatical personage.

It was only quite late in the Rue de Pontoise, that, thanks to the
brilliant light thrown from a dram-shop, he decidedly recognized Jean
Valjean.

There are in this world two beings who give a profound start,--the
mother who recovers her child and the tiger who recovers his prey.
Javert gave that profound start.

As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable
convict, he perceived that there were only three of them, and he asked
for reinforcements at the police station of the Rue de Pontoise. One
puts on gloves before grasping a thorn cudgel.

This delay and the halt at the Carrefour Rollin to consult with his
agents came near causing him to lose the trail. He speedily divined,
however, that Jean Valjean would want to put the river between his
pursuers and himself. He bent his head and reflected like a blood-hound
who puts his nose to the ground to make sure that he is on the right
scent. Javert, with his powerful rectitude of instinct, went straight to
the bridge of Austerlitz. A word with the toll-keeper furnished him with
the information which he required: "Have you seen a man with a little
girl?" "I made him pay two sous," replied the toll-keeper. Javert
reached the bridge in season to see Jean Valjean traverse the small
illuminated spot on the other side of the water, leading Cosette by
the hand. He saw him enter the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine; he
remembered the Cul-de-Sac Genrot arranged there like a trap, and of the
sole exit of the Rue Droit-Mur into the Rue Petit-Picpus. _He made sure
of his back burrows_, as huntsmen say; he hastily despatched one of his
agents, by a roundabout way, to guard that issue. A patrol which was
returning to the Arsenal post having passed him, he made a requisition
on it, and caused it to accompany him. In such games soldiers are aces.
Moreover, the principle is, that in order to get the best of a wild
boar, one must employ the science of venery and plenty of dogs. These
combinations having been effected, feeling that Jean Valjean was caught
between the blind alley Genrot on the right, his agent on the left, and
himself, Javert, in the rear, he took a pinch of snuff.

Then he began the game. He experienced one ecstatic and infernal moment;
he allowed his man to go on ahead, knowing that he had him safe, but
desirous of postponing the moment of arrest as long as possible, happy
at the thought that he was taken and yet at seeing him free, gloating
over him with his gaze, with that voluptuousness of the spider which
allows the fly to flutter, and of the cat which lets the mouse run.
Claws and talons possess a monstrous sensuality,--the obscure movements
of the creature imprisoned in their pincers. What a delight this
strangling is!

Javert was enjoying himself. The meshes of his net were stoutly knotted.
He was sure of success; all he had to do now was to close his hand.

Accompanied as he was, the very idea of resistance was impossible,
however vigorous, energetic, and desperate Jean Valjean might be.

Enlarge


Javert advanced slowly, sounding, searching on his way all the nooks of
the street like so many pockets of thieves.

When he reached the centre of the web he found the fly no longer there.

His exasperation can be imagined.

He interrogated his sentinel of the Rues Droit-Mur and Petit-Picpus;
that agent, who had remained imperturbably at his post, had not seen the
man pass.

It sometimes happens that a stag is lost head and horns; that is to
say, he escapes although he has the pack on his very heels, and then the
oldest huntsmen know not what to say. Duvivier, Ligniville, and Desprez
halt short. In a discomfiture of this sort, Artonge exclaims, "It was
not a stag, but a sorcerer." Javert would have liked to utter the same
cry.

His disappointment bordered for a moment on despair and rage.

It is certain that Napoleon made mistakes during the war with Russia,
that Alexander committed blunders in the war in India, that Cæsar made
mistakes in the war in Africa, that Cyrus was at fault in the war
in Scythia, and that Javert blundered in this campaign against Jean
Valjean. He was wrong, perhaps, in hesitating in his recognition of the
exconvict. The first glance should have sufficed him. He was wrong in
not arresting him purely and simply in the old building; he was wrong
in not arresting him when he positively recognized him in the Rue de
Pontoise. He was wrong in taking counsel with his auxiliaries in the
full light of the moon in the Carrefour Rollin. Advice is certainly
useful; it is a good thing to know and to interrogate those of the dogs
who deserve confidence; but the hunter cannot be too cautious when he is
chasing uneasy animals like the wolf and the convict. Javert, by taking
too much thought as to how he should set the bloodhounds of the pack on
the trail, alarmed the beast by giving him wind of the dart, and so
made him run. Above all, he was wrong in that after he had picked up the
scent again on the bridge of Austerlitz, he played that formidable and
puerile game of keeping such a man at the end of a thread. He thought
himself stronger than he was, and believed that he could play at the
game of the mouse and the lion. At the same time, he reckoned himself
as too weak, when he judged it necessary to obtain reinforcement. Fatal
precaution, waste of precious time! Javert committed all these blunders,
and none the less was one of the cleverest and most correct spies that
ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what is called in
venery a _knowing dog_. But what is there that is perfect?

Great strategists have their eclipses.

The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of
a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take all the
petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after
the other, and you say, "That is all there is of it!" Braid them, twist
them together; the result is enormous: it is Attila hesitating between
Marcian on the east and Valentinian on the west; it is Hannibal tarrying
at Capua; it is Danton falling asleep at Arcis-sur-Aube.

However that may be, even at the moment when he saw that Jean Valjean
had escaped him, Javert did not lose his head. Sure that the convict who
had broken his ban could not be far off, he established sentinels, he
organized traps and ambuscades, and beat the quarter all that night. The
first thing he saw was the disorder in the street lantern whose rope
had been cut. A precious sign which, however, led him astray, since it
caused him to turn all his researches in the direction of the Cul-de-Sac
Genrot. In this blind alley there were tolerably low walls which abutted
on gardens whose bounds adjoined the immense stretches of waste land.
Jean Valjean evidently must have fled in that direction. The fact is,
that had he penetrated a little further in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot, he
would probably have done so and have been lost. Javert explored these
gardens and these waste stretches as though he had been hunting for a
needle.

At daybreak he left two intelligent men on the outlook, and returned to
the Prefecture of Police, as much ashamed as a police spy who had been
captured by a robber might have been.



BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS



CHAPTER I--NUMBER 62 RUE PETIT-PICPUS

Nothing, half a century ago, more resembled every other carriage gate
than the carriage gate of Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. This entrance,
which usually stood ajar in the most inviting fashion, permitted a
view of two things, neither of which have anything very funereal about
them,--a courtyard surrounded by walls hung with vines, and the face
of a lounging porter. Above the wall, at the bottom of the court, tall
trees were visible. When a ray of sunlight enlivened the courtyard, when
a glass of wine cheered up the porter, it was difficult to pass Number
62 Little Picpus Street without carrying away a smiling impression of
it. Nevertheless, it was a sombre place of which one had had a glimpse.

The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept.

If one succeeded in passing the porter, which was not easy,--which was
even nearly impossible for every one, for there was an _open sesame!_
which it was necessary to know,--if, the porter once passed, one entered
a little vestibule on the right, on which opened a staircase shut in
between two walls and so narrow that only one person could ascend it at
a time, if one did not allow one's self to be alarmed by a daubing of
canary yellow, with a dado of chocolate which clothed this staircase, if
one ventured to ascend it, one crossed a first landing, then a second,
and arrived on the first story at a corridor where the yellow wash and
the chocolate-hued plinth pursued one with a peaceable persistency.
Staircase and corridor were lighted by two beautiful windows. The
corridor took a turn and became dark. If one doubled this cape, one
arrived a few paces further on, in front of a door which was all the
more mysterious because it was not fastened. If one opened it, one
found one's self in a little chamber about six feet square, tiled,
well-scrubbed, clean, cold, and hung with nankin paper with green
flowers, at fifteen sous the roll. A white, dull light fell from a large
window, with tiny panes, on the left, which usurped the whole width
of the room. One gazed about, but saw no one; one listened, one heard
neither a footstep nor a human murmur. The walls were bare, the chamber
was not furnished; there was not even a chair.

One looked again, and beheld on the wall facing the door a quadrangular
hole, about a foot square, with a grating of interlacing iron bars,
black, knotted, solid, which formed squares--I had almost said
meshes--of less than an inch and a half in diagonal length. The little
green flowers of the nankin paper ran in a calm and orderly manner to
those iron bars, without being startled or thrown into confusion by
their funereal contact. Supposing that a living being had been so
wonderfully thin as to essay an entrance or an exit through the square
hole, this grating would have prevented it. It did not allow the passage
of the body, but it did allow the passage of the eyes; that is to
say, of the mind. This seems to have occurred to them, for it had been
re-enforced by a sheet of tin inserted in the wall a little in the rear,
and pierced with a thousand holes more microscopic than the holes of
a strainer. At the bottom of this plate, an aperture had been pierced
exactly similar to the orifice of a letter box. A bit of tape attached
to a bell-wire hung at the right of the grated opening.

If the tape was pulled, a bell rang, and one heard a voice very near at
hand, which made one start.

"Who is there?" the voice demanded.

It was a woman's voice, a gentle voice, so gentle that it was mournful.

Here, again, there was a magical word which it was necessary to know. If
one did not know it, the voice ceased, the wall became silent once more,
as though the terrified obscurity of the sepulchre had been on the other
side of it.

If one knew the password, the voice resumed, "Enter on the right."

One then perceived on the right, facing the window, a glass door
surmounted by a frame glazed and painted gray. On raising the latch and
crossing the threshold, one experienced precisely the same impression
as when one enters at the theatre into a grated _baignoire_, before the
grating is lowered and the chandelier is lighted. One was, in fact, in
a sort of theatre-box, narrow, furnished with two old chairs, and a
much-frayed straw matting, sparely illuminated by the vague light from
the glass door; a regular box, with its front just of a height to lean
upon, bearing a tablet of black wood. This box was grated, only
the grating of it was not of gilded wood, as at the opera; it was a
monstrous lattice of iron bars, hideously interlaced and riveted to the
wall by enormous fastenings which resembled clenched fists.

The first minutes passed; when one's eyes began to grow used to this
cellar-like half-twilight, one tried to pass the grating, but got no
further than six inches beyond it. There he encountered a barrier of
black shutters, re-enforced and fortified with transverse beams of wood
painted a gingerbread yellow. These shutters were divided into long,
narrow slats, and they masked the entire length of the grating. They
were always closed. At the expiration of a few moments one heard a voice
proceeding from behind these shutters, and saying:--

"I am here. What do you wish with me?"

It was a beloved, sometimes an adored, voice. No one was visible. Hardly
the sound of a breath was audible. It seemed as though it were a spirit
which had been evoked, that was speaking to you across the walls of the
tomb.

If one chanced to be within certain prescribed and very rare conditions,
the slat of one of the shutters opened opposite you; the evoked spirit
became an apparition. Behind the grating, behind the shutter, one
perceived so far as the grating permitted sight, a head, of which only
the mouth and the chin were visible; the rest was covered with a black
veil. One caught a glimpse of a black guimpe, and a form that was barely
defined, covered with a black shroud. That head spoke with you, but did
not look at you and never smiled at you.

The light which came from behind you was adjusted in such a manner that
you saw her in the white, and she saw you in the black. This light was
symbolical.

Nevertheless, your eyes plunged eagerly through that opening which
was made in that place shut off from all glances. A profound vagueness
enveloped that form clad in mourning. Your eyes searched that vagueness,
and sought to make out the surroundings of the apparition. At the
expiration of a very short time you discovered that you could see
nothing. What you beheld was night, emptiness, shadows, a wintry mist
mingled with a vapor from the tomb, a sort of terrible peace, a silence
from which you could gather nothing, not even sighs, a gloom in which
you could distinguish nothing, not even phantoms.

What you beheld was the interior of a cloister.

It was the interior of that severe and gloomy edifice which was called
the Convent of the Bernardines of the Perpetual Adoration. The box in
which you stood was the parlor. The first voice which had addressed you
was that of the portress who always sat motionless and silent, on the
other side of the wall, near the square opening, screened by the iron
grating and the plate with its thousand holes, as by a double visor.
The obscurity which bathed the grated box arose from the fact that the
parlor, which had a window on the side of the world, had none on the
side of the convent. Profane eyes must see nothing of that sacred place.

Nevertheless, there was something beyond that shadow; there was a light;
there was life in the midst of that death. Although this was the most
strictly walled of all convents, we shall endeavor to make our way into
it, and to take the reader in, and to say, without transgressing the
proper bounds, things which story-tellers have never seen, and have,
therefore, never described.



CHAPTER II--THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA

This convent, which in 1824 had already existed for many a long year in
the Rue Petit-Picpus, was a community of Bernardines of the obedience of
Martin Verga.

These Bernardines were attached, in consequence, not to Clairvaux, like
the Bernardine monks, but to Cîteaux, like the Benedictine monks. In
other words, they were the subjects, not of Saint Bernard, but of Saint
Benoît.

Any one who has turned over old folios to any extent knows that Martin
Verga founded in 1425 a congregation of Bernardines-Benedictines,
with Salamanca for the head of the order, and Alcala as the branch
establishment.

This congregation had sent out branches throughout all the Catholic
countries of Europe.

There is nothing unusual in the Latin Church in these grafts of one
order on another. To mention only a single order of Saint-Benoît, which
is here in question: there are attached to this order, without counting
the obedience of Martin Verga, four congregations,--two in Italy,
Mont-Cassin and Sainte-Justine of Padua; two in France, Cluny and
Saint-Maur; and nine orders,--Vallombrosa, Granmont, the Célestins,
the Camaldules, the Carthusians, the Humiliés, the Olivateurs, the
Silvestrins, and lastly, Cîteaux; for Cîteaux itself, a trunk for other
orders, is only an offshoot of Saint-Benoît. Cîteaux dates from Saint
Robert, Abbé de Molesme, in the diocese of Langres, in 1098. Now it was
in 529 that the devil, having retired to the desert of Subiaco--he
was old--had he turned hermit?--was chased from the ancient temple of
Apollo, where he dwelt, by Saint-Benoît, then aged seventeen.

After the rule of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a bit of willow
on their throats, and never sit down, the harshest rule is that of the
Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga. They are clothed in black,
with a guimpe, which, in accordance with the express command of
Saint-Benoît, mounts to the chin. A robe of serge with large sleeves,
a large woollen veil, the guimpe which mounts to the chin cut square on
the breast, the band which descends over their brow to their eyes,--this
is their dress. All is black except the band, which is white. The
novices wear the same habit, but all in white. The professed nuns also
wear a rosary at their side.

The Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga practise the Perpetual
Adoration, like the Benedictines called Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,
who, at the beginning of this century, had two houses in Paris,--one at
the Temple, the other in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. However, the
Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus, of whom we are speaking,
were a totally different order from the Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,
cloistered in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève and at the Temple. There
were numerous differences in their rule; there were some in their
costume. The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus wore the
black guimpe, and the Benedictines of the Holy Sacrament and of the
Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève wore a white one, and had, besides, on their
breasts, a Holy Sacrament about three inches long, in silver gilt or
gilded copper. The nuns of the Petit-Picpus did not wear this Holy
Sacrament. The Perpetual Adoration, which was common to the house of
the Petit-Picpus and to the house of the Temple, leaves those two orders
perfectly distinct. Their only resemblance lies in this practice of the
Ladies of the Holy Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, just
as there existed a similarity in the study and the glorification of
all the mysteries relating to the infancy, the life, and death of Jesus
Christ and the Virgin, between the two orders, which were, nevertheless,
widely separated, and on occasion even hostile. The Oratory of Italy,
established at Florence by Philip de Neri, and the Oratory of France,
established by Pierre de Bérulle. The Oratory of France claimed the
precedence, since Philip de Neri was only a saint, while Bérulle was a
cardinal.

Let us return to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga.

The Bernardines-Benedictines of this obedience fast all the year
round, abstain from meat, fast in Lent and on many other days which are
peculiar to them, rise from their first sleep, from one to three o'clock
in the morning, to read their breviary and chant matins, sleep in all
seasons between serge sheets and on straw, make no use of the bath,
never light a fire, scourge themselves every Friday, observe the rule of
silence, speak to each other only during the recreation hours, which are
very brief, and wear drugget chemises for six months in the year, from
September 14th, which is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, until Easter.
These six months are a modification: the rule says all the year, but
this drugget chemise, intolerable in the heat of summer, produced fevers
and nervous spasms. The use of it had to be restricted. Even with this
palliation, when the nuns put on this chemise on the 14th of September,
they suffer from fever for three or four days. Obedience, poverty,
chastity, perseverance in their seclusion,--these are their vows, which
the rule greatly aggravates.

The prioress is elected for three years by the mothers, who are called
_mères vocales_ because they have a voice in the chapter. A prioress can
only be re-elected twice, which fixes the longest possible reign of a
prioress at nine years.

They never see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them
by a serge curtain nine feet in height. During the sermon, when the
preacher is in the chapel, they drop their veils over their faces. They
must always speak low, walk with their eyes on the ground and their
heads bowed. One man only is allowed to enter the convent,--the
archbishop of the diocese.

There is really one other,--the gardener. But he is always an old man,
and, in order that he may always be alone in the garden, and that the
nuns may be warned to avoid him, a bell is attached to his knee.

Their submission to the prioress is absolute and passive. It is the
canonical subjection in the full force of its abnegation. As at the
voice of Christ, _ut voci Christi_, at a gesture, at the first sign,
_ad nutum, ad primum signum_, immediately, with cheerfulness, with
perseverance, with a certain blind obedience, _prompte, hilariter,
perseveranter et cæca quadam obedientia_, as the file in the hand of
the workman, _quasi limam in manibus fabri_, without power to read or
to write without express permission, _legere vel scribere non addiscerit
sine expressa superioris licentia_.

Each one of them in turn makes what they call _reparation_. The
reparation is the prayer for all the sins, for all the faults, for all
the dissensions, for all the violations, for all the iniquities, for
all the crimes committed on earth. For the space of twelve consecutive
hours, from four o'clock in the afternoon till four o'clock in the
morning, or from four o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the
afternoon, the sister who is making _reparation_ remains on her knees on
the stone before the Holy Sacrament, with hands clasped, a rope around
her neck. When her fatigue becomes unendurable, she prostrates herself
flat on her face against the earth, with her arms outstretched in the
form of a cross; this is her only relief. In this attitude she prays for
all the guilty in the universe. This is great to sublimity.

As this act is performed in front of a post on which burns a candle,
it is called without distinction, _to make reparation_ or _to be at
the post_. The nuns even prefer, out of humility, this last expression,
which contains an idea of torture and abasement.

_To make reparation_ is a function in which the whole soul is absorbed.
The sister at the post would not turn round were a thunderbolt to fall
directly behind her.

Besides this, there is always a sister kneeling before the Holy
Sacrament. This station lasts an hour. They relieve each other like
soldiers on guard. This is the Perpetual Adoration.

The prioresses and the mothers almost always bear names stamped with
peculiar solemnity, recalling, not the saints and martyrs, but moments
in the life of Jesus Christ: as Mother Nativity, Mother Conception,
Mother Presentation, Mother Passion. But the names of saints are not
interdicted.

When one sees them, one never sees anything but their mouths.

All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent.
Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the
loss of one's soul.

They never say _my_. They possess nothing of their own, and they must
not attach themselves to anything. They call everything _our_; thus: our
veil, our chaplet; if they were speaking of their chemise, they
would say _our chemise_. Sometimes they grow attached to some petty
object,--to a book of hours, a relic, a medal that has been blessed. As
soon as they become aware that they are growing attached to this object,
they must give it up. They recall the words of Saint Thérèse, to whom a
great lady said, as she was on the point of entering her order, "Permit
me, mother, to send for a Bible to which I am greatly attached." "Ah,
you are attached to something! In that case, do not enter our order!"

Every person whatever is forbidden to shut herself up, to have _a place
of her own, a chamber_. They live with their cells open. When they meet,
one says, "Blessed and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"
The other responds, "Forever." The same ceremony when one taps at the
other's door. Hardly has she touched the door when a soft voice on the
other side is heard to say hastily, "Forever!" Like all practices, this
becomes mechanical by force of habit; and one sometimes says _forever_
before the other has had time to say the rather long sentence, "Praised
and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar."

Among the Visitandines the one who enters says: "Ave Maria," and the one
whose cell is entered says, "Gratia plena." It is their way of saying
good day, which is in fact full of grace.

At each hour of the day three supplementary strokes sound from the
church bell of the convent. At this signal prioress, vocal mothers,
professed nuns, lay-sisters, novices, postulants, interrupt what they
are saying, what they are doing, or what they are thinking, and all say
in unison if it is five o'clock, for instance, "At five o'clock and at
all hours praised and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"
If it is eight o'clock, "At eight o'clock and at all hours!" and so on,
according to the hour.

This custom, the object of which is to break the thread of thought
and to lead it back constantly to God, exists in many communities; the
formula alone varies. Thus at The Infant Jesus they say, "At this
hour and at every hour may the love of Jesus kindle my heart!" The
Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago at
Petit-Picpus, chant the offices to a solemn psalmody, a pure Gregorian
chant, and always with full voice during the whole course of the office.
Everywhere in the missal where an asterisk occurs they pause, and say in
a low voice, "Jesus-Marie-Joseph." For the office of the dead they adopt
a tone so low that the voices of women can hardly descend to such a
depth. The effect produced is striking and tragic.

The nuns of the Petit-Picpus had made a vault under their grand altar
for the burial of their community. _The Government_, as they say, does
not permit this vault to receive coffins so they leave the convent when
they die. This is an affliction to them, and causes them consternation
as an infraction of the rules.

They had obtained a mediocre consolation at best,--permission to be
interred at a special hour and in a special corner in the ancient
Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land which had formerly belonged
to their community.

On Fridays the nuns hear high mass, vespers, and all the offices, as on
Sunday. They scrupulously observe in addition all the little festivals
unknown to people of the world, of which the Church of France was so
prodigal in the olden days, and of which it is still prodigal in Spain
and Italy. Their stations in the chapel are interminable. As for the
number and duration of their prayers we can convey no better idea of
them than by quoting the ingenuous remark of one of them: "The prayers
of the postulants are frightful, the prayers of the novices are still
worse, and the prayers of the professed nuns are still worse."

Once a week the chapter assembles: the prioress presides; the vocal
mothers assist. Each sister kneels in turn on the stones, and confesses
aloud, in the presence of all, the faults and sins which she has
committed during the week. The vocal mothers consult after each
confession and inflict the penance aloud.

Besides this confession in a loud tone, for which all faults in the
least serious are reserved, they have for their venial offences what
they call the _coulpe. To make one's coulpe_ means to prostrate one's
self flat on one's face during the office in front of the prioress until
the latter, who is never called anything but _our mother_, notifies the
culprit by a slight tap of her foot against the wood of her stall
that she can rise. The _coulpe_ or _peccavi_, is made for a very small
matter--a broken glass, a torn veil, an involuntary delay of a few
seconds at an office, a false note in church, etc.; this suffices, and
the _coulpe_ is made. The _coulpe_ is entirely spontaneous; it is the
culpable person herself (the word is etymologically in its place here)
who judges herself and inflicts it on herself. On festival days and
Sundays four mother precentors intone the offices before a large
reading-desk with four places. One day one of the mother precentors
intoned a psalm beginning with _Ecce_, and instead of _Ecce_ she uttered
aloud the three notes _do si sol_; for this piece of absent-mindedness
she underwent a _coulpe_ which lasted during the whole service: what
rendered the fault enormous was the fact that the chapter had laughed.

When a nun is summoned to the parlor, even were it the prioress herself,
she drops her veil, as will be remembered, so that only her mouth is
visible.

The prioress alone can hold communication with strangers. The others can
see only their immediate family, and that very rarely. If, by chance,
an outsider presents herself to see a nun, or one whom she has known and
loved in the outer world, a regular series of negotiations is required.
If it is a woman, the authorization may sometimes be granted; the nun
comes, and they talk to her through the shutters, which are opened only
for a mother or sister. It is unnecessary to say that permission is
always refused to men.

Such is the rule of Saint-Benoît, aggravated by Martin Verga.

These nuns are not gay, rosy, and fresh, as the daughters of other
orders often are. They are pale and grave. Between 1825 and 1830 three
of them went mad.



CHAPTER III--AUSTERITIES

One is a postulant for two years at least, often for four; a novice for
four. It is rare that the definitive vows can be pronounced earlier
than the age of twenty-three or twenty-four years. The
Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga do not admit widows to their
order.

In their cells, they deliver themselves up to many unknown macerations,
of which they must never speak.

On the day when a novice makes her profession, she is dressed in her
handsomest attire, she is crowned with white roses, her hair is brushed
until it shines, and curled. Then she prostrates herself; a great black
veil is thrown over her, and the office for the dead is sung. Then the
nuns separate into two files; one file passes close to her, saying in
plaintive accents, "Our sister is dead"; and the other file responds in
a voice of ecstasy, "Our sister is alive in Jesus Christ!"

At the epoch when this story takes place, a boarding-school was attached
to the convent--a boarding-school for young girls of noble and
mostly wealthy families, among whom could be remarked Mademoiselle
de Saint-Aulaire and de Bélissen, and an English girl bearing the
illustrious Catholic name of Talbot. These young girls, reared by these
nuns between four walls, grew up with a horror of the world and of the
age. One of them said to us one day, "The sight of the street pavement
made me shudder from head to foot." They were dressed in blue, with a
white cap and a Holy Spirit of silver gilt or of copper on their breast.
On certain grand festival days, particularly Saint Martha's day, they
were permitted, as a high favor and a supreme happiness, to dress
themselves as nuns and to carry out the offices and practice of
Saint-Benoît for a whole day. In the early days the nuns were in the
habit of lending them their black garments. This seemed profane, and
the prioress forbade it. Only the novices were permitted to lend. It is
remarkable that these performances, tolerated and encouraged, no doubt,
in the convent out of a secret spirit of proselytism and in order
to give these children a foretaste of the holy habit, were a genuine
happiness and a real recreation for the scholars. They simply amused
themselves with it. _It was new; it gave them a change_. Candid reasons
of childhood, which do not, however, succeed in making us worldlings
comprehend the felicity of holding a holy water sprinkler in one's hand
and standing for hours together singing hard enough for four in front of
a reading-desk.

The pupils conformed, with the exception of the austerities, to all the
practices of the convent. There was a certain young woman who entered
the world, and who after many years of married life had not succeeded in
breaking herself of the habit of saying in great haste whenever any
one knocked at her door, "forever!" Like the nuns, the pupils saw
their relatives only in the parlor. Their very mothers did not obtain
permission to embrace them. The following illustrates to what a degree
severity on that point was carried. One day a young girl received a
visit from her mother, who was accompanied by a little sister three
years of age. The young girl wept, for she wished greatly to embrace
her sister. Impossible. She begged that, at least, the child might be
permitted to pass her little hand through the bars so that she could
kiss it. This was almost indignantly refused.



CHAPTER IV--GAYETIES

None the less, these young girls filled this grave house with charming
souvenirs.

At certain hours childhood sparkled in that cloister. The recreation
hour struck. A door swung on its hinges. The birds said, "Good;
here come the children!" An irruption of youth inundated that garden
intersected with a cross like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads,
innocent eyes, full of merry light, all sorts of auroras, were scattered
about amid these shadows. After the psalmodies, the bells, the peals,
and knells and offices, the sound of these little girls burst forth on a
sudden more sweetly than the noise of bees. The hive of joy was opened,
and each one brought her honey. They played, they called to each other,
they formed into groups, they ran about; pretty little white teeth
chattered in the corners; the veils superintended the laughs from a
distance, shades kept watch of the sunbeams, but what mattered it? Still
they beamed and laughed. Those four lugubrious walls had their moment
of dazzling brilliancy. They looked on, vaguely blanched with the
reflection of so much joy at this sweet swarming of the hives. It was
like a shower of roses falling athwart this house of mourning. The young
girls frolicked beneath the eyes of the nuns; the gaze of impeccability
does not embarrass innocence. Thanks to these children, there was,
among so many austere hours, one hour of ingenuousness. The little ones
skipped about; the elder ones danced. In this cloister play was mingled
with heaven. Nothing is so delightful and so august as all these fresh,
expanding young souls. Homer would have come thither to laugh with
Perrault; and there was in that black garden, youth, health, noise,
cries, giddiness, pleasure, happiness enough to smooth out the wrinkles
of all their ancestresses, those of the epic as well as those of the
fairy-tale, those of the throne as well as those of the thatched cottage
from Hecuba to la Mère-Grand.

In that house more than anywhere else, perhaps, arise those children's
sayings which are so graceful and which evoke a smile that is full of
thoughtfulness. It was between those four gloomy walls that a child of
five years exclaimed one day: "Mother! one of the big girls has just
told me that I have only nine years and ten months longer to remain
here. What happiness!"

It was here, too, that this memorable dialogue took place:--

_A Vocal Mother_. Why are you weeping, my child?

_The child_ (aged six). I told Alix that I knew my French history. She
says that I do not know it, but I do.

_Alix_, the big girl (aged nine). No; she does not know it.

_The Mother_. How is that, my child?

_Alix_. She told me to open the book at random and to ask her any
question in the book, and she would answer it.

"Well?"

"She did not answer it."

"Let us see about it. What did you ask her?"

"I opened the book at random, as she proposed, and I put the first
question that I came across."

"And what was the question?"

"It was, 'What happened after that?'"

It was there that that profound remark was made anent a rather greedy
paroquet which belonged to a lady boarder:--

"How well bred! it eats the top of the slice of bread and butter just
like a person!"

It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that there was once
picked up a confession which had been written out in advance, in order
that she might not forget it, by a sinner of seven years:--

"Father, I accuse myself of having been avaricious.

"Father, I accuse myself of having been an adulteress.

"Father, I accuse myself of having raised my eyes to the gentlemen."

It was on one of the turf benches of this garden that a rosy mouth six
years of age improvised the following tale, which was listened to by
blue eyes aged four and five years:--

"There were three little cocks who owned a country where there were
a great many flowers. They plucked the flowers and put them in their
pockets. After that they plucked the leaves and put them in their
playthings. There was a wolf in that country; there was a great deal of
forest; and the wolf was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks."

And this other poem:--

"There came a blow with a stick.

"It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat.

"It was not good for her; it hurt her.

"Then a lady put Punchinello in prison."

It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent
was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heart-breaking
saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured
in her corner:--

"As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!"

There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the
corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The
_big big girls_--those over ten years of age--called her _Agathocles_.

The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square form, which
received no light except through a vaulted cloister on a level with the
garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. All
the places round about furnished their contingent of insects.

Each of its four corners had received, in the language of the pupils,
a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar
corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner.

Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly esteemed. It was not
so cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to
the boarding-school, and there served as in the old College Mazarin
to distinguish four nations. Every pupil belonged to one of these four
nations according to the corner of the refectory in which she sat at
meals. One day Monseigneur the Archbishop while making his pastoral
visit saw a pretty little rosy girl with beautiful golden hair enter the
class-room through which he was passing.

He inquired of another pupil, a charming brunette with rosy cheeks, who
stood near him:--

"Who is that?"

"She is a spider, Monseigneur."

"Bah! And that one yonder?"

"She is a cricket."

"And that one?"

"She is a caterpillar."

"Really! and yourself?"

"I am a wood-louse, Monseigneur."

Every house of this sort has its own peculiarities. At the beginning of
this century Écouen was one of those strict and graceful places where
young girls pass their childhood in a shadow that is almost august. At
Écouen, in order to take rank in the procession of the Holy Sacrament,
a distinction was made between virgins and florists. There were also the
"dais" and the "censors,"--the first who held the cords of the dais, and
the others who carried incense before the Holy Sacrament. The flowers
belonged by right to the florists. Four "virgins" walked in advance. On
the morning of that great day it was no rare thing to hear the question
put in the dormitory, "Who is a virgin?"

Madame Campan used to quote this saying of a "little one" of seven
years, to a "big girl" of sixteen, who took the head of the procession,
while she, the little one, remained at the rear, "You are a virgin, but
I am not."



CHAPTER V--DISTRACTIONS

Above the door of the refectory this prayer, which was called the _white
Paternoster_and which possessed the property of bearing people straight
to paradise, was inscribed in large black letters:--

"Little white Paternoster, which God made, which God said, which God
placed in paradise. In the evening, when I went to bed, I found three
angels sitting on my bed, one at the foot, two at the head, the good
Virgin Mary in the middle, who told me to lie down without hesitation.
The good God is my father, the good Virgin is my mother, the three
apostles are my brothers, the three virgins are my sisters. The shirt in
which God was born envelopes my body; Saint Margaret's cross is written
on my breast. Madame the Virgin was walking through the meadows, weeping
for God, when she met M. Saint John. 'Monsieur Saint John, whence come
you?' 'I come from _Ave Salus_.' 'You have not seen the good God; where
is he?' 'He is on the tree of the Cross, his feet hanging, his hands
nailed, a little cap of white thorns on his head.' Whoever shall say
this thrice at eventide, thrice in the morning, shall win paradise at
the last."

In 1827 this characteristic orison had disappeared from the wall under
a triple coating of daubing paint. At the present time it is finally
disappearing from the memories of several who were young girls then, and
who are old women now.

A large crucifix fastened to the wall completed the decoration of this
refectory, whose only door, as we think we have mentioned, opened on the
garden. Two narrow tables, each flanked by two wooden benches, formed
two long parallel lines from one end to the other of the refectory.
The walls were white, the tables were black; these two mourning colors
constitute the only variety in convents. The meals were plain, and
the food of the children themselves severe. A single dish of meat and
vegetables combined, or salt fish--such was their luxury. This meagre
fare, which was reserved for the pupils alone, was, nevertheless, an
exception. The children ate in silence, under the eye of the mother
whose turn it was, who, if a fly took a notion to fly or to hum against
the rule, opened and shut a wooden book from time to time. This silence
was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud from a little
pulpit with a desk, which was situated at the foot of the crucifix. The
reader was one of the big girls, in weekly turn. At regular distances,
on the bare tables, there were large, varnished bowls in which the
pupils washed their own silver cups and knives and forks, and into which
they sometimes threw some scrap of tough meat or spoiled fish; this was
punished. These bowls were called _ronds d'eau_. The child who broke the
silence "made a cross with her tongue." Where? On the ground. She licked
the pavement. The dust, that end of all joys, was charged with the
chastisement of those poor little rose-leaves which had been guilty of
chirping.

There was in the convent a book which has never been printed except as
a _unique copy_, and which it is forbidden to read. It is the rule of
Saint-Benoît. An arcanum which no profane eye must penetrate. _Nemo
regulas, seu constitutiones nostras, externis communicabit_.

The pupils one day succeeded in getting possession of this book, and set
to reading it with avidity, a reading which was often interrupted by
the fear of being caught, which caused them to close the volume
precipitately.

From the great danger thus incurred they derived but a very moderate
amount of pleasure. The most "interesting thing" they found were some
unintelligible pages about the sins of young boys.

They played in an alley of the garden bordered with a few shabby
fruit-trees. In spite of the extreme surveillance and the severity of
the punishments administered, when the wind had shaken the trees, they
sometimes succeeded in picking up a green apple or a spoiled apricot or
an inhabited pear on the sly. I will now cede the privilege of speech
to a letter which lies before me, a letter written five and twenty
years ago by an old pupil, now Madame la Duchesse de----one of the most
elegant women in Paris. I quote literally: "One hides one's pear or
one's apple as best one may. When one goes upstairs to put the veil on
the bed before supper, one stuffs them under one's pillow and at night
one eats them in bed, and when one cannot do that, one eats them in the
closet." That was one of their greatest luxuries.

Once--it was at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop to the
convent--one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was
connected with the Montmorency family, laid a wager that she would ask
for a day's leave of absence--an enormity in so austere a community. The
wager was accepted, but not one of those who bet believed that she would
do it. When the moment came, as the archbishop was passing in front of
the pupils, Mademoiselle Bouchard, to the indescribable terror of her
companions, stepped out of the ranks, and said, "Monseigneur, a day's
leave of absence." Mademoiselle Bouchard was tall, blooming, with the
prettiest little rosy face in the world. M. de Quélen smiled and said,
"What, my dear child, a day's leave of absence! Three days if you like.
I grant you three days." The prioress could do nothing; the archbishop
had spoken. Horror of the convent, but joy of the pupil. The effect may
be imagined.

This stern cloister was not so well walled off, however, but that the
life of the passions of the outside world, drama, and even romance,
did not make their way in. To prove this, we will confine ourselves to
recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact,
which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by
any thread whatever with the story which we are relating. We mention the
fact for the sake of completing the physiognomy of the convent in the
reader's mind.

About this time there was in the convent a mysterious person who was
not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was addressed as
_Madame Albertine_. Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad,
and that in the world she passed for dead. Beneath this history it
was said there lay the arrangements of fortune necessary for a great
marriage.

This woman, hardly thirty years of age, of dark complexion and tolerably
pretty, had a vague look in her large black eyes. Could she see? There
was some doubt about this. She glided rather than walked, she never
spoke; it was not quite known whether she breathed. Her nostrils were
livid and pinched as after yielding up their last sigh. To touch her
hand was like touching snow. She possessed a strange spectral grace.
Wherever she entered, people felt cold. One day a sister, on seeing her
pass, said to another sister, "She passes for a dead woman." "Perhaps
she is one," replied the other.

A hundred tales were told of Madame Albertine. This arose from the
eternal curiosity of the pupils. In the chapel there was a gallery
called _L'Oil de Bouf_. It was in this gallery, which had only a
circular bay, an _oil de bouf_, that Madame Albertine listened to the
offices. She always occupied it alone because this gallery, being on the
level of the first story, the preacher or the officiating priest could
be seen, which was interdicted to the nuns. One day the pulpit was
occupied by a young priest of high rank, M. Le Duc de Rohan, peer of
France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince de
Léon, and who died afterward, in 1830, as cardinal and Archbishop of
Besançon. It was the first time that M. de Rohan had preached at
the Petit-Picpus convent. Madame Albertine usually preserved perfect
calmness and complete immobility during the sermons and services. That
day, as soon as she caught sight of M. de Rohan, she half rose, and
said, in a loud voice, amid the silence of the chapel, "Ah! Auguste!"
The whole community turned their heads in amazement, the preacher raised
his eyes, but Madame Albertine had relapsed into her immobility. A
breath from the outer world, a flash of life, had passed for an instant
across that cold and lifeless face and had then vanished, and the mad
woman had become a corpse again.

Those two words, however, had set every one in the convent who had the
privilege of speech to chattering. How many things were contained in
that "Ah! Auguste!" what revelations! M. de Rohan's name really was
Auguste. It was evident that Madame Albertine belonged to the very
highest society, since she knew M. de Rohan, and that her own rank there
was of the highest, since she spoke thus familiarly of so great a lord,
and that there existed between them some connection, of relationship,
perhaps, but a very close one in any case, since she knew his "pet
name."

Two very severe duchesses, Mesdames de Choiseul and de Sérent, often
visited the community, whither they penetrated, no doubt, in virtue of
the privilege _Magnates mulieres_, and caused great consternation in the
boarding-school. When these two old ladies passed by, all the poor young
girls trembled and dropped their eyes.

Moreover, M. de Rohan, quite unknown to himself, was an object of
attention to the school-girls. At that epoch he had just been made,
while waiting for the episcopate, vicar-general of the Archbishop of
Paris. It was one of his habits to come tolerably often to celebrate the
offices in the chapel of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus. Not one of the
young recluses could see him, because of the serge curtain, but he had
a sweet and rather shrill voice, which they had come to know and to
distinguish. He had been a mousquetaire, and then, he was said to be
very coquettish, that his handsome brown hair was very well dressed in
a roll around his head, and that he had a broad girdle of magnificent
moire, and that his black cassock was of the most elegant cut in the
world. He held a great place in all these imaginations of sixteen years.

Not a sound from without made its way into the convent. But there was
one year when the sound of a flute penetrated thither. This was an
event, and the girls who were at school there at the time still recall
it.

It was a flute which was played in the neighborhood. This flute always
played the same air, an air which is very far away nowadays,--"My
Zétulbé, come reign o'er my soul,"--and it was heard two or three
times a day. The young girls passed hours in listening to it, the vocal
mothers were upset by it, brains were busy, punishments descended in
showers. This lasted for several months. The girls were all more or
less in love with the unknown musician. Each one dreamed that she was
Zétulbé. The sound of the flute proceeded from the direction of the Rue
Droit-Mur; and they would have given anything, compromised everything,
attempted anything for the sake of seeing, of catching a glance, if only
for a second, of the "young man" who played that flute so deliciously,
and who, no doubt, played on all these souls at the same time. There
were some who made their escape by a back door, and ascended to the
third story on the Rue Droit-Mur side, in order to attempt to catch a
glimpse through the gaps. Impossible! One even went so far as to thrust
her arm through the grating, and to wave her white handkerchief. Two
were still bolder. They found means to climb on a roof, and risked their
lives there, and succeeded at last in seeing "the young man." He was an
old _émigré_ gentleman, blind and penniless, who was playing his flute
in his attic, in order to pass the time.



CHAPTER VI--THE LITTLE CONVENT

In this enclosure of the Petit-Picpus there were three perfectly
distinct buildings,--the Great Convent, inhabited by the nuns, the
Boarding-school, where the scholars were lodged; and lastly, what was
called the Little Convent. It was a building with a garden, in which
lived all sorts of aged nuns of various orders, the relics of cloisters
destroyed in the Revolution; a reunion of all the black, gray, and white
medleys of all communities and all possible varieties; what might be
called, if such a coupling of words is permissible, a sort of harlequin
convent.

When the Empire was established, all these poor old dispersed and exiled
women had been accorded permission to come and take shelter under the
wings of the Bernardines-Benedictines. The government paid them a small
pension, the ladies of the Petit-Picpus received them cordially. It was
a singular pell-mell. Each followed her own rule, Sometimes the pupils
of the boarding-school were allowed, as a great recreation, to pay them
a visit; the result is, that all those young memories have
retained among other souvenirs that of Mother Sainte-Bazile, Mother
Sainte-Scolastique, and Mother Jacob.

One of these refugees found herself almost at home. She was a nun of
Sainte-Aure, the only one of her order who had survived. The ancient
convent of the ladies of Sainte-Aure occupied, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, this very house of the Petit-Picpus, which belonged
later to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy woman, too poor to
wear the magnificent habit of her order, which was a white robe with
a scarlet scapulary, had piously put it on a little manikin, which she
exhibited with complacency and which she bequeathed to the house at
her death. In 1824, only one nun of this order remained; to-day, there
remains only a doll.

In addition to these worthy mothers, some old society women had obtained
permission of the prioress, like Madame Albertine, to retire into the
Little Convent. Among the number were Madame Beaufort d'Hautpoul and
Marquise Dufresne. Another was never known in the convent except by
the formidable noise which she made when she blew her nose. The pupils
called her Madame Vacarmini (hubbub).

About 1820 or 1821, Madame de Genlis, who was at that time editing a
little periodical publication called _l'Intrépide_, asked to be allowed
to enter the convent of the Petit-Picpus as lady resident. The Duc
d'Orléans recommended her. Uproar in the hive; the vocal-mothers were
all in a flutter; Madame de Genlis had made romances. But she declared
that she was the first to detest them, and then, she had reached her
fierce stage of devotion. With the aid of God, and of the Prince, she
entered. She departed at the end of six or eight months, alleging as a
reason, that there was no shade in the garden. The nuns were delighted.
Although very old, she still played the harp, and did it very well.

When she went away she left her mark in her cell. Madame de Genlis was
superstitious and a Latinist. These two words furnish a tolerably good
profile of her. A few years ago, there were still to be seen, pasted in
the inside of a little cupboard in her cell in which she locked up her
silverware and her jewels, these five lines in Latin, written with
her own hand in red ink on yellow paper, and which, in her opinion,
possessed the property of frightening away robbers:--


               Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:
               Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas;
               Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas;
               Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.
               Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas.<a
      href="#linknote-15" name="linknoteref-15" id="linknoteref-15">15</a>


These verses in sixth century Latin raise the question whether the
two thieves of Calvary were named, as is commonly believed, Dismas and
Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. This orthography might have confounded the
pretensions put forward in the last century by the Vicomte de Gestas, of
a descent from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attached to
these verses forms an article of faith in the order of the Hospitallers.

The church of the house, constructed in such a manner as to separate the
Great Convent from the Boarding-school like a veritable intrenchment,
was, of course, common to the Boarding-school, the Great Convent, and
the Little Convent. The public was even admitted by a sort of lazaretto
entrance on the street. But all was so arranged, that none of the
inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from the outside world.
Suppose a church whose choir is grasped in a gigantic hand, and
folded in such a manner as to form, not, as in ordinary churches, a
prolongation behind the altar, but a sort of hall, or obscure cellar, to
the right of the officiating priest; suppose this hall to be shut off by
a curtain seven feet in height, of which we have already spoken; in the
shadow of that curtain, pile up on wooden stalls the nuns in the choir
on the left, the school-girls on the right, the lay-sisters and the
novices at the bottom, and you will have some idea of the nuns of the
Petit-Picpus assisting at divine service. That cavern, which was called
the choir, communicated with the cloister by a lobby. The church was
lighted from the garden. When the nuns were present at services where
their rule enjoined silence, the public was warned of their presence
only by the folding seats of the stalls noisily rising and falling.



CHAPTER VII--SOME SILHOUETTES OF THIS DARKNESS

During the six years which separate 1819 from 1825, the prioress of the
Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose name, in religion,
was Mother Innocente. She came of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur,
author of _Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint-Benoît_. She had
been re-elected. She was a woman about sixty years of age, short, thick,
"singing like a cracked pot," says the letter which we have already
quoted; an excellent woman, moreover, and the only merry one in the
whole convent, and for that reason adored. She was learned, erudite,
wise, competent, curiously proficient in history, crammed with Latin,
stuffed with Greek, full of Hebrew, and more of a Benedictine monk than
a Benedictine nun.

The sub-prioress was an old Spanish nun, Mother Cineres, who was almost
blind.

The most esteemed among the vocal mothers were Mother Sainte-Honorine;
the treasurer, Mother Sainte-Gertrude, the chief mistress of the
novices; Mother-Saint-Ange, the assistant mistress; Mother Annonciation,
the sacristan; Mother Saint-Augustin, the nurse, the only one in the
convent who was malicious; then Mother Sainte-Mechtilde (Mademoiselle
Gauvain), very young and with a beautiful voice; Mother des Anges
(Mademoiselle Drouet), who had been in the convent of the Filles-Dieu,
and in the convent du Trésor, between Gisors and Magny; Mother
Saint-Joseph (Mademoiselle de Cogolludo), Mother Sainte-Adélaide
(Mademoiselle d'Auverney), Mother Miséricorde (Mademoiselle de
Cifuentes, who could not resist austerities), Mother Compassion
(Mademoiselle de la Miltière, received at the age of sixty in defiance
of the rule, and very wealthy); Mother Providence (Mademoiselle de
Laudinière), Mother Présentation (Mademoiselle de Siguenza), who was
prioress in 1847; and finally, Mother Sainte-Céligne (sister of the
sculptor Ceracchi), who went mad; Mother Sainte-Chantal (Mademoiselle de
Suzon), who went mad.

There was also, among the prettiest of them, a charming girl of three
and twenty, who was from the Isle de Bourbon, a descendant of the
Chevalier Roze, whose name had been Mademoiselle Roze, and who was
called Mother Assumption.

Mother Sainte-Mechtilde, intrusted with the singing and the choir, was
fond of making use of the pupils in this quarter. She usually took a
complete scale of them, that is to say, seven, from ten to sixteen years
of age, inclusive, of assorted voices and sizes, whom she made sing
standing, drawn up in a line, side by side, according to age, from the
smallest to the largest. This presented to the eye, something in the
nature of a reed-pipe of young girls, a sort of living Pan-pipe made of
angels.

Those of the lay-sisters whom the scholars loved most were Sister
Euphrasie, Sister Sainte-Marguérite, Sister Sainte-Marthe, who was in
her dotage, and Sister Sainte-Michel, whose long nose made them laugh.

All these women were gentle with the children. The nuns were severe only
towards themselves. No fire was lighted except in the school, and the
food was choice compared to that in the convent. Moreover, they lavished
a thousand cares on their scholars. Only, when a child passed near a nun
and addressed her, the nun never replied.

This rule of silence had had this effect, that throughout the whole
convent, speech had been withdrawn from human creatures, and bestowed
on inanimate objects. Now it was the church-bell which spoke, now it was
the gardener's bell. A very sonorous bell, placed beside the portress,
and which was audible throughout the house, indicated by its varied
peals, which formed a sort of acoustic telegraph, all the actions of
material life which were to be performed, and summoned to the parlor, in
case of need, such or such an inhabitant of the house. Each person
and each thing had its own peal. The prioress had one and one, the
sub-prioress one and two. Six-five announced lessons, so that the pupils
never said "to go to lessons," but "to go to six-five." Four-four was
Madame de Genlis's signal. It was very often heard. "C'est le diable a
quatre,"--it's the very deuce--said the uncharitable. Tennine strokes
announced a great event. It was the opening of _the door of seclusion_,
a frightful sheet of iron bristling with bolts which only turned on its
hinges in the presence of the archbishop.

With the exception of the archbishop and the gardener, no man entered
the convent, as we have already said. The schoolgirls saw two others:
one, the chaplain, the Abbé Banés, old and ugly, whom they were
permitted to contemplate in the choir, through a grating; the other the
drawing-master, M. Ansiaux, whom the letter, of which we have perused
a few lines, calls _M. Anciot_, and describes as _a frightful old
hunchback_.

It will be seen that all these men were carefully chosen.

Such was this curious house.



CHAPTER VIII--POST CORDA LAPIDES

After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitable
to point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The reader
already has some idea of it.

The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost the whole
of the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection of the Rue
Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus, and the unused lane,
called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four streets surrounded this
trapezium like a moat. The convent was composed of several buildings
and a garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety, was a
juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a bird's-eye
view, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet laid flat on the
ground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied the whole of the fragment
of the Rue Droit-Mur comprised between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the Rue
Polonceau; the lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated façade which
faced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked its
extremity. Towards the centre of this façade was a low, arched door,
whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders wove their webs,
and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on rare
occasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was the
public entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet was a square hall
which was used as the servants' hall, and which the nuns called _the
buttery_. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters,
and the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory,
backed up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door No. 62 and
the corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the school, which was not
visible from without. The remainder of the trapezium formed the garden,
which was much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused
the walls to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. The
garden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit of
a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran, as from
the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and, ranged by twos
in between the branchings of these, eight small ones, so that, if the
enclosure had been circular, the geometrical plan of the alleys would
have resembled a cross superposed on a wheel. As the alleys all ended
in the very irregular walls of the garden, they were of unequal length.
They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall
poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at the angle of
the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little Convent, which was at the
angle of the Aumarais lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was
called the little garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard,
all sorts of varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prison
walls, the long black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the
Rue Polonceau for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will
be able to form for himself a complete image of what the house of the
Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy house
had been built on the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of the
fourteenth to the sixteenth century, which was called the "tennis-ground
of the eleven thousand devils."

All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,
Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear them
are very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane;
the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Églantiers, for God opened
flowers before man cut stones.



CHAPTER IX--A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE

Since we are engaged in giving details as to what the convent of the
Petit-Picpus was in former times, and since we have ventured to open
a window on that discreet retreat, the reader will permit us one other
little digression, utterly foreign to this book, but characteristic and
useful, since it shows that the cloister even has its original figures.

In the Little Convent there was a centenarian who came from the Abbey
of Fontevrault. She had even been in society before the Revolution. She
talked a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis
XVI. and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very intimate.
It was her pleasure and her vanity to drag in these names on every
pretext. She told wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault,--that it was like
a city, and that there were streets in the monastery.

She talked with a Picard accent which amused the pupils. Every year,
she solemnly renewed her vows, and at the moment of taking the oath, she
said to the priest, "Monseigneur Saint-François gave it to Monseigneur
Saint-Julien, Monseigneur Saint-Julien gave it to Monseigneur
Saint-Eusebius, Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius gave it to Monseigneur
Saint-Procopius, etc., etc.; and thus I give it to you, father." And the
school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their sleeves, but under
their veils; charming little stifled laughs which made the vocal mothers
frown.

On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said
that _in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the
mousquetaires_. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the
eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines, which
existed before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a great
personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer, traversed
a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came out to harangue
him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which they
had poured four different sorts of wine. On the first goblet this
inscription could be read, _monkey wine_; on the second, _lion wine_; on
the third, _sheep wine_; on the fourth, _hog wine_. These four
legends express the four stages descended by the drunkard; the first,
intoxication, which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the
third, that which dulls; and the fourth, that which brutalizes.

In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object of which
she thought a great deal. The rule of Fontevrault did not forbid this.
She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself up, which her
rule allowed her to do, and hid herself, every time that she desired to
contemplate it. If she heard a footstep in the corridor, she closed the
cupboard again as hastily as it was possible with her aged hands. As
soon as it was mentioned to her, she became silent, she who was so fond
of talking. The most curious were baffled by her silence and the most
tenacious by her obstinacy. Thus it furnished a subject of comment for
all those who were unoccupied or bored in the convent. What could that
treasure of the centenarian be, which was so precious and so secret?
Some holy book, no doubt? Some unique chaplet? Some authentic relic?
They lost themselves in conjectures. When the poor old woman died,
they rushed to her cupboard more hastily than was fitting, perhaps, and
opened it. They found the object beneath a triple linen cloth, like some
consecrated paten. It was a Faenza platter representing little Loves
flitting away pursued by apothecary lads armed with enormous syringes.
The chase abounds in grimaces and in comical postures. One of the
charming little Loves is already fairly spitted. He is resisting,
fluttering his tiny wings, and still making an effort to fly, but the
dancer is laughing with a satanical air. Moral: Love conquered by the
colic. This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly,
the honor of furnishing Molière with an idea, was still in existence
in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-à-brac merchant in the
Boulevard Beaumarchais.

This good old woman would not receive any visits from outside _because_,
said she, the _parlor is too gloomy_.



CHAPTER X--ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION

However, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have sought to
convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced with the
same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue du Temple,
in particular, which belonged, in truth, to another order, the black
shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor itself was a
salon with a polished wood floor, whose windows were draped in white
muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a portrait
of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face, painted bouquets, and even the
head of a Turk.

It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that famous
chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the largest in
France, and which bore the reputation among the good people of the
eighteenth century of being _the father of all the chestnut trees of the
realm_.

As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by Benedictines
of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those who
depended on Cîteaux. This order of the Perpetual Adoration is not very
ancient and does not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649 the
holy sacrament was profaned on two occasions a few days apart, in two
churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en Grève, a rare
and frightful sacrilege which set the whole town in an uproar. M. the
Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain des Prés ordered a solemn
procession of all his clergy, in which the Pope's Nuncio officiated.
But this expiation did not satisfy two sainted women, Madame Courtin,
Marquise de Boucs, and the Comtesse de Châteauvieux. This outrage
committed on "the most holy sacrament of the altar," though but
temporary, would not depart from these holy souls, and it seemed to
them that it could only be extenuated by a "Perpetual Adoration" in some
female monastery. Both of them, one in 1652, the other in 1653, made
donations of notable sums to Mother Catherine de Bar, called of the Holy
Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, for the purpose of founding, to this pious
end, a monastery of the order of Saint-Benoît; the first permission for
this foundation was given to Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de Metz, Abbé
of Saint-Germain, "on condition that no woman could be received unless
she contributed three hundred livres income, which amounts to six
thousand livres, to the principal." After the Abbé of Saint-Germain, the
king accorded letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and
royal letters, was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and the
Parliament.

Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment of the
Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament at Paris.
Their first convent was "a new building" in the Rue Cassette, out of the
contributions of Mesdames de Boucs and de Châteauvieux.

This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with
the Benedictine nuns of Cîteaux. It mounted back to the Abbé of
Saint-Germain des Prés, in the same manner that the ladies of the Sacred
Heart go back to the general of the Jesuits, and the sisters of charity
to the general of the Lazarists.

It was also totally different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus,
whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII. had
authorized, by a special brief, the Bernardines of the Rue Petit-Picpus,
to practise the Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictine nuns of the
Holy Sacrament. But the two orders remained distinct none the less.



CHAPTER XI--END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS

At the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus
was in its decay; this forms a part of the general death of the order,
which, after the eighteenth century, has been disappearing like all
the religious orders. Contemplation is, like prayer, one of humanity's
needs; but, like everything which the Revolution touched, it will be
transformed, and from being hostile to social progress, it will become
favorable to it.

The house of the Petit-Picpus was becoming rapidly depopulated. In 1840,
the Little Convent had disappeared, the school had disappeared. There
were no longer any old women, nor young girls; the first were dead, the
latter had taken their departure. _Volaverunt_.

The rule of the Perpetual Adoration is so rigid in its nature that it
alarms, vocations recoil before it, the order receives no recruits. In
1845, it still obtained lay-sisters here and there. But of professed
nuns, none at all. Forty years ago, the nuns numbered nearly a hundred;
fifteen years ago there were not more than twenty-eight of them. How
many are there to-day? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that
the circle of choice was restricted. She was not forty years old. In
proportion as the number diminishes, the fatigue increases, the service
of each becomes more painful; the moment could then be seen drawing near
when there would be but a dozen bent and aching shoulders to bear the
heavy rule of Saint-Benoît. The burden is implacable, and remains the
same for the few as for the many. It weighs down, it crushes. Thus they
die. At the period when the author of this book still lived in Paris,
two died. One was twenty-five years old, the other twenty-three. This
latter can say, like Julia Alpinula: _"Hic jaceo. Vixi annos viginti et
tres." _ It is in consequence of this decay that the convent gave up the
education of girls.

We have not felt able to pass before this extraordinary house without
entering it, and without introducing the minds which accompany us, and
which are listening to our tale, to the profit of some, perchance, of
the melancholy history of Jean Valjean. We have penetrated into this
community, full of those old practices which seem so novel to-day. It is
the closed garden, _hortus conclusus_. We have spoken of this singular
place in detail, but with respect, in so far, at least, as detail and
respect are compatible. We do not understand all, but we insult nothing.
We are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who
wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the sneer of Voltaire,
who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.

An illogical act on Voltaire's part, we may remark, by the way; for
Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even
for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix
represent? The assassinated sage.

In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis.
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that,
while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human
heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but
on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

In the meantime, let us study things which are no more. It is necessary
to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits
of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future.
This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport. Let
us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard. The past has a
visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the visage
and let us tear off the mask.

As for convents, they present a complex problem,--a question of
civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, which protects
them.



BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS



CHAPTER I--THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA

This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.

Man is the second.

Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road, it
has been our duty to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which is common
to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well as to
modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well as to
Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to the
Infinite.

This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain
ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our
restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we
encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel
ourselves overpowered with respect. There is, in the synagogue, in the
mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate,
and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind,
and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the
human wall!



CHAPTER II--THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT

From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism
is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in
its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where
centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great
social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is
to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the
impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the
beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the
spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,
when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of disorder,
it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it salutary in its
period of purity, because it still continues to set the example.

Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early education
of modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injurious
to its development. So far as institution and formation with relation
to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth century,
questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth. The
leprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton two wonderful
nations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other the splendor of
Europe for centuries; and, at the present day, these two illustrious
peoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to the healthy and
vigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.

The convent--the ancient female convent in particular, such as it still
presents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,
in Spain--is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. The
cloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. The
Catholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the black
radiance of death.

The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, in
obscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague with
shadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immense
white crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, all
nude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,--bloody;
hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, their
knee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,
crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood drops
of rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamonds
and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,
their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,
their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with
prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves
seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they
love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their
bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath
under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of
death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them.
The immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient
monasteries of Spain. Liars of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,
ferocious places.

Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent was,
above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the Orient
about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up and kept
watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the
odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen in dreams
and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man descended
from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one. Lofty walls
guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her sultan, from
all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was infidelity. The
_in pace_ replaced the leather sack. That which was cast into the sea in
the East was thrown into the ground in the West. In both quarters, women
wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the grave for the last; here
the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallel.

To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have
adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion
a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of
invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing
facts and all gloomy questions. _A matter for declamations_, say the
clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer;
Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.
I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer,
that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that poor
Holofernes."

Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are
obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight
leagues distant from Brussels,--there are relics of the Middle Ages
there which are attainable for everybody,--at the Abbey of Villers, the
hole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly
the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone
dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were _in pace_.
Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a
grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of the
river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground. Four
feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is always
soaked. The occupant of the _in pace_ had this wet soil for his bed. In
one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet riveted to
the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabs
of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him to
stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stone
on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These _in pace_,
these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole
on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid
of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here
was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those
oozing walls,--what declaimers!



CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST

Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in
Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. It
simply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge
of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, the
forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right of
the first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, the
ferocities of which we have just spoken, the _in pace_, the closed
mouths, the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in the
dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment of
living souls. Add individual tortures to national degradations,
and, whoever you may be, you will shudder before the frock and the
veil,--those two winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, at
certain points and in certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite
of progress, the spirit of the cloister persists in the midst of the
nineteenth century, and a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this
moment, astonishing the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquated
institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of
the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the
spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the
child's garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness
of corpses which should return to embrace the living.

"Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why
will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep
sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have
loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent.

To this there is but one reply: "In former days."

To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the
government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition,
to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to
refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles
on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and
militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication
of parasites, to force the past on the present,--this seems strange.
Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists,
who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple
process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social
order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique
authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about
shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the
ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over
with chalk, and said, "She is white, _Bos cretatus_."

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above
all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive,
we attack it, and we try to kill it.

Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms,
all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails
in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war
must be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the
fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms.
It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the
earth.

A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, is
a college of owls facing the light. A cloister, caught in the very act
of asceticism, in the very heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 and
of 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinary
times, in order to dissolve an anachronism and to cause it to vanish,
one has only to make it spell out the date. But we are not in ordinary
times.

Let us fight.

Let us fight, but let us make a distinction. The peculiar property of
truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration?
There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there is that which
it is simply necessary to elucidate and examine. What a force is kindly
and serious examination! Let us not apply a flame where only a light is
required.

So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general
proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe,
in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration. Whoever says
cloister, says marsh. Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is
unhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates
them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot think
without affright of those lands where fakirs, bonzes, santons, Greek
monks, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes multiply even like swarms of
vermin.

This said, the religious question remains. This question has certain
mysterious, almost formidable sides; may we be permitted to look at it
fixedly.



CHAPTER IV--THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES

Men unite themselves and dwell in communities. By virtue of what right?
By virtue of the right of association.

They shut themselves up at home. By virtue of what right? By virtue of
the right which every man has to open or shut his door.

They do not come forth. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right
to go and come, which implies the right to remain at home.

There, at home, what do they do?

They speak in low tones; they drop their eyes; they toil. They renounce
the world, towns, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests.
They are clothed in coarse woollen or coarse linen. Not one of them
possesses in his own right anything whatever. On entering there, each
one who was rich makes himself poor. What he has, he gives to all. He
who was what is called noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of
him who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the
same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on
the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs, the
same rope around their loins. If the decision has been to go barefoot,
all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them; that prince is the
same shadow as the rest. No titles. Even family names have disappeared.
They bear only first names. All are bowed beneath the equality of
baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family, and constituted
in their community a spiritual family. They have no other relatives than
all men. They succor the poor, they care for the sick. They elect those
whom they obey. They call each other "my brother."

You stop me and exclaim, "But that is the ideal convent!"

It is sufficient that it may be the possible convent, that I should take
notice of it.

Thence it results that, in the preceding book, I have spoken of a
convent with respectful accents. The Middle Ages cast aside, Asia cast
aside, the historical and political question held in reserve, from the
purely philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of militant
policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a voluntary
matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall always
consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and, in some
respects, a deferential gravity.

Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a
commune, there is right. The monastery is the product of the formula:
Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid
transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a
republic.

Let us continue.

But these men, or these women who are behind these four walls. They
dress themselves in coarse woollen, they are equals, they call each
other brothers, that is well; but they do something else?

Yes.

What?

They gaze on the darkness, they kneel, and they clasp their hands.

What does this signify?



CHAPTER V--PRAYER

They pray.

To whom?

To God.

To pray to God,--what is the meaning of these words?

Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent,
permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because,
if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since
it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end
there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can
attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms, is it
not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not
an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming
plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second
infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's
mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another
abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does
it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of
them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as
there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the
_I_ on high is God.

To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought,
with the infinity on high, is called praying.

Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must
reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards
the Unknown; thought, revery, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What
is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, revery,
prayer,--these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them.
Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow;
that is to say, to the light.

The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of
humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there
exists the right of the soul.

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let
us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of
creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We
have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against
the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd,
to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify
belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of
caterpillars.



CHAPTER VI--THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER

With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they are
sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.

There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is
also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this
philosophy is called blindness.

To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind
man's self-sufficiency.

The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs which
this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which beholds
God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, "I pity them with their sun!"

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led
back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that
they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in
any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove
God.

We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
philosophy.

Let us go on.

The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
word Will.

To say: "the plant wills," instead of: "the plant grows": this would be
fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: "the universe wills." Why?
Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has an _I_;
the universe wills, therefore it has a God.

As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
nothing _a priori_, a will in the plant, accepted by this school,
appears to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe denied
by it.

To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have demonstrated
this.

The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything
becomes "a mental conception."

With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts
the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists
itself.

From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only
"a mental conception."

Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in the
lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.

In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all
end in the monosyllable, No.

To No there is only one reply, Yes.

Nihilism has no point.

There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything
is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an
energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the condition
of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in
other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge from the man
of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science should be
a cordial. To enjoy,--what a sad aim, and what a paltry ambition! The
brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to give them all as
an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and science fraternize
in them, to render them just by this mysterious confrontation; such is
the function of real philosophy. Morality is a blossoming out of truths.
Contemplation leads to action. The absolute should be practicable. It is
necessary that the ideal should be breathable, drinkable, and eatable to
the human mind. It is the ideal which has the right to say: _Take, this
is my body, this is my blood_. Wisdom is holy communion. It is on this
condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science and becomes the
one and sovereign mode of human rallying, and that philosophy herself is
promoted to religion.

Philosophy should not be a corbel erected on mystery to gaze upon it
at its ease, without any other result than that of being convenient to
curiosity.

For our part, adjourning the development of our thought to another
occasion, we will confine ourselves to saying that we neither understand
man as a point of departure nor progress as an end, without those two
forces which are their two motors: faith and love.

Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type.

What is this ideal? It is God.

Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.



CHAPTER VII--PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED IN BLAME

History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same time,
simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the Lawgiver,
Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is clear, direct,
and limpid, and offers no obscurity.

But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its
abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account. Cenobitism is a
human problem.

When one speaks of convents, those abodes of error, but of innocence,
of aberration but of good-will, of ignorance but of devotion, of torture
but of martyrdom, it always becomes necessary to say either yes or no.

A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto,
sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme
abnegation.

To abdicate with the object of reigning seems to be the device of
monasticism.

In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of
exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light.
In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on paradise.

The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity.

It does not seem to us, that on such a subject mockery is permissible.
All about it is serious, the good as well as the bad.

The just man frowns, but never smiles with a malicious sneer. We
understand wrath, but not malice.



CHAPTER VIII--FAITH, LAW

A few words more.

We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise the
spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere honor
the thoughtful man.

We salute the man who kneels.

A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor
and invisible labor.

To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers.

To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.

Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that
a perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,
the priest and the philosopher agree. _We must die_. The Abbé de la
Trappe replies to Horace.

To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre,--this is
the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,
the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we
admit it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and
vivacious spirits say:--

"What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?
What purpose do they serve? What do they do?"

Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which
awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of
us, we reply: "There is probably no work more divine than that performed
by these souls." And we add: "There is probably no work which is more
useful."

There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never
pray at all.

In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is
mingled with prayer.

Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. _Deo erexit
Voltaire_.

We are for religion as against religions.

We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and the
sublimity of prayer.

Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,--a minute which
will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,--at
this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little
elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,
and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,
whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.

The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still
sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its
own.

Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all
sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,
the female convent in particular,--for in our century it is woman who
suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something
of protestation,--the female convent has incontestably a certain
majesty.

This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of
whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;
it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place
whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side
the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it
is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated
and obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has
become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half
obscurity of the tomb.

We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,
live by faith,--we have never been able to think without a sort of
tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of
envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these
humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the
mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is
not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing
the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring
towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the
darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at
times, by the deep breaths of eternity.



BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM



CHAPTER I--WHICH TREATS OF THE MANNER OF ENTERING A CONVENT

It was into this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent expressed
it, "fallen from the sky."

He had scaled the wall of the garden which formed the angle of the Rue
Polonceau. That hymn of the angels which he had heard in the middle
of the night, was the nuns chanting matins; that hall, of which he had
caught a glimpse in the gloom, was the chapel. That phantom which he had
seen stretched on the ground was the sister who was making reparation;
that bell, the sound of which had so strangely surprised him, was the
gardener's bell attached to the knee of Father Fauchelevent.

Cosette once put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have
already seen, supped on a glass of wine and a bit of cheese before a
good, crackling fire; then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by
Cosette, each threw himself on a truss of straw.

Before he shut his eyes, Jean Valjean said: "I must remain here
henceforth." This remark trotted through Fauchelevent's head all night
long.

To tell the truth, neither of them slept.

Jean Valjean, feeling that he was discovered and that Javert was on
his scent, understood that he and Cosette were lost if they returned to
Paris. Then the new storm which had just burst upon him had stranded
him in this cloister. Jean Valjean had, henceforth, but one thought,--to
remain there. Now, for an unfortunate man in his position, this
convent was both the safest and the most dangerous of places; the most
dangerous, because, as no men might enter there, if he were discovered,
it was a flagrant offence, and Jean Valjean would find but one step
intervening between the convent and prison; the safest, because, if he
could manage to get himself accepted there and remain there, who would
ever seek him in such a place? To dwell in an impossible place was
safety.

On his side, Fauchelevent was cudgelling his brains. He began by
declaring to himself that he understood nothing of the matter. How had
M. Madeleine got there, when the walls were what they were? Cloister
walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child? One
cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one's arms. Who was
that child? Where did they both come from? Since Fauchelevent had lived
in the convent, he had heard nothing of M. sur M., and he knew nothing
of what had taken place there. Father Madeleine had an air which
discouraged questions; and besides, Fauchelevent said to himself: "One
does not question a saint." M. Madeleine had preserved all his prestige
in Fauchelevent's eyes. Only, from some words which Jean Valjean had let
fall, the gardener thought he could draw the inference that M. Madeleine
had probably become bankrupt through the hard times, and that he was
pursued by his creditors; or that he had compromised himself in some
political affair, and was in hiding; which last did not displease
Fauchelevent, who, like many of our peasants of the North, had an
old fund of Bonapartism about him. While in hiding, M. Madeleine had
selected the convent as a refuge, and it was quite simple that he should
wish to remain there. But the inexplicable point, to which Fauchelevent
returned constantly and over which he wearied his brain, was that M.
Madeleine should be there, and that he should have that little girl with
him. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to them, and still did
not believe it possible. The incomprehensible had just made its entrance
into Fauchelevent's hut. Fauchelevent groped about amid conjectures, and
could see nothing clearly but this: "M. Madeleine saved my life."
This certainty alone was sufficient and decided his course. He said to
himself: "It is my turn now." He added in his conscience: "M. Madeleine
did not stop to deliberate when it was a question of thrusting himself
under the cart for the purpose of dragging me out." He made up his mind
to save M. Madeleine.

Nevertheless, he put many questions to himself and made himself divers
replies: "After what he did for me, would I save him if he were a thief?
Just the same. If he were an assassin, would I save him? Just the same.
Since he is a saint, shall I save him? Just the same."

But what a problem it was to manage to have him remain in the convent!
Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical
undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder
than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old
rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous
enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the
steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoît. Father Fauchelevent was
an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards the end
of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the world,
found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action to be
performed, flung himself upon it like a man, who at the moment when he
is dying, should find close to his hand a glass of good wine which he
had never tasted, and should swallow it with avidity. We may add,
that the air which he had breathed for many years in this convent had
destroyed all personality in him, and had ended by rendering a good
action of some kind absolutely necessary to him.

So he took his resolve: to devote himself to M. Madeleine.

We have just called him a _poor peasant of Picardy_. That description
is just, but incomplete. At the point of this story which we have now
reached, a little of Father Fauchelevent's physiology becomes useful.
He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added trickery to his
cunning, and penetration to his ingenuousness. Having, through various
causes, failed in his business, he had descended to the calling of a
carter and a laborer. But, in spite of oaths and lashings, which horses
seem to require, something of the notary had lingered in him. He had
some natural wit; he talked good grammar; he conversed, which is a rare
thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him: "He talks almost
like a gentleman with a hat." Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that
species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last
century qualified as _demi-bourgeois, demi-lout_, and which the
metaphors showered by the château upon the thatched cottage ticketed in
the pigeon-hole of the plebeian: _rather rustic, rather citified; pepper
and salt_. Fauchelevent, though sorely tried and harshly used by fate,
worn out, a sort of poor, threadbare old soul, was, nevertheless, an
impulsive man, and extremely spontaneous in his actions; a precious
quality which prevents one from ever being wicked. His defects and his
vices, for he had some, were all superficial; in short, his physiognomy
was of the kind which succeeds with an observer. His aged face had none
of those disagreeable wrinkles at the top of the forehead, which signify
malice or stupidity.

At daybreak, Father Fauchelevent opened his eyes, after having done an
enormous deal of thinking, and beheld M. Madeleine seated on his truss
of straw, and watching Cosette's slumbers. Fauchelevent sat up and
said:--

"Now that you are here, how are you going to contrive to enter?"

This remark summed up the situation and aroused Jean Valjean from his
revery.

The two men took counsel together.

"In the first place," said Fauchelevent, "you will begin by not setting
foot outside of this chamber, either you or the child. One step in the
garden and we are done for."

"That is true."

"Monsieur Madeleine," resumed Fauchelevent, "you have arrived at a very
auspicious moment, I mean to say a very inauspicious moment; one of
the ladies is very ill. This will prevent them from looking much in our
direction. It seems that she is dying. The prayers of the forty hours
are being said. The whole community is in confusion. That occupies them.
The one who is on the point of departure is a saint. In fact, we are
all saints here; all the difference between them and me is that they say
'our cell,' and that I say 'my cabin.' The prayers for the dying are to
be said, and then the prayers for the dead. We shall be at peace here
for to-day; but I will not answer for to-morrow."

"Still," observed Jean Valjean, "this cottage is in the niche of the
wall, it is hidden by a sort of ruin, there are trees, it is not visible
from the convent."

"And I add that the nuns never come near it."

"Well?" said Jean Valjean.

The interrogation mark which accentuated this "well" signified:
"it seems to me that one may remain concealed here?" It was to this
interrogation point that Fauchelevent responded:--

"There are the little girls."

"What little girls?" asked Jean Valjean.

Just as Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain the words which he had
uttered, a bell emitted one stroke.

"The nun is dead," said he. "There is the knell."

And he made a sign to Jean Valjean to listen.

The bell struck a second time.

"It is the knell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will continue to strike
once a minute for twenty-four hours, until the body is taken from the
church.--You see, they play. At recreation hours it suffices to have a
ball roll aside, to send them all hither, in spite of prohibitions, to
hunt and rummage for it all about here. Those cherubs are devils."

"Who?" asked Jean Valjean.

"The little girls. You would be very quickly discovered. They would
shriek: 'Oh! a man!' There is no danger to-day. There will be no
recreation hour. The day will be entirely devoted to prayers. You hear
the bell. As I told you, a stroke each minute. It is the death knell."

"I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are pupils."

And Jean Valjean thought to himself:--

"Here is Cosette's education already provided."

Fauchelevent exclaimed:--

"Pardine! There are little girls indeed! And they would bawl around you!
And they would rush off! To be a man here is to have the plague. You see
how they fasten a bell to my paw as though I were a wild beast."

Jean Valjean fell into more and more profound thought.--"This convent
would be our salvation," he murmured.

Then he raised his voice:--

"Yes, the difficulty is to remain here."

"No," said Fauchelevent, "the difficulty is to get out."

Jean Valjean felt the blood rush back to his heart.

"To get out!"

"Yes, Monsieur Madeleine. In order to return here it is first necessary
to get out."

And after waiting until another stroke of the knell had sounded,
Fauchelevent went on:--

"You must not be found here in this fashion. Whence come you? For me,
you fall from heaven, because I know you; but the nuns require one to
enter by the door."

All at once they heard a rather complicated pealing from another bell.

"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "they are ringing up the vocal mothers. They
are going to the chapter. They always hold a chapter when any one dies.
She died at daybreak. People generally do die at daybreak. But cannot
you get out by the way in which you entered? Come, I do not ask for the
sake of questioning you, but how did you get in?"

Jean Valjean turned pale; the very thought of descending again into
that terrible street made him shudder. You make your way out of a forest
filled with tigers, and once out of it, imagine a friendly counsel that
shall advise you to return thither! Jean Valjean pictured to himself the
whole police force still engaged in swarming in that quarter, agents on
the watch, sentinels everywhere, frightful fists extended towards his
collar, Javert at the corner of the intersection of the streets perhaps.

"Impossible!" said he. "Father Fauchelevent, say that I fell from the
sky."

"But I believe it, I believe it," retorted Fauchelevent. "You have no
need to tell me that. The good God must have taken you in his hand for
the purpose of getting a good look at you close to, and then dropped
you. Only, he meant to place you in a man's convent; he made a mistake.
Come, there goes another peal, that is to order the porter to go and
inform the municipality that the dead-doctor is to come here and view a
corpse. All that is the ceremony of dying. These good ladies are not
at all fond of that visit. A doctor is a man who does not believe in
anything. He lifts the veil. Sometimes he lifts something else too. How
quickly they have had the doctor summoned this time! What is the matter?
Your little one is still asleep. What is her name?"

"Cosette."

"She is your daughter? You are her grandfather, that is?"

"Yes."

"It will be easy enough for her to get out of here. I have my service
door which opens on the courtyard. I knock. The porter opens; I have
my vintage basket on my back, the child is in it, I go out. Father
Fauchelevent goes out with his basket--that is perfectly natural. You
will tell the child to keep very quiet. She will be under the cover. I
will leave her for whatever time is required with a good old friend, a
fruit-seller whom I know in the Rue Chemin-Vert, who is deaf, and who
has a little bed. I will shout in the fruit-seller's ear, that she is a
niece of mine, and that she is to keep her for me until to-morrow. Then
the little one will re-enter with you; for I will contrive to have you
re-enter. It must be done. But how will you manage to get out?"

Jean Valjean shook his head.

"No one must see me, the whole point lies there, Father Fauchelevent.
Find some means of getting me out in a basket, under cover, like
Cosette."

Fauchelevent scratched the lobe of his ear with the middle finger of his
left hand, a sign of serious embarrassment.

A third peal created a diversion.

"That is the dead-doctor taking his departure," said Fauchelevent. "He
has taken a look and said: 'She is dead, that is well.' When the doctor
has signed the passport for paradise, the undertaker's company sends a
coffin. If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister,
the sisters lay her out. After which, I nail her up. That forms a part
of my gardener's duty. A gardener is a bit of a grave-digger. She is
placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street,
and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead. I don't
count the undertaker's men and myself as men. It is in that hall that I
nail up the coffin. The undertaker's men come and get it, and whip
up, coachman! that's the way one goes to heaven. They fetch a box with
nothing in it, they take it away again with something in it. That's what
a burial is like. _De profundis_."

A horizontal ray of sunshine lightly touched the face of the sleeping
Cosette, who lay with her mouth vaguely open, and had the air of an
angel drinking in the light. Jean Valjean had fallen to gazing at her.
He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent.

That one is not listened to is no reason for preserving silence. The
good old gardener went on tranquilly with his babble:--

"The grave is dug in the Vaugirard cemetery. They declare that they are
going to suppress that Vaugirard cemetery. It is an ancient cemetery
which is outside the regulations, which has no uniform, and which is
going to retire. It is a shame, for it is convenient. I have a friend
there, Father Mestienne, the grave-digger. The nuns here possess one
privilege, it is to be taken to that cemetery at nightfall. There is
a special permission from the Prefecture on their behalf. But how many
events have happened since yesterday! Mother Crucifixion is dead, and
Father Madeleine--"

"Is buried," said Jean Valjean, smiling sadly.

Fauchelevent caught the word.

"Goodness! if you were here for good, it would be a real burial."

A fourth peal burst out. Fauchelevent hastily detached the belled
knee-cap from its nail and buckled it on his knee again.

"This time it is for me. The Mother Prioress wants me. Good, now I am
pricking myself on the tongue of my buckle. Monsieur Madeleine, don't
stir from here, and wait for me. Something new has come up. If you are
hungry, there is wine, bread and cheese."

And he hastened out of the hut, crying: "Coming! coming!"

Jean Valjean watched him hurrying across the garden as fast as his
crooked leg would permit, casting a sidelong glance by the way on his
melon patch.

Less than ten minutes later, Father Fauchelevent, whose bell put the
nuns in his road to flight, tapped gently at a door, and a gentle voice
replied: _"Forever! Forever!" _ that is to say: _"Enter." _

The door was the one leading to the parlor reserved for seeing the
gardener on business. This parlor adjoined the chapter hall. The
prioress, seated on the only chair in the parlor, was waiting for
Fauchelevent.



CHAPTER II--FAUCHELEVENT IN THE PRESENCE OF A DIFFICULTY

It is the peculiarity of certain persons and certain professions,
notably priests and nuns, to wear a grave and agitated air on critical
occasions. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, this double form of
preoccupation was imprinted on the countenance of the prioress, who was
that wise and charming Mademoiselle de Blemeur, Mother Innocente, who
was ordinarily cheerful.

The gardener made a timid bow, and remained at the door of the cell. The
prioress, who was telling her beads, raised her eyes and said:--

"Ah! it is you, Father Fauvent."

This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent.

Fauchelevent bowed again.

"Father Fauvent, I have sent for you."

"Here I am, reverend Mother."

"I have something to say to you."

"And so have I," said Fauchelevent with a boldness which caused him
inward terror, "I have something to say to the very reverend Mother."

The prioress stared at him.

"Ah! you have a communication to make to me."

"A request."

"Very well, speak."

Goodman Fauchelevent, the ex-notary, belonged to the category of
peasants who have assurance. A certain clever ignorance constitutes a
force; you do not distrust it, and you are caught by it. Fauchelevent
had been a success during the something more than two years which he had
passed in the convent. Always solitary and busied about his gardening,
he had nothing else to do than to indulge his curiosity. As he was at a
distance from all those veiled women passing to and fro, he saw before
him only an agitation of shadows. By dint of attention and sharpness
he had succeeded in clothing all those phantoms with flesh, and those
corpses were alive for him. He was like a deaf man whose sight grows
keener, and like a blind man whose hearing becomes more acute. He had
applied himself to riddling out the significance of the different peals,
and he had succeeded, so that this taciturn and enigmatical cloister
possessed no secrets for him; the sphinx babbled all her secrets in his
ear. Fauchelevent knew all and concealed all; that constituted his art.
The whole convent thought him stupid. A great merit in religion. The
vocal mothers made much of Fauchelevent. He was a curious mute. He
inspired confidence. Moreover, he was regular, and never went out except
for well-demonstrated requirements of the orchard and vegetable garden.
This discretion of conduct had inured to his credit. None the less, he
had set two men to chattering: the porter, in the convent, and he
knew the singularities of their parlor, and the grave-digger, at
the cemetery, and he was acquainted with the peculiarities of their
sepulture; in this way, he possessed a double light on the subject of
these nuns, one as to their life, the other as to their death. But he
did not abuse his knowledge. The congregation thought a great deal of
him. Old, lame, blind to everything, probably a little deaf into the
bargain,--what qualities! They would have found it difficult to replace
him.

The goodman, with the assurance of a person who feels that he is
appreciated, entered into a rather diffuse and very deep rustic harangue
to the reverend prioress. He talked a long time about his age, his
infirmities, the surcharge of years counting double for him henceforth,
of the increasing demands of his work, of the great size of the garden,
of nights which must be passed, like the last, for instance, when he had
been obliged to put straw mats over the melon beds, because of the moon,
and he wound up as follows: "That he had a brother"--(the prioress made
a movement),--"a brother no longer young"--(a second movement on the
part of the prioress, but one expressive of reassurance),--"that, if he
might be permitted, this brother would come and live with him and help
him, that he was an excellent gardener, that the community would receive
from him good service, better than his own; that, otherwise, if his
brother were not admitted, as he, the elder, felt that his health was
broken and that he was insufficient for the work, he should be obliged,
greatly to his regret, to go away; and that his brother had a little
daughter whom he would bring with him, who might be reared for God in
the house, and who might, who knows, become a nun some day."

When he had finished speaking, the prioress stayed the slipping of her
rosary between her fingers, and said to him:--

"Could you procure a stout iron bar between now and this evening?"

"For what purpose?"

"To serve as a lever."

"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.

The prioress, without adding a word, rose and entered the adjoining
room, which was the hall of the chapter, and where the vocal mothers
were probably assembled. Fauchelevent was left alone.



CHAPTER III--MOTHER INNOCENTE

About a quarter of an hour elapsed. The prioress returned and seated
herself once more on her chair.

The two interlocutors seemed preoccupied. We will present a stenographic
report of the dialogue which then ensued, to the best of our ability.

"Father Fauvent!"

"Reverend Mother!"

"Do you know the chapel?"

"I have a little cage there, where I hear the mass and the offices."

"And you have been in the choir in pursuance of your duties?"

"Two or three times."

"There is a stone to be raised."

"Heavy?"

"The slab of the pavement which is at the side of the altar."

"The slab which closes the vault?"

"Yes."

"It would be a good thing to have two men for it."

"Mother Ascension, who is as strong as a man, will help you."

"A woman is never a man."

"We have only a woman here to help you. Each one does what he can.
Because Dom Mabillon gives four hundred and seventeen epistles of
Saint Bernard, while Merlonus Horstius only gives three hundred and
sixty-seven, I do not despise Merlonus Horstius."

"Neither do I."

"Merit consists in working according to one's strength. A cloister is
not a dock-yard."

"And a woman is not a man. But my brother is the strong one, though!"

"And can you get a lever?"

"That is the only sort of key that fits that sort of door."

"There is a ring in the stone."

"I will put the lever through it."

"And the stone is so arranged that it swings on a pivot."

"That is good, reverend Mother. I will open the vault."

"And the four Mother Precentors will help you."

"And when the vault is open?"

"It must be closed again."

"Will that be all?"

"No."

"Give me your orders, very reverend Mother."

"Fauvent, we have confidence in you."

"I am here to do anything you wish."

"And to hold your peace about everything!"

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"When the vault is open--"

"I will close it again."

"But before that--"

"What, reverend Mother?"

"Something must be lowered into it."

A silence ensued. The prioress, after a pout of the under lip which
resembled hesitation, broke it.

"Father Fauvent!"

"Reverend Mother!"

"You know that a mother died this morning?"

"No."

"Did you not hear the bell?"

"Nothing can be heard at the bottom of the garden."

"Really?"

"I can hardly distinguish my own signal."

"She died at daybreak."

"And then, the wind is not blowing in my direction this morning."

"It was Mother Crucifixion. A blessed woman."

The prioress paused, moved her lips, as though in mental prayer, and
resumed:--

"Three years ago, Madame de Béthune, a Jansenist, turned orthodox,
merely from having seen Mother Crucifixion at prayer."

"Ah! yes, now I hear the knell, reverend Mother."

"The mothers have taken her to the dead-room, which opens on the
church."

"I know."

"No other man than you can or must enter that chamber. See to that. A
fine sight it would be, to see a man enter the dead-room!"

"More often!"

"Hey?"

"More often!"

"What do you say?"

"I say more often."

"More often than what?"

"Reverend Mother, I did not say more often than what, I said more
often."

"I don't understand you. Why do you say more often?"

"In order to speak like you, reverend Mother."

"But I did not say 'more often.'"

At that moment, nine o'clock struck.

"At nine o'clock in the morning and at all hours, praised and adored be
the most Holy Sacrament of the altar," said the prioress.

"Amen," said Fauchelevent.

The clock struck opportunely. It cut "more often" short. It is probable,
that had it not been for this, the prioress and Fauchelevent would never
have unravelled that skein.

Fauchelevent mopped his forehead.

The prioress indulged in another little inward murmur, probably sacred,
then raised her voice:--

"In her lifetime, Mother Crucifixion made converts; after her death, she
will perform miracles."

"She will!" replied Father Fauchelevent, falling into step, and striving
not to flinch again.

"Father Fauvent, the community has been blessed in Mother Crucifixion.
No doubt, it is not granted to every one to die, like Cardinal de
Bérulle, while saying the holy mass, and to breathe forth their souls
to God, while pronouncing these words: _Hanc igitur oblationem_. But
without attaining to such happiness, Mother Crucifixion's death was very
precious. She retained her consciousness to the very last moment.
She spoke to us, then she spoke to the angels. She gave us her last
commands. If you had a little more faith, and if you could have been
in her cell, she would have cured your leg merely by touching it.
She smiled. We felt that she was regaining her life in God. There was
something of paradise in that death."

Fauchelevent thought that it was an orison which she was finishing.

"Amen," said he.

"Father Fauvent, what the dead wish must be done."

The prioress took off several beads of her chaplet. Fauchelevent held
his peace.

She went on:--

"I have consulted upon this point many ecclesiastics laboring in Our
Lord, who occupy themselves in the exercises of the clerical life, and
who bear wonderful fruit."

"Reverend Mother, you can hear the knell much better here than in the
garden."

"Besides, she is more than a dead woman, she is a saint."

"Like yourself, reverend Mother."

"She slept in her coffin for twenty years, by express permission of our
Holy Father, Pius VII.--"

"The one who crowned the Emp--Buonaparte."

For a clever man like Fauchelevent, this allusion was an awkward one.
Fortunately, the prioress, completely absorbed in her own thoughts, did
not hear it. She continued:--

"Father Fauvent?"

"Reverend Mother?"

"Saint Didorus, Archbishop of Cappadocia, desired that this single word
might be inscribed on his tomb: _Acarus_, which signifies, a worm of the
earth; this was done. Is this true?"

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"The blessed Mezzocane, Abbot of Aquila, wished to be buried beneath the
gallows; this was done."

"That is true."

"Saint Terentius, Bishop of Port, where the mouth of the Tiber empties
into the sea, requested that on his tomb might be engraved the
sign which was placed on the graves of parricides, in the hope that
passers-by would spit on his tomb. This was done. The dead must be
obeyed."

"So be it."

"The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was,
as he had ordered, and in spite of the king of Castile, borne to the
church of the Dominicans in Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis was
Bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can the contrary be affirmed?"

"For that matter, no, reverend Mother."

"The fact is attested by Plantavit de la Fosse."

Several beads of the chaplet were told off, still in silence. The
prioress resumed:--

"Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be interred in the coffin in
which she has slept for the last twenty years."

"That is just."

"It is a continuation of her slumber."

"So I shall have to nail up that coffin?"

"Yes."

"And we are to reject the undertaker's coffin?"

"Precisely."

"I am at the orders of the very reverend community."

"The four Mother Precentors will assist you."

"In nailing up the coffin? I do not need them."

"No. In lowering the coffin."

"Where?"

"Into the vault."

"What vault?"

"Under the altar."

Fauchelevent started.

"The vault under the altar?"

"Under the altar."

"But--"

"You will have an iron bar."

"Yes, but--"

"You will raise the stone with the bar by means of the ring."

"But--"

"The dead must be obeyed. To be buried in the vault under the altar of
the chapel, not to go to profane earth; to remain there in death where
she prayed while living; such was the last wish of Mother Crucifixion.
She asked it of us; that is to say, commanded us."

"But it is forbidden."

"Forbidden by men, enjoined by God."

"What if it became known?"

"We have confidence in you."

"Oh! I am a stone in your walls."

"The chapter assembled. The vocal mothers, whom I have just consulted
again, and who are now deliberating, have decided that Mother
Crucifixion shall be buried, according to her wish, in her own coffin,
under our altar. Think, Father Fauvent, if she were to work miracles
here! What a glory of God for the community! And miracles issue from
tombs."

"But, reverend Mother, if the agent of the sanitary commission--"

"Saint Benoît II., in the matter of sepulture, resisted Constantine
Pogonatus."

"But the commissary of police--"

"Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered among the Gauls
under the Empire of Constantius, expressly recognized the right of nuns
to be buried in religion, that is to say, beneath the altar."

"But the inspector from the Prefecture--"

"The world is nothing in the presence of the cross. Martin, the eleventh
general of the Carthusians, gave to his order this device: _Stat crux
dum volvitur orbis_."

"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who imperturbably extricated himself in this
manner from the dilemma, whenever he heard Latin.

Any audience suffices for a person who has held his peace too long. On
the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in
his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he
halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and
made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress, who was usually
subjected to the barrier of silence, and whose reservoir was overfull,
rose and exclaimed with the loquacity of a dam which has broken away:--

"I have on my right Benoît and on my left Bernard. Who was Bernard? The
first abbot of Clairvaux. Fontaines in Burgundy is a country that is
blest because it gave him birth. His father was named Técelin, and his
mother Alèthe. He began at Cîteaux, to end in Clairvaux; he was ordained
abbot by the bishop of Châlon-sur-Saône, Guillaume de Champeaux; he had
seven hundred novices, and founded a hundred and sixty monasteries; he
overthrew Abeilard at the council of Sens in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys
and Henry his disciple, and another sort of erring spirits who were
called the Apostolics; he confounded Arnauld de Brescia, darted
lightning at the monk Raoul, the murderer of the Jews, dominated the
council of Reims in 1148, caused the condemnation of Gilbert de Poréa,
Bishop of Poitiers, caused the condemnation of Éon de l'Étoile, arranged
the disputes of princes, enlightened King Louis the Young, advised Pope
Eugene III., regulated the Temple, preached the crusade, performed
two hundred and fifty miracles during his lifetime, and as many
as thirty-nine in one day. Who was Benoît? He was the patriarch of
Mont-Cassin; he was the second founder of the Sainteté Claustrale,
he was the Basil of the West. His order has produced forty popes, two
hundred cardinals, fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four
thousand six hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six
kings, forty-one queens, three thousand six hundred canonized saints,
and has been in existence for fourteen hundred years. On one side Saint
Bernard, on the other the agent of the sanitary department! On one side
Saint Benoît, on the other the inspector of public ways! The state,
the road commissioners, the public undertaker, regulations, the
administration, what do we know of all that? There is not a chance
passer-by who would not be indignant to see how we are treated. We
have not even the right to give our dust to Jesus Christ! Your sanitary
department is a revolutionary invention. God subordinated to the
commissary of police; such is the age. Silence, Fauvent!"

Fauchelevent was but ill at ease under this shower bath. The prioress
continued:--

"No one doubts the right of the monastery to sepulture. Only fanatics
and those in error deny it. We live in times of terrible confusion. We
do not know that which it is necessary to know, and we know that which
we should ignore. We are ignorant and impious. In this age there exist
people who do not distinguish between the very great Saint Bernard and
the Saint Bernard denominated of the poor Catholics, a certain good
ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century. Others are so
blasphemous as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI. to the cross of
Jesus Christ. Louis XVI. was merely a king. Let us beware of God! There
is no longer just nor unjust. The name of Voltaire is known, but not
the name of César de Bus. Nevertheless, César de Bus is a man of blessed
memory, and Voltaire one of unblessed memory. The last arch-bishop,
the Cardinal de Périgord, did not even know that Charles de
Gondren succeeded to Berulle, and François Bourgoin to Gondren,
and Jean-François Senault to Bourgoin, and Father Sainte-Marthe to
Jean-François Senault. The name of Father Coton is known, not because
he was one of the three who urged the foundation of the Oratorie, but
because he furnished Henri IV., the Huguenot king, with the material
for an oath. That which pleases people of the world in Saint François de
Sales, is that he cheated at play. And then, religion is attacked. Why?
Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittaire, Bishop of Gap,
was the brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun, and because both of them
followed Mommol. What has that to do with the question? Does that
prevent Martin de Tours from being a saint, and giving half of his cloak
to a beggar? They persecute the saints. They shut their eyes to the
truth. Darkness is the rule. The most ferocious beasts are beasts which
are blind. No one thinks of hell as a reality. Oh! how wicked people
are! By order of the king signifies to-day, by order of the revolution.
One no longer knows what is due to the living or to the dead. A holy
death is prohibited. Burial is a civil matter. This is horrible. Saint
Leo II. wrote two special letters, one to Pierre Notaire, the other to
the king of the Visigoths, for the purpose of combating and rejecting,
in questions touching the dead, the authority of the exarch and the
supremacy of the Emperor. Gauthier, Bishop of Châlons, held his own
in this matter against Otho, Duke of Burgundy. The ancient magistracy
agreed with him. In former times we had voices in the chapter, even on
matters of the day. The Abbot of Cîteaux, the general of the order, was
councillor by right of birth to the parliament of Burgundy. We do what
we please with our dead. Is not the body of Saint Benoît himself in
France, in the abbey of Fleury, called Saint Benoît-sur-Loire, although
he died in Italy at Mont-Cassin, on Saturday, the 21st of the month
of March, of the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor
psalm-singers, I hate priors, I execrate heretics, but I should detest
yet more any one who should maintain the contrary. One has only to
read Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithemus, Maurolics, and Dom Luc
d'Achery."

The prioress took breath, then turned to Fauchelevent.

"Is it settled, Father Fauvent?"

"It is settled, reverend Mother."

"We may depend on you?"

"I will obey."

"That is well."

"I am entirely devoted to the convent."

"That is understood. You will close the coffin. The sisters will carry
it to the chapel. The office for the dead will then be said. Then we
shall return to the cloister. Between eleven o'clock and midnight, you
will come with your iron bar. All will be done in the most profound
secrecy. There will be in the chapel only the four Mother Precentors,
Mother Ascension and yourself."

"And the sister at the post?"

"She will not turn round."

"But she will hear."

"She will not listen. Besides, what the cloister knows the world learns
not."

A pause ensued. The prioress went on:--

"You will remove your bell. It is not necessary that the sister at the
post should perceive your presence."

"Reverend Mother?"

"What, Father Fauvent?"

"Has the doctor for the dead paid his visit?"

"He will pay it at four o'clock to-day. The peal which orders the
doctor for the dead to be summoned has already been rung. But you do not
understand any of the peals?"

"I pay no attention to any but my own."

"That is well, Father Fauvent."

"Reverend Mother, a lever at least six feet long will be required."

"Where will you obtain it?"

"Where gratings are not lacking, iron bars are not lacking. I have my
heap of old iron at the bottom of the garden."

"About three-quarters of an hour before midnight; do not forget."

"Reverend Mother?"

"What?"

"If you were ever to have any other jobs of this sort, my brother is the
strong man for you. A perfect Turk!"

"You will do it as speedily as possible."

"I cannot work very fast. I am infirm; that is why I require an
assistant. I limp."

"To limp is no sin, and perhaps it is a blessing. The Emperor Henry II.,
who combated Antipope Gregory and re-established Benoît VIII., has two
surnames, the Saint and the Lame."

"Two surtouts are a good thing," murmured Fauchelevent, who really was a
little hard of hearing.

"Now that I think of it, Father Fauvent, let us give a whole hour to it.
That is not too much. Be near the principal altar, with your iron bar,
at eleven o'clock. The office begins at midnight. Everything must have
been completed a good quarter of an hour before that."

"I will do anything to prove my zeal towards the community. These are my
orders. I am to nail up the coffin. At eleven o'clock exactly, I am to
be in the chapel. The Mother Precentors will be there. Mother Ascension
will be there. Two men would be better. However, never mind! I shall
have my lever. We will open the vault, we will lower the coffin, and
we will close the vault again. After which, there will be no trace
of anything. The government will have no suspicion. Thus all has been
arranged, reverend Mother?"

"No!"

"What else remains?"

"The empty coffin remains."

This produced a pause. Fauchelevent meditated. The prioress meditated.

"What is to be done with that coffin, Father Fauvent?"

"It will be given to the earth."

"Empty?"

Another silence. Fauchelevent made, with his left hand, that sort of a
gesture which dismisses a troublesome subject.

"Reverend Mother, I am the one who is to nail up the coffin in the
basement of the church, and no one can enter there but myself, and I
will cover the coffin with the pall."

"Yes, but the bearers, when they place it in the hearse and lower it
into the grave, will be sure to feel that there is nothing in it."

"Ah! the de--!" exclaimed Fauchelevent.

The prioress began to make the sign of the cross, and looked fixedly at
the gardener. The _vil_ stuck fast in his throat.

He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.

"I will put earth in the coffin, reverend Mother. That will produce the
effect of a corpse."

"You are right. Earth, that is the same thing as man. So you will manage
the empty coffin?"

"I will make that my special business."

The prioress's face, up to that moment troubled and clouded, grew serene
once more. She made the sign of a superior dismissing an inferior to
him. Fauchelevent went towards the door. As he was on the point of
passing out, the prioress raised her voice gently:--

"I am pleased with you, Father Fauvent; bring your brother to me
to-morrow, after the burial, and tell him to fetch his daughter."



CHAPTER IV--IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN HAS QUITE THE AIR OF HAVING READ
AUSTIN CASTILLEJO

The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man;
they do not reach their goal very promptly. Moreover, Fauchelevent
was in a dilemma. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to return to his
cottage in the garden. Cosette had waked up. Jean Valjean had placed her
near the fire. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, Jean Valjean was
pointing out to her the vintner's basket on the wall, and saying to her,
"Listen attentively to me, my little Cosette. We must go away from this
house, but we shall return to it, and we shall be very happy here. The
good man who lives here is going to carry you off on his back in that.
You will wait for me at a lady's house. I shall come to fetch you. Obey,
and say nothing, above all things, unless you want Madame Thénardier to
get you again!"

Cosette nodded gravely.

Jean Valjean turned round at the noise made by Fauchelevent opening the
door.

"Well?"

"Everything is arranged, and nothing is," said Fauchelevent. "I have
permission to bring you in; but before bringing you in you must be
got out. That's where the difficulty lies. It is easy enough with the
child."

"You will carry her out?"

"And she will hold her tongue?"

"I answer for that."

"But you, Father Madeleine?"

And, after a silence, fraught with anxiety, Fauchelevent exclaimed:--

"Why, get out as you came in!"

Jean Valjean, as in the first instance, contented himself with saying,
"Impossible."

Fauchelevent grumbled, more to himself than to Jean Valjean:--

"There is another thing which bothers me. I have said that I would put
earth in it. When I come to think it over, the earth instead of the
corpse will not seem like the real thing, it won't do, it will get
displaced, it will move about. The men will bear it. You understand,
Father Madeleine, the government will notice it."

Jean Valjean stared him straight in the eye and thought that he was
raving.

Fauchelevent went on:--

"How the de--uce are you going to get out? It must all be done by
to-morrow morning. It is to-morrow that I am to bring you in. The
prioress expects you."

Then he explained to Jean Valjean that this was his recompense for a
service which he, Fauchelevent, was to render to the community. That it
fell among his duties to take part in their burials, that he nailed up
the coffins and helped the grave-digger at the cemetery. That the nun
who had died that morning had requested to be buried in the coffin which
had served her for a bed, and interred in the vault under the altar of
the chapel. That the police regulations forbade this, but that she was
one of those dead to whom nothing is refused. That the prioress and the
vocal mothers intended to fulfil the wish of the deceased. That it was
so much the worse for the government. That he, Fauchelevent, was to nail
up the coffin in the cell, raise the stone in the chapel, and lower the
corpse into the vault. And that, by way of thanks, the prioress was to
admit his brother to the house as a gardener, and his niece as a pupil.
That his brother was M. Madeleine, and that his niece was Cosette. That
the prioress had told him to bring his brother on the following evening,
after the counterfeit interment in the cemetery. But that he could not
bring M. Madeleine in from the outside if M. Madeleine was not outside.
That that was the first problem. And then, that there was another: the
empty coffin.

"What is that empty coffin?" asked Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent replied:--

"The coffin of the administration."

"What coffin? What administration?"

"A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes and says, 'A nun has died.'
The government sends a coffin. The next day it sends a hearse and
undertaker's men to get the coffin and carry it to the cemetery. The
undertaker's men will come and lift the coffin; there will be nothing in
it."

"Put something in it."

"A corpse? I have none."

"No."

"What then?"

"A living person."

"What person?"

"Me!" said Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent, who was seated, sprang up as though a bomb had burst under
his chair.

"You!"

"Why not?"

Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his
face like a flash from heaven in the winter.

"You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: 'Mother Crucifixion is
dead.' and I add: 'and Father Madeleine is buried.'"

"Ah! good, you can laugh, you are not speaking seriously."

"Very seriously, I must get out of this place."

"Certainly."

"l have told you to find a basket, and a cover for me also."

"Well?"

"The basket will be of pine, and the cover a black cloth."

"In the first place, it will be a white cloth. Nuns are buried in
white."

"Let it be a white cloth, then."

"You are not like other men, Father Madeleine."

To behold such devices, which are nothing else than the savage and
daring inventions of the galleys, spring forth from the peaceable things
which surrounded him, and mingle with what he called the "petty course
of life in the convent," caused Fauchelevent as much amazement as a
gull fishing in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Denis would inspire in a
passer-by.

Jean Valjean went on:--

"The problem is to get out of here without being seen. This offers
the means. But give me some information, in the first place. How is it
managed? Where is this coffin?"

"The empty one?"

"Yes."

"Down stairs, in what is called the dead-room. It stands on two
trestles, under the pall."

"How long is the coffin?"

"Six feet."

"What is this dead-room?"

"It is a chamber on the ground floor which has a grated window opening
on the garden, which is closed on the outside by a shutter, and two
doors; one leads into the convent, the other into the church."

"What church?"

"The church in the street, the church which any one can enter."

"Have you the keys to those two doors?"

"No; I have the key to the door which communicates with the convent; the
porter has the key to the door which communicates with the church."

"When does the porter open that door?"

"Only to allow the undertaker's men to enter, when they come to get the
coffin. When the coffin has been taken out, the door is closed again."

"Who nails up the coffin?"

"I do."

"Who spreads the pall over it?"

"I do."

"Are you alone?"

"Not another man, except the police doctor, can enter the dead-room.
That is even written on the wall."

"Could you hide me in that room to-night when every one is asleep?"

"No. But I could hide you in a small, dark nook which opens on the
dead-room, where I keep my tools to use for burials, and of which I have
the key."

"At what time will the hearse come for the coffin to-morrow?"

"About three o'clock in the afternoon. The burial will take place at the
Vaugirard cemetery a little before nightfall. It is not very near."

"I will remain concealed in your tool-closet all night and all the
morning. And how about food? I shall be hungry."

"I will bring you something."

"You can come and nail me up in the coffin at two o'clock."

Fauchelevent recoiled and cracked his finger-joints.

"But that is impossible!"

"Bah! Impossible to take a hammer and drive some nails in a plank?"

What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a simple
matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than
this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract
himself to fit the diameter of the escape. The prisoner is subject to
flight as the sick man is subject to a crisis which saves or kills him.
An escape is a cure. What does not a man undergo for the sake of a
cure? To have himself nailed up in a case and carried off like a bale
of goods, to live for a long time in a box, to find air where there is
none, to economize his breath for hours, to know how to stifle without
dying--this was one of Jean Valjean's gloomy talents.

Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,--that convict's
expedient,--is also an imperial expedient. If we are to credit the monk
Austin Castillejo, this was the means employed by Charles the Fifth,
desirous of seeing the Plombes for the last time after his abdication.

He had her brought into and carried out of the monastery of Saint-Yuste
in this manner.

Fauchelevent, who had recovered himself a little, exclaimed:--

"But how will you manage to breathe?"

"I will breathe."

"In that box! The mere thought of it suffocates me."

"You surely must have a gimlet, you will make a few holes here and
there, around my mouth, and you will nail the top plank on loosely."

"Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?"

"A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze."

And Jean Valjean added:--

"Father Fauchelevent, we must come to a decision: I must either be
caught here, or accept this escape through the hearse."

Every one has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging
between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not
said to a cat, "Do come in!" There are men who, when an incident stands
half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision
between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the
abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they
are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than
the audacious. Fauchelevent was of this hesitating nature. But
Jean Valjean's coolness prevailed over him in spite of himself. He
grumbled:--

"Well, since there is no other means."

Jean Valjean resumed:--

"The only thing which troubles me is what will take place at the
cemetery."

"That is the very point that is not troublesome," exclaimed
Fauchelevent. "If you are sure of coming out of the coffin all right, I
am sure of getting you out of the grave. The grave-digger is a drunkard,
and a friend of mine. He is Father Mestienne. An old fellow of the old
school. The grave-digger puts the corpses in the grave, and I put the
grave-digger in my pocket. I will tell you what will take place. They
will arrive a little before dusk, three-quarters of an hour before the
gates of the cemetery are closed. The hearse will drive directly up to
the grave. I shall follow; that is my business. I shall have a hammer,
a chisel, and some pincers in my pocket. The hearse halts, the
undertaker's men knot a rope around your coffin and lower you down. The
priest says the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, sprinkles the holy
water, and takes his departure. I am left alone with Father Mestienne.
He is my friend, I tell you. One of two things will happen, he will
either be sober, or he will not be sober. If he is not drunk, I shall
say to him: 'Come and drink a bout while the _Bon Coing_ [the Good
Quince] is open.' I carry him off, I get him drunk,--it does not take
long to make Father Mestienne drunk, he always has the beginning of it
about him,--I lay him under the table, I take his card, so that I can
get into the cemetery again, and I return without him. Then you have no
longer any one but me to deal with. If he is drunk, I shall say to him:
'Be off; I will do your work for you.' Off he goes, and I drag you out
of the hole."

Jean Valjean held out his hand, and Fauchelevent precipitated himself
upon it with the touching effusion of a peasant.

"That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All will go well."

"Provided nothing goes wrong," thought Fauchelevent. "In that case, it
would be terrible."



CHAPTER V--IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE DRUNK IN ORDER TO BE IMMORTAL

On the following day, as the sun was declining, the very rare passers-by
on the Boulevard du Maine pulled off their hats to an old-fashioned
hearse, ornamented with skulls, cross-bones, and tears. This hearse
contained a coffin covered with a white cloth over which spread a large
black cross, like a huge corpse with drooping arms. A mourning-coach, in
which could be seen a priest in his surplice, and a choir boy in his red
cap, followed. Two undertaker's men in gray uniforms trimmed with black
walked on the right and the left of the hearse. Behind it came an old
man in the garments of a laborer, who limped along. The procession was
going in the direction of the Vaugirard cemetery.

The handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the antennæ of a
pair of pincers were visible, protruding from the man's pocket.

The Vaugirard cemetery formed an exception among the cemeteries of
Paris. It had its peculiar usages, just as it had its carriage
entrance and its house door, which old people in the quarter, who clung
tenaciously to ancient words, still called the _porte cavalière_ and the
_porte piétonne_.16 The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Rue Petit-Picpus
had obtained permission, as we have already stated, to be buried there
in a corner apart, and at night, the plot of land having formerly
belonged to their community. The grave-diggers being thus bound to
service in the evening in summer and at night in winter, in this
cemetery, they were subjected to a special discipline. The gates of the
Paris cemeteries closed, at that epoch, at sundown, and this being a
municipal regulation, the Vaugirard cemetery was bound by it like the
rest. The carriage gate and the house door were two contiguous grated
gates, adjoining a pavilion built by the architect Perronet, and
inhabited by the door-keeper of the cemetery. These gates, therefore,
swung inexorably on their hinges at the instant when the sun disappeared
behind the dome of the Invalides. If any grave-digger were delayed
after that moment in the cemetery, there was but one way for him to
get out--his grave-digger's card furnished by the department of public
funerals. A sort of letter-box was constructed in the porter's window.
The grave-digger dropped his card into this box, the porter heard it
fall, pulled the rope, and the small door opened. If the man had not his
card, he mentioned his name, the porter, who was sometimes in bed and
asleep, rose, came out and identified the man, and opened the gate with
his key; the grave-digger stepped out, but had to pay a fine of fifteen
francs.

This cemetery, with its peculiarities outside the regulations,
embarrassed the symmetry of the administration. It was suppressed
a little later than 1830. The cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, called the
Eastern cemetery, succeeded to it, and inherited that famous dram-shop
next to the Vaugirard cemetery, which was surmounted by a quince painted
on a board, and which formed an angle, one side on the drinkers' tables,
and the other on the tombs, with this sign: _Au Bon Coing_.

The Vaugirard cemetery was what may be called a faded cemetery. It
was falling into disuse. Dampness was invading it, the flowers were
deserting it. The bourgeois did not care much about being buried in
the Vaugirard; it hinted at poverty. Père-Lachaise if you please! to be
buried in Père-Lachaise is equivalent to having furniture of mahogany.
It is recognized as elegant. The Vaugirard cemetery was a venerable
enclosure, planted like an old-fashioned French garden. Straight alleys,
box, thuya-trees, holly, ancient tombs beneath aged cypress-trees, and
very tall grass. In the evening it was tragic there. There were very
lugubrious lines about it.

The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white pall and the
black cross entered the avenue of the Vaugirard cemetery. The lame man
who followed it was no other than Fauchelevent.

The interment of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the
exit of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean to the dead-room,--all
had been executed without difficulty, and there had been no hitch.

Let us remark in passing, that the burial of Mother Crucifixion under
the altar of the convent is a perfectly venial offence in our sight. It
is one of the faults which resemble a duty. The nuns had committed it,
not only without difficulty, but even with the applause of their own
consciences. In the cloister, what is called the "government" is only
an intermeddling with authority, an interference which is always
questionable. In the first place, the rule; as for the code, we shall
see. Make as many laws as you please, men; but keep them for yourselves.
The tribute to Cæsar is never anything but the remnants of the tribute
to God. A prince is nothing in the presence of a principle.

Fauchelevent limped along behind the hearse in a very contented frame
of mind. His twin plots, the one with the nuns, the one for the convent,
the other against it, the other with M. Madeleine, had succeeded, to
all appearance. Jean Valjean's composure was one of those powerful
tranquillities which are contagious. Fauchelevent no longer felt
doubtful as to his success.

What remained to be done was a mere nothing. Within the last two years,
he had made good Father Mestienne, a chubby-cheeked person, drunk at
least ten times. He played with Father Mestienne. He did what he liked
with him. He made him dance according to his whim. Mestienne's head
adjusted itself to the cap of Fauchelevent's will. Fauchelevent's
confidence was perfect.

At the moment when the convoy entered the avenue leading to the
cemetery, Fauchelevent glanced cheerfully at the hearse, and said half
aloud, as he rubbed his big hands:--

"Here's a fine farce!"

All at once the hearse halted; it had reached the gate. The permission
for interment must be exhibited. The undertaker's man addressed himself
to the porter of the cemetery. During this colloquy, which always is
productive of a delay of from one to two minutes, some one, a stranger,
came and placed himself behind the hearse, beside Fauchelevent. He was
a sort of laboring man, who wore a waistcoat with large pockets and
carried a mattock under his arm.

Fauchelevent surveyed this stranger.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"The man replied:--

"The grave-digger."

If a man could survive the blow of a cannon-ball full in the breast, he
would make the same face that Fauchelevent made.

"The grave-digger?"

"Yes."

"You?"

"I."

"Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."

"He was."

"What! He was?"

"He is dead."

Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a grave-digger could
die. It is true, nevertheless, that grave-diggers do die themselves. By
dint of excavating graves for other people, one hollows out one's own.

Fauchelevent stood there with his mouth wide open. He had hardly the
strength to stammer:--

"But it is not possible!"

"It is so."

"But," he persisted feebly, "Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."

"After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. Peasant, my name
is Gribier."

Fauchelevent, who was deadly pale, stared at this Gribier.

He was a tall, thin, livid, utterly funereal man. He had the air of an
unsuccessful doctor who had turned grave-digger.

Fauchelevent burst out laughing.

"Ah!" said he, "what queer things do happen! Father Mestienne is dead,
but long live little Father Lenoir! Do you know who little Father Lenoir
is? He is a jug of red wine. It is a jug of Surêne, morbigou! of real
Paris Surêne? Ah! So old Mestienne is dead! I am sorry for it; he was
a jolly fellow. But you are a jolly fellow, too. Are you not, comrade?
We'll go and have a drink together presently."

The man replied:--

"I have been a student. I passed my fourth examination. I never drink."

The hearse had set out again, and was rolling up the grand alley of the
cemetery.

Fauchelevent had slackened his pace. He limped more out of anxiety than
from infirmity.

The grave-digger walked on in front of him.

Fauchelevent passed the unexpected Gribier once more in review.

He was one of those men who, though very young, have the air of age, and
who, though slender, are extremely strong.

"Comrade!" cried Fauchelevent.

The man turned round.

"I am the convent grave-digger."

"My colleague," said the man.

Fauchelevent, who was illiterate but very sharp, understood that he
had to deal with a formidable species of man, with a fine talker. He
muttered:

"So Father Mestienne is dead."

The man replied:--

"Completely. The good God consulted his note-book which shows when the
time is up. It was Father Mestienne's turn. Father Mestienne died."

Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: "The good God--"

"The good God," said the man authoritatively. "According to the
philosophers, the Eternal Father; according to the Jacobins, the Supreme
Being."

"Shall we not make each other's acquaintance?" stammered Fauchelevent.

"It is made. You are a peasant, I am a Parisian."

"People do not know each other until they have drunk together. He who
empties his glass empties his heart. You must come and have a drink with
me. Such a thing cannot be refused."

"Business first."

Fauchelevent thought: "I am lost."

They were only a few turns of the wheel distant from the small alley
leading to the nuns' corner.

The grave-digger resumed:--

"Peasant, I have seven small children who must be fed. As they must eat,
I cannot drink."

And he added, with the satisfaction of a serious man who is turning a
phrase well:--

"Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst."

The hearse skirted a clump of cypress-trees, quitted the grand alley,
turned into a narrow one, entered the waste land, and plunged into
a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the place of
sepulture. Fauchelevent slackened his pace, but he could not detain the
hearse. Fortunately, the soil, which was light and wet with the winter
rains, clogged the wheels and retarded its speed.

He approached the grave-digger.

"They have such a nice little Argenteuil wine," murmured Fauchelevent.

"Villager," retorted the man, "I ought not be a grave-digger. My
father was a porter at the Prytaneum [Town-Hall]. He destined me for
literature. But he had reverses. He had losses on 'change. I was obliged
to renounce the profession of author. But I am still a public writer."

"So you are not a grave-digger, then?" returned Fauchelevent, clutching
at this branch, feeble as it was.

"The one does not hinder the other. I cumulate."

Fauchelevent did not understand this last word.

"Come have a drink," said he.

Here a remark becomes necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish,
offered a drink, but he did not explain himself on one point; who was to
pay? Generally, Fauchelevent offered and Father Mestienne paid. An offer
of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation created by the
new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but the old
gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after Rabelais in
the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself, Fauchelevent did
not wish to pay, troubled as he was.

The grave-digger went on with a superior smile:--

"One must eat. I have accepted Father Mestienne's reversion. One gets to
be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the labor
of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener's stall in
the market of the Rue de Sèvres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the
cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of
love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love letters; in the
evening I dig graves. Such is life, rustic."

The hearse was still advancing. Fauchelevent, uneasy to the last degree,
was gazing about him on all sides. Great drops of perspiration trickled
down from his brow.

"But," continued the grave-digger, "a man cannot serve two mistresses.
I must choose between the pen and the mattock. The mattock is ruining my
hand."

The hearse halted.

The choir boy alighted from the mourning-coach, then the priest.

One of the small front wheels of the hearse had run up a little on a
pile of earth, beyond which an open grave was visible.

"What a farce this is!" repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.



CHAPTER VI--BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS

Who was in the coffin? The reader knows. Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had arranged things so that he could exist there, and he
could almost breathe.

It is a strange thing to what a degree security of conscience confers
security of the rest. Every combination thought out by Jean Valjean had
been progressing, and progressing favorably, since the preceding day.
He, like Fauchelevent, counted on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt
as to the end. Never was there a more critical situation, never more
complete composure.

The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace. It
seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into Jean
Valjean's tranquillity.

From the depths of that coffin he had been able to follow, and he had
followed, all the phases of the terrible drama which he was playing with
death.

Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the upper plank, Jean
Valjean had felt himself carried out, then driven off. He knew, from the
diminution in the jolting, when they left the pavements and reached the
earth road. He had divined, from a dull noise, that they were crossing
the bridge of Austerlitz. At the first halt, he had understood that they
were entering the cemetery; at the second halt, he said to himself:--

"Here is the grave."

Suddenly, he felt hands seize the coffin, then a harsh grating against
the planks; he explained it to himself as the rope which was being
fastened round the casket in order to lower it into the cavity.

Then he experienced a giddiness.

The undertaker's man and the grave-digger had probably allowed the
coffin to lose its balance, and had lowered the head before the foot. He
recovered himself fully when he felt himself horizontal and motionless.
He had just touched the bottom.

He had a certain sensation of cold.

A voice rose above him, glacial and solemn. He heard Latin words, which
he did not understand, pass over him, so slowly that he was able to
catch them one by one:--

_"Qui dormiunt in terræ pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam æternam, et
alii in approbrium, ut videant semper." _

A child's voice said:--

_"De profundis." _

The grave voice began again:--

_"Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine." _

The child's voice responded:--

_"Et lux perpetua luceat ei." _

He heard something like the gentle patter of several drops of rain on
the plank which covered him. It was probably the holy water.

He thought: "This will be over soon now. Patience for a little while
longer. The priest will take his departure. Fauchelevent will take
Mestienne off to drink. I shall be left. Then Fauchelevent will return
alone, and I shall get out. That will be the work of a good hour."

The grave voice resumed

_"Requiescat in pace." _

And the child's voice said:--

_"Amen." _

Jean Valjean strained his ears, and heard something like retreating
footsteps.

"There, they are going now," thought he. "I am alone."

All at once, he heard over his head a sound which seemed to him to be a
clap of thunder.

It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin.

A second shovelful fell.

One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up.

A third shovelful of earth fell.

Then a fourth.

There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean
Valjean lost consciousness.



CHAPTER VII--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON'T LOSE
THE CARD

This is what had taken place above the coffin in which lay Jean Valjean.

When the hearse had driven off, when the priest and the choir boy had
entered the carriage again and taken their departure, Fauchelevent, who
had not taken his eyes from the grave-digger, saw the latter bend over
and grasp his shovel, which was sticking upright in the heap of dirt.

Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolve.

He placed himself between the grave and the grave-digger, crossed his
arms and said:--

"I am the one to pay!"

The grave-digger stared at him in amazement, and replied:--

"What's that, peasant?"

Fauchelevent repeated:--

"I am the one who pays!"

"What?"

"For the wine."

"What wine?"

"That Argenteuil wine."

"Where is the Argenteuil?"

"At the _Bon Coing_."

"Go to the devil!" said the grave-digger.

And he flung a shovelful of earth on the coffin.

The coffin gave back a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself stagger
and on the point of falling headlong into the grave himself. He shouted
in a voice in which the strangling sound of the death rattle began to
mingle:--

"Comrade! Before the _Bon Coing_ is shut!"

The grave-digger took some more earth on his shovel. Fauchelevent
continued.

"I will pay."

And he seized the man's arm.

"Listen to me, comrade. I am the convent grave-digger, I have come
to help you. It is a business which can be performed at night. Let us
begin, then, by going for a drink."

And as he spoke, and clung to this desperate insistence, this melancholy
reflection occurred to him: "And if he drinks, will he get drunk?"

"Provincial," said the man, "if you positively insist upon it, I
consent. We will drink. After work, never before."

And he flourished his shovel briskly. Fauchelevent held him back.

"It is Argenteuil wine, at six."

"Oh, come," said the grave-digger, "you are a bell-ringer. Ding dong,
ding dong, that's all you know how to say. Go hang yourself."

And he threw in a second shovelful.

Fauchelevent had reached a point where he no longer knew what he was
saying.

"Come along and drink," he cried, "since it is I who pays the bill."

"When we have put the child to bed," said the grave-digger.

He flung in a third shovelful.

Then he thrust his shovel into the earth and added:--

"It's cold to-night, you see, and the corpse would shriek out after us
if we were to plant her there without a coverlet."

At that moment, as he loaded his shovel, the grave-digger bent over,
and the pocket of his waistcoat gaped. Fauchelevent's wild gaze fell
mechanically into that pocket, and there it stopped.

The sun was not yet hidden behind the horizon; there was still light
enough to enable him to distinguish something white at the bottom of
that yawning pocket.

The sum total of lightning that the eye of a Picard peasant can contain,
traversed Fauchelevent's pupils. An idea had just occurred to him.

He thrust his hand into the pocket from behind, without the
grave-digger, who was wholly absorbed in his shovelful of earth,
observing it, and pulled out the white object which lay at the bottom of
it.

The man sent a fourth shovelful tumbling into the grave.

Just as he turned round to get the fifth, Fauchelevent looked calmly at
him and said:--

"By the way, you new man, have you your card?"

The grave-digger paused.

"What card?"

"The sun is on the point of setting."

"That's good, it is going to put on its nightcap."

"The gate of the cemetery will close immediately."

"Well, what then?"

"Have you your card?"

"Ah! my card?" said the grave-digger.

And he fumbled in his pocket.

Having searched one pocket, he proceeded to search the other. He passed
on to his fobs, explored the first, returned to the second.

"Why, no," said he, "I have not my card. I must have forgotten it."

"Fifteen francs fine," said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people.

"Ah! Jésus-mon-Dieu-bancroche-à-bas-la-lune!"17 he exclaimed. "Fifteen
francs fine!"

"Three pieces of a hundred sous," said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger dropped his shovel.

Fauchelevent's turn had come.

"Ah, come now, conscript," said Fauchelevent, "none of this despair.
There is no question of committing suicide and benefiting the grave.
Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you may not be able to
pay it. I am an old hand, you are a new one. I know all the ropes and
the devices. I will give you some friendly advice. One thing is clear,
the sun is on the point of setting, it is touching the dome now, the
cemetery will be closed in five minutes more."

"That is true," replied the man.

"Five minutes more and you will not have time to fill the grave, it is
as hollow as the devil, this grave, and to reach the gate in season to
pass it before it is shut."

"That is true."

"In that case, a fine of fifteen francs."

"Fifteen francs."

"But you have time. Where do you live?"

"A couple of steps from the barrier, a quarter of an hour from here. No.
87 Rue de Vaugirard."

"You have just time to get out by taking to your heels at your best
speed."

"That is exactly so."

"Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you get your card, you return,
the cemetery porter admits you. As you have your card, there will be
nothing to pay. And you will bury your corpse. I'll watch it for you in
the meantime, so that it shall not run away."

"I am indebted to you for my life, peasant."

"Decamp!" said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger, overwhelmed with gratitude, shook his hand and set off
on a run.

When the man had disappeared in the thicket, Fauchelevent listened until
he heard his footsteps die away in the distance, then he leaned over the
grave, and said in a low tone:--

"Father Madeleine!"

There was no reply.

Fauchelevent was seized with a shudder. He tumbled rather than climbed
into the grave, flung himself on the head of the coffin and cried:--

"Are you there?"

Silence in the coffin.

Fauchelevent, hardly able to draw his breath for trembling, seized his
cold chisel and his hammer, and pried up the coffin lid.

Jean Valjean's face appeared in the twilight; it was pale and his eyes
were closed.

Fauchelevent's hair rose upright on his head, he sprang to his feet,
then fell back against the side of the grave, ready to swoon on the
coffin. He stared at Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean lay there pallid and motionless.

Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as faint as a sigh:--

"He is dead!"

And, drawing himself up, and folding his arms with such violence that
his clenched fists came in contact with his shoulders, he cried:--

"And this is the way I save his life!"

Then the poor man fell to sobbing. He soliloquized the while, for it is
an error to suppose that the soliloquy is unnatural. Powerful emotion
often talks aloud.

"It is Father Mestienne's fault. Why did that fool die? What need was
there for him to give up the ghost at the very moment when no one was
expecting it? It is he who has killed M. Madeleine. Father Madeleine!
He is in the coffin. It is quite handy. All is over. Now, is there any
sense in these things? Ah! my God! he is dead! Well! and his little
girl, what am I to do with her? What will the fruit-seller say? The idea
of its being possible for a man like that to die like this! When I think
how he put himself under that cart! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
Pardine! He was suffocated, I said so. He wouldn't believe me. Well!
Here's a pretty trick to play! He is dead, that good man, the very best
man out of all the good God's good folks! And his little girl! Ah! In
the first place, I won't go back there myself. I shall stay here. After
having done such a thing as that! What's the use of being two old men,
if we are two old fools! But, in the first place, how did he manage to
enter the convent? That was the beginning of it all. One should not
do such things. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire! He does not hear me.
Now get out of this scrape if you can!"

And he tore his hair.

A grating sound became audible through the trees in the distance. It was
the cemetery gate closing.

Fauchelevent bent over Jean Valjean, and all at once he bounded back and
recoiled so far as the limits of a grave permit.

Jean Valjean's eyes were open and gazing at him.

To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much
so. Fauchelevent became like stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all
these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he had to do with a
living man or a dead one, and staring at Jean Valjean, who was gazing at
him.

Enlarge


"I fell asleep," said Jean Valjean.

And he raised himself to a sitting posture.

Fauchelevent fell on his knees.

"Just, good Virgin! How you frightened me!"

Then he sprang to his feet and cried:--

"Thanks, Father Madeleine!"

Jean Valjean had merely fainted. The fresh air had revived him.

Joy is the ebb of terror. Fauchelevent found almost as much difficulty
in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.

"So you are not dead! Oh! How wise you are! I called you so much that
you came back. When I saw your eyes shut, I said: 'Good! there he is,
stifled,' I should have gone raving mad, mad enough for a strait jacket.
They would have put me in Bicêtre. What do you suppose I should
have done if you had been dead? And your little girl? There's that
fruit-seller,--she would never have understood it! The child is thrust
into your arms, and then--the grandfather is dead! What a story! good
saints of paradise, what a tale! Ah! you are alive, that's the best of
it!"

"I am cold," said Jean Valjean.

This remark recalled Fauchelevent thoroughly to reality, and there was
pressing need of it. The souls of these two men were troubled even when
they had recovered themselves, although they did not realize it,
and there was about them something uncanny, which was the sinister
bewilderment inspired by the place.

"Let us get out of here quickly," exclaimed Fauchelevent.

He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a gourd with which he had
provided himself.

"But first, take a drop," said he.

The flask finished what the fresh air had begun, Jean Valjean swallowed
a mouthful of brandy, and regained full possession of his faculties.

He got out of the coffin, and helped Fauchelevent to nail on the lid
again.

Three minutes later they were out of the grave.

Moreover, Fauchelevent was perfectly composed. He took his time. The
cemetery was closed. The arrival of the grave-digger Gribier was not to
be apprehended. That "conscript" was at home busily engaged in looking
for his card, and at some difficulty in finding it in his lodgings,
since it was in Fauchelevent's pocket. Without a card, he could not get
back into the cemetery.

Fauchelevent took the shovel, and Jean Valjean the pick-axe, and
together they buried the empty coffin.

When the grave was full, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean:--

"Let us go. I will keep the shovel; do you carry off the mattock."

Night was falling.

Jean Valjean experienced some difficulty in moving and in walking. He
had stiffened himself in that coffin, and had become a little like a
corpse. The rigidity of death had seized upon him between those four
planks. He had, in a manner, to thaw out, from the tomb.

"You are benumbed," said Fauchelevent. "It is a pity that I have a game
leg, for otherwise we might step out briskly."

"Bah!" replied Jean Valjean, "four paces will put life into my legs once
more."

They set off by the alleys through which the hearse had passed. On
arriving before the closed gate and the porter's pavilion Fauchelevent,
who held the grave-digger's card in his hand, dropped it into the box,
the porter pulled the rope, the gate opened, and they went out.

"How well everything is going!" said Fauchelevent; "what a capital idea
that was of yours, Father Madeleine!"

They passed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest manner in the world.
In the neighborhood of the cemetery, a shovel and pick are equal to two
passports.

The Rue Vaugirard was deserted.

"Father Madeleine," said Fauchelevent as they went along, and raising
his eyes to the houses, "Your eyes are better than mine. Show me No.
87."

"Here it is," said Jean Valjean.

"There is no one in the street," said Fauchelevent. "Give me your
mattock and wait a couple of minutes for me."

Fauchelevent entered No. 87, ascended to the very top, guided by the
instinct which always leads the poor man to the garret, and knocked in
the dark, at the door of an attic.

A voice replied: "Come in."

It was Gribier's voice.

Fauchelevent opened the door. The grave-digger's dwelling was, like
all such wretched habitations, an unfurnished and encumbered garret.
A packing-case--a coffin, perhaps--took the place of a commode, a
butter-pot served for a drinking-fountain, a straw mattress served for
a bed, the floor served instead of tables and chairs. In a corner, on a
tattered fragment which had been a piece of an old carpet, a thin
woman and a number of children were piled in a heap. The whole of this
poverty-stricken interior bore traces of having been overturned. One
would have said that there had been an earthquake "for one." The covers
were displaced, the rags scattered about, the jug broken, the mother had
been crying, the children had probably been beaten; traces of a vigorous
and ill-tempered search. It was plain that the grave-digger had made
a desperate search for his card, and had made everybody in the garret,
from the jug to his wife, responsible for its loss. He wore an air of
desperation.

But Fauchelevent was in too great a hurry to terminate this adventure to
take any notice of this sad side of his success.

He entered and said:--

"I have brought you back your shovel and pick."

Gribier gazed at him in stupefaction.

"Is it you, peasant?"

"And to-morrow morning you will find your card with the porter of the
cemetery."

And he laid the shovel and mattock on the floor.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Gribier.

"The meaning of it is, that you dropped your card out of your pocket,
that I found it on the ground after you were gone, that I have buried
the corpse, that I have filled the grave, that I have done your work,
that the porter will return your card to you, and that you will not have
to pay fifteen francs. There you have it, conscript."

"Thanks, villager!" exclaimed Gribier, radiant. "The next time I will
pay for the drinks."



CHAPTER VIII--A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY

An hour later, in the darkness of night, two men and a child presented
themselves at No. 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. The elder of the men lifted the
knocker and rapped.

They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.

The two old men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruiterer's in
the Rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had deposited her on the
preceding day. Cosette had passed these twenty-four hours trembling
silently and understanding nothing. She trembled to such a degree that
she wept. She had neither eaten nor slept. The worthy fruit-seller had
plied her with a hundred questions, without obtaining any other reply
than a melancholy and unvarying gaze. Cosette had betrayed nothing of
what she had seen and heard during the last two days. She divined that
they were passing through a crisis. She was deeply conscious that it was
necessary to "be good." Who has not experienced the sovereign power
of those two words, pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a
terrified little being: _Say nothing! _ Fear is mute. Moreover, no one
guards a secret like a child.

But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she
beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any
thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed
that it issued from an abyss.

Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All the
doors opened.

Thus was solved the double and alarming problem of how to get out and
how to get in.

The porter, who had received his instructions, opened the little
servant's door which connected the courtyard with the garden, and which
could still be seen from the street twenty years ago, in the wall at the
bottom of the court, which faced the carriage entrance.

The porter admitted all three of them through this door, and from that
point they reached the inner, reserved parlor where Fauchelevent, on the
preceding day, had received his orders from the prioress.

The prioress, rosary in hand, was waiting for them. A vocal mother, with
her veil lowered, stood beside her.

A discreet candle lighted, one might almost say, made a show of lighting
the parlor.

The prioress passed Jean Valjean in review. There is nothing which
examines like a downcast eye.

Then she questioned him:--

"You are the brother?"

"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.

"What is your name?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Ultime Fauchelevent."

He really had had a brother named Ultime, who was dead.

"Where do you come from?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"From Picquigny, near Amiens."

"What is your age?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Fifty."

"What is your profession?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Gardener."

"Are you a good Christian?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Every one is in the family."

"Is this your little girl?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"You are her father?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Her grandfather."

The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice

"He answers well."

Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.

The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud to the
vocal mother:--

"She will grow up ugly."

The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in the
corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said:--

"Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell. Two will be
required now."

On the following day, therefore, two bells were audible in the garden,
and the nuns could not resist the temptation to raise the corner of
their veils. At the extreme end of the garden, under the trees, two
men, Fauvent and another man, were visible as they dug side by side. An
enormous event. Their silence was broken to the extent of saying to each
other: "He is an assistant gardener."

The vocal mothers added: "He is a brother of Father Fauvent."

Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled
knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.

The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been the
prioress's observation upon Cosette: "She will grow up ugly."

The prioress, that pronounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy
to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.

There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.

It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are
conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their beauty
do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary in inverse
proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from the ugly than
from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.

The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good, old
Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean, whom
he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier, who said
to himself: "He spared me that fine"; with the convent, which, being
enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother Crucifixion under
the altar, eluded Cæsar and satisfied God. There was a coffin containing
a body in the Petit-Picpus, and a coffin without a body in the Vaugirard
cemetery, public order had no doubt been deeply disturbed thereby, but
no one was aware of it.

As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was very great.
Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious of
gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop's next visit, the
prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something of a
confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed. On leaving
the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval, and in a whisper
to M. de Latil, Monsieur's confessor, afterwards Archbishop of Reims
and Cardinal. This admiration for Fauchelevent became widespread, for it
made its way to Rome. We have seen a note addressed by the then reigning
Pope, Leo XII., to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the Nuncio's
establishment in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of Della
Genga; it contained these lines: "It appears that there is in a convent
in Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named Fauvent."
Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; he went on
grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds, without in the least
suspecting his excellences and his sanctity. Neither did he suspect his
glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey bull whose portrait is published
in the _London Illustrated News_, with this inscription: "Bull which
carried off the prize at the Cattle Show."



CHAPTER IX--CLOISTERED

Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.

It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean's
daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and
then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just
observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette
had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to
breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her.
She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with
Jean Valjean. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she
regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did
say to Jean Valjean: "Father, if I had known, I would have brought her
away with me."

Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent, to don
the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded in getting
them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside. This was the
same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she had quitted
the Thénardiers' inn. It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean
locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a
quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in a
little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this valise on
a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key about his person.
"Father," Cosette asked him one day, "what is there in that box which
smells so good?"

Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action, in
addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he knew
nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had much less
work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he
found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three
times as much as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more
luxurious manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.

The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean _the
other Fauvent_.

If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert's glance, they
would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand to be
done outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the elder
Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went, and never the
other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed on God know not how
to spy, or whether they were, by preference, occupied in keeping watch
on each other, they paid no heed to this.

Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did not
stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.

This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by gulfs.
Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw enough of the
sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity, and Cosette enough to
remain happy.

A very sweet life began for him.

He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with
Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in
existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three
chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the
walls. The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean
had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The
walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails
whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note
of '93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the
following is an exact facsimile:--



This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall by
the preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, and
whose place Fauchelevent had taken.

Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very
useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found
himself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all
sorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to
advantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and wild.
He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.

Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As the
sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons and
adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered
the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed
out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he afforded
Cosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far
from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant
than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and
playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the
rest.

For Cosette laughed now.

Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The
gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; it
banishes winter from the human countenance.

Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean
gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at
the windows of her dormitory.

God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,
to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean. It is certain
that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil
exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably
near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the
convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to
the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble;
but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general,
and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have ended by
returning very gradually to hatred.

The convent stopped him on that downward path.

This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,
in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite
recently again, he had beheld another,--a frightful place, a terrible
place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of
justice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the
cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys,
and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, he
confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.

Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly
descended the endless spirals of revery.

He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at
dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they
lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches
thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of
the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed,
as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a woollen
carter's blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they drank no
wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on "fatigue duty." They
lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a
manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered
voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.

Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.

These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with
lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world,
not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders
lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from
among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.
They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained until
evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in a
black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter,
without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without having
even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment or the
woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge chemises
which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only during
rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept,
not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally, they were
not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of toil, they
were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at the moment
when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse
themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel,
with their knees on the stones.

On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve
successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon the
pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

The others were men; these were women.

What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged,
murdered, assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners,
incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had
done nothing whatever.

On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,
homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,
one thing only, innocence.

Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious
assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing
something of heaven through holiness.

On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in
whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what
crimes! And what faults!

On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the one
hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of
cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on
the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,
darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,
and of gleams full of radiance.

Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible,
a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,
perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that
faint light of liberty which men call death.

In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by
faith.

What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,
hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a
sarcasm against heaven.

What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.

And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species
of beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,
expiation.

Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; that
personal expiation, the expiation for one's self. But he did not
understand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach and
without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation of
what? What expiation?

A voice within his conscience replied: "The most divine of human
generosities, the expiation for others."

Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; we
place ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate his
impressions.

Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest
possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,
and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture
accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the
sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity
swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct
and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery
of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.

And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!

Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful
song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the
blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly
chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he,
wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.

There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like
a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the
passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of
death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which
he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made in
order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his destiny?
This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance to
that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived an
idea of anything similar.

Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.

These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once
more around lambs.

This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was
still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.

These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A cold,
harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the barred
and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more biting
breeze blew in the cage of these doves.

Why?

When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in
amazement before this mystery of sublimity.

In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart
in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.
All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him
back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the
convent through humility.

Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was
deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which
skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed on
the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he knew,
the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he prayed
as he knelt before the sister.

It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.

Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant
flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and simple
women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by little,
his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of perfume like
the flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the children.
And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God which had
received him in succession at two critical moments in his life: the
first, when all doors were closed and when human society rejected him;
the second, at a moment when human society had again set out in pursuit
of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and that, had it not
been for the first, he should have relapsed into crime, and had it not
been for the second, into torment.

His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.

Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.

[THE END OF VOLUME II. "COSETTE"]



VOLUME III--MARIUS.

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BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM



CHAPTER I--PARVULUS

Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the
sparrow; the child is called the gamin.

Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other
all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood; there
leaps out from them a little being. _Homuncio_, Plautus would say.

This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to
the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body,
no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies of
heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen
years of age, he lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open
air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father's, which descend below
his heels, an old hat of some other father, which descends below his
ears, a single suspender of yellow listing; he runs, lies in wait,
rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict,
haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women _thou_, talks
slang, sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart. This is
because he has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls are not to be
dissolved in mud. So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that he
shall be innocent.

If one were to ask that enormous city: "What is this?" she would reply:
"It is my little one."



CHAPTER II--SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS

The gamin--the street Arab--of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.

Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,
but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then
they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for
he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he
finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose
foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors:
to be dead is _to eat dandelions by the root_; his own occupations,
calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means
of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he
calls _making the bridge of arts_, crying discourses pronounced by the
authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks
in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the
little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.
This curious money, which receives the name of _loques_--rags--has
an invariable and well-regulated currency in this little Bohemia of
children.

Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in
the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which menaces by twisting
about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which
has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on
its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns
and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls
sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a
look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this
monster "the deaf thing." The search for these "deaf things" among
the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as
Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the
composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly
from high comedy to farce.

A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a
doctor. "Hey there!" shouts some street Arab, "how long has it been
customary for doctors to carry home their own work?"

Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and
trinkets, turns round indignantly: "You good-for-nothing, you have
seized my wife's waist!"--"I, sir? Search me!"



CHAPTER III--HE IS AGREEABLE

In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means
to procure, the _homuncio_ enters a theatre. On crossing that magic
threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes
the titi.18 Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the keel
in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together. The titi
is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being endowed
with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with his
radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his
hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that
narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel, the
name of Paradise.

Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary,
and you have the gamin.

The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, and we say
it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic
taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give an example, the
popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little audience of stormy
children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gamin called her
_Mademoiselle Muche_--"hide yourself."

This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a
baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the
cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his
wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers
Alleluia with Matanturlurette, chants every rhythm from the De Profundis
to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is ignorant
of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is lyrical
to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill and
emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is Rabelais in
this youth.

He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.

He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he makes
songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations, he twits
mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out
of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas.
It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn
vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to
him, the street Arab would say: "Hi there! The bugaboo!"



CHAPTER IV--HE MAY BE OF USE

Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab, two
beings of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance, which
contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme
and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history. The whole of
the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of anarchy in the
gamin.

This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops, makes
connections, "grows supple" in suffering, in the presence of social
realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself
heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter; he is
on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your name is
Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice,
Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin.

The little fellow will grow up.

Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand. A handful
of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A
God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny
being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy
kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low.
Will that become an Ionian or a Bootian? Wait, _currit rota_, the Spirit
of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men
of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of a jug an
amphora.



CHAPTER V--HIS FRONTIERS

The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has something
of the sage in him. _Urbis amator_, like Fuscus; _ruris amator_, like
Flaccus.

To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine
employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that
rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but
odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,
notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.
End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning
of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of
the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,
beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.

Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by
the passing stroller with the epithet: _melancholy_, the apparently
objectless promenades of the dreamer.

He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers
of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That
close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools,
those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early
market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of
the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison
drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of battle, those
hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill which turns
in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the
corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls
squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of land inundated with
sunshine and full of butterflies,--all this attracted him.

There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
singular spots, the Glacière, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
de Châtillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a
level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of
Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing
but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is
to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The
spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped
with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both appeal
to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make their
appearance.

Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes
contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of
Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the
most unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a
lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy,
dusty, ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with
corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape
from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the
suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant. There
they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or
rather, there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of
May or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, snapping marbles with
their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings, irresponsible, volatile,
free and happy; and, no sooner do they catch sight of you than they
recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their
living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled
with cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange
children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces of
the environs of Paris.

Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--are they
their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with
sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of
rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries among
the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These groups,
warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or indistinctly seen in
the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time, and these
visions mingle with his dreams.

Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth
to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more
escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the
water. For them, nothing exists two leagues beyond the barriers:
Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Menilmontant,
Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Meudon, Issy, Vanvre, Sèvres, Puteaux,
Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnières,
Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy,
Gonesse; the universe ends there.



CHAPTER VI--A BIT OF HISTORY

At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this
book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at
the corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss
here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average
of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that
period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process
of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of these
nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of
Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms. All
crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.

Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative
measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the
exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is
a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in
some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the
public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy
of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the
surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to
put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our
popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the
idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of
the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which
one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around
whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken
family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still
is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families
pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has
become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the
public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for this
sad thing has given rise to an expression, "to be cast on the pavements
of Paris."

Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not
discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in
the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of
the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people
was a dogma. What is the use of "half-lights"? Such was the countersign.
Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant child.

Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in
that case it skimmed the streets.

Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired
to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider
the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that
plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of
necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either
by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what
steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley
is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required.
Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make
as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of
complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a
procession--it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A
child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen
years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the
galleys. Grand reign; grand century.

Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them
off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with
terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple. Barbier
speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the
exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who
had fathers. The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts. In that
case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung. Who? The exempts?
No, the fathers.




CHAPTER VII--THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF
INDIA

The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste. One might
almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can do so.

This word _gamin_ was printed for the first time, and reached popular
speech through the literary tongue, in 1834. It is in a little work
entitled _Claude Gueux_ that this word made its appearance. The horror
was lively. The word passed into circulation.

The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamins for each
other are very various. We have known and associated with one who was
greatly respected and vastly admired because he had seen a man fall from
the top of the tower of Notre-Dame; another, because he had succeeded in
making his way into the rear courtyard where the statues of the dome
of the Invalides had been temporarily deposited, and had "prigged" some
lead from them; a third, because he had seen a diligence tip over; still
another, because he "knew" a soldier who came near putting out the eye
of a citizen.

This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamin, a profound
epiphonema, which the vulgar herd laughs at without comprehending,--
_Dieu de Dieu! What ill-luck I do have! to think that I have never yet
seen anybody tumble from a fifth-story window! _ (_I have_ pronounced
_I'ave_ and _fifth_ pronounced _fift'_.)

Surely, this saying of a peasant is a fine one: "Father So-and-So, your
wife has died of her malady; why did you not send for the doctor?"
"What would you have, sir, we poor folks _die of ourselves_." But if
the peasant's whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole of the
free-thinking anarchy of the brat of the faubourgs is, assuredly,
contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening
to his confessor in the tumbrel. The child of Paris exclaims: "He is
talking to his black cap! Oh, the sneak!"

A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin. To be
strong-minded is an important item.

To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at the
guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names: The
End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the sky), The Last
Mouthful, etc., etc. In order not to lose anything of the affair, he
scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees, he
suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys. The gamin is
born a tiler as he is born a mariner. A roof inspires him with no more
fear than a mast. There is no festival which comes up to an execution
on the Place de Grève. Samson and the Abbé Montès are the truly popular
names. They hoot at the victim in order to encourage him. They sometimes
admire him. Lacenaire, when a gamin, on seeing the hideous Dautin die
bravely, uttered these words which contain a future: "I was jealous of
him." In the brotherhood of gamins Voltaire is not known, but Papavoine
is. "Politicians" are confused with assassins in the same legend.
They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment. It is known that
Tolleron had a fireman's cap, Avril an otter cap, Losvel a round hat,
that old Delaporte was bald and bare-headed, that Castaing was all ruddy
and very handsome, that Bories had a romantic small beard, that Jean
Martin kept on his suspenders, that Lecouffé and his mother quarrelled.
"Don't reproach each other for your basket," shouted a gamin to them.
Another, in order to get a look at Debacker as he passed, and being too
small in the crowd, caught sight of the lantern on the quay and climbed
it. A gendarme stationed opposite frowned. "Let me climb up, m'sieu le
gendarme," said the gamin. And, to soften the heart of the authorities
he added: "I will not fall." "I don't care if you do," retorted the
gendarme.

In the brotherhood of gamins, a memorable accident counts for a great
deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut
one's self very deeply, "to the very bone."

The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the
gamin is fondest of saying is: "I am fine and strong, come now!" To be
left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint is highly esteemed.



CHAPTER VIII--IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE
LAST KING

In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,
when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,
from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen's boats, he hurls
himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions of
the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the police keep an
eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which
once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was
celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it
scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the
eleusiac chant of the Panathenæa, and in it one encounters again the
ancient Evohe. Here it is: "Ohé, Titi, ohééé! Here comes the bobby, here
comes the p'lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with
you!"

Sometimes this gnat--that is what he calls himself--knows how to read;
sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub. He
does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual
instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from
1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he
scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe was
returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his knee,
perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on one
of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that good-nature
which came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin, finished the pear,
and gave the child a louis, saying: "The pear is on that also."19
The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence pleases him. He
execrates "the curés." One day, in the Rue de l'Université, one of these
scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at the carriage gate of No.
69. "Why are you doing that at the gate?" a passer-by asked. The boy
replied: "There is a curé there." It was there, in fact, that the Papal
Nuncio lived.

Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if
the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite possible
that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass civilly. There
are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he always desires
without ever attaining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his
trousers sewed up again.

The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris, and
can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to
meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their
habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the souls
of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and
without flinching: "Such an one is a _traitor_; such another is very
_malicious_; such another is _great_; such another is _ridiculous_."
(All these words: traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a
particular meaning in his mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the
Pont-Neuf, and he prevents _people_ from walking on the cornice outside
the parapet; that other has a mania for pulling _person's_ ears; etc.,
etc.



CHAPTER IX--THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL

There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the fish-market;
Beaumarchais had something of it. Gaminerie is a shade of the Gallic
spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to the latter,
as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer repeats himself
eternally, granted; one may say that Voltaire plays the gamin. Camille
Desmoulins was a native of the faubourgs. Championnet, who treated
miracles brutally, rose from the pavements of Paris; he had, when a
small lad, inundated the porticos of Saint-Jean de Beauvais, and of
Saint-Étienne du Mont; he had addressed the shrine of Sainte-Geneviève
familiarly to give orders to the phial of Saint Januarius.

The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has
villainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and
handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he
would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on
boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and
straightens himself up with a revolt; his effrontery persists even in
the presence of grape-shot; he was a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the
little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy
was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts: "Forward!" as the horse of Scripture
says "Vah!" and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the
giant.

This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that
spread of wings which reaches from Molière to Barra.

To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses
himself, because he is unhappy.



CHAPTER X--ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO

To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the
_græculus_ of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the
wrinkle of the old world on his brow.

The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a
disease which must be cured, how? By light.

Light renders healthy.

Light kindles.

All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,
education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm
you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will
present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;
and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea
will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of
Paris; flames in the light or will-o'-the-wisps in the gloom.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.

For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole
of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living
manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with
heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the
Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a
Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion;
and it replaces the Gemoniæ by ridicule. Its _majo_ is called "faraud,"
its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its _hammal_ is the
market-porter, its lazzarone is the pègre, its cockney is the native of
Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman
of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the
discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer.
Therapontigonus Miles could walk arm in arm with Vadeboncour the
grenadier, Damasippus the second-hand dealer would be happy among
bric-à-brac merchants, Vincennes could grasp Socrates in its fist as
just as Agora could imprison Diderot, Grimod de la Reynière discovered
larded roast beef, as Curtillus invented roast hedgehog, we see the
trapeze which figures in Plautus reappear under the vault of the Arc
of l'Etoile, the sword-eater of Pocilus encountered by Apuleius is a
sword-swallower on the Pont-Neuf, the nephew of Rameau and Curculio
the parasite make a pair, Ergasilus could get himself presented to
Cambacères by d'Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome: Alcesimarchus,
Phodromus, Diabolus, and Argyrippus, descend from Courtille in Labatut's
posting-chaise; Aulus Gellius would halt no longer in front of Congrio
than would Charles Nodier in front of Punchinello; Marto is not a
tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the wag jeers in
the Café Anglais at Nomentanus the fast liver, Hermogenus is a tenor
in the Champs-Élysées, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad like
Bobèche, takes up a collection; the bore who stops you by the button
of your coat in the Tuileries makes you repeat after a lapse of two
thousand years Thesprion's apostrophe: _Quis properantem me prehendit
pallio? _ The wine on Surêne is a parody of the wine of Alba, the red
border of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of Balatro,
Père Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains same gleams as the
Esquiliæ, and the grave of the poor bought for five years, is certainly
the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin.

Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius contains
nothing that is not in Mesmer's tub; Ergaphilas lives again in
Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vâsaphantâ become incarnate in the Comte de
Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Médard works quite as good miracles
as the Mosque of Oumoumié at Damascus.

Paris has an Æsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is
terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision; it
makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places the grisette on the
throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there; and, taking it altogether,
if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian, Madame Dubarry is better than
Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed
and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the
Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up
a spectre in old numbers of the _Constitutional_, and makes Chodruc
Duclos.

Although Plutarch says: _the tyrant never grows old_, Rome, under Sylla
as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine.
The Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it
by Varus Vibiscus is to be credited: _Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus,
Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci_. Paris drinks a million
litres of water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally
beating the general alarm and ringing the tocsin.

With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally;
it is not too particular about its Venus; its Callipyge is Hottentot;
provided that it is made to laugh, it condones; ugliness cheers it,
deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it; be eccentric and
you may be an eccentric; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does
not disgust it; it is so literary that it does not hold its nose before
Basile, and is no more scandalized by the prayer of Tartuffe than Horace
was repelled by the "hiccup" of Priapus. No trait of the universal face
is lacking in the profile of Paris. The bal Mabile is not the polymnia
dance of the Janiculum, but the dealer in ladies' wearing apparel there
devours the lorette with her eyes, exactly as the procuress Staphyla
lay in wait for the virgin Planesium. The Barrière du Combat is not the
Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as though Cæsar were looking
on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet, but, if Virgil
haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac and Charlet have sat
at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns. Geniuses flash forth
there, the red tails prosper there. Adonaï passes on his chariot with
its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entry
there on his ass. For Silenus read Ramponneau.

Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem,
Pantin. All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms
also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.

A little of the Place de Grève is a good thing. What would all that
eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely
provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.



CHAPTER XI--TO SCOFF, TO REIGN

There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which
sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!
exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the
fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris
may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;
then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs
its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face
of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing
that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors,
that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this
parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the
Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign
joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.

Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its days,
its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the bounds of
the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the
mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks.
It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people; the highest
monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their
eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has a prodigious
14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take
the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three
hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle
of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of
the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar,
Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is
everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779,
at the Isle de Léon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it
whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American
abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear
of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before
the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga;
it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while
proceeding whither its breath urge them, that Byron perished at
Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune under
the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre;
its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its
philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Régnier,
Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Molière
for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal
mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds
the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the
generations trusty friends, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and
its poets that all heroes of all nations have been made since 1789; this
does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called
Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal
Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes
_Credeville the thief_ on the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is
laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A
heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is
more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

To dare; that is the price of progress.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In
order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that
Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that
Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,
that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it
is necessary that Danton should dare it.

The cry: _Audacity! _ is a _Fiat lux_. It is necessary, for the sake of
the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons
of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and
are one of man's great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises.
To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one's
self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount
of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to
insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's ground;
that is the example which nations need, that is the light which
electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch
of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe.



CHAPTER XII--THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE

As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always the
street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is for that
reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow. It is in
the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race appears;
there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this
people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces of
man. There exist there immense numbers of unknown beings, among whom
swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of la Râpée to the
knacker of Montfaucon. _Fex urbis_, exclaims Cicero; _mob_, adds Burke,
indignantly; rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly
uttered. But so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do
go barefoot! They do not know how to read; so much the worse. Would you
abandon them for that? Would you turn their distress into a malediction?
Cannot the light penetrate these masses? Let us return to that cry:
Light! and let us obstinately persist therein! Light! Light! Who knows
whether these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions
transfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, light up, think
aloud, speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun, fraternize with
the public place, announce the good news, spend your alphabets lavishly,
proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms, tear green
boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This crowd may
be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast
conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles, bursts forth
and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these
rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these darknesses, may be
employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you
will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be
cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a
splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will
discover stars.



CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GAVROCHE

Enlarge


Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this
story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the regions of
the Château-d'Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of age, who would
have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the gamin sketched
out above, if, with the laugh of his age on his lips, he had not had a
heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well muffled up in a
pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a
woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or
other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and
a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not
love him.

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

He simply took flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
he was free.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.

Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and see mamma!" Then
he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
Salpêtrière, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
50-52 with which the reader is acquainted--at the Gorbeau hovel.

At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare
thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to
that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings
in whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who collects scraps.

The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead and had been
replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has
said: "Old women are never lacking."

This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable
about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in
succession over her soul.

The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of
four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already
well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the
cells which we have already mentioned.

At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except its
extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had stated
that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in, which had
borne a singular resemblance to _the entrance of nothing at all_, to
borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this Jondrette
had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the same time
portress and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So, if any one should chance
to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a Spaniard,
perchance, it is I."

This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and
found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth
and cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: "Whence come you?" He
replied: "From the street." When he went away, they asked him: "Whither
are you going?" He replied: "Into the streets." His mother said to him:
"What did you come here for?"

This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants
which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he
blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should
be.

Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.

We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this child
was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?

Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.

It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the
thread.

The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the
last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a
very poor young man who was called M. Marius.

Let us explain who this M. Marius was.



BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS



CHAPTER I--NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH

In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge there
still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a
worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with complaisance.
This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet
entirely disappeared--for those who regard with melancholy that vague
swarm of shadows which is called the past--from the labyrinth of streets
in the vicinity of the Temple to which, under Louis XIV., the names of
all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, the
streets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the
capitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress is
visible.

M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of
those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because
they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly
resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man,
and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather
haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, old
bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates. He
was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw
clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of
his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous
disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly
and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he
did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I were
not ruined--Héée!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of about
fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and
to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He did
not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of
octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life;
his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always
had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into
a passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. When
contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he had done in the
great century. He had a daughter over fifty years of age, and unmarried,
whom he chastised severely with his tongue, when in a rage, and whom he
would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He
boxed his servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!" One of his
oaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He had singular
freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who
had been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on
account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand
admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was
extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some
penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it
came."

The words which he uttered the most frequently were: _the sensible man_,
and _nature_. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation
which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own
fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in
order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even
specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia
and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard
is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages.
They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they
transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only
the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not
devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."



CHAPTER II--LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE

He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6. He owned the
house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number
has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the
streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment
on the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very
ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing
pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were
repeated in miniature on the arm-chairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast,
nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from
the windows, and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.
The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that
one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or
fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with
great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a
boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat,
with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers and
fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered of his
convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had
inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt, who had died a
centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between
those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which
he might have been. He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In
his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their
wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same
time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in
existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a
marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens, executed
with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused
and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand's attire was not the habit of
Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables
of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and
had followed the fashions. His coat was of light-weight cloth with
voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With
this he wore knee-breeches and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands
into his fobs. He said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap
of blackguards."



CHAPTER III--LUC-ESPRIT

At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor
to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the same
time--ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire, the
Camargo and the Sallé. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic
retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry, who was
sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love.
He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim: "How pretty she
was--that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her
at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her
come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly
arrived, and her little agitation muff!" He had worn in his young
manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about
effusively. "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin," said he.
Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had
described him as "a charming fool." He was horrified by all the names
which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and
bourgeois. He read the journals, the _newspapers, the gazettes_ as he
said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. "Oh!" he said, "what
people these are! Corbière! Humann! Casimir Périer! There's a minister
for you! I can imagine this in a journal: 'M. Gillenorman, minister!'
that would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would pass"; he
merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and
did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse
speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack
of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the
unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of
periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His god-father
had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed
on him these two significant names: Luc-Esprit.



CHAPTER IV--A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT

He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins, where he
was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duc de Nivernais,
whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention, nor the death
of Louis XVI., nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor
anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. _The
Duc de Nevers_ was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century. "What
a charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine air he had with
his blue ribbon!"

In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made reparation
for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for three
thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from Bestucheff. He
grew animated on this subject: "The elixir of gold," he exclaimed, "the
yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte's drops, in the eighteenth
century,--this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the
panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial. Louis XV.
sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope." He would have been greatly
irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told him that the
elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand
adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789; he was forever narrating
in what manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he had
been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety and cleverness in order to
escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce
an eulogium on the Republic in his presence, he turned purple and grew
so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to
his ninety years, and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three
twice." On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to
be a hundred.



CHAPTER V--BASQUE AND NICOLETTE

He had theories. Here is one of them: "When a man is passionately fond
of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares but little,
who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights, perched on the
code, and jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself
from the quandry and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife
control the purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his
wife busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her
fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education
of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers,
presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law,
follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the
sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds fast
and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges,
hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme and personal delight,
and that consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the
satisfaction of ruining her husband." This theory M. Gillenormand had
himself applied, and it had become his history. His wife--the second
one--had administered his fortune in such a manner that, one fine day,
when M. Gillenormand found himself a widower, there remained to him just
sufficient to live on, by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity
of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with
him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave
a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are
subject to adventures, and, for instance, become _national property_; he
had been present at the avatars of consolidated three per cents, and he
had no great faith in the Great Book of the Public Debt. "All that's
the Rue Quincampois!" he said. His house in the Rue Filles-du-Clavaire
belonged to him, as we have already stated. He had two servants, "a male
and a female." When a servant entered his establishment, M. Gillenormand
re-baptized him. He bestowed on the men the name of their province:
Nîmois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard. His last valet was a big, foundered,
short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty
paces; but, as he had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him
_Basque_. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette
(even the Magnon, of whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a
haughty cook, a cordon bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented
herself. "How much wages do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand.
"Thirty francs." "What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall have fifty
francs, and you shall be called Nicolette."



CHAPTER VI--IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN

With M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath; he was furious at
being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts
of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his
internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have just hinted, that he
had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed energetically for such.
This he called having "royal renown." This royal renown sometimes drew
down upon him singular windfalls. One day, there was brought to him in
a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly
born boy, who was yelling like the deuce, and duly wrapped in
swaddling-clothes, which a servant-maid, dismissed six months
previously, attributed to him. M. Gillenormand had, at that time,
fully completed his eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the
establishment. And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to
believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calumny! M. Gillenormand
himself was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable
smile of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an
aside: "Well, what now? What's the matter? You are finely taken aback,
and really, you are excessively ignorant. M. le Duc d'Angoulême, the
bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly jade of fifteen
when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis d'Alluye, brother to
the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had, at the age of
eighty-three, by the maid of Madame la Présidente Jacquin, a son, a
real child of love, who became a Chevalier of Malta and a counsellor of
state; one of the great men of this century, the Abbé Tabaraud, is the
son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in
these things. And then, the Bible! Upon that I declare that this little
gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his
fault." This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose
name was Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a
boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated. He sent the two brats
back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their
maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any
more. He added: "I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well.
I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did. He had had
a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector of the Academy of
Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine.
"I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom but little memory
remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself
bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them
anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of
going to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gillenormand the elder, he
never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was
kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind
would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him
should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having
been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross
and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: "That was
indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has
degenerated in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the
way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but
badly robbed. _Silvæ sint consule dignæ! _" He had had two wives, as
we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter, who had
remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who had died
at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance,
or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the
Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had
been made colonel at Waterloo. _"He is the disgrace of my family," _
said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a
particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the
back of one hand. He believed very little in God.



CHAPTER VII--RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING

Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,--which
was gray rather than white,--and which was always dressed in "dog's
ears." To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this.

He had something of the eighteenth century about him; frivolous and
great.

In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand,
who was still young,--he was only seventy-four,--lived in the Faubourg
Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired
to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of
eighty.

And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits. The
principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door
absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one whatever
except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door
was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would not
swerve from it. "The day is vulgar," said he, "and deserves only a
closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the
zenith lights up its stars." And he barricaded himself against every
one, even had it been the king himself. This was the antiquated elegance
of his day.



CHAPTER VIII--TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters. They had come
into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very
little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance,
and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The
youngest had a charming soul, which turned towards all that belongs to
the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which
fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was
wedded from her very youth, in ideal, to a vague and heroic figure. The
elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy
purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man,
or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the
antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues
of the town-hall, to be "Madame la Préfète,"--all this had created a
whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her
own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had wings, the
one like an angel, the other like a goose.

No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise
becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her
dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.

At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are
relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of
the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible
to see. A characteristic detail; outside of her immediate family, no
one had ever known her first name. She was called _Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, the elder_.

In the matter of _cant_, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given
points to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of
blackness. She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man
had beheld her garter.

Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was
never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She
multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.
The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in
proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.

Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of
innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,
named Théodule, to embrace her without displeasure.

In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: _Prude_, under which we
have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a
demi-vice.

To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged
to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,
mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred
heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar
in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful,
and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and
through great rays of gilded wood.

She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named
Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom
Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond
the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of
anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle
Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a
single spot of intelligence.

Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than
lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had
never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear
away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to
her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not
herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor
of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.

She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near
him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.
These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not
rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on
each other for support.

There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this
old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in the
presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never addressed this child
except in a severe voice, and sometimes, with uplifted cane: "Here, sir!
rascal, scoundrel, come here!--Answer me, you scamp! Just let me see
you, you good-for-nothing!" etc., etc. He idolized him.

This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.



BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON



CHAPTER I--AN ANCIENT SALON

When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented
many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although a bourgeois, M.
Gillenormand was received in society. As he had a double measure of wit,
in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly, that
which was attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much of. He
never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief person there.
There are people who will have influence at any price, and who will have
other people busy themselves over them; when they cannot be oracles,
they turn wags. M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his domination
in the Royalist salons which he frequented cost his self-respect
nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold his
own against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallée.

About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in
his own neighborhood, in the Rue Férou, with Madame la Baronne de T.,
a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of
France to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime,
had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died
bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune,
some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript
volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had
not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a
meagre income which had survived no one knew how.

Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed society," as she
said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled
twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely
Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of
horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution
of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the
wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of
the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.

The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called _Nicolas_, were
received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and
charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the
following, addressed to "the federates":--


               Refoncez dans vos culottes
               Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
               Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
               Ont arboré l' drapeau blanc?<a href="#linknote-20"
      name="linknoteref-20" id="linknoteref-20">20</a>


There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,
with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with
quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a
moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:--


          Pour raffermir le trône ébranlé sur sa base,
          Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.<a href="#linknote-21"
      name="linknoteref-21" id="linknoteref-21">21</a>


Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably Jacobin
chamber," and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such
a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: _Damas.
Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr_.--All this was done merrily. In that society,
they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give
point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little _Ça
ira: _--


               Ah! ça ira ça ira ça ira!
               Les Bonapartistes à la lanterne!

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day this
head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.

In the Fualdès affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took
part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdès was "a Buonapartist." They
designated the liberals as f_riends and brothers_; this constituted the
most deadly insult.

Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two cocks. One of
them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois, of whom
it was whispered about, with a sort of respect: "Do you know? That is
the Lamothe of the affair of the necklace." These singular amnesties do
occur in parties.

Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay
through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the same
way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are
cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of despised
persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above
this law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother of the Pompadour,
had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise. In spite of? No, because. Du
Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier, was very welcome at the house
of M. le Maréchal de Richelieu. This society is Olympus. Mercury and
the Prince de Guémenée are at home there. A thief is admitted there,
provided he be a god.

The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years of
age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious
air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat
buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long,
flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the same color
as his trousers.

This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in this salon on account
of his "celebrity" and, strange to say, though true, because of his name
of Valois.

As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely first-rate
quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in
any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was imposing,
dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his great
age added to it. One is not a century with impunity. The years finally
produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.

In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the
old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis
XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count de
Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat
as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most
delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings who are
not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One day, the
following question was put and the following answer returned in his
presence: "To what was the editor of the _Courrier Français_ condemned?"
"To be suspended." "_Sus_ is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.22
Remarks of this nature found a situation.

At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, he
said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There goes his Excellency the
Evil One."

M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that tall
mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome
little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting
eyes, who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmur
around him: "How handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!" This child
was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was called "poor
child," because he had for a father "a brigand of the Loire."

This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law, who has
already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called "the disgrace of
his family."



CHAPTER II--ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH

Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at
this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental
bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron
cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the
parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and
trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow
which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned
by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large
scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,
prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
much larger: "these are gardens," and were they a little smaller: "these
are bouquets." All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and
on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes
of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures
and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He lived there alone and
solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor
old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who
served him. The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated
in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there.
These flowers were his occupation.

By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of
water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had
invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been
forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange
Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the
cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He
was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,
hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,
sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful
for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a
child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of
a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very
plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him give
way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed shy, he
rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his
pane and his curé, the Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the
inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to
see his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with a
smile. He was the "brigand of the Loire."

Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,
the _Moniteur_, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been
struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name
of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been
a soldier in Saintonge's regiment. The revolution broke out. Saintonge's
regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the old regiments
of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even after the fall
of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in 1794. Pontmercy
fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at
Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard's
rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps
of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only
rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon had opened
a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was
under Kléber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where
a ball from a biscaïen broke his arm. Then he passed to the frontier
of Italy, and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col
de Tende with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and
Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the midst
of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte to say:
"Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier." He beheld his
old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment when, with uplifted
sabre, he was shouting: "Forward!" Having been embarked with his
company in the exigencies of the campaign, on board a pinnace which was
proceeding from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into
a wasps'-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander
wanted to throw his cannon into the sea, to hide the soldiers between
decks, and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had
the colors hoisted to the peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns
of the British frigates. Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having
increased, he attacked with his pinnace, and captured a large English
transport which was carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded
down with men and horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the
sea. In 1805 he was in that Malher division which took Günzberg from the
Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a
storm of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the
9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable
march in echelons effected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry of
the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line,
Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the
Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,
Mélas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession.
He formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which Mortier
commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the
55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Eylau
he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic
Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained
alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile
army. Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that
cemetery. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Bérésina,
then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of
Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the
Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At
Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,
and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on
this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left
arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just
exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was
called under the old regime, _the double hand_, that is to say, an
equal aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or
a squadron or a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude,
perfected by a military education, which certain special branches of the
service arise, the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men and
infantry at one and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the Island
of Elba. At Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in
Dubois' brigade. It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg
battalion. He came and cast the flag at the Emperor's feet. He was
covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he had received a
sword-cut across his face. The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him:
"You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion
of Honor!" Pontmercy replied: "Sire, I thank you for my widow." An
hour later, he fell in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges
Pontmercy? He was this same "brigand of the Loire."

We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,
Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain, as it
will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army, and had dragged
himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the
Loire.

The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him into
residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis
XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during the Hundred
Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an
officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title
of baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself
"Colonel Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat, and he never
went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the Legion
of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the authorities
would prosecute him for "illegal" wearing of this decoration. When this
notice was conveyed to him through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy
retorted with a bitter smile: "I do not know whether I no longer
understand French, or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is
that I do not understand." Then he went out for eight successive days
with his rosette. They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times
the Minister of War and the general in command of the department
wrote to him with the following address: _"A Monsieur le Commandant
Pontmercy." _ He sent back the letters with the seals unbroken. At the
same moment, Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating in the same fashion
the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to _General Bonaparte_.
Pontmercy had ended, may we be pardoned the expression, by having in his
mouth the same saliva as his Emperor.

In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused
to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's spirit.

One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of
Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: "Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted
to wear my scar?"

He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had
hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there
alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire, between two wars, he
had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois,
thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh,
saying: "The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815, Madame
Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way, lofty in
sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a
child. This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but the
grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring that if
the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had
yielded in the little one's interest, and had transferred his love to
flowers.

Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief
nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which
he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his
time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel
was "a bandit" to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel,
except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to "his Baronship."
It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see
his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed
over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy
was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the
child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these
conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right
and sacrificing no one but himself.

The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the
inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.
This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the maternal
side, and her sister's son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name was
Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened
his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into which his
grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually
enlightened the little boy's mind; he had finally understood something
of the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which
were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and
slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father only with
shame and with a pain at his heart.

While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away every
two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal breaking
his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when
Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the aunt
should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not daring to
breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was afraid of that
old spinster.

From this had arisen his connection with the curé of Vernon, M. l'Abbé
Mabeuf.

That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice, who had
often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on his cheek,
and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly an air, yet
who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung
to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he had
encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had recognized the man
of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance to the curé,
and both had paid the colonel a visit, on some pretext or other. This
visit led to others. The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at
first, ended by opening his heart, and the curé and the warden finally
came to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his
happiness to his child's future. This caused the curé to regard him with
veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, on his side, became fond
of the curé. And moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so
penetrate each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old
priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same. The one has
devoted his life to his country here below, the other to his country on
high; that is the only difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's day, Marius
wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt, and
which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula; this was
all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered them with
very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.



CHAPTER III--REQUIESCANT

Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It
was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life. This
opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night than day, came
to him through this skylight. This child, who had been all joy and light
on entering this strange world, soon became melancholy, and, what is
still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by all those singular
and imposing personages, he gazed about him with serious amazement.
Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him. There were
in Madame de T.'s salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noé,
Lévis,--which was pronounced Lévi,--Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. These
antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in the child's mind
with the Old Testament which he was learning by heart, and when they
were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted
by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray or
white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious colors
could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals, words which
were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared at them with
frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but
patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of
this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private
secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,
under the pseudonyme of _Charles-Antoine_, monorhymed odes, the Prince
de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty
and witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with
gold torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******,
the man in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness," the
Comte d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chévalier
de Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's
cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont
to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in the
galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the Bishop
of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he was so in the
capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at
night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons
who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs
these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of
blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at
night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by
dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies of the
undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard,
M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the right, M.
Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his short breeches
and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon on his way to M. de
Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and
unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl
on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher
avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there was the Abbé Halma, the
same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator on _la Foudre_, said: "Bah! Who
is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?" The Abbé
Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbé Frayssinous, who was not, as
yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer, and who wore an old
cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbé Keravenant, Curé of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés; also the Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi,
Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long,
pensive nose, and another Monsignor, entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri,
domestic prelate, one of the seven participant prothonotaries of the
Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian basilica, Advocate of
the saints, _Postulatore dei Santi_, which refers to matters of
canonization, and signifies very nearly: Master of Requests of the
section of Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de
Cl****** T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined
to have, a few years later, the honor of signing in the _Conservateur_
articles side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T******* was
Archbishop of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to his nephew,
the Marquis de T*******, who was Minister of Marine and War. The
Cardinal of Cl****** T******* was a merry little man, who displayed his
red stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred
of the Encyclopædia, and his desperate play at billiards, and persons
who, at that epoch, passed through the Rue M***** on summer evenings,
where the hotel de Cl****** T******* then stood, halted to listen to the
shock of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to
his conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop _in partibus_ of Caryste:
"Mark, Abbé, I make a cannon." The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had
been brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de
Roquelaure, former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty. M. de
Roquelaure was notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the
Academy; through the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library
where the French Academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on
every Tuesday, contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing
erect, freshly powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned to the
door, apparently for the purpose of allowing a better view of his
little collar. All these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as
much courtiers as churchmen, added to the gravity of the T. salon, whose
seigniorial aspect was accentuated by five peers of France, the Marquis
de Vib****, the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the
Vicomte Damb***, and the Duc de Val********. This Duc de Val********,
although Prince de Mon***, that is to say a reigning prince abroad, had
so high an idea of France and its peerage, that he viewed everything
through their medium. It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers
of France of Rome; the lords are the peers of France of England."
Moreover, as it is indispensable that the Revolution should be
everywhere in this century, this feudal salon was, as we have said,
dominated by a bourgeois. M. Gillenormand reigned there.

There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
entered there, would have produced the effect of Père Duchêne. Some of
the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance. Comte
Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.

The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists of
to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.

At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and
haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners there
admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old
régime itself, buried but still alive. Some of these habits, especially
in the matter of language, seem eccentric. Persons but superficially
acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was only
antique. A woman was called _Madame la Générale. Madame la Colonelle_
was not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Léon, in memory, no
doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this
appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de Créquy was also
called _Madame la Colonelle_.

It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the
refinement of speaking to the King in private as _the King_, in the
third person, and never as _Your Majesty_, the designation of _Your
Majesty_ having been "soiled by the usurper."

Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They abetted
each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum
of light which they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on
Epimenides. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course
of things. They declared that the time which had elapsed since Coblentz
had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace
of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were,
by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.

All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted
to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead. The liveries in
the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were
served by domestics of the same stamp.

They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately
resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of
_Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor_,--that
was the point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these
venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified
society. The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with
straw.

A worthy old marquise, an _emigrée_ and ruined, who had but a solitary
maid, continued to say: "My people."

What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.

To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have
disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us
explain it.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of
the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat
the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is
to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by
heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry;
it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the
Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently
royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented
with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of
whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming
their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the
Restoration.

Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in
1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villèle,
the practical man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary
moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and
sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at
the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still
filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing
resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France
with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls
of marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the
"former" subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen
who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold
their country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the
nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had
lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just
remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and
nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and
was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no
longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some one who called
Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we
repeat, exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us
as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a matter of
fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared beneath two
Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it
is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create
frightful gulfs!

Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times
when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.

These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed
in Fiévée. M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M.
Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon
was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction into
history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King's
armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.

These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way
was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the
ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had
wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated
with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully
too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
coats. The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to
create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of
engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
"Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the
nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this
mistake which it makes with regard to us,--have we not sometimes been
guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to
be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of
liberalism. What an error! And what blindness! Revolutionary France is
wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its
mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September, the
nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire was
treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle, we are
unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always have something
to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis
XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de
Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that
he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.
The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To
what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the
past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history?
Why not love the whole of France?"

It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which
was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.

The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves
here to this sketch.

In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has encountered
in his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he has been
forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace once more some of
the singular features of this society which is unknown to-day. But he
does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea. Souvenirs both
respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother, attach him to
this past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur
of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate
it. It was the France of former days.

Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This
young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.

Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law
school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his
grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and cynicism repelled him, and
his feelings towards his father were gloomy.

He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.



CHAPTER IV--END OF THE BRIGAND

The conclusion of Marius' classical studies coincided with M.
Gillenormand's departure from society. The old man bade farewell to
the Faubourg Saint-Germain and to Madame de T.'s salon, and established
himself in the Marais, in his house of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
There he had for servants, in addition to the porter, that chambermaid,
Nicolette, who had succeeded to Magnon, and that short-breathed and
pursy Basque, who have been mentioned above.

In 1827, Marius had just attained his seventeenth year. One evening, on
his return home, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand.

"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will set out for Vernon to-morrow."

"Why?" said Marius.

"To see your father."

Marius was seized with a trembling fit. He had thought of everything
except this--that he should one day be called upon to see his father.
Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let us admit
it, more disagreeable to him. It was forcing estrangement into
reconciliation. It was not an affliction, but it was an unpleasant duty.

Marius, in addition to his motives of political antipathy, was convinced
that his father, _the slasher_, as M. Gillenormand called him on his
amiable days, did not love him; this was evident, since he had abandoned
him to others. Feeling that he was not beloved, he did not love.
"Nothing is more simple," he said to himself.

He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand. The
grandfather resumed:--

"It appears that he is ill. He demands your presence."

And after a pause, he added:--

"Set out to-morrow morning. I think there is a coach which leaves the
Cour des Fontaines at six o'clock, and which arrives in the evening.
Take it. He says that here is haste."

Then he crushed the letter in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.
Marius might have set out that very evening and have been with his
father on the following morning. A diligence from the Rue du Bouloi
took the trip to Rouen by night at that date, and passed through Vernon.
Neither Marius nor M. Gillenormand thought of making inquiries about it.

The next day, at twilight, Marius reached Vernon. People were just
beginning to light their candles. He asked the first person whom he
met for "M. Pontmercy's house." For in his own mind, he agreed with the
Restoration, and like it, did not recognize his father's claim to the
title of either colonel or baron.

The house was pointed out to him. He rang; a woman with a little lamp in
her hand opened the door.

"M. Pontmercy?" said Marius.

The woman remained motionless.

"Is this his house?" demanded Marius.

The woman nodded affirmatively.

"Can I speak with him?"

The woman shook her head.

"But I am his son!" persisted Marius. "He is expecting me."

"He no longer expects you," said the woman.

Then he perceived that she was weeping.

She pointed to the door of a room on the ground-floor; he entered.

In that room, which was lighted by a tallow candle standing on the
chimney-piece, there were three men, one standing erect, another
kneeling, and one lying at full length, on the floor in his shirt. The
one on the floor was the colonel.

The other two were the doctor, and the priest, who was engaged in
prayer.

The colonel had been attacked by brain fever three days previously. As
he had a foreboding of evil at the very beginning of his illness, he
had written to M. Gillenormand to demand his son. The malady had grown
worse. On the very evening of Marius' arrival at Vernon, the colonel had
had an attack of delirium; he had risen from his bed, in spite of the
servant's efforts to prevent him, crying: "My son is not coming! I shall
go to meet him!" Then he ran out of his room and fell prostrate on the
floor of the antechamber. He had just expired.

The doctor had been summoned, and the curé. The doctor had arrived too
late. The son had also arrived too late.

By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on
the pale and prostrate colonel's cheek, where it had trickled from his
dead eye. The eye was extinguished, but the tear was not yet dry. That
tear was his son's delay.

Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time, on that
venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not, on those
white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there, brown
lines, marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of red stars, which indicated
bullet-holes, were visible. He contemplated that gigantic sear which
stamped heroism on that countenance upon which God had imprinted
goodness. He reflected that this man was his father, and that this man
was dead, and a chill ran over him.

The sorrow which he felt was the sorrow which he would have felt in the
presence of any other man whom he had chanced to behold stretched out in
death.

Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber. The servant-woman was
lamenting in a corner, the curé was praying, and his sobs were audible,
the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping.

The doctor, the priest, and the woman gazed at Marius in the midst of
their affliction without uttering a word; he was the stranger there.
Marius, who was far too little affected, felt ashamed and embarrassed at
his own attitude; he held his hat in his hand; and he dropped it on the
floor, in order to produce the impression that grief had deprived him of
the strength to hold it.

At the same time, he experienced remorse, and he despised himself for
behaving in this manner. But was it his fault? He did not love his
father? Why should he!

The colonel had left nothing. The sale of big furniture barely paid the
expenses of his burial.

The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius. It
contained the following, in the colonel's handwriting:--

"_For my son_.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battle-field of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course." Below, the colonel had added:
"At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. The man's
name was Thénardier. I think that he has recently been keeping a
little inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris, at Chelles or
Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all the good he can to
Thénardier."

Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty to his father,
but because of that vague respect for death which is always imperious in
the heart of man.

Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and
uniform sold to an old-clothes dealer. The neighbors devastated the
garden and pillaged the rare flowers. The other plants turned to nettles
and weeds, and died.

Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment he
returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies, with
no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived. In two
days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.



CHAPTER V--THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, IN ORDER TO BECOME A
REVOLUTIONIST

Marius had preserved the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday,
when he went to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at that same chapel of the
Virgin whither his aunt had led him when a small lad, he placed himself
behind a pillar, being more absent-minded and thoughtful than usual on
that occasion, and knelt down, without paying any special heed, upon a
chair of Utrecht velvet, on the back of which was inscribed this
name: _Monsieur Mabeuf, warden_. Mass had hardly begun when an old man
presented himself and said to Marius:--

"This is my place, sir."

Marius stepped aside promptly, and the old man took possession of his
chair.

The mass concluded, Marius still stood thoughtfully a few paces distant;
the old man approached him again and said:--

"I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you a while ago, and for
again disturbing you at this moment; you must have thought me intrusive,
and I will explain myself."

"There is no need of that, Sir," said Marius.

"Yes!" went on the old man, "I do not wish you to have a bad opinion of
me. You see, I am attached to this place. It seems to me that the mass
is better from here. Why? I will tell you. It is from this place, that
I have watched a poor, brave father come regularly, every two or three
months, for the last ten years, since he had no other opportunity and
no other way of seeing his child, because he was prevented by family
arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew that his son would be
brought to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was
there. Perhaps he did not even know that he had a father, poor innocent!
The father kept behind a pillar, so that he might not be seen. He gazed
at his child and he wept. He adored that little fellow, poor man! I
could see that. This spot has become sanctified in my sight, and I have
contracted a habit of coming hither to listen to the mass. I prefer it
to the stall to which I have a right, in my capacity of warden. I knew
that unhappy gentleman a little, too. He had a father-in-law, a wealthy
aunt, relatives, I don't know exactly what all, who threatened to
disinherit the child if he, the father, saw him. He sacrificed himself
in order that his son might be rich and happy some day. He was separated
from him because of political opinions. Certainly, I approve of
political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.
Mon Dieu! a man is not a monster because he was at Waterloo; a father
is not separated from his child for such a reason as that. He was one of
Bonaparte's colonels. He is dead, I believe. He lived at Vernon, where I
have a brother who is a curé, and his name was something like Pontmarie
or Montpercy. He had a fine sword-cut, on my honor."

"Pontmercy," suggested Marius, turning pale.

"Precisely, Pontmercy. Did you know him?"

"Sir," said Marius, "he was my father."

The old warden clasped his hands and exclaimed:--

"Ah! you are the child! Yes, that's true, he must be a man by this
time. Well! poor child, you may say that you had a father who loved you
dearly!"

Marius offered his arm to the old man and conducted him to his lodgings.

On the following day, he said to M. Gillenormand:--

"I have arranged a hunting-party with some friends. Will you permit me
to be absent for three days?"

"Four!" replied his grandfather. "Go and amuse yourself."

And he said to his daughter in a low tone, and with a wink, "Some love
affair!"



CHAPTER VI--THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN

Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.

Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris, went
straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the files of the
_Moniteur_.

He read the _Moniteur_, he read all the histories of the Republic and
the Empire, the _Memorial de Sainte-Hélène_, all the memoirs, all the
newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything.
The first time that he came across his father's name in the bulletins of
the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went to see the generals
under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, Comte H.
Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the life
at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers, his solitude. Marius came
to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man, that species
of lion-lamb who had been his father.

In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed all
his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands at
all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him, and he
was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. "Bah! bah! He is just
of the age for the girls!" Sometimes the old man added: "The deuce!
I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems that it is an
affair of passion!"

It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his
father.

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The
phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the
history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to
follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.

That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.

The first effect was to dazzle him.

Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only
monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire,
a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where he had
expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort
of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling,
Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins,
Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He
recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little, when his
astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this radiance, he
contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined these personages
without terror; the Revolution and the Empire presented themselves
luminously, in perspective, before his mind's eye; he beheld each of
these groups of events and of men summed up in two tremendous facts: the
Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses,
the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe; he
beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution, and
the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire. He asserted
in his conscience, that all this had been good. What his dazzled state
neglected in this, his first far too synthetic estimation, we do not
think it necessary to point out here. It is the state of a mind on the
march that we are recording. Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
That stated, once for all, in connection with what precedes as well as
with what is to follow, we continue.

He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his
country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known
either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured
his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the other
he adored.

He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair that
all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb. Oh! if his
father had still been in existence, if he had still had him, if God, in
his compassion and his goodness, had permitted his father to be still
among the living, how he would have run, how he would have precipitated
himself, how he would have cried to his father: "Father! Here I am! It
is I! I have the same heart as thou! I am thy son!" How he would have
embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar,
pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his
father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of
his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his heart, which
said to him every moment: "Alas!" At the same time, he became more truly
serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought and his faith. At
each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his reason. An inward
growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was conscious of a sort
of natural enlargement, which gave him two things that were new to
him--his father and his country.

As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that
which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred; henceforth
he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human sense of the
great things which he had been taught to detest, and of the great men
whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected on his former
opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which, nevertheless,
seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled.

From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the
rehabilitation of Napoleon.

But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.

From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of
1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its
interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated
him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to
sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of
mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order
to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately
pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814
made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from
that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is
terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in
speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with
laughter, provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never
entertained--about _that man_, as he was called--any other ideas in his
mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and
materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes
of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,
and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on
the score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more
distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost
regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though
attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then
the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps
of enthusiasm.

One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle
was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close
to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and
mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears dull
sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter, which
is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a firebrand,
the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.

He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes
penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his
father's name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great
Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising
within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close
to him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into
a singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets,
the measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the
cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed
upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless
depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they
beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted
within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,
without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was
obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the
eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"

From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--the
usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his own
sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner of
Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave place
in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an
inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Cæsar. The Emperor had
been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for
whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more to Marius. He was
the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman
group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,
of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry
IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety,
having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man,
that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots,
powerful in his crime.

He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: "The
great nation!" He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of
France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre
which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the
future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus
Christ is the man-God.

It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his
conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion
and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the downward
slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag. Fanaticism
for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his mind his
enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with genius,
and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he was
installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that
which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he
had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything. There
is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth. He had a
violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump. In the new
path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes of the old regime,
as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating
circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His
orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had
turned squarely round.

All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family
obtaining an inkling of the case.

When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon
and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and
the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly
democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des
Orfévres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: _Le Baron Marius
Pontmercy_.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had
taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his
father.

Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any
porter, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his
father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which the
colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his
grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's temper did
not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances
of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Géronte
shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same
political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,
Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge
fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius
experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it
was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly
from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child
of the father.

By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
for his grandfather.

Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have
already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and rare
in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and
alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a pretext.
His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis: "In love!
I know all about it."

From time to time Marius absented himself.

"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his aunt.

On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to
Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had
left him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper
Thénardier. Thénardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew
what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on
this quest.

"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.

They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.



CHAPTER VII--SOME PETTICOAT

We have mentioned a lancer.

He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,
who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the domestic
hearth. Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions
required to make what is called a fine officer. He had "a lady's waist,"
a victorious manner of trailing his sword and of twirling his mustache
in a hook. He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that Marius had
never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We think
we have said that Théodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand, who
preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits one
to attribute to them all possible perfections.

One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her
apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.
Marius had just asked his grandfather's permission to take a little
trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. "Go!" had been
his grandfather's reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as
he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: "Here he is passing
the night out again." Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to
her chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this
exclamation: "This is too much!"--and this interrogation: "But where is
it that he goes?" She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less
illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would
not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a
mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls
do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret
compartments of bigotry.

So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.

In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her a little beyond
her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and set about scalloping,
with one layer of cotton after another, one of those embroideries of the
Empire and the Restoration, in which there are numerous cart-wheels.
The work was clumsy, the worker cross. She had been seated at this for
several hours when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised
her nose. Lieutenant Théodule stood before her, making the regulation
salute. She uttered a cry of delight. One may be old, one may be a
prude, one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable
to see a lancer enter one's chamber.

"You here, Théodule!" she exclaimed.

"On my way through town, aunt."

"Embrace me."

"Here goes!" said Théodule.

And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk and opened
it.

"You will remain with us a week at least?"

"I leave this very evening, aunt."

"It is not possible!"

"Mathematically!"

"Remain, my little Théodule, I beseech you."

"My heart says 'yes,' but my orders say 'no.' The matter is simple.
They are changing our garrison; we have been at Melun, we are being
transferred to Gaillon. It is necessary to pass through Paris in order
to get from the old post to the new one. I said: 'I am going to see my
aunt.'"

"Here is something for your trouble."

And she put ten louis into his hand.

"For my pleasure, you mean to say, my dear aunt."

Théodule kissed her again, and she experienced the joy of having some of
the skin scratched from her neck by the braidings on his uniform.

"Are you making the journey on horseback, with your regiment?" she asked
him.

"No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission. My servant is
taking my horse; I am travelling by diligence. And, by the way, I want
to ask you something."

"What is it?"

"Is my cousin Marius Pontmercy travelling so, too?"

"How do you know that?" said his aunt, suddenly pricked to the quick
with a lively curiosity.

"On my arrival, I went to the diligence to engage my seat in the coupé."

"Well?"

"A traveller had already come to engage a seat in the imperial. I saw
his name on the card."

"What name?"

"Marius Pontmercy."

"The wicked fellow!" exclaimed his aunt. "Ah! your cousin is not a
steady lad like yourself. To think that he is to pass the night in a
diligence!"

"Just as I am going to do."

"But you--it is your duty; in his case, it is wildness."

"Bosh!" said Théodule.

Here an event occurred to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,--an idea
struck her. If she had been a man, she would have slapped her brow. She
apostrophized Théodule:--

"Are you aware whether your cousin knows you?"

"No. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me."

"So you are going to travel together?"

"He in the imperial, I in the coupé."

"Where does this diligence run?"

"To Andelys."

"Then that is where Marius is going?"

"Unless, like myself, he should stop on the way. I get down at Vernon,
in order to take the branch coach for Gaillon. I know nothing of Marius'
plan of travel."

"Marius! what an ugly name! what possessed them to name him Marius?
While you, at least, are called Théodule."

"I would rather be called Alfred," said the officer.

"Listen, Théodule."

"I am listening, aunt."

"Pay attention."

"I am paying attention."

"You understand?"

"Yes."

"Well, Marius absents himself!"

"Eh! eh!"

"He travels."

"Ah! ah!"

"He spends the night out."

"Oh! oh!"

"We should like to know what there is behind all this."

Théodule replied with the composure of a man of bronze:--

"Some petticoat or other."

And with that inward laugh which denotes certainty, he added:--

"A lass."

"That is evident," exclaimed his aunt, who thought she heard M.
Gillenormand speaking, and who felt her conviction become irresistible
at that word _fillette_, accentuated in almost the very same fashion by
the granduncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:--

"Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He does not know you, it will be
easy. Since a lass there is, try to get a sight of her. You must write
us the tale. It will amuse his grandfather."

Théodule had no excessive taste for this sort of spying; but he was much
touched by the ten louis, and he thought he saw a chance for a possible
sequel. He accepted the commission and said: "As you please, aunt."

And he added in an aside, to himself: "Here I am a duenna."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.

"You are not the man to play such pranks, Théodule. You obey discipline,
you are the slave of orders, you are a man of scruples and duty, and you
would not quit your family to go and see a creature."

The lancer made the pleased grimace of Cartouche when praised for his
probity.

Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence
without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the
first thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete and
conscientious. Argus snored all night long.

At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: "Vernon! relay of
Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!" And Lieutenant Théodule woke.

"Good," he growled, still half asleep, "this is where I get out."

Then, as his memory cleared by degrees, the effect of waking, he
recalled his aunt, the ten louis, and the account which he had
undertaken to render of the deeds and proceedings of Marius. This set
him to laughing.

"Perhaps he is no longer in the coach," he thought, as he rebuttoned the
waistcoat of his undress uniform. "He may have stopped at Poissy; he may
have stopped at Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan, he may have got
out at Mantes, unless he got out at Rolleboise, or if he did not go on
as far as Pacy, with the choice of turning to the left at Évreus, or to
the right at Laroche-Guyon. Run after him, aunty. What the devil am I to
write to that good old soul?"

At that moment a pair of black trousers descending from the imperial,
made its appearance at the window of the coupé.

"Can that be Marius?" said the lieutenant.

It was Marius.

A little peasant girl, all entangled with the horses and the postilions
at the end of the vehicle, was offering flowers to the travellers. "Give
your ladies flowers!" she cried.

Marius approached her and purchased the finest flowers in her flat
basket.

"Come now," said Théodule, leaping down from the coupe, "this piques my
curiosity. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to? She
must be a splendidly handsome woman for so fine a bouquet. I want to see
her."

And no longer in pursuance of orders, but from personal curiosity, like
dogs who hunt on their own account, he set out to follow Marius.

Marius paid no attention to Théodule. Elegant women descended from the
diligence; he did not glance at them. He seemed to see nothing around
him.

"He is pretty deeply in love!" thought Théodule.

Marius directed his steps towards the church.

"Capital," said Théodule to himself. "Rendezvous seasoned with a bit of
mass are the best sort. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle which passes
over the good God's head."

On arriving at the church, Marius did not enter it, but skirted the
apse. He disappeared behind one of the angles of the apse.

"The rendezvous is appointed outside," said Théodule. "Let's have a look
at the lass."

And he advanced on the tips of his boots towards the corner which Marius
had turned.

On arriving there, he halted in amazement.

Marius, with his forehead clasped in his hands, was kneeling upon the
grass on a grave. He had strewn his bouquet there. At the extremity of
the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head, there stood
a cross of black wood with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON
PONTMERCY. Marius' sobs were audible.

The "lass" was a grave.



CHAPTER VIII--MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE

It was hither that Marius had come on the first occasion of his
absenting himself from Paris. It was hither that he had come every time
that M. Gillenormand had said: "He is sleeping out."

Lieutenant Théodule was absolutely put out of countenance by this
unexpected encounter with a sepulchre; he experienced a singular and
disagreeable sensation which he was incapable of analyzing, and which
was composed of respect for the tomb, mingled with respect for the
colonel. He retreated, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and
there was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him with large
epaulets, and he almost made the military salute to him. Not knowing
what to write to his aunt, he decided not to write at all; and it is
probable that nothing would have resulted from the discovery made
by Théodule as to the love affairs of Marius, if, by one of those
mysterious arrangements which are so frequent in chance, the scene at
Vernon had not had an almost immediate counter-shock at Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon on the third day, in the middle of the
morning, descended at his grandfather's door, and, wearied by the two
nights spent in the diligence, and feeling the need of repairing his
loss of sleep by an hour at the swimming-school, he mounted rapidly to
his chamber, took merely time enough to throw off his travelling-coat,
and the black ribbon which he wore round his neck, and went off to the
bath.

M. Gillenormand, who had risen betimes like all old men in good health,
had heard his entrance, and had made haste to climb, as quickly as his
old legs permitted, the stairs to the upper story where Marius lived,
in order to embrace him, and to question him while so doing, and to find
out where he had been.

But the youth had taken less time to descend than the old man had to
ascend, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic, Marius was no
longer there.

The bed had not been disturbed, and on the bed lay, outspread, but not
defiantly the great-coat and the black ribbon.

"I like this better," said M. Gillenormand.

And a moment later, he made his entrance into the salon, where
Mademoiselle Gillenormand was already seated, busily embroidering her
cart-wheels.

The entrance was a triumphant one.

M. Gillenormand held in one hand the great-coat, and in the other the
neck-ribbon, and exclaimed:--

"Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going to
learn the most minute details; we are going to lay our finger on the
debaucheries of our sly friend! Here we have the romance itself. I have
the portrait!"

In fact, a case of black shagreen, resembling a medallion portrait, was
suspended from the ribbon.

The old man took this case and gazed at it for some time without opening
it, with that air of enjoyment, rapture, and wrath, with which a poor
hungry fellow beholds an admirable dinner which is not for him, pass
under his very nose.

"For this evidently is a portrait. I know all about such things. That is
worn tenderly on the heart. How stupid they are! Some abominable fright
that will make us shudder, probably! Young men have such bad taste
nowadays!"

"Let us see, father," said the old spinster.

The case opened by the pressure of a spring. They found in it nothing
but a carefully folded paper.

_"From the same to the same,"_ said M. Gillenormand, bursting with
laughter. "I know what it is. A billet-doux."

"Ah! let us read it!" said the aunt.

And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read as
follows:--

"_For my son_.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course."

The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt
chilled as by the breath of a death's-head. They did not exchange a
word.

Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking to
himself:--

"It is the slasher's handwriting."

The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions, then put
it back in its case.

At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper, fell
from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle Gillenormand
picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.

It contained Marius' hundred cards. She handed one of them to M.
Gillenormand, who read: _Le Baron Marius Pontmercy_.

The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the
ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor in the
middle of the room, and said:--

"Carry those duds away."

A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the old
spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other, and were
thinking, each on his own account, the same things, in all probability.

At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:--"A pretty state
of things!"

A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered. Even before
he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one of
his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter
exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was
something crushing:--

"Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present you my
compliments. What is the meaning of this?"

Marius reddened slightly and replied:--

"It means that I am the son of my father."

M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:--

"I am your father."

"My father," retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air, "was
a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France gloriously,
who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who
lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century, beneath grape-shot and
bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain at night, who captured two
flags, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and
who never committed but one mistake, which was to love too fondly two
ingrates, his country and myself."

This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the word
_republic_, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang to his feet.
Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on the visage of the
old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from a forge upon a blazing
brand. From a dull hue he had turned red, from red, purple, and from
purple, flame-colored.

"Marius!" he cried. "Abominable child! I do not know what your father
was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that, and I do not know
him! But what I do know is, that there never was anything but scoundrels
among those men! They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps, thieves! I
say all! I say all! I know not one! I say all! Do you hear me, Marius!
See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They were all
bandits in the service of Robespierre! All who served B-u-o-naparté were
brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their
legitimate king! All cowards who fled before the Prussians and the
English at Waterloo! That is what I do know! Whether Monsieur your
father comes in that category, I do not know! I am sorry for it, so much
the worse, your humble servant!"

In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand
who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know what
would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who beholds
all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a
passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had been
uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just been
trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? By
his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the
other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was
equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the one
hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.

He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,
with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised
his eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of
thunder:--

"Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!"

Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to
him.

The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He
wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the
chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.
Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the
window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length
of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though he had been a
stone statue walking.

On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her
with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman, and a
bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."

And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with
his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he
extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:--

"Be off!"

Marius left the house.

On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:

"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
and you will never mention his name to me."

Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing
what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as _you_
instead of _thou_ for the next three months.

Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic
dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in reality,
the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius' "duds"
precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather's command, Nicolette
had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic staircase, which
was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which contained the paper
penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found.
Marius was convinced that "Monsieur Gillenormand"--from that day forth
he never alluded to him otherwise--had flung "his father's testament" in
the fire. He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel had written,
and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing, that
sacred relic,--all that was his very heart. What had been done with it?

Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and
without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes
in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the
hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin
quarter.

What was to become of Marius?



BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C



CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC

At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was on
the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were
undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,
through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the
compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance
which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals,
liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with
a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create
intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people
adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. These
were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian
royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist
liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they
sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They
grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite
realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards
the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing
like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams
for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.

These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery
menaced "the established order of things," which was suspicious and
underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The
second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in
the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the
premeditation of _coups d'état_.

There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
organizations, like the German _tugendbund_ and Italian Carbonarism; but
here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process of
throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there
existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society
of the Friends of the A B C.

What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its object
apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation of man.

They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,--the _Abaissé_,--the
debased,--that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people.
It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes
serious factors in politics; witness the _Castratus ad castra_, which
made a general of the army of Narses; witness: _Barbari et Barberini_;
witness: _Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram_, etc., etc.

The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in
the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries ended in
heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities, near the fish-market,
in a wine-shop called _Corinthe_, of which more will be heard later on,
and near the Pantheon in a little café in the Rue Saint-Michel called
the _Café Musain_, now torn down; the first of these meeting-places was
close to the workingman, the second to the students.

The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held in a back
room of the Café Musain.

This hall, which was tolerably remote from the café, with which it was
connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit
with a private stairway on the little Rue des Grès. There they smoked
and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud
tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map
of France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,--a sign quite
sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.

The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students, who were
on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the
principal ones. They belong, in a certain measure, to history: Enjolras,
Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or
Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.

These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond of friendship.
All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.

Enlarge


This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which
lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached,
it will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these
youthful heads, before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow
of a tragic adventure.

Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,--the reader shall
see why later on,--was an only son and wealthy.

Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He
was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said,
to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already,
in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary
apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a
witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great
affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He
was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of
view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the
priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his
lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A
great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view.
Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of
the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with
excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to
hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and
twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not
seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.
He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow
the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the
Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he
ignored spring, he did not hear the carolling of the birds; the bare
throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved
Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing
except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He
chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic.
He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired,
and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of
soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him!
If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais,
seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,
those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the
wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had
conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty
on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown
her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty
cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.

By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,
Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the
Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that its
logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.
Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but
broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of
general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and around the
mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution
was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.
Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.
The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself
to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world
more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men to
attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the wise
man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. _Homo_
and _vir_, that was the exact effect of their different shades.
Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural
whiteness. He loved the word _citizen_, but he preferred the word
_man_. He would gladly have said: _Hombre_, like the Spanish. He
read everything, went to the theatres, attended the courses of
public lecturers, learned the polarization of light from Arago, grew
enthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explained
the double function of the external carotid artery, and the internal,
the one which makes the face, and the one which makes the brain; he
kept up with what was going on, followed science step by step, compared
Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble
which he found and reasoned on geology, drew from memory a silkworm
moth, pointed out the faulty French in the Dictionary of the Academy,
studied Puységur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles;
denied nothing, not even ghosts; turned over the files of the
_Moniteur_, reflected. He declared that the future lies in the hand
of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with educational questions. He
desired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation of
the moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting ideas
into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons, and
he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness from
a literary point of view confined to two or three centuries called
classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholastic
prejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges into
artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of
the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful "even
to chimæras," so his friends said. He believed in all dreams, railroads,
the suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the fixing of
images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the steering of
balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the citadels erected
against the human mind in every direction, by superstition, despotism,
and prejudice. He was one of those who think that science will
eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a
guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind
the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did
not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by
main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human
race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the
inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between
two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for
conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why
not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a
still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness
of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,
progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this
tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into
the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still
more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the
whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the
cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In
short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends,
captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary
adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take
its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but
irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have
knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all
its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous
evolution of the races. _The good must be innocent_, he repeated
incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists
in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither
athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty
of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,
who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that
difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an
eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name
was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the
powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study
of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot
of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same
confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a
royal head, that of André Chénier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,
but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost an
Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those
who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter of
poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,
Juvenal, Æschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigné to Corneille. He loved to saunter through
fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds
nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on
the side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or
he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,
salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production
and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human
ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those
enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke
softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,
dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and was
very timid. Yet he was intrepid.

Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father and
mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had but
one thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to
educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taught
himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by
himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was
immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had
failed him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound
divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the _idea of
the nationality_, had learned history with the express object of
raging with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,
occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had
for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered
these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the
tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of
Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,
the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign
eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that
eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the
subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that
three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern
of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,
have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of
birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in
the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which
all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been
a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,
approved, counter-signed, and copied, _ne variatur_, the partition of
Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the
first thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted
that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815
was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This
poor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she
recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there is
eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be
Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make
them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and
reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The
protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a
nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality
have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket
handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of
the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The
particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the
bourgeois of the epoch of _la Minerve_ estimated so highly that poor
_de_, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin
had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de
Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.
Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest, and called himself
plain Courfeyrac.

We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here,
and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: "For
Courfeyrac, see Tholomyès."

Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called
the _beauté du diable_ of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the
playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois,
on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation of the
successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from
hand to hand, _quasi cursores_, and is almost always exactly the same;
so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to
Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyès in 1817. Only,
Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities
of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyès was very
great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different
in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyès a
district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the
centre. The others gave more light, he shed more warmth; the truth is,
that he possessed all the qualities of a centre, roundness and radiance.

Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion
of the burial of young Lallemand.

Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a
spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and
at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow
possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale
blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless
it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were
a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the
pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it;
a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did not
practise it. He had taken for his device: "Never a lawyer," and for his
armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every
time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned
up his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and took
hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a fine
old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a monument!" In his
lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasions
for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like
three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for
their son.

He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the
reason they are intelligent."

Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafés; the others
had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To saunter
is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a
thinker than appeared to view.

He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and
other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take form later
on.

In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.

The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having assisted
him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated, was wont
to relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the King was
disembarking at Calais, a man handed him a petition.

"What is your request?" said the King.

"Sire, a post-office."

"What is your name?"

"L'Aigle."

The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheld
the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte orthography touched
the King and he began to smile. "Sire," resumed the man with the
petition, "I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamed
Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by
contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle." This caused the King
to smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting office of Meaux,
either intentionally or accidentally.

The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Légle, and
he signed himself, Légle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation, his companions
called him Bossuet.

Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed
in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything. At five and twenty
he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field; but
he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field in a bad
speculation. He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but
all he did miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived him;
what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting
wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered
that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment,
hence his joviality. He said: "I live under falling tiles." He was
not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was what he had
foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of
fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was poor, but
his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached his last sou,
never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his doors, he
saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on
the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by
its nickname: "Good day, Guignon," he said to it.

These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of
resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to
him, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance." One night, he went so far
as to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspired
him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull off my
boots, you five-louis jade."

Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a
lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner of Bahorel.
Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now with
one, now with another, most often with Joly. Joly was studying medicine.
He was two years younger than Bossuet.

Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had won in medicine was
to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he thought
himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his tongue
in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, and
in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south, and the
foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his blood
might not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe.
During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayest
of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived
in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable
being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called
Jolllly. "You may fly away on the four _L's_," Jean Prouvaire said to
him.23

Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which is
an indication of a sagacious mind.

All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole, can
only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.

All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of
them became solemn when they pronounced that date: '89. Their fathers in
the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters not what;
this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not concern
them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in their veins. They
attached themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible right
and absolute duty.

Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.

Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was
one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's name
was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this
rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in
anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most
during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had
at the Café Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Café Voltaire, that
good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard
du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes
at the Barrière de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the
Barrière du Compat. He knew the best place for everything; in addition,
boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough
single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was
inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma
Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as
follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not to
be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the
air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his
comrades believe that he was in general demand.

All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social
contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,
civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing
whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the
intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony.
This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." He
sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the
brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly in
advance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is a
gibbet which has been a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine,
often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:
"J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV.

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a
dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras.
Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this
anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To
the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his
ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable.
A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of
complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the
light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad
always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in
its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith
soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm,
upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly
aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having
occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft,
yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves
to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that
firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once
more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were,
to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His
indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his
heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction;
for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted. There
are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong
side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja.
They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man;
their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction
_and_; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an
existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was
the obverse of Enjolras.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the
alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will,
pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.

Grantaire, Enjolras' true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men;
he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them
everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes
of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good humor.

Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man
himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity.
Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras,
roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of
Enjolras: "What fine marble!"



CHAPTER II--BLONDEAU'S FUNERAL ORATION BY BOSSUET

On a certain afternoon, which had, as will be seen hereafter, some
coincidence with the events heretofore related, Laigle de Meaux was to
be seen leaning in a sensual manner against the doorpost of the Café
Musain. He had the air of a caryatid on a vacation; he carried nothing
but his revery, however. He was staring at the Place Saint-Michel.
To lean one's back against a thing is equivalent to lying down while
standing erect, which attitude is not hated by thinkers. Laigle de Meaux
was pondering without melancholy, over a little misadventure which
had befallen him two days previously at the law-school, and which had
modified his personal plans for the future, plans which were rather
indistinct in any case.

Revery does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer from
taking note of that cab. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were straying about
in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived, athwart his somnambulism, a
two-wheeled vehicle proceeding through the place, at a foot pace and
apparently in indecision. For whom was this cabriolet? Why was it
driving at a walk? Laigle took a survey. In it, beside the coachman, sat
a young man, and in front of the young man lay a rather bulky hand-bag.
The bag displayed to passers-by the following name inscribed in large
black letters on a card which was sewn to the stuff: MARIUS PONTMERCY.

This name caused Laigle to change his attitude. He drew himself up and
hurled this apostrophe at the young man in the cabriolet:--

"Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!"

The cabriolet thus addressed came to a halt.

The young man, who also seemed deeply buried in thought, raised his
eyes:--

"Hey?" said he.

"You are M. Marius Pontmercy?"

"Certainly."

"I was looking for you," resumed Laigle de Meaux.

"How so?" demanded Marius; for it was he: in fact, he had just quitted
his grandfather's, and had before him a face which he now beheld for the
first time. "I do not know you."

"Neither do I know you," responded Laigle.

Marius thought he had encountered a wag, the beginning of a
mystification in the open street. He was not in a very good humor at the
moment. He frowned. Laigle de Meaux went on imperturbably:--

"You were not at the school day before yesterday."

"That is possible."

"That is certain."

"You are a student?" demanded Marius.

"Yes, sir. Like yourself. Day before yesterday, I entered the school, by
chance. You know, one does have such freaks sometimes. The professor was
just calling the roll. You are not unaware that they are very ridiculous
on such occasions. At the third call, unanswered, your name is erased
from the list. Sixty francs in the gulf."

Marius began to listen.

"It was Blondeau who was making the call. You know Blondeau, he has a
very pointed and very malicious nose, and he delights to scent out the
absent. He slyly began with the letter P. I was not listening, not being
compromised by that letter. The call was not going badly. No erasures;
the universe was present. Blondeau was grieved. I said to myself:
'Blondeau, my love, you will not get the very smallest sort of an
execution to-day.' All at once Blondeau calls, 'Marius Pontmercy!' No
one answers. Blondeau, filled with hope, repeats more loudly: 'Marius
Pontmercy!' And he takes his pen. Monsieur, I have bowels of compassion.
I said to myself hastily: 'Here's a brave fellow who is going to get
scratched out. Attention. Here is a veritable mortal who is not exact.
He's not a good student. Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who
studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and
sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession.
He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts, who
cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex, who is at
this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us save him. Death to
Blondeau!' At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen in, all black with
erasures in the ink, cast his yellow eyes round the audience room, and
repeated for the third time: 'Marius Pontmercy!' I replied: 'Present!'
This is why you were not crossed off."

"Monsieur!--" said Marius.

"And why I was," added Laigle de Meaux.

"I do not understand you," said Marius.

Laigle resumed:--

"Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close
to the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me with a
certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must be the malicious
nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter L. L is my letter. I
am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle."

"L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what fine name!"

"Monsieur, Blondeau came to this fine name, and called: 'Laigle!' I
reply: 'Present!' Then Blondeau gazes at me, with the gentleness of a
tiger, and says to me: 'If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.' A
phrase which has a disobliging air for you, but which was lugubrious
only for me. That said, he crossed me off."

Marius exclaimed:--

"I am mortified, sir--"

"First of all," interposed Laigle, "I demand permission to embalm
Blondeau in a few phrases of deeply felt eulogium. I will assume that he
is dead. There will be no great change required in his gauntness, in his
pallor, in his coldness, and in his smell. And I say: '_Erudimini qui
judicatis terram_. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau
Nasica, the ox of discipline, _bos disciplinæ_, the bloodhound of the
password, the angel of the roll-call, who was upright, square, exact,
rigid, honest, and hideous. God crossed him off as he crossed me off.'"

Marius resumed:--

"I am very sorry--"

"Young man," said Laigle de Meaux, "let this serve you as a lesson. In
future, be exact."

"I really beg you a thousand pardons."

"Do not expose your neighbor to the danger of having his name erased
again."

"I am extremely sorry--"

Laigle burst out laughing.

"And I am delighted. I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer. This
erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar. I shall not defend
the widow, and I shall not attack the orphan. No more toga, no more
stage. Here is my erasure all ready for me. It is to you that I am
indebted for it, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay a solemn call of
thanks upon you. Where do you live?"

"In this cab," said Marius.

"A sign of opulence," retorted Laigle calmly. "I congratulate you. You
have there a rent of nine thousand francs per annum."

At that moment, Courfeyrac emerged from the café.

Marius smiled sadly.

"I have paid this rent for the last two hours, and I aspire to get rid
of it; but there is a sort of history attached to it, and I don't know
where to go."

"Come to my place, sir," said Courfeyrac.

"I have the priority," observed Laigle, "but I have no home."

"Hold your tongue, Bossuet," said Courfeyrac.

"Bossuet," said Marius, "but I thought that your name was Laigle."

"De Meaux," replied Laigle; "by metaphor, Bossuet."

Courfeyrac entered the cab.

"Coachman," said he, "hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques."

And that very evening, Marius found himself installed in a chamber of
the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques side by side with Courfeyrac.



CHAPTER III--MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS

In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac's friend. Youth is the
season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars. Marius
breathed freely in Courfeyrac's society, a decidedly new thing for him.
Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not even think of such a
thing. At that age, faces disclose everything on the spot. Words are
superfluous. There are young men of whom it can be said that their
countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.

One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation
to him:--

"By the way, have you any political opinions?"

"The idea!" said Marius, almost affronted by the question.

"What are you?"

"A democrat-Bonapartist."

"The gray hue of a reassured rat," said Courfeyrac.

On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Café Musain.
Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: "I must give you your entry
to the revolution." And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A B
C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word which
Marius did not understand: "A pupil."

Marius had fallen into a wasps'-nest of wits. However, although he was
silent and grave, he was, none the less, both winged and armed.

Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to
asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this covey
of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited his
attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements of
these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes,
in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had difficulty in
recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of literature, of
art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He caught glimpses
of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in proper perspective,
he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos that he grasped. On
abandoning his grandfather's opinions for the opinions of his father,
he had supposed himself fixed; he now suspected, with uneasiness, and
without daring to avow it to himself, that he was not. The angle
at which he saw everything began to be displaced anew. A certain
oscillation set all the horizons of his brains in motion. An odd
internal upsetting. He almost suffered from it.

It seemed as though there were no "consecrated things" for those young
men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which
embarrassed his still timid mind.

A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear to
the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:--

"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the
bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has
a reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of
Æschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in
nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not
a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which
are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is
the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I do
not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique
tragedy."

Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau
between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac took his arm:--

"Pay attention. This is the Rue Plâtrière, now called Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived in it sixty
years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. From time
to time, little beings were born there. Thérèse gave birth to them,
Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings."

And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:--

"Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied
his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people."

Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor.
Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said
"Bonaparte." Enjolras pronounced it "Buonaparte."

Marius was vaguely surprised. _Initium sapientiæ_.



CHAPTER IV--THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFÉ MUSAIN

One of the conversations among the young men, at which Marius was
present and in which he sometimes joined, was a veritable shock to his
mind.

This took place in the back room of the Café Musain. Nearly all the
Friends of the A B C had convened that evening. The argand lamp was
solemnly lighted. They talked of one thing and another, without passion
and with noise. With the exception of Enjolras and Marius, who held
their peace, all were haranguing rather at hap-hazard. Conversations
between comrades sometimes are subject to these peaceable tumults. It
was a game and an uproar as much as a conversation. They tossed words
to each other and caught them up in turn. They were chattering in all
quarters.

No woman was admitted to this back room, except Louison, the dish-washer
of the café, who passed through it from time to time, to go to her
washing in the "lavatory."

Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had
taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs,
and shouting:--

"I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has an
attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will
be applied to it. I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a
hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is
worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in
which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique
reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: 'All is vanity.'
I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing
to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up
of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a
professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary
is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, a
jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche. Vanity has a
right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with
his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with
his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are
called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally
of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a
horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself
up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef. As for
the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the least.
Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white
is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give
the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous
than the asp and the cobra. It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise
I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. For instance,
I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of
daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples;
_rapin_24 is the masculine of _rapine_. So much for myself; as for
the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your
perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends
towards a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous man is next
door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he
who says very pious says a trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices
in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes' cloak. Whom do you admire, the
slain or the slayer, Cæsar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the
slayer. Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue,
granted, but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men.
The Brutus who killed Cæsar was in love with the statue of a little boy.
This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion,
who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg,
Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion
left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was
in love with the one, Nero with the other. All history is nothing but
wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The
battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and
the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water.
I don't attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to
conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If
you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what
wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys
success, even grammar. _Si volet usus_, says Horace. Therefore I disdain
the human race. Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me
to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be
Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion,
as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent that
Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: "His urine attracts the bees." The most
prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas,
who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load his shoes with
lead in order not to be blown away by the wind. There stood on the great
square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny;
this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented
a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass on to others. Shall I
admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris?
I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of
London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is
the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year of
hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion. I add,
as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of
roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England! If I do not admire
John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for
that slave-holding brother. Take away _Time is money_, what remains of
England? Take away _Cotton is king_, what remains of America? Germany
is the lymph, Italy is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia?
Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its
beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots.
Their health is delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter,
a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans
strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils
poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia
is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity. All civilized peoples offer
this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized
war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the
brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding
of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. 'Bah!' you will say to
me, 'but Europe is certainly better than Asia?' I admit that Asia is a
farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand
Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and
your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty
chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen
of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it! It is at Brussels that
the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the
most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at
Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are
all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short. In Paris,
even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a
rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the
Piræus. Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers are
called _bibines_; the most celebrated are the _Saucepan_ and _The
Slaughter-House_. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis,
mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers,
caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat
at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll
naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. Good
day."

Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching
at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of
the Café Musain.

Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him,
and Grantaire began again worse than ever:--

"Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with
your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-à-brac. I excuse
you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish
me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a
success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal. A
crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch,
_Femme_--woman--rhymes with _infâme_,--infamous. Yes, I have the spleen,
complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and
I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to
death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!"

"Silence then, capital R!" resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point
of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a
phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:--

"--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an
amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms
of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an
equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving
the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well
as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases,
freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--"

"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire.

Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand
and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville was
being sketched out.

This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads
at work touched each other: "Let us begin by finding names. When one has
the names, one finds the subject."

"That is true. Dictate. I will write."

"Monsieur Dorimon."

"An independent gentleman?"

"Of course."

"His daughter, Célestine."

"--tine. What next?"

"Colonel Sainval."

"Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin."

Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking
advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel. An old
fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen, and explaining
to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.

"The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play is
neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning, a
just parade, mathematical parries, _bigre!_ and he is left-handed."

In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes,
and talking of love.

"You are in luck, that you are," Joly was saying. "You have a mistress
who is always laughing."

"That is a fault of hers," returned Bahorel. "One's mistress does wrong
to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see her gay removes
your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience pricks you."

"Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you never
quarrel!"

"That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming our little
Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we never
cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on the
side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace."

"Peace is happiness digesting."

"And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with
Mamselle--you know whom I mean?"

"She sulks at me with cruel patience."

"Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness."

"Alas!"

"In your place, I would let her alone."

"That is easy enough to say."

"And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?"

"Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with
tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,
with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her."

"My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant,
and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of
double-milled cloth at Staub's. That will assist."

"At what price?" shouted Grantaire.

The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan
mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was
about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure
romanticism.

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,
a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both
laughing and lyric.

"Let us not insult the gods," said he. "The gods may not have taken
their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead. The gods are
dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the
flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.
Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the
Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has
not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into
the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with his
fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do with the
cascade of Pissevache."

In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had
been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding it
weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it. On the table
lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter. Courfeyrac had
seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the
rattling of this sheet of paper.

"In the first place, I won't have any kings; if it were only from an
economical point of view, I don't want any; a king is a parasite. One
does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At
the death of François I., the national debt of France amounted to an
income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two
milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which
was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five
hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.
In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is
but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften
the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly
from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional
fictions,--what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never
enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale
in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant
from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14.
By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches
back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie
lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a charter abdicates. The law is
only the law when entire. No! no charter!"

It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace. This
was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor
Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire. The paper
flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn
philosophically, and contented himself with saying:--

"The charter metamorphosed into flame."

And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called
_entrain_, and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad
taste, good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue,
mounting together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a
sort of merry bombardment over their heads.



CHAPTER V--ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON

The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable
property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the lightning
flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst of laughter
starts from a tender feeling.

At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on
the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices
to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with
abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the
stage-manager of such conversations.

A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly
traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire,
Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.

How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it
suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We
have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of the
uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to Combeferre,
with this date:--

"June 18th, 1815, Waterloo."

At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a table,
beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his chin, and
began to gaze fixedly at the audience.

"Pardieu!" exclaimed Courfeyrac ("Parbleu" was falling into disuse
at this period), "that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is
Bonaparte's fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you
have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,
that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement."

Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and
addressed this remark to Combeferre:--

"You mean to say, the crime and the expiation."

This word _crime_ overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was already
greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo, could accept.

He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall, and
at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment, laid his
finger on this compartment and said:--

"Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great."

This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt that
something was on the point of occurring.

Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude of the torso
to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.

Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed to be
gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:--

"France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is
France. _Quia nomina leo_."

Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his
voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver of his very
being:--

"God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon
with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question. I am
a new comer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me. Where do we
stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come to an explanation
about the Emperor. I hear you say _Buonaparte_, accenting the _u_ like
the Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does better still; he
says _Buonaparté_'. I thought you were young men. Where, then, is your
enthusiasm? And what are you doing with it? Whom do you admire, if you
do not admire the Emperor? And what more do you want? If you will
have none of that great man, what great men would you like? He had
everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the sum of human
faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Cæsar, his
conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the
thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins
are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of
Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids,
at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he
replied to Laplace, in the Council of State he held his own against
Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the
chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal
with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he
went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything;
he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing
good-naturedly beside the cradle of his little child; and all at once,
frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of
artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry
galloped in the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones in every
direction, the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound
of a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its sheath; they
beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing brand in his
hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder, his two wings,
the grand army and the old guard, and he was the archangel of war!"

All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always
produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being driven
to the wall. Marius continued with increased enthusiasm, and almost
without pausing for breath:--

"Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be
the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it
adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign,
to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to
take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of
dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make
you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the
sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Cæsar, Charlemagne;
to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling
announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to
rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words
which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! To cause
constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the
zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the
Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand
army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain
sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike
with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory,
to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer
the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what
greater thing is there?"

"To be free," said Combeferre.

Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple word had
traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it
vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer
there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had
just taken his departure, and all, with the exception of Enjolras,
had followed him. The room had been emptied. Enjolras, left alone with
Marius, was gazing gravely at him. Marius, however, having rallied his
ideas to some extent, did not consider himself beaten; there lingered in
him a trace of inward fermentation which was on the point, no doubt, of
translating itself into syllogisms arrayed against Enjolras, when all of
a sudden, they heard some one singing on the stairs as he went. It was
Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:--


              "Si César m'avait donné
                La gloire et la guerre,
              Et qu'il me fallait quitter
                L'amour de ma mère,
              Je dirais au grand César:
                Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,
              J'aime mieux ma mère, ô gué!
                J'aime mieux ma mère!"<a href="#linknote-25" name="linknoteref-25"
      id="linknoteref-25">25</a>


The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated to
this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully, and
with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My
mother?--"

At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic."



CHAPTER VI--RES ANGUSTA

That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow
in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel, at the moment
when it is torn open with the iron, in order that grain may be deposited
within it; it feels only the wound; the quiver of the germ and the joy
of the fruit only arrive later.

Marius was gloomy. He had but just acquired a faith; must he then reject
it already? He affirmed to himself that he would not. He declared to
himself that he would not doubt, and he began to doubt in spite of
himself. To stand between two religions, from one of which you have
not as yet emerged, and another into which you have not yet entered, is
intolerable; and twilight is pleasing only to bat-like souls. Marius
was clear-eyed, and he required the true light. The half-lights of doubt
pained him. Whatever may have been his desire to remain where he was,
he could not halt there, he was irresistibly constrained to continue, to
advance, to examine, to think, to march further. Whither would this lead
him? He feared, after having taken so many steps which had brought him
nearer to his father, to now take a step which should estrange him from
that father. His discomfort was augmented by all the reflections which
occurred to him. An escarpment rose around him. He was in accord neither
with his grandfather nor with his friends; daring in the eyes of
the one, he was behind the times in the eyes of the others, and he
recognized the fact that he was doubly isolated, on the side of age and
on the side of youth. He ceased to go to the Café Musain.

In the troubled state of his conscience, he no longer thought of
certain serious sides of existence. The realities of life do not allow
themselves to be forgotten. They soon elbowed him abruptly.

One morning, the proprietor of the hotel entered Marius' room and said
to him:--

"Monsieur Courfeyrac answered for you."

"Yes."

"But I must have my money."

"Request Courfeyrac to come and talk with me," said Marius.

Courfeyrac having made his appearance, the host left them. Marius then
told him what it had not before occurred to him to relate, that he was
the same as alone in the world, and had no relatives.

"What is to become of you?" said Courfeyrac.

"I do not know in the least," replied Marius.

"What are you going to do?"

"I do not know."

"Have you any money?"

"Fifteen francs."

"Do you want me to lend you some?"

"Never."

"Have you clothes?"

"Here is what I have."

"Have you trinkets?"

"A watch."

"Silver?"

"Gold; here it is."

"I know a clothes-dealer who will take your frock-coat and a pair of
trousers."

"That is good."

"You will then have only a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat and a
coat."

"And my boots."

"What! you will not go barefoot? What opulence!"

"That will be enough."

"I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch."

"That is good."

"No; it is not good. What will you do after that?"

"Whatever is necessary. Anything honest, that is to say."

"Do you know English?"

"No."

"Do you know German?"

"No."

"So much the worse."

"Why?"

"Because one of my friends, a publisher, is getting up a sort of an
encyclopædia, for which you might have translated English or German
articles. It is badly paid work, but one can live by it."

"I will learn English and German."

"And in the meanwhile?"

"In the meanwhile I will live on my clothes and my watch."

The clothes-dealer was sent for. He paid twenty francs for the cast-off
garments. They went to the watchmaker's. He bought the watch for
forty-five francs.

"That is not bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on their return to the
hotel, "with my fifteen francs, that makes eighty."

"And the hotel bill?" observed Courfeyrac.

"Hello, I had forgotten that," said Marius.

The landlord presented his bill, which had to be paid on the spot. It
amounted to seventy francs.

"I have ten francs left," said Marius.

"The deuce," exclaimed Courfeyrac, "you will eat up five francs while
you are learning English, and five while learning German. That will be
swallowing a tongue very fast, or a hundred sous very slowly."

In the meantime Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good-hearted person at
bottom in difficulties, had finally hunted up Marius' abode.

One morning, on his return from the law-school, Marius found a letter
from his aunt, and the _sixty pistoles_, that is to say, six hundred
francs in gold, in a sealed box.

Marius sent back the thirty louis to his aunt, with a respectful letter,
in which he stated that he had sufficient means of subsistence and that
he should be able thenceforth to supply all his needs. At that moment,
he had three francs left.

His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear of
exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: "Let me never hear the name
of that blood-drinker again!"

Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish to
run in debt there.



BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE



CHAPTER I--MARIUS INDIGENT

Enlarge


Life became hard for Marius. It was nothing to eat his clothes and his
watch. He ate of that terrible, inexpressible thing that is called
_de la vache enragé_; that is to say, he endured great hardships and
privations. A terrible thing it is, containing days without bread,
nights without sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a
fire, weeks without work, a future without hope, a coat out at the
elbows, an old hat which evokes the laughter of young girls, a door
which one finds locked on one at night because one's rent is not
paid, the insolence of the porter and the cook-shop man, the sneers of
neighbors, humiliations, dignity trampled on, work of whatever nature
accepted, disgusts, bitterness, despondency. Marius learned how all
this is eaten, and how such are often the only things which one has
to devour. At that moment of his existence when a man needs his pride,
because he needs love, he felt that he was jeered at because he was
badly dressed, and ridiculous because he was poor. At the age when youth
swells the heart with imperial pride, he dropped his eyes more than once
on his dilapidated boots, and he knew the unjust shame and the poignant
blushes of wretchedness. Admirable and terrible trial from which the
feeble emerge base, from which the strong emerge sublime. A crucible
into which destiny casts a man, whenever it desires a scoundrel or a
demi-god.

For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances
of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by
step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and
mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no
renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune,
isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have
their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the
heroes who win renown.

Firm and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a
step-mother, is sometimes a mother; destitution gives birth to might of
soul and spirit; distress is the nurse of pride; unhappiness is a good
milk for the magnanimous.

There came a moment in Marius' life, when he swept his own landing, when
he bought his sou's worth of Brie cheese at the fruiterer's, when he
waited until twilight had fallen to slip into the baker's and purchase
a loaf, which he carried off furtively to his attic as though he had
stolen it. Sometimes there could be seen gliding into the butcher's shop
on the corner, in the midst of the bantering cooks who elbowed him, an
awkward young man, carrying big books under his arm, who had a timid yet
angry air, who, on entering, removed his hat from a brow whereon stood
drops of perspiration, made a profound bow to the butcher's astonished
wife, asked for a mutton cutlet, paid six or seven sous for it, wrapped
it up in a paper, put it under his arm, between two books, and went
away. It was Marius. On this cutlet, which he cooked for himself, he
lived for three days.

On the first day he ate the meat, on the second he ate the fat, on the
third he gnawed the bone. Aunt Gillenormand made repeated attempts, and
sent him the sixty pistoles several times. Marius returned them on every
occasion, saying that he needed nothing.

He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution which we
have just described was effected within him. From that time forth, he
had not put off his black garments. But his garments were quitting him.
The day came when he had no longer a coat. The trousers would go next.
What was to be done? Courfeyrac, to whom he had, on his side, done some
good turns, gave him an old coat. For thirty sous, Marius got it turned
by some porter or other, and it was a new coat. But this coat was green.
Then Marius ceased to go out until after nightfall. This made his coat
black. As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself
with the night.

In spite of all this, he got admitted to practice as a lawyer. He was
supposed to live in Courfeyrac's room, which was decent, and where
a certain number of law-books backed up and completed by several
dilapidated volumes of romance, passed as the library required by the
regulations. He had his letters addressed to Courfeyrac's quarters.

When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of the fact
in a letter which was cold but full of submission and respect. M.
Gillenormand trembled as he took the letter, read it, tore it in four
pieces, and threw it into the waste-basket. Two or three days later,
Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father, who was alone in his room,
talking aloud to himself. He always did this whenever he was greatly
agitated. She listened, and the old man was saying: "If you were not a
fool, you would know that one cannot be a baron and a lawyer at the same
time."



CHAPTER II--MARIUS POOR

It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends by
becoming bearable. It finally assumes a form, and adjusts itself. One
vegetates, that is to say, one develops in a certain meagre fashion,
which is, however, sufficient for life. This is the mode in which the
existence of Marius Pontmercy was arranged:

He had passed the worst straits; the narrow pass was opening out a
little in front of him. By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and
will, he had managed to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a
year. He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had
put him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled
the modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing
house. He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated
editions, compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and year
out, seven hundred francs. He lived on it. How? Not so badly. We will
explain.

Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of thirty
francs, a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which contained only
the most indispensable articles of furniture. This furniture belonged to
him. He gave three francs a month to the old _principal tenant_ to come
and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water every morning,
a fresh egg, and a penny roll. He breakfasted on this egg and roll. His
breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous, according as eggs
were dear or cheap. At six o'clock in the evening he descended the
Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau's, opposite Basset's, the
stamp-dealer's, on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He ate no soup.
He took a six-sou plate of meat, a half-portion of vegetables for three
sous, and a three-sou dessert. For three sous he got as much bread as
he wished. As for wine, he drank water. When he paid at the desk
where Madam Rousseau, at that period still plump and rosy majestically
presided, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a
smile. Then he went away. For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.

This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water carafes
were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant. It no
longer exists. The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was called
_Rousseau the Aquatic_.

Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost him twenty
sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add
the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six francs to the old woman,
plus a few trifling expenses; for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius
was fed, lodged, and waited on. His clothing cost him a hundred francs,
his linen fifty francs, his washing fifty francs; the whole did not
exceed six hundred and fifty francs. He was rich. He sometimes lent ten
francs to a friend. Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs
of him. As far as fire was concerned, as Marius had no fireplace, he had
"simplified matters."

Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old, "for every
day"; the other, brand new for special occasions. Both were black. He
had but three shirts, one on his person, the second in the commode, and
the third in the washerwoman's hands. He renewed them as they wore out.
They were always ragged, which caused him to button his coat to the
chin.

It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing
condition. Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others to
climb. Marius had not failed for a single day. He had endured everything
in the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts.
He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed any one a sou.
A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery. He even said to himself,
that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only
your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to
it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had
passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that,
if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of
soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality
or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a
deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against
it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to rudeness.

During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even
uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.
The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it. It is the
only bird which bears up its own cage.

Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius' heart,
the name of Thénardier. Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature,
surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts,
he owed his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved the
colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo. He never
separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and
he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship in two
steps, with the grand altar for the colonel and the lesser one for
Thénardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude towards
Thénardier, was the idea of the distress into which he knew that
Thénardier had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter. Marius had
learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate
inn-keeper. Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts to find
traces of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in which
Thénardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country; he
had gone to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny. He had
persisted for three years, expending in these explorations the little
money which he had laid by. No one had been able to give him any news of
Thénardier: he was supposed to have gone abroad. His creditors had also
sought him, with less love than Marius, but with as much assiduity, and
had not been able to lay their hands on him. Marius blamed himself, and
was almost angry with himself for his lack of success in his researches.
It was the only debt left him by the colonel, and Marius made it a
matter of honor to pay it. "What," he thought, "when my father lay dying
on the field of battle, did Thénardier contrive to find him amid the
smoke and the grape-shot, and bear him off on his shoulders, and yet he
owed him nothing, and I, who owe so much to Thénardier, cannot join him
in this shadow where he is lying in the pangs of death, and in my
turn bring him back from death to life! Oh! I will find him!" To find
Thénardier, in fact, Marius would have given one of his arms, to rescue
him from his misery, he would have sacrificed all his blood. To see
Thénardier, to render Thénardier some service, to say to him: "You do
not know me; well, I do know you! Here I am. Dispose of me!" This was
Marius' sweetest and most magnificent dream.



CHAPTER III--MARIUS GROWN UP

At this epoch, Marius was twenty years of age. It was three years since
he had left his grandfather. Both parties had remained on the same
terms, without attempting to approach each other, and without seeking to
see each other. Besides, what was the use of seeing each other? Marius
was the brass vase, while Father Gillenormand was the iron pot.

We admit that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's heart. He had
imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and that that crusty,
harsh, and smiling old fellow who cursed, shouted, and stormed
and brandished his cane, cherished for him, at the most, only that
affection, which is at once slight and severe, of the dotards of comedy.
Marius was in error. There are fathers who do not love their children;
there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. At bottom,
as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him after
his own fashion, with an accompaniment of snappishness and boxes on the
ear; but, this child once gone, he felt a black void in his heart;
he would allow no one to mention the child to him, and all the while
secretly regretted that he was so well obeyed. At first, he hoped that
this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembrist, would
return. But the weeks passed by, years passed; to M. Gillenormand's
great despair, the "blood-drinker" did not make his appearance. "I could
not do otherwise than turn him out," said the grandfather to himself,
and he asked himself: "If the thing were to do over again, would I do
it?" His pride instantly answered "yes," but his aged head, which he
shook in silence, replied sadly "no." He had his hours of depression.
He missed Marius. Old men need affection as they need the sun. It is
warmth. Strong as his nature was, the absence of Marius had wrought some
change in him. Nothing in the world could have induced him to take a
step towards "that rogue"; but he suffered. He never inquired about him,
but he thought of him incessantly. He lived in the Marais in a more and
more retired manner; he was still merry and violent as of old, but
his merriment had a convulsive harshness, and his violences always
terminated in a sort of gentle and gloomy dejection. He sometimes said:
"Oh! if he only would return, what a good box on the ear I would give
him!"

As for his aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was no
longer for her much more than a vague black form; and she eventually
came to occupy herself with him much less than with the cat or the
paroquet which she probably had. What augmented Father Gillenormand's
secret suffering was, that he locked it all up within his breast, and
did not allow its existence to be divined. His sorrow was like those
recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It sometimes
happened that officious busybodies spoke to him of Marius, and asked
him: "What is your grandson doing?" "What has become of him?" The old
bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a
fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de
Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some corner or other."

While the old man regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the case
with all good-hearted people, misfortune had eradicated his bitterness.
He only thought of M. Gillenormand in an amiable light, but he had
set his mind on not receiving anything more from the man who _had been
unkind to his father_. This was the mitigated translation of his first
indignation. Moreover, he was happy at having suffered, and at suffering
still. It was for his father's sake. The hardness of his life satisfied
and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that-- _it was
certainly the least he could do_; that it was an expiation;--that, had
it not been for that, he would have been punished in some other way and
later on for his impious indifference towards his father, and such a
father! that it would not have been just that his father should have all
the suffering, and he none of it; and that, in any case, what were his
toils and his destitution compared with the colonel's heroic life? that,
in short, the only way for him to approach his father and resemble him,
was to be brave in the face of indigence, as the other had been valiant
before the enemy; and that that was, no doubt, what the colonel had
meant to imply by the words: "He will be worthy of it." Words which
Marius continued to wear, not on his breast, since the colonel's writing
had disappeared, but in his heart.

And then, on the day when his grandfather had turned him out of doors,
he had been only a child, now he was a man. He felt it. Misery, we
repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has
this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards
effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration. Poverty instantly lays
material life bare and renders it hideous; hence inexpressible bounds
towards the ideal life. The wealthy young man has a hundred coarse and
brilliant distractions, horse races, hunting, dogs, tobacco, gaming,
good repasts, and all the rest of it; occupations for the baser side
of the soul, at the expense of the loftier and more delicate sides.
The poor young man wins his bread with difficulty; he eats; when he has
eaten, he has nothing more but meditation. He goes to the spectacles
which God furnishes gratis; he gazes at the sky, space, the stars,
flowers, children, the humanity among which he is suffering, the
creation amid which he beams. He gazes so much on humanity that he
perceives its soul, he gazes upon creation to such an extent that he
beholds God. He dreams, he feels himself great; he dreams on, and feels
himself tender. From the egotism of the man who suffers he passes to the
compassion of the man who meditates. An admirable sentiment breaks forth
in him, forgetfulness of self and pity for all. As he thinks of the
innumerable enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and lavishes to souls
which stand open, and refuses to souls that are closed, he comes to
pity, he the millionnaire of the mind, the millionnaire of money. All
hatred departs from his heart, in proportion as light penetrates his
spirit. And is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never
miserable. The first young lad who comes to hand, however poor he may
be, with his strength, his health, his rapid walk, his brilliant eyes,
his warmly circulating blood, his black hair, his red lips, his white
teeth, his pure breath, will always arouse the envy of an aged emperor.
And then, every morning, he sets himself afresh to the task of earning
his bread; and while his hands earn his bread, his dorsal column
gains pride, his brain gathers ideas. His task finished, he returns to
ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys; he beholds his feet set
in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the nettles, sometimes
in the mire; his head in the light. He is firm, serene, gentle,
peaceful, attentive, serious, content with little, kindly; and he thanks
God for having bestowed on him those two forms of riches which many a
rich man lacks: work, which makes him free; and thought, which makes him
dignified.

This is what had happened with Marius. To tell the truth, he inclined a
little too much to the side of contemplation. From the day when he had
succeeded in earning his living with some approach to certainty, he had
stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time from his work
to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed entire days
in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute
voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded
the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material
labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is
impalpable; in other words, to bestow a few hours on real life, and to
cast the rest to the infinite. As he believed that he lacked nothing, he
did not perceive that contemplation, thus understood, ends by becoming
one of the forms of idleness; that he was contenting himself with
conquering the first necessities of life, and that he was resting from
his labors too soon.

It was evident that, for this energetic and enthusiastic nature, this
could only be a transitory state, and that, at the first shock against
the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would awaken.

In the meantime, although he was a lawyer, and whatever Father
Gillenormand thought about the matter, he was not practising, he was
not even pettifogging. Meditation had turned him aside from pleading. To
haunt attorneys, to follow the court, to hunt up cases--what a bore! Why
should he do it? He saw no reason for changing the manner of gaining his
livelihood! The obscure and ill-paid publishing establishment had come
to mean for him a sure source of work which did not involve too much
labor, as we have explained, and which sufficed for his wants.

One of the publishers for whom he worked, M. Magimel, I think, offered
to take him into his own house, to lodge him well, to furnish him with
regular occupation, and to give him fifteen hundred francs a year. To be
well lodged! Fifteen hundred francs! No doubt. But renounce his liberty!
Be on fixed wages! A sort of hired man of letters! According to Marius'
opinion, if he accepted, his position would become both better and worse
at the same time, he acquired comfort, and lost his dignity; it was a
fine and complete unhappiness converted into a repulsive and ridiculous
state of torture: something like the case of a blind man who should
recover the sight of one eye. He refused.

Marius dwelt in solitude. Owing to his taste for remaining outside of
everything, and through having been too much alarmed, he had not entered
decidedly into the group presided over by Enjolras. They had remained
good friends; they were ready to assist each other on occasion in every
possible way; but nothing more. Marius had two friends: one young,
Courfeyrac; and one old, M. Mabeuf. He inclined more to the old man.
In the first place, he owed to him the revolution which had taken
place within him; to him he was indebted for having known and loved his
father. "He operated on me for a cataract," he said.

The churchwarden had certainly played a decisive part.

It was not, however, that M. Mabeuf had been anything but the calm and
impassive agent of Providence in this connection. He had enlightened
Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle
which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.

As for Marius' inward political revolution, M. Mabeuf was totally
incapable of comprehending it, of willing or of directing it.

As we shall see M. Mabeuf again, later on, a few words will not be
superfluous.



CHAPTER IV--M. MABEUF

On the day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: "Certainly I approve of
political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind. All
political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he approved
them all, without distinction, provided they left him in peace, as the
Greeks called the Furies "the beautiful, the good, the charming," the
Eumenides. M. Mabeuf's political opinion consisted in a passionate love
for plants, and, above all, for books. Like all the rest of the world,
he possessed the termination in _ist_, without which no one could exist
at that time, but he was neither a Royalist, a Bonapartist, a Chartist,
an Orleanist, nor an Anarchist; he was a _bouquinist_, a collector of
old books. He did not understand how men could busy themselves with
hating each other because of silly stuff like the charter, democracy,
legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world
all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs which they might be looking at,
and heaps of folios, and even of 32mos, which they might turn over. He
took good care not to become useless; having books did not prevent his
reading, being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener. When
he made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed between the
colonel and himself--that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for
fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling pears as savory
as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one of his combinations,
apparently, that the October Mirabelle, now celebrated and no less
perfumed than the summer Mirabelle, owes its origin. He went to mass
rather from gentleness than from piety, and because, as he loved the
faces of men, but hated their noise, he found them assembled and silent
only in church. Feeling that he must be something in the State, he had
chosen the career of warden. However, he had never succeeded in loving
any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir.
He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one asked him: "Have you
never been married?" "I have forgotten," said he. When it sometimes
happened to him--and to whom does it not happen?--to say: "Oh! if I were
only rich!" it was not when ogling a pretty girl, as was the case with
Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating an old book. He lived alone
with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and when he was asleep,
his aged fingers, stiffened with rheumatism, lay crooked up in the folds
of his sheets. He had composed and published a _Flora of the Environs
of Cauteretz_, with colored plates, a work which enjoyed a tolerable
measure of esteem and which sold well. People rang his bell, in the Rue
Mésières, two or three times a day, to ask for it. He drew as much as
two thousand francs a year from it; this constituted nearly the whole of
his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to form for himself,
by dint of patience, privations, and time, a precious collection of rare
copies of every sort. He never went out without a book under his arm,
and he often returned with two. The sole decoration of the four rooms
on the ground floor, which composed his lodgings, consisted of framed
herbariums, and engravings of the old masters. The sight of a sword or
a gun chilled his blood. He had never approached a cannon in his life,
even at the Invalides. He had a passable stomach, a brother who was a
curé, perfectly white hair, no teeth, either in his mouth or his mind, a
trembling in every limb, a Picard accent, an infantile laugh, the air of
an old sheep, and he was easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no
other friendship, no other acquaintance among the living, than an old
bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to
naturalize indigo in France.

His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman was a
spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri's miserere in
the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the quantity
of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams had ever proceeded
as far as man. She had never been able to get further than her cat. Like
him, she had a mustache. Her glory consisted in her caps, which were
always white. She passed her time, on Sundays, after mass, in counting
over the linen in her chest, and in spreading out on her bed the dresses
in the piece which she bought and never had made up. She knew how to
read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.

M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and
gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined
with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without
wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder,
with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles
in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the
sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his hero
from the point of view of flowers.

His brother the curé died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when
the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf. A
notary's failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs, which
was all that he possessed in his brother's right and his own. The
Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of
embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a _Flora. The
Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz_ stopped short. Weeks passed by
without a single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at the sound
of the bell. "Monsieur," said Mother Plutarque sadly, "it is the
water-carrier." In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted the Rue Mésières,
abdicated the functions of warden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not a
part of his books, but of his prints,--that to which he was the
least attached,--and installed himself in a little house on the Rue
Montparnasse, where, however, he remained but one quarter for two
reasons: in the first place, the ground floor and the garden cost three
hundred francs, and he dared not spend more than two hundred francs on
his rent; in the second, being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could
hear the pistol-shots; which was intolerable to him.

He carried off his _Flora_, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his
portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the Salpêtrière,
in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of Austerlitz, where,
for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a garden enclosed by a
hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell
off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his entrance into his new
quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on which his engravings
and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands, dug in his garden the
rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that Mother Plutarque had a
melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder
and said to her with a smile: "We have the indigo!"

Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius,
were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a brawling
name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to him.

However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some
bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are
but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny
is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a
passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble
philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,
and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self. It always ends, it is
true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it
seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on
between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we look
on at the game with indifference.

It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his
hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather
puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular
swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very
long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not
stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.

M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive
and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother
Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was
reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus. To read aloud is
to assure one's self of what one is reading. There are people who read
very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their word
of honor as to what they are perusing.

It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading the
romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without listening to
her.

In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase. It
was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:--

"--The beauty pouted, and the dragoon--"

Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.

"Bouddha and the Dragon," struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. "Yes, it
is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave,
spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars
had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the claws
of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the
dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque.
There is no more beautiful legend in existence."

And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious revery.



CHAPTER V--POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY

Marius liked this candid old man who saw himself gradually falling into
the clutches of indigence, and who came to feel astonishment, little
by little, without, however, being made melancholy by it. Marius met
Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however; twice a month
at most.

Marius' pleasure consisted in taking long walks alone on the outer
boulevards, or in the Champs-de-Mars, or in the least frequented alleys
of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in gazing at a market
garden, the beds of lettuce, the chickens on the dung-heap, the horse
turning the water-wheel. The passers-by stared at him in surprise, and
some of them thought his attire suspicious and his mien sinister. He was
only a poor young man dreaming in an objectless way.

It was during one of his strolls that he had hit upon the Gorbeau house,
and, tempted by its isolation and its cheapness, had taken up his abode
there. He was known there only under the name of M. Marius.

Some of his father's old generals or old comrades had invited him to go
and see them, when they learned about him. Marius had not refused their
invitations. They afforded opportunities of talking about his father.
Thus he went from time to time, to Comte Pajol, to General Bellavesne,
to General Fririon, to the Invalides. There was music and dancing there.
On such evenings, Marius put on his new coat. But he never went to
these evening parties or balls except on days when it was freezing cold,
because he could not afford a carriage, and he did not wish to arrive
with boots otherwise than like mirrors.

He said sometimes, but without bitterness: "Men are so made that in a
drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes. In order
to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable thing is asked
of you; your conscience? No, your boots."

All passions except those of the heart are dissipated by revery. Marius'
political fevers vanished thus. The Revolution of 1830 assisted in the
process, by satisfying and calming him. He remained the same, setting
aside his fits of wrath. He still held the same opinions. Only, they had
been tempered. To speak accurately, he had no longer any opinions, he
had sympathies. To what party did he belong? To the party of humanity.
Out of humanity he chose France; out of the Nation he chose the people;
out of the people he chose the woman. It was to that point above all,
that his pity was directed. Now he preferred an idea to a deed, a
poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job more than an event like
Marengo. And then, when, after a day spent in meditation, he returned
in the evening through the boulevards, and caught a glimpse through
the branches of the trees of the fathomless space beyond, the nameless
gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery, all that which is only human
seemed very pretty indeed to him.

He thought that he had, and he really had, in fact, arrived at the truth
of life and of human philosophy, and he had ended by gazing at nothing
but heaven, the only thing which Truth can perceive from the bottom of
her well.

This did not prevent him from multiplying his plans, his combinations,
his scaffoldings, his projects for the future. In this state of revery,
an eye which could have cast a glance into Marius' interior would have
been dazzled with the purity of that soul. In fact, had it been given to
our eyes of the flesh to gaze into the consciences of others, we should
be able to judge a man much more surely according to what he dreams,
than according to what he thinks. There is will in thought, there is
none in dreams. Revery, which is utterly spontaneous, takes and keeps,
even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our spirit. Nothing
proceeds more directly and more sincerely from the very depth of our
soul, than our unpremeditated and boundless aspirations towards
the splendors of destiny. In these aspirations, much more than in
deliberate, rational co-ordinated ideas, is the real character of a man
to be found. Our chimæras are the things which the most resemble us.
Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance
with his nature.

Towards the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who waited on Marius
told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, had been
turned out of doors. Marius, who passed nearly the whole of his days out
of the house, hardly knew that he had any neighbors.

"Why are they turned out?" he asked.

"Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two quarters."

"How much is it?"

"Twenty francs," said the old woman.

Marius had thirty francs saved up in a drawer.

"Here," he said to the old woman, "take these twenty-five francs. Pay
for the poor people and give them five francs, and do not tell them that
it was I."



CHAPTER VI--THE SUBSTITUTE

It chanced that the regiment to which Lieutenant Théodule belonged came
to perform garrison duty in Paris. This inspired Aunt Gillenormand with
a second idea. She had, on the first occasion, hit upon the plan of
having Marius spied upon by Théodule; now she plotted to have Théodule
take Marius' place.

At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need of
a young face in the house,--these rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to
ruin,--it was expedient to find another Marius. "Take it as a simple
erratum," she thought, "such as one sees in books. For Marius, read
Théodule."

A grandnephew is almost the same as a grandson; in default of a lawyer
one takes a lancer.

One morning, when M. Gillenormand was about to read something in the
_Quotidienne_, his daughter entered and said to him in her sweetest
voice; for the question concerned her favorite:--

"Father, Théodule is coming to present his respects to you this
morning."

"Who's Théodule?"

"Your grandnephew."

"Ah!" said the grandfather.

Then he went back to his reading, thought no more of his grandnephew,
who was merely some Théodule or other, and soon flew into a rage, which
almost always happened when he read. The "sheet" which he held, although
Royalist, of course, announced for the following day, without any
softening phrases, one of these little events which were of daily
occurrence at that date in Paris: "That the students of the schools
of law and medicine were to assemble on the Place du Panthéon, at
midday,--to deliberate." The discussion concerned one of the questions
of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard, and a conflict
between the Minister of War and "the citizen's militia," on the subject
of the cannon parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were
to "deliberate" over this. It did not take much more than this to swell
M. Gillenormand's rage.

He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go with
the rest, to "deliberate, at midday, on the Place du Panthéon."

As he was indulging in this painful dream, Lieutenant Théodule entered
clad in plain clothes as a bourgeois, which was clever of him, and
was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The lancer had
reasoned as follows: "The old druid has not sunk all his money in a life
pension. It is well to disguise one's self as a civilian from time to
time."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father:--

"Théodule, your grandnephew."

And in a low voice to the lieutenant:--

"Approve of everything."

And she withdrew.

The lieutenant, who was but little accustomed to such venerable
encounters, stammered with some timidity: "Good day, uncle,"--and made
a salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical outline of the
military salute finished off as a bourgeois salute.

"Ah! so it's you; that is well, sit down," said the old gentleman.

That said, he totally forgot the lancer.

Théodule seated himself, and M. Gillenormand rose.

M. Gillenormand began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets,
talking aloud, and twitching, with his irritated old fingers, at the two
watches which he wore in his two fobs.

"That pack of brats! they convene on the Place du Panthéon! by my life!
urchins who were with their nurses but yesterday! If one were to squeeze
their noses, milk would burst out. And they deliberate to-morrow, at
midday. What are we coming to? What are we coming to? It is clear
that we are making for the abyss. That is what the _descamisados_ have
brought us to! To deliberate on the citizen artillery! To go and jabber
in the open air over the jibes of the National Guard! And with whom
are they to meet there? Just see whither Jacobinism leads. I will bet
anything you like, a million against a counter, that there will be
no one there but returned convicts and released galley-slaves. The
Republicans and the galley-slaves,--they form but one nose and one
handkerchief. Carnot used to say: 'Where would you have me go, traitor?'
Fouché replied: 'Wherever you please, imbecile!' That's what the
Republicans are like."

"That is true," said Théodule.

M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Théodule, and went on:--

"When one reflects that that scoundrel was so vile as to turn carbonaro!
Why did you leave my house? To go and become a Republican! Pssst! In
the first place, the people want none of your republic, they have common
sense, they know well that there always have been kings, and that there
always will be; they know well that the people are only the people,
after all, they make sport of it, of your republic--do you understand,
idiot? Is it not a horrible caprice? To fall in love with Père Duchesne,
to make sheep's-eyes at the guillotine, to sing romances, and play on
the guitar under the balcony of '93--it's enough to make one spit on all
these young fellows, such fools are they! They are all alike. Not one
escapes. It suffices for them to breathe the air which blows through the
street to lose their senses. The nineteenth century is poison. The
first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat's,
thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives. He's
a Republican, he's a romantic. What does that mean, romantic? Do me the
favor to tell me what it is. All possible follies. A year ago, they ran
to _Hernani_. Now, I just ask you, _Hernani!_ antitheses! abominations
which are not even written in French! And then, they have cannons in the
courtyard of the Louvre. Such are the rascalities of this age!"

"You are right, uncle," said Théodule.

M. Gillenormand resumed:--

"Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum! For what purpose? Do you want
to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere? What have those cartridges
to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! the young men of the present day are
all blackguards! What a pretty creature is their Benjamin Constant! And
those who are not rascals are simpletons! They do all they can to make
themselves ugly, they are badly dressed, they are afraid of women, in
the presence of petticoats they have a mendicant air which sets the
girls into fits of laughter; on my word of honor, one would say the poor
creatures were ashamed of love. They are deformed, and they complete
themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and
Potier, they have sack coats, stablemen's waistcoats, shirts of coarse
linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their
rigmarole resembles their plumage. One might make use of their jargon
to put new soles on their old shoes. And all this awkward batch of brats
has political opinions, if you please. Political opinions should be
strictly forbidden. They fabricate systems, they recast society, they
demolish the monarchy, they fling all laws to the earth, they put the
attic in the cellar's place and my porter in the place of the King, they
turn Europe topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love
affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses as
these women climb into their carts. Ah! Marius! Ah! you blackguard! to
go and vociferate on the public place! to discuss, to debate, to take
measures! They call that measures, just God! Disorder humbles itself
and becomes silly. I have seen chaos, I now see a mess. Students
deliberating on the National Guard,--such a thing could not be seen
among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches! Savages who go naked, with their
noddles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less
of brutes than those bachelors of arts! The four-penny monkeys! And they
set up for judges! Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate! The
end of the world is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable
terraqueous globe! A final hiccough was required, and France has emitted
it. Deliberate, my rascals! Such things will happen so long as they go
and read the newspapers under the arcades of the Odéon. That costs them
a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence, and their heart and
their soul, and their wits. They emerge thence, and decamp from their
families. All newspapers are pests; all, even the _Drapeau Blanc!_ At
bottom, Martainville was a Jacobin. Ah! just Heaven! you may boast of
having driven your grandfather to despair, that you may!"

"That is evident," said Théodule.

And profiting by the fact that M. Gillenormand was taking breath, the
lancer added in a magisterial manner:--

"There should be no other newspaper than the _Moniteur_, and no other
book than the _Annuaire Militaire_."

M. Gillenormand continued:--

"It is like their Sieyès! A regicide ending in a senator; for that is
the way they always end. They give themselves a scar with the address
of _thou_ as citizens, in order to get themselves called, eventually,
_Monsieur le Comte_. Monsieur le Comte as big as my arm, assassins of
September. The philosopher Sieyès! I will do myself the justice to say,
that I have never had any better opinion of the philosophies of all
those philosophers, than of the spectacles of the grimacer of Tivoli!
One day I saw the Senators cross the Quai Malplaquet in mantles of
violet velvet sown with bees, with hats à la Henri IV. They were
hideous. One would have pronounced them monkeys from the tiger's court.
Citizens, I declare to you, that your progress is madness, that your
humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic
is a monster, that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel,
and I maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists,
economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty, of
equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine! And that I
announce to you, my fine fellows!"

"Parbleu!" cried the lieutenant, "that is wonderfully true."

M. Gillenormand paused in a gesture which he had begun, wheeled round,
stared Lancer Théodule intently in the eyes, and said to him:--

"You are a fool."



BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS



CHAPTER I--THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES

Marius was, at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature,
with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow,
well-opened and passionate nostrils, an air of calmness and sincerity,
and with something indescribably proud, thoughtful, and innocent over
his whole countenance. His profile, all of whose lines were rounded,
without thereby losing their firmness, had a certain Germanic sweetness,
which has made its way into the French physiognomy by way of Alsace
and Lorraine, and that complete absence of angles which rendered
the Sicambres so easily recognizable among the Romans, and which
distinguishes the leonine from the aquiline race. He was at that period
of life when the mind of men who think is composed, in nearly equal
parts, of depth and ingenuousness. A grave situation being given, he
had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he
might be sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polished, not very
genial. As his mouth was charming, his lips the reddest, and his teeth
the whitest in the world, his smile corrected the severity of his face,
as a whole. At certain moments, that pure brow and that voluptuous smile
presented a singular contrast. His eyes were small, but his glance was
large.

At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that young
girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid, with death in
his soul. He thought that they were staring at him because of his old
clothes, and that they were laughing at them; the fact is, that they
stared at him because of his grace, and that they dreamed of him.

This mute misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by had
made him shy. He chose none of them for the excellent reason that
he fled from all of them. He lived thus indefinitely,--stupidly, as
Courfeyrac said.

Courfeyrac also said to him: "Do not aspire to be venerable" [they
called each other _thou_; it is the tendency of youthful friendships to
slip into this mode of address]. "Let me give you a piece of advice,
my dear fellow. Don't read so many books, and look a little more at the
lasses. The jades have some good points about them, O Marius! By dint of
fleeing and blushing, you will become brutalized."

On other occasions, Courfeyrac encountered him and said:--"Good morning,
Monsieur l'Abbé!"

When Courfeyrac had addressed to him some remark of this nature, Marius
avoided women, both young and old, more than ever for a week to come,
and he avoided Courfeyrac to boot.

Nevertheless, there existed in all the immensity of creation, two women
whom Marius did not flee, and to whom he paid no attention whatever. In
truth, he would have been very much amazed if he had been informed
that they were women. One was the bearded old woman who swept out his
chamber, and caused Courfeyrac to say: "Seeing that his servant woman
wears his beard, Marius does not wear his own beard." The other was a
sort of little girl whom he saw very often, and whom he never looked at.

For more than a year, Marius had noticed in one of the walks of the
Luxembourg, the one which skirts the parapet of the Pépinière, a man
and a very young girl, who were almost always seated side by side on the
same bench, at the most solitary end of the alley, on the Rue de l'Ouest
side. Every time that that chance which meddles with the strolls of
persons whose gaze is turned inwards, led Marius to that walk,--and it
was nearly every day,--he found this couple there. The man appeared to
be about sixty years of age; he seemed sad and serious; his whole person
presented the robust and weary aspect peculiar to military men who have
retired from the service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have
said: "He is an ex-officer." He had a kindly but unapproachable air,
and he never let his glance linger on the eyes of any one. He wore
blue trousers, a blue frock coat and a broad-brimmed hat, which always
appeared to be new, a black cravat, a quaker shirt, that is to say, it
was dazzlingly white, but of coarse linen. A grisette who passed near
him one day, said: "Here's a very tidy widower." His hair was very
white.

The first time that the young girl who accompanied him came and seated
herself on the bench which they seemed to have adopted, she was a sort
of child thirteen or fourteen years of age, so thin as to be almost
homely, awkward, insignificant, and with a possible promise of
handsome eyes. Only, they were always raised with a sort of displeasing
assurance. Her dress was both aged and childish, like the dress of the
scholars in a convent; it consisted of a badly cut gown of black merino.
They had the air of being father and daughter.

Marius scanned this old man, who was not yet aged, and this little
girl, who was not yet a person, for a few days, and thereafter paid no
attention to them. They, on their side, did not appear even to see him.
They conversed together with a peaceful and indifferent air. The girl
chattered incessantly and merrily. The old man talked but little, and,
at times, he fixed on her eyes overflowing with an ineffable paternity.

Marius had acquired the mechanical habit of strolling in that walk. He
invariably found them there.

This is the way things went:--

Marius liked to arrive by the end of the alley which was furthest from
their bench; he walked the whole length of the alley, passed in front
of them, then returned to the extremity whence he had come, and began
again. This he did five or six times in the course of his promenade,
and the promenade was taken five or six times a week, without its
having occurred to him or to these people to exchange a greeting. That
personage, and that young girl, although they appeared,--and perhaps
because they appeared,--to shun all glances, had, naturally, caused some
attention on the part of the five or six students who strolled along
the Pépinière from time to time; the studious after their lectures,
the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was among the
last, had observed them several times, but, finding the girl homely, he
had speedily and carefully kept out of the way. He had fled, discharging
at them a sobriquet, like a Parthian dart. Impressed solely with
the child's gown and the old man's hair, he had dubbed the daughter
Mademoiselle Lanoire, and the father, Monsieur Leblanc, so that as no
one knew them under any other title, this nickname became a law in the
default of any other name. The students said: "Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is
on his bench." And Marius, like the rest, had found it convenient to
call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc.

We shall follow their example, and we shall say M. Leblanc, in order to
facilitate this tale.

So Marius saw them nearly every day, at the same hour, during the first
year. He found the man to his taste, but the girl insipid.



CHAPTER II--LUX FACTA EST

During the second year, precisely at the point in this history which the
reader has now reached, it chanced that this habit of the Luxembourg was
interrupted, without Marius himself being quite aware why, and nearly
six months elapsed, during which he did not set foot in the alley. One
day, at last, he returned thither once more; it was a serene summer
morning, and Marius was in joyous mood, as one is when the weather is
fine. It seemed to him that he had in his heart all the songs of the
birds that he was listening to, and all the bits of blue sky of which he
caught glimpses through the leaves of the trees.

He went straight to "his alley," and when he reached the end of it he
perceived, still on the same bench, that well-known couple. Only, when
he approached, it certainly was the same man; but it seemed to him that
it was no longer the same girl. The person whom he now beheld was a tall
and beautiful creature, possessed of all the most charming lines of a
woman at the precise moment when they are still combined with all the
most ingenuous graces of the child; a pure and fugitive moment, which
can be expressed only by these two words,--"fifteen years." She had
wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads of gold, a brow that seemed
made of marble, cheeks that seemed made of rose-leaf, a pale flush,
an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence smiles darted like
sunbeams, and words like music, a head such as Raphael would have given
to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean Goujon would have attributed to a
Venus. And, in order that nothing might be lacking to this bewitching
face, her nose was not handsome--it was pretty; neither straight nor
curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is
to say, spiritual, delicate, irregular, pure,--which drives painters to
despair, and charms poets.

When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were
constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut lashes, permeated with
shadow and modesty.

This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling as she listened
to what the white-haired old man was saying to her, and nothing could
be more fascinating than that fresh smile, combined with those drooping
eyes.

For a moment, Marius thought that she was another daughter of the same
man, a sister of the former, no doubt. But when the invariable habit of
his stroll brought him, for the second time, near the bench, and he had
examined her attentively, he recognized her as the same. In six months
the little girl had become a young maiden; that was all. Nothing is more
frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls blossom out
in the twinkling of an eye, and become roses all at once. One left
them children but yesterday; today, one finds them disquieting to the
feelings.

This child had not only grown, she had become idealized. As three days
in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had
sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had arrived.

One sometimes sees people, who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass
suddenly from indigence to luxury, indulge in expenditures of all sorts,
and become dazzling, prodigal, magnificent, all of a sudden. That is
the result of having pocketed an income; a note fell due yesterday. The
young girl had received her quarterly income.

And then, she was no longer the school-girl with her felt hat, her
merino gown, her scholar's shoes, and red hands; taste had come to her
with beauty; she was a well-dressed person, clad with a sort of rich
and simple elegance, and without affectation. She wore a dress of black
damask, a cape of the same material, and a bonnet of white crape. Her
white gloves displayed the delicacy of the hand which toyed with the
carved, Chinese ivory handle of a parasol, and her silken shoe outlined
the smallness of her foot. When one passed near her, her whole toilette
exhaled a youthful and penetrating perfume.

As for the man, he was the same as usual.

The second time that Marius approached her, the young girl raised her
eyelids; her eyes were of a deep, celestial blue, but in that veiled
azure, there was, as yet, nothing but the glance of a child. She looked
at Marius indifferently, as she would have stared at the brat running
beneath the sycamores, or the marble vase which cast a shadow on the
bench, and Marius, on his side, continued his promenade, and thought
about something else.

He passed near the bench where the young girl sat, five or six times,
but without even turning his eyes in her direction.

On the following days, he returned, as was his wont, to the Luxembourg;
as usual, he found there "the father and daughter;" but he paid no
further attention to them. He thought no more about the girl now that
she was beautiful than he had when she was homely. He passed very near
the bench where she sat, because such was his habit.



CHAPTER III--EFFECT OF THE SPRING

One day, the air was warm, the Luxembourg was inundated with light
and shade, the sky was as pure as though the angels had washed it that
morning, the sparrows were giving vent to little twitters in the depths
of the chestnut-trees. Marius had thrown open his whole soul to nature,
he was not thinking of anything, he simply lived and breathed, he passed
near the bench, the young girl raised her eyes to him, the two glances
met.

What was there in the young girl's glance on this occasion? Marius could
not have told. There was nothing and there was everything. It was a
strange flash.

She dropped her eyes, and he pursued his way.

What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and simple eye of a
child; it was a mysterious gulf which had half opened, then abruptly
closed again.

There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him
who chances to be there!

That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is
like the dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant
and strange. Nothing can give any idea of the dangerous charm of that
unexpected gleam, which flashes suddenly and vaguely forth from adorable
shadows, and which is composed of all the innocence of the present, and
of all the passion of the future. It is a sort of undecided tenderness
which reveals itself by chance, and which waits. It is a snare which
the innocent maiden sets unknown to herself, and in which she captures
hearts without either wishing or knowing it. It is a virgin looking like
a woman.

It is rare that a profound revery does not spring from that glance,
where it falls. All purities and all candors meet in that celestial
and fatal gleam which, more than all the best-planned tender glances of
coquettes, possesses the magic power of causing the sudden blossoming,
in the depths of the soul, of that sombre flower, impregnated with
perfume and with poison, which is called love.

That evening, on his return to his garret, Marius cast his eyes over
his garments, and perceived, for the first time, that he had been so
slovenly, indecorous, and inconceivably stupid as to go for his walk in
the Luxembourg with his "every-day clothes," that is to say, with a
hat battered near the band, coarse carter's boots, black trousers
which showed white at the knees, and a black coat which was pale at the
elbows.



CHAPTER IV--BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY

On the following day, at the accustomed hour, Marius drew from his
wardrobe his new coat, his new trousers, his new hat, and his new
boots; he clothed himself in this complete panoply, put on his gloves, a
tremendous luxury, and set off for the Luxembourg.

On the way thither, he encountered Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see
him. Courfeyrac, on his return home, said to his friends:--

"I have just met Marius' new hat and new coat, with Marius inside
them. He was going to pass an examination, no doubt. He looked utterly
stupid."

On arriving at the Luxembourg, Marius made the tour of the fountain
basin, and stared at the swans; then he remained for a long time in
contemplation before a statue whose head was perfectly black with mould,
and one of whose hips was missing. Near the basin there was a bourgeois
forty years of age, with a prominent stomach, who was holding by the
hand a little urchin of five, and saying to him: "Shun excess, my son,
keep at an equal distance from despotism and from anarchy." Marius
listened to this bourgeois. Then he made the circuit of the basin once
more. At last he directed his course towards "his alley," slowly, and as
if with regret. One would have said that he was both forced to go there
and withheld from doing so. He did not perceive it himself, and thought
that he was doing as he always did.

On turning into the walk, he saw M. Leblanc and the young girl at the
other end, "on their bench." He buttoned his coat up to the very top,
pulled it down on his body so that there might be no wrinkles, examined,
with a certain complaisance, the lustrous gleams of his trousers, and
marched on the bench. This march savored of an attack, and certainly
of a desire for conquest. So I say that he marched on the bench, as I
should say: "Hannibal marched on Rome."

However, all his movements were purely mechanical, and he had
interrupted none of the habitual preoccupations of his mind and labors.
At that moment, he was thinking that the _Manuel du Baccalauréat_ was
a stupid book, and that it must have been drawn up by rare idiots, to
allow of three tragedies of Racine and only one comedy of Molière being
analyzed therein as masterpieces of the human mind. There was a piercing
whistling going on in his ears. As he approached the bench, he held
fast to the folds in his coat, and fixed his eyes on the young girl. It
seemed to him that she filled the entire extremity of the alley with a
vague blue light.

In proportion as he drew near, his pace slackened more and more. On
arriving at some little distance from the bench, and long before he had
reached the end of the walk, he halted, and could not explain to himself
why he retraced his steps. He did not even say to himself that he would
not go as far as the end. It was only with difficulty that the young
girl could have perceived him in the distance and noted his fine
appearance in his new clothes. Nevertheless, he held himself very erect,
in case any one should be looking at him from behind.

He attained the opposite end, then came back, and this time he
approached a little nearer to the bench. He even got to within three
intervals of trees, but there he felt an indescribable impossibility of
proceeding further, and he hesitated. He thought he saw the young girl's
face bending towards him. But he exerted a manly and violent effort,
subdued his hesitation, and walked straight ahead. A few seconds later,
he rushed in front of the bench, erect and firm, reddening to the very
ears, without daring to cast a glance either to the right or to the
left, with his hand thrust into his coat like a statesman. At the moment
when he passed,--under the cannon of the place,--he felt his heart beat
wildly. As on the preceding day, she wore her damask gown and her crape
bonnet. He heard an ineffable voice, which must have been "her voice."
She was talking tranquilly. She was very pretty. He felt it, although he
made no attempt to see her. "She could not, however," he thought, "help
feeling esteem and consideration for me, if she only knew that I am
the veritable author of the dissertation on Marcos Obrégon de la Ronde,
which M. François de Neufchâteau put, as though it were his own, at the
head of his edition of _Gil Blas_." He went beyond the bench as far as
the extremity of the walk, which was very near, then turned on his heel
and passed once more in front of the lovely girl. This time, he was very
pale. Moreover, all his emotions were disagreeable. As he went further
from the bench and the young girl, and while his back was turned to her,
he fancied that she was gazing after him, and that made him stumble.

He did not attempt to approach the bench again; he halted near the
middle of the walk, and there, a thing which he never did, he sat down,
and reflecting in the most profoundly indistinct depths of his spirit,
that after all, it was hard that persons whose white bonnet and black
gown he admired should be absolutely insensible to his splendid trousers
and his new coat.

At the expiration of a quarter of an hour, he rose, as though he were
on the point of again beginning his march towards that bench which was
surrounded by an aureole. But he remained standing there, motionless.
For the first time in fifteen months, he said to himself that that
gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter, had, on his side,
noticed him, and probably considered his assiduity singular.

For the first time, also, he was conscious of some irreverence in
designating that stranger, even in his secret thoughts, by the sobriquet
of M. Leblanc.

He stood thus for several minutes, with drooping head, tracing figures
in the sand, with the cane which he held in his hand.

Then he turned abruptly in the direction opposite to the bench, to M.
Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.

That day he forgot to dine. At eight o'clock in the evening he perceived
this fact, and as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint-Jacques,
he said: "Never mind!" and ate a bit of bread.

He did not go to bed until he had brushed his coat and folded it up with
great care.



CHAPTER V--DIVERS CLAPS OF THUNDER FALL ON MA'AM BOUGON

On the following day, Ma'am Bougon, as Courfeyrac styled the old
portress-principal-tenant, housekeeper of the Gorbeau hovel, Ma'am
Bougon, whose name was, in reality, Madame Burgon, as we have found
out, but this iconoclast, Courfeyrac, respected nothing,--Ma'am Bougon
observed, with stupefaction, that M. Marius was going out again in his
new coat.

He went to the Luxembourg again, but he did not proceed further than his
bench midway of the alley. He seated himself there, as on the preceding
day, surveying from a distance, and clearly making out, the white
bonnet, the black dress, and above all, that blue light. He did not stir
from it, and only went home when the gates of the Luxembourg closed. He
did not see M. Leblanc and his daughter retire. He concluded that they
had quitted the garden by the gate on the Rue de l'Ouest. Later on,
several weeks afterwards, when he came to think it over, he could never
recall where he had dined that evening.

On the following day, which was the third, Ma'am Bougon was
thunderstruck. Marius went out in his new coat. "Three days in
succession!" she exclaimed.

She tried to follow him, but Marius walked briskly, and with immense
strides; it was a hippopotamus undertaking the pursuit of a chamois.
She lost sight of him in two minutes, and returned breathless,
three-quarters choked with asthma, and furious. "If there is any sense,"
she growled, "in putting on one's best clothes every day, and making
people run like this!"

Marius betook himself to the Luxembourg.

The young girl was there with M. Leblanc. Marius approached as near as
he could, pretending to be busy reading a book, but he halted afar off,
then returned and seated himself on his bench, where he spent four hours
in watching the house-sparrows who were skipping about the walk, and who
produced on him the impression that they were making sport of him.

A fortnight passed thus. Marius went to the Luxembourg no longer for the
sake of strolling there, but to seat himself always in the same spot,
and that without knowing why. Once arrived there, he did not stir.
He put on his new coat every morning, for the purpose of not showing
himself, and he began all over again on the morrow.

She was decidedly a marvellous beauty. The only remark approaching a
criticism, that could be made, was, that the contradiction between
her gaze, which was melancholy, and her smile, which was merry, gave
a rather wild effect to her face, which sometimes caused this sweet
countenance to become strange without ceasing to be charming.



CHAPTER VI--TAKEN PRISONER

On one of the last days of the second week, Marius was seated on his
bench, as usual, holding in his hand an open book, of which he had not
turned a page for the last two hours. All at once he started. An event
was taking place at the other extremity of the walk. Leblanc and his
daughter had just left their seat, and the daughter had taken her
father's arm, and both were advancing slowly, towards the middle of the
alley where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then opened it again,
then forced himself to read; he trembled; the aureole was coming
straight towards him. "Ah! good Heavens!" thought he, "I shall not have
time to strike an attitude." Still the white-haired man and the girl
advanced. It seemed to him that this lasted for a century, and that it
was but a second. "What are they coming in this direction for?" he asked
himself. "What! She will pass here? Her feet will tread this sand, this
walk, two paces from me?" He was utterly upset, he would have liked to
be very handsome, he would have liked to own the cross. He heard the
soft and measured sound of their approaching footsteps. He imagined that
M. Leblanc was darting angry glances at him. "Is that gentleman going to
address me?" he thought to himself. He dropped his head; when he raised
it again, they were very near him. The young girl passed, and as she
passed, she glanced at him. She gazed steadily at him, with a pensive
sweetness which thrilled Marius from head to foot. It seemed to him
that she was reproaching him for having allowed so long a time to elapse
without coming as far as her, and that she was saying to him: "I am
coming myself." Marius was dazzled by those eyes fraught with rays and
abysses.

He felt his brain on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how
she had looked at him! She appeared to him more beautiful than he had
ever seen her yet. Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and
angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and
Dante kneel. It seemed to him that he was floating free in the azure
heavens. At the same time, he was horribly vexed because there was dust
on his boots.

He thought he felt sure that she had looked at his boots too.

He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared. Then he started
up and walked about the Luxembourg garden like a madman. It is possible
that, at times, he laughed to himself and talked aloud. He was so dreamy
when he came near the children's nurses, that each one of them thought
him in love with her.

He quitted the Luxembourg, hoping to find her again in the street.

He encountered Courfeyrac under the arcades of the Odéon, and said to
him: "Come and dine with me." They went off to Rousseau's and spent
six francs. Marius ate like an ogre. He gave the waiter six sous. At
dessert, he said to Courfeyrac. "Have you read the paper? What a fine
discourse Audry de Puyraveau delivered!"

He was desperately in love.

After dinner, he said to Courfeyrac: "I will treat you to the play."
They went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin to see Frédérick in _l'Auberge des
Adrets_. Marius was enormously amused.

At the same time, he had a redoubled attack of shyness. On emerging
from the theatre, he refused to look at the garter of a modiste who was
stepping across a gutter, and Courfeyrac, who said: "I should like to
put that woman in my collection," almost horrified him.

Courfeyrac invited him to breakfast at the Café Voltaire on the
following morning. Marius went thither, and ate even more than on the
preceding evening. He was very thoughtful and very merry. One would
have said that he was taking advantage of every occasion to laugh
uproariously. He tenderly embraced some man or other from the provinces,
who was presented to him. A circle of students formed round the table,
and they spoke of the nonsense paid for by the State which was uttered
from the rostrum in the Sorbonne, then the conversation fell upon the
faults and omissions in Guicherat's dictionaries and grammars. Marius
interrupted the discussion to exclaim: "But it is very agreeable, all
the same to have the cross!"

"That's queer!" whispered Courfeyrac to Jean Prouvaire.

"No," responded Prouvaire, "that's serious."

It was serious; in fact, Marius had reached that first violent and
charming hour with which grand passions begin.

A glance had wrought all this.

When the mine is charged, when the conflagration is ready, nothing is
more simple. A glance is a spark.

It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His fate was entering
the unknown.

The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are
tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every
day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A
moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come,
dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is
over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has
caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought
which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you.
You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious
forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human
succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from
agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune,
your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power
of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this
terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured
by passion.



CHAPTER VII--ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U DELIVERED OVER TO CONJECTURES

Isolation, detachment, from everything, pride, independence, the taste
of nature, the absence of daily and material activity, the life within
himself, the secret conflicts of chastity, a benevolent ecstasy towards
all creation, had prepared Marius for this possession which is called
passion. His worship of his father had gradually become a religion,
and, like all religions, it had retreated to the depths of his soul.
Something was required in the foreground. Love came.

A full month elapsed, during which Marius went every day to the
Luxembourg. When the hour arrived, nothing could hold him back.--"He
is on duty," said Courfeyrac. Marius lived in a state of delight. It is
certain that the young girl did look at him.

He had finally grown bold, and approached the bench. Still, he did not
pass in front of it any more, in obedience to the instinct of timidity
and to the instinct of prudence common to lovers. He considered it
better not to attract "the attention of the father." He combined his
stations behind the trees and the pedestals of the statues with a
profound diplomacy, so that he might be seen as much as possible by the
young girl and as little as possible by the old gentleman. Sometimes, he
remained motionless by the half-hour together in the shade of a Leonidas
or a Spartacus, holding in his hand a book, above which his eyes, gently
raised, sought the beautiful girl, and she, on her side, turned her
charming profile towards him with a vague smile. While conversing in the
most natural and tranquil manner in the world with the white-haired man,
she bent upon Marius all the reveries of a virginal and passionate eye.
Ancient and time-honored manouvre which Eve understood from the very
first day of the world, and which every woman understands from the very
first day of her life! her mouth replied to one, and her glance replied
to another.

It must be supposed, that M. Leblanc finally noticed something, for
often, when Marius arrived, he rose and began to walk about. He had
abandoned their accustomed place and had adopted the bench by the
Gladiator, near the other end of the walk, as though with the object
of seeing whether Marius would pursue them thither. Marius did not
understand, and committed this error. "The father" began to grow
inexact, and no longer brought "his daughter" every day. Sometimes, he
came alone. Then Marius did not stay. Another blunder.

Marius paid no heed to these symptoms. From the phase of timidity, he
had passed, by a natural and fatal progress, to the phase of blindness.
His love increased. He dreamed of it every night. And then, an
unexpected bliss had happened to him, oil on the fire, a redoubling of
the shadows over his eyes. One evening, at dusk, he had found, on
the bench which "M. Leblanc and his daughter" had just quitted, a
handkerchief, a very simple handkerchief, without embroidery, but white,
and fine, and which seemed to him to exhale ineffable perfume. He seized
it with rapture. This handkerchief was marked with the letters U. F.
Marius knew nothing about this beautiful child,--neither her family
name, her Christian name nor her abode; these two letters were the first
thing of her that he had gained possession of, adorable initials, upon
which he immediately began to construct his scaffolding. U was evidently
the Christian name. "Ursule!" he thought, "what a delicious name!" He
kissed the handkerchief, drank it in, placed it on his heart, on his
flesh, during the day, and at night, laid it beneath his lips that he
might fall asleep on it.

"I feel that her whole soul lies within it!" he exclaimed.

This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it
fall from his pocket.

In the days which followed the finding of this treasure, he only
displayed himself at the Luxembourg in the act of kissing the
handkerchief and laying it on his heart. The beautiful child understood
nothing of all this, and signified it to him by imperceptible signs.

"O modesty!" said Marius.



CHAPTER VIII--THE VETERANS THEMSELVES CAN BE HAPPY

Since we have pronounced the word modesty, and since we conceal nothing,
we ought to say that once, nevertheless, in spite of his ecstasies, "his
Ursule" caused him very serious grief. It was on one of the days when
she persuaded M. Leblanc to leave the bench and stroll along the walk.
A brisk May breeze was blowing, which swayed the crests of the
plaintain-trees. The father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed
Marius' bench. Marius had risen to his feet behind them, and was
following them with his eyes, as was fitting in the desperate situation
of his soul.

All at once, a gust of wind, more merry than the rest, and probably
charged with performing the affairs of Springtime, swept down from
the nursery, flung itself on the alley, enveloped the young girl in
a delicious shiver, worthy of Virgil's nymphs, and the fawns of
Theocritus, and lifted her dress, the robe more sacred than that of
Isis, almost to the height of her garter. A leg of exquisite shape
appeared. Marius saw it. He was exasperated and furious.

The young girl had hastily thrust down her dress, with a divinely
troubled motion, but he was none the less angry for all that. He was
alone in the alley, it is true. But there might have been some one
there. And what if there had been some one there! Can any one comprehend
such a thing? What she had just done is horrible!--Alas, the poor child
had done nothing; there had been but one culprit, the wind; but Marius,
in whom quivered the Bartholo who exists in Cherubin, was determined to
be vexed, and was jealous of his own shadow. It is thus, in fact, that
the harsh and capricious jealousy of the flesh awakens in the human
heart, and takes possession of it, even without any right. Moreover,
setting aside even that jealousy, the sight of that charming leg had
contained nothing agreeable for him; the white stocking of the first
woman he chanced to meet would have afforded him more pleasure.

When "his Ursule," after having reached the end of the walk, retraced
her steps with M. Leblanc, and passed in front of the bench on which
Marius had seated himself once more, Marius darted a sullen and
ferocious glance at her. The young girl gave way to that slight
straightening up with a backward movement, accompanied by a raising of
the eyelids, which signifies: "Well, what is the matter?"

This was "their first quarrel."

Marius had hardly made this scene at her with his eyes, when some one
crossed the walk. It was a veteran, very much bent, extremely wrinkled,
and pale, in a uniform of the Louis XV. pattern, bearing on his breast
the little oval plaque of red cloth, with the crossed swords, the
soldier's cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned, in addition, with a
coat-sleeve, which had no arm within it, with a silver chin and a wooden
leg. Marius thought he perceived that this man had an extremely well
satisfied air. It even struck him that the aged cynic, as he hobbled
along past him, addressed to him a very fraternal and very merry wink,
as though some chance had created an understanding between them, and as
though they had shared some piece of good luck together. What did that
relic of Mars mean by being so contented? What had passed between
that wooden leg and the other? Marius reached a paroxysm of
jealousy.--"Perhaps he was there!" he said to himself; "perhaps he
saw!"--And he felt a desire to exterminate the veteran.

With the aid of time, all points grow dull. Marius' wrath against
"Ursule," just and legitimate as it was, passed off. He finally pardoned
her; but this cost him a great effort; he sulked for three days.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this, and because of all this, his passion
augmented and grew to madness.



CHAPTER IX--ECLIPSE

The reader has just seen how Marius discovered, or thought that he
discovered, that _She_ was named Ursule.

Appetite grows with loving. To know that her name was Ursule was a great
deal; it was very little. In three or four weeks, Marius had devoured
this bliss. He wanted another. He wanted to know where she lived.

He had committed his first blunder, by falling into the ambush of the
bench by the Gladiator. He had committed a second, by not remaining at
the Luxembourg when M. Leblanc came thither alone. He now committed a
third, and an immense one. He followed "Ursule."

She lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, in the most unfrequented spot, in a
new, three-story house, of modest appearance.

From that moment forth, Marius added to his happiness of seeing her at
the Luxembourg the happiness of following her home.

His hunger was increasing. He knew her first name, at least, a charming
name, a genuine woman's name; he knew where she lived; he wanted to know
who she was.

One evening, after he had followed them to their dwelling, and had seen
them disappear through the carriage gate, he entered in their train and
said boldly to the porter:--

"Is that the gentleman who lives on the first floor, who has just come
in?"

"No," replied the porter. "He is the gentleman on the third floor."

Another step gained. This success emboldened Marius.

"On the front?" he asked.

"Parbleu!" said the porter, "the house is only built on the street."

"And what is that gentleman's business?" began Marius again.

"He is a gentleman of property, sir. A very kind man who does good to
the unfortunate, though not rich himself."

"What is his name?" resumed Marius.

The porter raised his head and said:--

"Are you a police spy, sir?"

Marius went off quite abashed, but delighted. He was getting on.

"Good," thought he, "I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the
daughter of a gentleman who lives on his income, and that she lives
there, on the third floor, in the Rue de l'Ouest."

On the following day, M. Leblanc and his daughter made only a very
brief stay in the Luxembourg; they went away while it was still broad
daylight. Marius followed them to the Rue de l'Ouest, as he had taken up
the habit of doing. On arriving at the carriage entrance M. Leblanc made
his daughter pass in first, then paused, before crossing the threshold,
and stared intently at Marius.

On the next day they did not come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited for
them all day in vain.

At nightfall, he went to the Rue de l'Ouest, and saw a light in the
windows of the third story.

He walked about beneath the windows until the light was extinguished.

The next day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then went
and did sentinel duty under their windows. This carried him on to ten
o'clock in the evening.

His dinner took care of itself. Fever nourishes the sick man, and love
the lover.

He spent a week in this manner. M. Leblanc no longer appeared at the
Luxembourg.

Marius indulged in melancholy conjectures; he dared not watch the porte
cochère during the day; he contented himself with going at night to gaze
upon the red light of the windows. At times he saw shadows flit across
them, and his heart began to beat.

On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows, there was no light
in them.

"Hello!" he said, "the lamp is not lighted yet. But it is dark. Can they
have gone out?" He waited until ten o'clock. Until midnight. Until one
in the morning. Not a light appeared in the windows of the third story,
and no one entered the house.

He went away in a very gloomy frame of mind.

On the morrow,--for he only existed from morrow to morrow, there was,
so to speak, no to-day for him,--on the morrow, he found no one at the
Luxembourg; he had expected this. At dusk, he went to the house.

No light in the windows; the shades were drawn; the third floor was
totally dark.

Marius rapped at the porte cochère, entered, and said to the porter:--

"The gentleman on the third floor?"

"Has moved away," replied the porter.

Marius reeled and said feebly:--

"How long ago?"

"Yesterday."

"Where is he living now?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"So he has not left his new address?"

"No."

And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.

"Come! So it's you!" said he; "but you are decidedly a spy then?"



BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE



CHAPTER I--MINES AND MINERS

Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, _a third
lower floor_. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes for
good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the other.
There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and a
bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath
civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under
foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was
almost open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive
Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion
under the Cæsars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the
sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow
that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night. The
catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar
of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.

Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure,
there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the
philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and
such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another
with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to
another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they
branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize
there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his
lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius
by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these
energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which
goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities,
and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the
bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this
digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There
are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works,
as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The
future.

The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work
is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to
recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down,
it becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer
penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man
has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.

The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of this
ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold, and
where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine, sometimes
misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is
Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there
is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre,
there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on. Lower
down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the
invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who perhaps do not exist as
yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms.
The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic
work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.

A world in limbo, in the state of fotus, what an unheard-of spectre!

Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.

Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always, think
themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary greatly, and
the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The first are
paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may be the
contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal,
from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this
is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They
throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not of
themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute. The
first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical though he
may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the infinite.
Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign--the starry eye.

The shadowy eye is the other sign.

With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one
who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.

There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light
becomes extinct.

Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these
galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of
progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than
Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection
with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot.
This is what we have designated as the _le troisième dessous_. It is the
grave of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. _Inferi_.

This communicates with the abyss.



CHAPTER II--THE LOWEST DEPTHS

There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each
one is for himself. The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and
gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf.

The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost
phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant
both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything
but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost
unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible
obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and
misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction,
appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not
after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger.
From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy
creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower
level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest
of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty--that
is the point of departure; to be Satan--that is the point reached. From
that vault Lacenaire emerges.

We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the
upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical
excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified,
honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of
veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there
effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress.

The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths,
hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point,
and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated,
the great cavern of evil.

This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without
exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut
a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the
inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this
stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to
Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of
everything.

Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates.
It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social
order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it
undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines
progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination.
It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance.

All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress it.
It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their
organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by
their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and
you destroy the lair Crime.

Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written.
The only social peril is darkness.

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no
difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow
in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But
ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable
blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there
converted into evil.



CHAPTER III--BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE

A quartette of ruffians, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse
governed the third lower floor of Paris, from 1830 to 1835.

Gueulemer was a Hercules of no defined position. For his lair he had the
sewer of the Arche-Marion. He was six feet high, his pectoral muscles
were of marble, his biceps of brass, his breath was that of a cavern,
his torso that of a colossus, his head that of a bird. One thought one
beheld the Farnese Hercules clad in duck trousers and a cotton velvet
waistcoat. Gueulemer, built after this sculptural fashion, might have
subdued monsters; he had found it more expeditious to be one. A low
brow, large temples, less than forty years of age, but with crow's-feet,
harsh, short hair, cheeks like a brush, a beard like that of a wild
boar; the reader can see the man before him. His muscles called for
work, his stupidity would have none of it. He was a great, idle force.
He was an assassin through coolness. He was thought to be a creole. He
had, probably, somewhat to do with Marshal Brune, having been a porter
at Avignon in 1815. After this stage, he had turned ruffian.

The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the grossness of Gueulemer.
Babet was thin and learned. He was transparent but impenetrable.
Daylight was visible through his bones, but nothing through his eyes. He
declared that he was a chemist. He had been a jack of all trades. He had
played in vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of purpose, a fine
talker, who underlined his smiles and accentuated his gestures. His
occupation consisted in selling, in the open air, plaster busts and
portraits of "the head of the State." In addition to this, he extracted
teeth. He had exhibited phenomena at fairs, and he had owned a booth
with a trumpet and this poster: "Babet, Dental Artist, Member of the
Academies, makes physical experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts
teeth, undertakes stumps abandoned by his brother practitioners. Price:
one tooth, one franc, fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three
teeth, two francs, fifty. Take advantage of this opportunity." This
_Take advantage of this opportunity_ meant: Have as many teeth extracted
as possible. He had been married and had had children. He did not know
what had become of his wife and children. He had lost them as one loses
his handkerchief. Babet read the papers, a striking exception in the
world to which he belonged. One day, at the period when he had his
family with him in his booth on wheels, he had read in the _Messager_,
that a woman had just given birth to a child, who was doing well, and
had a calf's muzzle, and he exclaimed: "There's a fortune! my wife has
not the wit to present me with a child like that!"

Later on he had abandoned everything, in order to "undertake Paris."
This was his expression.

Who was Claquesous? He was night. He waited until the sky was daubed
with black, before he showed himself. At nightfall he emerged from the
hole whither he returned before daylight. Where was this hole? No one
knew. He only addressed his accomplices in the most absolute darkness,
and with his back turned to them. Was his name Claquesous? Certainly
not. If a candle was brought, he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist.
Babet said: "Claquesous is a nocturne for two voices." Claquesous was
vague, terrible, and a roamer. No one was sure whether he had a name,
Claquesous being a sobriquet; none was sure that he had a voice, as his
stomach spoke more frequently than his voice; no one was sure that he
had a face, as he was never seen without his mask. He disappeared as
though he had vanished into thin air; when he appeared, it was as though
he sprang from the earth.

A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than
twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming
black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all
vices and aspired to all crimes.

The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the
street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was
genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of
his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft
of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence.
His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a
fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The
cause of all this youth's crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The
first grisette who had said to him: "You are handsome!" had cast the
stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel.
Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the
height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few
prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already
numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with
outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a
pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman,
the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the
boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon
in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the
sepulchre.



CHAPTER IV--COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE

These four ruffians formed a sort of Proteus, winding like a serpent
among the police, and striving to escape Vidocq's indiscreet glances
"under divers forms, tree, flame, fountain," lending each other their
names and their traps, hiding in their own shadows, boxes with
secret compartments and refuges for each other, stripping off their
personalities, as one removes his false nose at a masked ball, sometimes
simplifying matters to the point of consisting of but one individual,
sometimes multiplying themselves to such a point that Coco-Latour
himself took them for a whole throng.

These four men were not four men; they were a sort of mysterious robber
with four heads, operating on a grand scale on Paris; they were that
monstrous polyp of evil, which inhabits the crypt of society.

Thanks to their ramifications, and to the network underlying their
relations, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse were charged
with the general enterprise of the ambushes of the department of
the Seine. The inventors of ideas of that nature, men with nocturnal
imaginations, applied to them to have their ideas executed. They
furnished the canvas to the four rascals, and the latter undertook the
preparation of the scenery. They labored at the stage setting. They were
always in a condition to lend a force proportioned and suitable to
all crimes which demanded a lift of the shoulder, and which were
sufficiently lucrative. When a crime was in quest of arms, they
under-let their accomplices. They kept a troupe of actors of the shadows
at the disposition of all underground tragedies.

They were in the habit of assembling at nightfall, the hour when they
woke up, on the plains which adjoin the Salpêtrière. There they held
their conferences. They had twelve black hours before them; they
regulated their employment accordingly.

_Patron-Minette_,--such was the name which was bestowed in the
subterranean circulation on the association of these four men. In the
fantastic, ancient, popular parlance, which is vanishing day by day,
_Patron-Minette_ signifies the morning, the same as _entre chien et
loup_--between dog and wolf--signifies the evening. This appellation,
_Patron-Minette_, was probably derived from the hour at which their
work ended, the dawn being the vanishing moment for phantoms and for the
separation of ruffians. These four men were known under this title.
When the President of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in his prison, and
questioned him concerning a misdeed which Lacenaire denied, "Who did
it?" demanded the President. Lacenaire made this response, enigmatical
so far as the magistrate was concerned, but clear to the police:
"Perhaps it was Patron-Minette."

A piece can sometimes be divined on the enunciation of the personages;
in the same manner a band can almost be judged from the list of ruffians
composing it. Here are the appellations to which the principal members
of Patron-Minette answered,--for the names have survived in special
memoirs.

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.

Brujon. [There was a Brujon dynasty; we cannot refrain from
interpolating this word.]

Boulatruelle, the road-mender already introduced.

Laveuve.

Finistère.

Homère-Hogu, a negro.

Mardisoir. (Tuesday evening.)

Dépêche. (Make haste.)

Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetière (the Flower Girl).

Glorieux, a discharged convict.

Barrecarrosse (Stop-carriage), called Monsieur Dupont.

L'Esplanade-du-Sud.

Poussagrive.

Carmagnolet.

Kruideniers, called Bizarro.

Mangedentelle. (Lace-eater.)

Les-pieds-en-l'Air. (Feet in the air.)

Demi-Liard, called Deux-Milliards.

Etc., etc.

We pass over some, and not the worst of them. These names have faces
attached. They do not express merely beings, but species. Each one of
these names corresponds to a variety of those misshapen fungi from the
under side of civilization.

Those beings, who were not very lavish with their countenances, were not
among the men whom one sees passing along the streets. Fatigued by the
wild nights which they passed, they went off by day to sleep, sometimes
in the lime-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmatre or
Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. They ran to earth.

What became of these men? They still exist. They have always existed.
Horace speaks of them: _Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolæ, mendici,
mimæ_; and so long as society remains what it is, they will remain what
they are. Beneath the obscure roof of their cavern, they are continually
born again from the social ooze. They return, spectres, but always
identical; only, they no longer bear the same names and they are
no longer in the same skins. The individuals extirpated, the tribe
subsists.

They always have the same faculties. From the vagrant to the tramp, the
race is maintained in its purity. They divine purses in pockets, they
scent out watches in fobs. Gold and silver possess an odor for them.
There exist ingenuous bourgeois, of whom it might be said, that they
have a "stealable" air. These men patiently pursue these bourgeois. They
experience the quivers of a spider at the passage of a stranger or of a
man from the country.

These men are terrible, when one encounters them, or catches a glimpse
of them, towards midnight, on a deserted boulevard. They do not seem
to be men but forms composed of living mists; one would say that they
habitually constitute one mass with the shadows, that they are in
no wise distinct from them, that they possess no other soul than the
darkness, and that it is only momentarily and for the purpose of living
for a few minutes a monstrous life, that they have separated from the
night.

What is necessary to cause these spectres to vanish? Light. Light in
floods. Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up society from
below.



BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN



CHAPTER I--MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN IN
A CAP

Summer passed, then the autumn; winter came. Neither M. Leblanc nor the
young girl had again set foot in the Luxembourg garden. Thenceforth,
Marius had but one thought,--to gaze once more on that sweet and
adorable face. He sought constantly, he sought everywhere; he found
nothing. He was no longer Marius, the enthusiastic dreamer, the firm,
resolute, ardent man, the bold defier of fate, the brain which erected
future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans, with projects,
with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost dog. He fell into a
black melancholy. All was over. Work disgusted him, walking tired him.
Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms, lights, voices, counsels,
perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay empty before him. It seemed
to him that everything had disappeared.

He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer
took pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they proposed to him
in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: "What is the use?"

He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself. "Why did I follow her? I
was so happy at the mere sight of her! She looked at me; was not that
immense? She had the air of loving me. Was not that everything? I wished
to have, what? There was nothing after that. I have been absurd. It is
my own fault," etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing,--it
was his nature,--but who made some little guess at everything,--that was
his nature,--had begun by congratulating him on being in love, though he
was amazed at it; then, seeing Marius fall into this melancholy state,
he ended by saying to him: "I see that you have been simply an animal.
Here, come to the Chaumière."

Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed
himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and
Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps, find her there.
Of course he did not see the one he sought.--"But this is the place,
all the same, where all lost women are found," grumbled Grantaire in an
aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot,
alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and troubled eyes,
stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled with singing
creatures on their way home from the feast, which passed close to
him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in the acrid scent of the
walnut-trees, along the road, in order to refresh his head.

He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed, wholly given
up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain like the wolf in
the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere, stupefied by love.

On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on him a
singular effect. He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity of the
Boulevard des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman and wearing a
cap with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse of locks of very
white hair. Marius was struck with the beauty of this white hair, and
scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly and as though absorbed in
painful meditation. Strange to say, he thought that he recognized M.
Leblanc. The hair was the same, also the profile, so far as the cap
permitted a view of it, the mien identical, only more depressed. But why
these workingman's clothes? What was the meaning of this? What signified
that disguise? Marius was greatly astonished. When he recovered himself,
his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows whether he did not
hold at last the clue which he was seeking? In any case, he must see the
man near at hand, and clear up the mystery. But the idea occurred to him
too late, the man was no longer there. He had turned into some little
side street, and Marius could not find him. This encounter occupied
his mind for three days and then was effaced. "After all," he said to
himself, "it was probably only a resemblance."



CHAPTER II--TREASURE TROVE

Marius had not left the Gorbeau house. He paid no attention to any one
there.

At that epoch, to tell the truth, there were no other inhabitants in the
house, except himself and those Jondrettes whose rent he had once paid,
without, moreover, ever having spoken to either father, mother, or
daughters. The other lodgers had moved away or had died, or had been
turned out in default of payment.

One day during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the
afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient Candlemas
day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks' cold spell,
inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines, which have with justice
remained classic:--


           Qu'il luise ou qu'il luiserne,
           L'ours rentre dans en sa caverne.<a href="#linknote-26"
      name="linknoteref-26" id="linknoteref-26">26</a>

Marius had just emerged from his: night was falling. It was the hour for
his dinner; for he had been obliged to take to dining again, alas! oh,
infirmities of ideal passions!

He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma'am Bougon was sweeping at
the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:--

"What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing
in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for nothing,
the trouble of the world!"

Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order to
reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.

All at once, he felt some one elbow him in the dusk; he wheeled round,
and saw two young girls clad in rags, the one tall and slim, the other a
little shorter, who were passing rapidly, all out of breath, in terror,
and with the appearance of fleeing; they had been coming to meet him,
had not seen him, and had jostled him as they passed. Through the
twilight, Marius could distinguish their livid faces, their wild heads,
their dishevelled hair, their hideous bonnets, their ragged petticoats,
and their bare feet. They were talking as they ran. The taller said in a
very low voice:--

"The bobbies have come. They came near nabbing me at the half-circle."
The other answered: "I saw them. I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

Through this repulsive slang, Marius understood that gendarmes or the
police had come near apprehending these two children, and that the
latter had escaped.

They plunged among the trees of the boulevard behind him, and there
created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort of vague white spot,
then disappeared.

Marius had halted for a moment.

He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little grayish
package lying on the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. It
was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.

"Good," he said to himself, "those unhappy girls dropped it."

He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected
that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket, and
went off to dine.

On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child's coffin,
covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated by a
candle. The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.

"Poor mothers!" he thought. "There is one thing sadder than to see one's
children die; it is to see them leading an evil life."

Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished from his
thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual preoccupations.
He fell to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness
in the open air and the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of
Luxembourg.

"How gloomy my life has become!" he said to himself. "Young girls are
always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now they are
ghouls."



CHAPTER III--QUADRIFRONS

That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed, his hand
came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet which he
had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought that it
would be well to open it, and that this package might possibly contain
the address of the young girls, if it really belonged to them, and, in
any case, the information necessary to a restitution to the person who
had lost it.

He opened the envelope.

It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.

They bore addresses.

All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.

The first was addressed: _"To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,
the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.--"_

Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the
information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,
it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.

It was conceived as follows:--

Madame la Marquise: The virtue of clemency and piety is that which most
closely unites sosiety. Turn your Christian spirit and cast a look of
compassion on this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty and attachment
to the sacred cause of legitimacy, who has given with his blood,
consecrated his fortune, evverything, to defend that cause, and to-day
finds himself in the greatest missery. He doubts not that your honorable
person will grant succor to preserve an existence exteremely painful for
a military man of education and honor full of wounds, counts in advance
on the humanity which animates you and on the interest which Madame la
Marquise bears to a nation so unfortunate. Their prayer will not be in
vain, and their gratitude will preserve theirs charming souvenir.


My respectful sentiments, with which I have the honor to be                            Madame,
                                 Don Alvarès, Spanish Captain
                                 of Cavalry, a royalist who
                                 has take refuge in France,
                                 who finds himself on travells
                                 for his country, and the
                                 resources are lacking him to
                                 continue his travells.

No address was joined to the signature. Marius hoped to find the address
in the second letter, whose superscription read: _À Madame, Madame la
Comtesse de Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9_. This is what Marius read
in it:--


Madame la Comtesse: It is an unhappy mother of a family of six children the last of which is only eight months old.  I sick
 since my last confinement, abandoned by my husband five months ago,
 haveing no resources in the world the most frightful indigance.

In the hope of Madame la Comtesse, she has the honor to be, Madame, with profound respect,
                                        Mistress Balizard.

Marius turned to the third letter, which was a petition like the
preceding; he read:--


        Monsieur Pabourgeot, Elector, wholesale stocking merchant,
           Rue Saint-Denis on the corner of the Rue aux Fers.

I permit myself to address you this letter to beg you to grant me the pretious favor of your simpaties and to interest yourself in a man
 of letters who has just sent a drama to the Théâtre-Français. The subject
 is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne in the time
 of the Empire; the style, I think, is natural, laconic, and may have
 some merit.  There are couplets to be sung in four places.  The comic,
 the serious, the unexpected, are mingled in a variety of characters,
 and a tinge of romanticism lightly spread through all the intrigue
 which proceeds misteriously, and ends, after striking altarations,
 in the midst of many beautiful strokes of brilliant scenes.

My principal object is to satisfi the desire which progressively animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion,
 that capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes at almost
 every new wind.

In spite of these qualities I have reason to fear that jealousy, the egotism of priviliged authors, may obtaine my exclusion from
 the theatre, for I am not ignorant of the mortifications with which
 new-comers are treated.

Monsiuer Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened protector of men of litters emboldens me to send you my daughter who will
 explain our indigant situation to you, lacking bread and fire
 in this wynter season.  When I say to you that I beg you to accept
 the dedication of my drama which I desire to make to you and of all
 those that I shall make, is to prove to you how great is my ambition
 to have the honor of sheltering myself under your protection,
 and of adorning my writings with your name.  If you deign to honor
 me with the most modest offering, I shall immediately occupy myself
 in making a piesse of verse to pay you my tribute of gratitude.
 Which I shall endeavor to render this piesse as perfect as possible,
 will be sent to you before it is inserted at the beginning of the
 drama and delivered on the stage.
                             To Monsieur
                                and Madame Pabourgeot,
                                   My most respectful complements,
                                      Genflot, man of letters.
       P. S. Even if it is only forty sous.

Excuse me for sending my daughter and not presenting myself, but sad motives connected with the toilet do not permit me,
 alas! to go out.

Finally, Marius opened the fourth letter. The address ran: _To the
benevolent Gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-haut-Pas_. It
contained the following lines:--


Benevolent Man: If you deign to accompany my daughter, you will behold a misserable calamity, and I will show you my certificates.

At the aspect of these writings your generous soul will be moved with a sentiment of obvious benevolence, for true philosophers
 always feel lively emotions.

Admit, compassionate man, that it is necessary to suffer the most cruel need, and that it is very painful, for the sake of obtaining
 a little relief, to get oneself attested by the authorities as though
 one were not free to suffer and to die of inanition while waiting
 to have our misery relieved.  Destinies are very fatal for several
 and too prodigal or too protecting for others.

I await your presence or your offering, if you deign to make one, and I beseech you to accept the respectful sentiments with which I
 have the honor to be,
                       truly magnanimous man,
                         your very humble
                           and very obedient servant,
                                        P. Fabantou, dramatic artist.

After perusing these four letters, Marius did not find himself much
further advanced than before.

In the first place, not one of the signers gave his address.

Then, they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alveras,
Mistress Balizard, the poet Genflot, and dramatic artist Fabantou; but
the singular thing about these letters was, that all four were written
by the same hand.

What conclusion was to be drawn from this, except that they all come
from the same person?

Moreover, and this rendered the conjecture all the more probable, the
coarse and yellow paper was the same in all four, the odor of tobacco
was the same, and, although an attempt had been made to vary the
style, the same orthographical faults were reproduced with the greatest
tranquillity, and the man of letters Genflot was no more exempt from
them than the Spanish captain.

It was waste of trouble to try to solve this petty mystery. Had it not
been a chance find, it would have borne the air of a mystification.
Marius was too melancholy to take even a chance pleasantry well, and to
lend himself to a game which the pavement of the street seemed desirous
of playing with him. It seemed to him that he was playing the part of
the blind man in blind man's buff between the four letters, and that
they were making sport of him.

Nothing, however, indicated that these letters belonged to the two
young girls whom Marius had met on the boulevard. After all, they were
evidently papers of no value. Marius replaced them in their envelope,
flung the whole into a corner and went to bed. About seven o'clock in
the morning, he had just risen and breakfasted, and was trying to settle
down to work, when there came a soft knock at his door.

As he owned nothing, he never locked his door, unless occasionally,
though very rarely, when he was engaged in some pressing work. Even when
absent he left his key in the lock. "You will be robbed," said Ma'am
Bougon. "Of what?" said Marius. The truth is, however, that he had, one
day, been robbed of an old pair of boots, to the great triumph of Ma'am
Bougon.

There came a second knock, as gentle as the first.

"Come in," said Marius.

The door opened.

"What do you want, Ma'am Bougon?" asked Marius, without raising his eyes
from the books and manuscripts on his table.

A voice which did not belong to Ma'am Bougon replied:--

"Excuse me, sir--"

It was a dull, broken, hoarse, strangled voice, the voice of an old man,
roughened with brandy and liquor.

Marius turned round hastily, and beheld a young girl.



CHAPTER IV--A ROSE IN MISERY

Enlarge


A very young girl was standing in the half-open door. The dormer window
of the garret, through which the light fell, was precisely opposite
the door, and illuminated the figure with a wan light. She was a frail,
emaciated, slender creature; there was nothing but a chemise and a
petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. Her girdle was a
string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed shoulders emerged from her
chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, earth-colored collar-bones, red
hands, a half-open and degraded mouth, missing teeth, dull, bold, base
eyes; she had the form of a young girl who has missed her youth, and the
look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of
those beings which are both feeble and horrible, and which cause those
to shudder whom they do not cause to weep.

Marius had risen, and was staring in a sort of stupor at this being, who
was almost like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams.

The most heart-breaking thing of all was, that this young girl had not
come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even
have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the
hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of
beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight
which is extinguished under hideous clouds at dawn on a winter's day.

That face was not wholly unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered
having seen it somewhere.

"What do you wish, Mademoiselle?" he asked.

The young girl replied in her voice of a drunken convict:--

"Here is a letter for you, Monsieur Marius."

She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that he was the person
whom she wanted; but who was this girl? How did she know his name?

Without waiting for him to tell her to advance, she entered. She entered
resolutely, staring, with a sort of assurance that made the heart bleed,
at the whole room and the unmade bed. Her feet were bare. Large holes
in her petticoat permitted glimpses of her long legs and her thin knees.
She was shivering.

She held a letter in her hand, which she presented to Marius.

Marius, as he opened the letter, noticed that the enormous wafer which
sealed it was still moist. The message could not have come from a
distance. He read:--


My amiable neighbor, young man: I have learned of your goodness to me, that you paid my rent six months ago.  I bless you, young man.
 My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel
 of bread for two days, four persons and my spouse ill.  If I am
 not deseaved in my opinion, I think I may hope that your generous
 heart will melt at this statement and the desire will subjugate you
 to be propitious to me by daigning to lavish on me a slight favor.

I am with the distinguished consideration which is due to the benefactors of humanity,--

Jondrette.

P.S. My eldest daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.

This letter, coming in the very midst of the mysterious adventure which
had occupied Marius' thoughts ever since the preceding evening, was like
a candle in a cellar. All was suddenly illuminated.

This letter came from the same place as the other four. There was the
same writing, the same style, the same orthography, the same paper, the
same odor of tobacco.

There were five missives, five histories, five signatures, and a single
signer. The Spanish Captain Don Alvarès, the unhappy Mistress Balizard,
the dramatic poet Genflot, the old comedian Fabantou, were all four
named Jondrette, if, indeed, Jondrette himself were named Jondrette.

Marius had lived in the house for a tolerably long time, and he had had,
as we have said, but very rare occasion to see, to even catch a glimpse
of, his extremely mean neighbors. His mind was elsewhere, and where the
mind is, there the eyes are also. He had been obliged more than once to
pass the Jondrettes in the corridor or on the stairs; but they were mere
forms to him; he had paid so little heed to them, that, on the preceding
evening, he had jostled the Jondrette girls on the boulevard, without
recognizing them, for it had evidently been they, and it was with great
difficulty that the one who had just entered his room had awakened in
him, in spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met
her elsewhere.

Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his neighbor
Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry of speculating on the
charity of benevolent persons, that he procured addresses, and that he
wrote under feigned names to people whom he judged to be wealthy and
compassionate, letters which his daughters delivered at their risk
and peril, for this father had come to such a pass, that he risked his
daughters; he was playing a game with fate, and he used them as the
stake. Marius understood that probably, judging from their flight on the
evening before, from their breathless condition, from their terror
and from the words of slang which he had overheard, these unfortunate
creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and that the
result of the whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now
constituted, two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a
species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.

Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor
evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood,
have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor
responsibility. Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded
to-day, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled
with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them.
Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her, the
young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the audacity
of a spectre. She kicked about, without troubling herself as to her
nakedness. Occasionally her chemise, which was untied and torn, fell
almost to her waist. She moved the chairs about, she disarranged the
toilet articles which stood on the commode, she handled Marius' clothes,
she rummaged about to see what there was in the corners.

"Hullo!" said she, "you have a mirror!"

And she hummed scraps of vaudevilles, as though she had been alone,
frolicsome refrains which her hoarse and guttural voice rendered
lugubrious.

An indescribable constraint, weariness, and humiliation were perceptible
beneath this hardihood. Effrontery is a disgrace.

Nothing could be more melancholy than to see her sport about the room,
and, so to speak, flit with the movements of a bird which is frightened
by the daylight, or which has broken its wing. One felt that under other
conditions of education and destiny, the gay and over-free mien of this
young girl might have turned out sweet and charming. Never, even among
animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That
is only to be seen among men.

Marius reflected, and allowed her to have her way.

She approached the table.

"Ah!" said she, "books!"

A flash pierced her glassy eye. She resumed, and her accent expressed
the happiness which she felt in boasting of something, to which no human
creature is insensible:--

"I know how to read, I do!"

She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read with
tolerable fluency:--

"--General Bauduin received orders to take the château of Hougomont
which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five
battalions of his brigade."

She paused.

"Ah! Waterloo! I know about that. It was a battle long ago. My father
was there. My father has served in the armies. We are fine Bonapartists
in our house, that we are! Waterloo was against the English."

She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:--

"And I know how to write, too!"

She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:--

"Do you want to see? Look here, I'm going to write a word to show you."

And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper,
which lay in the middle of the table: "The bobbies are here."

Then throwing down the pen:--

"There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an
education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We
were not made--"

Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing,
saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish,
stifled by every form of cynicism:--

"Bah!"

And she began to hum these words to a gay air:--


      "J'ai faim, mon père."      I am hungry, father.
       Pas de fricot.             I have no food.
       J'ai froid, ma mère.       I am cold, mother.
       Pas de tricot.             I have no clothes.
       Grelotte,                  Lolotte!
            Lolotte!                   Shiver,
            Sanglote,                  Sob,
            Jacquot!"                  Jacquot!"

She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exclaimed:--

"Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little
brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me tickets
sometimes. But I don't like the benches in the galleries. One is cramped
and uncomfortable there. There are rough people there sometimes; and
people who smell bad."

Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:--

"Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?"

And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both, and made
her smile and him blush. She stepped up to him, and laid her hand on his
shoulder: "You pay no heed to me, but I know you, Mr. Marius. I meet you
here on the staircase, and then I often see you going to a person named
Father Mabeuf who lives in the direction of Austerlitz, sometimes when I
have been strolling in that quarter. It is very becoming to you to have
your hair tumbled thus."

She tried to render her voice soft, but only succeeded in making it very
deep. A portion of her words was lost in the transit from her larynx to
her lips, as though on a piano where some notes are missing.

Marius had retreated gently.

"Mademoiselle," said he, with his cool gravity, "I have here a package
which belongs to you, I think. Permit me to return it to you."

And he held out the envelope containing the four letters.

She clapped her hands and exclaimed:--

"We have been looking everywhere for that!"

Then she eagerly seized the package and opened the envelope, saying as
she did so:--

"Dieu de Dieu! how my sister and I have hunted! And it was you who found
it! On the boulevard, was it not? It must have been on the boulevard?
You see, we let it fall when we were running. It was that brat of a
sister of mine who was so stupid. When we got home, we could not find it
anywhere. As we did not wish to be beaten, as that is useless, as that
is entirely useless, as that is absolutely useless, we said that we had
carried the letters to the proper persons, and that they had said to us:
'Nix.' So here they are, those poor letters! And how did you find out
that they belonged to me? Ah! yes, the writing. So it was you that we
jostled as we passed last night. We couldn't see. I said to my sister:
'Is it a gentleman?' My sister said to me: 'I think it is a gentleman.'"

In the meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed to "the
benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas."

"Here!" said she, "this is for that old fellow who goes to mass. By the
way, this is his hour. I'll go and carry it to him. Perhaps he will give
us something to breakfast on."

Then she began to laugh again, and added:--

"Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean
that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our
breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day, and all that at once, and
this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs, burst!"

This reminded Marius of the wretched girl's errand to himself. He
fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and found nothing there.

The young girl went on, and seemed to have no consciousness of Marius'
presence.

"I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don't come home again. Last
winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges.
We huddled together to keep from freezing. My little sister cried. How
melancholy the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said
to myself: 'No, it's too cold.' I go out alone, whenever I choose, I
sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along
the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all black and
as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the river, I say
to myself: 'Why, there's water there!' The stars are like the lamps in
illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew
them out, I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in my ears;
although it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning-machines, and I
don't know what all. I think people are flinging stones at me, I flee
without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very
queer when you have had no food."

And then she stared at him with a bewildered air.

By dint of searching and ransacking his pockets, Marius had finally
collected five francs sixteen sous. This was all he owned in the world
for the moment. "At all events," he thought, "there is my dinner for
to-day, and to-morrow we will see." He kept the sixteen sous, and handed
the five francs to the young girl.

She seized the coin.

"Good!" said she, "the sun is shining!"

And, as though the sun had possessed the property of melting the
avalanches of slang in her brain, she went on:--

"Five francs! the shiner! a monarch! in this hole! Ain't this fine!
You're a jolly thief! I'm your humble servant! Bravo for the good
fellows! Two days' wine! and meat! and stew! we'll have a royal feast!
and a good fill!"

She pulled her chemise up on her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius,
then a familiar sign with her hand, and went towards the door, saying:--

"Good morning, sir. It's all right. I'll go and find my old man."

As she passed, she caught sight of a dry crust of bread on the commode,
which was moulding there amid the dust; she flung herself upon it and
bit into it, muttering:--

"That's good! it's hard! it breaks my teeth!"

Then she departed.



CHAPTER V--A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE

Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in
distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True
misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just
passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of
man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who
has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the
misery of the child.

When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last
resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround
him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him
simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral
light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the
woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.

Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile
partitions which all open on either vice or crime.

Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the
heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated
in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which
encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers,
mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere
and become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that dusky
promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies, and innocences.
They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. They exchange
woe-begone glances. Oh, the unfortunate wretches! How pale they are! How
cold they are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet much further
from the sun than ours.

This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad
shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.

Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of revery and
passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbors up
to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement,
which any one would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done
better than that. What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned
beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of
the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the
last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or
rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to
them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side
of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even
lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen
to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible
radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human
creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people,
were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their
misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor
who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable
man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of
distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold
of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no
doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming
degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and
the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,
_the miserable_; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be
all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?

While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions on
which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue and
scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall which
separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his
gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched
people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and beams,
and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the sound of voices and
words to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as Marius could
have failed to perceive this long before. There was no paper pasted on
the wall, either on the side of the Jondrettes or on that of Marius; the
coarse construction was visible in its nakedness. Marius examined the
partition, almost unconsciously; sometimes revery examines, observes,
and scrutinizes as thought would. All at once he sprang up; he had just
perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a triangular hole, which
resulted from the space between three lathes. The plaster which should
have filled this cavity was missing, and by mounting on the commode,
a view could be had through this aperture into the Jondrettes' attic.
Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity. This aperture formed
a sort of peep-hole. It is permissible to gaze at misfortune like a
traitor in order to succor it.27

"Let us get some little idea of what these people are like," thought
Marius, "and in what condition they are."

He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.



CHAPTER VI--THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR

Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most wicked
and formidable creatures which they contain conceal themselves. Only,
in cities, that which thus conceals itself is ferocious, unclean, and
petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests, that which conceals itself is
ferocious, savage, and grand, that is to say, beautiful. Taking one lair
with another, the beast's is preferable to the man's. Caverns are better
than hovels.

What Marius now beheld was a hovel.

Marius was poor, and his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his
poverty was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now
rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid. The only
furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits of
crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets; all
the light was furnished by a dormer window of four panes, draped with
spiders' webs. Through this aperture there penetrated just enough light
to make the face of a man appear like the face of a phantom. The walls
had a leprous aspect, and were covered with seams and scars, like a
visage disfigured by some horrible malady; a repulsive moisture exuded
from them. Obscene sketches roughly sketched with charcoal could be
distinguished upon them.

The chamber which Marius occupied had a dilapidated brick pavement; this
one was neither tiled nor planked; its inhabitants stepped directly
on the antique plaster of the hovel, which had grown black under the
long-continued pressure of feet. Upon this uneven floor, where the dirt
seemed to be fairly incrusted, and which possessed but one virginity,
that of the broom, were capriciously grouped constellations of old
shoes, socks, and repulsive rags; however, this room had a fireplace,
so it was let for forty francs a year. There was every sort of thing
in that fireplace, a brazier, a pot, broken boards, rags suspended
from nails, a bird-cage, ashes, and even a little fire. Two brands were
smouldering there in a melancholy way.

One thing which added still more to the horrors of this garret was, that
it was large. It had projections and angles and black holes, the lower
sides of roofs, bays, and promontories. Hence horrible, unfathomable
nooks where it seemed as though spiders as big as one's fist, wood-lice
as large as one's foot, and perhaps even--who knows?--some monstrous
human beings, must be hiding.

One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. One
end of each touched the fireplace and faced Marius. In a corner near the
aperture through which Marius was gazing, a colored engraving in a black
frame was suspended to a nail on the wall, and at its bottom, in large
letters, was the inscription: THE DREAM. This represented a sleeping
woman, and a child, also asleep, the child on the woman's lap, an eagle
in a cloud, with a crown in his beak, and the woman thrusting the
crown away from the child's head, without awaking the latter; in the
background, Napoleon in a glory, leaning on a very blue column with a
yellow capital ornamented with this inscription:


                            MARINGO
                           AUSTERLITS
                              IENA
                            WAGRAMME
                              ELOT

Beneath this frame, a sort of wooden panel, which was no longer than it
was broad, stood on the ground and rested in a sloping attitude against
the wall. It had the appearance of a picture with its face turned to
the wall, of a frame probably showing a daub on the other side, of some
pier-glass detached from a wall and lying forgotten there while waiting
to be rehung.

Near the table, upon which Marius descried a pen, ink, and paper, sat
a man about sixty years of age, small, thin, livid, haggard, with a
cunning, cruel, and uneasy air; a hideous scoundrel.

If Lavater had studied this visage, he would have found the vulture
mingled with the attorney there, the bird of prey and the pettifogger
rendering each other mutually hideous and complementing each other; the
pettifogger making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey making the
pettifogger horrible.

This man had a long gray beard. He was clad in a woman's chemise, which
allowed his hairy breast and his bare arms, bristling with gray hair,
to be seen. Beneath this chemise, muddy trousers and boots through which
his toes projected were visible.

He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking. There was no bread in the
hovel, but there was still tobacco.

He was writing probably some more letters like those which Marius had
read.

On the corner of the table lay an ancient, dilapidated, reddish volume,
and the size, which was the antique 12mo of reading-rooms, betrayed a
romance. On the cover sprawled the following title, printed in large
capitals: GOD; THE KING; HONOR AND THE LADIES; BY DUCRAY DUMINIL, 1814.

As the man wrote, he talked aloud, and Marius heard his words:--

"The idea that there is no equality, even when you are dead! Just look
at Pere Lachaise! The great, those who are rich, are up above, in the
acacia alley, which is paved. They can reach it in a carriage. The
little people, the poor, the unhappy, well, what of them? they are put
down below, where the mud is up to your knees, in the damp places. They
are put there so that they will decay the sooner! You cannot go to see
them without sinking into the earth."

He paused, smote the table with his fist, and added, as he ground his
teeth:--

"Oh! I could eat the whole world!"

A big woman, who might be forty years of age, or a hundred, was
crouching near the fireplace on her bare heels.

She, too, was clad only in a chemise and a knitted petticoat patched
with bits of old cloth. A coarse linen apron concealed the half of her
petticoat. Although this woman was doubled up and bent together, it
could be seen that she was of very lofty stature. She was a sort of
giant, beside her husband. She had hideous hair, of a reddish blond
which was turning gray, and which she thrust back from time to time,
with her enormous shining hands, with their flat nails.

Beside her, on the floor, wide open, lay a book of the same form as the
other, and probably a volume of the same romance.

On one of the pallets, Marius caught a glimpse of a sort of tall pale
young girl, who sat there half naked and with pendant feet, and who did
not seem to be listening or seeing or living.

No doubt the younger sister of the one who had come to his room.

She seemed to be eleven or twelve years of age. On closer scrutiny it
was evident that she really was fourteen. She was the child who had
said, on the boulevard the evening before: "I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

She was of that puny sort which remains backward for a long time,
then suddenly starts up rapidly. It is indigence which produces these
melancholy human plants. These creatures have neither childhood nor
youth. At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve, at sixteen they
seem twenty. To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. One might say
that they stride through life, in order to get through with it the more
speedily.

At this moment, this being had the air of a child.

Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft,
no spinning-wheel, not a tool. In one corner lay some ironmongery of
dubious aspect. It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and
precedes the death agony.

Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than
the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering
there, and life was palpitating there. The garret, the cellar, the lowly
ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at the very bottom of the
social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre, but only its antechamber;
but, as the wealthy display their greatest magnificence at the entrance
of their palaces, it seems that death, which stands directly side by
side with them, places its greatest miseries in that vestibule.

The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did
not even seem to breathe. The scratching of the pen on the paper was
audible.

The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing. "Canaille! canaille!
everybody is canaille!"

This variation to Solomon's exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.

"Calm yourself, my little friend," she said. "Don't hurt yourself, my
dear. You are too good to write to all those people, husband."

Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw
apart. This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging
from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and
reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the
whole group, this had become extinct. There no longer existed in her
anything more than the ashes of affection for her husband. Nevertheless,
caressing appellations had survived, as is often the case. She called
him: _My dear, my little friend, my good man_, etc., with her mouth
while her heart was silent.

The man resumed his writing.



CHAPTER VII--STRATEGY AND TACTICS

Marius, with a load upon his breast, was on the point of descending
from the species of observatory which he had improvised, when a sound
attracted his attention and caused him to remain at his post.

The door of the attic had just burst open abruptly. The eldest girl made
her appearance on the threshold. On her feet, she had large, coarse,
men's shoes, bespattered with mud, which had splashed even to her red
ankles, and she was wrapped in an old mantle which hung in tatters.
Marius had not seen it on her an hour previously, but she had probably
deposited it at his door, in order that she might inspire the more pity,
and had picked it up again on emerging. She entered, pushed the door to
behind her, paused to take breath, for she was completely breathless,
then exclaimed with an expression of triumph and joy:--

"He is coming!"

The father turned his eyes towards her, the woman turned her head, the
little sister did not stir.

"Who?" demanded her father.

"The gentleman!"

"The philanthropist?"

"Yes."

"From the church of Saint-Jacques?"

"Yes."

"That old fellow?"

"Yes."

"And he is coming?"

"He is following me."

"You are sure?"

"I am sure."

"There, truly, he is coming?"

"He is coming in a fiacre."

"In a fiacre. He is Rothschild."

The father rose.

"How are you sure? If he is coming in a fiacre, how is it that you
arrive before him? You gave him our address at least? Did you tell him
that it was the last door at the end of the corridor, on the right? If
he only does not make a mistake! So you found him at the church? Did he
read my letter? What did he say to you?"

"Ta, ta, ta," said the girl, "how you do gallop on, my good man! See
here: I entered the church, he was in his usual place, I made him a
reverence, and I handed him the letter; he read it and said to me:
'Where do you live, my child?' I said: 'Monsieur, I will show you.' He
said to me: 'No, give me your address, my daughter has some purchases to
make, I will take a carriage and reach your house at the same time that
you do.' I gave him the address. When I mentioned the house, he seemed
surprised and hesitated for an instant, then he said: 'Never mind, I
will come.' When the mass was finished, I watched him leave the church
with his daughter, and I saw them enter a carriage. I certainly did tell
him the last door in the corridor, on the right."

"And what makes you think that he will come?"

"I have just seen the fiacre turn into the Rue Petit-Banquier. That is
what made me run so."

"How do you know that it was the same fiacre?"

"Because I took notice of the number, so there!"

"What was the number?"

"440."

"Good, you are a clever girl."

The girl stared boldly at her father, and showing the shoes which she
had on her feet:--

"A clever girl, possibly; but I tell you I won't put these shoes on
again, and that I won't, for the sake of my health, in the first place,
and for the sake of cleanliness, in the next. I don't know anything more
irritating than shoes that squelch, and go _ghi, ghi, ghi,_ the whole
time. I prefer to go barefoot."

"You are right," said her father, in a sweet tone which contrasted with
the young girl's rudeness, "but then, you will not be allowed to enter
churches, for poor people must have shoes to do that. One cannot go
barefoot to the good God," he added bitterly.

Then, returning to the subject which absorbed him:--

"So you are sure that he will come?"

"He is following on my heels," said she.

The man started up. A sort of illumination appeared on his countenance.

"Wife!" he exclaimed, "you hear. Here is the philanthropist. Extinguish
the fire."

The stupefied mother did not stir.

The father, with the agility of an acrobat, seized a broken-nosed jug
which stood on the chimney, and flung the water on the brands.

Then, addressing his eldest daughter:--

"Here you! Pull the straw off that chair!"

His daughter did not understand.

He seized the chair, and with one kick he rendered it seatless. His leg
passed through it.

As he withdrew his leg, he asked his daughter:--

"Is it cold?"

"Very cold. It is snowing."

The father turned towards the younger girl who sat on the bed near the
window, and shouted to her in a thundering voice:--

"Quick! get off that bed, you lazy thing! will you never do anything?
Break a pane of glass!"

The little girl jumped off the bed with a shiver.

"Break a pane!" he repeated.

The child stood still in bewilderment.

"Do you hear me?" repeated her father, "I tell you to break a pane!"

The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, rose on tiptoe, and
struck a pane with her fist. The glass broke and fell with a loud
clatter.

"Good," said the father.

He was grave and abrupt. His glance swept rapidly over all the crannies
of the garret. One would have said that he was a general making the
final preparation at the moment when the battle is on the point of
beginning.

The mother, who had not said a word so far, now rose and demanded in
a dull, slow, languid voice, whence her words seemed to emerge in a
congealed state:--

"What do you mean to do, my dear?"

"Get into bed," replied the man.

His intonation admitted of no deliberation. The mother obeyed, and threw
herself heavily on one of the pallets.

In the meantime, a sob became audible in one corner.

"What's that?" cried the father.

The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting the
corner in which she was cowering. She had wounded herself while breaking
the window; she went off, near her mother's pallet and wept silently.

It was now the mother's turn to start up and exclaim:--

"Just see there! What follies you commit! She has cut herself breaking
that pane for you!"

"So much the better!" said the man. "I foresaw that."

"What? So much the better?" retorted his wife.

"Peace!" replied the father, "I suppress the liberty of the press."

Then tearing the woman's chemise which he was wearing, he made a strip
of cloth with which he hastily swathed the little girl's bleeding wrist.

That done, his eye fell with a satisfied expression on his torn chemise.

"And the chemise too," said he, "this has a good appearance."

An icy breeze whistled through the window and entered the room. The
outer mist penetrated thither and diffused itself like a whitish sheet
of wadding vaguely spread by invisible fingers. Through the broken pane
the snow could be seen falling. The snow promised by the Candlemas sun
of the preceding day had actually come.

The father cast a glance about him as though to make sure that he had
forgotten nothing. He seized an old shovel and spread ashes over the wet
brands in such a manner as to entirely conceal them.

Then drawing himself up and leaning against the chimney-piece:--

"Now," said he, "we can receive the philanthropist."



CHAPTER VIII--THE RAY OF LIGHT IN THE HOVEL

The big girl approached and laid her hand in her father's.

"Feel how cold I am," said she.

"Bah!" replied the father, "I am much colder than that."

The mother exclaimed impetuously:--

"You always have something better than any one else, so you do! even bad
things."

"Down with you!" said the man.

The mother, being eyed after a certain fashion, held her tongue.

Silence reigned for a moment in the hovel. The elder girl was removing
the mud from the bottom of her mantle, with a careless air; her younger
sister continued to sob; the mother had taken the latter's head between
her hands, and was covering it with kisses, whispering to her the
while:--

"My treasure, I entreat you, it is nothing of consequence, don't cry,
you will anger your father."

"No!" exclaimed the father, "quite the contrary! sob! sob! that's
right."

Then turning to the elder:--

"There now! He is not coming! What if he were not to come! I shall have
extinguished my fire, wrecked my chair, torn my shirt, and broken my
pane all for nothing."

"And wounded the child!" murmured the mother.

"Do you know," went on the father, "that it's beastly cold in this
devil's garret! What if that man should not come! Oh! See there, you! He
makes us wait! He says to himself: 'Well! they will wait for me!
That's what they're there for.' Oh! how I hate them, and with what joy,
jubilation, enthusiasm, and satisfaction I could strangle all those rich
folks! all those rich folks! These men who pretend to be charitable,
who put on airs, who go to mass, who make presents to the priesthood,
_preachy, preachy_, in their skullcaps, and who think themselves above
us, and who come for the purpose of humiliating us, and to bring us
'clothes,' as they say! old duds that are not worth four sous! And
bread! That's not what I want, pack of rascals that they are, it's
money! Ah! money! Never! Because they say that we would go off and drink
it up, and that we are drunkards and idlers! And they! What are they,
then, and what have they been in their time! Thieves! They never could
have become rich otherwise! Oh! Society ought to be grasped by the four
corners of the cloth and tossed into the air, all of it! It would all
be smashed, very likely, but at least, no one would have anything,
and there would be that much gained! But what is that blockhead of
a benevolent gentleman doing? Will he come? Perhaps the animal has
forgotten the address! I'll bet that that old beast--"

At that moment there came a light tap at the door, the man rushed to it
and opened it, exclaiming, amid profound bows and smiles of adoration:--

"Enter, sir! Deign to enter, most respected benefactor, and your
charming young lady, also."

A man of ripe age and a young girl made their appearance on the
threshold of the attic.

Marius had not quitted his post. His feelings for the moment surpassed
the powers of the human tongue.

It was She!

Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meanings contained in those
three letters of that word: She.

It was certainly she. Marius could hardly distinguish her through the
luminous vapor which had suddenly spread before his eyes. It was that
sweet, absent being, that star which had beamed upon him for six months;
it was those eyes, that brow, that mouth, that lovely vanished face
which had created night by its departure. The vision had been eclipsed,
now it reappeared.

It reappeared in that gloom, in that garret, in that misshapen attic, in
all that horror.

Marius shuddered in dismay. What! It was she! The palpitations of his
heart troubled his sight. He felt that he was on the brink of bursting
into tears! What! He beheld her again at last, after having sought her
so long! It seemed to him that he had lost his soul, and that he had
just found it again.

She was the same as ever, only a little pale; her delicate face was
framed in a bonnet of violet velvet, her figure was concealed beneath
a pelisse of black satin. Beneath her long dress, a glimpse could be
caught of her tiny foot shod in a silken boot.

She was still accompanied by M. Leblanc.

She had taken a few steps into the room, and had deposited a tolerably
bulky parcel on the table.

The eldest Jondrette girl had retired behind the door, and was staring
with sombre eyes at that velvet bonnet, that silk mantle, and that
charming, happy face.



CHAPTER IX--JONDRETTE COMES NEAR WEEPING

The hovel was so dark, that people coming from without felt on entering
it the effect produced on entering a cellar. The two new-comers
advanced, therefore, with a certain hesitation, being hardly able
to distinguish the vague forms surrounding them, while they could be
clearly seen and scrutinized by the eyes of the inhabitants of the
garret, who were accustomed to this twilight.

M. Leblanc approached, with his sad but kindly look, and said to
Jondrette the father:--

"Monsieur, in this package you will find some new clothes and some
woollen stockings and blankets."

"Our angelic benefactor overwhelms us," said Jondrette, bowing to the
very earth.

Then, bending down to the ear of his eldest daughter, while the two
visitors were engaged in examining this lamentable interior, he added in
a low and rapid voice:--

"Hey? What did I say? Duds! No money! They are all alike! By the way,
how was the letter to that old blockhead signed?"

"Fabantou," replied the girl.

"The dramatic artist, good!"

It was lucky for Jondrette, that this had occurred to him, for at the
very moment, M. Leblanc turned to him, and said to him with the air of a
person who is seeking to recall a name:--

"I see that you are greatly to be pitied, Monsieur--"

"Fabantou," replied Jondrette quickly.

"Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that is it. I remember."

"Dramatic artist, sir, and one who has had some success."

Here Jondrette evidently judged the moment propitious for capturing the
"philanthropist." He exclaimed with an accent which smacked at the same
time of the vainglory of the mountebank at fairs, and the humility of
the mendicant on the highway:--

"A pupil of Talma! Sir! I am a pupil of Talma! Fortune formerly smiled
on me--Alas! Now it is misfortune's turn. You see, my benefactor, no
bread, no fire. My poor babes have no fire! My only chair has no seat! A
broken pane! And in such weather! My spouse in bed! Ill!"

"Poor woman!" said M. Leblanc.

"My child wounded!" added Jondrette.

The child, diverted by the arrival of the strangers, had fallen to
contemplating "the young lady," and had ceased to sob.

"Cry! bawl!" said Jondrette to her in a low voice.

At the same time he pinched her sore hand. All this was done with the
talent of a juggler.

The little girl gave vent to loud shrieks.

The adorable young girl, whom Marius, in his heart, called "his Ursule,"
approached her hastily.

"Poor, dear child!" said she.

"You see, my beautiful young lady," pursued Jondrette "her bleeding
wrist! It came through an accident while working at a machine to earn
six sous a day. It may be necessary to cut off her arm."

"Really?" said the old gentleman, in alarm.

The little girl, taking this seriously, fell to sobbing more violently
than ever.

"Alas! yes, my benefactor!" replied the father.

For several minutes, Jondrette had been scrutinizing "the benefactor"
in a singular fashion. As he spoke, he seemed to be examining the other
attentively, as though seeking to summon up his recollections. All at
once, profiting by a moment when the new-comers were questioning the
child with interest as to her injured hand, he passed near his wife,
who lay in her bed with a stupid and dejected air, and said to her in a
rapid but very low tone:--

"Take a look at that man!"

Then, turning to M. Leblanc, and continuing his lamentations:--

"You see, sir! All the clothing that I have is my wife's chemise! And
all torn at that! In the depths of winter! I can't go out for lack of a
coat. If I had a coat of any sort, I would go and see Mademoiselle Mars,
who knows me and is very fond of me. Does she not still reside in the
Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, sir? We played together in the
provinces. I shared her laurels. Célimène would come to my succor, sir!
Elmire would bestow alms on Bélisaire! But no, nothing! And not a sou in
the house! My wife ill, and not a sou! My daughter dangerously injured,
not a sou! My wife suffers from fits of suffocation. It comes from her
age, and besides, her nervous system is affected. She ought to have
assistance, and my daughter also! But the doctor! But the apothecary!
How am I to pay them? I would kneel to a penny, sir! Such is the
condition to which the arts are reduced. And do you know, my charming
young lady, and you, my generous protector, do you know, you who breathe
forth virtue and goodness, and who perfume that church where my daughter
sees you every day when she says her prayers?--For I have brought up my
children religiously, sir. I did not want them to take to the theatre.
Ah! the hussies! If I catch them tripping! I do not jest, that I don't!
I read them lessons on honor, on morality, on virtue! Ask them! They
have got to walk straight. They are none of your unhappy wretches who
begin by having no family, and end by espousing the public. One is
Mamselle Nobody, and one becomes Madame Everybody. Deuce take it! None
of that in the Fabantou family! I mean to bring them up virtuously, and
they shall be honest, and nice, and believe in God, by the sacred name!
Well, sir, my worthy sir, do you know what is going to happen to-morrow?
To-morrow is the fourth day of February, the fatal day, the last day of
grace allowed me by my landlord; if by this evening I have not paid my
rent, to-morrow my oldest daughter, my spouse with her fever, my child
with her wound,--we shall all four be turned out of here and thrown into
the street, on the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, in the snow.
There, sir. I owe for four quarters--a whole year! that is to say, sixty
francs."

Jondrette lied. Four quarters would have amounted to only forty francs,
and he could not owe four, because six months had not elapsed since
Marius had paid for two.

M. Leblanc drew five francs from his pocket and threw them on the table.

Jondrette found time to mutter in the ear of his eldest daughter:--

"The scoundrel! What does he think I can do with his five francs?
That won't pay me for my chair and pane of glass! That's what comes of
incurring expenses!"

In the meanwhile, M. Leblanc had removed the large brown great-coat
which he wore over his blue coat, and had thrown it over the back of the
chair.

"Monsieur Fabantou," he said, "these five francs are all that I have
about me, but I shall now take my daughter home, and I will return this
evening,--it is this evening that you must pay, is it not?"

Jondrette's face lighted up with a strange expression. He replied
vivaciously:--

"Yes, respected sir. At eight o'clock, I must be at my landlord's."

"I will be here at six, and I will fetch you the sixty francs."

"My benefactor!" exclaimed Jondrette, overwhelmed. And he added, in a
low tone: "Take a good look at him, wife!"

M. Leblanc had taken the arm of the young girl, once more, and had
turned towards the door.

"Farewell until this evening, my friends!" said he.

"Six o'clock?" said Jondrette.

"Six o'clock precisely."

At that moment, the overcoat lying on the chair caught the eye of the
elder Jondrette girl.

"You are forgetting your coat, sir," said she.

Jondrette darted an annihilating look at his daughter, accompanied by a
formidable shrug of the shoulders.

M. Leblanc turned back and said, with a smile:--

"I have not forgotten it, I am leaving it."

"O my protector!" said Jondrette, "my august benefactor, I melt into
tears! Permit me to accompany you to your carriage."

"If you come out," answered M. Leblanc, "put on this coat. It really is
very cold."

Jondrette did not need to be told twice. He hastily donned the brown
great-coat. And all three went out, Jondrette preceding the two
strangers.



CHAPTER X--TARIFF OF LICENSED CABS: TWO FRANCS AN HOUR

Marius had lost nothing of this entire scene, and yet, in reality, had
seen nothing. His eyes had remained fixed on the young girl, his heart
had, so to speak, seized her and wholly enveloped her from the moment of
her very first step in that garret. During her entire stay there, he
had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and
precipitates the whole soul on a single point. He contemplated, not that
girl, but that light which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet bonnet. The
star Sirius might have entered the room, and he would not have been any
more dazzled.

While the young girl was engaged in opening the package, unfolding the
clothing and the blankets, questioning the sick mother kindly, and the
little injured girl tenderly, he watched her every movement, he sought
to catch her words. He knew her eyes, her brow, her beauty, her form,
her walk, he did not know the sound of her voice. He had once fancied
that he had caught a few words at the Luxembourg, but he was not
absolutely sure of the fact. He would have given ten years of his life
to hear it, in order that he might bear away in his soul a little of
that music. But everything was drowned in the lamentable exclamations
and trumpet bursts of Jondrette. This added a touch of genuine wrath
to Marius' ecstasy. He devoured her with his eyes. He could not believe
that it really was that divine creature whom he saw in the midst of
those vile creatures in that monstrous lair. It seemed to him that he
beheld a humming-bird in the midst of toads.

When she took her departure, he had but one thought, to follow her, to
cling to her trace, not to quit her until he learned where she
lived, not to lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously
re-discovered her. He leaped down from the commode and seized his hat.
As he laid his hand on the lock of the door, and was on the point of
opening it, a sudden reflection caused him to pause. The corridor was
long, the staircase steep, Jondrette was talkative, M. Leblanc had,
no doubt, not yet regained his carriage; if, on turning round in the
corridor, or on the staircase, he were to catch sight of him, Marius,
in that house, he would, evidently, take the alarm, and find means to
escape from him again, and this time it would be final. What was he
to do? Should he wait a little? But while he was waiting, the carriage
might drive off. Marius was perplexed. At last he accepted the risk and
quitted his room.

There was no one in the corridor. He hastened to the stairs. There was
no one on the staircase. He descended in all haste, and reached the
boulevard in time to see a fiacre turning the corner of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier, on its way back to Paris.

Marius rushed headlong in that direction. On arriving at the angle of
the boulevard, he caught sight of the fiacre again, rapidly descending
the Rue Mouffetard; the carriage was already a long way off, and there
was no means of overtaking it; what! run after it? Impossible; and
besides, the people in the carriage would assuredly notice an individual
running at full speed in pursuit of a fiacre, and the father would
recognize him. At that moment, wonderful and unprecedented good luck,
Marius perceived an empty cab passing along the boulevard. There was but
one thing to be done, to jump into this cab and follow the fiacre. That
was sure, efficacious, and free from danger.

Marius made the driver a sign to halt, and called to him:--

"By the hour?"

Marius wore no cravat, he had on his working-coat, which was destitute
of buttons, his shirt was torn along one of the plaits on the bosom.

The driver halted, winked, and held out his left hand to Marius, rubbing
his forefinger gently with his thumb.

"What is it?" said Marius.

"Pay in advance," said the coachman.

Marius recollected that he had but sixteen sous about him.

"How much?" he demanded.

"Forty sous."

"I will pay on my return."

The driver's only reply was to whistle the air of La Palisse and to whip
up his horse.

Marius stared at the retreating cabriolet with a bewildered air. For the
lack of four and twenty sous, he was losing his joy, his happiness,
his love! He had seen, and he was becoming blind again. He reflected
bitterly, and it must be confessed, with profound regret, on the five
francs which he had bestowed, that very morning, on that miserable girl.
If he had had those five francs, he would have been saved, he would have
been born again, he would have emerged from the limbo and darkness, he
would have made his escape from isolation and spleen, from his widowed
state; he might have re-knotted the black thread of his destiny to that
beautiful golden thread, which had just floated before his eyes and
had broken at the same instant, once more! He returned to his hovel in
despair.

He might have told himself that M. Leblanc had promised to return in
the evening, and that all he had to do was to set about the matter more
skilfully, so that he might follow him on that occasion; but, in his
contemplation, it is doubtful whether he had heard this.

As he was on the point of mounting the staircase, he perceived, on the
other side of the boulevard, near the deserted wall skirting the Rue De
la Barrière-des-Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the "philanthropist's"
great-coat, engaged in conversation with one of those men of disquieting
aspect who have been dubbed by common consent, _prowlers of the
barriers_; people of equivocal face, of suspicious monologues, who
present the air of having evil minds, and who generally sleep in the
daytime, which suggests the supposition that they work by night.

These two men, standing there motionless and in conversation, in the
snow which was falling in whirlwinds, formed a group that a policeman
would surely have observed, but which Marius hardly noticed.

Still, in spite of his mournful preoccupation, he could not refrain from
saying to himself that this prowler of the barriers with whom Jondrette
was talking resembled a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias
Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once pointed out to him as a very
dangerous nocturnal roamer. This man's name the reader has learned in
the preceding book. This Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille,
figured later on in many criminal trials, and became a notorious rascal.
He was at that time only a famous rascal. To-day he exists in the state
of tradition among ruffians and assassins. He was at the head of
a school towards the end of the last reign. And in the evening, at
nightfall, at the hour when groups form and talk in whispers, he was
discussed at La Force in the Fosse-aux-Lions. One might even, in
that prison, precisely at the spot where the sewer which served the
unprecedented escape, in broad daylight, of thirty prisoners, in 1843,
passes under the culvert, read his name, PANCHAUD, audaciously carved
by his own hand on the wall of the sewer, during one of his attempts at
flight. In 1832, the police already had their eye on him, but he had not
as yet made a serious beginning.



CHAPTER XI--OFFERS OF SERVICE FROM MISERY TO WRETCHEDNESS

Marius ascended the stairs of the hovel with slow steps; at the moment
when he was about to re-enter his cell, he caught sight of the elder
Jondrette girl following him through the corridor. The very sight of
this girl was odious to him; it was she who had his five francs, it was
too late to demand them back, the cab was no longer there, the fiacre
was far away. Moreover, she would not have given them back. As for
questioning her about the residence of the persons who had just been
there, that was useless; it was evident that she did not know, since the
letter signed Fabantou had been addressed "to the benevolent gentleman
of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas."

Marius entered his room and pushed the door to after him.

It did not close; he turned round and beheld a hand which held the door
half open.

"What is it?" he asked, "who is there?"

It was the Jondrette girl.

"Is it you?" resumed Marius almost harshly, "still you! What do you want
with me?"

She appeared to be thoughtful and did not look at him. She no longer had
the air of assurance which had characterized her that morning. She did
not enter, but held back in the darkness of the corridor, where Marius
could see her through the half-open door.

"Come now, will you answer?" cried Marius. "What do you want with me?"

She raised her dull eyes, in which a sort of gleam seemed to flicker
vaguely, and said:--

"Monsieur Marius, you look sad. What is the matter with you?"

"With me!" said Marius.

"Yes, you."

"There is nothing the matter with me."

"Yes, there is!"

"No."

"I tell you there is!"

"Let me alone!"

Marius gave the door another push, but she retained her hold on it.

"Stop," said she, "you are in the wrong. Although you are not rich, you
were kind this morning. Be so again now. You gave me something to eat,
now tell me what ails you. You are grieved, that is plain. I do not want
you to be grieved. What can be done for it? Can I be of any service?
Employ me. I do not ask for your secrets, you need not tell them to me,
but I may be of use, nevertheless. I may be able to help you, since I
help my father. When it is necessary to carry letters, to go to houses,
to inquire from door to door, to find out an address, to follow any one,
I am of service. Well, you may assuredly tell me what is the matter with
you, and I will go and speak to the persons; sometimes it is enough if
some one speaks to the persons, that suffices to let them understand
matters, and everything comes right. Make use of me."

An idea flashed across Marius' mind. What branch does one disdain when
one feels that one is falling?

He drew near to the Jondrette girl.

"Listen--" he said to her.

She interrupted him with a gleam of joy in her eyes.

"Oh yes, do call me _thou!_ I like that better."

"Well," he resumed, "thou hast brought hither that old gentleman and his
daughter!"

"Yes."

"Dost thou know their address?"

"No."

"Find it for me."

The Jondrette's dull eyes had grown joyous, and they now became gloomy.

"Is that what you want?" she demanded.

"Yes."

"Do you know them?"

"No."

"That is to say," she resumed quickly, "you do not know her, but you
wish to know her."

This _them_ which had turned into _her_ had something indescribably
significant and bitter about it.

"Well, can you do it?" said Marius.

"You shall have the beautiful lady's address."

There was still a shade in the words "the beautiful lady" which troubled
Marius. He resumed:--

"Never mind, after all, the address of the father and daughter. Their
address, indeed!"

She gazed fixedly at him.

"What will you give me?"

"Anything you like."

"Anything I like?"

"Yes."

"You shall have the address."

She dropped her head; then, with a brusque movement, she pulled to the
door, which closed behind her.

Marius found himself alone.

He dropped into a chair, with his head and both elbows on his bed,
absorbed in thoughts which he could not grasp, and as though a prey to
vertigo. All that had taken place since the morning, the appearance of
the angel, her disappearance, what that creature had just said to him, a
gleam of hope floating in an immense despair,--this was what filled his
brain confusedly.

All at once he was violently aroused from his revery.

He heard the shrill, hard voice of Jondrette utter these words, which
were fraught with a strange interest for him:--

"I tell you that I am sure of it, and that I recognized him."

Of whom was Jondrette speaking? Whom had he recognized? M. Leblanc? The
father of "his Ursule"? What! Did Jondrette know him? Was Marius about
to obtain in this abrupt and unexpected fashion all the information
without which his life was so dark to him? Was he about to learn at last
who it was that he loved, who that young girl was? Who her father
was? Was the dense shadow which enwrapped them on the point of being
dispelled? Was the veil about to be rent? Ah! Heavens!

He bounded rather than climbed upon his commode, and resumed his post
near the little peep-hole in the partition wall.

Again he beheld the interior of Jondrette's hovel.



CHAPTER XII--THE USE MADE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE

Nothing in the aspect of the family was altered, except that the wife
and daughters had levied on the package and put on woollen stockings and
jackets. Two new blankets were thrown across the two beds.

Jondrette had evidently just returned. He still had the breathlessness
of out of doors. His daughters were seated on the floor near the
fireplace, the elder engaged in dressing the younger's wounded hand. His
wife had sunk back on the bed near the fireplace, with a face indicative
of astonishment. Jondrette was pacing up and down the garret with long
strides. His eyes were extraordinary.

The woman, who seemed timid and overwhelmed with stupor in the presence
of her husband, turned to say:--

"What, really? You are sure?"

"Sure! Eight years have passed! But I recognize him! Ah! I recognize
him. I knew him at once! What! Didn't it force itself on you?"

"No."

"But I told you: 'Pay attention!' Why, it is his figure, it is his face,
only older,--there are people who do not grow old, I don't know how they
manage it,--it is the very sound of his voice. He is better dressed,
that is all! Ah! you mysterious old devil, I've got you, that I have!"

He paused, and said to his daughters:--

"Get out of here, you!--It's queer that it didn't strike you!"

They arose to obey.

The mother stammered:--

"With her injured hand."

"The air will do it good," said Jondrette. "Be off."

It was plain that this man was of the sort to whom no one offers to
reply. The two girls departed.

At the moment when they were about to pass through the door, the father
detained the elder by the arm, and said to her with a peculiar accent:--

"You will be here at five o'clock precisely. Both of you. I shall need
you."

Marius redoubled his attention.

On being left alone with his wife, Jondrette began to pace the room
again, and made the tour of it two or three times in silence. Then he
spent several minutes in tucking the lower part of the woman's chemise
which he wore into his trousers.

All at once, he turned to the female Jondrette, folded his arms and
exclaimed:--

"And would you like to have me tell you something? The young lady--"

"Well, what?" retorted his wife, "the young lady?"

Marius could not doubt that it was really she of whom they were
speaking. He listened with ardent anxiety. His whole life was in his
ears.

But Jondrette had bent over and spoke to his wife in a whisper. Then he
straightened himself up and concluded aloud:--

"It is she!"

"That one?" said his wife.

"That very one," said the husband.

No expression can reproduce the significance of the mother's words.
Surprise, rage, hate, wrath, were mingled and combined in one monstrous
intonation. The pronunciation of a few words, the name, no doubt, which
her husband had whispered in her ear, had sufficed to rouse this huge,
somnolent woman, and from being repulsive she became terrible.

"It is not possible!" she cried. "When I think that my daughters are
going barefoot, and have not a gown to their backs! What! A satin
pelisse, a velvet bonnet, boots, and everything; more than two hundred
francs' worth of clothes! so that one would think she was a lady! No,
you are mistaken! Why, in the first place, the other was hideous, and
this one is not so bad-looking! She really is not bad-looking! It can't
be she!"

"I tell you that it is she. You will see."

At this absolute assertion, the Jondrette woman raised her large, red,
blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a horrible expression.
At that moment, she seemed to Marius even more to be feared than her
husband. She was a sow with the look of a tigress.

"What!" she resumed, "that horrible, beautiful young lady, who gazed at
my daughters with an air of pity,--she is that beggar brat! Oh! I should
like to kick her stomach in for her!"

She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for a moment, her
hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her mouth half open, her fists
clenched and drawn back. Then she fell back on the bed once more. The
man paced to and fro and paid no attention to his female.

After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached the female
Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded arms, as he had done
a moment before:--

"And shall I tell you another thing?"

"What is it?" she asked.

He answered in a low, curt voice:--

"My fortune is made."

The woman stared at him with the look that signifies: "Is the person who
is addressing me on the point of going mad?"

He went on:--

"Thunder! It was not so very long ago that I was a parishioner of
the parish of
die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread! I have
had enough of misery! my share and other people's share! I am not joking
any longer, I don't find it comic any more, I've had enough of puns,
good God! no more farces, Eternal Father! I want to eat till I am full,
I want to drink my fill! to gormandize! to sleep! to do nothing! I want
to have my turn, so I do, come now! before I die! I want to be a bit of
a millionnaire!"

He took a turn round the hovel, and added:--

"Like other people."

"What do you mean by that?" asked the woman.

He shook his head, winked, screwed up one eye, and raised his voice like
a medical professor who is about to make a demonstration:--

"What do I mean by that? Listen!"

"Hush!" muttered the woman, "not so loud! These are matters which must
not be overheard."

"Bah! Who's here? Our neighbor? I saw him go out a little while ago.
Besides, he doesn't listen, the big booby. And I tell you that I saw him
go out."

Nevertheless, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice,
although not sufficiently to prevent Marius hearing his words. One
favorable circumstance, which enabled Marius not to lose a word of this
conversation was the falling snow which deadened the sound of vehicles
on the boulevard.

This is what Marius heard:--

"Listen carefully. The Crosus is caught, or as good as caught! That's
all settled already. Everything is arranged. I have seen some people. He
will come here this evening at six o'clock. To bring sixty francs, the
rascal! Did you notice how I played that game on him, my sixty francs,
my landlord, my fourth of February? I don't even owe for one quarter!
Isn't he a fool! So he will come at six o'clock! That's the hour when
our neighbor goes to his dinner. Mother Bougon is off washing dishes in
the city. There's not a soul in the house. The neighbor never comes home
until eleven o'clock. The children shall stand on watch. You shall help
us. He will give in."

"And what if he does not give in?" demanded his wife.

Jondrette made a sinister gesture, and said:--

"We'll fix him."

And he burst out laughing.

This was the first time Marius had seen him laugh. The laugh was cold
and sweet, and provoked a shudder.

Jondrette opened a cupboard near the fireplace, and drew from it an old
cap, which he placed on his head, after brushing it with his sleeve.

"Now," said he, "I'm going out. I have some more people that I must see.
Good ones. You'll see how well the whole thing will work. I shall be
away as short a time as possible, it's a fine stroke of business, do you
look after the house."

And with both fists thrust into the pockets of his trousers, he stood
for a moment in thought, then exclaimed:--

"Do you know, it's mighty lucky, by the way, that he didn't recognize
me! If he had recognized me on his side, he would not have come back
again. He would have slipped through our fingers! It was my beard that
saved us! my romantic beard! my pretty little romantic beard!"

And again he broke into a laugh.

He stepped to the window. The snow was still falling, and streaking the
gray of the sky.

"What beastly weather!" said he.

Then lapping his overcoat across his breast:--

"This rind is too large for me. Never mind," he added, "he did a
devilish good thing in leaving it for me, the old scoundrel! If it
hadn't been for that, I couldn't have gone out, and everything would
have gone wrong! What small points things hang on, anyway!"

And pulling his cap down over his eyes, he quitted the room.

He had barely had time to take half a dozen steps from the door, when
the door opened again, and his savage but intelligent face made its
appearance once more in the opening.

"I came near forgetting," said he. "You are to have a brazier of
charcoal ready."

And he flung into his wife's apron the five-franc piece which the
"philanthropist" had left with him.

"A brazier of charcoal?" asked his wife.

"Yes."

"How many bushels?"

"Two good ones."

"That will come to thirty sous. With the rest I will buy something for
dinner."

"The devil, no."

"Why?"

"Don't go and spend the hundred-sou piece."

"Why?"

"Because I shall have to buy something, too."

"What?"

"Something."

"How much shall you need?"

"Whereabouts in the neighborhood is there an ironmonger's shop?"

"Rue Mouffetard."

"Ah! yes, at the corner of a street; I can see the shop."

"But tell me how much you will need for what you have to purchase?"

"Fifty sous--three francs."

"There won't be much left for dinner."

"Eating is not the point to-day. There's something better to be done."

"That's enough, my jewel."

At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door again, and this
time, Marius heard his step die away in the corridor of the hovel, and
descend the staircase rapidly.

At that moment, one o'clock struck from the church of Saint-Médard.



CHAPTER XIII--SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABUNTUR ORARE
PATER NOSTER

Marius, dreamer as he was, was, as we have said, firm and energetic by
nature. His habits of solitary meditation, while they had developed in
him sympathy and compassion, had, perhaps, diminished the faculty for
irritation, but had left intact the power of waxing indignant; he had
the kindliness of a brahmin, and the severity of a judge; he took pity
upon a toad, but he crushed a viper. Now, it was into a hole of vipers
that his glance had just been directed, it was a nest of monsters that
he had beneath his eyes.

"These wretches must be stamped upon," said he.

Not one of the enigmas which he had hoped to see solved had been
elucidated; on the contrary, all of them had been rendered more dense,
if anything; he knew nothing more about the beautiful maiden of the
Luxembourg and the man whom he called M. Leblanc, except that Jondrette
was acquainted with them. Athwart the mysterious words which had been
uttered, the only thing of which he caught a distinct glimpse was the
fact that an ambush was in course of preparation, a dark but terrible
trap; that both of them were incurring great danger, she probably, her
father certainly; that they must be saved; that the hideous plots of the
Jondrettes must be thwarted, and the web of these spiders broken.

He scanned the female Jondrette for a moment. She had pulled an old
sheet-iron stove from a corner, and she was rummaging among the old heap
of iron.

He descended from the commode as softly as possible, taking care not to
make the least noise. Amid his terror as to what was in preparation, and
in the horror with which the Jondrettes had inspired him, he experienced
a sort of joy at the idea that it might be granted to him perhaps to
render a service to the one whom he loved.

But how was it to be done? How warn the persons threatened? He did not
know their address. They had reappeared for an instant before his eyes,
and had then plunged back again into the immense depths of Paris. Should
he wait for M. Leblanc at the door that evening at six o'clock, at the
moment of his arrival, and warn him of the trap? But Jondrette and his
men would see him on the watch, the spot was lonely, they were stronger
than he, they would devise means to seize him or to get him away, and
the man whom Marius was anxious to save would be lost. One o'clock had
just struck, the trap was to be sprung at six. Marius had five hours
before him.

There was but one thing to be done.

He put on his decent coat, knotted a silk handkerchief round his neck,
took his hat, and went out, without making any more noise than if he had
been treading on moss with bare feet.

Moreover, the Jondrette woman continued to rummage among her old iron.

Once outside of the house, he made for the Rue du Petit-Banquier.

He had almost reached the middle of this street, near a very low wall
which a man can easily step over at certain points, and which abuts on
a waste space, and was walking slowly, in consequence of his preoccupied
condition, and the snow deadened the sound of his steps; all at once he
heard voices talking very close by. He turned his head, the street was
deserted, there was not a soul in it, it was broad daylight, and yet he
distinctly heard voices.

It occurred to him to glance over the wall which he was skirting.

There, in fact, sat two men, flat on the snow, with their backs against
the wall, talking together in subdued tones.

These two persons were strangers to him; one was a bearded man in a
blouse, and the other a long-haired individual in rags. The bearded man
had on a fez, the other's head was bare, and the snow had lodged in his
hair.

By thrusting his head over the wall, Marius could hear their remarks.

The hairy one jogged the other man's elbow and said:--

"--With the assistance of Patron-Minette, it can't fail."

"Do you think so?" said the bearded man.

And the long-haired one began again:--

"It's as good as a warrant for each one, of five hundred balls, and the
worst that can happen is five years, six years, ten years at the most!"

The other replied with some hesitation, and shivering beneath his fez:--

"That's a real thing. You can't go against such things."

"I tell you that the affair can't go wrong," resumed the long-haired
man. "Father What's-his-name's team will be already harnessed."

Then they began to discuss a melodrama that they had seen on the
preceding evening at the Gaîté Theatre.

Marius went his way.

It seemed to him that the mysterious words of these men, so strangely
hidden behind that wall, and crouching in the snow, could not but bear
some relation to Jondrette's abominable projects. That must be _the
affair_.

He directed his course towards the faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked at
the first shop he came to where he could find a commissary of police.

He was directed to Rue de Pontoise, No. 14.

Thither Marius betook himself.

As he passed a baker's shop, he bought a two-penny roll, and ate it,
foreseeing that he should not dine.

On the way, he rendered justice to Providence. He reflected that had he
not given his five francs to the Jondrette girl in the morning, he
would have followed M. Leblanc's fiacre, and consequently have remained
ignorant of everything, and that there would have been no obstacle to
the trap of the Jondrettes and that M. Leblanc would have been lost, and
his daughter with him, no doubt.



CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH A POLICE AGENT BESTOWS TWO FISTFULS ON A LAWYER

On arriving at No. 14, Rue de Pontoise, he ascended to the first floor
and inquired for the commissary of police.

"The commissary of police is not here," said a clerk; "but there is an
inspector who takes his place. Would you like to speak to him? Are you
in haste?"

"Yes," said Marius.

The clerk introduced him into the commissary's office. There stood a
tall man behind a grating, leaning against a stove, and holding up with
both hands the tails of a vast topcoat, with three collars. His face
was square, with a thin, firm mouth, thick, gray, and very ferocious
whiskers, and a look that was enough to turn your pockets inside out.
Of that glance it might have been well said, not that it penetrated, but
that it searched.

This man's air was not much less ferocious nor less terrible than
Jondrette's; the dog is, at times, no less terrible to meet than the
wolf.

"What do you want?" he said to Marius, without adding "monsieur."

"Is this Monsieur le Commissaire de Police?"

"He is absent. I am here in his stead."

"The matter is very private."

"Then speak."

"And great haste is required."

"Then speak quick."

This calm, abrupt man was both terrifying and reassuring at one and the
same time. He inspired fear and confidence. Marius related the adventure
to him: That a person with whom he was not acquainted otherwise than by
sight, was to be inveigled into a trap that very evening; that, as he
occupied the room adjoining the den, he, Marius Pontmercy, a lawyer,
had heard the whole plot through the partition; that the wretch who
had planned the trap was a certain Jondrette; that there would be
accomplices, probably some prowlers of the barriers, among others a
certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille; that Jondrette's
daughters were to lie in wait; that there was no way of warning the
threatened man, since he did not even know his name; and that, finally,
all this was to be carried out at six o'clock that evening, at the most
deserted point of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, in house No. 50-52.

At the sound of this number, the inspector raised his head, and said
coldly:--

"So it is in the room at the end of the corridor?"

"Precisely," answered Marius, and he added: "Are you acquainted with
that house?"

The inspector remained silent for a moment, then replied, as he warmed
the heel of his boot at the door of the stove:--

"Apparently."

He went on, muttering between his teeth, and not addressing Marius so
much as his cravat:--

"Patron-Minette must have had a hand in this."

This word struck Marius.

"Patron-Minette," said he, "I did hear that word pronounced, in fact."

And he repeated to the inspector the dialogue between the long-haired
man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier.

The inspector muttered:--

"The long-haired man must be Brujon, and the bearded one Demi-Liard,
alias Deux-Milliards."

He had dropped his eyelids again, and became absorbed in thought.

"As for Father What's-his-name, I think I recognize him. Here, I've
burned my coat. They always have too much fire in these cursed stoves.
Number 50-52. Former property of Gorbeau."

Then he glanced at Marius.

"You saw only that bearded and that long-haired man?"

"And Panchaud."

"You didn't see a little imp of a dandy prowling about the premises?"

"No."

"Nor a big lump of matter, resembling an elephant in the Jardin des
Plantes?"

"No."

"Nor a scamp with the air of an old red tail?"

"No."

"As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks, and
employees. It is not surprising that you did not see him."

"No. Who are all those persons?" asked Marius.

The inspector answered:--

"Besides, this is not the time for them."

He relapsed into silence, then resumed:--

"50-52. I know that barrack. Impossible to conceal ourselves inside
it without the artists seeing us, and then they will get off simply
by countermanding the vaudeville. They are so modest! An audience
embarrasses them. None of that, none of that. I want to hear them sing
and make them dance."

This monologue concluded, he turned to Marius, and demanded, gazing at
him intently the while:--

"Are you afraid?"

"Of what?" said Marius.

"Of these men?"

"No more than yourself!" retorted Marius rudely, who had begun to notice
that this police agent had not yet said "monsieur" to him.

The inspector stared still more intently at Marius, and continued with
sententious solemnity:--

"There, you speak like a brave man, and like an honest man. Courage does
not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority."

Marius interrupted him:--

"That is well, but what do you intend to do?"

The inspector contented himself with the remark:--

"The lodgers have pass-keys with which to get in at night. You must have
one."

"Yes," said Marius.

"Have you it about you?"

"Yes."

"Give it to me," said the inspector.

Marius took his key from his waistcoat pocket, handed it to the
inspector and added:--

"If you will take my advice, you will come in force."

The inspector cast on Marius such a glance as Voltaire might have
bestowed on a provincial academician who had suggested a rhyme to him;
with one movement he plunged his hands, which were enormous, into the
two immense pockets of his top-coat, and pulled out two small steel
pistols, of the sort called "knock-me-downs." Then he presented them to
Marius, saying rapidly, in a curt tone:--

"Take these. Go home. Hide in your chamber, so that you may be supposed
to have gone out. They are loaded. Each one carries two balls. You will
keep watch; there is a hole in the wall, as you have informed me. These
men will come. Leave them to their own devices for a time. When you
think matters have reached a crisis, and that it is time to put a stop
to them, fire a shot. Not too soon. The rest concerns me. A shot into
the ceiling, the air, no matter where. Above all things, not too soon.
Wait until they begin to put their project into execution; you are a
lawyer; you know the proper point." Marius took the pistols and put them
in the side pocket of his coat.

"That makes a lump that can be seen," said the inspector. "Put them in
your trousers pocket."

Marius hid the pistols in his trousers pockets.

"Now," pursued the inspector, "there is not a minute more to be lost by
any one. What time is it? Half-past two. Seven o'clock is the hour?"

"Six o'clock," answered Marius.

"I have plenty of time," said the inspector, "but no more than enough.
Don't forget anything that I have said to you. Bang. A pistol shot."

"Rest easy," said Marius.

And as Marius laid his hand on the handle of the door on his way out,
the inspector called to him:--

"By the way, if you have occasion for my services between now and then,
come or send here. You will ask for Inspector Javert."



CHAPTER XV--JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASES

A few moments later, about three o'clock, Courfeyrac chanced to be
passing along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. The snow had
redoubled in violence, and filled the air. Bossuet was just saying to
Courfeyrac:--

"One would say, to see all these snow-flakes fall, that there was a
plague of white butterflies in heaven." All at once, Bossuet caught
sight of Marius coming up the street towards the barrier with a peculiar
air.

"Hold!" said Bossuet. "There's Marius."

"I saw him," said Courfeyrac. "Don't let's speak to him."

"Why?"

"He is busy."

"With what?"

"Don't you see his air?"

"What air?"

"He has the air of a man who is following some one."

"That's true," said Bossuet.

"Just see the eyes he is making!" said Courfeyrac.

"But who the deuce is he following?"

"Some fine, flowery bonneted wench! He's in love."

"But," observed Bossuet, "I don't see any wench nor any flowery bonnet
in the street. There's not a woman round."

Courfeyrac took a survey, and exclaimed:--

"He's following a man!"

A man, in fact, wearing a gray cap, and whose gray beard could be
distinguished, although they only saw his back, was walking along about
twenty paces in advance of Marius.

This man was dressed in a great-coat which was perfectly new and too
large for him, and in a frightful pair of trousers all hanging in rags
and black with mud.

Bossuet burst out laughing.

"Who is that man?"

"He?" retorted Courfeyrac, "he's a poet. Poets are very fond of wearing
the trousers of dealers in rabbit skins and the overcoats of peers of
France."

"Let's see where Marius will go," said Bossuet; "let's see where the man
is going, let's follow them, hey?"

"Bossuet!" exclaimed Courfeyrac, "eagle of Meaux! You are a prodigious
brute. Follow a man who is following another man, indeed!"

They retraced their steps.

Marius had, in fact, seen Jondrette passing along the Rue Mouffetard,
and was spying on his proceedings.

Jondrette walked straight ahead, without a suspicion that he was already
held by a glance.

He quitted the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him enter one of the most
terrible hovels in the Rue Gracieuse; he remained there about a quarter
of an hour, then returned to the Rue Mouffetard. He halted at
an ironmonger's shop, which then stood at the corner of the Rue
Pierre-Lombard, and a few minutes later Marius saw him emerge from the
shop, holding in his hand a huge cold chisel with a white wood handle,
which he concealed beneath his great-coat. At the top of the Rue
Petit-Gentilly he turned to the left and proceeded rapidly to the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. The day was declining; the snow, which had ceased for a
moment, had just begun again. Marius posted himself on the watch at the
very corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, which was deserted, as usual,
and did not follow Jondrette into it. It was lucky that he did so,
for, on arriving in the vicinity of the wall where Marius had heard the
long-haired man and the bearded man conversing, Jondrette turned round,
made sure that no one was following him, did not see him, then sprang
across the wall and disappeared.

The waste land bordered by this wall communicated with the back yard of
an ex-livery stable-keeper of bad repute, who had failed and who still
kept a few old single-seated berlins under his sheds.

Marius thought that it would be wise to profit by Jondrette's absence to
return home; moreover, it was growing late; every evening, Ma'am Bougon
when she set out for her dish-washing in town, had a habit of locking
the door, which was always closed at dusk. Marius had given his key to
the inspector of police; it was important, therefore, that he should
make haste.

Evening had arrived, night had almost closed in; on the horizon and in
the immensity of space, there remained but one spot illuminated by the
sun, and that was the moon.

It was rising in a ruddy glow behind the low dome of Salpêtrière.

Marius returned to No. 50-52 with great strides. The door was still open
when he arrived. He mounted the stairs on tip-toe and glided along the
wall of the corridor to his chamber. This corridor, as the reader will
remember, was bordered on both sides by attics, all of which were, for
the moment, empty and to let. Ma'am Bougon was in the habit of leaving
all the doors open. As he passed one of these attics, Marius thought
he perceived in the uninhabited cell the motionless heads of four men,
vaguely lighted up by a remnant of daylight, falling through a dormer
window.

Marius made no attempt to see, not wishing to be seen himself. He
succeeded in reaching his chamber without being seen and without making
any noise. It was high time. A moment later he heard Ma'am Bougon take
her departure, locking the door of the house behind her.



CHAPTER XVI--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE WORDS TO AN ENGLISH AIR WHICH
WAS IN FASHION IN 1832

Marius seated himself on his bed. It might have been half-past five
o'clock. Only half an hour separated him from what was about to happen.
He heard the beating of his arteries as one hears the ticking of a watch
in the dark. He thought of the double march which was going on at that
moment in the dark,--crime advancing on one side, justice coming up on
the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a shudder
of what was about to take place. As is the case with all those who are
suddenly assailed by an unforeseen adventure, the entire day produced
upon him the effect of a dream, and in order to persuade himself that he
was not the prey of a nightmare, he had to feel the cold barrels of the
steel pistols in his trousers pockets.

It was no longer snowing; the moon disengaged itself more and more
clearly from the mist, and its light, mingled with the white reflection
of the snow which had fallen, communicated to the chamber a sort of
twilight aspect.

There was a light in the Jondrette den. Marius saw the hole in the wall
shining with a reddish glow which seemed bloody to him.

It was true that the light could not be produced by a candle. However,
there was not a sound in the Jondrette quarters, not a soul was moving
there, not a soul speaking, not a breath; the silence was glacial and
profound, and had it not been for that light, he might have thought
himself next door to a sepulchre.

Marius softly removed his boots and pushed them under his bed.

Several minutes elapsed. Marius heard the lower door turn on its hinges;
a heavy step mounted the staircase, and hastened along the corridor; the
latch of the hovel was noisily lifted; it was Jondrette returning.

Instantly, several voices arose. The whole family was in the garret.
Only, it had been silent in the master's absence, like wolf whelps in
the absence of the wolf.

"It's I," said he.

"Good evening, daddy," yelped the girls.

"Well?" said the mother.

"All's going first-rate," responded Jondrette, "but my feet are beastly
cold. Good! You have dressed up. You have done well! You must inspire
confidence."

"All ready to go out."

"Don't forget what I told you. You will do everything sure?"

"Rest easy."

"Because--" said Jondrette. And he left the phrase unfinished.

Marius heard him lay something heavy on the table, probably the chisel
which he had purchased.

"By the way," said Jondrette, "have you been eating here?"

"Yes," said the mother. "I got three large potatoes and some salt. I
took advantage of the fire to cook them."

"Good," returned Jondrette. "To-morrow I will take you out to dine with
me. We will have a duck and fixings. You shall dine like Charles the
Tenth; all is going well!"

Then he added:--

"The mouse-trap is open. The cats are there."

He lowered his voice still further, and said:--

"Put this in the fire."

Marius heard a sound of charcoal being knocked with the tongs or some
iron utensil, and Jondrette continued:--

"Have you greased the hinges of the door so that they will not squeak?"

"Yes," replied the mother.

"What time is it?"

"Nearly six. The half-hour struck from Saint-Médard a while ago."

"The devil!" ejaculated Jondrette; "the children must go and watch. Come
you, do you listen here."

A whispering ensued.

Jondrette's voice became audible again:--

"Has old Bougon left?"

"Yes," said the mother.

"Are you sure that there is no one in our neighbor's room?"

"He has not been in all day, and you know very well that this is his
dinner hour."

"You are sure?"

"Sure."

"All the same," said Jondrette, "there's no harm in going to see whether
he is there. Here, my girl, take the candle and go there."

Marius fell on his hands and knees and crawled silently under his bed.

Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through the
crack of his door.

"P'pa," cried a voice, "he is not in here."

He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter.

"Did you go in?" demanded her father.

"No," replied the girl, "but as his key is in the door, he must be out."

The father exclaimed:--

"Go in, nevertheless."

The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette come in with a candle
in her hand. She was as she had been in the morning, only still more
repulsive in this light.

She walked straight up to the bed. Marius endured an indescribable
moment of anxiety; but near the bed there was a mirror nailed to the
wall, and it was thither that she was directing her steps. She raised
herself on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. In the neighboring room,
the sound of iron articles being moved was audible.

She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled into the
mirror, humming with her cracked and sepulchral voice:--


         Nos amours ont duré toute une semaine,
         Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!
         S'adorer huit jours, c'était bien la peine!
         Le temps des amours devrait durer toujours!
         Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!<a href="#linknote-28"
      name="linknoteref-28" id="linknoteref-28">28</a>


In the meantime, Marius trembled. It seemed impossible to him that she
should not hear his breathing.

She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way she
had.

"How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!" said she.

She returned to the mirror and began again to put on airs before it,
scrutinizing herself full-face and three-quarters face in turn.

"Well!" cried her father, "what are you about there?"

"I am looking under the bed and the furniture," she replied, continuing
to arrange her hair; "there's no one here."

"Booby!" yelled her father. "Come here this minute! And don't waste any
time about it!"

"Coming! Coming!" said she. "One has no time for anything in this
hovel!"

She hummed:--


         Vous me quittez pour aller à la gloire;
         Mon triste cour suivra partout.<a href="#linknote-29"
      name="linknoteref-29" id="linknoteref-29">29</a>


She cast a parting glance in the mirror and went out, shutting the door
behind her.

A moment more, and Marius heard the sound of the two young girls' bare
feet in the corridor, and Jondrette's voice shouting to them:--

"Pay strict heed! One on the side of the barrier, the other at the
corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don't lose sight for a moment of
the door of this house, and the moment you see anything, rush here on
the instant! as hard as you can go! You have a key to get in."

The eldest girl grumbled:--

"The idea of standing watch in the snow barefoot!"

"To-morrow you shall have some dainty little green silk boots!" said the
father.

They ran down stairs, and a few seconds later the shock of the outer
door as it banged to announced that they were outside.

There now remained in the house only Marius, the Jondrettes and
probably, also, the mysterious persons of whom Marius had caught a
glimpse in the twilight, behind the door of the unused attic.



CHAPTER XVII--THE USE MADE OF MARIUS' FIVE-FRANC PIECE

Marius decided that the moment had now arrived when he must resume his
post at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his
age, he had reached the hole in the partition.

He looked.

The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a curious aspect, and
Marius found an explanation of the singular light which he had noticed.
A candle was burning in a candlestick covered with verdigris, but
that was not what really lighted the chamber. The hovel was completely
illuminated, as it were, by the reflection from a rather large
sheet-iron brazier standing in the fireplace, and filled with burning
charcoal, the brazier prepared by the Jondrette woman that morning. The
charcoal was glowing hot and the brazier was red; a blue flame flickered
over it, and helped him to make out the form of the chisel purchased by
Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, where it had been thrust into the
brazier to heat. In one corner, near the door, and as though prepared
for some definite use, two heaps were visible, which appeared to be, the
one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes. All this would have
caused the mind of a person who knew nothing of what was in preparation,
to waver between a very sinister and a very simple idea. The lair thus
lighted up more resembled a forge than a mouth of hell, but Jondrette,
in this light, had rather the air of a demon than of a smith.

The heat of the brazier was so great, that the candle on the table was
melting on the side next the chafing-dish, and was drooping over. An old
dark-lantern of copper, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood on
the chimney-piece.

The brazier, placed in the fireplace itself, beside the nearly extinct
brands, sent its vapors up the chimney, and gave out no odor.

The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, cast its
whiteness into the crimson and flaming garret; and to the poetic spirit
of Marius, who was dreamy even in the moment of action, it was like a
thought of heaven mingled with the misshapen reveries of earth.

A breath of air which made its way in through the open pane, helped to
dissipate the smell of the charcoal and to conceal the presence of the
brazier.

The Jondrette lair was, if the reader recalls what we have said of the
Gorbeau building, admirably chosen to serve as the theatre of a violent
and sombre deed, and as the envelope for a crime. It was the most
retired chamber in the most isolated house on the most deserted
boulevard in Paris. If the system of ambush and traps had not already
existed, they would have been invented there.

The whole thickness of a house and a multitude of uninhabited rooms
separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window that existed
opened on waste lands enclosed with walls and palisades.

Jondrette had lighted his pipe, seated himself on the seatless chair,
and was engaged in smoking. His wife was talking to him in a low tone.

If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who
laugh on every occasion in life, he would have burst with laughter when
his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman. She had on a black bonnet with
plumes not unlike the hats of the heralds-at-arms at the coronation of
Charles X., an immense tartan shawl over her knitted petticoat, and the
man's shoes which her daughter had scorned in the morning. It was this
toilette which had extracted from Jondrette the exclamation: "Good! You
have dressed up. You have done well. You must inspire confidence!"

As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new surtout, which was too
large for him, and which M. Leblanc had given him, and his costume
continued to present that contrast of coat and trousers which
constituted the ideal of a poet in Courfeyrac's eyes.

All at once, Jondrette lifted up his voice:--

"By the way! Now that I think of it. In this weather, he will come in a
carriage. Light the lantern, take it and go down stairs. You will stand
behind the lower door. The very moment that you hear the carriage stop,
you will open the door, instantly, he will come up, you will light the
staircase and the corridor, and when he enters here, you will go down
stairs again as speedily as possible, you will pay the coachman, and
dismiss the fiacre."

"And the money?" inquired the woman.

Jondrette fumbled in his trousers pocket and handed her five francs.

"What's this?" she exclaimed.

Jondrette replied with dignity:--

"That is the monarch which our neighbor gave us this morning."

And he added:--

"Do you know what? Two chairs will be needed here."

"What for?"

"To sit on."

Marius felt a cold chill pass through his limbs at hearing this mild
answer from Jondrette.

"Pardieu! I'll go and get one of our neighbor's."

And with a rapid movement, she opened the door of the den, and went out
into the corridor.

Marius absolutely had not the time to descend from the commode, reach
his bed, and conceal himself beneath it.

"Take the candle," cried Jondrette.

"No," said she, "it would embarrass me, I have the two chairs to carry.
There is moonlight."

Marius heard Mother Jondrette's heavy hand fumbling at his lock in the
dark. The door opened. He remained nailed to the spot with the shock and
with horror.

The Jondrette entered.

The dormer window permitted the entrance of a ray of moonlight between
two blocks of shadow. One of these blocks of shadow entirely covered the
wall against which Marius was leaning, so that he disappeared within it.

Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two
chairs, the only ones which Marius possessed, and went away, letting the
door fall heavily to behind her.

She re-entered the lair.

"Here are the two chairs."

"And here is the lantern. Go down as quick as you can."

She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.

He placed the two chairs on opposite sides of the table, turned the
chisel in the brazier, set in front of the fireplace an old screen which
masked the chafing-dish, then went to the corner where lay the pile
of rope, and bent down as though to examine something. Marius then
recognized the fact, that what he had taken for a shapeless mass was a
very well-made rope-ladder, with wooden rungs and two hooks with which
to attach it.

This ladder, and some large tools, veritable masses of iron, which were
mingled with the old iron piled up behind the door, had not been in the
Jondrette hovel in the morning, and had evidently been brought thither
in the afternoon, during Marius' absence.

"Those are the utensils of an edge-tool maker," thought Marius.

Had Marius been a little more learned in this line, he would have
recognized in what he took for the engines of an edge-tool maker,
certain instruments which will force a lock or pick a lock, and others
which will cut or slice, the two families of tools which burglars call
_cadets_ and _fauchants_.

The fireplace and the two chairs were exactly opposite Marius. The
brazier being concealed, the only light in the room was now furnished
by the candle; the smallest bit of crockery on the table or on the
chimney-piece cast a large shadow. There was something indescribably
calm, threatening, and hideous about this chamber. One felt that there
existed in it the anticipation of something terrible.

Jondrette had allowed his pipe to go out, a serious sign of
preoccupation, and had again seated himself. The candle brought out the
fierce and the fine angles of his countenance. He indulged in scowls and
in abrupt unfoldings of the right hand, as though he were responding to
the last counsels of a sombre inward monologue. In the course of one of
these dark replies which he was making to himself, he pulled the table
drawer rapidly towards him, took out a long kitchen knife which was
concealed there, and tried the edge of its blade on his nail. That done,
he put the knife back in the drawer and shut it.

Marius, on his side, grasped the pistol in his right pocket, drew it out
and cocked it.

The pistol emitted a sharp, clear click, as he cocked it.

Jondrette started, half rose, listened a moment, then began to laugh and
said:--

"What a fool I am! It's the partition cracking!"

Marius kept the pistol in his hand.



CHAPTER XVIII--MARIUS' TWO CHAIRS FORM A VIS-A-VIS

Suddenly, the distant and melancholy vibration of a clock shook the
panes. Six o'clock was striking from Saint-Médard.

Jondrette marked off each stroke with a toss of his head. When the sixth
had struck, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.

Then he began to pace up and down the room, listened at the corridor,
walked on again, then listened once more.

"Provided only that he comes!" he muttered, then he returned to his
chair.

He had hardly reseated himself when the door opened.

Mother Jondrette had opened it, and now remained in the corridor making
a horrible, amiable grimace, which one of the holes of the dark-lantern
illuminated from below.

"Enter, sir," she said.

"Enter, my benefactor," repeated Jondrette, rising hastily.

M. Leblanc made his appearance.

He wore an air of serenity which rendered him singularly venerable.

He laid four louis on the table.

"Monsieur Fabantou," said he, "this is for your rent and your most
pressing necessities. We will attend to the rest hereafter."

"May God requite it to you, my generous benefactor!" said Jondrette.

And rapidly approaching his wife:--

"Dismiss the carriage!"

She slipped out while her husband was lavishing salutes and offering
M. Leblanc a chair. An instant later she returned and whispered in his
ear:--

"'Tis done."

The snow, which had not ceased falling since the morning, was so deep
that the arrival of the fiacre had not been audible, and they did not
now hear its departure.

Meanwhile, M. Leblanc had seated himself.

Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair, facing M. Leblanc.

Now, in order to form an idea of the scene which is to follow, let the
reader picture to himself in his own mind, a cold night, the solitudes
of the Salpêtrière covered with snow and white as winding-sheets in
the moonlight, the taper-like lights of the street lanterns which shone
redly here and there along those tragic boulevards, and the long rows
of black elms, not a passer-by for perhaps a quarter of a league around,
the Gorbeau hovel, at its highest pitch of silence, of horror, and of
darkness; in that building, in the midst of those solitudes, in the
midst of that darkness, the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a single
candle, and in that den two men seated at a table, M. Leblanc tranquil,
Jondrette smiling and alarming, the Jondrette woman, the female wolf,
in one corner, and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, erect, not
losing a word, not missing a single movement, his eye on the watch, and
pistol in hand.

However, Marius experienced only an emotion of horror, but no fear. He
clasped the stock of the pistol firmly and felt reassured. "I shall be
able to stop that wretch whenever I please," he thought.

He felt that the police were there somewhere in ambuscade, waiting for
the signal agreed upon and ready to stretch out their arm.

Moreover, he was in hopes, that this violent encounter between Jondrette
and M. Leblanc would cast some light on all the things which he was
interested in learning.



CHAPTER XIX--OCCUPYING ONE'S SELF WITH OBSCURE DEPTHS

Hardly was M. Leblanc seated, when he turned his eyes towards the
pallets, which were empty.

"How is the poor little wounded girl?" he inquired.

"Bad," replied Jondrette with a heart-broken and grateful smile, "very
bad, my worthy sir. Her elder sister has taken her to the Bourbe to
have her hurt dressed. You will see them presently; they will be back
immediately."

"Madame Fabantou seems to me to be better," went on M. Leblanc, casting
his eyes on the eccentric costume of the Jondrette woman, as she stood
between him and the door, as though already guarding the exit, and gazed
at him in an attitude of menace and almost of combat.

"She is dying," said Jondrette. "But what do you expect, sir! She has so
much courage, that woman has! She's not a woman, she's an ox."

The Jondrette, touched by his compliment, deprecated it with the
affected airs of a flattered monster.

"You are always too good to me, Monsieur Jondrette!"

"Jondrette!" said M. Leblanc, "I thought your name was Fabantou?"

"Fabantou, alias Jondrette!" replied the husband hurriedly. "An artistic
sobriquet!"

And launching at his wife a shrug of the shoulders which M. Leblanc did
not catch, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection of
voice:--

"Ah! we have had a happy life together, this poor darling and I! What
would there be left for us if we had not that? We are so wretched, my
respectable sir! We have arms, but there is no work! We have the will,
no work! I don't know how the government arranges that, but, on my word
of honor, sir, I am not Jacobin, sir, I am not a bousingot.30 I don't
wish them any evil, but if I were the ministers, on my most sacred word,
things would be different. Here, for instance, I wanted to have my
girls taught the trade of paper-box makers. You will say to me: 'What!
a trade?' Yes! A trade! A simple trade! A bread-winner! What a fall,
my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we have been!
Alas! There is nothing left to us of our days of prosperity! One thing
only, a picture, of which I think a great deal, but which I am willing
to part with, for I must live! Item, one must live!"

While Jondrette thus talked, with an apparent incoherence which
detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression of his
physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at the other end of
the room a person whom he had not seen before. A man had just entered,
so softly that the door had not been heard to turn on its hinges. This
man wore a violet knitted vest, which was old, worn, spotted, cut and
gaping at every fold, wide trousers of cotton velvet, wooden shoes on
his feet, no shirt, had his neck bare, his bare arms tattooed, and his
face smeared with black. He had seated himself in silence on the nearest
bed, and, as he was behind Jondrette, he could only be indistinctly
seen.

That sort of magnetic instinct which turns aside the gaze, caused M.
Leblanc to turn round almost at the same moment as Marius. He could not
refrain from a gesture of surprise which did not escape Jondrette.

"Ah! I see!" exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with an air of
complaisance, "you are looking at your overcoat? It fits me! My faith,
but it fits me!"

"Who is that man?" said M. Leblanc.

"Him?" ejaculated Jondrette, "he's a neighbor of mine. Don't pay any
attention to him."

The neighbor was a singular-looking individual. However, manufactories
of chemical products abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many of the
workmen might have black faces. Besides this, M. Leblanc's whole person
was expressive of candid and intrepid confidence.

He went on:--

"Excuse me; what were you saying, M. Fabantou?"

"I was telling you, sir, and dear protector," replied Jondrette placing
his elbows on the table and contemplating M. Leblanc with steady and
tender eyes, not unlike the eyes of the boa-constrictor, "I was telling
you, that I have a picture to sell."

A slight sound came from the door. A second man had just entered and
seated himself on the bed, behind Jondrette.

Like the first, his arms were bare, and he had a mask of ink or
lampblack.

Although this man had, literally, glided into the room, he had not been
able to prevent M. Leblanc catching sight of him.

"Don't mind them," said Jondrette, "they are people who belong in the
house. So I was saying, that there remains in my possession a valuable
picture. But stop, sir, take a look at it."

He rose, went to the wall at the foot of which stood the panel which we
have already mentioned, and turned it round, still leaving it supported
against the wall. It really was something which resembled a picture, and
which the candle illuminated, somewhat. Marius could make nothing out of
it, as Jondrette stood between the picture and him; he only saw a coarse
daub, and a sort of principal personage colored with the harsh crudity
of foreign canvasses and screen paintings.

"What is that?" asked M. Leblanc.

Jondrette exclaimed:--

"A painting by a master, a picture of great value, my benefactor! I am
as much attached to it as I am to my two daughters; it recalls souvenirs
to me! But I have told you, and I will not take it back, that I am so
wretched that I will part with it."

Either by chance, or because he had begun to feel a dawning uneasiness,
M. Leblanc's glance returned to the bottom of the room as he examined
the picture.

There were now four men, three seated on the bed, one standing near the
door-post, all four with bare arms and motionless, with faces smeared
with black. One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall, with
closed eyes, and it might have been supposed that he was asleep. He
was old; his white hair contrasting with his blackened face produced a
horrible effect. The other two seemed to be young; one wore a beard, the
other wore his hair long. None of them had on shoes; those who did not
wear socks were barefooted.

Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on these men.

"They are friends. They are neighbors," said he. "Their faces are black
because they work in charcoal. They are chimney-builders. Don't trouble
yourself about them, my benefactor, but buy my picture. Have pity on
my misery. I will not ask you much for it. How much do you think it is
worth?"

"Well," said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the eye, and with the
manner of a man who is on his guard, "it is some signboard for a tavern,
and is worth about three francs."

Jondrette replied sweetly:--

"Have you your pocket-book with you? I should be satisfied with a
thousand crowns."

M. Leblanc sprang up, placed his back against the wall, and cast a rapid
glance around the room. He had Jondrette on his left, on the side next
the window, and the Jondrette woman and the four men on his right, on
the side next the door. The four men did not stir, and did not even seem
to be looking on.

Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague
an eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have
supposed that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad
with misery.

"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette, "I
shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left for me but
to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to have my
two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade, the making of boxes
for New Year's gifts! Well! A table with a board at the end to keep the
glasses from falling off is required, then a special stove is needed, a
pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength of
the paste, according as it is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a
paring-knife to cut the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to
nail the steels, pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all that
in order to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen hours a
day! And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times!
And you can't wet the paper! And you mustn't spot anything! And you must
keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day! How do you
suppose a man is to live?"

As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing
him. M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was
fixed on the door. Marius' eager attention was transferred from one
to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: "Is this man an
idiot?" Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: "There
is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! I went down
three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz the other day for
that purpose."

All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash; the little
man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step toward M. Leblanc
and cried in a voice of thunder: "That has nothing to do with the
question! Do you know me?"



CHAPTER XX--THE TRAP

The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of
three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black
paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the
second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the
handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for slaughtering
cattle. The third, a man with thick-set shoulders, not so slender as
the first, held in his hand an enormous key stolen from the door of some
prison.

It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had been
waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the
cudgel, the thin one.

"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.

"Yes," replied the thin man.

"Where is Montparnasse?"

"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."

"Which?"

"The eldest."

"Is there a carriage at the door?"

"Yes."

"Is the team harnessed?"

"Yes."

"With two good horses?"

"Excellent."

"Is it waiting where I ordered?"

"Yes."

"Good," said Jondrette.

M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around him in
the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into, and his
head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him, moved
on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness, but there
was nothing in his air which resembled fear. He had improvised
an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant
previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had
suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the
back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.

This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a
danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous
as they are kind, both easily and simply. The father of a woman whom we
love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of that unknown man.

Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: "They are
chimney-builders," had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one
with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third
with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without
uttering a syllable. The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely
opened his eyes. The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.

Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the
direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.

Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying
it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to
him:--

"So you do not recognize me?"

M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--

"No."

Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.
Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M.
Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to
bite, he exclaimed:--

"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is
Thénardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand?
Thénardier! Now do you know me?"

An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he replied
with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,
with his accustomed placidity:--

"No more than before."

Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment
through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard,
stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: "My name is
Thénardier," Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against
the wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his heart.
Then his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot, dropped
slowly, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, "Thénardier, do you
understand?" Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol
fall. Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc,
but he had quite upset Marius. That name of Thénardier, with which M.
Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. Let the reader
recall what that name meant to him! That name he had worn on his heart,
inscribed in his father's testament! He bore it at the bottom of his
mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred injunction: "A certain
Thénardier saved my life. If my son encounters him, he will do him all
the good that lies in his power." That name, it will be remembered,
was one of the pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of
his father in his worship. What! This man was that Thénardier, that
inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought! He
had found him at last, and how? His father's saviour was a ruffian!
That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself, was
a monster! That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the point
of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet, clearly
comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! And against whom,
great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father
had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good in
his power to this Thénardier, and for four years Marius had cherished
no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father's, and at the
moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the very
act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him: "This is Thénardier!"
He could at last repay this man for his father's life, saved amid a
hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it
with the scaffold! He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that
Thénardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet;
and now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over
to the executioner! His father said to him: "Succor Thénardier!" And he
replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thénardier! He was
about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who
had torn him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the
Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to whom
he had entrusted that man by his will! And what a mockery to have so
long worn on his breast his father's last commands, written in his own
hand, only to act in so horribly contrary a sense! But, on the other
hand, now look on that trap and not prevent it! Condemn the victim and
to spare the assassin! Could one be held to any gratitude towards so
miserable a wretch? All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the
last four years were pierced through and through, as it were, by this
unforeseen blow.

He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves, he
held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before his
eyes. If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thénardier lost;
if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who knows?
Thénardier would escape. Should he dash down the one or allow the other
to fall? Remorse awaited him in either case.

What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most imperious
souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty,
to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father's testament,
or allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it seemed to him
that he heard "his Ursule" supplicating for her father and on the other,
the colonel commending Thénardier to his care. He felt that he was going
mad. His knees gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for
deliberation, so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes
was hastening to its catastrophe. It was like a whirlwind of which he
had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away. He
was on the verge of swooning.

In the meantime, Thénardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other
name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy
and wild triumph.

He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with
so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the
tallow bespattered the wall.

Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these
words:--

"Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!"

And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.

"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!
Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls! you old
ninny! Ah! so you don't recognize me! No, it wasn't you who came to
Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823! It
wasn't you who carried off that Fantine's child from me! The Lark! It
wasn't you who had a yellow great-coat! No! Nor a package of duds in
your hand, as you had this morning here! Say, wife, it seems to be his
mania to carry packets of woollen stockings into houses! Old charity
monger, get out with you! Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire? You
give away your stock in trade to the poor, holy man! What bosh! merry
Andrew! Ah! and you don't recognize me? Well, I recognize you, that I
do! I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here. Ah!
you'll find out presently, that it isn't all roses to thrust yourself
in that fashion into people's houses, under the pretext that they are
taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a poor man, to whom one
would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play the generous, to take away
their means of livelihood, and to make threats in the woods, and you
can't call things quits because afterwards, when people are ruined, you
bring a coat that is too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you
old blackguard, you child-stealer!"

He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. One would
have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone;
then, as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been
saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and
shouted:--

"And with his goody-goody air!"

And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:--

"Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my
misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and
who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a
great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live
on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that
I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual
row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all
the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it!
Well, never mind! Say, now! You must have thought me ridiculous when you
went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest. You were the
stronger. Revenge. I'm the one to hold the trumps to-day! You're in a
sorry case, my good fellow! Oh, but I can laugh! Really, I laugh! Didn't
he fall into the trap! I told him that I was an actor, that my name was
Fabantou, that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle
Muche, that my landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of
February, and he didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the
4th of February is the time when the quarter runs out! Absurd idiot!
And the four miserable Philippes which he has brought me! Scoundrel!
He hadn't the heart even to go as high as a hundred francs! And how
he swallowed my platitudes! That did amuse me. I said to myself:
'Blockhead! Come, I've got you! I lick your paws this morning, but I'll
gnaw your heart this evening!'"

Thénardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted
like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a
feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last,
harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of
a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the
joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead
that he can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer
still.

M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:--

"I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am a very
poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you. You are
mistaking me for some other person."

"Ah!" roared Thénardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie! You stick to that
pleasantry, do you! You're floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don't
remember! You don't see who I am?"

"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at
that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see that you are
a villain!"

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word
"villain," the female Thénardier sprang from the bed, Thénardier grasped
his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you
stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--

"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!
it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no
bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It's three
days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! Ah! you folks
warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats,
like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have
porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch
in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when
you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what
the engineer Chevalier's thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are
thermometers. We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner
of the Tour de l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;
we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our
hearts, and we say: 'There is no God!' And you come to our caverns, yes
our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But we'll devour
you! But we'll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister
millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have
been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it's quite possible
that you are not!"

Here Thénardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door, and
added with a shudder:--

"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me like a
cobbler!"

Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:--

"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I'm not a suspicious
character, not a bit of it! I'm not a man whose name nobody knows, and
who comes and abducts children from houses! I'm an old French soldier,
I ought to have been decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the
battle I saved a general called the Comte of I don't know what. He told
me his name, but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear. All I
caught was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks.
That would have helped me to find him again. The picture that you see
here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,--do you know what
it represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize that
feat of prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am carrying him
through the grape-shot. There's the history of it! That general never
did a single thing for me; he was no better than the rest! But none the
less, I saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have the certificate
of the fact in my pocket! I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies!
And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an
end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous
lot of money, or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!"

Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish, and was
listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. It certainly
was the Thénardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that reproach of
ingratitude directed against his father, and which he was on the point
of so fatally justifying. His perplexity was redoubled.

Moreover, there was in all these words of Thénardier, in his accent, in
his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word, there
was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that
mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage
and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in
that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights
of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that
conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something
which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as the truth.

The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had proposed
that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else, as the reader has
divined, than the sign of his tavern painted, as it will be remembered,
by himself, the only relic which he had preserved from his shipwreck at
Montfermeil.

As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could examine
this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize a battle, a
background of smoke, and a man carrying another man. It was the group
composed of Pontmercy and Thénardier; the sergeant the rescuer, the
colonel rescued. Marius was like a drunken man; this picture restored
his father to life in some sort; it was no longer the signboard of the
wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection; a tomb had yawned, a
phantom had risen there. Marius heard his heart beating in his temples,
he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bleeding father, vaguely
depicted on that sinister panel terrified him, and it seemed to him that
the misshapen spectre was gazing intently at him.

When Thénardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot eyes
on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:--

"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"

M. Leblanc held his peace.

In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this lugubrious
sarcasm from the corridor:--

"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"

It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.

At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made its
appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited not teeth,
but fangs.

It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.

"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thénardier in a rage.

"For fun," retorted the man.

For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and
following all the movements of Thénardier, who, blinded and dazzled by
his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full confidence
that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed man fast, he being
armed himself, of being nine against one, supposing that the female
Thénardier counted for but one man.

During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned his back
to M. Leblanc.

M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and
the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,
before Thénardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window. To
open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work of a second
only. He was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged
him back energetically into the hovel. These were the three
"chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him. At the same time
the Thénardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.

At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up from the
corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed under the influence
of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up, with a
stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.

One of the "chimney-builders," whose smirched face was lighted up by
the candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing,
Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M. Leblanc's
head a sort of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a
bar of iron.

Marius could not resist this sight. "My father," he thought, "forgive
me!"

And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.

The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thénardier's voice
shouted:--

"Don't harm him!"

This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thénardier,
had calmed him. There existed in him two men, the ferocious man and
the adroit man. Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph in the
presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did not
stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled and
tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.

"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first
success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged, and to
paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the case disappeared,
and who, in the face of this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting
a while longer.

Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him
from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish, or
of destroying the colonel's saviour?

A herculean struggle had begun. With one blow full in the chest, M.
Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of the
room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown two
more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches
were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure as under a granite
millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by both
arms and the back of his neck, and were holding him doubled up over the
two "chimney-builders" on the floor.

Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those
beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in vain
to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him, M. Leblanc
disappeared under the horrible group of ruffians like the wild boar
beneath a howling pile of dogs and hounds.

They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window, and
there they held him in awe. The Thénardier woman had not released her
clutch on his hair.

"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thénardier. "You'll
tear your shawl."

The Thénardier obeyed, as the female wolf obeys the male wolf, with a
growl.

"Now," said Thénardier, "search him, you other fellows!"

M. Leblanc seemed to have renounced the idea of resistance.

They searched him.

He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing six
francs, and his handkerchief.

Thénardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.

"What! No pocket-book?" he demanded.

"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."

"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key, in the
voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."

Thénardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle of ropes
and threw them at the men.

"Tie him to the leg of the bed," said he.

And, catching sight of the old man who had been stretched across the
room by the blow from M. Leblanc's fist, and who made no movement, he
added:--

"Is Boulatruelle dead?"

"No," replied Bigrenaille, "he's drunk."

"Sweep him into a corner," said Thénardier.

Two of the "chimney-builders" pushed the drunken man into the corner
near the heap of old iron with their feet.

"Babet," said Thénardier in a low tone to the man with the cudgel, "why
did you bring so many; they were not needed."

"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted to
be in it. This is a bad season. There's no business going on."

The pallet on which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort of hospital
bed, elevated on four coarse wooden legs, roughly hewn.

M. Leblanc let them take their own course.

The ruffians bound him securely, in an upright attitude, with his feet
on the ground at the head of the bed, the end which was most remote from
the window, and nearest to the fireplace.

When the last knot had been tied, Thénardier took a chair and seated
himself almost facing M. Leblanc.

Thénardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few moments
his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil and cunning
sweetness.

Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile of a man
in official life the almost bestial mouth which had been foaming but a
moment before; he gazed with amazement on that fantastic and alarming
metamorphosis, and he felt as a man might feel who should behold a tiger
converted into a lawyer.

"Monsieur--" said Thénardier.

And dismissing with a gesture the ruffians who still kept their hands on
M. Leblanc:--

"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."

All retired towards the door.

He went on:--

"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window. You might
have broken your leg. Now, if you will permit me, we will converse
quietly. In the first place, I must communicate to you an observation
which I have made which is, that you have not uttered the faintest cry."

Thénardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had escaped
Marius in his agitation. M. Leblanc had barely pronounced a few words,
without raising his voice, and even during his struggle with the six
ruffians near the window he had preserved the most profound and singular
silence.

Thénardier continued:--

"Mon Dieu! You might have shouted 'stop thief' a bit, and I should not
have thought it improper. 'Murder!' That, too, is said occasionally,
and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken it in bad part.
It is very natural that you should make a little row when you find
yourself with persons who don't inspire you with sufficient confidence.
You might have done that, and no one would have troubled you on that
account. You would not even have been gagged. And I will tell you why.
This room is very private. That's its only recommendation, but it has
that in its favor. You might fire off a mortar and it would produce
about as much noise at the nearest police station as the snores of a
drunken man. Here a cannon would make a _boum_, and the thunder would
make a _pouf_. It's a handy lodging. But, in short, you did not shout,
and it is better so. I present you my compliments, and I will tell
you the conclusion that I draw from that fact: My dear sir, when a man
shouts, who comes? The police. And after the police? Justice. Well!
You have not made an outcry; that is because you don't care to have the
police and the courts come in any more than we do. It is because,--I
have long suspected it,--you have some interest in hiding something. On
our side we have the same interest. So we can come to an understanding."

As he spoke thus, it seemed as though Thénardier, who kept his eyes
fixed on M. Leblanc, were trying to plunge the sharp points which darted
from the pupils into the very conscience of his prisoner. Moreover, his
language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated, subdued insolence
and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice, and in that
rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time previously, one
now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."

The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had been
carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his own life, that
resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature, which is to utter
a cry, all this, it must be confessed, now that his attention had
been called to it, troubled Marius, and affected him with painful
astonishment.

Thénardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for Marius
the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular person on whom
Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.

But whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded with executioners, half
plunged, so to speak, in a grave which was closing in upon him to the
extent of a degree with every moment that passed, in the presence
of Thénardier's wrath, as in the presence of his sweetness, this man
remained impassive; and Marius could not refrain from admiring at such a
moment the superbly melancholy visage.

Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror, and which
did not know the meaning of despair. Here was one of those men who
command amazement in desperate circumstances. Extreme as was the crisis,
inevitable as was the catastrophe, there was nothing here of the agony
of the drowning man, who opens his horror-filled eyes under the water.

Thénardier rose in an unpretending manner, went to the fireplace, shoved
aside the screen, which he leaned against the neighboring pallet, and
thus unmasked the brazier full of glowing coals, in which the prisoner
could plainly see the chisel white-hot and spotted here and there with
tiny scarlet stars.

Then Thénardier returned to his seat beside M. Leblanc.

"I continue," said he. "We can come to an understanding. Let us arrange
this matter in an amicable way. I was wrong to lose my temper just now,
I don't know what I was thinking of, I went a great deal too far, I said
extravagant things. For example, because you are a millionnaire, I told
you that I exacted money, a lot of money, a deal of money. That would
not be reasonable. Mon Dieu, in spite of your riches, you have expenses
of your own--who has not? I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy
fellow, after all. I am not one of those people who, because they have
the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make themselves
ridiculous. Why, I'm taking things into consideration and making a
sacrifice on my side. I only want two hundred thousand francs."

M. Leblanc uttered not a word.

Thénardier went on:--

"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate. I
don't know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don't stick
at money, and a benevolent man like yourself can certainly give two
hundred thousand francs to the father of a family who is out of luck.
Certainly, you are reasonable, too; you haven't imagined that I should
take all the trouble I have to-day and organized this affair this
evening, which has been labor well bestowed, in the opinion of these
gentlemen, merely to wind up by asking you for enough to go and drink
red wine at fifteen sous and eat veal at Desnoyer's. Two hundred
thousand francs--it's surely worth all that. This trifle once out of
your pocket, I guarantee you that that's the end of the matter, and that
you have no further demands to fear. You will say to me: 'But I haven't
two hundred thousand francs about me.' Oh! I'm not extortionate. I don't
demand that. I only ask one thing of you. Have the goodness to write
what I am about to dictate to you."

Here Thénardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words, and
casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--

"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."

A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.

Thénardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand,
a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open, and
in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.

He placed the sheet of paper before M. Leblanc.

"Write," said he.

The prisoner spoke at last.

"How do you expect me to write? I am bound."

"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thénardier, "you are quite right."

And turning to Bigrenaille:--

"Untie the gentleman's right arm."

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, executed Thénardier's
order.

When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thénardier dipped the pen in the
ink and presented it to him.

"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our
discretion, that no human power can get you out of this, and that we
shall be really grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable
extremities. I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you,
that you will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the
letter which you are about to write shall have returned. Now, be so good
as to write."

"What?" demanded the prisoner.

"I will dictate."

M. Leblanc took the pen.

Thénardier began to dictate:--

"My daughter--"

The prisoner shuddered, and raised his eyes to Thénardier.

"Put down 'My dear daughter'--" said Thénardier.

M. Leblanc obeyed.

Thénardier continued:--

"Come instantly--"

He paused:--

"You address her as _thou_, do you not?"

"Who?" asked M. Leblanc.

"Parbleu!" cried Thénardier, "the little one, the Lark."

M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion:--

"I do not know what you mean."

"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thénardier, and he continued to
dictate:--

"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee. The person who will
deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me. I am
waiting for thee. Come with confidence."

M. Leblanc had written the whole of this.

Thénardier resumed:--

"Ah! erase 'come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose that
everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible."

M. Leblanc erased the three words.

"Now," pursued Thénardier, "sign it. What's your name?"

The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--

"For whom is this letter?"

"You know well," retorted Thénardier, "for the little one I just told
you so."

It was evident that Thénardier avoided naming the young girl in
question. He said "the Lark," he said "the little one," but he did not
pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man guarding his secret
from his accomplices. To mention the name was to deliver the whole
"affair" into their hands, and to tell them more about it than there was
any need of their knowing.

He went on:--

"Sign. What is your name?"

"Urbain Fabre," said the prisoner.

Thénardier, with the movement of a cat, dashed his hand into his pocket
and drew out the handkerchief which had been seized on M. Leblanc. He
looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.

"U. F. That's it. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign it U. F."

The prisoner signed.

"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me, I will
fold it."

That done, Thénardier resumed:--

"Address it, 'Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house. I know that you live a
long distance from here, near Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because you go
to mass there every day, but I don't know in what street. I see that
you understand your situation. As you have not lied about your name, you
will not lie about your address. Write it yourself."

The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen and
wrote:--

"Mademoiselle Fabre, at M. Urbain Fabre's, Rue Saint-Dominique-D'Enfer,
No. 17."

Thénardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.

"Wife!" he cried.

The Thénardier woman hastened to him.

"Here's the letter. You know what you have to do. There is a carriage at
the door. Set out at once, and return ditto."

And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--

"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress. You
will get up behind the fiacre. You know where you left the team?"

"Yes," said the man.

And depositing his axe in a corner, he followed Madame Thénardier.

As they set off, Thénardier thrust his head through the half-open door,
and shouted into the corridor:--

"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry two
hundred thousand francs with you!"

The Thénardier's hoarse voice replied:--

"Be easy. I have it in my bosom."

A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip was
heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.

"Good!" growled Thénardier. "They're going at a fine pace. At such a
gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters of an hour."

He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms, and presenting
his muddy boots to the brazier.

"My feet are cold!" said he.

Only five ruffians now remained in the den with Thénardier and the
prisoner.

These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces,
and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes, or
demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they
perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either wrath
or mercy, with a sort of ennui. They were crowded together in one corner
like brutes, and remained silent.

Thénardier warmed his feet.

The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity. A sombre calm had
succeeded to the wild uproar which had filled the garret but a few
moments before.

The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim
light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all those
monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.

No sound was audible except the quiet breathing of the old drunken man,
who was fast asleep.

Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle.
The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.

Who was this "little one" whom Thénardier had called the Lark? Was she
his "Ursule"? The prisoner had not seemed to be affected by that word,
"the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner in the world:
"I do not know what you mean." On the other hand, the two letters U. F.
were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre; and Ursule was no longer named
Ursule. This was what Marius perceived most clearly of all.

A sort of horrible fascination held him nailed to his post, from which
he was observing and commanding this whole scene. There he stood,
almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though annihilated by the
abominable things viewed at such close quarters. He waited, in the hope
of some incident, no matter of what nature, since he could not collect
his thoughts and did not know upon what course to decide.

"In any case," he said, "if she is the Lark, I shall see her, for the
Thénardier woman is to bring her hither. That will be the end, and then
I will give my life and my blood if necessary, but I will deliver her!
Nothing shall stop me."

Nearly half an hour passed in this manner. Thénardier seemed to be
absorbed in gloomy reflections, the prisoner did not stir. Still, Marius
fancied that at intervals, and for the last few moments, he had heard a
faint, dull noise in the direction of the prisoner.

All at once, Thénardier addressed the prisoner:

"By the way, Monsieur Fabre, I might as well say it to you at once."

These few words appeared to be the beginning of an explanation. Marius
strained his ears.

"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient. I think that the
Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural that you
should keep her. Only, listen to me a bit. My wife will go and hunt her
up with your letter. I told my wife to dress herself in the way she did,
so that your young lady might make no difficulty about following her.
They will both enter the carriage with my comrade behind. Somewhere,
outside the barrier, there is a trap harnessed to two very good horses.
Your young lady will be taken to it. She will alight from the fiacre.
My comrade will enter the other vehicle with her, and my wife will come
back here to tell us: 'It's done.' As for the young lady, no harm will
be done to her; the trap will conduct her to a place where she will be
quiet, and just as soon as you have handed over to me those little two
hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you. If you have me
arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark, that's
all."

The prisoner uttered not a syllable. After a pause, Thénardier
continued:--

"It's very simple, as you see. There'll be no harm done unless you wish
that there should be harm done. I'm telling you how things stand. I warn
you so that you may be prepared."

He paused: the prisoner did not break the silence, and Thénardier
resumed:--

"As soon as my wife returns and says to me: 'The Lark is on the way,' we
will release you, and you will be free to go and sleep at home. You see
that our intentions are not evil."

Terrible images passed through Marius' mind. What! That young girl whom
they were abducting was not to be brought back? One of those monsters
was to bear her off into the darkness? Whither? And what if it were she!

It was clear that it was she. Marius felt his heart stop beating.

What was he to do? Discharge the pistol? Place all those scoundrels in
the hands of justice? But the horrible man with the meat-axe would, none
the less, be out of reach with the young girl, and Marius reflected on
Thénardier's words, of which he perceived the bloody significance: "If
you have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the
Lark."

Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his own
love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt himself
restrained.

This frightful situation, which had already lasted above half an hour,
was changing its aspect every moment.

Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all the
most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.

The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the
den.

In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase
was heard to open and shut again.

The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.

"Here's the bourgeoise," said Thénardier.

He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thénardier woman did in fact
rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes,
and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--

"False address!"

The ruffian who had gone with her made his appearance behind her and
picked up his axe again.

She resumed:--

"Nobody there! Rue Saint-Dominique, No. 17, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre!
They know not what it means!"

She paused, choking, then went on:--

"Monsieur Thénardier! That old fellow has duped you! You are too good,
you see! If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast in four quarters
to begin with! And if he had acted ugly, I'd have boiled him alive! He
would have been obliged to speak, and say where the girl is, and where
he keeps his shiners! That's the way I should have managed matters!
People are perfectly right when they say that men are a deal stupider
than women! Nobody at No. 17. It's nothing but a big carriage gate! No
Monsieur Fabre in the Rue Saint-Dominique! And after all that racing
and fee to the coachman and all! I spoke to both the porter and the
portress, a fine, stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"

Marius breathed freely once more.

She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her, was safe.

While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thénardier had seated himself on
the table.

For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot,
which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.

Finally, he said to the prisoner, with a slow and singularly ferocious
tone:

"A false address? What did you expect to gain by that?"

"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice, and at the
same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut. The prisoner was
only attached to the bed now by one leg.

Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward,
he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand to the
brazier, and had then straightened himself up again, and now Thénardier,
the female Thénardier, and the ruffians, huddled in amazement at the
extremity of the hovel, stared at him in stupefaction, as almost free
and in a formidable attitude, he brandished above his head the red-hot
chisel, which emitted a threatening glow.

The judicial examination to which the ambush in the Gorbeau house
eventually gave rise, established the fact that a large sou piece, cut
and worked in a peculiar fashion, was found in the garret, when the
police made their descent on it. This sou piece was one of those marvels
of industry, which are engendered by the patience of the galleys in
the shadows and for the shadows, marvels which are nothing else than
instruments of escape. These hideous and delicate products of wonderful
art are to jewellers' work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry.
There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons
in language. The unhappy wretch who aspires to deliverance finds means
sometimes without tools, sometimes with a common wooden-handled knife,
to saw a sou into two thin plates, to hollow out these plates without
affecting the coinage stamp, and to make a furrow on the edge of the sou
in such a manner that the plates will adhere again. This can be screwed
together and unscrewed at will; it is a box. In this box he hides a
watch-spring, and this watch-spring, properly handled, cuts good-sized
chains and bars of iron. The unfortunate convict is supposed to possess
merely a sou; not at all, he possesses liberty. It was a large sou of
this sort which, during the subsequent search of the police, was found
under the bed near the window. They also found a tiny saw of blue steel
which would fit the sou.

It is probable that the prisoner had this sou piece on his person at the
moment when the ruffians searched him, that he contrived to conceal
it in his hand, and that afterward, having his right hand free, he
unscrewed it, and used it as a saw to cut the cords which fastened him,
which would explain the faint noise and almost imperceptible movements
which Marius had observed.

As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself, he
had not cut the bonds of his left leg.

The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.

"Be easy," said Bigrenaille to Thénardier. "He still holds by one leg,
and he can't get away. I'll answer for that. I tied that paw for him."

In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--

"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble of defending it.
When you think that you can make me speak, that you can make me write
what I do not choose to write, that you can make me say what I do not
choose to say--"

He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--

"See here."

At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel
which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.

The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor peculiar
to chambers of torture filled the hovel.

Enlarge


Marius reeled in utter horror, the very ruffians shuddered, hardly a
muscle of the old man's face contracted, and while the red-hot iron
sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed on
Thénardier his beautiful glance, in which there was no hatred, and where
suffering vanished in serene majesty.

With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses
when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth, and
make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery force
the captain to show himself.

"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"

And, tearing the chisel from the wound, he hurled it through the window,
which had been left open; the horrible, glowing tool disappeared into
the night, whirling as it flew, and fell far away on the snow.

The prisoner resumed:--

"Do what you please with me." He was disarmed.

"Seize him!" said Thénardier.

Two of the ruffians laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked
man with the ventriloquist's voice took up his station in front of him,
ready to smash his skull at the slightest movement.

At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition,
but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy
conducted in a low tone:--

"There is only one thing left to do."

"Cut his throat."

"That's it."

It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.

Thénardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer, and
took out the knife. Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol.
Unprecedented perplexity! For the last hour he had had two voices in his
conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father's testament, the
other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. These two voices continued
uninterruptedly that struggle which tormented him to agony. Up to that
moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means
of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of
possibility had presented itself.

However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had been
reached; Thénardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces distant from
the prisoner.

Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource of
despair. All at once a shudder ran through him.

At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full moon
illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper. On this
paper he read the following line written that very morning, in large
letters, by the eldest of the Thénardier girls:--

"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."

An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient of which
he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was
torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.

He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the sheet of
paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall, wrapped the paper
round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice into the middle of
the den.

It was high time. Thénardier had conquered his last fears or his last
scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.

"Something is falling!" cried the Thénardier woman.

"What is it?" asked her husband.

The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster. She handed it
to her husband.

"Where did this come from?" demanded Thénardier.

"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from?
Through the window, of course."

"I saw it pass," said Bigrenaille.

Thénardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.

"It's in Éponine's handwriting. The devil!"

He made a sign to his wife, who hastily drew near, and showed her the
line written on the sheet of paper, then he added in a subdued voice:--

"Quick! The ladder! Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap and decamp!"

"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thénardier woman.

"We haven't the time."

"Through what?" resumed Bigrenaille.

"Through the window," replied Thénardier. "Since Ponine has thrown the
stone through the window, it indicates that the house is not watched on
that side."

The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key on the
floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched his fists,
three times rapidly without uttering a word.

This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks for action on
board ship.

The ruffians who were holding the prisoner released him; in the
twinkling of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled outside the window, and
solidly fastened to the sill by the two iron hooks.

The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on around him. He
seemed to be dreaming or praying.

As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thénardier cried:

"Come! the bourgeoise first!"

And he rushed headlong to the window.

But just as he was about to throw his leg over, Bigrenaille seized him
roughly by the collar.

"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"

"After us!" yelled the ruffians.

"You are children," said Thénardier, "we are losing time. The police are
on our heels."

"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go down
first."

Thénardier exclaimed:--

"Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a pack of boobies! You want to waste
time, do you? Draw lots, do you? By a wet finger, by a short straw! With
written names! Thrown into a hat!--"

"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.

All wheeled round. It was Javert.

He had his hat in his hand, and was holding it out to them with a smile.



CHAPTER XXI--ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS

At nightfall, Javert had posted his men and had gone into ambush himself
between the trees of the Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins which faced
the Gorbeau house, on the other side of the boulevard. He had begun
operations by opening "his pockets," and dropping into it the two young
girls who were charged with keeping a watch on the approaches to the
den. But he had only "caged" Azelma. As for Éponine, she was not at her
post, she had disappeared, and he had not been able to seize her. Then
Javert had made a point and had bent his ear to waiting for the signal
agreed upon. The comings and goings of the fiacres had greatly agitated
him. At last, he had grown impatient, and, _sure that there was a nest
there_, sure of being in "luck," having recognized many of the ruffians
who had entered, he had finally decided to go upstairs without waiting
for the pistol-shot.

It will be remembered that he had Marius' pass-key.

He had arrived just in the nick of time.

The terrified ruffians flung themselves on the arms which they had
abandoned in all the corners at the moment of flight. In less than a
second, these seven men, horrible to behold, had grouped themselves in
an attitude of defence, one with his meat-axe, another with his key,
another with his bludgeon, the rest with shears, pincers, and hammers.
Thénardier had his knife in his fist. The Thénardier woman snatched up
an enormous paving-stone which lay in the angle of the window and served
her daughters as an ottoman.

Enlarge


Javert put on his hat again, and advanced a couple of paces into the
room, with arms folded, his cane under one arm, his sword in its sheath.

"Halt there," said he. "You shall not go out by the window, you shall go
through the door. It's less unhealthy. There are seven of you, there
are fifteen of us. Don't let's fall to collaring each other like men of
Auvergne."

Bigrenaille drew out a pistol which he had kept concealed under his
blouse, and put it in Thénardier's hand, whispering in the latter's
ear:--

"It's Javert. I don't dare fire at that man. Do you dare?"

"Parbleu!" replied Thénardier.

"Well, then, fire."

Thénardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert.

Javert, who was only three paces from him, stared intently at him and
contented himself with saying:--

"Come now, don't fire. You'll miss fire."

Thénardier pulled the trigger. The pistol missed fire.

"Didn't I tell you so!" ejaculated Javert.

Bigrenaille flung his bludgeon at Javert's feet.

"You're the emperor of the fiends! I surrender."

"And you?" Javert asked the rest of the ruffians.

They replied:--

"So do we."

Javert began again calmly:--

"That's right, that's good, I said so, you are nice fellows."

"I only ask one thing," said Bigrenaille, "and that is, that I may not
be denied tobacco while I am in confinement."

"Granted," said Javert.

And turning round and calling behind him:--

"Come in now!"

A squad of policemen, sword in hand, and agents armed with bludgeons and
cudgels, rushed in at Javert's summons. They pinioned the ruffians.

This throng of men, sparely lighted by the single candle, filled the den
with shadows.

"Handcuff them all!" shouted Javert.

"Come on!" cried a voice which was not the voice of a man, but of which
no one would ever have said: "It is a woman's voice."

The Thénardier woman had entrenched herself in one of the angles of the
window, and it was she who had just given vent to this roar.

The policemen and agents recoiled.

She had thrown off her shawl, but retained her bonnet; her husband, who
was crouching behind her, was almost hidden under the discarded
shawl, and she was shielding him with her body, as she elevated the
paving-stone above her head with the gesture of a giantess on the point
of hurling a rock.

"Beware!" she shouted.

All crowded back towards the corridor. A broad open space was cleared in
the middle of the garret.

The Thénardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who had allowed
themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in hoarse and guttural
accents:--

"The cowards!"

Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which the Thénardier
was devouring with her eyes.

"Don't come near me," she cried, "or I'll crush you."

"What a grenadier!" ejaculated Javert; "you've got a beard like a man,
mother, but I have claws like a woman."

And he continued to advance.

The Thénardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart, threw
herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert's head. Javert
ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind, knocked off a
huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle to angle across the
hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at Javert's feet.

At the same moment, Javert reached the Thénardier couple. One of his
big hands descended on the woman's shoulder; the other on the husband's
head.

"The handcuffs!" he shouted.

The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert's order
had been executed.

The Thénardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands, and
at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor, and exclaimed,
weeping:--

"My daughters!"

"They are in the jug," said Javert.

In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man asleep
behind the door, and were shaking him:--

He awoke, stammering:--

"Is it all over, Jondrette?"

"Yes," replied Javert.

The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their
spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.

"Keep on your masks," said Javert.

And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II. at a Potsdam
parade, he said to the three "chimney-builders":--

"Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!"

Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with the
meat-axe:--

"Good day, Gueulemer!"

And to the man with the cudgel:--

"Good day, Babet!"

And to the ventriloquist:--

"Your health, Claquesous."

At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians' prisoner, who, ever
since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word, and had held
his head down.

"Untie the gentleman!" said Javert, "and let no one go out!"

That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,
where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a
stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.

When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never vary,
he raised his eyes:--

"Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."

The policemen glanced round them.

"Well," said Javert, "where is he?"

The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre, the father of
Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.

The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he had found
himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing up his
report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd, the darkness,
and of a moment when the general attention was diverted from him, to
dash out of the window.

An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.

The rope ladder was still shaking.

"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have been the
most valuable of the lot."



CHAPTER XXII--THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO

On the day following that on which these events took place in the house
on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, a child, who seemed to be coming from the
direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the side-alley on
the right in the direction of the Barrière de Fontainebleau.

Night had fully come.

This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers in the month
of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.

At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern; the
child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--

"Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"

He pronounced the word _enormous_ the second time with a jeering swell
of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: "an
enormous, ENORMOUS dog."

The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.

"Nasty brat!" she grumbled. "If I hadn't been bending over, I know well
where I would have planted my foot on you."

The boy was already far away.

"Kisss! kisss!" he cried. "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"

The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face, all
hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the corners
of her mouth.

Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One
would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light
from the night.

The boy surveyed her.

"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which pleases
me."

He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--


              "Le roi Coupdesabot
              S'en allait à la chasse,
              À la chasse aux corbeaux--"

At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front of
No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it with
resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's shoes that
he was wearing than the child's feet which he owned.

In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at the
corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him, uttering
clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.

"What's this? What's this? Lord God! He's battering the door down! He's
knocking the house down."

The kicks continued.

The old woman strained her lungs.

"Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?"

All at once she paused.

She had recognized the gamin.

"What! so it's that imp!"

"Why, it's the old lady," said the lad. "Good day, Bougonmuche. I have
come to see my ancestors."

The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful
improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,
which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:--

"There's no one here."

"Bah!" retorted the boy, "where's my father?"

"At La Force."

"Come, now! And my mother?"

"At Saint-Lazare."

"Well! And my sisters?"

"At the Madelonettes."

The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon, and
said:--

"Ah!"

Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman,
who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear, young
voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--


              "Le roi Coupdesabot
              S'en allait à la chasse,
              À la chasse aux corbeaux,
              Monté sur deux échasses.
              Quand on passait dessous,
              On lui payait deux sous."<a href="#linknote-31" name="linknoteref-31"
      id="linknoteref-31">31</a>


[THE END OF VOLUME III. "MARIUS"]



VOLUME IV.--SAINT-DENIS.

Enlarge


Enlarge


THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS



BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY



CHAPTER I--WELL CUT

 1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried shining there.

This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to
be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal
lines even at the present day.

We shall make the attempt.

The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to
define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult,
and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a
halting-place.

These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to
convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but
repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,
to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great
events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we
have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would
exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "What
a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have
reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first
change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with
Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.

Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which
are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,
what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of
tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the same
time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in
their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, they
are, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,
and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts are
the stewards of the household and fouriers32 who do nothing but prepare
lodgings for principles.

This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--

At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand
guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.

This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this
is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.

These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.
Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things which
gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts
did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a
glimpse of in 1814.

The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had
the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, and
that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House of
Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing, and
that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was
merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of
Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should
please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have
felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come
from it.

This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an
ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a
trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked
glum. The people saw this.

It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive that
it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not perceive
that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.

It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;
it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots
of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.
These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,
but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the
throne.

The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in
her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the
Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there
had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how
should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reigned
on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the
battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes been
so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authority
which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here below
which is called the right of kings denied to such a point the right from
on high.

A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more on the
guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it termed them.
Sad. A sad thing! What it termed its concessions were our conquests;
what it termed our encroachments were our rights.

When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration, supposing
itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in the country, that is
to say, believing itself to be strong and deep, abruptly decided on its
plan of action, and risked its stroke. One morning it drew itself up
before the face of France, and, elevating its voice, it contested the
collective title and the individual right of the nation to sovereignty,
of the citizen to liberty. In other words, it denied to the nation
that which made it a nation, and to the citizen that which made him a
citizen.

This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the
ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.

It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to
all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it
alongside.

Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm
discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur
in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and
strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of
Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon
had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles
X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind
ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the
pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and
charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles
which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be
seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the
law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the
accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until
1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the
hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but
on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but
without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those
solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; it
was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream of
Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and
retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They
lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. Charles
X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cut
over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled
etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened
devoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored their
race. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with
weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possession
of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself,
restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government to
law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old king
Charles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. and
set him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only with
sadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, it
was France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her
victory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,
before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume du
Vair after the day of the Barricades:--

"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors of the
great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough, from an afflicted
fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves harsh towards their
Prince in his adversity; but as for me, the fortune of my Kings and
especially of my afflicted Kings, will always be venerable to me."

The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. As we have
just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded out
in the horizon.

The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout the
entire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm, the
others turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,
the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes, wounded
and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. A fright which can be
comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. This strange revolution had
hardly produced a shock; it had not even paid to vanquished royalty the
honor of treating it as an enemy, and of shedding its blood. In the eyes
of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty
calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being
formidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted or
plotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated, the most
trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, a
mysterious respect springs from events in which we are sensible of the
collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. A
thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of
1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of being
violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The
fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, and
if it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infallibly
destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,
even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of
hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,
let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a
demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact.
And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the
fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the
presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with the
humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the fact
and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.



CHAPTER II--BADLY SEWED

But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to
prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title
of Statesmen; so that this word, _statesmen_, has ended by becoming
somewhat of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that
wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. To
say "the skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."

In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent to saying
"traitors." If, then, we are to believe the skilful, revolutions like
the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt ligature is
indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken. Also, right
once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened. Liberty once assured,
attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful, but they
begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the first place, what
is power? In the second, whence comes it? The skilful do not seem to
hear the murmured objection, and they continue their manouvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the mask
of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement of a people
after a revolution, when this people forms part of a monarchical
continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty. In this way, say they,
peace, that is to say, time to dress our wounds, and to repair
the house, can be had after a revolution. The dynasty conceals the
scaffolding and covers the ambulance. Now, it is not always easy to
procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of a
king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make a
dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity in
a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his own
person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it, that
he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein, that
he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is to
say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed, but by
reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past and be historic;
be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves with
finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second absolutely
insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick or the House of
Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success the
sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may tremble
from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken, to augment
the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress, to dull
that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to
cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to envelop
the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very speedily, to
impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on the treatment
of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the expedient, to offer to
spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar thinned out with a potion,
to take one's precautions against too much success, to garnish the
revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right.
Now, logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the
candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will be
satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the
bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the
people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair
is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is not
one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which that part
of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock
of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and
laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber
which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams; it was
the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double and almost contradictory
sense: a troop on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is
to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on the
alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels and holds
itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of
to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man who
should express this word Halt. An Although-Because. A composite
individuality, signifying revolution and signifying stability, in other
terms, strengthening the present by the evident compatibility of the
past with the future.

This man was "already found." His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it _the best of republics_. The town-hall of Paris took the
place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work of
1830."

When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their solution became
apparent. All this had been accomplished outside the bounds of absolute
right. Absolute right cried: "I protest!" then, terrible to say, it
retired into the darkness.



CHAPTER III--LOUIS PHILIPPE

Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly and
choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced to the
state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearly
always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them from
falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may be
deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In the
establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been
cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a
rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of
blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful
of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing
the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene,
peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his
wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing
the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular
sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate
displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and,
what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking
them; an admirable representative of the "middle class," but
outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent
sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting
most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,
very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly
the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene
Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in
public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at
bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own
fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman,
but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and
his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly
cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest
range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of
superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to
put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under
thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but
with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in
countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!
Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming
more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a
disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves
politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society
from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious,
indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the
lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain,
bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise
with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste
for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to
chimæras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms
of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes;
attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling. Brave as a
grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the
chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political
adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising
his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an
intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not
with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is
to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating
good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing
incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Cæsar,
Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper
names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the
crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of
souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with
France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too
much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out
of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas;
mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and
organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the
founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and
something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a
prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness
of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe
will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be
ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved
glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to
the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained
graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the
masses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he
wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new; a
mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis Philippe
was transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient pronunciation
and the ancient orthography which he placed at the service of opinions
modern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote _les Polonois_, and
he pronounced _les Hongrais_. He wore the uniform of the national guard,
like Charles X., and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.
Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers; this
made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went out
with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part of
his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, something
of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse; Louis
Philippe no more went about without his lancet, than did Henri IV.
without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, the
first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to be
made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the reign,
that which accuses the King; three columns which all give different
totals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a matter of
secondary interest, the protests of the street violently repressed,
military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over by arms, the
Rue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of the real
country by the legal country, on half shares with three hundred thousand
privileged persons,--these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused,
Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the
English, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith, to
Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are the doings
of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than national was the
doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of
everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,
which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their
civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of
admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of Louis
Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name of her race among
artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it among poets. She made of
her soul a marble which she named Jeanne d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's
daughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: "They are young people
such as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never seen."

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, is
the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of
the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of the
revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein lay
the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more complete
adaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the other, and the
incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he
had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had
been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In
Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in France had
sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave
lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and
sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage of
Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI., and used by Louis XV. He was the
companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged
to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton
had said to him: "Young man!" At the age of four and twenty, in '93,
being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the depth of a box,
the trial of Louis XVI., so well named _that poor tyrant_. The blind
clairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the
King with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal, the
public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply, the
alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that sombre
breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe, of those
who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked on those
things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen the centuries
appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he had beheld, behind
Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made responsible, the
terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the shadows; and there had
lingered in his soul the respectful fear of these immense justices of
the populace, which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was
like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,
in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he
rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical list
of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the
press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.
The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the
gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the
light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as yet,
only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has
not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a definite
judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian Louis Blanc
has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis Philippe was
elected by those two _almosts_ which are called the 221 and 1830, that
is to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution; and in any case,
from the superior point of view where philosophy must place itself, we
cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above, except with certain
reservations in the name of the absolute democratic principle; in the
eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the right of man in the
first place, the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation;
but what we can say, even at the present day, that after making these
reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is
considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language of ancient
history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the
king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times
even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravest
souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the
continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted
with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a death
sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering
it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still
greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He obstinately
maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the
ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys,
those _chatterers of the law_, as he called them. Sometimes the pile of
sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was anguish to
him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he said to
the same witness to whom we have recently referred: "I won seven last
night." During the early years of his reign, the death penalty was
as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violence
committed against the King. The Grève having disappeared with the elder
branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the name
of the Barrière-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity of
a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories of
Casimir Périer, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie,
over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe
annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he
exclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have
pardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by
his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is
one of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it
only remains for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis
IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by
others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present
day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before
history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently and
above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a dead
man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the
same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly to
be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: "This one
flattered the other."



CHAPTER IV--CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION

At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point of
penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop
the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary that there
should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that this book should
offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a
revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the
Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orléans, exercised no personal
initiative. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have
been elected King. He had not served this mandate on himself; he had not
taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it; convinced,
wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in
accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance
with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we say it in
good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect good
faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack, the amount
of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither on the
King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles resembles a clash of
elements. The ocean defends the water, the hurricane defends the
air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends the people; the
relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the
republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that which constitutes
its suffering to-day will constitute its safety later on; and, in any
case, those who combat are not to be blamed; one of the two parties is
evidently mistaken; the right is not, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on
two shores at once, with one foot on the republic, and one in Royalty;
it is indivisible, and all on one side; but those who are in error are
so sincerely; a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a
ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it
was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague movements
of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so lacking in
solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the
preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and from
being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of
France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have
said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of it;
translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense.
Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most sagacious, the
calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with
their text, the task has long been completed; there are already twenty
translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party,
and from each misinterpretation a faction; and each party thinks that it
alone has the true text, and each faction thinks that it possesses the
light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are
the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think
that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the
right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one
who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely
the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,
contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists
sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives
even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A
revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it
must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of
1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors
make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable
spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this
revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: "Revolution, why this
king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from
them, this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the
establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at
loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the other
hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe. To
keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony established
contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. From this secret
conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace,
that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the
European cabinets is suspicious in itself. The Royalty of July reared
up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the harness of European
cabinets. Metternich would gladly have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed
on in France by progress, it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers
in Europe. After having been towed, it undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education,
penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery,
production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights of
capital, the rights of labor,--all these questions were multiplied above
society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement became
manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic fermentation.
The elect felt troubled as well as the masses; in another manner, but
quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,
others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social
questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who
tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly
disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they caught
glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated
epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights, they
occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from
society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization, such
as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great deal by
the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics. These men
who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be
designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that
rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not
here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view, the
questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves to indicating them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic
visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two
principal problems.

First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must
be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without, individual
happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation
great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth
admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on
one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence,
monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the
rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly,
feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which
sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State
in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in
which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral
element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made
by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore
impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is
not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The
two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will
be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like
England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man. You will die
by an act of violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England
will fall. And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely
selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a
virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England, we
designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will live
again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is
immortal. That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by
the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who
is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust,
mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and
compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science
the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one
and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render
property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal,
so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier
matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce
wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and
material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects which have
gone astray; that is what it sought in facts, that is what it sketched
out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account, confused
evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system of politics to be
created, which shall be in accord with the old world without too much
disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal, a situation in which it
became necessary to use Lafayette to defend Polignac, the intuition of
progress transparent beneath the revolt, the chambers and streets, the
competitions to be brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in
the Revolution, perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the
vague acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain of
his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people, his
own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully, and there were
moments when strong and courageous as he was, he was overwhelmed by the
difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade, gradually drawing
nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over ideas;
a shade which came from wraths and systems. Everything which had been
hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. At times the conscience of
the honest man resumed its breathing, so great was the discomfort
of that air in which sophisms were intermingled with truths. Spirits
trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm.
The electric tension was such that at certain instants, the first comer,
a stranger, brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.
At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July, the year
1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
de Condé engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus as
Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French Prince
and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas,
behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in
Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over
Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North no one
knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her coffin,
irritated glances watching France narrowly all over Europe, England, a
suspected ally, ready to give a push to that which was tottering and to
hurl herself on that which should fall, the peerage sheltering itself
behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law, the fleurs-de-lys
erased from the King's carriage, the cross torn from Notre Dame,
Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead in
indigence, Casimir Périer dead in the exhaustion of his power; political
and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two capitals of the
kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil;
at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same
glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in
la Vendée, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera, added the sombre roar
of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.



CHAPTER V--FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES

Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. The
fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830, petty partial
revolts had been going on here and there, which were quickly suppressed,
but ever bursting forth afresh, the sign of a vast underlying
conflagration. Something terrible was in preparation. Glimpses could be
caught of the features still indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a
possible revolution. France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning its
ebullition.

Enlarge


The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union of
the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops, grave and
stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question. There
people publicly discussed the _question of fighting or of keeping
quiet_. There were back shops where workingmen were made to swear that
they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm, and
"that they would fight without counting the number of the enemy."
This engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the
wine-shop "assumed a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand! You have
sworn!"

Sometimes they went upstairs, to a private room on the first floor,
and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made the
initiated take oaths _to render service to himself as well as to the
fathers of families_. That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. _They treated the
government with contempt_, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:--

"I don't know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not know the day
until two hours beforehand." One workman said: "There are three hundred
of us, let each contribute ten sous, that will make one hundred and
fifty francs with which to procure powder and shot."

Another said: "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.
In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government. With
twenty-five thousand men we can face them." Another said: "I don't sleep
at night, because I make cartridges all night." From time to time,
men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats" came and "caused
embarrassment," and with the air of "command," shook hands with _the
most important_, and then went away. They never stayed more than ten
minutes. Significant remarks were exchanged in a low tone: "The plot is
ripe, the matter is arranged." "It was murmured by all who were there,"
to borrow the very expression of one of those who were present. The
exaltation was such that one day, a workingman exclaimed, before the
whole wine-shop: "We have no arms!" One of his comrades replied:
"The soldiers have!" thus parodying without being aware of the fact,
Bonaparte's proclamation to the army in Italy: "When they had anything
of a more secret nature on hand," adds one report, "they did not
communicate it to each other." It is not easy to understand what they
could conceal after what they said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them, there
were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they were always
the same. In others, any one entered who wished, and the room was
so full that they were forced to stand. Some went thither through
enthusiasm and passion; others because it _was on their way to their
work_. As during the Revolution, there were patriotic women in some of
these wine-shops who embraced new-comers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."

Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue de
Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons in
the Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of wooden
broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons were removed
from the foils.

A workman said: "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't count
on me, because I am looked upon as a machine." Later on, that machine
became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
to another woman: "For a long time, there has been a strong force busy
making cartridges." In the open street, proclamation could be seen
addressed to the National Guard in the departments. One of these
proclamations was signed: _Burtot, wine-merchant_.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marché
Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from
an occult power. Groups formed around him, and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down. "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn, our
bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The breakdown
which has recently taken place in cottons has converted to us many
mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in our obscure
ranks."--"Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction, revolution or
counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer believe either in
inertia or in immobility. For the people against the people, that is the
question. There is no other."--"On the day when we cease to suit you,
break us, but up to that day, help us to march on." All this in broad
daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832, a
passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the
Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!" But beneath
Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:--

"Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly and
treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side, it preaches
revolution, it is democratic in order to escape being beaten, and
royalist so that it may not have to fight. The republicans are beasts
with feathers. Distrust the republicans, citizens of the laboring
classes."

"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very well
dressed man," who said to him: "Whither are you bound, citizen?" "Sir,"
replied the workingman, "I have not the honor of your acquaintance." "I
know you very well, however." And the man added: "Don't be alarmed, I
am an agent of the committee. You are suspected of not being quite
faithful. You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on
you." Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying: "We
shall meet again soon."

The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not
only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

"Why?"

"There is going to be a shot to fire."

Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with
evident Jacquerie:--

"Who governs us?"

"M. Philippe."

"No, it is the bourgeoisie."

The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word _Jacquerie_ in
a bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by: "We have a good plan of attack."

Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four men
who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barrière du Trône:--

"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any
more."

Who was the _he?_ Menacing obscurity.

"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
aid for tailors, Rue Mondétour, had the reputation of serving as
intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these
leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of
this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:--

"Who was your leader?"

_"I knew of none and I recognized none."_

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle
reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground
on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly
found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still
legible the following lines:--

The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections
for the different societies.

And, as a postscript:--

We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière,
No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a
gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.

What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another
paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we
reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to
these strange documents:--



 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart.  After so doing
 | | | | | | you will tear it up.  The men admitted
 | | | | | | will do the same when you have transmitted
 | | | | | | their orders to them.
 | | | | | | Health and Fraternity,
 | | | | | | u og a' fe L. |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+

It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this
find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital
letters: _quinturions, centurions, decurions, éclaireurs_ [scouts],
and the sense of the letters: _u og a' fe_, which was a date, and
meant April 15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names
followed by very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. _Bannerel_. 8 guns, 83
cartridges. A safe man.--C. _Boubière_. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.--D.
_Rollet_. 1 foil, 1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--E. _Tessier_. 1 sword, 1
cartridge-box. Exact.-- _Terreur_. 8 guns. Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure, a third
paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly, this sort of
enigmatical list:--


          Unité:  Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
          Barra.  Soize.  Salle-au-Comte.
          Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
          J. J. R.
          Caius Gracchus.
          Right of revision.  Dufond.  Four.
          Fall of the Girondists.  Derbac.  Maubuée.
          Washington.  Pinson.  1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
          Marseillaise.
          Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
          Hoche.
          Marceau.  Plato.  Arbre-Sec.
          Warsaw.  Tilly, crier of the _Populaire_.

The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew its
significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature of
the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections. To-day,
when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than history,
we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation of the
Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to the date
when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to written
notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-à-brac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this same
gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card, on which was
written the following:--


           Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . .  12 ounces.
           Sulphur   . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.
           Charcoal  . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces and a half.
           Water     . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.

The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong smell
of powder.

A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little package
on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package was taken to
the police station. It was opened, and in it were found two printed
dialogues, signed _Lahautière_, a song entitled: "Workmen, band
together," and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see how
warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Père-Lachaise and the Barrière
du Trône, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood, a
bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation of
cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of hunting-powder,
and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented evident traces of
melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon, who
was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got himself
killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing near his
bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he was in the act of
preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barrière Picpus and the Barrière Charenton in a little lane
between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there was a "Jeu
de Siam."33 One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to
the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the perspiration
of his chest had made the powder damp. He primed the pistol and added
more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the two men parted.

A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair
of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and
twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. On
the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. The
remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a
single one.

An intercepted letter read: "The day is not far distant when, within
four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms."

All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The
approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of
the government. No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean
crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peaceably to
the working-classes of what was in preparation. They said: "How is the
rising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said:
"How is your wife?"

A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: "Well, when are you
going to make the attack?"

Another shop-keeper said:--

"The attack will be made soon."

"I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there
are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a
small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris nor
in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere. Like
those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the
human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over the
country. From the associations of the Friends of the People, which was
at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of
Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day: _Pluviôse,
Year 40 of the republican era_, which was destined to survive even the
mandate of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and
which did not hesitate to bestow on its sections significant names like
the following:--


     Pikes.
     Tocsin.
     Signal cannon.
     Phrygian cap.
     January 21.
     The beggars.
     The vagabonds.
     Forward march.
     Robespierre.
     Level.
     Ça Ira.

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. These
were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. Other
associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother
societies. The members of sections complained that they were torn
asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of
the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the liberty of the press,
for individual liberty, for the instruction of the people against
indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal Workingmen which was divided
into three fractions, the levellers, the communists, the reformers.
Then the Army of the Bastilles, a sort of cohort organized on a military
footing, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by
a sub-lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never more than
five men who knew each other. Creation where precaution is combined with
audacity and which seemed stamped with the genius of Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms, the Society
of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced and repudiated
there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities, Lyons,
Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society of the Rights of
Man, the Charbonnière, and The Free Men. All had a revolutionary society
which was called the Cougourde. We have already mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than the
faubourgs. A café in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop of the
_Seven Billiards_, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served as rallying
points for the students. The Society of the Friends of the A B C
affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the Cougourde of Aix,
met, as we have seen, in the Café Musain. These same young men assembled
also, as we have stated already, in a restaurant wine-shop of the Rue
Mondétour which was called Corinthe. These meetings were secret. Others
were as public as possible, and the reader can judge of their boldness
from these fragments of an interrogatory undergone in one of the
ulterior prosecutions: "Where was this meeting held?" "In the Rue de la
Paix." "At whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?"
"Only one." "Which?" "The Manuel section." "Who was its leader?"
"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course of
attacking the government. Where did your instructions come from?" "From
the central committee."

The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Béford, Luneville, and Épinard. They
counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth, on
the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry. In Burgundy and
in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree; that is to say, a
pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like
an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees, was
quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult. Everything
was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption, however, of
the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea of this lively yet
sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists poignant distress hidden
under attic roofs; there also exist rare and ardent minds. It is
particularly in the matter of distress and intelligence that it is
dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble; for it
received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures, strikes,
slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances. In times
of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow which it deals
rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue, capable to the
highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to
explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to be only awaiting the
fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon chased
by the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very
gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the _Faubourg Antoine_, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused, possess
historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow intoxicated there
more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic spirit and an afflatus
of the future circulates there, swelling hearts and enlarging souls. The
cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine resemble those taverns of Mont
Aventine erected on the cave of the Sibyl and communicating with
the profound and sacred breath; taverns where the tables were almost
tripods, and where was drunk what Ennius calls the _sibylline wine_.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary
agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular
sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil; it can be mistaken like any
other; but, even when led astray, it remains great. We may say of it as
of the blind cyclops, _Ingens_.

In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good or evil,
according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm, there leaped
forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions, now heroic
bands.

Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men, who in the
early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling, wild, with
uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves upon ancient Paris in
an uproar, what did they want? They wanted an end to oppression, an
end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the
child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity,
bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress;
and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible
wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist,
a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of
civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with
fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed
barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of
night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but
ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling,
embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white
plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on
a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on demeanor
and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right,
of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the death penalty, of war,
glorifying in low tones and with politeness, the sword, the stake, and
the scaffold. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between
the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we
should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope.

God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes
less steep.



CHAPTER VI--ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS

It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible
catastrophe, instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Café Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical but
significant metaphors:--

"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we may
count. If combatants are required, they must be provided. It can do no
harm to have something with which to strike. Passers-by always have more
chance of being gored when there are bulls on the road than when there
are none. Let us, therefore, reckon a little on the herd. How many of us
are there? There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.
Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught unprepared. We must
go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they hold fast.
This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac, you will see the
polytechnic students. It is their day to go out. To-day is Wednesday.
Feuilly, you will see those of the Glacière, will you not? Combeferre
has promised me to go to Picpus. There is a perfect swarm and an
excellent one there. Bahorel will visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the
masons are growing lukewarm; you will bring us news from the lodge of
the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré. Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical
lecture, and feel the pulse of the medical school. Bossuet will take a
little turn in the court and talk with the young law licentiates. I will
take charge of the Cougourde myself."

"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.

"No."

"What else is there?"

"A very important thing."

"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.

"The Barrière du Maine," replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection, then he
resumed:--

"At the Barrière du Maine there are marble-workers, painters, and
journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic family,
but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter with
them for some time past. They are thinking of something else. They are
becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes. There is
urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little, but
with firmness. They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found there
between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into a glow.
For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius, who is a good
fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us. I need some one for
the Barrière du Maine. I have no one."

"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I."

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold
in the name of principle!"

"Why not?"

"Are you good for anything?"

"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.

"You do not believe in everything."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire will you do me a service?"

"Anything. I'll black your boots."

"Well, don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your
absinthe."

"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."

"You the man to go to the Barrière du Maine! You capable of it!"

"I am capable of descending the Rue de Grès, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the Rue
d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind me the
Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vieilles-Tuileries, of striding
across the boulevard, of following the Chaussée du Maine, of passing
the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that. My shoes are
capable of that."

"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"

"Not much. We only address each other as _thou_."

"What will you say to them?"

"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles."

"You?"

"I. But I don't receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I
have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution
of the year Two by heart. 'The liberty of one citizen ends where the
liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take me for a brute? I have
an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the
sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hébertist. I
can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in
hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am wild," replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man who
has taken a resolution.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go to the
Barrière du Maine."

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Café Musain. He went
out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put on a
Robespierre waistcoat.

"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. Then,
with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of
the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--

"Be easy."

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Café Musain was
deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his own
direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved the
Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met on the
plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are so numerous in
that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
in review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident. When
facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady, move heavily,
the slightest complication stops and entangles them. A phenomenon whence
arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried a luminous uplifting
beneath the gloomy skirts of the future. Who knows? Perhaps the moment
was at hand. The people were again taking possession of right, and
what a fine spectacle! The revolution was again majestically taking
possession of France and saying to the world: "The sequel to-morrow!"
Enjolras was content. The furnace was being heated. He had at that
moment a powder train of friends scattered all over Paris. He composed,
in his own mind, with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating
eloquence, Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash,
Bahorel's smile, Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's
sarcasms, a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at
once. All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barrière du Maine will not take me far
out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's? Let us have
a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on."

One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall
to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables,
men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another
voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double-six."

"Fours."

"The pig! I have no more."

"You are dead. A two."

"Six."

"Three."

"One."

"It's my move."

"Four points."

"Not much."

"It's your turn."

"I have made an enormous mistake."

"You are doing well."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]

"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it at the
beginning, the whole play would have been changed."

"A two again."

"One."

"One! Well, five."

"I haven't any."

"It was your play, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Blank."

"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two."

"One."

"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."

"Domino."

"Plague take it!"



BOOK SECOND.--ÉPONINE



CHAPTER I--THE LARK'S MEADOW

Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon whose
track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted the building,
bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches, than Marius also
glided out of the house. It was only nine o'clock in the evening. Marius
betook himself to Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable
inhabitant of the Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la
Verrerie "for political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that
epoch, insurrection liked to install itself. Marius said to Courfeyrac:
"I have come to sleep with you." Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off his
bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor, and said:
"There."

At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to the hovel,
paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon, had his books,
his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs loaded on a
hand-cart and went off without leaving his address, so that when Javert
returned in the course of the morning, for the purpose of questioning
Marius as to the events of the preceding evening, he found only Ma'am
Bougon, who answered: "Moved away!"

Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an accomplice
of the robbers who had been seized the night before. "Who would ever
have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter, "a young
man like that, who had the air of a girl!"

Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence. The first
was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he had beheld, so
close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most ferocious development,
a social deformity which is, perhaps, even more terrible than the wicked
rich man, the wicked poor man. The second was, that he did not wish
to figure in the lawsuit which would insue in all probability, and be
brought in to testify against Thénardier.

Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten, was
afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home at the time
of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him, however, but without
success.

A month passed, then another. Marius was still with Courfeyrac. He had
learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter of the
courts, that Thénardier was in close confinement. Every Monday,
Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force for
Thénardier.

As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs from
Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had ever borrowed
money. These periodical five francs were a double riddle to Courfeyrac
who lent and to Thénardier who received them. "To whom can they go?"
thought Courfeyrac. "Whence can this come to me?" Thénardier asked
himself.

Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through a
trap-door once more. He no longer saw anything before him; his life
was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly. He had for a
moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity, the young girl whom
he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father, those unknown beings,
who were his only interest and his only hope in this world; and, at the
very moment when he thought himself on the point of grasping them, a
gust had swept all these shadows away. Not a spark of certainty and
truth had been emitted even in the most terrible of collisions. No
conjecture was possible. He no longer knew even the name that he thought
he knew. It certainly was not Ursule. And the Lark was a nickname. And
what was he to think of the old man? Was he actually in hiding from
the police? The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the
vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable
that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he
disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. Why
had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he, or was he not,
the father of the young girl? Was he, in short, the man whom Thénardier
thought that he recognized? Thénardier might have been mistaken. These
formed so many insoluble problems. All this, it is true, detracted
nothing from the angelic charms of the young girl of the Luxembourg.
Heart-rending distress; Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night
over his eyes. He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not
stir. All had vanished, save love. Of love itself he had lost the
instincts and the sudden illuminations. Ordinarily, this flame which
burns us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.
But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion. He never
said to himself: "What if I were to go to such a place? What if I were
to try such and such a thing?" The girl whom he could no longer call
Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius in what direction
he should seek her. His whole life was now summed up in two words;
absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog. To see her once again;
he still aspired to this, but he no longer expected it.

To crown all, his poverty had returned. He felt that icy breath close to
him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long before
this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than
discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. A habit which is easy
to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes
severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects
the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there,
binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But too much
dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to
fall entirely from thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend
with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same
thing. Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To
replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had
supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimæras
without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one's self except
for the purpose of going off to dream. Idle production. Tumultuous and
stagnant gulf. And, in proportion as labor diminishes, needs increase.
This is a law. Man, in a state of revery, is generally prodigal and
slack; the unstrung mind cannot hold life within close bounds.

There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if
enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. But the poor
man who is generous and noble, and who does not work, is lost. Resources
are exhausted, needs crop up.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as
the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of two
holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to
throw one's self in the water.

Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written seems
strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being kindles in
the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it
beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon;
the star of the inner night. She--that was Marius' whole thought. He
meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly conscious that his old coat
was becoming an impossible coat, and that his new coat was growing old,
that his shirts were wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his
boots were giving out, and he said to himself: "If I could but see her
once again before I die!"

One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him, that her
glance had told him so, that she did not know his name, but that she did
know his soul, and that, wherever she was, however mysterious the place,
she still loved him perhaps. Who knows whether she were not thinking of
him as he was thinking of her? Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours
such as are experienced by every heart that loves, though he had no
reasons for anything but sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy,
he said to himself: "It is her thoughts that are coming to me!" Then he
added: "Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."

This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later, was
sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times resembled hope,
into his soul. From time to time, especially at that evening hour which
is the most depressing to even the dreamy, he allowed the purest, the
most impersonal, the most ideal of the reveries which filled his brain,
to fall upon a notebook which contained nothing else. He called this
"writing to her."

It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged. Quite the
contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and of moving firmly
towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with more clear-sightedness
and rectitude than ever. Marius surveyed by a calm and real, although
peculiar light, what passed before his eyes, even the most indifferent
deeds and men; he pronounced a just criticism on everything with a sort
of honest dejection and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, which
was almost wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared
on high.

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him, and
every moment he was discovering the foundation of life, of humanity, and
of destiny. Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has
given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed
the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light
has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.

The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.

However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. It
merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained to be
traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. He thought that
he already distinctly perceived the brink of the bottomless abyss.

"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"

When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on one
side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance, you reach
the Rue de la Santé, then the Glacière, and, a little while before
arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come to a sort of
field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous chain of the
boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdael would be tempted to sit down.

There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter rags
drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house, built in the
time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly pierced with dormer
windows, dilapidated palisades, a little water amid poplar-trees,
women, voices, laughter; on the horizon the Panthéon, the pole of
the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grâce, black, squat, fantastic, amusing,
magnificent, and in the background, the severe square crests of the
towers of Notre Dame.

As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither. Hardly one cart
or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.

It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of
ground, near the water. That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty of
the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"

The person replied: "It is the Lark's meadow."

And he added: "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry."

But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more. These sudden
congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices to
evoke, do occur. The entire thought is abruptly condensed around an
idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.

The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths of
Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning stupor
peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow. I shall know
where she lives now."

It was absurd, but irresistible.

And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.



CHAPTER II--EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS

Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had not been
so.

In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety, Javert
had not taken the prisoner prisoner. The assassinated man who flees
is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that this
personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians, would be
no less fine a prize for the authorities.

And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.

Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy" must be
waited for. Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Éponine as she stood
on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had led her off,
preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes
with the father. It was well that he did so. He was free. As for
Éponine, Javert had caused her to be seized; a mediocre consolation.
Éponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.

And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of the
principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost. It was not known how
this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could
not understand it at all." He had converted himself into vapor, he had
slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the crevices of
the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled; all that they
were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison, there was no
Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had had a hand in it. Had
Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake in water? Had there
been unavowed connivance of the police agents? Did this man belong
to the double enigma of order and disorder? Was he concentric with
infraction and repression? Had this sphinx his fore paws in crime and
his hind paws in authority? Javert did not accept such comminations, and
would have bristled up against such compromises; but his squad included
other inspectors besides himself, who were more initiated than he,
perhaps, although they were his subordinates in the secrets of the
Prefecture, and Claquesous had been such a villain that he might make
a very good agent. It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an
admirable thing for the police to be on such intimate juggling terms
with the night. These double-edged rascals do exist. However that may
be, Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again. Javert appeared
to be more irritated than amazed at this.

As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become
frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached very
little importance to him. Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted up at any
time. But was he a lawyer after all?

The investigation had begun.

The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men of
the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he
would chatter. This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard, and
the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.

This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force. In that hideous
courtyard, called the court of the Bâtiment-Neuf (New Building), which
the administration called the court Saint-Bernard, and which the robbers
called the Fosse-aux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch), on that wall covered with
scales and leprosy, which rose on the left to a level with the roofs,
near an old door of rusty iron which led to the ancient chapel of the
ducal residence of La Force, then turned in a dormitory for ruffians,
there could still be seen, twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly
carved in the stone with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--


                       BRUJON, 1811.

The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.

The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the Gorbeau
house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark, with a bewildered
and plaintive air. It was in consequence of this plaintive air that the
magistrate had released him, thinking him more useful in the Charlemagne
yard than in close confinement.

Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands
of justice. They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle as
that. To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning on
another crime. They are artists, who have one picture in the salon, and
who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.

Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison. He could sometimes be seen
standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's window in the
Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the sordid list of prices
which began with: _garlic_, 62 _centimes_, and ended with: _cigar_, 5
_centimes_. Or he passed his time in trembling, chattering his teeth,
saying that he had a fever, and inquiring whether one of the eight and
twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.

All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered that
Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different commissions
executed by the errand-men of the establishment, not under his own name,
but in the name of three of his comrades; and they had cost him in all
fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay which attracted the attention of the
prison corporal.

Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of commissions
posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that the fifty sous could
be analyzed as follows: three commissions; one to the Panthéon, ten
sous; one to Val-de-Grâce, fifteen sous; and one to the Barrière de
Grenelle, twenty-five sous. This last was the dearest of the whole
tariff. Now, at the Panthéon, at the Val-de-Grâce, and at the Barrière
de Grenelle were situated the domiciles of the three very redoubtable
prowlers of the barriers, Kruideniers, alias Bizarro, Glorieux, an
ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse, upon whom the attention of the police was
directed by this incident. It was thought that these men were members
of Patron Minette; two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been
captured. It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,
not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,
must have contained information with regard to some crime that had been
plotted. They were in possession of other indications; they laid hand on
the three prowlers, and supposed that they had circumvented some one or
other of Brujon's machinations.

About a week after these measures had been taken, one night, as the
superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower dormitory
in the Bâtiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in the box--this
was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen performed their
duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be dropped into all the
boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--a watchman looked through
the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld Brujon sitting on his bed and
writing something by the light of the hall-lamp. The guardian entered,
Brujon was put in a solitary cell for a month, but they were not able to
seize what he had written. The police learned nothing further about it.

What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"
was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the
five-story building which separated the two court-yards.

What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pallet of bread artistically
moulded, which is sent _into Ireland_, that is to say, over the roofs of
a prison, from one courtyard to another. Etymology: over England; from
one land to another; _into Ireland_. This little pellet falls in the
yard. The man who picks it up opens it and finds in it a note addressed
to some prisoner in that yard. If it is a prisoner who finds the
treasure, he forwards the note to its destination; if it is a keeper, or
one of the prisoners secretly sold who are called _sheep_ in prisons and
_foxes_ in the galleys, the note is taken to the office and handed over
to the police.

On this occasion, the postilion reached its address, although the person
to whom it was addressed was, at that moment, in solitary confinement.
This person was no other than Babet, one of the four heads of Patron
Minette.

The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two lines
were written:--

"Babet. There is an affair in the Rue Plumet. A gate on a garden."

This is what Brujon had written the night before.

In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass the note on
from La Force to the Salpêtrière, to a "good friend" whom he had and who
was shut up there. This woman in turn transmitted the note to another
woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon, who was strongly suspected
by the police, though not yet arrested. This Magnon, whose name the
reader has already seen, had relations with the Thénardier, which will
be described in detail later on, and she could, by going to see Éponine,
serve as a bridge between the Salpêtrière and Les Madelonettes.

It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting
in the investigation directed against Thénardier in the matter of his
daughters, Éponine and Azelma were released. When Éponine came out,
Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes, handed her
Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into the matter.

Éponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,
observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later, brought to
Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit, which Magnon
transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpêtrière. A biscuit, in the
shady symbolism of prisons, signifies: Nothing to be done.

So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met in
the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination, the other
on his way from it:--

"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"

"Biscuit," replied Babet. Thus did the fotus of crime engendered by
Brujon in La Force miscarry.

This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly
distinct from Brujon's programme. The reader will see what they were.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite
another.



CHAPTER III--APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF

Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.

While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps which may be
called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places without light, where
the happy can be heard walking overhead, M. Mabeuf was descending on his
side.

The _Flora of Cauteretz_ no longer sold at all. The experiments on
indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz, which
had a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only a few
plants which love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did not become
discouraged. He had obtained a corner in the Jardin des Plantes, with a
good exposure, to make his trials with indigo "at his own expense."
For this purpose he had pawned his copperplates of the _Flora_. He had
reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left one of these for his old
servant, to whom he had paid no wages for the last fifteen months. And
often his breakfast was his only meal. He no longer smiled with his
infantile smile, he had grown morose and no longer received visitors.
Marius did well not to dream of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour
when M. Mabeuf was on his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and
the young man passed each other on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital. They
did not speak, and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A
heart-breaking thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses
bonds! Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by.

Royol the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for his
living. He said to himself: "When I shall have made my balls of blueing,
I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from the pawn-shop, I
will put my _Flora_ in vogue again with trickery, plenty of money and
advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy, I know well where, a
copy of Pierre de Médine's _Art de Naviguer_, with wood-cuts, edition of
1655." In the meantime, he toiled all day over his plot of indigo, and
at night he returned home to water his garden, and to read his books. At
that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.

One evening he had a singular apparition.

He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother
Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined
on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he
had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned
stone post, which took the place of a bench in his garden.

Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens, a sort
of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated, a rabbit-hutch on
the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There was nothing in the
hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit-closet,--the remains of
the winter's provision.

M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the aid of
his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond and in which,
a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity
rendered him accessible to the acceptance of superstitions in a certain
degree. The first of these books was the famous treatise of President
Delancre, _De l'Inconstance des Démons_; the other was a quarto by Mutor
de la Rubaudière, _Sur les Diables de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la
Bièvre_. This last-mentioned old volume interested him all the more,
because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in
former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to
blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book which he held
in his hand, Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others a
magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations; four days of
heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed; the stalks were
bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling; all this needed water,
the rhododendron was particularly sad. Father Mabeuf was one of those
persons for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all day over
his indigo plot, he was worn out with fatigue, but he rose, laid
his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with tottering
footsteps, to the well, but when he had grasped the chain, he could not
even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a
glance of anguish toward heaven which was becoming studded with stars.

The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night promised to
be as arid as the day had been.

"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud! Not a
drop of water!"

And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon his
breast.

He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--

"A tear of dew! A little pity!"

He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.

At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--

"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"

At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became audible
in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery a sort of tall,
slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him and stared boldly at
him. She had less the air of a human being than of a form which had just
blossomed forth from the twilight.

Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we have
said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable, this
being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness, had
unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket, and filled the
watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare
feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds
distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the
leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that
the rhododendron was happy now.

The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. She
watered the whole garden.

There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths, where
her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms, and with
her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears in his
eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.

"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take care of
the flowers."

"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."

The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing her
response:--

"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can do nothing
for you!"

"You can do something," said she.

"What?"

"Tell me where M. Marius lives."

The old man did not understand. "What Monsieur Marius?"

He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had
vanished.

"A young man who used to come here."

In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.

"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed. "I know what you mean. Wait! Monsieur
Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu! He lives,--or rather, he no
longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."

As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he
continued:--

"Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes in
the direction of the Glacière, Rue Croulebarbe. The meadow of the Lark.
Go there. It is not hard to meet him."

When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any one
there; the girl had disappeared.

He was decidedly terrified.

"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should think
that she was a spirit."

An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell
asleep, at that confused moment when thought, like that fabulous bird
which changes itself into a fish in order to cross the sea, little by
little assumes the form of a dream in order to traverse slumber, he said
to himself in a bewildered way:--

"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudière narrates of the
goblins. Could it have been a goblin?"



CHAPTER IV--AN APPARITION TO MARIUS

Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one
morning,--it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the
hundred-sou piece from Courfeyrac for Thénardier--Marius had put this
coin in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office, he
had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would make him
work on his return. It was always thus, however. As soon as he rose, he
seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper in order to scribble
some translation; his task at that epoch consisted in turning into
French a celebrated quarrel between Germans, the Gans and Savigny
controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to
write one, could not, saw a star between him and his paper, and rose
from his chair, saying: "I shall go out. That will put me in spirits."

And off he went to the Lark's meadow.

There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny and
Gans.

He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;
there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which
were broken in his brain; then he said to himself: "I will not go out
to-morrow. It prevents my working." And he went out every day.

He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings. That
was his real address: Boulevard de la Santé, at the seventh tree from
the Rue Croulebarbe.

That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself on
the parapet of the River des Gobelins. A cheerful sunlight penetrated
the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.

He was dreaming of "Her." And his meditation turning to a reproach, fell
back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness, his paralysis
of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night which was growing
more dense every moment before him, to such a point that he no longer
even saw the sun.

Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas which
was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him, and he
had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this melancholy
absorption, sensations from without did reach him. He heard behind him,
beneath him, on both banks of the river, the laundresses of the Gobelins
beating their linen, and above his head, the birds chattering and
singing in the elm-trees. On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the
careless happiness of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the
sound of toil. What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect,
were two cheerful sounds.

All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard a familiar
voice saying:--

"Come! Here he is!"

He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to
him one morning, the elder of the Thénardier daughters, Éponine; he knew
her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,
two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. She had
accomplished a double progress, towards the light and towards distress.
She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely
entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes
were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice,
the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and
vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face
that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a
prison adds to wretchedness.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through
having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she
had slept in the loft of some stable.

And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O
youth!

In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace of joy
in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.

She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.

"So I have met you at last!" she said at length. "Father Mabeuf was
right, it was on this boulevard! How I have hunted for you! If you only
knew! Do you know? I have been in the jug. A fortnight! They let me out!
seeing that there was nothing against me, and that, moreover, I had not
reached years of discretion. I lack two months of it. Oh! how I have
hunted for you! These six weeks! So you don't live down there any more?"

"No," said Marius.

"Ah! I understand. Because of that affair. Those take-downs are
disagreeable. You cleared out. Come now! Why do you wear old hats like
this! A young man like you ought to have fine clothes. Do you know,
Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius, I don't know
what. It isn't true that you are a baron? Barons are old fellows, they
go to the Luxembourg, in front of the château, where there is the most
sun, and they read the _Quotidienne_ for a sou. I once carried a letter
to a baron of that sort. He was over a hundred years old. Say, where do
you live now?"

Marius made no reply.

"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt. I must sew it up for
you."

She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--

"You don't seem glad to see me."

Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then
exclaimed:--

"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"

"What?" demanded Marius. "What do you mean?"

"Ah! you used to call me _thou_," she retorted.

"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"

She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some sort
of inward conflict. At last she appeared to come to a decision.

"So much the worse, I don't care. You have a melancholy air, I want you
to be pleased. Only promise me that you will smile. I want to see you
smile and hear you say: 'Ah, well, that's good.' Poor Mr. Marius! you
know? You promised me that you would give me anything I like--"

"Yes! Only speak!"

She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--

"I have the address."

Marius turned pale. All the blood flowed back to his heart.

"What address?"

"The address that you asked me to get!"

She added, as though with an effort:--

"The address--you know very well!"

"Yes!" stammered Marius.

"Of that young lady."

This word uttered, she sighed deeply.

Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting and seized
her hand distractedly.

"Oh! Well! lead me thither! Tell me! Ask of me anything you wish! Where
is it?"

"Come with me," she responded. "I don't know the street or number very
well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know the house
well, I will take you to it."

She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent
the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius in his
intoxicated and ecstatic state:--

"Oh! how glad you are!"

A cloud swept across Marius' brow. He seized Éponine by the arm:--

"Swear one thing to me!"

"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean? Come! You want me to swear?"

And she laughed.

"Your father! promise me, Éponine! Swear to me that you will not give
this address to your father!"

She turned to him with a stupefied air.

"Éponine! How do you know that my name is Éponine?"

"Promise what I tell you!"

But she did not seem to hear him.

"That's nice! You have called me Éponine!"

Marius grasped both her arms at once.

"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am saying
to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this address that
you know!"

"My father!" said she. "Ah yes, my father! Be at ease. He's in close
confinement. Besides, what do I care for my father!"

"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.

"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me!
Yes! Yes! I promise that! I swear that to you! What is that to me? I
will not tell my father the address. There! Is that right? Is that it?"

"Nor to any one?" said Marius.

"Nor to any one."

"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately."

"Come along. Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.

After a few steps she halted.

"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go on ahead,
and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice young man like you
must not be seen with a woman like me."

No tongue can express all that lay in that word, _woman_, thus
pronounced by that child.

She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined
her. She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--

"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"

Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world was the
five francs intended for Thénardier the father. He took them and laid
them in Éponine's hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, and gazed at
him with a gloomy air.

"I don't want your money," said she.



BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET



CHAPTER I--THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET

About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue
Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as _Combat des
Animaux_.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the
ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen down stairs,
a boudoir upstairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a
garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about
an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by
passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and
at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and
a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse
in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked
door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding
corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden
with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden enclosures and
cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in
another door, also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league
away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue du
Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and
would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go
to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate
had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little
parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining
the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought
they had a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the
long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their flower-beds and
their orchards. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable
that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal
about the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted and
furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned
on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had something
discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love
and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence
fifteen years ago. In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with
the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the
nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the
coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly
to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man does not
communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was
always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed
through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible
bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on the
first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact. The windows had
short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He
had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.
The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished
with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some
repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had replaced the
paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors, steps in the stairs,
missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass in the lattice windows,
and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an elderly
maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is slipping
in than like a man who is entering his own house. The neighbors did not
gossip about him, for the reason that there were no neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.
The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved
from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a
stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided
Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under the name
of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In all that has been
related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than
Thénardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had
happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so
happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every
day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more,
he brooded over the soul of that child, he said to himself that she
was his, that nothing could take her from him, that this would last
indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being thereto
gently incited every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the
universe for her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and
that she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that
he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation
was possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He
interrogated himself. He asked himself if all that happiness were
really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of
the happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and
stealing; if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child
had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in
advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under
the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her
ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation
germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie
to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some
day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come to
hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the rest,
but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit the convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact that it was
necessary. As for objections, there were none. Five years' sojourn
between these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed
or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among men.
He had grown old, and all had undergone a change. Who would recognize
him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,
and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason
that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is danger in
comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his being prudent
and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It was not long
in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told her
that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his brother,
which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he should leave
the service of the convent and take his daughter with him; but that, as
it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the vows, should
have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend
Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community, as indemnity,
for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five
thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual
Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise the
key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to
touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which
proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. He always
had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing sometimes, that
he carried off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at it,
and called this valise his _inseparable_, saying: "I am jealous of it."

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from
sight there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--Ultime
Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order that
he might attract less attention than if he were to remain always in the
same quarter, and so that he could, at need, take himself off at the
slightest disquietude which should assail him, and in short, so that
he might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had
so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were very
pitiable, poor in appearance, and in two quarters which were far remote
from each other, the one in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de
l'Homme Armé.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Armé, now to the
Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint.
He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out as a
gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having a little
temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles
in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.



CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD

However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he had
arranged his existence there in the following fashion:--

Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the gilded
fillets, the justice's drawing-room furnished with tapestries and vast
arm-chairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed of
antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased in
the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher's, put into Cosette's
chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these magnificent
old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-à-brac all the gay and
graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls, an étagère,
a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand, a blotting-book,
paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl, a silver-gilt
dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain. Long damask
curtains with a red foundation and three colors, like those on the
bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the ground floor, the
curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette's little house was
heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the sort of porter's
lodge which was situated at the end of the back courtyard, with a
mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two straw chairs, an
earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf, his beloved valise
in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with Cosette, and he had a
loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.

When Toussaint came, he had said to her: "It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house."--"And you, monsieur?" Toussaint replied in
amazement.--"I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father."

Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated
their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put
his arm through Cosette's and took her for a walk. He led her to the
Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her
to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.
As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the
poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him
Thénardier's epistle: "To the benevolent gentleman of the church of
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas." He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the
poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet.
Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went himself for
water to a fountain near by on the boulevard. Their wood and wine were
put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work which lay near
the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the chief-justice as
a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and "Little Houses" no love was
without a grotto.

In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined for
the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants of
the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters, the
entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love
affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to
the tax-collector's notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.
Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard;
he had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of
1831. The municipal information collected at that time had even reached
the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud,
whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise, and, consequently,
worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the town-hall.

Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and mounted
guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct disguise which
mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had
just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he
did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape
his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed
no civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his
identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we
have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes. This
man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.

Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with
Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of
a retired officer. When he went out alone, which was generally at night,
he was always dressed in a workingman's trousers and blouse, and wore
a cap which concealed his face. Was this precaution or humility? Both.
Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny, and
hardly noticed her father's peculiarities. As for Toussaint, she
venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.

One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to
her: "That's a queer fish." She replied: "He's a saint."

Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
except by the door on the Rue de Babylone. Unless seen through the
garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they lived in
the Rue Plumet. That gate was always closed. Jean Valjean had left the
garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.

In this, possibly, he made a mistake.



CHAPTER III--FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS

The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become
extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to
gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its fresh
and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowed
his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of
that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two
green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of
undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on
the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass
everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of
land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing
in this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;
venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over
towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had
inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that
which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over
towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,
clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,
married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep
and close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the
well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet
square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is
to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,
quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a bouquet,
solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floréal34 this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within its
four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered in
the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of
cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in
its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,
sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling
steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,
flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,
perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and
it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about
there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure,
a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the
twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the evening, a dreamy
vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a
calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating perfume of the
honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every part of it, like an
exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers and
the wagtails were audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt the
sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice the
leaves, by night the leaves protect the wings.

In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and
allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old gate
had the air of saying: "This garden belongs to me."

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every side,
the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple of paces
away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputies
not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the Rue
Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vain
did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other's
course at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passed
over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness,
forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to
this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great
crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles,
uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths
of the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certain
indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts
the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle,
to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force
and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal
ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the
little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision
for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and things;
in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despises
the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away
terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is
doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.
All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.
Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with
the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the
birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope
ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger field
of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an
ant-hill of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,
exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts of
substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with
each other, to such a point that the material and the moral world are
brought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually
returning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a
planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of
thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all, except
that geometrical point, the _I_; bringing everything back to the
soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from
summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the
flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who
knows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the
comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop
of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of
which is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.



CHAPTER IV--CHANGE OF GATE

It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal wanton
mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter chaste
mysteries. There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens, or
tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity
falling like a veil over all. Paphos had been made over into Eden. It is
impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered this retreat
wholesome. This flower-girl now offered her blossom to the soul. This
coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised, had returned to
virginity and modesty. A justice assisted by a gardener, a goodman who
thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon, and another goodman who
thought that he was a continuation of Lenôtre, had turned it about, cut,
ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry; nature had taken possession of
it once more, had filled it with shade, and had arranged it for love.

There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready. Love
had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed of verdure,
grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows, agitated branches, and
a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor, of hope, of aspiration,
and of illusion.

Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child; she was
a little more than fourteen, and she was at the "ungrateful age"; we
have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was homely
rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she was awkward,
thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl, in short.

Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught
religion, and even and above all, devotion; then "history," that is to
say the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar,
the participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little drawing,
etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant, which is a
great charm and a great peril. The soul of a young girl should not be
left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively
are formed there, as in a dark chamber. She should be gently and
discreetly enlightened, rather with the reflection of realities than
with their harsh and direct light. A useful and graciously austere
half-light which dissipates puerile fears and obviates falls. There is
nothing but the maternal instinct, that admirable intuition composed of
the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman, which knows
how this half-light is to be created and of what it should consist.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world
are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's
soul.

Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.

As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude; but
he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing a
woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast ignorance
which is called innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. The convent
turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart, thus
thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself, since it cannot
overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand. Hence visions,
suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances, a desire for
adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built wholly in the inner
obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes where the passions
immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open gate permits them to
enter. The convent is a compression which, in order to triumph over the
human heart, should last during the whole life.

On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more sweet and
more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. It was the continuation
of solitude with the beginning of liberty; a garden that was closed, but
a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous, and fragrant; the same dreams
as in the convent, but with glimpses of young men; a grating, but one
that opened on the street.

Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child. Jean
Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her. "Do what you like with
it," he said to her. This amused Cosette; she turned over all the clumps
and all the stones, she hunted for "beasts"; she played in it, while
awaiting the time when she would dream in it; she loved this garden
for the insects that she found beneath her feet amid the grass, while
awaiting the day when she would love it for the stars that she would see
through the boughs above her head.

And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean, with
all her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made the goodman
a beloved and charming companion to her. It will be remembered that M.
Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a great deal. Jean Valjean
had continued this practice; he had come to converse well; he possessed
the secret riches and the eloquence of a true and humble mind which has
spontaneously cultivated itself. He retained just enough sharpness to
season his kindness; his mind was rough and his heart was soft. During
their conversations in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of
everything, drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had
suffered. As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.

This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild
garden sufficed for her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the
butterflies, she came panting up to him and said: "Ah! How I have run!"
He kissed her brow.

Cosette adored the goodman. She was always at his heels. Where Jean
Valjean was, there happiness was. Jean Valjean lived neither in the
pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure in the paved back
courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers, and in his little
lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than in the great drawing-room
hung with tapestry, against which stood tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean
sometimes said to her, smiling at his happiness in being importuned: "Do
go to your own quarters! Leave me alone a little!"

She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are so graceful
when they come from a daughter to her father.

"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet here
and a stove?"

"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I and who have
not even a roof over their heads."

"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"

"Because you are a woman and a child."

"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"

"Certain men."

"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged to
have a fire."

And again she said to him:--

"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"

"Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."

Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean ate
white bread.

Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood. She prayed
morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. The
Thénardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures in a dream. She
remembered that she had gone "one day, at night," to fetch water in a
forest. She thought that it had been very far from Paris. It seemed to
her that she had begun to live in an abyss, and that it was Jean Valjean
who had rescued her from it. Her childhood produced upon her the effect
of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders,
and serpents. When she meditated in the evening, before falling asleep,
as she had not a very clear idea that she was Jean Valjean's daughter,
and that he was her father, she fancied that the soul of her mother had
passed into that good man and had come to dwell near her.

When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and
dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: "Perhaps this man is my
mother."

Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make, in the profound
ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,--maternity being also
absolutely unintelligible to virginity,--had ended by fancying that she
had had as little mother as possible. She did not even know her mother's
name. Whenever she asked Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean remained silent. If
she repeated her question, he responded with a smile. Once she insisted;
the smile ended in a tear.

This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.

Was it prudence? Was it respect? Was it a fear that he should deliver
this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?

So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to talk
to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was impossible
for him to do so. It seemed to him that he no longer dared. Was it
because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a certain
religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette's thought; and of
placing a third in their destiny. The more sacred this shade was to him,
the more did it seem that it was to be feared. He thought of Fantine,
and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.

Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared
to have its finger on its lips. Had all the modesty which had been
in Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,
returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation over
the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in her
grave? Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure? We
who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject this
mysterious explanation.

Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name of
Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him:--

"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night. She had two big wings.
My mother must have been almost a saint during her life."

"Through martyrdom," replied Jean Valjean.

However, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,
in the plenitude of her heart. Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within
him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so
wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated
with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would
last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered
sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the
depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a
wretch, by that innocent being.



CHAPTER V--THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR

One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror, and she said
to herself: "Really!" It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This
threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she
had never thought of her face. She saw herself in her mirror, but she
did not look at herself. And then, she had so often been told that she
was homely; Jean Valjean alone said gently: "No indeed! no indeed!" At
all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had grown up
in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood. And here, all
at once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean had said: "No
indeed!" That night, she did not sleep. "What if I were pretty!" she
thought. "How odd it would be if I were pretty!" And she recalled those
of her companions whose beauty had produced a sensation in the convent,
and she said to herself: "What! Am I to be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?"

The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this time,
and she was assailed with doubts: "Where did I get such an idea?" said
she; "no, I am ugly." She had not slept well, that was all, her eyes
were sunken and she was pale. She had not felt very joyous on the
preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful, but it made her
very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer. She did not look at
herself again, and for more than a fortnight she tried to dress her hair
with her back turned to the mirror.

In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool or
did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean Valjean read
beside her. Once she raised her eyes from her work, and was rendered
quite uneasy by the manner in which her father was gazing at her.

On another occasion, she was passing along the street, and it seemed
to her that some one behind her, whom she did not see, said: "A pretty
woman! but badly dressed." "Bah!" she thought, "he does not mean me.
I am well dressed and ugly." She was then wearing a plush hat and her
merino gown.

At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old
Toussaint saying: "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?"
Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words caused
a sort of commotion within her. She fled from the garden, ran up to
her room, flew to the looking-glass,--it was three months since she
had looked at herself,--and gave vent to a cry. She had just dazzled
herself.

She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with Toussaint
and her mirror. Her figure was formed, her skin had grown white, her
hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had been lighted in her blue
eyes. The consciousness of her beauty burst upon her in an instant, like
the sudden advent of daylight; other people noticed it also, Toussaint
had said so, it was evidently she of whom the passer-by had spoken,
there could no longer be any doubt of that; she descended to the garden
again, thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard the birds
singing, though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun among
the trees, flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in inexpressible
delight.

Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable oppression
at heart.

In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that
beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's sweet
face. The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became
aware of it herself. But, from the very first day, that unexpected light
which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole of the young girl's
person, wounded Jean Valjean's sombre eye. He felt that it was a change
in a happy life, a life so happy that he did not dare to move for fear
of disarranging something. This man, who had passed through all manner
of distresses, who was still all bleeding from the bruises of fate, who
had been almost wicked and who had become almost a saint, who, after
having dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging the invisible
but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the law had not
released from its grasp and who could be seized at any moment and
brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad daylight of
public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, and
merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law, of society, of nature,
of the world, one thing, that Cosette might love him!

That Cosette might continue to love him! That God would not prevent
the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!
Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded
with benefits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was well
with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him: "Do you want
anything better?" he would have answered: "No." God might have said to
him: "Do you desire heaven?" and he would have replied: "I should lose
by it."

Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
made him shudder like the beginning of something new. He had never
known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means; but he
understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.

He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more
triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the innocent
and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of
his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.

He said to himself: "How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?"

There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the
tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have
gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:
"Decidedly I am beautiful!" Cosette began to pay attention to her
toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty, but badly
dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had
vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are
destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is
the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.
She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat. Her
father had never refused her anything. She at once acquired the whole
science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, the
stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that science
which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming, so deep, and so
dangerous. The words _heady woman_ were invented for the Parisienne.

In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue de
Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the "best
dressed" women in Paris, which means a great deal more.

She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see what he would
say, and to "teach him a lesson!" The truth is, that she was ravishing
in every respect, and that she distinguished the difference between a
bonnet from Gérard and one from Herbaut in the most marvellous way.

Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that
he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings
sprouting on Cosette.

Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette's toilet, a woman
would have recognized the fact that she had no mother. Certain little
proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by
Cosette. A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl
does not dress in damask.

The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown and mantle,
and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant,
rosy, proud, dazzling. "Father," she said, "how do you like me in this
guise?" Jean Valjean replied in a voice which resembled the bitter voice
of an envious man: "Charming!" He was the same as usual during their
walk. On their return home, he asked Cosette:--

"Won't you put on that other gown and bonnet again,--you know the ones I
mean?"

This took place in Cosette's chamber. Cosette turned towards the
wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.

"That disguise!" said she. "Father, what do you want me to do with it?
Oh no, the idea! I shall never put on those horrors again. With that
machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."

Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.

From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always
heretofore asked to remain at home, saying: "Father, I enjoy myself more
here with you," now was always asking to go out. In fact, what is the
use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume if one does not
display them?

He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the back
garden. Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade
back and forth in front of the railed fence. Jean Valjean, who was shy,
never set foot in the garden. He kept to his back yard, like a dog.

Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the grace
of ignoring it. An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness
is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent
creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise
without being conscious of it. But what she had lost in ingenuous grace,
she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole person, permeated
with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty, breathed forth a
splendid melancholy.

It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw her
once more at the Luxembourg.



CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN

Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as
two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow
and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally
fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two
beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way
people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is
nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these
great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of
that spark.

At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance
which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also launched
a look which disturbed Cosette.

He caused her the same good and the same evil.

She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to
think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young man
was nothing to her.

Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of voice
when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held himself
badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was all his
own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole person
was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he seemed
to be poor, yet his air was fine.

On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those
first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette did
not immediately understand. She returned thoughtfully to the house in
the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had
come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of
that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to
pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention
was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary,
somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A
substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her, and the idea caused
her a wholly childish joy, that she was going to take her revenge at
last.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though
in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with
their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.

The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations, his
terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed
Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: "Father, let us stroll about
a little in that direction." Seeing that Marius did not come to her,
she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Mahomet. And then,
strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is
timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet
nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each
other and assuming, each the other's qualities.

That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius'
glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and Cosette
uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound
melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the
day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young
girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It
melts in love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered
in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which entered
the convent, _amour_ (love) was replaced by _tambour_ (drum) or
_pandour_. This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the
_big girls_, such as: _Ah, how delightful is the drum! _ or, _Pity
is not a pandour_. But Cosette had left the convent too early to have
occupied herself much with the "drum." Therefore, she did not know what
name to give to what she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one
does not know the name of one's malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She
did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or
dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved. She
would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: "You do not
sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You
have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not be! You
blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at the
end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!" She would not have
understood, and she would have replied: "What fault is there of mine in
a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?"

It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to
the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute
contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of
youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining
a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but
having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor
defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a
chimæra with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have
alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in
the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children
and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the convent, with
which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in
the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything
tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he was not
even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring Marius as
something charming, luminous, and impossible.

As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him with
all frankness.

Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with
impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought
when she said to Jean Valjean:--

"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not
address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know
each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are
separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other.

It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty, and in
ignorance of her love. She was a coquette to boot through her ignorance.



CHAPTER VII--TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF

All situations have their instincts. Old and eternal Mother Nature
warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean
shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew
nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the darkness
in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him something in
process of construction, and on the other, something which was crumbling
away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the deep law of God,
by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep out of sight of
"the father." Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean Valjean sometimes
espied him. Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural. He
exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He no longer came quite
close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a distance and pretended
to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly he had come in his old
coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure
that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore
gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.

Cosette allowed nothing to be divined. Without knowing just what was the
matter with her she was convinced that there was something in it, and
that it must be concealed.

There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had
recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed by
that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean. It might be
accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.

He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger. One day,
however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague
despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair, he
said to her: "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"

Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl, would have
replied: "Why, no, he is charming." Ten years later, with the love
of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "A pedant, and
insufferable to the sight! You are right!"--At the moment in life
and the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with
replying, with supreme calmness: "That young man!"

As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.

"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean. "She had not noticed him. It is
I who have pointed him out to her."

Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of
those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles,
that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap
whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. Jean Valjean
had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with
the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine. Jean
Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him; he changed his hour, he changed
his bench, he forgot his handkerchief, he came alone to the Luxembourg;
Marius dashed headlong into all these snares; and to all the
interrogation marks planted by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he
ingenuously answered "yes." But Cosette remained immured in her apparent
unconcern and in her imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean
arrived at the following conclusion: "That ninny is madly in love with
Cosette, but Cosette does not even know that he exists."

None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. The minute
when Cosette would love might strike at any moment. Does not everything
begin with indifference?

Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him. He rose from his
seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: "What,
already?"

Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so sweet
to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated
Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw nothing in all
the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean was fixing on
Marius flashing and terrible eyes. He, who had finally come to believe
himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when
Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and
ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which
had formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up
against that young man. It almost seemed to him that unknown craters
were forming in his bosom.

What! he was there, that creature! What was he there for? He came
creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying! He came, saying: "Hey!
Why not?" He came to prowl about his, Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl
about his happiness, with the purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!

Jean Valjean added: "Yes, that's it! What is he in search of? An
adventure! What does he want? A love affair! A love affair! And I? What!
I have been first, the most wretched of men, and then the most unhappy,
and I have traversed sixty years of life on my knees, I have suffered
everything that man can suffer, I have grown old without having been
young, I have lived without a family, without relatives, without
friends, without life, without children, I have left my blood on every
stone, on every bramble, on every mile-post, along every wall, I have
been gentle, though others have been hard to me, and kind, although
others have been malicious, I have become an honest man once more, in
spite of everything, I have repented of the evil that I have done and
have forgiven the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment
when I receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over, at the
moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment when I have what
I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid, I have earned it, all
this is to take flight, all this will vanish, and I shall lose Cosette,
and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because it has pleased a
great booby to come and lounge at the Luxembourg."

Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.

It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy
surveying an enemy. It was a dog scanning a thief.

The reader knows the rest. Marius pursued his senseless course. One day
he followed Cosette to the Rue de l'Ouest. Another day he spoke to
the porter. The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean:
"Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?" On the
morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last
perceived. A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure. He swore
to himself that he would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg
or in the Rue de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she
did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. Jean
Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which
are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the
consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of
Cosette's silence.

He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his
side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.

Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.

"Yes," said she.

They went thither. Three months had elapsed. Marius no longer went
there. Marius was not there.

On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

She replied, sadly and gently:--

"No."

Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this
gentleness.

What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so
impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place
in Cosette's soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he passed
whole nights asking himself: "What has Cosette in her mind?" and in
thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.

Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that
cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
glacier of virtue! How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy, that
convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins, where
all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! How he adored that
Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly
emerged! How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having brought
Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled
to the earth by his very self-devotion! How he said to himself, "What
have I done?"

However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. No ill-temper,
no harshness. His face was always serene and kind. Jean Valjean's
manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. If anything could
have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.

On her side, Cosette languished. She suffered from the absence of Marius
as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly being
conscious of it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their customary
strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her
heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and
that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father
would take her thither once more. But days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean
Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent. She regretted it.
It was too late. So Marius had disappeared; all was over. The day on
which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What
was to be done? Should she ever find him again? She felt an anguish at
her heart, which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no
longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining or
shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season for
dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming than
the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought home
was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had done "her
marketing" well or ill; and she remained dejected, absorbed, attentive
to but a single thought, her eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by
night at a black and fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.

However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
except her pallor.

She still wore her sweet face for him.

This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
Sometimes he asked her:--

"What is the matter with you?"

She replied: "There is nothing the matter with me."

And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would
add:--

"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"

"With me? Nothing," said he.

These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so
touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other
now suffered side by side, each on the other's account; without
acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and
with a smile.



CHAPTER VIII--THE CHAIN-GANG

Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its
sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is
the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. He
had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him. He
would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by
some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have
just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very
childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on
the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on
horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the
commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it
would be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an
incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be
dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the
Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice
for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.

An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.

In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell
in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. They sometimes took
a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which
befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.

For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. The streets
are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird herself, liked
to rise early. These matutinal excursions were planned on the preceding
evening. He proposed, and she agreed. It was arranged like a plot, they
set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many small delights for
Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young people.

Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then
existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor
meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in
summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been
gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but
peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored
there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a
little girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her
hat, laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl who
cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on
the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies, which she placed
on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated with sunlight, glowing
until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of burning embers.

Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom of early
strolls.

One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of
the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break of
day near the Barrière du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak; a
delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there in the
deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white, a quiver
amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of twilight. A
lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a prodigious
height, and one would have declared that that hymn of pettiness calmed
immensity. In the East, the Val-de-Grâce projected its dark mass on the
clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant
was rising behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape
from a gloomy edifice.

All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray
laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to
their work along the side-paths.

Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at the
gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his back
towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point of
rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which the
mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which are
equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called
vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return
to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was
thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came
between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a
light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in
his revery. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the
clouds as they turned rosy.

All at once Cosette exclaimed: "Father, I should think some one was
coming yonder." Jean Valjean raised his eyes.

Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barrière du
Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue de Sèvres,
and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. At the elbow of the
causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it branches, they heard a
noise which it was difficult to account for at that hour, and a sort of
confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing which was coming
from the boulevard was turning into the road.

It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner, though it was
bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle, but its load could
not be distinctly made out. There were horses, wheels, shouts; whips
were cracking. By degrees the outlines became fixed, although bathed
in shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just turned from the
boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course towards
the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,
followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their
appearance in succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of
the wagon in front. Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were
visible through the dusk as though there were naked swords there, a
clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains, and as
this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder, and it turned
into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave of dreams.

As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap which
was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures turned
into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--

Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first six were
singularly constructed. They resembled coopers' drays; they consisted
of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming barrows at their rear
extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say, each ladder, was attached
to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders strange clusters of
men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to be divined
rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to
back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs
they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on their
necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each man had
his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these four and twenty
men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk, they were seized with
a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind over the ground
with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after the fashion of millepeds.
In the back and front of each vehicle, two men armed with muskets
stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his foot. The iron
necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage
wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a
sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains,
among which were mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at
full length, and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all lattice-work,
was garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for
former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle of the road. On
each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect, wearing
three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory, shabby,
covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of veterans and the
trousers of undertakers' men, half gray, half blue, which were almost
hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder belts, short sabres,
muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of soldier-blackguards.
These myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness of the beggar and the
authority of the executioner. The one who appeared to be their chief
held a postilion's whip in his hand. All these details, blurred by the
dimness of dawn, became more and more clearly outlined as the light
increased. At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted
gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.

This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the
barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. A throng,
sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in a twinkling, as
is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward from both sides of
the road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the shouts of people
calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners hastening
up to gaze were audible.

The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in
silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen
trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest
of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were
horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin in
rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps,
and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the elbow;
many wore women's headgear, others had baskets on their heads; hairy
breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments tattooed
designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids;
eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or three
had a straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended
under them like a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of them held
in his hand and raised to his mouth something which had the appearance
of a black stone and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which
he was eating. There were no eyes there which were not either dry,
dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The escort troop cursed, the men
in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of
a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or
skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible;
their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed
together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their
fists clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the
rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.

This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. It
was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain might
descend, that it might be followed by another and another, and that
their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked, these
men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not again
get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by the
downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes from
the whips would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the
chain would continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would
continue to dangle, and it was impossible not to shudder at the sight
of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of
autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies
of the air, like trees and stones.

Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,
who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,
and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with
misery.

Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all those
ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration of grins,
oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet of light severed
the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies, leaving feet and
wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their appearance on these faces;
it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their masks removed,
fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which they
blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn accentuated
these lamentable profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there
was not one of these creatures who was not deformed by reason of
wretchedness; and the whole was so monstrous that one would have
said that the sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the
lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song,
and were shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,
a pot-pourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called _The Vestal_; the trees
shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by
spectres.

All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were to
be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation, savage
grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps, heads like those
of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantile visages,
and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces, to which death
alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who had been a slave,
in all probability, and who could make a comparison of his chains. The
frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at
that degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by all
in their extremest depths, and ignorance, converted into dulness, was
the equal of intelligence converted into despair. There was no choice
possible between these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the
mud. It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that
unclean procession had not classified them. These beings had been
fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably, and
loaded hap-hazard on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped
together, always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched men
give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load
had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one where they were singing,
there was one where they were howling; a third where they were begging;
one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load
menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent
as the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles
of hell on the march. The march of the damned to their tortures,
performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot
of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet
cart.

One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth.
An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years
old, and said to him: "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"

As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the
captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful
dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail, fell upon the
seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which redoubled
the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up, a swarm of flies
on these wounds.

Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They were no
longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects which replace the
glance in the case of certain wretched men, which seem unconscious
of reality, and in which flames the reflection of terrors and of
catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision.
He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not move his
feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and hold you
fast. He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself,
athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral
persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium which was
pursuing him. All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture
habitual to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this
was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this
detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on the
road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before, he had
himself passed through that barrier.

Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not
understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at
length she cried:--

"Father! What are those men in those carts?"

Jean Valjean replied: "Convicts."

"Whither are they going?"

"To the galleys."

At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became
zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled with it, it was a
perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts bent before it, a hideous
obedience was evoked by the torture, and all held their peace, darting
glances like chained wolves.

Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--

"Father, are they still men?"

"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.

It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak from
Bicêtre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid Fontainebleau,
where the King then was. This caused the horrible journey to last three
or four days longer; but torture may surely be prolonged with the object
of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.

Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters are
shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles a thorough
shaking up.

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back to
the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him with other
questions on the subject of what they had just seen; perhaps he was
too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice her words and reply to
them. But when Cosette was leaving him in the evening, to betake herself
to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as though talking to
herself: "It seems to me, that if I were to find one of those men in my
pathway, oh, my God, I should die merely from the sight of him close at
hand."

Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--fêtes in
Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine, theatrical
performances in the Champs-Élysées, fireworks at the Arc de l'Étoile,
illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did violence to his habits, and
took Cosette to see these rejoicings, for the purpose of diverting her
from the memory of the day before, and of effacing, beneath the smiling
tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed before her.
The review with which the festival was spiced made the presence of
uniforms perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a
national guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking
himself to shelter. However, this trip seemed to attain its object.
Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion
with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fête; so that
Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded, and that no
trace of that hideous vision remained.

Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly, and
they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction of
the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself, and
to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had caused
Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect in that
negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls in an
adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over a star;
and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep, submitting
to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking a daisy to
pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend, _I love a little,
passionately, etc_.--who was there who could have taught her? She was
handling the flower instinctively, innocently, without a suspicion that
to pluck a daisy apart is to do the same by a heart. If there were a
fourth, and smiling Grace called Melancholy, she would have worn the air
of that Grace. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those
tiny fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance
emitted by that child. A red-breast was warbling in the thicket, on one
side. White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly, that one would
have said that they had just been set at liberty. Cosette went on
attentively tearing the leaves from her flower; she seemed to be
thinking about something; but whatever it was, it must be something
charming; all at once she turned her head over her shoulder with the
delicate languor of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean: "Father, what are
the galleys like?"



BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH



CHAPTER I--A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN

Thus their life clouded over by degrees.

But one diversion, which had formerly been a happiness, remained to
them, which was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing
to those who were cold. Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean on these
visits to the poor, on which they recovered some remnants of their
former free intercourse; and sometimes, when the day had been a good
one, and they had assisted many in distress, and cheered and warmed many
little children, Cosette was rather merry in the evening. It was at this
epoch that they paid their visit to the Jondrette den.

On the day following that visit, Jean Valjean made his appearance in the
pavilion in the morning, calm as was his wont, but with a large wound on
his left arm which was much inflamed, and very angry, which resembled a
burn, and which he explained in some way or other. This wound resulted
in his being detained in the house for a month with fever. He would not
call in a doctor. When Cosette urged him, "Call the dog-doctor," said
he.

Cosette dressed the wound morning and evening with so divine an air and
such angelic happiness at being of use to him, that Jean Valjean felt
all his former joy returning, his fears and anxieties dissipating, and
he gazed at Cosette, saying: "Oh! what a kindly wound! Oh! what a good
misfortune!"

Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion
and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard.
She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him
the books which he desired. Generally they were books of travel. Jean
Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving in these
ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger, Cosette's
coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim. He had
reached the point where he said to himself: "I imagined all that. I am
an old fool."

His happiness was so great that the horrible discovery of the
Thénardiers made in the Jondrette hovel, unexpected as it was, had,
after a fashion, glided over him unnoticed. He had succeeded in making
his escape; all trace of him was lost--what more did he care for! he
only thought of those wretched beings to pity them. "Here they are in
prison, and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm,"
he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!"

As for the hideous vision of the Barrière du Maine, Cosette had not
referred to it again.

Sister Sainte-Mechtilde had taught Cosette music in the convent; Cosette
had the voice of a linnet with a soul, and sometimes, in the evening,
in the wounded man's humble abode, she warbled melancholy songs which
delighted Jean Valjean.

Spring came; the garden was so delightful at that season of the year,
that Jean Valjean said to Cosette:--

"You never go there; I want you to stroll in it."

"As you like, father," said Cosette.

And for the sake of obeying her father, she resumed her walks in the
garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned, Jean Valjean, who
was probably afraid of being seen through the fence, hardly ever went
there.

Jean Valjean's wound had created a diversion.

When Cosette saw that her father was suffering less, that he was
convalescing, and that he appeared to be happy, she experienced a
contentment which she did not even perceive, so gently and naturally
had it come. Then, it was in the month of March, the days were growing
longer, the winter was departing, the winter always bears away with it a
portion of our sadness; then came April, that daybreak of summer, fresh
as dawn always is, gay like every childhood; a little inclined to weep
at times like the new-born being that it is. In that month, nature
has charming gleams which pass from the sky, from the trees, from the
meadows and the flowers into the heart of man.

Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence of that
April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself. Insensibly, and
without her suspecting the fact, the blackness departed from her spirit.
In spring, sad souls grow light, as light falls into cellars at midday.
Cosette was no longer sad. However, though this was so, she did not
account for it to herself. In the morning, about ten o'clock, after
breakfast, when she had succeeded in enticing her father into the garden
for a quarter of an hour, and when she was pacing up and down in the
sunlight in front of the steps, supporting his left arm for him, she did
not perceive that she laughed every moment and that she was happy.

Jean Valjean, intoxicated, beheld her growing fresh and rosy once more.

"Oh! What a good wound!" he repeated in a whisper.

And he felt grateful to the Thénardiers.

His wound once healed, he resumed his solitary twilight strolls.

It is a mistake to suppose that a person can stroll alone in that
fashion in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting with some
adventure.



CHAPTER II--MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A
PHENOMENON

One evening, little Gavroche had had nothing to eat; he remembered
that he had not dined on the preceding day either; this was becoming
tiresome. He resolved to make an effort to secure some supper. He
strolled out beyond the Salpêtrière into deserted regions; that is
where windfalls are to be found; where there is no one, one always
finds something. He reached a settlement which appeared to him to be the
village of Austerlitz.

In one of his preceding lounges he had noticed there an old garden
haunted by an old man and an old woman, and in that garden, a passable
apple-tree. Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house, which was
not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get an apple. One
apple is a supper; one apple is life. That which was Adam's ruin might
prove Gavroche's salvation. The garden abutted on a solitary, unpaved
lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting the arrival of houses; the
garden was separated from it by a hedge.

Gavroche directed his steps towards this garden; he found the lane, he
recognized the apple-tree, he verified the fruit-house, he examined the
hedge; a hedge means merely one stride. The day was declining, there was
not even a cat in the lane, the hour was propitious. Gavroche began
the operation of scaling the hedge, then suddenly paused. Some one was
talking in the garden. Gavroche peeped through one of the breaks in the
hedge.

Enlarge


A couple of paces distant, at the foot of the hedge on the other side,
exactly at the point where the gap which he was meditating would have
been made, there was a sort of recumbent stone which formed a bench, and
on this bench was seated the old man of the garden, while the old woman
was standing in front of him. The old woman was grumbling. Gavroche, who
was not very discreet, listened.

"Monsieur Mabeuf!" said the old woman.

"Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."

The old man who was thus addressed, did not stir. The old woman
repeated:--

"Monsieur Mabeuf!"

The old man, without raising his eyes from the ground, made up his mind
to answer:--

"What is it, Mother Plutarque?"

"Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."

Mother Plutarque began again, and the old man was forced to accept the
conversation:--

"The landlord is not pleased."

"Why?"

"We owe three quarters rent."

"In three months, we shall owe him for four quarters."

"He says that he will turn you out to sleep."

"I will go."

"The green-grocer insists on being paid. She will no longer leave her
fagots. What will you warm yourself with this winter? We shall have no
wood."

"There is the sun."

"The butcher refuses to give credit; he will not let us have any more
meat."

"That is quite right. I do not digest meat well. It is too heavy."

"What shall we have for dinner?"

"Bread."

"The baker demands a settlement, and says, 'no money, no bread.'"

"That is well."

"What will you eat?"

"We have apples in the apple-room."

"But, Monsieur, we can't live like that without money."

"I have none."

The old woman went away, the old man remained alone. He fell into
thought. Gavroche became thoughtful also. It was almost dark.

The first result of Gavroche's meditation was, that instead of scaling
the hedge, he crouched down under it. The branches stood apart a little
at the foot of the thicket.

"Come," exclaimed Gavroche mentally, "here's a nook!" and he curled up
in it. His back was almost in contact with Father Mabeuf's bench. He
could hear the octogenarian breathe.

Then, by way of dinner, he tried to sleep.

It was a cat-nap, with one eye open. While he dozed, Gavroche kept on
the watch.

The twilight pallor of the sky blanched the earth, and the lane formed a
livid line between two rows of dark bushes.

All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance.
One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.

"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.

The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent and
thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly
because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.

The second was straight, firm, slender. It regulated its pace by that
of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait, suppleness
and agility were discernible. This figure had also something fierce and
disquieting about it, the whole shape was that of what was then called
_an elegant_; the hat was of good shape, the coat black, well cut,
probably of fine cloth, and well fitted in at the waist. The head was
held erect with a sort of robust grace, and beneath the hat the pale
profile of a young man could be made out in the dim light. The profile
had a rose in its mouth. This second form was well known to Gavroche; it
was Montparnasse.

He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was a
respectable old man.

Gavroche immediately began to take observations.

One of these two pedestrians evidently had a project connected with
the other. Gavroche was well placed to watch the course of events. The
bedroom had turned into a hiding-place at a very opportune moment.

Montparnasse on the hunt at such an hour, in such a place, betokened
something threatening. Gavroche felt his gamin's heart moved with
compassion for the old man.

What was he to do? Interfere? One weakness coming to the aid of another!
It would be merely a laughing matter for Montparnasse. Gavroche did not
shut his eyes to the fact that the old man, in the first place, and the
child in the second, would make but two mouthfuls for that redoubtable
ruffian eighteen years of age.

While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place, abruptly and
hideously. The attack of the tiger on the wild ass, the attack of the
spider on the fly. Montparnasse suddenly tossed away his rose, bounded
upon the old man, seized him by the collar, grasped and clung to him,
and Gavroche with difficulty restrained a scream. A moment later one of
these men was underneath the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee
of marble upon his breast. Only, it was not just what Gavroche had
expected. The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who
was on top was the old man. All this took place a few paces distant from
Gavroche.

The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that in such
a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant and the assailed
had exchanged rôles.

"Here's a hearty veteran!" thought Gavroche.

He could not refrain from clapping his hands. But it was applause
wasted. It did not reach the combatants, absorbed and deafened as they
were, each by the other, as their breath mingled in the struggle.

Silence ensued. Montparnasse ceased his struggles. Gavroche indulged in
this aside: "Can he be dead!"

The goodman had not uttered a word, nor given vent to a cry. He rose to
his feet, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse:--

"Get up."

Montparnasse rose, but the goodman held him fast. Montparnasse's
attitude was the humiliated and furious attitude of the wolf who has
been caught by a sheep.

Gavroche looked on and listened, making an effort to reinforce his eyes
with his ears. He was enjoying himself immensely.

He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character of a
spectator. He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue which borrowed
from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent. The goodman
questioned, Montparnasse replied.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"You are strong and healthy. Why do you not work?"

"It bores me."

"What is your trade?"

"An idler."

"Speak seriously. Can anything be done for you? What would you like to
be?"

"A thief."

A pause ensued. The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought. He
stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.

Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the
twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare. He gave a jerk, tried a
crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made efforts to
escape.

The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms with one
hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.

The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily at
Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice, in the midst of the
darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue, of which Gavroche did not
lose a single syllable:--

"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most
laborious of lives. Ah! You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare to
toil. There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it? It is
the rolling-mill. You must be on your guard against it, it is crafty
and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of your coat, you will be
drawn in bodily. That machine is laziness. Stop while there is yet time,
and save yourself! Otherwise, it is all over with you; in a short time
you will be among the gearing. Once entangled, hope for nothing more.
Toil, lazybones! there is no more repose for you! The iron hand of
implacable toil has seized you. You do not wish to earn your living, to
have a task, to fulfil a duty! It bores you to be like other men? Well!
You will be different. Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find
ennui his torment. You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a
slave. Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on the
other. You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its negro slave.
Ah! You would have none of the honest weariness of men, you shall have
the sweat of the damned. Where others sing, you will rattle in your
throat. You will see afar off, from below, other men at work; it will
seem to you that they are resting. The laborer, the harvester, the
sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in glory like the blessed
spirits in paradise. What radiance surrounds the forge! To guide the
plough, to bind the sheaves, is joy. The bark at liberty in the wind,
what delight! Do you, lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march! Drag your
halter. You are a beast of burden in the team of hell! Ah! To do nothing
is your object. Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall you have
free from oppression. You will be able to lift nothing without anguish.
Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack. What is a feather
to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become steep
acclivities. Life will become monstrous all about you. To go, to come,
to breathe, will be just so many terrible labors. Your lungs will
produce on you the effect of weighing a hundred pounds. Whether you
shall walk here rather than there, will become a problem that must be
solved. Any one who wants to go out simply gives his door a push, and
there he is in the open air. If you wish to go out, you will be obliged
to pierce your wall. What does every one who wants to step into the
street do? He goes down stairs; you will tear up your sheets, little
by little you will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your
window, and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and
it will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the rope
is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you, to fall. To
drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height, on what? On what
is beneath, on the unknown. Or you will crawl up a chimney-flue, at the
risk of burning; or you will creep through a sewer-pipe, at the risk of
drowning; I do not speak of the holes that you will be obliged to mask,
of the stones which you will have to take up and replace twenty times a
day, of the plaster that you will have to hide in your straw pallet. A
lock presents itself; the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a
locksmith. If you wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a
terrible work of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in
two plates; with what tools? You will have to invent them. That is your
business. Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking
great care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so
that they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover.
The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected. To
the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box. What will
you put in this box? A small bit of steel. A watch-spring, in which you
will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw. With this saw, as long
as a pin, and concealed in a sou, you will cut the bolt of the lock, you
will sever bolts, the padlock of your chain, and the bar at your window,
and the fetter on your leg. This masterpiece finished, this prodigy
accomplished, all these miracles of art, address, skill, and patience
executed, what will be your recompense if it becomes known that you
are the author? The dungeon. There is your future. What precipices are
idleness and pleasure! Do you know that to do nothing is a melancholy
resolution? To live in idleness on the property of society! to be
useless, that is to say, pernicious! This leads straight to the depth
of wretchedness. Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! He will
become vermin! Ah! So it does not please you to work? Ah! You have but
one thought, to drink well, to eat well, to sleep well. You will drink
water, you will eat black bread, you will sleep on a plank with a fetter
whose cold touch you will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to
your limbs. You will break those fetters, you will flee. That is well.
You will crawl on your belly through the brushwood, and you will eat
grass like the beasts of the forest. And you will be recaptured. And
then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall, groping for
your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible loaf of darkness
which dogs would not touch, eating beans that the worms have eaten
before you. You will be a wood-louse in a cellar. Ah! Have pity on
yourself, you miserable young child, who were sucking at nurse less
than twenty years ago, and who have, no doubt, a mother still alive! I
conjure you, listen to me, I entreat you. You desire fine black cloth,
varnished shoes, to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on
your locks, to please low women, to be handsome. You will be shaven
clean, and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes. You want rings
on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. If you
glance at a woman, you will receive a blow. And you will enter there at
the age of twenty. And you will come out at fifty! You will enter young,
rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all your white teeth, and your
handsome, youthful hair; you will come out broken, bent, wrinkled,
toothless, horrible, with white locks! Ah! my poor child, you are on the
wrong road; idleness is counselling you badly; the hardest of all work
is thieving. Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of
an idle man. It is not comfortable to become a rascal. It is less
disagreeable to be an honest man. Now go, and ponder on what I have said
to you. By the way, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is."

And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's
hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which he allowed it to
slide gently into the back pocket of his coat, with the same mechanical
precaution as though he had stolen it.

All this having been said and done, the goodman turned his back and
tranquilly resumed his stroll.

"The blockhead!" muttered Montparnasse.

Who was this goodman? The reader has, no doubt, already divined.

Montparnasse watched him with amazement, as he disappeared in the dusk.
This contemplation was fatal to him.

While the old man was walking away, Gavroche drew near.

Gavroche had assured himself, with a sidelong glance, that Father Mabeuf
was still sitting on his bench, probably sound asleep. Then the gamin
emerged from his thicket, and began to crawl after Montparnasse in the
dark, as the latter stood there motionless. In this manner he came up
to Montparnasse without being seen or heard, gently insinuated his hand
into the back pocket of that frock-coat of fine black cloth, seized the
purse, withdrew his hand, and having recourse once more to his crawling,
he slipped away like an adder through the shadows. Montparnasse, who
had no reason to be on his guard, and who was engaged in thought for the
first time in his life, perceived nothing. When Gavroche had once more
attained the point where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the
hedge, and fled as fast as his legs would carry him.

The purse fell on Father Mabeuf's foot. This commotion roused him.

He bent over and picked up the purse.

He did not understand in the least, and opened it.

The purse had two compartments; in one of them there was some small
change; in the other lay six napoleons.

M. Mabeuf, in great alarm, referred the matter to his housekeeper.

"That has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarque.



BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING



CHAPTER I--SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED

Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five
months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact, entered
upon its convalescence. Nature, spring, youth, love for her father,
the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something almost resembling
forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop, into that soul, which
was so virgin and so young. Was the fire wholly extinct there? Or was
it merely that layers of ashes had formed? The truth is, that she hardly
felt the painful and burning spot any longer.

One day she suddenly thought of Marius: "Why!" said she, "I no longer
think of him."

That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers, with
a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl, a
sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka, passing the
gate. Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round face,
was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius. He
had a cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought that this officer doubtless
belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue de Babylone.

On the following day, she saw him pass again. She took note of the hour.

From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.

The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept"
garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature,
who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not
unknown to the reader, and whose name was Théodule Gillenormand,--passed
by.

"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there who is
making eyes at you, look."

"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls who
look at me?"

This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily
towards agony, and was saying: "If I could but see her before I
die!"--Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment
gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word, and
he would have expired with grief.

Whose fault was it? No one's.

Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in
sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge into
sorrow and emerge from it again.

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal
phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which the isolated
heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling,
as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of
a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be
she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances
are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as
many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune,
is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand
ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who
has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but
inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a
block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the
post of a drinking-shop.

What did Cosette's soul contain? Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;
something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth, and gloomy
lower down. The image of the handsome officer was reflected in
the surface. Did a souvenir linger in the depths?--Quite at the
bottom?--Possibly. Cosette did not know.

A singular incident supervened.



CHAPTER II--COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS

During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This,
as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long intervals.
He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where did he go? No
one knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on the occasion of one of these
departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as far as a
little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: _Impasse de la
Planchette_. There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back to the
Rue de Babylone. It was usually when money was lacking in the house that
Jean Valjean took these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was absent. He had said: "I shall return in three days."

That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get
rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to sing,
accompanying herself the while, the chorus from _Euryanthe_: "Hunters
astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful thing in all
the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained wrapped in
thought.

All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in
the garden.

It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,
she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.

She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and
laid her ear against it.

It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was walking
very softly.

She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a
small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was at
the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was
visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had
heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and
magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified
depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which
one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of the
huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her
veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs
barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove.
There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which
occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound similar
to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were walking
beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but she told
herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass as the
friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and she
paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to
regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in
front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another
shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which
had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of
the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or
stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as
the gate, and found nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another
hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might
pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that
the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round
hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she
thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see
her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: "You are a little goose."

Jean Valjean grew anxious.

"It cannot be anything," said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw
him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly
heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window.
She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of fact, there
was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. Just as she
was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. It was her
father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: "He is very uneasy!"

Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the
garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise
later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst
of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--

"Cosette!"

She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her
window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look,
there is your shadow with the round hat."

And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and
which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man
wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of
sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were
allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,
she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron
chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did
not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was
really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she
had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the sky.

She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot
which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some
one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when Cosette
had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of this.
Cosette's serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her to
be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there could
possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or at
night.

A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.



CHAPTER III--ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT

In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,
screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms,
but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the
outside, past the trees and the gate.

One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out;
Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was
blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless
sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible
sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows,
from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.

Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.

Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on the
grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the species of
melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: "Really, one needs
wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. One takes cold."

She returned to the bench.

As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the spot
which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had, evidently, not
been there a moment before.

Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant. All at once
the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench all by
itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been thrust
through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. This time, the
fear was genuine; the stone was there. No doubt was possible; she did
not touch it, fled without glancing behind her, took refuge in the
house, and immediately closed with shutter, bolt, and bar the door-like
window opening on the flight of steps. She inquired of Toussaint:--

"Has my father returned yet?"

"Not yet, Mademoiselle."

[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered.
May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future. The musical
notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often
returned quite late at night.

"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly barricade
the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening,
and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?"

"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."

Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the
fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--

"It is so solitary here."

"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. We might
be assassinated before we had time to say _ouf!_ And Monsieur does
not sleep in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten
the shutters up like prisons. Lone women! That is enough to make one
shudder, I believe you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter
your chamber at night and say: 'Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut
your throat. It's not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and
that's all right; it's the abomination of feeling those people touch
you. And then, their knives; they can't be able to cut well with them!
Ah, good gracious!"

"Be quiet," said Cosette. "Fasten everything thoroughly."

Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and
possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week,
which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at
the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the
garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. She saw that all the doors
and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go all over the
house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own chamber,
bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept badly.
All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain and full
of caverns.

At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all
our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion
to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette, when she
woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have
I been thinking of? It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a
week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the
chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" The sun, which was glowing through
the crevices in her shutters, and turning the damask curtains crimson,
reassured her to such an extent that everything vanished from her
thoughts, even the stone.

"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round
hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."

She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench, and
broke out in a cold perspiration. The stone was there.

But this lasted only for a moment. That which is terror by night is
curiosity by day.

"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."

She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large. Beneath it was
something which resembled a letter. It was a white envelope. Cosette
seized it. There was no address on one side, no seal on the other.
Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen
inside.

Cosette examined it. It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity;
it was a beginning of anxiety.

Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of paper,
each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very fine and
rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.

Cosette looked for a name; there was none. To whom was this addressed?
To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.
From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession
of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to
herself that she must know what it contained.

This is what she read.



CHAPTER IV--A HEART BENEATH A STONE

Enlarge


The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a
single being even to God, that is love.

Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.

How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!

What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the
world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could
comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of
all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.

The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain
is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are
black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being
transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which
possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing
each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude
of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the
birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of
the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.
And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is
sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.

The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that
is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite,
the inexhaustible is requisite.

Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like
it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,
imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is
immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can
extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and
we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.

Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances
which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!
strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have
sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from
the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of
men.

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in
fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable
felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is
impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the
plenitude of man.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because
it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater
mystery, woman.

All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack
air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.
Suffocation of the soul.

When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic
unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are
concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of
the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the
same spirit. Love, soar.

On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she
walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to
think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.

What love commences can be finished by God alone.

True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a
handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its
hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little.

If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive
plant; if you are a man, be love.

Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we
possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand
how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more
than heaven, it has voluptuousness.

"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does
she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone
to dwell?"

"She did not say."

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame
on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child
of him!

There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There
is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.

Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand
in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a
finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live
in it.

Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.
There is ecstasy in agony.

Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.

Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.

Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long
trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This
destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the
tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the
definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive
the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.
In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to
him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will
deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His
hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled
through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is
to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer
composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything
that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more
germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,
inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds
and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its
vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels
anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests
of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.



CHAPTER V--COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER

As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the
handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--it was his
hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most
charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with
divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been
added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,
then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh, irregularly,
without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard. Cosette
had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she already
perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a
half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines shone before
her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance. The education
which she had received had always talked to her of the soul, and never
of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the
flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed
to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning,
the end. It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon her
a handful of rays of light. In these few lines she felt a passionate,
ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an immense sorrow, and
an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy fully expanded. What
was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without name, without address,
without date, without signature, pressing and disinterested, an enigma
composed of truths, a message of love made to be brought by an angel and
read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the
love-letter of a phantom to a shade. It was an absent one, tranquil and
dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the
absent love, his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love. This
had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven.
These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what might
be called drops of soul.

Now, from whom could these pages come? Who could have penned them?

Cosette did not hesitate a moment. One man only.

He!

Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an
unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish. It was he! he who had written!
he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!
While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again! But had she
forgotten him? No, never! She was foolish to have thought so for a
single moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire had
been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all plainly
now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth afresh, and
had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a spark which
had fallen from that other soul into hers. She felt the conflagration
starting up once more.

She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: "Oh
yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that! That is what I had
already read in his eyes." As she was finishing it for the third time,
Lieutenant Théodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs
upon the pavement. Cosette was forced to raise her eyes. She thought him
insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and
extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.

She turned away as in shame and indignation. She would gladly have
thrown something at his head.

She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to
peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.
When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her
bosom.

All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The
abyss of Eden had yawned once more.

All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely
thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain,
she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a tremor,
what? vague things. She dared make herself no promises, and she did
not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over her
countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed to her, at
intervals, that she was entering the land of chimæras; she said to
herself: "Is this reality?" Then she felt of the dear paper within her
bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles
against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he
would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,
which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it
is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!"

And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial
chance, had given him back to her.

Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial chance, that
intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief to
another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion's Ditch, over
the roofs of La Force.



CHAPTER VI--OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY

When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She
arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress
whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which,
through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat, and
was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent." It was not in the least
indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet thus
without knowing why she did so.

Did she mean to go out? No.

Was she expecting a visitor? No.

At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her kitchen,
which opened on the back yard.

She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches
from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung very
low.

In this manner she reached the bench.

The stone was still there.

She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though she
wished to caress and thank it.

All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she does
not see the person.

She turned her head and rose to her feet.

It was he.

His head was bare. He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black
clothes were hardly discernible. The twilight threw a wan light on
his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. Beneath a veil of
incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death
and night. His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and
by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.

He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry. She retreated slowly,
for she felt herself attracted. He did not stir. By virtue of something
ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his
eyes which she could not see.

Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had
it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--

"Pardon me, here I am. My heart is full. I could not live on as I was
living, and I have come. Have you read what I placed there on the bench?
Do you recognize me at all? Have no fear of me. It is a long time, you
remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg, near the
Gladiator. And the day when you passed before me? It was on the 16th of
June and the 2d of July. It is nearly a year ago. I have not seen you
for a long time. I inquired of the woman who let the chairs, and she
told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on
the third floor, in the front apartments of a new house,--you see that
I know! I followed you. What else was there for me to do? And then you
disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the
newspapers under the arcade of the Odéon. I ran after you. But no. It
was a person who had a bonnet like yours. At night I came hither. Do
not be afraid, no one sees me. I come to gaze upon your windows near
at hand. I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for you might be
alarmed. The other evening I was behind you, you turned round, I fled.
Once, I heard you singing. I was happy. Did it affect you because I
heard you singing through the shutters? That could not hurt you. No,
it is not so? You see, you are my angel! Let me come sometimes; I think
that I am going to die. If you only knew! I adore you. Forgive me, I
speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I may have displeased
you; have I displeased you?"

"Oh! my mother!" said she.

And she sank down as though on the point of death.

He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her close,
without knowing what he was doing. He supported her, though he was
tottering himself. It was as though his brain were full of smoke;
lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to him
that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was committing
a profanation. Moreover, he had not the least passion for this lovely
woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside himself with
love.

She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he
stammered:--

"You love me, then?"

She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than a
barely audible breath:--

"Hush! Thou knowest it!"

And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and
intoxicated young man.

He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The
stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips
met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that
the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the
black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?

A kiss, and that was all.

Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.

They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp
earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts
were full of thoughts. They had clasped hands unconsciously.

She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,
and how he had made his way into the garden. It seemed so simple to her
that he should be there!

From time to time, Marius' knee touched Cosette's knee, and both
shivered.

At intervals, Cosette stammered a word. Her soul fluttered on her lips
like a drop of dew on a flower.

Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed
silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.
These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their
dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimæras, their
weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had
longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each
other. They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing
could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They
related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that
love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about
them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out
into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an
hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul, and the young
girl who had the young man's soul. Each became permeated with the other,
they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she
laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:--

"What is your name?"

"My name is Marius," said he. "And yours?"

"My name is Cosette."



BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE



CHAPTER I--THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND

Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck
and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but
in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thénardier pair had had two other
children; both males. That made five; two girls and three boys.

Madame Thénardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still
young and very small, with remarkable luck.

_Got rid of_ is the word. There was but a mere fragment of nature in
that woman. A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than
one example extant. Like the Maréchale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the
Thénardier was a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity
ended. Her hatred of the human race began with her own sons. In the
direction of her sons her evil disposition was uncompromising, and her
heart had a lugubrious wall in that quarter. As the reader has seen, she
detested the eldest; she cursed the other two. Why? Because. The most
terrible of motives, the most unanswerable of retorts--Because. "I have
no need of a litter of squalling brats," said this mother.

Let us explain how the Thénardiers had succeeded in getting rid of their
last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.

The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the
same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two
children which she had had. She lived on the Quai des Célestins, at the
corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the
opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will
remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts
of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science took
advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of
inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the present day by the
external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both
her boys, who were still very young, one in the morning, the other
in the evening of the same day. This was a blow. These children were
precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month. These
eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by
collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du
Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was at an end. The Magnon
sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she
formed a part, everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend
mutual aid. Magnon needed two children; the Thénardiers had two.
The same sex, the same age. A good arrangement for the one, a good
investment for the other. The little Thénardiers became little Magnons.
Magnon quitted the Quai des Célestins and went to live in the Rue
Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself
is broken between one street and another.

The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and
the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.
Only, the Thénardier exacted for this loan of her children, ten francs a
month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she actually did pay.
It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to perform
his compact. He came to see the children every six months. He did not
perceive the change. "Monsieur," Magnon said to him, "how much they
resemble you!"

Thénardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become
Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to
discover that they had two little brothers. When a certain degree
of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral
indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were spectres.
Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague shadowy
forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life and easily
confounded again with the invisible.

On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little
ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever, the
Thénardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple. She said to her
husband: "But this is abandoning our children!" Thénardier, masterful
and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying: "Jean Jacques
Rousseau did even better!" From scruples, the mother proceeded to
uneasiness: "But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell me, Monsieur
Thénardier, is what we have done permissible?" Thénardier replied:
"Everything is permissible. No one will see anything but true blue in
it. Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after children
who have not a sou."

Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. She was
careful about her toilet. She shared her lodgings, which were furnished
in an affected and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English
thief. This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne,
recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with the
medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar's diamonds, became celebrated
later on in judicial accounts. She was called _Mamselle Miss_.

The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to
complain of their lot. Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well
cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived; they were
neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like
"little gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than by their real
one. Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves' slang in their
presence.

Thus passed several years. Thénardier augured well from the fact. One
day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend
of ten francs: "The father must give them some education."

All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been
protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly hurled
into life and forced to begin it for themselves.

A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret,
necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations,
is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society
which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this
description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world. The
Thénardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.

One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Éponine the note
relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police in the
Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss; and all
the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character, were
gathered into the net. While this was going on, the two little boys were
playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried
to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the house
empty. A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to them a
paper which "their mother" had left for them. On this paper there was
an address: _M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No_.
8. The proprietor of the stall said to them: "You cannot live here any
longer. Go there. It is near by. The first street on the left. Ask your
way from this paper."

The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his
hand the paper which was to guide them. It was cold, and his benumbed
little fingers could not close very firmly, and they did not keep a very
good hold on the paper. At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of
wind tore it from him, and as night was falling, the child was not able
to find it again.

They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.



CHAPTER II--IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE
GREAT

Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which
do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden
the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of
cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting
door or window. It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had
remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the
spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century
broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing
than ever. It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which
was ajar. It was the door of the sepulchre. In these winds one felt the
breath of the cholera.

From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed this
peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension.
Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth at
this epoch.

One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree that
January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had resumed their
cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering gayly under his rags,
was standing as though in ecstasy before a wig-maker's shop in the
vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's
woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where, and which he had converted
into a neck comforter. Little Gavroche appeared to be engaged in intent
admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with
orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her
smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was
taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he
could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then
proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs. He had
often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his species of
work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered
between his teeth: "Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps
it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday."

No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.

Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last
occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now
Friday.

The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving
a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy, that
freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were in his
pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.

While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of windsor
soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed, and still
smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years of age, the other
five, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, with a request for
something or other, alms possibly, in a plaintive murmur which resembled
a groan rather than a prayer. They both spoke at once, and their words
were unintelligible because sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the
teeth of the elder were chattering with cold. The barber wheeled round
with a furious look, and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the
elder with his left hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed
his door, saying: "The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for
nothing!"

The two children resumed their march in tears. In the meantime, a cloud
had risen; it had begun to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--

"What's the matter with you, brats?"

"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.

"Is that all?" said Gavroche. "A great matter, truly. The idea of
bawling about that. They must be greenies!"

And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather
bantering, an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--

"Come along with me, young 'uns!"

"Yes, sir," said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an
archbishop. They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the
Bastille.

As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance at the
barber's shop.

"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"35 he muttered. "He's an
Englishman."

A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file, with
Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter. This laugh was
wanting in respect towards the group.

"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.

An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more, and he
added:--

"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting, he's a serpent.
Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll have a bell hung to your
tail."

This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive. As he strode over a gutter,
he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy to meet Faust on the
Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.

"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"

And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.

"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.

Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.

"Is Monsieur complaining?"

"Of you!" ejaculated the man.

"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any more
complaints."

In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a
beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short a
gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled under a
porte-cochère. The little girl was getting to be too old for such a
thing. Growth does play these tricks. The petticoat becomes short at the
moment when nudity becomes indecent.

"Poor girl!" said Gavroche. "She hasn't even trousers. Hold on, take
this."

And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,
he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl, where
the scarf became a shawl once more.

The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in
silence. When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his
misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns
thanks for good.

That done: "Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint
Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

At this _brrr!_ the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became
furious. The wicked skies punish good deeds.

"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this? It's
re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my
subscription."

And he set out on the march once more.

"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl, as
she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."

And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--

"Caught!"

The two children followed close on his heels.

As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices, which indicate
a baker's shop, for bread is put behind bars like gold, Gavroche turned
round:--

"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"

"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since this
morning."

"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.

"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know where
they are."

"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche,
who was a thinker.

"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder, "we
have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have found
nothing."

"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."

He went on, after a pause:--

"Ah! we have lost our authors. We don't know what we have done with
them. This should not be, gamins. It's stupid to let old people stray
off like that. Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."

However, he asked them no questions. What was more simple than that they
should have no dwelling place!

The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered the
prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--

"It's queer, all the same. Mamma told us that she would take us to get a
blessed spray on Palm Sunday."

"Bosh," said Gavroche.

"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."

"Tanflûte!" retorted Gavroche.

Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been
feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.

At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,
but which was triumphant, in reality.

"Let us be calm, young 'uns. Here's supper for three."

And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.

Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed both of
them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou on the counter,
crying:--

"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."

The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.

"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.

And he added with dignity:--

"There are three of us."

And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers, had
taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose with
an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the great
Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this indignant
apostrophe full in the baker's face:--

"Keksekça?"

Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this interpellation
of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word, or one of those
savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl at each other from
bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes, are warned that it is a
word which they [our readers] utter every day, and which takes the place
of the phrase: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?" The baker understood
perfectly, and replied:--

"Well! It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."

"You mean _larton brutal_ [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche, calmly and
coldly disdainful. "White bread, boy! white bread [_larton savonné_]!
I'm standing treat."

The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread he
surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.

"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure like
that for?"

All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.

When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer, and
Gavroche said to the two children:--

"Grub away."

The little boys stared at him in surprise.

Gavroche began to laugh.

"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."

And he repeated:--

"Eat away."

At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.

And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy of
his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be
relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added, as he
handed him the largest share:--

"Ram that into your muzzle."

One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.

The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. As they tore their
bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up the shop of the baker,
who, now that they had paid their money, looked angrily at them.

"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.

They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows, the smallest
halted to look at the time on a leaden watch which was suspended from
his neck by a cord.

"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.

Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--

"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better than
that."

Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached the
angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end of which the low
and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--

"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.

"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no other
than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles, but recognizable to
Gavroche.

"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color of a
linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor. You're putting on style,
'pon my word!"

"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."

And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.

The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the
hand.

When they were ensconced under the arch of a porte-cochère, sheltered
from the rain and from all eyes:--

"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.

"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"36 replied Gavroche.

"Joker!"

And Montparnasse went on:--

"I'm going to find Babet."

"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."

Montparnasse lowered his voice:--

"Not she, he."

"Ah! Babet."

"Yes, Babet."

"I thought he was buckled."

"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.

And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very
day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his
escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police
office."

Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.

"What a dentist!" he cried.

Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--

"Oh! That's not all."

Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in
his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a
dagger made its appearance.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have brought
along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."

Montparnasse winked.

"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout with the
bobbies?"

"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. "It's
always a good thing to have a pin about one."

Gavroche persisted:--

"What are you up to to-night?"

Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every syllable:
"Things."

And abruptly changing the conversation:--

"By the way!"

"What?"

"Something happened t'other day. Fancy. I meet a bourgeois. He makes
me a present of a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket. A minute
later, I feel in my pocket. There's nothing there."

"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.

"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"

Gavroche pointed to his two protégés, and said:--

"I'm going to put these infants to bed."

"Whereabouts is the bed?"

"At my house."

"Where's your house?"

"At my house."

"So you have a lodging?"

"Yes, I have."

"And where is your lodging?"

"In the elephant," said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not
restrain an exclamation.

"In the elephant!"

"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche. "Kekçaa?"

This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which
every one speaks.

Kekçaa signifies: _Qu'est que c'est que cela a? _ [What's the matter
with that?]

The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and
good sense. He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to
Gavroche's lodging.

"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant. Is it comfortable there?"

"Very," said Gavroche. "It's really bully there. There ain't any
draughts, as there are under the bridges."

"How do you get in?"

"Oh, I get in."

"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.

"Parbleu! I should say so. But you mustn't tell. It's between the fore
legs. The bobbies haven't seen it."

"And you climb up? Yes, I understand."

"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."

After a pause, Gavroche added:--

"I shall have a ladder for these children."

Montparnasse burst out laughing:--

"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"

Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--

"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."

Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--

"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.

He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than
two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.
This gave him a different nose.

"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so, you
ought to keep them on all the time."

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.

"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"

The sound of his voice was different also. In a twinkling, Montparnasse
had become unrecognizable.

"Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.

The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being
occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew
near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and
admiration.

Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.

He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing
his words: "Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square with
my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten sous on
me, I wouldn't refuse to work, but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."

This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled
round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound
attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to
them a few paces off. Gavroche allowed an: "Ah! good!" to escape him,
but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:--

"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant with my
brats. Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and
hunt me up there. I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter. You will
inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."

"Very good," said Montparnasse.

And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of
the Grève, and Gavroche towards the Bastille. The little one of five,
dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his
head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.

The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than the
assonance _dig_ repeated five or six times in different forms. This
syllable, _dig_, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words
of a phrase, means: "Take care, we can no longer talk freely." There was
besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which was lost
upon Gavroche, that is _mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue_, a slang
expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife,
greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century
when Molière wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of
the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the
ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has
already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved
to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a "member of the Institute,
the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model
itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of
Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown,
on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had
acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional
aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and
masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly
painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind,
and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the
broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his
enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under
the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was a sort of
symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense. It was
some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside
the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was
falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from
its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. "The ædiles," as the expression
ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814. There it
stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten
palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered
athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished
between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all
around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous
movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in
a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it.
It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the
bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was something
about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and
something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated. As
we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is the real element of
everything that is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant
became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in
the formidable serenity of the shadows. Being of the past, he belonged
to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.

This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but assuredly
majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and savage
gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic
stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress
with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal
classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an
epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass away, people
have already begun to understand that, if there can be force in a
boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other words,
that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but ideas.
Harness locomotives to ideas,--that is well done; but do not mistake the
horse for the rider.

At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect
of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the
architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of
bronze.

This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called
the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried,
was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we
regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed the
task of isolating the elephant.

It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection
of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."

The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him
that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the
tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage,
and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep
in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.

On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the
effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small,
and said:--

"Don't be scared, infants."

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's enclosure
and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The two
children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a
word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which
had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.

There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served
the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised it with
remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's forelegs.
Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the belly
of the colossus could be distinguished.

Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to
them:--

"Climb up and go in."

The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.

"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:--

"You shall see!"

He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without
deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture. He
entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within,
and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale,
appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish
spectre.

"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns! You'll see how snug it is
here! Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you a hand."

The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired
them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining
very hard. The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his
brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this
huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.

The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder;
Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations like a
fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.

"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!--Give us
your hand here!--Boldly!"

And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and
vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.

"Nabbed!" said he.

The brat had passed through the crack.

"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me. Be so good as to take a seat,
Monsieur."

And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped down
the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his feet in
the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and planted him
fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb up behind
him, shouting to the elder:--

"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."

And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,
thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,
and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick
which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--

"Here we are! Long live General Lafayette!"

This explosion over, he added:--

"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."

Gavroche was at home, in fact.

Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless! Charity of great things! Goodness
of giants! This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the
Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been
accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in
their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond
of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:
"What's the good of that?" It served to save from the cold, the frost,
the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve
from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the
snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,
no bread, no clothes, no refuge. It served to receive the innocent whom
society repulsed. It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair
open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the
miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with
warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned,
condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a
benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on that
other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet,
without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed
on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good
for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by
God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order
to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass,
iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster
sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that
Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its
tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he
wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he
had lodged a child there.

The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was
hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,
beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and
homeless children who could pass through it.

"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at
home."

And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is
well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped up the
aperture.

Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity. The children heard the
crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical
match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade steel
represented progress.

A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one
of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called _cellar rats_.
The _cellar rat_, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the
interior of the elephant confusedly visible.

Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation which they
experienced was something like that which one would feel if shut up in
the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still, like what Jonah must have
felt in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton
appeared enveloping them. Above, a long brown beam, whence started at
regular distances, massive, arching ribs, represented the vertebral
column with its sides, stalactites of plaster depended from them like
entrails, and vast spiders' webs stretching from side to side, formed
dirty diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were visible large
blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive, and which
changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.

Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly had
filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it as on a
floor.

The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered to
him:--

"It's black."

This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche. The petrified air of the
two brats rendered some shock necessary.

"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed. "Are
you scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the
Tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don't belong to
the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope's
establishment?"

A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring. The two
children drew close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to
gentle, and addressing the smaller:--

"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing
intonation, "it's outside that it is black. Outside it's raining, here
it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom of wind;
outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one; outside there
ain't even the moon, here there's my candle, confound it!"

The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but
Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

"Quick," said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the
end of the room.

There stood his bed.

Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a
blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of
gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new. This is what the alcove
consisted of:--

Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish
which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two
in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as to
form a pyramidal bundle. This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass
wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held
by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes. A row
of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor so that nothing
could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than a piece of the
brass screens with which aviaries are covered in menageries. Gavroche's
bed stood as in a cage, behind this net. The whole resembled an
Esquimaux tent.

This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,
and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he crawled
in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the opening
hermetically again.

All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still had the _cellar
rat_ in his hand.

"Now," said he, "go to sleep! I'm going to suppress the candelabra."

"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the
netting, "what's that for?"

"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats. Go to sleep!"

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the
benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--

"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It's used for fierce animals.
There's a whole shopful of them there. All you've got to do is to climb
over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. You can
get as much as you want."

As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold of the
blanket, and the little one murmured:--

"Oh! how good that is! It's warm!"

Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he. "I took that from
the monkeys."

And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very
thick and admirably made mat, he added:--

"That belonged to the giraffe."

After a pause he went on:--

"The beasts had all these things. I took them away from them. It didn't
trouble them. I told them: 'It's for the elephant.'"

He paused, and then resumed:--

"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government.
So there now!"

The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this
intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated
like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable
and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose
physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank,
mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid of the
police, then?"

Gavroche contented himself with replying:--

"Brat! Nobody says 'police,' they say 'bobbies.'"

The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on
the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the
blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat
under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the
child. Then he turned to the elder:--

"Hey! We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"

"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of
a saved angel.

The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow
warm once more.

"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"

And pointing out the little one to his brother:--

"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big
fellow like you crying! It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."

"Gracious," replied the child, "we have no lodging."

"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say 'lodgings,' you say 'crib.'"

"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."

"You don't say 'night,' you say 'darkmans.'"

"Thank you, sir," said the child.

"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything.
I'll take care of you. You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer,
we'll go to the Glacière with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in
the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at
Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get
mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the
man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see
Frédérick Lemaître. I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even
played in a piece once. There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran
under a cloth, and that made the sea. I'll get you an engagement at my
theatre. We'll go to see the savages. They ain't real, those savages
ain't. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see
where their elbows have been darned with white. Then, we'll go to the
Opera. We'll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well
managed. I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the
Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies.
They're called dishclouts. And then we'll go to see the guillotine work.
I'll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur
Sanson. He has a letter-box at his door. Ah! we'll have famous fun!"

At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled him
to the realities of life.

"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out. Attention! I can't
spend more than a sou a month on my lighting. When a body goes to bed,
he must sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's
romances. And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the
porte-cochère, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."

"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk to
Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw, and we
must look out and not burn the house down."

"People don't say 'burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche, "they say
'blaze the crib.'"

The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the
back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. "You're taken in, rain!"
said Gavroche. "It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of
the house. Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses
its labor, it can't wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old
water-carrier that it is."

This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche, in
his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted, was
followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of it
entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the same
instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little creatures
uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network came near
being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them, and took
advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

"Calm down, children. Don't topple over the edifice. That's fine,
first-class thunder; all right. That's no slouch of a streak of
lightning. Bravo for the good God! Deuce take it! It's almost as good as
it is at the Ambigu."

That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children
gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them
out at full length, and exclaimed:--

"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now,
babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It's very bad
not to sleep. It'll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in
fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the
hide! I'm going to put out the light. Are you ready?"

"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right. I seem to have feathers under
my head."

"People don't say 'head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say 'nut'."

The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished
arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then
repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--

"Shut your peepers!"

And he snuffed out his tiny light.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began
to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic
sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was
accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and
chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother
had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little
one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in
a very low tone, and with bated breath:--

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head down on the mat again.

The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the
elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already
mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as
it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same
as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good
story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in
throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun
to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

Still the little one could not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Hey?" said Gavroche.

"What are rats?"

"They are mice."

This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in
the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he
lifted up his voice once more.

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche again.

"Why don't you have a cat?"

"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate
her."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little
fellow began to tremble again.

The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?"

"Who was it that was eaten?"

"The cat."

"And who ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate
cats, pursued:--

"Sir, would those mice eat us?"

"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.

The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--

"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch
hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"

At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand across his
brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.
Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating
themselves. Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their
voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,
they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast
asleep and heard nothing more.

The hours of the night fled away. Darkness covered the vast Place de la
Bastille. A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the
patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks,
and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence
before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed
into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good
deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping
children.

In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must
remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at
the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity of
the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a
man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the
enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until he
was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had illuminated
that man, it might have been divined from the thorough manner in which
he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain. Arrived beneath
the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any
human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have imitated. Twice he
repeated this cry, of whose orthography the following barely conveys an
idea:--

"Kirikikiou!"

At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly
of the elephant:--

"Yes!"

Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,
and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell
briskly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.

As for his cry of _Kirikikiou_,--that was, doubtless, what the child had
meant, when he said:--

"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his
"alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it
together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.

The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:
Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--

"We need you. Come, lend us a hand."

The lad asked for no further enlightenment.

"I'm with you," said he.

And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of
market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.

The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the
salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers
on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange
pedestrians.



CHAPTER III--THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT

This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--

An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer, and
Thénardier, although Thénardier was in close confinement. Babet had
arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day, as the reader
has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to
help them from outside.

Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had
time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a
plan. In former times, those severe places where the discipline of the
prison delivers the convict into his own hands, were composed of four
stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement, a camp bed, a grated
window, and a door lined with iron, and were called _dungeons_; but the
dungeon was judged to be too terrible; nowadays they are composed of an
iron door, a grated window, a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone
walls, and a stone ceiling, and are called _chambers of punishment_. A
little light penetrates towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about
these chambers which, as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they
allow the persons who should be at work to think.

So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment with
a rope. As he had the name of being very dangerous in the Charlemagne
courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. The first thing he found
in the New Building was Guelemer, the second was a nail; Guelemer, that
is to say, crime; a nail, that is to say, liberty. Brujon, of whom it
is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an
appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a
polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance,
and an atrocious smile. His glance resulted from his will, and his
smile from his nature. His first studies in his art had been directed
to roofs. He had made great progress in the industry of the men who tear
off lead, who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process
called _double pickings_.

The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment peculiarly
favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers were re-laying
and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of the slates on the
prison. The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated
from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were
scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the
direction of liberty.

The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be
seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. The walls
were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the authorities had been
obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories with a sheathing of wood,
because stones were in the habit of becoming detached and falling on
the prisoners in their beds. In spite of this antiquity, the authorities
committed the error of confining in the New Building the most
troublesome prisoners, of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in
prison parlance.

The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other, and a
top story which was called the Bel-Air (Fine-Air). A large chimney-flue,
probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de la Force, started
from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories, cut the dormitories,
where it figured as a flattened pillar, into two portions, and finally
pierced the roof.

Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been placed, by
way of precaution, on the lower story. Chance ordained that the heads of
their beds should rest against the chimney.

Thénardier was directly over their heads in the top story known as
Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine,
after passing the barracks of the firemen, in front of the porte-cochère
of the bathing establishment, beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs
in wooden boxes, at the extremity of which spreads out a little white
rotunda with two wings, brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic
dream of Jean Jacques.

Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda an enormous
black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.

This was the outer wall of La Force.

This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.

Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof, which
could be seen beyond. This was the roof of the New Building. There
one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they were the
windows of the Fine-Air.

A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the
dormitories.

The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large
hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double doors
of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. When one entered
from the north end, one had on one's left the four dormer-windows, on
one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals, four square,
tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages, built of masonry
to about the height of the elbow, and the rest, up to the roof, of iron
bars.

Thénardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since
the night of the 3d of February. No one was ever able to discover how,
and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a
bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which
a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the _Endormeurs_, or
_Sleep-compellers_, rendered famous.

There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,
half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an
unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.

On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two lost
children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped that
morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as Montparnasse,
rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found, began to pierce
the chimney against which their beds stood. The rubbish fell on Brujon's
bed, so that they were not heard. Showers mingled with thunder shook
the doors on their hinges, and created in the prison a terrible and
opportune uproar. Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall
asleep again, and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices. Brujon
was adroit; Guelemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the
watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the
dormitory, the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron
grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two
redoubtable ruffians were on the roof. The wind and rain redoubled, the
roof was slippery.

"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.

An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the
surrounding wall. At the bottom of this abyss, they could see the musket
of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. They fastened one end of the
rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon to the stumps of the iron bars
which they had just wrenched off, flung the other over the outer wall,
crossed the abyss at one bound, clung to the coping of the wall, got
astride of it, let themselves slip, one after the other, along the rope,
upon a little roof which touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after
them, jumped down into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it,
pushed open the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled
this, opened the porte-cochère, and found themselves in the street.

Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen in bed in
the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.

A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were
prowling about the neighborhood.

They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit of it
remained attached to the chimney on the roof. They had sustained no
other damage, however, than that of scratching nearly all the skin off
their hands.

That night, Thénardier was warned, without any one being able to explain
how, and was not asleep.

Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw
two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls, in front of
the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. One halted at the window,
long enough to dart in a glance. This was Brujon.

Thénardier recognized him, and understood. This was enough.

Thénardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution
under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force, was
kept in sight. The sentry, who was relieved every two hours, marched
up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. The Fine-Air was
lighted by a skylight. The prisoner had on his feet fetters weighing
fifty pounds. Every day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a jailer,
escorted by two dogs,--this was still in vogue at that time,--entered
his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black bread weighing two
pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather thin bouillon, in
which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons and tapped the bars.
This man and his dogs made two visits during the night.

Thénardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he
used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve
it from the rats," as he said. As Thénardier was kept in sight,
no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered
afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: "It would be better to let
him have only a wooden spike."

At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was
relieved, and replaced by a conscript. A few moments later, the man with
the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything, except,
possibly, the excessive youth and "the rustic air" of the "raw recruit."
Two hours afterwards, at four o'clock, when they came to relieve the
conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a log near
Thénardier's cage. As for Thénardier, he was no longer there. There was
a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the
roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably
carried away with him, as it was not found. They also seized in his cell
a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine
with which the soldier had been drugged. The soldier's bayonet had
disappeared.

At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that
Thénardier was out of reach. The truth is, that he was no longer in the
New Building, but that he was still in great danger.

Thénardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the
remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the
chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not
been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.

When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile,
one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. There stood on
that spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now
remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the
third story between the adjoining buildings. This ruin can be recognized
by two large square windows which are still to be seen there; the middle
one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a worm-eaten beam
adjusted like a prop. Through these windows there was formerly visible a
lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of the outer wall of La
Force.

The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is
half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.
In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the
portion of the ruin which has remained standing. The fence has a gate,
which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.

It was the crest of this ruin that Thénardier had succeeded in reaching,
a little after one o'clock in the morning.

How had he got there? That is what no one has ever been able to explain
or understand. The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered
and helped him. Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the
slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from
compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court,
then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and
thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary
there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility. Had
he placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the
Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping
of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut?
But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line;
it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks, it rose
towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings, it was not
even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on the Rue Pavée;
everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then, the sentinels must
have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence, the route taken by
Thénardier still remains rather inexplicable. In two manners, flight was
impossible. Had Thénardier, spurred on by that thirst for liberty which
changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into wattles of osier, a
legless man into an athlete, a gouty man into a bird, stupidity into
instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had
Thénardier invented a third mode? No one has ever found out.

The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for. The man who makes
his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and
of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards
deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime,
and one says of the escaped thief: "How did he contrive to scale that
wall?" in the same way that one says of Corneille: "Where did he find
_the means of dying?_"

At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his
clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his
knees torn, Thénardier had reached what children, in their figurative
language, call _the edge_ of the wall of the ruin, there he had
stretched himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed
him. A steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the
pavement of the street.

The rope which he had was too short.

There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair which
he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling himself that
the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea of hearing the
neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an
hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found
asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible depth, at
the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pavement, that pavement
longed for yet frightful, which meant death, and which meant liberty.

He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded,
if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance. He
listened. With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed through
the street since he had been there. Nearly the whole of the descent of
the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from Vincennes,
and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished through the Rue
Saint-Antoine.

Four o'clock struck. Thénardier shuddered. A few moments later, that
terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery of an escape
broke forth in the prison. The sound of doors opening and shutting, the
creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house, the
hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-butts on the pavement
of the courts, reached his ears. Lights ascended and descended past the
grated windows of the dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of
the top story of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks
on the right had been summoned. Their helmets, which the torch lighted
up in the rain, went and came along the roofs. At the same time,
Thénardier perceived in the direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness
lighting up the edge of the sky in doleful wise.

He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the heavy
rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir, subject to the
giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror of a certain arrest,
and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these
ideas to the other: "Dead if I fall, caught if I stay." In the midst of
this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man who
was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue Pavée, halt in the
recess above which Thénardier was, as it were, suspended. Here this
man was joined by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by
a third, then by a fourth. When these men were re-united, one of them
lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered
the enclosure in which the shanty stood. They halted directly under
Thénardier. These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order
that they might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the
sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant. It
must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in his box.
Thénardier, not being able to distinguish their visages, lent an ear to
their words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels himself
lost.

Thénardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before his
eyes,--these men conversed in slang.

The first said in a low but distinct voice:--

"Let's cut. What are we up to here?"

The second replied: "It's raining hard enough to put out the very
devil's fire. And the bobbies will be along instanter. There's a soldier
on guard yonder. We shall get nabbed here."

These two words, _icigo_ and _icicaille_, both of which mean _ici_, and
which belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second to
the slang of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thénardier. By the
_icigo_ he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers, by
the _icicaille_ he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been an
old-clothes broker at the Temple.

The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except in
the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in all its
purity. Had it not been for the _icicaille_, Thénardier would not have
recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.

In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.

"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit. How do we know that he doesn't
stand in need of us?"

By this, which was nothing but French, Thénardier recognized
Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand all
slangs and to speak none of them.

As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed
him. Thénardier did not hesitate. It was Guelemer.

Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--

"What are you jabbering about? The tavern-keeper hasn't managed to cut
his stick. He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't! You have to be
a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make
a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file
your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself!
The old fellow hasn't managed to play it, he doesn't understand how to
work the business."

Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken by
Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, highly colored
and risky argot used by Brujon what the language of Racine is to the
language of André Chenier:--

"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act. You have to be
knowing. He's only a greenhorn. He must have let himself be taken in
by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as his pal.
Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison? You have
seen all those lights. He's recaptured, there! He'll get off with twenty
years. I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there ain't anything more
to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance. Don't get mad, come with us,
let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."

"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.

"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon. "At the present moment, the
inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him. Let's be
off. Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."

Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance; the fact
is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who never abandon
each other, had prowled all night long about La Force, great as was
their peril, in the hope of seeing Thénardier make his appearance on the
top of some wall. But the night, which was really growing too fine,--for
the downpour was such as to render all the streets deserted,--the cold
which was overpowering them, their soaked garments, their hole-ridden
shoes, the alarming noise which had just burst forth in the prison, the
hours which had elapsed, the patrol which they had encountered, the
hope which was vanishing, all urged them to beat a retreat. Montparnasse
himself, who was, perhaps, almost Thénardier's son-in-law, yielded. A
moment more, and they would be gone. Thénardier was panting on his wall
like the shipwrecked sufferers of the _Méduse_ on their raft when they
beheld the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.

He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything. An
idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration; he drew from
his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached from the
chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space enclosed by the
fence.

This rope fell at their feet.

"A widow,"37 said Babet.

"My tortouse!"38 said Brujon.

"The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.

They raised their eyes. Thénardier thrust out his head a very little.

"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope,
Brujon?"

"Yes."

"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can fasten
it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."

Thénardier ran the risk, and spoke:--

"I am paralyzed with cold."

"We'll warm you up."

"I can't budge."

"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."

"My hands are benumbed."

"Only fasten the rope to the wall."

"I can't."

"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.

"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.

An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had been used
in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and mounted almost
to the very spot where they could see Thénardier. This flue, then much
damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen, but the marks of it are
still visible.

It was very narrow.

"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.

"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would take
a brat."

"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.

"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.

"Wait," said Montparnasse. "I've got the very article."

He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one was
passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate behind
him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.

Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thénardier;
Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate
opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed by
Gavroche. The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.

Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these
ruffians with a tranquil air. The water was dripping from his hair.
Guelemer addressed him:--

"Are you a man, young 'un?"

Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--

"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."

"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.

"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.

"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered:--

"Climb up that flue."

"With this rope," said Babet.

"And fasten it," continued Brujon.

"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.

"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.

"And then?" said Gavroche.

"There!" said Guelemer.

The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows, and made
that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips which signifies:--

"Is that all!"

"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.

"Will you?" began Brujon again.

"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared a most
unprecedented one to him.

And he took off his shoes.

Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty,
whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight, and handed
him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during Montparnasse's
absence. The gamin directed his steps towards the flue, which it was
easy to enter, thanks to a large crack which touched the roof. At the
moment when he was on the point of ascending, Thénardier, who saw life
and safety approaching, bent over the edge of the wall; the first light
of dawn struck white upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid
cheek-bones, his sharp and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and
Gavroche recognized him.

"Hullo! it's my father! Oh, that won't hinder."

And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.

He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though it had
been a horse, and knotted the rope firmly to the upper cross-bar of the
window.

A moment later, Thénardier was in the street.

As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out
of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling; the
terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke, all that
strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect and free,
ready to march onward.

These were this man's first words:--

"Now, whom are we to eat?"

It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent
remark, which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder.
_To eat_, true sense: _to devour_.

"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon. "Let's settle it in three
words, and part at once. There was an affair that promised well in the
Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house, an old rotten gate on
a garden, and lone women."

"Well! why not?" demanded Thénardier.

"Your girl, Éponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.

"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer. "Nothing to be
made there."

"The girl's no fool," said Thénardier. "Still, it must be seen to."

"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."

In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, during
this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts; he waited
a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would turn towards him,
then he put on his shoes again, and said:--

"Is that all? You don't want any more, my men? Now you're out of your
scrape. I'm off. I must go and get my brats out of bed."

And off he went.

The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.

When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets,
Babet took Thénardier aside.

"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.

"What young 'un?"

"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."

"Not particularly."

"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."

"Bah!" said Thénardier, "do you think so?"



BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG

Enlarge



CHAPTER I--ORIGIN

 _Pigritia_ is a terrible word.

It engenders a whole world, _la pègre_, for which read _theft_, and a
hell, _la pègrenne_, for which read _hunger_.

Thus, idleness is the mother.

She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.

Where are we at this moment? In the land of slang.

What is slang? It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect;
it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.

When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre
history introduced into a work written with the same aim as this39 a
thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor.--"What! How!
Argot! Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys,
convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc.

We have never understood this sort of objections.

Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound
observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of the people,
Balzac and Eugène Sue, having represented their ruffians as talking
their natural language, as the author of _The Last Day of a Condemned
Man_ did in 1828, the same objections have been raised. People repeated:
"What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang is odious! Slang
makes one shudder!"

Who denies that? Of course it does.

When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when
has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to the bottom? We have
always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a
simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty
accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore everything,
and study everything? Why should one halt on the way? The halt is a
matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman.

Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to
undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order,
where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage in
those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling, still
quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with
filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary each
word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the
shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in
its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of
slang. It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the
night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one beholds
a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers, rustles,
wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word resembles a
claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and such a phrase
seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive with
the hideous vitality of things which have been organized out of
disorganization.

Now, when has horror ever excluded study? Since when has malady banished
medicine? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper, the
bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who would
cast them back into their darkness, saying: "Oh! how ugly that is!" The
thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon
who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like
a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher
hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For, it must be stated
to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a literary
phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly speaking? It is
the language of wretchedness.

We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is
one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades, professions,
it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy and all
forms of intelligence, have their own slang. The merchant who says:
"Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality," the broker on 'change
who says: "Assets at end of current month," the gambler who says:
_"Tiers et tout, refait de pique,"_ the sheriff of the Norman Isles who
says: "The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate cannot claim the
fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of the real estate
by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: "The piece was hissed,"
the comedian who says: "I've made a hit," the philosopher who says:
"Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman who says: _"Voileci allais,
Voileci fuyant,"_ the phrenologist who says: "Amativeness,
combativeness, secretiveness," the infantry soldier who says: "My
shooting-iron," the cavalry-man who says: "My turkey-cock," the
fencing-master who says: "Tierce, quarte, break," the printer who says:
"My shooting-stick and galley,"--all, printer, fencing-master, cavalry
dragoon, infantry-man, phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher, comedian,
playwright, sheriff, gambler, stock-broker, and merchant, speak
slang. The painter who says: "My grinder," the notary who says: "My
Skip-the-Gutter," the hairdresser who says: "My mealyback," the cobbler
who says: "My cub," talks slang. Strictly speaking, if one absolutely
insists on the point, all the different fashions of saying the right
and the left, the sailor's _port_ and _starboard_, the scene-shifter's
_court-side_, and _garden-side_, the beadle's _Gospel-side_ and
_Epistle-side_, are slang. There is the slang of the affected lady as
well as of the _précieuses_. The Hotel Rambouillet nearly adjoins the
Cour des Miracles. There is a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase
contained in a love-letter from a very great lady and a very pretty
woman of the Restoration: "You will find in this gossip a fultitude of
reasons why I should libertize."40 Diplomatic ciphers are slang;
the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome, _grkztntgzyal_ for
despatch, and _abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI_. for the Duc de Modena, speaks
slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for carrot, radish, and
turnip, said _Opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum,
angelorum, postmegorum_, talked slang. The sugar-manufacturer who
says: "Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common, burnt,"--this honest
manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of criticism twenty years
ago, which used to say: "Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of
plays upon words and puns,"--talked slang. The poet, and the artist who,
with profound understanding, would designate M. de Montmorency as "a
bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and statues, speak slang.
The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora," fruits, "Pomona," the
sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, "charms," a horse, "a
courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose of Bellona," the
three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that classical Academician talks
slang. Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their slang. The tongue
which is employed on board ship, that wonderful language of the sea,
which is so complete and so picturesque, which was spoken by Jean Bart,
Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré, which mingles with the whistling of
the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the shock of the
boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale, the cannon, is
wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the fierce slang of the
thieves what the lion is to the jackal.

No doubt. But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word
_slang_ is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part,
we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and
determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang. The veritable
slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be
coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing
else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous,
cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness. There
exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all misfortunes, a last
misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into conflict
with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning rights; a fearful
conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy and ferocious
at one and the same time, it attacks the social order with pin-pricks
through vice, and with club-blows through crime. To meet the needs of
this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is
slang.

To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf, were
it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which would,
otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of
which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated, to extend
the records of social observation; is to serve civilization itself. This
service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by making two
Carthaginian soldiers talk Phonician; that service Molière rendered,
by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of
dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phonician, very good!
Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass! They are tongues
which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is the use
of preserving slang? What is the good of assisting slang "to survive"?

To this we reply in one word, only. Assuredly, if the tongue which a
nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language
which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and
study.

It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for
more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible
human misery.

And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and
infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy,
is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of manners
and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events.
The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of crowns, the
births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles, assemblages, great
public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything on the exterior;
the other historian has the interior, the depths, the people who toil,
suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing child, the secret war
between man and man, obscure ferocities, prejudices, plotted
iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct tremors of multitudes, the
die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law, the secret evolution of
souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans,
the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms which roam through the
darkness. He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity
at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable
casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who deal the
blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those
who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it. Have these
historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians
of external facts? Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer
things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any
less important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and more
sombre? Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted
with the cavern?

Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what
precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes
of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good
historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples,
if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian
of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the
interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the
exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history
of events, and this is true reciprocally. They constitute two different
orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always
interlaced, and which often bring forth results. All the lineaments
which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their parallels,
sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of the depths
produce ebullitions on the surface. True history being a mixture of all
things, the true historian mingles in everything.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double
focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some
bad action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in
word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.

One finds it difficult to recognize. Is it really the French tongue, the
great human tongue? Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort
upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of
evil. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the
Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it is called
vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have painted its face, it
crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile. Henceforth, it is apt
at all rôles, it is made suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with
verdigris by the forger, blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the
murderer applies its rouge.

When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,
one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside.
One distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without
understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,
but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.
The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic
bestiality. One thinks one hears hydras talking.

It is unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and whispers, completing
the gloom with mystery. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still
in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang. Obscurity
in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices. Terrible,
toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and
stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain
and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of
suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.

Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who
am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And are
you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth
is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is not a
recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is
so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.

Are you what is called a happy man? Well! you are sad every day. Each
day has its own great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were
trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your
own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow
the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some
friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been broken
or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your vertebral
column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs. This without
reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on. One cloud is
dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a hundred which
is wholly joyous and sunny. And you belong to that small class who are
happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and
the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another,
there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish
the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,--that
is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading,
means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer
in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn
without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer.
The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in
darkness.



CHAPTER II--ROOTS

Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.

Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden
to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic
dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement
made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of
the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were,
beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking.
Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a
thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare.
Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are
fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one
feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.

Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange
dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case
of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as
for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the
public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a
language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the
fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain
metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.

That exquisite and celebrated verse--


          Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
          But where are the snows of years gone by?

is a verse of slang. _Antam--ante annum_--is a word of Thunes slang,
which signified the past year, and by extension, _formerly_. Thirty-five
years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there
could be read in one of the cells at Bicêtre, this maxim engraved with a
nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: _Les dabs
d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coësre_. This means _Kings
in days gone by always went and had themselves anointed_. In the opinion
of that king, anointment meant the galleys.

The word _décarade_, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at
a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word,
which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly
onomatopoia the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:--


          Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
          Six stout horses drew a coach.

From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more
curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language
within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft
which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the
old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side of
the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of
slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that
is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable
alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or shorter distance
into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provençal,
Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports,
English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties, French,
Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic. A
profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected in common
by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each
suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its
pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed
life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely
visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.

Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is
_boffete_, a box on the ear, which is derived from _bofeton; vantane_,
window (later on _vanterne_), which comes from _vantana; gat_, cat,
which comes from _gato; acite_, oil, which comes from _aceyte_. Do you
want Italian? Here is _spade_, sword, which comes from _spada; carvel_,
boat, which comes from _caravella_. Do you want English? Here is
_bichot_, which comes from _bishop; raille_, spy, which comes from
_rascal, rascalion; pilche_, a case, which comes from _pilcher_, a
sheath. Do you want German? Here is the _caleur_, the waiter, _kellner_;
the _hers_, the master, _herzog_ (duke). Do you want Latin? Here is
_frangir_, to break, _frangere; affurer_, to steal, _fur; cadene_,
chain, _catena_. There is one word which crops up in every language of
the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and authority. It is the
word _magnus_; the Scotchman makes of it his _mac_, which designates the
chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore, the great Farlane, the
great Callumore41; slang turns it into _meck_ and later _le meg_, that
is to say, God. Would you like Basque? Here is _gahisto_, the devil,
which comes from _gaïztoa_, evil; _sorgabon_, good night, which comes
from _gabon_, good evening. Do you want Celtic? Here is _blavin_, a
handkerchief, which comes from _blavet_, gushing water; _ménesse_,
a woman (in a bad sense), which comes from _meinec_, full of stones;
_barant_, brook, from _baranton_, fountain; _goffeur_, locksmith, from
_goff_, blacksmith; _guedouze_, death, which comes from _guenn-du_,
black-white. Finally, would you like history? Slang calls crowns _les
maltèses_, a souvenir of the coin in circulation on the galleys of
Malta.

In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses
other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the
mind of man itself.

In the first place, the direct creation of words. Therein lies the
mystery of tongues. To paint with words, which contains figures
one knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human
languages, what may be called their granite.

Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words
created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without
etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous,
sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of
expression and which live. The executioner, _le taule_; the forest, _le
sabri_; fear, flight, _taf_; the lackey, _le larbin_; the mineral, the
prefect, the minister, _pharos_; the devil, _le rabouin_. Nothing
is stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, _le
rabouin_, for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and
produce on you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.

In the second place, metaphor. The peculiarity of a language which is
desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures.
Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke,
the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom is more
metaphorical than slang: _dévisser le coco_ (to unscrew the nut), to
twist the neck; _tortiller_ (to wriggle), to eat; _être gerbé_, to be
tried; _a rat_, a bread thief; _il lansquine_, it rains, a striking,
ancient figure which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates
long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the
lancers, and which compresses into a single word the popular expression:
it rains halberds. Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from
the first epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage
sense to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be _le rabouin_,
and becomes _le boulanger_ (the baker), who puts the bread into the
oven. This is more witty, but less grand, something like Racine after
Corneille, like Euripides after Æschylus. Certain slang phrases which
participate in the two epochs and have at once the barbaric character
and the metaphorical character resemble phantasmagories. _Les sorgueuers
vont solliciter des gails à la lune_--the prowlers are going to steal
horses by night,--this passes before the mind like a group of spectres.
One knows not what one sees.

In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It uses
it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it
often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and
summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and
complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in
which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the
direct creation and the metaphor: _le cab jaspine, je marronne que la
roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri_, the dog is barking, I suspect
that the diligence for Paris is passing through the woods. _Le dab est
sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative_, the bourgeois is
stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Generally,
to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to adding to
all the words of the language without distinction, an ignoble tail, a
termination in _aille_, in _orgue_, in _iergue_, or in _uche_. Thus:
_Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche?_ Do you think that leg
of mutton good? A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to
find out whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.

The termination in _mar_ has been added recently.

Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted
itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as
it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Contrary to what
happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls
upon it kills whatever it touches. Thus slang is in constant process of
decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never
pauses. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten
centuries. Thus _le larton_ (bread) becomes _le lartif; le gail_
(horse) becomes _le gaye; la fertanche_ (straw) becomes _la fertille;
le momignard_ (brat), _le momacque; les fiques_ (duds), _frusques; la
chique_ (the church), _l'égrugeoir; le colabre_ (neck), _le colas_. The
devil is at first, _gahisto_, then _le rabouin_, then _the baker_; the
priest is a _ratichon_, then the boar (_le sanglier_); the dagger is _le
vingt-deux_ (twenty-two), then _le surin_, then _le lingre_; the police
are _railles_, then _roussins_, then _rousses_, then _marchands de
lacets_ (dealers in stay-laces), then _coquers_, then _cognes_;
the executioner is _le taule_, then _Charlot, l'atigeur_, then _le
becquillard_. In the seventeenth century, to fight was "to give each
other snuff"; in the nineteenth it is "to chew each other's throats."
There have been twenty different phrases between these two extremes.
Cartouche's talk would have been Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of
this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men who utter
them.

Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement,
the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more. It has its
headquarters where it maintains its sway. The Temple preserved the slang
of the seventeenth century; Bicêtre, when it was a prison, preserved the
slang of Thunes. There one could hear the termination in _anche_ of
the old Thuneurs. _Boyanches-tu_ (bois-tu), do you drink? But perpetual
movement remains its law, nevertheless.

If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of
observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls
into doleful and useful meditation. No study is more efficacious and
more fecund in instruction. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in
slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means
to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.

For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of
darkness. The night is called _la sorgue_; man, _l'orgue_. Man is a
derivative of the night.

They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light
of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of
their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a
_sick man_; one who is condemned is a _dead man_.

The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which
he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon
the _castus_. In that funereal place, life outside always presents
itself under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his
feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet
that one walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one
dances; so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first
idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the _bastringue_
(public-house ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The
ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads
him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on
the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime _la
sorbonne_, and the head which expiates it _la tronche_.--When a man has
no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when
he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the
word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for
crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his
distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says
_un réguisé_.--What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The
convict calls himself a _fagot_.--And finally, what name do malefactors
give to their prison? The _college_. A whole penitentiary system can be
evolved from that word.

Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the
galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary _lirlonfa_,
have had their birth?

Let him listen to what follows:--

There existed at the Châtelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This
cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither
windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter
there, air could not. This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and
for floor ten inches of mud. It was flagged; but the pavement had rotted
and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the floor,
a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation from side
to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart, chains three
feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings for the
neck. In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys were
incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon. They were
thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging in the
darkness and waiting for him.

The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,
caught the unhappy wretches by the throat. They were rivetted and
left there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They
remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam,
almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug,
or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their
very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving
way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain some
rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened every
moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more. In order to
eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the mud, along
their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.

How long did they remain thus? One month, two months, six months
sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys.
Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this
sepulchre-hell, what did they do? What man can do in a sepulchre, they
went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they
sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters
of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before
the sound of the oars. Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone
through the prison-cellar of the Châtelet, said: "It was the rhymes that
kept me up." Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?

It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.
It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Châtelet of Paris that comes
the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: _"Timaloumisaine,
timaloumison."_ The majority of these songs are melancholy; some are
gay; one is tender:--


       Icicaille est la theatre        Here is the theatre
       Du petit dardant.               Of the little archer (Cupid).

Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart
of man, love.

In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is
the thing above all others. The secret, in the eyes of these wretches,
is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to
tear from each member of this fierce community something of his own
personality. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is
called: "to eat the bit." As though the informer drew to himself a
little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each
one's flesh.

What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor
replies: "It is to see thirty-six candles." Here slang intervenes and
takes it up: Candle, _camoufle_. Thereupon, the ordinary tongue
gives _camouflet_42 as the synonym for _soufflet_. Thus, by a sort
of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor, that
incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the Academy;
and Poulailler saying: "I light my _camoufle_," causes Voltaire to
write: "Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred _camouflets_."

Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step. Study and
investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of
intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.

The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,
whoever passes by; _le pantre_. (_Pan_, everybody.)

Slang is language turned convict.

That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it
can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,
that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is
sufficient to create consternation.

Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!

Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness?
Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator, the
immense rider of Pegasi and hippogriffs, the combatant of heroes of the
dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings, the radiant
knight of the future? Will she forever summon in vain to her assistance
the lance of light of the ideal? Is she condemned to hear the fearful
approach of Evil through the density of the gulf, and to catch glimpses,
nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the hideous water of that dragon's
head, that maw streaked with foam, and that writhing undulation of
claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there, without a gleam
of light, without hope, given over to that terrible approach, vaguely
scented out by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing its arms,
forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked
amid the shadows!



CHAPTER III--SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS

As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred
years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre,
symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful,
now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those
vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of
their own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for
instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves,
a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this
tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman
on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence
emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than these
reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes
for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling of
counterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in the realm
of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of this
powerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of some
of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point of
evoking tears. The _pègre_ is always the poor _pègre_, and he is always
the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardly
complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come
down to us: "I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture
his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself
suffering torture."43 The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes
himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society;
he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of
compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.

Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs
and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial
mien. The plaintive _maluré_ was replaced by the _larifla_. We find
in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and
prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident
and lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a
phosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest
by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--


                    Miralabi suslababo
                    Mirliton ribonribette
                    Surlababi mirlababo
                    Mirliton ribonribo.

This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a
man's throat.

A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy
of the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the
_grand meg_ and the _grand dab_. Given Louis XV. they call the King of
France "le Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they are almost gay. A
sort of gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their
consciences were not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribes
of darkness have no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions,
they possess the heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing
the sense of their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers
and dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter themselves
know not of. A sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter
into doctrines and sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their
ugliness, while communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines. A
sign, in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless
some diversion shall arise.

Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth
century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth
century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot
at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,
Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are
four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due
to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards
the four cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful,
Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards
the just. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the
sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock
in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great
books of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the
court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King's
sanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which were
eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to
say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret
Library. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the
surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger.
It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the one
who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was
Restif de La Bretonne.

This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in
Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed up
by Schiller in his famous drama _The Robbers_, theft and pillage rose up
in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and
false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in
reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,
after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of
theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and
honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared
the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it. Whenever a fact
of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders
wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,
which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the
unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made
spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of
society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful
commotions which were formerly called _jacqueries_, beside which purely
political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer
the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of
discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.

Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth
century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut
short.

The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with
the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the
door of ill and opened the door of good.

It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,
rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.

It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a
second soul, the right.

The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and
to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply
impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!
Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and
monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of
the Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days when
terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet
the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from
mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the
soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one
suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.

The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once
developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all is
liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to
Robespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the whole people has
been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who,
possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels
within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an
internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns. Hence
incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes
heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomeness
is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August,
there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened and
increasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an honest man; the
ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were
the wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By
the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over
the treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In
those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a
hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with
diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond,
which was worth thirty millions. Barefooted, they guarded that crown.

Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The
old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth
it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the
red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares
no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures
alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.



CHAPTER IV--THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.
There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood
will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner
in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis
is there. Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by
lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget
that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must
understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking
first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing,
airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a
magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in
offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness,
in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the
universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit
to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in
having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to
the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that
grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,
and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting
salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is,
that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need;
in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more
comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.

And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is
this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for
that.

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material
improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,
truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science
and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and
minds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-breaking than
a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from
hunger for the light.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we
shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge
naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be
accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It censures.
This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is walking and
advancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives
with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with his
banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He advances, he
threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on our
side. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists
a return of a river on its course.

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When
they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that
they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are
inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting
To-morrow, and that is to die.

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul
never,--this is what we desire.

Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem
will be solved.

Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be
finished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future
blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a
divinely fatal phenomenon.

Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them
within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of
equilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth and
heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker
of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than
extraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,
and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed
by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem
impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a
solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson
from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that
mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident
face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the
imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.

In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the
grandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially
in science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolve
wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it scrutinizes, it
analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of
reduction, discarding all hatred.

More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind
which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of
nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some fine
day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all
away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of
Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are
the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies
have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice
which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible
deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply.
Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they
sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that
we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind
those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels,
Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which
emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and
light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient
civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhere
upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we
lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once
diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.
Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its
prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. It is
already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.
All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards
this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty--to auscultate
civilization.

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this
persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an
austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we
feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has
these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor
because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do
not kill man.

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his
head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their
hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put
this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy
face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of
the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite
increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,
a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the
suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the _I_ so swollen that it bars
the soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of
seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards
assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality,
impure and simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point
which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal
is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,
imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,
monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the
maw of the clouds.



BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS



CHAPTER I--FULL LIGHT

The reader has probably understood that Éponine, having recognized
through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had
sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet,
and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent
in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws
the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built
the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette's garden as
Romeo entered the garden of Juliet. This had even proved easier for him
than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only
to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which
vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.
Marius was slender and readily passed through.

As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered
the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.

Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these
two souls, Marius was there every evening. If, at that period of
her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least
unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are
generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.
One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where it
is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness
of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the
heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon
it in the gloom with a shudder. Love has no middle course; it either
ruins or it saves. All human destiny lies in this dilemma. This dilemma,
ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than
by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same
sentiment says "yes" and "no" in the human heart. Of all the things that
God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,
alas! and the most darkness.

God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves which
save.

Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were
there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that
thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two beings
composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the
felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure,
honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows.
It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette
had a nimbus. They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they
clasped each other's hands, they pressed close to each other; but there
was a distance which they did not pass. Not that they respected it;
they did not know of its existence. Marius was conscious of a barrier,
Cosette's innocence; and Cosette of a support, Marius' loyalty. The
first kiss had also been the last. Marius, since that time, had not gone
further than to touch Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her
hair, with his lips. For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.
He inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was
happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which
can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. It was
the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. Two swans
meeting on the Jungfrau.

At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute,
beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic
Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised
Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle. Once, in the moonlight,
Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell
apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat. Marius
turned away his eyes.

What took place between these two beings? Nothing. They adored each
other.

At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a sacred
spot. All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense; and they
opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers. The wanton and
vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength and intoxication, around
these two innocents, and they uttered words of love which set the trees
to trembling.

What words were these? Breaths. Nothing more. These breaths sufficed to
trouble and to touch all nature round about. Magic power which we
should find it difficult to understand were we to read in a book these
conversations which are made to be borne away and dispersed like smoke
wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves. Take from those murmurs of two
lovers that melody which proceeds from the soul and which accompanies
them like a lyre, and what remains is nothing more than a shade; you
say: "What! is that all!" eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions,
laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most
sublime in the world! The only things which are worth the trouble of
saying and hearing!

The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these
absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious
fellow. Cosette said to Marius:--

"Dost thou know?--"

[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without either
of them being able to say how it had come about, they had begun to call
each other _thou_.]

"Dost thou know? My name is Euphrasie."

"Euphrasie? Why, no, thy name is Cosette."

"Oh! Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I was
a little thing. But my real name is Euphrasie. Dost thou like that
name--Euphrasie?"

"Yes. But Cosette is not ugly."

"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"

"Why, yes."

"Then I like it better too. Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. Call me
Cosette."

And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a
grove situated in heaven. On another occasion she gazed intently at him
and exclaimed:--

"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you
are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid
you defiance with this word: I love you!"

And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a
star.

Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she said to
him:--

"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without my
permission. It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me. I want you to
be well, because, in the first place, if you were not well, I should be
very unhappy. What should I do then?"

And this was simply divine.

Once Marius said to Cosette:--

"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."

This made both of them laugh the whole evening.

In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--

"Oh! One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish breaking
up a veteran!" But he stopped short, and went no further. He would have
been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter, and that was impossible.
This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh, before which that immense
and innocent love recoiled with a sort of sacred fright.

Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this, without anything
else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, to displace the old and
accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate, to sit elbow to elbow
on that bench, to gaze through the trees at the scintillation of the
on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee of his trousers into the
ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress her thumb-nail, to call her
_thou_, to smell of the same flower, one after the other, forever,
indefinitely. During this time, clouds passed above their heads. Every
time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than
of the clouds of heaven.

This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means.
To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of
bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it. A compliment
is something like a kiss through a veil. Voluptuousness mingles there
with its sweet tiny point, while it hides itself. The heart draws back
before voluptuousness only to love the more. Marius' blandishments, all
saturated with fancy, were, so to speak, of azure hue. The birds when
they fly up yonder, in the direction of the angels, must hear such
words. There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all
the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in
the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical
effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of
cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and
exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.

"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are! I dare not look at you.
It is all over with me when I contemplate you. You are a grace. I know
not what is the matter with me. The hem of your gown, when the tip of
your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me. And then, what an enchanted
gleam when you open your thought even but a little! You talk
astonishingly good sense. It seems to me at times that you are a
dream. Speak, I listen, I admire. Oh Cosette! how strange it is and how
charming! I am really beside myself. You are adorable, Mademoiselle. I
study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope."

And Cosette answered:--

"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed since
this morning."

Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue, which
always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little pith figures
always turn on their peg.

Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency,
whiteness, candor, radiance. It might have been said of Cosette that she
was clear. She produced on those who saw her the sensation of April
and dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the
auroral light in the form of a woman.

It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her.
But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent,
talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts of
true and delicate sayings. Her prattle was conversation. She never made
a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly. The woman feels and
speaks with the tender instinct of the heart, which is infallible.

No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at
once, both sweet and deep. Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of
woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.

In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A
crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn
broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with
melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep. The most
sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost
unbearable.

And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning
play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily and with
a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes presented the
air of two boys.

Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is
always present and will not be forgotten. She is there with her brutal
and sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one
feels in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious
shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

They idolized each other.

The permanent and the immutable are persistent. People live, they smile,
they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of their lips, they
interlace their fingers, they call each other _thou_, and that does not
prevent eternity.

Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight, in the
invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate each other in
the darkness with their hearts which they throw into their eyes, they
murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime, immense librations of the
planets fill the infinite universe.



CHAPTER II--THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS

They existed vaguely, frightened at their happiness. They did not notice
the cholera which decimated Paris precisely during that very month. They
had confided in each other as far as possible, but this had not extended
much further than their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an
orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that
he lived by writing things for publishers, that his father had been a
colonel, that the latter had been a hero, and that he, Marius, was on
bad terms with his grandfather who was rich. He had also hinted at being
a baron, but this had produced no effect on Cosette. She did not
know the meaning of the word. Marius was Marius. On her side, she
had confided to him that she had been brought up at the Petit-Picpus
convent, that her mother, like his own, was dead, that her father's name
was M. Fauchelevent, that he was very good, that he gave a great deal
to the poor, but that he was poor himself, and that he denied himself
everything though he denied her nothing.

Strange to say, in the sort of symphony which Marius had lived since he
had been in the habit of seeing Cosette, the past, even the most recent
past, had become so confused and distant to him, that what Cosette told
him satisfied him completely. It did not even occur to him to tell her
about the nocturnal adventure in the hovel, about Thénardier, about the
burn, and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father.
Marius had momentarily forgotten all this; in the evening he did not
even know that there had been a morning, what he had done, where he had
breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ears which
rendered him deaf to every other thought; he only existed at the hours
when he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in heaven, it was quite natural
that he should forget earth. Both bore languidly the indefinable burden
of immaterial pleasures. Thus lived these somnambulists who are called
lovers.

Alas! Who is there who has not felt all these things? Why does there
come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does life go on
afterwards?

Loving almost takes the place of thinking. Love is an ardent
forgetfulness of all the rest. Then ask logic of passion if you will.
There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there
is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette
and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette. The universe
around them had fallen into a hole. They lived in a golden minute. There
was nothing before them, nothing behind. It hardly occurred to Marius
that Cosette had a father. His brain was dazzled and obliterated. Of
what did these lovers talk then? We have seen, of the flowers, and
the swallows, the setting sun and the rising moon, and all sorts of
important things. They had told each other everything except everything.
The everything of lovers is nothing. But the father, the realities, that
lair, the ruffians, that adventure, to what purpose? And was he very
sure that this nightmare had actually existed? They were two, and they
adored each other, and beyond that there was nothing. Nothing else
existed. It is probable that this vanishing of hell in our rear is
inherent to the arrival of paradise. Have we beheld demons? Are there
any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer know. A rosy cloud
hangs over it.

So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that
improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the
zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in
the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot;
already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with
humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms which are
waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds of destiny;
ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow; amazed, rapturous,
floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight
out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity.
They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. Oh! splendid lethargy of the
real overwhelmed by the ideal.

Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her
presence. The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.

Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them.
They considered that they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on
man's part to wish that love should lead to something.



CHAPTER III--THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW

Jean Valjean suspected nothing.

Cosette, who was rather less dreamy than Marius, was gay, and that
sufficed for Jean Valjean's happiness. The thoughts which Cosette
cherished, her tender preoccupations, Marius' image which filled her
heart, took away nothing from the incomparable purity of her beautiful,
chaste, and smiling brow. She was at the age when the virgin bears her
love as the angel his lily. So Jean Valjean was at ease. And then, when
two lovers have come to an understanding, things always go well; the
third party who might disturb their love is kept in a state of perfect
blindness by a restricted number of precautions which are always the
same in the case of all lovers. Thus, Cosette never objected to any of
Jean Valjean's proposals. Did she want to take a walk? "Yes, dear little
father." Did she want to stay at home? Very good. Did he wish to pass
the evening with Cosette? She was delighted. As he always went to bed at
ten o'clock, Marius did not come to the garden on such occasions until
after that hour, when, from the street, he heard Cosette open the long
glass door on the veranda. Of course, no one ever met Marius in the
daytime. Jean Valjean never even dreamed any longer that Marius was in
existence. Only once, one morning, he chanced to say to Cosette: "Why,
you have whitewash on your back!" On the previous evening, Marius, in a
transport, had pushed Cosette against the wall.

Old Toussaint, who retired early, thought of nothing but her sleep, and
was as ignorant of the whole matter as Jean Valjean.

Marius never set foot in the house. When he was with Cosette, they hid
themselves in a recess near the steps, in order that they might neither
be seen nor heard from the street, and there they sat, frequently
contenting themselves, by way of conversation, with pressing each
other's hands twenty times a minute as they gazed at the branches of the
trees. At such times, a thunderbolt might have fallen thirty paces from
them, and they would not have noticed it, so deeply was the revery of
the one absorbed and sunk in the revery of the other.

Limpid purity. Hours wholly white; almost all alike. This sort of love
is a recollection of lily petals and the plumage of the dove.

The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. Every
time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar of the
gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.

He usually went away about midnight, and returned to Courfeyrac's
lodgings. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--

"Would you believe it? Marius comes home nowadays at one o'clock in the
morning."

Bahorel replied:--

"What do you expect? There's always a petard in a seminary fellow."

At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to
Marius:--

"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."

Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part this
reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not much in the
habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient, and now and then he
called upon Marius to come back to reality.

One morning, he threw him this admonition:--

"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located in
the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions, capital,
soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what's her name?"

But nothing could induce Marius "to talk." They might have torn out his
nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable
name, Cosette, was composed. True love is as luminous as the dawn and as
silent as the tomb. Only, Courfeyrac saw this change in Marius, that his
taciturnity was of the beaming order.

During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette learned to know these
immense delights. To dispute and to say _you_ for _thou_, simply that
they might say _thou_ the better afterwards. To talk at great length
with very minute details, of persons in whom they took not the slightest
interest in the world; another proof that in that ravishing opera called
love, the libretto counts for almost nothing;

For Marius, to listen to Cosette discussing finery;

For Cosette, to listen to Marius talk in politics;

To listen, knee pressed to knee, to the carriages rolling along the Rue
de Babylone;

To gaze upon the same planet in space, or at the same glowworm gleaming
in the grass;

To hold their peace together; a still greater delight than conversation;

Etc., etc.

In the meantime, divers complications were approaching.

One evening, Marius was on his way to the rendezvous, by way of the
Boulevard des Invalides. He habitually walked with drooping head. As he
was on the point of turning the corner of the Rue Plumet, he heard some
one quite close to him say:--

"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."

He raised his head and recognized Éponine.

This produced a singular effect upon him. He had not thought of that
girl a single time since the day when she had conducted him to the Rue
Plumet, he had not seen her again, and she had gone completely out of
his mind. He had no reasons for anything but gratitude towards her, he
owed her his happiness, and yet, it was embarrassing to him to meet her.

It is an error to think that passion, when it is pure and happy, leads
man to a state of perfection; it simply leads him, as we have noted, to
a state of oblivion. In this situation, man forgets to be bad, but
he also forgets to be good. Gratitude, duty, matters essential and
important to be remembered, vanish. At any other time, Marius would have
behaved quite differently to Éponine. Absorbed in Cosette, he had not
even clearly put it to himself that this Éponine was named Éponine
Thénardier, and that she bore the name inscribed in his father's will,
that name, for which, but a few months before, he would have so ardently
sacrificed himself. We show Marius as he was. His father himself was
fading out of his soul to some extent, under the splendor of his love.

He replied with some embarrassment:--

"Ah! so it's you, Éponine?"

"Why do you call me _you?_ Have I done anything to you?"

"No," he answered.

Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that
he could not do otherwise, now that he used _thou_ to Cosette, than say
_you_ to Éponine.

As he remained silent, she exclaimed:--

"Say--"

Then she paused. It seemed as though words failed that creature formerly
so heedless and so bold. She tried to smile and could not. Then she
resumed:--

"Well?"

Then she paused again, and remained with downcast eyes.

"Good evening, Mr. Marius," said she suddenly and abruptly; and away she
went.



CHAPTER IV--A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG

The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it is necessary
to indicate on account of the grave events which at that epoch hung on
the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds. Marius,
at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening,
with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight
of Éponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard. Two days
in succession--this was too much. He turned hastily aside, quitted the
boulevard, changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue
Monsieur.

This caused Éponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which
she had not yet done. Up to that time, she had contented herself with
watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to
encounter him. It was only on the evening before that she had attempted
to address him.

So Éponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. She saw him
displace the bar and slip into the garden.

She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and
readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.

She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--

"None of that, Lisette!"

She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the
bar, as though she were guarding it. It was precisely at the point where
the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in
which Éponine was entirely concealed.

She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without
breathing, a prey to her thoughts.

Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who
passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making
haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted
the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall,
heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--

"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."

The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into
the black niche, and was greatly alarmed. He redoubled his pace.

This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few instants later,
six men, who were marching separately and at some distance from each
other, along the wall, and who might have been taken for a gray patrol,
entered the Rue Plumet.

The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited for the
others; a second later, all six were reunited.

These men began to talk in a low voice.

"This is the place," said one of them.

"Is there a _cab_ [dog] in the garden?" asked another.

"I don't know. In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him
eat."

"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"

"Yes."

"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a
ventriloquist.

"So much the better," said the second who had spoken. "It won't screech
under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."

The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect
the gate, as Éponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar in
succession, and shaking them cautiously.

Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. As he was on the
point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness,
fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a push
in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him, but not
loudly:--

"There's a dog."

At the same moment, he perceived a pale girl standing before him.

The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings. He
bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as
ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.

He recoiled and stammered:--

"What jade is this?"

"Your daughter."

It was, in fact, Éponine, who had addressed Thénardier.

At the apparition of Éponine, the other five, that is to say,
Claquesous, Guelemer, Babet, Brujon, and Montparnasse had noiselessly
drawn near, without precipitation, without uttering a word, with the
sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night.

Some indescribable but hideous tools were visible in their hands.
Guelemer held one of those pairs of curved pincers which prowlers call
_fanchons_.

"Ah, see here, what are you about there? What do you want with us? Are
you crazy?" exclaimed Thénardier, as loudly as one can exclaim and still
speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"

Éponine burst out laughing, and threw herself on his neck.

"I am here, little father, because I am here. Isn't a person allowed to
sit on the stones nowadays? It's you who ought not to be here. What
have you come here for, since it's a biscuit? I told Magnon so. There's
nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little father! It's a
long time since I've seen you! So you're out?"

Thénardier tried to disentangle himself from Éponine's arms, and
grumbled:--

"That's good. You've embraced me. Yes, I'm out. I'm not in. Now, get
away with you."

But Éponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.

"But how did you manage it, little pa? You must have been very clever to
get out of that. Tell me about it! And my mother? Where is mother? Tell
me about mamma."

Thénardier replied:--

"She's well. I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you."

"I won't go, so there now," pouted Éponine like a spoiled child; "you
send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've hardly had
time to kiss you."

And she caught her father round the neck again.

"Come, now, this is stupid!" said Babet.

"Make haste!" said Guelemer, "the cops may pass."

The ventriloquist's voice repeated his distich:--


     "Nous n' sommes pas le jour de l'an,
                              "This isn't New Year's day
     A bécoter papa, maman."
                               To peck at pa and ma."

Éponine turned to the five ruffians.

"Why, it's Monsieur Brujon. Good day, Monsieur Babet. Good day,
Monsieur Claquesous. Don't you know me, Monsieur Guelemer? How goes it,
Montparnasse?"

"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thénardier. "But good day, good
evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"

"It's the hour for foxes, not for chickens," said Montparnasse.

"You see the job we have on hand here," added Babet.

Éponine caught Montparnasse's hand.

"Take care," said he, "you'll cut yourself, I've a knife open."

"My little Montparnasse," responded Éponine very gently, "you must have
confidence in people. I am the daughter of my father, perhaps. Monsieur
Babet, Monsieur Guelemer, I'm the person who was charged to investigate
this matter."

It is remarkable that Éponine did not talk slang. That frightful tongue
had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.

She pressed in her hand, small, bony, and feeble as that of a skeleton,
Guelemer's huge, coarse fingers, and continued:--

"You know well that I'm no fool. Ordinarily, I am believed. I have
rendered you service on various occasions. Well, I have made inquiries;
you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see. I swear to you that
there is nothing in this house."

"There are lone women," said Guelemer.

"No, the persons have moved away."

"The candles haven't, anyway!" ejaculated Babet.

And he pointed out to Éponine, across the tops of the trees, a light
which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion. It was
Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen to dry.

Éponine made a final effort.

"Well," said she, "they're very poor folks, and it's a hovel where there
isn't a sou."

"Go to the devil!" cried Thénardier. "When we've turned the house upside
down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below, we'll tell
you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous or
half-farthings."

And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.

"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Éponine, "I entreat you, you
are a good fellow, don't enter."

"Take care, you'll cut yourself," replied Montparnasse.

Thénardier resumed in his decided tone:--

"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"

Éponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again, and
said:--

"So you mean to enter this house?"

"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.

Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians who were
armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages of demons,
and said in a firm, low voice:--

"Well, I don't mean that you shall."

They halted in amazement. The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin.
She went on:--

"Friends! Listen well. This is not what you want. Now I'm talking. In
the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on this
gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody, I'll
have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."

"She'd do it, too," said Thénardier in a low tone to Brujon and the
ventriloquist.

She shook her head and added:--

"Beginning with my father!"

Thénardier stepped nearer.

"Not so close, my good man!" said she.

He retreated, growling between his teeth:--

"Why, what's the matter with her?"

And he added:--

"Bitch!"

She began to laugh in a terrible way:--

"As you like, but you shall not enter here. I'm not the daughter of
a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what
matters that to me? You are men. Well, I'm a woman. You don't frighten
me. I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit
me. If you approach, I'll bark. I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't
care a straw for you. Go your way, you bore me! Go where you please, but
don't come here, I forbid it! You can use your knives. I'll use kicks;
it's all the same to me, come on!"

She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst out
laughing:--

"Pardine! I'm not afraid. I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall be
cold this winter. Aren't they ridiculous, these ninnies of men, to think
they can scare a girl! What! Scare? Oh, yes, much! Because you have
finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed when you put on a
big voice, forsooth! I ain't afraid of anything, that I ain't!"

She fastened her intent gaze upon Thénardier and said:--

"Not even of you, father!"

Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes upon
the ruffians in turn:--

"What do I care if I'm picked up to-morrow morning on the pavement of
the Rue Plumet, killed by the blows of my father's club, or whether I'm
found a year from now in the nets at Saint-Cloud or the Isle of Swans in
the midst of rotten old corks and drowned dogs?"

She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath came
from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.

She resumed:--

"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang!
There are six of you; I represent the whole world."

Thénardier made a movement towards her.

"Don't approach!" she cried.

He halted, and said gently:--

"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud. So you intend to
hinder us in our work, my daughter? But we must earn our living all the
same. Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"

"You bother me," said Éponine.

"But we must live, we must eat--"

"Burst!"

So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence and
hummed:--


       "Mon bras si dodu,            "My arm so plump,
        Ma jambe bien faite           My leg well formed,
        Et le temps perdu."           And time wasted."

She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she
swung her foot with an air of indifference. Her tattered gown permitted
a view of her thin shoulder-blades. The neighboring street lantern
illuminated her profile and her attitude. Nothing more resolute and more
surprising could be seen.

The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check by a girl,
retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern, and held counsel with
furious and humiliated shrugs.

In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.

"There's something the matter with her," said Babet. "A reason. Is she
in love with the dog? It's a shame to miss this, anyway. Two women, an
old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains that ain't so bad
at the windows. The old cove must be a Jew. I think the job's a good
one."

"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. "Do the
job. I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"

He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light of
the lantern.

Thénardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever the rest
pleased.

Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows,
"put up the job," had not as yet spoken. He seemed thoughtful. He had
the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was known that he
had plundered a police post simply out of bravado. Besides this he made
verses and songs, which gave him great authority.

Babet interrogated him:--

"You say nothing, Brujon?"

Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head in
various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--

"See here; this morning I came across two sparrows fighting, this
evening I jostled a woman who was quarrelling. All that's bad. Let's
quit."

They went away.

As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--

"Never mind! if they had wanted, I'd have cut her throat."

Babet responded

"I wouldn't. I don't hit a lady."

At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following
enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--

"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"

"Under Pantin [Paris]."

"Have you the key to the gate, Thénardier?"

"Pardi."

Éponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the
road by which they had come. She rose and began to creep after them
along the walls and the houses. She followed them thus as far as the
boulevard.

There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom,
where they appeared to melt away.



CHAPTER V--THINGS OF THE NIGHT

After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its
tranquil, nocturnal aspect. That which had just taken place in this
street would not have astonished a forest. The lofty trees, the copses,
the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass, exist in
a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses of sudden
apparitions of the invisible; that which is below man distinguishes,
through the mists, that which is beyond man; and the things of which we
living beings are ignorant there meet face to face in the night. Nature,
bristling and wild, takes alarm at certain approaches in which she
fancies that she feels the supernatural. The forces of the gloom know
each other, and are strangely balanced by each other. Teeth and claws
fear what they cannot grasp. Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious
appetites, hunger in search of prey, the armed instincts of nails
and jaws which have for source and aim the belly, glare and smell out
uneasily the impassive spectral forms straying beneath a shroud, erect
in its vague and shuddering robe, and which seem to them to live with
a dead and terrible life. These brutalities, which are only matter,
entertain a confused fear of having to deal with the immense obscurity
condensed into an unknown being. A black figure barring the way stops
the wild beast short. That which emerges from the cemetery intimidates
and disconcerts that which emerges from the cave; the ferocious fear the
sinister; wolves recoil when they encounter a ghoul.



CHAPTER VI--MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING
COSETTE HIS ADDRESS

While this sort of a dog with a human face was mounting guard over the
gate, and while the six ruffians were yielding to a girl, Marius was by
Cosette's side.

Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the
trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had
the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had
all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the
inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy,
more ecstatic.

But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping. Her eyes were
red.

This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream.

Marius' first word had been: "What is the matter?"

And she had replied: "This."

Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while he
tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:--

"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, because he
has business, and we may go away from here."

Marius shivered from head to foot.

When one is at the end of one's life, to die means to go away; when one
is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.

For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees,
taken possession of Cosette each day. As we have already explained, in
the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body; later
on, one takes the body long before the soul; sometimes one does not take
the soul at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add: "Because there is
none"; but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. So Marius possessed
Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her with all his soul, and
seized her jealously with incredible conviction. He possessed her smile,
her breath, her perfume, the profound radiance of her blue eyes, the
sweetness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark which
she had on her neck, all her thoughts. Therefore, he possessed all
Cosette's dreams.

He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched lightly with his
breath, the short locks on the nape of her neck, and he declared to
himself that there was not one of those short hairs which did not belong
to him, Marius. He gazed upon and adored the things that she wore, her
knot of ribbon, her gloves, her sleeves, her shoes, her cuffs, as sacred
objects of which he was the master. He dreamed that he was the lord of
those pretty shell combs which she wore in her hair, and he even said to
himself, in confused and suppressed stammerings of voluptuousness which
did not make their way to the light, that there was not a ribbon of her
gown, not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold in her bodice, which was
not his. Beside Cosette he felt himself beside his own property, his
own thing, his own despot and his slave. It seemed as though they had
so intermingled their souls, that it would have been impossible to tell
them apart had they wished to take them back again.--"This is mine."
"No, it is mine." "I assure you that you are mistaken. This is my
property." "What you are taking as your own is myself."--Marius was
something that made a part of Cosette, and Cosette was something which
made a part of Marius. Marius felt Cosette within him. To have Cosette,
to possess Cosette, this, to him, was not to be distinguished from
breathing. It was in the midst of this faith, of this intoxication, of
this virgin possession, unprecedented and absolute, of this sovereignty,
that these words: "We are going away," fell suddenly, at a blow, and
that the harsh voice of reality cried to him: "Cosette is not yours!"

Marius awoke. For six weeks Marius had been living, as we have said,
outside of life; those words, _going away!_ caused him to re-enter it
harshly.

He found not a word to say. Cosette merely felt that his hand was very
cold. She said to him in her turn: "What is the matter?"

He replied in so low a tone that Cosette hardly heard him:--

"I did not understand what you said."

She began again:--

"This morning my father told me to settle all my little affairs and to
hold myself in readiness, that he would give me his linen to put in a
trunk, that he was obliged to go on a journey, that we were to go away,
that it is necessary to have a large trunk for me and a small one for
him, and that all is to be ready in a week from now, and that we might
go to England."

"But this is outrageous!" exclaimed Marius.

It is certain, that, at that moment, no abuse of power, no violence, not
one of the abominations of the worst tyrants, no action of Busiris, of
Tiberius, or of Henry VIII., could have equalled this in atrocity,
in the opinion of Marius; M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter off to
England because he had business there.

He demanded in a weak voice:--

"And when do you start?"

"He did not say when."

"And when shall you return?"

"He did not say when."

Marius rose and said coldly:--

"Cosette, shall you go?"

Cosette turned toward him her beautiful eyes, all filled with anguish,
and replied in a sort of bewilderment:--

"Where?"

"To England. Shall you go?"

"Why do you say _you_ to me?"

"I ask you whether you will go?"

"What do you expect me to do?" she said, clasping her hands.

"So, you will go?"

"If my father goes."

"So, you will go?"

Cosette took Marius' hand, and pressed it without replying.

"Very well," said Marius, "then I will go elsewhere."

Cosette felt rather than understood the meaning of these words.
She turned so pale that her face shone white through the gloom. She
stammered:--

"What do you mean?"

Marius looked at her, then raised his eyes to heaven, and answered:
"Nothing."

When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him. The smile of a
woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance, even at night.

"How silly we are! Marius, I have an idea."

"What is it?"

"If we go away, do you go too! I will tell you where! Come and join me
wherever I am."

Marius was now a thoroughly roused man. He had fallen back into reality.
He cried to Cosette:--

"Go away with you! Are you mad? Why, I should have to have money, and I
have none! Go to England? But I am in debt now, I owe, I don't know how
much, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of my friends with whom you
are not acquainted! I have an old hat which is not worth three francs,
I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my
elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I
have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only
see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the
daytime, you would give me a sou! Go to England! Eh! I haven't enough to
pay for a passport!"

He threw himself against a tree which was close at hand, erect, his brow
pressed close to the bark, feeling neither the wood which flayed his
skin, nor the fever which was throbbing in his temples, and there he
stood motionless, on the point of falling, like the statue of despair.

He remained a long time thus. One could remain for eternity in such
abysses. At last he turned round. He heard behind him a faint stifled
noise, which was sweet yet sad.

It was Cosette sobbing.

She had been weeping for more than two hours beside Marius as he
meditated.

He came to her, fell at her knees, and slowly prostrating himself, he
took the tip of her foot which peeped out from beneath her robe, and
kissed it.

She let him have his way in silence. There are moments when a woman
accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion of love.

"Do not weep," he said.

She murmured:--

"Not when I may be going away, and you cannot come!"

He went on:--

"Do you love me?"

She replied, sobbing, by that word from paradise which is never more
charming than amid tears:--

"I adore you!"

He continued in a tone which was an indescribable caress:--

"Do not weep. Tell me, will you do this for me, and cease to weep?"

"Do you love me?" said she.

He took her hand.

"Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to any one, because my
word of honor terrifies me. I feel that my father is by my side. Well, I
give you my most sacred word of honor, that if you go away I shall die."

In the tone with which he uttered these words there lay a melancholy so
solemn and so tranquil, that Cosette trembled. She felt that chill which
is produced by a true and gloomy thing as it passes by. The shock made
her cease weeping.

"Now, listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow."

"Why?"

"Do not expect me until the day after to-morrow."

"Oh! Why?"

"You will see."

"A day without seeing you! But that is impossible!"

"Let us sacrifice one day in order to gain our whole lives, perhaps."

And Marius added in a low tone and in an aside:--

"He is a man who never changes his habits, and he has never received any
one except in the evening."

"Of what man are you speaking?" asked Cosette.

"I? I said nothing."

"What do you hope, then?"

"Wait until the day after to-morrow."

"You wish it?"

"Yes, Cosette."

She took his head in both her hands, raising herself on tiptoe in order
to be on a level with him, and tried to read his hope in his eyes.

Marius resumed:--

"Now that I think of it, you ought to know my address: something might
happen, one never knows; I live with that friend named Courfeyrac, Rue
de la Verrerie, No. 16."

He searched in his pocket, pulled out his penknife, and with the blade
he wrote on the plaster of the wall:--

_"16 Rue de la Verrerie."_

In the meantime, Cosette had begun to gaze into his eyes once more.

"Tell me your thought, Marius; you have some idea. Tell it to me. Oh!
tell me, so that I may pass a pleasant night."

"This is my idea: that it is impossible that God should mean to part us.
Wait; expect me the day after to-morrow."

"What shall I do until then?" said Cosette. "You are outside, you go,
and come! How happy men are! I shall remain entirely alone! Oh! How sad
I shall be! What is it that you are going to do to-morrow evening? tell
me."

"I am going to try something."

"Then I will pray to God and I will think of you here, so that you may
be successful. I will question you no further, since you do not wish it.
You are my master. I shall pass the evening to-morrow in singing that
music from _Euryanthe_ that you love, and that you came one evening to
listen to, outside my shutters. But day after to-morrow you will come
early. I shall expect you at dusk, at nine o'clock precisely, I warn
you. Mon Dieu! how sad it is that the days are so long! On the stroke of
nine, do you understand, I shall be in the garden."

"And I also."

And without having uttered it, moved by the same thought, impelled by
those electric currents which place lovers in continual communication,
both being intoxicated with delight even in their sorrow, they fell into
each other's arms, without perceiving that their lips met while their
uplifted eyes, overflowing with rapture and full of tears, gazed upon
the stars.

When Marius went forth, the street was deserted. This was the moment
when Éponine was following the ruffians to the boulevard.

While Marius had been dreaming with his head pressed to the tree, an
idea had crossed his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged to be
senseless and impossible. He had come to a desperate decision.



CHAPTER VII--THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH
OTHER

At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first
birthday. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned. He was, as
the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death
perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even
sorrow cannot curve.

Still, his daughter had been saying for some time: "My father is
sinking." He no longer boxed the maids' ears; he no longer thumped
the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in
opening the door. The Revolution of July had exasperated him for the
space of barely six months. He had viewed, almost tranquilly, that
coupling of words, in the _Moniteur:_ M. Humblot-Conté, peer of France.
The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected. He did not bend, he
did not yield; this was no more a characteristic of his physical than
of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving way internally. For four
years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot firmly planted, that
is the exact word, in the conviction that that good-for-nothing young
scamp would ring at his door some day or other; now he had reached
the point, where, at certain gloomy hours, he said to himself, that
if Marius made him wait much longer--It was not death that was
insupportable to him; it was the idea that perhaps he should never see
Marius again. The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered
his brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him, and
it chilled him. Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural
sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather's love for the
ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash. It is during December
nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees, that one thinks oftenest of
the son.

M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things, incapable
of taking a single step, he--the grandfather, towards his grandson; "I
would die rather," he said to himself. He did not consider himself
as the least to blame; but he thought of Marius only with profound
tenderness, and the mute despair of an elderly, kindly old man who is
about to vanish in the dark.

He began to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.

M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself, for it
would have rendered him furious and ashamed, had never loved a mistress
as he loved Marius.

He had had placed in his chamber, opposite the head of his bed, so that
it should be the first thing on which his eyes fell on waking, an
old portrait of his other daughter, who was dead, Madame Pontmercy,
a portrait which had been taken when she was eighteen. He gazed
incessantly at that portrait. One day, he happened to say, as he gazed
upon it:--

"I think the likeness is strong."

"To my sister?" inquired Mademoiselle Gillenormand. "Yes, certainly."

"The old man added:--

"And to him also."

Once as he sat with his knees pressed together, and his eyes almost
closed, in a despondent attitude, his daughter ventured to say to him:--

"Father, are you as angry with him as ever?"

She paused, not daring to proceed further.

"With whom?" he demanded.

"With that poor Marius."

He raised his aged head, laid his withered and emaciated fist on the
table, and exclaimed in his most irritated and vibrating tone:--

"Poor Marius, do you say! That gentleman is a knave, a wretched
scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty, and
wicked man!"

And he turned away so that his daughter might not see the tear that
stood in his eye.

Three days later he broke a silence which had lasted four hours, to say
to his daughter point-blank:--

"I had the honor to ask Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention him
to me."

Aunt Gillenormand renounced every effort, and pronounced this acute
diagnosis: "My father never cared very much for my sister after her
folly. It is clear that he detests Marius."

"After her folly" meant: "after she had married the colonel."

However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle
Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the
officer of lancers, for Marius. The substitute, Théodule, had not been a
success. M. Gillenormand had not accepted the _quid pro quo_. A vacancy
in the heart does not accommodate itself to a stop-gap. Théodule, on his
side, though he scented the inheritance, was disgusted at the task
of pleasing. The goodman bored the lancer; and the lancer shocked the
goodman. Lieutenant Théodule was gay, no doubt, but a chatter-box,
frivolous, but vulgar; a high liver, but a frequenter of bad company; he
had mistresses, it is true, and he had a great deal to say about them,
it is true also; but he talked badly. All his good qualities had a
defect. M. Gillenormand was worn out with hearing him tell about the
love affairs that he had in the vicinity of the barracks in the Rue
de Babylone. And then, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes came in his
uniform, with the tricolored cockade. This rendered him downright
intolerable. Finally, Father Gillenormand had said to his daughter:
"I've had enough of that Théodule. I haven't much taste for warriors
in time of peace. Receive him if you choose. I don't know but I prefer
slashers to fellows that drag their swords. The clash of blades in
battle is less dismal, after all, than the clank of the scabbard on
the pavement. And then, throwing out your chest like a bully and
lacing yourself like a girl, with stays under your cuirass, is doubly
ridiculous. When one is a veritable man, one holds equally aloof
from swagger and from affected airs. He is neither a blusterer nor a
finnicky-hearted man. Keep your Théodule for yourself."

It was in vain that his daughter said to him: "But he is your
grandnephew, nevertheless,"--it turned out that M. Gillenormand, who
was a grandfather to the very finger-tips, was not in the least a
grand-uncle.

In fact, as he had good sense, and as he had compared the two, Théodule
had only served to make him regret Marius all the more.

One evening,--it was the 24th of June, which did not prevent Father
Gillenormand having a rousing fire on the hearth,--he had dismissed his
daughter, who was sewing in a neighboring apartment. He was alone in
his chamber, amid its pastoral scenes, with his feet propped on the
andirons, half enveloped in his huge screen of coromandel lacquer, with
its nine leaves, with his elbow resting on a table where burned two
candles under a green shade, engulfed in his tapestry armchair, and in
his hand a book which he was not reading. He was dressed, according to
his wont, like an _incroyable_, and resembled an antique portrait by
Garat. This would have made people run after him in the street, had not
his daughter covered him up, whenever he went out, in a vast bishop's
wadded cloak, which concealed his attire. At home, he never wore a
dressing gown, except when he rose and retired. "It gives one a look of
age," said he.

Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly; and,
as usual, bitterness predominated. His tenderness once soured always
ended by boiling and turning to indignation. He had reached the point
where a man tries to make up his mind and to accept that which rends his
heart. He was explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason
why Marius should return, that if he intended to return, he should
have done it long ago, that he must renounce the idea. He was trying to
accustom himself to the thought that all was over, and that he should
die without having beheld "that gentleman" again. But his whole nature
revolted; his aged paternity would not consent to this. "Well!" said
he,--this was his doleful refrain,--"he will not return!" His bald head
had fallen upon his breast, and he fixed a melancholy and irritated gaze
upon the ashes on his hearth.

In the very midst of his revery, his old servant Basque entered, and
inquired:--

"Can Monsieur receive M. Marius?"

The old man sat up erect, pallid, and like a corpse which rises under
the influence of a galvanic shock. All his blood had retreated to his
heart. He stammered:--

"M. Marius what?"

"I don't know," replied Basque, intimidated and put out of countenance
by his master's air; "I have not seen him. Nicolette came in and said to
me: 'There's a young man here; say that it is M. Marius.'"

Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice:--

"Show him in."

And he remained in the same attitude, with shaking head, and his eyes
fixed on the door. It opened once more. A young man entered. It was
Marius.

Marius halted at the door, as though waiting to be bidden to enter.

His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity caused by
the shade. Nothing could be seen but his calm, grave, but strangely sad
face.

It was several minutes before Father Gillenormand, dulled with amazement
and joy, could see anything except a brightness as when one is in the
presence of an apparition. He was on the point of swooning; he saw
Marius through a dazzling light. It certainly was he, it certainly was
Marius.

At last! After the lapse of four years! He grasped him entire, so to
speak, in a single glance. He found him noble, handsome, distinguished,
well-grown, a complete man, with a suitable mien and a charming air. He
felt a desire to open his arms, to call him, to fling himself forward;
his heart melted with rapture, affectionate words swelled and overflowed
his breast; at length all his tenderness came to the light and reached
his lips, and, by a contrast which constituted the very foundation of
his nature, what came forth was harshness. He said abruptly:--

"What have you come here for?"

Marius replied with embarrassment:--

"Monsieur--"

M. Gillenormand would have liked to have Marius throw himself into his
arms. He was displeased with Marius and with himself. He was conscious
that he was brusque, and that Marius was cold. It caused the goodman
unendurable and irritating anxiety to feel so tender and forlorn
within, and only to be able to be hard outside. Bitterness returned. He
interrupted Marius in a peevish tone:--

"Then why did you come?"

That "then" signified: _If you do not come to embrace me_. Marius looked
at his grandfather, whose pallor gave him a face of marble.

"Monsieur--"

"Have you come to beg my pardon? Do you acknowledge your faults?"

He thought he was putting Marius on the right road, and that "the child"
would yield. Marius shivered; it was the denial of his father that was
required of him; he dropped his eyes and replied:--

"No, sir."

"Then," exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief that was
poignant and full of wrath, "what do you want of me?"

Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said in a feeble and
trembling voice:--

"Sir, have pity on me."

These words touched M. Gillenormand; uttered a little sooner, they would
have rendered him tender, but they came too late. The grandfather rose;
he supported himself with both hands on his cane; his lips were white,
his brow wavered, but his lofty form towered above Marius as he bowed.

"Pity on you, sir! It is youth demanding pity of the old man of
ninety-one! You are entering into life, I am leaving it; you go to the
play, to balls, to the café, to the billiard-hall; you have wit, you
please the women, you are a handsome fellow; as for me, I spit on my
brands in the heart of summer; you are rich with the only riches that
are really such, I possess all the poverty of age; infirmity, isolation!
You have your thirty-two teeth, a good digestion, bright eyes, strength,
appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair; I have no longer even
white hair, I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my
memory; there are three names of streets that I confound incessantly,
the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue Saint-Claude, that
is what I have come to; you have before you the whole future, full of
sunshine, and I am beginning to lose my sight, so far am I advancing
into the night; you are in love, that is a matter of course, I am
beloved by no one in all the world; and you ask pity of me! Parbleu!
Molière forgot that. If that is the way you jest at the courthouse,
Messieurs the lawyers, I sincerely compliment you. You are droll."

And the octogenarian went on in a grave and angry voice:--

"Come, now, what do you want of me?"

"Sir," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but
I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away
immediately."

"You are a fool!" said the old man. "Who said that you were to go away?"

This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom of
his heart:--

"Ask my pardon! Throw yourself on my neck!"

M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that
his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was driving
him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief; and
as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased his
harshness. He would have liked to have Marius understand, and Marius did
not understand, which made the goodman furious.

He began again:--

"What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go no
one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off, it is
easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it's more convenient, to play
the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself; you have given me
no signs of life, you have contracted debts without even telling me to
pay them, you have become a smasher of windows and a blusterer, and, at
the end of four years, you come to me, and that is all you have to say
to me!"

This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was productive
only of silence on the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms;
a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, and apostrophized
Marius bitterly:--

"Let us make an end of this. You have come to ask something of me, you
say? Well, what? What is it? Speak!"

"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling
over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."

M. Gillenormand rang the bell. Basque opened the door half-way.

"Call my daughter."

A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with
pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing back
and forth in the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her:--

"Nothing. It is Monsieur Marius. Say good day to him. Monsieur wishes to
marry. That's all. Go away."

The curt, hoarse sound of the old man's voice announced a strange degree
of excitement. The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air, hardly
appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a syllable to
escape her, and disappeared at her father's breath more swiftly than a
straw before the hurricane.

In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his back
against the chimney-piece once more.

"You marry! At one and twenty! You have arranged that! You have only
a permission to ask! a formality. Sit down, sir. Well, you have had a
revolution since I had the honor to see you last. The Jacobins got the
upper hand. You must have been delighted. Are you not a Republican since
you are a Baron? You can make that agree. The Republic makes a good
sauce for the barony. Are you one of those decorated by July? Have you
taken the Louvre at all, sir? Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine,
opposite the Rue des Nonamdières, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in
the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription: 'July
28th, 1830.' Go take a look at that. It produces a good effect. Ah!
those friends of yours do pretty things. By the way, aren't they
erecting a fountain in the place of the monument of M. le Duc de Berry?
So you want to marry? Whom? Can one inquire without indiscretion?"

He paused, and, before Marius had time to answer, he added violently:--

"Come now, you have a profession? A fortune made? How much do you earn
at your trade of lawyer?"

"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of firmness and resolution that was
almost fierce.

"Nothing? Then all that you have to live upon is the twelve hundred
livres that I allow you?"

Marius did not reply. M. Gillenormand continued:--

"Then I understand the girl is rich?"

"As rich as I am."

"What! No dowry?"

"No."

"Expectations?"

"I think not."

"Utterly naked! What's the father?"

"I don't know."

"And what's her name?"

"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."

"Fauchewhat?"

"Fauchelevent."

"Pttt!" ejaculated the old gentleman.

"Sir!" exclaimed Marius.

M. Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man who is speaking
to himself:--

"That's right, one and twenty years of age, no profession, twelve
hundred livres a year, Madame la Baronne de Pontmercy will go and
purchase a couple of sous' worth of parsley from the fruiterer."

"Sir," repeated Marius, in the despair at the last hope, which was
vanishing, "I entreat you! I conjure you in the name of Heaven, with
clasped hands, sir, I throw myself at your feet, permit me to marry
her!"

The old man burst into a shout of strident and mournful laughter,
coughing and laughing at the same time.

"Ah! ah! ah! You said to yourself: 'Pardine! I'll go hunt up that old
blockhead, that absurd numskull! What a shame that I'm not twenty-five!
How I'd treat him to a nice respectful summons! How nicely I'd get along
without him! It's nothing to me, I'd say to him: "You're only too happy
to see me, you old idiot, I want to marry, I desire to wed Mamselle
No-matter-whom, daughter of Monsieur No-matter-what, I have no shoes,
she has no chemise, that just suits; I want to throw my career, my
future, my youth, my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into
wretchedness with a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must
consent to it!" and the old fossil will consent.' Go, my lad, do as
you like, attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, your
Coupelevent--Never, sir, never!"

"Father--"

"Never!"

At the tone in which that "never" was uttered, Marius lost all hope. He
traversed the chamber with slow steps, with bowed head, tottering and
more like a dying man than like one merely taking his departure. M.
Gillenormand followed him with his eyes, and at the moment when the
door opened, and Marius was on the point of going out, he advanced four
paces, with the senile vivacity of impetuous and spoiled old gentlemen,
seized Marius by the collar, brought him back energetically into the
room, flung him into an armchair and said to him:--

"Tell me all about it!"

"It was that single word "father" which had effected this revolution.

Marius stared at him in bewilderment. M. Gillenormand's mobile face was
no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature.
The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.

"Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber, tell me
everything! Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!"

"Father--" repeated Marius.

The old man's entire countenance lighted up with indescribable radiance.

"Yes, that's right, call me father, and you'll see!"

There was now something so kind, so gentle, so openhearted, and so
paternal in this brusqueness, that Marius, in the sudden transition from
discouragement to hope, was stunned and intoxicated by it, as it were.
He was seated near the table, the light from the candles brought out
the dilapidation of his costume, which Father Gillenormand regarded with
amazement.

"Well, father--" said Marius.

"Ah, by the way," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "you really have not a
penny then? You are dressed like a pickpocket."

He rummaged in a drawer, drew forth a purse, which he laid on the table:
"Here are a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat."

"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you only knew! I love her.
You cannot imagine it; the first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg,
she came there; in the beginning, I did not pay much heed to her, and
then, I don't know how it came about, I fell in love with her. Oh! how
unhappy that made me! Now, at last, I see her every day, at her own
home, her father does not know it, just fancy, they are going away, it
is in the garden that we meet, in the evening, her father means to take
her to England, then I said to myself: 'I'll go and see my grandfather
and tell him all about the affair. I should go mad first, I should die,
I should fall ill, I should throw myself into the water. I absolutely
must marry her, since I should go mad otherwise.' This is the whole
truth, and I do not think that I have omitted anything. She lives in a
garden with an iron fence, in the Rue Plumet. It is in the neighborhood
of the Invalides."

Father Gillenormand had seated himself, with a beaming countenance,
beside Marius. As he listened to him and drank in the sound of his
voice, he enjoyed at the same time a protracted pinch of snuff. At
the words "Rue Plumet" he interrupted his inhalation and allowed the
remainder of his snuff to fall upon his knees.

"The Rue Plumet, the Rue Plumet, did you say?--Let us see!--Are there
not barracks in that vicinity?--Why, yes, that's it. Your cousin
Théodule has spoken to me about it. The lancer, the officer. A gay girl,
my good friend, a gay girl!--Pardieu, yes, the Rue Plumet. It is what
used to be called the Rue Blomet.--It all comes back to me now. I have
heard of that little girl of the iron railing in the Rue Plumet. In a
garden, a Pamela. Your taste is not bad. She is said to be a very tidy
creature. Between ourselves, I think that simpleton of a lancer has been
courting her a bit. I don't know where he did it. However, that's not
to the purpose. Besides, he is not to be believed. He brags, Marius! I
think it quite proper that a young man like you should be in love. It's
the right thing at your age. I like you better as a lover than as a
Jacobin. I like you better in love with a petticoat, sapristi! with
twenty petticoats, than with M. de Robespierre. For my part, I will do
myself the justice to say, that in the line of _sans-culottes_, I have
never loved any one but women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, the deuce!
There's no objection to that. As for the little one, she receives you
without her father's knowledge. That's in the established order of
things. I have had adventures of that same sort myself. More than one.
Do you know what is done then? One does not take the matter ferociously;
one does not precipitate himself into the tragic; one does not make
one's mind to marriage and M. le Maire with his scarf. One simply
behaves like a fellow of spirit. One shows good sense. Slip along,
mortals; don't marry. You come and look up your grandfather, who is a
good-natured fellow at bottom, and who always has a few rolls of louis
in an old drawer; you say to him: 'See here, grandfather.' And the
grandfather says: 'That's a simple matter. Youth must amuse itself, and
old age must wear out. I have been young, you will be old. Come, my boy,
you shall pass it on to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles.
Amuse yourself, deuce take it!' Nothing better! That's the way the
affair should be treated. You don't marry, but that does no harm. You
understand me?"

Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign with
his head that he did not.

The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him a slap on
the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious and beaming air,
and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs of the shoulder:--

"Booby! make her your mistress."

Marius turned pale. He had understood nothing of what his grandfather
had just said. This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks,
the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. Nothing of
all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was a lily. The good
man was wandering in his mind. But this wandering terminated in words
which Marius did understand, and which were a mortal insult to Cosette.
Those words, "make her your mistress," entered the heart of the strict
young man like a sword.

He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the
door with a firm, assured step. There he turned round, bowed deeply to
his grandfather, raised his head erect again, and said:--

"Five years ago you insulted my father; to-day you have insulted my
wife. I ask nothing more of you, sir. Farewell."

Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth, extended his
arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word, the door closed
once more, and Marius had disappeared.

The old man remained for several minutes motionless and as though
struck by lightning, without the power to speak or breathe, as though
a clenched fist grasped his throat. At last he tore himself from his
arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can run at ninety-one, to the door,
opened it, and cried:--

"Help! Help!"

His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics. He began again,
with a pitiful rattle: "Run after him! Bring him back! What have I done
to him? He is mad! He is going away! Ah! my God! Ah! my God! This time
he will not come back!"

He went to the window which looked out on the street, threw it open with
his aged and palsied hands, leaned out more than half-way, while Basque
and Nicolette held him behind, and shouted:--

"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"

But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment he was turning
the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.

The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times
with an expression of anguish, recoiled tottering, and fell back into an
arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, with quivering head and lips
which moved with a stupid air, with nothing in his eyes and nothing
any longer in his heart except a gloomy and profound something which
resembled night.



BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?



CHAPTER I--JEAN VALJEAN

That same day, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was
sitting alone on the back side of one of the most solitary slopes in the
Champ-de-Mars. Either from prudence, or from a desire to meditate, or
simply in consequence of one of those insensible changes of habit which
gradually introduce themselves into the existence of every one, he now
rarely went out with Cosette. He had on his workman's waistcoat,
and trousers of gray linen; and his long-visored cap concealed his
countenance.

He was calm and happy now beside Cosette; that which had, for a time,
alarmed and troubled him had been dissipated; but for the last week or
two, anxieties of another nature had come up. One day, while walking
on the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thénardier; thanks to his
disguise, Thénardier had not recognized him; but since that day, Jean
Valjean had seen him repeatedly, and he was now certain that Thénardier
was prowling about in their neighborhood.

This had been sufficient to make him come to a decision.

Moreover, Paris was not tranquil: political troubles presented this
inconvenient feature, for any one who had anything to conceal in his
life, that the police had grown very uneasy and very suspicious, and
that while seeking to ferret out a man like Pépin or Morey, they might
very readily discover a man like Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had made up his mind to quit Paris, and even France, and go
over to England.

He had warned Cosette. He wished to set out before the end of the week.

He had seated himself on the slope in the Champ-de-Mars, turning over
all sorts of thoughts in his mind,--Thénardier, the police, the journey,
and the difficulty of procuring a passport.

He was troubled from all these points of view.

Last of all, an inexplicable circumstance which had just attracted his
attention, and from which he had not yet recovered, had added to his
state of alarm.

On the morning of that very day, when he alone of the household was
stirring, while strolling in the garden before Cosette's shutters
were open, he had suddenly perceived on the wall, the following line,
engraved, probably with a nail:--

_16 Rue de la Verrerie_.

This was perfectly fresh, the grooves in the ancient black mortar were
white, a tuft of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with the
fine, fresh plaster.

This had probably been written on the preceding night.

What was this? A signal for others? A warning for himself?

In any case, it was evident that the garden had been violated, and that
strangers had made their way into it.

He recalled the odd incidents which had already alarmed the household.

His mind was now filling in this canvas.

He took good care not to speak to Cosette of the line written on the
wall, for fear of alarming her.

In the midst of his preoccupations, he perceived, from a shadow cast by
the sun, that some one had halted on the crest of the slope immediately
behind him.

He was on the point of turning round, when a paper folded in four fell
upon his knees as though a hand had dropped it over his head.

He took the paper, unfolded it, and read these words written in large
characters, with a pencil:--

"MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE."

Jean Valjean sprang hastily to his feet; there was no one on the slope;
he gazed all around him and perceived a creature larger than a
child, not so large as a man, clad in a gray blouse and trousers of
dust-colored cotton velvet, who was jumping over the parapet and who
slipped into the moat of the Champ-de-Mars.

Jean Valjean returned home at once, in a very thoughtful mood.



CHAPTER II--MARIUS

Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair. He had entered the house
with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.

However, and those who have observed the depths of the human heart will
understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny, Cousin Théodule,
had left no trace in his mind. Not the slightest. The dramatic poet
might, apparently, expect some complications from this revelation made
point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. But what the drama would
gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one believes
nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one believes
everything. Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles. Early youth
has none of them. That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over
Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are hosts of crimes which Marius could
sooner have committed.

He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer.
He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. At two
o'clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac's quarters and flung
himself, without undressing, on his mattress. The sun was shining
brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber which permits
ideas to go and come in the brain. When he awoke, he saw Courfeyrac,
Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the room with their hats
on and all ready to go out.

Courfeyrac said to him:--

"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"

It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.

He went out some time after them. He put in his pocket the pistols which
Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d of February,
and which had remained in his hands. These pistols were still loaded. It
would be difficult to say what vague thought he had in his mind when he
took them with him.

All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going; it
rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased a
penny roll at a baker's, put it in his pocket and forgot it. It appears
that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. There are
moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. Marius was passing
through one of those moments. He no longer hoped for anything; this
step he had taken since the preceding evening. He waited for night with
feverish impatience, he had but one idea clearly before his mind;--this
was, that at nine o'clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness
now constituted his whole future; after that, gloom. At intervals, as
he roamed through the most deserted boulevards, it seemed to him that he
heard strange noises in Paris. He thrust his head out of his revery and
said: "Is there fighting on hand?"

At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette,
he was in the Rue Plumet. When he approached the grating he forgot
everything. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette; he was
about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced, and
he felt only a profound and unheard-of joy. Those minutes in which one
lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property, that
at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.

Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. Cosette
was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. He traversed
the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight of steps: "She
is waiting for me there," said he. Cosette was not there. He raised his
eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house were closed. He made the
tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he returned to
the house, and, rendered senseless by love, intoxicated, terrified,
exasperated with grief and uneasiness, like a master who returns home at
an evil hour, he tapped on the shutters. He knocked and knocked again,
at the risk of seeing the window open, and her father's gloomy face
make its appearance, and demand: "What do you want?" This was nothing in
comparison with what he dimly caught a glimpse of. When he had rapped,
he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.--"Cosette!" he cried;
"Cosette!" he repeated imperiously. There was no reply. All was over. No
one in the garden; no one in the house.

Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as
black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty. He gazed at the stone
seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he
seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with sweetness
and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and
he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left
for him was to die.

All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street,
and which was calling to him through the trees:--

"Mr. Marius!"

He started to his feet.

"Hey?" said he.

"Mr. Marius, are you there?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Marius," went on the voice, "your friends are waiting for you at
the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him. It resembled the hoarse,
rough voice of Éponine. Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the
movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who
appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the gloom.



CHAPTER III--M. MABEUF

Jean Valjean's purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf, in his
venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars;
he had not admitted that a star could coin itself into louis d'or. He
had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.
He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as
a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants. The
purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed
it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.

Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.

His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des
Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz. The year before he had owed
his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters
of his rent. The pawnshop had sold the plates of his _Flora_ after the
expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of
them. His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the
incomplete copies of his _Flora_ which were in his possession, he
had disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a
second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.
He set to work to eat up the money for these copies. When he saw that
this wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden
and allowed it to run to waste. Before this, a long time before, he had
given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate from time
to time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his
furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his
blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most
precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others,
_Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible_, edition of 1560; _La Concordance
des Bibles_, by Pierre de Besse; _Les Marguerites de la Marguerite_, of
Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book _de
la Charge et Dignité de l'Ambassadeur_, by the Sieur de Villiers Hotman;
a _Florilegium Rabbinicum_ of 1644; a _Tibullus_ of 1567, with this
magnificent inscription: _Venetiis, in ædibus Manutianis_; and lastly, a
Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained the famous
variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century, of the Vatican, and
those of the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, consulted with
such fruitful results by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in Doric
dialect which are only found in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth
century belonging to the Naples Library. M. Mabeuf never had any fire
in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume
any candles. It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors: people
avoided him when he went out; he perceived the fact. The wretchedness of
a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests a
young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of
all distresses, the coldest. Still, Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost
his childlike serenity. His eyes acquired some vivacity when they rested
on his books, and he smiled when he gazed at the Diogenes Laertius,
which was a unique copy. His bookcase with glass doors was the
only piece of furniture which he had kept beyond what was strictly
indispensable.

One day, Mother Plutarque said to him:--

"I have no money to buy any dinner."

What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.

"On credit?" suggested M. Mabeuf.

"You know well that people refuse me."

M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase, took a long look at all his books, one
after another, as a father obliged to decimate his children would gaze
upon them before making a choice, then seized one hastily, put it
in under his arm and went out. He returned two hours later, without
anything under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said:--

"You will get something for dinner."

From that moment forth, Mother Plutarque saw a sombre veil, which was
never more lifted, descend over the old man's candid face.

On the following day, on the day after, and on the day after that, it
had to be done again.

M. Mabeuf went out with a book and returned with a coin. As the
second-hand dealers perceived that he was forced to sell, they purchased
of him for twenty sous that for which he had paid twenty francs,
sometimes at those very shops. Volume by volume, the whole library
went the same road. He said at times: "But I am eighty;" as though he
cherished some secret hope that he should arrive at the end of his days
before reaching the end of his books. His melancholy increased. Once,
however, he had a pleasure. He had gone out with a Robert Estienne,
which he had sold for thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he
returned with an Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des
Grès.--"I owe five sous," he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque. That day
he had no dinner.

He belonged to the Horticultural Society. His destitution became known
there. The president of the society came to see him, promised to
speak to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce about him, and did
so.--"Why, what!" exclaimed the Minister, "I should think so! An old
savant! a botanist! an inoffensive man! Something must be done for him!"
On the following day, M. Mabeuf received an invitation to dine with the
Minister. Trembling with joy, he showed the letter to Mother Plutarque.
"We are saved!" said he. On the day appointed, he went to the Minister's
house. He perceived that his ragged cravat, his long, square coat, and
his waxed shoes astonished the ushers. No one spoke to him, not even the
Minister. About ten o'clock in the evening, while he was still waiting
for a word, he heard the Minister's wife, a beautiful woman in a
low-necked gown whom he had not ventured to approach, inquire: "Who is
that old gentleman?" He returned home on foot at midnight, in a driving
rain-storm. He had sold an Elzevir to pay for a carriage in which to go
thither.

He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages in his Diogenes
Laertius every night, before he went to bed. He knew enough Greek to
enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he owned. He had now no other
enjoyment. Several weeks passed. All at once, Mother Plutarque fell ill.
There is one thing sadder than having no money with which to buy bread
at the baker's and that is having no money to purchase drugs at the
apothecary's. One evening, the doctor had ordered a very expensive
potion. And the malady was growing worse; a nurse was required. M.
Mabeuf opened his bookcase; there was nothing there. The last volume had
taken its departure. All that was left to him was Diogenes Laertius.
He put this unique copy under his arm, and went out. It was the 4th of
June, 1832; he went to the Porte Saint-Jacques, to Royal's successor,
and returned with one hundred francs. He laid the pile of five-franc
pieces on the old serving-woman's nightstand, and returned to his
chamber without saying a word.

On the following morning, at dawn, he seated himself on the overturned
post in his garden, and he could be seen over the top of the hedge,
sitting the whole morning motionless, with drooping head, his eyes
vaguely fixed on the withered flower-beds. It rained at intervals; the
old man did not seem to perceive the fact.

In the afternoon, extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. They
resembled shots and the clamors of a multitude.

Father Mabeuf raised his head. He saw a gardener passing, and
inquired:--

"What is it?"

The gardener, spade on back, replied in the most unconcerned tone:--

"It is the riots."

"What riots?"

"Yes, they are fighting."

"Why are they fighting?"

"Ah, good Heavens!" ejaculated the gardener.

"In what direction?" went on M. Mabeuf.

"In the neighborhood of the Arsenal."

Father Mabeuf went to his room, took his hat, mechanically sought for a
book to place under his arm, found none, said: "Ah! truly!" and went off
with a bewildered air.



BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832



CHAPTER I--THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION

Of what is revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything. Of an
electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting
forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters
heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions
which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.

Whither?

At random. Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity and the
insolence of others.

Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations,
instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has
been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change,
the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to
take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love,
the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors,
disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted
it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitions that are hedged about, whoever
hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the
rabble, that mud which catches fire,--such are the elements of revolt.
That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl
outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants,
vagabonds of the cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of
houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who,
each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown
of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to
revolt. Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed
whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for riot,
and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and to
feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.

Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms
suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies
about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes,
uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the
feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom it
bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one against
the other.

It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and
extraordinary power. It fills the first-comer with the force of events;
it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a
rough stone, and a general of a porter.

If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a little
revolt is desirable from the point of view of power. System: revolt
strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It puts
the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie, it draws out
the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force of the social
framework. It is an exercise in gymnastics; it is almost hygiene. Power
is in better health after a revolt, as a man is after a good rubbing
down.

Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points of view.

There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense";
Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the
true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which, because
it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and is often
only pedantry. A whole political school called "the golden mean" has
been the outcome of this. As between cold water and hot water, it is
the lukewarm water party. This school with its false depth, all on the
surface, which dissects effects without going back to first causes,
chides from its height of a demi-science, the agitation of the public
square.

If we listen to this school, "The riots which complicated the affair
of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The
Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed
by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that
revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into
a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by
fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered
them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After
the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance; after the
riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.

"All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange
into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates
failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public credit
shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a discount,
fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs. It has been
calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty millions,
the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days' uprising costs
one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the financial
result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a disaster, a
shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty
ships of the line.

"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the
pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of
thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the
heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne.
Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points
of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students
proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard
invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins,
contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed
together. After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference
of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the
age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The
army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.
Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage
of the bourgeois.

"This is well. But is all this worth the bloodshed? And to the bloodshed
add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness among the
best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism happy in these
wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830
triumphing and saying: 'We told you so!' Add Paris enlarged, possibly,
but France most assuredly diminished. Add, for all must needs be told,
the massacres which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown
ferocious over liberty gone mad. To sum up all, uprisings have been
disastrous."

Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,
that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.

For our parts, we reject this word _uprisings_ as too large, and
consequently as too convenient. We make a distinction between one
popular movement and another popular movement. We do not inquire whether
an uprising costs as much as a battle. Why a battle, in the first place?
Here the question of war comes up. Is war less of a scourge than an
uprising is of a calamity? And then, are all uprisings calamities? And
what if the revolt of July did cost a hundred and twenty millions? The
establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two milliards. Even at
the same price, we should prefer the 14th of July. However, we reject
these figures, which appear to be reasons and which are only words. An
uprising being given, we examine it by itself. In all that is said by
the doctrinarian objection above presented, there is no question of
anything but effect, we seek the cause.

We will be explicit.



CHAPTER II--THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as
insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the
wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones
which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction
usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may
proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from
collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is
insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;
according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they
are justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the
populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of
Vendémiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;
the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which
universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty
cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining
purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted
to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when
directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The
destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of
rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the
refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by
students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is
revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that is
insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against
Christopher Columbus,--this is the same revolt; impious revolt;
why? Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to
civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in
that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to
itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,
anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in
contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive
moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
espouses the throne, turns into _chouannerie_, and, from having been an
insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of
ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death to
the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" The assassins of
Saint-Barthélemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of
Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the
assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of
Jéhu, the chevaliers of Brassard,--behold an uprising. La Vendée is
a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is
recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited
masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not
give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances
is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what
direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may
grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any
other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a
revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human
race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These
pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis
XIV. is insurrection; Hébert against Danton is revolt.

Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as
Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most
fatal of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space
of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of
peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it
is capable. Under the Cæsars, there was no insurrection, but there was
Juvenal.

The _facit indignatio_ replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Cæsars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of
the _Annales_. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on
his part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of
the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on
Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of
the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may
understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes
the _Annales_ is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The
work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured
into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that
is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his style
when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence
there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought
and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces
conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a
celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed
for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in
the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his
might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms
as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed
upon Cæsar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Cæsar and Tacitus are two
successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be mysteriously
avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the stage,
regulates the entrances and the exits. Cæsar is great, Tacitus is great;
God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash with one
another. The guardian of justice, in striking Cæsar, might strike too
hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great wars of Africa and
Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization introduced into
Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon.
There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to
let loose upon the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, sparing
Cæsar Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances to genius.

Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.
There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is
still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such reigns, nothing veils
the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal,
slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the
presence of all humanity.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and
under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the
repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product
of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein
the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;
consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla,
thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from
the Roman Senate, under Cæsar, there comes nothing but the odor of the
dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.

Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his
appearance.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in
the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which
is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;
insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the
stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in
the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzançais, for example, holds a
true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains
a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form. Shy
although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it
walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old
men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and
innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a
good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of
August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before
the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the
insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends
in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty
mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason,
right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from
rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and
increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a
swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage
has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception,
and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.
The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the
frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day may be,
To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former
and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such
shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the
revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be
punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day
as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the
gloom face to face with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts: "Long live the people!"

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to
say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and
insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy
extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an
uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it
is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be
calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs
undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,
nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of
Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly a characteristic
hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we enter
on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and
living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time
and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation,
human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so
to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of
history. The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of
this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not
sounded the depths, for another reason than history. We shall therefore
bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things
which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed
the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the
actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the
very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we
shall be able to say: "We have seen this." We alter a few names, for
history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall
paint will be genuine. In accordance with the conditions of the book
which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode,
and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the
6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may
catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of
the real form of this frightful public adventure.



CHAPTER III--A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN

In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all
minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an
indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe
for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of
artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the
shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General
Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,
under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery
requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the
bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a
sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after
upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and
the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances
of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the
Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gérard and Drouet, one of
Napoleon's marshals _in petto_. The treaties of 1815 removed him as
a personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which
pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically
preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to
intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to
his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of
the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word _army_, Lamarque
uttering the word _country_.

His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and
by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like
everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what
took place.

On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day
appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the
procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous
network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed themselves as best
they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of their establishment
"to break down doors." One of them had made himself a dagger of a
stocking-weaver's hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the
stump. Another, who was in a fever "to attack," slept wholly dressed
for three days. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:
"Whither are you going?" "Eh! well, I have no weapons." "What then?"
"I'm going to my timber-yard to get my compasses." "What for?" "I don't
know," said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted
some passing artisans: "Come here, you!" He treated them to ten sous'
worth of wine and said: "Have you work?" "No." "Go to Filspierre,
between the Barrière Charonne and the Barrière Montreuil, and you will
find work." At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms. Certain
well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say, running from
one house to another, to collect their men. At Barthélemy's, near the
Barrière du Trône, at Capel's, near the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers
accosted each other with a grave air. They were heard to say: "Have you
your pistol?" "Under my blouse." "And you?" "Under my shirt." In the
Rue Traversière, in front of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of
the Maison-Brulée, in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered
together. Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained
more than a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him
"because they were obliged to dispute with him every day." Mavot was
killed on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Ménilmontant.
Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle, seconded
Mavot, and to the question: "What is your object?" he replied:
_"Insurrection."_ Workmen assembled at the corner of the Rue de Bercy,
waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.

On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General
Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official military
pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with draped
drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with their swords
at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men.
The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it, bearing laurel
branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the
sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical
School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German,
and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of
banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who
were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their
paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly
all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres, without order
and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column.
Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with a pair of pistols in
full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and the files separated
before him. On the side alleys of the boulevards, in the branches of the
trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men,
women, and children; all eyes were filled with anxiety. An armed throng
was passing, and a terrified throng looked on.

The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with
its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in
the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their head,
cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to march;
in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard
echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of
dragoons; at the Grève half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other
half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Célestins; and the
courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery. The remainder of the troops
were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the
environs of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing
multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand
in the banlieue.

Divers reports were in circulation in the cortège. Legitimist tricks
were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked
out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating
him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained unknown,
announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,
would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. That
which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those
present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in
that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there were
visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which said: "Let
us plunder!" There are certain agitations which stir up the bottoms of
marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A phenomenon to
which "well drilled" policemen are no strangers.

The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the
deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained
from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many
incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at
the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his
head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire,
a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin,
an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud: "I am a Republican,"
the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against orders to remain
at home, the shouts of: "Long live the Polytechnique! Long live the
Republic!" marked the passage of the funeral train. At the Bastille,
long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the procession, and a
certain terrible seething began to agitate the throng.

One man was heard to say to another: "Do you see that fellow with a
red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." It
appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quénisset
affair, entrusted with this same function.

The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd,
surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have presented the
aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail spread
out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was prolonged on
the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced
around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and
bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august instant, all
heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.

All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance
in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.
Exelmans quitted the procession.

This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From
the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors
which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts went
up: "Lamarque to the Pantheon!--Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young
men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves and
began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and
Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.

In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed
that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a centenarian
afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who had fought at
Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under Lafayette.

In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set
in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
emerged from the Célestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men
who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner
of the quay and shouted: "The dragoons!" The dragoons advanced at a
walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in
their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air
of gloomy expectation.

They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in
which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it
to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the
crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that
fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds come
together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was
heard in the direction of the Arsenal, others that a blow from a dagger
was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were
suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron,
the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her
window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed:
"They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron of dragoons
which had remained in the barracks up to this time, was seen to debouch
at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue Bassompierre and the
Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.

Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade
breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank, and
pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of the
Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with combatants,
stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun, the young men
who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run,
and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their
swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to
all four quarters of Paris, men shout: "To arms!" they run, tumble down,
flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.



CHAPTER IV--THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS

Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it
prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From
the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there
of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the throng
and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is
mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the shops are
closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated
shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cochères,
servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying:
"There's going to be a row!"

A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
at twenty different spots in Paris at once.

In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded and
with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later, carrying
a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at their
head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the third
with a pike.

In the Rue des Nonaindières, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered
cartridges publicly to passers-by.

In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
"Republic or Death!" In the Rue des Jeûneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
distinguished in gold letters, the word _section_ with a number. One
of these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.

They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and
three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the
Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes,
the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred
and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and
eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one man took the
gun, the other the bayonet.

Opposite the Quai de la Grève, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making
cartridges. One of these women relates: "I did not know what cartridges
were; it was my husband who told me."

One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des
Vieilles-Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.

The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de
la Perle.

And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the
boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting
men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and
shouted: "To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.

They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the
dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: "The
arms have been delivered"; some signed "their names" to receipts for
the guns and swords and said: "Send for them to-morrow at the Mayor's
office." They disarmed isolated sentinels and National Guardsmen in
the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the epaulets from
officers. In the Rue du Cimitière-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the
National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and foils,
took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only able to
emerge at nightfall and in disguise.

In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their
hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrèss,
or descended to the Café des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.
There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the
Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single
point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with
their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they
abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on
a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la
Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a
package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National
Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
points of their bayonets.

All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less than
an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the quarter
of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No. 50, which
was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions, and which,
flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and on the other
by a barricade of the Rue Maubuée, commanded three streets, the Rue
des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which
it faced. The barricades at right angles fell back, the one of the
Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue
Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable
barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at
Mont-Sainte-Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant, where was visible
a porte cochère torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of
the Hôtel-Dieu made with an "écossais," which had been unharnessed and
overthrown, three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.

At the barricade of the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man
distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be
the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of
silver. "Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses, wine, et cætera."
A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to
barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue
police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the
barricades, the wine-shops and porters' lodges were converted into
guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most scientific
military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full of angles
and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the Halles, in
particular, a network of streets more intricate than a forest. The
Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, undertaken to
direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in
the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a plan of Paris.

That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a
sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection
had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized
nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a
train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,
on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the
whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the
Château-d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pélagie, the Place Maubert, the
powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five
o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the
Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place
des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Pères barracks, and the
Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.

The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as a
result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers' shops hastily
invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing of
stones was continued with gun-shots.

About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the field
of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other.
They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer, the
author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this volcano,
found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that he had to
protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which
separate the shops; he remained in this delicate situation for nearly
half an hour.

Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in
haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from
their barracks. Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer received a
blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by thirty
young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword. Another
was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue Michel-le-Comte,
three officers fell dead one after the other. Many of the Municipal
Guards, on being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards, retreated.

In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a
red flag bearing the following inscription: _Republican revolution, No.
127_. Was this a revolution, in fact?

The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable,
tortuous, colossal citadel.

There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest
was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there
lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.

In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the
fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation
which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General
Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the
National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his scarf
of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The insurgents,
on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open spaces, and
audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each side was
watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated;
the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make
itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult, who had
seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.

These old sailors, accustomed to correct manouvres and having as
resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly
disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called public
wrath.

The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A
battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of
the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School
had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending
from Vincennes.

Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly
serene.



CHAPTER V--ORIGINALITY OF PARIS

During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more
than one insurrection. Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than
the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of
the rebellious quarters. Paris very speedily accustoms herself to
anything,--it is only a riot,--and Paris has so many affairs on hand,
that she does not put herself out for so small a matter. These colossal
cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone
can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable
tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the
shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he
contents himself with the remark:--

"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin."

Or:--

"In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."

Often he adds carelessly:--

"Or somewhere in that direction."

Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and
firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:--

"It's getting hot! Hullo, it's getting hot!"

A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his
shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places
his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.

Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and
re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts
of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber the
streets. A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be heard in
the cafés.

The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious laugh
and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with
war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner
somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is
going on.

In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.

At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a
little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored
rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and
came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade, offering
his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government, now to
anarchy.

Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of uprisings
in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this end, two
things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The city of
Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.

On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 25th, 1832, the
great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It
was afraid.

Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the
most distant and most "disinterested" quarters. The courageous took to
arms, the poltroons hid. The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.
Many streets were empty at four o'clock in the morning.

Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,--that
_they_ were masters of the Bank;--that there were six hundred of them
in the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the
church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel
had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: "Get a
regiment first"; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them,
nevertheless: "I am with you. I will follow you wherever there is room
for a chair"; that one must be on one's guard; that at night there would
be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of Paris
(there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed up with
the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been established
in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were putting their
heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at latest, four
columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the uprising, the
first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin,
the third from the Grève, the fourth from the Halles; that perhaps,
also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ-de-Mars;
that no one knew what would happen, but that this time, it certainly was
serious.

People busied themselves over Marshal Soult's hesitations. Why did not
he attack at once? It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The
old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.

Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with
an air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were
arrested. By nine o'clock, more than eight hundred persons had been
arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the
Conciergerie, so was La Force.

At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the
Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap
of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly.
All that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy
shower. Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled
on top of each other.

Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual
with Paris.

People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were
uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this: "Ah! my God! He has not come
home!" There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be
heard.

People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the
tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were
said: "It is cavalry," or: "Those are the caissons galloping," to the
trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable
alarm peal from Saint-Merry.

They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of
the streets and disappeared, shouting: "Go home!" And people made haste
to bolt their doors. They said: "How will all this end?" From moment to
moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on
a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.



BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE



CHAPTER I--SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S
POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY

At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the
populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement
in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the
hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed,
so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.
The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their
escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight.
The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,
overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred
streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.

At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue
Ménilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which
he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old
holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-à-brac merchant's shop.

"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."

And off he ran with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing
through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad
brandishing his pistol and singing:--


              La nuit on ne voit rien,
              Le jour on voit très bien,
              D'un écrit apocryphe
              Le bourgeois s'ébouriffe,
              Pratiquez la vertu,
              Tutu, chapeau pointu!<a href="#linknote-44" name="linknoteref-44"
      id="linknoteref-44">44</a>

It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.

Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,
and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We
know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche was well
up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his
own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of
the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertory
of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with
thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been
for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a
commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin
of letters.

Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered
the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously
rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of
Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning;
that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets
at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically
extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of
breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding
them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost
entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same
spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a
farewell: "I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as
they say at the court, I file off. If you don't find papa and mamma,
young 'uns, come back here this evening. I'll scramble you up some
supper, and I'll give you a shakedown." The two children, picked up by
some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank,
or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,
did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of
these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks
had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the back
of his head and said: "Where the devil are my two children?"

In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du
Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that
street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook's
shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another
apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in
his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,
and began to shout: "Help!"

It is hard to miss the last cake.

Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.

Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the
Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the
apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in the
immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.

A little further on, on catching sight of a group of comfortable-looking
persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders
and spit out at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as
they passed:

"How fat those moneyed men are! They're drunk! They just wallow in good
dinners. Ask 'em what they do with their money. They don't know. They
eat it, that's what they do! As much as their bellies will hold."



CHAPTER II--GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH

The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one's hand in the
open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his
fervor increasing with every moment. Amid the scraps of the Marseillaise
which he was singing, he shouted:--

"All goes well. I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I'm all broken
up with rheumatism, but I'm satisfied, citizens. All that the bourgeois
have to do is to bear themselves well, I'll sneeze them out subversive
couplets. What are the police spies? Dogs. And I'd just like to have
one of them at the end of my pistol. I'm just from the boulevard, my
friends. It's getting hot there, it's getting into a little boil, it's
simmering. It's time to skim the pot. Forward march, men! Let an impure
blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never
see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini? But never mind! Long
live joy! Let's fight, crebleu! I've had enough of despotism."

At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having
fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the
man, then he assisted in raising the horse. After which he picked up his
pistol and resumed his way. In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and
silence. This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast with
the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were chatting in a doorway.

Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping
hags; and the "Thou shalt be King" could be quite as mournfully hurled
at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of
Armuyr. The croak would be almost identical.

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own
concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker
with her basket on her back.

All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age,
which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.

The rag-picker was humble. In this open-air society, it is the
rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused
by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will of
the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap. There
may be kindness in the broom.

This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a
smile! on the three portresses. Things of this nature were said:--

"Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?"

"Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It's
the dogs who complain."

"And people also."

"But the fleas from a cat don't go after people."

"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year
when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the
newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great
sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember
the King of Rome?"

"I liked the Duc de Bordeau better."

"I knew Louis XVIII. I prefer Louis XVIII."

"Meat is awfully dear, isn't it, Mother Patagon?"

"Ah! don't mention it, the butcher's shop is a horror. A horrible
horror--one can't afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays."

Here the rag-picker interposed:--

"Ladies, business is dull. The refuse heaps are miserable. No one throws
anything away any more. They eat everything."

"There are poorer people than you, la Vargoulême."

"Ah, that's true," replied the rag-picker, with deference, "I have a
profession."

A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for
boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:--

"In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort my
things. This makes heaps in my room. I put the rags in a basket, the
cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard, the woollen
stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner of the window,
the things that are good to eat in my bowl, the bits of glass in my
fireplace, the old shoes behind my door, and the bones under my bed."

Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.

"Old ladies," said he, "what do you mean by talking politics?"

He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.

"Here's another rascal."

"What's that he's got in his paddle? A pistol?"

"Well, I'd like to know what sort of a beggar's brat this is?"

"That sort of animal is never easy unless he's overturning the
authorities."

Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal, with
elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his hand wide.

The rag-picker cried:--

"You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!"

The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together
in horror.

"There's going to be evil doings, that's certain. The errand-boy next
door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day with a
young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass, and
he had a gun on his arm. Mame Bacheux says, that last week there was a
revolution at--at--at--where's the calf!--at Pontoise. And then, there
you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! It seems that the
Célestins are full of pistols. What do you suppose the Government can
do with good-for-nothings who don't know how to do anything but contrive
ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun to get a little
quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened, good Lord! to that
poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to
make tobacco dearer. It's infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him
beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!"

"You've got the sniffles, old lady," said Gavroche. "Blow your
promontory."

And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavée, the rag-picker occurred
to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:--

"You're in the wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother
Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. It's so that you may
have more good things to eat in your basket."

All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress Patagon
who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him in the
distance and crying:--

"You're nothing but a bastard."

"Oh! Come now," said Gavroche, "I don't care a brass farthing for that!"

Shortly afterwards, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon. There he uttered this
appeal:--

"Forward march to the battle!"

And he was seized with a fit of melancholy. He gazed at his pistol with
an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--

"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"

One dog may distract the attention from another dog.45 A very gaunt
poodle came along at the moment. Gavroche felt compassion for him.

"My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask, for
all the hoops are visible."

Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.



CHAPTER III--JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER

The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two little
fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior of the
elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving an old
soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. They were
talking. The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the veteran of the
riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had passed to
the Emperor. Thence sprang up a conversation between barber and
soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present, would have enriched with
arabesques, and which he would have entitled: "Dialogue between the
razor and the sword."

"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.

"Badly. He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."

"Did he have fine horses? He must have had fine horses!"

"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a
racing mare, perfectly white. Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle
deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly
articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful
crupper. A little more than fifteen hands in height."

"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.

"It was His Majesty's beast."

The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence
would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--

"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"

The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who
had been there:--

"In the heel. At Ratisbon. I never saw him so well dressed as on that
day. He was as neat as a new sou."

"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"

"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything. At Marengo, I
received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right
arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland,
a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven or eight
lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed
one of my fingers. Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaïen in
the thigh, that's all."

"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, "to
die on the field of battle! On my word of honor, rather than die in bed,
of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms,
syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my
belly!"

"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.

He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. The
show-window had suddenly been fractured.

The wig-maker turned pale.

"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"

"What?"

"A cannon-ball."

"Here it is," said the soldier.

And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. It was a
pebble.

The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing
at the full speed, towards the Marché Saint-Jean. As he passed the
hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind,
had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had
flung a stone through his panes.

"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue,
"that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. What
has any one done to that gamin?"



CHAPTER IV--THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN

In the meantime, in the Marché Saint-Jean, where the post had already
been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction" with a band led
by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were armed after
a fashion. Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the
group. Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun
of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt,
two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire
an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an
unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched
at their head shouting: "Long live Poland!"

They reached the Quai Morland. Cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked
by the rain, with lightning in their eyes. Gavroche accosted them
calmly:--

"Where are we going?"

"Come along," said Courfeyrac.

Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was like a fish
in water in a riot. He wore a scarlet waistcoat, and indulged in
the sort of words which break everything. His waistcoat astounded a
passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:--

"Here are the reds!"

"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel. "A queer kind of fear,
bourgeois. For my part I don't tremble before a poppy, the little red
hat inspires me with no alarm. Take my advice, bourgeois, let's leave
fear of the red to horned cattle."

He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the
most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a
Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock."

Bahorel exclaimed:--

"'Flock'; a polite way of saying geese."

And he tore the charge from the nail. This conquered Gavroche. From that
instant Gavroche set himself to study Bahorel.

"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong. You should have let that
charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal, you are
wasting your wrath to no purpose. Take care of your supply. One does not
fire out of the ranks with the soul any more than with a gun."

"Each one in his own fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This
bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without being permitted.
Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing myself. Besides, I'm not
wasting myself, I'm getting a start; and if I tore down that charge,
Hercle! 'twas only to whet my appetite."

This word, _Hercle_, struck Gavroche. He sought all occasions for
learning, and that tearer-down of posters possessed his esteem. He
inquired of him:--

"What does _Hercle_ mean?"

Bahorel answered:--

"It means cursed name of a dog, in Latin."

Here Bahorel recognized at a window a pale young man with a black beard
who was watching them as they passed, probably a Friend of the A B C. He
shouted to him:--

"Quick, cartridges, _para bellum_."

"A fine man! that's true," said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.

A tumultuous retinue accompanied them,--students, artists, young men
affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, longshoremen, armed with
clubs and bayonets; some, like Combeferre, with pistols thrust into
their trousers.

An old man, who appeared to be extremely aged, was walking in the band.

He had no arms, and he made great haste, so that he might not be left
behind, although he had a thoughtful air.

Gavroche caught sight of him:--

"Keksekça?" said he to Courfeyrac.

"He's an old duffer."

It was M. Mabeuf.



CHAPTER V--THE OLD MAN

Let us recount what had taken place.

Enjolras and his friends had been on the Boulevard Bourdon, near the
public storehouses, at the moment when the dragoons had made their
charge. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those who had
taken to the Rue Bassompierre, shouting: "To the barricades!" In the Rue
Lesdiguières they had met an old man walking along. What had attracted
their attention was that the goodman was walking in a zig-zag, as though
he were intoxicated. Moreover, he had his hat in his hand, although it
had been raining all the morning, and was raining pretty briskly at the
very time. Courfeyrac had recognized Father Mabeuf. He knew him through
having many times accompanied Marius as far as his door. As he was
acquainted with the peaceful and more than timid habits of the old
beadle-book-collector, and was amazed at the sight of him in the midst
of that uproar, a couple of paces from the cavalry charges, almost in
the midst of a fusillade, hatless in the rain, and strolling about among
the bullets, he had accosted him, and the following dialogue had been
exchanged between the rioter of fire and the octogenarian:--

"M. Mabeuf, go to your home."

"Why?"

"There's going to be a row."

"That's well."

"Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf."

"That is well."

"Firing from cannon."

"That is good. Where are the rest of you going?"

"We are going to fling the government to the earth."

"That is good."

And he had set out to follow them. From that moment forth he had not
uttered a word. His step had suddenly become firm; artisans had offered
him their arms; he had refused with a sign of the head. He advanced
nearly to the front rank of the column, with the movement of a man who
is marching and the countenance of a man who is sleeping.

"What a fierce old fellow!" muttered the students. The rumor spread
through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,--an old
regicide. The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.

Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made of
him a sort of trumpet.


He sang:           "Voici la lune qui paraît,
       Quand irons-nous dans la forêt?
       Demandait Charlot à Charlotte.

            Tou tou tou
            Pour Chatou.
       Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

       "Pour avoir bu de grand matin
        La rosée à même le thym,
        Deux moineaux étaient en ribotte.

            Zi zi zi
            Pour Passy.
       Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

      "Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,
       Comme deux grives étaient soûls;
       Un tigre en riait dans sa grotte.

            Don don don
            Pour Meudon.
       Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

      "L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait.
       Quand irons nous dans la forêt?
       Demandait Charlot à Charlotte.

             Tin tin tin
             Pour Pantin.
         Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte."<a
      href="#linknote-46" name="linknoteref-46" id="linknoteref-46">46</a>

They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.



CHAPTER VI--RECRUITS

The band augmented every moment. Near the Rue des Billettes, a man of
lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold and daring
mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre, but whom
none of them knew, joined them. Gavroche, who was occupied in singing,
whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on the shutters of the
shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol; paid no attention to this
man.

It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front of
Courfeyrac's door.

"This happens just right," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse,
and I have lost my hat."

He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. He seized
an old hat and his purse.

He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions of a large
valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.

As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:--

"Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"

"What's your name, portress?"

The portress stood bewildered.

"Why, you know perfectly well, I'm the concierge; my name is Mother
Veuvain."

"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you
Mother de Veuvain. Now speak, what's the matter? What do you want?"

"There is some one who wants to speak with you."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?"

"In my lodge."

"The devil!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.

"But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour," said the
portress.

At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and youthful
artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers of ribbed
velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred as a man than of
a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which
was not the least in the world like a woman's voice:--

"Monsieur Marius, if you please."

"He is not here."

"Will he return this evening?"

"I know nothing about it."

And Courfeyrac added:--

"For my part, I shall not return."

The young man gazed steadily at him and said:--

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Where are you going, then?"

"What business is that of yours?"

"Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?"

"I am going to the barricades."

"Would you like to have me go with you?"

"If you like!" replied Courfeyrac. "The street is free, the pavements
belong to every one."

And he made his escape at a run to join his friends. When he had
rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. It was only
a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man, who had
actually followed them.

A mob does not go precisely where it intends. We have explained that
a gust of wind carries it away. They overshot Saint-Merry and found
themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.



BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE



CHAPTER I--HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION

The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondétour, a
basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form of Napoleon
the Great with this inscription:--


                    NAPOLEON IS MADE
                    WHOLLY OF WILLOW,

have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed
hardly thirty years ago.

It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called _Corinthe_.

The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade
effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade
Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to
shed a little light.

May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of
Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably exact
manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch near the
Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of Paris,
where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to
imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles
with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue de la
Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse
bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue
Mondétour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles. So
that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to
form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue
Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue
des Prêcheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, of
varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely separated,
like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.

We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,
contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. These
buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue
de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running
from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter broad,
the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet, skirting
little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with iron hoops,
excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous, century-old
gratings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.

The name of Mondétour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that
whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still better
expressed by the _Rue Pirouette_, which ran into the Rue Mondétour.

The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de
la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had
entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street, which was very
short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles
by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind
alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through
which he could make his escape. This was the Rue Mondétour, which on
one side ran into the Rue de Prêcheurs, and on the other into the Rue
du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of
cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be
seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort
of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that
an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years
before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
Theophilus described in the following couplet:--


               Là branle le squelette horrible
               D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.<a href="#linknote-47"
      name="linknoteref-47" id="linknoteref-47">47</a>

The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
from father to son.

In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
_Pot-aux-Roses_, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
sign-board, a post (_poteau_) painted rose-color. In the last century,
the worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by
the stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the
very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of
gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of the
cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be placed
in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: "At the Bunch of Corinth
Grapes" (_"Au Raisin de Corinthe"_). Hence the name of Corinthe. Nothing
is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The ellipsis is the
zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses.
The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no longer
acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.

A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the first
floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase piercing
the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad
daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with a
trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor were
the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a staircase
which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their entrance
only a private door in the large room on the first floor. Under the
roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants. The
kitchen shared the ground-floor with the tap-room.

Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is
that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone
in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented a capital
thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps,
which he called _carpes au gras_. These were eaten by the light of a
tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to which
were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came thither
from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to notify
passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped a brush in a pot of black
paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as
a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this
remarkable inscription:--


                    CARPES HO GRAS.

One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to
obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began
the third; this is what remained:--


                      CARPE HO RAS.

Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become
a profound piece of advice.

In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father
Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his
kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled
Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant:
"Enter my wine-shop."

Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondétour labyrinth was
disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer exists
at the present moment. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe have
disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.

As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the
rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had
discovered Corinthe. He had entered it on account of the _Carpe horas_,
and had returned thither on account of the _Carpes au gras_. There they
drank, there they ate, there they shouted; they did not pay much, they
paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome.
Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.

Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper
with a mustache; an amusing variety. He always had an ill-tempered air,
seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people who
entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking a quarrel
with them than of serving them with soup. And yet, we insist upon
the word, people were always welcome there. This oddity had attracted
customers to his shop, and brought him young men, who said to each
other: "Come hear Father Hucheloup growl." He had been a fencing-master.
All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. A big voice, a good
fellow. He had a comic foundation under a tragic exterior, he asked
nothing better than to frighten you, very much like those snuff-boxes
which are in the shape of a pistol. The detonation makes one sneeze.

Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.

About 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him disappeared the secret of
stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the wine-shop.
But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable; the wine, which had
always been bad, became fearfully bad. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his
friends continued to go to Corinthe,--out of pity, as Bossuet said.

The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given to rustic
recollections. She deprived them of their flatness by her pronunciation.
She had a way of her own of saying things, which spiced her
reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. It had formerly
been her delight, so she affirmed, to hear the _loups-de-gorge_
(_rouges-gorges_) _chanter dans les ogrepines_ (_aubépines_)--to hear
the redbreasts sing in the hawthorn-trees.

The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated, was
a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches, and
tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It was reached
by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner of the room at a
square hole like the hatchway of a ship.

This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was
always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture
comported itself as though it had but three legs--the whitewashed walls
had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame
Hucheloup:--


         Elle étonne à dix pas, elle épouvente à deux,
         Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
         On tremble à chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche
         Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.<a
      href="#linknote-48" name="linknoteref-48" id="linknoteref-48">48</a>

This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.

Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till
night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. Two
serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,49 and who had never been
known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set on the tables
the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths which were served to the
hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. Matelote, large, plump, redhaired,
and noisy, the favorite ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was
homelier than any mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it
becomes the servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was
less homely than Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with a
lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids, always
languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called chronic lassitude,
the first up in the house and the last in bed, waited on every one, even
the other maid, silently and gently, smiling through her fatigue with a
vague and sleepy smile.

Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the
following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--


         Régale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.<a href="#linknote-50"
      name="linknoteref-50" id="linknoteref-50">50</a>



CHAPTER II--PRELIMINARY GAYETIES

Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than
elsewhere. He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The
two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had
everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what
the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, _bini_. On the
morning of the 5th of June, they went to Corinthe to breakfast. Joly,
who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh which Laigle was beginning to
share. Laigle's coat was threadbare, but Joly was well dressed.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when they opened the door of
Corinthe.

They ascended to the first floor.

Matelote and Gibelotte received them.

"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.

And they seated themselves at a table.

The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.

Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.

While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared at the
hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:--

"I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie
cheese. I enter." It was Grantaire.

Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.

At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the
table.

That made three.

"Are you going to drink those two bottles?" Laigle inquired of
Grantaire.

Grantaire replied:--

"All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous. Two bottles never yet
astonished a man."

The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a
bottle was rapidly gulped down.

"So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again.

"You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.

And after having emptied his glass, he added:--

"Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old."

"I should hope so," retorted Laigle. "That's why we get on well
together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind
me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my
movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm. Old coats
are just like old friends."

"That's true," ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue, "an old goat
is an old abi" (_ami_, friend).

"Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up," said
Grantaire.

"Grantaire," demanded Laigle, "have you just come from the boulevard?"

"No."

"We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."

"It's a marvellous sight," said Joly.

"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle. "Who would suspect that
Paris was turned upside down? How plainly it is to be seen that in
former days there were nothing but convents here! In this neighborhood!
Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbé Lebeuf.
They were all round here, they fairly swarmed, booted and barefooted,
shaven, bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins,
Carmelites, Little Augustines, Great Augustines, old Augustines--there
was no end of them."

"Don't let's talk of monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes one want
to scratch one's self."

Then he exclaimed:--

"Bouh! I've just swallowed a bad oyster. Now hypochondria is taking
possession of me again. The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly.
I hate the human race. I just passed through the Rue Richelieu, in front
of the big public library. That pile of oyster-shells which is called
a library is disgusting even to think of. What paper! What ink! What
scrawling! And all that has been written! What rascal was it who said
that man was a featherless biped?51 And then, I met a pretty girl of
my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be called
Floréal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the angels,
because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with
small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! Alas! woman keeps on the
watch for a protector as much as for a lover; cats chase mice as well
as birds. Two months ago that young woman was virtuous in an attic, she
adjusted little brass rings in the eyelet-holes of corsets, what do
you call it? She sewed, she had a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot
of flowers, she was contented. Now here she is a bankeress. This
transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in
high spirits. The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty
to-day as she was yesterday. Her financier did not show in her face.
Roses have this advantage or disadvantage over women, that the traces
left upon them by caterpillars are visible. Ah! there is no morality on
earth. I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel,
the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace, the
apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips, and the
fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats. As for right, do you know what
right is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and demands
what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus answers: 'The wrong that
Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenæ did to you, the wrong that the
Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done to you. They were your
neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness just as
you do. You have stolen Alba, we shall take Clusium.' Rome said: 'You
shall not take Clusium.' Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: 'Væ victis!'
That is what right is. Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!
What eagles! It makes my flesh creep."

He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and went on,
having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine, of which no one,
not even himself, had taken any notice:--

"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes the grisette
is an eagle. There is no more modesty in the one case than in the other.
So we believe in nothing. There is but one reality: drink. Whatever your
opinion may be in favor of the lean cock, like the Canton of Uri, or
in favor of the fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, it matters little,
drink. You talk to me of the boulevard, of that procession, _et cætera,
et cætera_. Come now, is there going to be another revolution? This
poverty of means on the part of the good God astounds me. He has to keep
greasing the groove of events every moment. There is a hitch, it won't
work. Quick, a revolution! The good God has his hands perpetually black
with that cart-grease. If I were in his place, I'd be perfectly simple
about it, I would not wind up my mechanism every minute, I'd lead the
human race in a straightforward way, I'd weave matters mesh by mesh,
without breaking the thread, I would have no provisional arrangements,
I would have no extraordinary repertory. What the rest of you call
progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to
say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary
troupe suffices neither for event nor for men: among men geniuses are
required, among events revolutions. Great accidents are the law; the
order of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition
of comets, one would be tempted to think that Heaven itself finds actors
needed for its performance. At the moment when one expects it the least,
God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star
turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death
of Cæsar. Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with
a comet. _Crac_, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution,
behold a great man; '93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of
1811 at the head of the poster. Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all
studded with unexpected flashes! Boum! Boum! extraordinary show! Raise
your eyes, boobies. Everything is in disorder, the star as well as
the drama. Good God, it is too much and not enough. These resources,
gathered from exception, seem magnificence and poverty. My friends,
Providence has come down to expedients. What does a revolution prove?
That God is in a quandry. He effects a _coup d'état_ because he, God,
has not been able to make both ends meet. In fact, this confirms me in
my conjectures as to Jehovah's fortune; and when I see so much distress
in heaven and on earth, from the bird who has not a grain of millet to
myself without a hundred thousand livres of income, when I see human
destiny, which is very badly worn, and even royal destiny, which is
threadbare, witness the Prince de Condé hung, when I see winter, which
is nothing but a rent in the zenith through which the wind blows, when I
see so many rags even in the perfectly new purple of the morning on the
crests of hills, when I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls, when I
see the frost, that paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and events
patched up, and so many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon,
when I see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich.
The appearance exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. He
gives a revolution as a tradesman whose money-box is empty gives a ball.
God must not be judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of heaven I
perceive a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt. That is why
I am discontented. Here it is the 4th of June, it is almost night; ever
since this morning I have been waiting for daylight to come; it has not
come, and I bet that it won't come all day. This is the inexactness
of an ill-paid clerk. Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits
anything else, this old world is all warped, I take my stand on the
opposition, everything goes awry; the universe is a tease. It's like
children, those who want them have none, and those who don't want them
have them. Total: I'm vexed. Besides, Laigle de Meaux, that bald-head,
offends my sight. It humiliates me to think that I am of the same age as
that baldy. However, I criticise, but I do not insult. The universe is
what it is. I speak here without evil intent and to ease my
conscience. Receive, Eternal Father, the assurance of my distinguished
consideration. Ah! by all the saints of Olympus and by all the gods
of paradise, I was not intended to be a Parisian, that is to say, to
rebound forever, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, from the
group of the loungers to the group of the roysterers. I was made to be
a Turk, watching oriental houris all day long, executing those exquisite
Egyptian dances, as sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a
Beauceron peasant, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewoman,
or a petty German prince, furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to
the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure with drying his
breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier. Those are the
positions for which I was born! Yes, I have said a Turk, and I will not
retract. I do not understand how people can habitually take Turks in
bad part; Mohammed had his good points; respect for the inventor of
seraglios with houris and paradises with odalisques! Let us not insult
Mohammedanism, the only religion which is ornamented with a hen-roost!
Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a great piece of stupidity. And
it appears that they are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to
break each other's profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of
summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on
their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows!
Really, people do commit altogether too many follies. An old broken
lantern which I have just seen at a bric-à-brac merchant's suggests
a reflection to my mind; it is time to enlighten the human race. Yes,
behold me sad again. That's what comes of swallowing an oyster and
a revolution the wrong way! I am growing melancholy once more. Oh!
frightful old world. People strive, turn each other out, prostitute
themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!"

And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing, which
was well earned.

"À propos of revolution," said Joly, "it is decidedly abberent that
Barius is in lub."

"Does any one know with whom?" demanded Laigle.

"Do."

"No?"

"Do! I tell you."

"Marius' love affairs!" exclaimed Grantaire. "I can imagine it. Marius
is a fog, and he must have found a vapor. Marius is of the race of
poets. He who says poet, says fool, madman, _Tymbræus Apollo_. Marius
and his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. They must
make a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in
which they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are
souls possessed of senses. They lie among the stars."

Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second
harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture of the
stairs. It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged, very small,
yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous amount of hair
drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.

The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three, addressed
himself to Laigle de Meaux.

"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?"

"That is my nickname," replied Laigle. "What do you want with me?"

"This. A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: 'Do you know
Mother Hucheloup?' I said: 'Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the old man's widow;'
he said to me: 'Go there. There you will find M. Bossuet. Tell him from
me: "A B C".' It's a joke that they're playing on you, isn't it. He gave
me ten sous."

"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire:
"Grantaire, lend me ten sous."

This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.

"Thank you, sir," said the urchin.

"What is your name?" inquired Laigle.

"Navet, Gavroche's friend."

"Stay with us," said Laigle.

"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire.

The child replied:--

"I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout 'Down with
Polignac!'"

And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the
most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.

The child gone, Grantaire took the word:--

"That is the pure-bred gamin. There are a great many varieties of the
gamin species. The notary's gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter, the cook's
gamin is called a scullion, the baker's gamin is called a _mitron_,
the lackey's gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is called the
cabin-boy, the soldier's gamin is called the drummer-boy, the painter's
gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman's gamin is called an
errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion, the kingly gamin
is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called the bambino."

In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:--

"A B C, that is to say: the burial of Lamarque."

"The tall blonde," remarked Grantaire, "is Enjolras, who is sending you
a warning."

"Shall we go?" ejaculated Bossuet.

"It's raiding," said Joly. "I have sworn to go through fire, but not
through water. I don't wand to ged a gold."

"I shall stay here," said Grantaire. "I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."

"Conclusion: we remain," said Laigle. "Well, then, let us drink.
Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."

"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.

Laigle rubbed his hands.

"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830. As a matter of
fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."

"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire. "I don't
execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton
night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think
that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his
royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end
against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."

The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction of
daylight. There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street, every one
having gone off "to watch events."

"Is it mid-day or midnight?" cried Bossuet. "You can't see your hand
before your face. Gibelotte, fetch a light."

Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.

"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered. "Enjolras said: 'Joly is ill,
Grantaire is drunk.' It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had
come for me, I would have followed him. So much the worse for Enjolras!
I won't go to his funeral."

This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not
stir from the wine-shop. By two o'clock in the afternoon, the table at
which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning
on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the
other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and
Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards
cheerfulness.

As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate
inspirer of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine enjoys only a conventional
popularity with serious drinkers. There is, in fact, in the matter
of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible
fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted
him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The
beer-glass is the abyss. Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and
being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse
to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the
most terrible of lethargies. It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy,
and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed. They are three
grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed
there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat,
three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the
slumbering Psyche.

Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was
tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.
Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas,
a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with
dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated
astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn
words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--

"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open! Let every one be a member
of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.
Let us drink."

And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--

"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate
thee!"

And Joly exclaimed:--

"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink.
He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two
francs and ninety-five centibes."

And Grantaire began again:--

"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting
them on the table in the guise of candles?"

Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.

He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the
falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.

All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
"To arms!" He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche
with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his sword, and
Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel
with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which was following
them.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet
improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his
mouth, and shouted:--

"Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hohée!"

Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few
paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting: "What do you want?" which
crossed a "Where are you going?"

"To make a barricade," replied Courfeyrac.

"Well, here! This is a good place! Make it here!"

"That's true, Aigle," said Courfeyrac.

And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue
de la Chanvrerie.



CHAPTER III--NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE

The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street
widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket
without exit. Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondétour was easily
barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible except
from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full sight.
Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.

Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob. There
was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight. In the space of a
flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables,
area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every
description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof. A terrified
old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles
for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry. The
wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that the
mob had rushed into it.--"Ah my God! Ah my God!" sighed Mame Hucheloup.

Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:--

"Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You will gatch
gold."

In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had
been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of
street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its passage,
and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray
contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles
of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the widow
Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly,
with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of fans, had
backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of blocks of
rough stone. Blocks which were improvised like the rest and procured
no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn from
the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks. When Bossuet and
Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with
a rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the
populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.

Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers. Gibelotte went and
came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She
served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.

An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.

Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,
made the passengers alight, offered his hand to "the ladies," dismissed
the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the
bridle.

"Omnibuses," said he, "do not pass the Corinthe. _Non licet omnibus
adire Corinthum_."

An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their
will, through the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus lying on its side
completed the bar across the street.

Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.

Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried
in a low tone. Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her
throat.

"The end of the world has come," she muttered.

Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup's fat, red, wrinkled neck, and
said to Grantaire: "My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman's
neck as an infinitely delicate thing."

But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote
had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round her
waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.

"Matelote is homely!" he cried: "Matelote is of a dream of ugliness!
Matelote is a chimæra. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic
Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with
one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to
give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She has
chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian's mistress, and she is a good
girl. I guarantee that she will fight well. Every good girl contains
a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she's an old warrior. Look at her
moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed! She
will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of the
banlieue. Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as there
are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic acid;
however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me. Gentlemen, my
father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics.
I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the good fellow.
Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of it, and the
result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been rich, there
would have been no more poor people! You would have seen! Oh, if the
kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things would go! I
picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild's fortune! How much good he
would do! Matelote, embrace me! You are voluptuous and timid! You have
cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim the kiss
of a lover."

"Hold your tongue, you cask!" said Courfeyrac.

Grantaire retorted:--

"I am the capitoul52 and the master of the floral games!"

Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,
raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had
something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would
have perished at Thermopylæ with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda with
Cromwell.

"Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine somewhere
else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for drunkenness.
Don't disgrace the barricade!"

This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire. One would
have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He
seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.

He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at
Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:--

"Let me sleep here."

"Go and sleep somewhere else," cried Enjolras.

But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him,
replied:--

"Let me sleep here,--until I die."

Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:--

"Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of
living, and of dying."

Grantaire replied in a grave tone:--

"You will see."

He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily
on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period of
inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him, an
instant later he had fallen asleep.



CHAPTER IV--AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP

Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:--

"Here's the street in its low-necked dress! How well it looks!"

Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to
console the widowed proprietress.

"Mother Hucheloup, weren't you complaining the other day because you
had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because Gibelotte
shook a counterpane out of your window?"

"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good Heavens, are you going
to put that table of mine in your horror, too? And it was for the
counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic
window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a
hundred francs. If that isn't an abomination, what is!"

"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."

Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit
which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account. She
was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received
a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and
cried for vengeance, saying: "Father, you owe my husband affront for
affront." The father asked: "On which cheek did you receive the blow?"
"On the left cheek." The father slapped her right cheek and said: "Now
you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter's
ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife's."

The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under
their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of
vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with
fire-pots, "left over from the King's festival." This festival was very
recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these
munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pépin.
They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
the lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all
the lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondétour, du Cygne, des
Prêcheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Two barricades
were now in process of construction at once, both of them resting on the
Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger shut off the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondétour, on the side of
the Rue de Cygne. This last barricade, which was very narrow, was
constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were about fifty
workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their way, they had
effected a wholesale loan from an armorer's shop.

Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than this
troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two holster-pistols,
another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn
slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine sheets of gray paper
and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who was shouting:
"Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at the point of our
bayonet." This man had no bayonet. Another spread out over his coat the
cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman, the cover of the
cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription in red worsted:
_Public Order_. There were a great many guns bearing the numbers of the
legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to
this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young men, and bronzed
longshoremen. All were in haste; and as they helped each other, they
discussed the possible chances. That they would receive succor about
three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure of one regiment, that
Paris would rise. Terrible sayings with which was mingled a sort of
cordial joviality. One would have pronounced them brothers, but they did
not know each other's names. Great perils have this fine characteristic,
that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers. A fire had been
lighted in the kitchen, and there they were engaged in moulding into
bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all the brass table-ware of
the establishment. In the midst of it all, they drank. Caps and
buckshot were mixed pell-mell on the tables with glasses of wine. In
the billiard-hall, Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously
modified by terror, which had stupefied one, rendered another
breathless, and roused the third, were tearing up old dish-cloths and
making lint; three insurgents were assisting them, three bushy-haired,
jolly blades with beards and moustaches, who plucked away at the linen
with the fingers of seamstresses and who made them tremble.

The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had
observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner of the
Rue des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade and was making
himself useful there. Gavroche was working on the larger one. As for the
young man who had been waiting for Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and who
had inquired for M. Marius, he had disappeared at about the time when
the omnibus had been overturned.

Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken to get
everything in readiness. He went, came, mounted, descended, re-mounted,
whistled, and sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of
all. Had he any incentive? Yes, certainly, his poverty; had he wings?
yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. He was constantly
visible, he was incessantly audible. He filled the air, as he was
everywhere at once. He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity; no halt
was possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its haunches.
He troubled the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated the weary,
he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in some,
and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now pricking
a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew off again,
hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one party to
another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole company; a fly on
the immense revolutionary coach.

Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor in his
little lungs.

"Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! Where are you
now? A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! Your barricade
is very small. It must be carried up. Put everything on it, fling
everything there, stick it all in. Break down the house. A barricade is
Mother Gibou's tea. Hullo, here's a glass door."

This elicited an exclamation from the workers.

"A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door, tubercle?"

"Hercules yourselves!" retorted Gavroche. "A glass door is an excellent
thing in a barricade. It does not prevent an attack, but it prevents the
enemy taking it. So you've never prigged apples over a wall where there
were broken bottles? A glass door cuts the corns of the National Guard
when they try to mount on the barricade. Pardi! glass is a treacherous
thing. Well, you haven't a very wildly lively imagination, comrades."

However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol. He went from one to
another, demanding: "A gun, I want a gun! Why don't you give me a gun?"

"Give you a gun!" said Combeferre.

"Come now!" said Gavroche, "why not? I had one in 1830 when we had a
dispute with Charles X."

Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

"When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children."

Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:--

"If you are killed before me, I shall take yours."

"Gamin!" said Enjolras.

"Greenhorn!" said Gavroche.

A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street
created a diversion! Gavroche shouted to him:--

"Come with us, young fellow! well now, don't we do anything for this old
country of ours?"

The dandy fled.



CHAPTER V--PREPARATIONS

The journals of the day which said that that _nearly impregnable
structure_, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call
it, reached to the level of the first floor, were mistaken. The fact is,
that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. It was
built in such a manner that the combatants could, at their will, either
disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its crest by
means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of each other
and arranged as steps in the interior. On the outside, the front of the
barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks bound together
by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels of Anceau's dray
and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.

An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made
between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which
was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this
point. The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with
ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the
barricade.

The little Mondétour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building,
was not visible. The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt.
Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other
fragment of the Rue Mondétour which opens through the Rue des Prêcheurs
an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible
communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of
an attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des
Prêcheurs.

With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which
constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a
branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on the
Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the wine-shop
formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed on all
sides. There existed an interval of twenty paces between the grand
barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the street,
so that one might say that the barricade rested on these houses, all
inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an hour,
and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin cap or
a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who still
ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a
glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and
redoubled their pace.

The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was
dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table.
Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This
coffer was filled with cartridges. When the mob saw the cartridges, a
tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.

Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder, and set about
making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of
powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in
reserve.

The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had
finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they no
longer paid any attention. This noise retreated at times, and again drew
near, with melancholy undulations.

They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with
solemn gravity. Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the
barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des
Prêcheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns
loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable
streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those
dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated,
enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on,
in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt
advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying,
isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.



CHAPTER VI--WAITING

During those hours of waiting, what did they do?

We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.

While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan
of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a
glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the
barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an
eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly,
Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and
united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations in their
student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been
converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt
which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting
against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to
a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.

What verses? These:--


              Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,
                Lorsque nous étions si jeunes tous deux,
              Et que nous n'avions au cour d'autre envie
                Que d'être bien mis et d'être amoureux,

              Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre âge à mon âge,
                Nous ne comptions pas à deux quarante ans,
              Et que, dans notre humble et petit ménage,
                Tout, même l'hiver, nous était printemps?

              Beaux jours! Manuel était fier et sage,
                Paris s'asseyait à de saints banquets,
              Foy lançait la foudre, et votre corsage
                Avait une épingle où je me piquais.

              Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,
                Quand je vous menais au Prado dîner,
              Vous étiez jolie au point que les roses
                Me faisaient l'effet de se retourner.

              Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!
                Comme elle sent bon!  Quels cheveux à flots!
              Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,
                Son bonnet charmant est à peine éclos.

              J'errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.
                Les passants croyaient que l'amour charmé
              Avait marié, dans notre heureux couple,
                Le doux mois d'avril au beau mois de mai.

              Nous vivions cachés, contents, porte close,
                Dévorant l'amour, bon fruit défendu,
              Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose
                Que déjà ton cour avait répondu.

              La Sorbonne était l'endroit bucolique
                Où je t'adorais du soir au matin.
              C'est ainsi qu'une âme amoureuse applique
                La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.

              O place Maubert! O place Dauphine!
                Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,
              Tu tirais ton bas sur ta jambe fine,
                Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.

              J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste;
                Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,
              Tu me démontrais la bonté céleste
                Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.

              Je t'obéissais, tu m'étais soumise;
                O grenier doré! te lacer! te voir
              Aller et venir dès l'aube en chemise,
                Mirant ton jeune front à ton vieux miroir.

              Et qui donc pourrait perdre la mémoire
                De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,
              De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,
                Où l'amour bégaye un argot charmant?

              Nos jardins étaient un pot de tulipe;
                Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;
              Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,
                Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.

              Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!
                Ton manchon brûlé, ton boa perdu!
              Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare
                Qu'un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!

              J'étais mendiant et toi charitable.
                Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.
              Dante in folio nous servait de table
                Pour manger gaîment un cent de marrons.

              La première fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge
                Je pris un baiser à ta lèvre en feu,
              Quand tu t'en allais décoiffée et rouge,
                Je restai tout pâle et je crus en Dieu!

              Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,
                Et tous ces fichus changés en chiffons?
              Oh que de soupirs, de nos cours pleins d'ombre,
                Se sont envolés dans les cieux profonds!<a href="#linknote-53"
      name="linknoteref-53" id="linknoteref-53">53</a>

The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars
which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted
streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in
preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low
tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle
poet.

In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in
the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on
Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way
to la Courtille. These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on
three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a fashion
that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade
remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag
formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.

This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and
terrible purple.



CHAPTER VII--THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES

Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance. All that they heard
was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare,
badly sustained and distant. This respite, which was thus prolonged,
was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its
forces. These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls
on the threshold of redoubtable events. He went in search of Gavroche,
who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious light
of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution, on account of
the powder which was scattered on the tables. These two candles cast no
gleam outside. The insurgents had, moreover, taken pains not to have any
light in the upper stories.

Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with
his cartridges. The man of the Rue des Billettes had just entered
the tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was the least
lighted. A musket of large model had fallen to his share, and he held it
between his legs. Gavroche, who had been, up to that moment, distracted
by a hundred "amusing" things, had not even seen this man.

When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes,
admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated, the street
urchin sprang to his feet. Any one who had spied upon that man up to
that moment, would have seen that he was observing everything in the
barricade and in the band of insurgents, with singular attention; but,
from the moment when he had entered this room, he had fallen into a sort
of brown study, and no longer seemed to see anything that was going on.
The gamin approached this pensive personage, and began to step around
him on tiptoe, as one walks in the vicinity of a person whom one is
afraid of waking. At the same time, over his childish countenance which
was, at once so impudent and so serious, so giddy and so profound, so
gay and so heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of an old man which
signify: Ah bah! impossible! My sight is bad! I am dreaming! can this
be? no, it is not! but yes! why, no! etc. Gavroche balanced on his
heels, clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his neck around like a
bird, expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He
was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. He had the
mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart, discovering a
Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an amateur recognizing
a Raphael in a heap of daubs. His whole being was at work, the instinct
which scents out, and the intelligence which combines. It was evident
that a great event had happened in Gavroche's life.

It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras
accosted him.

"You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen. Go out of the
barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the
streets, and come back and tell me what is going on."

Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.

"So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! I'll
go! In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust the big
ones." And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering his voice, added,
as he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: "Do you see that big
fellow there?"

"Well?"

"He's a police spy."

"Are you sure of it?"

"It isn't two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the Port
Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear."

Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very
low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at hand.
The man left the room, and returned almost immediately, accompanied by
three others. The four men, four porters with broad shoulders, went
and placed themselves without doing anything to attract his attention,
behind the table on which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning
with his elbows. They were evidently ready to hurl themselves upon him.

Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:--

"Who are you?"

At this abrupt query, the man started. He plunged his gaze deep into
Enjolras' clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter's meaning. He
smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic,
and more resolute could be seen in the world, and replied with haughty
gravity:--

"I see what it is. Well, yes!"

"You are a police spy?"

"I am an agent of the authorities."

"And your name?"

"Javert."

Enjolras made a sign to the four men. In the twinkling of an eye, before
Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down, pinioned
and searched.

They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of
glass, and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with
this motto: _Supervision and vigilance_, and on the other this note:
"JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two," and the signature of the
Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.

Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several
gold pieces. They left him his purse and his watch. Under the watch,
at the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope,
which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines, written
in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:--

"As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert
will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the
malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine,
near the Jena bridge."

The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms behind
his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the middle of the
room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.

Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved
of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and
said to him:--

"It's the mouse who has caught the cat."

All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about
the wine-shop noticed it.

Javert had not uttered a single cry.

At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly,
Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running
up.

Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes that he
could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid serenity of
the man who has never lied.

"He is a police spy," said Enjolras.

And turning to Javert: "You will be shot ten minutes before the
barricade is taken."

Javert replied in his most imperious tone:--

"Why not at once?"

"We are saving our powder."

"Then finish the business with a blow from a knife."

"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges and not assassins."

Then he called Gavroche:--

"Here you! go about your business! Do what I told you!"

"I'm going!" cried Gavroche.

And halting as he was on the point of setting out:--

"By the way, you will give me his gun!" and he added: "I leave you the
musician, but I want the clarionet."

The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through the opening
in the large barricade.



CHAPTER VIII--MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE
CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC

The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the
reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a
revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort,
in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here
outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred
almost immediately after Gavroche's departure.

Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they
roll along, a throng of tumultuous men. These men do not ask each other
whence they come. Among the passers-by who had joined the rabble led by
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there had been a person wearing
the jacket of a street porter, which was very threadbare on the
shoulders, who gesticulated and vociferated, and who had the look of a
drunken savage. This man, whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who
was, moreover, an utter stranger to those who pretended to know him,
was very drunk, or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated
himself with several others at a table which they had dragged outside
of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him drunk
seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house at the
extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded the whole
street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:--

"Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire.
When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can advance
into the street!"

"Yes, but the house is closed," said one of the drinkers.

"Let us knock!"

"They will not open."

"Let us break in the door!"

Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and knocks.
The door opens not. He strikes a second blow. No one answers. A third
stroke. The same silence.

"Is there any one here?" shouts Cabuc.

Nothing stirs.

Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.

It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely of
oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays, a genuine
prison postern. The blows from the butt end of the gun made the house
tremble, but did not shake the door.

Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed, for a
tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story, and at
this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a gray-haired
old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.

The man who was knocking paused.

"Gentlemen," said the porter, "what do you want?"

"Open!" said Cabuc.

"That cannot be, gentlemen."

"Open, nevertheless."

"Impossible, gentlemen."

Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below, and
as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.

"Will you open, yes or no?"

"No, gentlemen."

"Do you say no?"

"I say no, my goo--"

The porter did not finish. The shot was fired; the ball entered under
his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing the
jugular vein.

The old man fell back without a sigh. The candle fell and was
extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except a motionless head
lying on the sill of the small window, and a little whitish smoke which
floated off towards the roof.

"There!" said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the
pavement.

He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his
shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talon, and he heard a voice
saying to him:--

"On your knees."

The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras' cold, white face.

Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.

He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.

He had seized Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with his left
hand.

"On your knees!" he repeated.

And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years bent
the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him to his knees
in the mire.

Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized by a
superhuman hand.

Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman's
face, had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis.
His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek
profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which,
as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.

The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in a circle
at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter a word in the
presence of the thing which they were about to behold.

Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled in every
limb.

Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.

"Collect yourself," said he. "Think or pray. You have one minute."

"Mercy!" murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head and stammered a
few inarticulate oaths.

Enjolras never took his eyes off of him: he allowed a minute to pass,
then he replaced his watch in his fob. That done, he grasped Le Cabuc
by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his knees and
shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those
intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the most terrible of
adventures, turned aside their heads.

An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face
downwards.

Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe glance
around him. Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:--

"Throw that outside."

Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still
agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled,
and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondétour.

Enjolras was thoughtful. It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows
slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity. All at once he raised his
voice.

A silence fell upon them.

"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is frightful, what I have
done is horrible. He killed, therefore I killed him. I had to do it,
because insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is even
more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eyes of the
Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the victims of
duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. I have, therefore,
tried that man, and condemned him to death. As for myself, constrained
as I am to do what I have done, and yet abhorring it, I have judged
myself also, and you shall soon see to what I have condemned myself."

Those who listened to him shuddered.

"We will share thy fate," cried Combeferre.

"So be it," replied Enjolras. "One word more. In executing this man,
I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world,
necessity's name is Fatality. Now, the law of progress is, that monsters
shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall vanish before
Fraternity. It is a bad moment to pronounce the word love. No matter, I
do pronounce it. And I glorify it. Love, the future is thine. Death, I
make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the future there will
be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor
bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no
more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth
will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come,
citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it
will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to
die."

Enjolras ceased. His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time
standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. His
staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently, and,
leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched
with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young
man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also
of rock.

Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies were
taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent's card was found on Le
Cabuc. The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848, the special
report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police in 1832.

We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police, which
is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact
is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no longer any
question of Claquesous. Claquesous had nowhere left any trace of his
disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated himself with the
invisible. His life had been all shadows, his end was night.

The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the emotion
of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so quickly
terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade, the small
young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.

This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join the
insurgents.



BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW



CHAPTER I--FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS

The voice which had summoned Marius through the twilight to the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had produced on him the effect
of the voice of destiny. He wished to die; the opportunity presented
itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand in the darkness
offered him the key. These melancholy openings which take place in the
gloom before despair, are tempting. Marius thrust aside the bar which
had so often allowed him to pass, emerged from the garden, and said: "I
will go."

Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid in his
brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate after those
two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love, overwhelmed at
once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one desire remaining, to
make a speedy end of all.

He set out at rapid pace. He found himself most opportunely armed, as he
had Javert's pistols with him.

The young man of whom he thought that he had caught a glimpse, had
vanished from his sight in the street.

Marius, who had emerged from the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, traversed
the Esplanade and the bridge of the Invalides, the Champs-Élysées, the
Place Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open
there, the gas was burning under the arcades, women were making their
purchases in the stalls, people were eating ices in the Café Laiter,
and nibbling small cakes at the English pastry-cook's shop. Only a few
posting-chaises were setting out at a gallop from the Hôtel des Princes
and the Hôtel Meurice.

Marius entered the Rue Saint-Honoré through the Passage Delorme. There
the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their
half-open doors, people were walking about, the street lanterns were
lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the windows were lighted as
usual. There was cavalry on the Place du Palais-Royal.

Marius followed the Rue Saint-Honoré. In proportion as he left the
Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows, the shops
were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds, the street grew
sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased in density. For the
passers-by now amounted to a crowd. No one could be seen to speak in
this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull, deep murmur.

Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages", motionless
and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came as stones in the
midst of running water.

At the entrance to the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer walked.
It formed a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable
block of people who were huddled together, and conversing in low tones.
There were hardly any black coats or round hats now, but smock frocks,
blouses, caps, and bristling and cadaverous heads. This multitude
undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom. Its whisperings had the
hoarse accent of a vibration. Although not one of them was walking, a
dull trampling was audible in the mire. Beyond this dense portion of
the throng, in the Rue du Roule, in the Rue des Prouvaires, and in the
extension of the Rue Saint-Honoré, there was no longer a single window
in which a candle was burning. Only the solitary and diminishing rows
of lanterns could be seen vanishing into the street in the distance. The
lanterns of that date resembled large red stars, hanging to ropes, and
shed upon the pavement a shadow which had the form of a huge spider.
These streets were not deserted. There could be descried piles of guns,
moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking. No curious observer passed that
limit. There circulation ceased. There the rabble ended and the army
began.

Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more. He had been
summoned, he must go. He found a means to traverse the throng and to
pass the bivouac of the troops, he shunned the patrols, he avoided the
sentinels. He made a circuit, reached the Rue de Béthisy, and directed
his course towards the Halles. At the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais,
there were no longer any lanterns.

After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits of
the troops; he found himself in something startling. There was no longer
a passer-by, no longer a soldier, no longer a light, there was no one;
solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill which seized hold upon
one. Entering a street was like entering a cellar.

He continued to advance.

He took a few steps. Some one passed close to him at a run. Was it a
man? Or a woman? Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had
passed and vanished.

Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he judged
to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street, he came in
contact with an obstacle. He extended his hands. It was an overturned
wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones
scattered and piled up. A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.
He climbed over the stones and found himself on the other side of the
barrier. He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along
the walls of the houses. A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him
that he could make out something white in front of him. He approached,
it took on a form. It was two white horses; the horses of the omnibus
harnessed by Bossuet in the morning, who had been straying at random all
day from street to street, and had finally halted there, with the weary
patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of men, than man
understands the actions of Providence.

Marius left the horses behind him. As he was approaching a street which
seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one
knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by
him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his
head over a hairdresser's shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still
to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the
pillars of the market.

This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered
nothing more.

The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.

Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.



CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS

A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of
the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.

All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a
city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a
thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their
redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark and
enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance
fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed
windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased.
The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere,
and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary tactics of
insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply
every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. At
dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light
was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was
stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses;
and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of
windows and stores, the indentations of the chimneys, and the roofs,
and the vague reflections which are cast back by the wet and muddy
pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows
might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals,
of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and
profiles of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and
come in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated.
The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above
which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower of
Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those
grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.

All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters
where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a
few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have
distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble
of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were
swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly
drawing in and around the insurrection.

The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous
cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we
have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but
darkness.

A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,
into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible to
remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited,
where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible
combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street; snares of the
sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was over. No more
light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of guns,
no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death.
Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable. In
this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government
and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the
bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into
contact. The necessity was the same for both. The only possible issue
thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors. A situation so
extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves
seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.

Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were
equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of
retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of
flight.

It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that
triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should
prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government understood this
as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence
a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable gloom of this
quarter where all was at the point of being decided; hence a redoubled
anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe was on the point of
emerging. Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending
as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction, the tocsin of
Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than the clamor of
that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.

As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what
men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect.
The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their
melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an
immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.

While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in the
same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events,
while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name of
principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were
approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and
throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and
decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal
quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of
that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy
and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving
utterance to a dull roar.

A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute
and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the
wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from
on high like the voice of the thunder.



CHAPTER III--THE EXTREME EDGE

Marius had reached the Halles.

There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless than
in the neighboring streets. One would have said that the glacial peace
of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth and had spread over the
heavens.

Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background the
lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on
the Saint-Eustache side. It was the reflection of the torch which was
burning in the Corinthe barricade. Marius directed his steps towards
that red light. It had drawn him to the Marché-aux-Poirées, and he
caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Prêcheurs. He entered
it. The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not
see him. He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in
search of, and he walked on tiptoe. In this manner he reached the elbow
of that short section of the Rue Mondétour which was, as the reader will
remember, the only communication which Enjolras had preserved with the
outside world. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he thrust
his head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue Mondétour.

A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie which
cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed,
he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop, and
beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall, and men
crouching down with guns on their knees. All this was ten fathoms
distant from him. It was the interior of the barricade.

The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of
the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.

Marius had but a step more to take.

Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms,
and fell to thinking about his father.

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud a
soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic, and
had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,
Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who
had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that
same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray
before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his
sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade
blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks,
in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of
twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a
smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done
everything for France and nothing against her.

He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had
struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself
brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast
to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that
he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle,
and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the
street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!

He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he
was about to fall. Then he shuddered.

He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a
second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said to
himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape from
him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus fled, it
was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the future;
that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of the
gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through cellar-windows,
blows given and received in the rear; it was because, coming from
Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de la
Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father, it
did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that sword
were there, if after taking possession of it at his father's pillow,
he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of darkness
between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his
hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel!
He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not there and that
it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was just, that his
grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory, and that
it was far better that the colonel's sword should be sold at auction,
sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old junk, than that it
should, to-day, wound the side of his country.

And then he fell to weeping bitterly.

This was horrible. But what was he to do? Live without Cosette he could
not. Since she was gone, he must needs die. Had he not given her his
word of honor that he would die? She had gone knowing that; this meant
that it pleased her that Marius should die. And then, it was clear that
she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus without warning,
without a word, without a letter, although she knew his address! What
was the good of living, and why should he live now? And then, what!
should he retreat after going so far? should he flee from danger after
having approached it? should he slip away after having come and peeped
into the barricade? slip away, all in a tremble, saying: "After all, I
have had enough of it as it is. I have seen it, that suffices, this is
civil war, and I shall take my leave!" Should he abandon his friends who
were expecting him? Who were in need of him possibly! who were a mere
handful against an army! Should he be untrue at once to his love, to
country, to his word? Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of
patriotism? But this was impossible, and if the phantom of his father
was there in the gloom, and beheld him retreating, he would beat him on
the loins with the flat of his sword, and shout to him: "March on, you
poltroon!"

Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped his
head.

All at once he raised it. A sort of splendid rectification had just been
effected in his mind. There is a widening of the sphere of thought which
is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to
be near death. The vision of the action into which he felt that he
was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more
as lamentable, but as superb. The war of the street was suddenly
transfigured by some unfathomable inward working of his soul, before the
eye of his thought. All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery
recurred to him in throngs, but without troubling him. He left none of
them unanswered.

Let us see, why should his father be indignant? Are there not cases
where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? What was there that was
degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about
to begin? It is no longer Montmirail nor Champaubert; it is something
quite different. The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but
of a holy idea. The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds.
But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty
smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her
wound. And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of
view, why do we speak of civil war?

Civil war--what does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not all war
between men, war between brothers? War is qualified only by its object.
There is no such thing as foreign or civil war; there is only just and
unjust war. Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded,
war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening
on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary.
What have we to reproach that war with? War does not become a disgrace,
the sword does not become a disgrace, except when it is used for
assassinating the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth. Then
war, whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime.
Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does
one form of man despise another? By what right should the sword of
Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Leonidas against the
stranger, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the greater? the one is
the defender, the other the liberator. Shall we brand every appeal
to arms within a city's limits without taking the object into a
consideration? Then note the infamy of Brutus, Marcel, Arnould von
Blankenheim, Coligny, Hedgerow war? War of the streets? Why not? That
was the war of Ambiorix, of Artevelde, of Marnix, of Pelagius. But
Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France, Marnix against
Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all against the foreigner. Well, the
monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is a stranger; the right divine is
a stranger. Despotism violates the moral frontier, an invasion violates
the geographical frontier. Driving out the tyrant or driving out the
English, in both cases, regaining possession of one's own territory.
There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; after
philosophy, action is required; live force finishes what the idea
has sketched out; Prometheus chained begins, Arostogeiton ends; the
encyclopedia enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them.
After Æschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton. Multitudes have a
tendency to accept the master. Their mass bears witness to apathy. A
crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience. Men must be stirred up,
pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance,
their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them
in terrible handfuls. They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at
their own well-being; this dazzling awakens them. Hence the necessity
of tocsins and wars. Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations
with audacity, and shake up that sad humanity which is covered
with gloom by the right divine, Cæsarian glory, force, fanaticism,
irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in
the contemplation, in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs
of the night. Down with the tyrant! Of whom are you speaking? Do you
call Louis Philippe the tyrant? No; no more than Louis XVI. Both of them
are what history is in the habit of calling good kings; but principles
are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true is rectilinear, the
peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance; no concessions,
then; all encroachments on man should be repressed. There is a divine
right in Louis XVI., there is _because a Bourbon_ in Louis Philippe;
both represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right, and, in
order to clear away universal insurrection, they must be combated; it
must be done, France being always the one to begin. When the master
falls in France, he falls everywhere. In short, what cause is more just,
and consequently, what war is greater, than that which re-establishes
social truth, restores her throne to liberty, restores the people to the
people, restores sovereignty to man, replaces the purple on the head of
France, restores equity and reason in their plenitude, suppresses every
germ of antagonism by restoring each one to himself, annihilates the
obstacle which royalty presents to the whole immense universal concord,
and places the human race once more on a level with the right? These
wars build up peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges,
superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and
darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred.
It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To
conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,--and
therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has
a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent
extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound
despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects
and discuss theses. Logic is mingled with convulsion, and the thread
of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the mournful storm of
thought. This was the situation of Marius' mind.

As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in every
direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about to do, his
glance strayed to the interior of the barricade. The insurgents
were here conversing in a low voice, without moving, and there
was perceptible that quasi-silence which marks the last stage of
expectation. Overhead, at the small window in the third story Marius
descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to be singularly
attentive. This was the porter who had been killed by Le Cabuc. Below,
by the lights of the torch, which was thrust between the paving-stones,
this head could be vaguely distinguished. Nothing could be stranger, in
that sombre and uncertain gleam, than that livid, motionless, astonished
face, with its bristling hair, its eyes fixed and staring, and its
yawning mouth, bent over the street in an attitude of curiosity. One
would have said that the man who was dead was surveying those who were
about to die. A long trail of blood which had flowed from that head,
descended in reddish threads from the window to the height of the first
floor, where it stopped.




BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

Enlarge



CHAPTER I--THE FLAG: ACT FIRST

As yet, nothing had come. Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry.
Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves, carbines in
hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. They no longer addressed
each other, they listened, seeking to catch even the faintest and most
distant sound of marching.

Suddenly, in the midst of the dismal calm, a clear, gay, young voice,
which seemed to come from the Rue Saint-Denis, rose and began to sing
distinctly, to the old popular air of "By the Light of the Moon," this
bit of poetry, terminated by a cry like the crow of a cock:--


Mon nez est en larmes, Mon ami Bugeaud, Prête moi tes gendarmes Pour
leur dire un mot.

En capote bleue, La poule au shako, Voici la banlieue! Co-cocorico!<a
href="#linknote-54" name="linknoteref-54" id="linknoteref-54">54</a>

They pressed each other's hands.

"That is Gavroche," said Enjolras.

"He is warning us," said Combeferre.

A hasty rush troubled the deserted street; they beheld a being more
agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the
barricade, all breathless, saying:--

"My gun! Here they are!"

An electric quiver shot through the whole barricade, and the sound of
hands seeking their guns became audible.

"Would you like my carbine?" said Enjolras to the lad.

"I want a big gun," replied Gavroche.

And he seized Javert's gun.

Two sentinels had fallen back, and had come in almost at the same moment
as Gavroche. They were the sentinels from the end of the street, and the
vidette of the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The vidette of the Lane des
Prêcheurs had remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was
approaching from the direction of the bridges and Halles.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie, of which a few paving-stones alone were dimly
visible in the reflection of the light projected on the flag, offered to
the insurgents the aspect of a vast black door vaguely opened into a
smoke.

Each man had taken up his position for the conflict.

Forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre,
Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside
the large barricade, with their heads on a level with the crest of the
barrier, the barrels of their guns and carbines aimed on the stones as
though at loop-holes, attentive, mute, ready to fire. Six, commanded by
Feuilly, had installed themselves, with their guns levelled at their
shoulders, at the windows of the two stories of Corinthe.

Several minutes passed thus, then a sound of footsteps, measured, heavy,
and numerous, became distinctly audible in the direction of Saint-Leu.
This sound, faint at first, then precise, then heavy and sonorous,
approached slowly, without halt, without intermission, with a tranquil
and terrible continuity. Nothing was to be heard but this. It was that
combined silence and sound, of the statue of the commander, but this
stony step had something indescribably enormous and multiple about it
which awakened the idea of a throng, and, at the same time, the idea of
a spectre. One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching
onward. This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped. It
seemed as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end of
the street. Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom of that
dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude of metallic
threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about
like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one sees beneath
one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at the moment when
one is dropping off to sleep. These were bayonets and gun-barrels
confusedly illuminated by the distant reflection of the torch.

A pause ensued, as though both sides were waiting. All at once, from the
depths of this darkness, a voice, which was all the more sinister, since
no one was visible, and which appeared to be the gloom itself speaking,
shouted:--

"Who goes there?"

At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position,
was heard.

Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:--

"The French Revolution!"

"Fire!" shouted the voice.

A flash empurpled all the façades in the street as though the door of a
furnace had been flung open, and hastily closed again.

A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade. The red flag fell.
The discharge had been so violent and so dense that it had cut the
staff, that is to say, the very tip of the omnibus pole.

Bullets which had rebounded from the cornices of the houses penetrated
the barricade and wounded several men.

The impression produced by this first discharge was freezing. The attack
had been rough, and of a nature to inspire reflection in the boldest. It
was evident that they had to deal with an entire regiment at the very
least.

"Comrades!" shouted Courfeyrac, "let us not waste our powder. Let us
wait until they are in the street before replying."

"And, above all," said Enjolras, "let us raise the flag again."

He picked up the flag, which had fallen precisely at his feet.

Outside, the clatter of the ramrods in the guns could be heard; the
troops were re-loading their arms.

Enjolras went on:--

"Who is there here with a bold heart? Who will plant the flag on the
barricade again?"

Not a man responded. To mount on the barricade at the very moment when,
without any doubt, it was again the object of their aim, was simply
death. The bravest hesitated to pronounce his own condemnation. Enjolras
himself felt a thrill. He repeated:--

"Does no one volunteer?"



CHAPTER II--THE FLAG: ACT SECOND

Since they had arrived at Corinthe, and had begun the construction of
the barricade, no attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf
had not quitted the mob, however; he had entered the ground-floor of the
wine-shop and had seated himself behind the counter. There he had, so to
speak, retreated into himself. He no longer seemed to look or to think.
Courfeyrac and others had accosted him two or three times, warning him
of his peril, beseeching him to withdraw, but he did not hear them. When
they were not speaking to him, his mouth moved as though he were
replying to some one, and as soon as he was addressed, his lips became
motionless and his eyes no longer had the appearance of being alive.

Several hours before the barricade was attacked, he had assumed an
attitude which he did not afterwards abandon, with both fists planted on
his knees and his head thrust forward as though he were gazing over a
precipice. Nothing had been able to move him from this attitude; it did
not seem as though his mind were in the barricade. When each had gone to
take up his position for the combat, there remained in the tap-room
where Javert was bound to the post, only a single insurgent with a naked
sword, watching over Javert, and himself, Mabeuf. At the moment of the
attack, at the detonation, the physical shock had reached him and had,
as it were, awakened him; he started up abruptly, crossed the room, and
at the instant when Enjolras repeated his appeal: "Does no one
volunteer?" the old man was seen to make his appearance on the threshold
of the wine-shop. His presence produced a sort of commotion in the
different groups. A shout went up:--

"It is the voter! It is the member of the Convention! It is the
representative of the people!"

It is probable that he did not hear them.

He strode straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents withdrawing before him
with a religious fear; he tore the flag from Enjolras, who recoiled in
amazement and then, since no one dared to stop or to assist him, this
old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began slowly to
ascend the staircase of paving-stones arranged in the barricade. This
was so melancholy and so grand that all around him cried: "Off with your
hats!" At every step that he mounted, it was a frightful spectacle; his
white locks, his decrepit face, his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow, his
amazed and open mouth, his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose
through the gloom and were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch,
and the bystanders thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging
from the earth, with the flag of terror in his hand.

When he had reached the last step, when this trembling and terrible
phantom, erect on that pile of rubbish in the presence of twelve hundred
invisible guns, drew himself up in the face of death and as though he
were more powerful than it, the whole barricade assumed amid the
darkness, a supernatural and colossal form.

There ensued one of those silences which occur only in the presence of
prodigies. In the midst of this silence, the old man waved the red flag
and shouted:--

"Long live the Revolution! Long live the Republic! Fraternity! Equality!
and Death!"

Those in the barricade heard a low and rapid whisper, like the murmur of
a priest who is despatching a prayer in haste. It was probably the
commissary of police who was making the legal summons at the other end
of the street.

Then the same piercing voice which had shouted: "Who goes there?"
shouted:--

"Retire!"

M. Mabeuf, pale, haggard, his eyes lighted up with the mournful flame of
aberration, raised the flag above his head and repeated:--

"Long live the Republic!"

"Fire!" said the voice.

A second discharge, similar to the first, rained down upon the
barricade.

The old man fell on his knees, then rose again, dropped the flag and
fell backwards on the pavement, like a log, at full length, with
outstretched arms.

Rivulets of blood flowed beneath him. His aged head, pale and sad,
seemed to be gazing at the sky.

One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make him forget
even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents, and they approached
the body with respectful awe.

"What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras.

Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear:--

"This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. But
this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him. His name was
Father Mabeuf. I do not know what was the matter with him to-day. But he
was a brave blockhead. Just look at his head."

"The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus," replied Enjolras.

Then he raised his voice:--

"Citizens! This is the example which the old give to the young. We
hesitated, he came! We were drawing back, he advanced! This is what
those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble with fear!
This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. He has had a long
life and a magnificent death! Now, let us place the body under cover,
that each one of us may defend this old man dead as he would his father
living, and may his presence in our midst render the barricade
impregnable!"

A murmur of gloomy and energetic assent followed these words.

Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head, and fierce as he was, he
kissed him on the brow, then, throwing wide his arms, and handling this
dead man with tender precaution, as though he feared to hurt it, he
removed his coat, showed the bloody holes in it to all, and said:--

"This is our flag now."



CHAPTER III--GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE

They threw a long black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's over Father Mabeuf.
Six men made a litter of their guns; on this they laid the body, and
bore it, with bared heads, with solemn slowness, to the large table in
the tap-room.

These men, wholly absorbed in the grave and sacred task in which they
were engaged, thought no more of the perilous situation in which they
stood.

When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassive, Enjolras
said to the spy:--

"It will be your turn presently!"

During all this time, Little Gavroche, who alone had not quitted his
post, but had remained on guard, thought he espied some men stealthily
approaching the barricade. All at once he shouted:--

"Look out!"

Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel,
Bossuet, and all the rest ran tumultuously from the wine-shop. It was
almost too late. They saw a glistening density of bayonets undulating
above the barricade. Municipal guards of lofty stature were making their
way in, some striding over the omnibus, others through the cut,
thrusting before them the urchin, who retreated, but did not flee.

The moment was critical. It was that first, redoubtable moment of
inundation, when the stream rises to the level of the levee and when the
water begins to filter through the fissures of dike. A second more and
the barricade would have been taken.

Bahorel dashed upon the first municipal guard who was entering, and
killed him on the spot with a blow from his gun; the second killed
Bahorel with a blow from his bayonet. Another had already overthrown
Courfeyrac, who was shouting: "Follow me!" The largest of all, a sort of
colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet fixed. The urchin took in
his arms Javert's immense gun, levelled it resolutely at the giant, and
fired. No discharge followed. Javert's gun was not loaded. The municipal
guard burst into a laugh and raised his bayonet at the child.

Before the bayonet had touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from the
soldier's grasp, a bullet had struck the municipal guardsman in the
centre of the forehead, and he fell over on his back. A second bullet
struck the other guard, who had assaulted Courfeyrac in the breast, and
laid him low on the pavement.

This was the work of Marius, who had just entered the barricade.



CHAPTER IV--THE BARREL OF POWDER

Marius, still concealed in the turn of the Rue Mondétour, had witnessed,
shuddering and irresolute, the first phase of the combat. But he had not
long been able to resist that mysterious and sovereign vertigo which may
be designated as the call of the abyss. In the presence of the imminence
of the peril, in the presence of the death of M. Mabeuf, that melancholy
enigma, in the presence of Bahorel killed, and Courfeyrac shouting:
"Follow me!" of that child threatened, of his friends to succor or to
avenge, all hesitation had vanished, and he had flung himself into the
conflict, his two pistols in hand. With his first shot he had saved
Gavroche, and with the second delivered Courfeyrac.

Amid the sound of the shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards, the
assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit Municipal
Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from the suburbs could
now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves to more than half the
height of their bodies.

They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they did
not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of some
trap. They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion's
den. The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets, their bear-
skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.

Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged
pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel of
powder in the tap-room, near the door.

As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took aim at
him. At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius, a hand was laid
on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. This was done by some one
who had darted forward,--the young workman in velvet trousers. The shot
sped, traversed the hand and possibly, also, the workman, since he fell,
but the ball did not strike Marius. All this, which was rather to be
apprehended than seen through the smoke, Marius, who was entering the
tap-room, hardly noticed. Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived
that gun-barrel aimed at him, and the hand which had blocked it, and he
had heard the discharge. But in moments like this, the things which one
sees vacillate and are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing. One
feels obscurely impelled towards more darkness still, and all is cloud.

The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied. Enjolras had
shouted: "Wait! Don't fire at random!" In the first confusion, they
might, in fact, wound each other. The majority of them had ascended to
the window on the first story and to the attic windows, whence they
commanded the assailants.

The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and
Combeferre, had proudly placed themselves with their backs against the
houses at the rear, unsheltered and facing the ranks of soldiers and
guards who crowned the barricade.

All this was accomplished without haste, with that strange and
threatening gravity which precedes engagements. They took aim, point
blank, on both sides: they were so close that they could talk together
without raising their voices.

When they had reached this point where the spark is on the brink of
darting forth, an officer in a gorget extended his sword and said:--

"Lay down your arms!"

"Fire!" replied Enjolras.

The two discharges took place at the same moment, and all disappeared in
smoke.

An acrid and stifling smoke in which dying and wounded lay with weak,
dull groans. When the smoke cleared away, the combatants on both sides
could be seen to be thinned out, but still in the same positions,
reloading in silence. All at once, a thundering voice was heard,
shouting:--

"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

All turned in the direction whence the voice proceeded.

Marius had entered the tap-room, and had seized the barrel of powder,
then he had taken advantage of the smoke, and the sort of obscure mist
which filled the entrenched enclosure, to glide along the barricade as
far as that cage of paving-stones where the torch was fixed. To tear it
from the torch, to replace it by the barrel of powder, to thrust the
pile of stones under the barrel, which was instantly staved in, with a
sort of horrible obedience,--all this had cost Marius but the time
necessary to stoop and rise again; and now all, National Guards,
Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, huddled at the other extremity of
the barricade, gazed stupidly at him, as he stood with his foot on the
stones, his torch in his hand, his haughty face illuminated by a fatal
resolution, drooping the flame of the torch towards that redoubtable
pile where they could make out the broken barrel of powder, and giving
vent to that startling cry:--

"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision of the
young revolution after the apparition of the old.

"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself with it!"

Marius retorted: "And myself also."

And he dropped the torch towards the barrel of powder.

But there was no longer any one on the barrier. The assailants,
abandoning their dead and wounded, flowed back pell-mell and in disorder
towards the extremity of the street, and there were again lost in the
night. It was a headlong flight.

The barricade was free.



CHAPTER V--END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE

All flocked around Marius. Courfeyrac flung himself on his neck.

"Here you are!"

"What luck!" said Combeferre.

"You came in opportunely!" ejaculated Bossuet.

"If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!" began Courfeyrac
again.

"If it had not been for you, I should have been gobbled up!" added
Gavroche.

Marius asked:--

"Where is the chief?"

"You are he!" said Enjolras.

Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was a
whirlwind. This whirlwind which was within him, produced on him the
effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. It seemed to him
that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous
months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful precipice,
Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting himself killed
for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,--all these
things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to
make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was
real. Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing
is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always
necessary to foresee is the unforeseen. He had looked on at his own
drama as a piece which one does not understand.

In the mists which enveloped his thoughts, he did not recognize Javert,
who, bound to his post, had not so much as moved his head during the
whole of the attack on the barricade, and who had gazed on the revolt
seething around him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of
a judge. Marius had not even seen him.

In the meanwhile, the assailants did not stir, they could be heard
marching and swarming through at the end of the street but they did not
venture into it, either because they were awaiting orders or because
they were awaiting reinforcements before hurling themselves afresh on
this impregnable redoubt. The insurgents had posted sentinels, and some
of them, who were medical students, set about caring for the wounded.

They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception of
the two tables reserved for lint and cartridges, and of the one on which
lay Father Mabeuf; they had added them to the barricade, and had
replaced them in the tap-room with mattresses from the bed of the widow
Hucheloup and her servants. On these mattresses they had laid the
wounded. As for the three poor creatures who inhabited Corinthe, no one
knew what had become of them. They were finally found, however, hidden
in the cellar.

A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.

The roll was called. One of the insurgents was missing. And who was it?
One of the dearest. One of the most valiant. Jean Prouvaire. He was
sought among the wounded, he was not there. He was sought among the
dead, he was not there. He was evidently a prisoner. Combeferre said to
Enjolras:--

"They have our friend; we have their agent. Are you set on the death of
that spy?"

"Yes," replied Enjolras; "but less so than on the life of Jean
Prouvaire."

This took place in the tap-room near Javert's post.

"Well," resumed Combeferre, "I am going to fasten my handkerchief to my
cane, and go as a flag of truce, to offer to exchange our man for
theirs."

"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.

At the end of the street there was a significant clash of arms.

They heard a manly voice shout:--

"Vive la France! Long live France! Long live the future!"

They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.

A flash passed, a report rang out.

Silence fell again.

"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.

Enjolras glanced at Javert, and said to him:--

"Your friends have just shot you."



CHAPTER VI--THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE

A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the
barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants
generally abstain from turning the position, either because they fear
ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the
tortuous streets. The insurgents' whole attention had been directed,
therefore, to the grand barricade, which was, evidently, the spot always
menaced, and there the struggle would infallibly recommence. But Marius
thought of the little barricade, and went thither. It was deserted and
guarded only by the fire-pot which trembled between the paving-stones.
Moreover, the Mondétour alley, and the branches of the Rue de la Petite
Truanderie and the Rue du Cygne were profoundly calm.

As Marius was withdrawing, after concluding his inspection, he heard his
name pronounced feebly in the darkness.

"Monsieur Marius!"

He started, for he recognized the voice which had called to him two
hours before through the gate in the Rue Plumet.

Only, the voice now seemed to be nothing more than a breath.

He looked about him, but saw no one.

Marius thought he had been mistaken, that it was an illusion added by
his mind to the extraordinary realities which were clashing around him.
He advanced a step, in order to quit the distant recess where the
barricade lay.

"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.

This time he could not doubt that he had heard it distinctly; he looked
and saw nothing.

"At your feet," said the voice.

He bent down, and saw in the darkness a form which was dragging itself
towards him.

It was crawling along the pavement. It was this that had spoken to him.

The fire-pot allowed him to distinguish a blouse, torn trousers of
coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool of blood.
Marius indistinctly made out a pale head which was lifted towards him
and which was saying to him:--

"You do not recognize me?"

"No."

"Éponine."

Marius bent hastily down. It was, in fact, that unhappy child. She was
dressed in men's clothes.

"How come you here? What are you doing here?"

"I am dying," said she.

There are words and incidents which arouse dejected beings. Marius cried
out with a start:--

"You are wounded! Wait, I will carry you into the room! They will attend
to you there. Is it serious? How must I take hold of you in order not to
hurt you? Where do you suffer? Help! My God! But why did you come
hither?"

And he tried to pass his arm under her, in order to raise her.

She uttered a feeble cry.

"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.

"A little."

"But I only touched your hand."

She raised her hand to Marius, and in the middle of that hand Marius saw
a black hole.

"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.

"It is pierced."

"Pierced?"

"Yes."

"What with?"

"A bullet."

"How?"

"Did you see a gun aimed at you?"

"Yes, and a hand stopping it."

"It was mine."

Marius was seized with a shudder.

"What madness! Poor child! But so much the better, if that is all, it is
nothing, let me carry you to a bed. They will dress your wound; one does
not die of a pierced hand."

She murmured:--

"The bullet traversed my hand, but it came out through my back. It is
useless to remove me from this spot. I will tell you how you can care
for me better than any surgeon. Sit down near me on this stone."

He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and, without looking at
him, she said:--

"Oh! How good this is! How comfortable this is! There; I no longer
suffer."

She remained silent for a moment, then she turned her face with an
effort, and looked at Marius.

"Do you know what, Monsieur Marius? It puzzled me because you entered
that garden; it was stupid, because it was I who showed you that house;
and then, I ought to have said to myself that a young man like you--"

She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly
existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:--

"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"

She continued:--

"You see, you are lost! Now, no one can get out of the barricade. It was
I who led you here, by the way! You are going to die, I count upon that.
And yet, when I saw them taking aim at you, I put my hand on the muzzle
of the gun. How queer it is! But it was because I wanted to die before
you. When I received that bullet, I dragged myself here, no one saw me,
no one picked me up, I was waiting for you, I said: 'So he is not
coming!' Oh, if you only knew. I bit my blouse, I suffered so! Now I am
well. Do you remember the day I entered your chamber and when I looked
at myself in your mirror, and the day when I came to you on the
boulevard near the washerwomen? How the birds sang! That was a long time
ago. You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: 'I don't want your
money.' I hope you picked up your coin? You are not rich. I did not
think to tell you to pick it up. The sun was shining bright, and it was
not cold. Do you remember, Monsieur Marius? Oh! How happy I am! Every
one is going to die."

She had a mad, grave, and heart-breaking air. Her torn blouse disclosed
her bare throat.

As she talked, she pressed her pierced hand to her breast, where there
was another hole, and whence there spurted from moment to moment a
stream of blood, like a jet of wine from an open bung-hole.

Marius gazed at this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.

"Oh!" she resumed, "it is coming again, I am stifling!"

She caught up her blouse and bit it, and her limbs stiffened on the
pavement.

At that moment the young cock's crow executed by little Gavroche
resounded through the barricade.

The child had mounted a table to load his gun, and was singing gayly the
song then so popular:--


"En voyant Lafayette,             "On beholding Lafayette, Le gendarme
répète:--             The gendarme repeats:--Sauvons nous! sauvons nous!
Let us flee! let us flee! sauvons nous!"                     let us
flee!

Éponine raised herself and listened; then she murmured:--

"It is he."

And turning to Marius:--

"My brother is here. He must not see me. He would scold me."

"Your brother?" inquired Marius, who was meditating in the most bitter
and sorrowful depths of his heart on the duties to the Thénardiers which
his father had bequeathed to him; "who is your brother?"

"That little fellow."

"The one who is singing?"

"Yes."

Marius made a movement.

"Oh! don't go away," said she, "it will not be long now."

She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken by
hiccoughs.

At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her. She put her face as near
that of Marius as possible. She added with a strange expression:--

"Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick. I have a letter in my pocket
for you. I was told to put it in the post. I kept it. I did not want to
have it reach you. But perhaps you will be angry with me for it when we
meet again presently? Take your letter."

She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her pierced hand, but she no
longer seemed to feel her sufferings. She put Marius' hand in the pocket
of her blouse. There, in fact, Marius felt a paper.

"Take it," said she.

Marius took the letter.

She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.

"Now, for my trouble, promise me--"

And she stopped.

"What?" asked Marius.

"Promise me!"

"I promise."

"Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it."

She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He
thought the poor soul had departed. Éponine remained motionless. All at
once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she
slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death,
and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from
another world:--

"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in
love with you."

She tried to smile once more and expired.



CHAPTER VII--GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES

Marius kept his promise. He dropped a kiss on that livid brow, where the
icy perspiration stood in beads.

This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive farewell
to an unhappy soul.

It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter which Éponine
had given him. He had immediately felt that it was an event of weight.
He was impatient to read it. The heart of man is so constituted that the
unhappy child had hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think of
unfolding this paper.

He laid her gently on the ground, and went away. Something told him that
he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.

He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note, folded
and sealed with a woman's elegant care. The address was in a woman's
hand and ran:--

"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue de la
Verrerie, No. 16."

He broke the seal and read:--


"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We
shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7. In a week we
shall be in England.  COSETTE.  June 4th."

Such was the innocence of their love that Marius was not even acquainted
with Cosette's handwriting.

What had taken place may be related in a few words. Éponine had been the
cause of everything. After the evening of the 3d of June she had
cherished a double idea, to defeat the projects of her father and the
ruffians on the house of the Rue Plumet, and to separate Marius and
Cosette. She had exchanged rags with the first young scamp she came
across who had thought it amusing to dress like a woman, while Éponine
disguised herself like a man. It was she who had conveyed to Jean
Valjean in the Champ de Mars the expressive warning: "Leave your house."
Jean Valjean had, in fact, returned home, and had said to Cosette: "We
set out this evening and we go to the Rue de l'Homme Armé with
Toussaint. Next week, we shall be in London." Cosette, utterly
overwhelmed by this unexpected blow, had hastily penned a couple of
lines to Marius. But how was she to get the letter to the post? She
never went out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such a commission,
would certainly show the letter to M. Fauchelevent. In this dilemma,
Cosette had caught sight through the fence of Éponine in man's clothes,
who now prowled incessantly around the garden. Cosette had called to
"this young workman" and had handed him five francs and the letter,
saying: "Carry this letter immediately to its address." Éponine had put
the letter in her pocket. The next day, on the 5th of June, she went to
Courfeyrac's quarters to inquire for Marius, not for the purpose of
delivering the letter, but,--a thing which every jealous and loving soul
will comprehend,--"to see." There she had waited for Marius, or at least
for Courfeyrac, still for the purpose of _seeing_. When Courfeyrac had
told her: "We are going to the barricades," an idea flashed through her
mind, to fling herself into that death, as she would have done into any
other, and to thrust Marius into it also. She had followed Courfeyrac,
had made sure of the locality where the barricade was in process of
construction; and, quite certain, since Marius had received no warning,
and since she had intercepted the letter, that he would go at dusk to
his trysting place for every evening, she had betaken herself to the Rue
Plumet, had there awaited Marius, and had sent him, in the name of his
friends, the appeal which would, she thought, lead him to the barricade.
She reckoned on Marius' despair when he should fail to find Cosette; she
was not mistaken. She had returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie herself.
What she did there the reader has just seen. She died with the tragic
joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death,
and who say: "No one shall have him!"

Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses. So she loved him! For one
moment the idea occurred to him that he ought not to die now. Then he
said to himself: "She is going away. Her father is taking her to
England, and my grandfather refuses his consent to the marriage. Nothing
is changed in our fates." Dreamers like Marius are subject to supreme
attacks of dejection, and desperate resolves are the result. The fatigue
of living is insupportable; death is sooner over with. Then he reflected
that he had still two duties to fulfil: to inform Cosette of his death
and send her a final farewell, and to save from the impending
catastrophe which was in preparation, that poor child, Éponine's brother
and Thénardier's son.

He had a pocket-book about him; the same one which had contained the
note-book in which he had inscribed so many thoughts of love for
Cosette. He tore out a leaf and wrote on it a few lines in pencil:--

"Our marriage was impossible. I asked my grandfather, he refused; I have
no fortune, neither hast thou. I hastened to thee, thou wert no longer
there. Thou knowest the promise that I gave thee, I shall keep it. I
die. I love thee. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee, and
thou wilt smile."

Having nothing wherewith to seal this letter, he contented himself with
folding the paper in four, and added the address:--

"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de
l'Homme Armé, No. 7."

Having folded the letter, he stood in thought for a moment, drew out his
pocket-book again, opened it, and wrote, with the same pencil, these
four lines on the first page:--

"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

He put his pocketbook back in his pocket, then he called Gavroche.

The gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up to him with his merry
and devoted air.

"Will you do something for me?"

"Anything," said Gavroche. "Good God! if it had not been for you, I
should have been done for."

"Do you see this letter?"

"Yes."

"Take it. Leave the barricade instantly" (Gavroche began to scratch his
ear uneasily) "and to-morrow morning, you will deliver it at its address
to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme Armé, No.
7."

The heroic child replied

"Well, but! in the meanwhile the barricade will be taken, and I shall
not be there."

"The barricade will not be attacked until daybreak, according to all
appearances, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."

The fresh respite which the assailants were granting to the barricade
had, in fact, been prolonged. It was one of those intermissions which
frequently occur in nocturnal combats, which are always followed by an
increase of rage.

"Well," said Gavroche, "what if I were to go and carry your letter to-
morrow?"

"It will be too late. The barricade will probably be blockaded, all the
streets will be guarded, and you will not be able to get out. Go at
once."

Gavroche could think of no reply to this, and stood there in indecision,
scratching his ear sadly.

All at once, he took the letter with one of those birdlike movements
which were common with him.

"All right," said he.

And he started off at a run through Mondétour lane.

An idea had occurred to Gavroche which had brought him to a decision,
but he had not mentioned it for fear that Marius might offer some
objection to it.

This was the idea:--

"It is barely midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Armé is not far off; I will
go and deliver the letter at once, and I shall get back in time."



BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARMÉ



CHAPTER I--A DRINKER IS A BABBLER

What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections
of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean
at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of
gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris, on
the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours had
sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his conscience had
suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also, as well as of Paris, it
might have been said: "Two principles are face to face. The white angel
and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the
abyss. Which of the two will hurl the other over? Who will carry the
day?"

On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean,
accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue de
l'Homme Armé. A change awaited him there.

Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort at
resistance. For the first time since they had lived side by side,
Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct,
and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed. There had
been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. The abrupt
advice: "Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by a stranger, had
alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory. He thought that
he had been traced and followed. Cosette had been obliged to give way.

Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Armé without opening their lips,
and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal
preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's
sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's
uneasiness.

Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had never
done in his previous absences. He perceived the possibility of not
returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind
nor confide his secret to her. Besides, he felt that she was devoted and
trustworthy. Treachery between master and servant begins in curiosity.
Now Toussaint, as though she had been destined to be Jean Valjean's
servant, was not curious. She stammered in her peasant dialect of
Barneville: "I am made so; I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."

In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost a flight,
Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little embalmed valise,
baptized by Cosette "the inseparable." Full trunks would have required
porters, and porters are witnesses. A fiacre had been summoned to the
door on the Rue de Babylone, and they had taken their departure.

It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to pack up
a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles. Cosette had taken
only her portfolio and her blotting-book.

Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery of
this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet only
at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius.
They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Armé after night had fully
fallen.

They had gone to bed in silence.

The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Armé were situated on a back court,
on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a dining-
room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret where there
was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share. The dining-room
was an antechamber as well, and separated the two bedrooms. The
apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.

People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature
is so constituted. Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme
Armé when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. There are
soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on the mind. An
obscure street, peaceable inhabitants. Jean Valjean experienced an
indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley of ancient Paris,
which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages by a transverse
beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb in the midst of the
clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is, so to speak, incapable
of emotions between two rows of lofty houses centuries old, which hold
their peace like ancients as they are. There was a touch of stagnant
oblivion in that street. Jean Valjean drew his breath once more there.
How could he be found there?

His first care was to place _the inseparable_ beside him.

He slept well. Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes. On the
following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay. He thought the
dining-room charming, though it was hideous, furnished with an old round
table, a long sideboard surmounted by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated
arm-chair, and several plain chairs which were encumbered with
Toussaint's packages. In one of these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of
a National Guard was visible through a rent.

As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room, and
did not make her appearance until evening.

About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying
herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken,
which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.

That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache, had
bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber.
Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite, and
with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered his serenity,
had regained possession of his sense of security.

While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice,
noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said to
him: "Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting in
Paris." But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations, he had paid no
heed to it. To tell the truth, he had not heard her. He rose and began
to pace from the door to the window and from the window to the door,
growing ever more serene.

With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts. Not
that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis, a young
girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be nothing left
of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future, and, as was his
habit, he thought of it with pleasure. After all, he saw no obstacle to
their happy life resuming its course. At certain hours, everything seems
impossible, at others everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the
midst of one of these good hours. They generally succeed the bad ones,
as day follows night, by virtue of that law of succession and of
contrast which lies at the very foundation of nature, and which
superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had
taken refuge, Jean Valjean got rid of all that had been troubling him
for some time past. This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made
him begin to perceive a little azure. To have quitted the Rue Plumet
without complications or incidents was one good step already
accomplished. Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few
months, and to set out for London. Well, they would go. What difference
did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he
had Cosette beside him? Cosette was his nation. Cosette sufficed for his
happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette's
happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever and
sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. He was in a
state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he was fully entered
on optimism. Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical
illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind,
with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with
Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased,
in the perspective of his revery.

As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly
encountered something strange.

In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard, he saw
the four lines which follow:--

"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We
shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7. In a week we
shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."

Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.

Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard in
front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief, had
forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she had left
it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she had laid to
dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she had given in
charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. The writing had been
printed off on the blotter.

The mirror reflected the writing.

The result was, what is called in geometry, _the symmetrical image_; so
that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the mirror and
presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean had beneath his eyes
the letter written by Cosette to Marius on the preceding evening.

It was simple and withering.

Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror. He read the four lines again, but
he did not believe them. They produced on him the effect of appearing in
a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination, it was impossible. It was
not so.

Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked at
Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality returned
to him. He caught up the blotter and said: "It comes from there." He
feverishly examined the four lines imprinted on the blotter, the
reversal of the letters converted into an odd scrawl, and he saw no
sense in it. Then he said to himself: "But this signifies nothing; there
is nothing written here." And he drew a long breath with inexpressible
relief. Who has not experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?
The soul does not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all
illusions.

He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight,
almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the
dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he
beheld the vision. There were the four lines outlined with inexorable
clearness. This time it was no mirage. The recurrence of a vision is a
reality; it was palpable, it was the writing restored in the mirror. He
understood.

Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old arm-
chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes, in utter
bewilderment. He told himself that it was plain, that the light of the
world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette had written that to
some one. Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible once more,
give vent to a dull roar in the gloom. Try then the effect of taking
from the lion the dog which he has in his cage!

Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet received
Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it to Jean Valjean
before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not
been vanquished by trial. He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no
violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed
with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey
and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had
been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man,
had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered
everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a
point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a
martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have
appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld his
spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at
that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone
in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him,
this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.
He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt
the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say
rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.

Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as a
father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he
loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he
loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to love
or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that
sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the rest,
vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,
celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct,
less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real
attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness
for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and
virgin.

Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already
indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of
souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the
exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood,
Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of
that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other
had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or
dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter
and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more
than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum
total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to
Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the
brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom
there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored
her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his
country, his paradise.

Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping
from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding
from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this
crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish
of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her
father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he said
to himself: "She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt
surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done
for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing!
Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from head
to foot. He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense
reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.

There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A
despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting
aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are
the very man himself. Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong
flight of all the forces of the conscience. These are fatal crises. Few
among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty. When
the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is
disconcerted. Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself
afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes,
over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such a
cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was
crumbling away.

He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery, with
an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a
man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.

He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his
having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding
summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was
still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at
the bottom of it.

The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,
while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.

His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,
certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,
and he said to himself: "It is he."

The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses
its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the
name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived, in the
background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown
prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that
idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come
and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves
them.

After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at the
bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that
quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so
labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve
all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own
breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.

Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one with
existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within him
withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on
they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is
hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like the
flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full
thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats
which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all
women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before
one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when the
years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one
begins to behold the stars of the tomb?

While he was meditating, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean rose and asked
her:--

"In what quarter is it? Do you know?"

Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--

"What is it, sir?"

Jean Valjean began again: "Did you not tell me that just now that there
is fighting going on?"

"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint. "It is in the direction of Saint-
Merry."

There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from
the most profound depths of our thought. It was, no doubt, under the
impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly
conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the
street.

Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. He
seemed to be listening.

Night had come.



CHAPTER II--THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT

How long did he remain thus? What was the ebb and flow of this tragic
meditation? Did he straighten up? Did he remain bowed? Had he been bent
to breaking? Could he still rise and regain his footing in his
conscience upon something solid? He probably would not have been able to
tell himself.

The street was deserted. A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly
returning home, hardly saw him. Each one for himself in times of peril.
The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated
precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away. Jean Valjean
would not have appeared like a living man to any one who had examined
him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as
a form of ice. There is congealment in despair. The alarm bells and a
vague and stormy uproar were audible. In the midst of all these
convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul
struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man; the
hour is God. The passage of the hour produced no effect on Jean Valjean;
Jean Valjean did not stir. Still, at about that moment, a brusque report
burst forth in the direction of the Halles, a second yet more violent
followed; it was probably that attack on the barricade in the Rue de la
Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius. At this double
discharge, whose fury seemed augmented by the stupor of the night, Jean
Valjean started; he rose, turning towards the quarter whence the noise
proceeded; then he fell back upon the post again, folded his arms, and
his head slowly sank on his bosom again.

He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.

All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street, he
heard steps near him. He looked, and by the light of the lanterns, in
the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives, he
perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.

Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Armé.

Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something. He
saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.

Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself on
tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor; they were
all shut, bolted, and padlocked. After having authenticated the fronts
of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin shrugged his
shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:--

"Pardi!"

Then he began to stare into the air again.

Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind,
would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly
impelled to accost that child.

"What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" he said.

"The matter with me is that I am hungry," replied Gavroche frankly. And
he added: "Little fellow yourself."

Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.

But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped
vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He
had caught sight of the lantern.

"See here," said he, "you still have your lanterns here. You are
disobeying the regulations, my friend. This is disorderly. Smash that
for me."

And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with such
a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains in the
opposite house cried: "There is 'Ninety-three' come again."

The lantern oscillated violently, and went out. The street had suddenly
become black.

"That's right, old street," ejaculated Gavroche, "put on your night-
cap."

And turning to Jean Valjean:--

"What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the end
of the street? It's the Archives, isn't it? I must crumble up those big
stupids of pillars a bit and make a nice barricade out of them."

Jean Valjean stepped up to Gavroche.

"Poor creature," he said in a low tone, and speaking to himself, "he is
hungry."

And he laid the hundred-sou piece in his hand.

Gavroche raised his face, astonished at the size of this sou; he stared
at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou dazzled him. He
knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation was agreeable to
him; he was delighted to see one close to. He said:--

"Let us contemplate the tiger."

He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean
Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically to him:--

"Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns. Take back your ferocious beast.
You can't bribe me. That has got five claws; but it doesn't scratch me."

"Have you a mother?" asked Jean Valjean.

Gavroche replied:--

"More than you have, perhaps."

"Well," returned Jean Valjean, "keep the money for your mother!"

Gavroche was touched. Moreover, he had just noticed that the man who was
addressing him had no hat, and this inspired him with confidence.

"Truly," said he, "so it wasn't to keep me from breaking the lanterns?"

"Break whatever you please."

"You're a fine man," said Gavroche.

And he put the five-franc piece into one of his pockets.

His confidence having increased, he added:--

"Do you belong in this street?"

"Yes, why?"

"Can you tell me where No. 7 is?"

"What do you want with No. 7?"

Here the child paused, he feared that he had said too much; he thrust
his nails energetically into his hair and contented himself with
replying:--

"Ah! Here it is."

An idea flashed through Jean Valjean's mind. Anguish does have these
gleams. He said to the lad:--

"Are you the person who is bringing a letter that I am expecting?"

"You?" said Gavroche. "You are not a woman."

"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"

"Cosette," muttered Gavroche. "Yes, I believe that is the queer name."

"Well," resumed Jean Valjean, "I am the person to whom you are to
deliver the letter. Give it here."

"In that case, you must know that I was sent from the barricade."

"Of course," said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche engulfed his hand in another of his pockets and drew out a
paper folded in four.

Then he made the military salute.

"Respect for despatches," said he. "It comes from the Provisional
Government."

"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche held the paper elevated above his head.

"Don't go and fancy it's a love letter. It is for a woman, but it's for
the people. We men fight and we respect the fair sex. We are not as they
are in fine society, where there are lions who send chickens55 to
camels."

"Give it to me."

"After all," continued Gavroche, "you have the air of an honest man."

"Give it to me quick."

"Catch hold of it."

And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.

"And make haste, Monsieur What's-your-name, for Mamselle Cosette is
waiting."

Gavroche was satisfied with himself for having produced this remark.

Jean Valjean began again:--

"Is it to Saint-Merry that the answer is to be sent?"

"There you are making some of those bits of pastry vulgarly called
_brioches_ [blunders]. This letter comes from the barricade of the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, and I'm going back there. Good evening, citizen."

That said, Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly,
fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight like
that of an escaped bird. He plunged back into the gloom as though he
made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of
l'Homme Armé became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that
strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the
dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows of black houses, and
was lost there, like smoke in the dark; and one might have thought that
he had dissipated and vanished, had there not taken place, a few minutes
after his disappearance, a startling shiver of glass, and had not the
magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement once more
abruptly awakened the indignant bourgeois. It was Gavroche upon his way
through the Rue du Chaume.



CHAPTER III--WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP

Jean Valjean went into the house with Marius' letter.

He groped his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness as an owl
who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly, listened to see
whether he could hear any noise,--made sure that, to all appearances,
Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged three or four matches
into the bottle of the Fumade lighter before he could evoke a spark, so
greatly did his hand tremble. What he had just done smacked of theft. At
last the candle was lighted; he leaned his elbows on the table, unfolded
the paper, and read.

In violent emotions, one does not read, one flings to the earth, so to
speak, the paper which one holds, one clutches it like a victim, one
crushes it, one digs into it the nails of one's wrath, or of one's joy;
one hastens to the end, one leaps to the beginning; attention is at
fever heat; it takes up in the gross, as it were, the essential points;
it seizes on one point, and the rest disappears. In Marius' note to
Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words:--

"I die. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee."

In the presence of these two lines, he was horribly dazzled; he remained
for a moment, crushed, as it were, by the change of emotion which was
taking place within him, he stared at Marius' note with a sort of
intoxicated amazement, he had before his eyes that splendor, the death
of a hated individual.

He uttered a frightful cry of inward joy. So it was all over. The
catastrophe had arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. The being who
obstructed his destiny was disappearing. That man had taken himself off
of his own accord, freely, willingly. This man was going to his death,
and he, Jean Valjean, had had no hand in the matter, and it was through
no fault of his. Perhaps, even, he is already dead. Here his fever
entered into calculations. No, he is not dead yet. The letter had
evidently been intended for Cosette to read on the following morning;
after the two discharges that were heard between eleven o'clock and
midnight, nothing more has taken place; the barricade will not be
attacked seriously until daybreak; but that makes no difference, from
the moment when "that man" is concerned in this war, he is lost; he is
caught in the gearing. Jean Valjean felt himself delivered. So he was
about to find himself alone with Cosette once more. The rivalry would
cease; the future was beginning again. He had but to keep this note in
his pocket. Cosette would never know what had become of that man. All
that there requires to be done is to let things take their own course.
This man cannot escape. If he is not already dead, it is certain that he
is about to die. What good fortune!

Having said all this to himself, he became gloomy.

Then he went down stairs and woke up the porter.

About an hour later, Jean Valjean went out in the complete costume of a
National Guard, and with his arms. The porter had easily found in the
neighborhood the wherewithal to complete his equipment. He had a loaded
gun and a cartridge-box filled with cartridges.

He strode off in the direction of the markets.



CHAPTER IV--GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL

In the meantime, Gavroche had had an adventure.

Gavroche, after having conscientiously stoned the lantern in the Rue du
Chaume, entered the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, and not seeing "even a
cat" there, he thought the opportunity a good one to strike up all the
song of which he was capable. His march, far from being retarded by his
singing, was accelerated by it. He began to sow along the sleeping or
terrified houses these incendiary couplets:--


"L'oiseau médit dans les charmilles, Et prétend qu'hier Atala Avec un
Russe s'en alla. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles, Parce que l'autre jour Mila Cogna sa
vitre et m'appela, Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Les drôlesses sont fort gentilles, Leur poison qui m'ensorcela
Griserait Monsieur Orfila. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"J'aime l'amour et les bisbilles, J'aime Agnès, j'aime Paméla, Lise en
m'allumant se brûla. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles De Suzette et de Zéila, Mon âme à
leurs plis se mêla, Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Amour, quand dans l'ombre où tu brilles, Tu coiffes de roses Lola, Je
me damnerais pour cela. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Jeanne à ton miroir tu t'habilles! Mon cour un beau jour s'envola. Je
crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles, Je montre aux étoiles Stella, Et je
leur dis: 'Regardez-la.' Où vont les belles filles, Lon la."<a
href="#linknote-56" name="linknoteref-56" id="linknoteref-56">56</a>

Gavroche, as he sang, was lavish of his pantomime. Gesture is the strong
point of the refrain. His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks,
produced grimaces more convulsing and more fantastic than the rents of a
cloth torn in a high gale. Unfortunately, as he was alone, and as it was
night, this was neither seen nor even visible. Such wastes of riches do
occur.

All at once, he stopped short.

"Let us interrupt the romance," said he.

His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door, what
is called in painting, an _ensemble_, that is to say, a person and a
thing; the thing was a hand-cart, the person was a man from Auvergene
who was sleeping therein.

The shafts of the cart rested on the pavement, and the Auvergnat's head
was supported against the front of the cart. His body was coiled up on
this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.

Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, recognized a
drunken man. He was some corner errand-man who had drunk too much and
was sleeping too much.

"There now," thought Gavroche, "that's what the summer nights are good
for. We'll take the cart for the Republic, and leave the Auvergnat for
the Monarchy."

His mind had just been illuminated by this flash of light:--

"How bully that cart would look on our barricade!"

The Auvergnat was snoring.

Gavroche gently tugged at the cart from behind, and at the Auvergnat
from the front, that is to say, by the feet, and at the expiration of
another minute the imperturbable Auvergnat was reposing flat on the
pavement.

The cart was free.

Gavroche, habituated to facing the unexpected in all quarters, had
everything about him. He fumbled in one of his pockets, and pulled from
it a scrap of paper and a bit of red pencil filched from some carpenter.

He wrote:--


_"French Republic."_

"Received thy cart."

And he signed it:  "GAVROCHE."

That done, he put the paper in the pocket of the still snoring
Auvergnat's velvet vest, seized the cart shafts in both hands, and set
off in the direction of the Halles, pushing the cart before him at a
hard gallop with a glorious and triumphant uproar.

This was perilous. There was a post at the Royal Printing Establishment.
Gavroche did not think of this. This post was occupied by the National
Guards of the suburbs. The squad began to wake up, and heads were raised
from camp beds. Two street lanterns broken in succession, that ditty
sung at the top of the lungs. This was a great deal for those cowardly
streets, which desire to go to sleep at sunset, and which put the
extinguisher on their candles at such an early hour. For the last hour,
that boy had been creating an uproar in that peaceable arrondissement,
the uproar of a fly in a bottle. The sergeant of the banlieue lent an
ear. He waited. He was a prudent man.

The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible measure
of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.

"There's a whole band of them there!" said he, "let us proceed gently."

It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box and that
it was stalking abroad through the quarter.

And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.

All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him, and at the very
moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes,
found himself face to face with a uniform, a shako, a plume, and a gun.

For the second time, he stopped short.

"Hullo," said he, "it's him. Good day, public order."

Gavroche's amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.

"Where are you going, you rascal?" shouted the sergeant.

"Citizen," retorted Gavroche, "I haven't called you 'bourgeois' yet. Why
do you insult me?"

"Where are you going, you rogue?"

"Monsieur," retorted Gavroche, "perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday,
but you have degenerated this morning."

"I ask you where are you going, you villain?"

Gavroche replied:--

"You speak prettily. Really, no one would suppose you as old as you are.
You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would
yield you five hundred francs."

"Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going, bandit?"

Gavroche retorted again:--

"What villainous words! You must wipe your mouth better the first time
that they give you suck."

The sergeant lowered his bayonet.

"Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?"

"General," said Gavroche "I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife
who is in labor."

"To arms!" shouted the sergeant.

The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves by the
very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole situation
at a glance. It was the cart which had told against him, it was the
cart's place to protect him.

At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent
on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched with all
the latter's might, rolled down upon him furiously, and the sergeant,
struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards into the gutter while
his gun went off in the air.

The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant's shout;
the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they
reloaded their weapons and began again.

This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and
killed several panes of glass.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed,
halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting, on the
stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.

He listened.

After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the
fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level with his nose and
thrust it forward three times, as he slapped the back of his head with
his right hand; an imperious gesture in which Parisian street-urchindom
has condensed French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it
has already lasted half a century.

This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.

"Yes," said he, "I'm splitting with laughter, I'm twisting with delight,
I abound in joy, but I'm losing my way, I shall have to take a
roundabout way. If I only reach the barricade in season!"

Thereupon he set out again on a run.

And as he ran:--

"Ah, by the way, where was I?" said he.

And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets, and
this is what died away in the gloom:--


"Mais il reste encore des bastilles, Et je vais mettre le holà Dans
l'ordre public que voilà. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles? Tout l'ancien monde s'écroula
Quand la grosse boule roula. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Vieux bon peuple, à coups de béquilles, Cassons ce Louvre où s'étala La
monarchie en falbala. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la.

"Nous en avons forcé les grilles, Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour-là, Tenait
mal et se décolla. Où vont les belles filles, Lon la."<a
href="#linknote-57" name="linknoteref-57" id="linknoteref-57">57</a>

The post's recourse to arms was not without result. The cart was
conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner. The first was put in the
pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed before the councils of
war as an accomplice. The public ministry of the day proved its
indefatigable zeal in the defence of society, in this instance.

Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters
of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly
bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The
nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."

[THE END OF VOLUME IV. "SAINT DENIS"]



VOLUME V--JEAN VALJEAN

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BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS



CHAPTER I--THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE

The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies
can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work is
laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different
aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at the time
of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets
that history has ever beheld.

It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to
liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,
even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its
anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of
its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that
great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the
populace wages battle against, the people.

Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.

These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of night
even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those words
which are intended to be insults--beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,
populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the
fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
fault of the disinherited.

For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and
without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they
correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. Athens
was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace
saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.

There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
of the lower classes.

It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of
all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable
people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this
mysterious saying: _"Fex urbis, lex orbis,"_--the dregs of the city, the
law of the earth.

The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences
contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its
life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular _coups
d'état_ and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,
and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how
excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he
venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments
when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something
which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding
further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though
satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a
pain at the heart.

June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the
words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes a
question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy
anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and
this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,
at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.

Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,
then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a moment on the
two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which
characterized this insurrection.

One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these
two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath the
brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg,
that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged, cut
up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles
that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there,
powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the
formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades
were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets behind
this principal barricade. At the very sight of it, one felt the
agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that
point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what was
that barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished
expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others. It wore
the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred, ruin. It might be
asked: Who built this? It might also be said: Who destroyed this? It was
the improvisation of the ebullition. Hold! take this door! this grating!
this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked
pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn,
ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of
stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane,
the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the
malediction. It was grand and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied on
the public place by hubbub. The mass beside the atom; the strip of
ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of every
sort of rubbish. Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his
potsherd. Terrible, in short. It was the acropolis of the barefooted.
Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was
spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a
scar on that tumultuous façade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force,
to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of
savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their
terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what
horses of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt,
figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89,
the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the
11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation
deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very
spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is
thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this
shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought one beheld hubbub
petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though
there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress.
Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo
seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was
something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in
that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the
rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,
window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the
cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very
refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and
nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,
rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the
broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling headsman's
blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having the
form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,
amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old
tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine converted
everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the
head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm;
the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some
blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the
casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of the
brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an
inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it
was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming
heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of
sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag
flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of
drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving
were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the back of an
electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The
spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled
that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange
majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of
filth and it was Sinai.

As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the revolution--
what? The revolution. It--that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder,
terror, misunderstanding, the unknown--had facing it the Constituent
Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation,
the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the
Marseillaise.

Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.

The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance. The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the
faubourg. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the
strategy of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns, its
excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and
grinned beneath the smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the
bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;
what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to
the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of
redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its
enormous size.

A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which
debouches on the boulevard near the Château-d'Eau, if one thrust one's
head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne shop,
one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which
mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the rise, a
strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts, a sort of
hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as
though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order
to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of paving-stones. It was
straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid
out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case
of certain Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture.
The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. From distance
to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible
loopholes which resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated
from each other by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the
eye could reach. All windows and doors were closed. In the background
rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a
motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible;
not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.

The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.

It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.

As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was
impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this
mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated,
rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Science and gloom met there. One
felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
One looked at it and spoke low.

From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the
people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle
was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he escaped the
bullet, sometimes a biscaïen was seen to ensconce itself in some closed
shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in the
plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade had made themselves two
small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at
one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless powder.
Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of
blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came
in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cochères were
encumbered with wounded.

One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one
understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.

Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms at
the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking
column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal redoubt, this
immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some crawled flat on
their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care
that their shakos did not project beyond it.

The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a shudder.--
"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. "Not one paving-stone
projects beyond its neighbor. It is made of porcelain."--At that moment,
a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.

"The cowards!" people said. "Let them show themselves. Let us see them!
They dare not! They are hiding!"

The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they
did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they came
over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards
thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the
leader, Barthélemy, of whom we shall speak presently.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade of
the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts was
the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a
maw; the other a mask.

Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was composed
of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the
dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.

These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one,
Cournet, the other, Barthélemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine
barricade; Barthélemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image of
the man who had built it.

Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.
Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the
most formidable of combatants. War, strife, conflict, were the very air
he breathed and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer in the
navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he sprang
from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried the
hurricane on into battle. With the exception of the genius, there was in
Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the divinity,
there was in Danton something of Hercules.

Barthélemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street
urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for
him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came
out and made this barricade.

Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthélemy
slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught in
the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion plays
a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating
circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthélemy
was hanged. The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to
material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being who
possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began in
France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.
Barthélemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.



CHAPTER II--WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE

Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection, and
June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. So the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline, and an embryo
compared to the two colossal barricades which we have just sketched; but
it was formidable for that epoch.

The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
after anything, had made good use of the night. The barricade had been
not only repaired, but augmented. They had raised it two feet. Bars of
iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. All sorts of
rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated the external
confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly made over, into a wall on the
inside and a thicket on the outside.

The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it like the
wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.

The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered, the
kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded
completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had been
gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped, the
fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned, the
rubbish swept up, corpses removed.

They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondétour lane, of which they were
still the masters. The pavement was red for a long time at that spot.
Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of the suburbs.
Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.

Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a
command. Still, only three or four took advantage of it.

Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this inscription on the
wall which faced the tavern:--


LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!

These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a nail, could be
still read on the wall in 1848.

The three women had profited by the respite of the night to vanish
definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe more freely.

They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring house.

The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished, to fight still.
On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen, which had
been converted into an ambulance, there were five men gravely wounded,
two of whom were municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were
attended to first.

In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth and
Javert bound to his post.

"This is the hall of the dead," said Enjolras.

In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end, the
mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of
vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf lying prone.

The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the fusillade, was
still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening the flag to it.

Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always doing what
he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody coat of the
old man's.

No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty
men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of the
wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there. At a
given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of _la
Méduse_. They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then
reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in
the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents who
demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying: "Something to eat!"
with: "Why? It is three o'clock; at four we shall be dead."

As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. He
interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.

They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed.
Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came up again
said:--"It's the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as a
grocer."--"It must be real wine," observed Bossuet. "It's lucky that
Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of
difficulty in saving those bottles."--Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs,
placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might
touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf
was lying.

About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength. There
were still thirty-seven of them.

The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced in its cavity
in the pavement, had just been extinguished. The interior of the
barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street,
was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight
horror, the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went and
came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible nesting-
place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly outlined; at
the very top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was of that
charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue. Birds flew
about in it with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed the back of
the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof a rosy
reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of the
dead man at the third-story window.

"I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished," said Courfeyrac
to Feuilly. "That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the
appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of
cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles."

Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from
it.

"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God,
having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And so
he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus
the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected."

Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the
dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and
of Enjolras' sad severity. He said:--

"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,
Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was
too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that,
even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if
there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses the
joy of having served the human race."

And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment
later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire's verses,
Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with
Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated by
Malfilâtre, particularly the prodigies of Cæsar's death; and at that
word, Cæsar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.

"Cæsar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was severe towards Cæsar,
and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoïlus insults
Homer, when Mævius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope
insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an old law of
envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts insult,
great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoïlus and Cicero are
two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just as Brutus
is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that last justice,
the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Cæsar, the violator of the
Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the dignities which
emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of the senate,
committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, _regia ac pene
tyrannica_. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the
better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds
touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Cæsar is
stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God
through the greater outrage."

Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap
of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:--

"Oh Cydathenæum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the
Æantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a
Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?"



CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW

Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out
through Mondétour lane, gliding along close to the houses.

The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which
they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to
almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it with a
smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their
cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They
reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one
of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the day
which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o'clock in the
morning a regiment "which had been labored with," would turn; at noon,
the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.

They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for
an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade, the
great one, Jeanne's, still held out.

All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of
gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of
bees.

Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight into outer
darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded arms, and
one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of
the dawn, he said:

"The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing
down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National
Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the
line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you will
be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day it
is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.
Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."

These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A
moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been
heard flitting by.

This moment was brief.

A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:

"So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses.
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans
do not abandon the people."

These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that
great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social geneses
who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive word,
and who vanishes into the shadows after having represented for a minute,
in a lightning flash, the people and God.

This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the 6th
of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade
Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a
matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the
case:--"What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not? Let
us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man."

As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated, were
in communication with each other.



CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE

After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken, and had
given this formula of their common soul, there issued from all mouths a
strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense and triumphant
in tone:

"Long live death! Let us all remain here!"

"Why all?" said Enjolras.

"All! All!"

Enjolras resumed:

"The position is good; the barricade is fine. Thirty men are enough. Why
sacrifice forty?"

They replied:

"Because not one will go away."

"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration
in his voice, "this republic is not rich enough in men to indulge in
useless expenditure of them. Vain-glory is waste. If the duty of some is
to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other."

Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of
omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute. Still, great as was
this omnipotence, a murmur arose. A leader to the very finger-tips,
Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted. He resumed haughtily:

"Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so."

The murmurs redoubled.

"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk
about leaving. The barricade is hemmed in."

"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondétour is
free, and through the Rue des Prêcheurs one can reach the Marché des
Innocents."

"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. You would
fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs; they will spy
a man passing in blouse and cap. 'Whence come you?' 'Don't you belong to
the barricade?' And they will look at your hands. You smell of powder.
Shot."

Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and
the two entered the tap-room.

They emerged thence a moment later. Enjolras held in his outstretched
hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. Combeferre followed,
carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.

"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks and
escape; here is enough for four." And he flung on the ground, deprived
of its pavement, the four uniforms.

No wavering took place in his stoical audience. Combeferre took the
word.

"Come," said he, "you must have a little pity. Do you know what the
question is here? It is a question of women. See here. Are there women
or are there not? Are there children or are there not? Are there
mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot and who have a lot
of little ones around them? Let that man of you who has never beheld a
nurse's breast raise his hand. Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so
do I--I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms
of women wreathing their arms around me. Die, if you will, but don't
make others die. Suicides like that which is on the brink of
accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not
admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is
murder. Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks.
Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of the Rue
du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window, on the fifth
floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head of an old woman,
who had the air of having spent the night in watching. Perhaps she is
the mother of some one of you. Well, let that man go, and make haste, to
say to his mother: 'Here I am, mother!' Let him feel at ease, the task
here will be performed all the same. When one supports one's relatives
by one's toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one's self. That is
deserting one's family. And those who have daughters! what are you
thinking of? You get yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well. And
tomorrow? Young girls without bread--that is a terrible thing. Man begs,
woman sells. Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so
sweet, who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who
sing and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence
of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne, that
Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your
blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! What do
you want me to say to you? There is a market for human flesh; and it is
not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them, that you will
prevent them from entering it! Think of the street, think of the
pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past which women go
and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. These women, too,
were pure once. Think of your sisters, those of you who have them.
Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare--that is what those
beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels of modesty, gentleness
and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the month of May, will come to.
Ah! you have got yourselves killed! You are no longer on hand! That is
well; you have wished to release the people from Royalty, and you
deliver over your daughters to the police. Friends, have a care, have
mercy. Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing much
thought on them. We trust to the women not having received a man's
education, we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we
prevent their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them
from going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies?
Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to
this affair. I know well that courage is required to leave, that it is
hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say: 'I have a
gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.' So
much the worse is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow; you will
not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings! See,
here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles,
prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and
do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned? I have seen one, a
very small creature, no taller than that. His father was dead. Poor
people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for
themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did not cry.
You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire,
and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing
was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent. He
said nothing. If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is dead. He was
taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him. I was house-surgeon in
that hospital. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose
happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in
their robust hand, let each one of those fathers imagine that this child
is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when
he lay nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin
like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery. A sort of mud was found
in his stomach. There were ashes in his teeth. Come, let us examine
ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. Statistics
show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.
I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns
young girls, it concerns little children. Who is talking to you of
yourselves? We know well what you are; we know well that you are all
brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your souls the joy and
the glory of giving your life for the great cause; we know well that you
feel yourselves elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that each
one of you clings to his share in the triumph. Very well. But you are
not alone in this world. There are other beings of whom you must think.
You must not be egoists."

All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.

Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments.
Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He recalled the mothers
of other men, and forgot his own. He was about to get himself killed. He
was "an egoist."

Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope,
and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks, and
saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end was near, had
plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor which always
precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.

A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that
febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science, and which is to
suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. Despair, also, has its
ecstasy. Marius had reached this point. He looked on at everything as
from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far
away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details. He beheld
men going and coming as through a flame. He heard voices speaking as at
the bottom of an abyss.

But this moved him. There was in this scene a point which pierced and
roused even him. He had but one idea now, to die; and he did not wish to
be turned aside from it, but he reflected, in his gloomy somnambulism,
that while destroying himself, he was not prohibited from saving some
one else.

He raised his voice.

"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice.
I join them, and you must make haste. Combeferre has said convincing
things to you. There are some among you who have families, mothers,
sisters, wives, children. Let such leave the ranks."

No one stirred.

"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!"
repeated Marius.

His authority was great. Enjolras was certainly the head of the
barricade, but Marius was its savior.

"I order it," cried Enjolras.

"I entreat you," said Marius.

Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order, touched
by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce each other.--"It
is true," said one young man to a full grown man, "you are the father of
a family. Go."--"It is your duty rather," retorted the man, "you have
two sisters whom you maintain."--And an unprecedented controversy broke
forth. Each struggled to determine which should not allow himself to be
placed at the door of the tomb.

"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it will be
too late."

"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal
suffrage reigns. Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."

They obeyed. After the expiration of a few minutes, five were
unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.

"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.

There were only four uniforms.

"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."

And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should find
reasons for the others not remaining. The generous quarrel began afresh.

"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--" You
have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your three
little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You have a
right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early for you to die."

These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism.
The improbable was simple there. These men did not astonish each other.

"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.

Men shouted to Marius from the groups:

"Do you designate who is to remain."

"Yes," said the five, "choose. We will obey you."

Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. Still, at
this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed back to
his heart. He would have turned pale, had it been possible for him to
become any paler.

He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his
eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history
hovering over Thermopylæ, cried to him:

"Me! me! me!"

And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! Then
his glance dropped to the four uniforms.

At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the other
four.

The fifth man was saved.

Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

He had arrived by way of Mondétour lane, whither by dint of inquiries
made, or by instinct, or chance. Thanks to his dress of a National
Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.

The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondétour had no
occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman, and he had
allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street, saying to himself:
"Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it is a prisoner." The
moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel abandoning his duty and
his post of observation.

At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed
him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.
Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently removed his
coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.

The emotion aroused was indescribable.

"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.

"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.

Marius added in a grave voice:

"I know him."

This guarantee satisfied every one.

Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.

"Welcome, citizen."

And he added:

"You know that we are about to die."

Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was saving
to don his uniform.



CHAPTER V--THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE

The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place, had as
result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.

Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution; he was
incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so; he had too much
of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; still, his
mind, in the society of the Friends of the A B C, had ended by
undergoing a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas; for some time
past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and
had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress,
and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution,
the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human
republic. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent
situation being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never
varied; and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is
summed up in the words: "Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing erect on
the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of his
gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of
prophetic breaths; places where death is have these effects of tripods.
A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an
inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell
back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they
were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and
Enjolras cried:

"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of
cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations
sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the
present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full
equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience
become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the
school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for
all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! To
conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second.
Reflect on what progress has already accomplished. Formerly, the first
human races beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes,
breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who
was the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle and
the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. Man,
nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence, and
finally conquered these monsters. We have vanquished the hydra, and it
is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the
griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. On the day
when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have
definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimæra of antiquity, the
hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire,
and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which
the ancient gods formerly were to him. Courage, and onward! Citizens,
whither are we going? To science made government, to the force of things
become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its
sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn
of truth corresponding to a dawn of day. We are advancing to the union
of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions; no
more parasites. The real governed by the true, that is the goal.
Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and, later
on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the
intelligence. Something similar has already been seen. The amphictyons
had two sittings a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other
at Thermopylæ, the place of heroes. Europe will have her amphictyons;
the globe will have its amphictyons. France bears this sublime future in
her breast. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. That which
Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me,
you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you. Yes, you
clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father
nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right for
your father. You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here.
Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through
our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As
conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the
whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have
just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of
view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over
himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where
two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But
in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a
certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right.
This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession
which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing
else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This
protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of
intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.
This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what is
called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same
thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a
bond. Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is
the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a
surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a
proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally
speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;
politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously,
it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an
organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet,
that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on
all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an
identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction!
light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century
will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old,
we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a
usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of
civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary
tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because
of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to
face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we
shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising
from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the
sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events.
One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy.
The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe
accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul
and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet
around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing
you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A
revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up,
consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry
of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is
the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this
barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of
iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here
misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I
am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace
of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their
agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are
about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies
in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded
with the dawn."

Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to move
silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused them all to
gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. There was no
applause; but they whispered together for a long time. Speech being a
breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.



CHAPTER VI--MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC

Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.

Let the reader recall the state of his soul. We have just recalled it,
everything was a vision to him now. His judgment was disturbed. Marius,
let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great, dark
wings which are spread over those in the death agony. He felt that he
had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already on the other
side of the wall, and he no longer beheld the faces of the living except
with the eyes of one dead.

How did M. Fauchelevent come there? Why was he there? What had he come
there to do? Marius did not address all these questions to himself.
Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity, that it envelops others
as well as ourselves, it seemed logical to him that all the world should
come thither to die.

Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.

However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and
had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice to
say: "I know him."

As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent was
comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions, we
should say that it pleased him. He had always felt the absolute
impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was, in his eyes,
both equivocal and imposing. Moreover, it had been a long time since he
had seen him; and this still further augmented the impossibility for
Marius' timid and reserved nature.

The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondétour lane; they
bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. One of them
wept as he took his leave. Before setting out, they embraced those who
remained.

When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure, Enjolras
thought of the man who had been condemned to death.

He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged in
meditation.

"Do you want anything?" Enjolras asked him.

Javert replied: "When are you going to kill me?"

"Wait. We need all our cartridges just at present."

"Then give me a drink," said Javert.

Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert was
pinioned, he helped him to drink.

"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.

"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. "You are not
tender to have left me to pass the night here. Bind me as you please,
but you surely might lay me out on a table like that other man."

And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.

There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table at the end
of the room, on which they had been running bullets and making
cartridges. All the cartridges having been made, and all the powder
used, this table was free.

At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post.
While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.

Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a
slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting
the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches in
length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room, where
they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.

By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck,
they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt at
escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons a
martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach, and meets
the hands, after passing between the legs.

While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold was
surveying him with singular attention. The shadow cast by this man made
Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes, and recognized Jean Valjean.
He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself
to the remark: "It is perfectly simple."



CHAPTER VII--THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED

The daylight was increasing rapidly. Not a window was opened, not a door
stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. The end of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been evacuated by the troops,
as we have stated, it seemed to be free, and presented itself to
passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. The Rue Saint-Denis was as dumb
as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being in the cross-
roads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun. Nothing is so
mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing was to be seen, but
there was something to be heard. A mysterious movement was going on at a
certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was
approaching. As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but
this time all had come.

The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack.
Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height still
further.

On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of the Halles,
Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to a serious
decision. He had the small gut of the Mondétour lane, which had been
left open up to that time, barricaded. For this purpose, they tore up
the pavement for the length of several houses more. In this manner, the
barricade, walled on three streets, in front on the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de la Petite
Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondétour, was really almost
impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. It had
three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too," said
Courfeyrac with a laugh.

Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess," said
Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.

The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must
needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.

An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.

Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. Each
man selects his place as though at the theatre. They jostle, and elbow
and crowd each other. There are some who make stalls of paving-stones.
Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way, it is removed; here is
a redan which may afford protection, they take shelter behind it. Left-
handed men are precious; they take the places that are inconvenient to
the rest. Many arrange to fight in a sitting posture. They wish to be at
ease to kill, and to die comfortably. In the sad war of June, 1848, an
insurgent who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the top
of a terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for his
use; a charge of grape-shot found him out there.

As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action,
all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from one
another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more
holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes
into, a waiting for the assailants. A barricade before the arrival of
danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. Peril produces
order.

As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle, and had
placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself,
all the rest held their peace. A series of faint, sharp noises resounded
confusedly along the wall of paving-stones. It was the men cocking their
guns.

Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever; the
excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope, but
they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes gives
victory; Virgil has said so. Supreme resources spring from extreme
resolutions. To embark in death is sometimes the means of escaping a
shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank of safety.

As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed, we might
almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted up and
visible.

They had not long to wait. A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu
quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. A
clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click of brass
skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar, announced that
some sinister construction of iron was approaching. There arose a tremor
in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets, pierced and built for the
fertile circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made for
the horrible rumble of the wheels of war.

The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity of the street
became ferocious.

A cannon made its appearance.

Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim; the fore-
carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage, four were at
the wheels; others followed with the caisson. They could see the smoke
of the burning lint-stock.

"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.

The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche of
smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds, the
cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew had
just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste, into position
facing the barricade. Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain
of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order to raise the muzzle,
began to point the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer levelling a
telescope.

"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.

And the whole barricade clapped their hands.

A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street,
astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action. A formidable pair
of jaws yawned on the barricade.

"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac. "That's the brutal part of
it. After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. The army is
reaching out its big paw to us. The barricade is going to be severely
shaken up. The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."

"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. "Those
pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten parts of tin
to one hundred of brass is exceeded. The excess of tin renders them too
tender. Then it comes to pass that they have caves and chambers when
looked at from the vent hole. In order to obviate this danger, and to
render it possible to force the charge, it may become necessary to
return to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and to
encircle the piece on the outside with a series of unwelded steel bands,
from the breech to the trunnions. In the meantime, they remedy this
defect as best they may; they manage to discover where the holes are
located in the vent of a cannon, by means of a searcher. But there is a
better method, with Gribeauval's movable star."

"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle
cannon."

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force, but
diminishes the accuracy of the firing. In firing at short range, the
trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola is
exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently
rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is,
nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases
with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge.
This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled
cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness of the charge;
small charges for that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic
necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the gun-
carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that it
desires; force is a great weakness. A cannon-ball only travels six
hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand leagues a
second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."

"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.

How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the cannon-
balls? Would they effect a breach? That was the question. While the
insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men were loading the
cannon.

The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.

The shot sped the report burst forth.

"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.

And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball dashed
against it.

He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly
climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth of
the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than the cannon-
ball.

The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish. At the most there was an
omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. On seeing
this, the barricade burst into a laugh.

"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.



CHAPTER VIII--THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY

They flocked round Gavroche. But he had no time to tell anything. Marius
drew him aside with a shudder.

"What are you doing here?"

"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"

And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. His eyes grew
larger with the proud light within them.

It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:

"Who told you to come back? Did you deliver my letter at the address?"

Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of that letter.
In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather
than delivered it. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that he had
confided it rather lightly to that stranger whose face he had not been
able to make out. It is true that the man was bareheaded, but that was
not sufficient. In short, he had been administering to himself little
inward remonstrances and he feared Marius' reproaches. In order to
extricate himself from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he
lied abominably.

"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep. She
will have the letter when she wakes up."

Marius had had two objects in sending that letter: to bid farewell to
Cosette and to save Gavroche. He was obliged to content himself with the
half of his desire.

The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the
barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed out M.
Fauchelevent to Gavroche.

"Do you know that man?"

"No," said Gavroche.

Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean only
at night.

The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves in
Marius' mind were dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions?
Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican. Hence his very natural
presence in this combat.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end of the
barricade: "My gun!"

Courfeyrac had it returned to him.

Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade was
blocked. He had had great difficulty in reaching it. A battalion of the
line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie was on the
watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side, the
municipal guard occupied the Rue des Prêcheurs. The bulk of the army was
facing them in front.

This information given, Gavroche added:

"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."

Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his
embrasure.

The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not
repeated it.

A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end of
the street behind the piece of ordnance. The soldiers were tearing up
the pavement and constructing with the stones a small, low wall, a sort
of side-work not more than eighteen inches high, and facing the
barricade. In the angle at the left of this epaulement, there was
visible the head of the column of a battalion from the suburbs massed in
the Rue Saint-Denis.

Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar sound
which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn from the
caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the elevation and
incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. Then the
cannoneers began to load the piece. The chief seized the lint-stock
himself and lowered it to the vent.

"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all on your
knees along the barricade!"

The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop, and who
had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival, rushed pell-
mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras' order could be
executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying rattle of a round
of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.

The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there
rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced two dead
and three wounded.

If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. The grape-
shot made its way in.

A murmur of consternation arose.

"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.

And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun, who, at
that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying
and definitely fixing its pointing.

The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery, very
young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar
to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of perfecting
itself in horror, must end in killing war.

Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this young
man.

"What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What hideous things these butcheries
are! Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war.
Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant, you are not looking at
him. Fancy, he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident
that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are very well educated;
he has a father, a mother, a family; he is probably in love; he is not
more than five and twenty at the most; he might be your brother."

"He is," said Enjolras.

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too. Well, let us not kill him."

"Let me alone. It must be done."

And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.

At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle. The flame
leaped forth. The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms extended in
front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath, then he fell with
his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. They could see his back,
from the centre of which there flowed directly a stream of blood. The
ball had traversed his breast from side to side. He was dead.

He had to be carried away and replaced by another. Several minutes were
thus gained, in fact.



CHAPTER IX--EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT
INFALLIBLE MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796

Opinions were exchanged in the barricade. The firing from the gun was
about to begin again. Against that grape-shot, they could not hold out a
quarter of an hour longer. It was absolutely necessary to deaden the
blows.

Enjolras issued this command:

"We must place a mattress there."

"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."

Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the corner of the
tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment, taken no
part in anything that was going on. He did not appear to hear the
combatants saying around him: "Here is a gun that is doing nothing."

At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.

It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed her
mattress in front of her window. This window, an attic window, was on
the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyond the barricade.
The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported at the bottom on two poles
for drying linen, was upheld at the top by two ropes, which, at that
distance, looked like two threads, and which were attached to two nails
planted in the window frames. These ropes were distinctly visible, like
hairs, against the sky.

"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.

Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.

Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.

One of the mattress ropes was cut.

The mattress now hung by one thread only.

Jean Valjean fired the second charge. The second rope lashed the panes
of the attic window. The mattress slipped between the two poles and fell
into the street.

The barricade applauded.

All voices cried:

"Here is a mattress!"

"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"

The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade, between
besiegers and besieged. Now, the death of the sergeant of artillery
having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had, for several minutes,
been lying flat on their stomachs behind the line of paving-stones which
they had erected, and, in order to supply the forced silence of the
piece, which was quiet while its service was in course of
reorganization, they had opened fire on the barricade. The insurgents
did not reply to this musketry, in order to spare their ammunition. The
fusillade broke against the barricade; but the street, which it filled,
was terrible.

Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street, traversed the
storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress, hoisted it upon his back,
and returned to the barricade.

He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands. He fixed it there
against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men should not see
it.

That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.

It was not long in coming.

The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. But there
was no rebound. The effect which they had foreseen had been attained.
The barricade was saved.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."

Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:

"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of
that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. But never
mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"



CHAPTER X--DAWN

At that moment, Cosette awoke.

Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,
facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.

Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris. She had not been
there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired to her
chamber when Toussaint had said:

"It appears that there is a row."

Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly. She had had sweet
dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very
white. Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her in the light. She
awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first, produced on her the
effect of being a continuation of her dream. Her first thought on
emerging from this dream was a smiling one. Cosette felt herself
thoroughly reassured. Like Jean Valjean, she had, a few hours
previously, passed through that reaction of the soul which absolutely
will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish hope, with all her
might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang at her heart. It was
three days since she had seen Marius. But she said to herself that he
must have received her letter, that he knew where she was, and that he
was so clever that he would find means of reaching her.--And that
certainly to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,
but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it was very
early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to receive Marius.

She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that, consequently,
that was sufficient and that Marius would come. No objection was valid.
All this was certain. It was monstrous enough already to have suffered
for three days. Marius absent three days, this was horrible on the part
of the good God. Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone
through with. Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news.
Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless
and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future in the presence
of an unknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be
happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her on the
subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what
explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticed with what
nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and
hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are
thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of
our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to
lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little
effort made by her memory. She told herself, that it was very naughty
and very wicked of her, to have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.

She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul and
body, her prayers and her toilet.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial
chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it,
prose must not.

It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness
in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be
gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the
bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity
which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a
slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though a
mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and
conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing
vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn,
those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite
affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there is
no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as
the clouds of dawn,--it is not fitting that all this should be narrated,
and it is too much to have even called attention to it.

The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising of a
young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility
of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the
peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of the snow, the wing
of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse compared to that
chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is
only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is
hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance
brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here, contemplation is profanation.

We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter of
Cosette's rising.

An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God, but that
Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she was ashamed and
turned crimson. We are of the number who fall speechless in the presence
of young girls and flowers, since we think them worthy of veneration.

Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair, which
was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not swell out
their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did not put crinoline
in their locks. Then she opened the window and cast her eyes around her
in every direction, hoping to descry some bit of the street, an angle of
the house, an edge of pavement, so that she might be able to watch for
Marius there. But no view of the outside was to be had. The back court
was surrounded by tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on
several gardens. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous: for the first
time in her life, she found flowers ugly. The smallest scrap of the
gutter of the street would have met her wishes better. She decided to
gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come from that
quarter.

All at once, she burst into tears. Not that this was fickleness of soul;
but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. She had a
confused consciousness of something horrible. Thoughts were rife in the
air, in fact. She told herself that she was not sure of anything, that
to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost; and the idea that Marius
could return to her from heaven appeared to her no longer charming but
mournful.

Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her, and hope
and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust in God.

Every one in the house was still asleep. A country-like silence reigned.
Not a shutter had been opened. The porter's lodge was closed. Toussaint
had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her father was
asleep. She must have suffered much, and she must have still been
suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her father had been
unkind; but she counted on Marius. The eclipse of such a light was
decidedly impossible. Now and then, she heard sharp shocks in the
distance, and she said: "It is odd that people should be opening and
shutting their carriage gates so early." They were the reports of the
cannon battering the barricade.

A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly black
cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve of this nest
formed a little projection beyond the cornice, so that from above it was
possible to look into this little paradise. The mother was there,
spreading her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered
about, flew away, then came back, bearing in his beak food and kisses.
The dawning day gilded this happy thing, the great law, "Multiply," lay
there smiling and august, and that sweet mystery unfolded in the glory
of the morning. Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her soul
absorbed in chimæras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn
without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to
herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze
at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and
her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a
virgin.



CHAPTER XI--THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE

The assailants' fire continued. Musketry and grape-shot alternated, but
without committing great ravages, to tell the truth. The top alone of
the Corinthe façade suffered; the window on the first floor, and the
attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaïens, were
slowly losing their shape. The combatants who had been posted there had
been obliged to withdraw. However, this is according to the tactics of
barricades; to fire for a long while, in order to exhaust the
insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake of replying. When it
is perceived, from the slackening of their fire, that they have no more
powder and ball, the assault is made. Enjolras had not fallen into this
trap; the barricade did not reply.

At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek with his
tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.

"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth. We want some lint."

Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect which it
produced, and said to the cannon:

"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."

One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball. It is probable that this
silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,
and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt the
necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones, and
of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall which received
blows without retorting. The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet
glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. A fireman had placed his
back against a tall chimney, and seemed to be acting as sentinel. His
glance fell directly down into the barricade.

"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.

Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.

Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later,
the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. The
terrified soldier made haste to disappear. A second observer took his
place. This one was an officer. Jean Valjean, who had re-loaded his gun,
took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's casque to join the
soldier's. The officer did not persist, and retired speedily. This time
the warning was understood. No one made his appearance thereafter on
that roof; and the idea of spying on the barricade was abandoned.

"Why did you not kill the man?" Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean made no reply.



CHAPTER XII--DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER

Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:

"He did not answer my question."

"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.

Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch know
that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against
insurrections. It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of
June, 1832. A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or la
Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became
leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed
to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and
heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests
had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing
from the bravery of the movement. The diminution of a pile of crowns
made bankers sing the Marseillaise. They shed their blood lyrically for
the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive
of the fatherland, with Lacedæmonian enthusiasm.

At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not
extremely serious. It was social elements entering into strife, while
awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.

Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism
[the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order in
combination with lack of discipline.

The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or such
a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into
action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought,
"for an idea," and on their own account. At critical moments, on "days"
they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. There
existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of the sword,
like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrède.

Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather by an
aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or thought
itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting himself
a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected it with his own head;
and the first comer took it upon himself to save society.

Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination. A platoon of the National
Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council of
war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. It was
an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. Fierce
Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest,
for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as by the
monarchy in Europe. This Lynch law was complicated with mistakes. On one
day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul Aimé Garnier, was pursued in
the Place Royale, with a bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by
taking refuge under the porte-cochère of No. 6. They shouted:--"There's
another of those Saint-Simonians!" and they wanted to kill him. Now, he
had under his arm a volume of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. A
National Guard had read the words _Saint-Simon_ on the book, and had
shouted: "Death!"

On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from the
suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned, had itself
decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice and its own good
pleasure. This fact, singular though it may seem, was proved at the
judicial investigation opened in consequence of the insurrection of
1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of
condottiere of the order of those whom we have just characterized, a
fanatical and intractable governmentalist, could not resist the
temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the
barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his company.
Exasperated by the successive apparition of the red flag and the old
coat which he took for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and
chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did not think that the
moment for the decisive assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the
insurrection to fry in its own fat," to use the celebrated expression of
one of them. For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that
which is ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.

He commanded men as resolute as himself, "raging fellows," as a witness
said. His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was
the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. At the
moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men
against the barricade. This movement, executed with more good will than
strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. Before it had traversed two
thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the
barricade. Four, the most audacious, who were running on in front, were
mown down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this
courageous throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking in
military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after some hesitation,
leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. This momentary hesitation gave
the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very
destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the
corner of the street, its shelter. A moment more, and it was caught
between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece
which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.

The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this grape-
shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.

This attack, which was more furious than serious, irritated Enjolras.--
"The fools!" said he. "They are getting their own men killed and they
are using up our ammunition for nothing."

Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he was.
Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons.
Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number of
shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty
cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced. As repression has the
army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes, it does not
count its shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has
men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes. Thus
they are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end in
crushing the barricade; unless the revolution, uprising suddenly, flings
into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. This does happen
sometimes. Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe, popular
redoubts abound. Paris quivers supremely, the _quid divinum_ is given
forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a
wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back, and the
army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet,
France.



CHAPTER XIII--PASSING GLEAMS

In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there
is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor,
enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above
all, intermittences of hope.

One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope suddenly
traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the moment when
it was least expected.

"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, "it seems
to me that Paris is waking up."

It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection
broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy
of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies. Barricades
were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue des Gravilliers. In front
of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked
alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he
placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the
commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying: "There's another who
will do us no more harm."

He was put to the sword. In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the
National Guard from behind a lowered blind. The slats of the blind could
be seen to tremble at every shot. A child fourteen years of age was
arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of
cartridges. Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the Rue Bertin-
Poirée, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed a
regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General
Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces
of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a
bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's
old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at
Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre
on our heads."

These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when it
was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever of
wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep
masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,--all
this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. They made haste to
stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.

They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuée, de la Chanvrerie and
Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order that they
might have to deal with the barricades only and be able to finish them
at one blow. Columns were thrown into the streets where there was
fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small, right and left,
now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The troops broke in the
doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time, manouvres
by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards. This repression
was not effected without some commotion, and without that tumultuous
uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the people. This was
what Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the cannonade and the
musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing the end of the
street in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:--"Those wounded do not
come from us."

Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less
than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash of
lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents felt that sort of
leaden cope, which the indifference of the people casts over obstinate
and deserted men, fall over them once more.

The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline, had
miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy of
the generals could now be concentrated on the three or four barricades
which still remained standing.

The sun was mounting above the horizon.

An insurgent hailed Enjolras.

"We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this, without
anything to eat?"

Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure, made an
affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes from the end
of the street.



CHAPTER XIV--WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS

Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to
insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles
which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he
assailed it with a burst of irony.

"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me,
you are wasting your row. That's not thunder, it's a cough."

And the bystanders laughed.

Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with the peril,
like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and, as wine
was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.

"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet. "His impassive temerity astounds me.
He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras
complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us
have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that is to say, brave.
When a man is as much in love as a tiger, the least that he can do is to
fight like a lion. That is one way of taking our revenge for the capers
that mesdames our grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself killed for
Angélique; all our heroism comes from our women. A man without a woman
is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.
Well, Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to be
intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice
and as bold as fire."

Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him,
that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: "Patria."

Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:

"News!"

And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:

"My name is Eight-Pounder."

In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene. This was a second
piece of ordnance.

The artillery-men rapidly performed their manouvres in force and placed
this second piece in line with the first.

This outlined the catastrophe.

A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing point-
blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the soldiers
from the suburbs sustained the artillery.

Another cannonade was audible at some distance. At the same time that
the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue Saint-Denis, the
other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry
barricade. The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.

The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.

One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on the Rue
de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.

The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim
was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper
crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the insurgents,
mingled with bursts of grape-shot.

The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from the
summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the
interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.

The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls, and
from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns
could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even,
without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on
the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.

"It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns should
be diminished," said Enjolras, and he shouted: "Fire on the artillery-
men!"

All were ready. The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth
a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of
rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end
of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two thirds
of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the
cannons. Those who were left standing continued to serve the pieces with
severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.

"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras. "Success."

Enjolras shook his head and replied:

"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any
cartridges left in the barricade."

It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.



CHAPTER XV--GAVROCHE OUTSIDE

Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the
barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.

Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his way
out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full
cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the
slope of the redoubt, into his basket.

"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.

Gavroche raised his face:--

"I'm filling my basket, citizen."

"Don't you see the grape-shot?"

Gavroche replied:

"Well, it is raining. What then?"

Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"

"Instanter," said Gavroche.

And with a single bound he plunged into the street.

It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind it a trail
of bodies. Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the pavement,
through the whole length of the street. Twenty cartouches for Gavroche
meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.

The smoke in the street was like a fog. Whoever has beheld a cloud which
has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can
imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of
lofty houses. It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a
twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants
could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other,
short as it was.

This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on by the
commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful
to Gavroche.

Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,
he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. He
rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.

He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket in
his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to
another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a
nut.

They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which
was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.

On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.

"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.

By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade
became transparent. So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on the
outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters of the
banlieue massed at the corner of the street suddenly pointed out to each
other something moving through the smoke.

At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near
a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.

"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche. "They are killing my dead men for me."

A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--A third
overturned his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.

He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,
his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were
firing, and sang:


"On est laid à Nanterre,       "Men are ugly at Nanterre, C'est la faute
à Voltaire;     'Tis the  fault of Voltaire; Et bête à Palaiseau,
And dull at Palaiseau, C'est la faute à Rousseau."    'Tis the fault of
Rousseau."

Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen
from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the
fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There a fourth
bullet missed him, again. Gavroche sang:


"Je ne suis pas notaire,      "I am not a notary, C'est la faute à
Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Je suis un petit oiseau,
I'm a little bird, C'est la faute à Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of
Rousseau."

A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.


"Joie est mon caractère,      "Joy is my character, C'est la faute à
Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misère est mon trousseau,
Misery is my trousseau, C'est la faute à Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of
Rousseau."


Thus it went on for some time.

It was a charming and terrible sight. Gavroche, though shot at, was
teasing the fusillade. He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was
the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen. To each discharge he retorted with
a couplet. They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him. The
National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him. He
lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway, then made
a bound, disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to
the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on
pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his
basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their
eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not a
man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the
invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him, he was more
nimble than they. He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death;
every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the
urchin administered to it a fillip.

One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,
finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche was seen to
stagger, then he sank to the earth. The whole barricade gave vent to a
cry; but there was something of Antæus in that pygmy; for the gamin to
touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth;
Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting
posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms
in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and began
to sing:


"Je suis tombé par terre,     "I have fallen to the earth, C'est la
faute à Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Le nez dans le
ruisseau,      With my nose in the gutter, C'est la faute à . . . "
'Tis the fault of . . . "

He did not finish. A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him
short. This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no
more. This grand little soul had taken its flight.



CHAPTER XVI--HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER

At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze of
the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding each
other by the hand. One might have been seven years old, the other five.
The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on the
sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and
ragged; they had the air of wild birds. The smaller of them said: "I am
very hungry."

The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his
brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.

They were alone in the garden. The garden was deserted, the gates had
been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. The
troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies of
combat.

How did those children come there? Perhaps they had escaped from some
guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at the
Barrière d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire, or in the
neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read:
_Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum_, some mountebank's booth from
which they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped
the eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had
passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the
papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free. To be
astray and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little creatures were,
in fact, lost.

These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to some
trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the Thénardiers,
leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves
fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by
the wind. Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day, and
which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been
converted into rags.

Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned
children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again
on the pavements of Paris.

It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor
little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect
that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

These children were there, thanks to the locked gates. They were there
contrary to the regulations. They had slipped into the garden and there
they remained. Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is
supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the
inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the
outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not
seen the two delinquents.

It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But in
June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can
hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in
summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of
the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It
takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself
with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty. A shower
is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In the
morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered
over.

Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and
wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens and
meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become
perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at once.
Everything smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently
intoxicated. The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man
to have patience.

There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having the
azure of heaven, say: "It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in the
wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and
evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not
understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of these,
and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter, with the
lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the pallet, the
attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when they can
dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits they, and
pitilessly satisfied. Strange to say, the infinite suffices them. That
great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore. The
finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not think
about. The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine
combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided that
they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Joy never, ecstasy
forever. Their life lies in surrendering their personality in
contemplation. The history of humanity is for them only a detailed plan.
All is not there; the true All remains without; what is the use of
busying oneself over that detail, man? Man suffers, that is quite
possible; but look at Aldebaran rising! The mother has no more milk, the
new-born babe is dying. I know nothing about that, but just look at this
wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under
the microscope! Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you
can! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives with them to such
a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child. God eclipses
their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and
petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe. La Fontaine perhaps;
magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who
do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the
funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the
search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor
the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since
there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and
gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are
determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of
the birds are exhausted.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be
pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They
are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being
at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star
on his brow.

The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some, a superior
philosophy. That may be; but in this superiority there is some
infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan. One may be
more than man and less than man. There is incomplete immensity in
nature. Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?

But then, what? In whom can we trust? _Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?_
Who shall dare to say that the sun is false? Thus certain geniuses,
themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? That
which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which
sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly, sees
not at all? Is not this a desperate state of things? No. But what is
there, then, above the sun? The god.

On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning, the
Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes and
flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty into the sunlight. The
branches, wild with the brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring to
embrace. In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows
triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, administering
little pecks on the bark. The flower-beds accepted the legitimate
royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which
emanates from whiteness. The peppery odor of the carnations was
perceptible. The old crows of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall
trees. The sun gilded, empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips,
which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made into flowers. All
around the banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers,
hummed. All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse,
by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined to
profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the
charming threat of flying low. He who was there aspired to happiness;
life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor, help, assistance,
paternity, caress, dawn. The thoughts which fell from heaven were as
sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one kisses it.

The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow pierced
with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight; rays hung
from them on all sides. Around the great fountain, the earth was already
dried up to the point of being burnt. There was sufficient breeze to
raise little insurrections of dust here and there. A few yellow leaves,
left over from the autumn, chased each other merrily, and seemed to be
playing tricks on each other.

This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it.
Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath creation,
of the enormous size of the source; in all these breaths permeated with
love, in this interchange of reverberations and reflections, in this
marvellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of liquid
gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this
splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that
millionaire of stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain,
there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just been
bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish, which springs
from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. This
magnificence was cleanly. The grand silence of happy nature filled the
garden. A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand sorts of
music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of
the breeze. All the harmony of the season was complete in one gracious
whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in proper order; the
lilacs ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects
in advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butterflies
fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies of May. The
plantain trees were getting their new skins. The breeze hollowed out
undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It was
splendid. A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing
through the fence, said: "Here is the Spring presenting arms and in full
uniform."

All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour;
the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth on
earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly. God was serving the
universal repast. Each creature had his pasture or his mess. The ring-
dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet, the goldfinch
found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green finch found
flies, the fly found infusoriæ, the bee found flowers. They ate each
other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil mixed with good;
but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.

The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity of the
grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light, they tried to
hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak in the presence
of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept behind the swans' hutch.

Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort
of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows, which
were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. Smoke hung over
the roofs in the direction of the Halles. A bell, which had the air of
an appeal, was ringing in the distance.

These children did not appear to notice these noises. The little one
repeated from time to time: "I am hungry."

Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached
the great basin. They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years of age,
who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six. No doubt, a father
and his son. The little man of six had a big brioche.

At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the Rues Madame
and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden, of which the lodgers
enjoyed the use when the gates were shut, a privilege which was
suppressed later on. This father and son came from one of these houses,
no doubt.

The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching, and
hid themselves a little more thoroughly.

He was a bourgeois. The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day
heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling
his son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty air, and a
mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical
smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth
rather than the soul. The child, with his brioche, which he had bitten
into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child was dressed
as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection, and the father had
remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.

Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting.
This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans.
He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.

For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal
talent, and they were superb.

If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been of an
age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this grave man.
The father was saying to his son:

"The sage lives content with little. Look at me, my son. I do not love
pomp. I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace and stones; I
leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."

Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the Halles
burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.

"What is that?" inquired the child.

The father replied:

"It is the Saturnalia."

All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind the
green swan-hutch.

"There is the beginning," said he.

And, after a pause, he added:

"Anarchy is entering this garden."

In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out, and,
suddenly burst out crying.

"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.

"I am not hungry any more," said the child.

The father's smile became more accentuated.

"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."

"My cake tires me. It is stale."

"Don't you want any more of it?"

"No."

The father pointed to the swans.

"Throw it to those palmipeds."

The child hesitated. A person may not want any more of his cake; but
that is no reason for giving it away.

The father went on:

"Be humane. You must have compassion on animals."

And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.

The cake fell very near the edge.

The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy with some
prey. They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.

The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted, and
moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic agitation,
which finally attracted the attention of the swans.

They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships, as
they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche, with the
stupid majesty which befits white creatures.

"The swans [_cygnes_] understand signs [_signes_]," said the bourgeois,
delighted to make a jest.

At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another sudden
increase. This time it was sinister. There are some gusts of wind which
speak more distinctly than others. The one which was blowing at that
moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors, platoon firing, and
the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a
black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.

The swans had not yet reached the brioche.

"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking the
Tuileries."

He grasped his son's hand again. Then he continued:

"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance which
separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. Shots will soon
rain down."

He glanced at the cloud.

"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky is
joining in; the younger branch is condemned. Let us return home
quickly."

"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.

The father replied:

"That would be imprudent."

And he led his little bourgeois away.

The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin
until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.

In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche at the
same time as the swans. It was floating on the water. The smaller of
them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the retreating bourgeois.

Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand
flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.

As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily flung
himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin, and
clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water, on the
verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his stick
towards the cake. The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste, and in so
doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of service to
the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans, and one of
these gentle concentric undulations softly floated the brioche towards
the child's wand. Just as the swans came up, the stick touched the cake.
The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in the brioche, frightened away the
swans, seized the cake, and sprang to his feet. The cake was wet; but
they were hungry and thirsty. The elder broke the cake into two
portions, a large one and a small one, took the small one for himself,
gave the large one to his brother, and said to him:

"Ram that into your muzzle."



CHAPTER XVII--MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT

Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. But he was
too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket of
cartridges; Marius bore the child.

"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father, he
was requiting to the son; only, Thénardier had brought back his father
alive; he was bringing back the child dead."

When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face,
like the child, was inundated with blood.

At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed
his head; he had not noticed it.

Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.

They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over the
two corpses the black shawl. There was enough of it for both the old man
and the child.

Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he had
brought in.

This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.

Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his stone post.
When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.

"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras.
"He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."

"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.

"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.

And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:

"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."

One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering the
barricade hardly disturbed the interior. Those who have never traversed
the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the singular
moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. Men go and come,
they talk, they jest, they lounge. Some one whom we know heard a
combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot: "We are here as at
a bachelor breakfast." The redoubt of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we
repeat, seemed very calm within. All mutations and all phases had been,
or were about to be, exhausted. The position, from critical, had become
menacing, and, from menacing, was probably about to become desperate. In
proportion as the situation grew gloomy, the glow of heroism empurpled
the barricade more and more. Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it, in
the attitude of a young Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the
sombre genius, Epidotas.

Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: Bossuet and
Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask picked up by
Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly: "We are soon
to take the diligence for another planet"; Courfeyrac was disposing and
arranging on some paving-stones which he had reserved for himself near
Enjolras, a complete arsenal, his sword-cane, his gun, two holster
pistols, and a cudgel, with the care of a young girl setting a small
dunkerque in order. Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite
him. An artisan was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his
head with a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said. The young men
from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves, as
though eager to speak patois for the last time. Joly, who had taken
Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his tongue in it.
Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts of rather mouldy bread,
in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. Marius was disturbed with
regard to what his father was about to say to him.



CHAPTER XVIII--THE VULTURE BECOME PREY

We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades.
Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets
should be omitted.

Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we have
just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it, remains,
none the less, a vision.

There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the
unknown are commingled with fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes,
and any one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a
dream.

The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed out
in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are both
more and less than life. On emerging from a barricade, one no longer
knows what one has seen there. One has been terrible, but one knows it
not. One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which had human
faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. There were
corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. The hours were
colossal and seemed hours of eternity. One has lived in death. Shadows
have passed by. What were they?

One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a deafening
horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which
shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace; one was in the
midst of smoke, of night, perhaps. One fancied that one had touched the
sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one's
finger nails. One no longer remembers anything.

Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock
striking the hour became audible.

"It is midday," said Combeferre.

The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his
feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:

"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the roofs
with them. Half the men to their guns, the other half to the paving-
stones. There is not a minute to be lost."

A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their
appearance in battle array at the end of the street.

This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The
attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of
the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.

They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M. Clermont-
Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."

Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar to
ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape is
impossible. In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones which
Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to
the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed,
these stones, artistically set one upon the other, walled up the sash-
window on the first floor and the windows in the roof to half their
height. A few loop-holes carefully planned by Feuilly, the principal
architect, allowed of the passage of the gun-barrels. This armament of
the windows could be effected all the more easily since the firing of
grape-shot had ceased. The two cannons were now discharging ball against
the centre of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if
possible, a breach for the assault.

When the stones destined to the final defence were in place, Enjolras
had the bottles which he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay,
carried to the first floor.

"Who is to drink that?" Bossuet asked him.

"They," replied Enjolras.

Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron
cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.

The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop
was the dungeon. With the stones which remained they stopped up the
outlet.

As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing of
their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants
combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose
themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more than in
reality, and take their ease. The preparations for attack are always
made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning
strikes.

This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and
to perfect everything. He felt that, since such men were to die, their
death ought to be a masterpiece.

He said to Marius: "We are the two leaders. I will give the last orders
inside. Do you remain outside and observe."

Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.

Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance, as the
reader will remember, nailed up.

"No splashing of the wounded," he said.

He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly
tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.

"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase.
Have you them?"

"Yes," said Feuilly.

"How many?"

"Two axes and a pole-axe."

"That is good. There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. How
many guns are there?"

"Thirty-four."

"Eight too many. Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at hand.
Swords and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to the barricade. Six
ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first floor to
fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. Let not a
single worker remain inactive here. Presently, when the drum beats the
assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. The first to
arrive will have the best places."

These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:

"I am not forgetting you."

And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:

"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."

"Here?" inquired a voice.

"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own. The little barricade of
the Mondétour lane can be scaled. It is only four feet high. The man is
well pinioned. He shall be taken thither and put to death."

There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras,
it was Javert. Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.

He had been lost among the group of insurgents. He stepped forth and
said to Enjolras:

"You are the commander?"

"Yes."

"You thanked me a while ago."

"In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviors, Marius
Pontmercy and yourself."

"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I request one."

"What is it?"

"That I may blow that man's brains out."

Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost imperceptible
movement, and said:

"That is just."

As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes
about him:

"No objections."

And he turned to Jean Valjean:

"Take the spy."

Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating himself
on the end of the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint click
announced that he had cocked it.

Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.

"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.

Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar to
him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:

"You are in no better case than I am."

"All out!" shouted Enjolras.

The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went, received in
the back,--may we be permitted the expression,--this sally of Javert's:

"We shall meet again shortly!"



CHAPTER XIX--JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE

When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope which
fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body, and the knot of
which was under the table. After this he made him a sign to rise.

Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of
enchained authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take a beast of
burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter after him, emerged
from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded limbs, could
take only very short steps.

Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. The
insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their
backs turned to these two.

Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of the
barricade, saw them pass. This group of victim and executioner was
illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.

Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold for a
single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little
entrenchment in the Mondétour lane.

When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone in the
lane. No one saw them. Among the heap they could distinguish a livid
face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the half nude breast of a
woman. It was Éponine. The corner of the houses hid them from the
insurgents. The corpses carried away from the barricade formed a
terrible pile a few paces distant.

Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in a low
tone:

"It strikes me that I know that girl."

Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert a look
which it required no words to interpret: "Javert, it is I."

Javert replied:

"Take your revenge."

Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.

"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right. That suits you
better."

Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then he
cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on his
feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:

"You are free."

Javert was not easily astonished. Still, master of himself though he
was, he could not repress a start. He remained open-mouthed and
motionless.

Jean Valjean continued:

"I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by chance,
I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme
Armé, No. 7."

Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his
mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:

"Have a care."

"Go," said Jean Valjean.

Javert began again:

"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Armé?"

"Number 7."

Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."

He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness
between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting
his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction of the Halles.
Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:

A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:

"You annoy me. Kill me, rather."

Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean
as "thou."

"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.

Javert retreated slowly. A moment later he turned the corner of the Rue
des Prêcheurs.

When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.

Then he returned to the barricade and said:

"It is done."

In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.

Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not, up to
that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark background
of the tap-room.

When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the barricade in
order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. Something suddenly
recurred to his mind. He recalled the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise,
and the two pistols which the latter had handed to him and which he,
Marius, had used in this very barricade, and not only did he recall his
face, but his name as well.

This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.

It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he put to
himself:

"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name was
Javert?"

Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. But, in
the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.

Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself at the other
extremity of the barricade:

"Enjolras!"

"What?"

"What is the name of yonder man?"

"What man?"

"The police agent. Do you know his name?"

"Of course. He told us."

"What is it?"

"Javert."

Marius sprang to his feet.

At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.

Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried: "It is done."

A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.



CHAPTER XX--THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE
WRONG

The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.

Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment; a
thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed masses set
in movement in the streets which were not visible, the intermittent
gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery on the march, the firing
by squads, and the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth of
Paris, the smokes of battle mounting all gilded above the roofs,
indescribable and vaguely terrible cries, lightnings of menace
everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now had the accents of a
sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor of the sky filled with
sun and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the alarming silence of the
houses.

For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de
la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,
windows closed, shutters closed.

In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the hour
was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation, which had
lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a legal country, when
universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented
to the tearing up of the pavements, when insurrection made the
bourgeoisie smile by whispering its password in its ear, then the
inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated with the revolt, so to speak, was the
auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the
improvised fortress which rested on it. When the situation was not ripe,
when the insurrection was not decidedly admitted, when the masses
disowned the movement, all was over with the combatants, the city was
changed into a desert around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges
were nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help the army to
take the barricade.

A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly than
it chooses. Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand! A people does not
let itself go at random. Then it abandons the insurrection to itself.
The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. A house is an
escarpment, a door is a refusal, a façade is a wall. This wall hears,
sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge.
It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.
They seem dead, they are living. Life which is, as it were, suspended
there, persists there. No one has gone out of them for four and twenty
hours, but no one is missing from them. In the interior of that rock,
people go and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party
there; there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear
excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed with it, an
extenuating circumstance. Sometimes, even, and this has been actually
seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence
does into rage; hence this wise saying: "The enraged moderates." There
are outbursts of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful
smoke.--"What do these people want? What have they come there to do? Let
them get out of the scrape. So much the worse for them. It is their
fault. They are only getting what they deserve. It does not concern us.
Here is our poor street all riddled with balls. They are a pack of
rascals. Above all things, don't open the door."--And the house assumes
the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of that
house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if he
cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will
come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might
save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels
of stone.

Whom shall he reproach?

No one and every one.

The incomplete times in which we live.

It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into
revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and
from Minerva turns to Pallas.

The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits
it; it almost always comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and
stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph. It serves those who
deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates
them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is
indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.

Is this ingratitude, however?

Yes, from the point of view of the human race.

No, from the point of view of the individual.

Progress is man's mode of existence. The general life of the human race
is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called
Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial
journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places
where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it
meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on
its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the
poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the
human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken
that slumbering Progress.

"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of
these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption
of movement for the death of Being.

He who despairs is in the wrong. Progress infallibly awakes, and, in
short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for it has
increased in size. When we behold it erect once more, we find it taller.
To be always peaceful does not depend on progress any more than it does
on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders; obstacles make
water froth and humanity boil. Hence arise troubles; but after these
troubles, we recognize the fact that ground has been gained. Until
order, which is nothing else than universal peace, has been established,
until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its
halting-places.

What, then, is progress? We have just enunciated it; the permanent life
of the peoples.

Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers
resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct
interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and
defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary
life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to
the future. The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth,
is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal,
after all, who will have their turn later on.--"I exist," murmurs that
some one whose name is All. "I am young and in love, I am old and I wish
to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am
successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the
government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all
this, I desire to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a
profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.

Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes
war. It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle,
from the lie of yesterday. It, the future, behaves like the past. It,
pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism with a
violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a
violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which
it is fatally punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old
military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it
suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes
use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though Utopia had no longer
any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It
strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade has two
edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is
impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the
glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when
they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in
failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in
accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic
defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other
sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is
greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the
vanquished.

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they
fail.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems
a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their
ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are
reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning
social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs,
of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in
order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to
them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply:
"That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."

The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution. In short, let us
agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is
a good will which renders society uneasy. But it depends on society to
save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal. No
violent remedy is necessary. To study evil amiably, to prove its
existence, then to cure it. It is to this that we invite it.

However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,
who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are
striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal, are
august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they
accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the
appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers
to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager, they enter the
tomb. And this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they accept
in order to bring about the supreme and universal consequences, the
magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the 14th of July,
1789; these soldiers are priests. The French revolution is an act of
God.

Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the
distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are accepted
revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused
revolutions, which are called riots.

An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its
examination before the people. If the people lets fall a black ball, the
idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.

Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is
not the thing for the peoples. Nations have not always and at every hour
the temperament of heroes and martyrs.

They are positive. _A priori_, insurrection is repugnant to them, in the
first place, because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second
place, because it always has an abstraction as its point of departure.

Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal, and for
the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice
themselves. An insurrection is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasm may wax wroth;
hence the appeal to arms. But every insurrection, which aims at a
government or a régime, aims higher. Thus, for instance, and we insist
upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and, in
particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were
combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. The majority of them, when
talking freely, did justice to this king who stood midway between
monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. But they attacked the younger
branch of the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its
elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to overturn in
overturning royalty in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation
of man over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe.
Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. This is
the manner in which they reasoned. Their aim was distant no doubt, vague
perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was
great.

Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are
almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which,
after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves
into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are
about to do. Who knows? We may succeed. We are few in number, we have a
whole army arrayed against us; but we are defending right, the natural
law, the sovereignty of each one over himself from which no abdication
is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the
three hundred Spartans. We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas.
And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw back,
and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an
unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again,
the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the
event of the worst, Thermopylæ.

These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck,
and we have just explained why. The crowd is restive in the presence of
the impulses of paladins. Heavy masses, the multitudes which are fragile
because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch of
adventure in the ideal.

Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very
friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes the
stomach paralyzes the heart.

The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from
the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her
loins. She is the first awake, the last asleep. She marches forwards.
She is a seeker.

This arises from the fact that she is an artist.

The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the
beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are
also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to see the light. That is why
the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by
Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on to France. Divine,
illuminating nations of scouts! _Vitælampada tradunt_.

It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of
its progress. The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity of
imagination. Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people.
Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a
bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be
artistic. In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must
sublime. On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of
the ideal.

The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. It is
through science that it will realize that august vision of the poets,
the socially beautiful. Eden will be reconstructed by A+B. At the point
which civilization has now reached, the exact is a necessary element of
the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but
completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated. Art, which
is the conqueror, should have for support science, which is the walker;
the solidity of the creature which is ridden is of importance. The
modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its
vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.

Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to
guide civilization. Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes
away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. Hieratic or
mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance, lowers its
horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence, at
once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes
missionaries of nations. Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal.
Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of
the centuries, halos of civilization.

France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. She is
Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. Moreover,
she is good. She gives herself. Oftener than is the case with other
races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. Only, this
humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein lies the
great peril for those who run when she desires only to walk, or who walk
on when she desires to halt. France has her relapses into materialism,
and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain
have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the
dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is to be done in such
a case? The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her
freaks of pettiness. That is all.

To this there is nothing to say. Peoples, like planets, possess the
right to an eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light returns
and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and
resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is identical
with the persistence of the _I_.

Let us state these facts calmly. Death on the barricade or the tomb in
exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name of devotion
is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned allow themselves to be
abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us
confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far,
when they do retreat. One must not push too far in descent under pretext
of a return to reason.

Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;
but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom. The life of the moment has
its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. Alas! the
fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in
history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes
the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked
how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:
"Because I love statesmen."

One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.

A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else
than a convulsion towards the ideal. Progress trammelled is sickly, and
is subject to these tragic epilepsies. With that malady of progress,
civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage. This
is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr'acte of that drama
whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is
_Progress_.

Progress!

The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and,
at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it
contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps,
permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its
light to shine through.

The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one
end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its
intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from
the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,
from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the
beginning, the angel at the end.



CHAPTER XXI--THE HEROES

All at once, the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane. On the evening before, in the darkness, the
barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now, in broad
daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,
rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar,
the army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now became skill. A
powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular
intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot, and
supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen,
debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets
braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and,
imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade
with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.

The wall held firm.

The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade once scaled had a mane
of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment,
it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the
lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as the
cliff is covered with foam, to re-appear, a moment later, beetling,
black and formidable.

The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,
unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible
discharge of musketry. Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the
sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. Let
the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but
horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaïen at the tip of each
one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another
from its clusters of lightning. The barricade was underneath it.

On both sides, the resolution was equal. The bravery exhibited there was
almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity
which began by the sacrifice of self.

This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave. The
troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of
fighting. The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and
in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray, each
one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. The street was
strewn with corpses.

The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the
other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved
and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under
his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.
He made himself a target. He stood with more than half his body above
the breastworks. There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious
man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in
action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he
was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in
firing a gun.

The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In
this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied:

"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."

Or they uttered haughty comments.

"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those men,--[and
he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging
to the old army]--who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid
us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and
who abandon us!"

And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the
stars, from a great distance."

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that
one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position.
They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon the
soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in the
escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably
buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men
hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly
recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably
nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army
closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.

One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept
increasing.

Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la
Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged,
exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours, who
had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling
in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly all of
whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and blood-
stained linen, with holes in their clothes from which the blood
trickled, and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords,
became Titans. The barricade was ten times attacked, approached,
assailed, scaled, and never captured.

In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to imagine
fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze at the
conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace;
there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances were extraordinary.
The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed forth
there, and it was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red
glow of those salamanders of the fray.

The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we
renounce all attempts at depicting. The epic alone has the right to fill
twelve thousand verses with a battle.

One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism, the most
redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of
Swords.

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows of
the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above,
from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from the
windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had
crawled. They were one against sixty.

The façade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous. The window,
tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing now
but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.

Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;
Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the breast at
the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time to
cast a glance to heaven when he expired.

Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in the
head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood, and one would
have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.

Enjolras alone was not struck. When he had no longer any weapon, he
reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some arm
or other into his fist. All he had left was the stumps of four swords;
one more than François I. at Marignan. Homer says: "Diomedes cuts the
throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy Arisba;
Euryalus, son of Mecistæus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios, Esepius,
and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the blameless
Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius; Antilochus, Ablerus;
Polypætes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaon.
Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus' pike. Agamemnon, king of
the heroes, flings to earth Elatos, born in the rocky city which is
laved by the sounding river Satnoïs." In our old poems of exploits,
Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore with a cobbler's
shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter defends himself by stoning the
hero with towers which he plucks up by the roots. Our ancient mural
frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon, armed,
emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on horseback and approaching
each other, their battle-axes in hand, masked with iron, gloved with
iron, booted with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped
in azure: Bretagne with his lion between the two horns of his crown,
Bourbon helmeted with a monster fleur de lys on his visor. But, in order
to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion,
to have in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,
father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of
mail, a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give
one's life for a conviction or a loyalty. This ingenuous little soldier,
yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his clasp-
knife by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg
garden, this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book,
a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them,
breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face in the
Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray, and let the
one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let both of
them imagine that they are fighting for their country; the struggle will
be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit and this sawbones in
conflict will produce in that grand epic field where humanity is
striving, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia, tiger-
filled, crushing in his embrace the immense body of Ajax, equal to the
gods.



CHAPTER XXII--FOOT TO FOOT

When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except Enjolras
and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the centre, which
had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre,
gave way. The cannon, though it had not effected a practicable breach,
had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt; there, the
summit of the wall had disappeared before the balls, and had crumbled
away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now inside, now outside, had, as
it accumulated, formed two piles in the nature of slopes on the two
sides of the barrier, one on the inside, the other on the outside. The
exterior slope presented an inclined plane to the attack.

A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. The
mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up with
irresistible force, and the serried front of battle of the attacking
column made its appearance through the smoke on the crest of the
battlements. This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who
were defending the centre retreated in confusion.

Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. Many,
finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not
wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation
emits howls, when the beast re-appears in men. They were hemmed in by
the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their redoubt.
This house might prove their salvation. The building was barricaded, and
walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the troops of the line
had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was time for a door to
open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning was sufficient for
that, and the door of that house, suddenly opened a crack and closed
again instantly, was life for these despairing men. Behind this house,
there were streets, possible flight, space. They set to knocking at that
door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling,
entreating, wringing their hands. No one opened. From the little window
on the third floor, the head of the dead man gazed down upon them.

But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,
sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers:
"Don't advance!" and as an officer had not obeyed, Enjolras had killed
the officer. He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with
his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one hand, a
rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop which he
barred against assailants. He shouted to the desperate men:--"There is
but one door open; this one."--And shielding them with his body, and
facing an entire battalion alone, he made them pass in behind him. All
precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle,
which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a "covered
rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets around and in front of him,
and was the last to enter; and then ensued a horrible moment, when the
soldiers tried to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to bar
them out. The door was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back
into its frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.

Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he felt
that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes already
shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the swoon in
which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought,
mingled with a last memory of Cosette:--"I am taken prisoner. I shall be
shot."

Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the
wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each
man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the
bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and
chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was
now beginning.

The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.

The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still
more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were
mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of a
soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.

When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:

"Let us sell our lives dearly."

Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath
the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the
cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding
sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed
his brow on the preceding evening.

These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of
his life.

Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes;
the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are
dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are willing to die,
provided their opponent will kill them.

When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies: "After the war with
cannon, the war with knives." Nothing was lacking in the capture by
assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from
the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and
the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door yielded,
the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing into the
wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door which had been
beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single combatant there.
The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the middle of
the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing their last, every
one who was not killed was on the first floor, and from there, through
the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance of the stairs, a
terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of their cartridges. When
they were exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of death had
no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the
bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and
held the scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile clubs.
They were bottles of aquafortis.

We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The
besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did
not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war
is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the
besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily
surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking
streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror
when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched
with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons
attacked, spectres resisted.

It was heroism become monstrous.



CHAPTER XXIII--ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK

At length, by dint of mounting on each other's backs, aiding themselves
with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to
the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of the trap-door, the last
one who offered resistance, a score of assailants, soldiers, National
Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority
disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable ascent, blinded
by blood, furious, rendered savage, made an irruption into the apartment
on the first floor. There they found only one man still on his feet,
Enjolras. Without cartridges, without sword, he had nothing in his hand
now but the barrel of his gun whose stock he had broken over the head of
those who were entering. He had placed the billiard table between his
assailants and himself; he had retreated into the corner of the room,
and there, with haughty eye, and head borne high, with this stump of a
weapon in his hand, he was still so alarming as to speedily create an
empty space around him. A cry arose:

"He is the leader! It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is well that
he has placed himself there. Let him remain there. Let us shoot him down
on the spot."

"Shoot me," said Enjolras.

And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms, he
offered his breast.

The audacity of a fine death always affects men. As soon as Enjolras
folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in the
room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral
solemnity. The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless,
appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody,
and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an
invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to
constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at
that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh
and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed,
as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It was of him,
possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of war:
"There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National
Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: "It
seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."

Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and
silently made ready their guns.

Then a sergeant shouted:

"Take aim!"

An officer intervened.

"Wait."

And addressing Enjolras:

"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"

"No."

"Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?"

"Yes."

Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.

Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the
preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair
and leaning on the table.

He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of "dead drunk." The
hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown him into a
lethargy. His table being small, and not suitable for the barricade, he
had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture,
with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms,
surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming
slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any
effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the
grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where
he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault. He merely replied to
the cannonade, now and then, by a snore. He seemed to be waiting there
for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. Many corpses
were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to
distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.

Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him. The fall of
everything around him only augmented Grantaire's prostration; the
crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort of halt which the
tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy
slumber. It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which
suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons dozing within it wake up.
Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed
his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.

A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn
away. One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has
concealed. All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard
who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last
twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly
informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration of
intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is
dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity
of realities.

Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the billiard-
table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not even
noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his order:
"Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout beside
them:

"Long live the Republic! I'm one of them."

Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had
missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant
glance of the transfigured drunken man.

He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm
stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.

"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.

And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:

"Do you permit it?"

Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.

This smile was not ended when the report resounded.

Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,
as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.

Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining
insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired
into the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought under the very
roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the
windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus,
were slain by two shots fired from the attic. A man in a blouse was
flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed
his last on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped together on
the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each
other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace. A similar conflict
went on in the cellar. Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.
The barricade was captured.

The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the
fugitives.



CHAPTER XXIV--PRISONER

Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.

The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt at
the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean
Valjean.

Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose
himself in it. Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase of
agony, would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere
present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked
up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals, he
reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow, an
attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands. He held his
peace and lent succor. Moreover, he had received only a few scratches.
The bullets would have none of him. If suicide formed part of what he
had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had not
succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an
irreligious act.

Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see
Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. When
a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of
a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.

The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently
concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that no
one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms,
traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind the
angle of the Corinthe building.

The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on the
street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all
eyes, and a few square feet of space. There is sometimes a chamber which
does not burn in the midst of a conflagration, and in the midst of
raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind alley of
shoals, a tranquil nook. It was in this sort of fold in the interior
trapezium of the barricade, that Éponine had breathed her last.

There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, placed his
back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.

The situation was alarming.

For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was a
shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre? He recalled the
anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years before,
and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape; it was difficult
then, to-day it was impossible. He had before him that deaf and
implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared to be inhabited
only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the
rather low barricade, which shut off the Rue de la Petite Truanderie; to
pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of the barrier a
line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were posted on the
watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the barricade
was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that any head which
should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of that wall of
stones would serve as a target for sixty shots. On his left he had the
field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that wall.

What was to be done?

Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.

And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some expedient,
to come to some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces away;
fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of the
wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single soldier,
to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank, all was
over.

Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade at
one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of the
last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to pierce
a hole there with his eyes.

By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began to
assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power of
glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he
perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and
watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones
which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level
with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about
two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been
torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.

Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like
the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted
forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination.
To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who
was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this
burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that
sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon
which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind
him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below the
surface,--all this was executed like that which one does in dreams, with
the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle; this took only a
few minutes.

Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a
sort of long, subterranean corridor.

There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.

The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the
wall into the convent recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying to-day
was not Cosette; it was Marius. He could barely hear the formidable
tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.



BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN



CHAPTER I--THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA

Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without
metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With
no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no reason.
By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its
intestine? The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the
valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most
fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure. The
Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a
Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes to town without
bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two
full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the
earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese
wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable in
fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most
mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of
employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our
manure, on the other hand, is gold.

What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.

Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung
of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element
of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human and
animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead of
being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.

Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which jolt
through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street
department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the
pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? They are the meadow
in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,
they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the
evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are
health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious
creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.

Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from
it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.

You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.

Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit of half
a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths of her
rivers. Note this: with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter
of the expenses of our budget. The cleverness of man is such that he
prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. It is
the very substance of the people that is carried off, here drop by drop,
there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers into the
rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean. Every
hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs. From this spring two
results, the land impoverished, and the water tainted. Hunger arising
from the furrow, and disease from the stream.

It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames is
poisoning London.

So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late, to
transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices, sucking up
and driving back, a system of elementary drainage, simple as the lungs
of a man, and which is already in full working order in many communities
in England, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into
our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the cities,
and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would retain among us
the five hundred millions now thrown away. People are thinking of other
things.

The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good.
The intention is good, the result is melancholy. Thinking to purge the
city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. A sewer
is a mistake. When drainage, everywhere, with its double function,
restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a
simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data of
a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased
tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened. Add the
suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.

In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage
takes place. Leakage is the word. Europe is being ruined in this manner
by exhaustion.

As for France, we have just cited its figures. Now, Paris contains one
twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being
the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on
the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which
France annually rejects. These twenty-five millions, employed in
assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The city
spends them in sewers. So that we may say that Paris's great
prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its
stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence,
is its sewer system.

It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy,
we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the
well-being of all. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public
fortune.

Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is a
spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged
capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that
metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of
impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that
nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of
Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his
shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris
is itself an imitator.

These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this is no
young folly. The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome,"
says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant."
When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted
Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily,
then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.
This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe.
_Urbi et orbi_. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar to
intelligent towns.

For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we have
just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris of
sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its blind-
alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and minus
the human form.

For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there is
everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and, if
Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might,
Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also
contains Lutetia, the city of mud.

However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of
Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity
by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.

The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would
present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has no more
partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six
leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. Not to
mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar, not to mention the
inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast
tubular system for the distribution of fresh water which ends in the
pillar fountains, the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work
under the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding
thread.

There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product to
which Paris has given birth.



CHAPTER II--ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER

Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks a
species of large branch grafted on the river. On the right bank, the
belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary ducts will
form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.

This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle, which
is the customary angle of this species of subterranean ramifications,
being very rare in vegetation.

A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed by
supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet, as
intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows, and the
misshapen letters should be welded one to another in apparent confusion,
and as at haphazard, now by their angles, again by their extremities.

Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in the Lower
Empire and in the Orient of old. The masses regarded these beds of
decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death, with a fear that was
almost religious. The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to
giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according
to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from the
sewer of Münster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it was
from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the
veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused his false sun to emerge.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. The Germoniæ58
narrated Rome. The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and formidable
thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum. Crime,
intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all
that human laws persecute or have persecuted, is hidden in that hole;
the _maillotins_ in the fourteenth century, the _tire-laine_ of the
fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin's _illuminated_ in the
seventeenth, the _chauffeurs_ [brigands] in the eighteenth. A hundred
years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the
pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had
its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic _picareria_, accepted the sewer as the
adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither,
fierce and sly, through the Maubuée outlet, as into a bed-chamber.

It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset,
[Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of
their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert
of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of
souvenirs. All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors;
everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-
holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.

The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and of
all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social
philosophy there beholds a residuum.

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and
confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but
there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at
least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor,
that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask of
Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its
strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by
honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor. All the
uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this
trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. They are there
engulfed, but they display themselves there. This mixture is a
confession. There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is
possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout
all illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really
exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end.
There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle
tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has
entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more; the
effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas'
spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from the
gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end of the
suicide. A livid fotus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles which
danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has pronounced
judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which was formerly
Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent
to addressing each other as _thou_. All which was formerly rouged, is
washed free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells
everything.

The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul. When one has
passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the great airs
which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity, human justice,
professional probity, the austerities of situation, incorruptible robes
all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer and to behold the mire which
befits it.

This is instructive at the same time. We have just said that history
passes through the sewer. The Saint-Barthélemys filter through there,
drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,
political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage of
civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the
thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous
penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for an
apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI. is there with
Tristan, François I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,
Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is
there, Hébert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying
to make the traces of their actions disappear. Beneath these vaults one
hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness
of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.
There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.

The social observer should enter these shadows. They form a part of his
laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything
desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is
useless. What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful
side. Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does not
permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things
which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, it recognizes
all. It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from the
scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from
mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora or
the jug. By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it
recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It re-discovers in what remains that which
has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace, the ink-
blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials
undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which
characters have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution
in souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the
vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.



CHAPTER III--BRUNESEAU

The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth
century, Henri II. attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years
ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself,
and fared as best it might.

Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,
and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89
showed how understanding comes to cities. But in the good, old times,
the capital had not much head. It did not know how to manage its own
affairs either morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth any
better than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle,
everything raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to
every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer than
one could understand one's position in the city; above the
unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues
there reigned the confusion of caverns; Dædalus backed up Babel.

Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this
misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There
occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that
stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into
the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth.
These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they
were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant at
the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should
return. Drive it out better.

The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of the
age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des
Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue
Saint-Honoré by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Élysées, the
Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre-à-
Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt, through
the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through the sewer
of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des Champs-Élysées
to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the South, through the
vent of the Seine, performing its functions in inverse sense, it
penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Échaudé, and the Rue des
Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and nine metres, a
few paces distant from the house in which Racine had lived, respecting,
in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the King. It attained its
maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it rose to the height of
three feet above the flag-stones of the water-spout, and its maximum
length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it spread out over a stretch two
hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.

At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a
mysterious place. Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its
evil renown reached the verge of the terrible. Paris knew, in a confused
way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as of
that monstrous bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long
feet in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bathtub. The
great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than certain well-
known points. We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's
carts, from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis
de Créqui, discharged their loads directly into the sewer. As for
cleaning out,--that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which
encumbered rather than swept away. Rome left some poetry to her sewer,
and called it the Gemoniæ; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the
Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The
Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin
was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the
corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;
Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great
hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in
the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the _Gallant
Messenger_. The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was
celebrated for the pestilences which had their source there; with its
grating of iron, with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a
dragon's maw in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men. The
popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with some
indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no
bottom. The sewer was the lower world. The idea of exploring these
leprous regions did not even occur to the police. To try that unknown
thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of
discovery in that abyss--who would have dared? It was alarming.
Nevertheless, some one did present himself. The cess-pool had its
Christopher Columbus.

One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor
made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decrès or Crétet or
other, came to the master's intimate levee. In the Carrousel there was
audible the clanking of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of
the great Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was
blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the
Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau,
of Hoche, of Kléber; the aérostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of
Mayence, the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had
looked down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor
in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi,
others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, others had
preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. The whole army of that
day was present there, in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented
by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that
was the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind it and
Austerlitz before it.--"Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to
Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What
man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He
wants to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of
Paris."

This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.



CHAPTER IV

The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle
against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage
of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent
workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with
regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged
to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official
style. The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely
rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of
that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused
to go any further. The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the
necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same
time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings
and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the
currents at the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds
of the divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal
sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and the
width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom, in order to
determine the arrangements with regard to the level of each water-
entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the
street. They advanced with toil. The lanterns pined away in the foul
atmosphere. From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out. At
certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given away, the
pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless well;
they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly; they had great
difficulty in getting him out again. On the advice of Fourcroy, they
lighted large cages filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time,
in spots which had been sufficiently disinfected. In some places, the
wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors; the
very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill. At the point of
separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered
upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone indicated the
limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. with visiting the
subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of the
sixteenth century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of the
seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue
Vieille-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of
the eighteenth in the western section of the collecting canal, walled
and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that
of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt
sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of
Ménilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an
advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first
_valet de chambre_ to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed
into Lebel.

Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought they
recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the very sewer
itself. Hideous _in-pace_. An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of
these cells. They walled them all up. Some of their finds were singular;
among others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from
the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with
the famous and indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des
Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil
had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.

Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion, a
perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration of all
connoisseurs. Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle
with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and
silver, precious stones, coins. If a giant had filtered this cesspool,
he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. At the point
where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on
one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf
with a tiara on his head.

The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer.
This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but
the hinges remained. From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless
rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there in
the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart. Bruneseau
held his lantern close to this rag and examined it. It was of very fine
batiste, and in one of the corners, less frayed than the rest, they made
out a heraldic coronet and embroidered above these seven letters:
LAVBESP. The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters
signified _Laubespine_. They recognized the fact, that what they had
before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat. Marat in his
youth had had amorous intrigues. This was when he was a member of the
household of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the
Stables. From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great
lady, he had retained this sheet. As a waif or a souvenir. At his death,
as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house,
they buried him in it. Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in
that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed
voluptuousness. Bruneseau passed on. They left that rag where it hung;
they did not put the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn or
from respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there
sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides, the
things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select. In
short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise had slept in it; Marat
had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats of
the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have
joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed
gaze of Dante.

The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted
seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew,
directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch
of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the sewer,
in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of the
Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the
Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, under the Rue
du Mail, under the Rue de l'Écharpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812,
under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussée d'Antin. At the same
time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful. In
the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his
son-in-law Nargaud.

It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society
cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There
was that much clean, at all events.

Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,
jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid,
wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements
and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the
antique sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings, of
trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, cocum,
blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby
sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;
nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive
apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a
titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind
mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has
been splendor.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.



CHAPTER V--PRESENT PROGRESS

To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes
the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It
is proper and grayish; laid out by rule and line; one might almost say
as though it came out of a bandbox. It resembles a tradesman who has
become a councillor of state. One can almost see distinctly there. The
mire there comports itself with decency. At first, one might readily
mistake it for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common
in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes, in
those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." The present
sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical
rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have
taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of that
long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de
Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer. However, if the geometrical
line is in place anywhere, it is certainly in the drainage trench of a
great city. There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest
road. The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. The
very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject, no longer
are wanting in respect towards it. The words which characterize it in
administrative language are sonorous and dignified. What used to be
called a gut is now called a gallery; what used to be called a hole is
now called a surveying orifice. Villon would no longer meet with his
ancient temporary provisional lodging. This net-work of cellars has its
immemorial population of prowlers, rodents, swarming in greater numbers
than ever; from time to time, an aged and veteran rat risks his head at
the window of the sewer and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin
grow tame, so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace. The
cesspool no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity. The rain,
which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it. Nevertheless, do
not trust yourself too much to it. Miasmas still inhabit it. It is more
hypocritical than irreproachable. The prefecture of police and the
commission of health have done their best. But, in spite of all the
processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like
Tartuffe after confession.

Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage
which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view,
Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables, it is
certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.

It is more than progress; it is transmutation. Between the ancient and
the present sewer there is a revolution. What has effected this
revolution?

The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned,
Bruneseau.



CHAPTER VI--FUTURE PROGRESS

The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last
ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a
termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris. The
sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.
Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a
thousand antennæ, which expands below as the city expands above. Every
time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The
old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred
metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the
first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall
shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and
prosecuted; Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight
hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred and
nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six; Louis-
Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of 1848, twenty-
three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present government,
seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time, two hundred
and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres; sixty leagues of
sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An obscure ramification ever at
work; a construction which is immense and ignored.

As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day more
than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is
difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts which
have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of relative
perfection in which it now is. It was with great difficulty that the
ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years of the
eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in
perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed previous to 1806.
All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation, some peculiar to the
soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the laborious population
of Paris. Paris is built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious to
the pick, the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation. There is nothing
more difficult to pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation
upon which is superposed the marvellous historical formation called
Paris; as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures
upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. There
are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires
which special science calls _moutardes_.59 The pick advances laboriously
through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of
clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the
contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans. Sometimes a rivulet suddenly
bursts through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers;
or a layer of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a
cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass. Quite
recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting
sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or
emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water
suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond
the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a diver to
explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow entrance of the
grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty that it was stopped
up. Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a considerable distance from
the river, as for instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumière
Passage, quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in
which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides,
and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the
workmen become slowly impregnated. In our own day, after having
excavated the gallery of Clichy, with a banquette to receive the
principal water-conduit of Ourcq, a piece of work which was executed in
a trench ten metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides, and
with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted the
Bièvre from the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, as far as the Seine; after
having, in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in
order to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in
extent, which crouched near the Barrière des Martyrs, after having, let
us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barrière Blanche to
the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night, at a
depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen--made a
subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench, six metres
below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. After having
vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from
the Rue Traversière-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having
freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of rain by means
of the branch of the Arbalète, after having built the Saint-Georges
sewer, on rock and concrete in the fluid sands, after having directed
the formidable lowering of the flooring of the vault timber in the
Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch, Duleau the engineer died. There are no
bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful,
nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.

The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are to-day.
Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was required to bring
about the vast reconstruction which took place later on. It is
surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of the belt sewer,
called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered
to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city of
Paris found in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty
francs and six centimes required for covering this mass of filth. The
three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mandé, with
their discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their
depuratory branches, only date from 1836. The intestinal sewer of Paris
has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more
than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.

Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of
June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer. A
very great number of streets which are now convex were then sunken
causeways. At the end of a slope, where the tributaries of a street or
cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large, square gratings
with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng,
gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused horses to fall.
The official language of the Roads and Bridges gave to these gratings
the expressive name of _Cassis_.60

In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Étoile, the Rue Saint-
Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, the Rue Notre-Dame
de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Méricourt, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Rue du
Petit-Musc, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches, the Rue des
Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame des-Victoires, the
Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Batelière, in the Champs-Élysées,
the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic sewer still
cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous voids of stone
catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with monumental
effrontery.

Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in
1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms. After Bruneseau, on the 1st
of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. Between
1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average, seven hundred and
fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of
galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with
hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on a cement foundation. At
two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the
present day represent forty-eight millions.

In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the
beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected with that
immense question: the sewers of Paris.

Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air.
The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but
already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green clay
situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may
be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a
multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the
Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the
Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water
is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the
earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the
miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence
this bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been
scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from above Paris. In
a given time, with the aid of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and
as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the
sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that
by "washing the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the
earth; the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.
Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a
diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour,
the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the
Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease
of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The
popular instinct has never been deceived in it. The occupation of
sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the
people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror
and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce
a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool
cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form:
"to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of
hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with
terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of
the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found
vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of
Marat.



BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL



CHAPTER I--THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,
the diver may disappear there.

The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,
Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye,
in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed
from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of
the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of
the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute
obscurity.

An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door
of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that
sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He
remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.
The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial
goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable
ambuscades of providence!

Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a
dead corpse.

His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see
nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.
He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which had been
let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the
thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said,
otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the
depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other, touched the
walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he
slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put
forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that
the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in
which he stood.

After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little light
fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes
became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish something. The
passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the
situation--was walled in behind him. It was one of those blind alleys,
which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was
another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten
or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast
a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer. Beyond, the
opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an
entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man could, however,
plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do. Haste was
even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he
had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of
the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance. They also might
descend into that well and search it. There was not a minute to be lost.
He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,--that is
the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set
out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils
of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance. After
the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and
traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle
of hell into another.

When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem
presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he
encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which
should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he
to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which
we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its
slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that if
he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would
arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine
between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would
make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot
in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection
of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men
emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to
arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they would be seized before
they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth,
to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence
for the outcome.

He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an
air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more,
and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as
possible. Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's
feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and
groped along the wall with the other. Marius' cheek touched his, and
clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius
trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a
humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,
indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which
Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean
Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the
preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little
torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall
in order not to have his feet in the water.

Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night
groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his
eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned
to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall
which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The
pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends
by finding God there.

It was not easy to direct his course.

The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets
which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred
streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at
that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven
leagues. We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.

Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was
beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under
the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis
XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand
Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the
ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer,
whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie
the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has
never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at
the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was
entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself abound. The Montmartre
sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.
Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets
whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of
parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more
than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for
they are streets--presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation
point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Plâtrière, a sort of
Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs
under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far
as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the
curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are
also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail,
complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of
the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and
lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeûneurs, without
counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer,
which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be
safe.

Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he
would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was
not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the
ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal
even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and
mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under
his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone
filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred
francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as _à petits
matériaux_--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.

He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing
nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom
which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This
aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean
Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing
it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How
was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time?
would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow
itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some
unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable
and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of
hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two
skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these
questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris
form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and
without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he
was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against
his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now
descending. Why? Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine? This
danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.
He continued to advance.

It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding. The ridge which the
soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds
into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this
ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very
capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of separation
of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michel-le-
Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the
Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that
Jean Valjean had reached. He was directing his course towards the belt
sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.

Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if
he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the
passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route,
rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind
alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say,
the outlet. Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.

At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath the
Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had
suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and
normal Paris. Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous. It was the rumbling of vehicles.

He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the
calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of
rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.
The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured
him.

All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him. It was outlined on a
faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the
flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his
right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied,
he turned round.

Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed
through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense
obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying
him.

It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a
confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.



CHAPTER II--EXPLANATION

On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been
ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for
refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General
Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which
exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented
above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of agents and
sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the
right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city. The
agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and
poignards.

That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern
of the patrol of the right bank.

This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind
alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were passing
their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had
encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived that
it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated
thither. He had passed on. The police, on emerging from the gallery du
Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the
direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean
Valjean. The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern,
and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence
the sound proceeded.

This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.

Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It was
light and he was shadow. He was very far off, and mingled with the
darkness of the place. He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did
not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of sleep
and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the state of
a visionary. He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms. What was
it? He did not comprehend.

Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.

The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw
nothing. They held a consultation.

There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a sort
of cross-roads called _de service_, which was afterwards suppressed, on
account of the little interior lake which formed there, swallowing up
the torrent of rain in heavy storms. The patrol could form a cluster in
this open space. Jean Valjean saw these spectres form a sort of circle.
These bull-dogs' heads approached each other closely and whispered
together.

The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they had
been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless to get
entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste of time, but
that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry; that if there was
anything to do, and any "bousingot" to track out, it was in that
quarter.

From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults. In 1832, the word
bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become
obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such excellent
service.

The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed of
the Seine.

If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go in
both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. All hung on that
thread. It is probable that the instructions of the prefecture,
foreseeing a possibility of combat and insurgents in force, had
forbidden the patrol to part company. The patrol resumed its march,
leaving Jean Valjean behind it. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean
perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly
wheeled round.

Before taking his departure, the sergeant, in order to acquit his
policeman's conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of Jean
Valjean. The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt, like the
rumbling of that titanic entrail. A bit of plaster which fell into the
stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from Jean Valjean,
warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.

Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work,
gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance; the group
of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated and floated,
communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew fainter, then
disappeared; the silence became profound once more, the obscurity became
complete, blindness and deafness resumed possession of the shadows; and
Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet, remained for a long time
leaning with his back against the wall, with straining ears, and dilated
pupils, watching the disappearance of that phantom patrol.



CHAPTER III--THE "SPUN" MAN

This justice must be rendered to the police of that period, that even in
the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably fulfilled its duties
connected with the sewers and surveillance. A revolt was, in its eyes,
no pretext for allowing malefactors to take the bit in their own mouths,
and for neglecting society for the reason that the government was in
peril. The ordinary service was performed correctly in company with the
extraordinary service, and was not troubled by the latter. In the midst
of an incalculable political event already begun, under the pressure of
a possible revolution, a police agent, "spun" a thief without allowing
himself to be distracted by insurrection and barricades.

It was something precisely parallel which took place on the afternoon of
the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the slope of the right
shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.

There is no longer any bank there now. The aspect of the locality has
changed.

On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance, seemed to be
watching each other while mutually avoiding each other. The one who was
in advance was trying to get away, the one in the rear was trying to
overtake the other.

It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence.
Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though
each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble his
pace.

One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey, and
purposely without wearing the air of doing so. The prey was crafty and
on its guard.

The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog
were observed. The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant
mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking to seize
him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.

The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second;
but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who
could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre
hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.

The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman nor
a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.

It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite, and
to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance, the man who was
in advance would have appeared like a bristling, tattered, and equivocal
being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath a ragged blouse, and the
other like a classic and official personage, wearing the frock-coat of
authority buttoned to the chin.

Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were to see
them closer at hand.

What was the object of the second man?

Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to
make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole
question lies in the color. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be
dressed in red is disagreeable.

There is a purple from below.

It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort which
the first man is desirous of shirking.

If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet, it
was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up to
some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. This
delicate operation is called "spinning."

What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up
man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach on the quay as
it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver; the driver
understood, evidently recognized the person with whom he had to deal,
turned about and began to follow the two men at the top of the quay, at
a foot-pace. This was not observed by the slouching and tattered
personage who was in advance.

The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Élysées. The bust
of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along above the
parapet.

One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their agents
contains this article: "Always have on hand a hackney-coach, in case of
emergency."

While these two men were manouvring, each on his own side, with
irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on the quay
which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers arriving
from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. This inclined
plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die
of thirst, but the eye is gratified.

It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend this
inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the Champs-
Élysées, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return, much infested
with policemen, and where the other could easily exercise violence.

This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought to
Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated as "the house
of François I." A guard house is situated close at hand.

To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked did
not mount by the inclined plane for watering. He continued to advance
along the quay on the shore.

His position was visibly becoming critical.

What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?

Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay; there was
no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near the spot,
marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jéna, where the
bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue, and was
lost in the water. There he would inevitably find himself blocked
between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on his left and
in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.

It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight by a
heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some demolition
or other. But did this man hope to conceal himself effectually behind
that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? The expedient would have
been puerile. He certainly was not dreaming of such a thing. The
innocence of thieves does not extend to that point.

The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water's edge,
which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.

The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went
round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.

The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage of
this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. In a
few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. There
he halted in sheer amazement. The man whom he had been pursuing was no
longer there.

Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.

The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty paces
long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the wall of the
quay. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine without
being seen by the man who was following him. What had become of him?

The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore,
and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched, his eyes
searching. All at once he smote his brow. He had just perceived, at the
point where the land came to an end and the water began, a large iron
grating, low, arched, garnished with a heavy lock and with three massive
hinges. This grating, a sort of door pierced at the base of the quay,
opened on the river as well as on the shore. A blackish stream passed
under it. This stream discharged into the Seine.

Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted corridor
could be descried. The man folded his arms and stared at the grating
with an air of reproach.

As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook it,
it resisted solidly. It is probable that it had just been opened,
although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so rusty a
grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. This indicated
that the man before whom that door had just opened had not a hook but a
key.

This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to
move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:

"That is too much! A government key!"

Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole world of
interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented almost
ironically: "Come! Come! Come! Come!"

That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he should
see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on the watch
behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.

The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had, in its
turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. The coachman,
foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses' muzzles in the bag of
oats which is damp at the bottom, and which is so familiar to Parisians,
to whom, be it said in parenthesis, the Government sometimes applies it.
The rare passers-by on the Pont de Jéna turned their heads, before they
pursued their way, to take a momentary glance at these two motionless
items in the landscape, the man on the shore, the carriage on the quay.



CHAPTER IV--HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS

Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.

This march became more and more laborious. The level of these vaults
varies; the average height is about five feet, six inches, and has been
calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend
over, in order not to strike Marius against the vault; at every step he
had to bend, then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall. The
moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework
furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.
He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The intermittent
gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were
so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all the
rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was both
hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a
place full of water where a man cannot drink. His strength, which was
prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased
by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way,
nevertheless. Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength
decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase. Marius, who was,
perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh. Jean Valjean held
him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and so that
respiration could proceed as well as possible. Between his legs he felt
the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to such a
degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached
him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated
him.

It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the belt-
sewer.

He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening. He found himself,
all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach
the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The
Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.

At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other
subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of the
Abattoir, form a square. Between these four ways, a less sagacious man
would have remained undecided. Jean Valjean selected the broadest, that
is to say, the belt-sewer. But here the question again came up--should
he descend or ascend? He thought that the situation required haste, and
that he must now gain the Seine at any risk. In other terms, he must
descend. He turned to the left.

It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the belt-
sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy, the other
towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the subterranean
girdle of the Paris on the right bank. The Grand Sewer, which is, it
must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook of Ménilmontant,
terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack, that is to say, at its
ancient point of departure which was its source, at the foot of the
knoll of Ménilmontant. There is no direct communication with the branch
which collects the waters of Paris beginning with the Quartier
Popincourt, and which falls into the Seine through the Amelot sewer
above the ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the
collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Ménilmontant
itself, by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between
upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he
would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down with
fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall. He would
have been lost.

In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering
the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not
hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and by
taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the left,
then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian gallery, he
might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided that he did
not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the Bastille, he might
have attained the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But in order to
do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar with the enormous
madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications and in all its openings.
Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of that frightful drain
which he was traversing; and had any one asked him in what he was, he
would have answered: "In the night."

His instinct served him well. To descend was, in fact, possible safety.

He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in the
form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges and the
long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussée d'Antin.

A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch,
he halted. He was extremely weary. A passably large air-hole, probably
the man-hole in the Rue d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost
vivid. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother
would exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the
banquette of the sewer. Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the
wan light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His
eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a
painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead. A
clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his limbs were
cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth; his shirt had
thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his coat was chafing the
yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing aside the
garments with the tips of his fingers, laid his hand upon Marius'
breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt,
bandaged the young man's wounds as well as he was able and stopped the
flowing blood; then bending over Marius, who still lay unconscious and
almost without breathing, in that half light, he gazed at him with
inexpressible hatred.

On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things in his
pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding
evening, and Marius' pocketbook. He ate the roll and opened the
pocketbook. On the first page he found the four lines written by Marius.
The reader will recall them:

"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole, and
remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating in a low
tone: "Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand." He
replaced the pocketbook in Marius' pocket. He had eaten, his strength
had returned to him; he took Marius up once more upon his back, placed
the latter's head carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his
descent of the sewer.

The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley of
Ménilmontant, is about two leagues long. It is paved throughout a
notable portion of its extent.

This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we are
illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march, Jean
Valjean himself did not possess. Nothing told him what zone of the city
he was traversing, nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of
the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to
him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day
would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having become
intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost ceased, he
concluded that he was no longer under central Paris, and that he was
approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity of the outer
boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there are fewer houses and
streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The gloom deepened around Jean
Valjean. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in the
dark.

Suddenly this darkness became terrible.



CHAPTER V--IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS
WHICH IS TREACHEROUS

He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a
pavement under his feet, but only mud.

It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a
man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on the
beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past, he
has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like
pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-
lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes, as
soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The eye,
however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth and
tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes the
soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little cloud
of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the
passer-by.

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors
to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is
conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every
step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three
inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get his
bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared.
The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries
to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than
before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and
flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings
himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with
indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a
quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which
neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he
have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late,
the sand is above his knees.

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually
gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if
the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the neighborhood,
all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is condemned to that
terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible
to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come
to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which
drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at
every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air
of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces
a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the
horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on
the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and
sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment is the sepulchre which
assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards a
living man. Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. The
wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down, to climb; every movement
that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens himself up, he sinks; he
feels that he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the
clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in the sand up to
his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He
uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the
beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows
in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically;
the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand
reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries
aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand
closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above
the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and
disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is
swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck
elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man. The earth,
permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the
guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to
these treacheries.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also
possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain
of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the
ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,
having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of this
sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a
certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a
_fontis_, in the special tongue. What is a _fontis?_ It is the
quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the
earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked soil
is in a state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension
in soft medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The depth is
sometimes very great. Nothing can be more formidable than such an
encounter. If the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is
swallowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow.

Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the
earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of
the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,
those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried in
the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable
passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead of
all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation by
filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and
clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;
slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the
hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's
teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that
enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head!

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems his
atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in
shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.
But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme
floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is petty,
ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is
permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.
To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going
through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows
enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and
the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre
or a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the _fontis_ varied, as well as their length and their
density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.
Sometimes a _fontis_ was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or
ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost
solid, there almost liquid. In the Lunière fontis, it would have taken a
man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five
minutes by the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less,
according to its density. A child can escape where a man will perish.
The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every
sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath him began by flinging
away his sack of tools, or his back-basket, or his hod.

The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;
some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer
rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.
Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil
forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to
bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under
this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthénon,
obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Geneviève
hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the
mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,
like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was
developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the
cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be
promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior ravages
were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the
sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were
liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers
who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many names; among
others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a quagmire under
the man-hole of the Rue Carême-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this
Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last
grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents, in 1785,
the epoch when that cemetery expired.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we
have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida, where they
delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.
D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's, the Duchess de
Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which
he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis,
when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to
weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is no love
which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the
body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and
says: "Phew!"



CHAPTER VI--THE FONTIS

Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the
Champs-Élysées, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad
preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its
excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the
sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by a
stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata,
infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid that
the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des
Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone
sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in which we now see Jean
Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the
quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées as far as the
Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly six
months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,
particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than
unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a
half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.

The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour
of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent
sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.
Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated bottom
had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The obscurity
was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in a cavern of
night.

Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered
this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He must
pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying, and Jean
Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean advanced.
Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be very deep.
But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper. Soon he had
the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He walked on,
raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he could. The mire
now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer
retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could not, obviously,
uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a chance of
extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to advance,
supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.

The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was
only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which he
had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also an
obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of
expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had only
his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius. In the
old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.

He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the
water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had
seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a mask
floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of the
drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort and
launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point of
support. It was high time.

He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of
support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the
first step in a staircase leading back to life.

The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme
moment, was the beginning of the other water-shed of the pavement, which
had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water
like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault
and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting, partly
submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once on this
plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane and reached
the other side of the quagmire.

As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell
upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained
there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.

He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath
the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime,
and his soul filled with a strange light.



CHAPTER VII--ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS
DISEMBARKING

He set out on his way once more.

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to
have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had
exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause
for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once he
was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius'
position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his
vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred
paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with
the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the
turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes,
and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him,
he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was
good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly
perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt.
It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that
radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no
longer felt Marius' weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran
rather than walked. As he approached, the outlet became more and more
distinctly defined. It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault, which
gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed in as
the vault grew lower. The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel; a
faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries,
logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been
corrected.

Jean Valjean reached the outlet.

There he halted.

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all
appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone
jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous
brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in
the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those
prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore,
very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that
gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty.
On the right, down stream, the bridge of Jéna was discernible, on the
left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a
propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one of
the most solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces the Grand-
Caillou. Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the
grating.

It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening. The day was
declining.

Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the
vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the
bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move. The
grating did not stir. Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other,
in the hope that he might be able to tear away the least solid, and to
make of it a lever wherewith to raise the door or to break the lock. Not
a bar stirred. The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in their
sockets. No lever; no prying possible. The obstacle was invincible.
There was no means of opening the gate.

Must he then stop there? What was he to do? What was to become of him?
He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence the journey
which he had already taken. Besides, how was he to again traverse that
quagmire whence he had only extricated himself as by a miracle? And
after the quagmire, was there not the police patrol, which assuredly
could not be twice avoided? And then, whither was he to go? What
direction should he pursue? To follow the incline would not conduct him
to his goal. If he were to reach another outlet, he would find it
obstructed by a plug or a grating. Every outlet was, undoubtedly, closed
in that manner. Chance had unsealed the grating through which he had
entered, but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were barred.
He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.

All was over. Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless.
Exhaustion had ended in failure.

They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean
Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands and
quivering in the shadows. He turned his back to the grating, and fell
upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated, close to Marius,
who still made no movement, and with his head bent between his knees.
This was the last drop of anguish.

Of what was he thinking during this profound depression? Neither of
himself nor of Marius. He was thinking of Cosette.



CHAPTER VIII--THE TORN COAT-TAIL

In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a
low voice said to him:

"Half shares."

Some person in that gloom? Nothing so closely resembles a dream as
despair. Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. He had heard no
footsteps. Was it possible? He raised his eyes.

A man stood before him.

This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes in
his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach Jean
Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.

Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant. Unexpected as was this
encounter, this man was known to him. The man was Thénardier.

Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed
to alarms, and steeled to unforeseen shocks that must be promptly
parried, instantly regained possession of his presence of mind.
Moreover, the situation could not be made worse, a certain degree of
distress is no longer capable of a crescendo, and Thénardier himself
could add nothing to this blackness of this night.

A momentary pause ensued.

Thénardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead, formed
with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together, by screwing up
his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight contraction of the
mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is endeavoring
to recognize another man. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean, as we have
just stated, had his back turned to the light, and he was, moreover, so
disfigured, so bemired, so bleeding that he would have been
unrecognizable in full noonday. On the contrary, illuminated by the
light from the grating, a cellar light, it is true, livid, yet precise
in its lividness, Thénardier, as the energetic popular metaphor
expresses it, immediately "leaped into" Jean Valjean's eyes. This
inequality of conditions sufficed to assure some advantage to Jean
Valjean in that mysterious duel which was on the point of beginning
between the two situations and the two men. The encounter took place
between Jean Valjean veiled and Thénardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thénardier did not recognize
him.

They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though
taking each other's measure. Thénardier was the first to break the
silence.

"How are you going to manage to get out?"

Jean Valjean made no reply. Thénardier continued:

"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate. But still you must get
out of this."

"That is true," said Jean Valjean.

"Well, half shares then."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You have killed that man; that's all right. I have the key."

Thénardier pointed to Marius. He went on:

"I don't know you, but I want to help you. You must be a friend."

Jean Valjean began to comprehend. Thénardier took him for an assassin.

Thénardier resumed:

"Listen, comrade. You didn't kill that man without looking to see what
he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I'll open the door for you."

And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key, he added:

"Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made? Look here."

Jean Valjean "remained stupid"--the expression belongs to the elder
Corneille--to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was
real. It was providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel
springing from the earth in the form of Thénardier.

Thénardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his
blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.

"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."

"What is the rope for?"

"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. There's a
heap of rubbish."

"What am I to do with a stone?"

"Idiot, you'll want to sling that stiff into the river, you'll need a
stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water."

Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who does not occasionally
accept in this mechanical way.

Thénardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly occurred
to him.

"Ah, see here, comrade, how did you contrive to get out of that slough
yonder? I haven't dared to risk myself in it. Phew! you don't smell
good."

After a pause he added:

"I'm asking you questions, but you're perfectly right not to answer.
It's an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before the
examining magistrate. And then, when you don't talk at all, you run no
risk of talking too loud. That's no matter, as I can't see your face and
as I don't know your name, you are wrong in supposing that I don't know
who you are and what you want. I twig. You've broken up that gentleman a
bit; now you want to tuck him away somewhere. The river, that great
hider of folly, is what you want. I'll get you out of your scrape.
Helping a good fellow in a pinch is what suits me to a hair."

While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean's silence, he endeavored
to force him to talk. He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a
sight of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his
tone:

"Apropos of that quagmire, you're a hearty animal. Why didn't you toss
the man in there?"

Jean Valjean preserved silence.

Thénardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat to the
level of his Adam's apple, a gesture which completes the capable air of
a serious man:

"After all, you acted wisely. The workmen, when they come to-morrow to
stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned there,
and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by straw, to
pick up the scent and reach you. Some one has passed through the sewer.
Who? Where did he get out? Was he seen to come out? The police are full
of cleverness. The sewer is treacherous and tells tales of you. Such a
find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people make use of the
sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to everybody. The
river is the true grave. At the end of a month they fish up your man in
the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that? It's
carrion! Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries. You
have done well."

The more loquacious Thénardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.

Again Thénardier shook him by the shoulder.

"Now let's settle this business. Let's go shares. You have seen my key,
show me your money."

Thénardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet
amicable.

There was one singular circumstance; Thénardier's manners were not
simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease; while affecting
an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time he laid his finger on
his mouth, and muttered, "hush!" It was difficult to divine why. There
was no one there except themselves. Jean Valjean thought that other
ruffians might possibly be concealed in some nook, not very far off, and
that Thénardier did not care to share with them.

Thénardier resumed:

"Let's settle up. How much did the stiff have in his bags?"

Jean Valjean searched his pockets.

It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some money
about him. The mournful life of expedients to which he had been
condemned imposed this as a law upon him. On this occasion, however, he
had been caught unprepared. When donning his uniform of a National
Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten, dolefully absorbed
as he was, to take his pocket-book. He had only some small change in his
fob. He turned out his pocket, all soaked with ooze, and spread out on
the banquette of the vault one louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and
five or six large sous.

Thénardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist of the
neck.

"You knocked him over cheap," said he.

He set to feeling the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius, with the
greatest familiarity. Jean Valjean, who was chiefly concerned in keeping
his back to the light, let him have his way.

While handling Marius' coat, Thénardier, with the skill of a pickpocket,
and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip which he
concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel of stuff
might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man and the
assassin. However, he found no more than the thirty francs.

"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."

And, forgetting his motto: "half shares," he took all.

He hesitated a little over the large sous. After due reflection, he took
them also, muttering:

"Never mind! You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."

That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.

"Now, my friend, you must leave. It's like the fair here, you pay when
you go out. You have paid, now clear out."

And he began to laugh.

Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in making
some other man than himself emerge from that portal, the pure and
disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin? We may be permitted to
doubt this.

Thénardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then
he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted, making Jean
Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger on his mouth,
and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense; his inspection
finished, he placed the key in the lock. The bolt slipped back and the
gate swung open. It neither grated nor squeaked. It moved very softly.

It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled, were in
the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed. This softness
was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings, silent
entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread of crime.

The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band. This
taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.

Thénardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient space
for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again, gave the key a
double turn in the lock and plunged back into the darkness, without
making any more noise than a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet
paws of a tiger.

A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into the
invisibility.

Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.



CHAPTER IX--MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER,
THE EFFECT OF BEING DEAD

He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.

They were in the open air!

The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him. The pure, healthful,
living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him. Everywhere
around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has
set in an unclouded azure sky. Twilight had descended; night was drawing
on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a mantle of
darkness that they may escape from an anguish. The sky presented itself
in all directions like an enormous calm. The river flowed to his feet
with the sound of a kiss. The aerial dialogue of the nests bidding each
other good night in the elms of the Champs-Élysées was audible. A few
stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to
revery alone, formed imperceptible little splendors amid the immensity.
Evening was unfolding over the head of Jean Valjean all the sweetness of
the infinite.

It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no.
Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible to lose
oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient daylight to
permit of recognition at close quarters.

For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that
august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come to men;
suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is
eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night; and,
beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which is
illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars. Jean Valjean could not
refrain from contemplating that vast, clear shadow which rested over
him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea of ecstasy and prayer in the
majestic silence of the eternal heavens. Then he bent down swiftly to
Marius, as though the sentiment of duty had returned to him, and,
dipping up water in the hollow of his hand, he gently sprinkled a few
drops on the latter's face. Marius' eyelids did not open; but his half-
open mouth still breathed.

Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once
more, when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment,
such as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does
not see.

We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone is
familiar.

He turned round.

Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short while
before.

A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms, and
bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head was
visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean Valjean
was crouching over Marius.

With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition. An
ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a
thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon. Jean Valjean recognized
Javert.

The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thénardier's pursuer was no other
than Javert. Javert, after his unlooked-for escape from the barricade,
had betaken himself to the prefecture of police, had rendered a verbal
account to the Prefect in person in a brief audience, had then
immediately gone on duty again, which implied--the note, the reader will
recollect, which had been captured on his person--a certain surveillance
of the shore on the right bank of the Seine near the Champs-Élysées,
which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of the police.
There he had caught sight of Thénardier and had followed him. The reader
knows the rest.

Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly
opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thénardier's part.
Thénardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there; the man spied
upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was necessary to fling a
bone to that sleuth-hound. An assassin, what a godsend! Such an
opportunity must never be allowed to slip. Thénardier, by putting Jean
Valjean outside in his stead, provided a prey for the police, forced
them to relinquish his scent, made them forget him in a bigger
adventure, repaid Javert for his waiting, which always flatters a spy,
earned thirty francs, and counted with certainty, so far as he himself
was concerned, on escaping with the aid of this diversion.

Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.

These two encounters, this falling one after the other, from Thénardier
upon Javert, was a rude shock.

Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated, no longer
looked like himself. He did not unfold his arms, he made sure of his
bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement, and said in a curt,
calm voice:

"Who are you?"

"I."

"Who is 'I'?"

"Jean Valjean."

Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined
his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of Jean Valjean,
which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices, scrutinized him,
and recognized him. Their faces almost touched. Javert's look was
terrible.

Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert's grasp, like a lion
submitting to the claws of a lynx.

"Inspector Javert," said he, "you have me in your power. Moreover, I
have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. I did not
give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. Take me.
Only grant me one favor."

Javert did not appear to hear him. He kept his eyes riveted on Jean
Valjean. His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards towards his
nose, a sign of savage revery. At length he released Jean Valjean,
straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon
again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than uttered
this question:

"What are you doing here? And who is this man?"

He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as _thou_.

Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse
Javert:

"It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. Dispose of me
as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. That is all that I
ask of you."

Javert's face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to
think him capable of making a concession. Nevertheless, he did not say
"no."

Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which he
moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius' blood-
stained brow.

"This man was at the barricade," said he in a low voice and as though
speaking to himself. "He is the one they called Marius."

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to
everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to
die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows
leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

He seized Marius' hand and felt his pulse.

"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.

"He is a dead man," said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied:

"No. Not yet."

"So you have brought him thither from the barricade?" remarked Javert.

His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to
insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to
even notice Jean Valjean's silence after his question.

Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. He resumed:

"He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his
grandfather. I do not recollect his name."

Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius' coat, pulled out his pocket-book, opened
it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it out to Javert.

There was still sufficient light to admit of reading. Besides this,
Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds.
He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:
"Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du Calvaire, No. 6."

Then he exclaimed: "Coachman!"

The reader will remember that the hackney-coach was waiting in case of
need.

Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.

A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined plane
of the watering-place, was on the shore. Marius was laid upon the back
seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat beside Jean Valjean.

The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the
quays in the direction of the Bastille.

They quitted the quays and entered the streets. The coachman, a black
form on his box, whipped up his thin horses. A glacial silence reigned
in the carriage. Marius, motionless, with his body resting in the
corner, and his head drooping on his breast, his arms hanging, his legs
stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of
shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that vehicle full of night, whose
interior, every time that it passed in front of a street lantern,
appeared to be turned lividly wan, as by an intermittent flash of
lightning, chance had united and seemed to be bringing face to face the
three forms of tragic immobility, the corpse, the spectre, and the
statue.



CHAPTER X--RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE

At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius'
hair.

Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6, Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire.

Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance of the
number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker of beaten
iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat and a satyr
confronting each other, he gave a violent peal. The gate opened a little
way and Javert gave it a push. The porter half made his appearance
yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle in his hand.

Everyone in the house was asleep. People go to bed betimes in the
Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt. This good, old
quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as
children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads hastily
under their coverlet.

In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius out of
the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits, and the
coachman under the knees.

As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the
latter's clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast, and assured
himself that his heart was still beating. It was even beating a little
less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage had brought about a
certain fresh access of life.

Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the
presence of the porter of a factious person.

"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"

"Here. What do you want with him?"

"His son is brought back."

"His son?" said the porter stupidly.

"He is dead."

Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom
the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his
head that this was not so.

The porter did not appear to understand either Javert's words or Jean
Valjean's sign.

Javert continued:

"He went to the barricade, and here he is."

"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.

"He has got himself killed. Go waken his father."

The porter did not stir.

"Go along with you!" repeated Javert.

And he added:

"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."

For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically
classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance, and each
contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were arranged in
drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in variable
quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.

The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette;
Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.

As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he would
hear about the matter early enough in any case.

Marius was carried up to the first floor, without any one in the other
parts of the house being aware of the fact, and deposited on an old sofa
in M. Gillenormand's antechamber; and while Basque went in search of a
physician, and while Nicolette opened the linen-presses, Jean Valjean
felt Javert touch him on the shoulder. He understood and descended the
stairs, having behind him the step of Javert who was following him.

The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their
arrival, in terrified somnolence.

They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted his box.

"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."

"What is it?" demanded Javert roughly.

"Let me go home for one instant. Then you shall do whatever you like
with me."

Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin drawn back into
the collar of his great-coat, then he lowered the glass and front:

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7."



CHAPTER XI--CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE

They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their ride.

What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn
Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some other
useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures. As for
himself, so far as he was personally concerned, all was over; he had
been seized by Javert and had not resisted; any other man than himself
in like situation would, perhaps, have had some vague thoughts connected
with the rope which Thénardier had given him, and of the bars of the
first cell that he should enter; but, let us impress it upon the reader,
after the Bishop, there had existed in Jean Valjean a profound
hesitation in the presence of any violence, even when directed against
himself.

Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which may
contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean
Valjean.

At the entrance to the Rue de l'Homme Armé, the carriage halted, the way
being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles. Javert and Jean
Valjean alighted.

The coachman humbly represented to "monsieur l'Inspecteur," that the
Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood of the
assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin. That is the way he
understood it. He added that an indemnity was due him. At the same time,
drawing his certificate book from his pocket, he begged the inspector to
have the goodness to write him "a bit of an attestation."

Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him, and
said:

"How much do you want, including your time of waiting and the drive?"

"It comes to seven hours and a quarter," replied the man, "and my velvet
was perfectly new. Eighty francs, Mr. Inspector."

Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.

Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert's intention to conduct him on
foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives,
both of which are close at hand.

They entered the street. It was deserted as usual. Javert followed Jean
Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.

"It is well," said Javert. "Go upstairs."

He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an
effort in speaking in this manner:

"I will wait for you here."

Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This mode of procedure was but little in
accord with Javert's habits. However, he could not be greatly surprised
that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the
confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of
its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender
himself and to make an end of it. He pushed open the door, entered the
house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord
from his couch: "It is I!" and ascended the stairs.

On arriving at the first floor, he paused. All sorrowful roads have
their stations. The window on the landing-place, which was a sash-
window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its light
from without and had a view on the street. The street-lantern, situated
directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus effected some
economy in illumination.

Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,
thrust his head out of this window. He leaned out over the street. It is
short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. Jean Valjean was
overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer any one there.

Javert had taken his departure.



CHAPTER XII--THE GRANDFATHER

Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he
still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been
placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened
thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.

Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
incapable of doing anything but saying: "Heavens! is it possible?" At
times she added: "Everything will be covered with blood." When her first
horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation penetrated
her mind, and took form in the exclamation: "It was bound to end in this
way!" She did not go so far as: "I told you so!" which is customary on
this sort of occasion. At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been
prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and after having
found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded man had no very
deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the corners of his lips
proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat on the bed, without
a pillow, with his head on the same level as his body, and even a trifle
lower, and with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing
Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her beads in her own
chamber.

The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by
the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a
hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not
dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation
of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms
had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his face;
but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the result of
these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or
would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be decided. A grave
symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always
recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted
by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the barricade had protected the
lower part of the body from injury.

Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for the
time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside the
bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical
instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with
cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter, candle
in hand, lighted them.

The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a
negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which
he had inwardly addressed to himself.

A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the doctor
with himself.

At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly
touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the end
of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.

This was the grandfather.

The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep on
the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the
evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in
the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through
sheer fatigue.

Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined the drawing-
room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken, the noise
had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw under his
door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way thither.

He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering, his
body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as
destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom
who is gazing into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white with
a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid lips,
stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds, motionless
and brilliantly lighted up.

The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneæ were yellow on account of his
great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole face
assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell
pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed
by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which quivered
all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing, through the
opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs, all
bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:

"Marius!"

"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to the
barricade, and...."

"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Ah! The rascal!"

Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.

"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He
is dead, is he not?"

The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.

M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.

"He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on the
barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You blood-
drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he is
dead!"

He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to the
night:

"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at
that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I
had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had
only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and that
I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing what
to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but to
return and to say: 'It is I,' and you would have been the master of the
house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have done
whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew
that well, and you said:

"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what
I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed
then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening."

The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted
Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. The
grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:

"I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of
Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that is
to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You will
have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions,
progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press,
and this is the way that your children will be brought home to you. Ah!
Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A barricade! Ah, the
scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe? Oh! I know you well.
I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to tell you. You are
wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into a rage against a
dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I have reared. I
was already old while he was very young. He played in the Tuileries
garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and in order that
the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes that he made in
the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he exclaimed: Down with
Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of mine. He was all rosy
and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever noticed that all little
children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son of one of those brigands
of the Loire, but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes. I
remember when he was no higher than that. He could not manage to
pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was so sweet and
indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird chirping. I
remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese, people formed a
circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so handsome, was that
child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I talked in a deep
voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it
was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he entered my room, I
grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot
defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you
fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a
cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes, your
Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who have killed him?
This cannot be allowed to pass in this fashion."

He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom
the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The
old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the
passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
agony:

"Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!"

Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions
should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the
grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his
voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other
side of an abyss:

"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And to
think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been
delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing
himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down
like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
dance at the Chaumière, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What's
the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two
funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself arranged
like this for the sake of General Lamarque's handsome eyes! What had
that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box! To get
oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn't enough to drive any one
mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning his
head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That's the
way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-adays. Perish in
your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that is what I
was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old, I am a
hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought, by
rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So all
is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale ammonia
and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you fool of
a doctor! Come, he's dead, completely dead. I know all about it, I am
dead myself too. He hasn't done things by half. Yes, this age is
infamous, infamous and that's what I think of you, of your ideas, of
your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your
scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all the
revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening the
flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting
yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do
you understand, you assassin?"

At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still
dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.

"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! My little Marius! my child! my
well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,
thanks!"

And he fell fainting.



BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED



CHAPTER I

Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme Armé.

He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and
likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind his
back.

Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon's attitudes, only that
which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the chest;
that which is expressive of uncertainty--with the hands behind the back-
-had been unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his whole
person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.

He plunged into the silent streets.

Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.

He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,
skirted the quay, passed the Grève, and halted at some distance from the
post of the Place du Châtelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame.
There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand,
and the Quai de la Mégisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the
Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid.

This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more
dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by
the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. The two bridges,
situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water hurries in
formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible waves;
it accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles of the
bridges as though in an effort to pluck them up with great liquid ropes.
Men who fall in there never re-appear; the best of swimmers are drowned
there.

Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both
hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance of
his whiskers, he meditated.

A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the
depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine himself.

Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.

For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled; that
brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that
crystal was clouded. Javert felt duty divided within his conscience, and
he could not conceal the fact from himself. When he had so unexpectedly
encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been in
him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his prey, and of the
dog who finds his master again.

He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld
two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known
more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that
the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight lines
excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?

His situation was indescribable.

To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it; to
be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice, and to
repay his service with another service; to allow it to be said to him,
"Go," and to say to the latter in his turn: "Be free"; to sacrifice to
personal motives duty, that general obligation, and to be conscious, in
those personal motives, of something that was also general, and,
perchance, superior, to betray society in order to remain true to his
conscience; that all these absurdities should be realized and should
accumulate upon him,--this was what overwhelmed him.

One thing had amazed him,--this was that Jean Valjean should have done
him a favor, and one thing petrified him,--that he, Javert, should have
done Jean Valjean a favor.

Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no
longer find his bearings.

What was he to do now? To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad; to leave Jean
Valjean at liberty was bad. In the first case, the man of authority fell
lower than the man of the galleys, in the second, a convict rose above
the law, and set his foot upon it. In both cases, dishonor for him,
Javert. There was disgrace in any resolution at which he might arrive.
Destiny has some extremities which rise perpendicularly from the
impossible, and beyond which life is no longer anything but a precipice.
Javert had reached one of those extremities.

One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. The very
violence of all these conflicting emotions forced him to it. Thought was
something to which he was unused, and which was peculiarly painful.

In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion;
and it irritated him to have that within him.

Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of his
functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue;
thought on the day which had just passed was a torture. Nevertheless, it
was indispensable that he should take a look into his conscience, after
such shocks, and render to himself an account of himself.

What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to
decide, contrary to all the regulations of the police, contrary to the
whole social and judicial organization, contrary to the entire code,
upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his own affairs
for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? Every time
that he brought himself face to face with this deed without a name which
he had committed, he trembled from head to foot. Upon what should he
decide? One sole resource remained to him; to return in all haste to the
Rue de l'Homme Armé, and commit Jean Valjean to prison. It was clear
that that was what he ought to do. He could not.

Something barred his way in that direction.

Something? What? Is there in the world, anything outside of the
tribunals, executory sentences, the police and the authorities? Javert
was overwhelmed.

A galley-slave sacred! A convict who could not be touched by the law!
And that the deed of Javert!

Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to
proceed with vigor, the man made to submit,--that these two men who were
both the things of the law, should have come to such a pass, that both
of them had set themselves above the law? What then! such enormities
were to happen and no one was to be punished! Jean Valjean, stronger
than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty, and he, Javert,
was to go on eating the government's bread!

His revery gradually became terrible.

He might, athwart this revery, have also reproached himself on the
subject of that insurgent who had been taken to the Rue des Filles-du-
Calvaire; but he never even thought of that. The lesser fault was lost
in the greater. Besides, that insurgent was, obviously, a dead man, and,
legally, death puts an end to pursuit.

Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit.

Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as
points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence
of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him.
Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had formerly treated as
lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M. Madeleine re-
appeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superposed in
such fashion that they now formed but one, which was venerable. Javert
felt that something terrible was penetrating his soul--admiration for a
convict. Respect for a galley-slave--is that a possible thing? He
shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In vain did he struggle,
he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that
wretch. This was odious.

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict,
returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity
to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy,
saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more
nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit
to himself that this monster existed.

Things could not go on in this manner.

Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded without
resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous
hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. Twenty times, as he
sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger had
roared within him. A score of times he had been tempted to fling himself
upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say, to
arrest him. What more simple, in fact? To cry out at the first post that
they passed:--"Here is a fugitive from justice, who has broken his ban!"
to summon the gendarmes and say to them: "This man is yours!" then to go
off, leaving that condemned man there, to ignore the rest and not to
meddle further in the matter. This man is forever a prisoner of the law;
the law may do with him what it will. What could be more just? Javert
had said all this to himself; he had wished to pass beyond, to act, to
apprehend the man, and then, as at present, he had not been able to do
it; and every time that his arm had been raised convulsively towards
Jean Valjean's collar, his hand had fallen back again, as beneath an
enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought he had heard a voice,
a strange voice crying to him:--"It is well. Deliver up your savior.
Then have the basin of Pontius Pilate brought and wash your claws."

Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean
glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.

A convict was his benefactor!

But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had the
right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that
right. It would have been better to summon the other insurgents to his
succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by force.

His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty. He felt that he had been
uprooted. The code was no longer anything more than a stump in his hand.
He had to deal with scruples of an unknown species. There had taken
place within him a sentimental revelation entirely distinct from legal
affirmation, his only standard of measurement hitherto. To remain in his
former uprightness did not suffice. A whole order of unexpected facts
had cropped up and subjugated him. A whole new world was dawning on his
soul: kindness accepted and repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence,
violences committed by pity on austerity, respect for persons, no more
definitive condemnation, no more conviction, the possibility of a tear
in the eye of the law, no one knows what justice according to God,
running in inverse sense to justice according to men. He perceived amid
the shadows the terrible rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified
and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.

He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional cases,
that authority might be put out of countenance, that the rule might be
inadequate in the presence of a fact, that everything could not be
framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen compelled
obedience, that the virtue of a convict might set a snare for the virtue
of the functionary, that destiny did indulge in such ambushes, and he
reflected with despair that he himself had not even been fortified
against a surprise.

He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist. This convict had
been good. And he himself, unprecedented circumstance, had just been
good also. So he was becoming depraved.

He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.

Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was
to be irreproachable.

Now, he had just failed in this.

How had he come to such a pass? How had all this happened? He could not
have told himself. He clasped his head in both hands, but in spite of
all that he could do, he could not contrive to explain it to himself.

He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring Jean
Valjean to the law of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which
he, Javert, was the slave. Not for a single instant while he held him in
his grasp had he confessed to himself that he entertained the idea of
releasing him. It was, in some sort, without his consciousness, that his
hand had relaxed and had let him go free.

All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put
questions to himself, and made replies to himself, and his replies
frightened him. He asked himself: "What has that convict done, that
desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution, and who has
had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself, and who owed
it both to his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me my life, in
showing mercy upon me? His duty? No. Something more. And I in showing
mercy upon him in my turn--what have I done? My duty? No. Something
more. So there is something beyond duty?" Here he took fright; his
balance became disjointed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the
other rose heavenward, and Javert was no less terrified by the one which
was on high than by the one which was below. Without being in the least
in the world what is called Voltairian or a philosopher, or incredulous,
being, on the contrary, respectful by instinct, towards the established
church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; order
was his dogma, and sufficed for him; ever since he had attained to man's
estate and the rank of a functionary, he had centred nearly all his
religion in the police. Being,--and here we employ words without the
least irony and in their most serious acceptation, being, as we have
said, a spy as other men are priests. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; up
to that day he had never dreamed of that other superior, God.

This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt
embarrassed by him. This unforeseen presence threw him off his bearings;
he did not know what to do with this superior, he, who was not ignorant
of the fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow, that he must
not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the presence of a
superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no other resource
than that of handing in his resignation.

But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?

However things might stand,--and it was to this point that he reverted
constantly,--one fact dominated everything else for him, and that was,
that he had just committed a terrible infraction of the law. He had just
shut his eyes on an escaped convict who had broken his ban. He had just
set a galley-slave at large. He had just robbed the laws of a man who
belonged to them. That was what he had done. He no longer understood
himself. The very reasons for his action escaped him; only their vertigo
was left with him. Up to that moment he had lived with that blind faith
which gloomy probity engenders. This faith had quitted him, this probity
had deserted him. All that he had believed in melted away. Truths which
he did not wish to recognize were besieging him, inexorably. Henceforth,
he must be a different man. He was suffering from the strange pains of a
conscience abruptly operated on for the cataract. He saw that which it
was repugnant to him to behold. He felt himself emptied, useless, put
out of joint with his past life, turned out, dissolved. Authority was
dead within him. He had no longer any reason for existing.

A terrible situation! to be touched.

To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in one
piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact
that one cherishes beneath one's breast of bronze something absurd and
disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To come to the pass of
returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day
that that good is evil! to be the watch-dog, and to lick the intruder's
hand! to be ice and melt! to be the pincers and to turn into a hand! to
suddenly feel one's fingers opening! to relax one's grip,--what a
terrible thing!

The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating!

To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not
infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said
when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated
with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but
men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in
the immense blue pane of the firmament!

That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear
conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which
had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was breaking
against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of order, that
the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its
rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable,
the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect,
could bend! that there should exist for the locomotive a road to
Damascus!

God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the
false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to
remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable
absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, humanity which
cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that splendid
phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert
understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it to
himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that
incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his brain bursting.

He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. In all
this he perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. It seemed
to him that, henceforth, his respiration was repressed forever. He was
not accustomed to having something unknown hanging over his head.

Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a
smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible,
nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined, regularly disposed,
linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed, fully provided
for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no
dizziness in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except
from below. The irregular, the unforeseen, the disordered opening of
chaos, the possible slip over a precipice--this was the work of the
lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw
himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented
apparition: a gulf on high.

What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted,
absolutely! In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was
giving way! What! the defect in society's armor could be discovered by a
magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could suddenly
find himself caught between two crimes--the crime of allowing a man to
escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not settled in the
orders given by the State to the functionary! There might be blind
alleys in duty! What,--all this was real! was it true that an ex-
ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise erect and end by
being in the right? Was this credible? were there cases in which the law
should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?--Yes,
that was the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and Javert had
touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he had taken part in
it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual facts could
reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would confine
themselves to being proofs of the law; facts--it is God who sends them.
Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on high?

Thus,--and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion of
consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained this
impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the
universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple and
terrible feature,--thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due
to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy, the
government, prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal
infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest
political and civil security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all
this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy
of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog
providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at
the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a
halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had
come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.

Was this to be endured? No.

A violent state, if ever such existed. There were only two ways of
escaping from it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore
to his cell the convict from the galleys. The other....

Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time, betook
himself, with a firm tread, towards the station-house indicated by a
lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Châtelet.

On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police, and
he entered. Policemen recognize each other by the very way in which they
open the door of a station-house. Javert mentioned his name, showed his
card to the sergeant, and seated himself at the table of the post on
which a candle was burning. On a table lay a pen, a leaden inkstand and
paper, provided in the event of possible reports and the orders of the
night patrols. This table, still completed by its straw-seated chair, is
an institution; it exists in all police stations; it is invariably
ornamented with a box-wood saucer filled with sawdust and a wafer box of
cardboard filled with red wafers, and it forms the lowest stage of
official style. It is there that the literature of the State has its
beginning.

Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is what
he wrote:


A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.


"In the first place:  I beg Monsieur le Préfet to cast his eyes on this.

"Secondly:  prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off their
shoes and stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are being
searched.  Many of them cough on their return to prison. This entails
hospital expenses.

"Thirdly:  the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police
agents from distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions,
it is requisite that at least two agents should never lose sight of each
other, so that, in case one agent should, for any cause, grow weak in
his service, the other may supervise him and take his place.

"Fourthly:  it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison
of the Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair, even by
paying for it.

"Fifthly:  in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen,
so that the canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand.

"Sixthly:  the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other prisoners
to the parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous to call his name
distinctly.  This is a theft.

"Seventhly:  for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the weaving
shop; this is an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth is none the
worse for it.

"Eighthly:  it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be obliged to
traverse the boys' court in order to reach the parlor of Sainte-Marie-
l'Égyptienne.

"Ninthly:  it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard relating
in the court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put by the
magistrates to prisoners.  For a gendarme, who should be sworn to
secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination room is a grave
disorder.

"Tenthly:  Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat; but
it is bad to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap of the
secret cells.  This is unworthy of the Conciergerie of a great
civilization."

Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography,
not omitting a single comma, and making the paper screech under his pen.
Below the last line he signed:

"JAVERT, "Inspector of the 1st class. "The Post of the Place du
Châtelet. "June 7th, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning."

Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed
it, wrote on the back: _Note for the administration_, left it on the
table, and quitted the post. The glazed and grated door fell to behind
him.

Again he traversed the Place du Châtelet diagonally, regained the quay,
and returned with automatic precision to the very point which he had
abandoned a quarter of an hour previously, leaned on his elbows and
found himself again in the same attitude on the same paving-stone of the
parapet. He did not appear to have stirred.

The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows
midnight. A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. Not a single light
burned in the houses of the city; no one was passing; all of the streets
and quays which could be seen were deserted; Notre-Dame and the towers
of the Court-House seemed features of the night. A street lantern
reddened the margin of the quay. The outlines of the bridges lay
shapeless in the mist one behind the other. Recent rains had swollen the
river.

The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, situated
precisely over the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above that
formidable spiral of whirlpools which loose and knot themselves again
like an endless screw.

Javert bent his head and gazed. All was black. Nothing was to be
distinguished. A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not be
seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared, and
undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one
knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and
all became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there.
What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay,
abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from
sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was
to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of the
wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The
flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering
of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the
imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow was full of
horror.

Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening
of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled
attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed
it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which a
belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,
appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the
Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the
shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret
of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath
the water.



BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER



CHAPTER I--IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN

Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur
Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.

Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader
has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.

Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who was
occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and
damaged travellers on the highway.

Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in
the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to
find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he
lived to search the pockets of passers-by.

Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped
neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette's
garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his
drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able
to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a
man who had been robbed. An order of _nolle prosequi_, founded on his
well authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush,
had set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to
his road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative supervision,
broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast mien, in a very
pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but he was addicted
none the less tenderly to the wine which had recently saved him.

As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after
his return to his road-mender's turf-thatched cot, here it is:

One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his
work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught
sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone he
saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that
distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.
Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a
defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in conflict
with legal order.

"Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?" he said to
himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man
resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.

However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did not
belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot,
evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that hour.
He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great distance;
for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. From Paris, no doubt. Why was
he in these woods? why was he there at such an hour? what had he come
there for?

Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of ransacking his memory,
he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before, had a
similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him the effect
that he might well be this very individual.

"By the deuce," said Boulatruelle, "I'll find him again. I'll discover
the parish of that parishioner. This prowler of Patron-Minette has a
reason, and I'll know it. People can't have secrets in my forest if I
don't have a finger in the pie."

He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.

"There now," he grumbled, "is something that will search the earth and a
man."

And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line of
march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow, and
set out across the thickets.

When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already
beginning to break, came to his assistance. Footprints stamped in the
sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed, young branches
in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening themselves up
again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a pretty woman who
stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him a sort of track. He
followed it, then lost it. Time was flying. He plunged deeper into the
woods and came to a sort of eminence. An early huntsman who was passing
in the distance along a path, whistling the air of Guillery, suggested
to him the idea of climbing a tree. Old as he was, he was agile. There
stood close at hand a beech-tree of great size, worthy of Tityrus and of
Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle ascended the beech as high as he was able.

The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side
where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly
caught sight of his man.

Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.

The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near
a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with a
sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one
which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones, destined
for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years
ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of stones in
longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary expedients.
What a reason for lasting!

Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize the
beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.

It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which
indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an
hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,
very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was
necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which
ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the
best road.

"Let's take to the wolves' Rue de Rivoli," said he.

Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion
guilty of the fault of going straight.

He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.

He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.

At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to
traverse.

At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,
sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.

There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of
stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.

As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.

And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of
the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,
abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.

The hole was empty.

"Thief!" shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.



CHAPTER II--MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC
WAR

For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he
lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral
symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by
the wounds themselves.

He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity
of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of
the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds
being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill the
sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of
weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.

"Above all things," he repeated, "let the wounded man be subjected to no
emotion." The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult, the
fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been
invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet "as big as the
ceiling," as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty that
the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the
gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in
despair at his grandson's pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor
dead.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with
white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--came to
inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the
dressings.

Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the
sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a
dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.
Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months more
stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up by
the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like that
which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings indefinitely, to
the great annoyance of the sick person.

However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him from
all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public
character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the present
state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they are
followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.

Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors
to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public
opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded
were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception
of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the
councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in
peace.

M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then
through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his
passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big arm-chair
carried to Marius' bedside; he required his daughter to take the finest
linen in the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the
fine linen, while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.
M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him, that for the
preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good as coarse linen, nor
new linen as old linen. He was present at all the dressings of the
wounds from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself.
When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said: "Aïe! aïe!"
Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile palsy,
offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. He overwhelmed the
doctor with questions. He did not observe that he asked the same ones
over and over again.

On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of
danger, the good man was in a delirium. He made his porter a present of
three louis. That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced a
gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he sang the
following song:


"Jeanne est née à Fougère     "Amour, tu vis en elle; Vrai nid d'une
bergère;       Car c'est dans sa prunelle J'adore son jupon,
Que tu mets ton carquois. Fripon.                       Narquois!

"Moi, je la chante, et j'aime, Plus que Diane même, Jeanne et ses durs
tetons Bretons."<a href="#linknote-61" name="linknoteref-61"
id="linknoteref-61">61</a>

Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through the
half-open door, made sure that he was praying.

Up to that time, he had not believed in God.

At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more and more
pronounced, the grandfather raved. He executed a multitude of mechanical
actions full of joy; he ascended and descended the stairs, without
knowing why. A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning at
receiving a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to her.
The husband made a jealous scene. M. Gillenormand tried to draw
Nicolette upon his knees. He called Marius, "M. le Baron." He shouted:
"Long live the Republic!"

Every moment, he kept asking the doctor: "Is he no longer in danger?" He
gazed upon Marius with the eyes of a grandmother. He brooded over him
while he ate. He no longer knew himself, he no longer rendered himself
an account of himself. Marius was the master of the house, there was
abdication in his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson.

In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most venerable of
children. In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,
he stepped behind him to smile. He was content, joyous, delighted,
charming, young. His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay
radiance of his visage. When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is
adorable. There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.

As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care for him,
he had but one fixed idea: Cosette.

After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again pronounce
her name, and it might have been supposed that he no longer thought of
her. He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.

He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the Rue
de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows that were
almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Éponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf,
the Thénardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled with the smoke of
the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through that
adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle in a tempest; he
understood nothing connected with his own life, he did not know how nor
by whom he had been saved, and no one of those around him knew this; all
that they had been able to tell him was, that he had been brought home
at night in a hackney-coach, to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; past,
present, future were nothing more to him than the mist of a vague idea;
but in that fog there was one immovable point, one clear and precise
outline, something made of granite, a resolution, a will; to find
Cosette once more. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the
idea of Cosette. He had decreed in his heart that he would not accept
the one without the other, and he was immovably resolved to exact of any
person whatever, who should desire to force him to live,--from his
grandfather, from fate, from hell,--the restitution of his vanished
Eden.

He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.

Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and was but little
softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of his grandfather. In the
first place, he was not in the secret; then, in his reveries of an
invalid, which were still feverish, possibly, he distrusted this
tenderness as a strange and novel thing, which had for its object his
conquest. He remained cold. The grandfather absolutely wasted his poor
old smile. Marius said to himself that it was all right so long as he,
Marius, did not speak, and let things take their course; but that when
it became a question of Cosette, he would find another face, and that
his grandfather's true attitude would be unmasked. Then there would be
an unpleasant scene; a recrudescence of family questions, a
confrontation of positions, every sort of sarcasm and all manner of
objections at one and the same time, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune,
poverty, a stone about his neck, the future. Violent resistance;
conclusion: a refusal. Marius stiffened himself in advance.

And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers of his
memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past, Colonel
Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand and him,
Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness to expect from a
person who had been so unjust and so hard to his father. And with
health, there returned to him a sort of harshness towards his
grandfather. The old man was gently pained by this. M. Gillenormand,
without however allowing it to appear, observed that Marius, ever since
the latter had been brought back to him and had regained consciousness,
had not once called him father. It is true that he did not say
"monsieur" to him; but he contrived not to say either the one or the
other, by means of a certain way of turning his phrases. Obviously, a
crisis was approaching.

As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished before giving
battle, by way of proving himself. This is called "feeling the ground."
One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke slightingly of
the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen into his hands,
and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton, Saint-Juste and
Robespierre.--"The men of '93 were giants," said Marius with severity.
The old man held his peace, and uttered not a sound during the remainder
of that day.

Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible grandfather of
his early years, interpreted this silence as a profound concentration of
wrath, augured from it a hot conflict, and augmented his preparations
for the fray in the inmost recesses of his mind.

He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his bandages,
dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all the wounds which
he had left, and would reject all food. His wounds were his munitions of
war. He would have Cosette or die.

He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience of the sick.

That moment arrived.



CHAPTER III--MARIUS ATTACKED

One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was putting in order the
phials and cups on the marble of the commode, bent over Marius and said
to him in his tenderest accents: "Look here, my little Marius, if I were
in your place, I would eat meat now in preference to fish. A fried sole
is excellent to begin a convalescence with, but a good cutlet is needed
to put a sick man on his feet."

Marius, who had almost entirely recovered his strength, collected the
whole of it, drew himself up into a sitting posture, laid his two
clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his grandfather in the
face, assumed a terrible air, and said:

"This leads me to say something to you."

"What is it?"

"That I wish to marry."

"Agreed," said his grandfather.--And he burst out laughing.

"How agreed?"

"Yes, agreed. You shall have your little girl."

Marius, stunned and overwhelmed with the dazzling shock, trembled in
every limb.

M. Gillenormand went on:

"Yes, you shall have her, that pretty little girl of yours. She comes
every day in the shape of an old gentleman to inquire after you. Ever
since you were wounded, she has passed her time in weeping and making
lint. I have made inquiries. She lives in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, No.
7. Ah! There we have it! Ah! so you want her! Well, you shall have her.
You're caught. You had arranged your little plot, you had said to
yourself:--'I'm going to signify this squarely to my grandfather, to
that mummy of the Regency and of the Directory, to that ancient beau, to
that Dorante turned Géronte; he has indulged in his frivolities also,
that he has, and he has had his love affairs, and his grisettes and his
Cosettes; he has made his rustle, he has had his wings, he has eaten of
the bread of spring; he certainly must remember it.' Ah! you take the
cockchafer by the horns. That's good. I offer you a cutlet and you
answer me: 'By the way, I want to marry.' There's a transition for you!
Ah! you reckoned on a bickering! You do not know that I am an old
coward. What do you say to that? You are vexed? You did not expect to
find your grandfather still more foolish than yourself, you are wasting
the discourse which you meant to bestow upon me, Mr. Lawyer, and that's
vexatious. Well, so much the worse, rage away. I'll do whatever you
wish, and that cuts you short, imbecile! Listen. I have made my
inquiries, I'm cunning too; she is charming, she is discreet, it is not
true about the lancer, she has made heaps of lint, she's a jewel, she
adores you, if you had died, there would have been three of us, her
coffin would have accompanied mine. I have had an idea, ever since you
have been better, of simply planting her at your bedside, but it is only
in romances that young girls are brought to the bedsides of handsome
young wounded men who interest them. It is not done. What would your
aunt have said to it? You were nude three quarters of the time, my good
fellow. Ask Nicolette, who has not left you for a moment, if there was
any possibility of having a woman here. And then, what would the doctor
have said? A pretty girl does not cure a man of fever. In short, it's
all right, let us say no more about it, all's said, all's done, it's all
settled, take her. Such is my ferocity. You see, I perceived that you
did not love me. I said to myself: 'Here now, I have my little Cosette
right under my hand, I'm going to give her to him, he will be obliged to
love me a little then, or he must tell the reason why.' Ah! so you
thought that the old man was going to storm, to put on a big voice, to
shout no, and to lift his cane at all that aurora. Not a bit of it.
Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better. Pray take the
trouble of getting married, sir. Be happy, my well-beloved child."

That said, the old man burst forth into sobs.

And he seized Marius' head, and pressed it with both arms against his
breast, and both fell to weeping. This is one of the forms of supreme
happiness.

"Father!" cried Marius.

"Ah, so you love me!" said the old man.

An ineffable moment ensued. They were choking and could not speak.

At length the old man stammered:

"Come! his mouth is unstopped at last. He has said: 'Father' to me."

Marius disengaged his head from his grandfather's arms, and said gently:

"But, father, now that I am quite well, it seems to me that I might see
her."

"Agreed again, you shall see her to-morrow."

"Father!"

"What?"

"Why not to-day?"

"Well, to-day then. Let it be to-day. You have called me 'father' three
times, and it is worth it. I will attend to it. She shall be brought
hither. Agreed, I tell you. It has already been put into verse. This is
the ending of the elegy of the 'Jeune Malade' by André Chénier, by André
Chénier whose throat was cut by the ras . . . by the giants of '93."

M. Gillenormand fancied that he detected a faint frown on the part of
Marius, who, in truth, as we must admit, was no longer listening to him,
and who was thinking far more of Cosette than of 1793.

The grandfather, trembling at having so inopportunely introduced André
Chénier, resumed precipitately:

"Cut his throat is not the word. The fact is that the great
revolutionary geniuses, who were not malicious, that is incontestable,
who were heroes, pardi! found that André Chénier embarrassed them
somewhat, and they had him guillot . . . that is to say, those great men
on the 7th of Thermidor, besought André Chénier, in the interests of
public safety, to be so good as to go...."

M. Gillenormand, clutched by the throat by his own phrase, could not
proceed. Being able neither to finish it nor to retract it, while his
daughter arranged the pillow behind Marius, who was overwhelmed with so
many emotions, the old man rushed headlong, with as much rapidity as his
age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut the door behind him, and,
purple, choking and foaming at the mouth, his eyes starting from his
head, he found himself nose to nose with honest Basque, who was blacking
boots in the anteroom. He seized Basque by the collar, and shouted full
in his face in fury:--"By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil,
those ruffians did assassinate him!"

"Who, sir?"

"André Chénier!"

"Yes, sir," said Basque in alarm.



CHAPTER IV--MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A
BAD THING THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER
HIS ARM

Cosette and Marius beheld each other once more.

What that interview was like we decline to say. There are things which
one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.

The entire family, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled in
Marius' chamber at the moment when Cosette entered it.

Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was on the point of blowing
his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief, and
gazing over it at Cosette.

She appeared on the threshold; it seemed to him that she was surrounded
by a glory.

"Adorable!" he exclaimed.

Then he blew his nose noisily.

Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven. She was as
thoroughly alarmed as any one can be by happiness. She stammered all
pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself into Marius' arms, and
dared not. Ashamed of loving in the presence of all these people. People
are pitiless towards happy lovers; they remain when the latter most
desire to be left alone. Lovers have no need of any people whatever.

With Cosette, and behind her, there had entered a man with white hair
who was grave yet smiling, though with a vague and heartrending smile.
It was "Monsieur Fauchelevent"; it was Jean Valjean.

He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black, in
perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.

The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this correct
bourgeois, in this probable notary, the fear-inspiring bearer of the
corpse, who had sprung up at his door on the night of the 7th of June,
tattered, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face masked in blood and mire,
supporting in his arms the fainting Marius; still, his porter's scent
was aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter had
not been able to refrain from communicating to his wife this aside: "I
don't know why it is, but I can't help fancying that I've seen that face
before."

M. Fauchelevent in Marius' chamber, remained apart near the door. He had
under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance to an
octavo volume enveloped in paper. The enveloping paper was of a greenish
hue, and appeared to be mouldy.

"Does the gentleman always have books like that under his arm?"
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, demanded in a low
tone of Nicolette.

"Well," retorted M. Gillenormand, who had overheard her, in the same
tone, "he's a learned man. What then? Is that his fault? Monsieur
Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without a book under
his arm either, and he always had some old volume hugged to his heart
like that."

And, with a bow, he said aloud:

"Monsieur Tranchelevent...."

Father Gillenormand did not do it intentionally, but inattention to
proper names was an aristocratic habit of his.

"Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you, on behalf of my
grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for the hand of Mademoiselle."

Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.

"That's settled," said the grandfather.

And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in blessing,
he cried:

"Permission to adore each other!"

They did not require him to repeat it twice. So much the worse! the
chirping began. They talked low. Marius, resting on his elbow on his
reclining chair, Cosette standing beside him. "Oh, heavens!" murmured
Cosette, "I see you once again! it is thou! it is you! The idea of going
and fighting like that! But why? It is horrible. I have been dead for
four months. Oh! how wicked it was of you to go to that battle! What had
I done to you? I pardon you, but you will never do it again. A little
while ago, when they came to tell us to come to you, I still thought
that I was about to die, but it was from joy. I was so sad! I have not
taken the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my looks!
What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar? Do speak!
You let me do all the talking. We are still in the Rue de l'Homme Armé.
It seems that your shoulder was terrible. They told me that you could
put your fist in it. And then, it seems that they cut your flesh with
the scissors. That is frightful. I have cried till I have no eyes left.
It is queer that a person can suffer like that. Your grandfather has a
very kindly air. Don't disturb yourself, don't rise on your elbow, you
will injure yourself. Oh! how happy I am! So our unhappiness is over! I
am quite foolish. I had things to say to you, and I no longer know in
the least what they were. Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de
l'Homme Armé. There is no garden. I made lint all the time; stay, sir,
look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers."

"Angel!" said Marius.

_Angel_ is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. No
other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.

Then as there were spectators, they paused and said not a word more,
contenting themselves with softly touching each other's hands.

M. Gillenormand turned towards those who were in the room and cried:

"Talk loud, the rest of you. Make a noise, you people behind the scenes.
Come, a little uproar, the deuce! so that the children can chatter at
their ease."

And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very low
voice:

"Call each other _thou_. Don't stand on ceremony."

Aunt Gillenormand looked on in amazement at this irruption of light in
her elderly household. There was nothing aggressive about this
amazement; it was not the least in the world like the scandalized and
envious glance of an owl at two turtle-doves, it was the stupid eye of a
poor innocent seven and fifty years of age; it was a life which had been
a failure gazing at that triumph, love.

"Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior," said her father to her, "I told you
that this is what would happen to you."

He remained silent for a moment, and then added:

"Look at the happiness of others."

Then he turned to Cosette.

"How pretty she is! how pretty she is! She's a Greuze. So you are going
to have that all to yourself, you scamp! Ah! my rogue, you are getting
off nicely with me, you are happy; if I were not fifteen years too old,
we would fight with swords to see which of us should have her. Come now!
I am in love with you, mademoiselle. It's perfectly simple. It is your
right. You are in the right. Ah! what a sweet, charming little wedding
this will make! Our parish is Saint-Denis du Saint Sacrament, but I will
get a dispensation so that you can be married at Saint-Paul. The church
is better. It was built by the Jesuits. It is more coquettish. It is
opposite the fountain of Cardinal de Birague. The masterpiece of Jesuit
architecture is at Namur. It is called Saint-Loup. You must go there
after you are married. It is worth the journey. Mademoiselle, I am quite
of your mind, I think girls ought to marry; that is what they are made
for. There is a certain Sainte-Catherine whom I should always like to
see uncoiffed.62 It's a fine thing to remain a spinster, but it is
chilly. The Bible says: Multiply. In order to save the people, Jeanne
d'Arc is needed; but in order to make people, what is needed is Mother
Goose. So, marry, my beauties. I really do not see the use in remaining
a spinster! I know that they have their chapel apart in the church, and
that they fall back on the Society of the Virgin; but, sapristi, a
handsome husband, a fine fellow, and at the expiration of a year, a big,
blond brat who nurses lustily, and who has fine rolls of fat on his
thighs, and who musses up your breast in handfuls with his little rosy
paws, laughing the while like the dawn,--that's better than holding a
candle at vespers, and chanting _Turris Eburnea!_"

The grandfather executed a pirouette on his eighty-year-old heels, and
began to talk again like a spring that has broken loose once more:


"Ainsi, bornant les cours de tes rêvasseries, Alcippe, il est donc vrai,
dans peu tu te maries."<a href="#linknote-63" name="linknoteref-63"
id="linknoteref-63">63</a>

"By the way!"

"What is it, father?"

"Have not you an intimate friend?"

"Yes, Courfeyrac."

"What has become of him?"

"He is dead."

"That is good."

He seated himself near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their four
hands in his aged and wrinkled hands:

"She is exquisite, this darling. She's a masterpiece, this Cosette! She
is a very little girl and a very great lady. She will only be a
Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. What
eyelashes she has! Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that
you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it. Love is
the folly of men and the wit of God. Adore each other. Only," he added,
suddenly becoming gloomy, "what a misfortune! It has just occurred to
me! More than half of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity; so
long as I live, it will not matter, but after my death, a score of years
hence, ah! my poor children, you will not have a sou! Your beautiful
white hands, Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor of pulling
him by the tail."64

At this point they heard a grave and tranquil voice say:

"Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent possesses six hundred thousand
francs."

It was the voice of Jean Valjean.

So far he had not uttered a single word, no one seemed to be aware that
he was there, and he had remained standing erect and motionless, behind
all these happy people.

"What has Mademoiselle Euphrasie to do with the question?" inquired the
startled grandfather.

"I am she," replied Cosette.

"Six hundred thousand francs?" resumed M. Gillenormand.

"Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly," said Jean
Valjean.

And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand had
mistaken for a book.

Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.
They were turned over and counted. There were five hundred notes for a
thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred.
In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

"This is a fine book," said M. Gillenormand.

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" murmured the aunt.

"This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
senior?" said the grandfather. "That devil of a Marius has ferreted out
the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! Just trust to
the love affairs of young folks now, will you! Students find
studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino works better
than Rothschild."

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" repeated Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, in a low tone. "Five hundred and eighty-four! one might as
well say six hundred thousand!"

As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this was
going on; they hardly heeded this detail.



CHAPTER V--DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY

The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy
explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been
able, thanks to his first escape of a few days' duration, to come to
Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the sum
earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at Montreuil-sur-
Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,--which eventually
happened--he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest of
Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum, six
hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very
bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the box
from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut
shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the
Bishop's candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off the
candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The man
seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean Valjean.
Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went to get it
in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have mentioned. He had
a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself
alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at
hand, when that money might prove of service, he had gone to get it; it
was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on this
occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening. Boulatreulle
inherited his pickaxe.

The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred
francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.--"We
shall see hereafter," he thought.

The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand
francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten years,
from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had cost
only five thousand francs.

Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they
glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.

Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The story
had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in the
_Moniteur_, how a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned
under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au Change
and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man, otherwise
irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed to a fit of
mental aberration and a suicide.--"In fact," thought Jean Valjean,
"since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power, he must
have been already mad."



CHAPTER VI--THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN
FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY

Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor, on being
consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then
December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.

The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained for a
quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.

"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed. "And she has so sweet and
good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that I
have ever seen in my life. Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of
violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such a
creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to
pettifogging, I beg of you."

Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.
The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
had they not been dazzled by it.

"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.

"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God is caring
for us."

Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged
everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards Cosette's
happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with as much joy, as
Cosette herself.

As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette's
civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might
prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated Cosette from all
difficulties. He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure means
of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion of an
extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the daughter of
the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners to
the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent; the
very best information and the most respectable references abounded; the
good nuns, not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions of
paternity, and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never
understood exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the
daughter. They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An _acte
de notoriété_ was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the law,
Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan, both
father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it that he was
appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's guardian, with
M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.

As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted a
legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to remain
unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and ninety-
four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended on the
education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs of that amount
having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in the hands of
a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette at her majority, or at
the date of her marriage. This, taken as a whole, was very acceptable,
as the reader will perceive, especially when the sum due was half a
million. There were some peculiarities here and there, it is true, but
they were not noticed; one of the interested parties had his eyes
blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand francs.

Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she
had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another Fauchelevent
was her real father. At any other time this would have broken her heart.
But at the ineffable moment which she was then passing through, it cast
but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she was so full of joy that the
cloud did not last long. She had Marius. The young man arrived, the old
man was effaced; such is life.

And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing enigmas
around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is always
prepared for certain renunciations.

Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.

Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father Gillenormand.
It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant compliments and
presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal
situation in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand was
superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so amused him as
being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe of Binche guipure
which had descended to him from his own grandmother.

"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient things are the rage,
and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my
childhood."

He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer, with
swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let us hear the
confession of these dowagers," he said, "let us see what they have in
their paunches." He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all his
wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins,
damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India
kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a
right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alençon point lace, parures
in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented with
microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons--he lavished everything on
Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild with
gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness without limit
clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket seemed to her to be
upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with wings
of Mechlin lace.

The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have already
said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish of trumpets
went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-à-brac from the grandfather to
Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.

One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst of his
bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:

"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of
the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me
an antique memory."

"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "Thanks, Marius. That is
precisely the idea of which I was in search."

And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire
antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.

From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.

"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with it.
The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the
necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A palace
and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand
waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a
duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you
can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also
to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the
useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I
remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall
as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness to
indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and
which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--midday, the hour of the
sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--or any other hour that you like,
gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and
fishes, Phobus and Phobe, and a host of things which emerged from a
niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and
Éponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played
on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it
sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing
why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to
that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."

M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all
the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his
dithyrambs.

"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to
organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed. "Your nineteenth
century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it ignores the
noble. In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate is insipid,
colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your bourgeois who set
up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet,
ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying
Mademoiselle Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has
been stuck to a candle. There's the epoch for you. My demand is that I
may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! in 1787, I predict that all
was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Léon,
Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Soubise, Vicomte de Thouars,
peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits.
In this century, men attend to business, they gamble on 'Change, they
win money, they are stingy. People take care of their surfaces and
varnish them; every one is dressed as though just out of a band-box,
washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed,
brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble,
discreet, neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of
their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to
make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to
this age the device: 'Dirty Cleanliness.' Don't be vexed, Marius, give
me permission to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am
always harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit
of a slap to the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well lashes
well. Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry, but that
they no longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret the grace of
the ancient manners. I regret everything about them, their elegance,
their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury
which every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony
above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous
faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs, the
fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil's own row, the huge knots of
ribbon. I regret the bride's garter. The bride's garter is cousin to the
girdle of Venus. On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen's garter,
parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over the
head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did
Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances?
Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette's garter,
Homer would construct the _Iliad_. He would put in his poem, a
loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My
friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore, people married
wisely; they had a good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As
soon as Cujas had taken his departure, Gamacho entered. But, in sooth!
the stomach is an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which wants
to have its wedding also. People supped well, and had at table a
beautiful neighbor without a guimpe so that her throat was only
moderately concealed. Oh! the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were
in those days! youth was a bouquet; every young man terminated in a
branch of lilacs or a tuft of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a
warrior; and if, by chance, one was a captain of dragoons, one found
means to call oneself Florian. People thought much of looking well. They
embroidered and tinted themselves. A bourgeois had the air of a flower,
a Marquis had the air of a precious stone. People had no straps to their
boots, they had no boots. They were spruce, shining, waved, lustrous,
fluttering, dainty, coquettish, which did not at all prevent their
wearing swords by their sides. The humming-bird has beak and claws. That
was the day of the _Galland Indies_. One of the sides of that century
was delicate, the other was magnificent; and by the green cabbages!
people amused themselves. To-day, people are serious. The bourgeois is
avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude; your century is unfortunate.
People would drive away the Graces as being too low in the neck. Alas!
beauty is concealed as though it were ugliness. Since the revolution,
everything, including the ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a
mountebank dancer must be grave; your rigadoons are doctrinarian. It is
necessary to be majestic. People would be greatly annoyed if they did
not carry their chins in their cravats. The ideal of an urchin of twenty
when he marries, is to resemble M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what
one arrives at with that majesty? at being petty. Learn this: joy is not
only joyous; it is great. But be in love gayly then, what the deuce!
marry, when you marry, with fever and giddiness, and tumult, and the
uproar of happiness! Be grave in church, well and good. But, as soon as
the mass is finished, sarpejou! you must make a dream whirl around the
bride. A marriage should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade
its ceremony from the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I
have a horror of a paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for
that one day, at least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs.
Games and Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every
recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that
unique minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and
the eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the
bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune
them of their splendors; don't scrimp on the day when you beam. The
wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy, it
would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is my
programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival the
rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The
nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks and
entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a
chariot drawn by marine monsters.


"Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque Des sons si ravissants
qu'il ravissait quiconque!"<a href="#linknote-65" name="linknoteref-65"
id="linknoteref-65">65</a>

--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know
nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"

While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to
himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at
each other.

Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.
Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount
of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius
brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius
reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding
a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had been her last
surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first communion
returned to her. She went regularly to service, told her beads, read her
euchology, mumbled _Aves_ in one corner of the house, while _I love you_
was being whispered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a
vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was herself.

There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the
business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant
or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes. This
devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his daughter, corresponds to a
cold in the head. You smell nothing of life. Neither any bad, nor any
good odor.

Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
spinster's indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking her
so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of
consent to Marius' marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his
wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a single thought,--to satisfy
Marius. As for the aunt,--it had not even occurred to him that the aunt
existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and, sheep as
she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but
impassible externally, she had said to herself: "My father has settled
the question of the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle the
question of the inheritance without consulting him." She was rich, in
fact, and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this
point. It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would
have left him poor. "So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a
beggar, let him be a beggar himself!" But Cosette's half-million pleased
the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this pair of lovers
were concerned. One owes some consideration to six hundred thousand
francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise than leave
her fortune to these young people, since they did not need it.

It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--M.
Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in
the house. "That will make me young again," he said. "It's an old plan
of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my
chamber."

He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had
the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by
him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht
with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula
blossoms.--"It was with that stuff," said he, "that the bed of the
Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped."--On the chimney-piece,
he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her
nude stomach.

M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius
needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council of
the order.



CHAPTER VII--THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS

The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M. Fauchelevent.-
-"This is reversing things," said Mademoiselle Gillenormand, "to have
the bride come to the house to do the courting like this." But Marius'
convalescence had caused the habit to become established, and the arm-
chairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, better adapted to interviews
than the straw chairs of the Rue de l'Homme Armé, had rooted it. Marius
and M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did not address each other. It
seemed as though this had been agreed upon. Every girl needs a chaperon.
Cosette could not have come without M. Fauchelevent. In Marius' eyes, M.
Fauchelevent was the condition attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By
dint of discussing political matters, vaguely and without precision,
from the point of view of the general amelioration of the fate of all
men, they came to say a little more than "yes" and "no." Once, on the
subject of education, which Marius wished to have free and obligatory,
multiplied under all forms lavished on every one, like the air and the
sun in a word, respirable for the entire population, they were in
unison, and they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even
with a certain loftiness of language--still he lacked something
indescribable. M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also
something more, than a man of the world.

Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all
sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things had been
lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were
really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a
man, in the barricade.

This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be supposed
that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which
force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind
us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have
vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius clasped his
face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past traversed the
twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he
heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt beneath his lips the
cold brow of Éponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre,
Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect before him, then
dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear, sorrowful, valiant,
charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they actually existed? The
revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke. These great fevers create
great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt himself; all these vanished
realities made him dizzy. Where were they all then? was it really true
that all were dead? A fall into the shadows had carried off all except
himself. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the
curtain of a theatre. There are curtains like this which drop in life.
God passes on to the following act.

And he himself--was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was
rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry
Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had
entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb
the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the
past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and overshadowed
him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his serenity; but nothing
less than this felicity could have sufficed to efface that catastrophe.

M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was
the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely
beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares
occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However, the
natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.
Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him. We
have already indicated this characteristic detail.

Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit
agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is
commonly supposed.

Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the
conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
he said to him:

"Of course, you are acquainted with that street?"

"What street?"

"The Rue de la Chanvrerie."

"I have no idea of the name of that street," replied M. Fauchelevent, in
the most natural manner in the world.

The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the
street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really
was.

"Decidedly," thought he, "I have been dreaming. I have been subject to a
hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was
not there."'



CHAPTER VIII--TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND

Marius' enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind
other pre-occupations.

While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date fixed
upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be
made.

He owed gratitude in various quarters; he owed it on his father's
account, he owed it on his own.

There was Thénardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him,
Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.

Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to be
happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts of
gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life, which
promised so brightly for the future.

It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering behind
him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to obtain
a quittance from the past.

That Thénardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he
had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thénardier was a ruffian in the eyes of all
the world except Marius.

And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo,
was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as
Thénardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted
to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any
gratitude.

None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in discovering
any trace of Thénardier. Obliteration appeared to be complete in that
quarter. Madame Thénardier had died in prison pending the trial.
Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two remaining of that
lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. The gulf of the
social unknown had silently closed above those beings. On the surface
there was not visible so much as that quiver, that trembling, those
obscure concentric circles which announce that something has fallen in,
and that the plummet may be dropped.

Madame Thénardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated from the
case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal persons accused
having escaped from prison, the trial connected with the ambush in the
Gorbeau house had come to nothing.

That affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of Assizes had been
obliged to content themselves with two subordinates. Panchaud, alias
Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards, who
had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides of the
case, to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been the
sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.

Thénardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy, likewise
condemned to death.

This sentence was the only information remaining about Thénardier,
casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a
bier.

Moreover, by thrusting Thénardier back into the very remotest depths,
through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the density
of the shadows which enveloped this man.

As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,
the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to an
abrupt conclusion. They succeeded in finding the carriage which had
brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of the
6th of June.

The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the
commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o'clock in the
afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Élysées, above the
outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o'clock in the evening,
the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had
opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders
another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the watch
at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the dead man;
that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had taken "all
those folks" into his carriage; that they had first driven to the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the dead man; that
the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized
him perfectly, although he was alive "this time"; that afterwards, they
had entered the vehicle again, that he had whipped up his horses; a few
paces from the gate of the Archives, they had called to him to halt;
that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him, and that the
police-agent had led the other man away; that he knew nothing more; that
the night had been very dark.

Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing. He only remembered that he
had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at the moment when he
was falling backwards into the barricade; then, everything vanished so
far as he was concerned.

He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand's.

He was lost in conjectures.

He could not doubt his own identity. Still, how had it come to pass
that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked up
by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine, near the Pont des
Invalides?

Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the Champs-
Élysées. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion!

Some one? Who?

This was the man for whom Marius was searching.

Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the faintest
indication.

Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,
pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police. There, no more
than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.

The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the hackney-coachman.
They had no knowledge of any arrest having been made on the 6th of June
at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.

No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter, which
was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable
was attributed to the coachman.

A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even of
imagination. The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could not
doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.

Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.

What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman had
seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon his back
the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on the watch had
arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? What had become of
the agent himself?

Why had this agent preserved silence? Had the man succeeded in making
his escape? Had he bribed the agent? Why did this man give no sign of
life to Marius, who owed everything to him? His disinterestedness was no
less tremendous than his devotion. Why had not that man appeared again?
Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above gratitude. Was he
dead? Who was the man? What sort of a face had he? No one could tell him
this.

The coachman answered: "The night was very dark." Basque and Nicolette,
all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered with
blood.

The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius, had
been the only one to take note of the man in question, and this is the
description that he gave:

"That man was terrible."

Marius had the blood-stained clothing which he had worn when he had been
brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope that it would
prove of service in his researches.

On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn in a
singular way. A piece was missing.

One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean
Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable
inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts.
The cold countenance of "Monsieur Fauchelevent" angered him.

He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:

"Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. Do you know what
he did, sir? He intervened like an archangel. He must have flung himself
into the midst of the battle, have stolen me away, have opened the
sewer, have dragged me into it and have carried me through it! He must
have traversed more than a league and a half in those frightful
subterranean galleries, bent over, weighed down, in the dark, in the
cess-pool,--more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his
back! And with what object? With the sole object of saving the corpse.
And that corpse I was. He said to himself: 'There may still be a glimpse
of life there, perchance; I will risk my own existence for that
miserable spark!' And his existence he risked not once but twenty times!
And every step was a danger. The proof of it is, that on emerging from
the sewer, he was arrested. Do you know, sir, that that man did all
this? And he had no recompense to expect. What was I? An insurgent. What
was I? One of the conquered. Oh! if Cosette's six hundred thousand
francs were mine.."

"They are yours," interrupted Jean Valjean.

"Well," resumed Marius, "I would give them all to find that man once
more."

Jean Valjean remained silent.



BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT



CHAPTER I--THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833

The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed
night. Above its shadows heaven stood open. It was the wedding night of
Marius and Cosette.

The day had been adorable.

It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather, a fairy
spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over the heads of the
bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject of a painting to be
placed over a door; but it had been sweet and smiling.

The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day. France
had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off
one's wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church, of hiding oneself with
shame from one's happiness, and of combining the ways of a bankrupt with
the delights of the Song of Songs. People had not yet grasped to the
full the chastity, exquisiteness, and decency of jolting their paradise
in a posting-chaise, of breaking up their mystery with clic-clacs, of
taking for a nuptial bed the bed of an inn, and of leaving behind them,
in a commonplace chamber, at so much a night, the most sacred of the
souvenirs of life mingled pell-mell with the tête-à-tête of the
conductor of the diligence and the maid-servant of the inn.

In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are now
living, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law
and God no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the Postilion de
Lonjumeau; a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and with bell buttons, a
plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of green leather, oaths to the
Norman horses with their tails knotted up, false galloons, varnished
hat, long powdered locks, an enormous whip and tall boots. France does
not yet carry elegance to the length of doing like the English nobility,
and raining down on the post-chaise of the bridal pair a hail storm of
slippers trodden down at heel and of worn-out shoes, in memory of
Churchill, afterwards Marlborough, or Malbrouck, who was assailed on his
wedding-day by the wrath of an aunt which brought him good luck. Old
shoes and slippers do not, as yet, form a part of our nuptial
celebrations; but patience, as good taste continues to spread, we shall
come to that.

In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full trot.

Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was
a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not spoil
a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be
honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a
good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence
a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the
household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness.

And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.

The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now
superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.

Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the banns to
publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and the church
produce some complication. They could not get ready before the 16th of
February.

Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it
chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples,
particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.

"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so much the better. There
is a proverb:


"'Mariage un Mardi gras N'aura point enfants ingrats.'<a
href="#linknote-66" name="linknoteref-66" id="linknoteref-66">66</a>

Let us proceed. Here goes for the 16th! Do you want to delay, Marius?"

"No, certainly not!" replied the lover.

"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.

Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the
public merrymaking. It rained that day, but there is always in the sky a
tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even
when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.

On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence
of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

As the marriage was taking place under the régime of community of
property, the papers had been simple.

Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited
her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.

As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand house had
been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said to him in such an
irresistible manner: "Father, I entreat you," that she had almost
persuaded him to promise that he would come and occupy it.

A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident happened
to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand. This was not a
serious matter; and he had not allowed any one to trouble himself about
it, nor to dress it, nor even to see his hurt, not even Cosette.
Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe his hand in a linen bandage,
and to carry his arm in a sling, and had prevented his signing. M.
Gillenormand, in his capacity of Cosette's supervising-guardian, had
supplied his place.

We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office or to the
church. One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one is
accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it puts a wedding
nosegay in its buttonhole. We will confine ourselves to noting an
incident which, though unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the
transit from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint-Paul.

At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis was in
process of repaving. It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du Parc-
Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly to
Saint-Paul. They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest
way was to turn through the boulevard. One of the invited guests
observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a jam of
vehicles.--"Why?" asked M. Gillenormand--"Because of the maskers."--
"Capital," said the grandfather, "let us go that way. These young folks
are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the serious part
of life. This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the masquerade."

They went by way of the boulevard. The first wedding coach held Cosette
and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still
separated from his betrothed according to usage, did not come until the
second. The nuptial train, on emerging from the Rue des Filles-du-
Calvaire, became entangled in a long procession of vehicles which formed
an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and from the
Bastille to the Madeleine. Maskers abounded on the boulevard. In spite
of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew, Pantaloon
and Clown persisted. In the good humor of that winter of 1833, Paris had
disguised itself as Venice. Such Shrove Tuesdays are no longer to be
seen now-a-days. Everything which exists being a scattered Carnival,
there is no longer any Carnival.

The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with
curious spectators. The terraces which crown the peristyles of the
theatres were bordered with spectators. Besides the maskers, they stared
at that procession--peculiar to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,--of
vehicles of every description, citadines, tapissières, carioles,
cabriolets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other by the
police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. Any one in these
vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle. Police-sergeants
maintained, on the sides of the boulevard, these two interminable
parallel files, moving in contrary directions, and saw to it that
nothing interfered with that double current, those two brooks of
carriages, flowing, the one down stream, the other up stream, the one
towards the Chaussée d'Antin, the other towards the Faubourg Saint-
Antoine. The carriages of the peers of France and of the Ambassadors,
emblazoned with coats of arms, held the middle of the way, going and
coming freely. Certain joyous and magnificent trains, notably that of
the Bouf Gras, had the same privilege. In this gayety of Paris, England
cracked her whip; Lord Seymour's post-chaise, harassed by a nickname
from the populace, passed with great noise.

In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped like
sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts and
grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children in
disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six, ravishing
little creatures, who felt that they formed an official part of the
public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity of their harlequinade,
and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.

From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession of
vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until the knot
was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze the whole
line. Then they set out again on the march.

The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille,
and skirting the right side of the Boulevard. At the top of the Pont-
aux-Choux, there was a stoppage. Nearly at the same moment, the other
file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also. At that
point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.

These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of
maskers are very familiar to Parisians. If they were missing on a Shrove
Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part, and people
would say: "There's something behind that. Probably the ministry is
about to undergo a change." A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and
Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible
grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting
Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just
as the Mænads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights,
dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot
tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on
hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of
shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what
that institution was like.

Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need of
the hackney-coach of Vadé.

Everything can be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of
antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove
Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves
and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a
divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her shape under the
soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called the Jack-
pudding.

The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most ancient
days of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of
the palace "twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades in
the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures are
accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo carriage,
whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired landau, with
its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups. Twenty of them ride
in a carriage intended for six. They cling to the seats, to the rumble,
on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts. They even bestride the
carriage lamps. They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a
knot, and their legs hanging. The women sit on the men's laps. Far away,
above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible. These
carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of the rout. Collé,
Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang. This carriage which
has become colossal through its freight, has an air of conquest. Uproar
reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate, shout, howl, there
they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety roars; sarcasm flames
forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two jades there drag farce
blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.

A laughter that is too cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is
suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the
Carnival to the Parisians.

These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,
set the philosopher to thinking. There is government therein. There one
lays one's finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and public
women.

It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total of
gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should be
enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to
prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the
crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half
dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that they
should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that there
would be no festival for the populace, did not the police promenade in
their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy. But what can be
done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are
insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public. The laughter of all
is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals
disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And
populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has Roquelaure, the
populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a great, mad city on every
occasion that it is a great sublime city. There the Carnival forms part
of politics. Paris,--let us confess it--willingly allows infamy to
furnish it with comedy. She only demands of her masters--when she has
masters--one thing: "Paint me the mud." Rome was of the same mind. She
loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.

Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash, should
halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train halted on the
right. The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage
containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of the
boulevard.

"Hullo!" said a masker, "here's a wedding."

"A sham wedding," retorted another. "We are the genuine article."

And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,
the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.

At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their
hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's caress to
masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the
throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of
projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous
verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took
place between the maskers and the crowd.

In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard
with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a
gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a _loup_,67 had
also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by
were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.

Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of
rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the
breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked
gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.

Here is their dialogue:

"Say, now."

"What, daddy?"

"Do you see that old cove?"

"What old cove?"

"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."

"The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"I'm sure that I know him."

"Ah!"

"I'm willing that they should cut my throat, and I'm ready to swear that
I never said either you, thou, or I, in my life, if I don't know that
Parisian." [_pantinois_.]

"Paris in Pantin to-day."

"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"

"No."

"And the bridegroom?"

"There's no bridegroom in that trap."

"Bah!"

"Unless it's the old fellow."

"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."

"I can't."

"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his paw I
know, and that I'm positive."

"And what good does it do to know him?"

"No one can tell. Sometimes it does!"

"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"

"I know him."

"Know him, if you want to."

"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?"

"We are in it, too."

"Where does that wedding come from?"

"How should I know?"

"Listen."

"Well, what?"

"There's one thing you ought to do."

"What's that?"

"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."

"What for?"

"To find out where it goes, and what it is. Hurry up and jump down,
trot, my girl, your legs are young."

"I can't quit the vehicle."

"Why not?"

"I'm hired."

"Ah, the devil!"

"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."

"That's true."

"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me will
arrest me. You know that well enough."

"Yes, I do."

"I'm bought by the government for to-day."

"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."

"Do the old fellows bother you? But you're not a young girl."

"He's in the first carriage."

"Well?"

"In the bride's trap."

"What then?"

"So he is the father."

"What concern is that of mine?"

"I tell you that he's the father."

"As if he were the only father."

"Listen."

"What?"

"I can't go out otherwise than masked. Here I'm concealed, no one knows
that I'm here. But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. It's Ash
Wednesday. I run the risk of being nabbed. I must sneak back into my
hole. But you are free."

"Not particularly."

"More than I am, at any rate."

"Well, what of that?"

"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went to."

"Where it went?"

"Yes."

"I know."

"Where is it going then?"

"To the Cadran-Bleu."

"In the first place, it's not in that direction."

"Well! to la Rapée."

"Or elsewhere."

"It's free. Wedding-parties are at liberty."

"That's not the point at all. I tell you that you must try to learn for
me what that wedding is, who that old cove belongs to, and where that
wedding pair lives."

"I like that! that would be queer. It's so easy to find out a wedding-
party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week
afterwards. A pin in a hay-mow! It ain't possible!"

"That don't matter. You must try. You understand me, Azelma."

The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard, in
opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers lost sight of the
"trap" of the bride.



CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING

To realize one's dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be
elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to
ourselves; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected.

Cosette, both at the mayor's office and at church, was dazzling and
touching. Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.

Cosette wore over a petticoat of white taffeta, her robe of Binche
guipure, a veil of English point, a necklace of fine pearls, a wreath of
orange flowers; all this was white, and, from the midst of that
whiteness she beamed forth. It was an exquisite candor expanding and
becoming transfigured in the light. One would have pronounced her a
virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.

Marius' handsome hair was lustrous and perfumed; here and there, beneath
the thick curls, pale lines--the scars of the barricade--were visible.

The grandfather, haughty, with head held high, amalgamating more than
ever in his toilet and his manners all the elegances of the epoch of
Barras, escorted Cosette. He took the place of Jean Valjean, who, on
account of his arm being still in a sling, could not give his hand to
the bride.

Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.

"Monsieur Fauchelevent," said the grandfather to him, "this is a fine
day. I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows. Henceforth, there
must be no sadness anywhere. Pardieu, I decree joy! Evil has no right to
exist. That there should be any unhappy men is, in sooth, a disgrace to
the azure of the sky. Evil does not come from man, who is good at
bottom. All human miseries have for their capital and central government
hell, otherwise, known as the Devil's Tuileries. Good, here I am
uttering demagogical words! As far as I am concerned, I have no longer
any political opinions; let all men be rich, that is to say, mirthful,
and I confine myself to that."

When, at the conclusion of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced
before the mayor and before the priest all possible "yesses," after
having signed the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy,
after having exchanged their rings, after having knelt side by side
under the pall of white moire in the smoke of the censer, they arrived,
hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white,
preceded by the suisse, with the epaulets of a colonel, tapping the
pavement with his halberd, between two rows of astonished spectators, at
the portals of the church, both leaves of which were thrown wide open,
ready to enter their carriage again, and all being finished, Cosette
still could not believe that it was real. She looked at Marius, she
looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky: it seemed as though she
feared that she should wake up from her dream. Her amazed and uneasy air
added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty. They entered the
same carriage to return home, Marius beside Cosette; M. Gillenormand and
Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand had withdrawn one
degree, and was in the second vehicle.

"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron
and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."

And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic
whisper: "So it is true. My name is Marius. I am Madame Thou."

These two creatures were resplendent. They had reached that irrevocable
and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and
all joy. They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty
years old taken together. It was marriage sublimated; these two children
were two lilies. They did not see each other, they did not contemplate
each other. Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius
perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar, and in that glory, the
two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a
cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the
real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow.
All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in
intoxication. It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless
nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair,
converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming
the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs were but
so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy. How good it is
to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness.
The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.

It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness in
Marius, and with modesty in Cosette. They said to each other in low
tones: "We will go back to take a look at our little garden in the Rue
Plumet." The folds of Cosette's gown lay across Marius.

Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality. One
possesses and one supposes. One still has time before one to divine. The
emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming of midnight is
indescribable. The delights of these two hearts overflowed upon the
crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.

People halted in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in front of Saint-Paul, to gaze
through the windows of the carriage at the orange-flowers quivering on
Cosette's head.

Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Marius,
triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase
up which he had been borne in a dying condition. The poor, who had
trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them. There
were flowers everywhere. The house was no less fragrant than the church;
after the incense, roses. They thought they heard voices carolling in
the infinite; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them
like a ceiling of stars; above their heads they beheld the light of a
rising sun. All at once, the clock struck. Marius glanced at Cosette's
charming bare arm, and at the rosy things which were vaguely visible
through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, intercepting Marius'
glance, blushed to her very hair.

Quite a number of old family friends of the Gillenormand family had been
invited; they pressed about Cosette. Each one vied with the rest in
saluting her as Madame la Baronne.

The officer, Théodule Gillenormand, now a captain, had come from
Chartres, where he was stationed in garrison, to be present at the
wedding of his cousin Pontmercy. Cosette did not recognize him.

He, on his side, habituated as he was to have women consider him
handsome, retained no more recollection of Cosette than of any other
woman.

"How right I was not to believe in that story about the lancer!" said
Father Gillenormand, to himself.

Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean. She was in unison
with Father Gillenormand; while he erected joy into aphorisms and
maxims, she exhaled goodness like a perfume. Happiness desires that all
the world should be happy.

She regained, for the purpose of addressing Jean Valjean, inflections of
voice belonging to the time when she was a little girl. She caressed him
with her smile.

A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.

Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning of
a great joy. Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy. They do
not consent to be black. The night, yes; the shadows, no. If there is no
sun, one must be made.

The dining-room was full of gay things. In the centre, above the white
and glittering table, was a Venetian lustre with flat plates, with all
sorts of colored birds, blue, violet, red, and green, perched amid the
candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the walls, sconces with
triple and quintuple branches; mirrors, silverware, glassware, plate,
porcelain, faïence, pottery, gold and silversmith's work, all was
sparkling and gay. The empty spaces between the candelabra were filled
in with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a
flower.

In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played quartettes
by Haydn.

Jean Valjean had seated himself on a chair in the drawing-room, behind
the door, the leaf of which folded back upon him in such a manner as to
nearly conceal him. A few moments before they sat down to table, Cosette
came, as though inspired by a sudden whim, and made him a deep courtesy,
spreading out her bridal toilet with both hands, and with a tenderly
roguish glance, she asked him:

"Father, are you satisfied?"

"Yes," said Jean Valjean, "I am content!"

"Well, then, laugh."

Jean Valjean began to laugh.

A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served.

The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm, entered
the dining-room, and arranged themselves in the proper order around the
table.

Two large arm-chairs figured on the right and left of the bride, the
first for M. Gillenormand, the other for Jean Valjean. M. Gillenormand
took his seat. The other arm-chair remained empty.

They looked about for M. Fauchelevent.

He was no longer there.

M. Gillenormand questioned Basque.

"Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is?"

"Sir," replied Basque, "I do, precisely. M. Fauchelevent told me to say
to you, sir, that he was suffering, his injured hand was paining him
somewhat, and that he could not dine with Monsieur le Baron and Madame
la Baronne. That he begged to be excused, that he would come to-morrow.
He has just taken his departure."

That empty arm-chair chilled the effusion of the wedding feast for a
moment. But, if M. Fauchelevent was absent, M. Gillenormand was present,
and the grandfather beamed for two. He affirmed that M. Fauchelevent had
done well to retire early, if he were suffering, but that it was only a
slight ailment. This declaration sufficed. Moreover, what is an obscure
corner in such a submersion of joy? Cosette and Marius were passing
through one of those egotistical and blessed moments when no other
faculty is left to a person than that of receiving happiness. And then,
an idea occurred to M. Gillenormand.--"Pardieu, this armchair is empty.
Come hither, Marius. Your aunt will permit it, although she has a right
to you. This armchair is for you. That is legal and delightful.
Fortunatus beside Fortunata."--Applause from the whole table. Marius
took Jean Valjean's place beside Cosette, and things fell out so that
Cosette, who had, at first, been saddened by Jean Valjean's absence,
ended by being satisfied with it. From the moment when Marius took his
place, and was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God
himself. She set her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius'
foot.

The arm-chair being occupied, M. Fauchelevent was obliterated; and
nothing was lacking.

And, five minutes afterward, the whole table from one end to the other,
was laughing with all the animation of forgetfulness.

At dessert, M. Gillenormand, rising to his feet, with a glass of
champagne in his hand--only half full so that the palsy of his eighty
years might not cause an overflow,--proposed the health of the married
pair.

"You shall not escape two sermons," he exclaimed. "This morning you had
one from the curé, this evening you shall have one from your
grandfather. Listen to me; I will give you a bit of advice: Adore each
other. I do not make a pack of gyrations, I go straight to the mark, be
happy. In all creation, only the turtle-doves are wise. Philosophers
say: 'Moderate your joys.' I say: 'Give rein to your joys.' Be as much
smitten with each other as fiends. Be in a rage about it. The
philosophers talk stuff and nonsense. I should like to stuff their
philosophy down their gullets again. Can there be too many perfumes, too
many open rose-buds, too many nightingales singing, too many green
leaves, too much aurora in life? can people love each other too much?
can people please each other too much? Take care, Estelle, thou art too
pretty! Have a care, Nemorin, thou art too handsome! Fine stupidity, in
sooth! Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too
much, charm each other too much? Can one be too much alive, too happy?
Moderate your joys. Ah, indeed! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom
consists in jubilation. Make merry, let us make merry. Are we happy
because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is the Sancy
diamond called the Sancy because it belonged to Harley de Sancy, or
because it weighs six hundred carats? I know nothing about it, life is
full of such problems; the important point is to possess the Sancy and
happiness. Let us be happy without quibbling and quirking. Let us obey
the sun blindly. What is the sun? It is love. He who says love, says
woman. Ah! ah! behold omnipotence--women. Ask that demagogue of a Marius
if he is not the slave of that little tyrant of a Cosette. And of his
own free will, too, the coward! Woman! There is no Robespierre who keeps
his place but woman reigns. I am no longer Royalist except towards that
royalty. What is Adam? The kingdom of Eve. No '89 for Eve. There has
been the royal sceptre surmounted by a fleur-de-lys, there has been the
imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, there has been the sceptre of
Charlemagne, which was of iron, there has been the sceptre of Louis the
Great, which was of gold,--the revolution twisted them between its thumb
and forefinger, ha'penny straws; it is done with, it is broken, it lies
on the earth, there is no longer any sceptre, but make me a revolution
against that little embroidered handkerchief, which smells of patchouli!
I should like to see you do it. Try. Why is it so solid? Because it is a
gewgaw. Ah! you are the nineteenth century? Well, what then? And we have
been as foolish as you. Do not imagine that you have effected much
change in the universe, because your trip-gallant is called the cholera-
morbus, and because your _pourrée_ is called the cachuca. In fact, the
women must always be loved. I defy you to escape from that. These
friends are our angels. Yes, love, woman, the kiss forms a circle from
which I defy you to escape; and, for my own part, I should be only too
happy to re-enter it. Which of you has seen the planet Venus, the
coquette of the abyss, the Célimène of the ocean, rise in the infinite,
calming all here below? The ocean is a rough Alcestis. Well, grumble as
he will, when Venus appears he is forced to smile. That brute beast
submits. We are all made so. Wrath, tempest, claps of thunder, foam to
the very ceiling. A woman enters on the scene, a planet rises; flat on
your face! Marius was fighting six months ago; to-day he is married.
That is well. Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are in the right. Exist
boldly for each other, make us burst with rage that we cannot do the
same, idealize each other, catch in your beaks all the tiny blades of
felicity that exist on earth, and arrange yourselves a nest for life.
Pardi, to love, to be loved, what a fine miracle when one is young!
Don't imagine that you have invented that. I, too, have had my dream, I,
too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too, have had a moonlight
soul. Love is a child six thousand years old. Love has the right to a
long white beard. Methusalem is a street arab beside Cupid. For sixty
centuries men and women have got out of their scrape by loving. The
devil, who is cunning, took to hating man; man, who is still more
cunning, took to loving woman. In this way he does more good than the
devil does him harm. This craft was discovered in the days of the
terrestrial paradise. The invention is old, my friends, but it is
perfectly new. Profit by it. Be Daphnis and Chloe, while waiting to
become Philemon and Baucis. Manage so that, when you are with each
other, nothing shall be lacking to you, and that Cosette may be the sun
for Marius, and that Marius may be the universe to Cosette. Cosette, let
your fine weather be the smile of your husband; Marius, let your rain be
your wife's tears. And let it never rain in your household. You have
filched the winning number in the lottery; you have gained the great
prize, guard it well, keep it under lock and key, do not squander it,
adore each other and snap your fingers at all the rest. Believe what I
say to you. It is good sense. And good sense cannot lie. Be a religion
to each other. Each man has his own fashion of adoring God. Saperlotte!
the best way to adore God is to love one's wife. _I love thee!_ that's
my catechism. He who loves is orthodox. The oath of Henri IV. places
sanctity somewhere between feasting and drunkenness. Ventre-saint-gris!
I don't belong to the religion of that oath. Woman is forgotten in it.
This astonishes me on the part of Henri IV. My friends, long live women!
I am old, they say; it's astonishing how much I feel in the mood to be
young. I should like to go and listen to the bagpipes in the woods.
Children who contrive to be beautiful and contented,--that intoxicates
me. I would like greatly to get married, if any one would have me. It is
impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything but this:
to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like, to be dainty,
to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze at one's image in
one's little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to plume oneself; that
is the aim of life. There, let not that displease you which we used to
think in our day, when we were young folks. Ah! vertu-bamboche! what
charming women there were in those days, and what pretty little faces
and what lovely lasses! I committed my ravages among them. Then love
each other. If people did not love each other, I really do not see what
use there would be in having any springtime; and for my own part, I
should pray the good God to shut up all the beautiful things that he
shows us, and to take away from us and put back in his box, the flowers,
the birds, and the pretty maidens. My children, receive an old man's
blessing."

The evening was gay, lively and agreeable. The grandfather's sovereign
good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each person
regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality. They danced
a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an amiable wedding. Goodman
Days of Yore might have been invited to it. However, he was present in
the person of Father Gillenormand.

There was a tumult, then silence.

The married pair disappeared.

A little after midnight, the Gillenormand house became a temple.

Here we pause. On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling angel
with his finger on his lips.

The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the
celebration of love takes place.

There should be flashes of light athwart such houses. The joy which they
contain ought to make its escape through the stones of the walls in
brilliancy, and vaguely illuminate the gloom. It is impossible that this
sacred and fatal festival should not give off a celestial radiance to
the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man
and the woman takes place; the being one, the being triple, the being
final, the human trinity proceeds from it. This birth of two souls into
one, ought to be an emotion for the gloom. The lover is the priest; the
ravished virgin is terrified. Something of that joy ascends to God.
Where true marriage is, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal
enters in. A nuptial bed makes a nook of dawn amid the shadows. If it
were given to the eye of the flesh to scan the formidable and charming
visions of the upper life, it is probable that we should behold the
forms of night, the winged unknowns, the blue passers of the invisible,
bend down, a throng of sombre heads, around the luminous house,
satisfied, showering benedictions, pointing out to each other the virgin
wife gently alarmed, sweetly terrified, and bearing the reflection of
human bliss upon their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the
wedded pair, dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone,
were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling of
wings. Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with the angels.
That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling. When two
mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible
that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering
throughout the immense mystery of stars.

These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these
joys. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.

To love, or to have loved,--this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is
no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a
fulfilment.



CHAPTER III--THE INSEPARABLE

What had become of Jean Valjean?

Immediately after having laughed, at Cosette's graceful command, when no
one was paying any heed to him, Jean Valjean had risen and had gained
the antechamber unperceived. This was the very room which, eight months
before, he had entered black with mud, with blood and powder, bringing
back the grandson to the grandfather. The old wainscoting was garlanded
with foliage and flowers; the musicians were seated on the sofa on which
they had laid Marius down. Basque, in a black coat, knee-breeches, white
stockings and white gloves, was arranging roses round all of the dishes
that were to be served. Jean Valjean pointed to his arm in its sling,
charged Basque to explain his absence, and went away.

The long windows of the dining-room opened on the street. Jean Valjean
stood for several minutes, erect and motionless in the darkness, beneath
those radiant windows. He listened. The confused sounds of the banquet
reached his ear. He heard the loud, commanding tones of the grandfather,
the violins, the clatter of the plates, the bursts of laughter, and
through all that merry uproar, he distinguished Cosette's sweet and
joyous voice.

He quitted the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and returned to the Rue de
l'Homme Armé.

In order to return thither, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue
Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little
longer, but it was the road through which, for the last three months, he
had become accustomed to pass every day on his way from the Rue de
l'Homme Armé to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, in order to avoid the
obstructions and the mud in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple.

This road, through which Cosette had passed, excluded for him all
possibility of any other itinerary.

Jean Valjean entered his lodgings. He lighted his candle and mounted the
stairs. The apartment was empty. Even Toussaint was no longer there.
Jean Valjean's step made more noise than usual in the chambers. All the
cupboards stood open. He penetrated to Cosette's bedroom. There were no
sheets on the bed. The pillow, covered with ticking, and without a case
or lace, was laid on the blankets folded up on the foot of the mattress,
whose covering was visible, and on which no one was ever to sleep again.
All the little feminine objects which Cosette was attached to had been
carried away; nothing remained except the heavy furniture and the four
walls. Toussaint's bed was despoiled in like manner. One bed only was
made up, and seemed to be waiting some one, and this was Jean Valjean's
bed.

Jean Valjean looked at the walls, closed some of the cupboard doors, and
went and came from one room to another.

Then he sought his own chamber once more, and set his candle on a table.

He had disengaged his arm from the sling, and he used his right hand as
though it did not hurt him.

He approached his bed, and his eyes rested, was it by chance? was it
intentionally? on the _inseparable_ of which Cosette had been jealous,
on the little portmanteau which never left him. On his arrival in the
Rue de l'Homme Armé, on the 4th of June, he had deposited it on a round
table near the head of his bed. He went to this table with a sort of
vivacity, took a key from his pocket, and opened the valise.

From it he slowly drew forth the garments in which, ten years before,
Cosette had quitted Montfermeil; first the little gown, then the black
fichu, then the stout, coarse child's shoes which Cosette might almost
have worn still, so tiny were her feet, then the fustian bodice, which
was very thick, then the knitted petticoat, next the apron with pockets,
then the woollen stockings. These stockings, which still preserved the
graceful form of a tiny leg, were no longer than Jean Valjean's hand.
All this was black of hue. It was he who had brought those garments to
Montfermeil for her. As he removed them from the valise, he laid them on
the bed. He fell to thinking. He called up memories. It was in winter,
in a very cold month of December, she was shivering, half-naked, in
rags, her poor little feet were all red in their wooden shoes. He, Jean
Valjean, had made her abandon those rags to clothe herself in these
mourning habiliments. The mother must have felt pleased in her grave, to
see her daughter wearing mourning for her, and, above all, to see that
she was properly clothed, and that she was warm. He thought of that
forest of Montfermeil; they had traversed it together, Cosette and he;
he thought of what the weather had been, of the leafless trees, of the
wood destitute of birds, of the sunless sky; it mattered not, it was
charming. He arranged the tiny garments on the bed, the fichu next to
the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, and he looked at them,
one after the other. She was no taller than that, she had her big doll
in her arms, she had put her louis d'or in the pocket of that apron, she
had laughed, they walked hand in hand, she had no one in the world but
him.

Then his venerable, white head fell forward on the bed, that stoical old
heart broke, his face was engulfed, so to speak, in Cosette's garments,
and if any one had passed up the stairs at that moment, he would have
heard frightful sobs.



CHAPTER IV--THE IMMORTAL LIVER 68

The old and formidable struggle, of which we have already witnessed so
many phases, began once more.

Jacob struggled with the angel but one night. Alas! how many times have
we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience, in the darkness,
and struggling desperately against it!

Unheard-of conflict! At certain moments the foot slips; at other moments
the ground crumbles away underfoot. How many times had that conscience,
mad for the good, clasped and overthrown him! How many times had the
truth set her knee inexorably upon his breast! How many times, hurled to
earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! How many times had that
implacable spark, lighted within him, and upon him by the Bishop,
dazzled him by force when he had wished to be blind! How many times had
he risen to his feet in the combat, held fast to the rock, leaning
against sophism, dragged in the dust, now getting the upper hand of his
conscience, again overthrown by it! How many times, after an equivoque,
after the specious and treacherous reasoning of egotism, had he heard
his irritated conscience cry in his ear: "A trip! you wretch!" How many
times had his refractory thoughts rattled convulsively in his throat,
under the evidence of duty! Resistance to God. Funereal sweats. What
secret wounds which he alone felt bleed! What excoriations in his
lamentable existence! How many times he had risen bleeding, bruised,
broken, enlightened, despair in his heart, serenity in his soul! and,
vanquished, he had felt himself the conqueror. And, after having
dislocated, broken, and rent his conscience with red-hot pincers, it had
said to him, as it stood over him, formidable, luminous, and tranquil:
"Now, go in peace!"

But on emerging from so melancholy a conflict, what a lugubrious peace,
alas!

Nevertheless, that night Jean Valjean felt that he was passing through
his final combat.

A heart-rending question presented itself.

Predestinations are not all direct; they do not open out in a straight
avenue before the predestined man; they have blind courts, impassable
alleys, obscure turns, disturbing crossroads offering the choice of many
ways. Jean Valjean had halted at that moment at the most perilous of
these crossroads.

He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy
intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had
happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out
before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.

Which was he to take?

He was counselled to the one which alarmed him by that mysterious index
finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes on the darkness.

Once more, Jean Valjean had the choice between the terrible port and the
smiling ambush.

Is it then true? the soul may recover; but not fate. Frightful thing! an
incurable destiny!

This is the problem which presented itself to him:

In what manner was Jean Valjean to behave in relation to the happiness
of Cosette and Marius? It was he who had willed that happiness, it was
he who had brought it about; he had, himself, buried it in his entrails,
and at that moment, when he reflected on it, he was able to enjoy the
sort of satisfaction which an armorer would experience on recognizing
his factory mark on a knife, on withdrawing it, all smoking, from his
own breast.

Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had everything, even
riches. And this was his doing.

But what was he, Jean Valjean, to do with this happiness, now that it
existed, now that it was there? Should he force himself on this
happiness? Should he treat it as belonging to him? No doubt, Cosette did
belong to another; but should he, Jean Valjean, retain of Cosette all
that he could retain? Should he remain the sort of father, half seen but
respected, which he had hitherto been? Should he, without saying a word,
bring his past to that future? Should he present himself there, as
though he had a right, and should he seat himself, veiled, at that
luminous fireside? Should he take those innocent hands into his tragic
hands, with a smile? Should he place upon the peaceful fender of the
Gillenormand drawing-room those feet of his, which dragged behind them
the disgraceful shadow of the law? Should he enter into participation in
the fair fortunes of Cosette and Marius? Should he render the obscurity
on his brow and the cloud upon theirs still more dense? Should he place
his catastrophe as a third associate in their felicity? Should he
continue to hold his peace? In a word, should he be the sinister mute of
destiny beside these two happy beings?

We must have become habituated to fatality and to encounters with it, in
order to have the daring to raise our eyes when certain questions appear
to us in all their horrible nakedness. Good or evil stands behind this
severe interrogation point. What are you going to do? demands the
sphinx.

This habit of trial Jean Valjean possessed. He gazed intently at the
sphinx.

He examined the pitiless problem under all its aspects.

Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwreck. What
was he to do? To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold?

If he clung to it, he should emerge from disaster, he should ascend
again into the sunlight, he should let the bitter water drip from his
garments and his hair, he was saved, he should live.

And if he let go his hold?

Then the abyss.

Thus he took sad council with his thoughts. Or, to speak more correctly,
he fought; he kicked furiously internally, now against his will, now
against his conviction.

Happily for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep. That relieved
him, possibly. But the beginning was savage. A tempest, more furious
than the one which had formerly driven him to Arras, broke loose within
him. The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared them
and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man
writhed.

He felt that he had been stopped short.

Alas! in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty, when
we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered,
furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground, hoping
for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt and sinister
resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!

To feel the sacred shadow which forms an obstacle!

The invisible inexorable, what an obsession!

Then, one is never done with conscience. Make your choice, Brutus; make
your choice, Cato. It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into
that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune,
one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in
one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings
in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the
vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.

Somewhere in the fog of the ancient hells, there is a tun like that.

Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible
have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength?
Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: "It is enough!"

The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the
obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, can perpetual
self-sacrifice be exacted?

The first step is nothing, it is the last which is difficult. What was
the Champmathieu affair in comparison with Cosette's marriage and of
that which it entailed? What is a re-entrance into the galleys, compared
to entrance into the void?

Oh, first step that must be descended, how sombre art thou! Oh, second
step, how black art thou!

How could he refrain from turning aside his head this time?

Martyrdom is sublimation, corrosive sublimation. It is a torture which
consecrates. One can consent to it for the first hour; one seats oneself
on the throne of glowing iron, one places on one's head the crown of hot
iron, one accepts the globe of red hot iron, one takes the sceptre of
red hot iron, but the mantle of flame still remains to be donned, and
comes there not a moment when the miserable flesh revolts and when one
abdicates from suffering?

At length, Jean Valjean entered into the peace of exhaustion.

He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives, the mysterious
balance of light and darkness.

Should he impose his galleys on those two dazzling children, or should
he consummate his irremediable engulfment by himself? On one side lay
the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other that of himself.

At what solution should he arrive? What decision did he come to?

What resolution did he take? What was his own inward definitive response
to the unbribable interrogatory of fatality? What door did he decide to
open? Which side of his life did he resolve upon closing and condemning?
Among all the unfathomable precipices which surrounded him, which was
his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of the gulfs did he
nod his head?

His dizzy revery lasted all night long.

He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude, bent double over
that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance,
alas! with clenched fists, with arms outspread at right angles, like a
man crucified who has been un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth.
There he remained for twelve hours, the twelve long hours of a long
winter's night, ice-cold, without once raising his head, and without
uttering a word. He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts
wallowed on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the
eagle. Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him
dead; all at once he shuddered convulsively, and his mouth, glued to
Cosette's garments, kissed them; then it could be seen that he was
alive.

Who could see? Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no one there.

The One who is in the shadows.



BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP

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CHAPTER I--THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN

The days that follow weddings are solitary. People respect the
meditations of the happy pair. And also, their tardy slumbers, to some
degree. The tumult of visits and congratulations only begins later on.
On the morning of the 17th of February, it was a little past midday when
Basque, with napkin and feather-duster under his arm, busy in setting
his antechamber to rights, heard a light tap at the door. There had been
no ring, which was discreet on such a day. Basque opened the door, and
beheld M. Fauchelevent. He introduced him into the drawing-room, still
encumbered and topsy-turvy, and which bore the air of a field of battle
after the joys of the preceding evening.

"_Dame_, sir," remarked Basque, "we all woke up late."

"Is your master up?" asked Jean Valjean.

"How is Monsieur's arm?" replied Basque.

"Better. Is your master up?"

"Which one? the old one or the new one?"

"Monsieur Pontmercy."

"Monsieur le Baron," said Basque, drawing himself up.

A man is a Baron most of all to his servants. He counts for something
with them; they are what a philosopher would call, bespattered with the
title, and that flatters them. Marius, be it said in passing, a militant
republican as he had proved, was now a Baron in spite of himself. A
small revolution had taken place in the family in connection with this
title. It was now M. Gillenormand who clung to it, and Marius who
detached himself from it. But Colonel Pontmercy had written: "My son
will bear my title." Marius obeyed. And then, Cosette, in whom the woman
was beginning to dawn, was delighted to be a Baroness.

"Monsieur le Baron?" repeated Basque. "I will go and see. I will tell
him that M. Fauchelevent is here."

"No. Do not tell him that it is I. Tell him that some one wishes to
speak to him in private, and mention no name."

"Ah!" ejaculated Basque.

"I wish to surprise him."

"Ah!" ejaculated Basque once more, emitting his second "ah!" as an
explanation of the first.

And he left the room.

Jean Valjean remained alone.

The drawing-room, as we have just said, was in great disorder. It seemed
as though, by lending an ear, one might still hear the vague noise of
the wedding. On the polished floor lay all sorts of flowers which had
fallen from garlands and head-dresses. The wax candles, burned to
stumps, added stalactites of wax to the crystal drops of the
chandeliers. Not a single piece of furniture was in its place. In the
corners, three or four arm-chairs, drawn close together in a circle, had
the appearance of continuing a conversation. The whole effect was
cheerful. A certain grace still lingers round a dead feast. It has been
a happy thing. On the chairs in disarray, among those fading flowers,
beneath those extinct lights, people have thought of joy. The sun had
succeeded to the chandelier, and made its way gayly into the drawing-
room.

Several minutes elapsed. Jean Valjean stood motionless on the spot where
Basque had left him. He was very pale. His eyes were hollow, and so
sunken in his head by sleeplessness that they nearly disappeared in
their orbits. His black coat bore the weary folds of a garment that has
been up all night. The elbows were whitened with the down which the
friction of cloth against linen leaves behind it.

Jean Valjean stared at the window outlined on the polished floor at his
feet by the sun.

There came a sound at the door, and he raised his eyes.

Marius entered, his head well up, his mouth smiling, an indescribable
light on his countenance, his brow expanded, his eyes triumphant. He had
not slept either.

"It is you, father!" he exclaimed, on catching sight of Jean Valjean;
"that idiot of a Basque had such a mysterious air! But you have come too
early. It is only half past twelve. Cosette is asleep."

That word: "Father," said to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, signified:
supreme felicity. There had always existed, as the reader knows, a lofty
wall, a coldness and a constraint between them; ice which must be broken
or melted. Marius had reached that point of intoxication when the wall
was lowered, when the ice dissolved, and when M. Fauchelevent was to
him, as to Cosette, a father.

He continued: his words poured forth, as is the peculiarity of divine
paroxysms of joy.

"How glad I am to see you! If you only knew how we missed you yesterday!
Good morning, father. How is your hand? Better, is it not?"

And, satisfied with the favorable reply which he had made to himself, he
pursued:

"We have both been talking about you. Cosette loves you so dearly! You
must not forget that you have a chamber here, We want nothing more to do
with the Rue de l'Homme Armé. We will have no more of it at all. How
could you go to live in a street like that, which is sickly, which is
disagreeable, which is ugly, which has a barrier at one end, where one
is cold, and into which one cannot enter? You are to come and install
yourself here. And this very day. Or you will have to deal with Cosette.
She means to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. You have your own
chamber here, it is close to ours, it opens on the garden; the trouble
with the clock has been attended to, the bed is made, it is all ready,
you have only to take possession of it. Near your bed Cosette has placed
a huge, old, easy-chair covered with Utrecht velvet and she has said to
it: 'Stretch out your arms to him.' A nightingale comes to the clump of
acacias opposite your windows, every spring. In two months more you will
have it. You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right. By
night it will sing, and by day Cosette will prattle. Your chamber faces
due South. Cosette will arrange your books for you, your Voyages of
Captain Cook and the other,--Vancouver's and all your affairs. I believe
that there is a little valise to which you are attached, I have fixed
upon a corner of honor for that. You have conquered my grandfather, you
suit him. We will live together. Do you play whist? you will overwhelm
my grandfather with delight if you play whist. It is you who shall take
Cosette to walk on the days when I am at the courts, you shall give her
your arm, you know, as you used to, in the Luxembourg. We are absolutely
resolved to be happy. And you shall be included in it, in our happiness,
do you hear, father? Come, will you breakfast with us to-day?"

"Sir," said Jean Valjean, "I have something to say to you. I am an ex-
convict."

The limit of shrill sounds perceptible can be overleaped, as well in the
case of the mind as in that of the ear. These words: "I am an ex-
convict," proceeding from the mouth of M. Fauchelevent and entering the
ear of Marius overshot the possible. It seemed to him that something had
just been said to him; but he did not know what. He stood with his mouth
wide open.

Then he perceived that the man who was addressing him was frightful.
Wholly absorbed in his own dazzled state, he had not, up to that moment,
observed the other man's terrible pallor.

Jean Valjean untied the black cravat which supported his right arm,
unrolled the linen from around his hand, bared his thumb and showed it
to Marius.

"There is nothing the matter with my hand," said he.

Marius looked at the thumb.

"There has not been anything the matter with it," went on Jean Valjean.

There was, in fact, no trace of any injury.

Jean Valjean continued:

"It was fitting that I should be absent from your marriage. I absented
myself as much as was in my power. So I invented this injury in order
that I might not commit a forgery, that I might not introduce a flaw
into the marriage documents, in order that I might escape from signing."

Marius stammered.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"The meaning of it is," replied Jean Valjean, "that I have been in the
galleys."

"You are driving me mad!" exclaimed Marius in terror.

"Monsieur Pontmercy," said Jean Valjean, "I was nineteen years in the
galleys. For theft. Then, I was condemned for life for theft, for a
second offence. At the present moment, I have broken my ban."

In vain did Marius recoil before the reality, refuse the fact, resist
the evidence, he was forced to give way. He began to understand, and, as
always happens in such cases, he understood too much. An inward shudder
of hideous enlightenment flashed through him; an idea which made him
quiver traversed his mind. He caught a glimpse of a wretched destiny for
himself in the future.

"Say all, say all!" he cried. "You are Cosette's father!"

And he retreated a couple of paces with a movement of indescribable
horror.

Jean Valjean elevated his head with so much majesty of attitude that he
seemed to grow even to the ceiling.

"It is necessary that you should believe me here, sir; although our oath
to others may not be received in law . . ."

Here he paused, then, with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority,
he added, articulating slowly, and emphasizing the syllables:

". . . You will believe me. I the father of Cosette! before God, no.
Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant of Faverolles. I earned my
living by pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean.
I am not related to Cosette. Reassure yourself."

Marius stammered:

"Who will prove that to me?"

"I. Since I tell you so."

Marius looked at the man. He was melancholy yet tranquil. No lie could
proceed from such a calm. That which is icy is sincere. The truth could
be felt in that chill of the tomb.

"I believe you," said Marius.

Jean Valjean bent his head, as though taking note of this, and
continued:

"What am I to Cosette? A passer-by. Ten years ago, I did not know that
she was in existence. I love her, it is true. One loves a child whom one
has seen when very young, being old oneself. When one is old, one feels
oneself a grandfather towards all little children. You may, it seems to
me, suppose that I have something which resembles a heart. She was an
orphan. Without either father or mother. She needed me. That is why I
began to love her. Children are so weak that the first comer, even a man
like me, can become their protector. I have fulfilled this duty towards
Cosette. I do not think that so slight a thing can be called a good
action; but if it be a good action, well, say that I have done it.
Register this attenuating circumstance. To-day, Cosette passes out of my
life; our two roads part. Henceforth, I can do nothing for her. She is
Madame Pontmercy. Her providence has changed. And Cosette gains by the
change. All is well. As for the six hundred thousand francs, you do not
mention them to me, but I forestall your thought, they are a deposit.
How did that deposit come into my hands? What does that matter? I
restore the deposit. Nothing more can be demanded of me. I complete the
restitution by announcing my true name. That concerns me. I have a
reason for desiring that you should know who I am."

And Jean Valjean looked Marius full in the face.

All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent. Certain gusts
of destiny produce these billows in our souls.

We have all undergone moments of trouble in which everything within us
is dispersed; we say the first things that occur to us, which are not
always precisely those which should be said. There are sudden
revelations which one cannot bear, and which intoxicate like baleful
wine. Marius was stupefied by the novel situation which presented itself
to him, to the point of addressing that man almost like a person who was
angry with him for this avowal.

"But why," he exclaimed, "do you tell me all this? Who forces you to do
so? You could have kept your secret to yourself. You are neither
denounced, nor tracked nor pursued. You have a reason for wantonly
making such a revelation. Conclude. There is something more. In what
connection do you make this confession? What is your motive?"

"My motive?" replied Jean Valjean in a voice so low and dull that one
would have said that he was talking to himself rather than to Marius.
"From what motive, in fact, has this convict just said 'I am a convict'?
Well, yes! the motive is strange. It is out of honesty. Stay, the
unfortunate point is that I have a thread in my heart, which keeps me
fast. It is when one is old that that sort of thread is particularly
solid. All life falls in ruin around one; one resists. Had I been able
to tear out that thread, to break it, to undo the knot or to cut it, to
go far away, I should have been safe. I had only to go away; there are
diligences in the Rue Bouloy; you are happy; I am going. I have tried to
break that thread, I have jerked at it, it would not break, I tore my
heart with it. Then I said: 'I cannot live anywhere else than here.' I
must stay. Well, yes, you are right, I am a fool, why not simply remain
here? You offer me a chamber in this house, Madame Pontmercy is
sincerely attached to me, she said to the arm-chair: 'Stretch out your
arms to him,' your grandfather demands nothing better than to have me, I
suit him, we shall live together, and take our meals in common, I shall
give Cosette my arm . . . Madame Pontmercy, excuse me, it is a habit, we
shall have but one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney-corner in
winter, the same promenade in summer, that is joy, that is happiness,
that is everything. We shall live as one family. One family!"

At that word, Jean Valjean became wild. He folded his arms, glared at
the floor beneath his feet as though he would have excavated an abyss
therein, and his voice suddenly rose in thundering tones:

"As one family! No. I belong to no family. I do not belong to yours. I
do not belong to any family of men. In houses where people are among
themselves, I am superfluous. There are families, but there is nothing
of the sort for me. I am an unlucky wretch; I am left outside. Did I
have a father and mother? I almost doubt it. On the day when I gave that
child in marriage, all came to an end. I have seen her happy, and that
she is with a man whom she loves, and that there exists here a kind old
man, a household of two angels, and all joys in that house, and that it
was well, I said to myself: 'Enter thou not.' I could have lied, it is
true, have deceived you all, and remained Monsieur Fauchelevent. So long
as it was for her, I could lie; but now it would be for myself, and I
must not. It was sufficient for me to hold my peace, it is true, and all
would go on. You ask me what has forced me to speak? a very odd thing;
my conscience. To hold my peace was very easy, however. I passed the
night in trying to persuade myself to it; you questioned me, and what I
have just said to you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do
it; well, yes, I have passed the night in alleging reasons to myself,
and I gave myself very good reasons, I have done what I could. But there
are two things in which I have not succeeded; in breaking the thread
that holds me fixed, riveted and sealed here by the heart, or in
silencing some one who speaks softly to me when I am alone. That is why
I have come hither to tell you everything this morning. Everything or
nearly everything. It is useless to tell you that which concerns only
myself; I keep that to myself. You know the essential points. So I have
taken my mystery and have brought it to you. And I have disembowelled my
secret before your eyes. It was not a resolution that was easy to take.
I struggled all night long. Ah! you think that I did not tell myself
that this was no Champmathieu affair, that by concealing my name I was
doing no one any injury, that the name of Fauchelevent had been given to
me by Fauchelevent himself, out of gratitude for a service rendered to
him, and that I might assuredly keep it, and that I should be happy in
that chamber which you offer me, that I should not be in any one's way,
that I should be in my own little corner, and that, while you would have
Cosette, I should have the idea that I was in the same house with her.
Each one of us would have had his share of happiness. If I continued to
be Monsieur Fauchelevent, that would arrange everything. Yes, with the
exception of my soul. There was joy everywhere upon my surface, but the
bottom of my soul remained black. It is not enough to be happy, one must
be content. Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, thus I
should have concealed my true visage, thus, in the presence of your
expansion, I should have had an enigma, thus, in the midst of your full
noonday, I should have had shadows, thus, without crying ''ware,' I
should have simply introduced the galleys to your fireside, I should
have taken my seat at your table with the thought that if you knew who I
was, you would drive me from it, I should have allowed myself to be
served by domestics who, had they known, would have said: 'How
horrible!' I should have touched you with my elbow, which you have a
right to dislike, I should have filched your clasps of the hand! There
would have existed in your house a division of respect between venerable
white locks and tainted white locks; at your most intimate hours, when
all hearts thought themselves open to the very bottom to all the rest,
when we four were together, your grandfather, you two and myself, a
stranger would have been present! I should have been side by side with
you in your existence, having for my only care not to disarrange the
cover of my dreadful pit. Thus, I, a dead man, should have thrust myself
upon you who are living beings. I should have condemned her to myself
forever. You and Cosette and I would have had all three of our heads in
the green cap! Does it not make you shudder? I am only the most crushed
of men; I should have been the most monstrous of men. And I should have
committed that crime every day! And I should have had that face of night
upon my visage every day! every day! And I should have communicated to
you a share in my taint every day! every day! to you, my dearly beloved,
my children, to you, my innocent creatures! Is it nothing to hold one's
peace? is it a simple matter to keep silence? No, it is not simple.
There is a silence which lies. And my lie, and my fraud and my
indignity, and my cowardice and my treason and my crime, I should have
drained drop by drop, I should have spit it out, then swallowed it
again, I should have finished at midnight and have begun again at
midday, and my 'good morning' would have lied, and my 'good night' would
have lied, and I should have slept on it, I should have eaten it, with
my bread, and I should have looked Cosette in the face, and I should
have responded to the smile of the angel by the smile of the damned
soul, and I should have been an abominable villain! Why should I do it?
in order to be happy. In order to be happy. Have I the right to be
happy? I stand outside of life, sir."

Jean Valjean paused. Marius listened. Such chains of ideas and of
anguishes cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice once
more, but it was no longer a dull voice--it was a sinister voice.

"You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked,
you say. Yes! I am denounced! yes! I am tracked! By whom? By myself. It
is I who bar the passage to myself, and I drag myself, and I push
myself, and I arrest myself, and I execute myself, and when one holds
oneself, one is firmly held."

And, seizing a handful of his own coat by the nape of the neck and
extending it towards Marius:

"Do you see that fist?" he continued. "Don't you think that it holds
that collar in such a wise as not to release it? Well! conscience is
another grasp! If one desires to be happy, sir, one must never
understand duty; for, as soon as one has comprehended it, it is
implacable. One would say that it punished you for comprehending it; but
no, it rewards you; for it places you in a hell, where you feel God
beside you. One has no sooner lacerated his own entrails than he is at
peace with himself."

And, with a poignant accent, he added:

"Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am an honest man. It is
by degrading myself in your eyes that I elevate myself in my own. This
has happened to me once before, but it was less painful then; it was a
mere nothing. Yes, an honest man. I should not be so if, through my
fault, you had continued to esteem me; now that you despise me, I am so.
I have that fatality hanging over me that, not being able to ever have
anything but stolen consideration, that consideration humiliates me, and
crushes me inwardly, and, in order that I may respect myself, it is
necessary that I should be despised. Then I straighten up again. I am a
galley-slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that that is most
improbable. But what would you have me do about it? it is the fact. I
have entered into engagements with myself; I keep them. There are
encounters which bind us, there are chances which involve us in duties.
You see, Monsieur Pontmercy, various things have happened to me in the
course of my life."

Again Jean Valjean paused, swallowing his saliva with an effort, as
though his words had a bitter after-taste, and then he went on:

"When one has such a horror hanging over one, one has not the right to
make others share it without their knowledge, one has not the right to
make them slip over one's own precipice without their perceiving it, one
has not the right to let one's red blouse drag upon them, one has no
right to slyly encumber with one's misery the happiness of others. It is
hideous to approach those who are healthy, and to touch them in the dark
with one's ulcer. In spite of the fact that Fauchelevent lent me his
name, I have no right to use it; he could give it to me, but I could not
take it. A name is an _I_. You see, sir, that I have thought somewhat, I
have read a little, although I am a peasant; and you see that I express
myself properly. I understand things. I have procured myself an
education. Well, yes, to abstract a name and to place oneself under it
is dishonest. Letters of the alphabet can be filched, like a purse or a
watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false
key, to enter the house of honest people by picking their lock, never
more to look straightforward, to forever eye askance, to be infamous
within the _I_, no! no! no! no! no! It is better to suffer, to bleed, to
weep, to tear one's skin from the flesh with one's nails, to pass nights
writhing in anguish, to devour oneself body and soul. That is why I have
just told you all this. Wantonly, as you say."

He drew a painful breath, and hurled this final word:

"In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in
order to live, I will not steal a name."

"To live!" interrupted Marius. "You do not need that name in order to
live?"

"Ah! I understand the matter," said Jean Valjean, raising and lowering
his head several times in succession.

A silence ensued. Both held their peace, each plunged in a gulf of
thoughts. Marius was sitting near a table and resting the corner of his
mouth on one of his fingers, which was folded back. Jean Valjean was
pacing to and fro. He paused before a mirror, and remained motionless.
Then, as though replying to some inward course of reasoning, he said, as
he gazed at the mirror, which he did not see:

"While, at present, I am relieved."

He took up his march again, and walked to the other end of the drawing-
room. At the moment when he turned round, he perceived that Marius was
watching his walk. Then he said, with an inexpressible intonation:

"I drag my leg a little. Now you understand why!"

Then he turned fully round towards Marius:

"And now, sir, imagine this: I have said nothing, I have remained
Monsieur Fauchelevent, I have taken my place in your house, I am one of
you, I am in my chamber, I come to breakfast in the morning in slippers,
in the evening all three of us go to the play, I accompany Madame
Pontmercy to the Tuileries, and to the Place Royale, we are together,
you think me your equal; one fine day you are there, and I am there, we
are conversing, we are laughing; all at once, you hear a voice shouting
this name: 'Jean Valjean!' and behold, that terrible hand, the police,
darts from the darkness, and abruptly tears off my mask!"

Again he paused; Marius had sprung to his feet with a shudder. Jean
Valjean resumed:

"What do you say to that?"

Marius' silence answered for him.

Jean Valjean continued:

"You see that I am right in not holding my peace. Be happy, be in
heaven, be the angel of an angel, exist in the sun, be content
therewith, and do not trouble yourself about the means which a poor
damned wretch takes to open his breast and force his duty to come forth;
you have before you, sir, a wretched man."

Marius slowly crossed the room, and, when he was quite close to Jean
Valjean, he offered the latter his hand.

But Marius was obliged to step up and take that hand which was not
offered, Jean Valjean let him have his own way, and it seemed to Marius
that he pressed a hand of marble.

"My grandfather has friends," said Marius; "I will procure your pardon."

"It is useless," replied Jean Valjean. "I am believed to be dead, and
that suffices. The dead are not subjected to surveillance. They are
supposed to rot in peace. Death is the same thing as pardon."

And, disengaging the hand which Marius held, he added, with a sort of
inexorable dignity:

"Moreover, the friend to whom I have recourse is the doing of my duty;
and I need but one pardon, that of my conscience."

At that moment, a door at the other end of the drawing-room opened
gently half way, and in the opening Cosette's head appeared. They saw
only her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder, her eyelids were
still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird, which thrusts
its head out of its nest, glanced first at her husband, then at Jean
Valjean, and cried to them with a smile, so that they seemed to behold a
smile at the heart of a rose:

"I will wager that you are talking politics. How stupid that is, instead
of being with me!"

Jean Valjean shuddered.

"Cosette! . . ." stammered Marius.

And he paused. One would have said that they were two criminals.

Cosette, who was radiant, continued to gaze at both of them. There was
something in her eyes like gleams of paradise.

"I have caught you in the very act," said Cosette. "Just now, I heard my
father Fauchelevent through the door saying: 'Conscience . . . doing my
duty . . .' That is politics, indeed it is. I will not have it. People
should not talk politics the very next day. It is not right."

"You are mistaken. Cosette," said Marius, "we are talking business. We
are discussing the best investment of your six hundred thousand francs .
. ."

"That is not it at all," interrupted Cosette. "I am coming. Does anybody
want me here?"

And, passing resolutely through the door, she entered the drawing-room.
She was dressed in a voluminous white dressing-gown, with a thousand
folds and large sleeves which, starting from the neck, fell to her feet.
In the golden heavens of some ancient gothic pictures, there are these
charming sacks fit to clothe the angels.

She contemplated herself from head to foot in a long mirror, then
exclaimed, in an outburst of ineffable ecstasy:

"There was once a King and a Queen. Oh! how happy I am!"

That said, she made a curtsey to Marius and to Jean Valjean.

"There," said she, "I am going to install myself near you in an easy-
chair, we breakfast in half an hour, you shall say anything you like, I
know well that men must talk, and I will be very good."

Marius took her by the arm and said lovingly to her:

"We are talking business."

"By the way," said Cosette, "I have opened my window, a flock of
pierrots has arrived in the garden,--Birds, not maskers. To-day is Ash-
Wednesday; but not for the birds."

"I tell you that we are talking business, go, my little Cosette, leave
us alone for a moment. We are talking figures. That will bore you."

"You have a charming cravat on this morning, Marius. You are very
dandified, monseigneur. No, it will not bore me."

"I assure you that it will bore you."

"No. Since it is you. I shall not understand you, but I shall listen to
you. When one hears the voices of those whom one loves, one does not
need to understand the words that they utter. That we should be here
together--that is all that I desire. I shall remain with you, bah!"

"You are my beloved Cosette! Impossible."

"Impossible!"

"Yes."

"Very good," said Cosette. "I was going to tell you some news. I could
have told you that your grandfather is still asleep, that your aunt is
at mass, that the chimney in my father Fauchelevent's room smokes, that
Nicolette has sent for the chimney-sweep, that Toussaint and Nicolette
have already quarrelled, that Nicolette makes sport of Toussaint's
stammer. Well, you shall know nothing. Ah! it is impossible? you shall
see, gentlemen, that I, in my turn, can say: It is impossible. Then who
will be caught? I beseech you, my little Marius, let me stay here with
you two."

"I swear to you, that it is indispensable that we should be alone."

"Well, am I anybody?"

Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word. Cosette turned to him:

"In the first place, father, I want you to come and embrace me. What do
you mean by not saying anything instead of taking my part? who gave me
such a father as that? You must perceive that my family life is very
unhappy. My husband beats me. Come, embrace me instantly."

Jean Valjean approached.

Cosette turned toward Marius.

"As for you, I shall make a face at you."

Then she presented her brow to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean advanced a step toward her.

Cosette recoiled.

"Father, you are pale. Does your arm hurt you?"

"It is well," said Jean Valjean.

"Did you sleep badly?"

"No."

"Are you sad?"

"No."

"Embrace me if you are well, if you sleep well, if you are content, I
will not scold you."

And again she offered him her brow.

Jean Valjean dropped a kiss upon that brow whereon rested a celestial
gleam.

"Smile."

Jean Valjean obeyed. It was the smile of a spectre.

"Now, defend me against my husband."

"Cosette! . . ." ejaculated Marius.

"Get angry, father. Say that I must stay. You can certainly talk before
me. So you think me very silly. What you say is astonishing! business,
placing money in a bank a great matter truly. Men make mysteries out of
nothing. I am very pretty this morning. Look at me, Marius."

And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders, and an indescribably
exquisite pout, she glanced at Marius.

"I love you!" said Marius.

"I adore you!" said Cosette.

And they fell irresistibly into each other's arms.

"Now," said Cosette, adjusting a fold of her dressing-gown, with a
triumphant little grimace, "I shall stay."

"No, not that," said Marius, in a supplicating tone. "We have to finish
something."

"Still no?"

Marius assumed a grave tone:

"I assure you, Cosette, that it is impossible."

"Ah! you put on your man's voice, sir. That is well, I go. You, father,
have not upheld me. Monsieur my father, monsieur my husband, you are
tyrants. I shall go and tell grandpapa. If you think that I am going to
return and talk platitudes to you, you are mistaken. I am proud. I shall
wait for you now. You shall see, that it is you who are going to be
bored without me. I am going, it is well."

And she left the room.

Two seconds later, the door opened once more, her fresh and rosy head
was again thrust between the two leaves, and she cried to them:

"I am very angry indeed."

The door closed again, and the shadows descended once more.

It was as though a ray of sunlight should have suddenly traversed the
night, without itself being conscious of it.

Marius made sure that the door was securely closed.

"Poor Cosette!" he murmured, "when she finds out . . ."

At that word Jean Valjean trembled in every limb. He fixed on Marius a
bewildered eye.

"Cosette! oh yes, it is true, you are going to tell Cosette about this.
That is right. Stay, I had not thought of that. One has the strength for
one thing, but not for another. Sir, I conjure you, I entreat now, sir,
give me your most sacred word of honor, that you will not tell her. Is
it not enough that you should know it? I have been able to say it myself
without being forced to it, I could have told it to the universe, to the
whole world,--it was all one to me. But she, she does not know what it
is, it would terrify her. What, a convict! we should be obliged to
explain matters to her, to say to her: 'He is a man who has been in the
galleys.' She saw the chain-gang pass by one day. Oh! My God!" . . . He
dropped into an arm-chair and hid his face in his hands.

His grief was not audible, but from the quivering of his shoulders it
was evident that he was weeping. Silent tears, terrible tears.

There is something of suffocation in the sob. He was seized with a sort
of convulsion, he threw himself against the back of the chair as though
to gain breath, letting his arms fall, and allowing Marius to see his
face inundated with tears, and Marius heard him murmur, so low that his
voice seemed to issue from fathomless depths:

"Oh! would that I could die!"

"Be at your ease," said Marius, "I will keep your secret for myself
alone."

And, less touched, perhaps, than he ought to have been, but forced, for
the last hour, to familiarize himself with something as unexpected as it
was dreadful, gradually beholding the convict superposed before his very
eyes, upon M. Fauchelevent, overcome, little by little, by that
lugubrious reality, and led, by the natural inclination of the
situation, to recognize the space which had just been placed between
that man and himself, Marius added:

"It is impossible that I should not speak a word to you with regard to
the deposit which you have so faithfully and honestly remitted. That is
an act of probity. It is just that some recompense should be bestowed on
you. Fix the sum yourself, it shall be counted out to you. Do not fear
to set it very high."

"I thank you, sir," replied Jean Valjean, gently.

He remained in thought for a moment, mechanically passing the tip of his
fore-finger across his thumb-nail, then he lifted up his voice:

"All is nearly over. But one last thing remains for me . . ."

"What is it?"

Jean Valjean struggled with what seemed a last hesitation, and, without
voice, without breath, he stammered rather than said:

"Now that you know, do you think, sir, you, who are the master, that I
ought not to see Cosette any more?"

"I think that would be better," replied Marius coldly.

"I shall never see her more," murmured Jean Valjean. And he directed his
steps towards the door.

He laid his hand on the knob, the latch yielded, the door opened. Jean
Valjean pushed it open far enough to pass through, stood motionless for
a second, then closed the door again and turned to Marius.

He was no longer pale, he was livid. There were no longer any tears in
his eyes, but only a sort of tragic flame. His voice had regained a
strange composure.

"Stay, sir," he said. "If you will allow it, I will come to see her. I
assure you that I desire it greatly. If I had not cared to see Cosette,
I should not have made to you the confession that I have made, I should
have gone away; but, as I desired to remain in the place where Cosette
is, and to continue to see her, I had to tell you about it honestly. You
follow my reasoning, do you not? it is a matter easily understood. You
see, I have had her with me for more than nine years. We lived first in
that hut on the boulevard, then in the convent, then near the
Luxembourg. That was where you saw her for the first time. You remember
her blue plush hat. Then we went to the Quartier des Invalides, where
there was a railing on a garden, the Rue Plumet. I lived in a little
back court-yard, whence I could hear her piano. That was my life. We
never left each other. That lasted for nine years and some months. I was
like her own father, and she was my child. I do not know whether you
understand, Monsieur Pontmercy, but to go away now, never to see her
again, never to speak to her again, to no longer have anything, would be
hard. If you do not disapprove of it, I will come to see Cosette from
time to time. I will not come often. I will not remain long. You shall
give orders that I am to be received in the little waiting-room. On the
ground floor. I could enter perfectly well by the back door, but that
might create surprise perhaps, and it would be better, I think, for me
to enter by the usual door. Truly, sir, I should like to see a little
more of Cosette. As rarely as you please. Put yourself in my place, I
have nothing left but that. And then, we must be cautious. If I no
longer come at all, it would produce a bad effect, it would be
considered singular. What I can do, by the way, is to come in the
afternoon, when night is beginning to fall."

"You shall come every evening," said Marius, "and Cosette will be
waiting for you."

"You are kind, sir," said Jean Valjean.

Marius saluted Jean Valjean, happiness escorted despair to the door, and
these two men parted.



CHAPTER II--THE OBSCURITIES WHICH A REVELATION CAN CONTAIN

Marius was quite upset.

The sort of estrangement which he had always felt towards the man beside
whom he had seen Cosette, was now explained to him. There was something
enigmatic about that person, of which his instinct had warned him.

This enigma was the most hideous of disgraces, the galleys. This M.
Fauchelevent was the convict Jean Valjean.

To abruptly find such a secret in the midst of one's happiness resembles
the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves.

Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette thenceforth condemned to such a
neighborhood? Was this an accomplished fact? Did the acceptance of that
man form a part of the marriage now consummated? Was there nothing to be
done?

Had Marius wedded the convict as well?

In vain may one be crowned with light and joy, in vain may one taste the
grand purple hour of life, happy love, such shocks would force even the
archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his glory, to shudder.

As is always the case in changes of view of this nature, Marius asked
himself whether he had nothing with which to reproach himself. Had he
been wanting in divination? Had he been wanting in prudence? Had he
involuntarily dulled his wits? A little, perhaps. Had he entered upon
this love affair, which had ended in his marriage to Cosette, without
taking sufficient precautions to throw light upon the surroundings? He
admitted,--it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves
in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,--he
admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of
internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms
of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes,
and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing
more than a conscience bathed in a mist. We have more than once
indicated this characteristic element of Marius' individuality.

He recalled that, in the intoxication of his love, in the Rue Plumet,
during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoken to
Cosette of that drama in the Gorbeau hovel, where the victim had taken
up such a singular line of silence during the struggle and the ensuing
flight. How had it happened that he had not mentioned this to Cosette?
Yet it was so near and so terrible! How had it come to pass that he had
not even named the Thénardiers, and, particularly, on the day when he
had encountered Éponine? He now found it almost difficult to explain his
silence of that time. Nevertheless, he could account for it. He recalled
his benumbed state, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing
everything, that catching away of each other into the ideal, and perhaps
also, like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with this
violent and charming state of the soul, a vague, dull instinct impelling
him to conceal and abolish in his memory that redoubtable adventure,
contact with which he dreaded, in which he did not wish to play any
part, his agency in which he had kept secret, and in which he could be
neither narrator nor witness without being an accuser.

Moreover, these few weeks had been a flash of lightning; there had been
no time for anything except love.

In short, having weighed everything, turned everything over in his mind,
examined everything, whatever might have been the consequences if he had
told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, even if he had discovered that
Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? Would
that have changed her, Cosette? Would he have drawn back? Would he have
adored her any the less? Would he have refrained from marrying her? No.
Then there was nothing to regret, nothing with which he need reproach
himself. All was well. There is a deity for those drunken men who are
called lovers. Marius blind, had followed the path which he would have
chosen had he been in full possession of his sight. Love had bandaged
his eyes, in order to lead him whither? To paradise.

But this paradise was henceforth complicated with an infernal
accompaniment.

Marius' ancient estrangement towards this man, towards this Fauchelevent
who had turned into Jean Valjean, was at present mingled with horror.

In this horror, let us state, there was some pity, and even a certain
surprise.

This thief, this thief guilty of a second offence, had restored that
deposit. And what a deposit! Six hundred thousand francs.

He alone was in the secret of that deposit. He might have kept it all,
he had restored it all.

Moreover, he had himself revealed his situation. Nothing forced him to
this. If any one learned who he was, it was through himself. In this
avowal there was something more than acceptance of humiliation, there
was acceptance of peril. For a condemned man, a mask is not a mask, it
is a shelter. A false name is security, and he had rejected that false
name. He, the galley-slave, might have hidden himself forever in an
honest family; he had withstood this temptation. And with what motive?
Through a conscientious scruple. He himself explained this with the
irresistible accents of truth. In short, whatever this Jean Valjean
might be, he was, undoubtedly, a conscience which was awakening. There
existed some mysterious re-habilitation which had begun; and, to all
appearances, scruples had for a long time already controlled this man.
Such fits of justice and goodness are not characteristic of vulgar
natures. An awakening of conscience is grandeur of soul.

Jean Valjean was sincere. This sincerity, visible, palpable,
irrefragable, evident from the very grief that it caused him, rendered
inquiries useless, and conferred authority on all that that man had
said.

Here, for Marius, there was a strange reversal of situations. What
breathed from M. Fauchelevent? distrust. What did Jean Valjean inspire?
confidence.

In the mysterious balance of this Jean Valjean which the pensive Marius
struck, he admitted the active principle, he admitted the passive
principle, and he tried to reach a balance.

But all this went on as in a storm. Marius, while endeavoring to form a
clear idea of this man, and while pursuing Jean Valjean, so to speak, in
the depths of his thought, lost him and found him again in a fatal mist.

The deposit honestly restored, the probity of the confession--these were
good. This produced a lightening of the cloud, then the cloud became
black once more.

Troubled as were Marius' memories, a shadow of them returned to him.

After all, what was that adventure in the Jondrette attic? Why had that
man taken to flight on the arrival of the police, instead of entering a
complaint?

Here Marius found the answer. Because that man was a fugitive from
justice, who had broken his ban.

Another question: Why had that man come to the barricade?

For Marius now once more distinctly beheld that recollection which had
re-appeared in his emotions like sympathetic ink at the application of
heat. This man had been in the barricade. He had not fought there. What
had he come there for? In the presence of this question a spectre sprang
up and replied: "Javert."

Marius recalled perfectly now that funereal sight of Jean Valjean
dragging the pinioned Javert out of the barricade, and he still heard
behind the corner of the little Rue Mondétour that frightful pistol
shot. Obviously, there was hatred between that police spy and the
galley-slave. The one was in the other's way. Jean Valjean had gone to
the barricade for the purpose of revenging himself. He had arrived late.
He probably knew that Javert was a prisoner there. The Corsican vendetta
has penetrated to certain lower strata and has become the law there; it
is so simple that it does not astonish souls which are but half turned
towards good; and those hearts are so constituted that a criminal, who
is in the path of repentance, may be scrupulous in the matter of theft
and unscrupulous in the matter of vengeance. Jean Valjean had killed
Javert. At least, that seemed to be evident.

This was the final question, to be sure; but to this there was no reply.
This question Marius felt like pincers. How had it come to pass that
Jean Valjean's existence had elbowed that of Cosette for so long a
period?

What melancholy sport of Providence was that which had placed that child
in contact with that man? Are there then chains for two which are forged
on high? and does God take pleasure in coupling the angel with the
demon? So a crime and an innocence can be room-mates in the mysterious
galleys of wretchedness? In that defiling of condemned persons which is
called human destiny, can two brows pass side by side, the one
ingenuous, the other formidable, the one all bathed in the divine
whiteness of dawn, the other forever blemished by the flash of an
eternal lightning? Who could have arranged that inexplicable pairing
off? In what manner, in consequence of what prodigy, had any community
of life been established between this celestial little creature and that
old criminal?

Who could have bound the lamb to the wolf, and, what was still more
incomprehensible, have attached the wolf to the lamb? For the wolf loved
the lamb, for the fierce creature adored the feeble one, for, during the
space of nine years, the angel had had the monster as her point of
support. Cosette's childhood and girlhood, her advent in the daylight,
her virginal growth towards life and light, had been sheltered by that
hideous devotion. Here questions exfoliated, so to speak, into
innumerable enigmas, abysses yawned at the bottoms of abysses, and
Marius could no longer bend over Jean Valjean without becoming dizzy.
What was this man-precipice?

The old symbols of Genesis are eternal; in human society, such as it now
exists, and until a broader day shall effect a change in it, there will
always be two men, the one superior, the other subterranean; the one
which is according to good is Abel; the other which is according to evil
is Cain. What was this tender Cain? What was this ruffian religiously
absorbed in the adoration of a virgin, watching over her, rearing her,
guarding her, dignifying her, and enveloping her, impure as he was
himself, with purity?

What was that cess-pool which had venerated that innocence to such a
point as not to leave upon it a single spot? What was this Jean Valjean
educating Cosette? What was this figure of the shadows which had for its
only object the preservation of the rising of a star from every shadow
and from every cloud?

That was Jean Valjean's secret; that was also God's secret.

In the presence of this double secret, Marius recoiled. The one, in some
sort, reassured him as to the other. God was as visible in this affair
as was Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He makes use of the tool
which he wills. He is not responsible to men. Do we know how God sets
about the work? Jean Valjean had labored over Cosette. He had, to some
extent, made that soul. That was incontestable. Well, what then? The
workman was horrible; but the work was admirable. God produces his
miracles as seems good to him. He had constructed that charming Cosette,
and he had employed Jean Valjean. It had pleased him to choose this
strange collaborator for himself. What account have we to demand of him?
Is this the first time that the dung-heap has aided the spring to create
the rose?

Marius made himself these replies, and declared to himself that they
were good. He had not dared to press Jean Valjean on all the points
which we have just indicated, but he did not confess to himself that he
did not dare to do it. He adored Cosette, he possessed Cosette, Cosette
was splendidly pure. That was sufficient for him. What enlightenment did
he need? Cosette was a light. Does light require enlightenment? He had
everything; what more could he desire? All,--is not that enough? Jean
Valjean's personal affairs did not concern him.

And bending over the fatal shadow of that man, he clung fast,
convulsively, to the solemn declaration of that unhappy wretch: "I am
nothing to Cosette. Ten years ago I did not know that she was in
existence."

Jean Valjean was a passer-by. He had said so himself. Well, he had
passed. Whatever he was, his part was finished.

Henceforth, there remained Marius to fulfil the part of Providence to
Cosette. Cosette had sought the azure in a person like herself, in her
lover, her husband, her celestial male. Cosette, as she took her flight,
winged and transfigured, left behind her on the earth her hideous and
empty chrysalis, Jean Valjean.

In whatever circle of ideas Marius revolved, he always returned to a
certain horror for Jean Valjean. A sacred horror, perhaps, for, as we
have just pointed out, he felt a _quid divinum_ in that man. But do what
he would, and seek what extenuation he would, he was certainly forced to
fall back upon this: the man was a convict; that is to say, a being who
has not even a place in the social ladder, since he is lower than the
very lowest rung. After the very last of men comes the convict. The
convict is no longer, so to speak, in the semblance of the living. The
law has deprived him of the entire quantity of humanity of which it can
deprive a man.

Marius, on penal questions, still held to the inexorable system, though
he was a democrat and he entertained all the ideas of the law on the
subject of those whom the law strikes. He had not yet accomplished all
progress, we admit. He had not yet come to distinguish between that
which is written by man and that which is written by God, between law
and right. He had not examined and weighed the right which man takes to
dispose of the irrevocable and the irreparable. He was not shocked by
the word _vindicte_. He found it quite simple that certain breaches of
the written law should be followed by eternal suffering, and he
accepted, as the process of civilization, social damnation. He still
stood at this point, though safe to advance infallibly later on, since
his nature was good, and, at bottom, wholly formed of latent progress.

In this stage of his ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him hideous and
repulsive. He was a man reproved, he was the convict. That word was for
him like the sound of the trump on the Day of Judgment; and, after
having reflected upon Jean Valjean for a long time, his final gesture
had been to turn away his head. _Vade retro_.

Marius, if we must recognize and even insist upon the fact, while
interrogating Jean Valjean to such a point that Jean Valjean had said:
"You are confessing me," had not, nevertheless, put to him two or three
decisive questions.

It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind, but that
he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette attic? The barricade? Javert?
Who knows where these revelations would have stopped? Jean Valjean did
not seem like a man who would draw back, and who knows whether Marius,
after having urged him on, would not have himself desired to hold him
back?

Has it not happened to all of us, in certain supreme conjunctures, to
stop our ears in order that we may not hear the reply, after we have
asked a question? It is especially when one loves that one gives way to
these exhibitions of cowardice. It is not wise to question sinister
situations to the last point, particularly when the indissoluble side of
our life is fatally intermingled with them. What a terrible light might
have proceeded from the despairing explanations of Jean Valjean, and who
knows whether that hideous glare would not have darted forth as far as
Cosette? Who knows whether a sort of infernal glow would not have
lingered behind it on the brow of that angel? The spattering of a
lightning-flash is of the thunder also. Fatality has points of juncture
where innocence itself is stamped with crime by the gloomy law of the
reflections which give color. The purest figures may forever preserve
the reflection of a horrible association. Rightly or wrongly, Marius had
been afraid. He already knew too much. He sought to dull his senses
rather than to gain further light.

In dismay he bore off Cosette in his arms and shut his eyes to Jean
Valjean.

That man was the night, the living and horrible night. How should he
dare to seek the bottom of it? It is a terrible thing to interrogate the
shadow. Who knows what its reply will be? The dawn may be blackened
forever by it.

In this state of mind the thought that that man would, henceforth, come
into any contact whatever with Cosette was a heartrending perplexity to
Marius.

He now almost reproached himself for not having put those formidable
questions, before which he had recoiled, and from which an implacable
and definitive decision might have sprung. He felt that he was too good,
too gentle, too weak, if we must say the word. This weakness had led him
to an imprudent concession. He had allowed himself to be touched. He had
been in the wrong. He ought to have simply and purely rejected Jean
Valjean. Jean Valjean played the part of fire, and that is what he
should have done, and have freed his house from that man.

He was vexed with himself, he was angry with that whirlwind of emotions
which had deafened, blinded, and carried him away. He was displeased
with himself.

What was he to do now? Jean Valjean's visits were profoundly repugnant
to him. What was the use in having that man in his house? What did the
man want? Here, he became dismayed, he did not wish to dig down, he did
not wish to penetrate deeply; he did not wish to sound himself. He had
promised, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a promise; Jean
Valjean held his promise; one must keep one's word even to a convict,
above all to a convict. Still, his first duty was to Cosette. In short,
he was carried away by the repugnance which dominated him.

Marius turned over all this confusion of ideas in his mind, passing from
one to the other, and moved by all of them. Hence arose a profound
trouble.

It was not easy for him to hide this trouble from Cosette, but love is a
talent, and Marius succeeded in doing it.

However, without any apparent object, he questioned Cosette, who was as
candid as a dove is white and who suspected nothing; he talked of her
childhood and her youth, and he became more and more convinced that that
convict had been everything good, paternal and respectable that a man
can be towards Cosette. All that Marius had caught a glimpse of and had
surmised was real. That sinister nettle had loved and protected that
lily.



BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT

Enlarge



CHAPTER I--THE LOWER CHAMBER

On the following day, at nightfall, Jean Valjean knocked at the carriage
gate of the Gillenormand house. It was Basque who received him. Basque
was in the courtyard at the appointed hour, as though he had received
his orders. It sometimes happens that one says to a servant: "You will
watch for Mr. So and So, when he arrives."

Basque addressed Jean Valjean without waiting for the latter to approach
him:

"Monsieur le Baron has charged me to inquire whether monsieur desires to
go upstairs or to remain below?"

"I will remain below," replied Jean Valjean.

Basque, who was perfectly respectful, opened the door of the waiting-
room and said:

"I will go and inform Madame."

The room which Jean Valjean entered was a damp, vaulted room on the
ground floor, which served as a cellar on occasion, which opened on the
street, was paved with red squares and was badly lighted by a grated
window.

This chamber was not one of those which are harassed by the feather-
duster, the pope's head brush, and the broom. The dust rested tranquilly
there. Persecution of the spiders was not organized there. A fine web,
which spread far and wide, and was very black and ornamented with dead
flies, formed a wheel on one of the window-panes. The room, which was
small and low-ceiled, was furnished with a heap of empty bottles piled
up in one corner.

The wall, which was daubed with an ochre yellow wash, was scaling off in
large flakes. At one end there was a chimney-piece painted in black with
a narrow shelf. A fire was burning there; which indicated that Jean
Valjean's reply: "I will remain below," had been foreseen.

Two arm-chairs were placed at the two corners of the fireplace. Between
the chairs an old bedside rug, which displayed more foundation thread
than wool, had been spread by way of a carpet.

The chamber was lighted by the fire on the hearth and the twilight
falling through the window.

Jean Valjean was fatigued. For days he had neither eaten nor slept. He
threw himself into one of the arm-chairs.

Basque returned, set a lighted candle on the chimney-piece and retired.
Jean Valjean, his head drooping and his chin resting on his breast,
perceived neither Basque nor the candle.

All at once, he drew himself up with a start. Cosette was standing
beside him.

He had not seen her enter, but he had felt that she was there.

He turned round. He gazed at her. She was adorably lovely. But what he
was contemplating with that profound gaze was not her beauty but her
soul.

"Well," exclaimed Cosette, "father, I knew that you were peculiar, but I
never should have expected this. What an idea! Marius told me that you
wish me to receive you here."

"Yes, it is my wish."

"I expected that reply. Good. I warn you that I am going to make a scene
for you. Let us begin at the beginning. Embrace me, father."

And she offered him her cheek.

Jean Valjean remained motionless.

"You do not stir. I take note of it. Attitude of guilt. But never mind,
I pardon you. Jesus Christ said: Offer the other cheek. Here it is."

And she presented her other cheek.

Jean Valjean did not move. It seemed as though his feet were nailed to
the pavement.

"This is becoming serious," said Cosette. "What have I done to you? I
declare that I am perplexed. You owe me reparation. You will dine with
us."

"I have dined."

"That is not true. I will get M. Gillenormand to scold you. Grandfathers
are made to reprimand fathers. Come. Go upstairs with me to the drawing-
room. Immediately."

"Impossible."

Here Cosette lost ground a little. She ceased to command and passed to
questioning.

"But why? and you choose the ugliest chamber in the house in which to
see me. It's horrible here."

"Thou knowest . . ."

Jean Valjean caught himself up.

"You know, madame, that I am peculiar, I have my freaks."

Cosette struck her tiny hands together.

"Madame! . . . You know! . . . more novelties! What is the meaning of
this?"

Jean Valjean directed upon her that heartrending smile to which he
occasionally had recourse:

"You wished to be Madame. You are so."

"Not for you, father."

"Do not call me father."

"What?"

"Call me 'Monsieur Jean.' 'Jean,' if you like."

"You are no longer my father? I am no longer Cosette? 'Monsieur Jean'?
What does this mean? why, these are revolutions, aren't they? what has
taken place? come, look me in the face. And you won't live with us! And
you won't have my chamber! What have I done to you? Has anything
happened?"

"Nothing."

"Well then?"

"Everything is as usual."

"Why do you change your name?"

"You have changed yours, surely."

He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:

"Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean."

"I don't understand anything about it. All this is idiotic. I shall ask
permission of my husband for you to be 'Monsieur Jean.' I hope that he
will not consent to it. You cause me a great deal of pain. One does have
freaks, but one does not cause one's little Cosette grief. That is
wrong. You have no right to be wicked, you who are so good."

He made no reply.

She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face with an
irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck beneath her
chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.

"Oh!" she said to him, "be good!"

And she went on:

"This is what I call being good: being nice and coming and living here,-
-there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,--living with us,
quitting that hole of a Rue de l'Homme Armé, not giving us riddles to
guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us,
breakfasting with us, being my father."

He loosed her hands.

"You no longer need a father, you have a husband."

Cosette became angry.

"I no longer need a father! One really does not know what to say to
things like that, which are not common sense!"

"If Toussaint were here," resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who is
driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch, "she would
be the first to agree that it is true that I have always had ways of my
own. There is nothing new in this. I always have loved my black corner."

"But it is cold here. One cannot see distinctly. It is abominable, that
it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean! I will not have you say 'you' to me.

"Just now, as I was coming hither," replied Jean Valjean, "I saw a piece
of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis. It was at a cabinet-maker's. If I
were a pretty woman, I would treat myself to that bit of furniture. A
very neat toilet table in the reigning style. What you call rosewood, I
think. It is inlaid. The mirror is quite large. There are drawers. It is
pretty."

"Hou! the villainous bear!" replied Cosette.

And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips, she
blew at Jean Valjean. She was a Grace copying a cat.

"I am furious," she resumed. "Ever since yesterday, you have made me
rage, all of you. I am greatly vexed. I don't understand. You do not
defend me against Marius. Marius will not uphold me against you. I am
all alone. I arrange a chamber prettily. If I could have put the good
God there I would have done it. My chamber is left on my hands. My
lodger sends me into bankruptcy. I order a nice little dinner of
Nicolette. We will have nothing to do with your dinner, Madame. And my
father Fauchelevent wants me to call him 'Monsieur Jean,' and to receive
him in a frightful, old, ugly cellar, where the walls have beards, and
where the crystal consists of empty bottles, and the curtains are of
spiders' webs! You are singular, I admit, that is your style, but people
who get married are granted a truce. You ought not to have begun being
singular again instantly. So you are going to be perfectly contented in
your abominable Rue de l'Homme Armé. I was very desperate indeed there,
that I was. What have you against me? You cause me a great deal of
grief. Fi!"

And, becoming suddenly serious, she gazed intently at Jean Valjean and
added:

"Are you angry with me because I am happy?"

Ingenuousness sometimes unconsciously penetrates deep. This question,
which was simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette had
meant to scratch, and she lacerated.

Jean Valjean turned pale.

He remained for a moment without replying, then, with an inexpressible
intonation, and speaking to himself, he murmured:

"Her happiness was the object of my life. Now God may sign my dismissal.
Cosette, thou art happy; my day is over."

"Ah, you have said _thou_ to me!" exclaimed Cosette.

And she sprang to his neck.

Jean Valjean, in bewilderment, strained her wildly to his breast. It
almost seemed to him as though he were taking her back.

"Thanks, father!" said Cosette.

This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant for Jean
Valjean. He gently removed Cosette's arms, and took his hat.

"Well?" said Cosette.

"I leave you, Madame, they are waiting for you."

And, from the threshold, he added:

"I have said _thou_ to you. Tell your husband that this shall not happen
again. Pardon me."

Jean Valjean quitted the room, leaving Cosette stupefied at this
enigmatical farewell.



CHAPTER II--ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS

On the following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.

Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer
exclaimed that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room, she
avoided saying either "father" or "Monsieur Jean." She allowed herself
to be addressed as _you_. She allowed herself to be called Madame. Only,
her joy had undergone a certain diminution. She would have been sad, if
sadness had been possible to her.

It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations
in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing, and
satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not extend
very far beyond their own love.

The lower room had made a little toilet. Basque had suppressed the
bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.

All the days which followed brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. He
came every day, because he had not the strength to take Marius' words
otherwise than literally. Marius arranged matters so as to be absent at
the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house grew accustomed to the novel
ways of M. Fauchelevent. Toussaint helped in this direction: "Monsieur
has always been like that," she repeated. The grandfather issued this
decree:--"He's an original." And all was said. Moreover, at the age of
ninety-six, no bond is any longer possible, all is merely juxtaposition;
a new-comer is in the way. There is no longer any room; all habits are
acquired. M. Fauchelevent, M. Tranchelevent, Father Gillenormand asked
nothing better than to be relieved from "that gentleman." He added:--
"Nothing is more common than those originals. They do all sorts of queer
things. They have no reason. The Marquis de Canaples was still worse. He
bought a palace that he might lodge in the garret. These are fantastic
appearances that people affect."

No one caught a glimpse of the sinister foundation. And moreover, who
could have guessed such a thing? There are marshes of this description
in India. The water seems extraordinary, inexplicable, rippling though
there is no wind, and agitated where it should be calm. One gazes at the
surface of these causeless ebullitions; one does not perceive the hydra
which crawls on the bottom.

Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon which gnaws
them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles other
men, he goes and comes. No one knows that he bears within him a
frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives within the
unhappy man, and of which he is dying. No one knows that this man is a
gulf. He is stagnant but deep. From time to time, a trouble of which the
onlooker understands nothing appears on his surface. A mysterious
wrinkle is formed, then vanishes, then re-appears; an air-bubble rises
and bursts. It is the breathing of the unknown beast.

Certain strange habits: arriving at the hour when other people are
taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people are
displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be
designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk,
preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation,
avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one's ease and living poorly,
having one's key in one's pocket, and one's candle at the porter's
lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door, ascending the
private staircase,--all these insignificant singularities, fugitive
folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.

Many weeks passed in this manner. A new life gradually took possession
of Cosette: the relations which marriage creates, visits, the care of
the house, pleasures, great matters. Cosette's pleasures were not
costly, they consisted in one thing: being with Marius. The great
occupation of her life was to go out with him, to remain with him. It
was for them a joy that was always fresh, to go out arm in arm, in the
face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding themselves, before
the whole world, both of them completely alone.

Cosette had one vexation. Toussaint could not get on with Nicolette, the
soldering of two elderly maids being impossible, and she went away. The
grandfather was well; Marius argued a case here and there; Aunt
Gillenormand peacefully led that life aside which sufficed for her,
beside the new household. Jean Valjean came every day.

The address as _thou_ disappeared, the _you_, the "Madame," the
"Monsieur Jean," rendered him another person to Cosette. The care which
he had himself taken to detach her from him was succeeding. She became
more and more gay and less and less tender. Yet she still loved him
sincerely, and he felt it.

One day she said to him suddenly: "You used to be my father, you are no
longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you
were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don't like
all this. If I did not know how good you are, I should be afraid of
you."

He still lived in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, because he could not make up
his mind to remove to a distance from the quarter where Cosette dwelt.

At first, he only remained a few minutes with Cosette, and then went
away.

Little by little he acquired the habit of making his visits less brief.
One would have said that he was taking advantage of the authorization of
the days which were lengthening, he arrived earlier and departed later.

One day Cosette chanced to say "father" to him. A flash of joy
illuminated Jean Valjean's melancholy old countenance. He caught her up:
"Say Jean."--"Ah! truly," she replied with a burst of laughter,
"Monsieur Jean."--"That is right," said he. And he turned aside so that
she might not see him wipe his eyes.



CHAPTER III--THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET

This was the last time. After that last flash of light, complete
extinction ensued. No more familiarity, no more good-morning with a
kiss, never more that word so profoundly sweet: "My father!" He was at
his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his
happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after
having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose
her again in detail.

The eye eventually becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. In
short, it sufficed for him to have an apparition of Cosette every day.
His whole life was concentrated in that one hour.

He seated himself close to her, he gazed at her in silence, or he talked
to her of years gone by, of her childhood, of the convent, of her little
friends of those bygone days.

One afternoon,--it was on one of those early days in April, already warm
and fresh, the moment of the sun's great gayety, the gardens which
surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette felt the emotion of waking,
the hawthorn was on the point of budding, a jewelled garniture of
gillyflowers spread over the ancient walls, snapdragons yawned through
the crevices of the stones, amid the grass there was a charming
beginning of daisies, and buttercups, the white butterflies of the year
were making their first appearance, the wind, that minstrel of the
eternal wedding, was trying in the trees the first notes of that grand,
auroral symphony which the old poets called the springtide,--Marius said
to Cosette:--"We said that we would go back to take a look at our garden
in the Rue Plumet. Let us go thither. We must not be ungrateful."--And
away they flitted, like two swallows towards the spring. This garden of
the Rue Plumet produced on them the effect of the dawn. They already had
behind them in life something which was like the springtime of their
love. The house in the Rue Plumet being held on a lease, still belonged
to Cosette. They went to that garden and that house. There they found
themselves again, there they forgot themselves. That evening, at the
usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.--
"Madame went out with Monsieur and has not yet returned," Basque said to
him. He seated himself in silence, and waited an hour. Cosette did not
return. He departed with drooping head.

Cosette was so intoxicated with her walk to "their garden," and so
joyous at having "lived a whole day in her past," that she talked of
nothing else on the morrow. She did not notice that she had not seen
Jean Valjean.

"In what way did you go thither?" Jean Valjean asked her."

"On foot."

"And how did you return?"

"In a hackney carriage."

For some time, Jean Valjean had noticed the economical life led by the
young people. He was troubled by it. Marius' economy was severe, and
that word had its absolute meaning for Jean Valjean. He hazarded a
query:

"Why do you not have a carriage of your own? A pretty coupé would only
cost you five hundred francs a month. You are rich."

"I don't know," replied Cosette.

"It is like Toussaint," resumed Jean Valjean. "She is gone. You have not
replaced her. Why?"

"Nicolette suffices."

"But you ought to have a maid."

"Have I not Marius?"

"You ought to have a house of your own, your own servants, a carriage, a
box at the theatre. There is nothing too fine for you. Why not profit by
your riches? Wealth adds to happiness."

Cosette made no reply.

Jean Valjean's visits were not abridged. Far from it. When it is the
heart which is slipping, one does not halt on the downward slope.

When Jean Valjean wished to prolong his visit and to induce
forgetfulness of the hour, he sang the praises of Marius; he pronounced
him handsome, noble, courageous, witty, eloquent, good. Cosette outdid
him. Jean Valjean began again. They were never weary. Marius--that word
was inexhaustible; those six letters contained volumes. In this manner,
Jean Valjean contrived to remain a long time.

It was so sweet to see Cosette, to forget by her side! It alleviated his
wounds. It frequently happened that Basque came twice to announce: "M.
Gillenormand sends me to remind Madame la Baronne that dinner is
served."

On those days, Jean Valjean was very thoughtful on his return home.

Was there, then, any truth in that comparison of the chrysalis which had
presented itself to the mind of Marius? Was Jean Valjean really a
chrysalis who would persist, and who would come to visit his butterfly?

One day he remained still longer than usual. On the following day he
observed that there was no fire on the hearth.--"Hello!" he thought. "No
fire."--And he furnished the explanation for himself.--"It is perfectly
simple. It is April. The cold weather has ceased."

"Heavens! how cold it is here!" exclaimed Cosette when she entered.

"Why, no," said Jean Valjean.

"Was it you who told Basque not to make a fire then?"

"Yes, since we are now in the month of May."

"But we have a fire until June. One is needed all the year in this
cellar."

"I thought that a fire was unnecessary."

"That is exactly like one of your ideas!" retorted Cosette.

On the following day there was a fire. But the two arm-chairs were
arranged at the other end of the room near the door. "--What is the
meaning of this?" thought Jean Valjean.

He went for the arm-chairs and restored them to their ordinary place
near the hearth.

This fire lighted once more encouraged him, however. He prolonged the
conversation even beyond its customary limits. As he rose to take his
leave, Cosette said to him:

"My husband said a queer thing to me yesterday."

"What was it?"

"He said to me: 'Cosette, we have an income of thirty thousand livres.
Twenty-seven that you own, and three that my grandfather gives me.' I
replied: 'That makes thirty.' He went on: 'Would you have the courage to
live on the three thousand?' I answered: 'Yes, on nothing. Provided that
it was with you.' And then I asked: 'Why do you say that to me?' He
replied: 'I wanted to know.'"

Jean Valjean found not a word to answer. Cosette probably expected some
explanation from him; he listened in gloomy silence. He went back to the
Rue de l'Homme Armé; he was so deeply absorbed that he mistook the door
and instead of entering his own house, he entered the adjoining
dwelling. It was only after having ascended nearly two stories that he
perceived his error and went down again.

His mind was swarming with conjectures. It was evident that Marius had
his doubts as to the origin of the six hundred thousand francs, that he
feared some source that was not pure, who knows? that he had even,
perhaps, discovered that the money came from him, Jean Valjean, that he
hesitated before this suspicious fortune, and was disinclined to take it
as his own,--preferring that both he and Cosette should remain poor,
rather than that they should be rich with wealth that was not clean.

Moreover, Jean Valjean began vaguely to surmise that he was being shown
the door.

On the following day, he underwent something like a shock on entering
the ground-floor room. The arm-chairs had disappeared. There was not a
single chair of any sort.

"Ah, what's this!" exclaimed Cosette as she entered, "no chairs! Where
are the arm-chairs?"

"They are no longer here," replied Jean Valjean.

"This is too much!"

Jean Valjean stammered:

"It was I who told Basque to remove them."

"And your reason?"

"I have only a few minutes to stay to-day."

"A brief stay is no reason for remaining standing."

"I think that Basque needed the chairs for the drawing-room."

"Why?"

"You have company this evening, no doubt."

"We expect no one."

Jean Valjean had not another word to say.

Cosette shrugged her shoulders.

"To have the chairs carried off! The other day you had the fire put out.
How odd you are!"

"Adieu!" murmured Jean Valjean.

He did not say: "Adieu, Cosette." But he had not the strength to say:
"Adieu, Madame."

He went away utterly overwhelmed.

This time he had understood.

On the following day he did not come. Cosette only observed the fact in
the evening.

"Why," said she, "Monsieur Jean has not been here today."

And she felt a slight twinge at her heart, but she hardly perceived it,
being immediately diverted by a kiss from Marius.

On the following day he did not come.

Cosette paid no heed to this, passed her evening and slept well that
night, as usual, and thought of it only when she woke. She was so happy!
She speedily despatched Nicolette to M. Jean's house to inquire whether
he were ill, and why he had not come on the previous evening. Nicolette
brought back the reply of M. Jean that he was not ill. He was busy. He
would come soon. As soon as he was able. Moreover, he was on the point
of taking a little journey. Madame must remember that it was his custom
to take trips from time to time. They were not to worry about him. They
were not to think of him.

Nicolette on entering M. Jean's had repeated to him her mistress' very
words. That Madame had sent her to inquire why M. Jean had not come on
the preceding evening."--It is two days since I have been there," said
Jean Valjean gently.

But the remark passed unnoticed by Nicolette, who did not report it to
Cosette.



CHAPTER IV--ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION

During the last months of spring and the first months of summer in 1833,
the rare passers-by in the Marais, the petty shopkeepers, the loungers
on thresholds, noticed an old man neatly clad in black, who emerged
every day at the same hour, towards nightfall, from the Rue de l'Homme
Armé, on the side of the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, passed in
front of the Blancs Manteaux, gained the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine,
and, on arriving at the Rue de l'Écharpe, turned to the left, and
entered the Rue Saint-Louis.

There he walked at a slow pace, with his head strained forward, seeing
nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immovably fixed on a point which
seemed to be a star to him, which never varied, and which was no other
than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The nearer he
approached the corner of the street the more his eye lighted up; a sort
of joy illuminated his pupils like an inward aurora, he had a fascinated
and much affected air, his lips indulged in obscure movements, as though
he were talking to some one whom he did not see, he smiled vaguely and
advanced as slowly as possible. One would have said that, while desirous
of reaching his destination, he feared the moment when he should be
close at hand. When only a few houses remained between him and that
street which appeared to attract him his pace slackened, to such a
degree that, at times, one might have thought that he was no longer
advancing at all. The vacillation of his head and the fixity of his
eyeballs suggested the thought of the magnetic needle seeking the pole.
Whatever time he spent on arriving, he was obliged to arrive at last; he
reached the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; then he halted, he trembled, he
thrust his head with a sort of melancholy timidity round the corner of
the last house, and gazed into that street, and there was in that tragic
look something which resembled the dazzling light of the impossible, and
the reflection from a paradise that was closed to him. Then a tear,
which had slowly gathered in the corner of his lids, and had become
large enough to fall, trickled down his cheek, and sometimes stopped at
his mouth. The old man tasted its bitter flavor. Thus he remained for
several minutes as though made of stone, then he returned by the same
road and with the same step, and, in proportion as he retreated, his
glance died out.

Little by little, this old man ceased to go as far as the corner of the
Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; he halted half way in the Rue Saint-Louis;
sometimes a little further off, sometimes a little nearer.

One day he stopped at the corner of the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine and
looked at the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire from a distance. Then he shook
his head slowly from right to left, as though refusing himself
something, and retraced his steps.

Soon he no longer came as far as the Rue Saint-Louis. He got as far as
the Rue Pavée, shook his head and turned back; then he went no further
than the Rue des Trois-Pavillons; then he did not overstep the Blancs-
Manteaux. One would have said that he was a pendulum which was no longer
wound up, and whose oscillations were growing shorter before ceasing
altogether.

Every day he emerged from his house at the same hour, he undertook the
same trip, but he no longer completed it, and, perhaps without himself
being aware of the fact, he constantly shortened it. His whole
countenance expressed this single idea: What is the use?--His eye was
dim; no more radiance. His tears were also exhausted; they no longer
collected in the corner of his eye-lid; that thoughtful eye was dry. The
old man's head was still craned forward; his chin moved at times; the
folds in his gaunt neck were painful to behold. Sometimes, when the
weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm, but he never opened
it.

The good women of the quarter said: "He is an innocent." The children
followed him and laughed.



BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN



CHAPTER I--PITY FOR THE UNHAPPY, BUT INDULGENCE FOR THE HAPPY

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How content one is! How all-
sufficient one finds it! How, being in possession of the false object of
life, happiness, one forgets the true object, duty!

Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame
Marius.

Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage, had put no questions
to M. Fauchelevent, and, since that time, he had feared to put any to
Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise into which he had allowed
himself to be drawn. He had often said to himself that he had done wrong
in making that concession to despair. He had confined himself to
gradually estranging Jean Valjean from his house and to effacing him, as
much as possible, from Cosette's mind. He had, in a manner, always
placed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, sure that, in this way,
she would not perceive nor think of the latter. It was more than
effacement, it was an eclipse.

Marius did what he considered necessary and just. He thought that he had
serious reasons which the reader has already seen, and others which will
be seen later on, for getting rid of Jean Valjean without harshness, but
without weakness.

Chance having ordained that he should encounter, in a case which he had
argued, a former employee of the Laffitte establishment, he had acquired
mysterious information, without seeking it, which he had not been able,
it is true, to probe, out of respect for the secret which he had
promised to guard, and out of consideration for Jean Valjean's perilous
position. He believed at that moment that he had a grave duty to
perform: the restitution of the six hundred thousand francs to some one
whom he sought with all possible discretion. In the meanwhile, he
abstained from touching that money.

As for Cosette, she had not been initiated into any of these secrets;
but it would be harsh to condemn her also.

There existed between Marius and her an all-powerful magnetism, which
caused her to do, instinctively and almost mechanically, what Marius
wished. She was conscious of Marius' will in the direction of "Monsieur
Jean," she conformed to it. Her husband had not been obliged to say
anything to her; she yielded to the vague but clear pressure of his
tacit intentions, and obeyed blindly. Her obedience in this instance
consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot. She was not obliged to
make any effort to accomplish this. Without her knowing why herself, and
without his having any cause to accuse her of it, her soul had become so
wholly her husband's that that which was shrouded in gloom in Marius'
mind became overcast in hers.

Let us not go too far, however; in what concerns Jean Valjean, this
forgetfulness and obliteration were merely superficial. She was rather
heedless than forgetful. At bottom, she was sincerely attached to the
man whom she had so long called her father; but she loved her husband
still more dearly. This was what had somewhat disturbed the balance of
her heart, which leaned to one side only.

It sometimes happened that Cosette spoke of Jean Valjean and expressed
her surprise. Then Marius calmed her: "He is absent, I think. Did not he
say that he was setting out on a journey?"--"That is true," thought
Cosette. "He had a habit of disappearing in this fashion. But not for so
long." Two or three times she despatched Nicolette to inquire in the Rue
de l'Homme Armé whether M. Jean had returned from his journey. Jean
Valjean caused the answer "no" to be given.

Cosette asked nothing more, since she had but one need on earth, Marius.

Let us also say that, on their side, Cosette and Marius had also been
absent. They had been to Vernon. Marius had taken Cosette to his
father's grave.

Marius gradually won Cosette away from Jean Valjean. Cosette allowed it.

Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases, the
ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving of reproach
as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude of nature. Nature, as we have
elsewhere said, "looks before her." Nature divides living beings into
those who are arriving and those who are departing. Those who are
departing are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards
the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the old, and
involuntary on the part of the young. This breach, at first insensible,
increases slowly, like all separations of branches. The boughs, without
becoming detached from the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of
theirs. Youth goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love.
Old age goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other, but
there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel the cooling off
of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not blame these poor
children.



CHAPTER II--LAST FLICKERINGS OF A LAMP WITHOUT OIL

One day, Jean Valjean descended his staircase, took three steps in the
street, seated himself on a post, on that same stone post where Gavroche
had found him meditating on the night between the 5th and the 6th of
June; he remained there a few moments, then went upstairs again. This
was the last oscillation of the pendulum. On the following day he did
not leave his apartment. On the day after that, he did not leave his
bed.

His portress, who prepared his scanty repasts, a few cabbages or
potatoes with bacon, glanced at the brown earthenware plate and
exclaimed:

"But you ate nothing yesterday, poor, dear man!"

"Certainly I did," replied Jean Valjean.

"The plate is quite full."

"Look at the water jug. It is empty."

"That proves that you have drunk; it does not prove that you have
eaten."

"Well," said Jean Valjean, "what if I felt hungry only for water?"

"That is called thirst, and, when one does not eat at the same time, it
is called fever."

"I will eat to-morrow."

"Or at Trinity day. Why not to-day? Is it the thing to say: 'I will eat
to-morrow'? The idea of leaving my platter without even touching it! My
lady-finger potatoes were so good!"

Jean Valjean took the old woman's hand:

"I promise you that I will eat them," he said, in his benevolent voice.

"I am not pleased with you," replied the portress.

Jean Valjean saw no other human creature than this good woman. There are
streets in Paris through which no one ever passes, and houses to which
no one ever comes. He was in one of those streets and one of those
houses.

While he still went out, he had purchased of a coppersmith, for a few
sous, a little copper crucifix which he had hung up on a nail opposite
his bed. That gibbet is always good to look at.

A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. He
still remained in bed. The portress said to her husband:--"The good man
upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats, he will not last
long. That man has his sorrows, that he has. You won't get it out of my
head that his daughter has made a bad marriage."

The porter replied, with the tone of marital sovereignty:

"If he's rich, let him have a doctor. If he is not rich, let him go
without. If he has no doctor he will die."

"And if he has one?"

"He will die," said the porter.

The portress set to scraping away the grass from what she called her
pavement, with an old knife, and, as she tore out the blades, she
grumbled:

"It's a shame. Such a neat old man! He's as white as a chicken."

She caught sight of the doctor of the quarter as he passed the end of
the street; she took it upon herself to request him to come upstairs.

"It's on the second floor," said she. "You have only to enter. As the
good man no longer stirs from his bed, the door is always unlocked."

The doctor saw Jean Valjean and spoke with him.

When he came down again the portress interrogated him:

"Well, doctor?"

"Your sick man is very ill indeed."

"What is the matter with him?"

"Everything and nothing. He is a man who, to all appearances, has lost
some person who is dear to him. People die of that."

"What did he say to you?"

"He told me that he was in good health."

"Shall you come again, doctor?"

"Yes," replied the doctor. "But some one else besides must come."



CHAPTER III--A PEN IS HEAVY TO THE MAN WHO LIFTED THE FAUCHELEVENT'S
CART

One evening Jean Valjean found difficulty in raising himself on his
elbow; he felt of his wrist and could not find his pulse; his breath was
short and halted at times; he recognized the fact that he was weaker
than he had ever been before. Then, no doubt under the pressure of some
supreme preoccupation, he made an effort, drew himself up into a sitting
posture and dressed himself. He put on his old workingman's clothes. As
he no longer went out, he had returned to them and preferred them. He
was obliged to pause many times while dressing himself; merely putting
his arms through his waistcoat made the perspiration trickle from his
forehead.

Since he had been alone, he had placed his bed in the antechamber, in
order to inhabit that deserted apartment as little as possible.

He opened the valise and drew from it Cosette's outfit.

He spread it out on his bed.

The Bishop's candlesticks were in their place on the chimney-piece. He
took from a drawer two wax candles and put them in the candlesticks.
Then, although it was still broad daylight,--it was summer,--he lighted
them. In the same way candles are to be seen lighted in broad daylight
in chambers where there is a corpse.

Every step that he took in going from one piece of furniture to another
exhausted him, and he was obliged to sit down. It was not ordinary
fatigue which expends the strength only to renew it; it was the remnant
of all movement possible to him, it was life drained which flows away
drop by drop in overwhelming efforts and which will never be renewed.

The chair into which he allowed himself to fall was placed in front of
that mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for Marius, in which he
had read Cosette's reversed writing on the blotting book. He caught
sight of himself in this mirror, and did not recognize himself. He was
eighty years old; before Marius' marriage, he would have hardly been
taken for fifty; that year had counted for thirty. What he bore on his
brow was no longer the wrinkles of age, it was the mysterious mark of
death. The hollowing of that pitiless nail could be felt there. His
cheeks were pendulous; the skin of his face had the color which would
lead one to think that it already had earth upon it; the corners of his
mouth drooped as in the mask which the ancients sculptured on tombs. He
gazed into space with an air of reproach; one would have said that he
was one of those grand tragic beings who have cause to complain of some
one.

He was in that condition, the last phase of dejection, in which sorrow
no longer flows; it is coagulated, so to speak; there is something on
the soul like a clot of despair.

Night had come. He laboriously dragged a table and the old arm-chair to
the fireside, and placed upon the table a pen, some ink and some paper.

That done, he had a fainting fit. When he recovered consciousness, he
was thirsty. As he could not lift the jug, he tipped it over painfully
towards his mouth, and swallowed a draught.

As neither the pen nor the ink had been used for a long time, the point
of the pen had curled up, the ink had dried away, he was forced to rise
and put a few drops of water in the ink, which he did not accomplish
without pausing and sitting down two or three times, and he was
compelled to write with the back of the pen. He wiped his brow from time
to time.

Then he turned towards the bed, and, still seated, for he could not
stand, he gazed at the little black gown and all those beloved objects.

These contemplations lasted for hours which seemed minutes.

All at once he shivered, he felt that a child was taking possession of
him; he rested his elbows on the table, which was illuminated by the
Bishop's candles and took up the pen. His hand trembled. He wrote slowly
the few following lines:

"Cosette, I bless thee. I am going to explain to thee. Thy husband was
right in giving me to understand that I ought to go away; but there is a
little error in what he believed, though he was in the right. He is
excellent. Love him well even after I am dead. Monsieur Pontmercy, love
my darling child well. Cosette, this paper will be found; this is what I
wish to say to thee, thou wilt see the figures, if I have the strength
to recall them, listen well, this money is really thine. Here is the
whole matter: White jet comes from Norway, black jet comes from England,
black glass jewellery comes from Germany. Jet is the lightest, the most
precious, the most costly. Imitations can be made in France as well as
in Germany. What is needed is a little anvil two inches square, and a
lamp burning spirits of wine to soften the wax. The wax was formerly
made with resin and lampblack, and cost four livres the pound. I
invented a way of making it with gum shellac and turpentine. It does not
cost more than thirty sous, and is much better. Buckles are made with a
violet glass which is stuck fast, by means of this wax, to a little
framework of black iron. The glass must be violet for iron jewellery,
and black for gold jewellery. Spain buys a great deal of it. It is the
country of jet . . ."

Here he paused, the pen fell from his fingers, he was seized by one of
those sobs which at times welled up from the very depths of his being;
the poor man clasped his head in both hands, and meditated.

"Oh!" he exclaimed within himself [lamentable cries, heard by God
alone], "all is over. I shall never see her more. She is a smile which
passed over me. I am about to plunge into the night without even seeing
her again. Oh! one minute, one instant, to hear her voice, to touch her
dress, to gaze upon her, upon her, the angel! and then to die! It is
nothing to die, what is frightful is to die without seeing her. She
would smile on me, she would say a word to me, would that do any harm to
any one? No, all is over, and forever. Here I am all alone. My God! My
God! I shall never see her again!" At that moment there came a knock at
the door.



CHAPTER IV--A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY SUCCEEDED IN WHITENING

That same day, or to speak more accurately, that same evening, as Marius
left the table, and was on the point of withdrawing to his study, having
a case to look over, Basque handed him a letter saying: "The person who
wrote the letter is in the antechamber."

Cosette had taken the grandfather's arm and was strolling in the garden.

A letter, like a man, may have an unprepossessing exterior. Coarse
paper, coarsely folded--the very sight of certain missives is
displeasing.

The letter which Basque had brought was of this sort.

Marius took it. It smelled of tobacco. Nothing evokes a memory like an
odor. Marius recognized that tobacco. He looked at the superscription:
"To Monsieur, Monsieur le Baron Pommerci. At his hotel." The recognition
of the tobacco caused him to recognize the writing as well. It may be
said that amazement has its lightning flashes.

Marius was, as it were, illuminated by one of these flashes.

The sense of smell, that mysterious aid to memory, had just revived a
whole world within him. This was certainly the paper, the fashion of
folding, the dull tint of ink; it was certainly the well-known
handwriting, especially was it the same tobacco.

The Jondrette garret rose before his mind.

Thus, strange freak of chance! one of the two scents which he had so
diligently sought, the one in connection with which he had lately again
exerted so many efforts and which he supposed to be forever lost, had
come and presented itself to him of its own accord.

He eagerly broke the seal, and read:


"Monsieur le Baron:--If the Supreme Being had given me the talents, I
might have been baron Thénard, member of the Institute [acadenmy of
ciences], but I am not.  I only bear the same as him, happy if this
memory recommends me to the eccellence of your kindnesses. The benefit
with which you will honor me will be reciprocle. I am in possession of a
secret concerning an individual. This individual concerns you.  I hold
the secret at your disposal desiring to have the honor to be huseful to
you.  I will furnish you with the simple means of driving from your
honorabel family that individual who has no right there, madame la
baronne being of lofty birth.  The sanctuary of virtue cannot cohabit
longer with crime without abdicating.

"I awate in the entichamber the orders of monsieur le baron.

"With respect."

The letter was signed "Thénard."

This signature was not false. It was merely a trifle abridged.

Moreover, the rigmarole and the orthography completed the revelation.
The certificate of origin was complete.

Marius' emotion was profound. After a start of surprise, he underwent a
feeling of happiness. If he could now but find that other man of whom he
was in search, the man who had saved him, Marius, there would be nothing
left for him to desire.

He opened the drawer of his secretary, took out several bank-notes, put
them in his pocket, closed the secretary again, and rang the bell.
Basque half opened the door.

"Show the man in," said Marius.

Basque announced:

"Monsieur Thénard."

A man entered.

A fresh surprise for Marius. The man who entered was an utter stranger
to him.

This man, who was old, moreover, had a thick nose, his chin swathed in a
cravat, green spectacles with a double screen of green taffeta over his
eyes, and his hair was plastered and flattened down on his brow on a
level with his eyebrows like the wigs of English coachmen in "high
life." His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to foot, in
garments that were very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending
from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old
hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented
the profundity of his bow.

The first thing that struck the observer was, that this personage's
coat, which was too ample although carefully buttoned, had not been made
for him.

Here a short digression becomes necessary.

There was in Paris at that epoch, in a low-lived old lodging in the Rue
Beautreillis, near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose profession was to
change villains into honest men. Not for too long, which might have
proved embarrassing for the villain. The change was on sight, for a day
or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day, by means of a costume which
resembled the honesty of the world in general as nearly as possible.
This costumer was called "the Changer"; the pickpockets of Paris had
given him this name and knew him by no other. He had a tolerably
complete wardrobe. The rags with which he tricked out people were almost
probable. He had specialties and categories; on each nail of his shop
hung a social status, threadbare and worn; here the suit of a
magistrate, there the outfit of a Curé, beyond the outfit of a banker,
in one corner the costume of a retired military man, elsewhere the
habiliments of a man of letters, and further on the dress of a
statesman.

This creature was the costumer of the immense drama which knavery plays
in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into
which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room,
deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to the part which he
wished to play, the costume which suited him, and on descending the
stairs once more, the knave was a somebody. On the following day, the
clothes were faithfully returned, and the Changer, who trusted the
thieves with everything, was never robbed. There was one inconvenience
about these clothes, they "did not fit"; not having been made for those
who wore them, they were too tight for one, too loose for another and
did not adjust themselves to any one. Every pickpocket who exceeded or
fell short of the human average was ill at his ease in the Changer's
costumes. It was necessary that one should not be either too fat or too
lean. The changer had foreseen only ordinary men. He had taken the
measure of the species from the first rascal who came to hand, who is
neither stout nor thin, neither tall nor short. Hence adaptations which
were sometimes difficult and from which the Changer's clients extricated
themselves as best they might. So much the worse for the exceptions! The
suit of the statesman, for instance, black from head to foot, and
consequently proper, would have been too large for Pitt and too small
for Castelcicala. The costume of a statesman was designated as follows
in the Changer's catalogue; we copy:

"A coat of black cloth, trowsers of black wool, a silk waistcoat, boots
and linen." On the margin there stood: _ex-ambassador_, and a note which
we also copy: "In a separate box, a neatly frizzed peruke, green
glasses, seals, and two small quills an inch long, wrapped in cotton."
All this belonged to the statesman, the ex-ambassador. This whole
costume was, if we may so express ourselves, debilitated; the seams were
white, a vague button-hole yawned at one of the elbows; moreover, one of
the coat buttons was missing on the breast; but this was only detail; as
the hand of the statesman should always be thrust into his coat and laid
upon his heart, its function was to conceal the absent button.

If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he
would instantly have recognized upon the back of the visitor whom Basque
had just shown in, the statesman's suit borrowed from the pick-me-down-
that shop of the Changer.

Marius' disappointment on beholding another man than the one whom he
expected to see turned to the newcomer's disadvantage.

He surveyed him from head to foot, while that personage made exaggerated
bows, and demanded in a curt tone:

"What do you want?"

The man replied with an amiable grin of which the caressing smile of a
crocodile will furnish some idea:

"It seems to me impossible that I should not have already had the honor
of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society. I think I actually did meet
monsieur personally, several years ago, at the house of Madame la
Princesse Bagration and in the drawing-rooms of his Lordship the Vicomte
Dambray, peer of France."

It is always a good bit of tactics in knavery to pretend to recognize
some one whom one does not know.

Marius paid attention to the manner of this man's speech. He spied on
his accent and gesture, but his disappointment increased; the
pronunciation was nasal and absolutely unlike the dry, shrill tone which
he had expected.

He was utterly routed.

"I know neither Madame Bagration nor M. Dambray," said he. "I have never
set foot in the house of either of them in my life."

The reply was ungracious. The personage, determined to be gracious at
any cost, insisted.

"Then it must have been at Chateaubriand's that I have seen Monsieur! I
know Chateaubriand very well. He is very affable. He sometimes says to
me: 'Thénard, my friend . . . won't you drink a glass of wine with me?'"

Marius' brow grew more and more severe:

"I have never had the honor of being received by M. de Chateaubriand.
Let us cut it short. What do you want?"

The man bowed lower at that harsh voice.

"Monsieur le Baron, deign to listen to me. There is in America, in a
district near Panama, a village called la Joya. That village is composed
of a single house, a large, square house of three stories, built of
bricks dried in the sun, each side of the square five hundred feet in
length, each story retreating twelve feet back of the story below, in
such a manner as to leave in front a terrace which makes the circuit of
the edifice, in the centre an inner court where the provisions and
munitions are kept; no windows, loopholes, no doors, ladders, ladders to
mount from the ground to the first terrace, and from the first to the
second, and from the second to the third, ladders to descend into the
inner court, no doors to the chambers, trap-doors, no staircases to the
chambers, ladders; in the evening the traps are closed, the ladders are
withdrawn, carbines and blunderbusses trained from the loopholes; no
means of entering, a house by day, a citadel by night, eight hundred
inhabitants,--that is the village. Why so many precautions? because the
country is dangerous; it is full of cannibals. Then why do people go
there? because the country is marvellous; gold is found there."

"What are you driving at?" interrupted Marius, who had passed from
disappointment to impatience.

"At this, Monsieur le Baron. I am an old and weary diplomat. Ancient
civilization has thrown me on my own devices. I want to try savages."

"Well?"

"Monsieur le Baron, egotism is the law of the world. The proletarian
peasant woman, who toils by the day, turns round when the diligence
passes by, the peasant proprietress, who toils in her field, does not
turn round. The dog of the poor man barks at the rich man, the dog of
the rich man barks at the poor man. Each one for himself. Self-interest-
-that's the object of men. Gold, that's the loadstone."

"What then? Finish."

"I should like to go and establish myself at la Joya. There are three of
us. I have my spouse and my young lady; a very beautiful girl. The
journey is long and costly. I need a little money."

"What concern is that of mine?" demanded Marius.

The stranger stretched his neck out of his cravat, a gesture
characteristic of the vulture, and replied with an augmented smile.

"Has not Monsieur le Baron perused my letter?"

There was some truth in this. The fact is, that the contents of the
epistle had slipped Marius' mind. He had seen the writing rather than
read the letter. He could hardly recall it. But a moment ago a fresh
start had been given him. He had noted that detail: "my spouse and my
young lady."

He fixed a penetrating glance on the stranger. An examining judge could
not have done the look better. He almost lay in wait for him.

He confined himself to replying:

"State the case precisely."

The stranger inserted his two hands in both his fobs, drew himself up
without straightening his dorsal column, but scrutinizing Marius in his
turn, with the green gaze of his spectacles.

"So be it, Monsieur le Baron. I will be precise. I have a secret to sell
to you."

"A secret?"

"A secret."

"Which concerns me?"

"Somewhat."

"What is the secret?"

Marius scrutinized the man more and more as he listened to him.

"I commence gratis," said the stranger. "You will see that I am
interesting."

"Speak."

"Monsieur le Baron, you have in your house a thief and an assassin."

Marius shuddered.

"In my house? no," said he.

The imperturbable stranger brushed his hat with his elbow and went on:

"An assassin and a thief. Remark, Monsieur le Baron, that I do not here
speak of ancient deeds, deeds of the past which have lapsed, which can
be effaced by limitation before the law and by repentance before God. I
speak of recent deeds, of actual facts as still unknown to justice at
this hour. I continue. This man has insinuated himself into your
confidence, and almost into your family under a false name. I am about
to tell you his real name. And to tell it to you for nothing."

"I am listening."

"His name is Jean Valjean."

"I know it."

"I am going to tell you, equally for nothing, who he is."

"Say on."

"He is an ex-convict."

"I know it."

"You know it since I have had the honor of telling you."

"No. I knew it before."

Marius' cold tone, that double reply of "I know it," his laconicism,
which was not favorable to dialogue, stirred up some smouldering wrath
in the stranger. He launched a furious glance on the sly at Marius,
which was instantly extinguished. Rapid as it was, this glance was of
the kind which a man recognizes when he has once beheld it; it did not
escape Marius. Certain flashes can only proceed from certain souls; the
eye, that vent-hole of the thought, glows with it; spectacles hide
nothing; try putting a pane of glass over hell!

The stranger resumed with a smile:

"I will not permit myself to contradict Monsieur le Baron. In any case,
you ought to perceive that I am well informed. Now what I have to tell
you is known to myself alone. This concerns the fortune of Madame la
Baronne. It is an extraordinary secret. It is for sale--I make you the
first offer of it. Cheap. Twenty thousand francs."

"I know that secret as well as the others," said Marius.

The personage felt the necessity of lowering his price a trifle.

"Monsieur le Baron, say ten thousand francs and I will speak."

"I repeat to you that there is nothing which you can tell me. I know
what you wish to say to me."

A fresh flash gleamed in the man's eye. He exclaimed:

"But I must dine to-day, nevertheless. It is an extraordinary secret, I
tell you. Monsieur le Baron, I will speak. I speak. Give me twenty
francs."

Marius gazed intently at him:

"I know your extraordinary secret, just as I knew Jean Valjean's name,
just as I know your name."

"My name?"

"Yes."

"That is not difficult, Monsieur le Baron. I had the honor to write to
you and to tell it to you. Thénard."

"--Dier."

"Hey?"

"Thénardier."

"Who's that?"

In danger the porcupine bristles up, the beetle feigns death, the old
guard forms in a square; this man burst into laughter.

Then he flicked a grain of dust from the sleeve of his coat with a
fillip.

Marius continued:

"You are also Jondrette the workman, Fabantou the comedian, Genflot the
poet, Don Alvarès the Spaniard, and Mistress Balizard."

"Mistress what?"

"And you kept a pot-house at Montfermeil."

"A pot-house! Never."

"And I tell you that your name is Thénardier."

"I deny it."

"And that you are a rascal. Here."

And Marius drew a bank-note from his pocket and flung it in his face.

"Thanks! Pardon me! five hundred francs! Monsieur le Baron!"

And the man, overcome, bowed, seized the note and examined it.

"Five hundred francs!" he began again, taken aback. And he stammered in
a low voice: "An honest rustler."69

Then brusquely:

"Well, so be it!" he exclaimed. "Let us put ourselves at our ease."

And with the agility of a monkey, flinging back his hair, tearing off
his spectacles, and withdrawing from his nose by sleight of hand the two
quills of which mention was recently made, and which the reader has also
met with on another page of this book, he took off his face as the man
takes off his hat.

His eye lighted up; his uneven brow, with hollows in some places and
bumps in others, hideously wrinkled at the top, was laid bare, his nose
had become as sharp as a beak; the fierce and sagacious profile of the
man of prey reappeared.

"Monsieur le Baron is infallible," he said in a clear voice whence all
nasal twang had disappeared, "I am Thénardier."

And he straightened up his crooked back.

Thénardier, for it was really he, was strangely surprised; he would have
been troubled, had he been capable of such a thing. He had come to bring
astonishment, and it was he who had received it. This humiliation had
been worth five hundred francs to him, and, taking it all in all, he
accepted it; but he was none the less bewildered.

He beheld this Baron Pontmercy for the first time, and, in spite of his
disguise, this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized him
thoroughly. And not only was this Baron perfectly informed as to
Thénardier, but he seemed well posted as to Jean Valjean. Who was this
almost beardless young man, who was so glacial and so generous, who knew
people's names, who knew all their names, and who opened his purse to
them, who bullied rascals like a judge, and who paid them like a dupe?

Thénardier, the reader will remember, although he had been Marius'
neighbor, had never seen him, which is not unusual in Paris; he had
formerly, in a vague way, heard his daughters talk of a very poor young
man named Marius who lived in the house. He had written to him, without
knowing him, the letter with which the reader is acquainted.

No connection between that Marius and M. le Baron Pontmercy was possible
in his mind.

As for the name Pontmercy, it will be recalled that, on the battlefield
of Waterloo, he had only heard the last two syllables, for which he
always entertained the legitimate scorn which one owes to what is merely
an expression of thanks.

However, through his daughter Azelma, who had started on the scent of
the married pair on the 16th of February, and through his own personal
researches, he had succeeded in learning many things, and, from the
depths of his own gloom, he had contrived to grasp more than one
mysterious clew. He had discovered, by dint of industry, or, at least,
by dint of induction, he had guessed who the man was whom he had
encountered on a certain day in the Grand Sewer. From the man he had
easily reached the name. He knew that Madame la Baronne Pontmercy was
Cosette. But he meant to be discreet in that quarter.

Who was Cosette? He did not know exactly himself. He did, indeed, catch
an inkling of illegitimacy, the history of Fantine had always seemed to
him equivocal; but what was the use of talking about that? in order to
cause himself to be paid for his silence? He had, or thought he had,
better wares than that for sale. And, according to all appearances, if
he were to come and make to the Baron Pontmercy this revelation--and
without proof: "Your wife is a bastard," the only result would be to
attract the boot of the husband towards the loins of the revealer.

From Thénardier's point of view, the conversation with Marius had not
yet begun. He ought to have drawn back, to have modified his strategy,
to have abandoned his position, to have changed his front; but nothing
essential had been compromised as yet, and he had five hundred francs in
his pocket. Moreover, he had something decisive to say, and, even
against this very well-informed and well-armed Baron Pontmercy, he felt
himself strong. For men of Thénardier's nature, every dialogue is a
combat. In the one in which he was about to engage, what was his
situation? He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he did know of
what he was speaking, he made this rapid review of his inner forces, and
after having said: "I am Thénardier," he waited.

Marius had become thoughtful. So he had hold of Thénardier at last. That
man whom he had so greatly desired to find was before him. He could
honor Colonel Pontmercy's recommendation.

He felt humiliated that that hero should have owned anything to this
villain, and that the letter of change drawn from the depths of the tomb
by his father upon him, Marius, had been protested up to that day. It
also seemed to him, in the complex state of his mind towards Thénardier,
that there was occasion to avenge the Colonel for the misfortune of
having been saved by such a rascal. In any case, he was content. He was
about to deliver the Colonel's shade from this unworthy creditor at
last, and it seemed to him that he was on the point of rescuing his
father's memory from the debtors' prison. By the side of this duty there
was another--to elucidate, if possible, the source of Cosette's fortune.
The opportunity appeared to present itself. Perhaps Thénardier knew
something. It might prove useful to see the bottom of this man.

He commenced with this.

Thénardier had caused the "honest rustler" to disappear in his fob, and
was gazing at Marius with a gentleness that was almost tender.

Marius broke the silence.

"Thénardier, I have told you your name. Now, would you like to have me
tell you your secret--the one that you came here to reveal to me? I have
information of my own, also. You shall see that I know more about it
than you do. Jean Valjean, as you have said, is an assassin and a thief.
A thief, because he robbed a wealthy manufacturer, whose ruin he brought
about. An assassin, because he assassinated police-agent Javert."

"I don't understand, sir," ejaculated Thénardier.

"I will make myself intelligible. In a certain arrondissement of the Pas
de Calais, there was, in 1822, a man who had fallen out with justice,
and who, under the name of M. Madeleine, had regained his status and
rehabilitated himself. This man had become a just man in the full force
of the term. In a trade, the manufacture of black glass goods, he made
the fortune of an entire city. As far as his personal fortune was
concerned he made that also, but as a secondary matter, and in some
sort, by accident. He was the foster-father of the poor. He founded
hospitals, opened schools, visited the sick, dowered young girls,
supported widows, and adopted orphans; he was like the guardian angel of
the country. He refused the cross, he was appointed Mayor. A liberated
convict knew the secret of a penalty incurred by this man in former
days; he denounced him, and had him arrested, and profited by the arrest
to come to Paris and cause the banker Laffitte,--I have the fact from
the cashier himself,--by means of a false signature, to hand over to him
the sum of over half a million which belonged to M. Madeleine. This
convict who robbed M. Madeleine was Jean Valjean. As for the other fact,
you have nothing to tell me about it either. Jean Valjean killed the
agent Javert; he shot him with a pistol. I, the person who is speaking
to you, was present."

Thénardier cast upon Marius the sovereign glance of a conquered man who
lays his hand once more upon the victory, and who has just regained, in
one instant, all the ground which he has lost. But the smile returned
instantly. The inferior's triumph in the presence of his superior must
be wheedling.

Thénardier contented himself with saying to Marius:

"Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."

And he emphasized this phrase by making his bunch of seals execute an
expressive whirl.

"What!" broke forth Marius, "do you dispute that? These are facts."

"They are chimæras. The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron honors
me renders it my duty to tell him so. Truth and justice before all
things. I do not like to see folks accused unjustly. Monsieur le Baron,
Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean did not kill
Javert."

"This is too much! How is this?"

"For two reasons."

"What are they? Speak."

"This is the first: he did not rob M. Madeleine, because it is Jean
Valjean himself who was M. Madeleine."

"What tale are you telling me?"

"And this is the second: he did not assassinate Javert, because the
person who killed Javert was Javert."

"What do you mean to say?"

"That Javert committed suicide."

"Prove it! prove it!" cried Marius beside himself.

Thénardier resumed, scanning his phrase after the manner of the ancient
Alexandrine measure:

"Police-agent-Ja-vert-was-found-drowned-un-der-a-boat-of-the-Pont-au-
Change."

"But prove it!"

Thénardier drew from his pocket a large envelope of gray paper, which
seemed to contain sheets folded in different sizes.

"I have my papers," he said calmly.

And he added:

"Monsieur le Baron, in your interests I desired to know Jean Valjean
thoroughly. I say that Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine are one and the
same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert. If I
speak, it is because I have proofs. Not manuscript proofs--writing is
suspicious, handwriting is complaisant,--but printed proofs."

As he spoke, Thénardier extracted from the envelope two copies of
newspapers, yellow, faded, and strongly saturated with tobacco. One of
these two newspapers, broken at every fold and falling into rags, seemed
much older than the other.

"Two facts, two proofs," remarked Thénardier. And he offered the two
newspapers, unfolded, to Marius.

The reader is acquainted with these two papers. One, the most ancient, a
number of the _Drapeau Blanc_ of the 25th of July, 1823, the text of
which can be seen in the first volume, established the identity of M.
Madeleine and Jean Valjean.

The other, a _Moniteur_ of the 15th of June, 1832, announced the suicide
of Javert, adding that it appeared from a verbal report of Javert to the
prefect that, having been taken prisoner in the barricade of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, he had owed his life to the magnanimity of an insurgent
who, holding him under his pistol, had fired into the air, instead of
blowing out his brains.

Marius read. He had evidence, a certain date, irrefragable proof, these
two newspapers had not been printed expressly for the purpose of backing
up Thénardier's statements; the note printed in the _Moniteur_ had been
an administrative communication from the Prefecture of Police. Marius
could not doubt.

The information of the cashier-clerk had been false, and he himself had
been deceived.

Jean Valjean, who had suddenly grown grand, emerged from his cloud.
Marius could not repress a cry of joy.

"Well, then this unhappy wretch is an admirable man! the whole of that
fortune really belonged to him! he is Madeleine, the providence of a
whole countryside! he is Jean Valjean, Javert's savior! he is a hero! he
is a saint!"

"He's not a saint, and he's not a hero!" said Thénardier. "He's an
assassin and a robber."

And he added, in the tone of a man who begins to feel that he possesses
some authority:

"Let us be calm."

Robber, assassin--those words which Marius thought had disappeared and
which returned, fell upon him like an ice-cold shower-bath.

"Again!" said he.

"Always," ejaculated Thénardier. "Jean Valjean did not rob Madeleine,
but he is a thief. He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer."

"Will you speak," retorted Marius, "of that miserable theft, committed
forty years ago, and expiated, as your own newspapers prove, by a whole
life of repentance, of self-abnegation and of virtue?"

"I say assassination and theft, Monsieur le Baron, and I repeat that I
am speaking of actual facts. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely
unknown. It belongs to unpublished matter. And perhaps you will find in
it the source of the fortune so skilfully presented to Madame la Baronne
by Jean Valjean. I say skilfully, because, by a gift of that nature it
would not be so very unskilful to slip into an honorable house whose
comforts one would then share, and, at the same stroke, to conceal one's
crime, and to enjoy one's theft, to bury one's name and to create for
oneself a family."

"I might interrupt you at this point," said Marius, "but go on."

"Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the recompense to your
generosity. This secret is worth massive gold. You will say to me: 'Why
do not you apply to Jean Valjean?' For a very simple reason; I know that
he has stripped himself, and stripped himself in your favor, and I
consider the combination ingenious; but he has no longer a son, he would
show me his empty hands, and, since I am in need of some money for my
trip to la Joya, I prefer you, you who have it all, to him who has
nothing. I am a little fatigued, permit me to take a chair."

Marius seated himself and motioned to him to do the same.

Thénardier installed himself on a tufted chair, picked up his two
newspapers, thrust them back into their envelope, and murmured as he
pecked at the _Drapeau Blanc_ with his nail: "It cost me a good deal of
trouble to get this one."

That done he crossed his legs and stretched himself out on the back of
the chair, an attitude characteristic of people who are sure of what
they are saying, then he entered upon his subject gravely, emphasizing
his words:

"Monsieur le Baron, on the 6th of June, 1832, about a year ago, on the
day of the insurrection, a man was in the Grand Sewer of Paris, at the
point where the sewer enters the Seine, between the Pont des Invalides
and the Pont de Jéna."

Marius abruptly drew his chair closer to that of Thénardier. Thénardier
noticed this movement and continued with the deliberation of an orator
who holds his interlocutor and who feels his adversary palpitating under
his words:

"This man, forced to conceal himself, and for reasons, moreover, which
are foreign to politics, had adopted the sewer as his domicile and had a
key to it. It was, I repeat, on the 6th of June; it might have been
eight o'clock in the evening. The man hears a noise in the sewer.
Greatly surprised, he hides himself and lies in wait. It was the sound
of footsteps, some one was walking in the dark, and coming in his
direction. Strange to say, there was another man in the sewer besides
himself. The grating of the outlet from the sewer was not far off. A
little light which fell through it permitted him to recognize the
newcomer, and to see that the man was carrying something on his back. He
was walking in a bent attitude. The man who was walking in a bent
attitude was an ex-convict, and what he was dragging on his shoulders
was a corpse. Assassination caught in the very act, if ever there was
such a thing. As for the theft, that is understood; one does not kill a
man gratis. This convict was on his way to fling the body into the
river. One fact is to be noticed, that before reaching the exit grating,
this convict, who had come a long distance in the sewer, must,
necessarily, have encountered a frightful quagmire where it seems as
though he might have left the body, but the sewermen would have found
the assassinated man the very next day, while at work on the quagmire,
and that did not suit the assassin's plans. He had preferred to traverse
that quagmire with his burden, and his exertions must have been
terrible, for it is impossible to risk one's life more completely; I
don't understand how he could have come out of that alive."

Marius' chair approached still nearer. Thénardier took advantage of this
to draw a long breath. He went on:

"Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars. One lacks
everything there, even room. When two men are there, they must meet.
That is what happened. The man domiciled there and the passer-by were
forced to bid each other good-day, greatly to the regret of both. The
passer-by said to the inhabitant:--"You see what I have on my back, I
must get out, you have the key, give it to me." That convict was a man
of terrible strength. There was no way of refusing. Nevertheless, the
man who had the key parleyed, simply to gain time. He examined the dead
man, but he could see nothing, except that the latter was young, well
dressed, with the air of being rich, and all disfigured with blood.
While talking, the man contrived to tear and pull off behind, without
the assassin perceiving it, a bit of the assassinated man's coat. A
document for conviction, you understand; a means of recovering the trace
of things and of bringing home the crime to the criminal. He put this
document for conviction in his pocket. After which he opened the
grating, made the man go out with his embarrassment on his back, closed
the grating again, and ran off, not caring to be mixed up with the
remainder of the adventure and above all, not wishing to be present when
the assassin threw the assassinated man into the river. Now you
comprehend. The man who was carrying the corpse was Jean Valjean; the
one who had the key is speaking to you at this moment; and the piece of
the coat . . ."

Thénardier completed his phrase by drawing from his pocket, and holding,
on a level with his eyes, nipped between his two thumbs and his two
forefingers, a strip of torn black cloth, all covered with dark spots.

Marius had sprung to his feet, pale, hardly able to draw his breath,
with his eyes riveted on the fragment of black cloth, and, without
uttering a word, without taking his eyes from that fragment, he
retreated to the wall and fumbled with his right hand along the wall for
a key which was in the lock of a cupboard near the chimney.

He found the key, opened the cupboard, plunged his arm into it without
looking, and without his frightened gaze quitting the rag which
Thénardier still held outspread.

But Thénardier continued:

"Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest of reasons for believing that
the assassinated young man was an opulent stranger lured into a trap by
Jean Valjean, and the bearer of an enormous sum of money."

"The young man was myself, and here is the coat!" cried Marius, and he
flung upon the floor an old black coat all covered with blood.

Then, snatching the fragment from the hands of Thénardier, he crouched
down over the coat, and laid the torn morsel against the tattered skirt.
The rent fitted exactly, and the strip completed the coat.

Thénardier was petrified.

This is what he thought: "I'm struck all of a heap."

Marius rose to his feet trembling, despairing, radiant.

He fumbled in his pocket and stalked furiously to Thénardier, presenting
to him and almost thrusting in his face his fist filled with bank-notes
for five hundred and a thousand francs.

"You are an infamous wretch! you are a liar, a calumniator, a villain.
You came to accuse that man, you have only justified him; you wanted to
ruin him, you have only succeeded in glorifying him. And it is you who
are the thief! And it is you who are the assassin! I saw you, Thénardier
Jondrette, in that lair on the Rue de l'Hôpital. I know enough about you
to send you to the galleys and even further if I choose. Here are a
thousand francs, bully that you are!"

And he flung a thousand franc note at Thénardier.

"Ah! Jondrette Thénardier, vile rascal! Let this serve you as a lesson,
you dealer in second-hand secrets, merchant of mysteries, rummager of
the shadows, wretch! Take these five hundred francs and get out of here!
Waterloo protects you."

"Waterloo!" growled Thénardier, pocketing the five hundred francs along
with the thousand.

"Yes, assassin! You there saved the life of a Colonel. . ."

"Of a General," said Thénardier, elevating his head.

"Of a Colonel!" repeated Marius in a rage. "I wouldn't give a ha'penny
for a general. And you come here to commit infamies! I tell you that you
have committed all crimes. Go! disappear! Only be happy, that is all
that I desire. Ah! monster! here are three thousand francs more. Take
them. You will depart to-morrow, for America, with your daughter; for
your wife is dead, you abominable liar. I shall watch over your
departure, you ruffian, and at that moment I will count out to you
twenty thousand francs. Go get yourself hung elsewhere!"

"Monsieur le Baron!" replied Thénardier, bowing to the very earth,
"eternal gratitude." And Thénardier left the room, understanding
nothing, stupefied and delighted with this sweet crushing beneath sacks
of gold, and with that thunder which had burst forth over his head in
bank-bills.

Struck by lightning he was, but he was also content; and he would have
been greatly angered had he had a lightning rod to ward off such
lightning as that.

Let us finish with this man at once.

Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating, he set
out, thanks to Marius' care, for America under a false name, with his
daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty thousand
francs.

The moral wretchedness of Thénardier, the bourgeois who had missed his
vocation, was irremediable. He was in America what he had been in
Europe. Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to corrupt a good
action and to cause evil things to spring from it. With Marius' money,
Thénardier set up as a slave-dealer.

As soon as Thénardier had left the house, Marius rushed to the garden,
where Cosette was still walking.

"Cosette! Cosette!" he cried. "Come! come quick! Let us go. Basque, a
carriage! Cosette, come. Ah! My God! It was he who saved my life! Let us
not lose a minute! Put on your shawl."

Cosette thought him mad and obeyed.

He could not breathe, he laid his hand on his heart to restrain its
throbbing. He paced back and forth with huge strides, he embraced
Cosette:

"Ah! Cosette! I am an unhappy wretch!" said he.

Marius was bewildered. He began to catch a glimpse in Jean Valjean of
some indescribably lofty and melancholy figure. An unheard-of virtue,
supreme and sweet, humble in its immensity, appeared to him. The convict
was transfigured into Christ.

Marius was dazzled by this prodigy. He did not know precisely what he
beheld, but it was grand.

In an instant, a hackney-carriage stood in front of the door.

Marius helped Cosette in and darted in himself.

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Armé, Number 7."

The carriage drove off.

"Ah! what happiness!" ejaculated Cosette. "Rue de l'Homme Armé, I did
not dare to speak to you of that. We are going to see M. Jean."

"Thy father! Cosette, thy father more than ever. Cosette, I guess it.
You told me that you had never received the letter that I sent you by
Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands. Cosette, he went to the
barricade to save me. As it is a necessity with him to be an angel, he
saved others also; he saved Javert. He rescued me from that gulf to give
me to you. He carried me on his back through that frightful sewer. Ah! I
am a monster of ingratitude. Cosette, after having been your providence,
he became mine. Just imagine, there was a terrible quagmire enough to
drown one a hundred times over, to drown one in mire. Cosette! he made
me traverse it. I was unconscious; I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I
could know nothing of my own adventure. We are going to bring him back,
to take him with us, whether he is willing or not, he shall never leave
us again. If only he is at home! Provided only that we can find him, I
will pass the rest of my life in venerating him. Yes, that is how it
should be, do you see, Cosette? Gavroche must have delivered my letter
to him. All is explained. You understand."

Cosette did not understand a word.

"You are right," she said to him.

Meanwhile the carriage rolled on.



CHAPTER V--A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY

Jean Valjean turned round at the knock which he heard on his door.

"Come in," he said feebly.

The door opened.

Cosette and Marius made their appearance.

Cosette rushed into the room.

Marius remained on the threshold, leaning against the jamb of the door.

"Cosette!" said Jean Valjean.

And he sat erect in his chair, his arms outstretched and trembling,
haggard, livid, gloomy, an immense joy in his eyes.

Cosette, stifling with emotion, fell upon Jean Valjean's breast.

"Father!" said she.

Jean Valjean, overcome, stammered:

"Cosette! she! you! Madame! it is thou! Ah! my God!"

And, pressed close in Cosette's arms, he exclaimed:

"It is thou! thou art here! Thou dost pardon me then!"

Marius, lowering his eyelids, in order to keep his tears from flowing,
took a step forward and murmured between lips convulsively contracted to
repress his sobs:

"My father!"

"And you also, you pardon me!" Jean Valjean said to him.

Marius could find no words, and Jean Valjean added:

"Thanks."

Cosette tore off her shawl and tossed her hat on the bed.

"It embarrasses me," said she.

And, seating herself on the old man's knees, she put aside his white
locks with an adorable movement, and kissed his brow.

Jean Valjean, bewildered, let her have her own way.

Cosette, who only understood in a very confused manner, redoubled her
caresses, as though she desired to pay Marius' debt.

Jean Valjean stammered:

"How stupid people are! I thought that I should never see her again.
Imagine, Monsieur Pontmercy, at the very moment when you entered, I was
saying to myself: 'All is over. Here is her little gown, I am a
miserable man, I shall never see Cosette again,' and I was saying that
at the very moment when you were mounting the stairs. Was not I an
idiot? Just see how idiotic one can be! One reckons without the good
God. The good God says:

"'You fancy that you are about to be abandoned, stupid! No. No, things
will not go so. Come, there is a good man yonder who is in need of an
angel.' And the angel comes, and one sees one's Cosette again! and one
sees one's little Cosette once more! Ah! I was very unhappy."

For a moment he could not speak, then he went on:

"I really needed to see Cosette a little bit now and then. A heart needs
a bone to gnaw. But I was perfectly conscious that I was in the way. I
gave myself reasons: 'They do not want you, keep in your own course, one
has not the right to cling eternally.' Ah! God be praised, I see her
once more! Dost thou know, Cosette, thy husband is very handsome? Ah!
what a pretty embroidered collar thou hast on, luckily. I am fond of
that pattern. It was thy husband who chose it, was it not? And then,
thou shouldst have some cashmere shawls. Let me call her thou, Monsieur
Pontmercy. It will not be for long."

And Cosette began again:

"How wicked of you to have left us like that! Where did you go? Why have
you stayed away so long? Formerly your journeys only lasted three or
four days. I sent Nicolette, the answer always was: 'He is absent.' How
long have you been back? Why did you not let us know? Do you know that
you are very much changed? Ah! what a naughty father! he has been ill,
and we have not known it! Stay, Marius, feel how cold his hand is!"

"So you are here! Monsieur Pontmercy, you pardon me!" repeated Jean
Valjean.

At that word which Jean Valjean had just uttered once more, all that was
swelling Marius' heart found vent.

He burst forth:

"Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And
do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He
has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and
after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He
has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate,
to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks!
Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too
little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all
that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through
all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself.
Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses!
Cosette, that man is an angel!"

"Hush! hush!" said Jean Valjean in a low voice. "Why tell all that?"

"But you!" cried Marius with a wrath in which there was veneration, "why
did you not tell it to me? It is your own fault, too. You save people's
lives, and you conceal it from them! You do more, under the pretext of
unmasking yourself, you calumniate yourself. It is frightful."

"I told the truth," replied Jean Valjean.

"No," retorted Marius, "the truth is the whole truth; and that you did
not tell. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not have said so? You saved
Javert, why not have said so? I owed my life to you, why not have said
so?"

"Because I thought as you do. I thought that you were in the right. It
was necessary that I should go away. If you had known about that affair,
of the sewer, you would have made me remain near you. I was therefore
forced to hold my peace. If I had spoken, it would have caused
embarrassment in every way."

"It would have embarrassed what? embarrassed whom?" retorted Marius. "Do
you think that you are going to stay here? We shall carry you off. Ah!
good heavens! when I reflect that it was by an accident that I have
learned all this. You form a part of ourselves. You are her father, and
mine. You shall not pass another day in this dreadful house. Do not
imagine that you will be here to-morrow."

"To-morrow," said Jean Valjean, "I shall not be here, but I shall not be
with you."

"What do you mean?" replied Marius. "Ah! come now, we are not going to
permit any more journeys. You shall never leave us again. You belong to
us. We shall not loose our hold of you."

"This time it is for good," added Cosette. "We have a carriage at the
door. I shall run away with you. If necessary, I shall employ force."

And she laughingly made a movement to lift the old man in her arms.

"Your chamber still stands ready in our house," she went on. "If you
only knew how pretty the garden is now! The azaleas are doing very well
there. The walks are sanded with river sand; there are tiny violet
shells. You shall eat my strawberries. I water them myself. And no more
'madame,' no more 'Monsieur Jean,' we are living under a Republic,
everybody says _thou_, don't they, Marius? The programme is changed. If
you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast
which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate
her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head
out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked
to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs,
everybody is happy. You are going to come with us. How delighted
grandfather will be! You shall have your plot in the garden, you shall
cultivate it, and we shall see whether your strawberries are as fine as
mine. And, then, I shall do everything that you wish, and then, you will
obey me prettily."

Jean Valjean listened to her without hearing her. He heard the music of
her voice rather than the sense of her words; one of those large tears
which are the sombre pearls of the soul welled up slowly in his eyes.

He murmured:

"The proof that God is good is that she is here."

"Father!" said Cosette.

Jean Valjean continued:

"It is quite true that it would be charming for us to live together.
Their trees are full of birds. I would walk with Cosette. It is sweet to
be among living people who bid each other 'good-day,' who call to each
other in the garden. People see each other from early morning. We should
each cultivate our own little corner. She would make me eat her
strawberries. I would make her gather my roses. That would be charming.
Only . . ."

He paused and said gently:

"It is a pity."

The tear did not fall, it retreated, and Jean Valjean replaced it with a
smile.

Cosette took both the old man's hands in hers.

"My God!" said she, "your hands are still colder than before. Are you
ill? Do you suffer?"

"I? No," replied Jean Valjean. "I am very well. Only . . ."

He paused.

"Only what?"

"I am going to die presently."

Cosette and Marius shuddered.

"To die!" exclaimed Marius.

"Yes, but that is nothing," said Jean Valjean.

He took breath, smiled and resumed:

"Cosette, thou wert talking to me, go on, so thy little robin red-breast
is dead? Speak, so that I may hear thy voice."

Marius gazed at the old man in amazement.

Cosette uttered a heartrending cry.

"Father! my father! you will live. You are going to live. I insist upon
your living, do you hear?"

Jean Valjean raised his head towards her with adoration.

"Oh! yes, forbid me to die. Who knows? Perhaps I shall obey. I was on
the verge of dying when you came. That stopped me, it seemed to me that
I was born again."

"You are full of strength and life," cried Marius. "Do you imagine that
a person can die like this? You have had sorrow, you shall have no more.
It is I who ask your forgiveness, and on my knees! You are going to
live, and to live with us, and to live a long time. We take possession
of you once more. There are two of us here who will henceforth have no
other thought than your happiness."

"You see," resumed Cosette, all bathed in tears, "that Marius says that
you shall not die."

Jean Valjean continued to smile.

"Even if you were to take possession of me, Monsieur Pontmercy, would
that make me other than I am? No, God has thought like you and myself,
and he does not change his mind; it is useful for me to go. Death is a
good arrangement. God knows better than we what we need. May you be
happy, may Monsieur Pontmercy have Cosette, may youth wed the morning,
may there be around you, my children, lilacs and nightingales; may your
life be a beautiful, sunny lawn, may all the enchantments of heaven fill
your souls, and now let me, who am good for nothing, die; it is certain
that all this is right. Come, be reasonable, nothing is possible now, I
am fully conscious that all is over. And then, last night, I drank that
whole jug of water. How good thy husband is, Cosette! Thou art much
better off with him than with me."

A noise became audible at the door.

It was the doctor entering.

"Good-day, and farewell, doctor," said Jean Valjean. "Here are my poor
children."

Marius stepped up to the doctor. He addressed to him only this single
word: "Monsieur? . . ." But his manner of pronouncing it contained a
complete question.

The doctor replied to the question by an expressive glance.

"Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no
reason for being unjust towards God."

A silence ensued.

All breasts were oppressed.

Jean Valjean turned to Cosette. He began to gaze at her as though he
wished to retain her features for eternity.

In the depths of the shadow into which he had already descended, ecstasy
was still possible to him when gazing at Cosette. The reflection of that
sweet face lighted up his pale visage.

The doctor felt of his pulse.

"Ah! it was you that he wanted!" he murmured, looking at Cosette and
Marius.

And bending down to Marius' ear, he added in a very low voice:

"Too late."

Jean Valjean surveyed the doctor and Marius serenely, almost without
ceasing to gaze at Cosette.

These barely articulate words were heard to issue from his mouth:

"It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live."

All at once he rose to his feet. These accesses of strength are
sometimes the sign of the death agony. He walked with a firm step to the
wall, thrusting aside Marius and the doctor who tried to help him,
detached from the wall a little copper crucifix which was suspended
there, and returned to his seat with all the freedom of movement of
perfect health, and said in a loud voice, as he laid the crucifix on the
table:

"Behold the great martyr."

Then his chest sank in, his head wavered, as though the intoxication of
the tomb were seizing hold upon him.

His hands, which rested on his knees, began to press their nails into
the stuff of his trousers.

Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak to him,
but could not.

Among the words mingled with that mournful saliva which accompanies
tears, they distinguished words like the following:

"Father, do not leave us. Is it possible that we have found you only to
lose you again?"

It might be said that agony writhes. It goes, comes, advances towards
the sepulchre, and returns towards life. There is groping in the action
of dying.

Jean Valjean rallied after this semi-swoon, shook his brow as though to
make the shadows fall away from it and became almost perfectly lucid
once more.

He took a fold of Cosette's sleeve and kissed it.

"He is coming back! doctor, he is coming back," cried Marius.

"You are good, both of you," said Jean Valjean. "I am going to tell you
what has caused me pain. What has pained me, Monsieur Pontmercy, is that
you have not been willing to touch that money. That money really belongs
to your wife. I will explain to you, my children, and for that reason,
also, I am glad to see you. Black jet comes from England, white jet
comes from Norway. All this is in this paper, which you will read. For
bracelets, I invented a way of substituting for slides of soldered sheet
iron, slides of iron laid together. It is prettier, better and less
costly. You will understand how much money can be made in that way. So
Cosette's fortune is really hers. I give you these details, in order
that your mind may be set at rest."

The portress had come upstairs and was gazing in at the half-open door.
The doctor dismissed her.

But he could not prevent this zealous woman from exclaiming to the dying
man before she disappeared: "Would you like a priest?"

"I have had one," replied Jean Valjean.

And with his finger he seemed to indicate a point above his head where
one would have said that he saw some one.

It is probable, in fact, that the Bishop was present at this death
agony.

Cosette gently slipped a pillow under his loins.

Jean Valjean resumed:

"Have no fear, Monsieur Pontmercy, I adjure you. The six hundred
thousand francs really belong to Cosette. My life will have been wasted
if you do not enjoy them! We managed to do very well with those glass
goods. We rivalled what is called Berlin jewellery. However, we could
not equal the black glass of England. A gross, which contains twelve
hundred very well cut grains, only costs three francs."

When a being who is dear to us is on the point of death, we gaze upon
him with a look which clings convulsively to him and which would fain
hold him back.

Cosette gave her hand to Marius, and both, mute with anguish, not
knowing what to say to the dying man, stood trembling and despairing
before him.

Jean Valjean sank moment by moment. He was failing; he was drawing near
to the gloomy horizon.

His breath had become intermittent; a little rattling interrupted it. He
found some difficulty in moving his forearm, his feet had lost all
movement, and in proportion as the wretchedness of limb and feebleness
of body increased, all the majesty of his soul was displayed and spread
over his brow. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his
eyes.

His face paled and smiled. Life was no longer there, it was something
else.

His breath sank, his glance grew grander. He was a corpse on which the
wings could be felt.

He made a sign to Cosette to draw near, then to Marius; the last minute
of the last hour had, evidently, arrived.

He began to speak to them in a voice so feeble that it seemed to come
from a distance, and one would have said that a wall now rose between
them and him.

"Draw near, draw near, both of you. I love you dearly. Oh! how good it
is to die like this! And thou lovest me also, my Cosette. I knew well
that thou still felt friendly towards thy poor old man. How kind it was
of thee to place that pillow under my loins! Thou wilt weep for me a
little, wilt thou not? Not too much. I do not wish thee to have any real
griefs. You must enjoy yourselves a great deal, my children. I forgot to
tell you that the profit was greater still on the buckles without
tongues than on all the rest. A gross of a dozen dozens cost ten francs
and sold for sixty. It really was a good business. So there is no
occasion for surprise at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur
Pontmercy. It is honest money. You may be rich with a tranquil mind.
Thou must have a carriage, a box at the theatres now and then, and
handsome ball dresses, my Cosette, and then, thou must give good dinners
to thy friends, and be very happy. I was writing to Cosette a while ago.
She will find my letter. I bequeath to her the two candlesticks which
stand on the chimney-piece. They are of silver, but to me they are gold,
they are diamonds; they change candles which are placed in them into
wax-tapers. I do not know whether the person who gave them to me is
pleased with me yonder on high. I have done what I could. My children,
you will not forget that I am a poor man, you will have me buried in the
first plot of earth that you find, under a stone to mark the spot. This
is my wish. No name on the stone. If Cosette cares to come for a little
while now and then, it will give me pleasure. And you too, Monsieur
Pontmercy. I must admit that I have not always loved you. I ask your
pardon for that. Now she and you form but one for me. I feel very
grateful to you. I am sure that you make Cosette happy. If you only
knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her pretty rosy cheeks were my delight; when I
saw her in the least pale, I was sad. In the chest of drawers, there is
a bank-bill for five hundred francs. I have not touched it. It is for
the poor. Cosette, dost thou see thy little gown yonder on the bed? dost
thou recognize it? That was ten years ago, however. How time flies! We
have been very happy. All is over. Do not weep, my children, I am not
going very far, I shall see you from there, you will only have to look
at night, and you will see me smile. Cosette, dost thou remember
Montfermeil? Thou wert in the forest, thou wert greatly terrified; dost
thou remember how I took hold of the handle of the water-bucket? That
was the first time that I touched thy poor, little hand. It was so cold!
Ah! your hands were red then, mademoiselle, they are very white now. And
the big doll! dost thou remember? Thou didst call her Catherine. Thou
regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! How thou didst make me
laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had been raining, thou didst
float bits of straw on the gutters, and watch them pass away. One day I
gave thee a willow battledore and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and
green feathers. Thou hast forgotten it. Thou wert roguish so young! Thou
didst play. Thou didst put cherries in thy ears. Those are things of the
past. The forests through which one has passed with one's child, the
trees under which one has strolled, the convents where one has concealed
oneself, the games, the hearty laughs of childhood, are shadows. I
imagined that all that belonged to me. In that lay my stupidity. Those
Thénardiers were wicked. Thou must forgive them. Cosette, the moment has
come to tell thee the name of thy mother. She was called Fantine.
Remember that name--Fantine. Kneel whenever thou utterest it. She
suffered much. She loved thee dearly. She had as much unhappiness as
thou hast had happiness. That is the way God apportions things. He is
there on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of
his great stars. I am on the verge of departure, my children. Love each
other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love
for each other. You will think sometimes of the poor old man who died
here. Oh my Cosette, it is not my fault, indeed, that I have not seen
thee all this time, it cut me to the heart; I went as far as the corner
of the street, I must have produced a queer effect on the people who saw
me pass, I was like a madman, I once went out without my hat. I no
longer see clearly, my children, I had still other things to say, but
never mind. Think a little of me. Come still nearer. I die happy. Give
me your dear and well-beloved heads, so that I may lay my hands upon
them."

Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, in despair, suffocating with
tears, each beneath one of Jean Valjean's hands. Those august hands no
longer moved.

He had fallen backwards, the light of the candles illuminated him.

His white face looked up to heaven, he allowed Cosette and Marius to
cover his hands with kisses.

He was dead.

The night was starless and extremely dark. No doubt, in the gloom, some
immense angel stood erect with wings outspread, awaiting that soul.

Enlarge



CHAPTER VI--THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES

In the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the common grave,
far from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres, far from all
the tombs of fancy which display in the presence of eternity all the
hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner, beside an old wall,
beneath a great yew tree over which climbs the wild convolvulus, amid
dandelions and mosses, there lies a stone. That stone is no more exempt
than others from the leprosy of time, of dampness, of the lichens and
from the defilement of the birds. The water turns it green, the air
blackens it. It is not near any path, and people are not fond of walking
in that direction, because the grass is high and their feet are
immediately wet. When there is a little sunshine, the lizards come
thither. All around there is a quivering of weeds. In the spring,
linnets warble in the trees.

This stone is perfectly plain. In cutting it the only thought was the
requirements of the tomb, and no other care was taken than to make the
stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.

No name is to be read there.

Only, many years ago, a hand wrote upon it in pencil these four lines,
which have become gradually illegible beneath the rain and the dust, and
which are, to-day, probably effaced:


Il dort. Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange, Il vivait. Il mourut
quand il n'eut plus son ange. La chose simplement d'elle-même arriva,
Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va.<a href="#linknote-70"
name="linknoteref-70" id="linknoteref-70">70</a>



LETTER TO M. DAELLI

Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Misérables in Milan.


HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.

You are right, sir, when you tell me that _Les Misérables_ is written
for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I
wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to
Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to
Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs.
Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those
great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines
traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and
despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the
child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the
hearth which should warm him, the book of _Les Misérables_ knocks at the
door and says: "Open to me, I come for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which
is still so sombre, the _miserable's_ name is Man; he is agonizing in
all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your
admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism,
that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are
more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to
fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin,
Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a
heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you
are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin.
Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky
does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms,
blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of
the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled
with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone.
The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less
deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social
hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in
England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the
_vescovo_ is identical with the _bishop_, and it always means night, and
of pretty nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to
the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism be
yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance
below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance,
whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their
mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is
your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization
acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to
read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public
schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-
budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive
obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience?
military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of
firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy?
Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it
stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the
woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these
two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is
to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in
Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what
amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so
fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public
prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the
death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and
Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have
you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and
politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes!
Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass
miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as
we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious
condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed
by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great
nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves,
_Miserables_.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more
distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the
priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

I resume. This book, _Les Misérables_, is no less your mirror than ours.
Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,--I
understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that
does not prevent them from being of use.

As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own
country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other
nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I
become more and more patriotic for humanity.

This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of
the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French,
Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more,
human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.

Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition
which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste
and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.

In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight, with
having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste"; I
should be glad if this eulogium were merited.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal
suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a
man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"

This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and
for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one
phrase in your letter. You write:--

"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, _Les
Misérables_, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French
read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"--Alas! I repeat,
whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since
history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery
has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived
for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the
Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe
of the dawn.

If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and in
dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir.
Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished
sentiments.


VICTOR HUGO.



FOOTNOTES: 1 (return) [ Patois of the French Alps: _chat de maraude_,
rascally marauder.]


2 (return) [ Liège: a cork-tree. Pau: a jest on _peau_, skin.]


3 (return) [ She belonged to that circle where cuckoos and carriages
share the same fate; and a jade herself, she lived, as jades live, for
the space of a morning (or jade).]


4 (return) [ An ex-convict.]


5 (return) [ This parenthesis is due to Jean Valjean.]


6 (return) [ A bullet as large as an egg.]


7 (return) [ Walter Scott, Lamartine, Vaulabelle, Charras, Quinet,
Thiers.]


8 (return) [ This is the inscription:--


D. O. M. CY A ETE ÉCRASÉ PAR MALHEUR SOUS UN CHARIOT, MONSIEUR BERNARD
DE BRYE MARCHAND A BRUXELLE LE [illegible] FEVRIER 1637.]

9 (return) [ A heavy rifled gun.]


10 (return) [ "A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures
repaired, greater successes assured for the morrow,--all was lost by a
moment of panic, terror."--Napoleon, Dictées de Sainte Hélène.]


11 (return) [ Five winning numbers in a lottery]


12 (return) [ Literally "made cuirs"; _i. e._, pronounced a _t_ or an
_s_ at the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used
either one of them where neither exists.]


13 (return) [ Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a
writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him
nearly as follows, etc.]


14 (return) [ This is the factory of Goblet Junior: Come choose your
jugs and crocks, Flower-pots, pipes, bricks. The Heart sells Diamonds to
every comer.]


15 (return) [ On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas
and Gesmas, between is the divine power. Dismas seeks the heights,
Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will preserve
us and our effects. If you repeat this verse, you will not lose your
things by theft.]


16 (return) [ Instead of _porte cochère_ and _porte bàtarde_.]


17 (return) [ Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg--down with the moon!]


18 (return) [_Chicken: _ slang allusion to the noise made in calling
poultry.]


19 (return) [ Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day
as having a pear-shaped head.]


20 (return) [ Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging
out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.]


21 (return) [ In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on its
base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be
changed.]


22 (return) [_Suspendu_, suspended; _pendu_, hung.]


23 (return) [_L'Aile_, wing.]


24 (return) [ The slang term for a painter's assistant.]


25 (return) [ If Cæsar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged to
quit my mother's love, I would say to great Cæsar, "Take back thy
sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother."]


26 (return) [ Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns
to his cave.]


27 (return) [ The peep-hole is a _Judas_ in French. Hence the half-
punning allusion.]


28 (return) [ Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the
instants of happiness! To adore each other for eight days was hardly
worth the while! The time of love should last forever.]


29 (return) [ You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow you
everywhere.]


30 (return) [ A democrat.]


31 (return) [ King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two
stilts. When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.]


32 (return) [ In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.]


33 (return) [ A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is
smaller than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
a curve on the ground.]


34 (return) [ From April 19 to May 20.]


35 (return) [_Merlan:_ a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they
are white with powder.]


36 (return) [ The scaffold.]


37 (return) [ Argot of the Temple.]


38 (return) [ Argot of the barriers.]


39 (return) [ The Last Day of a Condemned Man.]


40 (return) [ "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-là, une foultitude de
raisons pour que je me libertise."]


41 (return) [ It must be observed, however, that _mac_ in Celtic means
_son_.]


42 (return) [ Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.]


43 (return) [ Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des
orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards et les locher criblant
sans être agité lui-meme.]


44 (return) [ At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well; the
bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue,
tutu, pointed hat!]


45 (return) [ _Chien_, dog, trigger.]


46 (return) [ Here is the morn appearing. When shall we go to the
forest, Charlot asked Charlotte. Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but
one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot. And these two poor
little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme
very early in the morning. And these two poor little things were as
drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave.
The one cursed, the other swore. When shall we go to the forest? Charlot
asked Charlotte.]


47 (return) [ There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who
hung himself.]


48 (return) [ She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart
inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should
blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her
mouth.]


49 (return) [_Matelote:_ a culinary preparation of various fishes.
_Gibelotte:_ stewed rabbits.]


50 (return) [ Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]


51 (return) [_Bipède sans plume:_ biped without feathers--pen.]


52 (return) [ Municipal officer of Toulouse.]


53 (return) [ Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so
young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well
dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could not
count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny
household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days! Manuel
was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched
thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.
Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the
Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn
round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she smells!
What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her charming
bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple
arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy
couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. We lived
concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that sweet
forbidden fruit. My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart had
already responded. The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored thee
from eve till morn. 'Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the chart of
the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert! O Place Dauphine! When
in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy
delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret. I have read a
great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me; better than
Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial
goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou
didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going
and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine
ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of
aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love
stammers a charming slang? Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips;
thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware
bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup. And those great misfortunes which
made us laugh! Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost! And that dear portrait
of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup! I
was a beggar and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms in
haste. A folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a
centime's worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I
snatched a kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled
and blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God. Dost thou
recall our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags? Oh!
what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly
depths!]


54 (return) [ My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy
gendarmes that I may say a word to them. With a blue capote and a
chicken in his shako, here's the banlieue, co-cocorico.]


55 (return) [ Love letters.]


56 (return) [


"The bird slanders in the elms, And pretends that yesterday, Atala Went
off with a Russian, Where fair maids go. Lon la.

My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her pane the
other day and called me. The jades are very charming, their poison which
bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. I'm fond of love and its
bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela, Lise burned herself in setting
me aflame. In former days when I saw the mantillas of Suzette and of
Zéila, my soul mingled with their folds. Love, when thou gleamest in the
dark thou crownest Lola with roses, I would lose my soul for that.
Jeanne, at thy mirror thou deckest thyself! One fine day, my heart flew
forth. I think that it is Jeanne who has it. At night, when I come from
the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and I say to them: "Behold
her." Where fair maids go, lon la.]


57 (return) [ But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put a
stop to this sort of public order. Does any one wish to play at
skittles? The whole ancient world fell in ruin, when the big ball
rolled. Good old folks, let us smash with our crutches that Louvre where
the monarchy displayed itself in furbelows. We have forced its gates. On
that day, King Charles X. did not stick well and came unglued.]


58 (return) [ Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which
the bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown into
the Tiber.]


59 (return) [ Mustards.]


60 (return) [ From _casser_, to break: break-necks.]


61 (return) [ "Jeanne was born at Fougère, a true shepherd's nest; I
adore her petticoat, the rogue." "Love, thou dwellest in her; For 'tis
in her eyes that thou placest thy quiver, sly scamp!" "As for me, I sing
her, and I love, more than Diana herself, Jeanne and her firm Breton
breasts."]


62 (return) [ In allusion to the expression, _coiffer Sainte-Catherine_,
"to remain unmarried."]


63 (return) [ "Thus, hemming in the course of thy musings, Alcippus, it
is true that thou wilt wed ere long."]


64 (return) [ _Tirer le diable par la queue_, "to live from hand to
mouth."]


65 (return) [ "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell
sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"]


66 (return) [ "A Shrove-Tuesday marriage will have no ungrateful
children."]


67 (return) [ A short mask.]


68 (return) [ In allusion to the story of Prometheus.]


69 (return) [_Un fafiot sérieux. Fafiot_ is the slang term for a bank-
bill, derived from its rustling noise.]


70 (return) [ He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived.
He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply,
of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.]



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